Archive for the 'Tabletop' Category

Comparing Feats

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Cineris
on August 25, 2008
in Games and Tabletop
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In 4th Edition D&D there are two generic feats that I’m considering taking. I wanted to do a bit of math to see which was better, and I figured this might be useful for other people as well.

Feat 1: Toughness
Effect: Gain 5 additional hit points per tier (ie, gain 15 total HP over the life of your character).

Feat 2: Durable
Effect: Gain 2 additional healing surges.

On the surface, these seem pretty similar. I want to look at the breakdown at a couple different points to see how that pans out.

Scenario 1:

Blank
Wizard, 10 Con
Level 1 HP: 20
Level 1 Healing Surge: 5
Healing Surges: 6
Cumulative HP: 50
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 61
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 60

Blank
Wizard, 10 Con
Level 11 HP: 60
Level 11 Healing Surge: 15
Healing Surges: 6
Cumulative HP: 150
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 172
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 180

Blank
Wizard, 10 Con
Level 21 HP: 100
Level 21 Healing Surge: 25
Healing Surges: 6
Cumulative HP: 250
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 283
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 300

Scenario 2:
Wizard, 18 Con
Level 1 HP: 28
Level 1 Healing Surge: 7
Healing Surges: 9
Cumulative HP: 91
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 105
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 105

Wizard, 18 Con
Level 11 HP: 68
Level 11 Healing Surge: 17
Healing Surges: 9
Cumulative HP: 221
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 249
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 255

Wizard, 18 Con
Level 21 HP: 108
Level 21 Healing Surge: 27
Healing Surges: 9
Cumulative HP: 351
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 393
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 405

Scenario 3:
Dragonborn Paladin, 18 Con
Level 1 HP: 33
Level 1 Healing Surge: 11
Healing Surges: 13
Cumulative HP: 176
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 194
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 198

Dragonborn Paladin, 18 Con
Level 11 HP: 93
Level 11 Healing Surge: 26
Healing Surges: 13
Cumulative HP: 431
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 467
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 483

Dragonborn Paladin, 18 Con
Level 21 HP: 153
Level 21 Healing Surge: 41
Healing Surges: 13
Cumulative HP: 686
With Toughness, Cumulative HP: 753
With Durable, Cumulative HP: 768

In conclusion, it looks like Durable is the overall winner, especially when we consider that HP continues to rise all the way to 30th level. With another 9 levels of HP, the amount of healing done by a Healing Surge will continue to increase, making each of those two additional healing surges more worthwhile.

However, Toughness is surprisingly better than you’d expect, and for the most part keeps pace with Durable. It’s also got the benefit in that it’s actually increasing your real HP pool, meaning you’re slightly harder to take down in a fight all things being equal.

4th Edition Flaws, part 2

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Cineris
on August 24, 2008
in Games and Tabletop
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I mentioned in my previous post how I was kind of unhappy about how my Warlock (ranged striker) plays compared to some of the other classes in the game.

As I already said, it seems like melee-oriented attack bonuses fly around a lot more than spell-based ranged attack bonuses. You’ve got an ability modifier, you’ve got a weapon proficiency, you’ve got feats, you’ve got combat advantage through flanking, and you’ve got a lot of stacking buffs from support classes.

I also feel compelled to mention that pretty much every spell is ranged 10 (Magic Missle is the exception), where bows are ranged 20. And, I’m sorry to say, but ranged 10 is just silly. Most things in the game move 6 squares. Elves move 7. You can double move and not incur any sort of defensive penalty, and easily get yourself into melee combat with a ranged combatant. I’m not really interested in realism here, but I’d think that, the point of ranged attacks being to shoot enemies at range, that you’d be able to hope for at least one round of firing before enemies are upon you.

I haven’t found this particularly problematic, but mainly because my character doesn’t pose an exceptional threat that deserves going out of the way to target. At least in my understanding, a Striker character is supposed to be doing substantially more damage than other characters. Not so. I find that other members of the party regularly hit as hard as I do.

Why? Again, that there are substantially more feats and cooperative abilities dealing with boosting weapon damage than there are for spell damage. The few feats that exist for spells are relatively unimpressive in comparison (being designed for the Wizard’s AoE attacks, rather than the Warlock’s single-target damage). And at this point I just don’t have the confidence that I’ll be making a good choice — Assuming we play to say 15th level, who’s going to say I’ll still want a feat that only affects Fire damage? Unlike a weapon user, a spellcaster can’t count on something that applied to his spell continuing to apply to future spells.

Another example: Warlocks have a ability called Curse they can apply to the nearest enemy, and when they damage that target they do 1d6 additional damage. Rangers have an ability called Quarry that they can choose on an enemy, and when they damage that target they do 1d6 additional damage. Rogues get a similar ability in Sneak Attack. Both Rogues and Rangers get a feat which increases this additional damage from d6 to d8. Warlocks don’t.

In fact, as a whole, the Warlock has almost no choices. At level one you choose your “pact.” Your pact grants you your two known at-will powers, you do not get a choice. Once you have chosen your pact you have already chosen your paragon path, because they are tied together. There are only four feats specifically for Warlocks in the entire book, and three of them tie into which one of the three pacts you chose (you only can choose the feat associated with your pact).

Even though I’ve been kind of anti-supplement for awhile now, I’m actually looking forward to whatever splatbook Wizards may put out for arcane casters, because the Warlock is sorely lacking in options, and they really do need substantial improvement in terms of choices to stand up to other classes.

4th Edition Flaws, part 1

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Cineris
on August 21, 2008
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So I’ve been playing in my group’s 4th Edition campaign for awhile now, and I think I’ve got a good enough handle on the game so far to feel out things that could be done better.

4th Edition is pretty convoluted when it comes to tactics. Once a combat gets going, you’ve got every class slinging around some kind of marker onto enemies, or enemies slinging them back. Positioning matters, and there are a number of abilities that allow constant repositioning. When people say 4th Edition is a miniatures game they’re not kidding - I don’t see any way to play this game except with miniatures.

The character I’m playing is a Warlock (a ranged striker), and I’m noticing a couple of things about the game.

Typically, when a character makes an attack, they roll a d20 and add the relevant ability modifier and a weapon proficiency bonus. That’s all well and good, except as a Warlock I don’t get a weapon proficiency bonus, because all of my attacks are “spells” and don’t use a weapon. On the plus side, my attacks aren’t usually hitting enemies’ Armor Class, but rather their Fortitude, Reflex, or Will defenses. This means I can potentially target the enemy’s weakest defense, which will compensate for not having a weapon proficiency bonus.

Thing is, how am I as a player supposed to determine what defense is an enemy’s weakest defense? I’ve purposefully avoided looking through the Monster Manual and finding info on enemies the GM has thrown at us, but it seems like I’m just hamstringing myself. As far as I’m aware there’s no game mechanic I can use to say, “I want to look at this creature and assess its weaknesses.” Sure, you can guess the extreme cases reliably - The musclebound savage, the darting creature, the brain in a jar - but the problem is when you’re talking about Joe Goblin who has a 15 in everything except Fortitude. You can’t even count on spellcasters having low Fortitude anymore because lots of spells factor in Constitution, and Intelligence counts as a Reflex defense.

Furthermore, it seems like melee combat is, frankly, just a lot more interesting tactically. If a combatant charges they can gain a +1 bonus to an attack roll. If you’ve got a friendly Cleric nearby, they can use Righteous Brand to give you a bonus to hit equal to their Strength modifier. If you’ve got a Warlord, they can allow you to shift a square (great for setting up flanks, which grant +2 to attack rolls against the flanked target) with Wolf Pack tactics, or boost attack and damage by his Charisma modifier with Furious Smash. And all of this before you consider things like feats that can add further bonuses to weapon users, but are basically entirely lacking for spell-based attacks. In short, there are a lot of cumulative conditions and interesting interparty tactics that take place for melee characters, and not so much for ranged.

It’s a bit of a nuisance to feel like the game has purposefully left my character out of “the loop” of combat tactics. Where everyone else is constantly coordinating with other characters, my choices are mainly about where I move, which enemy I target (The already-beat-up one, or the one who is hanging back?) and what attack to use to try and get a better chance to hit. It’s a lot more interesting than 3rd Edition on an individual level, surely. But none of these choices really play into the fun of coordinating with other people, except on the level of “I’m going to attack the guy back there so he doesn’t try to shoot at you guys.” Sure, that’s a valuable role. But it’s nothing like saying, “I’ve marked this guy, you move here, provoking an attack from him, but I’ve got this bonus going from another party member, and when he goes to attack you, my mark activates I will attack again with all X, Y, and Z that we have synchronized for this perfect moment of execution.”

When you can pull something off like that with your friends it feels great. When you’re off on your own rolling your d20 and hoping to make a difference in the big picture? Not quite as much.

Campaign Ideas: Star-Crossed

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Cineris
on September 30, 2007
in Games, RPGs and Tabletop
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This is a fairly simple idea, but it’s modular enough that you could work it into a variety of contexts. The major downside to this idea is that you’ve got less flexibility in dealing with character turnover, and so for that reason it probably wouldn’t work all that well in a gritty campaign, or one which people attend irregularly.

The idea is that each player character was born under a specific star sign, a sign under which few are ever born. This designates them as people who have great destinies. In game terms, you may also wish to expand this idea further to say that their special attunement to the stars grants them an increased affinity for magic. You could then use this as a possible explanation of how PCs could be readily healed and resurrected, but important NPCs, such as kings, may not be able to be. The explanation should facilitate creating a game world where dramatic actions have consequence on the game world, but which don’t overly penalize players.

As a campaign, once you have set forth that the players are all bound to this same destiny, you have a plethora of ways to get them together for a story. I suggest that you create an NPC character, an astrologer/astronomer, who has sent a summons to each character. When they arrive, the characters will be informed of the common bond between all of them.

At this point, with the characters assembled and, bound, however tenously, you can easily begin any adventure you like. There are a couple of ideas which I believe may work better than a standard-issue “Clear out the nearby goblin village” sorts of quests, though.

-The player characters are only part of the group that was sent a summons. There remain several individuals who did not manage to heed the astrologer’s call. The PCs are instructed to seek out these few remaining individuals. The conflict here would be that someone else has learned of these individuals’ special destinies and has been hunting them down and killing them. The villain himself could be one of these individuals, who has realized that only others born under this star sign may have the potential to stop his plans.
-The player characters have learned of their destiny, but must complete a ritual to complete their attunement to the stars. In order to do this, they must undertake a quest. This particular possibility would not pit the players against a specific enemy, but rather against a series of trials. Ideally, this line would focus on building the bonds of trust between characters as they face the obstacles.
-The astrologer may have nefarious plans, and is attempting to subvert the PCs into doing his will by posing as a mentor-type character. The PCs may be instructed to carry out various plans, but hints should be dropped that not all is as it seems.

Campaign Ideas: Shipwrecked

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Cineris
on September 17, 2007
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Basic introductory campaign idea designed to introduce players to the setting, establish the group without relying on “You all show up at a tavern” tropes.

Types: Semi-Travelogue, Fish out of Water

Scene 1: Fight scene. This scene establishes a villain/antagonist for the characters by immediately pitting them up against the antagonist and/or some of his henchmen. Premise for this fight is that the antagonist is trying to retrieve X, where X is an item or components of an item.

Scene 2: Flashback to the initial party meeting, which is on a ship. Each character has been hired by the Captain, and their mission to deliver X to [some location or NPC] is explained.

Scene 3: A storm strikes, and the ship is under attack by [pirates / mercenaries / unknown]. A battle ensues and the ship is wrecked.

Scene 4: The characters wake up on the shores of [some location on the same landmass where they were headed]. The majority of the crew seems to be lost and only the PCs are fit for travel, so they head on to finish their mission.

-After roughly another scene or two, the PCs should be ‘caught up’ in narrative time with Scene 1, after which they continue onward in ‘real time.’
-Subsequent scenes introduce the characters to the setting [mood/themes] and set up different factions of antagonists / allies. Since all characters are from a different location, play up customs and other elements that may seem strange to the PCs (and also to the players).
-By the end of the mission the PCs should have forged a bond with at least one faction, which will offer them some sort of ongoing relationship at the end of the initial scenario and possibly serve as the basis for further scenarios.

Selling My P&P Account

Published
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Cineris
on August 25, 2007
in Games, Personal, RPGs and Tabletop
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Currently I’m involved in a pretty mediocre pen and paper D&D game run by one of our group hangers-on, the guy who shows up every few weeks unannounced and doesn’t even bother to try and contact anyone if he’s coming or if he’s not coming. It’s not great, but, still, someone stepping in as DM keeps pressure off of me as I’m still too busy to do serious DM prep. In our first session it was decided one of our other players, whose character is a Paladin, was going to be the prince of a country. Everyone else would just be hangers on.

This is a pretty typical newbie DM mistake, but it doesn’t stop there … The first NPC we encountered was a ghost of a woman (we don’t know who) who gave our Paladin Prince a rather serious magical item. At the time we were all equipped with 7,500gp worth of equipment, and the first thing that happens is the Prince gets an amulet worth 36,000gp, at sixth level no less.

Our next session has us going to a mausoleum in the city. The Prince is selected to under a series of trials while the rest of us sit on our thumbs. Then after he defeated a giant skeleton he was rewarding with a dancing holy avenger flaming burst sword of brokenness +5. And, yes, that is not rules legal. He was also given an artifact-level amulet that basically makes him immune to death.

The session after that one we were attacked by a Cleric in the forest who was wandering around with his retinue of skeletons and death knights (Encounter table entry #3 — I kept pressing him to throw Nazi Zombie Bugbears at us, but I guess he thought they were too difficult of an encounter for us.) So we defeat this group of undead, and then slay an bronze dragon (ECL 17. Party average level: 8.) At this point we all decided to just give all the equipment, including a suit of armor with DR 15/good to the Paladin. As a friend said, we’re just going to twink his Paladin out with epic gear and sell his account.

I thought this was a pretty funny idea, and I bet’d actually be something you could make [some] money off of. I mean, in a world where someone sells a pixel on a webpage, or sells stuff on eBay by claiming it’s “haunted” a precreated Pencil & Paper D&D character sheet is downright utilitarian. One of these days I’ll get around to trying this out.

4DVENTURE

Published
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Cineris
on August 16, 2007
in Games, RPGs and Tabletop
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4DVENTURE1

Yesterday I was talking to one of my Pen and Paper gaming friends and he, for whatever reason, loaded up the Wizards of the Coast website. When he did, he was greeted with a little countdown to 4DVENTURE, which we immediately guessed was an announcement for 4th Edition.

I’m not entirely sure yet, but there are a few articles so far claiming that Wizards is coming out with 4th Edition next year. Although I’ve been expecting 4th Edition for awhile, I’m kind of surprised at how this announcement is being done. I’d actually expect to hear about playtesting accounts or design goals from the designers before we get a deadline for release.

I already outlined what’d make me buy the new system, but after looking over Star Wars Saga Edition a few weeks ago, I don’t think it’s going to live up to my expectations. Well, either way, we both agreed that we’d probably be sticking with 3.5 for some time to come (or move to something homebrew / true20 / etc.).

Guild Wars Game Modding

Published
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Cineris
on July 16, 2007
in Games, Guild Wars and Tabletop
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Apparently, some clever people managed to figure out how to mod their own Guild Wars datafiles. Although this is somewhat old news, as things like the hoax Terror Shield item demonstrated it could be done in 2005, there seems to be a newfound popularity for editing your own game data files of late. There’s a 30-some-odd page thread on GuildWarsGuru about it, and in roughly half a month several interesting User Interface mods have become available, not to mention innumerable other minor changes (like changing the textures on existing items).

A couple of minor examples:

GWMod1

This image above shows a user modification to the “Critical Hit” effect. A bit cartoonish and over the top, but you’ll always know when you critical.

Below we have a series of images showing alterations to the “wings” effect caused by certain Paragon skills. Normally these wings are gold, but people have modified the texture to display new colorations.

GWMod2

GWMod3

And then there’s the full User Interface reskins, like the one below.

GWMod4

Although it’s just texture replacement, some people have done some interesting things, such as add area-of-effect spell range indicators to the compass (seen above) or add indicators on the health bar for when you drop below major intervals (75%, 50%, 25%, etc).

Of course, for me, the major feature that makes me interested is the ability to reskin the “fog” on unexplored areas of the world map. I haven’t been playing Guild Wars all that much recently, but I would like to get the Cartographer titles eventually, and if I could reskin the fog with a red color (this has already been done) then it should be fairly simple to find unexplored areas of the map to attain 100% map completion.

Then the question becomes, do I want to mess with my Guild Wars files? And do I trust the people doing this sort of thing?

Another thing to mull over.

Giving up the d20

Published
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Cineris
on July 6, 2007
in Games, RPGs and Tabletop
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I’ve been pondering starting up a campaign for D&D again, and last week I ran the idea of a Guild Wars based campaign past my group and they gave the thumbs up to the idea — Now I just need to decide if I actually want to run a Guild Wars campaign, and what that would mean for the setting.

That’s not exactly what I wanted to talk about though. I’ve been mulling over running D&D with different dice systems — I’m kind of disillusioned with the d20, most notably because my dice have used up all their 20s long ago and nothing short of dipping them in the sacrificial blood of Polyhedro, the God of Dice, would be able to fix their consistently poor rolling.

I’ve been considering a couple of replacement systems:

  • 3d6. This is outlined in Unearthed Arcana (or is it Arcana Unearthed?), or available through the d20 SRD as a variant rolling method. This system’s got a couple of benefits. (1.) Everyone has plenty of d6s. (2.) A nice bell curve to decrease the chance that any one homicidal die will end up having your character fail at an easy task. (3.) All of the work behind figuring out this system has been worked out already.
  • 4d6. My main reasons for considering a 4d6 system are pretty superficial: 4d6 preserves the 20 point spread range of a traditional d20. You’ve also got an even larger bell curve, but I think at the point of 4d6 that might become as much of a liability as it would be a benefit: The dice are a constant source of amusement and twists and turns in RPGs … Too much averageness might reduce the importance of that. Not to mention I’d need to sit down and figure out the probabilities involved in 4d6 and figure out how that would affect weapons.
  • 2d10. This is a pretty obvious one, and though it’s not a full 20 point spread, it’s close. 2d10 was the first system I thought of when considering whether or not to run with an alternative rolling system. It has a curve, but it’s not as steep as either 3d6 or 4d6, and the probabilities are pretty intuitive as well, which is always a benefit to on-the-fly risk assessment.

I decided to go with a 2d10 system. It’s always a toss up to see how these things are going to work out, but a system that’s pretty quick to figure out on the fly, which has a bell curve but not a particularly steep one seems pretty ideal. On a purely visceral level, rolling 2d10 feels better to me than rolling 1d20, but it’s not like playing a game of Yahtzee with 4d6.

The major issue that needs to be resolved with 2d10 is weapon threat ranges. Although there’s room for improvement with d20’s weapons, for the most part I just to keep things simple. Things will look like so:

  • 20-20 -> 19-20, 18.H (Coin toss on 18s, heads threatens).
  • 19-20 -> 17-20
  • 18-20 -> 16-20
  • 17-20 -> 15-20

And so on. At some point I’d probably be compelled to cut the progression for large threat ranges down, but in terms of mechanical power a lot of the high threat range weapons are substandard anyway, so it doesn’t bother me all that much to give them a bit of a boost.

I think I might start outlining the sort of house rules I’m looking to go with…

Update: Redhammer the Old over at the Fear the Boot forums has this neat graphic illustrating 2d10 vs. 1d20…

Redhammer2d10vs1d20