I’m not sure if they were right, but it sure looks like it.

It’s a shame, because I liked 4th edition a lot. I personally thought it was a pretty well designed system that resolved a lot of my problems with 3rd edition. Of course, I also liked 3rd edition a lot, and thought that it was a good improvement over 2nd edition (granted, my recollection of 2nd edition is very fuzzy). Both 4th and 3rd edition had their problems, although I would argue that a lot of my perceived problems with these editions simply arise due to the constant production of power-creep enhancements and the ability of the internet to disseminate it all.

I’m currently running a 4th edition campaign, and I’m often surprised at what my player characters can do. Why? Because my players subscribe to the online D&D service that provides all the latest munchkin book goodness for player characters in a handy web application. I am willing to work with players to let them do what they want with their characters and the campaign (it’s a collaboration after all, not my own little lordship) but it’s somewhat annoying to find that players are airily grabbing this and that to min-max their damage and to-hit bonuses. I’m pretty convinced that the sheer volume of crunch leads to the swift decline of the game system as a whole. When the game is mastering the system, then mastery of the system is the end of the game.

In any case, there isn’t much information about 5th Edition out there yet, but Mike Mearls’ letter introducing it seems to indicate that 5th edition will have a modular design whereby players will be able to decide for themselves what they want to use. The goal seems ambitious but also infeasible. There’s a lot of different ideas out there on how D&D should work, developed over the last 30+ years. In that time frame D&D has gone from the archetype to the grand-daddy to the computer-game-simulator. I don’t think it’s possible to bring everyone in under one tent, at least not without essentially publishing a bunch of different rulebooks.

Myself, I’m skeptical of their goals but I’m hoping it goes in an interesting direction. My hopes are especially high that this edition of D&D will focus on delivering a good product that will really embrace new technologies (like phones and tablets) that are becoming ubiquitous and could totally replace reference books for most players.

If I’m feeling ambitious I’ll elaborate a little more later on what I’d like to see in a 5th edition, as a “Best of all Worlds” approach.

I’ve been meaning to write for about the past several weeks about a program that I recently discovered. The program is called Masterplan, and it’s a tool for Dungeon Masters of D&D games. There’s a lot of software out there on the internet designed for DMs, and I’ve tried a number of them.

But do I really need software to plan out my plot? No.

As a DM what I need is software that I can use to plan out a plot, create encounters, skill challenges, build maps, write descriptions, store information about NPCs, create treasure, and so on. The jump from doing one thing well to doing all the things DMs need to take into account is quite big and so there are very few programs that ever make the grade. Masterplan is the first piece of software that really seems to integrate well with my workflow as a DM to prepare for gaming sessions.

What’s so great about Masterplan? The key for me is the plot flowchart.

Inside Masterplan you can create a flowchart of events that happen in a plot. Whether it’s a scene change, a combat encounter, a skill challenge, what have you, you can enter it here as a plot point. The coolest bit is you aren’t forced into linear plot arrangements. If you want to, you can plan out what happens if the PCs take route B rather than route A, or ingratiate themselves with NPC Z instead of NPC Y.

For each plot point you can add a description, both notes to yourself as the DM and read-aloud text to be shared with the players. You can add a map for significant area features, a combat encounter, a skill challenge, treasure to be found in the area. And all of this is relatively straightforward to do and accomplish, requiring no especially deep knowledge of the program or the 4th Edition game session.

Since beginning use of Masterplan my D&D prep sessions went from, “I don’t know if I can keep committing this amount of time every week,” to about two hours total. Last week I spent roughly an hour writing up descriptions and dialogue notes for NPCs, then spent an hour in Masterplan developing the combat encounter my players would face. The encounter building itself is simple, I selected the monsters I wanted from a list of monsters I’ve imported into Masterplan and dragged them into the list of monsters for that area. For one monster I added a template, which automatically modified the creature in the predetermined ways. For another I increased the level slightly, which caused Masterplan to automatically update the monster’s experience value and defenses (unfortunately Masterplan doesn’t seem to automatically update the monsters’ attacks when levelling them up, or at least not consistently with all monsters).

I then exported the information about that plot point, printed it up, and had a nice little packet of information ready for the week’s game session.

The first option, which I’m going to immediately dismiss — Everyone rolls up new characters and we play a different adventure. Our group is really just getting into the swing of things, and I think a lot of the players want to continue playing their characters. I’m a little hesitant to continue the campaign onward after the KotB adventure finishes because D&D 4th Edition has some built-in assumptions I’m not really comfortable with (prevalence of magic mostly, and how this interacts with the game world). However, it’s not about me doing what I want, it’s about everyone having fun, so I’m going to ignore that little voice for now.

The second option is that I could run another published adventure. I actually have a copy of the Undermountain adventure from an earlier season of D&D Encounters, and another published adventure called The Slaying Stone. There are two problems posed by using either of these adventures. The first is story continuity: There really isn’t any story continuity, so I’d need to do additional work to try and fit the subsequent adventures into the context of the Keep on the Borderlands adventure. The second is that both of these adventures are designed for level 1 characters, while currently the group I am running is sitting around 3-5. This is particularly tricky because the Dungeon Master’s Guide spells out that adjusting monster difficulty up by adding levels doesn’t really work that effectively beyond a 5 level jump/dump — So I’d need to really think about the encounter building.

The third option is that I could write my own adventure from scratch. I actually want to do this. At the same time, I really need to invest my time and energy into other pursuits that are more important to me than a D&D game. The only question in my mind is whether it’ll be long-term easier for me to write my own adventure than to take the time and effort to try and adapt a published adventure to my purposes. The Undermountain adventure, for example — I’m sure the encounters themselves are something I could easily adjust to make more challenging. But the plot itself, and the characters, present a problem for me. The alternative, the Slaying Stone adventure, could actually dovetail fairly easily with the Keep on the Borderlands adventure. The downside is it’s designed in a non-linear way and so there’s no easy way to adjust the encounters on a per-session basis. I’d actually have to sit down one day and type up a bunch of new statblocks and encounter notes for level-adjusted encounters. That might be feasible at some point in the coming weeks, but large unfilled blocks of time are something that’s a little tricky to come by.

Fair warning: Spoilers ahead.

Throughout the Keep on the Borderlands adventure, the PCs meet up with a couple of different NPCs. The first few weeks have the adventurers trying to track down Ferdinand Ronnik, who is rumored to be heading up a cult of Tiamat. Eventually it’s revealed that this is a plot to distract the PCs from the real threat, and Ronnik is innocent. Well, in the final chapter Ronnik shows up as an ally that the PCs can recruit to their aid if they let him live. In addition, the PCs also face a young Copper dragon in an earlier section of the adventure, and he can aid the PCs during the final chapter of the adventure. The final chapter also includes important encounters centering around Avendra, an NPC who is said to be the priestess of a temple in the adventure, and also Lord Drydesdale, who is the lord of the keep and who the PCs interact with a few times.

I should mention that the final chapter of the Keep on the Borderlands adventure is actually all one large battle, with an army of Lizardmen led by a black dragon attacking Restwell Keep. In fact, I think all of the encounters in the final chapter except the final one feature allied minions who are guards of Lord Drydesdale. In general I found the whole concept and execution pretty cool. I definitely love that it is bringing back characters seen earlier in the adventure, as it lends an air of consequence to events that happened before. Lack of this feeling of consequence is by far my biggest gripe with similar RPGA adventures, by the way.

The encounter I ran for our group earlier this week was focused on the defense of the main gate of Restwell Keep. The encounter called for wave-after-wave of minions scaling the walls, while a larger beast attacked the gate and attempted to bust through it. I mentioned before that we’ve had some attendance issues in the game, and for most of the game I was playing a PC Warlord (in addition to DMing). One of my characters also was previously playing a Paladin character, but then decided to switch to playing a Ranger. We also had a Psion who showed up for one session but hasn’t been back since. I thought it would be a cool idea to incorporate these former-PCs into the encounters in place of some of the generic, unnamed guards.

So one of the things I did this week to bring even more “consequence” to the encounter was to replace one of the mook guards manning the walls with the former-PC Paladin. This did make the encounter a bit easier, so I also got to throw in some more enemies. More enemies made the encounter itself seem even more large scale – double bonus for me. The only issue I had with this particular encounter is that as a DM it’s difficult to run: 10 enemy minions, 2 important monsters, 1 important allied NPC, 6 allied minion NPCs, and 5 PCs. That’s a lot of initiatives to keep track of. Fortunately the encounter went pretty smoothly due to the 4th Edition implementation of “minions” which freed me up from having to keep track of HP for something like 30 different enemy/allied characters.

I’m looking forward to next week where I get to place my former NPC, the Warlord, in the thick of the action with a huge mob battle raging all around. I think the idea of incorporating former PCs as NPCs in this fight is personalizing the encounters in a way that’s really fun. I also feel more open to bringing up the scale/challenge of the encounters with my Warlord character in the mix since I can always have him use his Inspiring Word power if anyone gets in deep trouble.

I do like 4th edition, but there are some things that bug me about it. Some of those problems are part of the system, and some of those problems are just issues that arise from how players approach the game. That said, it’s fun, easy to pick up, and entertaining enough. This post isn’t about the merits and flaws of 4th edition though, so I won’t get into much more detail there.

Lately I’ve been running a D&D 4th edition campaign using the Keep on the Borderlands adventure. This campaign was initially being run by another player, but I’m a perfectionist and I felt I could do better, so I stepped up to the plate. Due to attendance issues, players in our group are not always near the same level, so it’s been a bit challenging getting the difficulty level for our players just right. Fortunately, adjusting the difficulty of encounters downward is usually quite easy – Remove a creature or some minions and you’re good to go.

This week’s session, we actually had a full group of players, including a new player. This posed a different problem for me, as I felt the group was actually substantially more powerful than had been accounted for in the published adventure. So before the session began (I was only aware we had a new player joining us when I arrived), I had to quickly do some sheet-margin math to adjust the encounters the players would be facing to ensure they’d be challenging. One of the the encounters for that night was actually against a young black dragon, so I wanted to make absolutely sure that monster was a fearsome and challenging foe.

The thing that impressed me was how easy it was to adjust the attributes of a monster upward in 4th Edition. For every level you’re increasing the difficulty of the monster you: Increase hit points based on the creature’s role, and increase all its defenses. For every two levels increase damage. When I saw that I was kind of shocked, in 3rd Edition D&D building opponents can be a very time consuming process. Granted, this is very simple adjustments of one level, and the 4th Edition DMG even notes that this works best for level adjustments of 5 or less, but I was still impressed.

Due to my adjustments the session went great and was a challenging and rewarding experience instead of the pushover it may have been otherwise.

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.

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 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.

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.