Weekend Entertainment Pursuits, Part III

[bryant]

I also played some D&D 4e. Tom runs a nifty game, plus it’s always fun playing with new peeps. Rock on, teenage love triangle, rock on. I’m trying to decide if my Felix is crushing on Geoff. It seems likely.

That link there is a good description of the game and I agree with all of the points made therein. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a remarkably movement-oriented system. Most of our fights were in clear space, and by the end of the game I was just moving thirty feet every turn, because I wanted to tag enemies with my Curse and you can only do that to the closest enemy. The one fight where my back was to a wall, that made me sad. Playing a Warlock is like playing a GEV with a howitzer bolted to the top in Ogre. Zip zip zip. BOOM. I very much regret the failure of my 5d8+1d6+6 bomb single-turn attack sequence.

It feels like D&D. Lots more powers, and much more to do, but it’s a d20 and you roll it and you hit things and do damage and move six squares and take attacks of opportunity and flank. The changes just sort of supercharge it in an alarmingly Hong Kong actiony sort of a way. Also, there are still weird little side cases that make you go “hm, not sure how that should work. Please send lawyers, runs, and FAQs.”

Cian, who I mentioned in comments a few posts back on the LJ side, was a cleric with a side business in being an archer. I spent a lot of feats and points on that, because I was expecting to get very bored if I was just a healer. I knew I’d run out of spells and I wanted to be effective in other ways.

If I was using 4e for him, I wouldn’t need to screw with any of that. He’d have a lance of pure holy light zapping out of his fingertips on demand, a million times a day. There is nothing bad about this. I like that I don’t have to spend feats to avoid boredom.

It is lacking in out of combat skills, albeit not to the degree that detractors claim. Also I don’t know if I like skill challenges. We did one and it felt a touch artificial. The old ad hoc system that Jeffwik or someone described based on an early leak, where you did whatever you wanted and rolls just applied? That seems better. I think Tom was running ours sort of like that, but since we were not RP-focused we were a bit slow to get into that mindset.

That, however, was my only beef. I have already created a spreadsheet to assist me in choosing 1d6+3 rolled against Will vs. 1d10+4 rolled against Reflex. It is a good system for the crunchy side of me, and it is simple enough to be fun for the non-crunchy side of me.

Originally published at Imaginary Vestibule.

Comments

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

In my experience the combats take eight to ten rounds, but by the end of the third or fourth round it's clear who's going to win and who's going to lose, so there's a half-hour or so of exercise-in-boring-statistics with little sense of risk. I was thinking that a way to speed this up would be to across the board halve the number of hit points everything has, but I'm eminently open to the idea that my experiences are a result of the way doctorflipper and I were playtesting, rather than something inherent to the system.

[bryant]

It's also still a resource management game. How many healing surges will be gone by the time that fight is won?

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Mm, fair enough.

[rob-donoghue.livejournal.com]

I haven't had it be that cut and dried, but there are occasions when only the lead opponents is still alive and surrounded by the PCs and it's really just a waiting game before he drops.

So far, the easy solution to that has been to make sure the boss has something board changing he can whip out late in the fight, such as something with a slide or teleport component.

The harder solution seems to depend upon the art and science of balancing encounters. The tip that we got on that was to make bosses a bit lower level than your instinct may suggest, both to increase the budget for support guys, and also to not make the gap between the boss and his allies so big as to slow things down. I still need to try this, but I can see the logic in it.

[bluegargantua]

"The tip that we got on that was to make bosses a bit lower level than your instinct may suggest, both to increase the budget for support guys, and also to not make the gap between the boss and his allies so big as to slow things down."

This echoes my insight which is that enemies are best if you can field a lot of solid, varied opponents. One big leader quickly draws all the fire and goes down. A strong leader backed up by a couple of brutes and snipers and soldiers and some minions to help out on the edges and suddenly the PCs have to start making tough decisions.

later
Tom

[rob-donoghue.livejournal.com]

Skill challenges came up a lot in D&D discussion this weekend. I like them, but that is mostly because I like the intent so much that I cheerfully gloss over the specifics of the rules and just make them go.

That said, I kind of dig the way mearls actually used them, which was that he basically never mentioned them, but just quietly kept them in mind when we were approaching certain problems, just calling for rolls when appropriate and tracking how we did all in all. It had the practical effect of meaning no single bad roll botched our otherwise reasonably solid plan. Net result was entirely transparent as a player, and I only picked up on it near the end because I was sitting next to him and spotted him checking things off.

In a later panel he described skill challenges as more of a framework than a strict system, and I think that matches my approach. It's a better idea than it's writing might indicate.