And the Pendulum Swings

The pendulum of my opinions about 4E has swung yet again.

Although I still hate the whole revision of the Forgotten Realms, I am still mostly looking forward to the new version of the game.

Once again, because I can’t go a week without repeating myself – the crunch looks good and the fluff looks bad. But my anger from the fluff announcements has calmed to a mild simmer. I still want to smack somebody, but this is an improvement from dropping an anvil on R&D’s collective heads.

(For those who don’t know; “crunch” = rules and game mechanics, “fluff” = role-playing information.)

I’m not sure about me gaming with the group soon. It’s kind of a bad time for several of us. The last two months of the year always are though.

But Worldwide D&D Gameday, or whatever it’s called, will be on the Saturday of that weekend (I think). So if I can’t do one, I’ll do the other.

Baby related stuff is about the same (little sleep, lots of complaints from the babies). When I get the extra cash to waste, I’ll buy them a tube of giant stuffed dice. I figure I have a better chance of getting that okayed by my wife than getting the baby shirts at www.tshirthell.com that say some hilariously offensive things.

Once again the 4E news appears to be pretty light.

Due to a released cover of the 4E preview book, with a tiefling on the cover, and probably some other information tossed out by one of the WotC R&D bloggers it appears that the tiefling will be one of the initial races. Since I’m not a fan of the tieflings, this will be another aspect of 4E I’m going to have to ignore.

Semi-rant; I know it’s not just me, as I’ve read others opinions on it, but it looks more and more like 4E is going all anime on us. This whole tiefling thing just gives me that feeling, but nothing specific I can put my finger on. I want D&D, not Dragonball Z (or whatever violence driven anime cartoon that 10 year old boys watch today). I used to watch that stuff too, but I would never mix D&D with the Transformers, or Thundercats, or Voltron, or Silverhawks, or G.I. Joe, or…ah hell you get the picture. Semi-rant over.

As part of my sleep-deprived perusals of 4E, someone brought up the point about how the designers are going to make it possible for multi-classing casters to keep up in power. Many people piped up about how they would like to see it handled. As usual the ideas ran the gamut from good to bad.

Here was my idea; feats or class options that give power to multi-class casters, doesn’t break them by making them stronger than their single-class counterparts, fits with the character concept, and can still scale a bit to make sure the ability is still useful 10 levels later – it just needs some requirements to limit to certain character archetypes.

A level 10 fighter can lay out some damage with his sword.
A level 10 wizard can lay out some damage with his spells.

A fighter 5 / wizard 5 can’t really do either very well outside the occasional lucky shot. But what if there was a character option that allowed you to burn off a spell slot that is no higher than your BAB that allows you to deal an extra d6 of damage for the spell level burned for that round (for 4E this would be +5d6). It is very similar to a dusk blade’s abilities, but simpler, and scales in levels.

You are burning a spell, your BAB is still not as high as a fighter of equal level so your chances of hitting are slightly smaller, and you’re dealing more damage. It sounds like a decent option to me.

I’m sure many people could poke holes through this idea, but once again, hey I’m not a D&D designer, though sometimes I wish I were.

I’ve also heard/read that there are going to be effectively 4 armor classes; your regular armor class and then what used to be your 3 saving throws. Regular melee attacks will be handled like normal, touch attacks will go after your reflex AC, and so on. The names may change, but so far they’ve converted the 3 saving throws into armor classes, and then removed your touch and flat footed armor classes. That sounds like a good change to me; 2 less things to worry about.

I received an e-mail from Aaron not too long ago. He likes the idea of doing Rappan Athuk as gestalts and going out of 3E with a bang. I just hope he likes all the changes I’m making in my attempts to speed the combats up.

I still want to make combats go even faster, but can’t think of anything more to do that could work and won’t irritate the players.

Making the math simpler is one way to go, but that is already too ingrained into 3E and can’t be easily removed without some heavy rewriting of the d20 game system.

My fix to Power Attack was an easy and obvious change I could make, but it has its drawbacks. It could potentially make some combats longer, but I feel that will happen less often and the change is an improvement overall, and I believe it balances the feat out a little.

I could put up a chart for average damage, which helps at higher levels. I’ll just make some modifications that will allow players to still roll a couple dice. The average result of 10d6 is 35, the average result of 8d6 is 28, so I could say that a 10d6 fireball does 28+2d6 damage which will still average 35 damage, but doesn’t involve tons of dice.

Banning certain classes that complicate the game too much (druids and duskblades) is something needed. As I remember more about the knight class, I’m thinking maybe that class isn’t so easy to run, but so long as no one goes crazy with weird builds then the class should be fine.

Which is something I will have to ban from the players, but hopefully isn’t a problem; screwy and complicated character builds. Your PC’s should be simple and easy to run. Don’t pick a class you’ve never run before that has a lot of different options. If you’ve never run a monk before, don’t make one now unless you’re going the simple monk route.

On that note; I’m not going to ban grapple or disarm as we’ve used those often enough to be able to deal with them. But I will insist that any player who likes to use those rules have that page marked for quick access.

By “poofing out” PC’s whose players didn’t show I’m saving quite a bit of time. Playing someone else’s PC is hard enough, but adding the gestalt combo is some heavy duty training. The only real issue is if they party loses all of a single, needed class-type. But with gestalt, that should not happen often. When it does I might take pity on the party after I’ve taken out one PC, if just to make a point. (That point would be to diversify your party.)

One thing this dungeon will not do is be nice to the party like 4E seems to be heading to (a.k.a. the wussification of D&D). There will be “save or die” spells and traps. The monsters will not necessarily be placed logically to provide the “optimum challenge” for the party. Some monsters will be incredibly easy, some will be the proper challenge level, some will be hard, and some will be literally impossible to defeat. It’s a good thing to realize when you’re outmatched. And this dungeon changes from the ultra-easy to the ultra-hard encounters from room to room. You could be a group of level 3 gestalt PC’s easily taking down a single ghoul one moment, only to be running from a horrid shapeless beast the next.

I don’t think I’ve really discussed what races I’ll allow PC’s to be in Rappan Athuk. Hmm, I want to keep it open, yet simple. So humans, mountain dwarves, hill dwarves, deep dwarves, tallfellow halflings, lighfoot halflings, deep halflings, half-orcs, half-elves, rock gnomes, forest gnomes, high elves, wood elves, grey elves, and wild elves. All these races go by the stats in the PHB and MM. You’ll notice there are no EL+1 or higher races. Maybe I’ll add them in later, but not now.

I’m going to make sure that the 15 minute long adventuring does not return like it did in the WLD. In region N of the WLD the party buffed up, ran through room after room, bashing down anything in their way. Then when the buff spells were close to wearing off, they stopped and returned to each room to search it.

In Rappan Athuk they still can do that. But the dungeon and its surrounding region is alive with activity. Something could could dill a void while the PC’s return to town and rests for a week. Now maybe that Iron Golem can’t be replaced so easily, but I’m sure a bunch of goblins could be recruited within a week. There are plenty of wandering monsters and plenty of intelligent monsters who are used to having their territory invaded, especially by adventurers. They know when to retreat, wait for buffs to fade, and return.

And unlike the WLD, I’m only allowing divine casters to get their spells at the time of day they need to pray (usually morning), plus I will be enforcing the resting rules appropriately. Casters attempting to rest that get a short term interruption have to add an hour to their rest time (or reset it to 8). Casters that have their rest interrupted for an hour or more must restart their rest. And they still need to spend time getting their spells (praying, concentrating, etc.). This is an expansion and clarification of the rules, which we really haven’t paid that much attention to in recent memory.

To reduce that last paragraph to its simplest form; only one rest period per day and casters can’t go on guard duty if they want to get their spells back.

This doesn’t prevent the party from resting in the dungeon, but it sure makes it a lot harder.

The dungeon is going to be hard, and the PC’s are going to be powerful.
This should be entertaining, so long as we don’t have a clone of Tomb of Horrors.