KotS #7
Well this session confirmed one big thing I do not like about 4E – Skill Challenges.
It was awkward back when we used the skill challenge rules when role-playing with Sir Keegan. I didn’t like that encounter when done as written. We still “defeated” the encounter, but the rules felt a bit off.
When they were used this session they were downright pathetic and pretty much unusable to the point where it was just better for us to treat it like a combat challenge.
I think the rules can be salvaged if rewritten though; heavily rewritten. I almost expect to see alternate skill challenge rules in DDI or an upcoming book.
In spite of that, we’re still having fun with 4E. I remember some rules in 3E that made me say “WTF?!”, so I’m not going to slam 4E for an attempt at giving skills a bit more of a chance to shine.
Besides one of the best things about 2E was the rules were so pathetic that we threw so many out and pretty much just winged the game half the time.
This session was also the first session of our newest member Mike.
Mike so far looks like a team player and took human cleric as his class, with an eye towards being a buffing and assisting cleric, which is always helpful.
That brings me to my next topic, soon, when Dale has to start skipping sessions for family reasons, I will run module H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth (thankfully to be bought by Aaron).
My original concern was that the group would have no healing, but since Mike has made a cleric, it’s not an issue.
Maybe, just maybe, at some point our group might stabilize and we can play more than 2 sessions without a change in the party make-up.
Oh to dream.
Our lineup for this session:
Me, playing Tornok, the level 3 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 3 eladrin rogue
Justin, playing Stout, the level 3 dwarven fighter
Scott, playing Earl, the level 3 dragonborn paladin (of Bahamut)
Mike, playing Ander, the level 3 human cleric (of Bahamut)
Dale offered, and strongly suggested, to let Justin bring in his wizard Berlin, but we declined. Five PC’s is plenty, and the controller job is arguably the easiest role to drop if need be. There’s no need to for one player to have a second PC when there are 4 other PC’s to help make up for the lack of a wizard.
We also are doing things much quicker now that Dale is having me keep track of damage to monsters and Justin or Aaron keeping track of the initiative. This allows Dale to deal with monster actions quickly and without having to wait for his “old eyes to focus”.
Last session we stopped at a point where we expected to be attacked from both sides in a pincer assault by the hobgoblins.
We started this session by pulling back out of the hallway and spiking the door we entered through shut.
Then we thought we could catch one pincer off guard so we traveled down the most likely hallway only to be stopped by a dropping portcullis.
What actually happened was that there was no pincer move and we had effectively alerted two separate groups of hobgoblins to our presence.
We pulled back to what we figured was our most defensive position, and waited.
Dale did not disappoint us when he dropped down 15 hobgoblin minis on the table; 8 minions, 4 soldiers, an archer, a warchief, and a warcaster, the combined forces of two separate encounters.
They came at us in a tight formation, which we couldn’t exploit because we had no wizard. We stood with our two tanks up front, the healers backing them up, and Valenae hiding around the corner – always trying to get a chance for a sneak attack.
Earl cleaned out each and every minion with his dragon breath.
Their archer and Valenae seemed to like shooting at one another.
The soldiers and the warchief stood toe-to-toe with Stout and Earl through the majority of the combat.
The worst opponent was the warcaster. Out of 4 attempts to gain back his special attack (Force Pulse – which did 2d8+4 or more in a burst 5, and knocked us down) Dale succeeded to roll 6 on three of those attempts. The first round he successfully blasted Earl and Tornok. The second round he blasted all of us (except Valenae) and 3 of his own soldiers.
His third blast on the fifth round killed an unconscious Tornok (he took a constant beating this combat, and I couldn’t connect with an attack roll for most of the combat).
Note: Make sure you have a high strength of you make a warlord. Damage doesn’t scale much at all in 4E, but attack bonuses and defenses scale evenly. That means the only you’re going to hit more often is through magic bonuses and your strength modifier. If I didn’t like the bonuses an 18 charisma warlord offers to the group, I’d have changed that long ago.
The final rounds was all of us in, all in bad shape (or dead), and the warcaster and archer.
The warcaster was swarmed, bringing us to the quote(s) of the week, when Aaron hits the warcaster who is supposed to be about to die:
Dale: “Do your worst.”
Aaron Rolls a 1
Sean: “He did his worst.”
After some discussion, the group decides to take Tornok back to town so see if anyone can resurrect him. Surprisingly there is, but it costs the group 500gp (still it’s cheaper than in 3E).
We rested the night in Winterhaven and then returned to the dungeon (we’re done with role-playing for this module – we’re ready to move on).
The next door we found had “Closed” scraped into it, so we opened it and went in.
We ended up getting attacked by a gelatinous cube and a pair of corruption corpse zombies.
Stout and Earl took on the tougher-than-expected gelatinous cube, Ander and Tornok took on the zombies, while Valenae split his attention.
The group taking on the gelatinous cube held their ground pretty well considering what could have happened to them. Gelatinous cubes are no longer 3HD creatures that can be killed as an afterthought.
Tornok got blasted once with an exploding zombie, but otherwise was fine. Ander did most of the damage to the undead while Tornok blocked.
The room was a dead end, so we went with our last option for doors, which must lead us to Kalorel.
That is after we got past the killer death trap with the ridiculous requirements for us to get past. Long story short, Valenae disabled a giant spinning titan statue while the rest of us were bashing on a group of smaller statues to prevent Earl from drowning in a magically walled off room that was filling with water, while two dragon statues were shooting Magic Missiles at us.
To stop a statue from attacking, Aaron had to roll 12 or better 4 times before failing twice. I’m no expert on probability, but figure that they could have said “if your rogue rolls a nat-20 on a d20, the statue turns off”. That’s not good design.
After all that a pair of double-doors is revealed.
We stopped there for the night.
And we’re skipping a week, so no update for nearly 2 weeks, and then I DM the campaign for a module.
It was awkward back when we used the skill challenge rules when role-playing with Sir Keegan. I didn’t like that encounter when done as written. We still “defeated” the encounter, but the rules felt a bit off.
When they were used this session they were downright pathetic and pretty much unusable to the point where it was just better for us to treat it like a combat challenge.
I think the rules can be salvaged if rewritten though; heavily rewritten. I almost expect to see alternate skill challenge rules in DDI or an upcoming book.
In spite of that, we’re still having fun with 4E. I remember some rules in 3E that made me say “WTF?!”, so I’m not going to slam 4E for an attempt at giving skills a bit more of a chance to shine.
Besides one of the best things about 2E was the rules were so pathetic that we threw so many out and pretty much just winged the game half the time.
This session was also the first session of our newest member Mike.
Mike so far looks like a team player and took human cleric as his class, with an eye towards being a buffing and assisting cleric, which is always helpful.
That brings me to my next topic, soon, when Dale has to start skipping sessions for family reasons, I will run module H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth (thankfully to be bought by Aaron).
My original concern was that the group would have no healing, but since Mike has made a cleric, it’s not an issue.
Maybe, just maybe, at some point our group might stabilize and we can play more than 2 sessions without a change in the party make-up.
Oh to dream.
Our lineup for this session:
Me, playing Tornok, the level 3 tiefling warlord
Aaron, playing Valenae, the level 3 eladrin rogue
Justin, playing Stout, the level 3 dwarven fighter
Scott, playing Earl, the level 3 dragonborn paladin (of Bahamut)
Mike, playing Ander, the level 3 human cleric (of Bahamut)
Dale offered, and strongly suggested, to let Justin bring in his wizard Berlin, but we declined. Five PC’s is plenty, and the controller job is arguably the easiest role to drop if need be. There’s no need to for one player to have a second PC when there are 4 other PC’s to help make up for the lack of a wizard.
We also are doing things much quicker now that Dale is having me keep track of damage to monsters and Justin or Aaron keeping track of the initiative. This allows Dale to deal with monster actions quickly and without having to wait for his “old eyes to focus”.
Last session we stopped at a point where we expected to be attacked from both sides in a pincer assault by the hobgoblins.
We started this session by pulling back out of the hallway and spiking the door we entered through shut.
Then we thought we could catch one pincer off guard so we traveled down the most likely hallway only to be stopped by a dropping portcullis.
What actually happened was that there was no pincer move and we had effectively alerted two separate groups of hobgoblins to our presence.
We pulled back to what we figured was our most defensive position, and waited.
Dale did not disappoint us when he dropped down 15 hobgoblin minis on the table; 8 minions, 4 soldiers, an archer, a warchief, and a warcaster, the combined forces of two separate encounters.
They came at us in a tight formation, which we couldn’t exploit because we had no wizard. We stood with our two tanks up front, the healers backing them up, and Valenae hiding around the corner – always trying to get a chance for a sneak attack.
Earl cleaned out each and every minion with his dragon breath.
Their archer and Valenae seemed to like shooting at one another.
The soldiers and the warchief stood toe-to-toe with Stout and Earl through the majority of the combat.
The worst opponent was the warcaster. Out of 4 attempts to gain back his special attack (Force Pulse – which did 2d8+4 or more in a burst 5, and knocked us down) Dale succeeded to roll 6 on three of those attempts. The first round he successfully blasted Earl and Tornok. The second round he blasted all of us (except Valenae) and 3 of his own soldiers.
His third blast on the fifth round killed an unconscious Tornok (he took a constant beating this combat, and I couldn’t connect with an attack roll for most of the combat).
Note: Make sure you have a high strength of you make a warlord. Damage doesn’t scale much at all in 4E, but attack bonuses and defenses scale evenly. That means the only you’re going to hit more often is through magic bonuses and your strength modifier. If I didn’t like the bonuses an 18 charisma warlord offers to the group, I’d have changed that long ago.
The final rounds was all of us in, all in bad shape (or dead), and the warcaster and archer.
The warcaster was swarmed, bringing us to the quote(s) of the week, when Aaron hits the warcaster who is supposed to be about to die:
Dale: “Do your worst.”
Aaron Rolls a 1
Sean: “He did his worst.”
After some discussion, the group decides to take Tornok back to town so see if anyone can resurrect him. Surprisingly there is, but it costs the group 500gp (still it’s cheaper than in 3E).
We rested the night in Winterhaven and then returned to the dungeon (we’re done with role-playing for this module – we’re ready to move on).
The next door we found had “Closed” scraped into it, so we opened it and went in.
We ended up getting attacked by a gelatinous cube and a pair of corruption corpse zombies.
Stout and Earl took on the tougher-than-expected gelatinous cube, Ander and Tornok took on the zombies, while Valenae split his attention.
The group taking on the gelatinous cube held their ground pretty well considering what could have happened to them. Gelatinous cubes are no longer 3HD creatures that can be killed as an afterthought.
Tornok got blasted once with an exploding zombie, but otherwise was fine. Ander did most of the damage to the undead while Tornok blocked.
The room was a dead end, so we went with our last option for doors, which must lead us to Kalorel.
That is after we got past the killer death trap with the ridiculous requirements for us to get past. Long story short, Valenae disabled a giant spinning titan statue while the rest of us were bashing on a group of smaller statues to prevent Earl from drowning in a magically walled off room that was filling with water, while two dragon statues were shooting Magic Missiles at us.
To stop a statue from attacking, Aaron had to roll 12 or better 4 times before failing twice. I’m no expert on probability, but figure that they could have said “if your rogue rolls a nat-20 on a d20, the statue turns off”. That’s not good design.
After all that a pair of double-doors is revealed.
We stopped there for the night.
And we’re skipping a week, so no update for nearly 2 weeks, and then I DM the campaign for a module.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 9:48 PM
2 Comments:
"I’m no expert on probability, but figure that they could have said “if your rogue rolls a nat-20 on a d20, the statue turns off”. That’s not good design."
We're still happily playing away with 3.5 in our D&D group, but knowing a bit about probability I might be able to shed some light here.
Moving skill rolls away from making one single roll to making several simpler rolls is essentially reducing the amount of luck in the rolls in favour of skill.
In the example above, four rolls of 13+ has about the same probability of rolling a single 20. But add in say 10 to the rolls, then rolling 3+ four times happens 2/3 of the time while 11+ once occurs 1/2 the time.
Ah, that explains the reasoning behind the multiple rolls, but does not fix the flaws in the design.
So now we have 3 possibilities:
1) Design flaw
2) Valenae has a low Dex
3) Dale read the module wrong
Each of those has a 1 in 3 probability :)
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