4e / GSL How do we actually play the game?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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Why I think you should try 4e (renamed)

Originally Posted by Mallus

In a few years time I believe we absolutely should evaluate 4e on how people actually played it. Heck, we should do that now, it's been out almost a year.

In another thread it was brought up that games are sometimes - maybe even often - played differently from how they might have been expected, designed or intended to be played.

The designers of a game make assumptions on play styles and on the way their rules are used, add elements they find crucial for the enjoyment (balance, fun, story, whatever). But then players come around and notice the rules don't work that well or that they can "abuse" the rules for different ends, and so on.

An example might be people that handwave detailed monster creation guidelines, or people that institute house rules to make a game more or less lethal, people hand out tons of magic items when they were "supposed" to be rare, people allow casters to select their spells known instead of rolling for it or whatever else you can come up, or maybe seeing Thief skills as the only way to do whatever they do instead of a unique special abilities. A lot of these house rules, misunderstandings and diversions from intentions or expectations are common among many groups. A game is supposed to be horror and research, but due to the way combats and adventures work most of the time, heavy weaponry is typically found on even the most unlikely character. Nobody actually casts spells because it's far too dangerous and pistols and lockpicks work a lot more reliable, despite the game assuming everyone is a kind of spellcaster.


Maybe it is a little early for 4E to figure those out, but hey, one can try.


What do you think is not working as intended by the designers? What are you ignoring in practice despite the rules or guidelines suggesting otherwise.

For example - do you notice that the roles are meaningless in actual play?
Do you find yourself ignoring the monster creation guidelines and make your own stat blocks? Do you never use official stat blocks for monsters and rather make your own? Do you work with XP "budgets" for encounters - and does this achieve the results you expected?
Do you not use skill challenges at all, pre- or after errata or replaced them with a house rule system? Do you find you ignore skills or class skills? Have you removed certain restrictions? Did you change healing surges? Do you find yourself ignoring build or ability score suggestions? Do you ever use the infamous p.42 in the DMG, or have you heavily house ruled it? Do you use different point buy values (or a different dice roll method?).
Do you find any rule particularly frustrating and costing you a lot of effort to "use", more than it is worth to you?

Or do you only house rule very selectively, like changing a specific power?

I am not asking for the details of house rules, but more of where you notice that you quickly diverged from the game assumptions or rules and which direction you did take. What rules did you notice have no actual impact on the game? What rules do not work as intended?

[Imaro]

Well here's a few things I've noticed about 4e through playing it...

4e does not actively encourage stunting or even actions outside of the use of powers (for most classes) in combat. I say "most" only because if one is willing and/or able to stunt around their one main attribute all the time then it still doesn't "encourage" it per se but 4e's design becomes less of a hindrance to it.

In fact I would go so far as to say it's design is a hindrance for most characters unless the DM is willing to abstract whatever stunt or action the PC is trying to rely on his main ability... otherwise there is no particular reason for a Paladin based on Cha to try a stunt or action with another attribute in combat, when he has actual powers based on Cha, all he nets is a larger chance of failure.


I think, for me, skill challenges are the biggest failure to come out of 4e. Every time I see posts about them on the internet, people refer the poster to Mike Mearls articles on DDI as the "correct" way to run skill challenges... and yet I don't think WotC should be charging for this type of column. Since the release of skill challenges many have been unsatisfied with them, and it boggles my mind that instead of WotC offering a free advice article as an update or even just advice on how to get these mechanics right in use (which, if I remember correctly even some of the designers admitted that the wrong incarnation of them were published in the rulebooks). Personally I don't use them too much because I haven't come up with a way that I like to implement them as thay now stand.


I'll have to think some more but these are two things that always pop in my head concerning 4e.

[Jack99]

I run most of 4e as is. Most of my house-ruling has been done with monsters. Upping their damage while lowering their hit points, especially for solos. However, with the advent of the MM2, I tweak much less. My minions still do low damage value instead of fixed damage.

Otherwise, it's mostly small thing (expertise feat for free, a handful of powers baned/fixed) that I have touched.

I run skill challenges somewhere between pre and post errata, but otherwise by the book. The stunting rule have been great, but nothing like I expected. My players rarely use them, although I do, when I am a player, but rarely more than once or twice per session. As a DM, however, I use them all the time (or rather, the monsters do). I have found this makes combats much more dynamic, flexible and varied, and it makes for great fun.

The one big thing I have considered changing is penalty stackability, I am not sure that untype penalties that stack was a good idea.

[Dykstrav]

I've tweaked minions a bit. My group has noticed that minions make the players feel like they have to waste attack rolls on speed bumps rather than make them feel powerful and heroic. At the moment, I'm giving them a flat die-based damage (like 1d6 instead of just 4 damage from an attack) and 25% of the hit points of a standard monster instead of 1 hit point. That's enough that they still go down in one or two hits, but without it being a guaranteed one-hit kill, they have some teeth. The players seem to really enjoy it when they can't tell which goblins are the minions and which are the "real" monsters.

We've also house-ruled critical hits. Sometimes you roll max damage anyway, so just doing max damage doesn't seem that cool. The extra damage you get from magic weapons meliorates the effect only slightly, since monsters rarely get extra damage on crits. In the last campaign we ran (that ended at thirteenth level), the fighter suffered six critical hits in a single battle and pretty much shrugged it off. For our current campaign, we're playing where a crit just adds a flat damage bonus (+10 at level 1-4, it'll go up to +15 or +20 at 5th level).

[tmatk]

I enjoy the game, but I think they made PCs too hard to kill. I've been playing for 8 months, and DMing for about 2, and I don't think I've ever seen a PC in real danger. It's starting to bother me, and I could see this eventually turning me off the game completely. Success is boring when there's no chance of failure.

[vagabundo]

Ive been playing mostly to the rules in the PHB; I cannot think of any specific alteration I make that arn't mistakes.

However I am fairly liberal with interpreting and altering monsters and situations on the fly. I use the DMG/MM mostly as guidelines. I believe that this is in the spirit of how 4e was designed, to make the DM more of a crafter of the narrative. I'll happy change HP, or make up rules and special abilities on the fly and not worry too much about the setting impact.

I've been unsure of Skill Challenges and how to handle them. I believe that it is best to be transparent with the mechanics, in the same way that the combat mini-game is transparent to the players. But I've yet to put it in practice to my satisfaction. I think Skill Challenges will evolve greatly over the course of this edition. We are playtesting a great feature of 5e - oh no I said a bad word. Don't get me wrong; I dont begrudge WotC for including skill challenges in 4e and I'm very glad they did.

[Toben the Many]

Interesting. Have you not heard about the numerous TPKs in 4e? When I've played 4e, there have certainly been moments in which the whole party is in danger. Primarily because, if everyone is battered down, there is no "Heal" or insta-cure for everyone to be back up to full.

Also, because the monsters are a lot tougher.

One really, really good fix we have come up with is allowing PCs to stock pile Action Points. Usually, you're only supposed to have one at a time, but allowing PCs to hold on to a whole bunch has proved extremely valuable to the enjoyment of the game.

Primarily this is because, if you have noticed, that to hit something in 4e, you usually have to roll 10+ on a d20. So, if you have a bad night, it's pretty easy for the entire party to miss attacks for two rounds in a row. When/if that happens, it can be pretty disastrous. If you listen to that first Penny Arcade D&D podcast, this is pretty much what happens to them at the end of the module.

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Originally Posted by tmatk

I enjoy the game, but I think they made PCs too hard to kill. I've been playing for 8 months, and DMing for about 2, and I don't think I've ever seen a PC in real danger. It's starting to bother me, and I could see this eventually turning me off the game completely. Success is boring when there's no chance of failure.

Throw harder encounters at the PCs.

That might be an interesting aspect of this - monsters have a certain level, challenges have a certain level. Do the encounters feel challenging enough at that level? Or do we most of the time default to higher level challenges?

When I look at my experiences from H2: Thunderspire Labrynth - I have only 3 players running 4 characters most of the time, and they levelled a little faster as result. I didn't originally plan it, but in one encounter (against the Duergar Stronghold) I let them run into the following-up encounter, basically combing both (though they still got to fight the monsters seperately, they didn't get a short rest). That was a very very tough and very very memorable fight. I combined multiple encounters a little more often after that (where it made sense), and those stayed very hard, but also very satisfying.

There are a lot of variables in play - a mismatched character level but also a mismatched party size for the adventure - so it is hard to generalize something reliably. But if, it is possible that encounters in the suggest level range are not "hard enough" and that the PCs maybe have too many resources to recover from damage and not enough to deal it out. (That can be a party composition aspect, too - more focus on healing powers, less on attack & damage boosting). Maybe the suggest monster damage values for a given level should simply be higher? The baseline for a monster is too low?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Originally Posted by Toben the Many

Interesting. Have you not heard about the numerous TPKs in 4e? When I've played 4e, there have certainly been moments in which the whole party is in danger. Primarily because, if everyone is battered down, there is no "Heal" or insta-cure for everyone to be back up to full.

Also, because the monsters are a lot tougher.

One really, really good fix we have come up with is allowing PCs to stock pile Action Points. Usually, you're only supposed to have one at a time, but allowing PCs to hold on to a whole bunch has proved extremely valuable to the enjoyment of the game.

Primarily this is because, if you have noticed, that to hit something in 4e, you usually have to roll 10+ on a d20. So, if you have a bad night, it's pretty easy for the entire party to miss attacks for two rounds in a row. When/if that happens, it can be pretty disastrous. If you listen to that first Penny Arcade D&D podcast, this is pretty much what happens to them at the end of the module.

Oh yes, that can happen too. Like when we fought a bog standard fight in an equal level challenge composed of goblins and hobgoblins and a trap that never did any harm. What a cruel fate.

[Obryn]

About the only major change I made was with minions. I halved their XP value, so 8 of them = 1 regular enemy.

That's about it, though. We're going along just fine!

-O

[ggroy]

To make combat move faster, all damage has a +level modifier added to it. (Star War Saga Edition had something like this, but with a +level/2 modifier for damage from melee and ranged attacks).

Even with this simple modification, the players tend to go through healing surges a lot faster.

[neuronphaser]

I could be mistaken, but the things I *think* I see the most (as in: are in my game, and the games of others I know/play in/read about):

- Mile stones/action points are handled differently. Various ways, really, but not per core.
- The staff implement/weapon debate is stupid...staffs can be whatever is most beneficial to the caster at the time
- Skill Challenges are often handled in some ways differently (usually just minor -- the DCs are different -- but sometimes major -- like Stalker0's system)
- Limits to magic item dailies are removed or altered

I think the milestones/action points thing has to be the most often house-ruled. The designers wrote it KNOWING that it wouldn't be used as-is, but it made senese to present it the way it is so that there is some "standard" for RPGA or just for reference. But I can't think of anyone who uses them as is.

[Zerakon]

Ban Consecrated Ground.

Forced movement doesn't always automatically break a grab. It might give a bonus saving throw, might do nothing, etc. at the DM's discretion depending on the nature of the grab and the forced movement.

Simplify daily magic item use, because the rules are annoying.

[JeffB]

Not currently running a 4E game, but I also upped the damage output and dropped monster HP, using The Rayvn's "Brutal 4E" rules he posted over at the Necromancer Games forum way back when. In essence- all weapons/attacks are high crit, dice "explode" and sometimes I reduced monster HPs by 1/4 or so (originally Rayvn was doing 1/2 HP) . Makes combats run quicker and much more "Conan-esque" Burns up the PC healing surges pretty quick too. Here's the thread in question (You will also be able to read the O.A.F. Creation Myth )

I like the "idea" of Skill Challenges though its nothing really new- I remember similar story mechanics in other games (Issaries Herowars/HeroQuest for example). I tend to improvise, be more ad-hoc with them- I reward the payers for good/creative play, and if they act foolish/poorly chances are the "challenge" will not go well for them. Of course sometimes it's simply a matter of "let the dice fall how they may".

[Obryn]

Originally Posted by neuronphaser

- Mile stones/action points are handled differently. Various ways, really, but not per core.

We actually use milestones and action points pretty much as-written, and it works pretty well, IMO.

-O

[Storminator]

I think the only change we make is to minions: any time a minion takes damage, it gets a save. Fail and it dies, succeed and and it lives. Crits deny the save.

We haven't run many skill challenges tho, because the ones we ran seemed pretty unsatisfying.

PS

[Cadfan]

I play the game as is, with very few exceptions.

I tend not to run skill challenges as written, unless I really feel that they're appropriate for the scene. Instead I just adjudicate like I used to, with players needing to accomplish whatever "makes sense" at the moment. Of course, I have adjusted how I do this as a result of learning about skill challenges- I tend to more heavily favor multiple check skill based encounters and I tend to put more thought into making sure that more characters can be involved at a time. I do use skill challenges for matters that have obvious degrees of success, or which can easily be conceived of in terms of each individual effort contributing to the overall "amount" of success. Use drops of water in a bucket as an example- it doesn't matter how the drops got in there, it just matters how many.

I don't give out XP based on the XP schedule. Instead I just handle level ups like I did in 3e- whenever it feels right. I do use XP for determining combat difficulty, and feel this works reasonably well.

I think minions work incredibly well when there are just a handful of them accompanying other more important monsters. I do not use encounters of nothing but minions. I often use minions in waves as part of reinforcements, as this protects them from single round obliteration. Sometimes I use what we might call respawning minions- skeletons that raise from the dead, for example. As I do not give out XP for monsters killed, this causes no particular problems.

I think that in modules WotC foolishing holds themselves to a strict "add up the monsters" style of determining challenge level and XP. WotC regularly issues realistic but intentionally poor tactics for their monsters, or combines monster synergies in highly effective ways, particularly in combination with terrain that is not officially a hazard and therefore not worth XP. The first results in a challenge of lower difficulty than assigned, and the latter in a challenge of higher difficulty. To give an example of what I mean, imagine a fight with a monster that can push targets it hits two spaces. If you fight this monster in a featureless plane, its worth 1000 xp. If you fight it in a room with a trap that sprays acid, then maybe the encounter is worth 1,200 xp, and you'll see some neat effects when the monster throws a PC into the trap. If you fight this monster in a room with a giant 40 foot deep hole in the floor that isn't a trap, just a feature of the room, the encounter is worth 1000 xp again, even though it may very well be far, far more deadly than the room with the acid. I try to keep careful watch on these things when I run published modules.

There's probably more, but that's what I can think up on the spot.

[Noumenon]

I think, for me, skill challenges are the biggest failure to come out of 4e. Every time I see posts about them on the internet, people refer the poster to Mike Mearls articles on DDI as the "correct" way to run skill challenges... and yet I don't think WotC should be charging for this type of column. Since the release of skill challenges many have been unsatisfied with them, and it boggles my mind that instead of WotC offering a free advice article as an update or even just advice on how to get these mechanics right in use (which, if I remember correctly even some of the designers admitted that the wrong incarnation of them were published in the rulebooks). Personally I don't use them too much because I haven't come up with a way that I like to implement them as thay now stand.

Remember how Robin Laws wrote that book you had to pay for, Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering, but then they got Robin Laws to write for the 3.5 DMG and most of that stuff got in there? I figure maybe DMG III or IV will have up-to-date skill challenge technology once the community has figured out what it actually is good for.

[Noumenon]

Edit: It told me it didn't post the first time because it was too close together!

[Dykstrav]

Originally Posted by tmatk

I enjoy the game, but I think they made PCs too hard to kill. I've been playing for 8 months, and DMing for about 2, and I don't think I've ever seen a PC in real danger. It's starting to bother me, and I could see this eventually turning me off the game completely. Success is boring when there's no chance of failure.

Yeah, in my first 4E campaign I had only one character actually die over the course of thirteen levels. That came as a bit of a surprise after previous editions, where I commonly saw a character death every three to four sessions.

After playing in the new heroic tier game I just started, I think that I figured out why characters can be tough to threaten some times: healing surges. What makes combats really dangerous in 4E is when characters start running low on healing surges. It used to be where characters wanted to rest when they started running out of spells for the day. Because powers refresh so quickly, it's healing surges that really become the issue. Attrition is more dangerous than the raw power of the monsters the characters fight.

In that first campaign, the characters were based in a city where they could basically rest any time they wanted. They could easily take on two or three encounters before resting because they always had a safe place to bolt up for the night. In my new game, they're in a wilderness area where I make them check for encounters when they take an extended rest. We had a character death in the second session, and once healing surges hit about half, the characters want to hunker down for the night.