D&D 4E Running player commentary on PCat's 4E Campaign - Heroic tier (finished)

[Markn]

Two leaders can make a HUGE difference. But yeah, I have run into the same problem as you. My group are all borderline powergamers, half of which are former Ultimate Delve champions. They know how to bring the pain.

I had been upping the encounter level of all my encounters but it still wasn't really threatening them, so I found a really good article by ChattyDM about 4e's "super secret synergy bonus" and how to account for it. It was very eye opening for me.

Essentially, as players begin to master 4e's complexities they become more difficult to challenge. They use smart tactics, they focus fire, they optimize their characters, and the develop nice combo attacks with their fellow party members. As a result combats of the appropriate level just become easier for them.

Read the article here:

Keeping up with the PCs: Part 1, The Secret Synergy Bonus : Critical Hits

And part 2 here:

Keeping up with the PCs: Part 2, What Not to Do and Quick Fixes : Critical Hits

So I implemented his suggestions and it made a HUGE difference in my game. Bottom line, I increased the damage output of monster and NPC attacks by +5 per tier per attack. It was funny, after my last couple of games, I was getting comments back about much tougher the combats seemed, PCs were actually getting dropped into negatives at least once per fight and there was a much bigger sense of danger.

At first I was worried that it would be too much for them and I would have a TPK, but my players adapted well. I'm also pretty generous in giving out appropriate level items to my players. If I had been stingier on magic there might have been more of a threat of a TPK, but its worked out very well for me so far.

PCs before were hoarding their dailies since they didn't need them and then would drop them all in the last fight before they took a rest and would just dominate. Now each PC is being forced to actually use one or two dailies per encounter. Also, the cleric player was thinking of playing something else, and the other players were encouraging him, saying they didn't even need a cleric. Now they are begging him to stay a cleric, or asking for someone else to play a leader.

I love it!

Interesting read. I do something similar to the +5 per tier damage bonus already. I add half level bonus to monster damage, which surprise, surprise, by the end of the tier matches that exact damage bonus. It does work and has made the game way more dangerous. To compensate I have reduced monster hp to 75% which speeds up combat a bit and seems to maintain the balance.

Our group has talked about it and we decided to only try 1 leader in the next campaign as we should reach 30th level this summer - which is the end of a 2 year campaign.

 

[Markn]

Pcat,

Sorry for derailing your thread, but at the very least it should be good to know how 2 leaders can affect your groups play/dynamic.

 

[jydog1]

PC parties can definitely have too much healing. Sure, it makes the party hugely resilient, but it also makes combat less fun because there is so little danger.
-KS

I dunno about that. With no luck finding a home game I've been playing LFR mods at the local gaming store, and my cleric is usually drained of everything she's got healing-wise after each fight. More than once we've had characters with no surges left and single-digit hit, but maybe we just aren't that smart!

 

[Piratecat]

Sagiro's been busy, so I'll give a quick update from last game.

Plot-wise, a visiting Grey Guard captain named Reymus turns out to be the same man who murdered Logan's mother and abducted his sister more than ten years ago. Logan is pretty sure the guy recognizes him and has been setting him up on suicide missions (such as scouting the bloodkiss beholder in previous games). The captain left port this game, and the PCs tried to anonymously threaten him; a simple trick (and some failed skill rolls) revealed that it was the PCs who threatened him.

The game was more plot-riffic than combat-tastic; one 45 minute long fight at the end of the session, a late night street ambush where an assassin accompanied by two frenzied attack dogs did their level best to kill Logan. The assassin tried this by releasing three dire stirges and then tossing a bucket of sludge on Logan that attracted them unerringly. So much for hiding.

It was an interesting on-level fight, albeit one that completely screwed Logan's new cunning sneak powers from his new build. Almost no one else in the group took any damage at all; in comparison, Logan dropped to zero and hovered around 10 hp for most of the fight. Heck, due to a bad initiative he didn't actually get to take any actions during his first three turns, and missed almost every roll after that!

And thus we learn the value of focused fire. When the enemy can concentrate on a single star destroyer a single PC, things get awfully scary.

I hadn't consciously intended to use all monsters that nerfed Logan's abilities, but it sure worked out that way. I wouldn't want to do that to anyone on a regular basis. Challenge is good; never getting to use your best tactics is much less so.

Incidentally, if you're not a player in either of my games, please feel free to brainstorm with me in this thread. My players shouldn't; no giant spoilers, but some fun stuff might be less fun if you do.

 

[Piratecat]

A quick bump for Sagiro so that he can tell you about astounding dice luck, many rituals, and an imperial herald.

 

[Sagiro]

This was our 31st run of the campaign; the tactical notes will be short, as there was no combat.

This was also our first session that saw significant and improvisational use of rituals. Okay, it was only three, but Rituals have been an underused system for us thus far, despite the fact that we have at least three Ritualists in the party. It helped that Piratecat adopted the house rule that non-combat rituals only take 10% of the listed casting time.

The first one was a 1st level Ritual from Primal Power called “Traveler's Camouflage.” It gives everyone in the party a bonus to non-combat stealth checks for 10 hours, and with a good roll plus assistance, Bramble's 30+ Nature check bestowed a whopping +10 bonus! This proved invaluable as we slipped through the streets of a panicked city without being slowed or accosted by the masses.

A bit of plot summary for context: Our duchy used to be called “Iskaine,” but Duke Torden declared independence and broke away from the Empire. Now he's King Torden, and there's been massive preparation (and conscription, and press gangs) given that the Emperor is expected to try to take back his rebellious dukedom.

Today the Empire Struck Back. A hundred-foot Colossus* appeared in the harbor, smashing Torden's ships in its mighty hands. A huge voice then boomed through the city (blowing out every glass window) declaring that all the buildings in the city (Bressail, capital of Iskaine) would be smashed to pieces in 12 hours unless Torden was handed over to Empire authorities.

What a coincidence! Logan is trying to find a lady friend who was conscripted away from her family, and The Grey Guard's ritualist used the Magic Map ritual to discover that said friend was in the royal palace. So, we suddenly found ourselves with a decent distraction for getting into the palace to look for her – that being a huge mob trying to break in and grab Torden to prevent city-wide destruction.

Still, the palace gates are closed and locked, and the guards inside won't be opening them for anyone right now. Bramble pulled another Ritual out of her book: Tree Stride. She used it to allow us to teleport from a tree outside the walls, to a tree inside the walls. And once inside, we have the stealthy cover of the first ritual to stay unseen by the guards. (In theory it won't be a huge problem if we're spotted. We're Grey Guard, and we're investigating rumors of a monster inside the palace. Never mind that we started those rumors, and that the sound of the monster is actually Strontium using Ghost Sound.)

A couple of other notes: With the Stealth Ritual going, Logan (a stealth-build Cunning Rogue) managed Stealth Checks of 46 and 47! We're only 7th level, but he's got a +18 base check, +10 for the ritual, and rolled an 18 and a 19.

Finally, unrelated to the game itself, I was idly rolling d20's four at a time during some downtime. I wanted to see how many it would take to roll a “20.” It took me an astounding 156 rolls! The odds of rolling 155 times without getting a “20” are about 2850 to 1 against. And here's the kicker. When I had gotten up to about 50 rolls, and the others were starting to look on with morbid fascination, Piratecat said “watch this,” picked up a single die, and rolled.

20. I kid thee not.

* - Piratecat hinted afterward that the Colossus was our first Level 30 monster. I''ll buy that, given that it was picking up warships, one in each hand, and smashing them together. Yikes!

 

[blargney the second]

I think I just tasted five different kinds of awesome.

 

[Piratecat]

Small correction: the colossus is 250' tall, about half again as large as the Statue of Liberty. I'll post its ultimatum once I'm at my main computer.

On a meta note, I'll be bribing my players to help me world-build (and as thanks for writing up game sessions.) The bribe well-deserved reward will be poker chips worth +1d6 on any d20 roll, passable to another player, usable after you've seen the result of the d20.

 

[Rechan]

So... what happened once you guys got into the palace?

Or was the session just "RUN and then get in"?

 

[Piratecat]

We ran out of time.

One of the uses of the magic map ritual was to find the albino tiefling Caducity Skirr, a former Grey Guard member (and head of the local smuggling operation) back in Floodford who was known to have "died" back in the lizardman battle. The PCs were sent south to Bressail to try and figure out if she was actually still alive or not.

Some interesting investigation here; the magic map ritual only covers 50x50 miles, and it's prohibitively expensive at 350 gp. I handed the group a fairly large map of the area, 10 miles per hex. "She could be anywhere on here!" they said, "or even off the map!" So they went to work.

She disappeared in Floodford. A series of streetwise checks indicated that she didn't come into Bressail, even though her most likely path would be to come south down the river. She likes civilization and being a big fish in a small pond, so she probably went somewhere she could get her claws into. And she probably wouldn't go anywhere with a strong Grey Guard presence, right?

History checks indicated which towns and cities had no, few, or a lot of Grey Guards. The group then settled on Laroch, the one small town on a (wine-producing) trade route that had few or no guardsmen...

and bingo!

I thought there was going to be about a 1 in 10 chance they got it right. It's fun to be outsmarted.

Behind the spoiler block is an absurdly large and poorly labeled hex map of the area, courtesy of Hexographer. The group is currently in Bressail, in the south; Floodford is way in the north; and Laroch is in the adjoining country of Croghan to the northeast. Each hex is 10 miles.

[sblock=Map of Iskaine and Environs]

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