I don't get the dislike of healing surges

[BryonD]

[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION] Works for me.

 

[Rogue Agent]

4) Play the odds: as has been pointed out numerous times, for the most part, martial PCs do not lose efficacy as their HP wane. We won a LOT of battles limping in with only 20% of our HP- which, to be fair, we had a lot of since most PCs had MCed into some kind of warrior class- and a few key spells.

Right there. Now, if a LOT of battles you were limping away with only 20% of your HP, how were you doing 4-6 encounters without having a core healer or healing wands?

First, notice the switcheroo you pulled there. I suspect it's contributing to your misunderstanding.

1. You could regularly do many encounters per rest period
2. You had no core healers and little or no healing items.
3. You had many encounters that left you with 20% of HP.

Do you not see what the problem here is? 1 and 3 are contradictory.

I'm not really seeing the contradiction. It's not like the only way to reach 20% of your HP is in one big encounter that costs you 80% of your hit points. You can also suffer slow attrition over the course of several encounters.

If you follow that pattern even 25% of the time, you'll still end up limping into "A LOT" of encounters with 20% of your hit points over the course of a campaign.

Maybe you're interpreting the words "a lot" to mean "most"? But that's not what the words actually mean.

As for the general viability of the scenario DA describes, I'd like to hear more about the total number of PCs and the relative ELs of the encounters they're facing. If you get 6-8 PCs facing a mixture of encounters with ELs equal to or lower than the APL, the game plays a lot more like old school AD&D (because that's generally how encounters were designed in AD&D).

That's how we generally play, and the result isn't too dissimilar from what DA describes: Anywhere from 5-10 encounters per day, with the last 2 or 3 featuring the wizard blasting the party clear to a safe zone because the fighters have been attritioned. (Where we differ is that our group sometimes gets into epic fights with dozens of strong opponents... at which point we fall back on our healing wands and other resources to win the day.)

As DA describes, the trick is effective arcanist casting: Soften up melee mobs or take out the "tentpole" elites in mixed groups; then stop casting while the rest of the group mops up. Nova-blasting completely dominates a tactical encounter; it almost always sucks at achieving strategic goals.

With that being said, I find DA's claim that they played levels 1-10 in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil -- an adventure designed for 4th to 14th level characters -- to be the truly extraordinary part of the campaign he describes. IIRC, the first combat encounter in the Moathouse is a CR 5 dragon dealing 6d8 damage with its breath weapon. That's an average of 27 points of damage. Even on a successful save, that'll wipe out everybody in a 1st level party except a barbarian or fighter.

My guess is that the module must have been heavily altered by his DM. (Although I guess if they managed to take out that dragon somehow they'd start leveling up pretty quick.)

Yes, you do. Heck, the designers DESIGNED it so that you do. 4 EL par encounters is meant to be the upper limit of an adventuring day. That 5th one is SUPPOSED to kill PC's. If you are regularly going into encounters at 20% of resources, then you are supposed to be losing PC's.

It's true. The DMG did say, "A fifth encounter [with an EL equal to the APL] would probably wipe them out."

But do you know what the very next sentence in the DMG is? "The party should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with ELs higher than their level."

And on the page before that: "Parties with five or more members can often take on monsters with higher CRs, and parties with three or fewer are challenged by monsters with lower CRs. The game rules account for these facts by dividing the XP earned by the number of characters in the party."

The game is capable of supporting a wide range of groups and a wide range of playing styles. Your desire to treat guidelines as rules while simultaneously ignoring significant portions of those guidelines (a) doesn't tell us much about how the game actually plays; and (b) is counter-productive when it comes to enjoying the game.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

[MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION], I'm still not buying it. Sorry.

Not buying what? That my experiences are what I say they are?

C'est la vie- believe what you will, but I was there. With witnesses.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

to be the truly extraordinary part of the campaign he describes. IIRC, the first combat encounter in the Moathouse is a CR 5 dragon dealing 6d8 damage with its breath weapon. That's an average of 27 points of damage.

The only creature that faced the dragon directly for any length of time was Masterson, my Ftr/Rgr/Div/SpSwd's* Bat familiar. He was eaten. We made him work hard to get a bead on any other target, and when he did, he got hit from another angle. Attrition taking its toll, he eventually decided to retreat, and got ganked by the Wizard's Ray of Frost.

I will say of that encounter that we rolled particularly well- the dragon took several crits- and the DM rolled extremely poorly- the first use of the BW, the highest single die roll result was a lone 3. That hurts, but it wasn't fatal...especially since everyone saved.

IOW, chalk that victory up to luck more than anything else.


* At the time, I believe he was just a Ftr/Div

 

[Oryan77]

Not buying what? That my experiences are what I say they are?

C'est la vie- believe what you will, but I was there. With witnesses.

Yer either:

1. A liar trying to impress the ladies around here with your l33t gaming skillz.

2. An idiot that was probably playing Quest for Glory part 3 and yer getting it confused with your D&D game.

3. Frustrated trying to defend yourself so you got your mom to post for you long ago.

Cause unless your group belongs to the RPGA or yer a game designer, what you say has gotta be a lie. Just like the other people that had similar games like yours but are not RPGA members or designers.

You and your mom should be ashamed of yourselves!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Actually, I'm

4) Captain Kirk, and I reprogrammed the DM- a Mr. K. Maru- to run things in my favor.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

my Ftr/Rgr/Div/SpSwd's*

Like dipping, do you? (I want a smiley, but none here seem appropriate.)

The Auld Grump

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Like dipping, do you? (I want a smiley, but none here seem appropriate.)

The Auld Grump

Do I?

If you went back through my 34 years of D&D PCs, you'd find 80%+ are some form of multiclassed, including the 1Ed & 2Ed humans. And a portion of those that aren't are not because the campaign ended before I could multiclass as planned.

(For the record, that PC was more Diviner and SpSwd than anything else- as I recall, he only had 3 or 4 levels of Ftr & Rgr combined.)

 

[pemerton]

I'll give you one telling example.

<snip>

it proves there are people out there with your experience. It still surprises me after all this time to hear that you are one of them. But, it is not news to me that they are out there. And it also demonstrates that those people can discover more and go "holy crap, that's awesome!"

<snip>

"4E just doesn't really have THIS issue." - for Hussar's style.
4E has this issue TERMINALLY for Bryon's style.

As long as we also acknowledge that 3E has certain issues - terminally - for my style, and that the players who have come to my 4e game having played only 3E, and not having experienced my Rolemaster game, have discovered more.

I enjoy WoW (well, I used to until I quit a couple years ago) and I enjoy fantasy board games with a dash of RPG (Descent, etc). But if you asked me what the one real differences is between those and RPGs, it would absolutely be the immersion.

<snip>

when someone says those shortcoming don't exist to them and that they saw 3E as no different, then suddenly it seems to me that their experience for BOTH 3E and 4E was a hell of a lot like what I consider to be the experience of WoW.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove here.

Here are some actual play reports of my by-the-book 4e campaign. Please show me where the WoW-ish shallowness, or the "fantasy board game with a dash of RPG", is to be found. I missed it while I was GMing those sessions.

To put it another way. I've got nothing against you enjoying the BryonD 3E experience. I get a bit frustrated with these ongoing assertions and implications that no one else's game using a different system was ever as deep or compelling.

 

[Rogue Agent]

Here are some actual play reports of my by-the-book 4e campaign. Please show me where the WoW-ish shallowness, or the "fantasy board game with a dash of RPG", is to be found. I missed it while I was GMing those sessions.

I'm not Bryon. And I would tend to categorize 4th Edition as being "too much boardgame in an RPG" rather than trying to claim that it's not a roleplaying game.

But for me it really does boil down to associated and dissociated mechanics: When you're using mechanics which are associated with the game world and with your character, your mechanical decisions -- the act of actually playing the game -- is roleplaying.

OTOH, when you're using mechanics which are dissociated from the game world, your mechanical decisions -- the act of playing the game -- isn't roleplaying.

This is, IMO, the essential, defining feature of a "roleplaying game". If the mechanics of a game aren't roleplaying, then it's not a roleplaying game.

With that being said, you can still roleplay in the vicinity of non-roleplaying mechanics. And lots of people clearly have fun doing that. But you can also do that with lots of other non-roleplaying games -- Arkham Horror, Clue, whatever.

For me, unfortunately, the particular mix of roleplaying and non-roleplaying mechanics in D&D4 is simply not palatable. I have the continual sensation of getting into character only to have the dissociated mechanics yank me out of it again. I'm not certain if this is specific to D&D (which I expect to be a roleplaying game), specific to this particular mixture, or general to any such mixing.

(I suspect it's the second: I don't mind light roleplaying mechanics injected into other game forms. And I'm generally a fan of story games which feature lots of dissociated, narrative control mechanics. I think it's the sheer pointlessness of 4th Edition's dissociated mechanics that turns my taste against it so thoroughly.

For an example that I ran into over the weekend: In Gamma World the Alien origin features three powers: One of these allows you to call your spaceship to teleport you; but oddly this teleport can only move you 10 squares. Another explicitly allows you to command your mothership to translocate a mini-nuke... as long as it translocates within 20 squares of you. It's not just that I can't take these powers seriously; it's that there's a complete disconnect between the mechanics and what the mechanics are supposedly modeling.)

Long story short: When people talk about how "shallow" they find 4E or that it reminds them of a video game, I think they're generally struggling to figure out why large chunks of the system simply don't play like a roleplaying game. (And this is because large chunks of the system isn't.)

It's long been held that roleplaying is something that happens outside of the mechanics of the game. That whole "roleplayer vs. rollplayer" thing. But that's not actually true. The gameplay of roleplaying games has always featured mechanical decisions which are simultaneously character decisions: The act of making the mechanical decision is an act of roleplaying.

4E moved away from that. And it's one of the major problems people have with it.