Per-Encounter Powers

[Steely_Dan]

I wonder how dragon breath weapons will work.

I already have an idea of how a Dragon ("solo") could work in 5th Ed.

 

[Abstruse]

You are still making a comparison between a scenario in which you have daily powers and a situation in which you do not. All such arguments support adding daily powers. They do not support taking away powers that are regained after a short rest.

If you want to argue that you should take away powers that are regained after a short rest, you need to show how combat balance becomes more difficult in a situation in which you have powers that are regained after a short rest, compared to a situation in which you only have at-will powers.

I haven't shown anything of the sort. I've shown that if your resources are encounter-based then you have to balance design on an encounter basis. I've shown examples. I've done analogies involving fruit. I can't explain it again without having a psychotic break.

If the majority of a character's resources recharge on an encounter basis, that means that every encounter has to challenge them. Otherwise, the encounter is front-loaded with those increased abilities and is too easy to be a challenge. There are also no resources expended as they refresh at the end of the encounter.

Either you're not getting what I'm saying or I'm not getting your counter argument but either way, we can just copy and paste our posts and replies at this point because we're going around in circles. I've exhausted every single way I can think of to rephrase my statements, so let's assume I'm the one that can't figure out what the hell we're talking about and you try a different way to explain to me what you're saying.

Going to have to disagree with you. I have converted Keep on The Boarderlands and Clerics Challenge II to 4e. Successfully. Right now my brother is working on a X-Crawl adventure for 4e Gamma World.

It's all on how you approach the conversion.

I bolded that last line for you because it's the important part. I've done 1st/2nd ed conversions to 4e too. But after a point, all you're doing is writing an entirely new adventure from scratch using a map someone drew in the 70s/80s and sticking to their theme for monster choices. I gave up on trying after my fourth one because it was easier and faster to write something completely from scratch that tried to tell the same story.

If you try to do a straight conversion, encounters are going to be horribly unbalanced by being either far too easy or far too difficult. If you group enemies into set and balanced encounters, you're re-writing the adventure. You're no longer making a conversion, you're doing a remake.

 

[Pseudopsyche]

This is where your argument fails for me. The at-will damages are not the same. Game A has 10 for at-will, and Game B should as well. Then it also adds in the short-rest powers on top of that.

I'd be interested in comparing like to like here, with at-will values which are identical, because that is what actually happened.

Well, I only intended my argument to address short-rest powers in the abstract. If you want to say that Game A is 3E and Game B is 4E, I would say that 4E added encounter powers that inflict more damage than 3E/4E at-will powers, but it then increased the number of hit points for both PCs and monsters to compensate. This change made combat less swingy and gave every class a variety of options, but it made parties particular effective against lower-level encounters.

I think this effect contributes to the complaint that some of us have about 4E adventure design. If a party of 10th-level 3E adventurers faces five separate ECL 8 combats before facing an ECL 13 set piece, their effectiveness in the final encounter is almost certainly reduced more (compared to how they would fare skipping the easy encounters) than a party of 10th-level 4E adventurers would be facing a level-13 encounter after a string of five level-8 encounters. In fact, unless those level-8 encounters managed to reduce some PC to under 3 healing surges before being obliterated by the onslaught of encounter powers, the 4E party may even be stronger, after achieving some milestones.

Yes, you could argue that the 4E DM should combine some for those level-8 encounters into a smaller number of "real" encounters, but that's exactly the point. The 3E DM doesn't need to change his design.

 

[jadrax]

I wonder how dragon breath weapons will work.

I already have an idea of how a Dragon ("solo") could work in 5th Ed.

I got slightly carried away in the playtest I ran and put a copper dragon in, which they ended up fighting. I just used the Sleep Spell to represent its Slow Breath as a quick kludge.

 

[Sigdel]

I bolded that last line for you because it's the important part. I've done 1st/2nd ed conversions to 4e too. But after a point, all you're doing is writing an entirely new adventure from scratch using a map someone drew in the 70s/80s and sticking to their theme for monster choices. I gave up on trying after my fourth one because it was easier and faster to write something completely from scratch that tried to tell the same story.

If you try to do a straight conversion, encounters are going to be horribly unbalanced by being either far too easy or far too difficult. If you group enemies into set and balanced encounters, you're re-writing the adventure. You're no longer making a conversion, you're doing a remake.

My players went in to it at a bit higher level then the module expects. So I was able to keep the numbers the same in the first few caves.

Also they learned early on that violence is not the only solution. When the elf ranger strolled up to the barricade that the kobolds set up in the main room and tossed their chiefs head to them and just pointed to them, then the cave entrance it was seven levels of classic. And by this point they had already survived several ambushes and were low on resources.

Lets not forget that in 4e monsters come in more than one flavor. If you need a horde, use minions. Heck, the kobolds in the adventure were minions (3 hp) anyway unless it told you they were special. For those of Meepo rank or higher, place the kind that makes the most sense.

Now granted, not every adventure will make a good conversion. A Light In The Belfry for example. But having done a Keep On The Boarderlands conversion I still disagree. I have had more success in converting OSD&D - 2ed adventures to 4e than I ever did to 3e.

 

[Abstruse]

Lets not forget that in 4e monsters come in more than one flavor. If you need a horde, use minions. Heck, the kobolds in the adventure were minions (3 hp) anyway unless it told you they were special. For those of Meepo rank or higher, place the kind that makes the most sense.

What about the large number of encounters in older modules where there is only one or two of a low-level threat? You can either buff them up (either more monsters, higher level monsters, or a solo if there's only one) to make them an encounter challenge, or you can remove them entirely. Either way, you've changed the pace of the original adventure which means you're re-writing it rather than converting it. And since a lot of the older modules had very little in the way of story, the pacing was pretty much the only thing they had to change the feel of each module.

 

[Sigdel]

What about the large number of encounters in older modules where there is only one or two of a low-level threat? You can either buff them up (either more monsters, higher level monsters, or a solo if there's only one) to make them an encounter challenge, or you can remove them entirely. Either way, you've changed the pace of the original adventure which means you're re-writing it rather than converting it. And since a lot of the older modules had very little in the way of story, the pacing was pretty much the only thing they had to change the feel of each module.

just for clarity sakes, what do you mean by re-writing?

It all depends on the intent of the adventure. KotB was a sandbox adventure. When I converted it I kept that in mind. I did not scale the adventure to challenge the PC's. When I started the adventure I warned them that this was not to scale. If you go to the cave with the hardest monsters when you are not ready you will get whacked. And that combat may not be the best option. Granted the pace was slower given it was 4e, but that was no big deal.

In CCII, I scaled monsters to best emulate the intended challenge of the adventure. Also put in all the "back door" tricks that the original had. Example; the entire final combat can be avoided by dumping a holy potion in to a keg of brandy ( it makes sense in context). Or you can go the slugfest route that would be harder unless you recruit the three NPC's that will help you out. I ran my wife through this one in one night, 4e had no slowdown on it.

 

[Steely_Dan]

I got slightly carried away in the playtest I ran and put a copper dragon in, which they ended up fighting. I just used the Sleep Spell to represent its Slow Breath as a quick kludge.

Cool, i'm thinking if your average Dragon has claw/claw/bite/wing/wing/tail, then it could break it up with its speed: move 10 feet, claw/claw; move 15 feet, wing; move 10 feet, bite, etc.

 

[jadrax]

Cool, i'm thinking if your average Dragon has claw/claw/bite/wing/wing/tail, then it could break it up with its speed: move 10 feet, claw/claw; move 15 feet, wing; move 10 feet, bite, etc.

The main issue we had was should it have some kind of Spell Resistance, and if so how would it work. Hopefully some Drow* rules will get released soon or something to give us some clues. ;o)


*Or Dragon Rules, Dragon Rules would really help.

 

[FireLance]

Either you're not getting what I'm saying or I'm not getting your counter argument but either way, we can just copy and paste our posts and replies at this point because we're going around in circles. I've exhausted every single way I can think of to rephrase my statements, so let's assume I'm the one that can't figure out what the hell we're talking about and you try a different way to explain to me what you're saying.

Well, let's use something similar to the numbers that Pseudopsyche used. Let's say fights are balanced around the assumption that the PCs only use at-will powers that deal 15 points of damage. My original point was that if you could balance a fight for PCs just using at-will powers that deal 15 damage, then it should be no different from balancing a fight for PCs using at-will powers at deal 10 damage half the time, and powers that are regained after a short rest that deal 20 damage the other half of the time. If the PCs lose some daily resources (such as hit points) when using only 15-point at wills, they should also lose the same resources when using half 10-point at-wills and half 20-point powers that are recovered after a short rest.

However, as Pseudopsyche pointed out, that means that shorter, presumably easier fights are easier, and longer, presumably tougher fights are tougher.

That said, daily-based design does have some drawbacks. From your earlier post:

If you have a daily-based design, you just have to make sure no particular encounter is going to TPK. Even weak encounters are going to chip away at resources and provide some level of challenge managing those resources. Far less stress and need to micromanage and balance every single encounter.

The problem with a completely daily-based design is that it is not always possible to predict how depleted the PCs' resources will be at the start of any particular fight. A fight that the PCs could take on when at full resources could result in a TPK if they have already expended half of them.

In a way, I think a mix of powers that are regained after a long rest and powers that are regained after a short rest give the DM the easiest time when it comes to balancing encounters. The powers that are regained after a short rest give the DM a reasonably reliable gauge of the minimum level of capability the PCs will almost always have. He just has to ensure that he doesn't plan for any fights below a minimum level of difficulty. The powers that are regained after a long rest are the big guns which give the PCs the spike capability needed to take on tougher fights.