Search results

I don't think you're alone in that. In fact, one of things the 4e designers talked about in one of the podcasts was that level appropriate encounters in 3e were pretty boring. An appropriate 3e encounter was one baddie of about your level, two of your level -2, or four or your level -4, etc...

What exactly do you feel is missing?

To quote from Darth and Droids, "Any GM worth his salt knows that shopkeepers must always be retired adventurers with oodles of levels in martial arts or the Jewelled Sword of Hacking Impertinent Hagglers to Bits under their counter."

A while back somebody who wanted to do the same thing (encourage a longer adventuring day) proposed increasing the XP for each encounter of the day. So: 1st Encounter: 80% of normal XP 2nd Encounter: 90% of normal XP 3rd Encounter: 100% of normal XP 4th Encounter: 110% of normal XP 5th...

Do you fight a lot of good creatures? The designers said in one of the podcasts that they intentionally removed a lot of the good creatures from the MM, or reclassed them as unaligned. Since most parties are good, the good creatures didn't really see a lot of use, so the designers thought DMs...

I agree with almost all of what you said, but I do have one quibble. I don't think Streetwise is just Gather Info with the serial numbers filed off. You can use it for the same stuff Gather Info did in 3e (and it will probably substitute for Knowledge (local) as well), but I think it's a lot...

Tell that to all the experienced players who swore the monk was overpowered when 3e first came out. ;) Oh, everybody will certainly want some anti-minion ability, but unless all your DM ever throws at you are minions, there will be a need for single target damage abilities too. In fact...

I think it's less than the average. Four creatures all doing average damage would be a lot more powerful than a single standard monster.

If you can select your own magic items without loosing any value from reselling the stuff the DM gave you, you can end up with a much more powerful result, even if the items are individually balanced. For instance, if you've got the power that gives your enemies vulnerability to cold, in your...

In previous editions, maybe. 4e has rituals for that sort of thing, so raising the dead no longer requires a high level cleric who could probably overcome any challenge suitable for low level characters by himself. ;) Who says they have competition? You don't really need enough new...

Fixed damage too.

Minions do fixed damage. I think that's the only other hard and fast rule. They have average AC per level, so if you're minionizing a soldier or other creature with unusually high AC, you'd need to reduce it. Just going through the ones in KotS there are other abilities characteristics that...

Conan has been reduced to basically zero wealth at times, liquid or not. The characters in Seven Samurai and Samurai Champloo were reduced to nothing more than the clothes on their backs and (mundane) swords. If you want to go a little grittier, it's hard to keep track of how often major...

We see them turn into heroes, but demigods usually takes a little longer.

At three hits it seems like you're setting up situations where a minion could be tougher than a regular monster of it's level, particularly at low levels and versus critical hits (especially with high crit weapons or other bonus damage on a crit). Maybe have a critical count as two hits?

I don't know if it's necessarily more difficult to rationalize, it's just that new rules need new and different rationalizations. The old rationalizations from 3e (and previous editions) are so ingrained we don't even have to think about them. A character with evasion is standing in a 10 foot...

You've got it right. A fighter can mark multiple creatures. Note that a Paladin cannot, since his ability specifies he can only mark one creature at a time.

Well, circles are square when you're using certain types of non-Euclidian distance metrics. ;)

The designers have said one of the emphases in the 4e MM was to make the monsters runnable right out of the book. The example they used was dragons (creating a full dragon stat block from the 3.x MM was basically an hours worth of work), but I think it applies to minions as well. They didn't...

Far better than 3e where the skills needed to play an archetypal thief took a huge bite out of even the rogue's big pile of skill points. In 4e you get the standard roguish package, plus there are still plenty of skill slots left over to actually customize your character to make them different...