Hm, yeah. I'm not sure 4e does "WFRP Rat Catcher" level of grim'n'gritty, but I'm using it for blood-soaked Heavy Metal swords & sorcery, and traditional Forgotten Realms high fantasy, and it's great at both. It was decent for old school earthy-high-fantasy sandboxing, too.
D&D 4E 4E DM's - what have you learned?
- Thread starter wedgeski
- Start date
Hm, yeah. I'm not sure 4e does "WFRP Rat Catcher" level of grim'n'gritty, but I'm using it for blood-soaked Heavy Metal swords & sorcery, and traditional Forgotten Realms high fantasy, and it's great at both. It was decent for old school earthy-high-fantasy sandboxing, too.
I like to play highish-CHA Defenders with some emergency healing for when another PC is bleeding out- Dwarven armour for themselves, and either a Paladin with minimal Daily lay-on-hands, or a Fighter with muticlass Warlord for an Inspiring Word.
I (a) don't want to play Leaders and (b) can't stand playing PCs who don't dare open their mouths, so my last 2 PCs have been a high-CHA Rogue (Larsenio Roguespierre) and a high-CHA LG Fighter, Rothgar.
My good-CHA Fighter PC is fairly sub-optimal since 4e hates high-CHA Fighters nearly as much as 3e did; I'm 'supposed' to put points in WIS not CHA and I pay a lot for some decent CHA-based skills. At least in 4e though the high CHA boosts my Will defence, and I'm not totally hopeless at Diplomacy etc the way that even a high-CHA 3e Fighter is.
I like that in 4e paying char-op resources for roleplay resources is not a completely hopeless tradeoff.
I loved it when a raging barbarian PC critted a young red dragon for 90+ damage; poor little thing lasted barely 2 rounds.
The occasional one-shot or too-swift demise of a major villain/monster is a price well worth paying to avoid routine grind, IMO. I've never seen players complain.
Ryujin
Legend
I loved it when a raging barbarian PC critted a young red dragon for 90+ damage; poor little thing lasted barely 2 rounds.
The occasional one-shot or too-swift demise of a major villain/monster is a price well worth paying to avoid routine grind, IMO. I've never seen players complain.
I have two characters that are optimized out the wazzoo, that easily do 70+ per round. A crit is often a kill. Halve the damage and it is a kill, without the crit.
Radiating Gnome
Adventurer
4e encouraged me to tinker, reskin, and build monsters from scratch, and that's been liberating.
4e presented a framework for skill challenges that's acceptable but limited -- but when you free yourself to make the same sort of drastic changes and just plain get jiggy with challenges, the idea alone provides a great way to structure non-combat parts of your game.
And I'm in the explicit SC camp. But I also don't use them often for RP encounters -- those we just RP with a few skill checks if I feel like I need them.
-rg
4e presented a framework for skill challenges that's acceptable but limited -- but when you free yourself to make the same sort of drastic changes and just plain get jiggy with challenges, the idea alone provides a great way to structure non-combat parts of your game.
And I'm in the explicit SC camp. But I also don't use them often for RP encounters -- those we just RP with a few skill checks if I feel like I need them.
-rg
In my game, the wizard is CHA 10 but Diplomacy trained, the tiefling CHA-paladin is Diplomacy and Intimidate trained with a Circlet of Authority, and the drow chaos sorcerer is Intimidate and Bluff trained.
Nevertheless it is the CHA 10 dwarven fighter, "Lord Derrik", with no social skills trained, who is the party leader in civilised regions. Naturally this leads to crazy hijinks as his heralds, advisors etc do their best to make his social appearances less than utter failures!
And to make this thread-relevant - it illustrates someting else I've learned GMing 4e, namely, how to set up and adjudicate social situations in which (i) the low-social skill PC gets drawn into the action, without (ii) having to look like an idiot, and without (iii) the party getting hosed as a result. Skill challenges have been a part of this, but more important has been a ruleset which makes it clear that failure can be adjudicated at the metagame rather than ingame-causal level - so the fighter failing a social skill check doesn't have to mean he embarrased himself, but rather simply that the situation complicates in a way that is contrary to what the player was hoping for. And those complications, besides (hopefully) being interesting in themselves, give all the players more stuff to play off and respond to.
I find this sort of player a bit frustrating - apparently keen on playing the game (ie not a reluctant partcipant) and yet seemingly uninterested in grappling with the mechanics of the PC, be that spell lists, powers etc. Thankfully I've only ever played with a few of them, and not at all in the past 10+ years.
Is someone able to redesign the sheet for him, so that the first things he sees are the powers he should be using rather than the ones he shouldn't? I found that play in our game certainly improved once the sheet that the sorcerer player had designed for his PC got widely disseminated among the group. (It lists all powers on a single (Excel) landscape page, ordered by action type, with frequency, to hit, damage, efffects etc across the page in a line. This particular sheet probably isn't good for your Warlord guy, but I just use it as an illustration of the capacity of a better-designd sheet to improve play. The sheet that comes off DDI strikes me as particularly useless!)
SensoryThought
First Post
One thing I did for players who find the 4-6 page sheet too full on was type the combat abilities into the DDI monster builder and print them a 1/2-1 page stat block. This breaks it down by standard, move, minor, and triggered actions. It was very helpful for a couple of new players when getting started.
Holy Bovine
First Post
That a single bad guy is going to have his ass handed to him by any moderately competent party. Minions are a good thing (not just the 1hp kind either - low powered but still credible as a threat minions are very important especially as I work back into DMing 3E).
I agree about the DDI sheet. He was handed the (DDI sheet) PC as a pregen by the DM. She's the sort who has no trouble with complex mechanics, hence starting us at level 12. I could maybe ask her about redesigning his sheet.
