4e for a high action / low lethality DM?

[Perram]

The Setup

A few months back, I drifted away from 4e for a variety of reasons I won't bring up here. While not all of those reasons have remedied themselves, I am liking the new tone that Wizards has lately, and since I still have a complete collection of 4e material save their published adventures... I don't want to let it just go to waist sitting on my bottom shelf (next to my old Paladium books and the 1e Earthdawn book that is held together by duct tape and a prayer.)

We aren't interested in a world change. Paizo's Golarion is a perfect fit for our backdrops, and their campaign setting material is, in my opinion, one of the best currently being published.

My Style

I like to describe my style of DMing as this: My games are like a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Very high action, very cinematic with a focus on cool, not a lot of PC death, episodic in nature (but with a few reoccurring BBEGs that have their hand in every few adventures), and a lot of focus on the RP between the characters and the NPCs at their 'home base' location. (keep, city, town, whichever.)

Currently I'm filling my needs with Pathfinder, using Hero Points to help lend that cinematic feel to the game. My only complaint is that I want to spice up combats a bit more than I've been able, and I would like to reduce my prep time a bit.

I've talked things over with my players, and they are willing to play just about anything I decide on, converting their characters over to the system of my choosing. We've done this several times over the ears, so system switch isn't something we aren't used to.

The Question

So, 4e, can it help me here, or no?

(my main interest is in 4e, but if anyone knows of a /perfect/ game system for my style of DMing, let me know.)

 

[Cyronax]

4e does fit that bill generally. You can do a LOT of damage to your party before they really start feeling desperate. Be careful with big elite monsters with near endless hit points. The PCs can probably stand up to them and eventually subdue them, but this sort of thing can lead to what people call combat 'grind.'

Interestingly enough, your description of your DM style reminded me of one of the more common GMing approaches described in the Mutant and Masterminds (2nd edition game). That book's GMing chapter says high action/low lethality really works well for most eras of super hero games (especially Silver Age, Marvel 1960's comics) .... and by extension I think its the baseline that best describes 4e, which I've seen described on these boards as 'fantasy supers.'

C.I.D.

 

[ferratus]

It depends on how skilled your players are at working together.

It is less lethal at low levels than 3e is as a whole, but if they don't work together and do their jobs, the monsters will kill you, with the controllers and strikers eating dirt first. Once people learn to work together, and build their characters to work together, you can generally get the high action/low lethality game you are looking for at all levels.

The "high action" largely comes from descriptive power names and the ability to affect the position of your opponent on the game map. Not super per se, but definitely martial classes seem more like they practice martial arts. Generally the image of fighters and other martial classes in prior editions was that they generally fought without technique with direct blows. A lot of people generally call 4e "JRPG" or "supers" because it deviates from that.

I wonder if the lack of respect for medieval European martial arts in pop culture for expertise and technique plays a role in that as well.

 

[S'mon]

4e seems very playable in that style. The issues I've seen are:

1. 1st level PCs may be taken to negative-bloodied hp (ie killed) in a single round by monster attacks. This becomes very unlikely after a few levels. Starting at 4th level would be enough to make this very unlikely.

2. Ongoing damage can be nasty. Last game I ran a PC was killed by ankhegs due to their grab + ongoing acid damage. The book keeping can be annoying too. Maybe avoid using ongoing damage foes.

3. Some monsters have too many hp for high-action. Halving monster hp (maybe w 2/3 XP) and using lots of minions works to keep things moving.

4. 4e PCs are generally robust enough to handle encounters several levels above their own, but to minimise lethality you may want to aim to keep the average encounter at PC level, eg PC level +/- 2 levels rather than the PC level + 0-4 levels you would use for a tougher campaign.

 

[Rechan]

Also note that PCs can go from dying to diving into the action within a round.

 

[Starfox]

Running a somewhat similar game, tough mine is less episodic. Depending on how you define action, you might want to try some of these tricks:

• Reduce Critter hp and increase their numbers (I use 50% hp and 150% numbers).
• Run many low-challenge encounters in a session
• Use minions, but not at 4:1 to regular critters; something like 10:1 is more appropriate.
• Use large maps with lots of terrain on them.