D&D 4E 4e limit of beatability

[UngeheuerLich]

• Go for the Uber-Round. Don't use Action Points at the start of the combat. Wait until the dragon is nearly bloodied, then Breath Weapon - action point for a big melee attack - move to provoke one or more opportunity attacks - get bloodied - and Breath Weapon again as free action.

woe that changed from immediate action to free action... so dazed or stun won´t prevent it...

edit: it vever was immediate... hmmh....

 

[Badwe]

great advice all. for those curious it is a theater of the mind, so the players will in some sense be hallucinating somehow to create these theatrics. Similarly, the mechanic will be they pick whos story they focus on and then if they succeed that hero will get some sort of boon (as described in AV2) and if not it's gone forever. I have the following plans:


1) our eladrin warlord wants to become a shadow captain so we will be doing the classic "fight your own shadows" trope. Initially I planned to use their characters exactly except for healing surges and action points, but i might skip that.

2) our hybrid fighter/ranger is optimized for damage (he's a bit of a math nut) so i'm cribbing a bit from WoW and using a gruul style encounter where a solo does more damage after every round. this will challenge them to maximize their damage per round or be crushed.

3) speaking of WoW, another player is a wow fanatic, and though he plays a swordmage with no obvious wow class analog, he injects a lot of the terminology (tank instead of defender, etc.) into the game. For him I'll be attempting to reproduce an exciting raid encounter using D&D monsters. Current plans are Razorwing using an elder blue dragon, which alone would be enough to rout a level 11 party, but with it flying around and pelting you with bolts until you can harpoon it down, double fun.

4) not all my players are wow fans. My wizard player loved shadows of the collosus, and his character is a human racist. Oddball as it is, it'll be up to him (and the party) to stop a bizarre and gigantic contraption built by the various savage races (goblin, hobgoblin, orc, drow, etc.)

5) finally for some non-videogame themes, our warlock is fey pact and focused on striking from stealth. They'll have to infiltrate a small elven tree fort while being pelted by a flurry of arrows if the elves ever get a look at them. they'll have to dodge roving pillars of light while shadowy stalkers follow them on the ground.

6) yes, i have six players. the sixth is a deva artificer who is going to take the deva racial paragon path. what will seem to start out as a diplomatic cotillion (SP?) with famous devas will turn out to be a ruse perpetrated by rakshasas and wicked devas who have not yet reincarnated as rakshasas to demonstrate the price of impiety.

 

[Soulsearer]

Great ideas Badwe, you've really though this one out. Thanks to the others for the inspiring comments specially about DRagons

Soul

 

[Gort]

Good for you. So many DMs would be offended by WoW references and try to "fix" the player (basically a futile effort) - it's nice to finally see someone stealing its good ideas and putting them to good use.