4E Situational Modifiers: Too Many or Not Enough?

[Drkfathr1]

Add me to the group that says too many.

For my group, its not that they are too difficult to keep up with, but just too fiddly. Kind of takes some of the fun out of it. Like some have mentioned, its all the conditional elements that go along with it.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

Last game had 6 Players and ended at mid-Paragon
There were too many modifiers. Players forgot saves, forgot bonuses and penalties, forgot action denial effects (daze, stunned, immobilized, etc).

Some things were easy. As the wizard, whenever I had a static zone, I just drew it on the battlemat. For our game, we rarely missed anything that involved a direct drawing on the battlemat.

Other things were difficult. I can't tell you the number of combats where the DM said, oh, forgot about this aura. Anything that involved a mobile area was difficult to both represent and to adjudicate. We tried creating index card zones that we could shift around. This was not ideal as it often required moving minis a lot.

In my eyes it boiled down to anything that visible was much more likely to be remembered. I am considering solutions to this problem (especially player effects). My best idea is status cards that you pass out to players when they get hit with a status. The first attempt of one inch, colored, wooden discs worked well for about 5 levels. After that, there got to be so many effects on a target (stacking 5+ was common) that they proved impractical.

 

[rjdafoe]

We have 7 players including DM, with 2 leaders. I've taken to making tokens with the bonus on them. If I hit with a Righteous Brand I hand the token to the player with the bonus. It has the +4, that it's a power bonus and when it ends written on the token. When it's over they hand it back. I've made a couple tent cards for encounter long effects.

My DM made a nifty stack of condition cards and I'm going to make some "duration tokens" so we can slap a condition card in front of a player and put a token on it (save ends, end of monster's turn, etc). We have been writing those conditions on the battle mat in front of the player, so this will be about the same.

Over all I'm feeling more open to experiment with the fiddly bits of RPGs than I have in a long time.

PS

They are about right, but hard to manage.

We did the same thing and it has worked great. I think 4E gave more conditions than 3E (or maybe we just didn't use them in 3E as much).

We have round cardstock markers for marking, cursing, and status (stun, etc) for the monsters that we put next to the mini on the grid.

For players, we have poker chips with status, bonus, penalty, etc stickers on each chip that players place on top of their character sheets.

Sometimes, we get a pretty goood line of tokens going!

The only problem I have with it is that it is a little "video gamey" but we have not found a better solution yet.

 

[rjdafoe]

Last game had 6 Players and ended at mid-Paragon
There were too many modifiers. Players forgot saves, forgot bonuses and penalties, forgot action denial effects (daze, stunned, immobilized, etc).

Some things were easy. As the wizard, whenever I had a static zone, I just drew it on the battlemat. For our game, we rarely missed anything that involved a direct drawing on the battlemat.

Other things were difficult. I can't tell you the number of combats where the DM said, oh, forgot about this aura. Anything that involved a mobile area was difficult to both represent and to adjudicate. We tried creating index card zones that we could shift around. This was not ideal as it often required moving minis a lot.

In my eyes it boiled down to anything that visible was much more likely to be remembered. I am considering solutions to this problem (especially player effects). My best idea is status cards that you pass out to players when they get hit with a status. The first attempt of one inch, colored, wooden discs worked well for about 5 levels. After that, there got to be so many effects on a target (stacking 5+ was common) that they proved impractical.

I am hoping to aleviate some of the zone problems when I get my projector setup for gaming.

I can totally see this, as we have had that problem as well.

We use smaller printed cardstock tokens that we line up next to each other near the mini.

 

[keterys]

While there are too many, I'm hesitating to answer because I do like having riders on powers.

I think I just wish more were things like forced movement or prone. Things that take effect and are obvious.

 

[karlindel]

I think they're close to the correct amount. However, it is easy to end up with too many if the players have a lot of powers that grant situational modifiers and/or particularly if a lot of the monsters do. A group with multiple leaders could run into problems, particularly with trying to figure out which bonuses stack and which don't.

I had one encounter recently where several monsters gave ongoing poison, ongoing poison+weakened, and ongoing poison+slowed, as well as one that gave immobilized and one that gave slowed. Unfortunately, the combined conditions got very confusing, something that I will work to avoid in the future.

However, my group doesn't normally have a problem with the number of situational modifiers going around. We sometimes use index cards for the bonuses likely to occur often (particularly in the group with players new to gaming), and we have the alea tools markers for conditions.

 

[TheNovaLord]

way more, but often having somewhat less affect (ie no stat raises) and therefore more likely to be missed.

i feel there are too many hence the number of McGuffins invented to keep track of stuff

 

[Storminator]

I am hoping to aleviate some of the zone problems when I get my projector setup for gaming.

I can totally see this, as we have had that problem as well.

We use smaller printed cardstock tokens that we line up next to each other near the mini.

I have a lot of colored pipe cleaners, and I've thought about making rectangles for zones. You can drop those around the minis pretty easily without having to move everything each time the zone moves. It hasn't come up enough to warrant yet tho.

PS

 

[samursus]

I did some soul-searching and answered the poll "Just right" only because I enjoy the modifiers we have, but wouldn't want to see more.

However, I, like many others, have yet to find a satisfying way to represent them so that they are not forgotten AND don't feel so meta-gamey.

AND that don't slow things down too much.

Maybe such a solution does not exist...

I know some have kind of worked (using pop bottle plastic rings-- it works but in a crowded melee kinda tricky to not knock things around)

One of the neater ideas is the flag system that I have seen in a couple threads recently.

If anyone else has any kick ass inspirations I hope they share as well.

 

[Davachido]

Wow. Just... wow. No offense to your playstyle - if it works for you, more power to you - but if it ever gets to the point that I need a whiteboard to keep track of all the modifiers flying around, I'm throwing out my 4E books and going back to BECMI.

(Okay, I probably wouldn't actually do that, but I'd start house-ruling the heck out of things in order to simplify the system.)

Its simpler that way, we still do if for 3.5e as well its just so everyone knows the amount of penalties/buffs flying about, keep in mind most of our play groups are 6+ players. Some of the bigger games has 3 DMs and 24 players in a single combat. We used to use cards for the smaller groups but then not everyone could see it.