Adventurer's Vault 2 Playtest

[Roger]

There really isn't any book keeping required - you know how many healing surges you start the day with, you know how many you have left. Subtract 1 from the other and you know how many you have used.

Do you remember how many times that wight hit you with its claw attack?

If the only way to decrease your stack of healing surges was to expend them, I'd agree with you entirely. It's not, so I don't.



Cheers,
Roger

 

[Saeviomagy]

The orbs sound like a bad idea all round.

They allow the players to replace the DMs carefully crafted encounter layout. If the PCs have one that is tactically advantageous to them, then you risk every fight occuring in exactly the same environment, which can only be tedious.

They allow the breaking of fights into small chunks, destroying any synergy between the creatures in an encounter.

Previously, a defender would have to strike a balance between his survivability and his tarbaby qualities. Now he can ditch the tarbaby side and take this item, then stack his defenses with all the rest of his resources.

Alternately: who needs a defender? The party can just split up and each take out whatever they're the counter to.

 

[fissionessence]

If the only way to decrease your stack of healing surges was to expend them, I'd agree with you entirely. It's not, so I don't.

I guess a better way to design the tattoos is to based the effects off of the number of surges you've spent or lost that day. (Is there a word that means spent/lost?)

They allow the players to replace the DMs carefully crafted encounter layout. If the PCs have one that is tactically advantageous to them, then you risk every fight occuring in exactly the same environment, which can only be tedious.

The good news is the transport power is only usable once per day. As long as the party has more than one encounter per day, then they won't all be like that.

~

 

[Runestar]

The good news is the transport power is only usable once per day. As long as the party has more than one encounter per day, then they won't all be like that.

What's stopping the party from acquiring more than 1? Say each PC has 1, this means they can use it once/encounter, for 5 encounters. Especially at epic levels, this sort of thing would be fairly inexpensive relative to the amount of gold you have. Seems that at higher levels, each PC should have little problem affording multiple copies of said item...

 

[jedrious]

Implements specify that in order to use any powers or properties of the item you must be of a class that uses that implement

 

[Runestar]

Implements specify that in order to use any powers or properties of the item you must be of a class that uses that implement

Oh, so it is an implement...
Still, there is the problem of that 1 PC hoarding multiple copies (and money is not necessarily an issue - the other PCs can chip in to buy orbs of their own for him...

Granted, he can't use any of his other dailies, but this effect is really reminiscent of 3e's forcecage/maze spells (which were extremely powerful)...

 

[James McMurray]

They only need one. Sure, they can't use it every encounter, but the threat of every encounter turning into an orb farce means the GM is less likely to bother trying for synergy between monsters and/or their environment. If the party does get more orbs, it just gets worse.

 

[Runestar]

Heh, seems like stuff with "orb" in its name never ends well...

 

[WalterKovacs]

The orbs sound like a bad idea all round.

They allow the players to replace the DMs carefully crafted encounter layout. If the PCs have one that is tactically advantageous to them, then you risk every fight occuring in exactly the same environment, which can only be tedious.

They allow the breaking of fights into small chunks, destroying any synergy between the creatures in an encounter.

Previously, a defender would have to strike a balance between his survivability and his tarbaby qualities. Now he can ditch the tarbaby side and take this item, then stack his defenses with all the rest of his resources.

Alternately: who needs a defender? The party can just split up and each take out whatever they're the counter to.

The article on Orbs points out that DM should include those at their own discretion. Basically it is a lot like the Monster Manual races, it's something that is earmarked as "something you may not want to allow as a DM".

If you do allow it, keep it in mind. Artificer with the ability to recharge a daily item power at every milestone (and can use orbs as an implement) could be ridiculous with one of these things. However, it is really up to a DM whether to allow these things into the game, and could very well have these be extremely rare (i.e. you can't make or buy them ... you may be given one).

Also, these don't actually pop up until the high paragon tier.

 

[WalterKovacs]

Do you remember how many times that wight hit you with its claw attack?

If the only way to decrease your stack of healing surges was to expend them, I'd agree with you entirely. It's not, so I don't.

However, if you:

(a) Have one of these tatoos, and thus know you have to track the number of surges you spend each day

(b) Are fighting a monster that drains your surges (or have a disease, or a lost a surge some other way

THEN, you have to track how many you actually spent. At that point you have to do some book keeping. It's not a lot, it's in very specific situations (rarely does something cost a surge without you spending it) and you know you have a magic item that cares about tracking that stuff anyway.

It would be a problem if you found out after the fact that you needed to keep track of it, and you didn't. But since this is an item you choose to take, and have with you contsantly, it shouldn't be an issue of forgetting to book keep for it while fighting wights.