Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6176948" data-attributes="member: 1165">I'm a 4e supporter and mainly a DM. As you pointed out, the DM really is the swing vote. If someone likes another edition but isn't willing to run, they're not getting that game. I doubt my group will ever go back to 3.x/Pathfinder, not because we have a huge hate on for it, but because no one wants to run it anymore.That doesn't bother me at all. I'm just finishing up a 4e Dark Sun campaign, and while they ran back the clock to eliminate some of the terrible late 2e changes, they then introduced some nonsense (tieflings?) that I just ignore. Other than a lack of adventures, I never felt there was a lack of 4e DMing options. There's templates, there's themes, there's reskinning, and if that's not enough, making NPCs is easy. Right now I've created 1st, 5th, 10th, and 15th-level versions of each class I'm interested in as NPCs (using the monster rules rather than DMG1/2 rules, as those are kind of lame). In any urban encounter, if I need to follow Chandler's Law and throws "ninjas" at the PCs, I can do so. I've only seen one such collection on the internet, but it was a pre-MM3 document based on the DMG1/2 rules, so it wasn't useful to me.Save me from 3e monsters. Balancing a 3.x monster is far harder than in 4e. Far too often they end up with some weak saving throw or some overly powerful grapple check, while you're wrestling with overpowered spellcasters. I don't want ogre kensei, I'd rather have the tools to create a monster the way I want.Also, I can steal PC stuff. I've blatantly made NPC copies of my PCs. I've taken player-only feats and given them (as traits) to NPCs. I have a diviner NPC wizard (working for the police) with the Divination Mastery "feat", as a trait, whose primary purpose is to use the Inquisitive's Eyes ritual (the one that lets you see 1 hour/level into the past) as a crime solver. No witnesses? No problem! (He's only 4th-level, but can perform divination rituals as if he's 8th-level.) One of my Dark Sun PCs has a somewhat overpowered feat called "Unfailing Resources" that lets him automatically save at the cost of spending 10 hit points. Many boss monsters have simply blatantly stolen that ability. Or the time I stole the grappling fighter stuff and put it on 1st-level "fighter" NPCs... I'm using those on jail guards. (That's relevant for my new campaign, which involves jail guards.)There was only one area where I found players got a power-up compared to 3.x, and that was the Character Builder. That takes away DM authority. It's much harder to say "core-only" when the players don't even know core is anymore. Or I say "no stuff from Divine Power" but some of the players don't even look at sources and I'm dealing with some poorly playtested nonsense.However, that's not really an edition thing. Pathfinder has one too, and when we were finishing up our Kingmaker campaign many players were using their (unofficial?) character builder. D&DN will have one, and will probably run into the same issue.I've found things often weren't codified enough in older editions or Pathfinder. We had a player alchemist in Kingmaker who made explosives far more powerful than they should have been due to a lack of codification. (It didn't help that the problem was probably solvable within the rules, but only if the DM is given an hour to figure out the problem...) In 4e I'd just consult my "damage expressions" table, say you can make four explosives (as "minion traps") based on your level, and that's that. Didn't kill all the trolls? Well, too bad. You weakened them, because you thought outside the box, but thinking outside the box is not an "I win" button.I heatedly disagree. I currently have a word document containing 80% of the monsters I've designed, and it's over 1 MB in size. It has no artwork, it's just text and tables. It takes forever to save because of that.I had filled 5 index card file boxes with them, and when I realized I needed 2 more, I gave up and bought a laptop. (I hate using computers at a game, and only use it for DMing. When I show up to play, the laptop stays at home and I use a paper character sheet.) Juggling 5 monsters is no problem for me; I simply open my "Holding Pen" document (not the one in Adventure Tools, in fact my laptop hates that program for some reason) and plop down the 4-5 monsters I might need. When I was using index cards, one reason I did that was I could go through my boxes and pull up the cards I needed, rather than try to juggle the MM3 and Monster Vault and Dark Sun Creature Catalog simultaneously; this was in addition to the index cards storing my own homebrew monsters.If you're finding the math annoying and slow, use one of the math charts found "out there". I've made a table based off the one from Sly Flourish, with a few additions (for high AoE + control powers, or brute encounter powers, etc) so I don't have to consult a calculator. It takes two pages to print, and I just put it in my binder. If I need a trap right away, the numbers are already there.For terrain and so forth, I find that to be just as big an issue in 3.x. Same with "synergizing" monsters, though it's not always necessary to do that. Only in a boss fight. Often our Kingmaker DM would spot a weakness in our PCs (for instance, we were very weak to AoE damage) and throw monsters at us with said abilities. Like that time he attacked us with several half-dragon/were-whatevers. So many breath weapons! Or (for my 4e campaign) I've found my PCs are very bad at resisting ranged attacks or fighting anything that can fly. There's no need to custom-design monsters. Elven archers riding on griffons would do the trick, just reskin for Dark Sun.Yes, coming up with cool setpieces takes time away from the table, but the exact same thing applies to any edition. There might be more pressure to run things that way, but you don't have to. And honestly, I can just steal setpieces from old copies of Dungeon Magazine or my collection of Dark Sun and free adventures. Plus, I think Piratecat is a great DM, and I recall him asking people on the boards for help setting up setpieces, and people even answered questions such as the volume of water pouring down every six seconds. I have no problem using R&D (research & duplicate) as long as it's not violating copyright, so I guess I'm going to R&D a great DM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Maybe at first, but I've participated in the playtest, and to me it looks like 3.x written in 2e style, so often-bad rules but written in a less clear format. I'm just looking at the "ability score" save system and saying "yuck". It's basically saying "you're not allowed to use ogres or other low-Dex creatures because they'll spend the whole time prone from being greased" (as an example). In 4e, a monster with very low stats doesn't suffer such a penalty to NADs. Since it'll be reasonably balanced, I only need to spend time creating the scenario and picturing tactics. Naturally I figured the ease of DMing would give me more time to write plot and what not, but I'm lazy, so instead I find the ease of DMing means I spend less time DMing away from the table.I hope you do.</blockquote>

Verification