Castle Smoulderthorn, Part 3

[Green Knight]

New playtest report is up here.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drpr/20070907a

Thursday Night, Wizards Conference Room (Wayne Manor).
Campaign Arc: Castle Smoulderthorn
DM: Dave Noonan
Players: Bruce Cordell, Richard Baker, Logan Bonner, and Toby Latin

As it turns out, I play in the same evening game that Bruce and Logan do, so I’ll try to talk about different parts of the game session than they have.

We’ve been playing in Dave’s Eberron game for several months now, and the party’s reached 6th–8th level with a fair bit of turnover due to mortality and players coming and going. Our current mission is to destroy Castle Smolderthorn, a huge fortress floating high in the air. It’s tethered to the ground by several long cables or chains made of pure elemental fire, and there’s a bound elemental that holds the castle in place. Release the key elemental, and the whole evil place soars up into the cold dark reaches of space and we heroically abandon hundreds of evil minions to their icy, airless doom—justly deserved, of course.

My character is Karhun. In the 3E incarnation of our game, Karhun was an illumian warblade/warmage, mixing up Nine Swords stuff with a decent amount of arcane firepower. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet gotten to illumians, warblades, or warmages, so I was faced with a pretty tough translation for my character. I eventually settled on making Karhun into a human warlord, and then using our multiclass system to dip into some wizardly bits. I’ve been tanking a lot for the party anyway, so converting to a melee-competent base class seemed pretty reasonable, and multiclassing wizard means that I can get more out of my character’s outstanding Intelligence score. The wizard abilities I gained give Karhun a couple of decent ranged area attacks each encounter, something warlords otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of. That means I’ve got lots of flexibility. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll just have to get hopping and design the swordmage class we’ve been talking about.

After we fought the flame priest and his minions (see Bruce’s and Logan’s entries if you don’t know what I’m talking about) we eventually found ourselves confronting a chamber very ominously named the Tomb of the Black Host. We explored other rooms around it to see if there were a different way to go, but no dice—we had to go through. The walls were burial niches chock full of old corpses, and there were three big golden sarcophagi in the middle of the room. We tried to quietly file through without disturbing anything, but you can imagine how that worked out. In the blink of an eye a dozen vampires poured out of their hiding places in the walls, and mummies starting climbing out of those big sarcophagi. It seemed like every square in the room had something dead standing in it.

Our first instinct was to begin blowing things up. Logan’s warlock laid down a Mire of Minauros on one side of the room, dissolving a couple of vampires and creating a nice acidic bog to guard our right flank. Infandous, Bruce’s “psion,” blasted another bunch of vampires with an area-effect attack. Then Karhun got his turn; I used one of those multiclass abilities I was talking about, and used a wand attack on more of the vampires. We discovered, much to our relief, that we were facing vampire minions—dangerous if they mob you, but otherwise easy prey for some big AoE attacks like the sort we were throwing out.

On my next round I saw several bad guys lined up in a row, so Karhun dashed a few squares over and used another wizard ability—my once-per-day scorch, a powerful fire attack. Karhun blasted two mummies and a hapless vampire minion for a pile of fire damage. After that, we were down to just a couple of monsters left, so Karhun switched over to melee attacks and spent the rest of the fight laying about him with his sword. I rolled pretty badly from that point on and managed to miss for the next three swings. Fortunately, the other players picked me up, and we finished off the mummies without too much trouble.

As it turns out, Toby’s warforged paladin is essentially indestructible under the current rules. I suppose a warforged ought to be tough, but the really odd thing is that his damage resistance (any DR, really) ignores psychic damage and poison damage. I’m not sure things ought to work that way; it seems to me that some sorts of damage ought to bypass DR by their very nature.

 

[Scholar & Brutalman]

It sounds like 4e DR is currently like SW Saga DR. In Saga I think the only thing that goes through SR is lightsaber damage. Psychic damage and poison damage? I'd be happy if there's no stat damage poison in 4e.

Also, interesting to see his multiclassed warlord with only some "wizardly bits" was actually doing enough damage with his wand attacks to harm his enemies.

 

[Dice4Hire]

That is a good point, and from what he said, in 3.5 speak, he probably only took 1-2 of his 6-8 levels in wizard. But he obviously has more power than that. Could it be something like initiator level in Bo9S? Where other levels count for half when it comes time to choose your abilities? It sure sounds like it.

That I would like a lot.

 

[TheArcane]

It kinda bothers me that they are playtesting 4e (at least the part they tell us about) with a half-converted Eberron campaign. On one hand, it can be a great measure of the systems flexibility. On the other hand, I'm tired of reading the same "class X is not ready yet / not in yet, so I tried to multiclass Y with Z and add some W abilities from rule V". I just hope they are putting in even efforts to playtest simpler combinations as well, so they don't miss simpler and more obvious details while looking for the complexities. Noticing that DR makes a warforged character broken is ok, but what about mosters with DR, does it make them broken also? Why wasn't this noticed or why was this ignored? And why should poison damage warforged anyway (aren't they constructs?)?

 

[Mouseferatu]

In Saga I think the only thing that goes through SR is lightsaber damage.

Nope. In Saga, you can have DR X/energy or DR X/slashing, for example.

I'd be happy if there's no stat damage poison in 4e.

I wouldn't. I like the fact that poison (and other types of attacks) damaged stats directly, rather than doing hp damage. Makes it feel like a different sort of effect.

Hoping for more info on this one...

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Because of this half-converted campaign business, I'm not finding these playtest reports very valuable. We don't know if what were reading is an artifact of 4E rules, some house rule, a conversion-unique example, or just flavor text for 3.5 mechanics.

I'd rather read about pure core rules 4E playtesting, thanks.

 

[D'karr]

Because of this half-converted campaign business, I'm not finding these playtest reports very valuable. We don't know if what were reading is an artifact of 4E rules, some house rule, a conversion-unique example, or just flavor text for 3.5 mechanics.

I'd rather read about pure core rules 4E playtesting, thanks.

I'd disagree.

With the current reports we are seeing how the game has evolved from Third to Fourth edition. If all they were doing was giving reports about 4th, we might be getting even less information as most of it could be out of context. By giving us the reports from a "converted" campaign we have a pretty strong frame of reference for comparison. A good example is the multiclassed warlord/wizard. We've never seen the warlord but we've seen the 3rd Edition wizard. We have also seen that a multiclassed wizard loses a lot when multiclassing into a non-spell level increasing class. However, in the playtest reports it looks like the wizard is still quite at home and viable.

Yes, I'd like to see more of 4th edition but these reports are valuable because they let us see how some of the conversion is good, and how some of it is not.

Even though WotC has said that they don't recommend conversion, there are going to be a lot of people that are going to do just that.

 

[Glyfair]

Even though WotC has said that they don't recommend conversion, there are going to be a lot of people that are going to do just that.

Based on comments they have made on the subject, I think the intent of that statement is narrower than many are reading it.

As I understand it, they mean there won't be any conversion rules ala "X=Y" in 4th edition. They have pretty much recommended looking at your character and recreating it with the same themes in 4th edition.

 

[D'karr]

Based on comments they have made on the subject, I think the intent of that statement is narrower than many are reading it.

As I understand it, they mean there won't be any conversion rules ala "X=Y" in 4th edition. They have pretty much recommended looking at your character and recreating it with the same themes in 4th edition.

No matter how narrow the intent, they still don't recommend it.

As a matter of fact they want people to start again at first level and see how the character grows.

Gaming groups will do all kinds of different things but the intent from Wizards is pretty clear, no matter how narrow.

 

[hong]

As a matter of fact they want people to start again at first level and see how the character grows.

WTF?