Dragon Editorial: Fearless

[jtrowell]

On the topic of a 4th level group beating a 11th level solo monster, note that with the 1/2 level progression, the base number is just a +3 difference (+2 for level 4 versus +5 for level 11, as I supposed it will be reounded down)

Of course, if you add paragon powers or items to the monster, it will give it another advantage, but a groupe of 4th level could manage to make it, especially it the group has got 5 or 6 PCs versus the lone solo monster.

I would still give the monster the advantage, but with the new math (and lower damage output from what we've seen), I'd would not suppose that it would win every time versus a well prepared (and lucky) PC group.

Moreover, maybe the PCs were higher level when they defeated the solo monster ? (eitheir because they had naturally gained one or two level since, or because they had been advanced in order to test paragon play)

 

[TwinBahamut]

Heh. The tvtropes entry for Nintendo Hard actually cites the Fire Emblem games -- and Radiant Dawn in particular -- as being examples of Nintendo Hard. I might agree with them on the series in general; I have a lot of memories of taking control of a battle, only to have enemy reinforcements bamf in out of nowhere and instagib one of my units who, prior to this unwelcome interruption, had been well out of harm's way. I haven't tried Radiant Dawn, though.

Well, I think the TV Tropes entry regarding Fire Emblem is more a result of modern players unfamiliar with true Nintendo Hard rather than a proper statement of that series' difficulty. The very fact that Radiant Dawn has a proper mid-battle save feature so you don't need to replay a chapter from the beginning every time you lose a character removes it from being Nintendo Hard in of itself. The game took me over 100 hours of play time, but I completed most of the missions on my first try.

Compare that to Super Ghost and Goblins, where it takes me hours of dying and retrying in order to pull off the perfect execution needed to reach the end of the first level, and dying that much in the second level means I need to play through the first level all over again (in a game where you need to complete the whole game twice in one sitting).

The ideas are still the same though. One could pretty easily point at the Tomb of Horrors, for example, as being Nintendo Hard, whereas something like the Red Hand of Doom is simply hard.

I have not played either, but I am perfectly willing to agree with the concept.

Navigating a labyrinth in which every chest either trapped, a mimic, or both, all the enemies have instant death attacks, you need to cross chasms full of lava in anti-magic zones (and no one in the party has any relevant skills), and the DM is counting every last turn so that he can insta-kill you when the dungeon collapses after two in-game hours is Nintendo Hard.

Fighting a running battle through an ancient ruin, fending off waves of attackers and getting caught in traps and ambushes as you go, giving you little time to rest, is just hard.

I think the second sounds more like fun to me.

Anyways, I don't understand why people are condemning 4E so much over this article. Before, the writer always wanted to play a reckless character who gets himself and the party into trouble, but had to limit that tendency because simple recklessness or a single mistake can be fatal in older editions. Now, it is possible to survive recklessness through luck and skill, and a single mistake may hurt, but it won't be fatal. This route may not be easy, but it is possible. This is not a case of a player charging in recklessly because he knows he won't die, it is a case of a player roleplaying a brave fool of a character, and not having to hold back because of guaranteed death.

This article is not trying to say that heroes are guaranteed to live, he is saying that there are no longer situations that are a guaranteed death. There is a huge difference between the two ideas. I would hate the first, but the second is a vast improvement over previous editions.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

I'm worried that my character will basically be invincible until I roll initiative. Can you give any examples where screwing up a standalone trap has proved to be a Very Bad Thing?

I can't provide any personal examples but I am sure they are there. Rodney's Trap Fun blog post worked out fine for them because the trap pinned the monster but it easily could have gone the other way. Traps are a great element of D&D and I am sure there will be many nasty ones in the game.

 

[Cadfan]

That's some clever semantics, there, Mr. Hong. (etc)

Hong is arguing that because risk is a question of perception, there are about a million other ways to create a perception of risk (or to give a character a stake in the outcome, which is perhaps a better way of putting things) besides killing a PC or two with a door.

Frankly, in my opinion, I find that sort of risk to be the clumsiest possible way to run a game. Its like in horror movies where, rather than actually create tension or drama or fear, they just have some bad guy disembowel a pretty girl in high definition. It gives the viewers the gut punch a horror movie is supposed to create, but its a trite gut punch.

There are better ways to give a player a stake in the outcome of a hazard besides insisting that an individual hazard carry an X in 20 chance of character death.

Unfortunately, most of those don't work for random traps. If a random trap has an X% chance of killing you, its an awfully lame way to die. Why is it lame? Because you're getting killed by something in which you had almost no stake. If a random trap does NOT have an X% chance of killing you, chances are your cleric will patch you up, and you'll move on, ensuring that the you have as much stake in the trap as you have in your cleric's 4th Cure Serious Wounds of the day- that is, none.

Which is of course why WOTC is pushing so heavily to integrate traps and skill hazards into larger scenes involving multiple traps, multiple skill hazards, and combat. That way the individual trap isn't a "roll above a 6 or die" challenge, its part of a larger scenario. The scenario as a whole gives you a risk of character death just as much as any D&D fight does. This also has the effect of giving characters a stake in the trap almost automatically- instead of the trap being a challenge in which they "roll above a 6 or die, or maybe waste a cure spell," the trap affects their ability to do something cool that they wanted to accomplish, like leap over a pit to attack a wizard. The players now have a stake in the trap, almost for free.

 

[I'm A Banana]

However, one of our first previews of 4E discussed the problem of the 15 minute adventuring day. In the article they talked about and suggested that the 3E design philosophy had assumed 4 encounters per day each using 25% of your resources, which meant in practice (they said) that all but the 4th encounter was "boring". They said that this had encouraged DMs to adopt an adventure design paradigm where instead of offering 3 "boring" encounters followed by one interesting one, they offered just one huge encounter that required all of the players resources first thing. This was the offered justification for going to a primarily 'per encounter' based system.

I think they've done several things to attack the problem. It consists of, but is not exclusive to:

• More HP padding at first level, less at high level (which keeps 1st level players alive while keeping high-level characters from resting too easily)
• A continuum of monsters from easy 'minions' to challenging 'solo' monsters (which allows DMs to mix and match resources in an encounter)
• A focus on making the encounter itself fun, with mobility and regenerating abilities (so that the PC's aren't worried about being left without their big guns)
• Encounter design that goes for multiple monsters (allowing DMs more variety and style in the type of critters the PCs face).
• Eradicating 'binary' abilities (immunities, stats so high no one can touch them, etc.)

None of those things necessarily remove the challenge from the game, but they allow for results of an encounter beyond "save" or "die." Just because they don't often die doesn't mean tht the encounter isn't challenging in one way or another, though. It's not a very robust pattern of thought that can't accomodate ideas for consequences beyond "succeed" or "fail."

 

[WhimsyTheFae]

I agree with Cadfan, Kamikaze Midget, hong and others (I suppose that means I'm also agreeing with WotC, too).

I like that heroic characters have more survivability and hope that it scales nicely through all levels. One of my gripes with 3.x was that once the players got to a certain level, encounters would often result in being a cake-walk or being too-deadly. There didn't seem to be a lot of middle-ground.

I also agree that it's easy enough to put "the deadly" back in the game, but if you don't like that option...don't play.

 

[Mirtek]

I'm also disturbed by the implication that 4e will have no obviously subpar character choices ("If you've ever selected the Travel domain with your cleric...").

What exactly is wrong with the travel domain? It's domain power is really good (for a melee cleric), much better than many other domains and the spell list has some very nice spells normally unavaible

 

[Celebrim]

I think they've done several things to attack the problem. It consists of, but is not exclusive to:

• More HP padding at first level, less at high level (which keeps 1st level players alive while keeping high-level characters from resting too easily)

• 
  
  Which I approve of. In fact, this is the one area of the new design that I'm certain is going to effect the way I play.
  
  

  [*]A continuum of monsters from easy 'minions' to challenging 'solo' monsters (which allows DMs to mix and match resources in an encounter)

  
  Nothing new here really. We've always had this, it was just never explicitly defined. The only innovation is making it easier on new DMs because now things 'on the shelf' are labeled. I don't oppose the labeling, its probably a good idea, but it doesn't let me do anything I couldn't do before.
  
  

  [*]A focus on making the encounter itself fun, with mobility and regenerating abilities (so that the PC's aren't worried about being left without their big guns)

  
  Nothing new here either. I approve of the 4E designers new focus on skillful adventure design, and may even learn something from it. But skillful encounter design can be done with 3E or earlier ones.
  
  

  [*]Encounter design that goes for multiple monsters (allowing DMs more variety and style in the type of critters the PCs face).

  
  Again, nothing new here either.
  
  

  [*]Eradicating 'binary' abilities (immunities, stats so high no one can touch them, etc.)

  
  And again, I approve, although alot of DMs were house ruling this into 3E. It's really not in itself a justification for any of the bigger changes of 4E.
  
  None of these things are really addressing Lizards expectation though, nor do they provide for any new results to an encounter that we didn't have before. We've always had rather precise means of tracking results in between 'succeed' and 'fail'. It's one of the great strengths of D&D.

 

[helium3]

We were all looking into a pit in a dungeon after having fought through a bunch of orcs over several encounters. Everyone was hurt, and my character had nearly died once. We weren't sure how deep it was or what was down there. Everyone else debated for a bit whether to go on or turn around and go back, and it was decided that the only sensible thing to do was to turn around.

Actually, the problem here is that you had no way of determining what was down the hole without committing yourself to encountering it. Nothing about Save or Die effects as near as I can tell.

 

[Kraydak]

I can't provide any personal examples but I am sure they are there. Rodney's Trap Fun blog post worked out fine for them because the trap pinned the monster but it easily could have gone the other way. Traps are a great element of D&D and I am sure there will be many nasty ones in the game.

I find it vaguely amusing, and kind of sad, that the request was for a dangerous *stand-alone* trap and the example given was a trap+monster... And the way the trap triggering worked was, in fact, danger-free except for the monster.