Dragon Editorial: Fearless

[SSquirrel]

I heart the net, I really do...

Stop with all this baseless LYING!! *grin*

 

[Spatula]

The massive damage save was introduced in 2e to account for high-level characters intentionally walking off cliffs, secure in the knowledge that 20d6 could not kill them. There wasn't really that much else in 2e that could reliably deal 50 points of damage in one attack. It was brought over into 3e probably without much thought about how damage scales at the upper reaches of the game. I simply ignore the save, myself.

 

[hong]

3e, for all intents and purposes, is far more deadly than 1e when it gets to the higher levels. 15th level adventuring - which is what I've been running a lot of recently - is terrifying once you start looking at the DCs of spells and abilities.

DC 25 is fairly standard with some of the monsters. What's the "low" save of your PC? Somewhere about +10, if you're lucky.

That's a 70% chance of failing your saving throw. For Wizards, the hit point damage is likely to kill you.

Of course, there are spells that will make you immune to certain "death" effects (fire, death, electricity, etc.) but rarely do they last long enough to be reliable in combat.

Cheers!

Heh. The monster in Age of Worms that scared us most wasn't Dragotha or Kyuss. It didn't even have any instakill spells. It was a buffed fang dragon with an AC of ~50, and damage on a full attack around 500. It (literally) ripped the barbarian a new one, we ran away, and we were too scared to go back.

 

[drothgery]

Seriously, those are interesting numbers. The characters in my campaign are not maximized melee powerhouses by any means, so I guess that's why this nastiness hasn't become apparent to me yet.

That character is hardly a maximized melee powerhouse. He's using all of one non-PHB feat (weapon mastery from the PH2), and is a brain-dead built, power-attacking, greatsword-focused fighter with a straightforward +x weapon with no specials and a stat booster. I don't know the wealth-by-level number for a 16th-level character off the top of my head, but I think that they can afford a belt of giant strength +6 and a greatsword +5 pretty easily.

 

[MerricB]

Heh. The monster in Age of Worms that scared us most wasn't Dragotha or Kyuss. It didn't even have any instakill spells. It was a buffed fang dragon with an AC of ~50, and damage on a full attack around 500. It (literally) ripped the barbarian a new one, we ran away, and we were too scared to go back.

Yeah. Kyuss didn't even get an action in the final battle.

The monster to end all monsters for us was the Overworm (?), with a terribly high grapple check that just swallowed the barbarian and that was that.

Cheers!

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Healing in 4E will also not be unlimited.

I'd actually be interested to hear a source/explanation on this... I kind of figured that clerics and warlords got something like Cure Light Wounds as an at-will ability, just like wizards get Magic Missile. (I had actually assumed that Second Wind was per-encounter as well, but I'm probably wrong on that one.)

As others have pointed out, if there's a hard daily limit on healing spells, we're still stuck with the "15-minute workday."

 

[Wolfspider]

Yeah. Kyuss didn't even get an action in the final battle.

Probably a good thing....

 

[The Little Raven]

They sold hundreds of thousands of copies of 3e. And *millions* of copies of 1e, when you rolled for hit points at first level and were often killed by small weasels.

Charles Ryan (former brand manager for D&D) said that 3rd Edition sold better than any other edition of D&D. If 1e sold millions, then 3e sold millions more.

 

[Wolfspider]

Charles Ryan (former brand manager for D&D) said that 3rd Edition sold better than any other edition of D&D. If 1e sold millions, then 3e sold millions more.

Not bad for something so completely unfun.

I kid, I kid!

 

[Lizard]

Charles Ryan (former brand manager for D&D) said that 3rd Edition sold better than any other edition of D&D. If 1e sold millions, then 3e sold millions more.

Not a surprise. Did it sell more than 1e over the entire 10 year run of 1e? If so, cool. I didn't know that. (I knew it blew 2e out of the water, but that's no shock -- it did a great job of bringing back 'lapsed' gamers and drawing in new ones, and the OGL explosion sort of cemented it as the dominant game in the crucial first few months.)

4e has a lot to live up to, sales-expectation-wise.