Dragon Editorial: Fearless

[HeavenShallBurn]

How do you get around the fact that you are whacking PC's every other session or so? Don't your players get annoyed by the fact that any PC they create, they may as well not bother with a background, because the PC won't survive long enough for the background to matter....How do you deal with that? Or do you deal with it at all?

Generally at lower levels I average 3-4 PC deaths per session. Beyond 12th level it tapers off to about 1 every two to three sessions, would be higher but my group knows how to powergame and does it well. I get around it with a very old school technique, the "raiding party" which is essentially 4-6 PC parties traveling as a dispersed group. Basically the idea is low level PCs are well aware of how crunchy they are and travel in larger groups so that losses can be soaked and individual groups rotate from the hot zone to be replaced by a fresh group if needed. Around 10-13th level these groups break up into component parties as the surviving members have become forces in their own right and less squishy. By this time player favorites will have developed and these can be the group the campaign follows with short jaunts to the other parties of the old raiding group if things bog down or they feel like a change.

See I don't get your comment on randomness being reduced, it isn't random when you hit a SoD and all you can do is either roll and pass or roll and die.

Odd given that it's the very definition of randomness. It's purely luck (dice) driven and has results that no character action can mitigate.

I think this also makes it MORE gritty since grit to me isn't about a person just dying thats it. It is about having to twist and turn and wiggle your way through tough encounters, through various means.

That's a fallacy, my encounters tend to be quite tough, and I like to see them creatively worm through a brutal encounter. But without that extra spice of random capricious death being possible my group doesn't find encounters to be brutal. the find them too predictable and not possession the required impression of risk.

Also with hordes of vicious monsters well given that we can actually deal with hordes of vicious monsters now and it is built into the ruleset I would think that be a good-thing for 4e in your eyes.

I've done hordes of monsters through 3 editions now. I do large encounterers just fine in 3e, and could do them in another system just as well (Okay not GURPS Vehicles but that was just sadistic). I don't need 4e rules to do what I already manage, and I don't like the changes to monster design philosophy in the new edition. So it's anything but a draw.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

*Shrugs shoulders* I guess this is just the impass of different gaming styles but, well this is what it is like with my group.

Basic SoD: Despite the most indepth, interesting description of the SoD, it is still *yawn* "okay I roll this, *rolls* "oh I succeded, okay *moves on* (or) *rolls* "crap, I failed... umm cleric a little help here".

With multiple-approach traps: *Trap is set off* "hmm lets see, if the trap is swinging down, my best bet is to doge aside, but wait! wasn't that crate nearby, hmm... *checks strength and initative* "awesome, I can pull this off" *quickly shoves crate into path of trap blocking it* "great it worked!"

Tough Encounter with SoD: "okay, you guys get ready" *Medusa petrifies* "what, I failed, what can I do then?" "nothing" "nothing! You mean thats it, I can't fight back I can't try and shake the effects off?" "nope, your now stone" *player waits out fight, while others fight*

Tough Encounter without SoD: "okay, you guys get ready" *Medusa begins to petrify character* "we have to get to him soon or hey may get it, Rogue! distract the medusa! while I try to get him out"

*Shrugs shoulders again* I dunno but in my and my groups eyes without SoD is quite alot more fun and interesting, as well as still being gritty because of having the characters actually have grit and the capabilities to survive by the skin of their teeth.

Now I am not saying SoD should be eliminated completely it has its place, but as a common element of the game, not in my books.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Let me use this to address a slightly different concern -- is 4e any different at level 30 than at level 1?

By this I mean:
Level 1, assumed +1 bonus, DC for an 'untrained' task=10.
Level 30, assumed +15 bonus, DC for an 'untrained' task=25.

If the game scaled so that, basically, you have roughly the same odds of accomplishing a task of the same difficulty? And is task difficulty based on YOUR level, not the difficulty of the task? It's been implied that DCs are set by level, not circumstance, so a fighter trying to hang on to a minecart has a DC 10 check if the party is average first level, a DC 15 check if the party is average 10th level, and so on. Is that how it really works?

I may be misreading it -- it may be the DMG says "Hanging on to a mine cart is a DC 20 task, so be careful asking parties of less than 10th level to try it".

I might be wrong, but I would assume that your formula works for "typical challenges of your level".

A 4th level hero needs to beat a DC 12 to steer the roller coaster mine cart.
A 14th level hero encountering the same mine cart would still need a 12. But he probably won't encounter the same mine cart. He is in a different dungeon,one with a large break in the track and a fiery hoop he has to jump through and with Ogers sidelining the path. He needs a DC 17 to make the jump over the break through the hoop.
A 24th level hero might find a mine cart on broken rails, with only 2 wheels, and jumping throug an reserve gravity field. off course, he needs to beat a DC of 22 to make the jump...

Off course, any given hero will only ever encounter one of these mine cart rides. And the rules will probably not tell you how awesome you need to describe the cart ride to make the DC and "level appropriateness" feel "reasonable".

 

[Primal]

You say this like it's a negative thing.

Oh no, I was just giving a friendly advice: you don't have to buy R&C to peek at boobs (well, others than those of your mom) -- there are magazines that are way cheaper than R&C that feature boobs.

 

[cwhs01]

Generally at lower levels I average 3-4 PC deaths per session. Beyond 12th level it tapers off to about 1 every two to three sessions, would be higher but my group knows how to powergame and does it well.

I can't really decide wether or not i like this kind of dnd. I suspect it might decrease the interesting personalities and details of individual pc's, but at the same time i see a lot of opportunities for unusual rp'ing. It could be very cool to rp this large group or band of adventurers trying to decide who gets to adventure with Goodewill, cleric of the healing god, and who gets to go with assasinor the tiefling... ranger.

I would probably enjoy it for a short campaign, but i suspect i will get anoyed at how often i had to roll up new characters and invent backstories/personalities (so its more detailed than generic fighter #7).

 

[Derren]

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."

That is speculation on my part based on the posts from Wotc_Shoe who compares the efficency of his 4E party with leaders to a 4E party without leaders.
The important part is that he says that the party with leaders can have 1-2 encounters more per day than the leaderless party before having to rest.

So if there is limitless healing in 4E, only leaders will have them. Without them its back to 15 minutes work day. At "worst" it means that healing is still a limited resource (which makes sense as otherwise non deadly traps wouldn't work. Hit by 50 damage form a fireball trap, fall into a pit, whatever? Heal up and continue).
So its either 15 minutes workday, leader classes are mandatory for serious adventures or both.

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=219557

 

[hong]

Oh no, I was just giving a friendly advice: you don't have to buy R&C to peek at boobs (well, others than those of your mom) -- there are magazines that are way cheaper than R&C that feature boobs.

But none of them have DRAGONBORN boobs.

They can hold the tiefling tails, though. DO NOT WANT TAIL.

HAW HAW!

 

[hong]

Generally at lower levels I average 3-4 PC deaths per session. Beyond 12th level it tapers off to about 1 every two to three sessions, would be higher but my group knows how to powergame and does it well.

So, not so much WoW as Warcraft 3...?

 

[shilsen]

I just give my players full HP between combats. And they still get their butts whupped on a fairly regular basis.

Precisely the same here. It doesn't actually matter so much in my game since I don't run dungeon crawls and I rarely have multiple encounters in a day, so the PCs would have been able to heal up after a fight easily enough anyway, but even when I do have multiple encounters, having automatic healing up between encounters hasn't affected my ability to challenge them constantly.

 

[shilsen]

Generally at lower levels I average 3-4 PC deaths per session. Beyond 12th level it tapers off to about 1 every two to three sessions, would be higher but my group knows how to powergame and does it well. I get around it with a very old school technique, the "raiding party" which is essentially 4-6 PC parties traveling as a dispersed group. Basically the idea is low level PCs are well aware of how crunchy they are and travel in larger groups so that losses can be soaked and individual groups rotate from the hot zone to be replaced by a fresh group if needed. Around 10-13th level these groups break up into component parties as the surviving members have become forces in their own right and less squishy. By this time player favorites will have developed and these can be the group the campaign follows with short jaunts to the other parties of the old raiding group if things bog down or they feel like a change.

I'm glad it works for you, but I just can't be that kind and gentle as a DM, and I refuse to use kid gloves on my PCs. So I've mostly taken death out of my game. That way, there's no real way for the PCs to escape their suffering and torture, and when they fail, they have to live with the repercussions of their failures. I won't even kill them at lower levels, since that means they can avoid serious attachment to their PCs until much later and won't be as affected when horrible things happen to them. It would be akin to just handing them a "get out of jail free" card, or more precisely, a "your PC is dead so nothing bad can happen to him any more" card. Hell, no! I've sometimes had players saying that it would just be much kinder of me to just kill their PCs, and I've even considered it a few times, but I just wouldn't be able to enjoy a game that soft. Maybe I'm just mean and hardcore.