Excerpt: The Warlord

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Heh, you wish.

The cleric/warmage has his prepared heal spells plus about 10 on scrolls, the mystic theurge has his prepared heal spells plus about 10 on scrolls, and the party rogue has about 10 more heal scrolls which he cannot fail his Use Magic Device check for.

Try, just try to challenge that party without risking a TPK every combat.



The big thing about healing surges that I absolutely love is that it gives the PCs lots of resources for healing throughout the day but says that they cannot burst it all in one encounter. (This relates to the per encounter ideal, of course.) So, you can challenge the PCs in one fight and bring them to the brink of death, and after that fight, you can do it again!

Under the traditional vancian resource allocation, this is extremely difficult. There's nothing saying the cleric can't cast heal five times in a combat (or in my case... um... a bajillion), so I have to design encounters expecting that they will, otherwise, they are under no danger.

I've been saying heal is the problem with 3e for years and years. It's why monsters do so much damage, it makes all other cure spells next to worthless, it takes over the entire high level game. I think if 3e hadn't had that one spell, it would have extended the sweet spot by at least five levels. I guess at this point we'll never know, though. A pity.

You really need to teach your players the power of the Staff of Healing or similar magical items! Scrolls are way to expensive!

My Radiant Servant of Pelor had one. It was definitely helpful, except in those encounters where we lost one PC per round before the Cleric could act. or the encounters where enemies dealt 2d6 points con drain without any attached qualifiers, making it impossible to heal during an encounter. (Oh, and I also rememeber that I've used the Staff against Undead, too....)

 

[med stud]

Just because there are counters for Heal doesn't mean there is no problems with it. If you have to bend over backwards to come up with counters for one spell, I say the spell is broken.

 

[Lacyon]

No, because Restoration takes 3 rounds to cast.

Negative levels don't require much recalculation, since they basically apply to every d20 you roll. It's slower because you have to take an extra step per roll, but it's not like you have rewrite a bunch of numbers on the character sheet.

"Activating a spell completion item is a standard action and provokes attacks of opportunity exactly as casting a spell does."

You have more expensive scrolls, but not by much.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Negative levels.

I've actually tried it.. It doesn't actually do much but slow down the game and frustrates players. I want a way to challenge them so that they enjoy it, not so that they pull their hair out.

I tried a pack of dread wraiths last session. 1d8 Con drain looks deadly, but with 104 hp, the PCs drop them like flies. Oh, and it slows down the game, too. *sigh*

Substitute 'Levels' for 'HP' and 'Restoration' for 'Heal'.

Know what really sucks about restoration? 3 round casting time.

Round 1: "Don't worry I'll get those negative levels!"
Round 2: "Don't die, dude, almost done!"
Round 3: "Battle's over? Oh... Um... here's your levels back."

 

[JohnSnow]

That's more like 4e (as it played for me).

ThirdWizard, I think you and I are in agreement as to how 4E will/does play. I agree with you that constantly having to drop PCs and have them pop back up is annoying. However, I also agree with Kamikaze Midget that having PCs go down and then come surging back to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat is cool. As such, simply tripling (or quadrupling, or whatever) the pool of hit points, as some have suggested, doesn't provide that sense of characters that are frequently on the "edge of defeat," or "in danger of dying."

Caveat: I have not playtested 4e. However, I'm reasonably certain that it will provide that exciting surge back to victory often enough without it becoming so routine as to become tedious. Similarly, I believe that the mechanics for negative hit points and healing surge recovery, which I realize some people dislike as "unrealistic," allows one to make each encounter satisfyingly "risky" without leading to the "single encounter adventuring day."

The alternative of simply making the "pool of hit points" larger instead leads to attrition-based adventuring, where the only encounter with a real hint of dramatic tension is the one where you're actually low on hit points. Since many players tend to stop before they get there, DMs instead make every encounter more dangerous, thus creating the "15-minute adventuring day" problem.

That's a very real problem that I believe 4e has solved. In the process of finding that solution, they also came up with a rationale for hit points that made a non-magical healing class viable in the game. Hence, we have the Warlord. Personally, I believe this is a substantial improvment on many levels.

(See how I tied that in and made this post actually on-topic? )

 

[ThirdWizard]

You really need to teach your players the power of the Staff of Healing or similar magical items! Scrolls are way to expensive!

Shhh... they don't know about it.

 

[Emirikol]

The Warlord Gives Official License For Players To Boss Antoher Player Around

The only thing that bugs me about the bard..errrrr' Warlord is that described, he's a leader. Most of us will take that to be just that..but the IDIOTS in our hobby will take that as an excuse to boss other players (not PC's..actual players) around and tell them how to run their characters.

jh

 

[JohnSnow]

The only thing that bugs me about the bard..errrrr' Warlord is that described, he's a leader. Most of us will take that to be just that..but the IDIOTS in our hobby will take that as an excuse to boss other players (not PC's..actual players) around and tell them how to run their characters.

jh

Table etiquette and peer pressure should fix that right quick.

 

[Surgoshan]

People often compare dealing with players to herding cats, yet they never think of the obvious solution. Train your players like you train cats; bring a water gun to the table and squirt a player whenever he's obnoxious.

 

[TwinBahamut]

The only thing that bugs me about the bard..errrrr' Warlord is that described, he's a leader. Most of us will take that to be just that..but the IDIOTS in our hobby will take that as an excuse to boss other players (not PC's..actual players) around and tell them how to run their characters.

From personal experience, people like that don't need the excuse. I have already put that kind of player near the top of my personal list of least favorite player archetypes, without ever seeing anything like the warlord in the game (well, other than my own White Raven Warblade character). Actually, in my experience, the worst possible place for a bossy player is already in the game: the role of DM. There is no way a bossy "Leader" can compare to a bossy DM.