blargney the second
blargney the minute's son
I can't vote - they're equally as deadly as far as we've been able to determine.
-blarg
-blarg
Forked Thread: Death in 4e Poll
- Thread starter Mark
- Start date
Treebore
First Post
I voted less deadly, because we made it through most of the Shadowfells module so far and we had two characters go unconcious in only one encounter, but we still won.
In similar encounters with similar numbers in 3E I think we would have had some deaths by now.
We are tactically astute. IE we stay in hallways to limit the number of attackers, etc... Mage was well protected behind two rows of the fighter/cleric types.
We are thinking of ruling all once per encounter or day powers are only expended on actual hits. All the enemy PC's being 20 to 22 like last night (That death jumping spider and those goblins standing next to each other) had us wasting those powers more than half the time, and was ticking us off. Fortunately the mage was rolling hot and consistently got 19+ on her dice rolls. The cleric doing some extremely effective healing was a big help as well. The Warlord didn't even need to help out. Which was good, because she failed to hit 75% of the time in that encounter. My Paladin was somewhat hot with the dice, so hit about 60% of the time.
Good thing we bottle necked ourselves in that hall way. Only the spider was a nuisance, and we quickly hurt it enough to make it jump away again. Then killed it with range attacks, which were the only attacks the Warlord hit with in that encounter.
Anyways, with tactically sound players 4E is significantly less deadly, IMO.
In similar encounters with similar numbers in 3E I think we would have had some deaths by now.
We are tactically astute. IE we stay in hallways to limit the number of attackers, etc... Mage was well protected behind two rows of the fighter/cleric types.
We are thinking of ruling all once per encounter or day powers are only expended on actual hits. All the enemy PC's being 20 to 22 like last night (That death jumping spider and those goblins standing next to each other) had us wasting those powers more than half the time, and was ticking us off. Fortunately the mage was rolling hot and consistently got 19+ on her dice rolls. The cleric doing some extremely effective healing was a big help as well. The Warlord didn't even need to help out. Which was good, because she failed to hit 75% of the time in that encounter. My Paladin was somewhat hot with the dice, so hit about 60% of the time.
Good thing we bottle necked ourselves in that hall way. Only the spider was a nuisance, and we quickly hurt it enough to make it jump away again. Then killed it with range attacks, which were the only attacks the Warlord hit with in that encounter.
Anyways, with tactically sound players 4E is significantly less deadly, IMO.
I had a problem with this too. I thought about using this solution, but making all encounter and daily powers "reliable" seemed like too much for me. Instead, I changed Action Points so that, instead of gaining an extra action, you can instead get a +10 on one attack roll. The player has to declare he is using the Action Point before he makes the roll, so it's possible to "waste" an AP if you roll well anyway, but the players seem to like the option of making sure their "big guns" are effective when they really want them to be. Plus, since you can only use 1 AP per encounter, it's not quite as powerful as making everything reliable. It's working well for us so far.
Victim
First Post
My experience with 4e is not particularly comprehensive, but it definitely seems less lethal to me. Death was often sort of expected, especially in high level combat.
But 4e does seem to increase the chance of TPKs under most circumstances. Increased interdependence between characters and more limited resources (in that a party can run out of stuff for an encounter, even if they have more abilities they could in theory tap for another one - mostly healing surges) seem to make mass deaths more likely.
But 4e does seem to increase the chance of TPKs under most circumstances. Increased interdependence between characters and more limited resources (in that a party can run out of stuff for an encounter, even if they have more abilities they could in theory tap for another one - mostly healing surges) seem to make mass deaths more likely.
Henrix
Explorer
I voted less lethal, but I don't think it is clearly so.
4e is clearly less accidentally lethal, which is an important point. By that I mean that there is less chance that a character dies just because of a stroke of bad luck (like a monster critting, or a failed save or two).
But I'm far from certain it is less lethal on the whole - my expereince is too limited, although it includes a TPK (at a demo scenario, Into the Shadowhaunt) and what would have been a TPK in 3e where all characters ended up unconscious and captured by kobolds - which was excellent fun!
4e is clearly less accidentally lethal, which is an important point. By that I mean that there is less chance that a character dies just because of a stroke of bad luck (like a monster critting, or a failed save or two).
But I'm far from certain it is less lethal on the whole - my expereince is too limited, although it includes a TPK (at a demo scenario, Into the Shadowhaunt) and what would have been a TPK in 3e where all characters ended up unconscious and captured by kobolds - which was excellent fun!
Gothmog
First Post
Somewhat more lethal IME. While random back luck won't kill a character as often in 3e, bad tactics can lead to a TPK or deaths in a hurry. I thought my players were pretty good tacticians before 4e- characters dying in our 3e game was pretty rare, and going down or unconscious only happened in about 1 out of 4 fights to any PC.
But playing through KotS and a homebrew adventure to have them learn the system killed a total of 8 characters! This included one TPK in the homebrew adventure involving zombies, a wight, and a couple dark creepers. If you go play the "lone wolf" in 4e, you're dead meat. In our current 4e campaigns, pretty much every encounter has a PC going down as long as the DM is using even halfway decent tactics, and roughly 25% of the time the PC dies from sheer damage or failing saves.
But playing through KotS and a homebrew adventure to have them learn the system killed a total of 8 characters! This included one TPK in the homebrew adventure involving zombies, a wight, and a couple dark creepers. If you go play the "lone wolf" in 4e, you're dead meat. In our current 4e campaigns, pretty much every encounter has a PC going down as long as the DM is using even halfway decent tactics, and roughly 25% of the time the PC dies from sheer damage or failing saves.
the Jester
Legend
Well, I'm a notoriously lethal, no-kid-gloves kind of dm, and we're up to about 4th level in the 4e campaign and nobody has died yet.
Less lethal imho.
But I'll echo the sentiment that 4e is more lethal if you have poor teamwork. My group learned that very, very quickly and have really tight teamwork on the whole. Several of the pcs are very tactically minded and savvy; that helps a lot for my group.
Less lethal imho.
But I'll echo the sentiment that 4e is more lethal if you have poor teamwork. My group learned that very, very quickly and have really tight teamwork on the whole. Several of the pcs are very tactically minded and savvy; that helps a lot for my group.
I voted less lethal. I play with optional lethal critical rules that I'm releasing in October for 4e. In the time I've played 4e, we've had zero tpks in real games. We've had two in playtests, but both times they completed the objective first and we kept going to see if they could beat the unbeatable foe (which they didn't, so it was a success from playtest perspective). I've had one near tpk where half the party escaped and half the party didn't, but that adventure was designed to be so hard that I made sure a single lost battle would result in captured PCs, not dead ones (the battle in question was two full level-appropriate encounters in a row, followed by one about two levels higher, with no rests to reset them as new encounters).
Meanwhile in 3.5, playing dragonlance, I've had to cheat at least three times to keep a player alive (each time I felt that it was my fault--not describing the situation clearly enough, for example--and so I fudged a bit so the character wouldn't die because of me). Anyway, 3.5 seemed a lot deadlier. More real death threats over the same period and I'm playing 2 4e games and only one 3.5.
Meanwhile in 3.5, playing dragonlance, I've had to cheat at least three times to keep a player alive (each time I felt that it was my fault--not describing the situation clearly enough, for example--and so I fudged a bit so the character wouldn't die because of me). Anyway, 3.5 seemed a lot deadlier. More real death threats over the same period and I'm playing 2 4e games and only one 3.5.
