AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yes, if you can suggest me a handful of places to watch. My dilemma is my friends and I loved a good hack n slash. I never really had a chance to play with many good DMs, often it was 2nd madness "how many are standing together? Fireball!" Although oddly enough the parts that do stick out in my mind were often not the combat. Except when i found a bow and disintegration arrows and rolled 4 1's in a row and killed the group.
Back in the day I liked reading up on the crazy strong combos but now, not so much. 1 , maybe 2 add on books with feats and skills was kool. but all these dragon, dungeon addons, etc. Its so overwhelming. Hence when I was doing the ranger for my daughter, i just stuck to PHB1 to keep it simple. PH3 , I always wanted to be a Psionicist from 1st ed. Trying for the 00 roll. But yea, hybrid, gestalts, all that stuff never really clicked with me. So far I have the PHB1,2,3 and some dark sun book my friend lent me. I dont think i want to go to darksun. All I know is barely Dragonlance from the books and a whole lot of Forgotten Realms.
But yes, module suggestions would be great. Especially if theres something that can somewhat seamlessly help chars get to 10 at least. I cant remember the last time I was in any campaign where people gained 5 or more levels total..
Hopefully by paragon I can get my act to gether and come up with some good stuff. I read a lot of fantasy and NONE of my friends do, so it'll all be pretty much "new" to them if I piecemeal ideas from several sources.
Well my youngest typically likes violence where the older one doesnt. Young one opted to play Wii instead of the first session so I dont know if she will come back. But yes, the older one clearly does not like the violence. The redbox adventure had that goblin die after she used heal skill and she was actually crying. I let her roll to heal again and save em. im already thinking of making that an npc buddy for her. I know one of the books had the beastmaster subset. Maybe Ill do that and have a pet and goblin buddy arguing all the time.
Just double checking. Group was ranger and 3 defenders, so her damage was absurdly different from the rest, and all ranged no less.
I had chosen Careful for her thinking sometimes you just want that extra chance to hit. In retrospect I think the math is better for 2 outright standard attempts vs 1 with +2.
Yeah, rangers look somewhat out of whack. They are somewhat glass cannons though, and a fighter that gets up close can be pretty nasty. Have the enemy try to move past them to get at the ranger, then the fighter gets an OA/Combat Superiority stuff which ramps up their damage a lot.
Beastmaster is fun, though a lot of people complain about the beast not really being a big combat monster (they aren't, but they're really fun for RP purposes and a beastmaster can still use a bow and Twin Strike with the best of them). The bard is another fun class, but really all the PHB2 classes worked pretty well. Shaman is a little complicated, Barbarian is fun (the one in my new game got a crit with Avalanche Strike I think it was and did 56 damage at level 1, lol), and the Warden is just ridiculously hard to kill (and being able to do "Form of Winter's Herald!" is pretty fun).
Monsters make great companions, they're simple to run. DMG2 has some rules for creating stat blocks specifically suited to be companion characters, which offers a few tweaks so things work a little better, but in general monsters are OK. I really like the modules in the various Essentials material. The one in the DM's Kit is a level 1 adventure IIRC. Orcs of Stonefang Pass is also pretty good. WotC really hasn't published much else beyond the 9-part HPE series. Those CAN be decent, but they tend to have a lot of spots that are just long slugfests. Again, DDI has a lot of more interesting shorter adventures, the "Chaos Scar" series are a whole bunch of adventures with a common theme, sort of an elaboration on the concept of the old Caves of Chaos where there's a keep and a whole area full of weird monsters and adventures.