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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5762142" data-attributes="member: 2011">The reason a blind Wizard can distinguish friend from foe is that he knows where everyone was before he got blinded. The moment anyone hides, the Wizard no longer knows where that friend or foe is located. The rules are that way for a reason.But for your specific example of fountain of flame, I think it is stupid to have area effect powers that can distinguish friend from foe in the first place if you aren't going to have logical rules that govern that. I think it's stupid to have elemental damage in certain squares that affects enemies, but not allies. This concept that magic, especially first level elemental magic, is intelligent is lame. IMO.But that doesn't mean that game designers should expand on that lack of design thought and create creatures that are hiding under a ship, but still able to distinguish friend from foe where the creature cannot itself see.If the Kraken is below the ship, it should have no idea where anyone is with the one exception of the foes that he placed on deck. But from then on, there is blocking terrain in front of the Kraken. No line of sight. No line of effect from the Kraken itself, only from its tentacles.So, it's reasonable that the Kraken can flail its tentacles along the edges of the ship. It's unreasonable to have intelligent tentacles that can see just fine because the creature using those tentacles cannot see or hear the foes above. If those tentacles have eyes and can see friend from foe, fine. Then, the PCs should be able to blind the tentacles. It's a real stretch that the tentacles have "sonar" that works in the air.The implementation of the creature is a bit lame. It's the mechanics driving the scenario, not the other way around. The designers created the creature to get the tactical and mechanical effects they wanted, they didn't start with the creature and decide which effects made sense for that type of creature. Granted, in a world of magic, strange stuff can happen. But, things like this should be Epic level, not Heroic level. And, putting an Epic level creature into a Heroic level adventure and then gimping it a bit shows a lack of imagination and lazy design. IMO.Both Fountains of Flame and the Kraken are examples of lazy game design. I have no problem with a Wizard targeting different foes with magical bolts of fire. But, it should not be an area effect using those AoE rules if the Wizard gets to target foes and not friends. That's a higher level feat and even then, the allies can still get hit. If it is an area effect, it should target all creatures in the area, not just enemies. If it creates a zone, then the zone should effect all targets.There are a lot of zones that affect enemies and not allies and that's just plain bad game design. Having an occasional one where there is reasonable justification is fine. The Cleric's god giving a buff to allies. But, a zone of fire shouldn't typically be one of those. Fire should be fire and it should damage everyone the same, especially at heroic levels. High level fire? Yeah, maybe. At that point, maybe the Wizard is conjuring little intelligent elementals to snuggle up to enemies and avoid his allies.One of the design flaws with 4E is that there is no metarules about how to combine Keywords, Power Sources, Conditions, Targets, and Effects. Every designer takes whatever he wants that sounds cool, throws them together, and doesn't worry about the fact that because of this, one gets same level powers where some are uber and others are lame. Ditto for items. 4E had an awesome concept behind it, but it doesn't have a good design model behind it. There is a bit of a design model about defenses, attacks, hit points, and damage of monsters (the design model for PCs though was flawed, hence, the math fixes), but the designers missed the boat on a lot of design meta-rule elements that should have been part of the overall design.So I find it interesting that as justification for why the Kraken should be designed the way it was, you pick one of the powers that is itself poorly designed.I don't understand why you cannot comprehend that not everyone thinks like you.I don't need to find out everything that's available to me. Instead of playing the same boring repetitive adventure over and over and over again that I've already beaten, I can go play a normal game that is different every time I sit at the table, I have a PC that I start to care about, I don't change him around for each session, and I have an actual storyline. I can inspire tavern tales because I have a campaign where events flow from one session to the next and I can work towards goals.Lair Assaults would be great encounters to run multiple times if they were a lot more interesting with a lot more options for changes each time to surprise the players. They aren't. So far, they are only moderately interesting and not that well designed, and there are no reasons to go back and rehash them. I won't learn enough new stuff to make it worth my while.Like I said, I'm glad it works for you.It doesn't work for me and I don't know why you feel the need to harp on why you think your way is better and mine is worse in your mind.You sure seem to not get it.There are no tavern tales about LA. It's a single adventure. If one has to play it 4 times before coming up with something to reminisce at the table for years to come, then the play of the players and the design of the adventure probably wasn't that awe inspiring in the first place.There were no zones or effects in LA2. What are you talking about?Sorry, but you're just arguing to argue now. "time-consuming activities that encourage players to compete against each other for the DM's time"?It seems that you are arguing that the adventures the way they were designed is great and anything else is lousy.Damage and only damage is boring (which is what the vast majority of both LAs was).Splitting up the party is a cool way to really show evil DM skills. Dropping detrimental effects that hinder the party and force the players to make difficult decisions is a cool way to really show evil DM skills. Putting in specific terrain that helps the enemies and hinders the PCs is a cool way to really show evil DM skillls.Doing a lot of damage and creating creatures that just do a lot of damage. That's sad dude. It's totally uninspired.Sorry, but you sound like a broken record when you preach going back again and again and again to adventures that are just damage fests as if this is some great and wonderful adventure that creates tavern tale if the players could just manage to get every bonus point that WotC thought of, and that the players are going to learn all these cool tips and tricks to overcome these challenges.Lair Assaults are supposed to be adventures where the DM can strut his stuff and overwhelm the best tactics of the players with the best cool DM curve balls and evil DM tactics. Instead, they are damage fests where the game designers thought that going outside the normal games rules was the only way to accomplish the goal. Definitely a lack of encounter design imagination.There's not a single thing in either Lair Assault where as a DM I thought: "Wow! What a cool way to do that. That's awesome.". The one I ran I thought: "Wow! There's no way my players aren't going to get through this." (and they easily did), and as a player in the second one I thought "Wow! That first encounter was really weak. And Wow! The DM killed the Cleric with 5 hits out of 6 attacks a third of the way through round one and the tentacles will kill us, we got to change the action economy here.".If the DM hadn't explicitly set the enemies up so that the Cleric was practically surrounded at the very beginning of the encounter to ensure that he could focus fire on her, LA2 would have been a cake walk for us.I'm glad that you find these to be awesome adventures dude. I find them to be meh at best. The DM had to try to force kill one specific PC (the one designed to keep the party going no matter what) before the majority of the PCs could act to even challenge us. Sorry, but that's just totally lame. A smart strategic move by our DM, but one where he used metagame knowledge to attack and kill our most valuable PC because he recognized (as I did before DMing the first LA) that well designed PCs (not even a well designed team which we did not do for either adventure, just well designed individual PCs) will easily wipe these adventures.I had heard that the tentacles could reach the crows nest. If that is true, then it is irrelevant for other races.The point of the comment was whether a pixie could get to that location and be out of range of the tentacles by being one more square up.So, your comment here doesn't make any sense if the tentacles can reach the crows nest.</blockquote>

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