SPECTRE666
Adventurer
-Jason Bulmahn Speaks about 4E He works for Paizo. I found this on the WotC forums. Good and Bad points.
[SBLOCK]Jason Bulmahn-He works for Paizo(Whom have not decide if 4e will work for them yet..)
DDXP Roundup
location: Home
mood: contemplative
/6070.html
So, DDXP is done and over with. I had a good time at the show, despite my poor showing in the D&D Miniatures Limited Championship (again... damn you 4th round redraft). The con for me started out on Thursday with the seminar about 4E, followed by both of the preview adventures, back to back. I will go into those, and my observations about the game a bit later. Following those two games, I had a few drinks with friends and wandered off to bed.
Friday was a minis day for me, during which I played the prerelease event for the new D&D Miniatures game. This was my first time playing and it took a bit of adjustment. The new game is pretty strongly based off the 4E rules, but one thing completely threw me for a loop. Pits. In the new game, when an effect pushed a opposing fig into a pit, you reroll the attack that pushed it. If you score a second hit, the figure is destroyed. In the first match, this little rule allowed me to win my game in the beginning of the third round, after being in a loosing position only minutes before. In the second game, my opponent had two figs that could push me, so I lost. In the third game, my opponent had no figs that could push so I won. After that, being 2-1 and feeling a bit dirty about the pit ruling bit, I dropped out. To be honest, until they fix this horribly broken rule, 2.0 DDM will not be the game for me (although I have heard that a change is most certainly in the works). After this, I had way too much beer, and a bit too much Vodka, and I stumbled off to bed.
Saturday was the Limited Championship and I woke with a buzzing skull. Not a good start. Despite this, I still made it to the tournament on time. It started at 9am and I had a pretty good first pull. After 4 rounds, I was 3-1, feeling like I had a pretty good shot of pulling out enough wins to make it to the top 8. Unfortunately, as it happens every year, my second pull was not so great. I had a good mix of figs, but nothing that could deal more than 15 points of damage. After losing my next made, dropping me to 3-2 with terrible tie breakers (I got paired down in round 3), I decided to cut my losses to spend more time chatting with friends and other gamers. More drinking followed that night... a lot more.
Sunday.. ugg.. I slept in. Woke up at about 11 and hung out with folks as the con slowly wound down. I had breakfast with Chris Perkins, which made for entertaining discussions, as always. Chatted with some more people and finally went out to dinner at a great Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away. More drinks were had, including some fine wine, and a great glass of cognac to wash it all down (I love desert liquor.. what a great concept). Anywho... that was all for Sunday. Most of the other folks were flying home, but not me.
By the time I woke on Monday, most of the rest of the con folks were gone. I grabbed a shuttle to head over to the subway to catch a ride to the national mall. I walked up to the capital (photos to come later) and then made my way over to the national gallery. After seeing a veritable art education worth of masterpieces, I made my way over to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. I had missed both these museums on my first trip and was quite glad to catch them this time around. Great museums... from Van Goghs to the Hope Diamond, how could you ask for a better day. From there, I walked over to 1600 Pennsylvania for a quick photo or two and caught a train back to my hotel. The flights home were long and grueling.. but here I am and not too much worse for the wear.
But enough of all that... on to the real details. 4E
First.. a disclaimer. These are MY opinions. They might not even be good ones. I have not seen all the rules. These thoughts are cobbled together through my limited experiences at DDXP, chats with the folks at the show, and information from previous announcements. So, take them for what they are, the ramblings of one gamer/game designer. If you want to know what Paizo thinks or what Paizo is going to do about 4E, wait for their official announcements on the matter. One last thing, if you are trying to avoid spoilers about the preview events or 4E, turn back now. I am not going to hold anything back.
Intro
So, first I played "Excape from Sembia". In this adventure, I played a tiefling wizard. The adventure itself was pretty straight forward. Deliver a message. When that gets botched, run from the guards and escape the country before they catch and punish you. The adventure featured five encounters, the first of which was a fight against some guards, while trying to deliver the message. The second was a skill encounter (more on this later). The rest were all fights, one against humanoids, one against undead, and one against guards. We had no real problems with this adventure and played through to its conclusion. The second adventure was "Scalegloom Hall", in which I played a halfling paladin. This was a dungeon adventure that also featured five encounters, all of which were fights. The first four were all against Kobolds, while the final combat was against a dragon. The kobolds fights were terribly easy and the dragon fight was incredibly hard. We still won out with no casualties, and played the game to its conclusion.
Observations
Well, there were a number of interesting observations I made as I played the games. Some things I liked and others I didn't. I am going to try to focus on big-picture issues instead of smaller rules issues (although I am sure a couple will sneak in now and again).
- The game was pretty easy to learn. We picked up the basic mechanics with relative ease. That said, some of the finer points of our characters took an encounter or two to figure out. This seems pretty normal to me.
- We all had a class-relative action to take pretty much every round. In 3.5, you would sometimes get forced to perform actions that were not part of your core character concept, such as having the wizard attack with a crossbow. While I consider this a plus, it did lead to repetitive action (something I was hoping 4E would avoid) after you used up your more limited powers. In other words, once I ran out of my per encounter powers, I pretty much used the same at-will power over and over because it was the best option I had.
- Once you face a monster, you know what to expect the next time you face that monster. This was very true in Scalegloom Hall. We faced the same kobolds again and again, and they performed pretty similarly over and over again. Since monsters do not have as many options available to them, they really only have a few things to do. This may be a factor of them being low level, but looking at the Pit Fiend post, I kinda doubt it. There were some variances, due to the room set ups (like swinging skulls and a rolling boulder), but setting those things aside, the kobold slingers did the same thing in every fight we faced them. I am not sure I like this, but there are worse things I suppose.
- Static random rolls are far more common than I would prefer. PC saves are pretty much always an 10+ (unless you have one of a few adjustments). This includes death saves. In addition, monster powers recharge on a random roll, usually somewhere between 3+ and 6+ on a 1d6. When you combine these two, it means that the fights can be very "swingy". If your group fails a bunch of these rolls, while the DM makes his recharge rolls, you are in for a tough fight. Meanwhile, the same PCs fighting the same monsters might have an easy time if the rolls are reversed (this is, I think, why some groups got TPK'd in some of the mods, while others had a breeze). I am not saying that I like things to be predictable, but since these rolls never really change as you go up in level (afaik) it seems a little off. A 30th Lv Fighter should have an easier time shaking off the effects of a simple poison than a 1st Lv wizard. Maybe that is just me.
- I am not sure you can die in 4E. Let me clarify that a bit. I am sure you can die, but it seems to me that you need to throw a vastly overchallenging encounter at the PCs, or you need to be a bit of a jerk. When a character drops below 0, you can go as low as half your total HP below 0 before dying. Each round you make a save to see if you get closer to death (9 or less), remain unchanged (10-19) or heal (20+). You can fail twice before dying on the third fail (the three strikes rule). With monster damage being what it is, I do not see PCs getting knocked that far into negatives in one shot without a crit (and even that is not a guarantee at higher levels). I am not saying it will never happen, the odds just seem slim. So, if that is out, you have to worry about the three strikes rule. It seems to me that any group that groks the system is going to make sure to save anyone before that happens if possible. The only other option left, then, is to gang beat a downed PC until they are dead. This seems highly unlikely to me in a group amongst friends. I generally never used coup de grace in 3.5 unless it was a particularly evil villain or other extenuating circumstances. I do not see myself doing it in 4E either. So.. while I think some PCs will die, I don't think it is going to happen too often. Without the serious threat of death, I feel that takes a big bite out of the excitement. In the games I played, we were never really in danger until the dragon, and that was only because the dragon was a level 4 solo monster against 1st level PCs. The rest seemed like cake.
- More Options, Fewer Choices. Both of the characters I played had a number of options, but in each combat, I found that every round, only one was a good choice (usually an encounter power if I had it, daily power if I needed it, or an at will if nothing else was available). This might just be an artifact of not seeing the whole rules (I hope so), because once a fight got past a few rounds, I found myself taking the same action over and over again. 3.5 certainly suffers from this problem as well to some extent. The difference here is that you would never dare to try and think about what other options might work in the fight because your at-will powers are clearly far superior. As a 4E wizard, I would never use my dagger unless I had too, because magic missile was a better option in just about every way. In 3.5, I might still use that dagger, crossbow, or even do something weird like aid another if I ran out of useful spells. I am not necessarily saying either is better, but it seemed a lot more binary to me.
- Sacred Hamburger. I had to roll to hit with a magic missile. Ugg. I missed a number of times (3 out of 9 times in fact). The guy who played the wizard in my other table did a lot worse, missing 7 out of 11 times. Goodbye Chaos and Law. Bye bye specialist wizards. See you later (like next year.. or even longer) barbarian, bard, druid, monk and sorcerer. No more spells (Wizard and Cleric abilities are called spells and prayers respectively, but they work like every other class's abilities). I have a bad feeling this is only the tip of the iceberg. I hope I am wrong.
- Almost everything revolves around combat. Nearly all my powers and abilities had something to do with combat and dealing damage. Although I was never a fan of the Craft rules, they had a place in the game, as did a host of other spells and abilities that allowed you to do things that did not necessarily involve spilling blood. I heard someone at the show mention that even the Maze ability deals damage now. Maze! If such is the case, I am wondering if there is an encounter power called "Identify" that deals 1d8+Int damage and you learn the power of the one of the target's magic items on a hit. Anyway... Diplomacy is still in there, as is Stealth, and a few other knowledge skills, but it seems like the rest is for killing.
- Skill challenges seemed fun. In "Escape from Sembia" we needed to hide from some guards for a bit. To this end, we each picked a way to do it. I chose to hide, others tried to run, and so on. Once we decided, we had a choice of taking the easy way, normal way, or the hard way. This modified the DC, but if we failed on the easy way, it came with a penalty above normal failure. On the opposite end, if we succeeded on the hard way, we got an extra bonus. While this seemed fun to me, it did have a couple of weird bits I am still trying to work out. Why not just combine it into one system, with benchmarks of success (you made it by 10, you not only hid, but you also learned a bit about your pursuers for example). I can see some advantages, but they seem less to me than the added complexity that drew me out of the moment.
- Everything scales. Damage, Hit Points, AC, Defenses, Attack rolls.. everything scales up at a pretty reliable rate. I can see how this might balance higher level play and that is a good thing. On the other hand, it kinda feels to me like you cannot break away from that curve to excel in anything. When fighting monsters similar to you, the fighter and the wizard have a similar difficulty level attacking it. This changes a bit depending upon what defense or AC you are shooting at, but they are still kinda close (it seems). What this seems to mean though, is that a lot of class niches seem blurred. In earlier editions, various monsters allowed the different classes to shine, which I feel is important to the game. I am shaky on this point, but it did make me wonder why everyone was not playing a cleric or paladin. They attacked nearly the same way as everyone else and could throw around the ability to use healing surges quite easily.
- Power Variety. This is an unfounded fear I am having. Most of the powers of a class all seem to do things along a similar line. Clerics, for example, seem to have a bunch of powers that do radiant damage. While this might work fine for a sun cleric. What am I gonna do about clerics of a shadow god or frost god or nature god? Not all of them can do radiant damage all the time. I hope there are a ton of powers for me to chose from because I really do not want to have to create a bunch to make my pantheons work. The same goes for just about every other class, each in its own way. I need a ton of options, but with every class getting a list of them, I am worried that it means less for those that really need it. I don't know, but some rumors that were going around the show have me a bit worried. This one is a wait and see I guess.
- No reliable coolness. Having to roll for nearly every power means that they miss sometimes. This really sucks when you burn your daily power and have it miss. While many have effects on a miss (I would guess), it is still a big letdown. I don't think I ever hit with my daily powers.
Wrap-Up
I am sure I will come up with a dozen more points in the coming days and weeks, but this is all I got for now. I think 4E is an interesting game and I will certainly be giving it a closer look. I have a lot of apprehension right now though. The games I played were fun, but they seemed awfully rushed to me, showing off a tiny slice of a larger game. I know some changes were made at the show, some of which might get folded back into the core books, which I guess go to the printer very soon. I am full of questions right now... only the GSL and the 4E rules will truly answer them I guess. Will 4E be a good game? I think so. Will 4E be D&D? I don't know. The waiting is killing me.
Static" monsters.
(Relatively) "static" characters.
(Apparently) "static" tactics.[/SBLOCK]
SPECTRE666
[SBLOCK]Jason Bulmahn-He works for Paizo(Whom have not decide if 4e will work for them yet..)
DDXP Roundup
location: Home
mood: contemplative
/6070.html
So, DDXP is done and over with. I had a good time at the show, despite my poor showing in the D&D Miniatures Limited Championship (again... damn you 4th round redraft). The con for me started out on Thursday with the seminar about 4E, followed by both of the preview adventures, back to back. I will go into those, and my observations about the game a bit later. Following those two games, I had a few drinks with friends and wandered off to bed.
Friday was a minis day for me, during which I played the prerelease event for the new D&D Miniatures game. This was my first time playing and it took a bit of adjustment. The new game is pretty strongly based off the 4E rules, but one thing completely threw me for a loop. Pits. In the new game, when an effect pushed a opposing fig into a pit, you reroll the attack that pushed it. If you score a second hit, the figure is destroyed. In the first match, this little rule allowed me to win my game in the beginning of the third round, after being in a loosing position only minutes before. In the second game, my opponent had two figs that could push me, so I lost. In the third game, my opponent had no figs that could push so I won. After that, being 2-1 and feeling a bit dirty about the pit ruling bit, I dropped out. To be honest, until they fix this horribly broken rule, 2.0 DDM will not be the game for me (although I have heard that a change is most certainly in the works). After this, I had way too much beer, and a bit too much Vodka, and I stumbled off to bed.
Saturday was the Limited Championship and I woke with a buzzing skull. Not a good start. Despite this, I still made it to the tournament on time. It started at 9am and I had a pretty good first pull. After 4 rounds, I was 3-1, feeling like I had a pretty good shot of pulling out enough wins to make it to the top 8. Unfortunately, as it happens every year, my second pull was not so great. I had a good mix of figs, but nothing that could deal more than 15 points of damage. After losing my next made, dropping me to 3-2 with terrible tie breakers (I got paired down in round 3), I decided to cut my losses to spend more time chatting with friends and other gamers. More drinking followed that night... a lot more.
Sunday.. ugg.. I slept in. Woke up at about 11 and hung out with folks as the con slowly wound down. I had breakfast with Chris Perkins, which made for entertaining discussions, as always. Chatted with some more people and finally went out to dinner at a great Italian restaurant a couple of blocks away. More drinks were had, including some fine wine, and a great glass of cognac to wash it all down (I love desert liquor.. what a great concept). Anywho... that was all for Sunday. Most of the other folks were flying home, but not me.
By the time I woke on Monday, most of the rest of the con folks were gone. I grabbed a shuttle to head over to the subway to catch a ride to the national mall. I walked up to the capital (photos to come later) and then made my way over to the national gallery. After seeing a veritable art education worth of masterpieces, I made my way over to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. I had missed both these museums on my first trip and was quite glad to catch them this time around. Great museums... from Van Goghs to the Hope Diamond, how could you ask for a better day. From there, I walked over to 1600 Pennsylvania for a quick photo or two and caught a train back to my hotel. The flights home were long and grueling.. but here I am and not too much worse for the wear.
But enough of all that... on to the real details. 4E
First.. a disclaimer. These are MY opinions. They might not even be good ones. I have not seen all the rules. These thoughts are cobbled together through my limited experiences at DDXP, chats with the folks at the show, and information from previous announcements. So, take them for what they are, the ramblings of one gamer/game designer. If you want to know what Paizo thinks or what Paizo is going to do about 4E, wait for their official announcements on the matter. One last thing, if you are trying to avoid spoilers about the preview events or 4E, turn back now. I am not going to hold anything back.
Intro
So, first I played "Excape from Sembia". In this adventure, I played a tiefling wizard. The adventure itself was pretty straight forward. Deliver a message. When that gets botched, run from the guards and escape the country before they catch and punish you. The adventure featured five encounters, the first of which was a fight against some guards, while trying to deliver the message. The second was a skill encounter (more on this later). The rest were all fights, one against humanoids, one against undead, and one against guards. We had no real problems with this adventure and played through to its conclusion. The second adventure was "Scalegloom Hall", in which I played a halfling paladin. This was a dungeon adventure that also featured five encounters, all of which were fights. The first four were all against Kobolds, while the final combat was against a dragon. The kobolds fights were terribly easy and the dragon fight was incredibly hard. We still won out with no casualties, and played the game to its conclusion.
Observations
Well, there were a number of interesting observations I made as I played the games. Some things I liked and others I didn't. I am going to try to focus on big-picture issues instead of smaller rules issues (although I am sure a couple will sneak in now and again).
- The game was pretty easy to learn. We picked up the basic mechanics with relative ease. That said, some of the finer points of our characters took an encounter or two to figure out. This seems pretty normal to me.
- We all had a class-relative action to take pretty much every round. In 3.5, you would sometimes get forced to perform actions that were not part of your core character concept, such as having the wizard attack with a crossbow. While I consider this a plus, it did lead to repetitive action (something I was hoping 4E would avoid) after you used up your more limited powers. In other words, once I ran out of my per encounter powers, I pretty much used the same at-will power over and over because it was the best option I had.
- Once you face a monster, you know what to expect the next time you face that monster. This was very true in Scalegloom Hall. We faced the same kobolds again and again, and they performed pretty similarly over and over again. Since monsters do not have as many options available to them, they really only have a few things to do. This may be a factor of them being low level, but looking at the Pit Fiend post, I kinda doubt it. There were some variances, due to the room set ups (like swinging skulls and a rolling boulder), but setting those things aside, the kobold slingers did the same thing in every fight we faced them. I am not sure I like this, but there are worse things I suppose.
- Static random rolls are far more common than I would prefer. PC saves are pretty much always an 10+ (unless you have one of a few adjustments). This includes death saves. In addition, monster powers recharge on a random roll, usually somewhere between 3+ and 6+ on a 1d6. When you combine these two, it means that the fights can be very "swingy". If your group fails a bunch of these rolls, while the DM makes his recharge rolls, you are in for a tough fight. Meanwhile, the same PCs fighting the same monsters might have an easy time if the rolls are reversed (this is, I think, why some groups got TPK'd in some of the mods, while others had a breeze). I am not saying that I like things to be predictable, but since these rolls never really change as you go up in level (afaik) it seems a little off. A 30th Lv Fighter should have an easier time shaking off the effects of a simple poison than a 1st Lv wizard. Maybe that is just me.
- I am not sure you can die in 4E. Let me clarify that a bit. I am sure you can die, but it seems to me that you need to throw a vastly overchallenging encounter at the PCs, or you need to be a bit of a jerk. When a character drops below 0, you can go as low as half your total HP below 0 before dying. Each round you make a save to see if you get closer to death (9 or less), remain unchanged (10-19) or heal (20+). You can fail twice before dying on the third fail (the three strikes rule). With monster damage being what it is, I do not see PCs getting knocked that far into negatives in one shot without a crit (and even that is not a guarantee at higher levels). I am not saying it will never happen, the odds just seem slim. So, if that is out, you have to worry about the three strikes rule. It seems to me that any group that groks the system is going to make sure to save anyone before that happens if possible. The only other option left, then, is to gang beat a downed PC until they are dead. This seems highly unlikely to me in a group amongst friends. I generally never used coup de grace in 3.5 unless it was a particularly evil villain or other extenuating circumstances. I do not see myself doing it in 4E either. So.. while I think some PCs will die, I don't think it is going to happen too often. Without the serious threat of death, I feel that takes a big bite out of the excitement. In the games I played, we were never really in danger until the dragon, and that was only because the dragon was a level 4 solo monster against 1st level PCs. The rest seemed like cake.
- More Options, Fewer Choices. Both of the characters I played had a number of options, but in each combat, I found that every round, only one was a good choice (usually an encounter power if I had it, daily power if I needed it, or an at will if nothing else was available). This might just be an artifact of not seeing the whole rules (I hope so), because once a fight got past a few rounds, I found myself taking the same action over and over again. 3.5 certainly suffers from this problem as well to some extent. The difference here is that you would never dare to try and think about what other options might work in the fight because your at-will powers are clearly far superior. As a 4E wizard, I would never use my dagger unless I had too, because magic missile was a better option in just about every way. In 3.5, I might still use that dagger, crossbow, or even do something weird like aid another if I ran out of useful spells. I am not necessarily saying either is better, but it seemed a lot more binary to me.
- Sacred Hamburger. I had to roll to hit with a magic missile. Ugg. I missed a number of times (3 out of 9 times in fact). The guy who played the wizard in my other table did a lot worse, missing 7 out of 11 times. Goodbye Chaos and Law. Bye bye specialist wizards. See you later (like next year.. or even longer) barbarian, bard, druid, monk and sorcerer. No more spells (Wizard and Cleric abilities are called spells and prayers respectively, but they work like every other class's abilities). I have a bad feeling this is only the tip of the iceberg. I hope I am wrong.
- Almost everything revolves around combat. Nearly all my powers and abilities had something to do with combat and dealing damage. Although I was never a fan of the Craft rules, they had a place in the game, as did a host of other spells and abilities that allowed you to do things that did not necessarily involve spilling blood. I heard someone at the show mention that even the Maze ability deals damage now. Maze! If such is the case, I am wondering if there is an encounter power called "Identify" that deals 1d8+Int damage and you learn the power of the one of the target's magic items on a hit. Anyway... Diplomacy is still in there, as is Stealth, and a few other knowledge skills, but it seems like the rest is for killing.
- Skill challenges seemed fun. In "Escape from Sembia" we needed to hide from some guards for a bit. To this end, we each picked a way to do it. I chose to hide, others tried to run, and so on. Once we decided, we had a choice of taking the easy way, normal way, or the hard way. This modified the DC, but if we failed on the easy way, it came with a penalty above normal failure. On the opposite end, if we succeeded on the hard way, we got an extra bonus. While this seemed fun to me, it did have a couple of weird bits I am still trying to work out. Why not just combine it into one system, with benchmarks of success (you made it by 10, you not only hid, but you also learned a bit about your pursuers for example). I can see some advantages, but they seem less to me than the added complexity that drew me out of the moment.
- Everything scales. Damage, Hit Points, AC, Defenses, Attack rolls.. everything scales up at a pretty reliable rate. I can see how this might balance higher level play and that is a good thing. On the other hand, it kinda feels to me like you cannot break away from that curve to excel in anything. When fighting monsters similar to you, the fighter and the wizard have a similar difficulty level attacking it. This changes a bit depending upon what defense or AC you are shooting at, but they are still kinda close (it seems). What this seems to mean though, is that a lot of class niches seem blurred. In earlier editions, various monsters allowed the different classes to shine, which I feel is important to the game. I am shaky on this point, but it did make me wonder why everyone was not playing a cleric or paladin. They attacked nearly the same way as everyone else and could throw around the ability to use healing surges quite easily.
- Power Variety. This is an unfounded fear I am having. Most of the powers of a class all seem to do things along a similar line. Clerics, for example, seem to have a bunch of powers that do radiant damage. While this might work fine for a sun cleric. What am I gonna do about clerics of a shadow god or frost god or nature god? Not all of them can do radiant damage all the time. I hope there are a ton of powers for me to chose from because I really do not want to have to create a bunch to make my pantheons work. The same goes for just about every other class, each in its own way. I need a ton of options, but with every class getting a list of them, I am worried that it means less for those that really need it. I don't know, but some rumors that were going around the show have me a bit worried. This one is a wait and see I guess.
- No reliable coolness. Having to roll for nearly every power means that they miss sometimes. This really sucks when you burn your daily power and have it miss. While many have effects on a miss (I would guess), it is still a big letdown. I don't think I ever hit with my daily powers.
Wrap-Up
I am sure I will come up with a dozen more points in the coming days and weeks, but this is all I got for now. I think 4E is an interesting game and I will certainly be giving it a closer look. I have a lot of apprehension right now though. The games I played were fun, but they seemed awfully rushed to me, showing off a tiny slice of a larger game. I know some changes were made at the show, some of which might get folded back into the core books, which I guess go to the printer very soon. I am full of questions right now... only the GSL and the 4E rules will truly answer them I guess. Will 4E be a good game? I think so. Will 4E be D&D? I don't know. The waiting is killing me.
Static" monsters.
(Relatively) "static" characters.
(Apparently) "static" tactics.[/SBLOCK]
SPECTRE666
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