Khaim
First Post
Last night I ran a 4e playtest, and I thought I’d share. I realize that there’s a ton of “I tried 4e!” threads, but so far I haven’t seen any epic-level ones. In response to the obvious question, no, there really isn’t that much epic material out there. I had to make a lot of it up- and I learned a few things in doing so. (For starters, a single amateur spending a few weeks on a one-shot is no match for a team of professional designers spending years on a game.) I’ll go over the planning, the session, and the aftermath; feel free to skip ahead. This is extremely long.
Designing the monsters was by far the easiest part of the process. Between everything, I had a lot of monsters to work with, and more importantly, full knowledge of how to upscale them. It also wasn’t that hard to figure out the underlying math, at least roughly, so I was able to build a few monsters from scratch without much trouble.
I’m going to skip most of the adventure design, since it has little to do with 4e changes. I will say that skill challenges were really hard to plan with the paltry information we have. The hardest part was figuring out how to incorporate a skill challenge into a one-shot without completely destroying the plot if they failed. I settled on a fairly simple “If you fail, you have to fight this combat; if you fail, you have to fight X.”
Designing 22nd level characters was a royal pain in the ass. Actually, that’s not true. If I had the books, I probably could have done five characters in less time than it took me to level up the monsters. What took a lot of time was designing 22 levels of the class, not to mention feats, paragon paths, etc. The PCs were a tiefling paladin, an elf cleric, a dwarf fighter, a human wizard, and an eldarin ranger.
The paladin was the most interesting, and probably the most successful design. I decided to give her a strong fire theme (as a tiefling, it made sense), mostly from her paragon path. She had a healing smite, a stunning smite, a smite that set the target on fire, a retributive strike, two close bursts, a cross-classed fighter Tide of Iron-esque red, and an immobilizing/slowing fire spell. Everything she had was either melee or a burst centered on herself, so the paladin was always throwing herself into combat. In addition, she was very successful at keeping the monsters on her, or at least away from the rest of the party (using status effects, usually). Her utilities were a mix of protecting nearby allies, protecting herself, and the paragon power of adding tons of fire damage to her strikes.
The cleric, on the other hand, I utterly failed at. To be honest, I still don’t know exactly what kind of powers a leader should have. I ended up giving him a lot of damage powers, which entirely didn’t fit. We did have a few powers that gave out temp hp, but not enough- and looking back, he didn’t have nearly enough powers that protected allies or made it easier to hit enemies. This turns out to be a big problem.
Also, don’t ever create a power that tells a player the exact hp of monsters unless you want to calculate their exact hp every single round. Actually, it was probably a silly power regardless.
The fighter probably would have worked out okay, but I honestly can’t say that for sure since the player had to leave before either of the meaningful battles.
The wizard, well, he was easy. Lots of area spells, throw a status effect on top of each, done. Of course, the wizard is the class with the most mid-level information, so I actually had several levels worth of real spells for him.
The ranger turned out all right. Her powers probably weren’t as striker-ish as they should have been- too many controller aspects- but to be honest, I think the basic class abilities define your role as much or more than your powers. Adding 3d8 damage to every attack helps turn the character into a striker regardless of what power she’s using. I tried to do an Order of the Bow Initiate thing with her paragon class, but I think I overpowered it. Fortunately, the player didn’t take advantage, so it wasn’t a problem.
The players had all had at least a little experience with D&D. The paladin’s player was the only one who read the PHB-Lite ahead of time, and he figured out the system fairly quickly (and then started pulling silly tricks). The cleric’s and wizard’s players were D&D veterans but had little or no knowledge of 4e, but still managed to pick things up reasonably quickly. The fighter’s and ranger’s player had played D&D before but had very little system mastery, and struggled a lot to understand what was going on.
The first fight was all five players against a level 21 solo Fire Giant, which was completely custom made. It turns out that an epic level solo brute has well over 1000 hp, by the numbers. I thought that was excessive, so I rule 0’d it from 5x to 4x, which put it at 980 hp. This was still a lot, but the PCs would have killed it in 15-20 rounds, which seems to be an acceptable range. However, the fight got really dull fast, and the players weren’t enjoying it much, probably because they didn’t know how their own characters worked, much less the system. Luckily, I had given the cleric an Energy Drain spell lifted almost verbatim from the Bodaks, and he dropped the Giant on round 3 after a little prodding.
Designing a good solo monster is hard. It needs to have enough attack power to be relevant; abilities that hit multiple targets seem good. For the giant, I gave him a recharging breath weapon and an at-will whirlwind attack. His normal strikes set the target on fire. On top of that, he had a recharging minor attack that pushed the target, and a special followup attack against bloodied enemies that launched them across the battlefield. The first was designed to give him some options against defenders: he could push them away, and then run after and attack the more vulnerable party members.
Unfortunately, I ran afoul of another design tenet: high level monsters need a way to deal with status effects. Five epic level PCs can hand out an impressive amount of blinding, stunning, immobilizing, and whatnot round after round. Go look at the Phane, a level 26 elite. It has an at-will ability to completely ignore one effect. I thought that was overpowered at the time, but after having a solo locked in place, nearly useless, for most of the (very short) fight, I think it’s almost required.
The next scene was a skill challenge, where the PCs were trying to get a magical crystal guarded by some ice archons and a nasty magic trap. The biggest problem with this scene was that I forgot to tell them it was a skill challenge. Or what skill challenge even was. I think if I had, it would have gone wonderfully. Even with them completely in the dark, they still did roughly what they should have done- knowledge checks about various things, diplomacy against the guardians, arcana against the trap.
At this point the fighter’s player was called away. Luckily, the players had to plane shift, and someone made a joke, “Hey, weren’t there five of us when we left?” It seemed as good a way as any to write out the character.
The plane shift dropped them right in front of a group of enemies. This encounter was the longest and most interesting. The enemies were two level 21 Death Knights (elites), two level 20 Blazing Skeletons (with upgraded abilities on account of being boosted from level 5), and a single Immolith (with fire changed to lightning). In retrospect, this encounter was deeply flawed for two reasons: one, the party had just lost a member against what was already a challenging encounter XP-wise, and two, every single one of the five enemies had a damage aura, on top of its normal combat abilities.
As the battle unfolded, the Death Knights proved to be almost impossibly difficult opponents. Since the cleric didn’t have enough- in fact, hardly any- of the leader’s helping abilities, everyone had a tough time hitting their AC, while the Knights almost always hit their target. The players eventually realized that their weak defense was Reflex, and then that only the wizard had consistent Reflex-targeting powers. This was, again, bad planning on my part.
One thing I will say about 4e: it was trivial to scale down the encounter mid-fight. I just didn’t use any abilities they hadn’t already used, didn’t recharge anything, didn’t use the damage auras (actually, I never used some of them). The Immolith had a passive healing ability for the other undead; I just stopped using it. It’s possible that the PCs could have won even without the help, but they seemed rather frustrated by mid-battle, so I went easy.
The paladin was really the centerpiece of the fight, as the Immolith pulled her into the middle of the enemies on the first round. The wizard dropped a fireball on her, missed all three enemies, and did enough damage to overcome the tiefling’s fire resistance. Needless to say, this was hilarious. The Immolith ended up stunned for most of the fight on account of two dailies and a lot of bad saving throws. The Skeletons retreated a little ways up a corridor and spent most of the battle shelling the party with small fireballs. The Death Knights dominated the battlefield, inflicting the vast majority of the damage. With nearly 400 hp each and high AC, it took a very long time to take them down. The paladin eventually found a nice tactic when she was engaged with one Knight while the other was trying to kill the ranger: she challenged the further enemy. That one broke off and came to her, while the one she had ran to fight the ranger. Next round, she switched the challenge again. The net result was the Knights bouncing back and forth, never quite able to escape the paladin. They eventually just ganged up on her- which is just what she wanted. Lay on Hands was literally the difference between life and death; the paladin used at least four healing surges on herself, and would have died without them.
Surprisingly, the battle ended quickly once the party managed to pull themselves together. While they did end up using their at-wills a lot, it never seemed as boring as the hack and slash of 3e’s combat. In particular, the wizard had lots of fun blasting both Knights and the paladin with Burning Hands round after round. Part of the problem was that they used too many of their good powers up front- both the wizard and cleric used blinding AoEs on round one; while they did hit all the enemies, they wasted the blinding effect by hitting the same monsters twice. On top of that, the paladin used her sword’s blinding ability on the same round (admittedly, for the extra damage). While it was amusing to see a triply-blind Death Knight, from a tactical point of view it was terrible.
The third battle was going to be a level 22 elite Mind Flayer, two level 22 Bodak Reavers, and a level 22 Balhannoth. Since they had so much trouble with the last fight, and were low on dailies, I removed the Balhannoth. In retrospect, they probably could have taken it. The mind flayer moved in to use mind blast, clogged up the corridor for the Bodaks, and allowed the paladin to pull the following play:
Minor action: Channel Divinity on self to save against weakness (from a Bodak)
Move action: Out of Harm’s Way, a custom utility power that let her shove the wizard back
Action point: Flame Strike, close burst 5 for 6d6+6 damage, critical on a Bodak for 42+3d10.
Standard action: Holy Light, close burst 5 for 2d8+9 damage and blinding.
Then the wizard ran back up and used Cone of Cold (aka Blast of Cold) to bloody all three enemies. The fight didn’t last very long after that.
Despite what seemed like a lot of frustration and bad feelings during the game, the players I talked to afterwards seemed to think it was a good system. One of them pointed out that a lot of the problem was their lack of understanding of their own characters, which makes sense. After all, they had over 15 powers on average, not counting at-wills and feat bonuses. If they had designed and played the characters up from level 1, I don’t think there would have been any problems.
The healing surge system worked wonderfully. No one had any problems with the concept, although with my players that may not mean very much. Despite my own design flaws, the classes did seem to fill their respective roles and were all useful (except the cleric, but as I said, that was my fault).
The power cards were a huge success. Major props to everyone from the “make your own power cards” thread. Thanks also to Neceros for the character sheet; although I made extensive modifications, the base is still his work. And, of course, thanks to the community for being such rabid information fiends and allowing me to pull a crazy stunt like this.
The most important thing was that we all had fun. And come June 7th, I’m starting my own campaign. It’ll be epic… it at least one sense of the word.
Monsters
Plot
Designing the monsters was by far the easiest part of the process. Between everything, I had a lot of monsters to work with, and more importantly, full knowledge of how to upscale them. It also wasn’t that hard to figure out the underlying math, at least roughly, so I was able to build a few monsters from scratch without much trouble.
I’m going to skip most of the adventure design, since it has little to do with 4e changes. I will say that skill challenges were really hard to plan with the paltry information we have. The hardest part was figuring out how to incorporate a skill challenge into a one-shot without completely destroying the plot if they failed. I settled on a fairly simple “If you fail, you have to fight this combat; if you fail, you have to fight X.”
Designing 22nd level characters was a royal pain in the ass. Actually, that’s not true. If I had the books, I probably could have done five characters in less time than it took me to level up the monsters. What took a lot of time was designing 22 levels of the class, not to mention feats, paragon paths, etc. The PCs were a tiefling paladin, an elf cleric, a dwarf fighter, a human wizard, and an eldarin ranger.
The paladin was the most interesting, and probably the most successful design. I decided to give her a strong fire theme (as a tiefling, it made sense), mostly from her paragon path. She had a healing smite, a stunning smite, a smite that set the target on fire, a retributive strike, two close bursts, a cross-classed fighter Tide of Iron-esque red, and an immobilizing/slowing fire spell. Everything she had was either melee or a burst centered on herself, so the paladin was always throwing herself into combat. In addition, she was very successful at keeping the monsters on her, or at least away from the rest of the party (using status effects, usually). Her utilities were a mix of protecting nearby allies, protecting herself, and the paragon power of adding tons of fire damage to her strikes.
The cleric, on the other hand, I utterly failed at. To be honest, I still don’t know exactly what kind of powers a leader should have. I ended up giving him a lot of damage powers, which entirely didn’t fit. We did have a few powers that gave out temp hp, but not enough- and looking back, he didn’t have nearly enough powers that protected allies or made it easier to hit enemies. This turns out to be a big problem.
Also, don’t ever create a power that tells a player the exact hp of monsters unless you want to calculate their exact hp every single round. Actually, it was probably a silly power regardless.
The fighter probably would have worked out okay, but I honestly can’t say that for sure since the player had to leave before either of the meaningful battles.
The wizard, well, he was easy. Lots of area spells, throw a status effect on top of each, done. Of course, the wizard is the class with the most mid-level information, so I actually had several levels worth of real spells for him.
The ranger turned out all right. Her powers probably weren’t as striker-ish as they should have been- too many controller aspects- but to be honest, I think the basic class abilities define your role as much or more than your powers. Adding 3d8 damage to every attack helps turn the character into a striker regardless of what power she’s using. I tried to do an Order of the Bow Initiate thing with her paragon class, but I think I overpowered it. Fortunately, the player didn’t take advantage, so it wasn’t a problem.
The players had all had at least a little experience with D&D. The paladin’s player was the only one who read the PHB-Lite ahead of time, and he figured out the system fairly quickly (and then started pulling silly tricks). The cleric’s and wizard’s players were D&D veterans but had little or no knowledge of 4e, but still managed to pick things up reasonably quickly. The fighter’s and ranger’s player had played D&D before but had very little system mastery, and struggled a lot to understand what was going on.
The first fight was all five players against a level 21 solo Fire Giant, which was completely custom made. It turns out that an epic level solo brute has well over 1000 hp, by the numbers. I thought that was excessive, so I rule 0’d it from 5x to 4x, which put it at 980 hp. This was still a lot, but the PCs would have killed it in 15-20 rounds, which seems to be an acceptable range. However, the fight got really dull fast, and the players weren’t enjoying it much, probably because they didn’t know how their own characters worked, much less the system. Luckily, I had given the cleric an Energy Drain spell lifted almost verbatim from the Bodaks, and he dropped the Giant on round 3 after a little prodding.
Designing a good solo monster is hard. It needs to have enough attack power to be relevant; abilities that hit multiple targets seem good. For the giant, I gave him a recharging breath weapon and an at-will whirlwind attack. His normal strikes set the target on fire. On top of that, he had a recharging minor attack that pushed the target, and a special followup attack against bloodied enemies that launched them across the battlefield. The first was designed to give him some options against defenders: he could push them away, and then run after and attack the more vulnerable party members.
Unfortunately, I ran afoul of another design tenet: high level monsters need a way to deal with status effects. Five epic level PCs can hand out an impressive amount of blinding, stunning, immobilizing, and whatnot round after round. Go look at the Phane, a level 26 elite. It has an at-will ability to completely ignore one effect. I thought that was overpowered at the time, but after having a solo locked in place, nearly useless, for most of the (very short) fight, I think it’s almost required.
The next scene was a skill challenge, where the PCs were trying to get a magical crystal guarded by some ice archons and a nasty magic trap. The biggest problem with this scene was that I forgot to tell them it was a skill challenge. Or what skill challenge even was. I think if I had, it would have gone wonderfully. Even with them completely in the dark, they still did roughly what they should have done- knowledge checks about various things, diplomacy against the guardians, arcana against the trap.
At this point the fighter’s player was called away. Luckily, the players had to plane shift, and someone made a joke, “Hey, weren’t there five of us when we left?” It seemed as good a way as any to write out the character.
The plane shift dropped them right in front of a group of enemies. This encounter was the longest and most interesting. The enemies were two level 21 Death Knights (elites), two level 20 Blazing Skeletons (with upgraded abilities on account of being boosted from level 5), and a single Immolith (with fire changed to lightning). In retrospect, this encounter was deeply flawed for two reasons: one, the party had just lost a member against what was already a challenging encounter XP-wise, and two, every single one of the five enemies had a damage aura, on top of its normal combat abilities.
As the battle unfolded, the Death Knights proved to be almost impossibly difficult opponents. Since the cleric didn’t have enough- in fact, hardly any- of the leader’s helping abilities, everyone had a tough time hitting their AC, while the Knights almost always hit their target. The players eventually realized that their weak defense was Reflex, and then that only the wizard had consistent Reflex-targeting powers. This was, again, bad planning on my part.
One thing I will say about 4e: it was trivial to scale down the encounter mid-fight. I just didn’t use any abilities they hadn’t already used, didn’t recharge anything, didn’t use the damage auras (actually, I never used some of them). The Immolith had a passive healing ability for the other undead; I just stopped using it. It’s possible that the PCs could have won even without the help, but they seemed rather frustrated by mid-battle, so I went easy.
The paladin was really the centerpiece of the fight, as the Immolith pulled her into the middle of the enemies on the first round. The wizard dropped a fireball on her, missed all three enemies, and did enough damage to overcome the tiefling’s fire resistance. Needless to say, this was hilarious. The Immolith ended up stunned for most of the fight on account of two dailies and a lot of bad saving throws. The Skeletons retreated a little ways up a corridor and spent most of the battle shelling the party with small fireballs. The Death Knights dominated the battlefield, inflicting the vast majority of the damage. With nearly 400 hp each and high AC, it took a very long time to take them down. The paladin eventually found a nice tactic when she was engaged with one Knight while the other was trying to kill the ranger: she challenged the further enemy. That one broke off and came to her, while the one she had ran to fight the ranger. Next round, she switched the challenge again. The net result was the Knights bouncing back and forth, never quite able to escape the paladin. They eventually just ganged up on her- which is just what she wanted. Lay on Hands was literally the difference between life and death; the paladin used at least four healing surges on herself, and would have died without them.
Surprisingly, the battle ended quickly once the party managed to pull themselves together. While they did end up using their at-wills a lot, it never seemed as boring as the hack and slash of 3e’s combat. In particular, the wizard had lots of fun blasting both Knights and the paladin with Burning Hands round after round. Part of the problem was that they used too many of their good powers up front- both the wizard and cleric used blinding AoEs on round one; while they did hit all the enemies, they wasted the blinding effect by hitting the same monsters twice. On top of that, the paladin used her sword’s blinding ability on the same round (admittedly, for the extra damage). While it was amusing to see a triply-blind Death Knight, from a tactical point of view it was terrible.
The third battle was going to be a level 22 elite Mind Flayer, two level 22 Bodak Reavers, and a level 22 Balhannoth. Since they had so much trouble with the last fight, and were low on dailies, I removed the Balhannoth. In retrospect, they probably could have taken it. The mind flayer moved in to use mind blast, clogged up the corridor for the Bodaks, and allowed the paladin to pull the following play:
Minor action: Channel Divinity on self to save against weakness (from a Bodak)
Move action: Out of Harm’s Way, a custom utility power that let her shove the wizard back
Action point: Flame Strike, close burst 5 for 6d6+6 damage, critical on a Bodak for 42+3d10.
Standard action: Holy Light, close burst 5 for 2d8+9 damage and blinding.
Then the wizard ran back up and used Cone of Cold (aka Blast of Cold) to bloody all three enemies. The fight didn’t last very long after that.
Despite what seemed like a lot of frustration and bad feelings during the game, the players I talked to afterwards seemed to think it was a good system. One of them pointed out that a lot of the problem was their lack of understanding of their own characters, which makes sense. After all, they had over 15 powers on average, not counting at-wills and feat bonuses. If they had designed and played the characters up from level 1, I don’t think there would have been any problems.
The healing surge system worked wonderfully. No one had any problems with the concept, although with my players that may not mean very much. Despite my own design flaws, the classes did seem to fill their respective roles and were all useful (except the cleric, but as I said, that was my fault).
The power cards were a huge success. Major props to everyone from the “make your own power cards” thread. Thanks also to Neceros for the character sheet; although I made extensive modifications, the base is still his work. And, of course, thanks to the community for being such rabid information fiends and allowing me to pull a crazy stunt like this.
The most important thing was that we all had fun. And come June 7th, I’m starting my own campaign. It’ll be epic… it at least one sense of the word.
Monsters
Plot
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