So, I’m not the most talkative member of this forum. Swooping in to give my opinion on a issue every now and again, but not often, and not much of starting anything new. Let alone posting house-rule stuff. That madness I have not tried since later 2008. But, times do change.
I have mentioned more than once that I am running an Epic DnD 4E game. At the time of writing the party is trying to stop Ashardalon from killing the World Tree. I’m also a players in another game which is at level 25, where we’re going to stop an invading Far Realm beastie. Regardless, the point is that I’ve seen a lot of DnD 4E, a lot of Epic DnD 4E, and I have seen The Grind. The Grind is a tricky problem to solve. On one hand, it is a player problem. In our last battle, everyone got frustrated with how late it was getting, so I basically man-handled the players and got the entire round done (4~ Elite Monsters included) in ten minutes. I’ve also seen fights take three hours at nearly fourty-five minutes a round. One thing I’ve noticed though is that part of the Grind is a problem with high level 4E, namely Multi-attacking.
The problem of Multi-attacking is a two-fold one. With it, we have the utter dominance of certain build models at the exclusion of all others for strikers. I have what ammounts to a party of four strikers, a controller, and a buff/heal/enable bot DMPC. One is a Dagger-Master Rogue, the Other is Brutal Scoundrel, both stocked up on minor action and multi-attack powers. The Dagger Master is particularly scary when he can land Path of the Blade, which is just a monster wrecking power. We have a barbarian who crit-fishes with a Rending Gouge and all sorts of horrifying multi-attacks, and can “accidentally” encounters with random crit-chains. Our Fighter is a Min-Maxed Shifter Tempest Fighter/Son of Mercy with the luck of a god. Every time one of these character’s turns comes up we see the game grind to a halt. Storm of Blades? O.k. Yes, you hit. Hit. Roll again? Crit? O.k., roll for your extra melee basic attacks. O.k. Hit. Miss. *Sigh* Alright. What’s you static damage? 23? Alright, that’s 92. Now roll for Storm of Blades. O.k., 110. That’s 12 for the Crit. 122. Now roll for the melee basics. 26? Total? 148. Now roll all of your extra critical stuff. 76? That... 224 damage.... you forgot the Artificer buffed you last round didn’t you? Did you remember you have combat advantage? Its dazed, of course you get combat advantage. That means the last attack also hit... and you get an extra 35 damage from the damage buff... roll for the last attack’s damage...
Now imagine a 10-to-40 second pause between each data-bit as buttons are pushed, electronic windows are navigated, dice are rolled, and math is done. On top of four other twenty-something guys all chatting around this, and/or trying to butt in and ask questions or make statements. Turns can take 5 to 15 minutes not from players being bad, but from having to do strings of multiplication and addition to get the turn done.
Of course, one could just ban multi-attacking, but that won’t make the Grind go away. Epic level monsters get fat. Really fat. End-Game Bosses like The Dragon of Tyr, Ogermooch, and Lolth clock in at over 1200 HP. Each. Most of those on that list are going to be facing a level 30 party with backup. With characters like controllers and leaders pinging away with their measily 2-4d10+17-23 damage a round and a non-charging, non-multi-attacking strikers maybe able to do, oh, 70-80 damage a round, with really min-maxed warlocks clocking in at 90 DPR at best, you’re looking at a fight which lasts 5-6 rounds, assuming no one goes down, no one gets their turn eaten by control, and no one misses. And with critters like Ogermoch, Lolth, and the Dragon of Tyr facing them at this point, good damn luck.
Monster HP scales out of control, so Multi-Attacks are needed to give players the kind of staying power against what ammounts to, after MM3, an army of Sherman Tanks with Wheat Threshers mounted on the front. But, multi-attacks are a real time-chewer, and they force Strikers into straight-jackets, with effective build choices narrowed greatly, and most keeping the one or two multi-tap powers they get in their career from anywhere as low as 1, all the way to 30. This turns Epic games into a long stream of math and cookie cutter builds when it comes to being a striker, and dice towers for everyone else.
I have a three-fold solution for this problem.
First Off: Halve Monster HP.
Second: Codify Bonus Stacking
Third: Nerf Multi-Attacking on Principle.
The most complex issue is the third, so I will touch on it first.
Let me introduce the concept of the Flurry Rule
Flurry
When a character makes more than one attack a turn, only the first attack that hits counts for full damage. Each additional attack only adds its [W] damage as Extra Damage. If a character is making more than one attack as part of a single power, if any blow is a critical hit, the entire power is treated as a critical hit. Attacks made with a standard action granted by an action-point or power are treated as a separate turn for the purposes of Flurry.
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Now, what this does is it takes away Multi-attacking’s overwhelming damage dealing power, and with monster HP halved, returns a lot of power to CONAN SMASH style one shot, bucket or [W]s style powers. It does give it some other advantages. For one, multi-attacking confers a lot more accuracy even if the overall damage can be less, and it also enables crit-fishing tactics. In other words, attacking rapidly from more than one direction allows you to wear down enemy defenses and strike weak points while they're trying to defend five places at once. You know. Exactly how flurry-tactics work in real life.
I am unsure wether Flurry should apply on a round-per-round basis or a turn-per-turn basis. On one hand, turn-per-turn is nice a clean, but with monster HP halved, things like strikebacks and fountain-of-MBA Warlords gain a lot of the power left behind by the Ranger. There is also the question of how Flurry should work on a fountain-of-MBAs leader if it where on a round-by-round basis. Should it work? What way works and makes sense?
Now, onto codifying bonus stacking. The reason to do this is to curb some of the effect halving-HP has on the math-balance. Suddenly, characters who would be doing only 20-30 DPR are raking in 40-60. The striker loses 100 DPR, but the 50 he has left over acts like its 100 old DPR, while his buddies gain gain an effective 120 extra. So the party that was doing 270 is now doing an effective 340. Oops. This really wont effect the guy who only has Stat+Enhancement+Focus Feat to his damage, as he won’t be effecting that much in game still, but mid-range damage dealers like Fighters and Blaster Wizards who weren’t investing in multi-attacking, but were investing in damage won’t suddenly get free effectiveness out of the rule-shift.
The rule of thumb for dealing should be as follows: If it comes from a Feat, its a Feat Bonus. From an item? Item Bonus. From a Class? Class Bonus. From a Paragon Path? Paragon Bonus? Epic Destiny? Epic Bonus, and so on and so forth. The second rule of thumb is that small bonuses that are conditional should be kept untyped, or made so. I don’t mean conditions which can be gotten all the time, like doing a certain type of damage. Those are rewards for specializing. Large bonuses, even conditional ones, should be typed, but should be larger than any constant bonuses of their type, or their pointless. I would consider a potential extra type of bonus called statistic, or, extra statistic bonus. This is for things like Lyrandar Windrider, or Radiant One. This is so someone like a Warlock/Lyrandar/Radiant One with the Cursed Spells feat couldn’t run around with a nice fat 10-21 extra damage over all the other strikers, which means a lot more now than it used to. Certain other items which provide large bonuses to damage, like charge kits, need to be changed for the sake of balance. Thundergod Weapons do +1 untyped damage per tier to charge attacks. Same with Horned Helm.
The final bit, and hardly the most unheard on, is halving monster HP. Now, this one I would make a slight suggestion for. In Paragon and Epic, halving monster HP might be a boon, but in Heroic, where the math still works perfectly, it sets the game on easy mode. My elegant solution is not so much a halving on the monster HP, but a fundamental change to the HP formula. For levels 1-10, or perhaps 1-15, HP it is the same. Beyond that, HP progression is halved. Brutes get 5 per level, Lurkers and Artillery get 3, everyone else gets 4.
A forth and final change may be removing the extra dice from a critical hit, for much the same reason bonus stacking should be curbed.
Ultimately the whole purpose of the Three-Fold Houserule is to stream-line the game’s math at epic level and stream-line play. I have not run playtests, or even used my Char-Op math-fu beyond the spit-balling I did in this post. I mostly wanted to toss this out to the community to see what they thought, and perhaps see which mad fool would like to playtest this for me.
So, thoughts, comments, criticisms?
(The things I do instead of homework... sheesh...)
I have mentioned more than once that I am running an Epic DnD 4E game. At the time of writing the party is trying to stop Ashardalon from killing the World Tree. I’m also a players in another game which is at level 25, where we’re going to stop an invading Far Realm beastie. Regardless, the point is that I’ve seen a lot of DnD 4E, a lot of Epic DnD 4E, and I have seen The Grind. The Grind is a tricky problem to solve. On one hand, it is a player problem. In our last battle, everyone got frustrated with how late it was getting, so I basically man-handled the players and got the entire round done (4~ Elite Monsters included) in ten minutes. I’ve also seen fights take three hours at nearly fourty-five minutes a round. One thing I’ve noticed though is that part of the Grind is a problem with high level 4E, namely Multi-attacking.
The problem of Multi-attacking is a two-fold one. With it, we have the utter dominance of certain build models at the exclusion of all others for strikers. I have what ammounts to a party of four strikers, a controller, and a buff/heal/enable bot DMPC. One is a Dagger-Master Rogue, the Other is Brutal Scoundrel, both stocked up on minor action and multi-attack powers. The Dagger Master is particularly scary when he can land Path of the Blade, which is just a monster wrecking power. We have a barbarian who crit-fishes with a Rending Gouge and all sorts of horrifying multi-attacks, and can “accidentally” encounters with random crit-chains. Our Fighter is a Min-Maxed Shifter Tempest Fighter/Son of Mercy with the luck of a god. Every time one of these character’s turns comes up we see the game grind to a halt. Storm of Blades? O.k. Yes, you hit. Hit. Roll again? Crit? O.k., roll for your extra melee basic attacks. O.k. Hit. Miss. *Sigh* Alright. What’s you static damage? 23? Alright, that’s 92. Now roll for Storm of Blades. O.k., 110. That’s 12 for the Crit. 122. Now roll for the melee basics. 26? Total? 148. Now roll all of your extra critical stuff. 76? That... 224 damage.... you forgot the Artificer buffed you last round didn’t you? Did you remember you have combat advantage? Its dazed, of course you get combat advantage. That means the last attack also hit... and you get an extra 35 damage from the damage buff... roll for the last attack’s damage...
Now imagine a 10-to-40 second pause between each data-bit as buttons are pushed, electronic windows are navigated, dice are rolled, and math is done. On top of four other twenty-something guys all chatting around this, and/or trying to butt in and ask questions or make statements. Turns can take 5 to 15 minutes not from players being bad, but from having to do strings of multiplication and addition to get the turn done.
Of course, one could just ban multi-attacking, but that won’t make the Grind go away. Epic level monsters get fat. Really fat. End-Game Bosses like The Dragon of Tyr, Ogermooch, and Lolth clock in at over 1200 HP. Each. Most of those on that list are going to be facing a level 30 party with backup. With characters like controllers and leaders pinging away with their measily 2-4d10+17-23 damage a round and a non-charging, non-multi-attacking strikers maybe able to do, oh, 70-80 damage a round, with really min-maxed warlocks clocking in at 90 DPR at best, you’re looking at a fight which lasts 5-6 rounds, assuming no one goes down, no one gets their turn eaten by control, and no one misses. And with critters like Ogermoch, Lolth, and the Dragon of Tyr facing them at this point, good damn luck.
Monster HP scales out of control, so Multi-Attacks are needed to give players the kind of staying power against what ammounts to, after MM3, an army of Sherman Tanks with Wheat Threshers mounted on the front. But, multi-attacks are a real time-chewer, and they force Strikers into straight-jackets, with effective build choices narrowed greatly, and most keeping the one or two multi-tap powers they get in their career from anywhere as low as 1, all the way to 30. This turns Epic games into a long stream of math and cookie cutter builds when it comes to being a striker, and dice towers for everyone else.
I have a three-fold solution for this problem.
First Off: Halve Monster HP.
Second: Codify Bonus Stacking
Third: Nerf Multi-Attacking on Principle.
The most complex issue is the third, so I will touch on it first.
Let me introduce the concept of the Flurry Rule
Flurry
When a character makes more than one attack a turn, only the first attack that hits counts for full damage. Each additional attack only adds its [W] damage as Extra Damage. If a character is making more than one attack as part of a single power, if any blow is a critical hit, the entire power is treated as a critical hit. Attacks made with a standard action granted by an action-point or power are treated as a separate turn for the purposes of Flurry.
-
Now, what this does is it takes away Multi-attacking’s overwhelming damage dealing power, and with monster HP halved, returns a lot of power to CONAN SMASH style one shot, bucket or [W]s style powers. It does give it some other advantages. For one, multi-attacking confers a lot more accuracy even if the overall damage can be less, and it also enables crit-fishing tactics. In other words, attacking rapidly from more than one direction allows you to wear down enemy defenses and strike weak points while they're trying to defend five places at once. You know. Exactly how flurry-tactics work in real life.
I am unsure wether Flurry should apply on a round-per-round basis or a turn-per-turn basis. On one hand, turn-per-turn is nice a clean, but with monster HP halved, things like strikebacks and fountain-of-MBA Warlords gain a lot of the power left behind by the Ranger. There is also the question of how Flurry should work on a fountain-of-MBAs leader if it where on a round-by-round basis. Should it work? What way works and makes sense?
Now, onto codifying bonus stacking. The reason to do this is to curb some of the effect halving-HP has on the math-balance. Suddenly, characters who would be doing only 20-30 DPR are raking in 40-60. The striker loses 100 DPR, but the 50 he has left over acts like its 100 old DPR, while his buddies gain gain an effective 120 extra. So the party that was doing 270 is now doing an effective 340. Oops. This really wont effect the guy who only has Stat+Enhancement+Focus Feat to his damage, as he won’t be effecting that much in game still, but mid-range damage dealers like Fighters and Blaster Wizards who weren’t investing in multi-attacking, but were investing in damage won’t suddenly get free effectiveness out of the rule-shift.
The rule of thumb for dealing should be as follows: If it comes from a Feat, its a Feat Bonus. From an item? Item Bonus. From a Class? Class Bonus. From a Paragon Path? Paragon Bonus? Epic Destiny? Epic Bonus, and so on and so forth. The second rule of thumb is that small bonuses that are conditional should be kept untyped, or made so. I don’t mean conditions which can be gotten all the time, like doing a certain type of damage. Those are rewards for specializing. Large bonuses, even conditional ones, should be typed, but should be larger than any constant bonuses of their type, or their pointless. I would consider a potential extra type of bonus called statistic, or, extra statistic bonus. This is for things like Lyrandar Windrider, or Radiant One. This is so someone like a Warlock/Lyrandar/Radiant One with the Cursed Spells feat couldn’t run around with a nice fat 10-21 extra damage over all the other strikers, which means a lot more now than it used to. Certain other items which provide large bonuses to damage, like charge kits, need to be changed for the sake of balance. Thundergod Weapons do +1 untyped damage per tier to charge attacks. Same with Horned Helm.
The final bit, and hardly the most unheard on, is halving monster HP. Now, this one I would make a slight suggestion for. In Paragon and Epic, halving monster HP might be a boon, but in Heroic, where the math still works perfectly, it sets the game on easy mode. My elegant solution is not so much a halving on the monster HP, but a fundamental change to the HP formula. For levels 1-10, or perhaps 1-15, HP it is the same. Beyond that, HP progression is halved. Brutes get 5 per level, Lurkers and Artillery get 3, everyone else gets 4.
A forth and final change may be removing the extra dice from a critical hit, for much the same reason bonus stacking should be curbed.
Ultimately the whole purpose of the Three-Fold Houserule is to stream-line the game’s math at epic level and stream-line play. I have not run playtests, or even used my Char-Op math-fu beyond the spit-balling I did in this post. I mostly wanted to toss this out to the community to see what they thought, and perhaps see which mad fool would like to playtest this for me.
So, thoughts, comments, criticisms?
(The things I do instead of homework... sheesh...)
