Shroomy
Adventurer
I just found Stephen Schubert's latest playtest report on his gleemax blog:
http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/BlogPost.aspx?blogpostid=40008&pagemode=2&blogid=2074
Lots of crunch here:
http://www.gleemax.com/Comms/Pages/Communities/BlogPost.aspx?blogpostid=40008&pagemode=2&blogid=2074
Lots of crunch here:
Stephen Schubert said:Super Weekend
Posted By: WotC_Shoe, 2/5/2008 6:10:34 PM
I find that my available free time gets sucked away during the NFL season, especially so during January when playoffs and the Super Bowl take up many of the waking hours of weekend days. But the time invested in observing this season paid off this past weekend, as the championship game did not disappoint. Of course, I had no emotional or monetary investment in either team (though I would have bet the giants to cover, with the under), so I was happy to watch a great game with a fantastic finish (sorry, Pats fans). Now if the Seahawks or Broncos had been involved, it would have been more of a mood-altering experience, one way or another.
I had a couple dozen people over for the game, though most of those were more interested in socializing and watching the commercials than the game itself. It's sort of weird that the Super Bowl is the only show where people don't want to fast-forward through the commercials. I mean, sure, these commercials are generally designed to sell by entertaining -- so much so that I don't remember which products were associated with most of the commercials -- so I can respect the potential entertainment value of such commercials. And with 100 million people watching, the advertisers are getting the most eyeballs they can hope for. But the lasting impressions are of a baby that has realized that clowns are creepy, there's a movie called Wanted that I might want to see this summer, and the A8 looks verry nice...
The rest of my weekend included a resumption/restart of my monthly D&D game. As we've been using playtest material for quite a long time now, the monthly game has suffered from what feels like a constant state of flux. Each month's session has begun with an hour or more of updating characters and (re)discovering mechanics. At least now the rules are getting more settled, and the changes for next month will be minimal (at least for the PCs). Since they were reworking PCs anyway, I had them level up, and fast-forwarded the campaign out of the dungeon that few of them remembered (since it had been 2 months since this group's prior session). Peter Schaefer also joined us, filling out the group size to 6 PCs, and in the process was exposed to the sorts of people that I've had to deal with since my college days.
After the requisite updating of characters, I decided that we'd get the PCs mixed up into some action directly, and let bits of the backstory and hints of the plot filter out through a few combat encounters. The scene was set in a gloomy, web-strewn copse of trees near the barricaded road leading from the quaint little hamlet of Adonburg. Without much warning, the heroes were beset by ettercaps and their spider allies (which, while technically Medium, were still quite huge - have you ever seen a man-sized spider? if you did, would you be freaked out?) I used a couple tricks of the ettercaps to try and catch the party in webs, at the very least slowing down their movement while the spiders worked on the peripheral targets like the rogue, cleric, and wizard. The tide turned right after the eladrin wizard teleported back a few squares to create some space while lining up some burst spells, as one of the ettercaps charged out after him -- which then caused the dragonborn warlord to step out of the webs, charge at the ettercap, power attack, and proceed to crit with her high-crit vicious axe, adding 3d12 to her max damage on the crit and slaying the ettercap outright. The very next round, she repeated the feat, charging back into the fray and eliminating yet another foe. Take note, as this will become a theme.
After the fight, the PCs discovered that the ettercaps had been instructed by a nearby dragon to waylay travelers on the road, with some mention of the people of the quaint hamlet Adonburg being much more dangerous than they seemed. So the PCs set off to do battle with this dastardly dragon, or at the very least take some loot from its lair. Along the way they found a group of lizardfolk in the midst of some religious rite to Tiamat. Sensing this was Bad (tm), the party proceeded to charge on in and disrupt this most-likely-vile ceremony. The biggest threats of the lizardfolk were the elite blackscale and his pet rage drake "Fluffy". Very quickly, battle was joined, as the fighter and the warlord rushed forward to take on the lizardfolk priest while the rest of the party tried to work on the blackscale that had charged their ranks. The rage drake has a neat mechanic where his accuracy and damage go up when he's bloodied. I was very much looking forward to a couple of rounds of massive hits, when suddenly the dragonborn warlord once again spun her axe down with another natural 20, and this time on a power that let an ally take a basic attack on the same target. The rage drake went from near-bloodied to all-dead in the course of those two die rolls. A couple rounds later, the blackscale also suffered a devastating crit from that vicious axe, as he fought to avenge his slain pet and companion. The battle, once again, was won.
Finally, the black dragon came to investigate -- to sum up a rather lengthy combat, the party once again was victorious, despite the dragon doing everything it could to mitigate attacks on it. It tried fighting within its globe of darkness (that it could see through, but not the PCs), and tried to set up its breath weapon to hit all the PCs (it's first breath was wimpy, though, as I rolled naught above a 7 or 8 on the attack rolls). It was ready to use its immediate breath when it became bloodied, but a readied action on the part of the paladin was able to daze the dragon, preventing it from using immediate actions. And finally, it had planned to fly away back to its lair once it was dropped to 25-30% of its hit points. That final plan was likewise ruined when you can guess what happened -- the dragonborn warlord once again swung down her mighty greataxe and rolled the mighty 20, this time with a daily power, dealing nearly 60 points of damage to the draconic foe, who was then finished off by a magic missile or some other less significant attack.
It was fun, however, even as my dragon's plans unraveled. After all, there's nothing that says the dragon's mate (or mom) couldn't be waiting back in its lair...
The interesting thing is that we've been developing a pile of magic items the past couple of weeks, and we had set the vicious weapon as an ok weapon property, but not one of the best properties available. After all, if its net effect is about +3 damage per plus of the weapon, and it only occurs on crits, then it probably isn't nearly as good as the weapon that lets you do +1d10 damage when you hit once per encounter. But when the wielder rolls 6 natural 20's on only around 20 total rolls, its clear that the variance of this ability can provide a bit more extreme results. Sure is a lot of fun to use though.
Last edited:
