The vampire starts with just 2 healing surges

But have you played a Vampire or DMed one?
Now that I know what the class does/looks like I've simply inserted a vampire into numerous encounters that I use for playtesting. Or just into my actual maptools games (doesn't take much effort to replace a striker for a striker to see the result). To be honest my own playing around confirms what I suspected in the first place. Without durable you have a fragile glass cannon class that can have its entire adventuring day decided by the first poor encounter/skill challenge/trap. With durable - that slight extra buffer - it becomes really hard to have a bad day. You will always have the odd good encounter to go with the crappy ones, meaning once you get on a bit of a surge roll you're usually fine (plus can spend surges for different striker feature powers more easily and safely).

If a PC wanted to play a vampire, I actually would be quite accommodating now that I've playtested it and seen it isn't so terrible as I thought it would be (especially as they can take durable). They are still weaker against traps/skill challenges, but with 4 surges it's just not crippling enough to make me worry about them. The chance of having the rest of their adventuring day completely screwed by one bad encounter is nowhere near as much.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Having to actively avoid starting the day off with an epic trap room can be extra work, yes.

Unless the epic trap room drains surges or knocks the vampire unconcious ... it's fine. As long as it can stay alive, it has the smallest post-fight clean up of anyone else. So, DEADLY epic trap room to start the day can be bad. Again, it has to take out 2 surges (or more, between durable, racial options,

Having to add vampire food to the game to make sure that one of the characters won't drag the rest of the party down can be extra work, yes.

How many adventuring days have multiple encounters that damage and drain surges without any monsters showing up? That's nowhere near conventional, and a corner case that could easily be overlooked. The Vampire's surge gaining drain power doesn't require you use specific monster types. As 'odd' as it may seem, he can drain constructs, undead, etc. If it's an enemy, he can get a surge off it. So vampire food involves having encounters where the characters actually fight something.

Having to make sure that I never start an adventuring day with a skill challenge or monsters that drag in surges can be extra work, yes. It limits my freedom as a DM in ways that no other class does, not even Knight and its horrible lack of function around anything with a good push power.

A monster that steals surges is going to be more annoying to the rest of the party. The vampire can get those surges back, his allies can't. If it limits your freedom as a DM so much, you can either ban it, or tell the player you won't be pulling any punches and let him play it if he still wants.

Regardless, if you are REGULARLY coming up with situations where the vampire is especially bad, you are already playing something that is very different from what most would expect when walking into a game of 4e.

You can break most traps with damage. Slayers do fine against traps. Skill challenges simply utilize skills most of the time, and while I don't have that book, I'm willing to bet that slayers have access to skills roughly on-par with the fighter. Athletics, acrobatics, and endurance are all extremely useful in many skill challenges.

And so too does the vampire have access to a lot of skills. And utility powers, paragon path features, etc that make those skills even better. And yet THEY are a horrible albatross on the party because it's possible that if they are in a specific situation AND have some bad luck, they may go into an encounter with no surges (which they have a way of getting around). They may take a lot of damage (which they can heal using a single surge that YES, another character has to contribute, but then in a normal encounter, the vampire can, through thp generation and regeneration NOT take up the leader's time being healed).

In the big picture, the Con based Shaman's horrible AC is a much bigger problem than the vampires' surges. Durable doesn't require you put points into what would likely have been a dump stat, and the different those two surges make it huge compared to getting your AC up to mediocre by grabbing chain. And, maybe it's just me, but generally I see PCs getting into fights with things trying to hit their AC more often than death marches through the forest or rooms of traps. Those things happen (and in my Dark Sun game, once they leave the city, there will likely be more skill challenges than usual), but ultimately, monster fights are the 'norm' ... other types of encounters are just less common.
 

Assuming you mean schtick, you've shifted goal posts. There's vast gulf between "are vampires okay for this campaign" and "do we need another defender."

Aside from your really classy spelling correction (feel free to also correct my grammar and then somehow compare me to Hitler; after all this is the Internet), I have no idea what you are getting at.

There are many classes and many races. Some are stupid (curse you Bladeling), many are appropriate for one campaign but not another. I can imagine any number of circumstances were the Vampire would be fun, mechanically interesting and a great contribution to the roleplaying experience. I can also imagine situations where this is not the case.
 

Having run Essentials, my games are actually more forgiving than the easy-mode of what WotC puts out there, considering their hard-core version is in the works, but based on your claims they're certainly more brutal than your own. Had a vampire PC been in the same position as the halfling rogue in my last session, against a barely above party level encounter, they would have rolled up new characters. After the first encounter of the day. Perhaps you only run pre-MM3 monsters?

In all of those cases, you only need ONE bad encounter to completely erase the vampire. As Aegeri has stated, it wouldn't be as bad if they had a couple more surges as a cushion for when the day starts with lurkers or landslides.

I suspect that they just didn't want vampires to be able to pile up surges for damage purposes - ironically they probably would have given them four surges if not for surge-gain feats, and so instead had to give vampires a penalty and a feat tax.

--

I don't know why you insist on making this into a squabble, but I would appreciate it if you would stop.
 

Having run Essentials, my games are actually more forgiving than the easy-mode of what WotC puts out there, considering their hard-core version is in the works, but based on your claims they're certainly more brutal than your own. Had a vampire PC been in the same position as the halfling rogue in my last session, against a barely above party level encounter, they would have rolled up new characters. After the first encounter of the day. Perhaps you only run pre-MM3 monsters?

In all of those cases, you only need ONE bad encounter to completely erase the vampire. As Aegeri has stated, it wouldn't be as bad if they had a couple more surges as a cushion for when the day starts with lurkers or landslides.

I suspect that they just didn't want vampires to be able to pile up surges for damage purposes - ironically they probably would have given them four surges if not for surge-gain feats, and so instead had to give vampires a penalty and a feat tax.

--

I don't know why you insist on making this into a squabble, but I would appreciate it if you would stop.

Pity your players. Had a vampire player been in my party...
I don't dont know what to tell you. In my game we are all friends and we make things work. Your examples are totally meaningless. I love killing charaters. Some players like to be killed and others hate it. I keep that in mind. I make try to make the game fun for everyone involved. I challenge everyone. I accomadate my characters, and the real human being that play the characters.

The "Pity your players." comment above is rude. It should not be repeated nor should it be responded to. Thank you. - Rel
 
Last edited by a moderator:

No need to pity my players, they were all playing well-designed classes, so they survived and even went on to have another encounter before resting, and only the very Avandra-denied halfling actually needed to rest. He had two surges left.
 

I don't have 1/session (except in my Dark Sun game) but they are actually decently common in adventures (Dungeon included). Checking many LFR adventures there are numerous examples of such skill challenges. They are also present in official modules (Tomb of Horrors) and traps are also another common way of losing surges. Trap based adventures like Tomb of Horrors emphasize that very well.

On the other hand, I wonder if the Vampire's utility powers will provide assistance in dealing with such obstacles - I haven't seen the specific listing, but if they get stuff like turning into mist, bats, etc, that can go a long way toward providing support in certain challenges.
 

On the other hand, I wonder if the Vampire's utility powers will provide assistance in dealing with such obstacles - I haven't seen the specific listing, but if they get stuff like turning into mist, bats, etc, that can go a long way toward providing support in certain challenges.

They get basically everything you'd expect in that department (the gaseous form even provides full phasing, making it better than I would have expected.)
 

Pity your players. Had a vampire player been in my party...
I don't dont know what to tell you. In my game we are all friends and we make things work. Your examples are totally meaningless. I love killing charaters. Some players like to be killed and others hate it. I keep that in mind. I make try to make the game fun for everyone involved. I challenge everyone. I accomadate my characters, and the real human being that play the characters.

The "Pity your players." comment above is rude. It should not be repeated nor should it be responded to. Thank you. - Rel

I am sorry for phrasing my comment in a way that was offensive.

In my game we create adventures that accommodate the players and the characters.
 

Your assumption that Incenjucar and myself do not is equally frustrating, especially when you know nothing about the games we do actually run (though mine are posted on this forum). My point is that I will not change the way I design the game, because Wizards introduces poorly thought through and designed elements into 4E. I'll balance my games by what actually works - not account for trap options. Instead of banning trap options, I will manually fix them myself (the beauty of being the DM) so they are on the same level as everyone else.

Vryloka get a +2 to surge value while bloodied. A powerful benefit in heroic tier, but rapidly tapers off towards later tiers.

Shade ... okay I am lost at what to do here because it really is absolutely terrible. Only a total rewrite of the races mechanics could possibly save it.

Vampire I've decided to just technically hand out durable for free (due to being the feat, it means it can't be taken again. 4 surges seems to work really well for the Vampire from what I've played with it, so I don't think needing to get it again is required).

And with that I'm relatively done. The Vampire with 4 surges is perfectly playable and I think pretty fun (if very limited). The Vryloka are basically already elves with a somewhat situationally weaker racial, but +2 to surge value is a fluffy and interesting perk, while not being out of whack against the Dragonborns constant bonus to his surge value (as an example).
 

Remove ads

Top