Whoa. 4e is hard on PC mortality rates.

[Pbartender]

Irontooth has a high PC mortality rate.

4e in general? Not so much.

I don't know, Nifft... I've run the three or four preliminary encounters of KotS for three different groups. With all three groups, thus far, I've had at least one moment in which half or more of the group was knocked out and dying all at once, and had two deaths. Irontooth wasn't th cause of any of them... In fact, Irontooth never lasted more than two or three rounds, once he showed his face.

I attribute this to two things...

First, as someone said above, 4E is all about teamwork, and the players aren't used to that. I can see it with my regular players at home... They had a tough time with the early encounters, but now that they'd played a few sessions, they are having more success with the goblins as they learn to work together in a way you couldn't with 3rd Edition.

Second, poor assumptions about the creatures they encounter... All the deaths and near deaths have been at the hands of creatures that were typically push overs in 3E, but aren't necessarily so in 4E. In my last demo, the guard drakes -- ostensibly "guard dogs", as far as the players were concerned -- took down the party wizard from full hit points to 1 point past dead in a bite and a half. My players at home are quickly realizing that creatures aren't always what they seem... you have to be careful when you run into something you haven't yet encountered.

 

[Najo]

I don't buy that. Why is it necessarily a problem on the players side? We played through Keep on the Shadowfell the other night and ran into a period there of rolling really bad on our die rolls while the goblin irontooth and company were rolling really well. We started dropping and hurting bad and there was a chance it could have been a TPK simply based on our bad luck.

All of the versions of D&D have an element of luck built into them. 4E doesn't make that magically go away.

Well, we have had encounters where the wizard kept rolling miss after miss and god tactics still held things together. 4e also has powers that still do thngs on misses, more tactical options with class abiltiies and action points built into the system. All of these things remove or control randomness to some degree.

Iron Tooth is the first real "boss" of the module. He becomes more deadly as he is hurt and he has alot of hit points. Many groups have died on him, mine was using good tactics and barely made it through alive.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think that a lot of what we're seeing isn't just a matter of "bad tactics" or whatever, but simple unfamiliarity with a system that purports to be "D&D" but actually plays completely differently to any previous edition of D&D (even Henry presumably admits that 1E didn't typically have fights requiring the same like of coordination and tactical finesse).

As mentioned, many monsters are wildly more dangerous than they were in any previous edition. One thing I've noticed personally, in test-play and designing an adventure, is that virtually all monsters have damage bonuses now, where few low-level ones did in 3E or before. Instead of doing 1d6 damage, a monster might do 1d6+3. That's almost as much as if it did 2d6, and even though you now typically have more HP, the fact that so many monsters hit SO hard really kind of obliterates that. Especially as quite a few monsters have encounter powers which do even more damage than their normal abilities. The design rules in the DMG seem to suggest even more damage, at levels 1-3 than any of the monsters in that level range actually seem to do, too.

I mean I think one big difference at low levels is, in 3.XE, a lot of us gave PCs extra HP at level 1, either 10 or Con or all sorts of different things. This meant that PCs had more HP than equal-level opponets. In 4E, PCs have as many or more HP than that, which is cool, but the surprise is, even the wimpiest of non-minion monsters do, too! Lots of things that the PCs kind of expect to be minions aren't, too. In fact arguably minions are kind of under-used and same-y in 4E as yet.

I'll be interested to see, on Thursday, how dangerous this actually all is in a full-on game. Personally I'm kind of wondering if I need to invent some new catergory of monster, between a minion and a "full-on" monster, perhaps a "mook" with normal monster stats but 50% HP and reduced XP value accordingly.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Personally I'm kind of wondering if I need to invent some new catergory of monster, between a minion and a "full-on" monster, perhaps a "mook" with normal monster stats but 50% HP and reduced XP value accordingly.

Just give the minions a 'save vs. death'. You'll get some that last two or three rounds and avoid having to track the hit points.

When we first played 3e, we all made characters and then just did a couple skirmishes against different lowish opponents to get a feel for the rules. When they got massacred by the ogre, it learned them pretty quick that things could get deadly in a hurry and that all was not necessarily as it seemed. I think a lot of the dying in KotS is just that same learning curve we all went through before.

I think the greater *required* coordination may be a net minus. I'm already hearing second-hand reports of games degerating into some players being overbearing when it came to telling others how they 'had' to act.

 

[Raven Crowking]

When WotC was revealing tidbits of 4e, and claiming that certain problems of 3.x would be resolved by innovations of 4e, I participated in a thread where I argued that per-encounter powers would not relieve the "nova" effect. Indeed, it would encourage players to use all their good powers in every combat, insofar as they were able. The result of this would be that the DM would have to throw deadlier encounters at the PCs to actually challenge them.

It was my basic argument that, in 3e, because there is a wider range of PC capabilities over the course of an adventuring "day", there is a wider range of threat levels that the DM can use to challenge parties. 4e, consequently, would have more "wahoo" combats, but those combats would start to look the same once the players got used to the system.

It should also be noted that almost dying isn't evidence of a high mortality rate; it may, however, be evidence of the illusion of a high mortality rate.

So far, from all reports, 4e playtests exactly as I suspected it would.


RC

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Just give the minions a 'save vs. death'. You'll get some that last two or three rounds and avoid having to track the hit points.

No, see you're getting the wrong end of the stick. Minion monsters are mechanically boring. Making them living longer means more boredom. Normal monsters are typically more interesting. If they get to live shorter, sure, they're less interesting, but still a hell of a lot more interesting and varied than a minion.

What I *think* I want (to be confirmed one way or the other in a few days) is to have monsters that can do some interesting things, but also die easily enough, and that aren't pretty much all a case of "OMG KILL THEM BEFORE THEY GANG UP ON HIM!" like virtually all the minions I've seen so far are (so tired of +2 to hit for each X in the area etc.).#

Raven Crowking - Hate to say it, and I've not played enough to confirm it, but I don't see you likely to be proven wrong. I just wonder if it'll be more or less fun in the long-term.

 

[Scribble]

Just give the minions a 'save vs. death'. You'll get some that last two or three rounds and avoid having to track the hit points.

When we first played 3e, we all made characters and then just did a couple skirmishes against different lowish opponents to get a feel for the rules. When they got massacred by the ogre, it learned them pretty quick that things could get deadly in a hurry and that all was not necessarily as it seemed. I think a lot of the dying in KotS is just that same learning curve we all went through before.

I think the greater *required* coordination may be a net minus. I'm already hearing second-hand reports of games degerating into some players being overbearing when it came to telling others how they 'had' to act.

I agree a lot of it is the learning curve. People still trying to apply the same rules of fighting as before, and learning it's not about simply doing the most damage the soonest... it's about getting into the right spot to do the most damage the fastest...

I'm not sure I agree about the last part though... Some players are just always overbearing wen it comes to how others should play/ what they should do.

D&D is a team sport now... I like that.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Raven Crowking - Hate to say it, and I've not played enough to confirm it, but I don't see you likely to be proven wrong. I just wonder if it'll be more or less fun in the long-term.

The worst part is, these are problems that would have been relatively easy to fix. There are a lot of good ideas in 4e; it is the execution of those ideas that is problematic. In that same thread, for example, Mustrum_Ridicully (sp?) offered some great ideas on how WotC could approach the material to much better effect. If he (and several others on EN World) had been the driving force behind 4e, the odds are I'd be playing it right now.

RC

 

[IanB]

We haven't had a player death yet through roughly the first half of KotS, though we've had one or two close calls.

Then again we have a couple very experienced DDM tournament players in the group, so we may have a better grasp on 4e tactics than most groups do this early on.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

No, see you're getting the wrong end of the stick. Minion monsters are mechanically boring. Making them living longer means more boredom. Normal monsters are typically more interesting. If they get to live shorter, sure, they're less interesting, but still a hell of a lot more interesting and varied than a minion.

No, just approaching it from a different angle. If the point is to have interesting combats, you need things to live long enough to do interesting things instead of always leading with their 'best' power because they can't expect to live long enough to get to their third best power. The problem I've seen with mooks (and granted it's all still relatively new) is that the party is largely ignoring them to focus on the big-bads because there's enough powers to take out the mooks quickly. So they aren't getting their licks in, and the big-bads aren't living long enough to strut their stuff.

Lots of half-HP 'real' monsters works, too, but it's a bit more work, and I think would make judging the relative deadliness of the encounter harder.