WotC Blogs II

[Glyfair]

Let's not have fourty identical rooms.

I've always thought about basing a dungeon on my old high school. It was a virtual maze because it was layed out in hexes. There were "pods" that had a single hexagonal room that was surrounded by other rooms.

That would definitely feel like 40 identical rooms.

 

[Glyfair]

David Noonan's last post covers Displacer Beasts and "siloing" class abilities.

Daily Work: Monsters! Monster numbers! Specifically, I did some work on displacer beasts, sahuagin, and some others. The displacer beast is +14 awesome now. It was only +12, but we upgunned it two awesome points to better reflect its level and role. And yeah, I'm using the word "awesome" to censor out the specific mechanics.

"But Dave," you ask, "weren't you doing class-related stuff yesterday?" You bet. We're at a stage now where we're dealing with a number of little issues--integration and implementation stuff. That means bouncing around the rules a lot. I think the pendulum will swing back next week and we'll tackle some thornier mid-level rules issues. For starters, we're going to do some work on making those sahuagin swim around a little better.

Silos: After two class meetings yesterday, I discover that I'm still smitten with the way we're "siloing" PC capabilities now. For example, it was always unfortunate how phantom steed had to compete with fireball on a wizard's "Spells Prepared" list. Don't get me wrong: Both spells are great, and they both have their place. But when all eyes at the table turn to you, it's a lot better to say, "I didn't prep phantom steed, but I've still got fireball," rather than "I didn't prep fireball, but I've still got phantom steed." Phantom steed suffers by comparison, despite its coolness, and thus it's relegated to scroll use and the occasional splash from a high-level wizard.

Not so in 4e. We've devised various ways of grouping like capabilities with like capabilities, so you don't have to sacrifice phantom steed's utility for fireball's killin'-the-bad-guys effectiveness. You'll get both. And one of the clever bits in D&D--figuring out combat uses for utility spells and vice versa--remains.

In some ways, it's like having a major and a minor in college. And 4e characters are looking a lot more well-rounded than their 3e counterparts.

 

[Irda Ranger]

For those of you worried about mashing succubus and erinyes together... I do think there's room in the game for both a fury and a succubus. The problem is, erinyes have rarely been depicted as furies (ironic, given the name of the monster). Even in 3.5--about the most fury-like depiction of the monster in a long time--erinyes have charm monster at will. It's their iconic shtick, really. That's the sort of thing we would like to improve on.

Well, hopefully we'll get a "real" Fury eventually then ...

One quick point of clarification I'd like to make... Don't assume that we're going to apply the 'Points of Light' conceit to existing campaign worlds.

I would hope not, but ...

I think Realms and Eberron would prosper if they got just a little more points-of-lightish, but we're not going to overthrow worlds with that much breadth and history.

This has been contra-indicated by The Orc King, which I won't repost here to avoid novel spoilers; but, without giving anything away, The Orc King suggests changes to the FRCS even more drastic that the Time of Troubles. It seems closer to "overthrow" than "a bit point-of-lightish."

I'm not saying the changes are bad either - I'm just thinking that Rich Baker isn't exactly being up front on this point.

But maybe we're just reading too much into a few throw-away lines. There could be failures of omission that we're misreading as "absence by intent." We shall see...

 

[Irda Ranger]

Silos: After two class meetings yesterday, I discover that I'm still smitten with the way we're "siloing" PC capabilities now. For example, it was always unfortunate how phantom steed had to compete with fireball on a wizard's "Spells Prepared" list. Don't get me wrong: Both spells are great, and they both have their place. But when all eyes at the table turn to you, it's a lot better to say, "I didn't prep phantom steed, but I've still got fireball," rather than "I didn't prep fireball, but I've still got phantom steed." Phantom steed suffers by comparison, despite its coolness, and thus it's relegated to scroll use and the occasional splash from a high-level wizard.

I'm sure some of the nuances of what "siloing" means escapes us at this time, but the problem he describes is very real, and has bothered me for some time. I have made many attempts to draft house-rules to address them, but if 4e can do all that heavy lifting for me, that's +14 awesome (where "awesome" is not a stand in for anything).

Not so in 4e. We've devised various ways of grouping like capabilities with like capabilities, so you don't have to sacrifice phantom steed's utility for fireball's killin'-the-bad-guys effectiveness. You'll get both. And one of the clever bits in D&D--figuring out combat uses for utility spells and vice versa--remains.

I'd put down money right now that most boom spells are being relegated to at-will and per-encounter, so that the Vancian "20%" of a caster's effectiveness is 100% reserved for the quirky, fun, utility spells like Tenser's Floating Disc, Magic Mouth, and Phantom Steed.

-IR

PS - Shout out to Glyfair for being a human RSS feed. You rock.

PPS - I'm also glad to know that the WotC folks are reading this board and taking in feedback before the rulebooks go to print. They'd be idiots if they tried to accommodate every request, but perhaps this way some major faux pas can be avoided.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I'd put down money right now that most boom spells are being relegated to at-will and per-encounter, so that the Vancian "20%" of a caster's effectiveness is 100% reserved for the quirky, fun, utility spells like Tenser's Floating Disc, Magic Mouth, and Phantom Steed.

That would be most cool

PS - Shout out to Glyfair for being a human RSS feed. You rock.

PPS - I'm also glad to know that the WotC folks are reading this board and taking in feedback before the rulebooks go to print. They'd be idiots if they tried to accommodate every request, but perhaps this way some major faux pas can be avoided.

Good news on both counts. Thanks Glyfair!

 

[Henry]

I'd put down money right now that most boom spells are being relegated to at-will and per-encounter, so that the Vancian "20%" of a caster's effectiveness is 100% reserved for the quirky, fun, utility spells like Tenser's Floating Disc, Magic Mouth, and Phantom Steed.

That sounds VERY much like the "per encounter" spells option that was in Unearthed Arcana, except redesigned from the ground up instead of tacked into the existing spell system. Things like "teleport" could be cast once per day, but Cone of Cold was castable every few rounds, etc.

 

[Klaus]

That sounds VERY much like the "per encounter" spells option that was in Unearthed Arcana, except redesigned from the ground up instead of tacked into the existing spell system. Things like "teleport" could be cast once per day, but Cone of Cold was castable every few rounds, etc.

Recharge Magic.

 

[Remathilis]

My guess

At Will Abilities

* Detect Magic
* Firey Burst

Per Encounter Abilities

* Fireball
* Haste

Per Day Abilities

* Teleport
* Rope Trick

 

[Glyfair]

Stephen Schubert touches on monster stuff:

'm getting more and more excited to play this game again. I put my two campaigns on hiatus for the last couple of weeks so that we could restart with most of our upcoming rules updates in place. The last few sessions of my Wednesday night game, I found myself reeling at the hp/damage and accuracy-related numbers of PCs and monsters - primarily because I was already working on a revised scale that made a bit more sense, and the two sets of numbers were different enough that I wanted to make the changes immediately, but I needed to wait until we had a thorough vetting of the scales involved.

After spending part of this week along with most of the designers and developers plugging those new numbers into our various monster files, I'm pretty confident that they are close to what our final version will be. I also got to walk our new developer through that process, and it either made sense to him (which is good), or his brain imploded allowing him only to smile and nod. I'm just saying, that if you're PC gets obliterated by a cave bear, blame Peter.

The grunt work will continue - we've updated the monster numbers through level 10, which is a sizeable chunk of the Monster Manual. That leaves 20 more levels to get through, which is still more than half the book. I also start leading actual Development of the monster manual next week, which, in addition to reality-checking our numbers work, will let us hammer out how all the special abilities will work, and make the monsters as fun to play for the DM as the PCs are for the players. It'll be fun.

 

[frankthedm]

The displacer beast is +14 awesome now. It was only +12, but we upgunned it two awesome points to better reflect its level and role. And yeah, I'm using the word "awesome" to censor out the specific mechanics.

SOunds like +14 Conceal to me.

Maybe it gets to roll a D20+14 to negate an attack roll should it roll higher than the attack roll? I am sick of concealment ignoring the attacker's skill, except for blindfight.