Alternate Hit Point Systems (or, Various Ways to Make Crits Stop Being Fun)

Posted on 16 April, 2013 by MssngrDeath

There’s a quiet assumption in 3rd Edition and its related systems that hit potions don’t actually keep track of damage. Getting cut by a sword is normally quite severe if not fatal, and gunshots and firealls aren’t any better. Rather, hit points represent fatigue, luck, training, or any number of things that allow you to survive in combat long after your armor has failed you.

I think Ultimate Combat put it best, or at least put it in the way that’s the most fun to read:

Hit points are an abstraction. When a fighter gains a level, his body does not suddenly become more resistant to damage. A sword’s strike does not suddenly do proportionately less damage. Rather, hit points suggest that the fighter has undergone more training, and while he may have improved his ability to deal with wounds to a small degree, the hit points gained at higher levels reflect less his capacity for physical punishment and more his skill at avoiding hits, his ability to dodge and twist and turn. Each loss of hit points, in this case, suggests that he is becoming progressively less nimble over the course of combat—in other words, that the decreasing hit points are a marker for his overall endurance and condition. It’s not quite as satisfying, however, to roll a critical hit and then tell a player that his opponent ducked out of the way, but that the sword’s slash made the enemy a little less lucky.

To bridge this gap, Wizards released a few options hit points variants as part of Unearthed Arcana (the fourth Core Rulebook). We could debate their merits as to how they represent the real world or change the balance of play, but that’s boring. Also, I’ve done too many posts lately on numbers. Instead I want to look at how fun they are, because that’s the point of the game and, ostensibly, the point of this blog.

There are four systems, three in 3.5’s Unearthed Arcana and one in Pathfinder’s Ultimate Combat. In the examples below, assume “character” means “PC, NPC, or monster”.

Injury

In Brief: When you take damage, make a Fortitude save, DC 15 + (damage / 5). If you fail, you take a -1 on subsequent injury saves. If you fail by 10 or more, you’re disabled, just like being at 0 hit points. Healing reduces the penalty to saves.

What it Means: Unless a characters has a high Fortitude save, every hit is a chance to be knocked nearly unconscious. Small damage values whittle away at your saves, increasing the chance of failure. Big damage values have a better chance to knock you out, but if you succeed you can shrug them off completely.

Who Loves It: Characters with high Fortitude saves or who make tons of attacks; players who love to gamble.

Who Hates It: Characters with low Fortitude saves; the unlucky.

Effect at the Table: Miserable. It puts almost every character at a risk of immediate, unpredictable failure and increases the chances that they’ll be knocked out before they can even take an action. It makes high-Fortitude characters completely immune to sufficiently small damage values (unless you rule that a natural 1 always fails by 10 or more, in which case every hit is a 5% chance to knock someone out). It gives every character a chance to completely ignore any attack by any other character, regardless of how much damage it deals; even a critical hit can be shrugged off, making it not much of a critical hit at all. Finally, it significantly increases the amount of rolling at the table, which slows the game and makes results less dependent on player choices and more dependent on happenstance.

Vitality and Wound Points

In Brief: Hit points are called “vitality points”, and are the same except you don’t add your Constitution modifier. You also have “wound points”, equal to your Con score. If you run out of vitality points or suffer a critical hit, deduct the damage from your wound points instead. At 0 wound points, make a Fortitude save to avoid going unconscious. Monsters have a similar system but are slightly different.

What it Means: Critical hits are a lot more significant, even critical hits that only do one point of damage. Fights are more lethal and thus faster, but because you recover one vitality point per level per hour, recovery between fights is also faster.

Who Loves It: Characters with a high chance to crit (by rule, a high crit multiplier is converted to a high crit range); monsters

Who Hates It: Characters with low Constitution scores; players

Effect at the Table: Cinema. Players have lower hit point totals while monsters, especially large monsters, actually have higher hit point totals, which puts the odds more against the players. Any hit is a chance to incapacitate an opponent, but it’s more based on the damage dealt rather than an extra saving throw after the fact. Critical hits also become a viable strategy against opponents with high damage reduction. Vitality points, and thus survival, are based more on your class (the choices you make) than your Con score (how you’re born), and it puts an emphasis on weapon-users rather than mages, giving non-magical classes a better chance to participate at high levels.

Reserve Points

In Brief: Hit points work just like normal. A character also gain an equal amount of reserve points. When a character takes damage, their reserve points are converted to hit points at the rate of one per minute.

What it Means: Players heal faster from lethal damage, to a point. No change occurs to battles.

Who Loves It: Players. All of them, actually.

Who Hates It: DMs used to the standard fights-per-day and Challenge Rating suggestions; timekeepers.

Effect at the Table: Freedom. It gives players a chance to last longer in a day without resorting to magical healing, which gives them the ability to do more in a day. It also reduces the stress on the healer and lets them spend their spells on something interesting rather than pumping cures into allies. But it doesn’t give players unlimited resources or let them bungle into fight after fight without downtime. A DM can use this to give the players more fights (since over the course of a day they essentially have double hit points) or harder fights (since the healer doesn’t have to save their big guns for healing during a long day). The biggest problem is that it requires the DM to decide exactly how many minutes have passed between fights, the sort of minutia that normally only matters to the wizard with his ten-minutes-per-level buffs.

Wounds and Vigor

In Brief: Determine vigor points and wound points just like the “Vitality and Wound Points” system, above, except wound points are doubled. Crits and negative energy damage can damage wound points directly. Losing half of your wound points makes you staggered, and healing can heal either vitality or wound points.

What it Means: A critical hit is almost guaranteed to stagger a character–an NPC on average is staggered by five wound points’ worth of damage, and even epic PCs are staggered after fifteen points.. Fights are more lethal and thus faster, and without magical healing a character may have to rest for many days before they are back in fighting shape even if their vitality points are full.

Who Loves It: Characters with a high chance to crit.

Who Hates It: Players and DMs who like long days or hard fights.

Effect at the Table: Downtime. Since healing can only apply to vitality points or wound points, it takes more healing to get a character back to full, and since a character with even a single missing wound point is unable to take actions without harming themselves, healing is more necessary. This leads to shorter days, both because the healer runs out of spells faster and because a player is more likely to be unable to continue once the healing is gone. It does have the same cinematic quality around crits as the previous Vitality system, but leverages it with the non-cinematic days of hospitalization and bed rest that follow.

I’m clearly a biggest fan of the Reserve Points system, and I think a big part of this is because it’s the same as the normal system. It’s quietly more powerful over a day but not much more powerful in a specific fight, and it doesn’t require a complete overhaul around the mindset of hit points. It does, however, have the same problem as the original hit point system, in that it’s still a vague abstraction of how hit points relate to character damage.

And you know, I’m okay with this. Just like how SimCity would be trash if growth happened in real-time (or if it required an Internet connection, zing!) and Mario games would be failures if the cartridge wiped itself every time you died, tabletop gaming isn’t at its best when it tries to perfectly mimic the real world. It’s at its best when everybody at the table is having fun, even when that requires a willing suspension of disbelief.

In fact, I tend to go the opposite route: every hit is an actual hit. It means that if a character is hit a few times with a sword, that character is actually hit a few times with a sword. D&D is kind of built like this already; it doesn’t make sense that a dragon vulnerable to fire takes extra damage throwing their back out from avoiding a scorching ray, so I say it hits. I feel it makes the characters seem more heroic, taking all this damage and fighting on, though that may be my shounen anime influences seeping in. Besides, 4th Edition is built like this somewhat explicitly. At least half of the powers don’t work if the intention is that a hit actually misses but makes the target feel sad.

I can understand a DM who looks at the hit point system and sees room for improvement. I’m just not sure that overhauling the system is the way to solve it (and I’m absolutely certain that the Injury system is the wrong way to do anything).

Posted in DMing, House Rules | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

On the Premium Spell Compendium

Posted on 11 April, 2013 by MssngrDeath

I know it’s not really in keeping with the theme of the blog, but I have to point out how ridiculous that Wizards is putting previews of the Spell Compendium reprint on its website. When I visit the Wizards website, I tend to expect content (content aimed at getting me to purchase a product, but content nonetheless), not “previews” of a book that came out in 2005. Instead, the previews contain only the fluff description of a few spells.

Dear Wizards: if you’re trying to resell a book that you already published seven years ago and the only selling points are the errata and an “attractive new cover”, perhaps the previews should contain the errata or the cover. Though, now that I’m looking at the cover, perhaps hiding it is best.

I’m not sure what to make of the fact that no excerpts for new material have been posted since October. I guess it’s good that they’re working on 5th Edition and that they’re making this information available to a new generation of role-players, but it weirds me out that the crunchiest articles these days are of the “Didn’t we used to be great?” variety.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | Comments Off on On the Premium Spell Compendium

On the Speed of Experience

Posted on 7 April, 2013 by MssngrDeath

The more I read about 5th Edition, the less I like it. Luckily, the players who comment on official Wizards articles feel the opposite way, so at least we balance out.

This time the issue is with the advancement discussed in the latest Legends & Lore article. The post is largely about tiers of play and is largely boring (unless you’re new to D&D, in which case it’s pretty well-written and sensible), but the end of each section describes the expected level advancement:

[In the Apprentice Tier], the idea is to have one play session that covers character creation and reaches 2nd level, and then have a second session that takes you to 3rd level.

Adventurer tier runs from 3rd level to 15th level. You can expect to level every other session in this tier.

Legacy tier runs from 16th to 20th level, with characters gaining a level every three sessions or so.

Early in my career, I had characters level about once every three or four sessions. Eventually I slowed it down for a few reasons. One, it breaks verisimilitude to think that characters are going from mundane folk to serious heroes in only about a month of adventuring. Two, I don’t like that, by rule, later levels are just as fast as earlier levels. Three, when the game’s power level scales that rapidly it’s harder to get a feel for growth. Four, it makes players more likely to reach for future gains rather than thinking about the characters they have now. And so forth.

My campaigns now are a lot slower. Except for the Tower Campaign, where the whole point was taking a kick-in-the-door, fast-experience, no-consequences world and slowly introducing deeper story and long-running plots, characters in my campaigns level once every seven to ten sessions. There are outliers for story reasons, but in general I’ve thrown the standard experience progression out the window.

So when I read that 5th Edition is based on a faster progression than even the system I rejected for being too fast, I find that terrifying. I’m envisioning the kinds of players who are thrilled by leveling that rapid, and I’m not anticipating an exciting play experience with them. Instead, I’m looking at a game where the focus is on getting cool new abilities instead of playing a character, something that seems expressly at odds with the stated goals of 5th Edition.

From what I understand of 5th, there aren’t a lot of neat choices you can make at later levels either. You choose your class, your feat tree (like a fighter can focus in different weapons, a wizard can use different schools, etc.), your background, what have you, and then you start playing. There are no options in the build beyond character creation because everything is carved in stone. Perhaps this has changed, but if it’s still correct then I don’t even understand why somebody would want to level along a liner, non-branching path.

Interestingly, at the same time Wizards announced “leveling will be super-fast”, they also announced the apprentice tier, where they’ve taken 1st-level characters and actually split them up into three levels so that players can play characters in their pre-adventuring career. Thus an L3 character in 5th is the equivalent of an L1 character in any other edition. The comments section loved it. So what I’m seeing is “we love taking our time to slow down and develop our characters, as long as we get to dump that trash fast and get to watching numbers go up.”

The article does make a point of saying that it’s trivial to change the XP progression, and that’s true. If you double the XP it takes to level, character will level half as quickly. Simple. But that’s a house rule made by the DM, which means it’s not the way the designers intended the game to be played. Intention pervades the rules, and if Wizards really wants fast leveling, then rulebooks, published modules, future articles, everything will be based on this intention, leaving DMs on their own to fix it.

4th Edition caught a lot of flak for being too much like a video game and not enough like a pen-and-paper system. How can nobody see that 5th Edition is the same thing?

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | 1 Comment

Underpowered: Samurai (3.5E)

Posted on 1 April, 2013 by MssngrDeath

The samurai has been ranked by very smart people as perhaps the least-powerful PC class in D&D 3.5. Apparently it’s on par with the expert, the adept, and other NPC classes. I think it’s common knowledge that non-spellcasting classes are generally less powerful than spellcasting classes, but is the samurai really that bad?

Well, let’s compare it to the fighter. Both have full BAB progression. Both have good Fortitude saves. Both have d10 Hit Dice. Both have two skill points per level, and both have Craft, Intimidate, and Ride as class skills; the fighter also has Handle Animal and the mobility skills (Climb, Jump, and Swim), while the samurai has Concentration, Diplomacy, Knowledge (history), Knowledge (nobility and royalty), and Sense Motive. It’s clear that at its base the samurai is a fighter with a little less of a focus on adventuring and a little more on interaction.

The skills tell another story though. The fighter’s skills are Strength-based (and Handle Animal, which makes sense with Ride), and most fighters are good at Strength. The samurai’s skills are more varied, with one Charisma-based, one Wis based, two Int-based, and Concentration (which the class has no way to use, so I expect it’s only there to help samurai qualify for the kensai prestige class later in the book). This lack of focus makes it harder to really excel at skills, and a samurai will probably have to choose between interaction and knowledge.

But nobody plays fighters for the skill points, do they? The real focus is on the eleven bonus feats. Samurai also happen to have eleven abilities they gain over time. So how do they stack up?

  • Daisho proficiency: A bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose. All samurai get Exotic Weapon Proficiency (katana) at L1. In general, getting a bonus feat is not as good as choosing a bonus feat, since it limits character options and power. So this is a bit worse than a fighter.
  • Two swords as one: A bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose and it only works in certain situations, but the character gets to ignore prerequisites. That’s usually pretty balanced (and the ranger is based on it), but the restriction here is greater. So the samurai just barely loses out here.
  • Kiai smite: It’s like a paladin’s smite, which is better than a feat. But the samurai’s smite damage is drastically lower at almost every level (Cha mod vs. class level) and the samurai gets it less frequently than a paladin. We’ll call it a wash.
  • Iaijutsu master: Another bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose, and it comes with an extra restriction. Worse than a feat.
  • Staredown: +4 to Intimidate, better than a feat (Skill Focus) but the player doesn’t get to choose it. The text also says that the samurai “can demoralize an opponent”, which characters can already do. It’s like a class power that says “you can jump”. We’ll call this even again, but I’m not fully convinced.
  • Improved Initiative: A bonus feat that the player doesn’t get to choose.
  • Mass staredown: This is the first time the samurai gets something unique. This is level 10. So it’s a win, but it shouldn’t have taken this long to let one.
  • Improved two swords as one: It’s like two swords as one, above. But while a ranger gets the equivalent of this ability at L6, the samurai has to wait until L11. So this is a loss.
  • Improved staredown: The ability to reduce demoralization from a standard action to a move action, not unlike what Improved Feint does for feinting. So it’s like getting a feat, but you don’t get to choose it, but it’s also not available as a normal feat. I feel like I’m being too down on the samurai, so I’ll do it a kindness and call this “break-even.”
  • Greater two swords as one: Same as improved two swords as one, right down to getting it five levels after the ranger. Similar loss.
  • Frightful presence: The samurai’s capstone ability, this can grant a long-standing penalty (often as long as the entire fight) to every opponent in the battle. But it’s a penalty that doesn’t stack with the staredown, which is what the samurai has been doing since L6, so it’s not too ridiculous. Even though high-level NPCs and monsters are completely immune to it, we’ll say this is better.

By my reckoning, the samurai gets two abilities better than a fighter’s bonus feats, three that are about as good, and six that are worse. The ones that are better aren’t much better, so it’s looking pretty dim.

But it actually gets worse than that. All of the samurai’s staredown abilities are based on the Intimidate skill, so taking max ranks in it is as good as necessary. Without it, the samurai loses its signature ability, and with it, the samurai gets one fewer of its already-sparse skill points. A non-human samurai with Int 8 essentially gets no skill points at all. And since the paladin’s staredown, kiai smite, and frightful presence are all based on Charisma, a samurai is running low on places to put its low stat rolls.

And a note about the power of staredown. Say you’re a samurai. To make an opponent shaken for one round, your Intimidate check has to beat the opponent’s modified level check (d20 + Hit Dice + Wis mod). Let’s ignore for a second that I don’t like comparing rolls (especially d20 rolls) as a resolution mechanic. If you always fight equivalent-level NPCs, you come out slightly ahead, because your ranks in Intimidate should be three higher than the opponent’s level and your Cha should be about the same as their Wis. But monsters usually have more Hit Dice than a player and this difference increases at higher CRs, so staredown’s usability drops against them as you level. And mindless creatures are immune to it wholesale, as are any creatures immune to mind-affecting abilities or fear.

Which gives us a class that looks like a fighter, but it needs to split its ability scores more, its abilities aren’t as good as bonus feats, and its only unique ability (staredown) rarely works and isn’t synergistic with its other key ability (two-weapon fighting). Yeah, I’d call that worse than a fighter.

I actually like the samurai from Oriental Adventures better. It’s like a fighter, but with good Will saves, four skill points per level, and the ability to enhance their swords. The tradeoff (besides, I guess, shield and heavy armor proficiency) is that their bonus feats must come from a series of lists based on their clan; a crab samurai can get the Power Attack tree as bonus feats but not the Combat Expertise tree, for example. I think that if you like the samurai, that’s not a bad place to go. But it loses a lot in the fun factor. It’s basically the fighter but a little better, and all the flavor is in the feat selection (you know, like a fighter). It also doesn’t have the 3.5 samurai’s key mechanic, the staredown. So I think we can do something in between to make the samurai both powerful and interesting.

First let’s deal with the bonus feats. Instead of giving one hard-coded progression, let’s give the player a choice of progressions. They’re still hard-coded, yes, but we don’t want to take too much away from the fighter by duplicating its abilities. The clans from Oriental Adventures have some good ideas on theming, so let’s steal them wholesale. This replaces the abilities gained at the listed levels:

Clan: Each samurai is part of a clan, an association of samurai with similar training and principles. As the samurai’s fighting style improves, he gains access to new abilities.
At the levels listed in the table below, a samurai gains a bonus feat determined by his clan. If he already has the listed feat, he instead gains any other feat for which he meets the prerequisites.
Clan Crab Crane Dragon Lion Phoenix Scorpion Unicorn
1st Weapon Focus (greatclub)* Weapon Focus (longspear) Exotic Weapon Proficiency (katana) Shield Proficiency Lightning Reflexes Combat Expertise Mounted Combat
2nd Power Attack Dodge Two-Weapon Fighting Weapon Focus (longsword) Alertness Dodge Point Blank Shot
5th Cleave Mobility Quick Draw Iron Will Iron Will Improved Disarm Mounted Archery
8th Improved Sunder Improved Initiative Improved Initiative Leadership Combat Reflexes Prone Attack Zen Archery
11th Improved Toughness Spring Attack Improved Two-Weapon Fighting Improved Shield Bash Great Fortitude Improved Trip Trample
16th Great Cleave Quick Draw Greater Two-Weapon Fighting Hold the Line Blind-Fight Whirlwind Attack Improved Mounted Archery

* – Feel free to use any big scary weapon here; the greatclub is a Core placeholder. I suggest a greataxe that does bludgeoning damage (a greathammer), or a tetsubo if you want to change it to Exotic Weapon Proficiency instead.

All of these feats are either in Core or Complete Warrior. That’s intentional.

Note that the dragon clan duplicates the samurai’s old feat list. The goal isn’t to invalidate the old samurai, just give it more choices and power. If somebody really wants to play the katana-and-wakizashi samurai, they should retain that option. But also note that the feats no longer requires the katana-and-wakizashi combo. There’s no reason a dragon samurai couldn’t dual-wield hammers or picks or axes or even katanas.

Now, the staredown. The big issues I have with this are that it takes forever to get going, it relies on opposed rolls, it grants a penalty many creatures ignore, and the results only last one round. There’s nothing I can do about the opposed rolls because that’s how demoralizing works. But the rest:

Staredown (Ex): At 6th level, a samurai becomes able to strike fear into his foes by his mere presence. He gains a +4 bonus on Intimidate checks. An opponent demoralized by the samurai is shaken for one round plus one round for every five points by which the samurai’s Intimidate check beat his opponent’s modified level check.
Mass Staredown (Ex): At 10th level, the samurai has sufficient presence that he can cow multiple foes. Using an Intimidate check, the samurai can demoralize all opponents within 30 feet as a standard action. Also, the samurai can now demoralize creatures normally immune to mind-affecting effects, though he takes a −10 on his Intimidate check against such creatures.
Improved Staredown (Ex): At 14th level, even a glance from the hard eyes of a samurai is enough to give his foes pause. The samurai can demoralize opponents within 30 feet as a move action, not a standard action. He can demoralize enemies within 60 feet as a standard action. Also, the penalty for demoralizing creatures immune to mind-affecting effects is reduced to −5.

So now staredown is more meaningful at L6 than it is for other characters, something the original samurai lacked, and the penalty’s duration is potentially increased. At L10 creatures are no longer immune to the samurai’s staredown, and at L14 the usability increases further. The samurai’s unique mechanic is actually worth using, and he can try it once or twice in a fight rather than spending the whole combat maintaining his enemies’ penalties.

I also recommend increasing the skill points to 4 per level and adding Climb, Jump, Perform, and Swim to the samurai’s class list. This lets them be as mobile as the fighter and plays to the cultured flavor of samurai while giving him the skill points to spend on it. No longer is an Int 8 samurai locked out of skills altogether (I suppose an Int 4 samurai still is, but that’s the territory of Int 4 so I don’t think I’m too worried about that). I’d love to do something about kiai smite, but it can stay as it is. Don’t want to change everything.

With that, we have a class with more options, more flavor, and more power than the original samurai. I know this isn’t enough to bring it up to the level of a spellcasting class, but that wasn’t the goal. The goal is to make the samurai into a class that people want to play rather than a class that people only view to make fun of the art, and I think that’s what we did.

I’d list the whole class here or provide a link to an HTML version, but I’d rather not duplicate all that Wizards material. You print out this blog post and stick it in your (legitimate, hardcover) copy of Complete Warrior if you’re that worried about having it all in one place.

Posted in Gaming Systems, Underpowered | Tagged | 7 Comments

Players Making Failure Interesting

Posted on 26 March, 2013 by MssngrDeath

So we had a TPK on Saturday.

The party came across the guardian to a gate we had to open. In the first round, the fighter won initiative, charged, and did 75 points of damage in one hit, dropping the enemy to about 20% health. The DM, seeing the writing on the wall, had an ally show up. But then the PCs went on a string of back luck: the fighter started missing, the rogue didn’t have the speed to flank with him, the wizard’s touch attacks were foiled by deflection bonuses, and the healer wasn’t at the session. In the end, the NPC fairy had to open the gate while the surviving guardian was futilely chasing the PC fairy around the room (it makes no more sense in context).

It wasn’t really anybody’s fault, just one of those things that happened. It’s hard to predict a string of bad rolls, it’s hard to work around the unexepected limitations of the characters, it’s hard to balance an encounter on the fly, and it’s hard to do anything when players aren’t available.

The thing it, the failure made the story better. The campaign has two sets of PCs: the A-Team (A for Awesome) and the B-Team (B for Bad). The A-Team is fledgling gods, the B-Team is comic relief. Ending an encounter in one hit is for awesome players, not comedy relief. It was much more appropriate and cinematic for the B-Team to muster their forces, approach a challenge, fail miserably, and get saved by somebody more competent.

There’s a lot of talk around the DM’s responsibility to make failure interesting, and it’s not inaccurate. A failure of “You jump the cliff, but drop your backpack” is more interesting than “You fail to jump the cliff and die”. Just Google the phrase “making failure interesting” for a fairly complete view of it. I think the whole idea is incomplete, short-sighted, and, unless handled by a DM far smarter than the concept expects, designed for a bad play experience. But that’s not what this post is about.

Instead, I’d like to put some of the onus on the players for making failure interesting, something that I couldn’t find any reference to in my research. It’s not solely the DM’s job to keep things fun, it’s everyone’s (Law #0 + Law #4). The DM can try to keep things interesting, but if the players are having none of it than the game won’t work at all.

Take our TPK. (Please! Ha, I kill me.) The DM was none too thrilled by it, but the players treated the whole thing like an excellent story for the PCs. It reinforces our role as the underdogs of the setting and keeps us in character. If we can slaughter our enemies, then we’re heroes, not the B-Team. If we signed up to be the campaign’s comic relief, then it’s our job to maintain that as much as it’s the DM’s.

If a DM isn’t making failure interesting, the players can. If a player fails to pick a lock and the DM decides that they don’t get through the door, I’ve seen too many DMs explicitly state that this is bad DMing. By that logic, the player who tries again, or the player who shrugs and forgets about it, is a bad player. A good player would see the failure, acknowledge it as learning, and try something else. A good player would break down the door, or use acid on the lock, or break out their magical lockpicks, or look for another way in.

Failure isn’t uninteresting in and of itself. Failure is uninteresting when it doesn’t advance the game state. If a player then uses the failure as a chance to advance the game state, then the failure is interesting. DMs are there to explain how the world reacts to the players. The players get to decide how they react to the world, and even “nothing happens” is an opportunity to react.

Posted in DMing | 1 Comment

On The Dungeon Master Experience

Posted on 21 March, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Chris Perkin’s penultimate article came down last week, which bothers me. As soon as I find an article on Wizard’s site that’s worth reading, it goes away. It’s like Leverage all over again.

I was going to link to his top ten pieces of advice for DMs last week, but at the bottom of the article he posted a poll asking readers which piece was the most important, and it took a week for the poll to close:

It’s things like this that finally restore my faith in the game. After all the excitement in the comments section of these articles for racial prerequisites (“You were born wrong, so no options for you!”), campaign settings (“I’m tired of having a unique, dynamic world. I want the same one everybody else has.”) and so forth, I’m pleased to see that D&D players (or at least the ones that read this article) find these as their top priorities:

  1. Don’t be a jerk.
  2. Make it fun.
  3. Be awesome about it.
  4. Screw with the rules when the rules don’t do what you want.
  5. Have a character, not a box of stats.

Or, in other words:

  1. Law #0
  2. Law #0
  3. Law #0, but louder
  4. Law #0 mixed with Law #1
  5. Role-play more. (…that should be a law, actually)

I was actually prepared to write some vitriolic response to the poll (in the same way that I’m prepared for my players ditching the campaign story to have their characters create an underwater utopia, or losing my shoes in a tornado), so it’s nice to see that all I had to do was write an “I told you so.”

Posted in Commentary, DMing | 3 Comments

Arbitrary Attack Bonuses in 4E

Posted on 15 March, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Somebody asked about the correct values for the arbitrary attack bonus that accompanies racial attack powers, item powers, and so forth. I put this together to see exactly how they stack up:

This chart assumes the following:

  • A character gets their new weapon the level after they become eligible. For example, a +1 orb at L2, a +2 at L7, etc. For every level that this is not true, adjust the chart accordingly. When a bonus like this increases, the comparison becomes worse, so shift the chart down, and vice versa.
  • A character’s weapon proficiency bonus is 2.5. If it’s +3, shift the line down .5. If it’s +2, shift it up .5.
  • A character takes their Expertise feat at L1. For every level they put it off, move the chart up 1.
  • No extra situational bonuses, like a +1 to attacking undead with a given weapon.

The exact ability scores are irrelevant because they affect all bonuses equally.

On average, the arbitrary bonus of 3/tier vs. AC lags behind weapon attack bonus by 1.8, and the arbitrary bonus of 2/tier vs. other defenses lags behind implement attack bonus by 1.3. The only times such attack bonuses are as good as implement bonuses are at L1-6, before the character gets a +2 implement, and L11, because of the discrete tier increase. The only times they’re as good as weapon bonuses are L1, L11, and L21 (that is, levels before you increase your enhancement bonus to attacks in a tier) for powers that target AC, and even then only if the character normally uses a weapon with a +2 proficiency bonus.

So if you have a paragon-tier magic item that you really want to attack at Str+5 vs Will, you’re fine. It’s still less likely to hit than any other power.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

Underpowered: Duergar (4E)

Posted on 13 March, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Generally I’m not the kind of person who ranks things by power level. I tend to leave that to the experts. But I do talk with people and I see a lot of gameplay. One of the big benefits of running D&D Delve Night for a couple of years was that I got to see literally hundreds of character builds, and I’ve noticed some trends that more powerful characters follow.

As I understand it, the power level of racial powers can be ranked roughly like this:

  • The dwarf
  • Minor action encounter powers that attack enemies
  • Immediate-speed powers
  • Minor action encounter powers that affect enemies without an attack roll
  • Minor action at-will powers
  • Powers that help the character using them
  • Standard action powers

So it’s a little weird that the duergar, with a minor-action encounter power that attacks enemies, is so underpowered. But let’s compare it to two other races with similar powers that get a lot of play, one older than the duergar and one newer:

Duergar (MM2) Dragonborn (PHB) Thri-kreen (DSCS)
Stats +2 to two +2 to two (errated to +2 to one, +2 to choice) +2 to one, +2 to choice
Speed 6 6 7
Vision Darkvision Normal Low-light
Languages Three Two Two (one uncommon)
Skills +2 to one +2 to two +2 to two
Traits None Two (attack bonus, healing bonus) Three (action bonus, jump bonus, doesn’t sleep)

Without traits, the duergar’s power level is largely reliant on its racial power. And how does it measure up?

Duergar (MM2) Dragonborn (PHB) Thri-kreen (DSCS)
Range Ranged 3 Close burst 3 (5 with feat) Melee 1 (targets three creatures)
Attack Con +2/tier vs. AC Choice of ability +2/tier vs. Reflex Choice of ability +3/tier vs. AC
Damage d8/tier + Con d6/tier + Con (d10 with feat) d8/tier + choice of ability
Damage Type None Choose at character creation None
Effect -2 to attacks, ongoing poison None (various with feats) None (reliable with feat)

The racial power only targets one creature, and that creature must be within 3 squares (but not adjacent, or that’s an opportunity attack). It has an attack bonus as though it was targeting a secondary defense, but it actually targets AC. It relies on Con, which is only a primary attack stat for battleminds and certain warlocks (hint: infernal warlocks are the expected build for duergars). With all these penalties to hitting, its damage should be serious. But instead it’s just on par with other racial powers, and it deals small ongoing damage of the most-resisted damage type.

So literally the only things that the duergar has going for it are darkvision and an encounter power that usually misses but deals -2 to attack rolls (save ends) when it hits. That’s nothing to sneeze at but it’s not enough to make anybody actually want to play the race. So let’s try to make it viable.

As before, let’s look at the monsters. Interestingly, every one of them has speed 5, like the dwarves on which the race is based. As much as I hate to lower a race’s power while trying to increase it, this fits too much to ignore. But every duergar also has resistance to fire and poison. Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s add that in. PC resistances tend to be 5 + half-level and the deva has two, so that works without being too unbalanced.

We also need to update their build to be in line with current design. There are eight duergar in the MM2: two Con-primary, two Wis-primary, three Str-primary, and one Cha-primary. The Cha-primary and Con-primary have secondary Dex, and the Wis-primary have secondary Int. So Cha and Int are rare, but Con and Wis both make sense as the mandatory ability, and Str and Dex can make both strong cases as the new third stat. When monster precedent fails, I’m inclined to earn toward race precedent. Their attack power uses Con, and duergar are basically evil dwarves. So let’s use the same stat line as dwarves, and we’ll modify the power to fit. And since many of the monsters are trained in Religion (the knowledge skill that tells players about devils), we’ll use that.

These changes pretty much bring them back up to competitive, especially since fire and poison are such common damage types. But I want to give them one more trait, something small and flavorful. I’d love to give them the devil keyword, but PC don’t have keywords, so that’s out. Since they’re hardy creatures who were enslaved by devils, let’s give them something to resist the attacks of devils.

Which leaves us with:

DUERGAR
Average Height: 4′ 2″- 4′ 8″
Average Weight: 160-220 lb.

Ability Scores: +2 Constitution, +2 Strength or +2 Wisdom
Size: Medium
Speed: 5 squares
Vision: Darkvision

Languages: Common, Deep Speech, Dwarven
Skill Bonuses: +2 Dungeoneering, +2 Religion
Force of Will: You gain a +1 racial bonus to Will defenses against attacks made by immortal creatures.
Infernal Resistance: You have resistance to fire damage and poison damage equal to 5 + one-half your level.

Infernal Quills Duergar Racial Power
You tense and send the quills projecting from your body into the gaps in your foe’s armor.
Encounter ⋄ Poison
Minor Action Ranged 3
Attack: Strength, Constitution, or Wisdom vs. AC. You gain a +3 bonus to the attack roll.
Level 11: The bonus increases to +6.
Level 21: The bonus increases to +9.
Hit: 1d8 + Strength, Constitution, or Wisdom modifier damage, and the target takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls and ongoing 2 poison damage (save ends both).
Level 11: 2d8 + Strength, Constitution, or Wisdom modifier damage, and the target takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls and ongoing 5 poison damage (save ends both).
Level 21: 3d8 + Strength, Constitution, or Wisdom modifier damage, and the target takes a -2 penalty to attack rolls and ongoing 8 poison damage (save ends both).

How to reskin this power so that it works with Wisdom is an exercise left to the reader.

This race didn’t need to be half-rewritten like the bullywug, just updated. I tried to give it the general feel of dwarf + devil. As much as I wanted to pull in the 3E duergar and add 4E versions of invisibility and enlarger person and psionics and stuff, that’s not really what they are any more. Plenty of room there for a racial paragon path, though.

Posted in Gaming Systems, Underpowered | Tagged | 2 Comments

On the Story of 5th Edition

Posted on 7 March, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Two articles appeared on Wizard’s website this week, both part of ongoing series: This week’s Legends & Lore by Mike Mearls, and this week’s The Dungeon Master Experience by Chris Perkins. They offer very different sides of D&D, as Mearls talks about the development of D&D 5th Edition (a.k.a. D&D Next, using the same naming theories as professional wrestling) and Perkins discusses a regular if busy campaign he runs. They form an interesting point/counterpoint for D&D, looking at it from the standpoint of a designer who’s trying to build or fix a system and a player who’s trying to maximize the use of the system that exists. Both are interesting reads.

The differences between the articles really hit home this week. In Mearls’ “This Week in D&D”, he says that Wizards is aiming for a smaller set of rules mechanics, instead focusing on things that make sense in common language rather than focusing on making new mechanics. The example he gives is making an “archer” rather than a character who has “Rapid Shot”, because “archer” is a more recognizable term. As long as there’s still some option in this that prevents all archers from playing exactly the same, I can get behind this. It eliminates or reduces problems with the scope creep, and it suggests that the real focus on a character will be how they act at the table and how they feel rather than what numbers are on their character sheet.

But he starts the article by saying that the development teams want to “shift [their] emphasis to story”, which says to me that we’re back to the world of pre-programming how the world works rather than trusting players and DMs to come up with their own. I’m not against having fluff in the books, and anybody who’s heard me gush over the Pathfinder bugbear can attest to this. But the story of D&D is best managed by DMs and players, not by the book that settled on the world months before any campaigns start. The more in-depth a system’s story is, the less respect I have for it.

The comments are all aflutter over this, mostly with approval, and mostly because they assume that a focus on “story” means a focus on “a default D&D campaign setting”. It looks like Greyhawk has a fanbase much larger than I thought, and I can’t really argue with what the customers want. Though it’s not escaped my notice that players want a focus on common language like “archer” but are fine with a focus on specific language like “Moradin”. It’s enough to make me think that players don’t know what they want, just that they want it.

On the opposite end of the scale, Perkins’ “Make It BIG!” explains that players and DMs best remember the events, settings, and characters that are over-the-top rather than the mundane path of a game. Though my evidence is largely anecdotal, I can agree with this. Players don’t remember the Monster Campaign because the plot was gripping, and I’m pretty sure half of the players couldn’t even tell me what it was. But they do remember the nimblewright launching a subterranean castle into the air to destroy his own airship, the myconid* dying when he tried to crawl into the mouth of a fiendish dinosaur, and the half-dragon orc getting into a toe-to-toe punch-up with an eldritch giant named Bootylicious.

The contrast between these articles is somewhat striking, as Mearls says “Let’s hold back on the rules so we can work on the story” and Perkins says “Nobody cares about the story until the players make it worthwhile”. Certainly large, interesting adventures aren’t precluded by the design aesthetic of 5E. But I think it’s a huge mistake to expect that designers can make those things happens. Just give the players the rules they need to play the characters they want, give the DM the framework he needs to build the plot the players like, and trust the customers to make their own story without a designer’s help.

I think it’s another conflict between Int-based design and Cha-based play. I’ve said before that Int-based design is a good way to lose sight of the system itself. Our situation has not improved.

* – You know, both my highlight reel and Chris Perkins’ involve myconids. Maybe, like Greyhawk, they also have a fanbase much larger than I thought.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged | 3 Comments

Pre-Campaign Survey

Posted on 3 March, 2013 by MssngrDeath

I mentioned a campaign survey once that I used for my campaigns, but I never actually published it. You can find it here. The idea is that players fill out the survey by indicating where they want the campaign to be on seven sliding scales.

For example, a player might check off the box halfway between role-playing and roll-playing, indicating a fairly typical campaign with a mix of combat and non-combat. They might go slightly right of center on rural/urban, indicating a slight preference for being in and near civilization.

I usually fill one out myself too and take the average, though I keep in mind any outliers. It helps me plan my campaign around what the players want and expect to play, sometimes in a way that changes the campaign significantly. Here’s how my last one turned out, with a surprisingly high preference toward a campaigned, non-episodic game:

I know the rows are reversed. Not sure what happened there.

These are general guidelines. Just because the players wanted to be around PG-13 doesn’t mean I can’t have G-rated moments, and vice versa. But it does indicate that I shouldn’t be running a campaign where the players are typical people just trying to survive after the End Days (low tech, low power, dark tone).

It’s clear that this is focused toward D&D; other systems don’t have a magic level to chart (though they might have a tech level, or a spirit level or something), or they assume a certain power level, or they don’t have patience for combat as a campaign focus. It also works best if you’re making your own setting, like a grown-up; Eberron, for example, leans toward dark tone, high magic, and low power level, and the survey results should be weighted accordingly.

Treating each as a scale from 1 to 7, like my players tend to do, my baseline is something like 3/6/5/5/3/5/6. It varies based on the campaign and what media I’ve recently consumed, but this line probably isn’t terribly surprising to anybody who’s seen my influence map. There aren’t any extreme values there, and that’s to be expected. In the survey above, I asked six players (and myself) seven questions to get forty-seven values with two abstentions. Only three of those values were a 1 or 7, and two of those were me trying to skew the results to fit the setting. Players tend to want something in the middle, and when they don’t it’s the DM’s job to sit up and take notice.

Posted in DMing, House Rules | Comments Off on Pre-Campaign Survey