4th Edition Themes (the Mechanic That Should Have Always Been)

Posted on 20 March, 2012 by Law

Recently, I said this:

The items are also neat, though I’m starting to be bothered by 4th Edition’s insistence on adding more and more item slots. First it was tattoos, then divine gifts, and now primordial shards and elemental gifts. Characters weren’t complex enough, but now they can have up to three invisible magic items that take up no slots.

In general, I’m against power creep in cooperative games. I don’t like the idea that players need to keep buying books to maintain pace with improving monsters and other players, though it’s something that 4th Edition loves. First, PHB2 came out with backgrounds (a +2 bonus to one skill or the ability to gain a skill not in your class, with no drawback). It also set the standard that all classes will have one primary stat rather than two, so that all characters of that class can get the best options rather than design characters that feel and act different. Then new items started coming out in Adventurer’s Vault 2 and later books. Essentials improved basic feats by buffing Lightning Reflexes at all and adding the Expertise feats that are objectively better that the original Weapon Expertise (a feat that didn’t exist either in PHB1). This isn’t even looking at the idea that newer classes are stronger than older classes, like the fact that the PHB2 sorcerer gets lower bonus damage than the HotEC sorcerer.

So it’s somewhat weird that I actually like themes. Themes usually give a character bonuses without drawbacks and don’t prevent that character from taking anything else. It’s just more powers and abilities stapled onto any character.

But something about themes feels different. Maybe it’s because they add a balance between flavor (which backgrounds do well, but classes and paragon paths usually do poorly) and mechanics (vice versa). Maybe it’s because they give a tangible change to the feel of a character. Maybe it’s because they stop at 10th level, giving players some configuration before they qualify for the most exciting options. But it’s probably a combination of everything, in that it’s break from 4th Edition’s tightly-controlled, cookie-cutter character design aesthetic.

When 3rd Edition still existed, prestige classes were my favorite thing. I went through new books looking at the prestige classes, learning their flavor and abilities, memorizing their prerequisites, and trying to figure out how to work them into my campaigns or characters. For Pathfinder, that role is filled by archetypes, which I consider an improvement. 4th Edition didn’t have anything that excited me in the same way until themes, and now I’m thrilled to see new ones in each book.

It’s deeply disappointing that themes were first published roughly one month before Wizards brought back Monte Cook, which is when the talk of D&D 5th Edition began. Most of 4th Edition’s life didn’t have them, and they certainly haven’t made it to every book since; I think they’re only in the Neverwinter Campaign Setting, the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, the Book of Vile Darkness, and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. These four books have 38 themes, which is a great number (compare to 26 classes), but more than half of them are in campaign settings, so they’re pretty easy to miss.

I’m optimistic for the future of themes over whatever time 4th Edition has left, and even more so for the possibility of creating custom themes for characters and campaign settings. In a sense, I like the idea of bundling them with a background, so that a character with a maritime background has a theme that accentuates their life at sea. It’s a great way to make characters that feel and act different instead of just looking different, and it finally gives players a way to bring character background into at-the-table mechanics.

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Denialist DMs

Posted on 13 March, 2012 by Law

There’s another article that popped up on the Google Spotlight last week, How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life. Again, it’s not a great article, but it reminded me to talk about denialist DMing.

It’s hard to design an adventure that’s difficult but not impossible. The sheer number of variables that go into any monster, let alone a fight or entire dungeon, make encounter difficulty more of a best guess than a clear formula. Add in traps, skill challenges, the d20 system’s inherent randomness, and players’ startling predilection toward terrible decisions, and the difficulty of a session can swing wildly at the slightest stimulus.

The best DMs I’ve seen have the ability to change difficulty on the fly. If a monster knocks out a player, perhaps it opts to attack somebody else rather than deliver a coup de grace. If a fight is much harder than expected, maybe the next fight will have one or two fewer creatures than planned, or maybe a trap spontaneously disappears. If a puzzle is stumping everyone or there’s no place to go in a mystery, a clue or lead might appear out of the blue. Making things harder on the fly works exactly the same way, but in reverse.

But not everybody is comfortable randomly changing the adventure at a moment’s notice, which is why we have planning. And the question I want to address is how to plan a session with the appropriate difficulty. Or, rather, how not to do it.

A denialist DM is one who bases session difficulty on the likelihood of the challenges subverting the characters involved. They build encounters that deny characters the ability to use their strengths. Essentially, it’s just like plusses and minuses, except that nobody is ever a plus. For example, if a denialist knows that the party has a fire mage, they will lean toward monsters with fire resistance. If a party has only slashing weapons, they will lean toward skeletons and other creatures that resist slashing. They will choose high-SR monsters for a party of spellcasters, undead for a party of rogues, and mindless or savage creatures for a party of diplomats. The idea is that those monsters pose a greater challenge than they normally would based on the party makeup.

On the plus side, this encourages parties to cover multiple bases and try new tactics. If a party of rogues fights mindless undead, many of their strategies and abilities aren’t as useful. But in a balanced party, only the rogue is at a loss, and the rest of the party can still run (perhaps more effectively, as with a cleric). The rogue could take their normal actions and be terrible at them, but ideally the player will think of something different and helpful, like drawing artillery fire or aiding other players. For a few fights, this is realistic and fun, and it gives players a chance to try out strategies and mix up fights a bit.

However, this also means that a character isn’t doing the thing they were designed to do. In the above example, a rogue can flank or distract enemies or do any number of things, but many of these things aren’t rogue abilities. The “rogue” part of the character isn’t helpful, so the player runs it as something else, which means they’re not playing the character (or at least the crunch, the build) they designed.

All DMs do this occasionally, and should. But a denialist DM doesn’t limit this to an encounter here or there. A denialist DM will use undead far more often against a party of rogues, because the fight is legitimately harder, but in a way that punishes the players for their decisions in character building. They would also set adventures in the wilderness to limit the effectiveness of savvy urban bards, or set adventures in a city to hold back druids and nature specialists. Even worse, there’s no right player decision. No matter what characters are in the party, a denialist DM will punish those characters, so if one member of the rogue party becomes a cleric or ranger and starts fighting undead, a denialist will instead use elementals.

The deeper this goes, the more players commit character resources to builds that quickly become worthless. I’ve said before that I don’t like save-or-die effect because they mean a player sits around not having fun based on a single die roll. With a denialist DM, there’s no die roll. The DM is actively trying to design a campaign where the players do not get to play the characters they wanted.

I’ve played with denialist DMs before, and it’s no fun. In one campaign, a player designed an illusionist that was completely worthless because all the monsters knew how to deal with illusions. Certainly, this is occasionally fine. An illusionist, no matter how accomplished, shouldn’t be able to wave their hand and scare away any and every hostile creature. But the first time a mundane tiger looked at a fifteen-foot-tall fire elemental, complete with sound and heat, and thought “That’s probably fake. I should ignore it and the guy with the sword to fight the man in the robe, because the DM wants to punish him for having low AC.”, we knew the campaign wasn’t salvageable.

Fixing this is actually pretty easy if you’re a DM. Just take note of what the players are designed to do (that is, what the player enjoys doing, since they designed a character for it) and give them the opportunity to do it. Sometimes give them something that limits their effectiveness, and sometimes give them something that accentuates it.

It’s a lot harder if you’re in a campaign with a denialist DM. As in the article that prompted this post, most denialists don’t realize whether they’re doing it to an extreme, and the bad ones will ignore complaints and assume the players are just looking for an easy ride. Try asking them what each character is built to do, then ask them to recall the last adventure (or fight, or NPC interaction) where they got to be good at it. If the DM legitimately can’t remember the last time they had a monster vulnerable to fire in a combat with the fire mage, there’s a problem.

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Heroes of the Elemental Chaos

Posted on 2 March, 2012 by Law

I like Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. When I got Heroes of Shadow, I found that it was mostly just an expansion to the staggeringly limited Encounters line, in that it wasn’t good but it was the best there was. When I got Heroes of the Feywild, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement it was. Now that Heroes of the Elemental Chaos is out and is even better, I’m looking forward to Heroes of the Astral Sea and Heroes of the Mundane World, That Place We Forget About Even Though Most Campaigns Happen There.

I would discuss the power level of the book, but that’s not my thing. There are plenty of places a person can go if all they want is a way to win at a cooperative game. Instead, I’d rather talk about the implications of the book with a Charisma-based playstyle.

As with most books for role-playing games, HotEC can be roughly divided into two sections: crunch (classes, powers, feats, themes, items, and anything that gives a player or a DM hard numbers) and fluff (introductions, descriptions, backstories, or anything that isn’t numbers). 4th Edition books tend to sprinkle both of them throughout the book. For example, Cleave is crunch, but the italicized description at the top of the power is fluff, and in Essentials, so is the whole paragraph before the power starts. Fluff is the part you throw out and redesign during reskinning, but it’s what tends to explain what on earth a power is supposed to be, and without it we’d just have an assortment of boring numbers.

The fluff in HotEC is magnificent. Chapter 1 goes into what elemental magic is, the reach of elemental magic, the Elemental Chaos, races, and primordials. Essentially, it’s the part of the book you skip completely if all you want is new way to shoot a guy, but for a DM or a player looking for a backstory it’s magnificent. In particular, I have to talk about the section on primordials. They’re a set of powerful NPCs, player patrons, campaign villains, and alternate gods all in one, just waiting for a DM to inject life into them. Wizards basically devoted ten pages to “We’re not entirely sure how these fit into the world. Go nuts!”, which is everything I’ve even wanted in a book.

The classes are similarly great. There are two new monk options based on water and fire, so we finally have a way to play firebenders and waterbenders without wild amounts of tweaking, but there’s also a section at the end laying the seeds for DMs and players to design three more. Druids only got six pages, but they include a new animal companion and what I think are the first beast form attacks in Essentials. The sorcerer got the Essentials treatment in that it lost all encounter and daily powers except for elemental escalation, which can be used a few times per fight, and I love this because it lets me force players to be more creative in their power descriptions than “I guess I hit a little bit harder this time”. The warlock pact option leverages my favorite thing about gaming (randomness) with its mutable damage types, and finally gives us elemental summons like we had from minute one in 3rd Edition. The only downside is the wizard, partially because I’m tired of wizards getting expended in every book, but also because I’ve never been a fan of familiars or their mechanics in any edition. And every one of these classes got a ton of new utilities to tweak a character’s feel and playstyle even more.

The paragons paths I like because they give back a lot of the things we had in 3rd that were missing in 4th, like the doomlords and the Xaositects speakers of Xaos. I’m also a big fan of the emergent primordial epic destiny and its “become huge” daily utility, even if I can’t see a single redeemable thing about the other epic destiny, the lord of chaos. The items are also neat, though I’m starting to be bothered by 4th Edition’s insistence on adding more and more item slots. First it was tattoos, then divine gifts, and now primordial shards and elemental gifts. Characters weren’t complex enough, but now they can have up to three invisible magic items that take up no slots. Just split the next slot into neck and back, or split head into head and face. We’ll understand.

I do think there was a missed opportunity, though, in giving players ways to add elemental powers to an existing character. One of the running issues I have with 4th Edition books is that each new book gives lots of ways to build a character from scratch, but almost no ways to tweak a character that’s in an ongoing campaign. Paragon paths and epic destinies are great ways to do that, and it loses some punch when the only way to take an elemental paragon path is to play an elemental character, especially when the prerequisites include one of the few things that player’s can’t retrain like a class option. The new feats at least give some way to give a normal person some elemental ability, and if you play one of the classes in the book you can take some elemental powers, but most characters are just left out (if you’re a martial or divine character, you can pretty much take a walk).

Overall, I was actually shocked (shocked!) by how much I enjoyed this book. It managed to expand on some of my favorite things in D&D (sorcerers, world-building, themes) and make some of my least favorite things at least marginally palatable (monks, Essentials druids). It even includes a tiny sidebar in the familiars elemental companions section giving players the go-ahead to make creative changes, and I like any implicit or explicit allowance Wizards makes for reskinning. I’m also told the book has some good options by somebody I trust to know about power levels, so if that’s your thing, consider that an endorsement. All told, this is a strong book that gives me hope for D&D, especially as 5th Edition starts taking shape.

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CRs, and Why They Mean So Little

Posted on 26 February, 2012 by Law

Last night in our 3.5E campaign, we fought an entomber, from Libris Mortis, the Book of Bad Latin (also undead). The entomber’s primary mechanic is, shock of shocks, entombing. Every time it connects with an attack, the target has to make a non-trivial Reflex save or become buried in a shallow grave. Escape requires the assistance of allies (which requires two turns and provokes attacks of opportunity) or two successful grapple checks. It’s actually a pretty neat monster with a pretty neat mechanic, and its Challenge Rating was only two higher than the party level, which makes it a difficult encounter where a character might go unconscious but where nobody should die.

The problem is specifically how the numbers worked in the fight. The creature hit the party’s defender on a 13 and the party’s striker on an 8, which is pretty reasonable. Its damage could knock out a player in three hits, or two hits if the monster rolled well for damage, which is fine for a brute. But the Reflex save against its entomb ability is fairly difficult, and the grapple check to escape was worse. The party rogue could avoid being entombed by rolling a 9 or higher, but needed a natural 20 to escape the grapple (which, recall, had to be done twice). The barbarian could escape the grapple on a mere 14. So with one hit, the monster gave a player a 50% chance to not participate in the encounter for a minimum of two rounds, most likely five rounds or more. We all got knocked underground, lost the combat, and the cleric had to dig everybody out and heal them before the monster came back to finish us off.

I think it’s important that every DM realize that monster levels and Challenge Ratings are a suggestion rather than a hard and fast rule. Monster CRs are designed for a theoretical perfect party of a healer, a defender, a damage-dealer, and a caster (specifically, Jozan the cleric, Tordek the fighter, Lidda the rogue, and Mialee the wizard). Any variance in this party creates a different situation that can lead to a different combat. Switching the rogue to a barbarian makes it easier to fight undead but makes the party more susceptible to spells that target Reflex, switching the cleric for a druid increases versatility at the expense of some healing, and so forth.

Consider the entombed. For the playtest party, Jozan could turn this undead creature on a difficult but possible roll of 19 on 1d20+Cha. Mialee can use single-target damage spells to hurt it or control spells to limit its reach. Lidda is largely irrelevant, but she can spend turns digging out entombed allies and is very likely to make her Reflex save. Tordek is pretty much unchanged, unless he has a silver weapon, which is unlikely but incredibly handy.

Now consider our party of three melee characters: a cleric, a barbarian, and a rogue(-like thing). We had nobody who could stay away from melee combat against the terrifying melee specialist. It was impossible for our cleric to turn it. Its DR ruined the two-weapon fighting of the barbarian and made the rogue almost incapable of dealing damage except with magical powers. And we had one fewer person to save entombed allies. On paper, this was a great monster, and it was still a fun fight. But it was a bad match with this party and its current capabilities.

Here’s a story I promised to tell. Also in Libris Mortis, there’s a creature called the entropic reaper. It has fast healing, damage reduction beaten only by cold iron and lawful, spell resistance, normal undead resistances, and the ability to deal an average of 100 damage on a critical hit (which my sorcerer took). These alone are pretty scary for a CR 12 creature, but its namesake ability is its entropic blade.

If entropic blade hits you, you make a Fortitude save. If you fail, you’re done in the fight. You are unable to cast spells, take a -4 penalty to attack rolls and a 50% miss chance besides, and have a random chance of targeting allies since you can no longer tell who your enemies are. But each round you’re in this state, you take 1 Wisdom drain, which kills you if your Wisdom reaches 0. The only way to stop this effect is the application of sufficiently powerful healing magic (restoration or heal, which only clerics have at level 12), so if you want to survive, you need a cleric who has one of these spells prepared or an ability to cast one of them spontaneously, such as from a scroll. You can delay the effect, but only for one minute with a DC 21 Charisma check as a standard action, which requires a Charisma of 30 to get to a 50% chance of success. A character with a good Charisma can stave this off almost forever by doing nothing but making this check, but it means they can’t affect the fight in any way.

When we fought this creature, we had a sorcerer, a rogue, a fighter/bard, a druid, and a cohort cleric who used wands. The only chance we had to survive entropic blade was if the cohort entered combat (which he generally hadn’t done yet in the campaign) and cast restoration. But even with a perfect team, the initial Fortitude save is essentially a save-or-die mechanic unless the cleric happened to choose the correct spells at the beginning of the day.

Is the entropic reaper a bad creature? Probably. I don’t think it should have been published, and I can’t imagine why it was included at CR 12. But that doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable. The right party with the right preparation, a sufficiently high-level party that can resist many of its powers, or an appropriate ability to retreat and strategize can all make the fight balanced if not easy. But the lesson here isn’t that some creatures are bad (that’s a different lesson). It’s that CRs aren’t hard and fast representations of the difficulty of fighting a creature. Every monster, challenge, story, and part of a campaign needs to be measured against the capabilities of the characters and the players to challenge them but keep each side of the table from invalidating the other.

This is a lot easier in 4th Edition with its stranglehold on monster attacks, damage, and defenses. But there’s still a lot of room for bad decisions in power design, especially custom power design, and any variance from the expected formula can have hilarious consequences. And any of the non-numeric aspects of a monster can be trouble too; a fire specialist can expect to be sad when a fire elemental comes to a fight, but sending the players on an extended story in the City of Brass is just malicious.

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Re: Why we pick bad leaders, and how to spot the good ones

Posted on 16 February, 2012 by Law

A neat article pooped up in Google Spotlight this week : Why we pick bad leaders, and how to spot the good ones. It’s not the most well-written article I’ve read this week, and it doesn’t have any earth-shattering research or world-changing analysis, but it does have application to what makes a good DM.

“Leader” is a good, if incomplete, word for a DM. A DM has to get people together, manage different personalities and time constraints, and moderate to keep everybody on the same page. Unlike a business leader, they don’t have to manage their people unless something at the table requires clear intervention, and they don’t perform any in-character delegation. Their job isn’t really to lead the party, but rather to lead the session and tell their story, present challenges, and make sure everybody is having fun.

With that in mind, I think we can draw clear parallels between Cohn’s article and the role of a DM. It lists a few traits that don’t make a good leader, particularly “a candidate’s charm, their stellar résumé or their academic credentials”. These correlations are fairly obvious. A good DM is not determined by their at-table personality (I’ve seen plenty of good players be average or lousy DMs), their past success in DMing (each new campaign, party, and set of players is a new challenge, and some DMs just don’t click with some challenges), or their knowledge of the system (it should go without saying, but encyclopedic knowledge of the system doesn’t make a person fit to design something in that system).

Some of the traits of good leaders are a little more vague, but here’s how I think they relate:

  • Integrity – Cohn defines this as “a blend of honesty, consistency and ethics”. A specific breakdown of integrity differs from DM to DM; I lie to my players all the time, which would make me dishonest, except that DMs should lie to present incomplete information or deliberate misinformation to represent character knowledge. In general, a DM should just be a good person. There are few good reasons to give time and effort to somebody who is trying to make you unhappy.
  • Passion – A person who treats DMing like a job isn’t nearly as enthusiastic as a person who treats it like a hobby, who in turn isn’t as enthusiastic as somebody who treats it like fun. A DM legitimately excited about their campaign will make players excited as well.
  • Courage – Hopefully, this doesn’t come up as much. But occasionally a DM has to confront a player who’s bringing down the table or trust their their players can handle some devastating change to the campaign. I’m strongly anti-spoiler in my campaigns (there’s another post there), so I don’t ask players if it’s alright before I kill somebody or give them a difficult situation. I certainly fret about it for the two weeks before it happens and for one week afterward, but at this point I mostly trust my players to run with it.
  • Vision – Campaigns are supposed to have goals. Few players can handle being dropped into the middle of a setting and told to explore. Good campaigns build to a peak or a series of peaks, and a DM had to at least know a little what he’s doing when he starts.
  • Judgment – This one’s pretty obvious. A DM with consistently bad judgment will lose players fast.
  • Empathy – A DM doesn’t run a table of characters, they run a table of players. A DM has to read players on the fly and occasionally flat-out ask them how things are going. If the players aren’t enjoying themselves (in general, maybe not at that specific moment), the DM has failed.
  • Emotional intelligence – I’m not sure I get the name of this trait, but it means that a DM should be able to stand back and look at what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Often, this means asking the players for their assessment and suggestions on how to improve. Much like anything, a DM who isn’t improving over time will never become good.

Ricky Gervais aside, I’m pretty sure this article is more targeted to the current election season than to business, and that works better for my comparison. DMs aren’t promoted, they’re elected. They don’t answer to management, they answer to the people who elected them. And it’s rare for a DM to not serve at least one term (the length of a campaign) unless they quit before then.

Having all seven of the traits above is rare. Everybody has should have them in some capacity, but most people can only expect to have a few of them enough to register as a courageous or empathetic DM. It can also be hard to figure out which ones a person has or doesn’t have until you sit through a campaign with them, and it’s even harder to see them in yourself. After years of running games, I think I’m good at passion, vision, and judgment and lousy at empathy, and emotional intelligence, which means that I create and run magnificent campaigns and I can’t figure out why my players don’t think I’m as great as I do.

Posted in Commentary, DMing | 2 Comments

Save or Die

Posted on 2 February, 2012 by Law

A million years ago in my post on Law #0, I mentioned before that I don’t like save-or-die effects. In case you’re on dial-up and can only load one page per hour (thanks for picking this one, by the way), here’s what I had to say:

I don’t like save-or-die effects. They’re the laziest kind of difficulty. They’re not interesting and they don’t challenge the players, they’re just a quick way to put a threat in the room. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that “roll a 14 or stop having fun” is a good mechanic in a rulebook or at a table. I have a standing rule in my campaigns that I won’t use any save-or-die effects as long as the players don’t.

I understand why save-or-die spells exist. Magic is terrifyingly powerful, by design. A first-level wizard, which is the weakest possible PC, doesn’t need as long as four seconds to summon a dog from space, change into a different person, or create fire that can shock an average person into unconsciousness. Magic escalates quickly, and at a certain point having some spell that causes instant death is a logical conclusion.

Spells aside, there’s also room for save-or-die effects in the flavor of D&D. Mythology in general is thick with creatures that can slay without really trying, like gorgons, basilisks, banshees, and whatever the plural of cockatrice is. In essence, giving players the ability to cast death spells is a way to even the playing field, giving them the same chance of killing their enemies with a minimum of time and work.

But what I don’t get is why a player would ever do that, or why a DM would do that to players. I don’t understand what player can cast one spell, consider it a job well done, and move on without having invested any effort in-character or out. I don’t understand what DM can enjoy hurling a creature like a medusa at unsuspecting players, knowing that it will probably result in people at the table who are just going to sit and watch as other people have fun for them. And I don’t understand why a game designer would write something like that, thinking “This has a good chance of ruining all the energy a DM or player put into something, there’s little if anything they can do about it, and that’s exactly what I want.”

Save-or-die effects really have to include things that aren’t explicit death, but have the same effect on an encounter. A player that gets paralyzed, put to sleep, or teleported away is as good as dead for that fight unless there’s some way to break them out, and it takes a dedicated character to prepare for the myriad ways a player can be incapacitated. At this week’s Delve Night, the players fought harpies. Three players fell for a harpy’s song, which requires that the characters take no action but follow the harpy until it stops singing. All the harpy had to do was fly toward a non-threatening area away from the quest objective, and suddenly there was only one player who got to participate in the session. There’s no threat of imminent death, but even with the extra save the players got from jumping off a boat into calm water, one effect shut down most of the party without any chance of salvation. The only ways to stop the effect were to cast silence (which requires a valuable spell slot at low levels), slay the harpy (which requires that a character with appropriate range and damage resists the spell), or play a bard (which requires playing a bard).

In my campaigns, save-or-die (save-or-become-temporarily incapacitated is too hard to type repeatedly) effects are soft-banned. I won’t design encounters with them, including avoiding monsters with those effects built-in or lessening the severity of the effects, and the players won’t use them either. If the players do happen to use a save-or-die spell, then that lock comes off; I’ll never forget the panicked looks the party had when one player, against all advice, tried flesh to glass on a monster, knowing that I would gladly (and indiscriminately, because I’m great like that) respond in kind. It allows players to either safely avoid them or keep one in reserve for a critical moment, which is a neat backup plan to have.

If there’s a flaw in this plan, it’s that the system expects you to use save-or-die effects, so you miss out on a few things avoiding them. Look at the save-or-die effects on the 9th-level spell list for wizards: dominate monster, hold monster (because of the setup for coups de grace), imprisonment, mage’s disjunction (for NPCs rather than monsters), power word kill, wail of the banshee, and weird. Nearly a third of core 9th-level arcane spells aren’t allowed in my campaigns, and a bunch of lower-level spells are out as well; in general, enchanters are outright ruined by this restriction, but all casters end up with fewer options. Things aren’t much better on my side, either. Every core monster above CR 17 can use some save-or-die effect except the tarrasque (which, as you may have heard, is the tarrasque), and I have to read some monsters closely to see whether they have some terrifying game-ending effect. Remind me to talk sometime about the entropic reaper.

I’m not sure whether to include lesser effects under this umbrella, but I lean toward no. A wizard in a silence spell or fighter who gets his weapon sundered probably feels like he’s locked out of the fight, but there’s always the opportunity to affect the encounter in some way. It’s a situation that rewards sufficiently creative players, which I like as long as I do something that means I don’t feel bad about destroying tens of thousands of gold pieces.

This is one of the many cases where Pathfinder improves on 3rd Edition and one of the rare cases where 4th Edition may as well. Pathfinder changed some spells like finger of death and wail of the banshee to direct damage rather than save-or-die, and 4th Edition has fewer effects capable of knocking out an enemy, most if not all of which are restricted to daily usage. In a sense, 4th managed to do away with save-or-die effects by breaking them down into many smaller effects designed to make sure that enemies participate in the battle as little as possible, giving them to players and monsters in equal measure, calling that role a “controller”, and making it a heavily-suggested part of every party and every fight. I’m not convinced this is a net gain.

I guess my favorite story around save-or-dies isn’t the above-referenced terrified players, but it was earlier in that campaign and similarly terrifying. The party was in a one-sided fight (a planned TPK), and the cleric broke out some serious spell to kill a nearly-unharmed enemy construct. She succeeded, and on the next initiative a death salad used implosion to kill the cleric and nobody else. I’m not sure what made the implosion stop (damage interfering with the concentration?), but I know the players suddenly had an opinion about that monster, which set up both the severity of the soft ban on save-or-dies and the consequences of playing D&D as written. It was delightful.

Posted in DMing, House Rules | 1 Comment

On “The Genius of D&D”

Posted on 27 January, 2012 by Law

For reference, I did not miss that Monte Cook thinks how you were born (race) is more important than what effort you’ve put into life (ability scores). This somewhat upsets me and leads me to imagine that this is not an issue I have that will be addressed in 5th Edition.

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Perform (dungeon master)

Posted on 27 January, 2012 by Law

So what is DMing with Charisma?

There are three skills in D&D that represent the ability to make money in a non-adventuring role (and it’s telling that all of them were in my last post, which means that 4th Edition doesn’t have them at all). Craft is Intelligence-based and is used to create something physical. Profession is Wisdom-based and is more service-oriented, representing broader but less deep knowledge. Perform is Charisma-based and is used for artistic expression. Each of them has limited application in, say, a dungeon crawl, but I think it’s safe to say that every non-adventuring NPC in every setting has some ranks in at least one of them.

I think that Wizards’ intent is that DMing is a Profession check, but DMing doesn’t fall perfectly into any of these buckets. A dungeon master really needs to use all of them to build an interesting session or campaign, so I feel like it’s not right to say for sure that DMing is one or another. Rather than looking at it from a Craft-Profession-Perform perspective, I think it’s best to consider it from the standpoint of the relevant ability scores.

I think of a Wisdom-based DM as a fairly typical DM. They have some knowledge of the system, but they’re not rules lawyers. They have NPCs with personality, but they aren’t method actors. A Wis-based DMing treats DMing like a service, where they have to balance a number of aspects of running a game. They feel kind of like an ascended version of a typical player, though I think the Wisdom style is better tapped into the players than other styles. Any DM has to respond to the players, but Wisdom DMs put even more weight into what the players want. Usually this is a great thing, but a DM too reliant on public opinion can get pulled in too many directions or become subject to only the loudest or most upset players. I’ve seen many sessions and more than one campaign be shanghaied by a particularity emphatic player and a sufficiently permissive DM.

Intelligence-based DMs are a step or two more comfortable with the hardest parts of the game. They treat a campaign as a thing to be built by one person more than a thing to be generated by a group, and they stick much closer to official rules and mathematical integrity than Wisdom-based DMs. It’s easy to think of them as uptight and distant, but my Int-based DMs always have a startling amount of internal story consistency, and they make sure that the gameplay is as fair as possible. Intelligence DMs treat the story as the most important thing; bad ones crush player opinion for the sake of the plot, but good ones integrate the players so they’re as involved as the DM is.

Charisma-based DMs are the opposite. They’re the DMs most likely to ignore the rules, dice rolls, and continuity for the sake of doing something great right now. In retrospect, the campaign may not have make the most sense, but the point is that everybody’s having fun. If you can get past the idea that Cha-based DMs are willing to blithely throw out things about the system that you’ve been using for years, the biggest issue is that the world around the players can take on a life of its own, far bigger than they can hope to manage.

For example, let’s say a player wants to incapacitate an opponent from far away by shooting their clothing and pinning it to the wall. It’s not an uncommon trope, and the target certainly has some loose clothing to pin. An Int-based DM might disallow it, on the ground that there’s a feat for this (Ranged Pin, Complete Warrior) and letting a player duplicate the feat without having it means the feat is meaningless. Clearly, the designers wants this to require some extra character investment. A Wis-based DM might allow it, but only on a sufficiently good roll, like a critical hit or the target’s AC with a bonus, and even then the target can remove the error on their own turn. Clearly, this is something that should be possible and it doesn’t break the game with these additional restrictions. A Cha-based DM might allow it outright as long as the player can make the shot, perhaps even the target’s AC with a penalty. Clearly, it’s easier to hit a wizard’s robe than the one bit of exposed skin on a fighter, and what the player wants to to is dynamic and cinematic.

None of these DMs are wrong. There is a feat that allows ranged pinning, and generally players shouldn’t be able to ignore restrictions like that at will (or else you probably want a more freeform system). A character should have to be a very good archer to pull off a shot like this, or else players and NPCs would be doing it all the time. Cinematic play is fun, and usually out-of-the-box thinking should be rewarded to encourage creativity. And all of the DMs would probably agree that an arrow that does 1d6-1 damage is going to have a hard time penetrating a steel wall deep enough to trap an enemy’s stray fabric. Each response leads to a different style of game and encourages a different type of player and a different style of thinking, but D&D is built to handle all of them, often in the same room.

In fact, the system is usually more robust than the people who use it. All of these styles have one significant downside, and it’s that they’re each most comfortable with players that act the same way. An Int-based DM doesn’t really want a thespian trying to rewrite base classes and spin the story in hilarious ways, and a Cha-based DM doesn’t want a strict player who gets upset whenever the rules are violated and doesn’t have the patience for nonessential quests and NPCs. And any Wis-based DM who has had both a performer and a rules lawyer in the same party knows exactly how hard it is to balance the two. The easy solution is to make sure that your players act the same way you do, but that’s about as stupid as it is lazy. Not only is it nearly impossible to cherry-pick players that way, but you end up depriving yourself of the experience of dealing with other personalities and the fun differing styles being to the table.

I actually started as an Int-based DM, and I retain a lot of my rules knowledge from then. By the time I finished my third campaign, I was Wis-based, and somewhere during my current campaign I moved to Cha-based, which is where I’m pretty happy. Over the years, I’ve managed to hit the highs and lows of each style of DMing before settling on what I’m currently doing. The good part is that I can DM in the moment, often pointedly planning as little as possible for a session, but with some sort of consistent overarching story and the understanding (or, if I can manage it, cooperation) of my players. I also still have all of the information I gathered from when information mattered more to me, do I don’t have to consult a reference table or make a wild guess when asked about the hardness of wood (it’s 5). The bad part is that my Cha-based method of designing and acting out NPCs has actually exacerbated my Int-based issues with players failing to remember them, and at this point I expect (almost require) my players to at least try some performance as well.

For reference, I would let the player take the shot. I would however remind them that the enemies function under the same rules and can do anything the players can, then let another player make their own impassioned plea on why giving enemies the ability to trap half the party from a hundred feet away is a terrible idea. Little diverts a player’s aim more effectively than the threat of reciprocity.

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Secondary Skills

Posted on 16 January, 2012 by Law

I have plenty of complaints about the skill system in 4th, but the thing I missed the most is the skills that fell by the wayside. I understand rolling skills like Listen, Spot, and Search into Perception, and I don’t lose a lot of sleep over that. I’m talking about the skills that are wholly missing from the system, like Profession and Craft. There’s not any way in 4th Edition for, say, a bard to be any better at music than a paladin with an equivalent Charisma.

I could rant for ages on why I miss these skills, what this means for characters in 4th Edition, and why this change is bad (and I have!). However, it’s awfully boring to just listen to me complain, so instead I’d like to put forth an optional rule, secondary skills, designed to fill in the gaps left by the skill system.

The types of secondary skills are described below:

  • Appraise – Intelligence: You can gauge the price and quality of an item within a narrow margin. This is for determining the cost of something non-magical, such as a gem, a work animal, a rare piece of art.
  • Craft (any one) – Intelligence: You are trained in a craft, trade, or art, such as alchemy, basketweaving, blacksmithing, leatherworking, shipmaking, stonemasonry, or something similar.
  • Handle Animal (any group)– Charisma: You can use body language and intuition to train or influence the actions of a group of creature that could not be influenced by a normal Diplomacy check, like housepets, insects, livestock, or marine mammals.
  • Knowledge (any one) – Intelligence: You are versed in a particular, narrow field of study, such as engineering, geography, mathematics, fashion, the culture of a specific region, or something similar.
  • Perform (any one) – Charisma: You are skilled in a type of artistic expression, such as acting, comedy, dancing, singing, or playing instruments.
  • Profession (any one) – Wisdom: You are trained in a non-manufacturing livelihood, such as boater, cook, farmer, fisher, miner, shopkeeper, or something similar.

For the most part, a secondary skill check is the same as an ability check using the relevant ability score, plus half of the character’s level. Also, a character can gain training in secondary skills, which gives them the normal +5 bonus to checks using that secondary skill. A character can train in a number of secondary skills equal to their Intelligence modifier (not counting half of the character’s level).

Importantly, these skills can not be used perform actions better covered by a normal skill. For example, Knowledge (religion) is not a good idea, because Religion already does the same thing, and the point of the secondary skills is not to effectively gain more trained skills than a character should have. One idea, though, is to represent a narrow focus. Knowledge (nature) is bad, but perhaps Knowledge (poisonous plants) could work for an assassin. There’s also some leeway in here for specificity and relative success. A player who rolls a 15 on Knowledge (desert creatures) should get less information than a player who rolls a 15 on Knowledge (scorpions), though the latter skill is not useful for identifying vultures.

This is intended to work almost outside of the normal system, complimenting it rather than changing it. Secondary skills should not be prerequisites for feats or paragon paths. A character can find or make items that give bonuses to secondary skill checks as for normal skill checks, if a character is sufficiently determined. The idea is to add another tool to make characters into people more than bundles of stats and power, and I don’t see any reason to add additional restrictions to the game based on secondary skill choice. More than anything, it’s a way to leverage a character’s non-adventuring life, something that really doesn’t exist in 4th Edition.

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The Seven Party Roles (Examples)

Posted on 27 December, 2011 by Law

So what does it mean to have roles that aren’t defined by the system? In 4th Edition, a fighter is a defender. Though you can build one with striking or controlling, it’s a rare fighter that doesn’t function at all as a defender. Rogues are always strikers and never defenders. Wizards are always controllers and very rarely strikers. None of these classes are ever leaders. 4th Edition is designed so that almost everybody of the same class serves the same role in slightly different ways, and everybody with the same role does similar things in similar ways (there’s a reason every leader gets two minor action bursts at first level that grant a healing surge).

3rd Edition and Pathfinder don’t have explicit roles assigned to classes, so what classes are good at what roles? This is where I really like the freedom of these systems, because just about any class can be just about any role. Some are certainly better than others, but any character can do almost anything (except healing). As an example, let’s look at the druid, one of the most versatile classes in the game, to see how well they work:

  • Control — At 1st level, druids gain the spell entangle, which is probably the strongest low-level control effect in the game. As they level, they continue gaining area effects that change the battlefield, slowing or damaging enemies and keeping their allies safe. They can also convert their spells into summoning, to put large walls of meat anywhere on the field.
  • Damage — A druid has no limit on the number of creatures it can summon or control, and five magical allies can do a startling amount of damage each turn. A druid can also transform into an animal and attack enemies directly, and they get the occasional spell like flame strike that rivals sorcerers for sheer damage.
  • Defense — They have an armor restriction and no class bonuses, so the average druid isn’t fantastic at defense. They do, however, have a fantastic amount of buffing spells, probably second only to the cleric, and a prepared or smart druid can protect themselves perfectly in almost any situation. Then add the defense bonuses from wild shape.
  • Diplomacy — Druids have some difficulty here, because they lack interaction skills as class skills and Charisma is not one of their primary ability scores. However, Pathfinder has no restriction on how players are allowed to spend their skills. A druid can put all of their skill points into Diplomacy, Sense Motive, and Bluff, and all they lose is the +3 class skill bonus, which they can counter with the feat Skill Focus. They also gain wild empathy, giving them the rare ability to engage in diplomacy with unintelligent beasts.
  • Healing — Druids gain cure spells more slowly than a cleric, because they have cure moderate wounds as a 3rd-level spell rather than 2nd, and all later cures are similarly delayed. But this only sets them back about 4.5 hit points per cure, and a high-level druid isn’t all that harmed by this. They also have the effect-healing spells one would expect, like neutralize poison, remove disease, and restoration.
  • Nature — Druids are nature specialists. Their class skills are based on nature, their spells manipulate nature, their class abilities make them better in nature, and their summons and wild shape simulate nature.
  • Stealth — Druids have something like the same problem here as with Diplomacy, since stealth skills are not class skills for them. But their wild shape allows them to change into creatures better suited for stealth, including animals that can fly, and their spells are better suited to hiding than interaction. At 3rd level, a druid is even immune to being tracked in natural environments.

Notably, few of these roles are mutually exclusive. A druid can’t put all of their skills into diplomacy, nature, and stealth, but they can certainly put their skills into stealth, prepare spells for healing or control, and use wild shape to deal damage. Most characters can and should handle multiple roles.

This is all well and good for a versatile class, but what about others? Let’s look at the barbarian, the greatest one-trick pony in the cole rules:

  • Control — There’s no reason a barbarian can’t wield a reach weapon, giving them better control over nearby enemies. Add the feat Combat Reflexes and proficiency with the spiked chain, and a barbarian can deal a terrifying amount of damage to anybody that walks nearby. Large barbarians, like ones under the effect of the spell enlarge person, are even scarier.
  • Damage — Barbarians rage, which is second only to sneak attack for a class ability capable of dealing tons of damage. Most barbarians are perfectly happy taking a defense penalty to hit scary things hard with large weapons.
  • Defense — It seems weird to play a barbarian that explicitly never uses their rage power, though in 3rd Edition that’s the best way to be a defender. Luckily, Pathfinder includes a number of rage abilities that make barbarians capable defenders, like beast totem, boasting taunt, and guarded stance. They also have a staggering number of hit points, letting them stay standing for far longer than they should be.
  • Diplomacy — Playing a diplomat barbarian is hard, for largely the same reasons as druids. Barbarians are also likely to make Charisma and Intelligence their lowest scores, so they aren’t good at talking and don’t have many skill points to make up for it. But a sufficiently dedicated player can make a barbarian who can talk, even if their preferred method of talking is shouting intimidatingly.
  • Healing — Barbarians can’t heal. Most classes, in fact, can’t. They can take ranks in Heal, carry potions, and keep magic items that allow limited healing, but they’ll never cast a healing spell. This is the only role that not every class can fill, and this is why.
  • Nature — Barbarians are about as good at nature as any class can be without class abilities that focus on it. Though they often prefer to use their skill points on mobility and shouting, a barbarian with Int 6 can still have good Knowledge (nature), great Survival, and the Track feat at 1st level.
  • Stealth — To be stealthy, barbarians have to spend skill points they rarely have on skills that don’t like them very much. Dexterity is also a non-primary ability score for barbarians, and they can’t transform like the druid. It is, however, possible, and there’s little more satisfying than seeing the seven-foot-tall musclebound berserker quietly sneaking his way into a hilarious location before starting to rage.

I’ll admit that this does make building a party a bit hard. In 4th Edition, you can say “we have two strikers, a controller, and a leader”, and everybody knew what was missing. In Pathfinder, saying “we have a druid, a fighter, and a monk” doesn’t tell the whole story. I’ve personally been burned on this, when I heard that a party had a druid and thus didn’t consider playing a healer. After the second time I died in three months, I switched to a real healer, letting the druid continue dealing damage and controlling.

Generally, I’ve been happiest letting players play whatever they want, pointing out at the end which roles were missing and seeing which characters could cover them best. I have no idea how this will work in a Delve Night setting. It’s probably best to bring whatever makes sense and just deal with missing a role or two in the first few weeks.

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