Paragons

As I mentioned before, we had a party wipe, and the decision was made that we would start our new campaign at 11th level, to see what more-advanced 4e characters were like in this edition; note that we have been playing 4e since it was released, and we died at fifth level. That should give you a sense of our pace, and of the likelihood of us having ever seen paragon tier "naturally". In fact, for the last three or four sessions, we had moved to half-the-encounters, twice-the-XP, just to try to ramp up our advancement. So much for that.

So what have we learned about the paragon tier so far?

Well, making a character is easy, which we knew: levelling up in 4e is almost trivial, since you make very few choices as you go, and the range of choice, while growing with the splat books that are coming out, is still small. However: choosing is one thing, knowing what you've chosen, during play, is another. Starting at 11th level is far different than advancing to 11th level -- as you advance, you get to know your powers at each level, only introducing one, at most, as you go. Maybe a new feat. Maybe a new magic item with a daily power. But you still have a whole level of adventure to get used to this newly available power. When you start at 11th level, especially with a class you've never looked at before (and remember, we've all only played on other 4e character), you've got a dozen or more powers available to you. Additionally, starting at a higher level means you start with magic items, again, likely ones you've never seen before, so have new abilities and modifiers there.

I do wonder how much of our tardiness was due to the new class, and how much to the large clump of new powers. While powers do define what you can do, in the end, the class does define the role, and thus gives you an overall sense of how your character is likely best played. Switching that up -- I went from a Leader to a Striker -- is quite the change (until, I'm sure, you've played them all, perhaps a few times), so we might have seen the same lack of coordination if we were to have started at 1st level with these characters. But I think we'd all agree that we would have caught on a lot faster, with just a couple of at-wills to get to know.


Two of our group was missing last night, but we decided that the party, sans deux, would tackle the first encounter without them, to take our new characters for a spin; if they won the battle, well hurray for them -- the other two would join the party later; if they died (because they were only four in an encounter designed for a party of five), then we'd press Undo, say, "that was fun", and wait until the rest of the group was available to really start the campaign, and re-do that encounter (without any metaknowledge of course!)

The reasons I wanted to do this were to let us get to know our new characters (which, as I mentioned above, is a real necessity), as well as to see if, as I believe the intent is, a paragon encounter takes no longer than a heroic one -- it's just more interesting, more involved.


Because of our struggles with our new powers and items, it's hard to say whether that test passed or failed; as the DM, I can attest that these paragon-level NPCs were no more difficult or time-consuming to run, but that's only half of the equation. And, our heroic battles could take many hours anyway (I've yet to decide if that's just us, or the game).

In the end, we halted the battle because it was after 2am, and we weren't going to finish it soon. We weren't losing, we were gaining ground, and I think we certainly would have won -- but not before a few of us would be waking to our children. And if we thought we were fighting trolls last night, we could easily imagine the trolls our wives would have been had we been up 'til 5am fighting them.

This is Epic?

A bit more on the PHB2.

For starters, I can see now why they include classes like the Shaman, Warden, and Warlord. For sure those "classes" are pale variants on stronger classes, but I can't say that they're not necessary. We need as many of these banal tweaks as we can get so that we can find something that closely fits most any character concept.

A ranger might not be quite right so there's the Warden. A druid kinda makes sense but the Shaman has powers that are better suited. Etc...

I still hate the idea of that, but I understand the design now.

I love the Paragon Paths. The more of these that come out in each book the better. They are really the one and only thing to look forward to. The one meaningful decision in your character's career.

So much for Rob Heinsoo's goal of widening the sweet spot. What they really did was set the Paragon Tier as the de facto sweet spot.

That's most obvious when you look at the Epic Paths. My god they suck! I mean, seriously suck. There is absolutely nothing there to look forward to. For any class.

Epic levels should bring epic choices. This is the time when we should be weighing every decision in light of our character's goals. We're talking heroic destiny here.

Yet we get repetitive drop-this-power-and-select-from-three-of-these-to-replace-it decisions. If you want to call that a decision.

Maybe they'll address that in PHB3. Or in some Epic Powers add-on. Or both. What better way to ensure that we drop another $50 into WotC's coffers?

Oh wait. They have already found a better way to snag our money. By putting core rules in "optional" source books.

How else does one explain the fact that they still didn't address double weapons in the PHB2? If double weapons had been overlooked or cut from the original PHB, well, so be it. Adding them in to the PHB2 would have been a reasonable remedy.

Instead they put the rules for double weapons in the Adventurer's Vault and nowhere else. If you want those rules, dig out your wallet chump.

On the bright side, I'm sure the "Adventurer's Vault" and similar books will have plenty of other good stuff. Enough at least to justify the extra money spent.

Maybe even something epic.