Adventuring at our own pace

Our group has been playing 4e since it was released, which has been for, what, fourteen months? Our party is level four.

At this rate, if I don't kill the party outright, we'll have explored the field to thirtieth level by 2018. We'll have missed Fifth edition by then, but might be willing to try 5.5.

Instead, I've proposed to our group that I start doubling the XP per encounter; this means reducing the number of encounters by half, of course, so the party doesn't advance beyond the challenges. This is actually quite tricky when it comes to the Wizards pre-made modules, because the "dungeons" are laid out in a way that all of the encounters matter -- they aren't there just to give the party something to do from point A to point B. And it's not as simple as just cutting each encounter in half, because the challenge is no longer there.

But why are we doing it? Again, to see the higher levels of 4e in our lifetime; whether that's to determine whether we'll stick with 4e at all (after having given it a fair shake) or just to finish a campaign and start up a new, homemade one, depends on who you ask in our group.


Not that I'm in a hurry to abandon the Wizards pre-made modules. As Griff just mentioned, the treasure is much more balanced -- according to their own rules! -- than the 3.5 modules. I started to feel really bad for sticking to the 3.5 modules as written. I will be adding an item or two, and a little treasure, to this current adventure, just to pad it up to the "parcel" level described in the DM's Guide, but it's not a huge addition -- if we had a party of five characters, I might very well not do it, but since we're six, it's a little more noticeable.

One of the things I'm enjoying, as we advance through these modules, is getting to play new monsters. Griff and I have both mentioned how we like the new monster design, where many of them have that signature power or ability, like the kobold's shiftiness, or the hobgoblin's phalanx. It's one thing to read it in a book, but it's another to put it to practice (if you remember, that is).

In fact, I was actually disappointed last session when one of the new monsters, a dire wolf (oops -- forgot to mention it was dire, did I, guys?) never got to use its signature ability. Griff even posited that the creature should have been able to knock the characters prone, and to watch for it, but the triggering environment for that ability, which the dire wolf does indeed have, never occurred. Good for you, young party of adventurers!


Also from our last session, there was one of those moments that sticks in the minds of the players for years to come (such as my cleric getting attacked by every animated object we encountered, a party member using a rod of lightning through the whole party "for the greater good", the aforementioned cleric, heavily clad in armor, crossing a rickety bridge safely, while his lightly-armoured companions behind collapse into the fast-flowing waters, one losing their prized magical rapier...)

A hobgoblin ran up a flight of stairs and leaped upon the back of said dire wolf in a flourish, landing and firing an arrow in one fluid motion -- only to be hit by Griff's wizard/fighter hybrid with a thunderwave spell, unceremoniously dumping the hobgoblin from the back of the wolf, tumbling down the stairs, landing flat on his ass. Perhaps the rest of the group won't remember it as I do, but the visualization of that sure stuck in my mind. And this is why I play this game.

The detail is in the devil

I know what they're doing... they know that the pit fiend is one of my iconic monsters from my experience computing monster stats, and they're just trying to suck up. But it won't work. Will it?


Pit Fiend Level 26 Elite Soldier (Leader)

We've known for a while now that it was coming, but this just reeks of a computer RPG stat, not our loving D&D. Level 26 - CR was something that belonged to D&D, and now we're just levels for everything. Elite Soldier. Leader. I could go on and on about the roles, but Griff has done that justice. Time to embrace it -- it's here to stay.

Large immortal humanoid (devil). Outsiders are now immortal humanoids - I think we knew that. Are they all? Does the "humanoid" portion of that type mean that they're more susceptible to spells and effects that target humanoids?

XP 18,000. Hrm. For everybody? Regardless of their level? The XP chart in 3.5 was needed to represent the Law of Diminishing Returns in a levelling-up game. If the XP granted upon defeating a monster is fixed, then grinding becomes a possibility in D&D: "Hey, let's go wipe out a few planes of Hell so we can all level up and get an extra feat!"

Initiative, Senses, Auras. All nice and familiar. "aura 5"? Just kill me now -- I'm sure that's "5 squares".

HP 350; Bloodied 175. I actually like this idea of "bloodied", where the monster gains/loses certain abilities based on how wounded they are. It does make me worry a little about that "line" -- if I smack the pit fiend down to 170hp, and realize I've given him some extra-nasty ability (I have to wait until below to see what those might be), can I actually heal him to take back that ability, until my party's ready to wipe out that last 175hp in one big attack?

AC, Fortitude, Reflex, Will. Phew -- I think I'd have to kill someone if they decided saving throws had to change.

Saving Throws +2. A bonus? Then why not just add them in to the above numbers? Curious.

Speed/fly/teleport - will I ever get used to this squares terminology? Should I just switch the D&D Miniatures now and throw my pencil away for good?

Action Points 1. Well good on you, pit fiend! Why should players be the only ones that get to have those.


They've changed the layout of the attacks a bit, but they're readable. The to-hit is interesting to see - "+31 vs. AC". It is what it has always been, but it's actually nice to see if standardized in this way. What I don't like about this new attack format is that it's not consistent with spelling out the source of the attack. The first one says

Melee Flametouched Mace (standard; at-will) • Fire, Weapon

Okay, good, it has Weapon on the end there. But the next one has

Melee Tail Sting (standard; at-will) • Poison

with no sign of "Natural Weapon" or anything. How do I tell the difference between that and

Melee Pit Fiend Frenzy (standard; at-will)

where as far as I know, "Tail Sting" is just a special attack that the pit fiend does, and doesn't really mean that it involves his tail at all. Perhaps it's just an oversight, and there should be a Natural Weapon on that one, but if not, they're losing some consistency in their drive to label everything (which, don't get me wrong, I'm all for).

The Flametouched Mace and Tail Sting have "Fire" and "Poison" respectively, and both mention that a save ends the effects, but there's no in-line mention of what the save DC (if that's even a concept in 4e) is. Perhaps it's later on, but statblocks are meant to be concise sources of information, and that's some pretty important info.

Ranged Point of Terror (minor; at-will) • Fear
Range 5; +30 vs. Will; the target takes a –5 penalty to all defenses until the end of the pit fiend's next turn.

I think it has been mentioned before, but I'm old and forgetful - "to all defenses" means to saves as well, doesn't it? "Minor"? Is that like a free/immediate/I've-lost-track-of-them-all kind of action?

Ranged Irresistible Command (minor 1/round; at-will) • Charm, Fire
Range 10; affects one allied devil of lower level than the pit fiend; the target immediately slides up to 5 squares and explodes, dealing 2d10+5 fire damage to all creatures in a close burst 2. The exploding devil is destroyed.

Cooool. Well, except for the "slides" bit. Is this some sort of miniature terminology, where "slide" requires an unobstructed path, yadda yadda? "close burst"? I'm sure it affects how it works around obstacles, etc.

Infernal Summons (standard; encounter) • Conjuration
The pit fiend summons a group of devil allies. Summoned devils roll initiative to determine when they act in the initiative order and gain a +4 bonus to attack rolls as long as the pit fiend is alive. They remain until they are killed, dismissed by the pit fiend (free action), or the encounter ends. PCs do not earn experience points for killing these summoned creatures.

Interesting about the initiative. Scary about the +4 bonus. I'd saddened that they have to spell out that the PCs do not earn XP for them -- this is a rule about summoned creatures, and is just going to take up line after line throughout every book that the idea appears in.

Tactical Teleport (standard; recharge 4 5 6) • Teleportation

I can guess what "recharge 4 5 6" means, but what happens after the third use? Does it stay at 6 rounds to recharge? Does it run out? Does it start back at 4?

Alignment: Evil. I remember hearing that alignment was changing -- does this mean no second axis?

Languages: Supernal? Superwhat?

Skills: Religion +24. I have to admit, dumping the Knowledge (xxx) style makes programming D&D a bit easier (you had to handle "subtype" for skills). Have they done the same for Profession, Crafting and Perform?

Str 32 (+24) Dex 24 (+20) Wis 20 (+18)
Con 27 (+21) Int 22 (+19) Cha 28 (+22)

This is interesting. So much for ((ability - 10) / 2) for bonus? Now it's (ability / 2) + 8? Okay... I wonder if they'll explain the reasoning? It gets my developer sense tingling!


Darn. No mention of what happens when the pit fiend is bloodied. Over all, I'm happy with this; it's still the pit fiend, and none of the things we've gleaned from this block have upset me any more than I already was (about squares and roles and ...)

Christmas elves - just in time for Valentine's Day?

Wow, what a slow month. Okay, sure, real-life has gotten in the way, and the lack of informative posts by Wizards doesn't help, but I have to embarrassingly admit that I haven't finished reading the Races and Classes sneak-peak book yet, which might have something to talk about.

It also doesn't help that I rely on the Wizards RSS feed to tell me about new articles being posted - silly me, thinking that something like that might be correctly set up. But no, I've now missed two Ampersand articles because of this.

Oh, and did I mention that I haven't seen a developer blog for about a month, because they've gone and made a mess of Gleemax yet again? No? A shame I haven't mentioned that...

But this isn't just a post to gripe. I don't think. Let's go look at the that missed Ampersand article and see.


The older article was on the elf racial block from 4e, apparently a Christmas gift from Bill Slavicsek -- one that he forgot to put the name tag on. Or even wrap in wrapping paper. No ribbon. Shoved behind the tree.

Let's see: height, weight, ability scores (extra wisdom, no constitution penalty - very nice), size, speed... let me help you out here, since if you're a D&D fan, you're obviously mathematically challenged and can't do feet-to-square conversion on your own. 7 squares = 35 feet. Interesting that they've gone against the grain with units of ten.

Vision, languages, skill bonuses: +2 Nature, +2 Perception. Okay, we've seen that Perception is the new Spot/Search/Listen/whatever, but Nature? Is that the old Survival? No, wait, it was Wilderness Lore. No, wait, Knowledge (Nature)? Huh.

But here we go. Elven Accuracy (Elf Racial Power). Encounter/Free Action/Personal - so per-encounter, the timing/speed of it, and the range of effect. Nice and clear. "Reroll an attack roll. Use the second roll, even if it's lower." Not too bad, not too powerful.

Wild Step: You ignore difficult terrain when you shift (even if you have a power that allows you to shift multiple squares).

Perhaps I've lost track of things, but "shift"? Is that like a five-foot step, but now possibly multiple squares five-feets if you know what you're doing?

Group awareness is interesting, and I'm sure it will be continually forgotten. It's bad enough trying to remember that you're under the effect of a bard song in the current rules -- who's going to remember that they have an elf in their party, that it matters, and that they might be close enough to get a bonus?

Elven Precision [Elf]. Prerequisites are "elf" and "elven accuracy racial power" and "heroic tier". Don't the "elf" and "elven accuracy racial power" go together? Or are they still blurring the lines between the name of a race and the subtype, so a drow might still be "elf" for satisfying prerequisites, but might now have "elven accuracy"?

All in all, mildly informative, and it looks like they've kept the elf recognizable. Huzzah?

Smite for the camera

Twice in one week! The latest Design & Development article has yet more sneak-peeking into the 4th edition mechanics.

These info blocks that appear in the article give us an idea of the layout of special abilities that are available in 4th edition. The third line,

Encounter • Weapon

seems to say when the ability can be used (or perhaps the type of "per" power it is, per-day, per-encounter, etc.) and how the ability is used. I'm hoping that the format is still in transition - having just a dot between two words doesn't really lend itself to understanding to the casual player.

The

Melee weapon

line is reminiscent of the latest stat block (with their lack of colons). So Melee means it's a melee ability (and implies that it's an attack? Or that this is the range? Or some other use of "melee" as a term in 4e?) and that, err, it's still a weapon. An example where the Weapon in the third line and the weapon in the fifth line weren't the same might give some insight to each of their meanings.

Attack: Charisma vs. AC

(Oh look, the colon is back.) This is interesting, and grows from the idea of static saves, as discussed previously. Attack rolls have been merged in with saves and probably difficulty checks, to be all the same style of check. I'm assuming that the "Charisma attack" mentioned in the text block isn't just what 3rd edition would call a Charisma check, unless armor class calculations have changed; somehow the base attack needs to be added in there, unless of course that has gone by the wayside.

I don't know what I think of the Hit: and Miss: labels. I think I prefer the old succeed/fail nomenclature that you would see with skills and such. For abilities that aren't combat-specific, they're going to have other terms anyway, so why not share them? Especially if you've turned to-hit into a difficulty check.

I like the idea of the damage calculation:

Hit: 2x[W] + Cha

But not the notation. It works fine for geeks like me, but I'm hoping it's going to get reworded a little better. One interesting point is that that's the weapon's base damage, no strength, or other bonuses that might arise.

The Hit-or-Miss text says "an ally", which then gets amended to include the paladin itself, which is just a nitpick, but I don't think of myself as an ally.

Wow, all that from the first block.

Encounter • Healing, Weapon 

Okay, so everything after the dot is a ... subtype? And Encounter is the type? That might make sense, but I think I preferred the older bracketed method, and would want

Renewing Smite [Encounter • Healing, Weapon]

Nitpick? Perhaps, but what was broken with the old style?


Seeing Paladin 27 on the third smite made me pause for a second, having briefly forgotten about the 30-level base to 4th edition.

Here we see

Attack: Charisma vs. Will

which is like the old-style saving throws (many people, unless having done monster design, don't realize that the DC of effects is based on an attribute). With the static saves, the rolling is now done by the "attacker" instead of the defender in third edition. I'm starting to warm to this. Again, it's not clear whether there's a base attack that gets thrown in, because now you wouldn't expect it in a "saving throw" versus a "to-hit". Is there some base 10 that gets added into saves? Are the numbers completely different from what we've become accustomed? Are we going to feel disoriented as those coming from THAC0 did when going to d20?

"cannot gain line of effect". Does this mean just for targeted effects such as ranged attacks and rays? Or does this somehow prevent cones and area effects from affecting anyone but the paladin? And interesting ability regardless. Interesting that it's also until the end of your next turn, where in 3rd edition we got used to "the start of your next turn" as the usual mantra.


As usual, this glimmer of 4e has created more questions than answers, but it does show us that June is getting that much closer.