Crwth’s last post got me to thinking. Namely his allusion to the onset of tedium in the official WotC module we’re going through.
I’m not privy to the details of the module, and as much as I’d love to, I can’t go and read through to see if we’re just in a combat heavy section, or if it opens up into more roleplay heavy section soon. I dunno.
I would like to give the benefit of the doubt to the module though. The storyline so far has been intriguing (although I’ve had to suspend reality a lot when it comes to the design of the keep. Just the physical layout as we’ve seen it strikes me as really stoopid for a defensive fort.) The recent plot twist of another group in the nearby mountains definitely grabbed my attention. The encounters have also been very interesting with terrain and monster powers being put to great use.
That aside, I’ve been feeling the slogging tedium of late. It's so bad that I almost dread combat now and find myself pushing for the group to ignore obvious XP and loot farming for avenues that I hope will lead to furthering the story.
I love XP and loot!
So what the hell is going on here!?
My current theory lays the blame on the powers. Especially the “At Will” ones. For me, they have just about sucked every ounce of fun from the game. There’s no more resource management or planning involved. It’s just a matter of looking at the grid, picking out a cluster of bad guys, and dropping a Scorching Burst. Next round? Same thing. Or maybe I’ll toss out an Encounter Power just for shits’n’giggles.
As much as I love the glut of feats our characters get, and the ritual system, I’m really missing the old 3.5 feats and spellcasting system. It was just, more fun. Fourth edition, for all it’s simplicity, and for all the huge improvements, isn’t as much fun for me.
I want to hold out and give 4e longer than the three months it’s had. I want to see the next round of books (and my glimpse at the Player’s Guide to FR was encouraging) but I don’t know if I’m gonna make it. Right now I’m almost to the point where I’m ready to push for a d20 Modern campaign. Or a return to 3.5.
Or, I guess I could blame the DM. ;-)
Showing posts with label terrain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrain. Show all posts
Monday, September 29, 2008
Monday, September 15, 2008
Solo monsters
Last night the party faced its first solo monster, and I have to say that it fits the bill nicely.
Without giving anything away, in case readers are adventuring through the same quest as we are, this solo encounter also made good use of terrain, one of the directions that 4e is putting more attention to. I think the creature's early attacks let the party know quite quickly that this wasn't a trivial encounter, and the action points and daily powers got spent a little more freely. Additionally, the "benefit" of fighting a solo monster is that you're pretty sure that ANY time is the right time to use your encounter powers.
The party survived, though we had one member drop unconscious, and even with the complication of the terrain, I think the battle played out well. I also think that this was the most cohesive battle this party has executed, though again that might have been because there was only one target for everyone to concentrate on.
The party has just hit level three with this encounter, so we've certainly not done 4e full justice yet, but I'll admit that with each session, there's that one little thing that 4e does right that gets noticed. That's not to say that there aren't some 4e things that still irritate us, but as we play through, into higher levels, some of the design decisions we may have questioned or failed to comprehend are becoming clearer. Specifically, how to use powers to turn a creature into a Solo foe was revealed -- well, to the DM, anyway.
Without giving anything away, in case readers are adventuring through the same quest as we are, this solo encounter also made good use of terrain, one of the directions that 4e is putting more attention to. I think the creature's early attacks let the party know quite quickly that this wasn't a trivial encounter, and the action points and daily powers got spent a little more freely. Additionally, the "benefit" of fighting a solo monster is that you're pretty sure that ANY time is the right time to use your encounter powers.
The party survived, though we had one member drop unconscious, and even with the complication of the terrain, I think the battle played out well. I also think that this was the most cohesive battle this party has executed, though again that might have been because there was only one target for everyone to concentrate on.
The party has just hit level three with this encounter, so we've certainly not done 4e full justice yet, but I'll admit that with each session, there's that one little thing that 4e does right that gets noticed. That's not to say that there aren't some 4e things that still irritate us, but as we play through, into higher levels, some of the design decisions we may have questioned or failed to comprehend are becoming clearer. Specifically, how to use powers to turn a creature into a Solo foe was revealed -- well, to the DM, anyway.
Monday, June 2, 2008
DMG - Building Encounters
The chapter starts off with Monster Roles, a popular topic of discussion here, and right off it starts off poorly:
This would explain the problems I had while trying to figure out some of the numbers between the classes and the monsters that we've seen so far. It's a shame that they designed this brand-new system of terminology and couldn't work their way around ambiguous naming.
It didn't occur to me before, but the idea of the Elite monster, which counts as two monsters of its level, and the whole idea of putting together an encounter based on the roles of the monsters, is a lot like spending the points in D&D Miniatures to put together your warband.
I've posted before about the difficulty I've had with some adventures, trying to provide enough encounters of enough value so the story can progress with the characters at an appropriate level (provided they survive), and how 4e seemed to have solved this with their various monster roles and level mixing. No more will I be putting four CR5 creatures together to make an EL4 encounter. Assuming the playtesting has revealed that their numbers work -- that four minions are equal to a regular monster, and that a solo monster is equal to five regular monsters -- encounter creation should be a lot easier and a lot more fun.
There is a good handful of templates that seem useful for newer DMs, and in fact, I might use them myself once in a while. They do the math for you, figuring out how many of what kinds of roles you want to make up a variety of encounter types, from Commander and Troops to Wolf Pack. I just hope that people don't stick to these templates religiously to the point that a player can count the number of foes and say "this is either a standard difficulty Commander and Troops encounter, or a hard difficulty Double Line encounter."
Terrain is being emphasized as a large part of any encounter. I think this is another case of Miniatures leaking into the game (without terrain in Miniatures, you'd have a pretty dull game). But terrain is definitely something that should be considered more than it was in the past. As pointed out in this chapter, encounter after encounter in a 20'x40' room (that's right -- feet, not squares) as you go through a dungeon will get boring quickly. I've always tried using blocking terrain in my encounter design, whether it's pillars in a dungeon or trees in a forest, but haven't given much thought to difficult terrain, challenging terrain, hindering terrain, etc. Remembering this chapter will be valuable for future adventure designs. There's also a nice list of "fantastic terrain", such as Choke Frost and Ember Moss which allow you to spice things up a bit more.
In the context of monsters roles (here and elsewhere in the game rules), the terms "controller" and "leader" have meanings and applications that are different from the class roles of controller and leader, as described in Chapter 4 of the Player's Handbook.
This would explain the problems I had while trying to figure out some of the numbers between the classes and the monsters that we've seen so far. It's a shame that they designed this brand-new system of terminology and couldn't work their way around ambiguous naming.
It didn't occur to me before, but the idea of the Elite monster, which counts as two monsters of its level, and the whole idea of putting together an encounter based on the roles of the monsters, is a lot like spending the points in D&D Miniatures to put together your warband.
I've posted before about the difficulty I've had with some adventures, trying to provide enough encounters of enough value so the story can progress with the characters at an appropriate level (provided they survive), and how 4e seemed to have solved this with their various monster roles and level mixing. No more will I be putting four CR5 creatures together to make an EL4 encounter. Assuming the playtesting has revealed that their numbers work -- that four minions are equal to a regular monster, and that a solo monster is equal to five regular monsters -- encounter creation should be a lot easier and a lot more fun.
There is a good handful of templates that seem useful for newer DMs, and in fact, I might use them myself once in a while. They do the math for you, figuring out how many of what kinds of roles you want to make up a variety of encounter types, from Commander and Troops to Wolf Pack. I just hope that people don't stick to these templates religiously to the point that a player can count the number of foes and say "this is either a standard difficulty Commander and Troops encounter, or a hard difficulty Double Line encounter."
Terrain is being emphasized as a large part of any encounter. I think this is another case of Miniatures leaking into the game (without terrain in Miniatures, you'd have a pretty dull game). But terrain is definitely something that should be considered more than it was in the past. As pointed out in this chapter, encounter after encounter in a 20'x40' room (that's right -- feet, not squares) as you go through a dungeon will get boring quickly. I've always tried using blocking terrain in my encounter design, whether it's pillars in a dungeon or trees in a forest, but haven't given much thought to difficult terrain, challenging terrain, hindering terrain, etc. Remembering this chapter will be valuable for future adventure designs. There's also a nice list of "fantastic terrain", such as Choke Frost and Ember Moss which allow you to spice things up a bit more.
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