Addressing General Complaints Re: 4e continued

Continuing on from the last post.

4e is more about roll-playing than 3rd edition.

Bullshit I say!

I don't even understand how this claim can be made. Is there a rule in the 4e books that I haven't noticed that says "Thine adventures shall consist of nothing more than combat after endless combat?" or "Speak not with thine DM's NPCs, except to mock them as thine broadsword cleaves they're worthless skulls from their bodies?"

Ok, the above rules would be kind of funny, but they just aren't in there nor are any other rules like it.

Let's compare editions.

3rd Edition social skills: Diplomacy, Bluff, Intimidate, Gather Information, Sense Motive.

(I don't rule Perform as such because by the rules Perform checks simply generated GP... they had no actual effect in social situations.)

4th Edition social skills: Diplomacy, Bluff, Insight, Intimidate, Streetwise.

Hmmm... same number of skills.

3rd Edition Diplomacy = 4e Diplomacy.

3rd Edition Bluff = 4e Bluff.

3rd Edition Intimidate = 4e Intimidate.

3rd Edition Gather Information = 4e Streetwise.

3rd Edition Sense Motive = 4e Insight.

Ok... our skills function the same ofr social situations... Maybe the explanations for the skills in 4e say that they don't work outside of combat?

Bluff: "You make a bluff check to fast-talk, con a merchant, gamble, pass off a disguise, or fake documentation, and otherwise tell lies." (4e PHB, page 183.)

Nope... nothing requiring you to be in combat there, though they DO have rules for using Bluff in combat.

Diplomacy: "Make a Diplomacy check to change opinions, to inspire good will, to haggle with a patron, to demonstrate proper etiquette and decorum, or to negotiate a deal in good faith." (4e PHB, page 183.)

Huh. Not even rules mentioning combat. They DO mention that most Diplomacy checks will take place in Skill Challenges though.

Insight: "You make an insight check to comprehend motives, to read between the lines, to get a sense of moods and attitudes, and to determine how truthful someone is being." (4e PHB, page 185.)

It mentions that using Insight against Bluff in combat is a minor action... but that's it so far as combat goes.

I'm stopping at this point because I think my point about social skills is clear. 4e has the same number, the same uses (actually some of them do more than just social interaction... Insight can determine if an effect is illusionary for instance). And 4e characters have greater access to these skills; Fighters have Streetwise on their class list for instance, not just Intimidate. So now I have a skill meant to represent that my Fighter is competant at chatting people up in bars and town for information!

So how does 4e not facilitate roleplaying? Oh, right, it insists that you ROLL instead of ROLE play... How? Because it doesn't have a "profession" skill? Shit, that's easy. Open up the PHB2 and read the section on Backgrounds... you want to be a carpenter in addition to whatever class you are? Ok... you are! Now exactly what effect do you want that to have on the game?

The real answer is... it doesn't have one. How many times is being a carpenter going to come into play? Or a baker, or anything else that you can't ROLEPLAY THE SITUATION OUT? Having a "Profession" skill just gives you a way to roll situation away.

4e introduces actual rules for REWARDING roleplaying social situations through skill challenges. Wait, you say, those rules just encourage you to roll for results! No. Read the section again. When you make your skill checks the rules encourage you to NARRATE the results. They encourage the DM to prompt players to explain HOW they use a skill for that situation. This is roleplaying. It isn't amateur acting, but it IS playing to a role. It encourages you to use the DM's best friend rule to award a +2 or -2 to the check for creative use of the skill check (like maybe a rousing speech?). And then it tells the DM how they can award XP to a party for going through this social interaction instead of just killing the NPCs and taking their stuff.

They had rules for that in previous editions.... wait, not really. They had "story XP" that you saw in modules, but no real guidelines on how to award it.

If your group wants to run 4e as a skirmish tactical game they can... and it'll be a hell of a lot of fun for your group! If they want to narrate every conversation and ignore skill checks for the results they can, but they won't find rules for it (nor will they in any RPG that I know of). If they want to narrate their social actions and then make a skill check they can.

There's as much roleplaying as there always has been.

End of Demented Rambling.

Addressing General Complaints Re: 4th Edition

Had an online Chat with my friend Josh today where he asked me what I liked about 4th Edition D&D and listed some complaints he had with it. He had to leave to help his girlfriend with something, but I thought I'd address a couple of common issues I've heard agains the newest edition of D&D (not necessarily what Josh addressed, though some of it is the same).

4th Edition is Just a Pen and Paper MMO.

Sorry. I've got to disagree. An accurate statement would be 4th Edition uses terminology made popular by MMOs to help express elements of the game that have always been there. What do I mean? I'll start with the Roles used to define classes in D&D.

If you see the terms Defender, Striker, Leader, and Controller you can certainly draw parallels to things like Tank, Striker, Healer, etc. used by MMOs. The important thing to remember is that Roles do not define what a character is; they define what a class is BEST AT. They are hardly the be-all, end-all of a class. Here's an example.

In most MMOs, if I play a Tank I'm going to be good for only a couple of things: taking hits and pulling aggro to myself. This is because MMOs are limited by the confines of AIs and the inability of the monsters and adversaries to make intelligent decisions. Monsters et al will focus on whomever provokes aggro against them and not against the most logical target.

In D&D there are 4 Defender classes in print at the moment: Fighter, Paladin, Swordmage, and Warden. The Defender role is designed to try to focus attacks on them by forcing enemies to make bad decisions, punishing them if they attack another target. Each class also has another role that they participate in, though they are best at the Defender role.

So take a Fighter. He marks everything he makes an attack roll against, giving the enemy a -2 to any attack roll that does not involve him (or her, to be fair gender-wise) as a target. In addition, any attempt to shift away from the Fighter or attack another target gives the Fighter a free attack against the marked enemy. If the enemy provokes an opportunity attack by moving away from the Fighter (regardless of whether it is marked or not) the Fighter stops its movement if he hits with his opportunity attack, and gets a bonus to hit with those attacks.  In other words, it's like screaming at an enemy "Don't turn your back on me, I'm your real opponent!"

This is NOT the same as pulling aggro. The Fighter does not have any inherit ability to force an opponent to face him. The DM may always choose to have a marked target attack another, it just might not be a smart choice for that monster. While the Fighter does have exploits that allow him to pull a specific creature to him, the player must CHOOSE for the Fighter to have this exploit. It is the player's CHOICE to build his or her character to do that. Let's look at a specific power: "Come and Get It" (Fighter level 7 Encounter Exploit). The Fighter shifts all enemies within 3 squares of him 2 squares so they end adjacent to him and then makes an attack against all adjacent enemies (marking all of them in the progress). This is very similar to "pulling aggro" in an MMO. But I don't HAVE to pick that exploit. There are 4 other level 7 encounter exploits I can select instead that do different things; one imposes an attack penalty on the target, another increases the Fighter's AC, the third does additional damage, and the fourth lets the Fighter move without provoking opportunity attacks. In fact, looking through all the Fighter exploits in the PHB from levels 1 through 30... that is the ONLY POWER that pulls enemies to you. Every other power that causes forced movement shifts already adjacent enemies or pushes them. For a Fighter to make an enemy focus on him he must directly engage the enemy, and can normally do so against only one enemy at a time (with a few powers providing exceptions to this statement).

Not, in my opinion, very MMO-like at all.

Now let's compare roles to previous editions. We'll use the Fighter again.

What does a Fighter in 3rd do? Well, just by looking at the Class Entry we can see that he a) wears every type of armor and b) can use every type of weapon and c) gets one of the highest HD in the game. Oh, and he has NO OTHER CLASS FEATURES. In other words: Wear good armor so things miss a lot, swing heavy weapon to do damage, and have lots of hit points to soak up damage. Which is another way of saying that the default for him was to engage the enemies and take punishment otherwise meant for other party members... in other words he's a Defender, but a bad one because he has no default means of keeping an enemy focused on you (in fact if you're AC and damage are doing their jobs the enemy will want to GO AROUND YOU because there's nothing other than a single attack you can do to stop him.)

1st & 2nd Edition... the Fighter is... well, he wears heavy armor and uses a big weapon to engage the front lines of his foes while his allies attack from behind or at range.... Yup, that's a Defender. Of course they also fulfil 4e's role of melee striker because in these editions there wasn't anyone else to actually perform that role.

Let's compare other classes roles in combat (because that's as far as a role is supposed to effect a character - combat). Rogues? In both 4th and 4rd they are Strikers because their Sneak Attack class features present for large amounts of damage in specific situations, and they are lightly armored and mobile (3rd did it by making Tumble a necessity for the Rogue, 4th does it by giving the Rogue a lot of powers that let them shift to avoid opportunity attacks). In earlier editions they don't fill this role, but that's because Thieves (not Rogues) weren't meant to really do much of anything in combat, they were supposed to be checking for traps and opening locks.

Clerics? In 4th Edition they're Leaders, meaning they support other characters through providing Buffs and Healing. Really, the role should probably be called Support, but who would really be drawn to playing that? In 4th Edition the Cleric gets one of the best healing powers in the game and plenty of powers to provide bonuses to their party members in combat. Plus rituals for out of combat stuff. In 3rd? Well, their spell list DEFAULTED to healing spells... a strong indication of how they were meant to be played. They had a lot of buff spells... The only thing that's changed is that 3rd Edition Clerics were broken into being able to basically be ANY CLASS THEY WANTED because they could just buff themselves into the proper class/role. In 1st/2nd edition they were mainly walking healing potions, or a single facet of the Leader role.

D&D came up with roles first. MMOs were created to emulate elements of D&D and found terminology to help explain these elements to new players. 4e is simply taking the improved terminology back.

Your mileage may vary, but when I see a D&D class I don't see an MMO class. I see the same thing I've bben seeing since the 1980s with updated terminology and mechanics.

MMOs commonly use grinds to level up characters, or collection quests to get PCs started. D&D doesn't do that UNLESS THE DM WANTS IT TO. I'm not going to the forest and killing hundreds of respawning wolves to get that next level; I'm goin through planned encounters.

Random loot drops? MMOs stole that from D&D (go back to early edition DMGs with random treasure tables that they expected you to use and try to claim otherwise). 4e advocates pre-planned treasure parcels placed throughout the adventure as the DM sees fit, customizing them to help empower your players' choices ("I know you built your character to use an axe... but here's A SWORD instead" isn't really encouraged, and you'll never hear "I know you took a feat to use that Fullblade, but I keep rolling hammers on the treasure table!" in the 4e DMG).

Stupid AIs that say the same thing over and over again? Only if the DM is lazy.

Not being able to avoid a combat through negotiation or stealth? That's the way it flies in an MMO. 4e provides mechanics so you can still earn xp while not fighting the monsters.

Spending 30 minutes explaining raid tactics to your group while the boss is ON THE SCREEN? Again, only if the DM lets you do it (personally, Orcus is already attacking you. Keep talking if you want).

In summery, 4e's rules don't support it being an MMO any more than previous editions do. It borrows effective terminology to help explain concepts to new players (a smart business strategy), and continues to use elements that MMOs took from early editions of D&D. 

4e only plays like an MMO if you make it.

I'll continue with other points in later posts.

End of Demented Rambling.

Back in Eberron Again

I haven't written anything set in Eberron in a long time, but I just wrote the pitch for an Eberron Adventure to submit to Dungeon Magazine. With the Eberron Player's Guide releasing in just a few days and Campaign Guide releasing shortly thereafter, I think they might be looking for some Eberron-goodness in that setting.

It feels good to revisit Eberron. I really love the feeling of the world and the fact that something about it just screams "cinematic action!" to me. It's hard for me to think small in Eberron. I just want to starting blowing shit up and having epic battles on airships while dinosaur-riders swoop down on the PCs and horribly mutated Daelky-worshiping suspend captives above a large vat containing some sort of animated ooze in a chamber with large Khyber Dragonshards jutting out of the walls.

Y'know, the FUN stuff!

"Let Sleeping Giants Lie" doesn't have the best title ever, but it starts out with the inn the PCs are trying to stay the night in EXPLODING right before the PCs arrive, just in time for the PCs to see the burning body of a Shifter Druid run out of the explosion and beg them to finish her quest with her last gasp. Follow that with a battle with assassins atop a series of bridges suspended above a drop that spells certain death to anyone who falls, a dungeon crawl to stop an ancient mutated Giant from awkening and destroying Sharn, a betrayal at the bottom of the dungeon and then a rush to escape the crumbling caverns afterword...

Indiana Jones, you can take your Crystal Skull and shove it back up E.T.'s ass!

I really WANT to write this and get it published! I'm salivating at the thought! Hell, I want to PLAY THIS, right now! Bring on Eberron-goodness, now!

End of Demented Rambling.

I Love Getting New RPG Books

Just got in my copies of Adventurer's Vault, Monster Manual 2, and The Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. I've read most of them already, but I've been checking them out at the Library. Now I don't need to worry about renewing them! Huzzah!

I'm really happy with 4e. 3.5 had a lot of issues that really killed the fun for me after a while. I'm just not a super-optimizer type of player and frankly I like playing Fighters.

3.5 Fighters are NOT fun after a certain low level unless you multi-class, and at that point you aren't really a Fighter anymore.

So 4e's equalizing of all the classes is a real feature for me, but I'm getting away from my point.

I like the Adventurer's Vault because it really expands equipment options and provides Alchemy for characters. It's not a "read from start to finish" kind of book, but it's a useful book. No matter what character you're playing, this book has something you'll find useful. Not to mention that more magic items gives me more points of comparison for determining the appropriate level for my homemade magic items.

Monster Manual 2 provides more monsters (duh) for a GM to mix into encounters. Not just ne monsters, but new types of existing monsters (more gnolls, goblins, etc.) to help broaden encounters with that monster race. Many of these monsters are high-end Heroic Tier monsters, but since DMG 2 is going to focus on play for Paragon-Tier it should be expected that they would focus more on those levels of play. There's still plenty of lower-tier and Epic monsters though. Dretches make an appearance as Level 2 Brutes, and Dagon (yes, the godlike Deep One from Lovecraft's writings) is there for Epic characters to face. There are more, but those are just examples.

The Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide presents all the information needed for a 4e Realms campaign... ok, not really... not even close really, but it DOES give you a solid start for the campaign and a method of "resetting" 3.5 campaigns to make the transition to 4e smoother. They've killed off or demoted a LOT of the gods, presumably to make it easier for players new to the Realms to get started. The old list WAS very daunting... especially if you went for the gods from every continent and not just the "main" area covered in the 3.0 Campaign Guide.

The new setting is 100 years into the future after an event called the Spellplague (started when Cyric murdered Mystra at Shar's bequest and both the Arcane Weave and the Shadow Weave came apart) has reshaped Toril and the planes. A new realm called Abeir is introduced, a mirror of Toril created by AO to stop the war between the Gods and the Primordials (which I believe is new to help the Realms fit into the backstory 4e uses). When the Spellplague changed the planes it merged portions of Toril and Abeir together. Whole regions of Toril have been replaced by regions of Abeir, also allowing the Dragonborn to enter the world (which is why we've never seen them before; it works as an explanation as long as you don't mind a little cheese in your setting). The Netherese Empire is back, and they've conquered some of the regions around them, including Sembia. Cormyr has had to claim some of the Dragon Coast, and Myth Drannor has been restored to its proper glory. The Zhentarim aren't really the Big Bads of the setting anymore... the split in their ranks between Bane and Cyric has made them unable to compete with the Netherese, and they actually help resist them to some extent (because they'd rather Bane conquer the world, not Shar). The Red Wizards of Thay are pretty much gone... because most of Thay is now full of undead thanks to the efforts of one wizard's attempts to become a Lich going awry. 

My major problems with the new Realms is the limited release schedule it gets. My wallet appreciates this, but having the Realms content limited to one Campaign Guide, one Player's Guide, and one adventure means that a lot of content is vague. In some cases this is good. I can fill in the blanks in regions, but it also means a lot more work for me. For example, I want to create an adventure in Cormyr. I want to do something in the Storm Horns. The entry on the Storm Horns mentions Eagle's Peak and Skull Crag, not to mention Castle Crag and High Horn... but the map provided doesn't list these locations. Not a big deal if you and your players are new to the setting but if I wanted to run something with Josh and Paul (who have both given me the impression that they're large Realms fans) I want to at least try and get the geography right! Why mention these areas if you aren't going to at least give me a dot on the map?

My other problem is the lack of information on the gods. The greater gods are detailed, and there's a list of lesser gods and exarchs, but little to no detail on them or which gods they actually serve. For example, Tempus is listed as an Unaligned Greater God with the Sphere of War, and whose domain is called Warrior's Rest. There is no mention of any gods who reside with him or exarchs who serve him in his entry. Looking among the list of lesser gods I see that Beshaba (Alignment: Evil, Sphere: Bad Luck) also resides in Warrior's Rest. I had to read the description of Warrior's Rest in the Cosmology chapter to discover that Beshaba is Tempus' lover. The Exarchs aren't any better; Garagos (Chaotic Evil, War), The Red Knight (Lawful Good, Tactics), Uthgar (Unaligned, Wildlands), and Valkur (Good, Sailors) all reside in Warrior's Rest... Now, I can expect that The Red Knight is an Exarch of Tempus, since they've always been connected. Garagos probably is too since he has the sphere of war just like Tempus (and since Tempus is Unaligned he probably doesn't mind having Exarchs of opposing alignments). But what about the exarchs of Wildlands and Sailors? Again, turning to the Cosmology section I see that Tempus regards the Red Knight as a daughter, but then it mentions that his other exarchs maintain their own realms... so does that mean taht Garagos, Uthgar and Valkur are exarchs of other gods?

I have no idea, and I wish I did. Since most of the Gods don't even get Channel Divinity Feats in the Player's Guide I can't even make use of them without needing to design new Channel Divinity Feats. I'd rather they had just died along with the other missing gods if there wasn't enough room to give me information on them.

Don't get me wrong. I like the book. It's beautiful and the changes are sufficient for me to feel like the Realms is a place I can make my own again instead of the "It's done, move on" feel I had in 3.5. I just wish there could be a few more supplements to help flesh it out a little more and prevent me from needing to put more work into the world. With the number of dieties in the Realms it could REALLY benefit from an updated Pantheon book describing the Greater Gods, Lesser Gods, and Exarchs in more detail, and maybe giving us a greater description of their realms. I don't want the glut of products from 3.5, just a few more to help me along my way (or else give me a REALLY GOOD set of guidelines for creating balanced Feats so I can at least create a few more Channel Divinity Feats for players who don't like the greater gods).

Maybe Dragon magazine has (or will have) future articles to flesh this stuff out. Maybe I should send them a pitch to write one. In the meantime I'll just need to pull out some of my 3.5 and 2nd Edition Realms material to fill in the blanks.

End of Demented Rambling.

The Village of Hommlet

I forgot to post this yesterday, but I got a rewards packet from the RPGA. It was sent to my parent's house (where I was living back when I regularly judged for Living Force/Living Greyhawk) a week or so back and I just hadn't gotten around to picking it up. I was expecting it to be the same old, same old. Rewards cards to open new character options in Living Forgotten Realms and some more membership cards. Considering I haven't played in an RPGA event in a couple of years I was in no rush to pick the packet up.

Imagine, if you will, my surprise at opening the envelope and seeing a shrink-wrapped 4e module inside! "The Village of Hommlet" is a reprint of ye olde Gary Gygax adventure T1: The Village of Hommlet, updated for 4e. For those of you who have never played or read through anything regarding the Temple of Elemental Evil, Hommlet was the small village laying near the temple and T1 kicked the whole adventure series off.

This new adventure is set long after heroes have cleared out the Temple of Elemental Evil, and Hommlet has been at peace all that time. But evil has a long memory, and dark forces are converging on Hommlet once again. The PCs stuble across this trouble village and must discover the secret of the evil gathering in an old moathouse. It was updated by Andy Collins and has been designed for 4th level characters.

Visually I'm impressed. It's a free product, and I can't find a UPC on it anywhere so I don't believe it was ever intended for resale. Despite that the module looks as professional as something like Keep on the Shadowfell or any of the other 4e modules, though it is primarily in black and white (not a big deal to me at all). The cover is a thin cardstock and the insides have two sets of maps printed on them. A map of the village of Hommlet, and a map of all three floors to the Inn of the Welcome Wench. Next is a 24-page booklet detailing Hommlet and the encounters. It consists of recycled black and white artwork and a lot of maps. There are 9 encounters and a couple of skill challenges detailed in this book, each with clear stat blocks from the MM. The last part of the adventure is a nice color poster-sized map, which is what really impressed me. I mean, throwing something like that into a free adventure couldn't have been cheap. This map has an enlarged copy of the ground floor of the Inn of the Welcome Wench and a large version of the map of what I believe to be the moat house (I'm still reading the adventure so I can't be sure).

This is the best reward I've ever gotten from the RPGA and I'd like to thank them. I've been thinking about getting into playing Living Forgotten Realms recently, in part because I figure I should do at least SOME playing in the campaign if I want to write for it! I'd always meant to play in it from the beginning but decided to devote more time to my family than gaming. Still, a little pick-up game every no and again wouldn't kill me!

So thank you RPGA!

End of Demented Rambling.