D&D experience oddness

I'm looking at a very tough encounter in the introductory adventure, Keep on the Shadowfell. It's a 6th level encounter when the PCs are very likely 1st level… it's known net-wide as a TPK (Total Party Kill) encounter. No explanation as to why it's so tough is given.

The DMG says that a hard encounter is three or four levels over the party's level. This one is five levels over. Granted, none of the individual monsters are over 3rd level, but still.

But that's not what's bothering me right now. What's bothering me is that this encounter is worth 1250 XP. But two 3rd level encounters are 1500 XP total. Combined, two 3rd level encounters are easier than one 6th level encounter… assuming you get to rest in between, your Encounter powers refresh and you get to spend healing surges. You're more likely to use your Daily powers in the bigger encounter than in the two lesser ones.

Trimming the 3rd level encounters down to 625, so that they're exactly half the power rating of the 6th level encounter doesn't change the basics… because XP are a flat measure, that is, five kobolds serially are worth the same XP as five kobolds at once, there is no value in taking additional risk. As the risk goes up, the rewards don't. Why take the extra risk with no extra reward? The ideal situation is to isolate individual monsters and kill them solo, five-on-one, because that's worth exactly as much as killing them in groups of twenty or thirty at a time.

Now, granted… the players don't always have a choice about how powerful an encounter is. But that seems like weak sauce to me… "You gotta take the higher-powered encounters because that's all that's being offered." And I don't think that's how the game is meant to be played… but I'm thinking that players should be rewarded appropriately for the risk.

My thinking is that XP values should be a function of the difference between party level and encounter level. The further away from the party level the encounter gets, the more it should be worth above its base value.

When it comes down to it, if I throw my players into this encounter, and they come out on top, they're going to throw things at me if I hand them a measly 1250 XP.

D&D 4E continues to amaze me

As I continue to study the new D&D 4E, and read design notes from various designers, I continue to be amazed at the design.

I had noticed at one point a lack of durations. Spells end at the end of your next turn or on a successful saving throw. Monsters have "recharge" powers that come back randomly without tracking how long it's been since the last one. As a GM, I discovered that all I needed to do was track hit points (and not of Minions) and drop markers on the miniatures. As long as the marker reminded me what was affecting the character, I didn't need anything else… just to know if it was to end this turn (simple because it was there at the beginning of the turn) or if a saving throw was needed to get rid of it.

It does mean a little extra rolling, but it's reduced my paperwork for myriad effects that could have required lots of little time "ticks" to keep track of. For a game this complex (the most complex game I've played in a really long time), that is a real boon.

D&D is still about levels and hit points and a core story of killing monsters and taking their stuff. But it's clearly been design by people not sitting in an ivory tower of "I've never played anything but D&D".

When 3E came out, I thought, "Finally, the game is catching up to the late nineties in its design." That is to say, it had a lot of great ideas in it, but nothing in it was ground-breaking… they were borrowed ideas. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn't a game that made players of other games sit up and take notice. But 4E seems to be really innovative… it is making players, and designers, of other games sit up and take notice.

In my current group of five, I'm the only one who played (a smattering of) 3E. My wife has basically never played D&D. One of my players has only played 1st edition, and two have played 2nd. This new edition is drawing in players who had given up on D&D, even given up on gaming in general. That's quite an accomplishment.

Bottom line, we're all having a lot of fun, and that's the most important measurement.

Are you a Minion?

Minions in D&D 4E are odd critters. I know they aren't unique… Feng Shui has its mooks that fill the same role. But having played out four combats involving Minions now, I find they still seem weird to me.

The one thing I'm wondering about is whether it should be clear to the PCs that they are Minions. Combat tactics are different if you can tell which kobolds have one hit point and which have 27. And for that matter, once you hit a Minion and realize its nature, are the minions clearly differentiated from non-Minions? Kobold Minions and Skirmishers carry the same gear… can you visually tell them apart?

I also ran into a situation where Minions created false expectations for some roleplaying newbies. The Minions fell left and right… but they were a bit surprised when the kobold Slinger took four hits to take down. (Kobolds sure have a lot of hit points nowdays.)

I can see having weaker versions of the monsters, but I'm conflicted over this "one hit point" thing. Would having five or six hit points really change their effectiveness in combat, though? Swinging at a Minion isn't a guarantee of a hit, though if you hit them they go down. Giving them five our six hit points changes that uncertainty theoretically, but practically, I'm not sure that it would change anything. So I'm guessing that the one-hit point thing is to simplify accounting for the DM. Pushing the hit points high enough that it makes a difference probably pushes them out of "Minion" status.

I guess what's bothering me is why are these kobolds so weak compared to the next level up? This kobold takes one hit, this other kobold takes, on the average, four or five. It means the heroes can wade through these kobolds and then suddenly those kobolds slow them down. I don't expect D&D to be "realistic," but this keeps grating on me.

I see where this is coming from… this is the "storming the castle, taking out guard after guard with one slash each" movie thing. Where, for some reason, the guards are child's play and the villain and his elite guards are far tougher.

I think the problem here is that we expect to see this in the movies, but I (and the newbies) don't expect the game to work this way. (Despite the newbies trying to do things that were obviously inspired by the movies.)

And it gets weirder when you look at things like the Level 7 Human Lackey Minion. 19 AC, +12 vs AC, deals a flat 6 damage… but has only one hit point. A Level 7 Minion? "Level 7" doesn't sound like "minion" to me.

4E core books PDFs

The D&D 4E core books and Shadowfell module are now available on RPGNow/DriveThruRPG… for 30% off cover price, which makes them slightly more expensive than the actual paper books from Amazon.com.

Free "Shadowfell" counters

This is nifty…

Fiery Dragon Productions has released a free PDF called Counter Pack: Castle of Shadows… which contains figure flats (counters) for every PC and monster in The Keep on the Shadowfell. Be sure to pick up the "bonus" PDF that contains a handful of counters left out of the main PDF.

http://www.fierydragon.com/downloads/castle_shadow.pdf http://www.fierydragon.com/downloads/castle_shadow_bonus.pdf

I don't normally use flat counters (I like cardstock standups), but this is hard to resist. Free, and I don't have to go scouring my collection (and the unpurchased collections from my favorite artist) to find all the right figures for this adventure.

Figure flats certainly have their advantages… with a 1" punch, I can cut them out in a jiffy. No folding and gluing, and storage is a breeze. Easy enough to dump them into coin envelopes for sorting. I'm afraid I may become a convert.

Public Service Announcement

I've given in to the evil and signed up for Twitter. You can follow me here. Don't know how much or for how long I'll use it, but I figure I need to understand why it's so appealing to a lot of people.

My apologies to D&D

After skimming bits of the new Dungeon Master's Guide, and having read bits of Mike Mearls' (one of the developers) blog and comments, I have to apologize to a large chunk of the D&D crowd… they aren't all playing the game I thought they were.

Mearls talks about Sorcerer and bangs and kickers. The new DMG is obviously drawing from principles in the storygames movement. Apparently there are not only people playing D&D with a story focus, but the developers and writers are concerned about the story as well. And I thought everyone was just killing monsters and taking their stuff.

Now, they haven't quite taken it all the way… the D&D mechanics still reward you for killing monsters, with rewards for story stuff being vague and almost an afterthought. I strongly believe that mechanics should reward the kind of play you desire to create, so stuff like The Shadow of Yesterday's keys mechanic really trip my trigger. But thanks to D&D 4E having both action points and healing surges as potential foundations for bonus economies (in addition to plain ol' XP), I think grafting in keys would be pretty simple.

Effects of the GSL on the industry

One of the interesting clauses of the GSL (Game System License) is that you can't sell the same product under the OGL and the GSL at the same time. But looking at it a little deeper, apparently you can't even sell products under the same product line trademark.

I bring this up because Goodman Games is, if I read the announcement right, planning to stop selling the existing "Dungeon Crawl Classics" modules so they presumably can use that trademark on a 4E/GSL-compatible line of modules.

And that's messed up. I think they're all available in print products, but consider if they were only available in PDF, like many OGL products are. To simply continue your line of products under the same trademark, you have to quit selling the OGL products. And the typical purchase agreement on PDFs says you cannot transfer the rights to the PDF to a third party. So suddenly, all of these PDFs go "out of print" and there is no legal way to obtain a copy.

The idea that PDF never has to go out of print is named as one of its greatest strengths… it costs almost nothing to keep it in a publisher's catalog. But then along comes Wizards saying, "Oh, no… if you want to keep that well-recognized trademark name, you're going to have to ditch all your old product.

While folks switching from 3E to 4E might not care, I'm the type of person who buys adventures just to mine them for ideas, maps and art. It doesn't bother me that I don't even play the game in question, let alone the right edition. It bothers me that, in this digital age of digital products, a whole slew of products are being "forced" out of availability by the 800-pound gorilla. Just because they can.

Wizards wants 3E to go quietly into the night. But will it? I'm afraid it's going to create a split, with Paizo's Pathfinder RPG and other invested 3E publishers keeping 3E alive, as Wizards and other publishers go off in this other direction.

But I think Wizards is going to win… they have the big budget, the pretty games, the weight of being the "official" game. And I think they may have a game that's more fun to play than 3E. Paizo's attempt to keep 3E alive may backfire on them.

Maybe Goodman's got it right… don't take a risk on keeping 3E alive, stick with Wizards, because 4E isn't going to be a failure.

Still sucks that so much material is going to "disappear" just because Wizards wants it to.

Playing D&D 4E

We finally got most of the group together and played some D&D 4E on Sunday. Okay, so we made characters and fought a four-round combat with some kobolds. But it was fun.

First, it was really cool playing D&D with first level characters and having them not suck. Starting characters can now whip out some pretty impressive little tricks.

There's been some funny escalation of hit points. My kobold skirmishers had 28! But typical attacks are still dealing single dice. I was surprised that 3 PCs cleaned up three skirmishers and two slingers so easily. Well, maybe not so easily… I almost took down their fighter, and they used most of their "daily" powers, just because they could.

Taking down the fighter was interesting… it took me about a round to tie together the rules so that the effects of the kobolds' "mobbing" ability were clear. When kobolds have "combat advantage," they add an extra 1d6 damage to their base 1d8. "Hm… you guys keep fighting while I go look up this 'combat advantage' thing." Oh… flanking, among other things, grants "combat advantage". Oh, and flanking gives you a +2 to-hit bonus. Oh, and kobolds get a +1 to-hit bonus for each other kobold adjacent to the target.

One kobold attacking the fighter? +6 to-hit and 1d8 spear damage.
Three kobolds attacking the fighter? +10 to-hit and 1d8+1d6 spear damage.

The latter attracted the attention of the wizard, who used Thunder Wave to great effect, scattering the kobolds, while the dragonborn fighter successfully defended against the area attack and stood his ground. It was a very cool scene.

Of course, I find myself contrasting this with Fudge. Part of the reason I'm playing this game is to figure out what I like in rules. And for some reason, all these cool fiddly bits appeal to me. In "vanilla" Fudge, a fighter has Superb Swordfighting, and everything beyond that is just color. But in D&D 4E, he's got a handful of special abilities that he can pull out from time to time to do something a little different. And I like that there's more than just descriptive color, but actual mechanical effects that let the character be cool instead of just pretending to be cool through good description.

Now a Fudge point mechanic does some of this. Fate 3 does some of this with its Aspects. But both are just mechanical bonuses to something you already do… temporarily making Superb Swordsman into a Superb+2 Swordsman. D&D 4E's powers go a step beyond and create new effects. Sure, in the more freeform games, you can say, "I want to cut through this opponent and strike the second opponent for half damage, and force both of them back five feet." But do you? I've not played with anybody who assumes that kind of ability out of skills, even when they're expert. I think "Superb Swordsman" sometimes causes the same problem players have with Fudge when creating characters without a list of skills to pick from. Without being given clear options, players, myself included, pick what options they see in front of them.

So I'm kind of liking this. D&D 4E may be a bit more complicated than I want, ultimately, but it's going to help give me a better idea of what I do want. For a long time, I was driving towards this ideal of the smallest, most "invisible" rule-set as possible. And I was becoming rather unhappy with it, blaming my inability to play freeform, instead of blaming my choice of rules.

So I'm really looking forward to playing this game for awhile and we'll see what comes out of it.