Tag Archives: D&D4e

My thoughts on Pathfinder, based on the Core Rulebook

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I’ve finished reading through the bulk of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook in preparation for the campaign in which I will soon be a player, and I thought I’d share my thoughts here. My background with RPGs is:

  • I played a little bit of D&D 3.0 around 2002. I got the core books, read them, loved them, played a session or two, wrote an adventure, never found a good group to play with, drifted away.
  • I started playing D&D 4e in early 2010, and here I am now. I’ve played and DMed a ton of 4e over the past year and a half.
  • In that year and a half, I’ve also had the chance to play one session each of AD&D 1e, GURPS, Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu.

So, I’m approaching Pathfinder as an experienced D&D 4e player, with some exposure to other games, including earlier editions of D&D – but just a little.

Introduction

The first thing that struck me about the Core Rulebook is that it opens with some mild politics. I understand that this is about the OGL and such, but it’s really awkward to read all the references to Pathfinder being an evolution of “the 3.5 version of the world’s oldest roleplaying game.” I get it – they don’t own the rights to the Dungeons and Dragons name, so they can’t say the name, but the OGL lets them say a lot of other stuff… it’s very weird.

I love that the single book is basically the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide rolled into one. I’ve really only been focusing on the player sections of the book, but I appreciate that the game master sections are right there if I want them.

The glossary on pages 11-12 is well-placed, too. Understanding things like Combat Maneuver Bonus right up front is helpful. The index in the back of the book seems to be pretty good, too. If you’re going to write a book that aims to be accessible to new players, a good glossary and index help a lot.

“Generating a Character” on pages 14-15 is not as helpful as it should be. I wish this had been an easier-to-follow step-by-step process, but it involves a crazy amount of flipping all over the book. I think an example would have helped a lot.

Races

Not much to say here. I’m fine with the races that get penalties to certain stats; it’s more flavorful. The races generally seem to have more flavor expressed in mechanics than 4e races do, but this isn’t always a winner for me. Some of the flavor is quite fiddly in practice, such as dwarves getting a dodge bonus to AC against giants and a bonus to Appraise checks involving precious metals or gems. I get the flavor, really, but the mechanics seem likely to be forgotten.

One other note: The illustration of the half-elf woman is fantastic. Half-elf males are lucky critters!

Classes

I see what people mean when they refer to the Essentials class presentations as being more like older editions. No two classes are alike in Pathfinder. They all have their own progression of different features that come at different levels, and that’s cool. Fiddly, yes, but I think the fiddliness comes from not having a Character Builder with power cards. If all of these special abilities were easy to follow and reference on the character sheet, they wouldn’t feel any more fiddly than 4e characters getting powers as they level up. So, no complaints about the progression of the classes themselves here, just a complaint about the lack of an easy-to-use character builder (though I’ve heard good – and expensive – things about Hero Lab).

It strikes me that Pathfinder seems to be a game that relies more on GM and player interpretation rather than rules – often phrased as “rulings rather than rules”. I’m fine with that, but it’s a meaningful difference with 4e.

Some things in Pathfinder make character creation harder than 4e, which gives each class a key ability score (and yes, there are some V-shaped class builds in 4e that depend on two different abilities, I know). When I tried to build a cleric in Pathfinder, I found myself gravitating toward a high Wisdom score. I then realized that Charisma is pretty important, too. And then I saw that if I wanted to have anything to do other than throw off the occasional healing spell, I’d probably want good Strength to get into melee, in which case I’d need reasonable Constitution in order to have some hit points and not just die in one shot… it’s just very different. If it leads to well-rounded characters, well, great! But it’s a very different approach.

Also, I love the way deities and domains are presented in the Core Rulebook. It’s a whole new pantheon of deities, of course, but I love that clerics pick a deity and then get spells and abilities from two of the deity’s domains. Again, good flavor.

Spells are, of course, one of the areas where D&D differs most from earlier editions and Pathfinder. All spells are “dailies” in Pathfinder (Vancian Magic). I have to say that based solely on reading the books, I prefer the 4e system. Any system where the wizard spends the first four levels of his career hiding from combat most of the time until he can start throwing the occasional fireball doesn’t seem that great to me. Yes, I know that the wizard becomes all-powerful later, but reading through the books does not make me a fan of the Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards phenomenon. Maybe it will be more fun in play.

I’m also annoyed by the difference between character level, caster level and spell level. I get it, but it’s terribly inelegant.

Skills

Again, more flavor than 4e. More judgment calls. More proliferation. More stuff that comes up outside of combat. It’s good, it’s bad… it’s just a difference.

Feats

I didn’t read them all, as you might imagine. But this feels like an area where 4e really didn’t change much from 3.5e / Pathfinder. Feats felt very familiar to me.

Equipment

Again, much like 4e in most respects (at least for starting equipment; I haven’t delved into magic items).

The various weapons confuse me a bit, as there seem to be cases where weapon A is Pareto superior to weapon B… is the difference really just flavor, or am I missing something? The Morningstar, for instance, just seems better than the Heavy Mace. It’s cheaper, it’s lighter, it deals two different types of damage… all I can figure is that dealing two types of damage is bad in some circumstances (such as against a creature that resists piercing damage, even when it’s paired with bludgeoning). I have much to learn, I guess.

A minor innovation that I actually like from 4e is the introduction of the Adventurer’s Kit. I personally think it’s fun to pore over the list of oddball equipment I could buy for my character, but I think it’s a good idea to provide a “default gear” option for players who aren’t interested in that sort of thing.

The illustrations of gear in this book are very nicely done too, in my opinion. Good artwork in lots of places… it’s strange that I’m not seeing artist credits on the images.

Additional Rules

It’s a little weird to me that we don’t see alignment spelled out until this chapter, but I guess there really wasn’t a good place to stick it earlier. I tend to think of alignment as being a very fundamental part of the character creation process. My only other comment on this section is that I find the changes to ability scores as characters age to be annoying rather than flavorful. I guess it’s both… sigh.

Combat

Okay, I read this chapter in detail. And I have to say that this is one where I’ll largely need to reserve judgment until I play the game. So many things are fundamentally different about combat between 4e and Pathfinder that I can’t accurately judge it until I try it.

I get that there’s sort of a Standard – Move – Minor action economy in this game, but I also understand that it’s still a different animal. Full-round actions have no clear analogue in 4e, except maybe the monk’s Full Discipline… but you can still take a 5-foot step with a full round action. It’s going to take some learning by doing on my part for sure.

I will say that combat seems a lot more complicated in Pathfinder. The difference between a weapon attack, touch attack and ranged touch attack is flavorful, but harder to follow. Holding a charge on a spell – also flavorful and hard to follow. Saving throws – I think the 4e system of different defenses works much better. Concentration checks for spellcasting seem like a huge pain in the butt. All the options to do things like fight defensively seem overly complicated. The different buckets for lethal and nonlethal damage seem like a pain. And oh, all the tables! It’s going to take a lot of learning for me.

Magic

Much like combat, I’m going to have to see it in action in order to really judge. Concentration, counterspelling, the shapes of spell areas, areas that originate on a grid intersection rather than in a square, spell resistance… again, it seems really complicated. More “realism” at the expense of clarity.

The Rest

I flipped through some of the spells. I haven’t touched Prestige Classes or the GM parts of the book. I haven’t delved into multiclassing, though I understand the gist of how it works.

Overall impressions

So far, Pathfinder looks like a game that does a much better job of handling the game world “realistically” than 4e, though at the expense of simplicity. I know that tomes have been written about “gamism versus simulationism” by people who’ve spent far more time comparing and contrasting various systems than I have, so I don’t have much I can add. Until I actually get to try the system out at the table, it will be hard for me to say which (if either) I prefer.

Fortunately, I’m not too worried. I had the chance to meet with my awesome GM, Phil, and I know it’s going to be a fun game. He’s not overly concerned about rules, and he’s interested in us focusing far more on the stories of our characters rather than their mechanics. Having played in his Call of Cthulhu game at Genghis Con, I’m really excited about playing in an ongoing campaign that he’s running. I honestly don’t think the system is going to matter all that much – with good people at the table, I’m going to have a good time.

Free RPG Day 2011 – my San Francisco experience

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I live in Colorado, within walking distance of the excellent Enchanted Grounds game store / coffee house. Last year I went there for a Dark Sun game on the morning of Free RPG Day and then went back in the evening because they offered a discount on RPG books in addition to giving away free stuff (I didn’t really know what the free stuff was). This year, however, I’m out of town, on a business trip to San Francisco – so I don’t get to participate in Free RPG Day at my friendly local game store. Frown.

Of course, given that San Francisco is a decent-sized city, you’d think that there’d be at least one store that’s participating in Free RPG Day, and in fact there is exactly one – Gamescape (which does not appear to have a functioning web page of its own, so here’s its Yelp page). I used to go to this store when I lived in San Francisco, although I went for board games (it has quite the awesome selection). I found out that Gamescape would be opening its doors at 10:00 AM Saturday, and since I’d heard that other stores had run out of Free RPG Day stuff quickly in past years, I decided to get there early. It helped that I randomly woke up around 6:00 AM local time.

Thus at 9:15 AM on Saturday, I found myself sitting on the sidewalk in front of Gamescape… all by myself. No massive mob for Free RPG Day, it seems. Five minutes before the doors opened, one other guy got “in line” behind me, though I don’t think he was even there for the “event”.

As it turned out, Gamescape was not running any actual Free RPG Day events, though they did have the standard box of goodies to give away – one item per customer. I was interested in the items for D&D 4th Edition, Pathfinder and Savage Worlds. The D&D item was an addition to the Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond boxed set, which didn’t look especially interesting. Since I’m starting to play Pathfinder pretty soon, I opted for the free Pathfinder adventure (not sure I’ll ever actually run a Pathfinder game, but if I do I now have an adventure ready to go).

I also want to support stores that participate in Free RPG Day, so I browsed through all of their gaming stuff, eventually deciding to buy my own copy of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (rather than continuing to rely on the copy I checked out from my local public library). Message to game store: You buy stuff to give away for free to me, I spend good money in your store (50 bucks plus tax – which is 9.5% here in San Francisco!).

So, Free RPG Day 2011 was… well, not at all exciting. Had I been back in Colorado, perhaps it would have been more interesting. Oh well; at least I got something for free, and bought something I’d been meaning to buy anyway.

Running an online game for new players

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I love it when a plan comes together. A couple of weeks ago I received a comment on my blog from a player who had never played a tabletop role-playing game before but who was interested in trying it out. Since I love to introduce new players to the hobby, I wanted to at least run one game for this prospective new player. So, I advertised here on the blog as well as over on EN World that I would be running a one-shot game for new players.

Getting this game set up went the way I originally expected setting up an online game to go when I first did it last July. For that game, I wanted five players so I recruited seven, figuring that a couple wouldn’t be able to make it. I ended up with eight. Oops.

This time I ended up recruiting six and only four were able to make it work (scheduling was problematic). That’s okay, though – four was plenty!

We gathered Friday evening on MapTool and Skype in the time slot that I normally run my long-running War of the Burning Sky campaign (my regular players were very understanding – thanks, guys!). I gave the new players some choice about what adventure we ran, and I ended up running a Living Forgotten Realms game – CORM 1-1 The Black Knight of Arabel (available here as part of a big archive file if you’re interested). This was, coincidentally, the first LFR game I had ever gone through as a player and one of the first I had run as a DM.

I specifically wanted to run an adventure I had run before in order to keep my prep time to a minimum (time was tight last week). Most of the prep time for this game went into getting the four PCs set up in MapTool. I did change the monsters in the adventure, too. First, I updated the damage expressions and defenses and everything to the post-Monster Manual 3 numbers. Second, since this particular adventure has the possibility of three fights with the same shadow creatures over and over, I mixed things up by bringing in some monsters from the Dark Legacy of Evard season of D&D Encounters that I’m running.

The group that gathered on Friday consisted of two new players (one of them in England – I somehow manage to attract players who are willing to play in the middle of the night!), one player who was rusty, and one player who at least hadn’t played online before (but he was looking for a game and I needed the fourth player to fill out the party). We had some minor technical difficulties at first, but soon enough we were all on MapTool.

I had created characters for the two new players based on descriptions they gave me – a tiefling cleric and a half-orc barbarian. The more experienced players created their own characters – an elf mage and a goliath warden. I started with some basics about how the MapTool program works and how the rules of the game work for the new players, and then we dove in.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BLACK KNIGHT OF ARABEL

The adventure began with the party on their way to Arabel to investigate reports of a black rider and shadow creatures. Near nightfall the party was approaching the city and came upon a wagon driver frantically trying to repair a wagon wheel before darkness came. The party offered to help, but just then the sun dipped below the horizon and some shadow creatures emerged. A battle ensued, using the Shadow Hulk and Shadow Seeker from the adventure, but using the Leeching Shadows from Dark Legacy of Evard instead of the Shadow Motes that were written. The fight was a little intense and the cleric ended up unconscious at the end, but the party stabilized her. They had seen the dark rider on a ridge in the distance during the fight and decided to go after him.

At this point, the party started tracking the rider through the woods and came to a steep downhill slope that was tricky for their horses. The barbarian ended up basically carrying his horse and then the cleric’s horse down the slope. It was awesome.

When the group came upon the rider’s horse, dead from shadow attacks, they started suspecting that the dark figure wasn’t commanding the shadow creatures after all. Eventually they found the dark creature and talked to him rather than fought. They learned that he was an exiled knight and that he was trying to fight the shadows, but that the townspeople thought he was commanding them. He also mentioned that his father had cursed him to an evil god. The PCs teamed up with him and tried to clear his name.

Next came a trip into town to confront his father, who wasn’t at his pub – but this didn’t stop the barbarian and the warden from starting a bar fight! I decided to roll with it and threw some brawlers at them. They fought for a couple of rounds and prevailed easily. Of course, they had to skedaddle because the barmaid went to fetch the guards (they DID start the fight, after all).

Ultimately, the group ended up at the theater where the cult of the evil god was meeting. They convinced the cultists (confused townspeople) that the cult leader was leading them astray as he wanted to sacrifice a baby to the evil god. The cultists left, leaving the party to fight the leader and more shadow creatures. This time I did use the original Shadow Motes but I paired them with the Dusk Beasts from Dark Legacy of Evard.

This ended up being an awesome battle, ranging all over the place. The mage used Mage Hand to pluck the baby off the altar, but the Dusk Beasts knocked him unconscious. The barbarian started raging and charging all over the place, twice getting knocked down to just one hit point. The cleric eventually grabbed the baby and took it up into a balcony for safekeeping, whereupon the warden smashed the ladder to the balcony to keep the cult leader from getting to it. Lots of damage, lots of heroism… it was a great fight, and the good guys just barely pulled it out in the end.

Everyone had a fun time, and I’m happy to say that one of the players has volunteered to DM the group through an ongoing campaign. Success!

This “game for new players” is something I would love to do on a regular basis, maybe once every few months. So, if you’re reading this post and are interested in learning to play D&D via an online game, drop me a line!

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 5

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This week marked the beginning of the second adventuring day for the intrepid travelers in the town of Duponde. A total of eight players showed up this week, so we split into two tables of four each. My table had:

  • Garro the hunter (the new player from week 1, now with a leveled-up PC!)
  • Sever the paladin (the new player’s friend, brand-new to D&D)
  • Markus the cleric (the replacement PC for the one I killed in week 1)
  • Jarren the mage

Having survived a night in the Shadowfell, the players napped through the morning back at the beloved Old Owl Inn, feeling a little shaky when they awoke (I’m using the Despair Deck, so they all drew a card). Some of the PCs spent some time studying the mysterious journal they had discovered at Evard’s tomb; it belonged to the wizard Nathaire who had disappeared from the Old Owl, and it was written in code. They haven’t fully deciphered it yet, but they’re making progress.

A young Vistani boy (basically a gypsy) came to the heroes to tell them that his grandmother Grivelda had a vision and needed to tell the heroes about it. She saw them as being the key to stopping whatever had happened to Duponde. We had a nice bit of role playing with Grivelda, with the PCs very interested in asking her about her visions. Three of them volunteered to have their palms read (two with poor results). They got the impression that she might know a thing or two about potion making, and I allowed them to make diplomacy checks to see if they could persuade her to whip up a healing potion, but none of them were very diplomatic (the best roll was an 8; I set the DC at 10). Oh well.

Before long, Grivelda’s grandson came running into the house, crying out that wolves were coming, along with a werewolf. As written, the battle starts with the PCs inside the house, but I thought the battle would be more interesting outside (the house was tiny), so I let them move outside as a free action when we rolled initiative.

Since there were only 4 PCs and most of them were level 1, I scaled the battle down. I threw two wolves at them instead of three, and I leveled the werewolf down by one level on the fly (reduced HP by 8, reduced defenses by 1 each). I left his attacks and damage alone.

The werewolf won initiative and rushed into battle, coming after the nearest target – the cleric (whose predecessor character from the same player, remember, I had killed in week 1). He went into his lycanthropic fury, in which he makes both a claw and a bite attack and deals himself 5 damage in the process. The claw was a critical hit, dealing a bunch of damage and knocking the cleric to the ground; fortunately, the bite missed.

The hunter in the party climbed onto the roof of the house and took at shot at a wolf  – and missed. The cleric used his turn to stand up, smack the werewolf, and then a minor action to increase the party’s AC for the encounter (rather than heal himself). One wolf came after the wizard while the other climbed up onto the roof after the hunter – who was quite surprised to have company up there!

The paladin and wizard went to work on the ground-bound wolf, and then Grivelda gave the werewolf a dirty look to turn off his regeneration (which ended up being hugely important) and his disease-bearing nature. The werewolf got back to savaging the cleric, who decided to heal the hunter on the roof instead of himself. This ended up being a mistake, as the werewolf dropped the cleric unconscious in the third round.

Eventually the mage started wrecking the ground foes with arc lightning and the paladin started drawing their attention. The hunter climbed off the roof and was pounced on from the roof by the wolf, who dropped him unconscious. Meanwhile, the cleric was busy failing death saves.

The mage’s dice were hot, and she started dropping the enemies one after the other. The last wolf tried to run but was met with a magic missile in the back.

Unfortunately, this was too late for the cleric, who failed three straight death saves. Pow. And once again, I killed one of Chris’s characters. Man, did I feel bad! But really, the dice just betrayed him. If he had just made one of those saves, he would have pulled through.

The other table breezed right through the encounter; maybe I should have scaled it down even farther. Well, so it goes. At least Grivelda was able to bring the cleric back with a four-healing-surge penalty, so Markus lives to fight another day!

No map this time, since I used the official Wizards of the Coast map for this one (it’s a map from Reavers of Harkenwold, which they put on their web site). If you’re a DDI subscriber, you can get the map here.

Previous sessions:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Factotum will try anything

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Given that I’m still pretty new to D&D (having started in early 2010), I’m still having “firsts” that are old hat for most gamers. I’ve just created my first character with a real concept, who I can really role play.

Factotum the Human Bard probably uses the same concept as a lot of 4e bards out there: Multiclassing. His motto is, “Oh, I’m great at that!” He’ll try anything. Note that he’s not especially GOOD at any of those things, but he thinks he’s ultra-capable.

His starting pre-racial stat array was 13 in every ability, with the one extra point in  Charisma (I wonder how many 4e players ever discover that trying to balance your stats gives you five 13s and a 14). As a slight nod to character effectiveness, I put his +2 human racial bonus in Charisma. So, he has 16 Charisma and 13 everything else. Optimized, he is not!

Factotum’s feats are, of course, his bread and butter. I made him a human so that he could have an extra feat at first level. Naturally, both feats are multiclass feats, so he’s a Warlord and a Rogue. Yeah, sneak attacking bards – woo hoo! I’m only picking feats that give him skill training; right now he’s trained in eight skills.

I’ve had a chance to play two Living Forgotten Realms sessions with Factotum. The first was not so great for him; it was the only LFR game I’ve seen so far that was four straight fights, with no time carved out for skill use. He muddled through all right, but he didn’t really shine.

The second session was this past week, and it was a blast. I hadn’t realized that the always-awesome Andy had set up a long series of LFR adventures at the local store with the intention of having a semi-consistent group of characters start at level 1 and go all the way through the heroic tier over the course of many months. I just happened to have signed up for the first game in this series. Two other players had brought fourth-level characters, so they obviously didn’t know about the series either. No matter – off we went!

SPOILERS AHEAD for CORE 2-1 The Radiant Vessel of Thesk

Our quest was to go to Thesk and find a mysterious “radiant vessel” on behalf of an insane halfling. We had a great opportunity for role playing in a small community in an effort to figure out what the heck this radiant vessel was. Factotum tried to turn on the charm, but managed to stick his foot in his mouth more often than not. With the help of the rest of the group, though, we ultimately got a lead: the radiant vessel was a woman with a mystical aura around her that destroyed undead creatures. She had been taken by orcs to some distant mountains, but her cousin had a map to get there (the cousin had been having a fling with one of the orcs – the hussy).

Into the mountains, then; Factotum was happy to stealthily lead the way. When we came to a room with ladders leading down to a chamber with enemies, most of the party climbed down to fight. Factotum, naturally, jumped down the 20 feet (and almost reduced enough damage with his Acrobatics check to land on his feet). He charged into a flank in order to sneak attack a minion. When confronted with a pit to cross (which could be done with ladders), Factotum jumped it.

Eventually the party found the kidnapped woman, surrounded by orcs and an imp. Factotum Bluffed his way in, saying that he was a trained physician. It would have gone well, too – if only he had been trained in Heal. A few failed skill checks later (the party’s Goliath Barbarian/Warlord didn’t have much luck, either), and we had killed the poor woman and her baby.

It was a sad moment around the table, but we wiped our tears and brought the body back to the cousin. Factotum was a blast to play, even though he usually missed in combat (his attacks were at +6 versus Armor Class or +3 versus other defenses). The best moment was when one of the other players said, “Factotum HAS to come back next week!”

Well all right then! It’s a lot of fun to have a character with actual personality. I need to learn to bring some of this to NPCs when I’m running games, too.

And since I think Factotum is so much fun, I decided it was worth taking 15 minutes to hack the five-page PDF that the Character Builder spits out into a one-page version. You know, I should probably just use the original offline Character Builder for this guy…

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 4

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I wasn’t expecting to be running D&D Encounters this week. Our local store has tried to set up a rotation so that no DM is running two weeks in a row (to prevent burnout). Thus, I ran the first 5:00 PM table on week 1, Andy ran it week 2, I ran it week 3, and Andy was scheduled to run it week 4 (this week). Wes has been the second table DM for all three weeks, but we haven’t had a second 5:00 PM table yet (we had only six players for each of the first three weeks).

However, I got an email from the store owner today asking me if I could be available to run a second table in case it was needed; Wes was unavailable. We haven’t had a second table yet, but hey, school’s out now – you never know.

So, I showed up at the store at 4:30 (I’m so glad to have a job with some flexible hours!) and set up my projector rig, just in case. It was a good thing that I did: We had 14 players! That meant two overly-full tables of seven players each. Woo hoo!

My table consisted of one player who had been attending most of this season of Encounters, one player who’s attended past seasons of Encounters, and five first-time Encounters players (two of whom were very new to D&D altogether – awesome!). The party was:

  • Hiver the Dwarf Fighter
  • Steven the Half-Elf Sentinel (our regular)
  • Chilliax the Drow Executioner (thanks again to Wielding a Bohemian Ear Spoon!)
  • Keira the Elf Thief
  • Balin the Elf Mage (a red box character!)
  • Fargrim the OTHER Dwarf Fighter
  • Thetari the Dwarf Cleric of Death

The session began with some recapping of the prior three sessions (since only one of the players had been present for any of them). This meant that it was tough to do much role playing; we pretty much just got the mission from the local cleric to head to the graveyard, since he believed all of the shadow troubles began there.

The players all made Perception checks as they entered the graveyard, none of which were especially great. This meant that the party saw some zombies shambling toward them, but they DIDN’T see the ghouls or shadows lying in wait. The ghouls actually acted very early in the initiative order, successfully attacking from hiding and throwing two characters to the ground and grabbing them. The rest of the party rushed to the rescue, with one ghoul getting pushed away by Smite Undead from the cleric and the other being Hypnotized by the Mage and forced to walk away, breaking both grabs (nice teamwork!).

Graveyard map for session 4 of Dark Legacy of Evard - with grid

Graveyard map for session 4 of Dark Legacy of Evard - no grid

When the shadows oozed out of the trees near the end of the first round, the brief panic around the table was awesome – “There are MORE monsters?!” The shadows did what they do, melding with PCs and draining their life for several turns. Zombies grabbed characters and started smashing them.

In the end, though, this party of largely fresh characters will full healing surges, action points and daily powers made short work of a graveyard full of undead monsters. Since I had more than the five PCs that the encounter was written for, I followed the guidelines and added one more zombie. Normally I would have added two, or perhaps even a zombie and a ghoul, but since so many players were new to the game I didn’t want to overdo it. I needn’t have worried – they rocked the encounter.

After the monsters were dead, we had a little more time for role playing. The adventurers examined the mausoleum of Evard’s tomb and saw that the main sarcophagus had been forced open and that some kind of magical curse had blasted whoever opened it. It was clear that the zombies were recently-killed workers who had helped to break into the tomb, but the wizard Nathaire and his halfling assistant were nowhere to be found. The group did, however, find a journal written in code that belonged to the halfling. The plot thickens!

After the party left the mausoleum, the sun came up and Duponde shifted back out of the Shadowfell. Ah, but for how long?

Previous sessions:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Anyone interested in a one-shot online game for new players?

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The comments on my previous post about my experiences reading the Pathfinder Core Rulebook were interesting. Kayti chimed in to express interest in learning to play Pathfinder and asked if I would be running a game. I’m still just learning that game, but I know D&D 4th Edition, and I always want to encourage new players whenever possible.

So, I’m putting out a call: Are there any people out there who would be interested in joining Kayti in a one-shot D&D 4th Edition game aimed at new players? I’d run the game online using MapTool and Skype (of course), and I’d ideally love to have a table of all-new players. I wish I could agree to run an ongoing campaign, but I’m already a bit overcommited. A one-shot, though, I can handle.

If you have any friends who might be interested in playing, send them my way! Once I have enough players (I’m aiming for 4-5) I’ll get in touch with all of them about scheduling the game, figuring out what they want to do about characters, etc. I’ll be sure to blog about the experience, too!

I’m starting to learn Pathfinder

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Most of my RPG experience so far has been with D&D Fourth Edition. I only started playing in earnest in early 2010, and it’s mostly been 4e home games, 4e online games, and 4e organized play games. I had the chance to try GURPS, Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu at Genghis Con in February. And I had a little bit of experience with D&D 3.0 about eight or nine years ago.

Pathfinder, as I know, is basically D&D 3.75. I know that it’s a pretty popular game, and that their adventure paths receive a lot of praise, even from people who don’t really play Pathfinder. It’s somewhat popular at my local store, too, though there seems to be far more D&D 4e organized play there. The store owner, Jeff, is a big fan of Pathfinder, and he encouraged me to try it out, offering to run a “learn to play” session sometime if I was interested.

I’m more of a book guy, frankly, so I decided to check out a copy of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook from my local library. So far I’ve read the introductory chapter, the Races chapter, a little bit of Classes, and most of the Combat chapter.

I want to reserve judgment on the system until I’ve finished reading more of the book, but I know that lots of folks out there probably have some insights to offer me that might help me better understand the game. What should I be looking for? What might not be obvious from a pure rules read-through that would enhance my understanding of Pathfinder?

Just to be clear, I’m perfectly happy with 4e, but I love lots of games and thought it would be fun to learn another one, just for variety’s sake. This is not an edition war – I’m pretty confident that I’ll find something to love about most RPGs out there. It’s all good!

The 4e Thief is brutally effective… and boring

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My Friday night War of the Burning Sky campaign has reached an exciting point – paragon tier! I had to delay the game by a week so that I had time to get everyone’s new and improved characters programmed up in MapTool, but we finally got together last night for some gaming with more power.

At this point, we have a party of seven PCs. We have the original five players who started the campaign in July 2010, plus two more players I added earlier this year when one of the original players got a job that caused a scheduling conflict and another player was only able to come about once every three weeks for a while. Lately, though, they’ve all been able to play, so it’s a big party.

One of the original five players was starting with a new character (11th level, of course) last night. This was the player who was running Fudrick, the gnome warlock who defected to the bad guys in the previous session. Fudrick’s player rolled up a new character – a human Thief. This is the Essentials rogue.

Meet the Thief

I had seen a second-level Thief in action once before, and the paragon thief is similar in a lot of ways. The Thief has fantastic accuracy with his attacks, especially since he has so many ways to get combat advantage. His damage is fantastic, too, with sneak attack being an almost every-round thing. Once the Thief was able to get into melee with the bad guys, they didn’t last long.

The Thief is a very effective striker, dealing out massive damage quite reliably. But after running a session with the Thief in the mix, it felt, well, boring.

I know that hitting despite a 2 on the attack die is what a Thief is built to do, but that takes the excitement out of the Thief’s attack roll. If you know you’ll only ever miss on a critical failure, there’s no drama with the attack roll.

The Math

The Thief in this party starts with a +20 to attack at 11th level. For comparison, an 11th-level monster should have an armor class between 23 (brute) and 27 (soldier), with 25 being typical (other defenses should be two points lower). Add in the fact that the Thief almost always has combat advantage (+2 to hit) and a feat (Nimble Blade) that gives him an extra +1 to hit when he has combat advantage (so we’re up to +23 now), and a feat that lets him choose whether he wants to attack AC or Reflex (which averages two points less than AC). And he can use Backstab twice per encounter for another +3 to hit.

Thus, the Thief is usually attacking at +23 versus Reflex, and twice per encounter he can bump this up to +26 versus Reflex. If by some chance the monster has a lower AC, he can attack that instead. Even-level opponents should have a Reflex defense of about 23. Level+3 opponents should have a Reflex defense of 26. With Backstab and Combat Advantage, the Thief will hit a typical foe three levels above his own on a zero, so the only chance to miss is on a natural 1.

To be clear, I do understand that “this is what Thieves do”. Their schtick is to be ultra-accurate, hardly ever missing. It works really well. And it’s boring. It’s like Magic Missile in a lot of ways (though the Thief at least gets to roll a bunch of dice for weapon damage plus sneak attack) – another power that works, but is boring.

This particular Thief is also a little boring in that if he can’t get into melee, he can’t do anything useful. Early in yesterday’s session, the party was facing down some soldiers mounted on flying drakes. The Thief actually spent one round taking the total defense action because he couldn’t do anything to a flying foe.

What to do?

So, what’s the solution for me as the DM? Well, I have a few options.

First, I could raise enemy defenses. This is a terrible idea, as making it so that the Thief needs to roll, say, a 6 to hit will mean that other PCs will need a 15 or better. Not fun for the rest of the party.

Second, I could give enemies ways to negate combat advantage. This isn’t a trait I’ve seen on many monsters, and using it would just feel like a “screw you” to the Thief, which isn’t what I want either.

Third, I could use monsters that punish melee strikers. They could have auras that deal damage or do other nasty things. I like this idea, as long as I give the melee PCs some ways to mitigate or entirely avoid the issue by doing something interesting.

Fourth, I could use monsters that are hard to get to in melee, such as fliers or artillery with protected positions. I’ll probably do this a little bit, but I won’t want to go overboard.

Fifth, I could raise hit points on monsters. I really have no desire to do this, as it leads to fights that drag on whenever the Thief isn’t hitting a particular bad guy. Plus, it’s still boring.

Sixth, I could have monsters that beat the crap out of the Thief, either by dealing tons of damage or by denying him the ability to get combat advantage by using something like immobilization (most of the Thief’s easy ways of getting combat advantage come from using move actions, though there are lots of cases where the Thief could use them even if he can’t leave his square).

I’m sure there are other options I haven’t thought of, and I’d love to hear more ideas in the comments. For now, I’ll try to think about using some enemies that are either hard to get to in melee or that punish PCs who get too close to them, but I don’t want to unduly punish the Fighter and Swordmage in the party, either. I definitely won’t make the bad guys shy about attacking the Thief when he starts dishing out massive damage, perhaps even breaking defender marks to do so. We shall see.

One more PC bites the dust

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I wonder if I’m starting to get a reputation as a killer DM. Tonight I ran a Living Forgotten Realms game at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds, and I killed off a PC – only the fourth time I’ve done so in the approximately one year I’ve been running D&D games. Still, one PC every three months… that’s a pretty aggressive kill rate!

This time, though, I don’t really feel bad about it. I was running an adventure called AKAN 1-3 Property for Sale.

SPOILERS AHEAD

This adventure is, in a lot of ways, a pretty standard dungeon delve. The party is hired by a halfling to clear monsters out of a long-forgotten temple. They fight some drow atop a waterfall, then head down into a cave and fight some stirges and a Cavern Choker (plus one of the drow who escaped the first encounter). The adventure then has something I’ve never seen in another LFR adventure – an actual puzzle (basically a sudoku puzzle with colored gems). The puzzle ended up being a fun few minutes for the table, so I’m glad I didn’t skip it.

After the puzzle comes a trapped room – stepping on a pressure plate would cause the doors at either end to close and water to fill the chamber. The party figured out it was a trap, and when they set it off they all dashed for the far door – all but the party’s shaman, who decided to wait in the hallway they had come from. The trapped room takes 20 minutes to reset once it goes off, so the four PCs who had moved through the room decided to forge ahead and leave the shaman behind.

Given that decision, I didn’t feel bad if they blundered into a total party kill. After all, they were heading into a climactic battle designed for five PCs but with only three, none of whom could heal.

The battle itself was a nasty encounter with a drow priestess, two giant spiders… and a beholder (the first time I’ve gotten the opportunity to use one – cool!). The party focused fire on the beholder, bringing it down to the ground and dazing it right off the bat. It stayed dazed for two rounds and ended up bloodied in a hurry. The spiders started dealing serious damage, and the beholder invoked fear in both defenders, making them flee the chamber, leaving just a pair of PC archers (a ranger and a seeker) in the room with the bad guys.

Spiders attacked the ranger and seeker, bloodying both of them, and then the drow priestess unleashed her nasty surprise – she blew the beholder to smithereens, dealing a whole bunch of damage to both archers, dropping them unconscious. Healing potions started being poured by the defenders, but one of the archers was stranded on the far side of the room, out of reach of their aid.

I eventually let the shaman try to pick the lock on the trapped room door, which he did – and then held on for dear life as water came rushing out. He had some special shoes that let him surf to the far door, and spent a couple of rounds trying unsuccessfully to pick that lock.

Meanwhile, things were grim for the four PCs against the spiders and the drow. The seeker kept rolling death saves, slowly inching closer to oblivion. The others were up and down a lot, using healing potions and continuing to beat on the spiders.

At long last, the shaman burst into the room, just in time for the seeker to fail his final death save. The poor seeker was dead.

Now, it did take seven rounds of unconsciousness for death to claim him, so I don’t feel that he really caught any bad breaks. And the party did rush in to a room with one PC out of the action, so they knew what they were getting themselves into. Bringing the fresh shaman into the battle finally turned the tide, and the survivors prevailed, but it was too late for Oona the seeker – sorry, Steve.

Fortunately, LFR is pretty forgiving about death, so I didn’t feel too bad. Still, I let the dice fall where they may, and if death happens, it happens. If you’re a player in one of my games… consider yourself warned! Mwoo ha ha ha!