Death and the Resurrected Orc

"Ok then, Grish dies".

I totally and purposefully killed a character of a player that wasn't at my session last night. Granted, I feel the monsters were doing what they should have been doing, but I went into the session with the mindset of being ok with killing one of them.

The fight itself was tough and positioning was a real ordeal, and many other things. As a result, the half-orc was dead, in the corner, molested by poltergeists and yuan-ti boneshard skeletons. He got up, two rounds later. He was feeling much better.

Yes, the death resulted in furthering a part of the story. Was I really gunning for him? Maybe more than I should have been. Though, for the most part, I think the monsters stayed acting how they should act. However, this is the second occasion in which I have injured or killed a player and it results in a plot point. Perhaps this is the wrong way to go about things. I hope that the story and options that result from it will be fun, and offer interesting choices to the players.

I might be making a mistake, though. Regardless, something like this I probably won't do again, at least, certainly not soon.

Unreasonable Expectations

I have unreasonable expectations. Not for everything, or even most things, but certainly for those in the defender role that work hard to be good at one thing, particularly, defense. The problem is, really, in pure defense stats themselves. If you spend time and resources in bolstering one above the others, the expectation is that when you are attacked on that stat, the enemy should miss, more often than not. That's a tough mindset to be in, as a player.

Monsters should roughly hit a player half the time, when targeting armor. Though, monster discrepancies play into this some as well. There is a 2 point fluctuation on any given monster role, and it's not separated by elites or solos. This is a weird inconsistency, and one that's really annoying when statting encounters. The thrust is, when you start pumping feats and really trying to up a particular defense, the player expectation changes. With my current base AC, as an example at level 12, I am hit either 35% of the time or 45% of the time, depending on the monsters being selected (brutes hit less often, but everything else is the same, roughly). This is from three feats used to up my AC and defenses. Otherwise, I would be hit 55% or 65% of the time. This is about on par with other light armor wearers, and only slightly behind heavy or medium armor wearers, which is as it should be.

So taking the 35%, which is most of the mosters. Let's start adding in big fights. My personal defenses go up by 2. This puts my getting hit at 25%. If other players start blowing their's, they can only hit my on a 20. This goes for both types of the monsters, the higher end ones and the normal ones.

You can see how this poses a problem. Monster levels need to start to creep up to challenge me against AC. If the defender isn't challenged, then the party isn't really at risk, in a lot of ways. Things can circumvent the defender, but that leads to the defender feeling useless. Any given fight is balanced around the potential use of powerful dailies. In the fights that dailies aren't used, then the numbers are slightly out of whack, and the feats begin to feel useless. Monsters two levels higher, and on the higher end have a 20% increased chance to hit. So there we are, over the half the time mark, with three feats taken.

This is frustrating, but it's completely understandable and a reasonable way the game is expected to operate, to some degree. Any given encounter is two levels in either direction, so some will miss a lot, some will hit a lot. The upshot is I need to change my expectations of what defenders are and the feats that I take.

It's not unreasonable for me to expect to be hit a lot, but getting hit consistently is really where that leads, as high defenses are pretty tough to deal with. The other option is plan attacks that don't target armor, but that is limiting in a different way.

This is an area that the game doesn't handle well, and as a player, I need to just be better.

An in-depth analysis of the status condition: Daze

Daze. The player only gets one action of any type, excepting free actions, during their turn. They may not take any opportunity actions, including immediate interrupts and immediate reactions.

That seems like it sucks. The first experience with it sucked, that's for sure. I never took the time to really think about WHY it sucked though. Recently, I encountered being dazed again. This time though, I didn't even care. I was too busy bashing faces in and trying to complete the objective to really notice, honestly. That got me thinking, why was the first time so bad?

The answer is pretty simple, positioning. If you are in position already, daze doesn't matter. You don't spend movement most of the time, anyway, save for maybe a shift. If the enemy moves away from you, you can't smack them, but you can then charge them. That's not so bad. Ranged has similar concerns, coupled with a greater need to move, should an enemy decide to encounter them.

When daze is really awful is when something else makes it bad. A persistent zone, fantastic terrain, or movement due to some sort of trap or obstacle. It's also bad if you need your minors consistently. Leaders suffer the most from this, with defenders being right behind them. If the defender doesn't care about the punishing portion, depending on the defender, and they just want the mark, as was my particular case last session, it matters less.

So what do to with daze? Try not to use it while characters are taking damage from a zone or something, unless it's a take damage at the end of their turn zone. If that's the case, sure, no problem. Try not to plan it around stopping healing, or making healing the only thing a leader can do. It's not a great time. Use it at the beginning of combat, or on a surprise round, make movement and strategy a commodity early on, without locking down a class entirely. Daze melee. They can have the option of using charges or other basic abilities if need be. It impacts them a lot, but still less than others. Use daze to cover a retreat. It's a great way to make a bad guy into a villain.

So what's my opinion? I don't hate it as much as I used to hate it. It has a place, but hopefully we don't visit that place too often.

Your bullshit 4e monster of the week

Wights. When you absolutely only want your group to have a single encounter in a day, accept no substitutes.

Making players cry without actually harming them or verbally abusing them

Last night I ran the conclusion of a dungeon in my bi-weekly (every other week, not twice weekly) Chessenta campaign. There were a total of three opponent factions in the final battle, some cultists, a blue dragon, and a brass dragon. The blue and the brass dragon were tangling atop a pile of treasure, crushing the treasure each time they moved or missed with an attack. After that was resolved, I had a list of randomly generated treasure that was being crossed out as the dragons fought and stumbled around.

It was pretty awesome. One of the players ran in and grabbed the dragon in order to forcibly remove him from the room to stop the treasure from getting entirely destroyed, and when the dragon eventually got back in the room, the party rushed him to at least stop him from moving.

The fight featured some neat monsters that were fun and challenging, but not frustrating. Proving once again that ongoing damage is a good mechanic.

Overall it was a fun session that ended up being more lucrative for the party based on the party's tactics and actions, a fine thing if you ask me. We also learned that dragons HATE blowguns.

Invokers are weird

Invokers are weird. They are controllers, they wear chain, and they make divine covenants with the gods.

They are sort of like that priest you thought about playing a long time ago that was a battle priest and didn't use weapons. Even stranger, they are sort of either midfielders or long-rangers, depending on which side you pick. If you pick single target damage and control, they are long range. If you pick lots of ae with horrible side effects, you mid-field it. Also, you get summons, maybe two at every daily spell level. You can also be a pseudo healer, but not really at all. Though you will sometimes let people spend surges and dole out hit points.

Some of the really weird stuff? There are entirely power lines that are dedicated to you dazing yourself. It's pretty bizarre and, at first blush, it looks kind of overwhelming because it's almost entirely utility and finesse.

That being said, I like what I have played of it thus far. It's a pretty nutty class with some nice tricks to whip out.

Whoops

I will finish that chart, honest. I've just been completely slammed, and have next to no free time. Ugh.

Last night, we played our first game of Paragon tier DnD. It can be summed up easily by the following phrase, "What just happened?". The entire session was a total and complete surprise. Paragon tier looks innocuous enough, at first glance. Your stats increase by one, you get a feat, you pick a Paragon Path and gain some abilities, and any scaling feats increase. It's a lot of little things that add up to one big thing, your party can now completely explode with awesome.

Everyone gets an extra encounter power, which is sort of scary by itself. This encounter power is going to be very attractive and have some real flash to it, as well. These powers are going to really emphasize your class roll in a way that hasn't quite been seen previously. Sure, it depends on the path you take, but count on your power being impressive. Some examples, a defender power that lets you permanently mark another creature until the end of combat, and it does decent damage. Not amazing damage, but solid damage. A controller power that let's you remove a target from the board until it successfully saves. Striker powers get additional damage kickers and start targetting multiple targets.

Not to mention the passive scaling. Leaders become gnarly. Their healing ability, long overdue for some love by this point, increases and becomes awesome again. Strikers get an additional damage kicker. Defenders...stay the same really. Controllers get some bonuses. Some feats scale, but not others. Hitpoints increase, some damage increases, some defenses increase. It's really amazing how these little changes all start to add up.

Now, the worst part about all of this is your action point action becomes utterly explosive. Every Paragon Path lets you do something else when you action point. The worst of these lets you take another action afterwards. The best just do something like passive resistances until the end of your next turn, or every enemy within X takes damage. Those are great for the person running the game, which is why I am terming them the best here. The extra actions let you really devastate an opponent. As an example, last night, as an assaulting swordmage, I made an immediate reaction and hit, raising my defenses by two, and my to hit by two. My turn went, I used a daily and targetted two creatures with attacks. I action pointed, made my attack, missed, but because I action pointed, I got a melee basic attack after that resolved. That's five attacks I got to make that round. That's pretty awful to resolve for anyone running the game. I was just one player, so this was happening all around the table as this was checked out last night.

The practical knowledge gained is hard to decipher at first, but I wrote about the converse of this not too long ago talking about the NPC level gap when you get to eight or ninth level. This is directly the opposite. All of a sudden monsters need to change and the encounters have to change as we catch up and slightly surpass them. I was expecting a little bit of this, but not quite the dramatic shift that we saw last night.

I really wouldn't say that I go out of my way to powergame my swordmage. I've made a conscious effort to make him a good defender after we had a pseudo defender leave the game, because he moved. I took feats that increase my defenses, allowed me to wear better armor, and I will be taking another feat to let me mark more targets. It's nothing awful, but all of a sudden, I'm damn near impossible to hit, unless we start fighting much tougher opponents.

One of the things not really expressed well in texts is that encounters NEED to increase when the players reach paragon tier. The information is there, it's just not obvious. If I haven't been scouring the books lately to find obscure corner cases for games I run, I wouldn't know that minions are now 5:1 instead of 4:1 for each encounter. I wouldn't know that you need an extra monster per encounter now. It's weird, but it does make sense. Experience totals become more of a way to judge encounters than by levels now. It does make sense scaling wise, but it becomes tougher to run. You have to vary your encounters up more monster type wise, and your level ranges are going to go from -2 to +3 on monster in each fight. It does make the fights more varied and unique, but it's a massive style shift in running.

These awkward transitions are something the game could definitely handle better.

I love random treasure generation

I love generating treasure. The possibilities that appear before you are endless. The random nature of the treasure is a surprise and a pleasure when you are generating it, and you know that the PCs are going to be surprised when they see it. Sure, sometimes it's nice to have nicely itemized rewards as well, and it's nice to have bazaars that the players can visit and purchase items. Other times, it's a nice reminder that the PCs are part of a larger world and the items are for people that are obviously not them.

So how do I do it? I made up some charts that I have been using after playing around with various methods.

First, determine how many items you want, or just roll a die to figure out how much you want.

d6 - type of treasure

1-4. Equipment

5. Rituals

6. Alchemy

d20 - type of equipment

1. Armor

2. Weapons

3. Augments

4. Implements

5. Reagents

6. Arm Slot

7. Feet Slot

8. Hand Slot

9. Head Slot

10. Rings

11. Waist Slot

12. Wonderous Items

13. Item Sets

14. Mount Slot

15. Familiar Slot

16. Companion Slot

17. Alchemical Items

18. Consumables

19. Intelligent Items (If you don't want to use these as random treasure, re-roll here instead)

20. Artifacts (If you don't want to use these as random treasure, re-roll here instead)

Level of Item

For players level 1-8 roll a d8 (1-8 level items)

For players level 9-18 roll a d12 (8-19 level items)

For players level 19-30 roll a d12 (19-30 level items)

You can obviously increase this if you wish, but it's a decent guideline based on levels.

Ok, you have determined the item type and the item level. That makes it pretty easy to narrow down choices now. For some things, less so though!

d6 -Armor type

1. Cloth

2. Leather

3. Hide

4. Chain

5. Scale

6. Plate

For armor, you can then determine subtypes if you want, githweave, finemail, warplate whatever if you want to, but the stuff is leveled, so you should feel comfortable subbing that in based on levels if you want. If the item type can match a level of that object (finemail at level 6 for example) roll a d6, 1-5 is normal, 6 is the special type.

d6 - Weapon Quality

1-2. Simple

3-5. Military

6. Superior

Superior Quality Weapons

1. Bastard Sword

2. Blowgun

3. Bola

4. Craghammer

5. Cutting Wheel

6. Double Axe

7. Double Flail

8. Double Scimitar

9. Double Sword

10. Drow Long Knife

11. Execution Axe

12. Fullblade

13. Garrote

14. Greatbow

15. Greatspear

16. Katar

17. Kukri

18. Mordenkrad

19. Net

20. Parrying Dagger

21. Shuriken

22. Spiked Chain

23. Spiked Shield

24. Superior Crossbow

25. Talenta Boomerang

26. Talenta Sharrash

27. Talenta Tangat

28. Tratnyr

29. Triple Headed Flail

30. Urgosh

31. Waraxe

32. Whip

33. Xen'drik Boomerang

34. Zulaat

35. Rapier

36. Reroll

That's a lot of superior weapons. The easiest way to do it is to break them into groups of six. 1-6, 7-12, 13-18, 19-24, 25-30, 31-36. Roll a d6 to determine what group you get, and then roll another d6 to determine weapon type.

Simple Weapons

1. Club

2. Crossbow

3. Dagger

4. Greatclub

5. Hand Crossbow

6. Javelin

7. Mace

8. Morningstar

9. Quarterstaff

10. Repeating Crossbow

11. Scythe

12. Sickle

13. Sling

14. Spear

15. Spiked Gauntlet

Still a lot, but not as many. Break them into groups of 5 and roll a d6 with group 1 (1-5) being 1-2, group 2 (6-10) being 3-4, and group 3 (11-15) being 5-6. Then roll a d6, rerolling any 6 you roll.

Military Weapons

1. Battle Axe

2. Battlefist

3. Broadsword

4. Falchion

5. Flail

6. Glaive

7. Greataxe

8. Greatsword

9. Halberd

10. Handaxe

11. Heavy Flail

12. Heavy War Pick

13. Khopesh

14. Light War Pick

15. Longbow

16. Longspear

17. Longsword

18. Scimitar

19. Scourge

20. Short Sword

21. Shortbow

22. Throwing Hammer

23. Trident

24. War Pick

25. War Hammer

Again, we have a multiple of five. Easy enough. Once again use a d6 to determine the item groups. If you roll a 6, just reroll. Group 1 is 1-5, group 2 is 6-10, group 3 is 11-15, group 4 is 16-20 and group 5 is 21-25.

Ok, so now you have your basic weapon types and your level ranges for items. I am going to do a huge thing here and list the effects as well, by level and weapon type.

One-Handed Non-Hammers

d4 - Level 1:

1. Magic Weapon +1

2. Challenge-Seeking +1

3. Reroll

4. Reroll

d20 - Level 2:

1. Aftershock +1

2. Armblade +1

3. Bloodclaw +1

4. Defensive +1

5. Farbond +1

6. Flesh Seeker +1

7. Gambler's Weapon +1

8. Goblin Totem +1

9. Guardian's Call +1

10. Harmonic Songblade +1

11. Mage Weapon +1

12. Manifester Weapon +1

13. Parrying Weapon +1

14. Pinning Weapon +1

15. Psychokinetic Weapon +1

16. Quicksilver Blade +1

17. Reproachful Weapon +1

18. Supremely Vicious Weapon +1

19. Vicious Weapon +1

20. Weapon of Shared Wrath +1

Level 3

1. Aegis Blade +1

2. Anathema Weapon +1

3. Aura Killer Weapon +1

4. Byeshk Weapon +1

5. Duelist's Weapon +1

6. Foe Maker Weapon +1

7. Frost Weapon +1

8. Great Hunger +1

9. Harsh Songblade +1

10. Inescapable Weapon +1

11. Inspiring Weapon +1

12. Ki Weapon +1

13. Luckblade +1

14. Pact Blade +1

15. Paired Weapon +1

16. Quick Weapon +1

17. Reckless Weapon +1

18. Scalebane Weapon +1

19. Strongheart Weapon +1

20. Subtle Weapon +1

21. Thundering Weapon +1

22. Vanguard Weapon +1

23. Warsoul Weapon +1

24. Gutting Weapon +1

25. Infectious Flame Weapon +1

Again, break this into groups of five. There will be five. Roll a d6 to determine the group then a d6 for the effect, re-roll any result of six.

Level 4

1. Acidic Weapon +1

2. Communal Weapon +1

3. Deathstalker Weapon +1

4. Dislocation Weapon +1

5. Echoing Songblade +1

6. Intensifying Weapon +1

7. Master's Blade +1

8. Maw of the Guardian +1

9. Medic's Weapon +1

10. Oathblade +1

11. Opportunistic Weapon +1

12. Stormbiter Weapon +1

13. Vigilant Blade +1

14. Weapon of Oaths Fulfilled +1

15. Wounding Weapon +1

Again, three groups of five, with re-rolling on a six.

Level 5

1. Chainreach Weapon +1

2. Fey Strike Weapon +1

3. Flaming Weapon +1

4. Flensing Weapon +1

5. Lifedrinker Weapon +1

6. Necroshard Weapon +1

7. Poisoned Weapon +1

8. Runic Weapon +1

9. Thieving Weapon +1

10. Thoughtspike Weapon +1

11. Vengeful Weapon +1

12. Weapon of Great Opportunity +1

13. Learning Weapon +1

Break them into groups of five. Roll a d6 to determine the grouping, a result of 1-2 for 1-5, a result of 3-4 for 6-10, and a result of 5-6 for 11-13. For the last group, assign each item two numbers then roll.

Level 6 - as level one with the following, all bonuses increase to +2

3. Dynamic Weapon +2

4. Sacrificial Weapon +2

Level 7 - as level two with the following changes, all bonuses increase to +2

d20

1-16. Roll on the level 2 chart for item type

17. Devilblind Weapon +2

18. Retribution Weapon +2

19. Spiderkissed Weapon+2

20. Transference Weapon +2

Level 8 - as level three with the following changes, all bonuses increase to +2

d20

1-11. Roll on the level 3 chart for item type

12- 20. Roll on the below Chart

1. Adamantine Weapon +2

2. Assassin's Weapon +2

3. Bronzewood Weapon +2

4. Cloaked Weapon +2

5. Cold Iron Weapon +2

6. Cunning Weapon +2

7. Dread Weapon +2

8. Flanking Weapon +2

9. Force Weapon +2

10. Graceful Weapon +2

11. Guardian's Brand +2

12. Mithrendain Steel +2

13. Mordant Weapon +2

14. Performer's Blade +2

15. Rubicant Blade +2

16. Tyrant's Weapon +2

17. Victory Flash Weapon +2

18. Waterbane Weapon +2

19. Writhing Vine Weapon +2

20. Re-roll

Level 9 - as level 4 with the following changes, all bonuses increase to +2

d20

1-12. Roll on the level 4 chart

13-20. Roll a d10 on the chart below.

1. Demonbane Weapon +2

2. Demonslayer Weapon +2

3. Dragonslayer Weapon +2

4. Feyslaughter Weapon +2

5. Elementalbane Weapon +2

6. Lucky Halfling's Weapon +2

7. Shapechanger's Sorrow +2

8. Singing Weapon +2

9. Vampiric Weapon +2

10. Wolfen Weapon +2

Level 10 - add the following to the level 5 chart, increase bonuses to +2

roll a d20

13. Blackshroud +2

14. Footpad's Friend +2

15. Guarding Weapon +2

16. Lightning Weapon +2

17. Righteous Weapon +2

18. Vitality Drinking +2

19. Wraithblade +2

20. Re-roll

I will finish the rest later, but this is a good start to get you going! Tomorrow will have levels 11-30 for weapons, hammers, armor and whatever else I get through.

Striation

"This isn't designed for you"

That phrase is said a lot in the MMO world right now. It's an interesting thing to consider. We've reached a point in MMO design where accessibility, time, and performance are clashing in a completely new fashion. In most MMO models that feature a PvE endgame which revolves around raiding, you have the following model.

Originally, everything was a competition. The players separated themselves into the above tiers. The striation and social structure is set by many factors. Most of which are time, accessibility and accountability.

Yes, accountability. People had to be accountable for their actions originally in MMOs. The leveling curve was steep and starting over just really wasn't something you wanted to consider. You couldn't just pay and swap servers. You couldn't rename yourself. Nothing was instanced, so you interacted with people on a continuous basis. I am not advocating a non-instanced fully Surviving the Game style of game. I do miss this level of accountability though in some games.

Time was a huge obstacle. You had to be available at a moment's notice if you wanted to be bleeding edge. It was a commitment. There was no playing 30 minutes a day or just twice a week. You had to put in the time. Almost unhealthily so. If you couldn't commit like this, then you were in a different strata.

Accessibility was not a game model until recently. The model didn't support multiple people being at the top at a time. By definition if you were not at the top, you couldn't access everything. There was a lot of other content with different difficulties and different rewards available, but if one guild was on top besides the one you were in, you couldn't do it. Now, games over time have tried to fix this. Instances have become common place. This prevents that single guild on top model in theory.

However, people like to compete. People WANT to separate themselves from the crowd. They want to show they are better than other people. They can't help it. This begins the problems with some of the design shifts that have occurred recently. Instead of that clearly delineated strata you had, you end up with something like looks like this.

Which is pretty odd. This is just people who actually want to experience the raiding content. There is another tier of people that have no interest in raiding at all. Still. Look at that. You have three of the tiers of people that have completed the content. This is pretty cool. Everyone seeing what they have paid for is still a new concept. I don't think it's lost its luster quite yet. However, this does raise problems.

The game design created competition is gone. It's entirely gone. This means that people have to create their own forms of competition. Let me be honest with you here, people are jerks. Giant jerks. If left up to them, they will create competition and barriers to entry that make game defined ones look like nothing. People create arbitrary requirements and then immediately start with the following process:

1) Anything I can't complete is overtuned.

2) Anything I can complete that you can't complete is an amazing fight and perfectly balanced.

3) Anything that I completed before you, but you have completed used to be an accomplishment, but now it's nerfed and weak.

4) Anything you can complete but I can't complete is tuned for people who treat this game as a job and have no life. I'm too busy dating supermodels and being a millionaire to worry about what you think, you fat basement dweller.

People chafe under this non-existent yoke. People want to flaunt their skill, dedication, and elitism. So what happens? You create optionally harder content as a way for people to distinguish themselves. You create challenging situations that change the fights in some fashion, or fights that are only accessible once you have completed all the hardmodes. Once again, limiting your access. It's not a big deal, and the top 5% and the group slightly behind them will say that it's for them and not for you, and you get access to everything now anyway and to stop crying. That's where it starts, not for you.

So what happens? You have a gear differential. Now, I am only talking about the same type of raiding size here. Some games separate the sizes and that creates a player imposed barrier. Well, you raid differently than me, that means you are either a) not as good or b) have no life. This depends on what side you are on. Anyway, this gear differential creates issues. You now have people who have significantly better gear. So, the next dungeon is released. The people in hardmode gear now seethe and whine about being placed back in the normal track with the rest of the people. They blow through content and say it's so easy. They complain that the game is dumbed down. They say that anyone who can't annihilate it is bad. Of course, if you release the hardmodes at the same time, you get more of the above four points.

Then what do you do?

You release more at once. You let people work through what they can work through at some sort of pace. Pacing is very important in games, something that seems to be forgotten in a lot of MMOs. You support competitions in game. You reward the people who do things first or quickly with vanity items that then become unattainable later. This lets people show off their skill and dedication but in no way gives them any sort of game edge. Limited titles, limited mounts, all neat. However, when you remove something, you have to replace it with a lesser reward to still encourage people. Still, it's actually a neat method.

You bring back accountability. Make people care about how they treat people and how they are treated. Yes, name changes and server transfers make you money. Still, there has to be a balance between this and giving people carte blanc to be d-bags.

Support rankings and player competition through in-game mechanics. Make things more friendly and supported by the game. Once it's a game structure, it becomes less mean spirited and more accepted. There are many ways to do that, but that's almost another post entirely.

You limit out of game resources needed to perform. If knowledge is presented in an appropriate fashion in the game, it stops being a barrier to entry or performance. People can learn to excel at the game while playing the game. This is something completely not done currently.

I like that we are in an age of change and experimentation. I don't like the fact that the wrong lessons are seeming to be learned. Strides need to be made. Not striations.

Purple Dragons

Out of all the dragons, and there are an awful lot, purple dragons are the weirdest. They are basically vampires, but they aren't undead.

Dominating gaze? Check

Emo color? Check

Destroyed by sunlight? Check

Their breath weapon even assaults the mind. Really, it deals psychic damage (it also dazes, but we'll ignore that part for purposes of this article). It's bite causes ongoing psychic damage. Everything about this dragon is bizarre. It's a not really dreamscape-nightmare dragon that might also be a vampire but isn't quite. I don't know where they fit necessarily in the scheme of dragon things. I mean, I can get behind a dragon of nightmare. That's pretty rocking. Heck, I've used a shadow dragon recently.

I am just not quite sure what to do with a purple dragon. I think, if I used one, it probably lives in the darkness of the underworks of a city. It probably spreads lies and rumors in people's dreams by whispering up drainpipes and through the walls of their buildings. It probably causes people to go insane and seek out the sewers for the voice of their visions and they bring their possessions with them.

Hey, that actually sounds pretty cool now.

Lazy Weekend One-Shot: The Legend of Zelda in 4e

Ever find yourself bored and wanting to run a throwaway game for some reason? Maybe you want to just get some people together to drink and grill and play a game while doing it. That made me think. Any old fantasy Nintendo game is great for this purpose. Why? They simply didn't have the storage space to make the games long and complex. So let's start with my personal favorite, the game my mother made me go outside in order to allow her to finish.

So how does a single player hack and slash style rpg translate to tabletop? Well, poorly. Fret not, I have ideas. It's pretty simple, the maps are already there for you. You can either print out the maps, the squares are already there even!, or you can just draw out the overworld map and leave it be and use a second map for the dungeons. Either one works.

The biggest thing to overcome is the combat. That's actually really easy to do, again, Zelda already does this for you! Everything is either a minion or a boss. Now there are different colors of minions, and different brackets, but they remain minions. This isn't as complicated as it sounds. The colors are easy, everything, with the exception of bats, slimes, lasagnas, mummies, hands, gargoyles, ghosts, golems, snakes, weird flower bugs, rabbit dudes, mermen and skeletons , is broken down into either red or blue. Red is weaker than blue. The exceptions are easy as well.

The creatures take one, two, four or eight hits to die. Again, everything is a minion, so you just count the number of hits and that's it. They are different than normal minions in this way, but still really easy to keep track of anyway. By the end of the session, everything will be back to dying in either one or two hits anyway.

List of One Hit Kills:

Bats

Skeletons

Red Octorock

Red Spiders

Blue Spiders

Snakes

Little Slimes

Red Moblins

Rabbit Dudes (ranged only)

List of Two Hit Kills:

Blue Octorocks

Blue Moblins

Golems

Weird Flower Bugs (must not be moving)

Red Sandworms

Big Slimes

Red Centaurs

List of Four Hit Kills:

Red Knight

Blue Centaurs

Hands

Ghosts (when not moving)

Mermen

Lasagnas

Red Wizards

Gargoyles

List of Eight Hit Kills:

Blue Knights

Blue Wizards

Mummies

Now, items, health and leveling. Keep the original stores and item prices around the world. Just roll to determine the treasure from a random monster.

D8

1. Nothing

2. One Rupee

3. Five Rupee

4. Ten Rupee

5. Twenty Rupee

6. Heart

7. Faerie

8. Nothing

You can multiply the Rupee rewards by the number of players in the game if you want them all to have the items bought. If not, then don't. Now, there will be Heart Containers around the world still. You can either keep them in their spots or move them around however you see fit. Skill checks made in place of bombing or rafts or the old man are reasonable substitutions. You can do a lot with player ingenuity and creative here to make the game fun and not just make it collect quest. For example, one of the walls could be an illusionary wall and the players could find it and then have to solve a puzzle to make the illusion disappear. You get the gist.

Now, Heart Containers are how you level and your health. Everyone starts with twenty-four hit points, and your surge value scales accordingly. Your number of surges is still based on your class, but surges and health are replenished by either a potion or a trip to the faerie spring. A potion or a faerie spring resets dailies and daily magic items as well. Finding a heart allows you to spend a surge and regain eight +surge hp or you just gain eight hp if you are out of surges. Finding a faerie gives you twenty-four + surge hp or just twenty-four hp. Potions do not spend a surge, obviously.

Leveling, Hit Points, and Healing. Finding a Heart Container raises your max hp by eight and your surge value by two. Once you have accrued four heart containers, you ascend to fourth level after finding your magical weapons. Once you have accrued nine heart containers, you ascend to ninth level after finding your legacy weapons. Once you have accrued thirteen heart containers, you ascend to eleventh level and select a paragon path as well. So, everyone will need to pre-generate four sheets total. Easy enough to keep track of again. Healing can still occur from player sources as normal. However, with the above healing methods, having a leader is not required to play this way.

Taking Damage. Damage is again easy. Everything deals either 4, 8, or 16 damage. Once your party acquires the blue rings, you gain Resist Half Damage. Once your party acquired the red rings, you gain Resist Three Quarters Damage. The way you determine the damage done is to look at the above monsters. One and Two Hit kills deal four damage, Four Hit Kills deal eight damage, and Eight Hit Kills deal sixteen damage. Traps deal eight damage. Bosses deal either eight or sixteen damage.

Dealing Damage. You start off dealing one hit worth of damage. No matter what class you are. The area and control abilities still function as per normal. Ongoing damage will count as a second hit when they take damage from it. Once you get your magical weapons, you deal two hits worth of damage. Once you get your legacy weapons, you deal four hits worth of damage. In addition, every weapon has the Project Weapon power.

Items. Items are just like they are in the game. Blue Candles can only be used once per combat and deal one hit worth of damage but the flame persists for two rounds. Red Candles can be used unlimited times per combat and deal once hit worth of damage, with the flame persisting for two rounds. The candle flames start in a square adjacent to you and move three squares before stopping and persisting in the third square until the end of the next round. Anything in those three squares takes damage. Arrows deal one hit, Silver Arrows deal four hits worth of damage. Arrows are not stopped in enemies and work as a ray attack in a one square line all the way across the drawn map. The Strength Bracelet lets you move Overworld objects that may be moved. Everything else functions just as you imagine it would. The object that are required to be used to kill bosses would still be required. The flute would still teleport them around the map. The boomerang can be used to collect items as a standard action or target an enemy as a ranged basic attack. If successful the enemy is stunned until the end of their next turn. The wooden boomerang has a range of five. The blue boomerang has a range of one room or area. The shortcuts work the same etc. Players are encouraged to talk about items they would like at the appropriate levels prior to playing so that leveling means you gain the items as well.

Combat. At the start of the game, everyone rolls initiative. That's the initiative for the whole game until the party levels. Once the party levels, initiative is rerolled. The party always gets a surprise round every combat. Combat should be fast paced and near constant in this game. Players can choose to skip combat unless they are locked in a room. They just spend movement to go to the next area and the entire party is transported there. Boss combats are normal solo encounters and you are encouraged to make the boss fights fun and unique. There are lots of dragons and things that could be abominations, also dinosaurs and plant monsters!

Project Weapon Power Heritage Power

At-Will * Arcane, Weapon, Implement

Requirement: Must be full health

Target: One Creature

Range One Room/Area

Attack: Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma +2 (+3 at 4th level, +4 at 9th level and +5 at 11th level) vs AC

Hit: One hit (two hits at level 4, four hits at level 9)

Defenses. Defenses scale with the monsters. Build them as you see fit type-wise. Level wise, one and two hit monsters should be level one. Four hit monsters should be level four. Eight hit monsters should be level nine. Bosses are either level four, eight, nine, ten or fifteen.

Dungeon difficulties. Pretty much just go by the difficulty in the game. Dungeons one through three are scaled for level one. Dungeons four, six and seven are scaled for level four. Dungeons five and eight are scaled for level nine. Dungeon nine is scaled for level eleven, regardless of if they have attained it.

Boss stats. Wing it really, but keep it cool and fun and go with the general boss feelings of the game.

So that's pretty much it. You can change up the plot however you would like, though I recommend keeping the original plot as it's as straight forward as it gets and just making the NPCs more robust and real to explain their presence, who they are, and give Hyrule more lore and history. Make the weapons cool, heroic and epic through the NPCs. You can also give out treasure in loot hoards in the tri-force rooms instead of just awarding it when they level as well.

There's not a lot too it, really. I think it would be a pretty fun way to kill a long weekend, and a way different method of checking out 4e.

Sometimes the DM makes bad decisions

Such was the case last night, when faced with some monsters on an adventure that we had never seen before, collectively. The first encounter of the night went well, and the group had a difficult time but won and got to look cool doing it. Everyone had a moment to shine in the fight, which was good.

However, I was apparently trying to murder people all night as I rolled a collective 14 20's on the evening. It was absurd. For such instances of ridiculousness I have given all players the following power.

Oh Crit

At-Will

Immediate Reaction Personal

Trigger: You are hit with a critical hit or take your bloodied value in damage in a single hit

Effect: You are able to make a skill check to describe how you are increasing your defenses. Some examples include making an insight check to get a bead on how they are attacking, using bluff or intimidate to show you have thrown off the effects of a mighty blow, stealth to use their own attacks as cover now that you know them, arcana to weave a quick cantrip that is easily diffused, but protects you, etc. The possibilities are up to the player and it is considered a success by meeting or exceeding DC 10 + CL. If successful, you gain a +2 skill bonus to all defenses until the end of your opponent's next turn.

No one decided to use it, maybe because they think it might be a crutch I am giving them. Really though, all this does is let you add some mid-fight roleplay and improv to temporarily give yourself a hand after a bad round. I think it's cool.

The second fight of the night was the bad decision fight on my part. I saw two things that might possible need to be changed. To my credit, I feel, I did say that they might possibly need to be changed and we'd see how this went. The thing I changed was the phase spiders having the attack "first failed save: stunned, save ends". At third level. Third level! Ridiculous! The thing I did not change, but in hindsight should have changed, as it frustrated everyone it seems, was the spiders had an ability that allowed them to teleport people away if they moved near as an immediate interrupt. There were 13 phase spiders in the fight, 10 minions, 3 regular, and a higher level controller that caused some havoc and damage but they dispatched of him pretty easily.

One of the melee decided to be the combat medic for the fight because he couldn't get near the monsters really, not going for the controller because he assumed the controller was even more horrible. This was pretty awesome and he saved a lot of people, but he was still frustrated. This is entirely my fault. Always running the chance of not being able to attack the monster you are trying to attack is not that fun. Even though I said we might need to drop it, I didn't for the fight, and I should have. Especially since the spiders could teleport as movement, never provoking opportunity attacks.

The water was a big obstacle for the group as well, and the water dealt 2d6 damage and slowed you if you were a non-aberrant and started your turn there. The spiders kept trying to web and drop the people in the water. Even though this, I believe, is what they spiders would want to do, it was frustrating to the party. Again, I understand why.

Though it was tough, the party did eventually win and were rewarded nicely for it. The first combat was a ton of fun for everyone involved, and the second one was cool at times and frustrating at others. The set up was awesome and it felt nice to really utilize the entire map. It was a good change.

So what did I learn?

1) Interrupt teleports should not be on every creature.

2) Trust my gut when I see something like that in the future.

3) Swapping stunned save ends for ongoing damage is the right call at this level.

4) Monsters behaving as monsters is a good thing.

5) Soldiers are still mostly bullshit.

A quick mirror's edge tutorial

I recently bought Mirror's Edge on Steam (thanks $5 weekends!), and I wanted to share my experience of the game briefly. Mostly, when you have to fight, you fight police officers. There are two types of police officers. You quickly learn which of the two police officers you are supposed to fight.

This is an example of a police officer that it is ok to fight.

He's just a dude. He's got a uniform. He's got a gun, he will try and shoot you with it. Beat this dude's ass. Take his gun and shoot him with it if you are feeling like being a dick. I never shoot anyone if I can help it, it slows down my running from police officer type 2.

They have machine guns and body armor. They are not ok.

Now you know everything you need to know about Mirror's Edge combat!

Soldiers, the Hard USA Superweapons General of 4e

Command and Conquer: Generals is one of my favorite RTS games. It combines tongue-in-cheek stereotypes and very solid game play. It is also great because I can use it to illustrate a point today. Generals had three difficulty settings for skirmish play. Easy, Medium, and Hard. However, there were hidden difficulties that once you started playing the game you realized. Prior to the release of Zero Hour, the expansion, there were three groups you could play. USA, GLA and China. Hard USA was significantly harder than any others. Making this the fourth difficulty. Zero Hour introduced generals with specializations. So generic Hard USA was still more difficult than any of the others, except for Hard USA Superweapon. Hard USA Superweapon was perhaps the most god awful devastating AI I have seen in a game. USA Superweapon gave everything lasers. Everything. Turrets, tanks, random dudes. I think even their missiles had lasers.

The point is, this was the fifth, extremely hidden and not announced difficulty. You just had to experience it and know about it to truly know what you were getting into should you then select it.

4e DnD actually works this way. You don't realize how awful things are until you really experience them. The snake fight is a good example of this, so is any fight with stun (save ends). However, the secret difficulty setting is really simple, adding soldiers. Do you want your fight to be a lot more difficult with little or no change in level and xp reward? Add soldiers! High defenses, high hit bonuses, good damage and usually awful conditions! Woo, welcome to soldiers! Equal level soliders are a pretty good challenge, elite or not. They are difficult and if there are a lot of them, yikes. Lower level soldiers are still a good challenge, did I mention the high everything? In your xp budget, you can actually use more of these lower guys too, making things both harder and easier at the same time. Higher level soldiers? Ugh. Just ugh. Even if you have good feats and good equipment, it's going to be a really tough time hitting these guys.

Now, do you necessarily need to do something about this? Not really. That's just how the game is set up. Just try and be cognizant of it when you are budgeting your fights. Soldiers are worth more than their counterparts, almost every time.

Are there things you can do? Sure, in a game I ran, I chose to give the players a way to lower defenses and increase damage taken on the showcased soldier NPC. It worked out alright. If I had to do it again, I would probably have it decrease defenses a little less, but it made the showcased items a commodity that was carefully used throughout the fight. That being said, do you need to do that if you are actually staying within xp budget (hint: I did these things because I specifically was NOT)? No, not at all. It's just something to keep in mind when setting up fights.

DragOwned

I did run session four of Planescape this past weekend, to at least my satisfaction as I won't speak for the players, but I am not ready to talk about the mechanics of it yet. I spent so long on that session that I need some time to decompress from it. Anyway, here is a quick picture to illustrate the first, in a hopefully series, or climactic battles, in which at least the Gnome made a lifelong enemy. The Dragonborn made an enemy in just getting into the mission, I think.

Anyway, I had this idea for a fight the other day. It might or might not be super cool, but it would need some special rules. Here's the pitch. The players are either hired to work escorting a barge of supplies from one city to another in a large kingdom, or they are hired to stop the transport of the goods. Here's the twist. The "barge" is a ship that has been tied to the bodies of dragons in order to keep them afloat. Three in the front and three in the back and one on each side have been assigned to keep the barge going. The players either must fight on the barge or the dragons, or attempt to pilot their dragons in such a way as to then be able to board or fight on the barge or dragons.

It's not really that complicated. First, you have the general set up. No matter which side the players are on, the rules are the same. The barge requires two people, one at the front and one at the back to keep a handle on the dragons. Keeping the dragons under control and their speed constant is a minor action. To boost or slow their speed is a move action. To cause them to attack is your standard action. Only one dragon can attack at a time.

Here, the barge is brown and the barge dragons are green.

The exception to this is to allow a nature check to let a dragon act on their own. If they have taken no damage, the challenge is DC 10 + 1/2 CL. If they have taken any damage, the challenge is DC 15 + 1/2 CL. If the dragon is bloodied or worse, the challenge is DC 20 + 1/2 CL. Once you fail a nature check, the dragon acts on it's own from that point forward until their opponent is killed.

Now, you have enemy dragons, either the players or just plain enemies, incoming. They are blue. Piloting a dragon is the same as controlling a dragon on the barge. As you can see, the dragons on the barge are tethered at the start. You may leap from barge to the dragon and from dragon to dragon using the following skills:

Arcana - using a quick cantrip or manipulation of raw magic to direct the wind around you and buoy yourself (DC 14 + 1/2 level)

Athletics - you climb and jump across (DC 14 + 1/2 level)

Acrobatics - You tumble, leap and otherwise flip across (DC 17 + 1/2 level)

Nature - You speak with the dragon to extend a wing a bit and allow you across. (DC 17 + 1/2 level)

These skills may be used to aid others climbing across as well. While on a dragon, you must success a DC 10 Endurance check or be knocked prone, if you are attempting to cross or fight on one.

Now here, you can see the two parties start to meet. The blue team is opening themselves up to lots of attacks, but they are trying to enrage the dragons and free them from their tethers to make the boat more unstable and bring it down. The barge team is staying put and focusing fire on the dragons, hoping their riders will lose control.

Riding a dragon, you must succeed in an Arcana, Diplomacy, Intimidate or Nature check in order to keep control of the dragon once it enters combat. This follows the same rules as the barge riders letting the dragon act on their own. The difference is that you, as a rider, controls the actions of the dragon fully as if you were the dragon. Once you leave the dragon, the rules are exactly the same.

Now you can see the chaos start to unfold. One of the blue dragons has been downed, one of the green dragons has been downed, and three green dragons are off their ties. The ship, while not crashing, will slowly descend. The green dragons and blue dragons are going to be battling it out, so you better hope that the riders are safely on that barge, or are going to make their way there soon.

This is a high risk, high fun-potential battle that lets players control dragons to a limited degree as vehicles, before eventually becoming shipboard combat. It's not a perfect system or skill challenge, but it definitely has a lot of potential to be awesome.

That snake hit you so hard that the you in a parallel universe just lost a healing surge

Last night was the first session of a hopefully regular game set in Chessenta, a nation in the Conan the Barbarian Forgotten Realms setting. As promised, there were snakes. Two of them actually, with foulspawn riding them. Before the players for to that though, they murdered the shit out of some goblins and hobgoblins. The half-orc rogue braved a potential bath and even tackled the one who was running for it's life. The poor hobbo almost made it to the river too.

The black crown on purple is the sign of the Nothing-King. The strange and enigmatic figure ruling over the Chasm of the Nothing-King, where the Adder Hills used to be. The Adder Hills, of course, are now floating over head, being the problem to shit that can fly. The goblin fight was not without perils though, as deadly, deadly, bees swarmed all over two of the players and made an official Bad Time for them.

Eventually the group gets to their launching point, the town of Maerchlin, where they discover that the item they need to recover is an axe that was, at one point supposedly, wielded by the Red Dragon God-King in the execution of those that had personally betrayed him. The town, though it has numerous other problems, citizens being kidnapped, the town being attacked by strange shadow creatures, and the occasional murder by beings made out of the night sky, was saddened by the loss of this object, which was apparently perpetrated by two large crystalline spiders.

This task was decided upon from 6-8 possible avenues for adventure the group could have chosen. They decided they wanted to kill some goblins to start off with and chose the area in which they knew they could find goblins. To be fair, that is the first thing they did. So, mission accomplished!

Shortly there after, the party found itself in a strange chasm, filled with giant mushrooms, strange faintly glowing fungi, twisted and blackened trees, being overlooked far in the distance by an exceedingly large and strange guard tower. The group made some stealth checks and nature rolls to remain hidden. They tracked their strange quarry to a spring which had been redirected to make a small lake. They found some boats and began to cross the lake, about half way across, the horror struck.

OH SHIT! SNAKES!

So, this was the first time in any 4e game in which water combat was a concern. It was an eye opener for all of us. The combat, which consisted of two large serpents, two foulspawn, and one water dervish, was eventually won by the PCs, but it was ugly. The foulspawn did not have cowboy hats. I wanted them to, though.

There are several lessons I learned from this combat as a DM, and that the players learned as players.

1) If you have water creatures that never leave the water, advantage water creature. The players and I both learned this lesson simultaneously.

2) When you have a water creature that only deals damage in water, and it's a flat out, that creature can be devastating if not immediately handled in some fashion.

3) Clumping is still bad, even in water.

4) 2d8 is a lot of damage at 3rd-4th. Those snakes were awful. Their bite did 2d8 damage and then had a chance of 2d4 and 5 ongoing after that. They had a tail swipe that did 2d8, only once but wow. Now, they were easy to hit, and their hit ratings weren't great, but damn. That's a lot of damage at 3rd-4th.

5) Consider giving players a way to increase their defenses after a particularly devastating round of combat with a skill check of some sort. This is something I was thinking about after the session. Yes there is total defense, but that's your action. Encouraging situation appropriate RP and tactics should give some sort of bonus. If you got snake slapped, attempting to use the snakes own tail as cover the next round isn't a bad thing to allow. Using athletics or acrobatics to latch on to the snake as it flails to increase your defenses would be cool. Allowing a bluff or intimidate check after being critically hit to shake the morale of the enemy would be cool. I am pretty sure I am going to incorporate this, I just need to fully think of how.

6) Snake Rape might replace Drake Rape as the most common reptilian sex crime.

Kratos says, "IT HAS BEGUN!"

By now, everyone has seen this. In discussing this yesterday, and reading through comments, someone referenced this article. I have several issues with the article and disagree with a lot of the generalizations made.

I don't really have any issue with a dating site that caters to gamers. The equivalent of gamer phone sex either, honestly. People pay money to watch a morbidly obese woman walk to her car, it's certainly not any stranger than that. It's like saying that J-Date is a horrible thing because it caters to Jewish people looking to date other Jewish people. It's ridiculous when you think of it like that. People want to date people they share interests with, it's not a new concept.

Two words, Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero changed the way video games were perceived. It's now ok to play video games. The audience has expanded. It's a thing. Businesses are holding meetings in Second Life. Not, you know, normal businesses, but still. It's always been ok to play a sports game. Sorry, I just don't buy the gamer stigma any more. It's a huge industry now.

The second point made is that the industry thinks we are all seventeen year old douchebags. He cites, of all things, God of War 3 as the first game to single out. Is there some sex and nudity in it? Sure, but it's done with a point, and it's not at all, pardon the pun, the thrust of the series or the game. The storytelling in God of War 3 was amazing. It brought the series to a satisfying conclusion and kept Kratos a horrible and compelling character. Few games have awesome endings, this is one of them.

He expounds on this with Bayonetta. His argument is that the creators took a long time making her realistically gorgeous looking, and then made her seductive. Sorry bud, that's like asking why James Bond has Bond Girls. It's not a video game specific phenomenon. It's not some secret double standard.

Now, I do agree that video game storytelling has been traditionally poor. He makes a point regarding the Wizard of Oz and other traditional movies. However, for every movie that's a classic you have a Manos, Hand of Fate. There is a dearth of shitty movies. It's a fact. However, video games are often based on movie tropes we have seen, and this is why the tend to make poor movies. Castlevania is a Dracula story. Resident Evil is a Night of the Living Dead. Prince of Persia? Alladin. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a great game, is basically Scarface. Now, there are rare exceptions. I point you to Planescape: Torment. A game so great people still borrow it and play it ten years later. Portals will undoubtedly be another type of game like this. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are both solid stories. God of War is really phenomenal in all honesty, very satisfying. Fallout is a great series too, awesome story telling. Eternal Dark, most Bioware games, the list goes on. It's not exactly common yet, but strides are being made. Alan Wake and Heavy Rain are two solid examples of this.

Shiny gadgets? Sorry, that's society. It's Apple's fucking business model. Moving the fuck on now...

Last, we come to his climactic point, sense of entitlement. This is really a OMG PEOPLE ARE STEALING GAMES IT KILLS THE INDUSTRY! point. I have some very simple counterpoints to his argument. When talking about the indie game bundle, he said the average was around $9 per donation. Guess what? I hold out for huge deals on Steam for the same price. I guess that makes me terrible. If you are taking a gamble on something, you don't want to pay full price. It might be awful. I wait on a lot of my console games to come down in price too. If I don't care about the newness, I can save a lot of money and have a good experience. Also, the people stealing the games? Yeah, they wouldn't be paying for the games anyway. People who steal shit are never the target demographic. That's like saying I am a dick for watching a movie on broadcast TV instead of at the movie theater. I didn't pay for it, yet I am still experiencing it. There is no way I would have paid for that movie if I didn't care enough to see it in theaters. The same applies here. Often, as people grow up and get jobs, they stop that and can afford to pay for the games.

People can bitch about DRM and which came first, but it's not a sense of entitlement. It's a justification for not wanting to pay. It's the gaming equivalent of "I'll wait until it's on TV", or on Netflix or Hulu as the case may be. These are not people that would be supporting your franchise or game anyway. It's all just a justification.

As to why console gaming is winning over PC gaming? Again, it's not hard. PCs are way more complicated. It's more do it yourself, most stuff you have to keep up with, and you have to upgrade it in order to keep up. Consoles require no upgrades for the life of the console. As long as the PS3 is the latest PS you know it's good. Eventually, you will buy a PS4. That's it. You insert the game, you play it, you're done. Xbox 360 is the same, but even easier. It's all DirectX and .NET framework. It's awesomely easy to keep programming for just that. Now, the majority of those often dual release on PC. I guess we shouldn't talk about that for his argument though.

Anyway, that's enough soap box from me. Tomorrow I'll talk about a DnD game with snakes.

When Angels Attack! (next on Fox)

I had this idea after reading The Plane Above and then playing in a game last week in which we, the players, controlled a summon angel to fight some stuff. It's simple.

Angels, as described in The Plane Above, are beholden to no god, but all gods. Angels are the servants of the deities, and the deities they serve change from hour to hour or day to day.

That got me thinking. What if there was a battle where one, maybe more, of the creatures on the field were angels, and you were facing off against the divine agent of an opposing god? You would be on a holy task yourself, and, importantly, you'd be in another domain or even plane than the two primary deities listed.

The fight setup might be something like this:

Kord has tasked you, through an intermediary, with the destruction of a temple dedicated to the Primordials, housing a cult that uses a brand created by Erathis to control abominations. Through this, they are hoping to break into portions of Carceri and control and free the abominations locked within. Kord has given you a gauntlet laced with his divine power to shatter the brand on contact. Bane has decided that a brand would be useful to him, and has dispatched his own group of mercenaries and devotees to instead capture the brand.

The site itself is actually a temple to a forgotten god and many angels fill the halls above the temple itself, still trying to enforce the edicts that were imposed centuries ago. Each group sees the other at roughly the same time and the two groups start to go at it, in the Hall of Forgotten Angels.

Here's how the combat would work. First, the general set up of the combat.

The blue squares are players, the green squares represent unaligned angels and the red squares are the troops of bane.

1) Any worshiper of Kord, or the person carrying the artifact could make a religion, intimidate, history, diplomacy or arcana check (the person carrying the artifact gets a functional +5 bonus to all skill rolls to do this). Bane has sent two holy men on his side, so each of them would get to make the same check on their turn.

2) Non-worshipers may roll bluff, diplomacy, history or intimidate at -5 to attempt to persuade the angels.

3) The base DC to persuade an angel is DC 15 + 1/2 level if the angel is currently unaligned and DC 20 + 1/2 level if the angel is aligned (this goes for the PC level in this case so the challenge can scale in any direction)

4) You may spend a minor action to try and persuade one angel. A standard action can be used to persuade two angels.

5) Any failed attempt at persuasion ends your attempts for that round, regardless of the action type you spend.

6) Angels act immediately once they are persuaded.

7) Once angels are aligned, they stay aligned to that god and act on that initiative until such time as they become differently aligned.

8) Angels become unaligned once they are bloodied for the first time.

The PCs act win the initiative and act first. The first round looks like this for them.

As you can see, the PCs have persuaded several angels and now they are using them to move forward. The PCs have four additional angels ready to wreck some opposing god face. Now the Banesworn get their turn.

It's not looking so good for the players now. The Banesworn have four of their own angels now, two of which were previously angels working for the players. Two of the angels remained unaligned and are thus out of the fight for the moment due to the Banesworn option to try and turn the tides against the players earlier rather than playing it safe.

The tides of battle could shift dramatically, with the angels playing the roll of terrain obstacle (you must move around them), trap (you must try not to catch them in area abilities in order to not aggravate them), ally, and enemy. The players might opt to kill the angels off completely, just to get them out of the combat and send them back to the Astral Sea in order to serve a purpose once again. Should the players align all of the angels, the banesworn might withdraw in order to try and live another day, surmounting those odds seems unlikely!

As for the angels? Well, they end up straight out of China Town.

Sure, they are confused and having an identity crisis, but they are just vessels after all, unless they are archangels or have names. In which case, they don't really qualify for this situation. This seems like it would be a pretty awesome way to incorporate some mythos, some skill challenges and some interesting combat tactics into a fight.

Condition! Save ends

4e has a lot of bullshit. It's not harm-signature spell bullshit. It's not maximized poison bullshit. It's not mystic theurge bullshit, but it's bullshit nonetheless. Here's what happens.

The DM wants to tell a story. The DM write the story first, for his near or just paragon tier party (lower levels there are instances of this, but it's not so bad). The story might go something like this.

The players are going to fight some devils sent by Asmodeus. They are looking for an artifact from the Dawn War that allows a being of sufficient power to siphon off the prayers of deities in order to strengthen their own magic. Devout followers can be sacrificed in order to gain power. This was something the primordials used in order to ramp up their power and weaken a god's power at the same time. For someone like Asmodeus, who loves to sacrifice people, this is a great object of desire.

Obviously, the players aren't going to stand for this and they will fight his minions at every turn before eventually fighting some sort of lieutenant that's in charge of the whole thing in a big, climactic battle.

Easy enough right? That's where the problem starts. The party is 4-6 people and anywhere from 8-11th level. You are getting to the meat of the game, so to speak. You start going over the monster manuals in order to desire some encounters revolving around devils, maybe some undead, maybe some aberrants or something, and you are a little daunted by what you see.

You see an array of monsters that your party might hate you for, if they are at all used. You start seeing condition modifiers all over the place. Most of the time they lead to other condition modifiers or spikes in damage...or both. You start seeing immobilized, save ends (not a big deal. That leads to, if target is immobilized, take a bunch of extra damage and maybe also be dazed or stunned, or even dominated. These start to be damn everywhere you look. Sometimes, it's even worse. Sometimes, you get penalized just for hanging out near the guys. You start off weakened, or you have lowered defenses, encouraging the conditional violating even further.

Here's a typical level 11ish encounter group for a party of 5:

2 Chain Devils (level 11 skirmisher) - at-will, restrained! save ends.

1 Gorechain Devil (level 12 Elite brute) - encounter, refreshes on 5 or 6, dominated, save ends (passive aura that keeps people within 3 squares of him, I might add)

1 Modified Gibbering mother (level 10 controller) - difficult terrain aura, free action 1/turn, burst 5 - dazed until end of next turn, at-will

2 Damned Choir (level 11 soldier) - swarm, immobilizes as a minor, passive damage aura and lowers will by 4

Yes, conditions are a big part of fourth edition. Yes, you should really prepare yourself to make a lot of saving throws. Yes, the party can inflict a lot of conditions on monsters as well.

Yeah, but...

Yeah, but let's talk about what that really means for a second. Monsters fill the field, and you can't really give them a condition, other than marked, every use of an ability. Elites and solos might as well not even worry, as they get bonuses to their saving throws. There are many ways to boost saving throws as well, that's true. Feats are certainly one way, but taking saving throw feats is a mixed bag at best. You give up so much in terms of power and utility in order to, essentially, be able to continue playing your character. Items are another way. That is tricky too, unless you make your own items or try and purchase the specific conditional save items that you want (fear, stun, immobilize, daze etc). Not to mention, if you have a party, that money is going to get split and it's going to take a while for everyone, or even one person to have that specific item.

So how do you handle this? There are a couple of methods I think would work well in this scenario.

1) Give out conditional save items as party treasure, once.

This gives the party a taste of what could be out there, and if nothing else, one person, probably a defender or leader, is going to be very happy. Once the rest of the party sees this in action, watch them all want one.

2) Give them information relating to a powerful named object that is really just a normal conditional save object.

This whets their appetite. They will want to, hopefully, learn about this item and what it can do. After they do, and fight things along the way to maybe find materials to make the item or even find the item that do horrible things to them, they will definitely look into having several.

3) Just have a talk with the party once they hit 9th or 10th, explaining to them how the game is going to work from that point forward. It gets a lot more serious a lot quicker than previous levels to that point, for the most part.

4) Destroy the party first, talk with them second.

I don't normally follow this route, but it depends on the party. They might have to see the awfulness in order to really understand.

5) Look for other monsters.

They are out there, but it's hard to write a good story around picking certain bad guys only. It certainly feels like pulling punches also. Not that there aren't other awful things out there, because there are. Oh yes.

6) As per comment discussion - consumable conditional save items.

Here's the pitch. They give you a temporary bonus to something like, daze, immobilize and restrained. The bonus starts at +4. When you decide to use this bonus, you spend a healing surge and reduce the bonus from +4 to +2. When you use it again, you spend a healing surge and the bonus is entirely consumed. The effect on you is a daily, consumable magic item, so it can't be used more than once a day, even if you make or have a bunch. This assumes responsible governing of the items, but if you want to run a tougher encounter or a one-off with a lot of effects, it's a good option to have.

Regardless, it's something you start having to account for as a DM. I believe that as a DM it's up to you to find a good way to introduce a way for this to appropriately fit the style of your party. The party will probably listen, and you should know them by now.

The big point is that the party should not be surprised about the conditions. The party should be surprised by the monsters and the story, but not the conditions. If they know what they are going to fight, letting them know what to expect isn't out of the question for the first time either. Afterwards, look into one of the points above. It will make for a happier party.

I have been lucky enough as a player to have DMs that mostly understand the big points, and a few of the players do. The rest could use a helping hand to get to the same level. That's player and DM responsibility.