/4eg/ - D&D 4th Edition General

Whats the party like/how is it going?

More interested in character than mechanics (Got to shed that 4e stigma somehow).

Ah, a pretty simple one. It was called Peltast. Lightly armed mercenary, really. So it gained bonuses to initiative, contacts with people he's worked for and worked with in nearly all cities, and a simple power that was basically "if using a heavy thrown or light thrown weapon, you may, once per encounter, as an immediate interrupt, shift 2 and do an RBA against the attacker".

Never was satisfied with it.

I'm GMing that game we were talking about running here. It's going well, but it inadvertedly caused sudden thread death syndrome.

Here's one.
>Jan. 5th 2013
>Start Scales of War campaign with 5 players.
>Players are a mix of seasoned veterans (10+ years gaming history) and a couple of relative new players.
>Eladrin Swordmage, Elf Ranger, Human Barbarian, 1/2 Elf Cleric and Tiefling Monk.
>3 sessions in, Tiefling Monk player decides her character sucks. (it does) and decides to reroll Tiefling Warlock.
>5 sessions in, everyone is happy and the game is steaming along full speed.

>Dec. 30th 2014
>After exactly 44 sessions of about 3 hours to 11 hours each, we finish the entire Scales of War campaign. All 5 players are level 30, Epic Destinies fulfilled and pretty happy with the entire game.

I just linked the 3 year Anniversary of our game on Kikebook yesterday.
In almost 20 years of gaming across at least as many systems with dozens of players, I have never been able to finish a full campaign until (or since) Scales of War.

I give out +1 to all defenses at levels 3, 13, and 23. It gives the players a chance to actually appreciate the bonus.

I find that the increase the attack isn't that important, since players have the choice to attack a different defense.

Party is pretty good. The pally is the tankiest tank to have tanked. Literally stood in a doorway and tanked 3 level+3 brutes for 6 rounds while the sorc moved in to position and nuked the shit out of them. Meanwhile the healer hid behind the pally and refused to heal because "they're going to kill you eventually and I need to be able to survive the encounter"

The pally is a warforged, wearing full plate with a big shield and a sword. He had like 25 AC at level 5. I literally had to buff my already buff enemies in order to make him sweat. And before you say hit his ref or will, I've tried. The moment something actually hurts him, the party sorc is there to kill it.

The sorc is a Dragonborn who specializes in burning things. You point him at something and it dies. I've seen him use every single action in a turn (minor, standard, move) to deal almost 100 damage in a turn. He has a magical item that he can use a free action to reposition one enemy a turn. He used it to make a huge blob, then fired off his dragon breath, then another aoe spell, then finished it off with another magical item that immobilized the enemy for 4 turns.

The healer is a Deva Artificer (we're playing Eberron if you can't tell). He's a total wimp. He constantly complains that he barely makes it through combat when all he does is hide way behind the pally and take potshots and occasionally toss heals. Despite that he's amazing out of combat. Always thinks outside the box. 4e is very combat heavy and running rp can be hard, but he makes it easy. He's a natural face. That I'm so glad to have.

I'm thinking of starting a 4e campaign (never DMed before but am very familiar with the system), but there are two main barriers of entry for me barring obvious logistics like players:

1) Which adventure paths / premade campaigns are good/bad? Coming from Pathfinder I'm used to all premade ones being hot garbage but hope it's not the case here too. Does one stand out as a particularly good one for a group that's new to the system (but not D&D in general)?

2) How do you know which premade adventures need refactored monster math? I remember monsters from MM1 and MM2 are the troublemakers, and MM3 and MMV are ok, but when looking at something premade I don't know which math it's using. Would Scales Of War need to be entirely refactored, or are all of its adventures' monsters good to go?

I've got a game on hiatus that I would love to go back to but the DM got burned out so we've just been running modules under another DM with different characters.

>The Fighter
Our Fighter (Human) used to be a real big-shot, working for one of the three major rulers of the setting: Mordenkainen, the Storm King. He enjoyed a direct connection to Mordenkainen, and was capable of wielding a portion of his powers, but was cursed by The King Below, one of the other three major rulers and also the most powerful necromancer in the setting. He lost his connection to Mordenkainen, had a piece of his soul stolen, and nobody remembers who he is anymore. His soul fragment is being used by someone else to commit terrible deeds in his name. Real old guy, the group dad/grandpa.

>The Barbarian
A gigantic silver dragonborn, raised by a mercenary company. Now the leader of his own mercenary company, the Iron Wolves (us.) Shares his soul with some sorta fey queen? Has some sorta big destiny. Party leader.

>The Rogue
A changeling that was raised in the slave pens of The King Below and really edgy about it. The group's interrogator, spymaster, and assassin, Chaotic Neutral as fuck, can't seem to stick with a single characterization with the exception of fucking hating necromancy and necromancers. Which brings us to...

>The Wizard
My character, specializing in necromancy. Searching for the individual(s) that remotely sabotaged a ritual he and his master were conducting that resulted in her death. Basically a bookish nerd, learned Necromancy under his master because only the bad guys understood it and you can't fight something you don't understand. Once she died, he started traveling and making a living as a wandering exorcist. The "kid" of the group, very unsure of himself in contrast to the rest of the party who are very much Big Damn Heroes. Recently had a huge blowout with the rogue after some questionable military decisions made in the wake of Mordenkainen's death.

The game's going pretty alright, honestly, even with pretty whacky timezones.

>The Warlord
Probably the most well developed character so far, an exceedingly Austrian lieutenant going through a major crisis of faith right now as he deals with church values versus church as an institution.

>The Fighter
Freedom fighter with a very sarcastic and slightly vengeful streak. Also the party's best at fighting, and the most practical problem solver.

>The Rogue
Scheming staunch republican. Most likely to seek out the simplest solution to any issue, really.

>The Elementalist
Manipulative destitute noble who lost her lands to the monarchy being overthrown. Ice queen, but also the only one in the party that is above average when it comes to dealing with people.

>The Druid
Feral child who's actually a tree from a place that's been overrun by magic. Currently under the care of the Elementalist.

The Orcus series is pretty bad, very disjointed and such. Scales of War though I hear is pretty good. Those are the only 2 official APs for 4e as far as I know really.

Played through Khyber's Harvest as the start of my adventure. It was pretty good. Nice variety of fights. A few non combat encounters and some traps. I felt it was a good intro for a group of players. No official follow up though.

>be in high school
>get invited to play in 4e group on the weekends
>first time actually playing DnD, so I roll a half-orc barb
>I'm a faggot who plays the "fishmalk" equivalent of chaotic neutral
>somehow, my stupidity does more good than harm throughout our campaign
>in one instance, we were trying to figure out how to solve a puzzle to get across a pit
>"Fuck that shit" as I pick up the dwarf and throw her across the chasm.
>this actually works, and she pulls a lever which allows us to skip DMs puzzle
>in another instance, we're stuck in jail
>we have no one skilled in lock picking, and no one wants to be crafty
>"I break down the bars"
>"Oh yeah user? Roll and see where that gets you"
>Natural 20. Strength is already pretty high, so the iron bars are like tissue paper.
The DM ended up hating me for that character, and my tendency to be "That Guy" with other characters.

Yeah I made a Channeler Theme that revolved around encounter powers where you would Channel a spirit to do a task, and daily Soul Traps that let you temporary absorb the abilities of enemies. Like an unfucked Warlock. My buddy liked it, but only cause he found a few ways to break the game with soul trap.

Sadly, you will need to do a lot of remathing for these premade adventures. Its not hard to memorize the equations, as they are all pretty simple and have enough built it swing to justify most DM mental math errors. Living Forgotten Realms might still have their old 4th ed content posted, and most of that stuff is really well done. You dont need to follow the story.

Yeah, it doesn't seem quite theme (More a rogue subclass or something). A bit combat focused/weapon types.

Working (more like brainstorming, early conceptual phase) a 4e spiritual successor. Thinking of using the most of SRD to help, but still thinking if I should use 3d6 or d20, hex or squares.
And the whole modifier bloat. I want to reduce it the most without removing the tactical aspect of the game.

Most of the homebrewing I do is minor changes to character building

For example, I made it so that, sort of like in 13th Age, you take one stat boost from your class, and one from your race, with humans receiving no racial stat boost

Should have been more clear. Just any sort of software for helping to manage combat.

My holy grail would be the following:

wiki.rpg.net/index.php/DnD4eCM#Current_Version

But I can't find a working download link for it.

Or a non-broken version of Masterplan, which was my favorite piece of software for 4e.

See, I don't see the problem with this. When a character plays a fighter or barbarian, it usually means that they don't want to do much outside of combat. Because the heavy martial classes don't get many bonuses outside of combat. So the few times that a problem can be solved by brute strength, I'm happy that the player is paying enough attention to do something. And even if you actually thought "fuck it, I'm just gonna throw this guy", that's likely a perfect RP of your character.

Thanks!

I don't mind remathing, but how would I know if monsters from a premade need to be remathed in the first place? Publication date, telltale "wrong" stats, etc?

I've always had the feel that brute force characters require brute force answers. A rogue is more likely to defuse the trap while the fighter is more than likely to take it straight to the face.

One of the various homebrewers taking a crack at a 4e rewrite here. Progress stalled over the christmas season, but we're hoping to put together something for people to actually look at some time in the next couple of months. We're thinking of starting out with just the heroic tier versions of our four core classes, basically four examples of the kind of characters you could build and the mechanics from our ideas for the system.

We've already got most of the core rules and math figured out, but we don't want to get overly invested in content we've made before gauging reactions to it. If our design direction isn't compelling or interesting to people, we should know that before we've created a lot of content. We're trying to put together enough to convey the ideas of the game, to see if there are any adjustments in direction we need to make, since we're trying to appeal directly to the 4e fanbase, and Veeky Forums is one of our primary sources.

(me) here. How are you dealing with the boring but needed rules? Copypasting from the 4e books, tweaking as needed or rewriting everything? I mean the movement, attack types, definition of blast/area/close/melee, diagonals, most of the combat chapter.

Rewriting from scratch. Most of it ends up pretty similar as a matter of practicality, but it's also a bit of butt covering since using identical phrases is a bit of a worrying thing in terms of potential lawsuits. We're trying to not change too much, since we want to appeal to the 4e audience, making a refined iteration of the same thing rather than a completely new 4e inspired game.

We're sticking to hexes, 20 and the six stats, although we're trying to restrict sources of modifiers and make things a little less stacking happy. We're actually considering removing untyped modifiers entirely, and having a strict list of potential sources of modifiers.

Master Plan is great if you can manage to find it.
I might upload my copy somewhere if you want, unfortunately it's the latest, "DRM" version (has some extra features but locks out your libraries if you change your hardware)

Pre-essentials expertise at lvl5
Improved Defences at lvl 7

Monsters being too tough is the point.
Monsters have brute force on their side, player characters have teamwork and flexibility.
80% of fights should feel like you're beating impossible odds through teamwork and tactics.
The rest should feel like teamwork and tactics are helping you breeze through what would otherwise be reasonable opposition.

I personally don't remath. I'm so I just give my players the bonus to defense. I also find that hp bloat is less of an issue because my players kill things too fast. But your mileage may vary. My suggestion is to play a few combats first so you can figure out how your party works.
In my experience my players enjoy this style of combat a lot.

Yeah, that's the main thing about 4e. The PCs are strong, but not infallible, but they're smart.

The easiest way to tell is their to hit modifier. If it isn't at least Level + 5 then the math most likely needs reworking.

Could you give an example of how to do the +25% damage calculation?

Like say going from 1d8+5 damage to 2d6+5 damage (Increasing average damage by 25%)

Anyone tried putting Gammaworld into their standard 4e game? Seems like a smooth fit to just stick Gammaworld character gen into D&D, but its benefits caps at lvl 10 and the constant power switching with cards never felt well for longer campaigns

Either multiply the result of the damage roll by 1.25, or take the average damage of the monster and add damage until it's high enough.

first method: Roll 2d6+4. result was 10. 10 * 1.25 = 12.5, round up to 13.

second method: 2d6+4, average dice outcome is lowest roll plus highest roll divided by 2. Lowest roll is 6, highest is 16. 22/2 = 11
11*1.25 = 13.75
11 - 13.75 = 2.75

Round up to 3. Add 3 damage to the attack.

You can also just change the damage formula from
8+level
to
10 + 1.25 level

Pretty simple, actually,". Though I'd say take care with off numbers.

Thanks a bunch!

Anyone have Seekers of the Ashen Crown in pdf form? The trove link doesn't work.

There was a trap in there that I really liked but I lost the original book in a fire.

Which trap? I don't have the book tho

DM for this here.
You can download the entire Scales of War here: mojoichiban.com/dnd/resources/scales of war/
It requires almost no additional work on your part to run. I did a very small amount of HP/Damage tweaking on the monster side throughout the campaign, but all this did was streamline the encounters and give some of the less deadly/more slogfest encounters more of an element of speed and danger.
If you already have the Character Builder for 4e updated to final patch, it contains all of the Scales of War traits.

It was a room with a spinning ball in the center and it spins really fast. I don't remember any of the other specifics

"The Kobolds"
or
"Wizard's Towers, Never Again"?

It's always fun to see players that caught the "4e is for casuals" meme wipe on their first encounter due to lack of scouting and teamwork.
The most humiliating scene I've see was wiping to a trapped corridor because 3.0 had trained them that a)it's pointless to look for traps, you can't find them, b)trap attacks are harmless.

...oh gods. That sounds terrifyingly bad.

I have fond memories of a recent 'battle' we had in 4e with PCs and Traps. The traps all hit predefined areas (But those areas could change as a trap rotated shifted targets/went offline to reload) so a lot of the battle was 'Work out the safest place to be that turn while we keep the elementals summoned every turn (Minions) under control.

Said minions were asshole air elementals with very low damage but Push 2 on their attacks in a trap-filled room.

It was not a centerpiece traps + enemies encounter.
It was a fairly simple "barred gates slam into place, crossbow turrets start saturating the area with bolts" gauntlet.
I tried to drop as many hints as possible to a party with no Perception and Thievery to speak of, but they walked right into it, spent two turns doing basically nothing, then finally decided to try and brute force one of the gates. A little too late, unfortunately.

Ok, I amend: That's just fucking embarrassing. I mean, at the LEAST dropping prone would have kept them alive a good bit longer while they blocked the turrets.

What was the group, class-wise?

Paladin, Cleric, Barbarian, Pyromancer

They probably would have had no trouble brute forcing the door if they'd started with that and the Barbarian did not have 13 AC (which I warned him about), or if they'd ducked prone and gone Full Defense until the traps run out of ammo.

Cleric AND Paladin? Yeah, that's enough healing/protection to help keep the Barbarian/Pyromancer alive while they smash up /melt the turrets or work on the door.

Players can be exceedingly dumb, especially when they bring certain mindsets that do not apply to a game because "they did it before".
In my kobold dungeoncrawl, I had repeatedly stressed how abnormally capable they were, how few people came back alive, and how their warren was unassailable in the opinion of some.
Then they start dying in it to all kinds of out there traps and savage ambushes, and they look at me like I did something wrong.
Not even gonna bring up the eladrin city crawl yet.

Was the Barbarian totally naked? Just wearing hide with no dex bonus still puts them at 14 AC.

These are the best fights.

I've conditioned my party to roll perception before and after they enter a room in hopes of getting even one sentence more of information out of me. Even when I say there's nothing in the room but zombies they don't belive me.

This is a result of them being super over confident when they see something like 3 gnolls against them and fail to see the pressure plates on the ground. Suddenly what was an easy fight has turned into Saw and they are clamoring for an extended rest. But when the sessions over they all tell me it's one of the best fights they've had.

While somewhat on the topic of it, has anyone made any good custom Themes? I’m thinking of making some for my campaign setting, but don’t really know how to go about it. Does anyone have any guidelines or somesuch to go about it?

Not trying to start shit, I honestly want to know this because I'm about to begin a 4e session next week as a DM, but looking at this thread: Is the edition so bad that 80% of the posts are about people trying to find ways to homebrew it?

Last week I played a 5e session and I liked the balance between combat and roleplay possibilities (many spells could be used to solve problems outside of combat), but taking a look at the PHB for the 4º edition, it seems more than 2/3 of the spells or skills are to be used solelly on combat situations. I'm thinking of abandoning it by all these indications, am I being ignorant (for lack of experience on it) or is the 4º edition that limited?

To add to this, I've ran a short lived session a couple years back and I remenber it being OK, but it was the first contact me and my players had with a official product with hard rules, so I couldn't give an objective assessment then.

Nah, it's just that there's no new material (like, at all), so people are trying to make their own. It's good discussion material.

One of the big problems with 4e in my experience is that roleplay is hard to do. 4e turns roleplay into noncommittal encounters where it takes a certain amount of successful rolls to succeed.

The problem is bad GMs who think that's the only way to do roleplay in 4e. It's not, you can still make your players roleplay the same way they do in other games. Yes a lot of the powers in the handbook are for combat, but there are still utility powers that are used out of combat, and some skills and powers are suitably abstract that you can also use them out of combat.

So say the PCs are investigating a kidnapping. Instead of saying you need to roll 10 success before 5 failures to get the information you need to advance, set up the whole town and make them work for the info. The point is that roleplay really comes down to how much work the GM wants to put into it. If your party loves combat then just have them roll for the roleplay portions. If they love roleplay then prepare to put some work into it. Otherwise if 5e really clicked for you then go try that.

>kobold dungeoncrawl

Kobolds are the reason I like to play elf monks in 4e. If all else fails, I know I can at least outrun both the rest of the party AND the kobolds.

If there's one thing I think OD&D did better than all the following iterations - in OD&D you were faster than most monsters and could run away. None of this "kobolds are as fast as you but also shift as minor".

4e is better for roleplaying, because it makes players actually think about the environment and context and rewards them for it.
Also, because 4e makes it easy to have your character be at least halfway capable, you don't have to worry about jumping through hoops and justifying it as much.
It also gets rid of the kind of player that thinks being a hindrance to the party is the halmark of good roleplaying.

I would argue 4e has more room for role playing exactly because of the lack of spells to solve all your problems.
>Players have to actually talk to people instead of just mind controlling them
>Players have to actually think instad of just bypassing every puzzle by teleporting

4e's thing with roleplaying is that it's really damn free. Where others doing it more freely would be kinda restricted, 4e pretty much did away with a lot of things in that sense. This is good, but most people didn't really gel with that at first.

Also, 4e's homebrew is more to do with the fact that it's basically a dead game by now, and we're trying to figure out how to breathe life into it.

I did a Paragon Path, a few powers and a Theme over my time playing 4e.

>Is the edition so bad that 80% of the posts are about people trying to find ways to homebrew it?

Nah, it's just not got more stuff coming out for it so most of the existing material has been talked to death.

I tried to make a race, once. Half-satyrs, really cheery and courageous. I got as far as writing out their fluff before I realized I didn't care that much.

I hazily remember them getting feats that let them use pan flutes in place of class implements, and a paragon path about their courage becoming impossibly infectious.

The flute thing sounds like a meh idea (it's not like you can't just fluff any implement as a flute... _especially_ if it's also a dagger), but infectously courageous sounds good.

>Also, 4e's homebrew is more to do with the fact that it's basically a dead game by now, and we're trying to figure out how to breathe life into it.
4e's "dead" right now is more alive than most RPGs will ever be. The deadest edition right now is 3e.

The biggest thing 4e lacks right now is adventure modules. The market was not kind to 4e in module support, which is a shame considering how many tools the DMGs offer. If somebody wants to contribute to 4e, they would do better off making adventure paths than trying to make faggy strike! heartbreakers.

I tried my hand at working on an obscure race from the custom setting my players are adventure in. They're a bunch of hegemonic and militaristic dragonfolk with four arms with a culture loosely based on a weird mix of china and rome, kinda.

Or take a warhammer to it's internals.

Endurance, high AC, high HP... He'll be ok.

You know this is basically a dragonborn with 7 speed and the thri-kreen feature, right? Oh, and the breath weapon changed to the bugbear feature, which hits harder in the action economy. I don't mean to be a party pooper, but stapling together the most overpowered and exclusive abilities of four races, one of which is a monster race is a bit sue-ish. At least take something away from it.

When making (your) own rewrite/retroclone/heartbreaker/homebrew like , do you use the 4e template of titles, headings, powers, boxes as he did or go OC?

not sure how balanced it would be in play user, but i really like the culture you've got going here for these four armed dragonborn. They seem heavily based on Chinese culture, which if so. I would like to know more about this homebrew world you have, as I two have a world where the dragonborn are based on the chinese culture.

4e is all put together with CSS. Either you trial-and-error mess with web pages for official abilities, or you write your own. The web pages for everything can be found on the compendium.

A quick and dirty way to do things is to find an ability with a similar template and copy everything to google documents. This should be decent formatting and easy to use.

...shit, stapling together features of other races was how I was making the Warcraft races for a warcraft homebrew, under the basis that since you can't play as the 4e races, it was ok

Is it not ok?

Mixing and matching is fine and encouraged.

Except he LITERALLY took the dragonborn, with every feature it had, then added the best run speed in the game from the elf, the best feature of the thri-kreen, then replaced the dragonbreath power with the bugbear ability, which is normally an unplayable monster race. So it's an overpowered mess of a mary-sue race that is just the best traits of four races put together.

Anyone have any homebrew stuff for artificrs?

Yes, actually. I did some powers for them to play with the small amount of summoning they get. I can post them if you want after I unfuck the formatting (Transferring to google docs kinda fucked them but since I was the only one using it I didn't really bother to fix it)

Awesome thanks. Their culture is very barebones right now but I'll get some sort of doc going if you're interested.

Yeah this is true. I'm new to homebrewing 4e so I just picked whatever powers/features seemed to fit the race itself (and desu whatever looked cool). Any suggestions on how I can balance the race? I guess lowering the Speed down to 6 and then replacing the bugbear ability would be a firm start?

Thanks a bunch user!

Alright, there we go. Fixed it up (Hopefully didn't leave any remaining issues)

Meant for

Oh yeah, I just realised in my attempts to fix the formatting I left a few issues (The flavor text from the golem was actually showing the guardian drone one and the Superior Electropulse Bomb didn't have the right name).

But yeah, these are based on the well 'Summoning' subtheme that the Artificer has but barely got any support.

Made a slayer that could make constant melee basic attacks and within the rules slaughter an entire gathering of commoners, I believe it was "reaping weapon" unless we were playing it wrong, the passive lets you shift one square and make a melee basic when you kill something, and the slayer aura thing lets you shift your movement speed when you hit with a melee basic

Made a character with 50 passive insight due to that +1 per language feat

> Any suggestions on how I can balance the race?
Compare it to other races and see what they get. A rian gains access to every single dragonborn feature except the breath weapon, which is replaced by a different power. The tactics power is fine because at least the rian gave something up for it: the breath weapon.

The race doesn't get a little sue-ish until the extra arms and speed 7 are added without giving up anything. The only problem with your design is you added two very powerful features without giving anything up.

The best races to compare to would be the dragonborn and thri-kreen. Now, obviously just stacking all of the thri-kreen and dragonborn features would be poor design, right? Logically for ever feature added you should consider taking one away. Also consider that not all features are equal and powerful combat features are not the same as situational bonuses. A race should have a mix of features that add flavor and add power.

Look at the stat blocks for other races. Perfection is when there is nothing left to take away, and most races don't get very many features. The balance doesn't have to be perfect, just remove anything that's not necessary.

Reaper's axe is a level 15 weapon. It checks out because the item ability doesn't take an action, and the slayer's aura is a free action. Once you're level 15, I don't think commoners are an issue anyway.

It basically forced the DM to get rid of minion enemies

he later threw me into a pit of lava, told the party not to fight there

Sounds like you were dealing with THAT DM. A character build that is really good at specifically wiping out one kind of enemy when they hit a high level really shouldn't have been a problem.

He just made minions have a bit more HP mostly, but the fact that I could kill them all in one turn was just silly, I assume reaping weapon wasn't designed with slayers in mind.

The character was literally Kenpachi and I had Yachiru as a pixie warlord who would ride on my back all the time giving me even more attacks

Noted. Made some changes and read through more races. Found that a feature that showcased just how indomitable the rian can be is pretty flavorful, and stole the Bold feature from the halflings.

Also removed that extra 1 sq (they are dextrous, but pretty large and lumbering.)

Minions aren't supposed to have more hp. They're supposed to die in one hit. What he should have done is stop using minions. Minions are literally there for when you want a horde of dudes to fight, but don't want to have to keep track of them all, or when you want the pcs to feel powerful. Normal monsters are for when the pcs start blowing through minions and can take more powerful stuff.

Right, I meant that he started just using enemies with a bit more HP that were still relatively weak like minions, we were mostly fighting demi-gods at that point anyways