Burrowowl

1. Think before negotiating: If you fire at them with everything you have, could you remove the need to negotiate?
2. If negotiation is a necessity, think while doing so: what is the best way to cleave the enemy ambassadors in twain?
3. If all else fails, fighting is always the answer.
4. If fighting fails, you are not fighting hard enough.
5. If you are not fighting hard enough, fight louder.
6. The best approach is always from the front.
7. If the enemy has left their flanks open, feint and then attack from the front.
8. If the front is heavily defended, they are expecting a flank attack. Attack from the front.
9. If their flanks and front is both heavily defended but they are vulnerable to an aerial strike, distract them with aerial bombardment and then attack from the front.
10. If attacking from the front does not work, you are not fighting hard enough. See point 5.
11. If attacking from the front is still not working, you’re obviously not attacking their front! See point 6.
12. If there is no possibility for victory, attack from the front as furiously and loudly as possible. Remember: the greater the defeat, the greater the moral victory.

Diplomacy is over-rated.

So I was knocking around some of the suggestions from the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide regarding the distribution of treasure. When following the advice of the DMG, a DM basically ends up distributing one less magic item than there are player characters every level, each of increasing level-value (level +1 … L+4). For four characters, the book recommends dropping the level+2 item, yielding an item output of L+1, L+3, and L+4 by the time the party advances.

As an issue of basic fairness, you wouldn’t want the person who got the level +4 item (ostensibly the coolest material reward that level) to also get the most super-neato-von-awesome stuff during the following level. It seems to me that a round-robin approach makes a lot of sense. But which direction to spin the wheel? Does the character that got the L+4 item this time get the L+3 item next time? Then the L+1? This would allow whoever missed out to get the L+4 next time. It also means that starting at 1st level, some guy is going to end up with multiple same-level items repeatedly during his career. Odd.

Here’s how the downward-stepping round-robin breaks down:

And so forth. An upward-stepping round-robin goes like this:

In both cases, naturally, the same number of items show up, of the same power levels, at the same rate. When descending, an individual’s gear clusters up into tight little clusters of general potency. When ascending there’s a lot more scatter.

Descending, I observe that if you look at each character’s best gear (at the tail end of level 6), Player A gets at 10th and 6th level item, Player B gets two 7th level items, Player C gets two 8th level items, and player D gets two 9th level items. All else being equal, I’d expect Player B to feel a little put-out at that point.

Ascended, Player A gets and 8th and a 7th level item, Player B gets a 9th and a 7th level item, Player C gets a 10th and 8th level item, and Player D gets a 9th and a 7th. Player A is right behind the pack and player C is a little ahead. I suspect this is the approach that would be most likely to yield a defensible appearance of fairness at the game table.

Previously I whipped up a demonstration that the “classic D&D party” (Cleric-Fighter-Rogue-Wizard) can cover the skill spread quite easily. With the Player’s Handbook 2 out today, it is now possible to make a couple of power-source-themed adventuring parties, with all four party roles covered but without having to mix your peanut butter and your chocolate. There’s no reason to avoid such delicious flavor combinations, but sometimes you just want chocolate, right?

What we find, pretty quickly, is that there is a lot of overlap in each power-source group. The Arcanists all have Arcana, History, and Insight. The Divine classes all have Religion. The Primal classes all have Athletics, Heal, Nature, and Perception. Some of this overlap is reinforced by requiring characters to train spefici skills as part of character creation (Arcana, Religion, and Nature being the big culprits for obvious reasons).

With the exception of the Bard (which has every skill available save Endurance, Stealth, and Thievery), each of these groupings have big gaping holes in skill availability. If you want to have a broadly-skilled Divine adventuring party, you will probably have to sink a fair number of feats into skill training, or resort to creating a gang of Eladrin.

Moral of the story: mix up your power sources. Most DMs and players have been stitching together traveling-circus hodgepodges of adventuring parties for years, of course.

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In Dungeons & Dragons, not all skills were created equal. Each is intended to be of moderately-equivalent value to a player character, so that there are no completely-wrong choices to be made at that phase of character creation. Sadly, this isn’t entirely true. Of the skills presented in the Player’s Handbook, some stand out simply by virtue of their availability:

Acrobatics, Bluff, Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Thievery are all only available to two classes. For each of these (aside from Nature), the only classes that have the skill available fill the “striker” role in a party. In a typical four or five-character adventuring party, you probably won’t have more than one or two characters filling the same role, so failing to train one of these skills would leave your party short a potentially-valuable skill.

By contrast, Heal, History, Insight, and Intimidate are available to five classes each. It would be difficult to put together an effective multiple-role party without having every one of these skills available. These, then, would be good skills to just presume a party is going to be reasonably good at. E.g. out of five player characters three or four of them probably have Heal available, and one or two of them probably have it trained. This makes placing a somewhat difficult Heal DC into an adventure a pretty darned reasonable thing for a DM to do.

What should we take away from this? If you’re a player, kindly make sure you’re covering the skills your party needs you to be covering; you cannot expect your Wizard to be intimidating any more than you should expect your Paladin to be sneaky. If you’re a DM concocting a clever skill challenge, try to think of ways that the more commonly-available skills may come in handy, and whether you should set the bar high or low.
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The game developers over at Privateer Press have been busy. Not busy producing new IKRPG material, but busy juggling what was once a nicely streamlined skirmish game WARMACHINE. Every year since its launch, Privateer Press has released a major expansion to the product, from Prime to Escalation to Apotheosis, then Superiority, and most recently Legends. Each of the four original factions has grown into new niches and fortified early strengths. It’s quite a good game.

But after six rule books and the introduction of the HORDES product line, things have gotten unwieldy. Each of the several-dozen models available has its own special rules, often creating exceptions to a core set of rules that is quite streamlined and almost elegant. The reminds me of a beautiful woman putting on makeup and jewelry. She puts a little something on to draw attention to her eyes, maybe a pair of earings. That’s all nice, but taken a little too far she’ll look like a tramp or a clown. The interactions of special rules had crossed the line at some point. The Privateers had to put an online FAQ up to keep the errata and rules-interaction rulings straight.

So they’re hitting the reset button. In April, we’ll see previews of the rules revisions. Every model’s point cost has been adjusted, unit and warjack rules have been revised, power attacks are being overhauled, and all your stat-cards will be obsolete when the second edition hits the shelves. I eagerly anticipate not the new release (I haven’t played a game of WARMACHINE in over a year), but rather the fanbase reactions. The pro-skub and anti-skub enthusiasts will be pouring out of the woodwork on this subject.

Oh, and here’s to the Juggernaut getting an tune-up.