Burrowowl

After waxing mathematic on my wariness of the 4th Edition D&D skill challenge system, I ran across the DMG Errata. Oh look, they totally retooled the target numbers, number of failures, etc. Because there are so many changes, I’ll just put the relevant, updated text below:

What level is the challenge? What is the challenge’s complexity?

Choose a grade of complexity, from 1 to 5 (1 being simple, 5 being complex).

SKILLCHALLENGE COMPLEXITY

Complexity	Successes	Failures
1	4	3
2	6	3
3	8	3
4	10	3
5	12	3

Level and complexity determine how hard the challenge is for your characters to overcome. The skill challenge’s level determines the DC of the skill checks involved, while the grade of complexity determines how many successes the characters need to overcome the challenge, and how many failures end the challenge. The more complex a challenge, the more skill checks are required.

For an easier or a harder challenge, use DCs from the row that corresponds to a lower or a higher level, and assign the challenge’s level as the midpoint of that level range. For example, if designing an easier challenge for an 8th-level party, you could use the DCs from the “Level 4–6″ row. That would adjust the challenge’s level to 5th.

Set a level for the challenge and DCs for the checks involved. As a starting point, set the level of the challenge to the level of the party, and use moderate DCs for the skill checks (see the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on page 42).

Example: A complexity 3 challenge using hard DCs and cutting the number of failures needed in half increases this skill challenge’s level by four.

This modification, along with a revised pg42 Difficulty Class table (effectively reducing the difficulty of skill checks by 10), means that the death spiral of skill challenge futility now points in the opposite direction: characters that excel at a set of skills related to a challenge now stand an excellent chance of succeeding. The math now looks an awful lot more like “roll some dice, feel good about training a couple of skills, win” instead of “roll some dice, curse your dice, throw your dice at the DM, curse a lot, fail.” Probably a good thing, though they may have swung things a bit too far over.

I picked up my 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons books the day they came out. I couldn’t help it; it’s a weakness of mine. I read through the rules, formed a few opinions, and got a hankering to run a game. Problem was that my playgroup is already hip-deep in a 3rd edition Forgotten Realms game, and I didn’t want to rock the boat by taking the reins from our current DM. So I waited. And jotted down some notes here and there about some adventure ideas.

Then, for reasons I would just as soon not go into on a blog, our campaign hit a bump and our DM isn’t really available at the moment. So we cracked open the books and four of us sat down for our first actual 4e game together. Jimbo put together a tough-guy hammer-and-shield Fighter, Daniel brewed up a halfling Warlock (Infernal Pact), and Jasper finally settled on a Warlord after strongly considering making a Cleric.

The new rules were foreign enough to these three that making characters required a bit of explanation, quite a few questions, and more than a little guesswork. When all was said and done, we were able to create three characters hailing from a desperate little foothills town with a Goblin problem. It had taken us about half a game session to make the characters, so I wanted to get straight to the action: they were on their way into Goblin territory to scout out a temporary logging operation. Times are so rough in town that gathering firewood for the season amounts to a military operation. Two skirmishes followed, which gave us a chance to flex our muscles and throw around some dice. A few observations:

• I would have had a really hard time making Goblin Tactics and Tide of Iron make sense to everybody at the table if I weren’t using a battle mat. Miniatures weren’t necessary; I just used some scraps of paper and used the grid to keep track of where everything was.
• Assuring that the party worked well together was a no-brainer. I encouraged them to each have a different party role (defender, striker, and leader, respectively) and the core rules character abilities took care of the rest.
• The Warlord ability Commander’s Strike works wonders along with the Fighter’s Combat Challenge against a badguy that’s trying to disengage from the fight: Fighter takes a double-move to get into position, Warlord goads the Fighter into a free basic attack, and now the fleeing ranged baddie is stuck.
• The Fighter works differently than he used to. Lots more reasonable options in the heat of the moment. Jimbo has been playing Fighters since I was in preschool, and after a little initial hesitation was right on top of his newly-refined party role, using Cleave and Tide of Iron to mop up minions and break up wolfpack flanking maneuvers like nothing. The Fighter rules have changed a lot, but Fighters haven’t really changed at all from what we really think of them as.
• The Warlock worked a lot like I used to wish Magic Users would, back when I thought Evocation spells were really cool. A Warlock can blast away all day, every day, with his curses and Hellish Rebuke really doing the heavy lifting when it came to parting the bad guys from their hit points. That’s the whole point of a “striker” character class, but it seemed to work out better than just reading the books had implied.
• The Warlord suffered from bad die rolls. Really bad die rolls all night. This made his Commander’s Strike and Inspiring Word abilities all the more important; he could be useful when he was rolling twos and threes.
• Whipping up appropriately-challenging encounters was a breeze. About 100xp worth of bad-guys per first-level character made for a pretty easy scrap. Throwing in an encounter of 125xp critters (two gray wolves and a Goblin Sharpshooter) challenged the party enough to blow a handful of healing surges and dropped the Warlock into negative hit points (largely due to some very good die rolls on my part).

Overall, though I’m dismayed by the cause of the interruption in our 3rd edition game, I’m pleased with how this seriously-reworked new edition of Dungeons & Dragons worked out. I am highly interested in seeing what Privateer Press does with the system, if anything. The creation of new character classes strikes me as superficially labor-intensive, but there are a number of design features built into the new system that I think really help keep things on an even keel, particularly in the area of keeping characters of diverse themes useful.

Next time we have a 4e game session, I’ll have to try out the Skill Challenge system a bit. It is intended to make non-combat encounters a bit more playable within the rules framework (as opposed to a bunch of jibber-jabber finally resolved by a single die-roll by a single character), but the math just doesn’t look right to me. We’ll see what happens when we start throwing dice for determining the location of their logging camp. It’ll almost certainly be interesting, but statistically I’m betting that following the DMG’s guidance will lead to a failed encounter.

From time to time a truly remarkable phrase is uttered at a D&D game. There are many variations of it, but it all boils down to “That’s not realistic!” This is ridiculous, of course. You’re playing a game with wizards and elves and dragons and such; you went through the looking glass when you picked up your dice. I ran into the following list online that demonstrates within the 3rd edition rules why anything happening past 9th level has no business even being compared to reality:

• 9th level Bard. He has 12 ranks of Perform, started with 16 Cha and increased it twice to 18 (+4). He also has a masterwork instrument (+2) and a Circlet of Persuasion (+3). His Perform modifier is now 12+4+2+3=+21. This means that, by taking ten, he nails a 31 every time. According to the PHB, this means that by playing on street corners, he will eventually attract the attention of extraplanar beings. Gimble will be sitting around drinking and playing his lute when a genie bamfs in and asks the gnome to perform at his kid’s Bar Mitzvah.
• 9th level Rogue. He has 12 ranks of Balance, started with 16 Dex and boosted it twice to 18 (+4). He gets a +2 synergy bonus from Tumble ranks, for a total modifier of 12+4+2=+18. Taking 10, he will, every time, be able to move at full speed across a one inch wide marble-covered beam. (18+10-5=23 for the check, 20+2(scree) =22 for the DC.)
• 9th level Barbarian. 12 ranks of Climb, now has 18 (+4) Strength, for a final modifier of 12+4=+16. Taking 10, he gets a 26. He can now climb most mountains while raining, moving 40 feet every 6 seconds. (Check is 26-5=21 for accelerated climbing, DC is 15+5=20 for climbing a rough natural rock surface that’s slippery.)
• 9th level Swashbuckler. 12 ranks of Jump, 12 (+1) Strength, +2 synergy from Tumble. His modifier is 12+1+2=+15. Taking 10 gets him a 25. The female world record for the long jump is (7.52 meters)*(3.28 feet/meter) = 24.7 feet. This character beats that every time he wants to. The men’s record is 8.95*3.28= 29.3 feet, which his character could swing pretty easily if he so desired. When the character rolls instead of taking 10, he can hit as much as 35 feet, blowing past the world record by two yards.
• 9th level Beguiler. 12 ranks in Disguise, 14 (+2) Charisma, with a disguise kit (+2). Total modifier is +16, taking 10 gets him a 26. He can disguise himself as a woman’s human husband (+10 for intimate familiarity) as long as she has a Spot modifier of 6 or less.
• 9th level Monk. 12 ranks in sense motive, 16 (+3) Wisdom. Final modifier is 12+3=+15. Taking 10, he can instantly tell whether a person is under the effects of Charm Person or not, every time. (DC 25) And that isn’t “I’ve a sneaking suspicion that something is wrong here” so much as it’s “Hi, my name is Benedict Thelonious. Also, you’re charmed.”
• 9th level Bard again. 12 “ranks” in Speak Language nets him 12 languages, because Bards are awesome like that. There are only 20 of the things listed in the PHB, one of them is Druidic, and he starts with a few because of race and intelligence. He learns this from hanging out in bars, and in addition to everything else he can do. I don’t think there are many people in the world that can boast that kind of repertoire, and finding one in his mid-20s that’s also a competent in battle, magic (which we can approximate to some degree with science or technology), and whatever this guy is burning his other 5+Int skill points on is fairly definitely impossible.
• 9th level Ranger goes tracking. 12 ranks in Survival, 14 (+2) Wisdom, +4 from Search and Know: Nature synergy, and +2 from some manner of tracking kit. Modifier is 12+2+4+2= +20, which means he takes 10 to get a 30. To match this, the DC is going to look like this: 4+5+1+20. That comes from tracking a single Toad (+4 DC for being Diminutive) that is covering his tracks (+5) after an hour of rainfall (+1) over bare rock (20).

Hat tip to Zilvar for pointing it out, and of course the original source by Merlin the Tuna

OK, so I’m a big boy. I’ve been in this hobby for a long time. Things have changed over the years. New ideas come, old ideas go. Some good decisions are made, and a few bad ones. Moving on can be daunting, and there’s always going to be a learning curve.

But putting the weapons on page 218? What the hell was Wizards of the Coast thinking? Page 100 (or thereabouts) is where player character equipment belongs in a Players Handbook, damn it! </nerdrage>

I’ll surely have some more coherent observations to share after things have had a chance to settle in a bit more.

My weekly RPG group has recently reverted to a Forgotten Realms game, complete with the stereotypical traveling-circus nonsensical party composition (an Ogre, two Humans, a Gnome, and a Halfling), and I’ve taken it upon myself to give the fabled Tome of Battle, the Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magics a shot with a Silas Coldwater, Crusader of Tyr.

In broad terms, the Tome of Battle seeks to make melee combatants more interesting to use than simply Move Action, Attack with the occasional Full Attack, 5-foot-step. The kinds of tactical options available to the typical Fighter or Barbarian character have generally involved wading hip-deep into rules that involve attacks of opportunity, special modifiers, and contested die rolls (grapple, trip, bull rush, and sunder: I’m looking at you, here). Basically they bog things down and tend not to be terribly useful against Gargantuan critters with more than two legs. Tome of Battle introduces three new character classes — basically just Fighter variants — that take advantage of a new set of rules for Maneuvers and Stances.

Maneuvers operate a lot like spells in that they have minimum level requirements. In the case of my Crusader, I can make an extra-powerful “Mountain Hammer” attack every once in a while, or use Stone Bones to gain temporary damage reduction, or a number of other flashy tricks. Stances are special maneuvers that are pretty much always on. Silas generally operates in Iron Guard Glare stance, which grants an armor class bonus to all his allies (but not to himself) against any opponent that Silas threatens.

The Tome of Battle is considered one of the books that 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons will be drawing greatly from; it was an experiment in some new ways of handling tactical encounters that works pretty smoothly. It also shows a bit of how the Wizards of the Coast folks would like to handle character advancement going forward. They wanted to make it so that players would have interesting choices to make every time their characters become more accomplished. For a Fighter, character progression meant a small number of skill points, often used simply to reinforce aptitude in areas that character was already good at, the Fighter would get some more hit points, and his base attack bonus would go up. Yawn. Every second and every third level, the Fighter would get to select a new feat. This is the chief way in which a Fighter would differentiate himself, the primary mechanism by which he’d be cool.

For the Crusader, they mix this up a bit. To illustrate, I’ll describe the decisions I got to make on my way to 6th level.

1. 1st: Any character has a ton of choices at 1st level. What’s the basic character concept? What race, class, class abilities, skills, equipment, etc help demonstrate that concept? I went with a polearm-wielding Crusader with Combat Reflexes and a smattering of maneuvers like Vanguard Strike that help his buddies do their jobs better.
2. 2nd: Here a Fighter would get a bonus feat. A Crusader instead gets a second stance and a class ability that helps with saving throws. Silas picks Martial Spirit, which lets him heal allies a little when he hits an enemy in melee.
3. 3rd: Everybody gets a feat at this level, and a Crusader gets a new maneuver. 3rd level is when 2nd-level maneuvers are available, so I take Mountain Hammer, which lets me do an extra 2d6 damage, bypassing damage reduction and hardness.
4. 4th: Everybody gets a stat improvement, a Fighter would get a bonus feat, and a Crusader gets to upgrade one of his old maneuvers, swapping it out for a new one. 2nd level maneuvers are pretty cool, so I swap out a 1st level one that I really took as a placeholder, and grab another tasty 2nd level maneuver.
5. 5th: This is a dead level for Fighters, but when Clerics and Wizards get 3rd level magic. Similarly, Silas got a new maneuver at up to 3rd level. I get him White Raven Tactics, which allows an ally to go at exactly one initiative after him, even if that ally had already acted that turn. This lets the Fighter in the party get two full-round actions, sometimes before our opponents even get a chance to act. Neato.
6. 6th: Everybody gets another feat, Fighters get two, and a Crusader gets to trade out another Maneuver (throw away an old, stale one for a new, hot one). I could trade out Crusader’s Strike (which lets me heal 1d6+5 to an ally when striking a foe) for Revitalizing Strike (which lets me heal 3d6+6 — eventually 3d6+15 — when striking a foe), a clear upgrade for something that’s nice at low levels but utterly unimpressive at mid-level or high-level play. Or perhaps I’d be better served taking Defensive Rebuke, which forces any opponent Silas strikes to target him or provoke an attack of opportunity (handy with Combat Reflexes and a reach weapon). Decisions, decisions. There are several other options as well.

That doesn’t go into the various interesting class abilities. Basically I get to make real decisions in mid-combat without having to muck through a massive spell list. Nice. The other Tome of Battle classes, the Sword Sage and Warblade, have their own distinct flavors, differentiated by the palette of maneuvers available to them, their class abilities, and the means by which they get to refresh their maneuvers.

A lot of the descriptive text is the kind of poorly-conceived high fantasy oriental tripe that I expect from Dungeons & Dragons, the kind of stuff that leaves me incapable of running a serious game in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms. That said, it’s an interesting addition to the way that D&D operates. Separate it a bit from the half-baked mysticism and I think they’re really on to something here. I can only hope that their approach to the 4th Edition Fighter is heavily inspired by the game mechanics, if not the fluff, of this book.

Looks like Wizards of the Coast have a hankering to squeeze out another set of core rulebooks. Sigh.

Only a handful of times since the advent of Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 have I had the occasion to drown a player character. I’ve been playing in or running D&D games nearly-continuously since the release of the d20 rule set, and it simply doesn’t come up that often. When it has, it has been frustrating, especially the v3.5 version.

Drowning should be a harrowing situation. The very air you need to survive is denied you as you struggle to surface, yet the rules as written make it a cakewalk in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.
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Every adventuring Wizard and Sorcerer worth his salt has a Fireball or Lightning Bolt and a couple Magic Missiles spell up his sleeve in case a fight breaks out, and spells like Bull’s Strength and Cure Serious Wounds have an obvious appeal when out dungeoncrawling or dragon-slaying. This post isn’t about those no-brainers, but rather the more subtle, multi-use spells you may have been forgetting.
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For years now, I’ve struggled with the existence of prestige classes in the d20 RPG system. I understand the desire to have them; they provide an underlying rule set to accompany a significant variation on the core character archetypes that are normal classes. They are “prestigious” in that there are necessary prerequisites to gaining entry into them. They are “classes” because progression in a PrC takes the place of the normal progression through a normal class.

Since the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook was released in 2000, Wizards of the Coast has been on a fairly-steady schedule of monthly releases, putting out additional skills, feats, spells, classes, and prestige classes that can help mold their rule set to whatever setting you may wish to run it in. They’ve re-released the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk, as well as Eberron and a number of environment-type-based settings (Frostburn etc.).

All told, there are currently 652 prestige classes published by Wizards of the Coast for the d20 system. This doesn’t count the plethora of prestige classes present in OGL products like the Iron Kingdoms, Midnight, or Warcraft. Granted, many of these 652 PrCs are repeats (Archmage, Incantrix, and Wayfarer Guide are some that show up in two books), but this is a truly-obscene preponderance of customized character rules, and likely indicative of either a fundamental flaw in the system’s underlying mechanics or something far more insidious in their marketing department.

Ok, so Fighters in D&D have traditionally been pretty lousy at a wide variety of things, excelling only in pumelling, piercing, or hacking opponents into pulp. The d20 system did a lot to make the Fighter a more appealing character class, largely through the customization allowed by the class’s feat progression. This allows them to closely match the archery or two-weaponed fighting skills of a Ranger, the mounted combat skills of a Cavalier, the brutal attacking power of the Barbarian, or any suitable blend of the above. Alas, the d20 core rules don’t give them a viable means of beating the living snot out of their opponents with their bare hands.

For ease of reference, here are the d20 Modern unarmed combat feats, grouped by “feat tree.” They provide three separate ways that a Fighter could progress in unarmed combat prowess, and while they don’t make a Fighter the equal of a Monk for this purpose, it gives them some room to grow. Consider using them in your fantasy campaign.

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