Morning Discussion: Together We're Heavy
I must say, I was rather impressed by The Conduit. It actually felt like a real first-person shooter for the Wii, the controls are quite well-done (and very customizable), the weapons are fun, and the six-hour campaign wraps up just before things get tiresome.
That said, if it wasn't for the Wii angle, The Conduit would probably be just another generic first-person shooter with an alien twist. I keep meaning to check out the online multiplayer, but keep getting sabotaged by a five-minute "waiting for network" time. Hrm.
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Must... buy... PHB...
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Yes, it's coming, hopefully by Friday (not that I'll get a chance to even read it till Sunday at the earliest).
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So, do we know what we are working with for Wednesday?
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That was mainly what I meant. We should find out today if he is still playing so somebody else can get in if he can't.
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I'm seriously thinking about signing up for this.
Also, thinking of writing my own module to use after I take and pass the DM Test.
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I enjoyed playing in Wadmaasi's session on Saturday, but it seems like all the other scheduled sessions are either full or on nights when I have other recurring commitments. Sad face. I'm actually thinking about quitting one of my local games, because it hasn't been much fun for me recently and I play so much other D&D that my schedule is getting a bit too full.
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Sorry about that. :-/
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Haha, yeah she said she wouldn't let that happen again. :-D
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I will say that my wife had a blast. Went a bit late for her, since she's pregnant, so she was pretty tired by the end. But she hasn't stopped talking about it and is looking forward to the next game. She actually request work off so she can play on the July 11th game.
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Are these happening all over the country? I'd love to go to one of these.
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Dude, SM man, now your number is out in the open like. You've been D&D ID * S T O L E N ' D *
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So this is all just a big D&D based ponzi scheme eh? I'm doomed, aren't I?
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The funny thing is, I'd completely forgotten about him when I wrote that post.
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I think my sarcasm projector is broke'd.
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Sorry, just did it this morning.
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I got the email but it looks like it's fine now? Please post here if you see any more errors and I'll just reboot the server.
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And don't worry guys, Pale Jon is definitely Good at killing small defenseless creatures >:)
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I think we have THREE Eladrin in the party now, which is a little crazy. You all should come up with some kind of story about how you came to be adventuring together. I meant to make Noitall82 tell a story about how his character ended up in the dungeon with y'all but I forgot about it in my rush to get everyone's character sheet in line and get started.
Also, I was trying my best to make the zombies grab people and drag them onto the runes for great hilarity but you folks killed them too quickly. I was even using a higher level version of the zombie monster than what the adventure specified, too.-
Going to up the difficulty next session? I think with an additional player, plus us all hitting 3rd level, we jumped a few more tiers of competence than normal
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I did make a conscious effort to increase the difficulty in each encounter by using higher-level versions of the monsters and adding one additional "big" monster to each. I'll have to bump the levels up a little more for next time, because you guys still destroyed. One problem was that the zombies all had EXTREMELY low defenses, to the extent that some of you couldn't miss except with a natural 1 or 2.
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Yeah that's what CB stands for ;)
He is saying that he can't find it in Dragon 372 even though the Character Builder cites that as the source.
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Haha yeah we usually start with dinner. I didn't even know my wife was recording the session until a ways in to it or I would have made more of an effort to have everyone finish before we started!
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Also I'm glad someone listened to it! Did you actually listen to the whole thing? That's insane.
Anyway, I'd love to hear any impressions if you have any. Things you thought were dumb, things you thought were good. We're always looking to improve the quality of our sessions and often times outside opinions help point out things we never even considered. :D-
I'm going to listen to it while at work this week. I would've started on it this weekend but I was listening to the Penny Arcade D&D podcasts instead.
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I'm glad you noticed that! That was actually something new I did that session. In the past I had basically just waited to see if the player would describe it and if he didn't I would do my own. The problem is the player doesn't know the guy is dead until I do describe it so I felt like they never got chances to explain an actual killing blow.
So this time I did the "he's dead, describe the blow" thing and I think it worked wonderfully. My wife's description of her killing blow on the dragon was particuarly cool and she had clearly thought about what this attack looks like visually in the past but never got a chance to really give a drawn out explanation of it.
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I didn't post it in the forums partly because it isn't really Shack D&D related but mostly because I really didn't think people would be interested in it because it's so damn long.
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PODCAST REPOST - Looks like a few people are interested that didn't see this before, so here it is:
I have a podcast available of the session I did last night Thursday with my friends. This is my regular weekly session that I have been doing for over a year now. Our characters are level 7 and in this session they fight a dragon.
http://shackdnd.greglaabs.com/recordings/a167/A167%20Session%202009-06-25.mp3
I am really happy with the quality of the recording! This was using the iPhone's new Voice Memo program that is built-in to OS 3.0. My wife just started the recording and placed the iPhone face up in the middle of the table. It picks up everyone's voices very well and even the music being played comes in at a perfect volume. The only thing that stopped me from recording our sessions earlier was because I didn't think we had a good way to get a decent-quality recording. This was a very pleasant surprise. :)
It weights in at a completely fucking ridiculous 6 fucking hours.
It's mostly combat. I tried to crop the audio to start when we actually started but I just listened to the beginning and found out that I was dumb and we ramble on for several minutes in the beginning about random shit like Michael Jackson's death and auto-erotic asphyxiation.
I wish I could go through this whole thing and edit out some of the random crap but jesus did I mention it's 6 hours? Instead here's are some notable timeline points:
6:50 - The actual session starts for real. Several minutes are spent storytelling
19:40 - First round of combat of the first encounter begins
1:03:45 - I finally remember to turn on the combat music.
1:59:00 - Melek forgets to save a minor action to sustain his very critical darkness spell that was preventing a deadly trap from functioning. They are not pleased.
2:10:10 - The last enemy combatant is killed. We break out of "combat mode" a couple minutes later when everyone is safe from the trap.
2:42:00 - The door to the final room opens and the description of the room with the dragon is given.
2:46:30 - First round of combat of the second encounter begins
4:52:35 - Killing blow delivered. Description of blow given by Cailin
The rest of the session (up to 5:47:53) is role-playing the interaction of the characters with the elven settlement that hired them, including a gift-giving ceremony, and finally they set off to continue their main quest (this was a side thing.)
The characters are:
Dan is playing Melek, a Tiefling Warlock
Cailin (my wife) is playing Arora, a Dwarf Paladin of Erathis
Eric is playing Deomin, an Elven Ranger
Eric is also playing Aurom, a Dragonborn Warlord
http://shackdnd.greglaabs.com/recordings/a167/A167%20Session%202009-06-25.mp3 -
OverloadUT: Listening to your 4E game, and noticing some things you do differently. It sounds like you have everyone roll themselves for attacks against them. How well does that work for you? It also sounds like you have a player keeping track of Initiative, and calling out to you who goes next. Why do you do this?
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Both good questions, and both are new things we started with this group.
Players rolling for monsters: We find it to be a lot more exciting! Rolling dice is what D&D is all about and so it's exciting for the players to get to roll more. Also I find that the increased transparancy in this case is a good thing; it allows the players to get a general sense of how good the monsters' attack bonuses are. It was something I just decided to try at the beginning with this group and was surprised at how much it took off. There's just something way fun about it.
Player tracking initiative: Two main reasons: One is to give the players (or one player in this case) something to do when it's not his turn, reducing the "just waiting for my turn" feeling people sometimes get. He's in charge of the initiative so he always has something to do when it's not his turn. The second and bigger reason is simply to take a bit of work off of the DM's plate. Often times the slowness in our games (in the past at least) is due to the DM having too many things to manage at once. This helps that a bit.-
For the players rolling for monsters, on this I would agree is a good idea, but I wouldn't have people rolling for attacks against themselves, maybe next alphabetically ordered or something (can't do to the left in a non-f2f game), in order to avoid cheating.
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Man when people say stuff like this I find it such a foreign concept. If my friends were the type that I would even suspect could possibly be cheating, I wouldn't be playing with them. I could have every one of my players roll secretly behind a screen and I would trust them to be honest about the results.
If you're afraid of them cheating for monster rolls, wouldn't you be worried that they are somehow cheating with their own attack rolls? Damage rolls? What about the bonuses they are adding to the rolls? I certainly don't check everyone's character sheets to make sure they are using the right numbers; I don't have any need to. But if your friends are cheaters do you have to do that?
But let's pretend for a moment that I had friends that were cheaters and I managed to put aside the fact that it sickens me, so I let them play anyway: How could they cheat? The dice are being rolled on the table right there for everyone to see, so it's not like they can change them or something.-
Understood, but this is online, there's no one there to double check you, and for some the temptation becomes pretty high. I know the first couple of times I played 2.0 I had a blast, and then I found out one of the group was cheating and it ruined the experience for me. As fluid as the rules can be it just didn't seem any fun without some structure.
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Have not, that would make sense, consider my post ignorant and uninformed.
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Also, I think I rolled a 1.
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I've found the best way to avoid cheating is to not play with cheaters. :)
I'll bring both these things up to my DM, he might rather like both those rules. We're already pretty transparent as far as that goes, he lets us know attack bonuses and defenses (after a few rounds) so that we can all calculate faster to keep things moving along. We've noticed the *real* fun is not knowing what kinds of crazy abilities the monsters have, and learning how to deal with those. Attack Bonuses and Defense scores become apparent to anyone who's paying attention anyway, so why make work out of it?-
We've been using a new system that my friend (Eric) suggested based on a game he played with a different groups: You can use a minor action to make a knowledge check about anything. You won't get the full info that the PHB suggests for monster knowledge checks but based on the roll you will get some small info like what the weak defense is or how a particular power they have seen works (so they can avoid triggering a trigger attack for example.)
This is mainly cool because most characters don't have anything to do as their minor action each round so this gives them a small thing to do.
I was new to this element in this recorded session so I think it was a bit more awkward than it will be in the future as I didn't have ideas of what to say prepared.-
You know what else is really nice about making the players roll the attack rolls? It forces everyone to pay attention. We have a couple players in the 4E game who are pretty bad about paying attention. Very frustrating. It's one of the things I really like about our podcast recording night. You can *not* have multiple people talking at the same time or it's junk audio, so you can't have cross talk, and that generally means everyone *has* to pay attention. Our games got soooo much better because of that. I almost wish we record every game I play in, it makes everyone behave so much better.
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The entire point of my post there was in the last 1/2 dozen words or so, I suggest rolling a comprehension check and, failing that, rereading the post.
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Recommend A class to Kenmis!
Hail 4E guru's. I'm about five sessions in to our home 4E game, and my interest is beginning to wane. I'm pretty sure this is due to my character class; the Avenger has been a bit boring to play. Maybe it's because their focus of "you do more damage and really hose people that try to get away" doesn't seem to be coming up as much as I'd like, or maybe it's because he's so damn fragile (though taking Toughness last level has really helped that).
What is your favorite Role/Class? A couple of my friends have recommended the Rogue to be quite a bit more fun to play than the Avenger, anyone have any thoughts on this? Back when Keep on the Shadowfell came out I played the Wizard, and he was a lot of fun. To be honest, Controllers, Defenders, and Leaders ALL sound like more fun than a Striker. And yet, there are twice as many Striker classes as any other!
You know what I think would be cool? If the Monk was a Martial Controller. That's a class I'd love to try!
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Overall, if you are finding your class boring I think you should stay away from strikers. They tend to be the simplest classes because their job is to do damage. You may find that a controller or one of the more technical defenders would be best. A Warden, for example, is very technical and has lots of opportunity for interesting tactics.
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Newb question:
If I charge as my standard action can I still take a move action afterward or no? I'm going to assume the answer is no since the PHB says:
No Further Actions: After you resolve a charge attack, you can’t take any further actions this turn,
unless you spend an action point to take an extra action.
If that's true, why charge at all? Why not just move and then attack?-
You're correct. You can't do anything after you charge unless you spend an action point.
Why charge? Because you can cover twice the distance! Do a full move, THEN charge, which gets you another move and an attack. Also, keep in mind you can charge over difficult terrain and it does NOT have to be in a straight line (though you do have to go to the nearest square for that target, so if that's occupied, you can't charge.). Charges are very usefull! The +1 to attack is nice too.-
hmm, rulebook says must move "directly to the nearest square" -- I always took that as requiring a straight line
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Most of the grognard DMs that run the in-person RPGA games I play interpret it this way. They even go one step further and say that if the nearest square from which you could attack is occupied, then you can't charge. I think that's retarded (if it's occupied, then it's not the nearest fucking square from which I could attack, god damn it) so I don't rule that way. There's one judge that usually lets us ignore the "must charge 2 squares minimum" rule, too.
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Charge is useful if the enemy is farther away than a standard move can get you.
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Cool. Thanks for the answers guys.
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Nobody mentioned the fact that a few classes have powers that can be used in a charge instead of a melee basic attack. So that makes charge BETTER than moving and attacking in those cases because you're using a regular power AND get the charge bonus.
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Rogue is awesome but I don't think it would be right for you based on what you've posted. You have to sometimes work really hard to optimize your damage output without putting yourself in harm's way too badly as the rogue. Sometimes you have to just suck it up and be more or less worthless because trying anything fancy would get you killed. It can be frustrating at times in that way, but I find that the moments where you completely and utterly annihilate the big boss outweigh the times when you have to hang out in the back and let the front line guys clean up.
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RPGA doesn't really appeal to me. Seems like a PnP MMO!
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Maybe I'll jump in for a session or two at some point.
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This is how I have been feeling, but I'm going to give it a few more tries before I completely dismiss it.
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Yeah, I do see RPGA as a fantastic way for people who can't get a regular group to still be able to play. Anything that allows more people to play D&D is a good thing in my book! It might not be for me but I still think it's an awesome thing Wizards is doing.
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I haven't looked at the actual material yet but I love the idea from what you've mentioned about it!
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As a pursuit avenger myself, rather than recommend another class I'd like to go over your problems with it.
When I started playing mine I thought the same thing about the mechanics not happening for you. What you need to do is change how you are playing in the fights to force enemies into no-win scenarios. Use your abilities that pull/teleport enemies to pull them away from your defender (who has marked them hopefully) so that they are forced to either stick with you and suffer the penalties of the defenders mark, or run back over to him and you get your bonus damage. On top of that, you should be using the pull/tele abilities to force flanking onto them when you can't force them into a lose/lose movement scenario.
As for fragility I'm not sure where you're going wrong, you should have the highest defenses of any striker class around. You should have high wisdom and dex, and just by not wearing heavy armor you get your class +3 AC ability and you can up that again with a feat to +4, and I grabbed leather armor proficiency to make my AC nearly as high as our defender. Avenger's are easily able to stand toe to toe with enemies as long as you keep it one on one (which you should be considering your primary ability is depending on it).
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