The General D&D thread

I know there's probably a lot of people that don't agree, but the line...

... really rankles with me. One of my many petty complaints with fourth edition is different rules for players and the DM. Characters have class levels. Monsters just advance. Characters have dailies and encounters. Monsters have recharging powers. It's always rubbed me the wrong way.

Oh, the monsters should be allowed to do things players can't, but within the context of the rules. Like I said, I know it's petty, and people (Especially Tomu) will disagree, but dang, I prefer the players and GM to be on what at least appears to be a level playing field.

I kind of like the player class templates they had for monsters.

Trigger Loaded: Theoretically, you could play 4E with P Cs using monster rules. I don't think it'd be anywhere near as fun, though.

You could also craft encounters using the Monsters as PC Races rules for the enemies.

I personally would like to see more classes with recharging power sets myself.

essentials may of introduced the concept along with fighter stances but I never bother with it.

My hypothesis is that daily powers will never work. If anything proves me wrong, I will be happy to burn that hypothesis in a gasoline fire.

The problem with daily resources (and to a lesser extent encounter resources) is that it's gameplay driving narrative. I'm all for gameplay/story segregation myself, but things like not getting an extended rest despite getting a full night's sleep-because of the encounters/day mechanism doesn't line up with the narrative of the given adventure-just rubs me the wrong way.

The "daily" designation is pretty stupid, yeah- not to start a system war, but I really like Legend's designation of a "scene," for such things, though that carries its own problems. I just mean in terms of player-power versus monster-power. If you give monsters "dailies," they outclass the fuck out of the players unless they completely suck otherwise; if you give the players dailies without compensating the monsters, the players will save their shit up to obliterate the bosses, and if you give players dailies and monsters recharging powers, there's an extremely delicate line of balance.

I think that, instead of "daily" powers, there should be at-wills, the weakest, recharging powers, in the middle, and encounter powers, the strongest.

I dislike rechargables. I don't think they add anything to the game. The exception is conditional rechargables-for instance, monsters that have an encounter power that recharges when first bloodied. That creates the gameplay incentive to bloody enemies ASAP before they have the chance to use their encounter powers, which I've found to have some interesting gameplay effects.

I don't have any problem with dailies other then I like to set my stories over a set period of time and the players automatically class them as Too Awesome To Us.

Yeah they didn't use the bloodied mechanic half as much as they could of done.

edited 23rd Sep '12 5:24:23 PM by joeyjojo

Conditional rechargeables is what I generally have in mind, yes, not die-rolled or arbitrary-turn-numbered ones.

Candid Moment: As a DM, I don't bother using encounters or rechargables. Instead, I just arbitrarily throw around powers pretending they're rechargable and that I've been rolling the recharge rolls. Gives me greater control over the flow of the battle.

Of course, if I played as a truly adversarial DM, I wouldn't do that. There's been a couple of occasions where I've had to seriously nerf my enemies at the last minute.

Note to self: Close Burst attacks over a wide area are way more powerful than the raw numbers would suggest.

Any way I think Next is making a step in the direction with making more powers useable per day or only usable able every other round.

I like the idea of conditional powers for P Cs. Like, you can only use such and such power (that would otherwise be a daily) if, say, you're adjacent to a bloodied ally or something. Of course, balancing that properly can be a difficulty.

Incidentally, in my next campaign, I'm getting rid of like, 80+% of daily resources.

And I think that those don't necessarily need to be perfectly balanced as long as all of the players in the group get to pop their big abilities once in a while and feel like badasses.

You know, so long as nobody has powers that are obviously just strictly better.

Well, in the context that we're worrying about, it's the issue of "novaing." When players "nova" their effectiveness is substantially greater than their non-nova effectiveness. Ergo, in order to balance an encounter-that is, to make an encounter sufficiently difficult for the party (rather than just balancing players vs eachother), you need to consider the player's ability to nova.

Thus, you run into the case where an encounter is impossible to beat without novaing, meaning that if the P Cs use limited resources prior to the encounter, they're fucked. On the other hand, if none of the encounters require novaing, then that means the big climatic encounter is anticlimatic because, by novaing, the P Cs are able to just totally walk all over it.

I should note that you CAN create a circumstance where daily powers are only very slightly stronger than encounter powers, and as thus one's nova isn't much greater than one's non-nova, but that rather defeats the point of daily powers to begin with.

edited 23rd Sep '12 6:10:54 PM by TheyCallMeTomu

Do you mean just getting rid of most daily powers? Becuase 4e allready got rid of most resource management.

Right, but nova-ing becomes less arbitrary when you work in conditional powers. Instead of having limited powers they can choose to spend or not, they have powers they can only use in limited circumstances. And if you pick the right conditions (being next to a bloodied ally is an interesting example), then you'll create a situation where they'll only be able to nova if the encounter is tough enough to warrant it.

The current plan is to do away with daily powers, but give each character 1 bonus encounter power per encounter, where the encounter power is a "converted daily" that they pick from a list of powers (and they can choose a different power for each given encounter). Likewise, surges are per encounter rather than per day, but the entire party gets a certain number of surges per encounter, rather than the normal values. Players heal to full at the end of the encounter.

Really? I'm trying to go the other way and introduce über powered 'monthlies'.

Bad idea. Something with that much weight should be dealt with by the narrative, not numbers.

Yeah they are sort of more plot device then anything else, it takes the whole party working togther to pull one off.

I've used something like that before, albeit actually in a freeform game. And in that context, there was a strict 1/party/encounter limitation.

You know, it'd be messy and awful, but I've always wanted to see Chrono Trigger-style Dual Techs in 4E.

I once nearly ran a Chrono Trigger ripoff campaign.