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Undead Unicorn posted:Thank you both for the advice, it's good to know just how easy it is to port monsters and stuff over. In addition to simplifying a monster, think about how to 13th Age-ify it. How can you script it so interesting things happen in response to certain d20 rolls, hits or misses, the escalation die, and maybe even icon relationship rolls? You can have a perfectly serviceable monster without those things, but having them in there lets you take advantage of what makes 13th Age cool. Undead Unicorn posted:I have another question. I like supporting my local game store, can I pre order the Bestiary from it and get the pdf? Or is that an online store thingie only? You can't pre-order the Bestiary through a retailer, only the Pelgrane shop. Once it's published you will be able to buy it there and get the PDF free through Bits and Mortar. Ratpick posted:Outside of combat, the rules only have backgrounds and icons by way of support for the Fighter, whereas Wizards have backgrounds, icons, utility spells, cantrips, ritual magic and what-have-you. What the Fighter and Paladin could definitely use is more out-of-combat support. Icon relationships, well-crafted backgrounds and One Unique Things have a lot of power in this game, and in my experience define play more than other d20 mechanics. Undead Unicorn posted:There is a legitimately great homebrew Paladin somewhere on the Pelgrane forums right now. As for the fighter, I'm trying to write up a 'Knight' varaint based on 4e that is just designed to actually tank and punish enemies for tackling other characters or dish out damage. Maybe it's this? New Toys for the Paladin
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Oct 19, 2013 02:03
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Thanks Wade for the feedback, I like how helpful you and the rest of team/company is on this project.
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Oct 19, 2013 04:06
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Quadratic_Wizard posted:Disagree. Lots more balanced than 4e. Because 4e goes with character optimization as a minigame. The gap between first timer building his fighter out of the player's hand book and one using a polearm momentum or whatever bullshit build is huge, bigger than the gap between fighter and cleric. This is also not nearly as serious as you contend, because 4e gives the DM the tools to adjust encounters to a ridiculously specific degree taking the people actually playing the game into account. If someones charop'ing gets to the point where it's causing an issue at the table, the issue isn't the charop, it's an issue that needs to be discussed among the group as to what kind of campaign they want to be playing in. Not hard to solve. e: nevermind, guess I'm not! S.J. fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Oct 19, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 04:54
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S.J. posted:This is also not nearly as serious as you contend, because 4e gives the DM the tools to adjust encounters to a ridiculously specific degree taking the people actually playing the game into account. If someones charop'ing gets to the point where it's causing an issue at the table, the issue isn't the charop, it's an issue that needs to be discussed among the group as to what kind of campaign they want to be playing in. Not hard to solve. Dropping it sounds good, but I'll end on the note that that same exact argument can be used to try and say wizards and fighters are balanced in 3.5.
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Oct 19, 2013 05:07
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Nevermind on dropping it I guess, since that argument would be factually incorrect in the context of 3.5. And really, there's no way you don't know that already.
S.J. fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Oct 19, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 05:08
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waderockett posted:Icon relationships, well-crafted backgrounds and One Unique Things have a lot of power in this game, and in my experience define play more than other d20 mechanics. Absolutely, but my point was that spellcasters get all of those things on top of things like rituals, cantrips and utility spells, whereas Fighters have to contend with just having Icons, OUTs and backgrounds. In addition to this, many of the spell-casting classes have talents that allow them to get more background points or improve their ability to use skill checks, as well as some having talents that help them interact better with the Icons. All things being equal, there's a huge disparity in non-combat support for Fighters vs. Wizards, just to give an example. I mean, assuming a Fighter and a Wizard both have equally well-crafted backgrounds and One Unique Things, the Wizard still has more possible venues of non-combat interaction than the Fighter (and the Barbarian and the Paladin). I personally think that every class should have, on top of the Backgrounds, Icons and Uniques that everyone gets, at least one thing to call their own as far as non-combat interaction goes. Looking at the different classes, the Barbarian, Fighter and Paladin all stand out as having no non-combat tricks to call their own. Obviously a part of the problem lies in the fact that one of the classes is called the Fighter: the name itself denotes a person that fights. That's it. Beyond being someone that fights, the class has no identity of its own outside of combat (even though 13th Age has, in my opinion, carved a unique niche for the Fighter in combat), and the assumption seems to be that the Fighter should build its out-of-combat identity using a pool of resources that everyone has access to, which would be okay if it weren't for the fact that almost all of the classes have inbuilt mechanics for expanding their out-of-combat capabilities. Within the scope of 13th Age I would personally propose one (if not both) of the following to give the Fighter at least something in the way of inbuilt non-combat support: 1) Give the Fighter a free background at +5, provided it somehow implies military/martial training. This would at least somewhat balance the fact that the Fighter has no toys of its own outside of combat, by broadening their access to communal resources. 2) Give the Fighter its own mechanic for interacting with the Icons. Nearly all the classes (with the exception of the Barbarian) have some way to either gain more relationship points with the Icons, to create temporary relationship dice with the Icons, or manipulating relationship rolls. Since the Fighter is still the Fighter (and fighting is, as such, their thing) I would personally allow them to gain a temporary relationship die with an Icon immediately after defeating an agent or servant of that Icon or after having successfully thwarted one of that Icon's plans, representing the Fighter having for a moment gained leverage on the Icon on account of being a thorn in their side. The Fighter could then roll that relationship die whenever they wanted, immediately losing it in the process. One or both of those things would give the Fighter a bit more support outside of combat. Also, just to drop the Fighter chat for a while: saying I was lazy but wanted to build a Warlord class for 13th Age, would it be completely whack to simply use the Fighter as a base and give them the Bard's Battle Cries instead of Fighter Maneuvers? Ratpick fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Oct 19, 2013 |
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Oct 19, 2013 18:19
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Ratpick posted:Also, just to drop the Fighter chat for a while: saying I was lazy but wanted to build a Warlord class for 13th Age, would it be completely whack to simply use the Fighter as a base and give them the Bard's Battle Cries instead of Fighter Maneuvers? Funny you should say that, me and one of my players were talking about this recently. By this, I mean my friend, who is an avid homebrewer, wanted my opinion on giving Fighters the Bard's Battle Cries. After all, the mechanics for battle cries and maneuvers are the same (flexible rolls). Personally, I don't think it'd damage game balance if Fighters could get a number of maneuvers and battle cries per level (3 maneuvers and 1 battle cry at level 1, for example). That said, having its own pool of Battle Cries (like a set of homebrew ones) might be better than just taking the Clerics though the latter is easier. While somewhat unrelated, the Fighter should be able to change his maneuvers and battle cries at full heal-up like spellcasters can with spells. Its funny, we never considered it would make the Fighter a pseudo-Warlord when we were discussing this.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:24
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If you want to play a warlord, just reskin the cleric and take warlord-y spells/talents. As an added bonus, you'll be more effective than the fighter at fighting.
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Oct 19, 2013 20:29
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Hey Quadratic_Wizard, could you sum up how you tweaked the fighter to be more competent? I'd read through the google doc, but you've got a lot to say about the subject, and I figured it would be easier to have you explain it. I think battle cries would make a great fit for the fighter, and its something I may add to a campaign.
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Oct 19, 2013 21:18
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Lord Frisk posted:Hey Quadratic_Wizard, could you sum up how you tweaked the fighter to be more competent? I'd read through the google doc, but you've got a lot to say about the subject, and I figured it would be easier to have you explain it. I think battle cries would make a great fit for the fighter, and its something I may add to a campaign. Sure. The main problem with the fighter is the flexible attack mechanic. They're designed to give the fighter something cool no matter what they do, and to "flexibly" respond to the situation, since you choose which one to use after you make the attack roll. The problem is that they either don't work or they work, but they overlap. When I say that they don't work, I mean stuff like Brace For It and Deadly Assault. Brace For It reads "Until the end of your next turn, the first critical hit you take from a melee attack becomes a normal hit instead." Now, let's say that your fighter is getting most of the aggro in a fight and taking two hits every round. That means that whenever you use Brace For It, there's a 9.75% chance you'll be hit with a critical hit, Brace For It will activate, and you'll take reduced damage. The other 90.25% of the time, they don't roll a 20 and Brace For It didn't do anything. That's the same principle for a lot of the maneuvers, like Deadly Assault, Carve an Opening, Defensive Fighting, Two Weapon Pressure, Strong Guard, etc. The maneuvers give small bonuses that last for a turn, and 90% of the time those bonuses fade away before they have zero impact and you were as well off if you'd just have used a basic attack. The other problem is overlapping. Battles in 13th Age last around 4-5 rounds on average. Say you have the Precision Attack, Combat Mastery, and Set 'Em Up maneuvers. Without feats, all of them only trigger when you roll a 16 or higher, and you can only use one maneuver per attack. So if you have a 25% chance of triggering them and you get 4 attacks a battle, that means that on average, you're only going to get to use one of them. And since Combat Mastery is better than Set 'Em Up and Precision Attack, that's the one you're going to use. Rarely, you'll also get the chance to use Set 'Em Up, and you'll almost never get any value out of Deadly Precision. To compare, back in 4e you had Encounter rather than Flexible attacks. If you had 2 encounter powers, that meant you could reliably use those every fight. Getting a third encounter gave you even more resources. Same with daily powers. That's how it works with classes like the Cleric and Wizard in 13th Age too. Whenever they get a new spell slot, they get a solid increase in total power. But with the Fighter, even if you had a dozen maneuvers, if they all trigger on the same roll, then you only get value from the strongest one, with a bit of versatility. My solution to this problem was to make two changes to flexible attacks. First, divide them into only two triggers--Even for offensive maneuvers, Odd for defensive maneuvers--and instead of making the more powerful maneuvers require a high/difficult roll that would overlap, instead make them 1/battle abilities, so that one wouldn't overshadow the others. After that, I went through and adjusted the math of the abilities to be more in line with the kind of advantages they needed, use the Ranger's Double Attacks, the Cleric's Combat Boon, and the Bard's battle cries as baseline levels. The battle cries are generally better than the normal flexible attacks, since they affect the whole party rather than just the fighter. Stuff like Pull It Together is way more powerful than anything the fighter gets. If you want to give them to the fighter, it'll hardly break it.
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Oct 19, 2013 23:39
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Is there any news about what the Necromancer in 13 True Ways is going to play like?
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Oct 20, 2013 00:16
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Is there any news about what the Necromancer in 13 True Ways is going to play like? Not yet. Rob Heinsoo just put a new version of the commander (formerly the battle captain) into internal playtest, and is moving on to design the druid. He hates to talk about how things will play until he's satisfied they're ready to show the public -- too much could change along the way. (Apparently his original concept for the battle captain looked good on paper but worked badly at the table.) waderockett fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Oct 20, 2013 |
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Oct 20, 2013 05:24
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waderockett posted:Not yet. Rob Heinsoo just put a new version of the commander (formerly the battle captain) into internal playtest, and is moving on to design the druid. He hates to talk about how things will play until he's satisfied they're ready to show the public -- too much could change along the way. (Apparently his original concept for the battle captain looked good on paper but worked badly at the table.) I'm counting on you to drive him to greatness, Wade! I'm more hyped about the Necromancer than the Chaos Shaman!
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Oct 20, 2013 08:35
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Just wanted to chip in on the fighter chat, I was pretty interested in 13th age when I first heard about it and was pretty psyched to play it but after a good glance at the classes it was pretty obvious to see the power disparity between the fighter and the wizard. We'll probably stick to 4e if we want a crunchy fantasy game, though sniping ideas like the escalation die, backgrounds, OUT and Icons sounds like it could make things more interesting.
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Oct 21, 2013 02:17
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axelsoar posted:Just wanted to chip in on the fighter chat, I was pretty interested in 13th age when I first heard about it and was pretty psyched to play it but after a good glance at the classes it was pretty obvious to see the power disparity between the fighter and the wizard. We'll probably stick to 4e if we want a crunchy fantasy game, though sniping ideas like the escalation die, backgrounds, OUT and Icons sounds like it could make things more interesting. 13th Age should never be thought of as a crunchy game, and anyone who sold it that way to you is a bad, bad person (Also, the Wizard isn't really the problem if we're talking pure number/combat balance). This is a game that tries to simplify D&D and add some story-game mechanics through things like backgrounds and OUTs.
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Oct 21, 2013 02:21
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Yeah, I've always been of the mind that if there are any disparities within 13th Age, they lie squarely of the feet of D&D. Fighters "being less than" is the most glaring example.
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Oct 21, 2013 02:47
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I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don't think they honestly set out and tried to make the fighter, rogue, and paladin underpowered.
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Oct 21, 2013 03:02
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CaptCommy posted:13th Age should never be thought of as a crunchy game, and anyone who sold it that way to you is a bad, bad person (Also, the Wizard isn't really the problem if we're talking pure number/combat balance). This is a game that tries to simplify D&D and add some story-game mechanics through things like backgrounds and OUTs. It is crunchy compared to the other games we play. (Dungeon World, Fate) Ash Rose fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 21, 2013 03:52
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Mormon Star Wars posted:I'm counting on you to drive him to greatness, Wade! I'm more hyped about the Necromancer than the Chaos Shaman! Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that class - especially since I just got the latest book in the Johannes Cabal, Necromancer series. Until the official necromancer class comes out, you might try the White Necromancer from Kobold Press.
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Oct 21, 2013 14:05
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The rogue isn't underpowered. If your DM is feeding you traps, she's BY FAR the most competent to deal with them. With base stats of Dex and (Cha or Int), she's useful outside of combat sneaking or speaking. Shadowwalk lets you miss a round of being attacked in exchange for damage, and at level 5 your standard attacks are doing 5d8+2d8+10 damage, plus effects.
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Oct 21, 2013 15:37
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Golden Bee posted:The rogue isn't underpowered. If your DM is feeding you traps, she's BY FAR the most competent to deal with them. With base stats of Dex and (Cha or Int), she's useful outside of combat sneaking or speaking. Shadowwalk lets you miss a round of being attacked in exchange for damage, and at level 5 your standard attacks are doing 5d8+2d8+10 damage, plus effects. Plus if she's built as a crit fisher she can easily deal out enough damage in a single hit to kill any monster you'll fight 2-4 times over. Edit: Although it's worth noting the Ranger is hugely more efficient at crit fishing. -Fish- fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 21, 2013 19:02
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I personally have no trouble with a fighter being the designated punching person and being very good at it while the Wizard gets to do all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm not that good at mechanics, sadly, so even reading through the abilities I'm not sure whether something or other is considerably more powerful than something somebody else can do. At the end of the day, what I want is simple: If I'm playing a fighter, and a friend is playing a wizard, and two demons show up, its fine for the wizard to vanish/explode one of the demons as long as I get to suplex the other one. So I suppose at the end of the day the question is: A good GM aside, will the mechanics of the game let me do this?
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Oct 21, 2013 20:14
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Kerzoro posted:I personally have no trouble with a fighter being the designated punching person and being very good at it while the Wizard gets to do all sorts of crazy stuff. I'm not that good at mechanics, sadly, so even reading through the abilities I'm not sure whether something or other is considerably more powerful than something somebody else can do. I'm not that good at mechanics either; but based on my experience running a 13th Age campaign and convention demos, and the actual play sessions that I've read, watched and listened to, I can confidently say yes. Everybody gets a chance to kick rear end in one way or another, inside and outside of combat. This is the first I've heard of the fighter, rogue and paladin being underpowered and the wizard overpowered, honestly. But if people want the classes to perform differently, the game is designed to be hacked so they should have at it. Disclosure: I'm the PR flack for the game, so I encourage you to check out the AP links on the Resources page yourself. Also disclosure: I haven't thrown two demons at my players. Just one demon who vomited 2d4 gnolls when staggered, and had a small army of possessed dwarf lumberjacks. waderockett fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Oct 21, 2013 |
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Oct 21, 2013 20:27
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As long as you can abstract weapon fighting to suplexes (which shouldn't be too difficult), then yes.
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Oct 21, 2013 20:27
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PantsOptional posted:As long as you can abstract weapon fighting to suplexes (which shouldn't be too difficult), then yes. In the second session of a 13th Age game I'm GMing, my Barbarian player asked if he could kill a dretch by tearing its head off with his bare hands. I let him roll his normal weapon attack, and since dretches are mooks, he killed it. His savage act also caused the other dretches nearby to run away, ending the combat. So, yeah, it's not that difficult at all.
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Oct 21, 2013 20:33
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Golden Bee posted:The rogue isn't underpowered. If your DM is feeding you traps, she's BY FAR the most competent to deal with them. With base stats of Dex and (Cha or Int), she's useful outside of combat sneaking or speaking. Shadowwalk lets you miss a round of being attacked in exchange for damage, and at level 5 your standard attacks are doing 5d8+2d8+10 damage, plus effects. -Fish- posted:Plus if she's built as a crit fisher she can easily deal out enough damage in a single hit to kill any monster you'll fight 2-4 times over. Right. The only reason I listed Rogue as underpowered is their resource mechanics. Rogue powers come in two varieties. At-Will and Momentum. They also have one daily power, Spiky Bastard, they can pick up, but that's the exception. The other 16 powers are at-will and momentum. Both are bottlenecked in efficiency by the cost of actions, either standard or interrupts. Momentum's bottleneck is that you need to hit someone first to get it, and you lose it if you use it on a power or get hit. So as you level up, you do get access to better powers, but since the resources that let you use those powers always stays the same, the new powers are the only upgrade. To use an analogy, it's like you're playing magic the gathering. At level 1, wizards, clerics, and rogues all have 1 land in play and are playing weenies. At level 10, the casters now have about 6 lands in play and are dropping bombs every turn, while the rogue has upgraded his commons into mystic rares like the others, has plenty of cards in his hand, but has been mana screwed.
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Oct 21, 2013 21:04
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Played 13th Age for the first time this weekend. Mechanically I dig it a lot, and I really enjoy the escalation die in combat. The only complaint I had about it was that combat STILL takes a long time, but I'm not sure if that's the GM's fault or just d20 period. I still can't fault this game, as it contains the Swashbuckler talent and encourages letting the players use talents from other classes if it sounds fun. Every hero deserves to do backflips.
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Oct 21, 2013 23:33
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Quadratic_Wizard posted:To use an analogy, it's like you're playing magic the gathering. At level 1, wizards, clerics, and rogues all have 1 land in play and are playing weenies. At level 10, the casters now have about 6 lands in play and are dropping bombs every turn, while the rogue has upgraded his commons into mystic rares like the others, has plenty of cards in his hand, but has been mana screwed. And for those of us who know absolutely nothing about MtG?
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Oct 22, 2013 01:11
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So I was looking through the Monsters chapter in the Core Rulebook when I came across the Half-Orc Legionnaire. I thought it was pretty interesting how, dependent on if the natural roll was odd or even, and if it was a hit or a miss, that it would do different effects. And I was thinking, how the Fighter is often criticized as being boring...well, wouldn't something like help to alleviate the problem? Have each of the Maneuvers have an additional effect depending on what is actually rolled. That was no two rolls will ever be the same, and even if the Fighter misses something good will come out of it.
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Oct 22, 2013 01:13
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-Fish- posted:And for those of us who know absolutely nothing about MtG? It comes down to output. The rogue has three limits in how effective he can be. The quality of his powers, the number of standard actions he can take, and the number of interrupt actions. Access to more and better powers makes the rogue more powerful. Death's Twin gives you an extra attack, which is really nice. It's almost always going to be better than every other momentum power you have. As long as you're in a situation where you can use it to make those two attacks every round, there's really no reason not to use as much as you can. And if you do, all your other momentum powers are useless. For that matter, so are your at-will basic attacks, since you have to use Basic Attacks with Death's Twin. A rogue is only as strong as their optimal play. If the obvious choice is to use the same power every single round, then those other 8 powers aren't really giving you much of a boost. This is contrasted with the casters. Because their spells are 1/healup or 1/battle, they can't use the same thing round to round. So each new one they gain is a concrete increase in power as well as versatility. And because the resource is limited, the designers feel justified in making those spells really, really powerful.
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Oct 22, 2013 01:31
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Quadratic_Wizard posted:A rogue is only as strong as their optimal play. If the obvious choice is to use the same power every single round, then those other 8 powers aren't really giving you much of a boost. One of the things I really appreciate about table-top games is that there's a human element, random chance, scripted surprises, emergent surprises, stylistic decisions, and all sorts of things preventing everyone who isn't a robot from spamming STRONG PUNCH over and over again.
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Oct 22, 2013 03:05
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moths posted:One of the things I really appreciate about table-top games is that there's a human element, random chance, scripted surprises, emergent surprises, stylistic decisions, and all sorts of things preventing everyone who isn't a robot from spamming STRONG PUNCH over and over again. Right, I hear you. I hate spamming the same thing over and over. I wasn't saying that Rogues should only spam their most powerful attack though. I was saying that, even IF you do spam your most powerful attack over and over, even if you're playing optimally, because of the resource mechanic, you've fallen behind.
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Oct 22, 2013 03:31
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I feel like analysis like this always come up short in that they don't factor in the intangibles, and myopically focus on the knowable numbers to the exclusion of unknowable conditions. Because in-play circumstances are weighed so much less than measurable numbers (not present at all, actually) they only present a partial picture that appears completely true because it's backed up with math. And in 3x (and 4e to a lesser degree) that was perfectly viable. Gridded combat consisted of bumping party figures into the monster figures and grinding their numbers against each other. That style of play really lends itself to dry numerical modelling. But under those conditions there are optimal moves. But in a more dynamic battlefield, 'optimal' gets fuzzier. Is it better to put a high-damage attack into the mooks' pool (where none will be wasted) or into the staggered villain that will certainly waste most as overkill? How do you put a number on Swashbuckle? In practice, a lot of the 13th Age mechanics facilitate games where things happen and you make decisions - which isn't as common as it should be in a genre that's ostensibly fueled by imaginations.
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Oct 22, 2013 04:07
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moths posted:I feel like analysis like this always come up short in that they don't factor in the intangibles, and myopically focus on the knowable numbers to the exclusion of unknowable conditions. Because in-play circumstances are weighed so much less than measurable numbers (not present at all, actually) they only present a partial picture that appears completely true because it's backed up with math. Fair enough. The math of a game doesn't actually need to be air tight. The math says that 3.5 is a horrible, horrible game that should be unplayable. But plenty of people have played it over the years and had an absolute blast. You don't remember the +1 bonus to attack that upgrade in a magic item got you, you remember rolling a natural 20 and your fighter stabbing that beholder right through the eye while the "overpowered" wizards were helpless in the antimagic field. Fighters are about 70% or 80% as effective as Clerics at being tanky warriors.. Does that mean they aren't fun? Hell no. You can have plenty of fun with them, and the flexible attacks are basically bells and whistles of fun. They don't make you go faster, but they're fun. Humans suck at math, so noticing that gap in power isn't going to be really in your face unless you have a war cleric in the party doing its thing. Balance only really matters in play when people feel like they're balanced. Also, the harder it is to give Swashbuckler a number, the longer it takes to figure out how to mechanically represent whatever cool stunt you do in the middle of a game, which is never good.
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Oct 22, 2013 05:08
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Quadratic_Wizard posted:Also, the harder it is to give Swashbuckler a number, the longer it takes to figure out how to mechanically represent whatever cool stunt you do in the middle of a game, which is never good. Except the whole point of Swashbuckler is that it should automatically succeed, at least as far as the stunt goes, with you only rolling to hit as normal at the end. The talent exists to handwave away mechanical representations of cool stunts, which is one of the ways applying direct math comparisons to classes doesn't really work in this game.
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Oct 22, 2013 05:24
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Here's some enemies I had in my last session (slightly modified): Bourgh – Large Level 8 Wrecker, Init +9 gently caress-off Maul +13 vs. AC (2 attacks), 40 damage Natural even miss: 16 damage Shatterblow: Against targets who are Dazed or taking ongoing Cold damage, Bourgh does 20 miss damage (even or odd miss). Too Big to Fail: While Staggered, every enemy engaged with Bourgh takes 8 damage when he uses gently caress-off Maul AC 21 PD 15 HP 404 MD 19  Lowenstein – Dbl Strength Level 8 Spoiler, Init +14 Resist Fire 16+ Lance +13 vs. AC, 45 damage Natural even hit: Ongoing 20 damage R: Icicle Javelin (1 nearby or faraway enemy) +13 vs. PD, 50 Cold damage Natural even hit: 25 ongoing Cold damage Natural 16+: Target is Dazed (save ends) Superjumps: Lowenstein automatically succeeds at Disengage Checks when engaged with fewer than two enemies Too Cool: The first time each round Lowenstein is missed with a melee or ranged attack, the triggering enemy takes 8 Cold damage AC 24 PD 22 HP 288 MD 18 They worked pretty well, even if they didn't get to show off all their tricks. The party did dump all the bodies overboard, so there's the obvious opportunity for Round Two: Death Knight Lowenstein and Revenant Bourgh.
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Oct 22, 2013 05:54
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PublicOpinion posted:Here's some enemies I had in my last session (slightly modified): Holy poo poo. Looking at their stats, I'm kind of amazed we managed to take them as well as we did.
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Oct 22, 2013 06:04
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PublicOpinion posted:Round Two: Death Knight Lowenstein and Revenant Bourgh.
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Oct 22, 2013 06:33
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With their batch of five level-six mooks the encounter was 'balanced' for nine level-five PCs, which I figured would be tough but doable. The encounter building guidelines have really only steered me wrong once (that one time I stuffed an encounter with scorpions and all the masses of ongoing damage started piling up--I try and take it easy on the ongoing damage sources now, and prefer one thing that deals a bunch of it to a bunch of little things that result in people needing to make five saves a turn). I had forgotten how much our Rogue can murder things that are Staggered, so Bourgh's low defenses may have harmed him more than they would against a different party.
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Oct 22, 2013 06:33
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 12:06 |
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Yeah, but your Grim Priest soaked 112 damage after death. I agree about the momentum thing. My opening move at level 5 (since level 4 really) is Bleeding Strike, then "Sure Cut" to finish off weakened enemies, and "Roll With It" to avoid being hit. Momentum never [i[]builds[/i]when the rogue does really well, and Spiky Bastard is a really lame ability I found...because if more than 2 things are attacking me at once, I'm done. (Then again, I'm playing a High Elf, and between Tumbling Attack, Harmless Misdirection, and Teleport, I can get where I need to. It used to be really bad...I had Swashbuckling AND Evasive strike, so I could move around the field basically unimpeded through the first four rounds of combat.)
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Oct 22, 2013 06:53
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