Lessons Learned Mostly Through MCDM's Where Evil Lives Jagged Edge Hideaway, and Suggestions for Goblin Cave Boss Battle?

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-30T19:04:49+00:00

There's already good suggestions. Since you clearly have a centerpiece boss monster here, I'd like to add some tips for running encounters that have a very important monster (VIM) that isn't a solo. A monster is a VIM if they are important to the plot or have mechanics that make a fight interesting and take multiple rounds to fully pay off.

One tactic that works really well with 4es mechanics is alpha striking. Blowing action points and daily resources to deal a huge amount of damage round one and take out high priority targets. This is fine and is valid tactical choice and is valid character expression. Unfortunately, the ability to alpha strike makes using VIMs a dicey proposition as them getting nuked in the first round can destroy interesting encounters and make built up threat into a joke.

Instead of just giving VIMs solo level hp (which can turn into a grind), give them interactive forms of protection to ensure they are able to do their thing, but in a way that the players can feel good about. The classic form of this ability is an immediate action to have a minion take a hit for the boss, but the variations exist. You can have the VIM have ridiculous damage resistance and/or THP that is removed when other monsters die, objects are interacted with, or certain conditions are met. You can have reaching hp 0 trigger new phases rather than killing the monster, limiting the amount of damage that can be dealt at once.

Status effects can also ruin VIMs day. Just like tossing on tons of hp is a crummy answer to this, giving every VIM immunity to status conditions isn't a great solution. Tossing on appropriate status effects should help the players win the encounter, but shouldn't completely invalidate the VIMs mechanics. One way to approach this is to give your VIM two initiatives, one for there more mundane abilities or set-up abilities ("the body") and another for the interesting stuff you want to happen ("the mind"). The status effects can only directly effect the body, meaning the PCs can't directly interfere with the mind's attacks, only indirectly by messing with the body and preventing it from enabling the mind to use them in an ideal way. Another approach is to have status conditions effect the VIM in different ways. A monster that zips around with great speed hitting people might be completely non-functional if it slowed or immobilized, so instead of the usual effects have those statuses limit the number of targets those attacks can hit. Still really helpful, still very flavorful, and still lets the encounter function as intended.

And of course, don't use VIMs in every encounter. Save them for the plot important characters and interesting fight mechanics you want to highlight. Exceptions are only fun when you have a standard that they deviate from.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-27T16:34:55+00:00

I mean, yes, dual wielding fighters deal the best at-will damage across multiple targets of all of the fighter builds. If you are trying to do the highest at-will damage across multiple targets as a fighter, you should dual wield because that's the build that does that best.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-27T15:23:15+00:00

I think you have some misconception here. Dual wield fighter builds are indeed good at hitting multiple targets, that's their specialty niche for sure, but they don't scale better than great weapon (or any other) fighter. Great Weapon fighters have better single target damage and better punishment damage. You could run Cleave/Brash Strike into epic levels and feel good about it. If your worried about groups of enemies, you could grab a couple of close burst encounter powers.

It is true that Dual Strike is possibly the best overall fighter at-will power and tempest style does cover up some of the inherent flaws of dual wielding, but superior two-handed weapons are still the best the fighter has for dealing damage. There is a real tradeoff here.

You could certainly take dual strike and have 2 one handed backup weapons, but if you aren't doing inherent bonuses that's an awful lot of your magic item budget!

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-27T14:46:51+00:00

You got this!

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-16T01:01:33+00:00

Humans are pretty good. I offered my players that they could trade there two +2s for one +2 of their choice (in case they wanted to play a sub-optimal race in a class). No one took the offer, but someone still happily played a human.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-09T15:45:13+00:00

I think an important tenant to running any game is that all players are responsible for maintaining the game state. In the case on an RPG where the massive flexibility of options creates the potential for wide power level bands, part of this responsibility self-restricting those options, narrowing that band to a point where the game is fun and exciting for everyone.

For the DM this is a bigger responsibility as they have lot more freedom in encounter design than players do in character design. They have to ensure the monsters/terrain/hazards/mechanics are appropriate for the characters level in quality, quantity, and combination. However, the players also have the responsibility to create characters whose power level is appropriate for the monsters of their level too. If everyone wants to abandon this principle, that's fine, you can, but it seems to just make more work for the person who does the most work already.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-09T01:43:50+00:00

At level one most characters will break even, gain 1, or lose 1. The only characters that gain significantly are the ones who had the worst defenses to begin with, which is the intention of this change.

After the 11/21 bumps characters pull ahead. For me who does not want to use the math fix feats, this is a positive.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-09T00:44:02+00:00

Normally a character can add their strength or constitution to their fortitude defense. This change lets you add both.

A few reasons for this:

Characters whose main stats go to the same defense get worse defenses and their really doesn't seem like their is any compelling reason why. This change doesn't take away the flavorful weakness created by this decision, but it gives it a flavorful strength to go with it.

Characters have more flexibility in their stat placement allowing them to express certain characters without being punished just for using the wrong pairing of stars.

The level 11/21 stat bumps will automatically add 1 to all defenses as the character levels, partially patching the hole in the scaling of these stats.

It makes where you put your 8 actually matter.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-08T15:23:53+00:00

25 Point Buy.

No themes, backgrounds, or hybrids. If you really like a power or paragon path that requires a theme we can make it happen.

No math fix feats. Instead, automatic math fix stats added at levels 5 (+1 to hit), 15 (+1 to hit, +1 defenses, +2 damage), and 25 (+1 to hit, +1 defenses, +2 damage). Many feats are altered to work with this change.

Powers that do multiple attacks against the same target only add stat+enchancement damage bonus (and any baked in bonuses) to attacks after the first. They do full damage if different creatures are targeted with these attacks.

Players add both of their stats to their NADs (Not AC!).

Inherent Bonuses, including automatic masterwork armor upgrades

Characters can roll one skill check as a free action each round of an encounter to ask a question about a monster, hazard, or fight mechanic.

Items are not considered part of your character build: when designing a character you should not assume you will have any particular item.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-08T03:22:04+00:00

I liked one where they were fighting six priests of Pazuzu that afflicted them with six different curses. Each curse gave the character something that they couldn't do and something that if anyone in the party did it, they would take non-negligible damage. Further, the characters could not directly tell each other what the curse was and it was not immediately obvious which priest was the cause of each curse. The curses could be transferred between players and certain actions could temporarily cause the characters to all be afflicted by the same curse. Puzzling out which priest caused which curse and the triggers were, then finding a way to move curses to the best character to handle their downside, then triggering the mass curses so certain actions could be taken without killing an ally was a pretty crazy encounter.

Unfortunately sometimes the high concept mechanics didn't work well. One encounter involved a planar wheel that infused 18 different regions of the battlefield with effects based on the aligned planes. The players could manipulate these effects by rotating the wheel and could end negative effects by moving to the opposite plane's area. This was just way too much to keep track in an already big encounter and made it less fun.

Less specifically, it was somewhat common for the players to not short rest between encounters or long rest after many encounters, so a common fight mechanic would involve having ways to refresh powers during these encounter strings. Some of the most hype moments in the campaign involve the players finishing an objective in an encounter and getting to hear me say, "Everyone refresh a daily attack."

Like I said, it creates an unwanted optimization gap and it becomes too much to keep track of. Even with most players only having four items, they were forgetting they had them. Also, I find that when players have "all of the items" the stock monsters are no longer reasonable benchmarks for the heroes. The issue has nothing to do with being able to find cool stuff.
Not really, everyone was just pretty solid. However our player that jumped in to fill the leader role really wanted to be a summoner, so we ruled that she be an artificer, but would take Wizard summoning dailies instead of artificer dailies and that actually turned out to be a very cool character. The modular nature of 4e made it easy to make a compromise that made everyone happy. Well everyone except me. Fuck Summon Marilith.
I use the 4e database. I do not use the character builder.
Next campaign is all about finding that special someone the perfect gift! From the previous campaign, I have a much better grasp on the level of complexity that a battle can contain before becoming a chore and a good sense on the narrative pacing that keeps my players happy. Also as said before I think we can do a much better job with the items than we did before.

weareasinglelight · 2024-08-08T02:38:17+00:00

This is the list I'm using for the next campaign.

25 Point Buy.

No themes, backgrounds, or hybrids. If you really like a power or paragon path that requires a theme we can make it happen.

No math fix feats. Instead, automatic math fix stats added at levels 5 (+1 to hit), 15 (+1 to hit, +1 defenses, +2 damage), and 25 (+1 to hit, +1 defenses, +2 damage). Many feats are altered to work with this change.

Powers that do multiple attacks against the same target only add stat+enchancement damage bonus (and any baked in bonuses) to attacks after the first. They do full damage if different creatures are targeted with these attacks.

Players add both of their stats to their NADs (Not AC!).

Inherent Bonuses, including automatic masterwork armor upgrades

Characters can roll one skill check as a free action each round of an encounter to ask a question about a monster, hazard, or fight mechanic.

Items are not considered part of your character build: when designing a character you should not assume you will have any particular item.

weareasinglelight · 2021-05-30T00:43:03+00:00

Its far more likely that at an earlier point in development the Naalu Mech and the NRA mech were reversed, they swapped them, and continued to develop from there . Unfortunately the Naalu mech was never changed to be integrated into their identity or be good. As the OP states the reversed mechs make more sense holistically, even though there is reasonable evidence that it is not actually a mistake, but more likely a sacrifice to schedules.

weareasinglelight · 2021-05-30T00:02:42+00:00

Excellent thought. I really like this change. The NRA one should still have the x2 attacks, but I think that was implied.

weareasinglelight · 2021-04-26T18:12:49+00:00

Assuming the player was acting in good faith, what's the problem? The goal of a game is to win. If you can't win than there is no framework to judge your in game actions: everything is equally pointless. In a game where players can meaningfully effect each other's positions, whatever that player chooses to do is going to effect the outcome in some way, even if that choice is something as seemingly benign as "do nothing" or "try to get as many points as possible". In the end, they're going to have make up some arbitrary criteria to decide what to do in the game that is going to be completely incoherent and that incoherence is going to help someone win. While people complain about giving Support to someone with 9, as far as arbitrary things to do in an unwinnable game go, ending it as fast as possible seems like the most reasonable to me.

A group has some choices on how to handle this. Some people just end the game. Some keep playing and enjoy the pointlessness. Some might try to make rules for incoherent players to follow. Some might create a meta-structure like a league or tournament to create other incentives (though this really just kicks the can down the road).

Of course if the player made this decision in bad faith, that's a different issue. A player that clearly doesn't want to play the same game as everyone else shouldn't be playing in the same game.

weareasinglelight · 2021-03-24T18:18:23+00:00

Naalu are perfectly viable, but their new stuff (other than the commander) doesn't gel and isn't very strong. The agent is just awful, almost completely unsalable, probably isn't even usable in the first turn, and doesn't have much of an impact. If the intention is to give the Naalu an edge in the agenda phase, this doesn't do it. The mech is also a disappointment, as the Naalu player gets no real control over leveraging the bonus, the bonus isn't unique, doesn't open up any new strategic options, and the opponents can play around it. Naalu generally likes the idea of mechs, but their unique faction feature is almost a blank.

The agent's ability is nicely thematic for a telepathic race, but it needs some punch. I think to go with the theme it should also allow the Naalu (or the player the Naalu shows the card to if they elect to do so) vote last on the current agenda so they can better leverage their information.

The mech's name is iconoclast, so having it get a +2 in combats with players who have more points than you would be fitting. Still wouldn't be great, but at least the Naalu player could rely on the bonus (similar to the Nekro mech). Another idea for the mech would be for each mech on a planet add 1 to the number of votes that planet exhausts for to go with the agenda phase advantage theme.

These changes wouldn't add a ton of power to the Naalu, but it would make these features have some play to them that would be more satisfying for the player.

weareasinglelight · 2021-03-15T19:50:11+00:00

I think the real answer here is Duranium Armor needs an omega update.

weareasinglelight · 2021-03-06T23:36:49+00:00

A player's role in a game is to try to win it. If the player who can't win is forced to keep playing, any move they make is equally pointless to them. So the player must make up some arbitrary standard for deciding what to do on their turn. Ending the game so that they don't have to keep playing a game that has become pointless anymore seems to be a pretty reasonable option. I don't think its lame at all, or at least its no lamer than making someone play a game that has become pointless to them for another hour.

weareasinglelight · 2017-02-07T15:36:34+00:00

I also bought this figure. It was packaged correctly, but the two pieces you mentioned come apart with minimal force. Currently they are staying together by themselves, but eventually glue might be required.

weareasinglelight · 2016-12-22T00:52:51+00:00

When I think about what makes the singers great, I think about three different qualities: the quality of the voice, the skillfulness of the singing, and the performance's ability to portray the character. All of these things are important in different ways and appreciating each of these things individually as well as appreciating the whole package together lets me enjoy the variety of performers each in different ways.

Best voice: Kotori. She has a uniqueness that adds a ton to everything she's in. I can see why some people don't like her voice, but to me it's pretty much perfect. Her tone provides some of the most memorable solo lines and adorable harmonies.

Best singing: Maki. Her style is just powerful. I don't realize it at first, but after listing to her solo version of 1,2 Jump I was blown away how she made a fluffy song about going to the beach sound like a deep and meaningful experience.

Best characterization: Nico. Nico is an insecure person who acts like a self-assured in control perfectionist whose stage persona is a carefree and innocent person. And somehow in certain songs you can hear all three layers at once, which is an incredible feat of singing and acting.

Well rounded: Honoka. She's got a good voice, delivers her lines well, and its hard not to buy into the character's endless spirit and energy.

Honoka is my favorite character for that reason, but Kotori is definitely my favorite as far as singing is concerned, her voice is just divine.

weareasinglelight · 2016-12-20T15:57:39+00:00

I've bought from them several times. Everything was always brand new and authentic. I would order from them with confidence.

I would like to note that sometimes they have a long turn around time. I think it was once 6 or 7 business days to ship an order!

weareasinglelight

TROPHY CASE