I play!, Really, I do!

So, there's a (role?)gaming club at TTY where I've involved myself in a group. The thing is a test-drive of D&D 4. The party has up to five players, and my character is a Drac Nuke'm warlock.

The main changes in low levels from 3rd are ones that suit me just fine. No more need to avoid combat altogether at low levels because of lack of hp or criticals from CR 1/bignumber cretins. Also, you can deal damage now, even at level 1. This is all good.
I'm also reminded why D&D is so easy to like.

Congratulations. I might interrogate you more at some point about D&D 4th, but random internet sources have pretty much confirmed that I won't be jumping in joy to run it. Play, maybe.

Does the game have a weekly schedule?

No schedules. It's an all-out brawl of daily convenience. The last time we went there, the GM had some kind of fresh personal issue that prevented him from managing, so there was no game. That happens, I hear. Still, we'll get to play about twice per week, based on my estimates from the three attempted sessions so far.

GM loot: In addition to some tokens I managed to loot one PHB of D&D 4th. Guess I'll be literate in that particular game within a month or so. No luck playing it, though.

Is this GM loot thing a Ropecon thing or did you buy a book you won't be using?

Ropecon thing. Everyone who runs at least two games gets to participate, in order of the total length of the games they GM'd. Pick one item, next person picks one, ...

There were two and half rounds. If there were dice available, I missed them; hence, 4e PHB and gem tokens.

My opinion on 4e: Laser clerics.

*Some months later*

The rate of play has regularized at one per week. The current campaign, second since I started playing at Excalibur, has been going on for a while now, and has seen our characters from fourth level to eleventh in the latest one. That means we got to Paragon-levels, whoo! I joined at level four, not sure from what level the others had started at since I joined midway. If they've gone from level one on up... Cheers.

Current characters:
Faler, elf rogue (mine, also the char I joined with)
Tannel, elf wizard (one of the original characters, I believe)
Joaquim, eladrin (elf) wizard (replaced the gnoll ranger of the player's first character, who fell out with the rest of the party. Means he didn't die, fancy that)
Argo, minotaur cleric (why minotaur? Go figure. Possibly one of the originals, might have had some paladin earlier, dunno)
Tsardis, genasi swordmage (second game for the player, new character. Replaced the previous guy and his dragonborn warlord, who got killed)

On the subject of very general game balance I'll say that the team-based format has so far worked on all levels. All characters take turns being deciding factor in different difficult fights or simply the most efficient in easier ones.
This turn-taking manifests the Gummy Bear Principle, but everyone still gets to be important. As power creep piles up, I expect this will get more and more skewed, but if we compare this to the situation in D&D3, we're at least not climbing vertical walls; at this level mages would already have started being gods to fighter types, without even need for that much non-core material. In 4E, the mundane characters are still keeping pace.

One dark note about game balance is the equipment. It should surprise no one here that items are still fundamental to increasing in character power, as surely as levels if not as directly. We can and have found usable equipment, yes. On a precious few occasions we even found items that were beyond our level at the time, such as a +3 longbow that no one had any damn use for. That one still bugs me, because on my suggestion it was deconstructed into residuum and made into another weapon. Later it turns out that the wizards could have just transferred the +3 to another item with one of their Rituals. I suck.
Anyway, other than that we only found +3 items in the hoard of a red dragon whose demise was the final checkpoint along our way to Paragon Paths. The power creep in items has thus not been very turn-key, I might say, especially since (and this is important), gold is not something you find that much. The prices for buying good stuff are and will always be beyond one's current level. One +3 weapon of any sort costs around 27k, and in the dragon's hoard we found 18k. And that was the major jackpot, probably doubling or at least increasing by half what we had found in the campaign so far. So 3600 per person, which means if I want to buy myself a new and sweeter piece of armor, we'll need to kill half a dozen more of the damn things. This is not an optimal state for things to be. I look at those items in the books that cost millions and wonder when the gold will start flowing in.
So, if you don't find new items as loot, you're only going to be buying things named "acrobat boots" or changing the property of your weapon. I went through all these sessions, dozens of hours of play and seven levels with the same dagger I bought for myself at level four. The dragon's hoard finally yielded a +3 one for me. Other characters were more fortunate; both our wizards dual-wield staffs, now +3 and +2 each. One staff was made into residuum (possibly), and one is now just not being used. No daggers at all throughout the campaign, though, and no hand crossbows either. I expect I'll start seeing more of the latter now that I've all but chosen a melee-only Path for my character.


A log has been kept of the game. Here are some interesting notations, I'll see about making the log available:
- The eladrin wizard is all about zones, area effects and mass murder, and as such deals the most damage - now even to big bosses, mainly because no attack can actually hit them at these later levels. The older wizard is more balanced between crowd control and single-target nuking.
The eladrin also has the highest and most fortunately targeted attack bonuses, so he can out-damage my striker even when fighting a single enemy; this, perhaps, owes as much to my continuing trend of abysmal sneak attack damage rolls as to the fact AoE will always > trying and failing to hit AC 29. I need to start using different d8s, seriously.
- The eladrin player is very amusing to play with. He's always a hoot. Among other things, we took his lead in naming our group "Korvakopla" before one session when the GM was late. There was a certain NPC, whose armor had cat ears affixed to it. The second that was described, everyone was sniggering and the eladrin guy started on about how Joaquim thought it was so cute.
So later, inspired by the NPC now (naturally) known as "Furry" or "catfolk", the wizards got around to figuring that we'll all add ears to our equipment as well. Now, you can't add mass to an item and no new properties with that simple ritual, so as a quest reward from a supposedly grateful people we asked (read: Joaquim demanded): a pair of cat ears for Joaquim, a pair of bunny ears for myself, and later we appropriated the ears of the deceased dragonborn character (who refused resurrection) for Tannel. xD God, that was great, and so was when the dragonborn's player heard. So now we have these ears in our armors or helmets, though Tannel's will be replaced with a large red dragon's ears we just killed once we can find the time to fix them on...

Something small said in the middle of a session and suddenly I have this need to have a background for my character that keeps me up until half one in the morning. Long campaigns = my thing. I'm also reminded of why I like fixed and pre-designed worlds that give me plenty to work with.

-Choosing the Daggermaster path made me suddenly effective. First fight and a new single-target damage record is set.
- The minotaur got made into a Large half-dragon or dragonkin or some such. Now the wizards are practically lining up for the treatment. xD

So, having progressed with the same character from level 4 to 12 and no designated end of game in sight yet, some observations that needed the long-term view:

-I prefer 4E to 3E. It's official.
-The greatest improvements are, in order of appearance:
1. Low-level characters are effective, regardless of class.
2. Low-level characters don't run a disproportionate risk of dying because of high crits or other bull reasons.
3. Being allowed to retrain powers and feats means, in short, that getting some survival skills in at low levels isn't harshly penalized at later levels. Character building and optimization still goes, but the goal is not so fricking hard to arrive at anymore because you can pull a complete 180-degrees if it suits your fancy. Retraining = <3
-Game balance holds steady - and so far fair to all sides - from low- to mid-levels. I won't speak for high levels yet, but I have expectations that they don't manage to ruin everything.

As of this moment the core and supplement material don't yet enable broken combos, but solo enemies are getting easier to deal with because of the party's ability to pile up stuns, sleep and such. A wizard item granting enemies a large penalty to the saving throws was nerfed so that solo bosses can't be taken down too easily.

Low points:
-The much-maligned similarity between the powers of different characters is valid. The system is far better suited to nursing a single character through many adventures as opposed to nibbling some sessions with a wizard here and some with a fighter there. I can picture a player of dime-a-dozen characters getting bored with the whole system after the third candidate.
->This one is somewhat diluted by the fact that as you get out of low levels, both your position in the party becoming established and the widening list of power options enable you to customize your abilities to perform a certain function. Strikers will still deal with single targets and so on, but other than that the options sprawl out.
-> The downside to this is that (though supplement books are fixing this), there are options that are, quite simply, superior to others on general terms. My rogue was never meant for melee, starting out with Str 10 and Con 11 and even a piss-poor AC that was, for most of the game, the lowest in the party. I wanted to be a sniper and even could've become one, had there been anything resembling a good alternative for the Daggermaster paragon path. Also, both our wizards chose the same paragon path, and, with only few functional differences, the two characters still do virtually the same things.

I have the distinct impression that rangers are the designated sniper-types of the game, rogues being more of a melee class. Their power selection seems like it: plenty of melee powers, some ranged options here and there.

On some D&D blogs there has been concerns over the high hit point totals of monsters and hence the time combat takes. Some people have been halving the hps. Any commentary?

I haven't been reading up on ranger's skills that intensively, or any other class besides rogue and warlock since I had a warlock in the earlier game. But off-hand, yes, rogues don't really have the amount of ranged-only powers that bespeaks range-focused character build options.
Rogues: melee one-target-attacks, secondarily ranged 1TA's.
Rangers: melee or ranged attacks, one or two targets.
Warlocks: mostly ranged, the midway between a striker and a controller.

There are a lot of sides to that...

First off I would say that it's not hair-splitting to ask, "What's 'too long' for these people?" Encounters that you blast your way through in less than five rounds are sure as hell erring on the side of too easy (even at low levels!), with the exception of a solo monster who bombs her save against Sleep and accrues close to fifteen coup de graces inside those five rounds. Other than that once, combat does take several rounds.
In this context I might as well mention that the classic "misunderstandings" about rules or working out their kinks takes less time for our group than deciding which power to use. I'm far faster than the rest because I (can usually) decide on my attacks in advance but compensate a little by taking more time to calculate all the damage. (Sweeeet...) Anyway, point is: making turns and rounds pass in a timely fashion takes the edge off high monster hit points.

Also, the monsters aren't supposed to be punching bags. If they can't be killed in a reasonable time, they should be able to do that to you instead.

Also, and this is something of a tactical element that doesn't occur to people automatically (certainly took me a while to grasp the full import): different attacks target different defenses. Something with high AC and fortitude is usually heavily armored, and thus more susceptible to attacks targeting the Reflex or Will defense. A character or even a group can completely cripple itself by failing to target the right defense, or even fail to choose powers that target different things altogether. If only one character has to pull the team's weight, it's no wonder if combat gets prolonged.
As an example, in our last session there was, in short, an armored orc boss who seemed to have high-everything-except-REF. With some fortunate rolls, I dealt almost 200 points of damage to him in three rounds with my first-level at-will power while others missed entirely and switched to targeting the other enemy in the room.


In conclusion, our GM has never reduced the hit points of monsters, and I think he's increased them on a few occasions. This is not because we players are so 1337 at finding and exploiting overpowered junk, but rather because our attack output is all-around balanced enough that we can target the weak point or support the character that can. Our combat doesn't drag along except for individual characters at times, and I see that as nothing more than the flip side of everyone having their moments in the spotlight of effectiveness.

Too long means that the outcome of the battle is clear, yet people are still rolling dice and counting damage and whatnot. Like, say, a single opponent being reduced no threat by status effects and no other foes in sight.

A quote from critical-hits.com:

The R&D mentioned is the research and development section of WotC.


How many encounters are there typically between extensive resting? Any skill challenges?

That statement could do with some revising or compromising, since most fights aren't "TPK or victory?" all the way to the end. However, some of this carries on to this next one:

The amount of encounters depends entirely on how much healing surges the party, and particularly its melee characters, have left. If not speeding combat needs a reason, that's one: our future encounters depend on how much hp we have left.

The session before last, the GM produced a carrot to dangle in front of us by increasing the amount of XP gain by 10% after the first milestone. I'm almost certain it was supposed to be after the third encounter, but last session it was after the second, so...
Anyway, that has already made us get into a fight twice when someone had no surges at all.
To summarize, there are usually two or three encounters, depending on how badly we get trashed. It has to be admitted that having no Leader and two wizards means that certain types of encounters make us head for the comfy beds faster than half the party would need to.

Skill challenges are few, and outside finding traps or secret doors or disabling traps, they are fewer still. Arcane knowledge is the thing most often rolled, I believe, since, y'know, two wizards, but even those don't usually take the form of a challenge as such.
Some elaboration:
-We have no charisma-heavy character to get into negotiations, or anyone proficient enough in diplomacy to actually be able to convince enemies to surrender. If we had, it would take place quite often. We used to try but it didn't take.
-Sneaking past enemies or farther into a dungeon to scout to find stuff out rarely works, since the only one who might be able to (yours truly) doesn't speak many languages and doesn't have darkvision. We've ran into that wall so often by now that we really don't even bother anymore.
-There's only been one instance in which trying to find our way about the wilderness was an actual challenge. Some module with enchanted woods, didn't seem to matter what we rolled. xD
-My character has had an item called Basket of Everlasting Provisions since I bought his starting inventory. Cuts down on the root-grubbing and meat-mincing. Hooray!

Take all that and your knowledge of what roles skills traditionally play in D&D, and you have our skill uses covered.

While there have been cases of someone bawling about the length of a fight or said person's character's impotence against the enemy (most fights, really, with the latter), no one has ever bawled about the balance between time spent and XP gained. Never even occurred to me, but from what I recall, the balance holds steady.

Also, the "lots of brutes" thing doesn't apply with us, because in the case of there being "much of anything" our wizards just start smiling.

Assume that outcome of a fight includes, in addition to any deaths, the amount of healing surges and daily powers used. (Hp and encounter powers do not matter, as they are generally restored between fights, unless I misremember.)

By skill challenges I mean the rule thus named, which is the extended resolution system for non-combat encounters. The party must get m successes before n failures in rolls using relevant skills. The exact implementation varies greatly from table to table and is what I am interested in. (Example: Track some tricksy kobolds; roll nature to find tracks, endurance to keep a good speed and maybe history to guess where they are going to.)

In such a case, combat can't be sped up. If the enemy survives at 1 hit point, he can still crit you, so you always have to count the damage.
And yeah, encounter powers don't matter. Our group usually decides to rest "after one more encounter",having saved up our dailies for that last one.

I had to look that up. I don't recall anything like that so far. Seems to me like making more than one successful check to find tracks is just spamming die rolls. Maybe the GM has increased the DC after a failed check, but I wouldn't know.

If you are interested, I may be able to explain why there is a point to skill challenges. (At least I'd find out if I can't explain that.)


Is there inventive use of powers, like igniting things with fire spells or fire beetle diplomacy? Are bull rushes or other non-power maneuvres used ever?

If you can do so without delving into the murky obscurity of technical RPG terminology, go ahead.

Yeah, there's been out-of-combat uses for powers, mainly stuff like burning things or chipping away with magic missile or such, plus of course Wizard's prestidigitation effects. Rituals get used almost every session at least once. No fire beetle diplomacy, but Ghost Sound diplomacy. Even still, the rolls didn't work. That's a general problem with our charisma.

Bull rushes used to be popular, but now it's easier to deal much of damage or use powers with slides or pushes. Four out of five characters have at least one, one has such as an at-will power, and if I use two dailies and an AP I can attempt to push someone off an edge five times in two rounds. Grappling is rarely used though our Large half-red-dragon minotaur cleric might've gone there against some enemies, but the player took off northwards for some months after the last session.


Hmm, now I remember to mention it: the quest we're currently involved in involves clearing out a dungeon of orcs to gain access to the loot they had stolen from caravans. We retrieve the goods and take them back like nice kids, though the concept of "välistä vetäminen" is often mentioned.
There's a crapload of the stuff, even for two level 12 wizards with Floating Disk rituals and the aforementioned minotaur, and early on I suggested we rent a cart. Then someone realized that our swordmage can call his weapon to hand from ten squares away (there was discussion of whether it's teleported of moved), and I hit upon the idea of renting a wagon and harnessing the damn sword in place of a horse, then using the magic pull to haul the cart along. I hope we get to try that on the next session. xD

Skill challenges: The principle is easy. There's plenty of detail in fights. Generalise.

My personal reason for using more detailed resolution systems (when I bother) is to add detail somewhere. Typically, people focus where the rules focus. People also focus elsewhere, but rules are a fairly safe way of catching attention. Focus is a bad word. Umm... Skill challenge communicates that something is important while not making it necessary to zoom in on the action. Think of the gather information skill in D&D 3rd. Like it, but one step more detailed.

Another reason is that they create scale of success or failure. Track goblins, each failure means they have time to set up an additional trap or get reinforcements or whatever. Or every failure in investigating a series of murders means another victim.


Carts and horses: Harness the Tenser's disks. Or use a boat and propel it forward by scorching bursts (or just plain old sailing, but what fun is that?). Just in case the GM does not like your idea.

I heard from another player who plays is another campaign our GM manages that adventures he prepares himself are more interesting and balanced than premade ones, like the current one and the one before that. I think both were converted from 3E, which caused some whinging at the point where a character died, but I digress.
As I said before, we haven't seen much by way of skill challenges, but it's possible that's only because the GM doesn't want to or is too busy to muck around with module balance by changing stuff and their plot relevance or XP worth. I dunno.


Hmm, since the disk doesn't teleport it'd be the better choice, but how do you harness a flat, circular object of force? Perhaps we can add a knob or hook with a good Arcana roll...

Large piece of cloth. A tent or another sleeping utensil. Put it around the disk as if making a bag, attach whatever is used to pull the cart properly and it will work. Or it could work, at least.

We let the logistics issue lie, though additional humor was delivered when an apprentice of Tenser's came to demand tribute for our usage of the spell.


So, To keep things from getting too predictable, we got handed a 16th-level encounter, when we had five characters at level 11 or 12. An example of a Hard Encounter for 12th-level characters from the DMG is a 14th-level encounter. And as of 4E, the standard party size is five characters. So that put us slightly behind in average levels and the enemy well ahead in encounter level.
We also only had four players, though the guy who played two characters knew the other one well enough that no one noticed any loss of efficiency. For once it wasn't a fight to the death which contributed to the nature of the encounter in the first place, but it was definitely interesting and one the more memorable fights to date.

The two heaviest normal attack hitters, myself and our warlord, have attack bonuses between 18 and 22 for most of our attacks depending on various circumstances, cough. (D&D) The opposition consisted of three monks. By now you can probably guess at the scale of all their defenses, but in case you can't or the edition upgrade put off your confidence, I'll lay it down for you: there are two things you should never ever want to attack. One's a dragon, and the other's a monk. The first because the backlash is cruel, and the second because you won't hit anyway. Their lowest defense was 28, and highest 31, if I recall.

With some beginning's fortune I got to shine on the first round, dealing a load of damage, but after that it was a mediocre drudgery of what had to be over 20 rounds. Some basic math shows that an attack of d20+19 vs def 30 is nothing overly daunting, but once you apply Practice to that prospect it comes out covered in crap. With only one attack per round, it doesn't take noteworthy luck on anyone's part for me to miss all attacks in five consecutive rounds. Of course, we have less defenses and the monks have more attack, so we're looking to get pounded into submission. In particular, the lowest Def value in the party, my Fort, is so abysmal that the monks could always put me down with a non-natural-1-roll of Stunning Fist. If my character dies on anything, it'll be because of that pathetic Fortitude.

Now, insert the wizards, who don't need to hit with half their attacks. With their damage-on-misses and AoE and ungodly amounts of Slow, Difficult Terrain production, Immobilize, Stun, Push, Slide and ET CETERA effects they did most of the work. When no one gets to hit, the unavoidable damage comes through. Never before have all characters poured through their whole list of abilities in a single encounter with all enemies immediately present; earlier there had been an instance where our blow-ass approach to a situation pretty much combined two encounters into one and almost TPK'd us for our trouble, but there the enemies came in something resembling waves.

My lackluck notwithstanding and balanced by fortunate rolls from the wizards the outcome doesn't get blamed on die rolls. I got KO'd (the monks could just attack anyone they damn well pleased with complete impunity, though it took the GM some time to notice that. Usually such behavior is discouraged by the party's defenders and leaders through penalties to the enemy's attack rolls or the threat of AoO's and the like, but with all defenses at 28+ those threats are as unto exactly nothing. ) but the rest of the party was standing at the end. Victoree, hoot!

For the record, my sense of numbers has never been attuned to 4e. I'd need to actually play it.

I'll try to speak in general terms this time, to avoid the necessity of insight into numbers. Still, this account delves into the first true imbalance I've come across and should, by all rights, be addressed as the number problem that it is.

Our group made its way through four encounters in a row and into the fifth, which is a record for us. Whoo! The first four were relatively easy; monster defenses were lower than what we're used to seeing (meaning nothing struck anyone as overly high). In one case there was a breed of enemies with notably low values in all four defenses, which was even puzzling. I don't know what their purpose was, to be honest. I also got to set a new damage record, but that's details.

So, the fifth encounter was a mind flayer. First we've seen, so we weren't familiar with its powers (4E-specifically, everyone knew the basics, of course). In short: mind blast dazes (gives you one action, either move or attack typically, as opposed to stun which would be far worse at no actions at all), domination dominates a character (can tell you to go wade in horrible acid, but not attack your teammates, or so I understood it) and at-will hover/fly movement were the three actions that the flayer used at us. There was also some not inconsiderable damage, but nothing unbalanced either.

Now, the numbers. The flayer had ALL defenses over 30, with Will over 35, we never found out exactly how much. Ref was 33. The GM didn't speak out loud any attack results over fourty, but everyone in the table is permitted statements to the effect of "certain hit", and he took out the time to say values such as "thirty-nine" (when he knows no one has a defense that high), which probably means that his attack bonuses were over 20, meaning his to-hit bonuses were higher than anything in our party, with the possible exception of myself. He also had a -2 Will def aura.

One very important difference between 3E and 4E is that in 4E, to-hit bonuses are far harder to come by. There is no "weapon focus" feat that gives you +1 with any one weapon group or even single weapon, even. Nothing. There are conditional modifiers to special cases like opportunity attacks, but nothing very turn-key there either. Not even in the Adventure's Vault supplement book. Point of reference: rogues are the accuracy people, especially with daggers. The theoretical maximum to-hit bonus for a rogue at this level, assuming combat advantage, no opportunity attacks, no conditions such as Helpless, no buffs of penalties from other people and a nearby wall (piling up conditional modifiers, all hail D&D), is +23, and I sit at +22. The others have less, and some even would've had to roll Nat20 to hit the enemy.

So what all this amounts to is that any attack from the flayer was more likely than not to hit us, and some of us could, basically, not hit him at all. Player AC can be pushed quite high, but defenses can't, unless you sacrifice outrageous and quite presumptuous amounts of resources to that and know in advance exactly what you're going to be facing. We didn't.
End result: our party's hitting chances were around 10%, on average, counting for the fact that some couldn't attack at all. Because the flayer had mass-effect stuff, his average hit percentage was over 100%.

Defenses that high are bad because it means that wizards get reduced to meatshielding. Still, it wouldn't have been crippling alone, and we would've won the endurance contest eventually. But then, the flayer has his hovering fly, at-will. Fly means he gets height on you and suddenly all melee characters are impotent. Hover means that immobilizing him doesn't make him drop to ground. To simplify the issue somewhat, you can't force him down except with effects that make him prone, and there's not many of those. Of course, melee-chars can't use theirs anyway, and those who can will simply miss the attack.

The GM told us that the level of the encounter was normal for our level, which I took to mean 15 for our 13th-level group. But it really wasn't. The combat was no longer a team effort in which someone took a turn shining or supporting someone else in their glow. No one could do anything. If we'd had a strong main range-attack who could've laughed at the fact of the flayer's flight, well, I expect that character would've been dominated and killed first and no difference there.

This is ominous because there is nothing in the higher levels that promise to give more bonuses to attack, barring some highest of Epic-tier equipment. There's the half-of-your-level element, but then, monster defenses go up at twice that: x+monster level, which relies purely on relative PC level. This is *very bad*. The common agreement among the group was that we couldn't have taken that fucking mind flayer if we'd got there to fight him two levels from now.

We lost our cleric there, not because we'd pushed so many encounters, but because of the basically unavoidable domination and the impossibility of disrupting the flayer's attacks. The only reason anyone got away was because the domination could only be used on one person at a time. One can play without a healer, but it pretty much means a return to 3E's one-encounter-per-day rhythm. Oh, and we lost all that character's equipment because he died in a pool of acid. Yay. The player is very very screwed to be forced to make a character at this level, with enemies like this around.

A specifically engineered party could have done it, certainly. A forcibly balanced party where everyone consulted with others regarding what sort of characters the party was missing and still needed, with overtones of outright optimization, sure. But an organic party where people don't have the prescience or skill to pile up unspeakable amounts of chained, readied and pre-planned disable powers?
Not possible, no argument possible.

Hover flight + absurd defenses + enough space = nothing balanced, nothing sensible or fair, nothing fun.

-The rift between resource drain encounters and potential killer encounters is now fairly obvious. You can tell something isn't serious by the fact of you can hit it more than 25% of the time.

-The role of defenders starts to break down as monsters accumulate to-hit bonuses. The only one who can actually stop an attack is fighter, who needs to hit with his AoO. Defenders can't stay true to their role and be effective: they need to shift into the striker/leader role to be useful. They're better suited for leaders, but then again, the dead cleric's replacement char which was being test-driven outdamaged me even when I got my Sneak Attack damages, and counting for the fact that I hit a lot more often.

-I died for the first time, due to the idiocy of one character (possibly the player, but it turned out well enough so no bitterness). There was a close-call TPK-trap that put everyone to sleep and then started damaging them. There were saves and I don't think the whole party should've been able to be in the range of it at once, but hey. Only one made his save and the rest of us got utterly owned by the sleep. Pretty "meh", all told. "Death shock" now means "-1 to all checks until you get three milestones", which is mellow as anything.

-I'm struck by how good this campaign would work out as a comedy novel. Too bad it's a published setting and everything, we produce great stuff on almost every session.

-Sans the illithid, I believe the issues of difficulty level are the result of the GM's challenging us more than any inherent game balance issues. When we paused our last session, we'd taken down the killer trap, one solo, another solo, one statue that we could just nuke from a distance, one regular encounter, and now we're being set upon by someone who waited for us to weaken ourselves. Five in a row, and since the defenders stopped working, I've been the punching bag who uses six Surges to our two wizards' total of one. The defenders and the leader all use less than I do.
Still, the only time we've been outright squashed so far was the illithid, so it's all good.

I am kind of confused now.

Are there or are there not balance issues with monsters of suitable level, such as illithids?

Is it a good, a neutral, or a bad thing that encounters are either resource ablation or big deals?

There has been one instance of a real balance issue, and that was the illithid. Anything else is a matter of

-stupidity (you can fuck up anything, such as the handling of the trap of sleepy death)
-tactics; we've pretty much got this one down, except perhaps I need to rush into combat less. The game balance assumes tactics involved, so you will get yourself owned without tactics. I don't see that as a problem at all.
-party balance; we're all right, though there's little getting over the fact that a bow ranger would be the best striker, period. Also, lots of sub-optimality in characters but the general feel of the game is that it isn't supposed to be an exercise in character optimization; particularly as two players are trying out their first D&D or 4E game ever. (Still, there's at least two of us, including myself, who like to get as much as we can out of our chars.)
-preparation; little enough possibility for that; buffs don't work as they did in 3E and sneaking will mostly serve to further separate the rogue from those who're supposed to be the tanks.
-and such.

The illithid, on the other hand, was and is impossible for a non-hardcore-engineered party of that level. It should not have been marked as suitable level for us. No ifs, no buts.

Potential for anything, really. I call it neutral.

The biggest issue, as I see it, is this:
If we assume that a given mixture in the frequency of mellow and yber encounters will produce balance or otherwise "balance things out", then we run the risk of easy encounters being inconsequential while the ybers become impossible.

I remember the illithid's pre-encounters as some things on two legs that we could affix on the ends of poles as minor at-will actions to wipe floors with. And then there's some untouchable freak hovering about the ceiling telling us to kill ourselves and WE OBEY MASTER.

If this is how it was supposed to be, it's a mistake and it's a bad thing. If for no other reason then because mere survival will require character optimization.

If that was a glitch, one-time or at least rare, we can wave the backs of our hands at it, make tutting noises and walk away. Except poor Argo and his equipment, who died in the acid.

The Chronicles of Korvakopla, continued...


So, Argo's replacement character's first session was a tryout for a dwarf fighter. The exact phrase used by the player to describe his character design and build was "juosten kustu". His backstory was that of an amnesiac, justifying potentially going "Hey, what'm ah doing with this sword anyway? Hell if I can use it, yo!" in the next session.

We found him among the goods we were questing to retrieve from a dungeon, stowed away snug in a barrel. I produced a name for the character, but it didn't stick and was bad to begin with. So his name became Tynnyri.

At the start of the next session he did change his profession to cleric, and even race to elf. Now that's amnesia healed! He's still called Tynnyri, of course.

Last session we also procured a juggernaut from 3E MM2, complete with rollers and updated abilities. Huzzah! With our newly acquired Korvamobiili, morale soared. We've already made plans and paid material costs to arrange for this huge-sized construct to be extracted from the midst of a painfully 5-to-10-feet wide multi-story maze of corridors, stairs and magical portals, and plan to drive it to Greyhawk's streets and eventually take it with us when we get back to Toril.


No deep insights about the system this time, except a note I made of how the gulf between varying ability to function between different encounters continues to widen. The two first encounters of the last session were around 50 dmg per encounter for me, with our wizards dealing more than that unimpressive total on one turn. Then, in the last fight against a solo lich with a maximum hp of 338+1/4 from second wind, I dealt 308 damage. Such is life.

Bad rolls = misses = not automatically bad, but when I can do my turn in a few seconds and then have to watch others start the process of deciding which powers to use when their turn comes and not a single second sooner omg, it does get frustrating. Especially if more than one attack in a row misses. Hey, even if the attack doesn't miss.


Editorial additions:
I forgot to mention this last time, but at best we have now fought through six encounters in a row. Everyone was quite drained by the end; I had no surges at all left for the last one and the wizards finally had to become the tanks. Through a rough balance of fortunate and unfortunate circumstances, I'm suitably impressed that we made it without any casualties. Tribute to tactics, I suppose. It felt good to get back to the inn.

Though my character still functions well, it nags me how much better I could've built this character if I'd known anything (about anything) at the start of the game;
- I didn't know we'd play as long as we did. Level 4 -> 15, 16 soon, and going strong? I thought it was a one-shot adventure, like Keep of the Shadowfell.
-No prior experience. No idea what I should choose for powers and feats. Thanks the gods this system allows retraining...
-Didn't know we'd be allowed to swap stats at start, so I made a character that even at that time I knew to be the weaker of two very important choices.

Combined with a delicious character concept I've been rolling around (for a wonder built as much of fluff as outright strength), I've been tempted to drop Faler Gorell and switch to Tayrel Drinnegaar, a very bloodthirsty and nasty Eladrin. Still, I can't just drop a character I've played this long. Dilemma!

There might be opportunities for, say, heroic sacrifice or temporary retirement or NPCification. If in doubt, consult the GM.

In episodic fantasy game I've been running now and then one character is effectively retired. A legendary merchant Chen Pong who still wanders the lands, they say, selling most remarkable goods and wares. The character might or might not enter play in some future session, but rumours and random references are there.

Faler can't retire, at least not before he gets to Toril. Even then, wouldn't be good. Heroic sacrifice doesn't work because it's not the pretext of dropping that matters, but the fact that it's a conscientious choice.

I'll continue with him until the need to change becomes overwhelming, I believe; the only scenario I see is I cease to be able to function because of melee+frailty. Though as a rule, the whole party has gotten all this way through obscene damage output rather than balanced party make-up. (No defender during the whole game, excepting the one-shot fighter tryout. Six players, and no love for defenders.)

We'll see, I suppose.