#dnd 4e

[looceyloo]

Been meaning to do a proper portrait of Dana for a while!

Dana was my very first D&D character who became my first Tav as well! She was a 4e Fey pact warlock whose patron was Sehanine Moonbow, so it was an easy switch to Selune.

Her mother was an Elven warrior who was sworn to protect sacred forests of Sehanine/Selune, but she was raised by her father, a wizard, in Baldur's Gate. Despite having no memories of her mother, and her father discouraging her from getting mixed up with deities and magic, Dana was naturally drawn to the moon. After her father's death, she set out to find herself.

She was the perfect Tav for a Shadowheart redemption/romance campaign!

[talenlee]

4e: I Like the Ardent

One of the elements of Dungeons and Dragons as a game system that I hold fast to as one of its greatest strengths is the nature of the class-species based system where a player is immediately invited to create a character the second they hear about the basics of the system. To this end, there is a design space in D&D where the classes in that class system regard the potential power carried in a name that meaningfully explicates what they do. Class systems, broadly, recognise the value of names for what a class is, because that conveys tone for what a class does. A Barbarian and a Fighter aren’t meaningfully useful classes but when positioned as game systems, one of them is immediately more technical than the other.

Even if, yes, I’m sure, Berserker is the more proper term.

Anyway, to this end, a D&D character class cares about what I think of as ‘name space’ – the kinds of things you can name classes in order to make those classes compelling, interesting and memorable, the handles that players can get a grip on. This means that some titles, like Wizard, Bard, Rogue, Sorcerer, the 90s idiot’s allure of The Ninja, have value and weight to them and you can almost always directly tie the quality of a class to the name it gets, as that’s a sign that someone had a real clear idea and wanted to do something. If the weird is generic (the Seeker) or completely obscure (the Factotum), then you were odds on dealing with something that was not designed with a strong class fantasy and were about to be in for A Bad Time that was maybe interestingly broken.

And then there’s the Ardent.

Ardents are a type of support character, a Leader in the context of D&D 4th edition. While by no means their first appearance in the game, 4th is the place where they got good. 3rd edition Ardents worked in a way that I will generously call weird, and were positioned as a psionic healer and therefore in direct competition with the Cleric, one of the best classes in the game that could always manage healing as an afterthought. Not a good look there at the best of times, especially with the strongest virtue of the psionic system of 3.5 being ‘guess what rules oversight I get to dance in.’

The simplest description for the Ardent is that they’re a melee psionic supporter that leads by example and expresses emotions hard. It’s a bit of a hard class fantasy to put into a single word, right? You’re a feeler. Wait no that’s bad. You’re an emotive? Nope, that won’t do it, either. You can tell Ardent is a rough word to use since it shows up in the flavour text of dozens of other things and the Paladin even gets a starting power called Ardent Vow.

Thing is once this idea is set aside, the actual mechanical package of the Ardent absolutely rules. For a start, it’s a melee weapon based Leader whose primary attacking stat is Charisma, and whose skills back that Charisma up. You can play a skulking streetwise Ardent or a sincere politician Ardent or even just a walking threat Ardent, they all have the compatibilities. They also rely on a big weapon, meaning you get some of that anime hero vibes of a character with a huge weapon leaping into combat to have a big impact.

Because their primary focus was how things feel they could put a lot of different emotional impacts on the kinds of moves they had. That could be something like leading your friends in a direct charge against an enemy or sometimes it could be about psychically dragging your enemy towards you so every friend you have gets to make an attack on them along the way like it’s an Assist Strikers spice reel from the attract mode on an arcade.

Ardents had a special ability that fired off when they got bloodied, which was rarely worth worrying about. They had another ability that change how you related to opportunity attacks, too – either you were better defended against them (prompting you to be more reckless about how you moved), you were better at dealing damage with them (and therefore became more mindful about forcing opponents into positions to deal with them) or you got to deal more damage when you got hit by them (in which case you were suddenly an immense idiot trying to get whacked on the snout all the time in combat just so you could retaliate with nova spikes).

They also grew well. See, they were a psionic class, which meant early on you picked some at-will powers and then instead of getting encounter attacks, you swapped those at-wills for other at-wills and got instead power points to choose how to fine-tune your powers for points in combat. This could lead to things like a slow burning opening turn setting up a late-combat nova, or vice versa, or maybe you’d find you had one power you loved to use all the time and focused on using it, with your other powers as niche, sometimes fooders. As an example, Demoralising Strike is a power you start with and, using no power points, just gives enemies a -2 to defenses when you hit with it. If you augmented it though, it would impose a penalty of -X, where X is 1+ your con mod, so in some cases, -5, or -6. This is a big swing and makes things very easy to hit and paints a very broad target.

On the note of painting a target, they also get the power Forward Thinking Cut, one of my favourite 4th edition powers ever. Used just on its own it’s a solid melee attack that gives everyone adjacent to you +1 to hit. That’s a perfectly reasonable power on its own. It can be augmented once to allow a higgledy-piggle side-step charge, but then it can be augmented a second time to instead allow two other characters to come with you on the charge. This kind of flexibility delights me, where it goes from a serviceable every-time power and then upgrades into a power for transporting people into the fray at the very start of combat.

It’s such a cool class about creating cool feeling moments.

Shame about the name.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

Yeah this isn't part of the tournament this is just for my sake. IMPROMPTU BATTLE FOR MOST SEXY ORC

5e Gray

5e PC

5e Claw of Luthic

4e

3e

2e

1e

[beatx-mavie-archangelx]

do you ever homebrew a bit too much to the point that the game turns into basements and lizards?

[magicturtle]

I started listening to critical hit when I was pretty young (maybe 13 or 14? Don't recall exactly when, before 5e and during the second term of the Obama presidency if that helps), and it really got me into ttrpgs in a big way - I bought *so* many secondhand 4e books. After a few years, I kinda fell out of listening to it and carried on with my life, still maintaining ttrpgs as my primary hobby space. Recently I've revisited 4e (hoping to run it with my group after our lancer campaign wraps up) and the podcast as well, which led me to this blog. Something I've always said about 4e is that it's the only edition of dnd to be really honest and up front about mechanically centering combat - 3.5 and 5 both do as well, but seem a little embarrassed about it an unwilling to commit to the idea. Revisting 4 though, I think I may have been mistaken. Writing from the designers (ex, the example characters they present in "4th edition for dummies") and some elements of the PHB make me believe that they, on some level, still were trying to do the "three pillars" thing mechanically. For example, having utility powers that are either only usable in combat or only usable out of combat as well as utility powers that could theoretically be used in either case (see PHB Warlock level 12 utilities) seems like a kind of weird design choice, like having those parts of the game compete for the same character resources strike me kinda weirdly. Curious if you have any thoughts on this.

I think you’re right, but you’re looking at it at an angle. 4e was the first (and maybe last) time that WotC’s D&D was honest about its focus on combat, and that allowed them to create a tight, robust system that could then be extrapolated into hundreds of combinations. Part of that focus is seen in player options emphasizing choice and mechanical impact.

These twin ideas mean that on level up, when given a choice, the player can choose one of many options, and that option will be mechanically impactful. Now, 4e existed for a long time and, especially if you were picking up the digital magazines you could argue that these ideas were not always at the forefront, but as far as the printed material, choice and mechanical impact were always important, even if the execution wasn’t always successful.

The extension of these ideas out of the realm of combat is reflected in 4th edition’s skill challenges. Same idea, choice and mechanical impact, hence feats and powers that care about skill rolls. Now, folks around here know that RAW skill challenges were, pun intended, a little undercooked; which is why I wrote up the Lord Kensington rules. If you continue to listen to The Void Saga on Critical Hit you may notice that my skill challenges are both tough and impactful, adding this pressure motivates players to get better at skill challenges. By the end of the game most, if not all PCs had one (or more) flat skill bonus feats. Many had, as you point out, chosen to forego potential combat bonuses for something that kept them from crashing and burning on skill challenges.

Run son! It’s time for a skill challenge!

So yeah, tldr 4e’s crew tried to extend their design philosophy to the other two pillars in the form of skill challenges, but clearly it didn’t receive the same amount of time as combat. But also that’s ok, because I fixed it for them.

Thanks for listening and thanks for writing in!

[ultraflavour]

Why there won't be a repeat of the 4E/Pathfinder Era

It's the year 2011. The sentiment on 4th Edition has badly soured with a large portion of the D&D-playing audience, and there's not much else going on in the fantasy sphere.

Dungeon World and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire aren't coming until 2012, and 13th Age won't be for another year after that. But there is one product line at the FLGS that's been getting a lot of buzz, and if you were around at this time, you know exactly what I'm talking about: Pathfinder.

But here's the problem. You, the hypothetical person in this situation, were still kind of having fun with 4th Edition. It didn't seem so bad that the world needed to abandon it outright, but apparently it did.

Now, don't get me wrong. 4th Edition had PROBLEMS. It's not that weird that it collapsed in the way that it did. I'm not going to get into a substantive rules breakdown here, but suffice to say, it needed a refresh. And whatever "D&D Essentials" was, it wasn't enough.

But keep in mind, this is 2011. The online tools required for randoms to play games with each other safely are on the horizon, but they are not here yet. We're still using MapTool. God damn, raise your hand if you remember fucking MapTool. Your options for who to play games with are the same people you'd always been playing games with. So if the group wants to switch games, you're switching games.

"It Feels Too Much Like a Video Game"

But now a new problem arises: Those people need to either make the case for Pathfinder, or make the case against 4th Edition. In 2011, most D&D players do not have anything close to the language they need to articulate what they actually like in TTRPGs, nor form any sort of coherent critical analysis of either system.

Furthermore, you can have a substantive rules discussion about 4th Edition all you want, but how does anyone know that Pathfinder is going to be any better? Until you've actually switched to it and you know what it's all about, you only know that it's "3.75 edition." So there's no real way to know if Pathfinder actually addresses the problems that 4th Edition created until you play it.

So, unable to make the conversation about the rules, Team Pathfinder has to resort to using a Razor. You need a statement that is so undeniable, so impervious to any attempt at refutation that it completely shuts down the argument entirely. And thus you arrive at "It feels too much like a video game."

I have a lot of feelings about this phrase. At the time I was going to school for Computing Science, with the intention of entering the games industry. Video games were not evil to me. So the idea that D&D feeling like a video game did not really register. Surely, that just meant that video games had started to mimic D&D. The Paladin class in World of Warcraft has "Lay on Hands" for god's sake.

Nevertheless, this line of reasoning worked, and part of the reason why it worked was because there was no real way to argue against it. 4th Edition had introduced mechanics from World of Warcraft such as "Tanks" that could "Taunt," and what basically amounted to "Cooldowns" that would refresh conveniently just in time for the next encounter. So that part could not be refuted.

But at the same time, so what? That was just D&D harvesting back ideas from a game that had pretty much used 3rd Edition as the basis for its entire class design. If 4th Edition felt like WoW, that's because WoW felt like D&D.

But it stuck, and Pathfinder enjoyed the most success it would see until probably 2023. 4th Edition fans the world over grumbled, put their Player's Handbook 3s away, and bookmarked the Archives of Nethys. (Yeah, I agreed to play Pathfinder, but I wasn't paying a single red cent for those books. Sorry Paizo, but I did get you back later with Starfinder.)

The OGL is a Flat Circle

Something we were not really "online" to at the time was also the GSL situation. You had to be deep in the forums at that time to understand what was going on, and hahahahahaha absolutely not.

Long story short, the GSL was WotC's first attempt at clamping down on the OGL in preparation for a digital toolset. Sound familiar? Well it happened pretty much the exact same way, except for one crucial difference: They didn't revoke the original OGL. I guess they just kind of assumed that everyone would move over to 4th Edition of their own volition, once 4th had conquered the world. Oops.

The sad part is that there was a Digital Toolset that was apparently the whole reason for doing the GSL in the first place, and it never materialized (For a pretty crazy reason, look it up if you want but it's not for the faint of heart). But this is another way in which history rhymes, because as soon as Wizards thought it had a hit on their hands, they tried to push it into the digital realm, where they could control how players interacted with their product.

So because of this situation, Pathfinder was able to basically reprint the 3rd Edition rules with some touchups and release it as their own product. They simply kept authoring the game under the (still valid) OGL 1.0, and nobody ever moved over to the GSL because thanks to Pathfinder, they didn't have to accept the much more restrictive terms of the new agreement.

This also meant that the "new hotness" was a game built on the bones of a game we had already been playing for nearly a decade. We opened the door of the sleek new sports car only to reveal that it was last year's model with a spruced up dashboard and a new suspension. It was still very much that game, and it brought with it that game's problems, many of which 4th Edition had at least gone some of the way toward solving.

It wouldn't be so galling, but when Pathfinder was pitched to me, I was assured that it had addressed the problems of 3.5e, and it very much had not. It had made meaningful improvements, don't get me wrong, but those improvements were not enough to make up for the system that I had walked away from to get to that point.

The Compromise Choice

5th Edition rode over the hill like Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan. I had a preorder copy waiting for me at the local Chapters in the Metrotown Mall. I remember it well, because I was very excited to pick it up.

People who think of 5E as this dominant, conquering force who weren't around before the Critical Role era might not realize that not everybody was on the 5E train right from the get-go. It had made a lot of controversial removals that some of the more devout Pathfinder believers balked at: Gone flanking, gone skill points, gone (most) feats. Gone stacking +2 bonuses, all replaced with some nebulous thing called "Advantage."

But what was left was a much leaner machine. Combats in 5E were downright breezy compared to Pathfinder and even 4th Edition. The narrative-forward features that many had criticized 4th Edition for removing were back.

But also notably absent were a lot of the features that people liked in 4th Edition, like the "Bloodied" condition, skill challenges and Minions. WotC could not have another 4E on their hands with this one, so it had to look at feel the way people remembered it when they actually liked the game.

So, we compromised in the interest of finally bringing everyone to the table again. Eventually the 1-2 punch of Critical Role and Stranger Things led to the game ballooning into the giant that nobody knew it could be. By the release of Xanathar's Guide to Everything in 2017, the 5E era was well and fully underway, and it had gained such a lead that it would be almost impossible for any independent company to catch up.

Vomiting in Stanzas

But as ol' George Lucas would say, history is like poetry, it rhymes. And so, eyeing the digital landscape once again, Wizards of the Coast blasted its own dick and balls off with a shotgun in January 2023 with the OGL crisis, shattering a long-held truce with its third party creators.

And so once again, with Wizards of the Coast dangling its 3rd party creators over the ledge like John Matrix in Commando, it was up to Pathfinder to save the day. Months worth of stock flew off the shelves in a matter of weeks, as once again the D&D community was left to answer the question of "What are we to do if D&D fails us?"

Except this time, things were different for my table. Because we had been proactive. About a year prior, I had already been getting a bit tired of interminable D&D 5E, and my group was ready for something new. We made a surprising discovery that changed a lot about how I thought about the TTRPG industry as a whole.

Lancer was like a bolt of lightning from the heavens. Up until we played Lancer, we had attempted a lot of different systems but none of them had stuck. Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, Warhammer 40k: Wrath and Glory, Star Wars Edge of the Empire, all thrown on the heap. None of those could replace D&D for us, for various reasons.

Lancer, on the other hand, was clearly made by people who were fans of the same parts of D&D that I was. The part where it forced you to play on a grid, drawing templates, glorious keywords. And perhaps most importantly, every mech had something approaching the concept of "Powers" that had been lost in the move from 4th to 5th.

And it was just fun. It had rules that enforced a 3-4 fight per level pacing that actually made the concept of attrition much more predictable than the loosey-goosey "let's just take a long rest now so we have all our spell slots" approach of 5E. And it forced us to actually finish adventures using a mission-like structure, tempering our worst DM impulses to just let things drag on and on in the interest of an "epic" story.

But what really struck me was that Lancer was written and maintained by such a small team. The majority of the combat mechanics were written and designed by Tom Parkinson-Morgan, who previously had been mostly known as the author of Kill Six Billion Demons.

This was not a case of some tenured TTRPG company dropping their masterpiece and shocking the world. This was a scrappy upstart conquering the Itch.io charts because, and I quote, "People are horny for mechs." Not only were they able to offer a digital toolset that rivals (and in some ways exceeds) the one that the billion-dollar company could put together, they also were able to get their product onto bookstore shelves this year thanks to a strategic partnership with Dark Horse.

It meant that brands other than the big, established players could do exactly what they did, and in some cases, better. It changed the game, literally.

Our Cup Runneth Over

So now, with the OGL 1.1 unpleasantness sending the brand of D&D firmly into the "uncool zone" once more, the D20 Fantasy community returns to Pathfinder with hat in hand.

But this is the part where things have changed.

Because this time we actually have options beyond just "Pathfinder, again." Want more of a "retro" Dungeon Crawler? There's Shadowdark, and the rest of the OSR that's been humming along in the background! Want something a bit more on the storytelling side of things? There's Fabula Ultima, or any number of PbtAs or Forged in the Dark games.

And if you, like me, are still mourning the death of 4th Edition, now there's Draw Steel from MCDM, which is taking up that banner and waving it for the sad dorks like me to rally under. And a cry rings out: "4th Edition was not perfect but it was actually pretty fun and Pathfinder wasn't really a suitable substitute!" It doesn't fit too well on a t-shirt, we can workshop it.

In a way, the 4E/Pathfinder scenario has flipped: This time, the incumbent in the election is the game that's built on "the old ways," and the incoming contenders are the ones who are making the bigger swings. It changes the conversation considerably when "the consensus choice" is also the one based on the oldest ideas. Its proponents don't really have an argument to make beyond "It's what we've always done, don't rock the boat."

Golarion's Strongest Soldiers

But perhaps more importantly, the group doesn't need to all agree on a game any more. It's never been more viable to find a pickup game on the internet than it is right now.

I've been giving Pathfinder a lot of shit this article, but I'm actually playing in a PF2E game on Sundays right now. I wanted to give 2nd Edition a shot to see if they had actually changed the parts of the game that I was most unhappy about and... Well, frankly they haven't, but that's not really a problem at this point.

Now that OGL mania has subsided and the incoming wave of PF2e players has somewhat crested, the people who have remained are the ones who didn't crawl back to 5E once it was deemed "safe" to do so. Those who have remained are the people who actually want to be there, rather than the ones who compromised for the sake of group harmony. Otherwise they'd just be playing 5E, again.

No More Compromise

That's the future that we should be moving towards, a future where nobody has to compromise for the sake of the group. 30,000 people backed the MCDM game on Backerkit, and the video where the Critical Role team makes Daggerheart characters currently has over 900,000 views on Youtube. The OGL didn't just fracture the D&D community, it created whole new ones.

Plus, there's a whole industry of indie creators who are begging for recognition. Review channels like Quinns Quest, Dave Thaumavore, and Questing Beast are increasing awareness about smaller titles, to the point where it's becoming less and less of an excuse to say that you don't know what's out there.

All that's required now is for those people to find each other, and Discord makes that really easy to do. Every publisher has its own Discord at this point because why wouldn't you, so everyone knows where to go to get a game going. Plus there's still Subreddits, and now services like Startplaying.games. And VTTs are more sophisticated than they've ever been.

Like I said: things have changed since 2011.

5E is just going to get weirder

So even if 5E probably isn't going away, the people who remain behind will increasingly be rubbing shoulders with the real cranks, the true freaks who only think in terms of words like "Action economy." And you know what? God bless. You've clearly found something you love, and I love that for you.

If you are sticking with D&D because you genuinely love it, then great. But if you're sticking to it because you're afraid to know what else is going on out in the scene, just know that you are increasingly going to be sharing the 5E community with people who have to make up the same justifications as you are. The FOMO will drive you mad.

I know, because I'm a pro-wrestling fan who doesn't watch WWE. I watch every day as people tear their hair out every time they see people online bragging about how much fun they're having with other companies. The cognitive dissonance of having made a hard choice about which product to spend your time and money on, only to see other people enjoying different products, gnaws at your soul.

It leads to stupid bullshit like Console Wars. It drives you mad, until eventually you're so deep in the tank that you're subscribing to podcasts whose only job is to talk shit about "the alternative" just so you feel better about the choice you've made.

So if you are sticking with 5E, you have to really know that it is the right choice for you. Because the people leaving it for other games have made similarly strong choices. It absolutely would be easier to just stick with 5E, but at the same time, that's going to be less and less of a good idea as the game gets more stale (and more "digital-first"), and the people who stay behind get weirder and more reactionary.

At this stage in the game's lifecycle, there would have been a 6th Edition, but now that we've seen the new Core Rulebook refresh for 2024, we can definitively say that that's not happening any time soon. Unless something really surprising happens and Wizards gets their clocks cleaned by the combined forces of the OGL, Daggerheart, Draw Steel and Core20, or the looming shadow of Brandon Sanderson actually manages to consume the entire industry as the prophecy foretold.

Even then, it seems unlikely that they'll ever totally kill the Golden Goose. But don't worry, 5E is evolving, except the thing it's evolving into is a morass of hacks and kludges thanks to the Creative Commons license. Then you'll get a new movement of "5E purists" who remember "The good old days" when healing potions WEREN'T a bonus action, back when you still had to house rule that in, as god intended!

It's do or die time

At this point, I hate to say it, but if in some bizarre freak occurrence all of the new alternatives like Daggerheart and Draw Steel utterly collapsed, I would probably just quit the TTRPG hobby entirely. If D&D went back to being the all-encompassing monster that it became during the 00's and mid-10's, then it would simply prove that this industry will never be mature enough to justify the emotional investment.

There likely won't be a better chance than right now. A failure here would be held up as precedent, to say "See? The last time you peasants rebelled against D&D, this happened." Hell, someone on Twitter used the RPG "Quest" as a snarky rejoinder to someone asking about how they felt about new fantasy TTRPGs!

I don't think that nightmare scenario is going to happen, I'm just making a rhetorical point that nothing that D&D could do at this point could get me to agree to going back to spell slots, death saving throws, and the fucking action economy, even if it somehow did manage to go back to being "The only game in town." I hear that "We're not going back" is a pretty popular slogan lately, I have to assume they're talking about not going back to 5E, right?

Editor's note: The audience is going to be doubled over in pain at that great US Politics joke, might as well just end the article here.

[whereserpentswalk]

Wow so this new dnd edition already has:

-A terrible VTT with video game monetization.

-People switching to pathfinder.

-Rules changes meant to fix the old system that just make it worse.

-OGL drama.

Can't wait for dnd 4.5th edition.

[alanofalltrades]

Inciting riots in the TTRPG community by exclusively referring to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons as "The Good One"

[minis-and-magic]

My Review of All D&D Editions Part I: Original D&D (1974)

I played them all so you don't have to. In honor of THAC0, low scores are better.

Where it all started.

This is the primordial soup that the game we know and love crawled out of to take it's first shaky steps on dry land. The system itself is an eclectic mess delivered in classic Gygaxian prose (read: big fuckoff paragraphs with important game mechanics buried in the middle). It's less a complete game and more of a bolt-on modification for an existing game (Chainmail) which happens to be where you'll find most of the actual combat rules. Considering that the wilderness exploration section of booklet 3 boils down to "Use the rules and map from this 3rd party board game with our house rules", it has the feel of a very enthusiastic homebrew rather then a real product.

This game was made on a shoestring budget and a dream and it shows. The formatting is particularly challenging, even in my "White Box" version which has been revised and cleaned up from the first printings. It should go without saying, but very little love and care is put into the visual design or artwork. Important information is rarely visually emphasized, the tables are cluttered and the order and arrangement of information can cause a serious headache. Do not expect any helpful sidebars or neatly columned spell lists.

That said, the game itself can be pretty enjoyable. It does not feel like what I'd consider the expected D&D experience; it is at it's heart a tabletop wargame more than a roleplaying game. There are few mechanics or opportunities to develop your character outside of combat or sweet *sweet* looting. But even in this earliest iteration you can see the nascent ideas that really defined the game to come. You probably would find the spells, monsters, character races and classes very familiar outside of a few name oddities (Not Fighter... Fighting MAN)

Fuck the dragon entry, blow the art budget on a sultry amazon! -G. Gygax, probably.

Truthfully, its biggest sin is that it doesn't live up to its own direct descendants. All versions of the Basic rules (and their infinite OSR clones) are much simpler and cleaner, AD&D is a far more complete experience and all of them have a much better play experience at the actual table.

All in all I would say it's still playable in this day and age but definitely chore-adjacent. It will almost certainly feel clunky and unintuitive to anyone who grew up playing 3e onward and suffers heavily from a painful lack of streamlining. Later products like Greyhawk massively improve the flow of play, but it is pretty clear that this was an unfinished and unrealized version of the game.

FINAL REVIEW: Chart-a-liciousness: Moderately Chart Heavy Sleaziness: Someone lend her a shirt! Formatting: I had to get my glasses for this one Ease of Play: Hope you have two other out-of-print games FINAL SCORE: 9

[gorillastraylight]

4e Project 0: Let's Talk About Worms

Alright, hopefully my players have blocked the tag. With that done, this is the first *real* post in my series of records and thoughts as I try to convert a long-form 3.5e D&D campaign to 4th edition. In this post, I want to talk about the campaign itself and provide some background info - a kind of overview before we get into the nitty gritty. Going forward, I'm going to have main posts that go in depth on the conversion process for each individual adventure, with some smaller posts (called "worm food" in the tradition of the campaign) containing thoughts about what the process is reaching me in regards to philosophical differences between editions, game design, etc; or just like individual parts of an adventure that I find especially interesting. There'll be a table of contents post here. Now, let's talk a bit about the campaign I'm trying to convert: The Age of Worms. At the risk of doing an xkcd's comic abt quartz here, I'd say AoW is one of the more famous prewritten campaigns to come out during D&D's 3.5 era, it's one you hear a lot of discussion about on forums and already has a fanmade conversion to 5e (which I'll be using as a reference point throughout my project). The campaign path consists of 12 separate adventures, all published serially in Dungeon magazine between 2005 and 2006. Each adventure was designed for a 4-character party and was intended to elevate the party by a level or two, taking them from level 1 all the way to 20 - this is a serious ass long-term campaign. The plot ramps up pretty decently from standard low-level shenanigans (the stated motivation for the party in the first adventure is literally the classic 'raid tombs get money'), to being heavily focused on stopping the return of a horrific eldritch-horror-undead demigod (Kyuss, who's been lurking in the background of various D&D books since like AD&D) about halfway through. It's apparently notorious for being pretty deadly as well, and I certainly believe it. Adventure 1: The Whispering Cairn

It's kind of odd by the standards of modern prewritten adventure design, but this campaign starts off with a classic dungeon crawl in search of treasure. It opens up into a more interesting quest afterwards, trying to find a ghost child's bones in order to get to the dungeon's real treasure, which will lead them into their first hints of the coming undead worm problem. A lot of the traps here are really nasty, and the dungeon is pretty combat-dense; also I can envision some parties getting pretty annoyed with being sent off on this crazy chase just to finish up a dungeon; but overall I'm a fan of this adventure. 1.5: Diamond Lake

There's a lot of info on this shithole mining town that the PCs start off in, with tons of cool locations and interesting NPCs, to the point where I feel like an AoW campaign would be incomplete without the DM adding at least some plotline with the party getting wrapped up in the local power struggle between mine owners. Fortunately, this won't be a problem for me, as my group will almost certainly try to start unionizing the minors and upending the town's power structure ASAP. The fact that the campaign seems to expect player groups to be basically fine with how shit the town is is definitely a mark of how the "default" game has changed.

2: The Three Faces of Evil

Usually recognized as "the shitty one", this adventure is pretty much entirely a big dungeon crawl. It's super lethal, the connective tissue between it and the first adventure is weak as hell, and frankly I find the whole "three faces" cult and its relation to Kyuss to be a bit bizarre, like in a weird misdirect-villain way. Also the text is full of typoes and some maps are labelled badly. Of all the adventures, this one is the one I suspect I'll be altering the most. 3: Encounter at Blackwall Keep The first of many "go talk to a wizard about this wacky shit" hooks, Blackwall Keep has a fine adventure trapped in it somewhere (that adventure is mostly 1982's 'Danger at Dunwater'). The players fight off lizardfolk raiding a frontier keep and then track them to their lair to rescue a wizard they need to talk to about clues uncovered in Three Faces. The fact that the adventure really wants them to kill the lizardfolk does not read well today, it's definitely reflective of the more morally ambiguous character of the default adventurer back in the day. The "villain" of this one is literally an escaped arena slave lizardfolk, no offense but I doubt my group will be killing him. It does a good job really setting up that this whole worm thing is becoming more of a problem though, and the initial siege fight of fighting the lizardfolk could be fun. Plenty to talk about with this one. 4. The Hall of Harsh Reflections Another "talk to a wizard" hook, this adventure takes the PCs to the Big City (Greyhawk by default, but could be whatever)! This is kinda neat, taking them from po-dunk Diamond Lake to the city is a good representation of escalation. Really, this is the first part of a 2-adventure arc, and has some genuinely neat intrigue elements involving doppelgangers impersonating the PCs to commit crimes, a hidden mind flayer overlord, and ending on the best cliffhanger/forboding note yet. I suspect I'll have to make very few changes to the actual storyline of this one.

5. The Champion's Belt *Fuck* yeah. Cool ass tournament arc where the parties are also trying to stop an evil cultist plot to kill the audience and raise them as undead (very reminiscent of that one bit of the dnd movie). All kinds of neat gladiator shit, opportunities to meet and roleplay with other adventurers, a dungeon crawl through the hidden halls of the under-arena, and an iconic final fight against an Ulgurstasta. The dungeon bit is pretty long, and I think there'll be some interesting challenges in adapting the Ulgurstasta. 5.5. The Free City

Like Diamond Lake, this is a big background section about the Free City (again, Greyhawk by default). This is helpful, but I like it less than Diamond Lake just bc the connection isn't there. The PCs should for sure have an opportunity to have a Big City Caper(tm) here, likely between adventures 5 and 6. 6. A Gathering of Winds Fuck that title, this is Return to the Whispering Cairn baby! This gimmick of going back to where you started to do new shit gets me hype every time. This adventure also gets points from me for having A FUCKING DRAGON FIGHT! HELL YEAH! (for now, these will get much less cool and special later on). As written, the dragon devastates Diamond Lake before the PCs arrive, and I like that - especially if they took time between adventures to work on making the town better (which mine certainly will), it feels devastating and adds a personal stake to the adventure. This one also has a long ass dungeon crawl (making use of both Ds is always nice), and feels like a fitting send-off to the more episodic early parts of the campaign. From here on, it's all kyuss all the time, baby.

7. The Spire of Long Shadows. There's some wack-ass shit in this one. Spire is the big lore-dump adventure, where the PCs learn about Kyuss and his backstory and whatnot - and the dungeon crawl through his ruined city to get it has some very neat survival horror potential. Outside of talking with a wizard (yes! it's the third 'talk to a wizard' hook!) at the start, there is very little non-dungeon crawling combat content here, which is fine but will present a challenge to 4e-ifying it without murdering the pacing. Also, there's a weird inclusion about a Pit Fiend who wants an artifact that the PCs found in the last adventure but who is never mentioned again and has no connection to Kyuss - might be cool, I guess, but just seems strange. Finally, this adventure sets the PCs on the trail of Kyuss's cult all the way to [next location].

8. The Prince of Redhand FORMAL BANQUET, YEAH BITCH! I FUCKING LOVE NOBLE PARTY ARCS!! After a great deal of dungeon-crawling, Prince of Redhand is a pretty welcome diversion into the realm of intrigue and heavy roleplay. The vibes are fucking rancid, which is exactly what you want for this tense intrigue story. Any more will have to wait until the detailed writeup, but this adventure might be my favourite of the lot.

8.5. Alhaster Another area writeup, this one's really great! Less shenanigans for the PCs to get into between adventures (which makes sense as the plot has ramped the fuck up), but does a great job detailing the town and creating an atmosphere of like, I dunno, New England creepy oldness? Also there's a scary evil angel of Hextor here who fully activates my switch reflexes.

9. The Library of Last Resort 🎵It's the Mystery of the Druids, they all have an attitude🎵 Much in the vein of Spire, the PCs talk to an expert and then go off in search of secret knowledge - in this case knowledge of Kyuss's great lieutenant's (the dracolich Dragotha, allegedly the first dracolich) phylactery. They travel to a hidden island with an ancient druidic library, undergo trials to impress the library's fey wardens and access it, and then trip balls to discover the phylactery's location. It ends with a kind of neat idea that because the knowledge is no longer sealed up in the library, it's back in the world again and Dragotha will be able to remember it soon, setting off a bit of a race. Pretty cool - also, the Hand of Vecna is here, which is fucking sweet.

10. Kings of the Rift Oh boy, this is one hell of a dungeon crawl. Now, to be fair, the PCs aren't really expected to do all of it, and it's also fucking sick. They're caught in the middle of a battle between a city of giants (where the phylactery is) and a flight of dragons sent by dragotha to go and get said phylacery. It reminds me a little of the one part of dark souls 2 where you witness the giants invade Drangleic. We get some reoccuring NPCs here, and the fact that you don't have to fight the giants is pretty cool - I'm excited to dig deeper into this one.

11. Into the Wormcrawl Fissure Here it is - the dungeon crawl to end all dungeon crawls (at least as far as AoW is concerned). With his phylactery destroyed, all that remains to the PCs in preventing Kyuss's rise (as far as they know) is destroying Dragotha in his lair. Unfortunately, his lair is an eldritch realm nightmare death-zone infested with his subordinate dragons, undead worms, and a ton of disgusting terrors. It follows the same trend that several dungeons so far have (go around and find several parts of a thing to advance), but does it in a kind of new way - Dragotha is a terrifying boss fight and a great capstone to a really nasty dungeon. It ends, of course, with the knowledge that one of their benefactors betrayed them and Kyuss is going to rise over Alhaster etc etc - it's one hell of a lead up to the finale.

12. Dawn of a New Age. Man, this one would be hell to run in 3.5. As the world falls to madness around the PCs, they desperately try to stop Kyuss's emergence in Alhaster (I guess it makes sense in the story, but I almost would have liked to go back to Diamond Lake). There's some very dangerous encounters here, and two pretty funny details - 1, that it's still formatted like an AoW dungeon in that the party has to do three side objectives before the finale, and 2, they have the opportunity to travel to the actual factual Tomb of fucking Horrors in order to hijack that sphere of annihilation in the first room for use against Kyuss. Is this fucking rad or wack ass fanservice? I don't know. The ending post-Kyuss is cool. I like it a lot.

Hoo boy, big post. Probably mostly useful for reference, and it's worth noting I'm more familiar with the early adventures at this stage. There's definitely stuff to pick at and change here, and the campaign's heavy reliance on dungeon crawls (or perhaps, the fact that that's notable) is a neat indicator of game philosophy gone past for D&D. I'm gonna have my work cut out for me porting all this for sure. Excited to get more into Part 1: The Whispering Cairn! My first post there is going to cover the Cairn itself, with the one one after that going into the conversion process for encounters!

[talenlee]

Why Is Druid?

Say that like ‘where is Wizard Hut?‘

I love the 4e Druid. This is a marked change from how much I liked the 3e druid, or how often you might see me playing a druid in a Baldur’s Gate game. Back in 3rd edition, the druid, despite being very powerful, never really engaged me, in part perhaps because I was always trying to find something exploitative and powerful rather than merely accepting the juggernaut of a toolkit the game just left in the Player’s Handbook. You couldn’t get clever with the Druid, you just had to pick it up and use it, like some sort of society of creative anachronisms where one of the anachronisms available to the players was has gun. Valid, but hardly sporting.

The Druid in 4th edition is different. Wildly different. Weirdly different, and different in one of those ways that shows what I think of as a seam in the design between 4th and 3rd editions of D&D.

The Druid was one of 3rd edition’s great mistakes, a full spellcasting class with healer capacity to serve as a pinch-hitter healer in a group that wanted things a little more varied, addressing an enormously complex potential build from its earlier edition, 2e, and all in the process, resulting in some deeply confused mash up of abilities that attempted to address confusion with volume. The druid of 2e had a special unique set of rules compared to the Cleric — for example, at a certain level, you passed into a specific category of Druidic ability and now you were technically a Hierophant, and Hierophants had seven extra spells of every level. Of course there was a limited supply of Hierophants in the world, so there was a question of if you could level up if another one existed, and maybe there’s a one-in, one-out policy? First in, first fired?

Anyway, I can’t speak to how it played, but I am at least aware, on the edges of it, that the 2e druid was odd. It had a lot of things it could do, but much of how it worked, reading the books, seemed to be interesting but challenging to manage. You could wild shape, you could heal, you could cast utility spells, you could even fight with some melee weapons — personally, I didn’t see any of it worth it, because none of the things it could do it could do very well.

3e addressed this seeming difficulty by instead taking all those different options and bringing them all up to the same level. Wild Shape worked by checking traits of monster units, which meant that you weren’t limited to specific reinterpretations of animals and instead could do what a druid feels like it should do — you know, turn into an animal. The spells were rebalanced and shared across different classes, which meant that they tended to work in a more standardised way. Armour rules were aggregated, and weapons were made less terrible.

The result was that the 3e druid went from being ‘decent’ at a bunch of things to ‘good’ at everything it wanted to do. The problem of the druid then became about picking the thing you wanted to at every opportunity, and doing a good job of it — you’d have druids carrying wands of healing so they could dedicate their spell slots to more important tasks, like Flame Striking opponents, or messing up the battlefield with roots. You’d also see druids keeping the ‘best’ list of animals on hand, and every new monster book presented a new chance for druids to develop a new best form.

It also created the strange question of What does the druid do?

The answer was ‘everything.’

The 4e Druid, in comparison and contrast to these designs is something very different that touches, at best, on the periphery of what the 3e Druid could be. I mean it stands to reason, you can only ever touch on doing everything when something you’re working from is so powerful. 4e with its role system of Defender, Striker, Leader and Controller, and its reliable, reusable balance math suddenly was confronted with fitting an elephant into a shoebox.

How do you represent something busted that could do everything in the context of a new system that sought to explicitly prevent that? I joked when the game was new that the four roles were Defender, Striker, Leader and Miscellaneous. That any class too powerful, with too much stuff it could potentially do, got thrown to the Controller role as suggested by the first Controller we ever saw being the Wizard. Oh and back in Player’s Handbook 1, the Wizard had a few builds that were pretty ridiculously pushed — the pinball wizard, I’ll talk about it sometime — and that meant that it was easy to feel like the Controller Does Everything.

That impression diluted through experience, of course, and eventually it came to that while yes, the Controller sure has some Miscellaneous vibes, the core of what the Controller was there to do was to attack the enemy action economy. Nice and obvious to a non giga-nerd, right? Okay, how about this: The leader lets you do more things, the controller stops them from doing more things?

And into this space, they poured the druid.

It works beautifully, for my tastes; the druid needs to do lots of things to feel properly druidy, but you need to make sure the doing lots of things doesn’t unbalance the game. Controllers have the widest variety of things they can do and ways they can do them – inflicting status conditions, changing enemy position, preventing specific action types, making areas on the battlefield inaccessible, these are all ‘controllery’ things, and that means there’s a lot of different ways you can flavour them. The Invoker is most famous for making zones in the play space hard to deal with, the Wizard has a build that slides things all over the place, and the psion controls people with immense penalties to their damage rolls.

Obligatory pause where, while reading this aloud, for either Fox or I to comment on how amazing it is that Dishearten is an AOE power.

Anyway, the druid was designed to be a mode switcher class. That is, there are two ways a druid can do things. One is a melee controller that makes a single target’s life harder, the other is a ranged controller that makes a large group of enemies’ lives harder. This mode switching then adds a new element to the class that your powers can interact with, where you now have control powers that can add a mode switching element to them as well. This is your Wild Shape – you transform into some kind of nonspecific beast, which can use your Wild Shape powers. Each form has fewer powers to manage, and you can build your druid to specialise in one or the other or do a mix.

This lets the druid do the ‘a lot’ without letting them actually do everything. You have a lot of choices and a lot of ways to play with those pieces, but even just how often you use the mode switch is part of what the druid does to control the battlefield. When I first played a druid, it was not uncommon to start a fight out of wild shape, use the first turn to make some kind of area control power, then shift into wild shape for the rest of the fight kicking people into that area control power. There are druids builds that work like wizards and only ever shapeshift to get away from problems, and make a hit while scuttling away, or to sit on a specific type of problem. There were druids who focused on summoning monsters and using them as kind of turrets on the battlefield, positioning allies in a way that benefitted them around those summons.

Lone artillery combat encounters, where you have a bunch of stuff in front of a long-ranged attacker? Druids love those. Even at level 1, that artillery is spending their days completely stuck underneath a Fire Hawk power.

Problem is, of course, that if you want to do Everything doing a Lot is going to miss something. That was what led to the subclasses of the druid, the ones that added healer elements to the druid, because the druid back in 3e could do that. It added animal companions, because the druid back in 3e could do that. Now I don’t worry too much about these things because if I wanted an animal companion on my Druid, I’d take a theme for that, but also because these changes were introduced in an Essentials book.

Which is to say, they’re crap.

They’re not crap crap, like I try to defend Essentials as giving players a choice for simplified character builds, but in the specific case of the Essentials Druids, in order to work with the simplified choices, these Essentials druids with their animal companions and their healing powers have to look at all other Druid powers and not use them. The only use they get out of their animal companion is using the specific subset of powers that make them work, and that makes combat more samey. But again: That’s a thing you probably want if you want a simplified build.

Still, it gives rise to my favourite joke – I mean like, funny thing, not really a joke, there’s no subversion of reality or anything here – about the Healer Druid. See, every Leader in the game gets an encounter power, usable twice a combat at level 1, that heals an ally with a bonus. Every class gets their own version that lets them distinguish their class specifically and add some interesting detail that shows how this Leader differs from other Leaders.

The Healer druid build gets Healing Word.

The Cleric power.

Literally, the same power, same name, listed as a Cleric power.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[mydnd]

As a 4th edition apologist, I'm glad to see it has its fans. I have a pocket rant about how people ragged on 4e, but love 5e for all of the stuff it does (that started in 4e).

4e holds a special place in my heart. I started playing D&D when 3e came out, and 4e addressed many of the complaints we had with 3e. So, it was surprising to see so many people bashing 4e when it gave us exactly what we wanted: streamlined and clear rules, martial classes that weren’t boring, defined roles for every class, easy encounter building, and genuinely helpful DM tips.

Imagine my disappointment when 5e reintroduced so many of the problems from 3e that I thought we had moved away from. In a way, though, I'm glad they are slowly reintroducing concepts from 4e into 5e, although I wish they had done that from the beginning.

[hewies-dnd-corner]

i've been learning how to play a lot of other TTRPGs recently, including some older editions of D&D. something stuck out to me in 4E a lot and it got me thinking about something i've felt for a long time in 5E:

saving throws suck. they're confusing for new players and really inconsistent (why does the attacker roll sometimes but not all time? why do i make rolls when i do some things, but then my opponent rolls when i do other things?) add that on top of the fact that save or suck effects are too risky to use. burning hands will always be better than charm person because charm person completely fails if the target succeeds on its save (AND ONLY AFFECTS ONE TARGET). both of those spells cost a 1st-level spell slot!!!! one of them is clearly riskier to use, and it's also the one that's less violent (and 5Eheads wonder why people say the game is about combat). burning hands deals damage, even if targets succeed on their saves, and affects a technically unlimited number of targets. why would i use hold person when i can just pelt them with damage spells that have no chance of failure? (((specifically, save or suck effects are too risky because if it fails, you just wasted your Action and whatever class resource you expended)))

the cool thing about 4E, though, is that it just. doesn't have saving throws. (there's still a type of roll called a saving throw but it works differently and you don't add any modifiers to it) in 4E, the attacker always rolls. nearly every offense you could wage against someone in 4E is considered an "attack," even if it's not going to cause injury (like charm person). each creature has four Defenses instead of Ability Saving Throws: Armour Class, Fortitude, Reflex, and Will when a dragonborn uses their Dragon Breath, they make an attack vs Reflex. when a wizard casts hold person, they make an attack vs Will. when a fighter swings a sword, they make an attack vs AC. (and so on) sometimes, an attack still does something on a miss, so you don't necessarily waste your turn just cause you rolled bad

in my own game, i think i'm gonna take that philosophy and run with it. the person performing the action is always the person who rolls

[el-is-away]

interpritation of ioun's symbol

[nutmeg-puppygirl]

Made some of the NPCs in my DND game and now that's your problem

First up is the Evil Lich from the Long And Boring Backstory, The Black Hand. He was super eeeeeeeevil, but was slain twenty years before the campaign started

Next up is Father Malphos, former high priest of Orcus and current big bad guy. He's currently running a criminal gang/cult in the poorer parts of the city.

Speaking of which, the party's erstwhile ally and sorta-kinda patron, city councilwoman Kilian Darkwater (two references in one!) As the only non-human on the council, Councilor Darkwater struggles to meet the needs of her poor constituents. This plus her time in the Army of Light has convinced her of the necessity of hiring adventurers to cut through red tape.

Her only friend on the council is Lord Alden Foxglove. Please don't ask about the Black Hand memorabilia or the dead kenku in his spare bedroom.

And finally Cassilda, (aka the Lady in the Bottle), the subject of a Maguffin Hunt for the past several weeks. What does she know, and why did both the local crime lords want to know it? Find out tomorrow, on Heroes of Haven!