D&D 4E New to 4ed. : what do i have to know/look out for?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Again, thanks a lot to all of you (wow, pemerton, lots of links for me to check out...thanks for the work!).

Quick question - what do you all think of the magazines that were available for 4e? Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine. Are there some really good issues from both lines? Is it worth it to check them out?

Sure, most of the material is high quality. The adventures range from meh to very good. 4e philosophy was to have a uniform level of quality of material, so character options and etc presented in Dragon were always considered as being an equal part of the game and were well-tested and not random hazards to your play. In fact they formed a fairly integral part of the whole corpus of 4e material. Obviously there were things that worked better than other things, and a few things were marked as being 'experimental' or previews. None of it is bad though.

Since PoLand has no actual setting book or anything like that the magazines also provide by far the majority of material fleshing out the default setting/cosmology to the extent those details exist. So if you are interested in playing in that setting as it was built you probably kinda need to have the magazines. Not that its vital in any sense, you can just play your own setting, use FR/DS/Eberron, or simply take the Nentir Vale as presented in the DMG as a starting point and go off in your own direction.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I use to have every (4e)issue of both mags in PDF from when I had a sub. There is some awesome stuff in there, both crunch and fluff.

 

[pemerton]

Again, thanks a lot to all of you (wow, pemerton, lots of links for me to check out...thanks for the work!).

Always happy to spruik my own stuff!

And to talk about play techniques.

There is a recurring discussion on these boards, that has generated multiple threads over the years, as to how to adjudicate failure (especially failed skill checks): does the failure have to correspond to the PC doing something wrong or making a mistake? or can the failure be narrated in terms of some external factor intervening to get in the way of the PC getting what s/he wants?

I think 4e works better if the GM is ready to take the second approach - when a check is failed (especially in a skill challenge), use that as an opportunity to introduce some new obstacle or complication or challenge that fits into the current story, but pushes things in a new (and, from the PC/player point of view, adverse) direction.

A much-discussed couple of examples that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has talked about are: (i) the PC is riding away from the goblins having stolen their sacred idol, and the player rolls and fails a Nature check - the PC suddenly comes to a wide gorge in his/her path, and has to choose either to try and jump it, or find some other mode of escape, or turn and confront the pursuing goblins; (ii) the PC is climbing a mountain to find the treasure at the top of it, carrying a magical divining rod that will let him/her find the treasure at the top of the mountain, and the player rolls and fails an Athletics check - the divining rod comes loose and falls down a ravine, so that now the PC has to choose whether to make it to the top of the mountain on time but with no divining rod, or to try and retrieve the rod from the ravine but risk letting his/her enemies get to the top of the mountain first.

Like some other posters in this thread have already said, 4e works best when you push it in this sort of action movie direction, rather than focusing on minutiae. And the depth of player resources (powers, healing surges, action points, etc) means that when you wield your power as GM to introduce these new complications in response to failure, your players have what they need to push back on behalf of their PCs. There's no need for GM fudging or softballing like in some other RPGs.

Quick question - what do you all think of the magazines that were available for 4e? Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine.

I haven't used them much as a GM, but my players have used plenty of stuff from them for PC building.

Generally, the magazine stuff doesn't seem to raise any balance issues.

 

[Jhaelen]

Generally, the magazine stuff doesn't seem to raise any balance issues.

Our 4e groups have generally banned everything from Dragon, excepting only a select few articles, e.g. (most) backgrounds and some Paragon Paths.

In my experience, whenever any of the players found a feat that seemed too good to be true it was a feat from Dragon. And most of the broken CO builds also rely on them.

A general ban may be an over-reaction, but nobody felt inclined to examine every little bit from Dragon magazine to ban only the problematic stuff.

 

[MwaO]

Our 4e groups have generally banned everything from Dragon, excepting only a select few articles, e.g. (most) backgrounds and some Paragon Paths.

In my experience, whenever any of the players found a feat that seemed too good to be true it was a feat from Dragon. And most of the broken CO builds also rely on them.

A general ban may be an over-reaction, but nobody felt inclined to examine every little bit from Dragon magazine to ban only the problematic stuff.

The really broken stuff is generally in books. The magazine articles that have good stuff are usually to fix classes that need help and even if they seem a bit too good, they're not phenomenal. They might be icing on the cake for a CharOp build, but they're generally not the actual cake. Hyperpoxia, as an example, only has book feats and options. There might be a power or two from a Dragon magazine, but...

Examples:
Paragon Paths - Battlefield Archer, Flame of Hope, Demonskin Adept, War Chanter, Divine Oracle, Lifesinger, Shock Trooper, Battle Captain, Battle Engineer...all from books.

Feats - most MC feats, Warlord's Combat Commander, Flail Expertise+Lashing Flail(prone on an MBA...), Superior X defense feats, Expertise feats, Superior Implement, CA granting feats such as Cunning Stalker, etc...

Powers - Come And Get It, Rain of Blows, Storm of Blades, Hurricane of Blades, all the Monk move action attack powers, Disruptive Strike, Pounding Barrage, Dimensional Vortex, Prismatic Burst, Dark Gathering, Flame Spiral, Low Slash, Snap Shot, all from books.

Etc...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I have to agree. The real bread-n-butter gold stuff is pretty much out of books. The last few dragons did put out some stuff that was clearly a bit 'developmental' and might not be super clean, like the feats for MCing and the hybridizing e-classes and whatnot, but none of that is really stupid broken.

In any case 4e doesn't tend to have one specific thing that makes some build 'broken'. Its like stupid charging tricks. You pile on 4 items and 5 feats, and a class choice, and some powers, and sure enough its kinda silly. There isn't any specific one of those things that has to be nerfed. They all just incrementally add up to 'you can do a stupid amount of stuff when you charge someone'. Of course good luck taking on some flying creature or getting stuck in the middle of a swamp full of difficult terrain... There were a very few things, like at one point Fey Charger builds, that were border-line. They were at the point of being 'obnoxiously good', and that did draw the nerf hammer. None of that used Dragon particularly though.

 

[Igwilly]

My group didn’t use the magazines because no one here had DDI, but there was some interesting stuff there. Actually, some of that stuff should be in the books, but it’s the way it is.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

As long as you don't put a tricked out mulriattacking ranger with all the right feats and gear to max out stacking bonuses next to a Binder or Vampire, 4e just...isn't unbalanced. At a normal table where no one is hunting The OP Build, pick whatever you want and have fun, and the game will run just fine.

 

[Manbearcat]

[MENTION=51843]Eilathen[/MENTION] , what you need to master to be a successful 4e GM is really just the following:

1) With your players, identify what they (through their characters) care about. This is the action.
2) Go directly to the action. Always. Relentlessly. Every single scene starts with the action and ends with its resolution. The fallout from that spawns the follow-on action scene.

On and on, that simple feedback loop drives play.

There is a recurring discussion on these boards, that has generated multiple threads over the years, as to how to adjudicate failure (especially failed skill checks): does the failure have to correspond to the PC doing something wrong or making a mistake? or can the failure be narrated in terms of some external factor intervening to get in the way of the PC getting what s/he wants?

I think 4e works better if the GM is ready to take the second approach - when a check is failed (especially in a skill challenge), use that as an opportunity to introduce some new obstacle or complication or challenge that fits into the current story, but pushes things in a new (and, from the PC/player point of view, adverse) direction.

A much-discussed couple of examples that @Manbearcat has talked about are: (i) the PC is riding away from the goblins having stolen their sacred idol, and the player rolls and fails a Nature check - the PC suddenly comes to a wide gorge in his/her path, and has to choose either to try and jump it, or find some other mode of escape, or turn and confront the pursuing goblins; (ii) the PC is climbing a mountain to find the treasure at the top of it, carrying a magical divining rod that will let him/her find the treasure at the top of the mountain, and the player rolls and fails an Athletics check - the divining rod comes loose and falls down a ravine, so that now the PC has to choose whether to make it to the top of the mountain on time but with no divining rod, or to try and retrieve the rod from the ravine but risk letting his/her enemies get to the top of the mountain first.

Like some other posters in this thread have already said, 4e works best when you push it in this sort of action movie direction, rather than focusing on minutiae. And the depth of player resources (powers, healing surges, action points, etc) means that when you wield your power as GM to introduce these new complications in response to failure, your players have what they need to push back on behalf of their PCs. There's no need for GM fudging or softballing like in some other RPGs.

And what pemerton has written above is one of the more technical aspects of GMing that is central to running a successful 4e game.

The PCs are heroes. When things go bad for heroes, it isn't because they have been revealed to be buffoons. It is because the stakes have been raised or something external to their locus of control has put a monkey wrench in the machinery of their plans.

Failure should mean new, interesting decision-points. Decision-points that express how the tide has turned against the heroes and threatens to sweep them away if they don't reverse it. Both success and failure need to change the situation, but failure needs to bring about a level of dynamism and urgency that throttles up the action and reveals the ominous portent of looming disaster (should failure become manifest).

I would say that mastering this skill in noncombat conflict resolution (The Skill Challenge) is the most difficult (and evasive) aspect of being a successful 4e GM.

Put your back into it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Just to provide a counterpoint, I've ever run 4e in the "always cut to the action" " run it like an action movie" style, and the game works extremely well.

Dont get get bogged down in minutia is good advice for any game, IMO, but not really moreso for 4e than for other games.