Terrain Features: Magic Circles

This is one of those strange articles that doesnt really get into hard mechanics, but mostly whimsy player-driven-fun. I’ve been dealing a lot with magic circles, having read the entire Dresden Files series in the span of a month, and one of many good effects its had on me is an appreciation for circular magic.
First of all, drawing circles is easy. Its so easy that Harry is able to explain it to someone who has never used magic before, on-the-fly: draw a circular shape on the ground (doesnt have to be perfect), invest some will into it and booyah. Done. With that in mind, accepting lots and lots of circles drawn out seemingly willy-nilly became much easier to digest, to the point that its one of those, “damnit I wish I’d read this before I started running my games,” moments. Fortunately, seeing as hindsight is 20:20 its something I can learn from and take it into future adventures and campaigns.

How does this pertaint to D&D? Well, I noticed really quickly with pre-published D&D adventures that a common terrain feature are magic circles that impart some minor benefit when you were standing inside it. In Keep on the Shadowfell, for example, there’s one outside the kobold lair (+1 to attack rolls), one in the graveyard (source of the undead), and one when you fight Kalarel (+2 to defenses and regen 5 for enemies only). Out of the three, only the one in the graveyard can be subjected to skill checks in order to fuck with it. I figure, why stop there?
I like to use terrain in my encounters: difficult terrain, pillars, tables, whatever I can think of that the players can fiddle with. I prefer such fiddling to take a single action in order to garner results, as there’s nothing like a Skill Challenge in the middle of combat to make on player engage Mindless-Dice-Rolling Mode, and I think that magic circles are great candidates for this sort of thing.

For instance, in my Inquisitives campaign, the players run into a couple magic circles in the first encounter of the first adventure, when they are ambushed by (of all Heroic-tier humanoids) goblins. A goblin hexer has drawn a basic circle using rat shit and placed insect husks along the border. The circle is used to boost its area of effect and maintain its vexing cloud power, so that he doesnt need to burn minor actions to maintain it. The only drawback is that it must be centered on the circle. Characters can take it out by using a single action to do one of two things: break the circle or safely disperse it.

I call these one-hit circles “minion circles” since they can be “resolved” with a single dice roll. Basically, a character can opt to take some damage to break it (representing a magical backlash) or make a single Arcana check to safely disperse the magic channeled into it. The option to just break it and take damage lets characters with shitty Arcana modifiers let hit points do the talking. Either way, the effect is gone. In the case of this vex-circle, once its out the vexing cloud is also disrupted, so its win-win for the party.
You might rule that circles with nice benefits take a bit more effort to disable. A circle that controls or sustains a summoned demon, for example, might take two or more skill checks since it can make a big difference in the battle. In this case I would not only have a success count for itself, but also impart some other benefit to help them feel like they are contributing more (attack penalty, dazed for a round, slowed for a round, some damage, etc).

Now, if players want they can get a bit more creative. Another option is to allow Arcana checks to allow a character to alter the effect of the circle. For example, lets say they run into a circle that grants an attack bonus. Using Arcana or Religion or whatever, they could change it from a +1 power bonus to damage to a +2 power bonus to damage. Perhaps a +1 power bonus to one or more defenses. The effect would apply to everyone, though I could see a player making one or more Arcana checks in order to impart their will into the circle, affecting only those she wants to.
Another thing that a player could take a crack at is disrupting the circle, damaging all the creatures inside it. I would base the damage largely on what you would expect them to do with an encounter power, and might even roll on a push/prone/daze condition depending on how spectacularly the circle goes out (ie, with a bang).

Its one of those on the fly rulings that I would be really open to player creativity and DM flexibility. There arent any “hard” rules for this sort of thing, but I dont think its really prone to abuse since you as the DM get to decide how/if the circle can be augmented, as well as the DC and requisite skill. In most cases I would demand Arcana, but not demand training in the skill (since again, its super-easy to do). You could use Nature for fairy rings or stone circles, and Religion could apply to circles that work with healing, undead, etc. Depending on how common magic is, you could demand training, I suppose.

Some common circle effects:

• Power bonus to attack rolls.
• Power bonus to damage rolls.
• Power bonus to one Defense.
• Change damage from one type to another (for example, all attacks deal fire damage).
• Grant energy resistance.
• Grant regeneration.
• Grant regeneration only while bloodied.
• Grant one of more effects to specific targets only (determined by circle drawer).
• Sustain summoned monsters (likely undead, elementals, and/or immortals).

Penny-Arcade/PVP Podcast

It is time.

Living Fireball

Here’s a final draft.

Forums Are Back

And…it looks like if Gleemax had sex with MySpace. Huh.

Addendum: Except that they look like crap and its a bitch to navigate. Oh well, I mostly stopped going there anyway.

Pathfinder Review

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Okay, okay, its finally out, and its huge. Its a good thing that we’re looking at a 3rd Edition re-hash, or I’d have a lot to learn, amirite? Content wise, its basically PH and DMG glued together. It starts out with race, classes, feats, skills, etc before moving on to building adventures and campaigns, dungeon settings, traps, and yadda yadda yadda. Same shit, different look.

I’m not going to pull a “Kurt Wiegel” and just say that Pathfinder is shit, and its not a role-playing game by a self-invented standard. I’m not even going to surmise this entire review by stating that, “I got tired of Pathfinder back when it was called 3rd Edition.” No, oh no. I’m going to give you actual reasons from a game design standpoint as to why it sucks. Mostly, I’m curious as to see if Paizo fixed the flaws. Okay, I’m kidding: we already know by the previews that they didnt, but lets go through the motions anyway and start things out on a positive beat by checking out the good part.

Art! Its got some usually-okay art. The best stuff is whatever recycled Wayne Reynolds bits they threw on as chapter-splashes, and the rest runs from great to good. The downside is that as far as I can tell its all recycled (like the rules, har har). I’d have preferred it if they added more stuff that was more contextually appropriate for the chapters.
For example, Chapter 1: Races, has a picture of the adventurers running through a drow city…which pertains to race because I guess the characters are using races out of the book? Chapter 3 is the cover of “Hook Mountain Massacre”, which makes sense because of…well…I got nothing. There’s a fighter there, and a sorcerer! Those are classes, right?
Anyway, points for generally very good art, even if its as rehashed as the game. Otherwise, there isnt much to say about the physical quality of the book. Its big, its expensive, and its for a game that you already bought almost ten years ago.

Moving on to the bad stuff (and by that I mean the rest of it), starting with the races.

Paizo has elected to keep all of the traditional races, with “traditional” being defined as the ones that were in the initial launch circa 3E (and not OD&D, AD&D, 2E, etc). The races all now get a bonus to a second stat, but keep the penalty. Humans and half-races get to add a +2 to whatever the hell stat they want (so hey, half-orcs dont get an Int dive!). They’re otherwise identical, except the half-orc who gets a few new racial abilities that make it a slightly more worthwhile racial option to play, but still not enough to make it an appealing choice.
This isn’t a problem unique to the half-orc, as many races lug around cumbersome features that are worthless if you play to type (such as an elf archer-type or half-orc melee warrior of any stripe), and if you play outside of the mold they still don’t amount to anything. Oh, I’m an elf wizard so I can use bows…not that I’m going to bother since my attack bonus is so abysmally shitty that I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if a giant threw it at me while I was paralyzed and enlarged.
Some benefits are so retardedly situational that I would be surprised if players bothered to write them down. Dwarves get a bonus on Appraise checks to identify the prices of non-magical items that also contain metals or gems. I…frankly cannot remember ever bothering to use Appraise. Its one of those strange skill that’s tries to add a layer of immersion to the game that just isn’t necessary, except to randomly allow the players to fuck themselves over by botching the list price of an art object (and forcing the DM to just add more shit to make up the difference).
On the other hand, some races gain features that are only useful to a specific class. Elves get a bonus against spell resistance, and with their Int bonus would make better-than-normal wizards, which is good since they were supposed to make good wizards all along, right? Well, kinda. I mean its handy if they play a class that uses caster levels (which is admittedly eventually most of them), but outside its completely, utterly worthless. Players who opt to make a fighter or similar character are going to end up parsing off a good chunk of the elf’s abilities (especially given that their familiarity is also pointless).

What this means is that ultimately we still have quite a few n00b traps. This is where you present a player with a list of choices, but many are underpowered, useless, or so highly circumstantial that they might as well be useless. The best example that comes to mind for me is a halfling fighter. Halflings are a Small race, and in OGL games they have to use smaller weapons, often get a Strength penalty, and take another penalty on many Strength-based applications (grapple, bull rush, disarm, trip, etc). They also tend to move slower and can carry even less than their Strength score would indicate.
See, a fighter is supposed to be about melee combat and “tanking”, where they defend their party from the onslaught of monsters. Aside from the complete lack of scaling and ability to prevent monsters from sidestepping them and mauling anyone they want to death, the halfling’s flaws culminate into a shitty character. They deal about 2 points of damage less overall, but the biggest problems (no pun intended) are realized when you consider that since she is Small and gets a Strength penalty that she takes an effective -5 penalty on her efforts to resist other critters from pushing her around, or just fucking picking her up and throwing her…wherever.
Since she moves slower and her Speed gets reduced even further by heavy armor, it takes her longer to maneuver around the battlefield (and if you are using physical skills, I’m sure that the reduced carrying capacity is going to mess with things even more so).
This is frankly, a trap character. A player might think it is a neat idea and give it a go, only to realize very quickly that you suck. You have no chance in hell of performing the duties that your class cant really do anyway, but even if it mechanically could, you’d still be fucked. Kind of like falling in a pit trap with spikes, only to have ceiling open up and dump acid filled with acid sharks on you: a double-trap! The only people that would get a kick out of this are the mechanic-masochists that think that its “cool” to play a crippled, underpowered character because its somehow more rewarding to succeed when the dice finally fall your way.

Moving on!

Next on the chopping block, classes. Most of the class stuff was picked apart months ago during the previews and tend to follow this trend: cut and paste the old class, add in a few features, and try to pretend the whole time that they dont still suck. For example barbarians can “rage climb/swim” and can pick up a bite attack that wont hit, which isnt that big of a deal since it only deals 1d4 damage anyway.
See, its stuff like that that sounds really badass, but c’mon: -5 to the attack? Half the Strength modifier? Are you fucking serious? I would have allowed the barbarian to make a useful bite attack as a minor swift action. Its not like she can do it all the damned time or its going to overpower her to the point where no one will play other melee classes. Be reasonable, no one plays fighters anyway.
Other classes, particularly spellcasters, get yet more powerful in the transition. You know, the guys that run the show since 5th-level? Yeah. Apparently Paizo thought that they still needed more freebies to further adorn their palanquin that the rest of the party was carrying them around on. Druids can opt to swap out their worthless animal companion to get access to more spells, and wizards and sorcerers get at-will powers and more magical flexibility. Since, you know, they obviously needed more shit to keep track of even if some of its pretty weak-sauce…*cough* hand of the apprentice *cough*.
The only good part I can see about classes is that Paizo made sure that every level has something to gain aside from hit/skill points. I assume that not all are interesting, but at least its there.

Some skills got condensed, just like in 4th Edition, but Paizo didn’t quite have the foresight to get rid of the useless “simulation” skills that don’t really do anything except make money on the off chance that the DM puts the game on hold long enough to make them worthwhile and let you justify to yourself that its “okay” to make the claim that your character is a farmer. I mean, its not like you could just say that that’s what your character did…right? Just like its not okay to say that your character had friends during her childhood without dumping enough points in the right skill.

Between the shitty races, classes, feats, and skills, what all of this does is cater to system mastery, where you play the game enough to realize what choices work, which ones dont, and leave the crap by the wayside. System mastery isn’t good, especially for new players or people wanted to try out classes that promise one thing and deliver nothing (example: halfling fighters, or just fighters in general).
On one hand, I don’t want to blame Paizo for this. They aren’t game designers, and they really want to peddle their wares to the desperate niche that got left behind when 4th Edition was announced. Pathfinder isn’t a new game, its just an old game with a new paint job.
In other words, its just 3E with a shitload of houserules. The problem is that groups that still want to play 3rd Edition have that. With Pathfinder, its now a matter of cross-referencing the original rules with the new rules and figuring out whats changed, whats different, and if the differences arent great enough its going to cause even more confusion. My group ran into this problem when Revised Edition was released, mostly with spells and feats but occasionally with mechanics and some class features. It was a massive pain in the ass, and since Pathfinder maintains much of the flaws of Yester-Year’s Edition, it just compounds the issues I’d have with it. Its quite a bit late to just push out a slightly modified game, charge the full price, and not fix the stuff that needed it.

But hey, its Paizo, and they have their fans that will eat it up no matter what they produce, even if they follow the same business plan as the, “800-pound gorilla,” that they desperately want to emulate (push out books that contain more of the same, just with the same system to boot). I used to be a fan, back when 3rd Edition was still in its heyday. I had a subscription to both of the dead-tree magazines, though I didnt use most of it. Hell, I mostly toughed it out for Dungeon since they were running Savage Tide and I thought it looked awesome.

Now?

Looking at Pathfinder gives me the same emotional conflict that I get when looking at World of WarCraft: the art is pretty, and…thats about it. It starts to draw me in, but I push myself away once I realize that thats the only thing it has going for it: eye candy. I’m not going to buy Pathfinder. Not the Big Book o’ Houserules, not the modules, nothing. If they made an art book I could dig it, because thats the only thing about their stuff that I like. I’d easily pony up $50 or even more for such a collection. Looks good. Looks great. Its something I could easily use for inspiration. I mean, Wizards of the Coast has eye candy, too. The difference is that they have a game that backs it up.
Maybe thats where Paizo went wrong. When they did the open beta, I realized very quickly that they took a lot of the good ideas from 4th Edition and did their best to shoehorn them in and try to pass it off as their own: more hit points, more feats, rogues can SA more things, spellcasters get “at-wills”. Lots of stuff like that.
I find it baffling that Paizo is making their own line of game products, and no one is calling them out on being a bunch of money-grubbing corporate wage-slaves. We got a $50 rulebook that everyone will need to have, since its for both players and DMs, a Bestiary coming out later, and a bunch of other shit specific to Pathfinder. I think that just makes it worse: its all specific to their own little homebrew campaign. It’d be like if Wizards just made nothing but Eberron books, which while super-cool, would cater to too narrow an audience.

Huh.

I guess Paizo is the RPG publisher equivalent of Nintendo. Well, not quite. To be fair, when Nintendo pushes out yet another Mario/Zelda/Metroid game, its usually a mostly different experience aside from the titular character. Not that different is necessarily good.

In closing, Pathfinder is just a 3rd Edition re-hash that tries to take an old, outdated system and shoehorn in some of the mechanics of 4th Edition in order to justify repurchasing a game that you’ve been playing, but not quite enough to make the mechanics work in an elegant manner. The book looks nice, its just too bad that I got tired of Pathfinder back when it was still called 3rd Edition (see, I waited til the end).

Bahamut’s Champions Review

Out of all the good aligned gods, Bahamut is certainly one of my favorites. One problem is that aside from clerics I dont really give two shits about divine characters, though that might change when Josh starts running Scales of War with plenty of houserules and extra bits tacked on to make it more presentable. The other problem is that I was gunning for tiefling avenger of Asmodeus, and this article throws a platinum holy symbol in the works. I’m thinking dragonborn paladin or maybe invoker.

Bahamut’s Champions is similar to the old “Core Beliefs” articles that ran in the olden days of Dragon, when people read it off of pieces of paper (while possibly wiping their asses with other pieces of paper): you get seven character backgrounds, three “initiations”, and then some paragraphs on beliefs and duties that takes up almost a column. Backgrounds come with an opening paragraph that tells you how they work (in case this is your First Time to the Rodeo), while initiations serve as a springboard for how you got into the adventuring gig. A simple-yet-elegant adventurer’s algebraic equation.

With those whopping three pages out of the way, its on to crunch. You get a paragon path, some feats, and then an epic destiny.

The paragon path is chromatic bane, a guy who really hates chromatic dragons, except she also hates metallic dragons. And planar dragons. Basically any dragon at all that serves Tiamat. Another name for this would be the bane of dragon’s who associate in some manner with Tiamat, but thats understandably waaay too fucking long. The path features grant you energy resistance when you burn an action point, allow an ally to make a fear save at the end of your turns (all the time), and gives you the Channel Divinity power platinum mantle, which gives out a defense bonus to you and all allies when you are hit by a close/area attack. Nifty.
Rolling stab lets you shift 5 squares and make an attack after you get hit, giving you a defense bonus and also dealing extra damage against dragons.
Rousing cry automatically removes the dazed/stunned condition from an ally and lets them move for freeeeeeeeee.
Heartstrike deals quad-weapon damage, slides the target, lets you shift after it, and marks it for the entire encounter. You can also use it with a charge.

There’s a dozen new feats, with almost half belonging to Heroic tier. Every single feat requires a divine class of some sort, except for Radiant Breath which also demands that you are dragonborn. Each tier presents something for every divine class, with the exception of Epic (that only has something for invokers and paladins). Here are some previews:

• Radiant Breath adds radiant to the damage of dragon breath, so dragonborn Chaladins are even more badass and exploding undead than they already were.
• Shielding Word adds a defense bonus to allies that you peg with healing word.
• Dragonbane lets powers that normally target undead also work on dragons.
• Forceful Challenge lets you slide a target that takes damage from divine challenge.
• Weakening Challenge is an epic-feat that weakens a target every time it is affected by divine challenge.

There’s also multiclass feats! Its two separate trees that start off with either Noble Indoctrination or Platinum Revelation, depending on if you like ranged/implement or melee attacks respectively. Since its multiclassing, you can only take on path, so stick to whatever the hell you’re competent at. They all rely on your “highest ability vs. Will”, so they really work for anyone I guess.
All of the powers that deal damage have a level swap entry that lets you deal more and more damage if you swap it out with higher level powers than whats normally required, so they can remain useful even at high levels.

Finally the epic destiny, Bahamut’s vessel. You get “touched” by Bahamut and he invests you with divine essence. Mostly this just makes you a total badass and gives you features and “epic powah”, but also functions as a deus ex machina in case Bahamut bites the big one: you can use it to reboot him, at the low-low cost of being utterly consumed by divine fire in order to give it a jump start. Sure you die, but you live on forever in the percentage of his brain that he actually accesses from time to time.

In all seriousness, its actually pretty damned cool. You get to increase Str, Wis, or Cha by 2 points for an opener, so it works great for any and all divine classes. However, each time you burn an action point you regain hit points as if you’d spend a healing surge in addition to a defense boost. Each time. At level 24 every ally within 5 squares gets a bonus on saves, and if they get healed get a bonus to attacks and defenses. Finally, when you get dropped you immediately regain all your hit points and turn into a Large platinum dragon. Sure, its not as cool as the sorcerer’s wyrmform power at level 29, but its still pretty sweet.

First, you get darkvision, some resistances, can fly and hover, and all enemies within 5 squares take an attack penalty. You can bite whenever you want, which deals 3d12 + 12 damage and slides the target, and you get a breath weapon attack that affects a close blast 5 and does some okay damage that pushes and immobilizes targets. The downside is that if you use that it ends your dragon form. On the plus side, you can still use any other powers that you want and the only gear you lose access to are wondrous items and weapons that you were holding.

I enjoyed this article, even though I dont play divine characters. I’ve wanted to give them a shot, but with all the playtest materials trickling in I’ve been investing free time to giving those a shot. This has ironically tempted me to give divine classes a closer look: even if I dont want to look up to Bahamut, it works well as a foundation for other deities (as well as consider giving those Core Beliefs articles another looksie). My only complaint is that I was expecting a bit more out of the story content.

Dragon Magazine Annual Review

As many have heard, for some reason its out an entire month early. Dont know why, dont care why. All that matters is that I got one before the clerical error(?) got resolved. Dragon Magazine Annual is a compilation of 14 articles considered to be the, “best of the best,” published out of Dragon from June 2008 to March of 2009. It runs 159 pages and thirty-fucking-dollars. Yeesh. Thats quite a hefty price tag for a book that barely meets the weight class of Adventurer’s Vault 2. Actually I just checked, and they’re both identical in size. Huh. I mean, yeah, it was also $30, but at least it had all new content.

In case you’re wondering, the articles re-printed in DMA are:

• Demonomicon of Iggwilv: Yeenoghu
• Creature Incarnations: Kobolds
• Mithrendain, Citadel of the Feywild
• Wish Upon a Star
• The Bloodghost Syndicate
• Intelligent Items: Smart Swords
• Fight!
• We Who Are About To Die…
• The Longest Night
• Playing Dhampyr
• Masters of the Planes
• Playing Shadar-Kai
• Art of the Kill

If you have a subscription to Dragon as-is, you will only want this if you really, really like the articles listed. If you only like a couple of them, you should/could probably pass on this. For example, if you enjoyed Wish Upon a Star that this gives you the powers in hardback form, but then you’d also have an updated Character Builder that already has the powers built-in.
So, I guess its a pretty hard sell. I myself liked Creature Incarnations, Wish Upon a Star, Playing Dhampyr/Shadar-Kai, and some of the stuff from some of the rest of the articles, but frankly after I bought it and started reading it on the walk to work I thought, “What the fuck am I doing? I’ve already read all this shit,” and promptly went back and brought Small Favor instead. Why did I buy it? I think at the time I was focusing on, “Shit yeah, Dragon in paper format,” completely ignoring the fact that I’d already read and re-read it all months ago.

I…really cant think of an ideal target audience for it. Hardcore D&D collectors, I suppose. I mean, some of its good for players, some of its good for DMs, but all of its stuff that you probably already read. Heck, some of the articles are still up for free. I guess if you dont have/want a subscription to DDI at all and like to play and DM in about a 50:50 ratio, it might be handy to a point, thought $30 is on the steep side considering you can get it all for a one-time $7 fee for a month of DDI (and access to all back issues and a complete Character Builder…for that month, anyway).

I think that Wizards should focus mostly on player or DM content, not both. I cant say that I would parse out the monster stuff since Dragon has catered to both sides of the screen in the past, but I suppose I would try to help out the players mostly. Check out what Paizo did for their Dragon compilation in the past (which I think was pretty damned cool). Lower the damned price tag, while you’re at it (or make it bigger). Its not like you’re paying for anything new.

Player’s Strategy Guide Cover

Straight from the Penny-Arcade site, Gabe has posted up a very clear image of the cover for Player’ Strategy Guide.

Gabe has said as such that its, “supposed to help you build a solid character.” I can tell you how to do that, easy: put a 16 in the ability score you use to make attacks, then do whatever the fuck else you want. Done. 😛

DMG2 Eye Candy

Looks like Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 has some badass pictures in store. Here are a few that you can find in the previews.

This one is my favorite. Its totally fucking epic-win.

Living Lightning Bolt

Here’s the living lightning bolt, Josh. Tis neither a brute NOR skirmisher! I kept it the same level as the fireball since they are both level 5 dailies.

Note: HA! The Teleportation keyword has a typo…better let the devs know that.