March of the Phantom Brigade, Week 3

There was considerably more social interaction this week, as Liz and the crew scouted out the ruins of Castle Inverness. The players, not knowing what to expect, were exceedingly cautious in their investigation. Well, most of them that is. Every player but one tried to sneak towards it, searching for access points and threats, while the warpriest just galloped around it on horseback. I think the idea was that she would try to make herself an obvious target, so as to make it easier on the rest of the party.

When nothing happened, the warpriest then strode towards what amounted to a gate and loudly proclaimed her presence. Everyone else? Quietly creeping up a wall some ways away. Again, nothing happened, which just intensified their paranoia. The explored the graveyard, and were relieved (disappointed?) when nothing clambered out to attack them. They checked the shattered towers, which contained no gargoyles, swarms of murderous avians, or even kenku. I feel like there’s a Doctor Seuss verse coming on…it came without oozes, it came without rats, it came without boxes of treasure and traps!

Eventually, they did stumble on the encounter: a pair of ochre jellies kicking back in the fountain. The clue is that out of everything in the ruins, the fountain is the only thing that isn’t overgrown with vegetation. Liz noticed this right away and made a beeline for it, which was bad because they had a nasty Stealth bonus and were elite brutes. Fortunately, they went almost dead last and had a pretty miserable attack bonus for level 3.

Most of the battle consisted of the mage sitting on top of a wall, blasting both oozes with arc lightning, while the scouts carved up one, and the thief and warpriest took the other. As brutes, they had a lot of hit points, and when bloodied neatly divided into two smaller critters. Yeah, you divvy up the hit points, but their damage output doesn’t change. I really like this because they deal 2d6 + a lot of acid damage initially, and when they get bloodied basically get to make two attacks. Oh, and since they can shift it makes it very easy to flank for a better attack bonus.

It was a really nasty fight, especially with the lack of a defender, and I almost took down three of the characters. The warpriests ability to grant damage resistance with her at-will, plus a well-timed sun burst (everyone gets a save) alleviated much of the damage, while having three strikers made whittling through the hit points a quick task. In the end, I think they were expecting more…harrowing, considering they were skulking about a purportedly haunted castle.

The only consolation prize was a basic amulet of protection, though Liz and another player found an interesting cornerstone with ancient writing on it. Spoiler: it’s not pertinent to the plot, but more of an easter egg for those who played in Greyhawk. I hope they aren’t expecting something, well, useful out of it. Oh, they also learned the name of a woman from a past adventuring party. It’s also not a need to know thing, but foreshadows a future encounter. Next week, they get to hold off a horde of undead as the priests try to cleanse the ruins.

EDIT: Liz also got her first Fortune Card reward, Indestructible (or some such).

Change Can Be Good

Rob has an article on ten things he’d have changed about 4th Edition. There are some things that I agree with, some I don’t, and some middle ground. I won’t respost his post, but I will address his proposed changes.

Classic Focus
I basically agree with what the designers did on all the cited changes: the succubus makes a lot more sense as a devil, considering that her bad is subtle corruption, and titans look cooler and are more in line with their Greek counterparts. In terms of races and classes, I don’t know what went on in their decision making process, but I don’t mind plopping the gnome in Monster Manual temporarily, and saving other stuff for later. Frankly I’m glad, as it gave them a lot of time to learn the class-making process and come up with a result that was probably a lot better than what we would have gotten. I know some people were upset (and used it as an excuse to hate 4E), but I don’t think that Wizards should just adhere to tradition for tradition’s sake.

Format
While I have no problem with martial powers (especially considering that daily non-magical attacks existed in 3rd Edition and possibly 2nd), I think that Wizards could have explained them better. As for “power-samey-ness”, that’s just a product of people that haven’t taken a look back at how every class in older edition makes attacks with weapons (or thinks that having the defender sometimes make the attack roll makes it magical). As for Essentials martial classes? They’re too routine and boring for me to maintain interest for long. Perhaps for a one-shot or delve, but for a long term game I’ll take complexity and diversity any day.

Tactical Encounters
I like the format for the most part, but agree that these don’t need to consume much space. We got along fine in the earlier days of Dungeon, which I think was too far in the other direction. For simple encounters, I think that taking up less space is a good idea. I also don’t mind having an adventure relegate some work to the DM to come up with their own random encounters. The important thing is that the DM knows what the hell is going on.

Alignment
To me, alignments were mostly a way to maintain character consistency, or to give you a fall back when it came to decision making. Some players and DMs took this to extremes, using it as a straightjacket. I don’t mind the condensing, and would prefer players to notate their characters with personality traits to help make consistent role-playing decisions.

Multiclassing
I think that the first MC feat is usually very good for a feat, generally Skill Training and something else. It’s the ones after that bug me, as they not only require you take an additional feat, but also require that you swap out powers. Spending a feat so that you can exchange powers? Maybe if powers from class were globally better than those from another, I could see that. I didn’t like multiclassing in 3rd Edition, because it made no sense. Yes, presumably if a fighter were to take a level in wizard, it was assumed that at some point she was studying it all along. The problem is that it purportedly takes years to learn magic, but in the span of perhaps a few days, she learns a lot of spells, gains a spellbook with all cantrips (as well as many 1st-level ones), can pick up a familiar, and more? Bullshit.

4th Edition multiclassing makes a LOT more sense. I can believe a fighter adventuring around and learning enough magic to cast one spell, gradually learning more as time passes. That’s much more plausible and demonstrates her gradual increase in magic. She’ll never master it like a wizard, but then she started out as a fighter, so it makes sense. The only real fix for me is to simply require that characters spend one feat to multiclass, and can exchange powers as they like when leveling up. You hit 3rd level as a fighter with wizard multiclass? Gain a level 3 fighter or wizard encounter. No need to burn another feat just to do that, too. However, since I view multiclassing in 4E as more like dabbling in another class, you might want to put a cap on it to avoid having a fighter with mostly wizard powers, such as one encounter attack, one daily attack, and one utility.

Concrete Things
This one seems a bit odd, and I’m not sure I fully understand what he’s saying, but here goes.

Of course there are goblins in D&D. The players and DM might refer to them by their Monster Manual labels, but he actual heroes in the game probably don’t…most of the time. For example, a character warning another about a goblin sharpshooter probably just points and yells archer, or look out, or something. If a goblin is trying to slip around and stab someone in the back, I also don’t imagine a character calling it a goblin blackblade, but simply goblin. This isn’t much different than how it worked in 3rd Edition, where you would have a goblin warrior, or a goblin sorcerer, or a half-black dragon goblin monk/truenamer (what the hell would you call that, anyway?).

As for classes and powers, I don’t think that divorcing them from classes is exactly a good idea, but you could certainly do that and get away pretty easily since every power does something based on it’s level, not whether its magical. I think that Rob’s proposed change would be similar to how something like Shadowrun does it, where anyone can do anything if you have the right attributes and buy the right skills. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it might make it a bit harder for a player to get the character they’re looking for, as well as require more system mastery.

I think having a book that offers composite heroes like this could have a lot of appeal, but I don’t think it should be the norm (assuming I get what he’s talking about).

Great Wheel Cosmology
A lot of the planes before were very hard to run adventures in, even at higher levels, because they were so hostile to non-native life. I much prefer the new cosmology, as its not only in line more with mythological other worlds, but is also a lot more hospitable within a broader level range. I tend to use the Shadowfell and Feywild at low-levels, since they’re largely just mirrors of the natural world (and thus easily accessed), and would use the Elemental Chaos and Astral Sea if I could get my players to paragon-tier (or somewhere close).

At any rate, I don’t think that keeping it as it was would have made things any better. Right now, it might just be a matter of people not being used to the fact that yes, you can go for a romp through the Feywild and not be explode due to an oversaturation of “life energy”, or instantly snuffed into nothingness, because that’s where you blundered in to. If it was the same as before, it makes it more difficult to utilize them in adventure building, which makes it even less likely that they’ll get used.

Magic Items
4th Edition makes it very easy to simply ignore magic items in there entirety, which is a good thing, as people can run low-magic games with minimal fuss. That being said, it’s also easy to do what Rob proposes by using the inherent item rule and just making magic items do more. This is something I plan to do in Dark Sun, though I think high-magic campaign settings like Eberron are fine with the system that exists.

Rituals
I think a major problem with rituals is that they’re just not being used. I’ve put a few here and there in past campaigns as ways to overcome obstacles that I knew the party would face, and might otherwise not be able to. For example, in one adventure, they had to go into an underwater grotto with two primary entrances. The quick way required them to hold their breath for a lengthy period of time, and so I placed a scroll of Water Breathing (along with necessary ritual components) so that they could just use that if they couldn’t think of another way (checking the river shore for an entrance, or using a magic item were other possibilities).

Reducing the cost, or simply eliminating it, might make for good feats (something like Eschew Materials). Basically, I think just including them is a major step forward for rituals.

Skill Challenges
Removing the more mechanical aspects of skill challenges is something I agree with. Frankly, I think dividing them into categories of primary and secondary skills is a bad idea, as I’ve found instances where a secondary skill has primary-applications. I think that by just posting the objective of a skill challenge, and putting up some bullet points is a better idea (and helps avoid rules-enforced skill grinding). I like the skill challenge out of Red Box, as it provides some guidelines for various skills and their effects.

Dark Sun Threats

I’ve already got the Dark Sun itch, and this article is a painful reminder. It’s short, featuring all of four new monsters and a pair of themes, but damn is it good. Going in order, we start with monsters.

• The aarakockra darter is a controller that can throw poisonous darts and and a death sentence barbed nets to easily fulfill its role. The darts work like drow poison, dealing ongoing damage and slowing you, before knocking you out if you botch even one save. The the net locks you down, and if you fail that save, you end up restrained. Yeesh. Finally, it has a limited use shift-and-fly maneuver in case it gets overwhelmed.
• Gith dust racers, as their title implies, can run insanely fast, shift after every attack, have recharging flight, and deal bonus damage if they take psychic damage. Oh, and enemies treat adjacent squares around them as difficult terrain, so ha. These things would be murder for a party with one or more psychic characters.
• In a world that is a giant desert, a human fire elementalist isn’t unexpected, and neither is their suite of abilities. They can hit you with a fiery staff, have a basic ranged attack that only deals ongoing fire damage, an encounter-area burst that creates a zone that deals automatic damage if anyone enters it, or ends its turn there, and a smaller area burst that deals damage, slides, and dazes if you were taking ongoing fire damage. To make matters worse? They have an aura that imposes fire vulnerability. I like a monster that has a lot of synergetic abilities, even if it’s a theme that’s been done many times before.
• Finally, the thri-kreen hunter has both a basic claw and chatkcha attack that you’d expect from the mantis folk, and it can also throw two chatkcha with a single action. Not so bad, considering it’s an artillery. Oh, wait, it also has a recharging ability that lets it throw three per round? It’s not even an elite, mind you. To round things out, it can also shift quite a distance and throw thankfully just one (and can only do so at best twice per encounter due to the limited recharge). If things get to hot, it can also jump its Speed without provoking opportunity attacks.

After monsters are themes, the first of which is Defiler Monster.

There’s a lot of powers to choose from, so I won’t go over them all. For starters, this theme gives monsters a +2 to Arcana and Bluff. The attack and utility powers focus on draining life to gain various benefits. Two of the attacks are contingent on defiling attack, which works with any attack that isn’t a charm, and deals damage other than psychic or radiant damage. Like arcane defiling, the attacker gets to roll twice for the attack, and deals bonus damage to the target and one of the attacker’s allies.

Now, there are a pair of Defiler Monster attacks that also work with this: one lets you target any enemy you want within range, imposing ongoing necrotic damage, while the other causes the target to gain necrotic vulnerability. As if that wasn’t enough, you can really give your players a bad day by adding soul tug to the monster, which causes all of its attacks to deal necrotic damage, and that’s just the attacks.

The utilities let you do stuff like deal damage to an ally in order to make an immediate save, gain necrotic resistance, deal damage to the nearest creature to avoid dying, and gaining a necrotic aura when bloodied. You know what? A lot of this would also be great for undead (except for well, the one that just gives you necrotic resistance, they shouldn’t have to pay for that) or necromancer-type monsters.

Last but not least, the Templar Monster theme. This obviously works best for monsters that have reason to serve a sorcerer-king, which means humanoids are the ideal fit. It gives an Arcana and Diplomacy bonus, and also recommends scoping out the Defiler Monster theme for some extra ideas.

For attacks, you can deal automatic psychic damage when bloodied, use an area burst that deals radiant damage, immobilizes, and allow an ally to gain temp hp if it makes an attack before the turn starts, add a kicker effect to your basic attacks that deals automatic psychic damage plus slow to an enemy you hit, and grants an ally an attack bonus, or a use an area burst that targets only enemies, slows, and grants an ally an attack bonus.

Unfortunately, there’s only two utilities. One is an encounter power that causes an enemy to grant combat advantage for a turn, and lets an ally make a free attack against the target after you do. The other is also an encounter powre, and grants an ally an attack and damage bonus if it ends its turn next to a creature that you just attack.

There’s a lot of leader-type powers in there, and like the Defiler Monster, the stuff in here provides a great foundation for giving leaders thematic powers. I could see this stuff being used for a archetypical villain as he orders his lackeys to “stop the cursed do-gooders”.

The first half of the article is great if you’re running Dark Sun or use monsters from it. The latter half, while likewise intended for Dark Sun, is great for any campaign.

Unearthed Arcana: Fight or Flight

For the less blood-thirsty groups, this article provides some basic advice on how to resolve encounters using methods other than thorough decimation. It starts out by adding an extra step to the turn sequence, allowing each side to determine if it wants to keep fighting, negotiate, run, or give up. There’s no rules or checks involved, with the Dungeon Master just making a choice based on factors such as the opponents, location, and condition of everyone involved. Really, a lot of it is just common sense that most capable DMs are privvy to: cowardly monsters tend to run when blatantly outmatched, undead and constructs tend to fight to the death, and animals probably flee when bloodied–or retreat if they manage to snag a meal.

Honestly, I’m kind of glad that there isn’t a hard morale system. I’ve had annoying players try to abuse Intimidate in the past (and Diplomacy in 3rd Edition), and while my group wouldn’t necessarily try to exploit the rules, I’m sure there are groups with one or more players that would. That’s not to say that there isn’t any crunch. There’s a pair of skill challenges that help determine if a party successfully retreats from an encounter, and if they can shake pursuing opponents should they fail. The first relies on whatever skill you think is appropriate (and your DM agrees on), with the DC based on how close you are to a monster when you try to book it.  The second has each player make Acrobatics, Athletics, or Endurance checks, with DCs based on opposed Speed.

I really like the skill challenges, and will probably even use the “Encounter Status Check” in some capacity or other. Normally I play monster morale by ear, with cowardly monsters–and even those with some sense–legging it when it’s obvious that they’re losing. Non-intelligent monsters like undead or constructs, as well as those being compelled or particularly fanatic (such as angels or trained animals), usually fight until they’re slain. Since I still give players full XP for monsters that flee this has the added benefits of rewarding the heroes for their mercy not wasting time chasing every last straggler down, as well as ending fights that the heroes have obviously won.

Not a bad article, especially for players/groups that have become jaded to mindlessly slaughtering their foes because their hit points are the path of least resistance.

Winning Races: Genasi of Athas

If you’re looking for new material on genasi and run Dark Sun, this article has a healthy mix of flavor and crunch material for you.

There’s a little more than four pages of information on history, role-playing, physical qualities, communities, personality traits, and backgrounds. I found it interesting, especially the bits on primordials creating the genasi themselves to help shape the world and fight the gods, before they retreated into a deep slumber. Unfortunately rather than protected the world as the primordials had hoped, they just ended up fighting each other until the other mortal races managed to get a numbers advantage. Then, to make matters worse, the sorcerer-kings managed to drain most of the life out of the world. So…yeah. They’d better hope that the primordials don’t wake up, cause I don’t think they’ll just slap their children on the wrist.

Anyway, I like that it  just comes out and explains some things, which is great for providing a prospecting DM with some solid history to go off of, as keeping the past undefined can be just as limiting for world-building. I also like that genasi aren’t exactly painted in a good light: they don’t seem to particularly like the mortal races, what with the whole killing the planet with life-draining magic, so they could make great villains. Unfortunately, this kind of limits the backstories that would easily allow integration into a party. I suppose since they seem to hate defliers and sorcerer-kings more than about anything else, you could always fall back to that…assuming that’s the aim of your campaign.

On the crunchy side of things, there’s four new elemental manifestations: embersoul, magmasoul, sandsoul, and sunsoul.

• Embersoul: You gain a bonus to Reflex and to saves against ongoing fire damage. You also gain ashfall evasion, which lets you explode into a zone of ashes that removes you from play and deals damage to enemies that end their turn there. 
• Magmasoul: You gain a bonus to Fortitude, and when you take fire damage, you deal bonus fire damage. You gain flowing magma, which turns you into a being of, well, magma. You can’t be subjected to forced movement, are slowed, and deal automatic damage to creatures that end their turn next to you.
• Sandsoul: You gain a bonus to Athletics and Acrobatics and a bonus against conditions that hamper your movement. You also gain sandslide, which makes you insubstantial and lets you move through enemies squares, as well as go through any opening larger than a grain of sand. Very cool.
• Sunsoul: You gain a bonus to saves against ongoing damage based around fire or radiant, and you don’t suffer any problems in the temperature extremes (including sun sickness). Finally, you gain sun flare, which is an AoE that triggers when you’re bloodied, causing you to make an attack that imposes attack penalties to creatures you hit (unless they are bloodied, in which case they are blinded instead). It also deals fire AND radiant damage, limiting resistances. My favorite out of the bunch.

The desert voice paragon path offers a lot of flexibility. The level 11 class features allow you to shift whenever you crit with a totem, gain a new manifestation from the ones in the article, and can deafen and slide creatures close to you when you burn an Action Point. The level 16 one provides a boost to any manifestations that you have, from increasing the range, to preventing creatures from standing up, to dealing automatic damage.

• The level 11 power is a close blast 5 that deals damage, pushes targets you hit, and imposes an attack penalty for a turn.
• The level 12 utility grants temp hps and recharges one of your elemental manifestations.
• The level 20 attack is a nice area burst that creatures a zone and deals automatic damage to creatures caught in it. You can also sustain it and make an attack that slows and deals ongoing damage to creatures inside it. It’s nice that you can maintain it on the off chance that creatures get knocked back in, but you can’t move it at all, so that kinda sucks.

Finally, the four genasi feats are all boosters for the manifestations. Pretty typical stuff, here.

The crunch works in any setting, and is really cool for genasi players. The fluff is intended for Dark Sun, but I could see the creation myth being used in any campaign setting. It’s certainly better than the varied, vague ideas pitched in past Winning/Playing Race articles. It’s also good for DMs looking for a solid Athasian villain.

Legends & Lore: Minis

Not pictured: the other sandwich bags, plastic tubs, and assorted clutter  on the bookshelves.

I have a lot of minis.

I’m pretty sure a looong time ago, I made a post talking about how much I like using minis in my D&D games. I’ve been using minis since I started out with Basic, which consisted of some solid-red plastic heroes and a bunch of cardstock stands for NPCs and monsters. As time and money allowed, I would gradually buy metal figures from Ral-Partha, up until Wizards launched their pre-painted minis, which were a godsend because now I didn’t have to spend all my time painting a bunch of stuff that would invariably chip and break.

Why do I like minis?

The first reason is that they look cool as hell. Yeah, I can describe how big or freaky a monster is, but being able to let the player plainly see just how small they are can really put things in perspective. Plus, it’s also nice when players get a better image of the monster and proclaim “what the fuck is that?” The other reason is tactical positioning, which falls into the second camp that Mike identifies, which are players that tend to use them to provide “hard and fast” rules, as opposed to relying on the DM’s arbitration.

To elaborate, as a DM I like this because it answers many of the questions that I used to get, such as if the monster is close enough to hit with a ranged attack, is there an attack penalty, will allies be caught in an area effect spell, how close is the monster to a/an [insert hazard], will I get attacked if I do [insert action], and so on and so forth. Most of these answers were based on what I assumed the characters were doing, which often did no match up with what the players thought they were doing.

Basically, players can readily make their own informed decisions, which also ties in with why I like them as a player: I can look at the map and make my move without having to ask the DM, refer back to my abilities, ask more questions, and spend god-knows-how long trying to determine a satisfactory course of action. Remember how long it would take spellcasters to come to a conclusion? Now have most of the party doing a similar song-and-dance as they peruse their options.

I don’t think that minis intrinsically detract from the imagination or description of the scene (I still use dice and tokens, even with my extensive collection). Some DM’s might be lazy and just let the minis and effects of actions do the talking, but then that’s really the DM’s fault. When I move a monster, I don’t sit there in stony silence like a chess-player, I let them know that the orc unleashes a bellowing roar as it rushes towards them, or that the ooze makes sick, slurping noises as it tries to envelope them. An axe doesn’t deal 9 damage, it cuts a vicious gash in your arm, and the oozes slime causes your armor to hiss and smoke as it slowly dissolves. To me they’re game aids, not the foundation of the game.

Wrath of Ashardalon, Wizard Solo

Castle Ravenloft had an adventure that you could solo, presumably to help learn the rules through actual play, as I couldn’t imagine surviving on your own for more than a few turns. Likewise, Wrath of Ashardalon has a small adventure in which you must navigate the halls until you find a secret entrance to escape. After reading the adventure, I noticed that the escape tile is always the seventh. I decided to give it a try today, figuring that having two healing surges to myself I could at least scrape by, especially considering that you don’t have to kill a boss monster: just get the fuck out and you’ll be fine.

To make this even more challenging, I went with the dragonborn wizard, taking the spells arc lightning, hypnotism, shock sphere, and mirror image. You automatically get hurled breath, which is a nice way to get a free ranged AoE attack. I’d considered taking wizard eye, but I’m not sure if it lasts only one turn, or forever.

With nothing to do on round one, I decided to cast mirror image and stay put to explore. Mirror image boosts your AC by six points, and is reduced by two each time you are hit. There’s no mention of duration, and figured I might as well do something interesting during my hero phase besides waiting for a monster to bum-rush me.

Ugh…why did it have to be snakes? Their bite adds the Poisoned condition, which ensures that you’ll lose at least two hit pionts if you get hit. To make things worse, I drew a black tile. Fuck. With no XP to cancel it, I also get sidelined with a whirling blade trap, which meant that now I got to eat two attacks during my villain phase. Thankfully, the snake missed, but the blades hit, meaning my mirror image bonus went from +6 to +4, and I took 2 damage.

Fast forward a few turns, and I’m down a healing surge, spawned a gibbering mouther, and mirror image is out. I didn’t get a chance to explore during turn two, and got nailed with an arrow (I think). Oh, and I’m dazed. The only upside is that I got lucky on disabling the whirling blades.

Cultists have never been remotely scary, except these guys carry poisoned daggers. When a single point of damage counts for almost a fifth of your total health, that’s a big deal. I manage to take them both out with arc lightning, and eat another encounter that I forgot about (but probably did damage). Down to my last few hit points, I’m fucked, but I keep exploring and hoping that a kobold doesn’t do me in.

Yay! A white tile. This just means I get to stand there while a monster skewers me, but which monster, I wonder?

I fucking hate duergar. With this guy, if you aren’t on the tile he’s on (and how could you be?), he explores. And draws a monster. Technically, it’s already my villain phase, so I don’t activate the cultists. I did, however, draw two long hall tiles, which means that now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Unfortunately, I’ve got only three hit points left, and if I get hit by the cultists, I’m pretty much done for.

So, I dash by the duergar and kill the cultist first with arc lightning (also damaging the duergar in the process), and get a fucking tome of experience. Would have been handy a looong time ago. Since I didn’t explore, I draw an encounter card, which ends up spawning a goddamned bear with a treasure token thankfully some ways away. I’m not going to go for it, obviously, and you don’t keep the treasure, and I’m guaranteed to die even if I did get it. Also fortunately, the duergar doens’t move and attack, he just moves.

I just realized while writing this that I could have double moved and gotten out last turn. At any rate, I just cancelled the rolling boulder trap that I triggered with the plethora of XP I’d accumulated through this hellish trial and managed to walk out on the next turn. Fuck, that was bullshit. I only won through sheer luck. Had I not gotten a pair of long hallways back-to-back, I would have been screwed big time.

Magic Item Wishlists

It’s probably just the orange light bulb from the Pulp Fiction Briefcase.

In the last 2nd Edition campaign I played in, we rarely if ever found treasure. I remember getting a +1 two-handed sword (+2 versus undead!) at third level, and I think a suit of +1 chainmail went to the cleric at sixth. I don’t recall how frequently it was assumed that players should find treasure, but I think we were getting hosed pretty badly, but at least it was something that everyone could use. Conversely, I remember running Age of Worms in 3rd Edition, which was fraught with numerous magical trinkets that did little except to serve as fanciful vendor trash, to be pawned off when the party got to a town that had a sufficiently high gp reserve.

4th Edition operates under a very different assumption: players are supposed to furnish wish lists to the DM, so that he/she can tailor valuable rewards in a more…appreciable manner. Wish lists are kind of a touchy subject with 4th Edition, as it’s the first one that I recall explicitly telling the DM to ask for them. Some people take it to mean that the DM should only dole out the items that characters specifically ask for, which can be fine–especially if you are running one-shots, or games where the players cannot easily sell/disenchant/enchant their own loot–though I take a more relaxed stance.

See, as a DM it can be difficult for me to remember what each player has, what their character can use, and what the character wants. To me, a wish list is a way for me to quickly reference all of these things when I’m generating treasure rewards. I try to keep my treasure logical and thematic, so player’s aren’t always going to get the exact thing that they want, and my players know that. When I was running At The Mines Of Madness, one of the players wanted a specific kind of magical scimitar. I don’t remember what it was now, but I ended up giving him a byeshk sword, which was A) a weapon he could use, and B) really useful considering that they were fighting wall-to-wall aberrants.

What he wanted? No. Useful? Hell yes. It’s because 4th Edition is the first D&D edition that I’ve played where the players really don’t need treasure in order to overcome obstacles, that this is something I feel a lot safer doing. In past editions, you might have needed a magical sword to overcome a creature’s damage resistance, and if you went further back, some were immune to weapons without a sufficiently high enhancement bonus. In 3rd Edition, items with static bonuses to ability scores are virtually mandatory. Not so anymore, as characters are mostly defined by their class as opposed by their magic item suite.

Recently a fellow player and I decided that our group should post character information on Google Docs so that the DM would have an easy and convenient way of tracking our personalities, goals, journals, and…wish lists. As a player, this is something new for me. Unfortunately (fortunately?) there’s a lot of items in the game, and I’m playing a class that I’ve never played before (cavalier). I’ve decided to meet the DM halfway, literally by filling out roughly half of my own wish list with a few items and leaving the rest blank, so that I can be better surprised (which is how I suspect a lot of players do it).

Anyway, that’s my thoughts on wish lists: use them as guidelines, not set-in-stone instructions. Try to cater to the character’s needs, but don’t sacrifice the integrity of the game if it doesn’t make sense.

Formatting Content

Robert posits the question of formatting. Specifically, if 4th Edition would have been better received had it been rendered in 3rd Edition’s format. He even goes so far as to do a quick mock-up of what a cleric might have looked like, including a couple of prayers, a spell, and an exploit in the vein of 3rd Edition’s spell blocks.

First, ugh. The old format is dreadful. There’s information all over the page, broken up by a class table. You have paragraph blocks of text with unnecessarily long wording. I remember back when I used to write up prestige classes that I would just copy and paste all of that over and over again, because typing it out was so tedious. Robert didn’t get it completely right however, as all the power information would be in the back of the book (where it was most inconvenient).

Second, I seriously doubt 4E would have been any better received, even had Wizards stuck to the old format. People were hating on it a full-half year before it was released, picking apart each preview despite the information being provided in a vacuum. The tired, re-hashed claims that I hear again and again depict the game as a MMO, or a card-game, for idiots, for kids with various disorders, and so on and so forth. I’ve yet to hear anyone complain about the format change, though that would be a welcome change of pace.

Personally, I really liked the initial 4E format, as things were placed in a logical order so that I could easily go from one step to the next, without having to flip back and forth from the front and back of the book to pick my options. This is one of the reasons that I dislike the format from the two player-Essentials books: when checking up on my specialization school, warpriest domain, hexblade pact, etc, I have to flip back and forth. Not nearly as far, mind you, but enough for it to be a bit of a hassle.

That’s really all I want to be able to do in a game: go from start to finish without having to jump all over the book. 4E does an excellent job of this (though I still prefer using Character Builder).

Hierophant Druids

In case you’re one of those people that think that the Essentials line divided classes pre-and-post release well, this article is geared for both druids and sentinels, as indicated by the Player’s Handbook 2 and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms stamps of approval. So, ha. You know, if they’re going to put little icons in the article that denote which book they pertain to, they could at least make them not so blurry/more stylish.

The article is kind of a throwback to 2nd Edition, in which you could only advance to a certain level before you had to start offing other druids of your level, as there could be only a set number of a given level. Mostly, it’s about an organization that tries to blend primal magic with elemental forces, something that most druids don’t like due to the Primordials’ prior agenda of keeping the world in a constant state of elemental flux.

The article also provides a couple new evocations, intended as benefits for Hierophant members, but technically anyone can pick them up. Unfortunately, you have to be at least 22nd level, which severely limits the scope.

• Elemental passage is a 22nd-level daily utility that lets you vanish, presumably into the Elemental Chaos, and reappear when your turn starts. When you return, there are four different effects that can occur, each tied with an element: push, pull, create difficult terrain around you, or impose fire vulnerability. It’s a standard action to use, which is a turn-off.
• Summon elemental warrior is a 25th-level daily attack that, as the name implies, lets you summon an elemental. The exact element is up to you, and there are four stat blocks to choose from. They all mark targets that they hit (along with a kicker effect, like ongoing damage or forced movement), and have an opportunity action that works on marked creatures. About what I’d expect.

EDIT: A buddy of mine pointed out that the evocations have the Elemental keyword (and Primal). Does this mean that Wizards is considering a class with the Elemental power source, or is this just a keyword that serves to globally encompass the four classic elements (instead of printing out a bunch of keywords). Frankly, I don’t see how much different an Elemental class could be, especially considering that wizards can summon elementals, and chaos sorcerers tap into it a bit as well.

And to wrap things up, the master hierophant epic destiny. I think the coolest part is the Immortality part: you eventually leave the world, drift through the Astral Sea, and become a new world. It’s kind of like radiant child, but for druids instead of warlocks…and a planet instead of a star. I could see this being used for an adventure hook, where the players have to explore the Astral Sea for a new world forged from the body of an ancient druid. Hell, you could use this as the basis for having a solar system, as the worlds don’t have to look like our own.

• Level 21: You gain a Wisdom bonus, as well as a bonus to something else.
• Level 24: You are immune to disease, stop aging, and can enter suspended animation once per encounter, during which you gain regeneration and make saves when you turn starts and ends. The regen only works while bloodied, and it renders you unconscious. On the plus side, you can end it when your turn also ends.
• Level 26: You gain elemental transmogrification, which makes you a Huge elemental with a variable benefit based on the element you choose.
• Level 30: You can use two options from elemental transmogrification, and once per day if you get dropped below 1 hit point, you immediately regain a shitload of them.

The article has some nice inspiration for campaigns of any level, but the provided crunch is intended entirely for epic-tier play, which reduces its utility. Personally, I’d like to see elemental evocations for a wider level spread, allowing players to be Hierophants from a lower level. Great for druid players approaching epic tier, also good for DMs.