Game Groups & Campaigns > Promiseland Rising

Different 4e campaigns

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JohnLS:
David Ainsworth is an old friend of mine who first showed us how to run a high-level 2e campaign. This turned into some high-level 3e, but the campaign was mostly over by then. He played in the earlier Promiseland campaign. He was not the one who played Mr. Underhill, Darien or the amazon, who have come up in the campaign. He is playing the same 4e adventure path that Cory ran. David was interested in my alterations to 4e.

I do like 4E now, and I even generated a bunch of divine encounter powers for a campaign in my world, each associated with a different deity and granting special bonuses if you worshiped that deity or an associate.  (The controlling conceit was a college of divine magics that attempted to unite the different churches into a single whole.)  Having semi-randomly determined encounter powers that you can cycle through seems to help resolve the stagnation problem (where you use the same powers in more or less the same order each fight).

At least one of the people I play with got fed up with the books being out of date almost immediately given all the patches, and I'm as annoyed as always with the "publish unbalanced stuff in Dragon/to sell new books" thing, as well as the way that certain classes, generally popular ones with good powers, end up getting lots of new powers and feats while other classes are ignored, meaning they continue to suck.

Playing in a campaign now which limited rules to the base books and one or two specific additions, and which concentrates on non-combat stuff (we get almost no combat XP but we get good XP for treasure) and encourages us to use guile where possible.

John, if your 4E changes are written up I'd love to see a copy.
David
> Dave,
> Most of the changes I made are on a web site www.protocon.com under
> "Promiseland Rising," but I am not sure if guests can access it anymore.
> I will send some of them, though.
>
> The largest change I made, which is not really a rules changes, is a
> "power tier" system for determining NPC/monster level relative to PCs.
> The PCs do gain some power and toughness as they level, but mostly
> higher levels means "more resourceful." Power tiers follow the threshold
> number until epic level. Power tiers are:
>
> -1: less than amateur soldier power
> 0: Amateur soldier (e.g., a fyrdman)
> 1: PC levels 1-5, a typical full time, professional soldier
> 2: PC levels 6-10
> 3: PC levels 11-15, an elite soldier
> 4: PC levels 16-20
> 5: PC level 21
> 6: PC levels 22-23
> 7: PC levels 24-25
> etc. (each tier is 2 levels)
>
> To get an enemy's level relative to the PCs, I subtract or add the tier
> difference. For example, 6th level PCs facing a low paragon-tier enemy
> are power tier 2 (PCs) v. power tier 3 (NPCs), so the NPCs/monsters
> would be 1 level higher or the same level and elites. My players are
> currently 15th level (tier 3), so ordinary full-time professional
> soldiers (tier 1) are 2 tiers below them and would be level 13. However,
> they would have few powers and abilities and only 2 healing surges, so
> are considerably weaker than PCs. Still, PCs would hesitate to attack a
> caravan guarded by 15 soldiers and it would be suicidal to attack 30
> soldiers without some sort of major terrain or other advantage.
>
> I can do this with other creatures. For example, a warhorse is an
> amateur soldier (tier 0) that is large (+1) and especially strong and/or
> tough (+1), making it a tier 2 creature. This means for the 15th level
> party war horses are 14th level and worth bringing along (level 1-3
> horses otherwise are just ways for enemies to knock you prone by
> swatting them).
>
> This makes campaign balancing easy and could not really be done in 3E
> because the powers people had changed so radically across levels (oh,
> you are 15th level? That mean ordinary soldiers can fly and dispel
> magic, which they could not before).
>
> Another major change was how some conditions worked. I like inhibiting
> or punishing someone as control, but complete shutdown should be
> difficult and rare. Unfortunately, especially with later supplements,
> mass shutdowns of whole classes of enemies are commonplace. I changed
> two conditions in a way that they are still useful and no power that
> granted them is worth dropping now:
>
> Daze - A dazed creature no longer has a move action, but can convert a
> standard action to a move action. A dazed creature grants combat
> advantage. A dazed creature is at -4 on any attack rolls, skill checks
> or ability checks made on another creature's turn.
> Reason: Daze is still immensely powerful and useful, but is not a way to
> cancel basically everything the enemy can do (combined with the mass
> push powers they gave out like candy, Daze effectively became this)
>
> Slow - Until a creature completes a regular move action (not a shift,
> stand from prone, etc.), it suffers the following penalties: speed is
> reduced to 2 and shift distances are halved (minimum 1).
> Reason: Slow, combined with those mass push powers or a mobile party,
> effectively shuts down any melee-centric monster or mobility-based
> monster. Now it inhibits them. No power that grants slow is not worth
> taking.
>
> Weakened: A weakened creature has a damage penalty to its attacks and
> ongoing damage equal to 2 per tier + threshold. Therefore, a level 12
> creature would have a -7 damage penalty (-4 for paragon tier, and a
> threshold of 3). This cannot lower damage below one-half the creature’s
> level after all resistances and vulnerabilities are applied. Weakness
> effects stack. Additional weaknesses applied increase the damage penalty
> by the creature’s threshold. For example, a level 23 creature with 3
> weakened conditions has a -21 damage penalty (-6 for epic tier plus 3 *
> -5 for threshold).
> Reason: Weakened is more of a problem for players at lower levels, but
> at epic level they give this one out like candy. The last campaign I
> played in (when fewer Dragon abuse powers were available), it was normal
> for all enemies to be weakened on every hit not on the defender on most
> rounds, and we covered them the rest of the rounds with other powers.
> Effectively a well built party at epic level, not particularly focused
> on power gaming, takes half damage the entire combat. This makes
> balancing difficult because if the enemies get lucky and avoid weakening
> for a round, they can drop half your party. Or you can make it so the
> party can go through 22 encounters with no extended rest (this happened
> in our first epic adventure).
>
> Changed power: Mantle of Unity - Effect ends prematurely if it prevents
> 3 hits. If Mantle of Unity would end during a power that attacks
> multiple targets, Mantle does not end prematurely until the power is
> resolved.

JohnLS:
It's fascinating to see the overlap/variation in game-breaking.  Beyond some low-level campaigns here, I'm in one epic campaign that ran through published modules through to the Death's Reach series (when I joined they were 6th level and now we're all 29th), and while it's been good fun to watch the party retrain (or adjust to all the game revisions over the years) into a well-coordinated destruction team, most of our fights have become boring because of the various brokenness on display.  We have a hybrid Paladin/Ranger with that multiclass Bard/Mantle of Unity, and since around 9th level we switched to trying to have as many encounters per day as we can... so now the group has one each of the four "add milestones to your X defense" items.  Add a second ranger and we have two characters at range who can use Disrupting Strike to grant penalties to hit.  Our Paladin/Ranger also has an item making his attacks psychic and uses the Psychic Lock feat to hand out -2 penalties, and both archers have Marking Arrows as well.

Either we never get hit, or one character gets dog-piled early in a fight.  The hard fights involve "half on a miss" monsters or terrain effects, almost exclusively.

Our cleric specializes in turning, dazing and granting vulnerability; the other defender has several stun attacks, while mine delivers crits and pushes and slows.

We never really saw a problem with weakened because we never really had the need to develop those powers.

I actually really like the way our GM ran one of the final combats: with a daze effect, you could choose to either remove the move or minor action from the target, while with stun you could remove one of standard, move or minor.  (I don't much see the need to make it a choice, of course.)

Locally, I found as a GM that it was always better to run monsters at or below PC levels and deploy more of them (including multiple elites or solos), because otherwise it's very easy for characters to be missing with encounter and daily powers and thus to get frustrated.  Sometimes I'd up the hit points a bit to give the monsters another turn or two before dying.  (I think the most successful single encounter involved two solo beholders in a constrained underground space.  They needed good tactics to survive.)

As with most of these systems, the real key is playing with people who are willing to NOT break the system if you ask them not to.  Another reason I can't imagine ever doing tournament play again.
David

I made another post outlining the changes I had made to the Divine Favor system from my earlier campaign. I also reiterated my long-running observation that the need to have players "not break the system" is a sign of poor system design and was easily avoidable in 4e.

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