Tabletops Blog

I wrote up a pretty good description of the last session yesterday, but since it was the first session writeup I had to set up a lot of backstory. Thus I didn’t really get a chance to go into much detail about the characters in my Eberron campaign, nor my players. So here’s a quick blurb about each character, as well as a simple profile of each player.

The player archetypes I mention are those described in the 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide, which has as good a list as any of player types. (Trying to fit people into neat little categories is always a pretty futile effort, as you’ll see, but the eight categories the DMG lists aren’t mutually exclusive.) In alphabetical order:

• Dexter, a changeling fey pact warlock, played by ‘Cort’. Telling Dexter’s backstory would really be telling tales about dozens of “people”–he is a consummate chameleon, and his true past remains a mystery. Dexter’s darker urges (the sort that eventually lead you to making a pact with powerful fey creatures) send him adventuring, and he has absolutely no qualms about killing anyone or anything that threatens him or his friends, but when things get rough he still usually picks the ‘heroic’ thing to do. Usually.
  (Player archetypes: Explorer, Power Gamer. Cort is fantastic at optimizing characters–Dexter had a +13 Bluff check at first level!– but he also enjoys discovering things about the world and being ‘Batman’ (he always has something up his sleeve.) Tends to play characters who are very good at ferreting out secrets, one way or another.)
• Guy, a human illusionist wizard, played by ‘Tucker’. Guy is a social pariah, due in equal measures to his aberrant dragonmark and his complete lack of social skills. He recently spent a few years with a clan of dragonborn in the Blackcap Mountains in northern Breland, where he met and befriended Torrin.
  (Player archetypes: Instigator, Thinker, Power Gamer. Tucker also loves making powerful characters, and for him it goes hand-in-hand with his Thinker attributes. He’s always looking for the most optimal choice at each opportunity for a decision (which is one reason he’s an excellent chess player, too.) However, he’ll happily leave that behind when the opportunity to do something presents itself (even if it’s not entirely in-character). Once he’s started something, though, he’ll often roleplay situations out rather than turn things into dice rolls. Really, he’s balanced perfectly between Instigator and Actor in that regard.)
• Koh’Rel, a warforged battlerager fighter, played by ‘Bobby’. Koh’Rel has given up the name his Cyran manufacturers gave him in favor of a Giantish name. He fought for Cyre in the Last War, escaping destruction only by virtue of being imprisoned in the Mror Holds and practically forgotten there. After his eventual release, he found himself without a country (and with some contempt for all Cyrans anyway); he trained briefly in a monastery but soon left to find a different destiny. He now seeks a way to Xen’drik, hopefully on a wide, straight road paved with dwarven corpses. He hopes to prove to himself that he has a soul before he gets there.
  (Player archetypes: Actor, Storyteller, Explorer. Bobby might be a better powergamer than even Cort–an engineer by trade, he’s constantly playing with numbers. But Bobby’s methods are different from most ‘munchkin’ powergamers: He tends to think of an interesting character, create a fascinating story and set of goals for that character, and then find ways for that character to have the best possible numbers that make sense for it. He also loves delving into the histories of Eberron (and worlds of his own devising), and acts out everything–he’s the only one of my players who describes every attack in fights.)
• Torrin, a dragonborn tempest fighter, played by ‘Noah’. For reasons unknown to all but himself, when Guy was eventually forced to leave the clan of dragonborn who had sheltered him, Torrin followed. Since then he has carefully kept Guy safe in some very dangerous places, usually without complaint. Quick and devastating in combat, he is otherwise reserved.
  (Player archetypes: Slayer, Watcher. Noah is actually pretty new to tabletop RPGs and is still coming out of his roleplaying shell. As a result, he tends to fall into the Watcher category in non-combat situations, although sitting back and thinking often gives him time to think “outside the box” and come up with interesting ideas. Combat is where he really shines as a player–he dives right into it with gusto.)
• Vance, a human artificer, played by ‘Don’. Vance is curious, fearless, always interrupting with questions and comments, and always willing to take things apart to see how they work. He’ll spend an entire day walking the streets of a town to find patterns in the tilework or to study its bridges, or incessantly asking a craftsman questions about his creations. He might be annoying (when not sicced on others), but he’s in many ways the moral compass of the group: No matter how wild he might’ve been acting a moment before, he’ll almost instantly drop everything to help someone, and the rest of the party follows without question. He’s an excellent alchemist too, though the party isn’t entirely comfortable with someone who acts like the world’s only half-gnome, half-kender alchemist.
  (Player archetypes: Actor, Instigator. In this game, Don dives head-first into his character and doesn’t come up for air, and is always finding something to do. This threw me for a loop at first, since in the game Don runs combat often comes first, but he’s apparently got very different styles as a player–in fact, he often seems to want to avoid combat.)

Sharp readers will notice that I’m simultaneously blessed and cursed with five players who between them cover all eight of the 4E DMG’s player archetypes. That’s been a pretty big challenge for me–it’s often difficult to find something that engages people with such different styles of gaming–but when it works the payoff is tremendous.  It also means that they tend to think in different ways, leading to several instances already where the players have gone in directions I never expected. (That’s even harder to do in my game than usual, since I run it online and have to have all my combat encounters mapped out ahead of time!)

The other interesting thing about my players is that they’re all math-and-science guys. Cort, Noah, Tucker and myself all work in the IT industry (not at the same company, for the record); Bobby is a civil engineer; and Don’s got a degree in physics, which he uses constantly (he works in a custom glasswork shop and is pretty much constantly doing calculations to make sure he’s turning out the best-quality work he can.) I’ve got actors and costume designers and librarians in the D&D game I play in; thus far I actually haven’t been able to pin down a lot of differences I can write about, though they’re definitely present. It’s a good contrast that helps work both sides of my brain.

At any rate, I hope this helps you flesh out subsequent “actual play” posts; I’ll henceforth be including a stubbed player/character matrix in each AP post to help newcomers keep things straight. The next session has been moved up to this Sunday, so more will be coming very soon!

I run a 4th Edition D&D campaign set in Eberron, usually every other Sunday. I’ll be documenting the campaign here as we go forward—not (just) to feed my own hubristic impulses, but to break down what did and didn’t work in each session, what I’ll try to do to improve things next session, and a few teasers about the next session (assuming I can accurately predict anything a group of players will end up doing!)

The (Very Incomplete) Backstory:

Currently, the PCs are working as a group in the small town of Nowhere in Breland. Nowhere is a town of about 2,000 people, about half of whom live and work in the House Orien enclave there: Nowhere is situated at the lightning rail junction south of Hatheril and south-west of Vathirond, and its entire economy is based around the cargoes and passengers that pass through the town. They’ve come back to Nowhere at the behest of its guard captain, one Kaius Romani, who presented them with a problem: The captain has been the victim of an unusual blackmail scheme for about a month. The anonymous blackmailer has not demanded money—rather, he or she has demanded that Nowhere’s guards be assigned to particular ‘beats’ in the town.

After a day of investigation, the party’s suspicions came to rest on one Kolmar Hamholm, a vicious-looking dwarf with a bad reputation in town, and his employer Simeon ir’Bettarn, a wealthy merchant with widespread investments and who employs Kolmar as his ‘factor’ in Nowhere. Additionally, with the help of Captain Romani the PCs have picked out several guards whom they believe might be particularly susceptible to bribery or blackmail themselves, and who might be the reason the blackmailer wanted the guards moved about. Most of those guards patrol the southern section of Nowhere, colloquially called “Trackside”.

We pick up our story at dusk, as the party troops back to “The Blue Bull” (where their rooms in town are)…

Play Summary:

When the party arrives back at “The Blue Bull”, they find a distraught woman waiting for them. After the party agrees to a private audience with her, she introduces herself as Sariah Fatwick (third cousin to one of the guards the party attempted to interrogate.) Her problem is simple: Sariah believes that her husband, Himil Fatwick, is possessed. His behavior had been bizarre for two weeks prior, but the previous day he simply went to work and never came back. Being unable to convince the city watch that his disappearance is of any concern—their marriage is notorious for vehement arguments, and Himil had once previously abandoned her for another woman for a full week—she came to the PCs in the hope that they could find Himil.

The PCs quickly learn from Sariah that her husband works for Kolmar Hamholm (alarm bells started ringing in my players’ heads at this point, I think) as a porter, hauling goods between the lightning rail and a warehouse in Trackside. They also learn that her husband has been acting as if he were sleepwalking or dreaming, coming home later and later each evening, and in his stupor occasionally muttered something about a “new opportunity” that would “make them rich”. Two of the PCs—the warforged Koh’Rel and the changeling Dexter (in the guise of a rather plain human)—escort her home while the rest of the party makes plans. (“We’re here to ask a dwarf about a man.”)

To confirm their suspicions, they decide to surreptitiously question another guard who patrols Trackside, one Jasin Shackler. Shackler is a notorious womanizer and braggart, so Dexter shapeshifted into the form of a comely woman, tracked down Shackler, and let him buy her drinks and brag at her. None of his boasts were of much consequence, but Dexter did quickly notice that despite spending a month patrolling that section of town, he had no tales of Gryphon Street, the longest street in Trackside.

After returning to the rest of the party and turning back into a man, Dexter led the party into Trackside. They carefully watched Gryphon Street for over two hours, and determined that the night watch also carefully avoided a particular stretch of the road. The party split up at this point—Dexter, Koh’Rel and Guy (a human wizard) interrogated the night watch while Torrin, a dragonborn fighter, and Vance, a human artificer, took a closer look at the warehouse. Torrin helped Vance climb up the rough wall of the warehouse and peer through a window high up on the wall; from there, Vance noticed a very heavy contingent of guards inside—at least three for this single warehouse. After clambering back down (and managing to go up and down the wall quietly) Torrin and Vance went back for the other three.

Those three badgered and threatened the pair of night watchmen until they gave in and admitted that Kolmar Hamholm had asked them to avoid patrolling near the warehouse; one was being paid, and the other’s gambling debts were being held over him to elicit cooperation. After further recriminations and a warning that if their story didn’t check out they’d almost certainly be fired from their posts, they were sent scurrying off to finish their patrol.

At this point, the party quickly prepared for a fight. The warehouse had three locked doors (aside from a massive and barred pair of cargo doors), so the PCs split up: Vance unlocked the southern door and quietly slipped inside with Guy as Koh’Rel kicked in the northern door and Torrin kicked in the eastern one (Dexter followed Torrin inside.) The guards were surprised, and despite their moderate skill—and the assistance of a trained pair of guard drakes—they were quickly overcome. The last guard was more than willing to talk to save his own hide, and pointed the party to a hidden trapdoor under some crates. That trapdoor opened into a stone-lined tunnel that leads off into darkness…

Read it all..

UPDATE: Because I’m incredibly bad at updating this blog, WotC’s PHB3 preview of the Monk class has long since come and gone. I’m going to leave this to them and find other stuff to write about. Warmup for NaNoWriMo, after all.

It now appears that Wizards of the Coast’s upcoming Players Handbook II will not include the monk class, at some had hoped. A shame – the Third Edition monk had a lot of flaws, but it had style, and if Wizards of the Coast hadn’t shamelessly ignored the class in most of its expansion releases it could have turned out very nicely. I was really looking forward to seeing it in Fourth Edition – the Book of Nine Swords‘ Swordsage class now feels like an early look at the 4E monk and its ki power source, and I loved the Tome of Battle.

The PHB II appears to be focusing on the “primal” power source – the Warden and Sorcerer classes make that clear. (As written, by the way, the Warden will be ridiculously powerful if it’s not subject to a massive overhaul before publication.) This may not be a bad thing. WotC has promised that base classes won’t be presented outside of its Players Handbook series, and so I would love to see them start publishing “themed” Players Handbooks.

Specifically, I dream about an Oriental-themed set of classes, spells, feats, etc.. Just thinking of the 3.5E classes WotC officially released, such a book could contain:

• Monk (controller or striker depending on interpretation)
• Samurai (defender or leader)
• Ninja (striker)
• Wu Jen (controller)
• Shugenja (leader or controller)

Each of these classes, except perhaps the Samurai, could easily use the “ki” power source. The problem, of course, is that base classes require a complete set of powers, paragon paths, epic destinies, and equipment. That’s tough, and it’s tough for players and GMs to come up with homebrew solutions. (The monk’s gotten a lot of love in this regard; I’ll be collecting various homebrew takes on the 4E monk sometime in the near future for everyone to peruse.)

Still, the 4E rules present us with a way around this dilemma: Paragon paths.

If you think about it, with the exception of the monk each of the above classes is a sort of D&D specialist. A ninja is a rogue with a mastery of infiltration techniques. A wu jen is an elementally-focused spellcaster (wizard or, when it comes out, perhaps a sorcerer.) A shugenja is similar, except that she uses divine spellcasting. A samurai is a selfless fighter specializing in particular weapons. This is fertile ground for the mechanics and flavor of paragon paths.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be developing these paragon paths further, trying to come up with workable versions for use in your games (and mine.) If anyone knows of existing versions of these classes for Fourth Edition, however, I’d love to see them!

The Gamer Dome – a solid website whose name always brings Master Blaster to mind – has pointed out a fascinating variation on minions for Fourth Edition D&D games. The gist of it: Minions have a minimum number of hits to drop that’s usually above one (depending on level) unless they’re hit for a certain, increasing amount of damage.

Personally, I quite like the idea. The suggested thresholds could be tweaked a bit, but they have the convenience of following an extremely simple formula: Number of hits is 1/3 the minion’s level, and the “killing blow” threshold is twice the minion’s level. Like the Dome I quibble a bit with the numbers – four hits seems like too much for any minion, since the whole point is for them to be a sort of ablative armor for more serious threats. (The word “minion”, in the parlance of most villains, means a disposable tool and meatshield.) It’d be a little more work, but 1d3 hits per minion seems like a good way to keep players from expecting minions to go down too easily, and to be pleasantly surprised when they do.

Of course, minions also have higher defenses than standard monsters, so in a peculiar way this might make minions too tough… Thoughts?

At Will linked to a delightful tool I’ve not seen before: Playwrite’s Fourth Edition Power Creator. It’s still an early beta (the link points to v0.3), but it already looks like a tool I’ll be using a lot. One caveat: It’s a .NET application, so Mac and Linux users are probably out of luck.

One of the complaints I’ve heard a lot from my friends who don’t like Fourth Edition D&D very much has to do with magic and improvisation.

In Third Edition (and certainly prior to 3E) classes like the wizard and cleric could have a tremendous variety of spells prepared. While there were certain obvious uses for every spell, clever and inventive players could often find unexpected ways to make those spells effective in an emergency – arcane lock to keep guards in their guardroom during an escape, and so forth. Likewise, some spells were so incredibly versatile – Wall of Stone and Silent Image come to mind – that their uses were only limited by the player’s imagination.

Fourth Edition explicitly did away with this sort of on-the-fly use of powerful spells, and that’s one of its bigger deficits. While wizards no longer need to prepare certain spells, the trade-off of Ritual Casting is that those ritual spells are usually too slow to cast in combat. (The aforementioned arcane lock spell now takes ten minutes to cast!) While I can certainly understand WotC’s developers wanting to bring the power level of the Third Edition wizard back down to earth, in this case I think they went just a little too far.

So how to let players of ritual casters improvise with rituals – essentially turning them into utility powers – without handing the game back to spellcasters after all of the WotC R&D team’s hard work?

Prepared Ritual (Heroic tier feat)

Prerequisites: Ritual Casting

Benefit: A single known ritual with a casting time no greater than 10 minutes may be prepared in advance during a full rest. The standard cost of this ritual must be paid for when prepared, and all necessary foci must be present during the preparation and when it is cast; likewise, the requisite skill check must succeed for the ritual to be prepared successfully. The prepared ritual may be changed during a full rest if not spent, but the cost of the new ritual must be paid in full.
The prepared ritual may be cast once thereafter with a single standard action. All other variables, including range, targets, area, etc.. Treat this as a daily utility power.
At 11th level, you may prepare a ritual in this manner with a casting time of no greater than 30 minutes; and at 21st level, you may prepare a ritual with a casting time of no greater than one hour.
This feat may be taken more than once, allowing you to prepare a number of rituals ahead of time for each instance of this feat.

What do you think? This seems to strike a good balance; I might also require that you be trained in the skill tied to the appropriate ritual, but that seems unnecessary as most ritual casters would have that anyway.

UPDATE: What I get for working from memory: The casting time intervals are 10, 30 and 60 minutes. Thanks, Cort, for catching that – I’ve fixed it in the original post above.