Playtest 3

Some more play test images from the most recent session:


This is some of my pre-session prep. I needed to introduce a new character so I modified the Smoke and Shadow encounter. Instead of creatures just bursting from a lava rift, I had the new character on the other side of the rift fighting npcs. I switched back and forth between the combat and the skill challenge and at the right point the lava plane (shown above) dumped into the Shadowfell....right on top of the rest of the party. The map shown here is actually part of Orcus's Lair from E3.

Anyhow, this shows the automatic effect creation when NPCs are dropped on the tracker. Effects are a huge part of 2.0. The actual processing of effects during combat is really the easier half of the problem. Parsing effects off NPC sheets/PC powers is where the real challenge was. Moon_wizard did in awesome job in making it all work. As someone who's spent a fair amount of time attempting to convert WOTC's data to a different format, I know just how daunting a task like this is.

An early round of the "Training Session" encounter. Not much is going on in this screenshot, other than me dropping an effect on Khem that doesn't belong and them him accidentially holding ctrl while picking up damage dice. That's what happens when the session runs late. Really I took this image more for the adventure log I keep on our obsidian portal page....oh well.

Siege at Bordrin's Watch

In other news my group finished Siege of Bordrin's Watch last night with a magnificent 20 round encounter. I had read about the final encounter on WOTC's community pages. Some groups claiming it went 40 rounds and hundreds of minions were killed. I'm not exactly sure why a DM would let it run that long, but 20 rounds was definitely a lot of fun.

I run with only 4 players so I had to adjust the encounter on the fly, using different waves to tailor the difficulty to keep my PCs challenged, but just barely keeping them from being overwhelmed. I think I managed to hit the difficulty just about right. With the exception of the ranger who killed minions by the dozen, everyone was at the very least bloodied and most of them had been one lucky hit away from making death saves at some point in the encounter. I probably should have thrown a bit more ranged damage at the ranger just to challenge him a little.

Since I knew it would be a long encounter and since numbers heavy encounters (i.e. ones featuring lots of weak npcs) are rough on an undersized group, I used the idea from the DMG 2 on Long Fights. I planned for one of two events to be a "turning point" in the battle. When the PCs completed the mini-skill challenge or when the PCs defeated the enemy leader they would be offered the choice of one of the following:

1) Regain 1 healing surge
2) Regain use of Second Wind
3) Gain an Action Point and be able to spend it, even if they had spent an AP this encounter
4) Regain use of an expended Encounter power

The party managed to kill the leader before doing the skill challenge, so that became the turning point. No one picked option 2, but every other choice was taken. Giving them that little extra boost of power really did turn the battle in their favor (although just barely). I'm not sure if the DMG 2 included the idea to let the player's pick or if that was something I thought up, but I feel it was key to making this idea work. There was really no single benefit from the list above that would have fit everyone.

It's not hard to see why many people rate Bordrin's Watch among the best adventures in the heroic tier. It borrows a lot from the LotR movies, is well paced, and unlike Rescue at Rivenroar has a final encounter that actually has that epic end of the movie feel to it. Definitely thumbs up for Siege of Bordrin's Watch and the DMG 2.

For those of you who are really interested, I'll do a write up with quotes, pictures, etc over on the groups Obsidian Portal adventure log .

2.0 in action

My scales of war campaign continues as a test bed for 2.0. You can see some of the messages in chat, along with an error report, and the crazy movement paths that are common for Reggie.

Another 2.0 screenshot

All my reskinning is pretty, but the real 2.0 changes were done by moon_wizard, deep in the bowels of the effects system. You can see some of the effects on my CT as this fight slowly ground to a halt. I bet my players were quite sick of hearing "A skeleton rises!"



You can find a more story based summary of the night's events here The memorable moments will be loaded when I'm finished cutting up the chatlog.

2.0 testing

My Scales of War group got to play beta tester for the v2.0 ruleset this week. Everything seemed to work pretty well. There were a few minor issues that I noted and need to confirm as bugs. Nothing that stopped us from playing. If you're really interested you can read all about the session here. But it's mostly story and quotes, not anything terribly useful.

So I took a screenshot as one of the encounters was ending. From the chat/CT you can effects being applied and removed. As moon_wizard previously posted, effects have a lot more functionality in 2.0 I'll leave the details to him, but I will say they make both the DM and the Player's life easier.

Note that the right hand icons and the center desktop image (obscured) are part of an extension I made, they aren't part of the ruleset itself. They are based off DevinNight's original DND reskin (I never got the version with the encounter icon..doh!) and an image Zeph sent me. You can find Devin's Reskin in a thread buried deep the FUM group. I actually made an extension containing his entire reskin and sent it on for him to distribute if he wanted. Everything else appears as it does in the ruleset

(I split the image into 3 parts for better display)

Ten Scales (Scales of War) screens

I've been working on a 4E project which I'm pretty excited about. It should be a nice ease of use upgrade for players and GMs alike. Unfortunately right now it's just a pile of .NET code and XML. I'll post screen shots of it once it's usable in FGII.

In the meantime here are some screen shots from last night's session. More details can be found at the Obsidian Portal site for our campaign, once I get to updating it.

Updates

In "Parsing of War" I mentioned I was going to be doing some DMing. I've run two sessions worth of the first Scales of War adventure (I've actually parsed the entire second adventure). You can follow my group's progress over on our Obsidian Portal site. It's mostly just background information I took from the Scales of War player's guide, and the adventure summaries. Maybe some time I'll get around to adding more content.

In other news, I "finished" the MM2 tonight. I'm sure there are still some data errors but I've got everything parsing correctly. I had to make some minor changes to handle the multiskill lore entries (Dungoneering or Nature DC 15:) and the new multi-icon powers. Well they aren't new but I think there were only 2 of them in the original MM. The MM2 has one NPC with 2 different multi-icon powers. Mutli-icons required some ruleset work and even me mauling some graphics. Hopefully we'll get something better in place for the final version:


As usual, I ended up doing more than I needed. I added all the stats, graphics, and fluff for the MM NPCs that were mentioned in MM2 encounters.

A halfling, a dwarf, an Elf, a Tiefling, an Eladrin, and a Dragonborn walk into a mysterious mountain maze....

And here is my Thursday group in action. We had a lot of token related crashes this week. I'm not really sure how to fix them, but man are they annoying. I don't think it's 4E specific but I've never played anything else so it might be. Oddly the bug seems to affect certain clients more than others.

Anyhow many dark dwarves were slain and none of the party ended up dead....yet. You never know when a puppy may appear and kill Breen with an OA.

One of my favorite things to do in my Thursday game is to name other player's weapons when they miss a session, or if I have to sub them for an encounter. Baelas the Elf ranger missed a session and he ended up with a bow named "Summer's Breeze" and 2 magic swords named "Dewdrop" and "Periwinkle". This week I got Dueraim the dwarf warrior. His magic waraxe +1 was christened "Beardtrimmer!" I eagerly await the chance to rename one of the caster's wands.....

Not my regular Tuesday....

Usually on Tuesday I get to drive my enemies before me and crush them with my awesome dwarven barbarian Hafgrim (okay he's been rolling like crap recently but I can dream!). However, this week the legendary Xorne (aka Jason) was swamped at work or something unimportant so he called off the session.

Well I have a new version of the ruleset that is in final testing (i.e. no one is adding new stuff until this version gets released). I've been itching to see how it actually performs so I did something I never do, and moved behind the DM screen for a session.

Now I'm good at a lot of things, but adventure design isn't something I've done a lot of. So I decided to take the easy way out and run one of the Lairs from Open Grave. Battlefield Downs in fact. Everyone made new characters/versions of their current characters that were the right level and we had Eric (my Thursday night DM) and Jake (who was supposed to be observing Xorn's GMing but instead suffered through mine!) round out the party. So 5 level 6 adventurer's stomped into a two encounter lair designed for 5 level 7 adventurers (what, they like a challenge!).

Unfortunately the ruleset did a few "strange" things that I need to look at. It's always possible my own GM ineptitude was the cause of some of the difficulty. The group struggled through (even with really bad rolls) and many undead were slain...and then slain again when they got back up.

I did manage to snap a screen shot of the fight in progress. It really doesn't show off much in the way of new features. The chat box contains a few effect drop messages and you can see the effect and modifier windows towards the middle of my desk top.

The Lair from Open Grave (and I assume the ones from Dragonomicon: Chromatic Dragons) worked pretty well. With minimal prep time (around 2 hours) I was able to throw something together that was playable. If I had more experience as a DM it probably would have been even better. That gives me a lot of hope for the Dungeon Delve book (which was unfortunately delayed).

I hope to get the ruleset issues ironed out today. Maybe even play again tonight, definitely on Thursday.

Bring on the subs....

It's been ages since I posted anything about actually playing 4E. Truth is I'm now involved in two weekly games which are pretty regular. I'd say in the average month I get to play 7 times...so all is good.

My original Tuesday group folded after H1, and eventually I joined up with the legendary Xorne's group. The game moved around a bit but eventually settled on Saturday evening. There have been a lot of character substitutions (no one from H1 is still with the party). In a way that gives us a leg up because we got to generate new characters with our knowledge from H1 and full access to items/feats/powers from DDI/Martial Power/AV/etc. And we need it, as this group only runs 4 characters at the moment. So the intrepid Fighter, Ranger, Warlord and Barbarian completed cutting a swath through Horned Hold last night. No one died, but a lot of healing surges were expended. Looking at our modified "Surges Remaining" tracker was pretty grim. The fighter had 4 or 5, the warlord had 0, and my barbarian had 1. Of course the ranger had like 30 or something...but who counts on a ranger?
The final "boss" fight wasn't looking too good for our team. My barbarian in particular couldn't roll over a 6. And then in 1 round it changed. I managed to kill a druegar after missing him for 3 rounds in a row (with combat advantage) and using swift charge I scored a dreaded critical hit on the boss. Not to be outdone, everyone else started scoring critical hits and the boss went from "Hahah you weak mortals can't hurt me!" to "This cannot be! I must escape to fight another day!".

I'll try and post something about my Thursday group as well. They are probably 4-6 sessions behind my Tuesday group.

Actually playing...

Tuesday night is my game night, we've been slogging through H1- Keep on the Shadowfell for a while now, the party is a mix of level 2-3 and up until last week, I thought everything was going well.

A while back I took over a rogue named Thelgar the Bloody. I thought the name was just a bit overly dramatic. It turns out, it wasn't. The party had given Thelgar the nickname after several encounters went bad and he was constantly Bloodied. I had a few close calls with Thelgar myself but I shrugged them off to a bad stealth roll that put me in the middle of more skeletons than I could count.

Well last week, Thelgar died. In the first round of an encounter he nearly killed some sort of hobgoblin caster. Unfortunately the caster returned the favor with some AE. The rest of the fight didn't go much better as the party ended up split and just keeping the tanks alive was straining our healing... in the end....
Last night we get ambushed following a short rest. It turns out our old ally/enemy Splug the goblin is back. Apparently he harbors some sort of revenge complex for Valbin, my wizard. During the course of the fight another goblin caster threw and ae that blasted the party about. Valbin used his Shield power to stay up. As an unfortunate side effect all the people between Valbin and the ranged goblins were blow out of the way. A few arrows later, Valbin was on the ground.

Enter Splug he does a run by spear chuck thing and rolls a 20. Valbin goes negative bloodied (hell he goes negative his max hps). And so....Fortunately everyone else survived and Splug didn't make it out of the encounter alive. Afterwards the party decided to go back to Winterhaven and raise the dead. There was a brief incident with some undead uprising in the local graveyard. However the four party members I hadn't managed to kill, mopped them up without any difficulty.