To review, I’ve entered the following books into my little database: PHB, FR PHB, Martial Power, and PHB2. I haven’t added any builds or content from Dungeon or Dragon, including the Artificer. I haven’t added the Dark Pact warlock, but I probably should.

Well, now! The long-tooth shifter seems to have cornered the market on the highest number of viable classes and builds. That’s in part because Strength remains king; the half-orc, goliath, and long-tooth are all within the top five most viable races, in no small part because PHB2 adds more Strength-based classes. What’s interesting is that now Wisdom narrowly beats Charisma as the second most valuable attribute.

Wisdom’s increased prominence means the dwarf has picked up three top tier classes and a bucketful of new builds due to Constitution appearing in a few classes. I still find it more than a little amusing that a dwarf is a viable bard, of all things. (It’s not that I can’t see the thematic possibilities— it’s that prior to 4e, it would’ve been a ridiculous, awful choice for a bunch of reasons.) What I find more amusing is the prospect of a goliath bard, a 7’5″ bard made of rocks. Think on that!

Speaking of the bard, half-elves now have a bard build as a top-tier choice! Eladrin still only have one, though, and dragonborn picked up two more top-tier builds, bringing them up to six (with the caveat that three of those are warlord builds).

Another thing I notice is that new classes are, at worst, on par with many of the races from PHB1 in terms of the sheer number of options. On average, PHB2 races have ~3.3 top tier builds, whereas PHB1 classes have more like ~2.8.  They have ~35 viable builds on average, compared to ~28 for PHB1 classes. I’m not going to read a whole lot into this, but it is vaguely interesting.

Again with the context

As I said in my previous post, this is based on a fairly simplistic analysis of what’s viable and what’s not. Some classes have racial abilities that complement classes nicely, whereas others are a poor choice for other reasons.

To wit, a dwarf avenger with an Execution Axe and Dwarven Weapon Training is quite terrifying. With 18 Wisdom, he’s rolling at least 9 damage on every attack! He’s also less mobile. And, since avengers start with Cloth only, it’ll cost feats to take advantage of dwarves’ “Speed 5 with heavy armor” schtick. It’s a tradeoff, in other words.

The other thing is that suboptimal builds have some recourse as of PHB2— now you can shore up your slightly lower to-hit with feats like Weapon or Implement Mastery. Of course optimal builds can take those, too, but that’s potentially at the cost of a feat that’s more interesting or relevant.

You’re a what now?

In the end, I like doing this analysis not in order to find the most optimal builds, but rather to find those that are unexpectedly viable and thus offer interesting ways to depart from the norm. The half-elf barbarian, goliath bard, half-orc cleric, and tiefling shaman are each combinations that are (by the above standard) viable as well as delightfully off the beaten path. I might have missed them if I hadn’t written this tool. Depending on whether or not I find time to polish my little app, I might be able to make it available, with this purpose chiefly in mind.

Thanks for reading!

See, I didn’t want to print all those character sheets out. Having all four characters on a computer would save ink, paper, and time spent fiddling with papers. But I don’t have a Windows laptop. I have a MacBook, and I replaced Windows with Ubuntu Linux on my ~4 year old Toshiba because it ran like moleasses (no sense in wasting an otherwise viable machine).  The rub? The D&D Character Builder doesn’t offer PDF exporting!

I don’t know whether this was by design or not but fortunately there’s a workaround: if a program lets you print, chances are you can save to PDF. There are various paid tools out there— I believe this functionality comes with Acrobat Pro— but of course there’s are free alternatives. PDFCreator is what I used.

Brief HowTo

Download and install PDFCreator.

Open an existing character or create a character in the Character Builder. Click Character Sheet.

Go to File > Print, and select PDFCreator instead of your usual printer. It’ll prompt you to provide some metadata for your PDF, like author and so on. Change it if you want, or leave it alone.

Click Save, which will prompt you to save your file someplace.

To survey your handiwork, open the file you just created in your favorite PDF viewer. (I recommend FoxIt Reader due to its speed and non-bloatedness.)

Bonus tip

I don’t know whether it was something with my network configuration, but I had a heck of a time getting the .NET 3.5 runtime installed at one point. smallestdotnet didn’t help. The installer linked off of the Character Builder page would error out after spending about ~10 minutes trying to download the installation data. There was no bleeding way I was going to download the 235mb (!) .NET installer.

In the end, going through Windows Update to install .NET 3.5 worked, so try Windows Update if you’re  having trouble.I would add one caveat, which is that that while Windows has been my primary OS for a while (I’m trying to remedy this), I’m no guru.

It’s also special in part because no Er-Eret tonight. It’s going to be a weeknight next week! It has to be. I’m determined. And I’m more than a little tempted to bring this to a close post-haste.

Anyway, I’ve only had a chance to skim PHB2 as of this writing. Even though my assessment is half-baked, I do have one or two impressions which are even more half-assed and ill-thought-out than usual!

Classes

Compared to previous editions, the barbarian is seems more meaty than dodgy: Strength is primary, and from there it’s Charisma or Constitution, leaving little room for improving AC via Intelligence or Dexterity. Picking up heavier armor is an interesting tradeoff— you’re spending a feat to forfeit +1 Reflex and 1 Speed in exchange for +2 AC.

Can we talk about dwarves? As I mentioned in a previous post, dwarves have a lot to gain from PHB2. There are tons of races that have Constitution, Wisdom, or both. In the top tier, we have druid, invoker, and shaman. All but a couple of classes have one or the other: avenger, barbarian, bard (!!!), and warden. For those of you counting, that’s seven out of eight of the classes in PHB2. 

If you were looking for more evidence of how much of a departure 4e is from 3.x, you have only to look at the half-orc: two physical traits up, Strength and Dex. 

I guess I have no excuse not to play a gnome bard. This time around, though, it’ll be far more interesting. No more goddamn talking to goddamn burrowing animals. And the bard? I could honestly see myself playing it, at least from a mechanical perspective. It’s viable as all get out and I want in on that shit. 

Shamans get a lot of at-wills to choose from. Six! This is on top of a couple of other at-wills. This is one class that took some flak over at Critical Hits. After browsing the level 1 abilities, it’s hard for me to see what the fuss is about. They seem as solid as any warlord, and if I’m in the mood to play a leader, they’d most certainly be in the running.

Someone pointed out that PHB2 classes a lot going on, and that seems pretty accurate. Barbarians have rage; sorcerers have their quirks; wardens shapeshift after a fashion, and druids more so. I’d say they’re definitely more mechanically ambitious than PHB1 classes at first glance. This is something worth discussing more in a separate post, so I’ll stop there.

Races

I have to say that demi-humans are the hardest part of D&D for me to get excited about. At the risk of repeating myself, my “ideal” fantasy game would be all human, but with similar mechanical benefits due to background. That said, there’re one or two bits that are interesting.

Deva make a great control wizard. In particular, imagine one at level 5— Cloud of Daggers or Thunderwave operating at 5 squares? -5 to enemy saves? Intriguing.

The rest Goliaths are sick barbarians, half-orcs are asshole brutal rogues, and gnomes can make for some pretty nasty fae-pact warlocks (COINCIDENCE? YOU DECIDE). It’s fairly standard, though one interesting bit is that a great number of these races are quite viable when it comes to PHB1.

Maybe the only complaint I’d voice about races is the proliferation of top tier race/class combinations. The math is transparent enough that you can adjust difficulty quite easily, whether or not the game assumes these highly optimized classes. Still, it makes me sad that, for example, the eladrin are still a ways behind the other races in terms of top tier class options. 

I’ll have more data on races later, once I’ve updated my data to include these new races and classes.

kthxbai

Aaaand on that note I’m going to adjourn. Expect more commentary in a later post.

Yax is stirring the pot! 

Is 4E the deadliest D&D?

Shit, isn’t one of people’s biggest complaints about D&D 4th Edition that it’s too hard to kill players? I don’t pretend to understand but these people really miss things like save-or-die effects or ridiculous crits, I guess.

That’s all right, though. I will happily indulge Yax, and I’ll even try to be constructive about it.

heals plz

Any character in 4e who rests for 8 hours recovers all of his hit points. Any character in 2nd Edition who rests for the night recovers a single hit point. A 3rd level character in 3.5 recovers three.

In 4th Edition, a cleric with 18 in his primary can heal a quarter of a character’s hit points, at a minimum, twice per encounter. In practice, it’s closer to half or more, and more than once per encounter due to things like Healing Strike and Beacon of Hope.

Clerics in 2nd Edition can heal somewhere a few d8 per day. It’s a bit better for clerics in 3rd Edition, but this has its own problems (i.e., cleric as heal-bot).

Woe betide thee, child, for thou hast rolled a 1.

A 3rd level fighter in 4th Edition will have, at a minimum, 35 hit points. In 2nd edition, a fighter will have a minimum of 3 hit points. In 3.5e, a 3rd level fighter who rolled a lousy Con score could have as few as 11 hit points.

We can take stats out of the picture: assume that the fighter has something reasonable for Con, like 16. The 4th Edition character has 43 hit points. The 3rd Edition character has anywhere from 21 to 39. 

How can you balance monsters and traps with that kind of spread? Easy: you don’t. The guys who have the misfortune of rolling 1s and 2s just die a lot.

Expectations, my man! 

All right, so maybe Yax doesn’t really believe that 4th Edition is the most deadly. What he describes sounds like the DM spring too much complexity on the players all at once. The players were used to straightforward encounters until then, so when the DM changed it up, the players weren’t ready for it.

If you want to add new tactical concepts, you do it gradually, in small chunks. This is different from a “tutorial” quest in that you don’t hit players over the head with it. Think less along the lines of a traditional video game tutorial and more like Half-Life 2 or Portal: the players should learn new concepts by doing.

For example, if you want to introduce them to difficult terrain, construct an easy combat with difficult terrain as a minor element. Think out loud so the PCs can see how the terrain impacts’ monsters decisions. Point out situations where they can use it to their advantage.

Also, don’t let them forget about their abilities! If the elf keeps forgetting he can shift into difficult terrain, remind him. If they’re just double moving to get into melee, remind them that they move and charge. This can also get them across difficult terrain or simply a big battlefield. If night is falling, ask them why they’re hoarding their daily powers. Point out where they can set up a particularly effective flank, or where an Icy Terrain spell might make a big difference.

Of course, this assumes that the players really are interested in the same kind of gameplay you’re offering. Maybe they’re not, which means you have a bigger problem: you want a game with some amount of teamwork and tactics, and perhaps they just want to show up and kill things.

Wraith was a bit odd among World of Darkness games. While you could make the case that the likes of Vampire, Werewolf, or Mage conferred on PCs a fair amount of power over their destiny, a cursory reading of Wraith led me to the opposite conclusion. It struck me very much as a roleplayer’s game, a game for folks who really enjoyed character-driven narrative. It was one of those games that I guessed would require really good role-players to work well, but if you could pull it off, it would be amazing.

Just like I imply, though, I never actually got to play Wraith. It’s also been a while since I’ve read it, so I could be wrong about all of that. Still, it’s interesting to think back on where Wraith was coming from and where Geist might go. Harrows were pretty important in Wraith, and my gut tells me that maybe there’s an analogous theme, here. Perhaps a sin-eater creates something analogous to these sorts of shadow plays for people, either guiding them through it or destroying them in the process.

The list of White Wolf books on my shelf reminds me that I really should be doing more role-playing. I’m working on that in the short term— this weekend, we should be playing either the ultimate or penultimate chapter in Er-Eret. (More on that in a moment.) There’s also a whole host of games on my shelf which I have not run or played. Maybe it’s time to change that by breaking games down to be shorter, one or two session affairs. Or maybe I should start a new post.

The PCs are in a spot I’m none too happy about. My inspiration is failing and I feel a bit trapped; that’s as good an explanation I can offer for the weeks of silence on this blog, honestly. So, rather than dragging this out further and try to salvage it, we’re going to end it in the next session or two. Quite simply, there comes a time when I’ve gotta lance the boil and cut straight to rapid exposition and a couple of battles.

I’m pretty sure at least one of my players reads this, so I’m not going to go into details. But I did leave myself this out; this was my original plan, and everything else was a wrinkle or variation on this.

If I may be premature about this game, particularly in the context of my performance, I’d say it was a mixed bag. The first couple of sessions were reasonably good, I’d say. Maybe the second one is one of the best sessions I’ve run. From there, it got harder, chiefly because I didn’t know how to structure a D&D game in order to make it interesting. Some of that was self-inflicted doubt; rather than focus on what I thought would be good, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I should be doing, if that distinction makes any sense. I had ideas but I didn’t execute most of them because I didn’t know how to introduce them.

I think perhaps one of my biggest mistakes with Er-Eret was to send the PCs on their way too soon. The timeline could’ve been slowed down, such that a second or third attack was necessary to bring the place to its knees. Alternatively, forcing the PCs to attack more than once, allowing more evidence to mount or giving them a better idea of where they’re headed, might’ve been a smarter move and provided more engaging play. As it stands now, it was “go from point A to point B and have some fights on the way.” That’s OK as far as it goes, but I wanted more.

As far as my level of confidence with D&D is concerned, I’m still not there. The next game that I run will probably be scaled back somewhat in terms of ambition— I’ll start with what I’m most familiar with, which is character interaction (as opposed to dungeon design, traveling, exploration, and the like), translate that into D&D, and take it from there.  I’ll have a more solid plan for getting PCs together, a tighter arc, and then we can decide after one or two sessions if we want to keep playing these characters or what

Because yes, even though the corpse of my old game isn’t even cold, I’m already thinking about my next game. I’m leaning heavily towards a game consisting of PCs with a divine power source only. I may have to stretch that a bit, since I believe there are only four (i.e., cleric, paladin, invoker, avenger). The characters would, in theory, be affiliated with the same or similar religious organizations, and could act in some professional capacity. An inquisition-style dynamic would let them perform investigations, fight, and politick to their hearts’ content. It might also give them opportunities to do some dungeon crawling.

That’s all for now, blog. You see, while I’ve designed the last couple of bits, I haven’t committed much fluff to paper. I’ve also got to nail down the details for the last encounter, since this session could actually end up being fairly quick.