The WordPress dashboard tells me that yesterday, someone came to this blog as a result of a Google search for “blood spatter.”
Awesome.
The WordPress dashboard tells me that yesterday, someone came to this blog as a result of a Google search for “blood spatter.”
Awesome.
The 4e classes that use Power Points intrigue me. I’ve always been a toolbox player and they offer a special kind of flexibility. I briefly played one in an ill-conceived game run by a friend of a friend and I currently play one in the Thursday game. The class is very strong, but building one can be kind of tricky.
Basic Feel: When I first looked at the Battlemind, I was struck by two things: the potency of its mark and how awkward the name is. It sounds like something from the worst live-action superhero movie ever. I also had some trouble wrapping my brain around the idea of a psionic defender. When I try to imagine a guy with a sword and mind powers, I immediately think Jedi and those guys are strikers, through and through.
Roleplaying the attack and boost stats for a Battlemind is a little confusing as well. From the class description, I expected to be looking at Charisma or Intelligence (though that overlaps a little too strongly with the Swordmage). It’s easy for me to see how an Infernal Warlock could use Constitution as an attack stat. They’re channeling otherworldly powers and the roll is to determine if they can handle the energies coursing through them. The Battlemind doesn’t do anything like this, though, making it hard to explain exactly how they work.
In play, the Battlemind most resembles the Swordmage. Both are defender classes with a strong background in controller. The Battlemind lacks the Fighter’s damage potential and the Paladin’s self-heals. The Character Builder claims that the Charisma build is more like a striker, but I’ve not been impressed with it. My experience is that Charisma is used most often with pulls and pushes, while Wisdom covers direct boosts to the Battlemind.
Races: You have a number of excellent options here, but we should start with the Dwarf, because it has excellent synergy with the class. To begin with, every defender drools at the opportunity to use Second Wind as a minor action. Tank with it for a while and it becomes really, really hard to give it up. Battleminds also have access to a decent number of shifts, teleports and speed increases, which means that you can have your grumpy Dwarf pinballing around the battlefield.
After the Dwarf, both the Wilden and the Half-Elf have reasons to recommend them. A Wilden who chooses Pursuit of the Hunter has a strong edge in staying on its mark. Half-Elves can be either flavor of Battlemind. Charisma and Wisdom are attack stats for a large number of classes, so you’ll have all sorts of interesting options if you choose Dilettante over Knack for Success. They’re also both races that aren’t commonly chosen as defenders, which can make for a refreshing change.
Human is actually a fairly poor choice here because the bonus at-will cannot be boosted.
The Character Builder puts the Dragonborn in the second tier for racial choices, which I don’t agree with. They have a clean CON+CHA pairing and the Dragonborn racial boost to healing surge value is a good fit for a Battlemind. I wouldn’t take one, however, because they’re already heavily represented as Paladins and Fighters.
I’m kind of interested in trying a Warforged Battlemind. There are enough non-boost stat powers to make not having Wisdom or Charisma as racial stats not really a problem. Having Strength might also alleviate some of the “crappy melee basic” problems. What really draws me in, however, is the imagery. I can be a teleporting ninja robot!
Hybridization: While hybridizing any Defender is a little problematic, the Battlemind stands out as one of the hardest to make functional. The nut lies is our inability to have both Mind Spike and Blurred Step. This forces us to choose between a powerful mark effect and being able to stay on our mark (Mind Spike requires you to be adjacent to activate). In my head, the conversation goes something like this:
Battlemind: You better not attack my friend! Monster: Oh, really? What exactly are you going to do about it? Battlemind: If you damage one of my friends with an attack that doesn’t include me, I can make you take as much damage as they do.
Monster: Sounds pretty strong. What happens if, say, I shift over… here? Battlemind: I have to be adjacent to you to do that. Normally I could shift to follow or even teleport (wouldn’t that be cool?), but I had to pick one of the two class features.
Monster: Why didn’t you take Blurred Step then? Battlemind: I would only be able to make an attack of opportunity and I’m not a Strength-based class. My opportunity attacks kind of blow.
Monster: Wow, you’re right. That does kind of suck, but I have a schedule to keep. Mind if I kill your friend now?
I’ve had it pointed out to me that the easiest solution to this is exactly the same as that for the Paladin: hybridize to Warlock and take Eldrich Strike. Frankly, I’m more than a little tired of how that power has effected the game. That’s a discussion for another day, just know that the option is there if you want to pursue it. Otherwise, you’re probably only going to want to hybridize a Battlemind if you’re very enthusiastic about a concept.
Another thing to consider when hybridizing a Battlemind is that they gain far fewer Power Points unless they choose another psionic class, dramatically increasing the opportunity cost of Boost 2+ powers.
Multiclassing: I was surprised at how effective it is to multiclass into Fighter. While you’ll probably never take any of the power swap feats (unless you’ve decided on a CON+STR build), you gain access to a sizable group of feats and, to a lesser degree, paragon paths. Wrathful Warrior gets you a nifty temporary hit point power (based on Constitution, so yours is awesome) on top of this. This opens up Encouraging Shield, Shielded Resurgence, Stout Shield and Unbalancing Shield Shove – all excellent feats for a Battlemind.
Multiclassing in other directions is not quite as good, but still viable. Student of Battle gives you an emergency heal (something Battleminds tend to be a little short on) and gets you at least into the martial feats. Initiate of the Faith or Student of Divine Runes gets you a similar heal and open up divine possibilities.
Class Feats:
I’m not such a fan of the feats that boost Mind Spike. This is the Browbeat Theory.[1] I think it unlikely that Mind Spike will get used often enough to make these feats that amazing.
Other Feats: As mentioned in the multiclassing section, Battleminds benefit from most of the same feats that Fighters prefer – minus the ones that require Strength, of course.
Notable Heroic Tier Powers:
Basic Tactics: Battleminds work very well when paired with a melee striker, acting as an assassination team in the enemy’s backfield. Battleminds excel at isolating a monster while the party deals with other things.
I’m loving my Battlemind. Please feel free to share your stories about yours.
[1] There’s a card in Magic: the Gathering in which the opponent gets to decide which of the two effects on the card will occur. While this sounds powerful, having the choice be in the enemy’s hands means that you will almost never get what you want.
Robert Schwalb had a very interesting post over at his D&D blog. I linked to it through my Facebook and Twitter, but I think it deserves some discussion.
At some point, perceptions about Dungeons & Dragons have morphed. The game is now winnable. Mechanical selection enables players to create characters that operate well-beyond the expected boundaries and have the means to trivialize the opposition, thus forcing DMs to eliminate options and look further afield for challenges to test the player characters. For example, the first battlerage vigor rules in Martial Power turned minions into temporary hit point batteries to fuel what were, in effect, unkillable characters. Optimal character construction has almost become the equivalent to the Ur-decks of Magic, and such combinations make the game no longer fun to play or run.
I like to call this the FF7 effect because that was the first console game that most gamers of my “generation” beat the crap out of. While it ushered in a new era for video gaming, I think the effect it has had on pen-and-paper gaming has been unfortunate. Schwalb is wrong in one respect: old-school gamers believed that they could “win” D&D. Even then, the victory condition was to become so powerful that you could do anything you wanted, even to other player characters. It was just that the game was so random and unfair that people didn’t expect to survive long enough to win.
I look back at FF7’s materia system with a certain amount of nostalgia because it was a simple, intuitive system that greatly empowered the player to play the game the way they wanted to. A side effect of this was that gamers started to learn systems mastery.[1] Systems mastery takes two forms: effectiveness and degeneracy (I choose not to use the word “optimization” because people fight too much over what it means and whether it applies to them). Effectiveness simply means trying to find something that works. Degeneracy tries to break the system.
Aside from just walking away and finding a new group, the solution, as I see it, comes from both sides of the DM’s screen. The players need to understand that even though an optimized character can be an asset to the party, it can also make impotent the challenges the DM creates. After a dozen toothless encounters, the game grows stale and eventually dies. Rule 0, when it comes to character creation (and I’ve said this before), if it smells like poop, it probably is poop. If you find some mechanical nugget that eliminates a rather sizeable chunk of game play (such as death) or wipes out a category of monsters (solos, minions), think carefully before choosing that option. As well, reverse rolls with the DM (who is also a player). As a player, you wouldn’t enjoy a game where every session, you have to spend one encounter dazed and weakened from start to finish, right? Why would the DM?
As a player, I try to walk back things that start to cross the line. In Josh’s Thursday campaign, my Battlemind became a problem because Conductive Defense is too strong against solos and elites when combined with the high-damage mark of our charasmadin. The moment both defenders were able to get on the boss guy, all his choices turned to crap. I replaced it with Demon Dance, which is far more situational and definitely less optimal. Do I feel bad about having to do this? Not at all. As players, we demand that the GM place the good of the game above their personal enjoyment. We shouldn’t expect anything less from the players.
[1] Schwalb is correct in stating that much of the gaming community’s understanding of degeneracy comes from Magic: the Gathering. I tend to look to Final Fantasy because it’s a roleplaying game.
I’m in the “wind down and reflect” portion that follows my Monday game. Episode 5 of “The Killing” is on the other monitor and I’m in that mellow/exhausted state that sometimes, but not always, bestows the gift of clarity.
This blurry little gem was the second combat of the evening. The characters have the phylactery of a lich that has managed to fuse itself with an iron golem (the phylactery itself was hidden in a pretty scary place) and are delving into his crypt below an ancient ziggurat in the Feywild (if you were able to follow all that on first blush, you’re a better man than I). It’s supposed to have a throwback Tomb of Horror feel and it’s been really successful. The guys (and girl) have been having a lot of fun with it.
Earlier on in the dungeon, the characters had to pass through one of six colored portals and defeat the creature on the other side to open the seventh portal, which led deeper into the crypt. Upon doing so, they were imbued with a strange aura matching the portal (they’re thankful now that they didn’t screw up and go through multiple portals. That would have been bad). For this section, the party had to split up in halves and defeat all of the guardians. Both the guardians and the traps were triggered by characters of that color. I had to print out the map sections because they could rotate or shift.
Early on, the sorceress got separated from her team and cornered by the yellow bug. She didn’t go unconscious (no one did), but she came very close on a couple of occasions. It got to be a running joke and she started keeping a stream-of-consciousness log (warning mild NSFW) of her character’s feelings. I find “They come in other colors?!?” especially amusing.
Three out of the last four encounters have included mechanics where it was difficult, if not impossible, for the characters to control the battlefield, so I wanted to catch feedback on how the players felt about this fight while it was still fresh. Interestingly enough, to a person they said that they found the terrain mildly frustrating, but that the encounter was a whole lot of fun. This illustrates some ideas that I have about roleplaying:
I want to continue, but it’s late and I’m tired. Have fun.
One of my players, Swift, asked the following:
“I’ve been meaning to ask for a while: what would happen if you did serve up an encounter that we should run from? I suspect the encounters that should be run from do not occur because they would make the players excessively unhappy.”
As someone who started playing in the bad old days when part of the accepted mindset was “sometimes you’re just screwed”, I’ve spent years trying to perfect the run-from-me encounter and I’ve discovered that it just doesn’t work. Keep in mind that when I say this, I’m talking about an overt Kobayashi Maru scenario, where the design intent is to force the characters to run. While being completely overwhelmed and having to flee works in film and literature, it tends to suck donkey balls at the table.
These types of encounters falter on a couple of different levels. First and foremost, there’s no clean mechanic for saying “you should run.” You could have the players make ability or skill checks, but if the encounter is made for running they should have that information pretty much from the start. Let’s say that the “optimal” things happen: you set up the minis, describe the scene and the players put on their game faces. A couple of rounds pass where very bad things happen and you have them roll dice to determine if they realize how screwed they are. Talk about a letdown. It’s also the worst kind of railroading: “I just told you what the only correct play is.” Ouch.
Another reason these encounters fall apart is that most players refuse to accept that they can’t. Most players aren’t very good at that. Being potent and capable by proxy is one of the big draws of roleplaying, after all. This means that you’ve presented them with the choice between running and feeling emasculated or staying and probably dying. Lots of players will choose the latter and it’s hard to blame them.
Now, it is possible to introduce the theme of flight from a superior foe, you just have to go about it a different way. I know a fair number of GMs that “box text” it. Box texting refers to the “this is what happens text” found in modules. Most of us have come to dislike the mechanism because, again, it’s a form of railroading.
I use what I refer to as the “vortex method” of getting the characters to the correct fight. Basically, once the characters have a target, this is when you have them check skills. This is how they discover that the enemy is heavily guarded or too high a level for them. Once they know this, they can start to figure out how to get around those problems. Using a MacGuffin may seem kind of cliche, but they’re common to the genre and players tend to handle “Oh, we gotta go grab the awesome sword of doom before we kill this guy” better than having their face mashed in. We also have access to a powerful tool in the form of skill challenges. It can be a skill challenge to get to the boss – in which one of the victory conditions is bypassing the boss’ defenses or putting him at a disadvantage.
What about you? How well does “forced to run” work at your table?
Yes, mollywhop is a real word. We use the second definition and joke about it coming from this guy:
I made the mistake of typing “D&D 4e blog” into Google today. Gods below, so much crying. If you’re not having fun with something, there’s a simple, three-step process that will fix the problem:
It’s step 3 that is so hard for people. I get that, having invested so much of yourself in something, it can be hard to let go. Lord knows I have felt the simmering frustration of a game system that no longer satisfies my needs (post-reset World of Darkness, I’m looking at you!). And it’s not as though I don’t have problems with WotC, either. I think the best thing that could happen is for the retards up the food chain at Hasbro to somehow come to grips with the idea that Dungeons and Dragons isn’t some sort of magical cash cow and be happy with the profit they make off the game, rather than the profit they don’t make.
It also pisses me off when people kvetch that “4e doesn’t support roleplaying.” Hogwash. As his blog posts clearly show, Mearls gets it. He thinks that roleplaying is awesome, same as the rest of us, he just doesn’t want it hard-coded into the system. As an example, I was reading a blog in which the author was commenting on Pathfinder’s including a spell that allows a character to speak with animals. Guess what, 4e has exactly the same thing, it’s called a skill check. You, the GM, are God, the alpha and omega of your table. If a player wants to speak with animals as a means of figuring out where to go, just let him. If he wants to turn into a cat in order to sneak past the guards, let him. The first is a simple Arcane or Nature check, though at my table I’m not likely to give away much from an animal’s perspective. The second is more tricky to imagine in terms of mechanics, but why, honestly, should you care? Do you need to place such high barriers to what is probably nothing more than a simple reconnaissance? At the end of the day, your game is as realistic or fantastical as you and the players want to make it. The rules are there to keep things fair and (mostly) balanced, not to stick a shiv in fun’s kidney.
There’s a piece of advice I wish they would include in the PHB: stop making simple things hard. If the PCs need information from the book, ask who is trained in History and give it to those characters. You can do the same thing with pretty much every non-mechanical application of skill. Character wants to know where the red light district is in a new town? Streetwise will get you there. The only time dice need to be rolled is when there’s a meaningful consequence to failure.
It’s important to remember that there’s a critical mass with regards to non-combat rules. 4e was the first RPG to acknowledge this and make the conscious decision to stay below that threshold. That’s not just a good thing, it’s an amazing thing. Once you understand how WotC taught you how to fish, you can feed your game.
I have long said “everyone has a favorite type of chocolate” as a metaphor for the idea that everyone has unique tastes in hobbies. Mike Mearls makes reference to this concept in his most recent Legends and Lore column, “Evolution and D&D”.
All Gaming Is Local
With all that in mind, I believe that there is no one, true way to play D&D. The game might change to accommodate different styles and new tastes or preferences, but at the end of the day the “right” way to play the game depends on you and your group. Do you like building characters, or would you rather just get to the action? What makes you the most excited, a tough fight or a funny roleplaying scene? We all have our preferences. We might all play D&D, but the ways in which we play or want to play are not necessarily compatible. It’s a big issues facing R&D, as edition wars clearly illustrate.
The video he references is especially good:
I agree with Gladwell that the consumers – in this case our players – will almost never be honest with us about what they really want because what their desires are obfuscated by other people’s expectations.
Now, none of this means that we as GMs should stop listening to our players, but we need to always be mindful that their real desires may not always jibe with the things they tell us. One of the things I realized a long time ago was that, when the players are having fun, I’m having a good time too. There’s a metagame there of learning to make “community chocolate,” crafting an experience that’s for everyone’s benefit. It can be hard to do when we all have such distinct feelings about what fun is, but it’s definitely worth it.
Work too long with a complex system and you start to make assumptions. Bad assumptions. Yesterday I was musing about area attacks with the weapon keyword, wondering whether or not they’re considered melee attacks and thinking that that would be an awfully uncomfortable conversation to have with players if it were so. Turns out that I’m an idiot. Everything I needed was right there in front of me, I just hadn’t considered it and this is one of those things that WotC never seems to discuss.
“Melee” is either an attack type or a range description. Otherwise, it is not a keyword. The “type” pulldown on the Monster Builder lists six power types: none, melee, close blast, close burst, ranged and area. Once you choose one of these types, the power inherits certain characteristics. Looked at in this light, the PHB wording is actually very clear:
Targeted: Melee attacks target individuals. A melee attack against multiple enemies consists of separate attacks, each with its own attack roll and damage roll. Melee attacks don’t create areas of effect.
Melee attacks have a defined number of targets; close and area attacks do not. Come and Get It is not a melee attack because it has an area of effect. All I really had to do is look at the darned icon.
Is this what WotC intended? I think yes. The most recent revision to the monster customization rules says that, in general, you should use the “low” damage expression for attacks that target more than one creature. In that light, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that most damage boosts, especially large ones like Hellsworn Blessing, would not apply to close and area attacks. It feels elegant and deliberate. Why then doesn’t WotC explain this? I suspect this is largely because the concept is difficult to justify in a non-mechanical sense. That still seems like a very unpleasant conversation to have.
May Kubrick forgive me…
I have added a 5-star rating system to the posts. While I don’t expect much in the way of discussion and commentary (though those are always appreciated), a little feedback would be helpful in guiding me to the things you find most interesting.
Thank you.