Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

I think we are under-served as gamers by the lack of any substantive coverage of the new edition of D&D and how it plays. I think its the best-designed system so far, heavily optimized for fun during play. I don’t think it’s perfect, I think the Magic Item and Skill Challenge design need revision, but overall I consider it successful. Not only is it a lot of fun to play, its really fun to run. In fact, running the game is so much fun I think it’s dangerous. The monsters have so many neat abilities and they dovetail together so amazingly that your enthusiasm may put your party in danger.

I’ve been running or playing the game weekly since it came out and I’ve learned some things about the new system. None of this is generic advice for GMs, if this is indeed going to be a series, it’ll all be stuff unique for 4E. First up, monitoring the party.

The GM needs to monitor the party. Because any adventure, even a module you bought at the store, is actually nothing more than a plan. And no plan survives contact with the enemy. There will be times when you think “this should be easy” and suddenly everyone’s dead. Or “OMG this is impossible” and the encounter is over in five minutes.

As the final arbiter of reality in your game, its therefore up to you to dynamically adjust things, if only to bring the encounter into accord with expectations. In other words; dial it up when it’s too easy, dial it down when it’s too hard. Even an easy encounter can be too easy, and we’ve all experienced difficult encounters that revealed themselves to be actually impossible.

The only way for you to KNOW whether the encounter is too hard or too easy is to monitor the party. Like a surgeon, you need to know the patient’s status on a moment to moment basis. This is, in Fourth Edition, harder than any previous Edition. Bold because this is the core premise of this post.

In previous editions you essentially knew if an encounter was too hard when someone died. If the players complained “Holy Christ, we’re all going to die!” and you thought that was an exaggeration, you could peek over the DM Screen and check to see who was dead. If everyone was alive, probably the players were just being dramatic.

4E appears to give us two useful mechanisms for monitoring the party; action points and Bloodied tokens. My group uses the invaluable tokens from Alea Tools, which are super handy since our miniatures have always had a magnetic base. Although these also look neat.

I started using the White Tokens for Action Points as a player so I could physically hand them to the GM when I used one, thereby making sure I didn’t forget. It was also useful as a GM, I thought, to see how many action points the party had used up.

Ditto Bloodied tokens. When the party complains that they’re all going to die, I would look up and check to see how many PCs were Bloodied. Very easy to do with the big red tokens.

This is highly deceptive! It took WEEKS of play before I realized what was wrong.

When the players complain about how tough something is, what they’re really complaining about is the fact that A: it’s very hard for them to be effective, and B: they’re rapidly using up all their resources. Being Bloodied is often a temporary state. And Action Points recover quickly enough that players use them just to burn them. They are not reliable metrics for gauging PC desperation. Often, concerned for the party, you may look up and notice no one dead, no one bloodied, and think “Well, obviously things aren’t that bad,” when they’re awful.

Instead I’ve found the most useful mechanism for keeping my finger on the pulse of the party is monitoring the use of their daily powers. Unlike Action Points, the players have no real sense of when their Dailies will refresh. Indeed, their Dailies ONLY refresh when they decide to rest for the day and this only happens AFTER they use their Dailies. Unlike Action Points and Encounter Powers, it is the act of using Daily Powers that forces the condition necessary to replenish them.

It’s the best metric, therefore, for judging desperation because players tend only to use them when things are going badly. And, once used, if they don’t turn the tide, things will continue going badly, and now the PCs have no mechanism other than their own ingenuity (which, let us not discount) to fix the problem.

Obviously if the players use their Dailies and feel good about it, there’s no problem. It’s up to you to recognize the difference, and it should be pretty easy. When things are going well, a player uses his Daily power and everyone congratulates him on being effective. When things are going badly, the players have used their powers, have few options left, and the bad guys still have several options.

It’s pretty easy to note A: how many dailies each player has, not counting bullshit ones like item powers and feats and the six different Divine Whatever powers each priest gets, and then B: mark when the players use them. It doesn’t matter which ones they use, that’s a detail you don’t need to track. Next to each player’s initiative result on my Scratch Paper, I make little brackets for each Daily power like so: (), in pen. Then I fill them in with dots in pencil thusly; (*), so I can erase the dots and leave the brackets after each encounter.

Eyeballing the party status by checking who’s bloodied and how many action points people use isn’t worthless, but alone cannot give you the data you really need. Tracking the party’s use of Daily Powers can. In fact, you might want to hand out Daily Power tokens, so you know when a players has used one; he hands you a token. Just a reminder to fill in the bracket. The tokens alone may be enough!

Popularity: 25% [?]

 

Recently

Rebuilding the Network, A Manifesto

INCEPTION

Predators

The A-Team

My Novel, Again

Robin Hood

Iron Man2

Farvel, Taarna the Valkyrie

The Book

It’s the IP, Stupid

 

Subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feed.
Respond, or trackback from your site.