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4 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2009 - 2:48PM
#71
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Date Joined:
Aug 19, 2007
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I guess my problem with this discussion is that in a typical LFR module, abusing this power (Unicorn's Touch) to its fullest potential out of combat is usually going to have no appreciable effect on the difficulty of the mod.
That's not quite true. It greatly raises the power level of Impiltur/Thay backgrounds. You can afford to dump Con if you know that you won't need to worry about healing surges with those backgrounds.
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4 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2009 - 4:08PM
#72
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Date Joined:
May 28, 2001
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That's not quite true. It greatly raises the power level of Impiltur/Thay backgrounds. You can afford to dump Con if you know that you won't need to worry about healing surges with those backgrounds.
People were already choosing Thay/Impiltur, and not in consideration of this power. If you were planning on dumping con in the first place, why not?
I agree with those that find this power overpowered in terms of mechanics...but find the actual effects in a typical LFR mod to be negligible.
Cedric
Check out my free online comic! Familiar Ground Fantasy Humor, Familiar Point of View
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4 years ago ::
Jun 01, 2009 - 4:28PM
#73
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Date Joined:
May 29, 2001
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Again, the question is asked:
Is a power broken when it is only "abusable" one time out of how many games you've played since the campaign started?
The real question is this:
Is the DM allowed to use her own judgment and common sense in adjudicating the rules of the session?
Yes, it's true that as-written the power allows a certain usage. But any DM who takes the time to understand the game system will see immediately (as more than one person in this thread has) that the way the power is written cannot possibly be the way it's intended to work in that usage.
There's a great essay in the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract related to this, but I'll just paraphrase part of it here. Say you're giving a championship to the best hitter, and you have the following rules:
1) The best hitter is defined as the hitter with the highest batting average
2) Only hitters with at least 100 games played will be considered for the award.
So you have one player who hits .359 over a full 162 game season, playing every day, and putting together about 600 at-bats, and you have another player who, playing exactly 100 games, getting exactly one at-bat per game, manages to get 36 hits for a .360 batting average.
One side says, 'hey, the rules are the rules, give the .360 guy the award'.
The other side says 'wait, just because a guy gets lucky in 100 at-bats doesn't make him the best hitter in the league; the regular player should get the award'.
I'm perfectly comfortable being in the camp that says that in this situation, obviously the rules don't do what they're intended to do (recognizing the best hitter), so let's ignore them to get the result that was intended. Since it's impossible to have a perfect rule system, let's empower the people who enforce the rules to compensate for the areas in which the rules are weak.
Also, relating to a different comment:
There are few situations where six hours will break the plot but two to three hours won't.[/quote]
I'd beg to differ; If I'd wanted to, I could have come up with at least one such situation in each of the past few adventures I've run:
Spoiler:
Show
Core 1-3
The DM could easily time the emergence of the island on which the Gondian temple rests so that a difference of three hours means finding the temple or watching it retreat below the waves again -- the thing only stays up long enough for one-to-three encounters, after all.
Bald 1-2
By my reading of the adventure, it's about three hours after the party drops off the skull from the initial encounter until they're called to assist with the hordes of undead; waiting another three hours means that not only are the two groups of civilians trapped in the district likely dead, but the halflings have probably moved much if not all of their ill-gotten loot out of their makeshift warehouse base.
Impi 1-1
Waiting three hours after rescuing the halfling from his goblin tormentors could leave the slaves in the next encounter alive; waiting an additional three hours could mean they've been marched up to the chieftain's lair or sent off somewhere else.
The problem with these solutions is that they require the DM to be both clear and fairly obvious that, if the party doesn't observe a timeline that's not necessarily obvious simply via the events of the adventure, they'll be punished by the loss of story awards and/or outright failure in subsequent encounters (with the according loss of XP), and that it's a lot easier to simply adjudicate the power than it is to follow through with what would be a much more heavy-handed (and punishing) option.
--
Pauper
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4 years ago ::
Jun 02, 2009 - 3:58AM
#74
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Date Joined:
Nov 10, 2003
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In other words, the number of healing surges per day is not really a big deal for most people. This only helps those who tend to run out of surges quickly, which I've seen probably once during a core special (and I've played a lot of LFR).
I've seen people run out of surges several times. It's usually melee strikers (we have rogue who's a bit too cocky for his own good and only has a con of 10, so 6 surges, who has run out on multiple occasions), but I've seen it happen to several characters, for a variety of reasons - bad play amongst them, but just as often they just got unlucky in a particular encounter and got scragged.
There is at least one mod out there (I won't say which) in which the number of healing surges the PCs have at the end is crucial to their success. Allowing infinite surge-free healing in that mod would completely ruin the challenge.
Not many mods, to my recollection, have a strict time-limit other than preventing you from taking an extended rest. Indeed, several I've run have no explicit penalty to taking an extended rest at all, although haste is strongly implied to be required by the RP sections.
All the other surge-free healing in the game is either daily or requires bloodied or hitting an enemy. I expect Unicorn's touch to get errata'd to one of them. As a daily it would be a bit weak; my preferred fix would be a bit clunky, but essentially require there to be at least one enemy in sight for it to work (and the 'bag of rats' ruling has to be used - an enemy has to be a legitimate threat, not a monster you knocked unconscious rather than killed at the end of the encounter).
For the 11 billionth time:
WoTC: Please either empower the campaign admins to make judgments about ambiguous rule interpretations, or deliver errata and FAQ faster and more comprehensively.
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4 years ago ::
Jun 02, 2009 - 4:21AM
#75
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Date Joined:
Nov 10, 2003
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Sooner or later we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that the 4th edition design philosophy and designers couldn't care less whether the rules they write are playable when you add power A from splatbook 1 to power B from splatbook two with items C, D, and E from Adventurer's Vault 1 and 2 and paragon path F from splatbook 3. Making 4th edition playable without an activist DM is not even a design goal. So why fight so hard to preserve a standard of play that died with Living Greyhawk. The bottom line is that players will vote with their feet if DMs are overly restrictive or make unreasonable decisions. Since WotC doesn't care enough to give us an airtight set of rules to start with, we're going to have to trust players and DMs to make them work.
This. Oh, this.
I'm already starting to dread paragon mods. There are some potentially very broken things that can happen even in those. If DM's don't have fiat, it may well be a case of either sit down at table, DM looks at you character sheet and says 'Well done, you win', or a ridiculous DME arms race where the DM has to sit down before each mod and up the encounter difficulty by three or four levels for each fight to give the players any semblance of challenge.
Personally I like a challenge, so I tend to play characters that are (IMO) well built but don't use abusive powers or heavily optimised builds. If you build your character on a shaky rules interpretation or an obviously overpowered ability/item, then I think you should be prepared for a nerf, be it by errata or DM fiat (I remember a number of people threw strops when Veteran's armor was nerfed - I never took it anyway, because I thought it was too good, but was not in the least bit surprised they neutered it).
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4 years ago ::
Jun 02, 2009 - 1:00PM
#76
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Date Joined:
Aug 10, 2007
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OP: I saw a similar problem with the "multiple short rests to use healing word and increase the value of the surge" early on in LFR.
My solution worked well for that - and may work well for you.
"Players, please keep careful track of how many short rests - and how much time - you are spending sitting and resting. I need to know."
Often, players understand that they may be under a time limit (because they often are), even if their characters are not aware of it. Several mods are written this way, and players never know whether the time is actually important or not. Roleplayers also tend to catch on quickly and say "I don't want to sit around for 3 hours - I'll spend a couple of surges so that we can get our quest completed!"
Good luck!
Dan Anderson
@EpicUthrac
Living Forgotten Realms Calimshan Writing Director
Living Forgotten Realms Epic Writing Director
Meet me at TotalConfusion:
http://www.totalcon.com/RolePlaying.html
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4 years ago ::
Jun 02, 2009 - 1:01PM
#77
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Date Joined:
Apr 10, 2005
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I think part of the attitude with broken powers stems down to the idea of the successful player being the bane of the DM, if the players succeed then its a feeling of failure on the part of the DM. This is on par with older school attitudes where the DM's job (in part) was to kill the party.
Now I think the core mechanic with 4th Ed is that the players should have fun, and that more mature players will seek challenging situations instead of just one easy encounter after another.
That being said, if you have a broken power creating a broken situation then increase the challenge to your players to keep it in par. I believe it is within the DME to increase the difficulty of encounters so to make things more challenging and enjoyable for players. If someone has the ability to heal up the party completely between each encounter surge-free then make the combats more difficult so there focus is staying alive during the encounters not what their HP totals will be between combats.
"That doesn't work that way at my table" is up to the DM in a private homebrew game but it really contradicts the spirit of the game in a living campaign and it will definitely scare off newer players in a public venue.
Christopher Green
RPGA# 5209379759
Aelar Tel'ess'san - Elven Cleric Lvl 4
Veloch Shade - Tiefling Rogue Lvl 4
Adaeth the Mindwalker - Deva Psion Lvl 2
The Story Tellers' Guild
The Roleplaying Association of SUNY Oswego
http://www.oswego.edu/stg
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4 years ago ::
Jun 02, 2009 - 1:31PM
#78
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Date Joined:
Jun 10, 2004
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GC1CEO you seem to understand the issue at hand but your solution doesn't work for everyone. For some people using DME to bring the table back down to the appropriate level is more frustrating than straight up denying the use of the offending power/feat/whatever. I know I personally would prefer a judge tell me not to use something over getting DMEed in the interest of balance.
"That doesn't work that way at my table", is really just a direct way of achieving the same result. Ultimately, it is about having a challenging and fun mod. Using DME is deal with the issue seems to bother just as many people as the direct approach does.
(Note: By using DME to solve the problem I mean doing things like adding an extra elite to replace the one that was one-shotted by Rain of Blows, adding Wights to suck up the surges that were saved by Unicorn's Touch, or giving all solos an Ettin-esque mechanic to save them from orbizard stunlocking.)
(Note pt2: The balance of the game starts to break down in late heroic, collapses at paragon, and is nonexistant in epic. It will be interesting to see how the mod authors try to curb the "LG effect" in their writing and keep things challenging for more casual players without overwhelming them while still challenging more serious players too.)
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4 years ago ::
Jun 03, 2009 - 1:01AM
#79
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The real problem with these and other powers is not as much the power itself, but the fact that they highlight the differences in playstyle between various players and the DM. If the whole group plays the same style of gaming, the problem would not arise, either the DM does not care or the players do not pick the power (or do not use it in the "abusive" way). Hence it is always a good idea to openly discuss this at the start of a session. Do the players want a good challenge, or do they want to have an easy time, or do they want something else entirely? You do not even have to mention nerfing specific powers, or increasing the powers of the monsters. If the players express a wish to be challenged, than they have no right to complain if you do up the challenge a bit when you note the players are having an easy time.
It becomes a bit of a problem when the players themselves have a different opinion on what is fun. I as a DM can simply shrug away (although doing so is easier said than done) such a powerhouse if all at the players at the table want their characters to totally dominate fights or at least don't care that much about a fight. In those cases the DM needs to find a middleway, but that is not always particular easy or fun especially for the DM. It is one of the downsides of DMing with strangers.
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4 years ago ::
Jun 03, 2009 - 8:15AM
#80
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Date Joined:
Mar 29, 2001
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It occurs to me that some of the disconnect between opinions in this thread can be mirrored with the old edition law/chaos alignments, as far as order vs individuality types of attitudes.
Lawful tending to follow the system as presented, and trusting that errors in the system will eventually be corrected.
Chaotic tending to want to correct errors themselves as they crop up, not always trusting that the system will be fixed in a timely manner.
It's actually kinda interesting to watch.
-karma
LFR Characters:
Lady Tiana Elinden Kobori Silverwane - Drow Control Wizard
Kro'tak Warscream - Orc Bard
Fulcrum of Gond - Warforged Laser Cleric
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