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3 years ago ::
Jun 20, 2010 - 1:55PM
#131
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Here are some truths about LFR mods.
Skill challenges make things easier as they assure an action point spent in each combat (even for non battle field archers) =)
spreading xp thin in more than 3 combats makes things very easy
the higher level PC's go the more encounters they are supposed to be able to face before resting
LFR does not take into account the additional resources PC's get as they level
The current ways of challenging players are
Insanely High DEFenses which turns into long combats of missfesting.
Crippling status effects, terrain or features which deny actions which make you feel like you are not doing anything for half the combat
Increased Monster damage, which gives a realistic danger of death.
If you at a base are going to have 2-3 paragon combats they need to have a real chance to down pc's
Monster tatics at paragon should mirror pc tatics that work.
Focus fire, down pc's and attempt to coup de grace them. Try and ignore defenders
to go after other classes.
If this fails Id suggest Upping the XP allowed for monsters but not raising the XP for the adventure.
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3 years ago ::
Jun 21, 2010 - 12:14AM
#132
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Date Joined:
Mar 19, 2010
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There is a lot of anti Alpha strike mentality in this thread and I think that this needs to be looked at from both sides of the coin.
It is disrespectful for a player to alpha every combat and not allow a player with low initiative to have what they consider a meaningful turn.
It is also disrespectful for a player with low initiative to expect the optimizer to never alpha strike.
Both players are there to have a good time and both players came there to play in their own style. Each player has the responsibility to try and allow the other player to have their fun. This can be hard at times as players do not always communicate their feelings until after the game has ended and often not directly to the offending player. Acknowledging the other players and allowing them to have their fun is an important part of convention play and if you overdo it then try and make peace afterwards. Saying "sorry man, I didn't mean to leave you out of a fight, its just how our group usually plays" could go a long way to fixing the situation. Next time you see that player delay until after they get a chance to act then alpha and they will hopefully see you are trying to be considerate. Yes it means they will have to eat the occasional alpha round and you might get the occasional sub optimal combat but maybe the social part of meeting new people at a convention will make up for that.
There is nothing wrong with Alpha striking occasionally with strangers or constantly with your gaming group. Just try to remember that everyone is there to play and not just watch from the sidelines. Don't hate the striker for doing his job, just let them know you would like a piece of the action next time. I have yet to run into players that flat out did not want others at the table to have a good time, some people just don't know what that means to someone they have never met before.
I am not an alpha striker by any sense of the word and yeah sometimes I don't get to act in a fight though it is usually because of a save ends stun or dominate and not other players. It sucks but it does not happen often enough for me to stress over it. In fact last time I was dominated, it was the alpha striking assassin who rescued me by killing the guy that was dominating me when I couldn't roll a saving throw for 2 rounds. I don't mind missing a turn of combat if it means I have more time to RP.
BTW I play a Priest of Tempus and I do not have RROT so please no hating on the priesthood. There are many ways to serve the lord of battle. Some of us prefer to support our allies.
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3 years ago ::
Jun 27, 2010 - 9:45PM
#133
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My Fighter was MC'd Barbarian and Avenger (long story) *and* just recently bought a set of Dice of Auspicious Fortune. Her level 13 Barbarian power is *designed* for being a big hit (literally) and it worked out that this mod (DALE1-6, in fact) would be her proving ground with this setup. In the first combat, I rolled low on initiative. Surprise, surprise, even though everyone went before me and used a few powers, I still managed to have time to make an attack against something. In fact, that combat lasted 4 rounds, if I remember. Anyway, I unloaded on one guy with Fortune's Favor. Since I hit with the attack (4[W] damage) I can reroll the attack and add 1[W] to it. Well, I had a 20 stored in my Dice, so I used it. Auto-crit on 5[W]? Yes, please. I think the damage was over 100. Enough to bloody the guy but not enough to drop him. I action pointed and hit him with an at-will. That was enough to drop him. But, here's the catch: I waited until round 2 before I did that. Why? Well, for one thing, I was trying to set up a better position for myself so I wouldn't be in a flank. But, when my second turn came up and I knew the combat was going to last for a while, I went ahead and took the chance. Here's the thing: if the DoAF didn't have a crit stored, I couldn't have done it (without a natural critical roll.) How often do you have players roll a crit on their DoAF? Not very often, I'd wager. Instead of using DME to make combats tougher, use it to ensure those stored digits are real: make the player roll his dice in front of you. If they get a 19 or 20, good for them. If they don't, good for you, I guess? Also, my fighter, won't be able to make that nova round again because, since she leveled to 14 after that mod, I fixed her feats and background back to being a MC Avenger only and being from Akanul. She didn't really fit into the Barbarian lifestyle.  I will make a complaint of my own, that goes along with this thread: Barbarian's suck because they can nova every round and can make any encounter trivial. I've seen it all through-out heroic tier and I shudder to think of what it'll be like when the barbarian in our LFR group makes it to paragon.... EDIT: Also, from a player's point-of-view, how are we supposed to know that a combat is "under control" before combat even begins? If they are alpha striking (meaning that are making that nova attack in round 1) then they are gambling that this is the big fight and is when they need to do so. If they didn't go nova on round 1 in the encounter you ran at the convention, OP, would they have had the combat "under control"?
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3 years ago ::
Jun 28, 2010 - 5:36PM
#134
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"Alpha Striking" is also sometimes just a bad tactic.
I once saw* a BBEG who, by the end of the first round, was:
~ Stunned (x2)
~ Restricted to only making basic attacks
~ Forced to attack thin air
~ "Thief of Five Fates'd" (the warlock PC could cancel any BBEG d20 roll by rolling higher on a d20), and
~ Had a huge penalty to attack rolls
All at the same time. It was ridiculous. The fight was obviously the last encounter, so everyone just automatically piled their absolute biggest, baddest daily power on the BBEG without paying any attention to what anyone else was doing. Most of the effects on the BBEG only lasted one round. So together, the table effectively cancelled out the majority of attacks that other players had made. (The BBEG isn't "more stunned" if he's stunned twice, the BBEG doesn't care if he has a huge penalty to attacks if he is only making an attack against thin air anyway, etc.) There were plenty of other non-minion baddies around and the fight lasted many rounds, so everyone would have gotten a chance to use their cool attack (and had it be meaningful) if people had just spread out their attacks a little (either spread them out over time or among several targets). Because everyone decided to blindly "nova" in the first round, the fight dragged out longer than it should have.
Constant and excessive Alpha Striking undermines teamwork and also discourages the use of interesting and/or effective tactics. You could program any computer to play D&D as an Alpha-Striker - use the biggest [W] attack on the first round of every combat on the BBEG, action point, and then use the second biggest [W] attack. Rinse and repeat. I have also seen Warlords rearrange everyone's initiative so that all the mega-strikers went first (instead of, for example, a defender) and then all the strikers got beaten into a bloody pulp. And then, of course, they complained that the mod was way too hard even though the fight would have been fine with non-Alphastike tactics.
* Disclaimer - This happened a few months ago, so my details might be slightly off. I wanted to throw that out there before someone who was at that table reads this post and says "No, you're remembering it wrong! The BBEG didn't have a huge penalty to attack rolls - he had a huge penalty to damage rolls!" The general idea is the same even if I'm misremembering a detail or two - the BBEG had 5 or 6 essentially overlapping conditions on him all at the same time.
Lori Anderson
WotC Freelancer, LFR author
@LittleLorika
CALI3-3 The Agony of Almraiven (co-author)
NETH4-1 Containing Shadow (co-author)
CALI4-1 Plain of Stone Spiders (author)
QUES4-1 Liberation (co-author)
EPIC5-1 Plaguewrought Prism (co-author)
TotalCon: http://www.totalcon.com/RolePlaying.html
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3 years ago ::
Jun 30, 2010 - 3:28PM
#135
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Date Joined:
Jun 26, 2004
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19-20 on a d20 is 1/10.
Rolling 3d20 comes to about 1/4: so with the Lucky Shot and the silloy dice you are pretty likely to have a crit stored (except that you aren't making an attack roll and therefore can't crit :P)
NPCs should *NOT* be using Coup de Grace except in exceptional circumstances. In-combat healing is *rare* in Faerun so it's not something that they should expect (and even if they've seen it they shouldn't expect a lot more) ...but more importantly it's not much fun having your character picked on that hard and the GM can pretty much guarantee a kill on most tables (well many anyway) if they really want to play that game.
I'm all for tougher combats myself: there's a reason LG gave out a lot less xp than was 'earned' in the fights. The only combats I've thought really unreasonable were
** CORM1-4 (bad mod in many ways but the final fight crowned it: regen20 with high defences and huge HP and very strong terrain is not much fun even if you didn't rely on spectacularly poor tactics from the monster to have any chance at all).
** WATE 1-5: iirc our APL1.25 party faced a level 7 fight (playing down for once) in hostile terrain.
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3 years ago ::
Jul 01, 2010 - 8:18AM
#136
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Date Joined:
Dec 13, 2009
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One anti-Alpha Strike gimmick that I have seen used a couple of times in the same recent mod is to give BBEGs some sort of "negate the initial attack" power, such as one fight where the main elite, for the first couple of rounds of combat, could grab a nearby civilian to use as a shield as an immediate interrupt. I would find this irritating if it was happening all of the time, but as an occasional gimmick it can put players on their toes about whether or not to go full-bore with their first attack. (The group I was running this for found it entertainingly evil, but that's a side benefit.)
After playing and/or running all of the Origins mods over the course of seven rounds of slot zeros and nine rounds at the convention (at all tiers) over the past couple of weeks, I saw maybe two cases where Alpha Striking was a problem. Of those, one involved two ranged rangers landing multiple crits each and the other involved the DM running what I knew to be a bad-ass encounter soft combined with some fortunate initiative rolls. In all the other cases a strong opening salvo either merely made the encounter manageable, was negated, or else wasn't enough to break the encounter. Could be that I was just lucky not to encounter the AS-focused tables, but I think that's more a testament to encounter design in recent mods which makes that more difficult to do.
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3 years ago ::
Jul 05, 2010 - 3:21PM
#137
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Date Joined:
Jun 26, 2004
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Did they have DoAFs?
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3 years ago ::
Jul 12, 2010 - 10:14PM
#138
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Date Joined:
Mar 19, 2008
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This is why I don't mind an alpha strike in the LFR games. I play in an all-dwarf group. We have low initiative scores and aren't the best strikers. One thing we are, however, is durable. We can take alot of damage and keep going. Its a stratagy that works well at home, but during events like DnDXP and GenCon its a problem....
Since you're on a timer, you have to be able to deal damage fast and reliably. We took on a SPEC event on its hard version and at the minimum level to attempt it. The DM aknowledged at the time limit that we would have been able to finish if we had more time, but we had to settle for an incomplete adventure / partial failure.
Since we're not built for damage dealing, alpha striking, and other optimal combat we're at a large disadvantage. It may not be my style, but its needed at times.
Tulkor, Ranger of Clan Beerbiter
If its not Dwarven, its CRAP!
Signature interrupted by rhesus macaque.
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3 years ago ::
Jul 13, 2010 - 5:31PM
#139
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Date Joined:
Jun 26, 2004
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My solution to that particular issue would be to play faster You can get through a round surprisingly quickly if you have someone pushing the initiative tracker and people know what they want to do (or delay while they think -often it will be someon else on the same team's turn next anyway) ..does rely on the GM being quick too of course. Ranged combat isn't really a RPG issue. It's intrinsic to ranged attacks and has to be actively mitigated by the rules (making ranged damage or attack bonuses lower than comparable melee) if you want them to be balanced. Another way to balance them is to make ranged attackers more vulnerable if they can be reached (glass cannon) which ranged PCs will often do for themselves in a system where they find defences largely unnecesary (tends to happen in LFR) ...but that's only so they can pile more damage on instead making the problem seem even worse. Of course LFR further exacerbates this by often making it seem pointless to invest in passive defences as you'll get hit anyway if you're attacked (generally not quite true but it can seem that way).
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3 years ago ::
Jul 18, 2010 - 12:47AM
#140
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My solution to that particular issue would be to play faster
You can get through a round surprisingly quickly if you have someone pushing the initiative tracker and people know what they want to do (or delay while they think -often it will be someon else on the same team's turn next anyway) ..does rely on the GM being quick too of course.
Ranged combat isn't really a RPG issue. It's intrinsic to ranged attacks and has to be actively mitigated by the rules (making ranged damage or attack bonuses lower than comparable melee) if you want them to be balanced. Another way to balance them is to make ranged attackers more vulnerable if they can be reached (glass cannon) which ranged PCs will often do for themselves in a system where they find defences largely unnecesary (tends to happen in LFR) ...but that's only so they can pile more damage on instead making the problem seem even worse.
Of course LFR further exacerbates this by often making it seem pointless to invest in passive defences as you'll get hit anyway if you're attacked (generally not quite true but it can seem that way).
Here's the solution get rid of 99% of the dice and just make a straight D20 roll if all weapon damage were a static number rounds would travel at a hypersonic speed effectively every hit would do max damage then it would be a matter of adding a static amount per plus for the crit damage.
So a War Axe would deal 10+ strength, a +2 Vicious War Axe would deal 12 + strength + 24, and a +1 Vicious War Axe would deal 11 + strength +12.
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