Monk-y Business

I’ve mentioned before that I miss the monk class in fourth edition.  I can see why they passed it by for the PHB — monks have always been kind of fiddly in D&D, and they don’t exactly fit into the Tolkienesque heroic fantasy D&D takes its inspiration from.  Gandalf and Frodo didn’t travel with Bruce Lee or the Bronzemen of Shaolin.  There are historical Western — European, I should probably say — unarmed martial arts, of course, but they don’t have the same kind of mystique built up around them that their Eastern counterparts do.  Whatever its actual strengths, pankration doesn’t draw the romantic associations that the 72 Shaolin Arts do.

My own games, however, draw heavily on Eastern influences.  They’re as much Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as they are Lord of the Rings.  So a monk class is, if not vital, at least important to my longest-running game world, Galadria.

The monk class is going to appear.  Eventually.  But since I don’t want to wait a year or more to see and use it, I’ve decided to create one of my own in the meantime.

It’s in an “alpha” stage right now — the pieces are all there: all of the powers from level 1 to level 30, the class features, the related feats, 7 paragon paths, and an epic destiny.  But they’re not all finished.  There will be balancing, and there will be revisions.

Still, it’s a start.

Monster Manual

I finally got a chance to look over the third core rulebook for 4e, the Monster Manual.

On the whole, I like it.  At first glance, there seem to be fewer creatures here than in the 3e version, but an actual count shows the numbers are pretty close to even.  And whereas a lot of the 3e creatures were things like normal animals or rarely-used (in most campaigns) aquatic monsters, the 4e book for the most part doesn’t include these.  It also doesn’t include a bunch of templates (those are in the Dungeon Master’s Guide).

What does it include?  Well, most of the iconic monsters I could think of off the bat, from aboleth to zombie.  Beholders, drow, mind flayers, displacer beasts, demons and devils, the Tarrasque and Orcus.  There are a lot of monsters in here that could see wide use in a lot of campaigns.  Less chaff, more substance.

That’s not to say that everything’s here.  There’s no nymph (although there’s a dryad), no centaur, no bullywug, no mephit, no blink dog, no couatl.  There are angels, but nothing that looks like the solar.  There are hill giants and fire giants and storm giants, but no cloud giants or stone giants.  There are dragons, but only the five evil chromatic varieties.  (Although the dragon entry mentions at least twenty-five varieties in five separate families — chromatic, metallic, catastrophic, planar, and scourge.  The catastrophic dragons seem to be the Oriental Adventures sorts, based on earthquakes and typhoons and other natural disasters.  Planar dragons cover the extraplanar equivalents, like shadow, Abyssal, and fey dragons.  And scourge dragons are the linnorms from earlier editions.)

I’ve heard that the designers chose to focus on monsters that were likely to be enemies for the players.  Since the game presumes the players will be generally good-aligned, most of the monsters are evil ones.  This might hold some weight; with the exception of those angels, the only really “good” creature is the unicorn, which is, in 4e, an unaligned fey creature, and whose inclusion might also be explained by the fact that it’s a mount.  (Along the same lines, the riding horse made it in — but oddly, the pegasus didn’t.)

There’s a pretty small number of real animals included.  Riding and warhorses are here, and a couple of animals the party might fight:  a cave bear, a crocodile, and a wolf.  There are some magical, giant, or dire versions around, too:  the above, plus boars and panthers, spiders and scorpions, beetles and the inevitable dire rats.  On the whole, I approve of the decision to use the space for more fantastic threats, but I would have liked at least one or two more:  either a lion or a tiger, and a guard dog.  I can make do with modifying the fey panther for the large cat and the gray wolf for the guard dog, though.

Almost every creature entry offers at least two stat blocks.  The boar entry, for instance, includes a level 6 dire boar and a level 15 thunderfury boar.  This seems helpful.  Many of the humanoids include several different types all around the same level, which is less helpful, but still okay.  There’s no more than one entry to a page, which makes things easy, at the expense of having some wasted space.  The book mostly does a good job of filling this space with artwork, but it does become obvious in places.

Along with the old standbys, the book offers up a couple of new or obscure old creatures.  Things like the boneclaw, the grick, the kruthik, and the shadar-kai.  I find these hit-or-miss.  I’d have preferred some of those things I mentioned above that were left out, honestly, but I suppose I can’t fault Wizards of the Coast for slipping a couple of these in.  It’s still at least as good as the 3e version in my estimation, and far better than the 2e Monstrous Compendium.

There’s an appendix at the end that gives a couple of monster race writeups in a similar vein as the PHB.  There’s also a note that they were balanced as monsters, not as player characters.  And that “[they] can be used as guidelines for creating [PC] versions of these creatures, within reason.”  I do have to recommend that any DM intending to offer them as PCs look things over and make some changes; in particular, the drow darkness ability becomes pretty broken when the drow is a rogue, and any creature with Oversized, which can wield weapons a size larger (which get bigger damage dice, just like in 3e) as though they were its size, has potential issues, especially as a two-weapon ranger.  A bugbear with +2 Strength and +2 Dexterity, dual-wielding 1d12 bastard swords, is pretty scary even without its once-per-encounter Sneak Attack-like racial power.

There’s a glossary.  And there was much rejoicing.

Finally, there’s a 4-page list of monsters by level and by monster role, which should make creating encounters very easy.  Unfortunately, since it has page numbers, the designers seem to have decided that it also serves as an index, which is only true to an extent.

The entries themselves are very lean.  There’s only a little bit of descriptive fluff — certainly no more essays about a creature’s society and culture.  On one hand, I sometimes enjoyed reading that stuff; on the other hand, I usually ignored it when it was time to build a world, and put my own monster societies in place anyway.  So it doesn’t really affect me, in the end, and it gives more space for those stat blocks.  I can live with that.

The artwork is on the whole really good.  I think all monsters are depicted; some have multiple pictures.  There’s not exactly a lot of splash-page action-scene art, but it gets the job done.

Overall, I think this’ll prove to be a very useful verion of the MM.  I’m not sure yet whether it’ll be the best version, but it’s a pretty high quality as a whole.  4e has really impressed me in that regard, despite some of its problems.

More on Skill Challenges…

Keith Baker – Skill Challenges talks about designing and running a skill challenge under 4e.  He’s got some pretty good advice.  If you’re GMing 4th edition, it’s definitely worth a look.

In particular, he’s right on when he writes, “It’s more than just twelve die rolls; it’s an encounter, and it should offer just as much opportunity for creativity and clever tactics as a battle.”  I’ve seen some other comments along the lines that eight or eleven dice rolls is anything but exciting, but many of these commenters seem to miss the point that a skill challenge is woven into an encounter — the mechanics aren’t the whole of the encounter.  Roleplaying is requisite.

Combat can be run like this:

“I swing.  I hit.  8 damage.”

“The orc attacks you.  Take 4 damage.”

“I miss.”

“The orc hits you again for 3 damage.”

But that gets boring fast.  That’s where roleplaying and narration come in.

“Atros hefts his axe in both hands, aiming a vicious stroke straight at the orc’s neck.  He’s trying to behead the monster with a single blow.”

“The orc ducks in time to save its neck, but not in time to avoid the blow — the axe rings off its heavy steel helmet, leaving a nasty-looking dent in the already-scarred metal.  Ears ringing, blood dripping down the side of its face, it still manages to lunge toward you, howling in rage and fear.  Its own weapon slams into your side.  Your armor deflects it, but you can already feel your skin bruising.”

Likewise, a skill challenge shouldn’t be “Diplomacy DC 15… made it.  Bluff DC 20… failed.”  The player should be describing what it is he’s doing, and the NPC should be reacting to each success or failure.

Anyway, good article to read over.

Skybreaker session 1: Into White Haven

We played through our first real session under 4e rules yesterday.  The campaign opened, as I mentioned earlier, on the mountain road near the mining town of White Haven, which was our characters’ first definition.  Our motley crew included:

* Rodrik the White, human cleric of the Raven Queen, played by yours truly.

* Zadjik Ildan Zarifi, human wizard, played by Steve.  Instantly assigned the nickname “Zaz.”  This is what you get for choosing unpronounceable names in one of our campaigns.  Someone always does anyway; it’s a running gag.

* Katryn “Cat” Silverpine, half-elf ranger, played by Lydia.

* Matias, no last name given, dwarf fighter, played by Jen.  A lot of people have “Scottish” dwarves.  Ours are inspired by Roman culture.

* Tomal Dreamwalker, tiefling warlord, played by Jeff.

The reasoning for starting the campaign on the road became evident pretty quickly:  we were ambushed by kobolds as we made our way toward town.  A good Perception score on Cat’s part saved the party some possible pain, but we were still facing down a dozen kobolds.

Now, kobolds are among the weakest of basic enemies in D&D.  They’re known for setting lots of traps and ambushes and dying by the score.  Sometimes, in the hands of a particularly fiendish GM, they’ve been known to annihilate an entire party of adventurers through cunning rather than might; for the most part, though, they’re the fodderiest of cannon fodder.

In 4e, though, kobolds have one more benefit:  a power called Shifty.  As a minor action, they can shift one square.  That means they move quickly, can generally avoid opportunity attacks, and they’re hard to corral; they’ll slip right past the front lines and swarm the squishies.

Which is exactly what they started to do.

Kobolds were dropping left and right.  A fair number of them were “minions,” a new 4e class of monster that dies after one hit, and Zaz killed off a couple right away with a miniature fireball.  Cat took down another as it approached, and Rodrik used his lance of faith power to smite another.  After that, things got a little trickier; kobolds were shifting all over the place, flanking Zaz and Cat.  A couple of unfortunate die rolls left the party taking some damage, and the kobold leader, a non-minion, proved surprisingly resilient, taking four hits to defeat.  (Low damage dice didn’t help there.)  With most of their number, including their leader, struck down, the kobolds started to retreat.  Not being the chivalrous type, we cut them down before they could get away.

A couple of healing surges later, we were back on our way into town.  The townspeople were somewhat distrustful of outsiders, but their situation was evidently becoming more desperate.  After some investigation, we ended up speaking with the shire reeve, a gruff ex-soldier by the name of Darstan.  Getting information and support out of him, Ron declared, would be a skill challenge.

We found almost immediately that the rules for skill challenges are somewhat broken, as written.  It’s nearly impossible to successfully complete a challenge at the DCs given, and a lower-complexity challenge is actually harder to succeed at than a higher-complexity one (or can be, depending on the difficulties involved), due to the smaller number of die rolls involved.  (Check out this Skill Challenge calculator for a better illustration.  ENWorld has a more detailed mathematical analysis.)

We quickly house-ruled a solution:  All skill challenge DCs were to be reduced by 5, and the number of skill check failures allowed before the challenge failed was increased to be equal to the number of successes needed to pass the challenge.  That served for this session; we may need to look more into it before running another.

(On the plus side, designer Mike Mearls has acknowledged the problem with skill checks in a forum thread.  He writes: “We came to a few conclusions on what happened, what our intent is, and what we’re going to do about it.”  So evidently we’ll see some errata soon.  In the meantime, Stalker0, who did that mathematical analysis on ENWorld, has come up with a system whose success probabilities are rather better.)

Our party succeeded with our revised skill challenge and learned some of the story behind the mine disaster.  White Haven had historically had troubles with kobold incursions into their iron mines, but recently, the intrusions became more frequent, and the kobolds more motivated to stand up to the townfolk’s resistance.  Recently, the miners had been all but entirely driven out; a work detail under heavy guard was left scrounging for ore in a side shaft site, while the mine proper, with its richer deposits, was now under the control of the kobolds.  The ore doesn’t seem to be the kobolds’ main purpose, although there’s mining going on — according to the reeve, the miners’ accounts agree that the kobolds seem to be looking for something.  Something that can inspire zealous fervor in kobolds.

We were given a mine foreman’s key, and permission to enter, but he warned us that he couldn’t spare any guards to escort or guide us.  (I’m wondering whether he might have, if we’d done better on the skill challenge — but it shouldn’t matter.)  On our way to the mines, we happened across another group of kobolds.  This time, we had the advantage, and we worked out a plan to catch them by surprise.  This group ran as soon as they saw us, but the plan worked out — Cat and Zaz had made a wide circle around their group, getting between them and the mines, and we managed to defeat the entire bunch.  Fewer minions, this time, and it entailed a running battle.  Emerging victorious, we continued toward the mines, and there ended the session.

I suspect things will pick up as we get used to the new rules.  Combats were still a little slow.  4e combat is a lot of fun, though — there’s plenty of movement, and tactical considerations play a big part.  The new system really does seem brilliant, at least for the moment.  Maybe its luster will fade, as 3.5e did for me, but for now, the entire group agrees that the raw combat part of the game has never been as entertaining as it is in 4e.

Dungeon Master’s Guide

When I first opened my 4e Dungeon Master’s Guide, I was astonished at what I found: Actual advice on running a game.

This seems counterintuitive, I know. But it’s true that such advice is hard to come by in the gamemaster manuals of most of the bigger systems. These books tend to give a little overview of running a game and a GM’s role, and then dive into the mechanics, dwelling on statistics for things like traps, surviving in extreme environments, the speed of various forms of transportation, the ease of finding an NPC of a given profession (and the cost of hiring one), and so on.

Lots of numbers, in other words. Numbers that do help in running a game. But that’s all on a practical level. Most of these books — including the 1e, 2e, and 3e DMGs — say little about the theory of gamemastering.

The 4e DMG has two entire chapters, right in the front, dedicated to theory. How to prepare for a session. What players might be looking for in the game — to bring a character to life, to explore the fantasy world, to watch the story come together, to kill monsters — and how to cater to those desires. Narration, pacing, improvisation. How to handle problem players. Advice on teaching the game to someone new.

This is as compact as the PHB. It’s 30 pages or so, but they manage to fit a lot into it. There’s not a lot of wasted space or rambling text. And it’s as good an encapsulation of gamemastering as I’ve ever seen in a mainstream RPG. Could there be more? Sure, entire books could be written. But this is a great, great thing. Good enough that I’d recommend this book even to someone who wasn’t running 4e.

The quality stays high. The book covers combat encounters and how to build them, noncombat encounters — including a system of “skill challenges” to formally delineate the sort of encounter that used to have to be entirely ad-hoc — and traps, puzzles, and terrain. It tells how to use published adventures and, inspirationally, how to adapt them to suit your custom campaign. There’s an incredible chapter on campaigns that covers themes, stories, how to begin, and how to start out at a higher level than 1st. There’s a chapter on “the D&D World” that details the assumptions the game is built around — high fantasy, monsters are everywhere, PCs are exceptional, and so forth. There’s a chapter on creating new monsters, applying templates, creating NPCs, and creating house rules. And the whole thing ends with a sample setting, the town of Fallcrest in the Nentir Vale, complete with a short sample dungeon.

The book is only about 220 pages long, and it uses the same larger-than-3e typeface that the PHB uses. But it’s packed full of things that are actually useful to running a game.

I was still a bit ambivalent about 4e after reading the PHB, although my opinion was leaning toward favorable. After reading the DMG, I’m definitely a fan. This is the best RPG book I’ve read since Nobilis. I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow’s Skybreaker session.

(Edited for tag update, 8/29/08)