As I write this entry, I just got back from the Essentials/Red Box Game Day. I would have recorded a segment, but honestly, I don’t think there’s much to say about it that hasn’t been said. I played the Rogue, it felt like a Rogue. As I sat there spamming melee basic attacks, I drfited back in my mind to earlier editions. I’ve played 4E enough now that I’m to the point where I miss a lot of the old tropes; spell lists, multiclass dips, not needing an 18 in a stat to be on the to-hit or damage curve, even THAC0. Maybe it’s time for me to go play Pathfinder, but I don’t think so just yet. I bet I could replicate more older edition feel in 4E without needing to change editions. Essentials does this to some extent with all the melee basic attacks, but that’s not the fun stuff really. In the next few episodes of Aberrant Rules, I’m going to begin disassembling some of the less fundamental assumptions of 4E to try to bring back more of that old-school flavor.

This week, I’m starting something easy, but kinda long, class, so start taking notes. Let’s talk spellcasting. When was the last time your wizard actually used his or her Spellbook feature, hunh? Your feats and powers are probably set up to complement each other so you don’t change them out often. The feature is just too small to be really flexible, so it tends to be forgotten. Rituals are supposed to step in and fill this gap for the Wizard (see also Cleric, Psion, Artificer, Bard and Druid), but again, how often do they get used? They’re too expensive and take up too much time. I never see my players use Rituals for anything and when I try to use them as a player, I get little to no support from the table. It’s really frustrating and needs to be changed – so here’s my fix.

If you get Ritual Casting as a bonus feat, you can spend 1 hour each morning to also prepare rituals for free to be used throughout the day as a standard action each. The total number of rituals prepared is equal to 4 + 1/2 of your level. Because rituals don’t inherently deal damage, there is no level spacing requirement. The only caveat is that if the ritual states that the subject must be present, willing and/or helpless for the duration of the casting, such as Imprisonment or Anthem of Unity, that must be true for the hour you spend preparing them. Furthermore, you can take a power twice in two different slots if you like. That is, if you have Shield as your level 2 Utility and you want to also have it as your level 6, so be it. Same goes for Encounter and Daily attack powers.

That takes care of your prepared casters, but how about spontaneous casters? I would place the Sorcerer, Swordmage, Invoker (minus Ritual Casting, of course) as a Favored Soul analog and maybe the Shaman here. For this group, I would allow a lower-level power to be recharged on the fly by sacrificing a higher-level power as a free action. Normally Encounters recharge Encounters, Dailies recharge Dailies, etc, though I might allow a Daily to recharge a Encounter if you really want.

What about metamagic? Take a look at Mongoose Publishing’s Quintessential Wizard and Svalin Games’ Power Alteration Feats; they’re pretty well balanced and absolutely useful. Thing is, my concept of arcane magic specifically is that it’s very malleable so metamagic shouldn’t be such a problem. I like how WotC dealt with this in the Enlarged Spell feat; -2 damage to each die to increase the size. Let’s mimic that with Arcana checks. How about a DC 35 Arcana check to extend a timed spell for another turn, but if you do, you’re dazed? Maybe a DC 25 to change the energy type on a spell, but you gain vulnerable 5 all until the end of your next turn? I miss the Spellcraft skill… a lot.. and this feels like stuff casters ought to be able to do.

Now this of course opens up a whole different can of worms for me which is the rigid power system in the first place. That’s a far more difficult nut to crack, though, and we’ll hold off on it… for now. I have plans. Give that a run, see if it adds a little bit more complexity and old-school fun to your casters. Next time, we’ll talk about how you don’t need to be 18 to be legal. An 18 hit stat, that is. And not like hitting that.. ya know, this metaphor’s REALLY going south fast. Alright people, I’m out.

There’s been another upsurge of Solo talk on the blogosphere recently, probably given the products recently released and those about to be released. Quinn has his Worldbreaker Solos, which are frickin’ spectacular and he’s been getting flooded with submissions, but not all Solos lend themselves to such theatrics. Sometimes, you want a Solo that’s engaging and challenging, but you don’t have the time to build a Worldbreaker, you don’t want to deal with the plethora of available powers or the enemy doesn’t feel like it should be enforcing radical terrain modifications. A quicker, more efficient way to add spice to a otherwise boring Solo monster is to make it a multiple-part or multiple-initiative monster.

I thought I was the only one doing this, but as it turns out Greg Bilsland, producer at WotC, and DM Tim of Radio Free Hommlet have also been pulling this trick. Great minds think alike, apparently! OK, a few creatures do something similar as written, like the Behir family of monsters. The basic premise is to split a Solo creature into two or three subsections, each of which get their own actions and initiative count. This doesn’t mean that the monster literally breaks into pieces – though you could certainly do that – but mechanically speaking, you assign actions to it as if it were several Elite creatures.

The easiest way to do this is to divide the monster into a head and body, or maybe a head, arms and legs depending on its general anatomy. The monster still uses all of its normal defenses and has a single pool of HP, a single move action and a single minor action. However, it gets a standard action and initiative count for every subsection. It can only use one standard action per count but can spend its move and minor on any count. Finally, split the powers among the subsections so that each subsection functionally has its own set of powers. You may want to add one or two powers overall to the creature so that each subsection has some variance, but for the most part, you can take a Solo as written, make this tweak and run with it.

As a multi-part Solo takes damage, it loses initiative counts and thus standard actions by proxy. A two-part creature loses its other subsection when bloodied, for example. At this point, allow the player who bloodied the creature to decide what section is ‘shut down.’ I’ll give you an example here in a second, but a few quick pointers I’ve found helpful when running these kinds of monsters:

1) Only roll initative once, then add and/or subtract 10 to get the other two counts. This gives the monster the ability to react to the PC’s better as it splits up their turns.
2) Multi-part solos have the opportunity and the actions to heal themselves, so make sure that your creature has at least one self-healing power, probably an encounter or a recharge 6. Allowing it to stand up as a minor is another simple but effective self-protection tweak.
3) Consider shunting the powers of ‘dead’ sections to ‘live’ sections, particularly if that section had a unique, gimmicky power like a grab or heal or an attack that hits several PCs all at once. Economy of actions is crucial for Solo monsters.
4) A two-part creature should have, at most, a universal +2 to saves. A three part creature should probably have no more than a +1.
5) Only slow, prone, forced movement and ongoing damage should apply to the creature as a whole. Marks, dazes and stuns, penalties to attack and defense and pretty much everything else should affect only one section at a time.

Now get out your Adventure Builder or Monster Manual and let’s build one of these real quick. From H3: Pyramid of Shadows, we have the Headless Corpse, a level 8 Solo Controller. This monster is a perfect candidate for the multi-part treatment. Give the body the Slam attacks as well as the two encounter powers – Winter’s Wrath and Razor Storm. The Head gets Ray of Ruin and Force Wave. Now each part has can deal damage and has the ability to hinder movement, either with a push or a prone effect. Drop the save bonus to +2, give it a save vs. prone trait and add 25 temporary HP to the Phantom Step power. Blow an AP on its first turn to drop Razor Storm, then just sit back and watch your players freak out!

So I know I said last week I was going to review Necromancer-type material but stuff came up as if often does and it occurred to me that I had at least two more houserule segments lying around I’d never talked about. This week, I’d like to talk about money and currency in 4E.

Let me start out by saying I don’t like 4E’s economy at all. Do YOU go around carrying thousands of dollars in cash in your wallet? Does it make sense to have a less technologically advanced society than us minting vast quantities of standardized coinage? And seriously, what’s up with this 20% return rate? I buy and sell used clothes, books and whatever on eBay or craigslist. I held garage sales at my mom’s house and back when my wife and I were first married, we seriously considered pawning off some of her mother’s jewelry due to employment issues so I think I have a reasonable idea of how this sort of stuff generally works. It just doesn’t add up for me. I can see in the math how it works out, but it’s just so… contrived in a lot of ways.

This is one of the big worldbuilding issues I considered when preparing for the Power Source campaign and one day at the lab working on a nanosphere formulation for a well-known antidepressant, an idea struck me. It was so simple, elegant and complete (at least to me, y’all can judge it for yourself of course) that I can’t imagine running 4E without it ever again. I cut the PCs actual gold earnings to about 20% normal and then put the balance in a sort of virtual “bank” in two separate “accounts” – one called Fame and the other called Karma or Luck. PCs can call upon this bank to obtain needed goods and services. For example, rather than actually shilling out 100 gp for a Raise Dead ritual, 100 gp is subtracted from the character’s “bank” and the priest performs the ceremony because the characters “have done such good around here.” The “bank” also represents resources funneled to the characters through their various sponsors, benefactors or investments. In practice, there is little mechanical difference between this system and the default economy – it is simply flavor to further illuminate the game world and allows the PCs to throw around their status as famous adventurers in a measured, regimented way.

Karma or Luck is earned for performing actions that help restore the natural “correctness” of the world. Noble deeds, delivering justice, killing undead, pretty much anything stereotypically “Good” earns Karma. It can be spent like normal GP in stores representing the odds that the location actually has what the characters want. It can also be spent while adventuring to have certain events occur. For instance, spending 50 Luck in a dungeon can give you a Healing Potion as treasure in the next encounter or chest. Spending 20 Luck can ensure that a water source you find is pure (as the Clearwater Solution). As a general expectation, the cost of an event is equal to an item that causes the event.

Fame is earned for performing deeds that will be talked about by others. It can be spent like normal GP in stores representing the shopkeeper’s willingness to sell the characters rare or dangerous items. It can also be spent while adventuring to have certain events occur. For instance, you can use Fame to “bribe” someone into letting you into an area they shouldn’t. It can purchase room and board in foreign towns when you lack the on-hand gold. (“Hey, we’ve heard about you guys? Tell us about your travels! A place to stay? Sure, it’s on the house.”) PCs might also spend Fame to receive gifts and favors from NPCs that they meet. As a general expectation, the cost of an event is equal to an item that causes the event, though this isn’t quite as sturdy an expectation for Fame as it is Luck.

When a PC goes to buy something, he or she is only required to have 20-40% of the cost in currency. The rest is paid in Luck or Fame. Thus when he or she tries to resell it, only the currency is returned and the 20% number makes more sense in-game. It also eliminates the problem of a single +2 weapon costing as much gold as a small army. The army only needs gold. The weapon requires Fame and Luck, which most NPCs do not have. I’ve found, as a side effect, that the system additionally tends to (though not completely) keep the party moving on the straight and narrow since they know the sorts of things that will earn them full wealth – big, heroic deeds. It would be just as simple to change Fame to Infamy if I was running an Evil campaign or Karma to Honor if the players were of a culture where that sort of thing is important. Having intangible wealth in a quantified, measurable way can really set the tone for the game. You could even use this system as a sort of compromise between the ‘wish list’ and ‘whatever the DM puts there’ methods of treasure placement. I like mechanics that facilitate bargaining between the DM and players on the meta level in an agreed-upon manner that also have a believable in-game expression; Fame and Luck banks totally do this for me in a way that nothing else does.

One Bad Egg publishing closed its doors on September 11, 2009. Their product line showed a lot of variance, running the full gamut of classes, races, adventures and DM tools, including the famous Hard-Boiled Armies which was an attempt to run mass combat using 4E rules. Though their products were spoken about often on ENWorld, apparently the sales were less than stellar. According to their website, “our best selling products never managed to break the 300 copies sold mark, and many of our catalog didn’t even hit 100. We’d have had to see significantly higher numbers for the sales themselves to make a strong argument for continuing the work. They didn’t happen.” That’s a real shame because despite the company’s absolutely tiny scale, they had a ton of publicity. OBE’s products were even featured on the Tome Show and put for ENnies. It goes to show just how rough it is trying to get third party material out there for this edition.

As to races and classes, One Bad Egg had two class contributions – the Shroudborn multi-class and the full Witch Doctor class– and two race, the Half-Dead race and the Apelord race. The Shroudborn and Half-Dead are intimately tied together so we’ll tackle those first.

The Shroud is a staple feature of the One Bad Egg D&D mythos – a sort of necrotic volcano that destroys the Frozen North and leaks Evil into the world. Those who die and are infected by the Shroud become Half-Dead, an alternative to the Revenant for all you zombie lovers. They have +2 Strength and Con, resist necrotic, get a bonus to death saves, stand as a minor and, like the Revenant, have a racial power that adds necrotic damage on an attack. While not outstanding in any way, it’s a solid race that’s absolutely impossible to kill with a couple of feats. I’d allow it in my game any day. Those who were born after the Shroud arrived or are in close contact to it may undergo some subtle changes and then take on the Shroudborn multiclass. And can I just say I freaking LOVE the Shroudborn multiclass. How could you not love a class with powers like Howling Abyss Strike, Unreal Vortex Strike and Ethereal Evasion? The Shroudborn does crazy stuff like rip an enemy’s blood from its body or cleaves its soul in half. It’s over-the-top, dark, brutal and made of awesome. The class is sort of a controller/defender and has powers that hit off of every stat, though classes that hit off of the mental stats will find it most useful. Go buy this. Now.

I can’t recommend the Apelord, unfortunately unless you want to mix it.. oh.. wait, no, can’t say anymore. I just figured out how to win Jeff Greiner’s copy of Amethyst. ::laughter:: But anyway, yeah, this class has many of the same problems as the Linotaur. Speed 7 with a climb speed of 5, Strength and Dex, bonuses to Athletics and Acrobatics, 1d6 unarmed damage, reduce falling damage by 10 feet and a racial encounter power that lets you do Twin Strike in melee? And I don’t even want to get into the feats. Can you imagine one of these as a Monk? Nope, not doing it. Great idea, awesome flavor – not happening at my table, thank you.

Then there’s the Witch Doctor – one of the first original third party classes. For reference, I’m not counting Ari Marmell’s Advanced Player’s Handbook since he just covered classes that would be released in PHB2. If you like the idea of playing a Shaman without the spirit companion, consider the Witch Doctor. It’s a controller though, not a leader, so you have to be OK with that. Its class feature lets you force enemies to reroll saving throws, making it a real thorn in the side of Solos and Elites. It uses a medicine stick as an implement and the vast majority of its powers are Close bursts, blasts or walls so it’s sort of a mid-range controller like the… actually, like the Jester. There’s not much in 4E core that looks like this except for maybe a couple of uncommon Sorcerer or Invoker builds. There are three sub-builds based on masks and a multiclass feat, but no hybrid option. Bottom line, Druids and Shamans who don’t want to change forms or run around with a second token on the board should look carefully at the Witch Doctor.
One Bad Egg also released a line of books about poisoncraft, including the Codex Venenorum – a bunch of new poisons and poison creation rules – as well as the Syrallax. I’m not all that interested in poisons, so I don’t have much else to say about that, but go check it out if you’re interested. Hard-Boiled Cultures is almost entirely flavor text, so while it’s good, I don’t have much to say about it. Finally, Hard-Boiled Armies does an excellent job scaling up the 4E class/race/power system to large-scale army maneuvers and is well worth the price if you’re interested in including mass combat in your campaign. You can find all of these products at RPGNow, DriveThruRPG and the OneBadEgg website.

I’m talking with Elderac on Twitter as I finish this recording and it looks like the demand for my own material is rising so next week we’ll skip back into houserules as I unveil a new death mechanic I wrote as part of a blog carnival – Under the Raven’s Wing.

Can’t believe I missed a show. Ah well. Let’s see some hands – how many of you all have played FASERIP Marvel? Hunh? Put up ‘em up! ten… twenty… thirty…. so less than a third, but still enough. Cool. Hands down. For those of you who haven’t, it’s an older TSR superheroes game set in the Marvel universe – so old in fact that the licensing has expired on it and you can legally pick up pdfs of the game for free. I’ll post the link in the forums when this show hits, so you can look it up. I really enjoyed Marvel in all its table-y glory, particularly for its use of Karma points and power stunts. I’m not going to cover karma points here, so go read about them in the books if you’re interested, but I do want to discuss power stunts here for a couple minutes.

Power Stunts are exactly what they sound like – unorthodox uses of a superpower in order to do something the power didn’t necessarily intend. Superman flying around the world backward to reverse time for instance, is a power stunt. The Flash phasing himself through solid objects by altering the vibrations of his molecules is another. Classic Silver Age stuff right there. Earlier editions of D&D had their own form of power stunts – metamagic feats but even moreso, the creative interpretations of spell effects based on their flavor text. Can you look like a small treant if someone casts Barkskin on you? How about shooting an arrow out of the sky with your own Magic Missile? And can you get a paladin out of his armor by polymorphing him into a snake and then using Animal Control to force him to shed his skin? These are the sort of creative solutions that players love to come up with and DMs either ignore completely or tremble in fear of. It’s important to notice though, that classic power stunts rarely deal damage and if they do, the point of the stunt is not actually the damage but some kind of utility effect – terrain modification, movement, etc.

4E has a weird way of discouraging this sort of thing. I don’t believe it was any intention of the design staff, but something about the way powers are written keeps a lot of people well within a precision-tuned box. But you know what? I’m an Instigator dangit; I like to see crazy stuff happen in my games and the best way I know to promote that sort of thing is to give it its own economy, in this case the FATE point.

I need to dip briefly into system design here for a second. The other uses of a FATE point were pretty tame. A +2 to a d20 roll is the standard “DM’s best friend” circumstance bonus. A reroll with a +3 bonus to skill checks sounds awesome – and can be! – but think for a minute. You’re only supposed to make right around half of your attack rolls according to proper game balance but you need to make two-thirds or better of your skill checks (4 successes out of 6 rolls for a complexity 1 skill challenge) so even a hefty reroll bonus isn’t too “out there”. Player narration, though it may mess with the plot in unexpected ways, has no mechanical effect on the game and so is safe as well. Using an attack power as a utility power – which is what we’re going to do here – does have mechanical impact on the game, and so we have to keep some kind of limit on it. Also, applying an artifical, arbitrary limitation on doing something triggers the natural human rebellion instinct, so in limiting usage, you’re also encouraging usage.

All that talk leads up to this idea. By spending a FATE point, the player may use an attack power in a predetermined utility way until the end of the encounter. Example – let’s say you have an underage kawaii pyromaniac tiefling assassin who does incredibly well with her relatively modest 20 AC at level 5. She wants to use her Executioner’s Noose to go all Spiderman and stuff. It’s an at-will power, so you want to limit the movement to standard speed or less but you think that a standard action to fly 5 is probably fair. She hands over the FATE point and until her next short rest, she can swing on branches, stalactites, clotheslines, whatever happens to be handy. What about using Dire Radiance to light up a room? It’s radiance, right? Another at-will power, so let’s use it like the Wizard cantrip Light except again as a standard action to not step on the Wizard’s toes too much. If you can find an already written utility power for what you want to do of the same usage and approximate level, that’s your best bet. I’d love to see some of your ideas, so please! Post them on the forums.

As a parting note, this will up your characters’ overall power levels a little bit, so to compensate I as a DM would raise all encounter levels by 1 and award Action Points only after milestones to keep roughly the same challenge. Depending on the way your PCs play, your mileage may vary.

Except for my Wave Dogs in the Vineyard game, I don’t get to play enough RPGs that aren’t D&D. Wait, Ryven, this is a 4E podcast. Yeah, yeah, I know, just run with me on this for a second. There are some mechanics I really want to play from other systems that I’m probably just not going to be able to play, so I’ll just have to port them into 4E, conveniently enough in the next few segments! Power Source folks be warned – some things will be changed after the end of the first arc here in about 6 weeks so pay attention! This week, the FATE point.

Actually, think of this more like Bonus Tokens Part II – Beyond Thunderdome. My original Bonus Token concept was specifically for skill challenges and while I like that option there, I want to expand it. A couple shows back, Jared and I briefly tossed around the idea of a roleplay build for 4E characters and FATE points and so this is really just the result of that discussion. Imagine – after you create your character at level 1, you have 5 Aspects – words or phrases that you use to describe your character. The first two are your race and class. The next three, you create on your own. You get more as you increase in level, but don’t worry about that right now.

At the end of each extended rest, you gain 2 FATE points + 1 per tier. You gain another after each milestone. A Bonus Token is then just sort of a temporary FATE point. You can use a FATE point to do one of four things. First, you can play it to gain a +2 to any d20 roll you’ve already made. Not a bad use, but as we’ll see, there are better. Second, if you spend it on a non-attack roll that goes along with one of your Aspects, you may reroll the d20 with a +3 bonus. Finally, you may spend a FATE point to declare a fact about the game world, again in accordance with one of your Aspects. The declaration can’t directly contradict something the DM has already said, but you can twist it. The DM may also Compel your Aspects, making an event occur because of your character’s habits and such. You may pay a FATE point to deny that event, but if you can’t the event happens and you get another FATE point for your trouble. Need some examples to sort this all out? No problem.

Mircolis is a half-elf star pact warlock. (this guy should be familiar to some of you). He’s level 8 and has 6 Aspects: Half-Elf, Star Pact, Evil-Looking Goatee, Ritual Master, Street Hustler and Love of Comfort. In this situation, he’s trying to pry some information about a cave from a hunter in town. The DM has already specified that the hunter doesn’t trust Mircolis enough to give him the information. Mircolis could try to roll Diplomacy to improve his mood and get a +2 bonus by spending a FATE point. However Street Hustler is one of his Aspects, so instead if he tries to Bluff to gain that trust, he can reroll with a +3 bonus if he doesn’t like the first roll by spending that same FATE point. Even better, though, I can plop down that FATE point and say “Mircolis reads the man’s fortune using his connections to the Far Realms and finds a mistress. Will he tell me if I threaten to expose him to his wife?” The twist opens up all kinds of fun options – maybe the hunter now gives Mircolis false information out of spite, or feels compelled to redeem himself by leading Mircolis to the cave personally. On the other hand, the DM could Compel the Evil-Looking Goatee Aspect to outright deny the information and force Mircolis to go some other route, but I still at least get another FATE point out of it. It’s a quick but robust system and after a couple playtests, I hope to implement it permanently.

Now astute listeners may have noticed that earlier I said four things to do with a FATE point, but I only gave the player three – the Compel is a DM option. That’s because next week we’ll talk about the fourth option for your FATE point purchases – the power stunt.

This one’s going to run a little long ’cause I have a lot to say. Just warning you. Also, I’m selling my PHB3, $25 (which includes shipping) anywhere in the States. International listeners, eh, we’ll talk. Shoot me an email if you’re interested.

But now let’s take a peek at cursed items. Back in earlier editions, a cursed item was basically a “gotcha;” the big middle finger from behind the DM screen. It looked like something cool until you found out it actually sucked – and then you couldn’t get rid of it or it killed you. Great for gritty “realism”, not so good for heroic storytelling. For the purposes of 4E, I think of three basic types of curses.
First, minor curses – downfalls or oddities that are fairly situational – are ok to spring on your PCs without warning most of the time. The 3rd edition version of the Backbiter Spear (though I would avoid the 1st or 2nd edition versions), an Elven Cloak that fails to work for dwarves, armor that makes you vulnerable to radiant damage while in direct sunlight and a healing potion that also turns you Smurf blue for the rest of the day aren’t going to be game-breaking and perfectly legitimate as surprise curses. If your curse is mildly annoying, easy to circumvent or simply played for laughs, you can put it on any magic item that seems feasible and have the curse only identified when it actually occurs for the first time.

I prefer the second class of curses, ones that a player can put aside if they want, but are tempted to endure for the sake of power. Think about cursed items in literature. Everyone in LotR knew what the One Ring was and exactly how it worked. Elric could put Stormbringer down any time he wanted to, but he didn’t. These are the kinds of cursed items you want to mimic for the bulk of your game. A necromancer’s wand that drains a healing surge the first time it is used each day but adds an extra d6 of damage to critical hits is going to entice players to keep using it so that the loss of the healing surge doesn’t go to waste. The dagger of a famous traitor that adds another die of Sneak Attack once per day, but only after it is has struck one of it’s wielder’s allies (for base d6 damage dice, of course) is another good option. When creating an item like this, you’re asking your players to make a sort of bet. They ante with an upfront cost and then hope their bet pays off. This keeps the curse in play and the item in the character’s hand without forcing it with a “this item can not be discarded without a Remove Curse” entry. Also consider a mechanic like the one in the Summoning Wizard’s class article from Dragon 385 where if you don’t use the item or do what it wants you to do, it “misbehaves.” Imagine a set of boots that give +2 speed but if the character doesn’t move at least half their speed on a turn, the boots will move them their full speed at the end of their turn – and never somewhere helpful! Characters who try to identify these types of items should probably at least know vaguely that something is wrong ahead of time if not the full nature of the curse.

If, however you are the sort of sadistic DM that needs to inflict horrible punishments and crippling infirmities on your PCs just because you can (and for whatever reason you’re still playing 4E), then let your players be heroic in their suckiness. That is, let them choose to be cursed, take up the weapon that can’t be sheathed or wear the ring that can’t be removed. But who’s going to choose being cursed? I bet the paladin in your party would rather be unable to put down the immensely powerful but soul-draining cursed sword rather than let it fall into the hands of the villain. I bet the party psion already hears enough voices in her head that she could deal with a supernatural possession better than that 10-year old orphan over there. And I bet the party rogue is willing to be mute or take a -4 to all saving throws if it will help him get through the dungeon to the hoard of gold at the end. You can hand your PCs the 2nd edition Backbiter Spear in 4th edition so long as they know how it works in advance and it will be an interesting, compelling item when used. A good DM will know the characters’ (and players’) motivations and can use them to convince said characters to willingly take on horrifying curses.

Since first writing this, Quinn Murphy of the At-Will Blog has put up a list of his own cursed items and I strongly encourage you to go read it. He and I had a lengthy discussion on the topic and turns out we have vastly different design philosophies. Namely, his items are far more complex and harder to get rid of, but you get the fun stuff before the curse hits. Mine are simpler and not so permanent but I make you deal with the curse first before you get the fun stuff. It’s all a matter of taste really. I have posted my versions of his two cursed items – Gamble and Valor – below.

Before I end, I should probably address the save-or-die curses. Some are fairly simple to import, like the Necklace of Strangulation. In 2nd edition this item dealt 6 points of damage per round to its wearer until their corpse fully decomposes, removable only with a wish or miracle! For 4E, you would probably want to give three saves, assisted by Heal checks, to prevent death so that it works more like a petrifying gaze attack. Don’t put these in every treaure chest, but once or twice per Tier, something similar could be quite a fun surprise! The scarab of death which after being worn for at least 10 minutes suddenly insta-kills … not so much. It’s just not the right fit for the heroic genre. Leave it be.

Feels good to be behind the microphone again. It’s been like 6 weeks since I actually recorded something, so I’m hyped to get back into it. For the next couple weeks, we’re going to talk about putting the magic back into your magic items.

Think back to your 1st, 2nd or maybe 3rd edition days. You just found some crazy magic item in a dungeon and you had no idea what to do with it. So now you’ve got two options: either stow it somewhere until you can get someone to explain it to you or screw around with it until it does something. You’ll end up paying out the wazoo for the chance (and I do mean CHANCE) to have an NPC identify the item so you can use it. If you do experiment, good luck because you’re probably going to get yourself or another party member killed, polymorphed or otherwise hosed. At best, you use the item at the wrong time and lose it. Before anyone gets on my case, yes, there is something fun about having to figure out how to use an item and the magic items of the time were commonly CRAZY awesome; it’s one of the charms of that genre of gaming.

However, 4E is a game of fantastic heroes managing resources. It assumes you are always going to be able to get maximum potential from your items and rarely if ever suffer penalties from unknowingly putting on the wrong hat or something. Can you imagine if Fafhrd or the Grey Mouser just suddenly keeled over dead from drinking from the wrong pool of water? Even Indiana Jones, who did in fact face that very situation, had a bunch of chalices to choose from and some foreknowledge, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I admittedly don’t really like the 4E magic item system in some ways. It’s too.. predictable. I want my players to pick something up from time to time and go “what the heck is THIS?” The uncertainty makes it more interesting. An item with multiple functions under different circumstances also feels magical. But how do you balance the wonder of something unknown against the pointlessness of the thing never being used? Your PCs have to know how and when to use something, but not what it is. This is obviously tricky.
I came upon one solution to this problem several weeks back, something I call Compound Items. Here’s something one Power Source Campaign party found in the belongings of what amounted to a flesh golem – it’s called Patchwork Synthetic.

See what I did there? I combined a slightly better Healing Potion, a suit of Delver’s Armor and a ritual scroll of Make Whole into one item. The players have a meaningful decision to make about the item and if I describe it correctly, they’ll know when to use it even if they’re not entirely sure what it is. I didn’t describe it well, though, since the group seems to have forgotten about it. An unused item is a pointless item. On the other hand, the Eifa tree I gave the other group that combined a healing potion with a stonemeal biscuit and a suit of Darkleaf Armor with a Tethercord seemed to draw their attention more. It may be because I gave the party’s artificer all of the options right upfront, so Casey, make sure Kaitlynn gets to hear this because I think Tullie is still carting it around*. Despite bad presentation so far I think the idea is sound so I will continue to toy with it and let you know how it works.
Once again I’m dangerously over time, but I have more examples for you, so watch the forum as I will post them when this show hits. Next week – curses and cursed items.

*Casey and Kaitlynn are players in my home campaign; Tullie is Kaitlynn’s character.

It’s time for the last segment on Skill Challenges, which is good because I’m getting kinda tired of this and ready to get on with something else .

When “Chatty DM” Phil Menard was on a few weeks back, he mentioned something he calls “Mouseguarding.” This is of course, a reference to the Mouseguard RPG; specifically page 91 of the core rulebook (which I own!). The text on the page reads as follows: “One of two things can happen and the GM gets to decide which one he wants. You can fail to overcome the obstacle and the GM can inject a twist into the game or you can succeed at your attempt with some cost. The GM can’t apply both options to one test.”

So what we’re actually saying here is that your PCs can fail a skill check and still succeed.. sort of. The concept needs to be translated slightly since Mouseguard has ongoing status conditions closer to Star Wars: Saga Edition’s condition track rather than 4E’s combat conditions and tends to use said conditions as the cost of success. If you’re in combat, you might be able to succeed on the check but are then Dazed until the end of your next turn, representing the extra focus required for the task that pulls you out of the fight momentarily. Outside of combat, though, we’re shooting for spirit rather than letter of the law.

I believe I may have used this example at the beginning of the series, but I’ll use it again because it’s good. You fail on an Athletics check to climb a cliff. The DM can simply say that you can’t find a good handhold and must locate a new way to your destination – the twist – or charge you some toll for the successful climb A healing surge or having to temporarily leave behind your armor immediately come to mind as costs. For a full skill challenge where the party is trying to locate the next major villain, the cost of failing the skill challenge could be an increase in the number of bad guys in the next combat or being stuck on the business end of a surprise round. Depending on the situation, these might be preferable to the pure fail, which is having to wait until the villain make his or her next move.

Most of the time, I recommend you go ahead and ask your players outright what they’re willing to sacrifice for the success. I am of the school of thought that meaningful choice, not just immersive narrative or setting, is the heart of the tabletop RPG and so I’m willing to step back into the metagame for a little bit to let the players mull it over. You can choose for them in secret occasionally, but I find it preferable more often that not to put that decision squarely in the players’ hands.

Why do this? Why add these complications or costs rather than simply failing? Several good reasons – first, it’s an extra layer of plot glue in case your PCs come up short on the rolls to move the story forward. If your skill challenge is built well based on the other criteria from the last few weeks, you shouldn’t need it, but better safe than sorry. Second, it helps the players feel engaged, even when they fail. There’s still a meaningful choice to be made. Grognards tend to be hard on “new school” gaming for being ‘soft’ when it comes to abject failure and character death. This is primarily a game genre issue and something I’ll revisit later, but remember that you as a DM want to encourage your players to keep playing. Besides, forcing characters to live with the ramifications of a bad decision is almost always worse than simply killing them or otherwise removing them from the game. Finally, imposing a toll can help expand the content and depth of what you already have written rather than being forced to improvise all the time.

I’m almost out of time and really, this isn’t something you write into a skill test or challenge inherently but a technique you use in play, so I won’t point out any DMG2 or RPGA module references. And with that (does it count if I say it?) we conclude the series on skill challenges. Next week – making magic items feel awesome and unique again without technically breaking the 4E magic item schema.

Section 3 of the Skill Challenge series – dead skill challenges.  What do I mean by a dead skill challenge?  A dead skill challenge is one that does not create a feedback loop, a back-and-forth with the PCs.  I used to be a big proponent of the idea that a skill challenge should feel like and be run like a combat for this very reason.  I don’t feel quite so strongly about that anymore since not every skill challenge needs to involve NPCs or forces antagonistic to the PCs.   You can have “friendly” skill challenges, like..  L..  alright, I have a sort running metaphor and I promise I’ll keep this modest but hold on a second.  (BBC Warning).  Making love to your spouse is a skill challenge.  I don’t care who you are or who you married, it’s a skill challenge.  I think many of you would agree with me.  But it’s not openly hostile to you — unless you’re into that sort of thing I guess.  Point being, if your partner just lays there you’re not going have as much fun.  In the same way, if a skill challenge just “lays there” as it were, it’s not going to be much fun.  It needs to respond to the PCs and prompt a response from them.  I have three primary methods of making skill challenges feel alive and interactive to share with you today.

First off, narrate your player’s successes and failures along linear time.  If you’re using various techniques and such with your partner but there’s no excitement building towards a climax, someone’s going to end up frustrated.  Similarly if your players are making various skill checks but you don’t narrate the events as being related to one another and getting closer to (or further from) the goal, it’s going to break immersion very fast.  Remember that your PCs should be navigating a small scene from a beginning to an end when involved in a skill challenge.  The challenge needs to tell the entire story of the scene, not just the beginning and end. “The Rushing River”, pg. 94 of the DMG2 does a very good job of this, splitting up the challenge into a sequence of smaller location-based checks; the characters literally move from one place to the next with their checks, giving them a sense of progress.  Encounter 3: Preparation from LFR Module CORE1-3 “Sense of Wonder” on the other hand, does not do this well.  The narration provided does not connect any skill checks to any other skill checks, requiring the DM to make a coherent story of the ship’s repairs.

Second, there’s structure.  Sometimes a little direction in the bedroom goes a long way – “faster” “softer” “higher” help convey individual preferences to common practices that maximize enjoyment.  In a skill challenge,  forcing a couple skill rolls is an excellent way to convey flavor without restricting number or type of primary skills.  A long forest hike that requires half the group to pass an Endurance check every once in a while is going to give the same feel as if Endurance were a primary skill to passing the challenge.   More aggressive lovers might employ a “do unto you so you’ll do unto me” approach.  Mimic this by occasionally giving your skill challenges a roll of their own against the PC’s defenses or passive skills.  Avoid doing this often or  when your PCs are near their last failure, obviously, but if they’re just breezing through the challenge without really paying much attention, a quick hit in the collective Fortitude or Passive Acrobatics is going to make them sit up and take notice.   “Traveling through Gorgimrith,” pg 92 of DMG2 really takes this concept and runs with it.  Dictating ALL of the PCs skill rolls in this way can be a little too rigid and domineering, making the PCs feel railroaded, so you probably don’t want to build a challenge quite like this one.  The point of the game is to interact with other people, not just perform a set mechanical routine, but it’s a goldmine of ideas for forced rolls.

Finally – branching.  Branching means that are several ‘paths’ through the challenge that open and close based on decisions the characters make and which checks succeed or fail.  For example, if the character succeeds on a Stealth check to sneak towards the door, the character can continue on the road to infiltration with a Theivery check to pick the lock.  On a failure, he or she may have to use Bluff or Diplomacy instead to convince the guards that he’s supposed to be there in the first place.  You can also just hand the player the opportunity to choose which path to take to involve more r-o-l-e-playing vs. r-o-l-l-playing.   Unfortunately, I don’t have a sly, risque analogy for this one, so you’ll just have to make do.  Sorry.  On to the books,  DMG2 pg 98 “Moving Through Suderham” by Mike Mearls involves a TON of implicit branching and branching by purposeful choice.  In terms of pre-written challenges, this is the gold standard for branching.  Encounter 2: Sava from EAST1-2 “Marauder’s Spear” is also good and far less complex.

Next week – we are rounding third and heading home to the last segment of the series.  Complications and Mouseguarding.  Thanks for staying with it!