Chapter 5: Adventures
I went out and got a couple more bottles of mead on sale, so let us continue with another chapter of the DMG2.
One of the things that people complain about with regards to 4e is how
shallow it is. NPCs only have stats if they are enemies, and all the villagers are just green dots. Monsters are depicted as having glowing poison bows while you are fighting them, but you can't actually pick up and use those bows after the monsters have been defeated. It's like a computer game, where most of the stuff in the world is just a sprite or even just a detail painted into the background - not an actual thing in the world you could interact with. Partly because of the amazing failure of every attempt to make a working skill challenge system, the 4e suggested adventures are basically "make some shit up for a while, then have a combat encounter, then hand out treasure and XPs", repeat ad nauseum. This chapter advertises itself as something that will help us create "exciting, immersive stories", which is something that the original core rules basically held in contempt.
The first mini-chapter in this is called "Alternative Rewards", and it is not off to a strong start when it has an opening that is a series of italicized in media res vignettes about characters getting powerups. Taking a few sips of golden honey booze I feel like this chapter is going to be about giving people things that are exactly like magic items, and then give them slightly different flavor text and call it good.
DMG2 wrote:These rewards occupy the same mechanical space as magic items. They balance on the same power curve and aim at the same place within the body of a character's abilities.
OK, I'm going to need more booze.
It turns out that these are more conservative than I even imagined. You complete an adventure and then instead of getting a magic ring that gives you a bullshit bonus, you get a divine boon or grandmaster training or something that does literally exactly what you would have gotten for having a magic ring. And because this is 4th edition, the bonus actually fades away after you've gained five levels, requiring you to go get a bigger, more level appropriate divine boon to replace it with. Exactly how the game thinks you're supposed to replace all your gear every five levels with newer, shinier, higher level gear.
It's difficult to overstate how boring and shitty 4e magic items are. The designers decided that the important part of D&D wasn't the thing where you explore strange locations and find fabulous treasure you remember forever, it was the part where you find a +2 shortsword and then you toss your +1 shortsword because the +2 version is 1 point better. So they made sure that everyone was forced to get newer wands, newer swords, newer pairs of pants, newer everything. And that every time you got a newer thing, it was just +1 bigger than the last pants or shoes you had. And since you're supposed to upgrade all your stuff every five levels, and the party is five people who are all doing that, that's basically all the "rewards" you get for your whole adventuring career. All the "rewards" are just you finding the incremental upgrades you're supposed to have to be the level you now are. And now the "alternate rewards" turn out to just be various colored marks on your forehead that are exactly the same as the upgradable pants and shoes. And now my glass of mead is empty. Again.
Just in case you missed how transparent this entire stunt was, they point out that you can use a "non item reward" to simply upgrade an item directly to being the higher level version of it. Also they give some sample divine boons that have actual honest to fuckness gold piece price equivalents in case it wasn't obvious enough how exactly the same as purchasable magic items this was. These fucking things even give "item bonuses", I'm embarrassed for these people.
We're 17th level now, so Yes.
Next up we have a section called "Item Components". This is where you hand out normal magic items, but you cut them up into three pieces. So you hand out more "treasure parcels", but the treasure parcels contain only legos that assemble into items rather than the items themselves. Maybe this makes people feel like they are making more progress, but it's so obviously not actually different from having completed items fall out of monsters less often that I can't even take this seriously. I mean, this is fucking 4th edition, where there is a total disconnect between the quests you undertake or monsters you defeat and the treasure that falls out. So since you can already punch a swarm of bees and have chain mail fall out Diablo-style, there's inherently nothing special you have to do to get the next segment of the multipart chainmail you're working on instead. It's stupid.
Artifacts are the book's big concession to something other than treadmill non-advancement. These are magic items or creatures that level up in weird ways when the PCs complete quests and then fuck off when they run out of higher level abilities to get. Fundamentally, they use up a lot of text for what is basically a minor temporary powerup in the form of an intelligent item. Fourteen and a half pages covers seven artifacts. The creeping shittiness of 4e items still permeates this. For fuck's sake, the Rod of Seven Parts does 2d10+5 damage after you assemble all 7 parts. That is a ratfucking
daily power. I've really already wasted more text on this non-section than it warrants.
Organizations make up the first part of the "adventures" chapter that isn't basically "alternate flavor text for 4e magic items". The purpose of organizations is, according to this book, to "connect the dots" between combat encounters. That is, the game is still defined as a series of battle set pieces, but here they acknowledge that you
might want something resembling a
plot or at least an identifiable
reason that you are engaging in this series of battles.
This subchapter has headings labeled "Politics" and "Rivalries", and you might think that it could touch upon actually
doing something other than finding groups of 5-10 enemies and stabbing them in the belly. You'd be wrong. The groups presented are just small cells of Bane worshippers and the like: groups that have an excuse to field 5-10 dudes who attack the PCs and get gut stabbed, and then field
another cell of 5-10 dudes who attack the PCs and get gut stabbed later on. That's
story continuity, motherfuckers! Really, I can't help feeling disappointed by these organizations. Even the section on politics and the section on rivalries is just excuses to split organizations up into combat-encounter-sized chunks so that the player characters can gut stab them. There's no rules on actually
doing politics or even really any suggestion that players should concern themselves with such things as
actually having any effect on the world. It's still just coming up with potential excuses for enemies to show up in family size fun packs without showing up in actual armies or even platoons (as that would show how small scale everything in 4th edition actually is).
Also, there are fights.
The final section of the chapter is the "Campaign Arcs". This is where they detail their vision of what it "really means" to have a campaign that goes from Heroic to Paragon to Epic. Allow me to say that I am an avowed
supporter of the concept of campaigns actually doing that. The book provides four suggested campaigns, which are kind of sketched out in a manner similar to the stuff K and I did for High Adventure in the Lower Planes, with a segment about low, medium, and high level and discussions about how to structure the campaign around these changes in venue. All in all, I feel that a sub chapter like this has every right to appear in a DMG, and probably should have been in the DMG1. This section is pretty much the money shot of the entire book, because it is the part where they talk about what an actual campaign of D&D actually is and should be. So I'll go ahead and review all four.
The first campaign arc is really pretty stupid. It starts with the characters being humble villagers and then magic rays from an an exploding planar breach turn them into player character adventurers wearing heavy armor and reading from spell books and shit. It's totally D&D Cartoon crap, and that shit was embarrassing in the 80s. Second, while being very sketchy it nonetheless suggests
extreme railroadiness. The final paragon tier showdown happens after the players
lose a race to a thingy against a rival adventuring party of jerks. Maybe it's just me, but I actually would feel pretty jerked around by a campaign arc that scheduled me losing a race for a plot device
19 levels in the future. And finally, while this campaign is epic in
scope (you travel to other planes of existence and put a stop to a threat that is unraveling reality), it's not terribly epic in
action. The player characters pretty much walk from plot point to plot point and handle all problems by killing small groups of enemies in skirmish combat. You start fighting planar themed kobolds and you end fighting demon lords, but it's the same "walk over to that point and stab whatever is there" structure all the way up. It would be one thing if the players got access to planar travel of their own at some point and their available options increased when they could go to numerous worlds and try different strategies - but it's all portals and railroads taking you through those portals the whole way. Not happy with the first offered campaign arc.
The second offering isn't epic in scope at all (the characters are from a collection of allied kingdoms, those kingdoms get attacked, the "epic" version is that you go to another plane and do it again), but it's actually much better about providing for growth of character ability and responsibility. You start out getting sent to fight brigands and stuff, then you also do court intrigue and such, then you become a king and start inventing your own missions to do, then you have wars to fight, and so on. There's a clear vision of what characters could be doing in Paragon Tier that is genuinely different from what they were doing in Heroic Tier. Unfortunately, 4th edition D&D just isn't up to the task. 4e doesn't have a kingdom management minigame or a mass combat minigame or
any of that shit! The book lamely suggests maybe using skill challenges or something to handle these things, but as discussed in Chapter 3,
that sure isn't happening. So while I'm actually fairly happy with the proposed 2nd campaign arc, it's painfully obviously that 4th edition D&D can't actually handle a campaign that interesting. And that's a shame. It makes me want to play D&D. 3rd edition D&D.
The third campaign is pretty similar to the 2nd, save that it actually has an epic proposal. The characters start doing small scale military operations with regional militias, then progress to the leaders of mighty armies conducting multi-front wars against armies increasingly getting aid from evil gods. The epic tier involves leading armies into the lands of those evil gods, pacifying the lands and murderstabbing the gods themselves while conducting nation building in a literal hellscape.
That is a campaign arc. Unfortunately again, I really have no idea how you could do that in 4th edition D&D. There are no funcitonal mechanics for army generalship or nation building. So even though I am fully in favor of this sort of campaign being done, and it is written in a way that makes me want to play it, the millstone of 4th edition D&D keeps reminding me of its presence every time I try to think of how you would actually represent
any of this under 4th edition rules.
The fourth one really brings the Paragon jump. The characters start doing fetch quests, but stresses the idea that the fetch quests themselves should have multiple possible resolutions. In Paragon, you get a fucking time machine and get to go forward and backward in time, picking and choosing your own missions. That's pretty awesome, and would be pretty awesome even under 4e rules. Unfortunately, the epic shenanigans are hamhanded and silly (the PCs turn into the gods of the campaign world, disassemble the time machine, and send dreams to their younger selves to go hunt for the parts, because
cliche). I've done closed loop time travel in D&D games before, and it can be very effective. But this
particular closed loop was kind of forced and lame. In any case, the campaign arc loses steam after the initial time travel sand box portion, because the way it tries to get the story "back on track" are lame. Still, I would totally play the shit out of the first half of this campaign and it works decently well within the harsh limits of 4th edition D&D's scope.
The mini-chapter and the chapter as a whole ends with a reprint of a web article by James Wyatt
about Campaign Arcs. It actually references books from 3.5 because it's a fucking reprint from a web blog article and has no place in a 4th edition book. Because James Wyatt is lazy as fuck and can't even be fucked to adjust his recycled work to talk about the edition he is currently shilling. Pathetic.
-Username17