recent d&d deathwatch data

[Krakatoa]

I'd answer the question myself, but I've literally not read a single module of any edition ever. I'm sort of inclined to say that whatever the modules do, it doesn't really matter. The principles of game design stand or fall on their own merits whether or not the published adventures hold to them.

[quanta]

There's nothing wrong with certain tasks never being trivial as you level (maybe your game just doesn't let characters reach that level of skill). Maybe you don't want diplomacy to be like mind control. Whatever.

But if you want some tasks represented by the same mechanical ability, say thievery, to scale and some to not scale, and decide to simply have the tasks you want to not become trivial scale up to the character, people might be pissed off that their bigger numbers mean different things at different times. Especially when they may not be able to determine which tasks in game are scaling and which aren't. ("If I go back and try to climb the cliffs of doom again, is it going to be any less deadly?")

From the standpoint of designing the game to be easier to interact with for the players, it's more sensible to clearly delineate scaling abilities or obstacles from those that don't. That way people can keep track of their progress when leveling by knowing which of their abilities scale rather than having to know how things work from the DM side of the screen.

tl;dr. It's better to have players not scale and the obstacle not scale than to have them both scaling if you expect the players to repeatedly interact with an unchanging obstacle. (Obviously, everything I said doesn't apply to a recurring villain scaling, because presumably he's been busy doing shit at the same time you were. But he better do more than just have bigger numbers if you want shit to be interesting).

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'd answer the question myself, but I've literally not read a single module of any edition ever. I'm sort of inclined to say that whatever the modules do, it doesn't really matter. The principles of game design stand or fall on their own merits whether or not the published adventures hold to them.

That's honestly too bad. As much as we bitch about them, some of the 4E modules are pretty good. Most of the sucky ones are heroic-tier which is, unfortunately, where most players play. The paragon-tier modules are a lot better because 4E characters have a decent bulge of abilities without straying too far from the balance curve and the adventure designers actually come up with some suitable adventure goals.

[Krakatoa]

My group prefers to play original stuff.

But I'm not neccesarily against modules, I'm just currently not DMing our game, so what funds I can throw at entertainment are mostly going to novels and cheap vidja games from two years ago, these days.

[souran]

That's honestly too bad. As much as we bitch about them, some of the 4E modules are pretty good. Most of the sucky ones are heroic-tier which is, unfortunately, where most players play. The paragon-tier modules are a lot better because 4E characters have a decent bulge of abilities without straying too far from the balance curve and the adventure designers actually come up with some suitable adventure goals.

I run prewritten modules because I no longer have the time I used to to come up with adventures. Most of the people in my group run prewritten modules when DMing any system so we don't have to spend as much time putting together encounters.

Lago is correct. Whoever is incharge of the 4E modules is WAY better than whoever was put in charge of the 3E "offical publsihed" modules for wizards of the coast.

While the stories are not to deep, They are at least complete stories. Troll Haunt Warrens, Demon Queen, Revenge of the Giants, and the whole "adventure path" that they published about killing tiamat each adventure is a complete and logical story to play through.

Compared to things like "expedition of castle ravenloft" where for space reasons they FUCKING CUT OUT THE ENDING. Or Demonweb Pits where the story is so threadbare that I as the DM couldn't remember what the offical storyline was while running it and had to pretty much write a new one. Or "return to the temple of elemental evil" whose attempt at a story was "this was once the site well selling adventure. Go to some of the same places!"

[hogarth]

Yes, I'm asking hogarth, the one here.

Although I think tzor put up a reasonable metric.

I'm not going to defend 4E's bass-ackwards way of doing things, but trying to avoid falling off the random number generator (e.g. making tasks trivial for the expert and/or impossible for the novice) isn't inherently wrong. Skills like Perception or Diplomacy are a good example.

Of course, 4E broke the RNG anyways by making it possible to auto-succeed on Hard skill checks at level 1 (with a high stat, a trained skill, skill focus and a racial bonus), so it's a moot point.

[Ferret]

That's honestly too bad. As much as we bitch about them, some of the 4E modules are pretty good. Most of the sucky ones are heroic-tier which is, unfortunately, where most players play. The paragon-tier modules are a lot better because 4E characters have a decent bulge of abilities without straying too far from the balance curve and the adventure designers actually come up with some suitable adventure goals.

You know, for all the bad shit that 4e did - I think their modules and the Encounters program were a fucking stellar idea. Weekly, drop-in, short duration games? The only reason I don't show up every week is because my game store runs Encounters Wednesday nights and I'm otherwise committed that night, but the idea of a company-supported program like this is, I think, a fantastic fucking idea and I'd love for more companies to jump on the bandwagon.

I'd like the Encounters modules to be a bit more involved, but I have to give Wizards their due on this one. Great idea.

[mean_liar]

Some of the shit you do in the Dragon modules is pretty awesome, such as cutting off the Githyanki threat to the Prime, forever. At 19th (?) level.

[Lago PARANOIA]

My only complaint about 4E modules is that they're too map-heavy. While this isn't a problem for face-to-face games because they come with the maps anyway, if you do want to run something online it's a pain in the butt. Having the maps online or better yet actually following through on their online tabletop idea would've been nice.

[Shazbot79]

Some of the shit you do in the Dragon modules is pretty awesome, such as cutting off the Githyanki threat to the Prime, forever. At 19th (?) level.

Isn't that one of the Scales of War adventures?

The one where PC's travel to the Astral Plane and resurrect the Lich Queen to overthrow the Githyanki empire?

I'm recalling another Epic level adventure in that path where your characters storm heaven in order to find the macguffin needed to resurrect a dead god...with an army of angels and devils out to stop you. When skimming through the encounters I saw one room that simply said "Dispater". Not "Cultist of Dispater", or "Aspect of Dispater", plain old Dispater...and he isn't even the end boss.

[souran]

Some of the shit you do in the Dragon modules is pretty awesome, such as cutting off the Githyanki threat to the Prime, forever. At 19th (?) level.

Isn't that one of the Scales of War adventures?

The one where PC's travel to the Astral Plane and resurrect the Lich Queen to overthrow the Githyanki empire?

I'm recalling another Epic level adventure in that path where your characters storm heaven in order to find the macguffin needed to resurrect a dead god...with an army of angels and devils out to stop you. When skimming through the encounters I saw one room that simply said "Dispater". Not "Cultist of Dispater", or "Aspect of Dispater", plain old Dispater...and he isn't even the end boss.

Yep, "Scales of War" is really probably one of the very best adventure paths ever done...at least once it hits paragon tier. The first 2 adventures feel REALLY tacked on.

Scales of War is TRUELY EPIC and deserves the capitals.

Yes, the charactrers fight dispater

The characters also go to a city/demi-plane that is a purgetory and filled with betryers. There they can bargin/fight with Kas - as in "sword of Kas", I freaking killed Vecna the first time Kas.

and it ends with the charactrers killing Tiamatt, and the implied ending of the story is that "greed, envy, and the rest of her portfilo STOP EXISTING until another good assumes those aspects of her worship.

Thats a definant win, when you change the world so that people cannot be greedy anymore.

[hogarth]

When skimming through the encounters I saw one room that simply said "Dispater". Not "Cultist of Dispater", or "Aspect of Dispater", plain old Dispater...and he isn't even the end boss.

Hm. The idea of Dispater hanging out in a dungeon room like a Mega-Orc guarding a Mega-Pie is lame; I hope it's more interesting than that.

[Shazbot79]

Hm. The idea of Dispater hanging out in a dungeon room like a Mega-Orc guarding a Mega-Pie is lame; I hope it's more interesting than that.

He's there because of what's happening in the actual plot. Which is something that I don't really want to spoil here.

I agree that the Sales of War adventure path is pretty spectacular. It starts off slow, as most of the heroic tier adventures really only have a tenuous connection to the plot, but it really takes off when the Githyanki invade the material plane.

I think that the epic tier installments are a pretty good representations of what adventures at that level are supposed to look like: plane-hopping, god-punching, universe altering romps.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But like I said, all of the really bad 4E modules (Keep on the Shadowfell, Marauders of the Dune Sea, the starter adventure in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, Pyramid of Shadows) are Heroic Tier. Which unfortunately manages to give the entire enterprise a bad name. I mean, shit, the 4E Tomb of Horrors actually manages to be really challenging without being blatantly unfair. It's actually pretty damn well made. But of course we have a bunch of people--even fans of the product--bitching because it doesn't run like a Gygaxian wankfest.

Whatever. Grognards ruin everything.

Related to this, my basic rule when I DMed 4E is that I never ran parties below level 7 and that was only to accommodate the newbies. If I had my druthers I would start directly in paragon tier but because there were always newbies I generally started one shots or new groups at around level 7-8.

I think that the epic tier installments are a pretty good representations of what adventures at that level are supposed to look like: plane-hopping, god-punching, universe altering romps.

You know, I think one of the things that ended up really kicking the edition in the taint was their refusal to package a default campaign setting into the mix.

My biggest, most enduring problem with the edition is that the epic-level adventures don't actually feel epic, but you know what? The biggest problem is that we don't have a backdrop to compare against! Everything gets written in a vacuum so when people design rituals or magical items or classes, they get stuck in the mentality of 'what would be good for a dungeon crawl', which gave us old-skool ridiculousness like regeneration being priced higher than raise dead or passwall higher level than teleport.

If Shadowrun has taught us anything, the best games have their rules intertwined with the metaplot. Now D&D is supposed to be a universal game so I can understand them not wanting to have, say, a magical system that reinforces every trope a certain setting wants to have, but if they had some kind of setting to work against we'd at least have a point of comparison.

I don't know if any of you guys remember, but one of the biggest things that 3E had going for it was the background assumption that you were in Forgotten Realms. Oh, sure, you weren't in FR specifically but they pumped out so much material that no one really gave a care whether you dropped in Runepriests or Thayan Knights or Spellcasting Prodigy into your original game. Not to mention the NWN popcultural osmosis going on. 4E doesn't have a 'fall-back' setting to plunder stuff from. Dark Sun would've been a really good idea if they had done it sooner and gone hole hog, rather than dropping it for Essentials stuff.

D&D Essentials unfortunately doesn't seem to have learned their lesson. Now their next flagship setting is going to be Neverwinter apparently? What the ass? I liked Neverwinter Nights, but...

[hogarth]

Jason Bulmahn posted a link to an interesting set of notes regarding WotC's presentation at DDXP on his Facebook page. http://tinyurl.com/4bbj39n

Tidbits:

Any plans on making more plastic miniatures?: “We’re having issues with the global economy.” D&D minis were produced in China, less cost-effective to do it now, so they discontinued Minis (per se) but they will still produce plastic minis for some of their existing products (like Legend of Drizzt boardgame etc). They’re taking a “wait-and-see” stance.

MISSING IN ACTION!!
Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell
Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Emporium
Hero Builder’s Handbook

Talking about doing research on how we use their content. They say these 3 didn’t fit into their master plan, and not putting out a book for its own sake. “We could put out Arcane Power II and you might only use 2% of it. We’re challenging our own plans. Is this good for the players, will it actually be used by the players in this format?” Books have been pulled off the schedule. They have the content, now how do they use it? So at least they’ll probably make it in eventually (especially the magic items, Mike Mearls says).

Heroes of Sword and Spell is bridge between PHB and Essentials... is Essentials is new format going forward, is it compatible with old stuff, when do we find this out? They don’t have a timetable, it’s tied up in business planning, but they want to get it taken care of.

That last part doesn't sound good -- they still haven't figured out how PHB and essentials are supposed to work together?