The Psion, one month review

My Tiefling Psion on top of stack of power point tokens.

Now that I’ve played the Psion class for one month, I thought I’d give a retrospective review.

The Psion is a controller class unlike previous ones. It has only two area-effects, and its the attacks generally have a damage + debuff (increase enemies’ vulnerabilities) effect.  There’s also not a lot of movement like there are for some other classes.  For all its debuff attacks the class is kinda like a Leader, but without any healing abilities. The Mind Thrust ranged attack does a nice bit of damage along with debuff when augmented, and in that sense it reminds me a bit of my Ranger, in the striker sense.

My favorite attack power is Betrayal, in which you slide an enemy and force it to make a basic attack on one of its allies.  It feels a little like chess by moving pieces around the battle mat, and it’s just plain nasty to attack an ally. Unfortunately the way I understand how 4e works, is that pcs and npcs understand all the attacks and their effects, and so it’s absent the confusion and horror on bad guy’s face when his friend takes time out of combat to attack him.

The augmentable at-wills is an interesting mechanic and it works quite well. Because the at-will powers are pretty good by themselves, I don’t miss the encounter powers. The augmentation levels make sense and benefit of using 2 points to augment seems like its worth giving up 2 separate 1 point augments. I’ve been using poker chips as physical symbols of the my power point pool, and that made it quite easy to keep track of them.  There’s also a nice of feel of ante’ing up.

The weakest point of the Psion is melee. My character is limited to cloth armor and none of the attack powers are melee, so if a monster is next door, I have to risk the AoO or whack them with a mere 1/2 level + proficiency with my staff implement. In the combats I’ve been in so far, I am pretty well defended in ranged (especially with resistances and a good reflex and will), but whenever my character’s gotten to melee, his hit points have disintegrated fast.

As with almost all classes of the flavor differences between them plays out only on the battlefield. The thing the Psion is really missing is some kind of mind-reading or empathic ability. Since I have a very low Wisdom, my character’s Insight is my lowest skill, despite the fact that I can command someone to attack an ally. Even the Send Message utility power is pretty weak since a line of effect is implied. It would be more useful to communicate with someone further away. I’ve been using Bluff and Intimidate skills out of combat to pretend like my character is a mean-as-they-come mind-reading SOB.  So far no one has called me on that yet.

I am going to be on holiday for the next two weeks. I have set a new article to be published here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5pm while I am out. I won’t be able to approve or respond to any comments in that time. Cheers and have a good American Thanksgiving.

Engaging your GM

The following post is presupposed on the fact that you enjoy gaming with your GM and would like to improve everyone’s enjoyment at the table. If you and your GM have fundamental and irreconcilable gaming philosophy differences, find a new game! But if sometimes there’s a bit of misalignment and you want to fix things, read on.

Dungeon’s Master recently wrote about Engaging Your Players. Smart advice there for DMs. In the author’s campaign the DM brought the players in through two elements: mystery and a time-limit. I personally enjoy these elements in a game I’m playing. I find time limits need to be well tuned. It’s pretty frustrating when you can’t win due to circumstances outside your control. Also there should be several levels of outcomes, so if you’re only a little late it’s not castastrophic.

But what about the reverse situation? It’s pretty challenging to keep a mystery from the GM, so we’ll leave that element for a future post.  Here I’ll describe turn the time-limit idea around on your GM when he is the one who doesn’t care. One way to bring the game back on track and get the GM involved in your plight is to create a false sense of urgency.

Let’s say you’ve got the party in town and you’re trying to track down a werewolf, but you’re having a hard time of it not because of bad rolls but because the problem is too open ended and you haven’t figured out the trick yet. You’re stumbling around trying to figure out what the GM wants you to do.  While no NPC has said it, you come to the conclusion that if you don’t discover the werewolf by midnight, another villager will die.

Here you are bringing the GM back into the game by forcing him to take action. One option for him is to run with it and make that part of the plot or to at least pick up on that energy and put some NPCs in your way for you gather some information from instead of letting the villager get killed. Or he can have an NPC respond to your inquiries “I don’t know what your talking about, the werewolf never strikes more than once a week.” But now you have someone to talk and ask more questions of. Or the DM can inform you that you are mistaken and the time concern is not part of this challenege, but at least then you’ve forced him to think about what’s going on at the table and hopefully bring his attention to your plight.

The worst option is that you have a sadistic GM who enjoys watching you and your partymates flounder around trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do. That’s when you have to remind him that you’re all there to have fun and he should throw you a bone or you all bring out the xbox.

I haven’t needed to try this yet in my current campaign, but I am interested if anyone has tried forcing the GM’s hand or done something similar.

 

I am going to be on holiday for the next two weeks. I have set a new article to be published here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5pm while I am out. I won’t be able to approve or respond to any comments in that time. Cheers and have a good American Thanksgiving.

Play by email

I’ve been interested for a while now in exploring ways to game away from the table. There’s been a lot of activity recently about using Google Wave as a RPG medium. I also tried getting a play by email campaign going a few months ago, and that fizzled before it even began. There’s a certain amount of stuff in roleplaying that is hard to in asychronous text, and there’s a certain amount of momentum required to keep any campaign going.

Gabe of Penny Arcade recently shared with the whole internet an itergame email skill challenge. The skill challenge itself is pretty interesting, but even more interesting is that they’ve managed to keep their gamementum going between sessions. I usually have such big plans at the end of the night of gaming to keep the discussion, planning, and prepping going between sessions, but I can never seem to get it going. Instead I’m usually updating my character sheet at the table immediately before play.

NewbieDM sends a PDF recap to his players after each session so they have something for them to think about in between games.

http://www.campaignmastery.com/blog/great-session-reminders/
These are things the DM can do to keep his players involved outside of the game night. Here are some things the players can do between sessions:

1. RP hanging out in the tavern.
2. Split the party: have two guys go off and some streewise stuff in the in-between time.
3. Research a spell or take a one-week apprenticeship with the town smith.

Ask your DM how you can keep your character active while you spend a week or two in the real world.

I am going to be on holiday for the next two weeks. I have set a new article to be published here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5pm while I am out. I won’t be able to approve or respond to any comments in that time. Cheers and have a good American Thanksgiving.

Player focus

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

In the recent Fear the Boot #168, the guys on that podcast focused on how to keep a player’s attention during a game. The arguments for wanting players to stay focused are good ones, and I can pretty much summarize them with the following statement: “people have limited time to game, and everyone has agreed to spend some of that time gaming together.” There was some back and forth about how much time at the table should be spent gaming vs table chatter and when those instances are okay or not. I am on the side of table chatter is good because I’m there to relax and have fun with friends. But I like to keep it contained because I want to accomplish something in-game as well (for me is fun and relaxing).

There are two consistent times when I feel my attention wandering while the game is going on. Either during combat when its not my turn in a long round or during an role-playing encounter when my character is on the sideline.  On analysis, these two are the same situation: I have nothing to do and what’s going on doesn’t affect me. One the hallmarks of a successful board or card game is that each player doesn’t have a lot of downtime. Since the activities in D&D are quite varied and DMs differ a lot in style, downtime isn’t inherent in the system, and so there are things that can be done to minimize (but not eliminate) downtime. Less downtime means less time for loosing focus and playing Wii while someone else is acting.

For better or worse, the DM is the de-facto leader in most groups and so most of the blogs, books, and podcasts out their give DM advice for helping players stay focused and keep the game moving. I personally like keeping an explodeable cart on every street corner as way of drawing players back into the game.

Here are suggestions to my fellow players on staying focused and keeping the game moving:

1. Respect the other players’ time. Come prepared; know your combat powers and rituals. Spend the time between rounds preparing in your head an A action (and a B action in case the situation changes). In an non-turn situation limit your time spent dominating the RP.
2. Provide hooks in the conversation so the DM can pause it or bring in other players. After striking up a conversation with the barkeep, take your drink back to a table and sit quietly for awhile. After prying information out of the lord’s chamberlain, take a while to look at the nice tapestries.
3. Don’t ramble on constantly and monopolize the game time.
4. Bring in your fellow players. If you’ve got a rogue, take him with you to scout out the rooftops. A wizard? Suggest that he go to talk to the town’s archmage. If two characters are charsima-y, do a good cop/bad cop routine on a prisoner. Of course that’s just sharing the spotlight with one other character. I’ll to take more time to figure out what you can do for a whole party.You can also bring in another player unwillingly. If two of you are out scouting the town together, punch the guard and you both wind up in jail. Speak on behalf of another to an npc, or start a little something like stealing the halfling’s breakfast ration. Player’s note: only do these things sparingly. Some people won’t take kindly to you forcing their characters to act or being negative towards them, and even a tolerant group gets sick of one player’s jackassery.
5. Get a combat buddy. Pair up with the guy next to you and help him plan his turn. Of course you have to make sure he/she is amenable to this type of gaming. It’s not about ego, but instead working together to solve a challenge.

What other tricks do you do help your fellow players stay focused?

Reaction powers

Many powers in 4e are reactions triggered by “you are hit.” This means you can immediately perform an action outside of your turn and outside of the standard/move/minor action paradigm. Some of these powers include buffs to defenses, transference of damage, or special move such as shifting out of the way. Many of these only make sense in the context of getting hit (“you get a +1 to attack the guy who just hit you”), but some abilities have neither flavor nor effect that have anything to do with being hit by an opponent. Or at least not all of the reaction power directly affects the attacker.

One such power is my character’s Cape of the Mountebank [DDI] immediate teleport reaction. If you have the cape on and an available item daily, you can teleport 5 squares when you’re hit. My question is, why do you have to wait to get to use the ability?

In last week’s extended session we were in a fight with the big baddie about to get away with all the treasure. We were on the roof, but there was a 10′ guard wall around the top between the party and the escaping villain. In order to get a clear shot to use a power, I wanted to take advantage of my cape’s teleport. Since no enemies were handy, I had an ally bash in my skull so I could use the reaction power. I took 6 points of damage for my trouble but I was able to be on top of the wall for my turn and got off my attack. Unfortunately those six points came up to bite me later when I went down to 1 hp.

It seems silly to take a hit from a friend to use the ability. Either the character should be able to use the ability as an equivalent action without the trigger, or my preferred house rule that an ally can make a zero-damage attack to cause the trigger. This shouldn’t come up too often as most immediate reaction powers do something directly to the instigator. In 3e one had the ability to deal subdual damage, and that seems like it would be handy here.

Anyone use a similar type of house rule?

What to do in an off-week

One problem with adulthood is that there are a lot of competing interests for one’s time. No matter what we might try, life happens and we don’t get to game every week. When we can, we still get together for some non-gaming hanging out. For those occasions I keep the D&D cartoon dvd set, runebound, and munchkin in my car. But sometimes we just punt on the week altogether.

On those occasions, I like to make up that lost time by working on my game. I l use that off night to spruce up my character sheet and update the stats on my power cards. Some other non-game night activities:

1. Reorganize my game bag. I always seem to wind up carrying an extra DMG or power cards for an old character for no reason. Also my dice bag seems to drop a die into the bowels of the bag from time to time.
2. Plan for the future. I like to review the feat and power options available for near levels and work on my back story and how that leads into a paragon class.
3. Look for inspiration in other fantasy sources. Watch some LotR, play a little Oblivion, catch up on some gaming blogs and podcasts (see the link roll on the right), and otherwise get ideas and pumped up for the next week.
4. Relax. Have a beer and watch some Law and Order. Sometimes its nice to just have a week off to recharge the gaming batteries. Plus there’s truth in absence makes the heart grow fonder

What do you guys do on an off week?

Wonderful Wondrous Items

My favorite treasure has always been wondrous items. Magic weapons and armor are always nice, but they pretty much have one use. Wondrous items can tickle the imagination and inspire creative uses. And I don’t just mean the 1,000 uses sovereign glue. I’m talking about the time we summoned a small boat to bridge a pit trap that was too far to jump.

This past week our DM let us choose a fresh magic item to round out some treasure parcels to get the party up to our power level. Choosing a free item from any book in the compendium is a challenge worthy of XP as any encounter with Trolls. My party is made up people passionate about their characters and who want the best chance of success for themselves as well as the party. Before I reveal how we really handled this is as a group, here is a real-life skill challenge, inspired by this quandary:

Photo curtosey http://www.flickr.com/photos/captaintim/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Take an item rusting in the party pool and exchange it for free with anything available in DDI; go! You have to make 5 successes before the DM decides to punish you all for taking too long or for fighting.

Arcana: You remember about a useful item from a Dragon magazine, get a +2 to your next History or Diplomacy roll.
Athletics: wrestle the Adventurer’s Vault out of your teammate’s hands.
Bluff: You get a party member to advocate for an item that really helps you although he thinks it helps him.
Diplomacy: You make an impassioned speech about why your character really needs an item and how much better off we’d all be if you had that Horn of Summoning.
Dungeoneering: The party is headed into the Underdark. Vote for an anti-Drow ritual.
Endurance: Everyone else is too tired to keep arguing with you. You automatically win.
History: You’ve been bitten by a Medusa the last time you played a 9th level Fighter. Argue for a mirrored shield.
Insight: Why does the wizard want a gem of soul trapping? He swore he wasn’t playing an evil character.
Intimidate: Let me have that Waraxe +2, or else!
Perception: You see that Deck of Many Things up the rogue’s hand. Call shenanigans, and he gets a -2 to Charisma-based checks.
Stealth: Where did Brad go? He must be a ninja. Give him a magic katana before he flips out and kills us.
Streetwise: How thoughtful of you to bring the DM glazed donuts. How’d you know they are her favorite?
Thievery: Steal all the handbooks. Now only you get to decide.

Of course that describes a hypothetical situation. What really happened was 20 minutes of us searching the books for the best item of that level for our characters in the current situation. I headed off the potential argument of which character should get it by suggesting we get a wondrous item that would benefit the whole party. Not only can such items be passed between players, but they are versatile: prone to creative uses in sticky situations.

Original photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/mararie/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The item we chose was the Map of Unseen Lands [DDI] from Adventurer’s Vault 2. This map draws the nearby surroundings at the large building/geographical feature level. I thought it would be useful for tracking down the rogue wizard we are hunting in her secret temple lair. It also shows potential danger/xp zones like monster lairs and known and secret travel paths, which make for great escapes from bad places. Unfortunately I think my party-mates still think this is the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter. This particular map doesn’t show people or fine building details, but I think this will be a great thing to have story wise. I guess we still need to come up with an explanation as to why we have it. The only downside mechanically is that redrawing the map counts as a magic item daily.

I wonder how other parties figure out up-for-grabs wish-list treasure?

Choosing the peaceful option in an angry world

There seems to be a tension for a gaming group between an interesting plot, realism, player freedom, and prep time. Through the course of a campaign one of these concerns will beat out the others at various times. Last week we had an encounter, as described by my DM on her blog. The short summary is: the party came across a group of bridge-guarding Spriggans who demanded gold in exchange for passage.

I don’t want to speak for my fellow players, but I think as a party we were responding with “realism.” Or as realistic as it would be for a group of well-armed professional murderers to propose a counter-offer: “move out of our way and not die from our swords.” From her blog, our DM indicates the encounter was designed to be fought and so the DC to diplome the situation was quite high. The result was a good combat with some interesting terrain (there was a bridge with its walls broken in places) and a well designed combination of monsters. I made a few strategic mistakes, and got my character’s ass handed to me.

Despite not wanting to get into the fight, we wound up in a do-or-die battle against the brigands. We managed to capture one alive. The prisoner led us to his cache of treasure and gave us a password needed later in the adventure in exchange for his life. This was a tough situation for us; we did not know that this combat would be useful to the story. By trying to RP our way out of it, we got to make some rolls to see if we could. But the GM want us to fight ,and so we did. Now that we know (meta-game) that even the most “random” of encounters might have a use, we’ll probably listen a little more to the DM’s pressure next time [Editor's note: we did and it worked out well for us].

The question still remains however: how to get out of a combat if the DM is set on it, especially knowing that the combat moves the plot forward?

Mini skill challenges

In tonight’s all-RP session, we had what I can only surmise was a series of small skill challenges.  These were basically a series of skill checks followed by a short resolution which resulted in a prize bonus. As an example, we encountered a dancing Satyr and his friends in the woods; using diplomacy, “perform,” and athletics we provided them with a good time. In return they helped us with a Communicate with Nature ritual (+4 to the nature check). Earlier in the night we had a similar set of small diplomacy and intimidate checks to get some info about our enemies.

These encounters didn’t feel like formal skill challenges, and that’s why I’m assuming our DM was trying out something newer and more versatile. The reason why I don’t think they were standard skill challenges was that it was not always clear if we were succeeding or failing, and the consequence of success/failure was not apparent. Also it just didn’t seem like enough rolls, usually there’s a lot more rolls in a “x successes before y fails” situations.

These encounters worked very well for us. It didn’t detract from the story, and when things went well we felt pretty good. The downside from the more structured challenge is that we were sometimes scrambling to come up with the right skill to use for the check. For instance, we discussed for a long time what skill the bard should roll to entertain with a song, or the right skill for a monster knowledge or whether detecting an illusion might be arcana or perception.

The other issue (and this I think is common with regular skill challenges) was that the participation was uneven. I think tonight the warlock felt redundant to the bard and psion in the arcana department. What should the players do when three characters all have high diplomacy? It’s not really fair if one person does all the talking for the party. The social skills (diplomacy, intimidate, bluff) present this challenge to any group in any gaming system, and I would like to explore this area more in later posts.

The less obvious challenge is what do you do when three party members all have a high history or arcana skill? Mathematically it only makes sense for the guy with a 14 in the skill to make the roll and the one with a 13 make the “aid another” check. But it sucks to have built a character to be really into history and have that 13 score, but the party member have a higher score because of his race. In some ways it must be like having a masters in one topic and being on a panel with a guy with a PhD in the same topic. And unlike real life, d&d doesn’t have the nuance in the skill checks to have people be the experts in a sub-specialty.

The only solution I can think of is for the DM to present situations where each person can shine in that skill and somehow prevent the other from participating or being the lead. As a player I could suggest that the party members should take turns making the skill, but that is not the optimal solution and it feels a little sour and forced to me. The ideal situation would be that each player has to make a choice between using that skill and performing some other action, and so the guy with the 14 in history instead chooses to do a religion check, leaving the guy with a 13 to do the history instead. I can see this being workable when making skill checks during combat: the way disabling a trap or magical device comes up in the published modules. It’d be interesting to see a history check as an action in combat (it’d have been one where it was more useful than using an attack power).

How else can actions be restricted, without combat, so everyone gets a turn?

The party: aren’t they cute?

Bonus post! I took some pictures at today’s weekend session. Here’s the party just about to jump out and do their business.

Tiefling warlock, Half-Elf bard, Tiefling psion, and Halfling rogue