The Grown Up Game Table

I love the Class Acts feature in Dragon. The fluff parts, which usually describe some organization or guild or school, don’t interest me that much. It’s the new player content that interests me. By the same token, I love the [Class] Essentials feature, not so much for the optimization and strategy bits but for the new powers and feats, which serve to fill in gaps in the possible applications for a character class.

Between these two columns and other odds and ends, the game grows incrementally, with each addition ultimately serving to make character creation more flexible and allowing characters to be more tailored to a specific concept, without dramatically altering the game itself.

A case in point is the new Class Acts: Fighter article, which serves up a brief description of a school of fighting that emphasizes flexibility and familiarity with multiple weapons.

It contains one new feat, Weapon Master, which allows you to extend the benefits of Weapon Focus and Weapon Expertise (both of which are prerequisites) to all your proficient weapons. It’s a good feat… useful but not overbalancingly powerful. It might be tempting to compare it in terms of “Wait, so you can get expertise and focus with every weapon a Fighter can use by taking three feats?”, compared to spending two feats per weapon… but realistically, you can’t use more than two weapons at a time and in the absence of a feat like this there’s very little reason for a Fighter to not focus on one weapon. By itself, it makes a character who dual wields different weapons that much more viable by saving them a feat. They’ll still spend one more feat on weapon-fu than a character who uses a single type of weapon, and that’s without getting into weapon-specific specialty feats.

That’s the feat in and of itself. However, the article includes a number of powers with “Weapon Master” in their name. Each of them have the following mechanics: they allow the Fighter to switch weapons as a free action as part of the attack (sheathing and drawing a new one), and they have a variable special effect depending on whether the Fighter is wielding an axe, heavy blade, mace, or spear/pole. Suddenly being expertised in more than two weapons makes sense.

The remainder of the powers in the article come in two other categories: new stances, which seem to be particularly Defendery (upping the Fighter’s defenses or allowing the Fighter to take on risk/damage to protect allies and/or end the fight sooner), and shield maneuvers.

Taken together, the new feat and the power selections would allow you to make the flexible weapon master described in the fluff. But just as the real appeal of LEGO sets is in the way you can take the pieces from them and add them to your collection to make exactly what you want, so, too, is that the real magic of these articles.

Above, I mentioned the advantages of the Weapon Master feat for a dual-wielding character. While the Weapon Master powers let you switch off between weapons for free, they don’t require it. You could make a character who uses a mace in one hand and a sword in another, using a two weapon attack power for one at-will and the Weapon Master at-will power for the other. With the growing number of melee classes that have two-weapon builds, there are a lot more options here than just a Tempest Fighter.

And said character could still take full advantage of the weapon-switching properties of the Weapon Master attack.

And then, there’s the possibility of using the Weapon Master powers while still specializing in a single weapon… making the name and its singular case a little more literal. At level 1, the new at-will power Weapon Master’s Strike provides the equivalent of a new power specialized for any of four of the major weapon groups, with the quick-draw/quick-change effect as icing on the cake.

For instance, if you’re playing as a spear-and-shield Fighter, you could choose to ignore the fact that they’d also give different bonuses if you chose to use a sword or axe or mace, or keep one of those as a back-up weapon. A Hybrid Fighter/Rogue with Ruthless Ruffian talent could pick up a great positioning power for mace. Any Defender using a spear could benefit from the added “stickiness” of the spear’s effect under Weapon Master’s Strike, which allows an opportunity attack if the target shifts after being hit. Actually, since Fighters already have the ability to make an attack if an enemy shifts, other classes might benefit more from this. A Bard who uses a mixture of bow and sword powers and who has Combat Virtuoso could take one of the Weapon Master encounter powers in order to be able to switch from ranged to melee quickly in a pinch. Actually, that’s true of any character, but that’s one of the builds that will have the easiest time switching between bows and swords, stat-wise.

Even if 4E hadn’t brought improvements to the feel of other classes, it would win major points from me for actually making Fighters interesting.

The general arc of the 4E releases has been for them to improve in quality, sometimes drastically. The developers note this trend themselves and have declared Primal Power to be the best Power supplement yet. I respectfully have to disagree… I don’t think it quite matches the peak of Divine Power. I’m not even sure it surpasses Arcane Power. I’d rank it closer to Martial Power, I think.

Martial Power was the first Power book to come out, and it consisted primarily of new options that could have existed in place of the ones in the PHB. There were some new keywords, the Beast Mastery Ranger build was quite a bit from anything that came before… but really what it added to the game was diversity of options. It didn’t do much to make characters more complex or to open the game up in a new direction. It had nothing along the lines of Arcane Power’s arcane familiar feat or Divine Power’s divinity and domain feats. The fighting style feats introduced after the domain feats were dreamed for Divine Power would have fit the bill nicely, opening up a new direction for characters to specialize in that would flavor martial characters distinctly from others, but they were devised too late.

Primal Power is somewhat like that. It introduces (or canonizes, as they were already previewed electronically) tribal feats, which give a bonus that increases for each ally who shares it. That’s a nice way of getting a mechanical representation for that sort of bond. It’s nothing huge.

This is not to knock the book at all. It fleshes out the mythos behind primal powers… and I have to say that while I was underwhelmed by the default pantheon at launch, the more the mythology gets fleshed out, the better I like it. It contains a couple of pages on how to play each primal character. These sections were cited by the devs as being one reason they think this is the best Power book yet. Aside from being good characterization and gameplay guides for newbies, they help clarify some of the nitpicky stuff in an incidental fashion: yes, druids can talk while Wild Shaped, if they want to. No, there’s no rule that says your Spirit Companion or Wild Shape are always the same.

The new options are welcome as new options always are. The Druid ones are especially awesome: the Summoning Druid (already previewed) adds much, and the Swarm Druid is just cool and fits in well with the handful of monsters who use similar effects. They use as an example a Drow who can turn into a mass of spiders, but I’d like to make an Eladrin who turns into a swarm of butterflies. As a special effect, she could leave a few butterflies behind when she Fey Steps, which would then flutter on over to her new location.

The feats are really my favorite part of the book, though. I always enjoy seeing new feats, as to me they’re the best way to put a distinct stamp on a character. The lack of an awesome new “system” for Primal characters is somewhat made up by the large number of “any primal class” feats that really… primal up, for lack of a better term… your character.

There are new multiclass feats for each of the primal classes, which aren’t alternatives to the existing ones so much as enhancements… each one has the existing multiclass feat as a prerequisite and gives you another feature borrowed from the class, for characters that want to do more than dabble.

The class specific ones are nice, too. Two stand-outs for Barbarian: Hurl Weapon and Improvised Missile.

My favorite feats, though, aren’t tied explicitly to any race, class, or power source: Herbalist, Inner Compass, and Wild Sage.

Herbalist gives you a feat bonus to Heal checks used to treat diseases and gives you the Brew Potion ritual for free when you reach its level. This is a much-needed addition to the game, in my opinion: something to give natural healers a boost, and a way of making potions without being a ritual caster. It’s a great addition to an Artificer, to any alchemist character who is not also a ritual caster, and to anybody making a Ranger who wants to emphasize the “nature lore” aspect over the combat Striker role.

Inner Compass gives you a perfect sense of direction and lets you roll twice when you make a roll to navigate the wilderness or dungeon. Nice for any outdoorsy character, including anybody making a Ranger who wants to emphasize the “nature lore” aspect over the combat Striker role.

Finally, Wild Sage gives you a +5 feat bonus to Nature knowledge checks/monster ID checks and lets you use one (chosen when you take the feat) of three level one Natural rituals once per day without any ritual components: Dowsing Rod, Portend Weather, or Traveler’s Camouflage. Again, a great feat for anybody making a Ranger who wants to emphasize the “nature lore” aspect over the combat Striker role.

All the other classless feats in the book are the tribal ones, but those three are each a welcome addition in my mind. I just might have a character concept in mind that could use one or all of them.

Well, the final “production” version of the Monk has been put up now… not the full class, only one build, but with revision and tweaks wrought by playtesting and feedback.

As I hoped/predicted when the Assassin was unveiled, they have changed the Monk’s implements to work more like the Assassin’s, including the ability to use a ki focus. This replaces the enchantable unarmed strike.

At the same time, they have reworked ki focuses to be a literal object that is used to focus ki instead of something internal. This settles the question of how “unarmed enchanting” stacks up in the game’s magic item economy neatly and it also answers any confusion/arguments about whether enchanting an unarmed strike or an internal focus amounts to “enchanting nothing”… which kind of bugs me because I honestly think that argument is stupid, but I think it’s the better game design choice all the same.

Monks do no naturally retain the ability to use an unarmed strike as a weapon. This leaves me hopeful that the unarmed strike will be the focus (no pun intended) of the basic Monk multiclass feat, allowing an unarmed variant of any melee-based class with a single feat. If they don’t do that, they’ll have missed a major opportunity… though it would get stickier, I suppose, now that the “unarmed strike” is no longer the subject of enchantment. They’d need to include ki focus, or else using unarmed strikes for your Paladin or Ranger powers would stop being viable as soon as you got past the point where the rest of the party is using mundane weapons.

The latest character class to be previewed from the PHB3 is the Seeker, a Primal Controller. There are several surprising things about this.

First, unless I’m overlooking something, then this marks the first only the second time** time that a power source has been given more than one class to fulfill a role besides Striker. That’s notable in and of itself, but it’s doubly notable in that Controllers have been the least represented group… there’s only one Controller in the original PHB, and even now Controllers are the only role that don’t exist in every power source.

The concept behind the character is a hunter, so it would have been fairly easy to make this into the second Primal Striker class… but then, I suspect, it would have been difficult to distinguish it from a Ranger*.

Second, it’s a Controller that channels powers through weapons. That doesn’t bend or break the system, nor does it really have any unusual in-game implications (although if the Seeker is using a longbow, it does give this Controller the longest effective range of any character in that role), but at a meta level it shows that the designers aren’t letting themselves be pigeonholed by obvious assumptions that could be drawn from the initial examples of each role. While a Druid’s non-beast evocations are very spell-like and the Invoker is very much like a divine Wizard, the Controller role is not limited to “Wizard Types”.

I’m not going to give an exhaustive overview of the class as detailed so far, but one of the previewed at-will powers, Elemental Spirits, is both pretty much a perfect example of what an at-will power should be and a great power for adding some mystical/elemental panache to a multiclass/hybrid character using a bow (Ranger, Bard, Artificer). It lets you make a ranged weapon attack doing cold, fire, lightning, or thunder damage, with splash damage to all creatures who start their next turn adjacent to the target.

I say it’s a good example of what an at-will power should be because there will be situations where it is clearly called for and because it will retain its usefulness throughout a character’s lifespan. The ability to inflict different elemental damage types is more valuable as you gain in experience, which is why all the “elemental admixture” abilities are Paragon tier.

*On a related note, the existence of a bow-wielding Primal class gives people who want more nature-based Archery Rangers some more options: multiclass between Ranger and Seeker, hybrid between them, or just flat out make a character who is of the Seeker class but call yourself a ranger in-game, if that’s what you desire. Combining this with Nature Skill Powers… yeah, once again, I must say that PHB3 is going to represent a giant leap for 4E.

If I were to make a “Nature Ranger” character by hybriding Ranger and Seeker, Elemental Spirits would be my Seeker at-will, along with the Ranger’s Twin Strike. Really want to make sure you definitely do as much damage to a single big target or that you bring down the minion before it sounds the alarm/gets away/triggers a trap? Twin Strike. Need to get a cluster of enemies, take advantage of elemental vulnerability, make sure the Troll stays down? Elemental Spirits.

It’s useful, and the ability to pull out a fire arrow, ice arrow, or storm arrow at will really sells the idea behind the character

**Whoops, yes… as noted in comments, I forgot about the Bard and Artificer both being arcane leaders.