I took a few minutes to do a Google search to see what other people were saying regarding the Companion rules in DMG2 and the possibilities of strongholds, and came across a blog post from someone declaring he was done with 4E… one of his complaints was that skill challenges replaced roleplaying with dice… but another of them was that it had no rules for henchmen and loyalty checks.

I can’t begin to reconcile the contradiction there, so I’m not going to try… I’m just going to parse it as what it is, which is “I like these rules, I don’t like those rules, I would rather play with these rules.”

And on that note, another sidenote: the Companion mechanics will be the best friend of a DM who wants to say yes when a player decides to research a golem-making/summoned creature binding/undead-raising ritual. (Or for artificers who wish to make a permanent construct). So far similar rituals are specifically created to be “utility only”… adjure binds an immortal to a task but excludes combat from possible tasks, the undead servitor ritual creates a sort of zombie busboy, etc.

So long as the DM balances combats based on the “new” party size (something that the first DMG already recommends doing if the party manages to get something like intelligent/capable mounts or monster allies) and doesn’t allow things to become terribly unwieldy, these Companion guidelines could be used to cover so many situations.

Ooooooooooooooooh.

I was about to say that as with many things, I wouldn’t care to test it out with a large group, but I just realized how the release of this book could mesh perfectly with some of my plans in the Wednesday campaign.

An excerpt from the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide:

Most doors have hinges. Obviously, sliding doors do not. (They usually have tracks or grooves instead, allowing them to slide easily to one side.)

You can read the entire exciting section on hinges online as part of the System Reference Document… although to understand its full glory, you really should read the entry for doors in its entirety. If you thought that doors in dungeons were simply entrances and exits, you will soon be proven wrong.

…

Okay, I shouldn’t bash 3rd Edition, and honestly, that’s not my intention here. But one of the criticisms pointed at 4E and its embrace of “Magical Tea Party” play for non-combat stuff is that the company shouldn’t expect people to pay money for books if they’re going to be handling most things themselves.

I don’t know about you, but I feel more taken advantage of for having bought a roleplaying book that spends several paragraphs talking to me about hinges. I mean, look at these sentences:

Secret doors concealed within a stone wall are usually stone doors.

All dungeons have rooms, and most have corridors.

Or a chart like this:

DC 10 or Lower: a door just about anyone can break open
DC 11-15: a door that a strong person could break with one try and an average person might be able to break with one try
DC 16-20: a door that almost anyone could break, given time
DC 21-25: a door that only a strong or very strong person has a hope of breaking, probably not on the first try
DC 26 or Higher: a door that only an exceptionally strong person has a hope of breaking

The chart might seem useful, but the whole point of DCs was to present a standardized difficulty system. 10 will always be something that almost anyone can easily accomplish, 20 will always be something that almost anyone can accomplish given time, etc., whether we’re talking about breaking down doors or buttering strangely hard-to-butter slices of toast.

Quantifying those difficulty levels for door-breaking in particular seems like a silly waste of space, especially given that the entire section is of dubious actual value.

Steve Jackson had a snarky comment at the d20 system’s deubt, that went along the lines of, “A generic universal roleplaying system? I wish I’d thought of that.” I think the bizarre attention to detail (not that attention to detail is bizarre, but it’s bizarre what details they paid attention to) in the DMG is evidence that they were taking notes from GURPS, and doing it badly… adding more detail to the game for the sake of adding more detail.

I’m sure 3E’s a fun game to people who enjoy it, but I definitely feel I got more value from the 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide.

about how they killed roleplaying in 4E. Seriously, after being told that I’m not playing the game as written or that I’m grasping at straws or tacking on an experience that wasn’t meant to be part of the game, it’s great to read stories like this from the staff.

Sometimes I think that perhaps the PHB and DMG could have gone a little bit further in emphasizing that this sort of imaginative interaction is expected, encouraged, and fully compatible with the detailed rules for combat/conflict resolution… but then, so many people ignored the many clear indications to that effect that are already there, and any more space they spent spelling it out would be space they couldn’t use for other things.

Whatever. Pass the tea!

Okay, I said I was done talking about Divine Challenge, but I keep noticing more ways in which the people who denigrate it are… well… stupid.

Take the scenario of the Ranger using Twin Strike and Hunter’s Quarry every turn and the Paladin using Enfeebling Strike with Divine Challenge every turn. The question is which is better for the monster caught between them to do, kill the Paladin first or kill the Ranger first. I’ve demonstrated why killing the Paladin first will result in less damage to the monster, but here’s a whole wrinkle that’s been ignored:

The Paladin can heal the Ranger.

If the Paladin has +4 Wisdom (and an Epic Paladin will have at least that), the Paladin can lay on hands four times a day, which is like saying that the Paladin can grant an adjacent ally 100% more HP. Now, I believe the official ruling is that Paladins can heal themselves with lay on hands (as they are a creature within melee touch range of themselves) so it could be countered that the Paladin could use the same power to stay alive longer. And this is true. But an Epic Level Paladin is going to have other healing abilities on top of that, some of which explicitly target “an ally”. A level 22 Paladin with Gift of Life can, in fact, perform a battlefield resurrection and restore a fallen ally to one-half hit points… one half the Paladin’s hit points. So if the monster kills the Ranger, it might have to kill the Ranger all over again.

And sure the Paladin’s got to give up those hit points to use Gift of Life, but between the Paladin’s lay on hands and powers like Gift of Life, attacking the Ranger means the monster is doing exactly what the “Damage Per Second” crowd says no intelligent monster would ever do: splitting its damage capacity between two foes so that it takes longer for either one of them to fall.

Attacking the Ranger before the Paladin all but guarantees that you’ll be taking damage from both of them for longer.

These people who seem to spend all their hobby-hours analyzing the game to death have somehow managed to come away with a shallower and more flawed understanding of it than people who just pick up a book and start playing. A DM who goes, “Oh, the Paladin has the bad guy marked. Guess I attack the Paladin.” is showing a sounder tactical approach than they are.

I’m working on composing a primer for the non-combat portion of the game, and in the process of organizing my thoughts on it, I keep flashing back to the rather less-than-fruitful conversations I’ve had with people who consider 4E to be nothing more than a combat miniatures game.

Among the stranger criticisms I’ve seen leveled at 4E is the idea that the system describes a world like a video game: where no matter how richly detailed the background scenery is, that’s all it is: background scenery, and characters can no more interact with it than a polygon model can interact with the texture maps on the walls around it.

I can sort of understand how somebody who just flipped through one of the books and only looked for tables and other obvious bits of “rules content” might walk away with the impression that the game doesn’t address “interactivity” at all.

Harder to understand is the idea that the designers of the game meant to discourage or even—as I’ve seen it claimed—forbid such interactions. You’d have to ignore whole portions of the core books to support that kind of claim.

What does the Player’s Handbook say about interacting with the environment, for instance? This is the first two paragraphs that appear under the heading “Interacting With The Environment”:

A typical adventure environment is full of dangers, surprises, and puzzles. A dungeon room might hold a complex bank of mysterious levers, a statue positioned over a trapped door, a locked chest, or a teleportation circle. Sometimes you need to cut through a rope, break a chain, bash down a door, lift a portcullis, or smash the Golden Orb of Khadros the Reaver before the villain can use it.

Your character’s interaction with the environment is often simple enough to resolve in the game. You tell the DM that you’re moving the lever on the right, and the DM tells you what happens, if anything. The lever might be part of a fiendishly clever puzzle that requires you to pull several levers in the right order before the room completely fills with water, testing your ingenuity to the limit, but rules aren’t necessary for pulling a lever. You simply tell the DM which lever you pull.

“Rules aren’t necessary for pulling a lever” might have been a mantra for the development team, every time they got tempted to add a new essential subsystem to the core rules.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide, under the heading of Teaching The Game, gives a nice concise description of the non-combat game: “the character can try anything the player can imagine, and it’s up to [the DM] to determine whether it works.”

Throughout both of the books, there are numerous references to Player Characters interacting with the world around them in ways that go beyond fighting monsters and finding treasures, and in each case the designers come down on the side of encouraging it even when what the players have decided to do something totally unexpected.

And of course, this leads to one of the reasons that I ultimately prefer a Rules Light™ system to a rules intensive one: you can actually create a better approximation of a real world without arbitrary limitations by using common sense to rule out what’s not possible than you can trying to make up charts and tables and rules to define what is possible.

When I started writing these blog posts, I wondered if “Strange Criticisms” wasn’t too snarky a heading for the posts I would make about, well… strange criticisms… but the more time I spend with the Dungeon Master’s Guide in preparation for running two campaigns for large groups, the more apt it seems.

The game laid out in the Dungeon Master’s Guide bears no resemblance to the game that’s been described to me. If you open it up to a random page, chances are there will be a reference to something that 4E’s critics have claimed is impossible or forbidden for a 4E game to involve: interacting with the environment, recurring villains, combat that ends in a conclusion other than the total death of one side, settlements with realistic economic activities and a logical purpose in the world, PCs acquiring real estate and building strongholds, etc.

I do expect future installments of the DMG to go into more details about those kinds of things… indications have been that the second DMG (due out next month) is going to expand on the paragon tier a fair bit, and chances are the third one will do the same for the epic tier. The first one contains information that’s useful for any tier, but as each tier builds on the previous one, that means that in effect it’s mainly about the heroic tier. First level characters are unlikely to be building fortresses, so while they explicitly mentioned it as a possibility they didn’t burn up any page count with details.

For all that, though, I don’t really expect the guidelines for things like strongholds to be anything that would satisfy the critics, because they’ll be designed to fit in with the themes and the feel of the game as it exists now.

In other words, it’ll involve a lot of handwaving and much pouring of tea.

And I wouldn’t like it half as much if it didn’t.

I can’t believe I’m still hung up on Divine Challenge, but I’ve had it stuck in my head and wanted to do the math to see if my suspicion that an ignored Paladin is doing more damage than a Ranger attacking with at-wills would prove correct.

It turns out I am right, whether it’s at level 1 or level 30.

First, assume both are using d8 weapon and have maxed out their relevant hit attributes. At level 1, a Paladin using Enfeebling Strike is going to be doing 9 damage on an average hit, 4 from the weapon and 5 from Charisma. The same Paladin’s going to be doing 8 damage to a creature that ignores Divine Challenge. A Ranger using Twin Strike is going to be doing 4 on each of two possible hits, as Twin Strike doesn’t include attribute damage.

If we assume that they have a 50% hit chance (which they could very easily have at level 1, with weapon proficiency bonuses added in), then the ignored Paladin is going to be doing 8 + (9/2) damage every round, or 25 damage every 2 rounds. The Ranger’s going to be doing (4 / 2) + (4 / 2) damage, or 4 damage every round, 8 damage every 2 rounds.

The Ranger’s Twin Strike will land an attack more often than the Paladin’s Enfeebling Strike, because it gets two attacks per turn… but if a monster’s ignoring the Paladin’s Divine Challenge, that benefit disappears.

As they go up in levels, each additional attribute plus they gain will benefit the Paladin in damage on both the Divine Challenge and the weapon strike, but not the Ranger’s weapon strikes. Each magical plus on their weapons will increase both the Ranger’s weapon strikes but not the Paladin’s Divine Challenge, but by the epic tier, the Paladin’s Divine Challenge damage will be 6 points higher anyway (equivalent to the largest bonus from a magical weapon) as it goes up every six levels.

Assuming level 30, +10 bonus from relevant attributes and 1d8 +6 magical weapons, and assuming Weapon Focus feat (+3 to damage from weapon) just to skew things to make the weapons as important as we can, to the Ranger’s benefit:

Paladin’s going to be doing 19 damage on an ignored Divine Challenge and 28 points of damage on an Enfeebling Strike (2d8 for epicness = 9 damage, +10 Charisma, +6 magical enhancement, +3 for Weapon Focus. Assume a 50% hit rate (very generous assumption for level 30 foes) and that works out to 14 damage per round from this attack. 33 damage, Paladin.

Ranger’s going to be doing 18 (edit: First time I did this I put 28 for the Ranger, forgetting that Twin Strike doesn’t do attribute bonus damage) points of damage on each hit from Twin Strike, same calculations as above but without the attribute bonus. That works out to 9 damage per round from each on a 50% hit rate. 18 damage, Ranger.

The actual hit rate will be lower than 50%, but that only skews the advantage even more towards Paladin as the 19 damage remains untouched by a drop in hit percent. At a more realistic 30%, the Paladin’s averaging 27 points of damage every round that it’s ignored, compared to a Ranger’s 10. 17 points of damage difference. The difference between the two is… considerable.

Wow. I don’t know how anyone thinks the Paladin’s Divine Challenge damage is meaningless, if not sheer pigheadedness.

[Edit To Note: I first started doing this up while half asleep and forgot about the Ranger's Hunter's Quarry power, which adds approximately 3 points of damage to the before-hit-percent calculation at level one and 10 points of damage to the before-hit-percent calculation at level thirty. That's per round, not per hit... Hunter's Quarry can only be used once per round. Not nearly enough to make up the difference, but enough to make the Ranger seem a bit more attractive given the comparison.

It's actually kind of interesting to note that the Hunter's Quarry will, on average, deliver less damage on a hit than the much-scorned Divine Challenge does... Sneak Attack will deliver, on average, about as much. It seems by the "logic" of those I'm refuting, these abilities themselves must be negligible.]

I said before that the Paladin goes from doing Defender damage to Striker damage when ignored… but mathematically, it’s more like the Paladin becomes several Strikers. And again, the monster can end this situation at any time by attacking the Paladin… it can knock 19 damage off every round in a situation where nobody else is going to be doing that much damage.

And each time the Paladin hits with Enfeebling Strike, the monster takes a -2 hit penalty, and each time it attacks someone other than the Paladin that’s challenging it, it takes a -2 penalty for the Paladin’s mark, for a cumulative -4, which means that it will take it that much longer to drop the Striker, and during that time it will be taking full damage from both of them. If it managed to take out the Paladin first, not only would it have avoided taking 19 points of damage a round the whole time, but it would be able to attack the Striker without either penalty.

One of the anti-Paladin contingent could make the point that the Ranger’s hit rate could be buffed by a Cleric using Righteous Brand with +10 attribute bonus to give the Ranger a much larger hit chance, but this would only apply to one of the Ranger’s strikes and it would also be a poor use of it, given that Paladin does more damage on a single hit with Enfeebling Strike.

A Rogue using Sly Flourish (which adds both Dexterity and Charisma damage modifiers), with +10 and +8 in the relevant attributes, a 1d6+6 weapon, Weapon Focus, and getting Combat Advantage for Sneak Attack every single round (not unlikely when the monster is sitting there ignoring a Paladin on its flank) would be hitting for an average of 54 damage per hit, or 27 damage per round at the generous 50% hit rate and 16 at the 30% hit rate. We’ll go ahead and say it’s 40%, though, because we’re assuming Combat Advantage. 21 points.

Total damage with 5d6 from Sneak Attack is only two points more than the Paladin’s Divine Challenge damage alone. Even if the Rogue has a crossbow or rapier, it’s not going to make up the difference.

(Note that the same people who say that Divine Challenge doesn’t do anything also claim there’s no reason for anyone to move around during combat. If the Rogue can do +5d6 damage every round from positioning, don’t you think the monster would move?)

Even if the Paladin rolls 1 for every single damage die, the ignored Paladin will be beating the Rogue’s average damage.

I think this makes the case for Divine Challenge as clearly as it can be made… and this is absolutely going to be my last post on the subject of Divine Challenge, at least in terms of “Hey, it’s not worthless.” Because that’s not really a contentious point. I think the people who are ragging on it don’t actually care about anything except “proving” that 4E’s designers completely missed the mark so that they can feel better about not liking it. They choose to ignore the thing that makes Paladins work as Defenders and think that proves something.

…is that even when an enemy ignores it, it’s far from inconsequential.

I don’t want anybody to get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that DMs are required to always have the target of the Challenge attack the Paladin. Circumstances can dictate otherwise.

And when that happens, the challengee will be zapped. For 3 + Charisma modifier damage at the heroic tier, 6 + Charisma at paragon, and 9 + Charisma modifier at the epic tier.

I can understand why people might look at that and go “That doesn’t sound like a lot of damage.” But it’s the equivalent of an averaged-and-rounded-down 1d6 roll per tier, plus an attribute modifier, and it will hit the target every single turn without an attack roll… the only thing that determines if it hits or misses is the subject’s own actions.

And it’s not taking up the Paladin’s attack every turn. It’s happening in addition to the Paladin hammering on the target. The Paladin’s going to be attacking it every turn with an at-will to keep the Challenge alive.

Effectively, for as long as an enemy ignores the Paladin’s Challenge, the Paladin is gaining the benefit of a double attack power, with the added benefit that one of those attacks always hits. The Ranger’s Twin Strike has nothing on that.

So, in turning its back on the Divine Challenge, the monster’s effectively turning the Paladin into a Striker… taking damage from the Paladin’s regular attacks plus the Divine Challenge on a hit, and the still Divine Challenge on a miss.

Over the course of a 20 round Epic Level battle, an ignored challenge from a Paladin with good but not uberoptimized Charisma is going to be doing 300 damage. That’s 20% of the HPs of some of the most HP-inflated bosses.

A Paladin who’s got Charisma pumped way up is going to be doing closer to 400 damage in that same time.

If the boss is vulnerable to radiant damage (as most big bad undead types, including the god Vecna are), you add their vulnerability in every round. Vecna, for instance, would take another 400 damage over the course of a 20 round fight.

In fact, since Vecna only has 790 HP before he discorporates, you would never get a twenty round fight against him with him ignoring a Paladin’s Challenge every round.

Even with non-undead bosses, the math holds.

While the Big Bad ignores the Paladin, the Paladin is a better Striker than Strikers are in terms of hitting every round.

While the Big Bad focuses on the Paladin, the Paladin is an ordinary Defender.

Even playing by numbers, it doesn’t make sense to ignore it… the people who think they’re being more clever than the designers by having the monster ignore the Divine Challenge to try to take out a Striker first are achieving just the opposite.

There’s a fallacy invoked in discussions of game design called the Oberoni Fallacy. It amounts to someone shutting down discussion of an ineffective or contradictory game rule by saying that the rule isn’t broken because the DM can fix it, since “Rule 0″ (the DM’s ruling rule) is understood to be part of the rules.

I think there needs to be a formulation of the opposite fallacy.

Call it the “Inorebo Fallacy”.

This is where someone asserts that a game system is broken because Rule 0 means the DM can choose to ignore what makes it work.

For instance, say someone has a house rule that says that all PCs get 100 HP at level one and 100 more at each new experience level but they don’t change anything else, the game’s going to start out wildly out of balance and only get worse, until at level 30 PCs you have 5 PCs with 3000 HP apiece taking on a “solo” monster that has half as many HP as any one of them.

Now imagine someone notices how large portions of the game fail to perform as expected when PCs have more HPs at level 2 than is to be expected for level 30, and they say, “This is a serious problem with the game. There should either be something in the rules that prevents this, or at least keeps the balance from breaking down. As long as people can give PCs hundreds of HPs and then waltz through every battle, the game must be considered to be broken and unbalanced.”

That would be ridiculous. While house rules are part of the experience, any discussion about whether or not the game “works” or is balanced must examine the game as it is written, not as some people choose to play it, right? If you go messing around with the core assumptions, then it’s on you to worry about the new balance… or not, if you’re not worried about that.

In particular, I’m thinking of Divine Challenge here, the Paladin’s main attention-grab ability, the cornerstone of their Defender ability.

There are those who try to devalue it with arguments like, “What if the subject doesn’t understand the language? What if it’s an animal or a construct? Anyway, it’s not like it’s a magical compulsion.”

But of course, the description of Divine Challenge says:

Even though this ability is called a challenge, it doesn’t rely on the intelligence or language ability of the target. It is a magical compulsion that affects the creature’s behavior, regardless of the creature’s nature.

This information isn’t contained in the fluff description that precedes the power’s info box, nor in the italicized flavor text at the top… it’s part of the power’s actual descriptor, under the label “Special”. The Special label is a standard part of power write-ups. If it’s meant to denote information that the DM may safely regard as optional flourishes to be followed only when one feels like going easy on the players, then there are a whole lot of the more interesting powers that are less useful than they appear…

Player: Hefting my great axe, I barrel across the field at the chieftain in a ferocious charge.
DM: Alright, roll your basic attack.
Player: What? No, I’m using Howling Strike. It says I can use it in place of a basic melee attack for a charge.
DM: That’s flavor text.
Player: What?
DM: It’s optional. I don’t have to pay attention to it.
Player: Are you kidding me?
DM: Anyway, it says you can use it in place of a basic attack. That’s ambiguous. It doesn’t say that you will.
Player: I said I will!
DM: It’s ambiguous.
Player: You’re insane.
DM: Don’t blame me. Blame the game system. If it were well-designed, I wouldn’t have to be sane for it to work.

Of course, I’m calling them insane, but I’m the one who sat there trying to have a conversation with them… one person told me that he would just assume that all trained soldiers in the world are taught how to resist the Divine Challenge.

Yes. He claimed that the game system was broken because in his imaginary world, everybody has extra training that makes one class feature not work.

This like a textbook example of the reason that grown-up fantasy games have rule systems and a DM instead of being pure freeform make-believe.

“Bang bang! I shot you!”

“Well, they don’t work on me because I have a forcefield.”

Divine Challenge doesn’t work in his campaign because he gave his guys forcefields.

…

Divine Challenge works on the same basic principle as the rest of the game: it starts by positing that the DM is not out to be a dick to the players. If the DM’s out to be a dick to the players, no rules are going to save the game.

Reverse Oberoni… Inorebo.

“This mechanic doesn’t work because I can ignore it.”

This is on my mind because I had a look at Divine Power earlier, and they’ve embraced and extended the Divine Challenge by adding a new wrinkle to it: Divine Sanction.

The real weakness of Divine Challenge even in the hands of a competent DM has always been that it can only single out a single opponent at a time… Divine Sanction is a version of Divine Challenge that can be splashed around on more things at once. Existing Paladins will require retraining to take advantage of it, as it’s tied to specific powers and feats, but one of those powers is an at-will attack. Encounter powers can sanction multiple enemies at once… in fact, Dragonborn Paladins can take a feat to sanction everybody with their breath weapons.

Most Sanctions only last a single turn, but during that turn, the sanctionees have to either attack the Paladin, not attack anybody, or take radiant damage roughly equivalent to a level-appropriate basic attack. Unlike the Challenge, which is described as a compulsion, the name Sanction makes it sound like the punishment is as much the point of it as anything. I’d probably play it on a case-by-case basis, possibly based on how close to death triggering the Sanction would put the individual. Minions won’t get sanctioned that often, because mostly they’d be killed by the attack that inflicts it, but one who did would probably throw itself at the Paladin to avoid burning. Undead and other supernatural foes who are vulnerable to radiant or lose regeneration from it, too. Unbloodied foes, it would probably depend on how close they were to another target and how much they wanted to get that target.

Even if some enemies do ignore the sanction, they’re taking an extra hit’s worth of damage… and if the Paladin’s sanctioning someone every turn or nearly so, they’re either going to be sticking to the Paladin or dropping all the faster.