[Information] Feedback for next leg!

[hvg3akaek]

OK, here's where I want you all to shout out information and feedback so that we can have a more exciting game going forward to leg 5!

Feel free to offer any ideas you want here, though try to keep it from insulting me
"hvg3, your monsters suck!" would be better worded as "i think monsters xyz could do with some re-tweaking, here's some ideas..."



I'll start us off with my biggest issue: those darn "brick" icons from the last maps! They may have looked nice (did they?), but they were a right pain to move, resize, and shift every round. I will not be using them again, it's a single colour backdrop from here on in!


I'll post up some more ideas later, for now - what do you think? What worked, what didn't? What should we change, and how should we change it?

[DrTeeth]

better healing options!

[kyo]

would it be possible to have defenses/hp shown of monsters just so we know if it dies or gets hit from our attack? The reason I ask is because of teleporting, and also other interrupts that I have to use.
it also helps me plan out the rest of my turn so I don't have to guess on what happens.
a defense stat block would be enough, because I know for bosses it would not be a benefit to know their HP at the start.

[hvg3akaek]

Yep, I'm definitely thinking about revealing more about the monsters. Maybe not the first time they are shown, but after that they might go into a common thread or something?

How about the pacing in general? I know that PbP takes a long time, but should I drop the number of monsters? Add more minions in to make battles quicker? Something else?

One big think I am thinking about (and the reason I have suggested not levelling yet) is to re-do how the gestalt thing works. Ultimately, it's difficult for me, as the houserules we use are not doable in the character builder, and thus i cannot look at the sheets online / access rules in the compendium etc as I do in other games. I'm wondering if people would be ok to rebuild the characters slightly, so as to use a different houserule that was transferable to the CB?

My other big thought was about group interaction. The last fight was a lot easier for me again - because I only had to make one map Now that there are only three teams again, what do people think about opening the threads up a bit? Either just not having them secret, so everyone can see / react to each other, or maybe even combining them in one thread (or only combining them at certain big fights?) It would allow for more interaction with each other, which i think could be more fun, but we'd have to work on how to keep other aspects of the race out there, to not fall into a single large party (so separate XP, treasure, etc)

[Coeur de Lion]

I think the pace is pretty good for a PbP. There are plenty of minions in the form of devilkin around (and others) so that we can chew through some groups quite quickly.

Happy to re-jig characters so that they work in the CB. Makes it easier all round I think, as I would like to use the CB to maintain Varesh.

I think a big group thread for main fights (like the Smithy) would be good, but otherwise I think separate is better for general exploring and fighting.

Also think simplifying the Scouts even more would be good. I find that a simple at-will/basic attack is fine, like Fading Strike and maybe a 1/enc damage enhancement like some Essentials classes have.

[hvg3akaek]

Simpler (possibly tougher?) helpers was indeed on my list of possible ideas! The essentialised bonus damage is also a nice idea.


For rests (and this kinda goes back to DrTeeth's request), I was toying with an idea of simply paying for all rests. If you want to rest, you return to camp, hand over some cash, and rest. That way, I won't have to keep track of rests, and they won't effect the final order of getting home. If you rest a lot, you will simply burn through more money.

Now, how *much* a rest should cost... with a basis of 50gp = healing potion, it clearly needs to be around an order of magnitude higher (or maybe half that?). An idea is to go for:
short rest = 20% of an item of your level
long rest = an item of your level
(note - you shouldn't need more than one long rest a leg, and they are already given out; this long rest price is for *extra* long rests on top of that!)

Thoughts?

Happy to re-jig characters so that they work in the CB. Makes it easier all round I think, as I would like to use the CB to maintain Varesh.

My initial thoughts are:

• choose a main class.
  • You get any one multiclass feat (that you meet prerequisites for) for free.
    As long as you have one at-will power of your main class, you can freely choose others from either class.
  or
• choose two classes and use standard hybrid rules.
  choose one:
  • You get any one multiclass feat (that you meet prerequisites for) for free.
    As long as you have one at-will power of your main class, you can freely choose others from either class.
    or
  • You gain the Hybrid Talent for free.
    or
  • Your class specific abilities (eg ranger's quarry) can still apply when using your other classes powers

[kyo]

I pick option 1 since you don't have to change anything except add a feat to everyone.
I LOVE the pacing at this game 1 post/3 days is slow for me personally, but great for overall.
this gives me time to post for my partner if needed, and think of strategies for a half day or so.

I don't mind having 1 thread. that way we can actually see if someone attacked a monster first and if it died and such. so many of my actions depend on the map.
idk how I feel about spending to rest. In this whole game I may have come upon 2-300 gold?(excluding items)
I guess I would have to change my play style since I don't hardly ever loot dead things.

when are you going to roll out the bonuses for being on time and such? those white/blue/red chips you spoke of before

[hvg3akaek]

I pick option 1 since you don't have to change anything except add a feat to everyone.

I was meaning the choice would be there for everyone to choose between

I LOVE the pacing at this game 1 post/3 days is slow for me personally, but great for overall.

Great to hear! how about the in-game posting? That is, how much stuff happens in the game (as opposed to how often we post). I look back and think "wow, we've been on this leg for a while...". Too long, or is that ok too?

I guess I would have to change my play style since I don't hardly ever loot dead things.

Ahuh! I had also thought of changing the loot system. Something like: instead of me rolling instantly, you could store up how many treasures you should roll for, and choose to roll them later. Currently, each standard monster has a 50% chance to have an item, so you could loot two corpses, and end up with nothing, one package, or two packages. If you stored it up, you could instead be guaranteed of getting one item (but not two).

Similarly, you could collect minion packages and combine them to become a larger standard package. (minion parcels have a 25% chance of rolling as a standard parcel, meaning that only one in eight actually has treasure).

when are you going to roll out the bonuses for being on time and such? those white/blue/red chips you spoke of before

yep, I could start implementing them too, if people wanted?

[Coeur de Lion]

Originally Posted by hvg3akaek

I was meaning the choice would be there for everyone to choose between

Awesome, happy with the two options as choices

Originally Posted by hvg3akaek

yep, I could start implementing them too, if people wanted?

Thumbs up from me on this one too

[kyo]

the leg was pretty long. I don't have a problem with that, but keep in mind, 1.5 years just to do 1 leg. Ideally my preference would be 6 months a leg. either that or a faster post rate so we can get through the same stuff in a shorter time. but I don't think the dungeon was that big at all. I think it just took a while because you had 10 teams. now that you have 3, it should be faster.

also, are you going to take new teams for this new leg?

choosing to save my loot rolls could help me because I don't like to loot dead stuff. my partner does on the other hand. if its option I guess we can pick for ourselves and I don't have an issue with that.

I could go with the chips, I liked that idea because in the 1.5 years I've been playing this one game, I might have missed 5 posts max while being in town?

[hvg3akaek]

Ideally my preference would be 6 months a leg.

That would be great, but I'm not sure (short of cutting out most of the monsters) how that would be achieved.

On maps, here is the complete map of the Barracks (you can try to work out where you all went, now!).

 

Of course, that was the second half of the leg - the first half was outside.

The next leg (which I initially drew when I started the game) covers three of those map sizes (so ~50% more than the last leg). It covers three levels of the jail, the inner cloister, cathedral, and four levels of the catacombs. I think that probably dropping the number of encounters would be the best way to limit the time, but I can also jump over levels of the jail / catacombs, if people prefer. (I could see how long it takes, and if a section is going too long, cut the next few out?) A third option is to just add in more linking passages, so that there are less dead ends? It might make some ways particularly quick and easy, though.

also, are you going to take new teams for this new leg?

I'm open to a few joining, but I am not out to heavily recruit like I did last time.

choosing to save my loot rolls could help me because I don't like to loot dead stuff

Just to clarify - my idea is to say "you get one minion loot at level 5" instead of rolling treasure, and then let the person who has collected loot equivalences to cash them in for rolls when they wanted to. You would still need to loot the dead.

Another option is for me to roll the loot whenever a monster is killed, and then either put a marker down (if there is something), or remove the enemy (if there is nothing). That way, there would be less looting of empty bodies?

[kyo]

i expect the next leg to be longer because like you said its multiple parts.
jail, cloister, catacombs and andarial. Maybe you could offer a map of places we already explored? I did it proactively by saving each map update you gave us for a reference. I had to use it about twice.
I will say that we did get pretty lost on the outside before these barracks, with no way of knowing where to go and how to get there. I don't know how to go about this without making it too easy.
I don't know if you do this now or not, but is it possible to scale the monsters to the number of players engaged with them?
i am pretty sure you scaled the smithy to 4 teams but we ended up doing it in 3 instead. obviously thats a bad example since the last team just kind of stopped posting right when the encounter happened. but I did have that curiosity on if you had thought of scaling encounters. not sure if this would make fights longer or more interesting, because doubling the HP of a monster just because another team engages it might be overkill.
looking over the map, I see most of us took the longest way to the smithy(haha) without realizing it.

[hvg3akaek]

I did it proactively by saving each map update you gave us for a reference. I had to use it about twice.

Funnily enough, you still backtracked too far You could have gone directly east, and wound up at the smithy way before everyone. Probably good you didn't

I don't know if you do this now or not, but is it possible to scale the monsters to the number of players engaged with them?

I do tend to do that. I have a list of encounters to the side of the map, and they are all set for a single group. If another group shows up later, I'd roll again. But scaling was all done in numbers, not in HP.

There were a few cases where there were more than the normal amount of monsters, due to the "train" effect, that is someone triggers one group, runs away from it, and triggers a second group, whilst drawing the initial group after them.

[DrTeeth]

What do you mean by CB?

I like the characters as is. My concerns are this...

Gonna go all meta and Order of the Stick here: Characters are built for one or two encounters a day. That huge gigantic map was a running string of encounters. I saved all my big gun attacks for the final battle. And even with rests we don't get some of them back. I like the idea of getting encounter and possibly even daily powers back without having to burn potions or rests. I think you said that the next level is several maps, maybe when we go to a new map we could get powers back? I think that things would go a ton faster if we could drop a 3d10 blast on the herd of devilkin every now and then rather than being surrounded and plinking off one 1d10 attack.

And yes healing is a must. With a level up I think Taraganath will be nearing 80hp's. The potions we have heal 10hp. Surges not much more and they cant be taken at will. One good (bad) round of your attacks and the best some of us can do is grab back 10.

I love the idea of a map, because as someone who hasn't played Diablo I think I'm at a definite disadvantage here.

I don't think we should recruit more. Originally you had intended to eliminate teams, well they are gone. The three teams are left. Just scale it for three teams. A mass thread would be neat but would make going separate ways hard. How hard would it be for you to split and merge, split and merge the groups? I think boss fights should definitely go into one mass thread.

Also I think at this point some of all of the "unknown" magic items should be identified.

[hvg3akaek]

What do you mean by CB?

Character builder.

I like the characters as is.

There wouldn't be a lot of change: Taraganath, for example, would take monk, and MC into fighter. You don't use your mark that often, so you wouldn't be losing much at all.

Characters are built for one or two encounters a day.

Actually, they are built for about 4-5 encounters. But short rests between each encounter are definitely the norm. I do like the idea about having an automatic short rest between maps (mind you, when I said there were many maps, the first large square map that matches the above one has three different levels of the jail on it).

As for potions - there are better ones out there, they just haven't come up in treasure much. But with more rests, you should have more healing from your cleric, and thus the main form of healing remains.

We could always change how potions work, allowing them to be used without surges, but that moves us back to the 3e "wand of cure light wounds" problem. Maybe if you could use one potion each encounter without it costing a surge? (so bigger potions would be better).

I love the idea of a map, because as someone who hasn't played Diablo I think I'm at a definite disadvantage here.

as in, you are not at a disadvantage as far as maps are concerned Absolutely not - Diablo maps are random (as were mine when I created them), so you know as much as the others!

I don't think we should recruit more.

Fair enough . If someone comes asking, then I might entertain it, but I won't put out any more recruitment announcements. Of course, that means one of you three will have to be eliminated next leg...

Also I think at this point some of all of the "unknown" magic items should be identified.

They should be - if anyone has any non-identified items, let me know. I thought I went through all the rewards threads and identified them all.