Save vs. Awesome!

Another house rule has favored the players strongly.

Last session, we experienced our first meaningful character death: the bard entered melee with a foe that possessed a vorpal weapon. She was decapitated on the very next action of said enemy. A small outcry arose, and the party's warmage declares an attack on the bard's killer. The warmage lands a crit of his own (thanks to his choice of Improved Critical: Ranged Touch at lvl 12) on a Sudden Empowered Orb of Fire, and ends up doing 40d6+24 damage to the target. That's a damage range of 64-264 fire damage. The warmage then roles all 40d6 at once, being very dramatic, and totals a modest 153 damage. Factor in fire resistance, and the target took 148 damage, 2 hp shy of being dropped in one hit.

However, I run rules for death from massive damage. Each creature has a threshold based on size, and if you exceed that threshold in a single attack, you must make fortitude save of 10+damage over threshold. For example, a medium creature has a massive damage threshold of 50 damage, for a large creature it's 65, for huge it's 80, etc.

So, the target of this Empowered Orb of Fire was subject to a DC 108 fortitude save.

Good job Danny, you killed the bad guy.

Set the pace.

Normally, the success of a group isn't measured by how many enemies they beat, or how good the XP per hour is; merely how fast the team perceives itself as moving through spawns.

Don't get me wrong. When I'm gaining multiple bars of XP per mission, leveling more than once with the same group post lvl 20, yeah, that group is badass. However, in general, the teams I remember most are the ones on which I felt like I was unstoppable.

Now, as awesome as my Blaster (Police Drone TH) is, he is made stronger by good teammates. Specifically, Tankers and Defenders.

Now, this isn't some post extolling the virtues of the "Holy Trinity" (Tank/Healer/Mage). Instead, I'm saluting the people who control how fast the team rolls. In CoH, it's the Tankers and Defenders. Tankers who eat alphas and manage agro, and Defenders who buff (not heal).

Tankers get a bad rep sometimes. They can be regarded as glory hounds, or seen as trying to do all the work just to show off. However, the real strength of a Tanker is in his ability to embolden the team, and make them strike harder and faster, having faith in the Tanker to keep the agro off them while they rain hell. This applies equally to all classes, not just "Mages". It's safer to debuff once a Tanker has moved in. It's safer for a Scrapper with a mandatory agro aura to engage the foes. Additional agro is less of an issue if the primary spawn is being adequately managed. Tankers, when performing their job properly, help set the pace at which a team does it's job. The better the Tanker, the faster the pace, without team safety being sacrificed.

Any player can tell you that they feel much stronger when an Empathy/Thermal/Pain Manip/Kinetic/etc buff is cast on them. The very nature of buffing powers in CoH lends huge strength to a team. Strong characters are bold ones, and a buffed team is more confident going into battle. While they may still be numerically inferior, they will most times still press on, putting faith in that extra +18.5% def the Defender gave them, or the extra +500% regen the whole group has. Knowing that they are backed by a vigilant Defender (no pun intended), a team is more likely to stand it's ground when people start to fall. More likely to keep fighting when they would otherwise run away. I've seen more team wipes resulting from premature retreat then from failing to run away fast enough.

When solo, I know my own limits. I can ride the razors edge, and tackle odds far greater than most other players. Most players perform better when solo, as they only have themselves to consider in any given situation. When teamed, everything changes, because up to seven other people can be impacted by what you do. When teamed, I have to exercise restraint, since more than my own fate rests in the balance (and usually, the odds are vastly stacked against me). However, when teamed with the right people, when there is the right combination of agro management and buffing, I can once again become the engine of death that I know I am. And this applies to the rest of the team as well.

MMO Manners

People online are notoriously rude. Whether or not one is actually being rude, it is usually how they are interpretted as acting anyway.

Two days ago, I was running some RWZ (Rikti War Zone) missions with my friends. We had a team of heroes and villains, are were doing the story arc where Longbow (think S.H.I.E.L.D.) tries to steal Vanguard's (think an even more badass S.H.I.E.L.D.) thunder. One thing leads to another, and much to the delight of the villains on the team, we start busting Longbow skulls. Fun.

Eventually, our battle takes us head to head with a Longbow Hero (Archvillain), who could make Chuck Norris's blood run cold. He smashes into our group like an angry bull, and we wipe. Once. Twice. Three times.

Finally, we re-order our team a tad, trade one or two of our players, and lower the difficulty. We go in for round four, and we start to win, but then our tank panics, jumps into the backline, right as the Hero fires an AoE at him. The result is a lot of dead support characters, and a fifth wipe. We rally, and keep the fight going. The tank runs back in, then gets knocked back into us. Again things get hairy, when I realize that our tank has no KB (knockback) protection. I try to get him to stand in a corner, in order to negate the KB, but he won't listen. As a result, he keeps getting bounced back into the team, who then eat AoEs in the face.

It doesn't take long before I flip a monumental shit, and start screaming at the guy. A few moments after my tirade, he falls in line, and we are able to take the Hero out.

We exit the mission, get ready for our next run, and I apologize to the guy. It turns out he was brand new to the game, so I took the time to explain what was going wrong, and what could be done in the future to fix it. As it turns out, he did have KB protection, he just failed to use it. I give him some slotting advice, as does the scrapper. As I wrap up with our tank, one of the villains chimes in:

"Wow, that's the first time I've ever seen someone apologize for something like that."

And that bothered me, because he was right. Online, far too many people are not accountable for what they "say" or how they "act". I play games, online and offline, in order to relax, not to yell at people. I don't enjoy acting like that, and it's important to me for people to understand that.

That's why I apologized, because I meant it.

0.0125%

As long as my incredibly simple, done with a calculator math is correct (funny thing, it was wrong the first time, but I fixed it), then that is the chance on any given attack that it results in an instant kill (That is, rolling three natural 20s back to back). It's a rule variant from the 3.0 Edition DMG, one that I've used in every game I've run.

I've actually, as a DM, rolled trip 20s three separate times, twice against player characters, once for an NPC attacking a Slaad. Both times it resulted in player death, and much endless bitching. Sorry guys, player death happens. No character is invincible, and sometimes as a DM it's important to remind the players that they are mortal.

But last night, my wife's Paladin 5/Pious Templar 4/Griffon Rider 2 rolled trip 20s on a smite against a mature adult dragon (CR 13), slaying it instantly. Now she's a Griffon Rider 3.

Um, what should I call you?

One of the things that I've always found fascinating about playing MMOs, or any game with online multiplayer, is how people choose to interpret the names of others. That is, how a persons name, or the name of their avatar/character/toon is changed/shortened/altered to make it more convenient in conversation.

Now, character names break down into five rough categories:

1. Actual names
2. Long multisyllabic names
3. Statements as names
4. Plays on words
5. Other
6. Actual names are easy enough to work out. Guild Wars requires you to have a first and last name for any of your characters, so usually you simply need use a player "first" name. I have a Warrior named Roland Dresden, a Paragon named Rook Enassi, a Mesmer named Freya Dresden, etc. Whenever I played them, people simply addressed me by my character's first name.

Longer names pose a small problem. When I played WoW briefly (Up to level 33), I had a Troll Warrior named Alavatus. While not a huge name, it is four syllables, and in general, people addressed me as "Ala" or "Al". Then, you have other names I've used like Kammorremae, which people shortened to "Kamm". I know people like Quatermain, or Abraxxus, who's names are shortened to "Quat" and "Brax" respectively.

Statements as names is where is gets weird. If you hook up with a mage named "Fase Pwner", what do you call him? "Fase"? "Pwner"? Generally, people will just use the first part, and call you "Fase", but every once in a while you get someone who recognizes "Fase" as the adjective, and "Pwner" noun it describes, and then everything goes to hell cause the whole team except the smart ass healer is calling you "Fase", while he is calling you "Pwner". Ass.

Plays on words sometimes overlap with Statements as names. For example, my Defender is named Combative Medic. My old friend Patrick had a Defender named Apathetic Empath. I have no idea what people called Patrick (other than asshole, cause he was one, not that I'm not), but people refer to me as "Medic" or "Med". Why they shorten it to "Med" is beyond me...

Finally you have Other. And honestly, most names these days are Other. My sisters-in-law ran characters named "Super Funky Peach", "Snuggle Bunnies", "Gorgeous Tsurugi", "Panda Mei", etc. My most recent Guild Leader in GW had characters like "The Devil Himself" and "The Devil Herself", while a friend of mine from CoH has toons like "Molten Slowa", "Insane Slowa", or "SWAT Drone SL-OW".

And frankly, that's the best way to go; having a common theme amongst your names that allows people to use the same moniker for all of your characters. These was an asshole from my old guild who had the name "Cangzhen" as a preface to all his character, with their. profession following it (Cangzhen Monk, Cangzhen Warrior, etc). Of course, that naming convention can defeat the point of some MMOs, like City of Heroes or Champions Online, where the point is to create a truly unique avatar that represents precisely the type of character you want to play.