# The Gaming Den

Welcome to the Gaming Den.

Skip to content

## 4e 1st Level Character Optimization

General questions, debates, and rants about RPGs

Moderator: Moderators

Post Reply

- Print view

34 posts

- Previous
- 1
- 2

Lago PARANOIA
  Invincible Overlord
  Posts: 10555
  Joined: Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:00 am

###

- Quote

Post by Lago PARANOIA » Sun Oct 07, 2012 9:55 pm

The only thing that really prevents me from recommending unerrata'd pacifist clerics for levels 1-7 is that like the battlerager fighter they're arguably too good. Even a tricked-out warlord build isn't going to carry the party as hardcore as a pacifist cleric.
A baseline healing 10 points of damage every round at level 1 (and you can do much better than that) is a pretty big 'FU' to the difficulty. Add in Moment of Glory and Consecrated Ground and/or you've pretty much made the party invincible. And personally, I think it's less frustrating to the DM and even other people in your party to turbocharge peoples' offense rather than put up a stone wall of awesome.
I'd personally only play a pacifist cleric if I knew that the rest of the party was going to be things like O-Assassins and Sorcerers.
Going back to the OPs suggestion, if bow rangers aren't your bag and you feel too dirty to use Orbizards (you shouldn't, they're not that dominating at low levels even unerrata'd) you can always go for a blaster wizard. Blaster wizards, even at 1st level, can do enough damage to make you care. If you're doing one-encounter workdays they can come close to or even exceed the damage of bow rangers. They don't really come until their own until around level 6, though.
And if your DM is doing unerrata'd skill challenges, you pretty much need someone who has Arcana/Religion/History and an intelligence bonus to go with it.

> Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
> In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.

Top

Josh_Kablack
  King
  Posts: 5317
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
  Location: Online. duh

###

- Quote

Post by Josh_Kablack » Mon Oct 08, 2012 7:02 pm

> Lago PARANOIA wrote: And if your DM is doing unerrata'd skill challenges, you pretty much need someone who has Arcana/Religion/History and an intelligence bonus to go with it.

to either

- accept that you will never ever succeed at them, or
- build the entire party to stack Training, Attribute, Power, Race, Background and Feat bonuses on their skills, or
- somehow not notice that Keith's secret stealth houserules are not in fact unerrata'd skill challenges.

Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Mon Oct 08, 2012 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Top

Username17
  Serious Badass
  Posts: 29894
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

###

- Quote

Post by Username17 » Mon Oct 08, 2012 7:16 pm

Well, you could be using one of the many half-baked ideas in the "advanced skill challenges rules" in the DMG2. Those were literally just a bunch of random ideas that can't work together and don't make any sense and don't fix the underlying problems - but they do come with DCs that players can actually beat.
-Username17
Top

Krusk
  Knight-Baron
  Posts: 601
  Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2010 3:56 pm

###

- Quote

Post by Krusk » Mon Oct 08, 2012 7:46 pm

If your DM is pretending they are going to use skill challenges have them walk you through how they think they work. There are seriously like 7 printed versions, and tons of "Suggestions" provided by the designers. You will be unable to get any relevant advice online without providing the skill challenge rules you are using.
Top

gardengnome
  NPC
  Posts: 2
  Joined: Sun Oct 07, 2012 12:27 am

###

- Quote

Post by gardengnome » Mon Oct 08, 2012 8:11 pm

Well when it comes to skills I am not to worried because I think as long as she can hurt things it will be ok. I don't really know anything about the DM so I am not going to bother getting that worried about how his games go. Although if there are specific skills that she should have and you tell me to take I will make sure she gets them.
I was thinking that the ranger seems like a good possibility. It looks pretty simple and straight forward.
If she wants something more flashy and magical maybe are there any simples things there. I was thinking the Dragonborn sorcerer seemed like a kind of cool/fluffy concept. Is that any decent? Is there a magical option that is the obvious choice? I know some people have mentioned orb wizard, but I have no idea what that means.
Thanks again this is really helpful.
Top

John Magnum
  Knight-Baron
  Posts: 826
  Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2012 12:49 am

###

- Quote

Post by John Magnum » Mon Oct 08, 2012 8:17 pm

Orb Wizard = Wizard with the Orb of Imposition class feature, and optimally using the Orb of Ultimate Imposition implement. Orb of Imposition was great. It lets you once per encounter apply a massive penalty to saving throws. And normally it's very hard to get more than a +/-2 to saving throws, so the fact that Wizards could literally toss around -10 by mid-level was incredible. Once per round, it let you turn a (save ends) effect from "2 rounds" to "the entire encounter".
They nerfed it (and almost all the items associated with it) so now once per round you can turn a (save ends) effect from 2 rounds to 3 rounds.
It's still POSSIBLE to run around as an Orb Wizard / Wizard of the Spiral Tower with a Cunning Longsword and throw down fairly nasty (save ends) effects, but the unerrata'd version is a billion times cooler.
Last edited by John Magnum on Mon Oct 08, 2012 8:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-JM
Top

Username17
  Serious Badass
  Posts: 29894
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

###

- Quote

Post by Username17 » Mon Oct 08, 2012 8:28 pm

> Krusk wrote:If your DM is pretending they are going to use skill challenges have them walk you through how they think they work. There are seriously like 7 printed versions, and tons of "Suggestions" provided by the designers. You will be unable to get any relevant advice online without providing the skill challenge rules you are using.

It's way worse than that. Let's consider the DMG2 by itself. The Skill challenges section is 23 pages long and has (I am not making this up) ten different authors. It contains:

- The Skill Challenge Framework.
- Example of Play, supposedly of the Skill Challenge Framework, but different in key areas.
- Ground Rules. These are advice bits on how to run Skill Challenges that explicitly tell you that all the pieces of the Skill Challenge framework are bad and should be worked around.
- Alternatives to Skill Challenges. There's totally a sidebar with a very sketchy outline of a totally different skill system based on players rolling skill checks and adding them up in some other way.
- Primary and Secondary Skills. This is a completely different way of using skills than the versions listed before.
- Group Checks. And another new way to use skills. Actually many different ways of handling things, because the game is radically different depending on how many players need to get a hit for it to count as a group success.
- Allow Options Besides Skills. This is an option that replaces the entire Skill Challenge format with diceless MTP, and thus basically counts as a distinct system in its own right.
- Get Everyone Involved. This subheader actually contains two major overhauls to the system, one of which is "maximum successes" and the other is "Aid Another". Either or both of these change the skill challenge dynamics unrecognizably.
- Stages of Failure. This is a new way to handle Skill Challenges. Well, it's kind of five different ways of handling Skill Challenges, because it has five different (and totally different) suggestions for what might actually happen if those Failure Stages were activated, but you get the idea.
- Stages of Success. This is another new way to handle Skill Challenges. Well, it's kind of zero ways to handle skill challenges because there actually aren't any rules for what success stages actually do. But it does say that as DM you might want to write some rules for success stages once you implement this version.
- Progressive Challenges. A standalone Skill Challenge variant.
- Branching Challenges. Another standalone Skill Challenge variant.

Now the examples. It should come as absolutely no surprise to absolutely anyone that of the nine example skill challenges spanning 13 pages, I would say about six of them do not conform to any of the skill challenge rule variants in the previous set of pages.
And this is one book. Probably the worst book as far as "throwing shit at the wall to see if we can confuse people into thinking we got Skill Challenges working", but I doubt it even contains half of the Skill Challenge variants that were ultimately printed. This came out in 2009.
-Username17
Top

Voss
  Prince
  Posts: 3912
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm

###

- Quote

Post by Voss » Tue Oct 09, 2012 2:22 am

> Doom wrote: Min-maxxing is fun, and a major theme at the Den, but you might want to consider pointing her to "easy to play", giving up the 2% or so improvement by taking something optimized in every conceivable way.

Have to agree. This isn't hardcore mode, this is non-shit mode for a newcomer, with a boyfriend who also knows little and is making an appeal to a third party who doesn't know much either. Since buffing is out, and there is an odd effort at role protection for whatever reason (and tanking can require they same sort of bullshit tracking of crap that probably turns her off buffers), some sort of striker or controller seems the order of the day, particularly one that straight up throws damage and/or stunlocks people.
I'd suggest ranger, wizard, barbarian (no errata, yeah?) or possibly even avenger, just from the standpoint that reliability might be reasuring, and the rerolls take some of the onus off the max stat and allow shit to be spread around a bit.
Top

duo31
  Apprentice
  Posts: 80
  Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
  Location: Beautiful, not so Frozen North

###

- Quote

Post by duo31 » Tue Oct 09, 2012 9:34 pm

Sorcerer Focusing on Blazing Starfall as your main at-will. it might be only d4 but it attacks multiple targets.
As you level, pick other powers that target groups. and stack as many +Dmg feats/items as you can.
There are enough things going on with the Sorcerer to be "interesting" and you have lots of damage output. Also this adds an arcane character to the party.
Nothing is Foolproof to a sufficiently talented Fool.
Top
Post Reply

- Print view

Display:
Sort by:
Direction:

34 posts

- Previous
- 1
- 2

Return to “In My Humble Opinion...”

Jump to

- Main
- ↳ About the Gaming Den
- ↳ In My Humble Opinion...
- ↳ I Gave the Mouse a Cookie...
- ↳ In The Trenches
- ↳ It's My Own Invention...
- ↳ MPSIMS