[D&D 4e] Balance Issues
Natespank:
Hello.
Sorry to begin a new thread while the other is still active. I need advice on something that came up in tonight's game- it's about balance problems in 4e.
One player had to work, so we played with 2 level 2 PCs and 1 DM. Excluding breaks, we played 7 hours.
At the start the party attacked a high level group of bandits and were TPK'd. No biggie, the ghost captain hauled their corpses back to the vessel and revived them. I need to improve my death mechanic btw. Then the party returned for revenge.
The paladin was immediately outright killed. The ranger however was able to kite the surviving bandits with his weird ranger build and wiped out a level 5 encounter all by himself. Took a bit, but victory was plainly certain. That was a little weird.
Later in the night, at the end, the party finally found the halfling island. They marched to the center of it and started shooting everything in sight. I sighed, expecting another TPK. The paladin however had declined resurrection so that the player could play a battlerage fighter. This fighter slew 40 halflings and murdered a level 3 solo single handedly while the ranger kited stuff. The ranger died (backed into a corner), but the fighter was able to genocide this entire island's inhabitants and loot it blind.
He was exploiting some skills that earns him temporary hit points and a ton of regeneration, plus had a few healing potions for emergencies. It was legit.
On another occasion, last year, we tried a level 20 game of 4e: our powergamer friend W. built a character who would buff up a barbarian. That barbarian dealt 1600 damage per round, and killed 3 solos in a single round- they're very clever character builders.
4e is full of stuff like this. It's everywhere. I banned battlerage fighters, but something else will come up next. The battleragers are even patched in the errata, this is their weakened form.
I don't know what to do. With that regen and that kiting strategy, on an overland map the party could defeat an almost infinite number of similar-level enemies. I'm tired and cranky, but I could really use some advice on how to save my game.
Natespank:
Besides, obviously, making that player make a new character. The issue is that something else will arise.
Eero Tuovinen:
I don't have enough footing with the 4th edition to resolve the specific mechanical issues, although I am a bit surprised if what you have here are truly legitimate and overpowered builds; the game has a pretty good reputation for balance, after all. However, I do have a GMing recommendation from how I myself run D&D and similar games: instead of trying to provide the players with level-appropriate challenges, what I do is I provide them with a selection of various challenges and allow them to choose for themselves. This way I don't have to know whether the group is powerful enough to face that troll or dragon or whatever, as I can just tell the players that there is a troll in that cave, and it'll be on their own heads if they choose to go into a combat they can't handle. And of course it's a given that I'll be able to populate my setting with something that'll provide a challenge.
Admittedly mere challenge-negotiation technique is not enough if the game's mechanics run into a dead end where the characters are so powerful that they can only really be stopped by challenges that are not themselves gameable; in 4th edition context I imagine this as fighting enemies that you can only hit on natural 20s, that sort of thing. What I myself do in that situation is that I make a game of it: the player who found the rules loophole that caused the overpowered character gets a lateral reward (something that does not further unbalance the character, that is), the loophole gets houseruled and the player changes his character to not rely on the loophole in question anymore. In this way it's no big deal if the occasional unbalanced character comes up, as they can be dealt with as they happen, and everybody wins provided your reward is sexy enough.
How is your own rules mastery with the 4th edition rules? Would you say that you know the rules better than your players? It's the sort of game where I'd be hesitant to go into it without either knowing the game very well or knowing that the players know the game very well and do not cheat with the rules. Without knowing about the exact issues here, the sort of rules-failures you describe are generally really, really common in games that have involved rules-systems that are not being adjudicated entirely correctly. Because I haven't really seen anybody else complain about broken ranger builds in the Internet I'm a bit inclined to suspect that there's an issue of rules-mastery here more than game balance. Then again, you know your group better, and probably know 4th edition better as well.
Chris_Chinn:
Hi,
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I don't know what to do. With that regen and that kiting strategy, on an overland map the party could defeat an almost infinite number of similar-level enemies. I'm tired and cranky, but I could really use some advice on how to save my game.
Have you checked the WOTC/D&D message boards? If there's any group who finds the most broken combos and how to use them or deal with them, it's that group. Also, check for errata - I know battleragers are the biggest broken example I've heard of, there's probably errata or at least, sensible houserules to replace them.
Chris
Natespank:
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Also, check for errata
He's been errata'd. He gains half the temporary hit points he used to. Still crazy.
I was able to rebuild a version of the character just now, he's legit. As he approaches level 7+ the regen/temp hit points won't matter as much, but then he'll find something new or change characters.
The WotC forums suck anyway- I'd get 2 pages of spam saying 4e is perfect, 2 pages of spam saying 4e sucks, and 1 page of people with similar issues :(
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This way I don't have to know whether the group is powerful enough to face that troll or dragon or whatever, as I can just tell the players that there is a troll in that cave, and it'll be on their own heads if they choose to go into a combat they can't handle. And of course it's a given that I'll be able to populate my setting with something that'll provide a challenge.
In my campaign last year I did that... I ended up building up an unfairly hard setting full of no encounters below level 5. The level 1 characters fought hordes of ghouls. It was retarded, but it worked. However, that's pretty lame and I ended up throwing groups of 3 PCs against over a dozen orcs at a time and they'd win. The system is crazy, that causes them to level up like wow. So, I divided out given-out xp by 4, and cutting way back on magic items so they got very little loot battle-to-battle.
All these "fixes" are a pain in the ass! I keep having to ban classes or combos and make weird houserules.
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