4eBlogs.com: Top Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Blogs. Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page. Crunch for Academies of Magic « Daily Encounter. Robot Viking » » Streamlining Mass Combat in 4E with Throngs and Squads. Even though Dungeons and Dragons evolved from tabletop wargaming, it has never really been easy to implement large scale combats in a D&D game.
Likewise lower level ‘monsters’ like city guardsmen eventually become so weak that they are little more than speed bumps for high level adventurers. This has never sat well with me so I’m always on the lookout for alternatives to a game system’s marginalization of ‘regular’ soldiers and a ‘clean’ way to implement troop formations on a battlefield that does not itself marginalize PC’s.
Last week as I took the reins back from Gavin as DM, I had a chance to implement a ‘squad’ design I’ve been tinkering around with for a while. It got some play testing from both sides and I have incorporated some of the lessons learned in the ‘final’ version presented here. Here’s how it works. I started with an individual ‘line’ soldier that my party has interacted with.
That was a 7 level increase from the zombie to the throng which I implemented for my squads. Feature Focus: iPlay4e - Masterplan. One upcoming feature we’d like to highlight is integration with iPlay4e, which will make its first appearance in Masterplan version 8.2.
This came about very simply: a short email from Andrew Reutter, the iPlay4e designer, mentioning that he’d received calls to integrate it with Masterplan, and would we be interested in some sort of collaboration? Sadly his users hadn’t given any indication of what kind of integration they wanted to see, so we’re starting with the most obvious: since Masterplan already has the concept of PCs, this feature allows users to enter iPlay4e keys and have Masterplan link to that character, so that if you select that PC in combat you’ll see the iPlay4e character sheet, rather than the usual PC breakdown that Masterplan provides (although Masterplan will also download all the relevant character information as a backup). The iPlay4e character sheet works exactly as it does outside Masterplan, allowing you to use all its features as normal. Welcome To LizardMag! Why Essentials Aren’t. A lot of people out there are getting their copies of Essentials.
In all, people seem to like some of the changes, while people are (in the words of Youseph) “losing their s**t” over other things they don’t approve of. Some are calling it 4.5, complaining that your previous books are now completely worthless and unnecessary, since a lot of powers and magic items have been changed. But what is “Essential,” really isn’t. There is nothing out there saying you can’t still roll to see if Magic Missile hits. Nothing. If a player shows up to my table with an Essentials wizard, and someone else is playing a PHB wizard, guess what? People: They’re just rules. Will I pick up the Essentials products? I do like what they’ve done with magic items now, making some common, others uncommon and rare.
I see absolutely no reason to take a pen to your PHB, fixing all the errata, and I’m finding it increasingly distressing that so many people get up in arms over the release of new errata.