Bonesnap’s Reflections: A Scales of War Adventure

When last we left our party, the Mighty Bonesnap had just been freed from an icy prison. At first the others were leery about the monstrous Bugbear, but after attempting to assist the group (after, of course, freeing himself), sharing with them a small cache of treasure, and generally claiming to be more useful to our heroes alive than dead, the party had a new Rogue.

Or did they?

As I’ve previously mentioned, Bonesnap was designed to be more tank support/controller than striker. With a group that has two Defenders (well, one pure Defender and a Hybrid), marking and locking down a single enemy with to-hit penalties didn’t seem as useful.

So it was time to rebuild him. Better, faster, stronger. The problem was, I didn’t feel like playing a standard beat-’em-up Rogue. I wanted to try something different. Now I’m pretty sure if I’d bellied up to the table claiming Bonesnap was not a Rogue at all, but a Fighter, the group might have let it slide.

Or if I’d somehow lost my Bastard Sword, and started waving around a Waraxe. Or a Flail.

But the roleplayer in me refused to make such concessions. No, Bonesnap was a Rogue who used a big damned sword. Ok, fine, but how could I make that work?

Just earlier that night, I’d had a conversation with Tim about Hybrid Strikers. WotC was very careful to make sure that you couldn’t double up on striker mechanics; if you were to play, say, an Avenger/Rogue, you could only use your Sneak Attack with Rogue powers, and only use your Oath with Avenger powers.

But looking over the Ranger Power list, I noticed the Ranger has several minor-action attacks. Bonesnap had several Rogue powers that were similarly minor/free/interrupt actions to use. And so a complicated build began to form.

Bonesnap 2.0 is more Ranger than Rogue, really. His main solution to most problems is to walk up and Twin Strike it into submission. But with powers such as Low Slash, he could theoretically gain the benefit of Sneak Attack and Quarry on the same turn!

So my goal was clear; try to make Bonesnap able to do as much stuff without the benefit of a Standard Action as I could. His Power list soon looked like this:

Hybrid at-will 1: Acrobatic Strike

Hybrid at-will 1: Twin Strike

Hybrid encounter 1: Off-Hand Strike

Hybrid daily 1: Press the Advantage

Hybrid utility 2: Sneak in the Attack

Hybrid encounter 3: Low Slash

Hybrid daily 5: Wounded Beast

Hybrid utility 6: Natural Terrain Understanding

Hybrid encounter 7: Deceptive Steel

Hybrid daily 9: Profit from Weakness

Hybrid utility 10: Shed the Mark

Hybrid encounter 13: Off-Hand Diversion (replaces Deceptive Steel)

Hybrid daily 15: Blade Cascade (replaces Wounded Beast)

Sneak in the Attack didn’t really let me claim my Sneak Attack, but the flavor was there; if I can’t use it, then someone else can! I was also happy to satisfy my inner Leader with Natural Terrain Understanding, a sweet Encounter Skill Power, and a good reason to train Nature.

-I’ve always enjoyed boosting my allies or meddling with Team Monster. Strange that I haven’t played a full Leader or Controller yet (unless you count that one session I played a Warlock). I’ll have to remedy that soon.

The Feats were pretty basic; make me more badass.

Level 1: Versatile Duelist

Level 2: Hybrid Talent

Level 4: Weapon Proficiency (Bastard sword)

Level 6: Weapon Expertise (Heavy Blade)

Level 8: Weapon Focus (Heavy Blade)

Level 10: Battle Awareness

Level 11: Heavy Blade Opportunity

Level 12: Two-Weapon Fighting

Level 14: Two-Weapon Defense

Battle Awareness is solid gold, and one of the best Multiclass Feats I’ve ever seen. Free Skill Training (always nice), and an Encounter version of Combat Challenge; basically, a free attack on someone shifting or attacking someone who isn’t me!

Compare to some of the other Fighter Feats, which include such amazing benefits as “once per Encounter, you get +1 to hit”. Yeah.

So now Bonesnap was a Fighter/Ranger/Rogue. Yikes! I knew after the Chaos Scar session that I seriously needed to work on speeding my play, and Bonesnap had a LOT of actions he could potentially make, so I bought some ruled index cards, and stayed up late jotting down all of his Powers, miscellaneous benefits, and a flowchart for what he should do on his turns.

This turned out to be a very wise decision, but not for the reasons I anticipated! With no useable printer of my own, I thought to kill two birds with one stone, sending Josh my new build for both his approval, and so that I could easily print him up at his place.

This would have worked, but when I got to his house, I found that he had uninstalled his character builder (he’d been having some issues with getting it to print character sheets), and for some reason, the reinstall refused to update, meaning it wouldn’t allow characters higher than level 3!

So I spent the entire session running from my notecards! Still, it wasn’t too bad, although I’m sure watching me flip madly through my cards looking for immediate actions had to be hilarious to watch!

The session itself was fairly challenging; I carefully stuck to the item budget for characters starting higher than 1st level, which meant I basically had a weapon, armor, a neck item, and some miscellaneous minor items. The big chunk of my budget was sunk into Paragon Iron Armbands of Power, pretty much essential for a melee Striker. This meant, of course, that I was running with +3 items, and I suffered for it! I don’t know how many times our enemies would hit one of my defenses right on the nose! I’d thought it was a pretty slick move to get a Cloak of Displacement, which would boost my AC and Reflex until I was hit, but sure enough, both fights, I took damage in the first round to negate the item bonus.

On the plus side, I don’t think I missed, since a +22 to hit is nothing to sneeze at, and when you throw in Combat Advantage and/or Demon Fury (our Sorceress has rage issues), I actually managed to hit an enemy on a 2 once!

For all my planning though, in real combat, I spent most rounds just applying my Hunter’s Mark and using Twin Strike, like just about every other Ranger ever built. Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun, and it’s always good to be effective, but…

The other characters I play, if I’m reduced to using their At-Will exploits, I’m usually underwhelmed. The damage is meager, and the side benefits are only useful on occasion. Here, I have a character with an At-Will that actually functions as my primary action round to round, and quite nicely!

I’m not calling to nerf the Ranger, I think the class is fine, really. But I definitely think there’s something wrong here, when, in a vast sea of At-Will abilities, most are lackluster options. Oh sure, there are ways to enhance them, with Style Feats and what-not, but investing one or more Feats in order to make an At-Will perform on the level of Twin Strike doesn’t sound right at all.

There’s a reason a lot of Half-Elf builds exist, solely to grab Twin Strike for another Striker Class!

Well enough about that. My first two rounds were probably the best of the session. In round one, before we had any idea of what we were fighting, I tossed out my Nature Utility.

-Nitpick. The ‘fluff’, that is to say, the description of how some abilities work doesn’t mesh well with their benefit. For example, Natural Terrain Understanding states the following:

“You alert your allies to the hidden advantages in the nearby terrain, giving them an opportunity to shift the battle and defend themselves.”

The power only affects your allies. Why, if I have the implied knowledge to take advantage of the local terrain, can I not use that benefit for myself? I mean, in this instance, I get it, I’m taking the action to tell everyone else what to do. But there’s simply no option to shut up and claim the benefits of my knowledge for myself, which is confusing.

While I’m on this tangent, it’s fairly prevalent throughout the system. Each Power has a description of what you’re seeing. This is great, because it helps assert verisimilitude; you can suspend your disbelief and actually get into character listening to descriptions of heroic actions!

Unfortunately, the mechanics don’t always line up with the description, and that locks up my brain for a moment as I try to wrap my head around the discrepancy of what my character should be seeing, and what’s actually happening! Ah well.

Back to the game itself, one major flaw of my character was exposed halfway through the first battle; we were facing a Beholder, and I hadn’t been able to afford a ranged weapon! Granted, I could have (and probably should have) bought something cheap, like a non-magical or +1 bow or the like, but at the time, I’d thought that, with ranged characters already in the party, there wouldn’t be much need for a sub-optimal Ranged attack. Yeah, nice thinking, that.

I also got a nasty surprise when I was attacked by a big critter, and found that I couldn’t actually use one of my interrupt powers to save my hide, because I can only use it on an adjacent attacking enemy. Too bad the thing had reach…

Our next great challenge was to climb up an ice shaft. Now, I had a Climber’s Kit, so I didn’t think this would be a major problem, but since we hadn’t bothered to spell out that I was using it to Josh, he assumed that I helped Turk (our Dwarf. Doesn’t every party have one?) free climb up the shaft (despite me having him claim the Climber’s Kit +2 bonus)!

Which meant that Josh then said, ok, roll initiative. We do, and I end up with a stellar 41 (!?). Which I figured was mostly useless, since I still had to climb up the shaft, and then, wait for the Defenders to engage.

-For whatever reason, the majority of High Initiative characters in the game are NOT Defenders or Controllers, the guys you really want to go first!

No problem, however, it turns out I could swap initiative with our other Defender. Satisfied, I took my new place at the end of the order. Only to find out that no, we didn’t have a rope to climb! And of course, nobody managed to make their Athletics checks to climb up the shaft until they finally gave up and let me secure a rope at the end of the initiative order.

Sigh. As I told them, DM’s (and I know this, because I am one) have a twisted desire to see characters climb things. We take sadistic glee out of watching heavily-optimized characters fail at mundane tasks, and climbing is usually at the top of our list. Why? Because failing to climb leads to falling, another one of our favorite things to watch player characters do!

I was telling Tim that I thought the Wizard Utility of Force Ladder was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen. He didn’t see it, but this is one of the reasons why. If you can’t find a use for this Power, you’re doing it wrong!

Force Ladder Wizard Utility 6

You create a shimmering ladder to aid your ascent.

Encounter * Arcane, Conjuration

Standard Action Ranged 10

Effect: You conjure a ladder of arcane force in an unoccupied square within range. The ladder can be up to 8 squares tall and lasts until the end of the encounter. The ladder stands firmly, does not need to be attached to anything, and cannot be moved unless you permit it. Climbing the ladder requires a DC 10 Athletics Check.

Ah well, no Wizards in this party, so it’s just wishful thinking. The fight after we finally got up to darned shaft was fairly grueling at first; we were facing these elementals that could bull rush/trample over party members (and of course, we were nicely grouped around the shaft!), and when you bloodied them, they leaked elemental fire all over the place, dishing out area damage (again, nicely grouped!). And as a final f*** you, when you kill them? They explode!

I had a hard time in this battle doing anything more complicated than “I Hunter’s Quarry it. I move. I attack”. I guess I could have used an Action Point to get more done, but really, there didn’t seem to be a need to do more! Especially when Chuck got mad, and showed us some Dwarven Rage in action, pulling his enemies to him and beating them all up for massive damage (in excess of 230 points, as I recall. Not individually, but even spread out, that’s fairly epic. More on this below*).

It also helped that Jeff decided to toss out one of his Daily powers, which granted the party bonus Radiant damage on our attacks. There was one turn that I had +3 to hit, +6 to damage, and a bonus 2d6 Radiant with each attack, and was attacking an enemy who had been ‘blessed’ with Radiant Vulnerability 5.

With Twin Strike and my Quarry Dice alone, I delivered 60 damage to an enemy. I could have done more, but, well, it was dead after that! Actually, it’s kind of amusing; despite the fact that Bonesnap is built to be able to use both his Striker Class Features, I didn’t get much mileage out of Sneak Attack. This implies that Bonesnap would be no less terrifying as a pure Ranger, but we’ll see; I still have yet to use my big attacks!

At battle’s end, we were prepared to rest before the next encounter, as people were getting tired. When I volunteered to go scout ahead, however, my idea was met with some derision. Tim even went so far as to say the game doesn’t work like that!

I’m not trying to be difficult, but you can’t make tactical decisions in a vacuum; you need intelligence (and not just the stat). I have Stealth as a skill, that implies I can recon a situation and report back. And at +20, I think Bonesnap has pretty good Stealth.

Now granted, I’m well aware of the difficulties of my suggestion; this isn’t WoW, no matter how much people like to compare DnD to the MMO. I don’t have a magic “stealth mode”. But I did have a Paragon Elixir of Invisibility, and as they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

So I went ahead and had a look. Since the next room had Umber Hulks (which probably have Tremorsense), Josh was probably being nice (especially since he wasn’t about to start the next encounter!), but I stand by my decision, even if it should have killed me. If the game is intended to be nothing more than a string of random encounters that you get tossed into with all the fanfare of a Final Fantasy-esque load effect (with the screen flashing or swirling as you enter combat), then they shouldn’t give characters out-of-combat utility. At all.

Since they do, I still consider DnD to be an RPG, not a turn-based strategy game. Granted, it’s an RPG about running into dangerous places to fight monsters and take their loot, but that doesn’t preclude the ability to approach a situation like a real person would!

But more on that later. For now, I’ll close with a look at another major difference between Heroic and Paragon Tiers. The damage. On the surface, it doesn’t look like your characters do all that much more damage. Encounter Powers are still mostly in the 2 [W] range (with a few 1 [W] and 3 [W] outliers, with varying levels of utility). Sure, at level 15 you might have a nasty Daily that does 5 [W], but it’s a Daily, it’s supposed to wreak some havoc.

So how is it that characters can do so much damage? It breaks down to the following:

1. Rising damage bonuses. It’s slow, and depending on how optimized your character is, your damage bonus can range from something as humble as +10 all the way to the low 20′s. Items feature heavily in this, and some classes (like, say, the Sorcerer) are simply designed to get big damage bonuses. Still, it’s a noticeable jump from Heroic.
2. Paragon Path abilities. The benefits and Powers you gain from your Paragon Path are, in theory, supposed to stand head-and-shoulders above those granted by your Class. Of course, that’s not always true, but when it is, it’s nasty. The Demonskin Adept is a good example, as it both grants a very nice Action Point buff, and a strong Encounter Power with Demon-soul Bolts.
3. Whose turn is it anyway? Characters are now able to do a lot more with both Minor Actions and actions taken outside of their turn. Immediate Interrupts, Immediate Actions, Out-of-turn Free Actions, Opportunity Actions, Opportunity Attacks..it’s a fairly hefty list. Sure, you can only take one of each type, but in a given combat, that’s still a lot that can be done outside of your turn. And more, if there’s a Warlord around to grant bonus actions!
4. More Powers. This is the big one. At lower levels, you have to carefully ration out your Powers. By level 11, however, you have more Powers than you can possibly use in any one battle! The options to recover your Powers are better, and with three Daily Powers to choose from, you can afford to use them more freely.
5. Action Points aren’t needed in every battle. When you can end a battle with Action Points to spare, you realize that there’s almost no reason not to ‘nova’ when the opportunity presents itself. And thanks to points 1-4, those nova rounds are going to be, well, epic. Which really makes me wonder what actual Epic play is like…

I don’t have as many lessons learned for this session; prepping before game helped me minimize the chance of making any blunders, and having a notebook nearby meant I could jot down temporary combat modifiers and the like. I think the biggest lesson I took from this is, if a bottle top says “Twist Off” on the side, you don’t need a bottle opener to drink it!

See you next time, Space Cowboy!

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