November 2, 2010
I noticed over the weekend that somebody had searched, found, and read the post Streamlined for Complexity here at the Big Bad Blog, in which we discussed how the way in which Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons had been streamlined actually created more complexity.
Until a couple of weeks ago, however, I did not properly appreciate the problem.
It was not until recently that I had played Fourth Edition as a player, and not as the DM. As a DM, I am fairly prone to modifying and ignoring rules — I am particularly fond of speeding up combat, and have a general aversion to grids and combats that take more than five rounds.
So while not necessarily surprised, your blogger was still a little bit astounded when, in one fight scene, an enemy combatant had a curse, three shrouds and a mark on him. Additional conditions that were also, at some point, simultaneously affecting this enemy were that he was slowed, granted combat advantage, and was bloodied.
That is six different effects. Currently the group is using coloured post-it notes to denote such conditions, and the Big Bad at the end of the encounter was a rainbow floating about the map.
All the characters, for the record, are still first level. What’s going to happen when we get to higher levels and begin to find ourselves with an array of powers with ongoing effects? This time it was one bad guy and a half dozen effects (mostly doled out by two players). They were not too difficult to track. When it becomes twenty effects spread across several enemies, how will we keep track of it? When will the post-it notes give out?
All I know is that they will.
It has been suggested previously that it is an expectation to require a laptop for gameplay at high levels — but beyond the Dungeons & Dragons subscription service, what is there to track these things during combat?
We can all come prepared with our standard adjustments, but it is these non-standard conditions that cause a problem. Are there computer programs out there to manage these? Established systems for tracking them?
Our rainbow bad-guy was the subject of many jokes and laughs at the last session. I can only imagine that constant repetition and magnification of the issue will make the jokes seem a lot less funny.
NB: The Big Bad Blog would normally do some research and attempt to give solutions to the problems we encounter, instead of just whining. But we are pretty low on Internet right now, so we are whining instead. Or as we prefer to call it Stating the Problem. Which means that we will, hopefully, have a follow-up post about solutions to this at some point. If we remember.
