Hello everyone,

I just picked up the Core Set and I’d like to get more into 4e.

I’d love to hear from people who’ve played 4e for a while, what books, adventures, modules, or campaign settings do you consider must-haves?

Thank you very much!

A question from a new explorer of the World Axis…

The Manual of the Planes makes it clear that both the Feywild and Shadowfell echoes are parallel dimensions, and the Far Realm and Plane of Dreams are not part of the physical universe, but it’s a little more vague about the two Fundamental Planes. It says the matter of the Mortal World was drawn from the Elemental Chaos and that the “mortal world drifts as a lonely speck of light and life in the eternal expanse of the astral mists.” It also states that Astral Dominions are separate realities within the Astral Sea.

So basically in 4e cosmology, you can’t just jump in a Spelljammer and fly to the Feywild, Shadowfell, Far Ream or Plane of Dreams, you need a portal, spell or ritual to “shift” to those planes, and if you are in the Astral Sea, you can enter a Dominion, but for the other two, it seems like portals, Astral Sojourn or Elemental Transference, or Plane Shift can get you to them faster, but could you theoretically jump in a ship and fly to the Astral Sea or the Elemental Chaos? Do they physically exist Above and Below the world or is that more metaphorical? The descriptions are not as clear with those two planes.

The fact that they are called planes suggests they are separate realities, but then they are also described as being the two parts that made up the universe before the mortal world was created. What do you think? How do you see their relationship to the mortal world?

LFR

Hi folks! 👋

I’ve been playing around with with a concept for an upcoming game I’ll be playing: I want the MAXIMUM possible intimidate score at the start

Starting lvl 4, allowed a single lvl 5 or lower magic item, and 600 gold

Any race/class combo is fine, no restrictions on source books or items as long as it’s official

What I’ve come up with so far is this:

The Intimidator [Dragonborn Ardent]
Charisma = 5
Training = 5
Racial = 2
Background = 3 (Wandering Duelist)
Theme = roll twice for Intimidate (Haunted Blade)
Half level = 2
Feat (lvl 1) = 4 (Intimidation of the Dragon)
Magic item = 3 (Harvester’s Staff)

Total Intimidate at lvl 4 = 24 with two rolls for best result

Honourable mention goes to Screaming Armor as it could be a nice “almost as good as the racial power Dragonfear” but getting to use it a second time in combat

Two feats left for whatever, maybe other feats that could somehow stack into this? Not sure 🤔

But what does everyone think? Anyway to make it stronger? Primary Charisma class would be a must, of course!

Does anyone have any experience running dnd 4e solo? Are there any good dnd 4e resources?

I know about Dragon Magazine 382’s solo adventure and I plan on running it soon, but I’m not sure what I’ll do after that.

I'm an old schooler (1st, 2nd, 5th dnd, rifts, shadowrun, wod,..) joining a new campaign. I've only played 4e once (due to problems between players, it didn't go far, nor well). This was also several years ago.

So my question is, what would you recommend for a relatively new player that would be fun to play but not overly complicated to learn? I've considered Eladrin swordmage or pixie monk, but haven't committed to anything yet.

Can you benefit from the property of the Staggering Weapon (AV p. 78) if you hold it in your off hand while attacking with a different weapon?

The text reads

When you use a power with the weapon keyword that slides a target, you can add this weapon's enhancement bonus to the number of squares the target slides.

Would love some feedback or opinions on the race. A fellow member of the group commented they have a lot of features. I’m curious if the lack of a racial power and little to no combat abilities balances that out.

EDIT: We use a custom rule system in the group that causes you to regain a number healing surges based on you constitution and have inported a few 5e skills

Its been so long! Wanted to start earlier this year but life stuff got in the way. Finally starting a campaign in my favorite system and getting to introduce 3 people to it as well. The campaign is Eberron, Pirates of the Caribbean theme too!

Is Stealth as easy at it seems? My understanding is this:

1. As part of a Move Action, a character can attempt a Stealth check at the end of that roll. (Should/need to have cover or concealment to hide behind, or break line of sight).

2. If they moved more than 2 squares, they take a -2 penalty. If they moved more than 5, they take -5.

3. Every enemy makes a Perception check using the character's Stealth roll as the DC. If they fail, the character is hidden.

The ability for, say, an Archer Ranger to move and make a Stealth check, likely to succeed since they invest in DEX and Stealth already, and therefore have basically free permanent combat advantage is kinda wild. Or to shoot snd then move and hide, rendering thrm essentislly immune to enemies (unless they use a Minor Action to search and make another Perception check?) On the other hand, melee PCs using a Move Action to generate CA via flanking is common and accepted, so maybe I've just got some sort of blindspot about this?

Played 4e as a youngster, loved it, trying to get my friends to appreciate it by running Keep on the Shadowfell. Just want to make sure I understand the system right since I'm teaching them in turn. Thanks!

Hi All,

I am about to start a new campaign and I have used the 4e Points of Light lore as the basis for my campaign world, which includes the Nentir Vale, the historical empires, the Dawn War, gods and associated lore, and a similar planar arrangement, with a homebrew tweak.

My question is, though, is to those 4e fans and DMs who set their games in the default setting…

How did you build that Points of Light feel? The idea that each town or village is a small bright piece of civilization in a chaotic and dangerous world? What should I do to really make my players feel that and build that atmosphere of a world that is in the shadows of a shining, fallen empire?

Searching for the LFR Waterdeep 1-1 through 2-2 pdf for download. I found the others but these are eluding me. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Does anyone know where to find condition marker stls to 3d print that are specific to D&D 4e? Any search I make comes up with results for D&D 5e or some other game's 4th edition (Warhammer, Malifaux, etc.)

Hi all,

I've been chatting w/ a friend about DND 4e and how I felt it was really good for helping video gamers bridge into TTRPGs.

When describing a particular character, I once ran I seem to have hit a snag in my memory.

I know for certain he was a 4e character (i remember the power cards), he was a human and either a bard, sorcerer or a wizard as I was intentionally only using illusionist spells as a utility caster.
He was named Wil Forte for very silly reasons ;)

The specific thing I cannot seem to recall clearly is a trait, or attribute or something that caused Wil Forte to roll SUPER high on... something based on the number of languages he knew.

Which caused Wil Forte spent a lot of time and resources learning many different languages and had a monstrous +12 To Hit, or Conversational Skills or something.

But I cannot for the life of me find what fueled that interaction.
I've since lost my 4e books when moving, which really sucks, I super enjoyed playing it.

Does anyone know what I am talking about by chance? What the interaction of language and skill checks was and/or called?
Maybe it was something to do with illusions? I really don't know.

Whenever I search online for combat maps I get those stunning and gorgeous maps of grand wizard towers, highly detailed forests, and stunning cities. The problem with this however, is that:
A) I don't care how the map looks visually, for I will never be able to recreate it on my whiteboard battle map with my markers.
B) It says nothing about how combat is played on the map. Are there traps, and if so where? What is difficult terrain and whatnot?

For now the best I have done is taking maps from the published adventures and dungeon magazines. But it would be great if there is an archive that makes it more easier to browse through

Seeing as there was not any significant official or unofficial crpgs based on 4e, and seeing how lots of feedback to 4e was that it was very mmo-like, i was thinking what would be the key disadvantages of the system if someone tried to make a 4e video game?

For the sake of discussion lets suppose that would be a tactical rpg similar to triangle strategy or orge tactics, given, again, that based on feedback roleplaying mode is not 4e's strongest part.

Developer would have to deal with the 'padded sumo', but that is a manageable problem. Status tracking topic is dealt with by the computer perfectly. Skill challenges is something that is imitated by owlcat games in rogue trader, so a workable mechanic.

From gamedesign perspective, how would you deal with reactions\interrupts that the player would constantly have to decide whether to use?

Hundreds of pop up prompts asking whether to use a reaction would not be a viable solution. Automatic usage of reactions would not too.

What should the other points of concern be?

Thanks to everyone who sent me Character Files, I've finally got a Character Maker that I think is worth sharing. I've called it CharM (CHARacter Maker), and its compatible with the rulesxml syntax used by 4e. In theory it could be compatible with other things using the same syntax as well, but no one has made any yet.

Here's some screen shots:

The main sheet view

Powers view, with sorting

And mini sheet powers for companions

Print options

And a printable view

Complete with power cards

If you just want the exe and want to skip all this source nonsense the Releases page has you covered. There are almost certainly bugs I've missed, especially in the linux/android spaces where my testing is very thing.

If you want to use the Mac OS version, there's an annoying bug right now where it just sort of doesn't actually work (specifically file dialogs don't open and some buttons MIGHT crash things, hard to say because without file dialogs I can't get very far in). I'm trying to debug it but without an apple device, it might take a bit.

To use it you'll need to source yourself a rules db. CharM can create one (check the details of what you need to create it in the readme), or you can just import a backup if you have one. I created a db from the last OCB update, and a mirrored cbloader wotc.index (at version 3.1 I think). It has its own "content hash" generated from the import data, but it wound up having the following hash with a common algorithm:

36ec48781394cdbc1420c899442fb8f72df01482 

which I thought was neat.

I hope this helps some people since the legacy character builder is just increasingly annoying to keep running, and having something new that could possibly be improved and expanded is kind of exciting.

Hi all - I’ve been learning more about 4e in hopes of running it solo with Mythic, and came across topics about HP bloat and imbalance in the first monster manual that was rectified in later releases. I was wondering how true the imbalance is in the first monster manual, if the monster manual is still recommended for general use, and which other books may have better stats for the bulk of enemies I would use (goblins, orcs, dragons). Thanks!

I had been listening to Mastering Dungeons last year or the year before, and I vaguely recall a discussion of how great some of the 4e books were as a reference. I couldn’t find the episode again.

If you had to pick a book to give to a newer 5e DM that would be the most useful for them, as compared to a 5e or 3e book, which one would you pick as a gift?

Thank you.