Quote from: Benoist;387599First, my first thought is that people, the players, are playing the game. Not the characters.
.

Yeah, but if the point of the game is to play the character, then solving problems as the player rather than as the character misses the point.

Bah, it's complicated. At some level it is always the player who comes up with the plans and interprets the clues, and that is kind central to the roleplaying game experience. But if the problem solving doesn't end up reflecting that character, his abilities, strengths, weaknesses and attitudes then it's no longer a roleplaying game,  it is just a simulation like the sort of  excercise you get on training course ( you know the kind, "your plane crashes in a desert, this is the list of items you have, what do you do").

And I think there is a further angle to this issue. A problem that is solved (or not) without engaging the mechanics, that is to say through player-GM negotiation has a different feel from one that resolved mechanically through the character's skills and player's luck.  It's hard to generalise on this because different players feel differently,  but for better or worse mechanical resolutions tends to put success or failure more directly on the player's shoulders.

I've done 2 players in 4e, but I prefer 3 minimum for all RPGs.   The encounter math divides fine, but roles/class choice really alters how the game plays.

Duo strikers are cool until somebody gets smacked.

Controllers are hard to use without a team to hold off the smackage.   I was in a 3 player campaign with 2 Strikers + 1 Controller and having no healing was an issue, as was keeping heat off the Controller.

Also, if neither one is striker, the damage output drops notably making fights longer.

But you can always warp the math to match the needs of the game.  Hack the HPs in half or more if you fear the encounter will take too long.

Quote from: Soylent Green;387601It's hard to generalise on this because different players feel differently

Absolutely. Whatever works at your game table, in the end. I guess that's the real bottom-line.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;387546In actual practice, the balanced party they recommend is fairly weak. A team of all or mostly strikers synergizes internally better than a mixed bag of strikers and defenders. A team of all defenders can make much the same claim actually. Most classes have a means of advancing towards victory that will eventually work on its own, so putting in another character of the same class is delightfully synergistic. A Paladin's greatest joy in life would be to be joined by four more paladins.

Yet another way in which 4e copies MMOG's.  The most powerful parties are ones that have all Shamans/Druids/Paladins/Priests (WoW) Captains/Guardians/Champions/Hunters (LotRO) etc etc.  A team of all one role can usually beat a diverse party in everything but PvP and even then it depends on the class.

Quote from: Benoist;387599First, my first thought is that people, the players, are playing the game. Not the characters.

Second, the whole idea that players can't role play a diplomat or trap finder is a red herring to me. Nobody can be anyone else but themselves, but give the appearance of being someone else? Everyone can, to some degree. Nobody's asking a player role playing a diplomat to study international affairs and perform like a real diplomat at the game table. Instead of die rolls, you can just assume that characters succeed at certain tasks, or be more lenient with the reactions of NPCs, whatever the case may be. If anything, die rolls may come as often in the way of the game's believability as in the case they wouldn't be used.

Take for instance a player of a diplomat making a ridiculous joke about the punch tasting like ass during a state dinner. You could for instance assume that, as people know who the diplomat is and what his accomplishments are, they would just laugh quizzily at the joke, not really guessing what the character was getting at, with some NPC then moving on the conversation to something else. Or you roll the dice with the character's +28 in Diplomacy, and get a 40+ result indicating that the joke is really great and everyone's laughing at it! Sure, some people will be comfortable with that. I'm not. I prefer to use common sense and situational role playing for these sorts of things.

Just an example. My point is that rolling the dice to model the abilities of the character may create just as many problems for the game's believability as it solves them in practice. It does accomplish one thing pretty consistently, though: players looking at the dice instead of concentrating on the actual make believe.

Sorry Benoist...I guess I read that you didn't like dice rolls and then assumed you didn't like having skills at all! Oops.
In practice I would only roll for stuff thats significant too - otherwise I'd assume they take 10 or whatever. In my games even for significant things, characters can certainly at least get a bonus for describing well what they're doing, and may be able to roleplay their way out of needing a check at all (particularly with diplomacy type stuff).

Back to the topic I would have thought using less monsters would be easy enough. You might be able to get away with using lower-level monsters if they have crappy defenses, maybe - depending on what sort of characters they have.
As far as characters go, you might want to encourage  'hybrids', so that the PCs have more diverse powers.

I run a D&D4 game with 1 player.  He runs his main PC and during combat he controls an additional Henchman PC.  Both are fighters.  D&D4 allows this to be an effective group.  The days of the mandatory Cleric/Medkit are thankfully gone.

I really don't do anything unusual.  I just use the guidelines to build fights for 2 characters instead of 5.  I use a few more minions and I try to lay off the Elites and Solos.  I've started halving everything's HPs because I prefer fights to be quicker and it allows me to stack more baddies on the map without them always being minions.

I run the rest the same as I would run any other RPG.  To me Skill Challenges are nothing more than "using skills creatively."  They require no special note.

Quote from: Benoist;387591I don't understand how people find rolling dice for these sorts of things any fun. Honestly.

I'm probably not going to manage to say this politely, but -- why did you bother posting that? It's a thread where a guy asks for help running 4e. Everyone knows you don't like the game. What's the point of reiterating that dislike at every opportunity?

Quote from: Thanlis;387624I'm probably not going to manage to say this politely, but -- why did you bother posting that? It's a thread where a guy asks for help running 4e. Everyone knows you don't like the game. What's the point of reiterating that dislike at every opportunity?

Because I want to understand why it's so "fun" to you guys. I just don't get it.

Quote from: Benoist;387635Because I want to understand why it's so "fun" to you guys. I just don't get it.

It makes it feel like more of a "game" and less like silly storytelling?

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;387636It makes it feel like more of a "game" and less like silly storytelling?

It's no less storytelling. Although it does make it more like a game. It is in fact a mini-game. Which means it directly engages players with the offer of ...something (an unlocked room, treasure, access to another area they haven't reached yet) if they step right up and engage the mini-game. Although it's common to take skill challenges and put them in the plot and say "ok, now you have to do this skill challenge before you can go any further..", I think it's also cool if you have them  as 'funhouse' type choices.

In the first Harry Potter book there's a series of rooms where they have to play music to put a guard dog to sleep, play a massive game of chess, and choose a key (well, I forgot, I remember the movie they changed it into a flying after keys scene that Harry had to do). Oh, and they also had to stun Neville and sneak under the invisibility cloak. It's a perfect example of a skill challenge.

The part that is being argued over is actually identical, except there's an impartial chance of failure if you have to roll for something. In one version, the players say "we attempt to roll the boulder over there towards the trap-plate.." and the DM says "sure", and in the other version the DM says  "maybe and maybe not.. roll over a 21 athletics check.."

There's also less of a difference than you might think- there's tons of quasi-skill checks like this in older edition stuff, it just isn't tied to an established skill system. Sometimes it's an arbitrary "roll a 1 or 2 on a d6" or sometimes the DM might say "roll 5d6 under your stat" (or some other improvised solution).

3rd thing, in the skill challenge version, you don't have to ask for rolls either. You can still make everything conditional upon what players say (or any other condition) so long as the tasks are identifiable. If you create a fortress with wandering patrols, you might say each patrol represents a task and the PCs have to either kill, divert, or disperse 3 or 4 or 8 of the patrols before the villains do a certain thing. Or you might say they have to gather 6 ingredients to give to the NPC alchemist, or talk 4 criminals before the NPC crimeboss will give them an audience.. or any combination of anything else..without it even coming to skill checks.

I guess at the end of the day when you don't understand why someone else is having fun, you need to sorta accept that it's your own issue, and it doesn't really matter if you find it fun or not if you aren't playing anyway.


But that's all off topic. The real topic here is how to create encounters when you have fewer than a medium sized group.

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the companion character rules in DMG2.

Maybe I'm over simplifying things or I've just been at the game for to long.  But whatever happened to a GM just designing encounters based around the players/characters at the table?  Seriously.  If you have a Priest and a Druid, design the game around that.  Don't try and pigeon hole them into the game you want to play, that's no fun for anyone.  Run a game that's appropriate to that group.  If you really don't want to run that game and your heart is set on playing stock game X then make sure the players are aware of that and encourage them into picking characters that fit into that game.  Perhaps a couple fighter types and give them a wand of heeling and a wand of knock to help them out in areas they can't inherently cover.

I just don't get it.  It's not just this thread (though it does seem to creep more in D&D threads then others) but at what point did GM'ing stop being about using the rules to run your game and more about making your game bend into the rules.  Seriously.  GM=Game Master.  Own it!

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;387642There's also less of a difference than you might think- there's tons of quasi-skill checks like this in older edition stuff, it just isn't tied to an established skill system. Sometimes it's an arbitrary "roll a 1 or 2 on a d6" or sometimes the DM might say "roll 5d6 under your stat" (or some other improvised solution).

Oh sure, I completely agree. I'm not somehow bitching at the fact of "rolling a die instead of role playing". I like to roll dice as much as the next guy, and somehow I just can't get hooked on diceless RPGs like Amber and such.

It's the systemization of it and the successive rolls until you hit the numbers of successes and failures indicated that annoy the heck out of me, i.e. the fact it's been made a rule, the sheer amount of die rolling going-on, and the reversed logic applied to them ("what do I role play next so the GM decides for me to roll the right skill?").

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;3876423rd thing, in the skill challenge version, you don't have to ask for rolls either. You can still make everything conditional upon what players say (or any other condition) so long as the tasks are identifiable. If you create a fortress with wandering patrols, you might say each patrol represents a task and the PCs have to either kill, divert, or disperse 3 or 4 or 8 of the patrols before the villains do a certain thing. Or you might say they have to gather 6 ingredients to give to the NPC alchemist, or talk 4 criminals before the NPC crimeboss will give them an audience.. or any combination of anything else..without it even coming to skill checks.

In which version, did you say? Where could I find it? So, just to make sure I understand: instead of a skill roll, you can basically decide on a set of conditions for success, and that could be ... anything of your choosing. Is that it? This sounds really, really much cooler already.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;387642I guess at the end of the day when you don't understand why someone else is having fun, you need to sorta accept that it's your own issue, and it doesn't really matter if you find it fun or not if you aren't playing anyway.

Well, it sure doesn't matter to you, but that matters to me. It's a question of perspective. Besides, I disagree on the whole "giving up" thing. When you have an issue, and don't understand something, you need to say it, talk about it, and that's what I did.

Sorry for the derailment, in any case. I apologize to have pissed off Thanlis, or anyone else, for that matter.

Quote from: Benoist;387660Sorry for the derailment, in any case. I apologize to have pissed off Thanlis, or anyone else, for that matter.

For a 4e thread, this is the first one in a LONG time I haven't regretted posting in, for what it's worth...=P

I didn't think you were being argumentative or trollish or trying to piss anyone off, just trying to understand...=)

Quote from: Tommy Brownell;387675For a 4e thread, this is the first one in a LONG time I haven't regretted posting in, for what it's worth...=P

I didn't think you were being argumentative or trollish or trying to piss anyone off, just trying to understand...=)

Good. I'm really not trying to be a pain, here.

Quote from: Benoist;387676Good. I'm really not trying to be a pain, here.

No worries. Thanks for taking my question in the spirit it was intended in.