Well the summer of Dark Sun has begun. The players have managed to free themselves from the Gladiatorial pits after a failed assassination attempt on the sorcerer king Andropenis..er I mean Andropinis. They are currently skulking their way around the under-belly of Balic while being hunted by their former slave master and trying to decide how to get the fuck out of dodge.
I started the game with a battle in the arena where the players were fighting as a team against a Black Dragon posing as a Silt Wyrm. I just wanted to give some props to the Black Dragon from the Monster Vault. At level+1 it was supremely efficient at eviscerating my gang. I managed to drop 3 of the 5 characters without breaking a sweat and needed to take my foot of the accelerator a little to not TPK in the first combat of the first session of the campaign.
The group, through the vagaries of online play, has found themselves without a leader. The current roster is filled with a defender, 2 strikers, and 2 controllers. Is it me or with that make-up are they not just asking for me to pound on them? I mean 2 controllers come on man. This puts me in an interesting spot as no one seems interested in playing a leader and I am not interesting on insisting someone play a leader and the players (at least one) want the game to be brutal in that prototypical Dark Sunny way. I was thinking of adding a 6th person but there is no guarantee they would want to play a leader either. So what are you going to do? It sort of makes encounter planning a little challenging as the game is balanced around the assumption of a leader.
So we are going to do some experimenting and see if we can make this work without compromising the feel of the setting too much. What I mean by feeling is that in my view things in Dark Sun need to be extremely nasty, scary, and hit like a sac of doorknobs to the junk. In the next session one of the NPC’s will dole out some magical fruit (Dark Sun equivalent of a healing potion) which the players can use with a minor action to spend a surge. So it’s a little better than a regular healing potion but a little worse than healing power. If this turns out to be a viable option then they will just have to use a lot of their resources acquiring the healing fruit. I am still setting the encounter difficulty at level +2 and above and have reminded them that fleeing is also an option in combat….what was Khalid’s catch phrase “better part of valor”
The Middle-Aged DM 
I’m curious, what are you guys going to use to play online? Currently there are two projects coming out to provide easy to use virtual table top environments. This includes Roll20 and Tabletop Forge. You could also be using Wizards Virtual Tabletop (And that’s worked really well for me in the past) but it’s purely 4e specific.
I’ve always been interested in running a Warlord, which would work just fine in the Dark Sun setting. That’s the kind of class that has a lot of great options, and a lot of players don’t feel like they feel like just another Healer type.
we are using maptools. i have used wotc’s vtt but it is a bit of a pain if not everyone has a ddi account and the lack of mapping options is a bit of a drag, but the integrated macros are awesome. i have d20 pro with 6 guests but have never used it.
If I add a 6th player to the game I have someone I have to offer the spot to first but if they aren’t able to play or we have another drop off do you want me to hit you up?
Sounds like your players are going to get the beats of their lives. Could you possible entice some of your players to assume a secondary role of leader, meaning take powers where they could heal themselves. I had a Warden who did not dish out the damage, but could take 375 hp of damage at 16th level. That could be an option.
yah the warden is thinking about multi-classing into warlord and for sure are they getting beat on. it is not just the healing they are missing it is also the debuffs and attack enabling.
Not having a healer just means the GM should account for that in encounters. Imo, having no healer makes things a LOT more exciting and epic. In 4E, you can just heal between encounters anyway, so you basically just have to survive the encounter.
The players also need to think more tactically (or the melee die). In other words, sometimes it’s smart to run and let someone else take the hits for awhile.
The good side is that they have enough DPS to take stuff down fast, which is often more optimal in most situations (in Pathfinder anyway). In 4E, I think combat healing is probably a lot better than it is in PF though.
Anyway, I think your game will be more entertaining without a healer (if you don’t kill them).
Two ways to use in concert for encounter design – terrain powers/treasure that grants healing and alternative combat resolution (aka combat outs). To the extent that combat /should/ have a goal outside of reducing one side or the other to a fine red paste, think about the purpose of the encounter and design a way to beat it that doesn’t involve grinding it out to 0 hp. That might be a skill challenge to be completed, a specific goal to attain like destroying all the magical pillars or taking out the leader, or combat outs that say, “These guys get the fuck outta dodge when they’re bloodied.”
I, for one, am looking forward to a leaderless game. We’ve all played and beat 4e on easy mode. Let’s try it on hard mode. Years later, players often remember how their characters died a lot better than how they lived anyway. Dying or failing is a great opportunity, not something to be avoided at all costs.
Try changing Second Wind to a minor.
thanks man I was wondering about that, that does seem like a good idea. the warden might also take the multi-class warlord feat and i might house rule it to inspiring word once per encounter than once per day
If you change Second Wind to a minor, you’re taking something away from the dwarf. You might want to make his SW a free action on his own turn in that case (though I don’t know how that would affect the many feats and items that key off SW).
I think we did just fine last night. Trick is, we had clear goals and once that goal was achieved, we should have gotten the hell out of there. “The tarek’s free, run!” No need to stick around and kill everything just for shits and giggles. If we’re going to be leaderless, we need to be a little smarter than that.
yah but your a bit of a masochist 🙂 I think Brick will be the first to get pork sword-ed
I really think if none of the players are willing to man up and take one for the team, then the whole team should still take the normal beating and see how well they can overcome the handicap which they have given themselves.
Do NOT cut them any slack or give them freebies, such as second wind as a minor action. They need to come up with innovative ideas or just play more cooperatively.
well they handled a pretty difficult battle okay, i think i dropped 2 or 3 of them and the rogue twice. i think they will have to spend a lot of their coin on healing fruits and I did give them the comrades succor ritual. I imagine whoever dies first will make a leader 😉
thanks for the comment
I just discovered this blog. Love your writing style and your use of regular-dude vernacular–it’s the same way I talk. Great stuff. LOL @ Andropenis (I had that in my head since I read the DS book…)
hey man thanks for reading.