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Stegoserious
2009-04-25, 06:17 PM
So, this is my first post here but I'm a long time lurker and love most of the advice that I can glean off the various threads in these forums.

I'm starting up a 4e campaign for a few friends, we're all 4e rookies. A couple of us used to play AD&D back in the day, but this is the first serious campaign I'll be running in a long time.

I really like the 4e rules, but one thing I notice is the obvious utility of the Perception skill. All three players (Swordmage, Warlord, and Rogue) used WIS as more or less their dump stat (the warlord's is 12, highest of the three), giving them all very low passive perception scores. I'm completely comfortable with the small party size, as the important roles are there, and for the modules I'm running I've been able to scale down the encounters for difficulty. But another friend of mine suggested running a 4th party member as an NPC to both balance the party and cover the perception skill (likely an Invoker). I certainly don't want to encourage any PCs to alter their preferred class or ability score choice to just cover this one skill.

I guess my question is - is this even worth doing? Can a party get by with pitiful perception? And how would I alter my encounters to keep things fun for them? I'm wary to add an NPC, especially a controller, since I don't want to take any spotlight away from the PCs and a controller's main job is to blast through minions and look like a superstar. Although I do like the story implications of having a party member under my control and available for plot twists like betrayals and rescues etc...

My current idea is to use him and have him be a semi-permanent party member, which would be fine, but doesn't really alleviate the concerns I have with the party's lack of perception.

Thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Alteran
2009-04-25, 06:24 PM
You could always lower the DCs of perception checks if you want the party to be able to make them. This doesn't require changing anything besides a few numbers, so I think it would work out pretty easily. Your players should still be at a disadvantage for having low wisdom, but try and make it so that the person with the best perception can make most passive perception checks. Some DMs would just let them fail the checks, but if you're not interested in that the above solution should work quite well.

Oracle_Hunter
2009-04-25, 06:29 PM
Of course your party can get by without Perception! It is nice to have, but hardly necessary.

In general, I like it better when my players don't have a Perception Specialist; that means they actually have to pay attention and make Active Checks to spot traps and ambushes. A party with, say, an Elven WIS Class with Trained Perception is rarely going to be surprised, and even traps will start being revealed by default.

Now, that said you can still play with high Perception parties - just don't expect traps and Lurkers to be as threatening as they normally are.

Now, onto NPCs generally. In the campaign I am DMing, the players have recruited 3 of the 5 adventurers who were hanging around town. I built then using the NPC rules, and they've worked out fine so far. Now, my party was rather small - 3 players - to start with, so adding 3 NPCs didn't explode the EL calculations, and because each NPC has 1 Surge per day and 1 Encounter, 1 Daily, and 1 Utility, they don't overshadow the players.

In general, I wouldn't recommend adding NPCs - unless you're willing to devote a lot of time making them "real people" and not just a bundle of stats. But, for a party of your size it's probably not a bad idea; if you build then as NPCs instead of PCs they won't overshadow the PCs, and they can help fill a gap in a small party, making the game run smoother.