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D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters: Web of the Spider Queen (Week 3)

After taking a pretty severe beating from the Drow last week, the party took a short rest to lick their wounds. Once they were healed up they quickly searched the Twisted Tower for any signs of the Pendent of Ashaba. All evidence suggested that the Drow came, stole the item, and then left through the cellar door with it. The PCs immediately began their pursuit.

Our numbers at my FLGS continue to hold steady at 14; two DMs with six players are each table. My group was back down to the original six. The party was badly wounded after last week’s ugliness and most were dangerously low on healing surges. Here’s the party breakdown along with their current number of healing surges.

  • Drow Wizard (Bladesinger) [3/8]
  • Drow Rogue #1 [4/7 ]
  • Drow Fighter [12/14]
  • Drow Druid [6/9]
  • Drow Rogue #2 [4/6]
  • Drow Cleric [4/9]
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DM Resources

Staying Alive: 8 Ways to Keep Wounded PCs in the Game

One of my biggest issues with D&D is the five-minute work day. This is when PCs expend all their best powers and burn through their healing surges so quickly that they’re useless unless they take an extended rest. The game is designed for PCs to have four or more encounters before they should need to take an extended rest but I suspect that many DMs rarely push through more than four encounters before calling it a day. However, there will be times when this just isn’t possible – either because it doesn’t make sense given how the story is progressing or the printed adventure doesn’t allow it. In these cases the DM may need to get creative to keep the PCs alive until the end of the day.

Assuming the PCs can still take short rests then output isn’t usually a big deal if the party continues on past four encounters. Sure they may not have those awesome daily powers at their disposal into the fifth encounter but they will have all their cool encounter powers. It’s healing surges that usually become the biggest problem.

Strikers generally have the fewest surges to begin with, and unless the player has a reasonable Constitution score or the Durability feat they’ll run out of surges quickly. What makes the problem worse is that as soon as monsters (intelligent monsters anyway) see a striker mowing through their ranks they’ll target the biggest threat (the striker). Unless you’ve got advantageous tactics or a decent defender at your side, strikers end up taking damage every fight.

So what’s a DM to do when this kind of thing happens? How do you keep a wounded party in the game and convince the players to push those PCs forward? It may just be a game, but players get emotionally attached to their PCs quickly and no one wants to enter a combat encounter knowing that their PC is likely to die. It’s a delicate situation that requires some careful manipulation. The key is not to do so in such a way that it insults the players or belittles the game mechanic. Players want to do well but they don’t want the DM to just give them an easy, unearned victory. It’s a real balancing act and here are 8 suggested ways to pull it off.

Categories
Month in Review

Month in Review: May 2012

May was a busy month at Dungeon’s Master. Despite our reduced publishing schedule we still showed great numbers and continue seeing upward trends. Running previews of the new D&D Encounters and Lair Assault certainly helped.

As the Dungeon’s Master home game moved into epic tier, so to does the focus of many of our articles. With the inevitable launch of D&D Next in the not-too-distant-future many of us are trying to get some epic play in before we shift to the new edition. With very few other blogs writing about playing in the epic tier we are becoming the place to visit for high level inspiration. Please let us know if there are any aspects of epic adventuring that you’d like us to focus on.

A lot of the gaming blogs are writing about D&D Next. Although we are participating in the play-testing we have decided to keep our comments and feedback on the new D&D to a minimum for now. We developed our core audience by being the place to go for 4e materials online. We intend to keep that audience happy by focusing on 4e and proving fresh new material for ongoing 4e campaigns. Many of our articles are edition-neutral and can easily be applied to whatever version of D&D you’re playing, including D&D Next, so if you’re fully engrossed in D&D Next we’re confident that you’ll still find many or our articles helpful. However, in the short-term we are staying true to our roots and focusing the majority of our effort on writing about 4e.

We’d like to thank everyone for visiting Dungeon’s Master in May. We saw a lot of new people commenting last month and we hope they continue to share their thoughts and feedback. We value your opinion and want to hear what you have to say. Remember that you can always email us (our email addresses are on the about page) if you have any questions or have an idea for an article.