April was another solid moth here at Dungeon’s Master. We covered a wide variety of D&D-related topics, many stemming from our very own gaming table. Some articles really polarized our readers and we received a lot of fantastic comments, many from first time posters. In April we welcomed our newest contributor, Bauxtehude, to Dungeon’s Master. We look forward to his new and unique views on 4e D&D. We want to thank everyone who visited our site this month and we will keep writing great articles about 4e D&D to keep you coming back every day. If you missed any of articles we published in April, here’s your opportunity to get caught up.
Highlights
D&D Encounters
“D&D Encounters is an exciting, weekly campaign that plays out one epic encounter at a time.” We continue our weekly coverage of the D&D Encounters program from Wizards of the Coast.
- D&D Encounters (Weeks 3 & 4)
- D&D Encounters (Week 5)
- D&D Encounters (Week 6)
- D&D Encounters (Week 7)
RPG Blog Carnival
Exchange of Realities, this month’s host of the RPG Blog Carnival: Let Me Show You My NPC. Our contribution looks at an interesting angle to creating important NPCs in your campaign.
- Hey, Isn’t That My Character: Using Retired PCs As NPCs
Skill Challenges
- 5 Ways To Include Rituals In Your Skill Challenge Design – Good skill challenge should have more than one way to overcome the problem. Encouraging ritual use is a great alternative to just using skills in the normal way.
- Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 1) | (Part 2) – Our newest contributor, Bauxtehude, offers his take on skill challenges.
- The Skill Challenges tab at the top of the page provides easy access to all of our skill aides and skill challenges.
Races
So far we’ve looked at the Dwarf, Tiefling and Goliath. In April we examined two of the new races from the PHB3.
- Born To Be Wilden – Our exploration of character races continues with the Wilden.
- The Shardmind – Our exploration of character races continues with the Shardmind.
DM Resources
- Adding Favours to Treasure Bundles – Money and magic are good rewards, but favours can be even more valuable.
- Fighting an Opponent You Can’t Beat – After facing this situation in our own game we took a closer look at how to handle this controversial topic.
- How To Introduce A New PC – There are many ways to introduce a new PC to the party and in this article we discuss three of them.
- The Miracle Of Divine Power – Our look at the “Greater Power” in D&D.
- Time in D&D – Should PCs be required to take down time before leveling?
- Who Owned Your Magic Sword Before You Did? – We look at the idea of ownership and whether or not PCs should return found magic items.
Player Resources
- Character Creation: The Importance Of Planning Ahead – Short-term power gaming can hurt your long-term development if you don’t do your homework during character creation.
- Have You Retrained Today? – Keep your character versatile by retraining often.
- I Want Individual Rewards in D&D – Should PCs who exemplify their class or role deserve something extra for being heroic?
- 1 d100 and 2 d4s – The polyhedral die quiz at DicePool.com was all the rage in the blogsphere during April. Here are our results.
GenCon
Event registration for GenCon 2010 began in April. Both Ameron and Wimwick are going to Indianapolis this summer. To round out our Championship team we put out a call for any interested gamers to Join the Dungeon’s Master GenCon Championship Team.
A Look Ahead
In May we’re going to ask all of our readers to help us pick the best articles at Dungeon’s Master. Throughout May we’ll pit our best and most popular articles against each other and let you vote on the best of the best. We’ll also bring you weekly reports from D&D Encounters, provide some recommended reading, look at a few more races, talk about skill challenges, return to Traps & Hazards with the revolving door, and explore death and resurrection in D&D. Be sure to visit every day in May for more great 4e D&D articles.