Month: November 2010

Categories
Editorial

How To Return From A Gaming Hiatus In 5 Simple Steps

The life of an adventurer is a tough one. It’s a life full of adversity. Obstacles oppose them at every turn. Monstrous races seek to thwart adventurers at all opportunities. In their quest for riches and eternal glory every task is weighted and considered. Time between adventures is spent honing weapons and mastering skills.

While we as players seek to advance our heroes onwards to even greater feats of strength and bravery, occasionally the monster known and Real Life rear’s its head and stomps its foot down. Be it family obligations, illness or work, occasionally we might miss a prolonged period of gaming.

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Categories
DM Resources Editorial

Stop Abusing Dragons!

Dragons should be like Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster – often talked about but rarely, if ever, seen. Just because the second “D” in D&D stands for Dragons doesn’t mean that you have to use them all the time. Overusing Dragons amounts to nothing more than abuse. Leave the Dragons alone and leave them out of your campaign.

Call me old school but I believe that Dragons should be feared and revered. When the PCs face a Dragon they should be scared. There should be no smug air of confidence. Any time a Dragon is part of the combat there should be a very real chance that PCs will die. However, very few DMs seem to hold this belief any more. It seems that Dragons have become the standard go-to villain for many adventures, especially low-level adventures. Just look at a random sampling of LFR (Living Forgotten Realms) adventures and D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. From where I’m sitting this amounts to nothing more than Dragon abuse. Stop throwing Dragons at every party!

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Categories
Book Reviews

The Dungeon’s Master Book Report

Have you read any of the D&D novels? Hundreds have been written over the past 30 years if you look at all of the different campaign settings and worlds. With new books coming out every month it’s difficult to know which ones are worth reading and which ones you should pass on. Today at Dungeon’s Master we’ve launched a new page called The Book Report. This permanent new page will help you decide what to read next.

When I can’t play D&D I find that reading D&D fiction is a pretty good substitute. I read a lot anyway, so it only makes sense that I’d pick up the novels set in the Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Ravenloft and Eberron (sorry Dragonlance). It’s not exactly the same as playing D&D, but there are many similarities. I find that the novels often serve as a source of inspiration for my campaign (when I’m the DM) and for the type of characters I might want to play (when I’m a player).

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Categories
Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 10)

This week’s encounter picked up with the party still trekking through the dungeon. Our party was made up of the same five heroes that entered the dungeon last week: Berrian, Quinn, Sola, an Assassin and a Wizard. It looked like this encounter was going to be nothing more than straight up combat with minimal role-playing opportunities. That was until Sola decided to shake things up a bit.

Before the party opened and passed through the doors, Sola had two things she wanted to discuss with the party. Her first suggestion was to re-activate the statue before they left the room from last week’s encounter – that way if anyone tried to follow the party deeper into the dungeon they would have to deal with the trap. The party agreed that this was a good idea; unfortunately we were unable to re-activate the trap.

Sola’s second suggestion was about division of treasure. Splitting gold three ways seemed unfair. After all the party was doing all the dangerous work. She was also not convinced that Benwick was being 100% honest with the party. So if the PCs decided to keep all of the gold what could Benwick and Gorn do about it? After all, they wanted to keep things quiet. If silence was that important then they’d have no recourse against the party if we changed the deal. If Gorn’s true interest was in the Dwarven Ruins as he said then as long as we gave those to him he should be content, if not a bit irked. The rest of the party had misgivings about not standing by the arranged agreement, but they said they’d think about it and we’d figure it out before we left the dungeon.

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Categories
Editorial Player Resources Technology

Character Builder: Is It REALLY That Bad?

Last week I reflected on my initial reaction of the new web based version of Character Builder. Overall, I was not impressed and if you’d like the details feel free to read the post entitled Character Builder: Working As Intended. However, what I did not do was review the new version. My reaction and major complaint is that the new version just has too many bugs and the release should have been delayed. This does not mean that it doesn’t have any good features.

Today we look at the Legacy and Silverlight version of Character Builder. We’ll compare the two as I build a new level one character. The point here isn’t to point out problems with one or the other but to look at the differences in the process and determine if the Silverlight version is actually a step forward, bugs aside, from the Legacy version.

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Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Exploring Skill Checks and the New DCs (Part 2)

Since the launch of 4e D&D, Wizards of the Coast has given us three different charts to measure the DC for skill checks. Clearly they’ve recognized that the DCs were off and they’re trying to find a more suitable model. Rather than wait for them to get it right I decided form the beginning that I was going to tweak the numbers as I felt was appropriate for my game. Following the DCs set out in any of the iterations of the skill DC chart just seemed to arbitrary given most circumstances.

In Exploring Skill Checks and the New DCs (Part 1) I explored the idea of when to actually use skill checks and when to let the narrative drive the story. In part 2 we’ll look at the actual numbers that determine success or failure and how to derive them.

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Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Exploring Skill Checks and the New DCs (Part 1)

Recently our friends at Wizards of the Coast updated the skill check DCs… again, and I admit that I did shake my head when I heard this. Shortly thereafter there was a disagreement at my gaming table about why these changes were made. After a lively discussion I realized that there are fundamental questions about what a skill check actually is that needed to be addressed before you can make use of these newly minted numbers.

What is a skill check? On the most basic level it is a die roll where you add your character’s relevant aptitude and circumstance as expressed as a number. The result is an abstraction about how skilled your character is or how fortunate they are in the circumstances. There are two distinct types of skill checks that you can make – opposed skill checks and skill checks against a set DC.

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Categories
Editorial

Review: Dragon Chess

Heads up D&D fans, there’s a new board game on the market called Dragon Chess. It takes traditional chess and makes it more exciting by adding new pieces – namely Dragons – and expanding and reshaping the chess board. Adding a new piece to chess and calling it a new game might seem like a strange and possibly disastrous idea, but it’s not. In fact it’s brilliant! By adding the new pieces and changing the configuration of the board it becomes an entire different game than the chess you’re used to playing.

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Categories
Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 9)

Level 2. It took nine weeks, but we finally made it. In addition to this week’s write up we’ve got level 2 versions of the pre-gens available for download below. This week’s encounter began a few days after the events from chapters 1 and 2. Our DM waved his Wand of Revisionist History and we suddenly remembered things differently now that we’d had a week to think about it.

After returning to Restwell Keep and turning Ronnik over to the guards, he was tried for his crimes. The evidence the PC already acquired was quite damning. Ronnik was found guilty after only a few days of deliberation and is scheduled for execution. The PCs spent some time trying to find anything to prove of disprove Ronnik’s innocence since the revelations that happened during the last encounter. All they found was more damning evidence including confirmation that Ronnik purchased supplies from the nearby outpost that were later found in the Cult of Tiamat hideout. No one in the keep had anything good to say about Ronnik either. It turns out he wasn’t very popular.

After a few days rest, Benwick invited the party to dinner with the hint of a new job opportunity. Once at Benwick’s home he introduced us to the captain of the watch, Gorn Hammerfall. He explained that Gorn is a direct descendent of the Dwarven bandit lord Greysen Ramthane, a former resident of the keep. Before Greysen was overthrown by Nerath’s forces he hid his wealth somewhere in the keep. Gorn has found the bandit’s cache but needs our help getting it. He’s concerned that if Lord Drysdale (the current lord) discovers the loot he’ll keep it himself even though it’s Gorn’s by right.

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Categories
Editorial Technology

Character Builder: Working As Intended

Disappointed. The word barely scratches the surface on my feelings towards the Character Builder. When Wizards of the Coast made the original announcement about the changes to the CB we remained silent, deciding we would wait until the new version was released before we commented. We had our opinions to be sure, but we felt to be critical of something we couldn’t actually experience wouldn’t be fair.

Well today I had my first taste of the new version of Character Builder. At first glance I was entranced. The interface is slick and very fluid. The updated CB is very user friendly, very new-to-the-hobby friendly as well. At first glance it appears that creating a new character would be a breeze and for the most part it is. It’s when you want to go beyond that first character that you start bumping into problems.

It didn’t take long for WotC to release a page of Known Issues for Character Builder.

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