Category: DM Resources

Categories
DM Resources

5 Tips To Increase Role-Playing At Your Game Table

Role-playing has featured prominently in several 4e blogs over the past few weeks. The topics and approaches to the subject have varied widely, from how to speed up combat to allow for more time to role-play to introducing new mechanics to encourage role-playing. Our own post on the 4th action is one of the later articles. The subject of role-playing in 4e has been of great debate since its release with many debating how much role-playing the edition allows.

Some have argued that skill challenges are the mechanic in 4e that facilitates role-playing. While skill challenges can certainly accomplish this task, to state that they are the only way to role-play in 4e is rather naive. I strongly believe that if your gaming group wants to role-play it will. I also believe that some players are more willing to embrace role-playing than others.

Continue reading “5 Tips To Increase Role-Playing At Your Game Table”
Categories
DM Resources

The Groundhog Day Effect in 4e D&D

In the 1993 director Harold Ramis brought us the Bill Murray comedy classic Groundhog Day. For those unfamiliar with this movie, Bill Murray’s character awakens every morning to discover that he’s reliving the same day, February 2, over and over again. After watching the movie again last week I started thinking about how to use the Groundhog Day effect in an upcoming D&D adventure.

I saw this playing out in two possible ways.

  1. The PCs would find themselves in a situation similar to that of Murray’s character in the movie where they actually had to relive the previous day over again.
  2. The PCs had to face the same encounters a second time after defeating them once before.

Both scenarios allow the players to learn from their previous mistakes. How often have you used a daily power in the first encounter and then realized that it would have been more effective against the creatures in the second? How often have you held onto a daily power and then regretted not using it? The same thing goes for actions points.

The Groundhog Day effect, in essence, gives the PCs a do over. Once they realize that they’re facing the same encounter again they can choose to alter their original course of action.

Continue reading “The Groundhog Day Effect in 4e D&D”
Categories
DM Resources Skill Challenges

Skill Challenge: Secret Identity

As the PCs become more powerful and earn a reputation they’re going to become better known across the land. However, there are going to be times when this fame and notoriety will actually be a hindrance. So when one of those situations arises why not throw a skill challenge into the background of the story in order to remind the PCs that if they want to keep their identities a secret it’s going to require a little bit of work.

I want to stress that this kind of skill challenge should be going on in the background and not be a full-on skill challenge in the traditional sense. By the time the PCs have earned enough experience to be recognized, a skill challenge to hide their true identities will seem beneath their level. When I say recognized, I mean to the extent that they can no longer walk among the common folk without drawing crowds and onlookers.

However, by making this a skill challenge with real consequences and XP, the players will realize that it needs to be taken seriously. It also gives the players additional motivation to really get into the role-playing.

Continue reading “Skill Challenge: Secret Identity”
Categories
DM Resources Player Resources

How Art Inspires Campaigns

As both a DM and a player I draw my inspiration from four different sources: fantasy literature, movies, my daily walk and art. It is amazing how a single phrase, scene, tree or image can inspire a character’s history or indeed an entire campaign. I walk my dog daily and on the path I take through a forest there was a dead tree that was covered in vines. This image inspired the idea for an entire campaign where the natural world was being threatened by rot and corruption. Not the most original idea, I’ll admit, but as the dead tree was surrounded by life I decided to represent this by an antagonist that the party trusted. Over time his duplicitous nature would be revealed. Not bad for an idea inspired by a tree.

I find that simple images and stills can often provide great ideas for campaigns and character concepts. Fantasy art has inspired me in more ways than I can count. The idea of taking an image and providing a history for that image is an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Art clearly is a popular subject and I’m obviously not the only one inspired by it. Two of our most popular articles here at Dungeon’s Master are The Art of D&D (Part 1 | Part 2). My purpose here isn’t to go back as Ameron did and talk about artists who have shaped our thoughts of Dungeons & Dragons. Instead I want to look at some select images and create things from them. Today’s post is a workshop and I’m interested in the stories we will create.

Continue reading “How Art Inspires Campaigns”
Categories
DM Resources

Henchmen in 4e D&D

As your character earns enough XP and gains sufficient level doesn’t it make sense that he’d start to attract some followers? Your character is a role-model for aspiring heroes. Tales of his exploits and successes will eventually reach the ears of impressionable youngsters. Inevitably some of them will take steps to seek out your character and bask in his greatness. Whether they seek to learn from him directly or they just want to be close by the next time something awesome happens, your PC has made a name for himself and gaining henchmen is one of the consequences of his fame.

Your character’s ever-developing reputation is a big part of what defines the PC and is just as big a part of how other people will interact with him. But we’ve already written about Reputation (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3) so we won’t bother retreading over that ground again. Instead I want to look at the idea of PCs attracting henchmen of their own.

Continue reading “Henchmen in 4e D&D”
Categories
DM Resources

The Best LFR Adventure Ever

What happens when you slam LFR and then are challenged to work with a game designer to come up with the best LFR experiences ever? You end up interviewing the author in question and working with him to understand the adventure’s potential. You get an exciting session of LFR available as an actual play podcast. And finally you get honest and critical afterthoughts from the DM who ran the adventure and the players who ultimately judged the success of this project.

In September I wrote the article 7 Reasons I Hate Living Forgotten Realms and it generated a lot of discussion about LFR. The article received many great comments in support of my criticisms and just as many well-reasoned arguments contrary to my own.

Three months later, after the discussion on this topic had cooled considerably, I received an email from Ben McFarland. He’d sent me an LFR adventure. I didn’t know him at the time, but you might recognize the name from his work with the Kobold Quarterly, Rite Publishing or the Ars Magica Fanzine. Most importantly for this discussion, he wrote the LFR adventure DRAG2-1: Discomfort which was published by Wizards of the Coast.

Continue reading “The Best LFR Adventure Ever”
Categories
Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Adventure Hooks: Campaigns in the Cold (Part 1)

This summer we ran a series of adventure hooks that featured numerous bizarre and strange happenings that occurred in the Sun & Moon Tavern (part 1 | part 2). These articles have been incredibly popular and continue to be among our most widely read pages from the past six months. It seems pretty clear to us that our readers want more short, quick adventure hooks.

One of the reasons the Adventure Hooks from the Sun & Moon Tavern were so popular was that they all centered around one common location. It made coming up with the adventure hooks easier for me as the DM, but I think it also made them more appealing for readers.

Before I sat down to brainstorm more adventure hooks I wanted to come up with a theme to tie them all together. The answer was as simple as looking out my front door. I decided to put together adventure hooks that all took place in a snowy environment.

Continue reading “Adventure Hooks: Campaigns in the Cold (Part 1)”
Categories
DM Resources Editorial

Putting More “Action” in Action Points

As D&D has evolved over the years many rules and mechanics have been tweaked and changed in order to make the game better. I think one of the greatest improvements was when actions points were introduced with the Eberron Campaign Setting back in 3e D&D. They began as bonus to your d20 roll. Expending an action point meant a good attack became a great attack. With 4e D&D the action point was changed and this good idea became a great idea. Now you actually got another action when you used an action point. Awesome!

Recently I’ve been thinking back to how Wizards of the Coast described the original action point mechanic. One of the reasons it was introduced was to add an extra level of excitement to encounters. This was your chance to have your character do something truly remarkable. You suddenly gave greater consideration to trying new things that were over the top and spectacular.

Continue reading “Putting More “Action” in Action Points”
Categories
DM Resources Editorial

Undead Make the Scariest Villains

Would you rather fight a beholder or a zombie? This is a much more complicated question than you might realize. Look at this through the eyes of your character and not through the eyes of a meta-gamer. In-character what is the scariest monster you can imagine? For me it’s undead more than any other.

Most monsters are, well, monstrous. They are clearly different than you and they must be destroyed. The beholder is an abomination. It’s scary, and a big party of what makes it scary is that it doesn’t conform to a physical shape you’re comfortable with. It’s a giant floating ball with eyestalks swirling about. Even if you’d never seen a beholder before and knew nothing about it, your initial instinct as an adventurer would be to attack and destroy something so awful.

Continue reading “Undead Make the Scariest Villains”
Categories
DM Resources Player Resources

Running the Combat Part of Combat Blisteringly Fast

Running the mechanical part of combat blisteringly fast allows you to spend more time role-playing your character and describing the action in combat. You’re not trying to get through combat quickly because you dislike it; you’re instead trying to move past the computational elements of the game so that the story-telling can take the forefront.

By focusing on the story-telling your game can become so much more exciting. Instead of waiting for the Warlord to thumb through the PHB to look up his class features (again) you can describe how the Warlord leapt from the second story balcony, dodged a provoked opportunity attack by doing a shoulder roll, toppled the gnarled hag with a low cut to her thigh, then sprung to his feet to stare down into her rapidly dimming eyes.

Below is a list of suggestions that will help you get through the mechanical part of combat blisteringly fast. These instructions are not for the faint of heart, and though some tables may pick and choose from these suggestions to speed up some areas of a dragging combat, only the committed will achieve the supersonic pace described by this article.

Continue reading “Running the Combat Part of Combat Blisteringly Fast”