Category: DM Resources

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Hey, Isn’t That My Character: Using Retired PCs As NPCs

A good NPC can make a campaign. A bad one, well bad NPCs are usually forgotten fairly quickly. With this in mind it’s in a DMs best interest to ensure that his key NPCs have detailed stories to accompany them. By providing these NPCs with quirks, strengths and weaknesses it provides the PC with more reason to interact and develop a relationship. This in turn makes it easier for the DM to move the story along, twining the PCs concerns with those of the NPC. Of course this takes a lot of work and as the PCs progress new NPCs are required, with new stories and reason to motivate the PCs.

April’s RPG Blog Carnival focus on NPCs. One way to build a very effective NPC is to use a PC that has for one reason or another retired.

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DM Resources

How To Introduce A New PC

It happens in almost every game, a PC dies and now you have to figure out how to introduce the new character. Or a new player joins your group and you struggle to explain why they should join the party? There are a many ways to go about answering these questions. From the serious role-playing that this type of event triggers, to the inane and superficial. How you approach this aspect of death and dying in Dungeons & Dragons will come down to the play style of your own group. Different approaches to the game will result in different introductions for new PC.

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DM Resources Top 10

5 Ways To Include Rituals In Your Skill Challenge Design

Rituals are an underutilized aspect of 4e Dungeons & Dragons. One way to increase the way rituals are used in your campaign is to incorporate them into your skill challenge design. By providing opportunities for your PCs to use their abilities you increase their engagement in the campaign. They feel that they are more involved in what is occurring and are committed to seeing things through. Using rituals in your skill challenges does require a little bit of extra work, but is well worth the reward.

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DM Resources

Who Owned Your Magic Sword Before You Did?

How does loot end up in a monster’s treasure horde? The beholder wasn’t wearing the chain mail or wielding the great axe when you fought it, yet there it is in its lair among the other wonders and treasures. You probably just assume that it belonged to the last guy who attempted to defeat the beholder before you and your party came along. But do you ever wonder who the last guy was? Do you ever feel guilty claiming his possessions? Sure he’s dead and has little use for them, but that doesn’t necessarily make them yours, does it?

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 2)

So you’ve chosen the premise of your skill challenge. Great, now for the second step. The second step is all about forecasting possible developments for the challenge.

Bauxtehude, our newest contributor at Dungeon’s Master, continues his look at skill challenges. In yesterday’s article, Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 1) he stated that the best skill challenges pose a very open-ended problem to the party. Open-ended problems allow for a diversity of possible approaches as well as interpretations of the actual nature of the problem. Good skill challenges allow the party to overcome the problem presented to them in their own way while forcing them to interact with increasing complications. Picking up right where we left off yesterday, we follow the example begun in part 1 through to its natural conclusions with a heavy dose of Bauxtehude’s thoughts and insights added along the way.

I find it harmful to try to start setting DCs for various skill checks unless there are obvious hurdles that will need to be overcome. It’s better to not set any expectations for the party’s actions. The telling of the narration should reflect the choices the party is making rather than what the Dungeon Master thinks the party would do or what the Dungeon Master might figure the party ought to do. In this way time is better invested in thinking about what sort of place the PCs find themselves in.

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

Creating and Running Engaging Skill Challenges (Part 1)

The best skill challenges pose a very open-ended problem to the party. Open-ended problems allow for a diversity of possible approaches as well as interpretations of the actual nature of the problem. The other great virtue of open-ended problems is that they have the unique ability to develop in any number of directions allowing for a multitude of possible resolutions. Good skill challenges allow the party to overcome the problem presented to them in their own way while forcing them to interact with increasing complications. These challenges allow the party to exercise their wide range of skills as they see fit and interact with the results that they generate. Perhaps an example is in order.

The Dungeon’s Master team welcomes Bauxtehude, our newest contributor and author of today’s post. We’ve written a lot of article on skill challenges and thought Bauxtehude’s take on the subject provides new and exciting insights.

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DM Resources

Adding Favours to Treasure Bundles

“Your reward for rescuing the Duke’s daughter is a magical weapon, a suit of enchanted armor and a favour.”

As D&D characters become more and more powerful they always seem to become filthy rich along the way. At first they reinvest their newly gotten gains in themselves, purchasing new weapons, armor and magical items. But after a few levels they have everything they need and they start accumulating wealth. Massive amounts of wealth.

I have numerous characters at or above level 10 and all of them have thousands of gold pieces recorded on their character sheet. And the money continues piling up as they continue adventuring. Now I can spend the cash for the sake of spending the cash, but honestly there’s nothing that these character want or need. They already have magic items in every item slot of their character sheet. Eventually these PCs hit a point where any monetary rewards become inconsequential. I mean what can you buy with 20,000 gp that you couldn’t buy with 15,000 gp?

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DM Resources

Time in D&D

Raise your hand if you’ve ever created a level 1 PC, entered a dungeon, killed a bunch of monsters, gained a bunch of levels while still inside the dungeon and then realized that only a few weeks of actual in-game time passed when you emerge. I know I’m not the only one reading this that has his hand up.

Time in D&D is an aspect of the game I find is overlooked way too often. Tracking time in your game may not be that big a deal, but the longer you continue playing that same PC the more important time becomes.

So just how long does it take to go from level 1 to level 2? In 4e D&D it takes about 10-13 encounters or about four gaming sessions. But what I really want to know is how much time passes in-game between levels?

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DM Resources Editorial

I Want Individual Rewards in D&D

Is having a good time reward enough for playing D&D? Hell no! I want treasure and I want XP. I’ve earned it. Gimme, gimme, gimme. I’ll admit that as a player I fall pretty squarely into this camp. Having a good time and socializing with friends is a great part of playing D&D, but what I look forward to most at the end of the session is the reward. And thanks to the mechanics of 4e D&D I’m rarely disappointed.

The rules for rewarding players are so simple and streamlined that I know at the start of the night what I can expect by the end of the night. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing at all. By having some general foreknowledge of what I’m risking my PC’s life for, I’m more strongly motivated to rush headlong into a fight with a dragon or attempt to decipher the ancient glyphs protecting the entrance to the lost treasure trove.

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DM Resources Player Resources

Improve Your Defenses With Energy Resistance (DMs Analysis)

I think we inadvertently angered a lot of DMs with our series on items that provide energy resistances. Few players needed our help min/maxing and power-gaming, yet over the past couple of weeks the Dungeon’s Master team made it immensely easier for PCs to find items that will protect them from various energy attacks. Today we’re going to set things right. The final installment of this series is geared specifically at the DM. We’ve analysed the item lists across heroic, paragon and epic tiers and offer some advice to DMs on how to best use energy-specific attacks.

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