Category: Editorial

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 13)

Never underestimate the how quickly you’ll get an audience with the Lord of the keep when you announce that dragons are going to attack. Of course, having a solid reputation for heroism and a couple of witnesses to corroborate your claims doesn’t hurt things either.

We began right where we left off last week. We’d just defeated Benwick’s men, killing Gorn and subduing the others. Upon learning the details of Benwick’s plan from his cronies, we marched our prisoners directly to the inner court where we demanded an immediate audience with Lord Drysdale. His guards were somewhat reluctant and even suspicious of us initially, but mention of two black dragons en route to level the castle had a way of getting them to grant us the audience we requested.

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Editorial

What Do You Do When Your D&D Game Is Cancelled?

Every once in a blue moon something happens and your regular game is cancelled. The reasons are various, ranging from illness, family obligations, exams, a hectic schedule at work or the fact that some of your group is at GenCon. No matter the cause it leaves those available with nothing to do on game night. But that doesn’t mean that you need to cancel game night all together.

As gamers, we are a versatile bunch with a wide range of interests and hobbies beyond D&D. Surely the loss of one or two players from your gaming table doesn’t mean that the rest of the group has to give up their one night a week where they indulge their inner geek. For me the weekly D&D game is the reason a great group of friends gather around the table and enjoy one another’s company. Just because a few guys can’t make it doesn’t mean that the rest of the group should cancel and miss the opportunity for friends to connect.

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 12)

Betrayal! Our suspicions of Benwick were well founded as the party was betrayed. After risking our lives for Gorn and Benwick we were repaid with violence. But this group of adventurers wasn’t about to fall victim to such an underhanded and evil act. We were ready to fight and expose this wrong doing.

This week our party consisted of seven players: Berrian, Eldeth, Hagen, Merric, Sola, an Assassin and a Wizard. The encounter began with the party retracing their steps through the three previous rooms. When we arrived in the room with the statue in the middle, there was Benwick, Gorn, Sal and Gordi waiting for us. Benwick explained that they were worried and wanted to see if we’d met with success or failure.

We quickly recapped all that had happened. Gorn seemed disappointed that there were no Dwarven relics, but was quite happy to hear about how much gold was collected. After much debate the party decided to give Benwick and Gorn their fair share.

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Editorial

What’s In Your Inventory?

Take a look at your equipment inventory. What’s there? Magic items, maybe an adventurer’s kit. Anything else? That’s what mine looks like too. In fact most players I’ve met have similar looking inventories. Empty. Bereft of any life or originality. Occasionally, I will see a crowbar or some other interesting tool in a players inventory, but mostly all I see magic items.

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Editorial Skill Challenges

Really Hard Skill Checks

Have you ever needed to roll over 20 to succeed at a skill check? If you’re a combat-heavy PC then the answer is probably yes, but what if you’re a well rounded PC with decent attributes? Does your DM ever make a DC so difficult that it’s practically impossible to succeed? With very few exceptions most DMs won’t present DCs that are out of the reach of the average PC. My question is why not? I know I do when I’m the DM.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the actual numbers when it comes to skill checks and DC. We already covered this issue last week in Bauxtehude’s articles Exploring Skill Checks and the New DCs part 1 and part 2. The point I want to discuss today is whether or not DCs should ever be out of reach to all but the very best and most highly trained characters?

Too many players focus too much on combat and forget just how important the skills are to the game and to their character. Players need to realize that feats and powers that provide bonuses to skills are just as vital to victory as the feat that gives bonuses to attacks and damage or powers that deal multiple weapon damage.

By presenting circumstances where incredibly high DCs rear their ugly head, the DM reminds players that they shouldn’t expect an easy victory all the time. These reminders need to be nailed home for out of combat encounters even more than for combat encounters.

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Editorial

D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands (Week 11)

Using the keys found in each of the previous two rooms the heroes opened the doors and entered the vault. They’d found the treasure room. Now all they had to do was find the treasure. The only question now is what kind of guardians will they have to defeat to gain their reward?

Our party had six members this week: Berrian, Eldeth, Hagen, Quinn, Sola and another Wizard. We began the encounter by recapping the events to date for one of the new players. It’s amazing just which details players remember and believe are important when compared to what actually happened and what is actually important.

As the back-up DM for my group I have a copy of the adventure, just in case I need to step up and run an encounter or two. I also use it as a reference after Wednesday night’s game while I’m writing up the weekly article. This gives me a lot more insight into what’s actually going on and is one of the big reasons I try not to be the decision-maker for our party.

When the other players recapped the events from the previous 10 weeks I have to bite my tongue and not chime in with important details that they forgot or overlooked. Fortunately the DM of10 does jump in with subtle reminders when this happens, but not always. This is a problem that happens all the time in D&D, but I think it’s even more prevalent with D&D Encounters. After all we only do one encounter a week. After 10 weeks we’re bound to forget some of the details. Unfortunately for us, forgetting those details, even from just a couple of weeks back, made things a lot more difficult during this week’s encounter.

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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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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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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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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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