Can you imagine creating a 4e character without using the character builder? I can’t. It’s become such an important and integral part of character creation that I don’t know what I’d do without it. And that got me thinking about how D&D Next will handle character builder? Will it be revamped to work with the new rule-set? Will Wizards support 4e and D&D Next versions of character builder concurrently? Or will character builder be scrapped all together? If such decisions have been made by the brass at Wizards they’re not sharing the secret with us. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t look at the possibilities and make recommendations.
Category: Editorial
Experience teaches player to never split the party. However, there are times when it doesn’t make sense for the party to remain together. This might be because there are many tasks to complete in a limited amount of time or it might be because some party members have skills or powers that make them uniquely qualified to handle a task alone. Yet when presented with any opportunity to split the party, no matter how logical it might seem to do so, a lot of players insist on staying together. It’s a knee-jerk reaction that is not founded in any rational assessment of the situation. It’s an instinctual response based on a previous disaster and a slogan ingrained into them by the Wizards marketing department. Players need to take a deep breath and repeat after me: Sometimes it’s a good idea to split the party.
My gaming group has actually had a lot of success when splitting the party. It’s not something we do very often, but we are certainly open to the possibility when it makes sense. Most often when we split up each group or individual ends up with their own mini skill challenge, but every so often the DM has something else in mind and combat occurs while the party is separated from each other. We’ve found that there are ways to make combat with a split party work. It’s definitely challenging, but our approach to these situations are always fun and rarely result in anyone being left out while their character is off screen.
Oil. In the real world it is one of the most precious resources on the plant. Those who have it are rich for possessing it. Those who don’t have it are willing to buy it and kill for it. In an industrial world run on oil there’s nothing more valuable. But in D&D oil isn’t important. After all, very few game worlds are mechanized and those with any industry use a more abundant resource: magic.
In fantasy role-playing is there an equivalent to oil? Something so precious and integral to society’s prosperity and advancement as oil is in the real world? Again the most likely answer is magic. But magic isn’t a limited resource. After all, magic is, well, magic. It doesn’t have any real tangibility and certainly doesn’t have to follow any rules or logic. It can be whatever the game needs it to be. But that’s not to say that a campaign world couldn’t be made more interesting if magic was a finite resource.
“The clothes make the man.” It’s a pretty common expression. It quite literally means that you can draw a conclusion, and usually a fairly accurate conclusion, about a person’s personality just based on what they’re wearing. In D&D, the type of clothes (or armor) a person wears will usually indicate with great accuracy what class he is but it’s less likely to accurately indicate what kind of a man he is – for that you have to look at his weapon.
During character creation most players I’ve gamed with will equip their character before they determine his personality. I know that’s how I usually do it. But I’ve noticed over the years that the personality of a PC is very often directly related to the type of weapon he carries. It’s like the weapon imprints a specific personality type on the characters wielding them.
So I’ve put together a list of my observations. This is simply my first-hand account of how I see things. It’s not based on any scientific method or precise sampling, it’s just what I’ve seen over and over again in the many years that I’ve played D&D. I think that despite my rather loose methodology the results are surprisingly accurate.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that 4e is really just a video game turned into a table-top role-playing game. The game is too tactical and relies too much on the visual aid of a battle mat and minis. These criticisms always talk about the limitations and restrictions of 4e. I admit that the visual component is certainly important, but the game is certainly not limiting. D&D is so much more than what’s on the table.
When I recently ran an adventure at my FLGS a new player sat down next to me, introduced himself and told me he was blind. I wasn’t sure how to handle this news. I was concerned that I’d have to make significant adjustments to my game in order to meet the needs of the blind player. He was really good about it and just told me to do what I’d normally do but to be sure to describe things (like the map) so that he could accurately picture it in his mind.
This seemed like a reasonable request. After all, everything in the game is described in the adventure, right? Nope.
Categories
March Broken
The Iron Man streak comes to an end. Yesterday was the first time since Dungeon’s Master began that we missed a day. Until yesterday we’d published something every weekday since we began back in February 2009.
After more than three years I finally decided that it was time to take a short rest. Since September when Wimwick went back to school full time, I’ve written the lion’s share of our articles. Of the 147 articles we’ve posted since September 1, I’ve written 128 of them. With most of our articles clocking in around 1,000 words (usually more) that’s over 128,000 words in seven months. The average novel contains approximately 50,000 words. So following this logic I’ve written the equivalent of 2+ novels since September. This is of course on top of my day job and the time I spend playing D&D. Put into this context I’m amazed I haven’t collapsed from exhaustion before now.
Don’t worry, we’re not closing up shop (that’s just crazy talk!), we’re just taking a week off to rest. Despite the break, I will still provide the weekly write-up of D&D Encounters on Thursday. Next week we’ll be back to our regular daily publishing cycle. To all of our loyal readers I apologize for the unexpected break, but I think that you’ll agree I’ve earned a few days off. Thank you for your understanding and your dedication to Dungeon’s Master.
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Every DM runs their home game a little bit differently, so as new players join the ranks it’s important that any house rules or tweaks to the RAW (Rules As Written) are clearly spelled out. This becomes even more important when you jump between editions or are playing in a home-brew campaign. Brendan at Untimately put together a list of 20 rules questions feeling “that it would be useful to have a list rules that often change from campaign to campaign.” By answering these questions DMs ensure consistence and rule clarity at their tables.
Many of the other bloggers who have posted their responses play older editions of D&D or use a mish-mash of various editions. The Dungeon’s Master crew plays 4e, bet even so the answers to some of these questions are not as straight-forward or clear-cut as you might think. Everyone has at least a few house rules and we’re no exception. So today I’m answering Brendan’s 20 quick rules questions.
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The New Dungeon’s Master Banner
Out with the old and in with the new. Today we debut our new banner. The original banner served its purpose but after three years we felt a change was in order. The only problem was that none of the members of the Dungeon’s Master team have the artistic skill needed to create the artwork. So we enlisted some help.
Our friend Winston Lew, a regular at D&D Encounters, recently graduated from college and is beginning his professional career as a freelance illustrator. For the past few seasons of D&D Encounters we’ve seen Winston’s character sketches and they’ve been fantastic. So when we decided it was time to find an artist to help design a new banner we knew Winston was our man. We weren’t sure what we wanted but when we saw Winston’s initial treatment we knew he nailed it. The final product that graces our website now absolutely exceeded our expectations.
Categories
Individuality vs. Group Dynamics
Never split the party. It’s one of the 4e mantras. Experienced players know that splitting the party often leads to disastrous consequences. D&D is a team game and as such the objectives almost always require a team to accomplish them. But just because the game is designed to be inclusive and keep everyone equally engaged, does that mean that there shouldn’t be opportunities for some players to split from the party and play to their strengths?
Sometimes circumstances will slightly favour one or two characters in the party. The most common example is to use monsters with vulnerabilities to energy attacks that the party has in its repertoire or have monsters attack using an energy types the party has resistance to. This may seem like a little thing but when it’s your character wielding the cold empowered bastard sword against the fire-based, cold vulnerable creatures it feels pretty great to have an advantage no one else in the party has. Likewise when your poison resistance lets you all but ignore the ongoing poison damage and shrug off a good portion of each hit from the poisonous serpents.
These kind of individual heroics are easy for DMs to place into encounters without throwing things out of balance and without excluding anyone (unless of course the entire party has fire resistance except for one poor soul). More importantly it doesn’t take any play-time away from other players. Everyone still gets their full normal turn, but in this kind of circumstance one PC may find that his turn is a little bit more exciting than his companion’s turns.
With another season of D&D Encounters coming to an end this week we’ve been having some discussions at my FLGS about who’s going to take over the reigns as the DM for the next season. I continue to volunteer my services as the primary DM at two FLGS in my community, but in both cases we have sufficient numbers to need additional DMs pretty much every week. During the discussion about who will step up to DM more than one prospective DM asked about compensation. They wanted to know what they got if they agreeing to DM. At first I was a bit surprised that they’d even ask, but as I gave the question more consideration I realized that it’s not an altogether unreasonable question.