I once again had the pleasure of participating in Worldwide D&D Game Day at 401Games in downtown Toronto. The adventure was called Journey Through the Silver Caves. It was designed for five, 5th level characters. The event attracted a lot of familiar faces as well as a few new ones. I had a lot of fun and would like to take this opportunity to share my thoughts about how Worldwide D&D Game Day went this time around.
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Worldwide Game Day Characters
The pre-generated characters for the May 23, Dungeons & Dragons Worldwide Game Day are available. Download them now as PDFs or for the DDI Character Builder.
The last time I participated in D&D WWGD I found that a lot of time was unnecessarily wasted while people got to know their characters. I’d like to do my part to speed things up this weekend so I’ve made the pre-generated character available for download. I know it’s kind of last minute, but you still have time to review the five PCs and decide which one you’d most like to play. This gives you a chance to sift through your PHB and PHB2 and review exactly what your powers allow you to do.
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Rewards Beyond Experience
You’ve just defeated the powerful red dragon. Now it’s time to reap the rewards. As expected, the DM hands out treasure according to the treasure tables and provides experience points. The PCs take an extended rest and then they move onward towards the next challenge. This tried and true system has served us well for years and provides as the primary measuring stick for a PC’s success. Although this is the normal and expected means of progression for the game, there are other ways to reward the PCs beyond heaping new magic items on them or giving them enough XP to level.
I’ve discovered the best possible combination of race, class and equipment to ensure that your character will deal more damage every round than any other character. These builds are 100% legal and by the book. I’ve followed all the rules and used only core books published by Wizards. I didn’t make the rules, but I’m sure as hell going to exploit them for my benefit. Keep reading to find out how.
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Change Is Coming To The DDI
Wizards of the Coast has announced changes to the Dungeons & Dragons Insider starting with an increase to the price of your subscription. The good news is that this price hike is accompanied by improvements to DDI and a slew of new content. I don’t think any of us expected the prices to remain the same forever, and it was really only a matter of time before we were asked to pay more money. But in light of all the materials Wizards is promising over the next year, the price increase seems justified and fair. And hopefully the revenue generated from increasing the price of DDI will be put towards the release of the online tools that WotC has been promising us since day one.
The new pricing will take effect on July 2, so I encourage you to either extend your existing subscription or sign up soon if you’ve been holding off. Doing so now will ensurer you get all the upcoming goodies at the lower price.
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What Monster Are You?
Monster Manual 2 hits shelves today. Ameron got his copy last week and wrote up a killer early review. So far there seems to be a consensus among the gaming community that the Monster Manual 2 is the latest must-have book. As more blogs post their own reviews we’ll see just how much love for the Monster Manual 2 is out there. We gave it 10 on a d10. So be sure to pick up your own copy of the Monster Manual 2 and give your PCs fair warning. Or just ambush them with new monsters, it’s your call.
Eliminating mundane, non-magical items from treasure hordes in 4e D&D was a great idea. But that doesn’t mean that the mundane treasures can’t be thrown in from time-to-time to create a more memorable encounter.
The way things were done in previous editions, where everything was stripped from fallen foes and monsters to sell off later may have made sense, but it hurt the game and slowed things down. I don’t know how many adventures I was a part of where an incredible amount of time was wasted gathering up long swords, suits of armor and other non-magical, every-day items from the corpses of the fallen foes and monsters. It often required an enormous amount of record-keeping and consumed valuable game time when we finally sold those items back to a local merchant. It unnecessarily side-tracked the game.
So in 4e if it’s not coins, jewels, art or magical items, the DM doesn’t describe it and the PCs don’t take it. It makes things simpler and, more importantly, faster. But just because we are now ignoring the mundane items doesn’t mean they don’t still exist. In some circumstances drawing attention to these now overlooked items can add some flare to an otherwise traditional encounter.
Do you define your character by his class or his role? We continue to look at roles in 4e and their defining characteristics. We’ve already explored the idea of how to make the Fighter a striker and we pondered whether the roles could be redefined. But this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to looking at roles. Since this is a new element in 4e perhaps it can be done better. We think there is room to introduce some new house rules around roles, but before we start developing them we thought it prudent to take a deeper look at how the existing presentation of roles affect the game.
Here are 10 new and alternative ways to use Athletics. Athletics and Acrobatics are not interchangeable. Too many PCs assume that if they’ve got a high Strength they can use Athletics and if they’ve got a high Dexterity they can use Acrobatics. Well I disagree. If these skills were intended to be interchangeable then they would only be one skill. When I’m the DM, I make a point to set up challenges that can only be overcome with Athletics or Acrobatics.
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Monster Manual 2: An Early Review
I have the Monster Manual 2.
I know it’s not supposed to be out for another week, but I’ve got one. And I feel it’s my duty to share some of the greatness inside with my fellow gamers. Since many of you will have the book by this time next week, I’ll try to give you just enough to keep you salivating and not enough to ruin all of the surprises.