GenCon 2009 is just a few days away and I can’t wait. Being the D&D snob that I am, my schedule is packed full of nothing but D&D. Since GenCon is all about meeting new people and playing along side them, I invite any of our readers who might happen to have the same games in the same time-slots to join me for some D&D next weekend in Indianapolis. Post a comment below or send me an email so we can arrange to meet ahead of time.
During a recent D&D game at my Friendly Local Gaming Store (FLGS) I got stuck next to a gaming jerk for four hours. Being the nice guy that I am I didn’t say anything at the time, but the more I thought about it afterwards the more I realized that gaming jerks need to be singled out and reprimanded for the good of the game.
Next week I’ll be participating in the Ultimate Dungeon Delve at GenCon. I’ve done my homework and I think I’ve come up with the best possible character for the delve. I’ve only got a few days remaining in which to make tweaks and changes to this PC, so I’m asking you – the readers – to give me your input.
Eberron is without a doubt my favourite campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. I enjoy its intrigue, moral ambiguity, post war/cold war setting and violence. Since I first read the 3.5 Eberron Campaign Guide I felt it was a setting designed for a more mature player. Not necessarily Wizard of the Coasts core audience, but rather the players who grew up with earlier editions of the game and who now wanted more than just a dungeon crawl. Eberron is a setting that encourages players and DMs to challenge certain assumptions and to role play moral and ethical issues.
Dragon WarAn Eberron Novel
Dragon War, the third and final installment in James Wyatt’s Draconic Prophecies comes out today. When I received my copy on Thursday, I couldn’t put it down. It was great.
Although you don’t have to read Storm Dragon and Dragon Forge to understand and enjoy Dragon War, it certainly helps. I enjoyed the other two books in this series a great deal and strongly recommend them to Eberron fans. Both are now available in soft cover.
July was a great month month for Dungeon’s Master. We saw our traffic and our readership rise steadily. This was helped in no small part by our early reviews of the July releases from Wizards of the Coast. We welcome the new readers who may have only discovered us in July and thank all of the loyal readers who found us earlier and keep coming back. With all of the great article published in July it’s possible that you might have misses a few. Here are the highlights.
As the DM you’ve got a lot of responsibility. You’re accountable for everything that’s not the Player Characters. It’s a tough job. But today we’re making it a little bit easier by giving you a Condition Tracker.
After almost a year we are putting our current campaign on hold, and rather than start something brand new we’ve decided to return to a campaign that we put on hold just before the release of 4e. In many ways going back to a retired campaign can be even more difficult than starting from scratch. As I prepare to put on my DM hat and dust off my old notes I’ve been thinking about all the things I need to do to make this transition run smoothly.
Just because I’ve seen Star Wars 100 times, does that mean I’m cheating when I play Star Wars Lego? The game follows the plot of each Star Wars movie with incredible accuracy. So does knowing where the game is going give me an unfair advantage? Does my familiarity with the heroes and villains ruin my experience? Not one bit. In fact I bought the games and have enjoyed playing them for EXACTLY that reason.
After playing Star Wars Lego every night for the past week I realized that this familiarity really appeals to me. It doesn’t matter that I know the story backwards and forwards. It doesn’t matter that I know which villain I’m going to face around the next corner. My love for this story and its characters is what brought me to this game and what’s kept me glued to the flat-screen for 50 hours of game play (so far). Upon making this realization my mind immediately started thinking about how to apply this epiphany to D&D.
There comes a time in every campaign when a player is ready to retire his character. Whether because of boredom, the release of a new Player’s Handbook or character death sooner or later every character retires.
There are many different ways to retire a PC. The method that works best for you is determined by the campaign you’re playing in and the conversation you have with your DM. In a 3.5e campaign I played, my character was a Fighter who specialized with the Spiked Chain. He was designed to disarm and trip his opponents. As the campaign unfolded I learned that 90% of our opponents had multiple legs and attacked with natural weapons. All my feat selections and expertise was wasted. I retired the character and brought a new one to life that fit the campaign much better.
Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you might retire your PC.