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Friday Favourite: 5 Reasons to Say No

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From July 19, 2011, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: 5 Reasons to Say No.

I believe that players should play the characters they want to play. I’m a total 4e, say yes convert. It took me awhile to come around but when I’m the DM I encourage creativity and I say yes… a lot. However, I’ve realized that as much as I want to always say yes, there are times when I probably should not. In a few of these cases it’s actually caused me more grief in the long run.

Players make choices during character creation and between levels during character improvement. Normally I’m very hands off as a DM and let the players do whatever they want as long as it’s legal. But it’s this absolute freedom of choice that often ends up causing the most problems. If I’d only stepped in earlier and said no, a lot of the problems I’ve experienced wouldn’t have been problems at all.

It’s taken me a while but I’ve learned the hard way that just because a choice is legal in character builder doesn’t mean that the DM has to automatically say yes to every choice that the players make. In fact the more I’ve thought about it the more I’ve realized that sometimes the DM should step in and say no; especially during character creation. Here are five examples.

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DM Resources Friday Favourites

Friday Favourite: Gaming in Silence

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From December 5, 2011, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: Gaming in Silence.

Playing D&D is a social experience. It’s often as much about getting together with your friends as it is about killing monsters. But I’ve noticed that we spend a lot of time talking about stuff that isn’t even related to the game. This has really become a big problem in public-play games at my FLGS. I’ve noticed that over the past few sessions of D&D Encounters I’ve had to ask people (with alarming frequency) to stop talking when it’s not their turn and pay attention to what the other players are doing, and that got me thinking: what if you weren’t allowed to talk during an encounter or an entire gaming session? How would things change?

To begin this kind of gaming experiment, the DM must make it clear to the players right from the outset that anything they say, anything at all, even if it’s something that their characters obviously wouldn’t say, is going to count as an utterance by their PC. Absolutely everything the player says his character says. No exceptions. Silence is going to be the key to success. Excessive noise will either force the PCs to fight something they know they have no chance of defeating (hence all the sneaking around) or it will lead to a final confrontation that is a lot more difficult because the PCs kept talking. In either scenario, the stakes should be incredibly high.

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D&D Encounters

Lair Assault: Round-Up and Podcasts

lair-assault-logoThe Lair Assault program provides power gamers with the chance to prove once and for all who’s the best of the best. Wizards designed killer adventures that challenge the most experienced gamer. When the players at my FLGS heard that such a thing existed they demanded that we play these adventures as quickly as possible and as often as possible. Although we’ve suffered a lot of TPKs along the way it’s been a thrilling program that’s met with great success in the Greater Toronto Area gaming community.

Every time we played Lair Assault we recorded the session. Some of the players found it useful to go back and listen to the games to see what they could do differently the next time through to improve their chances of victory. Others just enjoyed listening to the party fumble their way around a killer encounter. Today we’re sharing these podcasts for your listening pleasure.

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DM Resources Friday Favourites

Friday Favourite: How Observation Changes Characters’ Behaviour

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From November 28, 2011, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: How Observation Changes Characters’ Behaviour.

dreams-of-red-wizardHow often has your character done something during the heat of combat that he would never do under normal circumstances? Usually these uncharacteristic actions revolve around killing the enemy. It could be something marginally questionable like attacking an unarmed opponent or it could be a lot more extreme like killing an opponent that has already surrendered.

We don’t often worry too much about the consequences of these actions because the only witnesses are the other members of your party, and let’s face it they’re probably just as guilty of the questionable behaviour as you are. But lately I’ve wondered if players would make different decisions for their characters if they knew that the PCs were being watched. Would PCs still act with impunity if there was a good chance of their actions being seen by others?

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DM Resources Friday Favourites

Friday Favourite: How Art Inspires Campaigns

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From January 24, 2011, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: How Art Inspires Campaigns.

As both a DM and a player I draw my inspiration from four different sources: fantasy literature, movies, my daily walk and art. It is amazing how a single phrase, scene, tree or image can inspire a character’s history or indeed an entire campaign. I walk my dog daily and on the path I take through a forest there was a dead tree that was covered in vines. This image inspired the idea for an entire campaign where the natural world was being threatened by rot and corruption. Not the most original idea, I’ll admit, but as the dead tree was surrounded by life I decided to represent this by an antagonist that the party trusted. Over time his duplicitous nature would be revealed. Not bad for an idea inspired by a tree.

I find that simple images and stills can often provide great ideas for campaigns and character concepts. Fantasy art has inspired me in more ways than I can count. The idea of taking an image and providing a history for that image is an enjoyable and rewarding experience.

Art clearly is a popular subject and I’m obviously not the only one inspired by it. Two of our most popular articles here at Dungeon’s Master are The Art of D&D (Part 1 | Part 2). My purpose here isn’t to go back as Ameron did and talk about artists who have shaped our thoughts of Dungeons & Dragons. Instead I want to look at some select images and create things from them. Today’s post is a workshop and I’m interested in the stories we will create.

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D&D Encounters DM Resources

Lair Assault and D&D Encoutners Tokens

If you’re like me you use minis instead of tokens. However, when it comes to Lair Assault a sheet of tokens is provided for each adventure. It gives the DMs tokens for all the monsters, special terrain features, mounts and even a few boats. After seven seasons of Lair Assault it’s an extremely versatile collection of tokens which is why (after numerous requests) we’ve finally got around to sharing them with you.

When it comes to D&D Encounters everyone brings their own character so there are no standard tokens. However, with most seasons DMs are provided with one of the generic token sheets. I always assumed they were identical until I looked a bit closer in preparation for this post. It seems that I’ve acquired three sets of generic token sheets over the seasons.

I’ve scanned the token sheets, front and back, for all seasons of Lair Assault as well as the three generic token sheets from D&D Encounters and presented them below for your convenience. Using these scans you can print them and create your own token library.

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DM Resources

What is the Town’s Attitude?

Kelmarsh medieval villageA lot of D&D adventures begin with the PCs arriving in town. In most cases it’s someplace the PCs have never been before so everything is new – the people, the locale, and the problems. This is just a natural part of the adventurer’s life; going from place to place, getting in adventures and helping people along the way.

I’ll admit that I’ve run many adventures that start just like this. It’s not a bad thing, but it is a bit boring. The longer you play D&D the more often this will happen and the more trivial each town will seem as you continue on your quest for adventure.

After playing through this scenario for the umpteenth time during last week’s D&D Encounters introduction it occurred to me that a clever DM can turn this traditionally boring introduction into something a lot more interesting by adding one little detail – the town’s attitude towards strangers.

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Friday Favourite: DM Tips for Restarting a Retired Campaign

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From July 30, 2009, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: DM Tips for Restarting a Retired Campaign.

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.

I’ve come up with a few tips for DMs planning to go back to a campaign that’s been on hold for any extended period of time. These are guidelines that I’ve used and found useful. If you have additional tips that have worked for you, please leave them in the comments section below.

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DM Resources

DMs Are the Worst Players

They say that doctors make the worst patients; well I truly believe that DMs make the worst players. After DMing for long stretches DMs get used to having something to do all the time. They’re used to tracking initiative, running all the monsters, adjudicating rule disputes, playing the NPCs, and basically controlling the world. But when they give up the DM’s seat and go back to being one of the players all they have to worry about is running one character. For some DMs it can be a difficult transition. And for the new DMs it can spell disaster.

This is not to say that all DMs are bad players. Some DMs make the transition gracefully. This is especially true with a close-knit group where everyone takes a turn behind the screen. It’s the DMs who run the show for extended periods of time, especially during public-play or games with newer players that the transition from DM to player causes problems.

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9 Ways to Improve 4e D&D

For the past few months my regular gaming group took a break from D&D. Now we’re gearing up to return to 4e D&D. However, some of my players are again talking about why they wanted to take a beak in the first place. They were getting bored. They felt that 4e D&D was too much of the same week in and week out.

One of the objectives of this blog has always been to talk about ways to improve your gaming experience. We share a lot of ideas and insights about gaming in general with an obvious focus on 4e D&D. Personally I like 4e the way it is, but I do recognize that there are opportunities for improvement. In fact I encourage creativity if the players think a change will make any part of the game more fun, or more exciting.

With this in mind I opened the floor to new ideas. I asked my gaming group what we could do differently to win back the players who were bored. They came up with a lot of great suggestions. Some of these we’d tried before with varying levels of success, others were things they’d read on the Wizards’ forums that we thought sounded fun. In the end we came up with a list of 9 things that we felt would jump-start our 4e D&D games.

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