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DM Resources Editorial

Greatest Hits 2011: My Love Affair With Minions

While the Dungeon’s Master team enjoys some well-deserved vacation time, we’re breaking out the greatest hits and shining a spotlight on a few of our favourite articles from 2011. We’ve searched for hidden gems that our newer readers might have missed and our long-time readers will enjoy reading again. Enjoy a second look at these greatest hits from Dungeon’s Master.

I love minions.

It has been almost a year since the original article was published and my love affair with minions has not decreased. If anything the infatuation has only increased. Since this article on minions was published I’ve taken the DM hat off and returned to the other side of the screen. Yet, even as a player I love minions. 

I take great joy in watching how my DM deploy’s his minions, how he frustrates me and other players with their tactical usage. It’s most obscene, but I take a perverse joy when all the minions gang up on the controller. I attack something else for a round just to see what will happen. 

In my mind minions truly are the best tool in the DM tool box that 4e introduced. The ability to add swarms of easy to kill, easy to use enemies is fantastic. Minions can quickly change the dynamic of any combat. Player’s are often left guessing on which monster is the minion during the initial rounds of an encounter. Where minions really stack up is when their synergies mesh with the other monsters in the encounter. 

As a player I feel truly heroic when I dispatch multiple foes with a burst or blast attack. Sure, they only have 1 hit point, but that isn’t the point. The point is what minions truly represent in the game. The fodder. My characters are supposed to be powerful, there are opponents that I am supposed to be able to vanquish with impunity. Minions fill that role. 

I hope you enjoy another read of this article. Since it was first published it has become one of our most searched articles and whether you are a DM or a player I’m sure you’ll find the value, joy and satisfaction that minions inject into combat. As I’ve said, my love affair with minions stands. I don’t see us breaking up anytime soon.

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DM Resources Editorial

Traps: Challenge the Players and the Characters

Sometimes it’s difficult to separate what the player knows from what the character knows. The reverse can also be true, in a manner of speaking. There are going to be times when the character would have certain knowledge or information that the player would never ever know themselves. This is just part of how the game works. You have to accept it if you’re going to play RPGs.

When it comes to combat there’s rarely any concern between the separation of player and character knowledge. Combat has clearly defined mechanics that involve a lot of dice. It doesn’t matter that I’m not proficient with a great sword, if my PC has the appropriate proficiency then the mechanics account for that and I keep on rolling my dice.

Where this becomes more troublesome is outside of combat. During the non-combat parts of role-playing games players have to be more mindful of separating what they can do from what their character can do. This situation can be troublesome when playing characters with exceptionally high ability scores or playing characters with exceptionally low ability scores.

During the past couple of weeks I’ve come face to face with this conundrum. I’ve been working on some articles about traps and puzzles for Dungeon’s Master with Dungeonmaster Johnny, one of our new contributors. He’s come up with some fantastic ideas. However many of his puzzles challenge the players and not the characters. I personally enjoy a good brain teaser, but I don’t want to spend an hour of real-time while the real-life me tries to figure out how to escape from a trapped room. I’d prefer to have a way to solve a puzzle that involves at least some mechanics that relate to my PC’s numbers.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with challenging the players. It all depends on what kind of game you enjoy. Both approaches have merit and both have drawbacks, as we’ll discus below.

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DM Resources

The DM’s PC – Something Between a PC and an NPC

The distinction between PC and NPC is pretty simple. You, the players, are the PCs (Player Characters) and everyone else you meet in the game controlled by the DM is an NPC (Non-Player Character). But the more I thought about it, the more I’m realized that there was a lot to be gained by introducing a kind of character that fell somewhere between these two absolutes.

One of the most common D&D axioms is “Never split the party.” As many players have learned over the years this is sound advice. In most cases when the party divides into smaller groups or one character goes off on his own, they make themselves vulnerable and often end up dead. But I believe that the real reason to never split the party is because it divides the game. The DM has to jump back and forth between both groups. Each group has to have enough to do during their session to still enjoy the gaming experience, but the DM has to be conscious of how much time the group out of the spotlight spends doing nothing.

The type of story-telling that D&D creates and encourages, focuses on a party of adventurers who, for the most part, are always together. Strength in numbers and all entails; nothing new here. However, in fantasy literature that focuses on an adventuring party, including classics like The Lord of the Rings upon which D&D was heavily based, the story is constantly shifting between the characters as they do different things simultaneously.

This is something that doesn’t work well with the way D&D mechanics were created, and in some cases it’s really too bad. Many DMs, myself included, often feel that their hands are tied when they’re trying to come up with a really excellent story for their next campaign.

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DM Resources

Accepting a Suicide Mission

How often do you know the outcome of your adventure before you even begin playing? Almost never. But, what if you did know the way the adventure was going to end? More importantly, what if you knew – before you ever sat down to play – that the PCs could only achieve victory by sacrificing themselves in the process?

I’m not talking about a typical TPK. This isn’t just a really difficult encounter where the PCs, through bad luck, poor rolls and dismal tactics end up dead. I’m talking about an adventure that’s specifically designed as a no way out scenario. The PCs, and more importantly the players, know at the beginning of the campaign that they won’t be coming back.

This kind of set up makes for a very different D&D adventure. Normally the players assume (and rightly so) that their characters will survive everything that’s thrown at them. No one plays D&D and expects for their character to die. Where’s the fun in that? Well, I’m going to tell you.

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Adventure Hooks Class Discussions DM Resources

Adventure Hooks for Divine Characters (Part 2)

Last week we gave you 10 Adventure Hooks for Divine Characters. Today we add to that list by providing 10 more. As we mentioned in last week’s article, adventure hooks featuring divine characters can be a lot more complex than typical hooks.

The faith of the divine PCs will often dictate which side of the conflict presented in the adventure hooks they land on. It’s up to the DM to decide which side of the conflict will make for the most interesting encounter. Just remember that divine PCs may choose to act in the best interest of their faith even if it’s not in the best interest of their party.

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DM Resources

Mandatory DM Rehearsal

All performers rehearse. You’d never expect an actor to perform Shakespeare after a single reading of the script. Nor would you expect a musician to get up on stage and perform flawlessly just because you know that they can read the music that’s in front of them. If you’re trying to get the best performance from an artist then you need to ensure that they’ve had ample time to rehearse.

DMs may not be artists in the same sense or category as actors or musicians (and I’m not going to insult anyone who falls into one of those two categories by suggesting otherwise) but we can look to these disciplines and borrow their best practices. DMs certainly do their fare share of prep work when they build encounters. They choose monsters, draw maps and compose skill challenges, as well as develop the entire campaign arc. But prep isn’t the same as rehearsal.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been the DM for two different groups playing D&D Encounters. Every week I run the exact same encounter twice. None of the players or characters are the same, but everything else is identical. What I’ve found is that I’m a lot more comfortable when I run that second group and I’ve come to realize that’s it because of the familiarity I gained by running it twice. The first group provides me, as the DM, with a chance to rehearse the encounter.

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DM Resources

More Monster Variety – Put Undead to Rest

When the heroes finish clearing away the rubble they find the entrance to a long forgotten dungeon. As they enter, the stale musty smell clearly indicates that nothing has come in or out of this labyrinth for a very long time.

“Divine characters up front, everyone else get your radiant powers and glow stones ready. It won’t be long before we encounter our fist undead opponents.”

More often then not, when an adventure involves exploitation into a sealed environment, like a dungeon or tomb, the PCs expect to fight undead. And you know what; in almost every example of this scenario they’re right.

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DM Resources Editorial

My Love Affair With Minions

It started innocently enough. At first just one and then another. Before I knew it minions had invaded my encounters. It was so easy to just add one more. I’ve considered counselling to help me deal with my problem. The last encounter I ran my players through had 23 minions in it. I’m afraid I’ve gone too far. I’m not sure I can reconcile my love affair with minions.

I worry my players may hold the excess amount of minions they face against me. That they may grow bored with encounters as they realize that they have less and less cause to roll damage dice. Worse, I fear they all may recreate their characters and come back as controllers.

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DM Resources

The Groundhog Day Effect in 4e D&D

In the 1993 director Harold Ramis brought us the Bill Murray comedy classic Groundhog Day. For those unfamiliar with this movie, Bill Murray’s character awakens every morning to discover that he’s reliving the same day, February 2, over and over again. After watching the movie again last week I started thinking about how to use the Groundhog Day effect in an upcoming D&D adventure.

I saw this playing out in two possible ways.

  1. The PCs would find themselves in a situation similar to that of Murray’s character in the movie where they actually had to relive the previous day over again.
  2. The PCs had to face the same encounters a second time after defeating them once before.

Both scenarios allow the players to learn from their previous mistakes. How often have you used a daily power in the first encounter and then realized that it would have been more effective against the creatures in the second? How often have you held onto a daily power and then regretted not using it? The same thing goes for actions points.

The Groundhog Day effect, in essence, gives the PCs a do over. Once they realize that they’re facing the same encounter again they can choose to alter their original course of action.

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Editorial

Greatest Hits 2010: Who Owned Your Magic Sword Before You Did?

While the Dungeon’s Master team enjoys some well-deserved vacation time, we’re breaking out the greatest hits and shining a spotlight on a few of our favourite articles from 2010. We’ve searched for hidden gems that our newer readers might have missed and our long-time readers will enjoy reading again. Enjoy a second look at these greatest hits from Dungeon’s Master.

Magic item availability has changed in D&D since we first published this article eight months ago. D&D Essentials brought with it a new classifications of magic items based on availability. This change, a significant one in most magic-plentiful D&D campaigns, makes the discussion of ownership and an item’s origins even more important. With more items falling into the uncommon and rare categories questions of ownership should be on the forefront of all adventurer’s minds when the discover treasure hoards.

Players content with common magic items at lower levels will look to upgrade as the gain levels. Now that the really good stuff isn’t as readily available at Ye Old Magic Shoppe, adventurers really have to work to locate that special something. Before D&D Essentials players knew that as soon as they found enough gold they could easily purchase whatever item they wanted, now they have to either remain content with the common goods (unlikely) or figure out how to find those really rare treasures.

When we first ran this article most of the people who left comments agreed with my recommendation that investigation into magic item ownership was an interesting role-playing exercise that might be done once and a while, but not something they would likely do regularly. Thanks to D&D Essentials and the new item classification this scenario is likely to become a much more important and much more regular part of D&D campaigns.

Where I don’t see anything changing is the PCs willingness to give up their newly gotten riches. If magic items have become that much more uncommon then PCs are probably even less likely to “do the right thing” and return an item that clearly belongs to someone else (or more likely their heirs).

On the flip side, heroes with such valuable and distinct magic items will likely have their own admirers who will keep tabs on their adventures. Should these heroes not return from some quest, you know that these admirers will go looking for their fallen friend (or hire someone else to do it) for no other reason than to recover the rare magic items he possessed.

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