Tag: Dungeon’s Master

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Friday Favourites Player Resources

Friday Favourite: Always Train Your Worst Skills

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From December 7, 2009, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: Always Train Your Worst Skills.

Imagine you have an attack score of +15. Your opponent, a savage brute, has an AC of 20 and his companions all have ACs between 10-15. Does this fight even interest you? You’d hit with almost every attack. It might be ok if this was a rare, one-off situation, but imagine that this was how combat shaped up every single time. Personally, I’d lose interest.

Yet this is exactly what’s happening during skill challenges at gaming tables everywhere. We’re so concerned with being really, really good at a couple of skills that when it comes time to use them we are almost guaranteed automatic success. Using Stealth to move undetected or using Athletics to climb any wall under any circumstance can be very cool and a lot of fun, but training the skills we’re already good at just makes using those skills a bore.

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Player Resources

Your Character’s Psychological Profile

The character creation process, be it for D&D or any other role-playing game, usually starts with filling in all the boxes and fields on the character sheet. In D&D the areas that usually get the most attention are the class, race, ability scores, skills and weapons. Once these are filled in you’re well on your way. For many this is where the creative process ends. They have all the hard facts they need to begin play. From a mechanics point-of-view they’re ready to explore dungeons and slay monsters.

For the number crunchers and power gamers this is all they’re interested in. They’ve filled in all the blanks on their character sheet so they must be done, right? I suppose, but what about the character’s personality? After all, this is a living being. Shouldn’t you spend at least a few minutes figuring out this character’s personality? It may not factor into their attack scores or skill checks, but it can help guide your role-playing and give you (and the rest of the players at your table) a better idea of who the character is and not just what kind of sword he wields.

Unfortunately the only area of the character sheet that even comes close to defining the character’s personality is alignment. However, in my experience alignment is one of the most overlooked or outright ignored parts of the character sheet. Even when it is completed it rarely carries any weight in how the PC is run. In previous editions of D&D there were nine alignments, in 4e we’re down to five. As new players come to D&D, alignment seems to be less important and plays a much smaller role in the character development.

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Editorial

State of the Dungeon – Year 4

Today marks the fourth anniversary since we launch Dungeon’s Master. Four years. That’s a long time. When we began the blog it was just a way for us to share some of our ideas with the gaming community. We had no idea if people would be interested in reading what we had to say and we had no idea if we were going to be able to stick with it. Well here we are four years later and we’re still going strong.

Dungeon’s Master has always been dedicated to 4e Dungeons & Dragons. Although we focus our efforts on addressing 4e issues, we realize that there are a lot of gamers who play other editions of D&D. With the D&D Next play-testing in full swing and the official launch just over a year away we don’t know what direction we’ll take down the road. For now we’ll keep writing articles that appeal to 4e players but as our regular readers realize we’re trying to keep the topics broad enough that they also apply to older or newer editions alike.

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D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters: Against the Cult of Chaos – Preview

against-the-cult-of-chaos-coverAfter a short break in January the D&D Encounters public-play program returns with season 12, Against the Cult of Chaos on February 6.

This season the format returns to the familiar one encounter each week. All character begin at level 1 and by the time they’ve completed the adventure they will reach level 3. Characters get a short rest at the end of each week and an extended rest at set times throughout the adventure. It’s a regular 4e adventure, there aren’t any strange modifications to the rules. However, Wizards of the Coast is offering the opportunity to convert this 4e adventure into a D&D Next play test.

During the week 0 character creation session, everyone involved with D&D Encounters at your FLGS (players and DMs) should discus whether they want to return to regular 4e rules this season or if they’d prefer to try out the new D&D Next rules. Groups that decide to play test need to sign the NDA. It is possible to run some tables as 4e and some as D&D Next but once you pick one or the other you’re expected to stick with it for the season.

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DM Resources

Passing Notes at the Gaming Table

passing-notesOne thing that has always been challenging for D&D players is to have their character do something that none of the other players know about. This might be something harmless like visiting an NPC from the PC’s past, or it might be something devious like stealing from another character in the party. Passing notes has always been the way that one player let the DM (or other players) know that their character wanted to do something that the rest of the party should not be aware of.

The problem with this approach to secret communication is that as soon as one player does it the rest of the players get suspicious. They have their characters do things that they shouldn’t have any reason to do. Things like checking all their pockets to ensure nothing’s been stolen, or keeping an extra close eye on the note passer’s character during the night watch.

The reason we find it necessary to pass notes is that a lot of players (most players in my experience) can’t separate player knowledge from PC knowledge. If they hear one player say “My Rogue picks the Fighter’s pocket and takes the jewel,” the player running the Fighter will often get upset with the players running the Rogue, even though his PC has no idea anything inappropriate has happened. Because the player knows out of game what’s happened he’ll often change the way his PC acts as if the character knew this detail.

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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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DM Resources

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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Editorial

2,000,000 Page Views

Although Christmas was last week, I received a wonderful present this morning. When I logged into the blog I saw that Dungeon’s Master hit 2 million page views. It took us 31 months to reach our first million page views; it took only 17 more to reach our second million.

We’re approaching our fourth anniversary on February 1, and I honestly never thought that we’d ever have this kind of readership. You hope that people will find your website, read what you have to say, and enjoy it enough to come back again to see what you have to say next. If you’re really lucky they tell their friends and your readership continues to grow. We’ve been very fortunate because this is exactly what’s happened.

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Month in Review

Month in Review: December 2012

December was a month for reflection here at Dungeon’s Master. The only brand new articles we posted were the weekly D&D Encounters reports and the season 11 report card. However, for the last two weeks of the month we ran our 2012 greatest hits.

Even though I haven’t been playing as much D&D over the past couple of months as I used to, going through our archives and revisiting some of the articles we published this past year really served as a good way to get recharged. I remembered a lot of the great games that inspired me to write so many of the articles. Reading the comments our readers left reminded me how much we’ve contributed to the gaming community and hopefully how much we’ve helped along the way.

I’d like to thank everyone who visited Dungeon’s Master in December. For newer readers I hope that you enjoyed a look back at our greatest hits from 2012. I think they provided a good cross-section of the kinds of things we strive to accomplish with this blog. We welcome your comments and feedback as well as any ideas you might have for future articles.

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DM Resources

Greatest Hits 2012: Don’t Fight to the Death

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.

When PCs get hurt in combat you have two options for staying alive: heal or flee. Monsters don’t usually have the option to heal. They can’t use their second wind like PCs and very few monsters have powers or magic items that will allow them to heal. So when a monster is bloodied and approaching 0 hit points what do you think it’s going to do? Logically the answer should be flee, but if you’re a hardcore gamer you expect it to fight until it’s dead-dead.

This has always been one of those aspects of D&D that seems to make sense initially but makes less sense the longer you play. After all, if the objective of a combat encounter is to kill the monster why would the DM have it try to run away? How can I win if I don’t kill it? But as you play more D&D you start to realize that it doesn’t make sense that every single monster, especially those with high intelligence, would fight to the death.

I guess what it really comes down to is the kind of game you and your DM want to play. If you see combat as a zero sum game where the victors are the only ones left standing than keep fighting every monster until it’s down for good. But if you see victory as one side overpowering the other it doesn’t have to mean all of the other side is completely destroyed. Leaving opponents alive or letting them flee can create new problems down the road but it will add a certain amount of realism that is missing from a lot of games.

From January 4, 2012, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: Don’t Fight to the Death.

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