Tag: Dungeon’s Master

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DM Resources Player Resources

How To Solve the Cold Dice Problem

It will happen to you one day and when it does don’t be embarrassed, it happens to all gamers. I’m talking about cold dice. Eventually the dice run cold for all of us. Maybe the d6 keeps coming up 1, the d12 won’t roll higher than 3 or the d20 isn’t cooperating at all and you haven’t hit a monster all fight. Eventually the dice gods will correct the problems and balance the scales, but until then a streak of poor rolls can crush even the most experienced player.

When a player goes through a bought of bad dice karma it can actually have a detrimental effect on the entire group. Even though everyone else rolls as expected and has fun doing so, one player’s poor rolls can effect the overall mood of the entire table. I’ve learned over the years that when this happens (and it will, if it hasn’t already) players and DMs can actually do a lot of things to turn the tide.

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D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (Week 4)

This week marks the beginning of chapter 2. We decided to have all character advance to level 2 whether or not they’d actually played all of the previous encounters. We realized after tracking XP over the previous few seasons that when some of the party lags behind in the XP department it just weakens the party as a whole. It makes the encounter unnecessarily more difficult and people don’t have as much fun. Moving forward everyone will level simultaneously at my FLGS.

We continue to have good numbers for this season, with brand new people joining us every week since we began this adventure. At the FLGS where I played the adventure you’re going to read about below we’re holding steady with two DMs and 12 players. At my other FLGS we’ve gone from 8 players last season to over 20 this season. This week we had three DMs all running tables of six. Our fourth DM can’t play every week so we’ve begun actively recruiting another person to DM. I have no idea why this season has attracted so many new players and frankly I don’t care. I’m just glad we continue to have strong attendance. It wasn’t that long ago we could barely put together one table.

With the addition of a new player last week, our all-Genasi party became 1/6 Halfling. The new player came up with an interesting reason for why the Halfling joined this elemental-based group – he believes that they’re deities. He professed his devotion to them and literally worships the ground they walk on. He’s so humbled to be in their presence that he does whatever they ask him to do. It’s already made for some great role-playing moments and the Genasi PCs are certainly letting the admiration go to their flaming heads.

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Editorial Humour

What Your Weapon Says About Your Character

“The clothes make the man.” It’s a pretty common expression. It quite literally means that you can draw a conclusion, and usually a fairly accurate conclusion, about a person’s personality just based on what they’re wearing. In D&D, the type of clothes (or armor) a person wears will usually indicate with great accuracy what class he is but it’s less likely to accurately indicate what kind of a man he is – for that you have to look at his weapon.

During character creation most players I’ve gamed with will equip their character before they determine his personality. I know that’s how I usually do it. But I’ve noticed over the years that the personality of a PC is very often directly related to the type of weapon he carries. It’s like the weapon imprints a specific personality type on the characters wielding them.

So I’ve put together a list of my observations. This is simply my first-hand account of how I see things. It’s not based on any scientific method or precise sampling, it’s just what I’ve seen over and over again in the many years that I’ve played D&D. I think that despite my rather loose methodology the results are surprisingly accurate.

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D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye – Pre-Generated Characters

D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (season 8.) began a few weeks ago. As usual Wizard only provided the standard six pre-gens that we all know backwards and forward by now. Today we’ve added six new PCs to the Dungeon’s Master Pre-Generated Character Library.

These new characters were created by Brad Bound at Hit on Crit. All of the new additions were built using the new Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. Although these are all level 1 characters, Brad has provided character builder files for download. Now you can level them up as you see fit taking them from generic pre-gen to a character that is truly your own.

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DM Resources Editorial

How a Blind Player Improved Our Game

I’ve heard a lot of people say that 4e is really just a video game turned into a table-top role-playing game. The game is too tactical and relies too much on the visual aid of a battle mat and minis. These criticisms always talk about the limitations and restrictions of 4e. I admit that the visual component is certainly important, but the game is certainly not limiting. D&D is so much more than what’s on the table.

When I recently ran an adventure at my FLGS a new player sat down next to me, introduced himself and told me he was blind. I wasn’t sure how to handle this news. I was concerned that I’d have to make significant adjustments to my game in order to meet the needs of the blind player. He was really good about it and just told me to do what I’d normally do but to be sure to describe things (like the map) so that he could accurately picture it in his mind.

This seemed like a reasonable request. After all, everything in the game is described in the adventure, right? Nope.

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D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (Week 3)

During last week’s encounter the party was ambushed by Dwarves. After defeating them, the party continued though the Badlands south of Easting in search of The Sunset Shrine where they hoped to find a cure for the Abyssal Plague.

The terrain ahead was treacherous and would require perseverance in the form of a series of skill checks if they were to avoid any serious hardships and still make the Sunset Shrine before nightfall. Fortunately two new adventurers arrived on the scene to assist them in their endeavour.

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Editorial

March Broken

The Iron Man streak comes to an end. Yesterday was the first time since Dungeon’s Master began that we missed a day. Until yesterday we’d published something every weekday since we began back in February 2009.

After more than three years I finally decided that it was time to take a short rest. Since September when Wimwick went back to school full time, I’ve written the lion’s share of our articles. Of the 147 articles we’ve posted since September 1, I’ve written 128 of them. With most of our articles clocking in around 1,000 words (usually more) that’s over 128,000 words in seven months. The average novel contains approximately 50,000 words. So following this logic I’ve written the equivalent of 2+ novels since September. This is of course on top of my day job and the time I spend playing D&D. Put into this context I’m amazed I haven’t collapsed from exhaustion before now.

Don’t worry, we’re not closing up shop (that’s just crazy talk!), we’re just taking a week off to rest. Despite the break, I will still provide the weekly write-up of D&D Encounters on Thursday. Next week we’ll be back to our regular daily publishing cycle. To all of our loyal readers I apologize for the unexpected break, but I think that you’ll agree I’ve earned a few days off. Thank you for your understanding and your dedication to Dungeon’s Master.

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D&D Encounters

D&D Encounters: The Elder Elemental Eye (Week 2)

Last week the adventure began with the Merchant Council and Lady Bron of Iriaebor asking the PCs to travel to the village of Easting and investigate rumours of an outbreak of the Abyssal Plague. When the PCs arrived in Easting they discovered the rumours were true and those infected were already quarantined in a barn. When the PCs tried to enter the barn to assess the extent of the outbreak they were attacked by four people that had already transformed into demons.

They managed to defeat the demons and none of the heroes got infected in the process. During the battle in the barn a Dwarf emerged from the shadows and attacked the party before they knocked him unconscious. The village priest suggested brining the captured Dwarf back to the church where he could be questioned.

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DM Resources

Understanding Initiative and Surprise in D&D

D&D characters experience time very differently than we do in real life. Their world takes place in distinct 6-second rounds. How they can behave during these 6-second rounds is controlled by which part of the round the universe is currently in. As a player I have frequently witnessed the poor adjudication of Surprise Rounds, which is very understandable as the Surprise Round takes place in a weird moment in the already hard to fathom flow of D&D time. Beyond the problem of conceiving time in D&D, I think a deficit exists in the Surprise rules of the system, which takes Surprised to mean “has been successfully ambushed.” Due to this deficit, it is my opinion that DMs often intuitively but unknowingly house rule the Surprise Round rules to fit a variety a situations that the actual rules do not address.

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DM Resources

Tips For Making Encounters More Interesting

How many times has your party faced an encounter that was basically the heroes on one side, the monsters on the other side, and then the two forces bashing each other’s brains in until one side (usually team heroes) ends up destroying all of the opponents? I’d hazard a guess that most players see this kind of encounter most of the time. There’s nothing wrong with it, but if you play a lot of D&D this kind of setup gets really boring really fast.

Encounter design is one of those things that only gets better with practice. To help you get better at encounter design we’ve listed a few tips that we think all DMs will find useful. There are plenty of ways to make a regular encounter more interesting and more exciting. Little things that the DM can add or actions the DM can have the monsters take beyond just rushing the PC and try to kill them. Most of these tips will likely seem like common sense, but seeing them listed should remind DMs that using any or all of these tips can easily put an end to boring encounters once and for all.

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