Monte Cook’s inaugural Legends & Lore column is an inauspicious beginning. Taken as a whole, the column introduced Monte Cook to readers and discussed his take on the skill system proposed by Mike Mearls in his August 16 Legends & Lore article Difficulty Class Warfare. As if rehashing a used topic wasn’t bad enough, Cook didn’t present it nearly as well Mearls did a month earlier. If you haven’t yet read Monte Cook’s first Legends & Lore column, Very Perceptive, I encourage you to do so before reading my running commentary and opinions on the highs and lows.
Tag: Dungeon’s Master
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.
In the years since 4e D&D was first released Wizards of the Coast has tweaked and adjusted some of the rules in an effort to improve the game. Several vaguely worded powers were cleared up. The action economy of Solo and Elite monsters has taken steps towards becoming a challenge again. Different methods of power advancement, outside the AEDU (At-will, Encounter, Daily, Utility) model were attempted with mostly successful results. Despite these many improvements to the game, there is one aspect of 4e D&D that continues to hold it back – allowing PC to wield powers with save ends effects. I believe 4e would be a better game if we took save ends effects of out the hands of PCs and made it exclusive to monsters.
While this suggestion may seem a little extreme, there are good reasons for at least considering this change. In the hands of the DM, effects with a duration of save ends heighten the drama of the game for the players. It is another dice roll on the table and rewards players who are either favoured by luck or by proper planning. There are several powers which interact with saving throws, either by granting them or by granting a bonus to them, as well as several key class features and feats. As such, any character can effectively plan around suffering and shaking off effects with a duration of save ends. It is an empowering mechanic for PCs, because it places the power to save themselves firmly in their hands.
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Say What? – Languages in D&D
What languages does your character know? How about the other PCs in your party, any idea what languages they know? More importantly do you even care? During character creation everyone always pays close attention to class, race, ability scores, feats and powers. Little thought is usually put into choosing languages. By dismissing language as an insignificant part of the character creation process you may be overlooking a little detail that could provide you and the party with advantages you hadn’t considered.
In order to make things simple it’s assumed that all PCs are fluent in Common (the human language). Other non-human races are usually fluent in the language associated with their exotic heritage. Depending on the race, class and background you choose for your PC you might even be trained in a few additional languages right from level 1. However, few players that I’ve gamed with give much thought to this important choice.
So what should you consider when choosing your PC’s languages? I know from my own experience I usually select the language spoken by the monsters I suspect we’ll encounter or I take the language associated with the races that make up the rest of the party. This way relies more on mechanics and less on character development. For that angle I suppose you should carefully consider the languages that make the most sense with the character’s back story. Regardless of how you make your decision once you’ve selected your PC’s languages it’s time to look at how to put that knowledge to its best use during the game.
After a thrilling bar brawl (the second in four sessions) the party took a much needed extended rest upon completing last week’s encounter. However, before we proceeded with this week’s adventure we first needed to resolve some of the outstanding issues that still lingered from week 6.
The problem we faced last week was a lack of information which caused players to struggle with motivation for their PCs. I had to try to answer the repeated question “Why are we doing this?” Based on the fantastic comments left here and on the Wizards forums last week along with details I managed to pick out of the adventure after re-reading it, I think I managed to get the train back on the tracks. (A big thanks to Erik Scott de Bie, author of Lost Crown of Neverwinter, for replying personally to some of the comments left here last week.)
In this week’s Legends & Lore column, Mike Mearls announced he is stepping aside and handing the column over to Monte Cook. Over the past eight months, I’ve read every Legends & Lore article written by Mearls. I’ve come to know and respect his writing and his ideas. Thanks in large part to the content in the Legends & Lore articles; I’ve started to really internalize the game theory. The question on everyone’s mind now is how big an impact will replacing Mearls with Cook have on the Legends & Lore column and on D&D?
Last week we put out a call for submissions. Today the Dungeon’s Master team is pleased to welcome the first of our new contributors, Dantracker (Kenneth McNay). Kenneth discovered D&D as a way to a keep in touch with fellow Soldiers after he left the service. It only took a few sessions before he jumped into 4e with both feet and began running campaigns in 2009. He serves as a store organizer for D&D Encounters and participates in private campaigns as both a player and DM. Outside of D&D, Kenneth works in information and networking technology. On rare occasion, he even plays ukulele. We welcome him to the team and hope you enjoy his first contribution. – Ameron
Before proceeding I must admit that my gaming experience is limited. My introduction to D&D (and RPGs) was in 2009 shortly after 4e launched. My gaming knowledge and experience has grown considerably in the past two years, but I come to the hobby without preconception of previous editions or the baggage that often accompanies it. My opinions and comments regarding D&D and the Legends & Lore series specifically are those of someone without agenda or axe to grind. I enjoy everything D&D has to offer and love to share my enthusiasm. Now that you know where I stand, it’s up to you to decide how much value my opinion carries.
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Why Are We Doing This?
In the past couple of weeks character motivation has become a big issue in my home game and at D&D Encounters. Despite an engaging and interesting story, the players found themselves asking why their characters would actually do the task the DM set before them. What’s lacking was an immediate motivation.
The way I see it, characters in D&D have two different kinds of motivation – big picture motivation and immediate motivation.
Big picture motivation will answer questions like why is this party of misfits adventuring together. It’s usually a much broader and more generalized motive. Examples of the big picture motivation include things like “We’re together to fight our common enemy, the Red Dragon that’s ravaging the countryside,” or “We’re on a quest to find the lost sceptre because he who possesses it will become king.” As long as the PCs know and understand the big picture motivation then things generally run smoothly and no one wonders why a Drow, Dragonborn, Halfling, Eladrin and Minotaur are in the same adventuring party. They have a common goal or a common big picture motivation.
Well D&D camp is over for another year. Looking back it seems to me that the best way to share stories from D&D camp without a lot of superfluous context is to use the “Hey, do you remember when…?” approach. So for the final time this year I would like to share some of the best bits of fun, excitement and hilarity that happened this summer at D&D camp.
Video Games!
Obviously the kids come to camp to have fun first and foremost. Playing and learning the game of D&D is the secondary objective. A lot of the rules can be adjusted to suit the situation at hand if it’s going to make thing more fun. Each week as new kids come to camp we assess their level of play and do our very best to accommodate people so that everyone has a good time. Many of the issues that arise are because some kids just want to play even though they don’t know or don’t want to know the actual rules of “how D&D is supposed to be played.”
That being said, every year we get kids at camp who have never played D&D before and don’t seem to have any interest in it as such. Instead when their parents said “You’re going to camp, pick one!” they picked the camp that sounded most like video games. Well at camp this year we had quite a few Mine Craft kids and it made for some pretty strange in-game interactions.
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Dungeon’s Master Wants You!
Do you play 4e D&D? Do you have strong opinions about the game? Do you have ideas about D&D that you’ve always wanted to share with other gamers but lacked an outlet for doing so? Well then this is your big chance. The Dungeon’s Master team is looking for contributors.
If you’ve got good ideas and some writing ability we want to hear from you. It doesn’t matter if you consider yourself a writer or if you’ve ever been published, what we’re looking for are good ideas from people with something to say.
We’re not just looking for new talent. This is a great opportunity for anyone who writes their own gaming blog to do a guest post on Dungeon’s Master. By contributing to our blog you’ll get a chance to plug your own (and we’re ok with that).
If you think you’ve got what it takes to write for Dungeon’s Master please send me an email (ameron at dungeonsmaster dot com). We’re looking for articles on pretty much any D&D 4e topic. Articles should be between 1,000-1,500 words. Regrettably the only compensation we can offer is bragging rights and a by-line. But you never know where that may lead. After all, writing for Dungeon’s Master is what got us a foot in the door with Wizards of the Coast.
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This was without a doubt the worst week I’ve ever had at D&D Encounters. The problem had absolutely nothing to do with the players and everything to do with the encounter. I suspect that I’m not alone with my criticism of this week’s encounter. Let me explain what happened and why I felt that things went so very, very wrong.
I run D&D Encounters at two FLGS in my area. The game played on Wednesday night is the one I usually write about. However, when I can’t make the Wednesday night game I recount the session I played on Monday night with my other group. This week’s field report will follow the Monday night crew. For anyone following this season’s podcasts, don’t worry we still recorded the adventure. However, you won’t recognize any of the voices but mine.
On Monday night we usually have enough people to run two tables; however our second DM was unable to play this week which meant I ended up running one massive table. We started with seven players. Not great but definitely manageable. Within 10 minutes two more players showed up so we ended up running a table of nine. But believe it or not the overflowing game table had nothing to do with the overall problems we faced this week.