The ENnie Award nominees were announced today. Regretfully, Dungeon’s Master did not make the final cut in the best blog category. We want to congratulate the great gaming blogs that did get nominated and we wish them all good luck in the Best Blog category.
Here’s the complete list of all the 2010 ENnie Award nominees.
The party survived. I was shocked. When I was reading the encounter in preparation for week 5 I was sure it would be a TPK. But as so often happens in D&D, the players did the unexpected and lived.
Since week 1 the PCs have had their butts kicked all over the place. They’ve taken exorbitant amounts of damage and use way more resources each week than one might expect to during a typical D&D encounter. Coming into week 5 they were literally down to their last legs. But after four weeks of hell, the PCs finally got lucky and that made all the difference.
Cruven – I use Arcana to investigate the origins of the portal in order to learn how we might vanquish the elder evil that has attacked the realm.
DM – Will anyone assist Cruven? The DC to assist is 17.
Dox – 29. I assist.
Jacinth – 25. I assist.
Luk – 17. I assist.
Josey – 18. I assist
Cruven – Ok, with four assists that’s +8 to my roll. My base is a 17, so I’m rolling on a 25. Here goes…
DM – Don’t bother. The DC is only 23 so with the assists you can’t fail this check.
How often has this happened at your gaming table? Assisting is a great way to help a PC out with a check that they might not make on their own. It’s a potentially game breaking mechanic if a PC is already highly proficient at a given skill. As the DM, how do you prevent reckless assist roles?
Normally when combat is finished the PCs take a short, 5-minute rest. They get to rest up, heal, catch their breath, and regain the use of encounter powers. But what many players forget is that all of the benefits that come from taking a 5-minute rest come at then end of those five minutes. If the party is attacked or decides to venture onwards before the short rest is finished, they are still hurt and resource depleted.
In a recent game the PCs found themselves in a situation where they really needed a short rest, but couldn’t just drop their guard for five minutes. I decided to turn the 5-minute rest into a skill challenge. If they succeeded, then after five minutes they got all the benefits of taking the short rest (and some XP for completing the skill challenge). If they failed then at least some of the PCs would have to engage in combat to guard the others still resting. Here’s how it played out.
GenCon 2010, the four best days in gaming, starts exactly one month from today on Thursday, August 5. This year both Wimwick and I are going to Indianapolis. It’s my third GenCon and his first.
Although we’ve both registered for as many events as we could, there were still a lot of question marks in our schedule. Some events, like the Wizards of the Coast seminars, do not have firm times and dates yet. Other events, like Dark Sun Arenas: Glory and Blood and the Convention Delve: Lair of the Dread Witch were not available for preregistration. So with that in mind, here’s what my schedule looks like so far.
Expect your PCs to die if you are playing a campaign set in Dark Sun. Dark Sun is a deadly campaign setting and death is par for the course.
“This rule reflects the fact that daily life on Athas is much harsher than it is in other AD&D realms, forcing characters to mature more quickly if they are to survive.” – AD&D 2e Dark Sun Rules Book
The rule in question is the one which states that characters start at level 3 in the AD&D version of Dark Sun. With the changes in the game since this edition, especially the fact that in 4e level 1 characters are a lot tougher than their previous counterparts, this rule is no longer needed.
Today is Canada Day, a holiday across Canada, which meant that last night’s D&D Encounters Dark Sun had less than usual attendance. After three weeks with 20 or more participants, this week we were down to only 12 (including the two DMs). So with two tables of five, we returned to Athas.
Before we started the encounter itself, Jarvix performed a Comrades’ Succor ritual. This allowed the PCs to redistribute their remaining healing surges. So going into the encounter for week 4 everyone had full (or nearly full) hit points and at least one healing surge at their disposal during the combat. I want to thank the other DM running D&D Encounters for pointing out this ritual and explaining how to use it. Having never played an arcane character with Ritual Casting I had no idea. It made a huge difference.
Dark Sun is the hottest topic in D&D right now. We posted 10 Dark Sun articles here at Dungeon’s Master throughout the last month and promise to keep writing more on Athas and D&D Encounters season two. But that’s not all we covered in June. We still brought you plenty of player and DM resources as well as news from the D&D community. And just to let you know we haven’t forgotten about Eberron, we provided another installment in our ongoing Secrets of Eberron series. So whether you missed an article or two throughout June or you’ve only just stumbled upon our site, the Month in Review is a great way to get caught up on everything we ran in the past month. We’d also like to take this opportunity (as we do every month) to thank all of our readers for visiting Dungeon’s Master and for coming back again and again.
Knowing when to heal during combat is an under appreciated ability in Dungeons & Dragons. Too many players think that their characters are invincible, able to take whatever the DM throws their way. This refusal by the players to accept the reality of the situation can be detrimental, not only to their PC, but also to the rest of the party. Refusing to heal in favour of a combat action is a calculated risk that every player is forced to make. The question is what is the right decisions to make? While hindsight is always 20/20 we’d like to think we are making the right choices for our PCs.
The six pre-generated characters provided for D&D Encounters Dark Sun are so condensed that they only list the three or four skills each PC is trained in. So for everyone playing D&D Encounters season two, I’ve created skill cards for each character.
I’ll admit that the character sheet cards Wizards provided look great, but other than the aesthetic quality, the cards are terrible. They provide the absolute bare minimum detail required to play the characters. Some might even argue that they don’t even contain that much.