By now most players know, or should know, that a monster knowledge check can make all the difference when you’re fighting a monster for the very first time. Knowing that a monster is undead, has a vulnerability to fire or has a breath weapon will have a significant impact on what you do during the encounter. However, in practice I’ve discovered that making a monster knowledge check isn’t always as simple as rolling against the DCs set in the PHB. There are often other mitigating factors that need to be addressed when determining the success or failure of a monster knowledge check.
Tag: Dungeon Master Resource
Any skill challenge that isn’t a challenge is boring. Here at Dungeon’s Master we’ve written a lot of articles about skill challenges. We’ve created a lot of skill challenge templates intentionally made generic enough that you can drop them right into an existing campaign. However, some skill challenges just aren’t that challenging to some parties. This is especially true as PCs get to higher levels. So what do you do if you find a skill challenge you want to use in your campaign but it’s not going to challenge your players? Simple, you make it more challenging – and we’ll tell you how.
Some DMs feel that skill challenges aren’t that malleable. They believe that skill challenges are designed with a certain level in mind and if you try to adjust the numbers for a party more than a couple of levels up or down it’s not going to work. I wholeheartedly disagree. With a little bit of creative thinking most skill challenge can be adapted to suit your party, regardless of the PCs’ current level.
When players create a character one of the most important decisions they make is choosing their race. Most often players look at the race that provides the best ability bonuses or most interesting racial power to compliment their class. It’s because of this min/maxing we tend to see the same race/class combos over and over again. Introducing the Metamorphosis Curse into your campaign will force players to try new races they might not otherwise choose on their own.
Let’s assume that you’ve created the perfect character. You’ve played through a few levels and you’re really getting to know this PC. He was built to kick butt and he’s doing a fantastic job so far. Everything’s clicking. What happens if his race is suddenly changed? How does this affect your character?
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Adventure Builder Workshop: Location
Movies and television are great for portraying fantastic locations. I can still recall the sense of wonder I first felt when I saw the Argonath while watching The Fellowship of the Ring. With equal wonder I recall the first time I saw Naboo and the massive waterfall that cascaded away from the city. These two scenes fill me with wonder and a sense of adventure. Of course movies and television have the advantage of being primarily visual mediums. As a DM we use words more than visuals, this doesn’t mean we are limited in what locations we portray to our players. We are merely limited by our imaginations.
This is the second in a series that focuses on the Adventure Builder Workshop held at GenCon this past August. The first in the series focused on the villain, today we turn our attention to locations.
Every adventure has a purpose and more often than not that purpose is stopping the villain from completing their malevolent agenda. The central villain of an adventure is perhaps one of the most important design decisions a DM makes. If the appropriate time and effort is put into designing the villain, the rest of the adventure will form around him, creating memories you and your players will remember for years. However, if you don’t take the appropriate time to craft your villain you may find your adventure sessions shallow and lacking a clear sense of purpose.
What was the Fellowship without the evil of Sauron and the One Ring? Sherlock Holmes has Professor Moriarty as a nemesis and Batman has the Joker. All of these villains provided the requisite motivation to keep the hero working towards the success of his quest or mission.
This is part one of a series based on the Adventure Builder Workshop held at GenCon this year. Part one will focus on the villain, what you will receive in this series is a breakdown of the seminar that was led by Rodney Thompson from Wizards of the Coast. Earlier in August I posted a high level review of the Adventure Builder Workshop, what this series will do is go into much greater detail about the individual sections.
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Month in Review: June 2010
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.
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5 Errors I’ve Made as DM
DMs aren’t perfect. There I’ve said it. Any DM that claims he’s never made an error when running a game is lying. Even the best DMs make mistakes. Over the years I’ve made plenty of errors while playing D&D. I’ve found that the best thing to do in these situations is to try and learn from the experience. So today I’m going to share with you the 5 biggest and most egregious errors I’ve made as a DM. I think you’ll find that these are fairly common mistakes made by DMs across the board.
Even though we’ve spent a lot of time discussing Dark Sun over the past few weeks we still play our weekly game in Eberron and are still committed to bringing you Eberron-specific articles. With this latest installment in our ongoing series, Secrets of Eberron Revealed, we look at how Dragonmarks are permanently removed and how Dragonmarks can be made to manifest for a short time.
- Every member of a Dragonmarked house knows that one of the harshest punishments they can receive is to be excoriated – permanent banishment from the house. But when the house brings in The Effacers the punishment becomes so much worse.
- Have you every wished you had a Dragonmark, even for just a short time? The Drakes may be able to help you.
Click on the Eberron tab above the Dungeon’s Master banner to find the previous installments in this ongoing series as well as many other great Eberron articles and resources.
What do you do when you discover an ancient red dragon living in your neighbourhood? You get adventurers to kill it, of course. But what happens if the adventurers don’t kill the dragon? It will be angry that you tried to kill it and it will likely destroy your village. If only there was a way to keep sending adventurers against the dragon while avoiding the dragon’s wrath after each failed attempt. The inhabitants of Burrow’s Scar have come up with just such a plan. Unfortunately for your PCs, they are likely to be the next heroes tricked into face the dragon.
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My Campaign Should Be On TV
My personal spin as a DM is to think of each individual gaming session as a television episode and have the overall arc of my campaign play like a television season. Television shows such as Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules and Legend of the Seeker have a genre similar to that of Dungeons & Dragons and can provide some insight and ideas into your own campaign.
Here are some basic elements to keep your campaigns fresh so you don’t get “canceled” by your gaming group.
The Dungeon’s Master team welcomes Skallawag into the fold. Skallawag, Wimwick and Ameron have played D&D together for over 20 years. Since Dungeon’s Master launched, Skallawag has provided many insightful comments. It took some coaxing, but we finally convinced him to write an article. We hope that this is his first of many articles and that you find his perspective on D&D as helpful and insightful as we do.