Tag: Dungeons and Dragons

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Dark Sun Editorial

D&D Encounters Dark Sun (Week 14)

With only two weeks left the excitement really started building. The PCs left the lush mountain foliage where the feywild crept into Athas and returned to the harsh desert environment more familiar to the PCs. With the sun setting on the horizon and long shadows reaching out towards the PC, they move hastily towards Tyr. As the party weaved in and out of the rocky outcroppings they heard a blood-curdling shriek followed by several others as if in response. The Wastewalkers most powerful allies were upon the PCs.

Our numbers continue dwindling. We were down to five this week. Again, I stepped up as the DM and ran the four adventurers through the penultimate encounter. The only pre-generated character in the party this week was Barcan. He was joined by three familiar faces, the Half-Orc archer Ranger, the Human Warlord (archer build) and the Minotaur Seeker. No defender and no strong melee characters. This was going to make for an interesting encounter.

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DM Resources

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.

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DM Resources

Adventure Builder Workshop: The Villain

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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Editorial Skill Challenges

The Challenge Of Writing Skill Challenges

While attending GenCon this year I had a eureka moment. Or to be more precise, the sky parted, a brilliant ray of light shone down, I turned to Ameron and said, “We’re already doing that!” This was in response to almost every hand in the room going up in the air when Bill Slavicsek asked if people wanted more skill challenges during the Dungeons & Dragons preview seminar.

At Dungeon’s Master we love skill challenges. We enjoy writing them, dreaming them up and talking about them. Our archive has over 30 skill challenges and many related articles for the community to use and adapt for their own campaigns.

The challenge that comes with writing a skill challenge for a general audience is how do we make it specific enough to be important, yet general enough that anyone can adapt it and use it? It’s a conundrum.

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Dark Sun Editorial

D&D Encounters Dark Sun (Week 13)

This week I was back behind the DM’s screen. We had a full party of six, three players using the pre-generated characters – Barcan, Phye and Castri – while the other three players brought their own PCs – the familiar archer Ranger (who died last week), the Human Warlord and a new Thri-kreen Fighter.

D&D Encounters is doing exactly what it was intended to do, bring in new players. Every week for the past four weeks we’ve had at least one player join D&D Encounters for the first time. Some of these players are 4e veterans who finally came out to see what all the fuss is about. Others are brand new to the hobby. Either way, it’s great to see some new faces coming out to play on Wednesday nights. Now if only we could keep the rest of the participants coming back. Having the new players is great, but we’re loosing members of our core group just as quickly. Our numbers have been holding between seven and nine since the beginning of chapter 2. I suspect that things will pick up again when the summer ends and we move on to Season 3.

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Month in Review

Month in Review: August 2010

August was a big month for D&D and for D&D fans. Most notably, GenCon gave gamers from around the world an opportunity to get together and play D&D. Wizards of the Coast made numerous announcements about upcoming D&D releases at GenCon during their seminars, many of which we wrote about. In August we returned our attention to skill challenges, a topic we’ve always felt strongly about. And of course, we had another report from D&D camp. This time the kids tackled the Tomb of Horrors. August was a busy month for gaming and if you missed any of our articles this is your chance to get caught up.

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Humour

Achievement Rewards Are Coming To D&D

Breaking news! As you already know Player Rewards are being eliminated from organized D&D game play at the end of 2010. The big question is what’s replacing it? Today we have the answer. A reliable source (who has asked to remain anonymous) provided the Dungeon’s Master team with some specific details. Today we’re sharing everything we have and asking you to weigh in with you thoughts on these upcoming changes.

Achievements are on the horizon for 4e Dungeons & Dragons. The new achievement system is officially launching in January 2011. One of the lead developers of the achievement system had this to say about it.

“The new achievement system is going to shine; we can’t wait to reveal it to our fans. Giving players tangible goals to achieve while playing D&D, aside from killing orcs and ruining the well laid plans of DMs, achievements are going to enhance and change the way the game is played forever! I just wish I could say more, but I’ve already said too much!”

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Book Reviews

Open Game Table 2

Last week I received my copy of Open Game Table 2 in the mail. For those of you not familiar with this publication it’s a collection of great articles from around the blogsphere that highlight the best in gaming. There is a lot of D&D stuff in here but it’s not exclusive to D&D.

From Blog to Book

Creating OGT2 was a collaborative and interactive process. The articles selected for inclusion in OGT2 were done so after after a long and arduous vetting process. Anyone and everyone was invited to submit the URL of their favourite online gaming article for consideration in the OGT2. There were 376 submissions.

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DM Resources Skill Challenges

How Difficult Is It To Sneak Past A City Guard?

Assigning difficulty checks (DCs) for skill challenges can be a frustrating experience. Some checks have set DCs that are provided for the DM. Examples of this are traps and locks that have a predetermined level of difficulty. A skill check that doesn’t have such an obvious DC is Stealth for sneaking past a guard. Why is this check less obvious? Because it’s opposed by the guards passive Perception. The tougher the guard, the higher his Perception.

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Dark Sun Editorial

D&D Encounters Dark Sun (Week 12)

Last week ended with the PCs fleeing from the cannibalistic Halfings. Depending on how you fared they were either in hot pursuit or would be as soon as they discovered that the PCs killed all of the guards during the escape. So we literally hit the ground running this week. The DM set the stage and explained that as we fled through the jungle others who had also escaped or avoided capture were hiding in the underbrush. Realizing that there is strength in numbers, we decided to work together for survival.

We made brief introductions before moving on. This let the players introduce their characters. We had seven players this week. Our only new player brought a Human Bard. One player traded in Shakirr for his own Warlord (a Human I think). The Human Ranger (archer) and the Minotaur Seeker (me) returned for another week. The remaining three players used the familiar pre-gens: Castri, Barcan and Yuka.

The DM decided that rather than just jumping into the next combat we should role-play the trek through the jungle while we tried to avoid the pursuing Halflings and at the same time tried to find the best way through the foliage. The ensuing skill challenge was a lot of fun. Everyone tried to make use of different skills even though the DM said he didn’t mind if we repeated actions.

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