nature – Dungeon's Master

Skill Focus: Nature

Nature, like all the knowledge skills in 4e D&D, encompasses a great amount of information. Its scope is quite broad and its use is often limited only by the PC’s imagination. Here are 10 new and creative ways to use Nature.

Knowledge skills can be used for more than just monster knowledge checks. This is certainly a very useful feature of the skill, but its use shouldn’t end there. During skill challenges, Nature can often be used to assist other skills depending on the circumstance.

The Druid, Ranger, Shaman and Warden all receive automatically training in Nature. The Barbarian, Bard, Sorcerer and Wizard have it as an optional choice. Nature may not be the most common skill, but there’s a pretty good chance that someone in the party will have a good Nature check.

Skill Challenge: Skinning the Beast

Eliminating mundane, non-magical items from treasure hordes in 4e D&D was a great idea. But that doesn’t mean that the mundane treasures can’t be thrown in from time-to-time to create a more memorable encounter.

The way things were done in previous editions, where everything was stripped from fallen foes and monsters to sell off later may have made sense, but it hurt the game and slowed things down. I don’t know how many adventures I was a part of where an incredible amount of time was wasted gathering up long swords, suits of armor and other non-magical, every-day items from the corpses of the fallen foes and monsters. It often required an enormous amount of record-keeping and consumed valuable game time when we finally sold those items back to a local merchant. It unnecessarily side-tracked the game.

So in 4e if it’s not coins, jewels, art or magical items, the DM doesn’t describe it and the PCs don’t take it. It makes things simpler and, more importantly, faster. But just because we are now ignoring the mundane items doesn’t mean they don’t still exist. In some circumstances drawing attention to these now overlooked items can add some flare to an otherwise traditional encounter.