Last night I participated in my first D&D Championship. We didn’t complete the adventure but I think our party has a very good chance of advancing to the semi-finals this afternoon.
Each participant is required to bring a level 2 character for the qualifying round of play. If you advanced to the semi-finals then you use a level 3 version of that character. If you advance to the finals you use a level 4 version of that character.
Killing minions feels good. So good in fact players do weird things in order to kill minions. Controllers who normally hide behind the defenders will charge with wild abandon to unleash a close blast spell if they believe they can drop more than one minion on their turn. Likewise, strikers will move into the thick of a group of enemies they don’t consider a threat to get their shots in on some easy minion fodder.
Here are a few fun things you can do to exploit the PC’s perceptions of minions.
In Avoiding Death, Part 1 we covered these five recommendations for how to avoid needless character death.
Now we’re going to add five more ideas to the list. Most of these tips rely on you keeping your cool and not doing anything stupid. Sometimes that can be harder than you think.
I think it’s fair to say that everyone who plays D&D has experienced character death at some point. Hopefully your character has gone down swinging or sacrificed himself in such a way that people will be telling and retelling the story for years to come. But in reality I think we all know that more often than not character death is the result of someone (often the character himself) doing something stupid.