I’ve enjoyed hanging out over at GameFiend’s IRC chat room and the other day there was a particularly interesting discussion about Called Shots in 4E D&D. I started this conversation by asking what people would change ruleswise in 4E and among the comments I received, ObsidianCrane (from this blog) said that he would codify more …
Category Archive: Game Elements
Place to discuss various elements of the game, encounter design, tpks, DMing tips etc. Note Skill Challenges and Sources of Inspiration are separated from this to allow them to grow on their own. As other parts get enough posts they may also be split off.
And They All Fell Down
Last weekend, I killed some of my friends. It wasn’t something I had planned on doing. They made a decision I hadn’t expected and my reaction to the action they took killed them. Perhaps they had it coming. They were often, frequently impetuous and rash. They rarely took the time to evaluate potentially dangerous situations, …
The Climactic Battle
Recently my game finished the heroic tier, and I wanted to finish it with something big. The campaign, to a large extent, resolved around the slow build of a confrontation between a tribe of orcs and the main defense of the civilized lands where the PCs originated from. In essence if the orcs were not …
Are There Such Things As Bad DMs?
This post is a guest article by @paulbaalham enjoy: When I got back into D&D with the start of 4E, I was lucky enough to have not one but two great DMs in my group. Eventually I wanted to run a game and be as good as both of them. Recently this feeling surfaced again …
Dungeons, To Be, or Not To Be?
This week over in twitter land and on a few other blogs (re-examining the dungeon, examining the re-examining, death to the dungeon, re-examining the re-examining, dungeons & newbie dms and freshly stocked for your enjoyment) the topic of the role of the dungeon in our games has been much discussed. The initial discussion spawned by …
The Quest’s the Thing
4E officially introduced the idea of a quest as a trackable thing for DnD, with definite rewards tied to their completion. Sure they have been around for a long time, and sure we have been tying rewards to them for a long time, but 4E actually put it in the rules. One of the suggestions …
A Word of Difference
Today I was working on the NPCs for a couple of my campaigns, both of which are based on published adventures (Village of Hommlet by TSR & WotC, and Legacy of Fire from Paizo) by making a simple list of the NPCs that the characters of each campaign had met, or could readily meet. This …
Recurring the Villain
I’m not sure about you, but I have a lot of problems with getting a villain to have a life of more than 1 encounter. (I also have players that get cranky about bad guys that get away.) This blog is basically inspired by two things I’ve recently come across specifically for the purpose of …
Do you feel safe?
“aquelajames Now boarding giant eagles to defend the city against giants attacking from an earthberg! It’s on!! #dnd” “aquelajames The giants disposed of, we venture into the earthberg, where more giants await! #dnd” Now those two tweets sound like the expression of a cool and fun game, but they made me wonder are the players …
6 things I learnt from BECMI
BECMI – Basic Expert Champions Masters Immortals for those who don’t know. In 1984 I learnt about role playing games, the first game I ever played was Traveler but the game that made me a gamer came under the Christmas tree that year in a red box. That red box fundamentally changed my life without …