Just a quick post to point out the video for the upcoming online Character Builder to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet. While my earlier complaints about it not being usable when you aren’t online still stand, I’m happy to see that the design of the program appears to be good. I’m looking forward to taking it for a spin on November 16.
What do you all think? Does it look like an improvement in usability over the current Builder?
My first ongoing in-person Dungeons and Dragons game as a dungeon master reached a milestone yesterday: It moved from being an adventure to being a campaign.
I’ve read the Dungeon Master’s Guide from both 3rd Edition and 4th Edition, and I know that there’s some discussion of what differentiates an adventure from a campaign. From my reading, it’s always felt to me like it’s a question of duration. An encounter is something that takes a few minutes of game time and maybe an hour of real-life time. An adventure is a string of encounters that takes a few hours or days of campaign time and probably one to three gaming sessions in real-life time. A campaign is a series of adventures that takes any amount of time in-game and many sessions over months or years in real-life time.
I suppose those things are true, but I think there’s a more important distinction about what makes a real campaign: Collaboration between the dungeon master and the players.
In an encounter, I know which enemies are out there and what they’re capable of, and the players react to that.
In an adventure, I know the same things on a larger scale. Maybe the players are delving a dungeon or chasing after a bad guy through a city or something like that, but the overall script of what could happen is written by me. Yes, the players can come up with interesting ideas that I hadn’t thought of and I can work them in as I see fit. But I’m the one who establishes what could happen.
When we move to a campaign, things change. I’ll still be responsible for creating the future adventures and encounters, but what those adventures ARE is something that the players can have a huge hand in establishing. Would they rather head to the mountains to help a trader or head to the coast to find a wizard? Would they rather do something else entirely that I hadn’t considered as a possibility?
My first adventure ends; my first real campaign begins
Yesterday, my friends finished the first D&D adventure I had ever written. The main structure is something I wrote eight years ago when my wife and I tried D&D 3rd Edition, but that game never got off the ground and I never had the chance to use the adventure. The overall plot was pretty straightforward – the party is out to recover a mysterious family heirloom from a stronghold full of orcs. I used the stronghold design that I had drawn years ago and updated the monsters to match 4th Edition.
Things took an unexpected turn when the adventurers tossed some dead orc bodies into an underground river, which flowed by another room populated with live orcs. This triggered another battle, and the players decided to hole up in a fortified location in the stronghold to take a rest and defend themselves. Some bad guys took the heirloom out of the stronghold while the party was attacked by a smaller force, which led to a later chase through the woods and a last stand with the boss orc and a few lackeys. It was a satisfying conclusion.
So now what? Well, the party was able to establish that the heirloom has some magical properties that are being suppressed by a powerful enchantment. They could go find a mighty wizard to help them investigate further, or they could honor an earlier promise they had made to a riverboat merchant who had given them free passage if they would agree to serve as an armed escort on a future trip. They decided to help the merchant. And thus the campaign is born!
What makes this into a campaign for me is that the players have decided where to take the story. I held off on designing actual encounters for the next couple of possibilities, as I didn’t know which way the players would go. They’ve made their choice, so I now know what to build.
Furthermore, the players also took the story in a direction I hadn’t thought about at all – they decided to claim the former orc stronghold as their “castle”! Now, it’s out in the middle of nowhere in hostile lands, but they managed to convince the owner of the heirloom to send a small garrison of able-bodied villagers out to the stronghold to keep monsters from moving in while the party went a-questing.
There are so many juicy possibilities with this side story that I can’t wait to use them! The party CARES about this stronghold now. They have conquered it, and it is THEIRS. Any time you can get the players to actually care about something in the game world, you create the opportunity for future plots. Also, since they’re going in a completely different direction for their next adventure, things can be happening at their “castle” while they’re away. So many possibilities!
I feel great as a DM that I’ve managed to create world elements that my players care about and that they’re interested in making decisions about where the story goes. It’s a really good feeling.
(Pardon the rhyming title)
Related to my earlier post about line of sight and line of effect is the “condition” of being Hidden in 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. This particular post owes a debt of gratitude to the excellent “Hidden Club” post on the Wizards of the Coast message boards by LordOfWea.
What is Hidden?
A question that often comes up when there’s darkness or magical fog or blindness or invisibility is, “Does my character know where Monster X is, even though I can’t see him?”
The answer: Yes, you know exactly where everybody on the battlefield is, UNLESS they are Hidden from you.
Hidden does NOT just mean “you can’t see it.” Hidden in 4th Edition is basically a state, a condition like Blinded or Dazed or Bloodied – you have it or you don’t (though it’s possible to be Hidden from one creature but not another).
When you are Hidden from another creature, that creature is unaware of your presence and doesn’t know where you are. They can’t see you, hear you, smell you, feel the breeze of your movements or taste the acrid smoke that comes off your body (or they can’t do those things well enough to pin down your location). You are undetectable to them.
If you do NOT have the Hidden condition against a creature, that creature knows EXACTLY what square you are in. It might not be able to see you (in which case you have Total Concealment against that creature and its ranged and melee attacks will have a -5 penalty to hit you), but it can at least aim at the right square if it wants to attack you.
Think of it this way: All creatures in D&D are assumed to have super-sensitive hearing. Even if they can’t see you, they can hear your movements and therefore know where you are. Hitting what you can’t see is still tricky with melee and ranged attacks (-5 penalty from Total Concealment), but it’s no problem with close or area attacks (refer back to the earlier post about line of sight).
Getting Hidden
So, how does one go about getting the Hidden condition? One makes a Stealth check for free at the end of a move in which they end with Superior Cover or Total Concealment against a creature. If your Stealth check exceeds the Passive Perception score of the creature you’re trying to hide from, then you are Hidden from that creature. (You should write down the result of this Stealth check so that you know whether future Perception checks from your enemies succeed in finding you or not.)
That’s it. If you’re out of sight of a creature at the end of a move, you can roll Stealth to try to become Hidden. If you don’t do that successfully, even if you’re invisible or anything like that, you are not Hidden and the creature knows where you are.
Losing Hidden
What’s so great about being Hidden?
Two things:
The latter point brings up the “Targeting what you can’t see” rules. If you don’t know what square your target is in, you’re allowed to guess and target “that square.” If you guessed wrong, you miss (but the DM doesn’t have to tell you that you guessed wrong, just that your attack missed… mwoo ha ha!). If you guessed right, you might hit, but keep in mind that the target does still have Total Concealment, which means that if you attack is melee or ranged it will have a -5 penalty (remember, though, that this penalty doesn’t affect close or area attacks).
Wrapping up
Being unseen is not the same as being hidden – D&D creatures can hear well enough to know where another creature is, even if they can’t see it. If you’re Stealthy enough, you can perhaps become Hidden, in which case your enemies are unaware of your existence. This goes away when you attack, become visible or make too much noise from movement, or when an enemy successfully searches for you. Until that time, though, sneak into those shadows and Hide!
Update 11/18/2010: I’ve added a review of the online Character Builder now that it’s available.
I don’t tend to write many posts about “news” in the role playing game community, but since I go by “Online Dungeon Master” I thought I should chime in with my thoughts on the news that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is changing their fantastic Character Builder program from something you can download into something that you use within a web site.
The good news:
The bad news:
I’m sure that combating people who only would pay for the occasional month of DDI in order to get the updates is a big part of why WotC is making this change. I’m sure some of those people will say, “Oh well, I guess I’ll pony up for a regular subscription now.” But for people like me, who gladly support the company by subscribing to DDI all the time, there is nothing meaningful in this news that is good.
From my perspective, in an effort to combat piracy / cheapskatedness, Wizards of the Coast has diminished the value of their best program for their best customers.
I’m not one to say that I’m canceling my subscription or will never play D&D again or anything like that – I really enjoy the game and want the company to keep making it. I’m guessing this is why this strategy will work for WotC – their good customers, like me, will be disappointed but will keep subscribing. Still, it feels like a bad business decision to take value away from your best customers (offline access being the main one) without giving them anything in return.
Now, the expectation is that WotC will be making other online tools available for DDI subscribers, so it may be worth it in the end. But for now, it’s bad news for good customers. Bummer.
I’m excited to say that I’ve written my first adventure for Living Forgotten Realms (LFR), which I’ll be running at a local convention here in Denver called Genghis Con in February.
This is a “MyRealms” adventure. MyRealms is an interesting little program for LFR in which dungeon masters like me can write their own LFR-formatted adventures and run them in public (or in private, I suppose). The adventure should follow the overall format of a regular LFR module – 2-3 combat encounters and 1-2 skill challenges with certain experience point budgets and treasure amounts, designed to run in a four-hour time slot with a party of 4-6 characters within a certain level band. With MyRealms adventures you’re free to create pretty much whatever you like, and the connection to the Forgotten Realms doesn’t have to be all that strong.
The one restriction is that you’re not allowed to run anyone else’s MyRealms adventure. Technically speaking, I won’t be allowed to publish my adventure here on the blog… but I honestly don’t know how much that rule really matters. I’ll find out, but since I’ve gone through the effort of actually writing this adventure in the LFR format I’d like to share it with the world.
The adventure is called The Staff of Suha. It’s a distilled version of the adventure that I’m currently running for my friends here in Colorado, which is itself an adaptation of the adventure that I wrote many years ago under D&D 3.0 rules and rediscovered a few months ago. It’s a pretty straightforward little dungeon delve with a plot that’s basically “Retrieve the MacGuffin.” For a convention game, that’s enough plot.
Since I had already written the whole thing up in a Word document for my players here in person, it wasn’t too hard to adapt that version of the adventure into an LFR-friendly version. The biggest change was that my original version was too long. When all is said and done, we will have probably done 10-12 hours of adventuring to get through my original version, which is far too much for LFR.
I started by getting rid of the backstory. My in-person players started the adventure in a town where they were contacted by a messenger who works for a wealthy uncle of one of the PCs. The party had to travel to the uncle’s manor, talk to him about the theft of the titular family heirloom (the Staff of Suha), investigate the theft, and track the bad guys to their lair (with a fight in the forest on the way). Once they arrived at the stronghold, they had get past the front gate guards, fight some minions, infiltrate an orc barracks, fight through an orc shrine, deal with some orcs training for battle and then fight the big boss (with a few other wrinkles along the way which I won’t write about here because my players haven’t encountered them yet).
For the LFR version, the party starts off as they come in view of the orc stronghold. I’ll hand-wave the back story: “You’re here to get the MacGuffin, and here’s why. Go to it!” Not super-compelling, I’ll admit, but this is just a little delve.
There will be four encounters:
I stripped out two combat encounters and a skill challenge that happened before the stronghold (plus some general role playing), and I stripped out five and a half more combat encounters within the stronghold. Thus, a 10-12 hour adventure gets down into the 3-4 hour range.
The current version of the file is the “high challenge” version (for level 6-7 characters) and I plan to adapt it for the “low challenge” version (for level 4-5 characters) shortly. I may also re-write it as a MYRE1-1 adventure for level 1-4 characters, replacing the orcs with goblins.
I’m pretty excited about the idea of running my own game in public. I like the published LFR adventure well enough, and I always customize them to my taste, but running an adventure that’s completely mine is very appealing to me. Now I just have to wait until February!
Line of sight and line of effect are two concepts that can confuse new players and dungeon masters for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. I know that I have personally struggled with these, and it feels like there’s always something new to learn. Below are some basic pointers to help you understand line of sight and line of effect and what they mean for you and your game.
What is line of sight?
Line of sight means exactly what it says: You’re able to see a thing from where you’re standing. What blocks line of sight?
An interesting case of an object that does NOT block line of sight is a solid, transparent object such as a pane of glass or a transparent crystal. If you can see through it, it doesn’t block line of sight. Also, dim light and fog and similar things might grant some concealment, but they don’t block line of sight. You can still see through them, even if only dimly.
Creatures also don’t block line of sight. It’s assumed that the creature is moving around enough in its square that you can still make out what’s on the far side of it (even though the creature in the way might grant cover if it’s your enemy).
What is line of effect?
Line of effect means that something going from point A to point B won’t get stopped by anything. What stops line of effect?
Things like darkness and blindness and invisibility don’t matter one bit for line of effect – an object would not be impeded at all if it were going through a cloud of magical fog or darkness, so line of effect still exists through them. Creatures also don’t stop line of effect (again, they’re assumed to be moving around in their squares), though they may grant cover.
The canonical example of something that blocks line of sight but not line of effect is darkness. The canonical example of something that blocks line of effect but not line of sight is a pane of clear glass. Keep those examples in mind, and you should be able to figure out what’s what.
Melee attacks
In order to make a melee attack against something that’s in range of your melee attack, you must have line of effect to the target but you don’t have to have line of sight. As long as your axe can get there, it doesn’t matter if you can see the target or not – you have line of effect and are allowed to attack. If you can’t see it (you’re blinded, it’s totally dark, etc.) then the target has total concealment from you, which means your attack has a -5 penalty to hit. But you can still make the attack.
Ranged attacks
As with a melee attack, you only need line of effect to the target with a ranged attack, not line of sight. If you’re shooting an arrow through a cloud of magical darkness at a creature on the far side, the darkness does nothing to stop your arrow. Again, if you can’t see the target it has total concealment – a -5 penalty to the attack roll.
The hooded archer can shoot the goblin through the black cloud of magical darkness with a -5 total concealment penalty; he can't shoot the rat on the far side of the glass wall
Close attacks
With a close attack, you only need line of effect to the target. Your Thunderwave doesn’t care if you can see something or not – it just has to be able to get to it. In addition, concealment doesn’t matter for close attacks, so even if the target is invisible in a completely dark room, your close attack has no penalty to hit it.
Area attacks
Somewhat surprisingly to me, area attacks work pretty much as close attacks do. With an area attack, there are two different things to consider – the line from the caster to the origin square of the burst, and then the lines from the origin square of the burst to the targets that will be hit by it.
In order to put an area burst’s origin in a particular square, the caster only needs line of effect to that square, not line of sight. If the wizard closes her eyes and points, she can still have the magical burst originate exactly where she wants it to. If she’s shooting through an arrow slit , that’s good enough – the magical energy can get through the gap and erupt right where she wants it. She can’t place the magical effect on the opposite side of a pane of glass, though – she does need line of effect to that origin square.
Even if the green wizard is blind and the cloud of gas blocks line of sight, she can still have her Area Burst 2 attack originate in square 1 and hit the fungus creature
As for the burst itself, it works just like a close attack. As long as there is line of effect from the origin square of the burst to the target, the target will get hit. This lets the wizard “shoot around a corner” as well – she can place the burst at the intersection of two hallways, and the burst will shoot down the side passage to hit any creatures within range.
Wrapping up
The basics of line of sight and line of effect for attacks are that you always need line of effect and you never need line of sight. However, if you don’t have line of sight, then your melee and ranged attacks will suffer a -5 penalty from total concealment (but your close and area attacks are unaffected).
In a future post I’ll talk about a concept that has some connection to line of sight – being hidden.
This evening I ran a Living Forgotten Realms game at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds. The amazing thing is that it wasn’t a big deal.
You might remember my post from July where I ran my first LFR game at the store. That was a big deal to me. I spent a month preparing for that game. I talked on the blog and on EN World, asking for advice about running a game in public. I had to work to create paper maps and tokens for the bad guys. I read and re-read the adventure to make sure I understood the ins and outs (even though I had been through it already as a player). I over-prepared. And to be fair, I had a blast running the game.
This time I realized at some point over the weekend – oh yeah, I’m running a game on Tuesday! No problem. It helps that I had already run this particular adventure at TactiCon and I therefore had all of the files I needed on the laptop in MapTool, ready to run with the projector. (This is TYMA 2-1 Old Enemies Arise.) Still, I really didn’t stress about it.
Fortunately, I didn’t need to stress. Aside from my accidental unplugging of the projector during the game (twice – but fortunately never in combat), it all went very smoothly. The party battled some kobolds by the side of the road.
They met with some farmers to investigate the kobold menace.
They fought in a cave full of spike traps.
And they battled the big bad guy in another part of the cave.
The first battle was fair – the defender took some serious damage, but never dropped. The spike cave battle was lots of fun – I got to push and pull players into spikes all encounter long, when they weren’t stumbling into them on their own. The final battle was kind of boring – I really need to find a way to spice up that encounter if I ever run this adventure again.
Part of what I enjoyed about this particular adventure was that two of my players are DMs whom I respect – Rich and Aarun. You might remember Aarun’s name from my very first experience with Living Forgotten Realms – he was the dungeon master for my first game, and I absolutely LOVED the experience of playing under him. He mentioned this evening that the blog post where I mentioned his name (with its unique spelling) shows up when you Google that name. Well, Aarun – here’s another Google hit for you!
Anyway, it’s great to run a game for people you respect and for them to clearly have a good time. I also hung around the store afterward to chat with Wes, another DM I greatly respect. I’ve already signed up to play in some LFR games in December, and I specifically sought out games that Aarun and Wes are running. If I can run a game for that type of person and they have a good time, I feel good about my dungeon mastering!
I’ve been running my online Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition game for several months now, and MapTool has been fantastic for running the game. The players have macros for their powers and abilities, we can keep track of hit points electronically, etc. It’s also great because it’s easy to keep track of all of the conditions that can be put onto a character – bloodied, prone, marked, cursed, ongoing damage, weakened, dazed… the list goes on and on. My MapTool states for the online game consist of little icons that can show up over a token in a 3 by 3 grid (so there can be up to nine states on a token at once).
A token that is granting combat advantage, dazed, slowed, taking ongoing damage, marked, cursed and bloodied
I love this about MapTool for in-person games that I run using my projector, too. Unfortunately, it’s much harder to make out the details on a monster token when I’m using the projector because I have to keep the map zoomed pretty far out in order to project a grid with 1-inch squares. This means that it’s really hard for the characters to see all of the states on a creature. Is that guy bloodied? Is he marked? What about prone?
The solution here is a combination of using bigger states and using different states.
The most important states for players to be able to see clearly are those that are most likely to affect their interaction with a creature. They have to know if it’s bloodied, prone, marked, or subject to a striker ability (quarry, etc.). It’s nice to know if the bad guy is dazed or has -2 to its defenses or it’s slowed, but not AS important. The really important conditions, therefore, should get big, prominent marks across the face of the token. The less-important conditions can rely on the 2 by 2 grid (at the very least, you as the DM can still zoom in on them on your screen to see what they are.
The easily-visible conditions can be tailored to your own campaign, of course. Every defender should have his or her own color of marks, but they can all use the same symbol (since a new mark will override an old one, you’ll never have to worry about making multiple marks visible). If you have multiple strikers that can put conditions on a creature, you’ll want to use multiple shapes (maybe a cross for one and a diamond for another). Assassin shrouds are tricky – I haven’t yet come up with a good way to keep track of how many are on a creature, but fortunately my regular games don’t include any assassins (though I see them occasionally at convention games).
Bottom line: Icons are great for understanding what a particular symbol means, but they’re hard to see at a distance. Colorful shapes are better for in-person games with a projector.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve volunteered to take the next shift as dungeon master with the group I’ve been playing with here in Colorado for most of this year (my first real Dungeons and Dragons experience). I had considered three options for this campaign:
War of the Burning Sky was originally my first choice, but after starting to work on the adjustments I’d have to make for the level issue and after talking to my current players and getting their thoughts on the matter, I decided that it didn’t seem like it would be as much fun for me (even though it would be a LOT less work).
The playtest game intrigues me a great deal, but the adventure would span several sessions, and I really didn’t want to commit to anything like that without having the time to really get to know the material first (the whole document is over 100 pages in length).
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that homebrew was what I really wanted. Having discovered my adventure from years ago that never saw the light of day, I felt like I had to give it a go.
I began by transferring my map of what was originally a goblin stronghold (the adventure was written for first-level characters) into MapTool. It’s now an orc stronghold, since these characters are higher level. I kept the geography pretty much the same as I had created it years ago, removing only a couple of pointless storage rooms (I like verisimilitude, but rooms that have no bearing on the adventurers at all should be cut). I sketched out the whole complex, only making a couple of edits… and then realized that the party wouldn’t be STARTING in the stronghold, but out in a town where they’ll get the chance to find out about this thing.
So, I needed to back up and draw some more. I started with a tavern, using a Dungeon Tile image. I called it the Shady Maple Inn and built it around a huge maple tree in the middle of the place. It was built and owned by an elf who loved the tree and made it part of his establishment (this made me very happy for some reason). 
The players had the possibility of meeting some bandits along the road, so I created a bridge encounter map.
There was also going to be an attack by some insects during a night spent camping in the forest, so I put together a forest encounter map with trees and bushes.
This would be everything the party would face, at least for the first session. I figured that we would get through some decent fraction of the maps I had prepared. After all, there was a lot to get through in the first session:
Now, I don’t know if it was the efficiency of running the game in MapTool with the projector or what, but we got through a LOT in one session!
We started playing at about 4:15 this afternoon. We spent about 30 minutes on character introductions and party backgrounds. Then the action started, and the players jumped on it. No gallavanting about, chatting with random NPCs – they heard about a mission, pounced on it without asking questions and started to complete it. They wisely figured out that they could take a boat up the river to the manor house, which meant that they could skip the bandit encounter at the bridge. At the manor house, they investigated the theft of the family heirloom efficiently and moved on to the forest.
Here, they were set upon by some creepy crawlies at night. The luck of the dice had this encounter happen during the first watch, which meant that everyone would be taking an extended rest afterwards (some of them had just started doing so). This worked out pretty well, actually – since the extended rest was coming, everyone was free to blow daily powers and action points. The attack came from some centipedes and rot grub swarms (set to appropriate levels for the party, of course). Even after I brought in some extra centipedes in the second round, the PCs had no trouble beating them all up.
The next morning we had a little skill challenge to continue the navigation through the forest to the orcs’ lair. The party just barely failed this skill challenge, which made for a cool encounter. Instead of being able to walk right up to the front door and trying to figure out how to get through, their failure meant that orc archers in the guard tower saw them coming and got a surprise round on them. This was excellent, because the archers with surprise were pretty darn scary. Even though these are only level 4 creatures, they have a burst 1 attack (a hail of arrows, basically) that deals d10+6 damage to everyone in the burst that it hits, and I rolled a 9 and a 10 for damage for the two archers who fired into the group. Suddenly our healer was down to 12 hit points (out of a maximum of 43) and the party was legitimately scared.
Despite the fear, the party had the right tools to handle this problem: Area attacks. By the rules of the game, an area attack only requires that the spellcaster have line of effect to the origin square of the area burst (which the arrow slit grants), and then enemies inside the tower would not have cover from the area attack because it’s originating inside the tower. Unleashing a few of these helped bring the archers down before they could raise the alarm.
The door to the stronghold was trapped, and I allowed some active Perception checks to notice the trap before just setting it off on everyone’s heads. This was a bit generous on my part, but our games haven’t involved a lot of traps in the past and I felt like it was unfair to shock them TOO much by springing a trap when they would never think to look for one. Now they’ll think about it!
Once inside, the party used some good Stealth to sneak up on the orc minions (two-hit minions, as is usual in my games) in the next room, who were distracted by their dice games. 
For this battle, the minions went to the far side of the bridge and pulled it back across, attacking mainly from range (even though they’re not great at range). I made it clear that the river is nasty and the party does not want to fall into it. Again, the PCs beat up the bad guys before they could raise a further alarm.
The last battle of the evening took place in the orcs’ sleeping chamber. This area was dark, as the night shift orcs were sleeping. One orc was awake – the cook over in the kitchen area, preparing a foul-smelling stew. The party again made good use of Stealth, letting the party’s Monk get a surprise attack on the cook.
This battle was a little more interesting, as the orcs who had been asleep quickly woke up and did their best to sneak toward the party in the dark. The Monk ended up bloodied a couple of times, and the Warlock/Sorcerer got a little bit beat-up as well, but since the baddies kept clustering, they were mowed down by burst and blast attacks. Who says you need dedicated controllers in a party?
At this point it was a little after 9:15 PM. It had been five hours since we had started playing, and we had taken about an hour-long break for dinner in the middle. We played through four combat encounters, plus the background stuff and some role-playing, investigations and skill challenges. And this was all with brand-new characters and players who were still figuring out what those characters can do. I was amazed at how far the party had gotten. This was as much of the adventure as I had prepared, so we called it a night at that point (playing a few games of Zombie Dice first).
Today was a great start for a new campaign! I feel like everyone had a good time, and the MapTool / projector combo continues to be a big hit.
DM Lessons
The day has come: I’m about to serve as dungeon master for an ongoing, in-person campaign. I’ve been running my online campaign through the War of the Burning Sky via MapTool and Skype for nine sessions over the past few months, and it’s gone very well. I’ve also run one-shot Living Forgotten Realms games in-person at my local store and at TactiCon.
This is different. This is in-person and ongoing, playing with people I already know (including my wife). We’ve played two short campaigns with this same group of people. Nate ran the first one, which took our characters halfway through third level in a largely home-brew campaign inspired by some published stuff. That one ended when my character died and everyone else just felt like trying new characters and a new person wanted to DM.
The second campaign was run by Bree (Nate’s wife) and consisted of several of the Chaos Scar adventures. That took our characters from first up to third level as well. We wrapped that one up this past Saturday, with Bree deciding to step down as DM because of her other time commitments. I had previously offered to try my hand at running the game if she didn’t have time, and she took me up on the offer.
So, here I am. I will definitely be using my projector rig and MapTool to run the games. I love the rig, and I love MapTool. The next question is, what campaign will I run?
I’m considering running War of the Burning Sky (WotBS) since I’m already familiar with it and I have lots of maps and monsters already built in MapTool (meaning easier prep for me). The complicating factor there is that this new campaign is going to start with the characters at level 5, and WotBS starts at level 1. This gives me a few options.
I definitely don’t like the first option – dropping them in the middle of the story. That just feels wrong. I’m torn between the second and third options. The second option wouldn’t be too hard. I already have maps for the encounters I want to run, and I would just have to create new monsters (or level up the ones that I have). I can do that… but I’m trying to decide how much fun that would be. I’d really like the in-person campaign to be more free-form than that.
I could run a different published adventure. More Chaos Scar? Maybe Scales of War? Those leave me feeling a little cold, frankly. Tomb of Horrors is interesting to me, but that’s for higher-level characters (hey, this group will level up eventually…).
If I don’t go with WotBS, I think I’m going full-on homebrew. I mentioned a few months ago that I discovered a complete adventure I had written (but never run) when I first tried D&D Third Edition a long time ago. It’s actually pretty well fleshed out with nice maps and everything, and I could probably use it for this game. I’d have to pick completely different monsters, of course, not just because this is a Fourth Edition game but also because I wrote the adventure for first-level characters. I can do that, though. That one adventure would probably last a couple of sessions, which would give me time to start planning ahead.
The more I think about it, the more I’m feeling like the homebrew option will be more fun. Of course, it will be a lot more work, too! What do you think? Go with what I know? Or go with the treasure from the past?