Category Archives: Advice/Tools

One-page character sheet from the online Character Builder

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I’m at peace with the online Character Builder. I appreciate that it has the content that’s been released since the middle of last year – that’s its main benefit. However, it’s not as good as the old downloadable Character Builder in several important ways:

  • You have to be online to use it (so you can’t use it on an airplane, for instance)
  • You can only save 20 characters at a time before you have to start exporting and deleting them
  • There’s no house rule capability
  • You can’t customize your character sheet

I can live with the first three, but the last one has really been getting on my nerves. So, I spent a little time today hacking the character sheet for my newly 5th-level Elf Hunter, Greenleaf.

The original character sheet spanned six pages – three pages of information about Greenleaf and three pages of power cards (including magic items). There is so much wasted space in those first three pages, and so many extraneous power cards in the last three. So, I decided to create a custom version the hard way:

I used Photoshop. (Well, Photoshop Elements.)

First, I used CutePDF to print the character sheet from the Character Builder to a PDF file (I always do this for character sheets – I never print directly from the Builder).

Next, I opened up the PDF in Photoshop Elements, which gave me six separate image files.

After that, the copying and pasting began. I took the elements that I wanted from the first three pages and copied them all onto one page. I also copied and pasted the power sections of a few of my magic items onto that page as well (potion of healing, flaming longbow, shadowdance armor).

For the power cards, I really only needed nine of them so I copied and pasted until I had just the nine I wanted.

The final step was to create a multi-page PDF in Photoshop Elements. I went to the first page image and clicked Edit -> Add blank page. This brought up a message that the file would be converted to a Photo Creation Project (PSE), which is fine. I coped the power cards to that new page and saved the file as a two-page PDF.

Before (PDF version):

After (PDF version):

Now, I freely admit that this would be a pain in the butt to update whenever the character sheet changes, so I don’t think I’m likely to take the time to keep recreating it every time I play a new session. But I MIGHT be willing to modify it when I level up, since I now have a template to use – I can just copy and paste the new bits into their places in the template.

All of this is a long way of saying: Wizards of the Coast, PLEASE give us back the ability to customize our character sheets in the new Character Builder! I don’t want to reprint six pages when I only really need three. Thank you!

Critting a minion

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Yesterday’s post talked about what happens when a minion scores a critical hit on a PC. When I shared this on EN World, one of the commenters, Quickleaf, mentioned that the title of the EN World thread made him think I was going to be talking about what happens when a PC scores a critical hit on a minion.

What a fine idea!

As with minions scoring critical hits, there’s nothing in the rules to say that anything special happens when a player scores a critical hit on a minion. If you crit a minion, well, that’s a wasted crit (unless your character gets some kind of special benefit every time you score a crit, which some do). That’s kind of a disappointing feeling, and I think that scoring a critical hit shouldn’t lead to disappointment.

Another poster on EN World, FireLance, posted some cool critical hit table ideas that could apply any time a PC rolls a crit, not just when it’s against a minion. The ideas I came up with specifically for critting a minion are below.

Proposal 1: Crit a minion, gain an extra standard action

I like the idea of this house rule because it lets you “get back” the attack that you “wasted” on the minion. Sure, you wasted your rare crit on a creature that would have died if you had dealt minimum damage, but now you get to attack something else.

If I were to use this house rule, I would only have it apply to critical hits on minions where the minion was the only target of the attack. If you drop an area of effect on a bunch of minions and crit one of them, I’m not going to grant another standard action just because one of your five rolls came up as a 20. However…

Proposal 2: Crit a minion, kill another minion

I like this idea a lot, frankly. If your attack has enough oomph to kill one minion with extra oomph to spare, why not take out another one? Obviously, this is only plausible if you’re doing an area of effect attack where some minions were missed, or if it’s a melee attack with another minion nearby. I suppose you could argue that a critical hit with a ranged attack could go straight through one minion and hit another

Proposal 3: Crit a minion, get a future benefit

Here, I’m thinking that you feel so good about yourself from utterly destroying that minion that you get a +2 confidence bonus to your next attack roll, or maybe 3 temporary hit points or something like that.

Proposal 4: Crit a minion, turn your next hit into a crit

This one attempts to balance out the universe for you. You wasted your crit on that minion, so we’ll call the next hit you get on a non-minion a critical hit. Seems a little overpowered to me, but I can follow the logic.

Proposal 5: Crit a minion, recharge something

Here, you either get back an action point or an encounter power (certainly not a daily). From a balance perspective it’s probably okay, but the flavor doesn’t really work for me.

Summary

If I were to adopt a “crit a minion” bonus rule, I’d go with a combination of proposals 1 and 2. The theme should be that critting one minion counts as knocking off two of them, but if there’s no other minion available to go after, I’d still like there to be some benefit.

In the end, I like the idea of players getting to feel awesome when that 5% chance of a crit comes to fruition. Wasting the critical hit on a minion takes some of the fun out of it, so I’m going to try to make it worthwhile somehow. What do you think makes the most sense, if anything?

MapTool – updated and new macros

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I’ve spent a little time bringing the macros on my web site up to date with the latest versions that I’m using in my own games. You can see all of my macro code here.

A few changes of note:

  • Healing macro for PCs now handles healing surges and non-surge healing in one macro
  • Properties have been updated so that daily power tracking works properly (fun fact; having a property called D4 instead of Daily4 creates problems in a program that recognizes D4 as a four-sided die)
  • Added code to allow for encounter, X-times-per-encounter (such as Healing Word) and daily power tracking
  • Added macros for toggling states such as Dazed, Marked, etc.
  • Added short rest, extended rest, death saving throw and second wind macros
  • Revamped monster properties so that the items that need to be set manually are all grouped together (this makes for faster monster token creation)

I also realized that my list of macros on that page was getting insanely long, so I created an index at the top of the page that will let you jump directly to whatever macro you’re looking for. For convenience’s sake, I’ve reproduced that list below.

If there are any MapTool macros that you’re looking for but that you don’t see here, please let me know – I’m always looking for excuses to write new macros!

Links to individual macros:

Auras in MapTool

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When using MapTool to run Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition games, it’s useful to be able to show the players that a monster has an aura and which squares are and are not in that aura. Yes, MapTool can handle that!

The trick is to use lighting. I’ll admit that I don’t take advantage of the powerful lighting and vision blocking layer capabilities of MapTool; I just reveal the map as the party moves through an area by removing the fog of war manually. However, I don’t completely ignore lighting any more, now that I’ve discovered its uses in creating visible, color-coded auras for monsters (or PCs, but that’s rarer in my games).

To set up auras, go to Edit – Campaign Properties, and then navigate to the Light tab. Unless you plan to use the default light sources in your game, such as the candle or the torch, you can delete everything that’s here and replace it with auras.

I’ve set up three categories of auras – red, green and blue. To set up a category that will appear on the Light Source menu that pops up when you right-click on a token, enter a line of text for the category name, followed by a line of four dashes:

Auras - Red
----

Beneath the line of dashes, you can list your auras. The format is:

Aura name: aura square RadiusValue#HexCodeForColor

The aura name comes first, followed by a colon. Next, put the word “aura” to let the game know that this is just an effect that floats around the token rather than an actual light source that will reveal darkened sections of the map (if you’re using lighting in your game).

Next comes the word “square” to let MapTool know that this is a square aura (standard for D&D4e auras). Other possibilities include “circle” and “cone” but those aren’t going to come up in D&D4e.

Next comes the aura’s radius, measured in squares. The shortcut is to take the number of squares of the aura and add 0.5, so an Aura 2 would have a radius of 2.5. This is because an aura 2 is a 5 square by 5 square area, the radius of which is 2.5 squares.

Finally comes the hexadecimal code for the aura’s color (with no space between the radius and the hex code). I won’t go into the details of hexadecimal color codes as it’s not really my area of expertise (a better resource is here), but in a nutshell it starts with the pound sign “#” and then has two characters for the amount of red you want in the color, then two characters for the amount of green, then two characters for the amount of blue. The values for each color range from a low of 00 to a high of ff (hexadecimal is a base 16 system, and f is 16 – so ff is 255, since the counting starts at 0). Pure red is #ff0000, pure green is #00ff00 and pure blue is #0000ff. See this site for more options.

You can also add the “GM” option just before the radius if you only want the aura to be visible to the person running the game.

For my game, I have fifteen auras set up by default: red, green and blue, each ranging from an aura 1 to an aura 5. The code looks like this:

Auras - Green
----
Aura green 1 : aura square 1.5#00ff00
Aura green 2 : aura square 2.5#00ff00
Aura green 3 : aura square 3.5#00ff00
Aura green 4 : aura square 4.5#00ff00
Aura green 5 : aura square 5.5#00ff00 

Auras - Red
----
Aura red 1 : aura square 1.5#ff0000
Aura red 2 : aura square 2.5#ff0000
Aura red 3 : aura square 3.5#ff0000
Aura red 4 : aura square 4.5#ff0000
Aura red 5 : aura square 5.5#ff0000 

Auras - Blue
----
Aura blue 1 : aura square 1.5#0000ff
Aura blue 2 : aura square 2.5#0000ff
Aura blue 3 : aura square 3.5#0000ff
Aura blue 4 : aura square 4.5#0000ff
Aura blue 5 : aura square 5.5#0000ff

And if you want some GM auras, you can make them like so:

Auras - GM Only
----
Aura GM blue 1 : aura square GM 1.5#0000ff
Aura GM red 2 : aura square GM 2.5#ff0000

To give a creature an aura, right click on the token and go to Light Source. Find the aura you want and click on it. Note that you can give a token multiple auras if you want to.

As for auras in action, they look something like this.

A bullywug with a blue aura 2, a kruthik with a red aura 1 and an orc with a green aura 5

I hope you find this helpful. As always, if you have any MapTool questions, please ask! I love discovering the answers.

Embracing normal, one-hit minions

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When I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition about a year ago, I read all the rules and understood how minions worked. You hit them with any damage (except damage that happens on a miss), and they die. I saw them in action and thought, okay. They’re fine.

Then in my first Living Forgotten Realms game as a player, I saw that the DM was using two-hit minions, and I liked it. I ended up moving this direction myself as a DM – one hit bloodies the minion, and the second hit kills it. My only tweak to the process, which I blogged about, was that anything extra special – a critical hit, striker bonus damage, vulnerability to the damage type, et cetera, would still drop it in one hit.

My logic was that one-hit minions were boring. They showed up, they died. Sure, you get to throw four bad guys on the board instead of one, but they just didn’t seem to have any IMPACT on the battle. Two-hit minions felt like they mattered more.

Well, I’ve since changed my tune. I think the turning point came when I was listening to one of the Wizards of the Coast D&D podcasts, I believe from the DDXP convention, and Chris Perkins (Dungeon Master to the Stars, you know) talked about the way he’ll literally throw DOZENS of minions onto the table for his players to mow down.

This intrigued me. Regular minions didn’t really seem to matter for a combat, but that’s because I was using five or six. What if instead I used, say ten or twelve – or twenty?

I decided to try it. And you know what? I like it – a lot! Having gigantic waves of bad guys come screaming at you, only to be mowed down by your party’s controller is actually pretty cool, from both sides of the DM screen. The players get to feel awesome, and the DM gets to feel like he’s presenting a real threat that can be dealt with quickly.

Also, I think that players were getting sick of the two-hit minions. It was novel when I first started using it, but I think it got a little old. “I hit that pathetic little loser with my big bad heroism – he should be dead now! I have to do it again? Sigh…” A bunch of one-hit minions were a breath of fresh air.

So, my new philosophy on minions is, the more the merrier! I think my problem was that I was taking the D&D4e guidelines at face value and treating a minion as 1/4 of a real monster. I think the true value is more like 1/8. If I double the NUMBER of minions rather than doubling the number of HITS it takes to kill them, they’re more fun.

My suggestions:

  • Stick with the “one hit kills the minion” rule (in general – two hits might make sense from time to time)
  • Use a greater number of minions than the official guidelines would suggest
  • Try having the minions come in waves – some show up at the beginning of battle, and then some more rush in during round two, perhaps
  • Be careful if you don’t have PCs capable of multi-target attacks; a horde of baddies will be a slog against parties that can only hit one creature at a time.

Free D&D4e Adventure: The Staff of Suha (aka The Stolen Staff)

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Edit 9/8/2011: I’ve updated this adventure; the new version is called The Stolen Staff, but it’s the same adventure. You can find more about it with updated maps at this link.

 

At Genghis Con this past weekend, I ran two Living Forgotten Realms games. One of them was a MyRealms game that was an adaptation of a non-Realms home game I had run a few months ago. The updated version ended up being a lot of fun to run, so I’ve cleaned it up and posted it here as an ordinary adventure for the world to use.

Download the full adventure here.

The adventure is called the Staff of Suha (edit: now The Stolen Staff). It’s a pretty straightforward delve, aimed at characters of around 5th level (give or take a level or two).

The party is summoned to the manor home of a minor noble named Charles Suha for a job. Charles explains that a family heirloom, the titular staff, was stolen three nights ago by what appeared to be a band of orcs. He asks the party to track the orcs down and recover the staff. Doing so requires that the PCs infiltrate the orc stronghold and fight their leader, Grak.

The PDF above has all of the details of the adventure, monsters, maps, etc. If you want bigger maps for use in a game table program, those are below. And if you want the MapTool file that I used to actually run the game, you can download that here (note that it is built using MapTool version 1.3b66).

I’d really appreciate feedback on this adventure. I’ve never shared a complete adventure before, and I’m curious to see what other people think. Any feedback, positive or negative, is very welcome.

And if you end up actually USING this adventure, please tell me how it goes at your table!

Overview map

Guard tower / Garbage pit

Temple

Grak’s Chamber

It’s the people that matter, not the system

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I’ve just come home from day 2 of Genghis Con 2011. Day 1 (Thursday evening) I played a game of Savage Worlds – my first non D&D role-playing game. Today I played a game of D&D 4e Living Forgotten Realms, a GURPS game and a Call of Cthulhu game. I intentionally decided that, with this con, I wanted to broaden my RPG horizons.

So far, the only game that hasn’t been much fun was the LFR game, but I know it’s not because of the system – I’ve enjoyed lots and lots of D&D 4e games before. It’s just that the DM wasn’t that great – not too prepared, running skill challenges in a very dice-rolling way rather than a role-playing way, not being especially creative with monster behavior, etc.

The Savage Worlds game was set in a sort of magical steampunk Victorian era. Our characters were basically trying out to be in something like the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. We got to rescue Ada Lovelace and some other people from horrible alien egg implantation. The system was pretty easy to follow once I got the hang of it (a variety of dice come into play, with exploding die rolls). My character had the ability to turn into a huge wolf, and his main “disadvantage” was heroism – he would throw himself in harm’s way, with no attention to his own safety. That was fun to role-play.

GURPS was fun in a different way. Again, the mechanic was simple – roll 3d6 and try to get below your skill number. The GM was running us through a crazy kung-fu movie adventure, and the characteristics that we all had were plenty to give us a ton of role-playing opportunities. We had a sexy lady, a dirty cop, a drunk, a naive butt-kicker, and my character – an African with crazy luck, a stutter and a crippling fear of blood. Once we started discovering boxes of machine guns and explosives (thanks in part to my character’s Serendipity), things went nutty. I wouldn’t want to play like this all the time, but the GM had done a great job of creating interesting characters that were easy to get into.

Call of Cthulhu, much to my surprise, was way cool. I’m not really a horror / Lovecraft fan in general, but I was completely open to trying a game where it’s quite likely that everyone in the party will either go insane or die. I’m proud to say that, right at the end of the session, my character did both! This game mostly uses percentile dice, where you try to roll below a target number. I consistently rolled high on sanity checks, which meant that I kept losing sanity. When I got to the point that my character had to spend three hours nearly crippled by bacteriophobia, I think I really stepped up as a role-player. The whole group was well-developed, and even though we ended up “losing” in the end, I think we were very true to what our characters would do (even if it wasn’t heroic).

What’s the common thread? All of the fun games had great game masters and players, all of whom were enthusiastic about the game. I think maybe a game like D&D4e will be less consistently good with public games because there are so many people who play it, not all of whom are big RPG enthusiasts and not all of whom are really skilled at running and playing great games. With niche RPGs, only the people who are really into the game are playing it, which means that it’s more likely that you’ll have a great group of players and an awesome game master. It’s not that the system is better – it’s just that the random distribution of people is better.

As long as you have great people to play with, it doesn’t really matter what game you’re playing – you’ll have a good time.

Add a new player, and the adventure moves on

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As I mentioned in my last post, we recently bade farewell to one of the five players who had been in our online War of the Burning Sky campaign since its inception last summer. The player behind Thorfin the dwarven fighter was moving to a time zone that would make it impossible for him to continue with the group, so we needed to find a new addition.

I advertised the open spot here on the blog and over on EN World (where the group originally started). I quickly had one player express interest from the EN World post. He asked about the campaign and the rest of the party, and he soon created a new human fighter, Dorian, complete with a back story that would fit into the game world. He was the first to respond and therefore would have first crack at joining our group. We had to take the next Friday off as I was traveling for work, but we agreed that Dorian could join up for our game last night.

In the mean time, I was contacted by three other people. One was not a good fit, and the other two are on the “waiting list” effectively.

I’m happy to say, though, that it looks like Dorian the human fighter will work out just fine. We got together yesterday evening for our usual game, with three of the four pre-existing characters plus Dorian. I sent the party on a bit of a side quest, just in case things didn’t work out – I didn’t want things to be too plot-heavy if the character who had joined wouldn’t be there in the future.

We did start with some role-playing. The party was invited to try out for an acting troupe. One was flat-out rejected. One was accepted for a small role. One made it onto the stage crew. And an NPC that had been traveling with the party for a little while won a spot in a lead role (she’ll be leaving the party now).

After the audition, the group was contacted by an NPC who had previously traveled with the party. She had taken up with a half-elf woman who was trying to smooth over religious strife among various groups of refugees by starting a pan-theistic temple. The written adventure lays out a skill challenge to talk to the various religious groups to get them to agree to put aside their differences, and we still may run that (though this is a group of non-religious PCs – no divine characters – so I’m guessing we’ll skip it). However, the adventure doesn’t talk about a physical temple building, so I saw an opportunity for a side quest.

The PCs were asked to rid this forgotten temple of the undead monsters who had taken up refuge there. Straightforward battle premise – destroy the undead. I used a map I found online (I was in a hurry) and populated it with a variety of monsters. One monster I chose was the ghast – a monster the party had fought many levels ago, and I was delighted to see them remember the beast with dread.

Since this would be a two-combat day, I ramped up the challenge level, and I think I hit it just about right. The first fight left one PC unconscious at one point and everybody bloodied. The second was less brutal but more fun (the skeleton lord they fought was surprisingly fun to play).

So, it looks like our table is full once more – huzzah! Now I just have to figure out how to handle the fact that the leader in the party wants to switch to playing a striker…

Meet the Monster Vault solo

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I’m writing this post at the urging of two of the players in my Friday night online game in the War of the Burning Sky campaign. That’s unusual – I’ve never had someone tell me, “I can’t wait to see what you write on your blog about this!” but that’s exactly what happened this evening.

Well, I hate to disappoint my players – and I loved the solo I used from the Monster Vault tonight, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Lots of people have written elsewhere that solo monsters from the Monster Vault are vicious and exciting, and I have to say that I agree. My players had a run-in with a slightly modified Young Blue Dragon – a level 6 solo artillery creature. Since my party consisted of four level 8 characters, I nudged the dragon up toward level 7 (raising the defenses and attacks by a point or two, as I saw appropriate). I left its hit points alone, though. Also, since the encounter with the dragon was taking place in a semi-submerged temple, I gave it a swim speed equal to its fly speed.

I also threw two Stormlizards (level 9 brutes) into the mix. The encounter began with the party seeing the Stormlizards coming out of a hole in the temple floor. The dragon was sleeping farther down in the hole, and I intentionally gave it an initiative at the bottom of the first round. The Stormlizards emerged, the PCs set up their strategy and positioning for fighting them…

And then the dragon emerged.

This was the first solo my party has faced, and they’re at level 8 now. I wanted this to be special, and it was. The things that I especially loved about this monster were:

  • It gets an instinctive action at 10 plus its initiative roll, which lets it move its speed and make an area burst 2 attack. If it’s dazed or stunned and can’t make that attack, it instead shakes off the condition.
  • Both its breath weapon and its at-will lightning burst (area burst 2) deal lots of damage on a hit and half damage on a miss. They also target reflex, which was a scary surprise for my AC-heavy defenders.
  • When it becomes bloodied, it becomes scarier. It recharges and uses its breath weapon, and it develops an aura that deals lightning damage to anyone who ends their turn in the aura. Nasty.

The fight would have been easier if the dwarf fighter in the party would have been able to get to the dragon and mark it earlier, but he was stuck dealing with the Stormlizards. This initially left just our warlock and our shaman to face the dragon, and they were quickly bloodied.

I had a few simple terrain features in this encounter as well. I hand-waved the difficult terrain for the waist-deep water in the chamber – I didn’t want everyone moving at half speed throughout the battle. I included an altar that PCs could climb on for an attack bonus. I also had the dragon’s chamber include a magic fountain, which had long since stopped running, that contained two doses of magic water that would fully restore HP and shake off any negative conditions. My PCs used up both doses during the battle (and ironically didn’t get attacked again after that).

This was probably the most challenging fight my party has faced in eight full levels of play, and I think we all enjoyed it. The dragon fought hard – he was out to kill the PCs – but the heroes fought back harder. Winning was in doubt right until the end, and the party definitely considered fleeing. Victory was hard-earned and sweet.

In short, I really like my experiences with Monster Vault solos so far.

Post Script – farewell Thorfin!

This was the last session for the player who runs Thorfin, our dwarf fighter. He’s taking a job on the other side of the world that’s going to make it impossible for his schedule to line up with the rest of the gang for gaming, and we’re all sad to see him go. I tried to send him out in a blaze of glory by killing Thorfin off tonight, but the heroes wouldn’t be denied. Thorfin lives to fight another day, just in case our friend returns in the future.

And on that note, we now have an opening for one more player in our Friday night MapTool game in War of the Burning Sky. We could really use another defender. If you’re interested in joining the game, drop me a line at onlinedungeonmaster@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.

Length of 4e combat – Decision time, not calculation time

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Geek Ken has a post over at This is My Game today talking about an idea for speeding up combat. He suggests doing away with rolling dice for damage and instead having fixed damage for each attack with some variety for crits, near-crits and barely-hits. The variety sounds like fun, but as I commented on that post, I don’t think the time it takes to roll and add up damage adds much to the problem of long combats.

What slows down combat is the time it takes to make decisions.

When I first started my Friday night online campaign in August 2010 with first-level characters, combat seemed to move at a pretty good pace. Lately, I’ve noticed that we’ve had some battles that have taken two hours to finish.

What has changed? The PCs are now eighth level rather than first level, and they have a lot more powers to choose from each turn. They have more interrupts on one another’s turns. They have magic item abilities to think about.

It’s probably also true that I haven’t had quite as much time to prepare for sessions as I did back in August, so maybe I’m fumbling around a little more on the bad guys’ turns. But I think I fumbled around back then, too, because I was a new DM. The time it takes me to run the monsters’ turns now is probably similar to what it was back then.

One of the reasons I’m so confident that it’s about decision-making time rather than mechanical time to roll and add dice is that we use MapTool macros that automatically handle the rolling and adding. When the fighter decides to use Crushing Surge, he clicks one button and the attack roll and damage roll show up for all to see, with the math done. Even if he’s rolling 12 dice for damage, it takes no longer than a single die.

What to do about this? Well, I don’t really know. Suggestions to streamline the math of combat won’t help me, since the computer is handling that part. Could I raise monster damage and lower monster hit points/defenses? That’s a possibility. I can have monsters flee or surrender when the fight is clearly lost (and I do that where appropriate).

In the end, it takes time for players to decide what they want to do on their turn. I have great players, and they pay attention and keep their heads in the game. They just have a lot of options at their disposal, and they enjoy the process of making the best decision on their turn. That’s the fun of a game that’s tactics-heavy, and I don’t want to take that away from the players. But it sure does take a long time!