Category Archives: DM Lessons

Running my third homemade D&D4e adventure at the FLGS

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Woo hoo – I finally got to run the third adventure in my Staff of Suha trilogy tonight! (Adventure one and adventure two have been previously published.) I ran it as a MyRealms game at my friendly local game store. This was the inaugural run of the adventure, so it’s still a work in progress, but it was so much fun.

First, I should mention that my players were awesome. I had a father and son at the table whom I’ve played with before (I love multi-generational gaming families). I had a new player who was playing his third game of D&D ever – super nice guy.

And I had a husband and wife pair; I had met the husband a few weeks ago at D&D Encounters when he was a brand new player, and I managed to kill off his character in that first session. We’ve kept in touch, and his wife was excited about playing, too. The wife made homemade gluten-free cookies for me and my wife (who’s allergic to gluten) to thank me for helping with their characters and getting them into the game tonight. How sweet is that? I really, really like this couple, and I’m hoping that I’m making some new friends here.

Anyway, the adventure itself started off with a little exposition, then moved into the first action scene. I won’t go into too much detail here; I’ll put up a full post about the adventure itself once it’s polished (after I run it at Tacticon over Labor Day weekend). Suffice it to say that the first battle began with the PCs in total darkness. I forgot some of the abilities I had given to the leader of that fight, but it was still a good battle. Lots of PCs were bloodied, but none fell unconscious. The party interrogated the leader, who gave them some information but then died in anguish (he evidently said too much). And the party discovered one of the three artifacts they were seeking.

We had some exploration after that. This was technically a skill challenge, though I’m running it as several scenes that each have their own success and failure consequences. I really, really liked this approach, and the way that the PCs worked together. I’m getting farther away from the formal skill challenge structure and closer to just scenes that use skills. This particular challenge consists of three scenes, followed by a combat encounter, followed by the final scene.

The second combat encounter began with some sneaking and spying and conversation, but erupted into battle when the assassin in the party had to be true to his nature and took a swing at a bad guy.

I skipped the final skill challenge scene because we were running way short on time, and just threw the PCs into the final battle with fewer minions than I originally planned. I was pleased that the party took advantage of two different terrain effects in this battle, and even though I forgot about a mini skill challenge that was supposed to be running during the boss battle, it was a cool fight. The boss wasn’t quite as interesting as I had hoped, but he wasn’t bad.

Enemy lair with ziggurat and magma river - no grid

I ultimately had to end the battle early because the store was closing, so I declared victory for the PCs and called it a night.

Lessons learned:

  • I need to shrink some of the encounter maps. One map has some terrain effects that work in blast areas; an overly-large map encourages the monsters to spread out too much, making the terrain effects less attractive.
  • Minions that explode upon death are fun, but only in moderation. I think my second battle is overdoing it. Maybe I’ll make them non-minions and have fewer of them.
  • If I’m going to give the PCs cool magic items to use during the adventure, I don’t want it to be too hard for them to figure out what the items do. I think I’ll have this auto-succeed during a rest (I was previously requiring an Arcana check).
  • Players are easily tempted by treasure. If you dangle something valuable-looking just out of reach (literally, in this case), they will move heaven and earth to get it.
  • Having an in-game time limit does a nice job of ramping up the tension (and provides an incentive not to take back-to-back short rests to maximize healing powers).

I hope to run this adventure once for my home game players before Tacticon. Once I feel that it’s polished, I plan to release it on the blog, and then I plan to release the whole trilogy (edited and updated) as a single big adventure. I’d like to make it look a little bit pretty, too, and I’d be willing to pay for some help with layout and maybe even commission some artwork. Does anyone have suggestions on this sort of thing? How do I find and hire a freelance layout person?

GenCon 2011: Restless in Indy

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I’m attending my first GenCon this year, and since my company has some offices in Indianapolis (I live near Denver), I managed to convince them to buy me a plane ticket to come out here to work for a few days before the convention.

I arrived Monday afternoon and spent today (Tuesday) working. I’ll be working Wednesday through lunch time, and then I’ll be in full-on Con Mode!

For now, I’m antsy. I have this evening totally free, and I just can’t wait for the Con! I’ll be spending some time working on my next MyRealms adventure here on the computer in the hotel room, and I’m going to try to do some grocery shopping in advance of my wife’s arrival on Thursday (yay for wives who game!).

But I really wish I were surrounded by fellow gamers right now. I’m not even near the convention center – work is on the north side of town. Argh, the waiting!

At least I’m staying abreast of GenCon prep around the internet; I finally joined Twitter, largely so I could follow all of the cool GenCon info as it comes out. Sadly, the OnlineDM handle was already taken by a German tweeter who put up two posts a couple of years ago and seems to have not touched Twitter since. But if you want to follow me on Twitter, I’m @OnlineDM1.

Becoming “in-demand” as a DM

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Three independent incidents in the past few weeks have made me realize that, at least in my local D&D community, I’m becoming somewhat “in-demand” as a Dungeon Master.

First, the person who coordinates Living Forgotten Realms games at my local store asked me if I would be willing to DM a paragon-tier game for a charity event on July 30. Not the biggest deal in the world, I suppose, but I was flattered to be requested. After figuring out that I should have enough time to prep everything I need to prep, I agreed to run the game.

Second, the person who is coordinating D&D games for the Tacticon convention over Labor Day weekend asked if I would be willing to run an epic tier game (an all-day event) at the con. He did a good job of flattery on this one, making it clear that he was specifically approaching a small number of DMs who he thought could run a challenging adventure and make it fun for the players at a convention. Since I’m planning to iron man the convention anyway (running games for every slot), I agreed.

Third, the owner of the local store approached me yesterday about D&D Encounters. I’ve been running a table every other week at 5:00 PM (alternating with the excellent Andy), and the store owner wanted to know if I’d be willing to run a second table at 7:00 for the next few weeks, as there’s been a DM shortage. Sure, I can handle that.

In addition, the owner also asked if I’d be interested in running the next season of Encounters, seeking my input on how he should try to arrange things with dungeon masters. I really like running Encounters since I love introducing new players to the game and Encounters is an ideal way to do this. Unfortunately, Wednesday night is bowling night in the fall. My wife and I don’t have a lot of organized activities we do together, but bowling is one of them, and we have some good friends who bowl on Wednesdays, so I’ll probably have to decline.

However, I did offer my opinion that the best way to schedule DMs for Encounters is to have one DM assigned to each slot (5:00 PM table 1, 5:00 PM table 2, 7:00 PM table 1, 7:00 PM table 2) and then an alternate for each DM that the primary person can call on if they’re going to be out of town or too busy or whatever. While I couldn’t serve as a primary DM, I could probably be a 5:00 PM alternate (missing a week of bowling every now and then, or just showing up a little late). I appreciated being asked for my input.

I feel like I’m at a pretty good place right now with my dungeon mastering. My Friday night online game is going strong. Running D&D Encounters has been a lot of fun. I ran my Tallinn’s Tower adventure for LFR on Thursday (more to come on that later – I’m making some revisions based on feedback from the recent game) and will  be running the final adventure in my trilogy after GenCon.  And I’m really looking forward to three and a half days of non-stop dungeon mastering at TactiCon in a couple of months.

Going from being a total newbie as a dungeon master a year ago to the point where people are actually asking me to run events is a pretty good feeling!

I wish opportunity attacks would continue to matter

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Opportunity attacks can be hard for new players to understand. If you drop your guard by either walking away from a monster (rather than cautiously shifting a small distance) or doing certain things that take your attention elsewhere (making a ranged or area attack), the monster will get a free shot at you (a melee basic attack).

I like this rule. I can’t quite put my finger on why I like it, but I do. Maybe just force of habit, I suppose, but it feels “sensible” within the D&D world.

Thus, I’m a little bit annoyed by easy-to-access features of the game that shut off opportunity attacks. The biggest transgressors I’ve seen are Shadowdance and Shimmering Armor and the relatively new Staff Expertise feat.

Shadowdance Armor

Shadowdance Armor is available in cloth or leather, and it’s available as low as a 5th-level item. Now, it’s an uncommon, which means that the players only have access to it if the DM says so (thus, the DM can say, “Sorry, there’s no Shadowdance Armor in my game.”). It has a troublesome property in my mind:

“Your area and ranged attacks don’t provoke opportunity attacks.”

This is obviously a fantastic item for anyone who likes to make area or ranged attacks and doesn’t mind wearing cloth or leather armor. I think that would apply to lots of rangers, wizards, warlocks, sorcerers, etc.

The item annoys the heck out of me. If a PC uses a ranged or area power while standing next to a bad guy, unless they have something really cool about the power that makes it extra-defensive, the bad guy is going to get a free shot at them. Thus, they’ll need to figure out a way to get away from the baddie first, or maybe a way to make the free shot hurt (such as if the monster is marked by a defender) – or else just suffer the consequences. It’s part of the game, and I think it makes things more interesting.

Compare it in power level to the Razordark Bracers from Adventurer’s Vault 2 – a level 11 arms slot item for warlocks that says, “Your warlock at-will ranged attack powers don’t provoke opportunity attacks from adjacent enemies.” It only applies to warlock powers, it only applies to ranged powers (not area), it only applies to at-will powers (not encounter or daily) and it only applies to adjacent enemies (not farther-away foes with threatening reach). And that’s a level-11 item! I didn’t even mention that Shadowdance Armor also comes with a daily power (which, granted, I’ve not yet seen anyone use).

Shadowdance Armor is apparently from Seekers of the Ashen Crown, which is an Eberron adventure published in July 2009. I’ve never seen or played the adventure, and I don’t know how “integrated” it’s intended to be with the rest of the D&D world, but I’m comfortable saying that its armor just doesn’t exist in my universe in the future.

And for the character of Alayne in my Friday night campaign, don’t worry – she can keep her armor. Although I think it’s illustrative to note that when I theoretically bribed the warlock in my Friday night game with different leather armor that’s +4 instead of her current +2, she preferred to keep the Shadowdance. Yeah, it’s pretty optimal.

Shimmering Armor

Shimmering Armor is pretty much the same as Shadowdance, except that it’s only available in cloth and it doesn’t have the extra daily power. It’s available at 3rd level, and it’s from Adventurer’s Vault. I don’t like this one, either, though I’ll admit it’s a bit harder to justify it not existing in my world since it’s from a more core book like Adventurer’s Vault rather than a single adventure. Still, I can live with myself if I rule that it doesn’t exist.

Staff Expertise

Staff Expertise is the one that really bugs me now. This is one of the new expertise feats from Heroes of the Fallen Lands / Forgotten Kingdoms, and I generally love those feats. They add some flavor to a simple math bonus of a +1 to hit, and I’m a fan of that. Staff Expertise seems absurd to me, though. First of all, it gives +1 to the reach of your melee attacks. This isn’t going to come up all that often, but it will be nice every now and then.

Second, it gives you much the same benefit as Shadowdance or Shimmering Armor: your implement attacks made with a staff don’t provoke opportunity attacks.

Now, when I played a wizard as my first D&D 4th edition character (before the existence of Staff Expertise), he used a staff as an implement. I liked the idea that he could smack something if need be, and I liked the extra defense. But I know that lots of other wizards would use orbs or tomes or whatever.

Today, is there a reason for a spellcaster who CAN use the staff as an implement to use anything else? I think that making sure you never provoke an opportunity attack from casting a spell is a pretty huge incentive to be a staff wizard (unless you already have Shimmering Armor, I guess!).

Given that this one is a feat, it’s much more of a dick move for a DM to say, “Sorry, you can’t use this feat.” I’ll do it if I think it’s the right thing to do, but I feel guiltier about it. It’s right in the core Essentials books, after all.

Your thoughts

What do you think? Am I out of line for being annoyed with easy ways to prevent opportunity attacks? Am I wrong in thinking that these are no-brainer default choices for the appropriate character classes (if the DM allows them)? Are they TOO good?

Running an online game for new players

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I love it when a plan comes together. A couple of weeks ago I received a comment on my blog from a player who had never played a tabletop role-playing game before but who was interested in trying it out. Since I love to introduce new players to the hobby, I wanted to at least run one game for this prospective new player. So, I advertised here on the blog as well as over on EN World that I would be running a one-shot game for new players.

Getting this game set up went the way I originally expected setting up an online game to go when I first did it last July. For that game, I wanted five players so I recruited seven, figuring that a couple wouldn’t be able to make it. I ended up with eight. Oops.

This time I ended up recruiting six and only four were able to make it work (scheduling was problematic). That’s okay, though – four was plenty!

We gathered Friday evening on MapTool and Skype in the time slot that I normally run my long-running War of the Burning Sky campaign (my regular players were very understanding – thanks, guys!). I gave the new players some choice about what adventure we ran, and I ended up running a Living Forgotten Realms game – CORM 1-1 The Black Knight of Arabel (available here as part of a big archive file if you’re interested). This was, coincidentally, the first LFR game I had ever gone through as a player and one of the first I had run as a DM.

I specifically wanted to run an adventure I had run before in order to keep my prep time to a minimum (time was tight last week). Most of the prep time for this game went into getting the four PCs set up in MapTool. I did change the monsters in the adventure, too. First, I updated the damage expressions and defenses and everything to the post-Monster Manual 3 numbers. Second, since this particular adventure has the possibility of three fights with the same shadow creatures over and over, I mixed things up by bringing in some monsters from the Dark Legacy of Evard season of D&D Encounters that I’m running.

The group that gathered on Friday consisted of two new players (one of them in England – I somehow manage to attract players who are willing to play in the middle of the night!), one player who was rusty, and one player who at least hadn’t played online before (but he was looking for a game and I needed the fourth player to fill out the party). We had some minor technical difficulties at first, but soon enough we were all on MapTool.

I had created characters for the two new players based on descriptions they gave me – a tiefling cleric and a half-orc barbarian. The more experienced players created their own characters – an elf mage and a goliath warden. I started with some basics about how the MapTool program works and how the rules of the game work for the new players, and then we dove in.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BLACK KNIGHT OF ARABEL

The adventure began with the party on their way to Arabel to investigate reports of a black rider and shadow creatures. Near nightfall the party was approaching the city and came upon a wagon driver frantically trying to repair a wagon wheel before darkness came. The party offered to help, but just then the sun dipped below the horizon and some shadow creatures emerged. A battle ensued, using the Shadow Hulk and Shadow Seeker from the adventure, but using the Leeching Shadows from Dark Legacy of Evard instead of the Shadow Motes that were written. The fight was a little intense and the cleric ended up unconscious at the end, but the party stabilized her. They had seen the dark rider on a ridge in the distance during the fight and decided to go after him.

At this point, the party started tracking the rider through the woods and came to a steep downhill slope that was tricky for their horses. The barbarian ended up basically carrying his horse and then the cleric’s horse down the slope. It was awesome.

When the group came upon the rider’s horse, dead from shadow attacks, they started suspecting that the dark figure wasn’t commanding the shadow creatures after all. Eventually they found the dark creature and talked to him rather than fought. They learned that he was an exiled knight and that he was trying to fight the shadows, but that the townspeople thought he was commanding them. He also mentioned that his father had cursed him to an evil god. The PCs teamed up with him and tried to clear his name.

Next came a trip into town to confront his father, who wasn’t at his pub – but this didn’t stop the barbarian and the warden from starting a bar fight! I decided to roll with it and threw some brawlers at them. They fought for a couple of rounds and prevailed easily. Of course, they had to skedaddle because the barmaid went to fetch the guards (they DID start the fight, after all).

Ultimately, the group ended up at the theater where the cult of the evil god was meeting. They convinced the cultists (confused townspeople) that the cult leader was leading them astray as he wanted to sacrifice a baby to the evil god. The cultists left, leaving the party to fight the leader and more shadow creatures. This time I did use the original Shadow Motes but I paired them with the Dusk Beasts from Dark Legacy of Evard.

This ended up being an awesome battle, ranging all over the place. The mage used Mage Hand to pluck the baby off the altar, but the Dusk Beasts knocked him unconscious. The barbarian started raging and charging all over the place, twice getting knocked down to just one hit point. The cleric eventually grabbed the baby and took it up into a balcony for safekeeping, whereupon the warden smashed the ladder to the balcony to keep the cult leader from getting to it. Lots of damage, lots of heroism… it was a great fight, and the good guys just barely pulled it out in the end.

Everyone had a fun time, and I’m happy to say that one of the players has volunteered to DM the group through an ongoing campaign. Success!

This “game for new players” is something I would love to do on a regular basis, maybe once every few months. So, if you’re reading this post and are interested in learning to play D&D via an online game, drop me a line!

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!

A player character turns to the dark side

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I had an interesting session in the online D&D 4th Edition game I was running this evening. This is my main online campaign of the War of the Burning Sky that I’ve been running using MapTool and Skype most Friday nights since last July. It’s a great group of people, and tonight we had the whole group – the original five players plus the two new players we added over time when some of the original folks were unavailable.

The interesting part of the session was about a character who really didn’t get to do much during the session tonight. Fudrick the Gnome started off the campaign as a Shaman, but it became clear to Fudrick’s player at some point that Fudrick was really a darker character. So, when we hit someplace around level 9 and were reshuffling the lineup of players, I offered everyone the chance to significantly change their characters if they wished, and Fudrick decided to become a dark pact Warlock.

This was fine. Fudrick wasn’t evil exactly, but perhaps a bit more ethically flexible than the rest of the party. Hilarity ensued when the two new characters in the campaign were both lawful good and had to put up with Fudrick.

Fast forward to our previous session. The party was in a big city and had an audience with the king, after which they were taunted by the ambassador from their enemy country. Fudrick decided that he wanted to try to infiltrate the embassy from this enemy country, Ragesia, so he paid them a visit. No one was home when he first knocked, but he came back later, alone, and was invited inside.

He convinced the Ragesian ambassador that he wanted to switch sides, and so the ambassador had him go through some dark initiation rituals involving blood and chanting and so on (I think I did a pretty good job of improvising that part). He was welcomed into the fold and went to bed in the embassy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party was attacked in their inn during the night by non-Ragesians and were more or less forced to flee the city. They made a rescue mission first, though – go get Fudrick. Some awesome stealth on the part of the naturally sneaky tiefling and naturally not-so-sneaky minotaur led the two of them to Fudrick’s room. They woke Fudrick up and got his stuff and started heading downstairs… whereupon Fudrick flubbed a Stealth check badly.

The three of them heard the bad guys stirring upstairs and decided to run. But then Fudrick decided to try a bluff – he wanted the bad guys to think he was on their side and chasing off intruders, so he yelled out that there were intruders in the house and took a shot at the tiefling and minotaur, intentionally missing – but bluffing well enough that the tiefling and minotaur (and the bad guys) believed he was really trying to kill them. They left, and the party left the city, with Fudrick in the welcoming arms of the bad guys. He’s an NPC now.

To be clear, I’m not punishing Fudrick’s player or anything like that. I talked to him between sessions to see how he wanted things to go, and he basically wanted to go with the flow. It was his decision during this session to bluff the bad guys into thinking he was still with them, having his allies run away. And he’s not necessarily a lost cause, either – after all, he’s ostensibly a double agent. But there’s that ritual and oath that he underwent…

In the end, Fudrick’s player will be creating another character to join the party, and Fudrick has the potential to become an interesting villain (with his alter ego provided by an accidental typo from another player, FUDKIRC). I didn’t expect the campaign to go in quite this direction, but I’m completely fine with it.

Have you had any experiences with PCs joining the bad guys? How did you handle it when it came up?

Minion critical hits

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Somehow, I keep coming back to minions as a blog topic. I first talked about my love for two-hit minions, then later embraced the idea of using hordes of one-hit minions.

Today’s topic is a simple one: What happens when a minion scores a critical hit?

A normal monster gets to deal maximum damage on a critical hit (and you’ll occasionally see one that gets extra damage on top of that). Most minions, however, deal static damage (if they hit, they deal a flat 5 damage or something like that). What happens when they score a crit?

Well, technically speaking nothing happens when a minion scores a crit. They deal their regular old damage. But I feel like a critical hit (a natural 20 on the attack die for those who are confused by the terminology) is something special and should be more interesting (and deadly) than a normal hit.

For a while, my answer was for minions to deal double damage on a critical hit. If they normally hit for 5, a crit deals 10 damage, and so on. That works just fine, frankly, and makes minions a little more scary. I recommend doing something like this.

However, I’ve just started experimenting with a slightly different approach, thanks to the way I program my monsters in MapTool. My typical monster attack macro is as follows:

[h: AttackName="SingleTarget"]
[h: AttackBonus=0]
[h: Defense="AC"]
[h: NumDice=1]
[h: DamageDie=6]
[h: DamageBonus=0]
[h: DamageString="damage."]

[h: Enh=0]
[h: CritDamageDie=0]

[h: DamageRoll=roll(NumDice,DamageDie)]
[h: d20roll=d20]
[h, if(CritDamageDie > 0), CODE: 
 { [CritBonus=roll(Enh,CritDamageDie)]  }; 
 { [CritBonus=0] }
]

[h: AttackRoll=d20roll+AttackBonus]
[h: MaxDamage=NumDice*DamageDie+DamageBonus+CritBonus]
[h: RegularDamage=DamageRoll+DamageBonus]

<b>[AttackName]</b><br>
Attack: [d20roll] + [AttackBonus] = <b>[AttackRoll]</b> versus [Defense]<br>
[if(d20roll==20), CODE:
  {<font color=Red>--CRITICAL HIT--</font><br>
    Hit: [NumDice*DamageDie] + [DamageBonus] + [CritBonus] = <b>[MaxDamage]</b> [DamageString]
  };
  {Hit: [DamageRoll] + [DamageBonus] = <b>[RegularDamage]</b> [DamageString]}
]

For most monster attacks, I only edit the first seven lines (the attack name, attack bonus, defense it attacks, damage die, number of damage dice to roll, the damage bonus, and the accompanying text for a hit). For minions, I would usually edit this heavily to remove all of the business about damage dice and damage bonuses and just type the numbers into the bottom of my macro in the Hit line.

Then I realized I could save myself some trouble with minion attacks by setting the number of damage dice to zero and the damage bonus to the static damage. If you roll zero d6 and add 5, you always get 5 damage. Much easier!

The problem: Now I had no way to deal extra damage on a critical hit. However, my damage macro does allow for bonus damage on a crit – set Enh (equivalent to the enhancement on a magic weapon) to however many bonus crit dice the monster gets and set the CritDamageDie appropriately. Here, I stumbled across my new minion crit rule by setting Enh to 1 and CritDamageDie to the amount of static damage that the monster normally deals.

My new minion crit rule is that, if a normal hit deals X damage, a critical hit deals X + 1dX damage. So, a minion that normally deals 5 damage will deal 5 + 1d5 damage on a hit (somewhere between 6 and 10 total damage). Naturally, we don’t have 5 or 7 sided dice in the real world, but MapTool has no problem with this.

What do you think? Is it worth it to make minions deal extra damage on a critical hit? Is doubling their static damage on a crit too vicious? What about this new approach I’m toying with?

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.

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…