Category Archives: DM Lessons

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!

Bonus points – reward your players for awesomeness

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I like it when players in my D&D games do awesome things. Being an economist by training, I know that incentives matter. Therefore, if I want my players to do more awesome things in our games, I should give them an incentive to do so.

Enter Bonus Points.

Whenever a player in one of my games does something that, in my opinion, is awesome, I will give them a bonus point. They can save these points over time or spend them as they get them.

The rules for bonus points are simple (and open to DM reinterpretation on the fly). A player can spend a bonus point at any time (no action required) to add one to a die they’ve just rolled or to subtract one from a die that was just rolled against them.  Common uses of bonus points include:

  • Turning a miss into a hit
  • Turning a 19 on the die into a critical hit
  • Turning a 19 on a death save into the spending of a healing surge
  • Turning a failed skill check into a success
  • Making an attack that just hit you miss instead

If a player wants to do something that would stretch the rules a little too much, I might also allow them to spend a bonus point to make it work.

For my online game, bonus points are just another property on the PC’s token.  Players have a button on their tokens to spend bonus points, and I manually add them as needed.

For my in-person games, I created tokens following NewbieDM’s method (even using his bonus point images) of gluing printed one-inch circles of photo paper onto metal fender washers.

So, what earns a player a bonus point?  Whatever I feel deserves an extra reward.  Some situations in which I’ve given out bonus points include:

  • A party of new players completing a quest (just to make them feel good about their accomplishment and to get some point tokens in their hands)
  • A PC approaching a room full of archers behind arrow slits by teleporting through the slits into their midst, all by his lonesome
  • A PC avoiding the bottleneck of climbing down the narrow stairs into the bandits’ hideout by doing a Dungeoneering check to look for loose floorboards and then hacking a new entrance to the underground lair through the floor of the room above
  • A PC deciding to play Robin Hood when confronted with an NPC who was price-gouging poor refugees, thus derailing the adventure for a while as I put together an impromptu map of the NPC’s home with guards and a treasure chamber (this escapade was worth two bonus points!)
  • A PC surrounded by bad guys telling the wizard in the party to go ahead and shoot the whole area – he’d be fine! – at which point the wizard promptly critted that PC while missing all of the enemies

Basically, whenever my players do something cool that breaks from the standard mold of, “Let’s see, my optimal tactical position is here so that I can use this particular power and try to push the bad guy into a flank…” I want to reward them.  Creative behavior, in or out of combat, makes the game more fun for everybody.

I’ve started doing this in my Living Forgotten Realms games, too, now that the Rewards Cards are gone (and the Fortune Cards aren’t out yet).  It’s a little extra something for creative thinking.  So simple, and yet it really improves the fun at the table.

Bonus points are a house rule I highly recommend.  I know I’m not the first person to use them, but I don’t care – they rock!

Quick-hit recap

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I took a little time off from blogging over the holidays, but my D&D life continued.  Here are some quick-hit thoughts from the past couple of weeks.

  • My brother-in-law and his wife became huge D&D fans during their visit.  He played Sunday through Friday, every day, and she played Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  Now we have to figure out a schedule for an online game since they’re in Texas and we’re in Colorado.
  • We rolled up Gamma World characters with the family and had a good time doing so, but didn’t get a chance to actually play the game yet.  Too bad – it seems like goofy fun.
  • I ran two Living Forgotten Realms games at my local game store, one of which was my first try at a MyRealms adventure (one I wrote myself).  It went well and had some exciting combat, and I asked for player feedback afterward.  Since we finished with an hour to spare, they suggested that I include more role playing time at the beginning.  Done!
  • My regular Friday night online game took two weeks off and got back together for gaming last night.  It was good to get the band back together.  They’re deep in a swamp and spent last night fighting witches and skeletons.  I’m a little worried because we had a four-hour session and spent almost all of it on two combats – I need to speed those up.  I’m happy, though, that they reacted quickly and strongly to the new NPC I introduced – I think I’ve done well at role-playing her, and some of them love her and some of them hate her.  Perfect!
  • I’m participating in a forum-based “story playtest” of the next campaign saga from EN World, called ZEITGEIST.  Basically, the writer spells out a given situation, we tell him how our characters would react, and he narrates what happens and what comes next.  This is my first play-by-post experience, and I think it’s totally cool.  I love being able to really get into character with the rest of the group, and I could see myself doing some more play-by-post in the future. Also, the ZEITGEIST story is really cool so far.
  • I’m all signed up for Genghis Con, the February convention here in the Denver area.  I’m running three LFR games (two sessions of my MyRealms and one of another module I’ve run before) and I’ve signed up to play in three RPG sessions, none of which are D&D 4e.  That’s intentional.  My only RPG experience is with this one game, and the Con seems like a perfect time to see what other games are like.  I’ll be trying Savage World, Call of Cthulhu and GURPS.
  • My regular in-person game gets back together this afternoon after the holiday break.  I guess that means I’d better stop blogging and start prepping!

My players are smarter than I am – lucky me!

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As a relatively new dungeon master, I take the approach that I still have much to learn.  This education can even come at the hands of my players.

Now, I’m not talking about rules knowledge or information about D&D canon – I might have some gaps there, but those are no big deal.  I’m talking about knowledge of what makes an adventure fun.  When I get a great idea from my players, I’m proud to say that I quash my ego and run with the idea (or I try to).

This came up most recently on Saturday, when I was running my in-person campaign through my home brew world.  The adventurers are currently exploring an underground complex that they’ve learned is populated with duergar.  I’m actually taking the Second Edition module “The Gates of Firestorm Peak” as a source of inspiration here.

The first time the party encountered the duergar, it was in a guard room.  The room had a 20-foot ceiling and was about 30 feet square.  Running right across the middle of the chamber was a 10-foot wall made of rocks held together with some kind of mortar, and liberally spiked with shards of glass, pointy sticks, etc.  It could be climbed over without cutting one’s self to ribbons, though it wouldn’t be easy.  There was also a door hidden in the wall, though the latch was trapped.

The party found the door but not the trap, and combat began when our monk tried to open the door and found his hand nearly taken off by a bear trap.  At this point, the four duergar guards on the far side of the wall Enlarged themselves to become 12 feet tall (something that I gather was much more common in 2nd Edition than 4e, but I ran with it).  Now they could swing their warhammers or toss their throwing hammers over the wall.

In the first round of combat, the PCs threw some ranged attacks at the duergar while the two melee characters positioned themselves closer to the wall, perhaps in an attempt to try a climb or jump or another shot at the door in the next round.  One of my players said something interesting at the end of this round:

“Man, I hope they don’t push the wall over on us.”

Hmm… they weren’t going to, but only because I hadn’t thought of it before!  But now that I had three gigantic dark dwarves lined up along the non-spiky side of the wall, ready to take their turn… heave!

I had the duergar make some strength checks to push on the wall, which I was glad I had described as being somewhat makeshift.  No problem – over it goes!  I had the debris make attacks against the two PCs who were near the wall, going against Reflex (they could try to dodge out of the way), and I hit both of them.  I decided that this should deal some pretty significant damage (I believe I went with 3d6+7 for these 6th-level characters) and knock the PCs prone.  It also created a zone of difficult terrain where the wall fell.

I wrestled a bit with whether to tell the players that I was doing this on the fly thanks to their suggestion but ultimately decided not to bother.  On the one hand, they might have gotten a good feeling from having come up with a creative idea that I used.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t want them to hold back from sharing this kind of idea in the future!  So, I let them believe that this was all part of my grand plan.  Of course, if they read this post that illusion is gone, but I’ll live. 🙂

What do you think? Do you ever incorporate your players’ ideas for what terrible things might befall them on the fly?  If so, do you credit them for thinking of it, or act like it was all part of the plan?

Review – Brother Ptolemy and the Hidden Kingdom

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I had the pleasure to review Brother Ptolemy and the Hidden Kingdom before it was published, and seeing the final version makes me feel happy that the project is done and proud that I was able to help in a small way.

This new book from Nevermet Press is what they call an “adventure setting.”  It’s more than just a published adventure, though a full adventure is included in the book.  However, it’s not a full campaign setting, either.  It’s a deep look at one piece of the world, which could be any world at all.  This type of book seems aimed to inspire dungeon masters to include the city of Corwyn and its surroundings and inhabitants and events into the DM’s own campaign world.  And given that the adventure in it is aimed at 5th-level characters, it’s easy to envision a DM starting a game in a rather undefined world of their own creation and giving the player characters a reason to travel to Cormyr after they’ve had the chance to have some other adventures.

As a product, it’s a useful and creative idea.  I like to DM in my own world, so I wouldn’t want to use Dark Sun or Forgotten Realms or Eberron, as they are complete, fleshed-out worlds (though I could pick a small part of one of them for my world).  The lands within Brother Ptolemy have the potential to fit in many different campaign worlds, potentially including my own at some point.

The book is available in either a PDF or a hard copy.  The hard copy is nice – it’s a digest-sized book (the same as the D&D Essentials books) with a soft cover and nice artwork.   The front cover is appropriately dark and creepy.

Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD.  I am about to discuss the world of Brother Ptolemy and some of the back story, which I think is important for a useful review.  This review is aimed at Dungeon Masters who might use the book, however, and a player who reads it might learn more than they really want to know, thus spoiling some of the surprise.  You’ve been warned.

At the heart of this book is the “monk,” Brother Ptolemy, and his band of followers, the titular Hidden Kingdom.  The book opens with the back story of how an immortality-obsessed Duke found himself becoming an immortal and ultimately undead creature, eventually becoming the masked Brother Ptolemy.  The scene in which the Duke figures out what has happened to him – he is immortal, despite the fact that his body is effectively dead – is beautifully written and gives the DM great insight into why the Hidden Kingdom exists and what it offers its followers.  Knowing the inside story makes the Kingdom’s offers of “freedom from hunger, pain and fear” work on a deeper and more disturbing level.

What I love about this characterization of the Hidden Kingdom is its depth.  This is not simply a band of undead creatures determined to wantonly destroy the living.  There is reason behind the madness, and it comes from the horrible realization that one is alive inside a dead body, with no hope for escape.  Combined with a little insanity and the ability to pass this condition on to others via a ritual, a cult is born.  The cult’s MO of performing charitable works in a city in order to gain trust and converts is brilliant and horrifying.  These are great villains with tons of potential.

Chapter 2 of the book introduces a plague called the Red Harvest.  Naturally, the Hidden Kingdom is behind the plague, and its effect on an area is horrifying and effective as a recruiting tool (people turn to the Kingdom out of fear of the Red Harvest).  If I were to use this adventure setting in a broader campaign, I think it would use rumors of the Red Harvest as the hook.  The adventurers could come to the region after hearing horror stories from time to time, deciding to come to help out.

Chapter 3 covers the city-state of Corwyn, where the adventure takes place.  There’s a map that shows where Corwyn is in the broader region and a bit of back story on the town; fairly standard D&D fare, for the most part.

Chapter 4 contains the adventure itself.  This is the meat of the book, and it’s a bit different from most of the D&D 4e adventures I’ve read and run.  It basically takes place in three stages: investigating in Cormyr, exploring the Von Brandt Manor, and facing the music back in Cormyr.

The investigation section has a few skill challenges with combats interspersed here and there.  The PCs will have the chance to meet some well-designed NPCs and even potentially bring one with them to the second section.  I should mention that this section also has a reference to a group called Soul’s End that really appealed to me; I could see trying to give Soul’s End a bigger role in a campaign in this region.

The biggest part of chapter 4 is the exploration of Von Brandt Manor.  This begins with a lake crossing (and what lake crossing would be complete without a creepy lake monster?) and continues with a rather free-form exploration of the house.  This section feels old-school to me.  Rather than have encounters pre-planned in certain rooms, there’s a House Events Table that the DM rolls on whenever the party enters a new area.  Depending on the results of that roll, the party could discover information, items, or enemies.  This is different from the 4e philosophy that I’m used to, and I admit that I would probably add more structure and less randomness if I ran the adventure, but this book certainly lets you do that if you wish.

After the Manor section, the action returns to town with what is technically a skill challenge but is really a free-form roleplaying section with some structure.  The PCs are put on trial for their actions at the Manor, and many outcomes are possible.  If you have a party that’s not into role-playing very much, you might not use this section.  But if you have good role-players, this part is rich with possibilities!

Chapters 5 and 6 include items and rituals to help flesh out the world of the Hidden Kingdom.  The book concludes with some ideas for possible adventure hooks (including the Red Harvest).

Overall, I think Brother Ptolemy and the Hidden Kingdom is a well-made adventure setting for a group that’s looking for something a little bit creepy.  There’s plenty of background information and detail on the world, and the adventure itself is a good mixture of creative skill challenges and interesting combats.  If you want some “creeping menace” in your world, you might want to incorporate the Hidden Kingdom.

100 Posts: My top five favorites

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According to WordPress, this is my 100th post on Being an Online Dungeon Master.  My first post was in late April 2010, and here I am in November 2010 putting up post number 100.

I thought I would use this momentous occasion (tongue firmly in cheek here) to chronicle my own personal top 5 posts of the first 100.

#5: MapTool programming. I’ve picked this post to be emblematic of my many posts that talk about writing macros in MapTool (these are collected on my MapTool Education Central page). I list this mainly because a lot of the traffic my blog gets is from people who are searching for tutorials on writing MapTool macros, and I’m proud of my learning process and the way I’ve documented it on my blog.  If you just want a finished product to play D&D4e in MapTool, you should definitely check out the various frameworks that are out there.  But if you enjoy writing your own macros, as I do, I hope that my blog can help you with the learning process.

#4: Are you in the RPG closet? I like this post because of the discussion it engendered.  Lots of gamers hide their hobby from certain people in their lives (often co-workers), and I’ve been guilty of this myself.  Is it a bad thing?  Well, after this discussion I decided that I wanted to be more open about my hobby and specifically mentioned it to a few people at work.  Nothing horrible has ensued.  I feel better about myself now.

#3: Eat what you kill. I love this story. In this post I tell the tale of the first game of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition that I ever ran as a DM.  It was totally improvised and run at a friend’s wedding all the way across the country with no gaming supplies – and we still had a blast.  That story is what led to the creation of this blog.

#2: Building a better portable projector rig: This is one of my personal favorites, because I’m proud of what it documents.  In this post, I describe how I built the final version of the rig that holds my projector above the game table so that I can run in-person games using MapTool.  I was inspired by a post from Sean Pecor in which he details the construction of his portable projector setup, but after some trial and error and some investigating online, I went in a different direction.  I would love it if other people followed my lead and built a rig like mine and used it to play RPGs with their friends – that would be quite cool, in my opinion.

#1: My online campaign begins. This one isn’t so much about the post itself as the game behind it. I knew when I started this blog that it was entirely possible that I would someday run a game completely online – finding strangers online to play with, running the game, keeping a campaign going.  Amazingly enough, I’ve succeeded on my first try.  The group that gathered online for that first session in July is still playing together in November.  I had to cut the size from eight players down to five, but those five are still playing with me in the same campaign that we started four months and 12 sessions ago.  They’re great people, too – even though we’ve never met in person, I legitimately consider them friends.  And it’s all thanks to playing D&D on the internet!

To those of you who regularly read my blog, I thank you.  I appreciate those rare occasions when you leave comments, and I appreciate those of you with whom I’ve communicated regularly.  I enjoy blogging about this hobby whether anyone reads what I write or not, but it’s always nice to hear that someone is out there.  Thank you!

An adventure becomes a campaign

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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.

Putting some role-playing in my dungeon mastering

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I’ve been running D&D 4th Edition games for about four months now, and I feel like I’m to the point that I can run combat pretty well.  I generally know what the bad guys can do in combat, and I know how they want to approach the player characters.  I’m getting better at using interesting terrain, putting some movement into the battles and so on.

Where I’m not so great yet is role playing.  Role playing as a dungeon master is a very different experience from role playing as a player.  When you’re a player, you have a single character whom you know inside and out, whom you’ve built up from nothing, who has a personality and desires and fears that are intimately familiar to you.

When you’re a dungeon master, you’re playing a host of different characters every session.  Sure, you might have some recurring NPCs or some characters that accompany the party for many sessions, but that’s not always going to be the case – and besides, you don’t want an NPC to take too much of the spotlight anyway.  Most of the time, you’re playing monsters.

A great dungeon master can make these throw-away characters come to life – not to the degree that a great player character will come to life, but enough to make the bad guy memorable before it falls beneath the attacks of your party.  Below are some thoughts on how to become a better role-player as a DM (which I’m still trying to put into practice myself!).

Think like the character

This goes for any role-playing, but it’s easy to forget about it when it comes to a monster.  An intelligent NPC should certainly be thinking, and you should get into their heads, but that’s obvious.  What about a beast or an undead creature or an aberration?  Do they act on instinct alone?  Are they following commands from another creature?  Do they act randomly?

Once you know how the character acts and why, show it!  You can say, “The rat whips its head around, looking for the nearest piece of flesh.  It sees the meaty-looking cleric and charges in with fangs bared!”  Or, “The zombie hears the necromancer command it to attack the paladin, and it mindlessly obeys, shambling over with its arms raised in preparation for a smashing blow.”  “The aberration swerves erratically, paying no heed to the avenger standing next to it as it randomly heads toward the wizard.  Avenger, you can take an attack of opportunity…”

Talk like the character

No, you don’t have to channel your inner thespian too much here.  Some bad guys bellow.  Others sneer.  You might find some that hiss.  And of course lots of them don’t speak at all, but that doesn’t mean they’re silent.  Have your NPCs taunt the party, bellow in rage when hit, whimper pathetically when nearly destroyed.

On a related note, have the monsters talk to one another when appropriate.  A leader may yell commands to his troops (and here’s a possible area where you can reward the player who took language training in Goblin or Giant – they may be the only one who can understand the command).  A great suggestion that I received recently was to have one creature complain about the skill of another, especially when the other is a minion. “You useless pile of bones!  You’re not worth the necromantic energy the Dark Lord spent to animate you!”  Evil creatures don’t always get along with one another – play this up!

Act like the character

Might your NPCs and monsters have any interesting mannerisms?  Run with them!  Lots of dungeon master books talk about behavioral quirks that NPCs might have, but this can apply to monsters, too.  A bad guy might do a little dance of joy when he hits a player.  The monster might cower after being hit.  I played in a game with one DM who essentially described a poor little kobold as having pooped himself upon seeing a PC obliterate some other kobolds.  Yeah, it’s a poop joke, but it worked!

Summary

Just because you’re the DM doesn’t mean you don’t get to role-play.  You have a huge influence on how much your players will role-play and how immersed they get in the game world.  The more you can think, talk and act as your characters would (even when they’re just monsters), the more your players will buy into the game and the more fun everyone will have.

Writing my first Living Forgotten Realms adventure

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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:

  • Getting into the stronghold
  • A skill challenge to avoid attracting too much attention
  • A battle in a shrine
  • The showdown with the boss

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 in 4th Edition

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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?

  • Solid, opaque objects (walls, doors)
  • Complete darkness
  • Blindness
  • Invisibility
  • Certain magical effects that specifically say they block line of sight (such as a wizard’s Stinking Cloud)

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?

  • Solid objects, whether opaque or not (doors, walls, even glass or crystal)
  • Certain magical effects that specifically say they block line of effect (such as spells that generate solid walls)

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.