Tag Archives: D&D4e

D&D Encounters – Dark Legacy of Evard Week 3

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I had the pleasure of stepping back into the role of Dungeon Master for Week 3 of the current D&D Encounters season. When the start time for the game rolled around, only one player had showed up, but five more came in the next few minutes and away we went!

Tonight’s group consisted of:

  • David (the brand-new 4e player from week 1) playing his drow hunter (the only character to have shown up in all three encounters so far)
  • Dan with his half-orc knight
  • Chris with his half-elf warpriest (his replacement character after I killed off his revenant in week 1)
  • Chris’s daughter Allison with the pre-generated human mage Jaren,
  • Two new Encounters players, starting with Nick and his pre-gen vampire Constanz (thanks to Wielding a Bohemian Ear Spoon for generating these!)
  • And finishing with Nick’s friend Ofir and his Bohemian Ear Spoon pre-gen blackguard Klaxu

The party members who had played last week (the hunter, warpriest and mage) had defended the armory, so this week we continued that story with the town guard captain begging the group to search Duponde for shadow monsters and to protect the panicking citizens.

To the skill challenge!

This was the first skill challenge of this Encounters season, and I think it was the first time most of the players had been in one. I tend to be a “don’t tell the players they’re in a skill challenge” kind of DM; I prefer to lay out the situation and ask them how they want to deal with it, asking for skill checks as appropriate.

The group came up with some creative skill uses (History to see if they remembered any maps of the city to help them figure out what areas might be vulnerable to attack; Athletics plus darkvision to climb onto a roof to look for trouble, Heal to help out injured townspeople). Sometimes I let this give someone else a +2 to their next roll, and sometimes I let it count as a skill check of its own.

Ultimately, this group had one of the most efficient skill challenges I’ve seen, in that they racked up three failures in a hurry! I believe they had only two successes (out of six) when they hit their third failure. Even though the adventure didn’t specifically call for it in this particular skill challenge (it did for the other branch skill challenge for this session), I gave out cards from the Despair Deck from the Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond box set whenever characters failed a skill check. I described it as the PC heading down an alley, seeing a horrible shadow apparition that quickly faded, and being freaked out by it. One ended up Craven, one Jittery and one Delusional.

Town Map - Dark Legacy of Evard Session 3, with grid

Town Map - Dark Session of Evard Session 3, no grid

Once the battle started, with the monsters getting a surprise round and the PCs not getting an attack bonus thanks to the failed skill challenge, the Craven PC (the hunter) spent the first round climbing onto the roof of a building. I felt that was appropriately Craven behavior, so I handed him a bonus point token.

I only had the Dusk Beasts visibly act during the surprise round. One of them charged the warpriest, one moved close to the front of the party, and one started coming around behind them. In the second round, the two Leeching Shadows revealed themselves, and one glued itself to the blackguard and literally stayed on him for the entire encounter (that shadow was the last enemy to go, because the blackguard failed four saves in a row). When the Shadow Bolter popped out from around a building and shot the warpriest in the gut, the group started worrying about a potential TPK.

The second and third rounds got better, though. Even though both the knight and the blackguard ended up unconscious, the party started taking care of the bad guys. A shadow minion dropped, and the Dusk Beasts started getting bloodied and finally dying. Once one dropped, the others fell in short order. The warpriest was planning to revive the blackguard, but when the blackguard’s player said “Halleluja!” the warpriest’s player said, “I’m sorry, I’m a priest of death and I can’t support that kind of thing – I’ll save the knight instead.” He was kidding, but I promised him a bonus point if he would actually do that because of his character, so he did. I later awarded him renown points for a Moment of Greatness there.

The Shadow Bolter was planning to flee, but the revived knight stepped in, hit him and slowed him, dashing that plan. A gang-up on the bad guy ensued, and the warpriest dropped the monster with non-lethal damage.

Once the blackguard finally shook off his shadow and the party squashed it, they turned to questioning the Bolter. This was some fun impromptu role playing (for me at least). The party wanted to know how the shadow man got to Duponde, who he worked for, etc. He was confused, though, because from his perspective Duponde and its people had invaded his land and he was just defending himself against the horrid light-bearers.

I really am enjoying DMing this season of Encounters. It’s a fun adventure so far, and I’ve got a fun group of players at the table. I’ll live with the every other week role I’m given (Andy, it’s only fair to let you run some of these – you’re an awesome DM!), but I can definitely see myself wanting to run this adventure for another group in the future in a home campaign.

D&D Encounters Dark Legacy of Evard – Week 2

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My friendly local game store has set things up so that DMs are alternating weeks of running D&D Encounters this season, rather than having the same DM run the game every single week. That’s fine by me, although since I think I’ll probably want to run this adventure again someday, I’m preparing all of the encounters in MapTool. I’ll  be ready to go any week. As of this writing, I’m prepared through week 5.

But for week 2, I was a player rather than a DM. I threw together a character at the last minute – a dwarf warpriest named Gronk (I know that the table only had one leader last week and I thought a second might help). When I got to the table, we initially had a party of three leaders and three controllers. Okay…

Given that I’m not passionately invested in D&D Encounters as a player, I agreed to run a pre-generated character of a different role, so I ended up playing Brandis the paladin. One of the people who had brought a controller had a striker in reserve, so he switched to that, and off we went.

Week 2 of Dark Legacy of Evard was cool in that the players had a choice – they could either chase after a suspicious halfling who had tried to kill the captain of the guard, or they could try to get monsters out of the town armory so that the townsfolk could equip themselves against the evil onslaught of badness. Our group went with the armory.

The encounter itself turned out to be a fight against some spider swarms, deathjump spiders and shadow minions. I’m really enjoying the “meld with the target” ability of these shadow creatures – very spooky and flavorful. My paladin got the snot beat out of him, as was his job, but the two leaders in the party kept him coming back for more, and we ultimately defeated the enemies.

The new player from week 1 who was running a Hunter and who had only two healing surges after the first week’s combat managed to stay out of the melee and shoot things from afar this time, sustaining no damage. The party worked well as a group, and victory was achieved.

Even though I didn’t end up using the maps I had created for this encounter in MapTool (since I wasn’t DMing), I thought I’d share them here anyway, just in case anyone else would like to use them. There are two different maps – one for the armory and one for chasing the halfling through the woods. Each map is presented both with and without a grid and is formatted to a 50-pixel grid.

Halfling pursuit forest map - with grid

Halfling pursuit forest map - no grid

Armory with bridges map - with grid

Armory with bridges map - no grid

Recruiting RPG players via Magic: The Gathering

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Last night I went back to my old game for the first time in a year and a half: Magic: The Gathering. Yes, I know it’s widely derided in the RPG community, and ever since I started playing D&D I hadn’t been playing Magic.

But last night I wasn’t running my usual Friday night online game (sorry again for not being ready, gang!) and my wife was busy, so I decided to stop by my friendly local game store for Friday Night Magic.

Back when I played Magic regularly, my format of choice was called booster draft. This is where you open up a pack of cards, pick one, and pass the rest on. You take the next pack from the person sitting to your right, pick one, and pass the rest on. You keep doing this through three packs of cards and ultimately build a deck out of the cards you pick. It rewards good evaluation of the cards rather than a good budget to build a prepared deck of rare cards – much more my style.

I used to be quite good at booster drafting – my rating for that format put me among the top 20 players in Colorado. Last night, though, I was playing with cards that I had never seen at all, and was rusty in my play skills. I fully expected to do poorly, and I was okay with that (I was proud of having a good rating in the past, but it was never that a big deal to me).

The first good thing about last night was that somehow, despite not knowing ANY of the cards, I managed to win the draft! My first opponent was a first-time drafter, so I guess I would be expected to win that match. My second and third opponents were regular drafters, though, and I won a couple of close, hard-fought matches. That was a good feeling.

The second good thing was that I used the opportunity to try to recruit new D&D players! A couple of people at the draft were a pair of brothers, both of whom were familiar with D&D 3.5 but who were looking for a regular game and who had some interest in 4th Edition. I told them about D&D Encounters and Living Forgotten Realms, and I think they might come to check out Encounters. They’re really looking for an ongoing home campaign and actually asked if they could join my Friday night game, but that game is already VERY full.

So, despite the fact that I wasn’t playing RPGs last night, they were still on my mind. As for Magic, I like this quantity of play. I can see myself popping into a draft once or twice a year in the future, just to see how my skills hold up. It’s fun to see all new cards, too. And hey, if I can go into a draft completely cold and still do well, that’s a good feeling.

Reavers of Harkenwold – complete MapTool file

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Since I ended up putting all of my Reavers of Harkenwold maps into an easy-to-import format and since I had saved almost all of the MapTool monster tokens I had created for the adventure, I figured I might as well bring it all together in a complete MapTool campaign file.

The linked file (which was created in MapTool version 1.3.b66) contains:

  • A big map with all of the individual encounter maps on it (feel free to copy these to separate maps within MapTool if you prefer
  • One copy of each monster and NPC token that I created for the adventure (CTRL+C and CTRL+V will make more)
  • Complete stats and attack macros for all of the monsters on their tokens
  • A generic monster token and a generic player character token
  • Campaign macros for basic things like dice rolling and toggling conditions on and off the tokens

Now, I’ll admit that there are a few things it doesn’t contain

  • A couple of maps are not present, as I didn’t use them in my run-through of Reavers of Harkenwold
  • A couple of monsters are missing (I believe the underground goblin leader is one, and there may be a couple of others) – I simply failed to save them after I’d created them
  • Not every monster is quite as fleshed out as I’d like (senses, equipment, etc.) but they’re totally ready to use (they’ve got hit points, defenses and attack macros, which is the important stuff).

Note that this by no means replaces the adventure itself. If you want to run Reavers of Harkenwold, you still need to get your hands on a copy of the adventure (there’s no background information or even information about which monsters appear in which encounter). This is just a tool to help you run it online.

If you happen to run Reavers using this campaign file, I would LOVE to hear about it! I had a ton of fun with the adventure, and this file should let you pick it up and go (assuming you’ve at least read through the adventure so that you know what the plot is!).

Download the Reavers of Harkenwold MapTool campaign file here.

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?

D&D Encounters Dark Legacy of Evard – Week 1

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I’ve volunteered to run D&D Encounters for the Dark Legacy of Evard season that began today. I’ve only played one session of Encounters before, but the store owner, Jeff, was trying to recruit enough DMs so that we could run four tables per night and still be able to have DMs alternate weeks (so, eight DMs total). One encounter a week shouldn’t be too hard to prepare, so I gave it a go.

Setup

I got the adventure last Friday and gave the first chapter a read-through. The Encounters adventure comes with poster maps and tokens, but if you’ve been following my blog, you know that I love to run games using my projector setup and MapTool. So, I began creating maps in MapTool and programming up the monsters.

Players

For tonight’s session, we had six players, which meant that we were only going to run one table. I was the first DM there, so I was fortunate to be able to run my game. Four of the players were Encounters veterans, but two were not.

The first of these newcomers was my wife, Barbara! We’ve played D&D together many times over the past year and a half that I’ve been involved with the game, but this is the first time she’s participated in public play. Huzzah!

The second newcomer was David, a complete newcomer to D&D4e. He had played a little bit of D&D 3.0 years ago, but he was really coming to the game fresh. Excellent!

The story – SPOILERS AHEAD

Tonight’s session started off with the party introducing themselves to one another. They were on a weeks-long journey to take some messages from the leader of Fallcrest to far-off Sarthel. Some of the players decided that they were actual couriers while others were either guards or hangers-on. One was a Revenant who, it was decided, had been found by the party near the side of the road a few days prior with no memory of his previous life.

It was a quiet evening in the Old Owl Inn in the town of Duponde, and the adventurers were resting and waiting a few days for the bridges over the Nentir River to be repaired so that they could continue on toward Sarthel. They spent some time chatting with other travelers and locals about the spooky weather and hearing rumors about the ghost of the shadow wizard Evard whose grave is in Duponde. The innkeeper and a visiting scholar told them some of the tales, and the group eventually went to bed.

In the middle of the night, everyone woke up to a strange feeling of being pulled in odd directions, the temperature dropped, and lights began functioning poorly. A scream came from downstairs in the common room. The adventurers geared up and went down to investigate

The battle

They arrived to find the old bartender knocked out behind the bar while a quartet of gargoyles, animated incarnations of the statues that adorned the front of the inn, flew around the room wreaking havoc. Battle ensued.

The encounter map (no grid)

The Shade Executioner in the group snuck up behind one of the statues and grabbed it with his garrotte, nearly killing it outright. Our Half-Orc Knight waded into combat to challenge a pair of monsters. The Revenant Hexblade found himself on the wrong end of a gargoyle attack and was knocked to the ground and dazed – and bloodied. He fought back from the ground with his single action on his turn. Our Drow Hunter finished off the gargoyle that had been garrotted.

At the end of the round, a pair of shadow creatures emerged from the darkness and attacked. One of them melded into the shadow of the Knight, dealing him some necrotic damage, while the other melded with the prone Revenant, taking his hit points into negative territory, but not dropping him to unconsciousness yet (Revenants get to keep fighting until they fail a death saving throw).

These shadow creatures turned out to be pretty tough – hard to hit when they were melded with characters, and insubstantial unless hit with radiant damage (which no one in the party could deal). The gargoyles started dropping, but one of them ignored the Knight’s mark to go after the prone Revenant (who, remember, was at negative hit points, but still fighting) – and killed him outright. Negative bloodied value, dead-dead. (This is only the second time I’ve killed a PC as a dungeon master.)

Truly scared now, the remaining five party members did what they could to finish the fight quickly. Our Drow Hunter provoked an opportunity attack from a shadow (a hit – the first against him – bloodied the Hunter) and succeeded in dazing the monster. That shadow was soon finished off, but its partner came after the Drow and knocked him unconscious. The Knight had been brought back from unconsciousness by the Half-Elf Sentinel already, and then fell yet again to the shadows before the Sentinel eventually stabilized him.

Ultimately, our Shade Binder dealt the killing blow to the last shadow monster, and the survivors could catch their breath.

Thoughts

This was a brutal encounter. We lost one PC, although had it been anything other than a Revenant who kept fighting while at negative hit points, we might not have actually lost anyone. Two other PCs ended the fight unconscious, and one was bloodied. The Shade Binder somehow escaped the fight unscathed (my wife’s character, but I swear I didn’t go easy on her – she just stayed out of the way). The Drow Hunter (David, the first-time player) spent four healing surges at the end of the fight and now has a grand total of two remaining for the next three encounters. The Knight took a total of over 60 damage during the fight (hey, achievement!). Brutal, brutal, brutal.

In talking to the players who had played D&D Encounters before, it sounded like the only similarly tough first session was Dark Sun (which I had read about, and I understand that Dark Sun was supposed to be vicious). This felt like a pretty random battle, but man, was it tough. I guess the Shadowfell is meant to be an unhospitable place.

All that said, I think that this party’s particular makeup was not well suited to this encounter. We had multiple controllers, but there were no minions. We had only one defender, and he took a ton of punishment. We had only one leader, and extra healing would have been really helpful (rest in peace, Revenant). And of course, we had no divine characters, so no one could deal radiant damage. A cleric would have rocked against those shadow creatures, but the party had to slog it out the hard way, dealing with the insubstantiality of the shadows.

Wrap-up

All that said, the players legitimately seemed to have a good time, and the newcomer said that he plans to come back next week, bringing a friend. I had fun running the encounter, and I’m looking forward to the next one. I already have set up the first three encounters in MapTool, and I hope to get all 13 in there over the next few weeks. The adventure looks like a lot of fun, and I could definitely see running it again for a home campaign.

The encounter map, with a grid

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?

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?