Tag Archives: D&D4e

It’s the people that matter, not the system

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Add a new player, and the adventure moves on

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet the Monster Vault solo

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

And then the dragon emerged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post Script – farewell Thorfin!

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

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

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

Posted on by

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!

Fortune cards – Second impressions

Posted on by

I played in a Living Forgotten Realms game this morning at my friendly local game store. One of the guys who works there (a person I consider a friend) had a stack of the cards for players to look at. He knew that I wasn’t all that excited about the cards, and he was eager to tell me that I was wrong – the cards were AWESOME, in his opinion.

I looked through the stack of about 50 cards (some of which were duplicates, of course). Verdict: I’m still not impressed.

The cards seem to give minor bonuses to attack or defense or have a minor effect on the board. I think that’s the appropriate power level, since they’re pure add-ons to the powers that player characters already have. If they were super-powerful, the game would be warped and the DM would have to increase the challenge level of encounters significantly in order to make things interesting.

However, with these minor bonuses, it just feels like too much extra stuff to keep track of without enough benefit. On your turn, you now have your full array of normal powers PLUS one more card in your hand to keep track of. That card changes every turn (generally speaking, as I understand the rules of Fortune Cards), so you never get to the point that you’re totally familiar with your character’s abilities. Heck, I kept forgetting that my elf hunter ranger had Elven Accuracy this morning, and that power is always there! Fortune Cards would be one more thing that I would be likely to forget about (and then kick myself later).

Overall, I don’t think the cards add anything meaningful to the game. It’s another layer of complication on a game that, in my opinion, has enough complication already, thank you very much. If you want more twists in your game and bonus powers to give out to players, then Fortune Cards might be a great fit for you. For me – not so much. And that’s even ignoring the whole cost and rarity aspects (which bum me out, too).

By the way, Wizards of the Coast has cleared things up a little bit (in my opinion) about what organized play events will require the cards. They’re starting a new series of events in September that sound similar to the competitive Dungeon Delve events that have been held at several conventions. These are really tough adventures that you’re not expected to be able to just win. It’s strongly implied that Fortune Cards will be required for these events.

Some players will probably love this. If you’re a big-time tactical gamer and want to survive the hardest possible encounters with your min-maxed character, this is right up your alley, and building a powerful deck of Fortune Cards will help. That’s not my cup of tea, but I know some players will love it.

Disease – Delirium Fever

Posted on by

Edit: Thanks to a suggestion from Kingreaper on EN World, I’ve edited the Intermediate State so that hit points can go up to the PC’s surge value rather than being capped at 1.

Two areas where I wish there were more official Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition content are traps and diseases. To help remedy that, I’m sharing a disease that I put together for my home game: Delirium Fever.

Delirium Fever

  • Description: The patient is afflicted with a high fever accompanied by profuse sweating and weakness. As the disease progresses, the patient may fall into unconsciousness with periodic bouts of delirious wakefulness, babbling incoherently. Left untreated, Delirium Fever can be fatal.
  • Level: 6
  • Exposure: Via the venom of giant spiders (either at range via spitting, in melee via a bite, or after a hit from a weapon with spider venom on it)
  • Progression: Saving throw to avoid infection after initial exposure. Endurance DC16 to maintain, Endurance DC 21 to improve.
  • Initial state: The patient is weakened, and their hit points cannot go above their bloodied value (temporary hit points can still be gained as normal).  Improvement from this state represents the disease being cured.
  • Intermediate state: The patient is weakened and slowed, and their hit points cannot go above their healing surge value.
  • Advanced state: The patient is unconscious, with occasional bouts of waking delirium.
  • Final state: The patient dies.

In my game, the party encountered this disease when they ran into some duergar.  The duergar use giant spiders as mounts, and the venom of these spiders exposes the target of the attack to delirium fever (based on a secondary attack against fortitude). The party came upon a mining camp where some NPC dwarves had been attacked underground by duergar. The survivors came down with delirium fever.  The PCs went underground to rescue a dwarf prisoner and to try to get some spider venom in order to craft an antidote to the disease. In the process, one of the PCs ended up contracting the disease after a number of spider bites.

I was pretty happy with the role of the disease in my game, so feel free to use it in yours!

Fortune cards – I plan to ignore them

Posted on by

Since it’s the current big uproar in the D&D community, I thought I would give my two cents’ worth on the Fortune Cards news:

I plan to ignore them.

Yes, Wizards of the Coast seems to be trying to make more money by adding a collectible card game element to Dungeons and Dragons.  I understand why they’re doing it.  It doesn’t sound like much fun to me, so I plan to leave them out of my games.  Players will not be allowed to use them in games that I run.  I only DM right now so I’m not a player in a regular game at the moment, but if I were, I would vote to exclude them (and I’m pretty sure the people I play with would do the same).

I’m a little bummed about the part of the announcement that says, “For some Wizards Play Network programs aimed at experienced players, Fortune Card purchase will be a requirement to participate.”  They say that this will not apply to D&D Encounters (although this page talks extensively about Fortune Cards with Encounters, which confuses me), so I’m left to wonder what they mean.  I know that they required the purchase of Gamma World boosters for the Gamma World Game Day (which I did not participate in); is the plan to require Fortune Cards for future Game Days?  What about Living Forgotten Realms?

I’d be especially bummed if you had to use Fortune Cards to play LFR, especially since it seems that LFR is sort of run by the community now rather than by WotC.  I like LFR, and if I HAVE to buy Fortune Cards in order to play, then I’m not playing.  I’m just not interested in the cards.  Maybe someone will give me a stack of commons that I can put on the table and then not use.

Anyway, for people who don’t care about Organized Play (which is most D&D players, since most of us play home games), you can freely ignore Fortune Cards.  The two they’ve shown so far don’t seem that interesting anyway.

Is this a money-grab by WotC?  Yep.  They’re a business and are trying to maximize profits.  Is it distasteful?  Sure, but I don’t mind ignoring it.  I like D&D 4e without Fortune Cards, and no one can require me to add them to my home games if I don’t like them, so I won’t add them.

Quick-hit recap

Posted on by

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!

Creating D&D converts

Posted on by

Ah, the Christmas season.  That magical time of year when friends and family gather together and give the D&D fans in their lives the chance to talk about what a fun game this is and to turn them into brand-new gamers.

My wife’s brother and his family are staying with us for two weeks over the holidays.  My wife and I talked about D&D several times in the first few days of their visit, and they were interested in hearing more.

I received the Castle Ravenloft board game for Christmas, and my brother-in-law and I played it a couple of times .  Castle Ravenloft is a pretty good introduction to the concepts of D&D 4th Edition:

  • You have a standard and move action on your turn, with the option to turn the standard into a second move
  • You roll a d20, adding a modifier and comparing it to an armor class
  • There are D&D classes with the appropriate roles and flavors
  • There are D&D monsters with reasonable approximations of their feels

My sister-in-law joined in a five-player Castle Ravenloft game on the evening of Christmas Day, and while she was a little overwhelmed, she seemed to enjoy it.

So, the day after Christmas I showed them the online Character Builder (figuring that Essentials characters would be better for beginners) and helped them roll up their very first RPG characters.  My brother-in-law went with an elf hunter ranger named Homer, while my sister-in-law created a half-elf warpriest named Stasi.  My wife rolled up the sister of her beloved swordmage (another swordmage named Sora), and everyone was anxious to try out their new toys.

Sunday evening, the day after Christmas, we all sat down at the gaming table to really introduce my family to D&D.  I gave my in-laws a choice of three different low-level Living Forgotten Realms that I had prepared on the computer (using MapTool and my projector setup to run the game), and they chose to play a Luruar adventure in which they would be helping people at a magical college shore up some problems underground (LURU 2-3 Forgotten Crypts, Hidden Dangers, which I’ll be running at my friendly local game store this evening).  While my wife finished putting her character together, I ran my in-laws through a simple encounter with some orc minions, just so they got a feel for how battle works.

And then we were off!  We ran through the entire LFR adventure, with me scaling it down for 3 PCs on the fly.  Apparently I did a lousy job with the scaling, as I managed to kill off my brother-in-law’s character in the first battle (only the second time I’ve killed a PC).  All three of the bad guys in the battle had the ability to deal ongoing damage, and all three players had a horrible time with their saving throws.

The party decided that they wanted to take the dead character out of the catacombs and get him resurrected (rather than either give up or create a new character).  I introduced a cleric at the magical college who would resurrect him in exchange for a promise that they would work off the debt for the resurrection later.  The living PCs accepted the deal, but used some good diplomacy to persuade the cleric to give them a discount because the dead PC was working for the same organization as the cleric.  Good stuff!

Back into the catacombs, and the party made it through a skill challenge to get to the lair of the big bad guy.  They realized that the room was trapped, and they killed off the monster from the first battle that had caused them so much trouble before fleeing (a Kobold Rat Master, quickly renamed Rat Bastard).  They then retreated and took a short rest before coming back for the last two bad guys.  I had those characters move to a different part of the catacombs, and I’m glad I did – the original room for the final fight is pretty boring for the PCs if the trap is in effect.

They had such a good time on Sunday, that they asked what was next for the party on Monday!  They made it clear that they were really interested in the setting and wanted to do some more adventuring there, so I took a half day off work on Monday to whip up a brand-new adventure for them, which we ran Monday night.

This new adventure was a much better balance for the three-PC party.  They fought zombies, tracked some wraiths, bypassed a skeletal dragon (though they were sorely tempted to fight it), chased some skeletons through a series of rooms, and ultimately came to the crypt of a ghost who was using some portals to channel necrotic energy and bring more wisp wraiths into the world.  I’m quite proud of this encounter – it worked out even better than I had hoped.  I’ll write about it in more detail sometime – maybe I’ll write up the whole adventure as a PDF.

Anyway, I’ve created two new D&D players!  Now the trick will be to figure out how to keep their gamer fires burning.  We’ll probably play a little Gamma World before they head home, and maybe find time for one more D&D adventure (though I won’t have time to write a whole new one from scratch).  Maybe we’ll play using MapTool after they go home – who knows?  It’s been a fun experience so far, and I hope we get to play more in the future.

My players are smarter than I am – lucky me!

Posted on by

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?