Tag Archives: D&D4e

Free RPG Day 2010

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Since yesterday was Free RPG Day, I decided to head down to my friendly local game store to participate in the festivities.  Specifically, I knew from their Facebook feed and their podcast (yes, I listen to my local store’s podcast!) that they were running a free Dark Sun adventure.  Since I’m never able to play in D&D Encounters thanks to my Wednesday night bowling league, I thought this would be a good chance for me to experience Dark Sun.

I went to the store a little before the 9:00 AM start time for the game, and had no trouble getting a seat at the table.  We soon had the full six players, and a seventh showed up about 10 minutes after the hour, which the DM accommodated by handing her one of the player cards from Encounters.  She played a second healer, which turned out to be much needed!

My character was a goliath fighter, a former gladiator in the city of Tyr who was fleeing the chaos in the city along with his adopted cousin and a friend, both clandestine arcane spellcasters (apparently arcane magic is taboo in much of the Dark Sun setting).  We joined up with the other PCs, who were on a quest to get water for their people living in the mountains.  We all signed on with a elven caravan going from Tyr to Alderak, hired to protect the elves and their cargo.

The first part of the adventure was a loose skill challenge or two about surviving the desert and badlands, which we had no trouble with.  We were then set upon by raiders in a canyon for our first battle.  I enjoyed role-playing my fighter throughout – he had 10 Intelligence and 8 Wisdom, so he wasn’t too bright and he was quite gullible, very willing to go along with whatever his allies wanted to do.  He liked to smash bad guys with his sword and defend his buddies when they were in trouble.  It’s all mechanics, but you can totally role-play these things, which I loved doing.

The battle with the raiders was most interesting for me because of the guy sitting next to me, who had never played an RPG before but who had apparently read up on things a little bit before coming into the store.  His character was a wizard, and he found himself surrounded by minions before he could act, so he was thrown right into the fire of having to learn about opportunity attacks.  Every single power that his character had was either ranged or area, which means that if he cast them while standing next to a bad guy, the baddie would get an opportunity attack on him.  I believe he took Second Wind in the first round, then was able to shift away and start blasting in the second round after the rest of the group had pushed some of the minions away from him.  It was fun to see him learning what he could do, including trying to climb a cliff to get out of harm’s way (with 8 Strength, that didn’t go as well as he would have liked).

I did get a DM lesson out of this battle.  The DM generally did a great job all day, with lots of role-playing of the bad guys and description of the effects of attacks and so on.  However, he made one decision that I would have changed.  The minions in this particular battle only took one hit to kill, as with typical minions, but they would then keep fighting until the end of their next turns, at which point they would drop.  I have no problem with the mechanic, and the adventure writers tried to give some flavor for it.  Where I would have done things differently, though, is on critical hits.  Crits on these minions were treated just like any one-damage attack, and the minion still got its next round of actions before dying.  I think it would have made the players feel more awesome if a critical hit would kill one of those minions outright, rather than letting it fight on for another turn.  It’s a minor point, but it’s the type of thing that I would change on the fly to make the game more fun for the players.

After the canyon battle, the party arrived at Alderak and hung out in an elven marketplace while the guy who hired us went into a tent.  My guy, being rather dumb and oblivious, had no clue that anything was fishy, but some of the other PCs didn’t trust the elf who hired us and tried to follow him.  The DM basically said no – which was okay in this case, because the PCs in question happened to roll low on their Insight checks.

Sure enough, the party was soon ambushed by something like eight elven archers and four insects, all of whom acted in a surprise round while only one of our characters acted.  Then the bad guys went first in the first round of combat.  Before I had a chance to act (despite getting a 19 on initiative in this battle, after the 3 I rolled in the last one) I was on the ground making death saves, soon joined by another ally.  Our healer brought me back on her turn, at which point I was immediately dropped again.  The elf leader came back out of the tent, and he was soon killed by two of the other PCs, at which point the town guards showed up and sorted everything out.

This particular battle didn’t feel like it was very well designed.  Being able to take down two PCs (one of them twice) before they even have a chance to act seems far too harsh.  And then having the battle immediately end halfway through that round when the surviving PCs dropped the leader seemed anticlimactic.  I guess this was how this battle was intended to go, but two or three of our PCs didn’t even get to their spot in the initiative order before the battle ended.  It didn’t seem like much fun.

Anyway, the authorities established that we were in the right here, and so they arranged for our party to be paid what it was owed.  In addition, they let us face the elves in the arena games that were going on.  Here is where things got pretty cool.  Instead of a simple arena combat (which is what I think the written adventure called for), our DM modified things to make it an interesting game.  The two sides (the party and the wicked elves) started on opposite sides of the arena (east and west).  In the middle was a pile of seven huge ceramic coins – big enough that they required two hands to carry, but no check to pick them up or move them.  At the north end was a closed chest for our team, and at the south end was a closed chest for the elves.  The goal of the game was to have more coins in your chest than your opponents have in theirs when the battle ends at some unknown time in the future.

The real twist was that we were not allowed to deal any damage directly to one another – doing so would result in forfeit for the team that dealt the damage.  However, the arena was littered with lots of razor vine, which would deal 5 damage to any creature that began its turn in the vines.  Most of the elves were minions, so if we could push or pull them into the brambles, that would be fine within the rules and would kill them off.

The elves acted first and managed to get three coins into their chest right off the bat.  We had an ace in the hole, though – our wizard had Sleep prepared, which was awesome.  Our team grabbed some coins, shoved some minions into vines, etc.  The tide was about even, when suddenly three monster hounds of some sort were released into the arena and started attacking everyone.  Fortunately, we were allowed to fight back, but this would distract from the coin game.  Still, our team took the upper hand after taking a coin from the elves’ chest, putting it in ours (giving us four of the seven coins), closing the lid to out chest and then having a PC stand on top of the chest.

My fighter and our barbarian were keeping the hounds occupied, and the hounds had just dropped (but not totally killed) the barbarian when the elf leader saw the handwriting on the wall.  The evil elf knew that the game was lost, and since the DM said, “This is Dark Sun after all,” the elf decided to coup de grace our unconscious barbarian.  The authorities immediately declared our team the winners and said that we were free to fight to the death now (it’s worth noting that this was a one-shot game, and this was the final encounter).

I followed with what I thought was a winning move.  Surrounded by the two remaining hounds, both of which were bloodied, I Cleaved.  I critted on the attack roll, so I killed off one hound and dealt 5 damage to the other.  That wasn’t enough to kill the second hound, but since it was standing next to the elf leader and the hounds had a history of going after the closest person, I shifted away, figuring that the hound would kill the elf.  He almost did, but the DM decided that would be anticlimactic, so he had the hound come after me instead, which dropped me.  Then the elf coup de graced me as well.  Finally, our wizard killed the last hound and the elf with one spell.

Even though my character was killed off, I didn’t really mind.  It was the last battle, and I understood that it was appropriate for the Dark Sun setting.  I had a good time at the game and I think I picked up a couple of lessons.  I don’t think the Dark Sun setting is my particular cup of tea, but I know that lots of gamers out there love it, so good for them!

I do want to mention one final note about Free RPG Day.  The store was offering 20% off all RPG products, which I hadn’t realized until the afternoon when I was listening to the store’s podcast as I mowed the lawn.  They mentioned that the store was open from 7:00 AM until midnight on Free RPG Day, so I figured I’d stop on by in the evening to pick up Divine Power and Monster Manual 3, two books I’ve had my eye on.  I went to the store a little after 9:00 PM and saw that they didn’t have MM3 on the shelf, but they did have Divine Power.  I went to the register to buy my books, asking about MM3 and hoping to get a rain check (no luck).  When the cashier rang up Divine Power, it came up to full price plus tax.  I asked about the 20% discount for Free RPG Day that they had advertised, and she told me, “That ended at seven o’clock.”

Um, what?  The store’s web site and podcast clearly talked about Free RPG Day lasting until midnight.  I put the book back and left.  I’ve emailed the store owner, whom I know very well from having purchased lots of D&D and Magic stuff in the past, and I’m expecting that he’ll honor the discount.  Assuming he does (and I’ll post the resolution here, of course), I’ll trumpet this as the clear reason that you should support your friendly local game store – they’re not a faceless corporation, and they’ll make things right when problems come up.  If for some reason he fails to correct this, though, my faith in local stores will be shaken.  I really want to support them, but this is the sort of thing that will send me to Amazon with a clean conscience.  Here’s hoping the FLGS comes through!

Edit: I’m happy to say that the owner of the store got back to me promptly and said that this was indeed just a miscommunication with the employee, and that the discounts were supposed to be in place all day.  Even better, they DO have MM3 in stock and have set both it and Divine Power aside for me to come and get at 20% off.  The friendly local game store comes through with flying colors!

First MapTool session

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The D&D drought is over!  Last night, after Barbara and I returned home from our business trip to the east coast, we got together with Lane and Zach (our friends in Florida) to continue our adventures in the Keep on the Shadowfell.  This time, we did it with MapTool.  It was, quite simply, a success.

I’ve already written about how much I love MapTool, and my players seemed to really enjoy it as well.  They liked the attack macros (even Barbara, who loves rolling physical dice, even used the attack macros from time to time), they liked being able to keep track of their hit points within their MapTool character sheets, and they LOVED the way MapTool shows the path that their character is taking and the number of squares they’re moving as they drag their token along the map.  One quick tip for playing D&D Fourth Edition in MapTool: Make sure all of the players go to Edit – Preferences and set the Movement Metric to “ONE-ONE-ONE.”  If they don’t do this, MapTool will calculate diagonal movement incorrectly for them.

We played for about two and a half hours, yet only went through one encounter.  This was partly because we spent the first 30 minutes catching up with one another from our recent trips and partly because we had to make sure everyone knew how to use MapTool.  The encounter was the battle with the giant rats and the ochre jelly in the caves beneath the Keep.  I wasn’t quite sure how many giant rats I wanted in the battle – the original adventure calls for 13 rats, but against a party of five characters rather than the three that we have.  I decided I’d start with six rats and add as needed to keep things interesting.  I think this was exactly the right approach, and I ended up with 11 rats in the end.  The rats ended up not being all that interesting; they generally missed with their bite attacks, and they had a lot of trouble isolating one character away from the others.  I realized that this battle didn’t have any enemies with either ranged attacks or area/burst/blast attacks.  Every single monster only had the ability to attack a single character at melee each round.  This made them not especially challenging, although the moment that the jelly split in two when it became bloodied was pretty cool.

The battle was an easy win for the party, and Kana (Lane’s druid) did catch a glimpse of a pillar of white light off to the south, which disappeared before too long.  Hmm, what could that be?  (This is one of the ideas that I want to discuss on the blog, but it looks like we’ll have to wait and see).  When the battle was over, the party decided to take an extended rest, as they were getting low on surges.  Not bad for having battled through all of the goblin areas of the Keep, plus the rat/jelly cave.  Rather than heading back to Winterhaven or just staying in the rat cave, they decided to close themselves into the bedchamber of Balgron the Fat, with Zach’s Eladrin rogue trancing and keeping watch.

Since this decision has already been made, I can talk a little bit about the consequences that the party will face when they resume play on Monday evening.  See, they’ve left the goblin area of the Keep strewn with dead goblins everywhere.  Now, no other monsters have traipsed through this area while the party was exploring, but that doesn’t mean that no one will be passing through any time in the next six to eight hours.  It’s quite possible that other inhabitants of the Keep may pass through the area, discover all of the dead goblins, deduce that there must be enemies about and get reinforcements.  I haven’t challenged the PCs yet.  But this time, with the bad guys knowing what’s coming, it might be different!

Now, while the use of MapTool for the session was great, and I don’t plan to switch to anything else, I did learn a few lessons that I plan to implement before our next session.

  • I need a button for each character to be able to roll their own initiative.  While my macro that rolls initiative for everybody is cool and all, the players like to roll it themselves.
  • I need buttons for each character’s skill checks.  I think I’m going to implement this by adding skills to the character’s properties, but I’ll just have the number next to the skill be the number that gets added for training or any special skill bonuses (racial, item, etc.).  I’ll have the macro look up the appropriate ability modifier and half-level modifier from the character sheet so that I don’t have to touch the macros as characters level up.
  • I should allow the characters permission to edit the macros on their own character token.  I’ll trust them not to mess with the macros, but I want them to be able to look inside and see what’s going on if they’re interested (Zach is – he’s a programmer).
  • I need to figure out how I want to handle the bad guys’ tokens.  Right now, they use the same properties as the players’ tokens.  That’s not ideal, since it means that if I actually put numbers in for armor class, hit points, etc., the players would be able to see them.  I think I’ll create a separate set of properties for NPCs and make them invisible to players.
  • Similarly, I’d like to figure out how to hide the NPC macros from the players.  Strict Token Ownership might accomplish this, but I’m not sure yet.

All in all, it was a fun way to play D&D, and the players are psyched about playing again Monday evening.  Meanwhile, I played a Free RPG Day session this morning at my Friendly Local Game Store, and I’m playing the first session of the new campaign with my regular in-person group tomorrow.  The D&D drought is officially done!

When should I blog about campaign ideas?

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I’m currently in the DC area on a business trip, so there hasn’t been time to devote to D&D this week.  I’m happy to say, though, that there’s a chance that we might be able to resume our online campaign into the Keep on the Shadowfell this Friday, after I get home to Colorado.

Over the past few weeks of online D&D hiatus, I’ve done a lot of thinking about our campaign (as explained in my last few posts).  I’ve discovered MapTool, my new virtual D&D tabletop of choice, and learned how to make lots of cool macros for it.  I’ve played in two Living Forgotten Realms games, learning more about other dungeon masters’ styles.  I’ve also been re-reading the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 and pondering how to become a better DM myself.  Finally, I’ve been reading lots of D&D blogs and web sites, and I’ve listened to a bunch of episodes of NewbieDM‘s minicast (a cool little discovery – thanks NewbieDM!).

All of this pondering has led me to a question that’s really unique to dungeon masters who blog: At what point should I blog about ideas that I have for ongoing campaigns?  See, I know that some of my players read my blog, and I totally dig that.  I WANT them to be so into the game that they want to see what I’m writing.  At the same time, I’m coming up with ideas, big and small, for the campaign that I’m running for them.  I don’t want to ruin the surprise by writing about those ideas on my blog and having them read about them weeks before they ever encounter them in the game.  On the other hand, these are raw ideas from an inexperienced DM, and I’d like to get the input of other dungeon masters on these ideas before I try running with them.

What do you think?  Should I go it alone and then blog about my creations only after they’ve been put into action?  Should I go ahead and put them here, surprise factor be darned?  Should I discourage my players from reading my blog?  Or should I perhaps put spoiler alerts for my players and ask them to skip over the spoiler sections?  I’m looking for advice – please let me know what you think in the comments.