D&D Encounters - Session 1

Atora
Originally uploaded by stupidranger

Last night, I participated in D&D Encounters at Total Escape Games in Broomfield. Those of you who know me know that I'm actually pretty shy, and I don't usually game with people I don't already know. But I decided to give it a try; a half hour with strangers can't be too taxing, right?

Spoiler-Free (Mostly) Brief Overview

It was a lot of fun! Our DM was awesome and handled everything with grace and ease. We had one player who was completely new to 4E out of the six of us. Four players used pre-gen characters, two of us had rolled up original characters. We ended up with a warlock, a ranger, two monks, a psion and my hybrid invoker/avenger.

Given our party composition, combat went pretty well. We really could have used a leader to help with healing, but no one died. Only one monk fell in battle, but I managed to revive him (earning me a bit of renown). I couldn't manage to do much damage, so reviving the melee monk was probably the most effective thing I did throughout the combat!

By the end of the night, I had accumulated 12 renown points and my first renown reward. Hooray!

Trying out the Hybrid Invoker/Avenger

I decided to try out the hybrid class with an invoker / avenger. I wanted to combine the striker role with the controller role; take out the big bad, then wipe out the minions. Sounded great, and I think once I've got a few more levels, but at first level, eh, not so great. I couldn't get close to melee to invoke my oath of enmity and melee attacks. And not wanting to use my daily so early in the "day," I used my at-will invoker attack. Might have been more successful if I had managed to roll better than a two. Ugh, what a nightmare!

Regardless of how my dice betrayed me, it was a fun night, and I can't wait for next week!

Moved to Wordpress!

If you come across this post, you have likely arrived after we have left this place for Wordpress. You can find us, as always, at StupidRanger.com!

Thanks!
--Dante

Regarding spam comments...

I have been aware that we have had ongoing issues with a large amount of spam comments.

First off, allow me to apologize to those of you that have endured this issue for quite some time. I did not realize until recently that a number of our older posts have accumulated 30-50 spam comments. I realize that this is very annoying to those of you that have elected to receive email replies to certain posts.

I have turned on comment moderation for all posts over one week old in an effort to curtail the junk. In addition, I have gone through a few months of posts and removed many of the offending comments. I apologize if this inconveniences anyone.

Blogger has a known issue (currently still being worked on) that prevents me from deleting certain posts that contain Chinese language characters. This limits the amount of cleanup that I can efficiently perform, as does the inability to delete a large amount of comments in one go.

I will redouble my efforts to monitor the site and keep the disruption to a minimum. Later this year, we will be migrating the site over to Wordpress where we will have full control over my comment and spam monitoring system. At this time I would suspect the situation to dramatically improve.

Thank you for your patience, and thank you all for reading and taking the time to comment. If any of you have Blogger related blogs and have tried to combat this, I would welcome any advice.

-- Dante

Monster Manual 2!

I was lucky enough to receive a spankin' new review copy of the Monster Manual 2! I've not had the chance to actually exercise any of the new baddies in my campaign, but after reading through the book I am very excited to do just that.

The Good Stuff

There's a lot to like in the MM2. Some very iconic critters show back up: Rust Monsters, Genasi, Barghests, and the like... all exciting to see again. There is a large 14-page section on Metallic Dragons of varying difficulty levels (something for nearly every party level) and some truly excellent artwork. There's a whole host of new additions as well, I hope to review these new monsters as I get the chance to unleash them on my unwitting players.

Speaking of excellent artwork, they've got the Dimensional Marauder which I believe made a cameo appearance in the new Star Trek movie. I'm pretty sure they reused that artwork from before, but its still pretty striking. The Marauder makes use of a new snatch-and-grab style mechanic that can teleport the player and the Marauder itself around the map, giving close combat a bit more pizazz.

Located confusingly AFTER the glossary there is a single page that has racial traits for Monster Races intended to be NPCs, or if you're really brave, Player Characters. The options provided are Bullywug, Duergar, and Kenku. My mind immediately went to what havoc Vanir could wreck as a bullywug player character, but its probably wise to not give him any ideas.

The Bad Stuff

It seems that the nerf bat has struck, sadly. Petrification seems to still exist in its normal form, however many of the death effects appear to be AWOL. This was most noticable to me when reading the section on beholders... to me a beholder isn't a beholder if it can't kill you with a Ray of Death. Can the abilities of these new beholders still kill your players? Absolutely. They just do so in a more roundabout fashion.

It seems they are taking the opportunity to elaborate on sections previously created in the original Monster Manual... seeing some omissions from the Monster Manual make their return is encouraging, but part of me was wanting for a bit more originality.

Conclusion

The Monster Manual 2 appears to be a pretty solid addition on its surface, but the proof will be in the pudding as I drop some of these monsters in place in the campaign.

For a truly excellent in-depth look at the Monster Manual, head on over to the Critical Hits review. They even take an in-depth look at the contents of the Monster Manual 2 in two excellent articles. They're worth a read!

Behind the Screen: Questions about legendary item creation...

I had a good time writing last week's post on tailormade items, thanks for all of the great comments! As I was thinking about this topic further and reading through all of the insights provided on that thread, I started thinking about an underlying question.

Burning questions

At one point in the discussion, I asked whether or not it was important to have a rules set for generating weapons, armor, and items of that magnitude. Is the "outside the box" thinking that is required to create an item so suited to a player part of the creative fun that is being a DM?

So I'll turn this question over to you, gentle reader: if a set of rules existed for creating tailormade, high-power (or growing in power) magical items would you use them? Or would you still eschew these rules in favor of doing it by yourselves?

My thoughts

Honestly, it would have to be a VERY flexible rules set for me to consider using it. Often, I will see elements that I would want to have in my magical item but one little aspect of it isn't quite right... the descriptor isn't quite fitting, the drawbacks too severe (or not severe enough), the legend or lore that comes along with the item just doesn't fit with the setting or the intended character, and so on.

For me, magic item creation over a random treasure roll has to be an act of creative fun for me as a Dungeon Master. How about you?

Behind the Screen: The Legendary Chuck Item...

I had a Dungeon Master in college that would handcraft a special (usually awesomely powerful) magic item for each member of the adventuring party and sprinkle them throughout the campaign. Some we found, some we didn't (and found out about it later), but they all shared some common charactaristics.

These items would be exceedingly powerful. Some had a drawbacks, but in general they would be described as legendary, unique, or spectacular. We even took to calling them "Chuck Items" in the honor of our DM himself.

Usually these items were crafted outside the normal rules system for creating magic items. They would sometimes have complex combinations of effects or very specific rituals that had to be done to activate abilities. They often had significant lore surrounding them that would unveil itself as the campaign unfolded.

An example was a bow that SR's character came across named Harvester. It had numerous colored gems inlaid in it that could be activated to do different types of elemental damage. Each time you used the colored gems, the bow was drained and it had to be recharged by killing undead. If you activated all of the gems at once, it would do an immense amount of damage. Unbeknownst to her, Chuck later told me that each time she did this there was a chance that the bow would be destroyed but it did not happen during the course of our campaign.

(If anyone is interested in the D&D 3.0 stats for this item, I am told that SR retains a copy she might be willing to share!)

Learning from the Master

I have employed this same pattern in my campaigns. The process of creating an "outside the box" awesome item tailored to your players is alluring, but I have often found that if you don't temper it with a drawback or some sort of control mechanism it can heavily unbalance your game.

Since we're quickly approaching the end of the Keep on the Shadowfell module and the beginning of my original campaign content, I am thinking more about how/if I am going to execute this process for my new campaign.

A few words of encouragement: making a tailored magical item that suits a player character is a GREAT way to heavily involve them, especially if you give the item a rich background or legend to go along with it.

The player feels special and gets that moment of sheer excitement every time their awesome toy does what it is supposed to do. To me this is essential to a satisfying D&D experience, especially for new players.

A question to those that have come before

For those of you Dungeon Masters out there: have you tried something like this yourselves? Players, have you ever received a tailor-made item? If so, did it improve your gaming experience?

Finally, if you're reading this: thanks Chuck. They just don't make D&D moments like that anymore!!

Behind the Screen: Nearing the end!

First off, thanks to everyone that answered the Question of the Day that turned into the Question of the Week. I've been dealing with a heavily increased workload in real life since that posting has gone up, so we're going to exercise some of the great recommendations and get a solo campaign started up for her very soon.

The end of the module as we know it!

We're getting dangerously close to the end of Keep on the Shadowfell, and now's the time for me to start infusing some of my own details into the module to prepare my group for life outside the Keep. I've got about 10 sessions worth of material storyboarded, which is a new tool in my DM repertoire.

Essentially I've been writing out the campaign sessions in a bulleted list outlining the setting, the key players, and expected paths that the group could progress along. If the group goes "off script" I will just make some new bullets for the following session and adjust as needed.

I'm taking several notes of inspiration for this idea from the encounter structure from Keep on the Shadowfell. I really enjoy the two-page encounter style, and I'm also taking some inspiration from Phil the Chatty DM's one-page dungeon contest. Succinct representation of roleplaying ideas is a really important skill for busy dungeon masters like me!