A while ago I remember some Paizo messageboarder had collected himself a PDF of all the Dungeoncraft and DM advice articles that ran in Dragon/Dungeon.
I'd be interested in seeing such a PDF. Perhaps Paizo is able to publish an official compilation?
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A poll: What do you do for miniatures?
(Can someone rig this as an actual poll?) I currently use software, but before that we generally had no minis. When we did, we would use a lot of stand-ins, since it's hard find minis for every D&D monster and expensive to buy minis that won't see a lot of use, especially if they're rare or large. We once used a fishing reel as a red dragon. Anyone have interesting miniatures stories?
Short question. I run a regular online game via IRC. I'm a slow DM as it is but it's even slower online thanks to time delay between typing and reading and the lack of nonverbal communication. On top of that, the players are all veterans of third edition and I think they've basically seen it all by now. They're also sort of loath to take direction themselves, but I don't want to railroad them because that's taking control away from the players; frequently, the game involves them stumbling around not knowing where to go next and finding my somewhat-forced cues to be suspicious. Okay, maybe not so short. Question is, what can be done to make the game interesting, exciting and faster paced? What do you DMs do in your games that make it go?
Are the black dragons shipped yet? I still haven't received mine!
An advantage of D&D being word-based is that DMs don't have to specify which race their human NPCs are, or rather, not race but ethnicity. We simply say, "A tall man in half-plate armour" and let the player decide for themselves which of the real-world human races he resembles most, since it's not really important to the game. Of course, a human in any given D&D world must have one skin tone or another, a certain eye colour, and so on. This has gotten me thinking - in D&D, how many ethnicities are we likely to see and how do they differ? If I walk into Sharn, Waterdeep or Greyhawk, will I see dark-skinned humans as well as fair-skinned, and if so, do the dark-skinned humans and fair-skinned humans originate from different regions of the game world? I believe that Faerun says "Yes, humans have all real-world ethnicities and more" while Eberron says "It's not important, ignore it". What I'm wondering is, what do you think about it, how is it in your game world, and how much does it really matter?
I have a question for the editors as well as DMs and players. There's a lot of talk with the new adventure path about moving away from dungeon crawls and doing more investigation, wilderness, and so forth. How much do you enjoy playing in straightforward dungeon crawls or running dungeon crawls, and how much demand do the magazine's staff see for dungeon adventures compared to more modern types?
I've heard of many players quitting D&D because even though it's really interesting, it's essentially the same kind of thing happening in each game, making it repetetive so it can end up losing a player's interest. I'd like to hear how people on these messageboards have encountered this phenomenon. Have you encountered this problem, and how have you handled or prevented it?
Like most DMs, I'm always searching for ways to run better adventures - trying to find out what's fun, what's interesting, what bores the players so I know what to avoid. My current players are big fans of having a lot of freedom and hate feeling railroaded. When writing adventures in advance, however - lets say for Dungeon - is it possible to write it without some degree of railroading? Is it not a given that when you plan the encounters and plan the outcome, it's inevitable that the adventure will path the players into those encounters and into that outcome? In other words, how can an adventure be written without the players feeling either railroaded into the ending, or bewildered by the lack of usual structure?
I know it's old, but I just ran Touch of the Abyss and thought I'd see if other DMs had a similar experience to mine. One of the players, after the game, commented that I must have been reading "Ability Damage Monthly" before the game! The party's cleric (Jacinta, Clr11 of Pelor) specialised in turning undead and typically made light work of the first set of greater shadows, but not before the fighter (Eadwyn, Ftr8/Weaponmaster3) lost two points of Strength, on top of the Dexterity he lost to the reekmurk. The cleric spent much of that reekmurk fight throwing up. The hezrou fight... is that thing really only CR11? Long story short, when my players encountered it, they were completely borked over: When they finally beat him they heal up (lost about half their hit points each in that fight) and make it to Marquis, the party loses more Strength and the cleric is dropped to 2 Strength by the shadows before she can destroy them. The Marquis fills the corridor with cloudkill - Constitution damage each round - before Evard's black tentacles holds them in it. The cleric, at 2 Strength, needs a natural 20 to break the grapple of the tentacles, taking more Constitution damage all the while, and meanwhile the Marquis is having fun with enervation. I think ability score damage was doled out more often than real damage! Was the author on an ability score damage kick at the time, or have I just not noticed how much of it there is at level 11?
I was just re-organizing my shelves and noticed my old Dragon magazines, and it reminded me of some of the more interesting articles I enjoyed over the years. - Shades of Death, Dragon #298. What really interested me about this article was how it presented necromancy as something that could be good, netural or evil depending on the nature of whoever used it. Until then, I'd thought of raising undead as something only evil characters used, but this article got me thinking that there could be such a thing as a good necromancer. In a way, it felt like the article was written by a necromancer who was trying to justify his art, which was neat. The full-page picture was really cool, too. - Alchemy Begins In The Forest, Dragon #301. It's cool to play a gnomish alchemist and have more to make than just alchemist's fire and sunrods! - Shady Characters, Dragon #322. That guy should write more for Dragon. ;) - The Ecology of the Adventurer, Dragon #342. Funniest Dragon article in a while. - Domain Power, Dragon #342. A lot of the domain powers are quite mediocre and it's really nice to see such excellent abilities. They're useful and varied, and having four different ways to introduce the variant makes it all the easier to slot it into the game. What articles do you still remember for being particularly interesting?
I imagine that a lot of people here have experience in planning and writing adventures. I'm finding that while dungeon writing is a quite straightforward, it's trickier to write up anything less traditional and more open, such as city-based adventures. I've written a few words on applying dungeon thinking and metaphor to non-site-based adventures, here: http://d20.jonnydigital.com/2006/02/the-invisible-dungeon However, that's just applying the dungeon model to something that's not in a dungeon, which is more to do with adding traditional structure where there otherwise isn't any. It's still a different animal to write up an adventure in a city as opposed to one in a dungeon. Much of what I've thoroughly read is Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil and similar, so I'm finding it difficult to get out of the "dungeon crawl" mindset! Long story short, how do you draw up adventures that are more than dungeon crawls?
I was browsing the old PDFs here: http://paizo.com/store/downloads/wizardsOfTheCoast/aDAndD2/rulebooks&pa ge=1 I always wanted the "Encyclopedia Magica" series as a kid but never had any money. The solid colours made them look like such a tidy set in the front of the 1995 AD&D Player's Handbook, so it's nice to think that I can buy them all today for $16. But #2 seems to be missing! I can't exactly buy the grey, blue and green ones without the red one now, can I? :) Also, elsewhere in that section, some books are out of numeric order because they spell out their numbers in words, and "Three" comes before "Two" in the alphabet. It might look tidier to use normal numbers or roman numerals.
I really like the statblock format that shows up in recent Dungeon magazines - it's excellently convenient and very usable. I'd like to know, is it permitted for a third-party author (such as a PDF publisher) to use this statblock format in their own works, or does Wizards of the Coast hold exclusive legal right to use it in their own products?
Save for the "frogs in the moat" that reminds me too much of RttToEE, this is a pretty interesting and somewhat innovative adventure. I intend to run it at my next weekly session. Please use this thread to discuss the adventure. I have a question regarding the adventure. If the PCs avoid a combat, such as by not freeing the elemental, do they still gain experience? If not, doesn't it encourage PCs to pick unnecessary fights with creatures simply because they know they can beat them, which leans toward being an evil act?
I live in the UK. I'd like to buy Dungeon #123 for the first part of the three-part Shards of Eberron adventure, but to buy it from the website, the shipping would be prohibitively expensive. (I'm also not too impressed at the American international postal service after they lost my $120 shipment of animation cels.) Is there a more affordable way of obtaining the magazine? |