PhysChic's page

I'm leaving for Budapest, Hungary in a week. I'll be there for about three and a half weeks as part of an internship. After that, I'll be in Ireland for a week with a friend. I've never been to either of these places before. If anyone has any advice about either place, I'd really appreciate it :).

If I have an idea for an article, but I'm not quite sure where it belongs in the magazine, how do I submit it?

I know a bunch of you write stuff to submit to Dungeon and Dragon magazines. I was just wondering if anyone here wrote for anything else. You know, other magazines, newspapers, maybe even actual books. Just curious ;)

Is this even possible? Or do you just seriously cripple your chances of success?

Hmm, maybe I should be a bit more clear (an example might do). I've been thinking about a character concept for a bard who's motivation for adventuring is that he wants to be famous, but he's also a coward and doesn't want to die. Essentially, he wants the glory without so much of the risk. As such, he tries his best to stay away from combat while still making it appear as if he's doing everything he can to aid his party.

I'm not saying that he doesn't fight, he simply tries to avoid it if at all possible. That is, he'll boost his party as much as possible and try to do as many things away from the area of combat as possible (such as ranged attack). If the odds don't look good--if the party is suffering heavy damage with no appearance of a chance of success--he may cut his losses and run. In a fight in a session when I first put him into play, he stayed back to secure the horses while everyone else went to fight. By the time he caught up with the rest of the group, the combat was over.

So, I know this is a very simplified example, but could a character like this be effective? Are there any rule-based ways to compensate for his obvious problem? Has anyone else played a "flawed" character that might have some advice on the do's and do-not's of this style of gaming?

Wasn't sure whether this was the best place to put this, but considering there's a link to the guidelines on this page, it works. My computer has decided to be stupid and refuses to let me view anything that is a pdf (even though I have Adobe). Do you perhaps have the guidelines in a Word file or some other format that I can download and view? Interested in the guidelines for Dungeon as well.

I'm not sure if this has already been done somewhere, but I was wondering if anyone had any good stories about killing their entire party (or possibly just coming close).

As for me, I was running my very first game last spring. It was Mad God's Key (forget which issue) and I didn't understand most of what I was doing. My entire party was nongood alignment (I had an evil or two I believe). At one point in the cave they had entered they were supposed to fight a corpse rat swarm that was CR two levels above them. I had no one in the party that could turn undead and, as a whole, they couldn't really do much damage. My one evil PC ran away, but the rest were all killed before they had a chance. I felt so bad about killing everyone in my very first session ever. It took me a long time to try my hand at it again (I just ran another one-shot a few weeks ago and am now back on break to gain my confidence again).

I'm more interested in running games than in playing in them (though I admit that I do like them both), but I'm incredibly new to the D&D scene as a whole. There are so many materials out there (the core books as well as the rest of the books and all of the published magazines, as well as everything there is in threads). I don't exactly want to have to "study" for a year or something to get myself ready to run games, but I'm not sure what material I should really be reading other than the DMG and Player's Handbook. Are there any particular things (sections of books or articles in magazines) that I should try looking at that may be particularly helpful? Are there other suggestions that you could give to help me out?