I have heard that the path that ran in Dungeon was for 4 players and the one in hardcover is for 6. Can anyone confirm that as it influences my purchase decisions.
Thanks,
~MB
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I'm nearly certain that of the many tweaks, changing the adventures to suit 6 players was not one of them. (I'm pretty sure there was another adventure added, as well as handouts and some slight changes to the adventures to make things flow better).
I highly recommend the hardcover.
Hope that helps!
Yasumoto is right. Nothing that significant was altered in the hardcover. They're both for 6 characters.
In saying that the hardcover adds a lot of intersting extras and it's great having eveything in one book.
The hardcover has an extra adventure, a lovely before/after map of Cauldron, a players handout booklet, new regional feats and a great appendix with all sorts of cool info.
The hardcover is kinda 'DVD-boxed-set-like'; you get the original dungeon adventures remastered and uncut with lots of cool extras and something new for the fans.
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The hardcover was, to quote page 400 "...designed to challenge a group of six player characters..."
The adventures from the magazine, on the other hand, were, at least tentatively, meant for 4 PCs, as is the case with (almost) all adventures in Dungeon.
I ran the first 5 and a half chapters with only 4 PCs, and the death toll was VERY heavy (5 individual deaths and 1 TPK). I would push for 6 if you can find them, or at least be kind to your PCs.
Someone PLEASE tell me the hardcover has the new stat block format, rather than the old illegible jumble used in the SCAP magazine adventures! My purchasing it might just hinge on that one aspect (sad, I know).
Someone PLEASE tell me the hardcover has the new stat block format, rather than the old illegible jumble used in the SCAP magazine adventures! My purchasing it might just hinge on that one aspect (sad, I know).
Alas, no. Not only does it have the old version of the stat blocks, all the stat blocks are alphabetically arranged at the end, which... well... I always end up using sticky notes and flipping back and forth to do so.
Alas, no.
I was afraid of that. OK, thanks, Abraham. You just saved me $60. Now, if Pett and Logue had written the adventures therein, my decision might be different... Thanks again for the reply.
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Might have said it was a 4 player arrangement but reality, it never was, regular TPK situations. Dungeon got better with the second and third AP when it came to game balance. Not bashing the hardcover, own all the magazines and still think that it is the best value D&D adventure book on the market today. Yes, it still has the crap stat blocks, but it saves lugging all the magazines and look damn pretty to boot.
Alas, no.I was afraid of that. OK, thanks, Abraham. You just saved me $60. Now, if Pett and Logue had written the adventures therein, my decision might be different... Thanks again for the reply.
The hardcover was produced before the change over, but take it from someone who started the campaign in the magazines and then switched to the HC, dont let that stop you! This is one of the all time greats and is well worth the money. Hell, 90% of the time myself and the DM's I know tweak at best/rewrite most the stat blocks to customize them for our campaign anyway.
I also noticed that the Dungeon mag had info about the lighting, magic aura of items and even sounds for most of the rooms, this was omitted from the Hardcover. It would have been nice to have but i understand it would have added quite a few more pages. Maybe it could have been included as a seperate booklet as a reference.
Regarding new statblock, i recommend the following site:
http://mikael.borjesson.net/dnd/monster-list.aspWont help with NPC's and modified monsters but still good for monsters straight from monster manuals. Handy to have a print out to save flicking through another book.
Yeah I loved all that additional info, but it wasnt consistent through all the magazine adventures either. It was probably left out of the HC to save publishing cost and keep the HC at around $60.00. I actually go in and sticky note all of that for my PC and have done it for my age of worms pre-campaign work as well.
As stated above, they don't seem to have changed much about the power level between magazine and hard cover except to tell the GM's to let 6 PC's into it. That said, there is an issue, particularly if you have cohorts & companions: there are a lot of fairly compact spaces, particularly dungeon crawls, where having 6-10 people on each side in the combat makes for some fairly frustrating fights for the rearguards. A 10x20 room with six bad guys and furniture in it can only hold a few more PC's before you get gridlock. Having Tumble can get some more PC's into the room, but they're going to be surrounded (and, therefore, flanked). My recommendation to anybody running the HC with more than six warm bodies in the party is to examine the maps and make some of the rooms and corridors bigger, or have fewer, tougher bad guys.
For reference, my current group has eight PC's, a druid's companion and a fire elemental familiar, and the druid is about to start taking levels of Beast Master, so those numbers can only go up...
Creative Director
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The sections describing lighting, sounds, and auras was introduced in the magazines in the third adventure, and clung to the magazine for several issues. We abandoned it not only because it was repetitive and often redundant, but because at higher levels, listing all the magic auras in an encounter started taking up a prohibitive amount of space. It was stupid, frankly, to spend half of an encounter talking about what a 1st level spell can see.
As stated above, they don't seem to have changed much about the power level between magazine and hard cover except to tell the GM's to let 6 PC's into it. That said, there is an issue, particularly if you have cohorts & companions: there are a lot of fairly compact spaces, particularly dungeon crawls, where having 6-10 people on each side in the combat makes for some fairly frustrating fights for the rearguards. A 10x20 room with six bad guys and furniture in it can only hold a few more PC's before you get gridlock. Having Tumble can get some more PC's into the room, but they're going to be surrounded (and, therefore, flanked). My recommendation to anybody running the HC with more than six warm bodies in the party is to examine the maps and make some of the rooms and corridors bigger, or have fewer, tougher bad guys.
For reference, my current group has eight PC's, a druid's companion and a fire elemental familiar, and the druid is about to start taking levels of Beast Master, so those numbers can only go up...
My party has always been 6 to 8 and I have never had any complaints about small roomsize. Besides, dungeons and volcanic caverans are supposed to be tight. My suggestion would be to just expand the size a little to give your druid and his animal horde a little more room.
Does the hardcover offer advice on adjusting for level? My gaming group can drop to as low as three members depending on real life and I've been able to use the level-adjustment advice on the fly to keep the challenges fair.
Any of that in here?
One thing that's different from the magazine and the hardcover occurs in Life's Bazaar. Originally, Keygan could not speak Undercommon, and the skulks couldn't speak Common. I played this up in the initial encounter with Keygan, only to find out in the last session that Keygan DOES speak Undercommon, which makes sense (otherwise how could he have spoken with the critters to do what they said), but also made the mimic meeting rather anticlimactic, since Keygan, who had been brought along (with a town guard as a new PC) to open the locks (party rogue's max OL was 29), was the only member who could speak Undercommon.