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Books DnD Roleplaying

4e Month One: Links n Stuff organized

Game Resources
Chatty’s Tool Roundup, and Dragon Avenue’s Resource Page.
A 4e Form fillable auto-calculating character sheet (.zip)
Supplement tables, Reference screen (flash)

Setting and Adventure Ideas
Chris Chinn’s Five blades of Bahamut, Quest seeds, Airships
P3’s short series (a quick post each for 1-10, 11-20, and 21-30) extensible with lots of options.

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DnD

4e Talk at DnD Experience

Critical hits got a press pass to the D&D 4e seminar at the D&D Experience con. His quick notes hit a lot of high points and nail down a lot of specifics. It sounds like there’s still a lot of… “we’ll think about it” for something launching so soon, but we’ll see what comes of it.

[This post, links off to the various 4e coverage at DnD Experience]

Everything that follows is from the first link.

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DnD Game Group Roleplaying

Gaming: 12-14-2007

We’ll shift to a new game this Friday. Kev has important stuff to worry about that will prevent him from prepping the Shadowrun game. Rather than cancel the session, we’ll shift to our backup game.

Our backup game is D&D. Fortunately, we decided on our backup quite a while ago, so I’m ready to roll. Here’s all the detail you need to know…

**Note: There are already some changes. Tomorrow night’s session will probably be more character research & design, while the following session will be the world building. Jennifer has to leave relatively early in the session– she’s attending a party and providing the video game system– so we’ll save the collaborative world building til next time. **

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DnD My Game Ideas Roleplaying

Resources for my game

I’ve updated the D&D links page with character resources for the game. Other useful resources include:
The Dawn of Worlds PDF
Pen, Paper and Pixel’s Autocalcing Character Sheets

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DnD

The big announcement is made: 4e D&D

Quickly summarizing many other websites, who are themselves summarizing the Q&A and “press sheets” Wizards of the Coast is putting out, 4th Edition is coming. The new PHB will come out next May, MM in June, DMG in July.

Wizards of the Coast has redone their D&D website to coincide with this change. Interestingly, if you go in through the Settings (hit the plus) and “Eberron” or “Forgotten Realms”, those pages still have the old layout and links to the old material.

I got sucked into way too much browsing last night and found that many sites are repeating the same stuff… which is probably what’s in the information packet.

The two articles Wizards put out, Design & Development: Race and Design & Development: Class make it sound like this will be a pretty big jump without “backward compatibility”– it’ll be its own thing.

A grab bag of what interests me so far:

  • Built for 30 levels instead of twenty. They acknowledge that the old game had a small sweet spot (about levels 4-14 in their estimation) and they’re trying to expand that so play is fun at all levels.
  • All characters have at will, per encounter, and per day powers. It sounds like Mages will get “at will” effects similar to reserve feats– so they don’t have to drag out a crossbow when they run out of spells… they’ll throw a “mage bolt” (or whatever) that works like a crossbow but fits their concept.
  • Skill lists will be slimmed, with the less useful stuff taken out and the remainder shifted to emphasize what you can do with the skill.
  • Magic items are getting pushed down in importance: it won’t take feats to make them, they won’t sell as easily, and they won’t be as essential to “keeping up” with other characters in your class.
  • The races presented in the PHB will shift, which means that some of the races our group never uses (gnome, half-orc) might get replaced with ones that we will.
  • Races will set you apart at throughout. In the final version of 4th Edition, most of your racial traits come into play right out of the gate at 1st level—dwarven resilience, elven evasion, a half-elf’s inspiring presence, and so on. As you go up levels, you can take racial feats to make those abilities even more exciting and gain new capabilities tied to your race. You can also take race-specific powers built into your class, which accomplish a lot of what racial substitution levels used to do: a dwarf fighter with the friend of earth power can do something that other 10th-level fighters just can’t do.
  • The new book covers have pretty artwork.

A more complete roundup of the discussion is over at Jonathon Drain’s d20 source. Inquest magazine has a short article that hits the high points of the new edition, with a slightly different emphasis.

The Fourth Edition FAQ post is pretty handy too.

Mike Mearl wrote on his GenCon blog about D&D Insider, etc.:

Playing D&D Online: There’s a natural reaction to see this as similar to Warcraft and other MMOs, but I think that’s a mistake. A better analogy might be online poker. Imagine you had a Wednesday night poker game. If that game broke up for whatever reason, online poker is something you might turn to for your poker fix. Or, maybe you simply can’t find players. The really exciting thing to me is that it lets you game with friends you’ve met at conventions or via online forums. If someone talks about their cool campaign on the message boards, you can now play in that cool game without flying across the world.

More about D&D Insider.

Rodney Thompson talks about playtesting a 4e character, DMing, etc.

http://dnd4.com/ is gathering links and discussions and reposting the presentation videos.

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DnD Roleplaying

A useful, time saving product

The Lazy GM: Goblinoids,. Lots of prefigured goblins with class levels and templates. Enough to make a GM’s life a lot easier.

Categories
DnD

Collated Templates list

Half Fiend
Fiendish
Half Celestial
Celestial

Zombie
Vampire
Vampire Lord
Skeleton
Ghost
Lich
Demi Lich
Worm that Walks

Half dragon
Lycanthrope
Paragon
Pseudo Natural
Multi-headed
Drider Template

Phrenic

Categories
DnD Game Group Roleplaying

Magic Item Cost ideas

An issue with Magic Items is the way creating them costs a feat, time, gold and XP. They do need to be restricted– if you allowed unlimited production without a cost, spell casters would be turning them out by the truckload at tremendous profit.

The standard system doesn’t work very well though, especially for our group, since we’re eager to keep everyone the same level, with the same XP rewards and the like. Here are a few options I’ve seen or dreamed up.

a) Do nothing; enforce the rules in the books. The rules setup some assumptions and it’s good to carry them through if you don’t have a good replacement. Unfortunately, the way the XP affects levelling and group cohesion is a drawback. *A common variant is to allow the person the item’s being enchanted for to pay the XP, instead of making the caster do it.

a1) Do almost nothing. Use the standard rules, but make each person in the group contribute XP equally. That keeps PC levels together, and remedies the situation where a caster pays XP for someone else. It succeeds completely on keeping everyone level, but may anger people who are having XP drained for someone else’s benefit.

a2) Use a WOTC XP transference system– evidently, they came to the same conclusion I did.

b) Altered costs. In the Living Ebberon games, they’ve altered the cost of items for their environment. Instead of costing 50% Book GP + XP equal to 4% of Book GP, they instead have it cost 66% Book GP.

c) Level limits. Allow casters to create magic items = 1% of their current XP each level. (So a first level character has a 10XP budget, a fifth level character has 100 XP budget, etc. You could combine this with an “overdraft”– say, if you use more than 1% (and less than a 5% hard limit), then you’re drained by the experience. (The game effect would be a negative level, which as usual effects you until you level again.)

d) Limit the total XP available for items to what’s found. Allow casters to “disenchant” items to free up the XP locked in them… and perhaps 1/2 the cost of the item sacrificed (the same amount as selling it, or the cost to enchant it.) This also allows for special treasure; balls of material for storing XP, just waiting for a disenchant.

e) A good thought you have? Leave ideas in comments.

f) From Jonathan Drain’s D20 source: Rare Components for Spells and Magic items. There’s a similar idea for using Item components to power metamagic.

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DnD Roleplaying

D&D die rolls: When and why

I thought I’d contribute to Martin’s Blogging for GMs project.

Last night Jennifer and I were talking about calling for die rolls in adventures. I repeated a bit of truth that I’d read on an advice site: don’t roll dice when it doesn’t matter. (I can’t track it down at the moment; it was delinked long ago.)

For example, if the PCs are coming up on a hallway junction, it’s usually not worthwhile to call for listen checks. Why? Well, you’ll generate a result per person, usually with the effect that someone will succeed. (Enough die rolls and someone’ll usually succeed.) And they’ll turn to their companions and say “I heard X”. All of the time checking skills, gathering rolls, etc. boil down to a bit of information everyone winds up with anyway, which is a waste of time.

Categories
DnD Roleplaying

Below Zero: Death and Wounding in D&D

A few nights ago I mulled about a solution to “0 HP = unconscious, -10 HP = death” thing. Around 2 am I woke up and had most of a solution. I’ll take a stab at writing it down here. [Note: This is inspired in part by Blue Rose / True20. Iron Heroes, a new release, is supposed to mimic it in part.]

Low Death (but grittier) gaming–
The idea starts from a core: Death is dramatic… but it’s best when it’s dramatic. As it is, the space between “perfectly fine” (1 HP) and dead (-10 HP) is small. 11 hit points is normal damage from many of the critters our characters are fighting.

One advantage of this revision is that criticals have a greater impact (immediate wounding), but don’t take a character out immediately.

When a creature is hit and drops below zero hit points, or when a creature is hit for a confirmed critical, the character doesn’t necessarily fall unconscious (nor just loose hit points). Instead, the player rolls to resist the wound, to keep the character on its feet. This introduces an opportunity to introduce tradeoffs; creating wounds that don’t put a character out, but do impair fighting ability.

Whenever a character is struck and drops below 0 HP, or whenever a critical is dealt, you make a Fortitude saving throw with a DC equal to the damage your character was dealt. Compare the save and damage to the chart below. (We’ll call this “wound saves” for clarity.)

Beat the DC by 10 or more A scratch or bruise; no fight penalty, -1 to wound saves. (Cure minor to alleviate penalty).
Beat the DC A minor wound; a cut over the eye, a bruised rib, a gash along the forearm, etc. -1 to all rolls until healed (including wound saves). Cure Light to eliminate.
Failed by less than 10 A significant wound; bones break, muscles pull, artery pierced, finger severed, etc. -2 to all rolls until healed. Cure Moderate to alleviate the penalty, Cure Critical to eliminate the condition.
Failed by 11-20 Maiming wound; foot removed, eye gashed, skull cracked, massive blood loss. -5 to all rolls until healed. Cure Serious to alleviate the penalty, Regenerate or Heal to eliminate the condition.
Failed by 21+ Deadly wound. (Usually traded up to maiming + unconscious, unless the player decides it’s time for a dramatic death.)

In all cases, the player can choose for the character to take a wound one step less severe as long as the character is also knocked unconscious by the blow. (This is not necessarily a blow to the head; blood loss, shock and the like are other acceptable ways to “trade up” the damage and remove a character from the fight.)