D&D Day is on Sunday. That’s right, on Sunday, August 3rd, my group and I will launch our 4th Edition D&D campaign, and I’ll get to really see how this game plays. I’m running Keep on the Shadowfell, though I’ve made some modifications to the earlier parts of the adventure, and I’ll probably modify later parts as well, depending on how things go in the first session. Unfortunately, my gaming group is going to be one member shy; our elf rogue can’t come, which makes the group decidedly melee-centric with a warlord, a paladin, and a fighter. Hopefully that won’t prove to be too much of a problem. In any case, I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I had some friends over yesterday and we played some games. I’ll start with the ones that didn’t make that strong an impression, and move on to the ones that were more fun.

My friend Chris showed me Set. While I recognize the potential for this set-finding game to be a lot of fun it is, unfortunately, not particularly friendly to the color-blind community. I mean, come on; red, green, and purple? Were you guys even trying? How hard would it have been to make the colors something more easily to distinguish, like blue, red, and black?

We also played Bang!. I like the theme, and I can see how it would be fun with a large group, but with three players it pretty much falls flat. It is technically playable with three, but it really isn’t that interesting. Also, some of the cards are simply broken with only three, where you already know who is in which role (and thus, who to kill). Willy the Kid can use any number of Bang! cards on his turn, while everyone else is restricted to one. This meant that our first game ended before I even got a chance to act, because the Tad (playing Willy) had more than enough Bang! cards to finish me off and there was nothing I could do. Not a fun outcome, really, but I’d be willing to try the game again with, say, five or six players.

We played some DS games, too. New Super Mario Bros. has some minigames which are kind of fun, but I wasn’t really all that impressed by them. Mario Kart, on the other hand, is a blast in multiplayer.

Finally (actually, this is the first game we played yesterday), we played D&D Miniatures, which I got for my birthday. We played using the starter set and one Dungeons of Dread booster pack, for a total of thirteen minis, not all of which were used. We had two 100-point warbands with two players on a side, and we played on the Dwarven Ruins map. It was a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to play this game again, and to get more minis. The sculpts themselves are pretty good for the most part, though some are better than others. The grick, for example, has a pretty unimpressive paint job, while the young green dragon and the balhannoth look fantastic. As far as the actual gameplay, this is one of those strongly exception-based games where you have to play it a couple of times before synergies between minis start to reveal themselves. We disregarded alignment and faction restrictions because we otherwise probably wouldn’t have been able to construct very big warbands, so some of our synergies probably weren’t tournament-legal. That said, the yuan-ti swiftscale combined with the dwarven battlemaster is a pretty devastating combo, even if it isn’t strictly legal due to opposing alignments. I also think that the dire wolf and goblin picador go well together, though by the time the poor goblin was able to immobilize something for the wolf, the wolf had already died.

My wife made this for me. I think it’s awesome.

For a while now, I’ve been planning on running Keep on the Shadowfell as my first 4E D&D adventure, but recent developments have caused me to modify it somewhat. I do think that I would have had to modify it a little bit in any case, since KotS is designed with five PCs in mind and I only have four. So how easy is this, you might ask? Pretty easy, all things considered.

Let me give some idea of how much I modified the original adventure. So far, I’ve added three skill challenges and two combats, one of which can be completely avoided if some of the skill challenges go well. I then had to go through and tone down some of the combats in the adventure proper because, being designed for a larger party, the might have provided too much of a challenge for mine. The creation of new encounters I’ve already covered in a previous DM’s Journal. Modifying existing encounters was almost laughably easy. See, the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the adventure, itself, really give you everything you need to do this. The adventure tells you what level each encounter is, as well as how many experience points it’s worth; that level, though, assumes five PCs. There’s a table in the DMG that gives you target experience values for encounters based on level, and this table includes values for parties larger and smaller than five PCs, so it’s pretty easy to see what the encounter’s new level is (in most cases, a level X encounter for five PCs is a level X+1 encounter for 4 PCs). All you have to do to bring the level of the encounter down a bit is take out a monster or two based on their experience value (listed in the stat blocks of the monsters, themselves); this usually winds up being one monster of the party’s level, or equivalent XP worth of minions. What’s nice about this is that it allows you to easily scale encounters to suit your party, and it allows you to scale each encounter in such a way so as to preserve its original feel. Was the party facing a horde of zombie minions and two or three normal zombies? You might want to preserve that big horde and take out one zombie rather than four zombie minions. On the other hand, if the encounter revolves around a combination of really interesting bad guys, taking out a few minions might be the way to go.

But all this effects something else: treasure. D&D assumes that it takes eight to ten encounters to go up a level. It also assumes that you get a certain monetary value of treasure per level that you gain. The DMG then breaks this treasure down into ten treasure parcels, one set for every level from one to thirty, that you can hand out in any combination through the course of that level. The parcels, themselves, tend to be fairly customizable; four of them are simply magic items of a level relative to the party’s, while each of the other parcels gives you three different choices to go with, from coin to art objects to gems to healing potions.

Now, you can either leave the treasure in the adventure as-is, hoping that it’ll all work out in the end (which it might), or you can do what I did and re-figure it all. Basically, I disregarded all of the treasure in the adventure, figured out how many encounters it would take for my party to level up, and distributed treasure parcels. It took a while, but it wasn’t particularly hard, and I think the result will be satisfying because the PCs will wind up getting all kinds of cool stuff that they’ll have fun with, all of which I intended for them to get. And like I said, it wasn’t hard.

So, while the new D&D doesn’t seem to spend much time in the actual adventures telling you how to scale the adventure, the DMG gives you all of the tools you need to do it yourself fairly easily, which is nice.

I’ve made a number of updates to the wiki, most of which are setting-related. Enjoy.

It may be simple, and it may be something that a lot of us have been doing for decades anyway, but I absolutely love quests in 4th Edition. The fact that the DM’s guide gives really good guidelines on how much experience to award for quests at different levels, and the fact that that experience is built into the leveling system, is all really good stuff. I’ve taken to designing Quest Cards (similar to my Power Cards) to track quests for the PCs. My plan is, when they trigger a quest’s start, they get the card for that quest. It’ll have a quest name, and a basic rundown of what they have to do (vague enough to allow for multiple solutions, generally), and it’ll say whether it’s a major or minor quest. Oh, and a nice space for the PCs to take notes.

I’ve already created a number of quests for Keep on the Shadowfell, so that I can hand out carrots that draw the PCs toward the parts of the adventure that (I think) are interesting and fun. But what’s really got me excited are the personal quests. See, I gave my players homework. I told them that I wanted them each to come up with a short-term goal for their characters, and that I’d turn that goal into a minor quest. The stuff they came up with is really great, and helps to flesh out their characters quite a lot more. Even better, it gives me an inclination of what they’re interested in doing in the future, which will make it that much easier to create adventures that engage them once KotS is done. I plan on telling them that, any time they think of something important that they’d like their character to do, they can tell me and I’ll make up a personal quest for them. I think that this sort of feedback and shared storytelling is important to RPGs, and it tickles me that D&D is finally incorporating it into the core rules. If you read through the Dungeon Master’s Guide it actually becomes clear that not only are they incorporating it, they’re actively encouraging it. It’s great.

The thing that got me thinking about all this and how cool it is was actually a conversation I had with one of my players over IM. He was the only one who hadn’t given me a personal quest yet, and it kind of felt like he didn’t really have any idea who his character was, other than a race-class combination. So I pestered him about it, and he asked for help. I asked him some questions about his character, and he answered them as best he could. Eventually we came up with a quest for him (a really cool one, too), but what’s even better is that I really feel like his character has become a unique individual, completely differentiated from all the other members of that particular race-class combination. You could actually see the character growing and taking shape in between the lines of text in the IM window, and I’ve gotta say, it’s a pretty rockin’ character. (Don’t worry, I think all of you other guys have pretty rockin’ characters, too.)

My wife and I have put together a D&D wiki, which you can also access from the left-hand sidebar. This wiki will contain evolving information on my D&D campaign, edited and added to by myself and my players. Feel free to peruse it, but be warned that it’s in a pretty preliminary state right now. Some brief information is available on the player characters (including portraits for three of the four), but that’s really it. More will come soon.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not going to do an official review of the 4th Edition books. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that it’s a lot of work and time for me to do it, and I’m not convinced that enough people read this blog to make it worth my while. Two is that anyone who’s been reading this blog for any length of time already knows that I’m in love with 4th Edition and want to have its illegitimate babies, so it’s sort of a given that the reviews would be glowingly positive all around. Also, lots of people have reviewed it already, so I don’t feel that my review would really add anything valuable to the blogosphere.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be talking about the books at all, or my impressions of them. On the contrary. I’m starting a new (hopefully) regular column of sorts on this web site called ‘DM’s Journal’, the first installment of which is already up. I’m starting up a 4th Edition campaign, and I plan on blogging about my experiences with 4th Edition as I think of interesting things to say. So, while you won’t get a review of my impressions of the books after reading them, you will be getting my impressions of different parts of the game, itself, that result from actual use and play.

I just created my first encounters in 4th Edition D&D today. I actually created a series of connected encounters: two social encounters and a combat encounter that can be avoided entirely if the social encounters go well.

The social encounters were a breeze to create, and were a lot of fun, too. The skill challenge system allows for a lot of customization, such that these two encounters, both of which are basically negotiations, have different uses for the same, and different, skills. There are a couple of things that I really like about the tools given to craft non-combat encounters. First and foremost, I love the fact that I get to reward the PCs for their choice of skills, and encourage them to pick up more skills. If you read the Player’s Handbook, it’s not immediately apparent that skills have become more important in 4th Edition. Sure, the rogue has a lot of powers that key off of skills, and some of the other classes have utility powers that improve skill use, but it almost seems like an afterthought. Until you read the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and it all clicks into place. Between skill challenges and terrain effects, there are lots of ways for a DM who is so inclined to reward skill use in 4th Edition. When crafting these encounters, I made sure to include at least one skill that each PC had, so that everyone could feel useful, but I also included some other skills that nobody has, to nudge the PCs into picking up the Skill Training feat a couple of times in the future. I love that I have a tool to do that with.

The other thing that I like about the skill challenge system is that it gives me a way to take something like a negotiation and create an actual mechanical encounter out of it, with plenty of role-playing as well as plenty of die-rolling, and an XP reward at the end. Suddenly, non-combat encounters have become just as important as combat encounters.

The combat encounter that I created took a little bit more time, but it was still pretty easy, and it really served to highlight for me the things that I like about 4th Edition encounter and monster design.

Monster design in 4th Edition is great. Monsters are tactically and thematically interesting, with mechanics that both inform and are informed by the flavor of the monster. I also really like the idea behind minions, as well as the other end of the spectrum: elites and solos. I put a bunch of minions in this encounter, a couple of standard monsters, and an elite. The fight, itself, will be big, but I don’t think it will be difficult for me to manage.

Another thing that I like about monsters in 4th Edition is that they’re really easy to customize. Only one of the monsters that I used in the fight is straight out of the monster manual. The others have all be tweaked in some way. For the elite, I took a different elite, changed out some powers and characteristics, and reduced its level to be more in line with a 1st-level party. There are four different monster types in the fight, three of which have been customized, and it took me maybe 20 to 30 minutes to do the customization work for all three. Not too bad, really, when you compare it to 3rd Edition.

Something that I really like about encounter design in general is that terrain is a lot more important than it used to be. There are some really fantastic rules for creating terrain in the DM’s guide, and the DCs and Damage by Level chart on page 42 is absolutely invaluable for scattering all kinds of improvised attacks around the encounter for the PCs to make use of.

All in all, I’m very happy with encounter design in 4th Edition. There’s some work involved, but it feels like you get a lot of bang for your buck. And, truth to be told, I find the work to be a lot of fun in and of itself.