So, on Wednesday I went to my FLGS and played some D&D Encounters. It started out really well; it was an interesting fight in an alchemical laboratory with some myconids, and we had a pretty well-balanced party (though, I think that two controllers is one too many).

About an hour into it, though, when we had only succeeded in killing off the minions, it started to dawn on us that maybe things weren’t going so well. Then, people started to drop. The cleric, to her credit, managed to resuscitate us pretty regularly; I went into negatives at least three times over the course of the encounter. But when our only defender–a dwarven paladin–got completely obliterated, taken from being up and fighting to flat-out dead in one blow, we knew we were in trouble. There was no bringing him back, and the rest of us were pretty squishy.

I think we made some tactical blunders during the encounter. We spent too much time fighting the myconid guards, who were soaking up a lot of our strikers’ damage. They were, being myconids, shunting that damage off onto the myconid rot priests in the back ranks, who were just regenerating it since they weren’t being attacked. What we should have done was focus our strikers on them first; they would have gone done pretty quickly if we had, which would have made the guards easier to take out.

There was also the matter of a green slime. The slime wasn’t tough, but it kept on engulfing people, meaning it was taking half damage most of the time. We didn’t spend enough time attacking it when it wasn’t engulfing someone, choosing to react to its attacks rather than take a more proactive approach, which probably would have killed it quickly.

We also hung out in the hallway rather than going into the room and trying things out. I understand that there were some explody tables in the room that we could have made use of, and though the thought occurred to me (I used a very similar technique in my own campaign), we never really capitalized on it.

At any rate, Ash, my longtooth shifter seeker, has been brutally killed by fungus-people. I’ve decided that I’m going to make a different sort of character this time around and, rather than just making a character that I think is interesting, I’m going to try to make a character that benefits the party in a specific way.

I have two characters in mind right now. The first is Rafe, a genasi warlord. He’s the kind of character who stays at range (like my seeker), but I built him to maximize party damage output. He’s a resourceful warlord, meaning that when an ally succeeds with an action point attack, they get +4 damage. Add to this the fact that every single attack power I gave him (yes, every single one) grants at least a +4 to damage to someone (if not everyone), and I think our damage woes will be in the past. He’ll encourage people to focus fire on one target, and take that target out quickly.

The second character is Bulwark, a warforged fighter. I built him for extreme durability with pretty good damage output, going with the battlerager build for the temporary hit points it gave me. He’s got a pretty good AC at 18, but he can get as many as 6 temporary hit points from a successful attack with one of his powers, and a successful attack with any of his powers will net him 3 temporary hit points. Warforged resolve doesn’t hurt, either.

So, I’ll tell you how it goes. Hopefully one of these characters will prove to be a little more valuable, and a little harder to kill.

The idea of using true names to power arcane magic is not a new one, but it is extremely evocative. In Fool Moon, Harry Dresden uses pieces of his true name as bargaining chips when prying information from a demon. The idea of true names as a method of controlling other beings feature’s prominently in Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed, as well. If you’d like to introduce the idea of true names and their power into D&D, it’s not hard to do. Here’s how.

Sympathetic Ritual Casting
While most any ritual can be cast without using a creature’s true name, such rituals are far more potent when such powerful knowledge is used in the casting. Any ritual can be cast using a creature’s true name, as long as that creature is a target of that ritual. Typically, true names are used in the casting of rituals in the Binding and Scrying categories, but they are equally effective when used in Deception, Divination, Restoration, and Warding rituals that target the creature in question.

When you use a creature’s true name in the casting of the ritual, you may spend a healing surge (in addition to any other costs of the ritual) to create a sympathetic bond between you and the named creature. This sympathetic bond grants you a +5 bonus per tier on any checks required by the ritual. Using a true name does narrow the focus of certain rituals, though; any ritual that affects an entire group or type of creatures affects only the named creature. It is possible to name multiple creatures in the casting of a ritual, but you must possess all required true names, and you must spend a healing surge for each true name used. Note that anyone assisting in the ritual may spend these healing surges in your place, but anyone who spends a healing surge must know the associated true name.

Sympathetic Spellcasting
Spells, prayers, evocations, and hexes can be used in conjunction with true names, as well. Any power with the arcane, divine, primal, or shadow power source can be cast with a true name. You must spend a healing surge to do so (just as with rituals, multiple true names requires multiple healing surges, though using multiple true names does not increase the number of targets a power can affect), and doing so confers one of the following benefits:

• Increase the range of the power by 5 squares per tier.
• Gain a +2 bonus per tier to the attack roll.
• Gain a +5 bonus per tier to the damage roll.
• If the power grants healing or temporary hit points to the target, it heals 5 additional hit points per tier or grants 5 additional temporary hit points per tier.
• The target takes a -2 penalty per tier to saving throws made to resist the power.

Talismans
When using a true name to cast a ritual or use a power, you can also employ the use of a talisman. A talisman consists of two things: the first is a focus item representative of the target (a doll, statue, picture, etc.) worth at least 50 gp per level of the target. The second might be harder to come by: you must combine the focus with a piece of the target. This piece of the target can be blood, hair, a bit of skin, a scale, a tooth, or any other item that came from the target’s body. Once this is combined with the focus, it becomes a talisman. A talisman allows you to invoke a creature’s true name without expending a healing surge, but it can only be used once. Using a talisman does not destroy the focus component, which may be re-used, but does destroy the piece of the target used in the talisman’s creation.

The DMG2 presents rules for companion characters, which are good. They turn a companion character into a monster, mechanically, with the same simplicity and presentation of information. This makes it easy to run a companion as a second character, and keeps the companion complex and powerful enough to make a difference in the fight. In my campaign, I’m going to be one player short a lot for a while; Sredni’s player will be unable to make it to games on a regular basis. Because of this, I plan on making up a companion version of Sredni, so that one of the other players can run him as well as their own character; that way, the party isn’t without a leader.

Over at In the Eye of the Beholder, they have a different take. I must say, I like these rules quite a bit. They’re simple and streamlined, don’t require a lot of book-keeping, and allow allies to be important (but not too important) in a fight.

Is one method better than the other? I don’t think so. I think that each lends itself to different uses. I think that the DMG2 rules a great for replacing a PC, making a companion that’s going to be a full-fledged member of the party with an equal share of the XP. If you want allies for your PCs in a fight, but don’t want to cut into the party’s XP, the Beholder method is very good.

I might make a few modifications to the rules presented, though. For example, rather than giving each ally its own standard and move action, I’d have each ally be controlled by one of the players. When that player takes a move action, the ally can also do so, and the ally’s special ability would cost the player’s character a minor action to perform.

In my own campaign, I plan on using both methods. I’m going to stat Sredni out as a full companion character, and he’ll get a share of the XP just like everyone else. However, a lot of the walk-on companions in the adventure will use these other rules.

I’d like to preface this post by saying that I’m talking specifically about guidelines and advice for planning an adventure in 4e D&D, but some–or possibly even all–of this article could apply to other games that require an element of planning.

I like games where you can improvise and do things off-the-cuff; it makes for an interesting and dynamic world that responds to the decisions that the players make and allows them to have a real stake in how things turn out in the end. D&D can be that kind of game, but it’ll always require some element of planning in order to really run smoothly. Sure, you could make everything up as you go along, and for the most part that’ll work just fine–until you start running a combat encounter. Once this happens, things will grind to a halt as you find all the monsters you need in your various books or on the Compendium, sort out your battle map or tiles, find all your minis (or use appropriate stand-ins), figure out where everything goes, come up with interesting terrain, and so on, and so forth.

The simple truth is that a little planning can go a long way, and it’s entirely possible to plan in such a way that you can leave yourself a lot of room to react to what the players do, and allow them to see the impact they’re having on the world.

Re-Skin your Encounters
In D&D, it’s pretty easy to separate mechanics from flavor when you’re dealing with things like terrain effects, traps, and monsters. Swapping out types of damage and changing the way you describe things can be enough to make an encounter full of orcs and trolls feel like an encounter full of aberrations from the Far Realm.

This won’t necessarily be possible with all of your encounters. You definitely want your big set-piece encounters to feel distinct and to be exciting, and for the most part these encounters aren’t really going to be the kinds of encounters your players will easily avoid anyway. If the fate of the world hinges on a fight with the mad necromancer Falagoth and his undead minions, it’s a fair bet that your players will wind up in that encounter one way or another.

A lot of the minor encounters can be constructed in such a way that they can be re-purposed easily. Using monsters that have easily re-skinnable abilities helps this, as does having a stable of terrain effects that you can easily drop into an encounter. You might even consider organizing your Dungeon Tiles with note cards containing potential effects on the game, for easier use during play. A nice side-benefit of this technique is that, when your players manage to avoid an encounter completely (and they will, at some point), the encounter isn’t wasted; you can re-skin it and use it later, with little or no modification.

Create Generic Maps
You may have a number of encounters planned, but you don’t want to specify their exact order or location. Say, for example, your adventure revolves around fighting a murderous thieves’ guild in a city. You know that most of your encounters will be in indoor and urban environments, so it might be worth it to create five or six different maps for different locations around the city. Then, when your PCs get into a fight, you can choose an appropriate map and combine it with a group of enemies to create an encounter.

Create Encounter Pieces
It’s no secret that some monsters go well with each other. A challenging encounter often capitalizes on these synergies, allowing the monsters to work as a team as well as the players do. Something you can do to allow you to adjust your encounters on the fly is create a roster of encounter ‘pieces’–effectively, groups of two or three monsters that go well together, either mechanically or thematically–and keep them in a binder. Don’t worry about making an exhaustive list; focus only on the level range and types of creatures that your party is going to be fighting in the immediate future. Then, when an encounter ensues, you can grab a few encounter pieces and put them together to create an encounter that makes sense based on what’s happened so far. Combining this with generic maps can allow you to construct an entire encounter, including terrain, traps, and so forth, with only a few minutes of table time required.

Don’t Over-Plan
This is probably the single most important piece of advice that I’m going to give here. It’s tempting to want to plan out your entire adventure storyline from start to finish before the players even start playing through it. This is fine, but you should use broad strokes to define your story elements, and refrain from planning out specifics–encounters, skill challenges, even important NPCs–until you anticipate needing them. I know that, in my group, we can usually get through about two combat encounters and some roleplaying/investigation/skill challenge stuff in a single session. So, when planning for game day, that’s what I prepped for. I didn’t bother prepping anything beyond that, because that can wait. Instead, I really focused on making the stuff that’s going to happen in the next session interesting.

What this allows is, should the PCs do something that has implications down the line, I can integrate the consequences of their decisions into the adventure. Because I plan one session at a time, everything I plan is informed by what’s happened so far. This means that the players actually do have a significant impact on what happens in the story, and I try to make that plain to them.

Save Important Decisions for the End
The end of a session, that is. If you’re going to have a big decision for the players to make, and that decision is going to have significant ramifications in the rest of the adventure, it helps to put that decision near the end of a session. That way, you have a lot more time to think about and respond to their choice, and the consequences are likely to make more sense and feel more authentic.

The main alternative to this is to prep for multiple outcomes of the decision, so that you have something planned either way. This is a valid way to do things, and might be necessary sometimes. This is where a lot of the stuff that came earlier in this post can help you; if you can plan just enough so that you can react to multiple decisions quickly, then you’re more likely to keep your players engaged and coming back for more.

I’ve been playing a lot of different games this week, and I’ve got some stuff coming up; I figured I’d give little capsule reviews of what I’ve been doing, and talk a little about some stuff that’s upcoming. In no particular order:

Dead Space: I’m possibly a bit late to the party on this one, but I picked up Dead Space for a really good price around Christmas and just now got around to playing it. I’m not finished with it yet, but I’m eight hours or so into it and I’m really enjoying it. The atmosphere is suitably creepy, and while it doesn’t really create fear (what video game does, really?), it does succeed in creating an awful lot of tension. The fact that the main character, Isaac Clarke, doesn’t speak is a little bit strange considering how much he gets spoken to, especially when you take into account that there’s a character in the game who is supposed to be personally important to Isaac. The game spins a good yarn, though, and the combat is pretty good.

The Humble Indie Bundle: This is a group of indie PC games, for which you can name any price you want, pay it, and get them all. You can choose how much of your money goes toward the developers, and how much goes toward Child’s Play. There are some worthwhile games in the bundle, and while I haven’t liked all of them, I like enough of them that I’m happy I paid for the bundle. Plus, it’s for charity. Go buy it.

Of the games in the bundle, I’ve played World of Goo, which is excellent (I own this on Wii, too). It’s got a great Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, and even has Danny Elfman-esque music, and the puzzling is very, very good. I’ve played about twenty minutes of Aquaria, and I really like what I’ve played. Simple controls but apparently deep gameplay, and the music and art style are fantastic. Gish is sort of a mixed bag; it’s got a really neat premise and some cool mechanics, but the controls are frequently fiddly and annoying, and I feel that the game gets in its own way a lot. Samorost 2 is a Flash-based adventure game that is visually very charming. The problem is that there are a lot of pixel hunts in the game, and some of the puzzles are a little obtuse. Worse, there are puzzles that you can bring almost to completion over the course of a few minutes, screw up one thing (without realizing that you’re doing anything wrong), and have to do the whole thing again, from the beginning. It is very short, though, so you should at least give it a try. The other two, Lugaru and Penumbra: Overture I have yet to spend any real time with.

D&D Encounters: I got to play in Encounters again, and had a blast. I’ve played two different characters so far, both from the Player’s Handbook 3. First I played a human monk, which was very satisfying. I like the monk class quite a lot; very mobile and capable of some pretty spectacular stuff on the battlefield. Flurry of blows is also one of my favorite striker damage-spikes because of its versatility. The second character I played was a longtooth shifter seeker, which was also a lot of fun. I didn’t do a whole lot of damage (I was using a javelin, meaning that all of my attacks dealt 1d6+4 damage, even encounters and dailies), but I really felt like I was effective at controlling the battlefield, and my daily power made a significant difference in how the encounter played out.

My Home Game: My friend Dean isn’t going to be able to DM his mini-campaign for a while, so the campaign I’m DMing is resuming. I’m very excited to get back into the DM’s seat, and I’ve got some stuff planned. I’ll be updating the wiki as we play, as usual, and I’ll probably post some of the more exciting encounters on this blog, for your own use. Game day is the 23rd, which is only a week away!

There’s some talk over at Critical Hits about cursed items, and whether or not they have a place in 4e. Personally, I really like the idea of cursed items, but I’m not a fan of how previous editions handled them. I don’t like items that are just arbitrarily bad and nearly impossible to get rid of; that’s not fun for anyone. What I do like are items that give power for a price.

For my money, these rules work pretty well for modeling cursed items in 4e. I like the idea of magic items that are somewhat more potent than others at their level, but come with a trade-off that could occasionally screw you. However, I’d probably make one change to the way cursed items worked in my own game: I’d make the effect of the curse inextricably tied to the most potent aspect of the item.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I like the idea of aspects in D&D, though the implementation in my own game left something to be desired. I think that cursed items are a perfect place to use aspect-like mechanics; namely, the ‘compel’ action that the GM can use in games like Spirit of the Century. Effectively, the cursed item would have an aspect that could be compelled from time to time by the DM, forcing the player to act in a certain way . . . if he accepts the power that comes with the compel. Here’s an example of what I mean.

The Blood-Soaked Blade
Considered an ill omen by most, the blood-soaked blade demands to be soaked in the blood of the innocent, but grants power in exchange
Lvl 5
1,000 gp
Weapon: Light Blade, Heavy Blade
Critical: +1d6 necrotic damage, or +1d12 necrotic damage if the weapon’s curse is active.
Enhancement: +1 attack rolls and damage rolls
Property: This item gains a +2 item bonus on damage rolls against bloodied targets while the curse is active.
Power (Encounter): Free action. Use this power when you hit with the weapon. The target takes ongoing 5 damage and you can spend a healing surge. This power can only be used while the curse is active.
Curse: The blood-soaked blade demands to be soaked in the blood of the innocent. In order to activate the curse, you must slay a sentient, innocent being. This causes the curse to become active until the start of your next short rest. If, in addition, you spend a short rest (5 minutes) bathing the blade in the innocent’s blood, the curse becomes active until the start of your next extended rest.

In retrospect, the curse on this item bears only a passing resemblance to a true compel, though the idea is the same: do something that the item wants you to do, and you’ll be rewarded. In the case of the blood-soaked blade, you are offered fairly considerable combat prowess (extra damage against bloodied targets, extra crit damage, and an encounter power that deals ongoing damage and heals you), but in order to gain access to any of it, you have to actively engage in an act that is unequivocally evil. If you don’t satisfy the curse, you’ve effectively got a +1 magic sword, and not much else.

If you hand out a weapon like this, try to make sure it falls into the hands of someone with an alignment and personality opposed to to such an act, and tempt the hell out of them. Play up the weapons malevolent influence, suggesting courses of action to the player (in the voice of the weapon) that would allow the player to satisfy the curse. If you really want to put the screws to the player, put them in a situation where those powers would come in really handy, and let them know about the situation beforehand so that they have the opportunity to satisfy the curse.

There’s a post over on Mike’s blog about various solutions for minis in D&D, particularly when you don’t have enough minis to go around. I must admit that some of these solutions took me by surprise, particularly using Scrabble tiles for minions and such.

Minis are an interesting problem in D&D. The game is clearly built for them, and is better when you use a tactical map of some sort along with minis or counters. The official D&D minis are pretty high quality and are already painted, but it can be expensive to get the exact minis you need, and storage is an issue, as well.

I have a pretty small collection of minis, and I tend to save my minis for the big important villains and monsters that I want to draw extra attention to.

For the rest, I put together a Photoshop file full of custom-made counters with images that I scour from the web, or from PDFs of various books I have. I print these out on card stock for extra sturdiness and weight. Since I use this method for initiative tracking, I make sure that the images on the counters match up with the images on the initiative cards, so the players can easily reference who is where and what conditions are on which creatures.

In addition, the players each have their own mini. Most encounters feature the player minis and a bunch of card stock counters, which has the advantage of allowing the PCs to stand out and be easy to find. Like I said, major villains usually have a mini devoted to them, as do large brutes or elite meat shields that I want to draw attention to.

This method tends to work pretty well, allows me to use a lot of evocative art, and is cost-effective.

Sly Flourish has a great post/discussion going on right now about providing players meaningful choices. I agree completely with everything said there.

I think that a lot of DMs, particularly new DMs, are extremely daunted by the prospect of the players being able to steer the narrative; this often results in very linear storylines in their games. This is compounded by the fact that D&D requires a lot of preparation to really work well, particularly if you have a lot of combat in your game.

I think the thing to realize here is that in D&D, more so now than in the past, mechanics can be pretty effectively divorced from narrative flavor with little effort, and re-skinned quite easily. Something you can do to make providing choice easier on you as a DM is to construct your encounters in such a way that they can be easily re-skinned. Get the encounters to work the way you want them to mechanically, then come up with window-dressing in various flavors for various eventualities. Then, during the encounter, focus on really describing the window-dressing and bringing it to life; if you do it right, the players won’t realize that those fire elementals are really the bugbears that they would have fought had they made a different choice a few encounters back. It also helps to be able to re-arrange the order of your encounters.

This, of course, is even easier to do with skill challenges and other less mechanically-involved encounters. In my first 4e session, I had a skill challenge planned where the players would have to negotiate their way past a bunch of thugs to talk to their boss. The players opted not to do that, instead going to talk to a nearby influential merchant to see if he could get them in to see the boss. I thought this was a great idea, so rather than say, “No, he really can’t do that for you”, I just used the negotiation skill challenge I had planned already and tweaked the flavor to suit the situation. Easy peasy.

A couple of my players have given me feedback on my post on using Renown Points in your home game. They seem to like the idea, but they think it was maybe a little too complex and required a bit too much book-keeping in some cases. After looking at it again and giving it the old hairy eyeball, I tend to agree with them.

I’ve tweaked a few of the Renown achievements, and lifted a lot of the per encounter/per session restrictions. None of the once-per-session achievements still carry that restriction, but some of the point values have been changed a little. As far as the ones that were once per encounter, I’ve lifted that restriction sort of. What I’ve done is I’ve created a score card for keeping track of your Renown Points.

For the stuff that is free of restrictions, basically the DM tells you that you earned that achievement, and you immediately add those Renown Points to your total. For the encounter-based ones, I included four spaces for check marks for each of those. Any time you hit that achievement, put a check mark in one of the spaces; when all your spaces for that achievement are full, you can’t earn any more check marks. At the end of the encounter, each check mark that you’ve earned turns into a Renown Point, and you erase all of those check marks so you can earn them again in the next encounter.

Because you can earn these achievements multiple times in an encounter, I’ve tweaked a couple of them. Now, instead of hitting for 15+ damage (which my strikers do pretty often), you have to hit for 20+ damage. It’ll happen a little less often, but it’ll still happen. Also, the achievement for taking 50 damage in one encounter seemed like too much book-keeping, like it would get forgotten a lot. Now, instead, you have to take damage equal to your bloodied value in a single round to earn a check.

You’ll also notice that the costs of the rewards have increased a little; specifically, each one is 5 points more expensive. This is to compensate for the fact that players will likely be earning more Renown Points than they would have before. Anyway, take a look at it, and feedback, as always, is welcome.

D&D Encounters has this system of Renown Points that it uses to reward players for doing cool things. Since, during a single season of Encounters, you may not gain enough experience to level up, Renown Points are really the primary reward currency in Encounters.

Now, my players level up plenty, and the lethality rate of my home game is probably a bit lower than that of Encounters, so I expect them to level up and gain all sorts of cool gear. I do not, however, like handing out experience rewards to a single player; for book-keeping purposes, and for the sake of simplicity and balance, I try to make sure that everyone gains experience at the same rate, and everyone levels up at the same time. In terms of monetary and gear rewards, I try to provide magical gear that is good for specific players, and I try to reward my players equally. These reward mechanics, therefore, reward the players for pushing the main story forward, but not necessarily for pushing their own stories forward, or for simply doing cool things in play. I’ve been trying to think up a reward mechanic that allows me to reward individual players without disrupting the balance of the game too much, and I just realized today that Wizards has already done a lot of that legwork for me.

That said, Renown Points aren’t going to work in my–or your–home game without a little tweaking. Some of the Renown achievements don’t make sense in campaign play, or in your home game, and there are some achievements that I’d like to add for the sake of story and character development. So, here’s the list of Renown Point achievements that I plan on using in my home game:

• Hit a milestone: 2 points
• Complete a minor quest: 2 points
• Complete a major quest: 3 points
• Create a personal quest: 3 points*
• Complete a personal quest: 3 points*
• Revive a dying ally: 1 point**
• Hit for 15+ damage against 1 enemy (25+ at paragon, 35+ at epic): 1 point**
• Kill 3 minions with 1 attack (4 minions at paragon, 5 minions at epic): 1 point**
• Take 50 enemy damage during one encounter (75 at paragon, 100 at epic): 1 point**
• Score a critical hit: 1 point**
• Moment of Greatness: 2 points*

*Can be earned once per session per character.
**Can be earned once per encounter per character.

This is a working list, and things may be added or dropped. Now, what can you actually get with those renown points? Poker chips. At least, that’s what I’m going to be using. Different colors correspond to different effects (listed below), and both your chips and your unspent Renown Points can be carried over from session to session.

• Yellow (10 Renown Points): +2 bonus to any one skill check, ability check, saving throw, or attack roll OR +5 bonus to any one damage roll.
• Red (15 Renown Points): Re-roll any one d20 roll or damage roll, take the higher result.
• Blue (20 Renown Points): Immediately regain one spent encounter power OR immediately regain one healing surge
• White (25 Renown Points): Immediately regain one spent daily power OR immediately gain one action point that you must spend before the end of the encounter (you can spend this action point even if you have already spent an action point during this encounter).

Again, this is a working list; values and effects may change. At any rate, I like this idea a lot, and I think I’ll float it by my players and see what they think. What do you think?