There is a certain prejudice among some gamers against using pre-made adventures.  They are so cookie cutter that it begins to feel more like playing Monopoly than dungeons and dragons (not that Monopoly is a bad game).

As a Dungeon Master, however, pre-made campaigns and adventures can be huge time savers.  But to keep my players guessing here area a few tricks that I have use in the past.

·    Change the names of the NPC’s.  You would be surprised how effective this is.  Give the barkeep a name that fits your style and personality and the players will respond accordingly.
·    Use towns from your campaign world.  Scrap the whole starting village and put in one that comes from your world.  Put the useful clues where they would fit organically in your town and run with it.
·    Get rid of the adventure elements that don’t fit.  Just cut them out and move on with your life.  If you don’t need it don’t use it.
·    Use only the encounter information, i.e. stat blocks and get rid of the maps/set up information.  This is particularly useful for the outdoors encounters stuff.  The stuff that happens almost in town or between town and the dungeon.  A lot of times there is a ton of useless background information that has nothing to do with your campaign and your world, but the stats and combat info are good and can be quickly dropped into your personalized setting.
·    Add your own NPC’s.  This is very useful.  If, for example you have been facing the dread druid queen who seeks to enslave the world in a animal/hybrid paradise then introduce some of her minions into the premade.  Swap out an encounter or two.  Change the big bad bosses name.

Keep the elements that make sense – in particular maps, monster statistics, names that you like etc. Any unique magic items or encounters made just for that adventure are often very useful because they tend to add a ton of flavor.

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Sometimes more gold does not help a party much.  Sometimes even more experience points, magic items, and hordes of gems really aren’t worth very much to characters or to players.

Understanding the importance of these items in relation to the world that the characters live in is important to understanding how treasure and even experience can impact the game.

The easiest example is with magic items.  If an item has no use or very little use to the party then it really adds no value or power to the party.  An example would be a magic wand in a party with no one who can use a magic wand.  On paper the party appears to be at the appropriate power level, but in reality they are a magic item short.  This could be particularly devastating because it highlights a deficiency and exacerbates an existing weakness.

Gold can fall into a very similar situation very quickly if there is no place to spend the gold, or if the players are unwilling to spend the gold or if the characters are unable to haul the loot around.  A huge dragon horde at the bottom of a dungeon with a party that has no bag of holding or time in which to pack the loot out does nobody any good.  If, when they reach the top there is nothing waiting but a village with one general store selling only basic goods from the Player’s Handbook, then they will unlikely be able to find a good way to spend their money.

What about experience?  Can it really be of little or no value?  Most of the time experience is the single most valuable reward that can be given.  It is the only reward that inherently increases the character’s power – regardless of the campaign or situation.  However, in a vacuum it still is not the holy grail.  If there is not a corresponding increase in treasure – particularly useful magic items, then experience points alone can be a bit disappointing.  A wizard who does not have a powerful implement may struggle in situations where other high level wizards do not.

Until next time, have fun!

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Dungeons and Dragons can very quickly go from hobby to lifestyle.  The nature of the game very nearly demands it.

If you play on a weekly, or more often, basis, then you are committing as much or more time to the game as many people commit to the religion.  This means that it is a pretty strong commitment if you want to play and get to the full depths of the game.

Managing this kind of commitment can be very difficult, particularly for the more mature gamer.  If you are still in school, not working, not in a serious relationship (married, etc.), and have no children, then this is less of an issue.  If, however, you have a full time job, a spouse, and a few children; time, money, and the ability to justify the expenditure of said time and money to said spous and children can be in short supply.

Here are a few strategies for dealing with the problem.

1) Find gamers in similar circumstances.  This is not always possible, and you may have to travel a bit further, but really it is worth the effort.  These are people who will understand and possibly even tolerate your children.  In my group the kids all play together elsewhere while the adults role-play.

2) Don’t force the schedule.  Yes you do need to have a set time, but more importantly you need to be flexible.  Your group may want to play every week (or every day), but if you start treating it more importantly that your family they will quickly begin to resent it.

3) Keep the schedule you commit to.  Yes, a contradiction of the previous point, but not really.  What I mean here is that if you are committed, then explain that commitment to your family, and keep it.  Treat the game just as you would treat any other serious commitment.

4) Manage your budget.  This is important not just so that you have the extra cash for books and dice, but so that you can put the cost of playing in perspective for yourself and your significant other.  If you are shelling out $100 a month for D&D then your spouse may wonder where the diaper money went.  On the other hand, if you are paying attention to the money she (or he) may be a little more supportive.

5) Finally, include everyone.  Make time for the kids.  Explain the game to them in terms they can understand.  get them some cheap dice and let them play around.  They may not have your level of interest, but everyone wants to be included and feel like they are part of what you love.

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One of the basics of survival in any combat oriented rpg is to kill the bad guys.  In Dungeons and Dragons there are nearly limitless ways of accomplishing this task, and the less work that your character has to put into it the better.

Online D&D forums are full of all kinds of hints and tips about how to maximize your ability to dish out the damage, but there is far less information about how to eliminate the painful necessity of doing damage at all.

If you are clinging to 3rd edition, you have a few more options here, but 4th edition also has plenty of room for strategy.  In some ways even more.

The first key to keep in mind is that unlike many computer games the bad guys to in fact damage each other.  One of the greater fears about spell casters and their ilk are area attacks that can take out the entire party at once.  Often these types are paired with minions or partners whose job it is to bunch the party together.

Your strategy in these situation should be to always make sure that as many enemies as possible are within all possible areas of effect.  In other words if the caster wants to hit any two party members they should also be forced to hit at least one of their own allies.  This is most easily accomplished by keeping an enemy between the party members.

Next, look for opportunities to force the monsters to use hazardous terrain or to provoke opportunity attacks.  If you have a decent rogue type along then few traps should surprise the party.  Knowing which squares to avoid makes combat not only less dangerous but can be used to your advantage.  Skills such as intimidate and bluff can be used to good effect.  Also, using ranged attacks and blocking the good squares with skillful fighters can force enemies to either risk hazerdous terrain or opportunity attacks or be picked apart mercilessly at a distance.

Finally, never forget about compulsion effects.  3rd edition (and earlier) had many ways of taking control of an encounter.  These can be very powerful effects, starting at first level with charm person.  If you do manage to take control of the enemy, abuse the power mercilessly.  Lesser effects such as suggestion and charm person won’t allow you to cause an enemy to attack an ally or damage himself, but can be used to maneuver them into more vulnerable positions or to trigger traps of which they are not aware.

Always keep in mind that just like a real combat, D&D encounters are more than dice and numbers and the outcome can be swayed very quickly by using strategy and good jugment.

And be sure to have fun!

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Building a village for your Dungeons and Dragons campaign is relatively simple.  The key components of a village (despite what the Dungeon Master’s Guide may have told you) are:

·    A purpose
·    A place
·    A face

Lets start with the purpose.  Why is the village there?  Why do the players care?  Is it just a rest stop on the way to the next adventure?  Does it hold a vital clue to solving some mystery?  Understanding the purpose will tell you not only what elements to include in your village, but also give you some ideas about how to describe it and how much effort you need to put into it.  A watering hole on the way to the big city (because the players just need a place to rest for the night) will require significantly less effort than a collection of undead farmers attempting to hide their nefarious secret from the world.

Once you understand the purpose of the village you need to give the players a place to be and someone to interact with.  These are the place and the face respectively.

The place is simply the stage where most of the action is expected to happen.  This can be a tavern, a farmhouse, a store, or the village square (or any of dozens of other locations).  The whole idea here is that you put some amount of though into at least one location and give the players clues that this is where they need to be and who they need to talk to.  If you are building the village on the fly then understanding the place is vital – not only to keeping your sanity but to directing your players so they don’t get bored or confused.

Finally, the face is the one character that you want them to remember or care about.  This could be the innkeeper or the shadowy figure in the corner.  It is the person that you as a DM will draw attention to and focus the players attention on.

Now, if you are using stock NPC’s to go with your campaign, here is a handy trick that I use.  It is a version of the magician’s force, but it works well.  A force (in case you are wondering) is simply the art of offering a choice without really offering a choice.  The idea is simple.  Have one set of stats – anything that fits the power level of your part.  Then offer two or three physical descriptions to the players of people they encounter in the village.  Now, whoever they choose to talk to or interact with gets those stats.

90% of the time (or more) they will ignore the other characters that you created anyway and there will be no need for them to have stats – not even a name.  It gets confusing to keep track of too many characters, and most players just want to find the important ones.  Make it easy on them (and yourself) by simply having the one they talk to be the important one.  They will never know the difference and you will save yourself a few headaches.

If you are afraid of metagaming, then mix it up a little.  Make them get past a few red herrings first.

Either way, be sure to have fun with it!

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What is a stock NPC?  Put simply it is that guy that shows up in nearly every town, village, bar or other place the players visit often.

The judicious use of stock NPC’s can make many elements of your D&D campaign run much more smoothly, especially if you are running a campaign that involves a lot of city or town travel and is a bit lighter on the dungeons.

The monster manual, handily enough, provides us with a number of stock NPC’s ready for use, i.e. the various “monster” versions of the races in the Player’s Handbook.  These are very useful and should not be overlooked.  If you expect to use a new town or village in the next session it may be a good idea to keep the stat cards around for the humans at the very least, but you may want to consider having a few elves or tieflings as well, depending on your setting.

These statistics are useful for when the party decides to do the totally unexpected such as rob the local merchants of their winter grain storage or recruit the farmer’s daughter into the party.  Having the stats handy (rather than buried somewhere in a book) makes it a lot easier to say “yes” to the crazy ideas.

Combine the stat cards with a name generator and you are set.  If you can find a name generator that does many names at once then just print a list of 20 or 30 names and you are set.

The key to remember when using stock NPC’s is that the players will remember how you play the character rather than where he was found or what her name was.  The stats on the card are there only for reference should anything involving rules come up.  The rest of it is up to how you decide to play that particular character and what sort of feel you want to bring to the session.

Until next time have fun!

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As a DM I’m generally opposed to metagaming – that is all of the game stuff that goes on outside of the game.  As a player the same generally holds true.  However there is one specific instance when I think it is not only okay, but can be very valuable.

When metagaming prevents the game from coming to a complete and total standstill.

When a designer sits down and builds a dungeon they generally have a concept in their head of how the dungeon is going to play out.  For less experienced designers, such as new DM’s, this can lead to some very severe problems such as unsolvable puzzles or overwhelming (or underwhelming) monsters.

In particular this can lead to the problem of where the dungeon itself causes the game to come to a halt.  The party lacks a critical resource to solve some aspect or the dungeon.

In these cases metagaming – i.e. using clues about the designer of the dungeon to figure out the dungeon can be helpful – not only because it generally will lead to loot and experience but because it can take a gaming session from frustrating and boring to interesting and exciting.

One example from my own play experience would be a rather long and uninteresting maze-like dungeon with roughly 2 encounters in it.  Rather than slog our way through it, continuing a session that was going from boring to more boring, my compadres and I decided that the DM in all likelihood based on her personal tastes had very little in the way of serious campaign related material hidden in the dungeon.  We therefore decided to stop searching every little nook and cranny and just looked for the way out which it turns out wasn’t that hard to find.  A short time later we were back down the path of interactive fun.

It took some metagaming and us stepping outside of what we as players and what our characters would normally do, but if we hadn’t we would literally have spent hours doing activities that no one at the table would have enjoyed.

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Leatherworking has always been a bit of a fascination of mine.  I can’t say that I’m the greatest of the great - in fact I’m pretty much an amateur.  It is something that I do as a hobby when I have time, and then mostly to support my other habits of writing and gaming.

I am huge into making props for my games.  So I decided to take a look at a leatherworking guide.  For relatively cheap I discovered that I could in fact get back into leatherworking and begin to put together some extra fancy maps and things.

I’ve talked in the past about aging and preparing paper, but how cool are actual leather handouts.  Nothing can compare with that.  Not to mention doing a bit of custom leatherwork for dice bags and other odds and ends.  Needless to say I am pretty excited!

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The top 10 ways to piss off your players.

1. Cheat just to keep your prized NPC from dying (give him extra HP, extra damage, extra anything just so he doesn’t go down in 1 round).
2. Steal their stuff (virtual stuff of course).  Hand out that nifty new +17 axe of everything slaying that can also teleport them to safety and make pink bubbly healing potions at will - then steal it back when they killed your favorite NPC in one round.
3. Steal their stuff (their real stuff).  Eat all their chips and then kill of their players for not sharing the second bag.
4. Do all the talking at the table.  Do not let your players say anything at any time.  If they attempt to speak interrupt them with  your monologue.  If they begin to nod off during your monologue, violently shake the table and tell them that their character has been struck by lightning.  Proceed to explain where the lightning came from and how it fits into your game world.  Re-explain your game world in depth.  Re-explain why you created this game world.  Re-explain the game.
5. Roll their characters for them.  Hand out your pre-made PC’s and tell them in great detail exactly how they need to play their characters.  If they deviate from your script, punish them severely.  Then eat their chips.
6. Hand out no treasure.  They didn’t find it so they don’t get it.  After 5 levels of adventuring they should eventually figure out to use their swords as picks (or actually go to town and buy picks from the gnome who specializes in selling picks) and start digging up the northwest corner of the 3rd room.  I mean after all it is practically in plain sight.
7. Change all the rules.  Make up your own classes and races.  Tell them they can still play the races and classes and use the powers printed in the PHB, but that they will be severely under powered if they do so.  Apply your new rules to the NPC’s and make them more powerful than can be reasonably expected with the printed rules.
8. Rules Lawyer.  Need I say more?
9. Make a dungeon with no monsters, traps, treasures or encounters.  Force them to map it out in vivid detail - all 10 pages of graph paper.  Describe each empty room as detailed as possible.  Punish them if they try to leave.
10. Kill everyone - eat their chips while they roll new characters - then kill them again.

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Here is a bit of a ditty that I wrote up about my all time favorite creature.  More of my characters have fallen to the dreaded gelatinous cube than to any other dungeon danger.

The gelatinous cube
is slimy and crude
but never oh never
says anything rude.

It slithers and pokes
round corners and nooks
and often so often
eats heroes and crooks.

Till sated at last
it oozes on past
the door and the trap
to darkness so fast.

I enjoy using the cubes when they make sense in my dungeons but even more I enjoy the struggles that players go through to deal with them.  Almost always they make for an interesting challenge and are usually a nice variation from the other more solid creatures.

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Have you played a dwarf lately?  If you have then you may need a name for that dwarf.  His is a dwarven name generator that I find handy sometimes.  It is also useful for making up a list of dwarven names for NPCs which is especially useful if you know the party is going to be heading into a dwarf city or other area populated by dwarves.

Over at Seventh Sanctum there are generators for lots of different things and I like to use them from time to time.

Here is a dwarven name generator that only does one name at a time, but it also gives a bit of information about the name and how it could be used.  This is probably more useful for Players than for DM’s, but both are excellent tools if you need a name quickly or if you just don’t know where to come up with cool names on your own.

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Ok, so is the new D&D Draconomicon worth buying?  Is it worth stealing? (C’mon you know someone who has a bootleg electronic copy, and if you don’t you wish you did).  Well, personally I’m just a fan of hardcover D&D books - if for nothing else the art and the feel of a solid hardback book in my hands.  Draconomicon meets those criteria - but does that mean I’m willing to shell out the cash for it?

Lets start with the good points - Art.  The art is good.  I like dragons.  Who doesn’t like dragons?  And a book about dragons better have pretty dragons in it.  Draconomicon delivers pretty dragons.  So on a scale of 1 to worth it - the art gets a worth it.

DM useful.  Again I have to give it a worth it here.  There are those out there who may diss on Chapter 3: Dragon Lairs, but personally I find 75 pages of stuff I don’t have to write myself very useful.  Can’t use it all the time - but can and will use it when needed.  Get an electronic copy (scanner anyone) drop an image into Microsoft Excel and bam you have a game grid sized map - I explained how to use Excel for maps a while ago.

Cool New Creatures - Mostly worth it.  Once again I tend to shamelessly use what is already printed.  Why then only a mostly worth it?  Draconomicon just doesn’t meet all my flavor expectations.  My opinion, my bias - essentially me just complaining for no real reason. Purple dragons - not so much.  Gray Dragons - reminds me of the stone guardians outside of the castle in Bard’s Tale.  I prefer dragons with color (just not really purple).

Overall flavor - Take out the Purple Dragons and Draconomicon will pass muster.  I like dragons, who doesn’t?  A whole book about them - well Wizards ought to publish at least a few.

For your convenience (and my own) I’ve placed a handy link to buy the product here at the end of the post.

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Picking a good Dungeons and Dragons name for your character, whether a PC or an NPC can be a challenge.  For run of the mill NPC’s there are name generators available that can help with the task, but if you are making the boss that will appear over and over again throughout then finding the right name can make a world of difference to the players.  Likewise if you have spent time creating a character then the name is something you will have to live with for a very long time.

Here are some basic traits that a good name has:

1. It is memorable.  If you have to refer back to your notes two and three times then it is probably not memorable enough.  Memorable names can be short or long.
2. Short.  A short name is easy to remember and comes essentially as its own build in nickname.
3. Nicknames.  Does the name lend itself to more memorable nick names.  We all enjoy making fun of the bad guys.  The Count of All Evilness isn’t as scary as Lord Heartripper, no does it lend itself to mocking nicknames such as Heartripper the Stripper - soon to become just Lord Stripper and perhaps even Strip.
4. Meaning.  Does the name convey meaning that is relevant to the personality of the character?  A good Dungeons and Dragons name should give a hint about the purpose of that that character.  Often this can be accomplished using a compound name with a noun and a verb.  Swordwrencher could be a fine surname for a fighter who specializes in disarm tactics.

A Dungeons and Dragons name is not the same as choosing a name for a character in a short story or a novel.  Names for stories do not generally convey the same overt level of meaning because the author doesn’t want to give away too much.  In a game clues are much more necessary and often they need to be given a bit louder.  The DM needs to know how to treat your charcter in a social situation and the name can be a big help with that. Likewise players would generally rather face off against the goblin king Rancid Ashenforce than Bob the goblin.

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I’ll be honest I never heard of Eladrin until I picked up the 4th edition Players Handbook and then I thought – um so they put sun elves into the PHB and changed their name.  Then I read the entry for elves and thought – so they changed the magic loving elves that I grew up with since Basic Dungeons and Dragons into wood/wild elves which have been an expansion only race since the beginning.

I was a bit disappointed – but I can accept it.  At least they gave them reasonably decent art in the PHB, which is more than I can say for the Tiefling or the Dragonborn.  Sorry, but those need to go.

So what is an Eladrin?  Well it is much like the Tolkein elf that you would find in Rivendell whereas the “elf” is more like the Tolkein elf that you would find in Murkwood.  Oh I’m sure there were other influences but I doubt you’ll find any stronger than that.  Wizards couldn’t very well take the Middle Earth names so they chose Eladrin.  Either that or somebody was sitting around with the Forgotten Realms Players Guide from 3rd edition and realized that players often opted for ether sun elves or wood elves given the choice because the stats for high elves were kinda blah.

Personally I would have switched the two.  I would have kept elves as the magic loving race they have been since the beginning and then made the Eladrin into the wild dexterous tree huggers that elves now are.  I think for the sake of continuity this would have worked out better.

All that said, why has my experience been playing an Eladrin?  I ran an Eladrin wizard and I like it.  It has taken me a moment to get used to them, but they are probably my favorite race.  I have a soft spot for magic.  My very first character was a magic-user (died a horrible death on the Isle of Dread) and I’ve been hooked ever since.  I can’t say I would always pick Eladrin over other races, but I would certainly pick them over the new elves and I won’t be rolling up a Dragonborn anytime soon.

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