By now I’m sure you’ve all seen this alignment chart: This cute graphic got me thinking. Back when there were mechanical consequences (protection spells, powers, weapons, etc) to your character’s outlook on life, it made sense to abstract and categorize ethical alignment. D&D 4e presents players with a reduced and asymmetrical choice for alignment. What’s [...]
Archive for the ‘Rules’ Category
Time To Chuck Alignment
Posted in Rules, tagged 4e, alignment, characters, d&d, editions on March 23, 2011 | 17 Comments »
More on stealth
Posted in Combat, Rules, skills, tagged 4e, challenges, Combat, d&d, player v dm, rants, skills, sneaking, stealth on March 15, 2010 | 6 Comments »
Stealth seems to be a topic that I’ve been writing about a lot (see On Sneaking) lately. The reason why I’m writing about it again is because at our last game, we had a tough time of it. Our stealth woes were so bad, my DM wrote about it on her own blog. On the [...]
Vehicular slaughter
Posted in Combat, Rules, tagged 4e, boats, challenges, Combat, d&d, ddi, dm, dragons, horses, mounted combat, mounts, rail, treasure, vehicles on March 12, 2010 | 5 Comments »
Last week I wrote about escaping from a dungeon. Reader Paras commented that a good scenario would have the heroes locked up with the ingredients to build a battle vehicle for the escape. This comment got me thinking that vehicles don’t come up that often in regular D&D games. In novels the heroes always wind [...]
Levelling Up
Posted in Rules, tagged 4e, character development, dm, levelling, rp, xp on February 10, 2010 | 8 Comments »
When do you like to receive experience points? And when do you like for your characters to level up? Video games (Super Mario Bros. in particular) has conditioned me to expect to know how many points I’ve earned immediately. There is a part of me as a player that wants instant gratification… a desire to [...]
More on splitting the party: The Expert
Posted in Character Generation, Rules, tagged 4e, balance, characters, dm, leverage, magic, magic-users, numb3rs, philosophy, powers, roles, sage, the party, tropes, tv shows, wizards on February 5, 2010 | 5 Comments »
The TV show Numb3rs is about a FBI team that occasionally gets helped out by a math professor. The five FBI agents form the group that goes on missions, hunts down bad guys, and gets into gun fights. Each member of the team fills a different specialty, and yet at the same time are pretty [...]
Critical Misses
Posted in Combat, Rules, tagged 4e, Combat, d&d, dice, rants on February 3, 2010 | 16 Comments »
Does anyone else miss critical misses? I’m not sure if they were ever a real part of the rules or if some sense of fairness and consistency wanted a critical miss to balance out critical hits. I know at somepoint “natural 20″ == automatic hit became a real rule, and by the time 3rd edition [...]
Snow and Ice
Posted in Rules, tagged 4e, compendium, d&d, ddi, dm, frost giant, powers, rants, rituals, Rules, skills, terrain, weather on January 18, 2010 | 3 Comments »
My morning commute provided me time to think of all the awful situations that can occur weather-wise in a d&d setting. Be it driving a lightning rail through a thunderstorm or fighting a white dragon in a icy mountain pass, bad weather can really ruin one’s day. In my experience weather rarely comes up in [...]
How to gracefully fail a search check
Posted in Gathering Inspiration, House Rules, Rules, Skill Challenge, tagged 4e, challenges, characters, d&d, dm, heist, leverage, philosophy, rp, Skill Challenge, skills on January 13, 2010 | 6 Comments »
I don’t know about you, but sometimes the most mundane events in my life lead me to odd roleplaying ideas. For example, when I saw the office manager emptying out the shredder this week, I thought that a high level modern rogue could sneak in and steal those shredded documents and reassemble them for some [...]
The New Mounted Combat
Posted in Combat, Rules, tagged 4e, Combat, d&d, dolphins, editions, horses, mounted combat, Rules on December 25, 2009 | 3 Comments »
In a fantasy role-playing games sometimes a character finds himself on top of another creature in battle. In my Second Edition days, I had characters that jousted from horses and dragons, and even once fought some sea monsters whilst atop a dolphin. Each 2e sourcebook had some complicated set of rules for the mounts of [...]
Metagaming at the table
Posted in Combat, Rules, tagged 4e, Combat, metgaming, Rules on December 4, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I just read and responded to a post by Martin Ralya (follow him on twitter @martinralya). This post entitled How Much Metagaming Is Too Much? asks pretty much what you think it does, how much meta gaming should there be at the table and when is it too much. If I can take an attempt [...]
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