Asmor's Geek Blog

With the new season of D&D Encounters starting up, Wizards put out a call for “twitter buffs–” buffs which would be tweeted during game sessions and affect the game. I found one of the buffs very inspiring, the very first one posted in fact by a user named Atras.

Sand flies harshly to the South, right into your eyes.  All attacks made to the North are made with major concealment (-5) #dndenc

The idea of a directional bonus is absolutely awesome, because it strongly encourages movement. You’re constantly fighting to be in the favorable position. It can give an edge to ambushers or be used to balance out a tougher encounter. (continue reading…)

One of the things that always struck me as a bit… inelegant about 4th Edition is that leaders, who usually have powers which grant healing surges with bonuses, can basically use the healing powers as much as they want between encounters. I find this inelegant because there is at least an implicit–arguably perhaps even an explicit–expectation that players should spend their own healing surges between encounters to heal. (continue reading…)

I’ve always felt that skill challenges were one of D&D 4th Edition’s most egregious failings, in large part because I was so excited for them. At Encounter-a-Day, I’ve tried to come up with ways to fix them by completely altering the framework of skill challenges.

The more I think about it, though, the more I become sure that the idea of a skill challenge is fundamentally broken, and needs to be put to pasture. The inspiration is absolutely wonderful, but the idea that you can make a single framework, no matter how flexible, apply to any situation is misguided at best.

Even worse, the mere existence of such a framework encourages you to try and shoehorn things into it.

That’s why I think the idea of a skill challenge should be struck from the gamers’ lexicon. But retain the inspiration, the idea that skills matter. Actively look for places to add skill checks into the game, particularly during combat. Mike Shea’s Circle of Protection encounter is a wonderful example of making skills matter.

My problem here is that if I were designing the same thing, I probably would have tried to make it a skill challenge, when it clearly doesn’t need to be. I’d try to fit the situation into the framework, rather than trying to design a new framework to fit the situation. There absolutely are times when the skill challenge framework is appropriate, but I think having that framework in your mind ahead of time is counterproductive.

So really what my advice boils down to is this: look for opportunities to test the characters’ skills, and design a framework that suits the situation from the ground up.

Nifft has some great advice on ENWorld for dealing with players who like to change characters a lot. Specifically, let them, but take their preferences into account. For such players, just don’t involve their characters as heavily in the plot of the game.  If there aren’t any major plot points or threads resting on the character, there’s not much to be disrupted when they want to switch to a new one.

The same idea can be used for players who are less reliable in terms of showing up for games. There aren’t many things as frustrating as ending at a cliffhanger involving one of the PCs, only to have his player not show up for the next session.

Another idea I had a long time ago, since I’m one of those players who grows bored with a PC very quickly, was to offer to be anything the GM might need. I’d switch to whatever character he’d need whenever he needed me to. A priestess from a temple, a guide to the mountains, etc. It’s a bit of a double-edged– one of the caveats was that I not be required to play the same character more than a couple sessions, but on the other hand if I did find a character I enjoyed I’d have to be willing to give it up when the GM needed me.

I suggested this idea to a friend who was starting a game and he literally hugged me. Unfortunately, never actually got to try it out, as the campaign never got off the ground. But as a GM who was quite… down on my short attention span for characters, if he could get excited about the idea I think anyone could.