My online 4e D&D group plays roughly one Saturday night a month from 9pm – midnight. In that time, we normally have 2 combat encounters that seem to advance the story line. Recently, I was able to throw in a Skill Challenge that didn’t suck (as my first attempt, months ago, bombed).

A couple sessions ago, we had the opportunity to play two consecutive nights in a row, for the first time. The group agreed to play but requested that the second night of our double header be free from combat. *GULP* …3 hours…no combat?! What’s a DM to do?!

Thankfully, the second night of the double weekend session did not take place, as I was not only unprepared but had some other plans pop up.

Are Skill Challenges my only option? I’d rather not spend 3 hours reciting pre-written story line stuff.  I suppose I could do a series of Skill Challenges if I crafted them properly.  A series of puzzles?

What do some of you folks do? .. Or as a player, what would you want to see?

I’m having my first face to face D&D session this weekend and will be entertaining mostly new D&D players or players who have only played online with me and not in person. I wanted to make the event special…memorable, really get these new guys hooked.

Props are something I’ve always wanted to include in my sessions but playing online only can make that hard so I’ve decided to have props wherever possible and to keep this cheap but entertaining.

Behold the wares! (fine.. -I- called them amazing)

Two healing potions: $1.19 per vial at AC Moore Craft Store, Fruit Punch flavored Crystal Light drink mix.

Tunic scrap from cultist of Bane: $0.70 for the fabric in Wal*Mart’s reminant bin, $1.54 for the red fabric paint, $0.35 for the foam brush (Check hardware for the brush, not crafts)

Pouch of gold coins. $6.50 for all the gold foil wrapped chocolate coins. $0.50 for a yard of black toole mesh, $0.30 for the spool of gold ribbon. (comes to $1.50 each pouch)

Map back to the baddie’s hideout. Cost of printer ink/white paper. Parchment design was from the D&D Map-A-Day archives and drawn by my artistic friend Jordan Cain of o3visuals.

After the session, I’ll report back on how the party liked the props..and if any chocolate coins were left when it was time to pay the ferryman to use his boat

Well.. I did it. I decided to run a Skill Challenge. Early on in my 4th edition campaign, I tried one and it bombed.. hard.. like this.

(okay..enough pictures)

Back then, I tried the skill challenge example where you try to convince someone to do something for you..using bluff, intimidate, and diplomacy checks. The group at the time was very new, some new to D&D, others just unfamiliar with the other players present. I vowed never to do them again.

But then, some months later, the group got to a point where I may be able to throw in a skill challenge and it just might not do the ol` crash`n`burn.  After making their way through a seeekrit underground passage that hasn’t been touched in centuries, the party found themselves in the middle of a thick forest. In fact, the door that acted as the exit from the passage was intertwined with branches and vines and required some hacking to remove. Then I announced to the party:

“Skill Challenge time, comrades”

Silence over the headset (remember, I play online here).

I decided to do the tag-team group leader approach outlined in the DMG. The ranger took the lead. We rolled initiative and I described the scene and rules to the party.

Now that you’re out of the passage, the forest around you is dense and its hard for you to get your barrings given all the twists and turns you made underground in the dungeon. You`ll have to pass this skill challenge to find your way out of the forest and arrive at some familiar landmark.. road..trail. Something like that.

Endurance, Perception, and Nature checks are key skills and Jamlamin (the ranger) will make those at the top of each round. You`ll use any skill in your arsenal to try to give him a stackable +2 to his roll. If you use a skill other than the aforementioned 3, describe to me in detail why and how you’re using it.

I was blown away by the next 5 rounds of this.

• Someone used an Arcana check to feel the flows of magical force throughout the forest to get his barrings.
• Another used a Religion check to pray for divine guidance.
• Our Cleric rolled a Heal check to help patch up people’s scrapes and abrasions received while slashing their way through the woods.

The best of the evening was a Diplomacy check.. Yes.. lost in the woods, and let’s roll diplomacy. His argument was that his Dragonborn Pally has been called in to mediate several boarder and land disputes that have arisen between various waring factions. He wanted to look around to see if any of the local geographical features once crossed his desk on a map that was a part of a boarder dispute. Could it be more of a History check? Sure.. but c`mon. Rule of Cool here! Excellent thinking. In fact, I gave him a +2 to his own roll because it was so clever.

I told him I’d like to see his reasoning behind a bluff check in the woods but everyone was just about tapped for clever ideas all around.

Each round, the Ranger rolled endurance to simulate the hacking of the brush to get through the forest while the rest of the party did supportive actions to guide the group in the right direction.

While I won’t be including Skill Challenges in every session, I’m certainly more open to trying them again in the future.

If you run Linux or Mac OS and still want to use the character builder, there’s one way I can think of.

Yes… it requires a buddy running Windows.  Sorry :\

Convince your friend to set his Windows system to accept Remote Desktop connections. You can then sit in front of your *Nix/Mac system but still access the character builder via the remote screen. Save your character/sheet and email it to yourself.

No friends with Windows boxes? (Or ones that`ll let you do this?) Sign up at Amazon’s Cloud Services. You can set up your own virtual Windows box and Remote Desktop in to it. The cost is around 15 cents an hour of uptime and pennies for traffic to and from it. I fiddled around with one last month for about an hour and spend 18 cents. You can then shut down the Windows instance at any time. If the instance is not running, you don’t get charged.  But now you’re ending up having to pay more to use the character builder than a normal Windows user.

This has been tested with Linux users and my Windows box and works just fine, though it would be great to have it work natively under a non-Windows operating system.

I did some searching and so far, this Remote Desktop method seems like the only way out there right now. Any tricks we’re missing? Does a trick like this make buying a DDI subscription more appealing to those holding off because they don’t run Windows?

I logged in with my D&D Insider account this morning to check out the new Psion class. The .pdf downloaded without incident and I began to read through the new material.

Then I saw the new anti-piracy measures.

Purely mechanical items, such as powers and feats, appear only as list items accompanied by brief descriptions and/or flavor text; the mechanics of these items appear in the D&D Character Builder and D&D Compendium.

Oooooh. Is that how its done? So when it came to the Powers section, it showed the Power’s name (with properly color coded background), the flavor text,

In to your enemie’s mind, you inject naked images of their grandmother.

and then a clickable link to the Compendium entry that would have the entire power as listed in a book. Clever..yes. Will it stop pirates? Heck no. Popular D&D pirate mesage boards are already full of requests asking for people with DDI accounts to please (Yes, pirates use the magic words) provide the missing content.

And it`ll only be a matter of time until someone delivers. After all, the Eberron guide is already scanned and available.

At our last session, my D&D 4e party ended up in a town after jumping through a whirling blue portal to escape certain death.  They had some time to poke around, buy some gear, that kind of stuff. During their shopping spree, the group noticed that some people began looking.. sick.  Ashen skin, all that stuff.

Soon after, the party heard a scream coming from outside. When they rushed to investigate, they found that one of the townsfolk had began to mutate..growing in size. He chucked a water trough at the group and combat began. I sprinkled around the map 8 other townsfolk. I told the party that they looked sick as well and may begin to mutate at any moment. My idea was to have the large creature attack the party while the townsfolk would become zombie`ish minions. The group is level 4 and I gave the minions an AC of 13. Nothing hard to fight. But just an annoyance.

Then the cleric of the group asked me a question..

Is there a way we can stop them from turning?

How interesting..  I suppose I hadn’t thought of that. My plan was to have 1 creature turn each round.  Time to utilize The Rule of Fun!

Sure can! Here’s how it`ll work. Each round, one of the townsfolk will turn and begin to attack you. If you reach them and make a successful Heal check, you`ll be able to prevent them from turning.”

Then the cleric asked

Is there a way I can tell which order they`ll turn in?

Oo! This was getting good.  I responded by stating she could roll Perception to scan the battlefield and visually check the status of the nearby townsfolk. I set a rather high DC for it as the map was somewhat large and there were a few outlying townsfolk that may be hard to see.

She all but rolled a natural 20.

So the battle became 4 party members against the Cursechanged Beggar and the cleric running from one end of the map to the other..several times over. If I kept proper track, only one was lost when she was unable to reach it in time.. and another died when a fellow party member mercy killed a townsfolk who hadn’t changed yet..but was about to.

To finish the encounter, the cleric ran back from saving her last citizen and promptly Crit`ed the main baddie, dropping him to the dirt.

When the session was over for the evening, everyone commented on how they enjoyed the extra element that was added to the encounter instead of  it just being an exchange of weapon blows. In fact, I’ve reworked the next few encounters now to add some extra challenges/obstacles to the fight!

I remember playing in my first face to face D&D session. The book was still fresh in my hands and had that new book aroma. I Xerox’ed (Yes.. I was born in Rochester, NY) umpteen copies of the character sheet and sharpened a few pencils before sitting down at my table to roll a character. I ended up taking a blank char sheet and labeling which pages in the PHB I’d use to fill out specific sections. It worked rather well, and after a few times of doing it, I became somewhat speedy at filling them out. Erasure marks? Plenty. But in the end I’d copy it over to a clean sheet and make it look all purdy.

That was only two years ago.

I finally ponied up and bought a year’s subscription to D&D Insider.  In my opinion, the compendium alone is worth it. I dig the character builder but I’m on the fence about its effect on new players (and even veterans).

Its hard to put in to words but its as if the character builder takes away from the general experience of D&D. Does that make sense? If its purpose is to get players up and running in no time with a character ready to go, then yes, job well done.

Perhaps its my educational background. When I was going for my BA in History, I remember sifting through rolls and rolls of microfilm in the campus library, paging through endless books to find info. In fact, it felt unnatural for me to switch to PDFs (when available) but I really couldn’t pass up the ease of using Crtl+F to find what I needed…though I was almost just as fast using the index/TOC of a printed version of the book.

Or it can be equated to my nursing dosage calculation test that I took earlier in the Spring. We weren’t allowed to use calculators on the test but in a true clinical setting, we’d have one and infact, not using one could be considered dangerous.  The character builder keeps your characters D&D legal. Not using it could lead to errors.

Is it worth getting a grasp of the basics first?

Its great to see this wonderful program getting so many updates after being feared dead just a few months ago. Yesterday, Rizban released RC6 of Gametable 2.0. Here is the change log from the official Gametable website.

This release addresses several annoying issues as well as a few more major ones. Over all, this release makes Gametable a bit more stable and easier to use. This release has been made possible by Lotharious, who has contributed greatly to finding and fixing problems with the code base.

• [Fix] Continued changes to pogs and underlays to further improve the system.
• [Fix] Fixed issue with players disconnecting and still showing connected.
• [Fix] Chat system lag and potential for program crash fixed. All chat features from earlier versions work.
• [Fix] Rotation issues at various map zooms have been fixed.
• [Fix] Issue with save files still saving with wrong extension fixed.
• [Change] Pogs now sorted alphabetically in the pog library without regards to capitalization.
• [New] A menu option has been added to lock or unlock all pogs and underlays on the map.
• [Change] Rearrangement of files and packages within the Gametable project to bring them more in list with an MVC architectural pattern.

I posted instructions earlier on how to update Gametable and was notified by Rizban that there is a MUCH easier way..and I completely agree.  Its quite simple really.

1. Back up the gametable. jar file you currently use. I renamed mine gametable.jar_rc5
2. Take the new gametable.jar file from the RC6 package you just downloaded.
3. Drop it in the working folder for gametable you use where the gametable.jar_rc5 file is.
4. Run gametable.
5. Blam. You’ve got RC6 with all your maps/pogs/underlays intact.

And now, a game. 10 experience points to the first person to tell me which 4e D&D book this transcribed map came from.

As previously mentioned, I have the opportunity to play in an online 4e D&D group that meets weekly. I’ve chosen to play a Gnomish Bard as I was attracted to the Vicious Mockery at-will power they have. Here’s the flavor text from it.

You unleash a string of insults at your foe, weaving them with bardic magic to send the creature into a blind rage.

I can totally get in to that… and in fact, I plan to.

Our first session is tonight and I’ve compiled a list of insults that my character, Finrick, plans to hurl at the enemy. Here’s how I hope it`ll go:

Finrick points at the kobold and cackles, “”Thou mother is like spoiled milk – fat and chunky!”

Does anyone else have fun stories of bardic shenanigans?

First, please understand that I love DM`ing my 4e group. I have a blast doing it and look forward to our monthly sessions. But I’ve been experiencing the increasing urge to get out from behind the screen and doing some playing instead.

With my unique gaming time restrictions of only being able to play online, I did some research and registered for an account over at The Tangled Web which are forums dedicated to online pen and paper gaming.  They have a section where you can post some info about yourself, stating that you’re looking for an online group to play with. DMs can also post their need for players and browse around and pick up and gamers looking for a group.

I didn’t have much faith that anyone would consider me for their group. My time constraints were very heavy in my opinion with my only being available Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights starting at 9pm Eastern. Nonetheless, I was shocked when I received an email from an interested DM whos campaign was played Thursday nights starting at 9pm. Booyah!

We had a practice session last week. People are either new to 4th edition or new to the program we’re using, MapTools. We ran a couple encounters and called it a night. Finrick, my Gnomish Bard was throwing some great insults with his Vicious Mockery power! It started out like this..

Me: Finrick jumps over the carcas at his feet and begins to insult the Kobold’s mother, stating she’s horrible in bed!
DM: Well.. er.. you can do that if you want..
Me: No..its a power I have. Vicious Mockery. I yell insults and it causes damage!
DM: Oh! Well then! Go right ahead!

Take that zinger Kobold #58!

I`m also excited to experience another DM’s style of play. With my campaign, I strive to give my players the best time they can have on a Saturday night and hopefully I can bring back some interesting ideas to help that happen. Not like story line ideas but more like.. mannerism ideas. Ya dig?