Recent content by Amaroq

You're welcome! A couple other ideas - - We use a white board to track initiative order, hit points, and conditions. - Task one non-DM player dealing with initiative, keeping things moving ("You're on deck" to the player after the current can help a lot.) - Task a different non-DM player...

Crawl - one square, or two? And, provokes opportunity attacks, right?

Two of our regular players are out of town, which has put a crimp in our ongoing campaign sessions, but left us with enough players for three sessions of fun-and-forget. Does anybody recommend a published adventure to fill about three sessions (15-20 hours), maybe in the Level 7-15 ballpark...

To that, I'd add: Making the tension "who dies first" is not going to work very well. Hypothetically, if they have 2 defenders and 2 leaders, the leaders and the defenders will work together very very well to keep PC's from dying. So, I'd aim for alternate tension methods building methods...

Yep. Stand from prone is a move action. If your square is unoccupied, you stand into your square. If your square is currently occupied, you shift to the nearest unoccupied square. p.s., my players didn't figure this out for 5' and 10' wide corridors either, and are STILL cursing me out for...

Welcome to DM'ing!! I do try to imagine the courses of action my party might take and work out the DC's for skill checks in advance; it helps (a lot) to give yourself a day or two to think of various modifiers, or to look up, for example, the Jump rules, and pre-calculate all of the conditions...

(Or ... "You do .. WHAT?!") So. My players found a demon bound in a summoning circle. My intent in the set-up was, they needed its help to accomplish something else: destroy this necrotic engine which was powering a necromancer beyond belief (basically, nothing that died in his tower remained...

Yeah, I strongly agree with you, jester_gl. Spending a Standard action to grant a saving throw seems really high cost for minimal reward (50% chance of success). I've been considering house-ruling it to a Minor, but maybe I'll house-rule it to a feat to LET it be a Minor. I know my Fighter...

Echoed. Whenever I've played, or had a player I'm DM'ing play, a character with a "dark side" or "undiscovered powers", we've always taken the "put the reigns in the player's hands" approach; the DM should never "run" a PC. That said, back in 1e, we had great fun with a party barbarian whose...

Exactly. First, there needs to be a lot of trust between you and the players. Second, you don't have to have every action involving the characters happen on-camera. For example, one of Piratecat's Story Hours includes a sequence where the party were heading towards a village to do...

Same thing applies, basically. You want to give each player a "turn". For example, as DM I recently had the party stuck in a non-lethal trap, that they were having a hard time getting out of. The bard, being a naturally exuberant player, had multiple ideas she wanted to try. After she tried...

They bug me a bit from a game balance perspective: consider "Mark of Handling" vs the "Mounted Combat" feat. The former gives you everything the latter does, plus a +2 bonus to Speed and a +1 bonus to AC for your mount, plus a +2 bonus to Speed and a +1 bonus to AC for your beast companion...

One interesting note about having Falling damage occur at the start of the character's next turn, is, it gives everybody a chance to react to the fall. You get very very interesting behaviors this way - a neat sub-goal in the middle of an encounter thats a lot more fun than insta-death. For...

Are you willing to re-write rather than convert? How are you imagining the rope bridge? I typically write out my DC's with a bit more "range" to them than simple "success or failure", and I also hate "failure equals death" scenarios, so I'd come up with something like this: Bridge: Entering...

Good questions, Doctor. I'm not adept at updating printed encounters, but I do do a lot of monster-mashing; most of my party are power gamers who "recognize" monsters from printed sources, so I typically change levels, adjust fluff, etc for at least one monster per encounter and sometimes all...