Recent content by Bruce Vistani

I don't see skill checks as binary succeed/fail rolls. I see the modified roll as being along a continuum from spectacular failure to remarkable success and success or failure is a bit grey around the DC. Sometimes I don't even have a DC in mind when my players roll. I let the result define the...

How often do you reckon Borovia receives outside visitors? Are Borovians aware of a world beyond the mists? Should PCs know about the existence of Borovia, or Strahd at the start of the adventure?

Easiest way is to expand the page to full screen and do a screenshot, then paste into Paint and save as a jpeg. It should be decent quality. If you still want higher quality then screen shot the map in two halves or in quarters and then merge them together in Paint. This will produce very high...

Death House is going to be a location in Village of Borovia. I will not be using the mists to railroad players into exploring itas the module suggests, because that kind of DMing sucks harder than Strahd. I think that aside from the railroading its a great little adventure.

Vampires were scary AF in 1st edition. If they successfully hit your character they absorbed 2 experience levels! Now you can argue all you want about whether thats metagaming but I am telling you, players were propperly frightened.

Great ideas! I am fleshing my borovia out as well. There's not much going on in the eastern third of the Borovia map. The lakes at the base of Mount Ghakis seem like good places to put encounters. And the Svalich Woods northeast of Castle Ravenloft is a massive empty zone needing filling.

I still haven't fully digested the adventure but my thoughts are that Strahd should have some strong need of the PCs. That they would find themselves in his service, perhaps on the low to mid level, rather than constantly battling against him would greatly enhance the module and defy...

Player facing side is ugg. DM side is meh. Random encounter table is good. Barovia map should be in the center. The castle map isn't terribly useful imho as I'd be squinting to make out details. Descriptive text for landscapes and Borovian names might have been useful. Tarroka card meanings...

The first question a good dm asks is: how are they going to carry all this gold. The second question a good DM asks is: where are they going to keep it? The third question is: who is going to steal it? A lot of newer players laugh when I say that in AD&D that gold has a 1:1 value in XP. Gygax...

Thanks. I haven't finished reading the book yet but I haven't seen much in the way of suggestions for how to run Strahd. What if they encounter Strahd outside his castle?

Curse of Strahd is meant to cover levels 1 - 10. Presumably you are meant to fight Strahd somewhere near the upper end of that.But is Strahd hard to beat? I've never run a group over 6th level in 5E but 144 HP with a 16 AC strikes me as rather vulnerable (even with regeneration). I can see 6 x...

This is the direction I'm leaning. I don't really care for extra-planar travel as a concept, especially when its low level characters. The goings-on of Dark Powers and Gods and all that don't interest me much. I like to keep my fantasy as grounded as possible.

Sorry don't know what happened to the paragraph breaks in the post above! edit: fixed!

Just throwing this out there. What if I made the Vistani into Teiflings? Rationale:1 - To diversify the setting - Hey, its 5E! Might as well go whole-hog! A 10-level campaign where all the NPC personalities are human might get a bit dull, no? Given the Vistanis history as both servants and...

I've not read Out of the Abyss but have sat in on some sessions. I'm currently working my way through Curse of Strahd (reading modules is a slow process for me as I let my mind wander off on tangents and possibilities). Strahd is very different from standard D&D. Just the tone of it is very...