Getting back on the horse

[Mouseferatu]

I appreciate the thoughts guys.

That said, I don't really need general DMing advice. While it's been a few years, I've spent more time DMing than I have playing, over the course of my RPGing life. It's specifically stuff about 4E that playing or even writing the rules might not have revealed, but that only DMing 4E might have revealed.

I do fully intend to buy poker chips. That's a fantastic thought.

 

[jensun]

* I got some poker chips and painted them different colors (one for ongoing damage, one for dazed, one for stunned, one for dying, etc). Then, when a character is suffering from a condition during a combat, I put the chip under the base corresponding to its condition. Makes it easy to keep track of. (I stole this from Savage Worlds).

* This one speeds things up for players: USE POWER CARDS with all relevant info on them for that PC's power. This greatly reduces book-flipping, and once an encounter or daily power is used, you just put it in a discard pile.

These are the two things which have been the most help to us at the table. We use poker chips to represent healing surges, action points and marking and different coloured tiddly winks for status conditions. Our wizard made some transparent templates for his aoe spells.

Remember to encourage your players to think beyond whats printed on the sheet. The stunt system gives them a lot more options during play.

Be flexible with how skill challenges work. As presented in the book they are pretty inflexible. I have adapted them to include degrees of success and failure which has worked well.

I am currently at session 7 with my group who haven't played D&D since 2002. They grasped the system very quickly and now we play without cracking open the PHB at all. It greatly speeds up play.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Remember to encourage your players to think beyond whats printed on the sheet. The stunt system gives them a lot more options during play.

Be flexible with how skill challenges work. As presented in the book they are pretty inflexible. I have adapted them to include degrees of success and failure which has worked well.

Agreed... its hard to break the 3x mindset of the numbers on the sheet being the most important things in the game.

re: Skill Challenges.. I highly recommend picking up Stalker0's Obsedian variant over in the HR forum. Its cleaner to run and simple to explain.

 

[amysrevenge]

Be flexible with how skill challenges work. As presented in the book they are pretty inflexible. I have adapted them to include degrees of success and failure which has worked well.

I echo this - running almost everything else in 4E is easy-peasy for an experienced D&D DM. It's a bit of a trick to make Skill Challenges fluid and organic (abandoning the Initiative roll is where I've started). The first couple I ran were static and awkward, but they are getting better, and I'm still improving.

I find that my own chief difficulty is players in the 3.X midset, who immediately start throwing dice and shouting results even when they are not particularly good at the skill in question. I start to hint that the guard could use some "convincing" (with a DC 16 Diplomacy check in mind for a success), and I immediately get shouts of "11", "5", 15", "28", "12" - technically speaking, that's four fails and one success, which would end any skill challenge before it's even started lol.

I give my players a little speech at the start of each session (I get different players all the time, as I run games at the local game store) that runs something like this:

"The basic goal of skill challenges is to fool the DM into letting you roll checks for skills you are 'good' at, no matter the situation. If you can avoid it, NEVER roll a skill check in a skill you're not 'good' at. If you're only trained in Endurance, Athletics, and Thievery, try to find ways to make Endurance checks in social skill challenges - at least as a secondary thing to give someone else a +2."

 

[The Little Raven]

I do fully intend to buy poker chips. That's a fantastic thought.

This is where I pop in and shill for the Alea Tools guys. I've been using these magnetic markers for months now, and they're pure awesome. We did run into some issues with them interacting with eachother horizontally, but fixed that by placing a sheet of galvanized steel beneath our battlemat (4' by 3' sheet of metal runs about $20 without cuts). Each player has their own Bloodied token and a few others (Hunter's Quarry, mark, ongoing damage, etc) and having every involved in marking all the minis makes it all go faster.

I picked up their DM kit (about $75), and also ordered a couple of others individually (the 10-pack red tokens; the 5-pack silver/gold and burguny/teal just to have all the colors). I also have the hole puncher and a ton of conversion circles, which I use to make tokens (primarily for minions, but also for monsters that we don't have minis for). If you use them, I highly suggest using some super glue to bond the conversion circles to the minis, as they can come off in hot weather.

Alea Tools, Home of Magnetically Stackable Markers!

As for 4e DMing advice... make sure you REALLY use the terrain in your encounter. I've run a couple of encounters where I didn't focus too much on it, so it really didn't come into play at all, and it kinda served as a waste of design time to add to the encounter. With my last encounter, I was using the terrain to the NPCs advantage non-stop and it really made my players think more tactically and eventually turned the tables. I got more compliments on that last encounter than all of the previous ones combined.

 

[DeusExMachina]

I echo this - running almost everything else in 4E is easy-peasy for an experienced D&D DM. It's a bit of a trick to make Skill Challenges fluid and organic (abandoning the Initiative roll is where I've started). The first couple I ran were static and awkward, but they are getting better, and I'm still improving.

What I've found with skill challenges is that whenever I announce them they turn awkward as my players stare at their character sheet and think of a skill they could use, but nothing much comes out. Whereas when I don't announce them and just ask them for a reaction to a certains ituation or scene after which I say "ok, that'll require a nature check" and continue the scene that way it eventually becomes a skill challange anyway, but it doesn't have the static feel...
I've had a skill chllange this way where the party used diplomacy, bluff, arcana and insight to get past some magical statues that acted as guardians to a pass and it really was the best scene in my campaign so far, I think, but I think only 1 player realized it actually was a skill challange instead of just a roleplaying scene that included a few skill checks...
It's the way I intend to play skill challenges every time now. Of course YMMV...

Aside from the skill challenges and some minor bookkeeping like using chips or a white board for marking and conditions, I don't think there is anything really new to DM'ing 4e. Except that it is a blast...

Edit for forgetting what the little raven above said: Terrain is HUGELY important in encounters. With all the sliding and pushing and tactical movement, it is just a shame not to have at least a few bits of interesting terrain lying around. It doesn't have to be a fight on a wobbly bridge over a waterfall of lava every time, but have a few pieces of difficult terrain or some walls to take cover behind, a campfire to push enemies into and such. All the encounters I've done in an open area have been way less interesting than the ones with some cool terrain features...

 

[jgbrowning]

I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Keep good notes. One never knows how valuable they can be.

joe b.

 

[Asmor]

Be wary of minions... I have no problem with minions dying with an attack roll, but it annoys me when a player plops down something that deals a tiny amount of damage with no attack roll and takes them out. I've personally adopted a house rule that minions can only be killed by effects which required an attack roll in order to hit them. That said, and to hopefully prevent a thread jack, I'll also note that a lot of people feel that this is unnecessary or too heavy-handed, so to each their own.

I've been very disappointed with skill challenges in practice. Love the concept, but it just falls flat in execution. I think my issue is that a skill challenge system-- any system-- will never approximate every situation well. I think the best option is to take the idea of a skill challenge, but change it to suit your given situation. An entire party climbing a sheer cliff is a very, very different experience from the rogue trying to open a gate while his allies hold off a horde of orcs, for example.

 

[Starfox]

And here I was, about to give my optional rules for mounts...

 

[Ander00]

It's all been said before, I believe, and not you don't necessarily have to DM to find out, but some things that I've found:

• Tweaking/reskinning monsters/NPCs is quick, dirty fun. Substract a level here, swap a power there, change a keyword there.
• Initiative. Whether you use a board, cards or something else, it should be plainly visible to everyone to facilitate tactical decisions involving more than just one character.
• Counters. We use various counters from games such as Warhammer (both Fantasy and 40k), Gorka Morka, etc., as well as differently colored glass beads for all the conditions and effects. Whatever you use, it helps if you have enough variety so you do not have any serious overlap. I'd rather not memorize a new color-code every encounter if I can avoid it.
• Waves of monsters. I've always liked stringing encounters together to create one big, but winnable one, and this works well enough in 4E. You just have to take into account that most healing abilities have a per encounter limit and that the players typically won't want to be restricted to at-will powers for prolonged periods of time.
• Solo monsters/terrain. Any fight can be made more exciting by terrain that either or both sides can use to their advantage, and especially solo fights often need something to spice them up (I wish I had added something more to the Calcryx fight in my Sunless Citadel redux yesterday, though the warforged cleric did make a bookshelf come crashing down on the dragon, removing its cover from that side and dealing some damage).

cheers