Recent content by Calzone

A few ideas: Idea 1: Become a master of teleportation magic and become familiar with the elemental planes. Open portal to your favorite elemental plane above every seat of power and powerful army in the campaign setting, one by one. Flooding a city full of living fire = win. (For bonus points...

Instead of having the golem do a huge amount of direct damage, give it huge cinematic powers that allow it to change the environment and give forced movement along with damage. If I was a 60 foot tall invincible death machine, what would I rather do: bend over to squish a couple of annoying...

Sappers were an interesting of weakening and breaching fortifications. Perhaps something along the lines of an astral variant of the purple worm? Also, it gets trickier when you add in planar interactions. If you really want to take out a city with strong walls in the planar realm, why not just...

The good news is, now that the PCs have narrowly escaped a debilitating curse of DOOM, they are informed for future bouts of item destruction. I don't have to have an evil shadowy skull spirit try to eat me more than once to figure out I should consult an oracle or something next time I try to...

I totally agree with you (I tried to hint at this at the end of my earlier post). The only time you run into problems is when you presuppose that the gods created the world, and they only ever get their power from worship. If they have another power source, or have an initial power supply at...

If someone doesn't want to role-play, you won't fix things trying to force them to role-play. Something I've had some success with is trying to tie the roleplaying into an aspect of the game they do enjoy. When my players create their characters, I have them choose two words or short phrases...

Mixing "the gods created the world" and "the gods get their power from their worshipers" can lead to problems: How did the gods get the power to create the world if they had no followers? After all, there aren't followers until there's a world for them to exist on. Similar to the above, if...

This, this, this. Set up situations for the characters to engage with based on the narrative, and then let the encounters grow organically out of it. Encounters, like the rest of the adventure, should respond to the character's decisions. For instance, recently my players caught a pair of...

On a whim I rolled a Rogue|Druid, and I must say it is surprisingly fun to play. Play as a human for the extra at-will and feat, which help the build come together faster. Take primal predator for extra movement and supplemental feats to improve your charge abilities, and make sure you have...

There is obviously only one answer for such stats: Dump Dex to get a peg-legged paladin with a hook hand. Paul the Peg-Legged Paladin of Pelor "Aye, most initiates wait years for a chance to prove themselves worthy of the honor of the Piercing Sun. I received the mark a week after being...

How many classes do you want? Well, first answer the question, "What do you need classes for?" There seems to be two main reasons popping up for classes: mechanical and flavor differentiation. Either you need/want 'n' discrete mechanics for conflict resolution, or you want 'k' discrete...

I kind of view Timmy as the guy who can get behind 4e's "Page 42" rule. He's the guy who is willing to spend a couple of turns cutting support ropes for a swinging bridge because if he can pull it off, all of the enemies fall hundreds of feet to their doom. Johnny I see as the guy who has built...

One thing I keep in mind when placing traps is that your average evil overlord isn't going to want to spend several hours disarming them to get to his inner sanctum after an impromptu trip to the grocery store. I recently ran an adventure where my players ventured into a kobold warren to...

I just started reading, but I wanted to address this before I got too far in. I find it a little difficult to believe that "sameness" is much of a possibility, given the 20+ classes, most with several features to choose from, multi classing, hybrid classing, the thousands of available powers...

Here's a few that might help you. I might sit down and come up with some more later. ...and not a drop to drink. A small round room holds what appears to be an old well, filled to the brim with sand. On a hook by the well is a bucket, half full with clear water. Pouring some water onto the...