Recent content by coldpheasant

Find ways to make your spotter feel like his skill investment has directly contributed to party survival and experience, but tailor the encounters around your advance knowledge of your players' abilities to ensure they are not anti-climactic. A great example is the trap that is wickedly lethal...

It only takes a few hours to read the important parts of the PHB. Read about character creation, combat, and healing. Read through the class features of all the classes if you have the time and read all of their level one powers. Make a character or two. At that point you should be able to...

it's about the residuum The existence of magical portals does not assume ease of travel. The relatively cheap cost of a portal ritual does not assume that anyone is willing to perform the ritual for you. There are plenty of submarines out there and more than a few spaceships, but it is...

I'm trying to visualize this portal-hopping trade society ^_^. A wealthy merchant in Latham hires a dozen sturdy porters to carry armfuls of magic item goods up the twisting passages of a wizard's tower to the "portal room". The wizard stops what he was doing, takes the fifty gold for the...

Magical shields have some interesting powers. Check the PHB 244-245. Also, many paladin, cleric, and warlord powers do effects and deal damage independently of your weapon's damage. If you're a cleric that likes to use Lance of Faith and/or Sacred Flame for instance, then a two-hander...

Use a dishwasher. A little anachronism here and there couldn't hurt... (except for the person unfortunate enough to be underneath it.)

Thank you. This is the way I was interpreting it, but I wasn't sure if there was a special ruling somewhere that I'd overlooked.

Force Orb says "enemies." Freezing Cloud says "creatures." I had two questions: 1) Can the caster choose to hit an ally with a spell that targets "enemies." What designates something as an "enemy?" Can an ally that has been dominated by a Vampire Lord, for instance, be hit by an effect that...

can you have it hit an ally? Also, Freezing Cloud's effect (PHB160) states that "Any creature that enters the cloud or starts its turn there is subject to another attack." By "subject" to an attack, does that mean the caster can choose whether or not they get hit by the damage? I'm thinking...

same move action on a double move To double move you have to take the same move action twice in a row. -PHB 284 According to this rule it would appear that it is not legal to shift and then trade your standard for a walk or a run. You could shift and trade your standard for another shift...

Fighter crushes rogue Consider this: Human Fighter with a 20 Str, 14 Con, 10,10,10,8. Wield a heavy flail or a maul (2d6 damage). Feats: Power Attack and Weapon Focus. 5 str +2 proficiency +1 fighter weapon talent would give you a +8 to hit. +6 when you power attack. Reaping Strike...

Yea, i imagine three surges would bring your dragonborn fighter up about 3/4 of the way ;) Healing Word can be used twice per encounter but only once per round, so if you want to have the potential to "burst" heal someone, you could in one round spend a standard action for a Cure Light...

A 40-damage coup de grace would instantly kill a creature with 80 hp. If you deal the "bloodied" amount of damage in a coup de grace you slay the target outright according to the PHB. My 1st level group had a little bit of frustration with the coup de grace rules during our game this week...