Recent content by Dustin Cooper

I will say that if Eberron is a setting that appeals to you and the group, there's a level 1 starter adventure in the 4e Eberron book that I rather liked. It's a good overall introduction to the setting and to 4e in general. I'd recommend being looser about what skills are allowed in the skill...

That's the big one that most people recommend, though it matters less at low levels. If you want to use an old monster and adjust the math, just use MM3 on a business card, and you can get a mostly fixed monster in minutes. That said, they also did change the kinds of powers they gave, largely...

I mean, if they're having fun with it, there's nothing inherently wrong with a campaign with just a few challenging combats between long rests.

If they're not that interested in magic items and keeping track of what they need, you might want to consider Inherent Bonuses, where they just automatically get the expected math bonuses as they level regardless of their equipment. There's a checkbox for that in the character builder. I...

The first 4e games I played allowed this as a house rule. It didn't break anything. I'd say go for it if that's something you think would benefit your group.

Yeah, there's a few weird bits in here. Like the lack of a definition for "hobby games," a term neither me nor my friends use, or assuming that all time favorite game and current favorite are different. And the questions seemed to be phrased under the assumption that I've tried all the...

I feel like Princess Wing has some of the best tactical combat I've run into in a while. It's a Japanese TRPG where you play as Sailor Moon style magical girls equipped with Gundam style weapons, and it uses playing cards. The short version is that each character has four weapon slots, and...

Yeah, and making the floor for healing abilities to be 1/4 of a character's HP also helped a lot. It meant you never got into one of those situations where you spent one of your resources on healing, rolled like garbage, and felt like you wasted it. Healing is always useful.

Complete agreement on this. The fact this bombed and seemed to get a lukewarm reaction in general is utterly baffling to me.

Science fiction and fantasy settings work best when you explain just enough to be evocative and give the story context. The nerdy tendency to fill in all the blanks makes them much weaker. Star Wars worked in part because it showed you weird alien stuff, treated it as if it was just a normal...

So I want to talk about a class I like for the opposite reasons that most people like 4e classes. You know how some players like playing something simple? Like the kind of person who in 5e, picks Champion Fighter and seems satisfied to just say "I hit it with my sword" every round of combat...

I feel like this was an edition designed around online tools. No one I knew built characters manually, and even now, people will usually point you toward the offline character builder that fans have updated. At the time when I started (around the time Essentials came out), I was happy to pay...

It should also be noted that if you know someone in real life, you might give them money directly rather than go through gofundme. I'll admit I have my doubts on whether Justin would give anyone else a dime, but we really don't know who's actually being supportive in ways that aren't public.

I'm going to say Wanderhome. I ran it because a friend wanted to try it on her stream, and I'd heard good things. But reading it, I was surprised by the fact that the game has almost no rules. Like I'd played "rules light" games, but this was a whole different level. Instead, it tries to...

I ran a three part adventure (though one part was just the very involved character creation) of the base game earlier this year, and it was a blast. Not sure if it's super balanced (we had one character who managed to get max strength right out of the gate, and they just wrecked everything in...