Recent content by Maialideth

Sounds like a good call to skip it. If it feels tedious and you are close to ending the session, no one is going to be very creative, and that, in my opinion, is the strength and purpose of skill challenges... allowing the players to be creative beyond what is written on their character sheets...

As for skill challenges, now that I've opened my own flood gates, so to speak... I'm playing with the format a bit in my current campaign. For context, there are only two PCs in the group, so the numbers don't work quite as well here. Also, one is a barbarian and the other is a druid, so not a...

Totally agree. I bought it, because @SlyFlourish wrote about it on his blog and mentioned the homebrew section, something the '24 DMG, as good as it is, failed miserably with. The Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide is very much the GM's all-round toolbox.

I've been reading the Tales of the Valiant Game Master's Guide, and the section on skill challenges is pretty much spot on to how I've been running skill challenges in my 5e games for the last couple of years, with two rather important differences that I want to share here. I've run 5 or 6...

Edit: I just noticed you guys already covered this :) however, I think mostly about how Fireball melts gold, not as much about other items. Cone of Cold was to prevent all the coins from melting into huge lumps. Compare Fireball which specifically states that it damages items, and highlights...

AD&D 2e Cone of Cold didn't damage items (but only did 1d4+1 cold damage per level). Fireball caused all exposed items to roll save vs magical fire, unless they were worn by a creature and that creature made a successful saving throw. I actually thought the Fireball thing was an older rule, but...

Which is exactly why Cone of Cold was invented and was a higher level spell than Fireball, it didn't damage all the valuable loot. The way things are now, I don't see any reason why Cone of Cold couldn't be a 3rd-level spell with same scaling as Fireball and Lightning Bolt. I don't feel that...

I think the problem with Fireball isn't whether it is overpowered compared to other classes, but that it is overpowered compared to other damage spells. Neither Lightning Bolt nor Cone of Cold compares to Fireball because they are even more situational and scales nearly equally to Fireball, so...

I (the DM) found out the day before, that there was a leaky water pipe in my basement storage, so I had to clean out a lot of damaged cardboard boxes and contact my insurance company.

I started using minis, when the pre-painted D&D minis came out for 3e. I don't think the AD&D 2e books mentioned using minis, so it never occurred to me that it was an option. Besides, Warhammer 40k took all my budget for minis anyway. Now, I only use theatre of the mind for small...

When I had a larger group of players, we would create a pre-game playlist where each player sent me a song that represented their character and situation in the game, and I would choose a song that represented the campaign. Then I would start the playlist when people started showing up before...

I recently started a Planescape campaign, and sent the level 3 players to Ysgard to fight frost giants. Ysgard's schtick is that anyone who dies in battle is resurrected at the next dawn without any consequences. So it is easy to create "suicide" missions or maybe battle arena fights. Ysgard...

Poison in the PHB feels like a carrot dangling in front of the players. Only when they take it, it turns out to be rotten and not worth the effort getting it. But the monsters' carrots (poison) is awesome (cue sad trombone for player characters). Poison immunity is probably the most common...

Remember that Durable also requires a Bonus Action to spend the hit dice... BA for barbarians tend to be quite valuable in terms of damage and rage. And as mentioned above, just challenge the rest of the party... if the barbarian is the only party member surviving, he'll feel the pain as well.

I'm looking forward to see the 'bloodied' condition abilities. I think it was a great idea in 4e, so I'm thrilled that they brought it back.