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Not sure if this has been mentioned in 20 pages, but on the subject of "realistic" falling damage (and this can be adapted to poisons and other aspect you want to make more gritty): Damage no longer deals a dice amount of damage, but a percentage of a character's total health. Falling can deal...

Precisely. A better example, to me, is in Lord of the Rings (the movies since they're easier to picture): during the battle of Helm's Deep Aragorn and Gimli leap in front of a huge column of Uruk-hai and fend them off. Were they probably nervous to do it? Maybe a little, but they were pretty...

Once you roll initiative at the start of an encounter, the only way to change your position in the initiative tracker once combat has started is to hold your turn or ready an action. The bonus to initiative is to an initiative roll, not the score. Say you roll an attack and miss, but a round...

Letting them know the name is fine, you just have to be more creative with what the players don't know. If they see a troll, it should be fairly common knowledge to players that fire and acid are your best bet. So you use monsters in a creative way to avoid that. Or give them more...

I'm guessing there isn't any official word on that, and that its something you'd have to talk with your DM about. Still, the best way of having an empty hand to cast from, mechanically speaking, is to multiclass into an assassin or monk and use a ki focus, or to multiclass into a divine class...

These are some good ideas. In my campaign they'll not actually be meeting Bahamut; he died. They'll most likely meet Kord and Moradin though, as the two gods will stop by to see the mortal heroes, probably in Bahamut's halls. Looking at those pictures, I think I will give Bahamut a Scrooge...

I usually don't half a bosses health, only its because I plan the fight to be in phases and dynamic, and halving hit points would make things go too quick. If its just 2 elites, I'd say keep their hit points the same, but if the battle goes too slow, you can slowly start doing extra damage to...

Making things really big is something I planned on doing: I portray deities as much, much larger than your standard Gargantuan monster. Infinite tunnels or rooms that loop back on themselves would be interesting too. What about terrain or hazards and such, since the players will likely end up...

Arctic Wolf, I'd give you some XP, but I must spread it around first. I haven't looked too much at the Draconomicon yet, but I might have to if its got stuff like that in it.

My players will be heading to Celestia, home of Bahamut, Kord and Moradin, soon. Specifically they'll be in Bahamut's mountain-top home, and I'm working on mapping out the place, but it keeps coming out as too human; too much like a human designed it (of course a human is designing it [me], but...

If it helps, I always teach new players that blasts are like flamethrowers, and bursts are like grenades.

As Gnome said, this is how I would love for crafting to go at my table, but it never does. This is something I think you have to train the players for over several sessions. Show them an example of how crafting might work (an NPC doing it), and copiously reward players who attempt this freeform...

Its not so much about save penalties (it was when the Orb wizard was around), but rather about lots of "end of next turn" stuns. You can't save out of those stuns, and unless you give the solo monster a way to get out of them, a team of 4 PCs have enough EoNT stuns to lock a monster down for...

That's not bad though, especially if you're using an executioner axe, which has a damage die of d12 brutal 2 (average damage 7.5). That would increase to 2d6 brutal 2 (average damage 9). A barbarian using that with 4 or 5[W] attacks would be pretty powerful. However, it should be noted that...

I think what me means is that elites at epic tier are like standards at heroic tier: You could throw 6 elites at an epic party and they could handle it. Not that upgrading a standard monster to an elite monster increases its level by 20. That's what I'm reading, at least. I could be way off with...

I find that while I'm almost always the one DMing and rarely get a chance to be a player, I'm pretty okay with it. After DMing for so long (all through the 90s I don't think I got to play in more than 2 one-shots, because I was DMing the whole time) I find it harder to be a good player, as I...

This is a specific group issue I'm guessing. We have Ventrillo to use, but no one but me uses it to talk, for whatever reasons. I try to get them to use it, but they don't. So usually they'll type something into chat, and I'll reply via Vent. Of course before my microphone stopped working...

I'm in the same group as OnlineDM. I've used maptools to run my campaign for over 3 years, and there some flaws, but mostly its great. A short list of the pros and cons. Pros * Immersion is generally better. I can draw up detailed maps with photo-realistic graphics, create NPC tokens with...

Utilizing an enemy's vulnerability to a type of damage isn't quite the same though. With save-or-die effects (of which I haven't heard of this 2-step process, so any link to a source of this info would be appreciated), there is no vulnerability or weakness other than "you picked the wrong...

Except that a save or die effect that targets a character's dump stat means that character is pretty much hosed. A high ability score, even a maximized one, for a character will most likely not equate to an equally hosed opponent. So you end up with a moderate advantage in one area for a...