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I've got a challenge coming up in a few sessions where I'm trying something new. We use the Obsidian system, so challenges are always three rounds, and each player tries a skill each round, with a fixed number of successes required for victory or partial victory. The entire session will see the...

Thanks for all the advice. We prefer to roll their stealth checks for stuff like this -- too many passive checks make the players feel like they aren't in control of their characters. We only use passive checks when they shouldn't know the check even happened if they fail it. That's not the...

Yeah, that's the whole reason bow rangers get Defensive Mobility, so that they can fire point blank and get the prime shot bonus without always getting killed by OAs.

What are the rules for lying in ambush? I've been using straight perception vs. stealth rolls, but it ends up pretty unsatisfying -- because it would always be the worst stealth roll vs the best perception roll, it means that the ambusher pretty much never gets the drop against the prey. Is...

I ran a similar encounter, at level 5 with a 4 PC party. The cave was mostly difficult terrain (swamp), and the encounter ended up being painfully boring. I did give the party one round of help from the darkness -- the dragon had a drow captive, who was kept starving and weak. She used all of...

I've got a scenario coming up in a month or so in my game which will have the PC party visiting a dwarven fort while it is besieged by gnolls. I've read through a bunch of different mass combat systems, but they all seem overly heavyweight to me. I've come up with what I think will be a fun...

Yeah, thanks, I should have provided more detail. So, in my mind, the "challenging" parts of this scenario are: - Getting an audience in the first place: The PC was first given this assignment as a level 1 character, which implies that he was not personally hired by the court, but probably one...

One of the PCs in my game had as their character background that they were an elven ranger bounty hunter hired by the court of an elven lord to track down a poacher hunting stag in the sacred woods. 5 levels later, the party has identified the poacher as the black sheep brother of a nearby human...

You left crit bonus damage out of the spreadsheet. If you include it, it doesn't change the curves much, but it does knock Careful out of the lead for AC 20 once you get up to 2d6 bonus damage.

Is there anything available in 4e that works like Leadership did in 3e, allowing a player to take on an NPC henchman?

Demons, with their variable resistance, are a good example of a group with (potentially) different resistances that are likely to be found together.

Thanks for all the ideas, everyone. I've decided to go with Necrotic, because of the Eladrin precedent. I've also added a resistance to Radiant. The party doesn't have an easy way to do necrotic damage, but there is a laser cleric, so they'll notice the radiant resistance pretty quickly, and...

Pft. No edition holds a candle to first when it comes to awesome tables. DMG p192: Wandering Harlots.

Ooh, I like that. So "cold iron" is any kind of non-magical metal weapon. Magic weapons, non-magical wood weapons, and claws etc don't work. Of course, the Cold Iron Weapon enchantment from AV is the exception that proves the rule. :)

I'm creating a Fey monster with regeneration for my game. What's an appropriate vulnerability to give a fey to turn off the regeneration?

In the last session of my game, my PCs defeated a young black dragon, taking its hoard. The dragon itself escaped, though. The party was on a long-distance travelling adventure when they came across the lair -- it's unlikely that they'll be back in the area any time soon. I'd like to come up...

4e doesn't have any research rules; and even if it did (allowing you to make skill checks to learn a new ritual without copying it from another source), you'd still have to pay the market price of the ritual, since that is the cost of the raw materials (inks, papers, etc) to scribe the ritual in...

Forked from: Converting ritual scrolls to books? The PCs in my game currently have a bunch of scrolls above their level that they found in treasure. If they don't use the scrolls by the time they get to that level, they're probably going to want to turn those scrolls into books. Since this...

The PCs in my game have a few scrolls that are slightly above their level. If they don't use the scrolls by the time they get high enough to learn those spells, I suspect they're going to ask about how to convert ritual scrolls to books. Is there any way in the rules currently to do this? Would...

I think the entire HP system is balanced around Intimidate. Basically, in 4e, monsters should be running away bloodied a lot more than they used to.