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Two cultures are at war over one holy city. A powerful archmage realizes that one or both cultures will annihilate the other in order to 'make safe the city,' and so decides to raze the city and everyone in it before that happens. No more city to fight over, and a powerful (perceived) enemy to...

Thanks for the article and the link, Christopher Helton! I'm unlikely to ever play OD&D, but game history is a point of personal curiosity. Having cut my teeth on 2e, I do indeed tend to lose focus in discussions about earlier editions due to having no access to them. I can't even describe how...

I remember when I believed that the game devs have well-considered reasons to make the decisions they make. Ah, my naive childhood days!

Yeah, D&D has never needed any clear and present reason for another class. Nobody needs the knight-in-shining-armor-with-god-magic class, or the tribal-warrior-with-anger-management-issues class, or the jack-of-all-trades-I-sing-you-good class, or any of a dozen others. (And some of them are...

Indeed! 4e encounter guidelines are a thing of elegance and user-friendliness, and I find this issue utterly baffling. It's like the 5e team set out to do exactly what 4e detractors accuse 4e of: Making change for the sake of change, rather than sticking to something that's had its kinks already...

There's definitely a balance to be struck between making the rules as explicit as possible and the you-know-what-I-mean approach. I think that game writers should always err on the side of rules clarity and spelling out their intent, because a pure you-know-what-I-mean approach results in...

Hi Monte! I'm not familiar with your recent work, but I've been an avid PS fan since getting my grubby little hands on the boxed CS back in the 90s. So thank you for your contribution, and thanks for answering all these questions that I'm sure you've answered a million times already! 1. Which...

Well I had fun, and the two present players said they did too. We played through it a bit faster than I thought we would, mostly because the party navigator passed every single Dungeoneering check. (Despite not being trained!) In structuring the overall SC, I set up four 'exploration roles'...

Though bizarrely, gamers do get in arguments over wizards having access to the humble cure light wounds, and similar spells. Most of us are awfully selective about who gets interchangeable parts, and who gets to choose from which parts. /tangent

Just want to thank everyone again, particularly Quickleaf, for helping me! Last night the party made its way through winding passages, traps, and horrors, and are now poised on the edge of the adventure's climactic encounter!

On the whole incentivization topic, I see what pemerton means -- just about any situation can be framed to incentivize party-wide participation. But as an introvert, I think that framing situations like this on the fly would be exhausting for me. If I can plan a SC so that it 'naturally'...

Thank you both for those explanations! I think from here, it's just a matter of me experimenting with fail-forward, getting feedback from the group, and then refining. Rules-wise, I'll be using something like the +/-5 rule...except maybe for random combat encounter mini-SCs. I initially thought...

Ooh, this looks interesting! Thanks for your work. :) Exactly so. When starting this thread, my plan was to abstract the entire dungeon -- save for the last encounter -- into pure narrative-SC form. No map, no areas, just players choosing what their characters do as they explore the dungeon --...

Manbearcat: A lot of the dramatic terminology you use is going over my head -- which isn't a new problem for me, mind you -- but from what I gather, you prefer to plan specific dramatic moments as SCs with specific possible outcomes, rather than a single long-term navigate-the-dungeon SC. Like...

I wasn't able to make SCs fun in 2008, and gave up after a few tries. But now I'm running the dungeon area of a Dungeon adventure, and I'm less than enthusiastic about playing through it in the traditional one-room-at-a-time fashion. There are lots of 5-foot corridors, traps, and isolated...

Mind expanding on this a bit?

3, 4, 6, and 7. My perspective comes mostly from the DM's side of the table, and from having frustrating experiences with poor game balance making the game unfun, in and out of combat. As a player I'm less concerned with balance because I like playing casters, and because I can tap the...

Haha, yes, the very same Mr. Russian Skull. There's nothing quite like opening the first combat encounter with a new group with a crit by a solo! :devil: No worries! I'd spoiler anything I didn't want you to know about. Hm, not having to convert or re-stat [presumably] does make WotBS...

This is a phenomenon that I've never encountered; but I thought about it when introducing a friend to 4e recently. He always plays gnomish rangers, so exorcising his minor actions wasn't an option. He did ask me to choose his powers, so I chose all standard-action attacks, and then gave him a...

I'll be watching this thread for suggestions. I'm currently DMing a Dungeon adventure -- a Perkins adventure, in fact! I like the plot and the details that I don't have to come up with myself; but I see what other 4e fans mean when they say that WotC never realized 4e's potential. There's an...