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Bullgrit's point comparing the archway and the GDD is a good one. There's a lot of similarity between the two. On the other hand, the archway looks like a door. The GDD doesn't. Acererak's riddle explicitly says to go "through the arch," which is the best way to proceed. And anybody...

Drum roll please . . . Area 6. The Face of the Great Green Devil The other fork of the red path leads right up to an evil-looking devil face set into the back wall of the corridor. The face has a "huge O of a mouth" that is dead black. The mouth is about three feet wide. If you check, you...

IME, getting much above 10th level takes a lot of time and commitment. I've done it twice in 20 years. In both cases I was the DM, the campaign lasted for more than 2 years, and the campaign withstood a lengthy period during which we only met to play every six weeks or so. Also in both cases...

IIRC, XP for treasure was at best an optional rule in 2E. I DM'd 2E from the day it launched until a few months after 3.0 came out, and I don't think I'd even heard of giving XP for treasure until I started hanging out here.

Thanks for the link Gentlegamer. It's great to have an early first-hand account of the module. Some little differences between the convention report and the module as published. 1. The mist in Area 5 is described is blue in the con report. As far as I can tell, the module does not give a...

Reasonable people may disagree about how easy or difficult it is to find the treasure. In fact, the difficulty is going to change from group to group. However, IMO, the current discussion on that topic is too abstract to be interesting or informative. I don't know much about training times...

I'm having a hard time following the discussion here. As I understand it, the the criticism of Bullgrit's methodology is: 1. Bullgrit assumes that the players will find all of the treasure, and the players might not. 2. Bullgrit fails to consider the rules for training. Is that right?

If the issue is how difficult/easy it is to find the treasure in the modules, why doesn't somebody do a thread going through the modules on a room by room basis pointing out where the treasure is and speculating on how likely a party would be to find it?

The devil is in the details. Any given divination may or may not help you, but Augury probably isn't a good way to clean up at the casino. "Weal and Woe" is an acceptable response, and the spell is only able to see about a half hour into the future. Augury :: d20srd.org

I almost never separate the players when I'm the DM. For one, even when I'm playing in a home game I usually don't have a good place to put the split group. I've also found that splitting up the players is a guaranteed way to have one or more of them lose interest and drift away into...

I think one of the trickier parts of this area is that the text doesn't specify that the stones do anything when you touch them. In other words, touching a stone doesn't make it blink or beep or flicker off or anything else. I can imagine a group poking the stones a few times, not getting any...

That's one reason reconciling the 1E/2E saves with the 3E/4E saves is the $64,000 question.

The 3.5 Balor has 290 hit points. The 4E Balor has 622. The 3.5 Pit Fiend has 225 hit points. The 4E Pit Fiend has 486 All 3.5 numbers taken from d20srd.org. All 4E numbers taken from the Compendium.

Attacks that require a saving throw in 3.X simply target the equivalent defense in 4E. In other words, the nymph requires the victim to make a DC 17 Fort save in 3.5. In 4E, that's identical to an attack against the victim's Fort. defense with a +7 bonus. What 4E calls a "saving throw"...

This is an issue that comes up for me anytime I'm playing without a battlemap and there are traps on the floor. Consider the pit traps in Area 3. The hallway is 20 feet wide. Each pit is 10 feet square. Some of the pits are set to the west, and the eastern 10 feet of the hall is safe. Some...

I agree that the main point of the false entrances and the entrance hall is to get the party into a paranoid, "expect trouble from any angle" frame of mind. The traps here are mostly survivable and unlikely to end in a TPK. Did your group interact with Area 4?

Area 5. The Arch of Mist Located at the far end of the Entrance Hall is a stone archway filled with swirling mist. When the players get close, three stones in the arch will start to glow: the left stone glows yellow, ther right stone glows orange and the keystone glows blue. One branch of the...

A few weeks ago, my players decided to burn down a small building rather than explore it. They were so unhappy when I told them the bright purple flames rising from one corner of the place meant they had accidentally incinerated some magic item! Anyway, on to the deathtraps!

If I say something you don't like about whatever edition you prefer to play, we are having a simple conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of that particular edition. If you say something I don't like about whatever edition I prefer to play, it's an edition war.

I think the skill challenge system is supposed to make up for that. In other words, the party isn't supposed to just sit back and let the Bard fool the guard with a single skill check. The guard insists on interrogating everybody in the party, and they all have to say something (and make some...