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I believe that much of the scorn heaped on role-playing games stems precisely from the perception that they are for adolescents, not grownups. For better or for worse, I suspect that the best hope for change will come on the coattails of larger industries, such as video games, which have the...

This week I will start a new Eberron campaign with Keep on the Shadowfell, and I'm worried that even the Eberron conversion from Dungeon 155 doesn't add enough intrigue. My players have voiced a preference for "more story" than a dungeon crawl, but I would really like to make some use of the...

I would like to second everything El Mahdi wrote but especially this bit. "It's what my character would do!" is a lame excuse. Players choose who their characters are and what they do. Choosing a character who generates dissension is choosing to sow dissent.

As a DM, I used the Players Roll All the Dice variant in 3.5, and the players didn't seem to have any trouble catching on. I liked it, since it cut down immensely on the amount of dice I rolled. However, I switched back to the default rules for 4e, for two related reasons. First, a number of...

You don't have that big of a mess here. You (narrowly) avoided the real disaster of having the PCs fight three encounters' worth of monsters, the outside force and both inside waves, at the same time. After slaughtering the minions, the PCs were probably wise to retreat, leaving only two...

Oh, no, you're right, bookkeeping certainly still exists for many monsters. I made my original statement about the elimination of bookkeeping in the context of running a dragon when you assume it's reasonable to use the breath weapon as often as possible. The change in the recharge mechanic is...

I'm not sure I understand your question, but when running a 4E dragon, I simply roll the d6 at the beginning of all of the dragon's turns. If I roll a 5 or a 6, I know the dragon will use its breath weapon on that turn, and I immediately begin to execute that plan, potentially first moving the...

Suppose you are playing a character fighting a 3E dragon that has just used its breath weapon on you. You know its breath weapon will recharge in 1d4 rounds. Immediately after attacking, the DM rolls a d4 in secret. It's either a 1, 2, 3, or 4. In the first round after the initial attack...

I'd like to adopt the Eberron setting for my upcoming campaign, but after learning the design philosophy behind the Points of Light default, I'm worried about overwhelming my players with background information. For example, the Five Nations sourcebook describes the average citizen's opinions...

I'm considering implementing diminishing returns in my skill challenges. In short, when a PC achieves a success with a particular skill, the DC for that skill increases for that player for the remainder of the challenge. A PC optimized for a certain skill can still ensure one success with that...

WotC just published new errata for the core books: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/updates . The DMG errata revises the skill challenge system. In short, the DCs have been changed so that moderate is about 10 + 1/2 level. (Target DCs are the same for skills and mere ability checks...

Page 36, which describes this section of the dungeon, states, "When clerics served in the keep, they performed daily ceremonies to keep the dead from rising. Now, nothing prevents the influence of the rift from bringing the dead back to life." The blurb for Area 7 on the same page elaborates...

In my copy, the dotted red line stops one square short of completing the loop. I assumed that's where the boulder runs out of momentum.

Great, thank you! I appreciate all the work y'all have put into this site!

I just tried to create a new account, but I couldn't pass the image verification step. The image always seems to contain a background texture but no actual letters or numbers. (I'm human, I think.) The problem occurs in both Safari 3 on my Mac and Firefox 3 on our PC. (I was actually trying...

My understanding of RAW skill challenges is that individual players can't opt out. ("In a skill challenge encounter, every player character must make skill checks to contribute to the success or failure of the encounter." DMG 74) The Aid Another action only applies to group skill checks (DMG...

If WotC is smart, they'll make the Character Builder on D&D Insider both free and as newbie-friendly as WoW character creation. But yeah, asking somebody to learn D&D from the PHB is like asking somebody to read the entire WoW instruction manual and web site before actually playing the game. I...

In this sense, almost every skill challenge I've seen published from WotC has seriously tweaked what's presented in the DMG. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that WotC will address the problem with skill challenges by tweaking the definition of success. With minimal changes to the...

binary outcomes versus graded performance This. I trust the OP's math, but I wonder if the key problem is the DMG's fixation on skill challenge encounters as having a binary outcome: success or failure. This fixation seems to stem in part from categorizing them as just another kind of...

I don't think it's accurate to say that the new multi-classing rules only allow a character to dabble in a second class. Consider the case of a cleric multiclassing into fighter by taking every multiclass feat and selecting fighter as his or her paragon path. The cleric dabbling in fighter...