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I'm glad they beat out a Miley Cyrus autobiography.

My only experience with multiple PCs per player has been as a DM; I've only ever played in a few one-shots when I rotate to have another member of the group DM a session. My typical D&D experience is with small campaigns, with myself DMing and 1-3 players, so I've had a few incidents where...

In 4e you don't roll damage on a critical hit and simply max damage on all of your dice, unless you have a weapon that adds an additional dice on crits.

Agreed, its a wash - in previous editions there were a number of 'trust' steps involved with spellcasters. If you didn't trust your player, you would have to keep track of what spells they knew, what spells they had prepared that day, what spells they had used, and the duration remaining on...

This hasn't really been an issue in my games. Beyond the general trust I have for my players anyway (I only check their character sheets if something seems really weird; they do all the treasure and XP accounting), we use power cards so there is very little confusion as to what powers have been...

In my experience, more than one PC per player tends to stifle intra-party roleplaying (and roleplaying in general) unless your players are brilliant. In 4e, the increased complexity of running a character would make it a lot more difficult to play two at once. So far the vast majority of my...

You get 5 activations of the database downloading process per account, and they refresh when the database is updated monthly. You might want to be careful with this, though. I share my account with my two roommates, and we ran into a problem with the activation limit. My first roommate had no...

I've seen it mentioned a few times on Monte's boards (though searching is failing me right now...) that the Zaug are just a fill-in for illithids, which are WotC Product Identity and off limits. If you check where the Player Journals from Monte's Ptolus campaigns match up to adventures in the...

One useful way of separating Vertical and Horizontal advancement would be to use the two main 'reward' systems already built into D&D; Treasure and XP. In 4e (and earlier editions), both reward systems contribute to both types of advancement. The levels acquired through XP gain grant both...

Magic Missile - In addition to the damage, push the target one square on a hit. Scorching Burst - The target in the centre of the burst takes an extra 1d6 damage. Cloud of Daggers - The target takes twice your Wis mod damage instead of just Wis mod damage. Ray of Frost - Ignore cover from...

Have you tried playing with power cards or some game aid like that? If the players all have their powers written down (if not on cards, at least on a sheet or something), play goes much much faster, in my experience.

The Mind Flayers of Thoon were introduced in the 3.5e MM5 They're mind flayers that worship some strange entity from the Far Realms known only as 'Thoon' and have recieved amazing prowess in the production of biological constructs as a result. Thoon Hulks are mindless automatons created by...

I'm pretty intrigued by the Orbs of Sequestered Conflict as well. It reminds me of a similar idea introduced in OneBadEgg's Shroudborn Class, which introduces 'arena powers,' dailies that teleport a few combatants to a second battlefield. They look like they'll be a perfect implement to help...

I paint minis for shared use in roleplaying (I primarily DM) and wargaming (mostly Warmachine). The motivations behind the time I spend painting a mini tend to be about the same for both uses. Basically, the work I put into painting a mini correlates definitely with the amount of time I can see...

If you want them to fight an entire evil party, you probably won't want to use Elite monsters. which are worth 200XP at Level 1. Instead of using the class templates, you can build the evil PCs using the Monster creation rules [DMG 184], and give them a few powers representative of their...

What you've just described is more or less Stalker0's Obsidian system [which gets my 'other' vote, by the way]. Each player makes a total of three checks in the challenge, and the party as a whole has to get a certain number of successes once all of the checks have been made (in a 5 player...

Those would be pretty tough encounters - the XP budget for your average 3rd level party is about 900xp for a normal encounter. 150XP for a 3rd level monster * 6 players = 900XP

Like Rechan, I was a bit disappointed by the lack of new monsters. I haven't read it any further than a quick scan to check for new monsters, so I don't have much else to say about it yet.

I'm starting a campaign soon with a small number of players (likely 2-3) and have been considering allowing some variation of these backgrounds or the FRPG Regional backgrounds. I want to give the characters opportunities to have a slightly broader skill set so that the small party can deal with...

When combat encounter powers are used out of combat, the definition of an encounter is 'about 5 minutes.' I've been letting my players use this out of combat when they reasonably have time to rest for over 5 minutes, and it hasn't been a big issue - I've actually been a bit happy with it, as it...