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For the GMs out there, do you recap your previous session when you begin a new session of an ongoing campaign? How long do you spend recapping if you do? Do you do the recap yourself or have the players do it? I'm just curious. I realize that this may be impacted by how often you play, so...

I maintain a group of Story Hours, and I like to indicate in the thread titles when I've updated them. But since the development that prevents overlong posts from being edited, I can't update the thread title of one of my Story Hours. I attempted to delete some of the text to shorten the...

I'm a big fan of Paizo's item cards, for convenience of tracking my PC's equipment. But I buy the cards myself - my GMs typically don't use them to hand out treasure. Most of the time I cover up the flavor text with a sticky note containing the stats of the item it represents. I usually try to...

Specifically, what happens when you cast a spell from a scroll? I'm not talking mechanics here. What do you envision happens? Scrolls are single-use items, so how do you handle why you can't read the words off of that scroll more than once? Does the scroll burn up, Mission: Impossible style...

Just some general venting here, but hopefully it will give some DMs food for thought when designing challenges. Currently in two games I'm involved in our parties are facing puzzles of one sort or another. One of them involves following prophetic writings to locate an artifact. The other...

I maintain several threads in the Story Hour forum, and typically when I make a new post I edit the thread title to show when an update was made. I've been trying to do this to one of my Story Hours since Saturday, but each time I click the Edit button, make my changes, and click Save Changes...

A few months ago my friend ssspaladin decided to start up a D&D game using the Wilderlands setting, specifically City-State of the Invincible Overlord. What follows is my chronicle of that campaign. Our cast of characters: GM: ssspaladin Jerard the Weasel - male human fighter/rogue (Player...

So I'm playing an elf wizard, using the elf wizard substitution levels from Races of the Wild. The alternative elf wizard's familiar replaces Deliver Touch Spells and Speak With Others of Its Kind with the Natural Link ability, which doubles whatever benefit the familiar gives to the wizard...

I didn't hold out much hope that this would be great, but I did hope it would be like Eureka and surprise me. No such luck, sadly. It was 90 minutes of sheer boredom. I could forgive the changes to the story, but the acting was mediocre at best and the story was full of gaping plot holes. I...

I'm playing a wizard in a new campaign. We just reached 3rd level, and I'm trying to decide what feat to take. I was considering Craft Wondrous Item. Go ahead and treat me like I don't know anything. I've read the feat description and the DMG section on crafting wondrous items, but I'd like to...

I've never played a first-level wizard in 3E, and I'm contemplating playing one. What deters me a bit is the fact that a low-level wizard has so few spells per day, and so few hit points and weapon proficiencies, that it seems like a wizard could become pretty useless if she's out of spells...

A friend of mine is playing a changeling in an Eberron campaign. According to the way he's interpreting the description of the minor shape change ability, his changeling can't assume the appearance of a Small humanoid such as a halfling. He finds this very frustrating. The minor shape change...

I find it immensely frustrating to see all the editing and proofreading errors in various WotC books. I don't use 3rd-party materials much, so I don't know if those suffer from the same problems. For example, I was just reading up on Sharn, particularly on dwarves in Sharn. Page 54 of Sharn -...

A friend of mine who GMs several games just sent this email to Ask Wizards to clarify the spider climb spell. A couple of players in our group have perhaps been abusing it just a bit, using the druid's ability to cast personal spells on his animal companion to allow their animals to climb up...

Back in 2002, our gaming group began a Greyhawk campaign that was intended to be a 'filler' for when our other games were not available due to scheduling conflicts. Five years later, we're still playing. :) Since I've been chronicling our other D&D games here in Story Hour, I decided to add...

Anyone else check out the preview episode? I thought it was fairly decent for a children's programme. I liked how they made a lot of nods to Doctor Who, especially all the photos of the Brigadier and Harry Sullivan in Sarah's garrett room. 'Mr. Smith's' console looked rather a lot like a TARDIS...

Ever had an embarrassing gaming moment that your fellow players won't let you forget? I told this story over on Circvs Maximvs, but I'll repeat it here for a larger audience. :D Our party was sharing a communal room at an inn. My elf fighter was up (naturally) during the wee hours when he...

Another creepy episode with lots of good character development. Is Owen going over to 'the dark side'? Is Gwen going to start pulling a Suzie? Just how callous is Jack really? And when the heck are they going to catch on to all the foreshadowing about "something in the dark and it's coming"?

Anyone else see it? I quite enjoyed it. I thought they did a great job of visually capturing the feel of Pratchett's novels, and thankfully Mr. Pratchett was directly involved in the production. The casting was superb, particularly David Jason as Albert and newcomer Michelle Dockery as Susan...

That was a depressing episode. Good, but depressing. Yet again they managed to make Owen a sympathetic character. Although it serves him right if he's miserable for a while. Jack's scenes particularly moved me. He can show such kindness sometimes. I liked the way he bonded with John. Only...