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Er, yeah, that's supposed to be. It's a maptools character copy-paste, so I screwed something up there. Auto does not change the description, apparently. Perhaps companion character is the wrong word. It's essentially a surrogate PC. We had one player have to leave the campaign...

I'm doing the same thing in my dark sun game. Everyone has a character specific key magic item, that fits with their character type, and they rarely get new stuff when it's plot appropriate. Say, they kill a very large, angry insect that is nigh immovable. The trading town had an armorsmith that...

My dark sun group has always been a bit low on damage, this was made a lot worse when one of the strikers had to bow out due to personal issues. In order to balance that out a bit, I figured I'd give the PCs a companion PC. (We're running the campaign over maptools, so complexity isn't too much...

I did this awhile ago to show a group of new players 4e. Started with at-wills (And leader powers, though those were at-will for that campaign too. Very new players with no real tactical ability. And I still killed a few characters when they ran out of surges an an inopportune moment.), after a...

Brief aside, you're the kind of player I love to have. I can ask you about rules crap I'm not sure how to read, but when I say to hell with it, I get no complaints.

Yep. My monsters trend towards smarter than average. They won't ignore a distracting mark unless it's salient to do so, will attack the one making everyone else better, try to avoid the obvious meatshield in preference of the ones doing damage, try to sneak and flank... and that's just the dumb...

How about I politely suggest that looking to ignore DM intent is misguided. One can try to keep your combat and world building activities separate (I try to, for instance), but there is still intent in how the encounter is designed, how much of a threat it's meant to pose to the PCs, and what...

Also, this. I can run stuff as I want without worrying about the accidental TPKs I got in previous editions. Essentially, now the players die from being stupid, not me getting a number or two wrong. Or rolling well, which I tend to do a lot. (7th incarnation of the +5 Icosahedron of TPK) Or...

I agree with keterys, on both counts. Personally, I'm a murderous DM, and I'd read that it lasts until it's destroyed. Either way, errata would be great to clear that up. I've also been kicking around the idea of full on normal monsters (With own actions, stats, and everything) as summons as...

That'd be cool. I'll be honest, with level 3 I wasn't actively going for anything (Level 2 is what I'm working on polishing up a houserule mod for), more "Ok, we take this, and go a step farther...". Which still kind of works. (Or would if I had a better idea of what I was doing.) The primary...

Sorry if I misexplained, too much blood in my caffeine system, I'm afraid. Specifically, what irked me was the idea that, without death, there is no challenge. There are myriad reasons to win besides dying. And the ways to lose, even if death is transient, are legion. Also to better explain...

I always feel weird posting massive walls of dense text directly to forums. (Getting yelled at for breaking the formatting and TL;DR trollmods do that.) So, I have a quick study on how one could turn the power system in 4e to one of those complexity dials on my ENWorld blog here. Overall, I'm...

I just have to pick this one out because it irks me just a little. Having just run a long campaign with PCs that were effectively immortal, there are many, many ways to fail besides death. In many ways, death is a mercy. For example, my players failed, at the end of heroic tier, to stop a...

I like the minions-as-meatshields idea. It's nifty, I'm gonna have to steal that. I've got a vaguely similar encounter coming up, I have a two-tiered setup, for street-level and rooftops, you can climb most walls with an average climb check to count it as difficult terrain, and a couple places...

I'm kicking around an idea for a new adventure or two based on the new Shadowfell boxed set. Since my players are in the wrong universe for it, I figured I'd write something up in the style of published adventures and post it here. But first, I wanted to get a sanity-check from other DMs and...

Clearly, you've never had a good run and bad players as a DM :P Really though, I TPKed a group once with a Dire Boar. That they should have been able to stick like a, well, pig.

The only reason I don't have restrictions on rules like this is because I know my players. Otherwise I'd cut stuff down to settings-appropriate. Only time I've ever had powergamers it was in deathmatch campaigns that were a bit more adversarial. (Build fairly/within the rules, play to win, on...

More accepted, maybe. But it's not everyone's experience, that's for sure. I've only ever had one whiny player, and everyone around the table told him to STFU and go away before I could say anything about it. Then he got all uppity, and said it wasn't their call, it was (mine) as the DM. They...

Sounds like a good case for an ending with them regaling the patrons of the nearest bar with highlights from their adventures, ostensibly before heading out on yet more, "off-screen" adventures.

This could well be Belkar's time to go out in a blaze of glory, with Durkon fixing up Haley and Elan to wipe out the mage and other rogue. Which would be pretty awesome.