GRIM TALES: Gamemastering

[Crothian]

The information in this product has been revised and expanded from the original material which appeared in Grim Tales.

This 5 page PDF supplement presents rules for GMs to determine Encounter Levels (EL), create balanced encounters, award experience points, and design “serial” adventures.

For your convenience, this purchase also includes an Excel spreadsheet you can use to track the party level, determine EL of a group of creatures, determine the difficulty of the encounter, the expected survival chance, the expected expenditure of resources, and appropriate experience point awards.

Quick: What’s the EL of an Ogre Warlord (Bbn2), 5 Orcs, 3 Goblin Emissaries, and a Drow advisor (Wiz4)?

If you’re still relying on the DMG to determine Encounter Levels, you’ll have a hard time coming up with an answer that doesn’t feel like guesswork. Can your party survive this encounter, or not?

Grim Tales presented a new system for determining EL that took the guesswork out of Encounter Levels— and it has been improved with the release of this PDF.

This material has been revised and expanded from its original appearance in Grim Tales to include a greatly simplified and streamlined system for determining Encounter Level (EL) based on the relative power of opposing forces. The tables originally provided in Grim Tales have given way to a simple (but powerful) mathematical expression for accurately determining EL for any group of creatures, including mixed groups of widely varying CR.

 

[Crothian]

Grim Tales Gamemastering

Grim Tales Gamemastering

The game master needs to at times go beyond what is written in the Dungeon Masters Guide. People have found that while that book does a nice job of covering some of the basic s there are some areas that it does not do as well in. At time it has taken another company and another writer to come out with something better that over writes the rules in the DMG. For instance Mystic Eye Games did that with their Artificers Handbook which presented better rules for creating magical items. Grim Tales Gamemastering does it with encounter levels. It walks a person through the encounter levels and shows how they are calculated. This can be tricky for people not used to the math so they have also included and excel sheet that does the entire math for you.

Grim Tales: Gamemasteing is a PDF by Bad Axe Games. Bad Axe Games is one of those small RPG companies that really has deserved all the acclaims that they have gotten. They have not released that many books but those they have are just good. They have four books in the Heroes of High Favor line that cover a single race each. They have the half orc, the halfling, the dwarf, and the elf covered in this series and hopefully we will soon see their gnome book finally come out. It is the only race book series that I can say I have used all the books for in my game. Then they came out with Grim tales an almost revolutionary look at the d20 system and using it for a high adventure low magic type settings.

The PDF is not that long only nine pages total. It is filled though with just how to figure out the encounter levels and award experience based on that. The PDF is easy enough to follow but the excel sheet is really what makes this work. One enters the numbers into the proper places in the excel sheet and all the calculations are easily done. The PDF does a good job of explaining it all but it does use base two logarithms and not everyone is going to be familiar with those.

The material here is reprinted from the Grim Tales books. It is not a word for word reprint as it is expanded on here and the excel sheet is something that Grim Tales does not have with it. So, even for people who have Grim Tales like myself this PDF and excel sheet still has something to offer.

This is one of the first PDF and electronic books that really takes advantage of the benefits the format provides. The excel calculator is not something that can be done in a print book. It is really nice to see electronic products that finally offer something that print books do not. The Gamemastering PDF is well done, nicely organized, and seems easy to follow. It might be too exact for some people. Getting exact ELs is not something everyone worries about. But for those that do this book does exactly that.