How To Build An Encounter During Play With No Prep time

[mattcolville]

Over on another forum, I was extolling the virtues of the Combat Manager and how easy it is to build and run Encounters at the table in conjuction with the Monster Builder. Someone asked for a video tutorial and here you go. It's in HD so you might want to switch to HD and Full Screen. Otherwise it's gonna be reeeealy tiny.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq0JKXiTwUg"]D&D Monster Builder Plus Combat Manager[/ame]
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This is purely a technological solution. This won't teach you, for instance, what Minions are for, or how to make an Encounter interesting. It presumes you already know that and just want to throw together some cool monsters quickly, and track combat easily.

 

[Redshirt]

Nice video. Looks like I need to check out the Combat Tracker. Thanks.

 

[kaomera]

Could you post a link? "D&D 4e Combat Manager" brings up a ton of links, to a variety of different programs, and I'm not sure which one you're talking about.

 

[mattcolville]

Try this.

http://www.dragonpro.com/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=30&view=finish&cid=2&catid=2&m=0

I also added links to the video description.

 

[Traveon Wyvernspur]

I love me some DnD4e Combat Manager + Adventure Tools monster builder! Exporting those monsters into saved encounters is a breeze. Makes life easy.

 

[Beginning of the End]

"It took maybe a minute to put the encounter together."

(looks at time tracker on video)

This is why self-reporting "how long did it take?" means pretty much nothing about how long it actually took to put it together.

 

[Mercurius]

"It took maybe a minute to put the encounter together."

(looks at time tracker on video)

This is why self-reporting "how long did it take?" means pretty much nothing about how long it actually took to put it together.

Umm, he isn't spending the entire ten minutes putting the encounter together; he's also explaining how he's doing it. Not to mention that he was pretty much done putting the encounter together at 4 minutes or so, and a lot of those first 4 minutes were explanation.

 

[mattcolville]

"It took maybe a minute to put the encounter together."

(looks at time tracker on video)

This is why self-reporting "how long did it take?" means pretty much nothing about how long it actually took to put it together.

It took three minutes by the clock, and most of that three minutes was me talking about what I was doing.

Probably I should have been more clear in the video, but I felt like explicitly saying "You don't have to say all these words I'm speaking in order to get the magic to work" was unnecessary.

But it wouldn't hurt. If you want to write down everything I said as a kind of cargo-cult mantra to recite while you try it. Eventually you might conclude you can do it without all the talking.