DnD 4e Treasure Parcels

Here is a plan I have for handing out treasure in 4e DnD. Instead of the GM having to try to keep track of which character has received which treasure and all the other headaches that can come with handing out treasure, I am going to try the following.

Each player starts the game with 10 tokens numbered 1-10. When the characters find a treasure the GM merely indicates which parcels are in the treasure and what level the treasure is. The players then decide which of them is going to spend the tokens to obtain that treasure. The tokens remain spent until all the players tokens have been spent, at which point they refresh. If the treasure parcel includes a choice then the player who spent that token gets to decide what the treasure is.

The GM then only needs to keep a record of which tokens have been spent so he can plan which parcels of treasure to include in his adventures.

World Wide DnD Game Day 2009

Last Saturday I acted as a GM for WotC’s DnD Game Day.

I ran the adventure twice and things went quite well. The adventure consted of the party coming to a seemingly abandoned town and trying to figure out what happened. (The Town was called weeping briar, which is DnD for LV-426). The first encounter has the characters come upon a band of monsters looking for a little girl who should have been named Newt.

A fight ensues and we go directly to the second encounter a skill challenge that was way too easy. it had the players chasing down the little girl, cornering her and calming her down so she could tell them the story of what happened. She then asks the party to save her parents from the monsters. T

he party proceeds through two more combat encounters and frees the villagers.

Since this was supposed to be an introductory adventure I cut the hit points of the monsters in half. This was a good call as it allowed me to run the adventure in a shorter time and encounters ended while they were still fun and before tedium set in.

The pregenerated characters were weird. 4 of the 5 used classes from the new players hand book 2, yet only one used a new race from that book. The character sheets were also riddled with errors. Why didn’t WotC use their own character creator program to make the characters T

he maps were generated using the Streets of Shadow dungeon tiles and could have been done better. the map for the third encounter was really bad. it was hard to tell where things like the entrance was.

Overall I think the adventure could have been a lot better, and it felt like it was just thrown together by a WotC intern. If you are going to send out materials to promote your game shouldn’t those materials be top-notch?

The first group was not as mechanically inclined, one of them had never played 4e before, but they were still fun. The paladin got pinned down by the mezzodaemon and couldn’t do much for the whole last encounter, and curly the barbarian couldn’t hit anything to save his life. the gloomfell trap also got the avenger pretty good in the first group.

the second group was much more knowledgeable about the game mechanics and quickly figured out how the characters worked. they punked the main bad guy hard with the two strikers. One of the guys from the second group was also at game day last year.

Here are some of the awesome things that happened. Just like last years game day, another group playing an older version of DnD made some disparaging remarks about how 4e isn’t real DnD. I didn’t point out to him that the two tables hosting 4e games had a number of attractive women sitting at them (later in the day we had as many as 5 tables of people playing the game day adventure)

In my first group one player, one of the aforementioned women, pointed out to her boyfriend who was playing the bard that his power was to hurt peoples feelings. He kept using vicious mockery on the bad guys.