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.

It’s been a while

It has been a while since I posted anything, and I don’t really know why. I suspect the lack of feedback is a major cause though.

So, what have I been up to?

Working mostly.

My DnD game is still going well. we are just over 2/3rds of the way through the Rise of the Runelords. We still have all the same problems with scheduling and such but those are pretty normal and we are dealing with it. Our gaming group added a new player and he is working out well, although I haven’t heard much from him in the last couple of weeks.

I still have lots of ideas for role-playing campaigns and no time to actually play them.

Five Guys Burgers and Fries opened a couple of new stores in my neck of the woods and I am an addict. THey have a few problems with decor, but the food is good enough to keep me coming back. I am a big fan of restaraunts with a small well focused menu and Five Guys does that. The price is a bit high, but quality costs.

I am excited to play again.

A few months ago I was contemplating hanging up my dice bag and getting out of this hobby for a while. However recently I have found myself re-energized and excited to play. IN fact my every other week schedule if my big frustration. I want to play more often.

Free RPG day report

Free RPG day went well. I ran a demo game of 4e DnD using the free RPG day adventure. I had 5 players. 3 who had never played DnD in any incarnation. One 3rd edition player and one who has jumped on the 4e bandwagon. Much fun was had although we didn’t get to finish the adventure

DnD Worldwide Game Day Report

Last Saturday I spent the day at the FLGS (Hastur Hobbies) running the Worldwide Dungeons and Dragons Game Day adventure. I ran it for two groups, both of which were awesome. If any of you are reading this, thanks you for making it a lot of fun for me. If you are looking for a player and you think I might fit in let me know.

The adventure consisted of a small dungeon with 4 encounters. The first encounter was a puzzle to open a secret door. The second was a fight with a couple of hobgoblins in a trapped corridor. The third was a room with two traps and a couple of very tough animated statues and the two kidnapped children chained in the middle of the traps. The final encounter was with the elf wizard who kidnapped the two boys the party was trying to rescue.

Both groups proceeded through the adventure largely the same way; solving the puzzle, fighting the hobgoblins, rescuing the children fighting the statues and then facing off against the wizard and his skeletons. They both defeated the wizard the same way. The Eladrin wizard teleported up onto the platform and used thunderwave to knock him off into the waiting swords of the fighters and rogue.

The adventure was not a masterpiece, but it was sufficient to show off the new 4^th edition rules in a reasonably short time. Both games took about two and a half hours to play.

Overall, I am impressed with 4^th edition dungeons and dragons.

The game flowed well and we had to look up very little

Prep time was very minimal

The cleric and the wizard didn’t run out of spells after the first or second encounter

Healing surges work pretty well and keep the characters adventuring

The fighters had options beyond power attack

Another GM ran the adventure as well for a group of six and I am glad I wasn’t in that group. There were a couple of good players, but there were a bunch of problems. The GM had his music playing while playing. He claimed it was ambiance, but Goldfrapp has little to do with DnD. The group was not a team. In fact some of the players tried to escape with the kids locking the others in the dungeon so they could claim the reward for themselves. ( I didn’t mention the reward to my groups and just assumed they were the good guys going to resue the kids because that is what heroes do.) Two of the players were haters talking about how the game was too MMOish and that the first thing they would do with their rulebooks would be to go through them with a sharpie making changes. These two were the ones sitting closest to me and it got on my nerves.

nothing really going on today

today is going to be a pretty mild day with little to talk about.

My FLGS is holding a midnight sale for the DnD 4e books. Since mine are coming from Amazon I have to wait though.

I am hoping to run the little dungeon in the DMG as a warm up for my big event on the 28th of June. there sems to be little interest in this from my friends though.

I am trying to get the Bunch of Geeks forum up and running again, but it is hard.

MY wife bought Lego Indiana Jones for my son and I.

4e space-time

architecture got big. most hallways are now 10ft wide and a normal room is something like 40′ X 50′. This combined with diagonal movement being the same as all other movement makes me think that the whole time-space thing is extremely flexible and relative to the observer in DnD. Rooms change shape depending on where you are standing inside it. (a 15′ X 15′ square room would appear as a 15′ diameter circle to a person standing in the center of it. whil if he moved to an edge, the close edge becomes flat while the other side becomes more oval shaped.

A person from a universe that works like our real world would find the spatial distortions in a dnd world to be very unsettling.

Big wind

We had a big gust of wind last night. Tree limbs were down all over the neighborhood and we had no power for about seven hours. Wasn’t a big problem other than I was worried about the stuff in the refrigerators and it was hot making it difficult to sleep. Power came back on around two in the morning and all is good. Now it is just raining.

One strange thing occurred though. Around 1:30 in the morning a truck hauling a big trailer parked in front of my house. Two very large men unloaded a Porsche out of the trailer and then they drove off. One drove the truck, the other drove the car.

Now all I need is a way to get to New York City

I was given an invitation to an event at the Bar American Restaurant in New York City on June 4. Too bad I can’t go.