Online Dungeon Master

October 29, 2010

Line of sight and line of effect in 4th Edition

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 1:09 PM

Line of sight and line of effect are two concepts that can confuse new players and dungeon masters for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.  I know that I have personally struggled with these, and it feels like there’s always something new to learn.  Below are some basic pointers to help you understand line of sight and line of effect and what they mean for you and your game.

What is line of sight?

Line of sight means exactly what it says: You’re able to see a thing from where you’re standing.  What blocks line of sight?

  • Solid, opaque objects (walls, doors)
  • Complete darkness
  • Blindness
  • Invisibility
  • Certain magical effects that specifically say they block line of sight (such as a wizard’s Stinking Cloud)

An interesting case of an object that does NOT block line of sight is a solid, transparent object such as a pane of glass or a transparent crystal.  If you can see through it, it doesn’t block line of sight.  Also, dim light and fog and similar things might grant some concealment, but they don’t block line of sight.  You can still see through them, even if only dimly.

Creatures also don’t block line of sight.  It’s assumed that the creature is moving around enough in its square that you can still make out what’s on the far side of it (even though the creature in the way might grant cover if it’s your enemy).

What is line of effect?

Line of effect means that something going from point A to point B won’t get stopped by anything.  What stops line of effect?

  • Solid objects, whether opaque or not (doors, walls, even glass or crystal)
  • Certain magical effects that specifically say they block line of effect (such as spells that generate solid walls)

Things like darkness and blindness and invisibility don’t matter one bit for line of effect – an object would not be impeded at all if it were going through a cloud of magical fog or darkness, so line of effect still exists through them.  Creatures also don’t stop line of effect (again, they’re assumed to be moving around in their squares), though they may grant cover.

The canonical example of something that blocks line of sight but not line of effect is darkness.  The canonical example of something that blocks line of effect but not line of sight is a pane of clear glass.  Keep those examples in mind, and you should be able to figure out what’s what.

Melee attacks

In order to make a melee attack against something that’s in range of your melee attack, you must have line of effect to the target but you don’t have to have line of sight.  As long as your axe can get there, it doesn’t matter if you can see the target or not – you have line of effect and are allowed to attack.  If you can’t see it (you’re blinded, it’s totally dark, etc.) then the target has total concealment from you, which means your attack has a -5 penalty to hit.  But you can still make the attack.

Ranged attacks

As with a melee attack, you only need line of effect to the target with a ranged attack, not line of sight.  If you’re shooting an arrow through a cloud of magical darkness at a creature on the far side, the darkness does nothing to stop your arrow.  Again, if you can’t see the target it has total concealment – a -5 penalty to the attack roll.

The hooded archer can shoot the goblin through the black cloud of magical darkness with a -5 total concealment penalty; he can't shoot the rat on the far side of the glass wall

Close attacks

With a close attack, you only need line of effect to the target.  Your Thunderwave doesn’t care if you can see something or not – it just has to be able to get to it.  In addition, concealment doesn’t matter for close attacks, so even if the target is invisible in a completely dark room, your close attack has no penalty to hit it.

Area attacks

Somewhat surprisingly to me, area attacks work pretty much as close attacks do.  With an area attack, there are two different things to consider – the line from the caster to the origin square of the burst, and then the lines from the origin square of the burst to the targets that will be hit by it.

In order to put an area burst’s origin in a particular square, the caster only needs line of effect to that square, not line of sight.  If the wizard closes her eyes and points, she can still have the magical burst originate exactly where she wants it to.  If she’s shooting through an arrow slit , that’s good enough – the magical energy can get through the gap and erupt right where she wants it.  She can’t place the magical effect on the opposite side of a pane of glass, though – she does need line of effect to that origin square.

Even if the green wizard is blind and the cloud of gas blocks line of sight, she can still have her Area Burst 2 attack originate in square 1 and hit the fungus creature

As for the burst itself, it works just like a close attack.  As long as there is line of effect from the origin square of the burst to the target, the target will get hit.  This lets the wizard “shoot around a corner” as well – she can place the burst at the intersection of two hallways, and the burst will shoot down the side passage to hit any creatures within range.

Wrapping up

The basics of line of sight and line of effect for attacks are that you always need line of effect and you never need line of sight.  However, if you don’t have line of sight, then your melee and ranged attacks will suffer a -5 penalty from total concealment (but your close and area attacks are unaffected).

In a future post I’ll talk about a concept that has some connection to line of sight – being hidden.

October 26, 2010

Images for use with MapTool

Filed under: Advice/Tools, Maps, Online games — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 7:39 PM

I’ve talked at length about how much I love MapTool, but it’s important to understand that having the MapTool software itself is only half the battle. You also need images.

MapTool comes with a few images pre-installed, but if you want maximum power and flexibility in creating maps and running games, you’re going to want a larger library of images.  This includes images of objects such as tables, stairs, roofs, etc.  More importantly, though, it includes textures – dirt, grass, stone, snow, water, fire, wood and many more.  With textures, you can easily draw great-looking maps.

So where do you get these images?  Why, at rputorials.net!  What you’re looking for is a big file with a lot of data – and that means a torrent.  No, not some illegal pirated stuff – this is just a big file put together to share for the role-playing game community.  The link to that file is here.

Once you have the file downloaded and saved to your MapTool directory (or wherever you like), you’ll need to tell MapTool where to find it.  Open MapTool and go to File – Add Resource to Library.  Browse to the location of the library on your computer, and voila!  You’ve got images!

The folks over at rptutorials.net have put together videos about drawing maps and so on, which I won’t even bother to try to replicate – they’ve done it right the first time!  Here instead are just a few basic pointers for creating nice-looking maps in MapTool.

  • Start with a new map, picking a good background color or texture.  I’ll often pick a grass texture for an outdoor map and either a gray color or stone texture for a dungeon map.
  • Click on the Drawing Tools icon and select the Background Layer from the window that pops up.  This is important!  You don’t want your floors and walls in the same layer as your tokens – the tokens should be on top.
  • To make a building, click on the top left box in the drawing window and browse to a stone texture.  Click on the top right box and browse to a wood plank texture.  Set the line width (the stone) to about 40% of your grid box (I use 20 pixel walls for a 50 pixel grid).  Select the rectangle tool from the top menu.  Click on a spot, let go, drag out a box, and click again.  Poof – it’s a building with stone walls and a wood floor!
  • The same process works with irregular filled shapes, too (cavern rooms, lakes, lava pools, pits, etc.).  If you don’t want a border (I usually don’t when drawing caves, for instance), left click on the white box with the red slash through it (this will set your border color to “none”).  Use the freehand line tool instead of the rectangle tool to draw these.
  • To just draw lines, right click on the white box with a red slash through it (that will set your fill color to “none”) and left click on the top left box.  Select the line texture you want.  Select the line width you want.  If you want freehand lines or straight lines, select the appropriate tool from the upper toolbar.
  • For objects, go back to the Interaction Tool (the default tool on the upper left toolbar, to the left of Drawing) and select the Object layer.  Browse to things like doors, stairs, beds, etc. and drag them onto the map.  Resize them by clicking on the box in the lower right corner and dragging.
  • Don’t use TOO many objects in maps that people will be accessing online.  The more different types of objects you have on your map, the longer it will take to load.  Try to draw background objects (such as pits) rather than using an actual object image whenever possible.
  • Feel free to add multiple maps to your campaign file and set them as not visible to players, then make them visible as needed during the game session.  This seems to help with loading times as well.

That should get you started on the path to creating great maps in MapTool!

October 19, 2010

United Kobolds of the Living Forgotten Realms

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons, In-Person D&D, Maps, Play, RPG Projector — Tags: , , , , — OnlineDM @ 11:05 PM

This evening I ran a Living Forgotten Realms game at my friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds.  The amazing thing is that it wasn’t a big deal.

You might remember my post from July where I ran my first LFR game at the store.  That was a big deal to me.  I spent a month preparing for that game.  I talked on the blog and on EN World, asking for advice about running a game in public.  I had to work to create paper maps and tokens for the bad guys.  I read and re-read the adventure to make sure I understood the ins and outs (even though I had been through it already as a player).  I over-prepared.  And to be fair, I had a blast running the game.

This time I realized at some point over the weekend – oh yeah, I’m running a game on Tuesday!  No problem.  It helps that I had already run this particular adventure at TactiCon and I therefore had all of the files I needed on the laptop in MapTool, ready to run with the projector.  (This is TYMA 2-1 Old Enemies Arise.) Still, I really didn’t stress about it.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to stress.  Aside from my accidental unplugging of the projector during the game (twice – but fortunately never in combat), it all went very smoothly.  The party battled some kobolds by the side of the road.

They met with some farmers to investigate the kobold menace.

They fought in a cave full of spike traps.

And they battled the big bad guy in another part of the cave.

The first battle was fair – the defender took some serious damage, but never dropped.  The spike cave battle was lots of fun – I got to push and pull players into spikes all encounter long, when they weren’t stumbling into them on their own.  The final battle was kind of boring – I really need to find a way to spice up that encounter if I ever run this adventure again.

Part of what I enjoyed about this particular adventure was that two of my players are DMs whom I respect – Rich and Aarun.  You might remember Aarun’s name from my very first experience with Living Forgotten Realms – he was the dungeon master for my first game, and I absolutely LOVED the experience of playing under him.  He mentioned this evening that the blog post where I mentioned his name (with its unique spelling) shows up when you Google that name.  Well, Aarun – here’s another Google hit for you!

Anyway, it’s great to run a game for people you respect and for them to clearly have a good time.  I also hung around the store afterward to chat with Wes, another DM I greatly respect.  I’ve already signed up to play in some LFR games in December, and I specifically sought out games that Aarun and Wes are running.  If I can run a game for that type of person and they have a good time, I feel good about my dungeon mastering!

October 18, 2010

MapTool states should differ for online and in-person play

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, In-Person D&D, Macros, Online games, RPG Projector — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 9:00 AM

I’ve been running my online Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition game for several months now, and MapTool has been fantastic for running the game.  The players have macros for their powers and abilities, we can keep track of hit points electronically, etc.  It’s also great because it’s easy to keep track of all of the conditions that can be put onto a character – bloodied, prone, marked, cursed, ongoing damage, weakened, dazed… the list goes on and on.  My MapTool states for the online game consist of little icons that can show up over a token in a 3 by 3 grid (so there can be up to nine states on a token at once).

A token that is granting combat advantage, dazed, slowed, taking ongoing damage, marked, cursed and bloodied

I love this about MapTool for in-person games that I run using my projector, too.  Unfortunately, it’s much harder to make out the details on a monster token when I’m using the projector because I have to keep the map zoomed pretty far out in order to project a grid with 1-inch squares.  This means that it’s really hard for the characters to see all of the states on a creature.  Is that guy bloodied?  Is he marked?  What about prone?

The solution here is a combination of using bigger states and using different states.

  • Bloodied: The most important state.  Instead of an icon on the image, use a red circle around the token
  • Prone: A purple triangle (actually a yield sign)
  • Marked: A blue or green X (have two different marks available in case you have multiple defenders in your party)
  • Cursed/Quarried/Oathed/etc.: An orange cross
  • Other: Normal icons, but in a 2 by 2 grid instead of 3 by 3 (so they’re bigger)

The most important states for players to be able to see clearly are those that are most likely to affect their interaction with a creature.  They have to know if it’s bloodied, prone, marked, or subject to a striker ability (quarry, etc.).  It’s nice to know if the bad guy is dazed or has -2 to its defenses or it’s slowed, but not AS important.  The really important conditions, therefore, should get big, prominent marks across the face of the token.  The less-important conditions can rely on the 2 by 2 grid (at the very least, you as the DM can still zoom in on them on your screen to see what they are.

The easily-visible conditions can be tailored to your own campaign, of course.  Every defender should have his or her own color of marks, but they can all use the same symbol (since a new mark will override an old one, you’ll never have to worry about making multiple marks visible).  If you have multiple strikers that can put conditions on a creature, you’ll want to use multiple shapes (maybe a cross for one and a diamond for another).  Assassin shrouds are tricky – I haven’t yet come up with a good way to keep track of how many are on a creature, but fortunately my regular games don’t include any assassins (though I see them occasionally at convention games).

Bottom line: Icons are great for understanding what a particular symbol means, but they’re hard to see at a distance.  Colorful shapes are better for in-person games with a projector.

October 17, 2010

New campaign: Homebrew all the way!

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, DM Lessons, In-Person D&D, Maps, Minis, Play, RPG Projector — Tags: , , , , , — OnlineDM @ 1:16 AM

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve volunteered to take the next shift as dungeon master with the group I’ve been playing with here in Colorado for most of this year (my first real Dungeons and Dragons experience).  I had considered three options for this campaign:

  • War of the Burning Sky, which I am already running for my online campaign (though I would have to adjust for the fact that the in-person campaign is starting at level 5)
  • An adventure setting from Nevermet Press that I’ve volunteered to playtest (called Brother Ptolemy and the Hidden Kingdom)
  • A total homebrew campaign, based on an adventure I had written but never run for D&D Third Edition

War of the Burning Sky was originally my first choice, but after starting to work on the adjustments I’d have to make for the level issue and after talking to my current players and getting their thoughts on the matter, I decided that it didn’t seem like it would be as much fun for me (even though it would be a LOT less work).

The playtest game intrigues me a great deal, but the adventure would span several sessions, and I really didn’t want to commit to anything like that without having the time to really get to know the material first (the whole document is over 100 pages in length).

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that homebrew was what I really wanted.  Having discovered my adventure from years ago that never saw the light of day, I felt like I had to give it a go.I began by transferring my map of what was originally a goblin stronghold (the adventure was written for first-level characters) into MapTool.  It’s now an orc stronghold, since these characters are higher level.  I kept the geography pretty much the same as I had created it years ago, removing only a couple of pointless storage rooms (I like verisimilitude, but rooms that have no bearing on the adventurers at all should be cut).  I sketched out the whole complex, only making a couple of edits… and then realized that the party wouldn’t be STARTING in the stronghold, but out in a town where they’ll get the chance to find out about this thing.

So, I needed to back up and draw some more.  I started with a tavern, using a Dungeon Tile image.  I called it the Shady Maple Inn and built it around a huge maple tree in the middle of the place.  It was built and owned by an elf who loved the tree and made it part of his establishment (this made me very happy for some reason).  The players had the possibility of meeting some bandits along the road, so I created a bridge encounter map.

There was also going to be an attack by some insects during a night spent camping in the forest, so I put together a forest encounter map with trees and bushes.

This would be everything the party would face, at least for the first session.  I figured that we would get through some decent fraction of the maps I had prepared.  After all, there was a lot to get through in the first session:

  • Character introductions
  • Determining how the party members know one another – past adventures together, etc.
  • Meeting the NPC who would ask for the party’s help
  • Getting from the tavern to the manor house where a minor noble was looking for aid (likely encountering bandits along the way)
  • Meeting the minor noble and learning about the family heirloom that had been stolen
  • Investigating near the manor house to learn more about the thieves
  • Tracking the thieves through the forest
  • Battling creatures overnight in the woods
  • Getting to the stronghold
  • Dealing with the front door defenses
  • Working their way into the depths of the keep

Now, I don’t know if it was the efficiency of running the game in MapTool with the projector or what, but we got through a LOT in one session!

We started playing at about 4:15 this afternoon.  We spent about 30 minutes on character introductions and party backgrounds.  Then the action started, and the players jumped on it.  No gallavanting about, chatting with random NPCs – they heard about a mission, pounced on it without asking questions and started to complete it.  They wisely figured out that they could take a boat up the river to the manor house, which meant that they could skip the bandit encounter at the bridge.  At the manor house, they investigated the theft of the family heirloom efficiently and moved on to the forest.

Here, they were set upon by some creepy crawlies at night.  The luck of the dice had this encounter happen during the first watch, which meant that everyone would be taking an extended rest afterwards (some of them had just started doing so).  This worked out pretty well, actually – since the extended rest was coming, everyone was free to blow daily powers and action points.  The attack came from some centipedes and rot grub swarms (set to appropriate levels for the party, of course).  Even after I brought in some extra centipedes in the second round, the PCs had no trouble beating them all up.

The next morning we had a little skill challenge to continue the navigation through the forest to the orcs’ lair.  The party just barely failed this skill challenge, which made for a cool encounter.  Instead of being able to walk right up to the front door and trying to figure out how to get through, their failure meant that orc archers in the guard tower saw them coming and got a surprise round on them.  This was excellent, because the archers with surprise were pretty darn scary.  Even though these are only level 4 creatures, they have a burst 1 attack (a hail of arrows, basically) that deals d10+6 damage to everyone in the burst that it hits, and I rolled a 9 and a 10 for damage for the two archers who fired into the group.  Suddenly our healer was down to 12 hit points (out of a maximum of 43) and the party was legitimately scared.

Despite the fear, the party had the right tools to handle this problem: Area attacks.  By the rules of the game, an area attack only requires that the spellcaster have line of effect to the origin square of the area burst (which the arrow slit grants), and then enemies inside the tower would not have cover from the area attack because it’s originating inside the tower.  Unleashing a few of these helped bring the archers down before they could raise the alarm.

The door to the stronghold was trapped, and I allowed some active Perception checks to notice the trap before just setting it off on everyone’s heads.  This was a bit generous on my part, but our games haven’t involved a lot of traps in the past and I felt like it was unfair to shock them TOO much by springing a trap when they would never think to look for one.  Now they’ll think about it!

Once inside, the party used some good Stealth to sneak up on the orc minions (two-hit minions, as is usual in my games) in the next room, who were distracted by their dice games.  For this battle, the minions went to the far side of the bridge and pulled it back across, attacking mainly from range (even though they’re not great at range).  I made it clear that the river is nasty and the party does not want to fall into it.  Again, the PCs beat up the bad guys before they could raise a further alarm.

The last battle of the evening took place in the orcs’ sleeping chamber.  This area was dark, as the night shift orcs were sleeping.  One orc was awake – the cook over in the kitchen area, preparing a foul-smelling stew.  The party again made good use of Stealth, letting the party’s Monk get a surprise attack on the cook.

This battle was a little more interesting, as the orcs who had been asleep quickly woke up and did their best to sneak toward the party in the dark.  The Monk ended up bloodied a couple of times, and the Warlock/Sorcerer got a little bit beat-up as well, but since the baddies kept clustering, they were mowed down by burst and blast attacks.  Who says you need dedicated controllers in a party?At this point it was a little after 9:15 PM.  It had been five hours since we had started playing, and we had taken about an hour-long break for dinner in the middle.  We played through four combat encounters, plus the background stuff and some role-playing, investigations and skill challenges.  And this was all with brand-new characters and players who were still figuring out what those characters can do.  I was amazed at how far the party had gotten.  This was as much of the adventure as I had prepared, so we called it a night at that point (playing a few games of Zombie Dice first).

Today was a great start for a new campaign!  I feel like everyone had a good time, and the MapTool / projector combo continues to be a big hit.

DM Lessons

  • Once you’re comfortable as a dungeon master, run your own homebrew games whenever possible.  Time constraints may make this hard, but don’t let a lack of confidence stand in the way.
  • Drop future adventure hooks liberally – even if you haven’t figured out exactly where they’ll lead yet.  See what piques your players’ interest, and run with those, abandoning the others.
  • Preparation is huge.  Know the layouts of combat areas and how the enemies will use them before the battle starts.  If you can do the mapping in advance (such as with MapTool, or even pre-drawing the maps on battle mats or paper) it will save a lot of time at the table.
  • Be prepared for players to come up with ways to skip over combat encounters, and let them do it if they find a way.  Don’t get too attached to a battle.  You can probably find an excuse to use it again at some point in the future!
  • If you’re comfortable with it, technology at the table can automate the boring parts and help everyone get to the fun faster.
https://onlinedm.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/two-hit-minions/

October 11, 2010

Starting my first in-person campaign

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, DM Lessons, In-Person D&D, RPG Projector — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 5:35 PM

The day has come: I’m about to serve as dungeon master for an ongoing, in-person campaign.  I’ve been running my online campaign through the War of the Burning Sky via MapTool and Skype for nine sessions over the past few months, and it’s gone very well.  I’ve also run one-shot Living Forgotten Realms games in-person at my local store and at TactiCon.

This is different.  This is in-person and ongoing, playing with people I already know (including my wife).  We’ve played two short campaigns with this same group of people.  Nate ran the first one, which took our characters halfway through third level in a largely home-brew campaign inspired by some published stuff.  That one ended when my character died and everyone else just felt like trying new characters and a new person wanted to DM.

The second campaign was run by Bree (Nate’s wife) and consisted of several of the Chaos Scar adventures.  That took our characters from first up to third level as well.  We wrapped that one up this past Saturday, with Bree deciding to step down as DM because of her other time commitments.  I had previously offered to try my hand at running the game if she didn’t have time, and she took me up on the offer.

So, here I am.  I will definitely be using my projector rig and MapTool to run the games.  I love the rig, and I love MapTool.  The next question is, what campaign will I run?

I’m considering running War of the Burning Sky (WotBS) since I’m already familiar with it and I have lots of maps and monsters already built in MapTool (meaning easier prep for me).  The complicating factor there is that this new campaign is going to start with the characters at level 5, and WotBS starts at level 1.  This gives me a few options.

  • Drop them in the middle of the second adventure, when WotBS assumes characters are around level 5, hand-waving the back story
  • Start them at the beginning of WotBS but skip most of the encounters from the first adventure, increasing the difficulty of those encounters that I do run to be fun for fifth-level characters, eventually getting synched up with level and adventure sometime around level 6.
  • Run something else.

I definitely don’t like the first option – dropping them in the middle of the story.  That just feels wrong.  I’m torn between the second and third options.  The second option wouldn’t be too hard.  I already have maps for the encounters I want to run, and I would just have to create new monsters (or level up the ones that I have).  I can do that… but I’m trying to decide how much fun that would be.  I’d really like the in-person campaign to be more free-form than that.

I could run a different published adventure.  More Chaos Scar?  Maybe Scales of War?  Those leave me feeling a little cold, frankly.  Tomb of Horrors is interesting to me, but that’s for higher-level characters (hey, this group will level up eventually…).

If I don’t go with WotBS, I think I’m going full-on homebrew.  I mentioned a few months ago that I discovered a complete adventure I had written (but never run) when I first tried D&D Third Edition a long time ago.  It’s actually pretty well fleshed out with nice maps and everything, and I could probably use it for this game.  I’d have to pick completely different monsters, of course, not just because this is a Fourth Edition game but also because I wrote the adventure for first-level characters.  I can do that, though.  That one adventure would probably last a couple of sessions, which would give me time to start planning ahead.

The more I think about it, the more I’m feeling like the homebrew option will be more fun.  Of course, it will be a lot more work, too!  What do you think?  Go with what I know?  Or go with the treasure from the past?

Dice Sprites

Filed under: Advice/Tools — Tags: — OnlineDM @ 9:04 AM

Aren’t these the most adorable things you’ve ever seen to keep your dice company?

A few months ago I saw a post on DM Samuel’s blog about Dice Sprites, and I thought they were pretty cute.  I showed the post to my wife Barbara, who also found them adorable.  Since her birthday was coming up, I thought that getting her a custom set of sprites for some of her dice would be an excellent idea.

I visited the web site of the “Claymancers” and sent an email to Kirai and Stark to ask about ordering some custom sprites for my wife.  They showed me some of the photos of sprites from their Facebook page so that I could get an idea of what they could do and figure out what I would like.  As you can see, I settled on three custom sprites:This is a sprite that I left to the Claymancers’s imagination.  I ask for something to sit on top of a d6.  He’s great!

This is a kitten-inspired sprite, with the d20 being like a ball of yarn for the sprite to play with.  My wife fosters kittens for the local animal shelter, and we have four cats of our own.

This one is a dragon sprite, hovering over his treasure.  I love the wings and tail – this guy is so detailed!

If you’re looking for a creative gift for a dice lover in your life, I highly recommend Dice Sprites.  They’re much more durable than I expected (made of some kind of plastic, I think, definitely not ceramic or anything like that) and they can be custom made.  The custom sprites that aren’t attached to dice went for $15 apiece (if I had wanted the die to be part of the sprite, it would have been $10 apiece).  I sent the Claymancers photos of my wife’s favorite dice so that they could pick colors to match, and you can see that they did fantastic work.

Thank you, Claymancers!

October 10, 2010

Simultaneous skill / combat encounter: Burning grove

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, DM Lessons, Maps, Online games, Play — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 2:55 PM

In the second part of my online party’s recent session (part 1 is here), they attempted to help a dragonborn sorcerer remove the magical fire from a dryad’s grove.  This was mainly a skill challenge, with some combat thrown in.
I decided to use lots of color when drawing the map in MapTool, and I’m happy with how it turned out.  My only minor regret is that I used a lot of objects rather than just drawing on the map (the trees and flames are objects, for instance) and that meant a long load time for my players (about 3 minutes for some of them).  Lesson learned: Don’t overload MapTool with too many objects (unless you don’t mind some loading time for the party, which might not be a big deal).  Also, given the way the encounter played out, I would want to move the dryad and her children from the far left side of the map to a spot that’s a bit closer to the center.

When the encounter began, the sorcerer went to the altar in the middle of the grove to begin the ritual.  The players gathered around him, and those with Arcana training attempted to assist.  After a couple of minutes the ritual started to have an effect.  The burning grass died down, and the dryad screamed and started running toward the lake in the lower right corner.  A couple of players went over to assist her and her children, but most stayed near the altar.

Shortly after that, catastrophe struck.  A rift opened near the far left side of the map, separating the children from their now-running mother.  The four big trees surrounding the altar came to life, with vines attacking the players and force barriers going between each pair of trees.  And then the ground directly beneath the altar collapsed, casting the sorcerer down into a cave below.

It was clear to the players that the first priority was rescuing the children – the sorcerer seemed to be unconscious but alive at the bottom of the cave below.  The characters outside the force barriers started to use skills to get to the children and calm them down while those inside started working on the trees.  I was curious to see what they would try, and they ended up using skill checks to try to disable the magic of the angry trees.  Nature and Arcana eventually worked (hard DCs), and a crit on the third tree disabled both it and the fourth one.

Now the whole party was trying to help the children, and they did all right (barely).  Since we were in initiative order, it was a little awkward having the children so far out to the left, since players used their turns double running just to get partway over to them, and then had to do lots of running to get back to the lake.  It was awkward, but I hand-waved some of the distance in the end.

Two of the characters felt like there wasn’t much they could do to help the children, so they started working on rescuing the fallen sorcerer.  One set up pitons and a rope in the ground (good dungeoneering check) and then tied the rope to herself while the other held the rope and lowered her down.  She made it okay, tied the rope to the sorcerer and then moved into hiding (she’s a tiefling warlock who recently multiclassed to rogue).  Unfortunately, as the other character began pulling the sorcerer up, some fungus creatures came out of the darkness and cut the rope.

My favorite part: This is where we ended the session.  I love ending on a cliffhanger. The dryad children have been rescued (though the mother died in the effort), but now the warlock is alone in the lower cave with just the unconscious sorcerer for company and some fungus creatures coming out of the darkness.  I’ve already changed this next encounter up from the published version, and I’m excited to try it out next week!

October 9, 2010

Fungus and determined fighters

Filed under: 4e D&D, Online games, Play — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 10:24 AM

My online party ventured into its ninth session in the War of the Burning Sky campaign last night.  This session involved two skill challenges and really just one combat (though as you’ll see the dedicated fighter in the party tried to stretch that one out).

Deep in an eternally-burning forest, the party comes across a dragonborn sorceror who is studying the magical fire and trying to develop a ritual to put it out.  He asks the adventurers to go to a nearby cave to get reagents for the ritual – mushrooms and flint.

Upon entering the cave, the party is greeted by screeching, howling, screaming noises coming from the small chamber at the bottom left corner of the map.  The fighter nervously tiptoes in and finds that it’s coming from a small hole in a corner.  There’s a gem in the hole, and the fighter breaks a bone off a nearby skeleton and pokes the gem.  Nothing happens.  Eventually the swordmage detects magic and figures out that it’s an Eye of Alarm ritual that’s never been deactivated, so she takes the gem and throws it out of the cave, causing the noise to stop.  Cool roleplaying here.

  • DM Lesson: When there’s a very loud noise, play it up.  Make the characters think about it.  Can they communicate effectively?  Might it temporarily deafen them?

The mushrooms were clearly down in the chamber below, so three members of the party took the downward-sloping bridge at the top of the map while the others just climbed down.  The mushroom and flint hunt was on, and cooperation was the word of the day as the party worked together to try to get the needed reagents.  They noticed a misty tunnel in the upper left corner that seemed to get more active whenever they tried and failed to get the reagents.  The skill challenge ultimately failed, which meant that monsters (fungus creatures) came out of the misty tunnel in a surprise round.

This got a little bit interesting for me as a DM.  My players have generally mowed down most unmodified battles, so I had taken to upping the difficulty of most combat encounters.  I did that here, too, adding a couple of monsters.  After one round, I realized that this battle was way too tough – players were getting badly bloodied, and the monsters were barely scratched (they can essentially share hit points by shifting damage taken to one another).  I made some modifications on the fly:

  • I intentionally “forgot” to use the regeneration ability that several of the bad guys had
  • I nearly halved all of their hit points

This made for a kind of weird battle in the end.  Initially the monsters were nearly indestructable because of their high HP and their damage splitting ability.  Once I lowered the HP (and decided not to use the regeneration), they all dropped in a hurry.  Clearly my on-the-fly adjustments need some work!  But the players seemed to have fun bashing the mushrooms into oblivion, so all’s well that ends well.

The best part was the end of the battle, when all of the monsters were dead.  Before taking even a short rest, the fighter wanted to explore the misty cave.  Okay, that’s his call.  He walks into total concealment and sees some orbs that appear to be the source of the mist.  He almost stumbles into a pit (heavy mist obscured it) but makes the athletics check to catch himself.  He finds a ledge that he can walk around, and while standing on it gets knocked into the pit by attacks from mushroom creatures that he can’t see.  The swordmage then charges in to help, fails her athletics check and falls into the pit on top of the fighter.

  • DM Lesson: When one character falls on top of another, split the falling damage between the two of them (it seemed like fun).

So we have our two defenders prone at the bottom of a pit, with mushroom creatures on the far side attacking them.  The creatures have made it clear that they simply don’t want any intruders and that retreat is an option.  But no, the defenders start attacking (ineffectually) from the pit.  Our druid came in to help, lowering a rope to the pit-bound PCs, and only very reluctantly did they decide to climb out and rest.

After the short rest… the fighter charged back in!  He was immediately attacked at range by things he couldn’t see, and only when it became clear that the rest of the party was not helping did he finally back out.  Honestly, I see this as great roleplaying – that fighter is stubborn and refuses to back away from a fight!

Another great bit of roleplaying came when our shaman discovered an old book while searching for flint.  He flipped through it a little bit and then discarded it on the ground, since he’s not much of a book kind of guy.  He never mentioned it to the rest of the party, and it was only at the end of the session that we realized the book was still lying on the ground in the mushroom cave.  Heh.  Good thing it’s not too important!

The second skill challenge, involving the ritual to extinguish a dryad’s burning grove, will be covered in the next post.

October 6, 2010

MapTool macros: Improved tracking of encounter/daily powers

Filed under: 4e D&D, Macros — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 11:20 PM

I’ve been having fun playing with my MapTool campaign file recently.  One of my latest improvements is to add actual tracking for encounter powers and daily powers so that the players can know which powers they’ve used and which are still available.

In an earlier post I described my addition of code to the encounter and daily power macros that would give the player an error message if they tried to use a power that had already been used.  The code is basically as follows:

[h, if(E1==0), CODE:
{[assert(1==0,add(“This power has already been expended.”),0)]
};{[h: E1=0]}
]

Each macro will need its own E1, E2, E3, Daily1, Daily2, Daily3, etc. property to modify and check.  This is nice, but the player only figures out that they can’t use the power again if they try to do so.  What would be even better? A visual cue to show the player that the power is gone.

Enter the MetaMacro!  I didn’t learn until recently that MapTool macros can change the macro button itself.  One of the simplest things to change is the background color of the button.  I want the button to turn dark gray after a power is used up, so:

[h: setMacroProps(getMacroButtonIndex(), “color=darkgray”) ]

This piece of code uses the setMacroProps function to set the color property to “darkgray”.  The setMacroProps function takes two arguments: the index number of the macro whose button you want to change, and then a string that says what property you want to change and what you want the new value to be.

I didn’t know that each macro on a token has an index number, but it’s true.  I’m not sure how they’re assigned (perhaps the order in which you create them).  Fortunately, there’s a function you can use to get MapTool to tell you the index number of the macro you’re currently running.  That’s the getMacroButtonIndex() function that you see above.  It takes no arguments, and it just gives you the index number of the button.  Perfect!

Witchfire has been expended; Otherwind Stride is still available

Next, I had to write some code to turn the buttons back to their original color when the character takes a short rest (encounter powers only) or an extended rest (both encounter and daily powers).  This ended up being quite a bit trickier, but I finally figured it out.

[h, foreach(currentMacroName, getMacros()), CODE:
{
[h, foreach(currentMacroIndex, getMacroIndexes(currentMacroName)), CODE:
{
[h: myProps=getMacroProps(currentMacroIndex)]
[h: currentButtonColor=getStrProp(myProps, “color”)]
[h: currentFontColor=getStrProp(myProps, “fontColor”)]
[h: encounterPower=if(currentFontColor==”red” || currentFontColor==”purple”, 1, 0)]
[h: changeThisButton=if(currentButtonColor==”darkgray” && encounterPower==1, 1, 0)]
[h, if(changeThisButton==1): setMacroProps(currentMacroIndex, “color=default”) ]
}]
}]

Okay, what’s going on here? This piece of code loops through every macro on the token (that’s the first line), gets the index number for that macro (that’s the third line, counting the curly bracket as line 2), then checks to see if that macro needs to have its color changed.  That involves getting a string containing all of the properties for the macro (getMacroProps(currentMacroIndex)) and extracting the button color and font color for that macro.

In my campaign, the buttons for attack macros and special abilities use the default color for their background and a color-coded system for the text (green for at-will powers, red for encounter powers, purple for twice-per-encounter powers and blue for daily powers).  The short rest macro only resets encounter and twice-per-encounter powers, so it checks to see if the button is currently dark gray (expended) and the font is red or purple.  If so, it changes the color back to the default.  Otherwise, such as with a daily power, it leaves the button alone.

The same piece of code for extended rests looks like this:

[h, foreach(currentMacroName, getMacros()), CODE:
{
[h, foreach(currentMacroIndex, getMacroIndexes(currentMacroName)), CODE:
{
[h: myProps=getMacroProps(currentMacroIndex)]
[h: currentButtonColor=getStrProp(myProps, “color”)]
[h: currentFontColor=getStrProp(myProps, “fontColor”)]
[h: encounterOrDaily=if(currentFontColor==”red” || currentFontColor==”blue” || currentFontColor==”purple”, 1, 0)]
[h: changeThisButton=if(currentButtonColor==”darkgray” && encounterOrDaily==1, 1, 0)]
[h, if(changeThisButton==1): setMacroProps(currentMacroIndex, “color=default”) ]
}]
}]

Pretty much the same thing, except now it looks for fonts that are red, purple OR blue.

By the way, I’m aware that there are complete campaign frameworks out there, such as Rumble’s, and I’ve talked about them in an earlier post.  They’re great and very cool and they do everything that my code does and more.  But I write macros for the joy of it, and I love to learn about the language of MapTool.  My posts are intended to help other do-it-yourselfers out there who want to write their own code because they enjoy it.  If this isn’t for you, I highly recommend using a pre-packaged campaign framework – they’re quite slick!

In future posts I’ll talk more about my Short Rest and Extended Rest macros, and the concurrent improvements I’ve made to the healing macro.  Please let me know if there are particular macros that you’d like to hear about!

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