Online Dungeon Master

November 24, 2010

100 Posts: My top five favorites

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, DM Lessons, Online games, Play, RPG Projector — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 9:46 PM

According to WordPress, this is my 100th post on Being an Online Dungeon Master.  My first post was in late April 2010, and here I am in November 2010 putting up post number 100.

I thought I would use this momentous occasion (tongue firmly in cheek here) to chronicle my own personal top 5 posts of the first 100.

#5: MapTool programming. I’ve picked this post to be emblematic of my many posts that talk about writing macros in MapTool (these are collected on my MapTool Education Central page). I list this mainly because a lot of the traffic my blog gets is from people who are searching for tutorials on writing MapTool macros, and I’m proud of my learning process and the way I’ve documented it on my blog.  If you just want a finished product to play D&D4e in MapTool, you should definitely check out the various frameworks that are out there.  But if you enjoy writing your own macros, as I do, I hope that my blog can help you with the learning process.

#4: Are you in the RPG closet? I like this post because of the discussion it engendered.  Lots of gamers hide their hobby from certain people in their lives (often co-workers), and I’ve been guilty of this myself.  Is it a bad thing?  Well, after this discussion I decided that I wanted to be more open about my hobby and specifically mentioned it to a few people at work.  Nothing horrible has ensued.  I feel better about myself now.

#3: Eat what you kill. I love this story. In this post I tell the tale of the first game of Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition that I ever ran as a DM.  It was totally improvised and run at a friend’s wedding all the way across the country with no gaming supplies – and we still had a blast.  That story is what led to the creation of this blog.

#2: Building a better portable projector rig: This is one of my personal favorites, because I’m proud of what it documents.  In this post, I describe how I built the final version of the rig that holds my projector above the game table so that I can run in-person games using MapTool.  I was inspired by a post from Sean Pecor in which he details the construction of his portable projector setup, but after some trial and error and some investigating online, I went in a different direction.  I would love it if other people followed my lead and built a rig like mine and used it to play RPGs with their friends – that would be quite cool, in my opinion.

#1: My online campaign begins. This one isn’t so much about the post itself as the game behind it. I knew when I started this blog that it was entirely possible that I would someday run a game completely online – finding strangers online to play with, running the game, keeping a campaign going.  Amazingly enough, I’ve succeeded on my first try.  The group that gathered online for that first session in July is still playing together in November.  I had to cut the size from eight players down to five, but those five are still playing with me in the same campaign that we started four months and 12 sessions ago.  They’re great people, too – even though we’ve never met in person, I legitimately consider them friends.  And it’s all thanks to playing D&D on the internet!

To those of you who regularly read my blog, I thank you.  I appreciate those rare occasions when you leave comments, and I appreciate those of you with whom I’ve communicated regularly.  I enjoy blogging about this hobby whether anyone reads what I write or not, but it’s always nice to hear that someone is out there.  Thank you!

November 19, 2010

Virtual Table announcement – My thoughts

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, RPG Projector — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 4:23 PM

Wizards of the Coast made waves in the online D&D community on Thursday, November 18, when they announced that they are working on a Virtual Table program, the closed beta of which would be starting on November 22. (FAQs are here.)

Obviously, we don’t know very much about the Virtual Table yet, but we’ve been given some information.  The approach is similar to MapTool – two-dimensional, top-down view of the battlemap with circular tokens to represent player characters and monsters.  It’s programmed in Java, but apparently within a web application (for what it’s worth, MapTool is also a Java program).  It will also apparently have integrated voice chat.

This leaves much room for speculation, and there are many unanswered questions.  Let me first say that I see this announcement as good news.  I love MapTool and would be perfetly happy to keep using it forever.  But if WotC brings out a better product, great!  I’d be happy to switch.  I’m already a Dungeons and Dragons Insider (DDI) subscriber, so I obviously approve of their tools.  I also REALLY want to get in on the beta – I’m a great play tester and I think my input would help them improve their product.

Anyway, below are the questions to which we do not yet know the answers, and my thoughts on those questions.

Pricing

What will the Virtual Table cost?  From the announcement, they haven’t figured this out yet.  This means that it’s unlikely to be just a part of a normal DDI subscription.  I see a few possibilities here.

  • Free program to everyone.  Pretty unlikely, unless they think this will drive new subscriptions to DDI or something like that.
  • Free to DDI subscribers.  This could happen, but I think it’s unlikely given the announcement.  If this is the case, I imagine that every player in the game would have to have a DDI subscription, not just the Dungeon Master.  That’s a bit of a bummer; I don’t think all of my online players, for instance, are subscribers.
  • Included as part of a “higher tier” DDI subscription.  The existing DDI could still give you access to everything it does now, but the “Gold Tier” subscription would provide access to the Virtual Table as a DM, the Monster Builder, a potential Campaign Builder, etc.  This seems like a reasonable possibility.
  • Microtransactions.  This one makes me shudder, but I fear that it might be the way they go.  The basic program would be part of DDI (or potentially totally free), but the DM would have to pay for dungeon tiles, map objects, monster tokens, trap tiles, etc.  For players, who knows?  Maybe they would have to buy access to races and classes and even powers individually (or possibly as packs that would give access to a book’s worth of content).  This has some similarities to Magic Online, which has been successful for WotC.  I really don’t like this approach as a customer, though.

This is obviously complete speculation, but my guess is that they’ll make the Virtual Table part of a regular DDI subscription, and it will include tokens for the monsters in the Monster Vault and some basic Dungeon Tiles.  You’ll probably also be able to have character tokens from Heroes of the Fallen Lands.  If you want more than that, they’ll charge you for it.  To be fair, it takes me about 10 minutes to create a new monster token in MapTool (finding the image, making it into a token, setting its properties, programming its attacks and abilities), and if I could pay a dollar and have a pre-made token, that might be worth it to me (my time is worth more than $6 per hour).

Creation of maps

I think it’s pretty clear that the Virtual Table will support Dungeon Tiles (whether you have to pay for the various sets of tiles, of course, is an open question).  So, building maps out of Dungeon Tiles will be the default.  Will there be support for drawing custom maps as in MapTool?  What about importing JPG maps?  What about extra objects to drop on top of Dungeon Tiles?  I have no idea.  If MapTool can handle custom drawing and importing and objects, it seems like it would be a failure for Virtual Table to not be able to do this.  But I won’t be at all surprised if it’s Dungeon Tiles only.

Creation of monsters and PCs

The announcement says that there is currently no integration of Virtual Table with the online Character Builder or the future online Monster Builder (I’m glad that they’ve confirmed that there will be a new Monster Builder – I had assumed as much).  Maybe that integration will never come, but that seems like leaving it out would be completely stupid.  Let’s face it, the big win for Virtual Table over something like MapTool would be easy importing of PC and monster tokens, complete with stats and powers and everything.  I know that some folks have built tools to do this with MapTool frameworks, but having it built-in as part of the program itself would be nice.

The other possibility is that you’ll have to buy PC and monster tokens individually or in packs.  Sigh.

Built-in rules support

MapTool and its ilk generally have no knowledge of rules – they’re just virtual tabletops.  I’m guessing that the Virtual Table will have some kind of rules support built in by default (though to be clear, the announcement does say that you CAN use it with older versions of D&D, just with no built-in support).  This will likely mean that the player can click a button for their attack, click for their targets, and have the effects of the attack be handled automatically (hit or miss, damage, ongoing conditions, etc.).  It could possibly keep track of triggered abilities, reminders for saving throws, and so on.  Again, some frameworks do this for MapTool, but built-in support would be cool.  D&D4e is a complicated game, though, and I think it will be tough to do this right (especially since abilities are so open-ended and interactions with other abilities are nearly infinite).

Customizability

I said above that it would be nice to be able to import monsters from the Monster Builder, but I certainly hope that there’s some support for customization.  What if I want to give a monster an extra ability or tweak some numbers?  This is easy in MapTool, and I think it’s important to keep it easy in Virtual Table.  What about house rules?  I love the Bonus Point mechanic (more on that in a future post) and I intend to keep using it.  If I can’t do that in Virtual Table, that would stink.

This is an area where I could see the Virtual Table starting off with very little support and then having some of that support get added over time.

Finding a game

I think it’s likely that there will ultimately be an “online community” around the Virtual Table, just as there is for Magic Online.  There will probably be a server that the program connects to, with various “rooms” that you can go into to meet your friends and then invite them to the appropriate “table” where your game is being held.  This would also allow for the possibility of pick-up games, which is a cool idea.  I could see this being a place for weekly Encounters games to be available to people who can’t come to their Friendly Local Game Store, for instance, or for big events that take place with multiple tables playing the same adventure at once.  If this works, it could be a big advantage over something like MapTool.

The downside of this approach is that the game runs on the WotC server, and is therefore prone to slowdowns and crashes.  This was definitely a problem with Magic Online when I played during the release of new sets, so I worry that it could be an issue the with Virtual Table, too.  We shall see.

Usability with a projector on a physical table

This one probably doesn’t matter to the vast majority of people who are interested in the Virtual Table, but it matters to me.  I am an all-MapTool DM.  I use it for my weekly online game, my weekly in-person game and my occasional turns as DM at my local store for Living Forgotten Realms.  I really need the functionality to have one instance of the program running on my main laptop screen as the DM and something like a second instance running in full-screen mode on the projector.  Would I need two separate DDI accounts for such a thing?  I have no idea.

This is another area where I could see support not existing at first (because, let’s face it, most of the users don’t care) but perhaps being added later.

Wrapping up

Overall, I’m excited about the idea of the Virtual Table.  It has the potential to be tons of fun and to make it even easier to prepare for and run D&D games using a computer (which would make me happy).  It has the potential to stink horribly, of course, but I like that they’re announcing their beta plans and that they’ll be letting beta testers blog about their experiences.

And if anyone with any connections at Wizards of the Coast is listening: Please send me an invitation to the beta test!  I would be extremely useful to you, I promise. 🙂

November 18, 2010

Online Character Builder review

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, Reviews & Culture — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 4:22 PM

As of Tuesday, November 16, the new online Character Builder is live.  Fortunately for me, I did not get a chance to try it on the day that it came out – from everything I’ve heard, there were some serious server problems at launch, perhaps because every DDI subscriber on the Internet tried to use the program at once.

Now that I’ve had a chance to see it in action, here are my thoughts.

The good things:

  • It looks pretty
  • It has Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Dark Sun
  • It’s good at recovering a character you were working on in case you accidentally close the program or it crashes
  • I have access to my saved characters at any computer
  • It has real potential for the future

The not-so-good things:

  • The character sheets can’t be customized at all
  • It’s a little slower than the downloadable Character Builder, at least on my computer
  • You can’t export characters to send to your DM or to archive on your own computer
  • The scroll wheel on my mouse does not work with the program
  • I won’t be able to play around with it on the plane tomorrow and Saturday when I leave for a business trip because it requires internet access
  • Did I mention that you can’t customize your character sheet?

I think my original impression of the program based on the initial announcement was about right.  One thing I hadn’t realized was that I wouldn’t be able to customize the character sheet as I can in the current Character Builder.  I LOVE to be able to get my character sheet down to one page, with separate pages for my power cards (I’m one of those people who likes to cut out the cards and flip over my expended powers when I use them).  That won’t work here.

For the short run, I’m sticking with the downloadable Character Builder that I happily still have installed on my computer.  It’s just a better program.  If I want to build an Essentials character, I’ll give the online program a shot at it.  But the Essentials character that I’m most interested in building is the Hunter Ranger from Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms – which isn’t in the Builder yet.  Sigh.

To be fair to Wizards of the Coast, I fully expect that the export function, customizable character sheets, support for house rules and use of the scroll wheel will eventually be added to the program.  But for now, the online Builder is inferior to the downloadable one.

Of course, the big news today is the announcement of the Virtual Table, which, as the Online Dungeon Master, has me excited.  But that’s a topic for another post.

November 12, 2010

Online Character Builder – video preview

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, News — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 1:12 AM

Just a quick post to point out the video for the upcoming online Character Builder to anyone who hasn’t seen it yet.  While my earlier complaints about it not being usable when you aren’t online still stand, I’m happy to see that the design of the program appears to be good.  I’m looking forward to taking it for a spin on November 16.

What do you all think?  Does it look like an improvement in usability over the current Builder?

November 7, 2010

An adventure becomes a campaign

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons, In-Person D&D, Play — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 10:18 PM

My first ongoing in-person Dungeons and Dragons game as a dungeon master reached a milestone yesterday: It moved from being an adventure to being a campaign.

I’ve read the Dungeon Master’s Guide from both 3rd Edition and 4th Edition, and I know that there’s some discussion of what differentiates an adventure from a campaign.  From my reading, it’s always felt to me like it’s a question of duration.  An encounter is something that takes a few minutes of game time and maybe an hour of real-life time.  An adventure is a string of encounters that takes a few hours or days of campaign time and probably one to three gaming sessions in real-life time.  A campaign is a series of adventures that takes any amount of time in-game and many sessions over months or years in real-life time.

I suppose those things are true, but I think there’s a more important distinction about what makes a real campaign: Collaboration between the dungeon master and the players.

In an encounter, I know which enemies are out there and what they’re capable of, and the players react to that.

In an adventure, I know the same things on a larger scale.  Maybe the players are delving a dungeon or chasing after a bad guy through a city or something like that, but the overall script of what could happen is written by me.  Yes, the players can come up with interesting ideas that I hadn’t thought of and I can work them in as I see fit.  But I’m the one who establishes what could happen.

When we move to a campaign, things change.  I’ll still be responsible for creating the future adventures and encounters, but what those adventures ARE is something that the players can have a huge hand in establishing.  Would they rather head to the mountains to help a trader or head to the coast to find a wizard?  Would they rather do something else entirely that I hadn’t considered as a possibility?

My first adventure ends; my first real campaign begins

Yesterday, my friends finished the first D&D adventure I had ever written.  The main structure is something I wrote eight years ago when my wife and I tried D&D 3rd Edition, but that game never got off the ground and I never had the chance to use the adventure.  The overall plot was pretty straightforward – the party is out to recover a mysterious family heirloom from a stronghold full of orcs.  I used the stronghold design that I had drawn years ago and updated the monsters to match 4th Edition.

Things took an unexpected turn when the adventurers tossed some dead orc bodies into an underground river, which flowed by another room populated with live orcs.  This triggered another battle, and the players decided to hole up in a fortified location in the stronghold to take a rest and defend themselves.  Some bad guys took the heirloom out of the stronghold while the party was attacked by a smaller force, which led to a later chase through the woods and a last stand with the boss orc and a few lackeys.  It was a satisfying conclusion.

So now what?  Well, the party was able to establish that the heirloom has some magical properties that are being suppressed by a powerful enchantment.  They could go find a mighty wizard to help them investigate further, or they could honor an earlier promise they had made to a riverboat merchant who had given them free passage if they would agree to serve as an armed escort on a future trip.  They decided to help the merchant.  And thus the campaign is born!

What makes this into a campaign for me is that the players have decided where to take the story.  I held off on designing actual encounters for the next couple of possibilities, as I didn’t know which way the players would go.  They’ve made their choice, so I now know what to build.

Furthermore, the players also took the story in a direction I hadn’t thought about at all – they decided to claim the former orc stronghold as their “castle”!  Now, it’s out in the middle of nowhere in hostile lands, but they managed to convince the owner of the heirloom to send a small garrison of able-bodied villagers out to the stronghold to keep monsters from moving in while the party went a-questing.

There are so many juicy possibilities with this side story that I can’t wait to use them!  The party CARES about this stronghold now.  They have conquered it, and it is THEIRS.  Any time you can get the players to actually care about something in the game world, you create the opportunity for future plots.  Also, since they’re going in a completely different direction for their next adventure, things can be happening at their “castle” while they’re away.  So many possibilities!

I feel great as a DM that I’ve managed to create world elements that my players care about and that they’re interested in making decisions about where the story goes.  It’s a really good feeling.

November 6, 2010

Putting some role-playing in my dungeon mastering

Filed under: Advice/Tools, DM Lessons — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 7:00 AM

I’ve been running D&D 4th Edition games for about four months now, and I feel like I’m to the point that I can run combat pretty well.  I generally know what the bad guys can do in combat, and I know how they want to approach the player characters.  I’m getting better at using interesting terrain, putting some movement into the battles and so on.

Where I’m not so great yet is role playing.  Role playing as a dungeon master is a very different experience from role playing as a player.  When you’re a player, you have a single character whom you know inside and out, whom you’ve built up from nothing, who has a personality and desires and fears that are intimately familiar to you.

When you’re a dungeon master, you’re playing a host of different characters every session.  Sure, you might have some recurring NPCs or some characters that accompany the party for many sessions, but that’s not always going to be the case – and besides, you don’t want an NPC to take too much of the spotlight anyway.  Most of the time, you’re playing monsters.

A great dungeon master can make these throw-away characters come to life – not to the degree that a great player character will come to life, but enough to make the bad guy memorable before it falls beneath the attacks of your party.  Below are some thoughts on how to become a better role-player as a DM (which I’m still trying to put into practice myself!).

Think like the character

This goes for any role-playing, but it’s easy to forget about it when it comes to a monster.  An intelligent NPC should certainly be thinking, and you should get into their heads, but that’s obvious.  What about a beast or an undead creature or an aberration?  Do they act on instinct alone?  Are they following commands from another creature?  Do they act randomly?

Once you know how the character acts and why, show it!  You can say, “The rat whips its head around, looking for the nearest piece of flesh.  It sees the meaty-looking cleric and charges in with fangs bared!”  Or, “The zombie hears the necromancer command it to attack the paladin, and it mindlessly obeys, shambling over with its arms raised in preparation for a smashing blow.”  “The aberration swerves erratically, paying no heed to the avenger standing next to it as it randomly heads toward the wizard.  Avenger, you can take an attack of opportunity…”

Talk like the character

No, you don’t have to channel your inner thespian too much here.  Some bad guys bellow.  Others sneer.  You might find some that hiss.  And of course lots of them don’t speak at all, but that doesn’t mean they’re silent.  Have your NPCs taunt the party, bellow in rage when hit, whimper pathetically when nearly destroyed.

On a related note, have the monsters talk to one another when appropriate.  A leader may yell commands to his troops (and here’s a possible area where you can reward the player who took language training in Goblin or Giant – they may be the only one who can understand the command).  A great suggestion that I received recently was to have one creature complain about the skill of another, especially when the other is a minion. “You useless pile of bones!  You’re not worth the necromantic energy the Dark Lord spent to animate you!”  Evil creatures don’t always get along with one another – play this up!

Act like the character

Might your NPCs and monsters have any interesting mannerisms?  Run with them!  Lots of dungeon master books talk about behavioral quirks that NPCs might have, but this can apply to monsters, too.  A bad guy might do a little dance of joy when he hits a player.  The monster might cower after being hit.  I played in a game with one DM who essentially described a poor little kobold as having pooped himself upon seeing a PC obliterate some other kobolds.  Yeah, it’s a poop joke, but it worked!

Summary

Just because you’re the DM doesn’t mean you don’t get to role-play.  You have a huge influence on how much your players will role-play and how immersed they get in the game world.  The more you can think, talk and act as your characters would (even when they’re just monsters), the more your players will buy into the game and the more fun everyone will have.

November 3, 2010

The Hidden Condition in 4th Edition

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 10:12 AM

(Pardon the rhyming title)

Related to my earlier post about line of sight and line of effect is the “condition” of being Hidden in 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons.  This particular post owes a debt of gratitude to the excellent “Hidden Club” post on the Wizards of the Coast message boards by LordOfWea.

What is Hidden?

A question that often comes up when there’s darkness or magical fog or blindness or invisibility is, “Does my character know where Monster X is, even though I can’t see him?”

The answer: Yes, you know exactly where everybody on the battlefield is, UNLESS they are Hidden from you.

Hidden does NOT just mean “you can’t see it.”  Hidden in 4th Edition is basically a state, a condition like Blinded or Dazed or Bloodied – you have it or you don’t (though it’s possible to be Hidden from one creature but not another).

When you are Hidden from another creature, that creature is unaware of your presence and doesn’t know where you are.  They can’t see you, hear you, smell you, feel the breeze of your movements or taste the acrid smoke that comes off your body (or they can’t do those things well enough to pin down your location).  You are undetectable to them.

If you do NOT have the Hidden condition against a creature, that creature knows EXACTLY what square you are in.  It might not be able to see you (in which case you have Total Concealment against that creature and its ranged and melee attacks will have a -5 penalty to hit you), but it can at least aim at the right square if it wants to attack you.

Think of it this way: All creatures in D&D are assumed to have super-sensitive hearing.  Even if they can’t see you, they can hear your movements and therefore know where you are.  Hitting what you can’t see is still tricky with melee and ranged attacks (-5 penalty from Total Concealment), but it’s no problem with close or area attacks (refer back to the earlier post about line of sight).

Getting Hidden

So, how does one go about getting the Hidden condition?  One makes a Stealth check  for free at the end of a move in which they end with Superior Cover or Total Concealment against a creature.  If your Stealth check exceeds the Passive Perception score of the creature you’re trying to hide from, then you are Hidden from that creature. (You should write down the result of this Stealth check so that you know whether future Perception checks from your enemies succeed in finding you or not.)

That’s it.  If you’re out of sight of a creature at the end of a move, you can roll Stealth to try to become Hidden.  If you don’t do that successfully, even if you’re invisible or anything like that, you are not Hidden and the creature knows where you are.

Losing Hidden

  • If you attack, you end up losing Hidden (though you’re still Hidden until the end of the attack action, so you have Combat Advantage for the attack).
  • You also lose Hidden if you end up with no cover and no concealment – if you’re standing out in the open, the bad guys can see you again.  Partial cover or regular concealment is enough to keep Hidden once you have it, though hiding behind your buddy doesn’t provide enough cover to stay Hidden.
  • If you move more than 2 squares on your turn, you’re making noise, which means that you’ll have to make another Stealth check – this time with a -5 penalty from the noise.  If that Stealth check fails to beat your opponents’ Passive Perception, you’re no longer Hidden.
  • If a creature spends a minor action to make an active Perception check and beats the Stealth roll that you made to become Hidden, you are no longer Hidden from that creature.
  • Note that if one creature on the other team can see you (good Perception), it’s allowed to cry out to its buddies, “He’s in THAT square, right there!” and they’ll all know where you are, even though you’re still Hidden from most of them.

What’s so great about being Hidden?

Two things:

  • You have Combat Advantage against anyone you’re Hidden from.
  • Your enemies don’t know what square you’re in, so it’s really tough for them to attack you.

The latter point brings up the “Targeting what you can’t see” rules.  If you don’t know what square your target is in, you’re allowed to guess and target “that square.”  If you guessed wrong, you miss (but the DM doesn’t have to tell you that you guessed wrong, just that your attack missed… mwoo ha ha!).  If you guessed right, you might hit, but keep in mind that the target does still have Total Concealment, which means that if you attack is melee or ranged it will have a -5 penalty (remember, though, that this penalty doesn’t affect close or area attacks).

Wrapping up

Being unseen is not the same as being hidden – D&D creatures can hear well enough to know where another creature is, even if they can’t see it.  If you’re Stealthy enough, you can perhaps become Hidden, in which case your enemies are unaware of your existence.  This goes away when you attack, become visible or make too much noise from movement, or when an enemy successfully searches for you.  Until that time, though, sneak into those shadows and Hide!

November 2, 2010

The death of the downloadable Character Builder

Filed under: 4e D&D, Advice/Tools, News — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 7:44 PM

Update 11/18/2010: I’ve added a review of the online Character Builder now that it’s available.

I don’t tend to write many posts about “news” in the role playing game community, but since I go by “Online Dungeon Master” I thought I should chime in with my thoughts on the news that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) is changing their fantastic Character Builder program from something you can download into something that you use within a web site.

The good news:

  • You will be able to access the Character Builder on any computer with web access and Silverlight installed.  If you’re visiting a friend or family member and want to help them create a character or something, boom, you’re rolling.
  • Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Dark Sun will be included on the November 16 launch date
  • Macintosh users will be able to access Character Builder without having to boot to Windows

The bad news:

  • If you have no internet access, you can’t use Character Builder.  No more building characters during boring plane trips or anywhere without reliable WiFi.
  • You can’t (at launch) export your character file and send it to your DM.  This is a pain in the butt for me as a DM – it really helps me plan sessions when I can see my players’ character files.
  • You have to rely on WotC to store your characters for you and to make the application available.  Server crash = no character for you.
  • For those cheapskates who liked to pay for a one-month subscription to D&D Insider in order to download the Character Builder and its updates, that’s not going to work any more.

I’m sure that combating people who only would pay for the occasional month of DDI in order to get the updates is a big part of why WotC is making this change.  I’m sure some of those people will say, “Oh well, I guess I’ll pony up for a regular subscription now.”  But for people like me, who gladly support the company by subscribing to DDI all the time, there is nothing meaningful in this news that is good.

  • I don’t care about being able to access the Character Builder on a machine without having to download it.  I really only use it on my laptop to begin with.
  • I don’t have a Macintosh.
  • Heroes of the Fallen Lands and Dark Sun should have already been in the downloadable Character Builder by now.

From my perspective, in an effort to combat piracy / cheapskatedness, Wizards of the Coast has diminished the value of their best program for their best customers.

I’m not one to say that I’m canceling my subscription or will never play D&D again or anything like that – I really enjoy the game and want the company to keep making it.  I’m guessing this is why this strategy will work for WotC – their good customers, like me, will be disappointed but will keep subscribing.  Still, it feels like a bad business decision to take value away from your best customers (offline access being the main one) without giving them anything in return.

Now, the expectation is that WotC will be making other online tools available for DDI subscribers, so it may be worth it in the end.  But for now, it’s bad news for good customers.  Bummer.

November 1, 2010

Writing my first Living Forgotten Realms adventure

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons, In-Person D&D — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 10:36 PM

I’m excited to say that I’ve written my first adventure for Living Forgotten Realms (LFR), which I’ll be running at a local convention here in Denver called Genghis Con in February.

This is a “MyRealms” adventure.  MyRealms is an interesting little program for LFR in which dungeon masters like me can write their own LFR-formatted adventures and run them in public (or in private, I suppose).  The adventure should follow the overall format of a regular LFR module – 2-3 combat encounters and 1-2 skill challenges with certain experience point budgets and treasure amounts, designed to run in a four-hour time slot with a party of 4-6 characters within a certain level band.  With MyRealms adventures you’re free to create pretty much whatever you like, and the connection to the Forgotten Realms doesn’t have to be all that strong.

The one restriction is that you’re not allowed to run anyone else’s MyRealms adventure.  Technically speaking, I won’t be allowed to publish my adventure here on the blog… but I honestly don’t know how much that rule really matters.  I’ll find out, but since I’ve gone through the effort of actually writing this adventure in the LFR format I’d like to share it with the world.

The adventure is called The Staff of Suha.  It’s a distilled version of the adventure that I’m currently running for my friends here in Colorado, which is itself an adaptation of the adventure that I wrote many years ago under D&D 3.0 rules and rediscovered a few months ago.  It’s a pretty straightforward little dungeon delve with a plot that’s basically “Retrieve the MacGuffin.”  For a convention game, that’s enough plot.

Since I had already written the whole thing up in a Word document for my players here in person, it wasn’t too hard to adapt that version of the adventure into an LFR-friendly version.  The biggest change was that my original version was too long.  When all is said and done, we will have probably done 10-12 hours of adventuring to get through my original version, which is far too much for LFR.

I started by getting rid of the backstory.  My in-person players started the adventure in a town where they were contacted by a messenger who works for a wealthy uncle of one of the PCs.  The party had to travel to the uncle’s manor, talk to him about the theft of the titular family heirloom (the Staff of Suha), investigate the theft, and track the bad guys to their lair (with a fight in the forest on the way).  Once they arrived at the stronghold, they had get past the front gate guards, fight some minions, infiltrate an orc barracks, fight through an orc shrine, deal with some orcs training for battle and then fight the big boss (with a few other wrinkles along the way which I won’t write about here because my players haven’t encountered them yet).

For the LFR version, the party starts off as they come in view of the orc stronghold.  I’ll hand-wave the back story: “You’re here to get the MacGuffin, and here’s why.  Go to it!”  Not super-compelling, I’ll admit, but this is just a little delve.

There will be four encounters:

  • Getting into the stronghold
  • A skill challenge to avoid attracting too much attention
  • A battle in a shrine
  • The showdown with the boss

I stripped out two combat encounters and a skill challenge that happened before the stronghold (plus some general role playing), and I stripped out five and a half more combat encounters within the stronghold.  Thus, a 10-12 hour adventure gets down into the 3-4 hour range.

The current version of the file is the “high challenge” version (for level 6-7 characters) and I plan to adapt it for the “low challenge” version (for level 4-5 characters) shortly.  I may also re-write it as a MYRE1-1 adventure for level 1-4 characters, replacing the orcs with goblins.

I’m pretty excited about the idea of running my own game in public.  I like the published LFR adventure well enough, and I always customize them to my taste, but running an adventure that’s completely mine is very appealing to me.  Now I just have to wait until February!

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