A while ago, someone on Twitter mentioned using shelf liner to keep dungeon tiles from sliding around. I thought I’d posted about it here, but I can’t find that post so I guess I didn’t.
For those not familiar, shelf liner is a rubber material meant to line drawers and shelves and keep things from sliding [...]
One of the things I’ve been brainstorming is a way to turn skill challenges into their own little minigame, and my current line of thinking is creating a pseudo-boardgame.
And that lead me to this silly little thought. Picture this:
The PCs have to navigate an underground river through the underdark with no light. You announce that [...]
The announcement of Dark Sun as the next 4th edition campaign lead me to go take a look at the Dark Sun boxed set, a gift I received a couple years ago but never actually dug into much.
One of the more unexpected surprised of Dark Sun was the introduction of character trees. In a nutshell, [...]
Just wanted to spread the word about this 4e Style Guide put together by Icosahedrophilia. Helps maintain consistency without having to constantly reference the books and see how WotC did things.
MPTW (Formerly: MonkeyPirate TiddlyWiki) is absolutely amazing for making campaign sites. The really key feature to it is TagglyTagging. What’s TagglyTagging? Well, I could tell you, but it’s a lot easier to show you. Here’s the site for a campaign I ran last year.
See that gorgeous, hierarchical menu? How much time do you think I [...]
One common complaint about 4th edition is that combat can be a bit of a slog. Solos, in particular, are notorious for this problem. But sometimes, you just really want a big, climactic fight against one really nasty enemy.
What’s a DM to do? As always, we take out the one tool every DM should know [...]
An interesting exercise in worldbuilding is trying to figure out how the different classes fit into your world. This serves a couple purposes; it gives you a framework to explore and expand your world and it gives you some direction for your players. If a new player is curious about, say, invokers you could tell [...]
The Marvel Universe RPG is a diceless RPG with a highly unusual diceless system which is based on moving stones around different areas of your character sheet. For example, Cyclops’s optic blast might give him three stones, and he might move two of them to offense and one to defense.
That’s totally irrelevant to this post, [...]
Last Friday, I discussed what I consider the three rules of failure which apply to every skill challenge. Today, I’ll look at some planning you can do with those rules in mind.
Come up with an idea. This is probably the broadest and least helpful part. Sorry! A skill challenge can really be almost anything short [...]
Heading into 4th edition, skill challenges were one of the things I was most looking forward to, and one of the things I’m most disappointed in.
Ultimately, it was just too ambitious. You can’t hope to make a framework that will cover all non-combat situations equally well.
That said, if we distill skill challenges to the most [...]
