DM's Scribbled Notes

Coming back

2010-07-12T17:57:00.000+03:00

Had some time away from it. Now getting back to blogging.
New and improved slotted encumbrance rules are on the way.

4E slotted encumbrance rules

2010-03-18T21:29:00.003+02:00

So this post and subsequentely this one got, me thinking about encumbrance rules in D&D. I shall not repeat things that were said already - just show my take on this problem.

Character has a number of slots equal to his Str score. That's his "backpack".
Items worn or wielded are not counted here. These are:

primary wepon/implement
shield or secondary weapon/implement
headgear
neck slot item
armor/clothes
arm slot item
hand slot item
waist slot item
footwear
two rings

Most of the items take 1 slot. Two-handed weapons - 2 slot. Light armour save for the cloth - 2. Heavy armor save for the plate – 3. Plate armor– 4. Big and unwieldy items like chests, barrels, fallen comrades – 6 slots.
Small items like daggers, torches, lockpicks, potions, scrolls take one slot anyway, but can be stacked up to DMs allowance. One slot holds up to 500 coins/gems of any value. One slot holds reagents/residiuum of up to 500 000 gp value.
PC who has more than half of his backpack slots filled is dazed. This way he can move normally out of battle, but in combat situation has to decide if he drops his pack and fights normally or restricts his battle options.
PC who has all his backpack slots filled is dazed AND slowed.
There are special slots that don't count for encumbrance:

Belt - 5 slots. Only stackable items could be held here and only one in each slot. Items is retrieved/stowed with a minor actions (like weapon) from here, instead of standart (like from the backpack, similar to sheld).
Belt pouch - holds up to 50 coins/gems or up to 50 000 reagents/residiuum.

Well. That's how I see it. Comments are welcome.

Such a wonder :)

2010-03-17T19:19:00.002+02:00

Getting ready for paragon-level battles

2010-03-17T04:35:00.000+02:00

Here is the lesser vrocks to attack the party on their flying ship next Sunday.

And this one is for my take on Barrier Peaks.

Still not sure it's a good idea to mix Sci-Fi into my Fantasy, but we'll see...

Pitched battle and PC interrogation

2010-02-28T13:08:00.002+02:00

Prepearing to run a pitched (almost unfair) battle for my campaign interlude.
If the are defeated (very probable) I'll have a chance to try out Wrecan's excellent Social Challenge Rules.
Will come back with the results.

UPDATE: They've won. No SC this time. They lost their ardent and almost lost the fighter, all were bloodied, but they managed to win. Good game. :)
Unfortunately no pictures. Have to get used to taking them.

Some D&D magic and more 3d tiles

2010-02-28T02:56:00.001+02:00

They say you should blog every day, so ... :)

2010-02-18T18:51:00.001+02:00

Spent a lot of time updating my campagns info today. Had almost no time for this blog. Sorry.

Age of Conan and my tabletop campaign

2010-02-17T02:01:00.001+02:00

Today I entered the wonderful world of this MMORPG through free unlimited trial and was really excited with it. Though I'm not sure that I'd drop my WoW group (yes group, not guild - we play as a kinda party of 5 and prefer to percive all the rest as NPCs of the sort :)) I've certainly felt the great atmosphere of the game.
More than that - I wanted to make my players in my 4E campagns feel the same. So after thinking it over I thought it was about tiny details which speak loads about the world outside the current place of adventuring - ships in the harbor, exotic clothes, tavern tales, legends, bard songs and so on.
Now I'm thinking about doing it on the tabletop. Will get back to it later.

Trying new things

2010-02-14T21:01:00.001+02:00

This week games were good and let me try some experimental things.

My Lords of Chaos players met 2-hit minions. Not impressed - invoker+druid+tempest fighter don't care if they are 2 or 1 hit minions. Not for my party I guess.

My Hunt for the Queen players had a chance to try Universalis as a way of cooperative world/story-building between Heroic and Paragon tier. They didn't really like it and I wasn't impressed with how it turned out, but now I have half-a-dozen notebook pages (hardcopies, wow) to use for my paragon campaign story arc. Not bad I should say.

More of that later.

A wonderful advice on story-heavy game.

2010-02-13T05:50:00.001+02:00

Here at DungeonMastering.
Not only article itself, but comments are also pure gold.

Building your own world,part 1

2010-02-12T09:23:00.031+02:00

So today I'm gonna tell you about the world we've started to construct for the next campaign I'm going to run. We means me and Mathew - wonderful 12 y.o. with vivid imagination, 3 yrs of DnD and a own WoW RP-guild under his belt.
When he stated he wants to run his own game in school, we decided that this time we'll make it serious and use all the wonderful technincs we've found in the Internets.
We've spent sometime thinking if we start big or start small and decided to have kinda hybrid approach - we'll create the world to know the general location of everything, but details will be filled during actual campaigns.
After googling worldbuilding I've found wonderful 30 Days of WorldBuilding guide byStephanie Bryant and thoght it'd be cool to try it out.
And so we've started to do it together.
First day theme was called Climat and Variety and we were to determing climats and geographic places which "click" with us. The author told us to write 'em down in the notebook, but we, being computer geeks and nature lovers decided not to waste paper and just find and save some wow-pictures from the Net. So these are 8 pics that were chosen to represent key location of our world:

So here are the basic names of those places and moods we decided to give them in the order of the pictures above:

The Barrens - yes we play a lot :). Mathew felt danger here and I though this place to be lonely and incivilized and beautiful.
Penguin Coast - I felt sea winds and heard bird cries, he though it to be beautiful, but mentioned that there could be monsters in those depths.
Marshes - he thought them to be empty, even animals are rare here. My thought was about great and hot marsh with mists and strange aromas in the air.
Dragon Valley - that's Mathew who started talking about dragons here imagining that he is a member of some ancient order of dragonriders. I thought about the river turned into the roaring and dirty current during rain season.
The City - we both agreed that it's the center of trade and religion, maybe it was a capital when empire still ruled this lands.
Cold Mountains - again we agreed on this place. Both had the images of caravans going to some far places to bring luxuries this harsh land doesn't have.
Lightning Coast - we both though this place to be usually calm, but with fierce unpredictable storms.
Twisted Forest - Mathew felt danger in this place and false sense of safety. For me it was moist and intoxicating with lots of insects and maybe ridden with desease.

So these were the moods

Next time I'll tell you about weather effects and cataclysms of our world and show the basic map of it's biggest, not yet named, continent. Maybe we'll have basic ethinicities worked out by that time.

Why I use Masterplan

2010-02-11T10:33:00.000+02:00

And so today I'd like to speak about Masterplan. This program appeared about a year ago and even though at that time it wasn't so great as it is today, I saw it's potential right away.
So what's so special about Masterplan and what it does anyway?
Since the lates 8.0 version it is called Adventure Design Studio and it's real good name for this.
The main screen of Masterplan looks like this

All the yellow rectangles are plot points which can be anything you want in you adventure - combat, skill challenges, NPC interactions, vingettes, quests and so on.
You can connect them any way you want and they automatically line up, making a neat flowchart you see above. Every plot point can be filled with detailed description and all the game stats you need. What's neat is that Masterplan helps you in mechanical stuff - which DCs you challenge needs for this party level, what's the difficulty of the encounter with those monstes will be and so on.
The program allows you to build tactical maps from tiles and then use them as maps for your plot points with different overlays and tokens.
Every plot point could be expanded to create nested plots with any level of complexity.
And another wondeful thing is that if you have a DDi subscription you can download monsters, traps and magic items from DDi Compendium and use them in Masterplan.

In short - Masterplan allow to keep all your adventure notes in one place, without needing anything else.
I highly recommend it to any 4E DM who thinks about going digital at his table.

And here are some more pictures.

GAMING WITH 3D TILES

2010-02-10T16:40:00.001+02:00

And so the final battle is behind our party backs and they got victorius, though almost lost a rogue.

The 3d conversion of Dungeon Tiles went smothly, though I had to change the technics on the fly 'cause cutting them with the knife was rather hard and slow really.

It ended up something like this

It appeared sturdy enough, sometimes people kicked the table or were not careful with the minis and dice, but nothing fell apart, so I should say I'm pretty satisfied.

For now we have a break in Hunt for the Queen campaign. About a month during which we gonna play an interlude to show things going in the world during those three months which passed since the end of Heroic Tier play. Besides I plan to play a session or two using Universalis rules to flesh out the setting and give them a taste of intrigues and political strife that awaits them on Paragon Tier.

That means I won't have a chance to try my terrain with them, but this week Lords of Chaos players are in for a surprise.

Another surprise for them is that an NPC hafling whom there are going to save turns PC this week with a player whom I'm gonna add to real game using the Internet. Though this last one needs some more preps, 'cause I have never done it before.

3D DUNGEON TILES

2010-02-10T16:38:00.000+02:00

So after trying several ways to make my tiles go 3d I was really disappointed. And then today I saw this pic from February and beyond article.

See the red marks for cutting? And everything clicked at last.

So here is my terraing design for final battle. I really hope that I have enough of plain 4x2, 2x1 and 2x2 tiles, but the best part of this way of doing it is that you don't really ruin the tiles. They still can be used in their usual way.

That's great. Now work-work and then on to cutting cardboard.

Oh, yes. My terrain project.

BIG BOSS FIGHT IN 3D

2010-02-10T16:36:00.000+02:00

So now the heroic tier of my Hunt for the Queen Campaign is coming to an end - next Sunday they are going to fight their long time nemesis Gradius. A cultist of Orcus with a dream. The dream of the just and wonderful world where all the hard work would be done by undead minions and living beings will bask in eternal peace and happiness.

He offered the party to join his dream team thrice already and having been rejected considers them a major nuisance now. A nuisance to be dealt with.

Having failed in doing so through his minions, he meets them himself in the temple of Orcus floating in the Elemental Chaos.

Last time we leveled up to 10th level, all the 1-9 lvl treasure received, the party is standing before their long time enemy. The first words they'll hear next Sunday would be "Roll for initiative".

Now I wanted this battle to be something really hard and memorable. So I decided to do it in 3d environment.

Due to lack of money and time I wasn't able to prepare WWG TerrainlinX terrain and have to do something with my usual Dungeon Tiles.

By far I've done this kind of setup in 3d Max

Now I need to find a way to do it for real. Newbie DM in his blog gave me some inspirations, though I think I need to invent something else - not sure I can find those wooden thingies here.

But well - I'll think of something. Now back to work. See you soon, ppl.