Online Dungeon Master

October 17, 2011

WATE 2-4: Factotum the Bard is back on stage!

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Characters — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 7:30 AM

This past Thursday evening, I had the rare opportunity to play D&D as a player rather than a DM. My wife has been feeling unwell for a while, so I try to mostly stay home with her in the evenings, but on this particular night she was getting together with another friend. A new-to-me Living Forgotten Realms module was being run at the friendly local game store, Enchanted Grounds, so I headed on down for a game.

Spoilers ahead for WATE 2-4 Stage Misdirection

The particular adventure we were playing was set in Waterdeep, the hometown of my beloved bard Factotum. This was the first time I had gotten to play an adventure with Factotum in Waterdeep, and I was excited.Image

I learned that the adventure begins with the PCs having various jobs in an opera house. “Star of the show” wasn’t an option, so Factotum settled for a spot in the orchestra pit with his horn, while the rest of the party either served as bouncers or sat in the audience. I asked the DM if Factotum could be an understudy, and he was fine with it. Excellent!

Imagine my delight, then, when the opening scene of the adventure involved an opera where a man was about to duel his sweetheart’s father, and the man fell to the stage – apparently dead after drinking poisoned wine. The poisoned wine was not part of the show, and it was soon accompanied by an angry crowd being riled up by some thugs. While the rest of the party sprang into action fighting the thugs, Factotum did the natural thing for him:

He jumped on stage, picked up the fallen actor’s sword, and continued the faux sword fight with the actor playing the love interest’s father.

He feinted and twirled, finding the time to shout words of majesty to his ailing compatriots and to sing powerfully to push interlopers off the stage (Majestic Word and Staggering Note), but largely focused on entertaining the crowd.

Yes, this adventure was tailor-made for Factotum.

The rest of the evening was a fun investigative romp, ultimately culminating in a fight with other actors. Factotum attacked one man who hadn’t directly menaced anyone yet, simply because the man was a terrible actor – an unforgivable offense.

WATE 2-4 is an adventure that definitely benefits from having a bard in the party. I’m sure it could have been fun without one, but I was really glad I’d brought Factotum to the table. It’s an opportunity for his fame to grow!

September 5, 2011

TactiCon 2011 – LURU 2-4 Need to Know

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, DM Lessons — Tags: , , , , , — OnlineDM @ 1:38 PM

LURU 2-4 Need to Know – Spoilers ahead

The final adventure I ran at TactiCon 2011 was LURU 2-4 Need to Know. I had a full table of six players, including my friend Nate, another couple of players who I knew from Enchanted Grounds, a player I knew from other convention games, and a couple whom I hadn’t met before.

I began by asking the players to introduce their characters to one another, and Nate led things off by doing so in-character. This set the tone nicely for the rest of the table, as all of the PCs came to life. All of them mentioned their race (although the changeling in the party explained that she claimed to be an eladrin, hinting that she wasn’t really), though most did NOT mention their class. Instead, they let this become clear from the way they behaved in battle. One introduced himself as an actor (later revealed to be a hybrid bard-warlock), one as just an adventurer (later revealed to be a rogue), one as bloodthirsty bug (a ranger) and one as a princess (a hybrid bard-warlord).

The princess in the party is my favorite PC I’ve seen so far in an LFR game. She rode around on a Tenser’s Floating Disk and made excellent use of Direct the Strike to boss people around and make them attack. It worked really well. She was also able to leverage her “royal status” to bluff her way into a guarded city along with some of her allies during the adventure.

The best part of this adventure was the opening combat encounter, which took place in an inn that was soon set on fire. The growing fire and the lava elementals that arose from it were a ton of fun.

The final encounter was less fun, as it involved a beholder in a pretty boring 10 square by 10 square room (with an attached sewer area). Every time a player started their turn, they were subject to an eye ray attack (unless they ran into the sewers). They couldn’t flank the beholder, nor could they take opportunity attacks against it when it used its eye rays.

It got frustrating, but having learned my lesson from an earlier adventure I started changing the beast up a little bit. I tried to cut way back on the most devastating control effects from the beholder – the sleep ray knocked out the fighter for several rounds, and the petrification ray took away at least two PCs’ entire turns. The adventure made it clear that you need to go easy on those during the beholder’s turn, which I did, but when it rolls a random ray at the beginning of a PC’s turn, the odds are good that a controlling power is going to come up. So, I switched to more damage and less control later in the combat, even on the random rays.

Ultimately, everyone had a good time, and using MapTool and the projector to project the spreading fire onto the map in the first encounter was a big hit. It was a good way to end an awesome TactiCon.Image

TactiCon 2011 – MyRealms adventures

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, DM Lessons — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 1:38 PM

MyRealms adventures – Spoilers follow

All day Friday at TactiCon 2011 was devoted to my MyRealms adventure trilogy: The Staff of Suha in the morning, Tallinn’s Tower in the afternoon, and Descent Into Darkness in the evening. I only had one player who played in all three adventures, but my tables were full throughout.

I feel confident in saying that these were a hit. I’m constantly tweaking my own adventures, and I was taking notes as I ran them, but they were all little things to tweak here and there – nothing that needed a complete reworking.

My favorite moment of the convention came in the final battle of Descent Into Darkness, which involves facing a beholder in a room that includes a river of magma. The party was doing their best to keep the beholder locked down, and at one point a rogue decided to jump onto the beholder’s back. He stayed aboard for four rounds.

In the first round, the beholder was stunned, so the rogue stabbed away.

In the second round, the beholder got up from prone and tried to shoot an eye ray at the rogue (tough to do when he’s on top of the beholder) and missed.

In the third round, the beholder flipped upside down and flew just over the surface of the magma, but the rogue made a great Athletics / Acrobatics check to scramble around the ball of eyes as it rotated and avoided the magma.

In the fourth round, the beholder had had enough of this nonsense, decided that it could handle the magma better than the fragile humanoid on its back, and dove into the river and back out. The beholder and the rogue both took 30 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage (save ends).

The rogue’s player asked me, “So what happens if that takes me below zero hit points?”

The whole table replied with “Oooooh….”

Yes, he fell unconscious while in the river of magma, which meant that he lost his grip and floated just below the surface. The beholder survived the bath, but the party ran out of options to rescue the rogue without killing themselves. Thus passed the short-lived rogue, may he rest in peace.

I’m not much of a killer DM, but PC do die at my table from time to time. In this particular case, it was worth it. I knew that was true Sunday evening when some players at a different game I was running said they had already heard that story about the beholder and the rogue and the magma river. When your players are telling stories about your games to their other friends at the convention, you’ve done something right! Well, unless they were saying, “This jerk of a DM killed my character…”

TactiCon 2011 – CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, DM Lessons — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 1:37 PM

CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way – Spoilers Follow

I ran three sessions of CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way at TactiCon 2011 – Thursday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday morning. My biggest worry was that there wouldn’t be enough players for the Sunday morning game, thus denying me the Iron Man achievement, but no worries there – I had a full table. Actually, the Thursday evening table was the only non-full table I ran all weekend (only four players). Saturday morning’s table actually had seven players!

I hadn’t run this adventure before TactiCon, but by the end I was quite a natural with it. It’s a fun little adventure, where the party has to track a missing caravan into the feywild, dealing with a thieving elf who accidentally got the caravan into trouble. They rescue the captive drivers and caravan workers from gnomes who were planning to deliver them as slaves to some eladrin – and then fight off the eladrin as they try to escape from the feywild.

The first table decided to take a different approach to the final encounter. Rather than dashing for the portal out of the feywild, they decided to literally circle the wagons and shelter in place. No problem – I adapted the existing maps I’d prepared in MapTool, and they fought from within the wagon circle.

The second table, with seven players, had four people who had never played LFR before. As my regular readers know, I LOVE introducing new people to D&D, so this was a great time for me. The highlight was when one player, having thrown his only (non-magical) dagger at a foe in an earlier round, decided to try to take out the enemy by springing off one standing stone to kick the bad guy off another stone. Good Athletics and Acrobatics led to success, with the PC standing atop the stone and the bad guy prone at its foot, taking decent falling damage, after which he was soon dispatched. Awesome.

The third table had my friend Nate as a player (yay!) as well as a father-son pair who had approached me on Thursday or Friday, admiring my projector setup and asking about the game. I told them that the Saturday morning and Sunday morning games would be ideal for new players, so they signed up!

This was a solid little adventure, and I could see using it as a good introductory adventure for new players in the future. Also, I found myself using character voices in this adventure – something I don’t usually do much of as a DM. The thieving elf Harelahur somehow developed his own voice, which I think made the players feel a bit sympathetic toward him (they all let him run away instead of turning him over to the authorities at the end). The cold eladrin leader’s voice was fun to do, too. I’m not usually a big “voices” guy, but I could see doing a little more here than I have in the past, if the character is right for it.

TactiCon 2011 – SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, DM Lessons — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 1:37 PM

SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – Spoilers follow

I’ve already written extensively about my experience running this adventure at TactiCon. In a nutshell, it was a mostly-fun paragon tier adventure that my party decided to take on at a high challenge level. This came back to bite them in the final encounter against a hydra, which they eventually had to retreat from. This meant that they received a negative story award, which left them with a lousy feeling about the game. And it led to my only non-perfect DM evaluation scores of the convention (two people gave me a 9 out of 10).

I did learn later that the hydra’s attacks and defenses and damage should not have been scaled upward by 1 according to the adventure, so I made a mistake there (but the boss monster in the other adventure branch does have instructions to adjust his attacks and defenses and damage, so it was an understandable confusion on my part). And ultimately I should have changed whatever seemed unfun to me as we went along at the table (a lesson I took to heart in the last game I ran a the convention).

I guess I’ll have to shoot for perfect scores next time instead. 🙂

TactiCon 2011 is in the books

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 1:37 PM

And on the fifth day, OnlineDM rested.

TactiCon 2011 started Thursday evening at 6:00 and wrapped up Sunday evening at 6:00. 72 hours from open to close for me (plus a little extra time at the end for the DM appreciation ceremony). I spent 36 of those hours at the game table, running games.

And I had a blast!

I got some dubious looks when I said I wanted to Iron Man the con (running games the whole time), but I can honestly say that I came out of it feeling energized, not exhausted. I did run a little short on sleep over the course of the convention (I had a 30 minute drive each way, so that cut into my sleep time a bit), and I’ll admit that I feel asleep at 9:00 PM last night and slept until 8:00 this morning, but I wasn’t getting headaches or feeling drained or anything like that.

Ultimately, TactiCon was a lot of fun. I was running games at tables in more public areas for most of this convention (in the past I’ve often been in individual hotel rooms), which meant that a lot more people got to see my MapTool / projector setup in action. It was a great feeling to have people stop by to say how cool they thought it was, or to ask questions about how they could build something similar themselves. Some of them even brought friends back later to show my setup off to them.

I’m looking forward to the next convention!

Individual game recaps

I’ve decided to break my detailed recaps into separate posts, rather than putting it all in one massive post. The links to those posts are below.

Lost on the Golden Way (Thursday evening, Saturday morning, Sunday morning)

MyRealms adventures (all day Friday)

Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds (Saturday afternoon and evening)

Need to Know (Sunday afternoon)

September 3, 2011

Annoyed at SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 9:49 PM

I’m most of the way through my attempt to Iron Man TactiCon (I’m running nine slots – 36 hours of games over a 72-hour period). I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’m especially pleased that the adventures I wrote myself were well-received on Friday.

This afternoon and evening (Saturday) I ran a two-slot game of SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds. This is a paragon-level adventure, and I ran it with a party of mostly 11th level characters and a couple of 13th level characters. They chose to run it at level 14 (so yes, they opted for extra challenge).

It was a fun and challenging adventure for the first four hours, and when we came back from our dinner break we went into the last encounter.

It was silly-hard. Spoilers follow.

In the particular path my party chose, the adventurers have to fight against a hydra and two spore demons at the end. The spore demons were mildly annoying, but not much of a real threat. The hydra was insane.

It can’t be flanked, much to the frustration of the two rogues in the party.

It makes ranged attacks without provoking attacks of opportunity.

It has threatening reach in a 2-square radius (on a Huge creature).

It gets two free attacks against any PC that ends its turn within 2 squares.

Now, the PCs had spent a lot of resources in the next-to-last encounter, and only two of the six of them had action points for the last battle. There weren’t too many daily powers left (though there definitely were some).

The party had a really hard time with this battle, and they eventually retreated and declared defeat.

My annoyance comes in that, by running the adventure as written, I made the players have a less-good time than they otherwise would have. The final battle ended in defeat, and the party got a negative story award because of it (it makes them more vulnerable to diseases in the future). It was pretty miserable at the end.

And I have to admit that part of my annoyance is that two of the six players docked me a point on the GM evaluation sheet for the question, “How much fun did you have?” I still got great scores, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about the awesome possibility of getting perfect scores while Iron Manning the con. I really wanted that, and I failed.

Ultimately, this is on me. When the adventure as written has unfun things happening, I should deviate. I should follow my own judgment, and I didn’t. I should have had the hydra spread his attacks around more, rather than focus on one PC until it drops as the adventure says it should do. I could have changed things so that the hydra’s ranged attacks at least provoked opportunity attacks, or made it so that it only got a single bite attack against PCs that end their turns near it.

But I didn’t make any of those changes, and my players had less than optimal fun because of it. This doesn’t mean that every fight has to be a victory for the party, but if something feels unfair and I have the ability to change it, I should change it! I didn’t, and my players had less fun because of it.

Lesson learned. If something seems unfun, change it.

August 28, 2011

TactiCon 2011 approaches!

Filed under: 4e D&D — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 12:51 PM

I live in the Denver area. The Denver Gamers Association hosts two gaming conventions each year. The bigger one is Genghis Con, held over Presidents’ Day weekend in the winter. TactiCon is held over Labor Day weekend in late summer. This means that it’s time for TactiCon 2011!

My first gaming convention ever was TactiCon 2010, where I ended up running three Living Forgotten Realms adventures and playing in six others. I had a blast. When Genghis Con 2011 rolled around, I once again ran some adventures (one of which I had written myself), played in a few LFR games, and tried my hand at GURPS, Savage Worlds and Call of Cthulhu.

I’ve had so much fun running games at these conventions that I decided I wanted to try to Iron Man TactiCon 2011. I’m running games in all nine slots. That’s 36 hours of DMing over the course of three days. 12 hours a day. Wow.

I’m happy to say that I’m mostly ready. I have completely finished preparing the adventures for eight of the nine slots already in MapTool (for use with my projector setup), and I’m part of the way done with the ninth (I should finish this afternoon). This will leave me with time to polish the three adventures I’m running that I’ve written myself, get props and handouts together, get pre-generated characters on hand, re-read each adventure, etc. I’m taking Thursday off work (even though the convention doesn’t start until the evening), so I’ll have one more full day to do some prep work before the point of no return.

For those of you who will actually be at TactiCon and would like to play at my table, here is the schedule of the games I’m running (all of them D&D 4th Edition Living Forgotten Realms):

  • Thursday evening: CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way
  • Friday morning: MYRE 3-1 The Staff of Suha (written by me)
  • Friday afternoon: MYRE 3-1 Tallinn’s Tower (written by me)
  • Friday evening: MYRE 3-1 Descent Into Darkness (written by me)
  • Saturday morning: CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way
  • Saturday afternoon and evening: SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds (two slots)
  • Sunday morning: CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way
  • Sunday afternoon: LURU 2-4 Need to Know

I’ve run the three MYRE adventures before (obviously) as well as the two-slot SPEC event. I’m done prepping CORE 2-4, and I’m working on LURU 2-4 today.

Am I nuts? Maybe, but I think I’m going to have fun! I’ll be exhausted afterward, but that’s why I’ll have Monday to recuperate (Labor Day).

July 31, 2011

SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – MapTool file

Filed under: 4e D&D, Adventures, Macros, Maps — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 12:36 AM

I felt like I had to share this MapTool file simply because of the sheer insane amount of work I had to put into it.

I agreed to run a “special” Living Forgotten Realms game at my local store today for a charity benefit event. The adventure is SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds. A normal LFR game runs in four hours; this one was scheduled for six, plus an hour break for dinner (4:00 PM to 11:00 PM).

When I first saw the adventure I almost backed out due to the huge amount of prep work I would have to do in MapTool before I could run it with my projector setup. The adventure is cool in that it lets the players have a meaningful choice. Early in the adventure they can choose between two totally different paths. The encounters for each path are completely unrelated to one another, and you could get a legitimately different play experience if you were to repeat the adventure and go in the other direction.

Unfortunately, this means that, as the DM, I needed to prepare a whopping TEN different encounters that the PCs could go through. And half of that effort is going to be wasted on any given play-through, since the party can only take one path.

I decided to use the map images provided in the adventure PDF this time. I had to do the work to erase the markings for monster starting positions and PC starting positions, but I’m getting fairly adept at that. Then I had to create tokens for each monster.

Making matters more complicated is the fact that this is a season 3 adventure for LFR, which means it can be run at any of five different adventure levels – 12, 14, 16, 18, 20. In most cases the adventure uses the same monsters throughout (just leveling them up or down), but there are a few battles where the monsters for level 12-14 are different from the monsters for levels 16-20, for instance. And there’s almost no instances where a monster is used in more than one fight, so I had to create a crapload of unique tokens.

The work is done and the adventure is now over. If anyone out there ever runs this adventure in MapTool, you’re welcome. I’ve done the work for you.

Note that this campaign file was created in version 1.3.b66 of MapTool.

Download the PDF of the adventure here.

Download the MapTool file here.

Image

July 9, 2011

Becoming “in-demand” as a DM

Filed under: 4e D&D, DM Lessons — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 10:08 AM

Three independent incidents in the past few weeks have made me realize that, at least in my local D&D community, I’m becoming somewhat “in-demand” as a Dungeon Master.

First, the person who coordinates Living Forgotten Realms games at my local store asked me if I would be willing to DM a paragon-tier game for a charity event on July 30. Not the biggest deal in the world, I suppose, but I was flattered to be requested. After figuring out that I should have enough time to prep everything I need to prep, I agreed to run the game.

Second, the person who is coordinating D&D games for the Tacticon convention over Labor Day weekend asked if I would be willing to run an epic tier game (an all-day event) at the con. He did a good job of flattery on this one, making it clear that he was specifically approaching a small number of DMs who he thought could run a challenging adventure and make it fun for the players at a convention. Since I’m planning to iron man the convention anyway (running games for every slot), I agreed.

Third, the owner of the local store approached me yesterday about D&D Encounters. I’ve been running a table every other week at 5:00 PM (alternating with the excellent Andy), and the store owner wanted to know if I’d be willing to run a second table at 7:00 for the next few weeks, as there’s been a DM shortage. Sure, I can handle that.

In addition, the owner also asked if I’d be interested in running the next season of Encounters, seeking my input on how he should try to arrange things with dungeon masters. I really like running Encounters since I love introducing new players to the game and Encounters is an ideal way to do this. Unfortunately, Wednesday night is bowling night in the fall. My wife and I don’t have a lot of organized activities we do together, but bowling is one of them, and we have some good friends who bowl on Wednesdays, so I’ll probably have to decline.

However, I did offer my opinion that the best way to schedule DMs for Encounters is to have one DM assigned to each slot (5:00 PM table 1, 5:00 PM table 2, 7:00 PM table 1, 7:00 PM table 2) and then an alternate for each DM that the primary person can call on if they’re going to be out of town or too busy or whatever. While I couldn’t serve as a primary DM, I could probably be a 5:00 PM alternate (missing a week of bowling every now and then, or just showing up a little late). I appreciated being asked for my input.

I feel like I’m at a pretty good place right now with my dungeon mastering. My Friday night online game is going strong. Running D&D Encounters has been a lot of fun. I ran my Tallinn’s Tower adventure for LFR on Thursday (more to come on that later – I’m making some revisions based on feedback from the recent game) and will  be running the final adventure in my trilogy after GenCon.  And I’m really looking forward to three and a half days of non-stop dungeon mastering at TactiCon in a couple of months.

Going from being a total newbie as a dungeon master a year ago to the point where people are actually asking me to run events is a pretty good feeling!

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