(Note, this post will have a slight spoiler for Batman:Arkham Asylum. You have been warned.) It’s Not Being Lazy, It’s Being Efficient Creating a set of encounters for a group week after week can be a bit exhausting for a DM. Make a map, find or make some monsters for that map, place them so […]
Play At Your Own Pace
It’s hard to find a place online which talks about D&D4e that hasn’t, in recent weeks and months, been talking about the pace of 4e combat and ways to make it faster, faster, and faster still. There’s tons of advice that ranges from the practical to the extensive to the radical extreme. And I’m a […]
Speeding up D&D 4E
Much digital ink has been spilled on the topic of speeding up combat in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. I think at this point we can all at least agree that combat can grow a bit sluggish at times. The interesting thing is, and it’s something that some people have touched upon at various points in the 4E lifecycle already, that there seems to be a paradigm shift away from the simple “4E is slow because of combat”, and I think that’s a very good thing.
The “new” (and it’s not new, just only discussed by a select few in the past) idea is that the problem lies more in adventure design than combat sluggishness. @glimmthegnome on Twitter planted the seed of this idea for me a couple of weeks ago, @gamefiend pushed it along, and @neogrognard put it into words in his Save My Game column on the Wizards website last week.
Lost Skills: Perform
I’m an old dog: it’s hard to teach me new tricks. For example, take a recent 4e character I made. Lute playing is a huge part of my character concept, and I instinctively wanted to quantify his lute-playing expertise as a stat. But it turns out there’s no spot on the character sheet for musical […]