Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

For a while now I've been looking for ways to give back to the hobby that I love so much. I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd edition AD&D. During my earlier years, I had created a bunch of forms and props and other content for my various games, but not so much during the 3.x and 4e years. Recently, I was prepping a game session and I knew I was going to have a bunch of spiders menace the PCs. This meant I also needed to account for spider webs. Then I recalled something I built back in my 2e heyday, pages and pages of tokens, standups, etc, including a page of various sized web tokens. Since I'm not an artist, these tokens are all based on the same piece royalty free clipart I had available. So click on the image here to be taken to a page for the PDF download. If you like the product, let me know, and maybe I'll dig up some more of my older game content for future posts. Note: Don't let the 4shared preview scare you. The page looks like the im...

One of the things I like about 4e is reading the "why"s, why one rule was changed, created, or abandoned. Even though I'm still running a 3.5 game, as a DM, I get a lot of mileage out of knowing the thoughts of the game designers, folks who focus on this game much more than I have the chance to do (case in point, my new Second Wind rule for my game). Recently I've been thinking about the critical hits. In 4e, there is no critical threat/confirm critical for the simple reason that if you threat and fail to confirm, you go from being a hero to a loser in 2 seconds, and that certainly isn't as much fun as being the hero. Now, I'm not ready to adapt the 4e style for crits (especially since the threat range is kept much smaller than it can be min/max'ed in 3.5). But I do think something should be in order. Going forward, I'm going to try the following: On a Nat 20 (not necessarily a crit), if the player fails to confirm the crit, they still get +2 damage. ...

My current D&D campaign uses the 3.5 rules. At the same time, I'm interested in the new 4.0 rules, but don't have a lot of experience playing it (other than a few D&D Encounters sessions at my FLGS). While reading up on the new system thanks to the Rules Compendium for 4.0/Essentials. When I came across the detailed description for Second Wind, I realized that this was something I could easily incorporate into my 3.5 game. One of the things that makes it easy to use a Second Wind-type mechanic is that my game already uses the Reserve Points optional rule (from Unearthed Arcana). I use this option since for most of the campaigns, I didn't have a full party, and even now, the group doesn't have a healing cleric. Since there isn't a steady pool of healing magic available, I think Reserve Points nicely fills that gap (and allows players to play what they want, instead of someone feeling like they must play the walking band-aid). Since players have this Reserve ...

Sadly, since I had to cut my Gen Con trip short, I wasn't around for the Saturday seminar where the folks from WotC announced a bunch of new products for 2011. But I did eagerly follow every Twitter link and blog post I could find. I had some initial reactions to the announcements, but decided to sit on them for a while before writing down my thoughts, and I'm glad I did, since some of my initial reactions changed the more I thought about it. One thing that didn't change was my sub headline for this blog post: 2011 - The Year Everything Changes Technically you could say that things are changing right now with regards to D&D 4e, but it wasn't until I saw the product list for 2011 that I realized that what we'll be seeing in the upcoming months from WotC for 4e sets the stage for the "new normal". What I'm specifically referring to are the game changes that will be part of the new D&D Essentials line. We've known about the Essentials line for...

Besides Castle Ravenloft , one of the other games I played this year at Gen Con was the Dungeon Delve. This was a short event, where a party of pre-gen characters goes through about two encounters in a one hour time limit. This year the pre-gens were all built using the upcoming D&D Essentials ruleset. For this very reason, I was greatly interested in trying this out to get a taste of how these characters would behave. For the one game I played (due to other commitments, I didn't have time to play the delve more than once), I chose to play the slayer (fighter). If you haven't already read about the slayer, check out the preview article posted on the official site. The one thing I really liked was the new Stance ability. This allowed me to modify my basic attack with either a stance that gave me +1 to hit, or one that granted +2 to damage. I think this is much better than the previous at-will powers, which effectively negated the need to ever use a basic attack. Also, the l...

Having been home from Gen now for two days (I had to cut my visit short as I had family obligations on Saturday), I thought I should jot down some of my experiences, and thoughts. Originally I planned to draft a long post covering all the things I saw, played, and thought during the three days I was there (from early Wednesday through late Friday), but rather than one catch all post, I've decided to write up a number of short posts, all under the "Gen Con Aftermath" title, on various topics related to the convention. Up first was the first game I played at the con... the new Castle Ravenloft board game. The first thing to note is that many of the game mechanics are based on the D&D 4th Edition game. Heroes are based on the races and classes from D&D--for the game, I played a Dragonborn Fighter, while the other players had similarly familiar races and classes. Each character had a stat card (on very thick card stock--the same as the dungeon tiles sets). On one side...

For the first time in a few years, I'm heading out to Gen Con. Thinking back, I realize that the last time I was there, was the release of 3e. But more than that, I realize that this is the first time I'm going to Gen Con in the social media era. Last time I went, there were plenty of email threads and web pages for this and that, but as I get ready this time, I realized that I'm looking at a variety of sources, from blog posts, and Twitter feeds, to YouTube videos and finding a wealth of ideas and suggestions that I hadn't thought. And not just the variety of info, but the ease with which I can go from a tweet, to a blog, to a podcast or video really made planning and prepping this year much easier than in the past. I don't know if other people are leveraging all the great info out there, but I certainly am, and I for one thank everyone who's posted a suggestion, or link, or video... see you in Indianapolis!