The Dungeon Master’s Guide gives a handy table of sample DCs for skill checks. However, what they don’t tell you is the context in which they should be used. This article explores the potential skill bonuses at various levels of play and suggests DCs to use in various circumstances. First, we need to examine what bonuses the characters have. In a group of adventurers, skill … Continue reading D&D Tips: How to set the Difficulty of Skill Checks
When I was at university – so many years ago – a game was released based on the works of Roger Zelazny. Called Amber Diceless Roleplaying, it cast the player characters as the sons and daughters of an immortal, immensely powerful family, who were basically gods. The interesting thing about the game was that the characters didn’t like each other that much. The game was … Continue reading Things I learnt from Amber Diceless Roleplaying
My current campaign of Storm King’s Thunder is run using the D&D Adventurers League rules. One of the aspects of those rules is that I can’t use milestones. XP must come from the players overcoming monsters, whether through negotiation or combat and set XP awards in the text. In the case of SKT, it’s almost entirely overcoming monsters. The little quests in the adventure don’t … Continue reading Running Storm King’s Thunder – Wilderness Encounters in Chapter 3
As you may already know, I spent the Easter long weekend down in Melbourne, running and organising D&D Adventurers League games at the Conquest games convention. It was the first time I’d managed to get to the convention since the early 1990s; I’d planned to attend a couple of years ago, but an inconvenient bushfire almost destroyed our house about a month prior, but finally, … Continue reading Running Dungeons & Dragons at Conventions
In this chapter, it’s all about the pacing. The end of Chapter 2 gives the adventurers several adventure hooks; missions suggested by the NPCs they’ve saved that give treasure and other rewards. Chapter 3 is the “sandbox” chapter, where the players can explore the Sword Coast doing little missions on the way. It’s all very Baldur’s Gate. The DM’s role here is to maintain the … Continue reading Running Storm King’s Thunder: Chapter 3
In my last article, I talked about the importance of the overall structure of campaign adventures. It’s very hard to run an adventure when you don’t understand the steps the characters must take to navigate their way through it. Each adventure has its own structure, and some have multiple paths. Hoard of the Dragon Queen is relatively straight-forward. However, there’s a couple of areas that … Continue reading Hoard of the Dragon Queen – Adventure Structure
I’ve run Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat three times each, Curse of Strahd twice, Out of the Abyss and Princes of the Apocalypse once each, and I am currently running Storm King’s Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation. By now, I’ve had a lot of experience running the campaign adventures of Wizards of the Coast. Many people evaluate adventures based on how … Continue reading The Structure of Campaign Adventures
Every so often, the players in my D&D games do something unexpected: They talk to the enemies! There are many styles of playing D&D. I came up through the school of dungeon-delving where almost every monster tried to kill you, and the rest of the challenges were traps. I was about ten years old when I started, quite shy and not used to talking to … Continue reading D&D Tips: Role-playing Strategies
Player character backgrounds don’t do much if they stay in the player’s possession and you don’t see them. That’s the way of many, many campaigns – certainly most of mine. The players come up with backgrounds for their characters, and they rarely see play. The construction of many D&D campaigns relies on the main story being presented by the DM. The DM offers adventure opportunities … Continue reading Dungeon Master Tips: Backgrounds and Adventure Ideas
This is a wonderful time to be a Dungeon Master. There’s a huge amount of material out there, interest in the game is at an all-time high, and there are all these creative Dungeon Masters out there who are sharing their techniques. Which is just as well, because I’m horrible at coming up with new monsters, spells and magic items. What makes a successful DM? … Continue reading The Art of DMing: Assembling the Pieces (The Non-Creative DM)
