Articles by Tracy Hurley
Tracy Hurley is a recent convert to Dungeons & Dragons. Although she has many homes on the Internet, the best place to find her is on her blog at SarahDarkmagic.com or causing chaos on Twitter as SarahDarkmagic.
Hope and Fear
Recently I read the excellent book Hamlet’s Hit Points by Robin D Laws. The book provides game masters with tools to analyze the narrative structure of their games, most importantly, how the different scenes or beats within a game affect the emotions of the players. Most stories provide us with a mixture of emotions, leading us to worry about the protagonists in one scene only to provide us with hope for them in the next. These emotions cement our connection to the characters of the story. However, in 4e D&D, such analysis isn’t limited just to the overall narrative. Within a combat encounter this same cycle of hope and despair occurs, investing us further in the outcome of the battle.
First, let’s analyze a typical 4e combat encounter. To prepare, the DM uses the XP budget appropriate for the PCs’ current level and group size. All of the monsters appear at the beginning of the encounter. Since the DM has no idea how long the monsters will last, he comes out swinging, using their encounter and recharge powers as soon as possible. Between monster death and PCs’ debuffs, the longer he waits, the less like it becomes that the standard monster’s powers will be effective. The antagonists’ early victories translate into down beats, causing concern amongst the players, especially if any of them are bloodied or knocked out early in the contest. [Read the rest of this article]
Magic Item Wishlists and You
As a DM, assembling treasure parcels ranks pretty high on my feels-like-work list. Giving PCs treasure should be a fun experience. The players’ eyes should light up as I tell them about items I handpicked that are perfect for their characters and, heck, even match nicely with the rest of their gear. Yet, it never seems to go that way. I spend most of the week working out the story elements and building an exciting and dangerous, yet balanced, encounter or two. By the time I get to treasure allocation, I’ve spent my creative energy and it’s usually less than an hour to game time. What the heck do I give them? In my rush, I usually don’t have their character sheets in front of me and I end up providing rods to orb users and strength-based weapons to the dex-based classes.
Enter wish lists. They solve a number of problems for me. Believe it or not, mind reading is not my forte. Sure, if I look really hard at their character sheets and squint in just the right way, the perfect magic item may come to mind. This assumes that I have an idea of what magic items are available or have the time to research them. Since I do so little on the player side and monsters don’t really use magic weapons in 4e, I don’t have an incentive to keep up to date on the latest dwarven smithing processes or elven handiwork.
Yet, in 4e, magic items are important. Unless I use inherent bonuses, the system assumes players receive new magic items as they level. The whole system gets quite complex. Which weapon proficiencies does his class have again? How does this item interact with his other items? I don’t find this level of research fun and I’m not invested in determining which weapons or armor they carry. With the big list of other things I need to plan, why not offload this research to the players? [Read the rest of this article]
