So. You’ve seen movies or comic books where people can use their words as a tangible means to fight. You’ve been impressed by witty insults in swordfights, fierce battle cries, and people who use words to defend themselves with more than a snippy comeback.And you’ve thought to yourself, “Self, wouldn’t it be badass to be able to do that in a role-playing game?”.
Well, I believe it not only to be possible – but easily done in a variety of handily house-rulable forms. And not just the charismatic few who use as verbal buffs in combat to help allies or intimidate enemies – but that any characters can use a well-placed jibe to throw an opponent. Elan would be proud.
Gen Con Briefs: Wednesday
I don’t know how much I’ll be able to blog this year at Gen Con. I promised myself that I would not skip sleep to write so my posts will be Sporadic. Here’s a few highlight of Yesterday. I met Robin Laws at the O’Hare Chicago airport. We chatted about player types and motivation some […]
Minimum Session Prep: Listen
Hi, I’m Brent P. Newhall, and I feel bad about this post. I originally promised Chatty a post aimed at newbie DMs, describing the absolute minimum prep needed for a D&D 4th Edition session. And while I’ll cover that, I realized there’s a bigger issue that needs to be addressed. The amount of preparation required […]
4th Edition D&D: Beyond Level 30
Character level is one of the core concepts behind most roleplaying games, and it has been at the core of D&D from the very beginning as an indication of a character’s abilities, power, and influence in the world. Back in Original D&D they were so distinguished that each level had a different name depending on your class – a Fighter became a Veteran, Warrior, Swordsman, Hero, and eventually Myrmidon, Champion, and finally a Lord.
Silly DM, minor quests are for players
About a year ago, I read a post about sharing narrative control with players over on Gnome Stew that just blew my mind. After my initial reaction of “Are you kidding me? The DM is the narrator, end of story,” I realized that I already did some narrative sharing because I encouraged the players to […]
But my father was a blacksmith! – Crafting in 4E
Hi there. My name is Rob, a.k.a. “A Hero”, from A Hero Twice A Month. While I can be a chatty DM at times, I am not the ChattyDM. Still, he was nice enough to let me post my thoughts about crafting items while he is off on his GenCon hiatus. When the game designers […]
Inquisition of the Week: Your Steam is Punk
This past week saw the release of the Eberron Campaign Guide. While I’ve followed Eberron since its acceptance into the D&D campaign setting contest but I have yet to run or play in any kind of Eberron campaign. Some of the resistance to playing it before has been a dislike among some of my group to steampunk. While Eberron is more nuanced than simply a steampunk setting, there’s some clear resistance to the idea.
Tales of the City Within, Session 3: The Final Chapter
Disclamer: I take several narrative liberties in my game reports. While I write what actually happens, I often adapt dialog elements or change some details to make for a better narrative… also, beer tends to fog things up a little. Keeping up Appearances This session was to be the last of our gaming ‘season’. This […]
Drunken D&D Adventure Design
In a few weeks I’ll land in Indianapolis where 6 friends will be waiting to start our annual Drunken D&D game, a happy mix of D&D and collegiate drinking games. I’ll be the DM of this event and that means that I need to write an adventure for it. I’ll be spending a few nights […]
Inq. of the Week: Sources of Power?
Just before the Player’s Handbook 2 was released back in March I wrote an inquisition asking which power source people most wanted to see in the PHB3, the source that won the poll was psionics so it seems the PHB3 is shaping up to meet a lot of expectations already but unfortunately shortly afterward we discovered that WotC has abandoned the Ki power source concept which came in second in the poll.
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