All right, so if you’ve clicked that Critical Hits link or read the subject line here, you already know why I’m here, writing to you, dear blog. 

After reading the bard and barbarian playtests (more on those later?), I’m excited about the druid. I’m really curious to see which builds they put in. I heard that they’re going to have a shifter-based built. These are magical words that excite me.

Also, what the hell is this? Invoker? Dave pretty much says it all, except that he lies. He says we’ll find out “soon enough.” You’re not fooling me, Dave. December is, like, eleventy-billion days away!

Do you know what other magical words excite me? (There’s a whole list of ‘em!) Here is one word that excites me: Mercykiller. 

I can’t remember if I’ve talked about how Planescape: Torment is my favorite video game of all time, and by extension that Planescape is my favorite D&D setting of all time. A case in point is the Factol’s Manifesto. This book reads more like White Wolf than D&D, given that most of the stuff in there has little to no crunch and is just pure setting.

This’ll degenerate into wank if I don’t get to the point soon.

So, yes, playtest. Mercykiller. I’m not sure that it’s a paragon path like Dave says, though. Paragon paths are fairly discrete in terms of what they do; I don’t see much need for long-term tuning. Consider also that all of the playtest articles on the table, with the exception of the Adventurer’s Vault 2, feature new classes.

I’m not saying it’s impossible. In fact, I’m probably setting myself up for disappointment. Still, a playtest article implies something a bit more meaty to me. Could the Mercykiller be some kind of divine striker, perhaps? THE MIND REELS.

So I’m officially involved in two D&D games. My friend Avi has run a couple of sessions of his game, and I’ve started my game back up again. These were basically my criteria for subscribing to D&D Insider: running one game, and playing at least one other.

There’s just one problem: I can’t subscribe! Yeah. It’s a bad scene. Apparently there’s something related to my bank not releasing information to Digital River. They’re working on something, allegedly, but in the meantime I am dead in the water. 

As luck would have it, this was before they even announced the character creator beta. I guess you get to keep your existing rate when they launch it, as long as you’ve already subscribed? That’s the icing on the cake. 

Am I desperate enough to beg a friend to pay & I reimburse them? Possibly! I like having D&D stuff to read in between major releases, or even stuff to rip off for existing campaigns. I’m also burning with curiosity about the bard, which was among my least favorite classes from 3e. Is it cool, or is it merely viable?

Actually, speaking of which, isn’t Martial Power out this week? I’m a little bit afraid of power creep but some of the new builds sound terribly interesting. I’m quite curious to see how they manage the economy of actions with regard to the beastmaster ranger. Or does it slow down play as someone has two sets of abilities to choose from? I MUST KNOW.

Let me tell you, blog, that I had a heck of a time preparing for this one. I just couldn’t concentrate, and I didn’t know what I needed to do. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m not used to running dungeons. For one thing, I didn’t do any perception/stealth checks while people were tromping around. In retrospect: what? The formula for both encounters was 1) PCs enter room, and 2) combat begins. Tracking perception and stealth checks would emphasize that dungeons are dangerous, that monsters will poke around if they hear activity. 

The bigger problem is that I don’t know what makes dungeons interesting except in terms of flavor text (which I’m not that great at, either). I typically try to deconstruct or thwart tropes for my games, at least to some extent. For dungeons, I’m really not familiar enough with the play style to accomplish that yet, which means I should probably read up on other dungeons.

My prep sucked. As an outgrowth of the above, my prep was spotty. My excuse, I guess, is that I haven’t run a real session since, oh, August. This is also the first time I’ve run a dungeon basically ever.

So, yes, my ideas weren’t as fleshed out as they could’ve been. This dungeon makes sense and all, but I think I should’ve restructured it so that the PCs could’ve gotten the hook for it much sooner.

I also need to provide more “stuff” for people. I think dungeons should have kind of a mini-narrative to them beyond simply going from room to room and fighting things. I am not going to try to do anything super special this time, both because this is not the climax and because I don’t want to get too ambitious. But it would help to introduce PCs to this narrative sooner rather than later, or at least do a better job of it. 

On the other hand, I am not in a bad place right now: they’re down to a couple of surges, they are scared to rest in this place, but they can’t get out, so they’re looking for a place to rest. Tension!

Dungeon Tiles: good. I acquired a bunch of these off Amazon, via the remains of a gift certificate, and they are pretty good. If nothing else, they helped me focus on certain shapes rather than trying to figure out what belongs on a sheet of graph paper, and they saved me the trouble of having to draw that shit.

I don’t have a perfect system for this yet, but sketching out & labeling the dungeon on graph paper after building it out of tiles seems to work. Then I set aside those tiles before game time and it’s easy to build things. I think they added a lot to the game in the end.

Monsters die really fast. This party is particularly striker-heavy, with a 2h ranger, star pact warlock, and a brutal rogue. Notably absent is a defender, so I kept hesitating on the quantity of monsters, what type, and what they’d do. I don’t want a TPK!

You can see where this is going, I imagine. The first encounter was a breeze (although I have to say that I like regenerating monsters). The second one went better, in no small part because of a specter getting his Spectral Barrage off more than once. (Insubstantial monsters aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be.)

Of course, by “better,” I mean that it was more challenging. It’s easy to be a little disappointed that the monsters don’t at least put some people into danger. The PCs, on the other hand, did rather well. There were three or four crits last night, and the rogue, ranger, and mage really did run roughshod over my poor little skeletons. This is despite the fact that most people were out of daily powers.

I keep forgetting this, to the point where I should just have a post-it permanently attached to the Monster Manual: outside of solos and elites, monsters really only get a few chances to hit the PCs. They have good attack bonuses so that they do some damage in those few rounds that they’re alive, because PCs are incredibly resilient, and because monsters often miss.

You’ll need a penalty, obviously, to cancel out the half-level bonus. An 8 in a stat won’t do it because you take the higher of the two when calculating defenses. 

The solution? I’ll warn you: it’s ridiculous.

There is one way to get a penalty to one of your defenses: wear armor you’re not proficient with. That will give you a penalty to your Reflex defense, which will cancel out the +1. YES.

Congratulations! You have a Reflex defense of 10 at level 2!