DM Tips: Encounter Information

As you learned from Monday's (actually Tuesday) crafts i use the D&D tiles in every encounter. They are pretty generic and don't provide much information.

So today's tip is about encounter information. When building your encounter its important to list details about the encounter, is it day or is it night, what is the illumination like, is there difficult terrain in the encounter and where is it. Are there areas of concern, that could deal damage.

Every encounter you build should include the following
Illumination: Consider time of day, weather, and put in any negatives you need to apply to perception checks
Traps/Damage: Identify any areas that are traps or create damage. Example what if one square has a campfire.
Treasure: List any treasure that can be found in the encounter

This is where you can make your encounter unique and give your players additional challenges. Its a great way to increase the challenge of an encounter without affecting the monsters or XP. Check out the Dungeon Delve for great ideas on tweaking up your encounter.

So you have your encounter built, and your using tiles, how do you convey this information to the player?

Answer: Overhead projector sheets, cost about $12 for a pack of 20. Seems a bit pricey but when you use whiteboard markers you never realy need more.

Its hard to see in the picture to the left beacuse the material is so clear but thats the beauty of it, it allows you to mix well with your tiles, and still draw directly on the encounter. I highly recomend drawing walls, and if something in the encounter causes something to change, you can show it live, its even great for drawing in the wizards wall of fire.

One of the things i do in my encounters is orange squares, every encounter has 1.5 times the amount of orange squares than players. (5 players 7-8 squares) my players know that when the sceen starts (i will explain the diffrence between a sceen and a encounter next week) that they can chose where they want to be as long as its in a orange square.

It gives them some flexibility in the encounter that makes sence, brings back the old marching order question, and gives you control when setting up your encounter.

Sticky Tack, i used it monday and i am using it again today. This is a amazing tool for any DM. I use it to stick the tiles to the mat, and when creating multiple levels it helps to hold the blocks in place (muilty level encounter is going to be the topic in two weeks time) i've also used it to create a beholder (a zombie behodler).

In this case were going to create small peices of sticky tack and stick the film on the tiles. Five peices should work just fine, one in each corner and one in the middle.

Remember you can draw anything you want on the tiles, in this example here you can see i used it to draw an underground river. Sure its placed on top of a stair set, but it works, the rest of the area is a cave set tile system.

So this DM tip is half crafts and half tip, in either case i hope you enjoy it and find new ways to use the overhead projector sheets. I don't recommend cutting them up because it makes them harder to reuse, but having a bunch that are 8"x 8" will work out in your favor.

Until next time, keep your dice on the table.

Dungeon Master Tips: Organizing your Adventure

This week i am going to discuss how you can organize your adventure. All adventures in my opinion require a bit of planing. For every hour you intend to play an adventure you should spend the same amount of time planing.

I personally break up all of my adventures into 8 encounters, i mix and match the kind of encounters i want to do but for me a single adventure takes players from one level to another in 8 encounters. At our speed that's 4 weeks of game play.

Tools

There are various tools at your disposal but for me my main ones are the Dungeon Master Guide , MS Word, MS Viso, DDI Compendium, and DDI encounter builder.

MS Visio

The key to a good adventure is not wanting to railroad your players. So i create a start of my adventure, and a end, where i want my players to end up. I'll add a few boxes to the Viso showing possible pieces of information they can find. As i figure out the general storyline i then plot everything out into the Viso. the key is to make it fit on one page

Don't have MS Visio? Try LucidChart

Dungeon Master Guide

Great for references, nuff said.

MS Word

I build my encounters in MS, The first page contains the adventure name and details, the second page is blank. The third and fourth page is a the basic story line and my RP notes, while the 5th page contains the Visio drawing from earlier.

Now i break up the encounters so that the basic encounter information is on the left hand side, and the map (which honestly I've taken from dragon and customized for my own needs) on the right hand side. The next few pages contains monsters information taken from the DDI Compendium so i have everything i need in one place.

I repeat the encounters in the exact same method adding blank pages where i need to.

Don't have MS Word, try OpenOffice

DDI Encounter Builder & DDI Compendium

The DDI Compendium has two tasks for me, one is finding monsters and creatures that fit my story, level, and encounter so nothing seems out of place. The second is to copy & past into word so i have all my information during game play. I recommend for monster pages to be two columns, and formatting the text a bit. i can fit large monsters in 1 full column, and usually two minions per column.

The encounter build i use after i have a list of creatures in mind, and just use it to figure out what creatures are going to be in each encounter.

Don't have a DDI Account, try Monster Lister & Encounter Planner

Binding

Once i have everything checked over and it looks the way i want it to look, i save it off as a PDF (plenty of PDF printers out there) and upload it to staples. I will get it printed on both sides in black & white (so when your doing your map use circles with letters in them to identify monsters (A)). And i pick a cheap binding. the hole process costs me around $4.50 for a 30 page document.

Additions

Another great addition to add after the fact is the 'PrintableDM' sheets i mentioned before hand, I'll send them to staples at the same time for printing and usually get 8 done at a time. if your lucky they will accidentally bend the corners on them and you don't have to pay. good thing i was folding them in half anyway :)

So there you have it, you spent 8 hours designing your adventure, and saving all the information and you have a nice hard copy to show for it. Some of you are thinking, 8 hours that's a full days work for me. Well sometimes being a DM is, but when you have everything organized and know where your game is going, you can spend a hour a night on it after the kids have gone to bed. Before you know it your two adventures ahead of the game

That's all for this week's DM's tips, remember its us vs. them!

Crafts: Walls

So this week i am going to show you how to build basic walls. These walls are great when you need to show that there is something physically in the way, and can also be used as bushes.

Here is what where going to need to get started

Sharpie, Hot-glue gun, scissors, cardboard, tiles, cleaning scrub pads (pack of 12 for 1$)

Now first we are going to make a 4 square long walls, i make all my wall height 1.5 squares, because it gets the idea across and makes it pretty universal.



as you can see here, i traced a 2 square by 4 square area on the scrub pad, using the tile as a guide line. To ensure that i have the area i need i am going to make sure is 3 squares by 4 squares



Now we cut out what we don't need



We can save the excess (make 1 square bushes by rolling them up)
but our next step is to fold it in half, and have some guide lines.


you don't need to draw these lines in, they are just here to show

now that this is folded, we simply place hot glue along the lines one at a time, holding it closed and waiting a minute after each line to dry before proceeding to the next



make sure you add pressure to each glue so that the piece feels like one

Now while the entire piece is drying lets make the base, using the tile set and the cardboard, trace out a 2 square by 4 square area (if you have 1x4 blocks use them instead) and cut out that pathway



now place a bead of glue along the base of the wall, the base is the end that was folded onto itself. and place the wall in the center of the base you just cut out


and let it dry.

There you have it, a simple wall, you can sit back and make a bunch of these easy in an hour if you break everything down in steps.