So you’ve tried group initiative, or are thinking about it giving it a shot for a night. All in the name of turn efficiency and faster combat, right?
And yet… still not going fast enough, are you? And all those shiny initiative feats – not shiny enough anymore, are they?
Don’t worry – let’s fix that! One of the two major drawbacks of using group or side initiative I last talked about with you was our poor initiative-focused characters. Here’s the relevant snippet of their plight:
It started with the mention of group or “side” initiative versus the current D&D 4e standard of cyclical individual initiative in a recent Rule of Three.
That awakened my Faster Combat senses – combats average a long and all too often painful 60 minutes in D&D 4e and there’s an opportunity to improve combat pacing and speed with group initiative in 4e.
There are advantages and disadvantages to a group initiative approach and they showed up with great clarity. In our last Primal Frostfell session, a now-epic tier campaign I’m DMing, my playgroup talked about what we might expect out of group initiative and then simply rolled with it the entire night. Here’s what we discovered:
Binding the hands and feet of prisoners is a classic way to end a combat early or without having to kill everyone in sight. It’s an especially heady (if not civil) decision when you need to interrogate prisoners, keep them safe (or out of your way) somewhere until you come back, or turn them in to the local authorities for a reward.
And don’t forget – your enemies have their own nefarious reasons to bind you, too!
Yet the rules and options aren’t all clear or in one place when it comes to this simple and effective way to deal with the scoundrels you capture on your adventure. Here’s a quick review of your options, from skills to mundane gear and finally, a few magical tools.
Ever notice how the pain and suffering of some of your favorite characters in books, TV, movies or campaigns – and how they deal with the unenviable hand they’re dealt – is exactly what draws you into their story? Frodo, Aragorn, Buffy, Angel, Selene and even Conan.
There’s something about experiencing their struggles and trials first-hand, from every angle, that leads us to being sympathetic and even identifying with their scars, skeletons and fears. They leap off the screen or from the pages – or in D&D, they vault right out of the game and gameworld, capturing your imagination.
You root for them because of what they’ve gone through, who they are because of it and who they become.
In your D&D stories, whether you play or DM, you too can bring your characters to life by getting right to the heart of their pain and suffering.
Feast your eyes on the 100th D&D article on Leonine Roar!
I would like to once again extend a huge, sincere thank you to all of you who read and subscribe to Leonine Roar, as well as all of you who follow me and the site on Twitter.
I love to write about and play D&D and I love that you’ve made this one of your favorite spots for ideas to amp up your games, whether you play, DM or do both, like me.
How has Leonine Roar grown since its first 50 articles? Here’s just two of the coolest happenings:
Love your home brew campaign setting, and how much you borrow, pillage or re-imagine for your own, unique world? Does its breadth, evocative landscapes and both natural and unnatural dangers excite you? Looking for that next bit of inspiration for your next home brew campaign?
Much like Dark Sun or the Underdark, the natural world – its amazing and colorful contours, mighty forces of nature, and motley natives – have served as simple, yet powerful inspiration for countless homebrew D&D campaigns since the dawn of the game.
Looking for some help on how to decide where you and your player characters should explore or journey to next?
Be evil. Yes, you. Be vile, despicable evil. We already know you can and will do it! Don’t deny it! Give in!
How? Ah, yes, of course you have questions about being truly wicked.
First, however, let me share what it is like to to contemplate and create my only two evil campaigns. After all, evil need not be ignorant – in fact, at its most heinous, it can be alarmingly enlightened.
What does encounter difficulty really mean in D&D 4e?
Since the dawn of 4e, I’ve struggled with this question. The many times I’ve DMed and used the incredibly handy Encounter Calculator over on the D&D website, combined with a few years of seeing how those “Standard,” “Hard,” and even “Too Hard” 4e encounters actually unfold, have left me in a quandary.
As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, I’m not sure whether XP values for encounters measure challenge level or difficulty anymore. The mechanics of 4e, drastically different from its predecessors, now have me re-thinking what encounter difficulty truly means in D&D.
Today, does it mean “degree of resource management,” rather than a measure of “deadliness or lethality,” like it did in previous editions?
Ever wonder what a D&D game without opportunity attacks might be like? Or wish there were some way to resolve them more quickly and elegantly?
Tired of hearing “Wait, whose turn is it again? Oh, that was an opportunity attack, right…” or hearing the active player sigh while you interrupt his turn and stage time yet again with your annoying little poke?
You’ve come to the right place, my friend: I present you the latest Leonine list, a 6-pack of brilliant ideas to amp up your game tonight!
Pillage any of these alternative approaches to help get rid of those pregnant pauses and time-consuming interruptions that OA’s often feel like. Never let opportunity attacks ruin the opportunity for a great, fast-paced combat again!
What really is the difference between these two popular tabletop RPGs?
Dragon Age has gotten a lot of hype in both video game and tabletop RPG form, so my playgroup has been curious. And well, after playing in a Dragon Age-inspired heroic tier Shadowfell campaign, my brother was itching to GM an official DA campaign, including their unique rules system.
We’re all veteran D&D gamers – and really haven’t played much at all besides D&D all our lives. I mean, we’ve loved every edition, and it’s always been the RPG, so why mess with a good thing? Still, even loyal D&D gamers like us yearned for something different, perhaps something even more elegant than 4e’s rules-heavy and tactically rich environment.
So with only our resident power gamer fearing the worst, the rest of us welcomed the chance to try something different every other week while I continued to run our D&D 4e epic tier Frostfell campaign in between. (My brother and I rotate DMing a good portion of the year, week-to-week. If your group doesn’t give your “main” DM a break and a chance to play now and again like this, it should!)
And so, last week, we played our very first Dragon Age dark fantasy RPG game! Much like Newbie DM’s experience, we loved it. And I especially loved now being able to compare D&D 4e with Dragon Age.
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