On DMPCs

Hello!  It's been a while, hasn't it?  Well, there's been a couple reasons for that...one of which is the fact that I recently got married (yay!) but the lead up to it, particularly during the month of February and the first part of March, was particularly grueling, and didn't leave me much free time.  The other reason is the fact that after I got back from the honeymoon, I got lazy.  Like, really lazy.  Didn't want to do much of anything after work, never bothered to unpack, that sort of thing.  So I'm getting back in the saddle, and I thank you for everyone who cheered me on and pushed me to make more blog entries.
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Today's entry is on DMPCs.  Here's the short version: just don't fucking do it.  Ever.

Okay, now that I have that out of my system, let's go through the long version, and talk about DMPCs: what they are, why people want to use them, and why they shouldn't ever do this.

No, seriously.  I'm not going to espouse the merits of DMPCs, because as we'll see, there aren't really any solid, good reasons to use them.  And yes, this is coming from the perspective of someone who has both had them in groups he's been in as well as forced them upon the party as a DM.  It's time for me to atone for my sins.

Running The Numbers On Monster Creation

Making monsters can be hard.  3rd edition made them roughly as difficult as making a regular character (which was pretty time intensive), and then 4th edition threw it out the window but replaced it all with a bunch of different roles and a table for each.  This week I'm looking not at the fluff of conceptualizing a monster, I'm looking at the crunch.  We're gonna run the numbers on attacks, hit points, AC, and other defenses.  These are going to be some guiding principles that I take to heart; these aren't "be all end all" hard line rules, and they're not just a bunch of tables.  Oh, and all of this is going to depend on you having your group's character sheets in front of you, FYI.

The Show Must Go On: Dealing With PC Death

It's something that happens to everyone that's played the game.  The luck of a player goes south, the DM dice are hot, and suddenly, nailbitingly, the PC is down for the count.  Maybe the player failed his roll; maybe the monster stopped just long enough to stomp on the character's head for good measure before moving on to the next one.  Any way you slice it, in D&D, PCs die.

Or do they?

DM Tears: What To Do When Your BBEG Dies

So you've introduced your BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy/Girl) to the party once or twice, and you've got him moving his Big Evil Plan ever closer to fruition. You're going to have an encounter set up where he steals the MacGuffin right before the party's eyes! He scoffs at them, decides on a line or two of pithy dialog...

...then the Rogue crits him in the back of the face with a daily. He falls over, dead as a doornail, mid speech. What do?

Villainomics: Incentives, Motivations, and your BBEG

So it's time for another update, and today we're talking about the BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy/Girl). This topic is near and dear to my heart, as well as the hearts of DMs the world over. You lovingly craft your world, create entire nations with unique cultures and mannerisms...just so you can make your very own godzilla try to knock it all over. The intention, of course, is that you succeed so brilliantly in your world creation that your players care about its continued survival as much as you do, and want to fight terribly hard for it.

Well, uh, I hate to break it to you, but they don't care about your world nearly as much as you do. Sorry, but them's the breaks. I don't care how detailed you get, I don't care how much you draw them in, you will always care about the world more than them. You don't get them to care about the continued survival through love and care. You get them to care about it through hate - the sort of hate that only a well conceived BBEG can provide.

Cliché Corner: The Tavern

I'm calling this Cliché Corner because I really want to look at the really common clichés that we use in our games, examine why they are so well used, and look at some ways to kind of spice them up and make them unique.

This week we're looking at the Tavern; that all too common meeting place where so many D&D groups have met. I've played and DM'ed games where the group has all met up in a tavern for some reason or another, with seemingly little thought as to why we would do that aside from the obvious, which is simply that it's what we'd always done or were told we should do by those that came before. It was questioned, rebelled against, but rarely embraced. Why is that?

Keeping it Challenging: Crafting Intelligent Combat Encounters

So you’ve got your game going, and it’s going well! Your players are working together, solving puzzles, punishing evil…actually, they’re punishing evil a little too well. Okay, they’re completely crushing your encounters. There’s no challenge! You follow the instructions in the DMG for encounter creation, get your XP allowance, and pick monsters that sound cool, but nothing seems to work! The minions are out in the first round of combat, and then the Elite you put so much love and care into is bloodied after the first round, and about to die after the second. What’s a DM to do to put some challenge in there?

Dungeon Crafting: Fantastic or Realistic?

Dungeons are the meat of many D&D campaigns.  Hell, it's half the name, and I'll bet you've seen a lot more dungeons than you have dragons.  The nice thing about dungeons and why they're used so much is because they're the DM's ultimate playground.  In the dungeon the DM can really throw the kitchen sink at the party and really challenge them, because in a dungeon the DM is in the most control.  The only choices a player has is to leave the dungeon or to press forward in an attempt to clear it.

Cinematic Combat in 4th Edition

Hello everyone, and welcome to Crunch & Fluff: An RPG Blog. In this blog, I plan to look at various topics vast and small in RPGs in general, but specifically in 4th edition D&D. I'll jump around some from time to time to other systems, d20 and otherwise, and just generally give my own thoughts on Crunch (rules, mechanics, and other fun crunchy stuff), Fluff (settings, characters, descriptions, etc.) and how the two sometimes blend better than peanut butter and chocolate.

The subject up there says "Cinematic Combat in 4th Edition" but really it could just as well be named "Making Combat Awesome". It's no secret that nine times out of ten when we make our characters we look to the media we consume for ideas, whether it be from books, movies, or whatever else. Sometimes our characters aren't particularly heroic, and sometimes they just aren't even all that powerful. But we always want shit to be epic. We play D&D so we can have epic adventures where we kick in the door waving the 44, grab the loot, beat up the bad guys, save the town, and be lauded as heroes.