Thursday, August 13, 2009
Dungeons and Dragons has survived for as long as it has because of one simple rule: DM’s prerogative. What this means is no matter what action a player decides he or she would like to take, the DM has the final say on all rules. The DM can make judgments on what is and is [...]
The most obvious encounter is the combat encounter. The other articles in this series were aimed at adding other types of encounters instead of combat to keep things interesting and varied in a campaign, and promoting player character balance by increasing the value of non-battle skills to a player.
In this part, we instead look [...]
Another form of encounter that plays out well is the Puzzle Encounter. The encounter challenges the players directly, and relies little on either skills or combat. The ever popular "what do we need to do to move on?" gag is pretty standard fare, as is the "gotta figure it out before we die" method, but [...]
To keep things interesting, to give variation to play, and to keep characters from getting too awful strong in any one category (imbalance), DMs want to make sure that different types of encounters are placed into their campaigns. The primary encounters are categorized into three broad spectrums: Skill Challenges, Puzzles, and [...]