The Fourth Coming: Heroic Trials
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… and Paragonic trials, and … Epical trials. Encounters are what fills the play time of D&D, creating the adventure in the adventure.
The Dungeon Master’s Guide begins covering this in Chapter 3: Combat Encounters, before all that other shit about storylines and campaigns. It’s little more than a supplement to the Players Handbook combat chapter. Extras covered are things like forced Marching, Mounted combat and Flight - which is thankfully simplified. Just move two squares per round to stay on the wing, stay under your altitude limit, avoid crashing if your higher than your safe distance or halt descent with DC 30 check … it’s a bit more simple.
Fighting with poison, fighting disease, fighting fish; the star of this section is the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level chart. To enable you to improvize quickly this baby provides easy, medium and hard difficulties for whatever a creative player could conceive of as well as different damage intensities depending of if the manuever is comparable to an At-Will or Encounter power of that level. The 4th level halfling swings one handed from a chandelier to kick an old man - an EVIL old man - down a flight of steps, you’ve got it right there: swing is DC 21, Strength vs his Fortitude attack, 3d6+4 tumbling damage.
After this we roll into building encounters. Monsters are now categorized by similar roles as the player characters: Artillery, Brutes, Minions, or Leaders to name some. This, along with the blatant expression of movement in squares instead of feet, marks D&D’s return to it’s miniature battles roots. Classes and monsters serve certain tactical functions against each other. This helps ensure that everyone has something to do, and I can print out character counters to serve as minis - without spending on what are essentially action figures, raising my geek credt too high - so it’s a good thing.
Encounter construction I’m liking alot. Chose the level of encouter you want, with each having an experience point (XP) value for standard monsters. Multiply the XP value by the number in the hero party to figure out your XP budget. Populate the encounter with baddies until you’ve spent your budget. TAH-fuck’in-DAH! Done. The Catch: you should watch out for bunches of monsters 4 levels below the party as being too simple to be fun; a five levels higher monster will be putting the team on a skewer for shish kabob.
They further provide a few encounter templates to let you do the math quicker for just opening up the Monster Manual to pick the creatures of the right level relative to the heroes. Some advice on varying terrain and examples of fantasy type setting elements finishes things up nicely in this chapter.
The DM’s Toolbox, Chapter 11, should have followed here since it’s complementary. Rules are given for increasing monster powers by adding equipment and templates - good examples given. Included are guidelines for creating monsters that further lets you under 4th editions mechanics and allow you to add newness. Teaching DM’s to fish, bravo.
Most impressive in the book are the Non-Combat Encounters, specifically the Skill Challenges. Set a level, which will determine the skill check difficulties by the afore praised chart. Choose a level of complexity 1 to 5, this tells ya how many rolls are need to succeed and how many strikes ya get. Choose you skills involved and consequences, you’re all done. PLUS, XP is figured by multiplying complexity by level. The writers include several fully fleshed out example scenarios from negotiations to chases to interrogations.
Chapter five also features puzzles, not much new here - though they can be run as Skill challenges too, and traps. I found the traps kind of an intersting choice to detail since the Difficulty Class and Damage table can be used to freestyle them. Mostly they’re detailed like monsters with XP awards for level.
Despite it’s mechanical simplifications, all in all I think the DMG could have been an extra chapter in the Players Hanbook. It’s only half useful, but in some ways the highlights carry the dead weight, but not by much.
Next we’ll look at the Monster Manual and it’s dark denizens.
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