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I'm starting a Scales of War game with some friends of mine. I played 4 or 5 sessions of it as a player but decided to leave that game and start my own with people I know. I was wondering if anyone had any advice for someone DMing it, specifically? This will be my first time DMing 4e, but I have a little practice DMing 3.5.
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Jul 6, 2009 23:51
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:08 |
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CDW posted:Figure out what classes your players are using ASAP so you can either do the treasure for them, or have them do their wishlists. In my game everyone had never played before so I had to pick treasure for them. This was really helpful, thanks! I've got 3 experienced 4e players (one of whom is my DM in another game, the other two I play in that game with), two who have played 3.0/3.5 and one who has barely played except for a half-dozen or so sessions or 2e. The 4Ers are going to help me teach the new players and I've already asked them for their wishlists. I'm already looking at items for the others. I was already thinking since I have 6 players and Rivenroar only has 5 treasures I'm planning on doubling the number of treasures in there, but your post confirmed it was a good idea.  I'm also going to need to drop in a few more creatures with six players, but I might bump that up a few more if you think the fights are already too easy. Thanks so much for the advice. If you think of anything else, please let me know! I've got a fighter, warlord, wizard, druid, ranger and avenger playing, it should be a solid party but a little light on healing. I've cautioned everyone to think about picking up at least one healing potion, made sure at least one person has the heal skill, have already talked to everyone about remembering to use their Second Wind, any other ideas to help keep the party alive once the Warlord's used his Inspiring Word twice in a long encounter?
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Jul 7, 2009 15:37
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Question about the final fight in Rescue at Rivenroar, spoilered in case some people are playing through it right now. There are 5 minion skeletons in the room. Every round, all the skeletons that were defeated in the previous round reform and come back to (un)life. Do I give experience for all 5 only once, or do I give experience for each time one is killed? The module is unclear about it. I need to somehow give the party 800 more experience even after adding in a young green dragon fight on the way back to Brindol and counting their major & minor quest awards so they can get to level 3 before heading to the next module. Giving them loads of minion-killing XP there would help get them there without me upping the experience difficulty of the earlier fights even more, I've already balanced them out for our party of 6.
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Jul 30, 2009 15:34
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Lugubrious posted:Of course you could also lie and just say "hooray you magically have just enough experience to level up" I wanted to do XP this way but the supernerds in my group (most all of them) objected and now I send out a post-game wrapup with exact XP count because they really wanted me to.  So now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to give them the 800 XP I need for them to all level. CDOR Gemini posted:Anyway, to answer your question, it said to give experience for each one, and you could easily tweak it so that there are way more minions there if you want them to get more experience. More minions in this particular fight might just kill them, especially since they'd need 24 additional minions at this point to level up. I might start dropping more minions into regular encounters before they get to this point, though. Amusingly, though, on the topic of farming that fight, 3 of the people who play in the game I'm DMing are also in the game I play in, one of whom is the DM of that game. Last session we were fighting a large amount of creatures and a black pudding. It took us entirely too long to realize that attacking the pudding with weapons caused it to spawn more minions, plus the other things it was fighting with kept throwing things at it harmlessly to force it to spawn minions at us. By the time the fight was over, we'd gotten 3400xp purely off Black Pudding minions. We didn't farm it INTENTIONALLY, but I know the DM didn't mean for us to get quite that much XP from that fight. Thanks both of you for the advice!
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Jul 30, 2009 21:31
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For any DMs out there running Scales of War, I've found The Scales of War DM's Wiki to be an invaluable resource. It does a great job helping connect the modules, giving suggestions of things to change and also things to mention / do early on to make the stories flow together in later levels. Also it's really helped me "get" the ongoing story without giving too much away, and is great for quickly looking things up. I've been using it like nuts the last few weeks. Apparently there are large errors in continuity (like it just tells you that you players picked up a key in a previous module that that module didn't mention at all) that the wiki helps you avoid. Tomorrow night we start Siege of Bordin's Watch. I just printed out 2.5 pages of notes of things to remember to squeeze into the story before the end of night. I'm excited, though. It should be a lot of fun!
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Aug 27, 2009 23:57
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 18:08 |
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This is a Scales of War semi-specific question, so I'm going to use some spoilers a little later on. My party is currently in the middle of module #4, The Lost Mines of Karak. Whenever my group can't make a full game, I'll often run One-shots that take place in my game world, but outside the Elsir Vale to add more flavor and depth to the world. I try to somehow link them back to the Scales of War main game in some way, either vaguely or hinting at things to come. For instance, 2 months ago I ran the module Massacre at Fort Dolor, but had the father of one of my main game's PC's, (he's the 3rd son of a baron) hire the oneshot party to check out Fort Dolor which is in his jurisdiction. I replaced the endgame cave fight with Githyanki and the next time the PC in my main game visited Overlook, his mother had written him a letter telling him about what the PCs that went to Fort Dolor discovered. Tonight or tomorrow I'll be running another oneshot for a couple of players. I'm working on having them find an Inn that's had a massacre happen very recently, and was going to have a big part of it be the PC's trying to figure out what happened by following clues and piecing things together themselves. I was thinking in the end that they'd have to find a magic item that will open a portal to the Shadowfell, and find the Inn there is actually a cultist temple that worships Tiamat. Do you think that since the main party is only 6th level and is pretty far away from discovering Tiamat is behind the events of the main game it's too early to bring Tiamat into play? I think in the real game they don't discover it until the upper teens or early 20's. Again, this is with characters that aren't in the actual Scales of War game, but their players are. Any suggestions for what could be in the Shadowfell if it's too early for Tiamat? I don't want to reuse Githyanki. Thanks!
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May 28, 2010 12:54
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