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“The Cavern of Unending Woe? Subtitled ‘Abandon all hope, all who enter here’?” said Yara. “Surely you can’t be serious.” “Yara, I’m always serious,” said Kareem. So your players have explored a region: climbed its highest peaks, overcome its greatest challenges, or at least got all the stuff done that they were interested in getting …
The goal of a map is threefold: to facilitate the mechanics of travel, to illustrate the world your game is taking place in, and to provide choices for your players and characters. As the standard function of a map, making a map that facilitates travel is intuitive. For ease of use, you want to delineate …
However, they can also bog down pacing and damage that verisimilitude just as easily. As such, you want to ensure that your random encounters are making your wilderness a more vibrant, interesting place to adventure in. Your random encounters should accomplish some of the following: Save you time Save you work Push characters toward interesting …
For our purposes, we’re going to focus on three elements of giving a location character: What defines this place? How does this place interact with your setting? What can characters do in this place? You should start with the first question as it will guide you toward the others. There are exceptions. Such as, if …
Wilderness exploration has always been integral to the game. Even in its earliest forms, Outdoor Survival was considered an important addition while campaign structures like hex crawls and the West Marches setting have kept that tradition alive. In a genre dedicated to diving into the new and unknown, this is no surprise. The wilderness is …
Now that we have our system for creating skirmishes, let’s put it into action. Our hypothetical party is a four-character group at 3rd level, consisting of an elven ranger, a dwarf warlock, a hobgoblin rogue, and a human bard. We know that while they put out a lot of damage and are very mobile, they’re …
While manipulating the encounter difficulty chart is a simple way to indicate how factors affect combat difficulty, it’s also imprecise, doesn’t have many gradations, and can be misleading. It still has its uses in adjusting the broad overview of an encounter but is less useful for dealing with more granular modifications, like how NPC roles …
Fire lanes are a concept from skirmish wargaming that describe concrete areas of line of sight that allow attacks to be performed at range. Line of sight blockers describe terrain elements that block line of sight and therefore attacks and abilities. Movement blockers describe terrain elements that block or impede movement even if they don’t …
Art of Skirmishing: The Map is Not the Territory Read More »
A troll in a field is dead. A troll under a bridge is dramatic. A troll in your privy is terrifying. The danger of enemies in 5th edition is based heavily on the circumstances in which they are encountered. Skirmishing doesn’t change this fact but does change the nature of those circumstances. Previously, you’d have …
Selim’s dagger came free, the high priest’s corpse slumping over the altar. “That’s it then,” he said. “Let’s see what we’re getting out of this mess.” “Boss,” said Faridah, “we may want to nix the looting.” “Why would—” As he turned, Selim saw the ritual turned loose. The temple was falling apart, tendrils of noxious, …
To make a skirmish a skirmish, you will need an objective as well as a condition for ending combat. In a standard combat, these are the same thing. Once a side runs out of combatants, the other side has completed its objective, and the fight has ended. The game is designed around this paradigm, a …
The first step of creating any successful skirmish is to set compelling stakes and objectives for that skirmish and to communicate them clearly to the players. The worst-case scenario for a skirmish is the players not caring about the outcome of the fight or not understanding what they need to do to effect that outcome.
You could not call such bloodshed a victory. Dwarven pike had met draconic spear wall, neither buckling until lines were met. Hradakh had been in the thick of it, stabbing his way through the brutal melee, and when the fighting stopped, he and his dragonborn kin held the field.
5th edition isn’t designed for massive combats.
NPC allies are a reasonably common feature in home campaigns and published adventures. While a decent way to showcase the allies that characters are invested in, characters who are important to the plot, or just friendly combatants too important to be represented as some sort of disposable minion, they can be annoying to use.
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