Category: 4e DnD

Organizing Your Campaign with Freemind

I like a convoluted campaign. I like having 2-4 subplots running with hints and lures dropped along the way and as the players run through the game, more and more is revealed. Occasionally they complete an arc and have that ‘eureka’ moment when I leave a little clue about something else. It’s great fun and I think they enjoy the non-linear storyline. Giving the group a choice of A or B (and sometimes C) works as they don’t necessarily feel they are forced into plodding along one direction, plus either choice works for me as I’m typically somewhat prepared for each decision (although sometimes I fall short on that).

One tool I’ve picked up for that is Freemind. It is a great freeware program that allows you to construct mind maps. You can save it in a variety of formats, add links and comments, and have a lot of small features to help organize your mind map. Freemind allows you to incorporate all those odd plot lines and keep them organized so your main story can keep on track. More importantly, you can keep all the NPCs aligned to the right arcs.

I use a lot of symbols and color schemes to keep things organized. Bad guys for certain arcs have a matching color to the deeds they are responsible for. I also throw good NPCs into the mix to pair off against villains all tagged with a different color. When I add players into the mix, I also give them small icons that I can tag with particular adventures and NPCs.

The icons allow me to tailor various villains or storylines to a particular player for some more depth in a certain adventure (say an old villain from a character backstory, or a 1 shot solo adventure I ran a player through). Very quickly I can manage a lot of simultaneous arcs, and keep all the story threads neatly arranged. It also is pretty easy to edit, so I can add branches to ideas if new things roll into an arc by the player’s actions.

Give Freemind a whirl. It is a great tool to help congeal those nifty campaign ideas into something organized and readable.

4ED and Fun

4ED&DYeah, I ate up AD&D when I was younger. The whole ‘fire and forget’ magic user, demi-humans, you name it, I played the game. It was cool. And who the hell was I to question anything? After all, at the time AD&D was the only fantasy RPG out there.

Fast forward several years. I dabbled in other RPGs for other genres, but left D&D in the ditch. I finally got back into the game for a 3.5 campaign and found…well…some things just sucked the fun out of it. Maybe it was being away from the absolute canon that was Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, but there were elements in that version which were simply just no fun at all. 4ed shook up some things by making a few changes.

Cool stuff, all the time – Forget the one fight day. You know that big fight where the casters blow all their spells and are now powerless, so you all decide to take an 8 hour rest? Not anymore. And more importantly, your melee types also have a few choices other than doing the same attack, over and over again. Yeah, a variety of abilities and you can use them more than just once a day. Fun stuff.

No Cleric? No problem – Well most of the time at least. Healing surges are great. No longer is a party totally crippled without a healer type. And the types that do heal typically just make using healing surges more efficient. Now Clerics are more than just walking band aids in chain mail. They get to get into the action a little more also.

Melee or magic, it works the same – As I’m DMing some new RPers, they had a hard time wrapping their heads around the save mechanic and spells in 3.5. Melee attacks were simple enough. Roll a D20 and check against the AC. But spells got things wonky. Sometimes it was a touch attack. Sometimes you automatically hit, but the creature had a save. Spell casting was clunky.

Now you have a uniform mechanic. Roll versus a defense type and then roll damage. Saves are just for ongoing effects. Simple and easy to remember.

Save or die is ditched – Yeah I’m sure this upsets the iron man RPers out there. But having an absolute, one-shot die roll decide the fate of a character sucks. There is a little room now for flubbing a few die rolls. I love it. I don’t feel like I have to pull punches now when DMing. At the same time, my players know a single missed save doesn’t mean they have to roll up a new character.

4ED is not perfect, but I think they added a few tweaks to the game to bring the fun back. And isn’t having fun what it is all about anyways? I guess the fervor has settled down over 4ED hate/love, but feel free to pipe up with your thoughts. And if you haven’t tried it, why not give it a whirl for free?

So I started playing D&D…

As a simple play on words from my blog’s title, I’ll be posting a bit on fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons and dispensing my words of wisdom (or some might say, my idiotic thoughts). I recently got back into playing D&D after taking a long break from the game. I had not really played RPGs since my early years in college, and have not played D&D since high school. And way back then in high school I was playing 1st edition AD&D.

I jumped into a 3.5 campaign for a few months while I slowly accumulated the 4ED books. The people I were playing with were fervently against 4ED. They expressed opinions it was dumbed-down and WoW for wannabe RPers. Me? I had a different opinion. I loved the newest edition.

4ED is far from perfect, but coming back into playing D&D I found it far more enjoyable to play over the 3.0-3.5 editions. Maybe it was my time away from RPGs. Maybe it was my gaming time spent mostly with boardgames and miniature wargames. Yet I found the combination of tactical combat, streamlining a lot of the mechanics, and expanding the power use for characters all sorts of fun in 4ED. I’ll stand by my opinion that 4ED is a fun, fantasy roleplaying game and that it has a few strong points over the previous editions.