At Will

Everyone loves a good chase or Ben Hur moment, but handling any kind of high-speed encounter poses a significant challenge to the DM and the players:  speed.

Most things are just too darn fast. Your average character moves 80 ft. per round on foot (16 spaces double move at a run). If a round is roughly 6 seconds, the maximum speed for a character is 9 miles per hour. The average horse’s top speed is 37 mph. Assuming that’s a double move at a run, the horse travels 64 squares per round. And that’s a horse, on the ground. You would think the air speed of a dragon would be even faster.

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What is the true measure of an adventurer?  Is it his skill with the blade? His knowledge of the arcane?  The magical items he wields?

Everything mentioned can be taken easily. No, what defines an adventurer –a hero — is his Spirit. The ability to carry on despite insurmountable odds, the capacity to reach deep within himself to tap new reservoirs of strength and mental toughness.  This is what will define your adventurer, what will cause stories to be told of him or her one day.

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Tired of the only being able to tire out your characters by yanking HPs and healing surges? What you need, friend, are extra resources.

What do I mean by a resource? There are many ways to define it, but to put it simply in an RPG context, a resource is anything that a PC cares about that can be quantified. This will vary from campaign to campaign, but if you can quantify it some way, and players want/need it, it’s a resource. The basic resources in 4e are your powers, your hit points, and your healing surges. I feel that when people decry the lack of “roleplay” or non-combat stuff, it’s for lack of other resources that can drive the game in other ways.

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The characters have been captured by their enemies.  If they don’t escape soon, they’ll be the next sacrifice to their adversary’s dark god.

Caged is the first in the series of the ‘Prison Break’ skill challenges. These challenges represent the various scenarios that occur when PCs are captured, and can be used in sequence or interspersed with roleplay/combat to build a full series of encounters.

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Scenario: You sleep and dream.  You see people and places that you know.  The rest of your party is here as well, but they seem to not be part of your dreams.  What is going on?  The dream seems fine at first, but it slowly begins to twist and bend.  Finally it breaks around the edges, and you are floating amidst dream-ether.  You can wish all you want to wake, but it will take more than prayer and desire to make that happen.  To wake out of this nightmare, you must navigate the terrain of your own anxieties and fears.

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