This weekend the StupidRanger crew is heading out of town and that got me to thinking: how does everyone handle traveling long distances? I would like to recount one failed attempt on my part and open up the floor to obvious criticism and comments.

Rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ (wheels, not dice!)

In one of our recent campaigns, the party was tasked with traveling across country to locate pieces of an important artifact. It was all fun and games for awhile, I had a few episodic encounters put together for them to experience along the way and I augmented that with a few random encounters.

Even though the encounters fit into the landscape (feral wildlife and whatnot), eventually both the players and I tired of the encounters. They still had a long way to travel, and having already established this as a “dangerous” territory it didn’t stand to reason that they would be able to travel unmolested for a week or more.

How not to see the coastal plains on just three gold pieces a day.

Eventually, I ended up giving up and in the best interest of the players I handwaved a fair portion of the rest of the travel. I wasn’t very satisfied with this as a DM, I felt as if I should have come up with a more interesting way to transport them across hill and dale without just nixing the “dangerous” aspect of the terrain. The group ended up getting from Point A to Point B and things quickly picked back up once they were wired back into the plot, I suppose a good solution would’ve been not to establish plot points half of the coastal lands away.

Has anyone else run into this difficulty before? If so, how do you quickly move your group without having a random wizard show up and teleport them where they need to be conveniently?

Because your players see right through your B.S. anyway.

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One of my goals at the inception of Stupidranger.com was to provide some guidance for new players who may have only dabbled their toes in the sometimes chaotic ocean of D&D. So, I’m starting at the beginning with tutorials for those who are still waiting to take that plunge.

Welcome, New Players!

One of the greatest things about D&D is that it’s time you can spend with your friends. And most D&D friends are very supportive of sharing their addiction with newcomers. So, don’t worry. They’ll loan you dice, then help you figure out which ones to roll when needed. While they are pretty great about answering questions, it’s still nice to know a bit ahead of time so you know what’s going on.

Before all the adventuring starts, you’ll have to create your character. This character will start off as a series of numbers on a piece of paper, but I think you’ll find that after awhile, your character will be like a best friend without whom life is less interesting.

A Series of Numbers?

Yes, a series of numbers. Each of the following abilities will have a number (or statistic) assigned to it. The higher the number, the “more” of the trait. So, here’s your overview:

Strength (STR) – your physical.. well, strength. A high STR will give you an advantage in melee fighting and allows you to carry more stuff.

Dexterity (DEX) – your agility. Your DEX represents your coordination, your ability to dodge out of the way of danger, and your precision when using a ranged weapon, such as a bow.

Constitution (CON) – your stamina, your health, your ability to withstand tests of endurance. A high CON score equates to more hit points, meaning you can live through more of your enemy’s attacks.

Intelligence (INT) – your education or “book learning.” Your INT represents how much you’ve learned, and how much you are capable of learning.

Wisdom (WIS) – your common sense and intuition. A high WIS means you’re more aware of your surroundings, and you’re more likely to resist temptations.

Charisma (CHA) – your charming personality and dazzling good looks… if you have a high CHA. Your CHA helps determine how well you get along with others.

(You can read more about these abilities in Chapter 1 of the PHB.)

To create your character, you will roll six-sided dice (d6’s) to determine the numbers for each of these abilities. You’ll then assign those numbers to your abilities, a process generally known as “placing your stats.” But before you go randomly assigning numbers, you need to consider what character you want to play. So, next time, we’ll start exploring the race and class options available, and how best to place your stats.

It is time to discuss one of the unfortunate technical details that every DM has to overcome: scheduling.

Time changes everything.

In the beginning, we had a tight knit D&D group in the start so scheduling was not difficult. We usually played on Saturday nights, and it was fairly easy to coordinate conflicts and off nights. As years went on, our group grew by three additional members and scheduling became more and more difficult.

Eventually we amended our social contract to include a “one player out” rule, which meant that if one player could not make it we would continue playing and that character would be run by some other member of the group.

In practice, however, this did not end up working so well. We have two pairs of married people in our group, so many times we were short two players at a time. In addition, fairly erratic work scheduled tended to get in the way, so the social contract needs some work.

Different strokes for different folks

My co-DM and I were used to different levels of availability in D&D: he was more used to a classical “hard-lined” approach where everyone played each week and if you weren’t there you were just out of luck for that week’s experience. I tended to gravitate more towards character-centric plots, which didn’t work so well in that mode.

Due to family reasons, one of our players requested a “three weeks on, one week off” schedule, which tended to work pretty well for our group. We could schedule which week would be our off week, and those that felt like getting together would be available to play some other game, watch a movie, or just get together and hang out. This was officially dubbed “Alternagaming Night” and persists to this day.

Once again, communication is key.

Lately, things have shifted even more and we’ve gotten into an ad-hoc mode of trying to suit everyone’s schedules. Luckily, the weeks that people have not been available have been pretty consistent throughout our group and the only thing that suffers in this mode is our campaign pacing. We’ve had some luck with having a few longer sessions to re-establish pace, however nothing can replace regular gaming sessions for keeping a good campaign rolling.

I have no idea if this is a common trend, however it seems that availability and gaming frequency tends to shift over time. I don’t believe there is any silver bullet for solving the problem of gaming schedule vs. real life responsibilities, however I believe that communication is key. Get together and agree as a group what is acceptable and go from there, a good social contract means a happy gaming group (until the fireballs come out, that is).

Zero-Level arcane spells usually seem pretty lame compared to the awesome spells you can gain at higher levels. But some of them can also been exceedingly useful.

#1. Detect Magic. A must-have. One of my favorite uses: before you can take the Identify spell, you can figure out which items are magic. Prioritize which treasure to take with you when you can’t carry it all.

#2. Light. Abandon those torches… the darkness holds no mysteries for you. And since the target for Light is “object touched,” you can cast it on anything. In a middle of the night skirmish, cast light on an arrow and shot in the general direction of the disturbance to shed some needed light.

#3. Mending. Handier than a pocket-sized sewing kit. Fix those minor little inconveniencing issues that crop up while adventuring. Snapped lute strings or snapped bow strings… here’s your easy repair kit.

#4. Read Magic. Another must-have. Pick up scrolls or other spellbooks and instantly (well, almost instantly) understand the magical writings. This takes a lot of the effort out of casting from an acquired scroll.

#5. Mage Hand. Who doesn’t love Mage Hand? Basic telekinesis with little effort involved. As Dante pointed out, Mage Hand can lift the key from the hook on the wall to open your prison door. And if you tend toward the chaotic side of things, this may be an invaluable talent.

Our recent discussion on battle mats has led me to my next topic: miniatures.

Isn’t the miniatures discussion the same as the battle mat discussion?

Well, yes and no. Because of my previous distaste for battle mats, I never really had much of an opportunity to embrace miniatures in any meaningful way. Unlike battle mats, I can see the lure: being visual creatures, most guys really enjoy having a physical representation of their Good Guy to wave around. I, for one, loved action figures as a kid, and loved being able to make-believe that G.I. Joe or He-Man was kickin’ butt and taking names and I can see that carrying over to the world of minis. I have always had a small desire to get into incorporating miniatures into my gaming sessions, but many factors have been preventing me from diving in head first.

I have a hard time with several aspects of the miniature world. On several occasions I have considered using them in my campaigns, however cost was always the limiting factor. As a DM, I feel like I would need a lot of miniatures to illustrate my battles and scenarios appropriately (which is probably the point, from a marketing perspective) and that would cost more money than I’m willing to spend.

Also, I’m somewhat of a perfectionist and because of this I tend to be on a constant hunt to find “just the right thing.” After frequenting the many miniature booths at GenCon, I was struck with the feeling that finding the right miniatures for my campaign would be like finding a needle in a haystack. I imagine that this holds doubly true when shopping for a mini to represent your PC… I seemed to find the right character/pose with the wrong weapon/armor and this irritates my inner perfectionist. I ended up purchasing a handful of minis that were close, but not quite right, and we used them lightly before we fell out of the habit.

So what options have I?

I know they make many miniature kits, with plots and storylines built around that set of minis. I have never tried using these, as I like to have more artistic control over my campaign plots and have had some bad experiences with modules.

I know that the WotC miniatures are a game in and of themselves, and I have been intrigued by that however this doesn’t really help solve my problem of being able to leverage miniatures in my existing D&D sessions.

I have considered opening up the issue to our gaming group, and sharing the load of selecting the perfect minis to represent the characters that are playing. Each player could bring their own mini that they would hunt down, and I would be in charge of providing the “campaign setting” ones that would illustrate my side of the game.

How do you incorporate miniatures into your games, and mitigate the cost and necessity of accurate minis?

Let me begin this post by being very clear: as a rule, I generally dislike battle boards/mats/etc. I find them too time intensive to use “on the fly” and I have difficulty with matters of scale when forced to draw a scenario quickly. Most of our encounters happen on the road or in the wilderness, and drawing a believable landscape quickly is often problematic. Instead of using these products, I would prefer to describe the battle scenario (“you have three bandits surrounding you to fight, to your left you can see two more in the bushes”) and allow the players their own input.

If only it was this easy every time!

This week I had a chance to set up an encounter in a closed location. We have one player that is more visual than most, and he often requests a description or quick drawing of the ensuing battle. I grabbed the battle mat, drew out the room (it was a small room with a dias for giving a speech and some benches, so it it was easy) and away we went. It went much better than I expected, and the visual layout actually brought the characters more into the details of the battle which was nice. It did take considerably longer than I like to spend to keep it updated and move my bad guys around (there were many of them), so that part remained an annoyance.

Several years ago, we bought some “Dungeon Stamps” from Green Dragon Studio, These are extremely cool, they are small rubber stamps that represent common dungeon objects, such as crates, rocks, and other goodies.

By the time I would remember that I had them, the encounter was over and inking the stamps and laying them out tended to take quite awhile. The results were always extremely cool when we would decide to use them, but the added time investment in laying things out was almost always too much to bear and keep the session moving. As a result, we never really took to using them regularly.

You Tell Us: How do you use battle mats?

How do you handle performing DMing duties using a battle mat, and how do you handle drawing a suitably detailed wilderness environment on the fly? Are there any neat products or techniques that help expedite this process?

Once again, we would like to stop and say thank you to everyone that comes to us each day and reads what we have to say. We are nearing our second month of operation and today we passed the 10,000 pageview mark.

Just two weeks ago we were celebrating 3,000 pageviews and we were ecstatic, imagine how we feel getting to come back and share some love so soon!

Our analytics point toward a pretty healthy influx of new readers, which means that you all are telling friends about us. We appreciate the “positive buzz” and feedback that we have been getting on how to improve the site.

Last time we blogged, we received several queries regarding how we achieved the amount of readership that we currently have, and the answer is simple: we have a great community to live in.

One need look no further than our featured and favorite links to see the very welcome community of excellent gaming resources that help to make this site a success, I ask that you take a few minutes to visit a few new gaming blogs that you see to your right and get some of the good stuff that they’re laying down.

Thanks for everything, hopefully we’re on our way to 100,000 pageviews! As always, keep those suggestions and ideas coming!

Special prize to the person that wears this shirt to the most conventions next year! Send pics to contact@stupidranger.com.

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Recently, Jonathan Drain posted his picks for Top Five Fighter Feats. I like his picks… these are some really great feats! And I was inspired to share of some of my own favorites – for both fighters and non-fighters.

1. Weapon Finesse – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… this is a must for those characters whose Dexterity is better than their Strength. Add your Dex bonus to your attack to give yourself a better chance to hit the Big Bad. It doesn’t add to your damage, but it’s still a nice option for those Dex-based characters.

2. Dodge – How many times have you wished your AC was just a little higher? Dodge gives you that +1 that can help you keep you just a little bit safer. It’s not a huge bonus, and you do have to declare against which single target you set your Dodge, but it’s a little extra something.

3. Combat Casting – A nice addition to the spellcaster’s arsenal. Gain +4 to Concentration while casting defensively. That extra little bonus may make the difference between actually casting your spell off and letting it fizzle from lack of concentration.

4. Point Blank Shot – Your ranged weapon with melee capabilities… how awesome is that?! Even if you prefer to stay a nice, safe distance away from the chaos of melee fighting, this gives you the security that if melee comes to you, you’re not completely handicapped.

5. Two-Weapon Fighting – My newest favorite for melee fighters. In my mind, there’s something very poetic about a fighter wielding two weapons in a dance of deadly grace. The feat reduces the penalties to only -2 for each attack with two light weapons, and if you follow the feat ladder, you can add additional off-hand attacks.