Scales of War Dungeon Master notes - house rules, etc.

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General Notes

I encourage my players to be creative with their characters, feel free to take Feats, Rituals, Races and Classes that come from any of the WotC Books if they want to, I have a subscribtion to DnDInsider, so I will be able to keep up with the books, even if I don’t buy them all.

 

Character Death

If your character dies, like really all the way dies, all hope is not lost.  Since sometimes the dice hate players, and you have invested time in these guys (plus it is in the rulebook) there will be Raise Dead rituals available.  They will cost what the Player’s Handbook says and be available at major cities (there might be someone in Brindhol who can take care of you, but it could be hard to find them).  With all that said, however, I sort of hate making death meaningless.  The PHB says you need a part of a dead person to perform the ritual, and it can restore them to life; I hate this.  If you get killed, and your buddies bring back your pinky, raise dead will fail.  If they bring back your whole body, less your severed arm, you will come back, but without your arm.  You get decapitated, the ritual will work, long enough for you to die all over again once your head runs out of air.  In a nutshell, death may not be the end, but it sure does suck.  I do want you all to seriously consider not having a character come back from the dead more than once.  Not a hard rule, but a guideline I’d like to stick to.

 

Skill Challenges

This is basically how I plan on running Skill Challenges.  I will try to keep this up-to-date.

  • Skill Challenge (SC) is devised. This is either part of a written adventure, or one I try to put together. These have a set of Skills and DCs for each of the skills that determine the progress in the SC. Some SCs will have special rules, that remain hidden from you unless they are revealed. In some Challenges, any Intimidate attempt would fail the challenge; you could discover this with an Insight roll of 15 or higher, or by using Intimidate and failing. In that same Challenge, a Diplomacy of 20 could either be a victory or remove a failure. Some Skills have both a success and failure threshold, some are limited on how many successes they can achieve.

 

  • Characters roll initiative, using the primary attribute of the challenge for initiative: for example, in Diplomacy-heavy challenges, a Charisma roll would be used instead of standard Initiative. I want some sort of order so that people aren’t talking/typing all over each other the whole time.

 

  • Characters take turns applying their skills to the Challenge at hand.
a) You can make a basic skill check, and if it is listed in the SC as one of the skills I will just compare your roll to the written DC and let you know how the author intended that usage.
b) You can also choose to assist another character’s roll, with a 1–9 resulting in a −2 to their roll, and a 10–20 being a +2.
c) If you come up with a creative use of an ability, I will come up with a DC on the spot, based on the situation and your usage. Coming up with a particularly interesting (and appropriate) use will usually grant you an auto-success. I have not been doing this next part, but I think I will from now on: when you suggest a course of action, I will tell you the basic difficulty: Easy (~10), Medium (~15), Hard (~20). These numbers will adjust based on your level (likely by 1/2 your level), and could be higher or lower by a few numbers. After you know the difficulty, you have the option to not carry out your idea.
d) You may simply skip a turn. Instead of counting a character who does nothing as a Failure, I will track the number of Skips by the party in general. Three Skips are equal to one Failure.

 

  • I report the status of the Challenge in the form of “X Successes, Y Failures, Z/3 Skips” to the status. The Skip count will reset when a Failure is achieved from too many of them.

 

  • Win or lose, you will get XP for the event.  SCs just modify what you need to do in the adventure.