A couple of questions for the DMs out there.

Cafe Society
1

So I’ve been running a 3.5 D&D game for more than a year now, and I’ve got a couple of things I’d like a bit of help on.

First, spell targetting. I have two spellcasters in my group, and they tend to take a lot of time targetting area spells. ‘If you put the fireball here, it will get these 3, but here it will get 4, etc’ It doesn’t feel right that you can precisely place an explosion several hundred feet away, behind a line of large moving targets. How do you deal with this? I know one DM who just placed a flat 6 second time limit on action determination. If you didn’t tell him what you wanted to do at the end of the 6 seconds, your character stood and drooled. I kind of don’t want to do that, but it looks like I might have to. Anyone ever implement some kind of targetting rule for area effect spells?

Second, magic item (& spell) selection. Back in 2nd ed, you got the magic items the DM gave you. Requesting that a mage enchant a sword for you was likely to be met with laughter, because it tok a long time and was stupidly expensive. In 3.5, players can waltz into pretty much any mages shop and place an order for a flaming sword +1 with a side of haste potions and expect to have it in days. One thing I’ve noticed is that the players tend to treat the DMG as a catalog. Magic items are just another thing on the list to buy. It doesn’t feel right. Is this just me being an old fogey, or might it be a good idea to try to limit it?

Third, are your characters heroes or mercenaries? My characters seem to focus too much on money. They’ve turned people down for things because they felt they wouldn’t get paid enough for it. They’ve actually stopped in the middle of an adventure and argued about whether they should do $dangerous_thing based on how much they were being paid. These are definitely not heroes of legend, they’re just sellswords. Is this bad? It doesn’t feel right to me. I’ve had to abandon or repackage material I’ve written for the game because the characters just walked past it looking for more money. Should I worry about this?

Fourth, too many books. It feels like there’s way too much source material for a DM to have a good grasp on all of it. My players are always digging up prestige classes and spells and races from different books that I have to go read for myself because I don’t remember them. Has anyone made an attempt to limit the availability of material in a game? The only rule I have on that right now is that if the player wants to use something in the game they have to have the book at the table, I don’t want to hear ‘I read it on the internet’ or ‘I downloaded it and have the file on my computer’.

Fifth, min/maxers. I have two players I’m a little worried about with this. The first is a spellcaster who seems to think that when she casts a spell it should always work. When her target makes a save, suddenly ‘That spell never works, they always save, etc’. The spell in question is always something like hold person or tashas hideous laughter, some fight ending spell. If that spell gets through, the fight’s over for that target. So she’s got a new character (sorcerer Heartwarder of Sune) that seems to be designed specifically for boosting her cha to extreme heights. Now her save DC is going to be rediculous. The other is a player who wanted to bring a Fey’ri (Races of Faerun, go look it up) into a low level game. I wouldn’t allow it. So he played another character for a while with the intent of bring the first character in when I thought it was ok. So now the new character is in, and it’s just like I thought: really powerful. His big thing is that he has a huge DR. He’s a fighter, so it’s actually difficult to significantly hurt him. If I put them against something that can take him, the other party members are screwed if the fight doesn’t go exactly right. I don’t like introducing things specifically to counter player abilities, that’s just as bad as min/maxing. Anyone else ever deal with something like this?

Sixth, swapping characters. I’ve had several players recently decide to replace their current characters with new ones. I don’t really want to force a player to play a character they don’t want, so I allow it. I like to write stuff into the game for specific characters when I can, and switching throws this off. Anyone ever put restrictions on new characters? Do you let them come in at the level of the rest of the party?

I just want to hear from other DMs about these things. This isn’t my first time DMing, but it’s the longest campaign I’ve had in 3.5 so far.

2

Disclaimer: I am not a DM, but this is how my DM handles stuff. Some things I say will be how I would do it, because my DM hasn’t encountered it yet so I don’t know how he would do it.

I’d say you roll to see if you aim it properly, with a higher DC for ‘5 squares north, 1 square east’ than for ‘north, at the bad guy’.

Well, ordering that flaming sword is still going to be expensive, and it will rely on finding a mage able to do that for you. If you’re high-level in a big city, I don’t see any problem with being able to do that, because your character still has to be able to use it effectively. Otherwise, you’re probably not going to able to get it.

If that’s the way they want to play, the best thing for you to do is plan accordingly. Write modules that will offer them loot. Also, you should probably discuss this with them.

Personally, my DM vets stuff based on whether or not he feels it breaks the game. For example, he didn’t let us put in flaws because he felt that most of them did crap damage and allowed us to get valuable stuff. He also refused to allow most metamagic feats.

I’d say … um… yeah, I got nothing for this.

I’ve got a guy like that in my party. He’s a strong fighter, and can rage to get even more powerful. He hits easily for high damage, and it’s hard to hit him. However, he’s been color-sprayed at least once, and he just generally has a crappy save against spells. There’s a difference between specifically playing against their strengths, and providing a varying array of opponents that challenge different areas of a party’s offensive capabilities.

I myself like what the DMG says: replacement character is a level or two lower than the original character. This way, people can’t just switch in and out willy-nilly, but they also get to try new things without getting hurt too much.

3

Do the alignments of the characters match this sort of behavior?

4

I don’t see how there could be an alignment violation in that. It involves neither law nor chaos and being good doesn’t mean that you have to drop everything to deal with every sob story that comes along (and if it did then you’re just opening up a really ugly can of worms in the already ugly alignment system).

hotflungwok is just dealing with the problem of the reward system in D&D which has existed all the way back to the white box. Since the players can only be rewarded financially or with XP there’s little incentive for not maximizing either of those rewards. hotflungwok, I would advise just accepting it and tailoring your efforts to what they want to play. The first alternative is offering enough XP reward on the stuff without financial reward and you don’t want to go there since players will just game that too. The second, more complete solution is to drop D&D and move to a game that rewards players for behaving certain ways but that tends to be a scary jump for people who are stuck on D&D.

5

I don’t have a lot of experience DMing, but I can offer advice as best I can.

Ideally, your players ought to be strategizing while other turns are being taken. The spellcasters in my group are usually pretty quick about placing area spells, because they’ve been thinking about it while others have been acting. Personally, I have no issue with someone taking a minute to decide what they want to do; the rationale is that the PCs are typically going to be better trained and tactically minded in-game than the players, and while it might take me a couple moments to figure out who best to attack, my trained paladin would probably make the same decision in a fifth of the time.

This is completely up to you as the DM. Our DM prefers to randomly roll up loot, so we tend to get odd things we can’t precisely use. If we’re going to be an effective group, we need to be able to convert random items into useful ones, so he allows us to order enchantments. There’s also something worthwhile in building your own awesome weaponry; while it’s cool in some respects to come across a slick +3 frost longsword in a dragon’s hoard, it’s cool in other respects to have a sword you’ve had with you since the beginning grow in power as well. My main character uses a ranseur which was found, but I’ve held on to his original glaive because I’d like to eventually boost it up to a usable level at some point. Mm. Glaive.

If that sits ill with you, then you need to set the rules with your players, and you also need to be able to skew the loot so they can use what they find more easily.

All I can say here is, if that’s what the characters are like, then you need to play to that. D&D campaigns are as much about what the players do as what the DM describes, and if they prefer to fight for money, noble quests aren’t going to sit too well. If you have a noble quest you really want them to embark on, you guys need to talk and reconcile the differences in what you really want to get out of the game, because either you won’t be happy or they won’t.

This is completely within your purview as DM. Splatbooks aren’t meant to be all-inclusive, just potential sources, and you’re not expected to accomodate material from them if it doesn’t work with your setting.

I can’t really speak effectively to the rest of this paragraph, but I can say that counters are not cheap. If all you throw at someone is counters to their build, that’s no fun, but it does absolutely no harm to have one encounter feature creatures that the sorc can’t deal with but the fighter can, then another encounter have creatures that the sorc can deal with but the fighter has trouble…things like that. Your job as DM is to provide the players with a challenge, and if they’re running roughshod over your creatures or vice versa, you need to step back and re-evaluate your monster choices. Easier said than done, I know.

This is something of an issue in our current group. There’s been counts 9 characters between 5 players, and only one character has been with the group since the very beginning of the campaign. You can’t very well force someone to play a character, since the goal is for everyone to have fun, but you do want to caution them that you’d prefer it if they took the time to find a character they could stick with for most of the game. Also, if you can encourage them to bring a character back, that would be good as well.

Anecdote: One of our players decided she needed to take a break from the game for a few months. Since my character was linked to hers, it only made sense for him to leave as well. This was useful, since I’d been wanting to switch characters. I swapped out for a new character coming in at the same level (and wealth level) as the current party, and we completed the adventure that way. We’re taking a holiday break, and when we return the new character will part ways from the main group and the previous two will return, which IMO works out very nicely. It gave me a chance to play something new and won’t take away from having the same characters in the overall arc.

6

I was thinking of his comment that “They’ve actually stopped in the middle of an adventure and argued about whether they should do $dangerous_thing based on how much they were being paid.”

That seems chaotic to me.

7

Nature of the beast I’m afraid. Keep in mind that anything the players can do the NPCs can do as well. So if they’re going to pick and choose where spells go with such precision then so should enemy wizards. I can see some justifcation for allowing players to use precision spells. Their characters are presumably experts who spend all their time practicing the fine art of spell casting. It seems like they’d have a pretty good idea of how and where to place spells with area affect.

Even back then the game was built with the assumption that players of X level would have access to Y amounts of magic items. Personally I like players having some control over what their characters want.

I’ve always felt that way about D&D back through 1st edition at least.

This seems to be the nature of D&D that I’m familiar with. Players adventure to gain rewards to make them more powerful so they can go on even more adventures to get even more powerful and so on and so forth. Though in my games this isn’t much of a problem as we generally get all sorts of phat loot, yo!, after almost every adventure. It’s a bigger problem in games like Shadowrun where you often put your life, and millions worth of equipment, on the line for a job that only pays you 5,000 nuyen.

This might be an alignment issue. If I’m lawful I’ll probably complete the job no matter what because I said I would. If I were neutral or chaotic good I’d probably complete the job just because it’s the right thing to do though I’d complain about my lack of compensation.

Simple solution, just don’t let them use that stuff. Or compromise and allow them to use it only after you’ve had a chance to look over the material and decide whether or not it would fit into your game.

Typically the monsters in our games will go after whoever does the most damage against them. So if big bad fighter is up front doing all the damage then he’s going to be the one getting hit the most.

All the time. In the current campaign I’m participating in there were to be no evil characters. I’ve had two characters killed thus far (the first one was my choice because I didn’t like the character) and I’m making a third non-evil character. I’ve got no problem having players make characters that are going to fit into a campaign though I remain flexible and willing to work with others.

Marc

8

I haven’t DMed in a long long time, but I did a lot of it way back when.

1 - I never had a problem letting player’s cast a ranged AOE spell specifically where they wanted to. For them (and me) it was one of the fun tactical parts of the game, although I can see how it might seem a little unrealistic.

2 - I think we played 3.0, so I’m not sure what the current rules on item creation are. The worlds we played in were fairly low-magic, so a mage willing to enchant items was a rare thing, even in a large city. But I also never felt compelled to use the books to the letter. If you don’t like item-creation rules, just make the process take a week, or a month, or cost more, or whatever seems reasonable (without all your players quitting).

3 - Well…my groups have decided at the outset of a campaign what our goals/plans/themes would be. Our best/longest campaign was a Thieves Campaign…that’s right, everyone rolled up a rogue. But in other campaigns, I would find myself getting a feel for what the players wanted early, and gearing the adventures towards that. If I found out they are mercenaries, I would toss Temple of Elemental Evil out of the pile of possible modules, and start coming up with things more compatible.

4 - Too many books, agreed. In my campaigns, it’s understood that nothing is law until it got my approval. Generally law would start out as PHB and DMG, and whatever house rules we had. And I would never incorporate a whole book, it would be one rule at a time after I had reviewed it. i.e., I wouldn’t say “every prestige class in the Tome of Ultimate Badassness is allowed”, but instead if someone wanted to use a certain class, I’d review it and we’d discuss it before it was allowed. That’s a lot of work, I suppose, but less work than memorizing every accessory.

5 - I think I was lucky in that my players were pretty hard-core Role-players. But there’s always some min-maxers in every group, I suppose. I don’t really remember what I did, but I think maybe part of the reason it wasn’t too much of a problem is because of #4 - we didn’t use a ton of extra rules. If someone wanted to do something special, I’d assume it was for role-playing reasons and would have no problem in making the penalties greater than the bonuses (i.e., “I want to be half-tarrasque”, “Okay, you have -6 Cha, +1 Str, and you’re unable to wear armor”. Yes, I’m exaggerating, my players didn’t hate me. Too much.).

6 - I didn’t have a problem with character swapping, but it didn’t happen often. It would generally only be allowed when the situation would call for it - i.e, in town. And I believe the new character got 1/2 xp of the old, or something to that effect.

Man, I miss playing that game… :slight_smile:

9

Well, in all my games, I make it clear up front what is allowed, what is not allowed, but that we can discuss either if desired. Saves me from several of what you’re suffering.

  1. If they’re taking too much time on targeting spells, say “You’re taking too much time on targeting your spell, either cast it now, or we’re moving on to the next player’s action.” If the other players dilly-dally along with them, then they all lose their action that round, and the orcs get to attack again. Cures that problem pretty damn quick.

  2. 3.5 is based upon the PCs having appropriate and relevant magic items for their level. In particular, DR is a bitch at higher levels unless you’ve got the specialized materials like adamantine, silver, whatever. I personally have run where there is no Magic Emporium down the street, and the PCs get the magic items that they find – but I recognize they’re underpowered, and adjust the opposition accordingly. That’s one of the things I tell players upfront.

  3. It’s D&D. Yes, they’re mercenaries. I know that will happen, so I plan for it beforehand. (last AD&D game I played, the DM gave me a Cleric of the god of Greed to play, so I got to be a greedy mercenary and claim it was only good roleplaying! fun!)

  4. There are too many books. You’re not supposed to use them all on the same game. Choose which ones you’ll use, tell your players beforehand, and if they want to bring in oddball PrCs or races or whatever, let them know you’ll have to have plenty of time to review it. Personally, I’m willing to negotiate for something similar, but know damn well when my players are trying to pull a fast one on me to bring Pun-Pun into the game. In those cases, I point at them, Nelson laugh “ha-ha” and tell them they’re being a stupid dork to think I’d want to turn my game into their masturbatory power fantasy.

  5. Wait, I got to the masturbatory power fantasy point too early. Anyway, I say upfront – “if you twink your PC, I twink all the monsters”. And I point out that I’m perfectly willing to post their twinkapalooza character online somplace for people to dissect and suggest horrible things about, whereas they have absolutely no idea what I’m going to drop on them next. They get over it pretty fast.

  6. Eh, rolling up new characters is what RPGs are all about. Even if you dock them a level or two on the new character, with the 3.5 XP rules they’ll catch up so quick it’s really no penalty. If I absolutely need a PC for some plotline or other, I make sure the player knows that and agrees to it beforehand.

Ordinarily, my players are not power-munchkin min-maxers and prefer sub-optimal choices because of characterization or roleplaying they want to do. But there’s something about D&D that turns their brains to mush, and then I have to be the adult. If necessary, you just have to come out and tell them “You are making this unfun for me. I’m not DMing any more if you continue to make it unfun in this way. Either we find a way for it to be fun for everyone, or we find something else to do.”

And then, stick to it.

10

Lots of good stuff, thankx guys.

My campaign is in Forgotten Realms. The characters have spent most of the first part in or around Silvermoon & The High Forest, and the more recent part in Waterdeep. They just reached 8th level. I have a half-drow wizard (changing to a human female sorcerer/Heartwarder), a Fey’ri fighter, a human thief/cleric of Selune, an air genasi fighter/wizard, and a dwarven ranger (changing to a human fighter). The thief/cleric used to be a wemic bard, and the fey’ri fighter used to be a half-drow ranger/fighter. It’s been a wierd group.

I’m very flexible in my GM style, I never force the players to do anything. If they miss an adventure hook, I just change it a bit and present it some other way. I absolutely hate railroading and refuse to do it. If the players figure out some way to get around some huge obstacle, then they get around it. Good for them. I also let the dice fall where they may. Two games ago the wizard was killed by a dragon they were fighting, after she gained it’s attention by hitting it with a 4HD enervation. First player death in the game, but there were some close calls.

These are just some things I’ve kind of been thinking about throughout the game. We haven’t had any real problems with these things (although the new fey’ri might be the first) but I wonder about them.

I don’t want the magic item system to go back to the way it was in 2nd ed, but it just feels like magic items have lost their specialness. They’re just another thing to shop for, the same way you pick the best kind of armor or weapon.

My party is mainly neutral or neutral/chaotic good. I don’t allow evil characters in the game. The money grubbing isn’t really against their alignments, but it kind of feels wrong. I don’t expect them to do everything for free, but seeing them turn down good causes because they weren’t getting paid enough, even though they had nothing in particular to do at that point made me wonder. It’s not like it happens all the time, but it has happened. I’m working on something to play on it, something that could easily develop into a bigger storyline.

I do restrict things I think are too powerful, or don’t fit the game. I’ve disallowed the warlock completely, and refused to let a player make a dread necromancer. Probably a few other little things. I myself include things from different books, just to give the players something new. I’ve also broken them of saying things like ‘Oh its just a $monster, we can take it no problems’.

On the fey’ri, I think the thing that bugged me the most was how he finished the character. He did take the DR 10/+1 (its not required), and this was actually my biggest problem with it. It’s the reason I disallowed him from taking it originally. So when he hands me the character last game I see that he has taken a feat that boosts natural DR, making it 12/+1. It just feels like the ‘you give an inch, they take a foot’ kind of thing. I could be wrong, but that’s just my gut reaction to it. The character is far from invulnerble, but it makes it harder on me to come up with fitting and challenging encounters that don’t look tailored to the players.

The thing that really made me look at swapping characters was when the wizard died, the player said that they didn’t like the fact that they took a level hit when they got ressurected. So if they couldn’t get a true ressurection (9th level spell, $25k in diamonds), they were just going to make a new character. I had let another new character come in at the same level previous to this. I didn’t like that.

11

This, I think, could reasonably be labeled as ‘taking advantage of your permissive nature’. If your campaign is at all focused on roleplaying and not just wargaming (which isn’t bad in and of itself, mind), then this is a cheap twink’s tactic.

That said, I’d allow it in my game, but I would enforce a full level reduction (ie, you come in at the minimum XP for the level, rather than the midpoint like the res spells allow). Either way, a level lower is hardly a big deal once you’re past level 5. Power levels don’t change hugely, and the lower level person gets more XP relative to the rest of the party anyway.

My character was the first PC death in our campaign, and we only barely had the funds for reincarnation. Much was made of the tough-as-nails 6’+ human male with 16s in Str and Con being reincarnated as a 4’10" elven woman. :smack: I grumbled about it at first, then rolled with it even though my character continued grumbling. The level decrease didn’t hurt in the least. I’m looking at working with the DM to have the character return to the group as a dwarf next time we play. :smiley:

12

If you don’t think it fits the game, fine. But dude, the warlock… is nowhere near “too powerful.” It’s not even that close to “powerful.” Seriously. It’s rather underpowered.

I’m not saying it’s pants, but the fun of dinking away with your teeny Eldritch Blast soon pales while the wizard is mowing down hordes of foes with fireballs and the like. God forbid you’ve got a druid in the party, because you’ll really be wanting Eldritch Viagra for your teeny Blast, then.

Some of the invocations have potential for abuse (e.g., the Ebon Tentacles, and Fly ones). But by the time the warlock gets to drop them willy-nilly, the wizards have far more egregious offenses to spray around. And I found the party still insisted on the stopping to recharge the other casters, thereby making useless the one thing the warlock does better – the unlimited, at-will powers. For someone who hates the paperwork and spell-tracking required to play a wizard, though, the warlock is a godsend.

I’m surprised you have so many oddball races, though, even in a FR campaign. Even setting aside drowishness (and fey’riishness) motivations, non-human races are usually suboptimal for skilled twinkers and min-maxers. Those ECLs hurt (and are a pain to figure out, for me at least). Wemic? I’m not surprised someone would want to dump that for a human. And two players who’ve multiclassed primary spellcasters with non-caster classes? tsk

13

The way we do AoE spells is the person casting them points to a square and the spell goes off. They don’t get to talk about it or measure things, they just point. If the DM thinks it’s taking too long he starts to count down from 10.

I’m a player right now and my big problem is that the other players seem to have no idea what the hell is going on. We have a cleric who more or less refuses to cast heal spells and a dwarf in full plate and a bucket of hit points who’s so terrified of taking AoOs that he never actually gets into the fight before my fighter has to retreat due to imminant death. (Did I mention that the cleric doesn’t cast heal spells? The guy playing him informed me last session that he’s just taking cleric levels so he can cast raise dead and he’s not actually interested in being a cleric. A part of my soul died.)

14

Wow, what a waste. It’d probably be more effective in the long run to max out Use Magic Device and carry scrolls around.

15

As both a player and a GM - good for her, doing something to make her chosen character type useful. Those spells do, in fact, have a dismal success rate.

I’m currently playing a Wiz with a concentration on charm/suggestion/dominate type spells.

Until the GM gave her a magic item specifically to boost that kind of spell, Even with an INT of 18, the only time it ever worked was on a commoner who was part of a mob baying for our heads.

It was depressing, and made her a hell of a lot less fun to play in non-RP heavy sessions. It also altered her presented personality as she’s been forced to resort to lethal force - weapons, and the few properly offencive spells she knows* - a lot more than I would have liked. I’m still getting out of the strategic rut she was dropped in by the lack of utility for her chosen speciality.

  • And which she would not know if I hadn’t had a previous experience with a Wizard who never bothered with them, and therefor ended up completely useless in battle. (But that GM loved snatching victory from our grasp, so I’d hoped under a more reasonable GM, I’d be able to play my enchantress.)

If you want to discourage her from upping her save DCs, throw groups of lower levelled enemies (who thus have lower saves) at them from time to time - it gives her the satisfaction of the spell working occasionally, without automatically ending the fight. It also makes the singleton or leader enemies who can resist her look that much more badass.

16

Everybody’s got their own style when it comes to D&D, if your players want to be money-grubbing min-maxers, there’s not a lot you can do.

I discourage replacement characters, where possible. Bringing them in a level lower than the rest of the party is a reasonable thing. As long as you let the players know that that’s the policy, before it comes up suddenly.

17

Because we would rather you resurrect (any of the spells) the character than roll a new one, we implemented a change to the level hit that comes from rezzing. You lose one full level’s worth of XPs (as in, if you were 52% of the way to level 5, your XPs are now the same as if you were 52% of the way to level 4. 13% of the way to the next level: 13% of the way to the previous level. Yes, we had to create a simple program to do the math.) We set that up because people started being more cautious when they were close to leveling. (You could lose close to 1 1/2 levels’ worth of XP if you were near the end of your current level, but less than half a level’s worth of XPs if you’d just raised.)

More importantly, you don’t actually lose the level, just the XPs (reducing a character’s level is a pain in the ass). It means that anyone who uses XPs for item creation can’t until they no longer have an XP debt (their XPs are in the range of their level.) And it means the rest of the group raises a bit faster. But the DM doesn’t have to worry about scaling the adventure back, at least not right away.

If you brought in a new character, it’s one level lower. So, die/come back: no actual level loss but it takes longer to catch up; new character: one level lower, and at the minimum XPs for the level.

18

As a long time DM, here’s what I’ve done to these very familiar issues. I do what any DM should…homebrew! :slight_smile:

Spell targeting: I treat it like throwing a football to a deep receiver. Let the player know that spells take a few seconds to cast, you have to concentrate hard on the spell at hand, and the world keeps moving during this time. I combine INT and DEX into a single check roll…success means on target, and the degree of failure determines how much it drifts off target. Miss the roll by 1, and maybe 2 of those 20 goblins were out of the area. Miss the roll by 10, and goblins scattered wildly while your timing was off and you only got 10 of the 20 in the area of effect. Players have been happy with this. If there isn’t really any doubt though, lots of padding for error, the spell automatically does as intended.

Magic Item selection: The only magic shops are for simple potions and bare-bones consumable items like +1 arrows. The time and scarcity for high-level crafters means that kings and rulers are the only ones with that kind of access, and they don’t like unregulated magic-weapon factories in their kingdom (i.e. non-union shops get the mage-hammer coming down hard and fast on them).

Heroes or mercenaries: Let the characters play how they want, and structure plots and rewards to keep it fun for everyone. Mercenary PCs also create the opportunity for valiant/idealist/hero NPCs that may have a beef with their ways…

Too many books: Players like to shop and read the cool books too. Allow people to propose new books, pending your review. This is hard in modern D&D though…especially when a player wants to use all of the cool new stuff he got for Christmas. Only thing I can say is be diplomatic and flexible, and I feel your pain.

Min/maxers: The world and resources are flexible enough that your dual-wield-drow-ranger can still have many challenges that a sword can’t solve. Don’t punish the maxers, but don’t let your encounters cater to their strengths all of the time. It is amazing how powerless your uber-melee guy becomes against a simple telekenisis spell…

Swapping characters: We rotate DMs a lot, with many dormant sidekick characters that enter and leave campaigns. Players love the freedom, everyone wants a break or to play something new. When dormant, characters level up in the background, but at a slower rate and of course don’t get equipment gains that they weren’t actively questing for (…your mage returns from his apprenticeship with the militia a level higher in fighting skill…)

19

On new books and magic items…

When the Magic Item Compendium came out, I immediately bought it and was very pleased with all the cool stuff in it. I ended up actually loaning it to my DM for him to see if any of it was useful. As a result, the treasure we find now has gotten a lot more interesting and relevant to our interests.

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I haven’t played much since I was a wayward youth, but it seems to me that the most important thing to do is sit down with the players and find out what kind of game they want and let them know what kind of game you want. Hypothetically, if I had a potential player who was really mainly interested in testing their mental acumen and winning battles played according to defined rules, I’d suggest instead of D&D we play Risk or Stars! or Diplomacy or have a poker tournament. If their goal was to carefully exploit rules, solely in order to accumulate as much imaginary gold or imaginary power as possible, I’d tell them about computers and this World of Warcraft thing and tell them to have a good time at it. If they really were interested in role-playing, having fun with each other’s imagination, and creating interesting stories, then they’d probably understand and encourage any limitations the DM imposes, whether the limitations were in order to preserve the challenges for the players, keep the theme and atmosphere intact, or even just conserve the DM’s mental energy to put towards more entertaining things.