Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.
In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.
Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.
Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:
1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.
2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:
Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.
Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.
Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.
As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.
In the PHB, the Reincarnation spell only lists racial options that were given in the PHB, which makes sense. However, we have since gotten more playable races, so it’s high time to expand it. (This has probably been done already, but now it’s been done by me.)
I tried to give vaguely equal prominence to all races, while also including all subraces. This is mathematically impossible when dealing with one hundred integers, therefore you get this approximation. (Each result within “dragonborn” gives the option of two colours, to avoid being completely ridiculous.)
This includes all races and subraces from the PHB, Volo, Mordenkainen, and Elemental Evil.
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Roll a d20 whenever the party goes anywhere.
1-4: Nothing
5-16: Make everyone roll perception, and if anyone makes it you describe the immediate vicinity in extreme detail for no reason
17-20: Everyone rolls perception, then one or more object in the room is a mimic.
can randomly generate just about ANYTHING. awesome for dms
Tabletop Audio: background music and sound effects for the ambience.
PCGen – a character creation program that handles all the tricky and tedious parts of building characters, including NPCs.
d20pfsrd.com – all the free information you would ever need to play Pathfinder, an alternative to D&D
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I CANNOT believe I don’t have anything under my DM Tips and Tricks section for encounter building! So I’m going to try and give some advice (but I’ve included some links at the bottom to some good posts about encounter building, which I’ll have to reblog soon!)
Encounters can be tricky. You want to have the “perfect” hook to entice your players and you want the encounter to go smoothly – perhaps not as planned but at least smoothly.
However, I think it is highly important to know that how these encounters make your players feel is the key. In the long run your players may not remember the name of the barmaid who gave them that valuable piece of information, or the history of the haunted tavern they’re forced to stay in – they’re gonna remember how you made them feel.
So you want to make your encounters harder? I’m assuming you understand that encounters come in environmental, social, and combat forms!
Environment encounters could be something like a natural disaster such as: the entire village is underwater and someone must rescue the innocent people! Those are already pretty difficult challenges and they’re pretty time consuming.
Social encounters can be peaceful, difficult, or all around terrifying. It all depends on the NPCs your players are encountering – hehe. To make social encounters worth it for your players think deeply about the NPC they are dealing with. Perhaps the suspicious blacksmith was wronged in the past and that explains why he refuses to give out that vital piece of information. Or maybe that priest comes off as pretentious because of his past life as an orphaned street beggar. Giving your NPCs backstories and flavor can really spice up any encounter.
When it comes to my NPC I like to think of WWH – Why, What, and How. Why have the players encountered (or sought out) this NPC, What do the players need to know from the NPC and what do they want to get from them, and how will they get it.
For example: The players have ended up in on the merchants ship because they heard through tavern gossip that she was the best person to go to for exotic animals. The players need to buy a purple quail’s egg for a tyrant king’s birthday party and they’ve been sent to find one as quickly as possible. How will they get this from the merchant who, after a quick glance around the ship, has a whole hoard of quail’s eggs – they can choose to buy it for a hefty sum, haggle and bargain with the merchant, or try to steal it (they almost always try to steal it). This merchant, however, is very friendly and trusting of most people so she would have no problem lowering the price for the party, as long as they do her any favor she may need in the future.
Combat encounters are very hard for me to come up with. I’ve typically had the habit of saying something like “You’re walking towards the castle and out of the bushes explodes a hungry hungry hippo. Roll for initiative” buuuuuttttt you can make combat encounters harder simply by giving the player’s opponents more hit points or more powerful attacks – instead of 2d6 fire damage maybe it deals 4d6 fire damage. I have a link below by dndplus that goes into more detail about combat encounters because unfortunately I am not so sure what else to say about combat encounters – I have so much to learn!
I hope I’ve helped even if it was just a little
xx
Chelsea
THIS post elaborates on some environmental encounters such as the natural disasters I mentioned!
THIS is a post of some random wilderness encounters! Very good stuff!
THIS post is SO detailed about combat encounters – much better than what I had to say!
THIS post breaks down encounters in environment, social, and combat encounters just like I did and is worth the read! It doesn’t explain how to make encounters harder but it’s a good base for building encounters!
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