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Good Games and Players Choices

June 4, 2009 By

On Tuesday we gamed again with one of  the old 3.5 Living Greyhawk RPGA modules. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the module we played, but that is not important. It was a good game, but the DM was stuck playing the module verbatim so when the party was left with the choice of fighting four T-rexes and a druid to the left and four bodaks and a necromancer to the right; we were told we could not fight the druid, or the necromancer.

big battle with T-rex and bodaks

Granted, at the beginning of the battle it was cool that the DM took away the druid and the necromancer by stating they are off in the distance battling each other. I was cool with that, since the bodaks killed my Horse number 8 and our paladin’s loyal mount Clyde (the talking horse) in the first round of combat. After we had cleared the battle field of the four T-rex dinosaurs and the four bodaks we wanted to fight the druid and the necromancer, but again we were told no.

Sometimes the villains get away; that is how the story goes, but we were all 12th to 14th level and really wanted to rumble. We were told this was part two of a three part series so hopefully we get a chance in the next module. I think it is silly to offer either/or choices like this and not allow another choice. We may have broken the module by going after the two villains right there or we could have all died fighting them but we as a group all wanted to try it and were not allowed.

The D&D game is adventure for heroes where we step up to explore places normal people would never go and attempt things others would never attempt. I say let the dice decide our fate. If we fail, we fail, and if we beat the module early, we beat the module early.

Enough grumbling.

In the picture above you can see some of the neat ways we represent different things like flying and invisibility during play.

For flying we use plastic coated magnets that are 1inch in diameter. We use one magnet for every ten feet in altitude for the figure. This wizard is forty feet up.

altidude markers using 1 inch plastic magnets

For invisible player characters we use that plastic ring that is usually left on a 20oz soda bottle/water bottle after you remove the cap. We place the ring over the mini and from that point on the DM knows only creatures with life sense and/or see invisible can detect and attack that mini during combat.

invisible marker an old plastic ring from soda bottle

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About shent_lodge

Shent_lodge, AKA Jon, started this website, in 2000, initially as a player's guide to his home game. He has run through, and run for hundreds of players of the Dungeons and Dragons game since 1980. These days he mostly plays the Pathfinder RPG at cons.