So Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead came out today.  And the question in most peoples mind has to be, Is it worth it?  What makes this book worth going out and dropping the $30 for it.  Well that’s what I hope to answer for you today, or at least give you some general idea on. Be warned all ye who enter though, this way lies madness (and alot of bad analogies and catch phrases).

So going by a bit of web surfing and looking at Google Analytics it seems that much like me people are quite unhappy that there is once again not a yeti in the new Monster Manual. Well, fear no more for I shall give you that which you seek.  I did a bit of looking around and found one or two sources for this elusive beast such as at ENWorld but overall I am not exactly impressed with it.  Taking for instance the Yeti templates that Jester created on ENWorld I must say he really did massively fail on this one.  I have looked at some of his other monsters and normally he is quite good at conversion and creation but this time idiot mode just engaged.

So what can be done about something like this? Why, I give you the ones that I use myself of course.  And what better person to give you the yeti’s then the cranky bastard that is named after them.  Also I am going to be throwing down on a few monsters that you aren’t going to be using in a campaign but hopefully will still find yourself unexpectedly throwing at players when they deserve it.  But more on that in a later post.  For now lets get into what you probably came here for.

How do you track player and NPC initiative in combat?  This is a question that I see asked often on various D&D and many other roleplaying boards across the blogosphere. The problem is there isn’t really a good answer for it. Oh, answers there are, don’t get me wrong. The problem is there aren’t many good ones and alot of times they just boil down to however the person wants or an example of how the responder does it. That isn’t to say that none of the answers aren’t the right answer. Let’s go over a few of the more common methods.

It can happen from time to time. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, the steps you take to prevent it, sometimes a character just has to be changed mid-campaign. Characters die despite the best efforts of the healer, people get captured and sold into forced slavery, dragon slaying gets outsourced to a firm from India, or players just change their mind. The reasons vary but the end result is always the same and now it’s up to not just you to deal with it but the players as well. First though is how you are going to deal with it. Depending on how it is handled by you the DM can set the tone for how everyone else will cope with it. 

Rules lawyers. We have all ran into them at one time or another. They can be the bane of many a gaming group. So how does one deal with a rule book toting, combat interrupting rules hound? While the DM Guide for 4th Edition is great and offers ideas for dealing with many other types of gamers it is obviously lacking in this particular areas. So what is to be done about them?

While the DM guide might not be a direct help in this regard it does actually give some good insights. The thing about a rules lawyer is they generally fall into one of the other “categories” that the DMG lists. In my experience they are usually power gamers or slayer with a hint of the explorer types who feel that in order to help themselves accomplish their goals they have to attempt to force every encounter to abide by the rules at all times. The reason for this is that usually when they interupt combat or an encounter to tout some archaic rule it is because it is beneficial to them in some way. And trust me, these people know the rules even better than you do and have memorized every bit of errata to be released.

With the recent release of 4th Edition D&D my poor heart as a Dm has suffered a bit of a break. While reading over the rules of combat I came upon the critical hits section. With much anticipation I scanned through the rest of the rules only to be heartbroken. The critical miss rule is no longer there! What madman would go and remove the critical miss I ask myself. Surely there must be some mistake. Yet no matter how many times I read through the result was the same, my beloved critical miss was now gone. Brutally yanked from the pages by some mean spirited bastard. This would never do.