Don't kill me!!
we are a bunch of friends that like Descent (the board game) and dungeon Crawling, but we are not really heavy into Role playing as such, we do little as our character etc..
Now that 4ed been out a while I've seen some reports of people playing a campaign more or less without a DM!
are the rules really that clear that you can get away with this? I would love for our little 4 man group to do this as neither of us would really want to be the DM we would more enjoy playing our character together against the dungeon!
I know this is probably heresy here and punishable by death! but thats just our group.. and how we want to spend our time.
So does anyone know of any links describing ways of playing D&D 4ed as a boardgame without a DM.
Someone will need to control the monsters, but it doesn't need to be the same person each time.
Well, everybody takes turns controlling the PCs, so I think that a turn order would be appropriate for the monsters as well. Set out who gets firs monster move, then just have a cycle to follow. That way, everyone gets to play the monsters every battle. Of course, this comes with that "It only works if you are the kind of person who can play chess by themselves and not cheat" aspect, but that shouldn't be a problem as long as everyone makes the monsters do what they would do in the situation.
I bet if you played through a few sessions you could get a lot of these monster strategies down. Then at the beginning of every battle, draw cards or roll dice to randomly determine a strategy, and that way anyone who controls the monsters will have a good understanding of how to play them without showing favoritism.
It might help if you wrote down a variety of strategy "scripts" for the monsters ahead of time. Will the minions try to gang up on a target, attack the nearest target, or try to set themselves up for flanking? Will artillery concentrate fire on striker, leader, or controller? Do they stay in one group or come in waves?
I bet if you played through a few sessions you could get a lot of these monster strategies down. Then at the beginning of every battle, draw cards or roll dice to randomly determine a strategy, and that way anyone who controls the monsters will have a good understanding of how to play them without showing favoritism.
I really like this script idea. The main trick with DM-less dungeon crawling is that there's no rules-based guidance as to who the monsters will attack, so someone still has to strategize for the monsters' side, meaning you either end up with a partial DM (who has a PC and might end up playing favorites) or a rapidly-rotating set of DMs with different ideas. "Why are you moving away? He was going in to get a flank!"
Laying out some general strategies and drawing them at random will let you have a set of clear guidelines each fight - it'll help diminish favoritism and let the players think less about the monsters' tactics and more about their own.
Still, with all that, it's not going to be as fun as having a DM. You know, one of you could DM AND have a character. it's called a DMPC and it's not very hard to pull off, so long as it's not more powerful then the rest of the players. You could even cycle who DM's between players for each delve or adventure.
It might help if you wrote down a variety of strategy "scripts" for the monsters ahead of time. Will the minions try to gang up on a target, attack the nearest target, or try to set themselves up for flanking? Will artillery concentrate fire on striker, leader, or controller? Do they stay in one group or come in waves?
Yap - that's needed.
One player invents such rules for one encounter each, and the other players taking turns playing the monsters have to stick to those rules. In that case, you won't have problems with players playing monsters not attacking their own characters et cetera ...
ta-ta
E.
Are you kidding? The whole point of D&D (I thought) is to have a magical world where you can adventure in and you DONT KNOW whats going to happen next. How can you do this without a GM? I think you want to play D&D minis...
Not knowing is of differing importance to different people. The real whole point of D&D is to kill monsters and take their stuff. Or to hit the bags of hit points until experience points fall out. :D
Anyway, between a random dungeon generator (be it tables or a computer program) and a random encounter deck system, that's an awful lot of unknown stuff right there.
At this point, you can set up the map. You can have each player decorate a certain area of the map however they like, or have players take turns placing terrain obstacles.
Once the monsters are chosen and the map set, each player rolls initiative and they place their monsters in their areas. Monsters should be divided into groups of roughly 1/4 of the total EXP budget, and one group is placed at a time. Since going last during placement is an advantage, the player placing last also goes last once the fighting starts. Each initiative round, a player may control any of his 1/4 battle groups. A player must use all four groups before he can use one of them again.
Last player standing wins. Then you can run it again with a new map, new initiative order, whatever you want.
After a few sessions, you'll probably have certain banned monsters and monster combos as you find out which things are really effective.
Truth be told, I would prefer playing with a DM but no one wants to be one.. I know I could do a descent job being a DM (as i'm the rule addict, and the general storyteller and abundance of imagination) but well I want to play tooo!! I want to have my character and advance etc..
hence the reason for starting this topic
we have considered start playing Descent: Road to Legend which is a board game.. that is dungeon crawling, but with characters that grow over time, in a very long campaign..
but D&D rule-set would be cooler
Don't have your character be important story wise.
Don't ever have dialogue between your DMPC and an NPC unless you're really entertaining.
Don't mix your control of the setting and scenarios with your desire to have your DMPC advance and all that.
The problem is that in combat, you're going to be playing on both sides. This might not be as satisfying as playing on just one.
Are you kidding? The whole point of D&D (I thought) is to have a magical world where you can adventure in and you DONT KNOW whats going to happen next. How can you do this without a GM? I think you want to play D&D minis...
Entirely possible to play without a DM, They even show you how to build a random encounter deck. I recommend just writing the names of the monsters that will be making up this encounter deck out on a 3x5 card (very cheap to buy by the way) Shuffling them and having a player draw up to 6 cards at a time for each encounter. You don't know which monsters will be drawn, so you don't know what kind of encounter you will get. And the chances of having the same encounter twice, very minimal - shuffle the deck every third encounter. You get 50 cards to draw these encounters from after all.
It's also a very useful DM's tool that Every DM should have IMHO.
Best place to find a random encounter generator Jedibryan is probably by either making one up yourself, or Here, this one is pretty up to date, just gives you the names, and if you don't have access to every source listed, you can uncheck those sources for which you haven't got any access.
SO that's all there really is to it? I'm new to D&D and could someone point me in the direction of finding like a random map generator or a random monster creator?
http://inkwellideas.com/?p=142
http://www.asmor.com/scripts.php