Dungeons & Dragons: 4th Edition (4ed) - Tips & Strategies

When running a campaign, I implement an experience point bonus plan to encourage character development to encourage the “role” part of role-playing.

I assign bonus XP’s to a character based on many different things that a player can do. These do not need to be specific, and each player can choose what they want to do. Some examples:

-Background Story
-Character Illustration
-Family Tree
-Coat of Arms Artwork
-List of Magic Spell Incantations
-Maps of Homeland
-Development of Native Language
-Development of Personal Faith

As most folks who’ve been involved in 4th edition would say, party balance is pretty easy because of the clearly defined roles that the character builds have. They’re right.

What’s less easy is maximizing that cohesiveness if you’re looking to make everyone work at peak performance with everyone else. A defender isn’t always the best choice if you want to keep getting combat advantage for your rogue, clerics may have the most healing options, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be the best healer for your party, and strikers can be brutal, but does your one hit wonder work well enough to be an asset and not a liability once they’re spent?

The key is to not only understanding how your character’s powers and abilities work together, but understanding how the powers and abilities of everyone else works with them as well. The Essentials build Sentinel (Druid) is an awesome pick for getting that rogue his CA all the time, but there are wizard and cleric builds that work better with a ranged rogue.

If you’re looking to make things work together as tightly as possible, knowing how the characters powers help each other is the key.

Though I have to admit that I personally just create something fun for me to play in a role that hasn’t been taken yet. 🙂

Too often players will be afraid to use daily and encounter powers early on in an encounter. Where this can really get folks into trouble is that it’s not the strength of what’s attacking you that you have to worry about the most, it’s how many times you’ll be attacked.

Let your AOE guys go nuts early on once you find pockets of minions, have your strikers take out the ranged guys, and get your defenders out there to make safe passage for everyone to get to where they need to be. Your encounter powers make this much more efficient and you’ll take less damage overall during the encounter.

It’s also very important to know exactly what your powers do. Too often I’ve watched healers kick off their daily powers when the party’s chips have looked way down and it usually does just enough to get them to come out on top. But if those folks had actually read their powers, they’d have known that most healer based daily powers are most effective near the start of an encounter, not at the end.

They usually pump your healing ability and that is pretty much worthless at the end of an encounter because your healing stuff will all be used up by then.

Stop being afraid to stomp monsters at the beginning! You may not want the whole party using their daily’s first round, but it sure as heck is sad to risk a TPK with daily and encounter powers unused.

The way that D&D 4e has evolved has wound up consolidation all of the latest character (race, class, etc.) rules and monster stats into D&D Insider, a suite of online tools available for at most $10 per month. A subscription to this give you access to a character builder that allows you to make anything from the previous books. It also includes access to all past articles from Dragon and Dungeon, giving you plenty of adventure modules to run right away.

For the rules of the game, players and DM’s can find everything else they need in the Rules Compendium, another more recent release which combines rules from the Player Handbooks and Dungeon Master Guides into an easy to read format. This book and the subscription above can get you and a DM everything you need to play with the newest rules for about $30.

Aspiring Dungeon Masters might want to continue to pick up the Monster Vault, which comes with a huge set of Monster Tokens and classic D&D monsters, and possibly a Campaign Setting if fleshing out the world themselves is too much work.

That’s really all you need to get started these days, and with the rules as simple as they are, it’s a great time to begin D&D!

Flanking is when you and your comrade are on opposite squares from each other on either side of the monster. It is one of the most important tactics to remember, whenever you can get a +2 to your attack roles, that’s a huge plus. So always remember to use your shift ability to get into a superior tactile advantage, namely flanking!

So let’s be realistic for a moment. 4th Edition is very structured in the way it does combat. Unfortunately, some players will take a long time on their combat turn (especially the DM). So how does one prevent from being so distracted that they begin taking the entire group focus away from the game?

My advice is to have the Player’s Manual always handy. This isn’t for rule checking, but as a tool from entertainment. My players love investigating what abilities they’ll have to choose from, reading about equipment, and learning about mounts while waiting for their turn. This way, they are still playing DnD even when it isn’t their turn.

I have had plenty of parties in my time running DND that think it doesn’t matter if they have a controller or not

It does … make sure you cover all the bases if you can

(p.s. Controller is a party member how can attack multiple targets at once, and apply effects such as slow or weaken)