From the Private Journal of Duira Siannodel:
(Player Submitted Entry)

"Well we managed to kill all the forest trolls and burned them so they wouldn’t come back, and the Thorns who helped us were nice and as a thank-you, gave us four vials of barkskin potion.  Not exactly the nice crown I was wearing for awhile, but who’s counting?  Conveniently, the ridge above the area where we fought the trolls was also the gateway to Silvermote.  It didn’t look quite like Dad had described it in his diary, but close enough to recognize the standing stones.  The actual entry was a structure made of white stone with green veins running through it and a door with a big tree carved in it.  Funny thing about the door: there was no lock and no way to open it: no markings or anything, and yet it was obviously a mechanical door.  We were rather dumbfounded, especially since Saille and I are rather good at such things.  While we were contemplating the issue, one of the Petals came along, so I talked her out of the information we needed: one need only wait until nightfall and the moon letters would reveal themselves, though the Petal didn’t know what they said.  So, we hung out until nightfall, and there were the moon letters, in Common.  And, it was a riddle, of course.  Tsk.  Elves.  The riddle itself took us quite awhile to figure out (naturally, I was the one who finally did so: I am the more cunning of the Siannodel sisters, after all).  Unfortunately, the moon letters and the riddle they revealed did not demand that everyone give me their treasure and worship me in the manner to which I should be entitled.  Instead, it read:

I am the leafless tree grown in fearful earth
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Comments (9)

Campaign News Valley of Obelisks

I spent some time today (about two hours) analyzing the entire "grapple" process and it seems to me that the trouble with the rules isn't that they are too complex.  The real trouble is, and this is the problem with the vast majority of D&D, is that they are grossly verbose.  It seems to me that the rules are just packed with too much text.  Previous editions of D&D used more tables to elucidate the rules or provide for quick reference.  I've taken a page from that book here.

Anyway, fellow gamers, we're not dummies.  The details of grappling are just buried in too much branching conditional text.  Being a programmer myself, I attempted to provide a more programmatic version or summary of the rules for quick reference in our games.  Below are the results of this quest from our house rules.

Finally, The good thing about the original grapple rules is that they are a good simulation of what could actually happen in a real hand-to-hand fight.  They even cover the rather dramatic case of turning an enemy's weapon against him and stabbing him with it.  By the way I prefer the term "wrestling" since grappling can refer to the use of a hook like device for scaling walls.

So here goes...

P.S. These rules will look better in Internet Explorer than in Firefox since I used Word 2007 to create the original document.  Please don't sue me.

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Campaign News The Wizard's Scroll