Recently, one of the players in my D&D campaigns decided to take a stab at Dungeon Mastering 4E.  He had been talking to one of his old long-lost gaming buddies from college, and was telling him about the D&D campaign I run, which unfortunately is full up.  So my player decided to try running a game for a small group on the side, and was calling every couple of days to ask my advice getting things set up.

The preliminary advice was pretty easy, with him asking me stuff like what location in the Forgeotten Realms was the most European feudal in nature (I told him to check out Cormyr, and use the awesomely detailed map in Dragon 365), and what kind of evil cult might be a good challenge for low-level characters to face (and I immediately recommended he check out the Ashmadai or the Shadovar from the Neverwinter Campaign Setting).  But I was quite surprised to find out out that one of the problem areas this new 4E Dungeon Master was having, was to go about putting together encounters:

New DM: “OK, so I have the DMG and Rules Compendium, and I’ve got my target XP total, so now I just take monsters from the Monster Manual until I meet the total, right?”

Me: “Yea, but you can’t really use the monsters right out of the Monster Manual, because the damage math on them is all wrong… in fact, you can’t use Monster Manual 2 either… same problem.”

New DM: “You mean I just went out and bought two books and the stats are all wrong on them?”

Me: “Ouch… ummm yea, basically, only Monster Manual 3 has the right math on damage.  You can use those… but if you go get Monster Vault, you can use those monsters as well… and there are a bunch from Monster Manuals 1 and 2…”

New DM: “OK, so I have to copy all these stat blocks by hand into a word doc?  This is insane…”

Me: “No you can use the DDI tools to get monsters from the listing, and even modify them slightly if you want and print them out…”

New DM: “You mean I can select which monsters I want in my encounter and it puts a document of them together for me to take to the game?”

Me: “Well… no… you can print out each monster block on its own sheet and take that along… with your own description of the encounter…”

New DM: “Wait… 4E has been out for 3 years, and WotC never created a tool to put monsters together in an encounter… you mean DMs still are putting together encounters BY HAND?!  But what if I want to create a monster that isn’t updated in Monster Vault or I want to use an elite template from the DMG on a monster?”

Me: “Ummm well there’s this rules update from July 2010 that has the corrected monster damage, so you can always fix it by han… uhhh… did you know that Monster Vault has cool monster pogs in it?!”

New DM: “What the hell!  You’ve been putting together encounter like this for three years in two campaigns?!  You must be out of your mind!”

Me: “Dude, if you think this is hard, try putting together NPCs as monsters in an old 3.5 encounter… “

It was kind of funny to me at the time, because I had been comparing the ease with which I can use MB (both old and new) to modify monsters and prep my encounter info, compared to how hard it was in old 3.5.  Now I’m not 3.5 bashing, but putting together NPC characters as monsters, or advancing a monster to make it higher level used to take me HOURS of prep time in the last edition, working it all out by hand.  So to me, having 4E’s Monster Builder at my fingertips seemed like a burst of daylight in a darkened room… but to a new DM, I guess it’s more like lighting a small candle.

Honestly, by now, WotC’s Adventure Tools should be far more expansive than just a monster builder, but it looks like the majority of the DDI development budget is being steered toward Character Builder.  The fact that we can’t add elite templates yet, or create an encounter online by simply adding monsters to it is rather a sad from a Dungeon Master perspective, considering that it is our DM efforts enable four to six other D&D gamers to buy 4E products and play the game – I myself enable 11 D&D gamers in my two campaigns!  A little better support from DDI would really be nice for a change.

But there are some things I can recommend as a DM that I use all the time to speed up the encounter building process.  And since I just recently went through them with my friend, the new DM, I figured it might help someone to put them all down in a blog.

My Favorite Top 5 DM Encounter Prep Tools

1) DDI Subscription – despite my previous less-than-glowing comments, a DDI subscription still offers the best tools available to us 4E DMs right now to assist in building encounters.  Admittedly, I use my offline Monster Builder more frequently than the online version, but the online version has Dark Sun monsters, and I need those for one of my campaigns.  I use Compendium almost non-stop while prepping an encounter, as it is the fastest way to find a trap, hazard, or terrain power to make the combat more interesting.

2) Corrected Monster Damage Chart (July 2010 Update) – get a copy of this PDF and keep it handy whenever you are building or re-tooling or re-skinning monsters.

[Editor’s Note: I have even created an Excel spreadsheet of updated monster damage which you can download here .  The minion damage was a bit tedious to work out, by the way, as there are no clear cut rules for it anywhere.  I literally went through all the minion damages in Monster Manual 3 and the Dark Sun Creature Catalog, and noted them all by level, then extrapolated any blank spots on my level list.]

3) PDF Printer/Converter – get a good free PDF printer and install it on your computer so you can print output from Monster Builder directly to a file.  You can still only print one monster at a time, but it will save you copying all the stat blocks by hand.

4) PDF Compiler – look for one of the few PDF compilers out there that take a stack of PDFs and combine them into one document.  I will often write my notes in WORD, but convert it to a PDF, and then compile it and my monster PDF’s into one big document to use during a session.

[Editor’s Note: If you have access to the offline version, which I still use, you won’t need to mess with PDF stuff listed in #3 and #4, because you can export out standard and custom monsters from MB directly to RTF, and can drop them directly into your word document.  But if you want access to updated MM and MM2 monsters from Monster Vault, Dark Sun monsters, or monsters from recent supplement books and DDI content, you’ll have to deal with the online MB and using PDFs.]

5) Virtual Combat Cards – I still love to use VCC at the gaming table, as it tracks combat conditions, monster and character hit points, and initiative order really well.  It has a really nice feature to “capture” monster data from Compendium (Firefox Plugin) and store it in a monster library.  It can be used to quickly assemble an encounter, and will tell you the Encounter Level based upon the number of party members, as well as the experience point total to compare to the XP target.  I’m sure there are other free products out there with similar qualities, but I’ve gotten used to VCC and it works well for me.

Bonus Feature: Leucrotta!

As a special Halloween Treat for all my Readers out there, I wanted to offer one of my monster creations for DMs to use in their own D&D 4E campaigns.  In last week’s Legend & Lore (Preserving the Past), Monte Cook was lamenting having to lose some of the old, well-known AD&D monsters from more current editions:

“…I remember working on 3rd edition and having to make tough monster choices. In the end, for example, we included many new creatures in the Monster Manual and left out some classics such as the peryton and the leucrotta. I always felt bad about having to do that, not because they were the epitome of awesome (although they both had their charm) but because each represented a piece of game history.”

As it turns out, I had made my own version of the nasty leucrotta for my own Forgotten Realms campaign a few months ago, and it worked out to be a pretty obnoxious critter to have to battle against.  I decided to use the 3.5 edition version of the leucrotta from the Monsters of Faerun supplement, because I was running the campaign in the Forgotten Realms, afterall.

I ended up re-creating this “ugly mix of a stag, lion and badger” by re-skinning a dire wolf, and converting it over into a brute form for the renders, which I considered the “alphas” of the leucrotta pack and the rest of the pack – the rippers – I simply left as skirmishers.  The critter’s powers from Monsters of Faerun are pretty much the same as those listed in the old AD&D Monster Manual, except for an ability to rend armor to pieces with its powerful jaws:

From the AD&D Monster Manual:

This weird creature haunts deserted and desolated places, for it is so ugly most other creatures cannot bear the sight of it. The body of a leucrotta resembles that of a stag, its tail being rather lion-like, and its legs end in cloven hooves. Its head is that of a huge badger, but instead of teeth it has sharp, jagged boney ridges. This monster is very sly and can imitate the voice of a man or woman. They will do this to trick prey to approach within attack distance. When retreating the leucrotta can kick backwards with both hooves, causing 1-6 hit points damage with each that hits. The monster speaks the language of its alignment as well as the common tongue.

I decided to go ahead and add in the other odd abilities from MoF, like its immunity to charm effects, its additional skills and languages, to help round out the monster for the Forgotten Realms.  And I also created a minion version of the ripper (called a nipper), to represent the near adult adolescents of a leucrotta pack, and to include in combats to keep things from getting too bogged down with big hit point monsters in the mix.

For a nice read on the D&D publication history of the leucrotta, as well as its ecology and other fun facts, you can refer to the general Wikipedia entry , or check them out in the Forgotten Realms Wikia.

Leucrotta Pack (Level 7 Encounter – 1500XP)
2 leucrotta renders
4 leucrotta rippers

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For a faster combat, substitute 4 leucrotta nippers for one render or one ripper, and use the minions to make sure the rest of the pack can get combat advantage.

So until next blog… I wish you Happy Gaming, as well as a safe and fun Halloween!

Tags: D&D 4e, encounter building, leucrotta, Monster Builder, Wizards of the Coast

This entry was posted by Editor-in-Chief on Monday, October 31st, 2011 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Dramatis Personae, Dungeonmasters' Insider, Monsters, Tricks of the Trade. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.