Leonine Roar

What’s a Moment of Greatness?  Chances are you’ve already been the star of several!  They are often their own reward, but also consider reinforcing and encouraging awesome or otherwise memorable play and roleplay with a few simple rewards.

In D&D, we’ve all had those times during the game where the story leaps to life through epic dramatics or hilarious roleplay, problem-solving brilliance, or even a witty gut-busting pop reference to a movie, show, classic skit or fantastic actor.  Hey, it’s what we do, we’re gamers, right?

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Have you gotten away from using mounts and mounted combat?  Or just don’t understand the rules or find them a bit wordy?  Or think mounts are too expensive and don’t provide enough benefits?  If you answered yes to any of these questions, get on your horse and ride!

Like ritual magic, mounts and mounted combat may be a bit of an untapped resource for your playgroup in 4e.  They may not get enough play or stage time, for a variety of reasons.  Well, let’s change that, shall we? 

Where to start?  Skim over the Mounted Combat and Overland Travel rules and charts in the Essentials Rules Compendium, and you’re well on your way to riding mastery.  When you come back, just ride on through the rest of this article.

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So I’m on Facebook yesterday talking with a friend about how we all rocked last night’s D&D session like, well, rock stars in our now-paragon Nentir Vale campaign.  We start talking about other cool characters we’d like to play in case, Raven Queen forbid (and bring us back as revenants even!  Love revenants!), we bite it. 

We get to talking about controllers in the game, and we both simultaneously mention playing an Invoker would be really cool.  We enjoy the RP aspect of the game, and like Dungeon’s Master tells us in Divine Intervention, divine characters always seem a natural fit for great roleplaying right out of the gate for anyone.  My friend then mentions how the martial power source is the only one missing a controller right now. (more…)

Did you know there are a whopping 314 rituals (!) right now in D&D 4e? 

That’s 314 additional things nearly every party has access to.  Ritual scrolls, after all, are a “power” every individual character has access to, without needing to actually be a Ritual Caster via feat or class feature.

But do we seek out or include these 314 options enough in our adventures?  More importantly, do we really know how to use them?   Whether as PCs or DMs?

Remember that every ritual is a potential opportunity for your PC to creatively solve a type of problem as well a tool to help DMs create and add new layers of quests, encounters, adventures and storytelling in your game.  Whether in the hands of your characters, or in the hands of  antagonists, ritual magic is a resource for D&D problem-solving and inspiration.

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