Dungeons & Dragons

[Ruki]

It's gonna rawk.

[PkmnTrainerJ]

I can play. I would just need a ton of help setting up, since I haven't played D&D in a long while. Still, I am interested and available Tuesday nights.

I'm the same, not played for ages, but any time after 8pm UK time is good for me.

[apsham]

This is going to rawk. I am Punto Flinklock, neutral evil Gnome Rogue of awesome.

[TEOL]

Maybe. I could use a break from all my RL DMing to just chill and play for once, and time zones generally don't bother me cause I'm usually up at ungodly hours.

[PkmnTrainerJ]

So, I'm trying to get together a campaign starting next month and I've been reading all the books, have made some cards detailing a few things as many of the players are begginers, or haven't played 4th edition.

Just wondering if there's any pitfalls I should be aware of, or any large fuck ups that I can pre-empt, as I've learned 4th edition only last month, and have never DMed a game before.

Also, got an iPhone app called Dicenomicon, which lets you set up and store dice formulas and comes with one for rolling full character stats which will be handy.

I'm trying to set up a base town, but I'm not too sure on getting started with that, as I'd like to use it in future campaigns and later burn it to the ground, or have an uprising against the government or something, so I'd like lots of details within.

[Sousa]

The best way to build a base town is to start with what you need and build outward from there. Establish a few Token Adventurer Locales, starting--of course--with the local pub. Don't worry about mapping every tiny little thing, or you'll find yourself either losing interest or creating too much--nine times out of ten, your characters will only interact extensively with five or six different facets of the town: the blacksmith, the pub, the church, some sort of government building/castle/mayor's manor, and some manner of magic shop or wacky soothsayer or other mystical tomfoolery. For smaller towns, you'll only need a rough indication of the location of the town center, where most of the shops and the mayor's house can be found. Scatter houses beyond that, with a little tenable land for a few small livestock and a garden (most people in ye olde tyme were so poor that some degree of self-sufficiency was required). Basically, build who's important for the session you're running and improvise the rest; you never know when an NPC you create just off the top of your head could end up becoming an intriguing player down the road, but you don't need to worry about that at first.

Basically, there's no huge science to it. Your party won't care where the cooper or the haberdasher or the cobbler are unless you want them to, so I rarely even bother with all of that.

Of course, that's your standard dirt-farming D&D town. Large cities require some more large-scale planning and districting, but even then, I rarely go building-by-building. Cities are essentially a whole lot of small towns joined in one big urban sprawl with a huge fuck-off castle/lavish manor house in the middle. Again, start with the necessities and build outward as you find it necessary.

One thing I like to do, though, is to give every little town some minor detail that sets it apart from the others. For example, one of my otherwise normal truffle-farming forest towns once housed an eccentric gnome engineer who built a rather large and unstable cannon sticking out of the roof of his house. The cannon had fallen into disrepair, but it remained a local landmark. The party was much less interested in the Quaint Little Forest Town before they realized it was the Quaint Little Forest Town With The Giant Rusty Cannon. Little things like that--from landmarks to landforms to strange local celebrities or customs--distinguish your towns far, far more than a different arrangement of buildings does.