So, let’s talk about Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. There’s somewhat of a widespread belief that combat takes too damn long in this system. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I don’t really care why. Perception is reality, right? Here’s what I’ve done to fix it.

I built a spreadsheet that lists the different powers that each player has, collects data about their attack bonuses and average damage, and determines the average damage the overall party can output in any given round. By design this is somewhat limited: Burst attacks, ongoing damage, and environmental tricks are all going to increase the party’s lethality, so keep that in mind.

At the end, I can essentially use the values from the spreadsheet as the basic monster defenses, and know that combat will take no more than the chosen number of rounds. And now that I have a hard limit on how long combat will take, it’s a simple matter to calibrate the monster’s damaging abilities to put the party in danger without being an outright party kill.

And so, without further explanation, the spreadsheet: MonsterHelper (Office 2010) and MonsterHelper (OpenOffice).

Recently, I began work on a rules-agnostic character creator, and realized I haven’t the foggiest idea how to code something of that size in Java. Luckily, there’s an easier option…

I have recently lost the last bits of my patience with the official D&D character creator. Although it’s modestly functional and has reasonably few bugs, the thing is super slow and is limited to recent Windows machines only…

So it’s your first time as the Dungeon Master. That happened to me some time ago, and I trust my experience makes me qualified to dispense advice. So here’s some words about that…