Mike Mearls half-heartedly fulfilling his assignment to gush about the new D&D DM screen:

When Bart Carroll asked me to handle a Design & Development column on the new Deluxe Dungeon Master’s Screen, I wasn’t quite sure where to start. For my money, a DM’s screen needs the following key traits:

Opacity: A DM’s screen can’t screen anything if the players can simply look through it.

Screen-Like Shape: The screen should be shaped like a screen, in that it is rather flat, narrow, and capable of standing immobile. Other shapes simply won’t do. For example, a spherical screen has the potential to roll around the table and perhaps crush the smaller sort of D&D player.

Tall, But Not Too Tall: The ideal screen height blocks easy access to the DM’s notes (or lack thereof; the best screens make both the well-prepared and the “I’m completely making this up as I go” DMs indistinguishable). Too short, and the players keep finding all those secret doors and ambushes the DM set up. Too tall, and the DM is trapped behind, using finger puppets to portray the action.

Probably Some Art and Tables: I say probably because while a lack of these features doesn’t speak to the actual utility of a screen in terms of hiding stuff from the players, it makes the difference between an actual DM’s screen and a flattened cardboard box.

It’s hard to be funny while you’re selling something. I think there’s a reason why Mike Mearls is the current D&D designer with a Cult of Personality.

So I’m pretty much an expert in D&D Fortune Cards now, having:

• Purchased 4 packs of them the other day.
• Read the rules on how they work, including how to make your own custom deck: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/FortuneCardRules.pdf
• Made my own custom deck!

General Thoughts:

• None of the powers super overwhelm me with how awesome they are: This is probably a good thing or it would have screwed up the balance of the entire game.
• They are an obvious boon: There are no negatives to having fortune cards so you might as well get them from a pure character optimization point of view.

Thoughts on Deck building:

• Do It: If you have a bunch of boosters then there is virtually no reason not to build your own deck. It will be a lot more powerful once you get rid of “Lucky Fall”, “Only a Flesh Wound”, and similarly unimpressive cards.
• Build a 10 Card Deck: Just like in Magic: The Gathering, it is almost never a good idea to build a deck consisting of more than the minimum number of allowed cards (in this case, 10). Adding more cards just means diluting your deck with less than ideal cards. I’m unclear on what happens when you run out of Fortune Cards (do you just stop drawing them?), but fights that last more than 10 rounds are fairly uncommon in D&D 4e.
• Load Up on Easily Triggered Cards: Since you can only have one card in your hand at any given time AND can draw a card every round, you want to load up on cards that you can actively trigger, as a general rule, instead of those that only trigger when an enemy does something. Ideally, you’ll be playing a card every round and getting some kind of benefit out of it! With that said, the cards do seem to be balanced to push against this principle, with more powerful cards coming into play more rarely.
• Load up on Attack Cards: What this really means is put 4 attack cards in your deck (assuming a ten card deck) since you need a minimum of 3 tactics and 3 defenses. They seem to generally be more powerful than the other cards.

My Deck: Here’s what I put into my deck, following the general principles outlined above. I am playing a level 16 Half-Elf Valorous Bard: Read the rest of this entry »