User:Elsibor

I have a few names I use - Elsibor is the only one copyrighted to me, however. I do free-lance writing to pay the bills and small-time gem-trading to pay for everything that I don't need. I own two Siamese cats, who occasionally appear in my DnD campaigns as cameos or odd details.

I've been playing DnD for 8 years and DMing for 6. At any given time I've got at least two groups I play with and I've got two stacks of character sheets - Epic and non-epic, and both of those stacks are thirty+ deep, and yes, I know all the names, classes, and personalities of those characters. If there's something up here I've worked on, I've probably used it in a campaign to test it out - if there was something up here by me that's not up here anymore, I tested it and decided it wasn't worth keeping online.

If you see a typo in anything on here and you're sure it's wrong, fix it.

Don't talk to me about 4e. I have played 6 full length 4e campaigns. I will not ever play 4e again.

Editing: In general I don't like having my work edited and I typically won't edit anyone else's either. I might fix a few typos, and if I'm interested in what you've worked on, I'll give you a whole list of suggestions. Suggestions are good - they mean you've got something that's got some serious potential. If you absolutely must edit something I've worked on, tell me about it first.

Game Mechanics: I take a 'real' approach to game mechanics. For example, I take experience as the literal accumulation of experience fighting, using magic, etc, and leveling up as an indication your skill with whatever it is your class does best is increasing. If you don't have time to practice what you've learned from your experiences, you can't improve yourself, so leveling up in the middle of dungeon crawl seems odd to me. For hit points, I like to think that rather than becoming unbelievably tough, you are actually getting better at rolling with blows, stiffening muscles on impact and in general learning how to keep yourself alive. A human cannot survive being stabbed through the chest normally, so hit points must be a representation of skill rather than incredible toughness(though obviously toughness plays into it to a limited degree). For attacks per turn, those are the opportunities you have to hit the opponent while moving within your 5ft square for a good position to attack. 6 seconds is, after all, a long time for most actual fights to go on. To a lot of people most of this sounds pretty normal, I imagine, but it always surprises me how often players don't bother trying to think about what the game rules are expressing, and focus instead on the rules themselves.