The Pink Dice Chronicles

The original shadow curse in the Dungeon of Death causes PCs to lose one prime ability score point per hour while in the dungeon.  What a pain!  That means each character sheet is changing constantly while going through the dungeon. So, talking with some of my players, I proposed this alternate Shadow Curse: Characters lose 1 permanent hit point per hour while in the dungeon. These hit points can be restored 3 ways: While at full hit points, take a potion of curse serious wounds (or better) Use a healing potion that restore ALL hit points. Any restoration spell Resting for 8 hours after leaving the place that is cursed. Keep in mind that the dungeon of death has over 40 rooms, and averaging 10 minutes per room, that is 400 minutes of in-game time, not counting rest.  That is 7 hit points lost.  Throw in a few rest 8 hour rest periods for mages, and that is some serious motivation to keep healing the hit point loss.

So yesterday I had the conversation with the girls and my wife. "So D&D 3.5 is getting old and the world is moving on so we need to figure out what direction we're going to go.  We can either switch to 4, which is what we've been watching them play on D&D robot chicken..." "I really don't like the cards and I don't want to have to learn a whole new system." "... or we can switch to Pathfinder, which an extension to 3.5 that fixes some of the problems." I also mentioned that some of the races were changing in 4E.  S, who plays Coco the gnome, was not amused. I also mentioned that Pathfinder adds some new classes and such. I also mentioned that we can get Hero Labs for Pathfinder. The troops were sold on Pathfinder.  So as soon as we can assemble the necessary materials, I guess we're switching over to Pathfinder. -DM Dad

So we moved our D&D night up to Tuesday since there is much preparation on Wednesday night planned for Thursday's birthday festivities. The one thing I am learning to count on as a DM is not to count on things 'going as planned'. Tonight the crew investigated some ruins where there were rumored to be orcs. The ruins opened by means of solving a dwarvan riddle which described the 4 elements (earth, wind, water, fire)  in a specific order, giving the order to press the runes on a plate.  The riddle took a while to solve, and was complicated by the fact that we had watched "The Fifth Element" the night before.  They were blowing at and setting fire to the runes trying to get the dungeon open. Once inside, the rogue rushed ahead and set off a trap.  Everyone was stabbed in a flurry of spears flying down the hallway at them.  Before the rogue can try to ensure that the trap was disabled, here comes the fighter, setting the trap off again, and getting ever...