Sunday, May 15, 2011

Off-hand weapon damage bonuses

3.5 Rules
If you wield a weapon in your off-hand, you do not get to apply your full strength bonus to damage from your off-hand attack.  Thus, if you have a strength of 18 and you fight with a long sword and a dagger, you can add +4 for your strength bonus to attacks made with the long sword, but only +2 for your strength bonus to attacks made with the dagger in your off-hand.
You can find this information on page 134 of the Player's Handbook.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Benign Transposition - a favorite 2nd level spell

3.5 Edition Rules:
One of the spells we have had the most fun with is a 2nd Level spell from the Spell Compendium called Benign Transposition.  My Rogue/Wizard has it and usually has 2 memorized each day.  She has used it to take the place of another party member on the verge of death and she has used it to put herself inside a trap that she was small enough to get out of but that the other party member could not escape.  She used it to replace the party monk in the mouth of the T-Rex with the heavily armored party dwarf, who was then enlarged by a cleric with the Enlarge Person spell which trapped the dwarf in the maws of the T-Rex, but also prevented the T-Rex from spitting out the dwarf or swallowing the dwarf or attacking anyone else.  She has also moved into flanking position behind powerful enemies that ignored her because of her small size, then used the spell to replace herself with the party half-ogre who is definitely more threatening to most enemies.

If you take a moment to learn this spell, I suspect you too can find many creative uses for it.

The Best Way to Roll for Hit Points

Here is my favorite approach to rolling Hit Points, especially for 5E.   Per the 5E rules, you can roll the dice or accept the "standar...