So I DM'd my first D&D game last night, more about that elsewhere, but I specifically wanted to talk about
@corwin_raa's Wheel of Fate accessory for D&D 4th Edition. I actually really liked the idea of this as soon as I saw it.
The reason for this I always wondered why if you roll a 20 on a d20 you get a critical hit, but if you roll a 1 you don't get a critical miss. Reward, but no penalty? Doesn't seem right to me. However a lot of people don't like that, so when I saw the wheel of fate I thought this was a really great way to introduce at least the chance you fluffed up!
But, I'm not a hands on person. Give me a hammer, I'm more likely to smash my face in than hit a nail on the head, so even the thought of cutting out a wheel and creating a real spinner turned me off. So I immediately set about turning this in to an iPad app. Didn't take long to be honest, so I banged it out and the app has already been submitted to the app store, but because I'm the developer I get to use it on my iPad already.
So during my game whenever a PC or I rolled a one the PC who made the roll or was being attacked got to spin the Wheel of Fate. I estimate that "No Effect" came up about 50% of the time and the rest of the time the penalty was severe enough to be fun without ruining the game for that player or taking that monster out of the equation.
For instance, a skeleton archer was taking a shot at Musk, the Minotaur Paladin who was attacking the necromancer, as a square or so away. I rolled a 1 for the attack roll, so allowed Musk's player to spin the wheel. The result was to provoke an attack of opportunity but this was a bit of bummer since the Minotaur was not in melee range. Thinking on my feet, I allowed the Minotaur to shift one square and still make the melee attack, taking advantage of the skeleton archer's bumbling around with his bow and arrow.
The player seemed to really like this feature and it really didn't take any extra time or slow things down at all.
Other comments included:
“I loved the wheel of fate, it was awesome, all thats missing is the diming of the lights and canned cheering or booing and possibly a bit of exploding confeti.”
“I’m torn. On the one hand, it was a fun mechanic to throw in there, with a good range of outcomes, and not too deadly/stupid. On the other hand, I’m really not a fan of critical fumble rules in general – mostly because of my dire rolling.”
You can read more about the Wheel of Fate here:
And I've set up a support page in anticipation of my app being approved (fingers crossed):
