Permission to think freely!

Dungeons and Dragons 4E is emphasizing the idea that interactive and dynamic environments should be just as important in combat as the creatures you are fighting. You can see WotC's new design philosophy in action in now free module of the Keep on the Shadowfell (this link will take you to where you can download it http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4dnd/dndtestdrive).

Sometimes the environment is the focus of the entire encounter, such as a fight taking place on rickety scaffolding (Area 3), or dark caves with many small tunnels only the opponents can use to their advantage (Area 10). Other encounters while they are not dominated by one large environmental theme include large obvious interactive items like spiked pits (Area 1), fire pits, and open iron maidens (Area 2).

The large obvious interactive items often do get used by my group but I rarely get requests for actions in normal rooms. Page 42 of the Dungeon Masters guide is a great reference guide for the GM to handle player requests that are not included in the standard rules. To me, this one page shows provides the mechanics for the single most important mindset needed for a DM, “Say yes!”. Unfortunately, I find that my players rarely choose to do much of anything aside from the rules that are printed on their character sheet.

There are many reasons for this, but I think the main reason is that the character sheets contain so much player data, that the idea that they can ignore the page and think up their own move has a hard time coming into play when death is on the line. Virtual death that is.

So my current solution is to print out a blank power card for each player and fill it in with the following.

Go Wild Universal Utility
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
At - Will
Any Action
Target: any
Attack: any
Success: Something close to what you want to happen will be done
Miss; Depending on how much you desperate of a move you made, there might be consequences on a failure.

I’ll let you know how it works out. Of course we have yet to schedule our next game, so feedback might take a bit. If anyone seeing this likes it and tries it out, let me know how it worked out for you.