Gaming Systems

Shamus Young asked some questions a couple days ago that I just saw. I'm going to answer them in the interest of
1) Letting my readers know what my gaming background/experience is
2) Having something to blog about tonight since I still haven't received/written any more character stories for the new campaign
3) Thus having an opportunity to point out that less than 14 hours remain to give me your input on the current Weekly What the Heck

Anyway, Shamus asks:

1. What gaming system did you start with when you were learning the game?
2. What’s your preferred gaming system when you’re running a game?
3. What system do you prefer as a player? (For some people this is different from #2.)
4. And because we live in an imperfect world: What system do you actually end up using?

I answer:
1) My very first exposure to RPGs was the Moldvay Basic Set, followed quickly by AD&D 1st edition. Throughout my high school career I heard rumors of other game systems, but didn't really believe them.
2) I love the ease of building and running encounters in D&D 4e. I have never been a heavy immersion gamer, and never been in heavy immersion groups, so I'm fine with "pushing my piece around and selecting my attack options" as Jeff Rients puts it. 4e is what I've always wanted D&D to be - wargaming where at least one side in the war is a crack team of uber badasses instead of a mob of shlubs.
3) I hope I love 4e from the other side of the screen, but as I mentioned yesterday I won't find out for a couple of days. I actually have a soft spot in my heart for GURPS, our system of choice when I was in college. The actual playing was cumbersome, but the character building... oh, the character building! I have reams of GURPS Supers characters who will never be played, but that's OK - just creating them was more fun than playing them would be anyway. I can think of at least one GURPS Supers character who was spoiled for me after I actually played him.
4) Maybe my world is more perfect than most - my group has followed me to 4e and shows no sign of stopping.

QuickSilver

I'm going to take a break from porting spidery monsters to 4e for a day. Ravyn at Exchange of Realities just posted about fleshing out familiars. It reminded me of the most memorable familiar that ever turned up in one of my campaigns. I thought I'd talk a little about how that familiar, QuickSilver the pseudodragon, developed. Where he came from was covered in the linked article.

The key question that I asked at the time is in ravyn's article: "how does the familiar view its person’s competence level? Who does it think needs whom?" For the first couple of in-game months that the wizard had QuickSilver, the pseudodragon sat quietly in his pocket and watched. Mostly this was because as DM I wasn't used to having to play a familiar at all. In the end this quiet period became critical to QuickSilver's development.

After the party had completed some travel and one major adventure where QuickSilver did nothing but occasionally pop his head out to look for invisible threats, my wife/co-DM and I had some long discussions about how he might start to assert himself. We decided that since this was an axiomatic (law-aligned) pseudodragon, he should be keenly analytical and logical. Since the player of the wizard is a huge Star trek fan, we gave QuickSilver's personality a healthy dose of Mr. Spock. For example, in his first deep discussion with the wizard he pointed out that he had been observing the wizard for "two months, eight days, twelve hours and fourteen minutes".

It had also come to my attention that the player was having trouble making the wizard as effective as he wanted. At the time I had come across Being Batman: the Logic Ninja's Guide to Wizards, and hoped that if I could get the wizard to use some of those ideas his effectiveness would increase. So we decided to make the familiar an adviser and teacher, kind of like Spock to the wizard's Kirk or Brian to Dave's fledgling wizard in Knights of the Dinner Table these past couple years. In that first discussion QuickSilver indicated he wanted to discuss "more effective spell selection and deployment".

Finally, we decided that QuickSilver needed to use some sort of honorific to refer to the wizard, to reinforce the master/adviser relationship since he was about to get bossy/nitpicky. We toyed with lifting Spock's "Captain", but eventually settled on the more medieval "My Liege". This had the additional amusing effect of making the player a bit squirmy, as admonitions of "Just call me Raerskhed" were met with "Of course, my liege."

The simple personality base (logical, analytical) coupled with the honorific made it simple for me to get into character. When I turned to the player and said "My liege, we need to talk," I was instantly in character. The spell mentor relationship I had envisioned didn't really have time to get going, since we only played two more complete adventures in that campaign.

Maybe the wizard's player will drop by and leave his impression of my efforts from his side of the screen (hint hint QuinnTheRanger...)

Full-party Initiative

Through most of the Iron Heroes campaign I was playing in earlier this year, and throughout both of the 4th edition campaigns I've been running since late June, we've been using a loose house ruled system for initiative. Each PC rolls initiative. The monsters roll once (I usually use an off-the-top-of-my-head average of their modifiers to get one modifier). The PCs who beat the monsters go, in any order. Then the monsters go in any order, and the PCs go in any order. Repeat.

In Iron Heroes, with very few effect durations to worry about, this was a completely simple system to implement. Everyone seemed to love it. It fostered cooperation and teamwork among the PCs. It kept everyone's head in the game at almost all times.

In 4th edition, there are a few hurdles to jump over, but I firmly believe they're worth it. You have to be careful of all the durations on effects, but since 4e thrives on teamwork anyway this initiative system really brings out the best in the PCs.

I haven't had much trouble with the durations yet, surprisingly. The 4e Player's Handbook has a section on page 288 where it spells out the effects of delaying and where effects start and end if you do so, but that section strikes me as way more complicated than I want to deal with.

Basically I play that if an effect lasts "until the end of your next turn", that means each party member gets to take advantage of it once. Sure, it's a little weird if the warlord gives some creature an AC penalty after the ranger acts, then the paladin takes advantage of it, then a new round starts and the paladin acts again without the bonus, then the ranger acts and gets the bonus, but that's in keeping with the spirit of the duration and it really hasn't come up that often.

Phat Lewt

I'm not so sure about the treasure "generation" system in 4e. It feels far too easy to either give out solely what your PCs want ("I sure wish my warlock had a Rod of Corruption to amp up his curse.... oh look! A Rod of Corruption in the treasure hoard!") or overcompensate by only placing rewards that don't play to the party ("Oh boy, another orb for the staff wizard and the warlock to not fight over.").

On the other hand, it's not like I build adventures full of randomly generated monsters (well, not entire adventures), so why shouldn't I expect to also place non-random treasure? If the party has no wizard to lay down area effect damage it's probably best to hold back on throwing tons of minions at the party, so why not keep orbs out of the treasure hoards for the same reason?

And really, it wouldn't be that hard to build some tables of level N magic items to place as randomized parcels. That would keep the treasure balanced (at least on paper) and inject some luck of the dice into the proceedings. In fact, for the last adventure I prepped I did almost that. After determining that I needed to place one item each of levels 4 through 7, I simply noted that there were about ten item types of those levels (no rings) that the group could use (no orbs or rods) and rolled four separate d10s. Each d10 pointed me at a table, and I took the item of the appropriate level from each table.

Of course, I gave most of those items to monsters that could also use them....

When Good Encounter Planning Goes Bad

The other day I came across this post and a paragraph in the middle of it caught my eye.

When planning encounters, DMs need to make sure that everyone has something to do. If the Big Bad Demon has super-high spell resistance that is sure to stymie the mages, then provide some mooks that the wizard can blast away with chain lightning bolts. If the lich lord has ungodly damage reduction, make sure the fighter has some skeletons to cleave through. It’s not about throwing the players softballs; it’s about making sure that everyone has something to challenge and engage them.

This is good advice probably 99% of the time. However, I had it backfire on me spectacularly once years ago. It bugs me to this day so I thought I'd share the story.

In college we played a lot of GURPS Supers, and our main campaign seemed infested with paramilitary types carrying big guns instead of zapping bad guys with superpowers. For my first time running the game, I wanted a more four-color feel so I had everyone play students irradiated by a science lab accident on campus. The players came to the table with a big metal guy, a super-lucky guy, a speedster, a matter manipulator, and some others I don't remember. Overall, exactly the kinds of characters I was looking for.

Since the radiation accident smacked of the Fantastic Four and their cosmic rays, I ran with it - the first adventure involved a Mole Man clone leading an underground army up out of the campus quad. The PCs eventually battled his minions back to his underground lair, where I had made sure to follow the advice above. There was a big stone guy for the big metal hero, and morlock-style mooks for everyone else to play with.

There was just one problem: the player of the matter manipulator, who I figured would disarm the mooks by turning their axes into tapioca pudding or something, refused to attack them. Instead he focused on the big stone guy, who was too large for his limited power to affect. After one round of no effect and with mooks surrounding him, I thought he'd get a clue. After three rounds of his character attacking the same target and doing nothing effective, the mooks he could have disarmed with a thought carved him into dog food with their axes.

The thing that bugs me to this day is that the player argued with me for an hour that his character had done the tactically correct thing by focusing on the biggest threat. The evidence of the outcome didn't sway him in the slightest. I guess the moral of the story is that if you have a player with the same mindset, you might have to take that into account when adding mooks around a BBEG. Especially if the mooks are dangerous enough to do lots of damage if ignored.

Director's Vision, Part 4 (The Inspired Improvisation)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

In this installment of my series on the director's vision, I'll look at the inspired improvisation - when your players take off and do your job for you. This post actually comes more out of the movie Jen and I made that kicked off my thoughts about this stuff than out of any campaign example. The entire hide and seek sequence was her idea at the last minute, and now it's a favorite scene for both of us.

Letting inspired improvisation take off is more a matter of spotting the signs that it's coming and getting out of the way than actually doing anything. The best moments of improv will leap at you unexpectedly - you just have to be ready.

In yet another example from the same campaign I've been mining, the party had decided that the well in the center of the town they were in was where the treasure was hidden. They arranged with the mayor to "cleanse the well of evil" so they would have an excuse to go down and look for loot. Before they could actually act, though, they discovered that the treasure was really somewhere else and recovered it.

I was ready to call the adventure finished and gloss over them leaving the town, but they wanted to play out what happened. What followed was one of the more hilarious scenes it has ever been my pleasure to DM. The gnome wizard was lowered into the well, where he shouted, carried on, and used illusion spells to convince the watching mayor that something akin to Gandalf's battle with the balrog was going on down there. Meanwhile the party cleric stood by the mayor calmly assuring him that everything would be fine and that he should just stay back until it was over. I would like to say I ingeniously saw what was coming and let them go with it, but really I was probably just too tired to argue with them. Still, that's okay, because all I had to do was sit back and let them cut loose with descriptions of the gnome's pyrotechnic antics and roleplaying of the cleric's deadpan reassurances.

One good way to get ready to capitalize on improv moments is to practice never saying no when you can say yes. When we were filming, I couldn't tell how the hide and seek scene looked - I was behind the tree holding the giant plush bigfoot. I had to trust Jen's instinct and agree to follow her lead all the way through until we got home and watched the footage. Similarly, when GMing you need to look for signs that your players are really jazzed about what they're doing. The group was really gung ho about playing out the well scene, which should have clued me in that it was going to be good.

Director's Vision, Part 3 (The Wow Scene)

Part 1
Part 2

In this installment of my series on the director's vision, I'll look at the wow scene - the kind of thing that gets talked about weeks or years later.

In my experience, the harder you work on a "wow" scene, the less likely it is to have the impact you want. If you work too hard at it, it becomes forced and feels unnatural. Like the pivotal scene, it's best to work with what develops at the table than to try to force the scene you've wanted to see since before the campaign started.

In another example from the same campaign I mentioned last time, there was a semi-cool scene at the end of a premade module I was running. In it, a forgotten deity thanked the party members for saving his temple and blessed them for a month. I turned it up to 11 after noticing that the deity was supposed to favor the most lawful character in the party. For this party that was the goody-goody gnome wizard who was on the verge of taking the Improved Familiar feat to get a pseudodragon.

So when I set up the hook for the adventure, the gnome was the one who had the visions that led them toward the temple. He spent the entire adventure wondering why a voice in his dreams was speaking to him in a forgotten language. Then when the party got blessed in the finale, the grateful lawful deity also bestowed an axiomatic pseudodragon familiar on the wizard. OK, I stacked the deck in my favor by laying an extra-cool templated familiar on him, but there were reactions of "Ooh" and "Nice" from around the table.

There might have been other things the deity could have done to inspire awe, but I doubt many would have had a bigger impact than bringing the wizard's new familiar into the game with such fanfare. The wizard's player definitely had an extra-soft spot in his heart for that pseudodragon for the rest of the campaign. The other PCs even went well beyond the call of duty to save it when it got in trouble once or twice.

Like with the pivotal scene, I don't have a recipe to follow to cook up a wow scene. But, like with the pivotal scene, it's probably best to just go with the flow - riff off what your players come up with or what they care about. Build up gradually - when something works pretty well, look back over it afterwards, turn it over, see if you can polish it up and morph it into something even better the next time. And when all else fails... give the wizard an uber-kewl familiar.

More Laser Clerics!

I should probably be working instead of blogging, but I dig this and I wanna play too. Plus I have a laser cleric of the Raven Queen in one campaign who'll probably want to use Chatty's flavor, so I'd better at least do her other at-will...

Cleric Attack 1

Fire of Fate

A shaft of cold, white flame lances down from above, stealing a single enemy's luck and life force while at the same time transferring that luck or life force to an ally.

At-Will * Divine, Implement, Radiant
Standard ActionRanged 5
Target: One creature
Attack: Wisdom vs. Fortitude

Hit: 1d6 + Wisdom modifier radiant damage, and one ally you can see chooses either to gain temporary hit points equal to your Charisma modifier + one-half your level or to make a saving throw.

Increase damage to 2d6 + Wisdom modifier at 21st level.

Go go gadget laser clerics!

Director's Vision, Part 2 (The Pivotal Scene)

Part 1

In this installment of my little series on the director's vision, I'll look at the pivotal scene - a startling revelation that sets off the rest of the adventure/campaign.

An important consideration for the pivotal scene is the setup. It won't have the impact you want if the players don't have some investment in what's been going on. Before you turn their world upside down it helps if they're actually settled in the world.

For example, in the last long term 3e campaign I ran, the party returned from a side quest to find the caravan they'd been traveling with destroyed and one PC's father and brother apparently killed. The rest of the campaign was spent tracking down the evildoers responsible.

I waited a long time to spring this scene. The PCs were 4th or 5th level before it went down and they had been traveling with this caravan since campaign day 1. The father who was killed had also been their benevolent employer all that time. I had worked really hard to make him likable, from handing them bonuses for good work to just looking like a harmless old dude (click the name Niccolaio Torelli on that page to display his portrait).

I don't think, even though one character's family was killed, that the scene would have been as effective if I had gone ahead with it when they were level 1 or 2 (which I thought about doing at the time). No matter how much we want them to, players just don't start out attached to those NPCs in their back stories. It took time and work for them to lose at least some of the metagamey feeling that these guys were going to screw them over at any second*. I introduced an NPC from another PC's back story in the same campaign, and I don't think they ever trusted that guy. When he betrayed them it barely registered, even though he only did it because they took his mount and abandoned him in a plague-riddled town when he got sick.

I wish I had a formula or step by step instructions for how to make your players care about the things in the world you plan to take away, but I don't. Maybe they can just smell it on you when an NPC is going to betray them. The scene with the father dying might have worked because the father would never have betrayed them. He was doomed to die from campaign day one, but he would never have betrayed them. Maybe the best way to go is to just put lots of sympathetic NPCs in your campaigns... see which one they get the most attached to... then kill the hell out of that one.

* They never lost that feeling with the brother, but that's OK... he turned out to be behind the whole thing anyway.

World Building Through Interrogation

I tried an interesting experiment earlier this evening. It didn't accomplish everything I had hoped, but it showed promise.

Early last week I tried to get some player input into building my mini-campaign story arc by throwing it open on this blog. That (as my wife predicted) got almost zero response and none of it was really useful. I then tried to get her to contribute by playing the role of the tiefling the party was going to interrogate first thing in our session this evening. She didn't go for that plan, feeling that she should be able to focus on her characters, not my NPC.

So earlier today I hit on an idea that seemed to have promise: I would play the tiefling NPC, but only Jen's tiefling PC would be able to understand him. I had to retcon some minor things about the world and Jen's character (the tieflings of Bael Turath now spoke Supernal instead of Common and so do many of their descendants, including the prisoner and Jen's tiefling wizard). Then I told Jen before the game that the tiefling was going to refuse to speak Common to the party, instead speaking "Supernal" that I would make up on the fly which she would have to "translate".

For some things the prisoner was going to say I prepared translations on post-it notes ahead of time. I handed these to Jen so she would know what he was saying without the rest of the party knowing. I also warned her that if the line of questioning led into areas that

1. The prisoner would know about and be willing to tell them
2. I hadn't already fleshed out
3. I didn't even have an idea off the top of my head for
   

then I would spout some "Supernal" and hand her a blank post-it and it would be her job to "translate" by creating whatever he said.

In the end, I didn't have to hand out any blank post-its. I had thought out what the prisoner did and didn't know well enough that they didn't go down any tracks I hadn't thought of. I think the interrogation session in "Supernal" went really well anyway, though. I had prepped some insults and innuendo for the prisoner to say to Jen's tiefling privately that really stopped her in her tracks. At one point the other player at the table observed "Boy, it's taking a long time to translate that one" as Jen wrestled with what she should and shouldn't reveal.

Director's Vision, Part 1 (Introduction)

Last week I helped my wife shoot a music video starring our 6-foot plush bigfoot, Claude. I might be biased, but I think it turned out pretty well. I also think one of the reasons it turned out well is that from the start of the project I had a couple of clear ideas in my head for things I wanted to see (those things were the dancing and painting scenes, if you're curious). I've heard actors talk about the "director's vision" when plugging movies on talk shows, and I think this experience gave me some inkling of what they're talking about.

In the days after the video shoot, I did some thinking about the director's vision and how it might apply to campaign building, adventure building and game mastering. There are a few concepts that come to mind:

The Pivotal Scene
The crucial information or startling revelation that sets off the rest of the adventure/campaign.

The Wow Scene
A scene so cool you can play it in your head like a film in your mind's eye.

The Inspired Improvisation
Sometimes your players/actors come up with something so good you just have to get out of their way and let it happen.

In the next few days I'll try to expand on these and think about how to make them happen.

How to Draw Stairs

Longer ago than I care to consider, I was an engineering undergrad at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. At the time (and maybe still for all I know), every student in the engineering school had to take General Engineering 103 - Engineering Drafting. I hated the class, partly because I didn't see the point, but probably mostly because I sucked at it. I managed to pass (barely) and moved on with my life.

Years later, I finally found a use for all the stuff they tried to teach me about straightedges and compasses and parallel lines. I could use their techniques to help me draw old-school-D&D-map stairs like in the image to the right (bonus points to the first grognard to tell us which module this chunk of map is from).

You will need the following tools:

• Pencil (for construction lines)
• Pen or marker (for final lines)
• Good white drafting eraser
• 2 drafting triangles
• Drafting compass (optional)
  

I'll be showing my example on a scrap of 1" square graph paper from the stuff I've been using to make custom battle maps for our 4e sessions. You can click on the images to make them (a lot) larger. Maybe I should have scaled those down a bit. Ah well :)

I'll start with a hallway that I want to put stairs in (just like the one toward the top left of the map above).

Use one of the straightedges to draw two guide lines in light pencil from the top of the stairs to the bottom. At this point, truly particular drafting geeks can use the compass to draw evenly-spaced tick marks down one of the guide lines.

Set up the two triangles as shown. Set the guide triangle (the top one in the image) parallel to the direction your stairs go (I aligned it with a line on the graph paper). Press it against the paper so it doesn't move. Slide the other triangle to a point where its edge crosses both of the guide lines. Line it up with a tick mark if you drew some. Press down to hold it in place, but always keep pressure on the guide triangle as well. If you draw with a light touch you shouldn't need much pressure on the second triangle.

Draw a line in ink along the second triangle's edge from one guide line to the other. Keeping pressure on the guide, slide the second triangle along the stairs (to the next tick mark if you drew them) and repeat.

Finally, erase the guide lines.

I hope this little tutorial is of some use to somebody. It represents an application of pretty much every trick I remember from drafting class. I doubt my professor would be impressed.

Wandering Monsters

I was going to keep quiet tonight even though I've been writing, to stock up on backlog. I need something to carry the blog through while I'm out of town for the next couple of days. But it looks like the mighty Mike Mearls has come to blogger, and opened with quite the post.

I find myself really wanting to try his "skill challenge to avoid wandering monsters" idea this coming weekend. Now all I need is an adventure locale that lends itself to lots of weird monsters creeping around all over the place, getting up in the PCs business whenever they try to catch their breath.

Computerized Tools at the Table

Before I start this post, let me lay out my credentials for anyone who isn't aware of them. I'm the guy who wrote Virtual Dice Tray, a program that has at least a few fans in the tabletop sphere. I've even considered trying to make a career out of writing software tools for tabletop gaming.

So it might surprise you, dear reader (as it surprises me), that the 4e games I've been running have been done with almost no computerized assistance. I keep my laptop at the table, but it has only two simple tasks, neither of which is critical to the game:

1. Drive a small monitor that faces the group where I can display scene-setting images
   
2. Run an old version of iTunes and play a mix of movie scores and other background music

What caused this change? How did I wind up not even using a program, hailed by one user with "I don't know how I'll ever DM without Virtual Dice Tray", that I wrote myself?

I think it has to do with the campaign I played in from January to June of this year. By the third session there were 4 laptops at the table for 4 players and the DM. The DM was running DM's Familiar and had pdfs open. One player was trying to chronicle what was happening in-game as we were playing. My wife and I were running Virtual Dice Tray and I had my character sheet open in TextPad.

There were certain problems that kept cropping up for everyone. I had to keep flipping between my dice and my character sheet. My wife was using a screen smaller than the Dice Tray was designed for and kept running into problems. Our chronicler kept needing things repeated that were said during flurries of typing. During combat the DM would stare into his screen and then announce "You take 12 points of damage" because DM's Familiar had already decided whether his monster hit whoever was being attacked and rolled damage silently.

Maybe if we had kept going we could have kept the computers and found our way around some of these issues. Maybe not. All I know is that when we play now my laptop is the only computer at the table and, as noted above, it's not working nearly as hard.

And when I throw handfuls of dice down on the table in front of everyone, I don't have to worry about the players getting the weird empty feeling I used to get, wondering what was happening on the DM's laptop screen.