“Because DMing is a Perform check.”
The Blog
DMing With Charisma is a blog dedicated to helping DMs of tabletop games improve their skills and hopefully the enjoyment and engagement of their players, and vice versa. Created in mid-2011, it focuses mostly on d20 systems.
The Author
I got into gaming via a circuitous route. I’d played video games as long as I could remember, and I picked up the D&D 3.0 Monster Manual in a video game store because it contained a lot of the monsters I didn’t recognize from a rogue-like game I had been playing. From the monster information I reverse-engineered the basic rules of the system, which gave me enough of a foundation to join a gaming club in college without embarrassing myself. I joined a D&D campaign in my second semester and ran my first campaign a year later.
Since then I’ve run a few hundred sessions over a dozen campaigns, not counting playtests, emergency one-shots, guest DMing sessions, and D&D game nights both sanctioned by Wizards of the Coast and otherwise. Though I’ve played in a few big-name systems and I want to play in a half-dozen more, I run in d20 because that’s where I’m most comfortable and where I have the most experience. My current focus is on a multi-campaign setting in Pathfinder.
For additional minutia, check out my answers to the #RPGaDAY event questions:
- Do you prefer to use real dice, a dice application or program, or use a diceless system?
- What is the best game session you have had since August 2015?
- What is something you have done with your game character that you are the proudest of?
- What is the most impressive thing that you can remember another player’s character doing in a session?
- What story does your group of players tell about your character?
- What is the most amazing thing that you know a game group has done for their community?
- What aspect of Roleplaying Games has had the biggest effect on you?
- Do you prefer hardcover, softcover, or electronic books? What are the benefits of your preference?
- What things are a part of your ideal session, other than the actual game?
- What was the largest in-game surprise you have experienced?
- Which gamer that you have played with has most affected the way that you play?
- What game is your group most likely to play next? Why?
- What makes a successful campaign?
- Who would be on your dream team of people you used to game with?
- What types or source of inspiration do you turn to most often for RPGs?
- What historical character would you like in your group? For what game?
- What fictional character would best fit in your group? Why?
- What innovation could RPG groups gain the most benefit from?
- What is the best way to learn a new game?
- What is the most challenging but rewarding system have you learned?
- What was the funniest misinterpretation of a game rule in your group?
- What are some random events in your games that keep happening?
- Share one of your best ‘Worst Luck’ stories.
- What is the game you are most likely to give to others as a gift?
- What makes for a good character?
- What hobbies go well with RPGs?
- Describe the most unusual circumstance or location in which you have gamed.
- What film or novel would you be most surprised that a friend had not seen or read?
- If you could host a game anywhere on Earth, where would that be?
- Describe the ideal game room if your budget were unlimited.
- What is the best piece of advice you were ever given for your game of choice?
For reasons unknown, the comment box on most of your posts is closed, but on this one it’s open. I assume that means you’re not likely to publish any comments on this either, but actually mostly what I really want is to write you an email, so this’ll do just fine.
I have bad news for you about one of the claims in “House Rule: Three-Axis Cosmology”. You say:
> Since it’s not a wheel or a box, I’m calling this cosmology the Great Edifice
As I am both a mathematician and a troll, I must inform you that you are incorrect. The Great Edifice is, in fact, a box. You see, there is a concept in mathematics called the “dual”. It is a transformation you can apply to an object and get another object in the same general category, which if you apply it again will get you back to the original. This applies to a breathtaking variety of categories, which is why mathematicians like it so much, but the important category here is the Platonic Solids. The dual of a regular polyhedron is another regular polyhedron. Place a plane tangent to each vertex, and connect it up where those planes intersect. This makes the vertices become faces, and for every face, there is now a vertex in the corresponding location; edges become different edges, roughly at right angles to their previous directions. Each of your fourteen planes in the Great Edifice is a single point at a vertex or the midpoint of an edge, so each of these has a position in the dual as well, and in fact with only those fourteen points *these are equally valid interpretations* – there is no structure that would distinguish between them.
You can probably see where I’m going with this: the figure you drew is the regular octahedron, aka the d8, and its dual is the cube, the d6. It’s a box. Purgatory is center of the Active face, The Outlands the center of the Passive face. Each edge of the cube is one of the ten two-axis planes. (I’ve put a mockup at imgur/ b4hivl2 if you can’t visualize it easily.)
While I’m here, I’m curious where you got the name Utopia for Pathfinder’s plane of Law. Also what you’re doing for Lawful Neutral (of any valence on Active/Passive) outsiders – modrons, axiomites, formians, or something else entirely?
For the overall Active/Passive axis, it’s interesting, but I doubt I’d use it. If you’re familiar with the work of FrankTrollman & K, I’d draw an analogy to the system they used in their Dungeonomicon – An alignment grid which was a diamond rather than a square, with the four added extremes being denoted ‘XG’, ‘XL’, ‘XE’, ‘XC’ – Extreme Good/Law/Evil/Chaos, intense devotion to that single alignment to the exclusion of all else. Naturally, paladins switch from being LG-only to being XG-only. This essentially adds ‘Active’ with the rest of the grid as ‘Reactive’, without ‘Passive’. (You could perhaps also add ‘XN’, for the Lady of Pain/activist druid position that neutrality Must Be Maintained At All Costs.) I think this gets all the upside of the third axis, with most of the reactive/passive distinction being mostly cruft – normal people are passive or reactive, but without any stimulus occurring (and there rarely is any occurring) you’d never see the difference. Though the *cosmology* is interesting even without the alignment axis, though; I’d perhaps borrow from the Great Wheel’s Outlands and have each set of three aligned planes go from inner to outer, getting more strongly aligned as they go. Though I’d probably want to add a second plane each for LE/LG/CE/CG…