DMing with Charisma

What are some random events in your games that keep happening?

We have an entire ongoing campaign where enemies keep getting staggered. In D&D, that’s when you’re reduced to exactly zero hit points, when your consciousness is on its last legs. At 1st level it wasn’t that weird, because everybody was only doing five or ten damage, so every fifth or tenth enemy should be knocked to exactly zero. But it kept happening at 4th, and at 8th, and at 12th. When we’re doing thirty or more damage per attack, every fourth or fifth monster shouldn’t be able to dive through that narrowing window. And it only happens in this campaign.

In the fine tradition of the Hallway Campaign, where a solid chunk of combat happened in two-square-wide rooms, and the Monster-Friending campaign, where the players looked at the campaign description and elevator pitch and collectively said “…nah”, we’ve come to call this one the Staggered Campaign. Honestly, if the DM doesn’t decide to tweak the campaign so the demons’ plans require sucking the souls out of creatures who became staggered before they die, taking advantage of that dim window of near-lifelessness, it’ll be a tragedy.

What was the funniest misinterpretation of a game rule in your group?

Do people normally have funny misinterpretations of rules? It doesn’t seem like a real source of comedy to me.

I guess the winner has to be Spirit of the Healing Flood, a shaman daily power from 4E. It’s a burst attack that barely damages every enemy within five squares. Its real function is to give all allies in that burst regeneration 2 when they’re bloodied. It didn’t seem like much until we realized that “bloodied” meant “at half health or lower”, including “at negative hit points”. In 4E, if a character at negative hit points gains any healing at all, he or she goes to zero hit points before the healing is applied. This meant a player at negative hit points at the beginning of their turn would actually start their turn at two hit points, always.

That’s still not too terribly bad, except we were running the intentionally lethal Delve Night, a series of one-shots where players came with overpowered builds and we responded accordingly. Most sessions had at least one character death, sometimes before that player’s first action. A power that made characters largely immune to death changed the meta entirely. It meant monsters had to go around beating on unconscious PCs to kill them before the regeneration kicked in, wasting everybody’s time and turning every session into DPS races against practice dummies. Sessions largely ran like a game of whack-a-mole with PCs continually falling down and popping back up, essentially playing a series of minions with a shared pool of powers.

It turns out regeneration doesn’t work when creatures are below one hit point, unlike how it worked in 3E. But for one month, that shaman and its hermit crab nearly derailed the entire campaign. I guess that’s kind of funny.

What is the most challenging but rewarding system have you learned?

Language.

See, it’s both a serious answer and a joke because the question is grammatically incorrect.

But relevant to gaming, I’d say D&D, mostly because it’s a complex system and the first I learned. By the time I started into other systems I had already cut my teeth on tabletop gaming, so learning smaller, simpler sets of rules didn’t bother me. And the reward technically includes every session I’ve ever run, so that’s too vast to ignore. Every other system I’ve played, even counting those outside tabletop gaming, both was easier to learn and gave me less return on my investment in terms of game time, social interaction, and emotional satisfaction. It’ll be a good while before something comes close to usurping it.

What is the best way to learn a new game?

I think the best way to learn anything is to actually do it. Reading the rules and watching play are great, and they’re an important part of figuring anything out, but I think the best way to learn a game is to play it. That way you understand what parts of it work or don’t work for you, you can ask questions about the parts you don’t understand, you see where you have fun, and over time you refine it all into an accurate opinion of the game. It’s even better if you can work with somebody who already knows what they’re doing, but you’ll still get a better picture of the system by slogging through it together than you would from watching those people do it without you.

I do need to point out that no matter how you learn a game, you won’t get anything if you don’t want to learn it. It’s the difference between watching video game speed runs because they’re fun and watching them because you want to learn and duplicate the tricks. If you just want to play a short campaign and never touch the system again, that’s fine, but if you’re going to spend ten years in D&D you may want to remember that a full attack action requires a full round. It’s in the name.

What innovation could RPG groups gain the most benefit from?

A lot of groups are already doing things like cooperative world-building, treating the DM as a fellow player instead of an antagonist and vice versa, and other things I talk about. These are innovations in gaming but they’re not generally applicable. For groups to gain the most benefit, the most groups have to gain benefit, not just a subset of players. So I say holograms.

A visual, three-dimensional representation of a game enhances just about every aspect of it. It makes battles easier by clearly showing you where enemies are, how they’re different, what you can see from there you’re standing, and even temporary bits like areas of effects or threatened squares. It deepens immersion by letting DMs show players how big or scary monsters are or how damp and run-down this factory looks. It increases player investment by letting them make moving representations of their characters including idle animations, combat styles, and taunts. It lets DMs be creative by letting them have pitched mid-air battles, design chaos architecture, or give the players a sense of speed, distance, or ambiance that isn’t possible with static miniatures beholder to gravity. With holograms like the ones in the Iron Man movies, we can even push one floor of a building aside to look at what’s going on below it, or rotate the battlefield so each player can see what’s happening from their character’s perspective. We haven’t even touched on the applications for competitive wargaming or board games. It’s the kind of thing that changes tabletop gaming into the spectacle it’s always tried to spoof.

What fictional character would best fit in your group? Why?

See, this has the same problem as yesterday, but it’s just different enough that I can’t use the same steps to resolve it. There’s a huge difference between “who I want” and “who will work”, and a difference between “a person who exists” and “a fictional person who can be interpreted differently by different observers”. That was a question of opinion, and this is an assessment based on tenuous, mutable facts. It’s borderline unanswerable.

So you know what? Batman. I want Batman, because that can be dozens of characters based on what I want. Sometimes we need Adam West Batman and his zany comedy. Sometimes we need Christian Bale and grimdark growling. Sometimes we need a genius, sometimes we need storyteller, sometimes we need a mentor. By just saying “Batman” I can get whatever flavor I need at any given time because I have access to every interpretation of him.

Except Frank Miller Batman. I don’t foresee needing an expert in prostitutes and swearing.

What historical character would you like in your group? For what game?

I can’t speak to the personality of any given historical figure. I’m not a history buff myself and I don’t really know who’s approachable, who’s clever, who’s good at thinking in-character, and who’s actually incredibly racist. But in a sense that’s freeing, because it means I can discard personality and decide based on what other skills or knowledge they would bring to enhance the game experience. We’ve had plenty of times where we needed to know things like “how many people do you need to maintain a boat this size?” or “how hot does a fire have to be to eradicate a human skeleton?” Somebody who knows the answers would not only save us time, but probably come up with the kind of ridiculous ideas we treasure.

Since I basically want a Renaissance man to act as a repository of facts, I might as well say Leonardo da Vinci. If we can’t handwave the language barrier, then Benjamin Franklin. I think the best game for them would be one set during or slightly before their time period, preferably without too much magic. There’s no way our game is enhanced by having our guest star note that fire spells kill everybody in the room by consuming all of the oxygen.

What types or source of inspiration do you turn to most often for RPGs?

I’m always passively looking for neat ideas. Whenever I bungle into something that I think would make a neat campaign idea, like the Year Without a Summer, I make a note of it. There’s no specific place I look for things like that.

When I’m actively looking for ideas, the walls of my office are covered with pictures and posters from various forms of media. If I’m stuck, I’ll just look around the room. A single poster can remind me of an entire movie, or all the characters in a show, or a comic arc I really liked, and from there I can strip it down to its component ideas and get a plot, a character, a setting, or something else I can work into my campaign. It’s important to me to have a large number of works represented so I can work through as many ideas as possible; a picture of Ryu from Street Fighter doesn’t give me any more ideas than a picture of Zangief, because when I see Ryu I’m already thinking about the rest of the cast as well. I also prefer pictures to something small, like DVD cases or book spines, because it forces me to consider each of them instead of letting my eye pass quickly to the next. There’s no point to having something for inspiration if you’re not going to give yourself time to consider it.

Who would be on your dream team of people you used to game with?

The people from the last legs of the Great Tower of Oldechi were pretty close to an ideal gaming group. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen six players interact that well for that long and have that much fun doing it. We had a party who leaned incredibly evil, in a railroad-heavy campaign, in a setting with few if any long-term consequences, in a system that put handcuffs on almost every aspect of play, and they still knocked it out of the park for months without an ounce of complaint or table drama.

That said, I am happy with both of my current groups. Perhaps I could cherry-pick from those and the Tower group and form a perfect gaming Justice League. But that doesn’t always work. Again, gaming is a social hobby, and the society at the table was perhaps the best thing about it. I can’t say “removing Cid’s player and replacing him with somebody else would make the group better” because the consequences are so unknowable as to make the thought experiment meaningless. I can only say “I’m certain this group is great, because I’ve seen them play”.

What makes a successful campaign?

Everybody had fun. That’s it. My most successful campaigns were fun throughout, and my least successful were ones where either I felt the players weren’t having fun or I didn’t have fun myself. The same goes when I’m a player.

Of course, I prefer having a good story arc through the campaign. And I like it when the good guys win in the end, whether or not I’m one of them. And I like it when it’s clever, so we’re not just going through the motions while throwing jokes at the setting, but not so clever that it’s just an excuse for the DM to prove his or her intellectual superiority. And I prefer a consistent group of characters so we can see them interact and grow over time. But all this is secondary. I’d rather have a monster-of-the-week, cliché-ridden, saw-it-coming campaign that’s entertaining than a story-driven, smart, keeps-me-guessing campaign I can’t stand.

I guess what I’m trying to say is Sailor Moon is a better campaign than Evangelion. That’s how I’m going to describe it from now on.