Multi-Round Actions (Part 4, Tactical Feats)

Posted on 12 February, 2014 by MssngrDeath

I never felt like tactical feats really got the respect they deserve. I think the designers wanted to give characters neat tricks that meshed with their combat style while keeping them accessible enough that any character who wanted them could have them without rearranging the whole build or being forced into a weird prestige class. But I think players saw them as a too-long collection of mechanics, each of which was insufficiently interesting on their own and none of which were as good as a feat that simply increased a number somewhere. It’s a shame, because they’re really quite neat.

A tactical feat is a feat that allows a character follow a set of steps to gain some bonus. Often this is a bonus to whatever the character does at the end of the steps (Energy Gestalt, Complete Mage: cast a cold spell followed by a sonic spell for extra damage) or a new ability that normally isn’t allowed (Giantbane, Complete Warrior: if a big enemy attacks you while you’re taking a total defense, tumble to the far side of the enemy and stab them). The options given in tactical feats are vast, but each feat has a theme, like switching between spell and weapon attacks or fighting with allies in tight formation.

The options in tactical feats have to make sense as a series of actions, not just because it fits the theme of this article but because that’s the point. An example is one of the first tactical feats, Combat Brute, which allows a player to add an additional damage bonus from Power Attack as long as they charged in the previous round and accepted a high attack penalty. It represented a character who hurled himself at an enemy, weapon swinging wildly and throwing all caution to the wind. His attack and defenses were lowered, but if his attack connected the momentum would make it devastating. That’s a tactical feat in a nutshell: do a thing in one round that gives you a benefit next round in a way that makes narrative sense.

It’s worth noting the language in tactical feats. For one, they tend to refer to their actions as “maneuvers”. At the time the feats were published, maneuvers weren’t a thing in D&D. Now we have combat maneuvers (and, I suppose, the Book of Nine Swords, which we try not to talk about), so I had to invent some language. Also, tactical feats often talk about the “first round”, “second round”, etc. This is not the first round of a combat but the first round of the maneuver. The intent is to set up one action over a series of contiguous turns. If the player with Combat Brute above charged, then drank a potion in the next round and Power Attacked in the third, they’ve already lost all their momentum. The “first-second” language is necessary to keep the actions as adjacent as possible.

It’s probably easiest to understand with some examples. All of the feats here present three options, because doing things in threes is awesome, and a player with the feat gains access to all three options at will.

Maneuver Expert (Tactical)

Your skill in unexpected combat styles allows you to keep your opponents off-guard, manipulating the battlefield seemingly at will.
     Prerequisites: BAB +5, Combat Expertise, Power Attack.
     Benefit: The Maneuver Expert feat allows the use of three tactical maneuvers.
     Overbearing Momentum: To use this technique, you must successfully bull rush a creature in the first round. If you do, on the second round you gain a +2 bonus to Combat Maneuver rolls against that creature for each square you pushed the creature with your bull rush. This bonus only applies to Combat Maneuver rolls made to bull rush, reposition, or trip.
     Right Where You Want Them: To use this technique, you must successfully perform a dirty trick on a creature in the first round. If you do, on the second round you gain a +2 bonus to Combat Maneuver rolls. If your dirty trick attack exceeded the creature’s Combat Maneuver Defense by 5 or more, you may reduce the duration of the effect to one round (ending the effect) and gain an additional +2 bonus on Combat Maneuver rolls against the same creature for each round by which you reduced the duration. These bonuses only apply to Combat Maneuver rolls made to drag or trip.
     Thief’s Diversion: To use this technique, you must successfully disarm a creature or sunder a creature’s item in the first round. If you do, on the second round you may make a Combat Maneuver roll to steal an item from the target as a move action.

Mobile Combatant (Tactical)

You flit about the battlefield, making sure your enemies never know where you are or where you’ll be when you next strike.
     Prerequisites: BAB +4, Stealth 6 ranks
     Benefit: The Mobile Combatant feat allows the use of three tactical maneuvers.
     Nimble Sneak: To use this technique, you must make a successful Stealth check to hide in the first round. If you do, you gain a +2 bonus to Climb and Swim checks in the second round.
     Second-Story Artist: To use this technique, you must make a Climb, Fly, or Swim check, or an Acrobatics check to reduce falling damage, in the first round. If you do, you gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls in the second round for every ten feet you moved vertically in the first round. The bonus only applies to attack rolls made against a creature within 30 feet, and only movement made during your turn counts toward the bonus.
     Tricky Step: To use this technique, you must make an Acrobatics check to move through an enemy’s threatened square in the first round and make an attack against that enemy in the second round. If you do and you flank the enemy, you may treat the opponent as flat-footed for your first attack in the second round even if they normally cannot be caught flat-footed. This does not allow you to make a sneak attack against a creature immune to sneak attack.

Tactical Healer (Tactical)

Your mastery of healing spells lets you use residual curative effects to bolster your magic.
     Prerequisites: Ability to cast cure serious wounds, caster level 5th.
     Benefit: The Mobile Combatant feat allows the use of three tactical maneuvers.
     Divine Cascade: To use this technique, you must cast a spell from the conjuration (healing) school in the first round. If you do, you gain a +2 bonus to your caster level on any spell you cast from the conjuration (healing) school in the second round.
     Flow of Grace: To use this technique, you must cast a spell from the conjuration (healing) school in the first round and use a class ability that heals hit point damage (such as a cleric’s channel energy, a paladin’s lay on hands, or a witch’s healing hex) in the second round. If you do, you may increase your effective class level for the class ability by a number equal to level of the spell you cast in the first round. The class ability cannot be used to heal yourself or deal damage to enemies.
     Healing Conversion: To use this technique, you must cast a spell with the “harmless” saving throw descriptor in the first round and cast a spell from the conjuration (healing) school in the second round. If you do, any creature targeted by both spells cures an additional 2 points of damage per level of the second spell, but the duration of the first spell is reduced by one round.

Please note the first technique in each feat. For those techniques, the action in the second round can also qualify as the first round for the same technique. That’s intentional. A character using overbearing momentum can bull rush in the first round, use the bonus to CMB to bull rush in the second round, then use the result of the second bull rush to gain a bonus in the third round, and so on, as long as he does nothing but bull rush. A character using nimble sneak gains a +2 bonus to Climb and Swim as long as her Stealth check never fails. A healer using divine cascade gains an effective +2 to caster level as long as he heals every single round. They’re nontrivial bonuses, but they all lock a character into doing something that’s not always beneficial or wise.

Unlike channeled spells or the powers in 4E, this isn’t brand-new ground. Tactical feats existed for a while and there’s little reason not to use them. I found about two dozen in various books before stopping, not least because searching every book for the word “tactical” is really boring. They’re all built for 3.5E and most of them can work in Pathfinder with few if any changes. It means we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, just remind everybody that it exists.

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Multi-Round Actions (Part 3, 4th Edition)

Posted on 5 February, 2014 by MssngrDeath

Channeled spells are great and all, but they don’t exist in 4th Edition. This entire endeavor started because I was tired of the “if you don’t make an attack, you’ve wasted your turn” design philosophy and play methodology of 4E, so of course I was eventually going to write about about multi-round actions in a system where there’s no such thing.

I knew that I wasn’t going to invent things like full-round actions or two-round actions because I want to stick with the existing capabilities of the system, within reason. This means that I had to come up with a way for actions to flow from one to another, where one or more actions serve as the setup for something that come later. I just had to come up with a way for this to happen. I didn’t expect to come up with three.

By the way, WordPress really doesn’t like the science I do with tables, which is one of the reasons channeled spells were on their own page. But this time I want to say something between examples, so this is an image-heavy post. If you’re on a mobile device or operate your Internet by hand-crank, you may want to hold off on this one. (Also, thanks for being so dedicated to the blog! Hand-cranks are hard!)
Continue reading →

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Multi-Round Actions (Part 2, Channeled Spells)

Posted on 29 January, 2014 by MssngrDeath

When I thought of “things in D&D that can take more than one round”, the first place I went was “spells”. However, that space in D&D is largely filled with “spells not designed for combat” and “sorcerers trying to use metamagic feats no matter how little the designers wanted them to”, not so much “spells too awesome for a mere six seconds”. The only place I found combat-ready spells that took more than one round was the Player’s Handbook II, which introduced channeled spells.

Here’s the short version. A channeled spell has a mutable casting time. The longer a caster puts energy into the spell, the more powerful the spell is, within specified limits. Channeled spells usually do something mildly helpful when cast as a swift action, something fair when cast as a standard action, something interesting when cast as a full-round action, and something powerful (but not as powerful as casting two spells) when cast as two full-round actions. This means that with the same spell slot a caster can throw out a quick swift-action version of the spell to shore up their turn, spend twelve seconds focusing and releasing a game-changer, or something in between.

A caster doesn’t need to decide the casting time when they start casting. If a wizard starts casting a channeled pyroburst, she probably intends to spend two rounds and drop a much scarier version of fireball when she’s done. But if her allies rush into the area between rounds one and two, she can shrug, release the spell for less damage in a smaller area to preserve party continuity, and carry on with her turn.

Once I decided I wanted to write more channeled spells to scratch the multi-round action itch, I looked at everything Wizards had done in the space. All of the example channeled spells (hint: the full text of all three fits on one page) are basically mundane spells that get louder and louder as casting time increases. Channeled divine health gets a bigger range and heals more damage, channeled divine shield gives more damage reduction, and channeled pyroburst deals more damage in a bigger area. The spells get stronger, but they don’t get more interesting. They don’t offer any more options or utility. Given that they’re designed to get better as a player works at them, I found channeled spells a prime opportunity for presenting a list of options (benefits, targets, anything that allows choice) and letting a player pick from them.

So, yeah, I told you that story to tell you this one.

There are a few goals I had while working on these:

  1. Spells of various levels. The original three spells were all 3rd- and 4th-level, making them inaccessible for new characters and somewhat irrelevant at high-level.

  2. One spell for each school of magic. Channeled spells should be accessible to all casters, not just specific builds.

  3. Combat spells only. There’s little downside to a multi-round casting time if progression isn’t measured in rounds, so no exploration- or interaction- based spells and only one pre-combat buff. I suppose you could argue that a multi-round cast is easier for people to detect when you’re trying to cast one surreptitiously, but that’s enough of a corner case that I don’t see a point in designing for it.

  4. Try to present a list of options and allow the caster to pick from among them. It’s perfectly fine for a spell to just get bigger and bigger the longer you channel it, but it’s not as fun.

You can find my results here. They’re not playtested and there’s still work to be done around balance, but I hope I’ve opened up the design space for any players interested in firing a Mega Buster.

By the way, combining points (1) and (3) was a pain; there’s only so much a diviner does mid-fight. I didn’t always succeed at (4) either, though I succeeded about as much as I expected to. Where I definitely failed is the spell names. When I eventually play that half-orc sorcerer who uses only custom spells, I might tank his Intelligence so my naming can be excused.

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Non-Binary DCs (or, Why Players Can’t Have Nice Things, Part One of Infinity)

Posted on 22 January, 2014 by MssngrDeath

D&D is largely a binary system: you either succeed at something or you don’t. There are no partial successes or glancing blows, and aside from critical hits and natural ones on Reflex saves there’s nothing in the system that rewards particularly low or high rolls more than the basic yes-or-no. Results like “if you beat the Swim DC by 10, you can move at double speed” started as house rules, then became optional rules, and only recently graduated to Core rules that players should use. Being good at something doesn’t actually make you better at it, it just makes you more likely to succeed the same way everyone else succeeds.

Okay, fine, Craft checks take the result into account. But work with me here.

There’s a neat trick I’ve picked up from story-based systems like Apocalypse World and Icons. These systems rank the success of a roll on a small scale. If a player barely succeeds at something, they get some middling result. If they do better, their character does better. Often this takes the form of a list of options, and higher successes give the player more choices from that list.

I think it works best with an example. Say your superhero is using his laser vision against an enemy. The DM says “roll for Laser”, a phrase that should come up at least once per game regardless of system or character. The player rolls a nine, or a thirty, or whatever is a moderate success today. The DM replies “You did well at Laser, but not great. You can hit the enemy to deal damage, hit his power suit to disable him a bit next round, or turn off your laser in time to avoid collateral damage. Pick two.”

This gives the player a choice far beyond “I use Laser”, and they can play it however they want. If they’re playing to the character and the character is a punch-pulling boy scout, they’ll forgo the damage. If the player wants the power suit for later, they may avoid damaging it. And the character is a Rob Liefeld-esque gritty 90s antihero, collateral damage is not only expected but encouraged. The player’s input isn’t done just because they declared an attack, and it opens room for tactical and narrative decision-making.

My current players may be reading this and saying “That is a neat idea, though I can’t help but notice that you haven’t given us an option like this for the entire campaign. What gives?” Well, I’ve tried this before. I put my players into a skill challenge and started through it this way, comparing their rolls to thresholds rather than straight DCs. The first time a player (we’ll call this player “Terry”) did anything but a raucous success, I relayed three options and told Terry to pick two.

Terry froze, completely. That is, I-dont-understand-the-question, did-I-hit-or-not, why-won’t-my-tongue-work froze. I would have gotten a better response if I’d based the skill challenge on a real-world game of lacrosse. It took some serious cajoling before I got a response at all, which occurred when the party was able to band together and mutually agree on the best set of options. Terry made no actual single-person decision. For the rest of the skill challenge the party didn’t pick any results without a committee consensus.

This is, as the alert reader might note, the exact opposite of how the mechanic should work. It’s intended as a tool for character exploration, tactical and strategic differentiation, and individual expression. Instead, every character acted in the way that the party as a whole thought they should act. The entire party had a say in the turn of every other party member, which not only slowed the skill challenge but removed each player’s ability to control their own turn. Enforcing group silence in later skill challenges did little; turns were faster but each player still considered things from a “what would the group want?” paradigm, and we had to remind Terry that asking the other players for advice was not feasible. We no longer had a series of distinct personalities with different combat styles, we had a group combat style from which deviation was quietly discouraged.

I would love to blame the players for this, in the same way I would love to blame my oven for burning dinner. In truth it’s more likely that the group’s style of play was not conducive to threshold-base successes. Some players like the finality of complete success or complete failure and just want the minutia as flavor text; to them, “you hit the orc for ten damage” and “the orc twists out of the way, preserving vital organs, but your blade still makes a nasty slice against his thigh” are both good because there’s no variance in what actually occurs. It’s not a fault, but a preference, and in a world of ambiguity I get its appeal. In addition, some groups work as a team no matter what else happens or what’s appropriate for the characters. That’s a great trait for a bunch of superheroes or a dedicated adventuring party. It’s not very good in the conflict-based, split-the-party-or-else world of story gaming.

I still think it’s something for which D&D has room, more in skill challenges than in combat. I’ve seen tables for glancing hits and broken weapons and strained muscles, and none of it looks fun. If I want something that simulationist, I’ll just go out and hit a guy. But I love letting players act more quickly or succeed beyond expectations when they blow their rolls out of the water, and very few players have given me a hard time with additional short-term penalties for especially botched rolls (hint: those players and I tend not to get along).

I haven’t quite internalized the “come up with three or four options real quick and present them to the players”, but I really want to get into it. I’m already picturing a skill challenge with multiple non-exclusive paths for success or failure, like stopping the magic ritual while also disarming the traps and cleaning up the house before Mom and Dad get home, where big successes address two or more goals while partial successes let you address one situation by making the other situations worse. I know at least one of my current players is reading this paragraph and salivating. And, just as Gygax said*, drool is the best metric for player interest.

That said, I do plan on introducing some of the “present X options / pick X minus Y” into combat. Last time I talked about actions that take multiple rounds, specifically mentioning channeled spells in 3.5E. They’re a prime candidate for this mechanic, which I’ll detail more next time.

* — I can’t actually back that up.

Edit: I still would have done this post if I’d known that Left Oblique had written something on the same topic just a week ago, I promise. Yet another in a long line of “two people in our circles happen to run the same idea in different games without even having spoken to each other about it” instances. I blame the hundredth monkey effect.

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Multi-Round Actions (Part 1, The Folly of Setup)

Posted on 13 January, 2014 by MssngrDeath

One of the post ideas that’s been puttering about in my head for at the last year is the conceit that D&D 4E drastically cut down on the amount of actions a player can perform. Ostensibly there are the same number of actions: one standard, one move, one “other” (minor in 4E, swift in 3.5E), and as many free actions as a DM will tolerate. But 4E has this nasty habit of making moves and minors only tangentially relevant for corner cases or builds specifically designed to use/exploit them. Instead, all the money is in standard actions.

In 4E, things get done when characters use standard actions to do them, and most of them time that “thing” is hurting a target guy. A fighter uses a standard action to swing a sword and deal damage; attacking triggers the free side benefit of a mark, allowing the fighter to do his job as a defender. A wizard uses a standard action to cast a spell and deal damage; using this spell causes some control effect, allowing a wizard to do their job as a controller. Even a cleric spends their day making attacks to deal damage, and some of them have the tangential benefit of healing or buffing allies. The actual bread-and-butter healing is relegated to a minor action. 4E is structured around people using standard action attack powers to hurt other people, and perhaps those powers also allow them to fulfill some unique role in the party.

It’s one of the things that gets under my skin with 4E. It bothered me when I couldn’t stand 4E, and even now that I know what 4E does and why I like it I’m still upset by this focus on standard-action attacks. It’s not that standard-action attacks exist, because they’re a reasonable mechanic that know what they want to do and do it well. It’s that the game is built around standard-action attacks to the exclusion and detriment of all other types of actions. I’ve seen far too many players consider that a combat turn without using an attack power is a combat turn wasted, because moving to a better position or helping an ally or trying to disarm the trap aren’t action that hurt enemies. The entire game is phrased around “there are bad guys, kill they” and to the players targeted by 4E any non-killing action is an action not worth taking at all. It’s like the entire role-playing system takes a backseat to an imaginary damage-tracking app, like D&D is some sort of MMORPG raid and anybody not putting up sufficient numbers isn’t pulling their weight.

So I was all ready to write about how much this design choice upsets me as a player, DM, and designer, and as a counterexample I was going to talk about how different and better things were in 3.5E. That’s where I hit a snag: they’re not.

3E is built almost exclusively around standard actions for spellcasters and full-round actions for non-spellcasters. If a wizard spends a round not affecting combat with magic, it’s a waste (or the end of a long day). If a fighter spends a round moving and attacking rather than full-attacking, it’s a waste. This is one of the explicit issues Wizards wanted to address in 4E, the “5-foot-step, full attack, repeat” essence of melee combat, though we ended up with “flurry of expendable powers, then at-will attacks and shifts on repeat”. At least 4E gave players the rare occasion to do something at all with their move actions besides moving, drawing weapons, and trading them for iterative attacks.

Both editions have the same problem with different faces, and that problem is “if you’re not directly affecting the combat right now, you might as well not be doing anything.” There’s almost no support for setting something up and executing it in a turn or two besides buff spells, which generally last for multiple rounds, and the aid another action, which in the opinion of my players is the biggest waste of an action in the Core rules. Usefulness in D20 is defined by an action’s ability to solve a problem quickly, and “in two rounds” is too long a time.

I do have to give some credit to Wizards because they at least tried. Late in 3.5E they introduced spells that got more powerful the longer a character took to cast them. Channeled pyroburst is a ranged burning hands when cast as a swift action, but it’s a stronger version of fireball if you focus on it for two rounds. You can determine your casting time while casting, so you don’t lose the spells if you need to end the casting early. But these were spells introduced so late in the system’s life that they didn’t even make it into the Spell Compendium, even the updated version as far as I’m aware, and most players don’t know about them. With more options at more levels channeled spells become a viable and interesting tactic or character build.

Another multi-round action is a combo, a staple of fighting games and professional wrestling (two of the highest forms of art). The closest thing D&D has to a combo is “I spend an action weakening a target, then spend a round capitalizing”, which as as much a combo as “walk to store, purchase groceries”. 3.5E’s tactical feats tried to provide combos, thing like “charge a target in one round, then Power Attack in the next for bonus damage”. Spellcasters got in on it too, with tactical feats like “cast a darkness spell, then cast a lightning spell next round and everybody is dazzled or something”. But given that 3E players are generally feat-poor, tactical feats often require significant prerequisites, and committing to a combo robs players of their next-turn flexibility, they haven’t seen a lot of play.

It’s not that players are completely patience-averse. I have a player right now who lugs around a cannon. With a half-dozen NPC allies he can aim in one round, fire in the second, and repeat from the third round on. Without said squishy allies, reloading takes much longer. But he’s very willing to basically do nothing for one to three rounds between attacks, because firing the cannon is a nearly-guaranteed hit at ridiculous range for an average of forty-five damage. That’s enough to clobber* an monster of equivalent CR, which means that by round two even a dragon is bloodied with almost no cost or expenditure of resources, unlike spells. The downside is the sit-on-hands period, a sacrifice that the player is willing to make. Even if my other players wouldn’t run a similar character, they generally agree that the cannon is ridiculously powerful and truly awesome when it goes off.

Rather I think the problem is that D&D doesn’t support multi-round actions and players aren’t inclined to go looking for ways to tweak a system that isn’t helping them. A player can write their own channeled spells or tactical feats, or find an option like a cannon, but “just do something twice” is much easier. There’s a reason the only multi-round action that comes up in Core rules, a spontaneous caster using a metamagic feat on an already-long spell, is explicitly a penalty. D&D isn’t designed to handle a setup-and-execute style of play.

There are a few reasons I can think of why this would be. One is that D&D doesn’t like it when a player does nothing for an entire turn because it’s a negative play experience. However, 3E was full of paralysis, sleep, and other effects that take a character out for rounds or minutes, and 4E has an entire monster type and character type based around disabling the other team. Even in 5th Edition [REDACTED]. It’s not a design choice to be avoided if it’s constantly front-and center. Another potential downside is cognitive load, where we require players and DMs to keep track of previous actions to know how their actions this turn will go. But each group already has a method to deal with ongoing effects at the table, a method we can leverage. I don’t see a sufficiently compelling design reason that D&D doesn’t support multi-round actions (feel free to mention anything I missed in the comments).

However, I said that D&D doesn’t support it, not that it can’t. Tactical feats are great, they’re just very specific and suffer from their barriers to entry. Channeled spells are great, we just need more than three of them. 4E runs on powers, and I see room for a power or class that uses something like the Combo keyword in UFS (if you don’t get that reference, that’s fine, because I’ll explain it later).

Right now I’m just pointing out a problem, examining it, and posing a hey-you-know-what-would-be-cool solution. In future posts I want to address each of the examples above and potentially others. I want to come up with ways we can add multi-round actions to D&D without the game grinding to a halt and use those ideas to build something viable enough that we can use it in play without completely rewriting the rules. In a system with as many options as D&D, it doesn’t seem right that that we can’t do something Mega Man has been doing since 1991.

* – “Clobbered” is a house rule status ailment first mentioned in the Player’s Handbook. Per the rule, whenever a creature loses half of their maximum hit points in one attack they are staggered for a round to represent the force of the blow or spell. This makes some sense with a 100-hp character takes fifty damage from a sledgehammer. But it’s a little less fun at low levels where many character don’t have as many as ten hit points. It’s become shorthand in our circles for “received a blow that should stagger or knock out the player, but we ignore that because it’s not fun at all” and it’s representative of an acceptable break from reality even in simulation-heavy D&D.

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Confessions of a DM

Posted on 17 December, 2013 by MssngrDeath

I usually have something to say about the articles I mention here, but as soon as I saw “Confessions of a DM” on Table Titans I knew I had to just link to it and throw up my hands. I can’t top that.

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60-Minute Session Design

Posted on 13 December, 2013 by MssngrDeath

I think a person can judge their proficiency in some area by determining the relative complication of the things in that area that frustrate them. For example, I cook fairly frequently. I’m no executive chef, but I can turn ingredients and a shrug into dinner. I’m at the point where I’m not frustrated by complicated terms like “saute” or fancy tools like a “whisk”, but I’m also not frustrated by my local grocery not stocking dragonfruit or sufficiently earthy mushrooms. I’m at a mid-amateur level, where I’m frustrated with not having the right ingredients on hand for a quick meal, or not having the appropriate frozen items thawed. Basically, by prep work.

There’s one frustration that has dogged me from my first attempts to make a sandwich to now, and that’s silent steps in a recipe. In casual cooking there’s a magical amount of time beyond which a reader rejects a recipe out of hand. In order to keep recipes under this threshold, writers will subsume cooking steps into the ingredients list, where they no longer add to the cooking time.

I generally expect that a recipe will take longer than the strict given time, because I have to spend time looking for my cayenne pepper and heating my pan and so forth. But “six slices bacon, cooked and crumbled” is not an ingredient. It’s a step. It’s a step that adds five to seventeen minutes to a recipe depending on how you do it and how you like your bacon. An extra ten minutes is a death knell for certain recipes, but moving that step to the ingredients just means that a cook won’t finish it in the listed time anyway. I’ve seen small, largely inconsequential time sinks like “green onion, chopped”, but I’ve also seen massive omitted steps like “a pound of chicken, cooked and shredded”.

I don’t want to get too deep into this; if you want to hear about cooking adventures, maybe a DMing blog isn’t for you. You can read more if you’re so inclined. The point I’m trying to make is that budgeting for the amount of time something takes or the amount of time something should take is completely different from budgeting for the time it will take or, most relevantly, the amount of time you have.

DMing is no different. As a player I’ve seen few sessions cancelled because my DM suddenly couldn’t make it. I’ve seen far more cases where a DM couldn’t make it because circumstances didn’t allow them to commit the time they wanted to session preparation. They knew what they wanted to do and how to do it, but actually doing it required more time and effort than they thought it would or more time then they had. I’ve run into this more and more as we’ve been using software, which means I spend far longer building maps with tiles than sketching them on a playmat or far more time looking for NPC portraits than…not doing that.

If you’re strapped for time and a session is imminent, there are a few options. One is to get really, really good at improvising; most DMs seem to learn this through trials by fire rather than expressly working on it. Another is to grab a prepared adventure off the shelf, tweak it for your setting and players, and run it as a one-shot in the middle of whatever arc you’re doing. Jared Hunt wrote a great article on this a million years ago that’s especially relevant in OGL systems like D&D 3E and Pathfinder but valid for any system. The 3.5E Dungeon Master’s Guide II has a pretty good section on game preparation that specifically states “if you have less than three hours to plan a session, definitely use a published adventure; if you have three to four hours, consider it anyway”. Unless there’s a chance your players will recognize the adventure and knowing about it beforehand causes a problem, like a murder mystery, this is a perfectly fine way to get a session on a tight deadline.

But say you have no published adventure at hand and you’re not confident in your ability to pull a full session out of your hat live and on camera. You still only have an hour to prepare a session. Let’s assume that you don’t have to trawl your favorite image site or local folders for art and that you don’t have to design a map for publishing anywhere. (I understand that most groups use pen and paper rather than software for their pen-and-paper gaming. I know, right?) Let’s assume you just have four or five players, some freedom in what the next session can be (that is, more “we’re on the road to the neighboring kingdom” than “we were falling down a waterfall inside a prison in a very well-mapped portion of Milwaukee”), and sixty minutes between now and a deadline. What then?

5 minutes: panic. It won’t help anything, but you’ll get it out of the way.

5 minutes: review your options. Go to your bookshelf, video DVD case, video game collection, whatever place you have that stores creative media. Look over what you have and grab a few items with which you’re familiar. They don’t have to be your favorite, just somewhat disparate; don’t grab all the Die Hard movies and call it a day.

10 minutes: determine your plot. Given what you’ve grabbed, consider each and boil it down to its most basic conflict. This is the plot you’ll use for your session, so if you happened to grab Clifford the Big Red Dog or Dance Dance Revolution move on to the next item in your list, unless DDR happens to have gained a comprehensive story mode since the last time I checked. For these purposes the heroes and most of the setting are irrelevant. We only want a conflict and perhaps an antagonist, so ignore everything else.

Try to think of the plot you get in broad terms so you’re not too caught up in the minutia. That is, don’t think of The Avengers as “a disparate group of heroes team up to stop a great evil” because the heroes are irrelevant for it (you’re using your heroes instead), and don’t think of it as “a bad guy steals a magic device” because that’s a MacGuffin rather than a plot. Even “a magic device opens a portal for aliens” both states the conflict too specifically and ignores the primary antagonist. When we look at it very, very broadly, looking at the villain and conflict gives us “a magician appears to herald and lead invaders”. That’s the sort of thing you want because it gives you a lot of wiggle room.

It’s difficult to sift away an entire story to get only to the parts we need because we’re trained to care about heroes, actors, franchises, and other serial numbers that aren’t always easy to file off. Once you have an eye for it though, it becomes something like a second nature. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is “bad guys are racing to an artifact using a hero’s notes.” Batman: Arkham Asylum is “bad guys take over their prison, including their captors.” Even a gospel ends in “a religious figure says things that antagonize a lot of people.” All you want is a situation that your party can address and, depending on your play style or system or party, perhaps somebody they can hit to solve things.

10 minutes: tweak the plot to fit your campaign. Once you have the basic idea down, think about how it can slot into where your players are. This is why we divorced ourselves from the bits above; you’re not worried about Star Wars being interplanetary if your plot is “a dangerous weapon is in a powerful group’s hands.” You have plenty of space to fit it into the setting of your campaign, the location where your players are, and the level of threat they can handle.

You should also consider a hook. If the players heard about said magician and weapon but decide it’s not their problem, you’re back to where you were an hour ago. Give them some reason to be involved. Perhaps somebody will pay handsomely for their efforts. Perhaps it’s clear the threat can’t wait for a better-equipped group. Perhaps they’re just good people who like adventure. Bonus points if you can fit the plot into your existing campaign mythology; if the dangerous weapon has the same sigils as the scepter the players found last month, you’ve built on your arc and given the PCs a reason to remember the session. You can consider the long-term ramifications of it later, when you have some breathing time.

20 minutes: legwork. I know that to a lot of players it seems anathema to be thirty minutes into their hour without having considered a single number. Designing monsters, traps, dungeons, maps, NPCs, and other accoutrements takes time, and we just frittered half of our time away on something petty like our plot. Twenty minutes is not enough to build a single high-level NPC in some systems. So what are we going to do if only a third of our prep time can even be used for the actual, physical prep?

Steal, unabashedly. Steal from the rulebooks, using NPCs and monsters provided by designers. Steal from the Internet, checking forums or articles or wikis for things you can use. Steal from yourself, grabbing NPCs or monsters or maps from past campaigns or sessions, whether it’s to increase continuity or because you don’t think anybody will remember them. Your goal in one-hour prep is not to make a session that will stand the tests of time, like the Colossus of Rhodes looming over the harbor of your campaign. It’s to make something quickly so you don’t have to cancel a session, and speed requires approximation. Only the most onerous player will complain if these gnoll rangers feel a lot like orc fighters because you grabbed them from a wiki page, or if this temple is twenty feet longer on the inside than the outside because the map you’re using wasn’t perfectly to scale.

…in fact, if you have a player that really measures every room, I suggest skipping this whole post and canceling the session to give yourself a week off from dealing with them. Unless of course they have motivation besides pedantry, like they’re an architect looking for secret rooms or they have reason to believe there’s space-folding magic at work.

Since we’re dealing with numbers, it’s hard to steal from other systems. There’s no Fate-to-D&D conversion and there shouldn’t be. But you can share among 3E, 3.5E, and Pathfinder with almost no worries. This is much, much easier if you already know where to look, one of the reasons I have so many pictures, notes, and maps stored on my computer. I’ve included some of my favorite sources at the bottom of the article. Again, the goal is to play fast and loose with numeric integrity. You can take a temple map and use it as your bureaucratic office, and you can take an elven fighter and use it as your human guard. Don’t dwell on how an NPC or monster works and whether it’s what you want long-term, just focus on whether it’s what you need right now.

10 minutes: setup. Get everything you need to run the session you have planned. If you use miniatures, pick them out. If you use mapping software, build your maps. If you use a fine tool like Live GameScreen, gather your NPC portraits and background pictures. This isn’t just table-work either; if the NPCs or traps or whatnot use a rule you aren’t familiar with, like grappling or ritual magic or grappling again because it deserves to be mentioned twice, review it. You may have time to do some of this mid-session and you may need to do some of it on the fly, but the goal is to be prepared as possible when the clock hits 15:17 (or whenever your session starts). With Internet access or a robust local image folder it’s much easier to find a picture of a gnome ranger on short notice than it is to build that same ranger or come up with the reason he’s carrying all those elephant feet.

So there, you’ve taken yourself from zero to gaming in sixty minutes. If you’re doing your prep in the hour before the session starts, it’s fresh in your mind and you’re ready to run it. If you have decompression time, like a day at work (so “decompression” is relative) or a walk to your FLGS, turn everything over in your head and consider your options now that you have the bulk of the work done. You’ll still need to do something on the fly, but that’s a DM’s job and at least now you have a foundation around which you can build a session.

Sources:

  • Unofficial Pathfinder SRD NPC list – I like this list the most because it works. Other D&D wikis exist, but they’re packed to the brim with custom NPCs using custom classes and custom feats to cast custom spells with their custom items. If an NPC has footnotes, it’s not quick enough for one-hour prep.

  • Wizards of the Coast Map-A-Week Archive – Tons of great stuff if you can find it.

  • squid.org Random Name Generator – There are scads of name generators, but this one has a lot of options that make exactly as much sense as I need them to at any given time. Rinkworks’ is keen but it will never return “Eight Lonely Foots”.
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Haste Podcasting with Charisma

Posted on 9 December, 2013 by MssngrDeath

For anybody who’s been listening to me during Story Time with Blake and Highcove on I Podcast Magic Missile and thinking “Golly, this guy sounds knowledgeable and handsome; where can I hear more?”, I have good news for you! I’ve mentioned the Obsidian Portal Haste podcast once or twice before, and I’m happy to report that I’m a guest on the most recent episode. Give it a listen and poke around the archives a bit if you’re so inclined. They created four new tags just for me, so it would be irresponsible of you to do anything but reward them with your attention. Irresponsible!

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Masks/Eureka

Posted on 6 December, 2013 by MssngrDeath

This blog is pretty unapologetically about D&D (which, for the purposes of this article, is synonymous with Pathfinder). There’s a reason it’s called “DMing with Charisma” and not “GMing with Rapport” or “Storytelling with Manipulation”. That’s not necessarily because it’s the best system but because it’s a system that does most of what I want it to do and does it well, and it’s one in which I have a lot of experience. There’s a lot more I can discuss in a system where I’ve run a dozen campaigns than a system where I’ve played in one.

That said, I do try to cover advice that’s not particular to D&D. Most of the Laws are system-agnostic, though they aren’t all as paramount in other games; Law #4 is kicked to the curb in Paranoia and Law #3 is less relevant in a system like GURPS that claims to have rules for everything. Cooperative session design is so core to Fate there’s a mechanic for it. My character creation steps are appropriate for any system where you get to create a character, terms like “rolling stats” and “feats” aside. In each article that isn’t explicitly about D&D like a book review or some critique on 5th Edition, I try to comment in some way on gaming in general in the context of D&D.

But the point is that I focus on D&D, so I haven’t historically had a lot of need to review information from other systems. Only relatively recently have I started to gleam techniques and knowledge from other systems, play styles, GMs, and sources to see what they have to say, what’s worth repeating, and how (or whether) I can translate it to D&D. Articles like those on Gnome Stew and Left Oblique give me an insight I didn’t have before, and there are a lot of really neat ideas out there that don’t necessarily come from Seattle or Redmond.

So when I saw that Gnome Stew was publishing books, I got real interested in what system-agnostic advice they could fit into five hundred pages. I wasn’t too interested in their guide to campaign management or their guide to session preparation (though, more on the latter next post). But I was pretty excited about their book with a thousand NPCs or their more recent book with five hundred adventure plots, and only more excited when I read through the previews available on their website. Recently I was able to acquire these books (patronized with money!) and give them a more thorough read. It’s not an exaggeration to say that they’re everything I wanted and more.

Masks is the book on NPCs. Though it’s easy to regard a book like this as “ten city guards with different weapons, ten innkeepers with different hairstyles, etc.” the authors apparently picked a number of personality traits, good and bad, and distributed all of them to each author to ensure each was creating a wide array of personalities. They’re arranged in chapters for fantasy, sci-fi, and modern settings, and each chapter contains about eighty villains, eighty allies, and twice as many neutrals that can swing one way or the other. Each NPC is further tagged, and with the indexes in the back of the book you can look up only criminals, or only scientists, or only famous people, and so on.

There’s a lot to like in Masks. Each NPC feels like an actual person, with background and motivation and personality that can be slotted into just about any setting. Each has a quick quote, some of which are wonderful. I feel like there was a conscious effort to make each NPC memorable for players and do it as quickly as possible, but there’s still room for most to grow at the table. Through the magic of reskinning a member of the space patrol can be a traveling paladin in seconds, and since no stats are provided there’s no worrying about converting from one system to another (in fact, trusting a DM to build stat blocks for the NPCs encourages creativity more than limits it).

I do take some umbrage at what appears to be a false distinction among allies, enemies, and neutrals. I was able to find two reporters, a villain who looked for secrets wherever they were and a neutral who outed their own sources and burned as many bridges as necessary for a big story. These seem to be like they should be swapped, and there’s plenty of room for either to be an ally. This is one of many examples where I thought an ally, enemy, or neutral was in the wrong section entirely and had much greater potential elsewhere. I know that the sorting within a section is as good as random, but I think I would have preferred if “villainous” was a tag rather than a chapter section that only sort of works.

Eureka is the book on plots. It’s based on providing adventures for The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations in fantasy, sci-fi, and horror settings (because NPCs can be modern, but plots must be horrific, I suppose). There are four plots in each of the three settings for each of the thirty-six situations, plus sixty-nine more for those readers who are doing the math in their heads. The adventures include setup, background, encounter ideas, and possible resolutions, which makes it easy to see how a party can run from one set piece to the next. They also avoid mentioning NPCs by name where possible, which gets past that niggling quirk game designers have about making DMs run the plots exactly as the designer envisioned.

The plots have great ideas with wide variance and I could immediately see slotting almost all of them into at least one of the campaigns I’ve run. Once I started to understand the situations I was able to draw on themes, and since Eureka has a tag system similar to Masks it soon became easy to find something like what I wanted almost no matter what it was (the Sortable Excel plot matrix is a big time-saver here). The plots aren’t the same sessions whitewashed by the inclusion of a different author; they’re all unique, and I haven’t found one yet that looks outright boring. Even the worst plot I read, something about a cave system that the party finds because the guard at the entrance goes wandering and attacks them for no discernible reason, had some fantastic encounter ideas.

At times the book does get a little too specific in how an adventure progresses. My last post was about how no plan survives contact with the players, and building an adventure around “One PC will fall in love with the NPC witch, but the party will then go to the woods where they discover the bodies under her house” is pretty presumptuous. Plots also have a tendency to be overwrought. I expect this is because a DM doesn’t need help with something simple like “pirates are drunk and have cannons”, but there are a lot of layers necessary to the story that I can see my players skipping through ignorance or happenstance. The express lack of NPC names doesn’t help much; describing full-blown courtly intrigue is hard enough without referring to everybody as “the king”, “the retainer”, or “the other duke” over and over again. Combined this sometimes looks like a plot taking place regardless of PC influence, which while simulationist is about the worst possible goal for which a plot can strive. Though it’s nit-picking, the language also occasionally leaves something to be desired; I want to get my PDF copy of the books just so I can see how many times the phrase “the crux of the adventure” is used. (Edit: it turns out “the crux of the adventure” is only used twice in the entire book. But those two times happen to be on the same page. C’mon, man!)

I think I like Masks more than Eureka, probably because I’m used to running sessions with no idea which way is forward and only a vague idea of which way is up. It’s much easier to grab an NPC and slot them somewhere than it is to grab an entire plotline. But both books have a lot of great ideas in them and they’re a fun way to get ideas if you’re stuck or shake things up even if you’re not. It’s like having a mentor or muse to offer an idea that you hadn’t thought of or give you some seed to expand into a character or adventure of your own. Just as with reading advice or information about a different system, you can take the things you like and ignore or change the things you don’t.

The books aren’t tools for lazy DMs to get out of doing work, because the content in each still requires effort to put into a campaign, not to mention run it. They’re tools for busy DMs who need something fast, or for patient DMs who can take the time to think about the best thing they can run, or for new DMs who want a prompt, or for experienced DMs looking for a new take on what they can run. In short, they’re books for DMs, all of them, for any reason a DM could want.

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Cooperative Session Design (or, Everybody Has a Plan Until Players Show up)

Posted on 1 November, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Preparing for a session is hard, not least because it’s rarely clear what a DM needs to prepare. If you spend hours mapping out the sewers where bandits are hiding, you can be sure that the players will instead look into the stockholders of the company from which the bandits stole. If you build two armies so the players can weigh them both and either join one or stop the battle, the party will instead leave the country and explore another area you offhandedly mentioned once. Even if you assume that the players are going to run off and do something unexpected and prepare for everywhere you think they can go, one of them breaks into an inaccessible building and murders the most important person they can reach just to see what will happen.

All of these happened to me. The army one happened twice. There’s a teachable moment there.

There’s a maximum amount of preparation you can commit to a session because there’s a maximum amount of preparation the players will tolerate. Gamers have a sort of natural entropy that causes any plans or expectations to break down over time. It’s one of the reasons a 13-episode season is so hard, because it’s never clear from minute one what’s going to happen in a given week, much less five or ten weeks down the line.

The natural response is to stop planning at all, or at least that was my response. That is, trust in your own improvisational skills to deal with whatever the players want to do, and if you have an overarching plan you can lay seeds or nudge things along the way so it looks like you know what’s going on. However, right around that time we started using software to track combat statistics, show backgrounds and NPC portraits, and so on. This meant that either I took quick breaks before anything new happened so I could frantically search my pictures folder for something appropriate, or I had some idea of what was going to happen before the session so I could get things ready and let the game flow. Even my plan to stop planning was subverted. Meta.

This approach doesn’t work for all GMs. Some prefer the heavy planning or think they’re not good at improvisation. That’s fine, but the DM isn’t the only person in the room. Lately I’ve been leveraging something I’ve stolen unabashedly from story gaming in general and Left Oblique in particular: slave labor asking players to do some of the design for you live.

Imagine your players walking through a dungeon. Say, for the sake of argument, that you really wanted them to negotiate with the thieves’ guild this week, but they sprung a good old dungeon crawl on you by biting on a hook you hadn’t expected. You don’t have any dungeon prepared, much less the sorts of monsters or traps or treasures they might encounter. So when they open the first door, don’t wait for them to ask “What do I see?” Instead ask them the same thing, “What do you see?”

This isn’t laziness or a saving throws (well, not exclusively), it’s an opportunity for the players to participate in the session design. Some players will panic and shut down (see the aforementioned “think they’re not good at improvisation”), but somebody might jump at the chance to explain how they see the dungeon. In between you’ll likely find the player who asks questions rather than making statements, like an unprepared high school history student:

“Are there monsters in the room?”

For the sake of argument let’s say you haven’t decided what sorts of monsters live in this dungeon yet. “No.”

“Is there anything on the walls?”

Right away, there’s something you may not have considered even given time. If you’re still puzzling out what lives in the dungeon, you certainly haven’t made it to their interior design. You could say no, but the point is to have everybody build the room instead of building what the room is not. “Yes, uh…tapestries.”

“Great! I steal them!”

You can deal with the logistic of carrying carpet if you want. The point is that now you know your monsters live underground but appreciate finery. They might have made it, they might have stolen it, or they might have recently taken over the area and haven’t bothered to take down the old trappings. Also, a player feels rewarded for speaking up and asking about the room, and players will do something again if it gets them a reward. They’re a lot like horses that way.

“What about bones, are there bones lying around?”

Again, if you say no, it doesn’t mean anything. But if you say yes, your monsters can be carnivores. Pairing discarded, gnawed-on bones with wall tapestries makes for a very interesting monster. “Sure, why not.”

“Great! I steal them!” Because players are creepy.

Bit by bit, a picture starts to form. “Is there any lighting?” Do you want your monsters to need light? “What’s on the tapestries?” What sorts of things might the monsters want to depict? “What are the floors made of?” Are your monsters craftsmen who like making their place attractive, or do they care so little that the floor is rough and jagged? With each question you not only build the room but build the creatures who live there. By the time you’re done you have cannibal artisans who worship the moon, the dungeon feels unique, and the players are interested in meeting the inhabitants. And you haven’t prepared a thing.

(If you’re still worried what these monsters could be, just grab something close and tweak it. Heck, grab something far away and tweak it. Since the players were going to fight ninjas in the thieves’ guild, they’re fighting ninjas now. Just change their presentation to something that fits the theme you’ve developed, like sneaky nocturnal gnolls. You have all week to redo the guild into a Mafia hangout instead. Work with what you have.)

If this example sounds trite and unbelievable, it’s because example play always does. But it’s pretty close to how things do pan out. You might make it to the fourth room before anybody asks what the walls or doors are made of, or how the lighting works, or how the place smells, because it’s not important to the players. And that’s another trick to this method: you don’t spend hours writing and reciting a tortured description of the dungeon when all the players want to know is certain bullet points. If they don’t ask which way the door hinges swing, and you don’t have a reason to discuss it, don’t bother. You’re paring the game down from the realistic but labored descriptions to just the bits that make it fun.

If it sounds boring, that’s because it’s for a first attempt. When players aren’t used to coming up with things on the fly, expect room design to read like a game of Twenty Questions. Once they get their footing and understand more about what they want to see and what works with the game, they’ll get more bold and you’ll find them starting to surprise you. Maybe you didn’t think your orc base would have a spa, but now it does. Roll with it. If they start going too far-flung, you can always rein them in. Or don’t; it depends on the game everybody wants to play.

Of course this isn’t just for rooms. I’ve had success with asking players to design NPCs on the fly. The simple question “So, which crew member have you been spending the most time with?” gave me an overweight elf hiding his race, a gnome shipwright with a bad case of hero worship, a pirate with a crystal hook for a hand, and a cat that harasses the party’s cannoneer. That’s four NPCs I didn’t have to design, giving life to the boat rather than keeping it filled with faceless mooks. It also gave them some attachment to the PCs so there’s some interest in each. Now instead of “a crew member is missing”, I can say “Bobathan Bobert* has disappeared” and the players not only know who that is but that they’re suddenly out a carpenter. It increases investment, one of the purposes of not only gaming but of media in general

There are situations where this won’t work, or where you don’t want it to. No player will begrudge you if you opt to design the party’s patron or the campaign villain on your own, and if you leave every bit of design to the players they might wonder why they need you at all. But when you’re stuck, or out of time, or just want a little punch to keep things dynamic and interesting, ask the players to do some of the work for you. You’d be startled at the things they come up with.

* — For reference, his friends call him Sal. Because that’s what you get when you try to name an NPC “Bob”.

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