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.
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:
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!
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.
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”.
Little-known fact: there’s nothing that gets me quite as excited as this:
I’m the sort of person who watches video game rosters very closely during production. I watched every reveal trailer for Marvel vs. Capcom 3 the day it was released. I have the website for Super Smash Brothers 4/5 in my daily bookmarks list. I review every roster for a professional wrestling game, even though I have no intention of ever playing the game myself. Even after release, games with more playable characters have a higher appeal to me than games that don’t. It’s why I first picked up Fire Emblem, or got a pre-order of Batman: Arkham City for the DLC.
Why? Because there’s nothing that represents quite as much potential as a new character. I’m the sort of player who loves discovering new things, and playable characters are no exception. Will they be easy to learn, or powerful but difficult? How will their mannerisms translate to gameplay? Will the story be different with them, and how? Will they be terrible?
I approach D&D character creation the same way. I don’t want to come up with a great build and slot a personality into it, in the same way that I rarely want to come up with a great personality and slot a build into it. I want everything to work together. I want to iron out the kinks as I work through it. I want to take this character and see how they affect the story and how the story affects them. I want to change that potential into fun.
Most of my players look at character creation similarly. I do know players who design a build and a personality separately, either because they’re unaware that the two clash or because they simply don’t care. I also know players who design a build solely and trust the personality to come naturally during play, which is an interesting way to go about it for a strong role-player. But for the most part I think players love character creation as much as or more than actually playing the character.
When it comes to the actual work involved in creating a character, D&D and Pathfinder books do have advice. Often this comes in the form of an easy-to-follow list of steps, and often I have deep and abiding problems with that list. Here’s the list of steps for character creation in the 3.5E Player’s Handbook:
I expect that this is for a first-time player, and it’s one of the worst ways I’ve ever seen to present it. By these steps, you don’t consider your character’s personality until step (9), unless you want to put it off until last. That is, your ability scores, job, race, training, and possibly even your equipment are more foundational than your personality. As Socrates Jones might shout, “Nonsense!” That’s an academic way of building a character, something that you might expect to give to a program or a robot that can create character quickly and efficiently. But we don’t want quick and efficient. We want meaningful and fun. We want to design our characters not with Intelligence, but with Charisma.
…meaning “in keeping with the theme of this blog”, not “with Charisma as the primary stat all the time.”
I’ve only created fifteen-odd characters for campaigns, but by my count I’ve run campaigns for seventy-odd characters. Adding in the characters I’ve helped design for other campaigns and one-shots like Delve Night, I think I have an idea of what works and what doesn’t when building a character. And what doesn’t work is waiting until the end of character creation to create the character. Things like class and race can give you some direction, but they should never be your basis. Instead I have my own list:
The analytical or captious reader may note that each of these steps is a more significant undertaking than the list in the PHB. That’s intentional. Character growth can’t be boiled down to a GameFAQs walkthrough, where if you follow certain bite-sized discrete steps you’ll have fun. Character creation is an ongoing process, often but not always something that happens organically without an explicit focus.
I can’t guarantee that you’ll have a perfect character if you go through this list, in the same way I can’t guarantee that you’ll always roll a 20 if you flick your wrist a certain way. There are elements in play beyond your character, including your personality, other characters, the other players’ personalities, your DM, and simple luck. But I can say that this way I’m happier with my characters, and I see more players happy with their own characters. Meaningful characters take meaningful effort to reach the potential you saw when you first pictured them in their head.
When a campaign ends, I want to think “My character was as fun to play as I thought it would be when I came up with it, and a big part of that fun was the journey as I explored their possibilities.” I want to be satisfied enough that I can get excited about the next approaching challenger, because I know I’ll have fun with that too.
Unless it’s Toon Link.
I just noticed that I haven’t back to I Podcast Magic Missile since July, which was before any of the podcasts with me went up:
Story Time with Blake and Highcove 1
Story Time with Blake and Highcove 2
We’re not very good at naming.
Lest my previous post come down too hard on one side of the axis, I generally don’t have a problem with powerful, even startlingly so, characters. My concern is with situation where a player’s style is so focused on powergaming that it acts to the detriment of play. Though I may have less occasion to express it, I have the same problem with a player who focuses on story to the detriment of play.
A D&D campaign is cooperative (Law #0 / Law #4). It’s not about what one player wants to play, or what plot the DM wants to follow, or even what all the players want if it makes the DM miserable. It’s about the game that everybody wants to play whether it’s telling the best story, or stomping the scariest monsters, or some mixture of the two.
It’s certainly possible to form a group of players and a DM who all want (or are willing to tolerate) a totally off-the-wall power level. The problem there is that the game isn’t built for it. A fighter who deals triple-digit damage each turn quickly finds himself without meaningful enemies. A wizard who can challenge a god finds that even high-level dungeons serve no purpose. A bard who turns every enemy into a fanatical ally finds that all conversations begin and end the same way. D&D has lots of ways to be “powerful”, but they often exceed the expectations of the system, so the system has no way to keep itself interesting.
Enter Mythic Adventures.
I’ve only met one person to whom I did not have to explain the mythic mechanics, so here’s the elevator version. Characters work exactly like they do in every other campaign. Due to some very important event like the direct blessing of a deity, mythic characters also have a mythic level (a “tier”) that progresses independent of their experience points. Each tier grants new benefits, the most important of which is mythic power, an intentionally vague concept players use to power a lot of their mythic awesomeness. By spending one of their daily uses of mythic power, a character can activate mythic abilities. The most mundane of these abilities is “surge”, the ability to add 1d6 to any d20 roll after you know the result of the roll.
Anybody who did a spit-take upon reading the last phrase in that paragraph can safely skip this one. D&D has a lot of mechanics that modify d20 rolls. Almost universally those abilities include either the phrase “before you make the roll” or the phrase “after you make the roll but before you know the result.” The latter allows you a little more freedom, but both require that you make a decision without knowing whether you failed. That is, you may roll a 7 and decide to apply a special +4 bonus because you think a 7 isn’t high enough to succeed but an 11 probably is. Unless you’ve been tracking DCs for a while this is guesswork, and I believe this intentional. Surge instead lets you wait until the DM has declared success or failure. The additional 1d6 may not be enough to turn a failure into a success, but a player will never activate surge unnecessarily. This means the player is more likely to have it and use it when they need it. Already we’re at a higher power level than most of D&D.
A character chooses one of six mythic paths, with no restrictions. World of Warcraft players may draw parallels to professions. Any character can be a skinner, but it provides the highest benefit if the character is also a leatherworker (to use the skins) and a class that wears leather armor (to wear the things they craft). Similarly, any character can be an archmage, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a fighter who doesn’t cast spells. These paths provide other options for daily uses of mythic power, the most mundane being along the lines of “cast a spell as a swift action without expending a spell slot” or “as a swift action move your speed and make at attack at any point during that movement” or “allow your allies to take a move action or 5-foot step right now”.
In case this doesn’t sounds impressive, mythic power bottoms out at five uses per day. A high-tier character will have more than twenty uses each day, more if they’re willing to spend feats. Spread over a party that’s a lot of opportunities to flex some might.
There are abilities that don’t require daily uses of mythic power. (Small aside: the book actually refers to it as a “use of mythic power” every time. Not “mythic points” or anything less cumbersome.) I don’t think there’s any way I can give an appropriately representative sampling of the sorts of abilities they grant. Suffice it to say that this section of the book is thirty-six pages. There are also mythic feats and spells, most of which fall into the category of “a feat or spell you already know, but extreme!” If nothing else, they show that just about any character can go mythic if the DM has the inclination.
Speaking of which, the first hundred pages of the book are dedicated to building a mythic character. Only twenty-four pages are about running a mythic campaign. I suppose that’s because much of the structure of running the game remains the same. NPCs work the same way. Encounters work the same way, after adjusting CRs a bit. Plots work the same way, though the book spends far too long telling DMs that mythic adventures really really should follow Joseph Campbell’s monomyth; I usually prefer to work with my own stories that rely on somebody else’s framework, but I’ve already said this and we’ve already had a rebuttal of sorts.. The point is that the book seems to trust DMs to run mythic games with only a few minor tweaks, and most of those are to monsters.
And oh, the monsters. Mythic Adventures takes a page from 4E in that there’s a structure to making monsters mythic, including how they advance and what sorts of tricks they can do But at a certain point the book just says “and then give the monster some crazy-go-nuts abilities.” As long as they fit thematically and the powerful ones cost uses of mythic power (ugh) there’s no guidelines for what’s fair and what’s ridiculous. Rather than lazy, I find this fairly liberating. The sense of “where do I spend my uses of mythic power” is fun for me as a DM, more so than once-per-day or once-every-1d4-rounds or recharge-5 powers are.
What really got to me about the book are the little bits here and there to remind the reader that they’re not dealing with the standard Pathfinder world any more. Mythic isn’t just about being more powerful, it’s about being more powerful in such a way that the world feels a need to react. I imagine going mythic as the Pathfinder equivalent of the arc escalation in a fighting anime, where a villain tells the heroes “There’s a much tougher world out there with much stronger opponents, and you’ve barely scratched the surface” or something to that effect. It adds a layer to the game in a way that the Epic Level Handbook didn’t, by putting it alongside the system instead of on top of it. The closest approximation I can think of is the gestalt mechanic in Unearthed Arcana, but even that’s just a louder version of standard D&D.
Mythic Adventures isn’t about power that pushes other players to the wayside while one person gets to be the big game-breaking hero. It’s about power at all points, from the characters to the monsters to the plots to the settings to the very pacing of the story. It’s not powergaming that only works at the expense of the system and the other players, it’s powergaming that takes everything along with it to make something new and exciting. It’s not for everyone, but for its target audience I doubt there’s a better idea. As the book itself says:
The colors are brighter, the sounds are more mysterious, and all of the other stimuli are sharper and more vibrant. Where the non-mythic hero would encounter a crumbling keep filled with familiar monsters, a mythic hero faces a towering citadel that builds itself from the bones of would-be invaders and is inhabited by cruel and malign creatures of nearly god-like power.
That’s powergaming I can get behind.
I was loitering at my friendly local gaming store (patronize it with money!) lately, and a conversation sprouted about play styles. Specifically, we discussed a particular style of play formed around building powerful characters and having them do powerful things. Some at the table discussed some animosity to this style of play, a position I can understand. Eventually one participant pointed at me and said something to the effect of “I know this guy has the same reaction I do to the phrase ‘rules as written’ in a non-ironic context. It makes him want to reach across the table and throttle someone.”
Hang on now.
“Rules as written” (often abbreviated RAW) has gotten something of a bad rap over the decades. On its face it just means that we’re talking about the information as it exists in the book, distinct from house rules or our interpretation or the designer’s intent. Following the rules as written is a fairly important part of any gaming system; if we ignore the rules and allow wizards unlimited spells per day or let monsters move and still take a full attack, we have a different game than the one presented. Rules give us an ostensibly stable framework on which to build a game.
I’ve had plenty of occasion to say “rules as written” in a non-ironic context. I’m a DM. It’s our job to read the rules, interpret them within the framework of the vision we share with the players, and use them to keep the game running. If a player asks “Can I do X? The rules are unclear.” I’m as likely to rely on “How are the rules written?” just as much as I am “How ultra sick awesome would this be?”. Because if I wanted everything to be all awesome all the time, we’d go outside and play make-believe. Throwing out the rules is something that needs to be considered carefully if sometimes quickly, and keeping in mind how they’re written is important to keep everyone on the same page.
But that’s how DMs read rules. That’s probably how game designers read rules, too. Players are different, at least some of them. The stigma around RAW isn’t because DMs are tired of using the system they choose. The stigma is because there are players, a (probably) small but vocal subset, who wield the rules like a bludgeon. They don’t use the rules as written, they abuse the rules as written.
I own a copy of Complete Adventurer, a rulebook with options for skill-based characters in D&D 3.5. In this book is a prestige class named the vigilante, which is pretty much exactly how it sounds. A vigilante gets a certain number of spells per day of different spell levels. Somewhere along the line, the typesetting in that table broke.
An ordinary person would look at this and say “Ah, the typesetting broke. The second character in the ‘3rd’ column belongs in the ‘4th’ column.” A designer or editor might say “…frick.” But the sort of player who abuses RAW instead says “Awesome! A vigilante gets twenty 3rd-level spells per day at L7, and thirty-one at L8! Too bad they don’t get any 4th-level spells, but that’s a trade I’m willing to make.”
This is an extreme example, though not one so extreme that I haven’t seen it posited. When citing RAW, the speaker is trying to be free from intention or interpretation. Sometimes it’s helpful and clear. Other times it’s an excuse to exploit a loophole, error, or unexpected design consequence. The latter is the sort of behavior that inspires DMs to physical violence.
Since I love examples, imagine a character who threatens a critical hit on a roll of fifteen or higher with a scimitar. This is core, so it shouldn’t sound that unusual. You can even dual-wield them with the right build. But there’s also a fairly mundane feat that gives a character a free attack whenever they roll a critical threat with light maces. There’s a weapon enhancement in another book that lets scimitars count as maces. Using a prestige class in a third book, the critical threat range of maces (which are scimitars now) triples. In short, sixty percent of the character’s attacks generate a free attack, which in turn can generate another free attack, and so forth.
If this sounds powerful, you’re right. If it sound ridiculous, you’re exactly as right. And I see the appeal of building it as a thought experiment, or for a one-shot where everybody comes in with similar builds. One of my most fun characters sprang from a similar thought experiment, after some tweaking. But if you read the above and thought about how great it would be in a normal campaign, you are provably wrong.
See, a character like this is fun for one and only one person at the table. Nobody wants be in a party where they have to watch the critlomancer roll dozens of attacks, stretching their turn out far longer than anybody else’s and monopolizing the campaign’s combat time. Nobody wants to be in the party with the wizard who solves every problem effortlessly. Nobody wants to be in the party where the rogue runs off and slits the enemies’ throats before anybody else can interact with them.
It’s a DM’s job to step in and say “This character is hurting the campaign, the other players, and the mood at the table”. And it’s here where RAW gets its bad name, when a player’s primary, often sole, defense is that the rules allow it and thus they can’t be doing anything wrong. In this argument, cheating is a moral offense but actively harming other real, breathing, within-melee-range people is natural and expected. As far as I’m concerned, any position that manages to violate Law #0, Law #1, and Law #4 at once is provably wrong.
I can’t understand the sort of people who play cooperative games like D&D this way, in the same way that I can’t understand Twilight fans or I can’t understand not liking Sonata Arctica. I don’t even know how to approach it beyond forcing the player to acknowledge it. I’ve met people who played this way, at least when they started gaming. Some have developed into players who build living characters with faults and hard-fought triumphs, so I know such a transformation is possible. But I’ve met far more people who can’t or won’t accept that there are D&D tables where it’s not appropriate to wantonly abuse rules for a personal power trip. Those people are conspicuously not invited to the sorts of games our circle plays. It’s possible that given sufficient elucidation, cajoling, or alienation (in order of preference), this crowd might see how their fun comes at the expense of others, but until then I expect their gaming opportunities to dwindle smaller and smaller.
“Rules as written” isn’t a bad phrase, and it doesn’t have a bad meaning. It’s a victim of guilt by association. As the biggest arrow in the quiver of negative, selfish play, it’s subject to a Pavlovian reaction through no fault of its own. Instead of condemning the words, we need to return the concept to the DM’s toolbox. The next time you get a chance, use RAW non-ironically and start bringing it back into civil parlance. Until we do, it will remain the rallying cry of the players who have co-opted it for a very different type of D&D. The rules as written deserve better than players who abuse them.
Gnome Stew had an article recently on the concept of the GM Confidant, which is a GM that assists another GM with the campaign without actually participating. A confidant is there to discuss ideas, add to existing concepts or create them wholesale, and otherwise expand the GM’s horizons beyond what one person can manage. Plots, monsters, world-building, NPCs, anything can be bounced off a confidant to get another side of it.
It’s a neat idea, though one of the comments pointed out my biggest concern with it:
The challenge is, once you have a confidant who understands all those things, you’ll want to make that person a player in your game! My few confidants have all been people whom I would include in my game except there’s some deal-killer: they live too far away for a F2F game, they have a family commitment on the night of the week we play, etc.
There’s another concern that a confidant with a sufficiently strong personality will override the actual GM, essentially running the game by proxy. That might be me seeing hypothetical problems that can’t actually occur, but my view is probably colored by my first-blush opinion of the GM confidant, which is that it shared a lot of ground with something I’ve been mulling over lately.
All told I haven’t been GMing for too terribly long, a bit under a decade. I’m not one of the old hats who have been running D&D since the red box. Still, even in the time I have, I’ve seen a startling number of people whose first campaign was their last campaign. Some completed their DM debuts, but most burned out long before the story reached any sort of conclusion. I don’t know if it was the pressures of coming up with something new and fresh every week, or the trouble in coordinating the game without being able to sit back for a few minutes like a player can, or the hazard of trying to kill people within melee range of them, or what. I expect it was some combination of all of these, along with other stresses I’m missing.
Which led me to thinking: what if there was some way to spread out those stresses so they didn’t fall as heavily and as immediately on the DM? What if there was a way to put some onus on somebody more experienced at handling it, long enough for a first-time DM to find their voice?
For those of you who haven’t read the title of the post, I’m talking about a type of GM confidant called a DM mentor*. A DM running his or her first campaign would invite another DM to act as their confidant, helping with fleshing out ideas and filling in any holes that may exist (and need to be filled). But a mentor goes beyond just discussing the creative bits of the campaign. A mentor also helps with the mechanics of DMing itself: challenge level, pacing, time management, personality management, all the bits that books like the Dungeon Master’s Guide and the GameMastery Guide think they can teach but that really have to be learned.
I think the mentor should play in the campaign with the explicit expectation that they’ll provide guidance during the session and critique afterward. This also allows them to push things a little harder; if the players get to stagnation or boredom or frustration or arguing and the DM isn’t sure how to respond, the mentor can react live rather than talking about it later.
This is why I worried about the confidant overriding the original DM, because they’re a warm body at the table that even the DM is looking to for guidance. A mentor has to go in knowing that they’re acting in an advisory capacity, not to challenge the DM but to foster their ability to make decisions. I’m pretty sure that if your confidant undermines your confidence, that’s ironic. Over time the mentor needs to pull away, gradually becoming an ordinary player once the DM gets their footing.
The GM confidant is a good idea, but it’s more for experienced GMs who already know how to run a table and just want another creative voice helping to build their side of things. Conversely a DM mentor is only for new DMs who want a little help making sure their first campaign isn’t their last. Not everyone needs one, but I wish I’d had one when I put my first campaign together and I wish I’d been one for some of the one-and-done DMs I’ve met. Maybe then I could have become their confidant a few years down the road.
* – Please forgive the GM/DM disparity. This is a blog about D&D, after all.
