Underpowered: Bullywug (4E)

Posted on 28 February, 2013 by MssngrDeath

D&D has lots of options, and it’s fairly obvious that they’re not all equally powerful. I’ve ranted about this, but over time I’ve also been doing something about it. Rarely, it’s a house rule to limit to power of a given option. More often it’s a house rule to power up something that’s fun or flavorful but isn’t as good as a more common, powerful option. Every once in a while I like to look at one of these options and see if I can tweak it so that players who go for it aren’t taking a hit for their characters.

I know that working on game balance doesn’t really fit with a free-form, DMing-with-Charisma style. But I believe that one of the points of a system like D&D is the ability to let players play just about anything. If a player sees something they want to play (especially after spending forever looking for it) and find out that it isn’t fun, there’s a problem. Not everything can be perfectly-balanced all the time, but if a player has their heart set on a specific character, the system shouldn’t be working against them.

Races in 4th Edition have a very simple, consistent formula. Each race (now) gets a +2 bonus to one ability score and a +2 bonus to a choice of two others, a speed of 5 through 7 (except for the pixie, who flies at 6 but walks at 4), two languages, a +2 bonus to two skills, two to four racial traits (except for shifters, who get none, and eladrin, who get five because shut up), and some racial power. There’s little variance from this formula for PC races.

Monster races, however, aren’t so lucky. Included at the end of the Monster Manual and Monster Manual 2 (and the occasional other weird place), monster races are seriously underpowered compared to PC races in the Player’s Handbook series. They have fewer racial traits, occasionally lack powers, and weren’t given the same treatment that PC races were when Wizards shifted from the two-stat-bonus system for ability scores to the one-and-a-choice system.

It makes me wonder if they were never meant to be played, which in turn makes me wonder why they were published. I expect that the authors expected somebody to play them. After all, the big taboo in playing monsters is that they’re, well, monstrous. They’re not supposed to fit in with PCs. But PHB2 introduced playable lycanthropes and reincarnated spirits, and PHB3 gave us minotaurs (formerly a monstrous race) and psychic crystal robots. At this point, “monstrous” is kind of a loose term. Dark Sun gave us bugs. So I don’t see any reason that the monstrous races shouldn’t be treated the same as PC races, given that there’s no strong reason to differentiate them.

There’s a lot of work to do in putting all races on a (more) level playing field. But I think the best way to start is with the most obvious outlier, from the Monster Manual 2:

BULLYWUG
Average Height: 5′ 4″- 6′ 0″
Average Weight: 150-240 lb.

Ability Scores: +2 Constitution, +2 Dexterity
Size: Medium
Speed: 6 squares (swamp walk)
Vision: Normal

Languages: Common, Primordial
Skill Bonuses: +2 Athletics
Rancid Air (Poison) aura 2: Any enemy that spends a healing surge within the aura is weakened until the end of its next turn.

Bullywugs, as far as I can tell*, are still on the two-stat-bonus system for ability scores. They’re one of only seven races that don’t get +2 to two skills (shardminds get three, humans and orcs get none, and bladelings, duergar, and githyanki get one; note that five of these seven are monstrous). They have no racial power. They only have one racial trait, and it only triggers when an enemy spends a healing surge, something that fewer than a dozen monsters do, most of which are in the MM1. Only one monster in MM2 allows allies to spend healing surges so Wizards knew when the bullywug was printed that its only trait was a rare corner case. And it also uses the Poison keyword, so any enemy immune to poison (the most common immunity) ignores the aura. So the only thing they can expect to use in any given campaign is swamp walk, a trait reliant on the DM’s kindness in determining the setting.

The lore of the race almost supports this, but not enough. The whole point of bullywugs is that the natural world hates them, more than aberrations, undead, evil gods, and everything else with stats. Clearly this included the designers. But they’re adorable in a Ninja-Tutrle-esque way, so let’s see if we can save them from their creators.

There are four bullywugs in the Monster Manual 2 as actual monsters, and all of them have good Dex. So let’s keep Dex as their mandatory ability score. Since Con is already included in the race, that’s going to be one of their optional ability scores. We need to determine the other. Of the four monsters, one is Str-primary, one is Wis-primary, one is Con-primary, and the fourth is Dex-primary. The Con- and Dex- primary monsters both have Str and Wis high and tied. We can make a case for either Str or Wis here. But since the half-orc is already Dex/Str,Con, doing the same with the bullywug wouldn’t add anything interesting to the race list. Let’s make them Dex/Con,Wis, a unique set.

Their speed, vision, and languages are fine. Of the forty-four published races, thirty-seven have speed 6 (and the pixie should count, so thirty-eight). The monster bullywugs have normal vision, so that fits. And the monsters only speak Primordial, so that’s a given as their second language.

Let’s determine their other skill bonus. Athletics is good because it’s already there and all of the monsters have it (Athletics determines jumping distance, and bullywugs are frogs, so draw conclusions accordingly). But three of the monsters only have Athletics. The fourth, a shaman has Nature. Athletics/Nature isn’t exactly new or special, but it fits for a race that lives in swamps, so we’ll take it.

The racial traits and powers are harder, because we’re largely free-forming it. The aura can stay, but since it’s so rarely useful it won’t factor into our balance considerations. Swamp walk is also a good choice for a trait. But we still need two mid-level traits and one power to bring them up to a PC race. The only power that all bullywugs share is one that heals any creature who hits them with a critical hit, something that’s neither fun nor helpful. I thought I was going to have to start making thing up wholesale, until I saw this:

Bullywugs say they were created by the original primordials, not by the gods…By amassing legacies of savagery, the curliest bullywugs imagine that they will one day be reborn as slaads.

So the race was created by primordials and aim to become paragons of chaos? Now we have something interesting. Slaads also don’t have any consistent powers or traits save that most of the have a teleport speed, which is too powerful for a low-level PC. But just the idea of chaos as an origin and goal is helpful. So let’s try building them some racial traits that leverage this drive toward chaos:

Mutable Physiology: Whenever you spend a healing surge or complete a short or extended rest, roll a d10 to determine a damage type. You gain resist 5 to that damage type until you spend another healing surge. The resistance increases to 10 at 11th level and 15 at 21st level.

1 – acid
3 – fire
5 – lightning
7 – poison
9 – radiant 		2 – cold
4 – force
6 – necrotic
8 – psychic
10 – thunder

The idea is that the bullywug is changing frequently and randomly. It’s like the resistance offered by the shardmind but less powerful than the resistance offered by the diva or vryloka. Interestingly, it tends to go away just when you need it; if you’re in a fight where resist 10 fire is really helpful, you have a good chance of losing it if you take too much damage and need healing. It might make sense to drop this to a d8 and take away psychic and force, or to a d6 and also take away radiant and necrotic. A paragon path could also modify it. I know most races use resist 5 + half-level rather than 5/tier, but I’m toning this one down a bit because…reasons. I could be convinced to change it.

Yes, it duplicates the wild sorcerer trait. I’d actually forgotten about that one until I started looking up the correct language for the mechanics. But I’m not really bothered by the chaos race having ties to the chaos class, especially since bullywugs don’t gain a bonus to Charisma. A bullywug wild sorcerer would be underpowered but awesome, which I’ll allow.

Primoridal Origin: Your ancestors were native to the Elemental Chaos, so you are considered an elemental creature for the purpose of effects that relate to creature origin.
Deicidal: You gain a +1 racial bonus to attack rolls against immortals.

Primordials (elementals) and gods (immortals) fought a massive war deep in the lore of 4th Edition. Since bullywugs consider themselves fledgling primodials, this makes sense to me. It’s more flavor than anything that can really be expanded by feats or such. But attack bonuses are rare and cherished, so I think we’re done with racial traits. Now we need a power.

What makes a monstrous bullywug different from a PC bullywug? Since the race version doesn’t have the trait that heals enemies, maybe the PC version has gotten over this, to the point where nature doesn’t think the PC is quite as abhorrent as its brethren. But what if it was instead able to harness this “wrongness” and turn it into a strength?

Nature’s Revenge Bullywug Racial Power
As you feel nature shifting to thank your enemy for dealing a mortal blow, you use your mastery of chaos to pervert the reward.
Encounter
Immediate Reaction Close burst 20
Trigger: An enemy scores a critical hit against you.
Target: The triggering creature.
Effect: The target is weakened until the end of your next turn.

It it powerful? No, not really, unless you’re knocking a bunch of damage off a brute or solo’s next turn. It would be much stronger as an interrupt rather than a reaction. But for a power available for free at level 1, it fits, and it’s a rare racial power that affects an opponent without an attack roll. Again, it can be modified by feats to perhaps inflict ongoing poison or other ailments.

So we end up with this:

BULLYWUG
Average Height: 5′ 4″- 6′ 0″
Average Weight: 150-240 lb.

Ability Scores: +2 Dexterity, +2 Constitution or +2 Wisdom
Size: Medium
Speed: 6 squares (swamp walk)
Vision: Normal

Languages: Common, Primordial
Skill Bonuses: +2 Athletics +2 Nature
Deicidal: You gain a +1 racial bonus to attack rolls against immortal creatures.
Mutable Physiology: Whenever you spend a healing surge or complete a short or extended rest, roll a d10 to determine a damage type. You gain resist 5 to that damage type until you spend another healing surge. The resistance increases to 10 at 11th level and 15 at 21st level.

1 – acid
3 – fire
5 – lightning
7 – poison
9 – radiant 		2 – cold
4 – force
6 – necrotic
8 – psychic
10 – thunder

Primoridal Origin: Your ancestors were native to the Elemental Chaos, so you are considered an elemental creature for the purpose of effects that relate to creature origin.
Rancid Air (Poison) aura 2: Any enemy that spends a healing surge within the aura is weakened until the end of its next turn.
Nature’s Revenge: You have the nature’s revenge power.

A lot more complicated, isn’t it? But it’s also a lot more balanced, and we’ve taken the worst published race in 4th Edition much closer to something playable. It’s not the only bad race (the whole point of the races in Monster Manual 2 seemed to be to make the already-lousy races in the Monster Manual look almost decent by comparison), but it’s a start.

* – A lot of the monstrous races have gotten updates via the D&D Insider subscriber system. Since I’m not a member, I hear about them third-hand, so I’m not real clear on what has and hasn’t been updated. In general I treat them the same way I treat an obscure rule book that none of my players own–if I can’t read it, it doesn’t exist.

Posted in Gaming Systems, Underpowered | Tagged | 2 Comments

Live GameScreen

Posted on 25 February, 2013 by MssngrDeath

I have to give props to Live GameScreen, and not just because I invented it. It’s the tool I’ve been using at the table for almost three years now, and along with MapTool (for online gaming) it’s the only software I need or want for managing play. I’m not sure how many people reading this aren’t aware of it, but it’s worth checking out, especially now that it’s approaching v1.

I may need to log an enhancement for boss fights if I’m going to use it in the Awesome Campaign, though.

…you know, between this post and OpenOffice, I’m stating to think that my CamelCase software names outnumber my normal names. It’s really just Firefox and Minecraft, isn’t it?

Edit: Live GameScreen is now available for download from this very site. You can find more information about it in the top menu.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

System Depth and Published Material

Posted on 23 February, 2013 by MssngrDeath

When a player is building a character, I generally go through the same steps with them every time, or suggest that they go through the steps on their own if they’re sufficiently well-versed in the system:

  1. Decide what character they want to play. This includes personality, general role in a group, some backstory, and so forth.
  2. If the description from step (1) contains any in-game terms like the character’s class, feats, skills, etc., repeat step (1) until it doesn’t.
  3. Open a rulebook and start using D&D to build the character.

New players (that is, players new to D&D) don’t have a problem with this. They aren’t weighed down by in-game terms, information about what classes are good at what, predispositions toward how a certain class should act or which character ideas are powerful, and all that other stuff that gets in the way of building a character. Instead they just get an idea for what they want because they aren’t stuck with their concepts of what D&D can and can’t do.

Experienced players are actually just as good. They know what D&D is capable of, namely almost anything. They don’t mind playing a sub-par class, because that’s the class that fits the character they want and they trust the DM to not hammer them for their choice. They don’t think of characters as class-first (or, in the case of Monte Cook’s terrible, terrible opinion, race-first) because all classes have enough variance for plenty of character, especially once they start reskinning.

It’s the players in the middle that are the problem. They have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. They know that certain classes are good and others are not, usually favoring casters. They know what energy types they should use, what monsters they can expect, what powers are good, what position they should occupy in a party and on the battlefield, and so forth. They tend to think of characters as bundles of stats first and personalities second, and they have a hard time building characters without divorcing them from the rules that make them work. *

So what causes this? I think there’s an inherent need to look at a set of options and find a “best”, an option you can pick for maximum benefit and minimum hassle. We look for the best apartment in a town, for the best brand of mustard, for the best car to fit our lifestyle. This (I’m convinced) is why the Yankees have so many fans outside of New York, because it feels good to cheer a team you know is going to win more often than not. People gravitate to the “best” options, and it’s hard to consciously separate from that.

This gets harder and harder as more choices appear. It’s usually not that hard to pick Brand A or Brand B cola when they’re both offered at once, but when Brands C through J join the mix it’s much harder to narrow things down to a single option. It’s much quicker if you can reject half of them out of hand for one reason or another. If you can cut out Brands F through J because they’re diet colas, you’ve gone from ten choices to five and life is much easier.

It was kind of a roundabout way of getting here, but I think that one of D&D’s advantages is also one of its problems, that there’s so much information and so many choices. When presented with twenty classes, the player who can immediately reject the twelve weakest is left with eight options that are slightly above the curve of the game. When presented with a hundred feats, a player can get themselves a much smaller list by merely rejecting twenty that are duplicated or improved by a better feat.

To an experienced player, the amount of information isn’t a problem. More options is just that, more ways to build the character you want. But to new players it’s a bit intimidating to see the sheer volume of published information at their disposal, and intermediate players drop most of it almost subconsciously because it doesn’t result in the bundle of stats they want.

This gets back to the idea of the article I referenced last time, that long-running series are big time sinks for anybody who wants to get into them. People are becoming more and more accepting of marathon media consumption, but we’re still not at the point where the average gamer can look at ten rulebooks on a shelf and process them all in an afternoon. Reading a single rulebook cover-to-cover is too daunting a task for many players, much less retaining it at will for actual gameplay.

The 4th Edition Player’s Handbook has 198,243 words (I counted). That’s sixteen more words than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Reading, processing, and retaining the PHB1 isn’t simple, and that’s just the first third of the Core Rulebooks for one edition. Even the smaller, post-Essentials books come close to 100K words (longer than Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). That’s a lot of information to process for somebody at any experience level.

Perhaps in response to this, I’ve seen some games that fit entirely inside one rulebook. Sometimes this works, but more for shorter diversions than for a long-term campaign. A small system that can be extended to a big game tends to be somewhat hands-off about it, relying on the GM and players to do the extension. In the hands of a good group, this works great. With a…less good group or a sufficiently bad leader, the gaps in the system become clear, characters and NPCs end up all looking the same, and the players effectively become unpaid designers trying to write additions to the system that fit the game they want to play.

There’s no universal solution for this. Designers like writing new material, companies like releasing new material, and players like reading new material. GMs who ignore big systems in favor of smaller systems miss out on just as much as GMs who do the opposite, perhaps more if local players are only interested in the big names. Players who ignore half of the system, looking for only the best options, miss out on some great opportunities, but players who try to use it all end up lost in the sheer number of options presented.

The best idea I have is to talk with your players. If it looks like they’re in that intermediate mode where their characters are powerful but lack personality, suggest that they intentionally try something less powerful next time. If they’re avoiding a certain complicated mechanic, offer to go over it with them so you all learn it. If they want to play a new campaign, propose that you try a different, simpler system. And encourage them to ask question if they don’t understand something, in the same way that you should ask them if they’re doing something you don’t understand. No single person can be expected to consume and retain the rules for an entire system, but the answer isn’t to ignore half the game out of hand.

* — I realized after writing this paragraph that it sounded a little like a GNS analysis. That is, new players are narrativists who just make a character, intermediate players are stats-first gamists who play to win, and experienced players are simulationists who can make the system fit any character or world. That’s not even a little true. I’ve seen plenty of gamists who build a character based entirely around a powerful character idea, but I’ve seen plenty more who think of the character they want before they even consider their role in a party much less their class or feat tree. Players of all types fall into this general progression of experience.

Posted in DMing | 4 Comments

Marathon Sessions (or, Sleep Is for the Boring)

Posted on 17 February, 2013 by MssngrDeath

Note: One of the problems with having a post backlog that I go through is that sometimes I talk about issues that aren’t as topical by the time the post goes live. Trust me, three weeks ago House of Cards was all the rage.

There’s an article I came across in the New York Times, of all places, talking about House of Cards. The big earth-shattering idea behind House of Cards is that it appeared on Netflix all at once instead of appearing week-by-week like any show on television. Essentially, it was like buying the DVD of the series, were all of the episodes are available from the get-go. This is a response to the on-demand movement, where viewers are getting more and more into catching up with a series rather than watching everything as it airs.

The show also looks terrible. But that’s not why we’re here.

The idea of marathon viewing doesn’t surprise me, because it’s not too different from what I’ve been doing since I was first introduced to…well, to media. I can sit down and watch an entire season of a show or catch up on a long-running comic in two days, and back when I read books I would gladly burn through whole series. Granted, it colors most of my mindset for the following days or weeks, but it’s awfully fun to do.

It’s the result of one of those facts that’s only philosophical if you think too hard (or not hard enough): most things are in the past. We can’t go into the future and watch The Hobbit 2: Electric Boogaloo, but we can spend nine hours watching the first three Lord of the Rings movies. There’s always more media present right now than there is coming out, and anybody who doesn’t get in in the ground floor is playing catch-up.

There are two topics I want to address based on this, one of which is a lot closer to the real theme of the article. But before that, I want to talk about the first thing I thought when I read this article: “People are getting use to marathon session of watching TV? Finally! I can run those marathon D&D games I’ve been wanting to do since the Wilson administration!”

Short D&D campaigns aren’t all that hard. I’ve run a five-session campaign, I’ve played in a three-session campaign, and I’ve DMed about 130 one-shots, most of which were part of our version of Wizard’s D&D Delve Night. As long as you have a story simple enough to be told in that amount of time (and many are not), you can run a campaign without having to worry about deep world-building, power creep, or the players going too far off the rails. The players in turn don’t have to worry about getting lost in the plot, future time constraints, or how their characters will look or play at later levels. Everybody knows they’re getting into something short and sweet and they act accordingly, which makes the whole thing more streamlined than a long campaign.

On the other hand marathon D&D is hard. When I was much, much younger (Two years ago? Three?) I was in three campaigns D&D each weekend. I ran D&D for five hours on Saturday, played for six to nine hours that night, and playing in a different campaign for five hours on Sunday. At a more recent point, I was playing eleven hours on Saturday and eight on Sunday (ask other players how burned out they were from participating in only the Sunday half). That kind of schedule burned me out fast, and it was a good thing the Sunday afternoon campaign only ran every other weekend. As any ten-year-old can tell you, weekends are precious and my brain wasn’t happy about doing the same thing all that time, even if it was in four different gaming systems (…actually, I’m not sure if that helped or hurt me).

But I think day-long, or even weekend-long, games of D&D can work with sufficient breaks. It’s not always easy to monopolize a group of people for a day or two, but if everybody knows what they’re getting into, the feeling of going through an entire campaign in the course of a weekend can be fairly rewarding.

I’m especially a fan of it the context of something larger. I would love to have some mini-campaigns like that for the Eight Arms to build the characters and add to the mythos of the setting. It’s not a bad way to fit something quick and dirty into an ongoing campaign, like a quick plot with a much more pressing timeline. Heck, if you’re using anime as a framing device for your campaign, having out-of-continuity “movies” is almost required.

As long as you’re able to work it into schedules, there aren’t many players turned off by the theory of a marathon game (they might not be willing to practice it, but the theory is sound). A narrativist could want to explore their character acting in an unusual situation without committing to an entire plot based around it. A simulationist could enjoy seeing some part of the world that isn’t explored in the main campaign. A gamist could be interested in new and exciting challenges to overcome that might not have fit in the original campaign.

And when you consider changing characters for that short campaign, I think it actually becomes more attractive. A narrativist gets to flesh out somebody new, a simulationist gets to see how the world works without the PCs, and the gamist can try something that doesn’t click with their original character. It allows people to scratch the itch that makes them think their character or game is in a rut, but it happens in such a short time frame that it doesn’t throw off the campaign proper. For bonus points, try doing this by asking the players to be established NPCs or even villains, and I guarantee they’ll feel closer to the temporary characters and invent some traits that you hadn’t considered.

Like most things I want to try, I know that this isn’t for everybody, and it’s highly likely that not all of the players in your current campaigns will agree with me. But if you find people who are up for it, I think there’s a lot of benefit to be had.

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Schrödinger’s Gun in Games (or, That Robot Ducky is a Doombot!)

Posted on 7 February, 2013 by MssngrDeath

When I was younger and thus poorer, I liked to make gifts for people rather than purchase them. One year I came home from college for a weekend that coincided with my cousin’s first or second birthday party, and I decided to make him a small puzzle with a picture of a duck on it. I handed it to his parents, and during dinner they helped him put it together. I didn’t pay terribly close attention while he did, but whatever conversation I was having at the time was interrupted when I heard his jubilant cry upon completing the puzzle, staring at it for the first time.

You see, up until that moment he hadn’t recognized that there was a cohesive picture among the pieces, just that each piece had some colors and shapes. He didn’t know why certain pieces fit together, only that they did. It wasn’t until he saw the whole picture that he’d realized he’d been assembling a duck, and it was the biggest surprise in the world to see something recognizable appear out of nothingness.

I know a very smart GM with very poor taste in sports teams who likes to point out that nothing in a game is real until it’s explicitly presented to the players. The party can assemble any number of clues toward some in-game mystery: the brutal way the mayor was murdered, the large pawprints outside his windows, the full moon that night, the furry creature spotted fleeing the scene. But until they see it with their own eyes, they can’t be certain that they’re hunting a werewolf. It could just be a transformed druid, or some otherworldly monster, or just a very hairy person with terrible footwear.

The trope for this is Schrödinger’s Gun, and it’s probably the third most powerful weapon in a DM’s arsenal (after a BFG and an actual, at-the-table gun). The whole idea is that the GM is free, and in some systems encouraged or required, to change the details of the plot if it makes the game better for it.

In the example above, say the players determine that the murderer is a werewolf and load themselves up with anti-lycanthrope weapons and spells for a hunt. This is fine, since you figured it was a werewolf all along. But for some reason or another, you’re now thinking that maybe it’s not such a good idea. Maybe you came up with a better story between sessions, or maybe the players had a more awesome idea that you want to convert to on the fly, or maybe you just see how easy the fight will be when the party is overly prepared and you feel like being a jerk. You are, at any time, allowed to change what actually happened because, until the players see it, what happened could be almost anything.

Generally, I think this trope is understood in terms of story progression. Like the above, it refers to something that causes a DM to change their mind about some aspect of the plot that the players haven’t seen yet. But generally, that’s not how I end up using it (perhaps because my plots are always great to start). Instead I tend to use it for balance purposes.

I believe that the ideal fight is difficult but winnable. About a million years ago, I said this:

I like high difficulty. I tend to find that the combats that the players still talk about are the ones where they felt closest to death…Hard-won combats are more memorable and more enjoyable long-term than easy ones, even if at the time it feels terrible.

A fight that’s too difficult is frustrating for obvious reasons, but a fight that’s too easy is equally boring. Generally a good fight should consume some resources (hit points, spells, daily powers) but not tap them out.

So when a fight is starting to lean one way or another, that’s when I break out Schrödinger’s Gun. If a fight is too easy, an extra monster or two may appear halfway through, or a bloodied monster may gain a power that doesn’t actually appear in its stat block. If a fight is too hard, I can do the opposite: the planned minions don’t appear, or the monster loses its bloodied buffs or opts not to use a power it has available. Usually when I invoke this trope, it’s to give a creature a spontaneous “vulnerable X all” to speed the fight up some so that we can end the session on time or finish with a particularly boring encounter. The players aren’t aware of the exact plans you have or the numbers that go into a monster, so you have the option to change them on the fly.

4th Edition is a shade better at this than 3rd for a few reasons. One is the minion mechanic, where new enemies can join a fight that don’t completely rewrite its difficulty. Another is the higher power level, where adding a new trait (like vulnerable or resist 5 all) won’t completely kill the pace of the fight or invalidate certain characters. The “bloodied” status is a great time to make changes to monsters, one I’ve stolen for use in other systems. I think the most helpful change is the ease of reskinning, where a monster with the same stats can be any number of things by just changing its description and the names of its powers. Based on what your players are doing, you can change a goblin hexer to a kobold sorcerer, an orcish shaman, a human cultist, or even a plague elemental on a moment’s notice. The mechanics of the fight are the same, but the feel of it has changed dramatically based on what your campaign needs.

There are systems, like FATE, that are actually designed with this in mind. By spending fate points (or just making sense), a player can cause things to appear that were always there. For example, a player declares “I know about monster X, specifically that it nests in sewers”, and a GM responds “Sure, why not.” At first blush D&D doesn’t seem like a system built to handle such changes by players, but most DMs I know do it at some level. Maybe it makes sense that there’s a bookcase in a room even if I didn’t describe it, so it exists now that a player’s asked.

Beyond that, D&D explicitly mentions changing things on the fly as part of its core ruleset. It’s just that it only mentions it for dice rolls, and instead of “making things up as you go along”, the books call it “fudging die rolls.” Which is the same thing, but you get to feel like you’ve subverted luck as you do it. The 3rd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 (a book even less read than the 4th Edition version) goes as far as this:

…you should make your world serve the game, not the other way around. No part of your world is set in stone until it becomes part of the game. You might have an emotional connection to some elements of your material, but your players don’t, because they haven’t encountered those elements yet…Look at your background information as a work in progress, subject to instant revision if the moment demands a change that would result in greater entertainment…Even details that do become part of the game can be fudged on occasion. You shouldn’t change details the players vividly remember, because that punctures their belief in your imaginary world. Minor background details, on the other hand, should never be allowed to get in the way of an entertaining choice.

The point is that everything that hasn’t been shown to the players is as good as every conceivable outcome. To the players they’re obviously fighting the campaign villain, but you as a DM can spontaneously decide that this is just a clone, or a loyal follower, or a mind-controlled pawn. You don’t even have to decide this by the time the fight starts, and occasionally not even right after it ends. Until it’s spelled out, all the players have is shapes and colors, and you’re allowed to change the final picture any way you can.

Note: This isn’t even the only way players are like one-year-olds. Remind me to complain sometime about NPCs and object permanence.

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Law A

Posted on 30 January, 2013 by MssngrDeath

The Laws started as kind of a tongue-in-cheek breakdown of my DMing style, which is how they got wording like “players can screw themselves over” that would get me laughed out of Wikipedia. Originally the list was longer and included less serious items that were there for the humor value rather than as recurring, representative tenets. As I started rewriting them, especially for this site, a lot of them fell by the wayside, but there’s one that I had a real hard time cutting:

Law A – Everybody important should have a theme song.

Interestingly, this wasn’t a law I rejected because my style moved beyond it. If anything, I believe it now more than ever, made easier since I’m taking a laptop to sessions and have a means for playing music. This one fell by the wayside because the players universally rejected it. The players I had at the time, and actually any players I’ve mentioned it to since, felt very strongly that their characters should not have theme songs for reasons I never fully understood. And since a law isn’t a law if it only applies to half the population, this one never made it to the list proper.

That said, it hasn’t stopped me from using music wherever I can get away with it. In my post on set pieces I mentioned that I based one around the theme songs of a group of NPCs, and I still assign theme songs to significant antagonists. I find that it helps flesh them out a little, in that the style of the music accents their personality and it gives me some key phrases, epithets, or background that I can integrate into the character. Two characters with very similar stats feel very different when one appears to a jaunty jazz piece and another gets ominous Latin chanting.

The strongest example of this was in The Great Tower of Oldechi, where the party had spent the campaign dealing with a group of NPCs who blah blah blah I wrote about this last time. The music didn’t actually come into play until the set piece I describe, but I did name all of the NPCs after songs from the same band, Iron Savior. I then named that group of NPCs “the Iron Saviors”, fitting because their goal was to build a war machine to break everybody of the campaign setting, which they interpreted as a prison. Their motto was “Observe, Protect, Preserve”, a line in the chorus of the song Titans of Our Time, which was not only the leader’s theme song but spelled out most of their plan.

I only had two members of the Iron Saviors written (“Starchaser” Noma and “Running” Riot) before I decided on their plan, so the remaining members (“Mindfeeder” Ixxiata, “Ironbound” Nevitash, “Cybernetic Queen” Aine, and Mike [with his jetpack, named “Thunderbird”]) were designed by finding a song and building an NPC around it, which was startlingly successful. It also gave me an idea for lower-level creatures, the Predators, that the NPCs could use to assist and later antagonize the players before the final battle. It’s safe to say that the group wouldn’t have been as cohesive or memorable without the music behind them, and memorable villains are usually the best for one reason or another.

But beyond that, I also like giving theme songs to the campaigns themselves. It works in largely the same way; it helps with the feel of the campaign, gives me some ideas I hadn’t considered, and adds general background. Occasionally I even integrate the lyrics into the plot, to the point where a player that determines the theme song can learn non-critical plot details ahead of time. (Hint: nobody ever has.) Though I sort of feel that if I’m going to give a campaign a theme song then the players should know about it. I may start mentioning them on the campaigns’ websites, once I get over my tendency to only use big band or power metal songs.

A part of me feels like this is something I can bring back. The players liked the combat music enough to request it for later sessions, even if the logistics of the table didn’t support it. And when I mentioned that an NPC in Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant was entering the room to his own theme song, the players asked to hear it. I think I’m going to ask my current players to try and come up with one for their characters and see what comes up. I can guarantee that this law will be in effect for the Awesome Campaign, so I might as well get everybody used to it.

So if you’re currently reading this and in one of my campaigns, surprise! You have homework!

Posted in DMing, Laws | 4 Comments

Poll: Post Length

Posted on 23 January, 2013 by MssngrDeath

In general, do ya’ll prefer shorter, more frequent articles that split up a topic, or longer, less frequent articles that cover more of an issue at once? I tend to lean toward the latter, but I noticed that my most-commented article was actually one of my shortest (“A Rant on the Wizards Goblin”). I figure the right way to determine my approach would be to ask the people who put up with my delays.

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Set Pieces in D&D

Posted on 19 January, 2013 by MssngrDeath

I’ve said before that I like designing campaigns toward some sort of set piece, and I think there’s an opportunity to explain.

Here, a set piece is a significant encounter that doesn’t follow the normal flow of D&D. It’s usually a big deal but not quite a climax, usually leading to the climax as a direct result of the set piece. In a sense, it’s like a quick break from normal D&D right before the hardest part of the campaign. Smaller set pieces exist and most campaigns have them somewhere, like a flying battle on dragonback, but I like to design my campaigns toward (but not around!) a specific set piece near the end. It lets me do something special to make the campaign unique, and it allows me to end the campaign with normal D&D so the players can use their characters in the climax.

Explaining it is a bit difficult because I’ve never really quantified what makes something s set piece to me, or even why I like them. It’s probably easier to understand with some examples, so here are some of the set pieces that I’ve done in my last few campaigns:

  • The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion – In the penultimate session of the campaign, a city was taken over by an army of ostensibly good light-based creatures, who invaded as a response to the players’ efforts to stop them from performing a magical ritual. In response, an army of shadow-based creatures, led by the players’ ally but with a majority of forces intent on just wreaking havoc, also invaded. Counting the original inhabitants of the city, this set up a three-way struggle as each group loosely tried to kick out the others.

    I created a map of the city, divided into districts, on poster board, and the players moved about the city trying to gather allies, fend off enemies, and accomplish other goals like checking up on friendly NPCs. It wasn’t terribly unlike Risk, though the players didn’t know the forces in any given area until they entered it and investigated. I rolled three d20s, one for each army, to determine their strength whenever they went to a new district. This created some neat situations. One time, I rolled something like 19 on one die and 4 and 3 on the others, so that army had an overwhelming strength advantage and couldn’t be kicked out without significant effort. Another time, I rolled 10, 12, 2, indicating that two armies were battling it out and the third was barely present.

    The party ended up splitting into three groups, sending one to gather the baron’s forces, one to speak with the allied head of the shadow army, and one to gather NPCs and create a strong force that could take districts back. We didn’t do any turn-by-turn combat, opting to resolve most encounters will skill checks or abstract combat (“Make an attack roll. Well, you beat the average defender’s AC by 12 and they only beat yours by 2, so you fend them off but take some damage”). In the end, they rallied many of the shadow forces and all of the native forces together to force the light army back to the bay, were they retreated to a lighthouse for a final battle. I’m told that the whole event was pretty successful, though I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the giant poster board of the city I keep in my closet.

  • The Great Tower of Oldechi – This set piece wasn’t part of the campaign climax, but it was the end of a long-running plot. The party had spent the campaign (from levels 2 to 26) dealing with a group of NPCs who thought they had to break out of the campaign setting by force. Originally the players were allied with them, but as the campaign went on they learned more information and opted to only feign alliance. When the party arrived on Floor 26, the NPC’s base of operations, it was just in time to subvert their plans, and the NPCs reacted poorly.

    Here the set piece was a normal combat and a normal skill challenge, in that order. The sticking point was that each NPC had (and was named after) a theme song, and I set up a playlist that would run for the length of the session. At the beginning of the session, I started the playlist and let the music run in the background. Whenever an NPC’s theme song started, that NPC would arrive at the battle. Since each enemy was a level 26 elite who only went down when their hit points reached their negative bloodied value, the players had to kill them as quickly as possible knowing that the fight had a hard limit until it became as good as unbeatable.

    The players did end up killing four of the six NPCs before the session’s scheduled end time (we couldn’t run late, since I had a different D&D game to get to), but the session ended when the NPC’s leader entered the battle in a mecha, which was about 300 feet tall. It wasn’t killable in combat, so the next session was a skill challenge as the players tried to fight a creature fifty times their size. This fight was largely won by a combination of the party’s brute and their mobility specialist, but I can’t discount when the tank tried to shove the mecha over using only the power of light snowfall. I think this fight turned out alright, and certainly nobody complained.

  • The Eight Arms and the Conqueror Worm – This set piece was significantly less dramatic than the rest, but it was only a five-session campaign. The party had determined that a small group of demons and duergars was kidnapping craftsmen to build a war machine. The players were captured and fought their way out of the enemy base just in time to see the machine, a flying snake-like creature, take off. They managed to catch it, but then had to find a way to stop a city-destroying robot before it reached the city without incapacitating it to badly that it crashed, killing them all.

    This was, again, a fairly mundane skill challenge, except that any sufficiently bad roll on a sufficiently stupid idea was guaranteed to kill a character as they fell off the machine (except the the PC who could fly, I guess). Further, the robot itself got a turn in the skill challenge to try and dislodge the players, attack them, or heal itself. Oh, and it was in Pathfinder, a system without a skill challenge mechanic.

    The players mostly accomplished this by disabling as many weapons system as possible and stripping all the armor they could, which took about as long as the flight to the city. They finally felled the robot by chucking a sack of alchemical reagents into its mouth just as it was firing its breath weapon, which is one of those ideas so awesome that it works no matter what the dice say (though the dice rolled high, so the party also survived the blast). This led to the final confrontation with the robot’s driver, and everything went downhill from there. The challenge itself went fairly well, though it became clear that regardless of the characters involved, some players work better than others in my skill challenge system.

  • The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao* – During the campaign, the party was caught between two opposing countries willing and able to go to war over newly-disputed territory on their shared border. At one point, the party left to rally giants in neighboring lands to attack both countries, forcing them to work together and forget their differences. However, the party’s horses were eaten by a giant cockroach (no, really), so the trip took much longer than expected. By the time they returned, the countries were already at war.

    This set piece is unique in that it didn’t actually happen. My original idea was that the party would eventually choose one country or the other, and the climactic battle would take place as they lead troops against the enemy in a theater of war (I’d been playing a lot of Dynasty Warriors at the time). The players, though, wanted nothing to do with the actual conflict, deciding that preventing it wholesale was better. They were right, but it resulted in a face-to-face combat between two CR 20 creatures, which didn’t leave the L8 party a lot to do.

    In the end, a few lucky critical hits meant that the enemy boss was slain, though the allied boss had died a few rounds prior. The countries were united in adversity, but the spirit of the land was dead and the natural flora and fauna would gradually die, leaving a barren wasteland. The moral? Don’t screw with the set piece. (I’m joking here, because the players weren’t wrong to seek out a third option. But there was probably a fourth option neither of us though of that would have produced a happier ending.)

It’s worth noting that my first five campaigns ended with normal combat, and my last four were designed with set pieces in mind. This jump occurred right about the time I changed my DMing style to the one I use now.

I think that campaigns without set pieces at all are really missing something, because it allows us to push the limits of D&D and try mechanics somewhat beyond the d20-and-puzzles format. Sometimes they don’t work, like when I tried a battle using hexes in 4th Edition (remind me to write a post about that someday, with pictures), and other times they’re really awesome. I think as long as a DM is willing to branch out some and doesn’t shove bad set pieces down their players’ throats, there’s a lot of room for creative design.

One day I’m actually going to run that Dynasty Warriors battle, but it’s going to be a lot harder to run it using the pagoda pieces if I can’t set the campaign in Asia.

* – Yeah, it’s time to start abbreviating these campaign names.

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Skill Challenges (or, They Wasted a Perfectly Good Mechanic)

Posted on 7 January, 2013 by MssngrDeath

One thing I was excited about in 4th Edition was skill challenges. I think they’re a great idea. I think they’re such a great idea that I can’t help but notice that every DM in every campaign I’ve seen has run one, even before D&D 3.5 was published. Having a set of rules for it would just contribute to making this free-range, non-combat style of encounter a core part of the gameplay.

But then I read it.

Take, for example, the skill challenge “The Negotiation” on page 76 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. In this skill challenge, the players can contribute to success by making Bluff, Diplomacy, or Insight checks. Once during the challenge, one player can make a History check to gain a success, and any Intimidate check is an automatic failure. It’s a negotiation, so this sounds reasonable.

But then, look at the eight classes in the Player’s Handbook, the only classes published when the DMG came out. Of those classes, two of them have none of the skills needed in the encounter (ranger, warlord) and one only has the once-per challenge skill (fighter). There’s a very good chance a party has one of these classes, so that character is essentially locked out of the challenge. To be useful, the other characters must have chosen the correct skills, so a paladin who trained in Endurance, Heal, and Intimidate is also locked out.

The only chance those characters (and players) have to participate is if they think of a sufficiently good reason to use one of their good skills, which is subject to DM approval and made at the hardest difficulty by rule. Normally, this isn’t so bad, because it just means that the ranger keeps quiet during negotiations. But in the 4th Edition skill challenge system, players roll initiative and make skills checks in order. Bowing out of a skill challenge is not an option. That player is forced to make a check with a good chance of failure, not because it’s interesting or because the rewards are great but because the rules say that they must.

Wizards did address this somewhat in the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, which is news to a lot of the people reading this because they either don’t own that book or skipped the section on skill challenges (for reference, I’m in three campaigns now, and I’m the only one in any of them who read the DMG2 of his own volition). They didn’t explicitly say that skill challenges don’t work on initiative any more, and they removed that section from the rules in an errata, but their example of play went in initiative order anyway. They now recommend building skill challenges based on your party’s abilities and options rather than a high concept. They also increased the number of skills in a skill challenge, saying this:

…in play, [a skill challenge with only a few usable skills] is boring. The characters who excel at those skills make their checks while everyone else hangs back reluctant to make their own checks because they don’t want to be the reason that the group fails the challenge. If your potential skill challenge has a similar bottleneck—in which only one skill does the heavy lifting for the challenge—you need to rethink the challenge.

It was a very quiet way of saying “every skill challenge example we’ve given you before now was wrong”. I’m all for fixing a broken system, but maybe a system shouldn’t be published if there wasn’t a single thing about it that was right.

So after the errata, we’re left with a system for skills challenges that has these rules:

  • A skill challenge has a complexity rating that determines the number of successful skill checks needed to win the challenge and the XP reward for winning.
  • The players lose the challenge if they fail three skill checks.

…that’s it. Everything else is up to the DM to design and adjudicate (or it’s already part of the core rules, like rolling a d20 and adding a modifier). The only thing the skill challenge system gives us is “how do I know when I win, and what do I get for it?”, which isn’t the worst possible way to design a mechanic but is the worst possible way to design an ostensibly roleplay-based encounter. It’s not a sufficient framework in a framework-heavy system like 4th Edition.

So I ended up working on my own skill challenge system. It may or may not work for your style, but it’s allowed me to free-range the challenge as it runs (like I DM with Charisma or something) while still giving me enough structure to explain it to players and track things appropriately.

  • Don’t determine any skills beforehand. This isn’t really a rule, but it’s different from the normal system so it merits mentioning. Do determine five possible results of the skills challenge: one for if the players fail significantly, one for if they barely fail, one for if they neither fail nor succeed, one of if they succeed barely, and one for if they succeed significantly. Also, determine the number of checks the players need to succeed or fail (I like seven).
  • Inform the players that they’re in a skill challenge. It may also be best to put them in some order like initiative just so everybody gets a chance to speak, but that’s up to you. I like putting them in initiative order when time is of the essence in the skill challenge, or where having a character sit around and do nothing contributes to failure.
  • When a player wants to act or when it’s their turn, ask them for the skill they’re using and the reason they’re using that skill. Based on the explanation, determine whether they’re rolling against the easy, medium, or hard DC.
  • Have the player roll their skill check.
  • Based on their result, decide whether the player failed significantly (“red”), failed (“orange”), broke even (“yellow”), succeeded (“green”), or succeeded significantly (“blue”). (I guess we’ll call these colors “bands” of results. I don’t have a good name for them yet.) Note this result.
  • Inform the player what happens as a result of their check and move to a different player. Don’t let them know the specific band in which their result fell, though based on your response it should be somewhat obvious.
  • When the party gets some number of results in a given band, the skill challenge ends and the players learn the final result.
  • No XP is awarded, because XP is for losers. But if you must, you can award XP based on the number of results needed to succeed or fail.

Determining the DC and the result of a check is more of an art than a science, but I try to stick by a few points:

  • I reward good ideas over ideas that the character can do easily. If the wizard wants to make an Arcana check to detect a hidden door, I tend to be more harsh than if somebody wants to use Perception.
  • I reward varying ideas over using the same skill every turn. It’s a “skill” challenge, not a “my best skill is Diplomacy, so let’s roll five of those” challenge.
  • I reward risk over safety. If a player wants to use Religion to ward against a demon, that’s not as interesting as a player who uses Athletics to grapple it.
  • I reward expenditure of resources. I’ll often bump a success up to the next color band if the player spent an action point, a daily power, or some number of healing surges to achieve it.
  • I reward awesome over mundane. If an idea is exciting, I’ll often use a lower DC simply because I want to see it succeed.

An example: Varon, a half-elf bard, would like to use his Diplomacy to ask random people whether they saw the fleeing criminal. This helps him if he succeeds but doesn’t hurt him if he loses besides wasting time, so I use a moderate DC. If he’s dealing with orcs, I increase the DC to hard because orcs don’t like elves. If the skill check succeeds, I put a mark in the “green” or “blue” band, depending on how the player phrased his questions and how well the check went. If it fails, I put a mark in the “yellow” band.

His ally is Tela, a goliath warden. She wants to block the traffic in the street, fencing the criminal in, using Endurance or Athletics. Since failure could cause damage to her or create confusion that lets the criminal hide but success would hinder him, I use the moderate DC. If the skill check fails, she gets a mark in the “orange” band.

But Near, the party’s tiefling warlock, had found the criminal and, absent other options, attempts to attack him with Arcana. If she succeeds, she deals damage but doesn’t actually harm the criminal, and failure could injure passers-by. I use the moderate DC, maybe moving it to the easy DC if she’s willing to expend an encounter or daily power. If the check fails, I add a mark to the “red” band, while a success is just “yellow”. If Near opts to use a power that can blind or slow the criminal, a successful check may instead be in the “green” band. In either case, any damage dealt might apply to the criminal if the party fights him at the end of the chase.

After the players make a bunch of skill checks and have gone through a bunch of turns, they get some final result based on which color band first reached the threshold I’ve set. If they his the threshold in the “orange” band, the criminal gets away and the players need to go look for him. If “red”, the criminal gets away and the city watch is considering pressing charges against the players as accomplices. If “yellow”, the criminal gets away but the players have a lead to track him down. If “green”, they catch the criminal, and if “blue” they actually ambush him and get a surprise round.

So what does this give me over the normal skill challenge system? Most obviously, it creates five different results rather than two. The players can be rewarded for slaughtering a skill challenge more than just “you open the magical door”, and they can be penalized for crippling failure and bad decisions more than just “you need another way in”. It also means that they have a lot more freedom to try different ideas because they aren’t beholden to specific skills and, at your option, can fail more than three times before ending the challenge. Most helpfully, it works in 3rd Edition and Pathfinder, while the original system only works in 4th Edition due to the lower number of skills. Basing a skill challenge on seven skills out of seventeen is fairly inclusive, but not if it’s seven out of thirty and a lot of characters only have two skills.

The downside is that there’s a lot more on-the-fly adjudication, including the DCs and the results of every check. It makes it a little easier to flow from the beginning of the skill challenge to the final result with each action, but it’s still up to you to tell the players what happened as a result of each skill check. It’s also a little jarring when the players get six “red” results and six “orange” results, but get seven “green” results first and thus succeed. It could mean that they did well were it really counted, but sometimes it’s a bit awkward to justify.

Is this system better than the official system? Yes, because I wrote it and I’m allowed to make incredibly biased statements like that. But I know it’s not for every DM or every group of players. I know that it’s really best for people who like coming up with ideas on the fly, and it’s not for people who tend to stick to a few things at which they’re very good (Like a skill challenge itself! Gasp!). It might be something worth trying during a future session, and you can take it or leave it based on the opinions of your group.

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Pacing (Part 4, Ideas)

Posted on 27 December, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I’ve spent three blog posts going over the theory of pacing. Though I provided some examples, I didn’t really go over that many specifics of how pacing can work in a campaign. So here are some ideas I’ve used that have (more or less) worked:

  • Impending Crisis (The Eights Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao, Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant) – There’s something or someone coming and the players have to stop it. This generally falls into two categories: a soft time limit (“If we don’t get the magic sword, the evil advisor will take over the kingdom!”) and a hard time limit (“The moon is going to destroy the earth in three days!”). In both cases, the players should feel like they have to hurry to stop the oncoming enemy or threat. Handled well, this pushes the pacing upward as the deadline approaches and forces the characters to move forward even if their resources are low or if it’s smarter to wait.
  • Solve the Mystery (The Eight Arms and the Conqueror Worm) – Something mysterious is happening and the players need to find out what’s causing it. In mystery fiction this is often murder or kidnapping, but it could be that monsters are appearing or the world is slowly getting colder. This is like a crisis, but without a clear cause or obvious end point. Things ramp up as the players resolve parts of the mystery, getting closer and closer to the solution and potentially acting on it while things get in their way. It’s probably the easiest idea to throw together, but it’s the hardest to sustain over a long period of time because you have to give the players intermediate successes that don’t blow the mystery wide open.
  • Collect the Macguffins (The Nine Emblems, The Armor of Tiamat) – There’s some unique set of items in the world which, when collected, will cause some great event. This could be something as obvious as necklaces or as unusual as descendants of great leaders. This point is that as the players collect more and get closer to their goal, the going either gets more difficult or forces conspire to make the going more difficult. Perhaps the players need to go to ever-more exotic locations or make deals with ever-more dangerous creatures they’d rather leave alone. This is easy enough to implement that my first five (!) campaigns at least started out this way, and the main difficulty is having things escalate in a way that makes sense within the world.
  • Kill the Bad Guys (Osaevu the Chosen) – There’s some unique set of creatures in the world that need to be killed. Maybe they’re magically corrupted in some way, maybe they’re guarding some powerful allies, or maybe they’re going to cause the aforementioned crisis or collect the aforementioned MacGuffins in the absence of the party. In either case, the players need to find them and eliminate them in some way. This lets you design a campaign around increasingly difficult threats, where the crests are the fights and the troughs are the rests afterward and the results of killing each creature, but it makes it hard to design interesting bad guys when the players know they just want to kill them on sight.

Since these are fairly meta examples, with enough thought you can probably think of a dozen movies, books, video games, or television shows that use each. There are also a dozen more ideas you can use as a pacing framework, but these are the ones that, when executed properly, I’ve found work well in the context of a D&D campaign.

And bonus points for anybody who noticed all the Zelda references (I think I made eight).

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