Pacing (Part 3, Medium- and Long-Term)

Posted on 23 December, 2012 by MssngrDeath

Pacing a multi-session adventure or campaign isn’t as easy as “like a session, but longer”. Yes, there’s still a need for crests and troughs. Yes, the same principles generally apply to creating exciting moments and downtime between them. But an adventure or campaign needs to ramp up as it goes, and that creates some interesting dynamics.

Originally in my notes for this post, I wrote that pacing “should slowly escalate, like a JVM with a memory leak”. The idea is that the pace of anything vacillates back and forth around some central line or curve. In a session, it’s fine to have that line be straight and flat, where the overall pace of things at the beginning of a session is roughly the same as the pace at the end, and you have exciting points that rise above and downer points that dip below. But for a campaign, things should rarely end at the same place they started. The central pacing line needs to ramp up as well, meaning that the overall feel of a session at the end of a campaign is more exciting than the feel of a session at the beginning.

(This is probably best described by the chart referenced in the Extra Credits about pacing, viewable here. In general, it’s a good video about pacing, though it’s not 100% relevant to an slower-paced, interactive medium like D&D.)

Since this buildup covers the entire adventure, it needs to start early to put the adventure in a knowable place. This is especially true if the adventure or the campaign is short, about two to six sessions long. Introducing the problem or villain early gives the players some directions and gives them a reason to be there and a goal to focus on. I’m not saying that you can’t have a mystery villain who is only revealed at the end, but if the players don’t even know what they’re doing for the first session of a three-session adventure, you’ve lost out on a solid third of your pacing escalation.

In a longer adventure or campaign, it’s okay to start the real plot a bit later, but there’s additional responsibility in presenting it. The final session, fight, dungeon, or encounter (preferably all of the above) should be climactic and foreshadowed. Take, as an example, the Final Fantasy series. There’s a reason everybody gushes over Kefka and Sephiroth but ignores Zeromus and only tangentially remembers Chaos; the former two were introduced early in the plot as significant enemies that the players wanted to defeat, and the later two literally appeared out of nowhere in the last 10% of the game. Pacing should be continuous rather than discrete, and an abrupt late-adventure shift, unless handled very well, can make players feels like they spent all their time chasing nothing.

In adventures, crests are big fights, important plot reveals, or other significant moments. That is, while a kobold ambush is a fine crest for a session, it’s barely a blip on the radar in terms of the overall campaign. Now, if one of those kobolds is carrying an ancient artifact that the players need, or if the ambush occurs while the players are fleeing a rampaging dragon, the fight can certainly contribute to the crest. But not every encounter counts as a peak on the pacing of the campaign overall.

(I suppose this isn’t as true in a campaign like the one I just ran, which had an average of one fight every two sessions. But I think the players would generally agree that the fight in a church against the mafia enforcer was more of a crest than when they got attacked by dinosaurs in the middle of a jungle.)

Troughs have to be a bit more extreme as well; if a fight isn’t really an escalation in the overall campaign pacing, then the healing period afterward doesn’t count as a rest. I like using shopping and leveling as troughs, because it lets the players bask in the rewards of their efforts and engage in some meta-discussion around the table. In a long enough campaign, you can also use breather episodes as troughs, and you can devoid the campaign into smaller adventures where the gaps between them allow players and characters to rest.

It’s important to note that not all slow-paced discussion is a trough, especially if the players are discussing something particularly plot-relevant. If the party spends three hours talking about the best way to sneak into the enemy fortress and free a prisoner, the planning is actually the escalation and the execution is the crest. This is true even if the plan goes awry (and it usually should) and the players need a session in the fortress to sort things out. It just means that there’s an opportunity for short-term pacing in the middle of your long-term pacing.

In looking at pacing overall, keep in mind the abilities of your characters and the wants of their players. In general, each character should have some shining moment in a campaign where they get the starring role, where their abilities save the day and their powers are at the forefront. Sometimes this is done by basing an arc around their backstory, and sometimes it’s as simple as making them the plus during a boss battle. Even if the player hates the spotlight, it shows them that their character design was good and their choices paid off, which is a crest in general and a particularly high one for the players.

At the very top of your pacing curve, at the end, should always be your climactic foreshadowed encounter and a satisfying conclusion. In the same way that players should walk away thinking they didn’t play in a “nothing” episode, they should feel that their adventure had changed the world in some way. For the players, maybe they get a nice reward or maybe they just get the satisfaction of knowing they saved the city/kingdom/world (or at least didn’t ruin it). For players, they should feel like they were part of (not just observers to!) a story that made sense, built from start to finish, and ended in a way that was worth the trouble.

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Pacing (Part 2, Short-Term)

Posted on 18 November, 2012 by MssngrDeath

Some aspects of pacing are pretty clear. I think most DMs understand (and players prefer) that campaigns start with something interesting to make the characters care about the story, like a surprise fight that unites the party or a mystery that requires their attention. Most campaigns also end with a difficult fight against a powerful, narratively significant enemy. Even if they’ve never heard this terminology, players can agree that campaigns tend to start on a mild crest and end on a very high crest.

The short-term pacing for an individual session or fight is harder. It’s like the pacing for an episode of a TV show, opposed to the pacing of a season or a series. It’s the rise and fall of a particular scene in a movie or boss fight in a video game. In general, players are going to end a session or fight in roughly the same place as they started it because only so much can occur in a short time. But it’s still important to look at the excitement level even in the microcosm of a few hours of play.

Most DMs I know like to either start a session on a crest or end on one. If you start the session with something exciting, you can get players interested right away and, if the crest is a combat or something else with an unambiguous beginning, make it clear when the pre-session discussion stops and the session proper starts. If you end the session with something exciting, you can build to it over the course of the session and keep players progressively more interested. You can get the best of both worlds by ending a session on a cliffhanger that gets resolved at the beginning of the next session, but it doesn’t always work with the flow of the story. If it takes two hours to build to a cliffhanger and two hours to resolve it, then the whole campaign is built around a sine wave of pacing, which is just as predictable as a flat crest or trough. Generally, the most effective pacing changes are unexpected, but I’ll talk about that more in a later post.

As I said last time, it’s easy to think of a fight as a crest, and often that’s true. It’s the situation where the characters are in the most obvious danger, where choices needs to be made quickly and have the most direct effect on their health. To be fair, not all fights are crests; some are fairly mundane and easy, the D&D equivalent of a squash match (or, for the more adult readers, a curb stomp battle). But most are, and in this case the post-fight rest is a good trough.

Using fights as a crest usually works, but it becomes a lot harder depending on what you’re running. Imagine a D&D session that’s five hours long, which is plenty of time for a session. If every fight is fifteen minutes, you can fit twenty fights into that session (though you’re likely spending time on story, exploration, interaction, party maintenance, and faffing about, so don’t expect more than five fights tops). But if every fight takes two hours, you can only fit two. Fights get longer at higher levels in every edition of D&D, and at any level 4th Edition combats take longer than 3rd Edition. When you consider adding a fight to a session, you have to consider how much of the session it’s going to consume.

Long fights aren’t a death sentence for pacing, though. A good long fight tends to go through its own short crests and troughs, some of which are planned (new monsters arrive, an enemy uses a powerful spell, the terrain changes) and some not (somebody gets a critical hit that kills a powerful enemy, one side or the other goes on a string of missed attacks). One of the explicit goals of 4th Edition is to improve the pacing of combat, giving players encounter powers so they can do neat things in every fight and don’t resort to “five-foot step, full attack” every round (this is one of the reasons we refer to Essentials as “edition 4-point-minus-3”, because some of the classes took away the changes that even I, with my disapproval of 4E, saw as improvements over 3E). This is also why players and monsters get scarier when they’re bloodied. It shifts the balance of power, which puts the results of the fight into question, which increases excitement and interest.

There are also non-fight crests. When players meet a new or important person, or when a trap comes out of nowhere, or when a big mystery is presented or resolved, these are all crests. A lot of these have to be balanced against the longer-term excitement level of the campaign (the players can only meet the king for the first time once) so it’s harder to throw them on short notice into a session that’s lagging. As a general rule, I like to keep a couple of sub-plots in my back pocket that fit into the campaign but aren’t wholly required. If things get bored (or, more likely, if the players are doing too well), I’ll toss in an extra complication; it’s usually either one that needs to be resolved quickly, so that it doesn’t really affect later session, or one that can be safely ignored at the possible expense of some later complication, which gives me time to figure out how to integrate it.

The point of pacing a session or fight is to never have the players walk away burned out or thinking that it was a “nothing” session. Even breather episodes, which are troughs in the context of a campaign, have their own crests, and even the final session needs some trough to give players a chance to wind down. It’s easy to forget about controlling the excitement level for just a few hours of play, but working on it will help you have memorable sessions, which is a good step toward a memorable campaign.

Unless you specifically intend for your sessions to be forgettable, but that’s so far out of Charisma-based DMing that I’m not sure I can help you.

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Pacing (Part 1, Overview)

Posted on 11 November, 2012 by MssngrDeath

Imagine a football game* where every play ends in a touchdown. For the first few plays, it’s pretty exciting. Returning a kick for a touchdown is the thing of sports highlight reels, as are fifty-yard passes and expert runs. But by the time the second quarter rolls around, the plays begin to lose their magic. The athleticism is the same, but the spectacle of it is gone. After seeing it ten or twenty times in a row, it stops being special no matter how impressive it is.

Now imagine another football game where neither team ever makes a first down. The offenses are weak that neither team is able to make any yardage, so every possession ends in a punt. But at the same time, both defenses are too weak to make any impressive plays like interceptions or safeties. By the end of the game, no points are on the scoreboard and neither team has been on the other side of the fifty-yard line.

In both cases, the problem with the game is the pacing. You as a viewer or fan as used to a rise-and-fall pattern of games. Excitement rises as teams cross the field, culminating in a touchdown and lowering again as the ball changes owners. When something breaks this pattern, it changes the mood of the game; when a team is forced to punt, it unexpectedly lowers the excitement of that team’s fans, but one unexpected great play can bring them back to their feet. When the game stops rising and falling, when it falls into a predictable pattern, then the interest in the game disappears.

Pacing, the speed at which a game progresses, is one of the most interested parts of running D&D because it’s probably one of the most important parts of the game that’s also one of the least understood. There aren’t many books or guides that explicitly deal with pacing because it’s a story contract, not something with any rules implications. It’s not an exact science, so there’s not a lot of advice that can be given on it. But it’s phenomenally important that DMs understand pacing. Good pacing keeps players interested in the plot and the game and keeps them at the table, while bad pacing burns them out (ruining your big moments) or bored them (ruining pretty much everything).

The first, most important thing to get is that pacing is hard. Pretty much everything has pacing, from television shows to movies to jokes to ordinary conversations. A lot of these get pacing wrong, and it’s very easy to do unless you’re keeping an eye on it specifically. I could rattle off a list of things with bad pacing, but if they’re things you haven’t seen then it won’t mean anything. (Did anybody but me watch The Cape? I doubt it.) Just keep an eye on the next TV show you watch or movie you see. Pay attention to the highs and lows and what the show or movie is doing to keep your interest without taxing it. I bet there’s a good chance that it gets the big points right (and we’ll discuss those big points later), but there’s something in the middle fails.

The second thing to understand is the mechanics of pacing. Again, there aren’t game mechanics, but there are definable traits of pacing. There’s an irregular up-and-down rhythm to good pacing that pulls players in at key moments. These are “crests”, the high points that maximize their interest an excitement. But to give crests impact, there has to be something in between to keep players from getting burned out. These are “troughs”, the low points that let them relax, gather their thoughts, and look at things without the pressure of a crest.

It seems that crests and troughs can be subjective, but they usually aren’t. For example, think of a 3rd Edition campaign with a typical cleric/fighter/wizard/rogue party. Now add to that party a bard who focused on exploration, diplomacy, and knowledge, but isn’t built for combat in any way. When the party is ambushed by goblins in the middle of traveling, four players have ways they can contribute to the fight, while the bard is largely irrelevant. But that bard’s player will still acknowledge that ambush as a crest; even if that player wasn’t excited and interested in the progression of the fight, they can still see that was the intention. It does mean that the crest didn’t do its job, and probably that it wasn’t a very good crest, but it was still a crest.

This leads into the third important point about pacing, that it’s something that often needs to be adjusted on the fly. If you see that the players are getting bored, you can give them a crest, and if you see them running themselves ragged, you can give then a trough. The content of that crest or trough is equally mutable. When I say “crest”, meaning “something interesting or exciting”, a lot of players and DMs think “combat”, and that’s a good and valid answer in a lot of cases. But sometimes a fight is also a trough. I have a friend who refers to “the intellectual safety of combat” in this capacity. Sometimes players are so lost or bogged down in some aspect of the story that it’s relaxing to be in the set roles of combat, to enter a situation where choices aren’t nearly as expansive, and to they can make a cognitive switch that allows them to go back to the primary plot refreshed.

At this point, I think it’s pretty clear what pacing is and why it’s good, but I haven’t really been clear on how I apply it to campaigns (and, to be honest, how I think most DMs should apply it). That’s because there are lots of different kinds of pacing. A session has pacing, sure. But so does an adventure that lasts many sessions. So does a full campaign. Even a single fight has a pace to it, something that Wizards felt so strongly about that they designed 4th Edition around changing the pace of fights. So I’m going to go over each of these in different entries, both to pad my post count and to give each level of pacing the attention it deserves.

* – I’m a football fan, so I used a football analogy (though what I’d really like to use is a pro wrestling example, I think this post is better served by something that isn’t scripted). If you’re a basketball fan, instead imagine a game where each team makes full-court three pointers versus a game where no team makes a basket. If you’re a golf fan, imagine a match where every golfers makes all holes-in-one versus a match where all golfers are six over par. If you’re a baseball fan, imagine a game where every at-bat is a home run (baseball has no boring example, because a pitchers’ duel is apparently very exciting to baseball fans). If you’re a hockey fan…a game with all fighting versus a game with no fighting? I don’t know hockey.

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Session Zero

Posted on 3 November, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I think the hardest part of anything is the ending, but the second hardest part is the beginning. The first episode of a TV show, the first chapter of a book, and the first issue of a comic are what’s supposed to hook the viewer or reader and make them want to keep going.

The beginning of a campaign isn’t very different. A lot of campaigns have a reasonably stable player base, but I’ve left enough campaigns (and had enough players leave my campaigns) in the first few sessions to know how important it is to hook people, set the stage for the plot, and let the players know what they can expect for the rest of the campaign. A great Session One can go a long way toward a great overall campaign.

I think I’ve come up with a solution for problematic Sessions One: have a Session Zero. Before a campaign starts, I have a session with no plot, no role-playing, no actual dice hitting the table unless it’s to roll character abilities. The whole point is to have everybody gather and get a feel for each other, their characters, and the setting.

There are a couple of things I like to go over:

  • Character Generation – I prefer to roll character abilities, build characters, and discuss the party dynamic as part of Session Zero. It turns out a lot of players don’t like this, preferring to build character by themselves rather than by committee, but I still think it’s important to have everybody somewhat aware of what roles they’re filling in the party. It also lets players ask me or each other questions about things they’re having trouble with, like picking languages or figuring out how to spend their starting equipment budget.
  • Setting Discussion – Session Zero is a great chance for players to ask questions about the setting of the campaign and add their own notes to it. “I figure I was in a war ten years ago. Who would it have been with?” “Is there a problem with me playing a goblin?” “Are Eastern weapons or firearms available?” And so forth.
  • Survey Results – I have a campaign survey that I like to send out to players while I’m designing the campaign, and Session Zero is a good time to go over the results. I’ll go over my survey in a future post, but I’ve also tried the Same Page Tool that Left Oblique gushed over a while back.
  • Player Meeting – It’s nice to have everybody meet face-to-face before the campaign starts. I’m not worried (any more) that two players are actually mortal enemies that I won’t learn until they see each other across the table, but it makes everybody a little more familiar with each other.

One of the most important things I’ve learned about Session Zero is that the players have to treat it like a real session. My first Session Zero was optional, and half the party didn’t show, which sort of defeated the point. My second had players come in and out at different times, so while I was there for five hours, I never had more than three players there at once, and I ended up explaining things three or four times. When I started making it as mandatory as a real session, it finally had the impact I’d always wanted. The Session Zero for my current campaign was almost perfect.

The whole point of a Session Zero is to get the players interested, unified, and ready to dive right in for Session One. A good one can all but eliminate the mechanical, table-based problems with a first session (which leaves the DM with only the in-character, story-based problems, but every little bit helps). It’s kind of like giving your campaign a trailer, letting everybody know what they can expect coming in far better than you can by giving the same campaign pitch four or five times.

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On Undead (and also, I Suppose, Reskinning)

Posted on 17 October, 2012 by MssngrDeath

An article today on Wizards’ website got me thinking. Let’s try a little experiment. Take a look at this creature and this creature. Assuming that you only have the pictures to go on (and, I guess, the names since they’re right there on the webpage), think about their similarities and differences. Consider where one would make more sense than the other, how players would react to seeing each, and what strategies they might take against each in a fight. We’ll come back to this example later.

As Jon Schindehette very correctly said in his article on undead, the visual aspect of a monster is a very powerful element in what a creature is and how they exist in the game world. It helps players picture what’s happening, it gives them information they can use even if they don’t recognize the exact creature, and it helps differentiate monsters that might otherwise be very similar. For example, if I said “savage humanoids, low level, tends to appear in groups”, that could be orc, gnolls, goblins, certain kobold tribes, or any number of scary beasties. But if I say “hyena-headed guy”, that’s all you need to think “aha, that’s probably a gnoll, and he probably thinks I’m delicious.”

Following from this, changing some visual aspect of a monster or character can change players’ idea of them even without a single mechanical change. Wielding a “greatclub” is not the same as wielding a “four-foot long metal club inlaid with a relief of fire-breathing dragons”. “The wizard casts magic missile” is not the same as “The wizard gestures nonchalantly, and five magical hands appear and punch you in the stomach.” The former is a clear and complete, if lazy, description, but the latter is far more descriptive and memorable.

I said this way back when I wrote about Law #3:

…most players don’t memorize monster information. A reskinned creature is as good as a brand-new creature when it comes to surprising and interesting players, but takes far less time.

So what’s the difference between the earthquake dragon and the nightwalker? Not a darned thing. At least, not when you switch their stat blocks, which you can do with barely a change to either of them. Either monster can serve as a stand-in for the other, and they can both be any number of other monsters and vice versa. The stats are neat and they make the game run, but the real impact is in how you choose to represent these stats to the players.

I’ve made a second career of this, by deciding what creatures I want the players to fight, then checking the Monster Manuals for something of equivalent CR or level that does roughly what I want. It’s worlds faster than making monsters from scratch, fast enough that I can do it mid-session if the players do something unexpected, which means the story is driven by them rather than by the monsters I’ve prepared. In the Tower campaign alone, I used dragon mechanics for everything from elementals to devils to Japanese cyborgs. Part of this is necessity, because 4th Edition seems to think that all dragons should be solos and most solos should be dragons, but it’s mostly because it’s a lot of fun to take something old and present it as something wholly new with just a bit of reskinning.

So I kind of like this idea of “different monsters should look different” even if it does make reskinning harder. If ghosts, wraiths, and shadows are all that different, one can’t substitute for the other, but I think that’s a good thing. It shows that Wizards might be getting past the numbers-first design of 4th Edition and back to an aesthetic of telling a story in a coherent world.

Or it could just be one writer with a good idea. I don’t know.

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When You Miss a Session

Posted on 15 October, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I’ve gone over how to handle a player missing a session in a campaign from the DM’s perspective, but that’s not really complete. There’s also an etiquette around how to deal with missing a session yourself, whether you’re the DM or the player. Other people are counting on you to be available weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or whenever, and if you’re not going to be able to make it, some ways to handle it are better than others.

I’m in three weekly campaigns, so this month I was supposed to have twelve D&D sessions. Six of those were (or I expect to be) outright cancelled, and I’m going to miss another besides. All of these are for good reasons and all of them have been handled well by the DMs and players, much better than I’ve seen in past years (one of the perks of playing with grown-ups these days). I know a lot of the people reading this are similarly upstanding citizens, so forgive me if a lot of this seems obvious.

The most important thing is that you tell your DM or group when you expect to miss a session, preferably as soon as possible. If you’re a DM, alert your group that a session is cancelled early as well. I’m not saying that after a car accident your first call should be your gaming group, but let them know as soon as feasible so your DM can plan around it or so your players know they have the option to schedule other plans. I’ve been in too many campaigns where we only found out that the session was cancelled because the DM didn’t show up within the first hour. That shows not just laziness, but that the DM doesn’t care about the players, and that reflects poorly on the rest of the campaign. I’ve also held sessions for an hour waiting for players that never came, and I guarantee that those players weren’t on my good side when the orcs were deciding whom to behead.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re missing a session until it’s imminent. I had to drop a session of Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant because my throat was too sore to speak, and I didn’t know it until that morning. In a more extreme example, one of my DMs had a family emergency and couldn’t let us know any sooner than two hours prior. This is fine, because we both still contacted our players as soon as reasonable and kept everybody informed. I generally prefer knowing when a session will be cancelled weeks ahead of time, but often that’s not possible. I only recommend that you alert people whenever it makes sense; don’t leave it until right before the session to send that email, because it leaves people hanging almost as much as not letting them know at all.

Second, know what’s worth missing or cancelling a session. This goes both ways. On the one hand, don’t leave your party hanging for petty reasons; no matter how great Batman: Arkham City is (and it is), getting all the Riddler trophies is not worth dropping your players. After all, the trophies will still be there tomorrow and the session won’t. But on the other hand, don’t treat your campaign as the highest priority in your life. If you’re too sick to run a game, then get some sleep. If you have to drive 120 miles per hour to make it to a session on time, be late. It’s a pretty lousy person who doesn’t understand that sometimes you’re just not up to the task of being attentive, knowledgeable, and interesting for four to nine hours.

There’s a fuzzy line between “good reason” and “bad reason”. In general, if you think your players will understand, go for it. Most players know what it’s like to be sick, to have too much work to plan or run a session, or to have family in town, and they’ll be happy to let you have that necessary time. Certain groups will also understand new video game releases or staying up for midnight movie showings, and others won’t. If your players or DM think your reasoning for missing a session is lousy, they’ll probably tell you.

Third, know about the consequences of missing a session. There’s a good chance that you’ll miss out on some story and character development (in most games) and some treasure and experience points (in 4th Edition). You should expect that other players will try to update you on what happened while you were away. You can’t expect that they’ll save a share of treasure for you if you weren’t there to help earn/loot/steal it. No matter how good your reason was, you still weren’t there, and it’s perfectly reasonable for the DM to reduce your XP gains or for the party to withhold an equal share of loot.

If you’re a DM, expect that the players will have a harder time remembering what happened in previous weeks. There’s a reason a lot of TV shows begin with a “previously on ________” montage, because viewers are busy and can’t be expected to remember every interaction that happened in every previous episode. If you cancel two sessions in a row and your players don’t remember where they are, it’s not because they’re lousy players. It’s because they’ve been busy remembering other things for the last five hundred hours. It’s probably a good idea to start every session with a “previously on” montage anyway, to remind forgetful, busy, or missing players about where the campaign is.

In general, a lot of what I said falls under the “don’t be a jerk” rule (some sort of weird hybrid between Law #0 and Law #4). Remember that your fellow players are people who have lives and expectations and they usually understand when something unexpected happens, but if you push them too hard they won’t be nearly as willing to play with you in the future.

One last word: find out the best way to contact your players. Some players read their email religiously and some only check it weekly. Some ignore most text messages and some tweet all day. If you send them a message via a communication medium they don’t use, that’s as good as not telling them. I sometimes forget that most people *aren’t* required by their job to keep their phone on 24/7, so I use a lot of text, but I’ve shifted to email more lately because players seem to prefer it.

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Weapon With Powers (Part 2)

Posted on 21 September, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I’ve added a few new weapons to the list. I think I’m going to end up in Eastern weapons next, though I’m running out of status ailments. Maybe I need to make a weapon like in Rurouni Kenshin, where it occasionally does fire damage or something. Lists at the other end of the link.

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Ultimate Equipment

Posted on 15 September, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I wanted to write my impressions of Ultimate Equipment, but what is there to say? It’s not like reviewing a normal book, where there’s some sort of new game-bending feature (Words of Power, Ultimate Magic) or I can rail on devoting an entire chapter to terrible, terrible decisions (Backstory Dress-Up, Heroes of the Feywild). It’s more like reviewing a dictionary or another strongly-structured reference book. There are only a few points worth considering.

  • Is it organized? Ultimate Equipment improved on the 3rd Edition item book format by throwing it to the wolves and adopting the 4th Edition format instead. Items are still organized in the normal weapons / armor / rings / rods / etc. format, but there’s no longer a giant “Other” category for everything that goes on the body. Instead items are sorted by their body slot, which is perfect for the discerning powergamer who notices that they’re only wearing fifteen magic items and have neglected their head slot (distinct from the face and headband slots!). Occasionally the best way to find a new item for your character is still to open a PDF and search for it; there’s no way to determine which items in which slots add to what aspects of the character, but what can you expect? This is as compartmentalized and logical as a big sack of gear can get.
  • Is it complete? In this I don’t mean “Does it have every item?” but rather “Does it have as much content and variety as it can be expected to have for its size and price?” Mordenkainen’s Magically Delicious failed here because it took up way too much space giving us every item’s origin, preferred users, and favorite brand of shampoo rather than giving us more items (you know, the reason people bought the book). Ultimate Equipment only breaks up the items to give us pictures of the items and tables to help us find them. It even dedicates a chapter to mundane items, something the simulationist in me missed drastically from 4th Edition (and Pathfinder before this book). So yes, it’s as complete as anybody could expect.
  • Is it helpful? This could be the most thorough book on four legs and nobody would care if it was Ultimate Belt Slots for Bards. Any decent Ultimate Blank book should be applicable to most if not all characters and players (like the Complete Blank series, and I am glaring directly at you, Blank Power), and Ultimate Equipment fits that bill. It even has a whole set of items just for gunslingers, and there’s no more recent class than that. I started a campaign the week the book came out, and for a while in Session Zero every conscious player was more interested in what the new book had than the party dynamic, the world, or any of those petty set-building things. It really has something for everybody, except those Vow of Poverty monks.

That said, it’s not perfect. I really would have preferred pictures for every mundane weapon or at least every exotic weapon, because some of them really needed it (klar) and some really didn’t. I’m not sure what target audience is excited about the fact that they can now, finally, see what a greatclub looks like. Similarly, I don’t like how the special materials section only had pictures of things I already knew about (adamantine, dragonhide, bone, bronze, gold) and not some of the new stuff (angelskin, wyroot).

But these are pretty mundane nit-picks about a really good book. By the time I notice that I miss the art object “marble relief of wrestling dwarves” and have decided to blog about it, it’s because I’ve run out of things to lambast. I expect that everybody interested in the book has either picked it up or is only flipping through it when they come over to my house every Saturday, but I heartily recommend this book for pretty much every player or DM. It’s no fourth Core rulebook, but…actually since Paizo only has one Core rulebook, maybe it is.

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DM Wrath List

Posted on 28 August, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I’ve received a startling number of requests for this.

There are some actions a player can take during a D&D session that cause me to roll on a DM Wrath list. Most often, I roll because a player (or DM) has made a sufficiently bad pun, but it’s generally for whenever somebody has irritated me in a comedic way. The only wraths that are permanent are the ones that are funny, and every once in a while I change up the list to keep it fresh.

The original list is here, but here’s the one I’m currently using:

1 – You develop a phobia of the DM’s choice.
2 – You may only speak in song titles.
3 – You are convinced that a powerful magician is out to get you personally.
4 – You start each day covered in moss.
5 – Your heartbeat is audible to everybody within ten yards.
6 – You think you’ve had geas/quest cast on you by a high-level cleric.
7 – A pool of lava opens beneath you.
8 – Your weapon develops your personality.
9 – You think you are from the distant future.
10 – Your arms become tree branches.
11 – You think you can communicate with inanimate objects.
12 – You insist your name is something else.
13 – You believe everything is a CCG.
14 – You are followed by four skeletons with no combat ability.
15 – You become convinced that you invented magic.
16 – You are convinced that you’re a monstrous race (roll randomly)
17 – You only speak one random language.
18 – Your skin turns matte black.
19 – You become monosyllabic.
20 – Your tongue leaps from your mouth and scurries away.
21 – You believe that you are 5 feet taller than you are and behave accordingly.
22 – You perceive all art to portray only horrifying images.
23 – Gender switch. This is permanent and can only be undone by limited wish, wish, miracle, or another DM Wrath.
24 – You think the last d20 days were just a dream.
25 – You become magnetized.
26 – You can only walk backwards (can still fight forwards, just can’t advance forwards).
27 – Your tongue becomes twelve inches longer.
28 – You may no longer use the letter E.
29 – Shadows make obscene gestures at you.
30 – You forget everything since yesterday morning.
31 – You become cloned.
32 – You act like the campaign is a first-person shooter.
33 – You cannot touch anything of a certain color without unbearable pain.
34 – You sing in your sleep.
35 – Your nose floats six inches in front of your face.
36 – You have a wooden cat that you carry with you wherever you go and talk to it as if it were your best friend. You must narrate everything that happens to it.
37 – You become obsessed with cell phone reception in your adventuring locations.
38 – You are covered in whipped cream.
39 – Your touch robs objects of color.
40 – You become surrounded by a swarm of hornets.
41 – You think you are an iron golem.
42 – You are suddenly hated by townspeople.
43 – You can only talk in shrieks.
44 – You become tarred and feathered.
45 – You are invisible, but only when you speak.
46 – Every stick you find you must point north.
47 – You think you were recently murdered.
48 – Your shadow falls in the opposite direction.
49 – You talk in 3rd person.
50 – You fill with straw rather than blood, organs, or other functional parts.
51 – You feel other people consider you a coward and will go to great lengths to disprove them.
52 – You cannot remember your name.
53 – You feel ecstasy when wounded.
54 – You think you’re dead.
55 – You are terrified that your mother will find out what you’re doing, regardless of what it is.
56 – You are reduced to half Strength when in sunlight.
57 – You think cowardice and stupidity are virtues.
58 – You have chronic incandescence for one week.
59 – You become invisible and silenced, but only to yourself.
60 – You think you are a mind flayer.
61 – Half of your body is slowed.
62 – You think you are immune to a random energy type.
63 – You realize you haven’t slept in three weeks.
64 – You become bored stiff with the passage of time.
65 – A giant, translucent hand appears nearby and gestures whenever you speak.
66 – You believe a random deity to be a party member.
67 – You teleport one mile; stone replica appears in your place.
68 – You must be within thirty feet of a life-size iron statue of you, which suddenly appears, at all times.
69 – You become nocturnal.
70 – You weigh two hundred pounds more than usual, and your body changes accordingly.
71 – You must enforce happiness.
72 – Everything that anyone says to you counts as the spell suggestion (Will DC 13).
73 – All metal becomes toxic to you.
74 – Your hair turns to ice.
75 – You think that your body will rust if it gets wet.
76 – You ignite.
77 – You have the voice of a young child.
78 – You cannot leave a room when observed.
79 – Your hair and eye colors change with the color of the sky.
80 – You gain a remarkably quick temper.
81 – Your alignment changes randomly each hour.
82 – Everybody within ten miles forgets your name.
83 – You teleport whenever you hear or speak your name.
84 – Your eyes merge like a Cyclops’.
85 – Your face becomes an emoticon.
86 – Every time you answer a question, you must begin with “Back in my day…”
87 – You believe animals are out to get you.
88 – You think your weapon is cursed.
89 – You become convinced that an artifact is buried somewhere nearby.
90 – You may not speak when another person is within sixty feet.
91 – Your voice makes people want to be elsewhere.
92 – You and one or more friends switch bodies.
93 – You begin remembering things that never happened.
94 – You refuse to admit that anything occurred before your birth.
95 – You become convinced that people aren’t taking you seriously.
96 – You must finish every sentence with the phrase “if you know what I mean.”
97 – You are convinced your enemies are immortal.
98 – You may no longer walk on your feet.
99 – You aren’t entirely sure you exist.
100 – You gain Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.

Posted in DMing, House Rules | 4 Comments

The Three-Character Rule (well, Suggestion)

Posted on 23 August, 2012 by MssngrDeath

When I first heard the idea that most players only play three characters, I think I had the same reaction as everybody else, which was basically “That’s dumb, and you’re dumb”. I kind of resented the idea that players are so set in their ways that they can each be boiled down to three basic ideas. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it’s not that players only have three characters as much as they have three archetypes, or three concepts that they expand into multiple fully-fleshed characters.

It’s not that players say “I will only player fighters, dwarves, and raging drunks. And if I can fit them all into one character, bonus!” I doubt anybody sits down and specifies them at all, certainly not that clearly. There’s the occasional case where somebody might play the same character in different systems or settings, but I’ve only seen a few players even try it. It’s more that they enjoy certain parts of the system more, or they like certain things from other media more, or they’re specifically avoiding something they don’t like. Over time, this builds into a pattern that’s only really clear in retrospect.

I have some idea of what I like, but maybe by listing all my characters I’ll see a system that I hadn’t notice before. Since this is kind of a D&D blog, I’m only going to focus on my D&D characters, though my characters in other systems (pop star, strongarm zombie-killer, modern American minister, and insomniac Doctor Octopus) do contribute something:

D&D 3.0: super-fast rogue/barbarian
D&D 3.0: spider/dragon bard
D&D 3.0: healing snake-based druid
D&D 3.5: nimble swashbuckler
D&D 3.5: stalwart cleric/barbarian
D&D 3.5: curmudgeon cleric
D&D 3.5: shounen hero sorcerer
D&D 3.5: brooding favored soul
D&D 4.0: science-based robot paladin
D&D 3.5: civilization-building scout
D&D 4.0: science-based robot battlemind
D&D 4.0: rainbow spirit shaman
D&D 3.5: random-weapon ranger
D&D 3.5: giant reticent fighter

That actually did help. Based on what I’ve already played, I like the following:

  • Healers — Five of my fourteen characters were primary healers, and two more were secondary healers. I can’t explain exactly why I like it, though. Maybe it’s the idea of being the glue that hold everybody together, something I don’t get to do in real life. Maybe it’s the thrill of managing the resources of an entire party, making sure they’re all able to do their jobs in a way other roles can’t. Or maybe I just like looking at the damage the DM is doing and subverting it. 4th Edition has changed this a bit with the concept of healers that heal while doing damage, because players love damage. But I love healing for healing’s sake, and over time I’ve come to request that role when it’s available (Note: now that I like it, it never is).
  • Competent characters — This isn’t just regular competency or competency in expected roles, where most characters are expected to be. This is hyper-competency, where I take some corner case in the system and excel at it in a way that doesn’t fit the normal character role. For example, my 4th Edition robot was capable of doing 200 damage in a single round at L16, which was impressive considering that character is not a striker but less impressive when one realizes that I can’t do it for more than one round per day. My favored soul was a king of shield-based combat, my rogue was the fastest L5 character in the system, my ranger loved combat maneuvers in a age that didn’t have them, and so forth.
  • Snarky characters — This is the type of personality I tend to play because it’s the type of person I tend to be. Intentionally or otherwise, eventually enough of my personality will seep in to the character that they end up sounding like Gregory House. This fits six of my D&D characters and three of my four non-D&D characters, and it’s caused countless moments where other characters shift into snark for a quick joke.

So it looks like my perfect character is a snarky healer who’s also great at something besides healing. I’ve actually played this once (the favored soul) and come close a second time (the spirit shaman), but I’ve never gone into a character with that intention. In fact, both of those characters are backups for campaigns where I could run a second character.

It’s worth noting that I have a habit of picking my character last to fill any holes in the party. Using the seven party roles, I determine where there’s missing competency and build a character that fixes it, allowing everybody to have the character they want but still play in a balanced group. Most of the characters above were caused by me taking something I felt I needed to do and mixing it with something I wanted to do. If I had free reign to play any character I wanted, I think I’d be so consumed by analysis paralysis that I’d never make anything fun.

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