Law A

Posted on 30 January, 2013 by Law

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 Law

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Set Pieces in D&D

Posted on 19 January, 2013 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

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

Posted on 7 January, 2013 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems, House Rules | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Pacing (Part 4, Ideas)

Posted on 27 December, 2012 by Law

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

Posted on 23 December, 2012 by Law

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 Law

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 Law

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 Law

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 Law

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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