When You Miss a Session

Posted on 15 October, 2012 by Law

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 Law

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 Law

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 Law

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 Law

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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Weapons with Powers (Part 1)

Posted on 14 August, 2012 by Law

I have a lot of problems with 4th Edition (in fact, I have a list of topics I’d like to address eventually), and one is the change in weapon tiers. 3rd Edition had “exotic” weapons, for weapons that required a greater degree of expertise to use effectively or gave small, narrow mechanical benefits like a +2 to trip attempts. 4th Edition replaced them with “superior” weapons, which are designed to be mathematically better. Gone is the feeling of taking a feat for a character reason, and instead players take a feat to gain a damage bonus or a clear numerical advantage.

I wanted to do something about this, presenting another option for weapons while keeping the current weapons intact for anybody who for some (obvious) reason likes them. But then I realized that most people would give their left pinky and every silver piece they’ll ever earn for another at-will power, especially at high levels. So what about weapons that grant at-will powers? As long as the powers aren’t too broken, they can add another option to players from round-to-round without tipping the game too hard one way or another.

The idea is that there’s nothing anybody needs to do to use these powers. They’re available to all characters, as long as they meet the requirements. Here’s my first go at them (I took out the Price and Weight columns so this table was in any danger of fitting, but the background colors still don’t work. I’ll probably load the original up someplace.):

UPDATE: The weapons are available here.

Ideas? Comments? Pastries?

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Campaign Writeup: The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao

Posted on 13 August, 2012 by Law

The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao is the third campaign to end in the Eight Arms universe, though it was the second to start (five-week campaigns do a number on my count). The Eight Arms see an opportunity to gain a footing in a new part of the world by sending a small group to stop two nations from going to war. Their plan is hindered by a contract that grants the land to the country that doesn’t own it, assassins targeting the negotiating diplomats, giants knocking at the country’s border, and the ambitions of a powerful oni.

Here’s what I learned from running this campaign:

  • Some stories don’t have perfect endings. As an escapist, this kills me, because I want everything to be great forever. But sometimes the players or characters make decisions that prevent happy endings, and it can be rewarding to just make things a lesser sort of terrible.
  • Players can do great evil in the name of middling good. The party tortured an assassin to death to get the location of their guild, and only then stopped to consider what they might do with that information. It turned out alright (if you can consider “the party is now pursued by all living assassins” alright), but it was a pretty jarring moment for me, anybody I could get to listen to the story, and the player who missed that week.
  • Setting a campaign in a place with an unspeakable language is rough. The players and I knew this going in, but it did occasionally leave one or more players on he wayside because they couldn’t speak the language.
  • Good party composition is very helpful, but bad party composition is absolutely crippling. I’ve talked about the roles that characters can fill and acknowledged that players can do without one or two, but I didn’t really address what happens when roles are duplicated. This party had four players, and the roles broke down like this:
    • Zero controllers
    • Three damage-dealers
    • Two half-defenders (one needed buffs, the other was a barbarian)
    • Three diplomats
    • One quarter-healer (a bard who spent his spells on the aforementioned defending)
    • Zero naturalists
    • One sneak (and a guy who could cast invisibility)
  • Certain classes as more popular than others. Again, I knew this, but now I know which classes those are. I go into more detail on this below.

Given the option, here’s what I would change:

  • I actually would have made the ending more bleak. The players managed to pull a Hail Mary at the last second with two crits in one round, and it was easy to ride that wave of emotion, but the players did fail at their mission, and failed in a way that made things worse than if they hadn’t shown up at all. The conclusion should have been darker than “all of you live, though some are uncomfortable”. Luckily, those assassins are still around…
  • I might have run my set piece. I’ve said that I like planning campaigns with a set piece in mind. This time it didn’t happen, so I actually didn’t do the thing I designed this campaign to achieve. But I say I might have run it because I don’t know if I could fit it in without it feeling forced.

On a related note, I think I’m going to disallow summoners in the short-term future. Every Pathfinder campaign I’ve run so far has had one, and all of them used very similar builds to deal more damage than the other strikers while being more survivable and leaving a whole character free to perform other actions. It seems too easy to build an eidolon that steps on other players and negates the normal disadvantages of high-damage characters, and some players aren’t as conscientious as others about it. Besides, it means that the Eight Arms are 25% summoners (for reference, they have no representatives from six core classes); I’m just tired of running games for them.

I may soft-ban ifrit sorcerers for the same reason, though I think this guarantees that I’ll see them at Delve Night.

This campaign and The Great Tower of Oldechi also inspired me to cancel the Evil Campaign, an idea I had where all characters must be evil. After seeing how nonchalantly players can slide into evil when its expedient or fun, I think running an Evil Campaign would be redundant. A Good Campaign might be more rewarding.

Edit: It was not

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A Rant on the Wizards Goblin

Posted on 8 August, 2012 by Law

Sometimes I forget about the differences between D&D as intended by the developers and D&D as I play it (and have always played it, and how it’s played by the people I know, etc.) Reading today’s Dragon’s-Eye View, I saw a description of how goblins work in the world of D&D, the generic “all-campaign” where the developers work. It’s the place where dragons are strong, intelligent capstone creatures, where creatures like giants and golems are as rare and awe-inspiring as devils and gods themselves, and adventurers are shining examples of the heights to which civilized races (and only civilized races) can ascend.

You know, trash like that.

In particular, I really really don’t like the idea of the goblins as written. Part of it is the notion that I’m not sure exactly what the author of the article wanted to write. He talks about giving goblins “some structure and sense of culture”, because they’re a valid race just like humans and dwarves, then going out of the way to make them “appear more ‘monstrous’ and less evolved”. So they want goblins to be real and believable, but not so much that players feel bad killing them. He also goes on and on about how he doesn’t want them to be goofy or bumbling, then says they make great henchman. There’s no mention of any goblin leaders or standouts. So they’re serious creatures, but not so much that you have to take them seriously.

But mostly, it’s that I like the idea of the goofy, bumbling goblin. I like the look of the Pathfinder goblin, and I like the culture they gave it. They made goblins scary in groups, but for a reason, rather than just “because the XP budget is higher”. They gave players and DMs reasons to be afraid of goblins, especially when they were leveraging their strengths, like pyromancy. But they also kept them likable. They gave players a reason to see goblins as a race like humans, which gives them opportunities to interact with them in a non-sword way.

Wizards’ D&D has tended to be super-serious since sometime in 2nd Edition. No humor is allowed in creatures and very little is allowed in books in general. They’ve discussed why this is, but that’s different from what they’re doing, which is going out of their way to remove all possibility of comedy, trusting players to create it on their own, often out-of-character because the in-character world has no patience for it. Some creatures should be able to be goofy, just like they can be noble or wise (which, per the article, goblins aren’t allowed to be). Wizards wants to be able to prevent a race from being comedic, but they’re fine with them being unsalvageable monsters, because in D&D most of your life is determined your race.

It all comes down to intent. Wizards’ intent was to make goblins be a low-level monster and not a second thing (this is almost explicit in the article). My intent is to make them entertaining, with the freedom to be something else instead or in addition. This may just be another instance of Int-based simulationist DMing (“All things have a place in the world determined by the author or DM, and they must occupy that place.”) versus Cha-based simulationist DMing in general (“All things should lead to enjoyment at the table, and they really need to make sense.”). But I actually always thought of vanilla D&D as Wis-based, simulationist in 3rd Edition and gamist in 4th with 5th intentionally somewhere in between. If it’s moving elsewhere, we might have trouble some years hence.

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Campaign Writeup: The Eight Arms and the Conqueror Worm

Posted on 8 August, 2012 by Law

I recently concluded the second campaign in the Eight Arms universe, The Eight Arms and the Conqueror Worm. It’s part of my continuing effort to design a D&D super-adventure by building a setting organically through a series of campaigns (basically, a campaign setting that fixes everything wrong with campaign settings). This one was special in that it only lasted five sessions, which is the shortest campaign I’ve run and the second-shortest campaign I’ve heard of. The Eight Arms send a small contingent of their greatest craftsmen to investigate some disappearances in the dwarven capital. Their investigation leads them to a tiefling instructing some demons and duergar in building a war machine with the intent of attacking the city.

Here’s what I learned from running this campaign:

  • Again, I have a hard time remembering that I’m running campaigns for grown-ups now, though in a different way. I’m used to a world where “adult behavior in a campaign” means “roll a Constitution check, snicker under your breath”. But now I know people who are able to handle that kind of thing, and I feel like I missed some opportunities to give them the campaign they wanted.
  • Short campaigns are hard, because there’s less leeway if something explodes. In a normal campaign, there’s so much wiggle room that it’s fine if the players get stuck on a puzzle, go the wrong way in a dungeon, or (and I’m just pulling an example out of space here) spend four hours of at-the-table time investigating an empty warehouse. Similarly, if players accidentally or intentionally jump a few steps ahead in a plot, there’s plenty of time to complicate things. In a campaign that has to go from start to end in only thirty hours (minus time for faffing about and getting the technology to work), there’s a tighter leash on pacing.
  • Nobody much likes dwarves at all, except for the people who love them. I guess I already knew this, but it’s worth remembering.

Given the option, here’s what I would change:

  • I would have explained the concept of “non-fight combats”, a combat-based, initiative-paced version of 4th Edition’s skill challenges (note to self, find a better term for that). Players who aren’t used to thinking outside of the box, using skills in combat, or dealing with problems in a way besides attack rolls tend to shut down when attack rolls don’t work. I could have saved us all a few rounds by explaining what a skill challenge was beforehand.
  • I would have named the succubus. I kind of didn’t expect her to be a running NPC or for the players to name her themselves. Now I’m stuck with a demon named Pepper.
  • I would have updated the wiki more. Perhaps not between sessions, but there should have been more information available to players when the campaign started, or ideally during character creation.

I’m happy about this campaign, both on its own and in the context of the world in general. The characters could end up being a small forward party, dealing with small issues or exploring the wilds while the high-level characters rub their faces against problems at home. Now we can burn two cities to the ground at once, which is dramatically more efficient.

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Keeping Plots Discontinued (or, Nobody Cares about Your Wolfos Ranger)

Posted on 31 July, 2012 by Law

Most players don’t know what goes into making a D&D session. It’s not unlike how most children don’t know what it’s like to be a parent, or how most people don’t really know what their boss (or their boss) does every day, though on a much smaller scale. Players manage a character and its rules, remember plot details, and interact with each other and NPCs. DMs manage all NPCs, all monsters, all plots, and all interactions, and are expected to know any and all rules at any given time (I can’t count the number of times players have asked me what a spell did, a spell they read in a book and prepared for the session yet mysteriously forgot by the time they wanted to use it). The average player has never had to pick out a set of miniatures, plan a map, or search for the appropriate pictures to show players on a brilliant and under-appreciated piece of software. I think that, in general, if players knew how much work went into designing a session, adventure, or campaign, they’d appreciate the results of that work much more.

Some things, though, should be kept from players. Players don’t need to know that a given monster was a reskin of another monster, or that a given map is a modified version of a level from a video game. It generally doesn’t increase the player’s enjoyment to see too far behind the screen. If they guess the source of something, fine, but I don’t think DMs should be encouraging players to understand everything and its origins. In particular, I’d like to talk about plots the DM planned but didn’t run, and why players should remain in the dark about them.

Every week at our friendly local gaming store, we run a Pathfinder event based on the old D&D Delve Night. The arc just came to a close, and the designer of the session asked me about bringing up some plot details that had been left unresolved from past session. In particular, there was a mysterious cabal running a city who teleported troublemakers somewhere far away, and we considered explaining the mechanism of the spell to the players when it failed in a catastrophic way.

The thing is, the players never questioned the teleportation. They never sought out the cabal, asked how the came to power, researched the spell, or gave a second thought to any NPCs who were teleported away. We could have explained to the players that the teleportation spell had some intricacies that would lead it to failing in the last session, bringing back all lost creatures. But given that the players weren’t interested in it, we decided that adding that level of complexity to the last session wasn’t necessary or wise.

In general, DMs should stay away from using time during the session to resolve plots that the players didn’t know existed. During Delve Night, the players have so far angered two city-wide guilds, broke some people out of prison, failed to find some “merchandise” stolen from a slaver, opted not to meet with a great wyrm, and put themselves in debt to a powerful magician. If the campaign had more time left, we could have had the guilds attack the players, sent the police after them, brought back the “merchandise” to ally with or fight them, forced them into conflict with the great wyrm, or had the magician call in his favor. But all of these are sub-plots, and the players had clearly come to the end of the main plot. I don’t see how adding all the sub-plots back in at the end would have benefited anybody.

This gets worse when you factor in the plots we planned about which the players didn’t know. Throughout the campaign, the players had ignored (intentionally and otherwise) all information about the teleportation plot. Bringing it all back in for the last session would have compressed it so much it almost wasn’t recognizable and could only have detracted from the final session.

I learned this lesson way back in the Hyrule Campaign, by having a recurring enemy attack the party in the last session. Normally, this wouldn’t be stupid, except the only place I fought for it was after the battle with Ganon. Nobody wants to beat the final boss, then have to deal with a plot they’d long forgotten. All of us would have been much happier if I’d let that plot lie.

So I recommend that if players blithely ignore a sub-plot you had planned, let it go. In a long enough campaign that plot, possibly revised, may be able to work its way back in later. But shoving additional complexity into the end of a campaign to explain things that didn’t need explaining is a recipe for confused and unhappy players.

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