When a Player Misses a Session

Posted on 11 April, 2012 by MssngrDeath

Meteors. Zombie swarms. Conventions for Japanese cartoons. Jesus. There are probably a thousand things that can prevent a player from attending the session, and I’ve heard two-hundred thirty-eight of them. So when something explodes and a player can’t attend a session, what can you do to keep things steady?

Assume for a second that you’re not just canceling the session. If you know you’re going forward, there area a few options depending on you, your players, and your campaign’s story. Each requires a different amount of time and effort, and each has its own drawbacks and advantages.

The quickest and laziest method is to treat the character like they aren’t there. They disappear at the beginning of the session and arrive again at the beginning of the next session, and there’s no explanation. The character could also be there, not participating. We call this Mark the Redding, after the character in The Gamers. It means that players can pop in and our of the campaign without worrying about anything else, and it means that nothing happens to the character while the player isn’t there. But it’s a huge story break, and it leaves a bunch of unanswered questions about what the character is doing, where they are, and why no enemies have an opinion about them. It also swings the session balance in a different direction, as the party is suddenly without their healer or diplomat.

Another idea is to have the DM or another player run the character of the missing player. This requires that somebody has the character sheet or other information beforehand, but it means that the character can continue to lend their talents and gain experience and loot like normal. It does, however, mean that the character can die or spend resources without their player’s consent. Also, this works with some systems and some characters better than others; most players can pick up a 3rd Edition fighter and play him without a lot of knowledge about the character’s intricacies because it’s factored into the sheet. But picking up a spellcaster, a high-level character, or basically any 4th Edition character can be a huge pain if it’s the first time you’ve seen them. In general, the more powerful the build is, the harder it is to run it on the fly and the less this method works, and players love making unnecessarily complicated characters in the name of power.

A method I’ve been using lately is to leverage the companion characters from the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2. Basically, they’re half-characters, in that they have roles and some class powers but no equipment or feats and level-based attack bonuses and damage. They’re designed for short-term NPCs, but you can also make a companion version of your PCs, a low-maintenance version of them for sessions where the player can’t attend. They can’t spend consumable resources (unless they die) and they still get experience and loot. It even works in-story as long as you can explain why a character is suddenly, temporarily de-powered (a bad night’s sleep?). It does require that you maintain the characters occasionally, but it’s not hard to put them into Excel or OpenOffice and build most of their stats as a formula based on level. The biggest downside of this method is that it really only works in 4th Edition, because 3E has nothing at all like it.

The most difficult method is to design an NPC to temporarily replace the character. You can make them as simple or as complex as you want, give them whatever equipment you think makes sense, and even give them abilities that you think the party needs. If they die, the party is only minorly inconvenienced, and if they live the party might even get a long-term ally out of it. But preparing an NPC for each situation is time-consuming and potentially complicated for the DM. In a similar vein, players could prepare their own backup replacements. That is, if a player can’t bring their swashbuckler, they have a less-complicated, probably lower-level fighter prepared. This puts the onus on the players, but it means nobody has to create more than one backup character, and the entire party gets a set of backups to perform tasks like maintaining a base or working on lower-level quests off-camera (or retrieving the main party’s corpses after they die).

These are the only ideas I’ve come up with, and each has met with varying degrees of success. In general, I don’t have a lot of respect for the Mark the Red method because it violates the story far harder than my comfort level allows. And I’ve never seen somebody understand another player’s character sheet, even when they’ve watched that character for a year. I like the companion characters, but I really like NPCs and backup characters, especially when the players have a hand in designing them, because it expands the world more and occasionally scratches that my-character-feels-stale itch.

I’m wondering if anybody else has tried anything to deal with a missing player or character. Luckily, this is the intertruck, and I can just ask for stories in the comments.

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Designing for Parties Missing a Role (3rd Edition)

Posted on 30 March, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I’ve talked a few times about designing sessions for balanced parties and how hard it is. But some parties don’t have the luxury of being balanced. Sometimes, nobody wants to fill a certain role, or there just aren’t enough people to hit every base. Even missing a regular player for a session or two changes the dynamic of play. How do you build a session, adventure, or campaign when you’re missing something the game expects?

Here’s a link to part 1 of this article, about 4th Edition. 3rd Edition has more roles (also, I made them up), so they’re harder to cover. However, they’re not as explicit in the rules, and traditionally they’re less necessary than in 4th. Each party member is expected to have more than one role, and most classes can fulfill most roles. Still, if something is missing despite all that, there’s something you can do.

When I’m missing a role in 3rd Edition, sometimes I ignore it. After all, it’s not as though all combats are designed for a balanced party, and it’s more realistic that sometimes a party with no diplomat will still have to talk to somebody. But when I do make changes, here’s how I tend to design:

  • Control

    Controllers mess with the battlefield by keeping monsters separated, limiting their effectiveness, or protecting allies. A party without a controller will get in over their head, often before they realize it, so try to be open about giving them opportunities to back away and try to get a more advantageous situation. Keep away from tons of low-level monsters that somebody with area effects could normally disable or impede, because the party may not be able to do that any more. Try planning encounters in waves; fighting fifteen orcs is far more daunting than fighting three sets of five orcs each that appear every few rounds.

  • Damage

    Designing for a party without a damage role isn’t that difficult because you’ve probably already done it. If a party’s primary source of damage is a rogue, then a fight against undead means that the party doesn’t have a damage-dealer. The same goes for a party with a sorcerer fighting a high-level outsider with Spell Resistance, a two-sword ranger fighting a monster with DR against slashing or any of the above fighting a golem. One option is to plan on other sources of damage, like unusual terrain (not much can survive a lava pit), traps the party can co-opt, or limited-use magic items. Another is to accept that damage will be low and give monsters low health to compensate, perhaps increasing their Dexterity or Strength as much as you decrease their Constitution, or decreasing monster damage so neither side is outpacing the other.

  • Defense

    The defender role isn’t as hard and fast as it is in 4th Edition; rather than a mark, a defender in 3rd Edition just soaks attacks that could otherwise have gone toward squishier characters. A party without defense is rare because somebody usually likes having high AC, but that party would obviously take more hits in a given fight. Be wary of monsters with Power Attack or similar features, because while a -5 penalty to attack for +10 damage is incredibly meaningful when they hit on a 15 or higher, it’s not that much of a problem when they hit on an 8. Expect players to use smarter tactics, like cover and choke points, to limit the amount of damage they take, and plan on shorter days because the party healer is likely to be much busier.

  • Diplomacy

    A party without diplomacy will do a lot of punching and not a lot of talking, and when they do talk they’ll probably be bad at it. The key is to not make the party feel put upon for missing this role. That is, if the party is bad at high negotiations and political intrigue, don’t give them a series of adventures based around it. Having the occasional haggling or bartering session is fine, but remember that the players designed a less-talking-more-hitting team because that’s the sort of kick-in-the-door game they want to play. Unless they really want to feel evil, avoid monsters that like fleeing or surrendering, and lean toward monsters rather than NPCs with class levels.

  • Healing

    In general, without a healer you can also expect a lower amount of party satisfaction. When a player goes down, they usually stay down, and that player gets to sit back and watch while other players fight and complain about how hard combats are. They also get to do less in a day and rarely enter fights at full strength, so the dissatisfaction builds and builds. I suggest you really encourage players to reconsider a party without a healer, because it’s generally less fun for everybody involved. If this is impossible, a lot of the notes from the last post apply here: lean toward low-damage monsters, allow strategic (between fights) healing to make up for the lack of tactical (during fights) healing, and expect fewer fights per day. One difference is that having many, lower-level creatures here is a good idea, because damage and attack bonus scale more quickly in 3rd than in 4th.

  • Nature

    Obviously, parties without a nature role will be bad in the wilderness, so count on them to try to find ways around it (teleporting, taking a vehicle, hiring a guide, or simply avoiding quests outside civilized areas). You can also expect them to have trouble with monster knowledge, since Knowledge (nature) covers six creature types. Nature characters also tend to be mobile, whether it’s because of lots of skills like the ranger, great ability scores like the barbarian, or outright flying like the druid. Parties without mobility make have to approach obstacles in more blunt ways like punching through them, and even a simple castle wall can be a significant challenge, so keep that in mind when designing non-combat challenges.

  • Stealth

    Stealth is kind of a mixed bag. Parties without stealth tend to deal with problem head-on because they don’t have a second option, but they also tend to stick together because they have less opportunity to split up. Generally, remember that the party will be together most of the time and likes it that way, so don’t expect them to leave each other. Stealthy characters without spellcasting also tend to thrive on focused fire, so keep in mind that a party without stealth is more likely to split their damage (intentionally or otherwise). The same notes on mobility apply here as they do with nature, above.

Pathfinder basically has the same roles at 3rd Edition. There is one other thing I want to address in a future post, which is how to deal with a temporary change in a party rather than a general session design strategy.

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Designing for Parties Missing a Role (4th Edition)

Posted on 20 March, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I’ve talked a few times about designing sessions for balanced parties and how hard it is. But some parties don’t have the luxury of being balanced. Sometimes, nobody wants to fill a certain role, or there just aren’t enough people to hit every base. Even missing a regular player for a session or two changes the dynamic of play. How do you build a session, adventure, or campaign when you’re missing something the game expects?

This could be a stupidly long article, so I want to split it into two. First, I want to talk about 4th Edition. It has fewer roles and they’re all derived almost entirely from classes, so it’s easier to hit them, and I really only have to address battle ability. However, there’s an explicit assumption that none of them are missing for even one battle, let alone a campaign.

There are plenty of ways to approach this, but when I’m missing a role, here’s how I tend to design:

  • Controller – without this role, the party is less able to redirect and hold back enemies
    • Hold back on elites and be sparse with solos. It’s upsetting to get a key monster stun-locked (or daze-locked or even weaken-locked) for a fight, but some of the balance in a solo is that they won’t be able to run roughshod over the party every turn. Players can feel overwhelmed if there’s no way to keep monsters away or make them easier.
    • Be aware of what skills are missing. Controllers are almost universally Int- and Wis-based and tend to have more knowledge skills than other roles. It’s easy to forget that the party’s most-used skills (well, beside Athletics) are all on one person, and even easier to design an adventure that relies on a skill the party’s never had.
  • Defender – without this role, the party is more likely to take damage and less able to keep enemies away from vulnerable allies
    • Keep away from skirmishers. One of a defender’s key features is limiting the movement of enemies, either because the punish movement directly or they inflict a penalty on attacks against distant allies. A controller can hold them back some, but it’s safer to just avoid monsters that can run circles around the party.
    • Use lower-level monsters. Yes, they’ll be hit more often and have slightly fewer hit points. But more importantly, they’ll have lower attack bonuses. At-level monsters are designed to mostly fight defenders, and other roles usually have lower defenses, so lower-level enemies give them a better chance to survive the fight and the day.
    • Encourage minor character changes, like feats, that increase defenses and survivability. Players should expect that they’ll end up being targeted more often than in a normal party, and ranged characters especially should be somewhat comfortable in melee.
  • Leader – without this role, the party is less able to regain hit points in battle and gains fewer buffs
    • First, you have to reconcile with the idea that fights are completely different without a healer, and parties often act accordingly (after a few rounds or fights of making bad decisions). The most important resources in D&D are actions and hit points, in that order, and leaders are the masters of both. Losing a leader isn’t just a small adjustment, it’s a major change that needs to be addressed on both sides.
    • Consider monsters from earlier books, such as the Monster Manual, Monster Manual 2, Open Grave, and Draconomicon. Somewhere along the line, at least by the middle of 2010, Wizards released new, higher damage numbers for monsters, and later books use the new values. Older books have monsters with the same debilitating effects, similar attack bonuses and defenses, and sometimes more hit points, but do significantly less damage.
    • Give players more bonuses to healing between fights. For example, the consumable item herbal poultice from the Adventurer’s Vault lets a character regain additional hit points when spending healing surges after a short rest. Alternatively, plan on fewer fights per day. The ideas is that players get less healing in battle, so give them a way to get to full after being knocked to nothing in every fight.
    • Don’t rely solely on more, lower-level monsters. The Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 suggests this for smaller parties and it usually works, but monsters only lose a point of damage or two per level. The slight damage drop isn’t worth the large drop in defenses and attack bonus that monsters suffer. The players will survive, but mostly because their enemies are completely impotent, and impotent enemies are boring. This may just be my preferences talking, so feel free to try it, but keep an eye on the mood at the table to see if players are engaging or just assuming success.
  • Striker – without this role, the party is less able to bring down enemies quickly, which lets them attack the party longer
    • Know what damage your characters can deal and let them leverage it. A regular character can become a pseudo-striker on a monster with a vulnerability, and a controller with bursts and blasts is perfect for fighting swarms.
    • Encourage clever, powerful ideas like pushing monsters off cliffs, leading monsters into damaging terrain, or intimidating bloodied enemies into surrendering. Usually, I’m against things that can kill a monster in one hit, but it’s fine if it happens to one one monster in a busy fight or, as with intimidation, it’s only possible on bloodied enemies.
    • Don’t rely on solos or elite brutes for difficulty. Strikers are good at killing big monsters, and it’s easy to throw something dangerous or complicated at the party knowing it will last. But without a striker, the scariest monsters stick around much longer and end up much more dangerous than normal.

In all cases, a DM should design with the party in mind. Incomplete parties just have an extra step or two involved to make sure that fights remain fun and challenging.

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4th Edition Themes (the Mechanic That Should Have Always Been)

Posted on 20 March, 2012 by MssngrDeath

Recently, I said this:

The items are also neat, though I’m starting to be bothered by 4th Edition’s insistence on adding more and more item slots. First it was tattoos, then divine gifts, and now primordial shards and elemental gifts. Characters weren’t complex enough, but now they can have up to three invisible magic items that take up no slots.

In general, I’m against power creep in cooperative games. I don’t like the idea that players need to keep buying books to maintain pace with improving monsters and other players, though it’s something that 4th Edition loves. First, PHB2 came out with backgrounds (a +2 bonus to one skill or the ability to gain a skill not in your class, with no drawback). It also set the standard that all classes will have one primary stat rather than two, so that all characters of that class can get the best options rather than design characters that feel and act different. Then new items started coming out in Adventurer’s Vault 2 and later books. Essentials improved basic feats by buffing Lightning Reflexes at all and adding the Expertise feats that are objectively better that the original Weapon Expertise (a feat that didn’t exist either in PHB1). This isn’t even looking at the idea that newer classes are stronger than older classes, like the fact that the PHB2 sorcerer gets lower bonus damage than the HotEC sorcerer.

So it’s somewhat weird that I actually like themes. Themes usually give a character bonuses without drawbacks and don’t prevent that character from taking anything else. It’s just more powers and abilities stapled onto any character.

But something about themes feels different. Maybe it’s because they add a balance between flavor (which backgrounds do well, but classes and paragon paths usually do poorly) and mechanics (vice versa). Maybe it’s because they give a tangible change to the feel of a character. Maybe it’s because they stop at 10th level, giving players some configuration before they qualify for the most exciting options. But it’s probably a combination of everything, in that it’s break from 4th Edition’s tightly-controlled, cookie-cutter character design aesthetic.

When 3rd Edition still existed, prestige classes were my favorite thing. I went through new books looking at the prestige classes, learning their flavor and abilities, memorizing their prerequisites, and trying to figure out how to work them into my campaigns or characters. For Pathfinder, that role is filled by archetypes, which I consider an improvement. 4th Edition didn’t have anything that excited me in the same way until themes, and now I’m thrilled to see new ones in each book.

It’s deeply disappointing that themes were first published roughly one month before Wizards brought back Monte Cook, which is when the talk of D&D 5th Edition began. Most of 4th Edition’s life didn’t have them, and they certainly haven’t made it to every book since; I think they’re only in the Neverwinter Campaign Setting, the Dark Sun Campaign Setting, the Book of Vile Darkness, and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. These four books have 38 themes, which is a great number (compare to 26 classes), but more than half of them are in campaign settings, so they’re pretty easy to miss.

I’m optimistic for the future of themes over whatever time 4th Edition has left, and even more so for the possibility of creating custom themes for characters and campaign settings. In a sense, I like the idea of bundling them with a background, so that a character with a maritime background has a theme that accentuates their life at sea. It’s a great way to make characters that feel and act different instead of just looking different, and it finally gives players a way to bring character background into at-the-table mechanics.

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Denialist DMs

Posted on 13 March, 2012 by MssngrDeath

There’s another article that popped up on the Google Spotlight last week, How to completely, utterly destroy an employee’s work life. Again, it’s not a great article, but it reminded me to talk about denialist DMing.

It’s hard to design an adventure that’s difficult but not impossible. The sheer number of variables that go into any monster, let alone a fight or entire dungeon, make encounter difficulty more of a best guess than a clear formula. Add in traps, skill challenges, the d20 system’s inherent randomness, and players’ startling predilection toward terrible decisions, and the difficulty of a session can swing wildly at the slightest stimulus.

The best DMs I’ve seen have the ability to change difficulty on the fly. If a monster knocks out a player, perhaps it opts to attack somebody else rather than deliver a coup de grace. If a fight is much harder than expected, maybe the next fight will have one or two fewer creatures than planned, or maybe a trap spontaneously disappears. If a puzzle is stumping everyone or there’s no place to go in a mystery, a clue or lead might appear out of the blue. Making things harder on the fly works exactly the same way, but in reverse.

But not everybody is comfortable randomly changing the adventure at a moment’s notice, which is why we have planning. And the question I want to address is how to plan a session with the appropriate difficulty. Or, rather, how not to do it.

A denialist DM is one who bases session difficulty on the likelihood of the challenges subverting the characters involved. They build encounters that deny characters the ability to use their strengths. Essentially, it’s just like plusses and minuses, except that nobody is ever a plus. For example, if a denialist knows that the party has a fire mage, they will lean toward monsters with fire resistance. If a party has only slashing weapons, they will lean toward skeletons and other creatures that resist slashing. They will choose high-SR monsters for a party of spellcasters, undead for a party of rogues, and mindless or savage creatures for a party of diplomats. The idea is that those monsters pose a greater challenge than they normally would based on the party makeup.

On the plus side, this encourages parties to cover multiple bases and try new tactics. If a party of rogues fights mindless undead, many of their strategies and abilities aren’t as useful. But in a balanced party, only the rogue is at a loss, and the rest of the party can still run (perhaps more effectively, as with a cleric). The rogue could take their normal actions and be terrible at them, but ideally the player will think of something different and helpful, like drawing artillery fire or aiding other players. For a few fights, this is realistic and fun, and it gives players a chance to try out strategies and mix up fights a bit.

However, this also means that a character isn’t doing the thing they were designed to do. In the above example, a rogue can flank or distract enemies or do any number of things, but many of these things aren’t rogue abilities. The “rogue” part of the character isn’t helpful, so the player runs it as something else, which means they’re not playing the character (or at least the crunch, the build) they designed.

All DMs do this occasionally, and should. But a denialist DM doesn’t limit this to an encounter here or there. A denialist DM will use undead far more often against a party of rogues, because the fight is legitimately harder, but in a way that punishes the players for their decisions in character building. They would also set adventures in the wilderness to limit the effectiveness of savvy urban bards, or set adventures in a city to hold back druids and nature specialists. Even worse, there’s no right player decision. No matter what characters are in the party, a denialist DM will punish those characters, so if one member of the rogue party becomes a cleric or ranger and starts fighting undead, a denialist will instead use elementals.

The deeper this goes, the more players commit character resources to builds that quickly become worthless. I’ve said before that I don’t like save-or-die effect because they mean a player sits around not having fun based on a single die roll. With a denialist DM, there’s no die roll. The DM is actively trying to design a campaign where the players do not get to play the characters they wanted.

I’ve played with denialist DMs before, and it’s no fun. In one campaign, a player designed an illusionist that was completely worthless because all the monsters knew how to deal with illusions. Certainly, this is occasionally fine. An illusionist, no matter how accomplished, shouldn’t be able to wave their hand and scare away any and every hostile creature. But the first time a mundane tiger looked at a fifteen-foot-tall fire elemental, complete with sound and heat, and thought “That’s probably fake. I should ignore it and the guy with the sword to fight the man in the robe, because the DM wants to punish him for having low AC.”, we knew the campaign wasn’t salvageable.

Fixing this is actually pretty easy if you’re a DM. Just take note of what the players are designed to do (that is, what the player enjoys doing, since they designed a character for it) and give them the opportunity to do it. Sometimes give them something that limits their effectiveness, and sometimes give them something that accentuates it.

It’s a lot harder if you’re in a campaign with a denialist DM. As in the article that prompted this post, most denialists don’t realize whether they’re doing it to an extreme, and the bad ones will ignore complaints and assume the players are just looking for an easy ride. Try asking them what each character is built to do, then ask them to recall the last adventure (or fight, or NPC interaction) where they got to be good at it. If the DM legitimately can’t remember the last time they had a monster vulnerable to fire in a combat with the fire mage, there’s a problem.

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Heroes of the Elemental Chaos

Posted on 2 March, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I like Heroes of the Elemental Chaos. When I got Heroes of Shadow, I found that it was mostly just an expansion to the staggeringly limited Encounters line, in that it wasn’t good but it was the best there was. When I got Heroes of the Feywild, I was pleasantly surprised at how much of an improvement it was. Now that Heroes of the Elemental Chaos is out and is even better, I’m looking forward to Heroes of the Astral Sea and Heroes of the Mundane World, That Place We Forget About Even Though Most Campaigns Happen There.

I would discuss the power level of the book, but that’s not my thing. There are plenty of places a person can go if all they want is a way to win at a cooperative game. Instead, I’d rather talk about the implications of the book with a Charisma-based playstyle.

As with most books for role-playing games, HotEC can be roughly divided into two sections: crunch (classes, powers, feats, themes, items, and anything that gives a player or a DM hard numbers) and fluff (introductions, descriptions, backstories, or anything that isn’t numbers). 4th Edition books tend to sprinkle both of them throughout the book. For example, Cleave is crunch, but the italicized description at the top of the power is fluff, and in Essentials, so is the whole paragraph before the power starts. Fluff is the part you throw out and redesign during reskinning, but it’s what tends to explain what on earth a power is supposed to be, and without it we’d just have an assortment of boring numbers.

The fluff in HotEC is magnificent. Chapter 1 goes into what elemental magic is, the reach of elemental magic, the Elemental Chaos, races, and primordials. Essentially, it’s the part of the book you skip completely if all you want is new way to shoot a guy, but for a DM or a player looking for a backstory it’s magnificent. In particular, I have to talk about the section on primordials. They’re a set of powerful NPCs, player patrons, campaign villains, and alternate gods all in one, just waiting for a DM to inject life into them. Wizards basically devoted ten pages to “We’re not entirely sure how these fit into the world. Go nuts!”, which is everything I’ve even wanted in a book.

The classes are similarly great. There are two new monk options based on water and fire, so we finally have a way to play firebenders and waterbenders without wild amounts of tweaking, but there’s also a section at the end laying the seeds for DMs and players to design three more. Druids only got six pages, but they include a new animal companion and what I think are the first beast form attacks in Essentials. The sorcerer got the Essentials treatment in that it lost all encounter and daily powers except for elemental escalation, which can be used a few times per fight, and I love this because it lets me force players to be more creative in their power descriptions than “I guess I hit a little bit harder this time”. The warlock pact option leverages my favorite thing about gaming (randomness) with its mutable damage types, and finally gives us elemental summons like we had from minute one in 3rd Edition. The only downside is the wizard, partially because I’m tired of wizards getting expended in every book, but also because I’ve never been a fan of familiars or their mechanics in any edition. And every one of these classes got a ton of new utilities to tweak a character’s feel and playstyle even more.

The paragons paths I like because they give back a lot of the things we had in 3rd that were missing in 4th, like the doomlords and the Xaositects speakers of Xaos. I’m also a big fan of the emergent primordial epic destiny and its “become huge” daily utility, even if I can’t see a single redeemable thing about the other epic destiny, the lord of chaos. The items are also neat, though I’m starting to be bothered by 4th Edition’s insistence on adding more and more item slots. First it was tattoos, then divine gifts, and now primordial shards and elemental gifts. Characters weren’t complex enough, but now they can have up to three invisible magic items that take up no slots. Just split the next slot into neck and back, or split head into head and face. We’ll understand.

I do think there was a missed opportunity, though, in giving players ways to add elemental powers to an existing character. One of the running issues I have with 4th Edition books is that each new book gives lots of ways to build a character from scratch, but almost no ways to tweak a character that’s in an ongoing campaign. Paragon paths and epic destinies are great ways to do that, and it loses some punch when the only way to take an elemental paragon path is to play an elemental character, especially when the prerequisites include one of the few things that player’s can’t retrain like a class option. The new feats at least give some way to give a normal person some elemental ability, and if you play one of the classes in the book you can take some elemental powers, but most characters are just left out (if you’re a martial or divine character, you can pretty much take a walk).

Overall, I was actually shocked (shocked!) by how much I enjoyed this book. It managed to expand on some of my favorite things in D&D (sorcerers, world-building, themes) and make some of my least favorite things at least marginally palatable (monks, Essentials druids). It even includes a tiny sidebar in the familiars elemental companions section giving players the go-ahead to make creative changes, and I like any implicit or explicit allowance Wizards makes for reskinning. I’m also told the book has some good options by somebody I trust to know about power levels, so if that’s your thing, consider that an endorsement. All told, this is a strong book that gives me hope for D&D, especially as 5th Edition starts taking shape.

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CRs, and Why They Mean So Little

Posted on 26 February, 2012 by MssngrDeath

Last night in our 3.5E campaign, we fought an entomber, from Libris Mortis, the Book of Bad Latin (also undead). The entomber’s primary mechanic is, shock of shocks, entombing. Every time it connects with an attack, the target has to make a non-trivial Reflex save or become buried in a shallow grave. Escape requires the assistance of allies (which requires two turns and provokes attacks of opportunity) or two successful grapple checks. It’s actually a pretty neat monster with a pretty neat mechanic, and its Challenge Rating was only two higher than the party level, which makes it a difficult encounter where a character might go unconscious but where nobody should die.

The problem is specifically how the numbers worked in the fight. The creature hit the party’s defender on a 13 and the party’s striker on an 8, which is pretty reasonable. Its damage could knock out a player in three hits, or two hits if the monster rolled well for damage, which is fine for a brute. But the Reflex save against its entomb ability is fairly difficult, and the grapple check to escape was worse. The party rogue could avoid being entombed by rolling a 9 or higher, but needed a natural 20 to escape the grapple (which, recall, had to be done twice). The barbarian could escape the grapple on a mere 14. So with one hit, the monster gave a player a 50% chance to not participate in the encounter for a minimum of two rounds, most likely five rounds or more. We all got knocked underground, lost the combat, and the cleric had to dig everybody out and heal them before the monster came back to finish us off.

I think it’s important that every DM realize that monster levels and Challenge Ratings are a suggestion rather than a hard and fast rule. Monster CRs are designed for a theoretical perfect party of a healer, a defender, a damage-dealer, and a caster (specifically, Jozan the cleric, Tordek the fighter, Lidda the rogue, and Mialee the wizard). Any variance in this party creates a different situation that can lead to a different combat. Switching the rogue to a barbarian makes it easier to fight undead but makes the party more susceptible to spells that target Reflex, switching the cleric for a druid increases versatility at the expense of some healing, and so forth.

Consider the entombed. For the playtest party, Jozan could turn this undead creature on a difficult but possible roll of 19 on 1d20+Cha. Mialee can use single-target damage spells to hurt it or control spells to limit its reach. Lidda is largely irrelevant, but she can spend turns digging out entombed allies and is very likely to make her Reflex save. Tordek is pretty much unchanged, unless he has a silver weapon, which is unlikely but incredibly handy.

Now consider our party of three melee characters: a cleric, a barbarian, and a rogue(-like thing). We had nobody who could stay away from melee combat against the terrifying melee specialist. It was impossible for our cleric to turn it. Its DR ruined the two-weapon fighting of the barbarian and made the rogue almost incapable of dealing damage except with magical powers. And we had one fewer person to save entombed allies. On paper, this was a great monster, and it was still a fun fight. But it was a bad match with this party and its current capabilities.

Here’s a story I promised to tell. Also in Libris Mortis, there’s a creature called the entropic reaper. It has fast healing, damage reduction beaten only by cold iron and lawful, spell resistance, normal undead resistances, and the ability to deal an average of 100 damage on a critical hit (which my sorcerer took). These alone are pretty scary for a CR 12 creature, but its namesake ability is its entropic blade.

If entropic blade hits you, you make a Fortitude save. If you fail, you’re done in the fight. You are unable to cast spells, take a -4 penalty to attack rolls and a 50% miss chance besides, and have a random chance of targeting allies since you can no longer tell who your enemies are. But each round you’re in this state, you take 1 Wisdom drain, which kills you if your Wisdom reaches 0. The only way to stop this effect is the application of sufficiently powerful healing magic (restoration or heal, which only clerics have at level 12), so if you want to survive, you need a cleric who has one of these spells prepared or an ability to cast one of them spontaneously, such as from a scroll. You can delay the effect, but only for one minute with a DC 21 Charisma check as a standard action, which requires a Charisma of 30 to get to a 50% chance of success. A character with a good Charisma can stave this off almost forever by doing nothing but making this check, but it means they can’t affect the fight in any way.

When we fought this creature, we had a sorcerer, a rogue, a fighter/bard, a druid, and a cohort cleric who used wands. The only chance we had to survive entropic blade was if the cohort entered combat (which he generally hadn’t done yet in the campaign) and cast restoration. But even with a perfect team, the initial Fortitude save is essentially a save-or-die mechanic unless the cleric happened to choose the correct spells at the beginning of the day.

Is the entropic reaper a bad creature? Probably. I don’t think it should have been published, and I can’t imagine why it was included at CR 12. But that doesn’t mean it’s unbeatable. The right party with the right preparation, a sufficiently high-level party that can resist many of its powers, or an appropriate ability to retreat and strategize can all make the fight balanced if not easy. But the lesson here isn’t that some creatures are bad (that’s a different lesson). It’s that CRs aren’t hard and fast representations of the difficulty of fighting a creature. Every monster, challenge, story, and part of a campaign needs to be measured against the capabilities of the characters and the players to challenge them but keep each side of the table from invalidating the other.

This is a lot easier in 4th Edition with its stranglehold on monster attacks, damage, and defenses. But there’s still a lot of room for bad decisions in power design, especially custom power design, and any variance from the expected formula can have hilarious consequences. And any of the non-numeric aspects of a monster can be trouble too; a fire specialist can expect to be sad when a fire elemental comes to a fight, but sending the players on an extended story in the City of Brass is just malicious.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Re: Why we pick bad leaders, and how to spot the good ones

Posted on 16 February, 2012 by MssngrDeath

A neat article pooped up in Google Spotlight this week : Why we pick bad leaders, and how to spot the good ones. It’s not the most well-written article I’ve read this week, and it doesn’t have any earth-shattering research or world-changing analysis, but it does have application to what makes a good DM.

“Leader” is a good, if incomplete, word for a DM. A DM has to get people together, manage different personalities and time constraints, and moderate to keep everybody on the same page. Unlike a business leader, they don’t have to manage their people unless something at the table requires clear intervention, and they don’t perform any in-character delegation. Their job isn’t really to lead the party, but rather to lead the session and tell their story, present challenges, and make sure everybody is having fun.

With that in mind, I think we can draw clear parallels between Cohn’s article and the role of a DM. It lists a few traits that don’t make a good leader, particularly “a candidate’s charm, their stellar résumé or their academic credentials”. These correlations are fairly obvious. A good DM is not determined by their at-table personality (I’ve seen plenty of good players be average or lousy DMs), their past success in DMing (each new campaign, party, and set of players is a new challenge, and some DMs just don’t click with some challenges), or their knowledge of the system (it should go without saying, but encyclopedic knowledge of the system doesn’t make a person fit to design something in that system).

Some of the traits of good leaders are a little more vague, but here’s how I think they relate:

  • Integrity – Cohn defines this as “a blend of honesty, consistency and ethics”. A specific breakdown of integrity differs from DM to DM; I lie to my players all the time, which would make me dishonest, except that DMs should lie to present incomplete information or deliberate misinformation to represent character knowledge. In general, a DM should just be a good person. There are few good reasons to give time and effort to somebody who is trying to make you unhappy.
  • Passion – A person who treats DMing like a job isn’t nearly as enthusiastic as a person who treats it like a hobby, who in turn isn’t as enthusiastic as somebody who treats it like fun. A DM legitimately excited about their campaign will make players excited as well.
  • Courage – Hopefully, this doesn’t come up as much. But occasionally a DM has to confront a player who’s bringing down the table or trust their their players can handle some devastating change to the campaign. I’m strongly anti-spoiler in my campaigns (there’s another post there), so I don’t ask players if it’s alright before I kill somebody or give them a difficult situation. I certainly fret about it for the two weeks before it happens and for one week afterward, but at this point I mostly trust my players to run with it.
  • Vision – Campaigns are supposed to have goals. Few players can handle being dropped into the middle of a setting and told to explore. Good campaigns build to a peak or a series of peaks, and a DM had to at least know a little what he’s doing when he starts.
  • Judgment – This one’s pretty obvious. A DM with consistently bad judgment will lose players fast.
  • Empathy – A DM doesn’t run a table of characters, they run a table of players. A DM has to read players on the fly and occasionally flat-out ask them how things are going. If the players aren’t enjoying themselves (in general, maybe not at that specific moment), the DM has failed.
  • Emotional intelligence – I’m not sure I get the name of this trait, but it means that a DM should be able to stand back and look at what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Often, this means asking the players for their assessment and suggestions on how to improve. Much like anything, a DM who isn’t improving over time will never become good.

Ricky Gervais aside, I’m pretty sure this article is more targeted to the current election season than to business, and that works better for my comparison. DMs aren’t promoted, they’re elected. They don’t answer to management, they answer to the people who elected them. And it’s rare for a DM to not serve at least one term (the length of a campaign) unless they quit before then.

Having all seven of the traits above is rare. Everybody has should have them in some capacity, but most people can only expect to have a few of them enough to register as a courageous or empathetic DM. It can also be hard to figure out which ones a person has or doesn’t have until you sit through a campaign with them, and it’s even harder to see them in yourself. After years of running games, I think I’m good at passion, vision, and judgment and lousy at empathy, and emotional intelligence, which means that I create and run magnificent campaigns and I can’t figure out why my players don’t think I’m as great as I do.

Posted in Commentary, DMing | 2 Comments

Save or Die

Posted on 2 February, 2012 by MssngrDeath

A million years ago in my post on Law #0, I mentioned before that I don’t like save-or-die effects. In case you’re on dial-up and can only load one page per hour (thanks for picking this one, by the way), here’s what I had to say:

I don’t like save-or-die effects. They’re the laziest kind of difficulty. They’re not interesting and they don’t challenge the players, they’re just a quick way to put a threat in the room. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that “roll a 14 or stop having fun” is a good mechanic in a rulebook or at a table. I have a standing rule in my campaigns that I won’t use any save-or-die effects as long as the players don’t.

I understand why save-or-die spells exist. Magic is terrifyingly powerful, by design. A first-level wizard, which is the weakest possible PC, doesn’t need as long as four seconds to summon a dog from space, change into a different person, or create fire that can shock an average person into unconsciousness. Magic escalates quickly, and at a certain point having some spell that causes instant death is a logical conclusion.

Spells aside, there’s also room for save-or-die effects in the flavor of D&D. Mythology in general is thick with creatures that can slay without really trying, like gorgons, basilisks, banshees, and whatever the plural of cockatrice is. In essence, giving players the ability to cast death spells is a way to even the playing field, giving them the same chance of killing their enemies with a minimum of time and work.

But what I don’t get is why a player would ever do that, or why a DM would do that to players. I don’t understand what player can cast one spell, consider it a job well done, and move on without having invested any effort in-character or out. I don’t understand what DM can enjoy hurling a creature like a medusa at unsuspecting players, knowing that it will probably result in people at the table who are just going to sit and watch as other people have fun for them. And I don’t understand why a game designer would write something like that, thinking “This has a good chance of ruining all the energy a DM or player put into something, there’s little if anything they can do about it, and that’s exactly what I want.”

Save-or-die effects really have to include things that aren’t explicit death, but have the same effect on an encounter. A player that gets paralyzed, put to sleep, or teleported away is as good as dead for that fight unless there’s some way to break them out, and it takes a dedicated character to prepare for the myriad ways a player can be incapacitated. At this week’s Delve Night, the players fought harpies. Three players fell for a harpy’s song, which requires that the characters take no action but follow the harpy until it stops singing. All the harpy had to do was fly toward a non-threatening area away from the quest objective, and suddenly there was only one player who got to participate in the session. There’s no threat of imminent death, but even with the extra save the players got from jumping off a boat into calm water, one effect shut down most of the party without any chance of salvation. The only ways to stop the effect were to cast silence (which requires a valuable spell slot at low levels), slay the harpy (which requires that a character with appropriate range and damage resists the spell), or play a bard (which requires playing a bard).

In my campaigns, save-or-die (save-or-become-temporarily incapacitated is too hard to type repeatedly) effects are soft-banned. I won’t design encounters with them, including avoiding monsters with those effects built-in or lessening the severity of the effects, and the players won’t use them either. If the players do happen to use a save-or-die spell, then that lock comes off; I’ll never forget the panicked looks the party had when one player, against all advice, tried flesh to glass on a monster, knowing that I would gladly (and indiscriminately, because I’m great like that) respond in kind. It allows players to either safely avoid them or keep one in reserve for a critical moment, which is a neat backup plan to have.

If there’s a flaw in this plan, it’s that the system expects you to use save-or-die effects, so you miss out on a few things avoiding them. Look at the save-or-die effects on the 9th-level spell list for wizards: dominate monster, hold monster (because of the setup for coups de grace), imprisonment, mage’s disjunction (for NPCs rather than monsters), power word kill, wail of the banshee, and weird. Nearly a third of core 9th-level arcane spells aren’t allowed in my campaigns, and a bunch of lower-level spells are out as well; in general, enchanters are outright ruined by this restriction, but all casters end up with fewer options. Things aren’t much better on my side, either. Every core monster above CR 17 can use some save-or-die effect except the tarrasque (which, as you may have heard, is the tarrasque), and I have to read some monsters closely to see whether they have some terrifying game-ending effect. Remind me to talk sometime about the entropic reaper.

I’m not sure whether to include lesser effects under this umbrella, but I lean toward no. A wizard in a silence spell or fighter who gets his weapon sundered probably feels like he’s locked out of the fight, but there’s always the opportunity to affect the encounter in some way. It’s a situation that rewards sufficiently creative players, which I like as long as I do something that means I don’t feel bad about destroying tens of thousands of gold pieces.

This is one of the many cases where Pathfinder improves on 3rd Edition and one of the rare cases where 4th Edition may as well. Pathfinder changed some spells like finger of death and wail of the banshee to direct damage rather than save-or-die, and 4th Edition has fewer effects capable of knocking out an enemy, most if not all of which are restricted to daily usage. In a sense, 4th managed to do away with save-or-die effects by breaking them down into many smaller effects designed to make sure that enemies participate in the battle as little as possible, giving them to players and monsters in equal measure, calling that role a “controller”, and making it a heavily-suggested part of every party and every fight. I’m not convinced this is a net gain.

I guess my favorite story around save-or-dies isn’t the above-referenced terrified players, but it was earlier in that campaign and similarly terrifying. The party was in a one-sided fight (a planned TPK), and the cleric broke out some serious spell to kill a nearly-unharmed enemy construct. She succeeded, and on the next initiative a death salad used implosion to kill the cleric and nobody else. I’m not sure what made the implosion stop (damage interfering with the concentration?), but I know the players suddenly had an opinion about that monster, which set up both the severity of the soft ban on save-or-dies and the consequences of playing D&D as written. It was delightful.

Posted in DMing, House Rules | 1 Comment

On “The Genius of D&D”

Posted on 27 January, 2012 by MssngrDeath

For reference, I did not miss that Monte Cook thinks how you were born (race) is more important than what effort you’ve put into life (ability scores). This somewhat upsets me and leads me to imagine that this is not an issue I have that will be addressed in 5th Edition.

Posted in Commentary | Comments Off on On “The Genius of D&D”