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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Dealing with Character Death

Posted on 28 July, 2012 by Law

The death of a character is rarely a happy event. Sometimes it’s a well-deserved comeuppance for terrible play (he said, glaring knowingly at the mirror-man sorcerer), but usually it’s a series of unplanned circumstances that leave the player and the campaign in a lurch. So what’s a good DM to do?

There’s a style of play based on the contention that the DM is the campaign’s primary antagonist, and that he or she should treat the players with the same antagonism. Characters are challenges to be overcome, and the death of one is the intentional result of some difficult, unbeatable, or outright spiteful encounter. This is the style of Gary Gygax and a number of old-school adventures, including but not limited to the infamous Tomb of Horrors. If that’s the type of game you enjoy running, there’s nothing else to say about a character death. You won! Don’t let reading this post cut into your celebration time! Go frolic!

For the rest of us, the ones who actually play D&D, a character death is more accidental than predictable. It’s often the result of bad luck (rolling a series of failed Reflex saves, even though you succeed on a roll of 6 or higher), unexpected effects (a high-damage explosion that occurs when a creature dies), an unusual battlefield situation (somebody left the wizard alone with three ogres), or a combination of the above. A DM may know ahead of time that a battle will be difficult, but a lot of battles are difficult and don’t get anybody killed. It’s far more likely that nobody predicted that the rogue would fail to climb the wall, or that he would take maximum falling damage on the way down, where he lands next to a wraith that the players didn’t see.

Different DMs react in different ways to the threat of death. Some will subtly (or egregiously) alter events so that the situation is survivable, like by allowing a save where one shouldn’t exist or having a monster use unwise tactics to keep a weak player clinging to life. Other will let the chips fall where they may, holding the players responsible for decisions and luck just like monsters, because this adds the real threat of loss. Both points are valid, and I’ve used both in different situations.

What I really want to talk about is how to deal with the death after it happens, no matter how it came about. Depending on the character, the players, the campaign, and the immediate situation, you and your players have a lot of options.

The biggest question is whether to let the death stand at all. D&D has a lot of resurrection magic, and most parties of a sufficient level have access to it. If the party wants their ally back, has an appropriate spell or ritual available, and meets all of the requirements, a death might only last for an hour or two before the party is nearly back to full strength. Even if the players aren’t ready, they can carry their friend around until they can prepare the spell, or until they can get to a town where somebody can cast it for them (feel free to give them an NPC for the interim, so that the player of the dead character has something to do). This is convenient, but it does make death cheap.

If you like bringing the character back but think raise dead is too easy, you’re fully within your rights as a DM to require some sort of quest or sacrifice. Perhaps the spell only works in a certain place or with a certain strange component based on the creature who killed the character. Perhaps resurrection magic is rare and requires the aid of a mysterious hermit or the permission of a god of death. For sufficiently evil players, maybe a life can only be granted by an equivalent death, and the players have to find somebody to kill. The quest could also be on the other side. Imagine the characters can revive their ally immediately, but to prove that the character is worth coming back to life, he or she must perform some task as a spirit. This is a good time for a one-on-one session with the player, or for a quick side story as spirit allies (run by your other players) assist the character on their journey back to life. This redirects the campaign to a new temporary focus, but it makes death meaningful without being permanent.

Another option I like is allowing the character to return, but having them somehow wrong. Maybe a devil piggybacked on the soul as it returned from death, and now the character has an infernal influence helping to drive its actions. Maybe the character didn’t come back fully, taking a permanent penalty to something related (like a -2 to saves against fire for a character who died to red dragon breath). Or maybe the only way to bring them back is as something grotesque, like making them undead, putting their soul into a construct, and the like. It keeps death meaningful by applying an ongoing effect, it doesn’t necessarily derail the current plot, and it opens new roleplaying opportunity, but some players really don’t like the potential for a life-long character trait based on one bad fight or even one bad roll.

Perhaps your players aren’t in a situation where they can revive their ally. For example, if the character drowned in lava, the lack of a body prevents all but the rarest, most powerful resurrection magic. It could also be as simple as the player leaving the game or wanting to take the opportunity to change to a new character. In that case, you should be fine with letting the character stay dead, letting the other characters mourn or move on appropriately, and planning for the potential addition of a replacement character. This doesn’t mean that the character can’t come back later in some form, like being revived by an enemy as an undead minion or transformed into a saint in the afterlife and willing to help the players from another plane. It does mean that the players think the change would be more fun than focusing on their dead friend, and it’s the DM’s job to allow players that fun.

I’ve rarely seen a bad approach to a player death. Even if you disagree with your players on how much meaning death should have, or if some players disagree with others on whether or not to revive a character, there’s still opportunity for role-playing, world-building, and general fun. Really, the only way I know to turn a player death into a negative experience is to make the players feel bad about the death of the character by continually reminding them of their failure or blaming them for getting into a situation where death was a possibility. Chances are they feel bad enough about it without you. As strange as it sounds, I’ve actually seen a DM do this, and the only thing it accomplished was making the players like the DM less.

I’m usually of the opinion that death and revival should be interesting. I don’t like the cheap resurrection of high-level D&D, which typically has a high cost but only applies an uninteresting blanket penalty to rolls; 4th Edition made it even worse by turning the “high cost” into pocket change except at very early levels. My generic go-to is to make the remaining characters physically retrieve the dead character’s soul from a holding place in the afterlife, though some campaigns don’t work as well with that construct. If my players really really wanted simple resurrection, I might allow it, but they might change their minds the first time the campaign villains come back from the dead.

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A Rant on “Good” Role-Playing

Posted on 22 July, 2012 by Law

I’m starting to think that I don’t understand what makes a good role-player. I was pretty sure I did, but the more I watch other people and see what they think is “good” versus “bad” role-playing, the more I think that there’s some misunderstanding, some step I missed that everybody else has ingrained but doesn’t articulate.

I think we can all agree on a few points. A good role-player acts as the character would, not as the player. They don’t analyze everything from the standpoint of a game at a table, they build characters as people (or mice or gods or robots) rather than bundles of stats, and they’re driven by believable in-game reasons. They interact with other characters as much as other players. And, perhaps the most difficult requirement, they’re willing to make decisions that harm themselves if it works with the story or the character’s personality.

What gets me is the number of people whose “good” role-play is the willingness to inflict themselves on other people and characters. A “good” role-player will make a decision that the player knows would be bad, but that the character approves. That’s fine. But a lot of these decisions have the potential to negatively impact the fun at the table. A character might be a hair-trigger gunman with no foresight who shoots the king after a mean-spirit insult. Everybody knows that this is bad, every other character is trying to stop it, and it immediately, drastically, and irreversibly changes the nature of the story, the campaign, and the intra-party dynamic. But because somebody build a character knowing full well that the character would make these bad decisions, that makes them a “good” role-player.

In keeping with the above, the worse the decision, the better the role-player must be. A player who snarks at a police officer is cute, but a player who ignores the officer and speeds away is good, and a player who attacks the officer is better. Because of this, there’s no room among “good” role-players for even-headed characters. I tried playing a problem-solving, go-with-the-flow character in a recent campaign, and I was told that I was playing the character incorrectly, as though there was a specific personally I was required to have. If you’re not actively trying to make decisions that cause problems and force other players and characters to solve them, you’re not “good”.

Some games, players, and DMs can handle this better than others. In Paranoia, for example, backstabbing and intra-party conflict is expected. But I’ve seen it across a half-dozen systems in a dozen campaigns from dozens of players. Universally, it seems that the more a decision makes other players react to the situation your character creates, the better you are.

I hope it’s clear that I disagree. I think that everybody at the table should be having fun, ideally in equal amounts. I don’t think that having one short-sighted character controlling things, making the plot revolve around them, contributes to fun. It’s just like how I think combat isn’t fun if only one character is good at it, or how politics isn’t fun if only one player understands it, or how NPC interaction isn’t fun if one player does all of the talking all the time. If a DM consistently forces the story in a specific direction, it’s called railroading. How come when a player does the same, it’s good role-playing?

I could list a series of examples stretching back nine years to the first character I played, but most of them are uncomfortably discrete. I’d prefer not to call out specific incidents, characters, or players, because I’m not trying to attack anybody or their style of play. I just want to understand why it’s “good” role-play to have other players clean up your character’s messes, and why it’s “bad” role-play to have a character who thinks like a calm, rational person.

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Advanced Racism Race Guide

Posted on 26 June, 2012 by Law

Considering how little I like racism, I’m shocked at how much I’m loving the Pathfinder Advanced Race Guide. It’s a lot thicker than I thought it would be, has a good balance of crunch and fluff, and provides new rules for almost every part of the system.

The least impressive chapter is probably the first (which is kind of a running theme in d20 books). The seven core races get new feats, class archetypes, favored class options, magical equipment, mundane equipment, and even spells, but these are the races that probably needed them the least. I think all of them have already gotten a (Race) of Golarion book, and this feels like overkill. There are certainly good options for minor variations (wild elves, feral orcs, lava gnomes), but it’s a lot of options for things that doesn’t need a lot more options.

Luckily, the second chapter is the same thing for races that deserve it. I don’t follow the campaign-specific books, so I’m not sure how much of the orc, goblin, and hobgoblin sections was reprinted from Goblins of Golarion and Orcs of Golarion. But I’ve never heard of the writeups for aasimars, tieflines, drow, and the elemental races like ifrits, so to us this is new and exciting information. Each races gets cultural information and the same treatment as a core races, if shorter, and it really fleshes out a lot of them.

The third chapter is an even narrower version of the second, focusing on strange races like changelings, kitsune, and vanara (I suppose the lesson here is that races from Bestiary 2 are old enough to be “featured”, while races as new as Bestiary 3 are still “uncommon”). Each race only gets two pages, but the writers packed as much information as they could into those two pages.

When we first saw the catalog, it quoted this from the back cover of the book:

A complete and balanced system for creating an unlimited number of new races, mixing and matching powers and abilities to form characters and cultures specific to your campaign.

I laughed, perhaps guffawed, when I read that, but I was still interested in seeing what they thought “complete and balanced” was. Well, the second page had a sidebar named “Races without Constitution”, which was a great start. Page 3 explained how to build a half-construct, half-plant race. So I’d say it’s comprehensive, or at least sufficiently wacky. We’ve been able to find an example of every racial traits we’ve though of so far. The balancing is a little weird, but no weirder than Pathfinder’s already hilarious system for playing monstrous creatures.

I do think I’m going to make one change when I integrate this into my campaign and that’s to remove most racial requirements. I can deal with a lot of the feat requirements that build on race features (elves get even better senses) or heritage (aasimars get wings), but the other requirements don’t make sense. Besides, the book uses the same language for “only half-orcs can summon an avatar of the blood god” that they use for “only half-elves can read star charts”, and if the requirements are as loose as that I’m fine with throwing them out.

When you’re past the racial requirements, it stops being a book that’s about seven races, sort of about sixteen others, barely about fourteen more, and tangentially about everything that exists. Instead, it’s a book about options, with seventy archetypes, more spells than that, more feats than that, and dozens of magical and mundane items throw in as well. With that in mind it’s a brilliant book, just awkwardly organized.

Posted in Book Reviews, Commentary | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Thirteen-Week Campaigns (or, How to Write a TV Season)

Posted on 21 June, 2012 by Law

I like to think that after this long, I have some idea about how to build a 13-session campaign. I ran three campaigns over five semesters in college, and the winter and summer breaks framed 13-session arcs well. Since then, I’ve run two summer campaigns over 13-week breaks, and I’m running another now. So with seven such stories under my belt, I’m starting to get into a storytelling pattern:

  • Before the campaign starts: “Okay, I know roughly what the story is about. But how to I get there? I mean, I have some framework for the middle of the campaign, but what’s the beginning? I have a set piece planned for the end, an epic encounter or fight to serve as the payoff before the final boss, but what if the players do something that makes it impossible? What if the players hate the plot altogether? Panic!“
  • Week 1: “Let’s…throw out a short adventure leading obviously to a fight. People like that. And make it an easy fight, so everybody can see how they work together.”
  • Week 2: “They liked it! And with the seeds laid, I can take them to a lighter fight, or an exploration and investigation session.”
  • Week 3: “Alright, I need to start hinting at the general arc of the campaign. I’ll describe the general problem and see what they think about it.”
  • Week 4: “A harder fight, to show them that things are escalating, and a bit more plot progression. Let’s give them a few leads and see what happens.”
  • Week 5: “They figured out the plot too fast! Set piece in danger! Abort! Damage control! Panic!“
  • Week 6: “Okay, disaster averted. They’re on some side plot now. It’s a few weeks earlier then I planned, but I can stretch this out, and they’ll probably do something interesting that can take the story in a new direction.”
  • Week 7: “So far so good. May be time for another session without combat, to give the plot more chance to grow.”
  • Week 8: “Side plot completed. Players are going back to main plot with enough information to solve everything three weeks early. Set piece will happen too fast! Panic!“
  • Week 9: “I’ve changed the villain and/or master plot enough that the campaign can survive even if they solve everything next week, so I think we’re back on track again. I fully expect things to seem fixed next week, and then I’ll spring the escalation on them.”
  • Week 10: “The players failed to solve the campaign due to crippling failure and/or stupidity. The plot has taken a turn that will avoid the set piece entirely! Panic!“
  • Week 11: “After recovery, the players are back where I expected them to be last week. I may have to rush things a little, but only a little, and everything is set up for the rest of the campaign.”
  • Week 12: “Set piece! I’ve been wanting to run this session since I started the campaign. Everything is perfect!”
  • Week 13: “…frick, I forgot that I needed to have an entire session before the final boss. And I’ll probably have to buff the final boss midway through the fight, so I’d better make the early fights a little easier. But what if they blow through them and the final boss? Panic!“
  • The next day: “The campaign went great, and everybody seems reasonably happy. Except in going through my notes, I found a plot thread I forgot about it, or one I planned for that the players didn’t hit. That would have been fun. Ooo, I can add it to the set piece for the next campaign…”
Posted in DMing | 3 Comments

This Story Is Happy End

Posted on 2 May, 2012 by Law

I really don’t like endings. I don’t like it when a book ends, or a TV shows hits a season finale, or I have to say good-bye to a longtime friend. Little endings, like the end of an episode or a chapter, are fine, but I don’t like that sense of finality when something is well and truly over. Maybe that’s why I don’t like movies, since they end in only two hours, which is a pretty low entertainment-to-time ratio. But the longer something goes, the more trouble I have accepting that the characters are done, the plot is resolved, and there’s nothing else to be said.

So it’s with mixed emotions that I come up to the end of The Great Tower of Oldechi. I started it in March 2009 and its last session (session #108, which tells you about how often we met) is this weekend. The campaign started at Level 1 and ended at Level 30, so we’ve gotten to see many of the characters grow and grow apart over the last few years. It’s hard to think that I won’t be working on this campaign or designing with these players in mind any more, since it’s been a weekly ritual for so long.

My favorite endings are the ones that aren’t, the ones that include the possibility of new adventure even if it’s beyond the scape of the work. 4th Edition doesn’t have that. Once a player hits Level 31, there’s nothing left and the character is unplayable. Many even disappear into space, aligning themselves at the right hands of gods or fight great wars far beyond mortal eyes, just to make sure players don’t get antsy and try to play their characters too long. It’s a hard limit on power level, and it’s also a hard limit on the life of a character. That’s one of the reasons this is so hard, in that there’s no chance at all of the characters continuing. They’re changed permanently and irrevocably, and anything that severe has a strong sense of tragedy.

There’s also my fear that the ending won’t live up to the work, a problem that grow larger the longer a work goes. If it’s hard to end a book, imagine how hard it it to end a seven-book series, or a comic series that’s been running for fifteen years, or a video game where players have invested hundreds of hours. I’ve never been in (or heard of) a D&D campaign longer than this in time and level scope, and I have to imagine that there’s an expectation for the end beyond “The boss is dead! Pray for a true peace in space!“.

I’m not sure whether a lousy ending is better than no ending. The whole “no ending” idea never really occurred to me for a campaign, because I like my campaigns to have a myth arc. When I start a campaign, I have some idea of what the central conflict will be, even if I don’t know how it’s going to end (or, sometimes, start), and significant plots should end if there’s going to be a satisfying story. So I don’t expect that I’ll ever start a campaign expecting that it will only end when everybody gets tired of it. I’d rather do things with bangs than whimpers.

I know that what matters for an ending isn’t how I feel about it, but how the players feel. The problem is that I’m not sure how the players will react to the ending I have in mind (or anything, at all, ever), whether they’ll think it’s a satisfying conclusion or if it doesn’t make any sense or justify the campaign as a whole. Because justification is kind of the point of an ending: all plots should have a conflict, and all conflicts should have a resolution unless the lack of the resolution is a significant and inalienable part of the plot, like the horror franchises where the villain’s never really dead. If the players, viewers, or readers expect things to be resolved, they’re deeply unsatisfied with lingering questions. They want something that justifies all the time they’ve put into following a work, and an ending that doesn’t give them what they want can lead to them souring on the whole thing.

So it’s with some consternation that I work on the session for my least favorite part a campaign, a session that can play a big part in whether this campaign is a success or a failure. As I am wont to do, I’m already working on the next campaign and the one after that, so even if it’s miserable I hopefully won’t dwell on it too long.

…

I’m not good at ending blog posts either.

Posted in DMing | Tagged | 2 Comments

When a Player Misses a Session

Posted on 11 April, 2012 by Law

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 Law

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 Law

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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