Perform (dungeon master)

Posted on 27 January, 2012 by MssngrDeath

So what is DMing with Charisma?

There are three skills in D&D that represent the ability to make money in a non-adventuring role (and it’s telling that all of them were in my last post, which means that 4th Edition doesn’t have them at all). Craft is Intelligence-based and is used to create something physical. Profession is Wisdom-based and is more service-oriented, representing broader but less deep knowledge. Perform is Charisma-based and is used for artistic expression. Each of them has limited application in, say, a dungeon crawl, but I think it’s safe to say that every non-adventuring NPC in every setting has some ranks in at least one of them.

I think that Wizards’ intent is that DMing is a Profession check, but DMing doesn’t fall perfectly into any of these buckets. A dungeon master really needs to use all of them to build an interesting session or campaign, so I feel like it’s not right to say for sure that DMing is one or another. Rather than looking at it from a Craft-Profession-Perform perspective, I think it’s best to consider it from the standpoint of the relevant ability scores.

I think of a Wisdom-based DM as a fairly typical DM. They have some knowledge of the system, but they’re not rules lawyers. They have NPCs with personality, but they aren’t method actors. A Wis-based DMing treats DMing like a service, where they have to balance a number of aspects of running a game. They feel kind of like an ascended version of a typical player, though I think the Wisdom style is better tapped into the players than other styles. Any DM has to respond to the players, but Wisdom DMs put even more weight into what the players want. Usually this is a great thing, but a DM too reliant on public opinion can get pulled in too many directions or become subject to only the loudest or most upset players. I’ve seen many sessions and more than one campaign be shanghaied by a particularity emphatic player and a sufficiently permissive DM.

Intelligence-based DMs are a step or two more comfortable with the hardest parts of the game. They treat a campaign as a thing to be built by one person more than a thing to be generated by a group, and they stick much closer to official rules and mathematical integrity than Wisdom-based DMs. It’s easy to think of them as uptight and distant, but my Int-based DMs always have a startling amount of internal story consistency, and they make sure that the gameplay is as fair as possible. Intelligence DMs treat the story as the most important thing; bad ones crush player opinion for the sake of the plot, but good ones integrate the players so they’re as involved as the DM is.

Charisma-based DMs are the opposite. They’re the DMs most likely to ignore the rules, dice rolls, and continuity for the sake of doing something great right now. In retrospect, the campaign may not have make the most sense, but the point is that everybody’s having fun. If you can get past the idea that Cha-based DMs are willing to blithely throw out things about the system that you’ve been using for years, the biggest issue is that the world around the players can take on a life of its own, far bigger than they can hope to manage.

For example, let’s say a player wants to incapacitate an opponent from far away by shooting their clothing and pinning it to the wall. It’s not an uncommon trope, and the target certainly has some loose clothing to pin. An Int-based DM might disallow it, on the ground that there’s a feat for this (Ranged Pin, Complete Warrior) and letting a player duplicate the feat without having it means the feat is meaningless. Clearly, the designers wants this to require some extra character investment. A Wis-based DM might allow it, but only on a sufficiently good roll, like a critical hit or the target’s AC with a bonus, and even then the target can remove the error on their own turn. Clearly, this is something that should be possible and it doesn’t break the game with these additional restrictions. A Cha-based DM might allow it outright as long as the player can make the shot, perhaps even the target’s AC with a penalty. Clearly, it’s easier to hit a wizard’s robe than the one bit of exposed skin on a fighter, and what the player wants to to is dynamic and cinematic.

None of these DMs are wrong. There is a feat that allows ranged pinning, and generally players shouldn’t be able to ignore restrictions like that at will (or else you probably want a more freeform system). A character should have to be a very good archer to pull off a shot like this, or else players and NPCs would be doing it all the time. Cinematic play is fun, and usually out-of-the-box thinking should be rewarded to encourage creativity. And all of the DMs would probably agree that an arrow that does 1d6-1 damage is going to have a hard time penetrating a steel wall deep enough to trap an enemy’s stray fabric. Each response leads to a different style of game and encourages a different type of player and a different style of thinking, but D&D is built to handle all of them, often in the same room.

In fact, the system is usually more robust than the people who use it. All of these styles have one significant downside, and it’s that they’re each most comfortable with players that act the same way. An Int-based DM doesn’t really want a thespian trying to rewrite base classes and spin the story in hilarious ways, and a Cha-based DM doesn’t want a strict player who gets upset whenever the rules are violated and doesn’t have the patience for nonessential quests and NPCs. And any Wis-based DM who has had both a performer and a rules lawyer in the same party knows exactly how hard it is to balance the two. The easy solution is to make sure that your players act the same way you do, but that’s about as stupid as it is lazy. Not only is it nearly impossible to cherry-pick players that way, but you end up depriving yourself of the experience of dealing with other personalities and the fun differing styles being to the table.

I actually started as an Int-based DM, and I retain a lot of my rules knowledge from then. By the time I finished my third campaign, I was Wis-based, and somewhere during my current campaign I moved to Cha-based, which is where I’m pretty happy. Over the years, I’ve managed to hit the highs and lows of each style of DMing before settling on what I’m currently doing. The good part is that I can DM in the moment, often pointedly planning as little as possible for a session, but with some sort of consistent overarching story and the understanding (or, if I can manage it, cooperation) of my players. I also still have all of the information I gathered from when information mattered more to me, do I don’t have to consult a reference table or make a wild guess when asked about the hardness of wood (it’s 5). The bad part is that my Cha-based method of designing and acting out NPCs has actually exacerbated my Int-based issues with players failing to remember them, and at this point I expect (almost require) my players to at least try some performance as well.

For reference, I would let the player take the shot. I would however remind them that the enemies function under the same rules and can do anything the players can, then let another player make their own impassioned plea on why giving enemies the ability to trap half the party from a hundred feet away is a terrible idea. Little diverts a player’s aim more effectively than the threat of reciprocity.

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Secondary Skills

Posted on 16 January, 2012 by MssngrDeath

I have plenty of complaints about the skill system in 4th, but the thing I missed the most is the skills that fell by the wayside. I understand rolling skills like Listen, Spot, and Search into Perception, and I don’t lose a lot of sleep over that. I’m talking about the skills that are wholly missing from the system, like Profession and Craft. There’s not any way in 4th Edition for, say, a bard to be any better at music than a paladin with an equivalent Charisma.

I could rant for ages on why I miss these skills, what this means for characters in 4th Edition, and why this change is bad (and I have!). However, it’s awfully boring to just listen to me complain, so instead I’d like to put forth an optional rule, secondary skills, designed to fill in the gaps left by the skill system.

The types of secondary skills are described below:

  • Appraise – Intelligence: You can gauge the price and quality of an item within a narrow margin. This is for determining the cost of something non-magical, such as a gem, a work animal, a rare piece of art.
  • Craft (any one) – Intelligence: You are trained in a craft, trade, or art, such as alchemy, basketweaving, blacksmithing, leatherworking, shipmaking, stonemasonry, or something similar.
  • Handle Animal (any group)– Charisma: You can use body language and intuition to train or influence the actions of a group of creature that could not be influenced by a normal Diplomacy check, like housepets, insects, livestock, or marine mammals.
  • Knowledge (any one) – Intelligence: You are versed in a particular, narrow field of study, such as engineering, geography, mathematics, fashion, the culture of a specific region, or something similar.
  • Perform (any one) – Charisma: You are skilled in a type of artistic expression, such as acting, comedy, dancing, singing, or playing instruments.
  • Profession (any one) – Wisdom: You are trained in a non-manufacturing livelihood, such as boater, cook, farmer, fisher, miner, shopkeeper, or something similar.

For the most part, a secondary skill check is the same as an ability check using the relevant ability score, plus half of the character’s level. Also, a character can gain training in secondary skills, which gives them the normal +5 bonus to checks using that secondary skill. A character can train in a number of secondary skills equal to their Intelligence modifier (not counting half of the character’s level).

Importantly, these skills can not be used perform actions better covered by a normal skill. For example, Knowledge (religion) is not a good idea, because Religion already does the same thing, and the point of the secondary skills is not to effectively gain more trained skills than a character should have. One idea, though, is to represent a narrow focus. Knowledge (nature) is bad, but perhaps Knowledge (poisonous plants) could work for an assassin. There’s also some leeway in here for specificity and relative success. A player who rolls a 15 on Knowledge (desert creatures) should get less information than a player who rolls a 15 on Knowledge (scorpions), though the latter skill is not useful for identifying vultures.

This is intended to work almost outside of the normal system, complimenting it rather than changing it. Secondary skills should not be prerequisites for feats or paragon paths. A character can find or make items that give bonuses to secondary skill checks as for normal skill checks, if a character is sufficiently determined. The idea is to add another tool to make characters into people more than bundles of stats and power, and I don’t see any reason to add additional restrictions to the game based on secondary skill choice. More than anything, it’s a way to leverage a character’s non-adventuring life, something that really doesn’t exist in 4th Edition.

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The Seven Party Roles (Examples)

Posted on 27 December, 2011 by MssngrDeath

So what does it mean to have roles that aren’t defined by the system? In 4th Edition, a fighter is a defender. Though you can build one with striking or controlling, it’s a rare fighter that doesn’t function at all as a defender. Rogues are always strikers and never defenders. Wizards are always controllers and very rarely strikers. None of these classes are ever leaders. 4th Edition is designed so that almost everybody of the same class serves the same role in slightly different ways, and everybody with the same role does similar things in similar ways (there’s a reason every leader gets two minor action bursts at first level that grant a healing surge).

3rd Edition and Pathfinder don’t have explicit roles assigned to classes, so what classes are good at what roles? This is where I really like the freedom of these systems, because just about any class can be just about any role. Some are certainly better than others, but any character can do almost anything (except healing). As an example, let’s look at the druid, one of the most versatile classes in the game, to see how well they work:

  • Control — At 1st level, druids gain the spell entangle, which is probably the strongest low-level control effect in the game. As they level, they continue gaining area effects that change the battlefield, slowing or damaging enemies and keeping their allies safe. They can also convert their spells into summoning, to put large walls of meat anywhere on the field.
  • Damage — A druid has no limit on the number of creatures it can summon or control, and five magical allies can do a startling amount of damage each turn. A druid can also transform into an animal and attack enemies directly, and they get the occasional spell like flame strike that rivals sorcerers for sheer damage.
  • Defense — They have an armor restriction and no class bonuses, so the average druid isn’t fantastic at defense. They do, however, have a fantastic amount of buffing spells, probably second only to the cleric, and a prepared or smart druid can protect themselves perfectly in almost any situation. Then add the defense bonuses from wild shape.
  • Diplomacy — Druids have some difficulty here, because they lack interaction skills as class skills and Charisma is not one of their primary ability scores. However, Pathfinder has no restriction on how players are allowed to spend their skills. A druid can put all of their skill points into Diplomacy, Sense Motive, and Bluff, and all they lose is the +3 class skill bonus, which they can counter with the feat Skill Focus. They also gain wild empathy, giving them the rare ability to engage in diplomacy with unintelligent beasts.
  • Healing — Druids gain cure spells more slowly than a cleric, because they have cure moderate wounds as a 3rd-level spell rather than 2nd, and all later cures are similarly delayed. But this only sets them back about 4.5 hit points per cure, and a high-level druid isn’t all that harmed by this. They also have the effect-healing spells one would expect, like neutralize poison, remove disease, and restoration.
  • Nature — Druids are nature specialists. Their class skills are based on nature, their spells manipulate nature, their class abilities make them better in nature, and their summons and wild shape simulate nature.
  • Stealth — Druids have something like the same problem here as with Diplomacy, since stealth skills are not class skills for them. But their wild shape allows them to change into creatures better suited for stealth, including animals that can fly, and their spells are better suited to hiding than interaction. At 3rd level, a druid is even immune to being tracked in natural environments.

Notably, few of these roles are mutually exclusive. A druid can’t put all of their skills into diplomacy, nature, and stealth, but they can certainly put their skills into stealth, prepare spells for healing or control, and use wild shape to deal damage. Most characters can and should handle multiple roles.

This is all well and good for a versatile class, but what about others? Let’s look at the barbarian, the greatest one-trick pony in the cole rules:

  • Control — There’s no reason a barbarian can’t wield a reach weapon, giving them better control over nearby enemies. Add the feat Combat Reflexes and proficiency with the spiked chain, and a barbarian can deal a terrifying amount of damage to anybody that walks nearby. Large barbarians, like ones under the effect of the spell enlarge person, are even scarier.
  • Damage — Barbarians rage, which is second only to sneak attack for a class ability capable of dealing tons of damage. Most barbarians are perfectly happy taking a defense penalty to hit scary things hard with large weapons.
  • Defense — It seems weird to play a barbarian that explicitly never uses their rage power, though in 3rd Edition that’s the best way to be a defender. Luckily, Pathfinder includes a number of rage abilities that make barbarians capable defenders, like beast totem, boasting taunt, and guarded stance. They also have a staggering number of hit points, letting them stay standing for far longer than they should be.
  • Diplomacy — Playing a diplomat barbarian is hard, for largely the same reasons as druids. Barbarians are also likely to make Charisma and Intelligence their lowest scores, so they aren’t good at talking and don’t have many skill points to make up for it. But a sufficiently dedicated player can make a barbarian who can talk, even if their preferred method of talking is shouting intimidatingly.
  • Healing — Barbarians can’t heal. Most classes, in fact, can’t. They can take ranks in Heal, carry potions, and keep magic items that allow limited healing, but they’ll never cast a healing spell. This is the only role that not every class can fill, and this is why.
  • Nature — Barbarians are about as good at nature as any class can be without class abilities that focus on it. Though they often prefer to use their skill points on mobility and shouting, a barbarian with Int 6 can still have good Knowledge (nature), great Survival, and the Track feat at 1st level.
  • Stealth — To be stealthy, barbarians have to spend skill points they rarely have on skills that don’t like them very much. Dexterity is also a non-primary ability score for barbarians, and they can’t transform like the druid. It is, however, possible, and there’s little more satisfying than seeing the seven-foot-tall musclebound berserker quietly sneaking his way into a hilarious location before starting to rage.

I’ll admit that this does make building a party a bit hard. In 4th Edition, you can say “we have two strikers, a controller, and a leader”, and everybody knew what was missing. In Pathfinder, saying “we have a druid, a fighter, and a monk” doesn’t tell the whole story. I’ve personally been burned on this, when I heard that a party had a druid and thus didn’t consider playing a healer. After the second time I died in three months, I switched to a real healer, letting the druid continue dealing damage and controlling.

Generally, I’ve been happiest letting players play whatever they want, pointing out at the end which roles were missing and seeing which characters could cover them best. I have no idea how this will work in a Delve Night setting. It’s probably best to bring whatever makes sense and just deal with missing a role or two in the first few weeks.

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The Seven Party Roles (Definitions)

Posted on 22 December, 2011 by MssngrDeath

Since Delve Night is moving from D&D 4th Edition to Pathfinder, I think it’s about time to dig up this thing I wrote years ago, possibly back before Unearthed Arcana, the fourth core rulebook, was even released. Before 4th Edition really put them to words, 3rd Edition had a general idea of roles, though they listed them as “cleric”, “fighter”, “wizard”, and “rogue” (not coincidentally, these are four classes that match the four 4th Edition roles in the original Player’s Handbook). The problem is that these four roles don’t really cover everything that a party needs to succeed in the average D&D campaign, at least not in 3rd Edition and Pathfinder. When I thought about it, I came up with seven roles that players should have to be prepared for anything:

  • Control — Usually an arcane caster, this function is based around controlling the battlefield to limit the effectiveness of opponents. Often, it’s by killing them, but any debilitating effect such as movement limitations, poison, or even dispelled magic effects can work just as well. Examples: wizard, witch
  • Damage — This function is based around damage with weaponry, tactics, or spells. Multiple attacks, large weapons, or simply lots of physical power can all make a character worthwhile in this role, and spellcasters can deal damage in focused bursts or large areas of the battlefield. Example: barbarian, sorcerer
  • Defense — While the damage-dealer focuses on taking the hit points away quickly, the defender tries to keep them for as long as possible. More importantly, every time an attack is aimed at the defender, it is not aimed at another party member. The defender is in a party specifically to take hits rather than weaker party members, and in a world without marks, they usually do this by staying in the front line. Examples: fighter, paladin
  • Diplomacy — The diplomat often has the most difficult job in the party, largely because it’s based on the skill of the player as much as the skill of the character. Though not as useful in combat, a party that can’t navigate NPCs and cultures is making things much harder than they need to be, and some fights are best won by keeping them from starting. Example: bard, cavalier
  • Healing — This is arguably the most important function in a party, as hit points are the second most important resource a party has. A party can grudgingly get by without being stealthy or having a smooth talker, but a group without a healer is far easier to knock out, and unlike the other roles, this role is limited to only a few classes. Healing can also take place beyond damage. When a character is immobilized, diseased, or just running scared, a healer is invaluable. Examples: cleric, oracle
  • Nature — While a need for nature specialization is drastically reduced in urban settings, there is much to be said for the mobility and knowledge granted by focus in this role. The ability to survive journeys is essential in any campaign that involves travel and many that don’t. Examples: druid, ranger
  • Stealth — Not just the inability to be perceived, but also the ability to do it reliably and take advantage of it. Stealthy characters tend to be very mobile, able to dance around on the fringes of combat. Example: monk, rogue

Characters really should be able to fill at least two roles unless the party is especially big, in which case filling two roles is merely a great idea rather than imperative. The usefulness of each role is also based on the campaign; an urban campaign has less use for the nature role, a campaign of high politics has less use for the damage role, and so on.

There are also a few sub-roles. These generally aren’t important enough to devote a character to them, and a party can work perfectly well without them, but they make life easier:

  • Construction — Sometimes the party needs an item that can’t be currently bought. Pathfinder made this much easier than 3rd Edition, since making magic items no longer cost XP.
  • Enhancement — A role devoted to making others better at their roles, an enhancer uses buffs and aids to spread their usefulness around.
  • Mobility — In a world with full-round actions, combat tends to be fairly static. Mobile characters get a lot of opportunity to keep things interesting, especially when they act in ways enemies don’t expect.
  • Knowledge — Having a sage in the party can make all the difference concerning puzzles, strange monsters, or esoteric lore.

I mostly just wanted to get this post out quickly so that it’s accessible for anybody building a Delve Night character or thinking about a Pathfinder campaign. In my next post, I want to go over some of the differences between the role systems in Pathfinder and 4th Edition with examples of how most classes can fill almost every role.

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Disparate Character Abilities

Posted on 20 December, 2011 by MssngrDeath

One of the campaigns in which I’m playing has managed to step into a problem I’ve seen a lot since it was first brought to my attention years ago. A friend of mine was playing a character who couldn’t take very many hits before dying, and he realized that the best strategy was to not take hits at all. He raised his Armor Class to a ridiculous level, far beyond the capacity of the monsters he expected to fight, so that he could adventure without worrying about every stray arrow. The DM, however, looked at the character and asked that he pull back on his AC, reasoning that it made encounter design too difficult, either making that character too powerful or making the rest of the party too weak. That is, any monster that could reliably hit this character would be too good against other characters in the party.

As an example, let’s say his Armor Class was 55. A monster would need an attack bonus of +44 to hit him half the time on a primary attack, even higher to hit reliably on secondary and later attacks. A decent AC for a level 20 character can be around 45 (the highest AC among the level 18 characters in one of my campaigns was 41), so a monster that hits AC 55 half the time with a primary attack will hit a normal character half the time on a tertiary attack, with the primary attack almost a guaranteed hit. More hilariously, the feat Power Attack lets a monster reduce their attack bonus to gain a bonus to damage. A monster with an attack bonus of +44 can take a -10 penalty on attack rolls and still hit AC 45 half the time, but each hit will deal 20 extra damage. So any monster that can deal with AC 55 can ruin a character with AC 45.

This swings the other way too. A character with an especially low AC has the same problem in reverse, because a normal monster can expect to hit them most of the time. It’s a bit different because this is usually intentional. Characters who have low ACs are typically aware of it and choose low ACs because having a high AC requires them to sacrifice something else. Wizards have their spellcasting reduced for wearing armor, and the advantages of plate aren’t worth the penalties it gives. Rangers, rogues, and other classes also have some features that can’t be used in medium or heavy armor. Monks are right out. As long as they’re not begging to get stabbed, most characters are able to deal with having a somewhat low AC, and having a good front line helps a lot.

It also helps to have a DM who understands party roles. Even though it’s smart, it’s not very fun to have every monster blow through the characters in front of them to reach the wizard. Maybe after a round or two, most monsters will redirect efforts to the scariest characters, and it helps to have multiple monsters that can split the front line and the available healing, but in general a DM shouldn’t spend every fight leveraging the party’s greatest vulnerabilities.

The problem we have in our campaign actually hits all of these buttons for maximum hilarity. We have one character with a spectacularly low AC, a barbarian who put all of their energy into dealing damage. We have another character with a spectacularly high AC, largely to counteract the barbarian and draw attacks. When the second character, a healer, is really going, his AC is 20 higher than the barbarian’s. Further, the DM is sending monsters that are able to hit the healer, mostly because those are the only monsters able to stand up to more than one hit from the barbarian. So we have a situation where the monsters are drastically outpacing the damage of the party, and the only reason it hasn’t resulted in a few party wipes is because the DM isn’t using Power Attack out of the goodness of his heart.

We haven’t died yet, so there is a balance here, precarious though it may be. It’s also nobody’s fault, because everybody’s just doing the best they can to play their characters and balance the game, respectively. However, I get the impression that nobody’s really happy about it. The DM has mentioned a few times that the sheer damage output of the barbarian is making encounter design difficult, and missing one player on a 17 isn’t helping. The barbarian doesn’t like ending half of our fights unconscious, because time not playing is time, you know, not playing. Our wizard has given up on being missed and being near combat at all, and he’s spending his resources just making sure the barbarian stays alive. Even I, with what I thought was a decent AC, have gotten used to being hit more often than not. And all of us are feeling the pain of dealing with these high-level creatures, which limit everybody’s offensive usefulness (well, except for the cleric, whose offensive usefulness is a spiked gauntlet and harsh words).

The problem with a situation like this is that there are so many parts to it, so there isn’t a simple solution. If the barbarian tones down the damage, the monsters outpace us and we die, which isn’t fun. If the healer tones down the defenses, the monsters kill him and we die, which isn’t fun. If the DM tones down the monsters, we cleave through them with no effort, which isn’t fun. And if everybody changes at once, we’re not sure what we’ll lose in the characters or the general play experience. The only idea I can come up with is mixing up combat a bit, but we’ve created a wacky situation there too. Most monsters that target touch AC, bypassing the healer’s armor, are immune to my character as a whole. Most spellcasters can be shut down by our wizard before they can get off a single spell. And any group of monsters that we can deal with one at a time will have small, squishy individual monsters that can’t last a round with us. We’ve tried a few different ideas, but we always seem to end up back at the single giant enemy that can take a hit, deal tons of damage, and stand upright for four or five rounds.

Rather than a mark or some artificial defense bonus, the defense role in 3rd Edition parities is best served by the character able to gain the highest AC, so it’s not always the responsibility of other characters to keep up. But without 4th Edition’s well-controlled limits (read: stranglehold) on defenses and attacks, there’s the chance that a player can specialize in just about anything, creating a real good chance of breaking the game wide open. Whether it’s a spellcaster who can kill every enemy in the first round, the diplomat who can blink their way through every NPC interaction, or the half-man half-refrigerator capable of wading nonchalantly through half of D&D, the freedoms in 3rd Edition are balanced only by the players’ reluctance to exploit them.

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Campaign Writeup: The Nine Emblems

Posted on 12 December, 2011 by MssngrDeath

The Nine Emblems was the first campaign I ran, a million years ago in early 2004. Like most of my early campaigns, it was timed to wrap up by the end of the semester, and it must have been shortly after D&D 3.5 came out, because I think I ran it in “3.25”, or a hybrid while I got used to the 3.5 rules changes. The party is hired by the temple of Pelor to track down nine minor artifacts, which they can use to seal a gate that leads to a world with a different pantheon before too many representatives of those gods come through.

Here’s what I learned from this campaign:

  • A D&D campaign is not the DM’s story, it the PC’s story. This was one of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn, and I’ve seen a lot of DMs who never quite get it. I still remember the session before I learned it as the worst session I’ve ever run, and the session after I learned it as one of the best. Basically, the DM is there as a designer and a moderator, and he or she determines the challenges and builds the world and so forth, but ultimately the point of a campaign is to tell the story of the main characters. It’s not to tell the story the DM has in mind. Leading players through a story like that is railroading, and no matter how good the track is, there’s still no fun in going through every station at the time and in the order the DM first envisioned. For me, most of the fun in a game is running things on the fly as four or five people throw out their ideas and see that they make a difference in how things develop.
  • Be careful when asking people to join. The short version is that, due to events at and around the table, I’m still not on speaking terms with one of the players. At this point, I try to have a few people I know and trust in every campaign, so that I have some sort of buffer in case things go horribly wrong.
  • Be aware of your time constraints. I had nine artifacts and only twelve weeks to get the players to them, so most sessions were monster-of-the-week style jaunts to new and foreign lands without a lot of consistent NPC or villain interactions (aside from the horses of Pelor: Inkius, Blinkian, Pinknominus, and Clydesdale). More advanced storytelling techniques, like having another group collecting the emblems so the players could get a few at once, hadn’t occurred to me. We ended up missing a week or two, and I just barely got the finale run during exam week.
  • Don’t draw a complicated map, because the players don’t care. I never delete a file, so I know exactly what I was thinking when I designed the maps for the sessions, including drawing a grid in MS Paint and filling in terrain square by square. The only thing more tedious than creating them was drawing them while players were waiting for the game to continue, and by the last session I had abandoned detailed maps in favor of drawing roughly the size and shape I wanted and just winging it. Turns out players didn’t care whether a platform was ten feet wide or fifteen, unless they had to fight on it.

Given the chance, here’s what I would do differently:

  • Don’t overbook the campaign so hard. I wish I’d broken up the formula some, allowing us to spend two weeks on one artifact while getting another in some quick way. It would have allowed me to build NPC interactions or let the players explore the week’s setting at their own pace.
  • Introduce the villain early. The final boss of the campaign didn’t show up until the last session, nor were there any allusions to him before that. He just wandered in like a giant space flea from nowhere, attacked the party, then showed up later as an elemental ghost or something for some dialogue. There was no anticipation and no emotion when the players fought, killed, and talked to him (in that order), and the end of a campaign was a bit of a narrative letdown. I’ve learned a whole lot about effective villains since then, and I’d love a chance to build that into the character.
  • Commit to D&D 3.5. I see now that the rules are vastly improved over 3.0, but at the time I saw them as new and scary, so I only allowed part of them and it ended up taking me a lot longer to learn the changes. It was also confusing for the players, because we came into it with three different expectations of the rules (3.0, 3.5, and my hybrid), which helped nobody. And after it all, sticking with 3.0 didn’t improve the campaign or the players in any way, nor did it really make it easier for me to design. It was just an extra headache born of my resistance to change.

Overall, I’m willing to overlook a lot of the bad decisions I made in this campaign because it was my first campaign, before I started figuring out what I was doing. It was the only campaign I’ve done without some sort of theming (Hyrule, monster, dragon, Tower, Victorian), and it suffered a little for a lack of focus and a lot for my inexperience, but nobody really seemed to hate it, and it gave me a chance to try out a lot of things that I’ve been able to refine over time into good ideas.

I guess if I had to give this campaign a snarky nickname, it was the rogue campaign. The party started as a rogue, a multiclass rogue/fighter, a multiclass rogue/wizard, and a cleric of the god of rogues. This is an impressive amount of specialization for a 5th-level party.

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A Rant on Dragons

Posted on 5 December, 2011 by MssngrDeath

Dragons irritate me.

Maybe it’s because they’re popular with designers. After all, they’re in the name of the system, and I can think of five first-party books off the top of my head all about dragons and how players can better interact with them. Let alone that I can only think of one book in the last ten years that deals expressly with dungeons, the half of the game that receives top billing (Dungeonscape, 3.5, last of the environment series). The capstone creatures of the first D&D Miniatures set with huge models were two dragons, and I think that of the four Gargantuan and Colossal miniatures released, three are dragons (the other is Orcus, the guy from the cover of the 4th Edition Monster Manual and the highest-level creature in the original books). Every time something is released that deals with dragons, it means that something isn’t being released that could instead deal with something that hasn’t been done to death.

Maybe it’s because they’re popular with DMs. I know one DM who’s an incredibly smart guy, and he knows that dragons are also smart and should be run as such. When we fought our first dragon in his last campaign, the first thing it did was take to the sky where the players couldn’t reach and use Flyby Attack to make strafing runs with its breath weapon. Powerful, yes. Hard to defend against, yes. But fun? Two runs in, the players had determined that they had little ranged capability and no way to get cover, flee, or lead the dragon into a less advantageous position, so the DM settled the dragon down to ground level so that we had a fighting chance. It still had ridiculous attack bonuses, defenses, and hit points, and a host of other magical abilities to back it up, so it was still a worthwhile encounter, but it feels like dragons have a huge amount of power for their CR. Nobody can convince me that a 13th-level fighter is the same difficulty as a huge red dragon, but that’s where we are.

Maybe, most irritatingly, it’s because they’re popular with players. Most people look at the glut of dragon-based books, feats, spells, and powers as a good thing. Dragons hit a nerve in players’ minds as scary boss encounters, deeply powerful sages, and long-lived master manipulators, so any time a character emulates a dragon, there’s an element of power in it. There are also enough of them that a dragon-based campaign can run without being boring, in the way other creatures really can’t manage; Races of the Dragon listed forty-one different types of true dragons alone. Further, killing them feels like an accomplishment, more than other monsters do, and the idea of “triple standard loot” sweetens the deal, so no matter how infuriating a properly-run dragon is, the rewards are worth it. One only has to look at the sheer amount of books, movies, and television programs that involve dragons to see exactly how vast their reach is.

I have a long history of not liking things that are popular, usually because I’m tired of them hogging the spotlight while other things go unnoticed, but dragons also just don’t strike me as fun. As above, a dragon fight run accurate to the dragon’s intellect is rough, but I also don’t get how interacting with them is a positive play experience. Dragons are haughty, standoffish, petty creatures, whose types differ primarily in their color, innate powers, and what kind of jerk they are. Fighting a red dragon is the same as fighting a blue dragon, except that you have to remember a different elemental affinity. They still have breath weapons, spells, frightful presence, spell resistance, the same bite/claw/claw/wing/wing/tail slap routine, and so on. All dragons consider themselves above the PCs, and I’ve never understood why somebody would be so happy to meet a creature who talks down to them as a racial trademark. Even the most noble are entitled in a way that’s mostly reserved for villains in children’s movies, and the disproportionate affection hurled at them from all sides only perpetuates it.

One of the rare things that 4th Edition did better than 3rd is tagging all dragons as solo encounters. It does limit encounter design from the standpoint of XP budget, as the designers said “a dragon is an entire fight, and if you want to make it interesting by adding minions or traps or anything else, we wash our hands of it” until the Draconomicon 2. But it tells the DM and players straight-out that this is not a creature to throw somewhere for the sake of having a neat dragon fight. Dragons work best (and by that, I mean they work only) as climactic boss fights, that last gasp at the end of an arc when the dragon finally gets its comeuppance for being born better than everybody else and flaunting it. Alternately, they can work very well as the dragon (see what I did there?) to the main villain, as a smart and powerful enemy intended to wear the PCs down so the true boss can pick them apart.

Even in the best of situations, dragons steal the spotlight whether or not they deserve it. They’re every kind of bad design decision (except the ones that created the 3rd Edition Monster Manual 2) and bad personality decision rolled into one idea that doesn’t deserve nearly the focus it gets. Far too much time and energy is wasted by players, DMs, and designers who think of them as some great fantasy archetype, when they’re just irritating blocks of copy-pasted material. At least Pathfinder had the good sense to only devote two pages to each dragon and let DMs sort it out, but the problem won’t be solved until people realize that every role of a dragon can be filled by another creature, making encounters and plots more fun for the difference.

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A Rant on Racial Prerequisites

Posted on 29 November, 2011 by MssngrDeath

I’ve been asked why I don’t like racial prerequisites (or, as I like to call them, racist prerequisites), and I don’t think I have a clear, logical answer, certainly not the kind that will sway everybody to my viewpoint. The easiest way to describe it is that it “just bothers me”, much like how the texture of a tomato can be more off-putting than the actual taste. I’m certainly not going to the length of ignoring them in my campaigns or, worse, ignoring anything with them, but I think a looser interpretation of them is the best way to go.

I guess it comes down to egalitarianism or something like it, that I don’t like the idea that some characters are, by way of birth, banned from certain character paths. To be fair, we’ve come a long way from the early days of D&D, where elf and dwarf were classes. D&D has managed to go almost all the way through 3rd and 4th Edition without restricting character options based on gender or height or skin color, but restricting things by race is normal and expected, as early as the D&D 3.0 Dungeon Master’s Guide and as late as Heroes of the Feywild. Why is it alright to prevent players or characters from certain builds based on race, when everything similar is taboo?

What really gets me are racial feats that leverage something in training. There’s a feat in the 4.0 Player’s Handbook that gives dwarves proficiency in all hammers and a damage bonus with them. That is, every dwarf can learn how to use every hammer at the cost of one feat. For a normal, martial dwarven society, this may make sense. But what if you have a dwarven wizard or rogue, who doesn’t follow the path of the archetypal dwarven soldier? Weirder, what if you have a dwarf raised outside a dwarven society, like one brought up around elves or raised by wolves? Should all dwarves, regardless of upbringing, have hammers so ingrained in their racial background that any dwarf can learn every hammer with a minimum of effort?

This goes the other way, too. Say a human or elf is born in a dwarven society and raised in the mold of the soldier. They’ve spent their whole career using hammers. So why can’t they qualify for the same weapon training as every dwarf around them? And this gets really ridiculous when the two points are combined: a human fighter training for their entire life will never be as good with hammers as a dwarven wizard can be in a week.

I don’t approve of abolishing all racial prerequisites, because some of them make sense. Dragonborn, for example, have a breath weapon. Only dragonborn can take feats that modify this breath weapon. No problem here. There’s no purpose in an elf taking a feat that increases the range of dwarven darkvision, or in an orc taking a halfling feat that takes advantage of their Small size category. But there are far more feats, especially in 4th Edition, that just make some races better than others at something without a real explanation.

Other racial properties tend not to bother me, maybe because they’re surmountable. A dwarf has a racial bonus to Constitution and an elf doesn’t, so all else equal, the dwarf is tougher. But if that dwarf is a wizard, putting his focus into Intelligence and Wisdom, and the elf is a ranger, putting focus into Dexterity and Constitution, that elf will eventually surpass the dwarf, probably even at level 1 when the dwarf puts a lower ability score roll into Constitution. Also, I get the feeling that racial properties tend to be less powerful because they’re always present, and often they’re even not as good as a feat. Goliaths can roll twice for Athletics checks to jump and climb, but there’s a paragon-level feat that gives any character the same benefit on all Athletics and Acrobatics checks. So all goliaths are natural athletes, but anybody can surpass their racial advantage with sufficient training.

In 3rd Edition, I tended to ignore racial requirements with a sufficient story reason. A human training with dwarves who meets all other prerequisites can become a dwarven defender, in the same way that a shape-changing construct can take a prestige class reserved for humans and dopplegangers. 4th Edition made this a lot wackier, and I’m not sure how to approach it. In a lot of the books, many feats have racial prerequisites. I cracked open Martial Power 1 to verify this just now, and out of 182 non-multiclass feats, I counted 81 racial prerequisites. This is actually fewer than I thought it was, but epic level skewed the numbers a bit. In heroic and paragon tiers, 71 out of 140 feats were racial, or more than 50%. I can’t expect anybody to review all of the possible interactions among these feats when racial prerequisites are ignored, not even starting on paragon paths. Regardless of my trust in my players, I’m worried that there are too many ways to combine too many things that can break the game wide open.

So I’m stuck accepting racist prerequisites, wishing for the halcyon days of 3rd Edition and Pathfinder campaigns, when the designers weren’t quite as intent on putting characters into adorable little boxes based on race. It’s the last piece of equality that the designers are willfully ignoring, and there’s not really anything that anybody can do about it.

I was actually going to have a paragraph in this post about how WotC created some races and then completely ignored them, and how they’re banned from so much later material. Fo example, the bugbear is a playable race in 4th Edition, introduced way back in the Monster Manual. But since it’s not a ‘PC’ race, it gets no feats, optional utility powers, paragon paths, or anything else. Whole chapters of whole books are completely worthless to them, because the designers feel no need to allow them to play the same game as everybody else. But that was before we started working on the Savage Species for 4th Edition, a book designed to correct a lot of these wrongs, so for us at least I feel the severity of that complaint has somewhat lessened.

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Doing the Impossible

Posted on 6 November, 2011 by MssngrDeath

There’s a point in No More Heroes 2 when the main character walks into a(n American) football stadium and is immediately surrounded by two-dozen identical cheerleaders, all introducing a football star that the main character has been send to fight. They trade some barbs for a minute, until the football player confesses that a stadium is an insufficient setting for their fight. The cheerleaders take off like rockets, shooting into space and converging into a giant beams of light that gradually take the shape of a building-sized, humanoid robot. The star himself rides up to the robot in a football-shaped ship and lands on it, forming the head and completing his giant machine. The main character, a young man with a sword, looks up, says “I thought something like this might happen,” and summons his own giant robot, which up until then had not existed.

This sort of thing is one of my biggest payoffs in gaming. The player is faced with an impossible situation and can only succeed through wits, preparation, reaching down deep and finding a level they didn’t know they had, or some combination of the three. Sometimes, this manifests as a quick, “suddenly there’s a mecha” moment, and sometimes it’s a more drawn-out spectacle as the player considers the situation, assesses his or her resources, and through skill and luck dismantles the problem through a single battle, an entire night, or occasionally even longer. In particular, I’d like to discuss the latter.

The word “impossible” may seem a bit off here, since the player can eventually overcome the problem, but I like it. It speaks a lot more to the situation I mean than the word “difficult”. In a difficult situation, a player can succeed by being lucky on rolls, or having the enemy be unlucky, or barely surviving after a long-drawn out meeting. Difficult combats are perfect for final battles or hated rivals, difficult skill challenges are perfect for disarming the magic ritual or guiding the starship into port, and difficult puzzles are perfect for finding your way out of the maze before it fills with water or finding which guest is the murderer before they kill again.

Something impossible is different. An impossible combat is stopping the entire army with three heroes and a bard, an impossible skill challenge is moving an entire kingdom to rebel against their leaders, and an impossible puzzle is an ancient poem that speaks of the end times but offers no actual hints or substance. The point is that applying a player’s forehead directly to the problem is unlikely to work, no matter how well they roll or what their character is. They need to think outside the box and approach the problem from a standpoint other than declaring an intent and rolling a die or going through the motions of their normal problem-solving methods. A difficult problem challenges the characters, and an impossible problem challenges the players (a distinction I want to make more of in a future post).

I’ve hit my players with a few impossible situations lately, and I’ve been hit with a few others as well in the campaigns in which I play. With everything coming so quickly, I’m starting to develop a feel for how and how not to run an impossible problem:

  • Make sure the players exactly know how bad the situation is — This is a hard sweet spot to hit. You want the players to know that this is an impossible problem, and not merely a problem that looks hard at first but through which they will eventually triumph. If the players dive face-first into an impossible problem, they will likely fail spectacularly, in an incredibly frustrating way. But you also can’t pretend the problem as too impossible right off the bat, or the players will avoid it altogether. They may convince the villagers to flee rather than whittle down the army with guerilla tactics, or they may give up on repairing that artifact and just do without. Sometimes, what the players come up with can be more exciting, but just as often, they’ll just be angry that you’re railroading them in whatever direction leaves the problem behind.
  • Accept good ideas, whether you expected them or not — In 4th Edition, I have a sort of running rule that the DC for a check in a skill challenge is based on how good the player’s idea is. That is, the more clever or useful the check the player wants to make, the lower the DC. This makes clever ideas more likely to succeed, which is more interesting for me as I react to them and encourages the players to make good decisions with any skill rather then try to shove square peg of their best modifier into the round hole of the problem. It allows gives the players a chance to succeed even if they don’t have the perfect abilities for a given problem.
  • Feel free to help the players out sometimes — Especially at the beginning of an impossible problem, when the players don’t have a plan yet, or halfway through, when they begin to feel that they’re not making any progress, the players may become frustrated. The nature of an impossible problem is such that it looks impossible for a long time until it all comes tumbling down, and the players can easily get lost halfway through. A lot of players resent being given an obvious hint, so for something like this, I think it’s best to slide some extra information in as the result of a skill check. For example, a player makes a Perception or Spot check looking for something and fails, but they still see something else that they can use to accomplish something similar, or maybe a failed attack puts the player in position to notice something about an enemy’s armor that they can exploit.
  • Don’t overdo it — Impossible situations work because they force the players to think beyond the normal restrictions they apply on their characters’ actions. When you hit players with too many impossible issues in short order, however, breaking out of the routine becomes routine, and it defeats the point. You also run the risk of burning out the players that take the initiative in such situations, as they get repeatedly put on the spot to deal with the problems. But above all, the impossible situations lose their luster as they stop being a significant, different, challenging break in the normal action and lose their narrative impact.

I feel that impossible problems work best not as as capstones, but as preparation for capstones. It’s the players cleverly whittling down the elite guards in a castle so they can fight the king unmolested, or disabling the power so they can reach the secret labs without setting off the alarms. Players traditionally sign up for a D&D campaign to play D&D, and keeping a final battle in traditional D&D helps meet that expectation. But more than that, it gives the players to time to work on their plan, deal with a problem, and gather themselves together before enjoying the fruits of their labor. There’s nothing quite as great as seeing half of the enemies flee because your campaign of intimidation worked, leaving the general exposed, or watching a scientist summoning his robot only to see it collapse due to sabotage. An impossible plan is fun to execute, but the most fun is in watching it all come together at the end and seeing the enemies panic as they realize the characters were apparently in charge all along.

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D&D Stats in Simple Language

Posted on 23 October, 2011 by MssngrDeath

I’ve heard a lot of interpretations of ability scores. The most common of these is “Charisma correlates strongly to good looks”, which is incorrect and tends to irritate players of low-Charisma characters, but anytime there’s something the stats don’t cover explicitly (like weight and build), we try to draw conclusions about them based on the hard numbers we have. The problem is that this still leave a lot to interpretation. What’s the actual strength difference between a person who can lift 80 pounds and a person who can lift 100 pounds? How tough is a bard with Constitution of 14, really? What does it mean for my character when I roll poorly and have to drive the 3-Charisma barbarian?

I put together this list a few years ago to try to put this in simple language. Below are some quick descriptions of every stat, from 1 (a modifier of -5, or as low as a character can get without being undead or a construct) to 25 (a modifier of +7, or as high as a PHB character can get without magic):

  • Strength
    • 1 (–5): Morbidly weak, has significant trouble lifting own limbs
    • 2-3 (–4): Needs help to stand, can be knocked over by strong breezes
    • 4-5 (–3): Knocked off balance by swinging something dense
    • 6-7 (–2): Difficulty pushing an object of their weight
    • 8-9 (–1): Has trouble even lifting heavy objects
    • 10-11 (0): Can literally pull their own weight
    • 12-13 (1): Carries heavy objects for short distances
    • 14-15 (2): Visibly toned, throws small objects for long distances
    • 16-17 (3): Carries heavy objects with one arm
    • 18-19 (4): Can break objects like wood with bare hands
    • 20-21 (5): Able to out-wrestle a work animal or catch a falling person
    • 22-23 (6): Can pull very heavy objects at appreciable speeds
    • 24-25 (7): Pinnacle of brawn, able to out-lift several people
  • Dexterity
    • 1 (–5): Barely mobile, probably significantly paralyzed
    • 2-3 (–4): Incapable of moving without noticeable effort or pain
    • 4-5 (–3): Visible paralysis or physical difficulty
    • 6-7 (–2): Significant klutz or very slow to react
    • 8-9 (–1): Somewhat slow, occasionally trips over own feet
    • 10-11 (0): Capable of usually catching a small tossed object
    • 12-13 (1): Able to often hit large targets
    • 14-15 (2): Can catch or dodge a medium-speed surprise projectile
    • 16-17 (3): Able to often hit small targets
    • 18-19 (4): Light on feet, able to often hit small moving targets
    • 20-21 (5): Graceful, able to flow from one action into another easily
    • 22-23 (6): Very graceful, capable of dodging a number of thrown objects
    • 24-25 (7): Moves like water, reacting to all situations with almost no effort
  • Constitution
    • 1 (–5): Minimal immune system, body reacts violently to anything foreign
    • 2-3 (–4): Frail, suffers frequent broken bones
    • 4-5 (–3): Bruises very easily, knocked out by a light punch
    • 6-7 (–2): Unusually prone to disease and infection
    • 8-9 (–1): Easily winded, incapable of a full day’s hard labor
    • 10-11 (0): Occasionally contracts mild sicknesses
    • 12-13 (1): Can take a few hits before being knocked unconscious
    • 14-15 (2): Able to labor for twelve hours most days
    • 16-17 (3): Easily shrugs off most illnesses
    • 18-19 (4): Able to stay awake for days on end
    • 20-21 (5): Very difficult to wear down, almost never feels fatigue
    • 22-23 (6): Never gets sick, even to the most virulent diseases
    • 24-25 (7): Tireless paragon of physical endurance
  • Intelligence
    • 1 (–5): Animalistic, no longer capable of logic or reason
    • 2-3 (–4): Barely able to function, very limited speech and knowledge
    • 4-5 (–3): Often resorts to charades to express thoughts
    • 6-7 (–2): Often misuses and mispronounces words
    • 8-9 (–1): Has trouble following trains of thought, forgets most unimportant things
    • 10-11 (0): Knows what they need to know to get by
    • 12-13 (1): Knows a bit more than is necessary, fairly logical
    • 14-15 (2): Able to do math or solve logic puzzles mentally with reasonable accuracy
    • 16-17 (3): Fairly intelligent, able to understand new tasks quickly
    • 18-19 (4): Very intelligent, may invent new processes or uses for knowledge
    • 20-21 (5): Highly knowledgeable, probably the smartest person many people know
    • 22-23 (6): Able to make Holmesian leaps of logic
    • 24-25 (7): Famous as a sage and genius
  • Wisdom
    • 1 (–5): Seemingly incapable of thought, barely aware
    • 2-3 (–4): Rarely notices important or prominent items, people, or occurrences
    • 4-5 (–3): Seemingly incapable of forethought
    • 6-7 (–2): Often fails to exert common sense
    • 8-9 (–1): Forgets or opts not to consider options before taking action
    • 10-11 (0): Makes reasoned decisions most of the time
    • 12-13 (1): Able to tell when a person is upset
    • 14-15 (2): Can get hunches about a situation that doesn’t feel right
    • 16-17 (3): Reads people and situations fairly well
    • 18-19 (4): Often used as a source of wisdom or decider of actions
    • 20-21 (5): Reads people and situations very well, almost unconsciously
    • 22-23 (6): Can tell minute differences among many situations
    • 24-25 (7): Nearly prescient, able to reason far beyond logic
  • Charisma
    • 1 (–5): Barely conscious, incredibly tactless and non-empathetic
    • 2-3 (–4): Minimal independent thought, relies heavily on others to think instead
    • 4-5 (–3): Has trouble thinking of others as people
    • 6-7 (–2): Terribly reticent, uninteresting, or rude
    • 8-9 (–1): Something of a bore or makes people mildly uncomfortable
    • 10-11 (0): Capable of polite conversation
    • 12-13 (1): Mildly interesting, knows what to say to the right people
    • 14-15 (2): Interesting, knows what to say to most people
    • 16-17 (3): Popular, receives greetings and conversations on the street
    • 18-19 (4): Immediately likeable by many people, subject of favorable talk
    • 20-21 (5): Life of the party, able to keep people entertained for hours
    • 22-23 (6): Immediately likeable by almost everybody
    • 24-25 (7): Renowned for wit, personality, and/or looks

This really isn’t valid for 4th-Edition though. For one thing, the minimum you can get is 4th is a score of 3, and the minimum the system wants you to have is 8 since it discouraging rolling for stats at all. On top of that, the maximum is 30, and I’m not entirely sure where you can go from the capstones above. Stats also (always) scale with level and there are no magical ways to modify them, so it feel more like the ability scores are shoved to the back end of the character sheet, used in other calculations but meaningless for an actual description of a character.

Edit: Given the popularity of this post, it’s been retroactively extended with additional analysis in two parts:
What Measure is an 18?
The Definition of Charisma

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