Law #1

Posted on 20 October, 2011 by MssngrDeath

This one was requested, so I accept no blame for it.

D&D is a cooperative game, as has been discussed, but it’s not really an even cooperation. The players in the party may all be equal, but the DM by design must have a leadership position. He or she is responsible for most of the session and plot planning, most of the party mood, much of the rulings on mechanics, and wearing any other number of hats necessary to keep a game running smoothly. For better or worse, a DM is basically in charge of the campaign, and the whole system is built with this in mind. Thus:

Law #1 – The DM is always right.

This is so core that d20 systems actually refer to it as Rule 0, which means it’s more important to the game than Rule 1 (which is “to determine the success of an action, roll a d20, add a modifier, and compare it to a target number”, or, you know, the d20 system). Everything that affects the game passes through the DM at some point, whether it’s deciding before the campaign which books are too powerful and which classes don’t fit in the settings, or deciding on-the-spot whether a creature counts as prone if they’re flying sideways ten feet above the fighter. Generally, the assumption is that the DM is the final arbiter of things happening at and beyond the table, trumping even basic rules and the results of the dice.

However, this can go too far. I’ve seen a DM ban rules, classes, feats, spells, races, and so forth based not on any necessity of the setting, game balance, or fun, but whether the DM owned the book, making the players’ books largely unusable and forcing that game into one person’s comfort zone. I’ve seen a DM change rules on the fly because he or she was upset that the players were surviving traps, not to increase tension but because he or she thought that there needed to be some punishment for triggering the traps at all. And at least once in every campaign, both as a player and as a DM, I’ve seen all play stop while a player argued with the DM about a ruling that went against the rules as written. In order to avoid situations like this, there has to be some limit on the DM’s authority, or at least the frequency and severity of leveraging this authority. Thus:

First Corollary – But not always entirely right.

A few years ago, I figured that the best way to approach this was to make a rules decision immediately, run with it for that encounter, and then entertain dissent afterward to determine a more proper way to handle a situation without bringing the live game to a halt. This has generally succeeded, including one memorable case where a player knocked a flying enemy prone. The enemy at the time wasn’t subject to gravity, so I couldn’t validate them plummeting to the ground, but I also didn’t think they should be immune to being prone. So I ruled the enemy “off-balance”, which was treated like being prone except that they maintained altitude. It worked, we finished the session, and nobody had a problem afterward, so we’ve used the same mechanic in other situations.

I’ve been overruled on a judgment, too. When I started in 4th Edition, I didn’t know that a creature at 0 hit points was considered to be dying. I was used to 3rd Edition, where they were staggered, capable of taking one action before collapsing. So in my early sessions, players and monsters at 0 hit points were dazed, but not dying until they hit -1. This was overturned quickly, but at least we didn’t spend ten minutes rifling through books trying to find the rules for hit points, which I could swear are in a different chapter in every edition.

I have some fairly experienced players now, so the biggest way this comes up these days is in hit points, which I track in the program I use to display session information. When a player disagrees with their hit point total, at least one of us is wrong. But too many sessions have gotten caught up in a recap of the player’s damage changes since the last time we agreed, which leaves a bunch of people sitting around watching two people do math. This is lousy, and I should be smart enough to avoid it, but I have a tendency to try to understand the situation (or make a player understand the situation) rather than just declaring one number or the other to be correct and moving on with the fun part. If a player really has a problem with my ruling on their hit points, I should be asking them to do a comparison every round or two just to make sure we’re on the same page and try to find out what’s missing, but I default to discussion. I’m not sure whether that’s good or bad, but it certainly isn’t quick.

I kind of went off on a tangent there. The point is that I don’t like Rule 0 being Rule 0, because it encourages DMs to make authoritarian decisions. It may be the first rule in the game, but isn’t not the be-all and end-all of D&D. A DM who doesn’t understand this is begging for unhappy players, so I arranged the order of my Laws with this in mind. It feels strange to demote something to merely being Law #1, but I think it’s a better description of what gaming should be rather than what gaming is.

For anybody interested, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising is at least partially about the conflict between Law #0 and Law #1 as the most important rule in a game. It helps that it’s a good movie.

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Law #3

Posted on 30 September, 2011 by MssngrDeath

Only so many rules exist. There’s only room in the market for so many companies, those companies can only release so many books, and those books can only contain so much material. It’s impossible for one system to describe in excruciating detail every possibility for every character, so players and DMs do some of their own legwork, designing new classes, items, spells, and everything else a character may need. But not everybody has a good sense of what’s balanced, flavorful, and sufficiently individual for every facet of a character. I’ve seen a lot of books try to describe dozens of new weapons or hundreds of new gloves just for the sake of doing it, when all that’s really needed is a slight twist on something within arm’s reach. Thus:

Law #3 – A character is allowed to have anything, as long as it is treated like something that already exists.

We refer to this as reskinning: taking the skin off of an existing rule but leaving the numbers intact, then replacing it with the skin you want. The example I always give for this is the character who wields a giant rib. There’s nothing in a D&D book that explicitly says that a character can gain proficiency in giant ribs, and there’s no breakdown of what it costs, what it weighs, what damage it deals, and so on. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take something that’s already there and change it to look like a giant rib while having the statistics of something else.

This actually opens up more possibilities than it seems at first glance. If the character holds the rib at the narrow point and swings it around, then we use the information from a greatclub, but call it a giant rib. If the character instead wants to thrust the pointy end at enemies, then we use the information for a scythe. If the character wants to throw the rib, then it’s a javelin (or any number of thrown weapons, but I like the range on the javelin). There’s no one-to-one mapping for a giant rib, because it depends on the character and what they want to do with it.

There’s an obvious restriction on this, that the giant rib can’t be all these things at once. A character can’t take the best of each weapon and combine them into one super-weapon by virtue of reskinning. If a player feels very strongly about being able to do everything, there are options available, but the point of reskinning isn’t to change something mediocre into something great. Minor changes, however, are generally fine; I don’t think that reskinning a bastard sword into something that does bludgeoning damage instead of slashing is a sufficiently significant change.

Physical things like weapons are easy to reskin compared to spells, but there’s room there too. One early book mentioned that a player can change the physical representation of their magic missile to a series of arrows, or hands that slap opponents. Also, a coldball is exactly as powerful as a fireball (the feat Energy Substitution allows a character to switch damages type to acid, cold, electricity, or fire without an increase in spell level, which is all the argument I need). If a character learns a coldball, then they have to take a feat or use an item to change it into a fireball. But this allows a character to change every spell into one damage type without having to spend the feats or time to accomplish it using normal rules. They have essentially reskinned themselves into a pure element mage, and the rules follow with that concept.

D&D 3.5 actually went out of their way to add some reskinning options into some books. For example, Complete Arcane introduced alternate items, like magic fruits that worked exactly like potions or tattoos that worked exactly like spellbooks. However, this is where 4th Edition shines. In 4th Edition, characters aren’t people with personalities and hopes, they’re machines that all have similar numbers and similar items that help similar attacks to affect similar monsters in similar ways. But reskinning is one of the (few [I mean, very few (seriously, it’s pretty much reskinning and ease of leveling)]) things that 4th Edition does incredibly well. The only thing that really controls what a power looks like is an easily-ignorable bit of italicized text between the power name and the parts that players care about. Powers in 4th Edition are almost begging for a reskinning treatment, to change the rules as written into the characters that the players actually want.

Here are a few examples of reskinning working in some current campaigns:

  • One Piece Campaign: Gabriel Tomiko. This is one I did, changing a dragonborn battlemind (psionic defender) into a boxing Iron Man. Technically, the character is holding a longsword and a heavy shield, but I changed them both to metal gloves; it means that if I only have one glove on, I can either attack or defend, but not both, and I have to determine which is which when I equip them. Besides that, it’s a fairly easy exchange, switching psionic movement for rocket boots and lightning breath for tasers. I also like the reskinning for the power points, because I didn’t do any reskinning at all. They just work, and there’s no explanation, which doesn’t actually detract from the character.
  • Tower Campaign: Cid Viscous. Technically, Cid is a shardmind druid/psion, but Cid’s player performs the most thorough reskins I’ve ever seen. This character in my campaign is a living slime, who doesn’t switch between humanoid and beast forms as much as he changes between human-like form and a writhing mass of tentacles. He teleports by reaching a strand of himself to a remote location and pulling the rest of him along, and most of his area and close powers have been changed to waves of slime. Even his items are reskinned into his body, which might have been questionable in a system with disarming or sundering but is awesome in 4th Edition.
  • Post-Ragnarok Campaign: Vakr Eyvindarson. I really wanted to do this example, because not only is it 3rd Edition, but it’s a great example of a minor rules modification to allow a reskin. This character is a fairly ordinary human abjurer, with a focus on prismatic and rainbow spells, but there are no feats and few items based on this idea. So the DM approved changing the reserve feat Fiery Burst to Rainbow Burst, which gives a +1 bonus to caster level for rainbow spells rather than fire spells. In addition, the character can make a burst of energy at will, except that instead of fire damage, the damage type is determined randomly from among the big four (see above). The inability to choose the energy type keep this from being too bad, and it means the character can spend their turn accidentally causing cold damage to a creature he knows is immune to cold, which I’m sure the DM loves. The power level fits and it makes the character distinctive and fun to play, which is just about everything you could ask for.

As powerful as reskinning is, there’s one problem I’ve found with it, and it’s that I tend to value reskinning over not. I feel like there are so many great ideas for characters out there that don’t fit the normal, published molds, that over time I developed an unconscious derision for any character that follows them as written. That is, the less work a player puts into reskinning a character, the less interesting (and thus worse) that character is. Now that I’ve recognized this, I’ve been able to suppress it, but I still tend to encourage reskinning in my campaigns. Once you get into the mindset of thinking of a character and then bending the rules to fit them rather than the other way around, it opens up a terrific new world of character design.

Plus, most players don’t memorize monster information. A reskinned creature is as good as a brand-new creature when it comes to surprising and interesting players, but takes far less time.

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Law #4

Posted on 21 September, 2011 by MssngrDeath

This has come up recently in The Great Tower of Oldechi, so I figured it was a great time to write about it.

I’ve said before how D&D is a role-playing game, but there are a lot of adjectives I could apply to that description to make it more specific. It’s also tabletop (unless you’re playing online), pen-and-paper (unless you have a subscription to 4th Edition’s monthly service and online character builder), high fantasy (unless you’re in Dark Sun, d20 Modern, or any number of homebrew non-fantasy settings), and so on. But most importantly, D&D is a group game. Solo campaigns exist, but they’re awfully rare and don’t tend to get a lot of mention in the official books, because the whole point is to get a party together and adventure as a group. Whenever you have a group, intragroup conflict is almost guaranteed, and sometimes this can reach a point that’s damaging to the game and the party dynamic. Thus:

Law #4 – Players are expected to attempt a cooperative in-game environment.

For a while, at least, the official motto of 4th Edition was “Never Split the Party”. It was heavy-handed, but it sums this up fairly well. D&D is built around having a group of people who gets together and solve problems that no one person can solve alone, and occasionally that no incomplete subset of the group could solve. This is not to say that breaking into two or three groups to approach something is wrong, but it should be a minority of the session. Combats especially are built to expect a certain number of characters, and things get a lot more lethal if the party’s cleric and fighter are exploring a different lead when the wizard and rogue are ambushed. So in general, players should make an effort to stick together unless there’s a fairly good reason, but this law is only tangentially about difficulty level.

I knew a DM once whose style didn’t mesh with mine, at all. I recall clearly him complaining about the party after one of the first sessions, because the party split up to explore a dungeon, leading them into encounters that they couldn’t survive at half-strength, and he clearly considered this to be a stupid decision on the part of the players. That is, if the group split physically, the players get what they deserve, and that’s part of the game. Some sessions later, however, the players got into a heated discussion about what to do with an artifact they had acquired and the many powerful groups of varying legitimacy that wanted it from them. At one point, the players were actually shouting over each other to fight about what to do, while the DM sat back and smiled. When questioned about it, he said that he was enjoying watching the players fight, and we realized that he had specifically chosen a problem that he knew would divide us and lead into a shouting match. That is, if the players split mentally or ideologically, this was a good and reasonable goal for the DM.

This, to be short, is asinine. Listening to six people fight about the best way to treat an imaginary shield isn’t fun. We talked about this session among ourselves in future weeks, and as far as I know, not a single player enjoyed the argument, and the more a player argued for a route the party did not eventually take, the more upset they were with the session and the campaign. Whenever players are pitted against each other, somebody loses, and losing is even less fun than arguing. So why would a DM create a situation where he or she knows that they are going to frustrate some players and irritate most of them?

Besides acting as a guide for me and how to create plots and encounters, this should also act as a guide for players. Now, conflict occurs, and is occasionally hilarious. I don’t think anybody gets too upset when one player wants to pull a lever they just found, another player objects, and the problem is solved with an initiative check. One roll later, that’s resolved, and the players can get to whatever issue is at hand. But when a player has a very strong opinion about what the party should do, they usually end up winning, because the rest of the party doesn’t have a strong enough opinion to object. When somebody does, things can get ugly fast. In general, every player has to sometimes (not always, calm down) put aside their own best judgment and run with whatever the rest of the party wants.

The biggest cause of this is usually player vs. character opinions. Traditional Lawful Good paladins are barred from prolonged adventuring with evil characters, lest they lose all of their abilities. No matter how much the player of the evil character and the player of the paladin want to get along, the characters are mechanically incompatible, and even a short-term alliance can lead to a strong issue between the two on the premise of “But this is what my character would do!” A less mechanical but no less prickly situation is the ranger adventuring with one of their favored enemies. Unless there’s a very fast “You’re an exception” understanding built into the relationship, the player of the ranger is going to have a hard time suppressing their character’s strong desire to shoot their ally in the face. In cases like this, the best option is sometime to simply avoid it; don’t play an evil character in a party that you know includes a paladin (and vice versa).

Some of the best sessions I’ve seen are ones where the party is divided on a topic and are forced to consider multiple sides, because it means their opinion as players and characters matters and shapes the campaign. They’re right, and conflict is both unavoidable and necessary in any mentally-engaged group. But any kind of sufficiently serious conflict includes the danger of a strong argument, hurt feelings, and above all an absence of fun. Occasionally, the players have to just sit back and recall that D&D is a cooperative role-playing game, not a competitive one, and come up with a solution that satisfies everyone.

Besides, my sessions are hard enough with the players united. Forcing them to fight among themselves as well is just mean.

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Encounter Design: Pluses and Minuses

Posted on 1 September, 2011 by MssngrDeath

I’ve been told that I have an antagonistic relationship with my players, and I think that’s mostly true. I like making my players work for rewards, I like challenging them as much as their characters, and I like making them feel that there’s a real chance of failure. I don’t have a Gygax-like resentment of player success and a desire to see them suffer (well, not a strong desire), but I’ve found that players have the best memories of sessions where they survived by the skin of their teeth.

However, there are situations where some characters are simply more relevant than others, which is part of game design. If there’s a character who’s as good as every other character in every situation, then there’s a problem somewhere, but most systems disallow this somewhat explicitly. A character who’s great as punching probably won’t be great at tea functions, and if they’re good at both then fixing a car engine is likely not their scene. This is why most systems tell GMs to mix things up in their sessions, with a little bit of everything that the system can handle and that players enjoy, to give everybody a chance to shine.

D&D 4th Edition has made this a bit harder with a clear understanding that all characters are combat characters and perform non-combat activities only tangentially. There’s no expert in diplomacy unless they’re also using Charisma to shoot lasers at people, there’s no expert in knowledge unless it provides a damage bonus, and so on. I’ve had a few players try to create non-combat characters, and they just get lost in the shuffle, especially as combats drag longer at higher levels. The characters who are best at combat end up being far and away the members of the party with the most screentime, feeling the best about their characters, and those characters tend to be strikers. All systems have a similar issue for characters who are good at too many things, but I feel like 4th Edition gives the strongest impression that combat is the most important function a character can perform, and strikers are designed to do the most in combat.

In order to get around this scenario, I started thinking about encounter design in a new way. Whenever I write a combat encounter, I try to pick two characters out of the party. For one character (a “Plus”), I design some part of the encounter to compliment their abilities, and for another (a “Minus”), I try to limit their usefulness.

I feel like making an encounter that involves a Plus is pretty basic design. Every time you make a social situation with a diplomat in the party or build a trap with a rogue in the party, you’ve built something where one character is supposed to star, and doing this to combat isn’t terribly difficult. The Minus is a bit harder to explain, but I do have a few reasons for it. One is that, as previously explained, I’m antagonistic, and I like seeing players suffer occasionally. More relevantly, though, I feel like there’s no reason one character or build should be able to walk through all encounters. Decreasing the importance of a particularly good character is sometimes important for others to shine. And third, a character who’s too good isn’t really trying in most combats, and I feel like a character that doesn’t have to think or try is a player that isn’t having fun.

For example, let’s say I have a bow expert in the party who does ridiculous damage and debilitating effects from a ridiculous range. If that character is the Plus, I make sure the encounter has something that’s good to shoot, or something that’s harmed more than normal by the effects the character can cause. I know the character is good, but having a situation that validates their particular build can make sense in-story and show the player that I’m not always out to get them. If they’re the Minus, then I give the encounter a lot of cover that interferes with line of sight or include monsters that can close to melee range without a problem. This means that the archer doesn’t unduly control the match, and it gives the defender a good chance to protect them or the melee striker a good chance to block a choke point.

I started using this idea this spring, and I quickly realized that I was gravitating to determining Pluses and Minuses based on the amount of damage dealt in combat. That is, I would build encounters to limit the power of strikers and increase the power of controllers and low-damage defenders and leaders. I know that I designed the system to occasionally subvert strikers, but subverting them in every battle wasn’t fun, logical, or intended. Realizing this was half the battle, but I also decided to only let a character be a Plus or be a Minus only once every few sessions, to spread both the wealth and the undeserved wrath.

If nothing else, I really like this system because it’s prompted me to design some interesting mechanics. There are only so many ways to deal with a character who can teleport four squares as a free action every turn or gets threatening reach, and few of them exist in the standard ruleset. Coming up with a power that stops it isn’t difficult, but making it believable in terms of the encounter is often hilarious. Ever design a creature with no standard, move, or minor actions? Because it’s awesome.

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Campaign Writeup: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

Posted on 24 August, 2011 by MssngrDeath

This weekend, my summer campaign ended. The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion was an urban-based, semi-dark campaign set in a typical D&D setting time-advanced to the Victorian era, with a bit more (magical) technology and a lot more egalitarianism. While performing local odd jobs, the players uncovered a plot to invade their city from the Plane of Shadow, in order to disrupt the creation of a Plane of Light. Further investigation led them to the leader of the plot, who informed them that a Plane of Light would eventually collapse the entire cosmology, and when the players tried to stop the ritual, they found themselves on the wrong end of an angel and her light-based creations and allies.

Here’s what I learned from running this campaign:

  • I have a hard time remembering that I’m running campaigns for grown-ups now. When I started DMing, I worried a lot about how to motivate the players to participate in the plot of the campaign, whatever it ended up being. I used to solve this with interesting, “love-to-hate” villains and problems that left no room for a party to opt out of them, but in this campaign I was surprised at the gusto with which the characters approached the plot. I think what’s getting me is that I expect players to need to be motivated, lest they spend weeks faffing about and trying to cause trouble. But I tend to have far fewer players these days that want to play the chaotic neutral rogue who hassles the NPCs and the world because its funny. Rather, players want a good plot. They’re willing to accept small in-character sacrifices (the party leader decides to deal with the problem himself rather than alert the authorities and leave it to them) for long-term story benefits (chasing an airship, unpaid, is more fun than sitting in the office waiting for another gainful job).
  • Players like guns. This was a Pathfinder campaign, but I think the first session predated the playtest firearms rules, so I designed my own. Rather than dealing with actual gun rules, I made them not unlike reskinned crossbows, and I expected that nobody would complain. I was right, but what I didn’t expect was for every character to have at least one gun. I’ve never had a campaign before where every player had a ranged weapon, even if it was a really good idea, but this time even the party healer had two. Though right now, I don’t know if it’s the reskinning, or if players just feel more comfortable with a loaded gun than a loaded crossbow, or what.
  • Speaking of Pathfinder, it’s great. I still feel more comfortable with 3rd Edition than 4th Edition, so running this campaign felt a bit like coming home. I was worried about how it would run with so little published material, but it never got in the way, and rarely did a player complain about not having an option that fit their character. We did do a little bit of messing with spells and items, but I think we’re learning what Paizo already knew, that you can get all the mileage you need out of little changes to existing material.
  • 3rd Edition can be reskinned startlingly well, at least on my end. We tend to feel locally that one of 4th Edition’s greatest strengths is its openness to not being played as written, because every power can have the serial numbers filed off and described however the player wants. Conversely, there are only so many ways to reskin a full attack action. But I tried to approach designing monsters with the 4th Edition mindset of “creatures can do whatever, but try to stick to certain power guidelines”, and not only did I get great monsters out of it, the players really didn’t seem to mind when an opponent had DR 10/light.

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

  • I would have memorized Pathfinder’s skill system more. For the whole campaign, I ran Pathfinder on Saturday afternoons, played 3.5 on Saturday evenings, and played 4th Edition on Sunday afternoons. For the second half of the campaign, I also played Fate on Thursday. Depending on the system and edition, a player can try to accomplish the same thing by making a Gather Information, Streetwise, Knowledge (local), or Contacts check, and I never got it entirely straight. Experienced players weren’t fazed, but players not well-versed in all of the systems were awfully confused when I asked them to make a check that wasn’t on their sheet, and I should have been able to prevent that.
  • I probably would have introduced more fantastic elements. One of the points of the setting was that this was a time-advanced world, but with all of the normal trappings of high fantasy. I could have included an NPC giant working and living in the warehouse district, or let the players use a magical communication system, or mentioned a country with a dragon republic, but I ended up running it like only the players had overt magical powers, which wasn’t accurate or terribly immersive.
  • Similarly, I should’ve gotten more pictures to show the players. I wrote a program to track combat and display information to the players, but I tend to have it sitting on one or two pictures for most of the session. This was even more pronounced in this campaign, where most of the action happened in one city with one picture. If I’m going to have a screen facing the party at all times, I need to use it more.

In general, I’m really happy about the campaign. I fully intend to come back to this world, and in fact these characters and their company, for later campaigns of similar length. All worlds have unexplored depth, but I don’t think I’ve run one that I want to explore as much as this, and the players seemed really keen on their characters and willing to come back. Rather than one long campaign, I think the series of mini-campaigns fits the pulp-style setting and allows characters to jump in and out with the interest of the players. Also, I want to get more mileage out of the map I made of the main city.

I would love to do campaign write-ups like this for the other campaigns I’ve run, but I don’t know that they’ll be this thorough. This one’s a bit more fresh in my mind than the things I ran in 2004.

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Law #2

Posted on 6 August, 2011 by MssngrDeath

I feel like Law #1 is actually pretty obvious, because it’s something like the first rule of half of the RPing systems I’ve seen. But Law #2 of my DMing style is something that I find an opportunity to use almost every week, especially during character creation, and it’s gotten to the point that people have started quoting it to each other without my prompting. Thus:

Law #2 – The player is at all times allowed to screw themselves over.

There’s a balance to D&D, loose and mutable as it may be. There’s a clear expectation that a level 10 character is stronger than a level 1 character, and that a level 20 character is stronger still. There’s also an expectation that spells get stronger, monster get tougher, and equipment gets better as level increases. Similarly, one feat should not be more powerful than three feats put together, characters at the same level in different classes should be somewhat comparable to each other, and so forth. The idea that there is some concept of balance is what makes advancement meaningful.

That said, violating this balance is the goal of many characters and most players. D&D is designed so that a party with a reasonable role split (traditionally, cleric / fighter / wizard / rogue) and reasonably-built characters (clerics don’t put 11s into Wisdom) has a reasonably good chance of surviving any reasonable threats. Because of this, there are a lot of opportunities to specialize in something far more than the game expects, and thus succeed wildly when the game expects a challenge. In addition, there are an awful lot of ways to combine mechanics or situations to break the game’s loose, delicate balance, and an awful lot of characters that rely on it.

So if a player comes up to me and asks explicitly for a less-powerful version of something that already exists for the purposes of flavor, I feel compelled to allow it. First, the player cares more about the flavor of the character than the power level of defeating challenges, meaning they’re fine with having a harder time if they can have more fun along the way, which is something for which I have a lot of respect. Second, a less powerful character is easier to design for, because I have to escalate less to keep things challenging. And third, it opens the gates for more interesting ideas down the line, as other players look at the change and think “I wonder if I can do something similar.”

Sometimes, it’s real obvious when somebody wants something that’s less powerful than something else. For example, if a player in 3rd Edition wants a mage armor that gives a +3 bonus instead of a +4 bonus because their character thinks 3 is a holy number, that clearly falls under this rule. Other times, it’s slightly harder, like an attack in 4th Edition that hits a monster with a save-ends effect on a hit, while on a miss the attack only lasts until the end of the character’s next turn. If a player wants to intentionally miss, preventing the opponent from getting a save against the ability before the player’s next turn, it is really worse? (For reference, I tend to rule yes.)

The best example of this is a hierarchy of damage types. In 3rd Edition, the four elements (fire, cold, acid, electricity) were considered equal, with sonic stronger. In 4th Edition, this isn’t as clear-cut. There are ten damage types and no official rules on which is stronger than which, so if a player says “I want to play a storm mage, but I want to reskin it like a sun mage, who does radiant and fire damage instead of lighting and thunder,” does it fall under Law #2? To answer this, we polled local DMs and players for their opinions on the power levels of the different damage types. We compiled the result to gain a fairly usable ranking, that told us that radiant is the most powerful damage type (very little is resistant to it, many things are vulnerable to it, and radiant powers often contain healing or buffing effects).

Thus, if you have a character that uses radiant attacks, but you instead want to use fire, the character is only becoming less powerful for this change, and it’s something I would allow. This is a wholesale change, though; if you want to convert radiant powers to fire, you have to convert all radiant powers to fire, because the intent is not to allow a character to pick and choose damage types until they have everything in the game. Also, feats change accordingly. A formerly-radiant power changed to fire would not benefit from a feat or item that increased fire damage, but would benefit from an effect that increased radiant damage. Basically, the player has to read every power, item, feat, and feature, mentally replace “fire with “delicious” (or something equally ignorable) and “radiant” with “fire”, and build the character with these changes in mind, all for the purpose of having a less powerful character that has the flavor they want.

The main issue I see with this system is that it requires a rather deep understanding of how the mechanics in the game work, to determine both whether something is more powerful than something else and whether the change will drastically effect the game or the character in one way or another. Because of that, it’s not the kind of thing that can be applied to anything at will. And in fact, this law has a corollary that I want to discuss later, where certain disadvantages aren’t actually disadvantages when applied in certain ways. But in general, since it’s the DM’s job to maximize the fun at the table, by extension it’s the DM’s job to help a player build a character that they’re going to enjoy playing, and I’ve found that players will gladly take a small hit in power to gain a huge boost in making a character that matches their vision.

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House Rule: Three-Axis Alignment

Posted on 28 July, 2011 by MssngrDeath

I feel the need to defend the D&D alignment system. I get the feeling it’s one of the most oft-derided parts of character creation, and in fact the general functioning of the system. I think most people see it as a yoke to pull characters into acting a certain way. For example, “Your character wouldn’t lie to the cops, they’re lawful good! You have to tell the truth!” Not only do I not agree with that example, but the system as written even says somewhere (explicitly, I think) that the alignment doesn’t dictate character actions, character actions dictate character alignment. I mean, if your character goes around lying and stealing, maybe they shouldn’t have been a paladin all along. And there’s no reason alignment can’t change over the course of the character either. I’m more lawful than I was as a teenager. If we’re restricting ourselves to an alignment, then we couldn’t change, and I would be restricted to what it says on my character sheet. That’s not how people work.

While thinking about this one day, it occurred to me that there was more room in the D&D alignment system for action. For example, I said actions dictate alignment and I believe it, but not everybody actively pursues their alignment every day. Some people are content to think what they think, do what they do, but not inflict their beliefs on the world around them. So I thought, there’s room here for a third alignment axis. In addition to the ethical and moral axes, I have tried to add an effort axis to my campaigns.

  • Active – An active character makes a point of trying to change the world and the people around them to their viewpoint. They know that their belief is the best for the situation at hand, and if only people could understand this, or if only the world worked this way, things would be better (“better” being somewhat up to debate, but mostly good for the active character.) A chaotic good active character might fight slave traders, run for office on a viewpoint of equality and egalitarianism, or protest some injustice they feel exists in the current system. A lawful evil active character would attempt to invent a status quo where they have power, or gradually nudge property lines (or something similar) to enhance their own wealth.
  • Reactive – A reactive character does not pursue changing the world to their viewpoint, but will defend it if it comes under fire. This alignment is typically situational; a reactive character may seem active under pressure but act passive in other circumstances. The key is a willingness to enact their alignment, but only in a situation they think warrants it. A true neutral reactive may wait until they see an imbalance in the world before they try to bring things back to neutrality, or they may try to maintain a balance among warring factions. A chaotic evil reactive will wait until some slight is done to them,  then exert full wrath on the perpetrators.
  • Passive – A passive character feels no need to exert any effort to forward their alignment. If someone asks, they may say why they feel the way they do, but they’re generally content to live their life and let others live theirs, no matter how stupid or wrong they may be. A neutral good passive character will do what they think is right and best for everyone, but doesn’t necessarily use this as a drive for what they do everyday. A lawful neutral passive character will follow the rules or their personal restrictions, but if the people around them don’t follow the same rules, that’s fine too.

I want to point out that I haven’t leveraged this third axis in my campaigns in any way. It’s not a requirement, just a neat, quick character building tool that I thought would be useful. For example, I have no restrictions that a paladin must be active; I don’t see why you couldn’t have a lawful good passive paladin defending a small church somewhere. I have no weapon enhancement called gumption that damages passive people, and I have no 7th level cleric spell called ambivalence that kills active characters and blinds reactive ones. I suppose if someone asked, I could add that, but if someone doesn’t want to deal with the complications of a third alignment, I have no intention of making them.

Notably, most PCs are probably active or reactive, and most NPCs are passive (in the same way that most NPCs are true neutral). Monsters can be anywhere; even a giant who regularly raids around the countryside could be chaotic evil passive because they’re not actively pursuing chaotic evil, they’re just doing what they need to do to survive (and they happen to be jerks about it). Now, if they go out of their way to inflict unnecessary harm on people, then we have a chaotic evil active monster. Much like the moral and ethical axes, there’s clearly some wiggle room between alignments on the effort axis, but I want to save the concept of granular alignments for another post.

This is kind of a work in progress. One of the reasons I wanted to post about it was in the hope that writing it down will help solidify it more in my own head. I’m still open to suggestions on how it should work or on the vocabulary used. And if someone thinks it’s the dumbest idea in the world, well, that’s why it’s optional in my campaigns as well.

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Law #0

Posted on 23 July, 2011 by MssngrDeath

I suppose it makes the most sense to start with what I think is the most fundamental thing about DMing, the thing that DMs need to understand before they do anything else. I’ve seen a lot of rulebooks say that Rule #0 is “The DM is always entirely right”, but putting that first and foremost actually skips over a whole level of understanding. It suggests (rightly) that the DM has the ability to throw out rules that don’t work with the game, but I feel that this begs the question of what works with the game. Thus:

Law #0 – The goal of the game is to have fun.

D&D is a role-playing game. I’ve seen too many DMs put the focus on the role-playing, but that’s just an adjective. It’s a game that you participate in by playing a role, but it’s a game before it’s anything else. The goal of the game is not to create engaging personalities (unless the players think that’s fun), to tell a detailed story (unless the players think that’s fun), to create powerful characters (unless the players think that’s fun), and so on. At its most basic, D&D is a vehicle for everybody at the table to have fun.

This includes the DM. Though there’s a wealth of information out there about how to make something interesting for the players, the person running the game has to enjoy it as well. If the players and the DM have different ideas about what’s fun, the game will degenerate real fast. The player with a bard with a five-paragraph backstory detailing their noble family’s fall from grace will not enjoy a campaign run by a DM who wants quick and dirty dungeon crawls, and the player with the optimized barbarian/fighter combination and an empty “name” spot on their character sheet won’t last long in a campaign run by a DM who adores party infighting and political intrigue. The best DMs I’ve met tend to balance their campaigns to accept most kinds of players, but the most successful ones have always enjoyed planning, running, and discussing their sessions from week to week, regardless of the actual content.

Personally, I try to include combat and non-combat problems in similar measures, and I try to challenge the players as much as the characters. There are a few ways in which I differ from other DMs I’ve seen, though:

  • I like high difficulty. I tend to find that the combats that the players still talk about are the ones where they felt closest to death. For example, in the Monster Campaign, the players fought an arrow demon that killed two members of the party (one who was leaving the campaign anyway), and everybody remembers that story and the fact that the fighter was not present for it. What nobody remembers is the combat occurring at the same time that originally caused the party to split, a colossal fire scorpion that the party steamrolled. Hard-won combats are more memorable and more enjoyable long-term than easy ones, even if at the time it feels terrible.
  • I like using information from many sources. I’ve only had one campaign were I restricted players from certain races (the Monster Campaign, which required it by nature) and once where I restricted classes (the Hyrule campaign, because of in-campaign flavor, though if I ran another Hyrule campaign I don’t think I’d do it again). The only equipment or magic that I’ve banned was because I thought it was too powerful for the campaign. Because of this, players are free to come up with all sorts of ridiculous ideas, like a man made of living slime, the world’s holiest tailor, and a kobold werepanther rogue raised by goliaths.
  • I like egalitarianism. Related to the above point, I strongly reject any rules or fluff restrictions based on race, gender, origin, etc. I try to make 50% of my NPCs and monsters female, and I make a point of putting non-standard races in positions where the players can interact with them. I don’t think it’s fun to play in or run a world where only elves can be great archers, or only first-born males can rule an area, or goblins can’t be mayor.
  • I don’t like save-or-die effects. They’re the laziest kind of difficulty. They’re not interesting and they don’t challenge the players, they’re just a quick way to put a threat in the room. I can’t wrap my mind around the idea that “roll a 14 or stop having fun” is a good mechanic in a rulebook or at a table. I have a standing rule in my campaigns that I won’t use any save-or-die effects as long as the players don’t.
  • I don’t like published campaign settings. In general, I think of them as too impersonal, resistant to modification, and occasionally nonsensical. All of my campaigns have a setting that I’ve designed, in varying degrees with the input of the players. It means that I can spontaneously decide on the race or age or class of a given individual, and I don’t have to check a book for what backstory this changes or what limitations are imposed on the character by their country or weapon of choice or something equally meaningless.

In all of these cases, I’m open to some wiggle room if the players think that the game will be better for it. For example, I’m fine with a player using save-or-die effects, as long as it means I can too (this usually causes the other players as the table to kindly demand that the original player reconsider).

I’ve found that as long as everybody looks at the game through the lens of “what would be the most fun for everybody here?”, there’s pretty much no way a session can go wrong. Most people already do his in small ways, like designing a character that fills in gaps left by the other members of the party, or casting a buff spell rather than trying an attack with a low chance of success, but difference is looking at the entire campaign with this sort of view. I don’t expect every player to be helpful to the game at all times, or for every player to always think about how everybody would feel if they made a certain decision, and the game is better for it. But when you look at everything that’s going on, the entirely point is to have fun, and it’s everybody’s responsibility, especially the DM’s, to maintain it.

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