DMing with Charisma

Campaign Writeup: The Nine Emblems

Posted on 12 December, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in Campaigns, Gaming Systems | Tagged Campaign Reports, D&D 3.5E, D&D 3E | Comments Off

A Rant on Dragons

Posted on 5 December, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged D&D 3.5E, D&D 4E, Pathfinder | 2 Comments

A Rant on Racial Prerequisites

Posted on 29 November, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged D&D 3.5E, D&D 3E, D&D 4E | 2 Comments

Doing the Impossible

Posted on 6 November, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged D&D 3.5E, D&D 4E | Comments Off

D&D Stats in Simple Language

Posted on 23 October, 2011 by Law

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

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems | Tagged D&D 3.5E, D&D 3E, Pathfinder | 76 Comments

Law #1

Posted on 20 October, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems, Laws | Tagged D&D 3.5E, D&D 3E, D&D 4E | Comments Off

Law #3

Posted on 30 September, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Gaming Systems, Laws | Tagged D&D 3.5E, D&D 3E, D&D 4E | 1 Comment

Law #4

Posted on 21 September, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing, Laws | 2 Comments

Encounter Design: Pluses and Minuses

Posted on 1 September, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing | Tagged D&D 4E | 2 Comments

Campaign Writeup: The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion

Posted on 24 August, 2011 by Law

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.

Posted in DMing | Tagged Campaign Reports, Eight Arms, Pathfinder | 2 Comments