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.

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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.

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Law #2

Posted on 6 August, 2011 by Law

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 Law

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 Law

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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