DMing with Charisma

Concept: Lucid dreaming
Tested in: The Great Tower of Oldechi

What it is: D&D likes working via cause and effect. Orcs don’t lose hit points at random, they lose hit points when they get hit by hammers. Wounds don’t heal except when treated by magic, medicine, or time, no matter how much a player might prefer that their character had taken no damage. Spontaneous, unexplained occurrences live solely in the realm of flavor, and even then they sometimes have rational explanations, like a thick fog covering the besieged village because a druid is keeping it there. And while a DM can get away with the occasional illogical act, players don’t have the same leeway. Their actions should always make some sort of sense.

But Floor 27 of the Great Tower ran entirely on random occurrences. It was so random, I don’t even have notes for it, except at some point I think the party fought Tiamat. Everything was generated live at the table, and the players eventually learned that it was because the entire floor was mutable. Once they figured that out, they wanted to take advantage of it.

Using a technique I adapted from the Dresden Files RPG, I let them affect the floor by rolling three simultaneous checks. Basically, they could declare anything they wanted and it would happen. But their Intelligence check would determine the result of their declaration, their Wisdom check would determine its severity, and a Charisma check would determine its form. For example, a player might say “a wave of lava surges over the people chasing us and buries them”. Good results on all their rolls would cause exactly that, no further justification needed. A bad Intelligence check would have a bad result (the lava does not bury the enemies, but instead lights them on fire so they deal extra damage), a bad Wisdom check would have the opposite severity (the lava doesn’t “surge” as much as “trickle”, creating maybe one square of difficult terrain), and a bad Charisma check would have a different form (the wave is actually a crowd of people doing the wave, holding back the enemies with a mass of bodies; not functionally different, but weirder, and it might lead to other applications later). Continue reading →

Concept: Multi-character characters
Tested in: The One Piece campaign

What it is: As a shounen fighting manga, One Piece has a lot of battles. We did a pretty good job of simulating it in the One Piece campaign, with recurring enemies and climactic boss fights and whatnot. But fighting manga tends to resolve things one-on-one, while D&D is a party-based game. When it came time to end the campaign with a series of destined battles, we didn’t want to violate the setting by shoehorning the enemies into balanced groups so we could fight them on even footing, but we also didn’t want to violate the game by having fights where one player acted while everybody else sat down and watched. We needed a third option.

To solve this we leveraged a trope from the genre: heroes who tap into unknown stores of power to fight enemies who push them to their limits. To represent that in D&D, we decided that each character, for the purposes of their destined battle and only that battle, would actually be represented by multiple “characters”. For each fight, the relevant player designed three simple one-shot characters to back up their main character as a balanced party. For example, the cleric with tentacle powers created a defender, a controller, and a striker and reskinned them as masses of tentacles. By the rules, we were all different characters, but narratively, we were all controlling different parts of the same PC. The other players controlled these one-shot characters over four or five sessions made entirely of battles and shounen-style banter. Continue reading →

Concept: All-minion combat
Tested in: The Great Tower of Oldechi

What it is: In D&D 4E, minions were a creature type with static damage and only one hit point. They rarely had more than two powers (a melee attack and a ranged attack, or an attack and a movement power, etc.) and almost never had any consumable power. They were intended to supplement an encounter and give the PCs some roadblocks on the way to the actual monsters, serving as fodder the party didn’t have to focus on but couldn’t ignore either.

The rules said that four minions equaled one normal monster for the purposes of the XP budget (though later rules suggested using five minions at mid-level and six at high-level, to account for their low damage growth and the PCs’ increased access to multi-target powers). Since 4E was based around five monsters per combat, that meant a combat with twenty minions was technically a fair encounter. I had a party exploring a coastline, so I decided to hit them with a horde of murlocs, the numerous, irritating creatures we all knew from World of Warcraft. Continue reading →

Concept: Side-scrolling combat
Tested in: Delve Night and The Great Tower of Oldechi

What it is: D&D’s combat map has always been top-down, since before it was even D&D. It is, after all, a tabletop game, not a wallside game. Everything assumes you’re fighting on a mostly flat surface, perhaps with other flat surfaces around at different elevations. Underwater combat and flying enemies are a hassle because there’s rarely a good way to represent them, especially with physical miniatures, and everything from spells to fire breath to weapon reach is expressed in terms of how far it affects the world horizontally. Normally this is fine, but when you want an usually vertical combat, the rules sort of give up.

By taking the map and turning it sideways, we turned the top-down game into a side-scrolling game. Measuring vertical distance became trivial as it was exactly the same as horizontal distance. Mobile characters, like those who could jump or fly or teleport, got to use the full breadth of their abilities, and even slow, stable characters benefited because we made every walkable surface only five feet wide and there was no longer an easy way to get around them. Flanking was harder because there were only two spaces around a character instead of eight, but few other powers needed significant changes, especially in 4E where every area effect is a square. Continue reading →

Concept: Atypical damage dice
Tested in: Delve Night

What it is: The defunct miniatures game Dreamblade used six-sided dice for damage, but not the sort of dice from every other game. Normal dice have the sides 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6. Dreamblade dice have 1 / 2 / 3 / a hollow diamond / a filled-in diamond / the dreamblade. Our FLGS had a bunch of these dice available, so we used them in a Dreamblade-themed Delve Night session. Instead of any damage dice, players could (and the DM must) instead roll a Dreamblade die.

Numbers worked as expected. Rolling the the hollow diamond was equivalent to rolling a 0, and the filled-in diamond was maximum damage for the dice the player sacrificed. The dreamblade was twice the maximum. So if a player decided to rolled a Dreamblade die instead of a d8, the sides of that dice effectively were 1 / 2 / 3 / 0 / 8 / 16. Continue reading →