DMing with Charisma

Players most strongly remember two kinds of fights: the very easy and the very hard. If a fight seems difficult on paper and the players blow clean through it with good rolls, good strategy, and/or a good builds, they’ll tell that story for years if only because it’s hilarious. If a fight pushes them right to the edge, they’ll remember it too, either because they overcame a difficult challenge or because they lost. Many fights fall in between, and that’s fine. Each fight should mean something to the game, but not every fight has to be a life event.

Boss fights are different. They should be memorable, which means they shouldn’t be humdrum, by-the-numbers encounters. The more important a boss fight is, the more it should test the players’ and character’s limits. I trust this concept is not controversial. The problem is doing it. How do you make a fight hard enough to test the party but not so hard you accidentally wipe them out? Continue reading →

Stealing boss ideas is easy once you get used to it. A DM can pick up almost any game with a boss, pick almost any boss in that game, and apply it to their game for a fun encounter. But, as I like to say, every project in the world, from D&D sessions to movies to entrepreneurial pursuits, begins with two steps:

1. Hey, you know what would be cool?
2. No, seriously, how would we even do that?

Every fun concept must eventually match up to reality. Once you have a boss idea, you have to apply it to the system rules (or choose which rules to violate/ignore, but that’s a whole other topic). That means figuring out how to work it into your campaign, but also balancing the encounter against what the party can handle. Continue reading →

Boss fights are hard. Most editions of D&D really aren’t designed to handle them, so there’s no simple math you can do to turn a fight into a boss. You could just apply a template to a monster or give the players an enemy X levels above them or give it Y minions, but none of those methods work on their face because they’re all intended to make the fight harder. They don’t make it more interesting. A boss should be difficult, and we’ll talk about that soon, but more imperatively it should be an interesting encounter. The players should remember the boss fight more than they remember the mooks leading up to it, and that generally means it shouldn’t be simply a scarier version of those mooks. The fight needs something to make it fun, and that responsibility falls squarely on the DM.

The most important thing in a boss encounter is what the boss does. Monsters are differentiated by their powers, far more than by their ability scores or equipment or strategy, and a boss should have boss-level powers. Coming up with those powers is an art, especially in 5E where monsters tend to work a lot like each other and Challenge Ratings are more the results of guesswork than usable tools for estimating encounter difficulty. And since we don’t have a good system for creating boss powers, and thus boss monsters, from whole cloth, we have to rely on a tried-and-true method that has existed since the beginning of the game: stealing them. Continue reading →

A few actual, non-hyperbolic years ago, I said this:

Yes, having an odd ability score as an ability damage buffer is a type of metagaming. But it’s also a way of defining a character. As in, “Rock Hardslab is so strong! He can even take a hit from a wraith and barrel on, unharmed, where lesser action heroes might falter!” I could have a whole other post someday on how selling something the right way can be the difference between rejection and applause.

This is that post. Continue reading →

I’ll admit the name of the last post inspired this one, but its a valid topic besides.

I have been fortunate in my DMing career in that I’ve rarely had to deal with players who cannot stand each other. It’s much more likely that I don’t like a particular player, but I’m a lot more tolerant of my own suffering than others’, and such a player can stick around in my campaign for a while. On the other hand, if two players can’t coexist, one or both of them don’t last longer than a couple of sessions in our circle.

Having two characters who can’t stand each other is something completely different. Intra-party strife is a time-tested source of drama, entertainment, and character development. It encourages the group to look at problems from different perspectives and consider options they might ignore if the party was all of like mind. It helps define the group as a collection of individuals who work together rather than a group who think in concert. It’s a good tool all around…as long as it’s done maturely, it doesn’t detract from the table experience, and there’s no actual malice behind it. Continue reading →

I’ve begun a new campaign, because I am very dumb. While Faith is closing out its first season I’ve also put together Under the Stars, a campaign I loosely described to the players as Breath of the Wild meets Ni No Kuni 2, video games I’d been interacting a lot with lately. A new campaign means a new Session Zero, which means another opportunity to break out the old campaign survey, my favorite method for getting everybody on the same page in terms of campaign feel. While there’s some wiggle room in each survey question, for the most part it’s pretty straightforward. Players know the difference between a G-rated campaign and an PG-rated campaign, or the difference between leaning slightly urban and leaning slightly rural. I don’t have to spend a lot of time explaining what the results mean.

“Tone/Mood”, however, isn’t always as clear, and it’s a hard concept to fit into a simple 1-to-7 scale. Even the descriptions in the survey are kind of all over the place; they say a light campaign has clearly-defined good and evil while a dark campaign has moral ambiguity, but they also say a dark campaign has more elements of horror. Those aren’t equivalent. Really they’re two separate concepts that can go hand-in-hand but just as often don’t. The descriptions are more examples of what could be “light” and “dark”, not exhaustive lists. Finding a proper definition for tone is harder than that, and it’s worth doing. Continue reading →