Apparatus of Kwalish

Posted on 25 June, 2018 by Law

Every player can recall a moment when they latched onto something in a book, never to let it go. In fact, each player probably has several. Something about a class or a race or a spell tickled their brain and wedged itself in memory, and it became their mission to find a way to use it in game. Often it’s art that sticks out first, but art alone can’t do it. It’s a combination of how the object of their affection looks, how it runs, how it feels, and how they can apply it to a hypothetical character or campaign. It’s everything coming together in a mild obsession, such that a player can point at it and say “This? This thing right here? This is my jam.”

From anecdotal evidence and a bit of research, I think the apparatus of Kwalish is one of those obsessions for a lot of people. Introduced to D&D in 1979, it’s survived several edition and regime changes, continually popping up in Core sources like the Dungeon Master’s Guide. And why not? It’s an iron barrel filled with levers that transforms into a moving, drivable, crab-shaped submersible. It’s the closest thing D&D has to a mech or a submarine and there’s nothing else in the game like it. It enables weird exploration, it has stealth capabilities because it can transform back into an ordinary barrel, and it can even fight. What’s not to love?

I mean, besides the fact that it’s objectively terrible. Continue reading →

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Session Hangover

Posted on 20 June, 2018 by Law

In my last post I mentioned what I do the day after I run a session. That’s not exclusive to this campaign. Most of the time I use the next day to think about what worked, what didn’t, and where to go from there. Our sessions tend to run in the evenings, so it’s not practical to work on the campaign immediately afterward. Even when we game in the afternoon, I like having a chance to sleep on it before I do anything else.

But I also know I can’t wait a week, only touching the campaign again right before the next session. I’ve known DMs who do this, and that’s great, but it’s not how I work. If I wait that long, I find I’m not actually thinking about the campaign in the intervening week, which means I’m coming into my preparation with a bad memory of the previous session and no fully-formed ideas about where to go next. I have to start on the next session in that sweet spot, when the last session is still fresh in my mind but not so fresh there’s no room for anything else.

I call this the session hangover, in that it happens the morning after the session and has many of the same symptoms (headache, depression, anxiety, sweating, that sort of thing). Continue reading →

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Ask the DM

Posted on 16 June, 2018 by Law

Small blog update: I’ve added an “Ask the DM” link to the menu at the top of the page. If you have any questions or requests for future blog posts, hit me up.

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Faith: Planning through Time

Posted on 11 June, 2018 by Law

I know I’ve been talking a lot about Faith lately, and that’s unusual for this blog. I rarely give updates on my current campaigns because I expect readers will find them boring. A session-by-session recap is more for the creative types who can turn them into a proper narrative, while my style of gaming really lends itself more to the live presentation. When I do talk about my campaigns it’s usually in the context of gaming advice in general. But from my conversations with other players and DMs, I got the impression that there was some appetite for information about this campaign, not least because of its premise. Time travel is a messy, complicated mechanic, and giving it to several creative, free-willed players intensifies its most dangerous aspects. People wanted to know how it would work, either for their own campaigns or out of morbid curiosity, and I thought it would be a fun idea to write about how I manage time travel in a tabletop campaign.

So it’s with some embarrassment that I admit after a dozen sessions I’m still not sure what I’m doing myself, but I contend that this is a good thing.

Continue reading →

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Player Secrets

Posted on 6 June, 2018 by Law

One of the running themes in my posts is that good games have players who communicate with each other. To quote a previous post:

I think the best advice I’ve ever gotten for gaming is the best advice I’ve ever gotten in general: communicate…Communication is the principle behind cooperative design, session zero, this blog itself, and the very concept of cooperative tabletop play. If players and DMs don’t talk to each other, you don’t have a game at all.

A lot of my advice is about the ways DMs and players communicate and how, how often, when, and why it occurs. But there’s a key assumption here, that players want to communicate with each other. What if, for whatever reason, they very pointedly don’t?

Continue reading →

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Faith: Character Portraits

Posted on 3 June, 2018 by Law

A quick note: there’s been an update to the character page for Faith. Our partist party artist has drawn character portraits for everybody, so now we have art I’m allowed to post online.

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The Splash Damage of Alignment Restrictions

Posted on 31 May, 2018 by Law

I’ve been trying to come up with something else nice to say about 5E. I don’t think it’s a bad system, I just think it took away a lot of the things I like about running D&D games like agency and accomplishment. It still did several things right, like backgrounds (though the playtest version of them was much more interesting, closer to themes instead of “choose your life story from a dropdown list”), inspiration (though the rule as written invalidates its stated purpose and I vastly prefer the Angry GM’s version), and simple multiclassing (there’s no caveat here; I actually really like the multiclass spellcasting). There’s another quiet change of which I approve, more an absence of a rule than a rule itself: there are no alignment restrictions.

I didn’t even notice this until I went looking for it to see how badly it would hurt me, and I was pleasantly surprised to find few places where alignment even mattered. Monks don’t have to be lawful, because you don’t need a rigid code of ethics to be good at punching and running. Paladins don’t have to be lawful good, because a character can commit to evil just as easily as to goodness. Druids don’t have to be neutral, because “to follow nature, you have to be nature” sounds like the sort of statement one can only follow with “…you feel me, man?”. Even spells like detect evil and good only care about creature types, not evil or good itself. Character building in 5E has limitations and hard-coded assumptions, but none of them hinge on your alignment, binding you to a specific side in a specific war by virtue of your class. Which is good, because alignment restrictions don’t just bind the character you’re building. They bind other players too, and possibly the whole campaign.

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Faith: Opening and Ending

Posted on 26 May, 2018 by Law

I love working music into campaigns. Whether it’s using the lyrics of a song as inspiration for a plot or naming campaign villains after a specific artist’s works, tying music into the game is among the most deeply rewarding, if normally private, activities I do as a DM. I think of them almost like Easter eggs I leave for myself, inside jokes as much as creative tools. Though it’s even better if players can figure them out too, and I’ve been known to pick music that hints at plotlines or spells out enemy weaknesses to reward the enterprising researcher. I haven’t yet built an entirely campaign around a soundtrack, but I’m slowly inching my way there.

Obviously Faith was always going to have an anime-style opening and closing song, but I couldn’t approach them the same way I usually do. First, the songs had to be Japanese pop or rock, not the genres I usually use. Second, they couldn’t already be tied to an existing anime, because I was worried any association with a known work would be too strong for be to overcome. Third, they could not relate to the campaign or its plot in a meaningful way. Anime themes rarely have very much to do with the shows they bound and I wanted to keep up that fine if weird tradition. With this in mind the feel of a song became much more important than the lyrics, and I had to go digging until I found something with the emotional impact I wanted.

Now that we’re halfway through the first season of the campaign (episode 13 is today) I’ve finally found something I’m happy with:

Continue reading →

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A Window in the Fourth Wall

Posted on 23 May, 2018 by Law

DMing involves a lot of juggling acts. You have to balance what you want versus what the players want, challenge versus frustration, character and player spotlights, and all the payoffs that keep people at your table. Different games involve different tradeoffs; a DM with a rules lawyer and a thespian in the party faces different challenges from a DM with five min-maxers with competing builds, and only certain campaigns have to handle keeping the feel of a popular video game franchise. There’s no single piece of advice I can give on keeping everybody’s interests out of conflict, but the most helpful thing I can suggest is to keep everybody communicating. As an example, I have a story to share.

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Faith: Signature Items (Angeline)

Posted on 17 May, 2018 by Law

I had a rule of thumb for the capstone abilities: if a player read the ability I was trying to give them and their only response was “are you high?”, I did it right. Each capstone is ludicrously powerful, able to swing a battle all on its own. They’re basically custom 10th-level spells, atomic representations of the characters both by the dictionary definition of atomic and the fact that they’ll blow up an entire combat. With that in mind, I love this capstone. Of all the things I’ve written for D&D, this ranks among my favorites, alongside the healer class or spells like Grog’s audible profanity.

Angeline’s item is something like the opposite of Jace’s. Jace wanted to be good at one specific spell, but Angeline could end up with any spell in the book, so she needed an item that would complement almost anything and everything Pathfinder had to offer. Also, it had to be pretty. As if that wasn’t rough enough, Angeline is also the party’s smart guy by omission (Liam, the bard, is actually the chick, and Sarai, the scholar, is actually the big guy) but had exactly zero ability to perform that role. The solution I got was to ignore the build entirely and focus on the character. Angeline isn’t a sorcerer, she’s a magical girl, so I looked for neat magical girl powers and translated them into Pathfinder rules. That’s what I did the whole time, really, but here it stands out more than in other places.

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