Adaptations

Posted on 19 February, 2018 by Law

I’ve been referencing Chrono Trigger a lot as I talk about Faith, my players’ latest attempt to ruin not just one of my settings but several settings throughout history. But that’s not because I’m trying to run a Chrono Trigger campaign, because I’m not. If I was, we’d be reskinning thing much harder to fit with the four allowed magic types, I would have a system for double- and triple-techs, and I definitely wouldn’t be running in Pathfinder. But I still wouldn’t limit the campaign to only three players and I would be using my own world maps. The important things about Chrono Trigger to me aren’t the three-person party or Porre Village specifically. They don’t make things feel like Chrono Trigger to me as much as Lavos and Spekkio and tag team moves, and how my players and I feel about a work is the most important part of creating an tabletop adaptation for it.

When I say “adaptation”, I don’t mean “a copy in a new medium”. We’re not turning a book into a movie, trying to hit the same story beats while improving what we can with visuals and making the fewest concessions for time and budget constraints. Adapting something to tabletop gaming isn’t about doing the same thing over again. It’s about getting the feel of the original work and duplicating that feel in a new story with new characters because we like both the original work and the agency tabletop gaming gives us. We want the room to make a campaign that’s more of an homage than a copy, where we can leave our own mark on it while enjoying something we like in a new way.

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Faith: World Maps

Posted on 12 February, 2018 by Law

As part of planning for Faith, our time travel campaign where the characters go through history adjusting events so their respective gods can become top-tier members of their pantheon, I realized I would need world maps. That’s maps, plural. Chrono Trigger, our thematic launch point, had one world map for each era and expected the players to traverse all of them fully. A simple “yeah, this island is tropical or whatever” wouldn’t suffice for our campaign. The players need the ability to make intelligent decisions based on the current timeline and what they think they can do to change it, and that means I shouldn’t arbitrarily limit their ability to move. I mean, I’m going to limit it. It just won’t be arbitrary.

I made several world maps, one for each era, and decided to hide them from the players so they couldn’t review them until the dramatic reveal. Upon further consideration, I realized that was dumb. I should expect characters to know something about their world, at least as much as most modern people know about other countries, and letting the players see only the world map from their corner of history doesn’t actually add anything to the campaign. This way there’s some chance I’ll get players interested in things like “why is this continent bigger than before?” or “why did this island rotate?”. Questions like that tell me what the players want to know, and thus what they want to see in the game, and thus what I should put into my adventures. So here they are:

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A Comedy of Eras

Posted on 7 February, 2018 by Law

I’ve wanted to use that as a post name forever.

There are a lot of “nevers” in conventional DMing advice, and I’ve been on something of an unofficial quest to violate all of them. Consider “never give the players wishes”, but when my players got on a genie’s good side their wishes fed into the campaign plot and basically wrote another campaign for me. Or “never railroad the players,” but the Zelda campaign’s incredibly rigid story structure helped make it one of my best campaigns. Or “never give a player in-character authority over other players”, but I’ve done this for more campaigns than I haven’t, and it’s always worked because the players aren’t petty about their characters’ power structure. Even “never let a player use an unbalanced option that makes them stronger than other players”, but I let a player have a deliberately overpowered version of a spiked chain* and nobody batted an eye. For the most part “never” doesn’t actually mean “never”, it means “consider carefully your intentions and any foreseeable repercussions before you”.

It is with this in mind that I consider the advice “never use time travel” and intend to spend my next campaign willfully ignoring it.

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Subclasses, and What Came Before

Posted on 24 January, 2018 by Law

This is DMing with Charisma’s 300th post. I was planning on an important, sweeping post describing how my last campaign affected me and how it will affect all of my campaigns going forward from the standpoint of the table experience and the game’s social contract. But instead, let’s talk about something I do like about 5E: subclasses.

Traditionally, a character’s class affects his place in the game more strongly than his other choices. His ability scores affect how good he is at things, and his feats affect specific corner cases, and race can be very relevant if you’re a terrible person, but a class lays out most of what a character does. It determines whether he’s good with certain kinds of equipment, whether he can cast magic, how easy it is to grow in other areas like skills, what things he can do that nobody else can, and often his role within the party. Obviously it’s not as simple as “all fighters have good AC and swing swords and can’t use spells”, but as players we do get a certain picture in mind when we think “fighter”. It’s exactly why I ask my players to describe their characters without using class names, because we have those mental shortcuts telling us how each class works in the game.

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The Role of Rolls

Posted on 8 January, 2018 by Law

The essence of D&D, and arguably of tabletop roleplaying at all, is randomness. For years it was right there in the name: D&D ran on the d20 system, where players roll a 20-sided die and use rules to interpret the result. Everything about the system comes down to rolling somewhere, and even non-random choices like “you can Hide after making an attack” are actually ways to affect the randomness (here, creating a random chance to hide where normally no such chance would exist). It feels a bit silly to critique 5E for a mechanic it shares with (almost literally) every other game.

The issue at hand is the amount of randomness. Obviously there’s a sweet spot. Too much randomness and there’s no player agency, but too little and there’s no point to the system at all. Which, as I write it, is a succinct way of stating my point: the more randomness there is, the less say players have over what happens, and vice versa. Now that I’m nearly twenty sessions into 5E I think I can safely say the randomness is far more than in any system I’ve played, and that’s incredibly bad.
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The Superman Problem

Posted on 3 January, 2018 by Law

After several weeks of illness and travel, my first D&D 5E campaign has finally wrapped up. But in the long stretch of time between last two sessions, I realized a normal campaign post-mortem wouldn’t really cover the things I wanted to say. I think it’s more helpful to discuss each issue separately so it has the space it needs, and I’d like to begin by telling you about a pro wrestling match I saw right after the penultimate session.

It featured two popular, skilled men in a match that had minor implications in their storyline but was more an excuse to give both of them something to do. It was a gripping, back-and-forth affair where both competitors pulled out surprising, athletic maneuvers, and they kept the action moving quickly and constantly. Commentary covered it well, the crowd stayed interested, there were no ridiculous shenanigans to take away from the match or the result, and both wrestlers came out looking like beasts, one for his skill and the other for his determination against great odds. It was fun, it was entertaining, it was excellently performed, and I hated it.
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The Secret Language of Character Sheets: Examples

Posted on 15 October, 2017 by Law

Reading a character sheet isn’t easy, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for. “Longsword: +6 to attack, 1d8+3 damage” doesn’t actually mean anything without context, and that context is usually buried in gaming rules and minutia. Even if you have a frame of reference, like knowing you’re looking at a 2nd-level fighter in 3.5E, the context changes based on the campaign style (“Why don’t you have a magic weapon yet?”), the challenges (“You’re almost guaranteed to kill any goblin in a single hit, that’s ridiculous.”), the setting (“A longsword? So you’re showing off that you’re a foreigner?”), and too many other factors to list. I can’t give you a detailed primer on how to know if your character’s abilities, or the abilities of your players’ characters, fit the character or characters you want to play. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself within your campaign framework.

What I can do is give you examples of reading character sheets for information and what we learned from those examples. These aren’t direct recommendations like “if a character’s attack bonus falls below the recommended range for an attack bonus at the character’s level, that character is not interested in front-line combat”. Hard and fast rules don’t work for this. Instead they’re concepts, gentle nudges that say “here’s what we noticed, here’s what it meant, here’s how we reacted or did not react, and here’s the result” to demonstrate the general flow of this activity.
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The Secret Language of Character Sheets: Theory

Posted on 8 October, 2017 by Law

There is perhaps no less fruitful question in my daily life then “what do you want for dinner?” The perfect answer is something direct and attainable like “grilled cheese sandwiches with ham like you made three weeks ago”. Acceptable answers include “pizza”. But the most common answer is some version of “I don’t know.” It’s frustrating, it’s unhelpful, and it is completely reasonable.

In my experience, rarely does it actually mean “I don’t know.” It usually means something much more nuanced like “I want a meal that’s warm and hearty but not too heavy, strong on umami but light on salt, preferably heavily sauced, but right now I don’t have the wherewithal to express that.” A person typically knows what they want to eat, but they can’t express it in language. They just know a particular dish or place or culinary style sounds good or bad, and they consider those dishes and places and styles rather than finding the links among them to get a picture of their current perfect meal. That’s neither wrong nor surprising. It takes knowledge of food to be able to say what you want in food terms, and it takes knowledge of self to be able to even begin looking at your wants in that way, and most people don’t have both in sufficient capacity.
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Campaign Write-up: The Eight Arms and the Day That Wasn’t

Posted on 27 September, 2017 by Law

I don’t spend a lot of time here talking about how my current campaigns are going. I generally only mention what we’re doing week-by-week when it’s something I can apply to gaming in general or an opportunity to make fun of my bad luck. There’s probably some fun to be had in a narrative, in-character description of what we do each session, but that’s not really in keeping with a GMing advice blog.

Luckily there are other blogs, and one of my players is keeping an online journal for our campaign. Please thrill to the adventures of Dael, written by a player who heard me say “I want this campaign to be darker and more serious” and decided to play a drunken master of a monastic order founded on a typo. If you really what to go blog diving, this is the same player who brought us Egan Mospru, another character in the same setting, and Lao, Laotzu, and Lao!ze, the latter of whom is in this setting by virtue of becoming a god. I’m pretty sure this character will survive the campaign and complete his story, but it’s my first go at 5th Edition. So far I’ve only almost killed three characters in three sessions, so fingers crossed!

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Campaign Report – Monster of the Week

Posted on 18 September, 2017 by Law

In July I finished my first non-d20 campaign. Having played in and more or less enjoyed campaigns in Fate, Icons, and a Powered by the Apocalypse system, I wanted to apply that sort of narrative, rules-light feel to a campaign in the Eight Arms universe and see how it mapped to somewhat stereotypical D&D. We’d already been giving the rules a bit of a light touch in Pathfinder and I thought running in a system that actually supported it was the next logical step. I settled on Monster of the Week as the system because it matched the feel and the presentation I wanted; most PbtA systems I see are about settings more than anything else, and finding a system that worked in multiple settings was an unexpected boon. Our group applied one of the ideas we’d had while faffing about one week, of a group of low-level folks who begrudgingly dealt with a high-magic world, and gave it a whirl.

It didn’t go great. To put it pithily, the campaign ended more than a month ago and I’ve only recently separated myself from it enough to have a logical opinion on what happened. It was not a crushing failure, but it wasn’t a rousing success either. I went through several rounds of blaming myself, blaming the players, and blaming the system, in that order, until I think I’ve come to a point where I can look at what we did, what went wrong, and how to handle it in the future, all without burying any of the people who decide whether my characters live or die next week. My general takeaway is that while the campaign might have had its good points, this confluence of GM, player group, and play style was not a good match and I’m probably not going to do it again.
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