31 Dec 08 - The Advantage of Familiarity In Regards to Huge, Slavering Hell-Beasts

I've noticed something. Of those wonderful people who think up horrifying monsters for players to encounter during a tabletop role-playing session, many of them struggle with originality.

They strive to create thoughtful histories and almost complete ecologies for their creatures, in the attempt to create a monster that's not just another vicious humanoid.

I'd like to take a moment to say: They don't need to.

If I'm questing through a dark, eldritch forest, and something leaps out at me, I want to know how to react. Do I swing my katar at it? Do I make threatening moves? Do I very much not make threatening moves? Do I close in or keep my distance?

If I'm fighting a completely original creature, I've no idea how to react to the thing. So I usually have to resort to careful investigation ("Does it seem particularly muscular?"), trial and error ("I poke it."), or having fun with it ("I rush in and stab it, screaming the whole time!").

How much fun is that? Not much (for me, anyway). And certainly not if the same scenario occurs for creature in an adventure. I need some facts I can grab on to.

If, on the other hand, I encounter a bear with lizard-like skin, I know roughly how to react. It may spring plenty of surprises on me, but at least I have a framework within which to act.

Which is fundamental to role-playing. One reason for D&D's popularity is its medieval universe, which is familiar to all of us from reading The Hobbit under the covers as children. We know how to react to most environments in the world, at least basically. The challenge lies in keeping our characters alive and achieving their goals, which usually have nothing to do with the originality of the random creature that drops on their heads as they creep through the Sapphire Caverns.

Now, I love a well-thought-out, unusual creature. I applaud it. But if creature #5 is basically a wolf, don't worry. It'll still be fun.

Posted in Role-playing

16 Dec 08 - Practical Advice: Initiative Cards

I believe that speed is essential to good role-playing. Think of a good action movie or an engrossing book; the story rockets from revelation to revelation, leaving you breathless. Not that a GM should rush from one plot point to the next, but there's no point in taking a plot slowly.

Unfortunately, many of the rules and resolution mechanisms in role-playing systems slow down the game as players roll dice and compare numbers. They're necessary, sure, but the time they consume needs to be minimized.

Enter initiative cards. This one of those little tricks that drastically speed up a game.

Imagine a 3x5" card that contains the following information:

• Character Name
• Initiative score
• Max HP
• Current HP
• Standard attack
• Vulnerabilities

Imagine writing up one of these for each character (player and non-player). When a battle begins, write down the initiative scores, and order the cards by that score.

Boom. You call out the name of the player on the first card. The player attacks an NPC. You pull out the NPC's card, note any damage, and slip it back in. You then flip to the next card and announce that player's turn.

And battle zips from one player to the next. No need to write down a temporary initiative list, and all vital stats are in one place.

Even better, on subsequent battles you just sort in the appropriate NPC cards. Takes about ten seconds to set up for a battle.

It's greatly sped up my games. I'd prefer to just do away with initiative altogether, but that's another blog post.

Posted in Role-playing

10 Dec 08 - What I like about D&D

All right, I admit it: I play Dungeons & Dragons. This may horrify some of my evangelical friends, but trust me: there's nothing wrong with it.

You may ask, why play D&D when it has so many negative connotations? Why not use one of the hundreds of other role-playing systems out there, like FUDGE or GURPS?

First, I'll use Saalon's metaphor: D&D is like Microsoft Windows. Everyone uses it and it works okay, though it's kinda bloated and sometimes confusing.

I contend that World of Darkness is like the Mac, and FUDGE/GURPS are like Linux, but those are different subjects.

So, I play D&D because it's a standard. It provides a common context for discussing role-playing with others, and if I'm playing with a bunch of folks I don't know, D&D's a convenient default.

But that shouldn't be the only reasons. I play D&D because it's fun. It's exciting and adventurous; it feels like a big, epic fantasy action/adventure movie.

Well, the current 4^th edition feels that way. I also played 3.5 Edition, which felt more like an overly-long series of fantasy novels.

4^th Edition D&D provides a huge world, brimming with possibility. There are dozens of fascinating races, all scrambling over an ever-evolving world of good, evil, conflict, and flashing steel. You can throw yourself into combat, or negotiate with merchants, or haggle with kings.

(Can you tell that I love setting?)

The system works quite well, too. It's a heavy system, compared to all the others out there, but it works. You choose values for six core attributes, such as Strength and Intelligence. Your race and class (profession, like cleric or warlord) may improve those numbers, and will give you access to a menu of powers. Some powers can be used as often as desired, others only once per battle, and others once per day. You then choose from a set of skills, which are all affected by your attributes (a high Strength score makes you better at Acrobatics).

I'm not as crazy about the two-step combat mechanic, where you roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit, then another die (number of sides depending on the weapon) to determine how much damage you do. Combat can grind to nearly a standstill as half a dozen players roll their dice in turn.

But even that has its charm, with players picking out a shiny d8 or d10 to roll their damage.

It works. D&D is fun. It's goofy, and overly complex at times, but it's a fine way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, romping through a huge fantasy world and baring your teeth at dragons.

There are worse ways to spend a Saturday.

Posted in Role-playing

4 Dec 08 - Standards For Published Adventures

Before I published War in the Deep, I wanted to be sure I was publishing a good-looking, professional adventure. So I bought a few.

D&D adventures are of startlingly high quality, even those made by individuals. Of course, the official, published, $30 adventures look fantastic, though I knew I wouldn't achieve that level of quality on my first attempt.

I did have some minimum standards, though:

• There had to be maps, using standard squares, in color.
• (Thanks to Johnn Four) The colors had to be of sufficient contrast that they'd print beautifully in black-and-white. Most folks still don't have color printers at home, after all.
• The adventure had to work with a range of player levels. My players advance so quickly that an adventure designed for one level would only be useful to me for a couple of months, and even those designed for a few levels would be too limiting.
• There had to be artwork or pictures.
• The document had to start with an overall explanation of the adventure as a whole, so DMs could decide if it was right for them.
• Each creature had to have a complete stat block.
• I couldn't use a standard computer font (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.).

I satisfied all those criteria. The adventure is for characters from level 1 through 10 (the Heroic Tier), with maps created in Inkscape, and using Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos of underwater scenes. Of course, I'd like to have done more with it, like use artwork instead of letters for items on the maps, and use the two-column layout that RPGers seem to love--but nothing's ever perfect. I'm satisfied, and I learned a lot for the next adventure.

What about you? What standard elements do you need in an adventure?

Posted in Role-playing

2 Dec 08 - How I Introduce Myself To New RPG Players

New players are a fact of life for GMs. They may have never played a tabletop RPG before, or only using vastly different systems. How do you introduce yourself? How do you lay the ground rules?

I'm still figuring it out, but I do have a few things I make sure to go through.

1. I describe my policy on character death, that while I don't actively try to kill player-characters, neither will I re-arrange the laws of physics to prevent willful character death.
2. I explain what I love about GMing. This lets players know what to expect from me. I explain that I love to create worlds, so my games tend to be expansive and original, but not heavily detailed.
3. I describe what excites me in players. I figure, as a player, I'd want to know what sort of player the GM expects. Heavy role-playing? Intimate knowledge of the rules? Whatever. For me, I love players who really get into their characters, and who are ready when their turn comes up in combat.
4. I describe what gets me angry. I think this is vitally important, yet I never see folks write about it. What are those hot-button issues? Let's get them out in the open, so they don't surprise anybody. Mine are dealing with too many questions at once, and stubborn insistence on looking up every rule even when it halts gameplay for 10 minutes. So I explain that I'll sometimes come up with a reasonable temporary ruling if a rule look-up takes too long.

I also talk about a few of our house rules and social policies, such as:

1. Cell phones should be turned to vibrate or switched off.
2. If anyone has to leave the table, they should announce where they're going. They can leave instructions on what to do with their character while they're gone. If they don't, and they're gone for a full round, we'll skip their turn for that round.
3. The GM is happy to keep character sheets if players have trouble remembering to bring them.
4. We use "luck tokens," which can be turned in to either immediately succeed on a die roll, or add one fact to the world. The only restrictions on the latter are that the new faact cannot change history, and that if a luck token is traded in to immediately resolve a fight or problem, the players get no experience points for it. Players start with one luck token per session, and win more for good role-playing.

Once I began explaining this to new players, everyone gets up to speed much more quickly, and we don't spend valuable playing time with unhappy players.

How do you tell new players about house rules and such? And what are your house rules?

Posted in Role-playing

28 Nov 08 - How To Invent a Role-Playing Adventure, Part 2

When last we left our adventurers, they were swimming north in hot pursuit of Princess Teela, who adamantly refused to return to her parents until she'd wrought vengeance on the sahuagin for their invasion of her country.

Endings are crucial. I can forgive a rocky beginning, and I can push through a dull middle, but a bad ending will ruin a story for me.

The ending has to feel bigger than the rest of the story. It may not be flashier, or have more action; that depends on the type of story. But since this is a war story, I wanted this to have a big war ending. I wanted the equivalent of ending Wolfenstein 3D by fighting a powered armor-wearing Hitler.

This meant two things: a battle against a powerful enemy, and a battle against the sahuagin king. However, according to D&D lore, sahuagin kings are simply more vicious than the others; they're not inherently powerful enough to take down half a dozen seasoned adventurers.

So I could have gone in two directions. I could have increased the sahuagin king's power, by giving him some magical artifact. Or I could add a separate, powerful martial character.

I chose the second route, though I just realized that I could have tied the adventure together much better by going the first route. The sahuagin king could have stolen the magical artifact that the players are seeking from the merfolk king, and that could be giving the sahuagin king the power to raise this army. Ah well.

So I created a separate martial antagonist. Since this adventure is designed for Dungeons & Dragons, I figured I should put a dragon in somewhere if I could, so I decided that the sahuagin king is pushing a priestess to summon a white dragon to do their bidding. (For the record, this would never have worked.)

So, the players venture northward, and come upon a huge sahuagin city, which sits mostly empty as the army is down south fighting the merfolk. But a strange glow is coming from a temple in the city. This is the only distinguishing characteristic.

So the players travel there, and navigate through its twisting passages to a large, amphitheater-like room in the back. There, they find the priestess, holding an orb and murmuring a ritual, while the sahuagin king and a bunch of bodyguards stand nearby, watching. The water swirls around the priestess, and small wisps of light flash in and out of existence within it. The players can just make out the ghostly form of a dragon inside, slowly growing more distinct.

So, the players must fight the bodyguards first (who rush towards the players immediately to prevent them from getting to the king or priestess), then the priestess (who has plenty of spells), and the king (who is a very good fighter). After their defeat, the war is effectively over, and Teela can return to her father and people.

And that's the adventure: 3 to 5 encounters (depending on the number of sahuagin raiders that the DM decides to toss in), moving logically from one location to the next: the western sea, the aquatic elves, the merfolk capitol, the northern front, and the sahuagin capitol.

As you can see, my adventure creation method involves consequences. At each stage, I look for a next step that's logical and interesting. Logical because the alternative frustrates players; interesting to keep players engaged.

Works well for me. Now to design the next one....

Posted in Role-playing

21 Nov 08 - How To Invent a Role-Playing Adventure, Part 1

I've been working on a D&D adventure, War in the Deep. It's an underwater adventure in which the players are transported to an undersea kingdom, where they have to rescue a princess consumed with bloodlust.

(Which, incidentally, you can buy at DriveThruRPG for $5!)

Anyway, here's how I designed it:

I started with the reason for the adventure. This was originally part of a larger campaign, where the players are seeking seven different magical stones, and the king of this undersea kingdom has one of them. So, they were going to travel there to meet him. The question was, what would prevent the players from just requesting and taking the stone back from the merfolk?

I didn't have a good answer for that, so I began flipping through the Monster Manual to get ideas for the creatures that might be in that area. That's when I stumbled on the sahuagin.

The sahuagin are nasty brutes who mostly raid coastal towns. They're basically underwater goblins: they sneak up out of nowhere, attack anyone they find, and steal supplies.

Sound like fun antagonists. So what if they're the real antagonists? What if they're attacking the undersea kingdom?

Okay, so how to get the players involved in a war between the merfolk and the sahuagin? Well, the players are traveling to see the king. What if his daughter is in danger? An easy reason would be kidnapping; let's flip that around. What if she went off in search of danger, lusting after sahuagin blood?

And there was my plot.

So then it was a matter of designing the conflicts. I wanted to expand the time spent traveling to the merfolk's central city, so I added an early encounter with a sahuagin raiding party. I then added an enclave of aquatic elves who would help the players get through that area if the sahuagin proved too powerful. I also conjured up a High Council of the aquatic elves, who could answer the players' early questions about this area of the world, and the conflict between the merfolk and sahuagin.

After encountering the merfolk king, the players then had to find the princess. I figured the king would know at least roughly where the princess was, so I made that easy; the players just traveled north to a border town. On the way, they traveled above abandoned merfolk villages (as the merfolk prepared for war, they abandoned their easily-attacked villages).

Up to now, the players had been fighting sahuagin raiding parties, so I wanted to get across the feel of a large war. So I designed the next battle was a real battle, with dozens of sahuagin and several siege weapons assaulting this northern border town. The princess is in among the fray, giving it something of a Battle of Helm's Deep feel.

Now what? How to finish this up with a satisfying ending? I'll let you think about how you'd do it, and I'll answer in part 2.

Posted in Role-playing

11 Nov 08 - What I Don't Like About Playing in a Tabletop RPG

Much as I enjoy running tabletop RPGs, I don't much enjoy playing a character.

This is partly because characters have relatively little to do at any given time. Consider combat: in a four-person party, I'll spend at best four-fifths of the time twiddling my thumbs, watching everyone else fight. Even outside of combat, I'm just one of several adventurers.

Also, role-playing is social. As quoted in a recent post on Sin Aesthetics: "Enjoying roleplaying is rather like enjoying dancing: At some point you have to throw your inhibitions to the wind, admit you might look like a fool to passing spectators and enjoy the moment. Also like dancing, which at first may seem like a fairly limited activity, roleplaying has almost infinite depth and variety in the experiences it provides."

While I can "throw my inhibitions to the wind" with good friends, that's tough to do outside of intimate groups. And my role-playing friends don't really reward good role-playing. They're good guys; they're just focused more on killing stuff and taking loot than on role-playing, at this stage.

And that's one of the big limitations of role-playing: it requires a certain kind of mentality. Now, I think practically anyone can learn to role-play, just like anyone can play a game of charades. But it's a mentality that I don't get much of a charge out of.

Part of the trouble, too, is that I create worlds. I love thinking up cities and societies and people. If there's going to be someone in the whole process doing that, why not me?

Posted in Role-playing

4 Nov 08 - What I Like About Tabletop Role-Playing Games

I love role-playing. This is odd, since I only started role-playing a few years ago. And yet I've loved it since I was a young boy.

My older brother was a role-player. He played D&D, and Car Wars, and others, I'm sure. After he died, I looked over his few remaining hand-written materials. I was amazed at his creativity, not thinking at the time about how much of his stuff may have been copied from published work. Either way, he definitely loved it. Even if it was all copied from published books, it was lovingly and carefully copied.

I was drawn to the idea of role-playing, of thinking up an adventure and living it in my mind. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy at the time, so I was naturally attracted to the idea of collectively imagining an exciting adventure.

But I was also shy, so I never had anyone to role-play with. Not until I was in my 20's, when a few co-workers involved me in a short game of Nobilis, then I found a few younger friends for whom I could run games. And when I did, we had an absolute ball. That's when I realized what I love about role-playing.

I didn't own any role-playing source books, so I found and printed the simple Sherpa rules. They're brilliant; you can easily create a character and write up him or her in five minutes. They focus on simple conflict resolution, so we spent most of our time playing around instead of rolling dice.

We played a rip-roaring game of low-level mafia thugs in a science fiction setting, which culminated in a city-wide mafia war involving giant walking tanks. Then we moved to a short-lived heroic Greek fantasy game, then a D&D-inspired game before the group fizzled out.

Role-playing requires a huge imagination and a little guts (to yell "Och, y'not be wantin' to double-cross a dwarf, laddie!" to your friends). The result is a collaboratively created story, which can have everything from pathos to action to comedy, and in which you are involved. You're actually driving the story in whatever direction you want to take it. If it's not fun, you can make it fun.

As a GM (Game Master), I present the world, situation, and antagonists facing the players. So I get to create a world--or at least simulate one--which I love to do anyway.

A fun, imaginative game where everyone is actively involved and collaboratively push each other to greater and greater heights of story and personal interaction? What's not to like?

Posted in Role-playing

21 Oct 08 - Experimenting with DC Game Day III

I spent Saturday at DC Game Day, a full-day tabletop roleplaying experience. I normally don't go out much, to be honest, and I knew nobody there. But I wanted to meet some local tabletop RPG players, and get a feel for games I haven't played before.

The first game involved 1936, Nazis on jetpacks, a temple in the jungle, lizard men, a mind-controlling wizard, and Excalibur. It used the Hollow Earth setting and system, which was pretty cool: You typically add together a few simple stats (points in some attribute plus points in some skill), and roll that number of special dice. If you meet or beat a small number, such as 4, you succeed; if not, you fail. Simple.

The DM clearly loved the adventure and the setting, and he understood pulp. I was playing the Pompous Professor archetype, and as soon as I yelled to the evil Nazi doctor, "You've befouled the name of science!" he laughed and threw me a Fate Chip (which I could turn in later to force a better die roll). I had great fun.

The latter session was also fun, though I felt more tired and thus didn't enjoy myself as much. It was a space pulp adventure using I think a variant on the Fudge rules, in which a group of U.S. Rocket Corps fellows crash on Jupiter, and have to face the Iron Lords, Mole Men, Mind Spiders, and Living Mountains.

Character creation used the idea of your character's novel. The back of the character sheet had five spaces: in the first you described your character's childhood, and in the second his or her role in the Great War. In the third, you summarized the plot of a grand pulp adventure novel starring your character. You then randomly pick two other player-characters, who guest-star in your novel, while you fill in the fourth and fifth sections with how you guest-starred in other player-character's novels. And for each of these sections, you list a few aspects of your personality that were formed by these adventures.

And the system had a fascinating mechanic: when attempting to use a skill, you simply compare your skill value to your opponent's skill value (or a difficulty number), similarly to the Hollow Earth setting. However, you (and your opponent, if applicable) also roll "Fudge dice," which simply have +1 on two sides, -1 on two sides, and 0 on two sides. You add the result to your total. If you're trying to hit something, then if your final result is over the opponent's final result, you subtract the difference from their health, armor, etc.

It's elegant. Your stats are directly equivalent to your enemy's, but the Fudge dice can, um, fudge the comparison in interesting ways.

I met a bunch of great guys (and some girls), many of whom I'd enjoy playing with again. Even better, I won at the raffle (twice!) netting me a bunch of old roleplaying source books (Shadowrun, Dread, Colonial Gothic, Steal Away Jordan, and many others).

I'm definitely going again in six months, if I can.

Posted in Role-playing