Author Archives: Rick Neal

Obsidian Portal Update

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Two posts in one day! The eschaton has been imanentized!

I wanted to post a quick follow-up to the previous post about Obsidian Portal. No sooner had I posted my little paean to the wonders of their service than I got comments from two of the fine folks involved in the site. You can read them here.

The point of this post is to clarify a couple of things: first, that they jumped all over my little comment that my map wasn’t showing up properly. My comment about depth of support stands – they just haven’t had the time to build up a solid self-serve library on their site. However, that should not be interpreted as a criticism to the quality of their support. These two people read my little blog post, went and checked out my campaign, and got back to me immediately.

That just rocks.

As it turns out, the issue with the map was an issue with the computer I was viewing it on. I’ve tried it on two other computers, and it works great on them. Problem is all mine.

Second, once the map was working, I discovered a very cool feature. You can set markers on your map, and link them in to your wiki. I realize that this may not be groundbreaking, but it is an extremely nice feature, especially considering how the version of the map I have is not all that clear.

So, in closing, I repeat my whole-hearted endorsement of Obsidian Portal. Great features and friendly folks. What more can one ask for?

Obsidian Portal and Wiki World Development

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Everyone probably already knows about Obsidian Portal, right? I mean, I found out about it from reading Penny Arcade, and they have several orders of magnitude more readers than I do. So, I’m pretty sure I’m a little late to this particular barbecue, but I want to talk about it anyway, because I think it rocks.

For those who don’t know, Obsidian Portal is a combination wiki, blog, and social networking thing, designed specifically to manage RPG campaigns. You register, log in, create a campaign site, invite players, build a wiki for your world, and post to an adventure log to track events in the campaign. It’s dead easy to use, and the basic level is free. You get a fair bit at the basic level, too: the ability to create two campaigns, upload a map, and all the wiki, blog, and networking you can squeeze in. The premium membership costs $40 for a year, and gives you unlimited campaigns, 10 maps, more levels of map zoom*, and the ability to limit who can see your campaign.

As I mentioned elsewhere, I’m moving away from the Scales of War adventure path that’s being published in Dungeon magazine***, and taking the characters into adventures of my own devising. So I decided I would develop the new campaign using Obsidian Portal to see how I liked it and if I wanted to use it for other campaigns, as well.

Now, Scales of War is based in the Elsir Vale, the setting for the 3.5 mega adventure Red Hand of Doom, and takes place roughly a decade later. This means I have a fair bit of background material from both the original module and the adventure path to plug into the wiki****.

And I have discovered that I absolutely love the way wikis work for world design.

This is the first time I’ve ever used a wiki, and I had no idea what to expect. I watched the tutorial video that is linked from Obsidian Portal’s main page, learned about forward linking, and thought, “Huh. That looks pretty simple.” And I was right.

Not only is it simple, it really helps guide the creative process. I can see at a glance what bits I need to fill in on any given wiki page. I can look at the list of pages and identify gaps that I want to fill, and opportunities to expand the information. I can watch the campaign world take shape in a non-linear but still usefully structured way. There is even a special GM Only pane of each wiki page where I can put in my secrets and notes, and not have to worry about the players seeing them.

So, I’ve invited the players to the campaign to register for Obsidian Portal and sign up for my campaign. I’ve only got two of them to do it, so far, but the rest will come along eventually. I’ve also told them that they’re free to add stuff not only to the adventure log, but also to the wiki itself*****.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If you’re interested in a peek at the campaign, you can see it here. I hasten to point out that it’s still in early days of development in the wiki. But let me know what you think, anyway.

Just be gentle. It’s my first wiki.

 

 

*This is important: the map I uploaded shows up as a single pixel at highest zoom. I can view the original image by clicking on a link, but I was hoping for the zoom to work better. I probably did something wrong**.

**Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything in the help or forums that specifically addressed this issue. One of the hazards of a new service – not enough time for real depth of support to develop.

***As a complete aside, I was really impressed by the latest adventure in Dungeon. It’s called Depths of Madness, and focuses on a number of interesting and well-developed skill challenges, rather than just a lot of dungeon crawling and fights. Don’t get me wrong – there’s still a lot of fights and some dungeon crawling, but I think this is a big step in the right direction.

****Technically, this is a violation of copyright. Well, not just technically, I guess. I’m hoping that WotC won’t care enough about my little indiscretion. If they do, I’ll have to figure something else out.

*****Though I’m not sure if this will actually work.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Another session done this weekend. After the previous session, my players decided to abandon their original plans, and try to figure out the connection between the halfling gangsters and the goblins outside of town.

They started by interrogating the prisoners they had taken last session, which I did as a sort of skill challenge. I’ve been constantly trying to modify the way I use skill challenges to fit with what I think they’re good at doing, and how they can fit into the group’s play style. I was intrigued when I heard Mike Mearls on the latest D&D podcast give some advice that I had already deduced on my own: don’t let skill challenges become a substitute for roleplaying, and don’t use them to quash good ideas that the characters have.

To that end, I’ve started structuring the skill challenges in my games a little differently. They are rarely all-or-nothing affairs: I hand out some benefits after a certain number of successes, some more benefits after some more successes, and the last (and usually greatest) benefit if the test is successful. With failures, I either dish out a little grief with each one, or just stop giving benefits when the challenge fails. But I also let the players do an end run around the skill challenge if they come up with a good idea.

So, for example, I had three minor skill challenges set up in this session. The first one was interrogating the prisoners, the second was casing the business locations to spot the runners making their pick-ups, and the the third was following the runners back to the counting house. I also worked up a few combat encounters in case my wiley party of adventurers got spotted or took a more active approach to gaining the information.

The interrogation worked well, and they got two out of the three businesses with direct ties to the organization, deciding to stake out the brothel first. They weren’t very subtle about that, and wound up fighting the brothel’s guards in the night streets*. Only the tiefling heretic managed to escape, using her magic cloak, and wound up negotiating with the characters from the window of a building. The party agreed to leave the brothel alone if the owner would give up the name and location of the organization’s number two man. This was acceptable, and off went the heroes to beard the lion in its den.

I wanted the location for the gang hideout and counting house to be something kind of interesting, but still fitting in the theme of the fishing town. I came up with the idea of a boat house and fisherman’s warehouse built out over the water, with the pilings underneath having given way some time ago, sinking most of the building below water level. Only the upper floor is above the water, and the windows are boarded up and lined with blackout curtains. There’s a nice ten-foot gap between the pier and the building, and inside the ceiling is only about five feet above the plank walkways and platforms that let the inhabitants move above the water level**.

This fight went on a long time, due mainly to the movement restrictions imposed by the terrain. Again, the stealth approach failed the PCs, and they wound up having to fight their way into the building, then along the plank walkways over the water, all the while being pelted by sling stones and harried by halflings****. Splitting the party did some bad things to them, and they almost lost the cleric, but they triumphed in the end, and it was a neat fight. At least four of the combatants went into the water, which was fun, and Big Sid, the halfling fighter, got to put some real hurt on the warlord*****.

Now, with Big Sid captured and interrogated, the party has found out about a scheduled meeting with the goblins a couple of nights hence, where Jemmy Fish’s gang was going to by some loot from robbed caravans. The meeting place is a small stony beach below some cliffs called Aylsa Crag. I’m guessing there’s going to be some disappointed (and probably dead) goblins.

*I used the Rackham Reversible Gaming Tiles for the battle map. The nice thing about these (besides the beautiful art) is that they have the area in daylight on one side, and a night time version of the same scene on the reverse.

**I was going to do up a map of this in Dundjinni, but I just ran out of time. I wound up having to sketch it on the fly on my Tact Tiles***.

***Apparently, BC Products, who made Tact Tiles, has gone out of business, which is a real shame. They made a damn fine product.

****Sounds like a Gloom card, doesn’t it?

*****The party reallyhates halflings now. There was some talk about burning the halfling boat neighbourhood to the waterline.

“It’s Not D&D” – 4th Edition Analysis and Apologia

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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First off, let me start by saying a couple of things.

  1. I love 4th Edition D&D.
  2. I love 3rd Edition D&D, including 3.5.

There. Now you know where I’m starting from.

I’ve seen some comments on forums and such about how 4th Edition D&D is not D&D. People point to a number of things to justify this claim, from the loss of Vancian “fire-and-forget” magic to the fact that houscats can no longer kill 1st-level wizards with one swipe of the claws. Most of the people posting these… let’s call them discussions, because the word “diatribe” is needlessly inflammatory… feel very deeply and strongly about the points their making.

They make these points with varying degrees of skill and lucidity, like any internet discussion. Some are well-reasoned analyses of differences, some are foam-specked and profanity-laden rants. Both types often bring up interesting thoughts and opinions.

I’m going to wade in here, because I just read a blog post from one of my players here*, where he talks about why he feels that 4E is not D&D. I think it’s an insightful post, that makes some good claims, so I’m gonna talk about it.

Let’s get this out of the way: 4E is D&D, because Wizards of the Coast, who own the trademark and the intellectual property, say it’s D&D. Any other interpretation is just the wonking of self-perceived-purists of the so-called fanboy elite**.

Having made that somewhat-antagonist statement, I will say that 4E is definitely not the same game that 3E*** was. I would even go so far as to say that 4E is a much bigger departure from 3E than 3E was from 2E, or 2E was from 1E.

Now, to be fair, there was the same kind of outcry back at the launch of 3E, which broke a lot of the unwritten rules of D&D design. Maximum hit points at 1st level, free multiclassing, unified experience point progression for all classes, no racial class or level limitations… all that good stuff. Remember? And then there was the new stuff grafted on, things like feats and skills and prestige classes and funky double weapons. D&D finally owned up to the fact that it was simulating nothing but D&D – a very specific kind of medieval fantasy.

People came around. D&D became a driving force in the market again. Hell, 3E made me start buying D&D stuff again, and even made me run a game.

I think that the success of 3E, despite its real departure from the sacred cows of D&D tradition, showed that people would accept big changes, as long as the changes made for a fun game. And 3E was, and still is, a fun game. Currently, I’m playing in three different 3E games, so you know I love it.

The changes from 3E to 4E were even bigger. About the only things that stayed the same were the names of things and the basic die mechanic. Everything else got a big overhaul – so big that, without the names, you wouldn’t know it was the same game.

Here’s some of the claims made by those criticizing the game, and my response to them:

  • It’s not as gritty. Generally, I take this to mean that your character is not as weak and powerless at lower levels. I would totally agree with that. I just don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there is an appeal to emulating the sword-and-sorcery books of Leiber and Howard, but D&D hasn’t really done a good job of doing that ever. Firstly, because it’s been predicated on parties of adventurers, and secondly because the hit point mechanic doesn’t do that good a job of modeling realistic combat. However, it is very true that the lower levels are far less desperate and perilous, as long as the DM does a good job of balancing the encounters. Do I miss that sort of thing? Sometimes. On the other hand, it’s fun to have a character who can actually do cool stuff starting right at first level, and doesn’t need to sleep for eight hours after an eighteen-second fight.
  • Too many hit points. This is sort of tied to the above point, but not exclusively. This is one of the main things that makes the combats last longer, at least in number of rounds. Because it’s not just the PCs with more hit points, it’s the monsters, too, while damage output (at least, at lower levels) hasn’t scaled up by the same degree. This means that each fight generally goes on for more rounds than in 3E. The upside is that it makes it more likely that the monsters will get to trot out their special tricks. From the players’ point of view, that may also be the downside. I like the fact that monsters get to do more things, and to be more interesting. It also gives more time for the PCs to do things other than just stand and hit things.
  • Combat is very repetitive. I’ve heard from people that combat in 4E is just your character using the same power or two over and over again until the bad guys fall down. I really don’t get this one. After all, combat in 3E was just using the same attack or two over and over again until the bad guys fall down. Personally, I think the powers add more variety, even at low levels when you have fewer of them. Also, I think the way actions have been structured gives players more incentive to try different things in combat, because you don’t lose your iterative attacks if you move. Still, I’ve read this one on the net, and I’ve had a couple of players mention it to me in person, so they obviously feel that way. I just don’t see why, myself.
  • I hate having to pick a paragon path. Yeah. This one, I’ll go along with whole-heartedly. Paragon paths obviously replace prestige classes from 3E. The one thing that was overlooked, though, was that prestige classes were optional. Paragon paths really aren’t unless you’ve gone full-bore into multiclassing. Now, part of the feeling of constraint may be because we’re still pretty early in the development of the game, so there aren’t as many paragon paths to choose from as we might like. Still, I think it would be better if there was an option for a “purist” paragon path for each class, if you see what I mean.
  • It feels too much like a video game. I’m gonna be blunt, here: if it feels too much like a video game, that’s the fault of the people at the table, not the game. I honestly feel that you can’t blame the system for this one. Now, I’ll admit that they borrowed some ideas from things like World of Warcraft, but they also borrowed from other board, card, and roleplaying games. Some of the things they’ve borrowed work better than others, in my opinion. For example, the exceptions-based approach to powers and abilities (borrowed from Magic: The Gathering, among other games) works very well, letting monster stat blocks stay small and useful, and minimizing the amount people have to shuffle through various books. On the other hand, the marking mechanic (borrowed from the MMORPG idea of aggro) requires a lot more fiddling around in play than I think the advantages warrant. Interesting idea there, but not perfect implementation.
  • It’s just a combat system. That’s just crap. Like most mainstream RPGs, 4E devotes a fair bit of space to combat, because a) that’s where the market is, and b) that’s what requires the most simulationist rules. But 4E, for the first time, starts putting rules around non-combat encounters, as well. The skill challenge rules may not be perfect, but they’re definitely a non-combat set of rules that takes up several pages in the DMG. Now, there’s definitely a real weighting of the powers for characters towards the damage-dealing, combat powers, I will admit. More of a weighting than I might like to see, even among the so-called Utility Powers. But still, it comes down to what you do with the game at the table. If all you run is combat, then the game is gonna look like a combat system. If you mix it up a little more, then it won’t. And to say that there is no support for other types of play just says to me that you haven’t looked at the DMG at all.

In interest of full disclosure, this next list is some of the claims on the pro side of the argument, and what I think about them:

  • Combat is faster. Hmmm. So far, I’m not seeing it. I think each round goes faster, but you wind up with a larger number of rounds per combat, so on the whole, I think it’s a wash. If anything, I find that 4E combat is going slower because neither I nor my players have the mastery of the system that we developed in 3E. That, of course, will be corrected with practice. But I don’t see combat speeding up all that much.
  • Prep is faster for the DM. Yes and no. Customizing something that’s already been done, like updating a published adventure to match the number of characters in your party, is amazingly quick and easy. I love that. Having said that, building an adventure from scratch takes about the same amount of time, I find, though again part of that is lack of mastery of the rules. One thing that sort of complicates things is the linking of treasure to level, rather than to encounters. It pushes a DM to a very linear plot, I find, to make sure that the treasure is appropriate for the characters’ level. Still, that’s not insurmountable – it just takes some juggling, which takes some extra time.
  • Monsters are easier to run. This one I agree with whole-heartedly. I’ll even go a little farther, and say that monsters are also far more interesting to run. Even the lowliest kobold and goblin has a little trick designed to make them memorable to the characters. Fighting a goblin is now substantially different from fighting a kobold. And that’s a really good thing.
  • Running the game in general is easier for the GM. I don’t know. It’s tough to compare, because of that lack of rules mastery in the new system, compared to the acquired rules mastery in the old system. Still, the underlying structure, the new ways defenses are used, and the idea of exception-based abilities all seem to point in that direction. I hope it’s the case. But it’s too soon to tell.
  • Characters get to make interesting choices at each level. Yeah, I think so. There don’t seem to be anymore dead levels for any character. At each level, you get a new power, or feat, or something nice. Having said that, there seems to be optimal builds for each class, which I’m not sure I like. Optimal builds implies sub-optimal builds, which is a sort of tacit constraint on character development. I’m hoping that phenomenon is just a result of the comparatively small number of choices available because the game’s less than a year into it’s published support.

So, there’s my take on the whole thing. I like both systems, probably because they each do different things. In the end, I really find that the group makes the game, not the other way around. As my friend Penny said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that rules systems aren’t that important to the game. They’re just the tools you use to tell the stories you want.”****

This begs the final question: why am I currently running 4E games, and no 3E games? Simple. I’ve done the 3E experience. I ran an eight-year campaign. I’ll gladly play 3E, but I’m not interested in running it anymore. I’ve told my 3E story. Now I want to tell 4E stories.

But I love playing 3E, as Ladimir, Synry, and Dunael will attest.

 

 

 

*It was written back at the beginning of November, but I just read it now. Yeah, I don’t check that blog very often.

**So take that, Michael! 😉

***Take it as read that, whenever I refer to 3E, I’m including 3.5.

****I’m paraphrasing, despite the quotes. She said something that amounted to the same thing. Forgive the misquotation, Penny.

Happy Frakkin’ New Year

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So, it’s New Year’s Eve, and it true geek fashion, my friends and I got together for a nice dinner and an evening of games.

This year, we decided to test-drive the Battlestar Galactica boardgame from Fantasy Flight Games. I got it just before Christmas, and wanted a chance to try it out before demoing it on January 10 at Imagine Games.

We had six players, which is the maximum, and none of us had played before. To compound our difficulties, I had forgotten the rulebook at home after taking it out of the box to read. Fortunately, Fantasy Flight Games posts the rules for their boardgames online in .pdf format, so we just powered up the laptop and used that for the rules.

It’s late, and I’m coming down off all the caffeine I had this evening, so I’m not going to go into detail about the mechanics of the game. The rulebook is up on the site, and a number of reviews have discussed the game in detail*. I’m just going to talk about my impressions after a first playthrough.

  • The components are the luxurious quality I’ve come to expect from Fantasy Flight Games. Nice board, nice cards, nice little plastic ships, nice everything. My one tiny little complaint is that it would have been very cool (but understandably expensive and cumbersome) to have plastic base stars, along with the plastic vipers, raptors, raiders, and heavy raiders.
  • Same thing for the civilian ships, but that creates the problem of being able to identify what resources you’d lose from the shape of the ship model.
  • Fewer pieces than something like Arkham Horror or Runebound, so faster setup and teardown. About on a par with Fury of Dracula. However, those little plastic ships are pretty tiny.
  • From opening the box lid to closing it again, about four hours time. This is pretty good for learning an new game, though we rushed through the last two turns to get to the end. Hey, it may be New Year’s Eve, but we’re old and tired. Anyway, I expect a normal game to run about the two to three hours the box claims.
  • It was a lot of fun. Everyone had something interesting to do on their turn, and there’s obviously a fair bit of strategy involved, though we didn’t get all that deep into it.
  • Man, when the cylons start swarming around the ship, you can really start to feel boned.
  • The secret cylon mechanics were great at sowing discord and suspicion.
  • The revealed cylon mechanics were great at making you feel completely outnumbered.
  • The idea of the sleeper agents is brilliant.
  • There’s a lot to keep track of: what’s on your character card, what’s on your other cards, what’s on the board locations, etc. I found I kept forgetting my character’s special abilities.
  • The choice to jump early can be a difficult one.
  • Being Admiral and having to choose between two sucky jump destinations is bad. Being forced to choose a bad location in order to gain required distance hurts. And it should.
  • The game was very close. It came down to what Crisis Cards were drawn in the last couple of turns as to who would win.
  • The humans won. I was a human. I was happy.
  • Those who played cylons said it was a real blast.
  • Everyone said they wanted to play it again. Preferably not so late at night.

I count it as a win. We had fun, saved humanity, and ushered in a new year.

Who could ask for more?

Happy New Year, everyone.

*Here’s one. Here’s another.

Battlestar Galactica Demo

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Whoops! I forgot to mention that I will be running a demo of the Battlestar Galactica Board Game by Fanatasy Flight Games on Saturday, January 10, at Imagine Games. Demo starts at 1:00, and will run about 2 hours. If there’s enough interest, I will run a second demo after the first (around 3:00). If you’re interested, come on down and help save the human race from the cylon menace! Or help save the cylon race from the human menace! Either way!

 

[[EDIT: Changed the date of the demo to avoid conflict with a Flames of War tournament at Imagine Games.]]

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Ran the latest session of Storm Point last night. It went quite well, but prompted a bit of a change of focus for the group.

Up until the game last night, they were planning on riding one of the floating islands in Lake Thunder through the perpetual thunderstorm in the centre of the lake to see what was inside the swirling clouds and lightning. However, when they got back to town after their explorations of the Arkhosian ruins, they found that Jemmy Fish, the halfling gangster they had embarrassed way back in the first session, had gone out of his way to mess with each of their lives in some fashion.

This, they decided, would not do.

So, they got together to discuss what to do about it, and were ambushed by a gang of halflings. They defeated them all, knocking most of them unconscious*, though a lucky critical by Ssudai** caused one to fall to his death. As they were tying up their prisoners, they noticed another halfling run off from a hiding spot, and gave chase.

What followed was a very successful skill challenge, if I do say so myself. Ssudai was using Acrobatics to run, leap, and swing across the rooftops and Stealth to sneak up on her; Soren was using History to remember shortcuts through town; Faran used his Perception to keep track of the target and his Diplomacy to convince her to stop; Milo and Thrun just poured on the juice with Athletics to catch up and Intimidate to slow her down; and Galvanys used a number of skills plus his Fey Step power to close distance. It all ended with a well-placed, leaping Thrun landing on their quarry on a barge in the halfling quarter of town.

What made the challenge work, in my opinion, was that everyone not only picked different skills to try, but also narrated what it looked like in game. It changed it from a simple exercise in rolling dice into an interesting, gripping chase scene. People got into it, and kept scouting their character sheet for different skills they might try. This is, I believe, the real strength of skill challenges. When everyone gets into them and lets themselves go with it, it turns into a very entertaining part of the game.

Anyway, rather than interrogate her in the midst of a crowd of increasingly hostile halflings on a halfling barge in the middle of the halfling neighbourhood while looking for a halfling gangster***, the party prudently decided to take her back to the militia’s holding cells for a little talk. Using Diplomacy and Intimidate to do a good cop/bad cop routine on their prisoner, they got the name of Jemmy’s boat, the fact that he was holed up there with about a half-dozen of his men, and that he had hired some extra muscle from the goblins.

So, they stormed the boat. Turns out the goblins Jemmy hired were a couple of bugbears. They gave our boys some tight moments****, what with their ability to dish out huge helpings of damage, along with knocking folks prone and dazing them. Really, the fight on the boat was everything I could have hoped for, with a couple folks (on both sides) going into the drink, and Jemmy taking to the rigging and sniping at the party, and others following him up. It was a blast, and showed off the cinematic quality of 4E combat*****.

Now, with the missing goods recovered, and Jemmy out of the way, our heroes are talking about postponing their little trip on the floating island in favour of trying to figure out what’s going on with the halfling-goblin alliance that Jemmy seems to have been building. I’ve got them discussing it over on our message board, so that I have some idea of what sort of adventure to build around their intentions.

And this is why I’m glad I’m not running an Adventure Path campaign with Storm Point. The party can explore whatever interests them in the setting, instead of following a breadcrumb trail from one dungeon to another. Depending on how they decide to proceed, we may wind up with an urban investigation and gang war, or a wilderness hunt for goblins, or some combination of the two.

I’m looking forward to it, whatever it is.

*And we all liked how easy this was in 4E. When you reduce someone to 0 hit points, you get to decide if they’re dead or just knocked out. No more fussing with nonlethal damage and stuff. Some things, though, I’ve ruled can’t be turned into a knockout: crossbows, arrows, secondary effects of spells, stuff like that.

**And when I say lucky, I mean lucky! He rolled a natural 20 to hit, and I invoked the halfling’s reroll power. He pouted at me, but rolled again. Another natural 20! Right there, in front of God and everyone! So, that was the Trick Strike power, which reduced the target to 1 hit point, and slid the target right off the rooftop for a 1d10 fall. Dead.

***I don’t know what it is, but pretty much everyone I game with just hates halflings, so I find they make a good underclass, outsider society in most of my games. It lets me riff on prejudice and ostracism.

****And I find my self consistently impressed by the way the healing system in 4E changes the resource management model. I don’t have to pull as many punches as a DM, because I know the characters have the hit points and healing surges to take it, but they still have to be careful because they may not have the time or the ability to spend a healing surge when they need to. I was worried that the prevalent healing might remove the risk from combat, but it doesn’t. It just changes it.

*****Which, I am the first to admit, may not be to everyone’s taste. There’s something to be said for the grim, gritty style of fantasy play. But I gotta say, for my money, I want the high-flying, swashbuckling, crazy-magic-wielding 4E feel.

Gaming Code Phrases

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I don’t know about you folks, but my gaming groups have developed their own little lexicon of phraseology that gets used across most of the games we play. These are little things that started either as passing comments or jokes, and evolved firstly into in-jokes, and later into phrases that are shorthand for some pretty complex ideas. We use them now, often without thinking, in place of discussions of these ideas, because they relate to events and situations that have become part of our collected gaming history.

And some of them are kinda funny, so I thought I’d share them, and what they mean to us, and even what I remember about their origins.

Here goes.

“Arrangements are made.”

This is actually paraphrased from a Terry Pratchett novel. The orginal quote is, “Arrangements, presumably, are made.” It’s used as a wonderful dodge to avoid answering the question of how all the water that flows over the Rim of the Discworld gets back into the Discworld’s water cycle.

It came into our gaming vernacular during the year-long Amber campaign that almost killed me. I fell back on using it to deal with the issue of time distortion and conservation of momentum in Trump communication and transport, and soon found I was using it to gloss over holes in the ideas of n-dimensional physics that having infinite shadows to play in gives rise to. Really, I think the only phrase I uttered more often during the Amber game was, “You bastards.”

Now, it’s used by all of us as a code phrase that roughly means both “I’m being fantastical and creative, so stop asking questions” and “You’re paying attention to the wrong things; you can safely ignore this.”

“You’re an elf that uses magic.”

During one long-running campaign, one of my players got into a phase where he kept asking me questions about the physics of my D&D world, and getting frustrated by the fact that the rules and my world didn’t accurately reflect some real-world physics. I think, but cannot recall for sure, that both combustion and falling were involved, and he was looking to apply a little real-world logic to some of his abilities to get a boost out of them. When I told him that it wouldn’t work in the game, and he countered with a real-world argument, I used the above phrase. In fact, I had to do it a couple of times before the point was made.

Now, as then, it means, “So, you accept that your character is a magical being/superhero/creature of the night with strange and mystical abilities, but you can’t choke down the idea that unicorns are real/villains keep escaping from prison/priests can hold you at bay with a cross?” We use it to warn each other when our debates and ideas are straying too far from the accepted tropes of the game world.

“Get ’em!”

Not just a battle cry, though that’s how it started out in the game. Over the course of the game, it became the primary tactic of the group upon encountering anything even vaguely threatening or unexpected.

As it spread out of the game, though, it sort of evolved into the signal that people were overthinking something, or wasting time, or just that people were starting to get bored with things. Now, the cry of “Get ’em!” serves to tell everyone that enough dithering has gone on, and something exciting should ensue.

“I catch her and throw her back.”

There’s an entire gaming war story behind this one. Suffice it to say that it occurred in our Amber game, completely derailed my plot, left me speechless for several minutes, almost killed the character being thrown, and stands as a shining moment in play.

Now, it’s the signal that something is both completely unexpected and devilishly successful.

Thank you, Weyland.

“Two hundred feet tall with an army.”

This is something that existed among some of my players before I began gaming with them, as a holdover from a previous game they had played. In that long-ago game, so the sages relate, there was a villain that the party did not kill all the way somehow. And later he came back to get them. And he was bigger and badder. And so they killed him again, and this time they went out of the way to make sure they destroyed every last bit of him, because they were afraid he’d come back (all together now) “two hundred feet tall with an army.”

This phrase is our warning that we’re leaving something undone, or a loose thread hasn’t been resolved.

 

So, that’s my list, off the top of my head. If any of my gaming group has any to add, please feel free. Also, if anyone else wants to share similar stuff from their groups, I’d be very interested to read it.

In other words, comment below.

Duma Key

By | | What's he playing?
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I just finished Duma Key, by Stephen King. I’ve been wanting to write about it for a while, now, but forced myself to wait until I had finished the book; sometimes these things take a sharp turn south before the end, and I find my opinion of them changing.

But I like the book, right up to the end.

I have a sort of weird relationship with Stephen King’s books. Many years ago, when I was in high school, I started reading his novels – The Dead Zone, Firestarter, Carrie, Christine – and I loved them. Of course, I was about thirteen years old at the time, but that’s really neither here nor there.

When I graduated high school and moved into the city to go to university, I got a job at a book store. Some how, between the courses I was taking at university and the attitude of people at the store and the general tendency of people of that age to disparage anything popular, I developed this… contempt, I guess, is the only word… for the works of Stephen King.

This idea settled into my head, anchored deep, and somehow kept me from reading his stuff for many, many years. In fact, I didn’t start again until Wolves of the Calla came out. For some reason, this book got me to catch up on the Dark Tower series. And reading through The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three, I felt my old disdain for the man’s work to bubble up to the surface. Of course, these two are the earliest books, and really the least polished of the entire series, in my opinion.

But I kept at it.

By the time I finished Wolves of the Calla, I had a brand new respect for Stephen King as an author. And really, the series is a wonderful tour through his development and growth as a writer, stretching as it does from his very beginning, up to his current writing. I started going back and reading all the novels I had missed. Some of them, like Tommyknockers and Cujo, I’m just not a fan of. Others, like Dreamcatcher and Needful Things, I really enjoyed. And a few, like Bag of Bones and It, were amazingly good.

Stephen King is the kind of author I love. He is a craftsman, building his story through careful use of his tools. You can see him finding new tools and learning to use them well as his career progresses, from rougher earlier novels to more polished recent ones. He talks about writing the way I think about writing. And he is completely unapologetic about doing what he needs to do to make the story work.

And he had some very interesting things to say in the second half of his speech to the National Book Foundation when they gave him a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003. Things that made me want to stand up and cheer, even though I was reading the speech six months after the fact.

Okay, enough generalities. What about Duma Key?

I loved it. Part of this is the fact that I listened to the audio book, and the reader (John Slattery) was very good.  At times, his voice even sounded like Stephen King’s.

Beyond that, though, it’s a good story. The main character was, to me anyway, immensely likable, flawed though he was. I’ve noticed that, since his own accident, King brings the ideas of near-fatal accidents and the pain and effort of recovery into his work a lot more often. If he was less good at it, it would be annoying, but his own experience of such things lets him write about it with a truth and clarity that you rarely see. So, too, in this novel. I found myself very invested in Edgar Freemantle’s long, painful recovery, and his striving to build a new life after his old one is destroyed.

And then, of course, the weirdness seeps in. It comes with laudable subtlety, building slowly, with a little bit of prophetic teasing allowed by the first-person voice and the conceit of the book having been written after the events. It’s slow and patient, and you hardly notice the strangeness increasing until you’re neck-deep in it.

I compare this to other books, where I find that King just couldn’t keep it in his pants. His Lovecraftian short story, Crouch End, struck me as being spoiled by his rampant rush to the bizarre.

Aside from being a chronicle of a man’s struggle with physical recovery and a shattered life, Duma Key is a ghost story. The ghosts are a little strange, and some of them are still living, but really it’s all about ghosts, whether of dead people or former lives, clinging when they should let go.

It’s also a Cthulhu Mythos story, though not overtly. But the dread power reaching out through the sea to touch the troubled mind of a sensitive artist? Tell me that’s not straight out of Lovecraft. King even makes a brief mention to Old Ones or Ancient Ones, and then just sort of lets it drop. He’s captured the feel, and the threat, and the unknowable horror that gave Lovecraft’s stories their power, without resorting to a worn pastiche, like Crouch End.

It’s also a story about the transformative power of art, with the metaphor made hellishly literal in this sense.

And, in the end, Duma Key is a story about loss. It’s a story about how much someone can lose, and still struggle on. And about what happens when they lose more than they can stand, but need to keep going anyway.

The ending is not happy, but it is good. Solid. Right.

I found a lot of similarities in tone, mood, and style with Bag of Bones, another Stephen King first-person novel about a haunted artist. There’s the same sort of immediacy to the tale, and a strange mix of sentimentality and cynicism about both men that make them very real in the imagination. And there are subtle things woven into the beginnings of each story that change meaning radically later on as more is revealed.

So. Duma Key. Good book. I recommend it.

Leaving the Path

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, I’ve been running the Scales of War adventure path for a group of players. I’ve talked about it here. I’ve decided to give up on it, though.

Why? Because I’m bored with it.

Not with the game – I like playing with these people, and it’s always a fun social event when we get together to play. And they’re having fun.

But I’m not. I find the adventures to not be very interesting.

We started play back in September, and we play every three weeks. So, we’ve had five or six sessions. And we’re still on the first adventure, still slogging room-by-room through the first dungeon. And when I look at the adventures down the line, all I see are more large site-based adventures.

Don’t get me wrong; the adventures aren’t necessarily bad or boring, but I am bored with them. It’s not the kind of play style I prefer. I like my dungeon crawling in smaller chunks, with a variety of other stuff mixed in. To be fair, we start to see a little more of that in some of the later adventures, but it’s not enough to keep my interest, especially considering that we have to get through this extended crawl first.

Add to this the fact that two of my six players are pretty much brand new to roleplaying. I don’t think the published adventures are doing that good a job of showing off the variety of things that can go on in a game, and that means the new folks are getting a little shortchanged.

There’s another reason that I haven’t mentioned to any of the others, though. Now that I’m devel0ping some familiarity and skill with the new system, I want to stretch and make my own adventures. I see large areas of the game that are so far pretty much neglected in the rules and the published adventures, and I want to see what I can do with them.

What am I going to do? Well, being a democratic sort, I laid out four options and I’m letting people vote.

  1. Scrap the game entirely.
  2. Start a new game, with new characters.
  3. Continue with the same characters, but different adventures.
  4. Continue with different adventures, and give players the opportunity to rebuild or swap out their characters.

As I had expected, option 4 seems to be the most popular choice.

The caveat is that I want to finish this adventure first. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don’t like leaving things half-finished. I want them to get to the end of this story. Secondly, it strains verisimilitude to have their characters just walk away from the kidnapped townsfolk. It’s not very heroic.

I’m not giving up on Dungeon Magazine entirely, though; even if I’m not always happy with the adventures as wholes, there are some brilliant encounters in some of them that I plan to lift right out and use as I see fit.

So, over the next little while, as we finish off this adventure, I’ve got my players thinking about what they want out of the game. I want them thinking about whether their characters are what they want, or if they want to change them. It looks like at least one player is planning on making a change to her character, and we’re talking it out.

I’ve also asked them to send me ideas of what they want to see in the game, what sorts of adventures interest them, and what they want their characters to achieve. This will help me shape the adventures for them.

So here’s a question for you folks out there: What are your favourite moments from a fantasy roleplaying game? What made you think, “Yeah! This is what gaming should be?” I’m curious. And I want to steal your ideas.