Author Archives: Rick Neal

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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We’ve had two sessions since my last post about the game, and we’ve just finished the first full adventure. The party reached level 2 at the end of last night’s session.

There hasn’t been a whole lot new to report; we’re all learning the ins and outs of the new system, and seeing where it works and where we want to tweak it for our group. However, we have found out some interesting things, and we’ve been having fun.

In the session before last, I trotted out a couple of traps in the middle of a fight: a pair of spear gauntlet traps with four rat swarms. I decided that the rat swarms weren’t heavy enough to trigger the trap, but that they were valid targets when the trap went off. This allowed me to preserve the surprise of the traps while still allowing the PCs to use the traps against the rats if they could figure out how.

The fact that I used two traps in an overlapping pattern caused some consternation for the party, and it’s something I want to remember for next time. I found that they viewed the traps primarily as an obstacle to be avoided; they didn’t try to disarm the things during combat. They did work out the trigger pattern, though, and used it a couple of times to target the rats specifically.

The other encounter that session was with some zombies. Because the ruins were from the lost dragonborn empire, I described the undead as looking like rotting dragonborn, and the gravehounds as drakes instead of dogs or wolves. The battle took place in a little knot of rooms and corridors, with doors opening to surprise the party with more zombies, and the cleric wound up being cut off from the party while being savaged by a gravehound and a corruption corpse, but they pulled through. We all quite liked the zombie vulnerability to critical hits – it came up once or twice, and then everyone was hoping for a head shot. Very much in the vein of a zombie movie.

Last night, they faced off against a young black dragon. I advanced it one level to make it an appropriate level 4 enouncter for a party of 6 characters. At the start of combat, I began to be afraid that I had made things too tough; most of the party was down a few healing surges, and the dragon used darkness, stealth, and an underground river to get in a few pretty devastating attacks early on. Then the party fell back, regrouped, and did an end run around the river. They managed to trap the dragon away from the river, thanks to a plethora of readied actions and a very cautious advance, and proceeded to kick it all around the place. Thrun, the dwarven fighter, really started having fun with Tide of Iron, Footwork Lure, and Shield Bash, tossing the dragon around. Ssudai, the dragonborn rougue, came up with a neat Acrobatic stunt: grabbing the dragon’s tail on the backswing after the dragon had tail slashed another character and using it to swing around into a flanking position behind the dragon for a sneak attack. That’s the kind of thing I want the characters in my game doing, so I let him roll, and he nailed it, and unloaded with a pretty impressive helping of damage.

In the end, they took down the dragon, though Soren, the human warlord, fell during the fight. He didn’t die, though, so that’s okay.

The last encounter of the evening was with a shadar-kai witch, a chainfighter, and a couple of dark creepers. The players were feeling cocky after the dragon fight, and they’d had a chance to rest, so I didn’t pull any punches. The dark creepers got a surprise round, and the shadar-kai unloaded with everything they had. Level-wise, the fight was equivalent to the kruthik battle from a couple of sessions ago, though with fewer creatures. Still, whether it was because they were all fresh, or because they’re starting to work a lot better together, the fight was pretty easy for them. No one dropped, though Milo the swordmage came pretty close. The chainfighter even got to unload with two Dance of Deaths in the fight, though my bad dice luck minimized that advantage. The fight took a long time in real time, though, mainly becuase the dice were all tired and didn’t want to roll above a six.

So, we wrapped up a little late, but everyone was happy to level up, and seemed to have fun. I count it as a win.

Running a Demo

By | | What's he playing?
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Last time, I talked about building an RPG game demo. This time, I want to talk about running it.

Now, the last post was pretty long and in-depth. That’s because you need a fair bit of prep work to put together a workable demo. Running a game is almost an afterthought once you’ve put in the work ahead of time, so this article is going to be shorter, just a list of tips and tricks and advice about running a demo game.

My basic assumption is that you’ve run games before. If you haven’t, then you probably want to get in some practice with a group of friends before you strut your stuff in public.

So, what’s my advice for running demo games?

  • Be prepared. Have all the notes and play aids you need ready ahead of time. This is sort of the whole point of my last post.
  • Get there early. Often times things come up at the last minute before the game start. If you’re there early, you’ve got some lead time on set-up.
  • Make an attractive table. Set out character sheets and figures, lay out battle mats, put up your screen, display the books, whatever. The goal here is to make people want to come over and see what’s going on. Then you can talk them into playing.
  • Be friendly and polite. Smile. Talk to people. Be inviting. Laugh and joke. Make the prospect of gaming with you attractive.
  • Answer questions. When people ask you something about the game, answer them. Let them know what they need to buy to start out. Answer rule questions. Recommend other games.
  • Invite people to play. They may not know you’re doing a demo, so invite them to sit in if they seem interested.
  • Take rejection graciously. It’s not personal. Some folks won’t be interested, and some folks won’t have time. If they say no, then it’s no. Don’t badger or hound. Thank them, and let them get on with their day.
  • Talk to the participants. Find out if they’re first-timers or old-timers. See if they have any other experience with this game.
  • Teach to the audience. Once you know their level of experience, teach to that. If they’re all veterans of the last three editions of the game, then you don’t need to explain about dice – just on the new rules. On the other hand, if they’ve never played before, you’re going to have to teach them how to read a d4.
  • Remember that you’re in public. If you’re in a game store, you are also seen as a representative of the store. Keep that in mind before graphicly describing the murder of a child or the content’s of the Mad Duke’s box of bedtime toys.
  • Remeber that this isn’t your regular group. Shorthand, in-jokes, and assumptions about play style are not necessarily going to pan out. Pay attention to what’s actually going on at the table.
  • Get into it. Let yourself go. Have fun. Use the funny voices and the colourful descriptions of combat. Make other people wish they were having as much fun as you are.
  • Watch the time. Make sure you get to your climax, even if you have to cut other stuff short. If the particpants are looking at their watches, you should be moving things along.
  • If you’re playing in a game store, shill. Point out the books the participants should buy to get started. Show them where the dice are. Show off new products. Be willing to talk about the game and get people enthused.
  • When the game’s done, thank the participants. Tell them you hope they had fun.
  • When the session is done and you’ve got another one starting, reset everything. Set the table up the way it was at the start of the day. This means you need to leave yourself a little time between sessions, but that’s not such a bad idea, anyway.
  • When the day’s demos are done, pack up quickly and clean up the area. Thank your host for his or her hospitality.

Yeah, a lot of this stuff isn’t new, is it? Be friendly and polite. Be a good representative of the hobby, the game, and the venue. Make sure everyone has a good time.

One last thing: sometimes things go south. Maybe you wind up with a really annoying participant, or with no participants. What do you do then?

Suck it up.

One of the downsides of running a demo is that you don’t get to pick who you play with. Others decide if they want to play with you. Don’t take it personally; a lot of folks don’t like to game with people they don’t know, because it’s outside their comfort zone. If no one shows, hang around anyway, and talk to people. Some may have questions, some may want to tell you war stories, and some may just want to pass the time. Relax. Enjoy. Interact.

And if you wind up with that annoying gamer stereotype sitting at the table? So what. Have fun. Play and enjoy. Just remember that you need to be as attentive, friendly, and helpful to the annoying ones as you do to the fun ones. If someone’s being a jerk, don’t be a jerk back. It never helps. Just remember that you get to walk away at the end of this, and go back to your regular players.

So, there you have it. Questions? Comments? Leave ’em below.

Building a Demo

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Okay, if you’ve read my blog in the past couple of weeks, you probably know that I’m running a couple of D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games on November 29 and December 13. If you’re in Winnipeg and want to try out the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, come on down and play. Games start at 1:00 p.m. There’s limited seating, so show up early if you want to guarantee a spot.

Anyway, I’m working this week on putting together the demo, and figured that I’d talk about the method I use. It’s the method I’ve used in other demos in the past, and it works fairly well, so I’m not changing it this time around. Here’s how I go about building a demo.

There are four things you need to put together in order to have a solid demo:

  • Venue
  • Adventure
  • Characters
  • Play Aids

 Venue

For me, venue is the easies thing. I run my demos at Imagine Games, the local game and hobby store run by my friends, Pedro and Wendy. How do I set up the venue? I say to Pedro, “Hey. Want me to run a demo on Saturday?” Easy.

If you don’t have such a handy venue available, you may have to scramble a little. Having said that, most game stores are generally pretty open to having someone come in and run a demo – it’s free advertising for them, it generates some traffic, and it helps build the hobby. You may have to convince the manager that you’re the kind of person he or she wants to run a demo, so remember to be friendly and polite.

If you don’t have a local store available or willing to support you in this, check out the local libraries and community centres. They often have function rooms that you can use, sometimes free, sometimes for a nominal fee.

Wherever you wind up running your demo, keep in mind that, unless it’s your own personal venue, you’re a guest there. Find out what rules your host has, and make sure everyone follows them. That makes it more likely that you’ll get to come back. Remember: friendly and polite.

Adventure

Once you’ve got your space, you’ve got to figure out what you’re going to run. This is going to involve a number of factors you need to consider; it’s not like putting together the adventure for your regular group. You have to keep in mind:

  • Time. How much time have you got to run? If you’ve got a whole afternoon, you can put together a much longer adventure than if you have a two-hour slot. This may be set by the venue, or it may be set by the number of participants you’re expecting.
  • Participants. How many people are you going to have at the demo? If you want to limit the number of seats, you have to make sure that people know that seating is limited. Be realistic about your ability to manage the group size, and keep in mind that more players means the adventure will take longer to run, because it will take longer to cycle through each of them. If you’ve got a large number of people interested, but a game that works best with smaller numbers, consider running multiple shorter slots instead of one longer one. Run two two-hour sessions instead of one four-hour session. You don’t need a new adventure for this; just repeat.
  • Purpose. What are you trying to accomplish with your demo? If you’re trying to attract new players, you will want to run something simple and basic. If you’re trying to showcase a new release, you’ll want to make sure you use two or three of the coolest things from that release in the adventure. If you’re trying to appeal to more accomplished gamers, you need to run something a little less straightforward. Figure out what your primary goal is, and keep it in mind.

So, I’m going to have all afternoon for my demo. It’s D&D 4E, which is tailored for 5 players out of the box, but it’s pretty easy to adjust up and down on the fly, especially if I prepare the adventure knowing I might have to do that. Turn out for some demos at Imagine has been overwhelming, and for other demos it’s been underwhelming, so I think I’m going to build two two-hour adventures that can be crammed together into a larger four-hour adventure. That gives me the flexibility to stop after two hours if there’s another group of people who want in, or if two hours is all a group wants to play, while letting me stretch out the session to four hours if I only get one group of folks who want to play all afternoon.

I’m aiming the game at people who are new to 4E, if not D&D or RPGs in general, so I want something with a basic format to it, but a couple of twists along the way. Specifically for 4E, I want to show off the way character powers work, how interesting the monsters are, and skill challenges. I’ve previously done demo adventures based around a goblin raid on a caravan; I think I’ll start with that premise and see where it leads me.

Now, you don’t have to build an adventure. Using a published one is fine, and lots of companies even provide demo adventures in their products or on their websites. In fact, I still have the Into the Shadowhaunt demo kit Wizards sent out for the launch of 4E. Why am I building an adventure? Couple of reasons. For one thing, I find it pretty easy and quick to do in 4E. For another, most of the other adventures have a little too much exposure for my taste – I want to offer something fresh to the participants, and not have someone who has, for example, read the Kobold Hall adventure in the DMG bored because that’s the adventure I’m running.

Characters

 You need pregenerated characters for a demo. The time needed to create characters with the participants as part of the demo is just too great – it’ll overshadow the actual adventure. The only time to have character generation as part of the demo is either a multi-session continuing demo (I used to do a four-session Learn Dungeons & Dragons demo, and character creation was the entire first session) or if the character creation system something important to the actual play of the game and you want to show it off (games like Spirit of the Century, Dogs in the Vineyard, and 3:16, for example).

Keep the complexity of the characters in synch with your primary audience. If this is an intro game, keep them simple. If you’re trying to show off a new feature from a supplement, make sure it’s highlighted.

My demo is aimed at people new to 4E, so I’m going to go with first-level characters, and I’m going to use options only from the core rule books. I was planning on doing up a set of characters with the DDI Character Builder beta, but there are some issues with it on Vista that are still being resolved, so instead I think I’m just going to use the characters from Keep on the Shadowfell.

Play Aids

This last bit is kind of weird. You wouldn’t think so, but having the right play aids can do more for your demo than pretty much anything else. If you choose wrong, things slow down, participants get frustrated and bored, and you can wind up with a great adventure that no one actually enjoys.

The key I’ve found to play aids is to think about them in two flavours. One is something that makes the game flow easier, and one is something that makes the game more cool. And never forget that the aids need to help you, too; not just the players.

So, for making the game flow easier, the two big things are character sheets and the adventure text. Make sure both are readable, both are easy to understand, and both have all the details they need. Do the math ahead of time when you can, so that players don’t need to figure out their bonuses every time they roll the dice, and you don’t have to fumble around with the monsters the same way. If you are going to have multiple versions of some parts of the adventure, like adjusting encounters for different numbers of players, do the work ahead of time so it doesn’t bog you down at the table. You’re going to be busy enough running and teaching the game without trying to rebuild encounters on the hoof.

Also, if you have any quick rules handouts, bring them along. Wizards did a great two-page sheet for the D&D Experience this past spring that I’m going to print out, for example. Make sure you have a copy for each of your players.

Here’s a little tip about printed material: if they’re going to be used by multiple groups, make them sturdy. Either print them out on cardstock, or spring for some clear page protectors and a box of dry erase markers. It’ll save you time and heartache between groups.

Aside from the printed materials, make sure you’ve got enough dice and writing implements for everyone. Don’t expect your audience to bring what they need – anticipate what’s needed, and provide it.

As for play aids that make the game more cool, you can go as nuts as you have time for, here. At a minimum, I’m going to be bringing a miniature suitable for each PC, and suitable minis for the monsters. I’m also going to lay out the encounters using my Dungeon Tiles, possibly with a home-made battlemap for the final encounter that I put together in Dundjinni. That, plus my DM Screen and combat tracker pad – both of which fall into both categories of play aids.

Put everything – adventure, characters, play aids – together into something you can carry easily. Check it all, and make sure you haven’t forgot anything. Specifically, make sure you haven’t forgot your dice; trust me when I say that it can happen, and it sucks.

That’s the way I put together a demo. Of course, building a demo and running a demo are two different things. Next post I’ll talk about how I run the demos.

Dungeons & Dragons Insider – So Far, So Good

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Before I get rolling in my assessment of DDI, I want to remind folks in Winnipeg that I will be running D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games on Saturday, November 29, and Saturday, December 13. Games will start at 1:00. Sessions are limited to 6 players, so get there early if you want to guarantee a seat at the table. I’ll provide minis, pregenerated characters, and dice, so all you need to bring is yourself.

There. End plug. Let’s talk about Dungeons & Dragons Insider.

I, like a lot of people, was a little bit leery of the new digital initiative over at Wizards. The idea of having to shell out a subscription fee for electronic access to more D&D content struck me, initially, as pretty distasteful.

When I thought about it for a bit, though, I decided it wasn’t that bad. I was already shelling out 20 bucks a month buying Dungeon and Dragon magazines from the local game shop. Spending that on electronic versions was a bit much, but when you tack on the extras, it started to look a little more reasonable. Of course, this was before any pricing was announced. Currently, if you subscribe for a year, you get the two magazines at $4.95 a month, which is pretty decent.

Now, the price is going to go up as more and more tools come online for the system. I’m okay with that, as long as the tools they build are useful and functional, and the price stays in step with what I feel they’re worth.

Anyway, I subscribed.

I’m not totally sold on the whole thing, though; I think they’re off to a pretty good start, but I’m withholding final judgement. Here’s my thinking on the various components so far.

  • Dragon Magazine. Dragon’s doing a really good job of providing extra options for characters. That’s been my one reservation (well, my main reservation, anyway) about 4E – it’s early in the product life span, so there’s just not as many options available. Dragon’s helping to ease that concern, and the look at playtest files for things like the Artificer, Barbarian, and Bard classes gives me a better idea of the kind of depth of support and development Wizards has planned. Overall, thumbs way up.
  • Dungeon Magazine. This I’m not as enthusiastic about. The articles are pretty good, but I find that the adventures are a little less than thrilling. Sure, it’s early days yet, but the folks at Wizards just don’t seem to be taking any chances with their adventures. Pretty much everything is a dungeon crawl, with a few encounters on the way to the dungeon crawl, and maybe a few encounters on the way back from the dungeon crawl. While I find the adventures very useful for seeing the way encounters can be put together, and they can be stripmined for new monsters and traps, I just find them very bland. Safe, I guess, in that they are aimed at the very basics of the game. In comparison with what Paizo’s doing in the Pathfinder line, they really come out second best. Most specifically, the Scales of War Adventure Path just doesn’t compare to the Pathfinder Adventure Paths in terms of variety of activity and interesting options. Ah, well, as I say, it’s early days. I’m willing to give them a while to start stretching themselves.
  • D&D Compendium. I haven’t really used this much, though I can see it being useful. It just hasn’t come up so far. I think it’s a good idea in theory, but I really can’t say more about it than that.
  • Encounter Builder. I can see this becoming more useful to me as I learn the game more. Right now, I find it more helpful to page through the books looking for the right mix of monsters, because I don’t know what all of them do, yet. Still, it’s very handy for figuring out the XP budget for each encounter, and telling you whether it’s an easy, average, or hard encounter for your target party. I like it, but haven’t used it extensively.
  • Ability Generator. This is okay, but I’m assuming that it’s going to be superseded by the Character Builder. As a stand-alone thing, I don’t much see the point.
  • Monster Builder. Building monsters in 4E is a lot quicker than in other editions (and I know what I’m talking about: I built 30 3E monsters for the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary). This little tool makes it even easier. The one catch is that it doesn’t seem to do Elite or Solo monsters, which is disappointing. Having said that, it does all the heavy lifting, math-wise, for normal monsters, and the explanation in the DMG of how to improve them to Elite or Solo is pretty straightforward. It’s good, but not perfect. Also, I’ve yet to be able to get the formatted stat block view to work. Still, it shows great promise.
  • Character Builder. This is currently in closed beta testing, and only goes up to 3rd level. But I have to say that it’s pretty sweet. There are some weird things about it and a glitch or two, but this is a beta, and that’s to be expected. I’m not going to talk about the problems here, because I have every confidence that they’ll be corrected before release (the one-day turnaround time on the Vista x64 issue fix shows how serious they are about fixing things). What I will say is that I’m going to be using this tool to create all the pregen characters for my 4E demos, and it’s going to take me about a quarter of the time of using one of the form-fillable character sheets out there. When this is finalized, it’s going to be worth the price of admission all on its own, I think.
  • Upcoming Features. The three other things they’re talking about adding to the DDI offering are the Character Visualizer, the Dungeon Builder, and the D&D Game Table. I’m not all that interested in the D&D Game Table – my game schedule is full enough, without trying to cram in virtual sessions. The Character Visualizer seems like a neat toy, but I’ve been unimpressed with the quality of the art that I’ve seen in the previews. I’m guessing it will be better in the release, but it’s still not something that really draws me, though I’ll probably spend some time playing with it. The Dungeon Builder seems to be the item that I’d use most, especially if it has the option of printing out battle maps, but I don’t see that on the list of features. We’ll have to wait and see.

So, there it is. In general, I like where DDI is headed, though I have a few reservations. I’d like to see a broader variety of adventures in Dungeon, and I’m anxious for the extra features they’re developing. I’m tentatively sold on it. We’ll have to see how well it lives up to its promise.

The Thing About Skill Challenges

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Mike Mearls is writing a two-part article for Dragon Magazine about skill challenges. If you have a subscription to Dungeons & Dragons Insider, you can read the first part here. Now, he’s just laying the groundwork for a discussion of running skill challenges, but it’s pretty good stuff, so far, talking about when a skill challenge is appropriate, and when it isn’t, and how to put in a good mix of skills so everyone in the party can contribute. I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Having said that, I’ve got some thoughts of my own on skill challenges, based on running a couple of published ones, and creating and running a couple of my own.

When I first read the 4E DMG, I thought skill challenges were a great idea. They provided a way to implement game mechanics into what had formerly been mechanic-less scenes in adventures, and a way to calculate experience awards for these scenes. Great, right?

Well, yes and no.

See, if you turn every scene that was previously resolved by role-playing into a scene with dice mechanics, you can lose a lot of flavour and spontaneity and interaction. It becomes a different kind of combat in the minds of many of the players. On the other hand, having clear mechanics for some interactions can be a real boon for some players and characters, especially those who have trained up the interpersonal skills.

My own view on skill challenges is that they’re a good thing, but you have to use them appropriately. I’ve found that having a skill challenge in place to see if the characters accomplish something doesn’t work too well: if failing prevents them from accomplishing something important to the adventure, it can derail the entire thing, but if failing doesn’t have a penalty, it’s not interesting, so why devote all the time to the skill challenge?

My solution to this has been to put skill challenges in place to add complexity to the narrative of the adventure. For example, in my Storm Point campaign, the first session started with a skill challenge to track down a group of goblins rumoured to have a map to a previously-undiscovered ruin. Now, the characters were going to find the goblins no matter what, but I wanted to see how they might decide to go about it. They used their Nature and Perception skills to try and track the goblins down, but didn’t get too much good information that way. When they started interviewing the farmers in the surrounding area (using Streetwise and Diplomacy), they found out about a halfling who traded with the goblins, and then leaned on him (Intimidate) to get him to tell them where he met the goblins to trade.

The success of the challenge let the players surprise the goblins, which allowed them to run roughshod over the little beggars. If they had failed, the goblins would have been ready for them, and laid a trap. But the way the characters went about locating the goblins added some complexity to their story: they now have a rivalry with a halfling criminal, and have let the people in and around Storm Point know that they’re out looking for ruins and the wealth they contain.

By allowing the characters to run free with this skill challenge, I got to let them set the pace and flavour of the their search. Sure, I made some notes about how different skills might be used and the results thereof, and I created an NPC that could be slotted in as an information source, but I really let the players dictate the direction of the inquiries, and the method of the search. It told me a lot about how they viewed this new game world, and what they saw as their place in it.

The other thing I used skill challenges for was to introduce complications into what could otherwise be a long, boring part of the game. For example, the characters, after obtaining the goblins’ map and locating the chasm marked on it, had to climb down into the rift to find the ruins. Instead of just calling for Athletics rolls to see if they make the climb, I turned it into a skill challenge. They used Athletics and Acrobatics, of course, but also Dungeoneering, Endurance, Nature, and a few other skills. Instead of setting a pass/fail condition for the challenge as a whole, every time they failed, I threw a complication at them: a rock slide, an attack by a cavern choker, what have you. This turned a fairly boring set of rolls into a more exciting challenge, with each failure meaning some sort of obstacle to overcome.

What I don’t do anymore is use skill challenges to replace role-playing. In the first Scales of War game, there is a skill challenge (granted, it’s optional) where you try to convince the town council to hire you to fetch back the kidnapped townspeople. It’s listed pretty much whole-cloth from the DMG’s example of negotiating with nobility. I think everyone in on this one found it to be artificial and rather stilted, especially as we were using the pre-errata rules, where it was run pretty much like a combat*.

No, I find that it’s one thing to let people roll for their characters’ skills during a role-played encounter, and quite another to turn the whole thing into a succession of dice rolls. Granted, some of that feeling of “combat by other means” resulted from my inexperience using the rules, but the nature and the structure of the skill challenge seemed lacking. Far better, in my opinion, to role-play it, and call for rolls when necessary.

The other thing I really disliked about it was the automatic failure skill – basically a landmine in the challenge that blows up on you if you try the wrong thing. I hate this. Skill challenges, in my opinion, should be opportunities for players to try things that their characters are good at, not creep carefully through the encounter, going with choices that they know are safe. They should be trying different, exciting things to get the encounter moving.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the structure and use of skill challenges. Right now, I’ve got the notes for a skill challenge that should make up an entire adventure, as the characters take on a crime boss in Storm Point. Each success gives them an encounter based on what they’re trying to do, and each failure gives them an encounter where they’re at a disadvantage. Success and failure both lead to a final showdown, but the odds will be swayed one way or the other depending on whether the challenge was a success or failure.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

 

*If you are unaware of the errata, I suggest you check it out. It gets rid of the initiative roll, and the combat round sequence of skill challenges, making them more free-flow and intuitive.

No Roles II – More Board and Card Games

By | | What's he playing?
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Way back here, I said I was going to talk about some other board and card games I enjoyed in my next post.

Well, obviously that didn’t happen.

It’s been more than six months since that post, and I’m finally getting back around to it. Here are some brief discussions of other games I like.

Beowulf the Legend

From the good folks at Fantasy Flight (as usual), this is another very beautiful, high-quality game, with a wonderful set of rules. It’s a lot of fun to play. The concept is that the players (and it works with 2-5, though really you need 3 for it to be really fun) are members of Beowulf’s warband, and travel with him, helping him out in his adventures. The one who earns the most glory for himself by the time Beowulf dies at the end (Ooops! Spoiler!) becomes king of the Geats, and gets to preside over this tribe of folk as they wither and vanish from the earth.

You don’t have to play out that part, though.

It’s a bidding game, essentially. Everyone has a hand of cards with various suits for Fighting, Courage, Wit, Traveling, and Friendship, and you play these in various episodes throughout Beowulf’s story to help him achieve his goals. The person who helps the most gets first pick of the prizes, the next gets second pick, and so on. Some of the prizes aren’t such prizes, if you follow me; they’re things like wounds or misfortune. Other prizes are much better, being glory, treasure, alliances (which can be either glory or treasure), and special cards that help in play.

The thing that really makes this game shine, though, is the risk mechanic. It turns a fairly tame bidding card game with an interesting background into a full-on Viking game of boasting, challenging, and gambling. See, you may not have the suit of card you need to bid in the current round. In that case, you can risk, and draw two cards from the deck. If you draw a card of an appropriate suit, you bid it and hopefully stay in the game. Cards of the wrong suit are discarded. If you don’t get a single card of an appropriate suit, you take a scratch (three scratches make a wound, which can negatively impact your final score).

Strategy-wise, the game is all about risk management. You want to make sure you have the cards you need for the coming challenges, so you need to look ahead and plan accordingly. You want to take risks either for really good prizes or to avoid really bad prizes. You need to be able to judge whether or not taking a given risk is worth it to you at the time. And you need to be able to shrug off all the other Vikings in the game calling you a coward if you don’t take the risk.

It’s a lot of fun.

Now, I have been informed by a female friend of mine that this is very much a “Guy Game.” I don’t know how true that is, but I’m a guy, and I love it. I say give it a try, even if you happen to be a woman.

Gloom

This is a card game from Atlas Games, created by Keith Baker, the mastermind behind Eberron.

In general, I’m a big fan of the folks at Atlas, not least because the inestimable Dr. Michelle Nephew was very good to me while I was writing for them. And they published one of my favourite RPGs in the whole, wide world: Unknown Armies.

This game has nothing to do with any of that, but I felt it needed to be said, anyway.

In Gloom, you take control of a family of unfortunate people, and try and make them even more unfortunate. The art is very reminiscent of Edward Gorey, and the themes are very Lemony Snicket, as you play misfortune cards (“Pursued by Poodles,” for example; there’s a lot of alliteration in this game) on your family. These cards drop the score of each of the people in your family down into negative numbers. Then you kill them, freezing the score. In the meantime, you try and play fortunate cards on your opponents, raising the scores of their families. Once an entire family has been wiped out, you total all the scores, and low score wins.

The cards use a clear substance (mylar, maybe?), allowing you to stack fortune and misfortune cards on top of your character cards without obscuring the portrait and name. There’s a clever mechanic with the positive and negative scores appearing in different positions on the card, so that sometimes a new card with cover an old score, and sometimes it won’t. Only visible scores are counted, which leads to some strategizing about who gets what card, and the different deaths can also affect scores.

It’s not a complex game, and the strategy isn’t very deep, but it’s quick to learn and quick to play.

The really fun part about the game, though, is the rule that you have to tell a little story about the cards your playing, building on the cards already in play. You can’t just lay down the card “Mocked by Midgets.” You have to explain why they were mocking, and why it had such a negative effect. The absurd downward spiral of the characters really makes the game.

There are also three expansions for this, but I haven’t played with them. They look interesting, though.

Three Dragon Ante

I never expected to like this game, it being a kind of fantasy poker released by Wizards of the Coast a few years back. But you know, it’s a good game. Like poker, the game is fairly simple in principle and rules, but gets increasingly interesting as you learn it and begin to unpack the strategy in it. Play is generally fast, and fairly exciting, with pots shifting and changing fairly quickly. It does a good job of keeping the players in the hands, as opposed to the way poker encourages folding early.

It’s not a terribly deep game, and I could wish for cards that were a little less cartoony and a little more medieval in flavour, but it’s a good game to sit down with a bunch of friends for an hour or so of pretend gambling.

And now that I have my Campaign Coins, it’s probably time to give it a try again.

That’s it for now, though. Give some of the above a try.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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First off, I’m going to be running some D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games & Hobbies again. These will take place on Saturday, November 29, and Saturday, December 13. If you’re in Winnipeg, and want to try out D&D 4E in a friendly, non-threatening environment, come on down and bounce some dice with us. I’ll post more details here as I hammer them out with the store.

Anyway, on to the main topic.

I ran the second session of my new Storm Point campaign this past Sunday. Again, it went quite well. We were one man short, so one of the other players took over running his character for the session. These are the rules we hashed out at the start of this campaign, mainly to make my life as GM easier:

  1. I keep a copy of all character sheets.
  2. We run as long as four out of six players show up.
  3. The characters of absent players get played by someone who is present.
  4. No one ever plays more than two characters.
  5. No one ever has to double-up on characters twice in a row.
  6. All six characters get equal shares of the XP.

This set of rules prevents a couple of things that we ran into in the 3.5 campaign, when we would leave out the characters of absent players. First, I don’t have to try to adjust the encounters on the fly based on who shows up. Second, we don’t wind up with an XP gap between characters.

So, we had the full party when they got to the main adventure site. I threw a combat at them as they made camp for the night, a group of representatives from the Empire Reborn trying to take their map to the ruins by force. This was more of a challenging fight than they’d had up to that point, because the foes were of a more appropriate level, and were intelligent and unsurprised. They got worried a couple of times during the combat, which was good.

After that, there was a skill challenge to wend their way down through the treacherous chasm to the actual ruins of an Arkhosian outpost. Each failure they rolled produced some sort of setback: a rockslide, an attack by a cavern choker, etc. Also, each round of the challenge, they had to make an Endurance check or lose a healing surge from fatigue, random battering, bad air, etc.

Waiting for them at the bottom of the chasm was the toughest fight so far: a Level 3 encounter with a nest of kruthiks. Four hatchlings, two adults, and a hive lord. This was a close fight, with the cleric actually dropping at one point, and everyone rather battered and torn at the end, but they prevailed.

Again, everyone had fun, it seemed, and the various encounters worked well and were exciting. I’m gonna close this post with a quote from the player of Thrun the Anvil, dwarven fighter, who also ran Milo Tarn, human swordmage, in this session:

Lessons I learned:

– Thrun needs to pay more attention to protecting the healer.

– Thrun needs to stay closer to the pack in combat. I think what I *should* have done was to maneuver to force the critter he was fighting into the group via tide of iron instead of hanging out over by the pillar, just the two of us.

– I’d like to get/ask for/make a power card for Thrun’s challenge.

– Fighter’s challenge + enemies with reach = win. Thrun just hammered the crap clean out of that poor choker.

– Gaining healing triggers should be a priority for Thrun as I advance him through levels. Because of this, it’s also probably going to work better if I don’t burn the feat at second level to get him the craghammer and instead take a feat that extends his survivability either by mitigation (heavy armor or the like), or by endurance.

– Greenflame blade can be an awesome mook eraser.

– Aegis on one target at range + booming blade on a different, adjacent target = nice control.

– Aegis on one target at range + booming blade on a different, adjacent target = a big dent in my HP.

– Being hit by status effects sucks.

– For each additional status effect you are hit with, the suck amplifies as a product of cubes into the ultrasuck range.

Looking forward to the next game.

Read ‘Em And Weep

By | | What's he reading?
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I’ve just re-read Last Call by Tim Powers. I love this book.

I’m a big fan of all of Tim Powers’s books, but this one is my absolute favourite. It’s been about five years since I last read it, and I love it as much now as I did the first time I read it. Maybe more, because I know a little more about the real-world things he’s talking about. Not that I believe in the occult aspects of the book, but I know now about the traditions he draws from, and I’m better able to appreciate the rich, deep background he’s created with it.

I read a fair amount of modern fantasy, because I like the juxtaposition of the non-rational with the structured, technological milieu that is modern society. Until Last Call, though, most of the stuff I read was drawn from the well of celtic myth and paganism, things like Emma Bull’s The War for the Oaks and Charles de Lint’s Moonheart*.

Last Call was the first modern fantasy book that I read that used other themes – in this case, a mix of ceremonial magic in the Western esoteric tradition, Jungian archetypes, and Arthurian myth. It did a fantastic job of making you believe in a real underground network of people who are clued in on some level, in the know about the mystic underbelly that most folks refuse to acknowledge. And it showed the level of obsession that was necessary to take part in it**.

So, what’s the book about? It’s about a man, already behind the eight-ball because of who his father is and what his father wants to do to him, who manages to dig himself in deeper by playing in an ill-advised poker game. Twenty-one years later, the debts are coming due, and it’s not just him who has to pay the price, but his friends and family, as well. Not having anything left to lose, he travels back to the source of the evil reaching out to claim his life – Las Vegas – to try and find a kind of redemption.

Mixed up in there are the powers of the archetypes represented in the Tarot cards, the evil man lurking behind Mandelbrot equations, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, quantum probability, ancient Greek and Egyptian gods, body-swapping, evil Elvis impersonators, the ghost of Bugsy Siegel, and the friendliest hit man you could ever hope to meet.

It’s filled with desperate action, wild speculation, and a twist on history that does a lot to illuminate the reason things are the way they are. It charts a man’s heroic (and not-so-heroic, sometimes) attempts at redemption, seeking the love of a father who once tried to kill him.

It’s also got a couple of explosions and a spear gun battle under the waters of Lake Mead, lest you think it’s all about soul-searching and healing the child within.

One of the things I love most about Tim Powers’s books is the way he weaves historical facts and personalities into them. I read an interview with him about the rules he used when writing the book Declare, all about Kim Philby and Noah’s Ark. I’m paraphrasing, here, but his rule was that he could not contradict an established fact – if there was a report that Philby was in Cairo on a certain day, then Philby would have to be in Cairo on that day in the novel. All the weirdness, conpsiracy, and mysticism had to be woven in and around the gaps, changing not the facts, but the meaning of the facts***.

This is showcased less in Last Call, as the only real historical figure to take a role is Bugsy Siegel, but it shows up a lot more in The Stress of Her Regard, featuring the Romantic poets, and Expiration Date, the sort-of sequel to Last Call that features such notable personages (or at least their ghosts) as Tom Edison and Harry Houdini.

Tim Powers’s novels have a sheer inventive genius about them that really appeals to me. The ideas are creative, solidly built into the background and structure of the novel, and hang together very believably. Beyond that, he has a clear, clean prose style that really appeals to me, avoiding overblown descriptions or purple prose. And his characters are deep, individual, and fascinating.

Having finished Last Call, I’m starting on Expiration Date. This will be followed by Earthquake Weather, which transforms the three books into a trilogy by tying together the first two books. The three books were published some time apart, and I’ve never read them back-to-back like this, having bought each when it was released.

That’s the down side to being a Tim Powers fan: the man does good work, but you never seem to get enough of it****.

Anyway, I see I need one more new book cited to round out the Amazon sidebar, so let’s end with The Drawing of the Dark, a Tim Powers novel about the siege of Vienna, the reborn King Arthur, a bunch of wandering vikings, and beer.

How can you top that for cool?

 

*Both very excellent books. You should read them. Now.

** This idea of obsession being necessary to transcend the mundane and take part in the mystical is one of the core tenets of the Unknown Armies RPG, which I had the tremendous good fortune to do some writing for. UA owes a considerable and acknowledge debt to the works of Tim Powers. It’s one of the reasons I love the game the way I do.

*** This is related, in a way, to what I said about reading with filters in this post here.

**** Not to sound ungrateful. I’m happy for what I can get. I’m just greedy for more.

Back for More – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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So, after the devastating and anti-climactic TPK two weeks ago, my Sunday group, affectionately known as the Geek Game, decided that they wanted to play 4th Edition D&D for the next campaign. I agreed – hell, I encouraged it. I’ve been itching to run more 4E stuff, and I’ve been wanting to try out building adventures and campaigns in the new system.

I got some opinions from folks about what kind of game they wanted. The consensus was to leave behind the adventure paths and play in a game that, while it may have some throughlines of story, is more episodic, with the adventures being a little more self-contained. They also voted not to use Forgotten Realms, which is the only full setting currently published.

Again, I was okay with that. I came up with the idea of the fishing/mining town of Storm Point, that was on the frontier of the human empire a century ago, and barely noticed when the empire fell. I wanted a frontier, Deadwood kind of feel to the place, with little contact with the larger world and no external authority. I decided that representatives from some powerful neighbouring city-states and kingdoms had recently started paying attention to Storm Point because of the fact that it sits in the middle of the remains of three much older empires, and the ruins and treasure they contain. Most locals don’t care too much about that, but outsiders have started showing up, wanting to do some looting, and wanting the support of the town to do so.

I put together a couple of pages of notes into a campaign handout, told them what books they could use for their characters, and they got to creating them. We wound up with:

  • Ssudai T’kar, a dragonborn rogue (Ahem! Commando!)
  • Thrun the Anvil, a dwarf fighter
  • Soren Greensword, a human warlord
  • Faran Brae, an elf cleric
  • Galvanys i’Araukamegil, an eladrin ranger
  • Milo Tarn, a human swordmage

I also let them vote on what their first adventure would be, based on the writeups in the campaign handout, and they decided to go after some ruins from one of the older empires. I sat down with the DMG and the MM, and had the notes I needed for the adventure done in about an hour. I spent another hour to an hour and a half typing up the notes and statblocks I needed to run the game.

And I was done.

Two and a half hours to put together an adventure designed to take a party of six from first level to second level. I had time to create a map of the campaign area, and a prop map for the adventure.

I’m liking that a lot.

Anyway, last night we ran for the first time. We got started a little late, and there was some general hullabaloo that slowed us down some, but we got through two encounters, and everyone had a good time.

The first encounter was a mix of a skill challenge and combat, with the characters completing a skill challenge to locate a band of goblins with a map to an undiscovered ruin complex, and then taking the map away from them. They did some scouting of the nearby area, and figured out the general area the goblins would have to be, then talked to the farmers in the area to find out if there was any sign of goblins. They found out that one of the ne’er-do-wells in the town’s halfling community had been seen apparently trading with the goblins, so they went to his boat and put the fear of several gods into him until he told them where to find the goblins. After that, it was a simple matter of sneaking up on the goblin camp, pushing several of them into the fire, and putting the rest to the sword.

The second encounter was straight combat, with a pack of hyenas attacking them on the way to the place marked on the map.

Overall, I’d have to say it went very well. Everyone seemed to have fun, and they liked discovering the different ways their characters could work together, uncovering the synergy of the different powers. And they seem pretty anxious for the next game, two weeks from now.

I have to admit that I am, too.

Are You Watching Closely?

By | | What's he watching?
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Last night I went to see David Copperfield at the MTS Centre here in Winnipeg.

Bit of background for you folks who don’t know me. I’m a big-time magic geek. I love the stuff. Back in University, I used to perform professionally, and I was pretty good. Then the arthritis set into my hands, and a lot of the things that I loved doing just weren’t possible any more, and I let my practice slide.

Recently, I’ve started trying to get back into the hobby. Y’know what? It’s not a hobby. It’s a craft, and an art, every bit as challenging and respectable as acting or painting or writing. Anyway, I started trying to get back into it. I’ve been picking my effects carefully, based on what I can and can’t do with my hands, and I’ve started practicing with cards and coins and sponge balls to increase my finger strength, flexibility, and dexterity. They’re never going to be what they were, but they’re getting better.

So, that lets you know where I’m coming from when I talk about David Copperfield, which is the point. I’ve got some knowledge of the inner workings of magic, and some ability to judge technical expertise.

And my conclusion is that the man is good.

Technically, he’s tight in his workings, and clean in his handlings. He is very crafty when it comes to handling the dirty work of the various effects. His show runs very smoothly, and any gaffes (and I didn’t spot any) are quickly handled.

But what really makes him shine is the way his show is put together.

Every trick is chosen for the power of its effect. Smaller things lead to larger ones. Close-up and parlour effects are mixed into the big stage effects to display a wide range of talent and accomplishment. He even pulled out a floating tissue paper effect from one of his earlier TV specials (which effect I had first seen performed by Kevin James at a magicians’ convention in about 1989). It’s a charming effect that works right up close with a spectator, ending with a fiery transformation of a tissue paper rose into a real rose for the spectator to keep.

And he looks so totally at ease during the entire show. He seems to be having fun, he cracks jokes, often at his own expense, and generally charms the pants off the audience. How charming is he? So charming that none of us minded when he showed us a four-minute video of one of his big escapes down in Las Vegas.

Yeah. I paid $100 for my ticket, and didn’t mind that he showed me a clip from his TV show.

I dunno. I see a lot of negativity about Copperfield in some corners of the magic community. Some people say that he’s all flash and no substance. I think this may be because he represents, in a way, the complete, absolute refinement of one type of magic – the grand illusion show*. There’s been a sort of backlash to that type of magic, first evidenced in Penn & Teller’s revelatory magic act, and then retooled in the David Blaine street magic tradition. Copperfield is seen as kind of “old school,” while Blaine is “new school.” In the middle, you get people like Criss Angel, doing a mix of both, with a more modern persona.

But magic is a HUGE space in which to work. Along with these household names, you find less-well-known but perhaps more influential magicians like Max Maven, Eugene Burger, Tony Andruzzi, The Amazing Jonathon, and Jeff McBride. Kreskin and Larry Becker and Lee Earle and Banachek work in the niche of mentalism. Tom Mullica does an amazing (and somewhat nauseating) routine working with cigarettes. Daniel Garcia and Wayne Houchin have developed a number of absolutely incredible close-up effects, and have even produced an entire deck of special cards that they have created.

Magic isn’t just one thing, anymore than music is. We’ve got room for the street and the stage and the parlour table.

Wow. That was a bit more of a rant than I had intended. Deep breath time.

Okay.

Back on topic.

David Copperfield gave us a great show last night, with a mix of well-chosen, high-impact effects. His magic is stunning and his performance is just so much fun. I’m going to try and list the effects he performed now, but I can’t guarantee that I got them all, or got them in the right order.

  • Appearance on stage on a motorcycle.
  • Audience participation “You can’t follow me” trick with clasping of hands.
  • Passing through a steel plate.
  • Dancing borrowed tie.
  • Video of his Fires of Passion straitjacket escape in Las Vegas.
  • Card trick with scorpion.
  • Compression box, where David is squeezed down to hat-box size.
  • Lottery prediction, which finishes with the production of a 1942 Lincoln Convertible**.
  • Floating tissue paper rose production.
  • Vanishing while walking through a giant fan, reappearing in the middle of the audience.
  • Vanishing and reappearing duck in a bucket, with a slow motion repeat.
  • Vanishing 13 audience members, with them reappearing in the audience.

I think that covers it. It was a fun evening. If you enjoy magic, or even just if you don’t hate magic, I recommend the show.

And if you want to learn magic quickly and easily, I find I’m really liking the stuff at Ellusionist.com. Check them out.

 

*I’m not going to get into a discussion of other illusionists, here. Suffice to say that others at that lofty peak include Sigfried & Roy and Lance Burton.

**I think that’s what he says it was. I don’t know cars.