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Post Tenebras Lux Report

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last Friday night was the second of our Post Tenebras Lux sessions, the continuation of the campaign that started as a Scales of War adventure path. In it, our heroes arrived at Witchcross, met a few of the locals, took in some of the sights, and headed off into the Witchwood in order to find the barrow they’ve come in search of.

And promptly ran into trouble.

In designing this adventure, I did my best to depart from the standard dungeon crawls that this particular group has been playing through for the most part. I wanted different feeling adventure areas, more chances for interaction with NPCs and the environment, more choices that mattered, and so on. To that end, I designed a number of establishments in Witchcross, created a few local sites that might be of interest, and put together a more detailed backstory for the barrow and the ancient druidic folk that used to live in the area.

A lot of that got pretty much ignored in this session; the group is very mission-focused. This really came to mind when I explained that the engraving on the menhir in the middle of the village, marking it as the site where Terriath Ahmond first formed his pact with the Folk of the Stone, and then told them they knew nothing about those names or the incident it may describe*. Instead of interpreting it as local colour or an interesting detail, they said, “Red herring,” and went about trying to find the barrow.

I brought them into town on the afternoon before the full moon, so they have a day and a half to find the spot where the barrow appears. I also decided to do the cinematic full moon thing – giving each month three nights when the moon is considered to be full. That takes some of the time pressure off the party, and gives them the leisure time to explore and interact with the world without feeling they need to rush and push with no time for anything else.

I’ve set the hunt for the barrow up as a sort of modified skill challenge, with a number of nodes laid out in a matrix representing the woods around Witchcross. Every hour, the party makes a roll, choosing a skill from a list of about five, to find their way closer to the barrow. If everyone succeeds, I move them directly towards the barrow on the matrix. If most of them succeed, they get to choose a direction, and I move them that way on the matrix. If most of them fail, I move them away from the barrow, and preferably into something dangerous. If they all fail, I move them away from the barrow, and they each lose a healing surge from the hazards and exertions of their search.

Each node of the matrix has a scene tied to it. This may be a combat encounter, an NPC, an interesting site in the woods, or anything else I’ve thought of, but it’s some point where they can interact with the world and may get a benefit or a penalty for their search. When they make it through the matrix, they’ll arrive at the site of the barrow.

I felt this was a good compromise between mapping the woods out as a dungeon and just having a list of encounters that they have to fight their way through to get to the barrow. It puts choices back into their hands, and gives more of a feeling of decision, while still keeping the actual movement from site to site abstract and easily managed. It also allows the outdoorsy skills of the ranger to have some impact on the group and their quest.

Sor far, it seems to be working fairly well, though the group has walked into two combat encounters, and have started asking how the villagers manage to survive when they go looking for firewood**.

The first combat was an owlbear and two fey panthers***. The owlbear is another monster, like the carrion crawler, that I’ve always wanted to use, but never seem to get the chance. As I recall from previous editions, they’re pretty nasty. Well, the 4e owlbear takes the cake, in my opinion. It dropped the dragonborn paladin on the first turn****, which caused everyone to pause and take a breath. This is what I wanted: I never try to kill the characters, but I love the moment in the game when the players realize that they may lose a character in a fight. With the fey panthers harrassing the party from different angles, they couldn’t gang up on the owlbear at first, and that meant that it got to bat PCs around with impunity. The healing abilities of the party made sure they never lost anyone, but it scared them.

The next combat was a group of gnomes: 2 skulks, 2 arcanists, 2 iron defenders, and a pseudodragon*****. This fight was a blast to run, with the gnomes up in the trees sniping and messing with the party, the iron defenders chewing on legs, and the pseudodragon doing fly-bys with its tail sting. In the end, one of the arcanists and the pseudodragon escaped, and the party was beat up enough that they just let them go and hobbled back to town, planning to start again in the morning.

All in all, a pretty good session. I’m anxious for the next one, because some of the things they did in the last one will have got around town. I’m planning on updating the Witchcross entry in the wiki, but I’m going to hold off until the players discover more of the information in game, so as not to spoil anything.

Should be fun.

 

 

*I want a lot of the history of the ancient druidic folk to be a closed book, with just a jumble of confusing monuments and oral traditions remaining. I like the idea of the mystery in the past.

**The answer to this question is different for each of the two encounters. For the first one, the villagers know better than to go into the owlbear’s hunting ground. For the second, the Keepers of Eth in the village have a relationship with the gnomes, and don’t get attacked from hiding.

***1050 xp total, a level 4 encounter for 6 PCs.

****I had to use the owlbear’s action point to get in the bite attack, but it was worth it.

*****1000 xp total, a level 4 encounter for 6 PCs.

Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Player’s Handbook 2

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Just got word from Pedro and Wendy over at Imagine Games that we’re a go for March 21st for the next Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day – Player’s Handbook 2. I’ll be there running sessions in the demo at 12:30, 3:00, and 5:30, as long as people show up to play. For the curious, here’s the text from the Wizards of the Coast promo:

Ready an Action to Play on March 21st!

Prepare yourself (and your friends) to join D&D fans all around the world on March 21st for Worldwide D&D Game Day: Player’s Handbook 2. Everything you need to play will be on-hand, so it’s a great chance for new players, as well as veterans, to band together and find some adventure.

Come try out the new races (such as the gnome) and the new classes (like the invoker and barbarian) while you battle wicked fiends and thwart dark plots. No matter if you’re new to the game or a 4th Edition veteran; we’ll have everything you need to embark on an all-new adventure.

One Dark Night in Weeping Briar – A stormy night, an empty town, and a small girl that holds the key to thestrange disappearances. An adventure for 5 pregenerated 11th-level characters. The characters are:

  • Ilvarra, drow avenger
  • Markaria, tiefling invoker
  • Roswyn, gnome bard
  • Squeaks, warforged barbarian
  • Balasar, dragonborn paladin (uses material from the upcoming Divine Power product)

 

So, if you’re in Winnipeg and interested in trying out the new material from the PHB2, or you’re curious about 4th Edition or roleplaying games in general, come on down and play.

It’ll be fun.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Well, last night finished off the current adventure for the party in Storm Point. They made their way down to the last two big set-piece fights, and killed the baddies.

I stole the last two encounters from H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, changing a few details of the monsters to make them fit the current storyline of the game. This is remarkably easy, as I was able to keep most of the cool mechanics of the main characters’ powers, but changed the jazz a little to reflect a dedication to Vecna instead of Orcus. I also swapped out some of the monsters, trading the pair of human berserkers for a pair of bugbear warriors and the Orcus priest for a Shadar-Kai witch. That meant I had to drop one of the vampire spawn to keep the encounter in the right xp range I wanted, but still very easy to do.

I used the first encounter to deal with a concern I sometimes have with the heroes going to fight a tribe of humanoids: when they get to the lair/village/stronghold, what do they do with the non-combatants? What do they do with the goblin women and children in this case? Do they let them live, or do they slaughter them all like genocidal lunatics? Sell them into slavery?

Now, in some games, this can be very interesting roleplaying ground to explore – what are the heroes willing to do? Where do they draw the lines? How do the handle the aftermath of whatever choice they make?

This group, not so much. We play, in this game, pretty much a beer-and-pretzels game, focusing on the fun, cinematic aspects of the game, not on the introspective soul-searching. And I’m fine with that. I’ve got other games where I can explore questions like that.

But I dislike just ignoring inconvenient practicalities. So, I decided that the best thing was to take the choice out of their hand, and have the Shadar-Kai witch and the scion of Vecna sacrifice all the non-combatants in the ritual to open the portal in the temple. This did two things: one, it eliminated the non-combatants without forcing the heroes to make a choice that I don’t think was warranted in the game, and two, it showed that the bad guys were really bad.

Everyone was running short on healing surges by this time, and several had already used their daily powers, so these two big boss fights were pretty challenging. The Shadar-Kai witch’s aura power turned out to be pretty useful for me and frustrating for the party, and the toughness of the bugbears made them very good meat-shields*. The deathlock wight on the lower level didn’t even get a shot off, because everyone decided it was the best initial target. The scion of Vecna and the thing in the portal that he was summoning gave everyone a run for their money, what with the 3-square threatening reach of the thing and its ability to drag people toward the portal and heal the scion. And the skeletons were surprisingly resilient and hit pretty hard.

It was a good couple of fights, and everyone got to do something cool, which made me happy.

It also got a couple of the players trying to figure out what the connection was between the Shadar-Kai, the halflings, the goblins, and the black dragon from the first adventure. It looks like there’s a bit of a direction manifesting in the campaign**.

Nice.

*One got lightning-lured into the open pit down to the next level in the first round of combat, and everyone grinned at how clever they were. Until he climbed back up a couple of rounds later and ganged up on the rogue with his buddy, putting him down in a single round.

**In most campaigns, I plot out an overarching story. In this one, I didn’t because the players wanted somethng a little more episodic, with more freedom of choice. So, I’ve built a number of different threads and starting points into the game, and I elaborate on the ones that the players pick up and pursue. This allows them to have more control over their choices and options in the game, while still building in some ongoing mystery and narrative direction. But it’s player directed instead of GM directed, which I think is important.

Rituals – We Need More!

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I had a discussion today at lunch with one of my players about optimization of D&D characters in 4E*. Some of the points we raised got me thinking about things which led me to the titular conclusion. Here are my starting assumptions:

  1. The majority of powers in 4E are designed to reduce an opponent’s hit points, either directly or indirectly.
  2. Most of the remaining powers in 4E are designed to protect or restore character hit points, either directly or indirectly.
  3. The durations of the few utility powers that are useful outside of combat are either instantaneous or about five minutes**.
  4. A substantial protion of the rules in the PHB and the DMG are concerned, in one way or another, with combat***.

I want to note that I don’t think these are necessarily bad things. One of the most complex facets of any RPG is combat, and even with a rules-light system (which D&D is definitely NOT), combat takes up a disproportionate amount of game time. It is also the most competitive portion of most game systems, and often benefits from having the most detailed rules to help adjudicate difficult situations if things turn adversarial.

What these assumptions mean, though, is that the utility of most powers, which are some of the primary identifiers of character in the game, do not extend outside of combat situations. It means that my cunning wizard cannot turn himself invisible to accompany other characters to an audience with a crime lord and act as surprise back-up. Hell, even with a ring of invisibility, I only get one turn of invisibility once per day.

Invisibility is only one aspect. What about my ranger’s ability to construct a well-concealed campsite, or my thief’s ability to set a trap? Where are the glyphs of warding or guards and wards or explosive runes? If I want to infiltrate the tribe of gnolls, I’ve got to put on a hyena skin, because disguise self no longer exists.

I know. I know. This sounds like some “Bring Back 3rd Edition” wonking. It’s not, though.

I don’t mind that powers deal primarily with combat situations, because the designers have taken a bunch of the rest of those abilities and made them into rituals.

I love rituals.

I love the idea behind them, I love the design of them, I love the feel of them in game, I love pretty much everything about them. One of my friends has complained that he doesn’t like the idea of rituals because it means that a wizard can’t just wave his hand to create his phantom steed, and that makes him seem less magical. Fair enough. But I think the idea of wizards and clerics using big books of eldritch formula to weave the phantom steed together out of mist and shadows is a cooler image to me. Gathering rare and valuable components to call up a mystical oracle to provide guidance just works in my mind, in a way that saying, “I cast contact other plane,” never did.

Yes. Sure. A good GM makes the rather mechanistic spells seem more magical. The feel is more a result of play than of design. I completely agree with that point. In fact, I’ve made it myself in other arguments.

But design certainly helps.

So, I like rituals. But we need more. And we need them to push the envelope of things.

We need to see some more of the utility spells from 3E show up as rituals. Longer-term, multi-person invisibility, for instance, could be patterned after the way they did the Overland Flight ritual. All the missing polymorph effects would work pretty well as rituals, as would the protective spells I mentioned above. And even though 4E deliberately stays away from buff spells, I think rituals that grant bonuses to skill checks for one scene or one endeavour would work nicely. Not combat stats, mind you; just buff one or more skill checks.

Goodman Games is off an running on this. They’ve announced an open call for their Book of Rituals, and their sample ritual shows that they’re definitely doing a fair bit with summoning rituals. I say the more, the merrier.

But I think things should be a little more open with rituals. After all, in 4E, anyone who takes the Ritual Caster feat can use rituals, whether they are a spellcasting class or not. We see some very rangerish rituals in the PHB, with the Nature skill as their focus. Why not expand this to include fighters, rogues, and warlords?

Okay, some of the defining identity of those three classes is that they are non-magical, but some of their powers seem pretty fantastic. The rules describe them as using the Martial power source to fuel their exploits. But what if, instead of a mystical rite that gave the fighter the ability to force one foe in the next battle to reroll an attack, he instead performed the Willow Dance Kata to limber himself up and focus on defense? And of course, he’d need to rub his muscles with valuable salves and ointments to keep them loose, right? Or maybe the warlord sketches the Battle of Horn Falls out on the dirt and walks through the strategy and tactics used in the famous conflict in order to give his allies a bonus on their attempt to infiltrate the castle of the Mad Duke? And the rogue performs the Intrusion Evaluation to figure out how to open a locked chest.

In this way, the rituals become, not necessarily magical ceremonies, but the deep secrets of the various crafts and classes represented in the rules. They add out-of-combat functionality to the characters dedicated enough to take the Ritual Caster feat and devote some coin to acquiring, mastering, and performing these rituals.

So why haven’t I created a bunch of rituals to prove my point, and maybe sell them to Goodman Games? Well, two reasons. One is that I’m pretty lazy, and haven’t got around to doing it. The other is that, as far as posting such things on my site, I’m not sure how much it would involve the GSL and the Wizards of the Coast intellectual property.

But I’ve got a couple of ideas simmering in my brain, so maybe you’ll see something in a little while.

 

 

*Which is something else I’m gonna want to talk about at a later date.

**I’m sure there are exceptions, but I think they’re pretty rare.

***That is to say, they either deal with combat, or with something that impinges directly on combat. I don’t want to get into a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon scenario.

Encounters vs. Scenes – RPG Terminology and Philosophy

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I really started to notice it starting in 3E D&D, and it’s become even more prevalent in 4E. Adventures for D&D are breaking down to a collection of encounters. That’s the way the DMG addresses adventure creation, that’s the way the majority of the published adventures are written, and that’s the way I’ve been thinking about creating adventures.

What’s wrong with that? Nothing, really. But it does encourage a specific type of thinking about adventure construction, and that in turn shapes the type of game play you get in that adventure.

Let’s start with some definitions of terms. According to the DMG:

An encounter is a single scene in an ongoing drama, when the player characters come up against something that impedes their progress.

p. 34

Also according to the DMG:

An adventure is just a series of encounters. How and why these encounters fit together – from the simplest to the most complex – is the framework for any adventure.

p. 94

For contrast, I’m going to be talking about White Wolf‘s SAS adventure structure. Here’s what they say about scenes in their SAS Guide pdf:

Each scene is built as a discrete game encounter (or a closely-tied collection of game encounters) for the troupe to play through.

p. 2

And here’s what they say about their adventures:

Think of a Storytelling Adventure System product (SAS) as a story kit…

The basic parts that make up most SAS stories are simple: Storyteller characters, scenes and some advice on how you can put them together.

p. 2

So much for contrast, huh? They both seem to say pretty much the same thing.

Except they don’t, really.

D&D focuses on encounters, challenges for the characters to face, things that cause them to struggle. Whether it’s a combat or non-combat encounter, it is a point of conflict.

White Wolf adventures focus on scenes, which may or may not contain conflict, but that are focused on moving the story ahead.

What difference does this make?

Well, after my last D&D game, the discussion of the high points were things like how tough a monster was, or what a cool combat that one encounter was.

After my last Hunter: The Vigil game, the discussion was about what a cool NPC the Rag Man was.

It’s a subtle but profound difference. By thinking about the basic building blocks of the game – encounters/scenes – differently, a different mindset is created during both adventure creation and play. In D&D, the focus is on challenges overcome. In World of Darkness games, the focus is on story progression.

Let me put it another way.

In most D&D games*, the idea of spending an entire session attending a party with minimal dice rolling and no combat would be seen as a very unconventional session. Not necessarily bad, but different from the normal adventure. Especially if they didn’t have a mechanically-governed objective in mind**.

In most World of Darkness games, the idea of spending an entire session prowling through the sewers killing monsters and looting their corpses would be seen as a very unconventional session. Again, it wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but it would almost certainly be a departure from the norm. Especially if success (whatever that means in context) was based on the number of monsters killed.

Now, there are a number of reasons why this is. We can talk about genre conventions, the differences in appropriateness of tropes between fantasy and horror, modern versus medieval setting, and target market for the games. But all these things are focused through the lens of adventure creation, and the way the designers have chosen to address the universal RPG question of, “What do I do with my character?”

D&D is a game about heroic pseudo-medieval fantasy adventure. World of Darkness games are about dark modern horror stories***. The designers have chosen the tools, including the philosophy behind the adventure creation, to focus on the ideas that they feel work best given their respective games. And in many ways, I feel, the difference between the two is encapsulated in the simple choice of encounter or scene to represent the basic building block of the adventure.

So why am I going on about this?****

Because I was running into a brick wall designing the next adventure for my Post Tenebras Lux campaign.

Part of the goal was moving away from what my players called the Fight Club design of adventures, giving them more options and more freedom to respond to different situations. So, I’ve got a fairly loose, open-ended kind of adventure set up, with a small adventure site and a fair bit of exploration and interaction surrounding it. I sat down and created the combat encounters, and the traps and skill challenge portions, for the adventure in an hour or so, then sat looking blankly at the connecting portions, trying to think how to make the adventure more than just a bunch of strung-together encounters.

So, what to do?

Well, I’m stealing from the SAS school of adventure design, along with my years of experience running other games*****. I’m putting together a bunch of NPC notes, notes on the locales, little roleplaying scenes that provide story information without conflict, and other things. I’m using a very loose flowchart of the the adventure to show how one thing may lead to another, and how different parts interrelate.

And then, I’m gonna play it by ear, and let the characters set the pace and direction.

I think this will give me what I’m looking for.

See, I needed to make the mental transition from encounter-based design to scene-based design to make this adventure what I wanted it to be. Once I did that, I was able to look at the whole setup in a very different way, and see what needed doing to produce the result I wanted.

I want to be very clear about something, though. I don’t think that scene-based design is intrinsically superior to encounter-based design. I don’t think that D&D is wrong about how they design their games and adventures. I don’t think White Wolf games are inherently superior, or that all games should follow their model of adventure design.

What I do think is that we, as GMs and players, need to be aware of the underlying assumptions and design philosophy inherent in the games we play if we want to be able to make them be the games we want. The design and the system is just the toolkit. What matters is that, when you sit down to game, you and your friends have fun.

That’s all.

 

 

*Yes, I am generalizing here and, therefor, lying to some degree. I know that some people have different play styles. And don’t worry; I’m going to generalize about White Wolf games in the next paragraph.

** This is one of the blessings and curses of the skill challenge rules in D&D. Now, you can have a whole skill challenge centered around making a good impression at a party, and everyone can roll their dice to do it.

***Another example of the impact of language: adventure vs. stories.

****Dude, I’m at about 750 words, and you’re just asking this now?

*****In trying to gain some mastery of the 4E rules, I’ve been cleaving very close to the party line with adventure creation, doing things by the book. This has meant ignoring some of the skills at improvising in the middle of a game, or building a very loose structure, that I’ve picked up in running things like Unknown Armies, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Amber Diceless RPG.

Post Post Tenebras Lux Post

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Yeah, I pretty much had to do that title. Sorry.

On Friday, we had our first post-Scales of War session of the 4E campaign that I’ve retitled Post Tenebras Lux*.

We spent the first little while cleaning up some housekeeping, tying up some loose ends, divvying up the treasure, etc. That let people do a little light roleplaying, getting into their characters a little more than the previous adventure really encouraged.

After that, I had set up a skill challenge to let the party interact with the town, link into the world, and each have a moment or two of spotlight as they tried to hunt down either a job or a thread that hinted at some easy cash and adventure. I had prepped eight separate adventure hooks, along with a few generic encounters to throw at the party during travel.

They turned up six of the hooks, and opted to pursue the rumour that there was a barrow in the Witchwood that only appears during the full moon. After that, they plan to try and track down the true tomb of Azarr Kul, the half-dragon hobgoblin leader of the Army of the Red Hand**. They passed up caravan duty, hunting goblins, checking out the rumours of the Ghostlord down near the Thornwaste, and searching for the Fane of Tiamat.

Once they had decided which thread they were going to chase down, they went into research mode. Which was kind of interesting for me, because I had only minimal background created for the adventure.

Fortunately, I had read the original adventure recently, putting together the hooks for this session and filling in the wiki over at Obsidian Portal. I knew that the barrow was related to the ancient druidic people that had inhabited the vale before “civilization” arrived. So, based on those ideas, when they managed a co-operative History check somewhere north of 30, I went to town.

So, now they know that the Witchwood is home to shifters, fey, and werewolves, collectively called the Old People. They know that the Old People claim to be remnants of the ancient druidic folk, and that they have ties both to the magic of the Feywild and the primal spirits of the Elemental Chaos. They also know that the Witchwood is heavily sprinkled with barrows, menhirs, and stone circles, many of which exist in the normal world during certain times of the year or under certain astrological conditions, such as this barrow they’ve heard of.

Yeah, I took the cheap way out – tying things to the seasonal and lunar cycles of standard paganism. I stole the idea of seasonal rulers of the druidic people changing as the seasons change, and I decided that the barrow, with its obvious associations with death, would link to winter.

I worked all this out as I told them what they had discovered with their astronomically high History roll, improvising my ass off. But now I know what sort of framework to use for the adventure.

Well, they set out on the two-day walk to Witchcross, the village nearest the barrow site, and I threw in a little bit of travel roleplay, with an inn stay and such, but their attention was starting to waver by that time. So I threw a fight at them.

Nothing big – just a few hobgoblins and wolves, but it pulled people’s attention back to the game, and got everyone focused again. Unfortunately, that was right at the time we had to end the session for the evening.

Now I’ve got three weeks to put together the adventure they’ve picked. I’ve got a rough outline, drawn from a few different sources, that I think is gonna work pretty well. It’s gonna have opportunities for exploration, diplomacy, combat, and perhaps even one or two creepy moments.

All-in-all, it went pretty well, though I think it’s going to take a few sessions for people to get into the right mindset for this game, after the whole beer-and-pretzels dungeon crawl that we’ve been running up to now.

It’ll happen, though, and I think the game will be better for it.

 

 

*For those who care, the title means roughly, “After darkness, light.” It’s a phrase generally associated with the Book of Job, and has been used as a motto for a wide variety of societies and groups since the middle ages.

**I’m using a bunch of the background for the Elsir Vale, based on the Red Hand of Doom 3.5 adventure. I decided that there were tons of fake tombs for the hobgoblin leader floating around, and a thriving underground business in selling maps to these fake tombs.

Changing a Flat Tire Without Stopping the Car

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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This Friday is the first non-adventure path session of my 4E campaign that I started with Scales of War. I’ve talked elsewhere about my decision to abandon the adventure path, and the reasons behind it. Now, I want to talk a little bit about what I’m doing to revamp the campaign and turn it into what the group (including me) wants it to be.

First of all, there’s the wiki up at Obsidian Portal*. It’s not complete, yet, and indeed may never be, but it was really useful to me to sort of spread out all the material I had on the setting, making some of it up as I went, and take a look at the current information as a whole. This is letting me spot some threads that might interest the players, and pick up some story seeds.

I’ve also invited the players to contribute to the wiki. One of them has, filling in some interesting backstory. I like this, because it increases the emotional investment of the players in the world. It also builds some actual player familiarity with the setting material, so I have to resort less and less to telling them, “This is what you know about subject X.”

I also sent out an e-mail message to the players a couple of months ago, asking them what they wanted out of the post-Scales campaign. I didn’t get answers from everyone, but I did get some answers, and they gave me another batch of things to think about and throw into the mix. A lot of the answers were very definite about what they didn’t want, and much less specific about what they did, which is pretty much par for the course where my group is concerned. They like to tell me their deal-breakers, and trust me to find something interesting in what’s left over.

The answers were pretty scattered, though, with no real solid common element to latch onto and hang a campaign on.

See, this is where the interesting stuff starts to happen. I’m tossing out the Scales campaign structure and events, but I’ve got nothing, right now, to figure out what sort of campaign to build instead. Sure, I could just pick something and impose it on the group, but one of the things that the players were pretty clear on was that they wanted a more episodic kind of game, with shorter story arcs, and more personal relevance for the characters and their goals. And less dungeons.

Easy for them to say, right?

I’ve been thinking about what to do about this for a few weeks, now. I don’t really want to be forced to set the entire direction of the campaign, especially considering that they want more character hooks, but we’ve only played through one adventure, and that one was very combat-heavy and character-light**.

And then it occurred to me. They can’t make me decide for them. I’m lobbing the ball back into their court. I’m going to toss a bunch of options for adventures at them – in character – next session, and see what they pick up, and what threads of story interest them. Then I’m gonna run with it.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that I’m a bit obsessive about game prep because I tend to be fairly disorganized in general. Also, because I find it fun. But I can’t prep five or six complete adventures at a time. So, I’m prepping the first encounter for each one, along with another two or three other encounters that could work in several of the adventures. Some of these encounters are going to be skill challenges, some are going to be combat, and some are going to be straight roleplaying.

This sort of campaign is different for me. For the last several games I’ve run, there’s been a single, overarching story and objective from start to finish. I’ve always had that skeleton of story to go back to whenever I get stuck for the next adventure, or to figure out an NPC reaction, or whatever. In this style of game, that may develop over the course of play, but it’s not there right now. I’m flying by the seat of my pants.

Fortunately, I find the 4E rules make it very easy to improvise interesting scenes and encounters on the fly.

Here’s hoping it works.

 

 

*As an aside, I notice they’ve added forum functionality to their package. These guys get better and better!

**Part of this is the fault of the adventure – it was one big dungeon crawl. Part of it is my fault – I get tired of the big dungeon crawl, and start pushing just to get through it to the next thing, so it turns into a long series of fights with some boring wandering around in between. This is why I’m trying to push things back to the players, to make sure we get some more roleplaying and interesting choices rolled into the game.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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This week’s game was a little different – normally, we play at Imagine Games on Sunday evenings after the store closes at 5:00. However, this week Pedro (the owner and one of my players) was unavailable, so we decided to play at my place, and to start a little earlier. This meant we were able to jam in three pretty action-packed encounters.

After everyone got settled, we picked up where we had left off last time: just outside (with a few just inside) the entry to the crashed Bael Turath floating watchtower full of goblins. One of the sentries up on the canyon walls had escaped the slaughter, so the party knew they were on a clock. Instead of just bulling on through the main entry most of the goblins had used, they decided to climb the canyon walls and try to find where the scarpered sniper had run to, assuming that there was a less obvious entry up there.

I hadn’t prepared anything for that, but it was easy enough to let them try and climb the cliff wall* and then scout the area up top for a back door. Of course, there was one – an narrow tunnel obscured by gooseberry bushes, and trapped with a collapsing ceiling**.  Getting past these obstacles let them come in on the goblins from behind***.

So, instead of walking into the killing ground of the ambush the goblins had set up, they popped out of the door at the other end of the room, twenty empty feet away from the chieftain and his entourage, with a surprise round working for them instead of against them.

The poor chieftain was dead before his first turn.

The sharpshooters gave the gang some problems, and the skullcleaver ability to do double damage when bloodied came as a nasty surprise, but the real goblin hero of the fight was a minion who was obviously looking for promotion. With some good luck and goblin tactics, he got up behind the party, and managed to bull-rush the cleric right off the ten-foot-high platform****.

Despite the little guy’s best efforts, all the goblins died. I have decided that he has pleased Bane, and will be reincarnated as a warrior or blackblade.

So, after killing the goblins and looting their stuff, they set off deeper into the tower to get to the bottom of the whole goblin-halfling-black dragon coalition they’ve seen developing.

I’ve started doing something kind of different with dungeons in this campaign. In our last campaign, pretty much everything was an extended dungeon crawl, with people trying to remember where they’ve been, figure out where they need to go next, and decide which branch to take at every intersection*****. While this gave a bit of the feel of exploring ancient ruins and confusing, twisting caverns, what it mostly did was eat up time with decisions that had minimal impact on actual play. About the biggest result making decisions in a fully mapped dungeon has is determining the order of the encounters for the party.

So, I don’t map out my dungeons anymore. Or when I do, it’s a very loose, relational map, showing a branching tree or web of the encounters, rather than the one-square-equals-five-feet precision of graph paper. I provide the colour and choice through description and offering decision points pretty much whenever I feel like it.

So far, this is working pretty well, though really this is only the second dungeon they’ve explored in the campaign. Part of the reason it works, I think, is that I got sick of dungeon crawls, so I’m making all the dungeons much smaller in this campaign – this one is about five encounters in total, and that’s the same size as the previous dungeon. Another reason it works is the ease with which the 4E rules support improvisation to fill in details if the players go a different way than intended, as noted with the above follow-the-sentry episode.

But there are two main reasons it works well: one, I can concentrate on atmospheric description to help make the locale come alive instead of focusing on making sure I’ve told them about all the branching corridors, and two, the players are as sick of extended dungeon crawls as I am.

So, they proceeded deeper into the tower, going down to the area that used to be the baths****** for the tower garrison. Now, the goblins use it as their garbage dump. This was my excuse to use a couple of monsters I’ve always liked but never really had the right opportunity to put into an adventure.

Carrion crawlers and otyughs.

Why baths? Because I wanted the whole thing to feel like the trash compacter scene from Star Wars, with the otyughs reaching out of the slimed-over, filthy bathing pools to snag people with their tentacles when they were distracted by the carrion crawlers.

Now, two otyughs and a carrion crawler are a level 3 encounter for 6 characters, but they’re all level 7 creatures. While I think that one creature of a level that much higher than the party is fine to throw in a mix of creatures of lower level as a sort of boss monster, having all of the creatures 4 levels higher than the party is a bit much. I looked at the math, and saw that, on average, the party would miss all the creatures and be hit by all the attacks. That seemed skewed too badly for an encounter meant to be the same level as the party.

I decided to drop the level of all the creatures to 3rd, which halved the experience for each one. That meant that I could actually double the number of creatures in the encounter to bring it up to a level 3 encounter again. So, more monsters, same level, easier fight. The lesson here is that, like 3E’s EL system, the level doesn’t tell you everything about the encounter. You’ve got to look at the monsters themselves.

Anyway, I described the lower-level crawlers and otyughs as somewhat stunted and sickly, with weird mottling on them. This, in addition to justifying the lower level of the monsters, has got the party wondering about what might have caused it. They didn’t spend too much time thinking about this, though, because the carrion crawlers were attacking. And  then the hidden otyughs started hauling people into slimy garbage pools for a little up-close, personal attention. Three of the party wound up with filth fever, which is going to make the next few days interesting for them.

After they finished off the creatures and took a quick look around the room, the doors at the far end opened, and an undead tiefling in rusted armour with a corroded sword came into the room and told them to turn back. I stole this monster from H1: Keep on the Shadowfell, using the stats for the undead knight in the tomb that can be convinced to help the characters********. I just changed the name and description. Have I mentioned that I’m greatly in favour of looting other sources for good game bits?

Well, he hit like a dump truck, had a ton of hit points, and wasn’t bothered by the slippery, slime-covered floors. He actually came close to taking out the mega-tank dwarf at a couple of points. He was a different enough threat that the party changed tactics, working to lock him down in a four-way flank, rather than their usual tactics of using their mobility and ability to move the monsters. I think they were worried a couple of times during the fight.

Of course, they won, and now are even more curious about what’s deeper in the tower. That’s for next session.

As an aside, one of the characters made a comment about how the account of the game in this blog differs from the short recap I post on the game’s forum for the players. In particular, he mentioned that, in the forum, I don’t refer to the players as whiny babies*********.

But the main difference is that, on the forum, I provide an account of in-game events. Here, I discuss the game session as a whole, looking at my prep, my expectations, in-game and out-of-game influences, and other stuff.

It’s also the reason that this post is closing in on 1700 words, and the forum is gonna get maybe 300.

Anyway. Hope that clears that up.

*Couple of minor mishaps, and one character wound up taking some falling damage, but they made it up.

**Off-the-cuff trap, with a simple Thievery check to bypass. The list 0f standard DCs by level in the DMG and DM’s Screen makes this sort of quick-and-dirty improvisation pretty easy.

***As a general point of game philosophy, I like to reward my players for coming up with interesting plans and executing them.  Reward doesn’t necessarily mean that they get what they wanted, or get a bonus, but something interesting happens. Basically, I ask myself what would be cool to have happen in regards to their plan – both succeed and fail – and then do that. I tell myself it encourages creative play, and maybe it does. It certainly helps me be more creative and puts more interesting stuff into the game.

****I used a battle map from H3: Pyramid of Shadows for this fight. I don’t remember what the room is called in the adventure, but it’s the large rectangular one with the balconies made of bone. I thought it worked for a goblin lair. I’m a big fan of scavenging anything that looks interesting from other products.

*****No, none of them bother mapping.

******None of the players asked about the hotsprings I described there in relation to the whole floating tower thing. How could there be natural hotsprings feeding the baths in a chunk of rock that used to float 200 feet in the air? It was a little disappointing, because I had actually put some thought into the question*******.

*******Of course, I’m a big geek. You couldn’t figure that out based on the fact that I write a gaming blog? 😉

********I took out the bit about him being willing to help based on a successful skill challenge.

*********I guess I hurt his feelings. 😉

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Another session gone by.

My players had been acting rather aggressively towards the local halflings, I thought, so I was ready for them to move on to fighting goblins. They had the time and the place for the next meeting between the halflng and goblin smugglers, but wanted to set a trap for the goblins.

I decided to run this as an impromptu skill challenge, because I hadn’t prepped anything in particular for it. They interrogated the captured halfling underboss, Big Sid, and got the details of the contact arrangement. They scouted the area, and found a small sea cave in behind a pile of brush to hide in. And they cooperated to bury the dwarf fighter in gravel so he could spring up behind the goblins.

So when the goblins sent one of their sharpshooters in stealthily ahead of the main force to set up a sniper perch, the players started whining at me. “What are you doing? No fair playing the monsters smart!”

Well, boo-hoo.

I swarmed them with goblins. Eleven goblins against six PCs in the first fight, seventeen goblins against six PCs in the second fight. Of course, most of the goblins were minions*, but there were some tough guys hidden in there, too. Once the goblins started using their goblin tactics ability to shift after someone misses them, the PCs started getting a real hate on for the goblins, as well. Not as much as for halflings, but we’re getting there, and I’ve got a few more goblin fights lined up.

The fight on the beach went well, with everything going the PCs’ way for pretty much the entire fight. Right up to the end, when one of the goblin warriors decided to bugger off and warn people. That ended with a night-time chase through the rocky shore area, with the goblin running hell-bent for leather and the eladrin ranger chasing him with his bow. He managed to drop the goblin just before it made it out of range**.

After that, they backtracked the goblins’ trail to a ruin where one of the ancient Bael Turath floating watchtowers had crashed to earth, gouging a long rip into the ground. At the end of this rip, a doorway led into the mostly-intact tower.

Of course, the goblins had sentries. A couple of sharpshooters up on the canyon walls, a couple of warriors hidden in foxholes, a hexer just in side the doorway, and a whole mess of cutters to muddy things up. Combined, they trapped the PCs in a killing ground, and proceeded to go to work.

This was a tougher fight, despite the ease with which they put down the minions in large groups with area effect abilities. The hexer managed to keep the dwarf fighter immobile for much of the fight using stinging curse, and the snipers on the high ground were far enough away that the swordmage’s lightning lure couldn’t drag them to their deaths. The warriors hit the party from behind, and kept the pressure on the less-melee oriented folks.

Still, the PCs triumphed – mostly. One of the sharpshooters got away, so now the whole lair is on alert.

We didn’t get a whole lot done in this session. Certainly, less than I expected. This is a combination of a few things:

  • We got a late start. We didn’t really get rolling until just about an hour after nominal start time.
  • Several people were somewhat distracted by stuff going on in real life.
  • We broke to make a food run about an hour after we started to play.
  • We were down two players, which meant two folks were running double characters.

None of these things are neccessarily bad things. I know there are folks out there who hate having game sessions with such a lack of focus and intrusions and distractions. Sometimes, it gets to me, too.

But this game is played for fun. Part of the fun is the socializing, the tangents and digressions, and the opportunity to make Erik laugh so hard that blood comes out his ears. Jokes and banter flies fast and furious in the game, much of it out of character and only peripherally related to the current topic, never mind related to the game itself.

At the end of the night, if people go home smiling, the game is a success, whether we got through six encounters or none.

So, it wasn’t a full game, it wasn’t a focused game, and it didn’t progress the plot very much. But we all had a good time.

Win.

*Have I mentioned how much I love minions? Fighting against overwhelming numbers is so heroic!

**This was easy to run pretty fast and loose, thanks to simplified movement and range in 4E. One more round, and the goblin would have been beyond the long range of the bow.

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.