Category Archives: What’s he playing?

And what does he wish he was playing?

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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We wrapped up the siege of Storm Point yesterday, putting an end to the rebel shadar-kai storyline.

I had left the previous game just as the big bad arrived to try and finish off the heroes. Opening the game this session, I started with a bit of flowery description, talking about this skeletal figure in heavy robes, one eye and one hand replaced by ghostly replicas of black fire, gripping a massive mace, mounted on a manticore, and flying out of roiling black clouds, paced by three mastiffs made of shifting shadows with glowing eyes, swooping in on them in the flickering light of the burning buildings, framed by the smashed-open gates.

There was a moment of silence, then one of the guys said, “That is so metal! That would make an awesome ’80s heavy metal album cover!”

We then had to wade through a few minutes of people riffing on that idea (“I’m gonna paint that on the side of my wagon! I’m sure to be able to pick up chicks that way!”) before play resumed.

Now, I had wanted this fight to be tough. Very tough. That’s why I placed it after another tough fight, at the end of the long siege, when resources were low. I don’t try to kill my players, but I do want the chance of death to be there. Otherwise they get no real sense of accomplishment if they succeed.

To that end, the combat was a level 10 encounter for 6 characters, at 3,000 xp. I stole Barthus from FR1: Scepter Tower of Spellgard, who is a level 6 solo, and mounted him on a manticore, which is a level 10 elite. To round out the xp, I added three shadowhounds, which are standard level 6 creatures. I changed the description of Barthus and renamed him Tolvar Shadowborn, making him cosmetically a shadar-kai lich, better fitting the fact that he was leading a group of shadar-kai worshippers of Vecna, but I left his powers the same. Just described him as being skeletal, with a huge mace, and having his left hand and his right eye missing and replaced with black fire substitutes.

All in all, I thought, a tough combination.

Then, in the first round, the dragonborn rogue commando used trick strike to drop the leader off the manticore. He then leapt onto the back of the manticore, and they spendtthe next several rounds tearing viciously at each other flying above the city.

Everyone else wipes out the shadow hounds as quickly as possible to concentrate on dogpiling Tolvar. He held his own for a while, what with dominating the dwarf fighter for a brief time and using his desecrate ground power to mess people up. And when he was on the ropes, he turned to mist and fled into the city, letting everyone chase him.

Well, by this time, the manticore had managed to ditch its unwelcome passenger, but was really hurting, and the high-mobility swordmage was really crowding Tolvar, so he got on the roof of another house to try and remount the manticore.

And the rogue knocked him off again.

So he jumped up when the manticore swooped low, and got back in the saddle.

And the cleric commanded him off again.

And that was about it for him, thanks to the fighter’s rain of steel and a nice lance of faith to put the capper on it.

The manticore kept attacking through all this, but I was plagued the whole night with bad rolls, while all the players were making great rolls. I did some damage, but not enough to even put one of them down. Really, they had had more trouble the previous fight, when I almost managed to kill the warlord.

To finish things off, they decided that they wanted the manticore as a gift for the leader of the town guard, and asked if they could use Intimidate to cow it enough to be taken captive for retraining. I told them they could, and that they could each assist the main character, but that failed attempts to assist would in fact impose a penalty – my logic being that this is a vicious, fairly intelligent, war-trained beast that is going to attack any sign of weakness.

And they rolled a natural 20.

So, they cowed the manticore, the Storm Point forces chased the disintegrating army away, and in a few days, they had a nice little ceremony where the characters were given stuff.

Now, on to the Floating Islands.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Sunday was the latest installment of the Storm Point game, and saw the breaking of the siege of Storm Point.

After defeating the demons who broke through the city’s magical protections last time, the gang went back to the skill challenges protecting the city. They had reached a tipping point, though; failing the magical protection skill challenge took it off the table, and that meant they didn’t need to spend a character’s attention on it each turn, giving them effectively one more body to deal with the other skill challenges. This allowed them to start gaining some traction, and in about an hour and a half after start of play, they had succeeded in the majority of the skill challenges, which was the cue I was looking for to unleash the endgame encounters.

So, with the besieging forces in disarray and trying to quit the field, the enemy commander sent one of his lieutenants to lead a squad of ogres and orcs to burst a side gate, opening a way for the general to enter the city and deal with these pesky kids heroes*. The fight took pretty much the rest of the evening, but fresh from my experience with the end of the Post Tenebras Lux game, I warned them going in that this was one of two final fights to end the siege. This meant that they husbanded their resources a little more carefully, and didn’t immediately drop all their dailies on this combat. It made for a more careful, conservative fight which, coupled with the fact that some of them were down a few healing surges thanks to their actions during the siege, meant it took a little longer than it otherwise might have.

Boy, did they ever start hating that vampire shadar-kai witch, especially since she twice got to use her blood drain ability to jump back up in hit points. Only her vulnerability to radiant damage made them happy.

And, as the last foe dropped, and they stood panting by the ruins of the gate, the enemy general arrived on his manticore mount with an escort of shadowhounds. Fade to black.

Tomorrow is Rememberance Day here in Canada, and the gang has decided that, after the memorial services honouring the members of our armed forces that have fallen is service, we’re going to spend the afternoon finishing off the siege. Maybe we’ll even get to the start of the next adventure, when our intrepid heroes visit the Floating Islands, and ride one through the perpetual storm at the heart of Thunder Lake. I created that scenario for their second adventure, but they never got around to it, what with one thing and another, and they’ve been anxious to finish up this storyline so they can get there. I’ve kept the basic structure of the adventure, but beefed up the encounters to reflect the fact that the characters will be 7th level instead of 2nd.

I’m looking forward to it.

*Three ogre savages, four orc pyromaniacs, and Laundae Ethari, a vampire shadar-kai witch I found in the Monster Builder. 2,102 xp, a level 8 encounter for 6 characters. Back

Post Tenebras Lux Report – The End

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Post Tenebras Lux is done. The campaign ran to 5th level for the characters, and ended with them stopping a cult of oni who were using gnolls to harvest children in the Thornwaste in order to feed the power to the Chained God in the Abyss. Success, and good feelings all around.

The last session wasn’t really what I had planned. See, I didn’t want the last session to just be one big fight, with the party using the linked portal scroll to teleport into the lion tower and just kill the boss. I wanted to put in a bit more variety, but that didn’t seem to happen.

First of all, I let them try to sneak around some of the denizens of the tower, and they failed miserably. So, I pulled one of the encounters I had prepped for the frontal assault option and pulled out a battle map from one of the WotC modules, and laid it out. I chose the encounter that had an oni in it, just because I wanted them to get the idea that there was more than one oni hanging around.

Well, that encounter wound up being a level 8 encounter for 6 characters – an oni night haunter, 3 gnoll huntmasters, 5 gnoll packrunners, and two evistro demons (!), for a total of 2120 xp. It wasn’t until the second round that that really clicked home for me, with the realization that this combat was going to be far longer than I had anticipated. Had I caught it in time, I could have dropped the evistros, reducing the fight to a level 6 encounter, but it was too late when I twigged.

Too late? Yeah, because the the room looked like a final boss fight room, with the remains of the Pool of Rebirth in the centre, and a large number of monsters, including one that looked like the boss. So, the players started immediately laying down their dailies and spending their action points, so it would have been a bait-and-switch in my players’ eyes to turn it into a short, easy encounter.

Instead, I toughened it up. Instead of making the Pool of Rebirth cracked and empty, I put a pulsing, swirling purple light in the bottom, and had it generate four undead gnolls each round (Gnoll scavengers that I had turned into minions and otherwise changed slightly using the Monster Builder. I love that thing.), having them crawl up out of the pit to join the fight. I also added the challenge of unraveling the nature of the purple light and turning it off.

Things got pretty hairy. The paladin spent a couple of turns hanging in the pit, and the avenger had terrible, terrible dice luck. But the sorcerer got to use one power to create a lightning zone to keep the monsters slightly bottled-up, and the cleric used consecrated ground to keep erasing the minion undead.

Having these two zones (three, actually, counting the battle standard the paladin planted) could have made things a bit tough to keep track of, but my buddy Clint, who sculpts miniatures for various companies, had just provided a couple of us with one of the new things he had created – zone corner markers. Even unpainted (which mine won’t be for too long), they were great, allowing us to keep track of what was inside and what was outside the two stationary and one mobile zone. Clint talks about them on his blog.

The current ones are flame-shaped (but could be radiant or cold, depending on the paintjob), and he’s just finished up some different themed ones, as well as base markers for showing marked/cursed/quarry targets and the bloodied condition. They’ll be flat bases with interesting markings on them that you can stand your figure on, sticking it with little blob of blue tack or something similar. I look forward to them.

Anyway, the party killed the bad guys, closed the energy flow from the abyss, and helped the nomads of the Thornwaste destroy the gnolls and tear down the lion tower. Success and heroism for all.

Except the bad guys, of course.

What was I going to have them face? I had planned to have them have to seek out the shattered chamber of the Lion’s Heart, where the master oni had been pulling on Tharizdun’s power to use the spirits to reanimate fallen bodies and call up tainted elemental energy. The encounter was going to be an oni souleater, 2 witherling horned terrors, 3 gnoll huntmasters, and 14 of the minionized gnoll scavengers, for a total of 3,032 xp – a level 10 encounter for 6 characters.

Level 10 is pretty high, but a large number of the enemy were undead, and this group is hell on wheels against undead. I thought that they could probably take it, going in fresh (or nearly so), though it was going to be tough.

But that didn’t happen. Everyone seemed to have fun, though, and I think the consensus was that the campaign ended well. As I try to do at these moments, I asked everyone to tell me a little story of what happens to their characters after the game ends, and they did, and everyone pretty much lived happily ever after.

So, thanks to everyone who played:

  • Chris: Torrin, dragonborn paladin of Pelor, and the most civilized dragonborn I’ve had in the games I’ve run.
  • Tom: Akmenos, tiefling rogue monster bait.
  • Fera, Sergheia Jackalope, half-elven ranger, and winner of the Angsty-est Backstory award (a real achievement in this group)
  • Penny: Who first played a fighter, then dropped out, then came back with Bellamira, a half-elven sorcerer working under the name Kara.
  • Clint: Who followed the same path Penny did, but came back with Ruinghast, and eladrin revenant avenger of the Raven Queen, and winner of the Most Power Cards award.
  • Michael: Arcos, human cleric of Lathander, who dropped out about half-way through the game and was replaced, Bewitched Style, by…
  • Erik: Originally played Ash, a tiefling warlock who liked to burn things (and people). When Michael left the group, Erik took over Arcos, converted him to Pelor, and never looked back.
  • Dillip: Sparkantos, a human mage who liked to blow stuff up. He left the group at about the same time Michael did.

Thank you all. I appreciate the contributions you all made to the game, and have enjoyed playing with you.

Now to finish up the Hunter adventure for Friday.

System and Setting

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I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes up a game the past few weeks, thanks to my intended change in gaming habits. It’s got me examining that age-old balance in RPGs – system and setting. As I examine games that I might like to run, I look at both aspects, and I’ve been exploring the relationship between the two.

So, for the purpose of clarity in the following article, let me lay out my definitions:

System is the combination of mechanics that allow the modeling of the game world in play.

Setting is the fictional world of the game, including the campaign world and all the assumptions that go into it.

Essentially, I’m saying that the system is the set of tools that allow you to participate in the setting. Forgotten Realms is a setting, and D&D 4E is the system you use to play there.

We good? Good.

As I look at games to play, I’m struck by the observation that games tend to fall into two camps with regards to system and setting. One camp ties the system and the setting tightly together, so that the system reinforces the feel of the setting, and the setting pulls the necessary system elements into the game. Here, I’m thinking of games like Unknown Armies, Don’t Rest Your Head, and Polaris.

The other camp tends to divorce system from setting, so that the system can handle pretty much any aspect of any setting, and the setting uses only those aspects of the system that it needs to. Games in this category are things like GURPS, Basic Roleplaying, and d20 Modern. Now, I’ve chosen those three games specifically because they are at the extreme of this camp – they are essentially generic systems.

There seem to be real advantages to both ways of doing things. In the first group, you have games that are very rich in flavour, mood, and theme by default. You can feel the postmodern horror in Unknown Armies everytime you have to make a terrible sacrifice to power your magic. You feel the desperation and lurking insanity everytime you count up the dice colours in Don’t Rest Your Head. You feel the doomed fate of your characters with everything you do in Polaris. This is stuff that’s really lacking in the other camp without building a lot of specialist mechanics in, which, of course, moves you more into this category.

On the other side of the street, you tend to get systems that fade out of the spotlight and let you concentrate on the roleplaying. You can adapt the systems quickly and easily to pretty much anything you want to do, and your players won’t have to learn a new set of rules. This gives a fair bit of flexibility, and can emphasize the storytelling aspects of what you’re doing. But it can also limit the ability to mechanically implement creative ideas, both as a GM and as a player, that may require separate mechanics to produce.

Let’s look at an example I’ve currently been working on. I’m starting an episodic Hunter: The Vigil game, but I involved the players in the worldbuilding part of setting the game up. The result of that was a world where a lot of the specialized H:TV systems didn’t fit anymore. So, I developed a new framework for granting minor supernatural powers and/or special abilities to the characters, one that I planned to be fairly loose and rules-light. I wound up having to create different mechanics for about twenty different things that the players wanted to be able to do. This game of H:TV isn’t going to much resemble the default play style put forward in the book.

Now, that’s not bad, and that’s not necessarily good, but it involved a fair bit of effort on my part and negotiation with the players. It also illustrates both categories of game I cited above: World of Darkness is fairly setting-light, building a more generic system at the sacrifice of specificity of setting. the Hunter: The Vigil book provides specialized mechanics to integrate more closely with the setting. I wound up stripping several of those specific examples away and building new ones based on the generic stuff.

What’s my point?

My point is that I’m in a bit of a quandary. I want to run a number of one-shots over the next several months. Some are specific tightly-bound system-and-setting games, while some are just ideas that I need to put a system to. My buddy Clint put together a great three-shot game using OpenQuest, but he had to build some specific mechanics in to make the game do what he wanted. I’m not sure that the system is robust enough, or models things in the right ways, for some of the setting ideas I have. Another great generic system I like, FATE, could handle some ideas better, but I find it to walk a very fine balance between rules-heavy and rules-light – combat, specifically, doesn’t always have the tactical feel that many of my players like, and many settings would benefit from. And for the games where I’ve already got a system, there’s the problem of getting the group to learn the new rules.

So, anyone out there got any suggestions or comments? If you were going to run a game based on the movie The Prophecy, for example, what would you use?

C4 Post Mortem

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I spent Saturday and Sunday at the 2009 Central Canada Comic Con, running board and card game demos for the good folks at Imagine Games and Hobbies. It was a good time: the con was well-attended and well-organized, and the folks who came by the game tables were all friendly and interested. Some highlights and observations:

  • My friend Pedro, who owns and runs Imagine Games with his wife Wendy, got to meet Julie Newmar, gave her an iron rose he made for her, and got her autograph and a picture with her. He has now fulfilled his childhood dream and can die happy.
  • Another friend, Sharine (whose name I have probably misspelled), had Adam West sing her the Adam West song from The Family Guy.
  • I got to high-five a bunny rabbit that had high-fived Adam West… yes, parts of the con were quite surreal.
  • I got to meet GMB Chomichuk, one of the creators of Imagination Manifesto, an interesting graphic novel that is also turning into an RPG. I haven’t read more than the first five or so pages of the book, yet, so I can’t tell you too much about it, but it looks good. And it also looks like I’ll get to take part in the blind playtest of the RPG rules.
  • The mornings were slow in the gaming area both days – I figure that attendees were spending the morning walking the floor, buying their stuff, and meeting the guests, then heading over to the gaming area afterward to see what was going on.
  • Afternoons were pretty full – each day I ran two game sessions in the afternoons for people showing up, which is really about all you can fit in between about 1:00 and 6:00.
  • On Saturday, I got to play The Stars are Right this time, instead of just observing. It’s fun, but there’s a tendency to bite off more than you can chew sometimes. At different moments, both I and another one of the players thought we’d be able to put together a combo that would let us summon a Great Old One, only to lose the pattern on the third push or flip, leaving us with a wasted turn. Frustrating, but still a fun moment, when you realize that the pattern in your head has collapsed and you can’t see it in the layout of the stars anymore.
  • Also on Saturday, I played a session of Fury of Dracula. I love the game, and the folks who played loved it, too. As usual in a demo with players who have never played before, I took the Dracula role, as it’s the most complex one to play. Because of weird dice luck, I wound up doing better in combat with him during the day than at night, but they still ran me to ground in Belgrade and killed me.
  • Sunday was a big day for Battlestar Galactica – I had two groups who wanted to play it specifically. Well, three, actually, but more about that below. In both games, I facilitated rather than actually playing, because there were plenty of players – the first session had five players, and the second had six. The first game, the cylons won without ever specifically revealing themselves, as the cylon admiral used some strategic choices to drive the population down to a point they just couldn’t recover from. The second game, the cylons revealed themselves very early, and really pounded on the poor humans, doing substantial damage even before the first jump. That game ended early as players had to leave, but things looked bleak for the humans.
  • As a departure from our chaotic “just come and play” style, we decided to have a sign-up game for Battlestar Galactica on Sunday afternoon. I had four people sign up, but then had a group show up half an hour before the game was scheduled to start who wanted to play. I agreed to run the game, but let them know that I’d have to stop when the signed up group arrived. The people who signed up never showed, so we got the whole game in.
  • Next year, I think I’m going to have a sign-up Arkham Horror game with all the expansions. It’s a big, splashy game, and should attract some interest.
  • Pedro and Wendy’s kids, Leo and Maya, won the children’s costume contest for their costumes of a completely normal human meat-child and his pet dog. Yay!

So, thanks to Pedro and Wendy for paying my way to the show and supplying me with Japanese crackers and candy. Thanks also to Brian, who ran the gaming area at the con and kept things moving smoothly. And most especially, thanks to everyone who came out to try a game or just talk about them. You all made the weekend a real success.

Can’t wait for next year!

Central Canada Comic Con 2009

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Central Canada Comic Con 2009 runs this coming weekend, Friday through Sunday, at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. I’m going to be there, demoing board and card games for the good folks at Imagine Games and Hobbies on Saturday and Sunday.

What games? Well, here’s a list of what I’ll have with me:

  • Arkham Horror
  • Beowulf the Legend
  • Battlestar Galactica
  • Fury of Dracula
  • Gloom
  • The Stars are Right
  • Runebound
  • Anima
  • Deluxe Illuminati
  • The B-Movie Card Game

Tentative plan is going to be to do what I did the first time I did this, the year before last. Saturday, I run pick-up games of whatever people are interested in playing, except Arkham Horror. If there’s enough interest, and people commit to it, I set up Arkham Horror for a big, long game on Sunday. If there isn’t enough interest, Sunday is more pick-up games.

Why am I holding off on Arkham Horror? Because the game is huge, and it takes a long time to set up and tear down, and an even longer time to play. If I start Arkham Horror, I probably won’t be running anything else for at least four hours, more likely five or six. That means I only want to do it if people are really interested in playing it; nothing sucks more than having folks getting bored in the middle of a long demo.

So, if you’re at the con, stop by and say hi, or sit down and play a game or two.

It’ll be fun.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Been pretty quiet around here, hasn’t it? Don’t worry. Things should be picking up again fairly soon.

Anyway, last night we had the latest installment of the Storm Point campaign. We joined our heroes in the middle of the siege of Storm Point, after they had just failed the skill challenge to ward the city against magical assault, which allowed the enemy to summon in a squad of demons to wreak havoc in the town. Most of the characters were out of action points, having spent them for rerolls in the siege skill challenges, and several of them were down healing surges and suffering penalties to die rolls because of lack of sleep.

Now, the past couple of sessions were fairly abstract, dealing with things through skill challenges and roleplaying, with little actual combat played out. I decided that I wanted this session to open with a tough, knock-down, drag-out fight. As it turned out, because of several things*, the fight was all we had time for.

As I said, I wanted to make it tough, but I knew that the party was a little low on resources, so I created the encounter as 9th-level for 6 characters, with 3 canoloths, 3 runspiral demons, and a needle demon (2,200 xp total). I then scattered the runespiral  demons through the neighbourhood that I layed out using the very pretty city tiles from Rackham, put the canoloths in an open plaza, and hid the needle demon out of sight.

The party rode in on their hippogriffs, so I gave them perception checks to see if they could spot the demons, and they found them all except the needle demon. They decided to concentrate on the individual runespiral demons first, and swooped in on one. And, of course, that’s when the needle demon popped out and dominated a couple of them and had them leap from their flying hippogriffs head first to the paving stones.

Well, that got their attention, as did the fact that I had the unengaged demons set fire to buildings or eat civilians on their turns. They ganged up on the needle demon and one of the runespiral demons, while the ranger took on another runespiral demon from the air with his bow. Once they had put those three down, they went after the canoloths.

I had a string of crappy rolls in the fight, which made the remaining demons much less of a threat than they might have been, but it was somewhat balanced by the dazed cleric who could not roll a successful save, despite the extra opportunities granted by the warlord. In the end, the party defeated the demons and organized the citizens to put out the fires, and then we were done for the night.

I hadn’t expected the siege of Storm Point to last more than two sessions, but people still seem to be having fun, so I’m not too upset about it. Next session should see us to the end of the siege and (hopefully) the climactic battle with the commander. I’m willing to push it one session farther than that if I need to, but if it looks to run to three more sessions, I’m going to have to take some action to wrap things up.

But for now, it’s working, and people are enjoying it.

[[EDIT: Corrected name of the runespiral demons.]]

*Including the Winnipeg Zombie Walk, which went right by the store where we play. Back

Overdue DMG 2 Review, AKA Unwelcome Rant

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’m a little behind on getting this review up. I’m usually quicker off the mark; this time, I’ve waited several weeks before posting my review.

The truth is that I’m very conflicted about the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2.

See, I knew that it was going to be much harder to produce this book than the PHB 2 or the MM 2.* The PHB 2 can get away with just adding some classes and races. The MM 2 can get away with piling on the monsters. But the DMG 2 is tougher, because it has two jobs: first, it is supposed to provide advice as to how to run games, how to manage your group, how to build adventures, all that good stuff. Second, it’s supposed to have lots of lootable bits, like traps and templates and other little surprises that the DM can just plunk right into his or her own game with minimal retooling.

And the book does that. But I’m not sure I like the way it does it.

Because roughly 15% of the book (by page count) is stuff I’ve already paid for once.

I’m not talking about the preview stuff hosted on the WotC site, either. I’m talking about entire Save My Game, Dungeoncraft, and Ruling Skill Challenges columns plopped into the book. I’m talking about the bulk of the new section on traps being lifted from a Dragon article. I’m talking about a significant portion of the example skill challenges being pulled from published adventures and other sourcebooks.

Now, the stuff that’s been repeated is not bad – in fact, it’s quite good, most of it – but as I said, I’ve already paid for it once. It bothers me to find that I’ve paid for it again in buying this book.

Now, an argument can be made that repeating the material is a good thing, because it gives people who haven’t bought the other books or subscribed to DDI a chance to get their hands on the material.

Utter crap.

Firstly, it’s not my job to subsidize those who haven’t bought the other books by paying for some things twice.

Second, you can’t tell me that WotC wouldn’t rather get all those other folks buying the other books and subscribing to DDI. You know they would.

So, I am forced to conclude that WotC is double-dipping with this material either to cut corners or as a misguided attempt to lure those who have not already done so to give them more money by advertising the cool stuff available in other products. I say misguided because it strikes me as a bit of a slap in the face to the alpha-geeks like me who already buy all the 4E stuff that comes out.

I dunno. It just doesn’t seem like a good plan. Of course, the WotC .pdf sales policy proved to me that they don’t think things through very well at the best of times, but that rant is done, and no one wants to hear it.

So. Rant is done. You know my negative feelings about the book. How about the quality of the material?

It’s good. I like it. There is more of an emphasis, which I think is sorely lacking in 4E, on how to infuse your game with more story and roleplaying elements. The story branching section is very well done, and offers good advice to DMs both new and old. The section on Skill Challenges, though lifted almost completely from Mike Mearls’s column in Dungeon, is great, showing nice ways to use Skill Challenges and make them unobtrusive in the game. The section on Sigil has got me jonesing for a Planescape game. The new monster creation and customization rules look solid and easy. The traps and fantastic terrain examples are useful. And the advice on dealing with player motivations is very good.

One of the nicest things, though, are the little sidebar tips. These can add a little bit more information, or an example of what’s discussed in the main text, or just a little bit of advice from someone who’s been there. These are the things that stand out most in my mind after reading the book.

Well, there it is. I like the book, but am upset by the recycling of material I’ve already paid for. It hasn’t put me off WotC or D&D, but it does mean that I’m going to be checking the other supplements they publish to see if there’s enough original stuff in the book to warrant a purchase.

Because it’s good to know before I pay for it instead of after.

*Which I didn’t bother to review because it, like Adventurer’s Vault 2, is just a laundry list of things to add to the game. You’ll like some of the contents, and hates some of the others, and the ones you like or hate will probably differ from mine. Back

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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This past Sunday was the latest session of the Storm Point campaign, featuring the siege of Storm Point by an army of mixed humanoids led by shadar-kai heretics worshiping Vecna. We didn’t finish up the siege in one session, so we’ll have to get back to it next game.

I patterned the siege after the skill challenge I used for the defense of the mines last session. I varied it a little, because I wanted to accomplish a few very specific kinds of things:

  • Time pressure. I wanted the characters to feel that there just wasn’t enough time to do everything.
  • Resource pressure. I wanted the feeling of scant resources.
  • Random siege length. I wanted to have the actions of the characters determine just how long the siege goes on.

I also didn’t want to have the option each turn for the characters to kill attackers – in a siege this size, I felt that the impact of killing a few dozen besiegers just doesn’t tip the scales that much.

So, I decided to run the siege as a series of skill challenges, with eight-hour rounds. If a character worked more than a single round in a row, he had to start making Endurance checks – failure cost one healing surge and imposed a -1 (cumulative) penalty on all rolls. This, I felt, would make for some interesting choices, as the players try and decide whether they should take a nap or spend another eight hours manning the walls or whatever.

It worked, too, in that the players were all trying to push their characters as far as possible without sleeping, but saw their effectiveness diminish as they stretched too far. It also allowed for the Endurane skill to really shine for those who had good scores: Thrun the Anvil, for example, went three whole days before even starting to slow down.

The siege itself I broke into two phases: preparation and the siege itself. I set up a range of skill challenges in the preparation phase, each of which granted an advantage during the siege phase; things like training a command squad, laying in stores, reinforcing the walls, seeding the surrounding area with traps, and scrying on the approaching army. I gave them three days to get as much accomplished as they could, and they managed all of the preparatory challenges.

There was a longer challenge available, as well, one that I expected to run through the bulk of the siege. The Wizard was researching a mystical weapon created by the Bael Turathi tieflings in their war against Arkhosia. It was a set of runestones that could be used to unleash violent destructive energy in a wide area, and was called The Lightbringer. The DC on this challenge was tougher, and the Complexity higher than the other challenges. The swordmage and the cleric jumped all over this challenge.

And botched it. The experiment blew up, badly wounding the characters and killing the Wizard. The party paid to have him resurrected, but all the research notes and volumes were destroyed in the explosion.

Once the siege was established, I gave the party a list of nine different tasks that they could spend their time on, each one a skill challenge. This was stuff like planning, wall defense, blockade duty in the harbour, magical defense, leading a sally party, maintaining civil discipline, etc. The catch was that, every task they didn’t work on in a given round, automatically failed. When they succeeded in a task, they could either take the success or erase a failure. Failures also imposed some minor penalty, like costing a healing surge or giving a penalty to another roll.

To help alleviate the inevitable mathematical downslide this set-up produces, one of the tasks (Command) allowed the characters to remove a failure previously acquired in another area, and didn’t suffer from the possiblity of failure. Their success in the preparatory phase also gave them a command squad that they could assign to one of the tasks.

Now, the accrual of three failures on any given task results in something bad happening, but not in the failure of the siege. A certain number of challenges (which I’m not going to spell out here) need to fail for the siege to break the city. But, for example, if the party acquires three failures on the Magical Defense task (which they did just as we wrapped up for the evening), a band of demons is conjured into the city and begins wreaking havoc. They’re going out to fight them, now, and a few of the characters are very tired.

Breaking the siege will happen if they manage to succeed in a few key tasks, which will trigger the final battle, or after a certain amount of time, when off-stage developments will catch up with things.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way the set-up has been forcing the party to make some hard choices during the siege, and dealing with the consequences. The players seem to be having a good time with it, too. We went all evening without a single combat, and everyone was engaged and involved in the game.

Of course, next time starts off with a nasty demon fight just to make up for things.

One Shot, Part Three: Brother Puddler Saves Humanity

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Okay, maybe I’m revealing a little bias in the title.

Saturday, we had the third and final installment of the Robot Wasteland one-shot that I’ve talked about here and here.

We managed to save Junkyard, flying in on our scavenged hovertransport at about the same time as the Devourer army reached the walls. My character, Brother Puddler, was flying, because the others were better at shooting things with the transport’s weapons or with some recovered beam rifles tied into the transport’s targeting assist.

We went after a few of the bigger Devourers first, because we had limited ammo and wanted to do as much damage as possible  before we ran out. Unfortunately, the shooting rolls did not favour us, and then one of the big grinders chewed the cockpit off the transport. There was just enough of it left for Brother Puddler’s divine powers to cobble the control systems back together again, and then we blew one of the control Devourers apart as we headed back to the no-man’s land.

Why were we heading back there? Because our psychic had spotted a small band of humans on a small hill surrounded by ravager Devourers. We flew in for a quick pick-up and dust-off, saving the wounded and driving off the attacking Devourers long enough for the survivors to get inside a bunker. I also managed to bash the crap out of the transport with a bad piloting check, but it still presented a great cinematic image: a hovertransport, with the cockpit shredded and open to the sky, a heavily-armoured warrior holding the controls intact through sheer willpower, swooping in to a rough landing on top of a pillbox, the passengers blasting away at six-legged catlike robots the size of bears, snatching up the the wounded, and blasting off back to Junkyard.

Then the folks in the bunker activated the bombs hidden in a long line through the battlefield, blasting a fifty-foot wide, twenty-foot deep ditch about a third of a mile long through the advancing robots.

After dropping off the wounded, we asked the defenders where they needed us, and they suggested helping to reclaim one of the cannon emplacements on the wall. We shot up there, but were running short on energy for the weapons. The two folks with beam rifles tried to clear the cannon tower of little raider Devourers, while the gunner on the ship’s guns kept firing downrange at the advancing larger Devourers currently trying to cross the ditch. When she ran out of power, she took the ship’s controls and Brother Puddler leapt down onto the tower with his chainsword to show the upstart metal a thing or two about the will of man.

And he was promptly pulled down and had his arm mangled. Again. Critical hit by a raider coupled with a critical failure on my Dodge roll. The rest of the raiders dogpiled him.

But a lucky Strength roll let him burst to his feet, tossing one of the raiders over the battlements, and grab a plasma cutter tossed to him by one of the other characters. He drove off the bulk of the raiders, supported by beam rifle fire from the transport, and then used the cannon to take out one of the huge Devourers that happened to be crossing the ditch by the simple expedient of walking across on the back of another huge one that was stuck in the ditch.

At this point, the Devourers were starting to flee, and had less cohesion than they had previously displayed. That’s when we figured that the first one we had killed was probably some sort of Devourer brainbot leading this unprecedented army.

So, we wrapped up the game, and we each got to say what our characters were doing five years later: we had wandering scouts and troubleshooters, a research team set up in the old weapons cache we had found, and Brother Puddler leading a chapterhouse of the Cult of Iron, working with the tech cult to understand and use the transport and other tech devices we had uncovered.

All-in-all, a most enjoyable one-shot, for all that it expanded to three nights.

Thank you, Clint, for the enjoyable game.

And thank you, Penny, Fera, and Tom, for saving Brother Puddler so many times.