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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. 😉

Hunter: The Vigil

By | | Hunter - Shadow Wars, What's he playing?
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Last Friday evening, I got some of my group together to run a one-shot of Hunter: The Vigil. This is White Wolf’s New World of Darkness version of Hunter: The Reckoning, which never really inspired much love in me. Hunter: The Vigil, on the other hand, really intrigued me once I bothered to take a look at it.

My main problem with the old game was that, instead of playing normal humans confronting the supernatural, you played normal humans with funky powers confronting the supernatural*. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but I felt it ignored a large area of interesting story by not letting one play a normal human thrust into a paranormal world.

Also, I found that the basic assumptions of the game really tried to force one to play a very specific type of game, with very specific types of characters and plots. Not enough freedom readily available in the basic design, is what I’m saying, though of course every game can be expanded beyond its core assumptions by a dedicated GM.

Anyway.

The new version of Hunter really did a lot to fix that. It provides a much more open matrix of story than the previous game, and is designed to allow the GM to pick the style of game he wants to run. It’ll readily support stories told in the vein of the Supernatural TV series, stuff out of Poltergeist: The Legacy and X-Files, and full-blown gun-bunny Delta Force raids on vampire nests. You can pick the level of play in a manner very reminiscent of Unknown Armies, choosing how much the characters know about the weird of the world and what resources they have at their disposal. There is also a very nice section at the end telling you how to build your own creatures, so you’re not tied into the standard World of Darkness mythology, which I think is a good thing**.

Well, of late, we’ve just been playing D&D, so I think we were all hungry for a non-fantasy, non-d20 game as a change of pace. I downloaded one of the quick-start adventures available from White Wolf – The Hunt. It uses the characters from the in-game fiction in the rulebook***, and picks up their story about a week after the events described in the fiction. I invited five of my group to play, and they all said yes, so we set a date, they picked characters, and we got to it.

Overall, it was a success.

There were a few hiccups, though, in part because this was a first run for all of us, and in part because the intro adventure is very bare bones without a lot of depth to it. Not surprising in an intro adventure, but it showed its holes when confronted by experienced players.

A couple of negatives really stood out to me (I’ll try to avoid spoilers):

  • The timeline for the “mystery” really railroads the characters. There were a couple of points where the adventure basically says, “This is all you can do. Now you have to wait for things to happen.” Sure, that’s very reflective of reality, especially in a police investigation, but I prefer more active avenues be available for players and characters to explore.
  • The main villain, who is given a fairly rich backstory, is barely onstage at all. There is little to no interaction set up in the adventure beyond trying to shoot him.
  • Far more engaging and compelling than the main character is a red herring introduced about midway through the adventure. This really sidetracked the investigation a fair bit.
  • The combat stats were not really well-balanced. Five PCs, three of them tough cops and one of them a gang leader with a bodyguard, could barely handle four stock, run-of-the-mill gang members. The relevant stats were too out of whack for the cops to have had much of a chance unless they pulled their guns. When they ran into some of the supernatural threats, it was even worse.

And now the positives:

  • The SAS structure was quite easy to follow and use on the fly.
  • There was an interesting mix of things to do in the adventure, giving pretty much everyone a chance to shine.
  • Some of the ideas were great, such as Rag Man.
  • The quick-start rules that came with the adventure were handy, easy to follow, and gave us all the basics.
  • The write-ups for each of the pre-gen characters were wonderfully complete and easy to use.
  • It was fun.

In the final analysis, it’s really that last point that makes all the difference, isn’t it?

We liked the game enough that we’re going to run another one-shot available for free from White Wolf: One Year Later. If that one goes well, I’m considering starting an ongoing campaign.

We’ll have to wait and see on that, though.

Final verdict? Hunter: The Vigil is a fun game.

*I freely admit that I am oversimplifying, and indeed may be downright wrong about this. I haven’t looked at the game since it came out in 1999, and that’s the impression I came away with after reading it. Or at least that’s what I remember my impression to be.

**Especially considering the long-running Vampire: The Masquerade campaign that ran in my group for somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten years. A lot of the backstory and basics of the World of Darkness got explored in that time. Granted, it was the old World of Darkness, but still.

***Which is one of the creepiest bits of in-game fiction I’ve read in a White Wolf product.

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.

Obsidian Portal Update

By | | What's he playing?
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Two posts in one day! The eschaton has been imanentized!

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

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

That just rocks.

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

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

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

Obsidian Portal and Wiki World Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just be gentle. It’s my first wiki.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline – Storm Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

**So take that, Michael! 😉

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

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