Category Archives: What’s he playing?

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Happy Frakkin’ New Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who could ask for more?

Happy New Year, everyone.

*Here’s one. Here’s another.

Battlestar Galactica Demo

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

 

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

Dateline – Storm Point

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

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

This, they decided, would not do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaming Code Phrases

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

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

Here goes.

“Arrangements are made.”

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

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

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

“You’re an elf that uses magic.”

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

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

“Get ’em!”

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

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

“I catch her and throw her back.”

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

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

Thank you, Weyland.

“Two hundred feet tall with an army.”

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

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

 

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

In other words, comment below.

Duma Key

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

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

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

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

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

But I kept at it.

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

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

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

Okay, enough generalities. What about Duma Key?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving the Path

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

Why? Because I’m bored with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dateline – Storm Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running a Demo

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Last time, I talked about building an RPG game demo. This time, I want to talk about running it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suck it up.

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

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

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

Building a Demo

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

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

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

  • Venue
  • Adventure
  • Characters
  • Play Aids

 Venue

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

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

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

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

Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

Characters

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

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

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

Play Aids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dungeons & Dragons Insider – So Far, So Good

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I subscribed.

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

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

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