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The Thing About Skill Challenges

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

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

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

Well, yes and no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll let you know how it works out.

 

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

No Roles II – More Board and Card Games

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

Well, obviously that didn’t happen.

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

Beowulf the Legend

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a lot of fun.

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

Gloom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Dragon Ante

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

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

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

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

Dateline – Storm Point

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

Anyway, on to the main topic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons I learned:

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

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

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

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

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

– Greenflame blade can be an awesome mook eraser.

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

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

– Being hit by status effects sucks.

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

Looking forward to the next game.

Back for More – Storm Point

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I was done.

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

I’m liking that a lot.

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

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

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

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

I have to admit that I am, too.

Anti-Climax – The TPK

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Last night, I killed the entire party.

It was a 3.5 Eberron game, and we were playing through the Age of Worms Adventure Path from Dungeon Magazine. We have been for a couple of weeks more than three years. We try to get together every second Sunday, but we’re all people with busy real lives, and it doesn’t always work out, so the sessions are a little irregular.

It’s also a verys social, beer-and-pretzels game, with a lot of non-game directed table talk, and a tendency to drift off topic. In the three to four hours we meet each time, we get through one, maybe two encounters.

So, after three years, the group was almost finished with Spire of Long Shadows, which is the seventh of twelve adventures. They had only the Harbinger (an advanced spellweaver lich) and the Kyuss Knights (very tough combat monster undead) to face, in two separate encounters.

They picked the room with the Harbinger, and died.

A big part of it was the the thing was ready for them, with a high Spot and Listen check, so it heard the people in the hallway and had a couple of rounds to buff and prepare. The good guys got a face full of empowered level 17 chain lightning when they opened the door.

And then the monster beat them all on initiative.

Well, the prismatic spray kicked the dwarven cleric/fighter and the half-orc barbarian right out of the world with the violet ray. Bam. Two of the heaviest hitters gone in the first round. Everyone did their best, but it wasn’t all that much of a contest after that, although the rogue did almost take it down (within 20 points, Erik) before succumbing to the frost bite of the cold fire shield. The warforged juggernaut sucked up waaaaay too much damage the next turn, thanks to the thing being able to cast three scorching rays in one round, and that left the wizard and the druid.

At this point, the Harbinger turned invisible and healed itself up to about 80 HP. The druid summoned some girallons to try and find it and deal with it, while the wizard made a mad dash for the bodies of their comrades, in a bid to dimension door them out. One attack of opportunity from the invisible monster, and it was down to the druid and his monkeys. When the Harbinger sealed the way out with a wall of force and used a power word stun, the fight was essentially over.

Everyone sort of sat around and went, “Well. That sucked.”

And it did. A TPK is no one’s idea of a good time. Not even the GM. Sure, I could have pulled some punches, and fudged some rolls, but that minimizes the excitement and challenge, I think.

The turning point was that prismatic spray. I’ve never really liked save-or-die effects, from a play perspective, because it takes people out of combat and prevents them from having fun. Prismatic spray has two or three such effects. The plane shift that got our heavy hitters basically turned them into spectators for the rest of the combat. So, not only did it suck for their characters, it pretty much sucked for the players, too.

So, the characters failed in their quest. Kyuss awakens, and ushers in the Age of Worms, spreading death and destruction across Khorvaire, waking the other Rakshasa Rajahs, and dooming the world, despite Dragotha’s interference. Which would have been cool if the characters had died a little less anticlimactically.

Oh, well.

I want to say thanks to my players:

  • Chris, who played an elf druid with the biggest, baddest doggy in the whole, wide world.
  • Erik, who played an Extreme! explorer and rogue, for the sheer zest he put into shouting “Extreme!“
  • Pedro, who played an inexplicably scottish dwarf fighter/cleric, and incidentally gave us the place to play.
  • Dan, who played a ranger who grew up to become a wizard. Mainly for the imaginary chicks.
  • Paul, who played a warforged juggernaut who really liked to break things. And wander around underwater fighting squid.
  • Mark, who joined the game later on as a far-too-civil half-orc barbarian with a great name.

It’s been fun. Also deeply offensive on many levels, but still fun.

Now, on to our 4th Edition game.

What’s the Story? – RPG as Narrative

By | | What's he playing?
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I’m gonna get a little philosophical in the following post, so be warned. There’s some musing ahead.

I play a lot of RPGs. Right now, I’m playing in three different games, and running three more, not counting the computer RPGs that I indulge in as time permits. I also read a lot of books – got four of them on the go at the moment. And I write a fair bit. Writing is my day job (technical writing), and I’m currently trying to finish writing a novel.

This means that I think a lot about stories.

I’m thinking now specifically about stories in RPGs, because I just finished writing up the character diary for one of my characters. This is something I decided to take on because my character is a bookish, scholarly sort who would keep a diary. My GM in that group has asked me to post it on the game’s forum site, so that it can serve as a recap for the players, and I’m cool with that. It’s fun to write, fun to explore the development of the character out of game time, and fun to let his voice mature through the entries. I’ve done similar things with other characters, but this is the first time I’ve decided to keep a game diary from the get-go, and to make it public. Well, public among the others in the group.

But it’s got me thinking about narrative structure and convention within RPGs, and whether we are, in fact, generating stories when we play.

(Now, when I say “story,” I’m using the word in a very particular way. I’m referring to something that would appear in a novel, short-story collection, movie, or television. That’s a pretty formal and narrow definition, I know, but that’s really part of the point I’m trying to make.)

Yeah, I know, the current trend is to view RPGs as collaborative improvisational storytelling, but are we really telling stories?

I’ve been noticing that, as I write up my diary entries from my notes during play, that I have to do a fair bit of fleshing out of things that didn’t actually happen in play, or smoothing over and conflating things that did happen in play. And even then, it’s hard to call my finished product a story. Even when taken together, the entries from an entire adventure don’t really make up a story. Here’s why:

  • Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. RPGs certainly have a beginning, and a whole lot of middle, but the ending is very often not a clean, defined thing. Sometimes, games fade out as interest wanes, sometimes they are abandoned when something new comes along, sometimes they’re ditched after a TPK. Sometimes they make it to a defined ending point, but even those often leave many loose ends and follow-ups. And the middles sort of go on forever, which is really part of my next point.
  • Stories have focus. They tell a tale, and show you what’s important to the narrative progress. RPGs may have that sort of thing set up in their structure, but focus tends to go out the window once the players get involved. Because people pick up on different things, are interested in different things, and think about things in different ways, they don’t always spot the plotline right off the bat, and tend to wander around a bit trying to find it. Even when they do find it, they rarely want to focus specifically on it – their characters all have other interests as well as the main storyline.
  • Stories are (generally) controlled by the teller. This is what give stories their structure and focus. One voice, one vision, one direction*. In RPGs, the control is split among all the participants, players and GM alike, and each has a different agenda. Each player views his or her character as the main character in the story, and views the story to be about them. Plus the others, but mainly them. This is what weakens** focus and structure in RPGs.

When I look at my completed diary entries, or talk to people about what happened in a game, it doesn’t come out very storylike. The diary entries feel like diary entries, in that they are a strung-together account of events. They may have a little more focus and direction than real-world diary entries, but not a whole lot. Talking about games is the same way – outlining everything that happens in a game doesn’t provide a clear, focused narrative, because of all the little things that clutter it up. If we want to talk about the experience in a meaningful and interesting way, we tend to string together anecdotes from the game to highlight moments that had an impact on us.

Let’s look at the standard D&D*** game. If you tell the “story” of the game, it goes something like:

Goblins were attacking the town, so we went out into the woods, and fought some goblins. Then we fought some goblins with wolves. Then we camped overnight, and a bear attacked us. In the morning we followed the goblin trail to the caves. Along the way, we fought goblins twice more. One of the groups had a shaman. At the caves, we fought goblins with wolves in the first room, then goblin archers behind stacks of haybales in the second room. In the third room there was a pit trap, and we fought some more goblins. Finally, we got to the leader, and he was a bugbear, so we fought him and won. Then we went to collect our reward.

As a narrative, it’s not all that interesting. You fought a lot of goblins and things, and saved the town. There. I just boiled it down to a single sentence. Even if you have a group of very skilled roleplayers who are totally immersed in their characters, it’s not going to really add all that much to the story except some filler scenes to separate the fights.

I wouldn’t buy a book that told that story.****

And have you ever tried to tell a game story to a non-gamer? Don’t even bother. Their eyes glaze over pretty quick, even if they understand what you’re talking about. Even with gamers, what interest there is comes from comparison and identification with their own gaming experience. And a lot of gamers you tell your game story to are just nodding and smiling until you’re done flapping your gums so that they can tell you a real cool gaming story from their own lives.

Now, the argument could be made that I’m oversimplifying and that some RPGs are rich in story. I don’t think so, but I’m fine with being told I’m wrong. What we call story in RPGs is primarily background – the stuff in behind the stories. Or the infamous metaplot, which is closer to what I think of as story, but that I don’t think really comes on stage properly in the average game.

You could also say, “It’s the GM. My GM makes great stories.” And you may be right, but I don’t think so. It’s not that your GM isn’t great, but your GM is making campaigns and adventures, which are story skeletons that get fleshed out by play, and it’s the play that keeps the RPG experience from being story.

I’ve done it myself, creating a campaign that ran for just about eight years, with a storyline running through it, and a beginning, middle, and end, but I have to admit, after the fact, that it wasn’t a story in the way I’m talking about here. It was a collection of events, with a common theme and a sense of linkage to lead from one to the other, and a resolution that tied up most of the loose ends and put a lid on things. But it wasn’t really a story.

So, by my definitions, as outlined above, I’ve pretty much proved***** that what happens in RPGs is not story in the strictest sense. What is it then?

It’s a game.

Now, that may sound obvious or ridiculous, but I think it’s an important distinction. It’s a game, with rules that simulate events in which we participate. It produces a series of linked, simulated events that occur because of our interaction with the rules. These series of events can be adapted and restructured to produce a story, if we put in the effort to weed out the extraneous and add the missing. By applying the structure, focus, and control I mentioned above.

It’s fine that RPGs don’t produce stories as I’ve defined them. In fact, it’s a good thing. The bits that keep RPGs from being the same as novels are the interaction and surprise that emerges from play. Those are great things to have. Control of narration in the hands of the participants is a whole lot of fun. As a GM, not having to flesh out every detail of a plot, and relying on my players to supply the exciting parts is fun. As a player, knowing that I can steal a moment or two in the spotlight, and watch each of my friends do the same is fun.

What about the repetition? Well, that’s fun, too, because in the simulationist rules of the game, it produces varied and interesting results. What does that mean? It means combats are exciting. Introducing a random chance element into play is exciting. It doesn’t look exciting when it’s written down on the page, but man, when you’re rolling and praying for that natural 20, you are excited.

It just doesn’t make for such an interesting story.

So, enjoy the game for what it is. And enjoy stories for what they are. The two are not the same, though, so think about that the next time you read a book or play a game. Look at the differences between the two. It can tell you a lot about the nature of narrative and play.

And, in closing, lest you think I’m picking on games, it happens elsewhere, too. The musical Cats, for example, is a wonderful show, with good music, good lyrics (yay for T.S. Eliot!), good dancing, and great look to it. I love it.

But it ain’t got a story, neither.

 

*Now, admittedly, this isn’t always the case, but I’m playing it up as a rule to heighten the contrast of my argument. So all you postmodernists out there just bear with me.

**I say “weakens,” but it’s not necessarily a negative. I could also have said “increases the freedom and spontanaeity,” but I am, once again, trying to make a point.

***If there is such a thing. This may be the same sort of philosophical construct as the square root of -1, which doesn’t exist as a number but makes some important high-level math work.

****To be fair, I have bought books that tell that story. And I’ve enjoyed them. I just wouldn’t call them good stories.

*****And if I haven’t, sshhh. I’m bored now, and moving on to the next section.

Actually Playing 4E

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I know! Two posts in two days!

So, despite my resolve to wait until there were more options out there before starting a 4th Edition D&D game, I broke down and started a 4th Edition D&D game.

Those who know me are not surprised.

I wanted to get some practice running the game, get familiar with the rules and things, while I prepare the campaign I’m going to launch some time next year. This would give me a chance to build some proficiency with the new system, and get my head around what sorts of things a campaign needs that can be best modeled by the new rules.

Now, because I was coming in green, I wanted to use a pregenerated campaign, and Wizards of the Coast graciously provided their Scales of War adventure path. That made it easy. So, I sent out invites to eight gamers I know, hoping for four or five acceptances.

I got seven.

And then one of them asked if they could bring a friend. Back up to eight players.

Well, I decided, I wanted to see how much faster these rules were in play. This would give them a damned good stretching.

So how’s it going? First, some observations about the adventures.

  • They are (so far; we’re at #3 right now) fairly well-written. There are some nice encounters, and some interesting decisions to make.
  • There’s plenty of dungeon crawling going on. Too much? That’ll vary depending on your group, but it’s pushing the limits of my tolerance.
  • There are interesting little links, mainly using skill challenges, that break up the dungeon crawl monotony.
  • Starting especially in the second adventure, there’s plenty of opportunity for improvised little side adventures and extended roleplaying. Not so much in the first, which tends to drop you in the middle of the action and then give you a time-sensitive mission.
  • The editing on the second adventure is really sub-par, with missing labels being one of the more annoying aspects.

Now, as to playing the adventures:

  • After character generation, we had a tiefling warlock, a tiefling rogue, a dragonborn fighter, a dragonborn paladin, a human cleric, a human wizard, a half-elf ranger, and a half-elf fighter.
  • There are issues with running this large a group in any system. These were exacerbated in this game because none of us were overly familiar with the rules. Things dragged, no one got enough DM face time, and little timing misjudgements I made snowballed into huge problems.
  • Two players bowed out after the second session, saying that the group was just too large. They were right.
  • Six is much more manageable.
  • Leaving your rogue out front with no back-up in hostile territory will do bad things to the rogue.
  • Skill challenges have a lot of potential, but some practice is needed to run them as something more than a non-physical combat. Also, having skills that automatically grant failures seems designed to punish players for trying to stick to what their characters are good at. Skill challenges should encourage players to take risks, not devolve into a guessing game to see where the booby-trapped skills are.
  • Combat encounters still take a fair bit of time to run. Now, part of that is lack of experience with the system, and part of that is the fact that monsters have significantly more hit points on average, which makes the combats run a larger number of rounds.
  • The new system actively rewards you for co-operating in your party and playing to your strengths. After some shaky combats, the players started to see how to make their characters work together to support each other. The last fight of the last session was a complete slaughter of the monsters.
  • Adding Campaign Coins to the game has been fun.
  • Doing up customized cards for powers and magic items can greatly speed play. You can check out some templates here. Personally, I use the Power and Item Cards by JFJohnny5. Thanks, Johnny!
  • I got some Alea Tools magnetic markers to track bloodied, marked, and cursed conditions, but they were too attractive to each other, and wound up being more trouble than they were worth. Apparently, if you have a magnetically receptive play surface, they don’t push and pull your figures around nearly as much. I’ll have to see what I can find, but for now, I’m looking for a different way to handle this. Any suggestions are welcome.
  • Speaking of marked, I like what this condition is trying to do, which is make enemies attack someone who is very much a threat to them, but I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a less fiddly way of handling it. It can be a bit of a challenge to keep track of whom has been marked by who.
  • There has been some comment that combat seems very repetitive, because characters use the same powers over and over again. I find this confusing to me, because in 3.5, characters just used the same attacks over and over again, and the people complaining didn’t find that repetitive. Maybe this is an artifact of the low level limited number of powers; we’ll have to see how things change as the game progresses.

So, what’s the verdict? Among my players, it’s that 4E is a good system. It’s not the second coming, it won’t end world hunger, or bring about peace in the Middle East, but it works for what it sets out to do. Mostly, anyway. It’s easily as good as 3.5, and if there are places where it doesn’t quite measure up, there are also places where it outshines the former system significantly.

And my opinion? Well, let me put it this way. The adventure path I’m using is written for five characters. When I found out I was going to have eight, I went through and beefed up the encounters to be appropriate for that number of characters. The guidelines in the DMG on how to do this are very, very clear. The process is very simple. It took me under an hour to update over a dozen encounters, and that includes a couple where I had to increase the level of the monsters, rather than just add extras. When two players dropped out, it was even faster to adjust for that. And I’ve been getting faster with each adventure. This means I’m spending my prep time fleshing out background, making props and cards for treasure, updating power cards for the players, and reading the next adventure.

This, I like. This is what sells me on 4E.

Rammed by the Black Goat of the Woods

By | | What's he playing?
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Just finished our first Arkham Horror game using the Kingsport Horror and Black Goat of the Woods expansions (along with the other three: Curse of the Dark Pharoah, Dunwich Horror, and The King in Yellow). It was a lot of fun, but ended badly for humanity.

Some observations:

  • I had to put a leaf into my dining table to hold all three gameboards, and use two side tables to hold the various stacks of cards and tokens. The game has always been big; now it’s BIG! We had to walk around the table a fair bit to move our characters, read the monster stats, reach our clue tokens, etc.
  • The rifts mechanic in Kingsport is a potentially fatal distraction. You can’t ignore it, but you can’t really focus too much on it. We had only three players, and that meant that we were pressed to try and get everything done without worrying about the rifts. By the time we started paying attention to them, everything was getting out of hand.
  • Heralds and Ancient Ones: Having a Herald in play makes the game more difficult. Having the Ancient One associated with the Herald in play makes the game especially hard. We played with Shub Niggurath and the Black Goat Herald, because I wanted to see how the new stuff in the expansion worked, and the synergy between the Herald and the Ancient One was pretty overwhelming. With a couple of extra players, I think we would have had some breathing room, but it still would have been a real challenge.
  • Kingsport recommends playing with multiple characters per player if you have a small group; once you add the third board in, there is a lot of territory to cover. And Kingsport can’t be ignored as safely as Dunwich could, because of the whole rift thing. In future, I think running with two characters each if we have fewer than five players is a good idea.
  • The Epic Battle variant added a lot of flavour to the final battle when Shub Niggurath broke through. The new mechanics were good, and the flavour text was great. However, the “You Lose” card came up as the first red card, which was somewhat disappointing. I think it would be a good idea to expand the two decks, and pick the appropriate number of green and red cards randomly at the start of the game. Just to shake things up a bit.

We all died in the final battle. Tom went down when Shub Niggurath arrived, because his previous character had been devoured trying a courageous stunt to take a token off the doom track, and his new character didn’t have any monster trophies left. I fell next, to a Dark Young that got summoned as part of the Epic Battle and the customized Ancient One plot decks (my ninth injury was a duplicate – another sprained ankle). Fera held on to the bitter end, but then that damned “You Lose” card showed up, just when she had Shub Niggurath on the ropes.

Anyway, it was one of the more brutal games we’ve played, and everyone said we needed to play more often, which I took as a positive sign. I mean, we’d just had our asses handed to us by Shub Niggurath and her flunky, and it made us want to play again.

That’s a good game, in my book.

Home Again

By | | What's he playing?
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I’m back from GenCon. As always, it was a real blast. I got back around 9:00 last night, and had to be up for work this morning, so my recollection is kind of chaotic, but I want to talk a little bit about it while it’s fresh.

Here we go, in no particular order:

  • Once again, I spent my time with Scott Glancy of Pagan Publishing and Jared Wallace of Dagon Industries, both fine gentleman. We shared the both with Shane Ivey and the Arc Dream Publishing crew, and they were a good bunch of fellows, as well.
  • Greg Stolze spent a lot of time in the both, flogging his games Reign and Dirty World. I got to know Greg back in the days I was writing for Unknown Armies, and it’s always a pleasure to spend some time with him.
  • Ken Hite, one of my favourite connoisseurs of the weird and the real and the intersection of the two, stopped by a few times. He’s got a new book out: Tour de Lovecraft. It’s a collection of his blog entries, and takes you on a tour through all 51 of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories. Good, good stuff. I bought two.
  • I got to touch base with Fred Hicks and Lenny Balsera of Evil Hat. They were both pretty busy, but it was good to shake hands and attach faces to names. Nice folks.
  • At the Pagan booth, we had the printer’s proof of one of their next books, Mysteries of Mesoamerica. My good friend and GenCon traveling partner, sculptor Clint Staples, wrote a big chunk of the book, and it’s been a long time coming out. But it’s more than worth the wait. This book is absolutely beautiful!
  • Had dinner a couple of nights with Gwen and Brian from Sigh Co. Met them last year, and they’re very nice people. Good to see them again.
  • Fantasy Flight Games is rapidly becoming the powerhouse of the show. I bought a new expansion for Arkham Horror from them that I didn’t even know was coming – The Black Goat of the Woods. There were about four other games I would have liked to pick up, but the budget can only be stretched so far.
  • Last year, I passed on the Campaign Coins, and I regretted it. This year, I bought the starter set, and feel much better about myself. They’re very nice.
  • Also picked up Aces & Eights, BRP, and Alpha Omega. Haven’t had much chance to get into them yet, though. Look for thoughts in future posts.
  • Didn’t get to play in Scott Glancy’s playtest this year, but he did talk to me some about the scenario and his thinking behind it. I just want to go on record as saying that there is something broken inside his very soul if he can come up with stuff like that, and I thank him for it.
  • Seemed to be a larger female turnout this year. More, there seemed to be more females buying game product for themselves this year. I like to see this; the hobby has a lot to offer everyone, regardless of gender, and it’s good to see it grow.
  • For those interested, the final tally for the count on Saturday was 43*.

So, it was a good trip, and I had a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone I spent time with down there. You guys are what makes the trip worthwhile.

 

*Those who know don’t need to ask. Those who ask don’t need to know.

Catching Up

By | | Dresden Files Playtest, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?, What's he watching?
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Man, I have got to get on a more regular blogging schedule. Sorry for the neglect, folks.

Been a bit of a busy time round my place the past few weeks. Here’s what’s been going on:

Dresden Files RPG

Not a lot happening on this front. I’ve been lurking on the Burner list, and reading some blogs, and of course reading the new cut of the rules. The only real rules bit that’s come down so far has been the city creation stuff, and it’s pretty similar to the version we Bleeders saw. It’s nice to read the list and see that a lot of the Burners are having as much fun with it – and discovering as many cool things about it – as I did.

Mutant City Blues

I’ve had a few people say that they’re interested in trying this, but we’ve had scheduling issues. Summer is actually a pretty hard time to schedule games in our group. Especially pick-up games or one-shots. Many of the people I play with have kids out of school, and vacation trips, and all sorts of other things that come up in the summer. They’re willing to schedule around the regular, ongoing campaigns, but trying to shoehorn in a one-shot is difficult. Hopefully soon.

D&D 4E

I’m working on putting together a 4E campaign to start next year some time, probably after the Player’s Handbook II is released so that there are plenty of option for my players. However, people have been asking me to run a campaign – even a short one – and I wanted to try out the rules and get some familiarity with what works for me and what doesn’t. So, I started a campaign.

I sent out invites to eight people, hoping to get four. I got seven of the eight, plus one person asked to bring in a buddy. Yeah, I’m running with eight people. It’s a real crowd.

We’re using the Scales of War Adventure Path being published in Dungeon Magazine. We probably won’t finish it by the time I’m ready to start the new campaign, but it’ll give everyone a chance to have a taste of the system over a longer term than demos and one-shots. And I’ll get better at the game.

I’m not going to talk too much about the game – we’ve only had one session, and that was very combat heavy. What I do want to mention is the ease with which I was able to beef up the adventure to match my party. The adventure is written for five character; I have eight. It took me no more than an hour to go through and upgrade it to be a fair challenge for my larger party. Mostly, it just involved adding a few extra monsters, but I did have to add some traps/hazards, and I had to level up a solo monster to be a good challenge.

Under an hour. Sweet.

I also had to increase the treasure the way it talked about in the DMG; that took a little more guesswork, because the adventure had 14 treasure parcels to hand out, not the normal 10, so I had to increase the default numbers in the DMG to figure it out, but it was easy.

Anyway, it looks like it’s going to be fun.

The Dark Knight

Man. I love this movie. The performances, especially Heath Ledger’s Joker, are very good. The look is a little (well, a lot, really) brighter than Batman Begins, but there’s still the same sense of urban malaise that you need for Batman.

But the realy treat is the writing. The Nolans just get Batman. They get the rage and the obsession, which are easy, but they also get the hope and the diappointment, which are harder. Lots of times, they don’t come through.

But they do in this movie. You ache for Bruce Wayne fighting against the obsession that is overwhelming his life, all the while knowing that he has to give in to it if he wants to be able to live with himself. There are several moments throughout the movie where he reaches up to the light, hoping to leave the darkness behind, but, in the end, he always goes back to the darkness. He chooses to go back to the darkness. This is especially apparent in the last scene of the movie.

And the twisted, co-dependent relationship between Batman and the Joker is spot on. The Joker even sums it up at one point, saying (and I’m paraphrasing here), “We’re going to keep doing this forever. You won’t kill me because, well, you don’t do that. And I won’t kill you because you’re too much fun!” There are also a number of “jokes” by the Joker that simply happen and don’t get commented on, like the burning fire truck and the sign on the side of the semi trailer during the Harvey Dent assassination attempt. I like that the Nolans trust the audience enough to get these jokes, without having to shine a spotlight on them.

All in all, a great movie. If you like Batman, go see it. Even if you don’t like Batman, this movie may change your mind.

The West Wing

After talking to Jane Brooks, of MyLeftFootloose.com, at some length about Aaron Sorkin series, I started rewatching The West Wing. I’ve just finished the second season, which ends with one of my favourite episodes: Two Cathedrals. It’s a very powerful episode, with a lot of different threads coming together, and it ends with Jed Bartlet about to announce that he’s going to run for another term. The last eight or so minutes really stand out in my brain, because it’s set over the Dire Straits song, Brothers in Arms, and ends without Jed announcing that he has changed his mind and is going to run.

Another instance of Sorkin’s genius with storytelling, in my opinion. He often doesn’t show us the moment, because that would be anti-climactic. He shows us how you get to the moment, and then backs off to let us finish the job ourselves. He has the skill to lead us along with him, so that we know exactly where he’s going, and the trust to let us go the last distance on our own.

I love it.

GenCon Indy

My friend, Clint, and I are leaving very early tomorrow morning for the drive down to Indianapolis. We’re going to GenCon. Now, this isn’t something new for us – this will be our eighth trip down together, I think – but it looked for a while that I wasn’t going to get to make the trip. It worked out that I can, and I am almost as excited for this one as I was for the first one.

Anyway, I may be able to do some updates from GenCon, so check back. Of course, I may not be able to, so you might be disappointed. But I’ll try. And if any of you happen to be at the show, come on by Booth 1701, where I’ll be doing booth weasel duty for Pagan Publishing and Dagon Industries. I’ll be happy to say hello, and try and sell you some Cthulhu-related merchandise that you really don’t need, but really really want.

That’s about it for now. I promise not to take so long to post again.