Tag Archives: D&D

Keep on the Shadowfell – First Impressions

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’ve read through Keep on the Shadowfell now, and I want to talk a little about it. I’m going to do my best to avoid any spoilers, so this should be safe for everyone to read.

Overall, I think it’s a pretty good introductory adventure. It seems to cover pretty much everything I wanted to see, though combat gets the spotlight.

Physically, it’s a nice package, reminiscent of The Shattered Gates of Slaughterguard – you get a cardboard cover/folio, with two booklets and three double-sided poster battle maps. One booklet has the quick-start rules for players and five pregenerated characters, while the other has quick-start rules for DMs and the adventure itself.

Interestingly, Fiery Dragon has released a free download of counters for all the characters and monsters in the adventure. You can get it here.

The paper of the booklets is a little flimsy, being light-weight glossy paper of the sort you find in magazines. After a single reading, both of my booklets are already looking rather worn.

So, what’s in the adventure?

  • Background and synopsis.
  • Three potential hooks, two with alternate takes, and all with quest rewards.
  • A fight to kick things off.
  • An overview of the village of Winterhaven, with lots of information and opportunity to interact with the inhabitants.
  • A few more fights, not directly tied to the Keep, but good practice and providing some clues and links.
  • More information and conversation in Winterhaven.
  • The Keep itself, with backstory, overview, maps, and nineteen encounters, counting one interlude back in Winterhaven. These encounters include:
    • 18 combats
    • 7 traps and other hazards
    • 2 potential interaction
    • 2 puzzles
  • Several bits of DM advice scattered throughout on pacing, playing NPCs improvising, and other important skills.

The encounters use a slightly modified format based on what we were seeing in adventures nearing the end of the 3.5 run. Each encounter gets its own two-page (sometimes three-page) spread, with the level, XP award, setup, read-aloud text (including special text for succeeding at certain skills, usually Perception), monster stat blocks, description of area features (including treasure and how to use the furniture to make an interesting fight), tactics, and a small map showing the layout and initial monster placement. It’s all very clear and easy to use.

The stat blocks are nice. The longest one in the game (a level 8 elite controller) takes up a little over half a column on a two-column page, and that covers everything. All the attacks, all the defenses, all the powers, all the rules, everything. I could print it out on a 3×5 index card with about a 6-point font, and fit it on one side. It would be a little small, but it would fit.

Every encounter has something interesting going on in it, whether it’s tactically, or terrain-based, or another hazard thrown into the mix, or whatever. The encounter areas are larger than we’re used to in 3.5, often encompassing multiple rooms, and there seems to be plenty of excuses to move around that area, as opposed to stick and hit. The mix of hazards into the combats looks to make for some particularly interesting fights.

Not only that, but the numbers and mixes of monsters makes things look far more interesting than in low-level 3.5 adventures. There are a few encounters where the monsters number over a dozen, usually mixed between 3 or 4 different kinds. It allows the DM to get into the fun of different tactics for the different types of creature.

There is one encounter that really shows off the interaction rules that I’ve been wanting to see for so long, and they look nice. They’re obviously pared down and simplified in this adventure, based on the excerpt that was posted online, but it still makes it nice and clear, and it looks like fun.

Same thing with the traps. One encounter is essentially a deathtrap room, and it’s no longer just sitting around waiting for the rogue to disable device. Everyone gets into the mix.

One of the things I was worried about was that the vaunted simplification for the DM would lead to a dumbing down of creatures, and I am pleased to say that this doesn’t seem to be the case. Things just get a lot more focused. For example, the main villain in the piece is a spellcaster. He doesn’t have a list of ten or fifteen spells that he can cast (but probably won’t have time to) – he’s got a list of 5 powers, including his basic melee and ranged attacks, that each have a specific flavour and effect that can be summed up in no more than three lines. Yet the fight will feel like battling a powerful spellcaster.

There are a few problems with the adventure, though:

  • The stats for some of the monsters make reference to the “grabbed” condition, but this is not explained in the quick-start rules.
  • A few of the labels on the encounter maps for the monsters use the wrong letter to indicates some of the monsters. This is only in about 3 situations, and it’s easy to correct.
  • It makes me even more anxious to get my hands on the actual books.

The first two problems are proof of my maxim as a technical writer and editor: “Everything always needs another editing pass.”

The last is just my own problem, and it should be relieved in the early days of June.

This adventure has gone a long way to assuaging some of my doubts about 4th Edition. I’m going to be running demos at Imagine Games and Hobbies here in Winnipeg over the next three Saturdays, so come on down and check it out for yourself.

D&D 4th Edition Demos

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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Check out this link.

So, yeah, I’m going to be doing D&D 4E demos at Imagine Games and Hobbies over the next three Saturdays. For the first two, I’m going to be running excerpts from Keep on the Shadowfell, the first 4th Edition adventure, which goes on sale Tuesday, May 20. The adventure comes with a quick-start rulebook and pregenerated characters, which is what I’m going to be using. Two demos a day, as long as I get players; first one starts at 1:00 pm, second one starts around 5:00 pm. On Worldwide D&D Day, Saturday, June 7, I’ll be at the store all day, running demos out of whatever launch package they send Pedro. If you’re in Winnipeg, and you’re interested in giving the game a try, come on down and play with me.

Okay, the plug’s done. Now I want to talk about what I know about 4E, and what I think about it.

First off, I want to stress that all the information I have is coming from that immense mixed blessing, The Internet. When I was down at Imagine today, I got to look at the sealed Keep on the Shadowfell, but that’s it. It’s not on sale until Tuesday, and I have no special access.

But there’s been a lot of stuff written about the new game coming, and I’ve been doing my level best to read it all. Sites that have been really valuable for insight:

  • Wizards of the Coast has been posting regular updates and teasers and art previews for some time now.
  • ENWorld, which was born in the rumblings before 3E, has once again become the place to check for news on the newest edition of D&D.
  • The Chatty DM, who stops by this site every now and then, has posted an extensive review of Keep on the Shadowfell.
  • Some months back, Ain’t It Cool News posted a three-part review from one of the playtesters, but I can’t seem to find it now.

Anyway.

The point I’m making is that I really don’t know any more than anyone else about the game, and less than many. So why am I talking about it?

Because my hopes are high. And they’re high for specific reasons.

Unfortunately, I also have some serious reservations. And again, they’re very specific.

Let’s talk about why I’m pumped, first, then we’ll talk about why I’m worried.

The changes I’ve been reading about in the stuff that’s been posted online has shown me that the new game seems to be hewing close to one of my personal design goals when I build games – just enough complexity to make the game fun, and no more. For every new system I add to a game, for every time I come up with an idea that means a die roll, I try to ask myself, “Does this add to the fun?” If the answer is no or, worse still, that it detracts from the fun, I toss the system and start again.

It took me a long time to learn that lesson, and now that I have, I cling to it with both hands and all of my heart. Make sure that every time a player picks up a die, it’s adding to the fun. Make sure that players are excited to roll a die, not just going through the motions.

You can’t always achieve that, of course. The world’s not perfect. You need some complexity to make the game able to simulate what you want it simulating. But the complexity should serve the game, not the simulation.

And this seems to be the view taken by the designers and developers of 4E. In a lot of the interviews, they talk about how the game moves faster, especially in combat, while the characters all have interesting choices to make every turn. Some of the pregenerated characters and monsters have been posted on the Wizards site, and it looks like they’ve been paring away excessive complexity to focus on the fun stuff. That’s my kind of design.

They also talk a lot about how much easier it is for DMs to design and run adventures. Now, I generally spend about 30 minutes prep time for every hour of play in campaigns I run. One of the designers talked in an interview about how he never spends more than 30-40 minutes putting together a full evening of gaming. They say it’s much easier to build encounters, to adjust monster stats, to set up skill challenges, to create treasure, all the mechanical stuff. That leaves more time to building story, description, NPC quirks, building props and hand-outs, and all the other fun stuff.

The designers also say that it’s far easier to run the game. Looking at the monster stat blocks that have hit the Web, I’m starting to believe it. The one that really swayed me was the Pit Fiend stat block they posted. Instead of a laundry-list of special abilities, most of which never get used in combat, there are a set of powers that look like they work well together and a set of tactics to show you how to use them.

I just finished running a high-level D&D 3.5 campaign. This is so much nicer than the high-level threats I had to keep track of there, without losing flavour.

I mentioned skill challenges a couple paragraphs back. The new game integrates a system for handling non-combat challenges that rely on the characters’ skills, but don’t come down to single die rolls or rely on only one skill. They talk about it here, and it sounds pretty good to me.

They’ve also done a lot to try and address that age-old bane of verisimilitude, the 20-minute adventuring day. You know: the party gets up, heads out, gets into two fights, and has to rest for another eight hours to heal and regain spells. Well, they’re doing a number of things to deal with that, and I hope it solves the problem.

So, that’s what’s got me hoping.

Now, here’s what’s got me scared.

First, Wizards has obviously taken a long, hard look at the MMORPG phenomenon, and wants to grab a chunk of that market to play 4E. They’re emphasizing party roles, handing out more video-game-style powers, reworking some sacred cows like random hit points, and so on.

There’s a reason I don’t play MMORPGs. Actually, there are several, but stay with me.

I like the way D&D has traditionally done some things, and I don’t like the way a lot of MMORPGs seem to do things. I don’t want to play a table-top version of World of Warcraft.

Let’s talk roles, first of all. D&D has always been a class-based system, so roles have been an intrinsic part of it since the beginning. What I’m worried about now is the emphasis on the roles, and whether that leaves room for a graceful, elegant fighter or a wizard who likes to mix it up with a sword. I want it to, but I’m not sure it does.

As for the powers, a lot of it is going to depend on the jazz that goes with it. We’ve seen powers where a Paladin hits a foe and heals an enemy – how is that explained? What’s the logic behind it? Can you justify it in the game world without resorting to MMORPG terms? I hope so.

Y’know, really what it comes down to is that I really want to like this game, but there have been some big promises made and I don’t know if it will live up to them. I like the things they say they’re changing, but will I like the way they change them? When Mongoose released the new RuneQuest, I was so pumped. I figured that if they could deliver on even half the things they were promising, they’d be golden.

I don’t even want to get into how disappointed I was with the game once we playtested it.

I just really don’t want that to happen again. I’m leery of getting my hopes up to high.

But I can’t help it. I’m just really looking forward to the release, to trying it out, and to playing it regularly. After all, I was a real nay-sayer when they announced 3E, but it won me over big-time. They did it once; I’m sure they can do it again.

Please?

Anyway, to get back to the point, demos at Imagine for the next three Saturdays. Come down and try the game out with me. It’ll be fun.

In the meantime, I’ve got this idea for a 4E campaign – The Phoenix Covenant. Maybe I’ll talk a little about it next time.

The Bribe(TM)

By | | What's he playing?
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So, what do you do if you want to make sure that your players produce a little bit of character background?

I want my players’ characters to be tied into the game world. I want them to have home towns, family, and reasons for doing what they do. It gives me handles for writing adventures that will appeal to them and hook them in, and it lets me give certain characters a little bit of the spotlight when needed by pulling in something from their backstory.

Some players will automatically write up a complete history for their character. Sometimes it’ll be multiple pages, with great detail, family trees, accounts of first love and best friends, and all the secret tragedies of their lives. They do this as a matter of course, in an attempt to solidify their characters before play begins. I tend to fall into this category.

Others come up with a name, then sit back with an exhausted sigh, glad all the heavy lifting’s done.

And, as gamers get older and develop outside lives and families and jobs and interests, some start out to be the first kind, but wind up being the second kind.

What to do?

The first thing I tried was to make three pages of character background mandatory: if you want to play in my game, you’ve got to write three pages of background for your character.

Bad idea.

See, I’m a word-whore. I’m a technical writer by profession. I’ll write a thousand words about what I had for breakfast. I toss off three-page backgrounds in my sleep. So, three pages is nothing to me.

Three pages is a lot to some people, though. And when I made it mandatory, I got people promising to get it to me and never delivering. I got players deciding not to play in my game, because they’d have to write the background. Worse, I got people deciding not to play in my game because their significant other didn’t want to play because of having to write the background.

Not the effect I was looking for, at all.

So, I decided to steal from Amber. Say what I will about Amber, there’s a ton of good ideas in the game.

In Amber, you can make contributions to the game in order to get extra points to build your characters. This is a rather stunning idea because:

  1. The contributions are OUTSIDE of play. Things like recording quotes, bringing snacks, creating stories and art, etc.
  2. The reward is MECHANICAL. You actually get stuff that helps your character in the game.
  3. It is VOLUNTARY. No one has to make a contribution.
  4. It is SEDUCTIVE. Almost everyone winds up making a contribution. Certainly everyone in the game I ran did.

And so I instituted The Bribe(TM)*.

I did not require background from my characters anymore, except for some very basic things demanded by the system (Race and class in D&D, the phases in SotC and DFRPG, etc.) Instead, I offer some game benefit for each page of background they give me, up to a maximum (usually three). They can give me more, but the benefits top out at the maximum.

Sometimes, I make special requests, such as having a short list of questions that must be answered in the background, or asking them to create a little bit of the world outside their character. In cases like this, I usually set the minimum amount of material at a half-page. Format doesn’t matter; full prose is fine, bullet lists are fine; hell, if they want to write it in a series of sonnets, I’m good with that.

So far, in the games where I’ve used this (most of the games I run, that is), everyone has gone for the full bribe. Even the people who hate writing up background.

To use the Bribe(TM) most effectively, I’ve found the following considerations useful:

  • Make the reward significant. If the reward is an extra bonus to an attribute, the players will go for it. If it’s a healing potion, they probably won’t. It’s got to be something that will make a difference throughout play.
  • Give them options. Give them a number of options of things that count towards the Bribe(TM). Let them pick from a list of rewards.
  • Make them choose. If you’ve got a list of rewards, limit the number of times they can take a given reward. I usually say that you can choose each item only once.
  • Not all rewards need to be equal. The first time I used this in a D&D game, the rewards were +2 to a single stat, an extra feat, and a masterwork item. The first two rewards are pretty tempting, but the third one is only useful until magic items start cropping up**. Still, everyone wound up with a masterwork item because, if you’ve written two pages of background, you might as well write a third, even if the reward isn’t as cool.
  • Be aware that you are changing the power of the starting characters. Adjust the challenges accordingly, or they’re just going to dance through the adventures. This will follow them throughout the game, so bear it in mind. Just toughen up the opposition a little.
  • Use the stuff they give you. Show them that it’s valued and appreciated, and incorporate it into the game. DO NOT use it to smack them down, but DO use it to personalize things. This is a tough balancing act, but pay attention to how your players react to things to find the sweet spot.
  • Set a deadline. Do not start play until you have all the Bribes(TM) delivered to you, or take away the rewards from the late folks. You can return the rewards later, once the Bribes(TM) are complete, but make sure that only people who complete the Bribe(TM) get the rewards. Otherwise, you wind up with the same discrepancy in material I started this whole mess with.

Give it a try with the next game you start. Hell, you don’t have to wait that long; easy enough to drop it into an ongoing campaign, and give the players the rewards to improve their characters.

Just a little something that I’ve found useful.

*I added the (TM) later, after I decided that it worked, the players liked it, and the other GMs in our group started using it. Standard question when talking about creating characters for a new game is, “What’s the Bribe(TM)?”

**This was not actually the case in that campaign, because of some house rules on weapons acquiring enchantment based on the heroic deeds they were used for, but anyway…

When Did I Get Old and Wise?

By | | What's he playing?
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Weird thing happened to me a few minutes ago. I got some e-mail from a friend of mine, asking me if I thought he was ready to GM a D&D game for his friends, and asking me for any tips.

I remember when this kid was born. I remember his dad, who’s a friend of mine, bringing him into the bookstore where I was working at the time, a tiny little thing in a snuggly, his dad rocking back and forth in front of the Science Fiction section. I remember first being invited to game with his parents while he slept in a baby seat on the living room floor.

(Vampire: The Masquerade, if you care. Man, did that campaign ever not go where I thought it would.)

I gave him his first jean jacket, complete with Illuminati badges on it.

(Have I embarrassed you yet, Kieran?)

And now the guy’s fifteen years old, in my Dresden Files playtest, a regular at my boardgame nights (where he is nasty as a viper if you turn your back on him), and asking if I think he’s ready to GM.

His parents and I joke about making sure we get into the same retirement home so we can still game together. I’m thinking it’s getting to be less of a joke.

Anyway, seeing as I have now been cast in the role of elderly sage, I gave him what advice I had. I thought it was not too bad, so I’m reproducing it here, for those who are interested.

Yeah, you could do it. No problem. I was GMing regularly by the time I was your age.

But it takes practice to get good. Don’t be hard on yourself if the first few sessions don’t go as well as you would like.

As for tips, I’ve got a few:

  1. Prep. Get the adventure ready beforehand. Know how you want to describe things. Know what you’re going to need to know to run the encounters. For example, if you’re using a Purple Worm in an encounter, make sure you know how the improved grab and swallow whole rules work. If the adventure takes place in a volcano, read up on the rules for hot environments. Some people make notes, some put sticky notes on the pages of the rulebooks they need, some just need to refresh their memories before play. Do what you need to do so that you’re not fumbling around during play to figure something out.
  2. Start small. Don’t send everyone off on an epic quest to slay the gods and bring about Ragnarok. Make an adventure that can be finished in a session or two, and don’t get too fancy with it. Evil wizards or rampaging goblin hordes are fine. Rescue a princess or clean out a cave complex near a trade route. Simple objective. Once you get one or two of those under your belt, and you’ve got the confidence, then start stretching.
  3. Don’t let them push you around. Remember that you’re the GM, and that means you have the final say. Having said that, make sure you listen to them. If you’re wrong about something and they’re right, admit it, fix it, and move on. If they start arguing with you, say something like, “Look, that’s the way it’s going to work this time. After the game, we can talk and see if there’s a better way.”
  4. Say yes or roll the dice. Remember, the players aren’t the enemy. The big secret of being a GM is that it’s only fun if the players have fun. You’re not trying to beat them; you’re trying to help them beat you. If they come up with a neat idea, let it work if it’s feasible. If there’s a good chance that it’ll flop, roll the dice. Pick something to roll against: a skill, a save, an attack, an attribute, whatever. When all else fails, get them to roll a straight roll against a difficulty of 10 – that’s just like a coin toss. But if you’re going to roll the dice, make sure you’ve got an interesting thing to happen if they fail. If failure would be boring, don’t make it a possibility. Just let them succeed.
  5. Always play fair. You’ve got the ability, as GM, to annihilate the characters whenever you want. There’s no challenge to it, and there’s no fun in it. Play fair. Set up the situation, then let the dice and the players decide the fate of the characters. If they beat the crap out of your boss monster in a single round, remember it, congratulate them, and move on. Remember their tactics for next time, though.
  6. Relax and have fun. Some people will tell you that the GM’s job is to make sure everyone else has fun, but his first job is to have fun himself. If you’re not having fun, the game won’t be any fun for the players. Just make sure you’re not having fun at their expense.

All Good Things…

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This weekend, we moved into the endgame on a D&D campaign that I’ve been running since March of 2001. We’ve got about three more sessions, then this seven-year campaign is done.

It’s an interesting experience; I had envisioned the campaign running about three years, but the vagaries of scheduling and the way the story rolled out stretched it much beyond the planned time period. Over that time, I’ve lost three players, and had one rejoin. Everyone started at first level, and now the survivors are twenty-second and twenty-third level. The characters have grown into legends in the world, responsible for massive positive changes. And they’ve all suffered real losses over that time.

See, here’s my philosophy of roleplaying games: the characters should be able to do great things, if they’re willing to pay the price.

Yeah, there are combat challenges, and puzzles, and secrets to unravel, and treasure to find. But the real story is the choices the characters make, and how they deal with the consequences.

Want an example? Okay.

While dealing with wererats infesting a town, the party managed to capture one and interrogate him. At the end of the interrogation, they offered to cure the wererat of his lycanthropy. In this world, all werecreatures are cursed by an evil god; there are no good ones. So, this wererat refuses the cure, because he has pledged his soul for this power. And one of the characters, who are all soldiers in a sort of UN Peacekeeper force, executes the bound and confined prisoner.

Now, this caused a number of problems, because the PCs technically had no authority in the town, which was part of a very protective kingdom. So the extranational army they worked for offered them a choice: they could be turned over to the local authorities, they could request a court martial, or they could accept administrative discipline. The guilty character immediately came forward and accepted the administrative discipline (25 lashes) as long as his comrades were not punished. The others stepped forward and claimed responsibility for not having stopped the execution, and accepted administrative discipline as well, though they were only given 15 lashes each.

We had a whole play session for the punishment detail, with descriptions of the parade, the reading of the charges, the lashes, the recovery, the whole nine yards.

And I’ll tell you, it really turned the disparate characters into a tight-knit unit. They were about 5th level, and had been hesitant to work with or trust each other up to that point. Not afterwards. After their shared discipline, nothing could turn them against each other. They were family. They still bickered and argued, but they trusted each other implicitly.

Another example?

One character is now a king. He got there as a political compromise. See, his powerful family were scheming to place him on the throne by overthrowing the current queen. They had already assassinated the crown prince. When the character, who had always been very proud of his family, found out about this he decided to turn them into the crown. As a test of loyalty, the queen sent him to arrest his own father, with the promise that the rest of the family would be free to leave the kingdom and live out their remaining lives in exile. The family accepted this, but the father decided that he didn’t want to be executed in the traditional manner for traitors (public exposure and starvation), so he challenged the character to a duel in order to die on his son’s blade rather than in a traitor’s cage.

He showed up again, in Hell, and sacrificed his soul to allow his son to harrow Hell and destroy an evil god.

Those are examples of some of the stories we’ve told together in this game. There are tons more. Seven years is a long time. Not the longest campaign I’ve been in, but the longest campaign with a single throughline of story.

So, now with the end coming, I start to reflect. What would I have done differently? What would I change if I were doing this again today?

  • Start smaller. My original world document was two hundred pages, with everything fleshed out and developed. Most of the characters didn’t read it, and I wound up not needing large sections.
  • Stick more to official sources. Pretty much every character had some special case or arrangement or benefit that I had stolen from different sources or created. The flavour it added to the game is not necessarily commensurate with the effort it required to keep track of the changes. I’m not a young man, anymore; I have job and family obligations that mean I can’t spend all the time I used to on gaming stuff. Sticking to official sources minimizes the difficulty.
  • Stick to a regular game schedule. There were long periods when we were lucky to get in a single game in a month. By sticking to a regular schedule, people are better able to schedule around the game, rather than scheduling the game around everything else. Would have kept better pace and focus, and probably wrapped up a fair bit earlier.
  • Group character creation. Get everyone together to create characters, and make the players decide how they know each other. The novel technique from Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files are brilliant for this, and I plan on implementing them in pretty much any game I run.

It’s been a long, wild run, but we’re coming down to the finish line. I’ve still got a couple of surprises up my sleeve, but all the questions (that I can think of) will be answered. I am excited and sad at the same time.

I hope they like the ending.