Author Archives: Rick Neal

Drawing the Line – Willing Suspension of Disbelief in Gaming

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So, my last post generated some vocal and literate counterpoints. These made me realize that I had left an important piece out of my discussion, which is what I want to talk about this time.

When does a legitimate concern about verisimilitude become an irritating quibble about realism?*

My answer to this is the idea of the willing suspension of disbelief.

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined this phrase, saying that if a writer could create enough interest in and verisimilitude within a fantastic tale, the reader would overlook the story’s implausibility. Roleplaying games are the same way.

The trick, though, is the necessity of verismilitude. Things have to fit together in a manner that makes sense, that doesn’t strain our credulity. In short, we can’t ask too much of the audience (the players, in a game) in the way of suspending their disbelief. We have to make it easy for them to do so. And if it get’s too hard for them to overlook the things that aren’t making sense to them, they will start to call you on it.

What’s asking too much, though? Every group – hell, every player – is going to have their own limit. You find that limit usually only when you surpass it, so it can be hard to judge, especially with people you don’t know well. I’ve been gaming with my group for years (some of them for decades), so I know pretty much where everyone draws their line, and I work to respect it in running games. When I overstep, I pull back, and we sort it out.

See, I’ve discovered that people will only talk about how unrealistic a game is in one situation: when the game world does not respond as they expect it to. Expectations of how the world will respond are based on two factors: how the real world works, and how you’ve shown them that the game world is different from the real world.

Let’s be honest. We all have to start with the assumption that certain things in the game world will be like things in the real world. We generally play games where we have cause and effect, the basics of real-world physics, sentient characters, environmental dangers, etc. You can expect the game to have gravity, even if it’s generated by a machine in a space ship, for example.

As GMs, it becomes our responsibility to show how the world of the game is different from the real world. We show off certain differences right at the beginning of the game – people may play non-humans and have fantastic powers – but others are shown through play and only emerge as the game progresses. For example, the players may not know that the gravity of their world is caused by a magic gem set deep in the ground until they actually stumble across it on their explorations and have to escape from its terrible grip. Even then, the possibility of such a gem must have been inherent in the game – it would work in a fantasy game with magic, but not in a hard science fiction game**.

Players have only the real world and our description of the game world to base their decisions in-game on. If they take an action expecting a certain outcome based on these factors, and that outcome doesn’t occur, it creates a gap in the experience that forces them to rethink, and breaks the immersion and suspension of disbelief. This is when they start asking the difficult questions about why something didn’t happen the way they expected.

Now, some gaps in expectation are good. They lead to story, and therefor to game. For example, if the party is hired to rescue a princess from an evil duke, and they then find out that the duke actually rescued her from her tyrannical father, the party has more challenging adventure ahead of them as they side with the duke to overthrow the despotic king.

On the other hand, if the party is suddenly drowned in a shallow stream because you’ve changed the property of buoyancy in your world and it just hadn’t come up yet, that’s a bad gap in expectation, and you can expect a heated conversation to follow.

What’s the difference between the two? Well, aside from one being a pretty neat setup for a lengthy adventure and the other being a lame-ass TPK, the major difference is coolness.

Here’s something I’ve found in my lengthy career as a GM: Players will let you get away with anything as long as it lets their characters do more cool stuff. Even if it only implies that their characters have the potential to do more cool stuff.

It’s not free, though. The coolness has to be in proportion with the amount of nonsense you want them to swallow. If you want to have horses in your world replaced by riding dinosaurs, somebody’s going to start wondering about how you domesticate them, considering how hard it is to train reptiles – right up until the moment they see the Royal Tyrant Cavalry mounted on their armoured T-Rexes. Then they go, “Cooooooool!” And start trying to figure out how to get their own armoured T-Rex***.

Coolness covers a multitude of sins. If you plan on adding nonsense to a game – and really, we all like to do that – you’ve got to dip it in a layer of cool thick enough to make it palatable.

And when you cross the line and can’t cover it in cool? Well, then you have a couple of choices. You can either change things to make more sense, or you can create a reason why it makes sense the way it is. Why can’t a fireball blow open the walls of a small room with superheated air? The actual reason is that it opens up a wide range of new concerns that the GM has to juggle – how thick a wall can be blown out? What if a door is open? Do we get 1E-style fireball blowback? Does that mean I have to calculate the volume of the sphere and convert it to five-foot cubes to figure out how far back the wizard has to be standing? The complications compound.

So, you make up an in-game reason – the fire is instantaneous, transported to the site from the plane of fire, and it goes back there after the spell effect is complete, along with the extra volume of superheated air. Add in an effect where a strong wind blows in to the origin point of the fireball (no game effect), and you’ve generated your apologia, along with a little touch of cool to go with it.

A lot of this stuff has to do with the play style of your group, as well. Some groups like a very simulationist experience, where everything faithfully adheres to as many of the real-world assumptions as possible within the genre context. Some groups like things lighter and more free-wheeling, concerned with the spectacle over reality. And some only care about what serves the story. Your group is going to draw its line in a different place than my group.

But there will be a line.

You help to draw it, as the GM, but it’s the players who monitor it most closely. You must respect it if you want your game to be fun for you and for your players.

 

 

 

*I’m using these words in a specific, somewhat artificial way. My arbitrary contention is that it’s okay to talk about verisimilitude in the game, but that talking about realism in a fantasy endeavour is pointless. See my previous post.

**Maybe it could, but I can’t think of a way to do it without resorting to technobabble and applied phlebotinum.

***And for those who start to question how the riders make ground attacks, you distract them with the velociraptor-mounted skirmishers.

Realism vs. Verisimilitude in RPGs, or You’re an Elf That Uses Magic

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I’m going to make a statement here, one that I believe to be true based on a quarter century and more of gaming.

No one wants to play a realistic game.

I’m going to make another statement now, one that I know to be true based on a quarter century and more of gaming.

People will still complain about a game not being realistic.

Both statements are true. This can get confusing, but it’s really all about that word, “realistic.” I have a friend who studied philosophy but gave it up because he felt that all modern philosophy came down to arguing over the meaning of words. I can see that. This very important point comes down to the meaning of “real.”

For most of us who aren’t billionaire super-spies, gaming is escapism*, something we do to inject some vicarious excitement into our mostly mundane and routine lives. It’s power fantasy and storytelling and socializing and getting out of your own head. That means that we don’t want to play something that mimics our everyday life** – we get enough of our everyday lives in everyday life.

That’s one value of real. And we don’t want it.

Even if we’re playing a simulation of some sort – WWII miniatures, for example – we still don’t want it to be real. We don’t want to spend hours trying to push our tanks forward three inches on the table, or have to roll for logistical and communications foul-ups***. We want to deal with the fun parts of the subject, not with the tedious ones.

Let’s especially look at fantasy and sf games. Even the hardest of the hard sf games**** interjects a few elements of impossibility: FTL technology, aliens, whatever. And when you wind up playing, as the title of this post suggests, an elf that uses magic, you pretty much forfeit any right to decry a lack of realism. I mean, if you swallow the assumption of a near-immortal race changing reality around them with a thought, why would you balk at the idea that the economic scheme for buying, selling, and creating magic items doesn’t make any sense*****?

Now we’re getting somewhere. “Doesn’t make any sense.” That’s the key.

See, when we talk about whether a game is realistic or not, we’re not really talking about that. We’re talking about whether the game seems realistic or not. We’re talking about internal consistency, logical coherence, and believability. We’re talking about saying, “Given the basic assumptions about the world and setting the game presupposes, this makes sense.”

The word we’re really talking about is, “verisimilitude.” The quality of something seeming real or true.

This term comes up a lot in drama and fiction. One of my acting teachers, lo, these many years ago, used to say (I wrote it down and kept it, because I liked it):

If you ever start to feel that you are the person you are portraying on stage, please let me know immediately. Then have a little lie-down while I call a psychiatrist. We don’t become our roles; we are actors. We act as if we had become our roles. If you can’t make that distinction, the stage is not the place for you.

When we game, we don’t want the game world to be like the real world. We want the game world to behave as if ****** it were a real world. We want it to follow a coherent, internal structure that meets our ideas of cause and effect, allowing us to understand the relationships within that world.

We want it to make sense.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty weird, because we don’t necessarily have the same expectations of reality. Aristotle said:

With respect to the requirements of art, a probable impossibility is to be preferred to a thing improbable and yet possible.

What does that mean? Well, the real world is full of strangeness. Coincidence and synchronicity abound. Things happen every day that, if we read them in a book, we would point out as being far too coincidental. And in a game, they become very suspicious. Here’s an example:

  • If I go on vacation to Hawaii and run into my next-door neighbour there, we both say, “Wow. That’s weird.” Then we get on with our lives.
  • If a character in a book goes on vacation to Hawaii and runs into his next-door neighbour, we say, “Yeah, right. That’s completely unbelievable.” Despite the fact that such things can, and do, happen in real life.
  • In a game, if a character goes to a far away land, and runs into his next-door neighbour, the character says, “I wonder what he’s up to. Did he follow me here? Is he working for my enemies?” And then he attempts to knock his neighbour out and lock him in a trunk.

My point is that, in a constructed reality like fiction or gaming, we avoid certain aspects of reality, such as coincidence, as violating our sense of the real, despite the fact that such things are very much a part of reality. Reality, as Stephen King says, is Ralph*******.

Now, how this applies to gaming.

When you build an adventure, you need to keep the What, the How, and the Why in mind.

  • What. What happens? What is the event, the item, the character, the location? What do the characters have to do? What are the villains doing? This the core of most adventures, and serves as the starting point in development in a lot of cases.
  • How. What is the mechanism by which the What happens? If the villains are scrying on the characters, what magic are they using? If they’re going to blot out the sun, what device does that, and how does it work? If the characters run into their childhood friends, how does it come about? This is the first layer of explanation and verisimilitude, providing support and rationale for seeming coincidences. Players assume that this is here, even if it’s not, so best to be prepared.
  • Why. What’s the reason for the What? Why are the villains trying to blot out the sun? Why did the childhood friends come to the far away vacation land? This is the second layer of explanation and verismilitude. Again, players will assume it exists, so it’s a good idea for it to exist.

In a game, players don’t believe in coincidence. Everything is motivated by something, and that something revolves around the characters. This is a reasonable assumption; they are the stars of the story, and everything usually does revolve around them. Put some thought and preparation into it, and it helps the game feel richer and more real.

Now, there’s another type of realism bugaboo that rears its head from time to time. This is the real-world expert that tries to apply his real-world knowledge to the game world in order to squeeze some in-game benefit out of what he’s doing. This is the guy who argues that the heat of a fireball should cause the air to expand and knock out the walls of the building, or that, because he can fall 416 feet in a round, he should have a fly move of 83 squares. Or at least 40, because he’s gliding laterally. Or the economist who questions the stability of a kingdom’s currency because a hard metal standard can’t meet the needs of exchange and credit.

You know what to say to them, right?

“You’re an elf that uses magic. You don’t get to talk about realism.”

 

 

 

*I expect that billionaire super-spy gamers use gaming as a means of grounding themselves, and chilling out.

**”So, you’ve completed the website update. Roll your Dreamweaver skill check to see if you closed all the tags.”

***Now that I’ve written that statement, I’m sure there’s someone out there going, “But we do! That’s what our game is all about!” So, for you folks, I resort to this rebuttal: “That may be, but you sure don’t have real people really dying.” Those who disagree with this somewhat snarky and hyperbolic argument are free to discuss it with their local constabulary.

****I’m thinking probably Traveler 2300. At least, of the ones I’m familiar with.

*****And, really, who’s to say it doesn’t? When’s the last time you brewed a potion of invisibility? How much did you get for selling it?

******Stanislavsky talks about this idea at length in An Actor Prepares. He calls it, “the magic if.”

*******For an explanation of this weird little phrase, you’re going to have to read Lisey’s Story.

Eberron Player’s Guide Review

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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I’ve been dragging my feet over reviewing this book, because it’s really only half the setting, and therefor somewhat incomplete. The setting won’t be complete until the Campaign Guide comes out next month.

But I’ve always had a soft spot for Eberron. It is, hands down, my favourite official D&D setting, from any edition or version of the game. The mix of noire and pulp sensibility with the high fantasy of D&D, the predisposition to cinematic scenes in play, and the rich (and largely unexplored) backstory of the game world just really appeal to me.

The Player’s Guide is, overall, a good book. It’s certainly got me wanting more. There are some things in it that I’m not so sure about, and some things that I think are missing, but that’s going to be the case with any book. This book delivers more than enough to fulfill its purpose: giving players what they need to play in an Eberron game.

Let’s go through the book chapter by chapter.

Introduction

The introduction features Ten Important Facts, which are very similar to the original ones that were printed with the initial relase of Eberron for 3E. They’ve dropped the point about new races in favour of one on the Draconic Prophesy, and the order has been slightly rearranged. It winds up highlighting the interplay between the Draconic Prophesy, the Dragonmarked Houses, and Dragonshards, which is not a bad thing.

Chapter 1: Life in Eberron

This chapter covers the basics of geography, history, religion, power groups, and day-to-day life. It introduces some of the main themes and conflicts inherent in the setting, and just generally gives a player a nice overview of what the world is like from the ground level.

There are two pages of maps here, miniatures of the poster map that comes with the Campaign Guide. And I have to say that, if the full size version lives up to the promise of the miniature versions, they will be some of the nicest world maps ever done in a D&D product. The maps in the main campaign book were always one of my pet peeves about 3E Eberron – the large scale map didn’t show the political borders, roads, rails, or cities, and the small-scale maps didn’t show those things outside the border of the nation they depicted. It made the maps somewhat less than useful. The 4E version doesn’t seem to have that problem.

Chapter 2: Races

Changelings and Kalashtar are back, and Warforged get a full write-up. The other common races each get about a half-page to show how they fit into Eberron. The backstories for the Devas and the Eladrin in particular struck me as very nicely done.

The 4E implementation of the Changeling is very close to just being a straight lift from the 4E Doppleganger, which is fine. The mechanics seem solid, and the two powers nicely reinforce the sly, deceptive possibilities of the race.

The Kalashtar are… interesting. Without the Psionic power source (coming in Player’s Handbook 3), they don’t have that synergy working for them yet. However, they do get a nice psychic defense power and telepathic communication, so the groundwork is laid. A lot of the rich Kalashtar backstory from 3E is not in this book – understandably, from the point of view of space in the book and concerns about overwhelming the reader with information. They have been given more of a “flirting with madness” vibe in this edition that I think works*.

The Warforged write-up seems pretty much a rehash of the Dragon article on playing them. Nothing really new, but nice to have it in one book.

Overall, the races section delivers the goods. I’m very satisfied with it, and delighted by one or two bits.

Chapter 3: Classes

One new class – the Artificer, of course. A pile of new paragon paths, and a smattering of epic destinies.

The Artificer was previewed as a playtest feature in Dragon some time ago. Since then, it’s undergone some substantial work, and the result is pretty good, in my opinion. As an arcane leader, it shares some design space with the Bard, but (as is common in 4E) fills the role in a way that is qualitatively different and fresh. Artificers still get to power up weapons and items with funky temporary boosts and enchantments, but now also get to build little constructs to help you with various things – including combat. This is handled using the summoning rules, and just thrills me. The idea of an Artificer tossing down a pile of sticks, metal, and crystal and then conjuring an elemental spirit into it to animate it and send it in to battle just tickles me to no end. They also get to produce a number of different conjurations and zones, making them good secondary controllers.

I’m getting happier and happier with paragon paths. At first, I didn’t like the idea that a character who hadn’t multi-classed all through heroic tier would be forced to take one, but the increasing number of choices provided in the supplements, and the broader and more interesting requirements for them, are changing my mind. For example, the Alchemist Savant paragon path has as its only requirement the ability to make alchemical items. There are also paragon paths for each of the Dragonmarks. Nice and juicy, all of them.

The epic destinies tie strongly into the ideas of the Draconic Prophesy, the Last War, the Mournland, and the Silver Flame. As such, they are very flavourful, and linked directly to some of the primary themes of the Eberron campaign world.

So, the classes chapter also gets a big thumbs-up.

Chapter 4: Character Options

Feats, equipment, and rituals here, including the extra alchemy rules and items that are so important to the feel of Eberron.

The feats are the usual mix you might expect, mainly tied to world-specific things like the new races, the nationalities, the new deities, and Dragonmarks. I was again disappointed with the Shifter** – no real love there, when I thought the Shifters and their feats were one of the most interesting things in the 3E Eberron.

Dragonmark feats deserve some special mention. They have been redesigned to grant bonuses and boosts to certain character capabilities, and to allow the marked character to master certain rituals tied to the mark. No more spell-like abilities (or powers, as they would have been in 4E), and each of the marks now has something to offer to an adventuring character. I like it.

The equipment section has a smattering of Eberron weapons, some specific pieces of gear (ID papers, inquisitive’s kit, spellshards) and Dragonmarked House services, and those alchemical rules I mentioned. These latter are a very nice supplement to the Adventurer’s Vault alchemy rules, including fun things like clockwork bombs and woundpatch. The magic items are primarily devoted to implements for the new deities, artificers, and some Dragonshard items and Warforged components.

There are 20 new rituals, as well, and while they all tie in very nicely to the themes and feel of Eberron, they are also all very applicable in other campaign worlds. This brings the official published rituals up around the 200 mark, and that makes me happy, though I still hope to see them expand into the Martial power source.

Character options gets a grudging nod, despite the fact that Shifters have once again been shafted.

Chapter 5: The World of Eberron

This section walks through the world, using it as a source of character backgrounds. It starts with the Five Nations, moves on to the rest of Khorvaire, and then expands to take in the rest of the world and other background elements such as Dragonmarked Houses and professions. It does a good job of giving a decent overview without going too much in depth on any single topic.

I would have liked to have seen them revisit the trick they used the 3E Five Nations supplement, where each nation had a sidebar with five things everyone in that nation knows. I found that a brilliant way to encapsulate the mindset of the average person of that nation, showing what they find important, and what they think about many things. The section on backgrounds in this book would have been a perfect place to do that again.

This section holds the single piece of art in the book that I think fails. The picture of Sharn on p 127 just doesn’t do it for me. Sure, we get a nice view of the towers, but the whole thing looks like a piece of wargame terrain set on a flat table. The art from the Sharn: City of Towers 3E sourcebook did a significantly better job of showing the way Sharn is really built on more Sharn, reaching down into the depths of the headland. And the floating neighbourhoods would have been nice to see.

And that’s the book. On the whole, I like it, though I think there were a couple of missed opportunities, and some things (like the Psionic nature of the Kalashtar) that are going to take future supplements to bring to fruition. But, as a start, it certainly does its job. It’s got me thinking about running a new Eberron campaign***.

*Can you tell I like Kalashtars?

**I mentioned this back here.

***No, I’m not going to do it right now. I’d have to drop something else, or convert one of the current games over to Eberron, and I don’t think the players would be happy about those options.

Post Tenebras Lux Report

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Last Friday, we had another Post Tenebras Lux game. Almost full attendance; one person couldn’t make it.

The session was a little strange, in that the events in it existed for a meta-game reason, rather than for an in-game reason. See, the party was traveling back to Brindol, where there was going to be a market fair, to spend some of their treasure before heading down to the Thornwaste to investigate rumours of the return of the Ghostlord. While prepping for the game, I saw in my notes that I had not distributed a large amount (480 gp worth) of the monetary treasure they should have received in the previous level. That would put a significant damper on what they could and could not buy, so I decided they needed to have a cash injection before the market fair.

Now, I couldn’t just hand them the money – I’d already done something like that to adjust the balance of magic items during the great player shuffle – which meant I needed an adventure on the road from Witchcross to Brindol. The standard convention is a party of bandits or wandering monsters, but I wanted something more interesting, something that could fill an evening of play, and not just revolve around combat.

They had stopped at a roadside inn on their trip to Witchcross, and I decided to use that as the adventure site. I did some looking through the books, looking for an interesting threat, and came up with corpse vampires, from Open Grave. Now, the party is pretty heavy against undead, but corpse vampires aren’t vulnerable to radiant damage – it just turns off their regeneration for a turn (more on which later). This was going to be the only fight in the day, so I figured I’d make it a tough one: two corpse vampires and four zombies*.

The setup was that a corpse vampire had come to the inn and slaughtered everyone, producing a few zombies and a new corpse vampire in the process. The two vampires were now hiding in the inn, getting ready to head on to Brindol and the rich feeding there. One hid down in the cellar, lurking in the hanging hams and cheeses and onions from the cellar ceiling beams, with two zombies in beer barrels. The other hid up in the attic, under the eaves, with a pair of zombies under the dustcovers with the furniture. They would act to attack isolated characters who wandered in, but otherwise wait to get the drop on the whole party, and reinforce each other if needed.

The first part of the evening was spent with the party leaving Witchcross and making their way back down the road to Brindol, shadowed for the first little while by the unicorn they had glimpsed in the Witchwood. When they got to the inn and made their Perception checks, they noticed the quiet and the fact that the door was ajar. They approached stealthily, half the party circling around back to come in through the kitchen, and the other half keeping an eye on the innyard. Inside, they found a great deal of slaughter, and went to work investigating.

I had made up a set of detailed notes on the kinds of clues they would find in the inn with various skill checks – not a skill challenge, just a set of skill checks. Unfortunately, I then left this list at work, and had to wing it. It didn’t go badly, as I could remember most of the salient points from making the list, but it didn’t have the depth of detail that I could have had with my notes in front of me. Oh, well.

Anyway, they wound up sending the avenger down into the cellar to check on things, and he rolled an amazing Perception check, spotting the vampire hiding in the ceiling beams, and an amazing Stealth check, so the vampire didn’t spot him. Surprise round for the party. Everyone squeezed down into the basement, and took care of the vampire very quickly – more quickly than I had anticipated, in fact. I had decided that, if one vampire was attacked, the other would join the fight (with zombies in tow) on round 3. The vampire went down on round 2, after soaking up several concentrated Striker assaults.

The zombies lasted a little longer, and we wound up with the Sorcerer facing the newly-arrived reinforcements alone at the top of the stairs. She used a nice, sustainable area attack  to augment her cover from the bar she was hiding behind to hold the undead off until everyone downstairs finished off the zombies and came scooting up to join her.

And that’s when I realized that I had forgotten about the vampires’ regeneration ability.

Too little, too late. The remaining vampire kept getting blasted with radiant damage, keeping the regeneration from kicking in. They put it down in a couple of rounds, and mopped up the zombies afterward.

Now, the way the encounter wound up split in half, when I had planned on it doubling up, and the way I had forgotten the regeneration certainly made it an easier fight than I had intended, but that was all my fault. I’ll know better next time. I handed over the treasure (robbed from the bodies of the inn victims) an the xp, and the party said some prayers over all the corpses, piled them in the common room, and burned the inn to the ground to prevent any of the dead to come back.

And that was pretty much the evening. I think it went well, and all the players seemed engaged in the murder-mystery/horror miniplot. Everyone seems to be liking the move away from straight dungeon crawls and the opportunity to use their skills in different situations.

So, win.

 

 

*1,200 xp, a level 5 encounter for six characters.

Deeper Into Skill Challenges, Part Two

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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So, yesterday I talked about my thinking behind when and how to use skill challenges. Today, I’m going to post a few examples of skill challenges that I’ve used, or am planning to use, in my games.

Finding the Goblins

One of the first skill challenges I designed and ran was in the Storm Point game. The party had heard rumours of a band of goblins in the countryside stealing from farms. The goblins were said to have a map to a lost Arkhosian ruin that the party wanted. The party had to find the goblins and recover the map, incidentally stopping their predations on the rural folk.

Now, in previous editions, either the whole thing would have fallen on the shoulders of the ranger, who could try to track the goblins while everyone else sat around with their weapons ready and nothing to do. Or I could have laid out a map of the area and let the party wander around until they happened across the goblins. But I thought it would be a good way to use a skill challenge to get everyone involved.
I set the level at 1 (they were first-level characters) and complexity 2. To round out the experience to a full first-level encounter, I put together a squad of goblin minions and a hexer. Then I thought about the different ways the party could try to find the party, looking at the skills they had.
Perception was a good skill for tracking. Nature for understanding goblin behaviour and habits. History to know the area and the good hiding places. I wanted to add some social interaction, so I decided that they could talk to the farm folk in the area with Diplomacy, and use Streetwise to find out about a halfling crime boss that had some dealings with the goblins. This latter one opened up more social interaction – they could use Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate to get the information from him. I also assumed that my players would come up with interesting uses of skills that I hadn’t thought of. I like to encourage that; it’s more fun, and it increases the player buy-in to the adventure.
Now, it was vital that the party get the map, or else the adventure wouldn’t happen, so I set the DCs for most of the skill checks to 10, which is the moderate DC for levels 1 to 3. On the fly, based on the approach used, I shifted the base DCs up and down by a couple of points – If they were rude to the farmers when asking for information, I boosted the DC to 12, but if they spent some time helping with chores, I dropped it to 8. 
The fact that I needed them to get the map to move on to the next stage of the adventure also meant that failure in the skill challenge could not prevent them from finding the goblins. So, for failure, I decided that the goblins would be alerted to their coming and set a trap, with the hexer creating an illusion* of the goblins sitting around the fire while they were really hiding in the surrounding woods, ready to ambush the party when they attacked. If the party succeeded with no failures, the party would get the drop on the goblins and have a surprise round of their own. Success with one or two failures meant neither party had surprise.
In play, the party succeeded without any failures, and didn’t do anything really unexpected, so it worked pretty much as I had envisioned. Because it was one of the first skill challenges I created and ran, it was pretty bare-bones, without a lot of variety to it. Still, it fit the purpose I had intended, so it worked.
Descending the Rift
Later in that same adventure, I built a skill challenge to simulate the party climbing down through hundreds of feet of narrow chasm and caves. I did it this way rather than just mapping it out or reducing it to a single skill check. Mapping it out would have lengthened the dungeon crawl section of the adventure beyond what I wanted, and a single skill check wouldn’t add much interest or risk. Multiple skill checks would work, but if I’m having the party make multiple skill checks to accomplish something, I might as well turn it into a skill challenge, right?
Again, it was a level 1 challenge, to match the party level, and I made it a complexity 4 challenge to make it a larger section of the adventure. Appropriate skills I decided would be Dungeoneering, Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, and Endurance, with DCs of 10 – again, the moderate difficulty for the level. As I looked over the other skills, I couldn’t see much that would be applicable outside those five, but I’m always willing to be surprised by a good idea from my players, so I just decided that any other skills would be a DC of 15 – the difficult DC for that level.
I also decided to add an extra complication: this sort of journey would be physically taxing and exhausting, so every round (which duration I set at half an hour), each character had to make an Endurance check, on top of the skill check made to advance the skill challenge. A success meant things continued as normal, but failure meant the character lost a healing surge through minor damage, fatigue, etc. The DC started at 5, and increased by 2 every round.
Again, this was a sort of adventure bottleneck. The party had to get safely to the bottom of the rift to get to the next stage of the adventure, which means that they needed to get to the bottom whether they succeeded of failed. So, I decided that, for every failure rolled, they would run into some difficulty on the descent that they needed to deal with: a rockslide (the hazard from the DMG), an attack by a cavern choker, and an area of bad air that would sap a healing surge from each of them, in that order.
The party made it down, dealing with the rockslide and cavern choker, but it took significantly longer than I had expected. The fight with the choker broke things up a little, but the skill challenge still went on a bit longer than I personally found to be fun. Not enough variety, and with needing 10 successes, it took some time to run through. If I were doing it now, I would cut it back to about a complexity 2.
Navigating the Winter Maze
In my Post Tenebras Lux game, I decided that the Winter Barrow was surrounded by a mystical maze of ice, snow, and magic, that shifted and changed moment by moment. There were a couple of things they could do before venturing into the maze to make it easier on themselves, but they didn’t do those things, so they went in raw.
Level 3 challenge, complexity 5. I set the complexity that high because I wanted them to have to spend a certain amount of time in the maze, dealing with the cold (1d6+3 cold damage per round, the low normal damage expression for that level). I figured the primary skills would be Perception and Nature for navigating the maze, Arcana for dealing with the magical aspects of it, and Insight to spot the illusory parts. I also decided that each of those four skills needed at least one success for the skill challenge to succeed.
This was designed to be a difficult challenge – I set the DC for the skill checks at 12, midway between moderate and difficult for the level. Now, for the adventure to continue, the party had to reach the barrow, but it wasn’t a one-shot thing, like the two previous skill challenges I’ve described. I thought that making failure of the skill challenge equal death or something similar was pretty harsh – after all, they were in the maze taking cold damage every round, so they were already suffering just from the time put in. And, speaking of time, the longer it took them to navigate the maze, the less time they had to investigate the barrow, which would vanish with the setting of the moon. So, I figured that having a failed skill challenge deposit the party outside the maze, forcing them to retry the challenge and spend more time, was appropriate.
I also wanted to emphasize the danger of being in the maze, so I decided that a failed skill check by anyone would cost that person a healing surge, either from the mystical cold sapping their strength or from a magical or illusory danger that they run into.
Now, this challenge went more smoothly than the Descending the Rift challenge, because both me and my players were more familiar with skill challenges and working them into the game. The players were better at describing what their characters were doing, how they were using their skills to deal with the challenge. This is the most fun part of the rules for me, seeing how the players come up with interesting ways to deal with the difficulties.
The tension created by the risk of the challenge – the ongoing damage, the cost in healing surges, the time pressure – kept people more focused on what was going on, and thinking about ways to contribute. For a long skill challenge, it worked surprisingly well.
Find a Campsite
This is a challenge that my players generally trot out, rather than me calling for it. I run it pretty free-flow, with a level equal to the party level, and a complexity of 1, DC set at the moderate value for that level. They tend to use Nature, Perception, and sometimes History and Insight to find a spot that’s out of the way.
The goal is usually to find a safe site that’s fairly concealed, so I let the results of the challenge determine the difficulty of monsters to find it. They usually make a Nature or Stealth check afterwards to increase the concealment, so I give them +5 to that roll if they succeed with no failures, +2 if they succeed with one failure, +0 if they succeed with two failures, and -5 if they fail.
They like this challenge and the way it works, so it’s become SOP for them when they’re in the field. We’ve got the challenge down to the point where it takes about 3 minutes to run through the whole thing. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s fast, and they like it, so I like it.
Gang War
This skill challenge is one that I designed, but never ran, because the game went off in a different direction. It was set up as a framework for an entire adventure, where the characters worked to take down a criminal network run by a halfling gangster.
I broke the entire thing into a series of small skill challenges, all of complexity 1, each challenge uncovering one piece of the network. I had a set number of businesses for the party to work their way up through to the big boss. Each challenge would take an amount of time based on the kinds of things the party tried – staking out a known criminal hangout watching for runners might take all night, while buying drinks and pumping people for information might only take a couple of hours. Main skills were Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidation, but I foresaw a number of other possibilities, like Endurance for a stakeout or History to know which areas the gangs traditionally controlled.
Each successful skill challenge would give the party a line on one of the gangster’s businesses. A failed skill challenge would either lead them into a trap or send a group of hitmen out against something the characters valued – family, favourite hangout, whatever.
A total of five successful skill challenges were needed to make it to the big boss fight. I may still use this structure for something else in the future.
So, there are a stack of different skill challenge ideas. Let me know what you think.
*Yeah, I know goblin hexers don’t have that power, but they can if I want them to.

Now, in previous editions, either the whole thing would have fallen on the shoulders of the ranger, who could try to track the goblins while everyone else sat around with their weapons ready and nothing to do. Or I could have laid out a map of the area and let the party wander around until they happened across the goblins. But I thought it would be a good way to use a skill challenge to get everyone involved.

I set the level at 1 (they were first-level characters) and complexity 2. To round out the experience to a full first-level encounter, I put together a squad of goblin minions and a hexer. Then I thought about the different ways the party could try to find the party, looking at the skills they had.

Perception was a good skill for tracking. Nature for understanding goblin behaviour and habits. History to know the area and the good hiding places. I wanted to add some social interaction, so I decided that they could talk to the farm folk in the area with Diplomacy, and use Streetwise to find out about a halfling crime boss that had some dealings with the goblins. This latter one opened up more social interaction – they could use Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate to get the information from him. I also assumed that my players would come up with interesting uses of skills that I hadn’t thought of. I like to encourage that; it’s more fun, and it increases the player buy-in to the adventure.

Now, it was vital that the party get the map, or else the adventure wouldn’t happen, so I set the DCs for most of the skill checks to 10, which is the moderate DC for levels 1 to 3. On the fly, based on the approach used, I shifted the base DCs up and down by a couple of points – If they were rude to the farmers when asking for information, I boosted the DC to 12, but if they spent some time helping with chores, I dropped it to 8. 

The fact that I needed them to get the map to move on to the next stage of the adventure also meant that failure in the skill challenge could not prevent them from finding the goblins. So, for failure, I decided that the goblins would be alerted to their coming and set a trap, with the hexer creating an illusion* of the goblins sitting around the fire while they were really hiding in the surrounding woods, ready to ambush the party when they attacked. If the party succeeded with no failures, the party would get the drop on the goblins and have a surprise round of their own. Success with one or two failures meant neither party had surprise.

In play, the party succeeded without any failures, and didn’t do anything really unexpected, so it worked pretty much as I had envisioned. Because it was one of the first skill challenges I created and ran, it was pretty bare-bones, without a lot of variety to it. Still, it fit the purpose I had intended, so it worked.

Descending the Rift

Later in that same adventure, I built a skill challenge to simulate the party climbing down through hundreds of feet of narrow chasm and caves. I did it this way rather than just mapping it out or reducing it to a single skill check. Mapping it out would have lengthened the dungeon crawl section of the adventure beyond what I wanted, and a single skill check wouldn’t add much interest or risk. Multiple skill checks would work, but if I’m having the party make multiple skill checks to accomplish something, I might as well turn it into a skill challenge, right?

Again, it was a level 1 challenge, to match the party level, and I made it a complexity 4 challenge to make it a larger section of the adventure. Appropriate skills I decided would be Dungeoneering, Athletics, Acrobatics, Perception, and Endurance, with DCs of 10 – again, the moderate difficulty for the level. As I looked over the other skills, I couldn’t see much that would be applicable outside those five, but I’m always willing to be surprised by a good idea from my players, so I just decided that any other skills would be a DC of 15 – the difficult DC for that level.

I also decided to add an extra complication: this sort of journey would be physically taxing and exhausting, so every round (which duration I set at half an hour), each character had to make an Endurance check, on top of the skill check made to advance the skill challenge. A success meant things continued as normal, but failure meant the character lost a healing surge through minor damage, fatigue, etc. The DC started at 5, and increased by 2 every round.

Again, this was a sort of adventure bottleneck. The party had to get safely to the bottom of the rift to get to the next stage of the adventure, which means that they needed to get to the bottom whether they succeeded of failed. So, I decided that, for every failure rolled, they would run into some difficulty on the descent that they needed to deal with: a rockslide (the hazard from the DMG), an attack by a cavern choker, and an area of bad air that would sap a healing surge from each of them, in that order.

The party made it down, dealing with the rockslide and cavern choker, but it took significantly longer than I had expected. The fight with the choker broke things up a little, but the skill challenge still went on a bit longer than I personally found to be fun. Not enough variety, and with needing 10 successes, it took some time to run through. If I were doing it now, I would cut it back to about a complexity 2.

Navigating the Winter Maze

In my Post Tenebras Lux game, I decided that the Winter Barrow was surrounded by a mystical maze of ice, snow, and magic, that shifted and changed moment by moment. There were a couple of things they could do before venturing into the maze to make it easier on themselves, but they didn’t do those things, so they went in raw.

Level 3 challenge, complexity 5. I set the complexity that high because I wanted them to have to spend a certain amount of time in the maze, dealing with the cold (1d6+3 cold damage per round, the low normal damage expression for that level). I figured the primary skills would be Perception and Nature for navigating the maze, Arcana for dealing with the magical aspects of it, and Insight to spot the illusory parts. I also decided that each of those four skills needed at least one success for the skill challenge to succeed.

This was designed to be a difficult challenge – I set the DC for the skill checks at 12, midway between moderate and difficult for the level. Now, for the adventure to continue, the party had to reach the barrow, but it wasn’t a one-shot thing, like the two previous skill challenges I’ve described. I thought that making failure of the skill challenge equal death or something similar was pretty harsh – after all, they were in the maze taking cold damage every round, so they were already suffering just from the time put in. And, speaking of time, the longer it took them to navigate the maze, the less time they had to investigate the barrow, which would vanish with the setting of the moon. So, I figured that having a failed skill challenge deposit the party outside the maze, forcing them to retry the challenge and spend more time, was appropriate.

I also wanted to emphasize the danger of being in the maze, so I decided that a failed skill check by anyone would cost that person a healing surge, either from the mystical cold sapping their strength or from a magical or illusory danger that they run into.

Now, this challenge went more smoothly than the Descending the Rift challenge, because both me and my players were more familiar with skill challenges and working them into the game. The players were better at describing what their characters were doing, how they were using their skills to deal with the challenge. This is the most fun part of the rules for me, seeing how the players come up with interesting ways to deal with the difficulties.

The tension created by the risk of the challenge – the ongoing damage, the cost in healing surges, the time pressure – kept people more focused on what was going on, and thinking about ways to contribute. For a long skill challenge, it worked surprisingly well.

Find a Campsite

This is a challenge that my players generally trot out, rather than me calling for it. I run it pretty free-flow, with a level equal to the party level, and a complexity of 1, DC set at the moderate value for that level. They tend to use Nature, Perception, and sometimes History and Insight to find a spot that’s out of the way.

The goal is usually to find a safe site that’s fairly concealed, so I let the results of the challenge determine the difficulty of monsters to find it. They usually make a Nature or Stealth check afterwards to increase the concealment, so I give them +5 to that roll if they succeed with no failures, +2 if they succeed with one failure, +0 if they succeed with two failures, and -5 if they fail.

They like this challenge and the way it works, so it’s become SOP for them when they’re in the field. We’ve got the challenge down to the point where it takes about 3 minutes to run through the whole thing. It’s not terribly exciting, but it’s fast, and they like it, so I like it.

Gang War

This skill challenge is one that I designed, but never ran, because the game went off in a different direction. It was set up as a framework for an entire adventure, where the characters worked to take down a criminal network run by a halfling gangster.

I broke the entire thing into a series of small skill challenges, all of complexity 1, each challenge uncovering one piece of the network. I had a set number of businesses for the party to work their way up through to the big boss. Each challenge would take an amount of time based on the kinds of things the party tried – staking out a known criminal hangout watching for runners might take all night, while buying drinks and pumping people for information might only take a couple of hours. Main skills were Streetwise, Stealth, Perception, History, Diplomacy, Bluff, and Intimidation, but I foresaw a number of other possibilities, like Endurance for a stakeout or History to know which areas the gangs traditionally controlled.

Each successful skill challenge would give the party a line on one of the gangster’s businesses. A failed skill challenge would either lead them into a trap or send a group of hitmen out against something the characters valued – family, favourite hangout, whatever.

A total of five successful skill challenges were needed to make it to the big boss fight. I may still use this structure for something else in the future.

 

So, there are a stack of different skill challenge ideas. Let me know what you think.

 

 

 

*Yeah, I know goblin hexers don’t have that power, but they can if I want them to.

Deeper Into Skill Challenges, Part One

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, What's he playing?
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A while back, I posted about skill challenges in D&D 4E. My thoughts at the time were that they were a good thing, but needed to be used appropriately. My opinion on that hasn’t changed, exactly, but it has evolved a fair bit, based both on Mike Mearls’s skill challenge articles in Dungeon (including the podcast he did about them), and my experience using them in play. Because of that, and because someone posted a comment asking for more about skill challenges, I’m going back to the well to talk about how I use them now, and what ideas I have for them.

When to Use Skill Challenges

First off, skill challenges represent people trying to do stuff over time. The timeframe may be a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, whatever. But if its something that takes very little time in the game world, I think its better to use a simple skill check rather than a full skill challenge.

I use skill challenges in fairly limited situations. Here’s my current list of when I use them:

  1. When players ask for them. Often times, my players will ask to do something as a skill challenge if they feel that it falls into one of the cases below, or if they feel that co-operation could overcome some inherent difficulty. So, rather than just say, “Hey, ranger. Find us a good campsite,” everyone will pitch in with Nature checks, Perception checks, History checks, or whatever else they think they can persuade me will be applicable. And I let them. Why? Because it fosters creativity in the players (“Hmmm. I suck at Stealth and Perception, so I’m going to use Athletics to help sneak through the woods by lifting fallen trees out of the way, then replacing them after we’ve gone through.”), it gets everyone involved, and it’s more interesting than just making the same sort of check for every character, every round.
  2. When success in an endeavour relies on a combination of different tactics. If succeeding at something requires the use of two or more skills for it to be believable, I might use a skill challenge. For example, finding the way through a magical maze of ice and snow might require Nature, Perception, and Arcana checks. Maybe even Insight, if part of the maze is illusory. I may set a minimum number of successes for the required skills for the challenge to succeed – maybe the party needs at least two Arcana successes and two Nature successes to succeed.
  3. When success in an endeavour could come about through a variety of different tactics. Sometimes, I can think of several ways that something could be accomplished. For example, chasing someone through a crowded city. When this comes up, I leave the how up to my players, and see what their creativity comes up with. So, using Athletics to run after the target, or Acrobatics to swing up to the rooftops, or Perception to keep track of the target, or History to know a shortcut, or… You get the idea. This lets the characters play to their strengths, stretch their creativity, and set the tone of the success – the conversation with the captured runner is going to go a lot differently if you tackled him in the street than if you persuaded him to stop by promising not to hurt him.
  4. When I want to create a montage feel in the game. Like the song says, “Even Rocky had a montage.” They can be a good way to gloss over hours or days of some fairly uninteresting task, while still letting the players put their own stamp on things. So, if the characters have two days to get a keep ready to defend against the advancing hordes, we don’t have to play through the whole two days. Set it up in eight-hour turns, say, and let everyone decide what they’re doing for that twelve hours. Some may drill the troops, some may reinforce the doors, some may dig trenches or lay booby traps, some may examine maps and plan strategy, whatever. Everyone again gets to play to their strength, you the game moves forward quickly, and what the characters do sets the tone of the following encounter. If the fighter spent sixteen hours a day training with the troops and the rogue spent sixteen hours a day digging pit traps in the approach, the fighter’s going to have a better chance at rallying the troops, even though the rogue may have a higher Diplomacy check.

Those are pretty broad categories, but they do impose some restrictions. For example, if the party comes up to a castle gate and wants to get in past the guard, I don’t turn it into a skill challenge using Bluff. Hell, I wouldn’t even let them use the Aid Another rules! Let’s face it – one character saying, “Let me in, because I am the Inspector General!” and everyone else nodding and going, “He really is!” does not sound like a viable way to convince the guards to let you past. If they’ve decided ahead of time that they’re going to use this tactic, then I might turn it into a skill challenge to build the cover identity, using Thievery to forge papers, Streetwise to bribe someone for information, Bluff to work up a disguise, whatever.

Basically, though, I don’t allow a skill challenge when the co-operation of the party would strain the credulity of success, is what I’m trying to say. I also don’t use one when the entire thing takes place in just a minute or two.

The other time I never use a skill challenge is when the result of it just doesn’t matter to the game. Here, I follow the advice from that great game, Dogs in the Vineyard: Say yes, or roll the dice. I just say yes. Want to see if you can seduce the barmaid? Yes, you can. Want to see if you amuse the peasants with your magic tricks? Yes, you do. No rolls involved, unless a player insists. Why? Because it’s a free way to give a player a bit of the spotlight, let them explore their character and have fun, without the potential for ruining the experience with a bad roll.

Success and Failure

So, if you succeed on a skill challenge, you get your objective, right? And when you fail, you don’t, right? Well, first off, the DMG recommends that, if a skill challenge fails, it shouldn’t end the adventure. Good advice, right there. If failing the skill challenge means failing the adventure, you should probably rethink it.

Also, given the fact that you’re accumulating successes and failures, it makes sense to me that the succeed/fail result be a continuum, rather than a binary state. What does that mean? Well, if you succeed, but rack up two failures, it shouldn’t be as complete a success as a success with no failures. In the same way, getting your third failure when you have all but one success shouldn’t be as bad as getting three failures right out of the gate.

I’ve implemented this idea in different ways in play. Sometimes, like in the “find the campsite” skill challenge that my Storm Point players love, I give them a bonus on remaining concealed based on the success vs. failure ratio. Sometimes, as in the “find the temple” skill challenge I ran in the same game, I impose a penalty for each failure – in this circumstance, every failure had them encounter a patrol of hostile humanoids.  And sometimes I just eyeball it and adjust on the fly – trying to find a goblin camp without alerting the goblins, I decide that no failures means the party gets a surprise round in combat, one or two failures means that there is no surprise round, and three failures (complete failure) means that the goblins have set a trap.

You may have noticed that I link everything to the failures, and nothing to the successes. This is because I already know what unmitigated success should look like (otherwise why have a skill challenge, right?), so I use the measure of the failures in order to temper the success.

Now, there’s a bit of a danger to this – it may prompt your players to resort to picking the character best suited for the challenge at hand, and then just using Aid Another to max out his chances. I haven’t had that come up, but I can see how it could. What do you do then? Well, my first instinct is to let them. I think that would make the skill challenge boring enough for them that they won’t do it too often. My second tactic would be to make them describe exactly how they’re helping – if it doesn’t make sense, they don’t get to aid. Combining the two should mitigate the problem.

But what about success? How to determine what success looks like? This is sort of glossed over in the DMG, and sort of assumed in most of the articles you read about skill challenges, but it may be the most important point to consider when designing one. What happens when the characters succeed?

I decide this by asking myself, “If nothing goes wrong in this situation, and everything goes right, what’s the best outcome that could reasonably come about based on the characters’ abilities?” The two key sections of that question are the “reasonably come about” and “based on the characters’ abilities.”

Let’s talk about the first point – reasonable. You don’t want to give away the shop. If you’re using a skill challenge to bargain with a merchant, it’s not reasonable to assume that he’s going to give you his stuff for free. So, let’s say you set a discount that they could reasonably hope to achieve – let’s call it 25%. More than that, and he won’t be able to feed his kids. See? Reasonable.

Now, let’s talk about basing the success on the characters’ abilities. If the characters are making their way through that magical maze of ice and snow I mentioned, they don’t get to cause the maze to vanish just because they made a good Arcana check – at least, not at heroic tier. Maybe at higher levels. But you can also colour the outcome based on the skills they used – relying on Arcana has them using mystical compass needles and runestones to pick the correct pathway, while relying on Nature has them watching the blowing paths of the snow to avoid invisible walls and crevasses, and relying on Athletics has them scaling the walls to follow a straight-line path to the goal.

Anyway, I think I’ve made my points here: success and failure can be used to make the skill challenge more interesting.

Level and Complexity

What level should the skill challenge be? How complex?

Well, as to level, I generally set all the skill challenges at the party’s level. The reason for this is simple: I can usually remember the target DCs for Easy, Moderate, and Difficult rolls for the party level, so I don’t need to look that up. It speeds things up in play, and lets me make impromptu skill challenges more often if I see the need.

If a skill challenge is meant to be an important, memorable event in the game, then I may set it a level or two higher, but this is rare – the DCs in the DMG are grouped by 3 levels: level 1-3, level 4-6, etc. That means that I may have to bump a challenge by up to 3 levels for it to make a difference to the DCs; easier just to shift to the Difficult category, or increase the DCs by one or two.

Complexity is a little trickier, appropriately enough. Most impromptu challenges I set at complexity 1, because I don’t want them to slow down play. In fact, I lean toward setting most skill challenges at lower complexities these days; it really distinguishes them more sharply from combats.

When I use more complex skill challenges, I try to instersperse the skill challenge rolls with other stuff: other encounters, role playing scenes, dealing with the consequences of failure, etc. This tends to make the whole thing a little less static and mechanical, adding variety and interest to the proceedings.

Samples

I was going to offer some samples of the skill challenges I use (or try to use), but I’ve already topped 2000 words, which is enough for one post. Tomorrow, I will post Part Two, where I will show you some of the challenges I’ve built, and talk about why I’ve done things the way I did with each of them.

Check back then.

Other People I’ve Been

By | | What's he playing?
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I noticed the other day that all my game posts are about games that I run. I have been remiss in not mentioning the games I play in, and have played in. So, here’s a greatest hits of my player career:

  • Barabas – Barabas was a half-elven fighter/thief from Waterdeep in a home-brew AD&D game run by my friend, Michael. He was the first character I played for any length of time – up to that point, I’d mainly been running games. Barabas was surly, with a quick temper and a dislike of elves. I had conceived him primarily as an urban character, and the first session had the city of Waterdeep occupied by an orcish army and my character on the run throughout the Realms. He got into trouble a lot because he hated people telling him what to do, and tended to do the opposite. He wound up losing his home, his best friend, his eye, and his mortality, as he threw himself into a battle bigger than he could imagine, and wound up tapped to be a god because of it.
  • Jeyg Costin – A human from a Skyrealms of Jorune game, again run by Michael. It only lasted one (extended adventure), but I loved that game. Jeyg was a sneaky, tricky private eye type, who knew everyone and how to make contacts even in strange cities. He was also a deadly knife-fighter. In best noire traditions, he wound up addicted to a powerful narcotic after bearding the main villain in his den.
  • V’dreyn Heartshadow – An elven cleric in the continuation of the game that Barabas started in. He worshipped a god of self-sufficiency, and tended to a calm, measured, horrificly stubborn character. Once he got his heels dug in, not even death could shift him. I spent a lot of time as Heartshadow working through the theology and philosophy of such a deity, an exercise that I found surprisingly rewarding. He wound up sacrificing himself to prevent a TPK when our group of 11th-level character ran into a pit fiend by surprise*.
  • Anthony Vespucci – My Vampire: The Masquerade character; your basic Ventrue mobster. Again, one of Michael’s games. Anthony wasn’t all that bright, but he was good at following orders, convincing other people to follow his orders, and just not dying. One of his greatest moments was a face-off with the angry sire of one of the other players and his squad of gun-toting henchmen. The sire forbade Anthony to kill a priest (who was right there in the alley with them), so Anthony unloaded his Uzi into the priest’s chest, threw down his gun, and let the six vampires above him fill him full of lead. And then he stood up, brushed off his ruined suit, and asked them if they were finished screwing around. He wound up blowing his own head off with a white phosphorous grenade to prevent him being used by his enemies. He came back after a brief hiatus as a draug bent on vengeance.
  • Tom Kozlowski – Anthony’s replacement in the Vampire game after his suicide. Word of advice – it is very, very, very hard to believably bring in a new PC in a game centred around suspicion and paranoia. Tom didn’t fit well, and didn’t last long.
  • Julian the Apostate – My friend Clint ran a great Vampire: Dark Ages game, where I got to play the ex-Byzantine Emperor. Clint actually suggested the character, and it seemed like such a cool idea (especially after a little research) that I jumped at it. Julian was an okay warrior and a decent leader, but he really shone when working ritual magic through a system that Clint and I developed for him. He was also renowned for always having a plan and a back-up plan, which he would often neglect to tell his companions. Julian saying, “I have an idea,” became one of the most frightening moments in the game**.
  • Gaha’el – An angel of healing in a shortlived game of Everlasting that Clint ran. He was fun to play, from a very alien point of view: I tried to make him very different from mortals, not really understanding their interactions. He was great at dishing out healing, but had no compassion. And he was just as quick to draw his sword. I played him as God’s misericord – he would end suffering, one way or another. And his history was pretty cool***. Unfortunately, the system was convoluted and work-intensive for the GM, so the game folded after only a couple of sessions.
  • Asariel, Dee’s Angel – Asariel and Gaha’el were separated by years, but I eventually came back to the angel idea for a steampunk Victorian superhero game Clint ran, using Mutants & Masterminds. Asariel had been summoned during the reign of Elizabeth I by John Dee, and both Asariel and Dee were surprised to find that the other didn’t know how to get Asariel back home. He was a much more human character than Gaha’el, as you need in a superhero game, but still very cool to play. One memorable conversation had another of the heroes asking me about her dead husband, and if he was happy in heaven. Player scheduling killed that game.
  • Synry – Clint ran a small D&D 3E game for his wife and me, and my character was a human fighter/wizard. He started as a kind of socially maladjusted ex-soldier with some wizard training, but over the course of the game he wound up being quite the diplomat, spy, spellcaster, planar traveler, and power broker. He also inspired the greatest volume of game fiction I have written for a character.
  • Michael “MoJo” Johnson – My friend Erik ran an Unknown Armies game, and I was determined to play someone who was clued in to the supernatural but had no actual supernatural abilities. I made him the webmaster of MojoWeb.com, your one-stop Internet weirdness outlet. He was a manic, paranoid conspiracy theorist who knew more about what was going on than the mages and avatars around him, and so flipped completely out at the stupid things they would do. Of course, he believed most of the stuff on his site without any sort of critical thought, so he was wrong about a lot of things.
  • Ladimir Csabor – Michael invited me to play in an Iron Kingdoms game. I’m not a huge fan of Iron Kingdoms, partially because I’m tired of steampunk and partially because I think the world undercuts a number of fantasy gaming tropes that I like. But I like Michael’s games, so I came up with an Umbrean fighter – very plain vanilla. But a melee warrior in a party of ranged fighters and spellcasters really stands out, and he has become a man of action! He joyfully throws himself into the craziest stunts and fiercest battles, sometimes just because he’s tired of all the talking that’s going on. In a world I don’t really like, I’ve managed to create a character that I love.
  • Dunael a’Wemistarrin – An elven warlock in Clint’s current 3E game. He treats the oaths and pacts with the powers that give him his abilities in a very shamanic way, viewing them all as small gods that he has little rituals to appease and entreat. He tends to get fixated on one thing at a time, which sometimes makes him seem very cold, and other times just the opposite.

So, there’s a list. It’s almost complete – barring a couple of characters that weren’t all that memorable.

Listing them like this is interesting to me; I’m seeing patterns and commonalities that I hadn’t before. I mean, we all know that we like to play certain types of characters, and that the characters we build tend to share certain qualities, but until you see it all laid out in front of you, you may not see them as clearly.

My characters? Usually a couple of dominant traits:

  • Pride. Pride bordering on arrogance in some situations. In other situations, living so deep within arrogance, they can’t see the border any more.
  • Stubborn. When they care about something, there is no shifting them.
  • Action provoking. My characters all tend to like to make stuff happen.
  • In the know. They all like to be in on the secrets of the world.

Now, having listed all these characters, I leave the comments open for those who have known them to comment, and for others to spend a little time telling me about their favourite characters.

 

 

*Well, surprise for us. The pit fiend knew right where we were.

**Followed closely by, “The Domina has some questions for you,” and, “Let’s go into the forest.”

***I wish I could find the write-up I did, where he prevented Moses from entering the Promised Land and was both St. George and Dracula.

Dateline – Storm Point

By | | Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Storm Point, What's he playing?
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Last night’s Storm Point game advanced things very little, for a few reasons. First, we got an even later start than our usual late start. Second, one player had to take off early because of an emergency. Third, the single combat encounter went on a loooooong time.

They had found their way to the old eladrin ruin that’s being used as a temple by the shadar-kai who have brought the local humanoid tribes together into an army.  The temple itself is a large villa-style manor, covered in ivy. All the plant life around the temple had died, with the life apparently drained out of it.

Not wanting to make a frontal assault on the building*, they snuck around to the back and found a less-used door. The lockpicks failed them, so they applied the dwarf to the problem, smashing the door in**. Inside was a fairly cramped hallway, and a number of wraiths that attacked***.

The fight was tough for the party, both because it was a couple levels above them and because of the environment. The close quarters meant the group was packed tightly together, and the insubstantial, phasing, shift-six-squares-as-a-move-action wraiths were able to dart around and attack out of walls and stuff. There were doors in the hallway, but the party didn’t want to open them, worried about drawing more monsters in to the fight****.

They won, but are now considering holing up some where for a long rest.

They also built themselves another skill challenge this game, with everyone pitching in to sneak around to the back of the temple, using things like Stealth (an obvious choice), Nature (to understand how to move in the environment and hide tracks), Perception (to follow game trails), and Athletics (to lift fallen trees out of the way). Again, I am happy that they’ve adopted this habit for themselves, and are using skill challenges when they want to accomplish things, not just when I drop one in the adventure.

Anyway. As I said, not much advancement of the plot, but some progress made.

*Which surprised me, let me tell you!

**Phew. I was getting worried that they had mellowed.

***2 mad wraiths, 4 wraiths, 1,300 xp, a level 6 encounter for 5 characters.

****”Don’t open the door! Who knows what’s on the other side?” “Well, a couple of wraiths, for certain…”

The Myth of Balance

By | | What's he playing?
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I’ve been doing some thinking about game balance lately. Here’s where I’m coming from.

I remember back when D&D 3E came out. As information was slowly released, there started to be a lot of message threads on discussion boards about how different classes or spells or other features were broken – either too powerful or not powerful enough. When the game was released, there followed a real rush of house rules designed to fix the broken piece.

Same thing happened with 4E. Same rush of complaints, same rush of house rules.

Anything wrong with that? Nope.

But the threads became more strident and angry as time went by, with people arguing passionately* either for or against the broken item. It’s still going on and, with all the new powers in 4E, I expect it to continue pretty much indefinitely.

The issue at the core of each of these discussions is game balance.

A large number of the threads about powers say will say that a given power is unbalanced, meaning (generally) too powerful**. The words game breaker and win buttons get tossed around. And you know what? It’s all a bit ridiculous to me.

In my experience, there are two aspects of balance to consider. One is the balance between characters. This one, I take seriously – if someone feels that they have been slighted by the GM compared to another person in the game, that creates bad feelings, and that can hurt the game. It doesn’t matter if the perception is true or not: if it perceived to be true, then you’ve gotta deal with it as if it were.

These balance issues can usually be dealt with with a little communication. Talk to people. Find out what’s what. If one character is doing a ton more damage than the others, get that player to show the others how he built the character. If someone has more stuff, slant the treasure in the direction of the others until things even out. And if the perception is just plain wrong, look at why someone believes it and address that.

The other type of balance is the balance between the players and the GM. This is entirely illusory – a shared fiction that allows the game to take place.

See, I’ve been a GM for a while, now, and I’ve discovered that I can kill the characters any time I want to. And not just by resorting to Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. Any time I want to, I can just change the numbers on a monster in combat to make it kill the party. I can bring in more monsters. I can pick a monster that’s already just too much for the party to handle.

There’s no balance. I have all the power.

There’s an inherent social contract in gaming, though, that says the GM won’t pull crap like that. The GM will give the party reasonable challenges that the party can overcome. That’s all it is, though: social convention. An agreement that the GM and the players will work together to make the game fun.

So, I have to shake my head when I see a thread complaining about how powerful a given piece of the game is, and how it destroys the balance. Especially when these complaints come from GMs.

Don’t you guys get it? You’re in charge! The characters can have all the toys they can carry, and all the best powers they can think up, and they’re still at your mercy! Have they picked up a power that creates a zone of healing? Keep them out of it, either by having monsters that can move enemies around, or by making the environment so cramped that the zone is mostly inside solid walls. Have they got a power that can kill a target every round? Swarm them with minions. See? And that’s just playing within the rules. If you start to fudge things, the possibilities are literally endless.

There’s another option, too – let it work. Let it be as beautiful and horrifying as you feared it would be. Let the players have the sense of accomplishment that comes from doing well in an encounter. Enjoy it with them.

And plan something tougher for next time.

What’s my answer when players in my games want to take a power that they think might be overpowered? I say, “Sure!” If it looks like it’s out of whack with the powers available to other characters, then I reserve the right to retroactively veto it, but I have never had to do that.

Never. Even with home-made stuff.

In short, balance is a myth in roleplaying games. Rules strive to create fairness, but they can’t cover everything, and they can’t force someone to follow them. Don’t worry so much about balance.

Worry about everyone – you and your players – having fun.

Everything else will take care of itself.

 

 

*And only sometimes literately.

**Very few complaints out there that a power is unbalanced because it’s not powerful enough – those powers just don’t get picked by the players. The complaint about lack of power is usually reserved for class features and other things that players don’t get to pick from a list.

STORY – Home Again

By | | Story Seminar
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I made it home. Spent a lot of time sitting around the airport, thinking about writing. Spent a fair bit of time on the plane waiting on the tarmac, thinking about writing. Took a break during the flight to watch a couple of episodes of Carnivale on my iPod. Now, I’m home, doing my laundry, and thinking about writing.

Specifically, I’m thinking about my new novel.

I want to start fresh, after the seminar, and use the method and structure to see where they take me. To that end, I’m making notes about characters, scenes, the types of conflict, things like that. What I’m hoping to discover in the mess of ideas is what the story is about. Once I have that, I’ll have an idea about the antagonist (or forces of antagonism), and I’ll start to see the structure of the thing.

So, did I get what I wanted out of the seminar? Honestly, I dunno yet. I haven’t looked at the list, yet. Let’s do that now.

A better understanding of the underlying structures of story as put forth in the book. I primarily write short stories, with a single completed novel and half of another novel, and I find that thinking about things as Acts and Scenes and Beats doesn’t come naturally to me.

Check. His examples helped this sink home very nicely, and walking through Casablanca was very enlightening.

A better example of the way the elements discussed in the book work together to form the whole. There are tons of examples of each individual idea in the book, but they’re drawn from a number of different sources to illustrate individual points. The seminar features a stop-and-start viewing of Casablanca to analyze the movie scene-by-scene in light of the principles presented in class.

Check. Again, the viewing of Casablanca helped a lot, though there was a lot of time spent on the cinematic aspects of the movie. Fair enough; the seminar is primarily targeted at screenwriters, and I can see how useful and valuable that discussion would be. Some of it was interesting to me, some of it wasn’t. But the exercise gave some real insight into how everything fits together.

Discussion about the various points. Books are great, but a live tutorial session illuminates so many more elements of the material.

Check. Very much check. Several times during the session, I found myself thinking, “Oh, so that’s what the book meant!” Sometimes you just need to hear the right words the right way to really get it.

A renewed passion for writing. I’ve been a little bogged down, mentally, and really want this to recharge my batteries and get me excited about writing again.

Check, and check again. I really want to stay home from work tomorrow to get a full day’s work done on the new novel, but that ain’t gonna happen. Thank god for laptops and lunch hours.

Inspiration about the central conflict in a novel I’m working on. I’ve got a good idea for setting, some good characters, some interesting scenes, but no actual PLOT yet.

Kinda check. See, I don’t have the central conflict, yet, but I do have more confidence that it will emerge as I build and structure the novel using the method from the seminar.

See a little of Vancouver. I’ve got most of a day to walk around, and the hotel is near the waterfront, and Chinatown, and Gastown. I’ve never been to Vancouver, so I’ll be a bit of a tourist.

Check. I also got see one of the cruise ships pull into dock from the window of the seminar venue – it’s an experience I have to remember if I ever have to describe something huge and ponderous and building-sized moving. It was awe-inspiring.

Have dinner with my cousin. He lives there, and we’re going to a place called Sanafir. Once you get past the annoying (but pretty) intro, it looks like interesting food.

Check. Good food, good company.

So, that’s my trip. One last thing to tell you folks – on the taxi ride back to the Vancouver airport, I saw a sign that said, “Left turns restricted ahead. Use Hemlock.” I thought that was a little harsh*.

*I was tired and my head was full of literary thought. I make no apologies.