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Blog of holding
the whimsical fairies of a dead sun
10 hours 5 min agoIn 1912, William Hope Hodgson wrote the very long and very bizarre novel The Night Land. It's one of those novels that seems like it's more a D&D sourcebook than a novel. If I were running a fourth-edition game set in the Shadowfell, I'd actually take The Night Land over the D&D Gloomwrought boxed set.
The Night Land presents some obstacles to the reader. It's written in High Faux Archaic, with a ratio of five semicolons to the period. It's long and repetitive, describing every uneventful journey, camp, and meal break. It's got weird gender politics, even for 1912. But it's also got some powerful images. H. P. Lovecraft said of it, "The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget."
Oddly, this book, which contains a great Shadowfell setting, starts with an evocation of its fourth-edition opposite, the Feywild. The main character and his soul mate have had shared dreams of Fairyland:
And one evening, that I ever remember, as we wandered in the park-lands, she began to say—-half unthinking-—that it was truly an elves-night. And she stopped herself immediately; as though she thought I should have no understanding; but, indeed, I was upon mine own familiar ground of inward delight; and I replied in a quiet and usual voice, that the Towers of Sleep would grow that night, and I felt in my bones that it was a night to find the Giant's Tomb, or the Tree with the Great Painted Head, or-—And surely I stopped very sudden; for she gripped me in that moment, and her hand shook as she held me; but when I would ask her what ailed, she bid me, very breathless, to say on, to say on. And, with a half understanding, I told her that I had but meant to speak of the Moon Garden, that was an olden and happy fancy of mine.
Some good Feywild place names there! Also, you can see that I was not kidding about the semicolons.
Categories: Game News
D&D Next Idea: Cast Any Spell in 10 Minutes
Wed, 05/16/2012 - 10:00amMike Mearls talks about plans for the Wizard in his latest D&D Next article, Balancing Wizards in D&D.
One of his ideas is that using a scoll would require expending a spell of that level to use; so the idea is that scrolls wouldn't increase overall power, but they would allow for more versatality. This sounds like a great solution for allowing a wizard to get some use out of those corner-case spells that have utility only in specific situations, while still maintaining overall power balance.
This implementation reminds me of an idea Paul and I discussed a couple weeks ago for how to handle the same problem. It could be used in addition or in place of the above system for handling scrolls:
A wizard can cast ANY spell they know by expending a spell slot of that level and increasing the casting time to 10 minutes.
Thus, when you memorize your spells for the day, you can focus more on spells you know are going to be useful, such as offensive or powerful utility spells, since you can always cast the more situational spells, such as Stone to Mud or Disguise Self, out of combat if they are needed.
Of course, there are still going to be some situational spells that you may want to memorize since you'll be able to cast them in a single round, so it is not necessarily just a matter of loading up on your most obviously powerful spells, especially if you have reason to believe (such as by advance scouting or information gathering) that a certain spell will be useful.
The main advantage of this approach (or of the new approach for scrolls) is that it allows more of those fun wacky spells that rarely see use to come into the forefront when they will really be needed out of combat. When I am playing a wizard in 3.5 or previous editions, there are certain spells I never touch until higher levels (when I have enough lower level spell slots to diversify); it would be fun to see those spells coming into play earlier on.
Categories: Game News
Random Dungeon pdfs sent
Tue, 05/15/2012 - 3:32pmI sent emails to backers of the Random Dungeon kickstarter, letting them know that they could download the poster PDFs (and the DM notebook, for $22+ backers). Let me know if you're a backer and you didn't get an email.
Categories: Game News
What the 2e PR can tell us about 5e
Mon, 05/14/2012 - 9:44amWhen I got that giant box of D&D stuff in the mail, one of the first things I did (after reading the original owner's game notebook and the In Search of The Unknown module) was settle down with a random Dragon issue I'd never read before: Issue #121, from 1987.
There's a hilarious article by David "Zeb" Cook, trying to allay people's fears about the coming Second Edition. It's hilarious because, as an avid consumer of Fifth Edition previews, I find it so familiar.
Really, I do want to avoid having to do a Third Edition - at least having to repeat what I'm going through on Second Edition! The only way to do this is to build a set of core rules that can accommodate the inevitable changes and additions that will come. Just as the First Edition was not perfect, I know that new and better ideas will surface after Second Edition is done.
Our current plan is that we haven't got a plan. We are still looking at a lot of different ideas. Currently, all of them revolve around building a core set of rules that can be used by all players. One thought is that there would be two hardbound rule books — the Players Handbook and the Dungeon Masters Handbook (note the title change). These would present the core rules for the game, what everyone needs to know.
This sounds a lot like the marketing for D&D Next: the base 5e game will be very modular. We'll have core rules, and a bunch of room to add optional rules. That way, we can avoid having to do a sixth edition.
(Also, what happened to the proposed name change to Dungeon Master's Handbook? Was there public outcry against it?)
The article goes on to describe the "core" and "optional" rules in ways almost identical to the descriptions of the current new edition, except with the addition of a middle "tournament" rules tier:
TSR's attitude about official rules has changed. You know and I know that people create variants and house rules for use with the AD&D game. Trying to demand that they play only the official rules is pointless. Thats why we're planning on marking rules in the core set as "Standard," "Tournament," and "Optional." Standard rules are the absolute minimum you need to play something that is passably identifiable as the AD&D game - the races, character classes, attack rolls, etc. Tournament rules add the rules that will be normally used in any TSR-sponsored tournament. After all, in a tournament, you should be reasonably certain that you will be playing the same game as your neighbor, a useful thing to ensure fairness at a convention! Best of all, for all you tinkerers out there, the Optional rules allow you to make the game yours, filling your game with as much richness and detail as you want - weapon-based armor-class modifiers, create-your-own character classes, spell-casting times, proficiencies, casting components, and more. Optional rules are just that; if you don't like 'em, you don't use 'em.
Compare that to this Rule of Three article from 2012:
We want to put as many tools as possible in the hands of DMs and their players so they can tailor the game to their preferences. Part of this process involves providing a number of what you’ve heard us refer to as “rules modules”—that is, packages of optional or alternative rules that we have designed, developed, and playtested that help create a certain game play experience, either for a single player or the entire game table.
The second half of that process is one that should also make it easier for homemade rules modules: creating a streamlined base to the game that rules modules can be added to easily. With a clean, lean, and dependable core to the game, we hope to be able to communicate to players and Dungeon Masters what the basics of the game are, and then provide advice for designing your own material to work with that.
It actually seems like the spirit of the fifth-edition revision has more in common with the second edition than I realized.
I don't know if we can make any predictions about 5e based on the optional and tournament rules of 2e, but, for fun, I flipped open my new Second Edition PHB and found the items in the Table of Contents listed as Optional and Tournament:
Proficiencies (Optional)
Encumbrance (optional rule)
Basic Encumbrance (Tournament rule)
Specific Encumbrance (Optional Rule)
Encumbrance and Mounts (Tournament Rule)
Spell Components (Optional Rule)
Weapon Type vs Attack Modifiers (Optional Rule)
Group Initiative (Optional Rule)
Individual Initiative (Optional Rule)
Weapon Speed and Initiative (Optional Rule)
Parrying (Optional Rule)
Jogging and Running (Optional Rule)
What do you think? Will 5e's "clean, lean and dependable core" be leaner and meaner than 2e's "absolute minimum you need to play something that is passably identifiable as the AD&D game" (which core, presumably, included every rule except the ones mentioned above)?
There were a couple of other quotes in the article that I found interesting, not in relation to D&D Next, but to 2e's eventual replacement, Third Edition:
Now, 100% compatibility is just not possible. There are things that must be fixed. There are inevitable improvements and new ideas. These things are going to prevent Second Edition from being 100% compatible. Just what percent compatibility we wind up with, I can't say. Indeed, the need to keep things compatible results in us not making some changes that would only confuse the issue. Take the armor class numbering system. To many players, it does not make sense that the worst armor classes have higher numbers, and it would seem simple to change it. However, reversing the order of the armor class numbers would invalidate every AD&D game campaign and product in existence. For compatibility's sake, it is better to make no change, since this change is not worth the trouble it will cause.
Ascending AC was something that was done in the bolder rules changes of 3e. It's interesting that they were already thinking about it in 1987.
and
Ultimately, there will be people out there who will be playing Version 1.0, Version 1.5, Version 2.0, and probably even Version 2.3 of the AD&D game. Perhaps we should figure out some type of numbering system like that used on computer programs!
It would take this prediction 16 years to come true, with the publication of D&D 3.5.
Categories: Game News
mr. meeson’s will
Fri, 05/11/2012 - 9:42amMister Meeson's Will, by H Rider Haggard, tells the story of a veddy propah Englishwoman who is shipwrecked on a desert island and must have a dying tycoon's will tattooed upon her back. It's part of the 19th century tradition of novels exploring outlandish corner cases of the law, like Wilkie Collins' Man and Wife.
The informational tattoo idea has been explored in fantasy. The tattoo treasure map has been done before: I remember seeing it first in some Ultima game. In D&D, tattoos of spells have been mentioned as alternatives to spellbooks.
Worst case D&D scenario: someone is tattooed with an expendable spell. They're essentially a living scroll. Scrolls self-destruct when used.
This might lead to a rough situation for a poor sailor. He passes out at the tattoo parlor, and wakes up a living - and disposable - piece of ordnance. If the ship is attacked by pirates, the ship's wizard might decide that there's nothing to be done but read the scroll and expend the sailor.
Either that or someone is tattooed with Explosive Runes.
Any other weird D&D consequences of an ill-considered tattoo?
Categories: Game News
The magic quantity: How to scale everything important in the D&D world
Wed, 05/09/2012 - 10:10am
D&D is a game where you spend half your times killing monsters and half your time interacting with the world (adjust proportions to taste). In every edition, the killing-monsters part is very well-defined, mathematically speaking. The interacting-with-the-world part has a few data points here and there: how much do things cost in shops? How many men-at-arms does a level 9 fighter get? for how much can you sell a subdued dragon? At first it all seems like little islands of subsystem in a sea of dm-use-your-judgment, but what would you say if I told you it can all be distilled into a formula THAT ONLY I HAVE DISCOVERED?
You'd rightly tell me that I was going math crazy, like the guy in Pi. So I won't say that. I'll instead offer a rule of thumb that can be surprisingly useful, and offers surprisingly coherent results, that you can use when you don't know how the size of something, how many there are, how much it costs, or any other game-world number.
The Magic Quantity: How Many at What Level?
Every level has a Magic Quantity (and vice versa). It's meant to answer this question: "If I have one of something at level 1, how may will I have at level x?" The magic quantity for level 1 is 1. The magic quantity for level 30 is 1000.
TRANSLATING LEVEL TO QUANTITY:
Level 1 to 10: quantity = level
Level 11+: quantity = 10 per level above 10
Level 21+: quantity = 100 per level above 20
TRANSLATING QUANTITY TO LEVEL:
10 items or less: level = quantity
11+ items: level = 10 + 1 level per 10 items (round down)
101+ items: level = 20 + 1 level per 100 items (round down)
What do you do with a magic quantity?
You multiply it by things. Gold coins, soldiers, miles of land.
x1000 GP: That's how much PCs can earn per level.
x1000 GP: That's the price of a really awesome thing that's appropriate for a given level (pet monster, castle, airship)
x1 mile: That's the diameter of the domain PCs can control.
x1 soldier: That's how many soldiers PCs can defeat singlehanded.
x10 soldiers: That's how many soldiers PCs can command.
Disadvantages of this system:
Advantages of this system:
I think this rule of thumb is strong enough to be the backbone of several D&D subsystems. Below, I'll try a couple, and compare my work against existing D&D rules.
TREASURE PER LEVEL
If you multiply the Magic Quantity by 1000 GP to generate treasure by level, a character might get 1000 GP at level 1, 2000 GP at level 2, 20k GP at level 12, 100k at level 20, and 1 million GP at level 30. (Or less. This might be the total treasure the DM puts into the adventures, but no party clears out the whole dungeon.)
This not too terribly far off from the 3e expected Wealth By Level. A WBL character would earn 900 GP as opposed to 1000 at level 1. By level 20, a character using the magic quantity system would have accumulated about 600,000 GP; a 20th level WBL character is expected to have wealth of 760,000.
(For first edition, where GP=XP, wealth by level is irrelevant. You level up as soon as you collect the right amount of money.)
AWESOME THINGS
I recently posted a giant list of things for high-level characters to buy. I used the Magic Quantity rule to price the items.
The awesome-things economy is based on the same multiplier as the treasure-by-level economy - x1000 GP - so you can always spend your level's worth of treasure for one level-appropriate cool thing. This might be a magic item, in campaigns where you can buy magic items; a new spell; or cool stuff like hippogriff eggs, castles, and flying pirate ships. To determine a cool thing's price, just figure out the level at which you'd expect it to show up in the campaign. For a pet monster or henchman, this is the level of the monster. For instance, if a hippogriff is a level 3, encounter level 3, or 3 HD monster, you could price a hippogriff at 3,000 gp.
How well does this stack against canonical rules? OD&D specifies that a party can sell a subdued ancient red dragon for about 50k GP, so I presume they can buy it for 100k GP. That means that, if a red dragon were for sale, a level 20 character could afford to buy it. Badass! Similarly, in AD&D, hippogriffs are 3 HD monsters whose eggs and fledglings sell for 1000, 2000, or 3000 GP, depending on age.
From the 1e DMG, it's hard to tell how much it costs to build a typical castle - the construction menu is complicated - but I priced a four-tower castle of a couple thousand square feet at around 20,000 GP, which would make it suitable for level 12. Sure.
LAND CONTROLLED
Let's say we use the magic quantity for the diameter, in miles, of a PC's area of control: 1 mile at level 1, up to 1000 at level 30. That means that a level 1 character will find enemy monsters 20 minutes from his house, while a level 30 character can control an area about the size of Europe.
How well does this stack against canonical rules? We'll sanity-check this against the only D&D data we have for determining characters' areas of control: the rules for PCs building strongholds at name level. At level 10, when an OD&D fighter is clearing five-mile hexes for his stronghold, a Magic Quantity character can control a ten-mile-diameter area (about four hexes). OD&D specifies that a character can control land up to 20 miles distant from a single stronghold: that's a diameter of 40 miles, and, according to the magic quantity rule, would require a level-14 character. This is plausible for the level of a character who has maxed out his stronghold. For it to grow any further, a character will need to become a monarch or other ruler of vassals.
If you want to be a serious big-time king, you need to conquer an area the size of England. It's about 300 miles from the north of England to the south, making England a level-23 realm. (France is level 27.)
SOLDIERS DEFEATED
How many soldiers (or, more strictly, level 1 creatures) can a character expect to beat? Using the magic quantity for this might, or might not, match with actual combats run in different D&D editions. It's hard to say for sure, because D&D doesn't handle battles against 100 opponents very well. It's also inexact because it varies a lot by class and situation: a flying wizard can lay waste to legions while the rogue is better away from the battlefield. The numbers are reasonably plausible, though: A level 1 character can beat one soldier (sure, PCs are better than NPCS). A fifth-level fighter can defeat 5 soldiers, a 15th-level fighter 50, and a 25th-level fighter 500.
How well does this stack against canonical rules? I think it works reasonably well up to level 10, especially if you use the fighter as your yardstick. High-level PCs don't engage in melee with dozens of orcs, so let's turn away from D&D, towards literature, and see if we're capturing the right feel for battlefield might.
For an example of a paragon-level fighter - over level 10 - I usually think of Inigo Montoya, one of the best duelists in the world, who helpfully comments that, even at his best, he could not defeat 60 men. If he could defeat 50, that would put him at a very plausible level 15. For over-the-top epic heroes, one of the best is mythical Irish warrior Cú Chulainn. When he's singlehandedly defending Ulster from the army of Connacht, he flips out and kills "one hundred, then two hundred, then three hundred, then four hundred, then five hundred, where he stopped" - making him a level 25 barbarian. Archbishop Turpin, one of Gygax's inspirations for the cleric class, supposedly killed 400 Saracens in a battle, which means he's a level 24 cleric.
Now that that's set in stone, we can settle an old debate! What level are the Lord of the Rings characters? At the Battle of the Hornburg, Gimli kills 42 enemies to Legolas's 41, so both characters are level 14. That's settled!!
SOLDIERS COMMANDED
Let's say that a PC war leader usually has access to a number of level-one troops equal to 10 x the Magic Quantity. Thus, a fighter might command 10 troops at level 1 (as a sergeant), 100 troops at level 10 (as a lord), 1000 troops at level 20 (as a king), and 10,000 troops at level 30 (as an emperor). 100 at level 10 is in line with the followers granted to 10th-level fighters in the 1e DMG, and 10,000 is a realistic historical size for a medieval army from a powerful (non-points-of-light) country like France. (The largest late-medieval armies are larger than the ones generated by these rules, but human populations are probably smaller in a fantasy world shared with a hundred hostile species.)
How well does this stack against canonical rules? A level 9 AD&D fighter collects between 60 and 120 troops - 90 average. In OD&D, every group of 30 bandits has a 4th level leader, 50 bandits have a 5th or 6th level leader, and 100 bandits have an 8th or 9th level leader.
I'll go more into this later: for instance, I think you could put the troop guidelines together to make a decent mass combat system.
Categories: Game News
kickstarter posters shipping this week! In the meantime, run a barony!
Mon, 05/07/2012 - 10:00amGameSalute has been busy. They're doing shipping and fulfillment for my project as well as the Dwimmermount, Sunrise City and Empires of the Void kickstarters, as well as some others. Still, Dan at GameSalute says he'll begin shipping the posters this week. Thank you all for your patience!
Around the time that posters are shipped, everyone will get a URL where you can download PDFs of the posters and, eventually, the other rewards as they become available. Most of the other PDFs (all-star adventure book, board game, etc) aren't ready yet, but one reward that WILL be ready for $22+ backers (and $15 backers) is a PDF version of Paul's DM Notebook!
I've been working on the DM notebook for a lot of hours over the past month, and it's just about done: I just need to do one or two more illustrations. It weighs in at 64 pages. This will be a beta version of the book. I'd love it if you guys each tested something from the notebook in your next game and sent me some feedback. Next month or so, I'll update the notebook and make the final version available as a PDF and on lulu.
In the meantime, here's a big chunk of Chapter 7, which includes prices for big-ticket items like castles and armies, and gives rules for running a barony of your own.
Also, here's a picture I drew yesterday, for the Epic Adventures section of the book.
Categories: Game News
in search of the unknown
Fri, 05/04/2012 - 10:23am
I've heard a lot of references to the 1981 module "In Search of the Unknown:" it came with the first edition of Basic D&D, and a lot of people have fond memories of it. I've never read it. When I got a heavy box of D&D books in the mail, it was the first module I grabbed.
I've been on a search of my own lately, exploring the D&D I missed before I entered the hobby. As a kid, I played in bizarre junior high versions of Red Box Basic and AD&D, and as an adult I've mostly played third and fourth edition. It's been fun playing OD&D: I'm slowly getting a handle on a different style of D&D than one I've ever played.
I was delighted to find Mike Carr's lengthy "how to play D&D" essay at the beginning of the module. It's pretty similar to advice in the OD&D and Dungeon Master's Guide books, but since I've never read it before, it's fresh. I have two other fresh experiences with which to compare the advice: my OD&D games with Mike Mornard and my extremely close study of Gary Gygax's Random Dungeon Generation tables from the Dungeon Master's Guide. There are a lot of parallels to draw here.
mapping
Here's what Mike Carr says about the dungeon in In Search of the Unknown:
The dungeon is designed to be instructive for new players. Most of it should be relatively easy to map, although there are difficult sections - especially on the lower level where irregular rock caverns and passageways will provide a real challenge.
I didn't realize until Mike Mornard spelled it out for us that mapping was intended to be one of the big challenges of D&D. The labyrinth is as dangerous as the minotaur. In Search of the Unknown is explicitly teaching mapping skills. The assumption is that more advanced modules will be bigger mapping challenges.
It is quite possible that adventurers (especially if wounded or reduced in number) may want to pull out of the stronghold and prepare for a return visit when refreshed or reinforced. If this is done, they must work their way to an exit.
When we play in Mike Mornard's D&D game, he makes us use our maps. We can't say "We leave the dungeon." Every time, we have to specify our twists and turns back to the entrance. This still feels foreign to me. I think I've quoted Baf of The Stack before: a game is about what you spend your time doing. OD&D is a game about mapping. Exploration takes more game time than combat. Coming from 3e and 4e, I feel like I've been playing a different game.
I love the 1e Player's Handbook illustration of the troll re-winding the twine trailed by the fighter. (I referenced it in my poster.) Mornard related this story: Once in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor game, some guys decided to leave string behind them instead of mapping. Eventually, the rope jerked out of their hands and started unrolling, and then they heard a slurping, like someone eating spaghetti. Mapping is a necessary skill: don't try cheat your way out of it.
caution
One player in the group should be designated as the leader, or "caller" for the party... once the caller (or any player) speaks and indicates an action is being taken, it is begun - even if the player quickly changes his or her mind (especially if the player realizes he or she has made a mistake or error in judgment).
Before playing in Mike Mornard's game, my eye would have skipped over this classic bit of old-school advice as irrelevant to me. Now I've seen it in action:
DM: There are passages north and west.
US: We go south.
DM: Bump... bump... you bump into the wall.
More ridiculously, I recently had my thief start down the magic staircase into the chamber of Necross the Mad, even though I knew that the stairway hadn't been summoned yet. A merciful DM would have reminded me of that fact - what adventurer would step off a ledge? - but Mike Mornard took me at my word, and I fell. Mike only gave me one point of damage, where perhaps Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson would have assigned more.
Mike says that his game is pretty close to the Gary and Dave game in rules and in content, but where their influences ran more to swords and sorcery, Mike brings more Warner Brothers to the table. There is a lot of laughing in Mike's game, where Gary and Dave's were grimmer. But in all three games - and in Mike Carr's game as well - you need to listen to the DM, and visualize what you hear - and think. As Mike Carr's introduction says elsewhere, "Careless adventurers will pay the penalty for a lack of caution - only one of the many lessons to be learned within the dungeon!"
time
Every third turn of adventuring, the DM should take a die roll for the possible appearance of wandering monsters at the indicated chances (which are normally 1 in 6)... Some occurrences (such as noise and commotion caused by adventurers) may necessitate additional checks... Wasted time is also a factor which should be noted, as players may waste time arguing or needlessly discussing unimportant matters or by simply blundering around aimlessly. ... You set the tempo of the game and are responsible for keeping it moving. If players are unusually slow... allow additional chances for wandering monsters to appear.
This passage will feel very familiar to the players in Mike Mornard's game. We've all grown to fear the d6, which comes rolling out at us whenever we're "needlessly discussing unimportant matters or simply blundering around aimlessly" - which is often. Wandering monsters disappeared from 4e (and from many 3e games) because they slowed down the game pointlessly. What Mike Carr is suggesting here, and what we've learned from Mike Mornard, is that wandering monster checks are actually a way to preserve pacing. Once you're in the dungeon, you can't afford to get bogged down in bickering over minutiae. How I wish that work meetings came with wandering monster checks.
mysterious containers
The dungeon includes a good assortment of typical features which players can learn to expect, including... mysterious containers with a variety of contents for examination.
The typical D&D treasure announcement isn't "You find 1000 GP in a chest:" it's "You find an old wooden chest. What do you do?" Containers are important. The Appendix A random generator has three separate tables for rolling up characteristics of treasure containers. Here are a couple of the ones I've encountered in OD&D:
Contact poison on trap: One of the cardinal OD&D rules is "check the chest for traps." As the party thief, I make sure to incant this formula. I think that the Greyhawk supplement has rules for finding traps, and I imagine that my odds of success are quite low, but in the last game, Mike told me, without requiring a roll, that the lock was covered with a brownish paste. Good enough warning for me to wear gloves. This transforms a 50/50 chance at arbitrary death into a game element that rewards a methodical, cautious play-style: quite in keeping with the mysterious OD&D "player skill."
We considered taking the chest with us so we could brush it against opponents, but Mike's beatific expression - that of a DM who's thought of flaws in PCs' plans - warned us to leave it where it was.
Invisible chests: Invisible chests are are oddly common in dungeons made with the Appendix A random generator - and hard to illustrate. They always seemed to me oddly pointless. Why include a treasure you can't possibly find?
In our case, we passed the invisible chest on the way into a room, but tripped over it on the way out. I can imagine it working like OD&D's 3 in 6 chance to fall in a pit: there are rewards, as well as dangers, you might never know you passed.
Our invisible chest contained 1000 or so gold, but we were all struck by the advantages of owning our own invisible chest. My character in particular, who frequently leaves his bandit hirelings unsupervised at home, has every need of a way to hide his treasure.
There's probably a lot more of interest in In Search of the Unknown, but I'll leave the rest unread - just in case I can get someone to run it for me. After all (says Mike Carr,) "this element of the unknown and the resultant exploration in search of the unknown treasures (with hostile monsters and unexpected dangers to outwit and overcome) is precisely what a DUNGEONS & DRAGONS adventure is all about."
Categories: Game News
Portable hole, leveled
Wed, 05/02/2012 - 9:51amPortable hidey hole: This is just like a Portable Hole, but a creature may enter the portable hole and seal it up behind them. Every day, the creature must make a Stealth check with a +10 bonus which is used against all Perception checks. A creature in the hole may make Perception checks at a -10 penalty to hear what's going on outside.
My old houserules for leveling magic items mean that every piece of magical treasure has the potential to gain power in ways that the players can't predict. Furthermore, WOTC recently invented the concept of the "rare magic item," but we don't yet have lots of examples.While some items may get mechanically better (for instance, a +1 sword becomes a +2 sword), it's more challenging to improve items that don't have numeric bonuses. I thought I'd go through the Wondrous Items in the 4e Player's Handbook and give examples of how each could gain powers that reflect their history.
Inside the hole it is cramped and dark, with enough air for one Small or Medium creature with no fire. It is possible to eat and perform other quiet activities inside the hole. Loud activities will grant perception checks to nearby creatures.
Portable hobbit halfling hole: This portable hole is not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it is a halfling hole, and that means comfort.
Notch's Portable Mine Shaft: At the bottom of this Portable Hole is an unusually soft stone surface that, with proper mining tools, can be tunneled through quickly but loudly, in any direction, at a rate of 1 foot/hour. Tunnels and shafts can be excavated up to a maximum distance of 15 feet from the portable hole. If a tunnel breaks through into an area of open air in the real world, the digger can step through into that space. When the portable hole is removed from the surface, all tunnels are removed and the original surface is unharmed.
Categories: Game News
Scans of some kid’s D&D notebook from 1989
Mon, 04/30/2012 - 10:15amAs I mentioned, I recently came into a windfall: 45 pounds of D&D stuff that comprise some kid's D&D collection from the 80s. From the Dragon magazines, it looks like he subscribed from about '83 to '89, and he stopped playing around the time Second Edition came out.
I was excited to get the books and magazines, but the first thing I opened was the spiral notebook, on the cover of which were scratched the letters "D+D".
It's a peculiar, and brief, notebook. I might need a little help prizing out its secrets.
It starts very strong, with an awesome map of a land called ARCAUEN:
There are so many kickass names here, including, but not limited to, Drosifer Tower... Doricus... Isles of Clakoron... Drafek...Okioxion... Mount Flinkorst... Garroten... Dracorius Hill... Blueis Lake... Bay of Bengal... Straight of the Dragon. It's like an episode of He-Man, in the best possible way. My favorites have to be Bay of Bengal - yeah, it is an awesome name for a bay, even if it is real! and Straight of the Dragon. Straight of the Dragon isn't even a strait - it's a peninsula. Spotmarkedx suggested that the world of Arcauen is two dimensions, which you can traverse with the right spell: an island, in which the Straight is a peninsula, and a landlocked sea, in which the Straight is - well, still not a strait, actually. Maybe some sort of bay. Anyway, a good idea.
Other locations of note: Black Ledge, which protects Drosifer Tower, the home of (I suspect) the greatest evildoer of the campaign, and Plathister Tower, where good wizards weave great magics using the poetry of Sylvia Plath. That's just a guess.
The other interesting thing about this map is the scale: it's not a continent, as I first thought, but a pretty small island. It's maybe 30 miles across - approximately the same size as Mauritius. There are a lot of great locations packed together pretty tightly here.
On the next page, we have an Encounter Table!
It's a generalized encounter table, suitable for any location. It's quite well constructed: you can run encounters on the fly in Dangerous, Average, and Civilized zones. The monsters aren't filled it - you can do that when you run it. The percentages and the dice expressions look very reasonable. Either this is some published chart I've never read, from Second Edition or something, or this kid did a great job here.
Next page!
This is where the notebook gets confusing. What is that square thing on the bottom? A map? It does appear to say "15 ft" next to the tube thing.
In the corner, it looks like the player was writing with his left hand, or eyes closed, or something. "Assassin"? "Plokius"? And is that the eye of Sauron on a necklace?
Next page:
The thing at the top is a walled town: it's divided into "town", "castle", and "army", and it has little towers at the corners. This page also has some bizarre writing: a cipher or doodle language? and the enigmatic message "ROOM book".
I can make head nor tail of nearly nothing on this page, although I wouldn't be surprised if the thing at the bottom were barracks of some kind. I like the picture of the dashing, possibly levitating, mustachioed fellow. I believe he is wearing a clock around his neck like Flavor Flav. Or possibly it is the Eye of Sauron. Anyway, the guy is proud of it.
On the next page, the writer is trying to solve a cryptogram. I guess he's a player, not the DM. Can we give him any help? FO_IA_O
The rest of the page features a stick figure with 9 arms and legs, and a directional system for use with a d8, maybe for splash damage or wind direction.
On the last page of notes, we've got (top left) a silhouette of a unicorn duck, some wavy lines and numbers I don't understand, and the "first level" of something. Possibly a medieval mall.
You see what I'm saying, right guys? Confusing! Any ideas about what any of this means?
As a bonus, here are some character sheets:
Polass is cool because he has two names. I bet the other players had a field day with the fact that he had "ass" in his name, so the player, disgusted, wrote "Name: Polis" on the right side of the character sheet. This human barbarian ("fighter" written with a different pen) has plausible, rolled-looking stats. He also has THAC0 and non-weapon proficiencies, which narrows him down in time a little bit. 26 HP seems high for a first level character.
Polass's good gear, earned in adventuring, is written in pencil. He has a +2 Ring of Protection (boss!) and some mysterious stuff: "1 red, 1 black bottle", "quadruple crossbow", "ice blade", "silver balls 30". I like it all, and will use it as treasure in the next game I run, especially the quadruple crossbow.
Next, Dicorace! This player is pretty good at coming up with cool names. Cool names that end with something that sounds like "ass", and things that begin with "dick" or "pole", but who knows how intentional that was.
Dicorace is an elven mage with similarly high HP (12 at level 2) and more awesome equipment written in pencil: "1 green 1 white bottle", "eyes of dazing", "amulet of flight", "wand of fear". He also has 30 SP, which I just can't convince myself is silver pieces. Spell Points? He has 30. But Polass the barbarian fighter had 30 SP too. Maybe SP is some second edition stat I've forgotten.
Finally, Dicorace's spellbook:
Pretty good - fourth level spells for a second-level mage.
All in all, it looks like a pretty fun game. I'd join. Maybe I'd learn why everyone ended up with all these colored bottles!
Update: One last find: I flipped open Unearthed Arcana and found this beginning of what could well have been the greatest novel of the 20th century, had it been completed:
Categories: Game News
literary source of the brooch of shielding?
Fri, 04/27/2012 - 10:07amThe Brooch of Shielding (which absorbs 101 HP of Magic Missile attacks) was useful in early D&D editions, when evil wizards filled so many slots in the wandering monster tables and when there were so few low-level attack spells. By third edition, with the proliferation of monsters and spells, it was significantly less so. I bet that during the run of third edition, nobody's Brooch of Shielding ever took 101 points of Magic Missile damage.
It's not necessary to posit a specific literary model for the Brooch of Shielding: it's not too hard to come up with an item that protects against missile attacks. Still, here's a plausible literary source: a passage from Gardner F. Fox's 1964 Warrior of Llarn, written by an author Gary Gygax admired (and who is part of the Appendix N pantheon) at a time when Gygax was reading practically all the sci-fi and fantasy that came out.
The Llarnians carry ornaments on them - the medallion on a chain was such an ornament - that counteract the deadly efficiency of the red needle beams. These roundels perform somewhat the same service to their wearers as do lightning rods on earth. Their peculiar metal absorbs the awesome power of the red rays as soon as they come within a foot of anyone wearing them.
I take the Brooch of Shielding's 101-HP maximum to be a game balance thing; and I'm not sure what to make of the strange specificity of its description: "The Brooch of Shielding appears to be a piece of silver or gold jewelry, usually (90%) without gems inset." I guess sometimes you just like to roll a d100.
Categories: Game News
look what i got in the mail
Wed, 04/25/2012 - 9:44amA friend of my wife's said, "My dad has a giant box of D&D stuff in the basement. A friend of his gave it to me but I never played it. Do you want it?" Casually flicking some invisible cigarette ash off my perfectly-creased lapel, I murmured, "sure, if it will help him clear out his basement."
I got the box in the mail today - a banker's box filled with 45 pounds of Dragon magazines, books, and modules. Here's the haul.
The previous owner of this stuff seems to have been playing D&D right before I got into it. His Dragon Magazine collection goes from #87 to around #140, overlapping with mine for a few issues. He has the same hardcovers I had as a kid - I never re-acquired most of them, and I'm glad to see them back.
What's really new to me is the modules. As a D&D-playing kid in the 80s and early 90s, I never had a single module. For years, I've heard people talk with bated breath about their experiences playing Against the Giants, In Search of the Unknown, Vault of the Drown, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Isle of Dread, Ghost Tower of Inverness, and the rest. I'm excited to read them.
Finally, the original owner's D&D notebook and a few characters are in the box. Check out this sweet world map:
It would be totally great to share this random 80's kid's campaign world. Next stop: Arcauen!
Besides Arcauen (obviously), what should I read first?
Categories: Game News
try an easy rpg: d4 basic
Mon, 04/23/2012 - 10:04amI'm a big fan of easy D&D, which means, for me, two things: "easy for the dm to prep" and "easy to explain to a first-time player".
For me, the ideal prep for a game involves brainstorming a few characters and gimmicks. My DM notes generally look like this: "whenever the PCs search a house, they have a 1 in 3 chance of finding the black-handled knife. Whoever owns the house is the witch." and I never get around to looking up the Night Hag stat block.
I've also played a lot of D&D with first-time players, and the more rules they need to learn before they start playing, the more ashamed I feel for wasting their time. I think the ideal situation for a new player is to choose between a few pregens of recognizable archetypes, each of which has a couple of cool, simple attacks.
Experienced players should have lots of customization options, but experienced players can look after their damn selves.
I've been trying a playtest version of Jason Hurst's d4 Basic game. It's sort of a D&D-style RPG/board game which takes the "easiest" elements from each. From the RPG corner, it keeps the idea of the game master who makes judgment calls and referees actions outside the rules. From the Descent-style board game corner, it uses pregen characters and scenarios, clockwise play, and win conditions. The result is a rpg manual that's about 7 pages long: and actually, when you subtract art, table of contents, and the usual "what is an RPG and "what are dice" sections, it's probably 3 or 4 pages of rules. There's more text in the scenarios, treasure cards, and so on, but it's still probably 1/4 of the length of the Descent rules and a tiny fraction of the length of any D&D edition. You could play it with zero prep, and you could probably have a RPG n00b run the thing.
D4 Basic is in open beta right now.
Categories: Game News
playing D&D with mike mornard: better to be lucky than good. third best: be amusingly incompetent
Fri, 04/20/2012 - 9:56amLast time I played D&D in Mike Mornard's campaign was over a month ago, and I never got around to describing the game. I'll see what I can remember now. I should have detailed it at the time, but my kickstarter's taken up all of my time for the past month or so.
I took a look at my last "D&D With Mike" blog post to refresh my memory, and found this interesting passage:
When TSR printed 1000 copies of D&D, Mike said, people thought they were crazy to print so many. Today I feel an especially strong kinship with the guys at TSR, because my D&D poster kickstarter is driven by very much the same sort of loving pastiche, [although] I'd be crazy to expect to sell 1000 of my posters.
Since I wrote that, I sold 1000 posters! I am officially as good as TSR! Right??
OK, maybe not. I think my kickstarter's success was one of those freaks of fate. But hey - it's better to be lucky than good. And, best of all, my good luck means labor for Mike Mornard, since I convinced him to provide a dungeon as a kickstarter stretch goal.
On that note, here's what happened in that month-ago D&D game in Mike's dungeon:
I've mentioned before that in Mornard's game, some of the dungeon's denizens are significantly more powerful than we are. A few sessions ago, when we crept into a dungeon room and saw an unarmed old man scribbling away at a desk, I was terrified. I was convinced that this was one of those guys you don't want to mess with.
Last session, the group convinced me that we should at least go TALK to the guy. Somehow my 11 Charisma makes me the party negotiator, so I walked down the long, straight corridor to his study (thinking all the while about my chances to evade a lightning bolt in such a place). I cleared my throat nervously, and started babbling about how one rarely gets a chance to find such civilized company in the dungeon, and were there any errands we could run for him in town?
Our host introduced himself as Necross the (ha ha ha!) Mad. (As well as a dweller in the dungeon, he seems to be a character from the late 70s Cerebus comic.) Necross did have a quest for us: he wanted us to pick up some pipe tobacco in town next time we were in the area. OK, as quests go, that one sounded like it was within the capabilities of second- to third-level characters.
He also offered us a unique moneymaking opportunity. He had access, he said, to a private entrance to a rich part of the dungeon. He'd show us the entrance for a nominal fee of only 100 gold pieces.
This sounded a lot like the beginning of a confidence scam, but we decided to take the risk. It was only 100 gold pieces, after all.
Necross summoned a djinn and gave him a command. The genie summoned a set of wooden stairs that climbed to a doorway high on the wall of Necross's chamber.
We weren't sure what to make of this. Everyone knows that lower dungeon levels were more dangerous: what do you make of a dungeon level that's higher than level 1? One thing we all agreed on: we were glad we had talked to Necross, and not gone in swords a-blazing. Any wizard powerful enough to command djinn was probably a match for a ragtag group of low-level PCs, bandits, and muleteers.
We climbed the stairs and ventured into the new section of the dungeon. Somewhat to my surprise, we found that Necross had played straight with us about the richness of the treasure. We lost a character to monsters, but found a bunch of treasure, including a piece of jewelry worth 1000 or so gold.
With our loot and our fallen companion burdening our mule, we returned to Necross's chamber. And that's where we hit the "if I was smarter, I would have seen this coming" moment that I've experienced a few times in Mike's game. No doubt you know exactly what's coming, but hey, I'm not as smart as you.
We were in a doorway a few dozen feet up the wall of Necross's chamber. The djinn-summoned stairway was gone.
Necross offered to bring the stairs back, for a nominal fee...
"That's outrageous! We'll get down ourselves! We have a coil of rope!" we cried.
Necross sat back in his chair. "If you can get your mule down with a coil of rope, I'll gladly waive the fee," he said.
We tried. We couldn't find anything to work as a pulley system, and nothing to hang pulleys from anyway. The door was stone and had no doorknob, nor was there anything particularly doorknobby within a few yards down the corridor. If we abandoned the mule, we could have lowered down the corpse, our treasure, and most of our companions, though I don't know how the last party member would have gotten down.
Our wizard suggested that we drop the mule and use his corpse as a mattress to soften our landings, but our faithful muleteer would not have it.
When we finally admitted defeat, Necross waived the fee and summoned the stairway, in exchange for the entertainment we had provided him. Sometimes it's better to be hilariously incompetent than to be lucky or good.
Categories: Game News
Kickstarter reward progress!
Wed, 04/18/2012 - 10:00amI've been working hard in the random dungeon mines, mining random dungeons! I've got a few bits and pieces to show you.
First, here's a small version of the Random Dungeon poster file I sent to the printers:
All the backers will eventually get a big PDF of this, and most of you will get one, two, or more paper copies as well. The printer schedule is later than I'd like: I'm still hoping for late April delivery. We'll see. I'd planned for the poster to be available for WOTC's reprintings of the First Edition books. It looks like WOTC has pushed the reprints to June, so even if I'm late, I'll still beat them.
I'm working hard on all the other backer rewards too! I've got a lot of draft versions of things: I'll show you some samples of what's coming.
Dungeon Robber: I spent all this weekend playtesting Dungeon Robber, the solo board game played on the poster. (As a reminder, everyone who donated $5+ will get a PDF of Dungeon Robber.) Here's a sample table from the Treasure section:
USELESS ITEMS TABLE (roll 1d6)
1: Bad Art. Heavy. You are convinced it is worth 500 GP and will carry it in preference to any Heavy treasure of lesser value. You will only drop it if you are fleeing from a monster; while carrying it, you will not flee if you are at full health. If you get it out of the dungeon, you'll be unable to sell it. Still, you're convinced it's a masterpiece. You'll keep it in your house, and no one will ever appreciate it like you do. High Wisdom: You recognize this item as worthless and leave it where it is.
2: Moldy clothes. They're worth 1gp, but when you pick them up, you must save or take 1d4 damage.
3: Flawed weapon. It does 1d6 damage, and breaks the first time you hit with it. Worth 1gp.
4: Spoiled food. You can only throw away spoiled food if you're being pursued by a nonintelligent monster, and you'll throw away good food first. If you leave the dungeon with it, you get sick for 1d6 days, during which time you will not heal hit point damage. Worth 0gp. High wisdom: You recognize this food as spoiled and leave it where it is.
5: 1d20 cp.
6: 1d20 sp.
And here are 9 ways I died while playtesting:
Conclusion: The most dangerous place in the dungeon is level 1 when you're returning with treasure!
Interactive version of the poster: Haven't started on this yet. Eventually, $5+ backers will get it.
All-Star Dungeon Master book: $17+ backers will get this PDF containing adventures and rules from heavyweight DMs Mike Shea, Mike Mornard, Tracy Hurley, Tavis Allison, Jared von Hindman and James Maliszewski. James Mal has shared with me a rough draft of level 1 of Dwimmermount: as a preview, I'll send that separately to you $17+ backers. Players from my campaign, DON'T LOOK! Actually, go ahead: it will do you little good, now that we're on LEVEL TWO of Dwimmermount!
D&D Stickers! $22+ backers are all getting a sheet of 20 stickers by various awesome artists. The guy at Stickeryou.com was so excited about how the stickers looked that he sent me a blurry photo from his cameraphone of them on the assembly line. It doesn't do them justice, so I'll wait to show you a scan of the actual stickers. But, on a related note...
Virtual Table tokens! If you're getting stickers, you can also get WOTC Virtual Table versions of all the stickers as hero and monster icons. Most of the icons are cropped portraits of the original stickers. Here are a few!
Paul's DM Notebook: This is an ever-growing reward for $22+ backers: I keep on thinking of things to add. Here are two pages from my current draft (click for PDFs):
That's where I am right now. I'm going to keep working on every reward until it's time to put posters in tubes!
Categories: Game News
new category of magic item: magical map
Mon, 04/16/2012 - 10:13amAt the foot of the little rise there was a map of the world, carte du monde, mappamondo, karte der welt, with the countries marked on it in brilliant colors. I knew that if I wanted to go anywhere, from Angola to Paphlagonia, all I had to do was put my foot on the spot.
This quote from Sign of the Labrys got me thinking about how few magical maps there are in D&D. (Between proofing my Random Dungeon poster and working on my stretch-goal board game rules, I'm in a mappy place right now anyway.)
Maps are very important to the play of OD&D. Graph-paper maps are the primary archaeological product of an old-school D&D game, along with empty Mountain Dew bottles. Furthermore, in-game maps (treasure maps) are a big part of OD&D treasure. Nevertheless, there are virtually no magical maps. There might be one or two in splatbooks, but I don't think any core Dungeon Master's Guide has ever featured a magical map. (The 1e DMG, on the other hand, has four different magical periapts.)
Contrast this with computer games. A magical map is one of the ubiquitous items in computer RPGS: so common that it's part of the user interface. Nearly every game comes with an auto-map. I'm splitting hairs here a little: I know that, within the fiction of the game, most auto-maps represent the cartographic efforts of the main character. Still, if you've played old games like The Bard's Tale where you did your own mapping on graph paper, auto-maps feel pretty darn magical.
Here are some magical maps for D&D. They join a proud tradition of D&D's brilliant "you now have permission to ignore the rules" magic items. They don't really give the players new powers: they enable a free-and-easy play style that some prefer. Don't like encumbrance? Have a Bag of Holding! Don't like tracking light sources? Everburning torch!
Along with each magic map are notes about what play style it might support.
AUTOMAP PAPER
Automap paper looks like ordinary paper until a drop of ink is applied to it. The ink will crawl of its own accord, drawing a small overhead map view of the PC's current location. If the PCs are inside a structure, the picture will be scaled so that the entire floor of the building could be drawn on one sheet of paper. If the PCs are outside, it will be scaled so that the entire island or continent can be drawn. Detail level will be appropriate to the scale.
Once the map has been started, it will automatically update itself whenever it's in a new location. It can't map while it's inside a container: it needs to be held in a hand or otherwise out in the open.
Players can draw annotations on the map if they like.
Using automap paper in a game: Start a campaign for a new-school D&D group (3e or 4e) and make them map the dungeons. If they haven't done so before, every group should map a few dungeons. However, not every campaign is dungeon-crawl focused, and so, once the players have run the gauntlet a few times, let them find a sheaf of, say, 50 sheets of automap paper. From then on, let the players peek at your DM map if they ever get lost. This strategy goes with the general progression of level-based games: start with lots of restrictions, and slowly lift them.
This item also works well in games where the DM draws out the important locations on a battlemat.
Because every magical item should have a leveled version, here are some improved versions of Automap Paper:
Architect's Map: This superior version of automap paper is blue, and requires white chalk to activate it instead of ink. It draws a whole dungeon level at once, without requiring you to visit each part, and automatically shows hidden and concealed doors, as well as any trap that was built as part of a building's original construction.
Using the Architect's Map in a game: Give the PCs a copy of the DM map. It's up to them to track their journey and to notice your notations for traps and secret doors. While automap paper can be given freely to PCs, an Architect's Map might be a limited resource: players might find 1d4 sheets at a time. An architect's map is especially good when you don't mind letting the players making informed decisions about where to go.
Living Map: This is the Harry Potter version of the automap. It uses moving dots of ink to represent all living things on the map. A cluster of 10 hobgoblins might look like one large dot, and be indistinguishable from five hobgoblins, or from a dragon.
Using the Living Map in a game: Like the Architect's Map, this should be an expendable resource. It's handy in an ordinary dungeon: it's nice to be able to check the map to see if there's an ambush behind the door. It's even more useful for heist, stealth, or chase adventures. It's a nice magic item for groups that like to outthink obstacles instead of killing everyone in their way: in other words, give it to your Shadowrun group when they're playing D&D for a change. Keep in mind that a single piece of map paper only graphs one floor. If a creature goes upstairs, it's off the map.
Travel Map: If a character touches a point on this automap, he or she will instantly travel to that location. Keep in mind that the automap only charts visited places, so a character cannot use it to travel somewhere new. Also, a travel map can only teleport a single player: since the map travels with the player, it can't be used for party travel.
This map's special properties are only available if its owner is in the mapped area: in other words, a player can't use a travel map of a dungeon to teleport into the dungeon. He or she may only teleport from one point in the dungeon to another.
This map is especially useful as an outdoor map: travel between cities is usually more time-consuming and difficult than travel between different rooms in a dungeon.
Using a travel map in a game: A single piece of travel map paper, used as a continental map, can expedite the kind of fast-travel used in most computer RPGs. The first time you go somewhere, you have to go there the hard way. Once you've been there, you can hand-wave any future travel to or from that location. A single travel map allows a single character to take intra-continental jaunts, allowing for lots of communication and resupply options; more useful fast travel requires enough maps for the whole party. A pack of travel-map paper is a pretty good find for a high-level party which is outgrowing wilderness adventures.
A fun trick: Don't let the players know that their map is of the "travel map" variety. Watch the players during the game. When someone touches a spot on the map to make a point, tell everyone that that player's character has disappeared.
Categories: Game News
Mass Effect 3 and the plight of the Information Age
Fri, 04/13/2012 - 10:03am
My Shepard was female AND an infiltrator!
MASS EFFECT 3 SPOILERS AHEAD
This article is only kind of about Mass Effect 3:
- First of all, I really LIKED Mass Effect 3, including the ending!
- Second of all, it appears that many people didn't (check out the user ratings): http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/mass-effect-3
Why didn't they like it? My principle theory: The ending was too grim. People felt like they put all this hard work into their character and made all the "right" choices only to end up having to sacrifice Shepard in the end. Essentially, the ending was too sad and there's a perception that if you can change a bunch of other parts of the story, why shouldn't you be able to achieve an ideal happy ending?
This got me thinking about how there are certain kinds of computer/video games "choices" that kind of don't work. Or rather they don't work for me or, I imagine, most people I know:
- If a game has a "sad" ending or choice that could be avoided, and I can reload to prevent that sad ending, 90% of the time I will do so. The only time I won't do so is if neither ending is "correct"; i.e. maybe I have a choice between sacrificing myself or others, for example. Neither choice is obviously correct, so I will go with the one that feels best to me.
- If a game has a "sad" ending or choice that could be avoided, and I can't reload BUT I can look up a guide to preventing the sad ending on the internet, I will do so, providing I have warning ahead of time, such as by reading a review or talking to a friend. Or at least I imagine I will; I've never really played a game that has those kinds of choices and doesn't give you the opportunity to reload.
Essentially, when it comes to storytelling in a computer game/video game format, I can't stand a sad ending or outcome IF I HAVE A CHOICE to change it. Basically, I feel like a failure in those situations. I'm playing a game after all, and I will choose the ending or course of action that feels most like winning to me, reloading or checking the internet if necessary. I use this kind of thought process in most tabletop RPGs too (the exception being some indie rpgs); however, in those cases I do not have the luxury of reloading or checking the internet for the correct course of action.
To return to Mass Effect 3, I think it was okay that the endings were so grim no matter what actions you took. That is the ONLY real way to craft a narrative in a computer/video game if you want the vast majority of players to experience a less than perfect ending.
Why not just offer a perfect happy ending if that's what everyone wants? Short answer: it's bad storytelling. Sometimes a story, even one presented through a game that gives you choices to affect the events of the story, works best if it ends on a bittersweet or downright depressing note. For an obvious example, look at the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex; he has already killed his father and married his mother at the beginning of the story, and so there is no way for it to end happily!
I felt like that was the case with Mass Effect 3, which is incredibly dark from the beginning, a desperate struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds; while not Greek tragedy level inevitable, ending the story with the sacrifice of the main character (in all but one of the endings) seems quite appropriate.
So what's the take-away from all of this? Craft computer games with nuanced endings and consequences! Instead of having an obvious success or failure (you save the peasant's life or let him die) make the consequences cool and interesting (the peasant dies but he stops the fire from spreading across the village or he lives but many more homes in the village burn down, leaving villagers without homes). If you don't, then keep in mind that most people will just reload to get the happy ending.
I feel like Mass Effect 3 achieved this with its endings. Even the so called "perfect" ending where Shepard lives has her (I played a female Shepard) destroying all synthetic life in the galaxy! Not exactly a happy ending. Mass Effect 3 also achieved this dynamic with some of the choices you are presented with. For example, since I played with a new character my first time around, I was presented with the choice to to cure the genophage and risk the Krogans being the next big threat when the war dies down or pretend to cure it and curse the Krogans to eventually die off as a species. For me the choice was obvious, but this was a legitimate ethical choice with pros and cons! In contrast, some of the Mass Effect 3 outcomes felt more like rewards or punishments based on your paragon score, which were definitely not as interesting and left me disappointed that I didn't import my character fully Paragon character from Mass Effect 2 so I could succeed.
Maybe I am not giving people enough credit, and a lot of people play games without reloading often and without checking on the internet for hints when presented with choices that could dramatically alter the flow of the game or result in less than perfect outcomes. In some ways, I kind of wish I played games that way, but I don't! I'd kind of like to be forced to play a game that way, and in fact, that is one of the things I like about traditional table-top rpgs, that there is someone running the game ensuring that choices have permanent consequences. However, in the world we live in, I think creating computer games that present cool nuanced choices and outcomes without incredibly obvious "right" answers is the way to go.
Categories: Game News
Sign of the Labrys: Oh, so THAT’S where dungeon levels are from!
Thu, 04/12/2012 - 10:21amI bought Sign of the Labrys because it's on the Appendix N reading list, and because Mike Mornard recommended that I read it to understand where the D&D "dungeon" came from. Its bizarre 1960's back-cover blurb was icing on the cake:
This blurb merits further discussion, but right now, I want to talk about dungeon levels.
Pages one through 19 of Sign of the Labrys are fairly ordinary post-apocalyptic science fiction. Then on page 20, Margaret St. Clair gets down to business and explains exactly how dungeons work in D&D:
It is important to understand what a level is. It is not much like a floor in an office building. A level may be a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet deep, and subdivided into several tiers. Also, access to them is not uniform. The upper levels are simple and straightforward; one gets to and from them by stairs, escalators, or elevators. [...] But the upper levels are easy. As one goes down, it gets difficult. Entrances and exits are usually concealed.
It is interesting to note that just going down a set of stairs doesn't guarantee that you're going into a deeper "level": a complex that's 150 feet deep, and composed of several tiers, can be considered a single level if it's part of the same ecosystem. And that is, I think, how early dungeons were designed. Each level was its own conceptual unit: it might or might not be composed of several floors.
The author goes on to explain something else puzzling about Gygaxian dungeon design: levels aren't always stacked one above another.
F had been designed as the laboratory level, but there had been a foul-up in its construction. F1 and F2, the partial levels, or tiers, which had been meant to house the lab workers of F, had been constructed above it and on the bias, like the two arms of a Y.
Compare that to a side view of a dungeon from OD&D's Underworld and Wilderness Adventures:
It's important to Gygax that the dungeon levels have the same sort of complex relationships to each other that they do in the above St. Clair quote. Look at levels 4a and 4b, above level 5 like the two arms of a Y.
James Mal, ever a careful OD&D scholar, makes sure to do something similar in his Dwimmermount megadungeon: level 1 has two stairs down, leading to levels 2A and 2B. Who knows if Dwimmermount would be designed thus if there had not been a "foulup in the construction" of Level F in Sign of the Labrys!
High five, guys! We squeezed a lot of D&D out of that single page. But page 20's bounties are not yet exhausted. Here's some prototypical dungeon exploration, still on page 20 (and running to page 21):
The corridor was narrow and high. It ran straight for six or eight feet, and then seemed to descend a couple of steps... I walked along the corridor to where it changed level... the space in front of me was large, perhaps twenty by fifty feet, and it was carpeted with a dense deep covering of shining white... the space before me, from wall to wall, was filled with white rats.
Change the first person past tense to present second, and you have something that sounds a lot like a DM's monologue, even down to the obsession with measurements. So much, in fact, that I stole this room and put it into Dwimmermount when I ran the Lawful Evil event - along with a sinister glowing gem that turned people into rats. The party members, Lawful Evil as they were, went to great lengths to convince other characters to touch the gem.
Categories: Game News
you shall know the monsters by their traces
Tue, 04/10/2012 - 10:19amOK, back to D&D!
I've been thinking about monsters that leave signs of their passing: creepy clues that mystify the PCs the first time they're encountered. After the PCs have fought the monsters once, these clues allow the PCs to make informed choices about what's behind the next dungeon door.
This was inspired a little by Mike Mornard's tales of the original Gygax dungeons: outside a particularly dangerous part of the dungeon, the PCs might notice skulls and gnawed bones. Skulls and bones are so generic, though. Here are some extremely specific monsters and the strange trails they leave:
the teeth and buckles man
The party comes upon a pile of scattered metal bits: belt buckles, coins, and a sword blade. Besides the metal items, there are a few dozen human teeth on the ground, along with a few splotches of blood. A hundred yards later, the party finds a similar pile of metal and teeth.
Later, the PCs encounter a few leather-clad human guards. The weaponless guards wave the heroes, grinning, their pink mouths empty of teeth.
So here's my idea: this monster, which is sort of like an extra-creepy doppelganger, eats people and then takes their form. It hates to touch metal, and it can't do teeth: it can't digest them and it can't imitate them.
In battle, the Teeth and Buckles Man grabs and absorbs its prey. Its attacks are AC attacks that ignore the armor bonus of non-metal armor: it's perfectly happy to eat leather. The creature's grab does damage every round until the creature or the target are killed, or the target escapes. If a target is killed by the Teeth and Buckles Man, it takes the victim's form: it sheds all metal and spits out the victim's teeth before it continues.
The Teeth and Buckles Man is resistant to wooden weapons, like staves, and natural weapons like claws. Metal weapons and teeth do full damage.
I think that the Teeth and Buckles Man does its best to masquerade as its victim, the better to take any companions unawares. It's not a very effective ruse, though, because the monster can't talk, and is unaware that its toothless smile is unnerving.
The Red Unicorn
The PCs find that a section of the dungeon is criss-crossed with many thin trails of dried blood, like one of those fancy desserts drizzled with chocolate. Eventually, the PCs find that a blood trail down one of the corridors is fresh and red.
The players might well freak out and refuse to investigate. If they follow the trail, they'll eventually corner a white unicorn. From the beast's mouth drips an endless rope of bloody drool. The unicorn will attack in a panicked frenzy.
If the PCs incapacitate or kill the unicorn and investigate, they will find that something strange is lodged in the unicorn's throat: maybe a black iron burr, or a wide-eyed silent toad, or a small dancing man with arrowheads instead of feet. If this object is placed into any creature's mouth, that creature will drool endless blood and attack all creatures on sight.
It's always tempting to use unicorns as victims of the tragic and grotesque. Maybe one of these days I'll include a healthy, happy unicorn in one of my games.
Here's why I think this is a good idea: Bizarre monster details aside, I think it is good to give players some basis on which to make decisions. "Do you turn right or left?" and "Do you open the door or not?" are not compelling decisions unless you have an inkling what's to the right or what's behind the door. Many wandering monsters could profitably be exchanged for signs of the wandering monsters' presence, enticing or warning the PCs about what's ahead.
Categories: Game News
A thousand (and more) thanks!
Mon, 04/09/2012 - 10:10amThe Random Dungeon kickstarter is over: it ended up with almost $28,000 dollars and more than 1000 backers. That's a far cry from the $2,000 I expected to earn.
In fact, I thought $2,000 was going to be a stretch. I was way off base: I vastly underestimated the generosity and enthusiasm of D&D fans. You guys saw my project and didn't just say "I like that;" you said, "I'm going to make that happen." That's pretty awesome, and I'm hugely grateful to everyone who pledged, linked, commented, or just approved. I really hope that the finished project will make everyone happy.
Along the way, I got swept up in the excitement, and I came up with a lot of backer rewards! They're all coming: I'll be working an extra 40 hours a week (or more) until everything is finished. The posters are off to the printers, and I'm happy with how the DM's notebook is coming out. All the work I've seen from my all-star DMs and artists looks great.
Speaking of rewards, here's a little business to take care of:
Finally, I'd like to give one more colossal THANK YOU! to you all, for one outstanding Kickstarter!
Categories: Game News