Dungeons and Dragons Sunday Link Smashup for June 01, 2008
I’ve got some amazing links for you this week, so let’s get right to them!
Sandie Law had a great post a while ago called Geeks are Everywhere. This made me think of the Assets or liabilities? question we’ve been bantering around here for a while.
This is your last chance to get in on the Name This Blog, Win A Prize contest. I’ll be closing the comments at midnight EST on Wednesday. Help me out, and get a free D&D book in the process!
Martin over at Gnome Stew wrote an excellent article on 17 Steps to GMing a New RPG for the First Time. This is especially useful right now, as many of us are about to run a new RPG (D&D 4E) for the first time. Give Martin’s article a lookie.
Speaking of 4E (and who isn’t right now, really?) if you haven’t read Chatty’s and Critical Hits reviews of Keep on the Shadowfell, you ought to. We played our first session last night, and I’m hoping to have a review for you by the end of the week.
If you’re a player creating a new character, or planning on creating one any time soon, make sure you give Yax’s Pimp my character - a community project a look. Let his community do the work for you.
That’s all for now, folks. Tomorrow, I’ve got an interview with Harrison McLeod of Capturing Fantasy and Men with Pens, so be sure to come back!
Role-Playing Games Writing Contest / Guest-Posting at The DMs Blog
Hi everyone!
Just a couple quick unrelated notes today.
First: you want to make sure you check out this week’s writing contests at Helium. There is a contest specifically on Role-Playing Games. I wrote most of the topics and can’t enter, so I’d love to see one of my readers get 75 big ones this week. There are other cash prizes, but really, you want the $75, right? I’ve got tips on winning those contests over at The Writing Journey. Good luck, all!
Second: I’ve decided I want to try to increase the frequency again with which I update this blog. if you’ve got something you want to say about D&D, RPGs or just life in general, please let me know and I’ll feature it in a guest post!
Where do you get your adventure ideas?
I know where I’ll be getting mine for the foreseeable future: right here. Oh, and maybe I’ll win my first ever box of D&D Minis in the process.
Seriously, go check it out. You’ve only got until the 6th of May. I’ll wait for you.
———-
At any rate, Chatty’s little contest got me to thinking about something.
I find that, the older I get, the less I need other people to write my adventure material. Modules are nice, but I’m a writer by trade. No, I’m not a game designer, so I often use published Dungeons and Dragons adventures for stat blocks, but I don’t need them for story as much as I used to.
Heck, even Demonweb Pits
So, what about you all? Where do you come up with adventure ideas these days?
How to Stop Sucking and Kick Ass as a Dungeon Master
photo credit: Perfecto Insecto
I’ve written a lot about what it takes to be a successful DM. I’ve identified 7 Habits of Highly Effective DMs, and I’ve told you what to avoid. I’ve even built a new campaign from scratch, so you can observe the process.
I don’t pretend to know it all when it comes to DMing. Yeah, I’ve done it for the better part of two decades. Yeah, I’ve been able to keep the same group of folks at my table since moving here, with rare exception. In fact, I’ve got the opposite problem of many DMs: I’ve got more players than slots at the table. Having Randy along for the ride helps in that regard, as we tend to make sure everyone has a spot, and I give him the lion’s share of the credit for our group’s cohesion.
Still, while I’m not the best, I do kick ass as a Dungeon Master. Why?
I give a damn about my players.
The folks I play with are friends, and have been nearly since the day I met them. Some of them go way back, while some I’ve known just a little while. But each and every one of them is a friend. We stand in each others’ weddings. We babysit each others’ kids. We eat together, spend holidays together, camp together and will go to see Iron Man together.
It’s more than that, though. See, I want my players to have a good time. When I’m designing an adventure, I do it not only with their character in mind, but with them in mind. I put something in for each person. My hack-and-slasher gets to kill stuff. My role-player gets to parlay. My note-taking paladin… gets to take notes. I customize the experience for my players, and it adds exponentially to the game.
I’m passionate about the story.
I’m a writer. I write for a living. I write things about the difference between “HD ready” and “HD compatible.” I write about premature birth. I write about whatever my conscience will allow and whatever someone will pay me for. I even write solely for the purpose of helping other writers.
But when it comes to writing fiction, D&D is my outlet. It lets me tell a story, one that’s deep down inside of me just bursting to get out. It’s the story I’ll base a novel on, someday. It’s the story I’m thinking about when my wife says, “Whatcha thinking about” and I say, “How much I love you, of course.”
See, I need to tell this story. The fact that my friends are willing to sit at the table and help me tell it, and indulge me as I tell my part of it, is in many ways their gift to me rather than the other way around.
I know when to quit.
Sometimes, you have to take a break. You have to step away from the table, let someone else DM for a while. You might even need to stop playing altogether for six or eight months waiting for a new edition. Sometimes, you just need to quit.
It doesn’t end there, of course. You’ve got to know when to restart. I’m less than 30 days away from getting behind the screen for the first time in a good while, and I’m damned excited. I’m going to start with H1 and just sort of ride the wave from there with some one-shots until Gen Con. it’s going to be a wild ride, because the wait has made me hungry for it again.
I can paint a picture like nobody’s business.
Like I said, I write for a living. Hyperbole, onomatopoeia are my tools, and the thesaurus is my best friend. Can you be a kick-ass DM without a great vocabulary? Sure. But why would you want to be? Watch movies, read books and study the flipping thesaurus if you need to, but work on your flavor text.
Oh, and make no mistake, folks: it’s all flavor text.
I’m open to change.
I don’t DM the same way today that I did in 1996, because my players don’t play the same way they did in 1996. Likewise, when one of my players says, “Dude, that session sucked!” I make a note of it. If the player was full of crap, I forget about it. If the complaint was legit, I figure out what not to do next time.
I try new things. In my time, I’ve played just about every type of RPG you can imagine, from Live Action Vampire to Toon. Hell, I even enjoyed Everway. I watch other DMs, locally and at conventions. I read DM blogs and message boards and articles in Dragon and Dungeon, all so I can add something, anything, to make my game that much better.
I’ll very likey go 4th Edition for the same reason.
———-
I didn’t write this post to toot my own horn. Like I said, I’m far from the best DM. I wrote it to help motivate you guys and gals out there. Get passionate. Take a break if you need to. Change things up. Take your players out for dinner just to hang. Whatever you’ve got to do, take action now. You can be a kick-ass DM, you’ve just got to decide you’re going to do it and work toward that goal.
How To Kill Your D&D Game Without Really Trying
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’ve ended some campaigns in the past. My good friend Greg reminded me, right here in the blog, about the now-infamous Winter Court fiasco, for example. It occurred to me that maybe there is a lesson or two I could share with you all. Maybe if you could avoid the mistakes I made in that campaign, you can be spared the frustration and anxiety I experienced.
To give you some background, I decided in the fall of 2003 that I was going to start an Oriental Adventures campaign. Specifically, I decided I was going to start a Rokugan campaign. See, I’d been exposed to the Legend of the Five Rings settings via the collectible card game at Gen Con, and was truly enamored with the Clan system. I even bought the Clan Wars miniatures set and painted 40 some-odd samurai figs. Here was the first problem, though. Did you see it up there? *I* decided.
Step #1: Choose a campaign setting your players aren’t into.
Now, let’s not jump to any conclusions. I didn’t force-feed them Rokugan. In fact, I took a good three weeks to poll my players, dig into their collective brains, and try to decide on what campaign setting they wanted. There wasn’t a true consensus; there was a slight preference for Colona, my self-designed campaign world, with the Realms coming in a close second. Rokugan was in the bottom half, although no one outrightly opposed it. And, they preferred it to Ravenloft.
But they weren’t into it. See, Rokugan is a tough setting to play if you’re not really into it. The core classes are different, magic works differently, and you’ve got things like clans, honor and taint to deal with. And my players are loyal to a fault and willing to try anything, but they didn’t want to spend hours learning all of the intricacies of the world. So, I wound up with Shugenja casting standard-world spells like flaming sphere, and Samurai with a level of core Ranger so as to get the two-weapon bonus (this was 3.0, pre-nerfed Ranger). Mechanically those things work, but they killed the flavor.
But, that wasn’t the only thing that killed that particular campaign. See, I really have to give some credit to the only two words my players use today to describe the campaign: Winter Court.
Step #2: Force-feed good role-playing
photo credit: saintovbastards
Sometimes, you just can’t move your players.
Winter Court was a single gaming session that lasted about 5 hours. During that time, the idea was that the characters had to do just a shit-load of role-playing. They had a variety of objectives, including solving a murder, courtship, diplomacy and others. It was, in many ways, the opposite of the Warcraft Miracle Night (I’ll explain that one another time.)
At any rate, there were so many role-playing hooks that I couldn’t seem to present any of them in a way that engaged my players. Add to that the fact that, at the time, I had a couple of hack-and-slashers as players (No, Greg. Not you. I’m talking about Swamp Beast and the Big Red Dog). That certainly didn’t help things.
The result of that session? Everyone. Was. Bored. Out. Of. Their. Minds.
Had I stopped right there, we probably could have ended the game and moved on. But, I was determined. You see, there were good reasons, both before and after Winter Court, for me to move on. I completely missed them.
Step #3: Ignore the warning signs
I remember having to explain honor and taint at least once a session, sometimes twice. No one was listening. Not because they were rude (they weren’t, necessarily) but because they weren’t interested. Explain something once and they get it, that’s great. Explain it twice, that’s fine too. Probably a learning curve. Explain it six times and it must, by definition, be uninteresting and forgettable.
Now, I get that players sometimes have to miss a game. But with Rokugan, it seemed like we had at least one player gone each session, sometimes two. Sometimes, that happens. But not for six sessions in a row. The fact that people were skipping out on D&D night to go out to dinner with an uncle should have been a sign. In fact, it was a sign. I just missed it.
My players kept trying to back out (individually) due to scheduling reasons. I kept trying to accommodate them. That caused yet another problem.
Step #4: Get off schedule
Randy and I are opposites, in many ways, when it comes to DMing. Randy is a schedule Nazi. He plays, every two weeks on Friday, come hell or high water. And, if you can’t commit to that schedule, don’t even think about joining his campaign. I, on the other hand, tend to take the “we’ll play whenever” approach.
I really don’t advocate either approach. I think you have to have a routine, but I also think you need to have some flexibility built into that routine. How you do that is the topic of another blog post, someday.
Anyways, the result of “we’ll play whenever” became “we’ll play in 4 weeks,” and then “we’ll play in a couple of months,” and then, “Hey. Anyone want to start a new D&D campaign? I’m thinking Realms.”
Step #5: Fizzle out
D&D campaigns rarely die quickly. I told you before about the big blow-up we had during my wife’s campaign. That blow-up didn’t end things. It was a blowout that we patched. D&D campaigns end more like a slow leak. To mix metaphors, D&D campaigns don’t get the luxury of decapitation. They bleed out. Or better yet, they get a festering sore that starts on the ankle and winds up in a leprous coating over the entire body.
Ew.
Maybe we’ll just say they sort of fizzle out.
And it did. That’s what happened to my Rokugan game. What did I learn from the experience? Like the headline says: I learned how to kill a D&D game without trying.
—–
I also learned some important lessons about my group, my own personality, life, and even some lessons about running a small business from this experience, by the way. See, in any endeavor, especially a business, you can’t ignore your customers’ input. You can’t force your customers to want your product. You have to watch for warning signs that something is wrong, because some customers just won’t come out and say it. And you’ve got to be diligent about deadlines and follow-up, or you’ll never have them as a customer again.
What If? On 4E and the Future
What if it sucks?
Worse…
What if I don’t think it sucks, but the rest of my group does?
I’ve been asking myself this lately, as I think my good friend Phil has convinced Randy and the rest of our local group that 4E is going to be bad. REALLY bad.
Aw, hell. It’s not fair to blame it on Phil. There are things that look like they might be bad.
At any rate, what happens if I like it and they don’t?
Way I see it, I’ve got 3 options:
- Keep playing whatever everyone else wants to play. This means I’m stuck with Spell Compendium (etc), and I get no rules reset.
- Play something different altogether, like Vampire or Savage Worlds.
- Find another group with which to play 4E. (Note: I’m not talking about dumping the guys; they’re my friends, and nothing will change that. D&D or no, we’re compatriots.)
So, is there something I’m missing? A fourth, better option? If not, which of these three is best? Your thoughts are appreciated!
Building a New Dungeons and Dragons Campaign Diary #14 - An Adventure
I can’t believe it’s been 2 weeks since I’ve worked on the new setting. BAD DM. Bad.
I think we’re to the point now where we can actually start putting together an outline for our first adventure. I’m somewhat limited here because, well, I’m going to be running Lenryn as a 4E game (most likely. Did you hear the trepidation there? I’m slipping in my conviction that 4E will be good enough to switch. But, we’ll save that for another time.)
If writing everything you have so far hasn’t inspired you to write an adventure yet, go back and re-read it all. I’m certain that you will find something that jumps out at you.
For me, it is this figure of the Monty Fingers, the tiefling who is organizing a resistance against the eladrin elites. I like this guy, and I think I can develop him into a thoroughly interesting recurring character. So, let’s see if I can, today, put together some background for the first adventure using Monty Fingers:
Monty Fingers has, recently, begun recruiting members of his resistance organization in Halvinguard. His most influential recruit is, to date, Arsaen, the captain of the town guard. Arsaen has become disillusioned of late, realizing that it is unlikely that he will ever advance his station, regardless of how much he sucks up to the Eladrin in control of Halvinguard. In fact, Arsaen actually sought out Monty Fingers, and has been performing covert operations for some time.
On the advice of Monty Fingers, Arsaen has recently stolen the RING OF DESTINY from the Quessa T’alel. This ring is thought to hold extreme magical powers, and maintains some form of connection with other Eladrin bigwigs througout Lenryn. Not suspecting Arsaen , Quessa T’alel has assigned him to find the ring and bring in the perpetrators, dead or alive.
Unfortunately for the party, Arsaen intends to frame them for the theft. To do so, he will have to accomplish three tasks:
1) Plant the ring on one of the party members;
2) Get one of the party members to demonstrate sympathy for Monty Fingers and his motives;
3) Through the use of a memory-altering potion, transfer his memory of the theft to one of the party members.
To complicate matters, the party has previously come to the aid of Arsaen. Arsaenhas a trusted reputation in Halvinguard, and it is not likely that he will soon be suspect.
Arsaen calls the party in on the premise that they are to clear out a farm outside of town that has been overrun by goblins. The farm is half a day’s ride away. It is while the party is gone from town that he will commit his crimes.
Upon arriving at the Farmhouse, the party will realized that it is empty and abandoned, and probably has been for years. There is some sort of pestilence here such that nothing will grow within a square mile. In fact, this pestilence is such that, should the party spend more than 2 hours here, they will have some sort of negative effect (to be determined once 4E core rules are released!)
Investigating the farmhouse thoroughly provides access to several location encounters:
The attic - old diseased woman, speaks only in rhyme, smells of decay
The cellar - slaughtered animals (1 week fresh) perhaps people? Evidence of cultic activity of some sort.
The barn - Rats or some other appropriate feral creature. This creature will have a natural immunity to the pestilence, and will be the party’s only hope of a cure - consuming the animal raw.
Field - formerly growing, now dead. Closer inspection shows that the ground is not covered in dirt at all, but some sort of living material. The dirt itself seems to be moving.
Upon returning to Halvinguard, there will be several event-based encounters. I’ll be leaving these for another day, but it is worth thinking about something here:
On purpose, I’m combining some of the big adventure models. I have a linear beginning (PCs have to get out of town for it to work at all). I have location-based encounters at the farmhouse; and I’m using event-based encounters on return. See how I did that?
Truth is that my group and I really enjoy all three models. I like the control that comes with linear and the momentum that comes with event-based. Location-based encounters probably make the least sense to me as a DM, but they do have their uses. The above use is a great example.
What about all of you? What model or models to you prefer and use?
Dealing with Problem Players
A while back, I wrote about how, as a DM, I tend to make one of the worst players. I think this is pretty common among DMs. It is a different feeling, being on the other side of the screen.
So, let me tell you about my character. If you’re not interested, skip to the list down there at the end of the post.
A few years back, my wife ran a D&D campaign set in the Forgotten Realms, which we affectionately referred to as the “Flowers and Unicorns Campaign.” Now, I’ve only ever played in a handful of campaigns in my life, but this one was by far my favorite. Yep, I’m partial, but I think that most of the folks who played in that game had a good time.
That campaign was also the scene of the second scariest night I’ve ever had in D&D.
You see, I was playing an elven sorcerer. His name was Boskan, and he was something of a wunderkind. In fact, he and his sister, Yimsha, were thought to be the subjects of a prophecy spelling either the doom or the salvation of Faerun, depending on who you asked. Boskan wasn’t especially powerful, but he had attitude. See, Boskan had been raised by monks specifically to fulfill this prophecy. He knew his destiny (or thought he did) and he was driven to fulfill it, regardless of the cost to anyone around him.
The difficulty for Boskan came in that he had never met Yimsha; the pair had been separated at birth (think Luke and Leia stuff here). Yimsha was much more skeptical about the prophecy, as was the rest of the party.
Long story short (too late, I know) Boskan tended to rub everyone the wrong way. He wouldn’t entertain any efforts to question his destiny, not even from Yimsha, and he was determined that they would fulfill their roles in history.
Now, here is where the metagame comes in. I like to play ideologues when I do play. My characters, more often than not, tend to be driven, and often arrogant. Let’s just say that my characters tend to express the lesser angels of my nature. Deep down inside, there’s a part of me that’s just an asshole. My characters tend to take on that part of my personality perhaps more than any other part.
Anyways, in the process of playing this role, I crossed lines. I became heated, animated, and downright rude in character. This probably would have been fine, except that the person playing Yimsha and I had, in the past, had some personality tussles in real life, and this aggravated those sensitive areas for both of us.
Before the night was over, Yimsha’s player’s husband nearly handed me my teeth, and my wife kicked the two of them out of our house. It was the only time Angie has ever done that, and it was especially unfortunate given that Yimsha’s player and Angie were best friends. In the long run, it was OK; we had the two over the following day, and talked through the situation, and made nice. But it’s still something of a sore spot, all these years later.
So, what’s the point? Well, I think there are reasons that DMs often make the worst players. (These don’t all apply to every DM, I realize, but I can only speak from personal experience):
- First, as DMs, we are used to creating conflict. We run the bad guys, who argue with PCs, fight them, and are all-around pains in the ass to characters. It’s our job to be challenging.
- Second, we are all too often inexperienced as players. Mechanically, Boskan was weak, not for flavor’s sake, but because I didn’t build him right. I built him the way I would have built a single encounter creature, and that didn’t play right.
- Because of this inexperience as players, we often display our lesser angels. Most players figure out, in their first few characters, which of their own personality traits to project, and which ones to not project. We’ve never had to go through this process of trial and error. (My next character, by the way, was much less of an ass.)
- We also tend, as I talked about before, to mimic what we perceive to be player actions. In other words, on some level, I am disruptive as a player because I’ve had disruptive players as a DM. This isn’t a conscious decision, but I think it does happen from time to time.
- When we are playing, we can relax. DMing can be hard work; we feel like playing is something of a day off from the rigors of running the game.
So… how does your experience as a DM translate when you are on the other side of the screen?
Friday Fantasy Fun - D&D Links to Finish the Work Week: February 22, 2008
First, a video, discovered first by Kimmie:
I know I’ve featured it here before, but I have to read Dark Dungeons at least once a year. Yes, I know, linking just encourages them. I can’t help it.
Yax linked this one on Monday, but I’ll echo his sentiment here. Critical Hits has an excellent discussion of the 4E/WoW/MMORPG controversy. I can’t go whole hog with what he says, but he’s at least 80% on.
I’ll go even further back, a whole three weeks, to a post at Scholars and Rogues. I am a Geek in a Jock Culture is a fun, if slightly depressing, read.
Shamus over at Twenty Sided offers a look into the kooky costuming of Cosplay. Warning: his link goes to a site with Cosplay girls hot enough to make you want to dress up like Lacus Clyne.
My new friend Kam (I can call him that, he even said so!) has a review of the Dragonlance movie. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but Kam’s review suggests that it is not surprising, even if it is disappointing.
I’m sure you’ve been reading The Chatty DM for a long time now, but I have just found him in recent weeks. If you haven’t read Phil’s work, or even if you have, check him out. I especially like his RPG Tropes series.
A last minute addition today is from the Encounter-a-day blog. Yep, that blog is just what it sounds like: every day, Monday through Friday, Ian Toltz provides an encounter of some sort, grouped by themes and such. Thursday’s entry, Specters of Ptolan have me intrigued with this one. If nothing else, the site might be a great resource for inspiration, if not for usable ideas.
I’ve got one dishonorable mention. Trask over at LivingDice.com had a post Wednesday about how recent world events have inspired him as a DM. You know, recent events like “the attempted assassination/coup of the East Timorese president and the official secession of Kosovo from greater Serbia.” DUDE! That’s your reaction?!? “This would make a great D&D story?!?” What are you THINKING?!?
Look, Trask. If you tell players where you get your ideas, they’re liable to watch the news, figure out all of our plots, and bring about total game destruction. Shame on you. 
Of Markets, RPGs, and Third Parties
The Chatty DM has a guest column this morning over at dungeonmastering.com on the concept of the OGL and its effect on Dungeons and Dragons, both in terms of the effect it had on 3E as well as the possible effect on 4E.
I don’t substantially disagree with anything Phil is saying there. However, I’d like to hone in on a part of the argument he sort of glosses over:
- The OGL, at its base, is a business document. It has little or nothing do to with role-playing itself, at least not categorically.
- The negative effect of the OGL on retailers, in terms of third party products, demonstrates a weakness in the current publication and distribution channels - business factors - rather than a problem with the OGL itself. After all, comic book retailers are able to bring in titles that don’t sell on a regular basis with little danger. An aggregative distribution company for third party OGL materials could, I think, both lessen the impact to retailers, and see more consistent distribution of third-party product. Any entrepreneurial gamers out there want to start a company?
- A glut of bad products should make consumers focus on a known quantity. If there were 100 different brands of HDTVs and 84 of them completely sucked, you’d turn to the remaining 16; many people would turn to the top company, fearing the demise of the other viable 15. Who does this hurt? The 15? No; they will see increased business from people who were buying the 84, or at least level sales. And it sure doesn’t hurt the consumer.
- I don’t think we need time to know which system was best for us as consumers, if not as gamers. Competition forces the cream to rise to the top, and that is what happened with the 3E OGL. Great third parties who made great products (Goodman, Monte, etc) stayed in business. Companies that made less-than-stellar products didn’t. And WotC got a huge recruiting ground and sandbox out of the third parties, providing them with additional resources, but also forcing them to put out quality product so as to stay in the market.
What’s the point here? It’s the same point I’ve been making to my friend who believes that 4E is going to be “New Coke.” I’m not a marketing expert, and don’t want to be when I grow up. I don’t have access to industry data to tell me how things are trending, I don’t have demographic data, I only have what I read on the Internet and hear from my friends. And that is the definition of anecdotal. Most of us really have no clue what will happen when 4E comes out. We might have hunches or hopes, but it is business acumen, not gaming insight, that determines how accurate those hunches or hopes will prove to be.
The point, then, is like I said above: the OGL is a business document. Its impact on the game has to be understood in terms of how it affects the market; any other impact is, likely, minimal.
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