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biteghost · 3 years

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How do you come up with so many cool characters?? All of your OCs seem so vibrant and fleshed out. Do you have a specific process for developing them, or do they just kinda come to you mostly formed? I find I struggle with building a compelling OCs for D&D games & would love to hear your thoughts on character development.

(This answer got long, sorry.) This is a super nice sentiment, I’m happy you think my characters are all cool and unique!!

As far as process goes, uh, it depends on the character? I’ve spent a long time (years) rewiring my brain when it comes to what I think about when creating OCs. They don’t usually come to me fully formed - I get an idea in my head about a concept, and then over like a week or even months of fiddling I end up with a character for that concept.

A lot of the time my characters are simply people I wanted to see more of in media as a kid! Mostly, female characters I actually relate to or are as nuanced and messy as their male cast members, haha... (It was a trip when I realized in high school that I didn’t hate female characters - it was actually that none of them were written as well as the cool boys in the anime series I liked, haha! Be the change you want to see in the world, basically.)

Inspiration for characters (and stories for them to be part of) come from a lot of places. An easy piece of advice is to make an effort to intake media you like! Read new comics, watch new movies and television shows, read books, play video games, listen to music and obsessively memorize the lyrics - hell, obsessively learn everything there is to know about black holes or public domain characters (that’s what I did, lol...)!

(Note: ’New’ meaning new to YOU - you don’t need to only be partaking of media that’s created in 2021 - you can find a lot to love in media that was created before your time, or for generations before you!)

I must reiterate: intake new media that you ENJOY! You don’t have to like all the same things as everyone else, you don’t have to be invested in the same shows and podcasts as your friends. Varied interests and taste is part of what makes us all unique! Increasing your pool of inspiration will help you come up with interesting ideas, and help you find YOUR voice. Your particular interests and the niche things that speak to you will help you figure out what kind of characters and what kind of stories you like to create! But the process doesn’t end at just intaking media... When you find the stuff that brings you joy, analyze what exactly it is about that thing that speaks to you... Put it into words. Explain it to a friend. Make it tangible, analyze the feelings and why the series made you feel that way... and then take it and shove it into your own stories, lol!

Engage critically and thoughtfully with work you like, with characters you like, and it will help you have the language and thought process to recreate it in your own work!

My creative process is like an exquisite corpse of all the characters and series I’ve liked over my lifetime. I mesh them all together in a grim blender and what comes out is a shake in the vague shape as an OC, lol

BUT... it seems like you’re asking more specifically about making characters for tabletop roleplaying games like D&D? And THAT is a different process for me than making OCs for my comics or original story ideas!

I don’t usually join a tabletop game with a fully fleshed out character, actually?? I don’t spend a long time on their backstory, and I usually figure it out like halfway through the story, or through collaboration with my game master!

My TTRPG characters are usually whatever I think would be most interesting in the given game setting or set-up and... usually they exist in opposition to whatever the core concept of the game is. So, the examples I have from games I’ve played are:

In Cardians: West (World of Darkness: Hunter the Vigil): we played in a modern-day urban fantasy setting, where players were recruited into a supernatural Hunter group that was also a criminal organization that Did Crimes and Broke The Law in the name of keeping peace and protecting humanity from the supernatural creatures that go bump in the night. I played Andrew, a Lawful Good Police Detective, because I thought playing a character who would need to grow past his original ideals of ‘Right and Wrong’ in the name of the greater good would be interesting! (And it was!)

In SINNING ADVENTURE (WoD: Geist: The Sin-Eaters) we payed in a modern-day urban fantasy setting with the premise that the players all Died and were brought back to life by forming a pact with a powerful spirit (and getting cool ghost powers in the process!) I played Cassius, a character who could not cope with his death, and thus refused to use his new powers because they were evidence that he was no longer strictly human. It caused conflict in the group and world, but I thought it would be interesting! (And it was! Cassius was a Bitch.)

In Rex Machina (Dungeons and Dragons 5E), I wanted to play an Aarakocra, but was having a hard time deciding on a class or backstory... until I found out that in the ‘canon’ of D&D Aarakocra only live to be like, mid 20s???? Their lifespans are insanely short compared to other playable races!! And I thought that was stupid, so I decided to make MY Aarakocra, Izzy, a warlock that’s looking for ways to extend his own stupidly short life. His pact essentially granted that to him, giving him extra time to find a way to achieve True Immortality. His conflict challenges what’s ‘true’ living in this world, and his extended life is in direct conflict with a lot of forces in the world we play in, and while it is very stressful I think it’s really interesting to play!

In Lamplighting (Monster of the Week), my character Aicen is an assassin who made a deal with a demon and gained supernatural perks out of it... except I decided that she doesn’t WANT to be in this deal. She is actively trying to undo it because it wasn’t her deal - she inherited it from a CEO that she killed during an unrelated job. (Aicen is probably my character I’ve put the most backstory into, and that’s just because at character creation in MOTW you are given a lot of questions about who your character is and why they’re where they are!)

In Hand of Adam (WoD: HtV), the concept was that all players were going to join a post-apocalyptic supernatural-hating cult. I played Shouter, who was a self-preserving pacifist coward who also turned out to be a fae (which the cult would have killed him over). It was stressful but very fun. I love Shouter. He ran away from fights and didn’t actually kill anyone until the last episode where they fought God (whom he killed, lol).

NOW. THESE ARE ALL JUST EXAMPLES OF HOW *I* LIKE TO PLAY CHARACTERS!! For me personally, I enjoy playing a character who has built-in conflict either with the world, the story, or the other players. I’m only able to play characters like this because my friend group are all really cool and we all know that conflict is not bad - it’s fiction and we’re just roleplaying! If I didn’t trust my GMs and fellow players as much as I do, I probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough playing some of these concepts.

I don’t think you need to know every little thing about a tabletop character, and in fact, not knowing some things and leaving it up to the GM and story to flesh out is an easy way to help you get more invested in both your character AND the story your GM is telling! Tabletops are a collaborative storytelling experience, so if you’ve already plotted out your character’s whole story, there won’t be much participation from other players or your GM. Figure out what your character wants, and let your roleplaying and GM slowly put all the other pieces in place over the course of your campaign!

But the TL:DR about how I make tabletop OCs is that I just... try to give them a goal, an ideal, or a personality that is in direct conflict with some aspect of the game we’re playing. I don’t want the character to be undermining the whole game, because that’s really crappy to do to your GM, but I have to have something for my character to grow through or change. I like giving them built-in character arc starters, lol. I haven’t played a game where my character has gotten along with every other player character and NPC over the entire campaign since my very FIRST game, lol!

Also, if you’re having trouble, why not ask your GM what they think? Again, tabletops are collaborative! Don’t be afraid to talk ideas out with your GM for your character.

A final note about playing in specifically oneshot games (i.e. games that are not long campaigns but are meant to be played in one or two sittings). Personally, I always just retrofit an OC I already have to play in oneshots! When I make a new character for a long campaign, it usually takes me two or three sessions to find their voice and figure out how to roleplay them. If the game you’re playing is only one session, I find it easier to jump right in and get the most out of your character and the game when you’re playing a character you already know pretty well! I’ve played characters from my webcomic quite a few times, and it’s always a lot more fun for me than figuring out a new character on the fly!

SO UH, IN CONCLUSION... sorry if this is mad unhelpfu!! My personal processes are unique to me! but that's the point - no one person will have the exact answer that works for you! You have to keep trying until you figure it out for yourself! Good luck! Keep creating! <3

#long post #asktime #not art #art talk #writing talk #tabletop talk #gif #iwishihadhorns

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charminggamerposts · 4 years

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Top 10 Open World Games for Android and IOS

Open world games are those games in which the player can freely move around the map, explore the world, and use all the opportunities provided by the game. Often these are also sandbox games in which the player himself determines the purpose of the game. Also often these are plot-driven games in which you can independently choose the order of completing quests. Such games are usually contrasted with linear games, where you can only go to a certain location and complete quests in the strictly specified order. Players value open-world games for freedom of choice and a greater sense of reality. In this list you will find a variety of open-world games on Android and IOS which you can enjoy offline and not only at home.

Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm

Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm is an open-world adventure game inspired by The Legend of Zelda game series. As in many RPG games our hero unexpectedly gets involved in the conflict and decides to become a knight in order to fight evil creatures and protect the weak. In this he will be assisted by his companions. The plot of the game is largely revealed through the dialogue of the protagonist with NPC characters. The game has many interesting puzzles and side quests for which you can get good bonuses and upgrades. Separately we want to note the very nice cartoon graphics of the game.

Minecraft PE

Minecraft hardly needs an introduction. Even people who are completely uninterested in games have heard of this game. And yet, recall that in this game you can try to survive by running away from aggressive mobs, building fortresses, and getting food in survival mode. Or you can just enjoy exploring an open and almost endless world and building something from countless blocks in creative mode. Relatively recently this favorite game of millions has become available on mobile devices.

Portal Knights

According to the plot of Portal Nights, the enemies destroyed the world and only a lot of isolated islands remained from it. You can only move between these islands with the help of secret portals. Thanks to the procedurally generated infinite world, players do not know what awaits them for each new portal. Find all the portals and unite the pre-existing world. You can play as a mage, ranger or warrior. And to explore the world and fight monsters was more fun, you can play the game with friends (up to 4 people).

Galaxy on Fire 2

In this exciting game you will play as cosmonaut Keith Maxwell. Pirates attacked his spaceship and an accident occurred due to which he woke up on the other side of the galaxy after 35 Earth years. Of course, Keith really misses the house. He dreams of building a powerful spaceship that will bring him back. To do this, he first needs to earn a lot of money. You have to carry out many tasks of aliens from collecting valuable resources to protecting the universe from villains.

Mines of Mars

Mines of Mars is an exciting arcade game that combines the features of Minecraft and Metroid. You will need to explore the abandoned mines of Mars constantly bumping into crowds of hostile aliens. Fight with them, get valuable resources, and create modern weapons. You will appreciate this game for its thoughtful plot, nice 2D graphics, complex boss battles, and, of course, wide prospects for exploring the open world.

GTA: San Andreas

The plot of the world-famous crime action begins with the main character Carl Johnson deciding to return to his hometown of Los Santos in the early ‘90s. Immediately after Karl’s arrival the policemen decided to set him up, accusing him of killing their colleague. To protect himself and his loved ones, the main character is forced to seek help from his old friends engaged in crime. Millions of players love this game for the ability to perform various actions that are prohibited or inaccessible in real life: steal cars, kill people, hide from the police, fly a helicopter, create their own gangs, and much more. This perfectly relieves the stress of everyday life.

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition

Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition is a game made based on the once-popular D&D board games. According to the plot of the game the main character lived in Candlekeep fortress with his father. It seemed to them that they were absolutely safe. But everything changed when hired killers entered the fortress. The boy had to leave his native home and participate in a bloody war between Baldur’s Gate and Amn. The game strikes with an exciting plot, the presence of more than 40 classes, more than 150 game items, and more than 100 spells.

Escapist 2

The Escapists 2 is a jailbreak strategy game with cute Minecraft-inspired pixel graphics. Your character will need to explore the prison to find things that can help them escape, interact with other prisoners, and try to keep up with the prison schedule so as not to arouse suspicion. The game has many creative ways to escape, and at the same time you will need to come up with the right one in your situation. For example, you can change into a security guard, climb through a sewer, dig an underground tunnel, or climb into the box for transportation.

Realmcraft

Realmcraft can be considered one of the most successful free alternatives to Minecraft. Therefore, if you are a little fed up with Minecraft but still want something like that, then you can try this game. If you choose the survival mode, then you will need to hurry up to make at least a simple shelter before zombies and skeletons come out from all sides. But if you want to play a relaxing game, just select the creative mode and build from different blocks whatever you want.

Godus

Godus is a game in the genre of God Simulator, created by the director of the cult games Populous and Black & White, Peter Molyneux. In the game you control mainly nature. You can make the village as suitable as possible for farmers, and you can come off to the fullest, sending various natural disasters to people. But it’s more interesting to develop your civilization from cavemen to high technology, increasing the number of your believers.

#games #mobile games #Android #IOS #gaming

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tearlessrain · 4 years

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for the TTROG game- 4, 13, 18, 20?

thanks!

4. Tell me about your first OC! assuming this is limited to tabletop only because I have had. a lot. of ocs. to be honest I don’t remember the first character I ever played because the DM wouldn’t let me play a male character so I just never got that into the one I made, but the first one I got invested in and clearly remember was a lizardfolk mage with a broken mind control chip named Kell. They ended up being really fun because for like the first half of the campaign I played them as a serious, no-nonsense kind of character, which turned out to be so boring that I almost asked the DM to kill them off, but instead I came up with the mind control chip and had it break so their actual personality could emerge. their actual personality could charitably be described as eccentric (they kinda had the vibe of a presgr translator from the Imperial Radch series) and tried to keep a human NPC named Phil as a pet before the rest of the (partly human) party made them let him go. also they once performed an entire nat20 tango with the party barbarian, who was named Fleshpuppy and talked like the lovechild of tarzan and cookie monster. the barbarian was the one who got the nat20 (they were actually trying to dodge a room full of flying needles). I drew a picture of it.

13. How did you find and join your first tabletop group? the very first one was run by a friend’s dad back I think middle school or early high school. the thing is, I was homeschooled up until high school (I know, that’s why I’m like this) and our entire social circle was extremely protestant, so witchcraft and magic couldn’t be a thing. how did the dad get around this? by using his own homebrew system that replaced all the magic with “prayer” that caused similar effects. there were still elves and murder and these half-leopard satyr things called leopolds though, so I don’t know why magic was where he drew the line.

ngl though as goofy as parts of the system were he kinda went off with the leopolds.

18. What do you love about this hobby? I don’t like the real world and spend as little time there as possible, and with the magic of d&d I can do that but also bring friends with me.

no but seriously it’s been a great way to stay in contact with people I would otherwise have lost touch with over the years, and it’s an engaging collaborative creative outlet that’s still low stakes enough to just be fun.

20. Have you ever been a Gamemaster or hoped to be one? If you have, what’s your recommendation to others looking to try? If you haven’t, what holds you back? I have been a couple times, to be honest it’s not really my thing and I’m not that good at it but when I lived too far away to join any of my brother’s games I kinda had to because it turned out nobody else in the pacific northwest will take on the responsibility of controlling an aux cord at a party, let alone an entire d&d campaign.

my recommendations would be to make sure you all generally agree at least approximately on the tone/balance of your campaign before you start. if you want to run a complex, story-heavy, roleplay-focused campaign but your players all just want to be murder hobos (or really, if even one just wants to be a murder hobo and can’t compromise) none of you are going to have a good time.

my other advice would be to not let any of your players get outright drunk because that’s happened to me twice, and both times it was miserable for everyone.

#still not sure how that particular drawing came out so well #most of the humanoids I drew in the early 2010s were ROUGH #ask meme #Anonymous

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periodicreviews · 4 years

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Uncharted 1-3

With the release of the Uncharted trilogy for free, I decided to finally make my way through them. When I bought my PS4 in 2017, it came with a copy of Uncharted 4 that I’ve left untouched until now. I go into specifics for Uncharted 1-3, then talk a little about the series as a whole.

Uncharted 1

My biggest complaint with this game was the platforming. It was not only tough to figure out which ledges were “grabbable” but even after my 9 hours in the game, I couldn’t accurately judge distances.

Some ledges appear to be close enough, but there’s actually a different side path the developers want you to take. Drake as a character seems to have a variable jump distance depending on if the game detects you are trying to land on a grabbable ledge.

If you jump too soon or at the wrong angle, you’ll execute a short “hop” and fall to your death. I haven’t done any digging on whether such a system exists, that’s just what it appears like.

I died over and over on one of the later levels where there is a series of platforms in the rafters of a church. I just kept misjudging distances and jumping too early.

My primary cause of death had to have been just been falling as opposed to any enemy NPC.

As I say that, I’m reminded of one particular shootout in a courtyard. At the time I remember being really frustrated that being in cover didn’t mean that you were safe from bullets. There was so much gunfire that I couldn’t get anywhere near the people who were shooting at me especially with the number of grenades they were shooting at me. It was tough to have to unlearn everything I know about cover from Gears of War, where you are safe if you don’t peek out from people shooting towards you.

Uncharted 2

Uncharted 2 in some ways felt like a step back and a step forward.

The remastering team on U1 maybe did too good of a job because I felt the eyes of the characters in U2 felt a lot more lifeless.

The step forward was obviously in the improved platforming. I had less and less trouble judging distances. I can’t tell if that’s just because I had 9 hours of practice from the previous game, but I feel like the system judging character movement was also greatly improved.

I died 10 or more times in a single sequence when a helicopter is firing missiles at a building. The building begins to tip over and collapse and you are supposed to jump through a window on a neighboring building to escape.

Fail to jump and you die. Jump at the wrong angle, and you fall between the collapsing building and are crushed. Before I realized I was supposed to go through the window, I thought I was supposed to grab onto the ledge of the neighboring building.

Right after you jump at the exact spot, Drake says “Jump”. But for me, this audio cue always came after I was supposed to jump. I’m not sure if they intended that audio cue to be the cue for the user or not.

This particular scene is a symptom of the root problem in my opinion of the game trying to be too cinematic. I say that, even as a fan of Quantic Dream games. I know there’s a very fine line between cinematic and game. Go too far and you can confuse the player on when they are required to interact and/or make it feel like their actions have no impact. Uncharted 2 had a few such sequences for me. I never wanted to see another train by the end of it.

Uncharted 3

The beginning of the game had me a little worried about the collision detection. It might have just been a side effect of playing with a smaller character model and the collision requirements being slightly different than the regular sized character. There were a few moments when I would get stuck in the chase sequence on corners or edges of geometry.

U3 also put a lot more importance on the melee combat system. I personally prefer to stick with the gunplay but for certain enemies like the shotgun/bulletproof vest guy and the giant brawler types, it felt like a requirement to engage them melee combat. The ability to return grenades and dropdown on enemies in silent takedowns was a welcome addition though.

I really hated the “drug trip” levels. It was very uncomfortable to look at the screen as it distorts and I started to panic during the first level because I was worried I was going in circles and causing this level to last longer than it should. Though to the developers’ credit, that’s really the point of these sequences.

There was one segment I was intent on getting through on all stealth as you infiltrate the airport to stowaway on the cargo plane to the desert. Two enemies at the end guard a door and you can’t shoot either without triggering the “alert”. You had to catch their attention, one at a time, to lure them away from the door and take them out. I really wished I could use the rock mechanic from Horizon Zero Dawn to even get them to spread out on a patrol as they searched for the noise. Ultimately, I was able to remain in the shadows enough to grab their attention but not to fully alert them.

General

I think story-wise, I enjoyed the first game the most, despite it being a little cliché that the Nazis appeared. But gameplay-wise, I probably prefer U2. I enjoyed Elena being presented as someone who didn’t have to rely on Drake to save her. The scene where Elena breaks Drake out of jail in particular was well executed and it was fun to watch these actors perform it.

In U2, although realistic that there would be some animosity between Chloe and Elena, I wished the two could be there as part of a team, not just as two sides of the love triangle. Thankfully they do warm up to each other.

In U2 and U3, characters ask Drake “what’s the point?” and I felt like Drake never successfully answered that. In U1, the driving motivation is rescuing Sully and Elena, then later on it’s in preventing the destructive power from leaving the island. In U2, despite Elena being on death’s doorstep, Drake still decides to face Lazarevic. In U3, especially after getting the warning that Francis Drake himself is alleged to have written. Drake wants to continue on. I guess that just speaks to who he is as a character but the 2nd and 3rd games lost me in that regard as to knowing when to quit. To be fair, he did want to quit in U2 until Schafer convinced him otherwise with the power of the Cintamani stone.

Music

Given Uncharted’s inclusion on stuff like Video Games Live, I expected there to be more to the soundtrack. The main theme is notable but unfortunately that’s the only track that stands out. There are no bad tracks so to speak, but nothing that made me want to listen to it again.

Hints

The hint system was hit and miss at times. I imagine they did a lot of testing to figure out what’s the average time it takes for someone to figure out a particular puzzle and then use that time for how long it takes for the hint to appear. Frequently, the hint would appear when I was already well on my way to finishing the puzzle or when I had just figured it out.

Sometimes the hints would take the form of pressing up on the D-pad and that’s great because I have the option to not press it. It was frustrating when character dialog would tell me what to do instead of letting me figure it out. I know I could’ve turned off the hints in the menu, but I think that would have only worked for the D-pad. It would’ve been nice if that extra character dialog wouldn’t give it all away or could be triggered optionally by the D-pad.

Take a break

It’s probably my fault for trying to rush through these games. But I couldn’t help but notice how high the body count is as you kill non-descript enemy after non-descript enemy. In the first game, they’re just trying to find El Dorado and yet these people are throwing their lives away. In U2, it’s maybe a little more believable because Lazarevic is a warlord basically. And in U3, I guess it’s also believable that this secret society has vast sums of money and influence. Everyone has a price as they say.

At times, I just felt fatigued at having to mow through a whole other squadron of enemies. I know that sounds strange from someone who has played his fair share of Halo, Call of Duty, and Gears of War, where there are no puzzles or exploration, it’s just killing.

In two of those, you’re fighting aliens or “monsters”. I wonder if I played through the 3 Call of Duty Modern Warfare games back to back, would I feel the same way about them? Or maybe it’s merely because Uncharted is not sold to me as being a soldier on a battlefield, you’re just a treasure hunter against mercenaries hired by some rich guy who are just looking for a paycheck (though to be fair, that’s many soldiers as well). Maybe it’s just my personal tastes changing over the years.

This endless warzone type combat also made me yearn for one or two scene where Drake takes it easy. Even just like stopping to eat or sleep would’ve been good. The puzzle and vehicle sections are there to break up the standard run and gun action but I just feel like as a person, it would feel more realistic to see Drake take a nap some time.

Granted, Uncharted is not necessarily aiming for realism. Chances are very low that any person would be able to climb up a train car as it teeters on the edge of a cliff in Tibet. Or escape from a collapsing building that has been shot with rockets from a helicopter gunship. Or survive days walking through the Rub' al Khali with no water and still have the stamina to survive waves of troops in a gun battle. And keep doing it all over and over again.

He does take 1 nap in Uncharted 3 for like 3 hours and I welcomed every second of it. Uncharted 2 opens at a bar where he takes several sips of a drink and of course he takes several sips of the poisoned water in Uncharted 3. But in excluding all of these normal human activities, Drake feels less and less like a human and more like a god.

I feel like maybe I’m missing something that all of these 10/10 and 9/10 reviewers saw. Part of that is probably the time that has passed. I started with The Last of Us and moved on to other games, like Death Stranding, that have built upon the motion capture acting format. Part of it is probably due to me trying to beat these games too quickly, especially when it comes to 2 and 3. I feel like as a whole they are more an 8/10.

I’ve since moved on to Uncharted 4 and so far it feels like a very different game, which I’m not sure if that is a good or a bad thing yet.

#uncharted

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secretgamergirl · 5 years

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I hate that I hate MMORPGs.

Yesterday, on kind of a whim, I installed an MMORPG and played it for a couple hours, and I had the exact same miserable experience I always do, for the exact same reasons. Basically, everyone who has ever designed one of these suckers (with maybe a few rare exceptions) just fundamentally does not understand and actively undermines the appeal.

I’m not going to sit down and go through Richard Bartle’s whole player classification system, but personally, here’s some things I look for in a game, in general, and an RPG in particular:

I want to engage with fun moment to moment game mechanics.

I want to hang out and socialize with some friends for a bit.

I want to get lost in a character.

I want to go on some cool heroic quest.

I want to explore a world.

That last one is the only one I’ve ever really gotten out of an MMO, and honestly I’m really being charitable and only listing it so I can’t say things fail on every level.

Really though, an RPG can mean one of several different sorts of games.

We’ve got the traditional pen and paper sort. Maybe the mechanics are neat? Rolling dice is kind of fun in and of itself, I can usually improvise cool stuff to do, that’s fun. I definitely get to hang out with friends, since the game really can’t happen without a consistent group meeting up once a week or so and all. The sky’s pretty much the limit on character creation and depending on the group I can go fully in character all night, great. There’s a one-off cool big quest we’re all going on that’s just for us, rad. Probably some interesting stuff going on setting wise, but that depends.

If I’m playing an old school console RPG... I definitely get my big epic quest on, probably in a cool setting, the basic gameplay.... I personally kinda tend to like in a comfort food sort of way, but really as video games go it’s pretty lacking. And there’s no real getting lost in a character or any socialization at all.

And then of course there’s big open world games where I can probably lose myself in a character even without socialization because such games usually put way more emphasis on customizing your character and personal style stuff than anything, and be pretty aimless.

Now, MMOs tend to suck at, again, basically all of this. The basic game mechanics always tend to suck because, well, it’s massively multiplayer. There’s a bunch of other people, likely on garbage internet connections, people coming and going, people playing once a week for an hour, people playing every waking moment. So anything timing dependent is kinda shot and anything really competitive won’t work, and I mean there’s room to innovate, but you’re always going to be less appealing than games that don’t have those concerns.

Hanging out with my friends... there’s a few issues here and I’m going to revisit this point, but I think it’s important to stress that I AM NEVER GOING TO BRING MY OWN FRIENDS IN. When I can get all my friends together to play a game, we’re going for traditional pen and paper RPGs. That’s hard enough to schedule and we aren’t going to double up. I want to make friends in the game and hang out with them. And I mean, one of the big barriers to that is how scattershot the scheduling is. There’s a few easy ways I can think of to either determine which players are on the same schedule or to just ask upfront in some preferences panel, and just kinda consistently throw people together, but, I’ve never seen anyone really try for it.

Now, getting lost in a character and going on a big epic quest are... kinda tied together here. There’s a trend I think started with WoW, where MMOs are written with stories that would work just fine in a singleplayer game. I’m the big chosen hero from this tiny little village that maybe burned down, and I need to go tour the world and eventually go confront a big evil villain or 10.

But the thing is, everyone else around me is also the chosen hero, from the same tiny little village, with the same tragic backstory, pursuing the same subquests, facing the same villlains... who repop after for the next person. That just... doesn’t work. I can’t get lost in my character when everything the game is giving me to work with is also being given to everyone else. We all canonically have the same backstory and goals...

... and that’s not even getting into the MMO loop! In literally every single one of these games I’ve ever played, you start in area A, you do a bunch of filler quests for the NPCs who live there, they reward you, piecemeal, with a new equipment set, you put that on, you get sent to area B, and you just kinda meander through the whole world like that.

So essentially what happens here is that not only is everyone running through the same story, but time and space are interconnected in such a way that at any given point, all the people you can see are on the same story beat you are. That can be handy if you’re really trying to encourage partying up I guess, but it really just exacerbates the issue of everyone playing essentially the same character. I came here on Farmer Brown from Easterdale’s suggestion and I’m helping kill these bees. Which Farmer Brown also suggested to these other dozen people. Who are all dressed exactly like me, with the clothes they got from everyone else in Easterdale (except all the guys get full outfits while me and all the other women are in a bikini variation).

What am I supposed to talk to these people about? There’s immediate mechanical issues like, well, “want to party up to grind these bees faster?” but that’s really about it. And if I do meet someone who seems cool and want to hang out, it’s inherently fleeting. Because unless we happen to be putting in the EXACT same amount of play time, we’re going to drift apart. If you go to dinner and I keep playing for another hour, I’m a town or two ahead of you on the treadmill, we’re never going to see each other again.

Plus I mean, “I want to walk through a progression of wide fields slaughtering the same monster 20 times to earn a pair of shoes” is decidedly NOT on the list of things I want to do.

One way to get around this, which I have fuzzy memories was actually done by D&D Online, is to really formalize adventures into these discrete events you enter as a member of a party and complete together in a sitting. Desyncing still happens, but for a given play session you at least have a proper social experience instead of the standard one where you’re just talking to the people ahead or behind you on the minigolf course as someone waits for a hole to clear.

Here’s my thing though. I don’t honestly particularly WANT the big epic world-spanning quest. I seriously have hundreds of single-player RPGs to scratch that itch, and trying to match pace with other people just makes it stressful or obligatory. I want to hang out with a character and bounce off people. I don’t want to be an eternal wanderer touring the world, really. I want to find a cool place, settle in, and be a local. Have some neighbors. We have our own stuff going on. It’s nice to stop at the tavern now and then and catch up. Or maybe I run the tavern. Maybe there’s some regulars, some people stopping by as they pass through.

Setting things up to encourage this sort of thing can even involve less work than the traditional route. If you want people to generally stick around the same areas and keep bumping into each other, for, you know, the whole social aspect of things, you inherently need less sprawling map and monster designs. Just a couple cool cities worth hanging out in and the roads between them.

Just... have different goals to pursue, with different mission chains. They don’t even have to be super unique. If someone wants to get the master beast hunter achievement, killing every monster in the world, they don’t need a lot of writing. If someone wants to just run a cool tavern, all you need are some gather rare ingredients quests, and some kind of simple archetectural/business management bit of gameplay to focus on instead of the crappy combat. Maybe organically encourage interactions like when I order all this rare spiced rum to put on my menu it generates a caravan escort quest for someone else to get it to me.

Also let everyone play dressup right form the start! Don’t force everyone with the same time on the clock to wear the exact same shirt/bikini top.

#Game Design #MMOs

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lewnatic · 5 years

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For the D&D asks, 1-20

Oh gosh, okay. This is gonna be long so I’m gonna do it under a cut.

What was your favorite Nat 1 Experience?

I don’t think a lot of my characters have had really funny Nat1 moments, sadly. I will always remember the one when @zhixx made a goblin named Spook’em specifically designed to have the least survivability possible. The first time he was downed he rolled a Nat1 on his first death save. The feeling of comedic timing was just beautiful.

Favorite D&D Inside Joke?

“You are a privateer! BUT ON LAHND.”

Favorite Item Your Character received in D&D?

Phailyn was supposed to get a tome to increase his strength, but when his crush said she wanted it, he immediately fucking dropped it so she could have it. So the DM let me sneak off and get a scrying orb we’d passed up earlier. He hasn’t used it yet, but I just like the story behind it.

Ves probably considers Sikrikta to be the best item she’s received has a lot of really expensive shit she’s keeping just because she has bourgie taste. She got a bottle of wine as a gift that would have been 400g if she’d left it unopened. She’s drinking it gradually through the adventure. It’s good, but not quite as good as what she’s used to.

Teeki has a gaudy diamond crown that Bing bought for 300 gold. It does nothing. It is purely cosmetic. She loves it.

Basically I love frivolous shit.

Preferred Animal Companion (if you had any)?

Vesxlit has a familiar, if that counts. He’s a parrot named Brilliant. He talks like a normal human (in a setting where that is definitely not commonplace) and is a member of the Bardic College in the capital city of the nation we’re traveling in.

He’s a posh gentleman who helps Ves sew dresses. They spend 90% of their time arguing because, being a bird, his fashion sense is incredibly bright and garish.

Favorite D&D Battle Encounter?

Every boss fight Skaaren has done is goddamn awesome, tbh. My favorite is the first just because of how scary it was.

Keep in mind, we’re level 1 in Pathfinder, an Oracle (Ves) and a Barbarian (Cato.) We’ve just watched a big hole open up in the ground, and our characters don’t know why, but we’re looking for missing people (including the barbarian’s boyfriend Fabius, he’s important) so we figure hell, this is probably where they’re missing.

We find some of the missing people at the bottom of the hole, but we haven’t found Fabius, so we go deeper in. We find this creepy old woman doing some kinda ritual or something by a pool of water? Barbarian charges in to kill her and save his man, and… kills her very quickly.

Silence. We go to check on Fabius, and we’re not sure if we can safely move him. I’m running out of heals from earlier stuff and I pop my last one on him, and after a while of debating what to do a ton of undead start coming out of the water. Just a goddamn mob. Whatever the hell creepy-lady was doing, we were suddenly way in over our heads. Even if we picked up Fabius and ran, we don’t have a fast way out of this hole. And we start taking damage fast. Including Fabius.

I don’t remember the specifics of the fight. I think that’s a testament to how much we were panicking. I remember feeling the helplessness of being a mage completely out of spell slots frantically trying to hit things with my stupid mace.

And I remember when the fight was over, I stayed down there panicking for several more minutes, trying to determine if Fabius was even alive while the barbarian ran to get the local doctor in a town of which he didn’t even speak the language.

In the end, Fabius was okay, and we both got out of it alive. It was just that sense of dread and fear, that we didn’t know how the DM’s rolls were going or if anything we were trying had any impact. Skaaren has always done a stellar job since of bringing that sense of genuine fear into the game when he wants to, but that first unexpected taste of it was so damn cool.

Favorite D&D NPC Interaction?

Varis Vrynn was my favorite villain. Not because of his fight, or how he fit into the greater lore, but because of how @extravagantshoes played him. He was a slimy uppity elf in the city of Galthiel, a city with heavy class divides based on magic ability. Varis was a powerful diviner, and a lot of our party interactions involved everyone in the party trying to piss him off and Varis looking down his nose in disgust at all of us.

Then Cedlanna, our young sorcerer, got a conversation with him alone in his manor, where he wanted to make a deal with her. And she just ripped into him. Cut to the core of his insecurities and how with all of his riches on display, his manor still was incredibly empty–that for all the parties he hosted he was completely alone.

He was doing some really irredeemable things and later tried to kill us all but I still managed to feel kind of sad that we ended up gruesomely killing him.

Dumbest thing You & Your Party Did

Charging through multiple spinning saws comes to mind. Every time I try to sneak around in heavy plate armor also comes to mind.

I feel like I need to make a separate post to discuss just all the impulsive things Cato does. Turning an entire city upside down just for the chance to punch a specific guy in the face was one.

Most Epic thing You & Your Party Did

I might also make a separate post about this, but Cato and Ves convinced a bunch of lizard people that they were their gods.

Basically in this setting, the level 1 baddies generally fought are called Rapia. They’re kobold-esque in design, but they have a faith-based culture and… well, kind of a faith-based biology. Rapia need something to worship, they undergo gradual physiological changes based on the thing they follow. (Say it’s a sea creature, they might get gills.) And if they don’t have something to worship, they literally become sick and presumably die.

We’d fought a few before and looted crap from their caves, including a tiny hammer that we never could have used but the barbarian held onto cuz idk??

We later ran into some others by falling through the roof of their cave, but they didn’t attack us. They started to assume that we were the gods depicted on one of their cave walls. For the sake of brevity, a fight broke out later when we were trying to leave, and Cato gave the hammer to one of the rapia who was helping us escape. It turned out in the DM’s notes, this hammer had significance to the rapia, and was supposed to be given to the religious leader of a tribe. And so the entire tribe turned to our side and protected us. And… they started following us.

It was about this time that the DM broke character to tell us he had no plan of this happening, and I guess we just have a tribe of rapia now. And we’ve had the goddamn campaign balanced around having a tribe of rapia ever since.

What did you like about your Campaign’s World?

I’m gonna try to sum these up quickly cuz these stories have already gotten long.

The Ascension world has elements of what I affectionately like to call Pop Fantasy, there’s some genre-awareness while not being parody, and all the work on the pantheon Spi did has been goddamn amazing. I also cannot figure out the overarching mysteries and that is awesome.

Nejj puts a ton into immersing us into the world. I can always very clearly get a feel for the sort of setting he’s putting us in, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with the political intrigue he’s been setting up.

Skaaren’s got the weirdest goddamn races in his setting and I love every single one of them. He’s also packed the setting full of little cultural details, I swear to god he’s done extensive research into what we’re having for breakfast in the morning based on where we’re staying.

What was the most Interesting Lore you Found?

I seriously can’t pick a favorite here so I’m going to give a silly answer, and that’s that acolytes of Ves’s goddess commune with her by getting super high.

Summarize Your Campaign(s) in a Single Sentence

One for each campaign:A group of weird rebels and one very ordinary guy dismantle the ruling government.Goblins discover crazy politics and necromancy, what happens next will warm your heart.Tourists getting intimate with the horrifying hidden truths of nature

Describe your whole Party Dynamic in a Sentence

The best bunch of weirdos and one stupid shady paladin.Loner rogue becomes Team Mom by sheer force of how much the other two hate each other.Bug Jesus and The Angriest Boy discover family in the form of lizards.

What Alignment do your characters lean towards?

I have a weird time choosing an alignment for characters cuz motivations change a lot for my nerds. Teeki was True Neutral but has become more Chaotic Good. Ves is Lawful Good I guess?? And Phai is a goddamn mess whose alignment has shifted at least thrice since his conception.

How do you tend to Take Notes (if you do)?

Badly! Next question.

Prefer Story/Plot Driven or No Plot/Character-Driven Campaigns?

I tend to prefer plot-driven, but I honestly think elements of both should be implemented in your narrative–occasionally giving breaks from the overarching plot to give the cast some time to dick around can give a breath of fresh air to roleplay.

Combat or Role Play?

Roleplay, of course. I actually used to think I hated D&D combat. It took a lot of great sessions to make me realize that the RP doesn’t stop for combat, and that’s when I started really getting into learning and enjoying mechanics elements.

Favorite D&D Monster/Creature?

Illithid. I would love to actually play as one someday.

Magic User or Fighter?

Magic is more engaging to me, personally, but I like both.

Preferred Weapon/Spell in D&D?

Tasha’s Hideous Laughter. In large part because of how it’s roleplayed in Critical Role tbh. I also have felt the high of Sneak Attack enough times to really love it now.

What was your Favorite Nat 20 Experience?

One time I rolled a Nat20 perception while we were on the road and it was literally just to find a coin on the ground. That might always be my favorite.

#dnd #lewnspeak #gobbos #ascension #scarecrowmes

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valtharr · 7 years

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After both Critical Role and the first campaign of The Adventure Zone have ended recently, I imagine quite a few people who never had anything to do with Pen & Paper RPGs might want to try it out. However, starting with a hobby like this can be quite daunting, and I’m not gonna lie, if your main sources of information are campaigns run and played by professional entertainers, that might end up giving you expectations that most regular groups just won’t fulfill. So, I thought I’d help some people out. I’ve been playing RPGs for over seven years now and tried a bunch of different systems, both as a player and (mostly) as a GM. Maybe this will help some people. I’ll divide it into three different groups: General advice, advice for GMs, advice for players. Let’s go!

General advice:

D&D isn’t the be-all-end-all of RPGs. There are tons of different game systems, and they’re not all just variations on D&D, either. Like I said, I’ve been playing a lot of different systems, but I never played D&D in my life. I’m saying this here, because some of the biggest problems people seem to have when it comes to starting out with the hobby is the complexity of the rules and/or the financial investment needed to buy all kinds of books and new dice. But there are so many systems that are not just really easy to understand and only need standard D6 (six-sided dice), but are also completely free! If you listened to the last episode of The Adventure Zone, you already know about the FATE system, but if you go looking on sites like DriveThruRPG, you’ll find tons and tons of different games with different rules and settings.

Find a regular time to meet up. Don’t make the mistake of trying to find a new time for every single session. Because then, you’ll eventually have conversations like “oh, next Thursday doesn’t work for me, I got soccer practice! but Tuesday’s good.” “oh, but Tuesday doesn’t work for me. how about Saturday?” “no, I told my dad to help in the garden on Saturday.” etc. If you say right away “Friday at 3 PM is RPG time”, people can organize their schedule around that.

I really thought I’d have more general advice than that. Oh well.

For GMs:

Don’t say no. Just don’t. Well, as a general rule at least. If your player wants to do something, and their character is actually able to do that in that situation, let them do that. “But what if that interferes with the story I have planned?” Well, my friend...

The players will not obey the tropes. I once read the sentence “Just like no battle plan survives confrontation with the enemy, so does no adventure survive confrontation with the players.” This is one of the expectations shows like Critical Role or TAZ can build up that might very well be shattered by your regular players. The people in those shows are actors and entertainers. They have an understanding how narrative works and probably instinctively react to a plot hook differently. Not to mention that they are playing for an audience. Your group only plays for your group. And as a result, they might make decisions that you just didn’t expect, because you expected them to act like characters in a story. But that just doesn’t always happen. Your story might fall apart in a way. And you know what? That’s a good thing.

As I said, you’re not playing for an audience of thousands of people. You’re just playing to have fun. And that should be your ultimate goal. I once GMed a horror game that culminated in one of the characters riding on an interdimensional flying snake of doom like he was in a rodeo show. This wasn’t scary! We were laughing our asses off! And after that session, I felt kinda bad, because I didn’t manage to evoke that dark, scary atmosphere I wanted. But then I said to myself...so what? The players were still entertained! I was entertained! Sometimes, the players not doing what you wanted them to do can turn into an even better story than you could have ever come up with. As this spoony bard will tell you. (seriously, if you have two hours to kill, listen to this story. it’s great.)

The players are not the enemy. RPGs are a cooperative affair, and your common goal is to tell an awesome story and have fun together. Hell, even the “awesome story” part isn’t necessary, really. Lots of people will tell you not to run a simple lootfest where the characters just run from dungeon to dungeon, killing monsters and grabbing treasure, but...if that’s what you and your group want, if that’s what entertains you, fucking go for it! It’s your game, nobody can tell yopu how to play it!

Be spontaneous, and learn to improvise. As I said earlier, eventually your players will “destroy” the story you came up with. But don’t panic if they do. Ideally, try to make it seem like they went just the way you wanted them to. Simple example: You want the characters to visit Town A because there they will meet an important NPC. But then the players decide that Town B sounds much nicer, an they want to go there. Well...there’s no real reason why that important NPC has to be in Town A instead of Town B, right? So just have them meet that NPC there!

If a player behaves in a way that you think is inappropriate (maybe they’re hogging all the spotlight, maybe they refuse to engage with the story...), talk to them about it. BUT! Don’t call them out in front of the group. Take them aside before the game starts, or talk to them outside of game time and tell them what your problem is. A lot of times, they don’t even realize what they’re doing. But be nice about it.

Reward creative thinking. If a player comes up with a clever solution you didn’t think of, first of all, don’t say it doesn’t work (see the first point on this list), and secondly, consider giving that player/character some kind of bonus. Don’t throw around experience points for every cool idea a character has, but think about what your chosen game system offers as possible rewards (for example, in FATE, a cool idea might reward the player with a FATE Point. it’s not in the rules, but hey, why not?)

In general: Reward “good behavior” and don’t punish “bad behavior.” If a player who roleplays well and has good ideas is the one who easily achieves their goals, the other players might be more inclined to try to be more like them.

Bottom line: Let the players have fun. They’re not characters in your story, you’re all telling a story together. They’re just as much the author as you are.

For players:

Engage with the story, or at least the world! Don’t be the kind of asshole who doesn’t follow up on an obvious plot hook just because you can. Don’t go out of your way not to play the game. even if it would be “in character.” Like really, why would you take 4+ hours out of your week just to sit around and NOT play the game you came to play?

In general, just...be respectful. That of course includes the regular etiquette rules that are in place every time you interact with other people or are at someone else’s house, but there are some rules you have to follow to specifically be courteous to your Game Master and fellow players. Like, for example, not hogging the spotlight or talking over other players. Not taking loot that would be better suited for another character. And for fuck’s sake, pay attention to the story and the other characters, even when the scene isn’t about you. Occasionally checking your phone or something is fine, but don’t play Candy Crush while the GM is explaining important plot details. They probably invested a lot of time and energy in creating this world and story, so tapping around on your phone while they present it to you is just fucking rude. And again, why would you even come if you’re not gonna listen?

Don’t be a rules lawyer. Like, it’s okay to point out a rule here or there, if it seems like the GM or another player forgot about it, but you don’t have to point out every single minor rule, especially if it’s not really that important. At the end of the day, it’s the GM’s call anyway.

You’re not the main character, and the other player characters aren’t your character’s followers. You’re all there to have fun together, and that sometimes means taking a step back to let another character have day in the limelight. Your chance will probably come, don’t force your character into scenes where another character would fit better.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. This isn’t a video game where there are only three pre-programmed ways to solve a quest. Really think about what your character knows, can do, the items you have, the environment you’re in, and what the other characters bring to the table. What you come up with might not be the solution your GM expected, but hey, they might even reward creative thinking!

I think that’s it for now. Can’t think of any more. Hope I could some people. And have fun :)

#the adventure zone #critical role #rpg #rpgs #d&d #dungeons & dragons #tabletop rpgs #tabletop rpg

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fairyboydammit · 7 years

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Modules: Compare and Contrast

So I'm gonna talk about RPG modules.

First a little background, I've been playing tabletop RPGs off and on for two decades. Most of my experience is in D&D and other sword & sorcery type games but I've also played a smattering of other stuff, including Star Trek, GURPS, Star Wars (D20, not the West End version sadly) BESM, Shadowrun, White Wolf and Warhammer 40k. I've run about half the games I've played in and have traveled the whole spectrum from “Only lazy uncreative chumps use premade modules“ to “They don't have the monster stats in the module book? They seriously expect me to run this with a monster manual open too?“ So I've had an evolving relationship with modules and premade adventures, these days I've come to embrace them as a wonderful tool for facilitating fun game nights, though I do still love writing my own stuff now and then.

The impetus to write this came from having run two very different modules with wildly different results and with my perspective and experience I'm going to try to talk about why I think my experiences were so different, and what the differences in the modules had to do with it.

So, the two adventures I've been running are Hoard of the Dragon Queen, a module for 5th edition D&D that came out recently, and the Witchfire Trilogy, a campaign written for the D&D 3.5 version of the Iron Kingdoms roleplaying game which I adapted to use the more recent Iron Kingdoms tabletop rules. Some early disclaimers; Witchfire I'm running in person, Hoard I ran over Roll20 and Discord, the parties for each game were composed of different groups of people, the only person these two games have in common is me running them, and I know the players and how I interacted with them have had an impact on how the game goes so I'm going to try to account for those factors in how I judge these modules, but my experiences will color my perceptions for good or ill, objectivity is unattainable.

Let's start with the beginnings, both adventures start the party at 1st level, parties fresh out of character creation and open with some action. In Witchfire, the party starts the game as hired caravan guards going through a swamp, they get ambushed by Goblins and must defend the caravan. This is a cakewalk of a combat encounter, the goblins are weak and don't pose a real threat to the party, their objective is to steal from the wagons more than kill the players. I've played through this module before and this is never a tough fight, it serves mostly as a tutorial to introduce combat to the party and set up travel to the city most of the adventure takes place in. When I ran it this time the party wiped out the goblins in about 3 turns and did a good job introducing them to the rules, what they were capable of and how the system worked. The first encounter in Hoard of the Dragon Queen is a village being attacked by a Dragon. With an army. The encounter is actually a series of encounters, the adventurers are approaching the village of Greenest, under attack by the dragon and an army of cultists and kobolds. The first encounter in the series of encounters this entails is very similar to the Witchfire one in some respects, eight kobolds attacking a family, the book states the kobolds will not even attack the party if they don't intervene. So much like Witchfire you have a low-power encounter without much real threat to the party. A key difference I notice is that in Witchfire, once the goblins are beaten, that's the end of the fighting, the caravan cleans up, repairs and heads on to town, the party doesn't have another fight for over a day (barring particularly violent and rambunctious players) in Hoard, this encounter is followed by a series of encounters aiding the villagers of Greenest, the book intends for the party to do about seven of these before getting a Long Rest (in 5th edition, Long Rests restore all hit points and expended spell slots, Short rests can replenish some health but at first level you can only benefit from one Short Rest before taking a Long one) given that most of these encounters involve combat of some kind, potentially lethal combat in some cases, this can be daunting or outright hazardous to a first level party as they have limited means to heal themselves at this point.

After the goblin ambush in Witchfire the party heads to Corvis and meets The Main Questgiver who sets them down the path of the adventure proper with some investigation missions, leaving aside combat for at least an entire game session while the party explores the city and gathers information. Hoard has the party hole up in the town's keep until morning and face a tacitly unfair combat encounter that will likely leave a party member dead. I don't want to get too wrapped up in minutiae or bogged down in encounters, but felt these two beginnings warranted being contrasted. Witchfire opens with a quick and easy fight to introduce the mechanics, and introduces the setting in a moment of peace, when the party has had time to collect themselves from the fight. Hoard bombards the party from the word go, spiking the tension for what could easily be the entire duration of your play session and chasing it almost immediately with another fight.

Gonna switch gears to structure. Witchfire has a positively immense amount of preamble, the book dedicates 32 pages to the background of the city, its environs, the events preceding the adventure, where the notable NPCs are concerned with it and what information needs to be imparted to the PCs, and what has happened that they will have no idea about yet. Hoard has barely a page of content before the first encounter and most of it is just general background on the setting, where the adventure will be taking them and an overview of the adventures events. I don't want to seem overly unfair to Hoard, as being set in the Forgotten Realms means all the lore is already out there in one form or another, so they don't need to include the entire history of the Time of Troubles or the Spellplague at the beginning of this adventure, but what background they do provide is very barebones, giving very one-dimensional accounts of the NPCs and their motivations, which leads to some severe confusion later on.

NPCs can be tricky to write in any situation, simply because it's impossible to hand a GM a script of everything someone might possibly say to account for what a party might be, say or do. Hoard has fairly minimalist scripts, giving most NPCs essentially just a blurb about what they need the party to do, sadly some of its best NPC characterization is wasted on an extended travelling section that my players at least just wanted to be over. Witchfire does a similar thing but goes an extra mile in giving extended NPC dialogues a rough outline. In situations where NPCs will have extended conversations with PCs, the books gives them introductory dialog and a few scripted lines, then lays out some ground rules, stating what the NPCs motivation is, what they know, what they will tell the players, and what they will ask the players. I cannot tell you how useful this extra information was, even when surprised by a situation the book didn't anticipate, the context provided by the additional background gave me enough to infer a consistent and in-character reaction. This forethought also helped turn what would have been exposition dumps into question and answer sessions that were engaging for the players. Hoard had some serious problems with not clearly describing NPC motives and intentions, to the point where I had the party walk in on a character who the book gave absolutely no indication how they would react, beyond implying he'd be kind of a dick about it.

Both of these campaigns have relatively little downtime, throwing developments and encounters without giving the party a lot of time to mess about and do other things, but the way they do this is set up drastically differently. Hoard has periods of intense activity at the beginning and end, with a sort of 'downtime' period in the middle, consisting mostly of travel. This approach is made necessary by the narrative but makes for bad pacing. By the time the party gets to the travel section they mostly just want to move on to the next dungeon/adventure beat because that's what the module has accustomed them to. To further exacerbate things, the travel section isn't even really downtime because of the random encounters and intrigue that persist throughout it, so it ends up being run like a poorly structured dungeon where the party is stuck on a wagon going through it. Witchfire has very little downtime but a much more regular pace, players generally have a period of buildup followed by a period of decompression surrounding each of the dungeons or action beats, which themselves gradually ramp up in scope and intensity before climaxing (usually near the end of each of the three 'books' the campaign is composed of) each one feels like an organic endpoint too, giving the party some good falling action and resolution before leading them into another adventure in the next book.

Let's talk nitty-gritty stuff now, dungeon and encounter layouts. Both of these campaigns have some impressive dungeons and some really fun encounters, Both also take steps to prepare the DM for the specifics of the dungeon environments, though Hoard takes a slightly more cumbersome path. The dungeons in Hoard will often have environmental conditions (light, effects of weather, patrols etc.) listed at the beginning of each dungeon but then not mentioned in the pertinent areas, which can be confusing if you haven't committed the entire section to memory or have lost details in the intervening time in the dungeon. Also, a thing that only happens once or twice but is still really frustrating that Hoard does: Information critical to the party in order to progress/accomplish a stated goal that they have literally no way of obtaining, that is bad structure. Witchfire by and large does a really good job putting all pertinent information in the room descriptions, as well as giving almost every dungeon room a clearly marked “Read this out loud“ flavor text callout (another thing Hoard neglects on a few occasions)

I suppose one more thing is important to cover before narrative structure and I suppose it can be best described as 'progression'. Progression and levelling systems are kind of the hallmark of the RPG genre, to the point where video games say they have 'RPG elements' because after you do a certain amount of stuff a number goes up, and levelling up is important to engagement and helps pace a campaign. I can't really compare these two games in terms of levelling up just because the adventures are different lengths, they use different systemic scales to determine levels and relative power, it just doesn't work that well, but there's another important progression system I can call upon: Loot. Loot is also a hallmark of RPGs and especially in games like D&D your equipment can be as much an indicator of your power as your level. Often times upgrading equipment eventually becomes the only way to improve key aspects of your character's capabilities, so its importance is hard to overstate. Even 20th level veteran characters can be total pushovers without the cartload of epic loot they've accumulated in that time. In Hoard of the Dragon Queen the party will find precisely zero magic items until the penultimate dungeon. Which they will be level 7 upon completing. Even basic equipment is startlingly rare throughout this campaign, with most of the enemies who use equipment having low-quality gear that party won't need. Even the treasure they do find (primarily currency; coins, gems etc.) isn't of much use as they're only in a town long enough to go shopping once near the beginning of the adventure. Now I've run low-magic/low-treasure games before, they can pose unique and interesting challenges and be a lot of fun if you're prepared for them. Whoever wrote this campaign however was not, as well before the party will see it's first +1 magic sword (in the final dungeon btw) they'll encounter monsters resistant to nonmagical attacks, making what should be relatively standard fights to build tension on the way to a real showdown into bone-crunching slogs where spellcasters exhaust their entire arsenal and fighters slash away for hours at enemies they can barely damage. This is, in my opinion, simply an unforgivable oversight in terms of game design. Given the numerous typos and editing mistakes in this campaign it would not surprise me at all if they had just left out some sections where the players were supposed to find some decent equipment, as it was I threw in a few caches to get my party up to having a fighting chance. I'm all for challenging players and giving them a fight that really tests them but there's an art to crafting a real challenge and throwing something at the party that you haven't given them the tools to deal with is not part of it. If I hadn't added my own loot to the game most of the party would be facing the final boss with the exact same gear they started with, and while that can work in some games, D&D is not one of them. Witchfire was a bit of an odd case because of how magic items work in IKRPG and the fact that it was written for an earlier edition of D&D made that a bit off for my campaign but as written, the party found a magic item (albeit a dagger) in the first dungeon, and had the potential to find more substantial equipment upgrades at a fairly regular pace throughout the game, and even had a reward for a side quest be „One free masterwork item of your choice“ at the local weapon shop, so even people with obscure weapon preferences could be assured they wouldn't be left out.

Okay now it's time for Narrative structure, buckle in. One of the big problems I had with Hoard was getting the characters invested, they never stayed in any place long enough to care about it, never spent enough time with an NPC to care about them, never encountered an antagonist enough times to build a rivalry with them, and while some of this I can chalk up to the travelling nature of the campaign, some it I can't. In the extended caravanning section the party has chances to meet up and talk with some NPCs but they're almost immediately shunted off somewhere else at the next stop, the party never returns to Greenest or speaks to anyone from it again. My party's most protracted NPC relationship was with a named Lizardfolk NPC about 2/3 into the campaign and didn't last past that particular dungeon. Even the organizations they were ostensibly working for only spoke to them once the entire adventure. This is not good writing, this is not good engagement, if I was reading a novel about these events I would constantly be asking myself “Why do these adventurers even care?” and I'm sure some of my players asked themselves that at least once over the course of this game, which is not a good sign. Witchfire on the other hand, I will first say has the rather significant benefit of actually being a series of novels, though honestly the roles of the adventurers are written in such a way that I can't even grasp what must happen in the novels, unless they just include a set of characters who make up the adventuring party. I'll actually probably go more in-depth in another piece about the writing in Witchfire but for now I'll stick to my comparisons. By having the campaign take place almost entirely in one city, the party has time, and inclination to get acquainted and invested in it, they're going to be interacting with this place for a while, they're going to go to places and visit people multiple times, the person they spoke to in chapter 1 will still be there in chapter 10 and that makes it easier for them to care. The primary quest giver, Father Dumas, is a staple of the campaign and rather than being relegated to a simple exclamation point telling the party where to go to next, he becomes a person, with a complex relationship to the story, the antagonist, the other NPCs, the city itself and yes, the characters. Even minor NPCs are given life and depth and engender empathy from the players. When terrible events befall the city my players were wracked with concern, vowing revenge on those who did this and putting thought and heart into how they were going to help.

Writing a novel is hard work, so is coming up with interesting and compelling scenarios for games, writing a tabletop campaign is a delicate alchemy of these endeavors and can be tougher than both. I wanted to write this primarily to show how a well-written and structured adventure could be truly amazing for everyone involved, and how laziness, poor structuring choices and a lack of attention to detail can make what should be a ton of fun with your friends feel mediocre, or even like a slog. I've learned a lot from these experiences, and I hope some of it I've been able to impart to others. To anyone out there thinking of writing a campaign or just running something fun with their friends, I hope this has been a helpful look into some of the harder to see aspects of gaming. Happy role-playing everyone!

#Dungeons and Dragons #Tabletop #modules #IKRPG #Iron Kingdoms #Witchfire #Hoard of the Dragon Queen #Forgotten Realms

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yeahwesaidthat · 7 years

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TWWS: The Best of D&D

Ladiiiiiiiies and gentlemeeeeeeeeeeen! Welcome to the ultimate showdown: THE BEST OF D&D!

This post contains the best of the best of the D&D/RPG posts over the years of TWWS, all the way from the beginning. At the end of the post, there will be a link to a survey where you can vote for your favourites in each category (other/3.5e, 4e, and 5e) and nominate MVPs for each category. If the person you want to vote MVP has only been referenced as “Player,” just note down what quote they’re responsible for. A week from today (or until enough of you fill out the survey), Round 2 of the competition begins.

Everybody roll for initiative!

Overheard During Other RPGs

During Hackmaster, about a bottle label: SB: “It says ‘Thou shalt not question the DM over inane shit!’”

Overheard During D&D 3.5e

Unarmed damage?: MM: “It’s the difference between a slap and a bitch-slap.”

So wrong it's right: MM (IC): “I like your spunk.” KH (OOC): “So does [gay player].”

Rogue equipment: KB (IC): “I need [boots] that are…soft-sounding.” MM (IC): “We have socks.”

Describing a character: SO: “She is built like a brick shithouse.” DM: “She shits brick houses.” Bubbles: “She makes brick houses shit bricks.”

When the party has two rogues: KH (IC): “I can find it!” KB (IC): “I can find it better.”

RD (IC): “[Wizard], if you do not stop right now, I will arrest you for terminal stupidity, and I can assure you, I will find a law against it!”

A discount on services rendered: SO: “What’s 75% off of ‘I run and do whatever you ask without question’?”

Calling for divine help in very specific situations: MM: “Please state your current medical emergency.” KB: “Head-splosion.” SO: “If you have been stabbed, press one. If you are currently being stabbed, press two.” MM: “If your head’s detonated and you’ve launched into a wall, press three.” RD: “Why did you press three? We never expected anyone to press three!” SO: “We don’t know what to do in this medical emergency! Please dial again!”

IO: “[Wizard] is going to say - ” KB: “Can I tell you why this is a bad idea?” IO: “No.”

Proper procedure when everything goes to hell: RD: “[Cleric] goes outside and makes a magic circle, sits in it, and cries.”

KH (IC): “That stupid fucking son of a flea-ridden bitch cunt wizard - ” MM (IC): “Oh, him.”

How to pray to the god Ao: KB, KH, and MM: “I throw my hands up in the air sometimes sayin’ heeeeey-oh! I worship Aaaaaaa-o!” Bubbles: “[The wizard’s] gaaaaaaaay-o!"

Overheard During D&D 4e

SIDE NOTE: A Quiplash commentary on D&D 4e: A more environment-friendly alternative to toilet paper - 4th ed character sheets

What we think we saw - again?: Player: “If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and weighs the same as a duck, it must be a witch.” KH: “It’s a witch.” RJ: “Build a bridge out of 'er!”

Healing needed: Player: “I have a mess kit, will that help?” WS: “Only if you want to make a mess.”

Captain: “Neverwinter ho!” Dwarf: “Hos? Where?”

SB: “Eventually you end up at the most popular stall in the market.” Player: “Porn?”

About attacking a character that may or may not be good: SB: “Wait, what’s your alignment?” Player: “Lawful Paranoid.”

Taunting the kraken: Player: “Your tentacles are so short even an anime girl wouldn’t take 'em!”

Questioning the legitimacy of an NPC: SB (IC as Priest): “I have a degree in polytheism from the University of Phoenix Online!”

Making sure it’s really dead: SB: "You kick the head and it goes sailing through the open door of the tomb. You hear a voice in the darkness go ’Gooooooooal!’”

Killing the undead: SB: “Congratulations, you choked something to death that doesn’t breathe.”

Mass undead murder: Player: “We made a ghoul-ash. An evil gumbo, really.”

Architecture: Player: “I like big buttresses and I cannot lie.”

Interesting kills: SB: “You decapitated him with a bludgeoning weapon.”

About flying books: Player 1: “The window opens in! How do they fly out?” Player 2: “They’re paperbacks."

Player: “Thank God I decided to engage the dragon in melee.” MW: “You’ll never hear that in any other D&D campaign ever again.”

Player: “Is the food still on the table?” Three Of Us: “DON’T EAT IT!!!”

Overheard During D&D 5e

Annoying Teen: (about his character) “Would he still hate me?” AD: (not about his character) “I think everyone hates you.”

Don’t mess with a dire bear: JI: “There’s one inside who attacks the bear…" (rolls) "...and misses horribly ‘cause he shits his pants.”

JI: “He doesn’t have 100 hit points. He has 95.”

Demonic insight: KH: “I say in Infernal, ‘Peace! We mean you no harm!’” JI: “There’s no word in Infernal for ‘peace.’” Retroactive Edit: Demons actually speak Abyssal. Devils speak Infernal.

Animal form disadvantages: AD: “I’m going to bite [the zombie].” Everyone Else: (mass noise of disgust)

JI: “You feel a pinch in your mind as if she’s flipping through your yellow pages.” AD: “That’s got to be a euphemism for something.” ST: “Oh, yeah, baby, turn my yellow pages.” JB: “Turn to ‘F’ for fun.”

What happens in every religious venue in every D&D campaign ever: JB: “Here is the church, here is the steeple,” KH: “Open the door, and here are the zombies.”

KH: “Did you sneak off to her house in the middle of the night?” ST: “Does that sound like something I would do?” KH, AD, and CD: “Yes.”

JI: “You guys came in here - ” AD: “ - like a wrecking ball - ”

Post-adventure considerations: KH: “[Rogue] wouldn’t know what to do with her life.” AD: “She can bail herself out of jail.”

Switching to melee for a change: CD: “Let’s see if this ‘offense’ thing you do all the time really works.” (rolls a critical hit)

The logistics of being swallowed by a sea monster: ST: “Am I going to take damage if I move further along his digestive tract?”

EC: “If you had leprosy and your ears fell off would you be a deaf leper?”

Identifying mysterious cults: KH: “What’s the Cult of Howling Hatred?” EC: “The Westboro Baptist Church, obviously.”

DR: “Apparently your god has personally intervened due to your badassery.”

A Mass Effect cameo on a dexterity check for dancing: EC: “If you roll a one, you dance like Shepard.”

EC (IC): “So what you’re saying is that it’s very dangerous and we shouldn’t go in. I’ll take point.”

Things to worry about in combat: KH: “You don’t have enough hit points to take it like a man, honey.”

The ends justify the means?: Bubbles: “Did you have fun role-playing an interrogation?” DR: “You guys are fucked up.”

KH: “How do you stun-lock a Terrasque?!?” JB: “Fourth Edition.”

ST: “Do we have to kill them before we eat? I hate murdering on an empty stomach.”

About a revenant and a possible lover: EC: “Well the beast is committing necrophilia and the necro is committing bestiality…” DR: “What happens in Faerun, et cetera.”

Rolling high on a seduction check: DR: “Frankly, I didn’t think you’d go down this road.” KH: “Oh, I went down all right.”

More on the seduction roll: Bubbles: “Try to convince her to come with us. The way she came with you last night.”

About a nonviolent kua-toa: Player: “He’s a paci-fish.”

About dealing with face-hugging enemies: CD: “You swung at yourself and missed?” AD: “I swung at myself and missed.”

ST (IC): “I’ll be staying in the boat unless you have need of my specific skills.” CD (OOC): “Dying first is not a skill.”

About cultists: DM (IC): “They are water people. Maybe they’re just going with the flow.”

About a minotaur who keeps missing: DM: “At least when you put a bull in a china shop he’ll break shit.”

About bottles of brandy: EC: “I have two questions: how many of them are there and how many of them can I carry?”

Ideas so bad they’re good: KH: “We’re gonna blow up the temple with the distillery.” F: “The temple, the lich, half the plot…”

About going forward: KH: “Against our better judgment.” DM: “What better judgment?” KH: “Good point.”

About shooting arrows: KH: “'Nock’ yourself out.”

About using a lot of magic: JS: “We’re blowing a big load here right now.”

JS: “You wanna go up the shaft?” ST and T: “That’s what he said.”

About flirting with an efreet: JI: “Below her waist is a trailing cloud of black smoke, so you’re not getting anything.”

Questioning the guardian imp: Player (IC): “What happens if someone disturbs the sarcophagus before your time is up?” WS (IC): “There’ll be six more weeks of winter.”

MR (IC): “Trying to undercut me on my quest to restore my former glory?” KH (IC): “You have no glory to restore.” Other Players: “Oooooooh!” SW: “Quick, someone cast heal!”

When talking with a spirit: MR (IC): “You can’t just ask someone if they’re dead! That’s incredibly rude! The correct term is ‘mortally challenged’!”

After a petrifying encounter with some basilisks: BC: “I always thought she was stone-hearted.” KT: “I dunno, I thought she rocked.” JS: “I am going to kill all of you.”

What to do with windmills: KH: “If we had a lance, we could go tilting.” MR: “Cavalier idea.”

Quest priorities: Player 1: “No one’s going to pay us to do it right now. It’s not worth the attention.”

JF: “Roll to see if you hit me by accident.” KH: “Oh, I’d hit you on purpose.”

K’s paladin chastising A’s paladin about her sex habits: A (IC): “I thought you were the paladin of joy!” K (IC): “Not that kind of joy!”

About a previous edition of D&D: KH: “[What] the hell couldn’t you do in 3.5?” SW: “Win.”

KH: “Technically you’re underage.” ST: “That’s never stopped me before.” AD: “You or your character?” ST: “Do I have to answer that?”

D: “We’re gonna make the Underdark great again!” ST: “We’re gonna build a wall - a really big wall in the Underdark, and we’re gonna make the gnomes pay for it.” A: “We pay for everything already! Screw you!”

About a character who caught fire: T: “He’s not rolling initiative; he’s rolling on the ground.”

T (IC): “Let’s go before the men’s egos get us killed.”

JB (IC): “My god believes in good opportunities. Not dying is a good opportunity.”

Passing on some bad news: JI (IC): “[Chief] not sick!” AD (IC): “He was when we were done with him.”

To a healer: KH (IC): “I don’t suppose you have a cure for the common cold?” JI (IC): “I’m not a miracle worker.”

Reassuring a woman scorned: AA (IC): “Go tell her - all men dogs.” JI (OOC): “Says the cat.”

To the tune of “Like a G6”: ST and KH: “Roll a d6, roll a d6!”

KH: “Of course it’s always about dirty sex - I’m a bard!” AD: “The hell are you two talking about down there?!”

To a mindflayer, about a stupid character: KH (IC): “I’d offer you his brain to eat, but I don’t think he has one.” JS (IC as mindflayer): “I don’t eat junk food.”

MGW: “It’s Tza…Zsa…his name is Jasper.”

Saying goodbye to the barkeep: MR (IC): “I’ll be back visiting the northern parts soon.” KH (OOC): “And then you can visit her southern parts.”

About a questionable NPC: ST (IC): “I would never dream of hurting you!” KH (IC): “I would.”

About prison visitations: JB (IC): “How often is it that a [gypsy] walks in here voluntarily?”

Failing a romance/persuasion check: AA: “Ooh, she cast Zone of Friend!”

Preparing for a swamp adventure: CD: “I want to buy some insect repellant.” AD: “What, your personality doesn’t drive them away?”

About a magic boat: JB (IC): “I saw it grow!” ST (IC): “Are you sure you didn’t rub it? That sometimes happens with wood.” JB (IC): “You would know.” ST (IC): “You wouldn’t.” JB (IC): “Tell that to my two children.”

About an injured drow: MGW (IC): “Look at that poor girl! She has a black eye! You can’t see it, ‘cause her skin is black, but still!”

Last-minute aliases: RD (IC): “Unfortunately, no, my name is Dick Ballsenshaft.”

To a half-orc and Sir Bearington, regarding weirdness: MGW (IC): “…but for me to assume you’re in a loving relationship with a talking bear is where we draw the line?!”

Wisdom for stealing magic items: KC: “Anything that glows goes.”

About fleeing: RD: “I’m going to run like an Amazon employee during the holidays.”

MGW: “You were doing so well until everybody died.” JF: “D&D in a summary.”

Once more about fleeing: RD: “A smart man knows when to run like a little bitch.” J: “Why do you think that’s the first thing I did?”

Recapping the previous session: A: “There was a shitshow, but we got away with it.” S: “So the usual, then.”

About creature size: MR: “Is an ettin large or huge?” MGW: “I think he’s just large.” A: “He’s probably large but pretends he’s huge.” AS: “Typical guy.”

When a pervy character is disgusted by a perv: RD: “Dear Kettle, I have an issue with your current hue. Signed, the Pot.”

A: “He told us to send a message.” KH: “A sword in the stomach is a message.” SW: “The Lannisters send their regards.”

The pervy paladin: A: “I used Lay On Hands. I healed him.” KH: “Yeah, but where did you lay your hands?” MGW: “Wherever she wanted.”

About our tactics: SW: “We put the 'fun’ in 'dysfunctional.’”

About possible activities: MGW (IC): “I know you’re a tiefling, but we’re all the same color in the dark, right?”

Interesting weapon material: MGW: “You all take a moment of reflective silence.” JB: “Nah, I’m just cleaning my bone.” KH: “Technically that’s a moment of reflective silence.” KC: “Not if you’ve seen the barbarian do it.”

Scrying like bad cell reception: KH: “Switch to AD&D.” JB: “Can you scry me now?”

About the taste of human: SW: “You would know.” A: “Nah, I don’t swallow.” MR: “This conversation is making me uncomfortable.”

Wrestling prep: MR (IC): “I want a good, clean fight.” A (IC): “No we don’t.” JB (IC): “What’s a clean fight?” A (IC): “It means you have to take a bath first.” JB (IC): “What’s a bath?”

MGW: “There’s a bridge that looks like it may have collapsed at some point.” JB: “Is it a-bridged?”

Beautiful references (read in Rorschach’s voice): AA: “I’m not grappled with YOU,” ST, AA, and KH: “YOU’RE grappled with ME!”

About remaining spells: KH: “I have three 1st-level slots and one 2nd-level slot.” CD: “Those are 'keeping people alive’ slots.”

Dealing with extra-limbed gorillas: ST: “Uh-oh! They must have been forewarned!” AD: “What makes you say that?” ST: “Forewarned is four-armed.” AD: -_-

Negotiation skills: AD: “It’s just me trying to bullshit him.” JI: “Why don’t you make a bullshit check?”

Trying to figure out if the staff is necromantic: CD: “We could kill a mouse in front of the staff. We could kill a mouse with the staff. How much is it to buy a mouse?”

JB: “Anyone die while I was gone?” SW: “Not on the outside.”

Wizarding limits: JS: “You may not polymorph your zombies into t-rexes.”

Zombies aren’t too smart: BC (IC): “Bobs, attack the closest gnoll!” Bobs: (run at gnoll party member) KH (OOC): “Et tu, Bob?” JS (OOC): “If this doesn’t belong in your blog, I dunno what does.”

Far too relatable: JS: “Twenty psychic damage.” BC: “I’ve taken more psychic damage from my mother.”

Worst-laid plans: KH (IC): “I have a very bad feeling about this.” MR (IC): “You should.”

Our go-to combat tactic: MR: “Are we going to stupid the guy to death?”

Zing!: MGW (IC): “If you join me, I can make you the greatest dwarf who ever lived.” TP (IC): “I am the greatest dwarf who ever lived.” Whole Table (OOC): “Ooooohhhhh!!!”

Another verbal duel with a sea god/character class limitations: KH: “I would say 'what is a god to a nonbeliever,’ but I’m a cleric.”

Activating the mysterious device: BC (IC): “We did it! I wonder what we did?”

Business as usual: KH: “This seems like a bad idea, but go ahead.”

Old adages: MR: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” (IC) “But then, no enemy has survived contact with us!” (OOC) “Was that quote-worthy?” KH: “Yes.”

KC: “She can ride me. I don’t care.” KH: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) KC: “…I’M A BEAR IN ARMOR.”

Advantageous druidic inanity: KC: “Are you still riding the flying bear?” MR: “It’s flying now?” KC: “Yeah, he flew up to unlock the door.” AS: “…So he’s a flying bear with armor…”

Spell modifications for humourous purposes: MR: “Using a Dex[terity] save for Zone of Truth means they’re literally dodging the question.”

About a wild, crazy, out-of-left-field hypothesis: RD (IC): “I figured if you pulled something that big our of your ass there’d be bleeding involved.” MR (IC): “…That’s between me and my proctologist.” SW (OOC): “Did you take fire damage for that? That’s like Taco Bell levels of burn.”

As is per usual: MR: “We may have once again survived this by the skin of bullshit.”

Take the survey and vote for your favourites!

#twws #that's what we said #d&d

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gamesmasternotes · 7 years

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WRITING A GAME – The Steve Method pt 1

In 2015, my local gaming group ran its second “GM Bootcamp”, an opportunity for people who were interested in Gamesmastering but had never given it a go to write and run short games. The ideas was that a group would form, which I would shepherd, and each member of the group would run a short two session adventure in the game system of their choice.

To help the group plan their games, I wrote a collection of essays about how I personally like to approach writing and running games. This is the first part of those essays, with a few revisions, focusing on short game planning.

With a small game – a simple dungeon-dive or a short one or two session quest - the place I like to start is with one small element. This may be a scene, encounter, setting, theme, or something like that, and build from there. I like to start with one awesome aspect I think will be the good central aspect of the game, or a central "most-fun-point" I can build around. It’s the best place I think to start any story.

Once you have one tiny element, you can build on it. Its very existence already raises questions. What is this thing? How did it come to be? Why is it important? Etc.

For the GM Bootcamp 2015, I ran a D&D 5th game in the first two weeks of the Bootcamp to get things moving and provide a good example for the others. So the central core element obviously needs to be fantasy based of course.

What I did was start with a general theme - this being a rite of passage. We’re dealing with Level 1 characters, who have yet to make a mark on the world, so it’s a good way to get them involved in the adventuring theme of D&D.

That made a good starting point, as it gave me an opening. Think about what questions it raises, and as you answer them you'll develop your game. What is the rite of passage for? Who is making it happen?

In this case we're dealing with a small game, so to keep it simple I decided on membership of the Adventurers Guild. It’s a rite - a quest - necessary before membership is approved. From there you get more questions which help build everything else, but now that you have a reason for a quest, you can move onto "what is the quest".

There are two schools of thought when writing a game - a straight forward narrative and the sandbox. Some people like to write a narrative, and make it a path for the player characters to follow. One event follows another which follows another, each twist being ore-scripted. Its directly analogous with a classic platform style video game – one path the player can walk down, with no opportunity for exploration. With small games this can sometimes work better as it keeps things tighter and in the timescale you have available, and it can allow for the kind of GM who has a specific story they want to tell. My preferred method however is the sandbox, which essentially makes the players part of the storytelling. I like to make a small world in which the players can roam, explore and find interesting things to do. In this small world, there is usually one particular interesting thing to do, but I like to make sure that players can move through the world and reach that objective by any means they wish.

The first thing is to set the objective. In a larger game, this can be something massive and epic like destroying the One Ring or defeating The Dark One. These are simple enough, but entail a lot of build up. In a smaller game, you can go for a smaller, simpler objective. You can go for epic of course, but make it streamlined so you don't need the build up and complicated stuff. Your main villain doesn’t need armies, or beefy lieutenants, or vast, elaborate trap-mazes to defend them. In a small game, you don’t have time to go into those details once you actually get to the playing table. So cut it back. To try to make things simpler, destroying the One Ring needs a lot of preamble. It requires finding the bloody thing, getting to Rivendell, getting to Mordor without being caught, etc, all the mountain and mine stuff, the forest, Shelob, the plains of Gorgoroth, and then Mt Boom. Not to mention Ringwraiths. There's a lot of stuff. With a bigger game, having your epic quest usually means a series of smaller objectives along the road, or elements the players can pick up in whatever order they want, but once assembled open up the endgame. In a smaller game, it best to keep to just one objective though, and keep any preamble to a minimum.

As a brief analogy to explain the simplification concept – a few years back, I entered a short story competition on a gaming forum I frequent. The competition set a theme, a simple word (“Thirst”) and a limit on only 400 words. And I won, with a story stripped of everything that was unnecessary. I told the story of a king in a sci-fi setting, who poison detector found poison in literally everything. Being paranoid, he ends up not eating or drinking, and eventually died. A young usurper then takes the throne, and laughs at having reprogrammed the scanner.

But I didn’t ever give either character a name. Their names weren’t important or necessary for the story. I didn’t go into detail on the surroundings, because I assumed that was something that the readers could fill in for themselves. I stuck only to the absolute essentials, and that story won the competition by a reader vote.

For the D&D game, the players would be engaged in a rite of passage - a quest on behalf of the Adventurers Guild. For this sort of thing, as I've said a few times, simple is best. For D&D that usually means, "go find this thing" or "go kill this thing". “Oh no, our thing is lost. Go find". “Oh no, we've got trouble with this thing. Go KILL it".

There’s a common theme here. Quite often whole concepts add other assumptions which add into your plan, so don’t be afraid of obvious themes. Stereotypes, clichés and common tropes are not to be feared, especially when they might be what has attracted someone to a genre of game!

The idea of a rite of passage though means it needs to be something repeatable - other people need to be able to complete the rite from time to time, so it couldn't be a one-off deal. The best and most obvious route then was "go find/retrieve with a common but not to common item. So. A flower. A special flower that only grows in one place. That place needs to be interesting, so interesting terrain is called for. A mountain then - a flower that only grows near the top of a particular nearby mountain. This gives us a quest, a place to travel to, a journey which can be dangerous, and the assumption of a starting point.

So we've got a core element and a central objective. From here I'll tend to draw up a simple map of the area, which will be the arena my players will find themselves in. Its entirely up to you how much effort you put into this part, whether it be extremely simple sketch with key points indicated by simple crosses, or a highly detailed topographical map printed on leather with every building of every town painstakingly drawn in by hand.

Now we can populate the area. In my style, there are three areas of population that need to happen.

First, we need a cast of NPCs from the home base. These include the primary quest givers and holders of vital information/supplies. This is the standard level its good to have available to your players in their starting location - or available through some form of communication as player specific contacts. Most of these can and should come quite naturally. They're the either the basic things you would expect to have in any place, or the contacts players specifically want to come with. For information givers, I find it can be better to let the players come up with their own contacts as part of character creation and letting them just use the information their characters naturally have access to in their endeavours.

In this game, I added basic grocers, a blacksmith and an alchemist for supplies, as well as the Adventurers Guild leader to give the main quest.

Examples in popular culture would include the entire population of say, the Shire. But in here you have important NPCs who can be helpful. If we resort to the books, Fatty Bolger is a great example of a starting NPC character to help get the players on the road. Elrond later turns up as a primary quest giver. During character creation, a player who comes to me with a Ranger (who we’ve agreed secretly has a “lost king” thing going on) would like a Elven ally as a contact. We discuss and turn it into a romance with an Elven maid to mirror some of the backstory we’ve worked out in the game world. Screw it we say, lets make this a useful NPC who can both aid you and give you vital information and supplies. Lets make her Elrond’s daughter, and call her Arwen.

The second level of population is the main hazard. The thing you've got to battle through. This usually can spin right out of the main objective and setting. If you've got a primary antagonist as part of your objective, there is one part straight away. The rest of the hazard will be his followers, minions or employees. His private security forces, or his summoned monsters, or the tribe/gang he leads. It’s nice if there's some variation, but keep to the theme. If you have a horde of Goblins, have a generic minion but add the odd special guy. The ranged support, of the magic buffer, or whatever.

In our game, we’re going to populate the mountain with a race of Birdmen. There will be generic warriors, plus a ranged archer group, and a leader who lives higher on the mountain. To mix things up and account for magic users in the party, this leader will be a magic wielding shaman. We’ll also plan for some kind of monster at the peak, close to the final objective as a final boss level encounter.

We can also make the journey a bit more hazardous, and say that between town and the mountain is a forest. And there are Wolves in the forest.

To use a Lord Of The Ring game as our example again, we can populate Moria with Goblins, and give them the special bonus of a cave troll. Towards the end, we add a bigger monster – the Balrog.

That’s the level where you more or less have your world in general terms. You can go into a lot more detail, but this is the starting level I feel you can easily start a game with, and build the rest as you go along, ideally with input from the players or with elements derived from character creation. If one character decides to be a herbalist, I can add in areas of the landscape where certain special herbs might be found. If one player has decided that their character is a drug addict, I can also easily write in a few local drug dealers - maybe the odd undercover police stings waiting for him to fall into their trap...

In the game I ran in 2015, one player asked for a contact within the adventurers Guild. He designed a character who was joining because their uncle was a member. Instead o adding the uncle as a new character though, I transplanted the concept straight into the primary quest giver, and made HIM the characters uncle.

There is a third level of population I'll throw in once I have the general setting though, and this is side quests. This isn't something necessary for the game at all, but I find it helps develop the world and get the players more involved with events. What I'll do is take the map or the list of NPCs and just add into them a couple of special missions. Maybe someone needs something else found, or asks for something to be killed or collected whilst the players are out on their quest. Maybe something is found whilst out, and it leads into a mystery the solution of which yields an interesting reward.

“Oh, while you’re out there……”

In smaller games, I say only one side quest is best. Any more can make things too complicated or maybe push the time limits on the game a bit too far. If you want to add one into yours, I do say they are a good idea, but if you do make sure to reward it. A good idea on a smaller one-off game is to make the reward directly related but not essential to the main quest. When fighting a Vampire for example, rewarding an optional side quest with damaging Holy Water might be very suitable.

I decided that instead of having a random person standing around town desperate to find an Adventurer to take on a side-quest, along their journey the players would find something which points to an interesting mystery. It would be optional of course, but in the search for the flower the reward at the end of it will be directly useful.

The players would come across a cart which had been attacked at the base of the mountain. A survivor would say that his associate (or a brother perhaps) fled from the Birdmen up the mountain. Along the path then, the party would find tracks and could follow them to where the fleeing man was being attacked, and could rescue him. If they did, he could tell them important information – that giant lizards (a T-Rex) lived on the very top of the mountain, and was attracted to the flower the party was after. This warning could be extremely useful to them later, and they could maybe take precautions.

I do find that it helps player immersion if side-quests are also driven by their own personal character traits or background. Perhaps offer a clue to a mystery one of them is researching, or put someone they care about in danger. Maybe a magic item one of them would find particularly interesting is nearby, or maybe a foe a righteous character particularly wants to smite.

From my perspective, that’s the level you need for a game to be able to start. That really is all you need on a starting level for a small game. Anything else you need to add is a little bit of flavour here and there, character quirks, that sort of thing.

#rpg #roleplaying games #writing a game #gm #gamesmaster #tabletop

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