At long last: Halloween Mini-campaign Post-mortem

Recently I hosted a one day seasonal D&D campaign. We used D&D 4.0. I have many things about 4.0 that I like and a good deal that I criticize. However, it remains the sytem which I am most familiar with. In this case, I was introducing a number of people to the game for the first time.

It was remarkably exciting. The turn-out was 100%. Predictably, this fact sent me into a maelstrom of ambivalence. I felt surprised, excited, honored, and remarkably daunted. We had a total of 8 players. Previously, I had never DM-ed parties more than 5.

Since there were so many people who had never played (4 out of the 8), I realized that I needed to keep things fairly simple. My trusty and stalwart gf assisted me greatly by creating twice as many stock level 3 characters as there were players. Her designs included simple feats that would automatically be calculated into scores. Since I was creating a pseudo-historical 16th century European setting, she used only Humans as the base race. She selected a mix of simple and complex classes, since the party itself was of varied familiarity with D&D and RPGs in general.

I think that I am really finding my DM style: what is important to me, how I feel most comfortable, what I feel I can fudge, what I feel ought to be fudged. This sense is coming through consistently testing my own boundaries and methodologies of preparing and running games. I have been trying in every campaign I run (of which there have been 4) to find refinements to D&D 4.0 rules, define personal and house rules that improve upon official rules, and test them out both on myself and on players.

In this past campaign I was looking to make a couple of refinements whose success I feel are important in general if I am to continue using D&D 4.0 and would be crucial in keeping new players engaged. As a ruleset, 4.0 is very robust. Its primary failure--and this is subjective--is the overwrought combat rules which slow down the playtime far too greatly. It is somewhat sobering when one realizes that a combat that theoretically only last 45 seconds in game time can take 35 minutes or more to resolve in reality.

I had a number of strategies for addressing this, a couple of which included a tacit understanding that there is no way to fully circumvent the combat log and it must therefore be embraced and planned for: 1) use multi-hit minions in the place of some normal monsters; 2) give ample oppotunity for subdual; 3) embrace the idea of lengthy combat and create situations in which the party gets involved in a very minor encounter in which they are the overwhelmong power, but which can escalate very quickly if the players are not careful; 4) embrace the inevitability of lengthy combat, particularly in boss fights, and create dynamic, multi-phased boss fights that require observation and adaptation.

I feel like these were all in some part effective, though I was not able to fully explore the last of them, since the pace of the day was fairly forced. I would like to dissect each a little bit.

1) The idea of multi-hit minions is not by any means my own. I came upon it in one of The Chatty DMs posts. He proposed a multistage minion, when after 1 hit, the minions nature changes. This is an interesting idea. I tried this once before, but in a very conservative way. I had frost elves whose ice shields shattered after one hit lowering their AC and raising their attack bonus (ostensibly because they became more reckless). This seems like a good model of minion.

In the Halloween campaign I did something different and slightly simpler. I wanted fairly bland drones. I made them 4 hit minions. I did this for a number of reasons. I wanted to mob the party. I wanted the mob creatures to go down fairly quickly, but but not too quickly. I also wanted to not have to keep track of HP for the mob creatures. My basic play concept was to take HP, itself an abstraction, and abstract it further. I assumed that each mob minion had 60 hit points. Any hit would count as a strike against a minion's alottment of 4 hits. So anyy hit was worth 15 points regardless of damage roll. In the case of a remarkably high damage roll, two or three strike could be applied, taking the damage and rounding it up to the nearest multiple of 15. In other words a damage roll of 22 would count as two strikes against the mob minion, a damage roll of 31 would count as 3, etc.

This worked quite well for making large numbers of mobs who are dispatched fairly easily but without quite as much dispatch (pardon the pun) as a normal minion. In smaller fights I could see combining this model with that of Chatty, making for more interesting fights. But in a huge mob fight, less complexity and therefore less bookkeeping is key.

2) Keeping subdual as a possibility is more of a mindset than anything else. I tried to set the tone early by having one group of guards asleep, so that the party could try to deal with them before they even woke up. Having set that tone, it was not surprising that they were able to trick and subdue a mini-boss and avoid a pitched battle with a large number of mob-minions.

These first two strategies helped to create combats which were still overblown and felt dangerous without making them knock-down drag-out tests of stamina and patience. These were both predicated upon avoiding lengthy combat. The final two strategies were looking not to deny the inherently lengthy combat of 4.0, but to accept it and find ways to make it meaningful and mitigate its length, to make a long combat feel right and to make it feel less long.

3) I was looking to make the lengthy combat of 4.0 more meaningful to the players, to make it actively add to the suspense of the story and drive the players forward, rather than merely act as a stopping point, the battle retarding the pace of the story. They should be semi-colons, not periods. I feel that the conclusion of any good fight should include some sort of plot point, so that regardless of any financial/gear gain, the party has more useful information by the end of it, or something that will later be helpful to them. And there should be some form of suspense that any fight participates in. It is not enought in my mind to simply say that in order to get across this room and to the next part of the story, the party must fight the baddies in the room. There hould be a reason that the party thinks that they ought to and want to fight the things, again beyond personal gain.

One way in which I tried to implement this was by giving the party a pretty clear goal. They wanted to get out of the dungeon and to the top of the tower where they hoped to punish a mad cleric who had userped the throne of one of the PCs. The fact that it was a one day campaign made the players and thus the characters feel driven to achieve this with as few embroilments as possible. I then designed small, easy combats that could quickly escalate if they were not handled well. For example, as the party was climbing a set of stairs I had them encounter a pair of monks walking down a corridor. The party attempted a stealth check which they failed. When the monks saw the party on the landing, they bolted in the other direction, directly towards a large pair of doors that was two moves away. The party did not know, but could well guess that the room the monks were making for was filled with more and tougher monks. I felt that this made the subsequent combat more suspenseful and meaningful. The party was able to catch the monks before they alerted their brothers and, in the process of hiding the monks in an unoccupied storeroom, the party found mysterious cast-bronze and copper apparatus.

Needless to say, there was little tangible reward for the encounter, but the storeroom contents gave the necessary plot points to drive on the story. Had the party failed to catch the monks, there would have been a much larger, longer battle. On the other hand, the party would have recieved some gear and have gotten perhaps slightly more information regarding the apparatus they found.

4) Un/fortunately, the idea of multi-phased boss fights was not really tested fully. The fact that I did not get to evaluate the success of one of the boss fights was unfortunate, but I was fairly pleased with the general cause behind this result: the players very cleverly navigated the dungeon, avoiding some major pitfalls and mini-bosses and they were remarkably savvy about the bosses they did meet. They totally subdued one boss before a fight broke out through role-play alone. It is always a good thing, I think, if one's grand GM plots are foiled by good roleplay. It means the players are doing something right. The final boss fight with the main boss I had to curtail, for two reasons: firstly, it was getting late and players needed to leave, and secondly, the players were taking the boss down much more quickly than I thought they would. This clearly shows that my boss was not designed as well as he ought to have been.

All in all, the whole session was really fun, and from a DM's (my) point of few productive and instructive.

BTW

MV's is on WoW...

Crazy, huh?

We're rolling NE. I am a Rogue and she a Druid, both lvl 18 at present. Links follow:

Kryptiste

Pandwyna

It's happening

So D and D is a go! It has taken a while, and there was some waffling, but it our first session has been finalized. MV's bro is coming up next weekend and the fun will commence. It looks like it will be a more compressed game than we were hoping for, as the summer has frittered away so, but it is first try. Leaving aside character development and game mechanics, we come to another challenge--this one more aesthetic and practical than either character background or mechanics development: selecting, designing, and painting the miniature.

Mine:



MV's:


That was their status two days ago. They are now primed. Will post picture updates on our progress and our test cases (a little goblin platoon that came with the paint set) later.

A long-overdue post: a long, overdue post

Gentle Readers,

Please pardon my unpardonable absence. I have been busy with fairly important irl concerns: getting edged out of grad school; edging myself out of grad school with dignity (ongoing); a trip to Australia (whence comes the weird and wonderful wombat); a serious illness in the family; and finally an impending financial crisis! omg. As this is not a personal blog I will elaborate no more and merely say that all will be well in the end.

In the meantime, planning goes ahead apace for our Summer D&D session. Our other compatriots have made their character creation decisions. So it looks like the party is formed. I'll be the Eladrin Rogue about whom I've already blogged; MV is going to be a Dwarf Fighter. This means that between the two of us we'll be coming up with some fancy coordinated attacks to maximize each other's skills. We've got a couple of tandem attacks planned already. I'm hoping to make the DM proud, or at least surprise him. NC is going to be a Half-Elf Cleric. She had wanted to be a mage, but we had no healer, so she very graciously agreed to change classes. I hope that she is not doing this merely to support the party, but think that she took to the idea, quickly finding a way to apply the character mannerisms, motivations, and general background to the Cleric instead of the mage. It seems like she's going to be hilarious to play with. And she and my character should have a fairly amusing interactions based on our differing backgrounds and modes of interfacing with the world. Her SO will be playing a Tiefling Ranger. Mechanically, I think this race/class combination will prove to be a sub-optimal build, but I am interested to see how it turns out. From an RP angle, I think that both choices fit the player well, so I 'm not really worried in the long run about the choice. We have yet to choose a name for our adventuring company.

More closely connected to my own char, I have been sadly remiss in rounding out my char profile. I did a good deal of work earlier, and I unfortunately told everyone a key part of my background that would have been a really cool reveal later on in the campaign. That said, I have to work out the basics of the history. So far it's gone through a number of iterations and a good deal is sticking through. However, I had a fairly ridiculously convoluted tale of court intrigue and family tragedy. I scrapped that for more light-hearted derring-do. That is for another post though.

On another note, I have been reading the blog Advanced Gaming and Theory (whose author I shall refer to in ttis post as AGT). Unfortunately the enticingly academic title promises much more than the content delivers, both in quality and in general composition. As a complete novice, I cannot say that my experience or my ideas regarding RP-ing are that vast or that complex respectively. That said, I have remarked a number of posts at whose core rests a fairly interesting idea. And I find that the blogger's development of these ideas do not excite me all that much. The ideas themselves though are intriguing. I am referring to the following two linked posts: one on books and the other on festivals and tourneys. I post these for those wish to have a look. As I said, I didn't find that much that really grabbed me, and I do not want to criticize their content specifically, as they are definitely sound in their own contexts. And in fact they do spark the imagination admirably.

On the subject of books in game, it seems to me that books provide a really interesting way of deepening a player's experience of the world, depending on how much effort a DM cares to put into the scenario. AGT seems primarily focused on how books can apply to crafting and learning skills. He also puts forward the idea that certain books could aid players immensely in their quests if they have the right information in them (including legends). This seems rather obvious to me. I will pose what I think a more interesting question: how do the players locate, obtain, and interpret a book that is important to their quest? And how can the DM's hand in providing such information not seem patronizing? In other words how does one make sure that finding the correct book and extracting the relevant information doesn't devolve into a bit of a farce? And how would all of this be managed within the construct of the game's mechanics.

It is a challenge in real life to find books that are particularly useful to one's research. Finding books which provide useful, clear information is a skill. And even so, any book is colored to some extent by authorial bias. So even once one has a book, extracting the correct information is a matter of teasing apart the interwoven strands of solid information and the author's subjective opinion, and further of separating what of the author's interpretation is valid and what invalid. Indeed this even ignores the question of whether the book is not written in one's native tongue. Regarding language, even if one speaks a language fluently, technical writing in a specialized discipline is not necessarily easily read and correctly interpreted. I'd like to see this complexity brought to the question of books in D&D if they are to be integrated in a natural way. This requires thinking about where one would find books; who would be their custodians; whether they would be in a sacred, royal, mercantile environment; what languages they might be in.

In the somewhat rambling example I'm imagining, players find a bookshop in town and enter. The rest of the scenario follows from that. Other scenarios are possible along similar lines, but tailored say to an abbey library rather than a merchants scriptorium.

Here are some of my thoughts on how I would integrate books into a campaign:
1) Unless the book is critical to the end result of the adventure, the adventure should not require the knowledge held in the book to complete. The book would make certain aspects of the quest easier or quicker, but players could power through regardless or find clues along the way through trial and error.
2) If books are not per se necessary to the adventure, they could be included as undeclared side quests. These would grant a small XP reward and could be handled as skill challenges. What may have started out as a player going into a scriptorium to buy and sell scrolls could end up as a chance discovery of an interesting volume (a search check would return random lists of pre-prepared titles, of which only higher success rolls would include quest related books). An insight check could narrow down the choices on that list if the player hasn't already noticed the important volume. Once the book has been selected it will need to be acquired. A bluff check would determine whether the merchant sees how excited the player is about finding it. The more oblivious the merchant is, the easier it will be to acquire the book. If, on the other hand, the merchant realizes a player really wants the book, the negotiations would enter a Diplomacy/Intimidation phase. Depending on results one might get the book, one might merely fail to get the book, or one might get thrown out of the shop by passing town guards. Of the two failures, the former would allow for a further skill challenge, if players were really interested in getting the book. This skill challenge would be one of Stealth and Thievery, in which the players need to steal the book. In the case of the guards ending the negotiation, the DCs for the skill challenge would be significantly higher and the chance of legal trouble enough of a disincentive to keep players from attempting it unless they were desparate.
3) Assume that the volume if finally in the possession of the players now. Once they begin to try and read it, a further skill challenge is begun. This one requires someone who speaks the language of the book fluently or access to someone who does (an NPC could be provided, if it is not in the language). A relevant knowledge check would decide whther a good or bad translation of the piece is rendered. Once a translation is produced an insight check and/or relevant knowledge again would decide how sharp the players are in distilling out the information in the book and selecting what might be of some future use. I would say that there is no failure in this last skill challenge--merely a breadth of successful results. In other words, all possible outcomes give the players useful information. The success of translation and then interpretation merely affect how much extraneous information is mixed in with important and how garbled that important information is. In order to achieve this I would say that two sets of three texts need to be cooked up for the game session. One set of fairly poor translations (text somewhat garbled and using non-standard vocabulary to indicate slight mistranslations) and one set of good translations (well constructed englush). Within each of these groups would be three possible results which are ranked from having the most extraneous information to one which is almost devoid of it. One could even include a critical success result which allows for the player noticing someing in a small marginal gloss which gives the players a distinct advantage. At the end of all of this a small XP gain would be awarded to all players, with slightly higher bonus XP for those who were active participants. I say the whole party gains XP, as I feel that it is likely that not every player at the table would want to put tie into this whole idea, so they should have something out of it.

I suppose this all begs the question: is the inclusion of a bookstore/scriptorium by the DM just as much of a giveaway as a book being handed out? Are both such strong hints that the book is important that players cannot ignore it as a blatant plot point? I think not. While a book being conveniently found which contains keys to future success is clearly breaking the world's illusion, a bindery/scriptorium in the city is a natural part of breathing a thriving world. If a DM says "In the crypt lies a bag of gold, alchemical apparatus, and a tome bound in the tanned hide of a ...", the implication is that players should pay attention to the book, even if it turns out to be of no importance. If a DM describes a square in the center of the crafting district of a large city and mentions that among the surrounding shops are a prosperous cobbler's shop, a scriptorium with a large bay window and attached bookseller, and a tannery, reeking of boiling leather and animal scraps, which supplies them all, players are not necessarily going to take this to mean that they are plot points. Rather they may merely assume that these stores are useful for replenishing supplies, getting new gear, selling loot, etc.

As to festivals, I don't really want to cover my thoughts on them right now. I am still thinking. One of my main criticisms with AGT's article is that his best ideas are keyed to one player. And since D&D is inherently a party game, I would like to see some multiplayer options. Certainly each player could be involved in different activities throughout the day, but I think that can be dangerous (i.e. a split up party means the DM's attention is split between players). I have seen some DM's talking about letting players int the DM-ing on some level. This might be a good venue for this. In other words, people split up to do their own thing in smaller groups with one of the players in each group acting as a mini-DM. As it is though, I had a thought for how to have a


As I am not a medieval scholar, I cannot say that this idea is period, but it certainly has a strong grip on the Romantic notion and ff. notion of medieval, chivalric tourneys. I quote Ivanhoe for usage:




Taken from: http://books.google.com/books?id=lyIXAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=ivanhoe+grand+melee&source=bl&ots=O5ymOc_MzV&sig=6TBM5_AAQEQrU59EsoLtet0amxI&hl=en&ei=gdCBSrKsO4jEMNaEiakL&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Or to put it visually:


Perhaps not on that scale, but nevertheless on a field of competition open to a number of combatants at once. I'll have more on this someday, as I think it over. For now though, toodles.

Irony

I started a geeky blog with two blatant references to WoW. Three weeks later, I have all but decided to quit the game. Expect to hear little about my WoW exploits, as they are likely to cease until a new expansion comes out. I am not a raider. I don't have much fun raiding. I find the purposes of raiding pointless. WoW endgame is based on one goal and one goal only: raiding. This of course includes gear acquisition. But how do you acquire great gear and to what end? You acquire it raiding for the purpose of raiding. I have yet to tell my guild, but they'll just have to lump it. I would just level alts, but there aren't many lowbies to play with and the economy is really crap.

In the meantime, there is little to takes its place gaming-wise. I don't really think I want to go back to Diablo II full time. I guess I could finish Warcraft III. There's Starcraft II coming out soon. I'll probably dabble. But Starcraft people are so hardcore. They are really good. Hmmm. I'm not sure I ever fully played through Starcraft. That might be fun to go back and do before II.

MV's bro suggested Lord of the Rings on-line. I tried it out through their free trial, and it is fun. But I'm not sure that I really enjoyed it that much. The graphics were not as smooth as WoW, and the interface in many ways is WoW before either expansion. In terms of gameplay there are some really cool aspects. The integration of achievements with tangible stat rewards is very nice. In WoW accomplishments are purely for vanity (at this point, perhaps in expansion they'll give you a way to spend achievement points). It is clear that both Accomplishments and the Glyph systems in WoW are ripped from LotRO, but much in LotRO is ripped off WoW. Anyway, we'll see. If MV's bro does play, I might play with him, but I think that that is the same condition he's working from. This seeems to indicate that neither of us are really blown away with the game, so why waste time on it? We'll see. I'll give it a little more time.

In the meantime, Dragon Age: Origins looks cool. I comes out in Oct, but I have no idea if my comp will be powerful enough to play it. But it looks quite good.

...

ZOMG, my guild is composed of morons...

BlizzCon

This post is 3 days old now. After a long but productive weekend of gardening work, I emerge richer by $202.50 and a strained upper back muscle. I guess I wasn't putting enough good energy into the universe... silly me. :P

Begin retroactive post

---------------------------

What with the shallow and rocky strait that is my bank account right now, I had no plans of buying tickets to Blizzcon. Being of a naturally curious temperament though, I decided to see how expensive tickets were when the y went on sale this past Sat. I checked at about noon. They were already sold out. That seems a bit nutty.

WoW: though I've not played in a good week, I am slowly trying to get the 5000g for epic flight training. Yes, Yes, I know. How does a lvl 80 not have epic flight yet? Leatherworking... that's how. I've spent way too much on buying leather in the AH to level a profession which I've eventually come to the decision is a waste. It's cheaper to just buy mats and have another LW do the work for me than to invest in all the Frozen Orbs I'd need to get to 440.

Diablo II: MV ans I played DII last night. Righteous! We leveled about 3 levels, getting close to lvl 50. We are currently working through Act II on Nightmare difficulty. Only really remarkable drop was a Shael rune, which I'm saving for a bow runeword. All I need is a Ko, buteven then I'll have a choice between two runewords to work on: melody or harmony. Here's a link to a handy runeword tool. Anyway, there's no point in agonizing over this until I actually find a Ko, by which time it will probably irrelevant, as Diablo III will be out.

On that note, let me just say, I can't wait. There are millions awaiting the Starcraft release, there are as many awaiting the chance to raid Arthas, but I am most excited about Diablo III. I am actually waiting until close to release date to build myself a new computer. This will have been the first time I've built a computer for myself before (note the groovy Future Perfect there, peeps). I'll have more disposable income by then (for more, read any). No sense in doing anything until system reqs. are released anyway.

Currently listening to: On the Rise from Dr. Horrible. There are some good songs in there...