Off for my trimestrial cardboard crack fix
It’s 6h00 on a Sunday Morning. My 5-year old son is watching Captain Flamingo on the Tube. I’m looking at the blog’s stats ,still somewhat bemused to have at least 58 unique visitors day in day out (I need to go to California, apparently they dig me over there!). I’m also touching up on typos and grammar mishaps here and there. I’m fighting the urge to spend hours on Facebook (do drop in if you are a FB addict, I’m Philippe-Antoine Ménard) and I’m writing this post…
Thing is, I shouldn’t be doing all that, I should be reading the Lorwyn Spoiler over at MTGSalvation.com…
Yup, it’s yet another Magic The Gathering Prerelease Weekend. I’m cashing in all my husband points to get to game twice in the weekend. Thanks hon!
I’m not half bad at Magic. Not as consistently good as Yan, but I should say I’m Strong among the Weak. I’ve won at least 2 such Pre-release tournaments as well as one or 2 Friday Night Magic. I know the rules really well…. well enough to overturn bad rulings from Judges. But what do you expect? I’m a crunch junky and Magic is Crunch heaven!
Thing is, I’ve been getting worse and worse at that game in the last year. Granted the current collection (Time Spiral) just doesn’t work for me as Ravnica and Kamigawa did before. (Clueless about what I’m saying here? Look here, massive link!).
Magic is a complex game that needs a lot of mental and emotional focus to win consistently. If you lose one, your game is shot. I’m currently lacking in both departments.
Aside: Yan and I share the joys of the Best Player Syndrome in our game group. While Yan beats me at deck design and Mental focus, I’m a better politician so I squeeze wins by having the others think he’s a bigger threat than I. He He! However, I do get distracted and have a weakness to Jedi Mind Tricks, so I often throw a ‘Certain-win’ away.
Aside Two: Always Always Always kill Yan first in a multiplayer Magic game. If you don’t know why, Yan does! My ignoring this cardinal rule explains a significant chunk of my ‘lost’ games.
It seems that this Bloggy thing has also cured me from more than my World of Warcrack addiction… it has had the side effect of diverting my mental energies from Magic. So I’m going today to see if I can ride to success on Raw talent alone. Now I have a Spoiler to read. It’s 6h30, I have an hour and a half to do it and take a shower (Havast Gamer funk! I stab at thee!).
Wish me luck.
Comic Snap Reviews: 9/29/07
Now with even more spoilers than usual! You’ve been warned!
Meet the players!: Franky
Three weeks ago, I sent a questionnaires to my 5 D&D players. I finally got all 5 responses (in exchange for 750 xp each) and I’m posting the 3rd one today, along with my usual editorial comments. See here and here for previous postings.
What character do you play in our current D&D campaign? (Name, Race
Cixi, Sparkless (Iron Hero) Human(?) Archer
(With the strength to use a Large composite Longbow and a good Charisma to subdue Men)
She is part of a species that have been kept prisoner on the Carceri by some Devils or Demons. With some other Iron Heroes, she managed to escape the plane and enter the realm where the city of
So now, her key motivation is to find her real home-plane. Meanwhile, she works in getting some political influence in Ptolus. (Chatty DM: Cixi was salvaged from our last campaign. She’s one of the deepest most fluffylicious characters I’ve ever seen.)
What Quote would best summarize your Character?
“There are two kinds of Men: Those that need my “tenderness” and those that deserved an arrow in the head!”
“What are you talking about!? I’m Chaste and Pure!” (Chatty DM: She’s such a slut but it always, always happens ‘off camera’ so everyone is more or less forced to believe how pure she really is).
What other Role Playing games have you played other than D&D 3.x?
- The Dark Eye
- Paranoia
- All the White Wolf product (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, …)
- Elric
- Hawkmoon
- Cthulhu
- Bloodlust
- Lord of the ring
- In Nomine Satanis / Magna Veritas
- RuneQuest
- Shadowrun
- Starwars
Sorry, my memories stop there…(You beat me to the number of games you played, and you forgot Amber and Bloodlust)
What do you look for in a game session to make it a great session?
Good interaction with the DM and the other players (role-playing or not). Good progression in the story, with some fights and the apotheosis is a good old critical at the needed time.
What do you look in a multi-session adventure to make it a great
adventure?
A story that make my character (and me, of course) travel in an amazing world that I haven’t already imagined. Great Encounters, good fights and definitively,
keeping my character alive to make it enter the World’s legend.
What tends to decrease your fun the most in a single session?
Fatigue, crap dice roll and sometimes, lack in my skill of role-playing (Chatty DM: I find this funny that Franky criticizes his RPing skills when he’s quite possibly the best RP player of the group)
Tell me about your best RPG memory as a player?
It was the first time I played with my current group. I got to play the character of an absent player: a Rogue (my favorite type). I played him like I always think a true rogue should act in a party: always looking for good opportunities to get more money. Just not the money already gathered by the others members of the party (stealing the money and the goods of others players is always a mistake, in my opinion). (Chatty DM: Amen to that brother!!!!)
So that night, I managed to rob a poor female Inn Keeper. She was fat and ugly, but anyway, I used my “sex appeal” to steal the keys she was keeping on her breast. I ended up emptying her chest. My actions spurned such a funny reaction in my new gaming friends around the table. My introduction was complete. I will always remember that night.
Chatty DM’s take on the player:
François (Franky) is our Story-telling Explorer. While he loves a good fight like any D&D fan and he’s a mean Role Player, I’ve discovered what really rocks his boat. You have to bring him to something completely alien and different or you need to overwhelm him with graphic descriptions. I remember when I unveiled the secret of the Iron Heroes Prison world on the group. I was describing Carceri’s layers and appearances and how the world they knew was nothing more than a Texas-sized bubble. I remember quite clearly him saying ‘you’re so Evil man!’ Franky rocks and I hope he has as much fun playing with us as I have with him.
DM Chronicles, Session 3: Of Pools and Crashes
Image Source: WotC D&D Miniature Game
After having skipped a week from our usual bi-monthly game, I was really looking forward for this week’s. One of our players, Stef, had to stay home because his Wife was away and he was with the kids. So I offered to move the game over there.
So I rolled all the battlemaps I had prepared, packed the ziplocked minis, the adventure, the USB key with DM Wiki, the Core books and a few Splatbooks (Wow, Wikipedia has a definition for everything!).
It’s 4:15 PM, I hop in the car, put on Muse’s last album, real loud, and join the traffic jams that plague the Suburbs of Montreal. (Montreal is an Island, I’m lucky enough to live on it, but all my players live in Laval, a Northern Suburban Island).
At 4h30, I’m sitting behind a Mini-Van and I notice the right lane being free, I switch to the lane and accelerate…. and the van does the same thing 2 seconds later and crashes into my new 2007 Honda Fit. Result: The whole left side of my car is scratched, dented and my driver’s door can only open about 1 foot wide.
Now in Québec, crashes with no victims or ‘Hit and Runs’ are dealt with a ‘friendly’ exchange of information on specific forms that all good citizen have in their cars (I don’t). Anyway, long story-short (from me? HA!) the Mini-Van’s owner had 2 sets, we fill out the forms, we both deny responsibility (as should be) and we go our way.
I just had a car crash but I also haven’t played D&D in 3 weeks. What’s my decision? Screw it, I’ll call the insurance from Stef’s place!
Just so you know, the last time we were supposed to play at Stef’s, there was an Ice Storm. When I got there, I had a message from my lovely wife informing me that I needed to come back pronto because a Tree fell on our house! (True Story!)
Anyway, we ended up starting to play at around 7h00 pm. As promised, I’ll skip on story elements as Yan will tackle them in his player log.
The adventure was about finding the source of a weird creature in Ptolus. The initial investigation lead them to the the slums of Ptolus where they faced a 10-strong street gang. I had the occasion to test the Hit Point Pool approach I stol… huh borrowed from Greywulf.
It worked perfectly! All the energy I usually spend keeping track of individual hit points was shunted towards very graphic descriptions of wounds and deaths. You should have seen my player’s faces when I described heads exploding and Manga-like slicing of bodies that crumpled slowly in halves to the ground. There were a few weird cases where a Thug took an electricity charged arrow in the face and fell from the building and survived only to have his neighbor die from a rather average hit (Oh by the way, the re-vamped Duskblade rocks!!!!). So this house rule is a keeper. It was the best fight of the whole evening.
The players continued their exploration and found a link to the creature’s origin and followed it (yet again) in the Sewers. They quickly discovered a huge natural cavern filled with offals. Since visibility was limited, I described the room in bits and pieces as the players explored cautiously. I ended up pointed out a huge mound of trash and an exit.
I must have mentioned the exit more than once because at that point a player went Metagaming on me and said something like ‘If Phil (that’s me) talks about the exit like that it’s because that’s where he wants us to go…’ Hmmmm that’s grounds for a -2 penalty on Spot checks don’t ya think? (and a warning that I must ‘control the message’ as my old bosses used to say). The penalty was just enough to miss the Otyugh creeping up in the garbage pile and striking the players with it’s filthy tentacle, screaming ‘Trespassers! Me EAT Trespassers’.
Short fight, I mauled the Duskblade pretty badly, I wisely ignored all instances of potential Grappling with the creature’s 4 tentacles. When the players applied various healing powers, I described how the creature seemed to be leaching this energy to heal itself. Yeah, they freaked a bit. Twelve Seconds later, there was Otyugh sushi on the cave floor.
While the Duskblade let his armour regenerate him (The Magic Item Compendium is sooooo cool). Stef went to search the garbage pile, to cries of disgust from the other players. He found some valuables! Oddly enough, no one asked for their fair share… Go Stef, the loot is yours!
We ended the evening with one last encounter, an ambush by some Gnome-like Fey while the party was squeezing in a tight corridor (well, not Lillie the Pixie, but the rest). We were getting tired and the fight was more mechanical than flavorful. The players won and got some sweet piece of magical loot, a Human-slaying sword.
Overall a very fun evening. Now I have to wait until Monday to book an appointment with my Car Dealer’s repair shop.
Lessons learned:
- Hit point pools for mooks rocks!
- Graphic descriptions of a fight makes it a lot better than the actual mechanics (duh! about time I learned that)
What players liked:
- The gore and splattering of mooks all over the Slums.
- My ignoring anything Grappling for once.
- Yan loved that I worked the evil Feys into his backstory and gave him more info on the Big Bad than was warranted by the adventure.
- The Duskblade chucking ranged touch Spell-laced arrows and casting swift spells.
- Stef finding treasure where all others refused to go.
- The story hooked some of the players and they want to KNOW.
- Getting XPs for filling in the Player questionnaire! (I’m really looking forward to posting the other ones).
What players disliked
- The DM’s frequent breaks with immersion to joke around, bring reference from pass session and talk about his blog. (For my defense, I was dealing with a game and the shock of the crash… but I’ll be more careful henceforth).
- The adventure hook was a bit shaky and players had a passive aggressive reaction to it like ‘no we don’t do it, come on boys’ I don’t know if it was that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough or what… (See Yan’s comment, he’s right…)
What’s next:
- I’m not saying anything other than ‘we finish the adventure’.
Overall a great evening. For everything else, there’s Insurance.
Blasts From the Past: Virtual Adepts and Captioned Best Brains
I have two blasts from the past to share today. [Read the rest of this article]
Fantasy! Adventure! Boardgames!
It’s one of the most frequent requests, debates, and lists on Boardgamegeek, behind “what can I get my girlfriend/wife to play?” It’s fantasy adventure boardgaming, and it’s coming to a shelf near you.
Why is this so popular? Many, many people play or played D&D. Unfortunately, as we grow up and get out of college, it becomes more and more difficult to arrange a group, buy the books, meet regularly, plan the games, and so on. A board game means little to no prep time, and can easily be strictly one off affairs. It’s also more friendly to new players, since the rules are much smaller than the Player’s Handbook. Board games don’t have to account for every situation that comes up, since there is a limited number of actions that players can perform.
So, that said, there are many, many titles with what I would call a “D&D theme.” It’s vaguely Tolkien-esque, but clearly inspired directly from D&D monsters and tropes. Not all of these games are fantasy adventure boardgames, however. They may just be using the theme for other types of game play.
Fantasy adventure board games can very loosely be defined by having a D&Dish theme where all the players pick a character. They then move this character around a board (often by moving individual spaces based on some statistic, but sometimes through dice rolling) and battle monsters. Battles are done through rolling dice to determine who gets hurt. Treasure and/or powers is gained from the monsters.
Here is a list of fantasy adventure boardgames that I have some familiarity with, and their characteristics. This is by no means a complete list. [Read the rest of this article]
Fluff done right: Paizo's Pathfinder first impressions
Like a lot of Dungeon magazine subscribers, it’s with shock and apprehension that I learned about WotC’s revocation of the Dungeon and Dragon magazine licenses.
For those who don’t know yet, Paizo, the publisher of the two magazines, created a new D&D 3.5 compatible adventure magazine (they just don’t say it out loud) called Pathfinder to replace both canceled mags. All subscribers were given the choice to transfer the remaining magazines to Pathfinder. I did and I have 1 or 2 more coming up.
Pathfinder’s thing is to be 2 complete D&D campaigns per year (1 magazine per month) in a new Campaign setting of Paizo’s own design. I finally got my hands on the printed copy of this earlier this week…
Oh…. my… Gods*…
The production values of this magazine is absolutely incredible. It’s all glossy, thick, full color paper. The 1st issue is organized as follows:
- Foreword, with a cool ‘ten fun facts about Goblins’
- Burnt Offerings, a 50 pages, level 1 adventure featuring gobbos!
- A 14 page description of the town the adventure takes place
- An history of an old Fallen Empite that acts as a backdrop to the story line (written by my Fluff nemesis, Wolfgang Baur, no less!)
- A Pathfinder’s journal by Erik Mona
- A Beastiary with Crunchy bits
- Four Pre-generated iconic characters
I wasn’t too keen on this product since it came too late to inspire our new campaign. Furthermore, I had already proposed to start the new campaign at level 7 to recognize the player’s efforts in the last one we abandoned at my insistence.
But as I started reading, I was hooked, completely. The Adventure background is phenomenal, the description of the town is crisp, flavourful (the ‘u’ is Canadian/British and it stays no matter what the Google Thesaurus thinks!….. Armour, Humour! Bacon! Weeee!)….
Hmmm, sorry about that…
The artistic layout blows me away! I’m not that deep into it yet but so far it’s worth the 19$ it costs. Like a lot of d20 players, I grew tired of seeing yet another level 1 adventure years ago. But for once, the sheer fluffyness of the product makes it a worthwhile read for me.
I’ll post a more complete review later on.
* I’m not a Cylon!
Real Time Raytracing – One Possible Future of 3D Gaming
Introduction
We all love the wonderfully resplendent graphics possible on todays graphic hardware. It’s really quite amazing, the stuff we are able to squeeze out of some extremely complex arrays of silicon.
But current GPUs have a dirty little secret that I am going to share with you. Current GPUs are terrible kludges, composed of dirty trick layered haphazardly on dirty trick, resulting in an overly complex mess that requires leaf blowers to keep from melting down into slag. Raytracing could fix all that. [Read the rest of this article]
The Stages of a RPG Team’s Development, Part 4: Norming
We continue with the third topic in this discussion on the life stages of a RPG gaming group that borrows heavily on the work place team development concept.
So far we covered the definition of a RPG Team, it’s forming stage and the harsher storming stage.
When the storm becomes unbearable there are two choices opened to a RPG gaming group, have the game crash and die or go into…
Norming
- Your group develops a Social Contract.
- The DM starts jotting down what works and what doesn’t in his game and adjusts his adventures accordingly.
- The players discuss the game between sessions and come up with shared objectives.
- The number of ‘bad’ games decreases noticeably.
- ‘Maybe the campaign is not doing so bad after all…’
If and when you get to this point, Norming has set in.
Definition
At some point, the team may enter the norming stage. Team members adjust their behavior to each other as they develop work habits that make teamwork seem more natural and fluid. Team members often work through this stage by agreeing on rules, values, professional behavior, shared methods, working tools and even taboos. During this phase, team members begin to trust each other. Motivation increases as the team gets more acquainted with the project.
The elaboration of social contract needs not be formal. It can be just a set of unwritten rules that have been discussed and that all members of the group agreed to.
In our case, our social contract is pretty informal and currently goes like this (It was never written down before):
Away from the table:
- We share our preferred gaming styles and game objectives at a campaign’s beginning.
- I will do an e-mail roll call on the Monday of our Bi-weekly (that’s twice a month right?) game week.
- People must report by Wednesday if they’ll show up or not so I can adjust the power level of encounters in my gaming prep.
- I will propose a synopsis of the upcoming game’s plotline at least 2 weeks in advance and ask for players feedback on the proposed scenario.
- Character re-engineering is allowed to adjust PCs to players needs.
At the table
- Limited off topic banter, and mild metagaming is tolerated
- Jokes and good natured ribbing is encouraged.
- If a rules issue comes up, we discuss it for less than 5 minutes. If we can’t agree, I make a ruling. If I feel the ruling is ill received, I randomly determines between my ruling and player’s expected outcome and we all agree to discuss it offline between games.
Definition (Continued)
Supervisors of the team during this phase tend to be participative more than in the earlier stages. The team members can be expected to take more responsibility for making decisions and for their professional behavior.
At this stage the DM needs to move away from being a ‘boss’ and ‘referee ‘ and start acting as a team member. His goal should be to lead the players through fun adventures and intense emotions. Adversarial DMing needs to stop and be re-focused toward looking forward to the Player’s well-earned successes.
In fact, I’ll share one of my best management/DM secret just now. While it may appear that human beings crave instant gratification and easy challenges (that’s what a lot of managers think) this does not lead to long-term satisfaction.à
To truly achieve a level of deep satisfaction in his teammates, I believe that a true leader must give them tasks that bring them in positions of slight discomfort but with clear support on the leader’s part. I call this being put at the edge of your comfort level. Only there will the person spend significant effort and seek out the resources to complete the task. Then that person will return to a level of comfort by achieving confidence and success with the task. This is what brings job satisfaction.
In RPGs this needs to be achieved by placing your players in such situations such as:
- Challenging, dangerous and even borderline-lethal combats
- Slightly awkward social encounters with difficult moral choices (i.e. positive and negative consequences on either side of the fence)
- Challenging Puzzles and Investigations with multiple clues and avenues to explore.
Selfish Players
As mentioned in the last post, the absolute worse player or DM is the uncompromising selfish one. Those are the ones that will scoff at the concept of a social contract or agree to it and disregard it. They are those who get bored easily and go around kicking doors with no regards to party safety or fun. They split up from the party at the drop of a hat. They hog the spotlight as much as they can. If they are crafty enough they sit real close to the DM to get attention more easily.
There’s also the Nightmare DMs we’ve had (or have been in the past) that seemed to have stopped reading all GM advice at the “You are the boss and god of your game” chapter. They run the game like it was their personnal kingdom, with NPCs stealing the show and PCs forced to wallow in mud 99% of game time.
I think that only way to make them ‘functional’ in a group is to meet with that person one on one and share with them your concerns in direct unveiled terms:
- To DM: I am not having fun in your game because…
- To player: I’m concerned with the effect your behavior in our game has on our level of fun..
If they get to acknowledge their responsibility, there’s hope. If not, well there’s really only one solution. Inform the player he can no longer play with the group or explain to the DM that you will no longer come to the game. Its extremely hard to do, I agree, but its the workable, long term solution.
Selfishness behavior does not resolve itself. Being assertive on how you feel about that player or DM does. (There ya go, a nice slightly uncomfortable task if there is ever one. Go on! You can do it!)
Once Norming is achieved and selfish players/DMs have been dealt with, I believe that the group should naturally migrate to the ultimate gaming experience: A performing RPG group.
Random Thoughts Table: Adaptation Blues, Deaths and Grappling
Image Source: Necromancer games’ Mother of all Encounter Tables.
It’s Thursday and as I’ve seen a surge in reading on that day, what better time to serve a post of mini-musings? I’m playing tomorrow and I’m taking the evening off from prepping and blogging to recharge my mental batteries before the game. But as I get ready to play, the usual assault of ideas hits me…
Adapting a published adventure
Changing a published adventure is only a recent thing for me. I have more free time now that the kids are older and that I have a sane job. I feel more comfortable doing it do it more freely.
As I was finishing this week’s adventure prep, I realized something. There’s always at least one or two encounters that I can’t grasp or wrap my mind around. It’s either badly written or goes against my natural DMing style. Before, I would forge on and try to play it as is. It would almost always end up being in the forgettable parts of the evening.
Now I am more aware of this feeling and if, after 2 or 3 readings of the adventure, the scene or encounter still bugs me, off it goes.
Case in point: In tomorrow’s adventure, there was this polymorphed Bad guy who’s after the same secrets the players are. He poses as a friendly helper while in fact he’s the Big Bad of the campaing arc (and the focus of the 3rd adventure of the arc). He plans a few Red herrings along the way and is basically Mr Railroad. I don’t like this at all and my players won’t either. So off he went, replaced with a Crime Syndicate representative who’s very open about what he wants. No treachery and a good Ptolus discovery opportunity. I also dropped the 3rd adventure as my players are clamoring louder and louder that they want to go Plane-hopping pronto!
PC Deaths
Jonathan Drain talked about PC death on his blog recently. he mentions that the deaths of his players’ characters are among their own best souvenirs….
…
I must say that I have a hard time with this. And instead of throwing rotten vegetables at Jonathan (which would be totally undeserved as he makes an excellent point), I tried to put in words what bugged me.
I try real hard not to kill PCs because my players have invested so much time with them. Granted in D&D death is just a question of Money and regaining lost Experience but I can’t help but feel that my players see death as the ultimate uncoolness of failure.
Then it hit me this morning while listening the most excellent Muse track Knights of Cydonia
(Thanks Dave and Danny, I bought the album and it rules!). Why don’t I ask my players what they would be ready to let their characters die for? I never asked.
If they tell me then I can work on climatic once-a-season scenes in which those reasons come into play. If death occurs, then coolness can be preserved.
So I ask you: What would you accept your character dies for and what won’t you accept?
I for one reject all that is save or die! (well except Greywulf’s new e-zine…. ) but would willingly give my pet Halfling-Rogue PC’s life for the chance to touch the biggest most awesome piece of treasure in the land! I’d role play my death scene with a S#1t-eating grin and complain that I had the greatest of dreams when raised!
Grappling
Everybody hates grappling in D&D. I hate it, my players loathe it. While I could just stop using monsters that have improved grab and hope that 4e has a cool way of doing it, here is what I propose to do to fix it for my games until then.
- Size modifiers no longer applies to Grapple, your Size bonus to AC does (+1 per size instead of +4)
- You establish a grapple by winning an opposed grapple check, end of story.
- Weapon Finesse (Unarmed) allows you to use your Dex bonus instead of your strength. (Or maybe add this to improved Grab)
- Being grappled no longer drags you in your opponent’s square. If grappled at a distance, a creature could use grapplechecks to bring the grappled victim closer.
- You can’t move while grappled and both grapplers lose Dex bonus to AC.
- No longer do you have a 50% chance of hitting a friend in grapple
- You can strike with normal weapons and cast spell (Concentration check required)
Does that make it more bearable? You tell me.
All right, I have the Forming post all written up already and will post it tomorrow in order to give you something to read then. Have a nice weekend all.
