Brain was Hijacked by Heroes
I’m not writing much this weekend, I’m not apologizing, I’m just saying… 
I’m home with the kids while wifey’s doing some consulting work in the Great North, she’ll be back on Monday.
I don’t have a lot of creative juices once the wee ones are in bed… and I made the mistake of buying the 1st season of Heroes…
Just watched four hours of it….
So cool….
See ya tomorrow night.
The Perfect Game
I was talking to a fellow designer a few weeks back, and we were discussing the designing a game for a specific audience. While we both agreed that it’s very important when marketing to someone, he didn’t think it was as important when designing. I felt that in any kind of creative design, it’s important to know who the final product is intended for. He felt that he would rather design something that taps into the essence of fun, the very core of what it means to have fun, when designing a game. I said this was impossible.
We both agreed the perfect game, that is fun for all, has not yet been designed yet.
But with this in mind, and based on recent conversations, I have been mentally preparing a list of games that are close to perfect. These tend to fall into three camps:
- Great after a few tweaks to the rules as written
- Great except for an untweakable flaw
- Just plain great.
These are just my opinion of games that fit into these categories. [Read the rest of this article]
Critical Hits Gift Guide 2007
Starting next week, we’ll start putting our annual gift guide up. The categories will be different than last year, since most of what we covered last year hasn’t really changed. I also highly recommend checking them out again:
- DVD’s (one of the most comprehensive articles I’ve ever written)
- T-Shirts
- Games
- Everything Else
If you have any suggestions for what to include or an area you’d like us to cover, leave a comment, and we’ll see what we can do.
(I should also add that the next Showdown is postponed indefinitely due to lack of interest, and we don’t want it to conflict with the gift guides anyway.)
The Overlord's bid for Superstar status!
Man, the suspense is killing me! When I first learned about Paizo’s American Idol-inspired RPG Superstar contest, I was intrigued but not that interested.
While I have a certain knack for words and things D&D as well as non-professional experience in both department, being a RPG designer/writer was never seriously on my radar (As mentioned before, I make a comfortable enough living writing laboratory procedures and investigation reports).
But when I learned the HE was one of the three judges and that initial entries would be anonymous… Well I just couldn’t miss a chance to pull a fast one on my Nemesis now could I?
So I submitted a 200 words or less SRD-compliant Wondrous Item (Fluff, creation and pricing details included), along with some 850 other applicants, hoping to make the top 32 cut. Initially I wasn’t that nervous, picturing my chances to be close to nil. Mainly because I let a slight typo in my entry.
But then, Necromancer Games‘ Clark Peterson (another judge, along Paizo’s Erik Mona), dropped by the Paizo Forums and dropped that little gem:
“I don’t mind extra fluff text. Well, I take that back. I do mind it when it is overdone. And a bunch of entries have been rejected for being more backstory than item. But that isn’t an auto-reject, that is just bad item design.
However, that doesn’t mean that we (or I) am opposed to flavor text. A line or two is fine. And even that isn’t a hard and fast rule. One of my favorite items we have seen (oh man it is cool; and all three of us love it) has more flavor and descriptive text than I would say is ideal. But the item is so freaking cool I will be shocked if it is not in the top 32. Heck, I’ll be shocked if it wouldn’t be seeded in the top 5 (if we were seeding, which we arent).” (End of citation).
Now the way the human mind works (at least it does in my case), this statement will be taken and analyzed such that a person’s perception of his entry will try to mold itself to fit that comment.
I can’t give you the details of the item as I want to keep my chances open and at least one judge has been known to drop by. I’ll ask Paizo permission to post the item here if it’s rejected or I’ll link to their boards if they ever post it with acceptation/rejection comments (I also gave up all rights to the item by submitting it).
However, my mind keeps telling me that the item fits precisely what Clark was talking about, so my hopes have sky-rocketed since.
While I can’t give details I can still share my design approach:
- I wanted to create an item that would be useful in my campaign, now.
- I also wanted something more in the lines of the Magic Item Compendium (MIC).
- That meant an item that isn’t all that expansive,
- With more than one power
- Usable in a limited manner or a limited number of times a day
- I researched all Wondrous Items of the Dungeon Master Guide and MIC to see if the object existed
- I looked for items with similar powers on which I could base costing and spell needed to create
- I wrote the item’s crunch, including some aggressive costing, making sure that it was worded clearly with as little extra verbiage as possible
- I ended up attributing 2 SRD class features to the wearer of the item.
- One Passive
- One activated on the x/day model
- I ended up attributing 2 SRD class features to the wearer of the item.
- I wrote the Item’s fluff with the remaining words. I added the item’s description and some setting-neutral info on it’s history and spread of use.
- I edited the whole entry to cut words here and there to make it as close to 200 as possible (I think I ended up at 198)
- I sent the item to Yan for comments (he said ‘cool’!)
- I sent the item to Math’, telling him his character could have the item if he wanted it.
- He said: “Simple and elegant, doesn’t break anything and remains useful at higher levels. Cool!”
What more can you ask for? I submitted the item. I think that being motivated to create a balanced object my players would want to use right now helped me focus my design.
Hopefully it will be good/cool enough.
Wish me luck, results are due on the 28th of November.
Mini-Trope: The Bad, The Killer and the Evil.
So far I have been doing a lot of posts about DMing tropes, but what about tropes on DMing?
(This post is very satirical. If anyone is offended by this… well let’s just say I’d rather not play in your game…)
When you ask RPG-savvy people to describe a cliché (or a trope) about DMs, I would be willing to bet that the top two would be the Bad DM and the Killer DM.
I’ll add a third one, less known but well represented in RPG lore: the Evil DM.
The Bad DM:
Archetype: Immortalized in this story.
The bad DM cares about his NPC, his world and his plot-lines more than about his players.
Some think they can wing it and fail to prepare anything significant for a session. They spend a lot of time in-game looking for critters to throw at players and often completely misjudge the party’s abilities, sending monsters that are far too powerful. But never fear, his army of Marty Stus and Mary Sues are here to save the day!
Others write such rigid plot lines that even the most Lawful Introvert player will do anything to blow the rail to pieces and go explore the DM’s white spots on his maps.
The Killer DM:
Archetype: A DM who still think AD&D’s Tomb of Horrors (original version) rocks as an adventure.
Not necessarily a bad DM (although the combination exists and is particularly toxic), the Killer DM plays the game as is, with the brilliance of a battle-proven Colonel and the compassion of a High Inquisitor.
The Killer DM is a heartless TPKing machine that infuses even the dumbess of orcs with the tactical cunning of Veteran elite Special Ops troops.
He never cuts the players any slack. You want to spot the Killer Vampire Bats hiding on the Ceiling ready to surprise you? Did you say you were looking at the ceiling? No? No Spot checks… (True story).
Only if threatened to lose his game will a Killer DM grudgingly make things a bit more possible for players… but at the cost ff him bitching about ‘not being able to play the game to its full potential’.
Surprisingly, some types of players respect and even enjoy a Killer DM’s game. Probably because when success is achieved, no matter how rarely, the satisfaction of having played one-up on the DM is very very strong.
The DM will then most likely complain that ‘That was not good game because players had it too easy’ (True Story once again)
Aside: On the off chance that the DM I’m referring to ever reads this blog (which I doubt) let me say just this: Man, your game SUCKED!
The Evil DM:
Archetype: Anyone who DM’s the Banewarrens or enjoyed GMing Paranoia.
The Evil DM focuses his energies to make players feel the game with the widest possible range of emotions. He’ll ask for player backgrounds complete with extended family. He’ll then mercilessly invade home countries, kidnap family members and exploit every disadvantage, quirk or other weakness the characters have. All to make a player’s pulse spike.
A bane to Min-maxers, an Evil DM will feature obstacles needing a wide range of skills and ingenuity to resolve. If you have a dump stat, be certain that the Evil DM will make you pay for your choice at least once in the campaign.
An Evil DM will gleefully inflict life-or-death choices to characters that would make King Salomon cry for mercy. He’ll reward the choice with the allegiance of those who befitted from your decision, but you’ll have made mortal enemies of those left out.
Given the choice, I’d much rather play with an Evil DM… for as short a period of time as possible…
DM Chronicles, Session 6: Perfectly Paced Action Crunch! (Part 2)
Image Source: Monster Manual IV, Wizards of the Coast, Artist: Jim Nelson
In which ChattyDM’s players find all kinds of trouble and manage to always come out on top. See part 1 here.
The players entered deeper in the tomb’s second level, finding themselves in a large “T” shaped room. It featured 2 more stone-doors-with-levers contraptions.
The room contained 2 particular D&D DM challenges: 2 Sonic Blast Glyphs of Warding sitting in very precise spots on the floor and an illusionary wall hiding an old Umber Hulk tunnel.
Now as mentioned here, I was using D&D tiles for each and every room (with Franky being nice enough to move the tiles around to scroll the Dungeon) and had the players set their figurines in front of each entrance as if a fight was about to break.
Now the problem with traps in rooms is that the players need to state quite clearly where they step if you want to trigger the trap without the very predictable cry of outrage of the likes of ‘I never said I stepped there!” However, when you ask where the players step, the whole group become avatars of caution, metagaming, quite naturally, that you’re about to spring your latest deathtrap on them.
But using the tiles and letting the players moving their own figurines around as they went to explore parts of the room actually made my job a lot easier. Cixi went to examine the illusionary wall first and stepped on the glyph without triggering it.
Aside: Being a Iron Hero and not supposed to be used in a default d20 fantasy setting, I had to hack quite a few houserules for Cixi (actually from our last abandoned campaign where Cixi was a character). Iron Heroes was designed to allow characters that are on par (actually a bit ahead) of standard d20 character but without any Magic Items.
I worked an in-game reason why a Iron hero can’t wield/wear/use a magic item or be healed by magic. One of the side effects of this was to make Iron Heroes immune to all magic spells and spell-like abilities that allow a save vs Fort or Will (except from outsiders). So Cixi basically saw through the illusionary wall and failed to trigger the magical trap.
So when a player finally moved his figurine right over the glyph, I stopped the game and had the glyph explode, catching 3 players in the blast, and pushing Cixi through the illusionary wall just for kicks (I had informed Franky/Cixi but not the other players) . A Glyph blast requests a Ref save so Cixi got hit too. (Nobody complained so I guess it’s a good if a bit evil approach)
The players detected the other glyph and decided to explore the tunnel, leaving the 2 closed doors for later. I must say it’s refreshing to play a few non-linear Dungeon Crawls, with all those choices and possible reactions of denizens.
They got into another defiled room with no apparent usable exit. They rapidly found a lever inside a coffin as well as the double falchion-spring blade trap placed to chop unwary arms. Once sprung the trap resets after a bit, so while the players were discussing the best course of action, I voiced a loud “click” every 5-6 seconds or so. It was funny to hear the shift in conversations as I was doing this. After 9 clicks, I said ‘Clonk’ and Eric said ‘the trap resets after 1 minute’… Clever boy!
That opened another passage down to the tomb’s third level. Which the players eagerly sent Lille to explore (I had to rewind a bit since I assumed the whole party took the stairs… Wrong assumption to make when you have a flying, invisible Tinkerbell in the party). She saw more than what she bargained for and promptly came back.
They faced 2 Giant Bloodhulks (think Hill Giant Fast Zombies pumped with way too much blood, see image) over a battlefield featuring a 60-80 foot long, 10-15 foot wide crevice. Once again the fight was fun and intense.
The Bloodhulks have tremendously high HP (200), low AC (13) and one hard hitting, 10′ reach slam per turn (avg 20 pts of damage). Originally the room contained 2 Child of Sehan but I had decided, quite understandably, to replace them.
During the fight, Cixi got really hurt for the 1st time during the campaign. Enough so that another hit would send her into the dying range. While the players were trying to find a way to tank the Giant to protect her, I hinted that being a kickass skill machine (all Iron Heroes are) maybe she could tumble/jump her way over the crevice.
Now, in order to avoid what happened to Crueger (you know, the Bridge falling Hellbred Crusader) a few sessions ago, I broke the pacing of the game to take the time to clearly spell out what the tumbling (to dodge giant fists) and jumping DCs were and what were the consequences of failing. Franky accepted the odds, dodged the undead giants and cleared the hole in the ground. Gooooooo Cixi!
I think it was worth taking the time to do this as she was now out of danger and Franky was grateful.
Once the monsters were slain, the evening was nearing to an end and I was starting to look for a good Cliffhanger point. They explored an empty room featuring yet another defiled coffin. But when I saw Aravar (Elven Duskblade/Arcane Archer) and Nogard spend significant effort looking for loot, I decided to place some hidden bling under the sarcophagus.
You see, Stef (Nogard’s player) had dropped a lot of hints that he wanted to add a dragon religion element to his character. And while I added clear dragon flavoured shamanistic elements in the tomb to please him, I more or less ignored all his attempts to play with the tomb’s fluff (ex: spending time to restore desecrated coffins and such) as were very much into the Crunch of the adventure.
So I decided to generate a tresure and make the coffin the tomb of some Dragon Priest…. just after I resolved the floor collapsing under Aravar and sending him crashing down 100′ down the 4th level floor into a Stalagmite strewn cavern. He survived the trap quite nicely thanks to the selection of a swift 1-round duration fly spells.
The loot was all draconic-related (ancient dragon-stamped gold coins, a gold idol, some priestly gold-threaded vestment) and a pair of magic gloves! (All generated in less than 5 minutes using the Magic Item Compendium)! I’ll make it fit with the campaign later, I’m not worried at all.
At that time, it was past 10h30, so I let the players open one last Stone door. It was locked, so Nogard stepped up to it and axed it to bits with his new Axe. I showed a picture of what came out and ended the game there … (Nope I’m not going to tell… tune in next time!)
Lessons Learned:
- Improv rocks, even low-grade, non-earth shattering improv!
- Critical hits against non-critable creatures might not be such a big deal after all (Welcome to the blogosphere ve4grm!).
What players liked:
- The Pace, the action, the bling!
- Kicking butt and feeling competent!
- Dice that actually roll good results!
- Part of the group levels up to nine at the next game
What players disliked:
- Not much, though Stef would have liked to Roleplay a bit more than I was willing to do that night. To make up for it, I offerd by email to give him a significant XP bonus (10% of leveling up XP) to reward his efforts in spite of my resistance.
What’s next:
- Conclude the adventure.
- Factor in some downtime to allow players to unwind and do non-adventure stuff (Shop, interact, find a group name, etc).
Micro-Crunch: I knew Mike Mearls was a Crunch Overlord!
As you may know, Martin Rayla of Treasure Table is taking a well deserved month off from writing his daily blog. He’s now slaving away doing NaNoWriMo, writing about whatever it is DMs write about (I suspect Ninjas and Pirates, but that’s just me).
During that time he’s reposting some of his best stuff from the last few years, and I stumbled upon this one this morning:
Applying Stross’s Law (Aug. 2005) – Treasure Tables
In which Martin links to an old Mike Mearls Live Journal entry. There, Mike basically says that a Fluff entry for a Setting element should never go over 2 paragraphs. Not a summary of the fluff, the whole fluff!
Yup, Mike is definitively a Crunch Overlord. That makes me smile… Although I hope there are fluff overlords working on D&D 4e to balance it out…
As much as I tend toward crunch, fluff plays a critical role to make a good game.
DM Chronicles, Session 6: Perfectly Paced Action Crunch! (Part 1)
Previously in Phil’s game:
The heroes struck a deal with the Keepers of the Veil to investigate where the plant-like humanoids, created by the drug Green Welcome, were headed in Ptolus’ Necropolis. Said plant-like beings, called Children of Sehan, were tracked to an ancient funeral mound and engaged. Two were slain, diffcultly, one remains, inside a closed sarcofagous being kept closed by both Nogard and Cruguer…
Last Friday was exactly what D&D as been about for us for the last 7 years, an action RPG. The pacing was perfect. The fights were short and intense. the players met various challenges and each managed to shine in his own way at least once. So okay, the actual story-motivated role-playing wasn’t actually there much, but the guys got to play the role of serious butt kickers all right.
The evening started slowly. I was recovering from a nasty cold and my mental faculties were still dulled. That’s why I restrained my alcohol consumption and it probably contributed for this markedly sharper game.
We ordered some Chicken in a Box and we had a blast watching some of the crazy videos my friends posted on Facebook (Name: Philippe-Antoine Ménard… drop-in anytime, but a lot of stuff is in French) as well as some Flights of the Conchords on You Tube.
As we were done striping the last nanograms of meat from our deliciously incinerated birds, we started shifting gears toward some serious Child of Sehan butt kicking.
I spent a few minutes explaining the new Gaze attack variant rule and we quickly reviewed the player’s plan of attack, which required a look at the Tanglefoot bag rules (this is some serious nice piece of alchemy… when not abused).
We started the fight.
Everybody retreated from the room and let the child of Sehan open the coffin it was in. Cixi, who is an expert at throwing anything, threw the bag and scored a perfect hit while saving against the creature’s gaze attack! One gooed Child of Sehan coming up!
Yan, who was a bit overconfident about his feat-fueled charisma-enhanced save, failed to resist vs the creature’s gaze and left the fight to play the flute somewhere else in the dungeon.
The rest was over real fast, mainly because I mistakenly allowed a player to score a crit against a plant. When I realized it on the next player,s turn, I let it ride as a ‘nice DM’ bonus, preferring to maintain pace over rules orthodoxy. A good call in retrospect I think.
So no one got poisoned or mauled and players were happy!
After, there was a bit of monkeying around where everyone wanted to search different things and go explore different areas at the same time. I intervened and asked the group to act as a more cohesive unit, speaking in only one voice, if only for my poor virus-damaged brain. The group re-snaped into it’s usual efficient unit and remained thus for the rest of the evening.
A secret stairways down was found and explored before finishing the 1st level.
The second room featured a bunch of opened, emptied coffins. One held a Succubus polymorphed into a Necropolis Flower Girl. The Flower Girls are a small Ptolus organization I made up, where people pay then to put flowers on tombstones and pray for the departed (yeah I like to poke fun at outsourcing in my own special way).
Now Succubus encounters are a very hard to play because players see it coming a thousand miles away. I played this one as having been affected by a Str damaging poison still covered by the stuff. Of course, the players casted a bunch of lesser restoration and healing spells on her. Sigh… So I went for their hero’s heart and described how she still failed to get up after those ministrations, probably because she was taking poison damage again.
At that point, Cruguer offered to treat her poisoned state with a heal check (thanks you Eric!). I promptly had her embrace him and started the french-kissing chain of 3 successive level drain/suggestions before the rest of the party decided to attack.
Aside: As with Save or Die effect, level drains are one of the most sucky D&D mechanics (no pun intended). Players work hard as hell gaining levels, spending often 3 or more sessions between level ups. So I have now made level drains come back at the pace of 1 level per day of rest, like Iron Heroes does.
Now here’s the thing, I had made the succubus the exact same one that featured in our last Iron-Heroes-in-Ptolus campaign. She wasn’t a real bad guy, nor was she a clear-cut ally either. I originally planned to have her reveal herself at the end of the fight and offer to trade her life for all the bling she got from the Big Bad when he called her here. That plan failed miserably.
While the demon was in a different form from when she last saw her, I allowed Cixi a spot check, which she failed by a small margin. While Franky caught on pretty fast and called me an Evil DM(tm) he managed to ignore my clever plot, crit her to death and send her back to her prison on Carceri. I had managed to charm Cruguer had a nice party conflict building up…. Oh well so much for interesting plot twists! See Lillee’s take on it here.
I decided to leave the loot behind nonetheless. The players resolved the issue in a different way than I imagined, but they still resolved it. So the players scored a nice Adamantine Masterwork Battleaxe and about 8000 gp worth of bling!
After that, the players found that the doors to this tomb needed really strong people to open, using a lever that called for 4 consecutive successful DC 15 strength checks. Nogard, who is a 1/2 dragon 1/2 orc Barbarian, has a STR of 28… without raging… So yeah he opened the doors easily…
Okay well I’m about to hit the 1000 word mark and I already broke my rule for Tuesday post (you know, gym and all) so I’ll leave the rest for tomorrow!
Ciao!
Bonus YouTube: Watchmen Babies- V for Vacation
Until Fox pulls it from YouTube, here’s the appearance of Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, and Dan Clowes on The Simpsons.
Edit- they pulled it! You can watch the episode over at Fox’s site if you’re willing to install their movie plugin, reboot, then view it again. Boo on Fox… let us watch our clips on the much easier to use YouTube!
A fey's journal: Under Ptolus' Necropolis (estimated time: noon)
Image Source: Art from Song of Serenity (Magic the Gathering, Exodus, Wizards of the Coast), Copyright 2005 Tony DiTerlizzi (Check his site!), used with the artists’ permission.
Here is Yan’s latest player log detailing last Friday’s tomb crawling. Enjoy!
I take a few minutes to write this as we are discussing our next course of action.
Since my last entry we fought the last plant like monster. But this time we fought on our terms. This means we hit it with a tanglefoot bag (yeah Cixi!) slowing it just sufficiently for us to kill it without giving it a chance to strike back at us.
Although I looked at it for just a bit too long and ended up invaded by a feeling of oneness and peace… So I spent much of this fight playing the flute. Grrrrr!.
So we came back to the tomb’s first room and searched a bit before going on to the next passage. We found a hidden stairway, under the big statue in the middle of the room so we decided to start there.
Investigating this passage we stumbled into another room full of coffins whose content had been dumped on the floor and looted. In one of them rested a girl that was moaning, apparently poisoned. We rushed to her help.
After a few restoration spell and the healing ministrations of Cruguer she came to her senses and embraced him far longer than seemed appropriate… Then I noticed they were kissing! He certainly did not seemed to mind… Umph!
This profoundly annoyed me… I mean… He should have known that she was a succubus and he should have at least tried to resist her no?
I was the first to react to this abomination! When it became apparent that she was a fiend and that poor, no-backbone Cruguer was getting drained before my very eyes. I angrily shoot a bolt of sound at them but, in their embrace, I hit Cruguer instead of that nefarious bitc… huh creature.
Thank Elhonna the fight did not last long and a masterful hit by Cixi put an end to that Demon-Whore’s existence in this plane. I did feel a pang of guilt at having hit Cruguer and spent everything I had to heal him (emptying our only Restoration wand).
But still this was an unsettling experience… I it’s not like I actually like that sanctimonious tortured… nice guy… (Sigh)
I have no time to dwell on this as I’m being pressed by the others to finish writing this so we may smash that locked door…. So, by that time, the others were rummaging in the Succubus’s possessions. We found an adamantine battle axe that the succubus had received as payment for her services. Whoever called her here did not want anybody to go through. They didn’t plan for us, the Fiend Slayer quintet! Ha! (hmmm… They might actually agree to this group name… I liked the Emerald Quintet better but noooo… Too cheesy they said. Umpf!)
The room lead to another one which had two apparent exits. Some invisible glyphs where protecting this area and again Cruguer got wounded along with Cixi and Nogard when one of them exploded in their face. Along with 2 other stone doors, Cixi ‘discovered’ an illusion hiding a hewn stone passage.
We took that passage and it lead into another defiled coffin-filled room. This room only other visible exit was a tunnel that had been blocked seemingly to prevent something from entering into the tomb. The coffins in this room had also been mostly opened. We found one unsealed coffin and opening it revealed a lever in it.
After investigating we noticed that their was a trap on it which was not to hard to circumvent. Upon pulling the lever a segment of the wall opened behind us and stairs were seen leading down.
At the bottom of these stairs we arrived in a large domed room with an approximately 10 meters wide crevice filled with some kind of vine-like plant. Two gigantic blood-infused monstrosities were waiting for us there. Another fight, another victory. Again Cruguer, Nogard and Cixi received quite the beating. If thing continue at this rate I’ll need a brand new wand of healing before the end of the day…. (Chatty DM: I think about 20 charges of wands were spent in this adventure so far)
I did investigate the crevice spotting some pool filled of the very same green stuff that started it all, only this time there was a whole lot more of it and it was glowing, never a good sign …
I felt an ominous presence calling to me. but could not see much and did not want to investigate the premises thoroughly with no potential backup coming.
Back in our cicrular domed room, there is three doors leading out.One of them lead to a room containing a lone sarcophagus on a pedestal that had an hidden compartment with some magical stuff in it.
While Aravar was checking the room for magic, the floor collapsed under him but he evaded a drop onto stalagmites thanks to his Swift Fly spell… Quite handy hehe!
So here we are and as I’m writing this Nogard is about to chop down the second door that was locked (the 1st one so far). …
Wow! down in one strike! What a brute! Who needs a rogue when you have a 1/2 dragon wielding an adamantine axe?
Eh… What was that sound? It sound like a gorilla…
Oh Cra…
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