Happy B'day Shamus
Shamus Young of DM of the Ring fame turns 36 today.
Happy Birthday man! You created something really big and cool and we appreciate you doing it for us. I’m really curious about what’s coming next. I speculate that it will be a RPG satire (confirmed) but probably based on his own gaming photos instead of Screencaps.
Interplannar adventures
Warning, Spoilers for Monte Cook’s Ptolus d20 setting. Safe for my players to read.
I’ve been wishing to do a multiplanar campaign for a long time. A D&D 2nds edition was the period I had left that game for the crunchiness and detail of Gurps. So I missed out on Planescape, having touched it only in a A D & D demo at my FLGS and while playing Torment on my PCs (awesome game, but I hated real time RPGs back then).
My last campaign had a taste of plane hopping where we had this one session, quite like ‘The Truman Show’* , where the players were taken out of their world to actually see that it was a prison. My player’s reaction was so awesome that I was profoundly marked by that… and the idea has been bouncing in my head for a whole year.
However, by that time, we chose to move the game to Ptolus (we had purchased it). Of course, being the stickler for rules that I am, I chose to apply the setting as is, a prison plane where plane shifting is strictly prohibited. So I had to squelch my desire to have my players go plane hopping. (I since then integrated Ptolus in my Homebrewed world and did away with all that annoyed me in it: The Chaos Cults and the whole prison world thing).
But still when I started openly stating that I felt like we could move on to a new campaign, all my players chimed in that a Plane Hopping theme was way up there in their preference for a game. Side note: DMs (if any eventually read this stuff), you usually don’t get that kind of open feedback that easily with players. When you do get it, JUMP on it! 
But being the somewhat inflexible thinker that I can be. I had always envision the planes as being something incredibly hostile and deadly. I mean the Nine Hells of Baator are full of devils and fire. The Abyss has countless billions of demons in it. How can a 5th level PC play in this? The only multiplanar adventures I had DMed were the 1st editions Queen of the Demonweb Pits (14th level adventure IIRC) and Throne of Bloodstone (25-100th level adventure) which strongly reinforced the idea. So up to recently, I imagined that a low-mid level PC showing up on the shores of the Styx would just be picked up by a Soul Collecting Fiend and the game would end there.
Now having spent the last few months reading on it all with a broader perspective, I finally understand that game-world consistency and Power-level economics are secondary in multi-planar games. Plane hopping can be the Cyberpunk of fantasy gaming** in that it’s all about the attitude and the flavor, not believability. It calls to the explorer-type players and the story-tellers that can recall invading Limbo and recovering a shard of the Chaos Stone to power the Staff of Freedom against the hordes of Rakalat’hon, the devil general currently rampaging through the Kingdoms in your homeworld. Powerful stuff if you ask me.
So game on friends, we’re going on a tour of the Cosmic Wheel!
*Thank you Mr. K. Dick, those drugs gave you wicked ideas.
** Well arguably, Steampunk is the equivalent, but in 1989, Planscape was TSR’s answer to Vampire the Maskarade that was all about attitude!
Rock Options (Guitar Hero and Rock Band)
It wasn’t all that long ago that if you wanted to play a rhythm game, your option was to play Dance Dance Revolution and all the neighbor-disturbing fake-dancing silliness that it implies. There were other entries that hit mainstream- Donkey Konga and Karoke Revolution come to mind, but none of them hit hard enough to stay there.
But then, lo from the heavens, descending from New England came a Guitar Hero. Our prayers to Valhallen, Viking God of Rock, were finally answered in the form of a plastic axe and a handful of songs “made famous” by rock and roll icons.
Game Carnival (If Only It Had Funnel Cake)
Yehuda has posted the newest Game Carnival, which includes two of my Critical Threat articles. It also contains a number of other articles about games, from a few theory articles to some video game reviews. I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but already I’m digging an article by Corvus that I missed when he posted that mirrors my thoughts on theme. Check them out, and lemme know if there’s any other great articles in there.
Doritos Contest: Total Joke
Wired has a funny article up about the winners of a recent contest sponsored by Doritos to pitch games for Xbox Live Arcade. The kind of games selected are hilarious by themselves, but the article goes the extra distance of mocking them. A friend of mine entered a few ideas into the contest, mistaking it for a genuine competition about clever gameplay, when in fact it turned out to be a contest for who can come up with the most ridiculous product placement for Doritos and call it a game.
In other news, we need a better category name than “MiniPosts” to describe these short articles, as it is important to the new Critical Hits 4.5e, coming soon. Any suggestions for what to call these pint-sized posts?
Recent DMing stuff from the Bloggoshere
Instead of writing new DMstuff, why not link to interesting things other people have to say on the subject of DMing?
Danny (Bartoneous) from Critical-hits talks about how to end a gaming session. I agree that Cliffhangers are a great way to end a D&D gaming night. I’ll further add* that Cliffhangers are sometimes hard to pull off because you either
- End the evening too early (thank god for Magic the Gathering!)
- Overshoot the session passed the group’s fatigue threshold (Bleary eyes and lack of commentary while rolling dice are a sign).
The Dead stop (stopping a game after a Boss fight for example) is also a nice way of getting closure. While Bartoneous does’t imply his group does it, a dead stop is a great way to insert an indeterminate time between 2 adventures. This lets PCs do out of camera stuff (like training, leveling up, buying gear, reporting back to patrons, etc).
Martin Rayla, from Treasure Table, discusses campaign drift. That’s when a campaign moves significantly and often away from it’s intended themes and crashes. Like most of Martin’s posts, his points are always simple and concise. This one: If it happens, talk it out with players, even if the drift is your own doing. I feel that’s probably what happened with out Iron Heroes game. I went really overboard making the campaign themes too complex and trying to fit too many things together while making my preparation simpler that it blew up in my face and robbed me of my enthusiasm about the whole thing. I plan on fishing for more light feedback by the players in between games (don’t worry, no 2 hour long post game feedback sessions on Friday nights).
Finally, Dante from StupidRanger, has a no-brainer that’s simple and effective. Listen to your players. Not the Give-them-everything-they-ask-for listen, but the pick-up-the-clues-you-dense-block-of-ego-granite listening. DMing is all about juggling a tons of stuff at a table surrounded by good friends. While you can’t give everyone all the attention they deserve as friends (treating a RPG game as a uniform group instead of individuals is another Blog topic), making a little extra effort to pick up on passive feedback is a key skill a good DM should work at. And I will work at that
*I mean, I need to add some value to ripping other’s people work no?
How to End an Adventure
This just came up on Saturday evening, while talking to Dave about how he ended his latest D&D 3.5 adventure. Typically when you’re playing things will run long, whether or not you plan to get through your whole adventure or not, it’s still going to run long. When you’re young, this isn’t so bad and is in fact a part of the fun. However, now that most of us have regular jobs and families, a game running late can really be a pain in the arse! What happened with us is that we realized a few of our players had to get up way too early the next morning, and so before midnight, once we’d finished with the meat of the adventure, Dave wisely wrapped everything up in an instant and we began cleaning up so that people were free to stay or go as they needed to. This got me thinking about how the end of an adventure affects the entire session and indeed, the entire feel of a campaign.
The classic staple of storytelling is to wrap part of a series up in a good old cliffhanger. I love these things- most people do. That’s why they exist, but it is certainly not the only way to go about wrapping up an adventure. The best part of cliffhangers is that they leave the party thirsting for more, and if it is really effective, cause them to clamor for the next adventure. The problem that arises here is that they require you to break off the story at a critical moment, which will run the risk of the players becoming jaded and disinterested in the interim. Also, you must begin the next adventure on a high note that is typically difficult to reach when warming up for the day/evening of gaming. Some effective ways to mitigate these problems are to make sure you write really, really good cliffhangers that will grab and intrigue your players into wanting more and jumping head first back in once they return. Another way to approach it is when you return the next adventure, do not start off with the continuation of the cliffhanger but instead skip to the next day, or the end of the conflict and you can sooner or later go back and narrate the events. [Read the rest of this article]
Inquisition of the Week: D&D 4e Reaction
Last week, we presented the nominations for Best YouTube of the Year, and had you select your favorites. And the winner is… COLLEGE SAGA! Congratulations to Mark Leung for creating such an awesome video and sharing it with the world. Second place went to the hilarious and oft-quoted 300 Rated PG. To those of you who did not vote, I still encourage you to check out all the nominees- the poll entries link to each one so you can check them out.
GenCon seems to be the new place for publishers to announce their big new games. Fantasy Flight announced that they’re reprinting two classics: Cosmic Encounter and Dune (albeit without the actual Dune license, rethemed to fit the Twilight Imperium universe.)
But of course, nothing could come close to overshadowing the announcement of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. Like certain other sequels, it has been met with a mix of excitement and snark, with some fans proclaiming doom and others proclaiming the next big thing. There are those who don’t trust anything Wizards does (especially those who felt ripped off by the release of 3.5), but the market has spoken that gamers will pay for all new books every 4-5 years, and in the words of D&D’s former brand manager, not making new editions is like leaving money sitting on a table.
But as always, we here at Critical Hits are on hand to take the pulse of the industry. Knowing what little we do about the new edition, just based on your gut reaction to the announcement:
What do you think about the announcement of D&D 4th Edition?
- Critical hit! I'll definitely be buying! (21%, 10 Votes)
- I'll see what the reviews are like first. Cautiously optimistic. (49%, 23 Votes)
- An earlier version of D&D is all I need forever. (4%, 2 Votes)
- Nope, this is just a cash grab by WotC. I'll wait until at least 4.5e. (17%, 8 Votes)
- I don't care either way- since I either don't play D&D or don't play RPGs. (9%, 4 Votes)
Total Voters: 47
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