Inq. of the Week: Resolution?
The year of 2008 comes to a close this week, and quite the year it has been for us! I don’t know if Dave or I could have foreseen where Critical Hits would end up back in January, but we are certainly happy with the way things are. Last week Dave asked which fictional holidays you celebrate, with some awesome throwback options to shows like Dinosaurs that I found pretty funny. The miracle of Festivus won out with 24%, followed closely behind by the WoW players and the Feast of Winter Veil at 22%.
This week New Years is on Thursday, and no doubt many people will be taking part in the renewing tradition of setting New Years Resolutions. I’ve set very few of them in my life, and of those I don’t think I’ve ever fulfilled one but at least I set my goals high, right? Okay, maybe not. Whether you set them or not, and if you live up to them or not, the fact that you’re reading this means there is one important resolution that you DO have set.
Loading ...I realize many of you are probably over-clocking life itself and running dual monitors, and that most of us have a computer at work or at home, but the best is to share which resolution you’re happiest and most comfortable with. We’d also love to hear about any New Years Resolutions you’re committing to for 2009, so please share in the comments!
DM Chronicles: Session 6, When Fun Trumps Story, Part 1
Heya all,
I more or less expected to stop playing from late November until mid January. However, by a strange coincidence, we all (i.e. the 6 players and myself) managed to be free on December 19th!
Joy!
Warming up with the Band!
Some of the group made it to Math’s early enough so we could play some Rockband 2… that’s quite a honorable sequel to the original game. We played too many Pixies song and we quickly realized that Math’s taste in music does not meet with universal approval from the more Heavy Metal friendly Mike and Franky.
I also unintentionally tortured Franky. At a certain point he offers to sing and I got to choose the song, and I chose one from Red Hot Chili Pepper.
You gotta remember, English is at best, a second language for us, so a Chili song is quite a feat of speedy signing!
Poor guy, he was exhausted!
Har har har! I know you’ll get back at me Franky my man!
Setting up the crunch before the Fluff
If you’ve been a regular follower of my campaign logs, you’ll know that we concluded our first D&D 4e mini campaign a few weeks ago with our heroes vanquishing the leadership of the strongest Pirate fleet in the region and stealing their main vessel, an armed airship called the Red Dragon. This brought the players from level 1 to 4 and closed the storyline .
So this session was to be the start of the second campaign, covering levels 4-6, centered around the Wizards of the Coast published adventure: Thunderspire Labyrinth. With my limited energy levels and inspiration, I decided to tackle a published adventure I had heard good things about. This, mostly to allow me to sit back and truly tame this new way to play my favorite game that I both love while still finding some annoying bits I have a harder time digesting. Treasure parcels, I’m looking at you!
Anyhoo… Thunderspire was to be my ‘rebound’ game. I’m sorry I didn’t write an adventure prep post about this game. Suffice it to say that it was mostly about reading enough of the adventure to feel comfortable running it and connecting some viable adventure hooks to the group itself.
As more players arrived, we sat around the table so that players could update their character sheets, some people had been missing long enough to have missed two leveling ups. Also, as agreed upon, each player was free to change whatever they wanted on their characters between mini-campaigns.
For instance, Yan chose to take some new stuff from Martial Powers and made himself a ‘I mark you so stay the frak there’ combo fighter.
What most other players did was adjust feats and take new magic items. Since I completely fumbled treasure distribution in the first 5 sessions, I let each player pick and choose the usual mix of items allocated to a starting level 4 PC, i.e. a level 5, 4 and 3 item, plus the cash for a level 3 item.
(I may very well keep doing that!)
That worked out perfectly well! Plus it let the players get out all the crunchiness of the game’s prep out of the way in one go.
As we played with the numbers and ordered the Pizza we started fooling around, swapping jokes and being stupid as any group of tired geeks can get.
Literary critic’s little corner
This mood ended up pervading most of the evening and helped a lot…
…because the story of Thunderspire Labyrinth is flimsier than your average “made for DVD” porn flick. Its true!
Its got a great setting, a ruined underground Minotaur city, and its got some awesome encounters. However it’s tied around one of the lamest kidnapped-slave/please look into what my evil colleague is doing stories I have read in an adventure module!
Now I’m not criticizing WotC, this adventure is the equivalent of 3,0′s Forge of Fury in terms of the order it was published and it ranks at about the same level … but man this adventure hangs by just a few threads!
Filling in the Gaps
As the group slowly moved from number-driven activities and into ‘let’s play some D&D’ mode we discussed how a few years had passed since the pirates’ defeat in the south seas. We touched on how a few PCs spent their time during that period (I’m taking some slight artistic license here as we never truly got around the whole table to establish this):
- Masaru the Eladrin Feypact Warlock mused and explored why his powers failed him at such a critical time.
- Takeo the Dragonborn Warlord led his people in raids against the remaining pirate outposts
- Naquist the Elven Cleric of Bahamut was gone on a religious retreat
- Bjerm the Elven Fighter traveled further abroad in the world to learn new fighting styles.
- Fizban the Eladrin Wizard continued his studies and drawings
- Roco the Halfling Rogue got into trouble more often than not but managed to stay alive.
What all PCs had in common during that period was:
- They were considered and recognized as heroes wherever they went in the campaign’s original region.
- They had one last adventure where the crashed the explosive filled Pirate Airship into the Pirate capital, thus putting an end to the regional lycantrophic piracy threat… (boy that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write… but it does reek of the Rule of Cool, dudn’t it?)
I described that over the last two years, a new threat rose centered around a band of goblinoids called ‘the Bloodreavers’. This group of slavers became bolder and bolder as they took slaves from communities and villages further and further from a landmark mountain, called Thunderspire, where they are believed to hide in.
I explained that as time passed, more and more scared, desperate citizens implored the PCs to stop this scourge and help save disappeared loved ones.
This was an interesting twist. I had painted the PCs as local heroes, much to the delight of the players, and none of them balked at the idea that being local heroes, they were bound to get requests to deal with stuff like that. Its like feeling heroic makes you more likely to accept heroic railroading!
I also tested a Player Narrative trick. I asked if a player was willing to have one relative of his PC be one of the captured slaves. Mike who plays Takeo, volunteered and said that his brother, a Dragonborn diplomat could have been taken. Our efforts to give him a non stupid sounding Asian-like name failed, much to the mirth of the other player that we settled for some mono-syllabic nonsense finishing in ‘ing or ong’… I forget (I’m writing this one week after the game).
I laid down the regional map that we build as the campaign progresses and I added a road leaving from the Eladrin Capital I had it veer West, pass by a large mountain (Thunderspire) and pass through 2 Human settlements: Winterhaven and one yet unnamed one at the end of the Road. We established that Takeo’s brother vanished near Thunderspire while he was on a mission to establish contact with the Humans.
I really appreciated doing this and I plan to do more such things in future sessions. I added 8 other slaves and we made a list of people to save. That was to become the adventure’s main quest.
I also had 2 more Hooks:
- Roco’s father had bought slaves in the past to ‘free’ them by offering them a Gladiator’s life. He told his son in private that he knew an intermediate guy in Thunderspire that could possibly put the PCs in contact with the Bloodreavers. In fact he showed him a letter he received recently that said that the Bloodreavers were ready to ‘rebuy’ any slaves Roco’s dad bought because there was a huge demand by the Duergar of Thunderspire.
- Brandobaris the Fat, the party’s old patron, asked the PCs to explore Thunderspire’s Seven Pillared Hall (The Mountain’s Civilized area) for potential business opportunities to be developed away from the influence of the Hall’s Greedy leaders: The Mages of Saruum. (That hook ended up being the weakest of them all and I may abandon it if no players follow up on it).
Up next: How even a flimsy story can be made interesting by motivated players!
Playing Online Part 3: Wrapping-Up
Chatty DM: Here’s Part 3 of Wyatt’s wordilicious series on playing RPG through text interfaces online. I wish to thank him warmly for stepping in when I needed the break!
Hey there, this is Wyatt Salazar, your DJ for the night, and as we have done before (and before) we will talk online gaming!
Now that we have an idea of how it is played, and where to go to play it, we’ll talk a bit more about some very important subjects, including recruiting and how to start running it once it’s on the run. This article will concern itself mostly with GMs.
The player’s job online is very easy – he joins the game and he plays, much like in real life. The last two articles showed him how to play online and where, and that’s really all he needs to know. Now, by reading what the GM needs to know, the players will know how to make life easy for him.
Recruiting
A lot of people who start doing online gaming already have some friends they can bring to the medium alongside them, but some don’t, and unless all of your group agrees unanimously to it, you’ll probably have some holes left to fill.
This is where recruiting comes in. This is a major part of online gaming that can make a game or break it before it even starts. Most RPG websites will have a forum for finding players or recruiting, especially those that also have play-by-post boards.
This is where you would go to find players. RPG Forums are the best places to recruit, but if you’re part of a private forum with a good community, you could try to get non-RPGers interested in learning. If you can take the time to teach them, having fresh minds may help keep the game aloft more than hardcore RPGers who are already in two other games. But that’s all taste, really.
Before you start, have a good topic title in mind. You’re posting on this forum, among maybe hundreds of other topics, to try to draw players to your game. If your topic title is “D&D 4e Game on Gametable” then it’s not going to catch any eyes.
Now, if it is “The Unseen Scourge of the Gray Vale (D&D 4e Gtable)” then you have a better chance to hook people in. (Chatty DM’s unasked for editorial comment: I’d totally join a game called that!)
The title of your thread should have the system you’re running and how you’re running it – if it’s via an instant messenger, write the acronym for it (AIM, MSN, IRC, etc), write PBP if it’s a play-by-post, or the app you’re running it with (Mtool, Gtable, OpRPG, etc). Some people just plain don’t like a medium for their own reasons, and you don’t want them thinking you’re running a Play-By-Post, when you’re really running on IRC.
Also, try to resist posting the name of whatever module you’re running as the topic title (if you’re running a published module that is) unless it has a gimmick people would want to know. In fact try to resist telling people it’s a module you’re running at all.A lot of people, like myself, have played dozens of modules, some of them more than once, and if you tell me explicitly you’re running Keep On The Shadowfell, you’re projecting an aura of “same old, same old.”
Now, if you get me playing Keep on the Shadowfell and I can’t tell that’s what it is, you stave off both precognitive boredom and metagaming at once.
Your recruiting thread should, hopefully, have the following things, that will almost certainly ensure people are interested:
Introduction: This is where you give people a feel for the game you’re going to run. Like the title, this is another chance to hook them. Tell them the system, some backstory information (but not too much – this is a hook, remember, just enough that they can make a proper character), the kind of game (dungeon crawl, intrigue, etc), and how you’re running it.
You can supplement this basic information with any maps, images, short stories, your campaign wiki or blog, whatever you’ve prepared for the game beforehand. This is a big part of how a player will start judging your DMing if they don’t know you. That’s why I include a short story along with the plain introduction – to show people that I’m a creative type and give them something to go on about me.
Application Form: Best case scenario is you’ll have about 5-8 people interested at any one time, and in truly exceptional cases maybe a dozen or two. The only way you can pick one complete stranger over another is by, basically, a contest of some form. This is where your application form comes into play. Ask players to give you some information about the character they want to play. If it catches your eye, it’s in.
Stuff like Character Name, Gender, Race, Class (or role, or equivalent descriptor), Appearance, Personality, Backstory, Friends/Enemies. No crunch just yet – just imagination. People will either post this in your topic or Private Message (nearly every forum has this function) it to you. This is like a reverse of the intro – it’s what you will use to judge your players, based on how much effort they put into the application.
Terms: This is important. You have to lay the ground rules right now: What books you use, what point buy or dice rolling method for character generation, the level of the game, the starting equipment you allow, the date and time the game is on (if Real-Time) or the minimum number of messages you want per day (if Correspondence), but even more than that, etiquette concerns. This is where you address the level of maturity of the game you aim for, whether or not you’ll tolerate swearing or certain descriptive levels of violence or other mature content, or any other specific rules you wish observed.
Also, be sure to end with something like “You may ask any questions now” to cover yourself if you missed something.
Well, now that you’ve done your first post, you need to watch the people that join. A few things you can do is to look at their posting history. If you see them getting into a lot of arguments on forums, or if they’re already in a lot of games, you might want to consider that when you make your decision. This is something I skimp on a lot that has come back to bite me time and again. You’re playing with people you know nothing about, so it’s best to learn something about them before you pick them.
Some places offer average posts and total post counts. If somebody is active in the community, they tend to make good candidates for gaming. However, some people might be lurkers who have accounts for a long time but never post, and you might be overlooking them. It’s a toss-up and might seem complicated, but most people who apply for games tend to be decently nice. It’s very rare you’ll find somebody applying just to mess with you.
Running The Game
There’s different sets of things to do depending on what kind of game you’re running.
Correspondence: The basic things you need are a game thread (where in-character stuff happens) and a talk thread (for out-of-character discussion). If you’re playing in a place that gives you control over your forum, you can create subforums for this sort of thing. Otherwise, be sure that the OOC and the IC threads link to each other for easy access (provide the URL for the counterpart in the first post).
Your OOC thread is for talk related to the game, and (very importantly) for absences. If you’re not going to be able to post, say so. If you forget to say so, apologize after and explain why you couldn’t.
For players, it is important to warn of absences in advance, or to take a small moment to say “I can’t post today.” The first post of the OOC thread should contain links to the player’s character sheets (if you have control of the forum, make a separate subforum for sheets instead). Ideally, you will have these links because players made their sheets in an online sheet place – be sure to link your players to your favorite one so they’ll have their sheets in a format you know and enjoy.
Your IC thread is the game. Be strict about OOC talk inside the game – you don’t want to see your IC thread with a new post, and then have that new post be mostly about your player’s experience with Fallout 3.
Be sure to have your threads in order as close to the end of the sign-up period as possible. If sign-ups end, and you let a week go by without establishing threads and beginning the game, people will lose interest. For players, be sure to have your sheet set in stone as close to the end of sign-ups as possible. You want everything to rocket forward after sign-ups.
Real-Time: You want to keep logs of your chats for players who are absent to be able to read, or just for your campaign history. If you have a private wiki or campaign blog, keep the chats here for even easier access by the players. You should ask for a way to contact your players if they miss a session or if you need to send them materials to peruse before the session.
Some players have a habit of not handing you their sheets for real-time games. Always ask for a sheet. Either as a text document or a hosted sheet. Preferably both. Courteous players will have a sheet ready to go for you after signing up.
You want to be timely. Don’t cancel too many sessions unless you absolutely have to. Even if other players say they won’t show, you show up for anyone who does. Reward them for showing up. Be the rock that the players can lean on, so they know that you’re serious about running this game, and that if replacement players are needed, the game won’t just fall apart and waste everyone’s time. It’s the internet, so try to be as visible as possible, or you may become invisible.
Allow a few minutes before the game to just talk about whatever, socialize. Then right after the game, talk to the players about the game. Feedback is important. Ask for it. This also lets you see the player’s personal character. If they’re enthusiastic, or if they seem like they don’t care, or if they’re bitter about things. Make probing questions, and give good answers. Log everything. Make sure your players know that you are open to discourse. Even online, they might be afraid of approaching you about your game. Everyone should be open as possible.
You’re Online, Take Advantage Of It!
For real-time games run using map software, tokens are very important. A token is your character. Nobody wants to be “blank chip with a number 2 on it”. Grab an image, learn your software’s preferred token size (Gametable, for example, uses 64 x 64 tokens) and format, and make a face for your character.
Tokentool is free, easy, and does it all for you. But watch out, because Tokentool doesn’t handle megabyte-heavy images. This is important for people like me, who collect images online that range from a megabyte and above that they like to use. You may have to downsize them to get Tokentool to work with them.
A game soundtrack is awesome. Online, where a game soundtrack won’t interrupt the narration, it’s even more awesome. That said, I couldn’t really find many places that did what I wanted – to be able to upload an Mp3 from your computer and stream it to others. There are applications that do this, I’m sure, but I’m not much of a wiz at that sort of thing. I did, however, come across 8tracks.
It has its limitations, but it lets you make a small playlist of songs, save it on their site, and link to anyone to stream it. This lets you create mini-soundtracks and link your players to listen to. It’s also fairly fast and simple. Hopefully the audience here knows of some better ways they can tell me, but thus far, I’m digging this site. Here’s a sample playlist by me of some music from my computer. Yes I’m weird.
Guess voice and video chat go here if you’re so inclined, but again, I don’t recommend it. It just didn’t feel right to me whenever I did it. Try to live through your text, and see if you like it that way. It’s as slow or as fast as you want it to be, and as alive as you want it to be. And less technologically demanding.
Get into the online log trading community. I’m the creepy guy over there reading some other creepy guy’s romantic Eberron campaign. Ask people nicely for their campaign logs, and you’ll find that you’ll never run out of ideas for games. If you’re feeling down about your own game, read some logs. They’ll empower you – even if it turns out the guy’s game is worse than yours or far, far, far more elaborate and you feel like an ant.
Take advantage of image props. For forums, you will need to provide your own maps if you’re running a game that uses a map of course. For map software, you can get creative. For example, in gametable, you can turn practically any image into an underlay.
So you could, say, buy some of Wizard’s Dungeon Tiles, break them up, scan the pieces, and photoshop or GIMP them a bit, and you’d be running with pretty grids just like at the table (Chatty DM: That’s probably illegal but then again what isn’t with media today?). Or you can take a piece of grid paper, draw on it, and scan that too.
Your game is online, so you can even run it from your mobile! You can post in your play-by-post with any phone/mobile that has internet functionality. You can run chat games off of one if they can use AIM or something close. You don’t have to miss a session this way, especially if you’re using online sheets and image storage for your props, so every one of your resources is online and thus accessible from your phone/mobile/doohickey.
Also worth noting – all mobiles have some sort of text message and the really nice ones have email. Fast email. Email in your hands, all day, every day, everywhere. So as pointed out by Walkerp in the comments of the last article, play-by-email is quite viable from your mobile, especially if everyone has a mobile with good archiving and email features. What’s more, if the mobile also has full fledged internet, as mentioned above, a campaign wiki or blog, character sheets, everything is very accessible.
Run a joke game. Make fun of the fact that you’re playing online. Make video game allusions such as save points and cutscenes and even tutorials. Create an underlay of David Hasslehoff’s face on Gametable and use that as your combat grid. Make a grindcore soundtrack and tell your players it’s the boss music. Invite a guy named “Tarrasque” into your IRC chat then kick him after your players are scared enough. Run Maid: RPG. You won’t lose face – it’s the internet, you don’t have a face. Loosen up and see the possibilities.
And I guess that’s all for this series! Thank you all for being so welcoming and responsive. Special thanks to the Chatty DM for allowing me this great opportunity. And word up to the posse, Master Epyon, Helepolis, Dragoon Andrew, Mikeloop, Kuronoa, Faury, Nanoka, and all my other e-friends who’ve shown me such wonderful gaming experiences so far away from their homes.
Until we meet again, have lots of love, platypuses and black sheep.
Chatty: Once again Wyatt, thanks, I owe you one!
Merry Christmas!
It’s Christmas Eve already and I’m running around with my little family. Since all our parents are divorced, we must show up to 4 different places in a very restricted ammount of time. We don’t mind, because that’s what the season is about.
So while I catch my breath for a few minutes, I want to wish you all a great Holiday season. Thanks for being there and dropping by with your comments.
In terms of blogging, I plan on returning with more regular features shortly after tomorrow. I’m about halfway through my D&D adventure but I plan to spit my writing time between the blog and the adventure.
Enjoy the holidays and have fun!
A million little pieces (of equipment)
Inspired both by The Dice Bag’s post on equipment and my recent dive into Fallout 3, I’ve come to the realization that encumberance rules bug me.
There are several paradigms that I’ve run into:
- The standard D&D one, which pretends to have some semblance of realism by tracking the weight of all your gear, and imposing penalties if you go over the weight you can carry by strength. This leads to all sorts of wackiness if you actually think about it.
- The one that goes for maximum realism by making characters track exact weights and locations of all the items they are carrying, and is annoying as hell to keep track of.
- Systems that don’t track your carrying capacity, leading to players carrying everything they’ve ever found.
- Forced restrictions. “You can wear one set of clothing and wield one weapon, and that’s all.” Usually only in video games. [Read the rest of this article]
