Give the Gift of D&D: Winners Announced!
Nearly 40 entries later, our contest to give away a 4e Basic Set, Keep on the Shadowfell, and D&D Minis starter has ended. And we have winners to announce!
First, our runner-up, who posted the snarkiest answer. Tonester’s saga was as following: [Read the rest of this article]
YouTube Tuesday: Shine on Me Edition
When the Senior Brand Manager of D&D declares this to be good enough to be the next D&D movie, you know it’s going to be awesomely bad. Watch for a special appearance by Doctor Doom!
Chatty's Reruns: The Rule of Cool
I’m on blogging Hiatus until next week. During that time I’ll be re-posting old text of mine or guest posts.
This one was the first post I struck gold with (Sept 4th 2007). It’s as short as it was insightful and has made me known on the bloggosphere. It has since become a cornerstone of what i stand for in terms of tabletop roleplaying.
Since this text has been linked by others several times, I’m re-posting it instead of changing its publishing date.
I just found out about possibly the coolest site for failed writers (raises hand), Meta-plot analyst (raises hand… again) and just plain Story-driven entertainment junkies (Me, me, me!!!).
It’s called the TV tropes Wiki and it may very well Ruin your life. (God! I must be the billionth blogger to use that Shtick). It’s about plot devices and common tricks used in successful TV/commercials /movies.I love this as I’ve always been a great fan of discussing plots and narrative techniques in novels and TV shows.
I haven’t yet spent a lot of time on it, but I probably found one of the best rules of adventure design and DMing I’ve come across
The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group.
To transpose to RPG terms: Your players will put up with almost any illogical or “wobbly” plot devices or encounter you throw at them as long as things get cool enough. Which basically makes me think that my efforts as a DM should not so much be on far-reaching World Building and tight nitpicking-proof plot lines and such.
I should go all out for encounters and role playing that will swamp my players in coolness. Think combat on ice Bridges, negotiating the release of prisoners in a flooding underground prison, hopping from floating island to pieces of flying ruins in order to catch the thieves of the Star jewel of Radnia…
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Enjoy the site, I know I will.
Red Shirts anyone?
Inq. of the Week: Day Jobs?
Well it looks like Dave’s question from last week was a hit, when he asked what campaign settings we’ve played in we recieved 577 votes and it should be no surprise that Forgotten Realms came out in the lead with 19% of them. Ravenloft sits in second with 13%, followed very closely by Dark Sun and Greyhawk each with 12%, then Dragonlance at 11% and then in fifth place comes Planescape with 10% which three weeks ago we found out is the most desired setting to be brought into 4E by our readers. Eberron and Spelljammer filled out the rest of the most popular settings, standing above the rest of the options each of which got at least a few votes for people who’d played them.
A lot of the Inquisitions that I write are about you guys, the readers, because I’ve always been curious to find out a little more about who you are and what has brought you to our site. One thing that we’ve never quite touched on is the topic of what all of us do when we’re not busy gaming, or talking about gaming, or blogging about gaming. I’d say that it’s a safe assumption the vast majority of us still have day jobs, or at the very least are students working through school while we enjoy our wonderful hobbies whenever we can.
Thus, for this week’s Inquisition we’d like to know what field or professions you work in, you can select multiple choices because we’re sure there are some of you who have more than one job, or who’s job crosses between multiple fields. As always there is an Other option, and we’d love for everyone to share exactly what you do in the comments!
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Chatty's Guest: Playing Online, Part 1: Style
Chatty DM: I’m on blogging Hiatus until the week of December 20th. In the mean time I post some of my old articles as well as guest posts. Today, I’m treating you to the masterful penmanship of Wyatt Salazar, a rising blogger who’s got more talent than I could ever hope to develop. Enjoy!
Well, hey there. This is Wyatt Salazar from Spirits of Eden (and from the yakuza hideout of RPG blogging) filling in for Chatty for a bit.
For these posts, you can think of me as that kid from Live Free Or Die Hard. I’m here with my laptop filled with documents and software and doohickeys to talk to everyone about a style of play that I think is misunderstood or gets a bad rep. And beside me is this wise, experienced, badass dude with a gun who can take metric tons of punishment (yes, measured in metric tons) and survive before shoving a pistol down somebody’s throat, while I cry a little and IM my best friend who lives in his basement using my mobile phone.
I apologize for that simile.
A little background. I started playing D&D around 2004-ish. I say -ish because I have a notoriously bad memory. It might have been 2003. Nevertheless, I started during the 3.5 era. Since then I’ve tried out pretty much every edition of D&D, with 4th Edition becoming my de-facto right now, as well as numerous other games.
My second-favorite games are Maid: RPG, Dive Into The Sky, and Cthulhutech, all three of which are probably not very well-known (except maybe Cthulhutech).
As well, I started D&D, and RPGs in general, in a very peculiar way. A friend of mine from a popular video game message board gave me a message on MSN Instant Messenger that he wanted to start a D&D group. He was looking for people who had experience with storytelling and since he liked my short fiction and fanfiction a lot, he thought I’d be perfect for it.
I thought “D&D? I hear that’s a little time-consuming to learn, but it could be fun.” So I jumped in. That changed my life pretty much entirely.
You ruined my life Master Epyon, and I will someday hunt you down for it! Sleep with one eye open!
Ahem.
But the point of that was this – I didn’t start D&D by getting invited to a guy’s house and sitting around a table, like probably most of you have. Rather, I began playing D&D online. This is probably something rather alien to most of you. You might even feel pity for me, that hasn’t experienced “real” D&D gaming. Well don’t – I’ve played tabletop plenty of times. I honestly prefer online. But that’s not my point either.
My point is to talk about this kind of D&D that’s “not real” to many people out there. Discussing the tools, the techniques and the styles of the trade, and maybe to ultimately cultivate an understanding that might even help you to try it out. All of this is based on my (hopefully wide enough) personal experience.
For the first post in this mini-series, I’ll lay down some rough basics, and discuss style. Style is very important, I feel, more than the medium is. Medium will be the next post, then finally, a post about sprucing up the game and avoiding pitfalls regardless of the medium you’re using.
What You Need:
•An internet connection and a computer
•Internet buddies
•A text-based communication method of some form (forum, IM, etc)
Now, I’ll have to put a disclaimer here that I don’t advocate the usage of voice communication, and video, and cameras, and all that fancy stuff these days. That stuff’s cool, don’t get me wrong, but I like the psychic distance created by not having anything to relate to from another player but text.
We’ll get to that in a moment.
So Skype, Google Talk, all these video/audio chat thingies, don’t use ‘em. At best, you’ll be trying to over-emulate a world of gaming (the tabletop) that you cannot satisfactorily create online. The physical aspect of the game is not easy to transplant over to the online medium. Seeing and hearing a person does not accurately represent being with them physically. This is why I never tried, and probably will never bother to try, a very high-tech sort of D&D gaming of that form. Rather, I was brought up on an entirely different style of gaming.
Literary Gaming? What Cannabis Is this?
There’s a major difference between speaking words and writing text, and it’s not merely in the senses utilized. When you write a long forum post or instant message, the entirety of the message appears in your recipient’s screen instantly (or when they refresh). It can then be skimmed, re-read, ignored completely, with ease. When you talk, people have to listen to you. Your entire message does not appear – it has to be given, sound, by sound. A person has to pay attention to it and allow it to gradually be known in full. So if you’re around a tabletop having a soliloquy, you are taking up a lot of everybody’s time.
At the most basic level, for this communication to be effective, nobody can interrupt you, or talk at the same time as you. You have monopoly on this time. For a DM, this is expected – but there are also three, or four or even five players around that have to share this time effectively, listen to each other, and express themselves. This often results in a brevity of the messages involved.
On the internet, communication is instantaneous and simultaneous. Furthermore, it is archived (to an extent). All this lends itself much better to a fatter textual style than a tabletop game would have. The description I often give to new people is “play like you were writing the story down.” Let me go dig up a post of mine (with some editing to take out all the BBCode that wouldn’t display, and make it more palatable to a blog post) from some game I’m in to kind of show you how it’s done – don’t worry too much about the medium just yet. For now, it’s just important to know that this happened in a forum, a message board. Here:
“Sophia is knocked slightly off balance by the attack, but quickly finds her footing, plants herself before the ork in front of her. Panting heavily, she swings her sword. Glowing black and purple aura surrounds her blade as she drives forward into a horizontal slash, giving a raging scream as she does so. She flows cleanly from the strike, leaping back and covering the giant ork with her roiling phantasms. She quickly delivers a slash to the smaller ork in front of her as she lands on her feet, as though to get it out of the way. “Don’t say I never tried to defend you,” She shouts to Adelpha, before steeling her eyes on the giant ork.”
(I attacked an ork, marked it, and then smashed a guy beside me. Also note, for this game, we were treating Orcs as Warhammer-inspired Orkz.)
Never minding the weirdness of this game (I’m not in very many normal games of D&D 4th Edition right now, as I prefer over-the-top crush the world down games), this is a pretty standard bit of gaming in the online world. You write so that people can see the action play in their head, like you’d imagine a good book you’re reading, being played by all your favorite actors. I tend to imagine what’s going on as a manga or comic book, but that’s just me – I’m a big fan of cartoons of any sort. I also read way too many comics, and imagining that event as a two-page spread is really awesome to me.
Though the post has to be left vague enough to allow the possibility I might miss in my attack, I expressed myself and the surroundings pretty thoroughly. Then, my DM would post, describing the scene how it played out from my roll results, and though the continuity might be a bit buggered at times, we don’t really mind as long as we can end with a good idea of how the scene played out.
Not all posts are like that though. As with a real novel, there has to be a rhythm, rather than just thick paragraphs all the while. Or people get tired. For example, later on in the thread, some of my creative juices for the day were exhausted and I came up with this masterpiece:
“Sophia tries to knock down the giant ork in front of her.”
Yeah, I’m a real Thomas Pynchon. People will dissect that post after I die for all of its deep literary themes.
The former, I would never try to do in a tabletop game. It would be weirdly involved and really an absurd monopolization of everyone’s time involved. The second would be more along the lines of what I’d do for that. But in an online game, it’s more fun if you do it the first way.
There have been posts and IMs in games where I have to copy and paste them into documents (which I have since lost, bloody screw) because they were so unbelievably badass. There was so much emotion and consideration in the writing that if I could have clapped and the person heard me, I would have.
This is one thing I always try to tell people about online gaming. You’re missing out on something if you just try to project the table into the online world, and try to see everyone through cameras and microphones. Rather, I encourage people to try to project themselves into text instead.
“We will try…Chak’s, first. If any of you lack faith in him, look at this as an opportunity to see that faith restored.” Sophia says. Whether or not she in particular views this as a test of any sort, she does not make known. However, she is betraying a hint of weariness now, at least in her face, and in the slowing down of the horrible effigies and ghosts roiling over her armor.
How do I see or interact with the other players? I don’t. It’s not really about us. Instead, it’s about our characters. Sure, we have out-of-character dialogue and planning, but it’s short, and in a forum, would be confined to spoiler tags or to a separate board. But in the game, it’s about the characters.
I use a third person writing style when I game to exemplify this. I’m not Wyatt, here. I’m Sophia Athanasia Peithos, Evil Paladin of Bane. What Wyatt thinks is unimportant at this time – the information the players and the DM want to see is what Sophia feels, thinks, and what she does or wants to do, not what Wyatt says he’s going to have her do.
Whenever Sophia swings her sword and calls upon her Blasphemes (a fluff change from the 4th Edition D&D Paladin’s “Prayers”), she is thinking and feeling. Even an acknowledgment of her current basic state, such as anger or frustration or even calm, arrogant sureness, is enough to spice up what might normally just be “I use my staggering smite power on the Orc.” Sophia isn’t using her staggering smite – she’s bringing down her sword on the enemy’s shoulder, the blade crackling with cold, black necrotic energy. When the orc’s flesh yields to the sharp steel, his body is seized by cackling phantasms, launching him away from Sophia (he is pushed her wisdom modifier in squares away, as Staggering Smite says).
This might seem time consuming, and it probably would take some getting used to for most people. This is in part why many play-by-posters and Chat gamers are also fanfiction writers, or aspiring creative writers in some other way. We’ve already got this love of descriptive prose ingrained, and we can spit something out rapid-fire in that way. When we discuss the differences in the mediums and their separate codes of general etiquette more in-depth, you’ll find that there’s sort of a barometer for this – play-by-post being what you saw above (and beyond), and real-time mediums being less dense and perhaps less intimidating.
And the reason we can do this is the simultaneous, archiving, textual nature of the internet. If I make a really long post or message? It can be skimmed. Or even ignored (though that’s not very cool of you). Or read later on. But it doesn’t consume as much of a session as it would if I tried that sort of thing in a tabletop, and it’s also a lot easier, I think, to pay attention to. Hence, why it manages to become its own type of game. It might not be the “real thing” to some, but I feel it is a legitimate entity, and a stunning and beautiful evolution of the game.
Next time, we’ll talk about the mediums of online gaming. Which one’s for you? Where do you find good places? What should you know? Good news is, the barrier to entry is very low once you have the style in mind! Until next time, have lots of love, platypuses and black sheep.
And give a round of applause for the Chatty DM folks!
Ultimate D&D Universe
This is an entry into this month’s blog carnival about Transformations and Transitions.
Reading over the interview done with the authors of Manual of the Planes and the Design & Development article on Cosmology (DDI sub needed), I couldn’t help but notice the focus (which we were first informed of all those months ago in the preview books) on making all the planes places to adventure. Planes that felt underused were done away with, and a new cosmology was created that both had some new planes, but still drew on parts that existed in previous editions- most notably in my mind, Sigil and the City of Brass.
The push in 4e was to take what were considered the “core” parts of D&D and incorporate them into one solid setting that all worked together, instead of the previous elements of D&D that were added on as time went on and more modules were published. In a way, the transition from the previous editions core setting to 4e’s core setting was an attempt not unlike the attempts by DC and Marvel Comics to clean up their continuity so as to allow new readers (players) an easier entry point and to recreate the continuity to fit together better. DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths was the trend-setter there, but the analogue that works better for me is Marvel’s Ultimate line. [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty's Feed issues : Resolved?
Hi there,
I’m taking a short break from writing my D&D 4e adventure (things are going well, I’m 20% done) and my self imposed Blogging Hiatus to address an issue with my main feed.
For the past several months, my feedburner feed has been periodically broken, linking directly to my website instead of providing a real RSS feed. I’ve tried fixing it and I’ve never been able to find why it goes bad. Using RSS validators, I found that several of my posts have ‘weird’ HTML tags that may be causing the problem, but often, I don’t do anything and the feed starts working again.
I’m sick and tired of that and I don’t have the time or the energy to try to find a solution with feedburner.
So I instead deactivated my Feedburner feed and am now reverting to WordPress’ basic feed. I think that should resolve the issue.
My feed URL is: http://chattydm.net/feed/
If you did like I did, you subscribed to that feed when you initially did. If you subscribed to my feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChattyDm), please switch.
If you’ve never heard of a RSS feed, its a service that allows you to be notified when a new Musings of the Chatty DM post comes up. Just choose one of several RSS readers (I favour Google Reader) and get all my Chatty content as it comes up.
All right, I’m done. See you later!
Let me know if this still doesn’t work… if it doesn’t it may be because of a faulty plugin or something.
Chatty's Guest: We fight the blues
It’s that time of year, and I’m not talking about Christmas, but that 3 months time-span during which the winter blues hits some of us (probably more then we all think) and kills our well-earned creativity. So, my friends, readers, minions of The Great Chatty DM, I come bearing gifts! Weapons to fight the blues (at least +1, guaranteed).
The problem
When under the blues, most GMs try to open their minds as much as possible with hopes of grabbing a stray idea. They would use anything that they could get their kobold-like little claws on, but end up laying around in creative catatonia (stray ideas, ridiculous grapple bonus, don’t even bother). While searching for a general idea, looking aimlessly for awesome, one grows weary and bored, loses interest and further kills his or her own creativity. It’s the classic “Kill, revive and kill some more” torture, but self-inflicted. Needless to say, it’s not good for your brain.
The solution
Do the opposite, aim for small, focused, concentrate your brains to a bunch of tiny creative lasers, brave adventurers! Having a plethora (don’t you love that word?) of restrictions will help you focus you mind on the task at hand (spawning the next NPC, for example) and just make the work more bearable.
I’ll even be sharing a few of my own tricks, I’m just delightfully generous like that.
Using an iPod to get +2 in npc crafting
Necessary gear: Music (the more the better), a mp3 player of some kind, anything with a random function, really
Ideal use : Character creation, adventure hooks
Better if : You have crazy-ass eclectic tastes in music.
Note : Also awesome if your stuck in a bus
Here’s the idea, shuffle your iPod’s library and let her rip. Whatever song the machine chooses must become your character, or even your adventure hook. No, you can’t skip it if it’s not giving you anything good, just roll with it.
It’s similar in concept to the “3d6, in order” character creation technique, or the old-school Marvel RPG you might have read about on “Greywulf’s Lair”, 2 weeks-ish back. You look at what you get, and you forge something decent out of it.
Over the years, I’ve had plot hooks, wacky characters, and even an entire campaign based on a random song (or a music video, for the campaign)
Another similar trick is to open a dictionary at a random page, point a word, and make that word a pivotal point of your character’s life. You could technically do the same with any randomly-generated, non-numbered element (writing this makes me want to try it with tarot cards).
Using keywords to spawn new shiny settings
Necessary gear : Paper, a pencil, a d6
Ideal for : Setting creation
Better if : You have a friend yelling at you to keep you from thinking.
Note : If you don’t like rerolling 6s, find more words!
Choose 5 nouns. Any nouns. NO! DON’T THINK! WRITE, NOW! I DON’T CARE IF CARIBOU DOESN’T MAKE A LICK OF SENSE! WRITE. IT. DOWN! (I’ve done this to a few friends, interesting settings, I promise).
Now do the same thing with adjectives. Number each nouns to from 1 to 5, and roll the dice for each adjectives. Reroll on 6s and reroll if a number as already been rolled for another noun. Each adjective should now be held in a tender embrace by the chosen noun.
Each groupings must be a major part of your campaign, either a major NPC, an important historical event, the sky’s the limit. But everything must be used.
Here’s good example of a silly grouping giving great result. A year or so back, I forced my roommate to experiment with this technique (read the Better if section, I had to discover that somehow) and he got something along the lines of “powerful cat”. Turns out that cat was a lich’s consciousness trying to get out of a kitten’s body and destroy the world.
The moral of this story : torture gives great ideas. Oh, and you can potentially find something interested for very random pairings.
The ending theme
Thus ends my first experiment in blogging, folks. Leave me a comment or seven hundred, tell me what you think, try that character creation thing yourself and post your ideas, gimme some love! And if you do, I might grant you a few articles in the future.
Lemme hear them dice clank!
Hail Chatty! And thanks for lending me a spot, buddy.
D&D Character Builder Beta, Open to All
The character builder is now available for everyone, D&D Insider subscriber or not. It is still only levels 1-3 (a recent Digital Insider suggests that early into 2009, but not that early, it will be opened up to all 30 levels) but contains some updates from recent material, including Martial Power.
Check it out (it’s free), especially if you were intrigued by our review (even though this version is probably slightly updated from when it was reviewed.)
Chatty's Guests: Sharing Narrative Control
Chatty DM: I’m currently on blogging Hiatus until the Week of December 20th. In the meantime, I post old articles of mine or bring you guest posts from my readers. Today, prepare for a treat from my friend Eric Maziade.
Hi there! Don’t be fooled by the familiar decor: I’m not ChattyDM – most people aren’t. I’m Eric Maziade, subbing in for said ChattyDM. If you want to know more about me, you can visit my various Web sites, which are all linked from my “main” web site: eric.maziade.com.
Enough with the plugging…
I’ve been raking by brains for a topic to try and entertain you and I ended up choosing sharing narrative control.
According to some online dictionary, a narrative is the telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee (although there may be more than one of each).
In Dungeons and Dragons, the tradition (a.k.a. common assumption) is that the DM (or GM, or whatever you kids call’em these days) are the ones holding narrative control. They are the ones who tell the story in which the players participate.
And what is there to debate? As a DM, you create the story, you – with help from Dr. Polyhedral Randomzier – determine the outcome of the player’s action.
You are like a god onto your make-belief world – you have the absolute control.
Or do you? Even better – should you?
All the most memorable role playing sessions and memories I have and had the chance to read on the Internet seem to share one constant: something wonderful and exciting happened in which the player’s action had some unexpected effect (small or large) on the world.
My understanding is that sharing narrative control – allowing your players to decide what happens in the story – is the key to such memories.
(Or is it beer? Can’t remember)
To me, sharing narrative control goes beyond the choices that the players make as players – its not a direct cause-to-effect relationship. It truly is about allowing the players (as PCs) to willingly or not affect what happens in the story.
You’re not convinced? You don’t want to let go of your godly DM powers?
Fear not, for here’s a piece of good news: sharing narrative control is not the same as surrendering narrative control.
I’m no expert on that kind of sharing, but that won’t stop me from trying to start a good discussion on the topic 
What we’re aiming for is not necessarily to have your players tell you exactly what is going to happen next. That’s quite an interesting concept on its own, but I’m thinking more about allowing your players’ thoughts and actions to alter the outcome of what you might have planned.
The way I see it is quite simple:
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Engage Players Into Open Speculations
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Stimulate Creativity By Creating Limits
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Be ready to let go of the ‘default outcome’ that is already planned. (This is so hard for me!!)
Open Speculations
Engaging players into open speculations usually happens by itself. All the players I ever had always discuss their next moves when something happens. I listen to their thoughts about what is happening and allow their ideas to affect what’s coming next – trying hard not to be formulaic.
If I want to provoke speculations, I might trigger an unexpected event. The cleric might have a cryptic, prophetic dream that the players will try to interpret. They might also discuss it with an NPC… or choose to ignore it.
Whatever they turn out expecting I won’t necessarily give them what they want. After all, chances are each player will expect something else.
One thing for sure is that I’ll allow myself to be inspired by their expectations. If you’re playing with youngsters, just giving them what they want seems to works best. Most adults I play with, however, like to be surprised.
Here are a few examples:
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The rogue tried to convince the others that the dagger (planned loot) was cursed and should be discarded – in the hopes of getting it for himself. He succeeds and palms it instead of disposing of it. After a few game sessions, it turns out that the dagger actually was cursed!
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After having ignored all the hints about tracking some creatures, the players decided that the only way they could have escaped the village was through the well. Why not! The original story had kobolds capture kids that were wondering outside of town. Now? A kobold team stealthily invaded the town through a tunnel under the well. This no longer was an opportunistic kidnapping – the kobolds had a plan… they needed something or someone specific… for some specific needs. Triggering more speculations, altering the story more and making it much more personal.
Creating Limits
People are often incredulous when I say that creativity is stimulated by adding limits.
Do you think MacGuyver would’ve been as fascinating if he had access to everything ever made by man?
No – his creativity was fueled by the limited resources at his disposal.
Think about it: it is the limits that force you to be creative.
One of my favorite creativity exercise when I’m stumped for an idea is to open a dictionary, picking up a word at random and figuring what is the word’s relation to the situation.
The word itself is irrelevant, but just trying to create links will most often than not create new, better ideas.
Same goes for players.
Give them things to explore through your descriptions and they’ll create the path between them and their goal for you.
In my previous example, the well in the village was part of the description and was originally a red herring. (Kids disappearing? A well? Pfah! Way too easy!)
If a player is suspicious about an item, explore the idea by giving him obscure reasons to believe the object is not what it seems…. and give other players reasons to believe otherwise. Watch them make sense of it all.
Sometimes, you can also be blessed with players with whom you can truly share narrative control. Maybe you can share a campaign with a fellow DM/player, or maybe one of the players can flat out say : “wouldn’t it be cool if the evil sorcerer we’re after turned out to be the baron’s sister, which became mad after having been polymorphed into a man?”. (Wouldn’t it?).
Let Go of the ‘Default Outcome’
Sharing narrative control just cannot happen if you can’t let go of your original ideas… Your player’s ideas can only help stimulate your own creativity.
Your campaigns’ original storyline might end up taking you to wonderful, unexpected places if you allow your players to have an impact on it.
After all, that’s what role playing really is, isn’t it? A bunch of friends sitting together and telling themselves wonderful stories?
