Turning D&D 4e's Economy on its Head
I love 4e with a passion that my geek-fueled prose has expressed numerous times on various platforms.
However, after having played for more than one year, I must say that I really dislike the treasure attribution mechanics and the economics underlying them. Spending time choosing magic items for my players and placing huge amounts of cash is the lowest point of my adventure prep sessions and I always do it last.
Now that the class powers do all the heavy lifting in 4e, magic items are about as exciting as untangling yarn after your cat goes berserk in you knitting bag. I pour over the list every two weeks, trying to find cool stuff and I want to poke my eyes out before they explode of sheer boredom.
Yes, I could use the wish list approach, and I have, but my players don’t really take the time to update it. I’m therefore stuck doing it by default (since maintaining balance is important to me). However, I hate when I accidentally reward the same players more often than others or when the items I took a long time to choose end up being sold at 20% of it’s value. That’s just wasting time.
I know I could have a spreadsheet opened with all that info and insist that my players contribute to the wish list, but tell me… If I can prep all other aspects of D&D 4e easily and without annoyance, why do I have to be annoyed with treasure attribution?
So here’s what my friend Yan and I have been cogitating for the last few weeks…
Level up your items!
Instead of distributing magic loot in treasure, why not allow players to gain new items whenever they level up?
- Have lvl 1 PCs start the game with a level 2 item of his/her choice.
- Every time they level up, give them (for free)
- one new magic item of their choice at level +2 or
- 2 items of their level -1… for free (see below for money).
- allow players to chose whatever items they want.
- all items replaced by the upgrade ceases to exist (to break any inter-PC abuse)
Ex: At level 2, the PC gains a level 4 sword or both a level 1 Amulet and a level 1 pair of magic boots.
Work with the player to explain how they get (and lose) items , maybe they found it off camera during the last adventure, maybe they get it from the local lord for services rendered, whatever… chances are it will make as much sense (if not more) than the default system.
I’m pretty sure this won’t break anything in the game. While some calculations might be be needed to tweak the item upgrade formula, I’m confident that the game’s engine can take it.
What about Money? Abstract it!
Now that magic items are out of the picture, the need for money in the game changes. Depending on how you use it in your games there are a few things you can do.
If you want to have money to cover inns, bribes, mundane equipment and consumables (magic/alchemical), you can keep distributing the remaining money/potion parcels.
On the other hand, if you are like me and want to focus on heroics rather than accounting, you can eliminate Gold Pieces altogether since the main reason why they exist in 4e (Magic Items) is no longer relevant with the above house rule.
To do so, I’m seriously thinking of introducing a new skill called ‘Wealth’. This skill would be based on either Wisdom or Charisma (player’s choice) and could be taken by any class at level 1. It would represent the PC’s access to some abstracted form of wealth such as land, real estate, coinage, gems, debts (owned to the PC) and investments.
The concept still needs work in my mind (and you could help me here) but I see it as a skill a PC can use whenever you need to spend abstract material resources to obtain goods or services. The DC of such a skill use would be scaled with PC levels but also based on the value of what the PCs wants to obtain.
The skill could be used for:
- Pay for inns/food (when it’s a relevant challenge)
- Obtain an adventure map
- Repair equipment
- Bribe a NPC
- Purchase consumable magic/alchemical items (DC equivalent to item level, maybe put a limit per adventure)
- Purchase a ritual (DC equivalent to item level, maybe put a limit per adventure)
A failed ‘wealth’ check would likely impose a cumulative -2 penalty to the skill until the end of the adventure (meaning you have temporary liquidity issues). Also, like I’ve been doing with my games lately, a failed wealth check could grant the PC what he/she wants… but maybe something bad would also happen, some sort of unexpected plot twist.
Mwa HA HA HA! Hum, sorry, old habits.
Okay, the whole thing still needs to be worked on, but you have the gist of it: getting rid of Magic Item parcels to replace them by an abstract, player-controlled system of Magic Attribution. Once done, the Magic Item economy is no longer relevant so you can find ways to make wealth and money more abstract.
I’m going to try it in my next campaign and I’ll let you know how it works.
Thoughts? Ideas? I’ll update it with the best suggestions so feedback time, I know I’m not the only one in that position.
Please spread the post around if you like the idea.
Design: Yan Décarie and Phil Ménard. Development: Phil Ménard with help of Graham Poole and Dave Chalker.
Inq. of the Week: Story Games, Or Whatever You Want To Call Them
How often do you play? Once a week is the most common answer, with several times a month being a close second. I was surprised to see such a showing for several times a week: to all you multi-game night warriors, I salute you! And one lone person says that he or she plays daily, which I would assume is assisted by the Internet in some fashion, but if you’ve got a face to face game that happens every single day (and aren’t 12), then I bow down before you and your frequent playings.
Speaking of game nights, I’ve gotten into more and more games lately, joining new campaigns and trying to settle back into a grove for old ones. So far, the three games I’m in campaigns of are all 4e. This is great and gives me the chance to DM and then play 2 very different characters. However, I own a fair number of games (over 200 board and card games, and a bookshelf full of RPGs) and so I get cravings for other games. 4th Power is one out-cropping of it, but recently, a few of us have decided to embark on a mission to mix in some other games into our busy schedules, focusing on one-shot adventures and such to experience a wide range of other games.
Our focus for this is going to be those things we call “story games” or “indie RPGs“, a term that I cannot myself fully define, and have a little experience with but not enough to call myself an expert by any means. There’s also a world of politics and such around it that turns me off into getting too much into it, but I continue to pick up the stuff that seems interesting and try to seek out convention games that sound good. All that has meant that I’ve built up a number of games that I have never run or played but have been itching to try, and I’ve found a few others in the same situation, and so we’ve finally decided to do something about it. [Read the rest of this article]
Retro Critical Hits
Greetings everyone, Danny (aka Bartoneus) here! You may have noticed that late last week and over the weekend Critical Hits was in “Retro” mode and now that our layout is back a lot of things are still messed up. A lot of the problems stem from a completely honest and understandable accident, but the end result is hopefully a better framework for the site. Unfortunately the last full backup we had was in May of this year, so we’ll be working through today and tomorrow to get all of the missing images back up and hopefully have everything back to normal soon!
It was actually pretty funny to see the site in the default wordpress theme again, which is the same layout we had back in the Fall of 2005 when we started the site (but with spiffy and cool changing banners). After the next few days if you happen to notice something that’s still broken or missing let us know! Please bear with us as we sort these things out, and everything should be back to normal and better than ever by the end of the week!
Mouse Guard Diaries: The First Duel
Oh yes, another series 
Last night my friend PM dropped by the house for an impromptu geekout. We had a great session of armchair producing of potential remakes of Star Wars over Pizza and beer. We than played a game of Carcassone (loved it) and Dominion with Nico (my son won at Dominion, again).
When the kids were put to bed, PM started telling me about a scenario he’d like to build in a RPG, some sort of classic Samurai duel where charisma would rule combat more than Strength or Dexterity. As he was sinking deeper and deeper in D&Disms to try to explain how you would play out 2 guys looking at each other for minutes (and slaying all the players around the table with abject boredom) I gently stopped him…
Chatty: Dude, stop right now, D&D is not made for this. There’s a game that does exactly that, and it’s called Burning Wheel.
PM: Of course…
So we started talking about Mouseguard again and how we would need to try it soon. Since we were kind of in a gaming lull of the evening, I suggested we take out the book (and the pre-generated Character Sheets I have printed out) and just play a bit with it.
So we each picked a sword-wielding mouseguard and we agreed to set a duel at dawn in the plaza of an undisclosed city. We started re-reading the conflict section of the rules to try to get it right. We fumbled a few things but the game’s engine is sturdy enough to withstand it.
We started by generating our Disposition, the conflict’s Hit Points so to speak, by rolling as many d6 as we had ‘Fighter’ skill ranks. Each success (a roll of 4 or more, Mouseguard is a dice pool game) gains you one Disposition point, the total of which you add to your Health score (we flubbed that, adding our fighter to Health instead, giving my PC a clear advantage).
Then, we had to pick a Goal for our conflict. What we wanted to achieve by winning the conflict. The cool thing about the game is that you don’t have to say ‘Kill the other’ unless you have a story reason to do so.
After some cogitation…
PM: I want to distract you and all the people watching the duel so that my friends can sneak behind the crowd and infiltrate the Castle unseen.
Chatty: Great Idea! Then, my PC wants to truly humiliate you in front of your loved ones.
3 minutes and an adventure was created out of nothing. This is really cool.
Next came the ‘planning’ phase of combat, we each had to chose 3 actions (from a list of 4) to plan our first 3 rounds of combat. The actions are ‘attack, Defend, Feint and Maneuver’. We then unveiled our action for first round. I Defended and PM maneuvered.
We then stepped out of the crunch and back into roleplaying (as we must roleplay our action choices)
Chatty: With my hand on my sword hilt I square my feet in the ground and observe you, ready for anything you may do.
PM: I slowly try to shift so that the morning sun gets in your eyes.
We each rolled our attacks (Defend vs Maneuver is an opposed check) and he won by a slight margin. As I look at the rules while I write this, I noticed that we flubbed the attack too as maneuver does not ‘damage’ the opponent (as we played) but rather buys the PC one or several advantages for later in the fight. Still the result was cool.
Chatty (as the GM): The Sun get’s in your opponent’s eyes, which unnerves him, making him lose his initial air of cool detachment.
In round two, I chose Feint and he chose Maneuver again.
PM: I slowly step toward you, always letting the sun behind my back
Chatty: I run toward you, but I overplay my sun-blindness and strike you at the last moment, trying to catch you by surprise!
Feint trumps maneuvers and defend actions, so I got to roll against his disposition, lowering it some…
Chatty: The duel has started and the sound of crossing steel rises over the morning bustle of the city (I may be taking some artistic license here as we were very focused on the rules, but this is totally the kind of cool descriptive crap I would say)
Round 3 saw us both attack…
Chatty: Circling each other, we both look for an opening to pounce on the other.
Attack vs Attack is an opposed check, the game’s default.
PM rolled a series of dice with a lot of 6′s in them.
Chatty: You know you can spend what’s called a fate Point and ‘explode’ your 6s. You reroll them and keep re-rolling all 6s you play, adding successes.
Bottom line, I lost half my Disposition.
End of Round 3, Total duration: 5 minutes.
The duel ended on the next round where I feinted while he defended. Defend allows you to ‘heal’ your disposition but gets totally blown out of the water by feint. PM’s PC lost its remaining disposition and he was humiliated.
However, since my PC had lost more then half it’s disposition, a compromise had to be reached (the rules explain3 kinds of compromise). We had to negotiate something where either PM’s PC obtained half of what he wanted or we took away half-of what my PC wanted.
PM: Okay, let’s say that as soon as you force me to yield in front of my loved ones, guards come into the plaza and investigate before you can bask in the glory of my defeat. That would allow me to sneak out and help my friends enter the Castle through other means.
And thus a new adventure was born… I was almost ready to pick it up from here and play the next scene.
We spent the next hour checking the other fiddly bits of the game, like traits, beliefs, advancement and using your Mousy Nature to get you out of a jam. Needless to say after this short exercise, both PM and I were very excited to try an actual adventure!
Mouseguard now sits firmly on top of my ‘next RPG to try’. I’m really glad I bought this game and was doubly lucky to get to talk to the designer a few weeks back.
Critical Bits for the week ending 2009-11-09
- The Spiel game of the show by BoardGameNews would be right up @bartoneus’s alley
- Trek or Treat! Hear a bunch of us from the Star Trek family perform the radio version of War of the Worlds (via @wilw)
- Check out Swordgleam’s “Martial Flavor” supplement for 4e, including backgrounds, powers, class features, and more
- For those of you who missed the Dresden Files announcement over the weekend
- November’s Featured Campaign is Pursuit of Destiny, by @cwgabriel (via @obsidianportal)
- Win a signed copy of R.A. Salvatore’s “The Ghost King” (via @newbiedm)
- Not iPhone friendly, but here’s a good dominion randomizer (via Asmor)
- GeekDad names “Revenge of the Giants” and “FantasyCraft” on their Holiday Gift Guide (both reviewed on CH)
- “My group does skill challenges via email between games. Here is an example.” (via @cwgabriel)
- FFG is running a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Pre-release November 13-15
- Ever wondered what to call a group of monsters? (via @mudbunny74)
- Finally someone has answered one of my lingering questions of life…and storm troopers. (via @betterwithmayo)
- Skill Challenge: God of the Flaming Sea
- Friends, that magical time has finally come. *ahem* … TAUNTAUN PRE-ORDER!!! (via Thinkgeek)
- The three #darksun books are live in the product catalogue: Campaign Setting, Creature Catalog, and Adventure… no Player’s Guide. (via @wotc_rodney)
- North Star Games donating 2,000 games to libraries (via BoardGameNews)
- Get PHB and PHB2 for the price of one this holiday season
- Child’s Play 2009 has been officially launched. (via @mudbunny74)
City of the Overmind: Nipples of Chaos, Part 2
See part 1 here.
Cursed item to the rescue!
The session’s first scene was eventually concluded with the adventure more or less back on track. We had a 20′ tall Flaming Angel instead of a draconic blob. I was cool with that. Heck, I would have been happy with the Marshmallow Colossus from Ghostbusters as long as it moved the game forward.
That’s when something very interesting happened:
Stef (Impatient, but calm, as always): Can I go shop for a magic item now? I need a new armor.
Chatty (distracted): Yeah, sure, sure.
…
Chatty (His groove slowly coming back): Wait a minute, you can’t expect to find the magic armor you need in an hostile city. Roll me a Streetwise check.
Stef rolls and misses… crestfallen
Chatty: Here’s what’s going to happen…
Frankie (perking up): Oh, he’s going to pull a Mouseguard on you.
Chatty: Okay, I’m going to give you a choice. You either fail to find your armor, or you do buy one, but it turns out to be cursed!
Stef: Hum, well…
Chatty: The curse will have no combat effect, it will be a minor, possibly annoying thing.
Stef: Then I’ll take the cursed item.
Chatty: For real? Okay well then, whenever you use this armor in combat, you will (ad libbing like crazy)… Develop a lisp after combat until you take an extended rest!
The whole table exploded in laughter and we spent the next 5 minutes making lisping jokes about nipples and much much worse.
Yeah, we’re all 15 year old nerds on game nights.
Later in the evening…
Stef: How about I start lisping as soon as I get hitin combat? That would be funnier.
Chatty (Thinking “Did the guy just made his curse worse?): … huh, sure.
I don’t know about you, but that my best introduction of a cursed item ever in a D&D game… apart from the Gygaxian Girdle of Sex Change in Temple of Elemental Evil.
Bridge Battle for Control
After Stef’s humorous acquisition, I described that the next challenge would be that agents of the Overmind would try to wrest control of the Angel Monster on the way to the castle. The PCs failed. The Overmind’s agent (a Neogi slaver) took control of the Angel (freezing it in place).
I explained that some sort of skill contest would be needed to take back control.
That’s when Yan chimed in with another game defining suggestion.
Yan: Could the check be an athletics roll to bodycheck the bad guy?
You see, he wanted in the game too, and I finally took the hint.
Chatty: Okay, the Neogi’s got a Umber Hulk guardian but if you succeed you can take him out and free the Angel. If you fail, you get intercepted by the Umber Hulk and we start a fight.
He failed, The fight had an objective to take out the Neogi controller on a bridge flanked by buildings. As soon as the controller was dealt with, I told them that the Invoker (who controlled the Angel Monster) could kill one monster per round as a standard action.
The encounter turned out all right. The Controller was rapidly thrown into the water and the Angel monster reverted under the party’s control.
Issue #5: I was getting tired at the end, having spent a lot of energy trying to salvage the game. When I get tired, I revert to my core personality/DMing style which is very ‘Big Picture’. So when I drew the battlemap for the Bridge battle, I drew a Gatehouse in the middle of the bridge. As I was drawing, I thought aloud:
Chatty: I wonder if the Angel was frozen before she smashed the gatehouse? I’ll just play a Saving Throw (clatter clatter, rolled a 9). Nope she stopped before the gate (and I drew the Angel).
Mike: What kind of Saving Throw?
Chatty: Don’t worry about it, it’s not something you can do anything about (ouch!)
Mike: Wha? But if it’s a save…
Chatty (Getting annoyed): I said forget it, it was just something I rolled to see what happens.
Of course, Mike’s frustration spiked. It’s not the first time (and it won’t be the last) that we get in such a situation. In times of stress, details aggravate me and I tend to sweep them aside with no regards for their validity (or the needs of those asking for them).
I’m ashamed to say that I’m very much of the ‘Be Brief, Be Bright, Be Gone’ school of management. It’s very useful in crises or to quell endless droners (which thankfully, none of my players are) but not always appropriate in a D&D game.
In hindsight, I could have afforded a few minutes to ask him what he wanted to know, and explain how I used a wrong term for what I wanted to do (a coin-flip decision). Hell maybe his idea would have lead to something cooler.
It didn’t help that Mike’s situation in the fight wasn’t ideal, hindered by the presence of line of sight-blocking buildings and monsters standing outside of his powers range.
Finally, when the Angel was saved, he got to slay the Umber Hulk in one stroke but instead of playing out the cleaning out phase of the fight (allowing him to enjoy more killing stuff), I had all remaining monster flee ( I wanted to conclude the adventure early enough), cutting off his toy.
I’m sorry Mike… I noticed all that, I just ‘realized’ it later. I’ll make it up to you with some sweat Controller action next game.
The game ended with the players deciding to send the Angel to draw attention at the front of the Castle while they snuck behind the castle, crossed the moat and unlock an ancient door with the recombined key…
roll credits…
Lessons Learned (Oh Boy!)
- When planning something big, do an expectations check with players. Especially if you change your plans mid course.
- Any skill challenge that exclude a PC needs to be opened up, unless it lasts less than 5 minutes.
- If a player asks a question, no matter how busy or flustered, take a few minutes to answer, at your earliest convenience. Brushing off a friend never achieves anything meaningful and isn’t worth the time saved.
- Creating a fight on the run (the bridge one, I had the monster mix but nothing else) is Hella fun!
- I’m done with mystical ‘weave the fabric of the universe’ skill challenges… been there, done that.
- The Revised Errata DCs are a joke to my players who have very high skills. I’ll likely keep using the pre-errata ones.
- I didn’t talk about it, but I HATE the treasure rules of 4e and I’m working on eliminating them like I got rid of XPs. Yan and I have a prototype “Level your items” system in the works. I’ll keep you posted.
Review: "Kobold Quarterly #11"
There’s a reason every review I see of the Kobold Quarterly magazine compares it to the Dragon and Dungeon print magazines from years passed, even opening a PDF of the book and seeing the cover makes me immediately think of seeing those issues in my local book store. The comparison goes well beyond the cover, however, through the whole interior of the publication that screams nostalgia while providing tons of new content for our favorite systems. Wolfgang Bauer is the main man behind KQ and he was kind enough to offer up a review copy to many RPG bloggers for issue #11.
The editorial for this issue is a testament to the quality of KQ, discussing the one gold and three silver ENnies that were won, including a silver ENnie for Best Website which was a category filled with great candidates (haha)! Snarky bits aside, this should be enough on its own to tell you exactly what to expect from the publication. One of the elements that surprises me the most is precisely how much effort has gone into making it feel exactly like an old school gaming magazine, right down to having a letters column early on that really gives you a feeling of the RPG community as a whole when you’re reading it. It’s a shame that much of the discussion has to do with which edition of D&D people want to read about, but even despite that it’s still great to read other gamer’s thoughts and for gamers to have another platform to be heard from. No matter how prevelant blogging or forums become, a letters column in a magazine will always have its own unique flavor and associated tingly feeling that comes along with it.
The articles themselves present you with a literal truck load of interesting ideas for you to use in your games, even the system specific articles come with so much written material in addition to the mechanics that you can easily gain something from nearly all of them no matter what you play. There’s an interesting take on adding sanity and mental disorders into your D&D games, which is a concept very near and dear to our hearts (and seeing the Red Eye of Azathoth ad right beside it only increases that excitement). Another article introduces the Uvandir, a different take on the classic fantasy dwarf race followed by one that brings lycanthropy to your PCs with some very enlightening takes on it from both a player’s and a GM’s perspective. Considering the issue’s release in the fall, it should be no surprise that a werewolf article is followed up by an in depth discussion of vampires – their physiology, psychology, societies, and naturally the best methods for their extermination. [Read the rest of this article]
City of the Overmind: The Nipples of Chaos, Part 1
Chatty DM (wiping laughter tears ): Guys! Enough with the nipple jokes! I think I’m going to put that into the game report’s title.
Mike: You’d never dare, this stuff is always left out your reports.
Chatty DM: Just watch me…
This last game session was a strange, strange beast. On the one hand, we had fun, laughed our butts off and ended the session on a high note. On the other, the adventure unraveled itself within the first hour. My patching it up caused some players to get longer spotlight time than the usual, leaving other players to be spectators for a bit too long. This caused increasing tension and came very near the breaking point.
Fortunately, the adventure recovered after that first scene and everything went fine after.
In order not to make this into a 6 part monster, I’ll focus on summarizing the adventure and then I’ll address the game’s main issues/highlights. It will give a negative tinge to the report in part 1, but it gets much better in part 2.
Storming the Overmind’s Castle: The Digest.
Our heroes crawled out of the overflowing Vats pursued by a chariot-sized squamous monster of vaguely draconic origins. The party ‘lured’ it to an acid-damaged part of the city where they promptly collapsed a building on it. Wielding their acquired Spirit, Arcane and Divine Powers, they remodeled the monster into a 20′ high Divine Angel of Vengeance and drove it on a path of destruction toward the Overmind’s Castle.
They momentarily lost control of it to a Neogi Slave on a Bridge leading to the Castle, but the Slaver was rapidly tossed into the water and the Angel proceeded to storm the Castle’s front gate.
During the assault, our heroes sneaked out behind the Castle, crossed the moat and entered through a mystic gate using the 4 part key they had recovered all over the city.
When The Railroads Hit Differential Expectations
A series of issues struck the game early, threatening to derail it badly.
Issue #1 Overselling the game
I really did. I encouraged players to come up with a plan to lure the Monster all over the city and some good suggestions were passed around by email. Then, when we started the game, I asked Math to show us a few selected parts from Akira (a 20 year old anime where a teenager develops psychic powers and then grows into a stadium sized blob). This crystallized player expectations about the game to come
Thus, when I described the Vats monster as being ‘Hummer’ sized, you could hear the expectation deflate at the speed of plot. The ‘let’s crash it in the Castle’ players were disappointed and lost interest.
Damn, I lost a great opportunity here.
The way I had planned the game… the monster would be restrained and controlled. Then it would grow as it ate people and buildings and eventually became a 50′ monstrosity that would shape encounters as they occurred (like eating parts of the battlemap).
Yeah, maybe I put too much shine on them rails. I should know better huh?
So as the players were re-calibrating their expectations and were getting ready to fight the monster, the Shaman and the Invoker managed to collapse a whole building on the monster, stopping the fight (it was stuck under a ton of rock).
According to my plan (At that point I had not yet realized that said plan was going offroad ), immobilizing the monster was the encounter’s goal. So once again, expectations were jarred from those expecting to kill it.
At that point the level of jokes and inter-player ribbing started to rise.
Issue #2, Use the Force Conan!
One of the things I’m starting to regret about this campaign (I’m thinking of concluding it soon) is that I developed these Mystical plot elements where PCs manipulate the flows of Arcane/Spirit/Divine energies with the mere roll of a skill (i.e. without rituals). This ‘Force Use’ often comes up as skill challenge where the Shaman, the Sorcerer and the Invoker weave energy flows to achieve a specific end.
So I presented such a challenge to allow players to control the monster or kill it (since part of the group wasn’t all that interested in using it anymore). They chose an interesting compromise (making it into a 20′ high Angel of Erathis).
What I failed to realize is that such a Skill Challenge more or less pushed away half the party, who don’t have the skills to participate. And that was another cause of frustration.
Issue#3 Don’t you touch my fluff
While the Barbarian and Rogue were starting to get impatient, the Shaman, Sorcerer and Invokers were involved and seemed to appreciate it. (In fact Franky, the Shaman’s player loved it) The Warden (having the nature skill) also participated in it.
At one point the challenge was about stripping ‘trapped’ spirits from the monster. The Shaman and Warden were tag-teaming at it, the Shaman working on the spirits and the Warden providing a spirits Shield to let the Shaman work in peace.
Then, Franky, who was really into his character, started telling me how he would coach the Warden about manipulating spirits to help him free the spirits faster (there were 5 of them).
And then, the Warden’s player, our dear instigator friend, dropped this bomb…
Fangs listens politely to the Shaman’s explanation but he knows how it works (rolls the dice)
I could hear the loud record scratching noise in Franky’s mind.
Oh shit… That’s when I finally noticed that, beyond my own disappointment and confusion about the game’s direction, I had a player revolt brewing.
Now Franky has a very strong backstory based on communing with spirits and how he can interact with them. He also strongly associates doing that with what a Shaman is in 4e. So when Eric (the Warden’s player) said that, it dropped a huge rock in his puddle.
Yet, as I see it, a Warden also deals with spirits. He internalizes them and takes their shape to protect his allies. So I think that Eric’s PC also had a valid reason why he could participate in the challenge, except it wasn’t presented as such… just ‘oh I know how that works (clatter clatter).
So Franky’s expectations were now shattered, he was annoyed, most other players were impatient and the ribbing they were trading was starting to get ugly to a point I expected an outburst.
So I took a few minutes to gather my thoughts. Looked at the situation and had an idea to save the game.
I recently wrote: no matter how bad your game goes, you can always save it by making it more interesting for everyone.
And thankfully, Stef and Yan sent out poles for me to grab on.
What a game…
In part 2: How to do Cursed items in 4e, Battle on the Bridge and the vagaries of being a Big Picture DM.
YouTube Tuesday: We Were Googled Edition
Because I’m so excited that it’s finally been released to the public, I present to you “Googled”, a short film based on one of my short stories that previously appeared in the Welter literary journal. Even though I wrote it, I still get chills at the end. I hope you enjoy it.
The film version was done by They’re Using Tools film studio- be sure to check them out if you need some awesome video and/or animation work done.
Pain of Campaigning: Literature and Adventure Planning
Despite stereotypes that say otherwise, gaming groups are not monolithic in their cultural consumption. Most groups have a few shared interests (anime, sci-fi movies, etc.) and a few niche interests (history, literature, comics, etc.) This can readily be used to your advantage. This is where I’m most likely to borrow (rip off) ideas directly from books, film, and television. My Running Man-inspired adventures ended up being such a hit that they are demanded in literally every game I run. Players can’t get enough of facing off against Buzzsaw, Dynamo, and Sub Zero re-imagined over and over again.
However, much of gamer culture is shared and it’s not very interesting to rip something off that everyone instantly recognizes and inevitably metagames for. That’s where literature comes in. [Read the rest of this article]
