Articles by Danny Rupp
Danny works professionally as an architect and serves as managing editor here at CH, which means he shares many of the duties of being an editor but without the fame and recognition. He also writes about RPGs, videogames, movies, and TV. He is married to Sucilaria, and has a personal blog at Incorrect Blitz Input. (Email Danny or follow him on Twitter).
What Classes Should be in D&D?
For me, choosing a class has always been one of the most fun and important decisions to make while playing Dungeons & Dragons. I can still remember the feeling of pure excitement I had when I first cracked open the 3rd Edition Player’s Handbook and saw that Monk was a core class. I also remember our friends all having multiple discussions about what exactly the Sorcerer class was and how it was different from the Wizard. I view these discussions along the same lines as what would happen if the Fighter, Wizard, or Cleric were left out of the first Player’s Handbook for an edition. With the next edition of D&D now in open playtest, I felt it was a good time to discuss the varying levels of class distinction in D&D.
Considering the Monk is the class I played the most of in 3E, I was surprisingly happy it wasn’t included in the first PHB for 4th Edition. It never felt quite right to me as a class presented as an introductory option for D&D players unless it was specifically for an Oriental Adventures style of game. I think that if you boiled down the options for character classes to the most basic you would end up with Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and sometimes Thief/Rogue. Beyond these 3-4 options the list of secondary classes can vary greatly. Depending on player preferences, classes such as the Bard, Druid, Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, and many others can all be seen as important options for players. My opinion is that beyond the four main classes, most of the other options readily fall into two categories: specialization or combination.
Combinations / Multi-Classing
I would like to go through a quick experiment. Let’s put aside many of our assumptions/favorite characters and look at some of D&D’s classes in their raw forms. I don’t think it does any disservice to the Paladin class to say that it is a combination of the Cleric and Fighter concepts. In the same way, I believe you can say that most Bards fall somewhere between Rogue and Wizard, and that most Rangers can be put somewhere between Rogue and Fighter. The toughest combination I find is the Wizard/Cleric, but I keep coming back to the Druid as a class that often feels like it is somewhere between those two classes. Surely you can come up with a Bard, Ranger, or Druid that is nothing like any of the other classes, but I think having a class paradigm to begin with makes those break out concepts even more exciting and this is, after all, only an experiment.
This gives us a fairly clean wheel of class relationships:
Fighter – Paladin – Cleric – Druid – Wizard – Bard – Rogue – Ranger – Fighter (loop)
I really enjoy seeing a nice, clean, logical layout for classes and how they relate to one another. I enjoy thinking about the sliding scale between the primary classes and imaging what a Paladin would look like closer to the Fighter end (maybe close to or having already lost faith) or closer to the Cleric end (extremely dedicated, focused, and not rearing for a fight). I also think it gets interesting when you think about pushing a primary class closer to one or the other secondary classes. Imagine playing a Cleric or a Fighter that leans towards the Paladin concept between them, or a Rogue that dabbles in music/song and discovers a yet unknown arcane spark within themselves leaning towards Bard. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: The Ise Grand Shrine
I’ve sat through more hours of architectural history classes than seems reasonable for a human being, everything from the crude Dolmen tombs of early Europe to weeks of studying the various gothic cathedrals that all look pretty much the same. I never got the chance to take an asian architecture course, but one of the most memorable asian structures that I learned about was the Ise Grand Shrine.
The Shinto shrine complex located in the city of Ise in Japan features two main shrines, Naiku (the inner shrine) and Geku (the outer shrine), with 123 additional shrines in and around the city. The two main shrines are joined by a pilgrimage road, but access to both sites is very limited as they are some of the most important Shinto locations. The origin of the Ise Grand Shrine dates back to just over 2,000 years ago, and it was one of the few structures that really stood out to me during all of my architectural history classes.
Why am I talking about the Ise Grand Shrine here, in a series that focuses on helping you play in and run Roleplaying Games? I’m talking about it because I feel that real life is the best inspiration for your fictional adventures, and the Ise Grand Shrine is ripe with ideas to use in your games.
Ceremony
The two main shrines are dismantled and rebuilt on adjacent sites every 20 years. If you go and visit these sites now, you will see buildings constructed in 1993 that are the 61st iterations of the structures. This ceremony has many festivals that surround it and various celebrations at different dates leading up to the rebuilding based on necessary activities such as the carpenters preparing the wood for the next iteration of buildings. This rebuilding ceremony reflects the Shinto beliefs in the death and renewal of nature and impermanence.
One of the biggest reasons that I love applying this idea to RPGs is because it presents a very direct method for getting the inhabitants of a location to seek out the aid of adventurers. A ceremony such as the rebuilding of sacred shrines has many stages and various elements that the player’s may be able to help out with, or conversely any number of natural (or villainous) factors could impede the stages of the ceremony and cause the inhabitants to require aid.
Building Blocks for Rebuilding
Even though this example only consists of two main shrines (and a bridge) being rebuilt every 20 years, you can take this inspiration and apply it in any scale to your own games. Having an entire village that rebuilds itself every 100 years would be a very interesting place to explore, especially if there is a nefarious element such as a dragon that comes through each century that forces the relocation and reconstruction. Taking it in the other direction, you can have the residents of a town rebuilding a water tower or any other minor structure every couple of years.
Although the rebuilding of the Ise Shrines keeps them continuously new, it also serves to pass down the ancient design and construction methods from generation to generation. This ceremony is also a very interesting work around to the issue of historical preservation. While the buildings are never going to be ancient or historic in their materials or actual physicality, their design is preserved and every generation gets to experience them as they could have been experienced when originally constructed.
The key to including these ideas in your game is to consider what materials are needed for rebuilding the structures, how often they will be rebuilt, and how long it will take for the civilization to rebuild them. Even if we’re talking about a time span of a hundred years, it is still a reasonable assumption that the structures will be wood instead of stone as they would most likely last longer and would not benefit from being rebuilt regularly if built using stone. However, if you modify the ceremony and have the structure being moved piece by piece rather than rebuilt with new materials, it would make perfect sense for it to be a structure made out of stone.
Legend & Lore
The Ise Grand Shrine is very closely linked with the Japanese imperial family and with Japanese mythology, and it supposedly contains a piece of the Imperial Regalia known as the Sacred Mirror although the lack of public access makes this hard to confirm. This is as close to real life RPG plot material as you can get, and is another one of the reasons that this is the first example of architecture history that comes to mind for me to write about here.
Combine these elements with the pilgrimage road between the two shrines, and the complex of hundreds of smaller shrines, and you have a very rich location to use in anything from D&D with some adaptation or if you’re running a game like Legend of the 5 Rings you can use all of this information as it really exists.
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM series.
The Architect DM: Call for Questions
For those of you that don’t know, there hasn’t been an Architect DM post in several weeks because my wife and I welcomed our first child into our lives in early March and she’s been running things ever since! What this means is that I have a lot of small periods of free time on the internet at random points throughout my day. These short periods of time have made it tough to sit down and write a full post, but I will definitely be back to writing these posts regularly very soon. What I’d like to do in the meantime is help you, yes YOU, with anything you might need help with in your roleplaying games.
Over the last year I’ve gotten some great e-mails from readers responding to my Architect DM posts either with questions or personal experiences. People have asked me for help with their campaigns, adventures, encounters, or just general world building advice. Simply put, I love helping people with their games in any way that I can, but an added benefit is that often these discussions will spark some random chord with me and end up inspiring one or more posts in this series. Basically, I’m begging you to tell me about your character/game/world!
A great example of this in effect is my post about applying the design charrette concept to planning your RPG sessions, which was inspired by comments and questions from previous posts. The post then inspired one of our readers that e-mailed me a story about how he started a whole new campaign with a sit down charrette with his players that led to greater player buy-in for the campaign right from the start. It’s cliche, but I have to say it’s situations like this that make me really happy that I started the Architect DM series.
Down to business, here’s how you can ask me questions! Comment on this post and I’ll respond as quickly as I can, E-mail me here – bartoneus at critical-hits.com, or tag me with your questions on twitter @Bartoneus. While questions about location design and world building make the most sense, really anything relating to RPGs is fine and I’ll do my best to give good advice.
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM Series.
The Architect DM: Seven Wonders of Your World
Whenever I get a chance I make a pointed effort to read about or look at a map of other DM’s and GM’s roleplaying game worlds. I find it fascinating to look at them both objectively and subjectively, to see things that I may never have come up with or elements that are similar to things in the worlds I’ve created. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed a handful of elements that pop up in the majority of people’s fantasy game worlds and these elements have been some of the inspiration for earlier world building posts in my Architect DM posts.
A great place to start with world building is to take inspiration or replicate an element from the real world. Today I’d like to talk about the concept of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and how more people should apply it to their game worlds. One of my favorite aspects of this idea is that featuring exactly seven aspects of a world seems to be a perfect balance between highlighting diversity and summarizing generalities.
Adding Wonder to a Mundane World
When I visualize the “typical DM’s D&D world map” I see something that has wiggly lines for coast lines, land split up by forests, mountains, and maybe some rivers or lakes, and a sprinkling of towns that seem to be placed randomly with some scraggly roads connecting them. I’ve tried to write several posts to help you design a believable and interesting world map from scratch or to adjust what you’ve already designed, so I’m not going to go into the general concepts behind fixing what I’ll call the “boring old D&D world”. If you have a question about general fantasy world design, please share it with me and I’ll address it in a future post!
What I think is missing from a lot of these game worlds and maps are featured elements that stand out from the background of the rest of the world. Though I referenced the Wonders of the Ancient World, these can be natural, man-made, or any other kind of wondrous element you can think up for your world. Add a Thunderspire into the midst of your largest mountain range, draw a giant tree in the middle of one of your forests (maybe even call it Yggdrasil, Teldrassil, or any other kind of *drasil you like), and show a prominent wizard’s tower as the focal point for a major city.
The Building Blocks of Story
Adding Wonders to your game world not only gives the players sign posts that help them navigate the world and differentiate one region from another, but they also present a great foundation for adventures and stories that you and your players can explore. This might feel like a shortcut or skimping on world building, but if you think about running a modern game in the present world it really starts to make sense. If your players visit Egypt, I don’t think they would be disappointed with the adventure focusing on a series of dungeons buried beneath the Pyramids. Or if you run a historic game and the players are sailing to Rhodes, you better believe they’ll want to hear about the Colossus.
The best part about adding these elements to your game world is that you can (and should) borrow liberally from real life. Add a Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls to your game world, just give them a new name or change a few of the key features about them and you’re set. George R. R. Martin did this in the Song of Ice and Fire series with the Titan of Braavos and it was one of my favorite elements of the series.
An Overly Wondrous World
I would probably argue that you can’t add too many wonders to your game world, but I would recommend sticking to a nice list of seven and seeing how your world looks after that. If you really want to add more features, I would recommend creating a list of seven natural wonders, seven ancient wonders, and seven modern wonders of your game world. From there you should have a fantastic spread of elements on which to build stories and to entice your players to explore the world with little extra encouragement.
The idea of presenting ancient wonders and natural wonders in your game world presents a nice view of history and can inspire wonder based on the unanswered questions they bring up. You can tie natural wonders to a god’s acts of creation or to indicate natural forces at work in your world. Ancient wonders can provide the perfect gateways for you and your players to explore your game’s history or to set up ongoing plots that give your world a nice “lived-in” feeling. Modern wonders can round out your world and can even interact with the ancient and natural wonders in your game world. Imagine a Taj Mahal built in the middle of Niagara Falls, or a fantasy equivalent of the race to build the world’s tallest building.
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Forgotten Realms D&D setting, but upon looking into it in the last few years while running my campaign I was surprised at the number of wondrous elements that were spread around the map. It felt like every region had its one special/unique element that defined it, and very little or even none of the world map was left over to serve as background for the important elements. For a published campaign setting I actually think this is fine, but if you’re creating your own fantasy world I wouldn’t recommend going the route of the Forgotten Realms. Instead, look at the maps for settings such as Dark Sun and Eberron and take note of the way wonderous landmarks are used to define certain regions. A perfect example is the Lightning Rail in Eberron, which immediately effects the DM and player impressions of the regions it connects and can inspire all kinds of adventures and encounters entirely on its own.
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM Series.
Cure Selfish Wounds
Today’s D&D Next post at the Wizards site by Bruce Cordell is titled Time to Heal and discusses the role of the Cleric class and how it relates to healing through the life span of Dungeons & Dragons. There’s a nice little recap of how healing and the Cleric class have both worked in previous editions, and then there is a poll asking how people prefer the mechanics to be handled. Reading about how healing worked in previous editions brought forward some experiences that I am dying to share with you.
After the announcement of 4th Edition D&D, Dave decided he wanted to run a finale 3rd Edition (3.x in actuality) campaign to send the edition off in style. Gathering a group of players mostly from around where I live, Dave kindly traveled a decent distance to plan and run the game for us. One of the first things that happened amongst the players during character creation is that a friend of ours called playing the cleric. This wasn’t too surprising if you know anything about the cleric class in 3rd edition and how overpowered it can become, but even this early in the process I had a small suspicion that healing would be an issue for this party. As such, and inspired by an excellent character in the Wheel of Time novels I was reading, I decided to give a serious try to playing a Bard character for the first time. This allowed me to play a character type that I wanted to play while still having access to healing spells if the need arose.
Dawn of the Selfish Cleric
Before I get too far into this, let me say that I do not hold any grudges against this player (he is a regular in my current ongoing game) and he was never elusive or deceptive about the type of character he was playing. With that out of the way, I will say that there was quite a bit of tension in this party based on the fact that we were adventuring with a cleric that did not seem to know how to heal. Ever. Having chosen his domains in the direction of war, death, and destruction, this cleric instead become potentially the most powerful and dangerous member of our party through the entire course of the game. [Read the rest of this article]
Dungeons & Dragons of Future Past
I have a lot of other things I want to talk about here on Critical Hits, but with Monday’s announcement of a new style of Dungeons & Dragons in the works it feels wrong to talk about anything else. The 4th edition of D&D brought about the only long campaign I’ve ever managed to run, and I attribute a large part of that to the ways the new edition changed the role of being a Dungeon Master and the tools it provided. Another large part of my ability to run a long game was this, right here, the (online and otherwise) RPG community that I’ve had the benefit of being a part of for many years now that has provided me with limitless resources to aid in my DMing efforts. After D&D Next (as I’ll refer to it for simplicity) was announced the online RPG community went crazy, and I saw a number of people sharing lamentations that 4th Edition was now “old” and “going away.” I’ve finally managed to wrangle my thoughts about D&D Next, and they are overwhelming in their hope that whatever D&D Next is it helps me to continue running 4e D&D.
I say “continue running 4e D&D”, but what I really mean is that I hope D&D Next doesn’t mean the end of support for and the release of new content for 4e games. I’d say with any of the editions of D&D that I’ve played they never lasted more than 3 months without picking up house rules amongst our friends. My primary desire with D&D Next and its modular ideals is that it effectively presents an edition of Dungeons & Dragons that embraces the house rule approach many groups take and says, “Here’s D&D, here are some different ways to play it, and here are some tools to help you make it your own.”
No Edition is Perfect
I believe the primary issue with the “edition wars” and people arguing about D&D is that sooner or later, one or both sides forget that no edition of the game has ever been perfect. There may be some people out there who found Basic D&D, 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition, or 4th Edition 100% perfect as they were published, but I would hazard to guess that these people are in the extreme minority. If you look at the market right now, you can see the proof: Pathfinder expanded and modified 3.x and there are tons of old-school D&D hacks and clones that choose different pieces of the game to change and others to keep the same. The problem is that every person and every group is different and they’re going to have different expectations and discoveries as they play D&D. In the end, I hope that D&D Next is representative of all editions of the game because as a game that has no edition of its own it could really be perfect for everyone. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Winging It
Let me know if this situation sounds familiar to you: You’re the DM/GM for your gaming group and you’ve just wrapped up an adventure, and you have at least a whole week until the next one. You’re committed to planning well in advance and making sure you’ve worked everything out well in advance of the next adventure. You sit down the next day, or even that very night, and start the adventure planning process. Maybe you start with a recap of the last adventure, or by listing the continuing plot seeds from the previous sessions and loose ends. Over the next few days you stay on track but before you know it the next adventure is looming and you feel like despite your best efforts the game is still not as ready as you feel it should be. Stress builds, you think about postponing the game or suggesting you all play board games instead, but you hunker down and keep planning. The day of the game comes and you’re still not “ready”, you should have started even earlier and planned more in advance!
This situation has happened to me plenty of times, and I’m willing to bet it’s happened to many of you as well. I stopped the anecdote there intentionally because that is where it can branch in several different directions. If you’re particularly stressed (most likely by things other than the game you’re running, even if you don’t realize it) then you’ve already postponed the game or suggested something else to do instead. Maybe you sat down to watch some TV in the morning and held out to the very last moment, then just as your friends arrive and everything is being set up for the game you pull the plug and suggest something else. Maybe your players are fantastic (like many of mine have been in the past) and offer you so much encouragement and potential disappointment that you get a second wind (pardon the unintentional 4e pun) and run the game you’d been planning. Or perhaps you decide you’ve planned about as much as you ever manage to plan and go ahead with the adventure, improvising and winging it to the best of your potential.
The Genesis of Adventure
If you’re anything like me than all of the above situations are fairly familiar to you. No matter how much I prepare, plan, or plot there is a decent part of me that feels unprepared for running any given RPG session. I’ve had to cope with and adjust to this fact and in the end it has led to me becoming more comfortable at winging adventures and doing my own share of improvisational DMing. However, as I’ve gotten more experience at this process I’ve noticed some striking similarities to other processes that I’ve learned and read about. Specifically, my advice today relates the process of planning and running an RPG adventure to the process for generating ideas. Even more specifically, in the process of generating ideas one of the most important steps is taking time to relax, distract yourself, and partake in other activities and let your unconscious mind take over the process. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Building a DM Library
I believe that most DMs have only run a single campaign world, whether it was one big campaign that has been continued through various ages, or they’ve only managed to run one satisfactory campaign. The tendency for a DM seems to be to conserve the number of campaigns they run by reusing worlds or tying them together so that in the end the number of campaign worlds they run is as close to one as possible.
For instance, though I have run three separate D&D campaigns all have taken place within the same game world and have been tied together despite being run in two different editions of Dungeons & Dragons. Our very own Dave the Game ran a handful of campaigns through our years at school that all took place in the same game world, then he moved away to college, created a game world there, and upon his return ran a new game for us that had hints linking it back to the world he used at college. In the same vein, I think our tendency as DMs is to keep things relatively stable within our game worlds unless they are split by something like a change in campaign.
Last week I talked about my experiences in Architecture school and learning how to design with precedents, as well as how to apply this concept to running RPGs and creating campaigns. Now I would like to take that concept one step further and talk about building a personal DM library that you can use to help you run RPGs. The idea of building a personal library is nothing new, artists frequently do this with art books and clippings from magazines and newspapers for use as reference, and architects do it as I discussed in my post about precedents through study and history books that allow us to see how other architects have gone executed their designs. When I started to think about building a personal DM library, the idea was a lot more intimidating than I thought it would be.
Beyond the Spiral-bound Notebook
You might be thinking, “I already have a DM library, right here in my spiral-bound notebook!” That’s great, and I have the exact same thing for my own campaign, but the concept I’m trying to get across is something beyond just the notes about overall plots and the next adventure you plan to run. In essence, I’m talking about a library where you keep all of the ideas that you don’t put into your spiral-bound campaign notes. One of the most common phrases I hear in conversations between other DMs is, “Wow, I’d love to run a game using that idea!” For years we tossed around how fun it would be to run two ongoing campaigns that were linked and in the same game world, but it wasn’t until the launch of 4th Edition and with a lot of effort on our parts that Dave and I finally did it. I can’t even imagine how many other gaming groups have had the same idea but never took it passed the “that would be cool” phase. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Designing with Precedents
It has been a few weeks since my last Architect DM post, but I’ve been brainstorming a handful of different posts and this one came to the forefront as something I want to discuss. My last post introduced some of my general thoughts about worldbuilding for modern and futuristic games, which is a genre that I plan on talking about more in the future. However, this week I’d like to discuss something I learned in architecture school that can be applied to your games and make your life as a DM/GM easier.
Whenever we started a design project or exercise in college we would first spend time studying a selection of existing buildings, often designed by well known architects. After a few days or even a week of studying those buildings, we would then move into designing our own solutions to the challenges put forth by the project. While working through the early design process we would often refer back to the existing buildings we had studied and choose one or two to be our “design precedents”.
What is a Design Precedent and how do I use it?
The concept of using a design precedent in architecture is really just an easy way of teaching students the old saying, “there are no new ideas”. While working through a design challenge, it was very helpful to see how a well known, professional architect had solved similar problems and being inspired by them or replicating them in new ways. What does this mean for you and your RPGs? For starters, it means that for any location or setting you’re using in your game, you are not only completely free to use existing spaces or designs for inspiration but it is actually the best thing you can do for your game. Don’t worry about being completely original or designing the whole world on your own. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Modern and Futuristic Settings
I’ve talked quite a lot about worldbuilding and running roleplaying games in fantasy settings, but I’ve been planning on addressing modern and futuristic RPGs for a long time as well. One of the big hurdles that I have to overcome when thinking and writing about modern/future settings is that they seem inherently more difficult to deal with than their fantasy counterparts. For a modern or even a historic RPG I believe the difficulties come from the game being based in a real world that brings with it a vast amount of expectations from the players. If you’re running a game in these settings and a player at your table knows more about history than you, it can become very intimidating to even try to plan or run the game. Science fiction and futuristic games are a little bit better, but you’re still dealing with a lot of heavy science and realistic elements that can lead to issues where they might not have arisen in your typical elves and magic infused setting.
This topic is fresh in my mind because recently I was discussing with a few people online about how most fantasy RPG settings have levels implied in their character creation and most modern/sci-fi settings do not. Certainly there are some examples to the contrary (Star Wars Saga uses levels and is based on the d20 system, for one) but it does seem like a trend in RPGs that can be analyzed and discussed. It is always good to remember that generalizing and categorizing things like this is an imperfect practice, but I think it is safe to assume certain things about particular settings and so I’m going to discuss some of those things here. While taking part in the RPG levels discussion, I realized that in most modern/sci-fi settings the emphasis is less on the character increasing in power and more on their skills and equipment improving.
The Acquisition of Personal Power
If you have a modern/sci-fi game where the majority of the characters are increasing in personal power, it often falls more into the superhero mold of game. This train of thought led me to think about the typical Dungeons & Dragons game and how it can be seen to trend towards the superhero spectrum of fantasy games, a trend that I feel has been increasing as D&D has progressed through more and more editions. You are certainly perfectly free to run non-supers games of D&D, but rather than these being the norm for fantasy games they are now a sub-category often categorized as “gritty” or “low-fantasy”. [Read the rest of this article]
