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).
Why I’m Starting to Love Epic 4e D&D
I started playing and running 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons right when it was released. My current ongoing campaign began back then with a party of 1st level characters and now three years later I’ve run over 50 adventures and the party is up to 24th level characters. The campaign has had its share of rough spots and tough times, but overall I’d say it has been an incredibly fun experience and something that I look forward to every other weekend. Dave was also running a campaign that was on the same track as mine only slightly ahead (and in the same game world), but due to a myriad of reasons a few weeks ago we ran a day long, co-DMed finale that closed his game out in style with unrestrained awesomeness.
Since then I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to close my campaign out and thinking about exactly how much longer I want to run this game. What I’m discovering more and more as I think about it is that running epic level 4th Edition is some of the most fun I’ve ever had running or playing in any D&D game.
Some Disclaimers
As I’ve discussed a few times before, when I started running this campaign I was without a doubt a “newbie DM” and my attempts at writing, planning, and running my campaign definitely showed it. This is a disclaimer because now that I have 50 adventures under my belt and a lot of hours of DMing experience it should be expected that I’ve gotten better and that the games I’m running have improved as a result. In addition, I realize that many of these points may not be specific to 4th Edition D&D, they may also apply to any edition of D&D when it gets into the epic style of game play (or any RPG for that matter), but my experiences of running epic games are only in 4e so that’s what I’ll be focusing on.
Another part of this disclaimer is that player investment builds over time in a campaign and that adds to the overall enjoyment at the table as well. Last but not least there’s the simple fact that the epic tier is meant to be epic, and therefore awesome in its own right as the players become super powerful and go up against greater and greater threats. I believe all of these are fairly understandable reasons for why I am enjoying running epic level D&D so much, but I’d like to explore some of the other reasons and the finer points of the matter.
Everything AND the +5 Vorpal Kitchen Sink
The aspect that I’m probably enjoying the most about running epic level 4e is that I feel like I can throw practically anything I want at the party. Monsters that are 4 or 5 levels higher than the party will most likely be challenging but unless there’s a solo they stand very little chance of it getting anywhere close to killing the whole party. Even before level 24 when most Epic Destinies grant death defying abilities, many of my players have abilities that allow them to skirt the edge of death. My wife has been playing a cleric for the entire game and even despite her lack of focus on healing her Healing Word ability still gives characters an insanely high number of hit points.
I’ll freely admit that in the heroic and paragon tiers of play I was deeply concerned about the level of difficulty I was throwing at my players and how their characters could handle it mechanically. Being almost entirely free of those concerns is extremely satisfying as a DM and I’m sure it is contributing to the ease of my running the latest adventures of my game and the amount of fun I’m having doing it. There is a certain glee that can be found in the DM’s attempts at creating an all-out massacre and the players/characters abilities to disrupt those efforts. I know that some DMs run with the mindset of “unrestrained opposition” to the characters, and I know that there are some players who really don’t like that style of game, but my feeling is that in the epic tier the players don’t mind it as much and it has been incredibly fun for me as the DM. At least for me, I can’t speak for my players that much, my campaign has recently taken on an enhanced feeling of the DM vs. Players style of game but with an incredibly friendly vibe. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Last Minute Planning
Charrette is a word that most likely means nothing to you, unless of course you studied Architecture or Design in school then it is a word that can mean quite a lot and the emotions it brings up vary widely from person to person. Charrette is a word used among architecture students to describe a design crunch/cramming session that derives from the French word for “cart”. The term became popular because schools in Paris would have carts pushed around to collect student’s drawings and it was not uncommon for students to continue working on their drawings for as long as possible by riding in the cart. For better or worse, the term has stuck through to this day and architecture students are still as bad as ever at finishing their projects before rigid deadlines.
One of the unforeseen outcomes of my experience with things like charrettes in school has been the ability to more efficiently plan for the RPG adventures that I run. The word charrette inspires a mix of emotions in most design students because it represents the insanely stressful periods of a project for many people but also because it invokes a bizarre sense of pride in our shared suffering, and it is not surprising that people are proud to emerge from a charrette with a praise-worthy design and presentation having survived the experience. This kind of experience is also well known to Dungeon Masters and Game Masters around the world.
Planning an Adventure or Studying for an Exam?
It’s one thing to experience anxiety and stress when going through design school, after all so much rests on your shoulders and counts on your performance in school, but I was extremely surprised when I found myself experiencing some of the same problems when I found myself approaching the day of an adventure and found myself needing to plan for my game. Today I’m not only going to talk about some of the best advice I received about getting through charrettes and lessons I learned in school, but I’m also going to share some specifics about how I’m applying all of this to the hobby of running for tabletop RPGs. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Magic Items – Part 2
Last week I looked at some issues I’ve been experiencing with magic items in 4th Edition D&D and some possible solutions. This week I’d like to talk about some other possible solutions as well as just some general concepts related to magic items that hopefully generate some interesting ideas for how to handle magic items in your D&D campaigns. There were some fantastic comments on last week’s post and I’m going to incorporate some of the topics or ideas brought up there into this post as well.
The biggest thing that I meant to mention last week but didn’t get to was the Inherent Bonus rules for 4th Edition that allow you to run a game without any magic items at all and the math will still work for the players. There are a few different ways to use these rules, but my preference is to give player’s the inherent bonuses and then allow them access to all common magic items, a few uncommon magic items, and then hand out one or two more powerful magic items per player. I prefer thinking about these more powerful magic items as simple +1 items, even though they will mechanically be one plus higher than the inherent bonus the player’s currently have. In this way the magic items are still incredibly good and give the character’s an advantage, but at any given level they will still only be +1 or at most +2 magic items.
Breaking the Rules in All the Right Ways
The first thing that I changed about magic items in my own campaign was leveling up player’s primary weapon and armor instead of handing out new parcels as they leveled up. This isn’t so much of a change as a different way of handling the parcel system. The second thing I did was allow the players to break the rules and combine two separate items in specific cases. For example, my players very quickly found themselves wanting to have +3 Dragonclaw armor that was also Summonable.
I’m a big fan of the “say yes” style of DMing, but I also happened to agree with my players on this point. Since Summonable armor is the same level and cost as basic magic armor, I decided it was no problem at all for my players to make any piece of armor also Summonable for a small additional cost for the special enchanting. We’ve been doing this for well over a year now and through an entire tier of play and so far, not surprisingly, it hasn’t broken the game in any way. The only thing it’s done is given my players armor they’re happier with and possibly given them access to one additional ability. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Magic Items – Part 1
I’m sure that magic items in D&D have been talked about for countless hours, but with Wizards of the Coast finally releasing Mordenkainen’s Magical Emporium for 4th Edition in September and my home campaign nearing the middle of the epic tier I’ve been wanting to talk about them here. The handful of times that I ran 3rd Edition D&D I was guilty of handing out items of a much higher level than the party, but I would try to balance it out with concepts like staves only having a small number of charges. The players/characters always loved it, but I would hear from other D&D players outside of the game that they didn’t like what I was doing and that they had the impression it was “contrary to the rules of the game” or something like that. I didn’t mind them much, but was very intrigued by what they were saying.
Now in 4th Edition the magic items are in the Player’s Handbook (instead of the DMG), we have item rarity levels, and the way that magic items function in the game has changed quite a bit from when I started playing with 2nd Edition. In the heroic tier of my campaign I was pretty happy with how the magic items worked out, and I even have a character in my game that is STILL wearing the Acrobat Boots he found in the very first adventure. My players really seemed to enjoy finding and wearing new magic items; many of the item types such as gloves, boots, and helmets stood out as extremely useful during adventures.
The Walking Armory Dilemma
Things started to change roughly coinciding with paragon tier when the players became much less excited about new items, possibly because they’d been playing the game for a year, began to have too many items to manage, or they were hesitant to replace items they were already using. The one thing that I did change to counteract some of these feelings was allowing the players to keep the same armor and primary weapon and simply level up the items with the characters. At present my campaign is up to level 23 and I haven’t given out a single magic item since before they hit level 20. I’ve heard one or two of my players mildly complain about it but only in the capacity that they know the rules suggest giving out a certain number of items (and that number is more than zero). [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Campaign Building
It’s good to be back! The first week of August saw us at GenCon and very happily winning a Gold ENnie award, and then in the weeks after I’ve been catching up on things post-convention and getting back into the swing of things. Lately I’ve been discussing and toying with the concept that the best world building happens through playing a campaign, and so I suggest the world building DMs out there spend less time before play and just jump into things with a published or a bare bones adventure and then let the world build from there. This also opens your game up to the possibilities for players to contribute to the world building which for me has always turned out better than I could imagine.
Now that I’ve been running my current 4th Edition D&D game for 3 years and the players are progressing through the Epic Tier, I am starting to plan ahead for what we will play and run after the campaign is over. In addition playing a wider variety of games and RPGs, I am also hoping to run a series of mini-campaigns inspired by Phil’s ideas about running a campaign like a British TV Series and his Gears of Ruin campaign posts.
The early stages of planning for these future mini-campaigns is what has inspired all of my raving about world building through play. Now that I have spent more than 3 years playing in my campaign world, it has become incredibly easier for me (and more importantly my players) to envision playing a sandbox game in the world because we already have an intimate understanding of the world. All of this brainstorming has led me to another style of running a campaign that I think could be quite fun and I’d like to explore here.
The Core + Expansion Campaign
Players often cringe at the idea of restricted choices when starting a campaign, but this concept thrives on it. Start your “Core Campaign” with a limited number of races, classes, types of items, locations and pretty much anything else you can limit. Decide what kind of story you want to tell, what kind of character your friends want to play, and then work out what kind of restrictions you should put on the Core game. Run the game with a limited plot for 4-6 or 6-10 adventures and then wrap it up. Characters can die, subplots can remain unresolved, but give a good sense of closure to the game. [Read the rest of this article]
Game Previews from GenCon 2011
While at GenCon this year I was floored by the amount of new games that were being previewed and available to purchase at the convention. Checking out these new games is one of the big reasons that I go to GenCon, so today I’d like to talk about some of the games that I got to demo while I was there. This post is titled “previews” because I haven’t had a chance to play any of these games in their entirety, but they all stood out to me either from before I went to the con or while I was walking the exhibit hall.
These are just a few of the games that I saw and was excited about at GenCon. The first two previews here are games that I got to play demos of and talk to some of the people from the companies about the games. The rest of the games in this post are ones that I was hoping to get a chance to play but just didn’t have the time to play or wait for a spot to open up at the tables.
Ninja: Legend of the Scorpion Clan (Alderac Entertainment Group)
This is one of the games that I was excited for even before going to GenCon because I’m a big fan of what AEG has been doing with their Legend of the 5 Rings products, plus I love ninjas so that pretty much sealed the deal for me checking this out. Ninja is a board game that takes place in the L5R universe, and I have a copy of it here at home so there will definitely be a full review of it up in the next few weeks. The game plays with 2-4 players and allows 1 or 2 players to control the ninja and traitor as they secretly move about the board and try to avoid the samurai guards controlled by the other players. The samurai players place traps, objectives, and sleeping guards in hidden locations around the board to surprise the ninja, and every player has a small hand of action cards to add even more surprise into the equation.
Above and beyond the “I love ninjas” caveat, many of our friends (including myself) have been playing the game Letters From Whitechapel a lot recently and I was even more excited to see that Ninja appears to share many similarities with that game. I’m happy to see that Ninja is supposed to play quicker than Whitechapel, and the game also doesn’t end if the ninja or traitor are found but instead they get to kill and/or flee from the guards and still attempt to sneak away.
Food Fight! (Cryptozoic Entertainment)
The stand up displays for this game were immediately eye-catching. By eye-catching, I mean it featured badass looking food wearing combat gear and wielding guns! I jumped into the demo of the game knowing nothing more than that it is a card game, and I was pleasantly surprised once we got into playing the demo. Our first play through involved a dealt out hand, choosing which cards to play for either Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner, and then flipping up cards and battling against other players that chose the same meal that you did.
Food Fight’s cards are all extremely stylistic and, if you’re a fan of the game’s particular kind of humor, incredibly funny. If you think things like Private Pancake, Corporal Taco, and Sergeant Sushi all decked out in army outfits are funny, then this game is perfect for you. However, as we played that first hand I couldn’t help but find it to be a mediocre game at best. That’s when the demo changed completely. Once we’d played one hand to learn how the basic game played, we were each dealt a hand of cards from which we drafted one card and proceeded to pass hands around the table in the familiar card drafting fashion. I can understand why they were demoing the game without the drafting at first, but at least one of our friends ONLY got to play the game with a non-drafted hand and that confuses me. Once I started to draft the cards the game immediately improved for me and I understood the card designs and enjoyed it a hell of a lot more. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Nations as Character Backgrounds
I am still in the process of brainstorming on the following topics, but this post is an essential part of the process as I express my thoughts so far and more importantly get feedback from others and hear about their experiences.
After running an adventure of D&D last week that included our friend Dixon Trimline, he and I were having a post-adventure geek out because we don’t get the chance to talk in person that often. During this geek out we discussed the history of my D&D campaign, specifically the world that has been built before and during the game, when I caught inspiration for an idea of presenting nations and world building as character background “packages” that can be taken by players.
A concept that has become very prominent for me is the use of nations/regions in world building. The first campaign map that I designed was nondescript with a series of different towns and cities connected by long stretches of road. As I’ve built that game world over the last 10 years, the rest of the map has been divided into various nations and regions that help break up and define the world, and in so doing the nondescript area that I first designed has become more interesting as a contrast due to it not being a formal nation. For your own game these don’t have to be formal nations or well defined regions but the root of the idea is to have some kind of contrast between different locales, whether they’re bordering towns, two separate continents, entire worlds (Hoth vs. Dagobah, for instance), or hell even different solar systems and galaxies.
Stick to the Basics
When you start designing these different regions, start by outlining the basics for each region and look at the overall list to see what will make up your world. If you have to define what the planet Hoth is then the words “Snow Planet” are simple enough but extremely evocative, just like how “Swamp Planet” works for Dagobah. For my recent campaign world I started by tying the prominent nations to the roots of the 4th Edition D&D system with the following defining features: Divine, Arcane, Dwarf, Elf, Eladrin, Human, and Halfling. After making several lists along these lines, and looking at the pre-existing world map I was working with, I decided to make one nation the Arcane/Elf nation and another a more Fey/Eladrin nation. I also asked the players and heard a lot of requests for more technology, so I made a Dwarf/Technology nation as well. From there I’d already started adding secondary descriptions for each nation so I simply continued along that path until I started to get more and more refined ideas for each nation in the game world. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Sandbox Campaigns
The Architect DM series has covered a lot of different aspects or tabletop RPGs ranging from details of a single encounter to the much larger task of planning out an entire game world. I’ve found myself tending to progress through that range from post to post instead of staying to one end or another for more than one or two posts in a row. With this in mind, today’s post comes from some of my more recent thoughts on campaign planning and how to build towards running a mostly sandbox style game.
It’s Tough to Start in the Sandbox
One of the biggest reasons there is so much material written about sandbox games, and why people look so hard for it, is because running a sandbox game is not easy. Many people may offer you advice and provide tricks to help make it easier, but in my opinion attempting to run a sandbox game takes a difficult task (running a tabletop RPG) and makes it much more of a challenge. With this in mind I’ve been brainstorming what kind of advice I would give to people who know the difficulties of running such a game but still want to try it out.
Now that I’ve been running an ongoing campaign for the last three years, I’ve started to realize that my options for running a sandbox game in my game world have expanded. My number one advice for running a sandbox game would be to not worry about it and start running your game as soon as possible. You can plan as much as you want, but the best way to help the players feel more comfortable exploring the sandbox that is your game is to start introducing the players to locations and NPCs. It’s perfectly fine for you to start out with one or more railroading plots/adventures because the more plot seeds you plant and the more familiar the players become with your game world the easier it’s going to be to run an effective sandbox game. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Give It Some Height
I’m going to clue you guys in to a nifty little secret that I’ve been using for a while now in my RPG encounters – adding height to a tabletop RPG can be one of the best ways to invigorate your encounters. You must be careful, because using something like height in your game can become something of a gimmick or a trick and if overused could become predictable or boring to your players. However, when applied correctly and in the right amount height and depth can create some of the most memorable moments of your game and can also help enforce or dissuade certain styles of play.
It shouldn’t be surprising that the majority of play in tabletop RPGs like D&D takes place in two dimensions, the table or map you’re playing on is a flat surface and even in non-miniature based RPGs I am willing to bet the majority of encounters are mostly flat as well because it’s a heck of a lot easier for the GM to manage things on a single level. If you’re lucky enough to have a GM that often runs things on different levels (height above/below the standard floor of the environment), then consider yourself lucky but even then I still believe the majority of the action is taking place on one surface while there might be some very minor action going on above or below. No matter how your DM or GM runs things, players tend to remember that one encounter that was really cool when the party was split evenly between a balcony and the room below with adversaries to fight and puzzles to interact with on both levels.
Height as a Gimmick
I said early to avoid overusing the idea of height in your encounters, but that just means you should really enjoy using it to the extreme when you can! For instance, the picture above is of an adventure in my ongoing D&D campaign that I ran in August 2010 just after GenCon with many of my regular players and Jared Hindman as our house guest and very welcome jump-in player. For this adventure I took the opportunity of the party facing growing elemental threats and my house’s tendency to collect old soda boxes to throw four huge columns of earth that extended a hundred or more feet upwards into the encounter. Naturally, the fight started out quite normal so that the players were even more surprised when suddenly one or two of them ended up stranded on a tall plinth of rock and facing earth elementals and most terrifying of all an catastrophic earthquake dragon that wasn’t impeded by the height difference. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Give Your Cities Some Architecture
Not every D&D campaign or world map includes nations or regions that break the larger mass into more digestible pieces, but this is one of the features that I’m glad I chose to be a primary element of my current D&D campaign. Inspired by a 3rd Edition D&D campaign run by our friend Dennis (aka The Main Event) where the nationality of the PCs became one of the most memorable parts of the game for me and ended up factoring into the ongoing plots in interesting ways, I decided to present my players with a world divided into various nations each with a unique flair and often divided by racial distinctions. However, one of the elements that I failed to strongly present to my players and that I’m going to discuss today is the idea of giving a unique design and feel to each of those nations when it comes to locations and buildings.
I’m not going to say that every D&D game should have nations as I’m discussing them, but when it comes to precedents the worlds of Tolkien and Robert Jordan are strongly grounded in the idea of conflicting nations so it can’t be a bad idea to build on what they used to improve their stories. I am currently reading through the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan which is one of the main reasons this topic is so fresh in my mind. Throughout the books Jordan does an excellent job of describing (in detail, at length, constantly…) the different styles of architecture, fashion, and attitudes that are prevalent in each nation.
Details Grow Over Time
At first the intricate details that Jordan presents are simply descriptive and help us visualize specific people and places that we are reading about, but without knowing much about the nation as a larger concept they remain simple descriptions and are quickly forgotten. After numerous books and thousands of pages (I’m currently on the 11th book in the series, to give you an idea) these descriptions begin to grow into definitions and characteristics. What this means is that while Jordan will still go through the effort of describing the dress styles or architecture of a specific region, the reader already has a pretty damn good idea of what it’s going to look like from the precedents he has created. I have a strong feeling this same technique could become incredibly valuable over the course of a long campaign or several games set in the same world.
While I attempted to do this in my own game, the one place I fell short was on the architecture of each region. As ironic as it may be, in my own campaign I have developed a style of DMing that does not focus very much on the buildings or architecture. That said, if one of my players reads this and chimes in that they actually do have a very good idea of what the buildings in my game world look like, then I may just be harder on myself with regards to architecture (because damn it, I can do better)! [Read the rest of this article]
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