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).
The Architect DM: Negative Space in Dungeons
A very important design concept used in Architecture that I would like to discuss today is the concept of negative space. This topic flows naturally from the discussion in last week’s post about the open spaces in an urban setting being defined by the buildings that are placed around it. In addition I have been thinking quite a lot about the topic since seeing the post on Boing Boing about classic style D&D hand-drawn dungeon maps. If you haven’t seen those maps yet, they are indeed very classic but they are also, unfortunately not examples of good dungeon design.
There is certainly something to be said for that style of dungeon map and the feel it creates, but the simple truth of it is that one of the reasons they feel so classic is because they are inherently illogical and impractical. I admit that logic and practicality are not necessarily the primary concerns addressed by good dungeon design, but at the root of those dungeons there are a handful of factors at play that should not be in play when designing a location for you and your players to explore at the table.
We All Love Graph Paper
Everyone knows it. We really do all love graph paper. If you’re designing dungeons and have never used graph paper then you are missing out on a certain form of exploratory design that most DMs hold very close to their hearts. The problems that are apparent from the “classic” dungeon designs shown in the above Boing Boing article almost all stem from the use of graph paper. For starters, the extents of the dungeon are clearly set at the very edge of the paper itself but far worse than that is the fact that the designer seems to have been overcome with the strange desire to populate every single square of the graph with dungeon.
The next big problem is that the designer has decided to get “creative” and go against the nature of the graph paper by making roughly 50% of the walls at various angles to one another. The end result is a series of straight/angled corridors forming a rough grid around far too numerous rooms almost all of which are forced into harsh triangular shapes. Players and DMs the world over might enjoy looking at these graphite and graph paper dungeons for pure nostalgia, but the fact remains that the only thing gained from playing through them at the table is a shared sense of pride in having survived a horribly designed dungeon. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Open Spaces Design Toolbox
As I introduced in my last post about improvisation, I believe that the key to being able to design a location (whether beforehand or on the fly) is grounded in what I’m calling your toolbox for design. The key is that once you have a well developed toolbox to pull ideas from, you can more readily and quickly design a location for your tabletop Roleplaying Games on the spot or adapt your planned locations to fit the developing needs of the game table. An underlying goal of this series of posts is to help you develop the toolbox required so that you will be able to accomplish this task with relative ease and a good amount of confidence.
I’m going to start by discussing the open spaces that come into play in your average D&D game. The locations I’ll cover in this post will include streets, plazas, and markets but should be adaptable to a larger variety of spaces if you apply the pieces correctly. I started some discussion on open spaces in my post about incorporating them and the larger concept of holidays into your games, but today I’m going to focus more on the specifics of the design process.
Starting in the Streets
Let’s assume that you’re planning a street ambush, inner-city brawl, or an encounter that involves the party protecting (or assaulting) a caravan and you find yourself in need of designing a street location. Your typical town or city street is going to be incredibly easy to design the basics of, but the details can be what really define it as a great location for your game. The first big concern to figure out is what kind of traffic your street handles, it can range from a larger alleyway that mostly sees foot traffic to a bustling medieval highway full of horse drawn wagons. More fantastic concerns may also come into play such as what a street might look like in a city built by giants or even smaller creatures like kobolds. This decision should also directly tell you what kinds of buildings will run along both sides of you street. I’m focusing more on the urban street concept right now, but if there is demand I can get into the specifics of rural roads and trade routes in a later post.
Once you’ve decided on some of the key factors mentioned above, designing a street on the fly should be relatively simple. If you’re running D&D you can quickly count off 10 feet (or 2 squares, whichever you prefer to use) for a cart path in the road and assume 5 ft. (1 square) on each side for general wiggle room and/or foot traffic. So for a one-way or single-cart street you would use roughly 20 ft. as your width, or if you want to do a two-way street you would have 30 ft. (10 ft. x 2 for carts, 5 ft. path/sidewalk on each side of the street). At this point you can decide to keep your street mostly straight or have it be a turn or whatever your heart desires, just make sure that any turns are of a gentle curve so that they’re believable for carts or your desired type of traffic to easily navigate the turns. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: On Improvisation
I am extremely happy for February to be here because it means Winter is getting closer to ending and with it hopefully the seemingly annual lull in gaming activities that often afflicts our group of friends. There was an unintentional break from my regular D&D campaign from late November until the very end of January due to a combination of weather and horrible holiday scheduling conflicts. Last year I somehow managed to go from thinking about canceling my campaign in early December to running three full adventures within January alone. Thankfully my game got back into the swing of things two weeks ago and now I am gearing up for another adventure this weekend. As I’m getting back into planning my adventures, I’ve been thinking more and more about improvisation in tabletop RPGs.
Seeing as talk about improvising dungeon and location design during a guest spot on the DM Guys Podcast is what inspired me to begin the Architect DM series in the first place, it seems like fitting topic to discuss! If I had to guess I would say that over the last year of running my D&D campaign I improvise between 50% and 75% of any given adventure. This ratio has developed over time as I’ve learned that planning too much can be just as detrimental to my games as not planning at all. It might be an extremely common sense statement for some of you, but what I’ve come to realize is that the best way to prepare yourself for improvising in a tabletop RPG is to make sure that you have the right spread of elements available to you that aren’t too specific but are also clear enough that they will aid you as your improvise.
Tools to Match Your Style
If you look around the internet at various tools and posts or books offering advice on running RPGs, you will often come across tips such as generating a list of random names to pull for NPCs or random encounters to pull from if your party goes in an unexpected direction. This kind of advice is great, and it can be a real eye-opener for DMs struggling with those aspects of running. However, what I’ve found is that the list of names I generated and was used regularly throughout the Heroic Tier of my D&D game has gone almost entirely unused in the Paragon Tier. My campaign breaks down nicely into roughly one year per tier of play, so what this means is that while I used this resource quite a bit during my first year of regular DMing (ever) it was a resource that has become less useful to me as I’ve developed in my style. [Read the rest of this article]
Unboxing: Wrath of Ashardalon D&D Board Game
For those of us who have been playing and enjoying the game Castle Ravenloft, anticipation has been building for the quick release of the second D&D Adventure System board game Wrath of Ashardalon! We were fortunate enough to get an early preview copy and so what I’d like to provide for you today is a brief post about the box and its contents as well as a preview of what to expect from the game based on a preliminary look through the rules and components.
Wrath of Ashardalon is presented in a nearly identical manner to Castle Ravenloft; the box is the exact same size and the spread of components is the same as well. If you’re not familiar with Castle Ravenloft then you can check out the unboxing video that Dave and I did at GenCon 2010 to see what I’m talking about. The pieces that come with Wrath of Ashardalon are clearly designed with compatibility in mind and it feels like the aim was to provide a bunch of new rules, miniatures, tiles, and cards that can be interchanged between the two games with incredible ease. To see a larger version of any picture in this post, just click on it!
Whereas the first game focused on exploring the crypts of Ravenloft filled with vampires, wolves, and undead the Wrath of Ashardalon game is focused around the dungeons beneath Firestorm Peak and includes more aberrant and natural creatures to challenge the party.
Here’s what you’ll get inside of the box:
The game comes with 5 hero figures, 30 monster figures, and 7 villain figures that are all different from those we saw in Castle Ravenloft and include some great sculpts that I’m happy to see such as the Red Dragon, Otyugh, Cultists, and Gibbering Mouthers. It also includes 200 new cards including 50 new power cards, 53 encounter cards, 30 monster cards, 33 treasure cards, and 6 boon cards (all of which could easily be combined with those from Castle Ravenloft except the Boon cards which are new). [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Progress in Your Game World
Have you ever noticed that in most published tabletop RPG material the towns, cities, and overall civilization are kind of stagnant? Now have you ever driven down a street or been to a building campus and wondered when they would STOP doing construction on it? Our real life towns, cities, and overall civilization are very rarely in a state of stillness. When do these people build their cottages, repair their castles, and dig their mines? What I’m talking about today is introducing an element to your D&D games and RPGs that is very near and dear to the general topics I discuss in this column: Construction!
I’m sure that some time in the games I’ve run I have introduced a town beseiged by monstrous invasions that still happened to have a perfectly intact castle and city walls. Even in my current campaign I haven’t introduced the element of construction very much, with the towns in relative stillness except when it comes to events that the PCs themselves are involved with. The majority of residents in most D&D settings are most likely farmers, and if there’s one thing that farmers rarely have it’s free time. That’s because they are always working on something around their farms and more often than not it involves building something new or repairing something existing. My encouragement with this post is for you to throw a little bit of progress into your game world!
Pushing the Boundaries
Adding an element of progress into your game world isn’t just some gimmick that I’m proposing for one adventure or one location. In reality it can actually be a great element to really spice up your game and introduce new plot elements that you may not have thought of before. If you’re designing a town or even a whole kingdom for your RPG, why not look at the surrounding areas and decide that the people are expanding in one direction (or all directions, especially for those pesky & ambitious humans)? When borders are pushed conflict will invariably follow, and where there’s conflict there’s instant plot for your game to build from.
You can go with the classic and probably over-used deforestation route, or you can just have the humans expanding their farms and building structures further and further out from the town. As the people push farther into the wilderness, maybe the goblins or other natural residents of the region begin to lash out, and you have an already integrated reason for those goblin encounters you were planning on having to begin with! In this way you don’t necessarily have to create new plot points, but you might be surprised how you can tie expansion and progress into the plots you’ve already developed for your campaign. At its root expansion/colonization is change, and change is the magic stuff that can spawn plot points and build good adventures. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Questions & Answers
While I’m gearing up and preparing to continue the Architect DM series into 2011, I decided to first put out a call for more questions on my twitter account (@Bartoneus) and see what kinds of questions you guys have when it comes to DMing and world building in your RPGs. This has worked incredibly well for me in the past, at least half of the posts in this series so far have come directly from reader questions or suggestions and I’m always looking for more topics to cover.
Today I’m going to keep it simple and simply share and respond to some of the questions I received this afternoon.
Samldanach asked, “How much damage can your average structure really take before collapsing? Assume barbarian w/axe, not explosives.”
This is one of those interesting questions that you never expect someone to ask, but when you start to think about it some interesting discussions can come up. Most structures can actually take a surprising amount of damage before collapsing, and more likely than not only certain parts of the structure will fail without the whole thing being compromised. This is especially true if we’re talking about a barbarian with an axe doing the damage – think about how much effort a person has to put forth just to hack apart a pile of fire wood. If you’re dealing with a sturdy wooden tavern or inn, the structural beams would probably be roughly 6 inches thick (round or square, either way) and even an impressively strong barbarian would have to take at least a dozen good swings at that with an axe to make any progress through it.
The great thing about games like D&D is that they let us exaggerate for effect, so if you have a person trying to destroy the inn and they start hacking away at a beam you can follow it up with the barbarian cleaving through the beam in just one or two swings and really highlight how incredibly strong the barbarian is (when he’s angry, at least). However, the problem then becomes that the entire building won’t collapse simply because a single beam has been heroically chopped in half – at its worst this would only cause a part of the floor to sag or collapse. If you start to look into stone structures then it just gets even worse, and you’d need a huge mob of people before any damage could really be done to a building using weapons like axes. All of this really just highlights how powerful fire, explosives, and magic are when it comes to doing meaningful damage to structures.
Our very own Vanir asked, “Where do babies come from (from a world-building perspective)?” [Read the rest of this article]
Personal Encounter Design Workshop
In mid-December I received a great e-mail from a reader named Brian that I talk to regularly on my twitter account, he was planning for an upcoming D&D adventure and wanted some specific help with designing an encounter. I’m not sure what exactly prompted him to send it my way, but I was more than happy to read through and share some of my ideas to help spice up his encounter.
Just today I received a follow up e-mail that he is planning to run the encounter tomorrow and that he wanted to run his updated encounter by me again. I was all to happy to oblige, and I also realized that the exchange of e-mails might be something some of you would be interested in seeing. So here it is, with his permission of course.
Here’s his original e-mail to me (with some minor edits for clarity):
I’m running the prelate module “Thunder Below”, with my party this Thursday. We are playing 3.5 d&d, and I wanted to create a challenging boss fight with this elder green dragon in the encounter. It seems like whenever we fight a boss one on party, it goes down pretty quickly
I wanted to set my fight in stages. Have the party beat the dragon down the drain, and when it reaches a certain point, have it transform or mutate into a different color of dragon, say green to black or something. And when the dragon was down to another certain point, it could also gain extra abilities right before it dies
I was also thinking of having the fight in this cleared glade in the middle of the forest, and have these random craters in the bog spew poisonous clouds at random from the earth to add some spice to the encounter.
Thoughts?
-Brian
After reading his e-mail and giving it some thought, I sent him back some of my suggestions:
Brian,
That sounds like a pretty sweet encounter! I haven’t run 3rd Edition in 8 years (and I’ve never run 3.x) but I have played in a 3.x game more recently, so I can’t really offer that much monster design advice other than to say when I did run 3E I almost always ended up just BSing the monster’s stats. It’s less satisfying as a DM, because you feel like you’re cheating, but for the most part the players should never notice (especially if you have a DM screen). What that means is – the monster won’t die too early or take too long to kill, because even though you may have a max HP for the monster, you adjust its HP (or how much damage it’s taking) round-to-round to keep the combat fun and interesting.
When you’re doing a multi-stage encounter, my advice would be to try and design the stages so that they will happen at key points in the combat – realistically a stage should change right before the party starts to get bored with the combat as it exists at the moment. If your party is really good and avoids getting bored in longer combats, then I’d say build the first stage or two on them pretty quickly so they feel the escalating of the combat and it feels like it just keeps getting cooler and cooler, then the encounter will have a much more effective climax.
Some more general suggestions – make the Dragon’s phase changes meaningful (and logical), not just changing colors for the sake of it. My suggestion would be to set the scene in the cleared glade with the bogs spewing poisonous clouds at random, a pretty interesting setting (and a dragon foe should always be interesting). Maybe at some point the players start to get the upper hand, and they push/strike the dragon back and a large poisonous bog opens – have the dragon fall in. The players might think they’ve won, or watch impatiently, but then after a nice and short dramatic pause (maybe if they start to leave the area have it happen just as they’re about to leave), and the dragon comes back out of the bog infected (and for all intents and purposes it is then a black dragon, but maybe its scales have been tarnished by the poisonous bog so it’s doesn’t appear fully black or fully green anymore).
Then I would say right before the dragon dies, maybe it gains the ability to have the bogs burst and spew forth tons of poisonous stuff, so the dragon literally turns the environment against the party just before it dies. Then right at the end maybe have it become completely covered in swamp poison goo and explode or something, but give them good warning so the party can stand back a bit if they’re quick/smart enough.
I hope this helps some, I’ve been running 4E for the last 2.5 years so I’m not sure if my encounter/monster design has become skewed by the different design philosophies, but I tried to keep it rules generic enough that it would still help.
Thanks for sharing and definitely let me know how it goes! -Danny
Brian seemed to like the advice and thanked me for providing it, and I expected that to be it. However, I was very pleased today to see a second e-mail from him with some revisions and further sharing of thoughts: [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Open Spaces, Plazas, and Holidays
It’s the end of the year and what most of us would call the “Holiday Season”, while I was considering doing a recap post about the Architect DM series so far I have instead decided to bring up a relevant topic that is quite fitting for this time of year. I’m sure there are several published pieces and posts online about incorporating holidays into your RPG game, but I’d like to discuss them with a specific focus on the location designs you use in your game. I’d also like to focus on one specific holiday trope that you’ve probably considered for your own game – if there’s a holiday/special event, the party is most likely there to experience it.
The best example that comes to my mind is in the 4th Edition D&D material in the Underdark book, the Drow capital city of Erelhei-cinlu is detailed and one of the wards inside of it has a single day of the year where undead are let loos through the whole ward while locals board themselves inside or run for their lives. This is a ridiculous, hilarious, and overall fantastic event written out in the book but in the end I had one big problem with using it. My problem was that the odds of the party being in the city for that event are incredibly low. Sure, if I use the trope then the party just has the bad luck of being there on that one day, but in general I give my party more credit than that and try to avoid using tropes like that more than once per campaign.
I Use the Term ‘Holiday’ Loosely
The best way I can think of to use the above mentioned trope but avoid it feeling too coincidental is to design “holidays” that are more regular. Instead of going with our modern day concept of a once-per-year holiday, why not design your world and cultures with monthly holidays? If we broaden the extent of the term holiday, you can begin to incorporate weekly or even daily traditions that happen and add a unique feel to the cultures that celebrate it. If you begin to use monthly or weekly events, then it is not only more likely the party will get to experience them but also more believable when it does happen. For the primary town in my D&D campaign I set up that the market square in the middle of town is only really in operation for 1 or 2 hours each day, and for the rest of the day the caravans and wagons were boarded up or set out to travel to other towns.
Open Space is a Location Too
With my personal example above, the Market Square of a town is more than just a location but also a constant reminder that the merchants are open for a select few hours a day. If we apply this concept to the Drow “Running of the Undead” from Erelhei-Cinlu, perhaps you can use the design of the city to foreshadow the event without having to resort to the party having the worst luck in the world. When I ran my party through the Drow city, I hinted at the event but the party avoided that ward anyway so I never got to use the following ideas.
Consider how much impact the given event would have, if a swarm of vicious undead are loosed on a city the elements of that city are going to adjust in a fight for survival even if it only happens once a year. Including details such as extra fortification on buildings (especially doors and windows) similar to storm doors and windows seen in hurricane regions can allude to the event without being too overt. Maybe certain streets or alleys have heavy gates that are typically left open but will clearly point to some unspoken need for protection. Hell, you could go as far as having the ground floor of every building being noticeably clawed and chewed on to the point where they’re clearly temporarily occupied or even left vacant all year round. In this way, details of the open spaces in a city can tell a party just as much about a location as the architecture of the buildings themselves.
Feel Free to Steal From Reality
Another great way to use a holiday without actually using the holiday is to borrow from what happens in real life almost year round – decoration and preparation. Think about it, if a party of adventurers showed up in your neighborhood in mid-December, would they be able to tell something special was happening at the end of the month? All of the decoration we put up for the various holidays we celebrate are a great way to covertly imply the holidays or important events of your game world while still maintaining the feel that your party isn’t the center of the universe (even though they really are, shhh! We don’t have to let them know).
A town in the midst of their yearly festival preparations can be a much more interesting setting for your game, and if you’re looking for elements for your players to contribute the specifics of the culture’s rituals and preparations are a great way for them to get involved by suggesting random or even humorous ideas. Though I do have to caution the DMs out there, if you go with this you may find yourself with a group of bird worshiping invaders that use the phrase “Raven Poop” as their common greeting (I swear, it translates into ‘Hello’ in their language). Yes, I say that from experience. Yes, they still use “Raven Poop” as their greeting. No, I will not concede to changing it, my players came up with it and are stuck with it.
Using this idea for annual holidays is easy because we are so accustomed to it, but it can just as easily work for more frequent events. The best part of this strategy is that it naturally works to build tension in your game. Going back to the Market Square concept, imagine that your party of adventurers needs to buy something and they show up at the square only to find all of the merchants are packing up and closing down for the day. They might be able to bribe one of them to re-open, or they might be told to wait until the next day. Either way you’re setting up the party for some classic interaction, and it could even be the kicking off point for an entire plot line in your game if you want it to. The party gets involved in an adventure later that day and the Rogue quickly realizes things would have been easier if they’d gotten to the merchant – “I wish I had some freaking rope!”
Happy Holidays to Everyone!
Was this a shameless way of taking a normal post and giving it a Holiday theme just because it’s December 29th? No, actually, it’s a concept I’ve been thinking about since back in the summer/fall when I ran the above mentioned Drow undercity adventure. Thank you for reading Critical Hits and my Architect DM Series. I hope you have been enjoying both and I’m confident that this series will continue well into the new year!
Click here for the rest of the Architect DM Series.
The Architect DM: Fantasy Technology & Development
In my last post I talked about how the abandonment of locations and their resettlement can be used to influence the way we design our RPG worlds. The discussion led into the idea of technologies that could be developed and subsequently lost along with a civilization, only to be rediscovered at a later date by different cultures.
I know for a fact that many people have a mental disconnect when it comes to thinking of “technology” and their typical Dungeons & Dragons game world. I often think of technology in an RPG along the same lines as psionics, there seem to be a lot of people who love to use them and a lot of people who avoid using them altogether.
When it comes to technology there is quite a bit of framework that needs to be put forward in order to discuss it adequately.For the purposes of this article I’m going to use the term ‘technology’ in a very general sense. When I say your game includes technology it doesn’t necessarily mean there are dwarves flying around in gyrocopters shooting guns at each other, but that is certainly a distinct level of technology that some games might like to have. We most often hear technology and development described in terms of the Age system, starting with the Three-age System for classifying prehistory (particularly european/mediterranean prehistory) into the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. One of the resources that I like using for this kind of development is the List of archaeological periods over at Wikipedia, which shows you the progression of certain ages across the various continents.
Which Period Does Your Game Take Place In?
The answer to that question is a tough thing to figure out, and a lot of people probably see it as one of the most important questions regarding their game. The answer, in my opinion, is really not that important. Even if you’re attempting to run a game in a historic setting, unless you’ve studied history extensively, you’re not going to be able to get everything right. My observations are that the implied setting of most D&D games is very strongly early-medieval in theme and sticks pretty closely to the kinds of things that were seen throughout the Iron Age. Most people don’t run D&D games using only stone or bronze tools, but you also don’t often see a castle wall lined with cannons. However, when the characters inevitably end up on a (pirate) ship in the pirate ship-themed adventure, you bet your ass there are going to be cannons there!
How to Include Technology in Your Game
The way I see it there are two methods of inclusion for any particular type of technology into your game. The first method is that the technology exists in what I’ll call an Uncommon-to-Common way, meaning that if the PCs wanted to find this technology they could and it would be fairly reasonable for them to be able to reproduce it or purchase it if they so desire. One key distinction that I have to make is that this doesn’t mean your entire game world has access to this technology. One of the aspects of world building that I think is often overlooked by DMs and players is that civilization doesn’t develop at the same rate in every location. The example I used in my last post illustrates this perfectly, the Romans had means of creating and using Concrete (even advanced methods which allowed it to cure while underwater) which were lost when the empire collapsed and were not seen again until hundreds of years later. [Read the rest of this article]
Review – Tron: Legacy
I am a particular brand of Tron fanboy because the original movie came out the year before I was born and I wouldn’t really understand much about computers or programming until many years after I had the movie decently memorized. I’ve loved the original movie for pretty much my entire life, even writing about my love affair with the movie and how I can use it to know if I’ll really like someone right away. It should be no surprise that I went to see Tron: Legacy on the day of its release, but I am a bit surprised that we decided to see it in 3d and that it turned out to be a good decision.
Tron: Legacy is a fitting sequel to the original for a handful of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it makes the idea of fighting each other with frisbees seem really freaking cool again. The movie is an amazing visual and auditory experience that has some of the most entertaining action sequences I’ve seen in the last few years. The only thing that I really missed in the movie was the layer of real world computer references and ‘nerd-insider’ feeling that was pervasive in the original Tron, but in a 2010 world where computers are much more common place I’m not sure this layer is as necessary as it was back in 1982. Tron: Legacy is a mainstream and updated version of the original vision of Tron, but it is also very much a sequel and avoids retelling the exact same story as its predecessor though the structure will feel quite familiar.
Though the visuals and audio are the highlight of the film, the characters are not far behind. Jeff Bridges does a good job of mixing his age with the wit and slacker attitude that he created for Kevin Flynn back in the 80′s as well as playing the younger part of Flynn’s program CLU as a single minded but efficient entity. Garrett Hedlund performs extremely well as Flynn’s son, Sam, and even noticeably attempts to take on an aspect of Jeff Bridge’s personality in several parts of the film. Olivia Wilde is my hands down favorite of the film as the program Quorra, adding a bit of innocent humanity into the still entertaining habits of programs that we saw some of in the original film, while Michael Sheen is a close second for his small but scene-stealing role as the quirky and hilarious program Castor. [Read the rest of this article]
