Articles by Phil Menard
The Chatty DM is the "nom de plume" of gamer geek Philippe-Antoine Menard. He has been GMing various versions of D&D and other RPGs for nearly 30 years. A renowned RPG blogger, game designer and published author, he squats a corner of Critical Hits he affectionately calls "Musings of the Chatty DM." (Email Phil or follow him on Twitter.)
Online Tools, Take 2
Last month I posted about software tools I planned on using in our current game.
It turns out it worked a lot better than planned. All players joined the Google Group we created (see here for explanations on how it works) and I’m truly impressed by participation.
Google Groups are basically a discussion group tool. All members write messages that remained stored on the group’s page. Members have various options to be informed of new messages (CCed, abridged e-mails, and e-mail digests) . All messages can be searched in Google’s well-know way.
There is also a limited wiki-like function where you can create Web pages and link them together. Each page can then be further linked to discussions.
Finally you have 100 MB of space for shared files.
So I created a closed group (members only can browse) and invited each of my players.
I use the discussions for general out of game discussions: Background, rules discussions, player request. Basically everything we use to do by email and ended up losing time digging up afterwards.
Using the web pages tool, I posted all the game-related info (Background, plot lines, house rules, etc).
As for files, we store scans of race and classes writeups for easy reference as well as character sheets and other game related stuff.
Apart from a few bugs, It works real well. And whenever we read a message, we get these funny Google Ads that rip ‘key’ words from our messages and shows appropriate ads. Boy there sure are a lot of WOW gold sellers out there. 
Maybe it's time for D&D 4e after all…
Boy am I seeing a lot of hate and anger being spewed at the D&D 4e announcements (just try any forum: Enworld, Okay…Your Turn and RPGnet for a sample). I must confess that I also have been part of that strong resistance to change/Lashing-out-at-Hasbro’s- blatant-money -grab.
But, but but… as I go through the motions of planning and playing out my 5th D&D 3.x campaign, I can’t help thinking that some of it is getting stale. I’m not bored or burnt out of D&D, far from it, but let’s say that the system’s, um, shall we say ‘imperfections’ are starting to irritate me more than before. And most of theses irritants are systems the 3.0 designers decided to retain from earlier editions because it defined D&D throughout the years. Namely:
- Save or Die effects (How I hate those!)
- Spell Resistance
- The Grapple rules
- Bland magic Items
- The need for a healer in all parties
And I’m not alone in finding it so, just look at my player’s choice of characters. So maybe a new edition, with fixed mechanics and new outlooks could help in this.
(Aside: I’m a very mechanistic gamer and I’m noticing how much it shows in my posts. I know that cool modern mechanics is what brings me to a RPG and retains me. In my opinion, Story-telling motivated roleplaying don’t need fancy mechanics and can occur whatever the system… However, I’ll concede that it can be argued that one of D&D’s flaws is that it’s mechanics can and do hinder Role-playing in certain groups. Does it for our group? I’ll leave the question opened for further pondering)
However, lately there has been a new ‘wind’ of D&D design that seem to point towards things to come. Ever since the latest batch of designers/developers like Mike Mearls, Jason Bulmahn and Rich Burlew joined the lineup, some new very promising concepts have been put to press:
- Iron Heroes (what I like to call the early prototype of D&D 4e, or D&D 3.75)
- CoolerMagic Items (Magic Item Compendium)
- Way Cooler Fighter classes (Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords)
- Function-based Encounter design (Dungeonscape)
And from what I can glean from the Wizards’ D&D insider blogs these concepts are here to stay.
And that makes me optimistic and interested for what Spring/Summer 2008 will bring.
The case against Spell Resistance
This is a very D&D specific post.
Yan, one of my long-time players has started playing his 1st D&D arcane spellcaster ever.
One of his feedbacks from last Friday’s debacle was that Spell Resistance really stank from a player’s perspective. You wait for your turn, you fire your spell, you roll a number and if you fail, you lost the spell. And even when you do succeed, the target’s inherent defenses (Saving throws, resistances, etc) kick in and may invalidate your whole action anyway.
Now, D&D players are usually quite willing to accept foes resisting their spells with a good roll or specific resistance to certain spells (ex: elemental resistance). But spell resistance makes you have to pay twice for an effect and does not offer many other alternatives. Yes there are spells that ignore spell resistance but such spells are rare and feel more of a crutch than anything else.
Spell resistance is a holdover from Grandad Gygax’s game where sub-systems piled on sub-systems to create that lovable mess that was A D&D. I do not think it was one of the sub-system that should have been kept in D&D 3.x.
Like Yan pointed out, Spell Resistance could have been integrated as an extra bonus to saves (leaving the automatic fail of 1) or as an hit-point like resources representing absorption of spell energies.
While I am not willing to go and touch that part of the game (there are many systems based on SR) I would be willing to make this one small change:
A failed SR roll on the part of the caster does not expend a spell, spell slot or magic Item charge because the target fails to register as a possible target of the spel or magical effect (like trying to cast magic missile at a wall). The caster would still have expended the time to do the action though.
I’ll propose this to my players and see what they think.
Where has the post-game funk gone?
I don’t feel down at all about the bad game we had last Friday, I’m actually surprised at that. While bad sessions are a lot rarer than they were (switching from Gurps to D&D 3.0 was hard!), I often felt that it was finally time to hang my RPG skates after such a session. Even when we have an incredible session, I often feel gamed out and spent creatively speaking and I usually need a full week to recuperate.
It must be a tribute to the constructive impact of having discussed the session with the group since and having spewed my impressions out on this here blog. I’m already energetically planning the next session and am looking forward to the next game. (Ahrg! 2 weeks is a looooong time to wait!)
Can’t wait to have the players kick some serious Yugoloth butt and get the credit they deserve!
DM Chronicles, Session 1: Harsh Beginnings
This series will be a DM-centric log of my current D&D campaign, it will not be an attempt at telling a story so much as being a ‘lessons learned’ tool for me to reflect on what was good and what wasn’t so good in the last session. It will be mostly about game mechanics, design choices, and a review of the decisions and calls I made. I will try very hard not to let my neurotic side take over and keep the exercise as constructive as possible.
Preamble: Cast and Screenplay
Rules: A heavily house-ruled version of D&D 3.5 with strong influences by Iron Heroes and the Action Points and Death/Dying variants of the System Reference Document (SRD).
Setting: A Home-brewed classic fantasy world with Ptolus added as a port city at the outskirts of a recently fallen Lawful Evil empire. The world is recuperating from a global alignment-based conflict that was a former campaign focus.
Characters (all good alignments):
- Aravar: 7th level male Elven Duskblade (Fighter/Arcane Spellcaster) played by Mathieu
- Cixi: 7th level Human female Archer (from Iron Heroes) played by Franky
- Lillie: 3rd level female Pixie/4th level Sorcerer (Modified pixie progression from Savage Species) played by Yan
- Nogard: 7th level male human Dragon Shaman ( Melee/Buffer character) played by Steph (The Irony of Steph’s choice of name eluded me until it was clearly pointed out to me)
- Unnamed: 7th level Crusader (Holy Warrior) to be played by Eric who was absent from the 1st session.
Campaign Core Theme: A group of Yugoloths is planning an invasion of the war-torn world. The PC’s know about their intention and plan on being a huge nuisance to the fiends.
Session 1: Harsh Beginnings or ‘Even veterans DM screw up sometimes’
If you define a successful RPG evening by having the participants have a good time, the session was a disaster. I had my load of stinkers as a DM in 2 decades but last Friday night is one for the books.
As mentioned before I had designed the 1st session to be a big fight against what was to be the typical antagonists of the Campaign, a squad of Yugoloths. Since I was aiming for one large combat to get the evening started, I had created a group 6 of these fiends averaging a level 10-10.5 encounter. I went for 10 (3 more than the party) based on the following assumptions (which turned out to be wrong on many levels)
- It was to be the only fight of the PC’s day so I could safely go for an Encounter Level (EL) 2-3 over the party.
- The Character’s power had significant power creep (House rules, Player experience, 5 PCs in party) to consider the party to be equivalent to 8th level.
- The players, having about 5-7 years of playing D&D 3.x together under their belt, consistently beat more powerful foes in our last campaign (Iron Heroes).
I also choose to include only Yugoloths, monsters I had never used and had not completely reviewed. Finally, I chose them mostly on their Challenge Ratings (very approximate gauge of individual power) without regards to special abilities.
Following my usual rule of adventure design (a few mooks, 1 brute and 1 boss), I ended up with 6 monsters: 4 Skereloths (Fiend Folio), 1 Canoloth (Monster Manual III) and 1 Piscoloth leader (Fiend Folio).
The game was set up on a D&D miniatures Battle map (Broken Demongate). Cixi, a Ptolus citizen was standing one one side, defending an elven temple who had a portal to the lower planes opened and Aravar, Lillie and Nogard on the other side, having collapsed the portal’s generator and running to enter the temple before the portal’s closure. Between them stood the 6 fiends.
The fight went awfully for the players. On the 1st round, I had all fiends trying to summon more Yugoloths. While the Skereloth, easily dispatched minor nuisances, succeeded in only bringing one more of them, the Canoloth summoned 3 more copies of itself (A CR 5 creature becoming a CR 9 encounter by itself).
For those who don’t have the MM III book (or play D&D) Canoloths are heavily-armored dog-like creatures that have a 20′ long tongue that cause paralysis and can grapple at will (leading to a bite in the same attack), has a good Damage Reduction and has a strong Spell Resistance.
Paralysis, Repeatable Grappling/biting, Spell Resistance, Damage Resistance….
Wow…
Had I been a teenage, power-tripping sadistic DM, I could not have designed a better encounter to piss players off.
For the record, as written, the Piscoloth has 7 more paralysis attacks per turn than the Canoloth, has better Spell Resistance, better Damage resistance and more numerous, effective spell-like abilities…. sigh. Fortunately, I like to believe that I had the decency of playing it only as a screaming, abusive superior to it’s minions and did minor things with it.
So the players spent more than 2 hours getting bitten, grabbed, dragged, escape the grapple only to be grabbed again. The tanks saw their HP dip below 0 and the spell casters had the pleasure of tasting Spell Resistance. Also add to the fact that I play dice out in the open and I kept playing 18s on my d20. It was awful.
I soon realized that the players were not having fun, but I could not for the life of me imagine how I could salvage this and maintain the player’s suspension of disbelief (memo to self, as your player’s written feedback clearly state now, the suspension was long gone after 1 hour). Once one player dropped to negative hit points, and another only one hit away from it, I finally had the Piscoloth scream for it’s minions to follow it and left the temple to cause trouble elsewhere in the city.
It is a testament to my player’s trust and friendship that they never once burst out in open rebellion or anger. Kudos guys, you’re the best!
So for a 1st session that aimed at making the players look like Rock Stars, it failed miserably. Heck, it went so badly that Cixi actually never saw any of the other players during the fight and the party actually failed to meet!
To Keep this post readable, I’ll conclude with a list of lessons I learned in that session.
- Spell Resistance, Grappling, Damage Resistance: Yes, but not on both the Boss and the brutes.
- Nerf summoning for all fiends. As proposed in the Fiendish Codex II, switch it for a feat or a new Special Ability. That way I maintain better control on the encounter.
- Nerf the Piscoloth’s 8 paralysis attacks, the party does not have a cleric and the Dragon Shaman is not yet able to remove this condition.
- Allow players to rebuild their characters and re-purchase their equipment in light of the Yugoloth’s characteristics.
- Drink less while DMing and have a good night sleep (or a good nap) before the game, I would have noticed the dissatisfaction sooner and would have been more flexible to address it faster.
- We all have to unlearn playing like we did with Iron Heroes (the last campaign) where PCs are more competent to deal with all kinds of encounters than ‘standard’ D&D
- The fight was too hard too soon in the campaign. The 1st encounter should have been with a large number of mooks (no brutes and no boss) to allow players to test their capabilities and experiment (and look damn cool doing it).
Post Mortem
What players liked
- The setup: Brining the fight to the fiend’s Homeworld.
- The Loot from the grateful elven priests
- The Dragon Shaman’s immunity to Paralysis
What players disliked
- Casters HATE grappling and Spell Resistance.
- The lousy feeling of braking a grapple only to be snatched by a 20′ long attack of opportunity in the same round.
- Spending an Action points only to fail
What’s next (Spoiler-free)
- Organize a revenge expedition to kill the fiends, giving all the necessary resource to allow the players to plan a kick ass retribution assault.
- Use the Elven leaders of Ptolus to bring the players together by financing the punitive expedition
- Tie in rapidly with the other non-fiend adventures I had planned.
- Consider the party as high-end 7th level characters and not stronger.
Happy B'day Shamus
Shamus Young of DM of the Ring fame turns 36 today.
Happy Birthday man! You created something really big and cool and we appreciate you doing it for us. I’m really curious about what’s coming next. I speculate that it will be a RPG satire (confirmed) but probably based on his own gaming photos instead of Screencaps.
Interplannar adventures
Warning, Spoilers for Monte Cook’s Ptolus d20 setting. Safe for my players to read.
I’ve been wishing to do a multiplanar campaign for a long time. A D&D 2nds edition was the period I had left that game for the crunchiness and detail of Gurps. So I missed out on Planescape, having touched it only in a A D & D demo at my FLGS and while playing Torment on my PCs (awesome game, but I hated real time RPGs back then).
My last campaign had a taste of plane hopping where we had this one session, quite like ‘The Truman Show’* , where the players were taken out of their world to actually see that it was a prison. My player’s reaction was so awesome that I was profoundly marked by that… and the idea has been bouncing in my head for a whole year.
However, by that time, we chose to move the game to Ptolus (we had purchased it). Of course, being the stickler for rules that I am, I chose to apply the setting as is, a prison plane where plane shifting is strictly prohibited. So I had to squelch my desire to have my players go plane hopping. (I since then integrated Ptolus in my Homebrewed world and did away with all that annoyed me in it: The Chaos Cults and the whole prison world thing).
But still when I started openly stating that I felt like we could move on to a new campaign, all my players chimed in that a Plane Hopping theme was way up there in their preference for a game. Side note: DMs (if any eventually read this stuff), you usually don’t get that kind of open feedback that easily with players. When you do get it, JUMP on it!
But being the somewhat inflexible thinker that I can be. I had always envision the planes as being something incredibly hostile and deadly. I mean the Nine Hells of Baator are full of devils and fire. The Abyss has countless billions of demons in it. How can a 5th level PC play in this? The only multiplanar adventures I had DMed were the 1st editions Queen of the Demonweb Pits (14th level adventure IIRC) and Throne of Bloodstone (25-100th level adventure) which strongly reinforced the idea. So up to recently, I imagined that a low-mid level PC showing up on the shores of the Styx would just be picked up by a Soul Collecting Fiend and the game would end there.
Now having spent the last few months reading on it all with a broader perspective, I finally understand that game-world consistency and Power-level economics are secondary in multi-planar games. Plane hopping can be the Cyberpunk of fantasy gaming** in that it’s all about the attitude and the flavor, not believability. It calls to the explorer-type players and the story-tellers that can recall invading Limbo and recovering a shard of the Chaos Stone to power the Staff of Freedom against the hordes of Rakalat’hon, the devil general currently rampaging through the Kingdoms in your homeworld. Powerful stuff if you ask me.
So game on friends, we’re going on a tour of the Cosmic Wheel!
*Thank you Mr. K. Dick, those drugs gave you wicked ideas.
** Well arguably, Steampunk is the equivalent, but in 1989, Planscape was TSR’s answer to Vampire the Maskarade that was all about attitude!
Recent DMing stuff from the Bloggoshere
Instead of writing new DMstuff, why not link to interesting things other people have to say on the subject of DMing?
Danny (Bartoneous) from Critical-hits talks about how to end a gaming session. I agree that Cliffhangers are a great way to end a D&D gaming night. I’ll further add* that Cliffhangers are sometimes hard to pull off because you either
- End the evening too early (thank god for Magic the Gathering!)
- Overshoot the session passed the group’s fatigue threshold (Bleary eyes and lack of commentary while rolling dice are a sign).
The Dead stop (stopping a game after a Boss fight for example) is also a nice way of getting closure. While Bartoneous does’t imply his group does it, a dead stop is a great way to insert an indeterminate time between 2 adventures. This lets PCs do out of camera stuff (like training, leveling up, buying gear, reporting back to patrons, etc).
Martin Rayla, from Treasure Table, discusses campaign drift. That’s when a campaign moves significantly and often away from it’s intended themes and crashes. Like most of Martin’s posts, his points are always simple and concise. This one: If it happens, talk it out with players, even if the drift is your own doing. I feel that’s probably what happened with out Iron Heroes game. I went really overboard making the campaign themes too complex and trying to fit too many things together while making my preparation simpler that it blew up in my face and robbed me of my enthusiasm about the whole thing. I plan on fishing for more light feedback by the players in between games (don’t worry, no 2 hour long post game feedback sessions on Friday nights).
Finally, Dante from StupidRanger, has a no-brainer that’s simple and effective. Listen to your players. Not the Give-them-everything-they-ask-for listen, but the pick-up-the-clues-you-dense-block-of-ego-granite listening. DMing is all about juggling a tons of stuff at a table surrounded by good friends. While you can’t give everyone all the attention they deserve as friends (treating a RPG game as a uniform group instead of individuals is another Blog topic), making a little extra effort to pick up on passive feedback is a key skill a good DM should work at. And I will work at that
*I mean, I need to add some value to ripping other’s people work no?
A campaign's 1st session
It’s getting nearer. We should be starting our new (last?) D&D 3.5 campaign next Friday night. Now one of the 5 players as already said he’d be missing, I so hope that no one else will be missing as I designed the 1st session based on the strength of the whole party. It’s not a big problem as I have at least one or two backup plans for this.
That being said, a campaign’s 1st session is one of the hardest to design as a DM. You want to present the players with a strong enough incentive for them to act as a team as soon as possible. I’m rather lucky because I have my player’s trust and they will not balk at some gentle Railroading to get things started.
Nevertheless the 1st session is critical. It needs to grab each player’s main interest in D&D and play on their preferences. I strongly believe it needs action for the players to react to instead of a passive situation where the players need to find the action themselves.
I also have done the Tavern scene to death in my 20 odd years of DMing. That’s why this week I’m going to do it In Media Res, i.e. the game will start with a combat, with the characters already in the action. Why are they here? What is the mission that brought them here? Who cares? You gotta survive this and worry about the rest later.
Also, it’s a great mechanistic approach to getting the feel for the character’s combat capabilities.
I’m really looking forward to have the characters meet the campaign’s bad guys!
Cheers!
D&D 4th Edition
There, they’ve finally done it. D&D 4th edition comes out next year (in May).
I’m really angry because I bought a shitload of D&D 3.0/3.5 books (I mean I have a whole bookcase full of them) and I know that most mechanics in them will become useless. I’m not saying Wizards is evil and money grubbing and I’m not saying I won’t buy it, I will… but still come on, I could have used one more year
However, Wizards promises easier Adventure design with web tools that will make available the contents of the book once you activate it on the web. Which speaks volumes to me. Yesterday I was designing the 1st adventure of our new campaign on a TiddlyWiki interface and realize how much work I have to do. You see, I don’t want this new campaign to be ‘just D&D’, I plan on using the Core Monsters as little as possible and throw as much new monsters as possible at my PCs. But non core monsters are not Open Material and therefore are not available as fully written stat blocs. So I need to recopy it all in the Wiki (because groping for books in the middle of a fight is not fun) and this is a huge time sink…
Anyway, as many of the ‘let’s not cry Apocalypse now’ school of thoughts, I’ll take a wait and see approach.
I’m still very much looking forward to our new game that starts next week.
