Articles by Matt Dukes
Vanir is the sort of man who has openly wondered aloud about his own armor class in front of his own grandmother. Despite this, he has still managed to somehow become both married and a father. By day, he develops web applications. By night, web applications develop him. In addition to his weekly column Dire Flailings, you can also find Vanir at Stupid Ranger, read his Google+ feed or follow @direflail on Twitter. I guess you could also e-mail him. If you had to.
Hold On Loosely, But Don’t Let Go
This model clearly demonstrates why it's always best to play D&D outside, preferably on pavement or some other surface whose maintenance you are not responsible for.
Have you ever played in a game with a really good DM? The kind where you’re engaged even when you’re not on the edge of your seat, there’s not a lot of bickering at the table over rules, and everybody talks about their adventures years later?
I really wanna be that guy. I’m not yet.
This quest has caused me a lot of soul-searching over this past year. I’ve run a respectable gauntlet of newbie mistakes. I’ve tried planning for every contingency only to find my players easily discovered the gaping cracks in my armor. I’ve tried bludgeoning my players with DM Fiat to make my plans work. I’ve tried emphatically cautioning them about doing that next thing under pain of death. (That’s a crowd favorite, by the way.)
I’ve been experiencing something completely bizarre in the campaign I’m running now. I put some pieces in place, establish a few locations that are relevant to that week’s story, and a basic premise to get the plot started. Then I just sort of sit back and see what happens.
I’m not going to lie to you. It’s completely terrifying. But it’s the kind of terrifying where the session has consistently been interesting and fun for me to run and I’m pretty sure my players were really into it too. From the very first night, it’s recaptured the magic I felt years ago during my favorite D&D campaigns. That’s a big deal for me. I haven’t had that feeling in a D&D game when I was behind the screen until now. Three sessions in, it’s still a joy, and it’s far more fun than stress. I hope it stays that way.
I think it will. I finally realized why I loved some of the campaigns I’ve played in: I was let loose. Our party was free to do pretty much whatever they wanted, and the situations we got into off the beaten path are the stories we tell now. I know why this campaign feels better to me now. I’m letting the PC’s do what they will. Even if it’s not what I had planned for. Even if it’s stupid. Even if it will probably result in their eventual dismemberment, death, and reanimation as a zombie.
In short: I am blessed with a group of wildly creative players who are working well together as a group and I have finally realized everything works better if I just get the hell out of their way.
The stories we’ll collectively tell are infinitely more entertaining than any narrative I’d force down their throats. And, looking back, I believe that’s what the really good DM’s I’ve had did for me. It completely changed the game for me. That’s what I want to do for my group and anybody else I DM for down the road.
Great, Kid! Don’t Get Cocky.
Of course, simply realizing that one should just roll with things as they happen in-game is a lot different than actually rolling with actual things. There is still preparation to be done, though not of the kind I had been accustomed to. There were improvisational skills to be honed. Courage-loins to be girded.
I knew I could improvise and roll with anything — and I do mean anything – based on our unique experiences in the Nightmare Realm last year. I just wasn’t sure if I could react to what the players did in a sensible way. As it happens, that wasn’t the issue. I can do that.
What I can’t do is names. I can’t come up with names. I can’t remember names. Either I forget to write down names, or I don’t want the players to know I spawned the NPC they’re talking to out of the aether so I can’t risk scribbling the name I came up with on a piece of paper. That would be a tell. Of course, the fact that all the names I come up with on the fly are variations on “Stug”, “Bibbler”, “Bubbly Gordon”, and/or “Reeb Heeberbeeb” is probably a pretty good tell as well.
Another tell: I’ve noticed that a good 75% of the NPC’s I’ve tried to play on the fly wind up being kindly old men. I’ve tried to play mean old Mr. Wilson to the players Dennis the Menace, but each time the gentle old codger that I am destined to become wants to come out and play a little early. The PC’s have been treated to tea once and cookies twice. Yes, I know old people do other stuff besides baking. I like cookies, OK?
I Accidentally The Whole Improv
I ran face first into another learning experience this past week. Chris Perkins wrote a fantastic article on DM improvisation two weeks ago, and I read it the morning before our D&D session and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk on good feelings. I can improv anything! My players will tell a grand story! Top of the world, Pelor!
This was also the day we had a new player join the campaign. Second session of any tabletop RPG ever, her first being one mostly-combat night of 4e with our group months ago.
(Yes, now is the appropriate time to wrinkle your noses in anticipation for the horrors to befall her.)
The plot of our campaign revolves around retrieving stolen items, and the party frequently finds themselves at the merchant that fenced these items. We’d never established who sold the items to this merchant. In fact, I’d described the thief as a shadowy figure and set it up so that I might introduce him later.
Our new player decided to play a rogue. She joins up, and the party decides to visit the merchant. I decide it’d be funny to have the merchant chatting this new person up as if she’s a regular. Instantly, the rest of the party starts getting suspicious and somebody wonders aloud if she’s the thief.
I get inspired. She’s definitely the thief. She just didn’t know it until now. I’m *Improvising*.
About fifteen seconds of deer-in-the-headlights from our new player later, I realize what I just did. The party, thinking I’d set this up beforehand, is grilling her like they’re getting paid per question.
I’d been trying to make a concerted effort up to this point in the campaign to try to let people do what they will, but this was different. She didn’t know most of the backstory leading up to any of this. She didn’t put herself in this situation, I did, and it didn’t look like much fun. So I called for a break and took our new player aside and briefed her on what was happening after apologizing profusely for being a dumbass. She took it very well, fortunately, and I only took mild damage to my face and arms.
In all seriousness, the thing that I regret doing here was damaging the trust my group has in me as a DM. I like to push the limits of this, mostly because I don’t know what’s going to blow up in my face yet, but I feel like people are going to be a lot more likely to have fun and let loose if they’re pretty sure I’m not going to put them on the spot. Well, I take that back a little. Putting people on the spot can yield some awesome and fun results. Putting a new person who has barely played the game on a giant “we’re playing Fiasco and I just set up a scene where I cut your legs off with a machete” spot was a really stupid idea. I wasn’t thinking, I got cocky, and I didn’t put my players before my crazy idea. It’s not something I plan to do again soon.
There’s No “I” In Team (Unless That “I” Stands For “Improv”)
Sometimes I think the Internets are stalking me, because after a couple days of kicking myself over putting our new player through Surprise Improv Hell, Steven Townshend writes this incredible article on group storytelling. Go read it. Right now. Stop reading this and go read that. Done? OK, I’ll continue.
The core premise of that article? When you play D&D, you’re all on the same improv team. You’re all working together to tell a great story. Even if your character would be a jerk in a given situation, you don’t throw the group under the bus.
I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen situations in D&D where I wish people understood this simple idea. Chaotic Neutral characters that do stupid things because they’re random? Paladins drawing their weapons and threatening other PCs who do things they perceive as evil acts? QUIT DOING THAT CRAP. You’re not helping to tell a story. You’re not helping the team, and you’re probably being a jerk. This stuff has always annoyed me, and until now I never had the right words as to why.
This is another game-changing concept for me. This is how I will try to run every game for the rest of my days.
Have I mentioned I’ve been seriously loving playing D&D lately?
Photo Credit
Do Gamer Dads Dream Of 2:1 Sheep?
MANLY ENOUGH FOR ANY INFANT.
Being a father to a little baby was cool. He was all cute and snuggly and I loved the first words and the first steps and all that stuff. I remember getting Sam a “Level 1 Human” creeper and a couple nerdy onesies before he was born. One of the few perks of babies not being able to talk is that you can dress them in whatever you want without protest. Consequently, my kid has unwittingly displayed in his short time on this planet countless slogans, concepts, and characters from many nerdly sources. (Including one Celestial Porpoise onesie I designed when Stupid Ranger first started, which raised a few family eyebrows despite a great deal of well-reasoned logic about its utter manliness.)
Does The Konami Code Count As Operant Conditioning?
One thing that’s always been lurking in the back of my mind is whether all this geeky stuff is just a weird mold that he’ll eventually break. I remember thinking, he’s two. That Mario shirt is cute, Sam can even say “Mawio” when he sees it, but he doesn’t have any attachment to that character like I do. Am I just filling up his head with a bunch of crap he’ll just dump and replace with something real to him?
Now, my boy Sam is 4, and we can have conversations about stuff and tell jokes to each other and share what happened that day and play all freaking day and HOLY CRAP. IT ROCKS. THUNDEROUSLY. These days, Sam knows what’s on his shirt. Boy, does he know. Don’t try to send that kid to school in an Autobot t-shirt if he has declared it Robot Taco Shirt Day. At least, if you don’t want a war on your hands. He is familiar with the source material for pretty much everything he wears that has an associated game or TV show.
My favorite thing to do with Sam right now, which should surprise no one, is playing lots of old NES games on the Wii. I’m pretty sure he can tell it’s an older game, mostly because he asks me “Daddy, is this game old?” Even so, he still giggles and smiles and loves playing. It’s still colorful, it has cool music that makes him dance, and the characters are recognizable to him (perhaps the sole benefit of Hollywood remaking freaking everything!). I know a big part of why he loves this is because he’s spending time with me.
It is really cool to be a 4 year old’s dad. You are frequently super awesome in their eyes. [Read the rest of this article]
Pelor’s Florist
The natural world is full of wonders. That’s why we eat everything in it, and sometimes it eats us. The gods, being gods, take it upon themselves to mess with it when they get bored. This can go really wrong and then you get things like banana fungus, leprosy, Nickelback, and the Twilight series of books. Other times, it’s simple and beautiful, and you never even know it’s there. This is how the donut was born, and also the sweet-smelling Pelorbell flower.
The first Pelorbell flowers came to the Forgotten Realms long before anyone can remember, and only appear often enough that their legend continues. It’s said the flowers weren’t discovered, but rather the answer to a prayer — specifically, one about not being consumed alive by the undead.
By day, Pelorbells appear to be large, bright, white sunflowers. Their smell is sweet, not unlike lilac, and is said to gently calm the hearts of those nearby. By night, the flowers wither noticeably, to the point where it is difficult to tell if they still live. That is, unless they are exposed to light. Then, they bloom even larger than before, and radiate waves of their own silvery light.
No ordinary light is this, for it seems crafted for the express purpose of eradicating the unnatural damned. Those pure of intention who bathe in this light find their wounds healed and steel in their spine. Undead creatures, on the other hand find their rotting flesh burning off into oily smoke and their spines lying on the ground.
It’s unknown if the flowers are the product of powerful magic or if they are the physical manifestation of a god’s will, but their effects are potent indeed. One or two of these flowers planted outside a house shine sufficient light to keep its occupants safe for what would otherwise be a long night of horrors. The thought of yards and fields planted with Pelorbells is enough to give pause to even the most bloodthirsty dead-army-wielding necromancer.
In my D&D game last week, our intrepid adventuring party encountered just such a field (and undead army). And if, like them, you didn’t realize until it was far too late the lengths I will go to to make a Plants vs. Zombies joke….. then Pelor protect you.
Photo Credit
30 Ranks In Use Trope
We’ve all been there. The campaign has slowed to a crawl, morale is low, and players are getting more and more physically violent with every session. Soon, the blood-harvest comes. As a DM, you already know none of this is your fault. However, as the sovereign of your gaming group it is your right, nay, holy duty to return the light of goodness, truth, and the Gygaxian Way to your table. Allow me to assist.
Spunky Sunshine Mephit
Some DM’s, myself included, find a familiar albatross around their neck in the form of the same tired old plots week after week. There’s nothing worse than having the D&D equivalent of Spaghetti Thursdays at your gaming table.
What your game needs is a little help… or should I say, a little helper?
One commonly used tactic in many popular TV shows over the years is to add a cute and sassy kid to the mix to freshen things up. Let’s call this kid Cousin Olefar.
Always brave and daring, but just too darn spunky to have any regard for the well-being of any creature, Cousin Olefar can brighten up even the dullest combats. Now every combat has an exciting secondary objective!
Just imagine how the players would feel if they let the cute little bugger die.
Jumping The Bulette
Your players are probably bored with the standard fare of mystery, exploration, exciting combat, and deep roleplay. They can get that anywhere. You should give them something cooler. Remember the early seasons of Happy Days when it was boring and about stupid stuff American life and emotions? Remember when all the girls got anachronistic perms and Fonzie started getting superpowers he could invoke with a simple “AYYYY?”
That’s what you can do for your campaign. It works, too. Historically, the best campaigns are the ones where about halfway through, you drop everything and decide that you already know what’s going to happen. You tease your players incessantly about it for about 2 weeks beforehand, even dropping little hints about “wormsign” and “the likes of which God has never seen.” Everything leads up to a super exciting moment that you’ve been dreaming of for so long, and it’s gonna be so cool, and you don’t even need game mechanics you just make it happen.
When everybody sees the mage (with a brand new perm) riding bareback atop a half-lich bulette tarrasqueomancer through no real conscious choice of his own after an unlikely but charming sequence of events, they’ll all understand it was worth it.
Then you blow up the PC’s lair and have a guy from Murphy Brown chase them through time. Aww yeah.
Fuggedaboutit
Another fantastic TV trope you can use in your campaign is the old “amnesia caused by a bonk on the head” trick. I recommend you invoke this every time a player takes damage or fails a DEX check.
No metagaming, players! You’ll need to take another bonk on the head to remember who you are. Also, if a monster uses Claw / Claw / Bite, you may think of it as Forget / Remember / Forget.
Freaky Friday Night Magic
How many times over the years in movies and TV has a magic spell been cast or a lever been pulled causing characters to swap bodies? Countless. And it’s a thing of beauty every single time. Every DM should do this to their players at least twice in a given campaign.
Fun fact: skills, spellcasting ability, and weapon/armor proficiencies don’t transfer along with a person’s consciousness. Just their voice, memories, and a schedule that really isn’t conducive to having another person at the wheel much less a dwarf NOW I’LL NEVER GET MARRIED.
It’s science.
Quest For The Closet Of Elemental Water
PC’s never fear death anymore. Not with healing surges and resurrection and rings of regeneration all ready and waiting to save their imaginary butts.
Solving this issue means gleaning dark knowledge from the vilest master of terror that ever whitened a hair or startled an innocent puppy — Wakko Warner. To know true fear, a PC needs to be faced with a fate worse than death. A potty emergency.
Everybody always wants to know the secret of making 4e combat run fast and exciting. If every PC has an overfull bladder and cursed pants they can’t remove until they find and defeat the end boss of the dungeon, this problem is now officially solved.
Be warned, there are some minor mechanical issues to work out if you decide to go this route. For instance, who can say if the PC’s should be making Fort checks, Will checks, or a combination of the two to avoid certain embarassment and chafing. Regardless, I recommend making this check every 5 minutes of actual time, starting the DC at 0 and raising it by 5 after each check.
Bonus Tip: in the original Oriental Adventures book from TSR, there is a Wu Jen spell called Urine to Acid. Use this in the event that your players still fail to become excited at these new developments.
Photo Credit
Special thanks to TvTropes.org (especially their “Random” button) for all the article ideas and for straight up murdering my productivity for many years.
And yes, you can probably blame Chatty for this too.
Divine Divinity: Dividends Of The Divination Divide
D&D’s been around so long that clerics and paladins are a normal part of most fantasy settings. Divine magic in any setting has a great many implications — most of which involve causing players to get into stupid arguments.
I Wish I Could Turn Stupid People
In the real world, people pray to their deity of choice all the time. Whether it has any effect is the subject of intense theological debate and many wars throughout the course of history. The presence of divine magic in a setting means that gods definitely exist and that they will answer prayers. If you ask a cleric how she knows her god is real, she can say “You remember how your bones magically unbroke themselves and you quit bleeding to death? THAT.” If you ask a paladin how he knows his god is real, he can say “You remember when that vampire burst into flames when I smote him righteously in his stupid fangs? THAT.”
A person who has seen the direct effects of a deity’s influence won’t be wondering if their god exists. They have proof. However, there is still the opportunity to wonder if one is playing for the right team. What if a person finds the things their god asks of them to be immoral? What if someone thinks another god will treat them better? A lot of fantasy settings go polytheistic (many gods), so there are a lot of higher powers to choose from. That being said, it may not easy for the average person trying to change faith or renounce the gods, especially if that person’s family or village all support that god.
It stands to reason then, that a crisis of faith of this nature is absolutely catastrophic to a divine-powered character. For starters, there’s not going to be any more divine juice coming. Magic notwithstanding, a character whose resolve used to be backed by the force of a god is suddenly going to find only the otherwise unsupported steel in their own spine, and their confidence and morale are likely to be shaken until they can learn to deal with that.
Oh yeah. There’s also the whole “making a god angry” thing, and I’d imagine there are a few gods out there that might take being abandoned by one of their elite devout as a bad thing. Gods like curses. Mythology is littered with poor souls that ran afoul of the gods. Littered, I say!
Prostrate yourselves! BZZZTALAALKS, the lord of Sperm and Hornets is come unto your world!
Alignment Is Evil
I’ve never been particularly fond of alignment (mostly due to the amount of heated arguments I’ve seen over its interpretation), and while I think it might be useful to a DM as guidance for how to play a monster or NPC, I think it has no place on a player character sheet. People aren’t computer programs with set responses. They’re flawed, nuanced individuals who change over time. Their idea of good and evil may well be different than another person’s, and very few people will define themselves as evil.
It’s for these reasons that I hope game mechanics that deal with alignment go the way of the THAC0 in D&D Next. If you have two people with opposing views that each would consider good and the other’s evil, what then would a Detect Evil spell do? Detect Opposing Viewpoints? Does your whole party glow subtly, the marbled nuance of their moral fibre visible in the darkness?
There will need to be other options made available in their place, though. Detect Danger gets into Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses territory. Detect Malice might work but you’d have to make something angry at you and then it usually becomes evident. Detect Enemies is what this spell is usually after. It’s X-ray specs combined with a lie detector made out of a sledgehammer. Of course, since you’re receiving a power from a god, the god could let you detect whatever the hell they felt like. I personally like the idea of a Detect Nonbelievers variant of the spell. Or they could just mess with you. Detect Pollen? Detect Sharp Cheeses?
An interesting sidebar: the average joe in a fantasy realm probably won’t know the difference between arcane and divine magic (especially in a setting where magic is really rare to begin with). Mages could trick people into thinking their deeds were backed by the force of a god. And what if a divine character suddenly found out the powers they’d received from their god ever since childhood were actually psionic or a natural talent for sorcery?
Let Your Conscience Be Your Spirit Guide
At this point even I am starting to think I’ve loaded a shotgun with Divine Character Thought Pellets and fired it skyward, so here’s my (somewhat dubious) point:
Divine characters are fueled by pure belief. It’s interesting sometimes to think how much a character truly believes in their god’s ideals and how deeply this would affect this kind of character. Their belief in their god, their ideals, their confidence in what their doing would shape their very identity because to waver means to fall. But that doesn’t mean they’re all the same.
As usual, I have roleplaying-shaped ulterior motives behind my article. With all the recent discussion on Mike Mearls’ latest L&L column about clerics (and by “discussion”, I mean people angrily yelling “HEALBOT” into the heavens), it’s clear that people have a few defined ideas about what clerics and paladins should and should not be. One of the things that has me very excited about D&D Next is that the design team seems committed to making a system that allows you play whatever you want, whether it’s a traditional “mace & shield” cleric or “I get a horse and +5 holy avenger” paladin, or something new.
People are complex. Religion is complex. People’s feelings about religion are crazy complex. There’s conflict and drama all over the place. That means there is a wide variety of things you can create a character from, and million more things you could try when roleplaying that character. There is room in the imagination for infinite gods, and those gods can each grant different powers or demand something different from their followers. Even then, it’s up to the player to determine how his or her PC chooses to worship. Of course, in D&D, it helps the DM’s sanity if you have specific powers backed by game mechanics, but for several editions now clerics could choose spells or domains or feats or skills that made them different from any other Generic Cleric™. Paladins can still believe very strongly in gods and causes that are not Lawful Good, and I see no reason why a character’s personal code of ethics couldn’t be peppered with some nice habañero chaos.
For my part, I will be petitioning the team at WotC to make sure the default setting for D&D Next includes gods in charge of:
- Habanero
- Bacon
- Pigtails
- Marching Order
- Eczema
- Rock
Wish me luck. Or pray to whatever gods govern tabletop roleplaying games. Doesn’t matter to me. Crom gives a man but two things at birth: a blog and the courage to post in it. And if he won’t help me, then to hell with him!
Photo Credit
Group Development Inception
It was then that Skyden decided he would NEVER take second watch. Because he was an elf, and it didn't make mathematical sense for him to do so because he only had to go into a restful trance for four hours.
“You all meet in a tavern.”
We’ve all played in a campaign that started like this. Some DM’s will just ask for names. Other put it as “who are you and why are you here?”, hoping to grease the backstory wheels a bit. This is where you find out who’s really into backstory and roleplaying, who wants to get their axes bloody as soon as possible, who’s just along for the ride, and who wants to pickpocket someone in the first fifteen seconds of the campaign because they rolled a rogue.
The first night of a D&D campaign is a very strange phenomenon. I don’t know too many other places that an entire room full of people who have known each other for decades can feel uncomfortable around all their new coworkers. Most groups go under the assumption that the other adventurers can be trusted, but those who like to roleplay may not make that assumption.
Learning How To Make Camp
There’s always friction when a new group starts. They even have fancy theories and models for this kind of thing. Tuckman’s stages of group development suggest there are four stages to group development:
- Forming
- Storming
- Norming
- Performing
In a nutshell, groups form (1). There’s friction (2) until leaders emerge and they all figure out how to work together (3). Sometimes, they figure it out really well and go into super-awesome mode (4). Sometimes things will change, and sometimes they regress and the process starts back at (2).
In a D&D party, these can manifest themselves in combat, or in deciding marching order or the watch order at camp, or even deciding who speaks for the party during roleplay. There’s another layer to this, as well. Your D&D group — comprised of all the real live people who brought all their books and dice — goes through all these phases too. The extent to which they are separate depends upon each player and their own ability to distinguish between and/or roleplay the two.
Of course, I’m not suggesting the PCs have minds of their own or anything silly like that, nor am I suggesting players can’t distinguish fantasy from reality. I don’t need to go back to the padded room. What I am suggesting is that an adventuring party’s development is going to be affected by the development of the group of players. I sincerely doubt you’ll find a Performing adventuring party with Storming players. You’ll find them spending an entire session arguing over the watch order at camp. Not that I’m bitter.
Storming, Norming, Performing, Cheating, Skipping?
This past week, my group started a new campaign, and we tried starting things out a little differently. For starters, the PCs were members of the city guard instead of being random adventurers arbitrarily dropped into a setting. We also rolled characters starting at level 3. This was for a couple reasons. A few players wanted to try a new class and wanted to do a little more than just dip their toes in for the first few sessions. We also did it for my own convenience in setting up the campaign. I wanted to avoid the “you meet in a tavern” scenario and give the PCs a reason to have worked together for a short while.
Something really cool started happening right away with the group. Given the knowledge that their characters were already comfortable with their surroundings and with each other, the players just started adlibbing. References to previous events that never happened were common. Friendly crap-giving of the sort one might give their work friends ensued. There was a question at one point as to who was in command, and (after a quick out-of-character discussion) the fighter was nominated and everyone thereafter deferred to him, called him “chief”, and acted like it had been this way for years. The characters were more alive in the first hour of this campaign than they ever were in anything I’d run before.
I’d love to blame this on my superior DMing skills, but I honestly think two things happened. The PCs got to completely skip over Storming and started out Norming. (Do groups get “Norming” at level 3?) Watching this unfold was crazy fun.
More importantly, I think my D&D group figured out either Norming or Performing. I don’t think this is particularly far-fetched considering we’ve been together a little over a year, we have some very good roleplayers, and very little group drama. I couldn’t be happier.
No matter what happens, we had lightning in a bottle for a night, and I hope it sticks around.
Photo Credit (storm)
Xzibit meme by memegenerator.net
One Hundred Monkeys, One Hundred Typewriters, One Hundred Wands Of Magic Missile
Me, several times a day. That's right, I'm a werechicken. You wanna make something of it?
As some of you are no doubt aware, WotC has once again opened the window for article pitches to Dungeon and Dragon. For the first time in my life, I have decided to submit some stuff. As I have been writing about roleplaying games for nearly 5 years now, and with the recent success in this arena of several of my esteemed blog-tribe fresh in my mind, one might think I would be overconfident. One would be crazy wrong.
To be perfectly frank, I’m freaking terrified. Imagine being a nerdling of 13 winters, reading your favorite magazines every month – Dungeon and Dragon. The wild creativity. The enhancements to the game you play and think about and breathe every day. All the cool art. It’s the late 80′s. This is the only D&D/fantasy humor you regularly see. A quarter-century of winters later, I stand at their very gates, and I am to say what?
I’m here?
I can do this too?
Please?
Part of my fears stem from the idea that nothing I come up with will be original enough. So many decades of fantasy have come before me, and WotC’s editors have surely seen everything before. What could I possibly have to add?
I’m much better at fluff than I am crunch, and they’re going to want stats and maps and game mechanics. Can I get it together?
I can write, but can I write professionawesomeal?
Even if I have a good idea, can I distill it into a pitch that isn’t 2000 words long requiring a flowchart and interpretive dance?
…
You know what? F*** it. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing this anyway. [Read the rest of this article]
Paragon Wants, Epic Needs
Doing work for a client seems on its face a straightforward transaction. The client says what they want, and the professional they’ve hired performs the work. In some fields, this holds true. Specifications are put forth and followed. Job done, Cold Ones opened, feet up on the couch. If there’s a snag in the plans, most people will grumble at a plumber, carpenter, or architect — but ultimately it’s hard to argue with “your 6′ bathtub will not fit in a 5′ area” or “do you really want a 6′ square living room?”.
Hopefully, these problems have been identified while still on paper. It’s a lot costlier to go back, undo things, and then figure out some way to salvage things in a mostly-correct (read: passable) way. Experienced craftsmen have seen a lot of these types of things, and can plan to avoid them. They know a lot of ways to do their job well that the layperson doesn’t. Rooms are designed to be comfortable and space-efficient. Walls and floors are designed to be sturdy and flexible. Plumbing is designed to last a long time. (Admittedly, I really wish this hypothetical plumber was around with my home was constructed.)
The Plight Of The Creative
Doing client work in a creative field is much the same way, except many clients tend to view it differently. If you know any web developers or graphic designers, you’ve no doubt heard their particular repertoire of “Clients From Hell” stories. These people are no different from any other, except they tend to be some combination of clueless, under pressure, and/or completely morally bankrupt.
The first two, cluelessness and pressurization, are understandable. I’ve been in many a situation when I’ve been handed an impossible situation and flatly told to get it done, and I bear the shame of many hasty and boneheaded decisions. If I’d been hiring people to do the things I couldn’t, those may have qualified me for Client From Hell status. Cluelessness is even easier to understand. Techies, designers, and artists have a tendency to do things those outside their field don’t understand. (That’s why they’re being hired.) That also means it’s hard for the average Joe to wrap their head around a web developer’s priorities, or to place value on the things a designer does. Worse, sometimes these skills are trivialized and the client thinks anybody with a copy of Frontpage or Photoshop can get by. Concerns from creatives are frequently misunderstood, ignored, or met with hostility. It is not much fun.
Communication: Minmaxing For Social People
When people hire other people, it’s frequently because they have some sort of need or pain they want to address. One of the most important skills for anybody who does client work is communication. You need to be able to hear what your client is saying and apply your knowledge and skills to provide a solution for them. Sometimes, you realize what they’re asking for isn’t what they need. That’s when it really gets interesting. I mean that in several senses of the word. They might think you’re awesome and let you save the day. They might also throw a fit if you need more time and money to do it, or just fire you because you’re going off their original plan. This is not much fun either.
I’m not exactly sure when I realized this in my career, but one of the keys to succeeding in getting the client what they need instead of what they want is salesmanship. I worked at a Radio Shack for a year when I was a teenager, and I hated it. I didn’t like selling, I didn’t like feeling like I was tricking people, I didn’t like any of it. This is not what I am talking about. It’s about being confident about your ideas and infecting other people with that same passion so they believe in it too. I suck at this, and I wish I’d worked on it a lot more when I was younger. Accursed social skills!
The Herculean Path Of D&D Next
Some of you may be wondering at this point if this is some sort of extended April Fool’s Day joke where I write about how to sell yourself to freelance clients. I assure you, we are all done with our April’s Foolery for the year. I am, finally, working my way around to my thoroughly game-and-nerd-related point.
This is the job WotC faces right now with D&D Next.
The specifications on the project are loose. The game has to work well, yet “feel like D&D”. And yet, with many editions and 40 years behind it, D&D is a lot of different things to a very disparate group of people.
WotC’s client right now is a thousand-headed hydra. It’s us. We’re like thunder-mecha-hyper-double-octuple-mirror-image-garlic Tiamat.
And unfortunately some of us are Clients From Hell. Don’t believe me? Some among us get really angry and make wild assumptions about things we don’t know much about (like D&D Next). Enough of us even made a game company change an ending we didn’t like.
Their job right now is twofold. First, to make a game that works. Just going with one way or one edition’s methodology won’t do, so they’re trying to make a system that can accommodate being whatever we want it to be. This seems unattainable to me unless they accomplish the second goal: that of getting people to believe in it as much as they do.
It’s here I worry a little bit. WotC’s being absolutely fantastic about asking us what we want. But, once again, that’s like asking multiple-adjectives Tiamat what it wants. I hope somewhere along the way with all these surveys and the upcoming playtesting that they will correctly determine what we need (whatever that may be) – and that we’re open to seeing it.
Our job for D&D Next, as I see it, is to make sure we express our wants and needs to WotC in a way they can process. For the moment, that means being spoon-fed bits of info and providing little bits of input as requested. Angry manifestos on forums are the realm of Clients From Hell. They are no fun.
Let’s not be that.
Photo Credit
Golden Oldie – A Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Preview
ID: May Parker (secret)
Affiliations
Solo d8, Buddy d10, Team d6
Distinctions
Herald Of Galactus, Little Old Lady, Always Worrying About Poor Peter
Power Sets
The Power Cosmic
Cosmic Blast d12, Godlike Strength d12, Godlike Durability d12, Godlike Speed d12, Superluminal Flight d12, Telepathy d10, Telekinesis d10, Intangibility d10, Transmutation d10, Godlike Durability d12, Godlike Senses d12, Time Travel d10
SFX: Multipower. Use two or more The Power Cosmic powers in a single dice pool at -1 step for each additional power
Limit: Galactus’s Whim. Shutdown The Power Cosmic if Galactus wills it.
Limit: He’s A Menace. Gain a PP to step up Emotional Stress inflicted by Spider-Man doing something misunderstood.
Specialties
Cosmic Master, Baking Master, Knitting Master
Milestones
You Get A Big Delight In Every Bite
1 XP when you bake something.
3 XP when you convince Peter or Galactus that he really should eat something.
10 XP when you discover a golden food source tasty and plentiful enough to sate even the dread and mighty Eater of Worlds or discover that your darling Peter is that awful Spider-Man.
History
May Parker was a sweet old lady who lived a very happy life with her husband Ben. The couple cared for their nephew Peter after his parents died. Then Peter had an origin story that resulted in Ben’s death and his becoming Spider-Man. For years, it was thought that Aunt May’s heart would explode if she ever found out about her nephew’s second job.
One day, Peter took May and his girlfriend Mary Jane to a theatre and promptly ditched them to go do superhero stuff. As it happened, the Fantastic Four was sitting nearby and were having trouble figuring out how to simultaneously go save the world and find childcare for young Benjamin RIchards. May overheard their problem and kindly offered to watch the child. The Invisible Woman was justifiably creeped out, but Peter (as Spider-Man) showed up to give his official endorsement (which May didn’t like).
All the superhero-types went off to do some stuff, and May is walking around with Benjamin in a parking lot, and Galactus randomly shows up. He says he is weak, and Benjamin is powerful and he will help him reach his full potential. So he blasts some Power Cosmic on him, and apparently May is having none of this so she jumps out in front. Instead of being reduced to crispy old lady bits, she becomes Golden Oldie, Herald of Galactus.
May then uses the Power Cosmic to break into a snack shop so Benjamin can give Galactus some Twinkies. Then apparently she’s just not interested in the whole childcare bit anymore and she takes off into space to go find Galactus some more grub. Then she almost gets into a fight with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man over a planet-sized Twinkie. But he’s cool with it, and Galactus gets his nom on.
Then May wakes up, and it was all a dream. Except it totally wasn’t.
Art by Brian Patterson of d20Monkey. All characters © & ™ 2012 Marvel & Subs. Heroic Roleplaying and Cortex Plus ™ 2012 Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd.
How Economics Ruined My Gaming Joie De Médiocre
A few weeks ago, I had an odd conversation with one of the guys from my gaming group. We were discussing Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, and he was talking about how much he loved it, and I was discussing how much I didn’t. At one point, he pauses for a moment, and asks something to the effect of “Matt, what’s the last game you actually really liked?”
I had to think about it a minute. Which was bad, because it sort of proved his point.
This took me aback. Not like, kind of aback where you can right yourself and you’re OK again. Like “I’m looking up at the sky and someone has tied me to a pickup truck and is dragging me away” aback. What the hell? I’m not the Angry Videogame Nerd. I’m not Yahtzee. I love games. Games make me happy, not angry.
Right?
The game that first popped to mind that I really liked and had played semi-recently? Dragon Age II. No shocker there. I’m a story junkie, and BioWare does that well. Portal, Bastion, and Batman: Arkham City also made the list.
That’s why I was extremely surprised that I didn’t care for Star Wars: The Old Republic. [Read the rest of this article]
