Primal/Within Chronicles: City of the Overmind, Part 2
See part 1 here.
Burning Dungeon & Wheel Dragons
As Wednesday night was ticking by, a dangerous new idea about the way to run a D&D adventure came up…
You see, like many gamers unused to indie RPG designs, I read Mouse Guard with voracity but finished it with the feeling that while I had likely touched game design genius, I had absolutely no idea how to run the damn thing. (I’m exaggerating… somewhat).
The one part about Mouse Guard that really blew my mind was the way adventures were designed (I assume that this also applies, by extension, to Burning Wheel, which is the engine MG is based on). A 4 hour Mouse Guard adventure fits on 1 sheet of paper. The trick to that is that each adventure has a mission and the players are required to come up with personal goals that will, at least tangentially, move the story toward achieving the mission.
Play is achieved by setting out a simple scene where some sort of skill/ability roll is called for to allow PCs to achieve their goals. On a success, the scene moves to the next one but on a failure, the GM is free to add a complication to make the scene ‘more interesting’ or give the PCs a success but impose a negative condition on one or more PCs (Tired, Sick, Injured, Angry, etc).
There’s more to Mouse Guard than that, but these ‘Goal driven scenes’ and ‘Failure = complication’ concepts lit up a fire in my usually dormant Game Designer boiler…
There’s a method to my madness, behold!
What if… I was to replace minor quests with PC-specific goals that are chosen by the players at the start of an adventure?
Thus, each player would chose a goal that is related to the major quest (the game’s mission), either to help achieving it, to explore the adventure’s story in more detail or to help develop a character’s backstory more?
Now instead of having City of the Overmind be a site-based or event-based adventure (both requiring me to create scenes), why not have a goals-driven adventure based on a mission and the city’s map I drew?
I would asks players what goals they wish to work on first, then I would assign a complexity for attaining these goals. Each goal would set the basis for a freeform skill challenge. Each success that need to be rolled becomes a mini-scene to play out with the PCs, including player and DM narratives.
In other words, in a scene, players would describe what they do to progress toward their goals and I would do my usual job of bringing the scene to life. Then a skill check would be rolled based on what feels most natural for all. On a success: we describe the success and move forward to next sub-scene (or attain the goal).
But here is where it gets real interesting. On a failure, I would introduce a complication. For example, I could say that the PCs were spotted by the Overmind’s goons and I could either create a Chase skill challenge, or chose from my Depth of Madness encounters that are already prepped and make a fight.
In that sense, I would stop using the 3 strikes mechanic of skill challenges. If players fail their rolls, they get more/harder challenges to deal with. If they overcome the complication/challenge, they get to move to the next scene, regardless of the number of failed skill rolls.
Of course, I would award treasures based on the completion of goals…
It worked wonderfully on paper. I could sense deep in my guts that I was on the verge of a breakthrough in terms of adventure design, minor quests and skill challenge mechanics.
I just needed to validate this feeling in the arena of Actual Play…
Info dump Warning! The Warden Priest’s Tower
I knew I could not send my players blind into such a new way of playing. I needed to immerse them rapidly in the setting and give them all the info they needed so they could take the reins of the adventure from my hands and go.
Not being one to let much to chance, I had prepared the floor and built in some contingencies. First, I told Yan about my plan for the game. Not the content, but the whole Goal-to-Skill-Challenge to Failure to Complication thing. I wanted to know if he “got” what I wanted to do or if the whole thing was just my creative madness drowning common sense.
After wrapping his mind around the concept, he got it all right. I knew that I could trust him to act as a ‘change agent’ in the group later when I made the pitch. Just in case, I also had a contingency should players feel too uncomfortable with the change or were too tired to understand all my excited gibberish.
The first scene had several goals:
- Introduce the new setting through vivid descriptions
- Give the PCs a nearby ally and a home base so they could anchor themselves in an otherwise hostile environment.
- Share the city’s map with the players to help them plan
- Give them the adventure’s 2 missions
- Find a way to enter the Overmind’s Castle
- (Optional) Recover the 4 parts of the Overmind’s key and find out what it can be used for.
I described the city (imagine a ruined Erelhei-Cinlu, plus add a huge portal to the Far Realm and a dozen of floating, insubstantial Lovecraftian horrors ‘haunting’ the city’s roof) , the story of their Warden Cleric ally, his cult infiltrating the whole city and the political situation of the city. Once I was done, I explained my new approach to the game and asked them for the goals.
With gentle nudges from Yan and myself, they eventually formed a set of 6 goals that were… just plain awesome:
- Math (Corwin Sorceror of Chaos): I’m going to go and get the 4 parts of the key. It’s too crazy, it just might work!
- Yan (Nanoc, Barbarian): I’m going to investigate the city to find the probable locations of the key parts.
- Stef (Rocco, Rogue): I’m going to break the Overmind’s hold on the city’s citizen and end this fascist regime!
- Eric (Fangs, Shifter): I will destroy the city’s Vats and put a stop to the Overmind’s mutations of hapless monsters
- Franky (Dworkin, Shaman): I will bind a nature Spirit near the destroyed Vats to prevent the Overmind from reclaiming them and help protect the citizens.
- Mike (Usul, Invoker): I will bring the Gods’ influences (and Kord’s in particular) back to this city after the Overmind’s control is broken.
Chatty: So Mike, what you’re saying is that you want the citizen to be freed of the control of the Overmind… so they can become followers of the Gods?
Mike (showing a pained look): Essentially…. yes (smirking).
Chatty: Excellent!
I really didn’t expect as much. What I absolutely loved about those goals was that they came from the players, they weren’t scenes that I implanted in their minds, the train track had ended some time ago and this was all virgin territory for everyone at the table.
Those goals were beacons telling me what each player wanted to do in the game! All I did was connect a few goals (thanks to the 5X5 method) by putting a few coincidences here and there. For example, I put one key part in the Vats.
What was really funny is that Yan noticed me doing that and mimicked someone knotting some ropes together, but I think that this is a crucial part of the model as it allows goals to be tackled together and creates a more cohesive adventure.
So we set out to play this game out… I really was curious to see how it would play out.
Up next: So Chatty, are you ever going to tell us if your method works or not?
Image Credit: Archaia Studios
Primal/Within Chronicles: City of the Overmind, Part 1
After a few months of rest our heroes are called to save citizens of the City Within from the monstrous tentacles of a clutch of aberrant creatures. Following clues left behind by the monsters and the ever elusive ‘Master’, the party prepares to use thier recently acquired teleportation lore to follow the monsters to their source deep in the Dungeon and destroy one of the it’s most critical Nexus.
This series of game report will be different. I usually tell you the story of the game, peppered with my DMing calls and challenges. This time, I ended up using such a radically different structure for the adventure that I will summarize the whole story first and then tell you how I built/ran the session.
The City of the Overmind, Session 1 Redux
The PCs teleported on top of as ruined tower overlooking an eerie ruined city of the underdark. Far from being deserted, the whole city was under the control of a totalitarian and extremely insane Mind Flayer known as The Overmind. The PCs found an ally from the City Within and learned that the Dungeon’s nearest Nexus was likely found in the Castle of the Overmind. In its craziness, the mindflayer distributed 4 pieces of a magical key that could supposedly open the way to the castle and the Nexus. The party’s ally had one such key.
After some planning, the party decided upon an elaborate plan to retrieve the keys, disrupt the influence of the Overmind over the city, establish new Divine and Spirit foci to ‘convert’ the City, and sabotage some installations to create a diversion to facilitate entry into the Castle.
The heroes initiated the plan and obtained the likely locations of the other 3 keys from an ally hiding out in the city’s Slave Pens. They tracked one in the Market Quarter and forcefully obtained it from a reclusive and germophobe Cambion merchant.
They then set out to get the second key from the Overmind’s Re-education camps by infiltrating them from the Sewers. However our heroes got caught by a patrol of Overmind servants in the sewers. They dispatched the patrol but met with strange parasitic critters that tried to eat their brains trough their faces!
That’s the session’s story in a nutshell. Of particular interest is the ‘Elaborate Plan’ part of the story because this whole thing up there was driven by the players themselves… I didn’t prepare any of those scenes except the first one.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me rewind to the week before the game…
When Necessity and Creativity Collide
As I started planning for the game, I knew that I wanted to have the players invade the Primal Dungeon and dispatch one of the Nexus. In fact, I told the players that our next ‘Season’ of D&D would be about busting 5 or 6 of the Dungeon’s most important points of control in order to cut off all the denizens from their master and plan the obliteration of the imprisoned Primordial when they reached Epic levels.
I wanted the next adventure to have a theme about the Far Realm (D&D’s equivalent of Lovecraft’s R’yleh) and aberrant creatures. As I brainstormed, I had the idea of a monstrous city, built on the ruins of an abandoned Drow city (the Drow were severely shafted when I destroyed my campaign world at the end of my 2007-2008 season in order to reboot it for 4e).
I also doodled the city and placed various elements in it. I had an old temple to Lolth taken over by the City’s leader, a Mind-Flayer. Then I imagined that the city would be ruled like a fascist state, banners everywhere (using a symbol the PCs would recognize), crowds listening to speeches, Foulspawns acting like Secret Police, thugs and enforcers, monsters being kidnapped to be conscripted into the Dungeon’s armies, forced into slavery, brainwashed into joining the street enforcers….. or worse… Sent to the Vats for reconstruction…
I rapidly realized that I didn’t have an adventure in front of me, but a whole other chapter of the Primal/Within campaign setting.
Of course, time was slipping by, it was Wednesday night and I had no story yet. I quickly created an entry scene for the adventure. The PCs would teleport at the top of a ruined tower overlooking the city (setting my players up for description of the city in all it’s glory and the opened portal to the Far Realm sitting on top of the Overmind’s castle). The tower would be held by a City Within knight who lost all his comrades in a disastrous raid. The knight converted to a Warden and Cleric of both the Great Kodiak Spirit (to link him to Franky’s PC) and the trapped goddess of Civilization.
I then imagined that the Knight had created a secret society of converted monsters that spread out in the city, trying to subvert the Overmind’s influence…
Then I stopped myself. I now had a novel, not a game, there was nothing for the PCs to do other than ‘Go in Castle and bust the Mind Flayer’s face’.
I was getting desperate, I needed a plot and I wanted to avoid the ‘first idea syndrome’!
First Idea Syndrome: When you need to come up with a solution to a problem and you are pressed for time, the first idea that’s proposed will be taken as the best idea, regardless of its actual worth. I’ll write about this more in a future post.
I already had a Dungeon magazine adventure called ‘Depth of Madness’ that featured a full dungeon filled with aberrant. My first idea had been to take it as is. but there was way too many fights and not enough story for me. Yet, with game day coming fast, it was getting more and more tempting to run it as is.
Then my eyes fell on my copy of the Mouse Guard RPG and a second, far more dangerous idea formed:
What if I took Mouse Guard’s task resolution structure where failures lead to Plot twists or complication and transplanted it to my D&D game to drive the plot?
What if I let my players create the scenes through thier play?
Up next: From crazy idea to actual play.
I Didn't Know You Could Do That in 4e – Social Combat -or- Making Charisma the Overpowered Attribute for Once
Johenius (that would be me, I just like talking in the third person) is one-half of the awesome combination of seldom-updating South African DM’s that are Awesome Gaming. He enjoys long walks on the beach, pretty much every RPG system ever made, and coming up with weird mechanics to copy from one system that you’ve never heard of to the popular one he’s interested in at present. Enjoy!
So. You’ve seen movies or comic books where people can use their words as a tangible means to fight. You’ve been impressed by witty insults in swordfights, fierce battle cries, and people who use words to defend themselves with more than a snippy comeback.And you’ve thought to yourself, “Self, wouldn’t it be badass to be able to do that in a role-playing game?”.
Well, I believe it not only to be possible – but easily done in a variety of handily house-rulable forms. And not just the charismatic few who use as verbal buffs in combat to help allies or intimidate enemies – but that any characters can use a well-placed jibe to throw an opponent. Elan would be proud.
This article was inspired by the concept of social combat, an idea I stumbled upon reading a transcript for a game of Scion: Hero in the RPG.net forums. Of course, White Wolf games have an edge on d20 games in terms of mechanical representations of social concepts, in that they have three distinct social attributes where d20 offers one: Charisma. This presented an opportunity (or challenge, if you’re that way inclined) that was too good to pass up.
There are several distinct ways that social combat can be implemented in your game of D&D 4e, with differing degrees of buy-in, and an varying scale of mechanical additions. Two of them are presented in this article:
-
(Pardon the alliteration:) Subtle skill-based social combat (The “Mutants and Masterminds” way), where a few effects in combat can be triggered by social skill use.
-
Feat-(and thus power-)based social combat, where sticks and stones compete with words to hurt people (closest to the original concepts of D&D 4e)
Both of these options are far from “Rules As Written” in terms of balance, canonicity and acceptance, so, should any of the systems catch your eye, add them to your gaming groups’ collection of house rules and be aware that some systems suit a group better than others.
Let’s look at each of the proposed social combat systems in the order presented.
“What Do You Mean, You Prefer Reaping Strike?!” – Subtle Changes
In the great superheroes RPG “Mutants and Masterminds”, there are a variety of actions a character can take in combat related to social skills. Some are only accessible by feats, and this will be expanded in the next section – but the ability to throw out a taunt mid-fight, bluff an opponent to make a mis-step, or intimidate an enemy can add real character to a fight.
The challenge in this regards is balance. Many classes have utility or even attack powers that target an NPCs mind via trickery or coercion in combat. These concepts should not be absolutely limited to those classes though: a wizard with large, bushy eyebrows and a scary stare should be able to intimidate as well as a 7 foot tall fighter with plate armour and a great big sword, screaming a vicious warcry while charging straight at you. Actually, no wait. Bad example.
A WIZARD USING A CANTRIP THAT MAKES IT APPEAR THAT HE CAN EXPLODE YOU WITH *HIS MIND* AND WITH AWESOME SCARY EYEBROWS. He’d be intimidating too.
So the challenge of introducing a generic intimidation – or any other social skill – combat ability (other than an intimidation check when an enemy is bloodied, mentioned in the PHB) resides in keeping it subtly useful, without making it equal or superior to a class skill. Keep in mind that ANY player should be able to use these skills, in the same way that any PC can use a basic attack.
The two best solutions that suit both the mechanics, and the imagined reality the mechanics represent, are as follows: making the abilities one-shot per encounter (to keep them from being abused, and because monsters who see you trick their friend will be wary and won’t fall for it themselves), and to keep the effectiveness limited to a single minor status effect.
This might seem to severely curtail the usefulness of the abilities, but keep in mind that talking is a free action. Talking to an NPC who is hostile to you, however, is probably somewhat more problematic – a minor action would be required for their use. Furthermore, social powers are limited (typically) to living creatures – mindless undead, animates and constructs can’t be cowed by insults to their maternal parents.
Social skills use the relevant social skill as an attack modifier – no other modifiers (for weapons, proficiency, etc.) can be added beyond the standard +1 per 2 levels. Social skills are defended against with the target’s passive Insight, or the same skill that is being used for the “attack” (whichever is higher). Note that for brevity, the remainder of this document lists the defense as Insight only, though either are valid.
Some examples of social skill uses in combat can be seen below:
Of course, the use of these powers is entirely up to your DM – they might easily unbalance your running game or campaign, but I feel they add a dimension to combat that – I feel – has been lacking. Quipping, wisecracks, taunts and so on give character to a scene. Dialogue with an arch-nemesis is a time-honoured trope, and this brings mechanical benefits to that dialogue. Guybrush Threepwood would be proud.
“I Have This Bridge in Faerun to Sell You” – Using Feats to Balance the Mechanics
Another means of balancing the gameplay aspects of the use of social skills in combat is to introduce a feat requirement. By sacrificing the possibility of other feats, you can justify the power increase implicit in the use of social skills, and it also has a handy narrative explanation too: it requires great concentration to throw out a wise-crack while avoiding blows and attempting to land some attacks of your own. Feats come with the implicit understanding that they represent innate talent or extensive training. As the character trains to keep their cool during the heat of combat, they unlock the capability to throw off an opponent.
One option available to players is to introduce the above Encounter powers as At-Will powers instead, at the cost of a feat each. This option may appeal to some DMs who would rather limit the social aspect of encounters to PCs that choose to invest in this course of action – leaving the dour, silent-fighting types who prefer straight-forward [boring] combat (and whose butts, frankly, look fat in those breeches) – to leave out this wonderful system, focusing instead on “power attacks” and “weapon focuses”.
Another option, should you choose to “stack” the social combat systems, is to leave social combat as a once-per-encounter power, but increase it’s effect after training. In that case, the following feats and associated powers are suggested:
Feat: Barbed Jibe
Prerequisite: Charisma 13, any alignment except Lawful Good
Benefit: By insulting your opponent, getting under their skin and generally taunting them, you may use the Barbed Jibe social combat power once per encounter:
Feat: Shock and Awe
Prerequisite: Charisma 13, trained in Intimidate skill
Benefit: Suddenly looming, giving a vicious warcry or flourishing a great weapon, you attempt to intimidate your opponent into cowering.
Feat: The Ol’ Dodge and Weave
Prerequisite: Charisma 13, trained in Bluff skill
Benefit: By tricking the opponent into making an unwise attack against you by using The Ol’ Dodge and Weave, the opponent is left exposed for your allies.
“Your Mama’s a Bog-Hag” – The Highest Level of Social Comment
One thing to note about social combat – it requires active social roleplay in combat. You cannot just declare “I’m using Shock and Awe on the hobgoblin this round” – players must narratively buy in to the social action. “I cry ‘FOR THE CHILD YOU STOLE FROM ME, AAAARGH!”, followed by the declaration and rolls gives a much better sense of what you’re trying to achieve.
Of course, the habit of adding story-flavour to your attacks is an established tradition – but the social powers infinitely moreso. Their role is to simulate the exciting and imaginative combats that we read in literature, see on the silver screen, or imagine in our minds.
Final Words
So this is where I shall leave you: there is much more to do out there. Social combat as a mechanism can be taken even further than this brief article. Entire combats composed entirely of words should be more than possible with the strong base that D&D 4e has provided in terms of powers, feats, skills and attributes. Especially since the redefinition of hit points to include “mental attitude” (and the silly statement that zero hit points means “terminal sadness” – a concept that can be expanded for some real mechanical – and narrative – fun!). Always remember that the rule of fun trumps everything, and that one of the DM’s many great priorities should always be helping players to translate the characters that they have in their minds into the characters that their stats, feats and powers indicate they are.
I would like to thank ChattyDM very much for this opportunity to contribute on his blog in this guest spot, and to thank you, the reader, for bearing with my wild and bizarre D&D 4e mechanical ideas 
I would also like to apologize for the terrible power-tables. OpenOffice.org mangled the HTML, and the images seem to render strangely in this browser. Clicking “View Image” or the equivalent for your webbrowser might help.
But my father was a blacksmith! – Crafting in 4E
Hi there. My name is Rob, a.k.a. “A Hero”, from A Hero Twice A Month. While I can be a chatty DM at times, I am not the ChattyDM. Still, he was nice enough to let me post my thoughts about crafting items while he is off on his GenCon hiatus.
When the game designers at Wizards of the Coast decided to trim the skill list down from more than thirty-six skills in D&D 3E to a mere seventeen in D&D 4E, it was inevitable that many skills would not make the cut. Most of them were simply rolled into more general skills, like Hide and Move Silently being combined into Stealth. This makes sense to me since I always felt the skill list in D&D 3E was a bit bloated.
Notably absent from the D&D 4E skill list is the Craft skill. To some extent this makes a lot of sense, since Craft was more of a background skill which rarely came up in adventuring (barring the occasional use of the Fabricate spell). Still, I think it is a shame it is gone. There is something nicely thematic about a dwarf forging his own weapons or an elf crafting additional arrows during the time between adventures.
The need for a crafting mechanic is even more necessary if you look at the creation of magical items. According to the Player’s Handbook, Mountain Armor is created when “Dwarf armorsmiths combine the elemental earth of their mountain homes with other metals to craft this heavy armor.” A wonderful bit of flavor text which adds a lot to the feel of the suit of armor.
If you look at how it would be created in game though, the process is somewhat disappointing. Let’s say you want to create Warplate Mountain Armor +3. First, you buy Plate Armor. Then acquire 17,000 gold pieces worth of Alchemical Reagents or Residuum. Cast the Enchant Magic Item Ritual and touch the item. Presto, you now have Warplate Mountain Armor +3!
It is just not quite the same, is it?
I have found that skill challenges can be used to add a little of this flavor back without completely rewriting the rules. While it may seem odd at first, skill challenges were created to determine the success or failure of non-combat situations. So it helps to look at different types of crafting simply as different types of skill challenges.
So how do you go about creating an appropriate skill challenge for the item being crafted? Like any skill challenge, it is just a matter of determining the Setup, Level, Complexity, Primary Skills, and Outcome.
Designing a Crafting Skill Challenge
Setup
To craft an item, the character needs the appropriate tools and raw materials. Appropriate tools could be as simple as fletching knives to make a bow or could be as complex as needing access to a dwarven forge for the aforementioned Mountain Armor. Raw materials have a cost equal to half the purchase price for mundane items. Magic items still require the components for the Enchant Magical Item ritual. However, the item is treated as two levels lower on the magic item price chart.
Level
Level is equal to the items level. Mundane items are generally considered level one.
Complexity
- Horseshoes, Shovels, and other basic items.
- Simple Weapons, Military Weapons, Heroic Tier Armor, and most Heroic Tier magic items.
- Superior Weapons, Paragon Tier Armor, and most Paragon Tier magic items.
- Epic Tier Armor, and most Epic Tier magic items.
- DM’s discretion. This level may be needed for exceptionally complex magic items like the Apparatus of Kwalish.
Suggested Primary Skills
Crafting Metal Armor/Weapons: Athletics, Endurance
Crafting Bows/Crossbows/Arrows: Nature, Perception
Crafting Cloth/Leather Armor: Nature, Endurance
Additional primary or secondary skills should be chosen based on what is being crafted. For example, Eladrin armor would likely have Arcane as a secondary skill because of the Fey origin of Eladrin.
Outcome
Success allows you to craft the item for the reduced cost in materials listed above. Failure causes you to waste half of the necessary materials.
Example: Crafting a Longbow
Setup
Appropriate bowyer tools and 15 GPs worth of materials. Each roll requires one hour of time.
Level
As a mundane item, a longbow is level one.
Complexity
2 (Requires six successes before three failures)
Primary Skills: Nature, Perception
Nature (moderate DCs): Carving a bow requires insight into how to bring out both the strength and suppleness out of the wood.
Perception (moderate DCs): A flaw in the wood has been the downfall of many a bow. Perception allows you to avoid these errors. However, no more than half of your successes can come from perception.
Insight (hard DCs): Many elves believe that carving a bow is a spiritual matter. If you make a successful insight roll at the beginning of the challenge, you can gain a +1 bonus to all rolls during this challenge. This roll can only be made once. If multiple people are assisting they can each make this roll, but it only applies to the rolls they make and does not stack with other characters bonuses.
Special (Elf): Once during the challenge, an elf may use his Elven Accuracy to reroll a skill check. You must use the second roll, even if it is lower. If multiple elves are assisting in the creation of the bow, they may each only use this ability once.
Success
The longbow is created at the reduced cost.
Failure
The longbow is ruined. One-half of the materials are lost.
Example: Crafting Warplate Mountain Armor +3
Setup
Because of the nature of Warplate Mountain Armor, access to a dwarven forge within an appropriate mountain stronghold is required. Raw Materials, Alchemical Reagents or Residuum equal to 9,000 GP are required. Access to the Enchant Magical Item ritual is required, although it can be cast anytime after the armor is completed since the component cost is paid for by the crafting process.
Alternatively, the DM may allow the crafting of this armor by dwarves without the Enchant Magical Item ritual. In this case I recommend dropping the cost by only one level on the chart to 13,000 GP.
Each roll requires one hour of time.
Level
Level thirteen
Complexity
3 (Requires eight successes before four failures)
Primary Skills: Athletics, Endurance
Athletics (moderate DCs): Strength of arm important at the forge.
Endurance (moderate DCs): Working at a forge requires a great deal of endurance. At least two of the successes must come from an Endurance skill check. However, if an Endurance skill check is failed, the next roll made for the skill challenge is at a -2 penalty.
Dungeoneering (hard DCs): Understanding the ways of the mountain are essential to creating mountain plate. A successful Dungeoneering skill check adds a success and grants a +2 bonus to the next Athletics or Endurance Skill Check made for the skill challenge.
Arcane (hard DCs): By sensing the shifts in the elemental forces at work in creating mountain plate, you can cancel one failure incurred. This may only be attempted once during the course of the skill challenge.
Special (Dwarf): Dwarves get a +2 racial bonus to the checks required in making Mountain Armor.
Success
The armor is created at the reduced cost.
Failure
Half of the raw material/component cost is lost and the armor is ruined.
Mini-Crunch: The Bebilith Revisited
I’m currently writing about Friday’s last game and chances are the post will be massive. So I’m taking this one “Aside” I had plan to write and making it into a separate crunchy mini-post.
While I was preping last week’s adventure, I had a strong arachnid theme going (I looooooove spider monsters!). At a certain point, I needed a demonic Guardian in the CR9-10 range and the Bebilith came up.
Thing is, the Bebilith is an armour destroyer creature that got somewhat nerfed in the 3.0 to the 3.5 ‘upgrade’. Witness the latest ability:
Rend Armor (Ex)
If a bebilith hits with both claw attacks, it pulls apart any armor worn by its foe. This attack deals 4d6+18 points of damage to the opponent’s armor. Creatures not wearing armor are unaffected by this special attack. Armor reduced to 0 hit points is destroyed. Damaged armor may be repaired with a successful Craft (armorsmithing) check.
I don’t know about you, but I never did find the Armour HP and Hardness table in D&D 3.5. Granted an enterprising DM can tackle this by extrapolating from the Breaking Items table, but quite frankly, just how thick is Chainmail vs Full Platemail? What material do you use for Studded leather armour? You see where I’m going with this? [Read the rest of this article]
Mini-Links: Whole Wheat Bastard Boardgame Ninjas!
Ahhh it’s Friday afternoon, a snowstorm rages on Montreal and my boss just gave us the day rest of the day off…
Of course, on Fridays, our lab is drenched in fresh blood samples that we can’t leave on the bench for 3 days, so while I can relax and kickback a bit, I have to stick around…. plus I carpool with one of the technicians. So why not have a little post on linkies.
Set Phasers to Weasel!
It seems that well known RPG-blog commenter Phased Weasel has decided to go pro and has opened his very own blog (called Whole Wheat games, har har!). He has already tackled quite a few interesting Crunch issues of D&D 3.x like using electricity magic in water and dealing with Save or Die effects. Welcome to the fold Phased, consider some of your post like an extension to my House Rules list! Now what’s your feed URL again?
Listen to your Core Bastard
The Machavelian plans of our local Magnificent Bastard are unfolding…. Yax’s latest idea is to offer a free set of 4e D&D core books to one of the people who’ll subscribe to his blog’s feed by email. I swear he’s got something up his sleeve…. Are you trying to steal my Overlord job mate? You’re still going down! (Now where are those Ennie application forms?)
The Board game Sage
Dave of Critical Hits made me discover an Israel-based blogger whose passion for Board games seems to be rivaled only by the quality of his penmanship and his love of blogging. If you too think that board games are so much more than Monopoly, pay Yehuda a visit.
Pastryjitsu?
Yeah! Graham, our friendly neighborhood hacker and brutally honest pal, has a new post up about some Wiiiiiiii goodness! Apparently, there are more than 120 stars to catch playing Super Mario Galaxy. And he also talks about…. Ninjabread???
That’s it for me this week, wish me luck going back home!
My D&D Flavour: House Rules for Badass Heroes.
Tommi made a post suggestion in my last Adventure Prep post: “How about a brief summary of the house rules you use for those who have not read everything you have ever posted”?
I’m happy to comply…. except for the brief part. 
The core of the rules we use is D&D 3.5 with a metric ton of sourcebooks (most of which I own, check my library here).
Some players have the full Core set, the Players Handbook II and Stef even has the Magic Item Compendium (his D&D Sears Catalog he calls it I believe) .
Of course, many, many, many changes were made to the rules:
First, we borrowed most of the system-neutral cool stuff from the Iron Heroes Core book. Mostly because that game is crammed with stuff that makes character into Badasses:
Point buy:
Abilities Scores are purchased as per the option presented in the IH Core Book (which mirrors the DMG, I think). All players have a 10 in each ability score and buys increases at the rate of 1 point per +1 increase until 15, 2 points per +1 until 17… etc. All players had 16 points to buy their character. (Except Cixi, who had 24).
Cixi :
Franky plays the only fully Iron Hero Character, a throwback from our last campaign. Iron Heroes are classes that were designed to be equivalent to all other d20 Fantasy classes but without needing to use Magic Items and Buffs. Iron Hero, as the name implies, is a low/corrupted magic game.
In order to make Iron Heroes fit in a Generic D&D world, I tweaked a lot of rules for them:
- Immune to all Spells and Spell-like abilities that allow a Fort or Will Save (prevents healing, Divination and Charms, but a fireball hurts).
- If they die, they become incorporeal spirits that can possess a body (like the Fiendish Codex I) and transform it into their original forms (over 5 days).
- No Magic Item function in their hands. (There’s a whole lot of fluff behind these 3 rules)
Skill System:
All skills made into groups of 3-4 skills. Each classes has access to specific groups (Download Yan’s excellent cheat sheet here). Each skill point spent buys one rank in each skill in a group. All other skills can be bought at 1 point per rank. (So yes everyone gets to use Use Magic Device, great for a non-cleric party like ours).
Furthermore, all skills rolls and effect are handled as Iron Heroes. This means you can, for example, take a +5 DC to Climb faster or retain your Dex Bonus while doing so. The one exception is Perform and Search/Disable device where one must be a Iron Hero class, a Bard or have Trapsmithing to use as written.
Combat Challenges and Stunts:
Players can trade Base Attack and Defense Bonuses for extras in combat. These extras are all basically watered down combat feat effects akin to Power Attack, Combat Expertise, etc.
A stunt is an improvised attack that uses a skill (or a combination of skills). For example, I allowed tumble checks to deal damage to a swarm by using one’s body as an area attack.
Self Flanking and Attacks of Opportunity:
A Character that starts his move adjacent to a foe and moves to the opposite flanking position in the same turn gets to flank the opponent.
Also, the only way to provoke an AoO is to move more than 1/4 your speed within the threatened area of the same foe.
Draining:
Level and ability drains are now temporary. Negative levels are recovered at the rate of 1 per day.
The rest of the house rules were taken here and there…
For character design and management, we use the following House Rules:
Custom Classes:
- Math plays a Mashed-Up (not multiclassed) Duskblade Arcane Archer that can cast spells through arrows and Melee weapons.
- Yan plays a Shaper, a mashup between the Pixie racial template and Monte Cook’s variant Sorcerer with a unique spell mechanic.
- Stef plays a ‘standard’ 1/2 Dragon Barbarian, boosted a bit to give him a higher breath weapon DC, and recurrent breath weapon (every 1d4 rounds like a Dragon)
Hit Points:
All players have the choice of taking average Hit Point or Rolling them. But they must chose before, not after rolling
XP:
As mentioned earlier last week, I use Clinton R. Nixon’s Keys system. I took the one from something he called Sweet20, but it seems to have been incorporated into another of his creations called Shadows of Yesterday. I am still implementing this one to reward my player’s natural tendencies to start building their character’s stories. I’ll read SoY a bit more to see if the implementation of the key system is any different than the one I cobbled up here.
Other House rules we use:
Damage Reduction:
A high enough enhancement bonus penetrates material-related DR. For example, a +2 weapon overcomes X/Slashing and a +3 weapon overcomes x/adamantine. I took this from an old Monte Cook web post.
Spell Resistance:
When you target a monster with Spell Resistance with a magical effect that is subjected to it, make an SR check as usual. If failed, you do not spend any resource (Spell Slot, Spell, Charge, etc) but you still lose your action.
Golems now have very high Spell Resistance instead of pure immunity (Sorry Yan, I forgot that one last time).
Action points:
We use the full gamut of Action Points featured in the Unearthed Arcana variant rules.
Critical Hits:
Last but not least, now that Franky and I fixed a little rules error with Cixi’s Critical Hit rate, I’m re-instating the play test of Crit Resistant creatures instead of Crit immune ones (Taken from Graham’s very 1st post here). All creatures usually immune to crits can now be, if the player confirms a crit twice with the roll of two d20s.
Well, that’s about it. Once it’s all there in one post, it does seem like I’m not playing D&D 3.5 anymore…
DM Chronicles, Session 4: The Storytellers' Ball, part 2
See here for the 1st part of this DM log.
So the characters, victorious over the Big Bad and his sidekick, were battered, bruised and the players were showing the 1st signs of being tired (it was getting close to 9 pm). I still had 9 Spriggan mooks and a lab to go through.
That’s when inspiration struck me… I wanted to give the players an opportunity to ‘defeat’ the mooks without a fight but still at the same time to have a credible but short scene.
Once again, I’ll let Lillie handle the details (Yan told me he’s hard at work on his account). I basically started the scene with the Spriggans, now freed from the clutches of their evil boss, with two items on their agenda.
- Get out of the parley alive.
- Be freed of their slavish bonds to the Pactlords of the Quann, a Ptolus Monstrous organization bent on destroying all humanoids.
It worked really well, and Yan had, once again a ball. The scene, which was a success, lasted only a few minutes.
The characters got directions to the drug lab and set out to go, lower resources and all. Up to that point, all rooms with a potential combat encounter had been represented by either a D&D Fantastic Location battle map or a drawn map on my various blank maps (see here for my list of tools).
Contrary to the rest of the dungeon, the drug lab was a ‘normal’ dungeon room (i.e squarish, not a Cave). Since I had run out of blank maps, I had previously decided that it was a good time to test the D&D Dungeon tiles. I was able to easily create a faithful rendition of an alchemy lab (the Arcane Corridors tile pack helped).
The high-color visuals helped refocus the players and when I started describing the large Cauldron-Mecha Contraption charging them, I had their attention all right. When it grabbed the battered, level-drained, and rusted-out Dragon Shaman and dumped him inside his Drug Filled belly, groans were heard all around the table.
By that time, all players had reached the leveling up point and ended spending most of their remaining Action Points, which was good. Although I realized that the players focussed on using the points for an extra 1d6 on d20 rolls where in fact there is so much more that can be done and I noted this for later.
…it was another short fight. The damage dealing potential of the Crudader/Archer/Duskblade trio is phenomenal. All that was left was a dismembered construct and 3 very happy, newly-liberated Gnomish alchemists.
A general cleanup of the dungeon was done, magic items were distributed and the Big Bad’s extremely complete journal was found and read. End of adventure, roll credits.
Aside: Why the hell do bad guys keep such complete ISO-compliant journals? Is it a way to allow all the juicy Adventure Background the authors slaved on to be given in one serving to player if they somehow missed it?
Lessons learned:
- Storytelling scenes are absolutely great when they work, but they can drag on and on if the participants are the group’s extroverts. Such scenes can gain from being shorter.
- Improvising is fun!
- Give tactical players and Butt-Kickers sufficient time to gauge risks before asking for a dice roll. A player will reflectively roll a dice when prompted by the DM, this ‘reflex’ must not be abused.
Aside: Let me be clear on something though. In a game like ours where character death is nearly absent, failures do and should happen so it can create a certain sense of frustration in players. However, I believe that risks should be clearly stated out to the players so they can make an informed decision and better accept the consequences of failure. I strongly believe that frustration and the following release upon achieving success is one of the key drivers of successful Role-playing games.
What players liked:
- The storytellers absolutely loved interacting with the Evil fearies.
- Sending the lieutenant into the ravine.
- Cixi’s 3 critical hits.
What players disliked
- Crueger’s unnecessary fall in the ravine (see above)
- Math’s strings of bad d20 die rolls. Fortunately, the Duskblade has a combo of Swift True Strike (Which I now allow once per encounter) followed by an arrow-borne Shocking Grasp helped Math get ‘back in the zone’.
- Stef’s character was brutalized pretty badly in this game and while the Dragon Shaman is a great passive buffer… he lacks the oomph of the 3 fighting classes and the flexibility of being a flying, invisible, sorcerer. While Stef has yet to complain, I might give his character an extra nudge in his breath weapon and or more hit points to truly assume his role as the group’s tank.
What’s next:
- Ding! Level up to 8. Finally!
- Adapt part two of the campaign arc. A dungeon crawl in Ptolus’s Cemetary. The adventure needs some serious Bling upgrade and I’ll tweak it to make my Butt-Kickers and Supercool players really shine!
- Go over the action points rules with the players.
- Set the stage for the passage to Planscape!
Thanks for reading! As usual, feel free to drop comments and thoughts!
DM Chronicles, Session 4: The Storytellers' Ball, part 1
Image Source: Wizards of the Coast.
Previously in Chatty DM’s game:
The Characters were investigating the source of a new drug called ‘Green Welcome’ that appeared in the Warrens of Ptolus. This drug has a tendency to transforms its users in horrible Plant-like creatures. Following a tip by a shady dealer, our heroes have started exploring a sewer complex. Some resistance was met and conquered.
I made it to Stef’s in one piece. Not wishing to play dice with Fate, Franky actually escorted me most of the way. Thanks pal!
This week’s game was a success. Once again it wasn’t a top 5 thing and I’ll touch on this later, but it sure was a great session for at least 3 players: Yan, Franky and myself.
We settled in, we ordered food and, of course, my order was missing…. (at least it beats a Car Crash or a Tree-on-my-house). Thankfully, Eric shared his plate with me and I never even touched my order when it finally arrived, thanks, you really are a swell guy underneath that Crusty, Damned-to-Hell exterior!
As mentioned in the Adventure Prep post, I wanted to steer the game away from a straight Kill and loot scenario to a more story-based adventure. So shortly after we started again, I had one of the bad guys lieutenants show up with a white flag and attempt parley. When Yan perked up and prepared to make his move to initiate discussions, Eric said the first Out-of-Character quote of the evening: ‘Not another one of those!’
I’ll leave the details to Lillie’s journal, but what followed was what I feel one of my best Role Playing performances in a long time. One of my follow-up challenges to playing Evil characters was to try playing a non-humanoid NPC in such a way that the players knew they were not dealing with a Rubber Suit Human. This is harder to pull off for a gamer like me (i.e Crunch over Fluff).
It worked, perfectly. As you may recall, the bad guys were evil faeries called Spriggans. I don’t have a lot of experience with Faeries but I guess forging through Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norel last year paid off. I played them as egocentric, silver tongued jerks with no need for things like truth and , you know, getting anywhere with a conversation. (Ask Cixi what she thinks of the eight levels of the Heart…) Thank you Mrs. Clarke and thank to you O Muse I call Beer.
Aside: Stealing quirks and mannerisms from fiction characters is a great way to help uncomfortable role players like myself. It sure worked like a charm. Yan told me he could actually see the book’s bad guy while I was deep character.
Aside on the aside: In fact, Yan really nailed our shared style when he said ‘We’re bad role players but great Story tellers’
Yan had a ball interacting with the 2 fairie bosses and expanding his character’s backstory a bit. So did Franky who played Cixi flawlessly, charmed by the Spriggans’ strings of flatteries directed at her, but trying, unsuccessfully, to catch them in their lies.
At some point, while we three were lost in our little improv play, Math and Eric started showing signs of tiring of this charade and pointing out that this discussion could go nowhere other than ‘You stop this drug thing or you die’. At that point, all non RP-ing characters were poised for a fight, covering all of the room’s exits. (I had previously described lights and beast-like noises coming from another passage into the room).
So that was my cue to launch the ‘distraction’ so the Spriggans could reposition themselves in the dungeon (and possibly leave the place): 3 Mike-Mearls-approved Rust Monsters! They arrived right beside the Full-Plate clad Dragon Shaman!!!
They did their job, which was scaring the Shammy and damaging his armour slightly, (I love the new Rustie!) before getting destroyed swiftly. So swiftly in fact that the characters were able to chase the 2 Spriggan bosses into a large Cave featuring a Hemp rope bridge over a huge chasm.
A climactic fight ensued, with a burning bridge collapsing, brilliant use of lights, a bad guy moving at the very edge of the Chasm to painfully backstab the Shammy (he’s quite the tank) and the Crusader plummeting down only to be stuck between the narrowing walls of the ravine 80′ below.
That’s where I made my ‘bad call’ of the night that ended up damping some of Eric’s fun. He wanted his character, Cruguer, to run across the bridge before it collapsed. I couldn’t find the entry on the bridges’s balance check to cross so I initially okayed the move without any rolls. A few initiative ticks later, I found the reference and had Eric retroactively roll, factoring in the very hefty penalty caused by his armour. Even with the use of an action point he failed and fell.
I never really gave Eric a chance to re-evaluate his tactical choice once I told him the difficulty of the task. He had a potion of fly in his inventory and he might have wanted to quaff it instead of crossing the bridge. He spent most of the rest of the fight trying to get out of his predicament. I made a note to make up for it at the next session.
The fight ended with the Big Bad, a soul-eating druid, knocked out and in custody and the backstabbing lieutenant crushed at the bottom of the ravine. The players were battered and a lot lower on their resources.
They turned back into the cave complex to find the actual drug lab… only to be shanghaied by the 9 remaining Spriggans…
To be continued tomorrow!
DM Chronicles, Session 3: Of Pools and Crashes
Image Source: WotC D&D Miniature Game
After having skipped a week from our usual bi-monthly game, I was really looking forward for this week’s. One of our players, Stef, had to stay home because his Wife was away and he was with the kids. So I offered to move the game over there.
So I rolled all the battlemaps I had prepared, packed the ziplocked minis, the adventure, the USB key with DM Wiki, the Core books and a few Splatbooks (Wow, Wikipedia has a definition for everything!).
It’s 4:15 PM, I hop in the car, put on Muse’s last album, real loud, and join the traffic jams that plague the Suburbs of Montreal. (Montreal is an Island, I’m lucky enough to live on it, but all my players live in Laval, a Northern Suburban Island).
At 4h30, I’m sitting behind a Mini-Van and I notice the right lane being free, I switch to the lane and accelerate…. and the van does the same thing 2 seconds later and crashes into my new 2007 Honda Fit. Result: The whole left side of my car is scratched, dented and my driver’s door can only open about 1 foot wide.
Now in Québec, crashes with no victims or ‘Hit and Runs’ are dealt with a ‘friendly’ exchange of information on specific forms that all good citizen have in their cars (I don’t). Anyway, long story-short (from me? HA!) the Mini-Van’s owner had 2 sets, we fill out the forms, we both deny responsibility (as should be) and we go our way.
I just had a car crash but I also haven’t played D&D in 3 weeks. What’s my decision? Screw it, I’ll call the insurance from Stef’s place!
Just so you know, the last time we were supposed to play at Stef’s, there was an Ice Storm. When I got there, I had a message from my lovely wife informing me that I needed to come back pronto because a Tree fell on our house! (True Story!)
Anyway, we ended up starting to play at around 7h00 pm. As promised, I’ll skip on story elements as Yan will tackle them in his player log.
The adventure was about finding the source of a weird creature in Ptolus. The initial investigation lead them to the the slums of Ptolus where they faced a 10-strong street gang. I had the occasion to test the Hit Point Pool approach I stol… huh borrowed from Greywulf.
It worked perfectly! All the energy I usually spend keeping track of individual hit points was shunted towards very graphic descriptions of wounds and deaths. You should have seen my player’s faces when I described heads exploding and Manga-like slicing of bodies that crumpled slowly in halves to the ground. There were a few weird cases where a Thug took an electricity charged arrow in the face and fell from the building and survived only to have his neighbor die from a rather average hit (Oh by the way, the re-vamped Duskblade rocks!!!!). So this house rule is a keeper. It was the best fight of the whole evening.
The players continued their exploration and found a link to the creature’s origin and followed it (yet again) in the Sewers. They quickly discovered a huge natural cavern filled with offals. Since visibility was limited, I described the room in bits and pieces as the players explored cautiously. I ended up pointed out a huge mound of trash and an exit.
I must have mentioned the exit more than once because at that point a player went Metagaming on me and said something like ‘If Phil (that’s me) talks about the exit like that it’s because that’s where he wants us to go…’ Hmmmm that’s grounds for a -2 penalty on Spot checks don’t ya think? (and a warning that I must ‘control the message’ as my old bosses used to say). The penalty was just enough to miss the Otyugh creeping up in the garbage pile and striking the players with it’s filthy tentacle, screaming ‘Trespassers! Me EAT Trespassers’.
Short fight, I mauled the Duskblade pretty badly, I wisely ignored all instances of potential Grappling with the creature’s 4 tentacles. When the players applied various healing powers, I described how the creature seemed to be leaching this energy to heal itself. Yeah, they freaked a bit. Twelve Seconds later, there was Otyugh sushi on the cave floor.
While the Duskblade let his armour regenerate him (The Magic Item Compendium is sooooo cool). Stef went to search the garbage pile, to cries of disgust from the other players. He found some valuables! Oddly enough, no one asked for their fair share… Go Stef, the loot is yours!
We ended the evening with one last encounter, an ambush by some Gnome-like Fey while the party was squeezing in a tight corridor (well, not Lillie the Pixie, but the rest). We were getting tired and the fight was more mechanical than flavorful. The players won and got some sweet piece of magical loot, a Human-slaying sword.
Overall a very fun evening. Now I have to wait until Monday to book an appointment with my Car Dealer’s repair shop.
Lessons learned:
- Hit point pools for mooks rocks!
- Graphic descriptions of a fight makes it a lot better than the actual mechanics (duh! about time I learned that)
What players liked:
- The gore and splattering of mooks all over the Slums.
- My ignoring anything Grappling for once.
- Yan loved that I worked the evil Feys into his backstory and gave him more info on the Big Bad than was warranted by the adventure.
- The Duskblade chucking ranged touch Spell-laced arrows and casting swift spells.
- Stef finding treasure where all others refused to go.
- The story hooked some of the players and they want to KNOW.
- Getting XPs for filling in the Player questionnaire! (I’m really looking forward to posting the other ones).
What players disliked
- The DM’s frequent breaks with immersion to joke around, bring reference from pass session and talk about his blog. (For my defense, I was dealing with a game and the shock of the crash… but I’ll be more careful henceforth).
- The adventure hook was a bit shaky and players had a passive aggressive reaction to it like ‘no we don’t do it, come on boys’ I don’t know if it was that I wasn’t enthusiastic enough or what… (See Yan’s comment, he’s right…)
What’s next:
- I’m not saying anything other than ‘we finish the adventure’.
Overall a great evening. For everything else, there’s Insurance.
Loading ...
