With the open playtest of the new iteration of D&D coming tomorrow, I wanted to offer some of my advice on playtesting and giving feedback. Wizards of the Coast will provide plenty of instructions on what they do and don’t want to see, so obviously that could easily supersede anything I say here. These are some general guidelines to keep in mind for D&D, so hopefully you find these tidbits helpful while playing the game and collecting your feedback.

Respect Their Playtest Decisions

The designers at WotC have decided that the first thing we’re going to see is going to include pre-generated characters, and not have character creation rules initially. I understand not being happy with this decision, however, it’s not like they’re going to suddenly decide that there will never be character creation rules. So when submitting your feedback, you don’t need to tell them “I wish I could see the character creation rules.” As professional game designers, they’ve decided (after many meetings, I’m sure) on this method of rolling rules out, so try and respect that. Keep your responses to what you were provided, not complaining that you don’t have what’s already been promised.

Work From the Big Picture Down

There’s plenty of time in the development cycle of the game. The wording of a feat or the exact text of a spell are important but shouldn’t dominate your feedback. After all, if the entire magic system changes, that’s a lot of wasted effort in critiquing 1st level spells.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t note these things down. However, the big picture is the most important: how the game feels overall (in this case, does it feel like D&D?), was combat satisfying, and so on. This part will probably be represented most in surveys. Also important are core mechanics: rolling to hit, how skills work, hit points, etc. Then the lowest amount of your attention should be given to the small details that could easily change later.

Be Charitable With the Format

If the playtest files are anything like the previous versions, it’s going to look like a Word document. No art, no fancy layout, only minimal attention to organization. Again, this is something that we know the final product will have. So picking apart the exact placement of a sidebar or location of a rule isn’t going to be worth a lot.

If there’s something that you find confusing because of placement, it’s OK to note it. Just don’t focus on it. Be charitable with the format the content is taking right now, and do your best to be charitable about these kinds of issues in favor of  focusing on the actual rules and gameplay.

Don’t Kiss Up…

Even if you love everything about the game, you don’t need to gush to the game designers about how great they are. It’s simply not helpful to the game.

…But Be Sure to Praise What You Like

That said, if there are specific rules or aspects that you like, be sure to note them. All your feedback doesn’t have to be about what doesn’t work: noting what does work and what you really enjoy can be just as important (if not more so) than what doesn’t work.

Offer Suggestions, But Let Them Design the Game

We’re all game designers to some extent. We really want to be helpful too, by offering alternatives. This is OK in controlled pieces. Just don’t hang too much on each of these. Remember, you’re likely responding to only portions of the game, while they’re both looking at the game as a whole, but also comparing your feedback to everyone else’s, and trying to find mutual solutions to as many issues as possible. Thus, your suggestion on how to fix a rule might be brilliant, it just doesn’t necessarily fix everything that needs to be fixed at once. Let them do the heavy lifting as far as the actual changes, and instead, focus on communicating what you feel works and what doesn’t work.

Note Your Dealbreakers, But Try and Put It In Context

You may decide that any game with bards is not a game you want to play. You may even refuse to play any game that uses a d12. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve now seen on forums of taking the form “if D&D has _______, I know it’s not the game for me.”

Certainly note this in your feedback. But be aware that the vast majority of players aren’t going to share this view, and the game designers have to cover all of those, not just yours. So try to take those kinds of rules in context. If that’s the only thing that doesn’t work for you, do your best to put it aside. Give the best feedback as you can, taking a larger view of it all… even if you can’t stand bards.

Playtest What You’re Given, Not What You Fear

Finally, remember that what you’re seeing is only an early portion of the rules. It’s an important portion of the rules, probably the most critical parts, but there’s plenty more development and expansion to come. Thus, if you try a rule, and it works out or it doesn’t, report on that. In a lot of cases, you can extrapolate some worst case scenario of how a rule couldn’t work based on what comes later. Resist this urge. Assume that whatever comes later will be properly balanced, come out at the right rate, and be explained perfectly. You can’t predict what form these rules will ultimately take, nor does it help the designers for you to try and out-guess them. Playtest what you have in front of you, not what might come later. If this open playtest goes well, maybe you’ll be there to playtest everything else too.

One final note: I compiled this list of advice based specifically on playtesting this version of D&D. Every game with potential is different in some way than what’s come before. That means there’s not one-size-fits-all advice for whatever game you might be playtesting. Hopefully, however, this will help you when filling out your surveys when playtesting the new version of D&D, to help make the best game possible.

Now Communicate All That To Your Players

The latest D&D Next blog post by Bruce Cordell covers one of the oft-pointed to dealbreakers for many in D&D 4e: the use of the combat grid. This is actually only one piece of a whole topic about spacial thinking.

Bear with me here: if we all had perfect spacial thinking and effective communication skills, we wouldn’t need a battle grid in combat. The DM could describe the dimensions and shape of a room in the dungeon, as well as relative positions of inhabitants and features. We could just describe how far we’re going, all adjust our mental pictures appropriately, and voila: the entire time to set up a battle would be the time we need to talk about it.

Unfortunately, we don’t all have that. Some of us are terrible at it (me) while others of us are really good at it. In order to make it function at its best though, we have to ALL be reasonably good at it in the same game. Usually this is not the case: you have varying levels of spacial aptitude among the players at an RPG table, and definitely varying degrees of communication skills. In D&D, this has classically been addressed by one of the following styles:

• The battle grid, where everybody can see a birds-eye view of the entire battle, and can always determine exact distances and sizes.
• Rough battle grid (RBG) that does use a map and minis/tokens, but is less concerned with measuring distances and more simply about rough positions.
• “Theater of the Mind” (ToTM) as discussed by Bruce Cordell, where distances aren’t as important and everyone roughly imagines relative positions. (Notice there’s only one exact distance given in Bruce’s example in the size of the room.)
• A fourth style that I’ll call “Blueprints of the Mind” (BotM) that uses exact distances but does not represent them in the real (OOC) world, and is entirely reliant upon the DM to communicate where everything is.

(There is at least one other style in other RPGs I’ve played, which I’ll address later.)

Theater of the Mind, in 3D

Now, as someone with terrible, terrible direction sense, I tend to prefer one of the first two in D&D. The battle grid means that we’re all automatically on the same page. If I lay out a room as a DM, you can see how big it is without any negotiating. If I’m a player, I can easily look down and pre-plan what I’m going to do (and more importantly, get excited about what my character will do next turn) without having to wait and get a recap. The only delay tends to be working out fiddly things like line-of-sight. RBG operates largely the same way, though there’s a bit more clarification often involved.

ToTM can be OK, but also problematic. With situation that cares about relative positioning –  ”Can I my barbarian charge him? Is he in range of my bow? Can I aim this Cone of Cold to hit all of them?” – it becomes messier. Because I know I’m not going to be able to track where everything is, I have to wait until it’s my turn and get a recap. This sometimes leads to embarrassing situations where I’m not sure if there are goblins still attacking my face or not until it’s my turn. In other situations, I prefer the ToTM. In fact, in many other RPGs I play, this is the only way I’ll play because it just doesn’t matter who is where, and decisions are made based on what would make sense in a story.

BotM is my least favorite, as you might be able to tell, and I think it’s more common than people give it credit for. In this style, I completely check out when it’s not my turn because it just feels punishing and frustrating when I try to listen to everything that’s going on and I still can’t form a mental picture. Sometimes, it’s even worse when it feels like a math problem: “two golems are equidistant from each other in a 50 foot square room. One of them charges 30 feet to the wizard on your left. Assuming a halfling’s speed, can your rogue reach the other golem before he pulls the lever that drops the lava on the rest of the group?” It sounds extreme, but I’ve found that’s often the case when a very spacial thinker runs a game without a grid. While I cannot picture distances in my head, I’m sure there are folks out there that can’t help but describe things in terms of feet (and sometimes, horrifyingly enough, yards).

Stop And Ask That Pit Trap For Directions

These situations don’t just apply to combat mapping either. Take ye olde dungeone crawle. Mapping the dungeon is treated like another job you must perform like party caller or healer or stableboy. Only, in the case of dungeon mapping, it’s entirely based on player skill, so your illiterate barbarian with a 6 wisdom could be better at it than the 18 intelligence wizard.

So you have your dungeon cartographer, and the DM can describe the hallways that snake off 20 feet to the north and 30 feet to the south, then curve at a 45 degree angle for 40 feet, and so on. The cartographer listens intently and sketches it out as we go, making the player be in charge of trying to draw floor plans only by talking to a partner, like some kind of party game. Mess up, or misinterpret, and everything could be off. This is sometimes fun, for like the first time it happens, and other times, feels like you just programmed your Robo Rally robot to walk off a cliff repeatedly. Likewise, you miss all the possibly fun connections that are had by exploring a dungeon and seeing where the things wrap around, or connect in interesting ways.

Even assuming that you’re doing it perfectly, the mapping is done by one player, who has the best sense of what’s going on. The two players sitting next to her can see the map and weigh in on informed decisions about where to go next. Sitting anywhere else at the table? “Uh, left is always good.” Certainly a good cartographer will show it to other players when needed, but by and large, exploring a dungeon is the province of the one player who really understands what’s going on.

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE exploring in D&D. I love those “aha” moments where you figure out where there has to be a secret door because of the way things connect. That’s just what makes me sad about the style of play, since I don’t get to really participate. And trust me, you do NOT want me doing the mapping.

3d6+12 Feet Converted To Metric

All this is what lead me yesterday to declare, on the internet of all places, the following statement, in reaction to my friend Trevor stating that you need to know whether a range is in squares or feet:

I actually find feet similarly worthless in a gridless situation. Either you’re measuring exacts or not. Melee/Close/Medium/Far etc. would be fine, or some kind of zoning method.

Exact distances (like 30 feet, or my more hated 3e spell alternative, 30+2 feet per level) get you into the BotM framework. A spell tells you how far it works, and NEVER EVER goes beyond that. If you need to hit the dragon with an acid arrow but it’s 31 feet away, you’re out of luck (and if your DM isn’t out to hose you at every turn, he might even tell you before you waste the spell.) In more situations, we fudge it anyway, which TotM and RBG both live in the “fudge it/negotiate it” zone of play.

What I’m ultimately saying is that specifying exact distances in play, unless you’re using a battle grid or something similar, punish people like me, and there are more than us than you might think that are just playing along. It’s one of those things that has been a part of the game for so long it’s easy to just accept it. However, I do think there are solutions out there that can help everyone.

Virtual Matrix-Esque Worlds For Every Game Table

One alternative I floated, specifically in the context of D&D, is the idea of fuzzy ranges. That is, the range of distances is described by a rough description, like I described above: melee, close, medium, far. I can only attack in melee at melee range. My bow can hit anything I can see within far range. The cone of cold blasts everything close. You can still attach real world distances to them in the rules (close goes from 6-30 feet, medium from 31 to 100, etc.) so as to support battle grid usage. Additionally, and this is the important part, the abstract nature needs to be represented by the rules. Instead of relying on having an omniscient placement of a fireball because the spell description tells me it branches out to exactly 30 squares, it instead would say something like: “hits everything with close range of each other, up to 6 targets. You may designate a target you’re trying to avoid hitting and that target receives a +5 to their saving throw versus the effect.” Or: “Any character may try to run with an Endurance check to increase the distance of their run from close to medium. Halflings and dwarves have tiny legs and so get a -2 penalty to their check.” And so on. Those are just examples that might not work in play, but hopefully you get the idea.

Another alternative, as I alluded to earlier, is to take the approach that FATE and other games have done, which is create abstract “zones” of battle that only care about what area you are in, not exactly where you’re standing. So you might be in the ogre room zone, able to attack anything in melee in that zone, or attack with a longer range weapon into that zone or the hallway zone adjacent, but not the otyugh trash pile adjacent to that around the corner. Movement is listed in things like “1 zone.” And so on.

In both cases, you still have rules about distances, and you’re still going for the same effects that you’ve always had in D&D. It’s just thinking about them in a different way, and supporting them through the system instead of relying on DMs and players to be good at estimating distances. Heck, I couldn’t even tell you the size of the room I’m in right now, and I come to it every week day.

Ultimately, I think my point is that looking at the issue of just battle grid vs. not battle grid will leave us with the same issues, conflicts, and style preferences that lead us down the winding road in the first place from Chainmail to whatever comes next. Thinking about WHY we have these issues- like being unable to picture a battle in my head- and less about one style versus the other could bear some fruit in a solution that will work for everyone playing.

Photo Credit

This hack started with a few thoughts on my own for another project, and then discussing with Rob Donoghue about how easy it would be to make Race and Class into power sets, complete with the trappings of the 4e versions of them. After jotting down one or two, I found that the conversion was coming pretty easy to me, so I stole his idea completely ran with it.

I kept affiliations- the whole Solo, Buddy, Team thing- which might not be ideal, but also might be a way to get around the “never split the party” stuff. As well, 4e is sometimes referred to as having super-heroic PCs, and this just gets them closer to that. However, this write-up is specifically geared towards being closer to “1st level” feel, with mostly low dice values and small numbers of power traits.

This is only the barest of first drafts, containing the races and classes that I completed, as well as a sample milestone, and a few sample monsters. It hasn’t been particularly edited, or playtested at all. However, I saw requests online for this kind of thing, so I decided to put it out there. If you try it out, definitely let me know.

Without further delay:

Character Creation Overview | Races | Classes | Milestones | Monsters

Character Creation

1. Choose your Affiliation (Assign d6, d8, and d10 to Solo, Buddy, and Team)
2. Choose your Race.
3. Choose your Class.
4. Choose three Distinctions, related to your Race, Class, Theme, or Alignment.
5. Choose one Specialty at Expert.
6. Choose your Milestones (related to Race, Class, Theme, or Quest)
7. Choose your name.

Races

Elf

Enhanced Reflexes d8, Enhanced Senses d8, Speed d8
SFX: Elven Accuracy. Spend a PP to re-roll any attack action, adding in Enhanced Reflexes.
Limit: Fae. Shutdown Elf and gain a PP when confronted with cold iron or another Fae-specific magic.

Half-Elf

Enhanced Reflexes d8, Mimic d6
SFX: Dilettante. When making an Asset using Mimic based on another class’s power trait that you have witnessed, step up the die.
Limit: Fae. Shutdown Elf and gain a PP when confronted with cold iron or another Fae-specific magic.

Dwarf

Enhanced Stamina d10, Enhanced Senses d8
SFX: Dwarven Resilience. Before you make an action using your Dwarf power set, you may spend 1 PP to move your physical stress to the doom pool and step up your Dwarf power trait for this action.
Limit: Stocky. Convert Enhanced Stamina into a Complication and earn a PP. Recover on Opportunity.

Human

Choose one: Enhanced Stamina, Enhanced Reflexes, Enhanced Strength, Enhanced Senses
Start with an extra PP
SFX: Versatile. Split any Human power into two stepped-down dice.
Limit: Exhausted. Shutdown any Human power trait to gain 1 PP. Recover on Opportunity.
Choose two Expert Specialties.

Eladrin

Enhanced Reflexes d8, Psychic Resistance d8, Teleport d6
SFX: Focus. Replace two dice of the same size in a pool with a single die +1 step up.
Limit: Fae. Shutdown Elf and gain a PP when confronted with cold iron or another Fae-specific magic.

Halfling

Enhanced Reflexes d8, Fear Resistance d8
SFX: Second Chance. Spend a PP to re-roll a reaction against an attack, adding an extra die for your Fear Resistance.
Limit: Short. Convert Enhanced Reflexes into a Complication and gain a PP. Recover on Opportunity.

Tiefling

Fire Control d6, Fire Resistance d8
SFX: Infernal Wrath. Step up or double an opponent’s stress in your die pool (1 PP for both.)
Limit: Infernal Heritage. Shutdown Tiefling and gain a PP when confronted with something that affects your Infernal nature. Recover when no longer afflicted by it.

Dragonborn

Enhanced Stamina d8, Enhanced Strength d8, Breath Weapon d6
SFX: Draconic Fury. Add your stress to your own dice pool for no PP cost, double for a PP.
SFX: Dragon breath. Add 1d6 and keep an extra effect die for each target beyond the first.
Limit: Draconic Temper. Step up emotional stress to gain a PP.

Half-Orc

Enhanced Strength d8, Enhanced Reflexes d8
SFX: Furious Charge. Step up or double Enhanced Strength (1 PP for both), then shutdown. Recover on Opportunity.
Limit: Fringe. Gain a PP to step up emotional stress caused by being an outcast.

Classes

Fighter

Enhanced Durability d8, Weapon d10
SFX: Fighter’s Mark. When taking an attack action against an opponent, you may mark that opponent until your next turn. While marked, that opponent suffers a d8 “Marked” complication when attacking anyone except you.
Limit: Exhausted. Shut down any Fighter power to gain 1 PP. Recover on Opportunity.
Combat Expert

Mage

Sorcery d8, Blast d8
SFX: Area Attack. Add d6 and keep 1 extra effect die for each target after the first.
SFX: Constructs. Step up any asset made using Sorcery.
Limit: Spell memorization. Shutdown a Mage power to gain a PP. Recover during a Transition Scene.
History Expert, Arcana Expert

Sorcerer

Sorcery d8, Blast d8
SFX: Unleashed. Step up or double a Sorcerer power (1 PP for both) for one action. If action fails, add a die to the Doom Pool equal to the normal die rating of the power.
Limit: Unpredictable. Change a Sorcerer power into a Complication to gain a PP. Recover on Opportunity.
Arcana Expert

Rogue

Enhanced Senses d8, Weapon d8
SFX: Sneak Attack. Step up any Stunt activated by a Opportunity, or step up Physical Stress on successful action when activating an Opportunity.
Limit: Exhausted. Shut down any Rogue power to gain 1 PP. Recover on Opportunity.
Acrobatics Expert, Combat Expert, Stealth Expert, Thievery Expert

Cleric

Weapon d8, Enhanced Durability d8, Sorcery d8
SFX: Healing. Add Sorcery to your dice pool when helping others recover physical stress. Spend 1 PP to step back your own or another’s physical stress or trauma.
Limit: Spell Preparation. Shutdown Sorcery to gain 1 PP. Recover during a transition scene.
Combat Expert, Religion Expert

Barbarian

Weapon d12
SFX: Rage. Add a die from the Doom Pool to your attack action, then step up the die and return it to the doom pool.
Limit: Berserk. If the Barbarian takes emotional or mental trauma, he attacks the nearest creature each round, until all creatures are stressed out or the Barbarian is knocked unconscious.
Combat Expert, Intimidate Expert

Warlock

Blast d10, Teleport d6
SFX: Dark Pact. Add a die from the Doom Pool to your attack action, then step up the die and return it to the doom pool.
Limit: Growing Dread. Treat 1s and 2s as Opportunities when using a Warlock power.
Intimidate Expert, Arcana Expert

Bard

Mind Control d8, Blast d8
SFX: Area attack. Add d6 and keep 1 more effect die for each target beyond the first.
Limit: Music. Shutdown Bard to gain 1 PP. Recover on Opportunity.
History Expert, Arcana Expert, Diplomacy Expert

Paladin

Enhanced Durability d8, Sorcery d6, Weapon d8
SFX: Smite Evil. Against an evil target, add a d6 to your die pool and step back the highest die in your pool. Step up physical stress.
SFX: Lay on hands. Add Sorcery to your dice pool when helping others recover physical stress. Spend 1 PP to step back your own or another’s physical stress or trauma.
Limit: Pious. Shutdown Paladin when doing something against the Paladin code to gain a PP. Take an action versus the Doom Pool to recover.
Combat Expert, Religion Expert

Avenger

Sorcery d6, Weapon d8
SFX: Oath of Enmity. Designate an enemy to swear your oath against. Spend a PP to re-roll an attack action against that target, adding any Avenger power trait to your pool.
Limit: Sworn enemy. Shutdown Avenger if the target of your oath gets away. Recover during a transition scene.
Combat Expert, Religion Expert

Warlord

Enhanced Durability d8, Weapon d8
SFX: Inspiring Presence. Spend 1 PP to step back an ally’s emotional or mental stress or trauma.
SFX: Tactical Genius. Spend 1 PP to add a die pool from the Doom Pool and add it to your roll, then return it to the Doom Pool and step the die back.
Limit: Exhausted. Shut down any Warlord power to gain 1 PP. Recover on Opportunity.
Combat Expert, History Expert, Diplomacy Expert

Ranger

Weapon d8, Animal Control d6, Plant Control d6
SFX: Tracking. Step up any Asset related to tracking or terrain mastery.
SFX: Multiattack. Split Weapon d8 into 2d6.
Limit: Sworn to nature. Earn 1 PP and step up emotional stress related to damage to nature.
Combat Expert, Nature Expert

Druid

Sorcery d8, Animal Control d8, Plant Control d8, Weather Control d8
SFX: Constructs. Step up any Asset created with a Druid power by +1.
Limit: Sworn to nature. Earn 1 PP and step up emotional stress related to damage to nature.
Nature Expert, Mystic Expert

Milestones

Adventuring Party

1 XP whenever your party kills a monster.
3 XP whenever you complete a minor quest, or reject a minor quest in pursuit of a higher goal.
10 XP whenever you complete a major quest, or spectacularly fail a major quest.

Monsters

Young Red Dragon

(large scale threat)
Solo 3d10
Buddy 2d8
Team 1d6

Belly Full of Fire
Greedy
Always Chaotic Evil

Red Dragon
Fire Blast d10, Fire Resistance d12, Superhuman Strength d10, Superhuman Durability d10, Superhuman Stamina d10, Claws d8, Bite d10, Flight d8
SFX: Multipower. Include two powers in the same pool by stepping each down by -1.
SFX: Tailslap. On successful reaction against a melee attack, the attacker suffers a Tailslap complication equal to the dragon’s effect die. This complication applies to any movement attempts.
SFX: Area Attack. Add a d6 and keep an extra effect die for each target beyond the first.
SFX: Bloodied. Add the Red Dragon’s physical stress in any pool using a Red Dragon power, as long as the physical stress equals or exceeds d10.
Limit: Shutdown Fire Blast whenever you roll an Opportunity in a pool including a Fire Blast trait. Recover by activating an Opportunity.
Limit: Large scale threat. Defeat solo dice (with d12s) to defeat.

Combat Expert, Intimidate Expert

Kobold Mob

Team 6d4

Shifty
Small But Fierce
Dragon-Blooded

Claws d6 Spears d6 Slings d6

SFX: Traps and Devices. When creating an asset or complication, add a d6 to your pool and step up effect die.
Limit: Minion Mob. Knock away team dice (with d6 stress) to defeat.

Thievery Expert

Irontooth

Team d10
Buddy d8
Solo d6

Blood Crazed
Goblin Leader
Ambusher

Goblin Bandit
Weapon d10, Enhanced Durability d8
SFX: Versatile. Split Weapon into 2d8.
SFX: Berserk. Spend a die from the doom pool to step up any Goblin Bandit power. Afterward, return that die to the pool and step it up.
Limit: Gear. Shutdown or add or step up a die in the doom pool to shutdown any Goblin Bandit power. Recover by taking an action.

EDIT: Adam over at Exploring Infinity has added more Races and Classes using these ideas, so be sure to check them out!

However, I’ve been playing RPGs a long time now. I’m quite experienced at playing RPGs and games of all types. This is why I react poorly to statements implying that the D&D fighter should be the class that you give the new player, because they’re so simple. I don’t necessarily want a class that’s overly complicated (and we all know a few of those out there in D&D history) but I do want one that gives me plenty of decisions to make inherent in the class itself. I want to think like a Fighter, choosing what move (and maybe, what weapon) is most appropriate to the situation. I want to think like Batman in Dark Knight Returns and (paraphrasing) “There’s 9 different sword strikes from this position. 5 of them kill. 4 of them paralyze for life. The last one… hurts.”

Why is this? I point to what I want in D&D classes as a happy marriage between concept and mechanics. The Fighter- the tough, armored guy that uses weapons to fight monsters- is one that appeals to me for whatever reason. (Possibly because Con is my dump stat in real life.) The concept is awesome and there’s many, many examples of it out there in heroic fiction. Mechanics help reinforce that concept, but also serve with how I interface with the “game” portion of RPG, in giving me interesting decisions to make, and a specific outlet for creativity interpreted through those mechanics. (Slight digression: I think D&D needs better mechanics for improvised weapons and using stuff from your environment. There have certainly been rules and classes that attempt this, but it’s never quite clicked for me, and I think that could help some characters a lot, as well as having the side effect of powering cool descriptive background stuff from the DM and making the situation overall more dynamic.)

This doesn’t mean I’m against the simple Fighter. By all means: if simplicity is what you want in a class, whether you be new or whether the game portion of an RPG doesn’t appeal as much to you, you should have that option. The “Slayer” build in 4e Essentials vs. the core 4e Fighter is definitely one way to handle it. In fact, I’d love to see that option the other way for other classes like the Wizard and the Cleric. In fact, in a recent Design & Development column, WotC talked about developing the “Slayer” equivalent for the Sorcerer, which I think is a great step in the right direction. I’m not even saying that all classes need a full simplicity/complexity toggle (though if that could be pulled off in an easy way, awesome!) At least for the core classes, or archetypes, or whatever they are, regardless of game system even, don’t automatically assume that one concept only appeals to someone with a specific taste in complexity. Let me choose between my simple to play (and for me, boring!) Fighter and a more complex one. Obviously, this was brought up in the context of the new D&D, but I think applies to many RPGs, just with different names. (I’ve never been in love with the name Fighter anyway, as literally someone who Fights. Might as well call someone who uses magic… well, you get the idea.)

Just be sure no matter what to give me a Fighter that’s hungry for battle. And flapjacks.

Of course, as a game designer, I can’t help but still tinker with some of the pieces. I’ve done it before with the game, and have thought about further hacks. In the context of a new edition, there are any number of ways that an edition after 4th edition could go, while still building on the foundation of the game. While the publicly available info on the game seems to suggest that the new version will be different, hewing to ideas created in pre-4e editions, I have a few ideas for how a closer to 4e new edition could have gone. Here’s a few ideas for the D&D hackers out there.

4.G Edition

This version of D&D would use the new Gamma World as its model (minus the cards.) Attacks, damage, defenses, etc. scale at +1 per level. Damage can be swingy, but if you can get through a combat, you recover all your HP at the end. Races and classes form your two templated halves (which could be random, or not.) Your class and race each give you a primary stat, then roll 3d6 in order for the rest. You get skill bonuses from your class and race, plus a random one. Feats are also a thing of the past.

One thing that I really wish D&D would adopt that I could never see happening? Generic weapons stats: two-handed weapons do this, one-handed weapons do that, add a few attributes to customize (this one has this property, so it’s an axe!), and done.

Static Numbers, Better Powers

Another alternative would be to toss out the “plus half level” concept entirely. You get your baseline attack bonus, defenses, etc. at character creation. Feats, items, and other pieces may still tweak those bonuses. However, your powers continue to get better still, dealing more damage, inflicting harsher conditions, and generally being more powerful. HPs still increase though, so the attacks from lower level bad guys matter less and less, even if they can still hit you. Likewise, the bad guys are doing the same, so while a goblin remains equally easy to hit or miss, their relatively lower hit points means they could automatically become minions in a way after enough levels. This concept is what I was roughly going for with E11.

Powers Everywhere

One aspect of 4e that gives it the “combat-centric” reputation is how many powers are combat powers. However, there’s nothing about the powers system in and of itself that suggests this. Powers are merely templated ways to standardize how characters affect the game world, giving you range, what you roll to have it be successful, the effect, how often you can use it and so on. Thus, there’s no reason you couldn’t still use that format to open up the range of powers.

You still have your combat powers. You have utility powers as well, though the kind that aren’t usable in a fight like many of the utilities are. So more “gain a bonus to a skill” than “teleport 6 squares and get a bonus to attack.” Then you also have social powers, like a daily power that lets you find the word on the street, or a power that automatically lets you detect a lie. You could have investigative powers that point you in the right direction. All the utility style spells, something covered now by rituals, could make a comeback as powers, like your Rope Tricks and your Patternweaves and your Goodberries.

To take it further, I’d force every class to take a mix of combat and non-combat powers, the former like 4e to make sure that everyone can contribute meaningfully to a fight against monsters, the latter to round out the non-encounter portions and provide interesting flavor. The non-combat powers could even overlap interestingly with themes, the intersection of theme, race, and class giving you your powers. Currently, we have racial utilities, skill powers, theme powers and optional theme utilities. Mix those altogether and bring those to the forefront, and I think you’d have an interesting game.

Are there any major 4e hacks that you’ve experimented with?

Being The Game, the answer seemed obvious: 30 games in the course of one gaming party. After a bit of discussion with my fellow partygoers, we further clarified it had to be 30 different games. I succeeded, though with a little cheating. Here’s all what I played.

Game 0: Tetris with my Dishwasher

I didn’t count it, but fitting everything in my sink into the dishwasher with the added time pressure that people were arriving was one of the hardest challenges of the day.

Game 1: Toc Toc Woodman

This is a dexterity game that was recently brought to the US by Mayday Games. I enjoyed this one since the rules are very simple and clean while creating a pretty intense experience. You hit a plastic tree with an axe (two taps on your turns) and keep anything that hits the table. Bark on the edges is positive points, the cores in the center are negative points. A fun game that I’ll happily play once or twice occasionally but probably won’t become a permanent part of my gaming rotation.

Game 2: Fiasco “All The Damn Time”

I’ve wanted to pull this playtest playset out for a while, yet always rejected it since I rarely play Fiasco with a completely experienced group, and the playset heavily cautions against playing it with new people. While I agree it’s on the complex end of the Fiasco playset scale, and it certainly shouldn’t be a GROUP’S first playset, it worked fine with one new player.

This was without a doubt one of the funniest Fiasco games I’ve played in, while simultaneously being mind-bending and, of course, a Fiasco. You all play versions of the same person, unstuck through time and encountering each other. Each person as a result ends up bringing their own interpretation of the same character (as well as their own personality) which mixes quite well with the play. While the playset has the potential for a more introspective game, we went the other way bringing out the time travel tropes at rapid pace. Predestination paradoxes where the main character Sam convinced himself that he’s his own father because of a rumor he told himself, alternate timelines trying to scam each other, a temporal twin sister, a bag of heroin that gets dragged through time, and an aftermath involving Sam punching himself as a baby and eliminating all the others from existence were a few of the many highlights.

Game 3: Dominion, All Hinterlands Expansion

After the intense Fiasco session, I sat in on a game of Dominion using all Hinterlands, which I’ve only gotten to play with a few times. Due to some various action chaining, and some Noble Brigands making keeping high treasure cards difficult, this was a slow match.

However, Hinterlands has gone up to my top 3 Dominion expansions. Its effects that trigger in other times when playing them does make the decisions a bit more interesting than in other sets. There’s a lot to be said for just using my 3 favorite sets together (Hinterlands, Prosperity, and Seaside) along with the promos- especially since my custom box is too small to keep all the cards!

Game 4: La Strada!

My first cheat, especially because I am ALWAYS playing La Strada! And you should too.

Game 5: The Game

You just lost it too.

Game 6: Sorcerer (dice game)

As a third game played while also playing the Hinterlands game, I played this silly dice game with “the designer.” Here is the gist of Sorcerer:

• Start at level 1.
• Roll a d6.
• If you rolled anything but a 1, level up.
• If you roll a 1, you die at that level.
• If you get to level 20, you can roll to try and get into the pantheon of gods on a 4+.
• However, the pantheon is full, so that’s probably not an option anymore.
• If you’re playing competitively, you can stop rolling at any level.
• Did I mention it’s not much of a game?

 Game 7: Legend of Drizzt

The latest in the D&D “adventure system” board games, and the only one I hadn’t played before. I played the allied version of Artemis Entrari because assassins are awesome. We kicked Shimmergloom’s draconic ass, even though Drizzt fell in a pit for a turn.

I didn’t realize this version of the game came with more playable characters than the others. We suspect the characters are better than the characters in previous versions of the game, too. There’s a few other cool twists in the cards without adding extra rules to the core engine of the game, which is good. On the other hand, I don’t know if the missions add enough for the game to make me excited about playing it a lot more.

I did ruminate with Sly Flourish (who had brought the game, painted minis and all) that it might be time to combine all three into one mega-game though, and customize it to only contain the most fun stuff. Now that’s tempting, and gives me a few ideas for other games.

Game 8: Rock, Paper, Scissors

I held off on playing this until my friend Mark showed up, who had called it in advance. I had to turn down at least 4 previous offers to play it. And then, I lost. Stupid rock.

Game 9: Hit A Dude

I hit a dude, and play passed to the left. I did not use the player’s guide, however.

Game 10: Get Bit!

A few folks there had never tried it and asked me to play, so we busted out my “primo” copy with all the extras from the Kickstarter campaign. We had 7 players interested, and because of the promo pink robot, 7 player sets. I didn’t want to jump into the Sharkspansion either with new players. I also couldn’t just sit it out, so we tried it with 7 players, which I have never tested before.

As expected, there’s lots and lots of ties early on, and goes longer than I’d like. However, it still works as a game if you don’t mind it being more chaotic and punishing. I wouldn’t recommend it officially for the published rules, though. The Sharkspansion is still the best way to add a 7th player, and in my oh-so-biased opinion, adds a lot to the game.

Game 11: Loopin’ Louie

A friend of ours brought this over, unaware of my tournament-level past. I taught him the tournament rules, and enlightenment was had. And then I won the mini-tournament, showing that my skills have not atrophied much over the years.

Game 12: Crappy Birthday

We had a crowd around, so I busted out this party game from Northstar Games. It was appropriate since it’s about recieving gifts on your birthday, and inappropriate since my party and gifts were not crappy at all.

This is a quick, Apples to Apples-ish party game about giving the worst gift to someone on their turn, from a deck of cards of gifts whose quality ranges wildly. I do enjoy playing this, yet I may try some of the optional rules about giving someone a gift you think they’d like and one you think they would hate, and go from there. Also, it usually ends far too quickly if someone gets a better hand of crappier gifts.

Game 13: Seven Dragons

I busted out this game to play with the “Rainbow Dragon!” guy from the promotional video.

I enjoy Seven Dragons more than its predecessor Aquarius, not just for the Larry Elmore dragons but also for the added gameplay improvements. This is one of those games that I’ll rarely suggest on my own but works well in a group of both gamers and non-gamers.

Game 14: Tic-Tac-Toe

The Main Event suggested this one and threw down a piece of paper and allowed me to have the first move. Somehow, I lost, in plain view of many partygoers. I suspect I’ll have to relinquish my title of “The Game” as a result, and you would not be wrong to take it from me.

Game 15: Hangman

I had my revenge on The Main Event in this game, who also screwed up the rules. Unfortunately, the message was “Y O U  S U C K” so it indeed was a victory and great cost.

Game 16: Spot-It!

This real-time game, brilliant party game is easy to bust out for a short amount of time, choose your own preferred rules set with the same basic play (match the symbols on two cards, which is much harder than it sounds), play, and then be done in a few minutes while still feeling satisfying. Simple enough for kids to play, yet fun enough for adults as well (especially when you add swearing to everything), I’d say this is one of the hits of the year for me.

Game 17: Pit

As it was getting late into the evening, and some players were already leaving, I started to push for quick playing games to hit my quota. Pit is an old game, which I jokingly call a “shouting game.” It’s interesting because there are strategies there, and I have seen people (including those who have actually worked in the stock market) do consistently very well at the game. I know some basics and still haven’t figured out what the best way to play is. Still, for a game that goes that quickly and includes a bell, hard to go wrong with this one.

Game 18: Hey Waiter!

Another quick-playing game designed by my friend Anthony, you are given a stack of dishes (represented by poker chips) and try to serve them before your opponents do. We played partnership, which means you look for opportunities to help both yourself and your partner while blocking your opponents.

The design of the cards and the available actions gives it a bit of a learning curve for a pretty simple game, yet there’s some real decisions to make during it that make it fun. If you’re a fan of trick-taking games or similar, this one may appeal to you despite not being trick-taking at all.

This is also the point where I realized I was playing a lot of games with a “!” in the title.

Game 19: Falling

Another of my top 10 games of all time (alongside Loopin’ Louie and Dominion), Falling takes more time to teach the rules than it does to play, which means you can get in a few rounds of it very quickly, and each game still feels like a frantic rush… just like falling from the sky. This is a real time game where your only goal is to hit the ground last (which happens when the deck runs out). This game is hated by many but remains one of my favorites. I almost pulled out my other favorite real-time game (also from Cheapass) Brawl but didn’t make it happen.

Game 20: Jenga

This was one of the most intense games of Jenga I’ve ever seen, including a late game twist where one of the players developed a forceful strike to knock blocks away from the table where they would land with a violent fall. He ended up pulling this off three times, and was among one of the winners. The tower was very tall by the end, and went many rounds past where we thought it would. I also got to regale other players about playing Dread and getting really lucky with my pulls so that my complete bastard of a character got away in the end.

Game 21: No Merci (aka Geschenkt or No Thanks!)

This short yet brutal filler hasn’t seen much play lately, yet it’s still high up there. The rules are really simple: either place a chip (worth positive points) or take a card (worth many negative points.) Getting runs of cards means you lower the amount of negative points you have. That’s about it, except that random cards are removed from the deck, and are hidden, so you don’t know if the cards you need to connect are in the deck. There’s a combination of gambling on what will come up, as well as trying to milk points from other players at the right time and for the right amount.

Game 22: Mamma Mia!

Another great filler. Part memory game, part hand management, you play ingredient cards into a center pile along with pizzas recipes that have different requirements for the cards under it. When the deck runs out, you see if people were able to make their pizzas or not. You play for 3 rounds and see who has made the most pizzas.

I like this game because while there is a memory element, it’s is far secondary to smart card play. I managed to score all of my pizzas, easily winning.

Game 23: Magic: The Gathering Commander

Using two of my decks, we tossed down a quick one on one Commander duel: Kresh vs. my never before played Wrexial deck. I didn’t draw the right mana for most of the game, and Wrexial’s ability to pull instants from the graveyard didn’t end up helping that much. When Phage the Untouchable hit the table, it was over for me. I do have some tweaking to do with the Wrexial deck, yet I still like the idea and play of it a lot.

Game 24: Treehouse

One of the quickest playing Icehouse/Looney Pyramids games out there, I hadn’t played this in so long I forgot how all the different actions worked. Fortunately, I had a trained Looney Game Technician there to help me with it (and I won with a well-timed Aim.)

Game 25: Dots And Boxes

I managed to convince a few players that wanted to get to Risk Legacy (which I wanted as a closer) to help me hit my goal before we could play. Thus, this was the first of a few rapid-fire games.

I hadn’t played this since I was a kid. I won with some friendly assistance. I probably don’t need to play this again until I’m 40.

Game 26: Win, Lose, or Banana

I got a banana.

Game 27: High Card

I wrecked this game by pulling the Ace of Spades immediately. I have mad High Card skills.

Game 28: Texas Hold ‘Em

We dealt out two cards to everybody sitting there. Several people called. I folded my hand in this no stakes, no consequences game, then cashed out with as much money as I started with.

Game 29: Blackjack

Yes, my penultimate game of the evening was Blackjack, a game I’ve never played in a casino. After one hit, my 20 was enough to defeat the dealer. Good enough for me.

Game 30: Risk Legacy

This has been a frequent centerpiece at our Thursday game nights lately. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a game that could potentially define a whole new category of games.

Essentially, the game evolves, and is never the same from game to game. You make permanent changes to the board, the rules, the available resources, the other components: it all permanently changes with each game you play. As a result, a meta-storyline develops. You write on the board to name cities and immortalize the winners of conflicts. When certain events happen, you open envelopes.

In the game prior to this one, we opened two envelopes in the same game, and each was a mind-blowingly awesome twist that forever shaped how later games will be played. I’m trying very hard not to spoil anything just because of how cool it was to experience those.

The game we played was our first chance with the new stuff we unlocked in the previous game, and as expected, it made a big impact on how the game was played, and even had much more subtle repercussions in the strategy of the game I couldn’t predict. When people have asked me about the game, I’ve responded that it’s a really cool idea, but the game play is still Risk, so judge that carefully. I’m not a big Risk fan and didn’t play it much growing up, so I’m at a bit of a disadvantage when I play. Still, despite the fact that I’ve never won, I still look forward to every time I play just to experience more of the story we’re creating with the game.

In short, other than losing again (when so very close), it was a very satisfying close to 30 games in a single party.

Final exclamation point game title count: 6

As I experienced in my campaign, I never felt like there was enough actual epic storylines to justify a full 10 levels. When every combatant was supposed to be earth-shattering, it drained much of the impact away from each individual one. Plus, unless you’re just going on a tour of gods to kill, the variety of monsters ends up being a bit tough to manage- one or two times fighting a balor and his epic demon minions is cool, but the third or fourth? It loses a bit of its cool factor.

So what I propose is an alternate campaign plan that doesn’t focus on trying to make all 30 levels of a game operate similarly. It breaks out the epic tier into several segments with different focuses, and even changes a bit how many D&D campaigns are run. A good part of the inspiration for this was a 2nd edition D&D campaign I played in that borrowed heavily from the D&D Immortals Boxed set.

Levels 1-20

The first 20 levels are the meat of your campaign. The PCs start as nobodies but with the spark of heroes that they will ultimately embrace for their destiny. By the time they hit level 20, they have risen to become important people in the universe, and ended around level 20 with a major accomplishment that much of the previous campaign has been leading up to. Maybe you’ve even used the 5×5 Method once or twice to get there.

Additionally, by mid=paragon, the players should declare what epic destiny they will be taking at 21 so that the DM can work in ways in the story that head them towards opening up that epic destiny. For example, the future demigods in the party can get hints as to their divine spark, whereas the eternal defender becomes recognized worldwide for his achievements.

Levels 21-25

Level 21 is where the PC have just accomplished a major victory in the campaign, which has made major impact, but it’s not the end yet. Some epic level threat is behind it all, and the PCs have to stop it before (the universe explodes/time is torn apart/gnomes commit mass suicide/whatever). Maybe you finally get revenge upon Orcus himself for sending his demons and undead after you for so long, finally get to steal Tiamat’s horde, or punch Pelor in the jaw (he knows what he did). Levels 21 to 25 tell the story of how your characters get ready for the final battle, and put a stop to the major threat that they have discovered once and for all.

Level 25 is effectively the end of the campaign. The final boss can be something 5-8 levels above the party, with all manner of higher level nasties in the way. Level 25 the epic finale, where plot threads are finally tied off in meaningful ways. The death of a major force in a game should also have a lasting impact; the Scales of War finale did a really interesting job of this and is worth checking out.

Levels 26-30

This is where things really diverge. At this point, your campaign is effectively over, but the stories of the characters aren’t. These levels answer the question of “what’s next?” for the PCs as they move along to the “Immortality” section of their epic destiny. Instead of simply leveling up into their legacy, they must go on quests to truly earn their epic destiny. I call these “epilogue levels” or “legacy levels.”

Strongly consider not running these adventures in the same group as before. Each session you run should focus on one, or maybe two, player characters who are undergoing an important quest to achieve the next step in their journey to immortality. You can also play around with putting the spotlight on one character and having other players play supporting characters (NPCs that came up during the game who are still around, mysterious guides into the next stage of their journey, even experienced lieutenants and henchmen). You can play quite a bit with time here too, since the pressure of the main story should be over by this point. Characters that have gone on to be legendary sovereigns can jump to different periods in their kingdom’s reign as more pieces of what will end up being how they’re remembered as a ruler show up. Quests to research ultimate knowledge can jump between planes and time itself to collect the most of obscure arcane knowledge. The psionic character that prepares to join in the universal consciousness must first experience the history of the greatest minds to ever live and thus must jump into different bodies and learn a lesson first.

One important thing about these adventures are that they’re designed to show off what a character has learned from all the previous levels, Additionally, since you’re ideally running these in either solo or smaller group situations, the full might of an epic party against your  monsters isn’t as much of a concern, and characters used to facing the biggest threats in numbers now have to put their own skills to the test. That balor fight might have been a cakewalk when there were five of you, but maybe not anymore when the balor’s brother comes to face you alone.

These adventures should only go on as the players are interested. The natural inclination is to jump into a new campaign, which if that’s what everyone is ready for is fine. But playing out these levels and seeing what happens- and in some cases seeing who is successful in their ultimate quest for immortality- can help shape the next campaign you play. Old PCs become the new pantheon, ancient kings, greatest wizards, subjects of myth and cautionary tales. These legacy levels help give another campaign set in the same world a real history, as well as making those epic levels feel like the PCs accomplished something big that lasts.

Why These Changes?

Simply put, I find 10 levels of full epic play, in the same paradigm as the previous 20 levels, to be too much. Compressing the bulk of play into 5 levels helps that. Additionally, when running my campaign, I found having to tie everyone’s completion of epic destinies together into my finale to be a bit too much going on, and not enough attention is paid. By giving epic destinies their own set of levels to play with, they get the focus they deserve, as well as potentially being easier to challenge by not having a full party. As I mentioned up top, this may not fix the rules issues that many have with epic tier play, but it sounds like a good way to run an epic game to me.

Anyway, I was sad for the D&D minis to go- I thought the last set had been a huge step up from the past few, and was hoping to see more minis to fill in all the new stuff coming from 4e, even if the release schedule had been cut back to something like once a year. Instead, the announcement was made that D&D minis was ended, citing rising costs and other factors.

Understandably, this raised some questions among the community. “Are minis really that expensive to make?” “Why can’t I just buy a box of assorted monsters?” “Isn’t it stupid to reuse sculpts?” I hope to be able to answer some of these questions, with what limited knowledge I have about the situation.

First a fairly strong disclaimer: I am not an expert. My experience comes from working with/for a few board game companies, most notably for Robot Martini who first put out my game Get Bit! which used plastic figures that were produced under similar circumstances to how a miniature would be made. Thus, my experience is slightly tangental, and many of the numbers I can provide for it are based on something different, and are 4-5 years old. And I absolutely have no insider knowledge into WotC’s business numbers whatsoever. Still, I hope that it can at least provide some context for the whole situation, and will help you understand some of the economic realities of miniature production.

Still with me? Let’s start off with one of the most important parts of the plastic figure-making process: the mold.

Molds, and I Don’t Mean the Kind That Cause Disease

Meet the Dismembermen

The process used to create the Get Bit! plastic “dismembermen” involved a factory in China injecting liquid plastic into the mold to give it its shape, after which it cools off, becomes solid, and you have your hunk of plastic in the shape of a dude ready to have his limbs torn off by a shark.

That mold isn’t a trivial cost, though. Each shape you want your minis  to form requires a different one. So that D&D minis set with 80 different minis requires 80 different molds, and possibly even more depending on how fancy/multipart you get with the set. On Get Bit!, I was working with someone who had previous worked for a defunct toy company who already had this mold created for their product line. Thus, we didn’t have to pay to get the mold created, which was a huge savings. At one point, we priced it out (including for a shark figure to include) and some estimates came in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. The pieces aren’t very detailed, though they are articulated. For something more detailed, the cost might even be higher, or for something simple, might be cheaper. (I can’t discuss numbers on the new Get Bit! run with a new company, but I can say the goal was to make it cheaper.)

Another cost that is easy to overlook is that someone has to design that mold. Depending on the process, you might be paying someone to do it all in a 3D design program, or actually starting from a sculpted figure then translating it into whatever form the factory needs to actually make it.

More Filled Than a Gelatinous Cube

Of course, what you hope is that the cost of the mold will get spread out. Since you only have to pay that mold cost once, usually no matter how many figures you make with it. So if you have to make the mold for $5k, and you make 5k of that particular figure, you’re potentially adding $1 to the cost to make each individual mini. However, if you make another run, you already have the mold, and you’ve already paid to have it created. Thus, the more of the same exact mini you make, the more you’re spreading out that cost.

And speaking of spreading out the cost, plastics factories are classic economies of scale, just like printing. The more you make at once, the more of a discount there is. Our original run of Get Bit! was 500 copies- a very small run by the factory’s standards. For just solid colors of plastic, our cost for each piece in dismemberman ran around $0.60 each. We priced out paint jobs for the figures that would have added painted on eyes, clothes, etc. but it would have added further to the cost for each color of paint they would use on each figure. This could easily have added another $1 to the cost of each plastic guy we were making. So mold cost + plastics cost + paint cost, and you have a rough estimate of the minis cost.

Your Owlbear Cares About International Diplomacy

Now, let’s throw some curveballs in here. Remember how I mentioned that the factory we dealt with was in China? That’s because, by far, the world leader in mass manufacturing of cheap plastics like these is China. So taking your business anywhere else is likely to come with a hike in those raw costs I’ve already given you.

But, those low prices come with some setbacks. The factory in China has made them, but how do you get them back to the US in order to sell them in Friendly Local Game Stores? The cheapest way is to put them on, literally, the slow boat from China. Of course, you’re going to have to pay the transportation costs on those too, as well as any import costs once the ship hits shores… and account for the time that all is going to take. Now what if the US and China are having a spat over, say, a human rights violation or any number of other international issues? You might have all those costs and processes changed by foreign policy- something out of the control of a company like Wizards of the Coast (until they hire a LOT more Enchanters on staff.)

That’s one potential problem with keeping the costs manageable and predictable, but there’s one that we all deal with: the cost of oil. As Wikipedia says, “The raw materials needed to make most plastics come from petroleum and natural gas.” That’s right, the next time you’re cringing at how much it costs to fill up at the pump, realize that your plastic orcish hordes were affected by the same thing. That’s why the rising cost of oil was cited at DDXP for a reason to discontinue the minis line. So that $0.60 cents per model I quoted earlier has probably gone up quite a bit since I was involved in 2007- and much higher than the state of things when Harbinger was released in 2003.

That’s not the only things that can go wrong either. Just as an example, the factory with the original Get Bit! mold went out of business and, so I heard, burned down. The original mold is gone, gone, gone. So in order to make a new version of the game, a new mold has to be created. In the case of WotC’s miniatures, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the old molds were long gone, whether it was because they changed factories and couldn’t take the mold with them, the factories changed technologies and couldn’t use the old mold, or like my example, they were just plain lost.

Collectability and Extra Unicorns

So now that you have some idea of the costs involved in producing miniatures, and how much they can quickly go out of control, here’s some closing thoughts about how this relates to WotC’s business model.

Remember just in the past year or two when WotC released miniatures that weren’t blind and collectible, the PC heroes set and the monster sets with one visible? From what I’ve heard, those didn’t go over too well, and it’s where blind packs have the edge: gamers like you and me are more likely to buy multiple packs in the hopes that we get what we need, instead of buying multiple packs of something we don’t need.

Obviously, any unsold packs sit around on game shelves and don’t make money. That has to be factored into the cost too- if something doesn’t sell, you won’t recoup the costs put into making it in the first place, and orders for subsequent products go down, which is likely what happened in the last few sets. Couple that with there just plain being a lot of minis already out there from previous sets, with a strong secondary market, and you have a recipe for likely flagging sales and rising costs.

Now, one question that came up while thinking about their minis cost is why can’t they just use the molds they have, and produce some of the boxed sets filled with minis that many DMs have clamored for since the beginning? They’re doing it, just with a bunch of other stuff included: it’s called Castle Ravenloft (and Wrath of Ashardalon.) Those are all molds they had previously, but with solid color filling, and no extra money being spent on paints. They’re also producing them in enough quantities to manage the costs, and bundling them up with a fun board game and rolling the costs all into one package.

Yes, this isn’t the same as being able to buy a big bag of orcs or whatnot, but is a way around the “sit around unsold” problem, since you can buy it for the minis, or you want the game, or both (thus creating a more varied demand.)

Would I like to see something like the orc bag (that sounds dirty) or even better, more new miniatures? Yes, definitely. Unfortunately, with these economic realities I don’t see it significantly changing until technology changes. That’s one reason I’m following technologies like 3D printing: maybe someday, instead of needing to buy a box of minis, I’ll just be able to download a pattern from the internet, hit print, and wait for the resultant Dwarf with a santa hat wielding a double battleaxe with a fox on his shoulder. There’s some possibilities, I’d say.

With two sessions under my belt, with completely different players each time, I am convinced that this is a combination that works. In fact, one player of mine who was a big Mage fan described it as “note perfect.” Here now then, is my combination of Mage: The Ascension and the Leverage RPG. You will need both books for this hack to work, and prior understanding of both. 

Character Creation

Attributes are the same as Leverage, and are assigned the same way. Mages tend towards high Intelligence, Alertness, and Willpower, but there are some paradigms and traditions that rely heavily on Agility, Strength, and Vitality as well.

Replacing Roles are Spheres. For the purposes of the game, we use a stripped down list of 6 spheres. Each one encompasses skills that go along with those spheres as well, and I’ve given some examples.

• Correspondence. Skills include: Drive, Stealth, Investigation.
• Forces. Skills include: Occult and Science.
• Life. Skills include: Medicine and Brawl.
• Matter. Skills include Technology and Thievery.
• Mind. Skills include: Subterfuge and Leadership.
• Time. Skills include Intuition and Research.

Assign dice to the Spheres like you would Roles in Leverage, with an extra d4 for the sixth. Also assign Specialties as you would in Leverage: note that the skills listed make great Specialties, but magical Specialties work too (like Fire for Forces).

What about the 3 missing spheres? It’s assumed that each Mage in this version has enough Prime with which to create and Entropy to destroy, and the roles of Quintessence (explained below) covers many of these effects. Further use of those spheres, plus Spirit, are primarily covered through Rotes.

Assets are replaced by Foci. Each Mage starts with a Foci of their choice at d8. Further Foci can be made using Quintessence.

Each character has three Distinctions like in Leverage, but three specific kinds of them:

• Paradigm. Possibly the most important aspect of a character, this is the statement that sums up how the character views reality and thus warps it. Like any Distinction, this cuts both ways: some magics work with this world view, and some are actively hindered by it.
• Nature. Like in Mage, this is the core personality of your character. The ones in Mage are mostly appropriate, as are the sample personality distinctions in Leverage.
• Demeanor. This is how the world sees you. In play, I’ve been running the first adventure, then having the rest of the players choose this for the character.

Choose 2 Rotes. These are the equivalent of Talents, but tend to be described as consistently working magical effects. You can reskin Talents from Leverage, or have the players invent their own.

Finally, Mages have Quintessence. These work like Plot Points. They can be used to keep extra dice after a roll (putting some extra prime into an effect), introducing a new Foci (enchanting an item), or having a flashback (subtly affecting reality through will.)

Choose a name, any aliases, and a tradition/convention (if you’re using them.) As might be evident, your choice of tradition has no mechanical effect on making the character and is purely for flavor. For my group that wasn’t as familiar with Mage, I dropped the idea entirely.

Congratulations, you have a Mage.

Sample Characters

Complete sample characters from the game I ran for my local group are available on my Obsidian Portal page. Additionally, the second time I ran the game, I had the following characters in the game:

• Chatty DM played a Mind Mage who manifests his anxieties as physical manifestations.
• Tracy played a Matter Mage who was able to reshape matter with his hands whose paradigm was “It’s all negotiable.”
• Logan played a Correspondence Mage surveyor who believed the universe could be better ordered.
• Quinn played a Time Mage demolitions expert with the belief that “Everything falls apart.”
• E played a femme fatale Forces Mage who used her own specially blended cigarettes to affect the world.

Running the Game

In this version, I call the GM/Fixer “The Tapestry.” Because what else is the GM than the sum of the fictional reality, being messed with by the awakened?

When the PCs take an action that requires a test, they roll dice in a similar fashion to Leverage: Attribute + Role + other stuff that can be brought in.

The Tapestry opposes this by rolling one die for difficulty (from d6 easy to d12 really hard) and one die for the type of magic involved (d6 for non-magical, d8 for coincidental, d10 for vulgar without witnesses, and d12 for vulgar with witnesses.) The Tapestry can add other dice as applicable, whether it be the place, a character, Paradox, etc. As usual, add the top two dice together for a result on each side, highest result wins.

Speaking of Paradox, it takes the same role as Complications in Leverage. When a player rolls 1s, the Tapestry can hand him a Quintessence to create Paradox, of a strength depending on the amount of 1s rolled. This will often come up in relation to the magic used, although it can be anything that would happen in response to the magic being worked. Paradox works against a character wherever applicable, and lasts until the end of the session. (This means, by the way, that you can still succeed at a spell and have it generate Paradox, something that works especially well for Mage.)

Adventures

I’ve run two sessions of it so far, using roughly the same adventure for both, where a casino-owning vampire is using an ally’s blood magic on all the poker chips, siphoning all the gamblers’ luck into the chips themselves, to be used by him to take over and turn the clock back on Vegas, under his Princedom. I stated the big bad as a Mark, as follows:

Nicodemus “Nicky” Bett

• 8th Generation Ventrue d12
• High Roller d12
• Ring-A-Ding-Ding d8
• Nostalgic d4

I also used a location that factored heavily into the adventure:

Grand Destiny Casino

• Brujah Thugs d10
• Auspex Security Inc. d8
• Old School d4

And a supporting character:

Lianna Strauss

• Thaumaturgy d10
• Forward-Thinking d8
• My work is perfect d4

Between those and a loose story, that was pretty much all I needed. Granted, it played out like a heist, but with powerful Mages in the place of powerful characters. And boy, are characters capable in this- even when up against the vampire himself, there’s still a lot of damage they can do. It might not be ideal for those gritty struggles for ascension and control of reality, but it does make a damn fun game set in the same world where that’s happening.

Wrap-Up

That’s pretty much it. There’s a few ideas that I still need to play with: for example, I was thinking about using three kinds of Stress (Injury, Quiet, and Hubris) but haven’t nailed it down yet, and whether I want to use the Leverage experience system or not. However, it is fully playable, and thus I release it into world for you to try as you like. If you do, I hope you come back and let me know how it goes.

And one final thing: I created a character sheet for the whole thing, with character generation rules, and a brief summary on the page. It uses an old Mage sheet as its base, but no challenge is intended to any of the copyrights within.

Mage: The Ascension Job character sheet

"Run Away" by Ironshod

Combat speed in D&D is an oft-debated topic, and while much of the conversation is useful, I have one method that I trumpet above all others to make your combats take less time and work better as a scene in your game, and that’s the combat “out.” Since this technique is primarily in the hands of the DM and takes place in the story instead of the rules, it’s easier to implement than a lot of suggestions and is useful for most RPGs, not just D&D.

Though it’s a technique I’ve discussed before, to recap the core of the method:

In a given fight, have alternate means for the combat to end beyond the D&D default “one side is dead.”

To start, put yourself in the situation and in the mind of the adversaries. Now make sure you know their goals. Why are they fighting? What do they want to get out of it? Would they be open to negotiation? Is their heart really in the fight, or is there something else forcing them? Is one of the bad guys in the fight in charge? And so on.

From there, you can develop alternatives to having the fight just go all the way to the bitter end. Some examples that could result from the above questions:

• The elven brigands want an item from the PCs, and will focus on the PC with the item. If they can steal it, they’ll run away from the fight with it.
• The bad guys are a mercenary company. If too many of them are bloodied or killed, they’ll stage a tactical retreat. Alternatively, they respond well to offers of gold pieces.
• The orc is bossing around the goblins and getting them to fight. If the orc drops, the goblins take parting shots, grab their payment from the orc’s body, and get out of there.
• The hobgoblins operate as a brave unified fighting force- until there’s only one of them left. Then he pleads for his life to fight another day.
• The crazed wizard has summoned a group of elementals to help him fight. They are bound to his life force, so if he is killed, they’re banished back to the Elemental Chaos where they came from.
• The only thing keeping the zombie horde controlled is the will of the vampire necromancer. Stake him, and they begin to attack randomly.
• Caiphon, the Whisperer in Dreams, destroys the dream world around the PCs. They can’t fight him, they can only hope to escape through the portal… which is being guarded by ravenous beasts.
• The summoned primordial is bound to a powerful artifact. By severing it from its wielder, the primordial returns to slumber.
• The demon queen draws her power from multiple portals to abyssal planes. By closing those portals, much of her power is cut off.
• The flight of dragons is only interested in hit and run tactics. They will not stand and fight, but instead engage, deal out some damage, then fly away.
• The homunculi are all armed with self-destruct spells, in case their gnomish master is killed.

As you can see, not only do you have a technique to shorten combats, you also have an effective technique to build interesting encounters. Use of this method encourages skill checks/challenges, dialogue, roleplaying, and creativity in combat. Not only that, but it makes it easier to use a wider range of relative power level of creature- it just means that fighting becomes less of an option, and using the out becomes more important.

Will this work for every fight? No. While there are plenty of options to create outs in fights with fighting mindless killing machines, it’s not going to always be an option. As the always insightful Sly Flourish says, sometimes you just want to fight a Gelatinous Cube and not have it take an hour, which this technique doesn’t help with.

What it does help with, however, is to take those encounters that are fights to the death and make them more important by comparison. If there’s usually a chance that the fight isn’t going to end with death on both sides (or that death can be sped up due to thoughtful play), the ones that are more serious have a bigger impact. That’s when the players know to pull out some of the big guns. Thus, your overall time in combat is reduced, and I hope, more rewarding.

If you have a DDI account, be sure to also check out this Unearthed Arcana article by Rich Baker, giving some concrete rules for ending a combat through fleeing, surrender, or parlay.

However, I had a very specific style in mind that would feel like a big dungeon crawl. That posed a few problems:

1. My group is pretty capable, and I wanted to challenge them in ways that reflect the dungeon crawl style- choosing when to rest, what resources to expend. where to explore, etc.
2. I wanted to push the group forward in ways they weren’t used to in my episodic campaign.
3. To really get the Temple of Elemental Evil feel, I wanted to give the PCs good reasons not to hack and slash through everything, even though they were more powerful than most of the enemies there.
4. I wanted the Temple to really come alive and react, in ways discussed by Rob Schwalb and Chatty DM, whose articles would ultimately serve as the inspiration for what I wanted.

To try and achieve these ends, I came up with a 5×5 plan (based on my own 5×5 Method) for the Temple: one for each element, and one for the Temple itself (which also represented the imprisoned demoness at the bottom breaking free.) These I dubbed the Machination Meters: a list of goals that each temple element was pursuing for some ultimate agenda. Advancing a step on a track represented the passage of time and the goals advancing while the PCs adventure.

The tracks advanced as follows:

• +1 Every fight
• +1 Every extra short rest (i.e. a second short rest taken after a fight)
• +1 Alarm raised or other conflict
• +1d6 Every extended rest (After playing, I would revise this to +1d4)
• +1 End of session (in my game, through some teleportation magic, they were able to swap party members in and out to accomodate the player base, but if you have a stable group, this might not be necessary)

When one of these events would occur, I would advance a track of my choice, except for the Temple’s track which was special. The Temple’s track could only be advanced if each of the other elements were advanced to that point: so Temple 1 could only occur after all the other elements were at 1 or beyond.

For an example of one of the tracks, here’s Earth:

Earth’s goal is to build the largest army for the Elemental Eye. Since Earth focuses on the recruitment aspect, it gets the largest amount of space taking up the entire first dungeon floor, but since the followers are the weakest, Earth gets the least respect. Earth wants to build the ultimate army, train the best soldiers, and then unleash its forces on Tarturia.

1. Train and process recruits, provide food (Banquet Hall #119, Staging Area #103)
2. Interrogate Lord Hans for information on Tarturia (Prison #114)
3. Put down an insurgent Earth Priest (Room #135)
4. Get equipped by the artificers of the Fire Temple (Forges #202)
5. Use the Air Temple’s teleportation circles to invade Tarturia (Air Temple #210)

Each one lists a room where the event occurs, which could be averted (or helped!) by the PCs taking direct action, with #5 being the cumulation of that group’s schemes, and was generally Very Bad. So while the track could advance to #4, if the PCs already had gotten involved, they could have sabotaged the artificers and thus the advancement wouldn’t mean anything.

The special Temple track was for Zuggtmoy, trapped at the bottom, who got more powerful for the final showdown for each advancement on the track.

How did it work? It solved a number of problems, though wasn’t perfect.

Some of the big plusses from this system that helped smooth over some issues I was running into with 4e:

• Extended rests had to be undertaken carefully, which meant that using dailies and healing surges was a more nuanced decision. Unlike previous games, I was able to drain the healing surges from defenders, which really put them in some tough spots.
• Extra short rests to use healing powers really cost (and in fact extras never happened, which I’m OK with.)
• It encouraged talking, sneaking, and exploring the dungeon rather than fighting everything, which would be an easy impulse with powerful 19-20th level characters.
• Even when combat happened, there were some more decisions to make to try and keep combatants from getting away and raising an extra alarm.
• It forced the characters to really consider some moral grays, getting involved in the struggle between the Elemental temples and doing bad things for a greater good instead of, again, just killing everything in the path.

On the flipside, what didn’t quite work so well:

• As a DM, choosing between which track to advance wasn’t really a decision. Next time, I’d probably make a track of what order they advance in, rather than choosing.
• I ultimately didn’t come up with 20 schemes, just enough to flesh out general strokes for each section.
• Sometimes there were players who didn’t play a particular section because their characters were more drained from previous sections, but didn’t want to take an extended rest yet.
• During the second extended rest, the die roll came up a 6, which was way too big a swing for what was an essential and smart rest. As noted above, a d4 is probably the right amount of variance.

I liked the ultimate result, since it fixed a lot of the issues I was having running an episodic game. It wasn’t nearly as annoying as I thought to tell players to track daily powers and healing surge use between sessions, and the end result was something that felt a lot more dynamic.

This approach as stated here won’t work for everyone, so consider the situation with you group before implementing something like this. I, on the other hand, will be adapting something similar for the epic tier of my game. The players will be in an Astral race to find the Rod of Seven Parts. 5×5 isn’t the only shape for such a grid to take, so likely, I will be trying a 7×3.

The basic premise of Mage: The Ascension is that everyone has the capacity, at some level, to shape reality. This capacity, personified as a mysterious alter-ego called the Avatar, is dormant in most people, who are known as sleepers, whereas Mages (and/or their Avatars) are said to be Awakened. Because they’re awakened, Mages can consciously affect changes to reality via willpower, beliefs, and specific magical techniques.

–Wikipedia Entry for Mage: The Ascension

It was the mid-90′s when I would first pick up the book from a far off game store, ferried there by my one gamer friend who could drive. I don’t recall what made me buy it, other than a very probable “this looks cool”, though it must have beat out a number of other games in my very limited gamer budget. I had played some Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse and wasn’t all that impressed, so there must have been something else about that purple and gold cover that drew me to it.

It wouldn’t be until a week later when I would be on a vacation with my friend The O that I would get a chance to dive into the book fully. I sat on the beach in Ocean City and read the whole thing from cover to cover (yes, I chose reading an RPG book over swimming in the ocean, I’ve earned my nerdity).

Here was a game that took magic from being a big list of concrete spells and encouraged, no, demanded that you be inventive with your spheres of influence, combining them to form all kinds of effects, while keeping in mind how such an effect would strain against the consensus reality. Clever coincidences were your most reliable weapon, while blatant disruptions were your most powerful and most dangerous.

The combination of all the possibilities of magic, alongside a set of evocative factions, characters easily came to mind too. From a Degenerate gambler who would throw darts at a map to determine his next move,  to the escaped Technocracy experiment whose psychic abilities threatened to consume him, to the Syndicate operative whose stock projections were no match for eldritch horrors. All of them used “magic” and yet were completely different in play and personality.

It wasn’t just the spell system and the characters that fascinated me, though that was certainly the one that drove play the most. The concept of consensus reality and paradigms made me look at the world around me in a different way. Each different paradigm used was a complete model of how everything (and I do mean EVERYTHING) worked, all competing to be the dominant one in reality. Science, technology, religion, philosophy: all were determined by belief. That was an eye-opening idea to a teenage me, who was still grappling with how everything just in my own life fit together, not to mention the very structure of reality.

Not to say my grasp of reality was tenuous and I would start chanting to invoke my Forces 3/Prime 2 effect, it just gave me a heck of a lot to think about, and was an experience that has yet to be fully matched by anything else I’ve read.

Why didn’t Mage take hold more in our group? Well, it certainly had its fans. However, the basic rules ended up having some pretty severe flaws, which would later lead to a revised edition that was poorly received by us (perhaps my first true Grognard moment.)  Many of the games turned into “World of Darkness” kitchen sink games, such as a game with a Vampire, a Werewolf, a Mage, a Faerie, and a Wraith (the Wraith being especially hilariously disconnected from the main game.) Those combination games could be amusing in short bursts, but I always felt like it shortchanged the Mage: the vision of the universe laid out in the book just didn’t seem to sync up with those presented by other books. Especially in those combo games, it was clear that it can be difficult to run a game for characters who can do almost anything, limited only by their spheres and imaginations.

The most damning strike against the game though was how few of us seemed to “get it”- it was usually clear who had a consistent paradigm to their character, and those who took more of a stock approach, and those play styles didn’t always gel. It wasn’t a matter of the players involved being smarter or anything: it just takes some mental hoops to really get into Mage, and it often showed. The revised Mage: The Ascension book did some great work patching up the core rules and putting more emphasis on paradigm, while making it even harder for other players in our group to get into. Later, in the “New World of Darkness,” Mage: The Awakening would continue the trend of making the core rules much more usable, while tossing out much of what I enjoyed in the old game and forging something new. I wasn’t going on the Internet raging about how much it sucked, it just simply wasn’t my game, and I was willing to part ways. Bartoneus later experimented with a 19th century Mage game that used the new rules and the old setting, to limited success.

Now, I’m digging back into those old books, the binding on that original hardcover that had gone to the beach barely holding it together, as I work on my hack of the Leverage RPG for Mage, and it’s fun to look back at this game that was so influential to me. Not everything holds up: I’m not sure I ever liked that cheesy comic in the back used to give an example of play, for instance. Overall, I’m really enjoying a possible merger of new core RPG tech and one of my favorite game settings of all time. If I’ve found a new ideal gaming paradigm, I’ll let you know.

• Inception
• D&D (like has been done here)
• Mage: The Ascension
• Mistborn
• Firefly

One thing I was sure about though: before going too far into a hack of the game, I wanted to get some experiencing running Leverage as is to get my head around it. While I had participated as a player, running it is a whole other task, one that I wanted to know before diving into the system too much.

Well, my D&D game wrapped early on Sunday, and I suggested with the time left we bust open some Leverage. Here’s a rough recap of how it went.While the players went out and grabbed lunch, I printed off a few character sheets and the list of talents for character creation. Then I flipped to the Toolbox section and rolled up the job. This included rolling up the Client, the Mark, and more:

• Client: Full-time Parent and Athlete/Entertainer (rolled twice)
• Problem: Lost Reputation and Mistaken Identity (rolled twice)
• Pressure: No one else believes
• The Mark: Financier
• Angle: Visionary
• Power: Connected
• Weakness: Tyrannical
• Vulnerability: Family
• What else is in play: Enforcer
• Twist: Death/disappearance of the mark (ultimately unused)

Very quickly into rolling, the job took shape. With the client being an athlete and a full-time dad, and the mark being a financier, that suggested to me immediately that it was a disgraced star athlete who had been shamed by the owner of the team to cover up something nasty, and that his kids were threatened to keep him from going to the police. (Part of this may have been due to a football game in the background.)

Job creation could definitely use a reference page, especially with all the suggestions of what die sizes each should get. However, it wasn’t hard to pull from the advice about creating a job to get that info as well and assign it. I ended up with the following cards to start with their die ratings:

• Mark McNavy, the Client: Former Star Athlete d8, Full time dad d8, My kids d4
• Larry Preen, the Mark: More money than God d12, Visionary d12, Take me out to the ball game d8, Tyrnnaical d4, Family man d4
• Derrik McNavy, also in play: Enforcer d10, Looks like the client d8
• Stadium: Skimped on the expenses d10, Hometown pride d6

Once food had arrived, we gathered around the table to do character creation. The first step was to get everyone to choose a role, which took a little prompting and explanation (no one at the table was a fan of the show.)  With only four players, we had to relegate a role to secondary. I then did a cross between the “abbreviated” character creation of letting them assign their roles, though did do introductory flashbacks later. We went through attributes, specialties, and assets fairly easily. The specialties that immediately jumped out were the grifter’s “Kansas City Shuffle” (which we had to look up on TV Tropes to determine exactly what that was) and the mastermind’s “Xanatos Gambit.”

I passed around the printouts of talents for them to choose from, and explained a few more of the rules and had to look at a few myself to explain them. Distinctions came next, and were some of the hardest things for the group to come up with. Most ended up pretty simple, like “short” and “protective” which is fine. I had them choose 2, and then run a flashback each to decide the 3rd. Flashbacks took a little bit of prompting and guidance from me, but ultimately ran fine, and I ended up creating one complication from the grifter’s failed attempt to cheat at a blackjack game (when his triskaidekaphobia kicked in.) Having the other players decide on a 3rd distinction took some coercing as well but ultimately worked out.

During character creation, I definitely felt like I needed a one page reference to share and pass around. Character creation isn’t tough, but having it all in one place and well-organized is a big plus to jump in easier.

The finished crew consisted of:

• Huckleberry, the Grifter, a failed gambler with an unhealthy fear of the number 13 and a very helpful puppy dog.
• Hutz, the Mastermind, a washed up lawyer who moved into scamming because of one of his clients and who thrives on convoluted schemes.
• Badass, the Hitter, the product of a tough childhood who now protects those who can’t protect themselves, master of the silent takedown.
• Schlomo “4chan King” Bernstein, a spoiled emo child who likes to pick-pocket from the rich and trendy and enjoys the anonymity of the internet.

While the characters were giving their backstories and flashbacks, I picked up on multiple characters referencing Miami, so we decided that was where the crew operated, above Tobacco Road. Our client was a former linebacker for the Miami Dolphins, and our mark was the (fictional) owner of said team.

The client launched into the story: Mark McNavy had stumbled upon a massive gambling operation seemingly orchestrated by Larry Preen, the owner, to an unknown end. In retaliation, Mark had been disgraced by a YouTube video reportedly showing him gambling on opposing teams and agreeing to throw the game, yet he swore to the crew that he had never done that. Larry also threatened Mark’s kids if he went to the police about any of it, so the crew are his only hope. Several of the crew were incensed by bringing kids into the picture, so they were on the job.

Plans went into motion to first get the kids to a safehouse, where the crew quickly discovers that someone who looks vaguely like Mark is working for Larry, and is later discovered to be Mark’s older brother, thought killed in a jailhouse riot. This explained the fake video (after all, it’s hard to tell anyone apart in a grainy YouTube video), and allowed an easier way to pick up his kids, which Badass discovers while heading to McNavy’s house.

The crew does a good job taking out the elder McNavy, recovering the kids, and figuring out that they need to get Preen to admit what had happened, though they do throw up a few red flags online in the process as well as scaring the kids on multiple occasions. A plan is ultimately hatched to go after Preen and get him to admit to wrongdoing, and broadcast it all on the Jumbotron during the game (conveniently going on that day.) Mark McNavy is brought in to impersonate his brother.

Though there are some complications like the power going out throughout the stadium the ridiculously circuitous nature of a Xanatos Gambit confusing everyone, and the football game’s score coming up 13 to 13, the plan was ultimately successful. Larry Preen, in a bluster, admitted what he had done while broadcasting to millions of Sunday football viewers. In the process, his plan to bankrupt the team and get them sold to Arizona was revealed, along with evidence of orchestrating a jailbreak and uploading the smear video comes out. The crew had accomplished the mission, and Huckleberry’s hound made off with a portion of the gate.

Lessons Learned

• Xanatos Gambit/Kansas City Shuffle specialties are definitely appropriate and make the game much funnier, but also much more twisty to follow any kind of plan.
• I need to read through the fixer chapter once again to make sure I’ve got all the GMing rules down. I definitely don’t think I was pulling dice in the right way for the opposition, and I pulled one of the mark’s d12 attributes probably a bit too often. I also wasn’t sure when exactly to pull d4s on my side, since they didn’t help me, though maybe that’s one where I should be on the PC’s side and create more opportunities for them.
• Along those lines, I did run into some trouble in telling what attribute should be rolled. Straight up grifts did make me miss a charisma stat, and some like vitality never came up. Likewise, distinctions like “tough” were hard to work into a game where the rolls the PCs are making are active instead of reactive.
• References sheets will be very helpful for this game.
• It’s very important to keep the spotlight moving, though the fact that each PC is in constant communication with each other makes this much easier, and that each spotlight scene can often be broken down into a single roll is a great way to keep it moving.
• As advertised, one of the big strengths of the game is how fast it runs. I rolled the job, we made characters, explained rules, and played in 3 hours flat, which is an amazing feat of game design.

To hear me talk about the Leverage RPG and answer some questions about it from the Giant Fire Breathing Robot crew, check out their latest podcast.

To begin:

1. All the players decided on a setting that everyone at least has a passing familiarity with.  (For example, Westminster Maryland.)
2. Gammarize the name. (Questmonster.)
3. Each player writes down on an index card one element of that setting to start with. This can be specific or general. (McDaniel College, plentiful corn fields, Main Street, and cows are all possibilities.) These should be kept secret except to the GM, and duplicates are fine.
4. The GM shuffles the cards out and gives one to each player. It’s OK if players get their own.
5. Each player writes down on the card a way that connects that setting to one of their own origins. (A radioactive ratswarm may say that the corn fields are irradiated or filled with rats.)
6. The GM takes the cards and builds the adventure. If something immediately suggests itself based on the cards, great. Otherwise, try taking the cards, and assigning (either randomly or by selecting) one to be a setup/hook, two to be encounters/scenes, one to be a complication, and one to be the climax/finale.
7. Make adventure go.

I ran a test of this over the weekend, and I’d say it was a big success. The PCs all provided me with very good seeds to start with, and the nature of Gamma World makes it easier to gloss over any leaps of logic (“of course you can negotiate with the pile of cats” “of course a gravity cannon can turn a park into an army of mutant plants.”)

However, I essentially made a villain that was separate from all the cards, and pulled from my own imagination based on the off-hand comment by one of the players. So be prepared to either have some stock villains ready, or take a strong look at the adventure seeds for a villain specifically. Like they tell you in the Dungeon magazine adventure guidelines, the villain is often the one that drives the action, so keep an eye on that while you build your adventure from those elements.

Encounter design is also an important part to keep your head wrapped around. I had both the GW guide and Monster Vault ready, and dipped into both. As always, re-skinning is your friend, especially among the bizarrely specific Gamma World bestiary. Gamma moths became sentient silverfish, giant razor beetles became giant plants, and fire elementals became extradimensional summoned plasma creatures. Due to the swingy and brutal nature of GW combat, I didn’t worry as much about exactly balanced combats (to be honest I never do in D&D either, though usually in the opposite direction) as a few level 1s and a level 4 can always end up doing more damage than intended. It would be much easier to manage if there were a GW equivalent of a Compendium to print out individual monsters, but in the absence of that, use your own organizational method to make encounters go a bit smoother. I also seriously hurt for more poster maps in GW, since I am abysmally bad at drawing maps. Hopefully when the two expansions come out that will be helped somewhat.

While I may be a pretty experienced GM and now have a strong handle on Gamma World, I’m not a strong improviser of games from scratch, so I was a bit worried about how the game would run. I was fortunate enough to receive some great pieces to work with from my players which helped a lot. Just remember that these are only suggestions, and you should feel free to adjust them as you see fit to create the best story. Surprising a player with something based on what they had written is a satisfying experience by itself.

If you’d like to read a play report of how the first Gammarizer session went, you can read it over on Roll. With the Gammarizer developed, I can now turn my attention to the two Gamma World games I need to plan for DDXP.

High Leaf, the Plant Mind-Coercer

I picked up Gamma World last Thursday. I hadn’t intended to run it so soon, especially with DC Game Day over the weekend… and then fate intervened. My sunday morning game of Old School Hack was canceled on Saturday since the DM had something come up, and so I stepped up. None of the other players minded the switch, so life in Gamma Terra was on.

However, there were some obstacles. As I talked about in my review, I wasn’t a fan of the adventure that came in the core book, so I only wanted to use that as a last resort. I managed to get my hands on the preview adventure from Pax by Logan Bonner that had gotten excellent reviews. (It’s the same one Wil Wheaton played.)

Then, I had to get my stuff in order. The evening before, I tossed a bunch of miniatures in a box (ones I had acquired for cheap from Miniature Market, mostly Star Wars and Horrorclix), grabbed my Battlegraph boards and dry erase markers for the maps, printed the adventure, some character sheets, and a copy of these power cards. With the time I had available, that was the extent of my prep, other than reading the adventure.

I had 6 players for the game, two of whom had never played 4e and one or two had played some previous incarnation of Gamma World. A good range of experience, to be sure.

Mutant Creation

We rolled characters at the table, as suggested. The process isn’t entirely smooth, especially when there’s only one book floating around, but far far easier than most RPG character creation. Rolling the two mutant halves is done first, and is the most important aspect. Getting some of the details down like powers, skills, and equipment takes a bit longer. This was drawn out a little bit because I too was learning character creation as we went, though the character sheet does help a lot. In fact, there were several times I was corrected (for the better) because of a note on a character sheet, like how weapon attacks are determined and that level is added to most bonuses.

One part that ended up being especially tricky for me was the gear section. I figured out early on that the main gear table would feature a lot of things that the PCs wouldn’t get a chance to use, and I was right… I just hadn’t expected there to be so many horses. More interesting were the rolls on the Ancient Junk table, which were more obviously “this is useless unless you’re really creative.” Then there was the weapons- it says “if you’re in a hurry, give everyone armor, a melee weapon, and a ranged weapon.” Instead of passing around the book and explaining the table, I gave everyone the choice between light ranged/heavy melee or heavy ranged/light melee. It wasn’t until looking closely at the table that I realized that it was more nuanced then that, where melee weapons and ranged weapons both can use Str/Con or Dex/Int. In the future, I’d probably have some copies of the equipment list to hand out.

After around 45 minutes, we had our intrepid mutant heroes:

• High Leaf, Plant Mind-Coercer
• Gemini Salad, Doppleganger Plant
• Scrapple (the Magnificent), Electrokinetic Pyrokinetic
• Bumpy, Radioactive Doppleganger
• GRRM, Telekinetic Giant
• Grubs, Pyrokinetic Hawkoid

Intruders!

After a short explanation about the world of Gamma Terra, and with some background about the complex where the characters have been living, the Alpha Mutations were dealt out, along with a short explanation of how they work. Then the map was set up (after I discovered that the maps in the adventure were the same ones included in the boxed set, after I had drawn my own version), tokens were grabbed for the monsters, and initiative was rolled.

The first encounter went pretty smoothly, an early “De-evolution” alpha mutation limited one of the main bad guy’s effectiveness and then mostly there was cleanup against some dabber (raccoon-humanoid) snipers, and some reprogramming of some shieldbots. An invisible wall-creating alpha mutation also sealed the exit to prevent anyone from leaving, much to their surprise. The main bad guy, a technology-hating humanoid called a Gren, referred to the Returned Earth as coming for them all before it died.

The computer running the complex came to life to ask the PCs to help (otherwise, it would revoke their vending machine access.) After recovering a slightly burnt postcard (burnt thanks to Scrapple) that revealed the location of “The Great Antenna” with the caption “Welcome to Seat.” This computer, I might add, resembled a certain other complex-running computer. The computer displayed a map using pushpins to draw out their location, leading our mutants to ask if they’ll be able to spot the red line running between them. The computer said they needed to stop the Antenna as it was preparing to destroy all technology in the area, including the complex computer.

Meanwhile, GRRM rummaged around the complex looking for something to copy the map with, so I let him roll a perception check to look around. He rolled poorly, so I rolled on the Ancient Junk chart, which produced a working toy gun that distracted him from what he was doing.

Soon, our mutant bunch left the relative safety of the complex into the great outdoors.

P-P-Party

A wrecked motorcycle nearby revealed a cache of Omega Tech, giving everyone their first card (I missed the rule that said they started with one.) They were excited about getting some awesome new tech, but also made sure to recover the gas tank for use in some of their equipment, just in case.

Grubs took to the air to scout, using both binoculars and Omega Tech enhancements that enhanced his perception. He spotted the way to The Great Antenna, which contained a strange chunk of ground hanging off the side, and a winged lion-like creature guarding it.

As the party approached, they discovered a new challenge: the only elevator up the Antenna was surrounded by an electric fence, and a large robot with the inscription Dancebot 1986. Some options about going over the fence were discussed, but GRRM opted to take the direct route and walk up to the robot and try hitting it with a stop sign. However, GRRM discovered that this option wasn’t the most effective, as Dancebot produced several gun batteries and shot the giant repeatedly before kicking him back. “Entry is f-f-forbidden, but dancing is encouraged!” Dancebot told them. Grubs tried to fly over the fence, and he too was introduced to Dancebot’s formidable armory. Finally, the party decided to dance with Dancebot, which caused him to moonwalk away from the door. Taking the opportunity, the party dove into the elevator before Dancebot returned on his heels.

In the elevator, GRRM took a short rest- we discovered that it restores all hit points, though it did cause an alpha flux.

Top Floor: Returned Earth

The elevator doors opened to reveal the chunk of earth hanging off the top of the antenna, guarded by the lion-like creature spotted earlier, some mobile porcupine-like bushes, and two humanoids like the one that busted into the complex earlier armed with bows. One weakness of Gamma World is that the creatures aren’t as recognizable by name as D&D monsters, and their name doesn’t necessarily reflect what they are. So when I referred to Grens and Yexil, it was meaningless to the players even after explaining which was which, so I had to revert to descriptions more often than not.

After surveying the scene and spotting some trapped victims in the vines, the party started to formulate a plan. Scrapple stepped forward, flaring his pyrokinetic powers, and declared that he was the master of all and that they all should bow down before him. I had him roll an interaction check, to which he did well… so the Grens considered his proposal, keeping them from immediately engaging. Grubs came up beside him and added some extra flare.

The two dopplegangers used the distraction to split off and start to free some of the captives with their duplicates. Meanwhile, the non-humanoid guards were not swayed by Scrapple’s speech and waded into melee. The battle was on, with the two pyrokinetics taking point and burning their foes with a fiery aura in a doorway.

GRRM approached, holding his toy gun, causing the Grens to open fire on the giant holding “hated technology.” A pitched battle ensued, with GRRM being one of the first to drop. Eventually 5 of the 6 party members were down except for Bumpy, who used his doppleganger split in combination with his teleporting Alpha Mutation to confuse his enemies on who the doppleganger actually was. 4 party members ended up bleeding out on the ground, failing 3 death saves each. High Leaf, however, managed to roll a 20 on a death saving throw and get up (a rule that doesn’t exist in Gamma World, but I decided to port over to 4e on the fly.) The two of them finished off the remaining enemies… just in time for the Antenna to begin to fire up.

Victory, of a Sort

With just High Leaf and Bumpy remaining, the whole platform began to shake. If they didn’t act quickly, the Returned Earth would use the Antenna to knock out all technology in the area, and possibly take them with it. They found a set of vines connecting the ground to the Antenna, so they hacked away, scoring some solid hits and using the dopplegangers to assist in the task. The chunk of ground began to disconnect, so I asked them t0 roll acrobatics checks to stay safe… and they both rolled a 6, and went down with the ground, taking 50d10 damage.

One captive of the Returned Earth had been freed by the party. Since Scrapple (played by Fred Hicks) died, he started to roll up a new character that would be the freed captive, and made a Seismic Gravity Controller. While Fred didn’t get the chance to jump in since that was the end of the session, he pointed out that Gravity Controllers take no falling damage.

Thus, the original party suffered a TPK, even though they ultimately succeeded in their mission. That left only two characters left at the end to tell stories about what happened at the Great Antenna: the Gravity Controller they rescued, and Dancebot 1986. So the two of them walked off into the sunset, ready to start their new life in a buddy cop movie.

Lessons Learned

• While character creation is considerably more streamlined than 4e and many other games, it’s still tricky to pull off for a table of 6 players at once. Multiple copies of the book would help this, as well as more experience in rolling up characters. Making copies of some of the important pages would also help considerably.
• There are just a few “gotchas” in changes from 4e rules- plus full level to just about everything, the equipment table, how to determine your weapon damage, and how healing works. There are also a few carryover “gotchas” for non-4e players, like the difference between using your ability score and ability modifier.
• For one-shots, don’t worry so much about the miscellaneous starting equipment for PCs. The Ancient Junk table is much more interesting anyway.
• Gamma World is decidedly deadly, though there’s no aspect of long term resource management. You’ll either be in a deadly fight or you’ll be fine.
• However, it says a lot about a game when there’s a TPK and the players still have great things to say about the session and the game system. As they say in the book, you can always roll up another mutant…
• Nobody at the table felt like the Alpha Mutations were out of place, and often wanted to flux to see another card. The surprise aspect of the cards is definitely a prime motivator in the game. There was also almost no overcharging, which may have been me not explaining it properly, or the consequences for failure were too high.
• Unless your group are longtime Gamma World fans, the monster names will be meaningless. Don’t be afraid to rename and reskin.
• E-e-everybody loves Dancebot and wants to p-p-party with him.

Wednesday

Arrived in the morning, was able to check in relatively early (the Hyatt rocks, by the way, except for the completely awful slow and expensive internet connection.) We then managed to get into a game of Castle Ravenloft, the new cooperative board game, for which E summarized the game play and we later did an unboxing video. We also helped Asmadi Games haul in product to their booth, giving us an early look at the exhibit hall before it was fully set up. From Asmadi, I later got a copy of Innovation and the Win, Lose, or Banana promo card Cake.

Thanks to Sarah Darkmagic‘s husband Fred, we found a good liquor store with a very helpful owner and I dropped over $200 on booze. (Thanks again, Fred!) We then returned to the Hyatt to secure tables, and at 8, ran DD&D. I’m still delighted and amazed that the event worked out, and have even more ideas for next year. Primary on my list is expanding to another table, since the worst part was having to turn away friends. I also want to organize a simultaneous teetotaler D&D game for our non-drinking friends.

Thursday

Dave at Mayday Games with Get Bit!

Thursday was the busiest day for me. I was able to duck into the exhibit hall very briefly and say hi to a few folks, and check with Mayday Games about Get Bit! I was disappointed to learn that they didn’t have the copies yet, but they did end up arriving on Friday so only a day was lost.

I met up with Chatty DM to conduct a Dungeon Master Guys interview with “DM to the stars” Chris Perkins. We’re hoping to include the interview in the next episode- unfortunately, NewbieDM’s plane was delayed and he wasn’t able to make it to the interview, which had the additional downside of using less sophisticated recording equipment. So we’ll see how useable the audio is for podcast. At worst, we’ll transcribe it as a blog post.

I caught the end of E’s gamer girls panel, and then was one of the panelists (along with ChattyDM and Chris Sims) on a 4e DM Tips panel that was entirely Q&A. Audio should be posted by GameSalute in the coming months.

Directly after, we played in a Critical Hits staff game of Chris Sims’s “Welcome to Dark Sun, bitches” game, with myself, Bartoneus, Chatty DM, Vanir, The Main Event, and E. We were very close to beating the first very hard encounter, but ultimately were all captured by slavers. Then the second encounter was an awesome set piece on top of a tower featuring all kinds of interesting pieces to interact with to disrupt a ritual. We managed to stop it (with only one player death) and then ran out of time. The game definitely gave me some ideas for my own Dark Sun campaign, and Chris is a very descriptive DM with every hit and miss being fleshed out in evocative detail. Much fun was had… and man do I love to hate Dark Sun halflings.

My favorite picture from Roleplaying Therapy for the Severely Disturbed

We went from there to Roleplaying Therapy for the Severely Disturbed run by our good friends at Stupid Ranger. I played an inspiring compulsive liar whose real name was never revealed (he claimed at different points to be named George Washington and Napolean.) I look forward to their wrap-up, since everyone’s character had a different imaginary, hilarious mental disorder.

After that we ducked in to the bachelor party D&D game at Hooters organized by Jared for our good friends Graham and Christine. I didn’t end up playing D&D and just socialized but still had a blast. I heard great things about the bachelor party adventure too.

Finally, I got to play Mouse Guard for the first time run by Chatty DM with Bartoneus, Chris, Tony, and Jake. Chris and I got into a social conflict about whether to venture into weasel territory, arguing being a task at which my character was completely ill-equipped, but I loved every minute of it anyway. Though my cunning lie about bats and falcons almost swayed the group, we opted not to go on the mission… until we were swept into the area by weather anyway.

Friday

Panorama from the WotC Penthouse

Bartoneus and I conducted an interview with Mike Mearls and Rich Baker in the “WotC penthouse” which was kind of hampered by being before the big announcement instead of after, but was still informative and fun. I then ran off to Wil Wheaton‘s talk, where I grabbed one of the very last seats (though about 100 people took the standing room space in the back after me.) Despite a nasty sinus infection, Wil gave a great talk where he absolutely nailed what it’s like to be a gamer and completely captivated the crowd. I wore my dice shirt- though there was no group photo.

After some more socializing, I met up with other members of my gaming group to venture into True Dungeon (not my first, but most of theirs.) I played a Paladin, which might end up being my preferred class for TD. We rocked our way through most challenges (the colored shape/dice one posing the most difficulty) until we encountered the dragon at the end, which TPK’d us despite some amazing saving throws. For many in the group, the near-unwinnable challenge at the end soured the experience a bit, especially since our previous victories did nothing to help us in the final challenge. I still had a great time despite that, but I hope they find a good middle ground for next year in the final battle that is challenging without being frustrating.

There was some downtime before the Ennie awards. We didn’t win our category- my two predictions took it (Gnome Stew for silver and Kobold Quarterly for gold), but that’s OK because they both rock, as did the rest of the nominees. I can’t claim I wasn’t disappointed and it might have shown a bit, however both Wolfgang and Martin were class acts and both said they thought Critical Hits would win which took a lot of the sting off. Maybe next year…?

The rest of the Ennies also held only a few surprises. Pathfinder (rightfully) took many of the awards, leading to some in the audience to change the name of the awards to the “Pathies” or the “Pazies.” Kevin “Piratecat” Kulp did an excellent job MCing as always, and the Old Spice parody was spot on.

I didn’t stay for all of the awards, and didn’t hit up any of the traditional post-Ennie parties: I was just too spent and could feel the onset of con crud. My last event of the evening was to stop by E’s speed dating event, which seemed to go great.

Saturday

Top priority for Gen Con for a few years in a row has been the big D&D announcement seminar, and this year was no exception. I live-tweeted the event while Bartoneus took pictures, which was a lot easier this year having press seats as opposed to last year where we stood in the back of the room. We had arranged a Critical Hits press game, which I opted out of in favor of writing up the seminar. It was probably for the best since my voice was going anyway- though it was funny to me to pass off 6 players who have played in my game to Jeremy Crawford, one of the WotC professionals. I’m not insecure at all, honest.

Andy Looney ran a session of his Parsley game “Muffins” that I’ve been trying to play in for months. Despite it being a gigantic group, we found our way out of the underbelly of the muffin factory in under an hour, and had a great time- possibly my favorite Parsley adventure so far.

The media meet and greet in the evening is a great place to catch up with all the bloggers and podcasters I might not have encountered during the course of the convention. I’ve been able to put a few more faces to blogs, which is always great. I wasn’t able to stay long, however, as I had scheduled a Magic: The Gathering 11th edition draft that evening. After a strong start, my white/blue deck petered out in the 2nd half of matches. The final round was Chatty DM vs. The Main Event, with The Main Event coming out on top, and I declared victory for the USA. (Not really fair since there was only one Canadian in the draft.)

Sunday

I had a few unaccomplished tasks to take care of on Sunday, mainly in the “find people” variety. I had my copy of Hamlet’s Hit Points signed by Robin Laws, I picked up my backer’s signed copy of One Page Dungeon Codex, and finally, stood in the autograph line to once again talk to Wil Wheaton. I was two spots behind the cutoff to see members of The Guild as well, so I had to settle for some snapshots of them signing stuff for other people. Then I got to see Wil, picked up a copy of his limited edition chapbook, a signed print (a Scrooge McDuck reference, how could I not?), give him dice for his collection, and talk about how awesome Fiasco is.

Other than some final shopping and a round of goodbyes, we were pretty much done at Gen Con. After what could be described as a, heh, fiasco in getting our boarding passes printed, we were off to the airport, content that we were finished with Gen Con.

We made our way to our gate, and decided to stop at one of the last places to eat in that section of the airport. The place was crowded and we needed to seat three, so we made our way to one side of the restaurant with the only set of tables that could seat us. As we sat down, I thought to myself “hmm, I think I know the guy sitting next to us” and when I sat down, I confirmed it. Cognizant that it could be a faux pas, I still leaned over and said “Hi Wil!” startling both E and Bartoneus who didn’t notice that we were sitting next to the Secretary for Geek Affairs himself. We talked some more about his Fiasco game, about Maschine Zeit, and other Gen Con highlights. He then offered us the rest of his pizza, which in some ways is kind of a funny thing to geek out over, but how many of you can say you shared a pizza with someone who was on Star Trek?

Anyway, that was the awesome capstone to another great Gen Con. Is it August 2011 yet?

Swag

• Ascension – a Dominion-like game described to me as “Thunderstone with good rules.” That plus a convincing short demo convinced me to pick it up, though I still haven’t played a full game.
• Innovation – the hot new card game from Asmadi Games about creating different technologies to score achievements.
• The Dungeon Masters DVD – for the collection.
• Psionic Power - we were able to get a hold of one of the few copies there, which I claimed for review as the resident psionics expert. Expect it sometime this week.
• Hamlet’s Hit Points – examining classic story beats through an RPG lens, written by the great Robin Laws and produced by Gameplaywright (makers of Things We Think About Games and The Bones), making it a no-brainer.
• Flip-mats from Gale Force 9 – Market Square and Tavern.
• Dominion: Prosperity – I playtested this set back in April and it’s probably my favorite Dominion expansion. Reportedly it sold out on the second day of the convention.
• One Page Dungeon Codex – I was one of the judges on this, so it was very cool to see it in print, and of course very cool for Chatty DM and Chgowiz.
• Kobold Quarterly #14 – We placed an ad in this issue, so we had to get it. (It’s filled with useful articles too.)
• Why Games Matter chapbook and print – Limited edition stuff from Wil for Gen Con.
• Spooky Manor and Space Station Parsley games – looking forward to playing these, and then running them for other people.
• Maschine Zeit – A highly recommended horror science-fiction RPG that I plan on reading soon.
• Critical Hits t-shirt - Obviously a must-buy for me and a total surprise, the folks at The Owlbear make this shirt, along with a number of other really creative and well-made shirts.

I offered to step in and spear-head the DD&D game, if he would collaborate with me and run a second table. An accord was struck and the planning began: a Drinking Dungeons & Dragons event for Gen Con to top all the previous. As we planned more and more over the months leading up, it was clear this wasn’t just an ordinary convention game… it was an event. While the goal was drunken fun, the prep was serious business.

Last Wednesday at 8pm we ran the game to what I would call great success. We had 12 interested players, 2 DMs, a small audience, and over $200 in booze that would lead to quite an evening. I’d like to call out a few important things that went into the adventure… and I’ve invited ChattyDM to chime in with his thoughts as well.

(Chatty: Oh I’m there Dave! I’m there!)

Two Tables, Same Game

With two DMs and two tables to run, we could have just run the same adventure and be done with it. Instead, we decided to make the tables interact with each other. The setting was a time-lost dungeon, so we were able to make each table an alternate universe version of the other, but also incorporate a kind of race element into it. The tables were able to affect each other by completing parts first, and we wanted one team to curse the other team. Plus we made a few elements that affected cross tables: the expression on Chris Sims’s face was priceless as we dragged him from one table to the other.

(Chatty: It worked to everyone’s  advantage that we didn’t inform players about it as when a group shouted “DONE” and the other DM cleaned the ongoing encounter, a sense of urgency started competing with the rising blood alcohol levels.)

Photos courtesy Stupidranger.com

Pregens with Personality

It would have been easy enough to tell people to make characters of 8th level, or come up with a group of generic pre-gens. That would not have had nearly enough puns in the name. Plus, with our whole alternate universe thing going on, I thought it would be fun to have different versions of the same character, played by different people. (Maybe one has a goatee.)

I followed my rules of character generation for convention games (trying to choose powers and abilities that would come into play throughout the adventure), but I also gave them a strong personality that the players would be able to run with. From there, I added backstories, connections with the other PCs, and of course, drinking. An example is below, for Whit Rushon the Minotaur Paladin:

Advantageous Drinking

Drinking games tend to have rules, like “if you roll the dice with your left hand, take a drink.” Those kinds of rules, 5 beers in, tend to be forgotten, and you have to make a list to consult. Plus, there’s concerns in any drinking game about people drinking to excess, especially on day 0 of a big convention.

Thus, we took some inspiration from Gamma World and made a deck of cards that would grant the PCs powers… if they drink. I wrote 27 unique cards, each powered by drinking in some way. That way, they weren’t essential to play, and players could gauge how much they wanted to drink. Plus, every card had the extra effect that instead of using the listed power, they could invoke “The Cans of Time” and reroll any die in exchange for a drink, which let us avoid that whole pesky balance issue.

(Chatty DM: The “Cans of Time” was a placeholder name we use for the reroll power that ended up being too good not to use. And it was key to the success of the cards.)

In the end, the cards ended up being too tempting for most players, and a lot of drinking happened anyway, especially when they really wanted to hit. But that was their choice, at least, and we didn’t have to enforce any drinking rules.

Here is a sampling of the cards I made:

Mix Combat and Non-Combat Challenges

3 hours of drinking doesn’t go well with remembering to flank and make opportunity attacks. So we tried to keep the actual full combats early in the session, while people were still warming up. We failed a bit in that- we intended to have a major final boss fight against Miller, the lord of the dungeon, and that involved a big fight… right at the end. By that point, few players were lucid enough to fight effectively against 3 elites. Mix that in with a dimension-hopping toilet and that’s when the adventure threatened to go right off the edge. (That’s also when we decided to end the game.)

In between, we included a couple challenges that were completely non-combat. The opening was akin to an Action Castle/Parsley game, with a section in the middle consisting of complete roleplaying challenges, like naming drink recipes and dealing with the Dread Gazebo. It was during that we learned that Gamefiend’s drink is the Rusty Nail and Greg can walk a straight line even after some Dragon’s Milk Ale.

(Chatty: I wrote the Action Castle (created by Jared Sorenson) part because Parsely games were kind of the cult games of cons recently and I realized that many gamers had yet to be exposed to that awesome bit of reverse-retro gaming technology.  The players loved it.)

Here’s the stats for one of the combatants, as well as custom art we had made for the adventure from Jared von Hindman:

(Chatty: Jared went to town with that one.  I envisioned a Japanese coin-op Beer Machine when I designed it and Jared added the Kegger Frat Boy persona to it… Wonderful!)

The Big Question

A handle of rum was demolished, con fatigue was battled, a married man asked someone in the audience for a phone number, giant d20s were thrown, the Toastmaster was toasted, two universes were collapsed into one… and most importantly, we had a blast. We recorded the games, but it’ll be hours of work to get anything remotely publishable.

However, having heard all of this, the big question is: would you want to see this written up as a full adventure? Even if it cost money (to cover all the time we’d have to use to edit and format it)?

(Chatty: I’d like to see a package where we have the adventure, and suggestions to run awesome variant DD&D sessions)

Post-Publication Note: The drinking power cards and characters are now available.

Regardless, I’m looking forward to any comments or questions you have.

What does it mean that game design is mind control? As they explained it, games encourage you to do things you wouldn’t normally do. They encourage you to put yourself in situations you wouldn’t otherwise be in and have your feelings manipulated, which is a form of mind control. Well-designed games evoke certain feelings in players and put those players in the middle of a scenario. As they emphasized, the goal is not to make your players have fun, since fun is a very subjective thing. (Just like Yehuda said.) But if you can succeed in designing a game that causes the players to have the reaction you intended, you’ve succeeded as a game designer. They said everyone in the seminar is a game designer… which as they joked, meant arguing and starving.

They described games as a series of cog-like pieces that fit together. Games are about actions and interactions. When you interact with something in a game, you receive feedback for that action. In turn, games provide rewards for that interaction. Those rewards shape how people play, and promote competition between players. Even in a simple game like Checkers, there is a feedback reward for taking certain actions (getting your pieces kinged), which then shapes play (by opening up the board and providing incentive to push forward.)

Rewards have to be commiserate with the effort involved, or else it doesn’t serve to motivate enough. Luke offered a penny to anyone willing to walk up and shake his hand, and nobody stirred initially. Then when the reward for shaking Jared’s hand was $1, it caused a bit more competition.

Offering the same kind of reward for the same mechanic over and over again reduces the feeling of reward. The human brain is wired to release positive chemicals when experiencing a feeling of reward, but we get used to that reaction quickly when given the same reward for the same action. Thus, it’s important to offer different rewards for different actions.

Luke demonstrated part of this by running a dollar auction, which ended up netting $2.34 for them, and taught several audience members a lesson in competition. (Except for the kid who bid and then couldn’t pay.) Further discussion went into the prisoner’s dilemma, when continuing to talk about competition, which then transitioned into talking about games of perfect information (like Chess) vs. games of imperfect information (like Pandemic.)

In an RPG, the primary source of imperfect information is the dice or other random element. However, the other players (including the GM, if there is one) also are a big source of imperfect information. As an example, the GM might not provide the difficulty of a task, and thus there is imperfect information. However, they argued against this, since not providing the difficulty of an action in an RPG removes an element of decision-making from the player’s hands, and making decisions is a key part of a game. That lack of transparency usually collapses after a few rolls anyway as the players figure it out.

Back to rewards, not all rewards have to be points, levels, or power-ups either: sometimes story advancement and exploration are enough to motivate players. Different players have different motivations. For example, in MMOs, the types of players were listed as The Griefer, The Achiever, The Explorer, and the Socializer. Games that try to appeal to everyone and every motivation tend to suffer as a result. Games that appeal to one kind of audience usually only sell to that audience, which is a smaller player base. Jared gave an example of quests he worked on for D&D Online, where they wanted to do race-specific quests (like a Halfling dungeon.) That would appeal to Halfling players, but the amount of work required to develop it versus how many players would actually play through it wasn’t worth it. This also lead to a discussion about Male vs. Female characters (especially in games like Mass Effect.) Either you develop generic content so the choice doesn’t matter, or you develop unique content that at least half the players won’t ever see. Then there was a discussion on the different ways you motivate players to want to play through a game a second time, despite the fact that on average only 20% of players do that.

Ultimately, the best game designers use restrictions and challenges to shape the design and circumvent those issues in a new way.

At this point, as a demonstration of their mind control abilities, they started up a game of Action Castle using the majority of the seminar audience. Since I’ve played through Action Castle before and own it, I ducked out, but not before talking with Luke briefly about the seminar. I have to say, I expected the seminar to be much more focused on “indie” RPGs, and things like narrative control and other RPG-specific concepts. Instead, it was a solid seminar about the kind of game design that cuts across RPG, tabletop, and video games, and even dipped heavily into game theory, a field that is always good for game designers to have some experience with. If you get the chance to catch these guys in a seminar, or just a chance to talk to them directly, I highly recommend it.

For additional reading, check out (and compare) some of the game design seminars from previous years: Reiner Knizia’s “Creation of a Successful Game” and Monte Cook’s “Designing a Better Dungeon”

Thus, I consulted Gamefiend, the mad genius of skill challenges, for his help in designing it. One Skype call later (and then another day of planning later) I came up with the following skill challenge. It is stretching the skill challenge framework quite a bit and turning into its own mini-game, so be prepared for that right away. I’ve made it slightly more generic for use in your campaign, along with some notes for adapting.

Air War

Background

A ragtag fleet of 6 airships needs to puncture the enemy’s air forces in order to deliver the party to their objective. The party has been given command of the flagship of the fleet, which is equipped with listening coins to be able to communicate with the captains of the other ships. The goal is for the party to reach the end, while saving as many of the other ships as possible. The DM is encouraged to staff the other airships with important NPCs, absent PCs, and allied forces to increase the drama and importance of each ship to the party.

Setup

Give the party the fleet tracker (I’ve attached the one from my campaign here). Each ship, aside from the flagship, has one special ability that can be used once during the entire skill challenge at any time. Each ship also has 3 damage points (think of them as “mega-HP”). Designate one PC to captain the ship.

Choose Actions

In each round, the DM will describe the wave of enemies that the PCs are currently fighting. Then, each PC will have the opportunity to take one action. The most important actions will fall under one of the three categories:

• Fight! The PC uses his skills to increase the fighting ability of the fleet. Common skills include: Arcana (tossing magic spells at the enemy), Diplomacy (coordinating the fleet to take out prime targets), History (call upon military strategies), and Dungeoneering (point out weak points on the enemy).
• Flight! The PC uses his skills to try to mitigate incoming enemy fire. Common skills include: Acrobatics (barrel rolls and other dodge maneuvers), Athletics (manning the sails), Nature (use knowledge of winds and terrain), and Endurance (use knowledge of survival to brace for impacts).
• Feint! The PCs uses his skills to put the enemy off-balance and setup for the next engagement. Common skills include: Bluff (trick the enemies into a bad position), Intimidate (steering the fleet into “chicken” scenarios to rattle the enemy), and Insight (try to predict what the enemy will do next).

See the section on the monster waves below for skill DC information.

Other possibilities can include (but are not limited to):

• Use a power. The PC says what power he is using, and how. Generally, this will go towards one of the three common actions listed above, but will be more effective or give an automatic success. For example, a daily attack power like Fireball might give an automatic “Fight!” success.
• Identify the enemy. This defaults to a Perception check, or a standard monster knowledge skill check depending on the foe. This gives the PC knowledge of what the wave is strong or weak against (see the monster wave section below).
• Assist another PC. While this doesn’t help towards the challenge, it can provide a bonus to another PC on an important roll.

Resolution

The PC captain rolls 1d6 for each ship still remaining in the fleet, plus 1d6 for every “Fight!” success. This is the amount of damage dealt to the enemy wave.

The DM rolls 1d8, and subtracts 1 for every “Flight!” success. This is the amount of damage dealt to the PCs’ fleet. The PC Captain choose where to assign this damage among the fleet. Any ship that takes damage also deals damage to every PC onboard. Consult page 42 “limited” damage for the appropriate amount, increasing the amount of damage with each point dealt to the ship. Any ship that takes 3 damage crashes: its special ability is lost, it no longer contributes to combat, and may have other repercussions depending on who is on it.

The DM notes all “Feint!” successes. Each one is a +2 to all skill checks in the next round.

If the PCs destroyed the enemy wave, it moves onto the next one. Otherwise, see the note in the monster wave for how it proceeds. If the PCs pass the last wave without losing their ship, they win the skill challenge. If the PCs’ ship is destroyed, the DM should adjudicate what happens, possibly involving a “crashing” skill challenge.

Enemy Waves

Below are some examples of enemy waves. I used 6 waves altogether, which seemed about the right length.

• Catastrophe Dragon Swarm: 30 HP. Easy DC to Feint, Medium DC to Fight, Hard DC to Flight. Attacks every round until destroyed.
• Storm Giant Cloud Castles: 35 HP. Easy DC to Flight, Medium DC to Feint, Hard DC to Fight. Attacks two rounds, can be left behind after the second round.
• Air Elementals: 20 HP. Easy DC to Fight, Medium DC to Feint, Hard DC to Flight. Attacks for one round, then joins next wave.
• Lightning Storm: Cannot be fought or feinted. Deals its damage, then is left behind.
• Ground Force Giants: 30 HP. Easy DC to Feint, Medium DC to Flight, Hard DC to Fight. DM chooses where to assign damage to the fleet. Can be left behind after first round.
• Stone Giant Colossus: 50 HP. Easy DC to Feint, Hard DC to Flight or Fight. Guards the objective and must be defeated before the end.

Optional

Play a Final Fantasy airship theme while conducting the challenge.

That’s it. The PCs in my game passed, losing only two ships, with a full complement of damage to every other ship in the fleet. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

4th Power

Well, on Halloween, I ran the first ever playtest. I designed all the characters, constructed a scenario, recruited members of my regular D&D group, and GMed the game.

I am definitely happy to report one thing: the game didn’t combust in on itself…

…but the scenario did end in near TPK, and a total objective failure for the PCs.

Still, I was heartened to find that the system does work. The powers need tweaking, the selection of at-wills continues to be challenging (especially for mental stat-focused characters), and the amount of HP that each PC possess takes some adjustment, but overall, the core of the system is solid and that’s something to be thankful for.

What’s the next step? The one thing that’s definitely true is that I need more powers written. As before, the best way to drive me on is to have a goal in mind, and thus to that end, I’m going to run another playtest, with higher level characters, aiming to run around Xmas time. I have a specific, pre-written adventure in mind from another system. Unlike the 1st level game I ran, it will be less focused on survival, so it has a much greater chance of running all the way through.

Powers are not the only thing that still needs to be developed. Two pieces that still need sub-systems are:

• Extended Actions (which resemble rituals, though might fall closer to Martial Practices) for things like hacking, making cover identities, setting up a business, that kind of thing. I have some ideas, but need to work on it a bit more.
• Wealth. From my experiences with d20 Modern (and from some of your comments), this is the elephant in the room of d20 Modern and modern gaming in general.

My current thought on wealth was sparked by a chat (as it were) with my friend Phil, who was working on his own system for eliminating micromanagement of cash in 4e. I too don’t want players to be managing the exact amount of money in their bank account and their credit score and so on.

As part of those conversations, Phil proposed a skill to manage wealth, which is somewhat how d20 Modern handled it. Well, I already have a skill to handle it (Business). And I know already that I wanted to track social class alongside the system. Thus it made sense to combine it with another system that moves up and down over time based on skill checks.

Yes, I’m making Social Class a Disease.

Eventually I will develop a track, that goes from Destitute to Billionaire. Each one will cover a range of expenses that you can reasonably cover: middle class means you have a decent place to live and can afford reasonable meals on a regular basis. Buy something more extravagant (like a sports car), and you make a Business check. Succeed, and you manage to move your finances around in such a way to cover it. Fail, and your class shifts lower. There will be some bonuses and penalties depending on the situation (time involved, how familiar you are with the area, etc.) Voila. That’s my thought right now.

As I said, I have a new goal in mind, so my guess is that I won’t be updating as much on a weekly basis while I work my way towards my next playtest. I will try, however, to create a collection of everything I’ve developed so far for better reference, and add to it when I come up with more. And as always, if you have any questions or comments, lemme know.