The Experience
This week, I am off work and at a training facility to go learn the C# programming language. And by that, I mean I am in a small bathroom-sized office where a man teaches us the secrets of computers via conference call and remote desktop connection where things happened eerily on the screen without anyone pushing buttons. There was somebody there to let me in, and then I didn’t see a soul all day. It is a strange experience, not unlike living in the Post-Apocalyptic Midwest and being taught the secrets of the Ancients by ghosts. Well, sort of. Based on today’s experiences, the last bastion of humanity lives in a Hardee’s. I hope that burger I ate was, in fact, cow.
The Learning Experience
All this got me thinking about how PCs level. In most of the games I play in, we just sort of level up as the campaign progresses. I can buy that. My years of martial arts training tell me that a boot to the head is a very powerful lesson. Combat is a great teacher, assuming one survives. However, the theory always sort of fell apart for me when it came to wizards. Certainly, the wizard would gain a lot of knowledge about what worked and what didn’t after a few battles, but that doesn’t explain why a few weeks into his travels he suddenly knows how to cast a Fireball. Wizards always got screwed anyway. After a hard day’s work maiming unspeakable creatures, the fighter chugs some ale and crashes on his bedroll. The cleric has a little more to do in that he has to say something to the effect of “Rub-A-Dub-Dub, Thanks For The Spells” to his deity before it’s lights out for him as well. The rogue might pick the cleric’s pocket if he’s having trouble sleeping, but by and large he can disappear into the shadows and escape off to dreamland once the party makes camp. Up until recently, though, the poor Wizard was stuck not only re-learning the spells that he forgot (due to the extremely poor memory management of the Vancian magic system, mercifully fixed in the last service pack) but was also expected to spend his nights researching new spells. It’s no wonder the Wizard is the most physically frail of the character classes. They’re never allowed to sleep!
Of course, there are those who think the best learning comes from being taught by one more experienced. I can buy this too. Repeated combats without directed instruction and practice tend to yield slower and more painful results. While having the PCs find a trainer to practice and break those training plateaus that only repeated kobold skull-crushings can give sounds like a fine idea, those who have played the old SSI Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance understand what a pleasure it is to finally get enough experience to level up — and then have to travel halfway across a continent to find a city big enough to have a trainer for their class before they can do anything about it. I’m sure the wizard in the party is going to be thrilled. More reading! At least now he’ll have good lighting and it probably won’t be raining on his spellbook.
Learning To The Hell With It
Actually, you know what? This isn’t an article about leveling up anymore. This is about wizards and how they should just incinerate everybody they meet. They’re just crapped on by some cosmic force their entire lives. High-level fighter? Strong, big muscles, gets all the chicks! High-level wizard? Creepy, lives in a tower, probably thinking about becoming undead. You know why wizards become liches? It’s because liches can’t feel anything. All a wizard wants out of life is some steak and the love of a good woman. But no, if he ever successfully manages to have a significant other, it’s always late in his career and nobody ever bothers to research any spells to combat ED and he always winds up with one of those psycho hose-beasts that gets off on the power and will eventually sneak into his lab and summon a demon to help her dispose of the poor guy, and it always goes wrong and a barbarian has to show up to clean up the mess and then all his gold his gone and also he’s probably been sucked into an alternate dimension where he’s being used as a Ring Pop by an aboleth. Is it any wonder most wizards want to gouge out their eye (and replace it with Vecna’s)?
Screw it. I’m done writing this article. I’m going to go play some Dragon Age 2 so I can calm down.
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It Only Works On The Weak-Minded (Or The Unprepared)
Once upon a time, I was at karate class just minding my own business when a 10-year-old girl wearing a blue belt walks up to me with a question. I’d been a black belt for some time, so this was not an unusual occurrence. I was expecting for her to ask for help with her kata or how to do roundhouse kicks or something like that. Instead, she asks me simply
“Sensei, what’s a Jedi mind trick?”
My mind recoiled. I’d only met one person in my life up to that point who had never heard of Star Wars, and that was one of my former coworkers from India who’d grown up in an area too poor to have movie theaters. Surely this girl had seen it played on TV, where it is syndicated madly. Then I sensed a disturbance in the force. Why was she asking me this? I looked past her and saw one of our brown belts, an older man who thought making fun of nerds was hilarious, grinning at me knowingly.
Then, it happened. I stretched out my index and middle fingers gently and waved my hand at the girl, just as Master Obi-Wan had taught me so many years before, and I said to her:
“I’m not the sensei you’re looking for.”
In what I can only describe as a miracle, the girl cocks her head at me like a Labrador Retriever, turns on her heel, and walks away. I had successfully performed the Jedi Mind Trick on a real live person.
I turned my attention to the man who had sent her. The look on his face told me I’d just shattered his reality and replaced it with the Force.
Cool Story, Master Broda
Meeting new people always scares me to death, so I usually just tell a really weird story to break the ice. The above is one of my favorite stories to tell in these situations. It was for this reason that I elected to tell this story for my role as Jokemaster at our company’s biweekly Toastmasters meeting. I thought I’d told it enough times that I would barely have to think about it. When I found myself behind the podium, however, I realized that the amount of preparation I had done was Wholly Inadequate.
I started off the speech by asking who’d seen Star Wars. I didn’t see a whole lot of hands. That’s when the doubt started to creep in. I decided in the moment to try to give a little backstory on the Jedi Mind trick, and I started by talking about Obi-Wan and then how Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru got killed by the empire and then how they went to a bar and how they got to a security checkpoint and Obi-Wan said “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” and oh yeah they had robots in the back of the landspeeder where…… well, you get the idea. I was a babbling mess. Once I got to the actual story, I did a lot better, but my confidence had already been shot and I’m pretty sure I’d long ago lost my audience.
Afterward, my ego still twitching, I sat down to listen to the other speeches and I realized something critically important — a lot of my kind of humor requires context that the average person might not have. Star Wars was really popular, but I have to wonder how many people who aren’t nerds would laugh at a joke about parsecs or shutting down all the garbage compactors on the detention level. I needed to consider my target audience long before the moment I started speaking.
Much Unpreparedness I Sense In You….. You Are Not Ready
Many things for me over the last several months that have been hammering home the fact that I need to prepare more before I do things. My joke-speech could have been salvaged in this way. I could DM better. I could write better code. Despite knowing this, I frequently find myself charging in to difficult or awkward situations without any plan whatsoever. (I think it’s all the accumulated brain damage from my karate training.) I even find myself resorting to rhetoric to bolster my resolve. ”No battle plan survives contact with the enemy” is a favorite.
This strategy works for me most of the time. And by “works” I mean “is occasionally effective”. And by “most of the time”, I mean “once in awhile”. In truth, I usually manage to bumble my way through but it winds up like my joke-speech — ugly and kludgey and people aren’t particularly thrilled with the outcome.
It’s not that I don’t have good ideas. They’re a little random sometimes (even to me), but they usually serve me well. It’s that ideas alone can’t carry you to the finish line. So many times have we all started projects and dropped them a week later. Preparation is key to getting off the ground past your initial excitement. Especially on long-term projects, you need the discipline to make sure it stays in the air.
If your passion for your project starts to wane, I am available to administer the Jedi Mind Trick to convince you to stay on the project. Jedi consultant fees apply.
Tae Con Do – The Ancient Art of Convention Self-Defense
As most of you are no doubt aware, Gen Con begins in a matter of days. I can’t go this year, but it is one of my very favorite times of the year. (I’m not sure if I like it or Christmas more, but Gen Con has a slight edge in that it doesn’t play music that annoys the crap out of me for three months beforehand.) It is the most concentrated unbridled gaming fun I get to have in any given solar year, and I like to strap on my ceremonial fanny pack and let my hair all the way down for four days. That being said, bad things can and do happen to convention-goers. There are people out there who attend conventions and other public events to prey on the unwitting. It behooves all of us to be aware of our surroundings and to make informed, safe choices to protect ourselves.
Don’t Be A Fat, Dumb, Happy, Contented Cow
Have you ever looked at a cow grazing in a field? Cows couldn’t care less about what’s going on around them 99% of the time. They’ve got flies buzzing around them, getting in their eyes, and they barely care enough to flick their tail now and then. They just want to stand there and chew. Cows care sufficiently little about their surroundings that they are in a class of mammal colloquially known as “tippable”. It is not a wonder that they frequently become steaks.
Now think back to how you feel when you first arrive at a gaming convention. It’s freaking euphoric. You see old friends, you do nothing but play awesome games all day and night, sometimes you get drunk. It’s incredible fun. What you don’t realize, though, is that despite having a lot of fun, you’re not in a perfectly safe environment. You’re probably not paying much attention to anything aside from games and your friends, and alcohol and fatigue certainly aren’t going to help your level of awareness. Like it or not, this is a vulnerability that can be exploited.
Know Your Enemy
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but these are some potential threats to keep in mind at a convention:
Pickpockets/Thieves
You’re in your favorite place in the world. You’re not paying attention to anything but friends and games. There are tens of thousands of people around you, there’s frequently very little room to move, and sometimes you bump into strangers. I’d be interested to see what the crime statistics are like for Gen Con, because this sounds like easy pickings for someone who picks pockets for a living.
I know it’s a con and you typically carry lots of stuff, but try to take with you only what you need. You’re at one of the few places in the world where the majority of the population knows how valuable a binder of Magic cards can be, and there might be one or two people out there willing to nab it while you’re not paying attention. I recommend keeping your stuff in the hotel room when you’re not using it. Sure, the hotel staff comes in sometimes and there’s the potential for theft, but I’d much rather take that risk with people who have passed background checks and have a job to lose when they look up who was on cleaning duty when my stuff got stolen.
This site gives some excellent tips on some of the ploys pickpockets use and has some excellent tips for keeping your stuff yours.
For my part, I paid for my inattention a couple years back. I had a digital camera stolen while I was sitting on a bench, talking to a friend. It was sitting next to the bench one minute, then it was gone. It can happen that fast.
One last thing about this, because this drives me absolutely insane every time I see it at a con. If you’re at the convention center and you’re beat and you just need to take a quick nap, for the love of Vecna, do not make a little nest of all your gaming gear and doze off. You are basically asking to wake up without your possessions. After all the battles every group in the history of gaming has had over who has first watch when the party sleeps, you would think that would seem a good idea in real life.
Identity Thieves
There’s two issues to worry about here.
One is using public, unsecured wifi networks. That’s right, the free wifi you enjoy at Starbucks, the convention center (well, most years anyway), and everywhere else come with risks. Be aware that bad things can happen to you, all your accounts everywhere, and your computer if you don’t have your stuff locked down. This article goes into a lot more detail about these bad things. This article gives you some good hints as to how to prevent them from happening.
Another issue is credit card fraud. Know who it is you’re giving your credit card to on the sales floor and everywhere else. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t give them the card. ATM machines aren’t perfectly safe either. There are several known ways to steal money from ATM users.
Once again, if it feels fishy – bail.
Muggers
You’re carrying around a bunch of money, ready to hit the sales floor. You stop to use the restroom. Next thing you know, some guy has shoved you into one of the stalls and waves a knife in your face, demanding all your cash. In a situation like this, you comply with the mugger’s demands. Period. Give him your wallet and all your money and get out intact. I have over 20 years of experience in karate, and I would hand over my wallet in a heartbeat. Your life is worth more than anything he just stole.
Of course, the best defense against a mugger is to try not to put yourself in a situation where you can be ambushed. Being alone makes you a target, so stick with the crowds when you can.
Think this is an unlikely scenario? About 3 Gen Cons ago, I walked into the restroom near the food court and was almost knocked over by a guy running past me. I thought he was a jerk, but I continued on. When I got through the door, I found another guy leaning over the sinks, blood pouring from his freshly-pounded face. Did that guy just get mugged? Was it just a fight between 2 guys that knew each other? Honestly, I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I found a cop, and they said they were already aware of the situation (somehow) and said I could go. If nothing else, it showed me that people are still people at Gen Con, and on occasion that means somebody gets violent. It’s good to keep that in the back of your mind.
Sexual Predators
I know of at least one person that’s been groped at a con. People can and do get raped. You need to make smart choices, especially if you’re small enough that fending off an attacker is difficult.
Wearing a skimpy costume will get you lots of attention. Know this, and know you’re also increasing your risk of attracting unwanted attention. Should you be able to wear whatever costume you want? Sure. (Provided, of course, you follow the convention guidelines!) Just don’t blindly assume that you’re safe because you’re at a con.
If you do find yourself receiving unwanted attention — or worse — the absolute most important thing to do is to get help. Gather as much attention as you possibly can to yourself. Scream bloody murder. If you need to, hit and scratch your attacker in all the soft places on his body (eyes, throat, nose, and temples are a good start), and don’t stop until you’re free. You don’t have to be big or strong to do damage to soft tissue. Use weapons if you have them – car keys make an excellent flail. Self-defense devices like a security whistle, mace, or pepper spray are fantastic to have with you but keep it somewhere easily accessible — not at the bottom of your purse.
As always, prevention is the best protection. Travel with friends, especially if you’re going somewhere unfamiliar. DOUBLE ESPECIALLY if you plan to wear that skimpy costume.
This site has some good rape prevention information for use both at home and in public.
If you see someone else getting victimized, don’t walk past. Make a lot of noise, draw as much attention as you can to the situation, and get the victim out of there. Run interference so she has a chance to escape if you have to. Preferably, bring friends. Big friends. There is an organization called the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Project dedicated to making sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen to women at conventions. I wholeheartedly suggest joining.
Don’t Be A Victim
Awareness is your best defense against all of these threats. Predators tend to go for easy marks. Walking around confidently with your eyes open and head up will not only help you be aware of your surroundings, but will likely make you less likely to be targeted. Even if you’re not confident, fake it.
Certainly, none of this is to say you shouldn’t relax and have fun at conventions. I don’t hide under my bed every morning because I’m afraid I might get mugged. You can’t live like that, and you shouldn’t let any of this send you into a blind panic. Gen Con is awesome. Go have the time of your life.
Just try to make informed choices, and know what’s going on around you. I hope none of you ever have to worry about anything I just talked about. If you do, though — be ready.
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I Haven’t Washed My DM Pants In Six Months And They Smell Like Umber Hulk
When I got home from DDXP last January, the desire to have a gaming group again had been fanned from a wee spark into a roaring flame. I immediately set about the task of inviting people and getting things set up, and before we knew it, we were playing our first game together. As I’ve mentioned in this column before, I am not really accustomed to being at the helm of a gaming group. In past years, I just showed up at the designated place and time every week and consumed cookies and caffeine until something magical happened and I woke up at home with a tummyache the next morning. I knew that being the Dungeon Master was going to be different, but I really didn’t know how.
Now, just a shade under six months from where we started, I’m taking a step back to see how things are.
Formatting
When the group first started, we decided to play D&D every other week, and play various board and card games on the alternate week. We’d had a lot of people itching to play board games where I worked for some time, and I liked the idea of having more time to plan between sessions while I was still getting my dungeon-legs.
Now, after half a year, I find it interesting that the board game half of our game nights seems to be the star attraction (frequently, even to me!). Several of our players have brought friends or significant-other units, and I find myself with a very happy – and very full – dining room. Everyone still likes D&D, but I do think our campaign suffers from the lack of weekly play. There are other cards stacked against D&D as well. If more than 2 people are gone, we typically will default to board game night — which has resulted in 4-5 missed D&D nights. We also only play for a relatively short period (6-11pm, since it’s a weeknight), and we usually need until about 7:30 or 8pm to unwind, socialize, and get the game going. I don’t see this as a bad thing, except that it cuts into gaming time. All of our players have worked at the same place within the last year or so, several of us have either left or been laid off, and this is the only time we get to see each other and hang out now.
I’m not going to lie. This bothered me for a little bit. I wanted to put gaming first and I wanted everything to run super smooth and to have the Best Gaming Group Ever. Then Katherine, one our our players, utilized a particular talent she has in making people make sense. We need that social time. It’s a large part of why we have this group in the first place. It’s why you can go to a convention and have fun playing with a group of strangers, but you don’t have the same rapport and emotional connection like you do with a regular group. Do we need to make sure somebody sounds the Horn of Gaming to get the ball rolling sometimes? Sure. But do I still feel good at the end of the night even if we didn’t get a whole lot done? You better believe it.
Population Fluctuation
Our group has grown by a few members since we started. I had heard from several Smart People that anything above 6 players for D&D was too much, but we let a few more in anyway (mostly at my behest). The brains were correct: we frequently don’t get anything done — but we also don’t get a lot done when we only have 4-5 people either. As long as we have fun, I don’t really care. As for board game night…. I think we’re about to crest a dozen. We usually split into two games and each gets half the table. Sometimes it’s hard to hear, but it’s awesome.
As I mentioned before, all of us worked together or were (b)romantically involved with someone who worked with us. One unfortunate reality that goes along with this is that today’s business world/the economy/mole people etc. have not been particularly kind to said employer and they’ve been laying people off. People like, for instance, me. I was fortunate enough to land another job quickly and locally, but I worry about my friends who are still there. Especially the ones that I’m worried might have to move away, because then I don’t get to see them and/or kill undead with them anymore. My last group breaking up was not a pleasant experience for me, and it also involved some of my favorite people moving away where I don’t get to see them much anymore. We’re not to that point yet, and with the amount of players we have right now my guess is we could soldier on. But I really, REALLY don’t want to.
My Role In All This Play
I’ve talked a lot about the group itself, but not my role in it. Like I said, I’m not used to this, and I’m still not yet. I think I sort of act as a leader for us even today, but it pretty much consists of providing a place to play, making sure everybody knows where and when to come and working out the occasional (thus far almost negligible) issues the players might have. I’ve had a few DM’s that go on a power trip, so even talking about me being all leader-y makes me a little self-conscious even though I’m pretty sure that’s not me. I decided to take the initiative on things just because I knew somebody had to in order to make gaming happen. I’ve seen a couple groups fail because they never could get together or figure out what to do, and I think it happened in part because nobody stepped up. It certainly doesn’t have to be me, but I’m glad to try to nudge us in a gamerly direction, and to do the occasional organizational stuff. There’s not much, but it’s needed.
Speaking of organizational stuff — it didn’t always go right: I did all the pizza ordering for awhile and tried to have it ready by the time everyone got there, but getting everyone’s orders right frequently didn’t happen and we wound up with either too little or too much pizza. It wasn’t a tremendous deal but it was getting unnecessarily expensive. Lately we’ve been going with a “bring your own food” policy that seems to be working well.
I was kind of hoping to have the pre-game DM jitters gone by this point, but they’re still very much there before every session (and inversely as strong as how much preparation I’ve done, which really ought to be a lesson to me one of these weeks). I do think my confidence has improved somewhat. Some of the more… shall we say, experimental sessions we’ve had did have a few grains of method behind their madness. For instance, one side effect of having done a “zero-prep” session is that I know I can make something happen even if I don’t have anything to go on. Granted, it wasn’t very good, but now I feel much more comfortable if I actually do have things prepared and the terror of someone exploding my carefully-laid railplot is insignificant by comparison.
I had a player recently tell me he wasn’t having much fun during D&D, but he still loved playing boardgames and wanted to know if he could just do that half. I sat and read his text message for a moment, bracing myself for feelings of shame and inadequacy, waiting for the defensive response to bubble up into my brain. I was really surprised when it didn’t happen. I simply told him I was really glad he told me, and I’d SO much rather he told me and just did the stuff he enjoyed rather than sitting and being miserable every other week. I’ve been in a group where we were all too chicken to tell the DM we were unhappy and wanted to quit. It was awful, and it wasted everyone’s time. This was not. There were zero hard feelings and it was one of the better examples of communication among rational adult gamers I’ve ever seen. It did, however, make me want to get feedback from him to see what I could improve (regardless of whether he decides to play again later). If I was going to guess at my own flaws: I’ve stayed on the rails too much a few times, went way too far off the rails a couple times, I seem to be allergic to giving out treasure, and I don’t prepare enough. It might be time to poll my players to see what they think.
Appraisal
The uncertain future aside, I’d say we’re doing well and having fun. I don’t really know where this puts us on Chatty’s stages of RPG group development (any given session is a crapshoot between Storming and Norming), but our split format probably throws a few monkey wrenches into things. I’ve personally thought about lobbying to have board game night go three weeks in a row and only have one board game a night. Then again, I’ve also thought about doing the inverse. I feel like we’re having trouble doing a long campaign, and might do better with one or two session D&D adventures (or maybe even trying some “smaller” games like Leverage or Mouse Guard). I’d also like to try running some adventures I didn’t come up with. I think they might be a little easier for human brains to process, and I might learn how to make mine a bit more comprehensible along the way. Once again, probably time to speak to the group to see where we want to steer this thing. I really don’t think anybody cares, as long as we have fun.
So, basically, almost nothing turned out like I expected. Even so, sending out that batch of invites was one of the best things I’ve done in recent memory. I hope we can keep this going for a good long while.
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Save Yourself: Vote For Critical Hits
As many of you are aware, Critical Hits is up for an Ennie this year. Dave has already given you all several good reasons to vote for us, but I’m here today to seal the deal. I put myself at great personal risk to reveal this information, but a win this year would shed a lot of light on the truth all gamers need to know.
Your Dice Are Alive – How Long Will You Be?
You heard it here first: your dice are alive. Don’t believe me? Think about all the times your dice have betrayed you, or that one time you inexplicably rolled 6 20′s in a row. It is the richest of irony that people use dice to simulate the generation of random numbers. They are grown on secret farms deep within blackest Ohio, and their eggs are harvested and stored in what appears to be grain silos but are actually special dice towers designed for polyhedral husbandry. The dice are then sterilized so that they do not continue to breed at gaming tables around the world. The sole exception to this rule is the barrel that gamers typically buy a “scoop” of dice from at conventions, never realizing that those dice were never manufactured. They put 4 dice in that barrel six months previous, sealed the lid, and cracked it open at the convention months later. This is also why you frequently find dice in your bag that you don’t remember buying after you’ve been to a convention.
Even worse, this dark secret kept from you by the evil gaming megaconglomerates hides an even deadlier sub-secret. As you may have guessed, the different breeds of polyhedral dice yield the various numerical denominations. However, the d12 (being the alpha of any given set of dice) has a set of natural defenses not found in any other polyhedral breed – including a deadly neurotoxin secreted through its 8 facet, known as d12xin. This poison is the primary reason very few epic-level monks were ever played in D&D 3e – their players had a penchant for mysterious death the day after a particularly combat-heavy game night.
We here at Critical Hits believe that all gamers have the right to continue breathing, and we’ve made it our personal mission both to prevent the tragedies caused by d12xin and to find a humane (and perhaps one day even synthetic) way to produce dice for tabletop gaming. Our own Chatty Phil is a microbiologist, and it is for this reason that we joined forces with him over a year ago. While he has not yet produced an antidote for d12xin, several useful byproducts have resulted from his research – including a cure for Pathfinder’s.
We can’t do this without your support. A vote for Critical Hits is a vote for life – both for your PC, and you.
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Communication Skills And Gaming: The Fundamental Truth About Fundamentals
These aren't faces. They're an anthropologist beholder's eyes.
There are few things I like more than complimentary skillsets. There’s the obvious reason, which is that you can take something you learned one place and apply it to another without having to start from scratch. Then, there’s the secondary reason, which is the ability to look at everything as a metaphor, which I frequently find myself doing when I tell a long, rambling karate tale to a bunch of programmers about something that is clearly not programming.
I Assumed There Would Be Toast
Today, I found myself giving a speech to a room of about 20 people. It was a voluntary situation that I inflicted upon myself, as the company I work for offers a Toastmasters club and I wanted to improve my communication skills. In addition to being able to convey information effectively to other humans at work, I decided it would be a great opportunity to up my karate instruction game. I’ve been teaching the occasional class for a little over 15 years, and I can get the job done but I’ve never really been able to command the room like Sensei (now a retired high school teacher) always could. I prepared what they call an “Icebreaker” speech, an autobiographical journey by oration 5-7 minutes in length. I wasn’t all that nervous until my name was called, and it took me by surprise. I’ve been in front of a room twice this size before. I yelled at them all, made them do pushups, and kicked one or two. Why would I possibly be nervous?
In the end, it turned out OK. And by “OK”, I mean:
- I completely blacked out about halfway through, didn’t see any of the nice big colorful cue cards that let me know my time was up, and my speech clocked in at 9 minutes 55 seconds.
- We count “um”s, “uh”s, and other quirks of language that are Not Words in order to eradicate them. I believe I hold the current company record at 86. People with previously-embarassing totals like 46 were coming up to me and telling me I made them feel much better by comparison. Amateurs.
- Apparently, I fidget when I speak. A lot. And my right foot taps.
- Everyone was entertained and appeared to enjoy my presentation! Woot!
Most of these weren’t a surprise. That is, after all, why I showed up. I’ve gotten better at the “entertaining people” and “keeping their attention” part over the years, but it feels like I just crashed an experimental aircraft almost every time (with varying degrees of success).
Communication At The Gaming Table
This is also (utterly devoid of coincidence) how I feel after running a D&D game. It wasn’t long before the little combination engine in my head beeped and informed me that good communication skills would make for a vastly improved D&D game. I recently heard it said that communication is 90% of being effective at anything, and I am reminded of my years of folly during college dreaming of being so excellent at coding that people wouldn’t even have to talk to me to point, wink, and offer me lots of money. That was dumb. Nobody understands anything unless it is communicated to them in a way they can understand. That’s how it works.
Therefore, it stands to reason that the players led by a Dungeon Master who has The Best Gaming Materials In The World are still going to have an awful time if that DM sucks at delivering game information to them in a way they can process. The game can have been perfectly balanced by robot hyper-brains from the 34th century who are never wrong and if the DM presents things in a confusing way, it’s still going to be terrible. Good communication means planning and having a framework in place to know what’s coming or at least what to do if something unexpected shows up. (This fact was permanently etched into my brain after last week’s…. experiment.)
Never mind the fact that the DM is frequently the de facto leader of the gaming group, and has to settle the sticky situations that arise from playing with other sentient beings. Differences of opinion causing neverending arguments? Someone’s severe analysis paralysis grinding the game to a halt? It takes communication – and a little courage – to speak to people directly to try to work through things.
Delivering Your Informational Payload
It strikes me that there are two main things to consider when trying to communicate something effectively:
- WHAT to communicate
- HOW to communicate it
Let’s look at “what” first. If there wasn’t something to talk about, you wouldn’t be communicating! If you can deliver the information to the target, you win! It also occurs to me that if the stuff you want someone to know is buried in a whole bunch of extraneous stuff, it might get lost.
In RPG-land, I find myself needing to worry about this when I’ve concocted what I think is a genius plot with lots of hooks and ways to throw the PCs off the scent. Then I find myself all frustrated because I have to hit them with the dreaded Clue Bat…. which upon further thought might occasionally get named the Effective Communication Bat. Does it ruin the surprise sometimes? Sure. But is it better than having a table full of frustrated, unhappy players wondering what their DM (who probably thinks he is smarter than them and is a big jerk) is thinking?
In Conclusion
- Crucial Conversations by Patterson et al.
- QBQ! The Question Behind The Question by John MIller
- Switch by Chip & Dan Heath
- Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy
- The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey
Photo Credit
Improvisational Safety Limits
I’ll be the first to admit I probably don’t plan enough when I need to run an adventure. I usually wait until one or two nights before game day, and try to come up with something that sounds cool. The problem I keep experiencing is that I start going down a nice sensible path with maps and plots and adversaries and then I’ll get a flash of inspiration that derails me completely.
In this particular case, since my group is currently wandering around on a demiplane that is quite literally where nightmares come from, I thought it would be interesting to simulate the nonsensical yet completely serious nature of dreams. You know, a situation in a dream where you know something is the case but you don’t know why. A frequent example of this in my dreams is ”I’m on a mission to save the world”, but I’ve had it manifest in a thousand other ways. One I really dislike is when a bad guy shows up and I immediately know he’s after me because of Reason X. There’s no way to prevent having done whatever you did, no chance to plan ahead, just a half-second before he starts chasing you and your legs move too slowly to escape.
Paved With Good Intentions
What I decided to do was to have a certain kind of enemy attack change the PCs somehow in a nonsensical-dream way. This might mean their bodies would mutate or their role in the party would change, or even their backstory. I decided that, despite being more accurate to my dream experiences, the latter two would be much too disruptive to play. Therefore, the PCs would change in weird ways and have to learn to cope (and hopefully, find new ways to use these changes to their advantage). This was the concept that eventually derailed me. It sounded cool enough that I decided to play the whole thing by ear. Even I wouldn’t know what they’d be facing until the moment it happened. I thought I might be able to come up with ideas that fast, but I figured it would be a gameplay nightmare so I decided to make up a generic encounter with reskinned monsters in the roles I wanted my random baddies to play.
In the previous session, the PCs were approaching the tower of the Boogeyman, ready to go save the Raven Queen’s daughter from his evil clutches so they could hopefully get enough brownie points to get out of this godforsaken realm. I knew I wanted there to be some opposition, so I rolled for my brain to generate a random bad guy and got…. a giant loaf of pitch-black bread with bat wings. When I told the players, they all rolled their eyes and said “a BAT LOAF?” Even I didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t mean to do that. Regardless, I had the evil bread cut itself into a dozen or so 5′x5′ slices which it scattered about the battlefield. Then I had appropriately-sized pieces of dark, evil cheese fall from the sky onto the bread. Nothing too terrifying had happened yet, so I had evil lettuce (with menacing eye and mouth holes cut out of it) flap around the board to threaten the players.
I think it was about now that someone wondered if we were playing Burgertime. Ridiculous. There were no chefs.
WARNING! WARNING!
I had decided at this point that I wanted the bread slices to be a hazard rather than an enemy, and touching it would cause the mutations I mentioned above. I also decided the lettuce should get a special attack in which it enveloped a PC, with the intention of dropping it onto the bread the next round. None of my players knew any of this, of course, and to them the bread seemed the greatest threat. Once the bread started getting attacked, I decided to have the evil cheese bubble up and ooze dark yellow and eventually take the form of a dire boar (mostly because that was the template I’d chosen, and a cheese-boar sounded utterly ridiculous and therefore perfect). These did most of the direct combat of the encounter, and did a reasonably good job of distracting everyone from the lettuce scooping them up to get all mutated and stuff.
All this was going far better than I’d thought, and by that I mean nobody had hit me with anything heavy yet. When the first PC failed to break free of the lettuce and wound up mutating on a piece of evil toast, I realized I had far exceeded my ability to improvise. The first victim suddenly found himself with the hindquarters of a wooden wasp. I had been thinking about that one awhile, and I wanted him to have a cool ranged weapon. Then he attacked the bread with it, which I decided made it clamp shut like a beartrap (giving him another mutation). Now he had the body of a birdhouse, and I was struggling to figure out how that even worked much less how to use it. Another poor fellow found himself turned into a 6′ tall caltrop that smelled overwhelmingly of strawberries. I still let everyone use their equipment as normal, which yielded some rather interesting concept-drawings from the other players. The caltrop-PC did manage to improvise a means to use his new form to his advantage and immediately went to attack some lettuce – which promptly ruptured and died when it tried to envelop his now-pointy everything. Then our little gnome-assassin PC got changed, and I made him 7′ tall, swapped his arms and legs, and gave him mutton chop whiskers made out of fully functional ears. Yup, I don’t know where I was going with that one either.
The party’s mage is played by one of those players, bless his insane little heart, that just has to follow through on a crazy idea once he gets one. He decided to grab a big hunk of the dark-bread and eat it. I had his PC feel funny for a couple of rounds, and then he, shall we say, produced 4 tiny owlbears dressed as the Fruit of the Loom guys that followed them around for the rest of the night. Made sense at the time.
After all the sandwich-combat, the PCs found themselves in a wide open field separated from the object of their rescue-affections by only a large chasm. I changed everybody back to their original form and told everybody they knew they were a color but didn’t know why. I wanted them to all join hands and make a rainbow to get the girl across the chasm, which they all figured out somehow. The final encounter of the night was to be against the Boogeyman himself, and he showed up to confront the PCs, but several of our players needed to leave early so they made the session end on a cliffhanger instead of me for a change.
Reflections Upon The Aftermath
I’m definitely not going to file this adventure in the “success” basket. My players are usually pretty forgiving and can make a good time out of whatever I throw at them, but most of the night just plain didn’t make sense. I’m never leaving this much to be dynamically compiled by my brain at the last second ever again. I am not a Just-In-Time compiler.
I do, however, think that I could make this pretty cool if I had it all to do over. I think I was on the right track by making monster templates to apply a random skin to. I would even keep the randomness of the monsters and mutations I chose. I would simply do that part well in advance. This lets me come up with powers and abilities for both and gives me time to evaluate if they’re a good idea before I have 7 people giving me the deer-in-headlights look waiting to see what else is about to come out of my mouth. It’s not a new concept. Gamma World‘s alpha mutations do it all the time, the players still have no idea what to expect, and gameplay is at least somewhat sane. (It also makes me want to run a GW game just to see what happens!) I don’t know that I’d have to change everything as deeply as GW, but having a specific change and accompanying power (and card to give the player with the stats) ready for the player when it happens would have turned something weird and possibly stupid into something interesting they’d enjoy.
I really have to wonder what my poor players think of this campaign. I think everyone’s having fun, but I never played anything like what I’m putting these guys through (and I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing!). I love thinking of different ways to handle things and testing my own limits, but I think perhaps I’ve gone a few shades too self-indulgent with this last session. It’s probably time to turn the crazy dial back down to a 3 or 4 for a little while.
Nah, they fight the Boogeyman himself next session. It’s time to bring out the big guns. But you can bet I’ll be loading them with planning-tipped ammunition.
Photo Credit
Let Sleeping Dukes Lie
When I was but a lad of 14, I used to play a lot of shareware games. It was much easier to convince my parents to pony up $2 for a disk full of PC games than it was to get them to blow $50 on another NES game. At the time, I was very much into games like Commander Keen and Jill of the Jungle. It was also about this time I played a little game by Apogee Software called Duke Nukem. It was pretty typical of PC platform shooters of the time, but I will confess to enjoying the crap out of it and its sequel. I liked the game’s catchy title and the main character’s crew cut and really didn’t think too much about it after that.
Imagine my surprise 5 years later when Apogee (now 3D Realms) drops another Duke Nukem game. This time, it’s in 3D, the graphics are better than Doom’s, and there are scantily-clad women. Also, he swears. Then I remember I’m 19, and these things aren’t really all that new to me. I regard Duke3D’s more lascivious offerings as an interesting novelty, and move on to more important things. Like blowing up aliens. Even back then I remember rolling my eyes at some of the jokes. Pigcops? Really? And with no other accompanying animal-stereotypes? I was at least expecting to kill some rabid were-weasel lawyers.
It does bear saying, though, that the joke where he threatens to rip off a boss’s head and *OMG S-WORD* down his neck and then does (complete with newspaper to read) may have been the hardest I have ever laughed. If you’re going to go over the top, go all the way.
After that, well, you’re all familiar with the story. Poor ol’ Duke got cancelled and sold to other companies and cancelled and put through the most spectacular development hell any of us have ever heard of. I was incredibly worried the day Duke Nukem Forever came out last month. I was about 12% sure the world was going to end. Conversely, after the Worst Development Cycle Ever, I was over 90% sure Duke Nukem Forever was going to be really terrible.
It wasn’t terrible. It was worse than that. It was disappointing. [Read the rest of this article]
The Note
Since I have been unemployed the past few weeks, my wife and I have taken the opportunity to complete some of the larger, hairier projects we’ve been meaning to get around to for awhile. One of these projects consisted of taking all of the stuff from my son’s nursery and exchanging it with all the stuff in the bedroom in which I had made my nerd-lair, effectively swapping the functionality of both rooms. We got all of his stuff in and set up pretty fast, so he’d have a nice Big Boy Room in which to frolic, and I’ve slowly been crawling through all my belongings to decide what gets put on the shelves, what gets stored and what takes a trip to the dumpster.
I was going through the pile that was my current D&D books and notes (which is badly in need of organization) when I came upon a folded note.
The Terror Begins
On its face, this note isn’t particularly, well, noteworthy. However, as I thought about it a little more, the following factors joined forces to become slightly unnerving:
- That is my handwriting.
- The paper is from the pad of paper I’ve been using recently for D&D, so I know it’s recent.
- I have no recollection of writing this note.
- I don’t have the slightest idea what this message means.
What could “HE WAS VERY BAD” mean? Who is “HE”? Even knowing the intended recipient of the note might make me feel better. It almost sounds like an explanation, which makes things even worse. Why would I give someone an explanation that says no more than “HE WAS VERY BAD”? What kind of action requires that sort of explanation?
WHAT HAVE I DONE?
I tried to calm my nerves, thinking about how I wasn’t sore so I probably hadn’t been digging any shallow graves or lifting dead bodies into the trunk of my car. My bank account didn’t register any activities more dubious than the purchase of the Baconator I ate for lunch yesterday. I hadn’t washed any particularly difficult laundry, especially anything I would have described as “blood-soaked.” I was starting to feel a little better.
Then I flipped the note over.
Side II: The WTFening
Aw HELL no.
Once again, in my handwriting, I find a message I don’t understand. Only this time, it’s a bunch of circles and squares arranged in what is clearly some kind of pattern, and there are 3 terms written down (“coar”,”hon”, and “comp”) that I don’t know. All the weird parts of this note were combining to form Creepy Voltron.
At this point, I’m just dumbfounded. Was I explaining something to someone and needed to draw a diagram? Best I can tell, I have transcribed a college course schedule for someone who can only understand information if arranged in baseball terms. It also looks like a charm bracelet purchased from a shop run by aphasics.
It also sort of looks like the runes of a magic spell to be cast by someone familiar with entity relationship diagrams. Oh no. What if I can’t remember this note because I botched the spell? I knew I should have put the lines in between the shapes. I wonder if this means I finally learned how to cast that Mind Bondage spell Jack Chick has been promising all of us D&D players for so long?
Struggling to find some explanation that didn’t sound like it was from “Learn To Speak Gozerian In 25 Days”, I tried Googling for “coar comp hon”, the three words printed on the page. The results didn’t really make me feel much better. Sure, the top search result was to “College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific White Coat Ceremony”, which isn’t all that threatening – but anything that uses “white coat ceremony” as a term made me a little squeamish. There’s a link with some badly formatted information about a coal company whose domain inexplicably points to the Internet 1996 World Exposition (and boy, does it show its age). There’s someone complaining about how game reviews are too over the top. Oh, and some scandal involving the US Military’s decision to buy certain guns over some other type. Legitimate or not, I think it’s a good general rule to stop digging anytime your searches for the truth start turning up arms deals.
Next Week’s Column May Be Written From Prison
I sure hope one of my gaming group can provide an explanation for all this. Maybe the E.L. Fudge caused me to black out and this was simply my subconscious running the show for awhile. Until then, I am going over every inch of the house with a fine-toothed comb, ready to call both the Ghostbusters and the Wolf at a moment’s notice.
The Stay-At-Home Adventurer
Yesterday marked the beginning of my third week of unemployment. While the stress of my previous job is no longer an issue, I am faced with a whole new host of things to worry about. The first is, obviously, trying to find a new job. There’s lots of things to get done around the house, so it’s not as if I have a lack of things to do. Getting them done with a 3 year old who has no regard for his own personal safety (much less the well-being and structural integrity of his parents’ belongings, the furniture, or even the house) significantly raises the challenge rating on keeping my sanity. I’m used to spending my days in my own little world hacking away at some perl script, or among adults, talking about programming and D&D. I am reasonably sure, however, that my level of reading comprehension has risen somewhat after watching forty-seven episodes of Super Why.
To cope, I’m using a strategy I got from the father from Calvin and Hobbes. I’m not very good at lies, but I figure I can stunt my son’s development sufficiently if I teach him a bunch of random strange information that he will slowly peel open like an onion over the course of his adult life. When he hears thunder, he says “that’s Mjölnir.” When he hears “Welcome To The Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, I have him trained to say “shananananananana knees.” And people, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard a toddler say “algorithm.”
From The Comfort Of Your Own Castle
It occurred to me this morning during the few precious seconds between Super Why episodes that you don’t see very many D&D campaigns set in one place with the PC’s never really leaving. My first impulse is to think such a campaign would be boring without the joy of exploration and travel. Would it still be boring if everything you would have fought on the way came to you? A frequently used setting would be a benefit to DMs in that they could work on scenarios in a semi-constant familiar place, and the players might get emotionally attached to it. Then again, familiarity breeds contempt, and there’s the risk of both the DM and the players growing bored.
It should be said that I can’t quite unflag this as an Awful Idea, but I was intrigued enough that I figured I could run the risk of boring all of you for a few minutes. (It’s what I do.)
Shiv +3, Soap Tongue
It seems to me that there are several scenarios ripe for not-going-anywhere: prisons and castles.
The prison scenario would have to drive its plot with the actions of the inmates. It could be as simple as the campaign representing the PCs’ sentence in prison, ending in their release, and all they have to do is survive for the duration. Individual adventures could deal with trying to negotiate with prison gangs or evading the brutal prison guards, eventually culminating in large-scale prison riots (and possibly escape attempts). One potential limitation I can see is that your players had better enjoy fighting other humanoids and using primitive hand-made weapons. Also, rules regarding the consumption of pruno would need to be written.
A scenario in which the PCs were castle guards (or some other employee of the kingdom based in said castle) intrigues me for the simple reason that the dreaded Campaign Rails are not really an issue because that’s just sort of how the whole thing works. The PCs are doing their jobs, and the adventures show up at their doorstep. In a given session, they could be repelling an invasion, driving off monsters, or trying to make sure no harm befalls a particularly hedonistic nobleman. (Yes, that last one was inspired by my 3-year-old.) It’s certainly not out of the question that the PCs might run an errand outside the castle, but that’s not where all the fun is. Yup, there’s the little voice that makes me want to put my players on rails. I knew it would show up eventually.
A Man’s Castle Is His Home
Ultimately, even after thinking about how to make this more fun, I don’t really know if cooping the players up in one place for that long is such a good plan. I do, however, think this kind of idea might be used successfully — in moderation. This kind of thinking seems well-suited to a campaign where the players have a home base, especially if the PCs ended the last session at the home base and the DM has limited time to plan the next session.
Anyway, that was a fun little excursion. With any luck, I’ll be using my at-will power of “D&D As A Metaphor” to write an article about how to play adventurers who have recently been hired as IT professionals. (There’s usually quite a bit of culture shock, and the wizards don’t do as well as you’d think.)
