Proper Villainy
Villains add a great element to a campaign: an opposing force that the players can invest themselves in fighting against. But what exactly makes a good villain?
Twisted Reality
I’ve never been real crazy about declaring alignment for characters. If you have a Good character and he’s homeless and penniless and he steals some bread to survive, does that make him not Good anymore? What about a man who kills someone in a jealous rage but is otherwise good? Is he now “evil” or is he still a good guy who made a horrible mistake?
In cartoons and crappy movies, the bad guys do bad things because they’re EVIL. That’s simply the way it is. A realistic villain probably won’t see burning, raping, and pillaging as acts of blackest evil. They’ll see it as “Things To Do Wednesday Afternoon”. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a bad person. The human mind has a lot of powerful emotional defenses against this. My favorite of these is called cognitive dissonance, in which a person’s mind perceives reality in a way that supports what the person believes. Any ideas presented that challenge these beliefs are almost always discarded (and in many cases, violently attacked). Through this, our villain can justify what he’s doing in a variety of ways that relieve him of the responsibility of his actions:
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It’s YOUR fault!
The reason I’m burning down your house? You didn’t pay the protection money that you clearly owe.
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I was just following orders.
A character works for someone who asks him to do something reprehensible. He may be motivated by fear or material wealth but in his heart he knows damn well it’s not right — so he justifies it by “just following orders”. This is not to say that a mistake flips the switch and makes a character evil all of a sudden, but if this character continues to do this sort of thing and starts thinking of this as “normal” behavior…. what then? What better way to relieve yourself of guilt than to relieve yourself of the responsibility of your own actions? Don’t blame me! Blame the Dark Lord!
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Cold, Emotionless Logic.
It’s a whole lot easier to do bad things if you just view it as a bunch of stats and abstract concepts. For instance, deaths turn into “acceptable losses”.
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A sense of entitlement.
You can do whatever you want because you DESERVE IT. Whoever invented prima noctis was totally into this. The right to deflower all virgins in the land because you’re the lord of the place, dammit — that’s some USDA A-1 prime grain-fed angus entitlement right there.
A variation on this can occur if someone justifies their actions by declaring someone else deserves a particular fate. They may not even know the reasons for this. “My family has been enslaving the dwarves for 87 generations, there’s nothing wrong with it, and I don’t see any reason why it should change now!” -
You fools have no idea of the power you are dealing with.
A massively inflated ego is a wonderful tool for dismissing naysayers. And when you cultivate it long enough to get dreams of world domination, you say cool things like the previous statement! You can’t believe you’re doing anything wrong when you won’t listen to anybody. Yours is the only opinion worth listening to, and who cares that it stopped being grounded in reality decades ago?
Once again, evil people are still people. They still have to live with themselves somehow — even if that means descending into a big pit filled with neuroses. The really scary part is that in many cases, this isn’t even a conscious decision. The easiest way to live the lie is to believe it yourself.
Emotion: The Root Of All Evil
Any Jedi master worth his stylish burlap robes will tell you that strong emotions lead to the Dark Side. In many cases, they’re right. People frequently do bad things when their feelings overwhelm them and distort the world to their eyes and minds. If you look at the justifications above, you’ll see emotion at the root of every last one.
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Desire
When a person wants something badly enough, they might start doing morally questionable things to get it. This could be anything: money, power, sex, even love. Countless evils have been rooted in desire.
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Fear and Anger
You get someone scared or angry enough, and you’ll find that their perception of morality (and even reality) shift. In their head, committing horrible acts upon the cause of those feelings may seem perfectly justified!
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Jealousy
Who knows how many the Green-Eyed Monster has claimed over the millenia? A person who bottles the anger over an unrequited love or envy over wealth or power that he feels should rightfully be his may eventually vent those feelings, and may the gods help those in the way.
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Motivation
This might seem an odd one to you, but consider this: the person with the blackest thoughts in the universe will never be a villain unless they actually do something. Such a person finding a reason to act may simply be the spark that touches off the explosion.
Of course, simply acting on one’s emotions doesn’t make one evil, even if those actions are utterly wretched. It may, however, make one a villain. Take that and a suit of black plate mail, and you’ve got yourself a campaign. More or less.
Later in this series, I’ll discuss how to play a villain so that you might better torture your poor, hapless players. Until next time!
<evil laughter>
Photo Credit
*note: Readers of Stupid Ranger may remember a similar series several years back. I have thoroughly plagiarized this material without the consent of the original author. I hope he never finds me. I also plan to continue where he left off. You know, just to piss him off.
The Architect DM: Traps, Hazards, & Terrain
Once again I solicited on my twitter account (@Bartoneus) asking what aspects of location design in RPGs people have problems with, and I’d like to thank everyone that responded this afternoon. I will be addressing many of the topics you guys asked about in the future, but for today’s post I chose DigitalDraco’s comment: “I always want to include more interesting terrain effects, hazards & the like but they tend to seem added-on.” This topic immediately struck me as one that I’ve struggled with in the past and one that I believe many other people have had issues with as well.
The great thing about traps, hazards, and terrain effects are that they can be direct personifications of the environment that metaphorically (and sometimes quite literally) bring the world around your characters to life. First the best idea is to clarify some definitions that I feel are pretty widely acknowledged. Traps are typically intentionally malicious effects that were orchestrated by a foreign will or entity for a specific purpose. Hazards and terrain are generally considered to be natural but they can just as easily cross over into the realm of traps in the same way that traps can cause hazards and changes in terrain. Focusing on and playing up this potential inter-relationship of traps and hazards/terrain is my first recommendation for creating interesting locations that include these elements.
Connectivity Breeds Realism
What I mean by the above title is that tying elements of your design together can justify all of those elements even when they relate to very little beyond themselves. This is a direct suggestion focusing on the last part of DigitalDraco’s statement, “but they tend to seem added-on“. If you have added one element to a location and it seems added-on, try adding another element that relates directly to the first and you might find that instead of both of them feeling added-on, they start to create a new definition of the location you’re designing. I also recommend treating the main topics of this post as a set of guidelines when adding elements into encounters, if the first thing you’ve added is clearly a trap, the secondary element you add will probably fit better if it is a hazard or a terrain effect. If you’ve added a hazard, the secondary element may work best as a trap or a hazard. [Read the rest of this article]
It’s Got Electrolytes
One problem I keep running into with my campaign is that I have tunnel vision. I see the story, I see the characters, I see the players, and I have a tendency not to think about the existence of other things without some effort. One major side effect of this is that we’re 5 sessions in and nobody has received any loot. Well, aside from some weapons I gave them identical to their normally equipped one, except made of pure light and with a +1 bonus. I’d always planned to give the party some sort of specialized magical means of fighting The Evil Dark Things, but this wound up being a last-minute afterthought when one player asked about the lack of loot. I was astounded at how boring a weapon made of light turned out. It’s easy to see I got out of it what I put in.
Problem Solved. Problem Acquired.
I know at least part of the problem stems from me internally labeling the non-RP stuff “boring” or “banal”. I think about all the items from random treasure tables my D&D groups have received over the years, all the grey and white “sell to the vendor” items in WoW, all the time spent looking these things up and figuring out where to store them or selling them off, and it just seems like work for no reason. (The only exception to this I can think of is the one time our DM determined that we found a rare painting on an Ettin we killed, and we collectively determined he’d been storing it in his butt.)
I made a conscious decision at the start of my campaign to handwave a lot of things I’d experienced previously that I thought were too little payoff for too much effort. “Junk” loot was one of these. Encumbrance (at least, measuring items down to the ounce or gp) was another. We have a relatively standard marching order and everyone knows who has what watch when they’re at camp. I also decided not to use XP to determine when the PCs leveled, instead resorting to milestones or “whenever I tell them to”. All these save us a lot of time. They do that particular job very well. Problem is, I’ve come to realize I’m neglecting two very important reward systems for my players: loot and XP. Not everybody craves only to drink roleplay straight from the tap like I do; in fact, I’d say I’m in a pretty small minority in that respect.
Lifting The Unintentional Sanctions
I’m still not entirely convinced I need to change how our group does XP. While computing XP after each battle (or session) gives an immediate sense of reward, it has some drawbacks. One is that doing it during the session is just going to eat up time and pretty much buzzkill the session while we do the accounting. I could have the XP to add to the total for each monster ready beforehand, but then there’s the potential of wasted effort if they don’t kill everything. Do I give those I thought contributed to the battle more a greater share? If the party splits and I have non-participants, do they get left behind? I want the whole party at the same level so they aren’t frustrated and I’m not dealing with forces I understand even less than the regular forces that I barely understand.
The Loot Problem seems a little less hard to define, at least on its surface. One problem I’m running into is that giving them loot that isn’t immediately useful in some way may be useless to them. I know the dread wizard Wal-Mart’s influence is felt throughout the Forgotten Realms, but something tells me there isn’t one in a pocket-prison dimension in the Shadowfell. At the very least, not a 24-hour Supercenter. If I give them money, I don’t know where or how they are going to spend it. I’d rather not load them up on stuff that won’t be useful, although giving them items that could be used together (rope, a series of lead pipes, explosives, strawberry jam, etc) might work out for some puzzles or roleplaying challenges. One thing my previous DMs were very good at that I need to start emulating was to give each player an item or two that had enough flavor that you cared about it. It was simply unique in some way, it had its own backstory, or it tied into a PC’s backstory. I still remember my cleric carrying around an ancestral flail given to him by his tribesmen, and favoring its use even over more powerful weapons. Some of that was my DM, some of that was me giving it personal meaning. That’s what I want to engender with the items I give out. I realize they won’t read each individual caltrop and iron ration a story before tucking them into their backpack every night, but I can do a lot better than this.
Time To Go All Wonka On Their Asses
Whatever I do, I want to make sure that my players get rewarded for their actions, and I want them to feel like the time they invest at my table is well-spent. This and “make combat faster plz kthx” has been the topic of most of the player feedback I’ve received thus far. If I ever want to get our RPG team to the later stages of Orming, I would be wise to attend to these needs. I’ll just add another title to my ever-growing list: “Garlukk: Demigod of Fun”, “Chickenmaster”, “Concierge Of The Bloodthirsty And Materialistic”, and now “Lootmaster Electrolyte XP”.
I’ve got what players crave. Or something.
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The Creme Filling Of The DM Soul
Today's mimic knows that cinnamon rolls, not treasure chests, are a much better means of attracting unwary adventurers.
There’s a few reasons I like talking about my D&D game in my weekly column. One, it makes coming up with a topic much easier. Two,writing about my DMing troubles helps me identify what those troubles actually are. Last, if I talk about something I’m having trouble with, the community is awesome, and I have a veritable cornucopia of good ideas to choose from for next time. Seriously, you guys rock. I took a lot of notes from the last two weeks, and I think last week’s D&D session went considerably better.
The Unfortunate Bits
This not to say, of course, that there weren’t some bumps in the road. We had a player leave the group due to scheduling conflicts, so his spot went to the next guy on our waiting list. Naturally, the other guy on our waiting list wanted to play too. I initially told him no and was devastated by the ensuing puppy dog eyes. I took 5 ongoing guilt damage, and kept rolling 5′s for my save for the rest of the night. Also, I wanted him to play. So, against the advice of the village elders, I approached the group about adding a seventh member. There were some concerns aired about too much chaos at the table and combat taking too long, but everybody was OK with giving a group of 7 the ol’ provisional college try.
I won’t lie. We need to work on speeding up combat. We have a problem in our group with analysis paralysis. My gut tells me at least part of this stems from unfamiliarity with their powers. We’re only a few sessions in, we have a week between games, and only about half of us have the appropriate sourcebooks – relying only on Character Builder sheets for crunchy stuff. I’ve been prescribed a few fixes for this. Señor The Game recommended that make the new guy run initiative, which I totally forgot to do. ( I’ll get you next time, Gadget. NEXT TIME.) Another was to say who’s turn it is, and to also announce who’s on deck. I’ve also seen a few DMs over the years who impose a time limit on a player’s turn and either skip over them or have them automatically hold their initiative, but that just seems like a good way to irritate already-frustrated players. I never liked it when it happened to me. Coming up with weird crap to do takes time, dammit.
The Climactic Battle That Wasn’t
I tried hard this week to set up situations and hooks instead of railroading my players. I think they’re sufficiently used to me shoving them around that they recognized where the plot was and went without question. Hopefully that’ll change soon. I set up two combat encounters this week: one big bad and what I thought was a throwaway “kill some cultists” encounter as a lead-in. As it turned out, the “throwaway” took up most of the night, and wound up being probably our most exciting combat to date. It was the first time I’d used terrain effects, and the party took some adjusting. That, and I also used a reskinned Brain In A Jar type monster to dominate the PCs. On a few recommendations I’d read over the last week, I decided to throw a healthy amount of minions in with relatively few heavy hitters. I was honestly expecting the usual to happen: the mage comes in and nukes all the minions off the map, then the party gangs up on the bigger guys and we’re done by round 5. Somehow, the tank got separated and surrounded, the other melee fighters were separated (and also surrounded), and the party’s best ranged attacker was dominated and continuously pelting the paladin in the back of the head with arrows due to a statistically unlikely number of failed saves (I think we were approaching 10 by the time it was over.) I had decided from the start that I wasn’t going to fudge dice and try to let this one play out, and I’m pretty sure everyone at the table was wondering which way this battle was going to end. It was exciting. 100% all natural no-preservatives exciting. And no trans fats.
One thing I do regret is continuously attacking the paladin. I found myself trying to juggle between what I thought was a good tactical strategy (focus fire on one until dead, move on to the next) and trying to keep things fun (random/suboptimal target selection). I decided to go the tactical route, and I think I wound up with a frustrated player. I want things to be tense and exciting and to feel real, but not at the expense of people hating the game. The player knows I wasn’t just singling him out for personal reasons or anything like that, but I still felt bad. I never expected to have to think about this stuff before.
The Thing I Love Most
All that thinking about my campaign being somewhat devoid of humor last week made me realize something I had been missing since DMing: coming up with unusual character concepts and roleplaying my face off. Playing one of these characters was always a roll of the dice as a player. About 30% of the time, I’d find a deep vein of awesome and wind up having the time of my life for the whole campaign. The rest of the time, I find out about three sessions in that this schtick only goes so deep, it’s getting in the way of me being effective in combat, and/or it’s annoying the crap out of everyone else at the table. As a DM, however, my NPCs aren’t always right there breathing down everyone’s neck. Their on-stage insanity can be administered in measured doses, and I am no longer limited to ideas that would work for an adventurer. I realized at one point that a lot of these not-fun-to-play PCs all had one fatal flaw: they were NPCs born into the wrong side of the DM screen.
I decided to test this hypothesis using Lionel Pureheart, the first PC I ever had this issue with. He was gifted in the black art of necromancy, but had the kindest heart in the land. So he would offer his services (dubbed “Gentle Necromancy”) to the local townsfolk, such as having skeletons do the landscaping or bringing Grandma back from the dead to visit the family for a day. I had dreams of zany misadventures like these all through the campaign, but my DM at the time wasn’t having any of it. Every time he’d ply his trade, he’d be run out of town by a lynch mob. This was 3.5e, and I had him specialize in the Necromancy school of magic. Turns out that sort of mages aren’t particularly combat-effective. We eventually found some massively overpowered necromancy spell in some third party sourcebook, and Lionel was no longer a liability in combat. But he wasn’t much fun to play.
Since I’d just trapped our current group in what the Shadowfell, I thought it’d be interesting if poor Lionel managed to piss off the Raven Queen due to his, er, creative implementation of the black arts and she imprisoned him in the same realm as the PCs. However, since he’s the only one around who can help other poor souls trapped here, he can finally feel fulfilled. In fact, he’s never been happier. So I had him set up a nice little refugee camp, surrounded by picket fences made from various bones (with little hearts engraved on them) and set up signs around the area with a simple large pink heart and an arrow pointing to his camp. I got a lot of weird looks from my players, and then even more weird looks when I told them he smelled like fresh cinnamon rolls. It was totally worth it.
This, of course, comes with a few warning labels stuck on it. I’m thrilled that I get to have my particular brand of fun at D&D again. I need to be extra careful to make sure this story still belongs to the PCs. I need to make sure I don’t go too far off the deep end and go from entertaining to annoying. I’m not sure where the line is, but I do know that putting in the work planning everything seems a lot less like work when you get to do the thing you love most.
Strange as it sounds, it’s almost as if I feel like I’d just given myself license to play the game a little bit instead of just running it. I don’t know if that’s the “right” way to do run a game, but if you don’t like it then ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES.
I could get used to this.
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Can 4e Be Old-School D&D?
My most recent design project for Wizards of the Coast has left me thinking a lot about old-school D&D. I have been reminiscing about my early days of playing, when my Jr. High school friends and I could play first-edition AD&D for 72 hours straight without having to worry about jobs or families or responsibilities any more onerous than a paper route and little league baseball games.
The adventures and campaigns we played were home-brewed by necessity, because the only published adventures we had access to were very short and very light on details, but they gave us just enough to let our imaginations run wild through horrific tombs, around keeps on borderlands, and into certain lost caverns. What happened between those adventures, and often during those adventures, was always open to interpretation, alteration, and complete reconstitution by whichever one of us was DMing at the time.
But What is Old-School? And What is New-School?
Of course, “old-school” has become one of those ubiquitous terms that loses any semblance of meaning the more it gets used. So let me define a little more clearly what I mean when I use the term “old-school,” especially in relation to the way I see the game being played in more recent years. Since third-edition D&D was introduced, I have not really played in a true long-term, home-brewed campaign. Almost everything I have consumed (and most everything I have created) has been published content in one form or another. And a great deal of that content has been meant to for use in an organized-play setting.
That means DMs using the content are expected to run the games with at least some semblance of continuity, with an established plot and flow detailing where the adventure is supposed to begin and end. In other words, both the players and the DM have to agree to a contract that is unwritten but understood in organized-play campaigns: the party cannot go anywhere and do anything it wants, and the DM must keep the adventure-as-written somewhere in front of the players, even if some detours are taken along the way. Similarly, the adventure designers understand their implicit contract with these people: the writers must make an effort to be as thorough and clear as possible about how to DM the adventure.
While this type of gaming is not for everyone, it has certainly proved to be quite popular since the concept was introduced. And as much as I have given my time and energy to this sort of gaming, and gained much from it, part of me is a little sad to think that many DMs and players might never know the other type of gaming, where the word on the page is just a guide instead of a script—or where there is no page at all!
I think about an adventure like Gygax’s classic The Village of Hommlet. It starts out famously as the characters stroll into the village looking for adventure, probably finding themselves in the Inn of the Welcome Wench. Then there is the trek to the moathouse to battle the now-infamous Lareth the Beautiful and his forces. So much of the game, however, happens outside the pages. How the PCs interact with the NPCs in Hommlet has to be improvised by the DM. How much information about the temple’s past is revealed is up to the DM. How to keep the PCs from stealing that 1300 gp service set from the farmhouse is definitely the job of the DM!
For my money, the most interesting and important part of that adventure was the afterthought: an assassin comes to Hommlet to take out the PCs for messing up the plans of the Temple at the moathouse. This is the awesome stuff that makes a campaign memorable, yet when and how this assassination attempt is made is completely up to the DM. If that slight mention of a plot continuation is made in a published adventure today, how many DMs take the time to add it? There are no stat blocks, maps, or tactics supplied: how many DMs have the skill to make that happen in a cool and intriguing way.
Where There’s a Rule (or Lack Thereof), There’s a Way
I’ve loved every version of D&D I’ve ever played, and I have played ‘em all. Looking at the evolution of the rules over the years, and at the evolution of the way the game is delivered and discussed and consumed by the players, I have to say with all seriousness that the earliest version of D&D rules, game-mechanically speaking, were not good.
Yet, in a strangely paradoxical way, that was the best thing that could have happened to the game at that point in its development. Remember, there was no Internet to discuss or argue over rules. There were no instant errata updates. Unclear, wacky, or incredibly unbalanced rules were resolved in one place: at the individual tables. And even though this meant there were enough house rules to make the game look very different from one group to the next, that was fine.
In fact, it was more than fine. It gave each player and each DM the opportunity—if not the responsibility—to think about the game a little more deeply. Just like adventures had to be created and modified on the fly to make the game fun for everyone, so the rules often had to be adjudicated or created on the fly for that same reason.
As the editions of the game progressed through the years, I daresay that the rules became—game-mechanically speaking—better and better. And also more voluminous. And also more nit-picky and prone to rules-lawyering. Of course, some of that was a result of the advancements in technology and communication. But the more you try to make something as clear and resistant to alternative interpretation as possible, the more interpretation and the less clarity you will have.
With the push to create better mechanics to support the game, there was a similar push to create adventures that were easier to run for DMs who didn’t have the time to prepare their own stuff. That means adventures had to be more balanced, more clear, and more easily run—sometimes without any preparation at all. This is great in the way that microwave meals are good: they can be convenient and tasty and even just as good as some homemade dishes, but the downside is that people can rely on them so much that they forget how to cook, and how much fun cooking can be.
So, I return to my original question: can 4e rules support an old-school D&D campaign? I think the answer is a resounding yes. The rules are more entrenched, and the way the rules are consumed and the way players can communicate globally leads to a more homogeneous experience. And this might be what the market wants. DMs might want to just take the same material in the same format and run it in the same way, and that’s OK. Fun games can be played that way. But I hope there are DMs out there willing and able to create their own stuff, or to take published content and make it their own, and show their players that not every game has to look the same, even when it is the same adventure.
Pain of Campaigning: Rotating GMs
Dave and I always joked about our gaming white whale: The Supers Game. It’s not that running a superhero game was impossible, it was just that, for us, it had never gelled. Enter Gencon 2010 and my purchase of DC Adventures. I had a system, and I had player interest (though just barely); I even had a weeknight that would work, but I had one problem:
I wanted to play the damn game, not just run it.
And so, I launched a nefarious scheme. I would run an awesome adventure and then announce that I planned on being the “Head GM” for the group, but that I’d pass the GMing duties off after that. To be honest, as simple as it seemed, I was unsure as to whether or not my players would be interested or if they’d mutiny. Thankfully, two other players of mine eagerly volunteered to Co-GM.
Nineteen adventures and seven months later, I have learned a few things about how to manage a rotating GM. [Read the rest of this article]
The Architect DM: Give Your Cities Some Character
As with nearly every topic I cover in this series, I’ve touched on the idea of adding character to settlements and cities before but now I’d like to put it in the spotlight. Let’s face it, your players will only remember select portions of the adventures you run even on the best of days. The elements that players seem to remember the most are specifically striking elements of a few NPCs, villains, encounters, and social interactions. Generally speaking, they will not remember a location very much unless a specific element of that location ties directly to one of those elements. They may not remember a location featuring a really sweet bridge if you describe it to them, but set a dramatic encounter on that bridge and they’re much more likely to remember the details of that location.
When it comes to settlements, whether it is a village, town, city, or capital, they were founded for very specific reasons and often their nature reflects those reasons inherently. If a city is built on the edge of the ocean, then it is most likely going to have thriving docks, abundant fish markets, and a bustling economy built on trade from abroad. When you present a new city to your players these are the aspects that you want to put the most effort into preparing and presenting to them to help solidify the character of the new location in their minds. As with most of my suggestions for designing based on realistic concepts, in the end thinking about these concepts can also help you develop more ideas for your game while you’re planning everything out.
There’s No Such Place as Default Town
I would be willing to bet that the large majority of places a D&D group visits come off as nothing more than ‘generic fantasy town’ with perhaps one or two interesting elements that feel tacked on and unincorporated into the overall life of the area. No matter where the city you’re designing is located, you can add a handful of interesting elements with relative ease. The key to making this work is presenting these elements to your players up front, and not always leaving them free to discover everything on their own. If a town is located in the middle of rolling grasslands, begin by telling the players that the town is easily twice the size of any other town they’ve visited due to the flat nature of the terrain and the availability of space. From there you can branch into a large variety of interesting elements, and I have found that the more specific and unique you can get the more the location will stand out. With our grassland town, you could emphasize that the only food readily available within the town is that of the grassland lions found in abundance nearby. Your average D&D characters (and players) are not going to expect a town to eat mostly lion meat, and small details like this can really make a location stand out in your game. [Read the rest of this article]
Funny Pants of Omnipotence: The Metaphor Overstays Its Welcome
After last week’s little episode regarding how I can never go back to life before the day I sat behind the DM screen, I spent the better part of last week stocking up on information about how to do this better. I got a lot of seriously excellent advice from a lot of folks, and I buried myself in Sly Flourish’s DM Tips book. This all confirmed what I originally thought – I wasn’t making the PCs the center of the adventure. Now I have a few ideas how to go about that. Phil, the chattiest of DMs, recommended to me that I set events in motion (rather than the plot) and add hooks for the players to act upon. They’ll write the story, not me. Weeeeird. It makes the little control freak monkey pulling the levers in my brain very unhappy. If I have to hose out the inside of my head, there’ll be Hell to pay, simian.
Now I’m looking at where my campaign has been and where I think I should nudge it. I almost typed “where I think it should go”, but that was an old habit stubbornly refusing to die.
A Dungeon Master, flight testing his campaign.
The Need To Be Needlessly Complicated
My first thoughts upon deciding to run a campaign were about doing this crazy temporal jumping thing where the party sees their epic level future selves doing something Not Nice and has to figure out why this is happening and whether to stop it. I decided I would go insane trying to make that work in a story I was writing by myself, much less with a D&D group. But I keep feeling like the stories I come up with are perhaps a little too big for my DM britches at this point. At the very least, I’m wondering if they’re too big for the PCs’ collective britches.
When I think about this, I am reminded of the 3 tiers of character levels. Heroic characters save villages from kobolds. Paragon characters battle dragons and wizards for the fate of a nation. Epic characters stick their mighty thumbs up the diabolical butt of Orcus a la the Crocodile Hunter just to see what happens. And yet here I am throwing an entire army of cement zombies and powerful magics nobody has ever heard of at a party of level 1 characters. It makes sense that I’m having to resort to frustrating and arbitrary resolutions to encounters. They would die otherwise.
Does this mean I can’t set a huge and epic stage for low level characters to grow into? I’m guessing not, but figuring out how to do it in a way that works is proving somewhat elusive. I’m finding myself having trouble figuring out why the leadership of the Bad Team knows or cares who these guys are who were epic farmers and stable boys until sometime last year. It’s hard to resort to one of those “you’re the chosen one” plot scenarios when there are six of them with differing backgrounds. I could go all Curse of the Azure Bonds on them, but it’s a little late in the game for that.
I have a feeling it’s going to be a matter of making events with a long enough timetable that the PCs can grow and gain power and eventually get to be enough of a thorn in the Bad Team’s side that Evil Plans start including their eradication. I don’t think my plot is so far gone that this can’t happen anymore, but I’m at a loss as to how to set things right without jarring the players any further. I’m reasonably sure at this point that my players trust nothing going on around them due to my (incredibly successful) attempts at misdirection. I’m fighting that instinct I get when my computer is running all weird and I eventually say “f#*$ it, time to format the hard drive”. My hands smell enough like ham as it is.
Am I In The Wrong Room?
This whole business of running a campaign and entertaining 6 people for hours on end has me gazing at yet another facet of my navel – the northwest corner, also known as “the funny part”. I’ve used my sense of humor to my advantage my whole life. First, as a defense mechanism in school, and now when it enables me to talk about things on the Internet in a way that is not necessarily factually accurate. I’ve played every D&D character of my adult life in a weird and amusing way, and I think everybody thought I was going to run a humorous campaign as well. Even me.
I haven’t quite figured out why I decided to go all serious on my players, but I have a few guesses. One, I have yet to play a “funny” D&D game that didn’t get annoying fast. Every weird thing I ever did in D&D was against a serious backdrop, and it was in character for the most part. Is it that I prefer the DM to be the “straight man” in this comedic adventure? My players are up to the task of dropping the funny, and we’ve already had some “need to take a break for oxygen” moments.
I do have to wonder, though, if me taking this story seriously is an effort to be taken seriously for once. It used to drive me batty in our old campaigns when I would stop being strange for a moment and try to take a leadership position. I didn’t get to parlay much. I take that back. I would frequently try to do the talking. I didn’t get to parlay for very long before someone got worried I was going to get us all killed, soon pushing me aside. It is a skill I wish I’d developed more now that I’m running a campaign in which I have to have a lot of NPCs speak with a serious tone. One of my players, roleplaying in fine form, managed to intimidate both an NPC and me simultaneously and I had to stop the group to tell them not to take this fellow’s stunned silence as him trying to hide something. I simply didn’t know the answer to the question and my brain locked up because Katherine is speaking to me with pointy words OMG.
I do want to try a few more lighthearted things sooner or later. I just want them to fit. I can see myself coming up with an amusing scenario involving one of the PCs backstories a lot sooner than I could, say, send them after the Fart Queen of the Poop Ogres. That’s trademarked, by the way.
The Road Ahead: Sufferin’
If there’s one common thread I’ve noticed about my reaction to everything I’ve been considering for inclusion in my campaign, it’s that crippling self-doubt makes me want to scrap it all. I’m sure my former DMs are feasting on a neverending supply of delicious irony that I am taking writing a campaign far too seriously. Perhaps it’s time to throw caution to the wind and do what I do best.
Attention to all my players: SPOILER ALERT! This story is, and always has been about succotash.
Now there’s a mystery.
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Innocence Lost: The Price of Omnipotence
A funny thing happened at my D&D session last week. The PC’s were fighting a dragon that was extra-tough due to being all Dark and Corrupted™. I figured a level 4 elite green dragon with enhanced stats should be at least somewhat challenging for a group of 5 level 2 characters. I was wrong. They were mercilessly kicking its scaly butt. I didn’t know what to do. The exciting combat encounter I had planned – complete with NPC intervention after a few rounds to remove the corruption so they could kill the beast – was going to be over even before I could do anything. So I decided to cheat. That dragon now had unlimited hit points until I decided otherwise. And I decided to make him get bigger and do way more damage to make them all think they were going to die. Then, I had my super-cool NPC show up and he removed the corruption and…….
Well, it was lame. I the PC’s hit it a few more times, and then had their next hit kill it. In retrospect, I’m reasonably sure I violated the Code of Good DMing – Article 5 Subsection 34e – which states that the NPCs should not be more important to the story than the PC’s. As it happens, it’s not my mistakes that weigh heavily upon me this week. Those have been acknowledged and will hopefully improve with practice. My mind keeps going back to my dragon, kept alive only by dark DM magic. The players were rolling dice in earnest, hoping their combined powers could defeat this fell beast, and it was for nothing.
You Can Never Go Back
I started thinking about hearing some of my more experienced DM friends talking about adjusting hit points and fudging die rolls. As a DM, I didn’t have to follow any rules, and I could just make it up as I went along. How much of the combat my characters have participated in over the years was real? (And yes, I understand the duality of this term used in this context. Please do not make a TV movie about me and turn me in to Fox News for trying to cast Mind Bondage on my dad.)
Talking to my best friend (and former DM) Dante officially Did Not Help. “Don’t feel bad about cheating,” he said. “If you don’t let on, they’ll never know.” He confirmed that many fights had been Adjusted and that many dice had been Fudged over the years. Well, that’s just great. All those memories, suddenly put under harsh fluorescent lights. This was worse than when I found out there was no Santa Claus. How could I ever go back to being a player again?
I Have Seen The Matrix. Put Me Back In.
I asked Dante how he deals with this, as he’s been a player in a few campaigns with me. He confirmed that being a player was different for him after being a DM. He also made a crude analogy about it being like going to a strip club, and not caring what was fake. (He always knows how to make me feel better.)
Even so, I’d been wrestling over the last few weeks with the general feeling that combat was just getting in the way of storytelling. It was frustrating before. Now, it was false. Useless. A waste of my players’ time, and a breach of their trust. It was good to see all the melodrama exercises I’d been doing were paying off. Still, I had no idea what to do in order to make combat OK again. I kept thinking about how much effort had been put into balancing the combat in the various editions of this game and other RPGs, and all the millions of hours spent by players over the years rolling up character stats that effectively meant nothing.
I have to admit, I was not expecting to enter the “existential quandary” phase of my DM career before my fifth session. So it was that I once again turned to the ever-cryptic wisdom of Dave Chalker. Even he admitted to fudging.
The fights might not be fair, but that’s not really your job. Your job is to create an exciting story for them to take part in. You’ll just have to make sure their actions mean something.
That’s great! But how? How do I do this?
Wax on, wax off.
Renovations on Dave’s bathroom should be finished by Gen Con.
The Way Home?
I’ve gotten some good advice on this, but I’m still shell-shocked. I’m still going to keep DMing, of course, and trying to make this game as fun for my players and myself as humanly possible. Half the fun is just getting together with your friends, after all. I can’t believe I’ve been playing this game for this long and none of this ever occurred to me. I place a high value on good memories, and seeing them all in a new light was jarring. On a purely cognitive level, I can understand that I’ve played under some excellent DMs if nobody ever noticed and we all tell epic tales of battle years afterward.
I don’t know whether or not I would erase this part of my memory if given the chance. Since I find this prospect incredibly unlikely, I will file it along with my desire to time-travel back to before I asked that girl out in high school starting with the words “if your mom says it’s OK” and replace it with something way smoother.
In the short term, I have a plan. Since the “cheating” aspect of running combat is what’s disturbing me so badly, I’m not going to use it unless I have a damned good reason. That reason will always be “it makes the game more fun.” Wait, isn’t that why I was doing it in the first place? Yup, I’m screwed. (Note to my players: from now on we’re handling all combat via competitive eating contests. Anybody know where I can buy hotdogs in bulk?)
As if all this weren’t enough, I learned one final brutal lesson last week: it’s a terrible idea to get all sugared up on E.L. Fudge cookies when you’re trying to DM. It is really hard to concentrate. You have no idea how disappointed this makes me.
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Junk Punch
You have been sucker punched. As a gamer, you’ve been categorized and used as a negative stereotype to illustrate points about terrible movies. Video games and gamers get a bum rap in film criticism. Film critics seem to like to use video games and the people who play them as a culturally understood idiom. This practice makes the critics look as bad as what they might be criticizing.
Roger Ebert, with his starkly ignorant opinion of video games as art, might have brought this mistreatment to a head in popular media. This lack of actual cultural awareness has been around for a long time, however, with film critics decrying just about anything that’s based on a video game or seems gamish. The trend degenerates from there, with critics using the term “video game” to condemn crappy adventure movies, as well as the term “gamer” to refer to insipid consumers of such dreck. This sort of condescension is a refuge only of someone who can’t come up with a meaningful metaphor and, therefore, takes the lazy route of uninformed comparison. [Read the rest of this article]
