Loss Builds Character
I’ve experienced a bit of loss recently. I lost my job at Wizards of the Coast this past December. No permanent employment has come my way yet, so I could lose my house. (Maybe not such a bad thing, all considered.) I gave my pound of flesh to the surgeon who removed my little cancerous growth. (Shaking my fist at the sun, I know it’s really my fault.) I lost my sister this past month. Heck, I’ve even lost over thirty pounds, taking the good with the bad. Loss has been on my mind a lot recently.
This isn’t about me, though. Truth be told, despite some dark instances, life has been good to me. Any suffering I’ve endured has been, thankfully, minor. I feel like I’ve gained a lot in the past few months, from experiences to friends to opportunities.
Loss shapes us. How one responds and moves on from loss can have a profound effect on the path one’s life takes and the deeds one performs. In this world, loss is inevitable but often without deep impact. We don’t live in a place where kobolds can eat our babies or a maniac can call up the avatar of the Mad God. Our characters do.
Making Up Losses
The minor travails of modern life are not the norm in for heroes in a fantasy world like those of the Dungeons & Dragons game. The harsher the world is, the greater the potential for suffering. Take Dark Sun. Characters on Athas have a potential for loss few of us would like to imagine. Even if you’re playing a game set in cushy Faerûn, DM or player, you should take some time to imagine loss.
Loss and the desire to do something about it is one root of character motivation. It can be key in the background of a player character and the adventuring party’s forward momentum. Something as little as gambling debt or as big as the death of an entire tribe can shape a character’s path. If you’re a DM, loss can turn good guys bad, bad guys good, and mold the fate of nations and deities.
One element I included in the character history questions for players in my Dark Sun game was had to do with loss. It went something like: Athas is a harsh world in which people suffer regular hardships and loss. What have you suffered or lost? How has this event shaped you or your life? What are you going to do about it?
Malamac, one of those characters, had a lot of loss in his life. He was the only dwarf in his clan who had no touch of primal magic. For “blasphemous” discoveries in an ancient dwarven city, servants of the tyrant of Tyr killed Malamac’s kin and enslaved Malamac. Malamac found himself an unwilling gladiator bereft of possessions and friends.
Like with Malamac, I learned the most about the characters from the losses they had suffered and what they planned to do about them. The answers have shaped adventures and encounters for over a year now. As the characters approach paragon tier, I’m working to provide opportunities to resolve or provide closure for many of those losses. I’m also fostering new attachments and planning possible threats to those attachments.
You see, loss often leads to new experiences and connections. Malamac’s initial loss opened the way for his primal power to blossom. It also provided him with a new “family” made up of some characters in his party if not the whole group. He has risen to leadership among his friends, providing him with a sort of status he might never have gained otherwise. The “loss” of his status as a slave opened the door to adventure, and adventure has led to prestige that might become actual influence in Tyr. Certainly, Malamac and his peers stand in a position to influence Tyr’s future fate.
Losses Influence
Loss I’ve imposed has shaped the narrative course of my Dark Sun campaign. I began the game, and some of my “Welcome to Dark Sun” sessions, with an encounter against a gang of slavers known as the Red Hand. The encounter was (and is) utterly unfair, a beatdown five levels higher than the characters. After putting up a truly spectacular and desperate struggle in the first run of this encounter, the characters fell to the superior forces. They lost their freedom instead of their lives, setting up the first adventure, where they must regain their freedom far from home or die.
The players, and characters, have been itching to even the score with the Red Hand since that first encounter. The current meat of the campaign is rooting out the gang and its leaders, and gaining some payback alongside some justice. The motivation is largely based on the first loss with a dash of “let’s end slavery in Tyr” thrown in.
That’s cool, because the players are the driving force behind the course of the action. Yes, I bait the hooks well, but the players choose which ones the characters bite. Attachment and connection, and possible loss of these, are huge motivators.
In the narrative, characters also wanted revenge on the owner of the Cracked Jack (a cracked drinking horn as its sign), the bar in which they were abducted. Jak, the owner in question, a bald half-elf with a scar down one side of his face, seemed like he was in cahoots with the gang. It turns out, as it does so often, that Jak was almost as much a victim as anyone. What would you do if a gang of thugs gave you the option to let them use your establishment or lose your skin?
When the characters returned to the Cracked Jack, they ended up facing the Red hand again and discovering Jak’s dilemma. They tried to save Jak, but failed. They then felt a sense of duty toward Jak’s orphaned teenage daughter, Danae. She is now part of the characters’ NPC entourage. Jak’s loss has led to new possibilities in the narrative.
Looming Losses
I have another hook floating out there that the Dragon of Tyr demands a thousand slaves per year from each of the seven cities. The free city of Tyr has no slaves to send, and too few prisoners who deserve such execution. Rumors are now spreading on the streets that Tyr is doomed to face the Dragon’s wrath. The players and characters know they can’t face the Dragon and hope to live (at least they can’t at 8th level). Yet this possibility threatens almost everything the characters love. What can they do?
Possible losses need not be that concrete, however. Corvas, a deva avenger, exists on Athas only because he comes from a time long forgotten. He remembers little of his existence as a once-great servant of the goddess Melora, not even her name. Divine power is part of his being, however. He is one of the few devas left on the planet, supposing any others survive. He is the rarest of characters in that he has actual divine power.
Corvas looks at today’s Athas and can feel only great sadness. Although the past isn’t clear in his time-fractured mind, he recalls better days in his subconscious. He also knows who’s to blame. Defilers.
The very threat of any more loss to defiling on Athas drives Corvas to rage beyond reason. Further, he cannot, will not, accept the dying world. A desire to bring life back to the brittle husk that Athas has become drives Corvas to strive and slay, and to seek his memories and true power. Does his “Painted Lady” live, is she dead, or is she a delusion?
Loss looms large in Corvas’s future, formless and ominous. It has countless strings I can pull to manipulate the course of the game.
Loss to Catharsis
The point of loss in a game is to provide some sort of tension. It can provide motivations for villains that characters can sympathize with. Player characters can explain unusual or nontactical behavior with it. (For instance, to the chagrin of his teammates, Corvas breaks off from his current target to attack anyone who or anything that defiles. I like it, even if the other players sometimes don’t.)
Tension is a good thing for any old story, and much more so for a narrative game. The tension doesn’t need to be released, but it’s very satisfying when it can be. Players feel rewarded for their efforts, in character background and in ongoing play, when the game’s play provides a chance to make up for past failures. Imagine how the players felt when they faced the Red Hand again and won with no losses.
Consider using loss and the emotions it entails to give your characters and scenarios more depth and tension. Then manipulate the depth for personalized narratives, and use the tension to set up satisfying clashes and releases. Give loss meaning. I hope I’ve given some of mine a little more by sharing this with you.
Illustrations by Jared von Hindman of Head Injury Theater.
What I Want from Published Adventures
For the past three years I’ve run through the entire 4th Edition H1 through E3 adventures from Wizards of the Coast. Some, like Pyramid of Shadows and King of the Trollhaunt Warrens, I ran very close to the book. Others, like Prince of Undeath, I used hardly anything but the battle map.
With three years of weekly games, published adventures gave me the framework I needed when I wouldn’t have the time to write up my own campaign, but in some cases modifying them took as much time as building it myself. I’ve spent these three years seeing what worked well for me with these published adventures and what did not. Adventures, as written, do not give me exactly what I want.
In short: I want adventures to break away from linear pre-built stories and instead deliver a toolbox of components I can use to build my own story.
Today I hope to get adventure publishers to think differently about the format they use and components they include in published adventures. [Read the rest of this article]
Essentially Unbalanced: For Better or Worse
I am again preempting my planned column. It feels a little odd to write about the specifics of encounter design when I am sitting here with newly purchased goodies in the D&D Essentials line: specifically the Red Box D&D Starter Set, Rules Compendium, and Heroes of the Fallen Lands.
When the Essentials line was announced, the usual Internet-fueled hyperbole about the end of the gaming world as we know it erupted. When such a reaction is so prevalent, immediate, and sadly expected, it is difficult to weed out the legitimate and well-reasoned concerns amid so much venting of spleens and gnashing of teeth. I will admit right now to being neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary. I don’t consider all change bad, and I don’t embrace change for its own sake. With that mindset, I held off on forming an opinion of Essentials until I got a look at the goods.
Of all the new (or changed) rules that Essentials brings with it, the most controversial is probably going to be the new character class builds. These builds, particularly the rogue (thief) and the two new fighters (slayer and knight) deviate from the well-established class structure that we’ve seen with previous 4e classes. As you know if you play 4e at all, the classes (until now) are on equal footing in terms of structure. No matter what class you choose, you have access to roughly the same number of at-will, encounter, daily, and utility powers. While the powers may differ, the basic structure is the same.
The reasons given for the new structure of class powers in 4e were many, but one of the big reasons discussed was the discrepancy between the power levels and play of the classes. In previous editions of D&D (and its many clones) lower-level spellcasters in the Vancian magic system could easily run out of spells in the first encounter of the day. This led to the dreaded phenomenon known as the “five-minute adventuring day.” The first encounter would end, the spellcasters would be out of spells, and the players would immediately want to rest for the day so they could regain their spells. This system also tended to make the non-spellcasting characters more powerful at lower levels, as they never ran out of their favorite attacks: fighters could always power attack, and rogues could always sneak attack. Certain classes had to play a resource-management game, while others really did not.
I was happy with the direction that 4e took with the structure of the classes. People who never played wizards in the past because they didn’t like the spell system could now put on the pointy hat, and people who only played spellcasters because fighters were “boring” could now use martial powers that were just as exciting as many spells. I liked the balance. But as someone who has played since well before the original Red Box set was released, the superior balance did come at the price of uniqueness. There was something special about playing a fighter in 1st Edition D&D as opposed to a cleric or a wizard or a thief. I think the Essentials designers must have asked themselves after the release of 4e if there wasn’t a way to keep most of the balance while still making things unique within the classes. I think Essentials, as we are beginning to see it, is the answer to that question.
However, I think a more important question is this: does D&D really need that balance at all? Let’s answer by looking at games in general first. [Read the rest of this article]
Reel Melee: The Fateful Duel
About a year ago, as I suffered through a sunburn fever in the darkest, sweatiest part of Cabo San Lucas, my perception broke through a red and shuddery haze and tuned into the movie on TV, a swords-and-sandals extravaganza named The Scorpion King, starring several muscular and oily men. As I watched helplessly, I realized there was a certain rhythm to the battles, a swing and parry, a leap and tumble, a slash and dash and crash… a STANDARD and MOVE and MINOR. All at once, I saw that the action in this movie could be broken into pieces and reassembled into something like the Dungeons & Dragons 4E combat rules.
Now, I’d be only too happy to track down The Scorpion King with all of its Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson gloriousness and watch it again and again and again to parse one of its battles, but instead decided to examine a movie that was better known and, presumably, more readily available (hint: if I were you, I’d start by searching online at a site that rhymes with Moo-Doob).
Perhaps you’ve heard of a movie called Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, which featured the breakout child mega-star Jake Something-Or-Other, who played an annoying little kid who couldn’t act. There was, I admit, quite a lot in Menace to fundamentally despise, but towards the end of the movie, there’s this massively wonderful light saber duel between Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Darth Maul, and which features music that rivals (exceeds?) The Imperial March. I know, I know, blasphemy!
In order to make the melee work, I had to figure out the characters and equipment, and then slowly go insane as I tried to stay within the game rules while determining the powers that I was seeing on the screen. I did everything I could to avoid simply house-ruling everything, though there were, I’m afraid, a few elements where I was forced to do a little tweaking (For example, when Obi-Wan fell to the lower catwalk, what the heck was he doing for all that time that Qui-Gon was fighting Maul? His nails?). [Read the rest of this article]
Is Your Home Campaign Organized?
If you thought waiting for a patch to download was bad...
In case you haven’t heard, pen-and-paper role-playing games are awesome on so many levels. I assume, since you are reading this column, you already know that. But it never hurts to step back sometimes, get away from the minutiae of gaming that we analyze and ponder and debate, and remind ourselves that we play these games because they are so much fun.
The most fun I had as a player and a GM in home campaigns happened back in those early days of RPGs, particularly D&D, Top Secret, Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and the like. I am talking about a time when the personal computer was nothing more than a really expensive and practically unattainable myth for most, and the Internet was still the dream of a scattered bunch of computer scientists. I wasn’t even in high school yet, but my older friends showed me the two computers our school owned. My friends had managed to get their hands on a couple games a bit like D&D: text-based games where you had to type the instructions for your character, and most of the time the game did not accept the commands you typed. Not only that, you had to load the games via an audio cassette player, and more often than not the load failed. (If you are really young, go ask your parents about cassettes. Ask about 8-tracks while you are at it, for a real hoot.)
So you can only imagine, after waiting two hours and enduring four failed attempts to load games that were practically unplayable even when they did work, how unbelievably great it was to go to my friend’s house and let our imaginations run wild. No failed game-loading. No frustrating hours of trying to simply get your character to the dungeon by typing things like “GO NORTH. GO WEST. GO EAST. GO FREAKING SOMEWHERE.” In our D&D games, we told the stories. Our characters could do anything they wanted, and the DMs were ready to make up new adventures for us based on our whims. Our characters weren’t just going into the dungeon to rescue the kidnapped townsfolk. We were rescuing the NPCs who sat with us on town councils, who shopped at the stores we owned, and who frequented the churches we built with our own hard-earned loot. The world was built just for us to play in. We could spend whole evenings, whole weekends, totally immersed in that world.
Many gamers know what happens next. Youth passes. School ends. The responsibilities of jobs and families and the rest of life catch up to you, and those countless hours conquering fantasy worlds gives way to the less-thrilling but equally challenging task of conquering our own little corners of the real world. The game doesn’t change all that much, but we do. [Read the rest of this article]
The PAX Report
I had a great time at PAX. Here are some high points of my trip to the show. (Click on the pics for bigger and better.)
Thadeous!
Thadeous!
Thursday Night Fight
For pre-PAX fun, I gathered with some friends to play my Welcome to Dark Sun game. Players included such inimitable rowdies as Adam Wojtowecz, Brian James (The Grand History of the Realms, Demonomicon), Derek Guder, Erik Scott de Bie, Matt James, and Thadeous Cooper. Taking some tips from ChattyDM, I started at a different point than I began my Gen Con game. The players were sharp, and it was still a nail biter, but everyone survived to escape into the desert and head home to Tyr. They’ll never make it. I wouldn’t mind letting them try, though, since playing with these guys was fantastic.
Of Dice and Men
I received the same email that prompted Vanir to write his article on Cameron McNary’s play. Maybe I shouldn’t reveal this, but I read emails such as Cameron’s. I’m afraid I’ll miss something if I don’t. In the case of “Of Dice and Men” I was dead right.
Confidently, I arrived at the Unicorn Theatre at around 6:45 PM. The show was supposed to start at 7:30, so I figured I’d be able to get a seat even if I had to wait in line. Boy was I wrong. A queue had formed that already included more folks than the theater could hold. Cameron later told me, if I remember correctly, that they had to turn away around two hundred people. (My old nemesis Fire Code, we meet again.)
Cameron McNary & Me
Those who know me know I can be bold. Besides, I really wanted to see this play about the Dungeons & Dragons game. I asked the PAX Enforcers—bless ’em—at the door to see if Cameron might let me steal a seat. Someone—Cameron or his wife, Maureen, the managing director—decided to have pity on me. I got in.
The play was unbelievable. I mean that in the incredibly good sense.
Cameron is humble to call this a play about D&D. “Of Dice and Men” tells the story of John Francis (the DM, played by Cameron). A narrative about John Francis possibly giving up gaming frames his relationships with the D&D game and the people it brought into his life. The play hinges on the fact that John Francis is leaving the area for a new job. Before he can tell his gaming group, Jason, a longtime friend and player, reveals he has enlisted and will be leaving . . . during wartime.
The show is a wonderful mixture of fun anecdotes, which any longtime roleplaying gamer might recognize, and stirring interactions between the players. We, the viewers, have the privilege of enjoying the D&D characters’ introductions and exploits in the game, as well as the real-life interactions of the John Francis and his friends. When the funny and the gamey ends, the raw dealings among the characters begins. This is a story in which relationships outside the game are not only realistic, but are also affecting and easy to relate to.
I’ve had experiences like those the play depicts, down to having friends enlist and leave my life in a scary way for a while. Heck, I even met my wife through a gaming buddy. “Of Dice and Men” is my story. Countless personal accounts I’ve heard and read over the years tell me that the play is your story, too. It’s also a tale that people who don’t share our passion for gaming can appreciate. The play depicts normal, complicated people who care deeply for one another and share interests. That’s easy to understand. That’s all of us.
“Of Dice and Men” made PAX for me. For laughter and tears, nothing else compared. Cameron McNary, the actors, and the crew should be proud. They deserved the packed house and the standing ovation they got.
You must see and become involved with this play if you ever have a chance. Several ways exist to do so. First, Critical Threat Theatre needs donations to help the play see wider production. If you’re involved in a theater, you might email Critical Threat Theatre (info at criticalthreattheatre dot com) about producing the play locally in your region. Also, do yourself a favor and follow @cameronmcnary on Twitter.
The Dave Noonan
The Dave Noonan
TERA
Let me preface this short review of my experience with an admission. I am not a fan of MMOs. I played World of Warcraft for a while, and I’ve played other fantasy MMOs. I consistently had more frustration and boredom than fun.
A while back, I figured out my problem. Although I’ve enjoyed games such as Baldur’s Gate and Dragon Age, when I play a video game, I prefer action and/or deep story. I want my movements with the controls to matter. If I’m not within the monster’s reach because I wisely moved away, I want it to miss me. The narrative should be interesting and my choices should matter. Few MMOs do these things effectively if at all.
Not so with TERA. To quote the promotional material, “TERA’s groundbreaking combat system . . . [offers] all of the depth of an MMO with the intensity . . . of an action game.”
Thanks to my smoking-hot media credentials (Critical-Hits FTW!), I got in on an inner-circle demo. In the demo, the developers taught us about the game. Then we went on a dungeon run against some evil cultists. The first highlight for me was being able to ditch the keyboard and mouse for an Xbox controller. (Others decided to stick with the traditional interface method. Luddites!)
Yeah, I know you can do that with other MMOs. I also know that it matters a lot less with them than it does with TERA.
Playing a lancer, a heavily armored shield-and-weapon guy, I was able to block and avoid blows. I could reposition easily and leap back to my feet after a knockdown. Watching my opponents for tells, I could avoid their attacks. Playing became intuitive quickly and felt a lot more like an action console game than some action console games do. The fact that some powers had cooldowns, which I have disliked in the past, never phased me. (Something has to keep you from using the good powers over and over again, and TERA does that in more than one way.) Running around and kicking ass was too much fun.
In short, I loved it. I plan to check out TERA when it finally releases. All my buddies who played it at PAX do too. We’ll see if the developers were right about the game’s rich storyline.
As an added bonus, I got to schmooze with Dave Noonan, of D&D fame, in his role as Lead Writer for En Masse Entertainment. I also got to chat with an old friend and colleague Aaron LeMay, once of Bungie (Halo 3) and now Creative Director for En Masse. It’s good to see old friends working on something new and exciting.
I worry a little, however, because TERA is going the normal route of a subscription-model MMO. Might a free-play/ala-carte-pay/premium subscription be better for a new player with a new intellectual property? I guess we’ll watch and learn.
Chris Conan Youngs forces you to spell.
Chris Conan Youngs forces you to spell.
Magic Bus
Wizards of the Coast had a booth in the convention hall, along with plenty of tabletop action in the Hidden Level of the convention center, but much more interesting was the D&D Bus. Parked at 9th and Pike, the bus was host to demos, contests, and giveaways on the outside, along with the lovable beholder. On the inside it was an interview site and shelter for the D&D crew. They were watching Dragonslayer and the D&D Cartoon in there. Back to the 80s indeed.
Chris Youngs, my former supervisor at Wizards, wouldn’t let me play in any of the contests. He said something about me being a ringer, but I had stopped listening by then. No play for me, no listen for you. The contests were fun, though, including a D&D Spelling Bee and Name the Monster From Its Oldschool Picture. Yes, I can spell remorhaz and Mordenkainen, and I can identify the piercer and the lurker above. Heck, I can identify the original Fiend Folio’s svirfneblin and spell it, too. Does that make me a ringer? Okay, so no free loot for me, the ex-WotC guy. At least they excluded the James brothers, as well.
I also got to try out D&D Essentials characters in a custom adventure Mike Mearls ran for me and four other press folks. I was Ander the halfling thief (rogue), and my pal Robert played Korzon, human warpriest (cleric) of Thor (according to Mearls). We hammed it up, Ander searched for beer and sausages, he put the sausage back when he saw the monsters, and all had a good ol’ time killing Mearls’s Limb Thing. Ander (hail Loki!) got the killing blow (sneak attack!).
I have to say that I really like the simplicity and utility the Essentials characters have, acknowledging that some options are left off the character cards for the sake of brevity. At-will powers that modify basic attacks are good. Encounter powers that add to the effectiveness of an at-will power, especially after the at-will hits, are just awesome. This is what I wish 4e was like at the beginning, with more complexity added only later. Hindsight and all that.
Battle at Slaughterfast!
Battle at Slaughterfast!
Aeofel in Hell
I all but completed my two days at PAX with tickets and near-front seats to “Acquisitions Incorporated: D&D Live.” Chris Perkins, DM to the Stars, ran Binwin Bronzebottom (Scott Kurtz of PvP), Jim Darkmagic (Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade), Omin Dran (Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade), and Mister Stinky the Zombie (Wil Wheaton) through a harrowing adventure to save Aeofel (Wil Wheaton) from a hellish fate at the hands of Binwin’s archenemies, the Ambershard dwarves.
The house was packed. Chris seemed a little nervous, and who wouldn’t be in front of such a crowd, but it never showed in play. The players, in costume, took their places and really roleplayed, so much entertainment and hilarity ensued. Spectator votes determined such elements as whom a catapult attacked and what monster created the final obstacle. In the end, Acquisitions Incorporated rescued Aeofel and gained three new members, including Mister Stinky, who managed to survive despite being a minion, Rad, a California-accented human raised by dwarves, and Hellie, the hell beast Jim Darkmagic tamed by way of a failed Nature check.
The important part of these escapades is that, after heartfelt apologies from Binwin, Aeofel forgave his teammates. More important, Wil forgave Scott. The group, players and DM, put on one hell of a show.
Despite audience help, the company left scattered gems behind on the battlefield. Maybe Omin is becoming soft in his leadership position. Or has something more important than the fiscal success of Acquisitions Incorporated risen to the top of Omin’s list?
It's a Dragon Age for Michael Robles.
It's a Dragon Age for Michael Robles.
Play Time
In the two days I had at the show, had surprisingly few moments to actually play games in the exhibitors’ hall. That said, I did manage some quality time with Dragon Age II, Fable III, and Fallout: New Vegas. I’m a sucker for RPGs in case you didn’t know, although I somehow missed out on playing Brink. I also dabbled in some Xbox Live Arcade games.
I have mixed feelings about the original Dragon Age. The story was phenomenal. Interactions with and among the NPCs were great. Gameplay, when left to flow and focused on one character, was too much like a traditional MMO to elicit much enthusiasm from me. Further, the mute manikin that is one’s main character seemed so yesteryear.
Dragon Age II impressed me, however. I learned the new storyline spans a longer roll of years and jumps to exciting times in the hero’s life via a framed narrative. The game also has new art direction and style. That the main character actually speaks, much like the character of Mass Effect games, is great. What excited me the most, however, was the dynamism the rogue I played displayed in combat. Some of this energy is just animation related to power usage, but the game is a lot more exciting for it. I’m left to wonder if mage is still the best class, since it was in the first game. (I also got a shiny, new inflatable sword staff, which I was happy to share.)
The Fable series has been a favorite of mine since I played Fable on the Xbox. Fable III seems like all the goodness of Fable II—ease of play, fun story (mostly), and NPC interactions—with some improvements. Having played Fable II, I was able to fight skillfully right out of the load screen. The world was different, though. Set fifty years after Fable II and the death of your Fable II character, Fable III is a steamy world of industrial and military revolution. What’s more, my character actually spoke to his dog, which is something no Fable player character has ever done. Although those at the booth assured me that the interaction with items and the world is much more interactive and streamlined, relying less on menus and more on an intuitive interface, I didn’t get to see this feature. I’d know what I was getting for my birthday . . .
Don't you feel welcome?
. . . if Fallout: New Vegas didn’t release at nearly the same time as Fable III. The latest Fallout installment has the appeal of its latest predecessor. It has detailed interaction, cool world aesthetics, shooter fighting style, and the decidedly nontwitch, pause-and-aim targeting system. It’s also set in the same general region as Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout’s clear predecessor, the amazing Wasteland. I have to wonder how much homage New Vegas might pay to its ancestors. Further, in the brief time I played, I learned you can do something I often wondered about not being able to do while playing Fallout 3. You can disguise yourself as a member of a faction by stealing and wearing a faction member’s clothes. That’s great, and I wonder what other role factions might play in Fallout: New Vegas.
That’s enough about games that might take a hundred or more hours to complete. I also saw two lighter games that have me intrigued. Last year’s PAX introduced details of Ron Gilbert’s (of Monkey Island fame) Deathspank, a Diablo-like game with a much better sense of humor and better cartoon mayhem than Diablo. Despite the fact that the original Deathspank released in July, we can join the Defender of the Downtrodden in a new adventure across another cylindrical world in Deathspank: Thongs of Virtue. This time Deathspank has guns. Less action oriented but, perhaps, equally silly is Plants vs. Zombies. Although it has been out for a while, I just learned about it and its expanded Xbox Live version at the show. Plant a garden to fend off the warriors of the zombie apocalypse. This little game gives a new meaning to whirled peas.
The End
Like all good things, PAX ended. Due to required nuptial witnessing, it ended on Saturday for me. Oh, I’m not bitter. In fact, I feel privileged that PAX is local. With all this good stuff happening before, during, and after the show, it’s sure to become one of my yearly rituals.
The Unneccesary Evil?
"Character is much easier kept than recovered. Except in the original Tomb of Horrors. It's hard to do either there."
Last week I wrote about the pitfalls and challenges of writing boxed text (also known as read-aloud text). I was planning to move to a completely different topic this week, but the questions and comments posted after that column have brought up many good points. So this week I am going to try to bring some of that commentary into wider focus. Plus, I get to say that Chris Sims agreed with me (at least that’s the way I’m interpreting it), so that’s just too exciting to pass up!
The issues I have talked about in the last couple weeks—and many of the issues I will discuss in the future—all boil down to one overarching concern: enjoyable and smooth interaction in the game. For most of us gamers, we enjoy the hobby because the various interactions involved offer us something positive. We might seek the interaction of imagination and combined storytelling with the other participants. It might be an enjoyable mathematical interaction between the individual player and the rules. It might be the nearly supernatural interaction between the Mountain Dew and the Funyuns. For each of us it is different, but it is always about an interaction on some level.
Types of Interaction
"Funyuns have healing properties. When mixed with Mountain Dew, they may also lead to resurrection. If your resurrection lasts less than 12 hours, consult your alchemist immediately."
The levels and types of interaction within a game like D&D (or any other RPG you want to talk about) are numerous and complex. I dare say that when something goes wrong in a game, chances are fairly high that something has gone wrong at one of those points of interaction: either something is interfering with a proper interaction between the game and the participants (or among the participants), or the interaction is not meeting the expectations of some of the participants. For example, Johnny the player thinks his gaming chops are the baddest in all of gamerhood, and he expects to always “win” every combat. Sally the DM thinks that the published adventure she is running should be run exactly as written, with no adjustments permitted—and if the characters perish a horrible death, that is the players’ fault. I don’t think I need to explain with diagrams and full-color illustrations how this could end badly.
The situation just described is only one example of a potential situation where the interaction could go wrong. If you take a second to ponder all of the interactions possible in one round of combat, in an encounter, in an adventure, in a campaign, in a setting, in the rules themselves, and elsewhere, the simultaneous breakdown of many interactions can make a session of D&D look like a cockfight breaking out at a PETA rally.
When I discussed boxed text last week, I was touching on just one tiny aspect of just one instance of this interaction: specifically, the role boxed text plays in the interaction between the players and an encounter. The bulk of the comments about that column reflect that people think about boxed text what Thomas Paine wrote about government: “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”
No Boxed Text At All?
"Did I say no boxed text?! Er, I meant all boxed text!"
So while many agreed that boxed text is often flawed and better when it is brief or removed completely, my fellow Critical-Hitter (Critter?) Chris Sims—whose knowledge of game design dwarfs mine like Yao Ming standing next to Gary Coleman—goes the intellectual full monty and says that boxed text is not needed, period, full stop. If I were a braver man, I would have come out and said the same thing. Alas, the Don Knotts in me is too strong, and I waver. I have too often been handed a four-hour, seven-encounter, sixty-page adventure 10 minutes after the game was supposed to start and told, “Here, run this adventure and make sure the table has fun.” With no prep time at all, boxed text—even in its most flawed form—can be better than nothing: the proverbial necessary evil, and hopefully not an intolerable one.
The question that follows is obvious: what is the best way to support the DM in describing the current game situation to the players? Or, since I am supposed to be doing this writerly thing of always hearkening back to the main point, I’ll rephrase: what can an adventure designer do to assist the DM in fostering smooth interaction between the encounter and the players?
Let’s answer the question with another question or two. What sorts of information need to be communicated to players at the beginning of an encounter, both in terms of what the characters would experience, and also in terms of what the players have to accomplish within the game? What information needs to be imparted as the encounter progresses?
Setting and Tone – This is the information that the characters would know: what their five senses would tell them based on their current location and situation. If there is any tone or mood that the encounter is meant to convey, the details should also hint at that so that the players can roleplay effectively.
Terrain – Terrain that would affect an encounter needs to be highlighted. The tricky part is deciding how much information to provide. Do you tell the players exactly what each piece of terrain does? Do you hide the effects of the terrain until either the characters or some other creatures interact with the terrain? Would an appropriate skill check be enough to reveal the terrain effects? Would the skill check cost an action, or could it be done as a free action?
One way to smoothly introduce the terrain’s impact without harming the flow of interaction is to have the terrain first affect the bad guys, either positively or negatively. An extra minion running into the area crackling with electricity and exploding in a shower of gore gets the point across better than boxed text or skill checks could. The bad-guy boss tipping over a shelf of crates onto the PCs is a less-than-subtle but highly effective way of showing the interactions possible with the environment.
Monsters, Traps, and Hazards – Like terrain above, the players need to be aware of the threats they face. But how much information is too much, and how much is too little? The 4e rulebooks are quite clear and emphatic in stating that the players should know what is happening in the encounters. I am in agreement with that philosophy about 75% of the time. However, I am also a DM and a player who likes dealing with a little bit of adversity and surprise. I like to have to learn the hard way how best to confront a monster or deal with a trap.
One of the best examples of this is the rule in the 4e Player’s Handbook on monster knowledge checks. I have a love/hate relationship with this rule. I love that the rule allows players to learn something about the monsters, particularly when the characters might be struggling to overcome a high resistance or immunity, or are getting lambasted because of a specific power or trait. However, I hate what such checks, when used as standard operating procedure for a party, can do to the flow of a game. About 20% of the tables I have run do this in every combat encounter: At the beginning of combat, the first character to act first rolls knowledge checks for each of the monsters, asking for all of the information they would know based on the results of the check. So the game stops while I read everything for one monster, then the next, and then the next. The first player acts. Then the second player makes more checks to pick up any information that the first player may have missed. So back we go to the stat block, reading more. This gets as tedious and destroys the excitement of a game more thoroughly than would using instant replay to review every pitch of a baseball game. I generally try to sum up all the information into one quick sentence to maintain flow, but often players ask for more information or some explanation that slows the game anyway.
Replacing Boxed Text?
So again we are left with the question of the hour: if not boxed text, what? The simple answer would be that the DM prepares adequately, taking notes and highlighting the important things to tell the PCs. Then no clunky boxed text is needed. But where does this leave the DM who does not have time to prepare or is running a published adventure without the chance to read it over first?
I don’t think we can come up with an answer that can solve this completely, but we can make some considerations in the format and layout of the encounter:
- We can place important points about initial encounter circumstances in a bullet list or special area. This would always include lighting conditions, the height of ceilings, and other sensory information.
- In the section of the encounter where terrain is mentioned, we can put the more visceral fluff information at the beginning and the more mechanical information at the end.
- If there is a section on monsters and their tactics, we can give a quick description of the creatures and how they act. We can again place more descriptive text near the front and more technical details at the end.
- We can create sections for special information that might be needed to describe special circumstances that occur as the encounter progresses or at the end of the encounter.
I would love to hear from adventure designers, DMs, and players about other problems of interaction at the beginning of a combat encounter, and how adventure designers might be able to supply or place information in order to make that interaction smoother, especially if there was no boxed text.
Minions on the Table
In my last miniony article, I wrote about tinkering with minions mechanically to come to the flavor you really want from them. Now it’s time for your minions to meet the consumers, your players. A lot off cooks say that a big part of the experience with food is presentation. It’s the same with encounters in general and minions in specific. The tastiest minions might fail if you give them poor table presence.
A Nice Spread
Monsters can lose a battle before it begins if they have bad tactical positions. This is even truer with minions. Even if we assume, narratively, that your minions have no way to know they’re little competition for the characters, the creatures have a reason to seize tactical advantages. Beasts do so by instinct and natural ability, and smarter creatures do so through cunning, inclination, and planning.
Consider where the minions might want to be on the battlefield, just like you would for a monster of similar role. Assuming the monster has the ability to choose its lair or the fight’s locale, you can even build the encounter area to accommodate such a minion group’s terrain needs. Any artillery monster, as an example, seeks favorable terrain that allows it to shoot without direct melee confrontation. They favor high or protected places, such as a ledge or a window, that are hard to get to.
Speaking of hard to get to, movement modes can obviate the need for specific terrain while allowing a minion longevity and some narrative coolness. A movement mode—burrow, climb, fly, or swim—can allow minions to have the run of the combat zone. Skirmisher or lurker minions, or those designed for a specific narrative effect, might even be able to disengage with little risk, and then return to battle when they choose to. Such movement modes also make it easy to fill an encounter area that seemed empty when the characters entered. (Ambush!) The arrival of new monsters during the ongoing fight is also easily explained. In the previous articles I talked about myconid gas spores and kruthiks, both of which can use specialized movement modes to appear in combat from unusual angles.
When designing a space for your minions, take cues from cinematic video games, especially high-action games such as Borderlands. In Borderlands, some creatures (skags) emerge from burrows to join the fight, while others (spiderants) emerge from the soil in ambush. (It’s easy to see kruthiks as spiderants.) Still others (rakk) dive in for a flyby attack, then retreat. You often encounter an interesting array of creatures, weak to strong, that have varying powers despite physical similarities.
Consider that what’s good for the characters is also good for the monsters. Terrain powers add to a combat encounter interesting effects that the characters can exploit. A minion or group of minions might become particularly effective if they try to make use of the terrain powers, too. It’s all fair if everyone has an equal chance to use the terrain. When the kobold miners push the fiery brazier over on the characters, the players might just start to value terrain powers more. Just be sure to adjust the difficulty if it seems likely a terrain power might really favor the monsters.
Ingredients List
Food labels normally tell you what you’re eating so you can make informed dietary decisions. Gamist transparency is the same. It’s telling the players what the characters are facing so smart choices can be made. It’s called gamist because it’s more about the mechanical side of the game than the narrative side. It’s called transparency because the players are allowed to see through the game’s narrative reality, or what the characters might know, into the mechanical reality.
Transparency is a controversial subject. Some DMs prefer to tell the players everything, even if doing so requires giving out metagame knowledge—information the characters can’t really know. Such a DM allows players to act on this metagame knowledge. The DM justifiably assumes the characters are way more competent and informed than the players, so giving the players a little gamist leeway is harmless. Other DMs are stricter. They provide only information the characters have a way of really knowing, allowing knowledge and perceptual skill checks to expand the available data. As with other aspects of the game, the “right” way is what works best for you and your players.
Let’s face the facts. Minion, like any other role, is a game term the characters don’t know in a narrative or in-game sense. The characters can, however, sense whether an opponent looks less competent, poorly armed, or less prepared for battle. A fighter should easily notice that the fighting technique of an opponent is amateurish. An arcanist might note that the arcane power in a magical creature is weak, just like a cleric could be able to sense that an undead minion’s ties to the Shadowfell are tenuous. A ranger surely knows whether an individual beast is too feeble to be much of threat to the characters.
I favor some generosity in the realm of transparency. Sometimes I assume the battle-hardened characters can just tell when a creature is a minion. Other times, I use passive knowledge to determine what the players know. Every once in a while, I require an actual check or wait for the players to ask for such a check. (This is most true when the minions are considerably higher in level than the characters.) I have called for a check when a player is about to use an encounter or daily power on a minion. My inconsistency on this subject is due to conflicting desires, unique situations, and differing narrative needs in a given encounter. I prefer for the players to be able to use their resources as wisely as possible, but I also want to minimize the use of metagame knowledge. It can be an immersion killer. A decent level of immersion is required for me to have fun as a DM.
Robert Howard—a friend, player in my game, fine DM, and master of Pen & Paper Games—has a different perspective. He sees at least some of his minions as fully competent monsters that the characters can’t tell from the mechanically superior counterparts. The characters just happen, in cinematic fashion, to take out some of the fully competent monsters with one shot. Robert is using such minions to create an illusion of the characters’ badassery. To a character in such an encounter, he or she just took out a dangerous opponent in a single, gruesome blow. My difficulty with this tack is that the players see through it too easily; the mechanical reality is usually apparent.
Matters of Personal Taste
The point of all this is that minions, along with the other monsters, can be used in a variety of ways. You can create countless game experiences and stories by carefully employing minions, by manipulating their mechanics, and by engineering the encounter—XP budget to terrain—to accommodate them. You can even control transparency in varied ways, like Robert and I do. The process is more art than science, so experiment and have fun. You are the (evil?) mastermind and these minions are all yours.
Illustrations by Jared von Hindman of Head Injury Theater.
Dragon illustration appears in Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips.
Beware the Siren Song
In the old, ancient, black-and-white days, my Dungeons & Dragons habit existed happily inside its own space, separate from the zero-bit video game options like Cloudy Mountain (Intellivision) or Temple of Apshai (Commodore 64). These could never compete with the high-definition, dual-layered, widescreen, 1080p, surround sound, 3-D settings of my imagination, where using only pencil and paper and dice and dungeons, I was petrified by the scantily-clad medusa in Keep on the Borderlands, added to the ghostly feast after drinking the brandy in Castle Amber, blown up inside the malfunctioning power armor in Expedition to Barrier Peaks, and torn apart by the 4-armed gargoyle monstrosity in Tomb of Horrors.
Of course, gaming system and computer technology evolved and improved over the years, but the video games continued to take their cues and inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, their RPG Adam, incorporating experience points and leveling, ability scores and bonuses, coin accumulation and optimization. There was even some effort to incorporate roleplaying, starting with the binary or ternary approach of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books and building to a faux sandbox environment where you could go anywhere, explore everything, and interact with everybody.
As more and more players come to Dungeons & Dragons from a video game background (and, not coincidentally, were born after I graduated high school), they bring with them a very specific sensibility. The result is that the teacher becomes the student, and D&D players begin to integrate certain aspects that had previously only lived inside video games. For example, video games tend to deal in something I’d call “sense language,” where a scene is set by describing (or displaying) what you see and what you hear. In the same way, dungeon masters don’t talk about the three kobolds, but rather the “three emaciated lizard creatures with fanged dragon heads, hissing at each other in their horrid tongue, turning jagged blades in their clawed hands.” This is immersive, and that’s unquestionably a good thing. Unfortunately, not all of the adoptions are. [Read the rest of this article]
Thinking Outside the Boxed Text
Boxed text (also called “box text” or “real-aloud text”) got its name from some of the earliest published D&D adventures, where bits of text were set apart from the rest by a thin black box around it. The DM was supposed to read this text aloud so that the players would know what their characters were experiencing at the time, usually as they entered a new encounter area. This text gave the writer the opportunity to “speak to” the players, pointing out what he considered to be details important enough to mention.
I have a confession to make: I dislike boxed text. I don’t like writing it. Editing boxed text is painful. I don’t even like having to read it aloud to my players as a DM. I understand why it is included in published adventures. A DM relies on it to set the scene for the characters; otherwise, she would have to scan the entire encounter area and figure out what the PCs can sense at first glance. The players can get a better picture of what their characters are experiencing when good boxed text evokes the setting.
Unfortunately, the number of things that can go wrong with boxed text often far outweighs the positives. Before I get clinical on y’all, do me a favor. Read this bit of boxed text: [Read the rest of this article]
