Considering the Monk is the class I played the most of in 3E, I was surprisingly happy it wasn’t included in the first PHB for 4th Edition. It never felt quite right to me as a class presented as an introductory option for D&D players unless it was specifically for an Oriental Adventures style of game. I think that if you boiled down the options for character classes to the most basic you would end up with Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and sometimes Thief/Rogue. Beyond these 3-4 options the list of secondary classes can vary greatly. Depending on player preferences, classes such as the Bard, Druid, Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, and many others can all be seen as important options for players. My opinion is that beyond the four main classes, most of the other options readily fall into two categories: specialization or combination.

Combinations / Multi-Classing

I would like to go through a quick experiment. Let’s put aside many of our assumptions/favorite characters and look at some of D&D’s classes in their raw forms. I don’t think it does any disservice to the Paladin class to say that it is a combination of the Cleric and Fighter concepts. In the same way, I believe you can say that most Bards fall somewhere between Rogue and Wizard, and that most Rangers can be put somewhere between Rogue and Fighter. The toughest combination I find is the Wizard/Cleric, but I keep coming back to the Druid as a class that often feels like  it is somewhere between those two classes. Surely you can come up with a Bard, Ranger, or Druid that is nothing like any of the other classes, but I think having a class paradigm to begin with makes those break out concepts even more exciting and this is, after all, only an experiment.

This gives us a fairly clean wheel of class relationships:

Fighter – Paladin – Cleric – Druid – Wizard – Bard – Rogue – Ranger – Fighter (loop)

I really enjoy seeing a nice, clean, logical layout for classes and how they relate to one another. I enjoy thinking about the sliding scale between the primary classes and imaging what a Paladin would look like closer to the Fighter end (maybe close to or having already lost faith) or closer to the Cleric end (extremely dedicated, focused, and not rearing for a fight). I also think it gets interesting when you think about pushing a primary class closer to one or the other secondary classes. Imagine playing a Cleric or a Fighter that leans towards the Paladin concept between them, or a Rogue that dabbles in music/song and discovers a yet unknown arcane spark within themselves leaning towards Bard.

Another reason I really like this wheel of classes is that it shows the distant relationship between the Fighter/Wizard classes which leads to classes like the Spellsinger or Swordmage, which are often bizarre or hard to balance with other classes. I haven’t heard a lot of demand for a Cleric/Rogue class, but I’m sure it’s existed in the past and that people love playing that combination.

The important distinction for these classes is whether or not you can play a Paladin from the beginning, or if you have to start as a Fighter (or Cleric) and multi-class to become a Paladin. I believe that with the secondary classes I’ve presented here most players want to start playing as a Paladin/Druid/Bard/Ranger, they don’t want to slog through a level or three of being “another class” and then become what they wanted to be all along. Plus, while it might make sense for a Paladin to start out as a Cleric or Fighter in some worlds, it doesn’t always make sense and it stretches even more thin for Druids, Bards, and Rangers.

Specializations

The first thing I think of for a class that defines this category is the Assassin. To me the Assassin class falls clearly into the wheelhouse of a specialized Rogue/Thief concept. Certainly not all Rogues are Assassins, but to me it seems a safe assumption for all  classes involved to say that all Assassins are conceptually Rogues. Essentially, I’m saying the Assassin is a specialized Rogue. Several other classes feel like specializations as well, though they may not have as clear a connection to any one class. To me classes like the Barbarian, Monk, Sorcerer, Warlock, Necromancer, and even the Psion could all be considered specialized classes.

I believe that how classes are presented in any given edition of D&D is actually a big indication of how that game is going to feel. Being able to play a level 1 Assassin or Monk is a pretty big difference from having to go through 5 or even 10 levels of another class first. Taking all of this into consideration, I must say that the last thing I want to see in any D&D game is a player who wants to play a Psion being forced to play a classic Wizard character for 10 levels. I’m less scared by the idea of an Assassin player being a rogue that specializes in backstabs and then officially becoming an Assassin at a higher level. Would it all that different to play a Fighter specializing in unarmed combat/mobility for a few levels and then become a Monk than to play a Monk from the start?

I could even see adding a third level of classes to the scale I presented above, where Barbarian is placed somewhere between Ranger and Fighter. However, I feel that starts to get very muddy and I start to see classes getting restricted or feeling shoved into a place they don’t quite fit. I started thinking about this whole discussion because the playtest for the new version of D&D and the distinction of the Cleric as a more warrior-like class and the possible addition of a Priest class that would cover the less “fighty” side of the Cleric concept.

My personal feeling on the matter is if you can accomplish something simply and easily by providing more options for existing classes, then there is no need to add more classes. For example, a Monk can be a lot more than just a fighter that punches things and a Barbarian more than just a Fighter that gets angry. I feel that a Priest class would simply be a Cleric that casts spells instead of fighting, not a lot more to distinguish it other than the assumption that all Clerics wear armor and fight in melee. My inclination is that the Assassin should also not be an available class in the early game, because it mostly feels like a Rogue that specializes in killing, but if you explore ideas like mastering poisons then it starts to come into its own a little bit more.

What Does it Mean to be Level 1?

Something that I keep coming back to is that the spread of classes available to a player at 1st level can imply some incredible things about what it means to be a level 1 character. Surely a 1st level Wizard could be seen as only an apprentice/novice, but how much distinction is there between a 1st level rogue and a 1st level assassin? Does playing an Assassin or a Monk from level 1 limit a player’s opportunities for character growth and adaptability? There have been several times over the last few years where I, as a DM, have encountered a situation in play where it would be an interesting story for a player/character to switch classes and had backlash from it because the players were very hesitant to keep the same character but change their class.

As I continue to grow as a DM, I find myself questioning things like starting classes more often. If players can choose from a wide variety of very specialized classes right from the beginning, then what they choose becomes a very large part of their character’s identity. I feel that players could be just as satisfied making an archer Fighter and simply give the character the in-game title of “Ranger” (think about the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones) than they are if there is a Ranger class available to them, and this keeps the player’s options open to change and adapt with the story if the opportunity arises.

Enter DungeonBuilder into this area. The two pieces of software I’ve linked above are free, but there are pay alternatives that offer a bit more pizzaz, such as Fantasy Ground, and Wizard’s own Virtual Tabletop (though the latter is currently a feature of a D&D Insider subscription, so if you want to play with it you have to pick up the entire package). DungeonBuilder is a browser-based digital tabletop alternative that is purchased by subscription. DungeonBuilder costs $19.99 for a yearly subscription for a GM and $8.99 for a player. Though this is a “launch special” so I’ve no idea how long it will last. The prices seem decent for what you get right now – I’m not sure whether I’d endorse raising them unless more features get rolled out or the webapp gets cleaned up some. While it is a useful program, it could use touching up.

Players and GMs have separate account types because GMs have added functionality in their accounts (they can actually build and schedule game sessions) while players can only make characters, join games and post to the forums and so on. Dividing the accounts makes it more affordable for groups to purchase since they’ll only ever need one GM account. Right now though you can only buy with Paypal or by sending the DungeonBuilder people a check, which is probably going to be a turn-off for some folks.

DungeonBuilder allows you to build maps in its main overall interface, which you can invite players into. It has about everything you’d expect the stock, average gametable-style program to have, including a text chat, mapping interface and dice rolling, and character tracking. Dungeonbuilder can be run from practically anything that can use HTML5 including iPads, tablets and smartphones (though running the app from your browser in a smartphone will make you crushingly aware of your screen size). Everything is done from the browser, whether making maps or hosting games.

During games DungeonBuilder offers a built-in way to communicate using a fairly small text chat that you can’t seem to change the size of. The chat logs the text put in it, and allows you to roll dice there, delete messages, and use text colors and other BBCode. It reminds me a lot of the text boxes used to post in forums, but smaller. It’s better than the text chat in the freeware Gametable/Virtual Daivve by a longshot, but it’s not exactly optimal due to its somewhat cramped dimensions. I suggest using Skype or something like it, whether you want to do text or not (Skype’s text chat is pretty great even if you don’t want voice/video).

these roooooms, they wiiiiill not seeeaal

DungeonBuilder’s main interface contains the chat, mapping tool, dice, and tabs at the bottom with characters and monsters you’ve created and saved in the web app. You click on icons which produce a variety of shaped boxes which you can link together into simple dungeons. You can also upload your own images that will become the background of the map. I uploaded a map to use it in this manner but saw some distortion – and then it just up and disappeared when I clicked the “grid” button to try to overlay the mapping grid on the background. So bring your own grids on your maps, or use the game’s simple geometric shape map drawing when you play (it’s not really a problem to do so). One odd thing is that there’s no generic “line” drawing tool, only shapes and a tool to connect those shapes. This seems a strange thing to overlook in your mapper.

There’s an interface for making characters and monsters, albeit it’s only vaguely suggestive of any actual RPG systems (the character-maker has 12 attributes and AD&D classes), so it’s not a replacement for any building tools you may have, or your own gritty pencil-twisting character-making efforts. Regardless its oddness doesn’t intrude on much. You can also build your own random encounters and normal encounters, including setting the “frequency” of random encounters and when encounters are called for by the program itself.

The interface, while functional, works off clicking various Windows 95-looking icons, pop-ups and pull-downs. The text input boxes feel like I’m posting to an Invisionfree Forum and not in a paid product. The program is overall not very good looking and sometimes unintuitive. For example, all the dice icons are so tiny and weird I could only guess what die I was rolling until the pop-up came up telling me the die and its result, and whenever you click one of the shape icons to make a shape, you have to go back and click it again to make another of the same shape. There’s an FAQ that you should probably read, but the rest is a healthy dose of fiddling and experimentation. Personally there were a lot of features I don’t use often enough to warrant messing around with (like random encounters), and I didn’t feel terribly drawn to trying to understand them through the interface. There’s a forum, but nobody’s actually posting in it yet since the product is fairly recent.

Ultimately, DungeonBuilder is a sentiment I appreciate. It’s a gametable that runs out of a browser, so it’s unlikely to run into connectivity hitches like the ones I butt heads with whenever I try to host Maptools or Gametable games. It is coded entirely in HTML5 so that it can be run from all sorts of mobile devices. For a low yearly cost you and your group can get in, mess around with the interface and host some games. What it could use is polish. The interface is not fantastic. It’s functional, but not exactly a joy to play around with. These are kinks that they’ll probably work on in the future, or are working on right now, or at least I hope so. This could be pushing the envelope, but right now it’s merely “okay.” I would consider it among the other alternatives, as it definitely has perks they do not, but it’s not a knockout.

DungeonBuilder is available from VorpalSoftware now. Review the FAQ for more information. Complimentary access to the software was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.

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

Respect Their Playtest Decisions

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

Work From the Big Picture Down

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

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

Be Charitable With the Format

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

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

Don’t Kiss Up…

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

…But Be Sure to Praise What You Like

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

Offer Suggestions, But Let Them Design the Game

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

Note Your Dealbreakers, But Try and Put It In Context

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

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

Playtest What You’re Given, Not What You Fear

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

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

This model clearly demonstrates why it's always best to play D&D outside, preferably on pavement or some other surface whose maintenance you are not responsible for.

Have you ever played in a game with a really good DM? The kind where you’re engaged even when you’re not on the edge of your seat, there’s not a lot of bickering at the table over rules, and everybody talks about their adventures years later?

I really wanna be that guy. I’m not yet.

This quest has caused me a lot of soul-searching over this past year. I’ve run a respectable gauntlet of newbie mistakes. I’ve tried planning for every contingency only to find my players easily discovered the gaping cracks in my armor. I’ve tried bludgeoning my players with DM Fiat to make my plans work. I’ve tried emphatically cautioning them about doing that next thing under pain of death. (That’s a crowd favorite, by the way.)

I’ve been experiencing something completely bizarre in the campaign I’m running now. I put some pieces in place, establish a few locations that are relevant to that week’s story, and a basic premise to get the plot started. Then I just sort of sit back and see what happens.

I’m not going to lie to you. It’s completely terrifying. But it’s the kind of terrifying where the session has consistently been interesting and fun for me to run and I’m pretty sure my players were really into it too. From the very first night, it’s recaptured the magic I felt years ago during my favorite D&D campaigns. That’s a big deal for me. I haven’t had that feeling in a D&D game when I was behind the screen until now. Three sessions in, it’s still a joy, and it’s far more fun than stress. I hope it stays that way.

I think it will. I finally realized why I loved some of the campaigns I’ve played in: I was let loose. Our party was free to do pretty much whatever they wanted, and the situations we got into off the beaten path are the stories we tell now. I know why this campaign feels better to me now. I’m letting the PC’s do what they will. Even if it’s not what I had planned for. Even if it’s stupid. Even if it will probably result in their eventual dismemberment, death, and reanimation as a zombie.

In short: I am blessed with a group of wildly creative players who are working well together as a group and I have finally realized everything works better if I just get the hell out of their way.

The stories we’ll collectively tell are infinitely more entertaining than any narrative I’d force down their throats. And, looking back, I believe that’s what the really good DM’s I’ve had did for me. It completely changed the game for me. That’s what I want to do for my group and anybody else I DM for down the road.

Great, Kid! Don’t Get Cocky.

Of course, simply realizing that one should just roll with things as they happen in-game is a lot different than actually rolling with actual things. There is still preparation to be done, though not of the kind I had been accustomed to. There were improvisational skills to be honed. Courage-loins to be girded.

I knew I could improvise and roll with anything — and I do mean anything – based on our unique experiences in the Nightmare Realm last year. I just wasn’t sure if I could react to what the players did in a sensible way. As it happens, that wasn’t the issue. I can do that.

What I can’t do is names. I can’t come up with names. I can’t remember names. Either I forget to write down names, or I don’t want the players to know I spawned the NPC they’re talking to out of the aether so I can’t risk scribbling the name I came up with on a piece of paper. That would be a tell. Of course, the fact that all the names I come up with on the fly are variations on “Stug”, “Bibbler”, “Bubbly Gordon”, and/or “Reeb Heeberbeeb” is probably a pretty good tell as well.

Another tell: I’ve noticed that a good 75% of the NPC’s I’ve tried to play on the fly wind up being kindly old men. I’ve tried to play mean old Mr. Wilson to the players Dennis the Menace, but each time the gentle old codger that I am destined to become wants to come out and play a little early. The PC’s have been treated to tea once and cookies twice. Yes, I know old people do other stuff besides baking. I like cookies, OK?

I Accidentally The Whole Improv

I ran face first into another learning experience this past week. Chris Perkins wrote a fantastic article on DM improvisation two weeks ago, and I read it the morning before our D&D session and proceeded to get thoroughly drunk on good feelings. I can improv anything! My players will tell a grand story! Top of the world, Pelor!

This was also the day we had a new player join the campaign. Second session of any tabletop RPG ever, her first being one mostly-combat night of 4e with our group months ago.

(Yes, now is the appropriate time to wrinkle your noses in anticipation for the horrors to befall her.)

The plot of our campaign revolves around retrieving stolen items, and the party frequently finds themselves at the merchant that fenced these items. We’d never established who sold the items to this merchant. In fact, I’d described the thief as a shadowy figure and set it up so that I might introduce him later.

Our new player decided to play a rogue. She joins up, and the party decides to visit the merchant. I decide it’d be funny to have the merchant chatting this new person up as if she’s a regular. Instantly, the rest of the party starts getting suspicious and somebody wonders aloud if she’s the thief.

I get inspired. She’s definitely the thief. She just didn’t know it until now. I’m *Improvising*.

About fifteen seconds of deer-in-the-headlights from our new player later, I realize what I just did. The party, thinking I’d set this up beforehand, is grilling her like they’re getting paid per question.

I’d been trying to make a concerted effort up to this point in the campaign to try to let people do what they will, but this was different. She didn’t know most of the backstory leading up to any of this. She didn’t put herself in this situation, I did, and it didn’t look like much fun. So I called for a break and took our new player aside and briefed her on what was happening after apologizing profusely for being a dumbass. She took it very well, fortunately, and I only took mild damage to my face and arms.

In all seriousness, the thing that I regret doing here was damaging the trust my group has in me as a DM. I like to push the limits of this, mostly because I don’t know what’s going to blow up in my face yet, but I feel like people are going to be a lot more likely to have fun and let loose if they’re pretty sure I’m not going to put them on the spot. Well, I take that back a little. Putting people on the spot can yield some awesome and fun results. Putting a new person who has barely played the game on a giant “we’re playing Fiasco and I just set up a scene where I cut your legs off with a machete” spot was a really stupid idea. I wasn’t thinking, I got cocky, and I didn’t put my players before my crazy idea. It’s not something I plan to do again soon.

There’s No “I” In Team (Unless That “I” Stands For “Improv”)

Sometimes I think the Internets are stalking me, because after a couple days of kicking myself over putting our new player through Surprise Improv Hell, Steven Townshend writes this incredible article on group storytelling. Go read it. Right now. Stop reading this and go read that. Done? OK, I’ll continue.

The core premise of that article? When you play D&D, you’re all on the same improv team. You’re all working together to tell a great story. Even if your character would be a jerk in a given situation, you don’t throw the group under the bus.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen situations in D&D where I wish people understood this simple idea. Chaotic Neutral characters that do stupid things because they’re random? Paladins drawing their weapons and threatening other PCs who do things they perceive as evil acts? QUIT DOING THAT CRAP. You’re not helping to tell a story. You’re not helping the team, and you’re probably being a jerk. This stuff has always annoyed me, and until now I never had the right words as to why.

This is another game-changing concept for me. This is how I will try to run every game for the rest of my days.

Have I mentioned I’ve been seriously loving playing D&D lately?

Photo Credit

MANLY ENOUGH FOR ANY INFANT.

Being a father to a little baby was cool. He was all cute and snuggly and I loved the first words and the first steps and all that stuff. I remember getting Sam a “Level 1 Human” creeper and a couple nerdy onesies before he was born. One of the few perks of babies not being able to talk is that you can dress them in whatever you want without protest. Consequently, my kid has unwittingly displayed in his short time on this planet countless slogans, concepts, and characters from many nerdly sources. (Including one Celestial Porpoise onesie I designed when Stupid Ranger first started, which raised a few family eyebrows despite a great deal of well-reasoned logic about its utter manliness.)

Does The Konami Code Count As Operant Conditioning?

One thing that’s always been lurking in the back of my mind is whether all this geeky stuff is just a weird mold that he’ll eventually break. I remember thinking, he’s two. That Mario shirt is cute, Sam can even say “Mawio” when he sees it, but he doesn’t have any attachment to that character like I do. Am I just filling up his head with a bunch of crap he’ll just dump and replace with something real to him?

Now, my boy Sam is 4, and we can have conversations about stuff and tell jokes to each other and share what happened that day and play all freaking day and HOLY CRAP. IT ROCKS. THUNDEROUSLY. These days, Sam knows what’s on his shirt. Boy, does he know. Don’t try to send that kid to school in an Autobot t-shirt if he has declared it Robot Taco Shirt Day. At least, if you don’t want a war on your hands. He is familiar with the source material for pretty much everything he wears that has an associated game or TV show.

My favorite thing to do with Sam right now, which should surprise no one, is playing lots of old NES games on the Wii. I’m pretty sure he can tell it’s an older game, mostly because he asks me “Daddy, is this game old?” Even so, he still giggles and smiles and loves playing. It’s still colorful, it has cool music that makes him dance, and the characters are recognizable to him (perhaps the sole benefit of Hollywood remaking freaking everything!). I know a big part of why he loves this is because he’s spending time with me.

It is really cool to be a 4 year old’s dad. You are frequently super awesome in their eyes.

The Sam Of The Future

I’ve been in karate since I was a teenager, and I remember seeing an odd scenario play out not long after I started. One of the black belts had both his kids in the class, and they were rising up through the ranks a little ahead of me. About the time they got to brown belt, they just sort of vanished. I found out later that they quit and really hated being there. The instructor, being a good parent and extremely nice guy, let them follow their own path but was sad they didn’t take his.

That scenario kind of scares the crap out of me. I identify pretty hard as a giant code-slinging gamer nerd, and kids are known for thinking their parents are complete idiots after they reach a certain age.

It’s so weird simultaneously not wanting your snuggly little kid to grow up, and yet not being able to wait until they’re old enough to really game with you. I see boardgames a couple nights a week. I see after-dinner Magic: The Gathering. I see me running D&D campaigns for him and his friends. I see a means to have fun and bond with my kid and my family — hopefully even after he leaves the nest.

Thing is, I have no idea what I would have done if my dad would have been all “let’s play D&D” when I was 13. He is (and continues to be) an awesome dad and I learned all kinds of cool stuff from him, but we didn’t play all that much — certainly not at the level I have in mind.

What I’m hoping for is the scenario I saw at my D&D Next playtest table at DDXP this year: an experienced gamer dad of about 45 years with his 15 year old kid who had never played before and was loving it. I don’t usually think of Gen Con as a family vacation but bringing my teenaged kid to it sounds like a blast.

Unless, of course, he only likes NASCAR and thinks I’m an embarassing dweeb.

I suspect the answer is going to lie somewhere in the middle, where we have a lot of fun gaming together as he grows up and he thinks I’m completely embarrassing. I won’t be, of course.

That is, not until the Celestial Porpoise pictures come out at his wedding reception.

The Shinto shrine complex located in the city of Ise in Japan features two main shrines, Naiku (the inner shrine) and Geku (the outer shrine), with 123 additional shrines in and around the city. The two main shrines are joined by a pilgrimage road, but access to both sites is very limited as they are some of the most important Shinto locations. The origin of the Ise Grand Shrine dates back to just over 2,000 years ago, and it was one of the few structures that really stood out to me during all of my architectural history classes.

Why am I talking about the Ise Grand Shrine here, in a series that focuses on helping you play in and run Roleplaying Games? I’m talking about it because I feel that real life is the best inspiration for your fictional adventures, and the Ise Grand Shrine is ripe with ideas to use in your games.

Ceremony

The two main shrines are dismantled and rebuilt on adjacent sites every 20 years. If you go and visit these sites now, you will see buildings constructed in 1993 that are the 61st iterations of the structures. This ceremony has many festivals that surround it and various celebrations at different dates leading up to the rebuilding based on necessary activities such as the carpenters preparing the wood for the next iteration of buildings. This rebuilding ceremony reflects the Shinto beliefs in the death and renewal of nature and impermanence.

One of the biggest reasons that I love applying this idea to RPGs is because it presents a very direct method for getting the inhabitants of a location to seek out the aid of adventurers. A ceremony such as the rebuilding of sacred shrines has many stages and various elements that the player’s may be able to help out with, or conversely any number of natural (or villainous) factors could impede the stages of the ceremony and cause the inhabitants to require aid.

Building Blocks for Rebuilding

Even though this example only consists of two main shrines (and a bridge) being rebuilt every 20 years, you can take this inspiration and apply it in any scale to your own games. Having an entire village that rebuilds itself every 100 years would be a very interesting place to explore, especially if there is a nefarious element such as a dragon that comes through each century that forces the relocation and reconstruction. Taking it in the other direction, you can have the residents of a town rebuilding a water tower or any other minor structure every couple of years.

Although the rebuilding of the Ise Shrines keeps them continuously new, it also serves to pass down the ancient design and construction methods from generation to generation. This ceremony is also a very interesting work around to the issue of historical preservation. While the buildings are never going to be ancient or historic in their materials or actual physicality, their design is preserved and every generation gets to experience them as they could have been experienced when originally constructed.

The key to  including these ideas in your game is to consider what materials are needed for rebuilding the structures, how often they will be rebuilt, and how long it will take for the civilization to rebuild them. Even if we’re talking about a time span of a hundred years, it is still a reasonable assumption that the structures will be wood instead of stone as they would most likely last longer and would not benefit from being rebuilt regularly if built using stone. However, if you modify the ceremony and have the structure being moved piece by piece rather than rebuilt with new materials, it would make perfect sense for it to be a structure made out of stone.

Legend & Lore

The Ise Grand Shrine is very closely linked with the Japanese imperial family and with Japanese mythology, and it supposedly contains a piece of the Imperial Regalia known as the Sacred Mirror although the lack of public access makes this hard to confirm. This is as close to real life RPG plot material as you can get, and is another one of the reasons that this is the first example of architecture history that comes to mind for me to write about here.

Combine these elements with the pilgrimage road between the two shrines, and the complex of hundreds of smaller shrines, and you have a very rich location to use in anything from D&D with some adaptation or if you’re running a game like Legend of the 5 Rings you can use all of this information as it really exists.

Click here for the rest of the Architect DM series.

The first Pelorbell flowers came to the Forgotten Realms long before anyone can remember, and only appear often enough that their legend continues. It’s said the flowers weren’t discovered, but rather the answer to a prayer — specifically, one about not being consumed alive by the undead.

By day, Pelorbells appear to be large, bright, white sunflowers. Their smell is sweet, not unlike lilac, and is said to gently calm the hearts of those nearby. By night, the flowers wither noticeably, to the point where it is difficult to tell if they still live. That is, unless they are exposed to light. Then, they bloom even larger than before, and radiate waves of their own silvery light.

No ordinary light is this, for it seems crafted for the express purpose of eradicating the unnatural damned. Those pure of intention who bathe in this light find their wounds healed and steel in their spine. Undead creatures, on the other hand find their rotting flesh burning off into oily smoke and their spines lying on the ground.

It’s unknown if the flowers are the product of powerful magic or if they are the physical manifestation of a god’s will, but their effects are potent indeed. One or two of these flowers planted outside a house shine sufficient light to keep its occupants safe for what would otherwise be a long night of horrors. The thought of yards and fields planted with Pelorbells is enough to give pause to even the most bloodthirsty dead-army-wielding necromancer.

In my D&D game last week, our intrepid adventuring party encountered just such a field (and undead army). And if, like them, you didn’t realize until it was far too late the lengths I will go to to make a Plants vs. Zombies joke….. then Pelor protect you.

Photo Credit

Although my Torg hack is based on the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying rules, there are differences. Each Cortex Plus game needs to be altered differently to focus the important aspects of that game. Many of those differences are expressed in what goes into the dice pools that the players and the GM create. As far as Torg is concerned, the primary aspect that needs to be reflected well in the hack is the treatment of ‘reality’ and how it interacts with the characters.

Reality in Torg

First, I need to explain how the mechanics of causing contradictions in other realities worked in the original Torg game. If a character uses a tool: a spell, miracle, piece of tech or some sort of social concept, it causes a single contradiction if the axiom level of that tool is greater than either the character’s home reality or the reality that character finds herself in.   In the original Torg game, the Everlaw of One disconnects the character from their home reality on a roll of 1 on a d20. However, if the axiom level of the tool is greater than both the character’s home reality and the reality she is in (a double contradiction), the disconnection occurs on a roll of 1-4. When the character is disconnected, she is unable to create any more contradictions and is completely subject to the reality she is in. When the disconnection occurs, the action fails and usually the character is pretty hampered in her abilities. However, all the character needs to do is reconnect on her next turn via a successful Reality skill check.

In the original Torg game, the combat rounds were very quick to resolve, and there usually were 5-10 rounds in each combat. Although disconnecting was infrequent, enough combat rounds occurred in a session that a character could expect to disconnect once or twice. Disconnecting meant that the character lost a lot of her abilities (either superpowers, magic, miracles, high tech) for a brief period of time and then gained them back. It may take a round or two though, if the Reality skill checks fail.

In my initial playtest of the contradiction rules for my Torg hack, I tried two methods. In the first method, if the character was causing a single contradiction, he added a d4 to the dice pool. A double contradiction added 2d4 to the pool. If an opportunity was rolled (a 1 on one of the dice), the GM had the option of activating that opportunity and inflicting Reality stress equal to the die that provided the opportunity. In the end, I decided this made it too difficult to disconnect (which would occur when “stressed out”), it was predictable, and it would take a few rounds for it to occur at all.

My second method was to actually treat disconnection as a Limit, which could be activated by the GM or the player. However, when I did so, it severely nerfed the character’s ability to do anything. In this case, the Ninja wasn’t able to use any of his technological devices or his Ninjitsu (martial arts requires a certain Social and Spiritual axiom level).

Now, this problem normally wouldn’t be too bad since the player could have just made an action vs. the Doom Pool to reconnect. However, one thing I’ve learned in running Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and my Torg hack is that the individual Action Scenes don’t necessarily last very long, so disconnecting could mean a major negative impact on a character for much of an Action Scene.

Ultimately what I decided to do is reflect the fact that in the original Torg, the characters got to do their schtick most of the time, and any disconnections were usually speed bumps. The way I imagined it was that a US Marine, fighting in the Living Land, shooting at some incoming velociraptors suddenly would find himself disconnected, his gun not working until he focused briefly and reconnected to Core Earth. This would provide an opportunity for the velociraptors to chow down on him, but it would be a brief opportunity. So the solution to my dilemma was to use part of the first playtest option and add one category to the datasheet that all characters have:

Contradiction

Single              d4
Double         2d4

This solution simulates the original Torg game within the Cortex Plus framework. Disconnection can be a pain, but not one that eliminates the fun for the player.

Axiom Traits

Magic    d4
Social    d8
Spirit     d6
Tech      d10

During the first playtest, I tried just using the Affiliation trait from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, but it didn’t feel right. In the comics, heroes often split off, join up or run solo, but in Torg it’s always been expected that the group sticks together. My feelings on this were confirmed when Rob Donoghue blogged about not using the Affiliation trait for MHR hacks. Instead I’m looking at a trait focusing on the interaction of the character with the four axioms of all realities:  Magic, Social, Spirit and Tech.

These four axioms define all realities, and including them explicitly in the datasheets connects the character to the game more directly. Each axiom is associated with a d4, d6, d8 or d10 die, with one die for each axiom.

A d10 indicates that the character has a close connection with that axiom. Either he uses tools of that axiom instinctively, or at least knows how elements involving that axiom behave. For instance, a character with Magic d10  probably either uses arcane spells frequently, or at least is familiar enough with magic to know when it’s being used and how to react to it.

Conversely, a d4 indicates either inexperience with that axiom or that when using tools associated with that axiom, things get complicated for him. So a Social d4 could be a social misfit, or a coward. A Magic d4 indicates a character who has never been exposed to magic or could have weird things happen when he uses magic.

Although I’d considered using this trait earlier, I stopped thinking about it after reading Ryan Macklin’s blog post on “use whenever stats”. Although Rob Donoghue pointed out to me on Twitter that Cortex Plus pretty much assumes at least two “use whenever stats”, I felt it was better when the game didn’t use them (e.g. Smallville).

The solution came to me when I realized that I could force the reaction roll to use the same Axiom trait as the action roll that it was opposing. This would mean that there could be some tactical considerations when acting against a character. You might use your d8 trait if it was the d4 trait for your opposition. Plus, it directly ties in the fact that people who aren’t exposed to high axiom tools like powerful magic or amazing technology wouldn’t really know how to defend against it.

Distinctions

Distinctions work exactly the same as in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying:  either a d8 if it helps or a d4 plus a Plot Point if it hurts.

Aspects

Aspects are the equivalent to Power Sets from Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. They are groups of power traits, limits and SFX organized on a theme. There are three different types of Aspects:  Cosms, Ability Sets and Equipment.

1. Cosms

COSM
Nippon Tech (Axiom Limits:  Magic 1 Social 16  Spirit 8  Tech 21)

SFX: Law of Intrigue. Add a d8 to your dice pool when attempting to be sneaky, deceive or bribe someone.
SFX: Law of Vengeance. If you have been seriously wronged, you may immediately replace one of your milestones with I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE.
Limit: Law of Profit  If you do not have Business Master or Business Expert, acquiring a resource requires 2 PPs instead of one while in Nippon Tech.

MILESTONE – I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE

1 XP       when you inflict stress on your enemy or interfere with his or her plans.
3 XP       when you harm your team in your attempt to exact vengeance on your enemy.
10 XP     when you kill or otherwise permanently defeat your enemy.

Each character not only includes a Cosm on their datasheet, but also is subject to the Cosm based on the reality they are currently in. Each Cosm lists the four axioms plus SFX and Limits based on the World Laws of that reality. Shown above is the Cosm entry for Nippon Tech.

In my hack, I am not using the axiom definitions from the original Torg boxed set, but revised definitions shown on Storm Knights, written by Jasyn Jones and “Kansas” Jim Ogle. Comparing the axioms of your tools or other abilities to those of the Cosm you’re from or in allows you to determine if Contradiction dice should be added to your dice pool.

The SFX and Limits from Cosm Aspects are situational, but for the most part are dealt with exactly the same way as they are in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. However, some SFX involve replacing one of your Milestones with a new one,  like I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE.

2. Ability Sets

NINJITSU

SUPERIOR REFLEXES d10          ENHANCED STAMINA d8
ENHANCED DURABILITY d8    INVISIBILITY d8

SFX: Block/Strike. When you are attacked in unarmed or melee combat, the attacker provides an opportunity on a roll of a 1 or a 2.
SFX: Ki Focus. If a dice pool includes a NINJITSU die, you may replace two dice of equal size with one die +1 step larger.
Limit: Exhausted. Shutdown any NINJITSU  power to gain 1 PP. Recover power by activating an opportunity or during a Transition Scene.

Ability Sets are dealt with much like Power Sets in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. However, because there may be more than two Aspects on a datasheet, you can only add a trait die from each Aspect up to a maximum of two.

Ability Sets usually involve abilities that are inherent to the character: specialized training, super powers, arcane spellcasting or the invocation of miracles. Sometimes there will be some overlap with Ability Sets and Specialties, but the trait dice included in Ability Sets represents specializations (e.g. Rifles vs. ‘Combat’).

One important difference between my Torg hack and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is that Torg is a bit more ‘street level’ as far as power scale goes. Torg heroes aren’t controlling weather over scales the size of a state, or teleporting across the universe, or being able to hurl tanks into orbit. For most of the Power Set descriptions, I’ve eliminated the “Godlike” category, and moved “Superhuman” into the d12 rank. To replace “Superhuman,” I’ve made “Superior” the new d10 rank.

3. Equipment

EQUIPMENT

LAR Grizzly 50 Big Boar Rifle d10 (Tech 20; Accurate)
Herod IV Pistol d8 (Tech 21; Full Auto)
Magic Sword d8 (Tech 7, Magic 9)
Kevlar Vest d8 (Tech 20)

SFX: Accurate. If a pool includes a die from an Accurate weapon, you may replace two dice of equal size with one die +1 step larger.
SFX: Full Auto. If a pool includes a die from a Full Auto weapon, add a d6 and keep an additional effect die for each additional target.
Limit: Gear. Gain 1 PP and shutdown Equipment you are using. Make an action against the Doom Pool to recover.

Equipment is a set of Traits, SFX and Limits representing signature items that the character uses on a frequent basis. These items can include tech, magic spells or miracles. Since the tools your character uses have an impact on whether or not you are creating a contradiction, each item in your Equipment list has an axiom level associated with it. Some of these tools will have keywords (e.g. Accurate or Full Auto) that will reference SFX.

I’m still working with exactly how this section works, at least as far as magic spells and miracles go, but I’ll elaborate on that in a future post.

Specialties

Specialties in my Torg hack are mostly the same as in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. There are some changes (though they may be set in Jello):

• Cosmic is replaced by Reality and covers knowledge about the nature of realities, the cosmverse and probably will be involved in whatever mechanic I decide on to deal with reality storms.
• Mystic is replaced by Arcane, Faith and possibly Occult. Faith will be specific to a certain religion.
• Survival and Weird Science are new Specialties.

Milestones

Finally, Milestones are handled exactly the same way as they are in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying. In fact, Milestones replicate the mechanics of subplots from the original Torg game well.

Torg Hack Archive

Having successfully been a Guest GM before and having been inspired by excellent posts on using Marvel to power a fantasy-based system, I decided to try something odd.  I sensed my normally tireless DM was getting burned out in Pathfinder, so I offered to take over for a few adventures.  The group was pretty positive about a change of pace, but there was a lot of surprise when I said I was going to run the same characters, the same world, in campaign continuity with a different system.  My own character is being removed from the action, and the DM’s  “Dungeon Master Player Character” (DPC)  will be used as a player by our typical DM.  This all begs the question: why go through all the trouble to change the system from my group’s perspective?  I want to try it out, but I owe it to my playgroup to have a “payoff.”  That payoff is to give the group a completely different feel of the game and scope of the adventure.

17th Level Pathfinder is a game of superheroes, but bound by the Pathfinder ethos of very explicit rules and limits.  While the party is able to blow through 95% of anything in the world, we spend entire adventures dealing with the 5% of the universe that presents a challenge.  The other 95% is taken care of by skill-rolls and underlings because we play our combats with such simulationist tendencies it isn’t worth precious table time to deal with lesser issues.  Consequently, as with many D&D games, players find themselves constantly playing through harrowing situations where the characters are constantly in peril of dying (and not feeling very badass) despite being some of the most powerful people on the planet.  My goal with these sessions is to let the players exult in their characters’ superheroic nature without it being bland or boring.  I plan on their being challenges too, but there will be ample opportunity to just kick ass and not have it bog the game down.  In short, I want the players to have the opportunity to lord over weaker threats and struggle through tough situations all in rapid succession.

I anticipated difficulty convincing my soon-to-be players to buy-in to the idea of their character completely reworked in a different system.  Marvel Heroic Roleplaying has flexible character creation, but I needed to go the extra mile to make sure the characters reflected their Pathfinder counterparts’ flavor.  Some of the characters had very easy conversions (Immunity to Fire for our Fire Sorceress and Fire Cleric, for instance), but others proved vexing.  The most challenging of all was the aforementioned “DPC”, an antipaladin known as The Warlord.  The problem became clear when comparing him to the other characters: he’s not as strong or as tough as some characters.  His gear is solid, but not on the same level as our fighter.  In sum, I was left with a character that had a bunch of good, but not great attributes.  He felt second fiddle, even though in gameplay he had his own unique style.

I ended up distinguishing the Warlord through SFX.  In MHRP, these are special abilities that characters have and can use with their abilities.  In the case of the Warlord, he “debuffs” with auras and uses a bunch of specialized fighting styles.  To encapsulate his ability to cleave through multiple foes, I gave him area attack.  His disease attacks/smites became an affliction.  I tweaked the normal immunity FX to reflect the fact he is a vector for disease and passes diseases on, but ignores the effect himself.  Finally, his reach weapon and fear powers are represented by counterattack SFX that deal with physical and emotional attacks, respectively.  Ultimately, the character that presented the greatest challenge to convert ended up being the one I’m most proud of.

As suggested to me by Dave, to give the game a MHRP feel I also intend on playing with party milestones ingrained in the adventure design.  Each character will also have the opportunity to create their own milestones during the time we typically spend with casual table talk.  Although adventure goals in our Pathfinder game run the gamut from explicit to implicit, Marvel  is an excellent model for showing players the carrot.  Saving the elves is great in Pathfinder, there’s probably some XP in it, but in MHRP I plan on (literally) laying the cards out on the table and showing the players what is it they can do and what they’ll be rewarded for it.

I have been pleased with how the planning process has forced me to consider what makes my Pathfinder game, and its characters, tick.  The exercise has also shed light on some nooks and crannies in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying that I had not yet considered.  I believe I am well on my way to offering something new and unique to the players.  Ultimately, though the planning process has proved to be enlightening, the real test will be running the game with my hijacked players.

Spunky Sunshine Mephit

Some DM’s, myself included, find a familiar albatross around their neck in the form of the same tired old plots week after week. There’s nothing worse than having the D&D equivalent of Spaghetti Thursdays at your gaming table.

What your game needs is a little help… or should I say, a little helper?

One commonly used tactic in many popular TV shows over the years is to add a cute and sassy kid to the mix to freshen things up. Let’s call this kid Cousin Olefar.

Always brave and daring, but just too darn spunky to have any regard for the well-being of any creature, Cousin Olefar can brighten up even the dullest combats. Now every combat has an exciting secondary objective!

Just imagine how the players would feel if they let the cute little bugger die.

Jumping The Bulette

Your players are probably bored with the standard fare of mystery, exploration, exciting combat, and deep roleplay. They can get that anywhere. You should give them something cooler. Remember the early seasons of Happy Days when it was boring and about stupid stuff American life and emotions? Remember when all the girls got anachronistic perms and Fonzie started getting superpowers he could invoke with a simple “AYYYY?”

That’s what you can do for your campaign. It works, too. Historically, the best campaigns are the ones where about halfway through, you drop everything and decide that you already know what’s going to happen. You tease your players incessantly about it for about 2 weeks beforehand, even dropping little hints about “wormsign” and “the likes of which God has never seen.” Everything leads up to a super exciting moment that you’ve been dreaming of for so long, and it’s gonna be so cool, and you don’t even need game mechanics you just make it happen.

When everybody sees the mage (with a brand new perm) riding bareback atop a half-lich bulette tarrasqueomancer through no real conscious choice of his own after an unlikely but charming sequence of events, they’ll all understand it was worth it.

Then you blow up the PC’s lair and have a guy from Murphy Brown chase them through time. Aww yeah.

Fuggedaboutit

Another fantastic TV trope you can use in your campaign is the old “amnesia caused by a bonk on the head” trick. I recommend you invoke this every time a player takes damage or fails a DEX check.

No metagaming, players! You’ll need to take another bonk on the head to remember who you are. Also, if a monster uses Claw / Claw / Bite, you may think of it as Forget / Remember / Forget.

Freaky Friday Night Magic

How many times over the years in movies and TV has a magic spell been cast or a lever been pulled causing characters to swap bodies? Countless. And it’s a thing of beauty every single time. Every DM should do this to their players at least twice in a given campaign.

Fun fact: skills, spellcasting ability, and weapon/armor proficiencies don’t transfer along with a person’s consciousness. Just their voice, memories, and a schedule that really isn’t conducive to having another person at the wheel much less a dwarf NOW I’LL NEVER GET MARRIED.

It’s science.

Quest For The Closet Of Elemental Water

PC’s never fear death anymore. Not with healing surges and resurrection and rings of regeneration all ready and waiting to save their imaginary butts.

Solving this issue means gleaning dark knowledge from the vilest master of terror that ever whitened a hair or startled an innocent puppy — Wakko Warner. To know true fear, a PC needs to be faced with a fate worse than death. A potty emergency.

Everybody always wants to know the secret of making 4e combat run fast and exciting. If every PC has an overfull bladder and cursed pants they can’t remove until they find and defeat the end boss of the dungeon, this problem is now officially solved.

Be warned, there are some minor mechanical issues to work out if you decide to go this route. For instance, who can say if the PC’s should be making Fort checks, Will checks, or a combination of the two to avoid certain embarassment and chafing. Regardless, I recommend making this check every 5 minutes of actual time, starting the DC at 0 and raising it by 5 after each check.

Bonus Tip: in the original Oriental Adventures book from TSR, there is a Wu Jen spell called Urine to Acid. Use this in the event that your players still fail to become excited at these new developments.

Photo Credit

Special thanks to TvTropes.org (especially their “Random” button) for all the article ideas and for straight up murdering my productivity for many years.

And yes, you can probably blame Chatty for this too.

Torg is one of my all time favorite roleplaying games.  Although I have only briefly played it in the last 15 years, I’ve always wanted to go back to playing it.  However, although some of the mechanics (especially the Drama Deck) are great, the system as a whole is showing its age.  From problems such as the ‘glass jawed ninja’ to an over-proliferation of skills (even though it is a skill-based RPG), there are several modern RPGs that are more ‘elegant’ than that system.

When I was introduced to the Leverage RPG last year, and learning about the various hacks to the system, I decided to work on a Cortex Plus hack for Torg.  This has been something of a journey, learning the ins and outs of the various Cortex Plus games.  Originally I planned on making it a straight Leverage hack, but then after playtesting the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, I decided that it was the best fit.  However, I did briefly flirt with the idea of basing my hack on Smallville as well.

Before I get into how I’m hacking MHR, here is a primer on the Torg setting.

In Torg, a cinematic version of our Earth (known in the game as Core Earth) has been invaded by other realities, led by powerful beings known as High Lords.  These High Lords invade other realities in order to drain their “possibility energy.”  Core Earth has a massive amount of possibility energy and as such, it was necessary for multiple High Lords to invade to avoid the destruction of their own realities from the backlash from Core Earth.

Each reality is defined by a set of four axioms (Magic, Spirit, Social and Tech) which limit interactions between the living and unliving. For instance, in a low Tech reality, someone’s M-16 simply wouldn’t fire. Computers don’t work. In extreme cases, Middle Age era swords are no better than clubs. In low Magic or Spirit realities, magic and miracles don’t work. In low Social realities, people simply cannot fathom the concept of nations or money. In addition to the four axioms, each reality has a set of three or four World Laws that further define the flavor of the reality.

Ordinary people (known as Ords) are unable to contradict foreign realities for long. Once the universe notices that they are creating contradictions, the ‘Everlaw of One’ disconnects them from their home reality. Then, over time, Ords transform to completely integrate into the invading reality, giving up their minute amounts of possibility energy to the High Lords. Possibility rated people on the other hand, are able to rec0nnect themselves to their own reality and even briefly prevent the universe from noticing that they are creating contradictions.

Seven different realities, known as cosms, invaded initially:

• The Living Land, which invaded North America.  A low Tech, low Social, low Magic reality but with a very high Spirit axiom.  This is the reality of Lost Worlds, dinosaurs and intelligent, miracle invoking lizard men.
• Aysle, which invaded Britain and Scandinavia.  This is your high fantasy reality. It has a high Magic axiom (such that everyone native to the reality can cast a spell), medieval Tech and Social axioms, with a moderately high Spirit axiom.  It’s a reality where everything that is observed is real, and where honor and corruption is reflected in the appearance of the person.
• The Cyberpapacy, which invaded France. Originally a reality featuring medieval level Tech and Social axioms, moderate Magic and high Spirit axioms, this was the Spanish Inquisition on steroids. However, a month into the invasion, a massive tech surge swept through the realm, boosting the Tech axiom much beyond our own. It’s now the Spanish Inquisition with cyberware and a Matrix inhabited by devils and angels known as the GodNet.
• The Nile Empire, which invaded Egypt and spread quickly throughout north Africa and into the Middle East. This is the reality of 1930s era pulp: superheroes and weird science. Indiana Jones would be right at home here. Where good people are Good and evil people are Evil, and can’t act any other way (but can be seduced to the other side). Where things go wrong for the heroes all the time. Where merely being heroic can mean success. The Magic and Spirit axioms here are high, allowing avatars of Egyptian gods to awaken and guard newly discovered tombs.
• Nippon Tech, which invaded Korea and Japan. This is the reality of high tech mega-corporate intrigue, where any organization larger than 100 people is guaranteed to have a traitor, where money means everything, and vengeance pays.  Oh, and ninjas.
• Orrorsh, which invaded Indonesia. This is the reality of gothic horror. Orrorsh has Victorian era Tech and Social axioms, combined with magic powered by the Occult and moderate Spirit. The dominant religion isn’t just based on the Old Testament, it’s the Old Testament with a nasty side. In this reality, you can’t win until you overcome the Power of Fear.  In the original Torg, this is where Storm Knights go to die.
• Tharkold, the reality of cyberdemons and technological terror, failed in its invasion of Russia, repelled by Russian psychics who were forewarned by agents of Nippon Tech.

When the invaders attacked, whole swaths of Earth’s surface were replaced by the new realities. Even in the Canadian arctic, humid and hot jungles appeared. Into this war-torn world, the PCs from various realities join up to fight the High Lords. This is a game where an Elvish wizard, a 30s era pulp version of Iron Man, a lizard man priest, a cyberdecker, John McClane and Sherlock Holmes can join forces and fight Nile Shocktroopers, Cyberpapist inquisitors and Nippon Tech ninjas, sometimes in the same afternoon.

In the next segment, I will discuss the initial changes to the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying datasheets and dice pools, specifically focusing on the effects of Torg’s reality mechanics on the system.

I Wish I Could Turn Stupid People

In the real world, people pray to their deity of choice all the time. Whether it has any effect is the subject of intense theological debate and many wars throughout the course of history. The presence of divine magic in a setting means that gods definitely exist and that they will answer prayers. If you ask a cleric how she knows her god is real, she can say “You remember how your bones magically unbroke themselves and you quit bleeding to death? THAT.” If you ask a paladin how he knows his god is real, he can say “You remember when that vampire burst into flames when I smote him righteously in his stupid fangs? THAT.”

A person who has seen the direct effects of a deity’s influence won’t be wondering if their god exists. They have proof. However, there is still the opportunity to wonder if one is playing for the right team. What if a person finds the things their god asks of them to be immoral? What if someone thinks another god will treat them better? A lot of fantasy settings go polytheistic (many gods), so there are a lot of higher powers to choose from. That being said, it may not easy for the average person trying to change faith or renounce the gods, especially if that person’s family or village all support that god.

It stands to reason then, that a crisis of faith of this nature is absolutely catastrophic to a divine-powered character. For starters, there’s not going to be any more divine juice coming. Magic notwithstanding, a character whose resolve used to be backed by the force of a god is suddenly going to find only the otherwise unsupported steel in their own spine, and their confidence and morale are likely to be shaken until they can learn to deal with that.

Oh yeah. There’s also the whole “making a god angry” thing, and I’d imagine there are a few gods out there that might take being abandoned by one of their elite devout as a bad thing. Gods like curses. Mythology is littered with poor souls that ran afoul of the gods. Littered, I say!

Prostrate yourselves! BZZZTALAALKS, the lord of Sperm and Hornets is come unto your world!

Alignment Is Evil

I’ve never been particularly fond of alignment (mostly due to the amount of heated arguments I’ve seen over its interpretation), and while I think it might be useful to a DM as guidance for how to play a monster or NPC, I think it has no place on a player character sheet. People aren’t computer programs with set responses. They’re flawed, nuanced individuals who change over time. Their idea of good and evil may well be different than another person’s, and very few people will define themselves as evil.

It’s for these reasons that I hope game mechanics that deal with alignment go the way of the THAC0 in D&D Next. If you have two people with opposing views that each would consider good and the other’s evil, what then would a Detect Evil spell do? Detect Opposing Viewpoints? Does your whole party glow subtly, the marbled nuance of their moral fibre visible in the darkness?

There will need to be other options made available in their place, though. Detect Danger gets into Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses territory. Detect Malice might work but you’d have to make something angry at you and then it usually becomes evident. Detect Enemies is what this spell is usually after. It’s X-ray specs combined with a lie detector made out of a sledgehammer. Of course, since you’re receiving a power from a god, the god could let you detect whatever the hell they felt like. I personally like the idea of a Detect Nonbelievers variant of the spell. Or they could just mess with you. Detect Pollen? Detect Sharp Cheeses?

An interesting sidebar: the average joe in a fantasy realm probably won’t know the difference between arcane and divine magic (especially in a setting where magic is really rare to begin with). Mages could trick people into thinking their deeds were backed by the force of a god. And what if a divine character suddenly found out the powers they’d received from their god ever since childhood were actually psionic or a natural talent for sorcery?

Let Your Conscience Be Your Spirit Guide

At this point even I am starting to think I’ve loaded a shotgun with Divine Character Thought Pellets and fired it skyward, so here’s my (somewhat dubious) point:

Divine characters are fueled by pure belief. It’s interesting sometimes to think how much a character truly believes in their god’s ideals and how deeply this would affect this kind of character. Their belief in their god, their ideals, their confidence in what their doing would shape their very identity because to waver means to fall. But that doesn’t mean they’re all the same.

As usual, I have roleplaying-shaped ulterior motives behind my article. With all the recent discussion on Mike Mearls’ latest L&L column about clerics (and by “discussion”, I mean people angrily yelling “HEALBOT” into the heavens), it’s clear that people have a few defined ideas about what clerics and paladins should and should not be. One of the things that has me very excited about D&D Next is that the design team seems committed to making a system that allows you play whatever you want, whether it’s a traditional “mace & shield” cleric or “I get a horse and +5 holy avenger” paladin, or something new.

People are complex. Religion is complex. People’s feelings about religion are crazy complex. There’s conflict and drama all over the place. That means there is a wide variety of things you can create a character from, and million more things you could try when roleplaying that character. There is room in the imagination for infinite gods, and those gods can each grant different powers or demand something different from their followers. Even then, it’s up to the player to determine how his or her PC chooses to worship. Of course, in D&D, it helps the DM’s sanity if you have specific powers backed by game mechanics, but for several editions now clerics could choose spells or domains or feats or skills that made them different from any other Generic Cleric™. Paladins can still believe very strongly in gods and causes that are not Lawful Good, and I see no reason why a character’s personal code of ethics couldn’t be peppered with some nice habañero chaos.

For my part, I will be petitioning the team at WotC to make sure the default setting for D&D Next includes gods in charge of:

• Habanero
• Bacon
• Pigtails
• Marching Order
• Eczema
• Rock

Wish me luck. Or pray to whatever gods govern tabletop roleplaying games. Doesn’t matter to me. Crom gives a man but two things at birth: a blog and the courage to post in it. And if he won’t help me, then to hell with him!

Photo Credit

It was then that Skyden decided he would NEVER take second watch. Because he was an elf, and it didn't make mathematical sense for him to do so because he only had to go into a restful trance for four hours.

“You all meet in a tavern.”

We’ve all played in a campaign that started like this. Some DM’s will just ask for names. Other put it as “who are you and why are you here?”, hoping to grease the backstory wheels a bit. This is where you find out who’s really into backstory and roleplaying,  who wants to get their axes bloody as soon as possible, who’s just along for the ride, and who wants to pickpocket someone in the first fifteen seconds of the campaign because they rolled a rogue.

The first night of a D&D campaign is a very strange phenomenon. I don’t know too many other places that an entire room full of people who have known each other for decades can feel uncomfortable around all their new coworkers. Most groups go under the assumption that the other adventurers can be trusted, but those who like to roleplay may not make that assumption.

Learning How To Make Camp

There’s always friction when a new group starts. They even have fancy theories and models for this kind of thing. Tuckman’s stages of group development suggest there are four stages to group development:

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing

In a nutshell, groups form (1). There’s friction (2) until leaders emerge and they all figure out how to work together (3). Sometimes, they figure it out really well and go into super-awesome mode (4). Sometimes things will change, and sometimes they regress and the process starts back at (2).

In a D&D party, these can manifest themselves in combat, or in deciding marching order or the watch order at camp, or even deciding who speaks for the party during roleplay. There’s another layer to this, as well. Your D&D group — comprised of all the real live people who brought all their books and dice — goes through all these phases too. The extent to which they are separate depends upon each player and their own ability to distinguish between and/or roleplay the two.

Of course, I’m not suggesting the PCs have minds of their own or anything silly like that, nor am I suggesting players can’t distinguish fantasy from reality. I don’t need to go back to the padded room. What I am suggesting is that an adventuring party’s development is going to be affected by the development of the group of players. I sincerely doubt you’ll find a Performing adventuring party with Storming players. You’ll find them spending an entire session arguing over the watch order at camp. Not that I’m bitter.

Storming, Norming, Performing, Cheating, Skipping?

This past week, my group started a new campaign, and we tried starting things out a little differently. For starters, the PCs were members of the city guard instead of being random adventurers arbitrarily dropped into a setting. We also rolled characters starting at level 3. This was for a couple reasons. A few players wanted to try a new class and wanted to do a little more than just dip their toes in for the first few sessions. We also did it for my own convenience in setting up the campaign. I wanted to avoid the “you meet in a tavern” scenario and give the PCs a reason to have worked together for a short while.

Something really cool started happening right away with the group. Given the knowledge that their characters were already comfortable with their surroundings and with each other, the players just started adlibbing. References to previous events that never happened were common. Friendly crap-giving of the sort one might give their work friends ensued. There was a question at one point as to who was in command, and (after a quick out-of-character discussion) the fighter was nominated and everyone thereafter deferred to him, called him “chief”, and acted like it had been this way for years. The characters were more alive in the first hour of this campaign than they ever were in anything I’d run before.

I’d love to blame this on my superior DMing skills, but I honestly think two things happened. The PCs got to completely skip over Storming and started out Norming. (Do groups get “Norming” at level 3?) Watching this unfold was crazy fun.

More importantly, I think my D&D group figured out either Norming or Performing. I don’t think this is particularly far-fetched considering we’ve been together a little over a year, we have some very good roleplayers, and very little group drama. I couldn’t be happier.

No matter what happens, we had lightning in a bottle for a night, and I hope it sticks around.

Photo Credit (storm)
Xzibit meme by memegenerator.net

Now Communicate All That To Your Players

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

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

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

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

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

Theater of the Mind, in 3D

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

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

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

Stop And Ask That Pit Trap For Directions

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

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

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

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

3d6+12 Feet Converted To Metric

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

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

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

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

Virtual Matrix-Esque Worlds For Every Game Table

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

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

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

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

Photo Credit

While the Achilus Assault focuses on the military realities of the Imperium in the Jericho Reach, including the history of the conflict itself and its political and military implications for the people within and without, The Jericho Reach is more of a ‘traditional’ setting book. The book boasts three chapters each involving one of the salients of the Achilus Crusade and the enemy it faces, and it offers information on several planets, installations, conflicts and enemies that can serve as home bases, or as objectives in the thick of the Crusade. The final chapter is a sample adventure incorporating some of these elements. I would probably recommend The Jericho Reach if you have to buy just one.

The three Salients of the Achilus Crusade are represented, with the Acheros Salient and the fight against Chaos taking the first chapter, the Canis Salient and the Tau in the second, and the Orpheus Salient against the Tyranids in the third. Each of the Salients has descriptions of planets, fortresses and allies of importance, from the Wicked Sisters, paradise planets of Slaneesh that have lured the Imperium into a trap they still have not uncovered; the vast fortress of Hethguard, steeling itself against the Tyranid advance; and the contested world of Pelegius, fought over between the Imperium and Tau. Planet descriptions contain histories, locations, an Imperial Datafile entry on the planet with population numbers, government and so on, as well as uses for all of these areas in thematic missions or focused campaigns.

Each chapter also includes both narrative and mechanical tidbits for the players’ Space Marine characters. Fighting chaos is radically different to fighting the tau; both also quite different from fighting the Tyranids. The Jericho Reach provides new assets, demeanors, oaths and powers suited to fighting each of the great foes found in the Jericho Reach. The Demeanors in particular are a treasure trove of roleplaying tips. To acquire these abilities, you must fight several missions within one salient in order to prove your worth and experience. All of these are quite flavorful, though some are of fairly suspect game balance. For example there is a power that renders you instantly aware if someone is aligned with chaos, which is either essentially useless, or able to short circuit certain mission plots almost immediately. Another ability lets you reroll reactions against Daemons, which is very powerful against Daemons, and worth nothing at all against other enemies – and a chaos mission can put you up against traitor marines or heretics without you seeing a single daemon. All of these are worth hard-earned XP to buy, as well, so you have to really be gunning for certain kinds of foes and missions to put them to use.

Assets, introduced in Rites of Battle, are strategic deployments of Imperial troops, servants, munitions and craft to help the Deathwatch mission. The Assets included The Jericho Reach are fairly interesting, though again, some are strange for the kind of game that Deathwatch is, including an asset that sends a diplomatic team for dealing with Tau peacefully (which is either fairly useless, or so incredibly essential to a mission that you shouldn’t even have to spend Requisition on it) and a Xeno-Archeologist, which is another sort of built-in escort mission that is flavorful, but a dubious use of Requisition. However, there are plenty of badass assets to bring misfortune to the Emperor’s foes, including a squad of Sisters of Battle to purge the unholy alongside you, or calling in the Grey Knights to exterminate some daemons!

Each Chapter includes a couple of sections of interest for the Game Master, such as tips on running each Salient’s missions. For the Acheros Salient, there is an expansion to the Mass Combat rules introduced in Mark of the Xenos, including running a Massed Battle as a setting rather than a setpiece, as well as a series of examples, with turning points and complications that can arise as the Space Marines wade through the thick of combat. The Tyranid chapter includes a whole mess of new Tyranids, including Bio-Titans, to make life miserable for the Imperium. The Tyranid chapter is delectably cruel – there’s so many new creatures and things to play with. If you have Mark of the Xenos and the Core rulebook, you now have access to basically every Tyranid creature in the tabletop game, including some of the Forge World guys.

In the back of the book is an Adventure focused on the Tyranids, called Fall Into Darkness. It has some tips for incorporating it into a long campaign along with the previous two Tyranid-centric adventures released by Fantasy Flight Games, the Preview Adventure Final Sanction, and the Core Rulebook adventure Extraction. It is fairly interesting, with the Space Marines running around a dying world in the final stages of Tyranid infestation, as the Hive Fleet looms to devour it. The Space Marines will have to make hard choices with little outside aid in this ravaged landscape.

You can understand the setting as a whole very well with just the core rulebook, and if you need more critters you can get Mark of the Xenos. However, The Jericho Reach lets you focus on specific sections on the setting in much more detail, giving your players and you a lot of incentives to focus your missions, and to really get to know one segment of the war over all of the others. The material is interesting, with competently-written story text, interesting (if a bit weird at times) player options, and a slew of tips, seeds and system additions for the GM to employ. It is a great setting book.

Me, several times a day. That's right, I'm a werechicken. You wanna make something of it?

As some of you are no doubt aware, WotC has once again opened the window for article pitches to Dungeon and Dragon. For the first time in my life, I have decided to submit some stuff. As I have been writing about roleplaying games for nearly 5 years now, and with the recent success in this arena of several of my esteemed blog-tribe fresh in my mind, one might think I would be overconfident. One would be crazy wrong.

To be perfectly frank, I’m freaking terrified. Imagine being a nerdling of 13 winters, reading your favorite magazines every month – Dungeon and Dragon. The wild creativity. The enhancements to the game you play and think about and breathe every day. All the cool art. It’s the late 80′s. This is the only D&D/fantasy humor you regularly see. A quarter-century of winters later, I stand at their very gates, and I am to say what?

I’m here?

I can do this too?

Please?

Part of my fears stem from the idea that nothing I come up with will be original enough. So many decades of fantasy have come before me, and WotC’s editors have surely seen everything before. What could I possibly have to add?

I’m much better at fluff than I am crunch, and they’re going to want stats and maps and game mechanics. Can I get it together?

I can write, but can I write professionawesomeal?

Even if I have a good idea, can I distill it into a pitch that isn’t 2000 words long requiring a flowchart and interpretive dance?

…

You know what? F*** it. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing this anyway.

The Power Of F*** It

I never got anywhere doing anything by backing down when I got scared and I see no reason to start now. Usually, the above magical incantation, “You know what? F*** it. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing this anyway.”, soon finds me numb with adrenaline and nowhere near ready to face what’s coming.

Sometimes I survive and something good happens. Other times, my wife has to find my phylactery and we have a very uncomfortable dinner where we talk about where I’m going to find another new host body.

Fact is, I’m not the greatest writer or the greatest blogger in the world. I might even be lucky to land a spot somewhere on the right half of the bell curve, and those are my strengths. I am aware of (some) of my weaknesses, but their presence doesn’t mean I should quit. It means I should surround myself with people who are good at the things I want to do and learn from them. It means I should read lots of good stuff  that teaches and inspires me. It means I should, above all else, practice.

Every time I post something on a blog, every time I tweet something, there’s that brief panic that oh dear sweet Grummsh I have said something stupid and the Internet hordes will come each dual-wielding rechargeable Epilady depilatory products.

Every single time I put on my Dungeon Master hat and get out in front of my players, I have the brief urge to freak out and run. I’m afraid the story I’ve come up with will bore them. I’m afraid I’ll forget what I’m doing and I’ll accidentally create giant cosmic plot holes and I’ll drive the horrible fun-sucking plot-train I have them all strapped to straight into it and they’ll never want to come over to my house again or speak my name to another living creature.

I am somewhat prone to drama when I get insecure.

But you know what? F*** it. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing this anyway.

It doesn’t mean I don’t accept advice. It doesn’t mean I don’t think about what I’m doing. But if the only thing keeping me from moving forward is fear?

F-bomb-I-I-D-M-I-D-T-A. I will be damned if the thing that defeats me is me.

Once Again Into The Breach

So now, I have a lot of work ahead of me. I have ideas, and those ideas need polished. Then I have to figure out how to sell them to professional gamer people that scare me. Then I have to figure out how to do that in one paragraph.

Will WotC send a personal singing telegram to make absolutely sure I understand just how much I suck?

Maybe. But if they do, I’ll just develop the idea and post it here.

F*** it. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing this anyway.

Now you go do it.

Image Credit

(Extra special thanks to Chuck Wendig, whose writings you may blame for both the extra fire under my butt recently to create and the extra profanity in today’s article.)

Sometimes, in any fantasy world where you have invested a large amount of your imagination, you start to append your real-world experiences to those of the characters being portrayed. For example, in the Star Wars universe, characters such as Luke are relatable, in that most people understand the story of “the everyman.” He is compelling because of the extraordinary destiny that lies ahead in his life. People generally like to feel that there is a greater purpose for them, and as such, they always cheer for the protagonist that achieves this greatness. As we cheer on we also become invested in the story. No matter how far removed from reality the elements of the story are, there is a humanization that brings us right back in. We love this. We want this to continue. We want to never break the feeling we first received while experiencing that story.

Everyone experiences this in a different way. What we pull from a story will differ depending on our life’s experiences. Continuing with Star Wars, one might feel more attached to Han Solo, the brutish scallywag that really has a heart beneath his crusty façade. Or, maybe it is Leia, the strong-willed and persistent princess, one who can get things done, regardless of the testosterone that flies around. Maybe you even felt a connection with Chewbacca—a big cumbersome brute that protects his friends with furious devotion, but is cuddly and cute once you get underneath the fur. Regardless of how you made the connection, you connected. You became invested in the story, and you want nothing to scramble that experience, even if you’re willing to give little ground.

Continuity of a game world works the same way. Consumers of fantasy become invested in the characters, and they begin to sense the world around them, taking in the descriptions and feel an author has provided. R.A. Salvatore, New York Times best-selling author and creator of the renegade drow Drizzt, is fantastic at bringing in the reader and giving them what is needed to relate to his characters. It is undeniable that Drizzt is popular, and for numerous reasons, people keep coming back to hear what will happen to him next. They want to maintain that feel, and have the protagonist overcome adversity.

The Ultimate Power In The Universe

Consumers of fiction care about the setting of which their protagonists reside, and they want to see that maintained to a certain standard. When large swaths of their protagonist’s world are rewritten/overwritten/removed, it begins to deteriorate their experience, and becomes a frustration. Imagine, if you will, in Star Wars, that the snowy planet of Hoth was retroactively rewritten to be a tropic world. The explanation is that the Empire developed a terraforming device, the LifeStar, to make planets inhabitable so that the Empire could more easily expand their reach and develop larger populations. First things first, this is lame. It is so lame that I’m getting pissed just writing it. No matter why this was created, or what justification there is for doing it, it just plain sucks. It feels foreign, is not relatable (never found in any of the popular movies, or in the novels), and completely distorts our mind’s eye view of the Star Wars universe.

I admit, that would be big change, and I used it more to illustrate something extreme. Surely that would never happen, but the point remains. Let’s take an example that really did happen. R.A. (Bob) Salvatore, someone I am blessed to be able to call a friend, was tasked with killing off one of the most iconic characters in the entire Star Wars franchise: Chewbacca. At its concept, it is huge. It is almost exciting, right? Killing off an iconic character!? Oh, my God! Imagine the ruckus this will cause! Surely it will be good for sales! No, it is a kick in the nuts. Remember where I said Chewbacca was a cuddly and cute? People generally like bad-ass characters that are also cuddly and cute. How about Ewoks? Not so much. Kill them as much as you can. Yeah, I’m looking at you Wicket! Don’t even get me started on Jar-Jar Binks. Messa gonna have an aneurism.

Continuity of a shared world is difficult, however, and it is not without some major constraints. The longer the world exists, and the more people who contribute to it, the more it becomes a cumbersome beast. Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) used to employ continuity editors. In fact, Erik Mona, one of the big honchos at Paizo and one of my game design idols, was originally hired to be a continuity editor for the Greyhawk world. How freaking cool is that? His job (I assume) was to make sure things made sense and that the world of Greyhawk wasn’t devolved into something that would rebuke fans.

Continuity Cops: Protecting and Serving

Making things more difficult are fans like me. I have spent a good portion of my free time, prior to being a game designer, connecting the dots of continuity in the Forgotten Realms setting. Even with my dedication, I am but a speck when compared to others—such as my older brother, Brian R. James. So, if someone like me can devote a large amount of time to the Realms, imagine what a large group of like-minded individuals could accomplish? Fans like me tend to be viewed as a thorn in the side of editors and game designers. We are quick to point out inconsistencies and errors, and we are unforgiving in our relentless quest for purity. We’re not always right, and we’re certainly not always fair, but the intentions of such fans should be viewed as an asset to a publisher. I’ll explain.

Without fan-sites and discussion boards, I would have to comb through my large library of books for the nuances of what an author wrote. It could have been written 20 years ago. I feel these sites should be viewed as a resource, and not a burden. It’s much easier to see the collective discussion on a topic than it is to hammer it all out in your own brain. I can’t count how many times I have relied on these communities to pin-point an exact piece of information that I can use. As the game designer, it is my duty to remain true to that experience, and to be the judge in forming its creation.

The beauty of large and vast worlds is that there should, theoretically, be plenty of design space to create new and interesting stories. It may be the case, and I have been guilty of this, that writers want to butt up against something that is already established. This is not inherently bad, but it does open up a can of worms if proper due diligence is not employed.

After all is said and done, continuity is an important aspect of consideration that publishing companies should consider carefully. While the downsides are clear, and include a larger overhead (much larger depending on the setting), the benefits of taking the time to do it right can return ten-fold. What are your thoughts? How important is continuity when it comes to the imaginary worlds (or universes) you use?

Hopefully, these problems have been identified while still on paper. It’s a lot costlier to go back, undo things, and then figure out some way to salvage things in a mostly-correct (read: passable) way. Experienced craftsmen have seen a lot of these types of things, and can plan to avoid them. They know a lot of ways to do their job well that the layperson doesn’t. Rooms are designed to be comfortable and space-efficient. Walls and floors are designed to be sturdy and flexible. Plumbing is designed to last a long time. (Admittedly, I really wish this hypothetical plumber was around with my home was constructed.)

The Plight Of The Creative

Doing client work in a creative field is much the same way, except many clients tend to view it differently. If you know any web developers or graphic designers, you’ve no doubt heard their particular repertoire of “Clients From Hell” stories. These people are no different from any other, except they tend to be some combination of clueless, under pressure, and/or completely morally bankrupt.

The first two, cluelessness and pressurization, are understandable. I’ve been in many a situation when I’ve been handed an impossible situation and flatly told to get it done, and I bear the shame of many hasty and boneheaded decisions. If I’d been hiring people to do the things I couldn’t, those may have qualified me for Client From Hell status. Cluelessness is even easier to understand. Techies, designers, and artists have a tendency to do things those outside their field don’t understand. (That’s why they’re being hired.) That also means it’s hard for the average Joe to wrap their head around a web developer’s priorities, or to place value on the things a designer does. Worse, sometimes these skills are trivialized and the client thinks anybody with a copy of Frontpage or Photoshop can get by. Concerns from creatives are frequently misunderstood, ignored, or met with hostility. It is not much fun.

Communication: Minmaxing For Social People

When people hire other people, it’s frequently because they have some sort of need or pain they want to address. One of the most important skills for anybody who does client work is communication. You need to be able to hear what your client is saying and apply your knowledge and skills to provide a solution for them. Sometimes, you realize what they’re asking for isn’t what they need. That’s when it really gets interesting. I mean that in several senses of the word. They might think you’re awesome and let you save the day. They might also throw a fit if you need more time and money to do it, or just fire you because you’re going off their original plan. This is not much fun either.

I’m not exactly sure when I realized this in my career, but one of the keys to succeeding in getting the client what they need instead of what they want is salesmanship. I worked at a Radio Shack for a year when I was a teenager, and I hated it. I didn’t like selling, I didn’t like feeling like I was tricking people, I didn’t like any of it. This is not what I am talking about. It’s about being confident about your ideas and infecting other people with that same passion so they believe in it too. I suck at this, and I wish I’d worked on it a lot more when I was younger. Accursed social skills!

The Herculean Path Of D&D Next

Some of you may be wondering at this point if this is some sort of extended April Fool’s Day joke where I write about how to sell yourself to freelance clients. I assure you, we are all done with our April’s Foolery for the year. I am, finally, working my way around to my thoroughly game-and-nerd-related point.

This is the job WotC faces right now with D&D Next.

The specifications on the project are loose. The game has to work well, yet “feel like D&D”. And yet, with many editions and 40 years behind it, D&D is a lot of different things to a very disparate group of people.

WotC’s client right now is a thousand-headed hydra. It’s us. We’re like thunder-mecha-hyper-double-octuple-mirror-image-garlic Tiamat.

And unfortunately some of us are Clients From Hell. Don’t believe me? Some among us get really angry and make wild assumptions about things we don’t know much about (like D&D Next). Enough of us even made a game company change an ending we didn’t like.

Their job right now is twofold. First, to make a game that works. Just going with one way or one edition’s methodology won’t do, so they’re trying to make a system that can accommodate being whatever we want it to be. This seems unattainable to me unless they accomplish the second goal: that of getting people to believe in it as much as they do.

It’s here I worry a little bit. WotC’s being absolutely fantastic about asking us what we want. But, once again, that’s like asking multiple-adjectives Tiamat what it wants. I hope somewhere along the way with all these surveys and the upcoming playtesting that they will correctly determine what we need (whatever that may be) – and that we’re open to seeing it.

Our job for D&D Next, as I see it, is to make sure we express our wants and needs to WotC in a way they can process. For the moment, that means being spoon-fed bits of info and providing little bits of input as requested. Angry manifestos on forums are the realm of Clients From Hell. They are no fun.

Let’s not be that.

Photo Credit

ID: May Parker (secret)

Affiliations

Solo d8, Buddy d10, Team d6

Distinctions

Herald Of Galactus, Little Old Lady, Always Worrying About Poor Peter

Power Sets

The Power Cosmic

Cosmic Blast d12, Godlike Strength d12, Godlike Durability d12, Godlike Speed d12, Superluminal Flight d12, Telepathy d10, Telekinesis d10, Intangibility d10, Transmutation d10, Godlike Durability d12, Godlike Senses d12, Time Travel d10

SFX: Multipower. Use two or more The Power Cosmic powers in a single dice pool at -1 step for each additional power

Limit: Galactus’s Whim. Shutdown The Power Cosmic if Galactus wills it.

Limit: He’s A Menace. Gain a PP to step up Emotional Stress inflicted by Spider-Man doing something misunderstood.

Specialties

Cosmic Master, Baking Master, Knitting Master

Milestones

You Get A Big Delight In Every Bite

1 XP when you bake something.

3 XP when you convince Peter or Galactus that he really should eat something.

10 XP when you discover a golden food source tasty and plentiful enough to sate even the dread and mighty Eater of Worlds or discover that your darling Peter is that awful Spider-Man.

History

May Parker was a sweet old lady who lived a very happy life with her husband Ben. The couple cared for their nephew Peter after his parents died. Then Peter had an origin story that resulted in Ben’s death and his becoming Spider-Man. For years, it was thought that Aunt May’s heart would explode if she ever found out about her nephew’s second job.

One day, Peter took May and his girlfriend Mary Jane to a theatre and promptly ditched them to go do superhero stuff. As it happened, the Fantastic Four was sitting nearby and were having trouble figuring out how to simultaneously go save the world and find childcare for young Benjamin RIchards. May overheard their problem and kindly offered to watch the child. The Invisible Woman was justifiably creeped out, but Peter (as Spider-Man) showed up to give his official endorsement (which May didn’t like).

All the superhero-types went off to do some stuff, and May is walking around with Benjamin in a parking lot, and Galactus randomly shows up. He says he is weak, and Benjamin is powerful and he will help him reach his full potential. So he blasts some Power Cosmic on him, and apparently May is having none of this so she jumps out in front. Instead of being reduced to crispy old lady bits, she becomes Golden Oldie, Herald of Galactus.

May then uses the Power Cosmic to break into a snack shop so Benjamin can give Galactus some Twinkies. Then apparently she’s just not interested in the whole childcare bit anymore and she takes off into space to go find Galactus some more grub. Then she almost gets into a fight with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man over a planet-sized Twinkie. But he’s cool with it, and Galactus gets his nom on.

Then May wakes up, and it was all a dream. Except it totally wasn’t.

Art by Brian Patterson of d20Monkey. All characters © & ™ 2012 Marvel & Subs. Heroic Roleplaying and Cortex Plus ™ 2012 Margaret Weis Productions, Ltd.

You see, as a Dungeon Master, I often incorporate elements of the dramatic into my storytelling, even while using some of the trappings of journalism. I embellished in the pursuit of the sharing a story that I felt was important. I am sorry for misleading my audience when I claimed this to be the entire truth.

Thus, in the interest of clearing the air, I would like to clarify the following points:

• I claimed to have interviewed a former worker of Wizards of the Coast who said that he and his coworkers were paid entirely in copper pieces, which do not add up nearly enough to a living wage in Seattle. The truth is that they are paid entirely in coffee.
• My story about the giant mutant chickens being used as playtesters for the Gamma World game was slightly exaggerated. The mutant chickens were merely human-sized.
• My translator says she has no recollection about my meeting with a dice tester required to make sure d4s gave “the full experience” by being forced to walk across them barefoot.
• When I wrote that an iPad would be required to play D&D Next, I actually meant that the New iPad purchased using our Amazon affiliate code would be required to play D&D Next.
• My claim that there were entire rooms, running 16 hour shifts, devoted to playtesting every possible class from Archer to Runepriest was false. No one has every played a Runepriest.
• When I described the D&D Next modular system as being able to “effortlessly combine all aspects of every RPG you’ve ever loved in a seamless way that produces an RPG superior to anything you could ever do with your life in a million years and will make you wish that you could spend your entire life within the fully realized fantasy world that you create using the multitude of advanced tools guaranteed to produce the greatest story ever told,” I was engaging in a slight bit of hyperbole.
• When I said that you could get access to the D&D open playtest early by purchasing a copy of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying... well, wouldn’t hurt to try, would it?

So as you can see, my dramatic retelling of my trip was all in the purpose of serving a greater story, one that I felt was not being told properly in the greater media. I apologize to anyone I mislead in previous posts, in my speaking tour, or my various podcast experiences. Clearly, we will redouble our efforts to tell nothing but the truth, especially on April 1st of all days.