Review: “Alloy of Law”
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts, difficult revisions and cutting, actually getting work done, and reviewed Low Town.
Background
After his excellent Mistborn trilogy and being tapped to finish The Wheel of Time. Brandon Sanderson has risen swiftly through the ranks of fantasy authors. Personally, Mistborn is my favorite series of all time. When I found out that a new novel set in the same universe was coming out, I was excited. The magic in the world revolves around using metals to have significant, but limited, magical effects. Whereas the first novel took place in a fantasy dystopia with apocalyptic rumblings, this novels problems are decidedly more limited in scope.
Setting
With the same magic system firmly in place, Sanderson moves out of medieval stasis into a Wild West/ Industrial Revolution era in a novel that smartly extrapolates a world’s progression even if it fails to capture the grand scope of the original. Alloy of Law starts in the Wild West (called the Roughs), but spends most of the time in a bustling metropolis. Although Sanderson’s new characters lack the variety of powers found in the first trilogy, he uses his magic system adroitly to come up with formidable (and interesting) twists on what existed in his original Mistborn trilogy. Coupled with very cool newsprint/dime store inserts between some chapters, the setting is one that easy to enjoy. [Read the rest of this article]
Pain of Publication: Book Review of “Low Town”
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts, difficult revisions and cutting, and actually getting work done. Whereas I normally review books in a vacuum, this time I am reviewing a book and weaving some lessons learned into my own Pain of Publication series.
Low Town is the debut novel of fellow Dickinson alumni, Daniel Polansky. Mr. Polansky knew many of the same people I did in college, but even in a small liberal arts school like Dickinson our paths never crossed. It’s a damn shame because Low Town is a rollicking mash up of two great genres: noir and fantasy. The author skillfully weaves a first person narrative in a way that vibrantly develops the setting into a living, breathing, festering, and foul supporting character unto itself.
Setting
The book is named after the impoverished underbelly of the Imperial Capital and the vast majority of the action takes place in this fetid urban sprawl. The book follows a man simply known as The Warden: an independent drug dealer with a wonderfully checkered past. He ends up caught in a tangled web of child murders where his own conscience and the machinations of others forces him into solving one last mystery. Although we only see things through the eyes of The Warden, we get a good feel for the supporting cast and an incredible appreciation for the misery that is Low Town. The author pulls no punches depicting graphic violence and frequent drug use. There is a sense of history to the world, but the author walks the tight rope of unfurling the past slowly and only inasmuch as it bears an impact on the story of The Warden. Proper nouns and slang give Low Town its own feel without impairing the readability of the novel. However, only three or four characters besides The Warden manage to stick out. This did not bother me though, as the same word count that often goes into character development was instead packaged as setting development. Low Town was great, but if you like your fantasy noble then stay out of Low Town. [Read the rest of this article]
The Pain of Publication III: Making the Most of your Work Sessions
Previously I’ve talked about my previous novel attempts and about difficult revisions and cutting. Today I’d like to talk about actually getting to work.
The reality for most aspiring authors is that their writing has to give way to the realities of a full life outside of it. Most of the time, that means squeezing in time in between your job that pays you and other life activities. However, sometimes you can get lucky and have the opportunity to spend a large dedicated chunk of time writing without work getting in the way. Having neglected to use my vacation time much over the past few years, I found myself with time off to spare and resolved to take a work week off and write. And so, between Christmas and New Years I had nothing to do but write… and do family things for the holidays, of course.
This column is about getting the most out of your time during those brief times you ought to be able to dedicate to writing and coping with the inevitable interferences that will crop up. [Read the rest of this article]
The Pain of Publication: Revising and Cutting
My first installment detailed my past attempt to get published. This article is going to detail the last steps I am taking prior to preparing another deluge of query letters. First, here is an explanation of where my current project: it’s called Roland’s Legion and it could be described succinctly as Red Dawn meets Harry Potter. I could go into more detail, but this column is less about the plot of my novel and more about how you go about dealing with a novel. My novel is in the midst of revisions by third parties (friends that I begged to read it and they took pity on me). Two of my friends read, reviewed, revised, and critiqued the novel once. Then I did rewrites and revisions. At this point, 5-7 more people are going through that process again with version 2.0. I should have their notes in by the Christmas. At that point, I won’t have any more excuses for why I haven’t worked on my latest draft.
So now, with all the self-important preamble out of the way, its time to cut to the heart of this column: killing what you love. It’s easy, academically, to understand you need to tweak and change sentences to make a novel more readable. Over the course of thousands and thousands of words you are almost certain to put down some downright incomprehensible sentences. Maybe you fall in love with a few, but diction is not the issue I’m covering here today. No, instead we’re talking plot. Some readers questioned the purpose and execution of what I will call The Religion Subplot. At first, I rejected the notion it needed to be changed. I could fix it, tweak it, and make it better. I would show my friends what it was that I meant in my brilliant manuscript even if they were too stubborn to see it. In fact, my first revision did see me overhaul and improve the The Religion Subplot.
However, my friend Andy, who was insane enough to read my draft a second time, still had some rather well-reasoned criticism of the The Religion Subplot. I had thought that I had fixed it, but his renewed complaints planted the seeds of doubt. After overcoming my own wounded pride, I decided to look at The Religion Subplot with as much objectivity as I could muster and judge it based on the following criteria: [Read the rest of this article]
The Pain of Publication: How I Got to Where I Am
For those of you who don’t me, I was one of the original group that started writing for Critical-Hits, but as my life changed, my time as a DM/GM dwindled. As such, my status as a regular columnist shrunk to that of a mere guest columnist. I grew up with TheGame and Bartoneus and can even be seen grinning foolishly in a few Ennie Award pictures. My column, the Pain of Campaigning has languished and faded into obscurity, but from the ashes of that experience I would like to introduce my new column: The Pain of Publication.
If you want advice from guys that have actually been published in the gaming world, frankly, there are plenty on this site. None of my work has seen publication. My efforts are focused more on fiction writing. However, even in that regard, I have also struck out. I never tried to get the first novel I wrote published. I realized it was deeply flawed and I lacked the dedication to fix it. My second novel was better, and after a major overhaul I even had agent representation, but my agent never did get it published. Now, years later, I am nearing the completion (read: temporary stoppage in editing) of my third completed novel and seeking once again to find an agent and get published.
The Pain of Publication is a journey through this process. I emphasize, again, that this is a process. I can offer no advice on what works, because nothing has for me, but what I can do, is discuss my regular activity related to this subject. This column’s focus will range from the obvious (getting an agent), to related (how do I make my novel worth publishing), and all the way through tangential subject matters (I have not yet fathomed what those might be).This first installment is going to focus on how I found an agent. There are literally books written on this, and agents out there with information on how they find and evaluate talent. Those books and resources are more qualified to speak on things as an expert, but its my hope that my own anecdotal experiences and lessons learned will be useful to some people out there. [Read the rest of this article]
Innocence Lost: The Price of Omnipotence
A funny thing happened at my D&D session last week. The PC’s were fighting a dragon that was extra-tough due to being all Dark and Corrupted™. I figured a level 4 elite green dragon with enhanced stats should be at least somewhat challenging for a group of 5 level 2 characters. I was wrong. They were mercilessly kicking its scaly butt. I didn’t know what to do. The exciting combat encounter I had planned – complete with NPC intervention after a few rounds to remove the corruption so they could kill the beast – was going to be over even before I could do anything. So I decided to cheat. That dragon now had unlimited hit points until I decided otherwise. And I decided to make him get bigger and do way more damage to make them all think they were going to die. Then, I had my super-cool NPC show up and he removed the corruption and…….
Well, it was lame. I the PC’s hit it a few more times, and then had their next hit kill it. In retrospect, I’m reasonably sure I violated the Code of Good DMing – Article 5 Subsection 34e – which states that the NPCs should not be more important to the story than the PC’s. As it happens, it’s not my mistakes that weigh heavily upon me this week. Those have been acknowledged and will hopefully improve with practice. My mind keeps going back to my dragon, kept alive only by dark DM magic. The players were rolling dice in earnest, hoping their combined powers could defeat this fell beast, and it was for nothing.
You Can Never Go Back
I started thinking about hearing some of my more experienced DM friends talking about adjusting hit points and fudging die rolls. As a DM, I didn’t have to follow any rules, and I could just make it up as I went along. How much of the combat my characters have participated in over the years was real? (And yes, I understand the duality of this term used in this context. Please do not make a TV movie about me and turn me in to Fox News for trying to cast Mind Bondage on my dad.)
Talking to my best friend (and former DM) Dante officially Did Not Help. “Don’t feel bad about cheating,” he said. “If you don’t let on, they’ll never know.” He confirmed that many fights had been Adjusted and that many dice had been Fudged over the years. Well, that’s just great. All those memories, suddenly put under harsh fluorescent lights. This was worse than when I found out there was no Santa Claus. How could I ever go back to being a player again?
I Have Seen The Matrix. Put Me Back In.
I asked Dante how he deals with this, as he’s been a player in a few campaigns with me. He confirmed that being a player was different for him after being a DM. He also made a crude analogy about it being like going to a strip club, and not caring what was fake. (He always knows how to make me feel better.)
Even so, I’d been wrestling over the last few weeks with the general feeling that combat was just getting in the way of storytelling. It was frustrating before. Now, it was false. Useless. A waste of my players’ time, and a breach of their trust. It was good to see all the melodrama exercises I’d been doing were paying off. Still, I had no idea what to do in order to make combat OK again. I kept thinking about how much effort had been put into balancing the combat in the various editions of this game and other RPGs, and all the millions of hours spent by players over the years rolling up character stats that effectively meant nothing.
I have to admit, I was not expecting to enter the “existential quandary” phase of my DM career before my fifth session. So it was that I once again turned to the ever-cryptic wisdom of Dave Chalker. Even he admitted to fudging.
The fights might not be fair, but that’s not really your job. Your job is to create an exciting story for them to take part in. You’ll just have to make sure their actions mean something.
That’s great! But how? How do I do this?
Wax on, wax off.
Renovations on Dave’s bathroom should be finished by Gen Con.
The Way Home?
I’ve gotten some good advice on this, but I’m still shell-shocked. I’m still going to keep DMing, of course, and trying to make this game as fun for my players and myself as humanly possible. Half the fun is just getting together with your friends, after all. I can’t believe I’ve been playing this game for this long and none of this ever occurred to me. I place a high value on good memories, and seeing them all in a new light was jarring. On a purely cognitive level, I can understand that I’ve played under some excellent DMs if nobody ever noticed and we all tell epic tales of battle years afterward.
I don’t know whether or not I would erase this part of my memory if given the chance. Since I find this prospect incredibly unlikely, I will file it along with my desire to time-travel back to before I asked that girl out in high school starting with the words “if your mom says it’s OK” and replace it with something way smoother.
In the short term, I have a plan. Since the “cheating” aspect of running combat is what’s disturbing me so badly, I’m not going to use it unless I have a damned good reason. That reason will always be “it makes the game more fun.” Wait, isn’t that why I was doing it in the first place? Yup, I’m screwed. (Note to my players: from now on we’re handling all combat via competitive eating contests. Anybody know where I can buy hotdogs in bulk?)
As if all this weren’t enough, I learned one final brutal lesson last week: it’s a terrible idea to get all sugared up on E.L. Fudge cookies when you’re trying to DM. It is really hard to concentrate. You have no idea how disappointed this makes me.
Photo Credit
Week 4: I Have Lost Six Dungeon Pounds
This week will be my D&D group’s fourth session. I’m starting to get the lay of the land a little better. I’ve learned that a plot won’t burst into flames if not kept on the rails the entire session. I’ve also learned that tacking it down in a couple of spots sure won’t hurt, and drawing a path in the dirt with a stick where you might like it to go isn’t such a bad thing. I decided to go back to my first article about starting a gaming group and look at the things I was concerned about with a few sessions under my belt.
- Music
I keep planning to try it, but every session I remember to do it as everyone is walking out the door. I think I am going to list out my encounters – combat and otherwise – on a sheet of paper along with a track to play. I haven’t been using a computer for anything (aside from Kmonster on my phone), so keeping Grooveshark open on my tablet with all tracks one press away shouldn’t get in my way much. Who knows if it will be awesome or annoying? Probably never me. I anticipate serially forgetting about this for at least another six or seven months. - Initiative
I’ve been writing out the initiative order on a sheet of paper, trying to guess based on their rolls how much space to leave on the rows above and below. This is clunky, I don’t like it much, but to be honest it’s not really getting in my way too much. I plan to get some index cards this week to try, having the PCs write down their defenses, hit points and bloodied value, and other info on them. Then I’ll make enemy cards and combat order should be much simplified. - Bloodthirst
I haven’t once wanted to kill a PC. Truth be told, I don’t really like combat that much. It’s not really a surprise to me, I used to wish the combats were over so I could roleplay some more when I was a player. I’ve caught myself wanting to halve an enemy’s hit points just to get things over with a couple of times. Some of my players are really into combat, so I’m going to avoid that. - Better DMing Through Technology
Maybe I’m just oldschool. Maybe I’m not using the right tools. But, as I said before, I hardly use any tech at all in the actual running of my game – certainly nothing I have to enter info into. I don’t have to fight notebook paper to record something really fast. I don’t have to open the right window, or enter things in any particular format. I scribble something down, possibly circling it. This surprises me a lot. I was half-expecting to look like something out of freaking Neuromancer while running my game – sitting motionless, speaking to my players only via voice synthesis, and updating a digital battle map. With my brain waves. I feel like a hippie or a luddite or something. - Frequency
We’ve had to swap weeks a couple of times, and last week’s board game “D&D off-week” night found every last person with a scheduling conflict. Overall, though, I think we’re proving somewhat flexible. One of our group has his son’s soccer practice to go to on our D&D nights for the next month, so we’ll be doing some dancing around that. Keeping him in every week during this might not happen, but I think it’s safe to say we’ll be playing. - Expectations
This has probably been the hardest to bear of the lot. You’d think after blogging in one form or another for nearly a decade would give me immunity from worrying that people will think what I come up with is stupid, but it’s more nerve-wracking for me when the people you’ll be attempting to entertain for the evening are mere feet away from you for hours on end. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun. I love it. But it’s making those little insidious self-doubt demons come out to have a picnic in my brain a lot more than I’d like. They make me second-guess the story I’m writing and bring out my Anxiety-Fueled Perfectionist who doesn’t write things other people understand (in a bad way). They make me want to procrastinate. They make me worry I will be the D&D equivalent of Forever Alone. They must die.
It’s a little different than where I expected to be at this point, but I feel like I’m getting better and people are having a decent time. Now I have different concerns and goals to put into bullet points:
- Player Engagement
I have some players new to D&D who are somewhat shy at the table. I want to try to get them out of their shells. I realize there are a lot of different types of people, and that means there are also a lot of different types of players. This also inevitably means some won’t like the things I do, so I can’t just fire up the Master Roleplaying Computer and determine their optimal RP algorithm. Stupid free will. So, my task right now is to watch my players carefully for signs of delight, and to exploit these weaknesses in their psyche to… well, give them more delight. I am never going to pass the Evil DM exam at this rate.I’ve also been considering several reward systems for good roleplaying or teamwork. One idea was to use Fortune Cards as a reward. Another is to give out story awards like I saw used at the Living Forgotten Realms events at DDXP. It’s been my experience that it doesn’t take much to light a little fire in a player’s heart. Or maybe I’m just extra flammable. We’ll have to see if my group is.
- Loot, Or Lack Thereof
One of my players made a point to remind me that they hadn’t gotten any loot yet. I’d forgotten about it entirely, what with my head being firmly up my precious story’s ass. In the interim, I came up with nifty Weapons O’ Light for them to use, the powers of which may scale with the players’ level. I don’t think this is enough. It’s a weird state of affairs when everybody has weapons made of pure light and I’m worried nobody is going to feel special. I need flavor for these items. I want offbeat things that make this story belong to the players. I used to do this with magic items all the time. It’s harder to come up with them, for some reason. - I Prefer Rolling My Own
I’m starting to think I might be a masochist, or an egomaniac, or both. I have heaping mountains of sourcebooks and articles and other pre-made materials to choose from, but I want to come up with something brand new 99 times out of 100. I tend to prejudge pre-made material as a whole as “boring”, and I think this attitude needs to change. I know an awful lot of very bright people with excellent ideas waiting to be appropriated for the good of all playerkind. And it’s not as if I am a neverending fountain of The Best Ideas. If I hadn’t been introduced to the concept of reskinning, I shudder to think how combat might have gone these last few sessions. I think this problem stems from a few times in a previous campaign where our DM decided to drop in a pre-made module and we all couldn’t wait for it to be over. I also need to remember another campaign we were in, made completely from scratch, that was far worse. This is not really helping my anxiety. - 4 x 2 x 7 x 1
The “fast and loose” approach I’ve been taking the last couple of sessions has rained cosmic destruction upon the delicate 5×5 plot diagram I’d made in the infancy of this campaign. I’m having trouble figuring out how to guide them where they “should” go without chasing them around with a horde of cement zombies. I tried to lay clues for them in our last adventure, but they didn’t take the bait. Upon complaining about this, the Internets graced me with the Three Clue Rule and the knowledge that players are neither master detectives nor inside my brain. I’m not going to feel so bad about gentle use of the Clue Bat or letting Leopold, the Dancing Plot Point earn his keep. I’m going to try sprinkling a little more structure into our game, and hopefully it’ll go somewhere. I think the trick is not to care exactly where, as long as you are still tracking it via DM plot-satellite.
I’m certain that, as long as I am a Dungeon Master, I will always have a bunch of bullet points in my head. There’s an old saying we have in karate. I can’t remember it, so it is possible that I will not have all my teeth this time next week. What I do remember is that it describes the search for perfection of one’s character as neverending; as being in a boat atop an ever-rising sea; as playing Pac-Man and never splitting the screen. So too shall I approach the mastery of my dungeon.
In the end, there is only one truth: don’t use dry-erase markers on a battlemat.
Photo Credit
RPGs and Fiction: An Interview with Alana Abbott
I have spent the better part of the last three years with my head buried deep in the Forgotten Realms, a game world that lives and breathes at least as deeply through its fiction as through its game products. My background and education are tied to fiction-writing, first and foremost. As I become more familiar with the craft of designing games and adventures, the contrast and the synergy between the stuff of games and the stuff of fiction always leaves me pondering: What game design skills carry over from fiction-writing skills, and vice versa? Can fiction capture the essence of a game system or a game setting, while still working as good fiction?
I have enlisted someone to help me look into those questions. I first met Alana Abbott while writing adventures for the Living Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign, where she was the campaign’s director. Even then, before I knew her well, I was impressed with her chops as a writer. When I heard that she’d written a novel as a tie-in for an RPG game and setting, I was intrigued. I read that first novel called Into the Reach, and I was taken with how much the characters and the story drew me into that world. Despite my love of fantasy RPGs, I was never much a fan of fantasy fiction. The field is no doubt full of talented authors, but the redundancy of the tropes within the genre just didn’t do it for me.
At the time, I was also teaching fiction writing at the college level, so my brain was engaged in a sort of “read and feedback” loop that led me to contact Alana, offer my admiration for the work, as well as providing some (hopefully) constructive criticism. I was surprised and flattered when Alana suggested to her publisher that I take over as editor for the second novel in the trilogy. It was a pleasure to do so.
Alana’s talents have been noticed by many others, and her resume speaks for itself. As long as it is diverse, her list of credits includes the Origins Award-winning supplement Serenity Adventures for the Serenity RPG from Margaret Weis Productions. She was also the writer for the comic Cowboys and Aliens II. (A film version of the original Cowboys and Aliens hits theaters soon, starring Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.)
The first two novels in “The Redemption Trilogy” — Into the Reach and Departure — are available now available as e-books at DriveThruRPG, and they are well worth the read for fans of well-written fantasy literature. Alana’s vision of the setting, game, and characters is expertly rendered on the page, and I hold the novels up as an example of what can happen when a very talented writer finds a way to turn an RPG into excellent fiction.
I recently got the chance to ask Alana about the intersection of RPGs and fiction, as well as a number of other topics of interest to gamers, fantasy fans, and would-be writers. I hope you find the results enlightening: [Read the rest of this article]
That Almost Sucked
In retrospect, it should not surprise me that my procrastinatory tendencies extent to my DM planning sessions. Last week was a lovely off-week board gaming session with some Give Me The Brain (the original $2 “on pink card stock” version) and Cranium. The latter had been sitting unopened in our closet since Sarah and I got married in 2004. The purple Cranium clay was growing… something on it, so we drew pictures for the “sculpture” cards too. And somehow, a new week snuck up on me and I find myself with only a couple days to plan the party’s next adventures.
I’ve been mulling over in my head how I want the story to go first, because I want the story to drive the encounters I create. I’m sure there will come a day when I make up an excuse to use some cool monster I saw in a book in my campaign, but right now everything is supposed to Make Sense and be For A Reason. I’m certain this is going to come back to haunt me, but I haven’t put my finger on how or why yet. It may simply be that a little organized chaos spices things up. Some of the best battles we ever had were when my old DM would decide to wing it and roll on a random encounter table. I’m reasonably sure a lot of the things we fought over the years weren’t integral to the main story in some way. I think I’d like to provide a little foreshadowing for these encounters via side quests, just so the experience and setting feels cohesive. Then again, a random Owlbear ambush never hurt anybody.
A Brush With The Dark Side
This story-driven approach found me in a place I never thought I’d go. I was developing the character for this new major bad guy NPC, and he’s so full of Proper Villainy that his armor barely fits. I had mapped out what drives him and what he would do, and this led me to start thinking about how he might interact with the leader of the army the PCs had joined and I started coming up with all these story concepts and it was making me all giddy — but I was having a real problem coming up with how I was going to tie this in with the PCs. Technically, what I had in mind eventually made sense. However, there was a 15-step process that happened behind the scenes before the players even got remotely involved. It was at that point I realized the horrible truth: I was planning an adventure in which the PCs were not the main focus. I suppressed my urge to self-flagellate (in the interest of time, of course), and scrapped the idea in favor of something my players might give a crap about.
I don’t think the problem was that the story was bad. I think something marginally worth reading could have come out of this, had I taken the time to develop and write it. I think it just wasn’t right for D&D. I had similar problems as a player when coming up with character concepts. A few years back, I played a necromancer with a heart of gold. His name was Lionel Pureheart, and he wanted to use the black arts for the good of mankind. He’d let you speak with dead relatives, raise skeletons to help plow the fields, and reunite families with a beloved dead pet (at least, whatever parts were still available.) I still think he’s a funny idea, and I’m probably going to write some fiction about him at some point. In practice, he was unbelievably frustrating to play for various reasons. My DM found it appropriate to make the local populace flee in terror and/or attempt to lynch him whenever he would offer his services of Gentle Necromancy. This made sense, but it pointed to other “you need to work with your DM before you come up with this kind of thing” issues. That, and 3.5e wizards specializing in Necromancy don’t have much in the way of attack spells at low level. Or defense spells. They’re just sort of like goth punching bags. Lionel was a good idea. Just not for D&D, at least in that form.
It seems to me that a D&D adventure, when done well, is not a standard kind of story. Regular stories, once written, generally follow a timeline. They often don’t work right in D&D because the DM doesn’t have any idea what the players are going to do. They can kill somebody important to the plot. They can lose an important artifact. They can accidentally polymorph the royal family into weasels, throwing the country into civil war. They can all die, and nobody lives happily ever after. As DM, you can stop all of this from happening to preserve the story — but it’s always been my experience that you wind up with a bunch of grumpy players if they have no real impact on the world other than killing what you tell them to. Ever been in one of those campaigns where the world is incredibly detailed, the NPCs are the stars, the outcome of everything has been predetermined, and you would rather commit seppuku than play one more session of this? If I wanted that, I’d play World of Warcraft. Blizzard does, at least, make an effort to make the single-player experience seem like the PC’s actions have some effect on the world (especially with their new phasing tech that lets the world change only for that player when certain quests get completed.) However, the problem still exists. No player can ever be as big a badass as Thrall. Your PC never appears in any cutscenes. Some super-awesome NPC is doing all the cool stuff. That’s not the kind of D&D game I want to run.
Bullet Dodged, Another Bullet Please
This is all well and good, but now I have to figure out a better way to go. The first session with my new group was, admittedly, firmly on rails. I don’t know what I would have done if they decided to deviate from the plan, so I had a giant mixer-horde of cement zombies chase them back to camp. Effective, but ultimately lame — especially if used again. I have a decent idea of the major things I want to happen from using Dave The Game’s super-cool 5×5 method (the hype is real!). Thinking of things as an outline that you fill in as you go along makes the prospect of changing a future line-item to suit the game that is unfolding considerably less terrifying. At least, as compared to watching lots and lots of meticulous work unravelled by one PC inadvertently pulling the string that will bring it all down. I know it’s possible. I’ve been that player. I bear the scars of being repeatedly bludgeoned by a Dungeon Master’s Guide. (And, since I am using the Essentials paperback books, I do not know if I can produce “learning”-class impact force.)
At least I’m not quite as nervous as I was last time. Even when I dropped the ball, it sure seemed to me like we were having fun. I know I was. It’s good to know everything’s going to be OK even if you fail. Unless you’re a player, in which case you should have your DM come read this article. Damn, I’m good.
Photo Credit
Weird and Stubborn: A Tale of Omnipotence
My trip to DDXP last month did a lot for me, not the least of which was to make me hunger for playing D&D like a vampire in a carotid artery factory. (They come pre-filled.) It’s been over 2 years since I had a regular game going, and I was a bit lukewarm (read: had every popular misconception) about 4e. I played under some really good DM’s at DDXP, ones that emphasized the story and had lots of little tricks to make combat go smoothly. At one point, a little voice in my head started whispering “hey, you can do that too”. By the time I got home, it was very insistent. I had to have a talk with it. We’re friends now.
The end result of this, of course, is that I am scheduled to start playing with a brand new group in two days’ time. I’ve played D&D in some form since the late eighties, but almost exclusively as a player. I’ve dipped my feet into the DM pool a few times, though. There were plenty of ridiculous Monty Haul adventures in high school with a friend of mine, in which we rolled up characters and killed all the Greek gods (hooray for Legends and Lore!) As an adult, I’ve run a short games twice before, but they lasted no more than a handful of sessions. Regrettably, things went way off the rails during both and I decided to start letting everybody do whatever they wanted. The results were spectacular, but disappointing. In one campaign, a player polymorphed into a giant gorilla and defeated the main villain by — well, let’s just say it’s illegal in most states, at least when done by humans. (Feel free to contact a lawyer to find out other specifics.) In the other, I don’t remember exactly how it happened but somebody got the ability to set everything on fire. So they did. I think they won, if you can call it that. I can see in retrospect that I did what I tend to default to when nervous – go completely nonsequitur and hope people laugh. While I succeeded in making the table have a few laughs and what I believe to be a good time, it’s clear to me that this is an untenable strategy for the long haul.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t shaking in my boots. I have to come up with a cool plot, make (reasonably) balanced encounters, roleplay multiple characters, draw maps, track initiative, AND try to make sure everybody has fun…. it feels overwhelming right now. There are many bullet points flying through my brain right now. Look!
- Music
Is it annoying or worth it? Do I play it during battles or just when I think it might help the mood during roleplay? Am I wasting too much time thinking about the ramifications of music on my campaign? Is Chris Tulach right about the soundtrack to Bram Stoker’s Dracula being amazing for horror campaigns because it’s intensely oppressive? Do I have to worry about my players fainting?Regardless, I think this ought to be one of the last things I consider. It’s just one of the easiest to think about.
- Initiative
My bane in previous efforts, I always had difficulty keeping track of who went when. I’ve seen several excellent methods of dealing with this recently, not the least of which was the use of colored index cards the DM rotated through. It seemed ecologically unfriendly, but easy to track. My old DM Dante had a little dry-erase board with magnetic pieces he moved around. I’ve seen other DMs do it with just pencil and paper. I have to find a way that suits my way of thinking. It may involve pepperoni. Only time will tell. - Bloodthirst
I’ve seen so many Dungeon Masters over the years curse when one of their monsters failed to hit a player. This always struck me as odd. They’re not trying to win… are they? Will I find myself consumed with finding ways to TPK that don’t seem too suspicious? Will I use secret knowledge about their backstories to blackmail them? What will I buy with all this ill-gotten GP? What will I become? What will I have done? - Better DMing Through Technology
I am happy that I live in the future. Now I can have players create and/or level up characters quickly with the Character Builder instead of waiting forever for the people that forgot to do it the previous week. (Although, since I’m DM now, maybe we won’t have that problem…) I’d tried other automated solutions over the years, like PCGen. I never fully appreciated the complexity of a character builder app until using PCGen. It was like staring into the Abyss. While I have to administer props to those guys for making it work, there are a couple of my players that would self-destruct if they tried to use it. Say what you will about the new web-based CB, it will spit out an Essentials character for you in about 30 seconds flat. For a group of newbs, that’s a good thing.I’m also planning to use Obsidian Portal to organize and track all the stuff in our campaign. We used to use a similar service. We called her Stupid Ranger, and while her notes were very complete, they were not available over the Internets. To be honest, I’m not even sure where to begin. OP does a lot of stuff. For now, I’m going to get through our first session and hopefully bribe someone into being the party stenographer in the Adventure Log section. I’ve considered asking Stupid Ranger to listen to our sessions over Skype and then emailing me her notes. She’s very good at notes.
I’ve considered several ways to harness the power of the Intertrons to make my job easier, like for handling maps, but I’m not convinced at this point that they won’t just get in my way at the table. Not everyone is going to have a laptop, and WotC’s tools are all built with Microsoft products that hate everything but Windows. So much for my dream of every player with a tablet computer and a battle-map. I’ve considered trying to roll my own solution for this, but it is definitely not going to happen in two days. Even with caffeine.
- Frequency
We’re trying something I haven’t done before in our group: we play every week, but D&D only happens every other week. The alternate sessions are for board gaming and other leisurely pursuits. We have a few players that either can’t commit to a regular D&D group or just don’t want to play D&D, and this lets them join in.I’m also fielding a somewhat unique situation in that my wife is gunshy about playing D&D, but said she might join in on occasion. I’m willing to accommodate this because getting her to love something I do is one of the things I enjoy most in life. I’ve asked her to let me know several days in advance if she plans on playing, and I plan to adjust the encounters accordingly. There are a few obvious problems with this arrangement, not the least of which is I barely know how to set up encounters, much less adjust them. However, I was able to make sense in the story of her coming and going via the party being part of a larger army. My wife’s PC would simply get assigned and recalled (or I would take over if it didn’t make sense to have her disappear). I have every hope that I can make this work. Time may prove me a fool, but that never stopped me before.
- Expectations
I think it’s safe to say I’ve reached the “oh my god what am I doing here” phase. I hope it’s not like this every session. I’m trying to gear up for being a DM not so much as a rules-arbiter but more as a fun-causer. Dave the Game talks a lot about saying “yes” to your players whenever possible, and while I don’t want any more gorilla-incidents, that is what I plan to do. I plan to fail. Badly. Then, I plan to get up and try again as many times as it takes. That’s what they’re going to put on my tombstone. “Weird and Stubborn.”
I hope you enjoyed this glimpse as to what was in my brain during its last processor cycle. They say a man thinks about sex once every 10 seconds. Be glad it wasn’t that one.
Though I am nervous, I have a really good group of friends playing and I’m pretty much surrounded by the RPG equivalent of G.I. Joe Headquarters. I’ve got a lot going for me and I am so excited I might warp space-time. My group gets together on Thursday night. Some of them haven’t met, so we’re going to say hello and eat pizza, go over a social contract for the group, and I’m going to spend the rest of the time doing my damnedest to hook them into the story before we all turn into pumpkins promptly at 11pm (fact: pumpkin magic is all based on Eastern time.) It’s been awhile since I played on a weeknight.
Wish me luck! I shall recount the events that transpire in next week’s column.
P.S. if you’ve got any advice, for the love of Pelor, NOW’S THE TIME.
Loading ...
