Image Source: Necromancer games’ Mother of all Encounter Tables.
It’s Thursday and as I’ve seen a surge in reading on that day, what better time to serve a post of mini-musings? I’m playing tomorrow and I’m taking the evening off from prepping and blogging to recharge my mental batteries before the game. But as I get ready to play, the usual assault of ideas hits me…
Adapting a published adventure
Changing a published adventure is only a recent thing for me. I have more free time now that the kids are older and that I have a sane job. I feel more comfortable doing it do it more freely.
As I was finishing this week’s adventure prep, I realized something. There’s always at least one or two encounters that I can’t grasp or wrap my mind around. It’s either badly written or goes against my natural DMing style. Before, I would forge on and try to play it as is. It would almost always end up being in the forgettable parts of the evening.
Now I am more aware of this feeling and if, after 2 or 3 readings of the adventure, the scene or encounter still bugs me, off it goes.
Case in point: In tomorrow’s adventure, there was this polymorphed Bad guy who’s after the same secrets the players are. He poses as a friendly helper while in fact he’s the Big Bad of the campaing arc (and the focus of the 3rd adventure of the arc). He plans a few Red herrings along the way and is basically Mr Railroad. I don’t like this at all and my players won’t either. So off he went, replaced with a Crime Syndicate representative who’s very open about what he wants. No treachery and a good Ptolus discovery opportunity. I also dropped the 3rd adventure as my players are clamoring louder and louder that they want to go Plane-hopping pronto!
PC Deaths
Jonathan Drain talked about PC death on his blog recently. he mentions that the deaths of his players’ characters are among their own best souvenirs….
…
I must say that I have a hard time with this. And instead of throwing rotten vegetables at Jonathan (which would be totally undeserved as he makes an excellent point), I tried to put in words what bugged me.
I try real hard not to kill PCs because my players have invested so much time with them. Granted in D&D death is just a question of Money and regaining lost Experience but I can’t help but feel that my players see death as the ultimate uncoolness of failure.
Then it hit me this morning while listening the most excellent Muse track Knights of Cydonia
(Thanks Dave and Danny, I bought the album and it rules!). Why don’t I ask my players what they would be ready to let their characters die for? I never asked.
If they tell me then I can work on climatic once-a-season scenes in which those reasons come into play. If death occurs, then coolness can be preserved.
So I ask you: What would you accept your character dies for and what won’t you accept?
I for one reject all that is save or die! (well except Greywulf’s new e-zine…. ) but would willingly give my pet Halfling-Rogue PC’s life for the chance to touch the biggest most awesome piece of treasure in the land! I’d role play my death scene with a S#1t-eating grin and complain that I had the greatest of dreams when raised!
Grappling
Everybody hates grappling in D&D. I hate it, my players loathe it. While I could just stop using monsters that have improved grab and hope that 4e has a cool way of doing it, here is what I propose to do to fix it for my games until then.
- Size modifiers no longer applies to Grapple, your Size bonus to AC does (+1 per size instead of +4)
- You establish a grapple by winning an opposed grapple check, end of story.
- Weapon Finesse (Unarmed) allows you to use your Dex bonus instead of your strength. (Or maybe add this to improved Grab)
- Being grappled no longer drags you in your opponent’s square. If grappled at a distance, a creature could use grapplechecks to bring the grappled victim closer.
- You can’t move while grappled and both grapplers lose Dex bonus to AC.
- No longer do you have a 50% chance of hitting a friend in grapple
- You can strike with normal weapons and cast spell (Concentration check required)
Does that make it more bearable? You tell me.
All right, I have the Forming post all written up already and will post it tomorrow in order to give you something to read then. Have a nice weekend all.
Adaptation:
Every published adventure is there to be ruthlessly exploited. Sometimes this means letting the PCs wander around in a delightful wonderland that I’m glad someone else had the creativity to come up with, other times it means bulldozing and stripmining the place to get those few nuggets of goodness that I will smelt and reforge into something greater by my own hands, not the clumsy efforts of those who hid them away.
Grappling:
Yeah, I hate it in 3.5, too. It’s one of those things that makes me run screaming to other systems. I’m not sure how to make it work better in 3.5, though. Some of those seem to be good ideas, but the ‘attack with normal weapons’ bit strikes me as a bit much. If you’re wrestling with someone, it’s going to be darned hard to swing that longsword; they’re way, way inside your reach…
As for Improved Grab, why not make that a +4 to grapple checks, instead of the auto-grapple that it currently does?
PC Death:
This one is near and dear to my heart. It’s one of the things about RPGs that causes a lot of barracks philosophizing, which is great for the game, IMHO.
First, death in D&D is hardly a career ender. Only with lower-level clerics doing the bring-’em-back dance does it carry any sort of penalty.
O Death, where is thy sting?
From my Method Actor, Verisimilitude-craving point of view, Raise Dead/Ressurection cheapens the heroism of the PCs. Run into the burning building to rescue the orphans? No problem, if I don’t make it out, just drag out my charred corpse and have me raised. A valiant last stand? Don’t worry, I’m not really sacrificing anything; as long as you can recover some scrap of my body, I’ll be back and ready to go!
(Sure, you could have the orcs eat the body down to the last fingerbone, or the PC could be vaporized by lava, or whatever – but that’s gaming the mechanics of the system, not having a PC make a heroic self-sacrifice.)
Three things I have learned about roleplaying:
1) Conflict drives drama.
2) Sometimes, you just die.
3) Make your PCs (and others) death as much a part of their story as their life.
These are things that players should keep in mind. Without great conflict, there are no great achievements. Accept that there will be enormous challenges – who looks back on an easy encounter with pride? Who even remembers them?
Accept that there are times when you look up and the end is crashing down upon you; there’s nothing in the world that you can do about it…except die like a PC, not some nameless Commoner 1! Make the speech, utter the last blood-flecked words, make the heroic (or tragic) gesture, fight to the last breath!
For the player: Make the PCs death as important as their life.
This carries extra weight for the DM. The DM can squash any PC, anywhere, almost instantly. But that power must be exercised in the service of drama.
If the PCs death has no drama, if it has no meaning, then you’ve removed the thing that separates the PC from the NPC, and the player might as well have not shown up for the game.
For the GM: PC death must not be meaningless.
It must not be random and unpredictable; if ‘save or die’ is to be used, it must be from an opponent who is so powerful, so horrifying that that effect is what you’d expect.
Metagaming is sometimes the best way to handle PC death; it it’s known that it’s going to/could happen sometime in the future, then the player and DM should sit down and work out what would be a satisfyingly appropriate exit for the PC. If it comes in a flash, however, the player must accept observation #2, and think on their feet to make sure that #3 happens.
If the DM must be first to carry the burden of making sure that the story is good and dramatic, they players must share in that.
Noah! I love your comments and writings,I really do but I think you just broke my comments scripts!!!! 🙂
Seriously though, that discourse on death is worth pondering on. While I don’t plan on doing away with raising PCs as it’s ingrained in our shared D&D experience, I’ll think about it all.
Thanks for the Method actor/ Verisimilitude approach to it. It’s alien enough to me that it offers a fresh perspective… 🙂
And dude, seriously, get a freaking blog! You’ll have readers I guarantee it. 🙂
Or alternatively, submit me a Post and I’ll publish it as a Guest post! Something like the tortured-Soul player theater! 🙂
As for grappling
We actually don’t hate it. I’m a bit of a rules lawyer (in that I remember the rules, not that I enforce them at the cost of fun), so we’re able to do grappling without looking in the book. Last game, one player ended up grappling a large elemental. He was very pleased.
But you raise some good points. Let’s see.
Size modifiers no longer applies to Grapple, your Size bonus to AC does (+1 per size instead of +4)
I assume you mean the negative size mod to AC? Halflings getting +1 to grapple is a little odd.
You establish a grapple by winning an opposed grapple check, end of story.
ie. no touch attack?
Alright. The touch attack will almost always succeed, anyways. But this will make it very very easy to subdue, say, a pixie, whom you might never be able to get your hands on otherwise. The small, quick creatures/characters now have no little against grappling.
Weapon Finesse (Unarmed) allows you to use your Dex bonus instead of your strength. (Or maybe add this to improved Grab)
Helps the last point a tiny bit, but only if you give pixies weapon finesse unarmed. But even then, the size mod is a bitch, and they still have little defense.
My suggestion would be to allow strength or dex (whichever is higher) to apply to rolls when trying to resist or escape a grapple, for anyone. Finesse or improved grab will allow Dex to apply when you initiate a grapple, as well.
But keep the touch attack at least for anyone with a touch AC over 12-14. It shouldn’t be an easy task to grab a pixie.
Being grappled no longer drags you in your opponent’s square. If grappled at a distance, a creature could use grapplechecks to bring the grappled victim closer.
Sounds good, there. How do you propose handling attacks against the outstretched limb of the grappler?
For instance, we just fought a giant frog in RttToEE, who grapples us with his tongue. His tongue is now hanging out for a round until he can make another grapple check. I have a sword. What happens? How do you rule that? And what if it was his arm?
You can’t move while grappled and both grapplers lose Dex bonus to AC.
Um… that’s already the case.
Well, mostly.
The grapplers don’t lose their Dex against each other (I’d need a good reason why they would to accept that).
And by taking a -20 on the grapple check, you can grapple someone without being considered grappled yourself, meaning you can move (the other person comes with you), you retain your Dex, and you threaten squares, if you still have a limb/weapon to do so.
No longer do you have a 50% chance of hitting a friend in grapple
We don’t usually enforce that anyways. So sounds good.
You can strike with normal weapons and cast spell (Concentration check required)
I disagree with the attacking with normal weapons, on the same ground as noah. But you can already cast spells while grappling, if you make a concentration check and the spell takes no longer than a standard action to cast.
So, no offense, but it seems as though you dislike grappling, yet aren’t familiar with the rules around it. I realise that some of the rules are odd, of course, but at least a couple of your “fixes” already are a part of the core rules. I’d suggest familiarising yourself with them completely before changing them.
Post on death coming soon.
Fair enough… I must concede that I did not have the rules on hand (nor the SRD,s web page open) when i wrote that.
I’ll do a side by side analysis…
And I do, as a matter of fact, have a Pixie player in our group who hates being grappled like there’s no tomorrow… 🙂
On PC Death
I absolutely, positively, can not stand save-or-die effects. I was playing a d20 Modern game once, was at full health, and got hit by an enemy. I was told to make a Fort save, failed, and was then told I was dead.
I couldn’t believe it. At level 3 or so, an enemy that has a save-or-die effect on his normal attack, in a game without resurrection? I was livid.
We later discovered that the effect was actually the equivalent of a d20 Modern massive damage save, where you drop to -1 hp and begin to die, not drop to -10. The former gives your party a good chance to save you.
In any case, we have rewritten every save-or-die effect in D&D at this point. We removed some, we made some drop you to -1, and we made the Phantasmal Killer and Wail of the Banshee drop your Int and Cha (and Wis for Wail) to 0, effectively paralysing you and removing you from the battle. Same as death for enemies, recoverable for PCs.
As for when I would accept death, it when I volunteer for it, and know it’s a possibility. Whether that’s by giving my all in a drawn-out huge battle, knowing that I’m getting weaker, or by voluntarily putting myself in a situation where it’s possible. My characters are usually the types that would give up their own safety for the safety of another, and I have no problem with character death if it did some good along the way.
Those are when I’d gladly accept my death. But I have no problem with character death in most cases, as long as I can see that it’s a possibility. If it’s sudden and unexpected, then I dislike it, but if I’m wounded and fighting, I can always accept it.
As another example, from when I was GMing, the party wizard rushed into a beholder’s lair, and started blasting at it. Initiative was rolled, the beholder won, and he couldn’t see the rest of the party. So, disintegrate ray (failed his fort save, rolled the damage, he was dead, until we remembered we hadn’t rolled the attack roll which, somehow, missed), followed by flesh-to-stone (success) and telekinesis (violent thrust the statue into a wall, goes shattery).
The player didn’t mind, as he knew what he did was stupid and that death was a serious possibility.
(His hastily-rolled-up substitute character later went on to one-shot the BBEG. This was my City of the Spider Queen adventure.)
Great stuff Noah! It as always striked me as weird in D&D that death was so meaningless…
Its impact unto its society is rarelly taken into account. If every ennemy you encounter as the potential of returning from the dead what do you do?
For simplcities sake most DM will just take it into account for player but then again it should at least affect the behavior of your ennemies. “If I kill him they’ll just raise him back. Better capture him, torture him until he goes insane and then release him. That way he won’t be a thorn in my side again.” point is its not some little things that should just be taken for granted.
Personnally it feels like a safety net put into place in D&D because of the save or die crap. Remove this and increase the uncounscious buffer zone and you won’t have to worry about accidental death. That should bring back the meaning to self sacrifice… 😉
Wow by the time i had post my comment 3 other had been written…
I’ll comeback later to take in, Ve4grm’s comments. But seems like good point. 😉
On Death: So what I gather from the conversation so far is:
1) Get rid of Save or Die. Ve4’s hacks sound great! Agreed!
2) Make Returning form life a lot less accessible. More plot device than Save point.
3) Make death mean something and happen for a damn good reason. (be it Method Actor imposed stubbornness or self-sacrifice)
Gotcha! Thanks!
On casting spells while grappling, I forgot to mention the part where you can’t normally cast spells with somatic or material components.
That’s probably because I ignore this rule (and material components in general). I allow casting, so long as you make the Concentration check and it isn’t longer than a standard action.
Which is probably what your fix was going for in any case.
We played last night and I ended up not using grappling when I had a tentacled monster hit a PC. The look of gratitude from my players was worth it.
Until a player asked to Overrun someone…. Sigh….
I’m really liking ve4grm’s hacks; those I’ve stolen for my files. 🙂
(I’ve also found that there was a bunch of stuff that D20 Modern did that I thought would be great for D&D.)
As for Phil…
“And dude, seriously, get a freaking blog! You’ll have readers I guarantee it. :)”
That’s coming soon, at least for the game I’ll be running in 2 weeks. 🙂
I’m really liking ve4grm’s hacks; those I’ve stolen for my files. 🙂
Thanks. I actually got one part wrong, though.
Wail of the Banshee doesn’t kill/paralyse/whatever anymore. Instead, it causes an Insanity effect (as the spell) for everyone in range.
That hack was written a while back, though, and we haven’t played any high-level stuff since. I may change it to Int/Wis/Cha reduced to 0.
Finger of Death, Slay Living, and Destruction have essentially been removed from our games (anything the players use, the monsters can use against them, and the players don’t find them fun), but the “drop to -1” is a much more acceptable option.
(I’ve also found that there was a bunch of stuff that D20 Modern did that I thought would be great for D&D.)
Yeah, that inspired a lot of my game design and GMing, ever since I first ran a game of it. It’s a good system.
Consider the ideas “borrowed” Ve4grm!