bruceb

Today I went ahead a bit a bullet: I've put both my D&D games on hiatus, and well reappraise things on or around the Ides of March. I want to make them work, but after two solid months of it not happening, I think that the stress of trying and failing every week is much worse than the disappointment of waiting in hopes of a break.

I may well try some experiments in very-low-mechanics non-real-time play, but that's to decide some other time. For now, assimilating this (and the WoW-related changes I wrote about for Shift-T) will be some days' work.

...since I last wrote "I've delivered a completed draft to the publisher"? Maybe since Hollow Earth Expeditions, yes? Well...

I've delivered a completed draft to the publisher.

It's not long. And it wasn't exciting to write. But it's one of those things that I'm going to use myself, a lot, and I suspect others will too. What it is...well, heck, I'll just quote a bit.

Level 11
Ability Scores: Assign starting scores; add 1 to each ability, then distribute 4 bonus points.
Paragon Path: Your character is on a paragon path. Choose one and write down the features gained at level 11.
Passive Perception and Insight: 5 + your character’s Wisdom modifier
Initiative: +5 + your character’s Dexterity modifier
Armor Class: +5 + bonuses from armor and shield, + your character’s Dexterity or Intelligence modifier if they’re wearing light or no armor
Fortitude Defense: 15 + your character’s Strength or Constitution modifier
Reflex Defense: 15 + your character’s Dexterity or Intelligence modifier
Will Defense: 15 + your character’s Wisdom or Charisma modifier
Basic Melee Attack: +5 + your character’s Strength modifier
Basic Ranged Attack: +5 + your character’s Dexterity modifier
Trained Skills: +10 + the modifier for that skill’s ability
Untrained Skills: +5 + the modifier for that skill’s ability
Feats: 7
At-Will Powers: 2
Per-Encounter Powers: 4 (1 from paragon tier)
Daily Powers: 3
Utility Powers: 3

Like that, for every level, with a few explanatory notes. Look for it soon from Adamant Entertainment. (Yes, of course I'll have a link to vendor sites when Gareth is done with it.)

This struck me yesterday while reflecting on comments from people like mearls and rob_donoghue about encounter design for D&D 4th edition:

Include at least one movable, usable object per PC in each encounter.

It could be a table, a chair, a brazier, a bookcase, an orrery, whatever. Just make it something the PCs can pick up, shove around, or otherwise manipulate. And, perhaps, that their enemies can too.

We had our second session at last, and all I can do is quote....

DM: Jervis, this little bridge you're on crosses a pit of lava. The pyramids are about ten feet high, the bridge rising to five feet above the level of the surrounding floor.

DM: And you see what was moving at the far end of the room!

Jervis: Whoa!

DM: Two giant mechanical eyeballs, constructed of many tiny metal balls and irregular pieces whirling through the air.

Jervis: "Giant floating eyes, guys! Giant eyes!"

Darlass: "Really? Do they look dangerous?"

Jervis: "They look like giant floating eyeballs!"

Aron Mot: "Are they ...looking at you?"

Jervis: "There's two of them over here! It's pretty awesome!"

Jervis: (( Are they? ))

DM: They are, in fact. The myriad pieces making up lids lifted and settled, revealing five-foot spheres in the colors shown, which do turn to look at you.

Jervis: "Yeah, they're looking at me! It's pretty but also I might die!"

{later}

Jervis: Booming blade on the eye adjacent to me, Aegis of Shielding on the other one.

* jeff rolls: 1d20+7 => 10 + 7 = 17

Jervis: That's vs. AC
DM: That's a hit. Remind me of the effects.

Jervis: WOO LIGHTNING POWER!

Jervis: 1d8+5 damage on hit and 1d6+2 thunder damage if target moves away from me on next action)

DM: Oh, nice!

* jeff rolls: 1d8+5 => 4 + 5 = 9

Jervis: And if the other one attacks someone who isn't me, it's at -2 to hit and -7 to damage.

DM: The eye explodes as a coherent unit, pieces falling to the ground...and swarming at you. (Hey, Brendan Fraser's been here before.)

{Jervis' pog for MapTool is a picture of Brendan Fraser.}

Jervis: "HEY GUYS PIECES OF EYE ARE EATING ME!"

Jervis: "JUST A HEADS-UP!"

DM: (*laugh out loud*)

Darlass: "AS A SUGGESTION, MAYBE YOU SHOULD HOLD BACK ON ATTACKING THE GIANT FLOATING METAL THINGS"

Jervis: "IT WAS LOOKING AT ME WITH ITS... SELF"

Aron Mot: "And here I was going to say, 'Try not to make the eyes angry. They're just looking at you, after all.'" he says half to himself...

Darlass: "REMIND ME NOT TO STARE AT YOU"

{And that's how the game went. I had a great time.}

Another good session, from my point of view. The set piece this time was a trap encounter, a freshly abandoned dig site operated by malevolent NPCs now on the run, loaded up with all kinds of goodies. There was very little actual injury, but (from my point of view, at least) a high level of suspense, and I liked that a lot.

More later. :)

I just wrapped up session #3 of the Tuesday campaign, and it was good. I feel like I'm hitting my mark when it comes to distilling things down for online play and time slot - it looks like planning one big set piece and some general roleplay and exploration is the way to go. Once again, the players cleverly subverted a lot of my lead-in and setup prep, and I'm delighted. The point, after all, is for heroes to triumph over adversity, if they work at it with courage and cleverness. Working as intended.

I like Maptool. I just have to budget more time to actually finish set pieces a bit before game time, but it does a lot, and now that I've seen the video tutorials I understand it.

Possibly my favorite line of the session, as the aristocratic rogue checks out mysterious small holes in a deep tunnel:

* Valek crouches, catlike, sliding the end of the rod into one of the small passages. "I hope I don't end up with a dashing eyepatch for my trouble," he grouses.

I'm in a bit of a bad way this weekend - on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "I'm as good as I get" and 10 is "bed, blanky, bye-bye", I'm somewhere in the middle, maybe 5.5 or so. This is annoying territory. I'm okay as long as I don't do anything, basically. :-/ More specifically, I'm okay as long as I don't do anything new. My ability to take on anything unfamiliar collapses more quickly than my ability to manage routine, familiar actions. So I'm going to coast today.

If I feel better in the afternoon or evening, I'll fire up the Jacob's ladders then.

We ran long, but that's gonna happen sometimes as we all get the hang of it. Only three players could make it, but I just trimmed my planned fight scene for a bit and went ahead. They evaded the setup for a skill challenge thanks to unexpected choices of action, but that's okay, it's a modular thing I can use another time, and plunged with adequate heroism into the fray against mysterious bad guys. Whom they slaughtered. Now comes interrogating the one one who surrendered, in e-mail before next session.

Once again, a wonderful time. One of the players, jeffwik, already has a fair amount of 4e experience, and he discovered that not only do we like it when knowledgeable people suggest cool things to do others had missed, we welcome it. So that was extra great.

An amusing snippet from early on:

Aron Mot avoided the spices with suspicious names like "dragon's breath" while shopping, so, lunch goes well for him.

Jervis has a sandwich heavily spiced with dragon's breath, medusa's glare, and owlberries.

Aron Mot blinks a bit just at the _smell_ wafting over from Jervis' sandwich.

Later/tomorrow/etc, some more comments.

Last week, as some of you may recall, I had to cancel my Tuesday D&D session because of last-minute illness. Tonight it worked. We had a touch under three hours of pure conversational roleplay, as the characters bounced off each other and with the authorities of the local mining settlement. Secrets were revealed, mysteries raised and pondered, and the price of khumiss discussed. The players repeatedly made me laugh out loud. Here, for instance. Kairon is a tiefling paladin, Ninieel a half-elf fighter with a lot more exuberance than profound wisdom. Valek is somewhere in between the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Scarlet Pumpernickle in general presentation.

DM: The herbalist spreads his hands. "Nobody's ever proven that the troglodytes are descended from miners who lost their bindings to the sun and surface. But it seems likely enough. If we knew more about their warrens, we might even go after them, but they live in places that aren't even on our maps anymore. So much was lost when the demons broke free." He smiles politely to Kairon. "That is, when those who deserved shackles did. No offense intended against your worthy self, or your holy calling."

Ninieel blinks at Valek, then snaps her fingers. "MAP!"

Ninieel: "I didn't get anything he said beside 'bedding', but MAN!" SHe pokes both males. "MAP! We have a MAP!"

DM: The herbalist looks curious. "A map capable of making your strong friend here interested? A rare lore indeed."

Valek: "A telling shot, sirrah, but Nineel did recover yon document from the trogs."

Ninieel: "Oh... It's going to interest YOU!" She chuckles and urges the others to show the map.

Ninieel blinks again, then turns to Aria, but pointing at the herbalist. "Did he just call me dumb?"

They do a great job handing each other setups - nobody seems to want to score points at each others' expense, at least not at the player level. All I have to do is toss in an occasional nugget of info and off they go.

Next time, I hope, some slugging to go with the banter.

Scorecard: 2 sessions in 3 weeks. Shooting for 25 sessions in 52 weeks. Anything beyond that is dessert.

I'd like a form that I could fill in and print out with the key stats for each PC and space to note their powers, with maybe 2-4 characters per page. Anyone got something like that?

So there I was, setting up for tonight's game. I'd gotten myself a bit of a treat in my last grocery order - a couple of little pastries to enjoy snacking on as I DMed - and had one of them along with some water. This was an hour or so before the first players would log on. I started feeling worse and worse almost immediately, but struggled to pull myself together. Got Gametable up, players on, settled a few questions, but felt worse and worse...

Then came 10 minutes of vomiting. And a respite. And another 10. And so on for some time. It's not altogether settled yet, but I think the worst is past. Still had to cancel the game, which is a real downer. As nearly as I can tell, something bad for me that I didn't think to check for was in the pastry.

*sigh*

Mending time, I guess.

Update: It's not just me tonight.

It was a really long time between last night's 4th edition D&D game and the previous time I'd used miniatures of any kind in roleplaying. Not quite twenty years, but more than fifteen, unless I'm forgetting something. It turns out that the secret to making me interested in using them again is very simple:

Make the powers available to characters and antagonists things I find cool, and make the use of minis support that coolness.

Take, for instance, a bit near the end of last night's fight scene. The PCs were winning their fight against an ambushing bunch of degenerate cave dwellers, but a few still remained, and one was getting away. The group's rogue dashed after it and used Positioning Strike to steer it back toward a conveniently positioned big brazier. I thought, "I've seen this maneuver before." And indeed I have, countless times, in film and print: Captain Blood or Robin Hood or the Rose of Versailles or whoever has their enemy at the tip of their blade (perhaps just touching the throat, or poised above the heart) and steers them around. It's something I wanted to do in one of the first D&D games I played, only to find that while I could describe it, it wouldn't actually matter to gameplay. But having it written up as a per-encounter exploit means that it does matter by default when Valek does it: the fact that he can only do it once per encounter puts some significance on it, and the effect definitely mattered to that part of the fight, since the proto-dero ended up dying in a fire. (Today on Proverbs Illustrated, DIAF...)

I got to scratch an itch of more than thirty years' standing with that one maneuver. :)

The other characters' powers had the same pattern, for me: using Gametable to track everyone's position supported the characters doing cool things I was happy to see in play.

So now I know.

I had my first session of the Tuesday evening campaign tonight, and it was a real delight. I was as much of a noob DM as I expected to be, but the players didn't hold it against me. We're playing with Gametable's text chat unaugmented by voice - there was a strong consensus in favor of that as good for the roleplaying - and even with all the noobishness and everything, in three and a half hours hours we:

- Got the characters together with a mysterious summons from an unseen authority.
- Introduced them to each other, with enough purple prose to make my office feel like a shrine to Prince.
- Had a skill challenge, when the apparent local authority proved to be a mere thief stealing the documents summoning them to a big construction project far from the parts of the city they know. In the end the characters didn't quite catch him, but it was fun along the way.
- Had a fight, when degenerate flabby white-skinned cave dwellers ambushed the characters on the way to their rendezvous despite now lacking their official documents. It ended in complete victory, and in the recovery of a very old map of the engineering project they're in now.

A log and further comments later. For now....

Whee!

(By the way, if anyone wants to tell me how much the game sucks, or how it's no fun for them, or anything like that, I'm just gonna nuke it. This is me sharing my personal pleasure with you. There will time for criticism in other threads. Thank you.)

Looks like Tuesday evening will the first session for one of my two groups. The players have been busy, to put it mildly. Early results are at my new D&D wiki, and I am really, really happy. So far the Tuesday folks have been more active than the Thursday crew, but both are setting up some glorious high-adventure strangeness.

Memory always places us false, in some degree. We don't remember entire scenes; we remember cues around which we reconstruct - invent - the rest of the details. This isn't me philosophizing, this is me pointing at the ongoing results of medical research. With that in mind, I like to take the time sometimes to revisit old experiences and see how things look to me now.

It's no secret to my readership that I think early D&D was a miserable failure at delivering what I hoped for from it. But was I kidding myself? I've got the PDFs of the original three brown booklets, so I can go ahead and take a look.

( In a moment, the results of that trial. )

I've finalized the roster for what turned out to be two complete sets of five players for D&D, and we're poking at thematic, setting, and such-like issues. Early responses suggest that one group will be exploring a world of vast deserts punctuated by epic ruins, sailing over them via an airship uncovered in early sessions, while the other may be spending time in vast decadent city/cities, where the points of light are neighborhoods in the midst of ruin and vileness.

This is what makes me giddy.

I've had opportunities for the evocation of exuberance in my gaming design and writing, and taken them, and been glad for them. But I haven't had much chance for this sort of really free-wheeling let-loose-the-hounds-of-fannishness playfulness. And I like it. A lot.

It just feels so great to kick back and thing that swipes from Donaldson and Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and Lee and Peake and Borges and Kirby and and and are not just okay, but actively desirable. There will be looming evils to smite and ancient wonders to discover and innocents to rescue and it will just be great. I hope. :)

I've seen some talk about spreadsheets or whatever that can accommodate the between-sessions details and generate nice simple-for-use-in-play output. I have cleverly not bookmarked any of that. If you have such a thing, or know where I can go look at one, please speak up!

I am, as some of you already know, a tremendous fan of the Vampire: The Reckoning supplement Damnation City. I do think it's one of the best, most tremendously useful resource books for any game line published this decade. It is, of course, first and foremost a gloriously useful tool for...

...yes, this has D&D content, the subject line isn't misleading, hold your horses....

...for V:TR chronicle building. It's also good for any modern-day game with an urban environment full of corruption, decay, and evil.

It just dawned on me tonight that Damnation City is also a great resource for building cities in the spirit of Lankhmar, the City of Wonders, and the like (or for that matter a riff on Helium, or Bey Su, or whatever). Take the districts in chapter 5. There are forty-odd of them, and of those, more than forty survive as is or with the simple change of ethnicity:

Asylum, Cathedral, Chinatown, City Courts, City Hall, Corporate Sector, Elysium, Fashion Circuit, Financial Sector, Gallery Circuit, Harbor 1-2, Industrial Works, Latin Quarter, Library, Little Italy, Media Sector, Medical Center, Mercantile District 1-3, Morgue, Mosque, Museum, Nightclub Circuit 12, Nobility Hill 1-3, Police Department, Projects 1-2, Sewers 1-2, Slums 1-6, Synagogue, Theater Circuit, University

The following work with changes reflecting different technology and magic:

Airport, Bus Station, Chemical Plant, Metro Underground, Power Plant, Rail Station, Waste Plant

Each of these entries has modifiers for physical, mental, and social activity in the area and qualities good or bad as a haven, plus general description and suggestions for using it in play. Mix 'em up, lay 'em out, or just use the provided example of Newcastle, which gets a whole chapter of its own and would make a great...well, how about it being one of the cities that trades with Freeport?

But it's not just locations. It's got styles of leadership, all of which apply just fine to swords & sorcery and the points-of-light style. It's got a discussion of secret travel routes from high above ground to far below the surface. It's got goals for NPCs and memorable personalities. It's got moods and virtues for neighborhoods, with modifiers that work great as circumstance bonuses or penalties in D&D. It's got rules for urban chases, complete with the use of neighborhood and district boundaries to help or hinder the chase. It's got...a lot more stuff like that.

If you want to do up an original yet evocative ancient sprawling city steeped in challenge and peril, you could do a lot worse than to get Damnation City. It makes city-building productively fun.

A very enthusiastic tip of the hat to mearls here, for inviting me to join in a new Facebook game. I started playing, got hooked, and invited more friends to share the fun. :) And now I have a review up at Tor.com. What a hoot this is.