By level 6 the players were starting to get into a groove, both in party style and in how they worked in the campaign. They’d paid their dues in the early levels, fought some goblins and hobgoblins and such, and beaten their first tower guardian. They were ready for something more exciting than forests and hills. But they were still heroic tier, not high enough level to get to the really fun parts. They needed to go through places and challenges more exciting than starting quests but not so extreme that they couldn’t handle it. In a sense, they needed to find their limitations and how to get past them so they could move on. It was only fitting that their tower guardian was the same.
To be as pithy as possible, Rody was Alex with two campaigns’ more experience and three more rulebooks. While Alex was limited to the rules as written, Rody was working on finding his own voice separate from the vanilla DM the books described. He was very willing and at least partially ready to explore things that the rules didn’t cover to see how he, the players, and the system could handle it. At the same time he held some disdain for the mundane environments of the lower floors and for the party itself.
Rody fell perfectly into the escalation of the tower floors. He still used mundane environments, but he tweaked them in some way to make them a little more fantastic. He sent the players into caves, but with a whole ecosystem that threatened the party instead of a single boss leading a group of humanoids. He gave them a swamp, but one made of poison. He gave them ruins, but with competing players stalking and attacking them more than hostile monsters. In each case he kept the framework of ordinary D&D but modified it a bit to work with his own voice and with the player’s desire for more interesting challenges.
The hardest part of running Rody was figure out how to get some things right and some things wrong intentionally. I wanted Rody to look like somebody who knew what he was doing, but not entirely. Luckily I didn’t really know what I was doing either, so it worked out, though I certainly made mistakes I hadn’t intended.
Some things that went well deserved it. Floor 6 had four groups warring for dominance over the caves, and the players could choose any one of them to fight. Each of them was a sufficient challenge for the players to advance, so they got to measure the threats and pick the one they thought they were best able to stop. Instead of a simple “there are monsters, kill they” plot there were elements of fighting, stealth, and potentially diplomacy in each option. Rody had progressed beyond a video-gaming-style idea of “challenge the players” and was giving them choice and more varied activities.
Some things that went well didn’t deserve it. On floor 10 the party met a group of goliaths, the same race as Rody. They challenged the party to a game of goatball, which Races of Stone tells me is a common goliath pastime. This was supposed to be a bit of racial arrogance on Rody’s part; the last allies the party would meet are goliaths, and to get the golaiths’ help they had to win at a goliath game, because of course goatball is an appropriate measure of heroism. But the party took to it like fish to water. Or, to be more exact, they took to cheating at it. The wizard managed to score at least two goals with a combination of mage hand and the referee’s terrible Insight checks, and there were many skill checks to advance the game in “ain’t no rule” ways. The players won easily, and not by following the rules of the game but by inflicting themselves upon it. We retold stories from that session for months.
Some things didn’t go well like hexes, which deserved success, and flying, which didn’t (though I suppose I’m not the best judge of which of my ideas deserved to succeed). Except for the area of blasts (which I think I understand now, partially, perhaps) 4E seems made for hex-based movement: heavy combat focus, no facing, non-Euclidian distances, probably other reasons. So I tried a combat using hexes. But in what I promise is an unusual display of terrible foresight I also put the players on flying vessels that had a maximum turning radius and minimum forward speed. In my mind it made sense because I cut my teeth on hexes with airplane-based board games. But to the players it was two new, weird mechanics at once, one of which limited their options in combat. I think since both happened at once the flying soured them on hexes. We never tried either again.
But that’s what Rody was about, trying things and seeing what happened. He was a DM with a few campaigns under his belt and he wanted to push the limits of the system to see what bent and what broke. And it helped a lot that I was doing the same. The session between goatball and hexes was the session where I first tested my system for skill challenges, finding the original system lacking. I was designing monsters with new, weird powers. I was giving the players combats made entirely of minions (fun fact, players can handle a lot more minions than the experience point budget thinks they can). I was finally comfortable enough with the game to give the players my favorite sort of puzzle, the type where I don’t know the solution but I expect them to figure something out while I adjudicate it.
At the same time Rody and I still fell into some of the traps of beginning DMs, mostly around “if I like X, my players will.” Mechanically he liked ranged attackers, traps, and damaging terrain (that is, terrain that damages players, not destructible environments). Besides the aforementioned love of goliaths he also liked humanoid enemies rather than monstrous creatures (another trait he shares with me). He liked self-important simultaneously-endearing-and-annoying enemies (a trait my players assure me he shares with me), like the shadar-kai who insisted his name was “Sir” and The Orb who spoke only in third person, who could be beaten with diplomacy. He preferred smaller environments to lands that could conceivably expand infinitely. His opportunity for sending giant constructs at the party was limited by the party level, but he still managed to hit them with one when the players fought him.
I don’t think the players ever picked up on Rody’s list of likes or dislikes. I guess that’s good in that they didn’t roll their eyes and say “oh, a gnoll archer behind a pit of acid, how surprising.” At the time they may have been feeling out their own characters as well, focusing more on how to work with each other and themselves more than the scenery of their story. So Rody was largely left to do whatever he wanted as long as it wasn’t disruptive to the game. It was probably for the best; when a DM is trying to find his voice, nothing shuts him down like the players telling him to shut up.
They did quickly figure out that he was their enemy and he knew it. He had been DMing long enough to know that the players were going to do everything they could to ruin the world he had made, but not long enough to plan for or encourage it. To him the floors were the hero and the players were the villains. They deserved whatever challenges he threw at them (hence a floor made mostly of poison) and if they couldn’t handle it that was their own fault. But he still knew enough to keep things fair and always give them a way out whether they took it or found their own. And, of course, his section of the floor ended with the players beating him and his giant construct in combat. A DM is allowed to be antagonistic if that’s what everybody wants, but he should expect to lose.
The party wasn’t quite as forgiving for the next DM. While they accepted her style, I think they grew weary of it over time despite her attempts to keep things fresh. But that’s another post.