Wish

Posted on 5 January, 2017 by MssngrDeath

Some years ago, when I frequented the Wizards D&D message boards, there was a user whose signature said something to the effect of “the spiked chain exists to find the DMs brave enough to ban Core material”. That is, the spiked chain is intentionally broken, and it should be stripped from the system even though it’s in the very first rulebook, and this is a secret test of character to find which DMs are truly good. I’ve never been sure whether this was a self-satisfied delusion from a lone DM who thought they spoke for everybody, or a cry for help from a player who’d seen too many games go bad because of rules abuse. The very concept that a single item could damage the game that badly seemed alien to me, and it still does.

I generally argue that there’s nothing in the rules guaranteed to be a game-breaker. Some things are incredibly powerful in specific situations or combinations, like the blaster sorcerer with access to every cure spell or the monk who can jump so far all witnesses become their slavering sycophants. But in a cooperative game, you can usually solve these by telling the player “hey, that’s not fun, can you power it down some?”. A lot of these builds are complicated structures, where if the player removes a single feat or spell they remain powerful but no longer disgustingly so. And even if they don’t, there’s usually a way around these builds if you’re willing to exploit them. Nothing can turn a game upside-down on its own. Only specific, borderline malicious actions you take with those items can.

Still, I’ll admit it’s easier to cause a problem with some things than others. It’s easier to do insane damage with a hulking hurler than with a samurai, with haste than with a two-weapon fighting tree, and with a vampire than with a gnome. Some things require a more delicate hand to keep things fun for everybody.

Chief among these things, of course, is the spell wish. Wish is less a spell in the rulebook and more a creature of legend, a dusty passage in the back of the Player’s Handbook included for completeness but not to be taken seriously, in the same way the edge of a map might say “here there be tigers”. DMs treat it as a nuclear option, so enemy wizards and demons can fiat their way out of a bad situation, and as a campaign capstone reward, so players can satisfy their desire for ludicrous requests but the DM absolves themselves of adjudicating the consequences. In the eyes of D&D players, it’s not there to be realistically used.

Wish does have game-breaking potential. Its powers are intentionally loosely defined, though they include “pluck anybody from anywhere in existence and deposit them anywhere else in existence”, “heal maladies at the level of a deity walking the earth”, and “be an 8th-level spell, because why not”. It’s this ambiguity that causes the problem. DMs are worried players will use the wish too well, either getting themselves some distressingly powerful gear, granting themselves a disruptive power, or sabotaging the game’s intended direction. Players are worried they won’t use the wish well enough, and the DM will interpret their request in whatever way hurts the player the most. It’s a cold war where neither side wants to use wish because they’re worried the other side will twist it out of control.

Well, we’re in a campaign with genies, so I figured wish was going to come up at some point. In our last session the players befriended a malik, and here are their wishes:

  1. As many diamonds as wish can create, teleported to the party’s home base.
  2. Eternal youth for the party’s middle-aged leader. Specifically, “I wish to enjoy the physical benefits of youth forever.”
  3. The exact location of their missing party member, since the point of the campaign was to find her.

An astute reader may notice that these are the exact concerns I gave above about how players can damage the game with wish: inordinate wealth, a disruptive power, and a near-instant solution to the campaign’s driving conflict. They also all gave me ways to hurt the players with them: they didn’t specify the source of the diamonds, they left “eternal youth” open-ended, and they asked for a location open to misinterpretation. We were set up to demonstrate everything wrong with wish.

And here’s where we get back to my original argument: there’s nothing wrong with wish, just with how you use it. My players and I do not have an antagonistic relationship, no matter how much we I pretend we do. All of us knew the pitfalls of wish, and not only did we avoid some, we deliberately invoked others. When the players asked for wealth, they explicitly noted that they did not specify from where the diamonds came, expecting it to be a plot point later (their origin is, of course, a spoiler). When they asked for youth, they deliberately chose an open-ended wording and left the rest to me. I puzzled over it for a few days trying to find an option that gave the player what they wanted but didn’t punish them inordinately for it, because I didn’t want to ruin the character any more than they did.

Most importantly, they didn’t actually ask for their ally’s location. First they tried to annul the contract that caused their ally to leave in the first place, and I told them that wasn’t possible, as that actually would end the campaign. They then asked if they could find out where she was, so I looked through rulebooks until I found a spell they could duplicate that did exactly that, and I adjusted my plans to compensate for cutting out a few sessions of trying to find her. We worked together to find a solution that met both the characters’ criteria and the players’, and chief among the players’ was “this is a good game and I want to play it next week too.” There was no battle of wits, no attempt to damage each other’s play experience, and as a result this overtly powerful spell not only didn’t break the game, it improved it.

Wish isn’t the problem. Neither are the spiked chain or the hulking hurler or firearms that target touch AC. The problem is an antagonistic relationship between players and DMs. Somewhere along the line, we as a hobby decided this was how the game should be run, with the DM trying to prove his or her mastery over the game while the players try to outsmart them at every turn, and that’s rubbish. You don’t solve a problem like that by pruning every part of the rules with the potential for abuse. You solve a problem like that by not abusing them.

Posted in Campaigns, DMing, Laws | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

The Art of Art

Posted on 24 December, 2016 by MssngrDeath

Our campaigns tend to have three names: an real one, a colloquial one, and a snarky one. I’ve talked about how The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori quickly became The Monster-Hunting Campaign and soon after became The Monster-Friending Campaign. Less frequently used are the transition from The Eight Arms and the Shadow Invasion to The First Eight Arms campaign to Victorian Greyhawk (especially interesting because the campaign is set in neither the Victorian era nor Greyhawk), or from Fortune and Glory, Kid to The Mystara Campaign to The Terrible, Terrible Mystara Campaign. Our current campaign is no exception. Ostensibly its name is The Eight Arms and the Contract of Barl, but before it even started it became The Plane-Hopping Campaign. It doesn’t have an official snark name yet, but I’d like to propose The Art Campaign.

Visual art is a double-edged sword in deliberately non-visual media like tabletop gaming. When done well, it can put everybody on the same page about something or provide seeds for exploration and investigation or give the players that sense of wonder they can’t get from a simple description of “a big city on an island”. I’ve had whole adventures happen because I found a piece of art for an area, saw something in it, and adopted it into the session, or because I found a picture of a character and decide he or she was too awesome to not use. When done poorly, it disrupts the players’ mental picture or changes the style of the game to something you don’t want or provides a source of endless frustration as you search and search for the perfect piece of art that you know exists but can’t find. Nothing throws me out of whack like seeing five characters in five different art styles and being told they all exist next to each other in the same space.

Contract of Barl, weirdly is doing both. I knew it was going to be an art-heavy campaign from the start because of the plane-hopping. Places like Bytopia are inherently weird and we need a visual frame of reference to understand why it’s different from what we expect and how it works. I also decided it was high time to populate the campaign wiki with pictures, after I spent something like days getting the wiki to accept file uploads in the first place. Everything kind of came together here and now to make this the campaign about visuals.

The good news is that we’re in the process of getting character portraits for key Eight Arms personnel and it’s going absolutely swimmingly. Before too long we should have all the characters in this campaign, and then it’s on to the founders from the original campaign. They seem to keep popping up in stories even if their players don’t, so it strikes me as a good investment, and a bit of a present to the players for putting up with me. It you’re as thrilled with the portraits as I am, that picture is a link.

The bad news is just about everything else. Art of the planes is a great idea, but a lot of the planes and the sites on them are really specific. Bytopia is a plane of communities and civilization, except the sky is another parallel continent of untamed wilderness, and you will be hard-pressed to find a picture of that without very definitely finding a picture specifically intended as Bytopia. The more generic the plane, the easier it is to find art of it, but the more boring the plane itself is. A true plane-hopping campaign needs to go to the weird places, and I’m finding myself making do with whatever I can cobble together with all the Photoshop skills of a sleepy koala.

The monsters are no better. Past campaigns have had enemies like orcs (incredibly common as long as you like the World of Warcraft style, and I do), weird nightmare creatures (also easy, especially if you look for art and build the monster around it), animals (DeviantArt loves weird animals so much I’m not even kidding) or simple, actual human beings. The most relevant creatures in this campaign are efreet, which are not illustrated all that commonly. I can’t really do a search for “like a genie, except with red skin and horns and legs instead of trailing off into wispiness.” The closest I can find are devils, but even that’s a generic term and I end up searching through hundreds of pictures to find one or two I can use. Then consider the most common PC race in the campaign, ifrits, who are normal people but their skin is orange and their hair is on fire. They’re pretty much Pathfinder-exclusive, and finding art of them that isn’t from a Paizo book is rough. Then come fire giants, which you’d think would be fairly common, but no. I managed to come away from my search with maybe two good fire giant pictures, which is significantly lower than the number I need.

Sometimes when I hit walls like this I can take a step back, reconsider what I’m doing, and come up with an alternative that fits my resources. Here that’s not as possible. This is a planar campaign, and we need pictures of planes. It’s a campaign about an ifrit, and we need pictures of ifrits. The Zelda campaign had exacting standards for what worked and didn’t work for enemy portraits because the players already had an expectation for every monster, and I still spent less time for better results than I am on this campaign. I’m mostly finding whatever art I can, then building NPCs and locations around it, which means the art is defining the campaign even more than normal. It’s working out okay so far, but it’s not great and I worry it’s unsustainable.

So for better or worse, this campaign is as much about art as it is anything else. I’m not happy about it, but I’m happier struggling through pictures than I am changing the campaign concept. It does make me long a bit for the days before DMing software, where I described things to players instead. There were misconceptions and misinterpretations, and we regularly forgot ongoing status effects or hit point changes, and I had to print or write monster stats to bring them to a session, and the more I reminisce about them the worse those dark ages actually sounds. But at least I spent less time on Google Image Search.

Posted in DMing | Tagged | 2 Comments

House Rule: Three-Axis Cosmology

Posted on 18 December, 2016 by MssngrDeath

Especially astute readers may have picked up on this in the last article:

…the players suffered a planar travel mishap and ended up on Carceri, the plane of prisons…Instead I told the players on their way out the door that they had actually landed on Utopia, the plane of city.

This is important because they’re mutually exclusive. The Pathfinder planar cosmology has Utopia but not Carceri, and D&D’s Great Wheel has Carceri but not Utopia. I wanted both in my setting, so I had to find a way to squash the two together without creating problems with the overlapping planes.

More than five years ago (cripes), I wrote about a house rule in my campaigns, three-axis alignment. In additional to good/evil and law/chaos, my worlds have a third axis, action/inaction. A character can be lawful good active, where she rides out and slays evil or performs great works, lawful good passive, where she lives quietly but nobly, or lawful good reactive, where she is mostly passive but becomes active under duress or when a need presents itself. The issue is in how much she feels the need to impress her views on others or the world. It’s a measure not of how a person feels, but how strongly they feel about it. To be entirely nerdy, if good and law are the direction in a character’s alignment vector, active/reactive/passive is the magnitude.

Since that post I have started leveraging this axis in my campaigns, effectively making it mandatory rather than optional. Nobody has wielded a gumption sword to deal extra damage against passive players, but that’s less because I’m not committed to the idea and more because it’s a really expensive weapon enhancement at the levels at which we play. The option is always there, within reach for any player or NPC who wants to use it.

This presented a small problem when we hit the seventh Eight Arms campaign and got to plane-hopping. Both Pathfinder and D&D use two-axis alignment and their cosmology reflects that. D&D uses the Great Wheel, a circle of planes aligned along moral and ethical lines, and Pathfinder uses the Great Sort Of A Box With Planes In, a smaller set of planes aligned largely the same way. Both are two-dimensional. If I wanted a third alignment axis, I needed a third dimension, because that’s what the word “axis” means.

The thing is, something like this already existed. Most versions of d20 have the elemental planes, a set of planes representing fire, air, earth, and water. Alongside them in a separate-but-equal capacity are the Positive and Negative Energy Planes. They don’t really fit in a wheel; you can’t say fire is closer to positive energy than it is to negative energy because those concepts don’t have meaning to fire. They’re defined more by their opposition to each other: fire is far from water, air is far from earth, and positive is far from negative. It’s like an octahedron, or a d8 if you can’t reach Wikipedia from here. Each point on the octahedron is an energy plane, and each plane is “adjacent” to four other planes and opposed to the sixth.

But then, some versions of D&D have the para-elemental and quasi-elemental planes that exist in the confluence between two energy planes. For example, between the Plane of Air and the Plane of Water is the Para-Elemental Plane of Ice. Between the Plane of Fire and the Negative Energy Plane is the Quasi-Elemental Plane of Ash. If each energy plane is a point on a d8, the para- and quasi-elemental planes are the lines between sides. Each connects to two and only two energy planes, and it is what happens when those planes interact. These planes have a long and varied history throughout D&D, in which they sometimes exist, sometimes don’t, sometimes exist but without being separate planes, and sometimes exist only if you squint real hard and turn the book sideways.

The point is that this octahedral concept gave me the idea for a custom three-dimensional Outer Plane cosmology that let me add the effort axis to the planes. It also let me marry D&D’s planes, which we know and love, with Pathfinder’s, which is what every published monster, spell, and deity assumes. I ended up with this:

Each of the planes on points represents pure chaos (Limbo), law (Utopia), good (Nirvana), evil (Abaddon), action (Purgatory), and inaction (The Outlands). Each edge is a place that connects two of these concepts: Pandemonium is the chaotic/active plane, Elysium is good/inaction, and so on. Pathfinder’s planes mostly got to stay where they were except for Elysium. A bit of this is because I didn’t want to disrupt the game’s assumptions too much, but mostly it was because they were so generic; the D&D planes have more character, so they were easier to shift to active or inactive. Just like the standard planes, these inflict penalties on characters of opposed alignment, and the outsider races living in each generally act according to their role on the effort axis.

I did have a finite number of places to put planes and every one of those places had to be filled, so there were changes. After some deliberation I cut Ysgard, because I kind of feel like the whole Norse concept is played out and doesn’t fit much with an Industrial Revolution setting besides; Gehenna, because a plane whose whole concept is “place with steep surfaces” doesn’t merit preservation; Arcadia, because it’s incredibly boring and the “perfection” angle is already done by Utopia; and Acheron, because screw Acheron. I merged the Beastlands with Arborea, because that separation had always seemed weird to me. Instead of two planes whose gimmick is “nature, like, really really hard”, now there’s one with elements taken from both. None of the existing planes made sense for chaos/inaction so I added the Maelstrom, which I think I invented out of whole cloth except for the name. Everything else fit nicely into the new framework with a minimum of jostling or reinvention.

We’re also using the para-elemental and quasi-elemental planes, which means the Inner Planes and Outer Planes share a shape and make sense together. This happened to tie into a seed I planted in the first Eight Arms campaign about the nature of the universe, in a complete accident which I had planned the whole time because I’m incredibly smart and attractive. Since it’s not a wheel or a box, I’m calling this cosmology the Great Edifice (also foreshadowing) and I’ve started adding information about the planes to our campaign wiki. I don’t know how much of this I’ll fill out, but at least it’s there in case a player wants to know.

Posted in House Rules | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Art of the Retcon

Posted on 13 December, 2016 by MssngrDeath

I’m wrong a lot. Like, a lot. It’s a big part of the reason my first campaigns were so incredibly linear, because I couldn’t reconcile being the all-powerful expert running the game with being the guy who thought his rubber pot lid was oven-safe. I thought the DM had to be right all the time, and that included knowing how the rules worked and where the plot was going and whether using this monster was a good idea and so forth. I still kind of feel this way: Law #1 is “The DM is always right”.

But the first corollary is “But not always entirely right”. In this case, that means the DM is right, but not necessarily right now. Tabletop gaming is a storytelling medium that lets you tell stories over time, and that gives you a chance to revise earlier decisions in a way self-contained media can’t. A DM can say anything he or she wants, but also has the power to change their mind later and issue a retcon if that makes the game better.

Retcon is short for “retroactive continuity”. It’s the act of making a change to a story such that an event that already occurred instead occurred differently, and everything else in the story uses that change instead of the original version. Rather than belabor the point with further examples, I’ll just link you to TV Tropes, though I also recommend the full version of the manga page in the trope picture.

In D&D and other tabletop games, retconning is easy: the DM tells the players something happened a certain way, and that’s how it happened. It’s the equivalent of a text box in a comic book that says “From now on Superman was raised in Queens — Ed.” It very obviously breaks the fourth wall, but it doesn’t matter if it’s more heavy-handed than in other media. It’s partially because of the direct relationship between the creator (DM) and consumers (players) that other media doesn’t have, but also because the consumers are themselves creators. A player can say “I’ve decided my character is a blonde”, and everybody just accepts it without several essays of justification and a court order. Movies can’t do that, and if you disagree, please consider researching one James Bond.

The most important part about retconning something in a game isn’t how to do it, but when. Obviously it’s a terrible idea to retcon away a player’s moment of glory or something that ended up being incredibly fun. But a lot of systems also track character resources, and the more resources there are, the harder it is to back up to a time before they were expended. Fate systems may only need you to remember a few stress tracks or fate points, but in D&D you have to remember hit points, cast spells, used powers, consumed items, spent ammunition, and the like, on top of forgetting all the story changes. This is why it’s generally a bad idea to retcon a fight; too much goes into the result to change the result on the fly.* It takes a very specific kind of player or software to remember every action that occurred in a fight and set things back to how they were beforehand. The same may be true of a long skill challenge, or even exploration or interaction encounters. After all, suspense and emotional investment are resources you can spend, just ones you can’t track numerically or roll back.

There’s one exception to this: retconning a TPK. I completely understand if a party decides a particular fight was objectively bad and letting it stand ruins the campaign entirely. I usually feel there are story-based ways to get around it, to let the failure stand and roll into something else, but in some situations that just isn’t possible. Here a retcon still isn’t a good idea, but it may be the best idea among bad ones.

The DMing books I’ve read actually do recommending using a retcon for one specific case: rules questions. There’s an oft-cited example of the player who tries to do something ludicrous and it’s not immediately clear whether the rules allow or even cover it. Consider the player who wants to summon an elephant ten feet above the wizard. A DM may not know whether this is legal, and finding the section in the rules that says “you can’t summon a creature into an environment that can’t support it” can take forever, especially in the days of paper books without search functions. The books recommend the DM make a decision and use it until he has a chance to verify, usually between sessions, then use the correct rules. This is sort of a retcon in that technically things didn’t happen that way and the players are free to invent another reason the wizard suddenly took two hundred damage and became flat, but again, nobody is recommending re-running the fight without that specific action.

My retcons tend to be story-based, and for me the “when” is “whenever the decision I made affects how the game will play out for the worse.” Sometimes it’s small, like when I changed the caliphate in my current campaign to a sultanate. Between sessions one of my players pointed out how strongly caliphates were aligned to a religion, and I didn’t want that, so I changed it. Except to an especially historically, religiously, or etymologically aligned player both words mean basically the same thing, so the context shift wasn’t a problem.

The other big one we did was when the players suffered a planar travel mishap and ended up on Carceri, the plane of prisons. Carceri was the result of a random roll at the end of the session, and as we were packing up I tried to think about what I would do with Carceri next week. The answer was, unfortunately, nothing. There was no fun idea I had related to the campaign plot, and doing a side quest there would derail things just as they were starting to pick up. Instead I told the players on their way out the door that they had actually landed on Utopia, the plane of city. They had allies there, it was relatively non-hostile, and there was any chance something would happen that could lead into this campaign or another one later. By all metrics it was a better landing spot, so that’s what happened. At the next session the players faffed about on Utopia, purchased some perfectly cubic pastries, and went on their way without problem. I didn’t have to scramble for a meaningful plot, the players got to do what they wanted without random interference, and we got everything back on track much faster than we would have if we had adhered to the will of the dice.

The point of both is that they made the game better, one because it helped the plot and the other because it helped our impression of the world. That’s ostensibly the point of the retcon: something wasn’t working, so you fix it. It’s a delicate task to decide what’s worth changing and what isn’t. Most parties might decide changing “caliphate” to “sultanate” isn’t worth learning how to pronounce a second word, or they like the feel of the word better regardless of the religious connotations, or they like the connotations and want to adopt them. They can decide what they want to do with a ninety-second conversation. Bigger changes require more consideration and perhaps table-wide agreement, but the point is that it’s possible. You’re not beholden to your past decisions any more than the players are, and it’s well within your rights to change anything from an NPC’s name to the entire grappling ruleset if it’s affecting how you feel about the game.

I guess my suggestion is the same as always: talk to your players if you’re going to change anything major. There’s a chance any change that enhances your game will hurt theirs and there has to be a balance, if not a third option that makes everybody happy. But for small changes, you’re probably fine. Your players aren’t likely to judge you harshly if an NPC’s race or accent changes. The ability to adjust continuity like that is one of the advantages of this type of media, and it would be a shame to ignore it when it’s needed.

* — This said, I kind of like the idea of a campaign where the battles are intentionally ludicrously hard, where the players have to try them again and again until they succeed. Maybe something like Edge of Tomorrow where the players are stuck in a time loop, or something that mimics a video game where the players take snapshots of their characters at “save points”. But since repeating fights is intentional, those aren’t really retcons, and that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Posted in DMing | 3 Comments

On November

Posted on 10 December, 2016 by MssngrDeath

I need to apologize for November. I didn’t have everything lined up nearly as well as I thought I did when I signed off to work on National Novel Writing Month. I should have realized other people would have the same problem I do: unlimited freedom means unlimited options.

Me: Can you do a post for DMing with Charisma in November:
DM: Sure.
Me: Great, thanks.
DM: Wait. What should I write about?
Me: Well, what do you want to write about?
DM: What do you want me to write about?
Me: …
DM: …

I want to thank both of the DMs who contributed. One of those articles was actually published, and the other came in late enough in the month that I figured I’d hang on to it for a thematically appropriate time later. I still think guest authors are a good idea, but I also want to play a Deadlands campaign, so I may not make good decisions exclusively. We’ll see how it goes.

On the bright side, I did at least finish:

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DMing with Intelligence

Posted on 14 November, 2016 by MssngrDeath

Except my wife, our first guest DM is probably the person with whom I have spend the most gaming time. He’s the player behind Mikau the Unwitting and Hadarai and the DM behind The Gods are Dead, Long Live the Gods, which I’ve called the Post-Ragnarok campaign a few times on here. He DMs with high amounts of preparation, research, and numerical game balance, and he’s opted to talk about that today:

Today, I’ll be filling in for your normal DM who runs with Charisma to bring you a different perspective and approach on things. I am a DM who runs with Intelligence, which now that I say that out-loud, makes me seem far more pompous and arrogant than I had intended. I guess it’s because I’m implying that DMing with any other stat makes you non-Intelligent, which certainly isn’t the case. Wow, that’s a bit of a loaded word there, then.

I’ve played with your normal DM, on both sides of the table, for over 10 years (my, how time flies), so I’d like to think that we have a good understanding of how each other works. The first conversation I remember having with him was commenting that I was the only “good” (as in alignment) character in the party. He interpreted that as “good” (as in overall quality), and so we’ve been friends ever since. I am also a consistent patron and victim of the Wrath List Wrath List. I started to DM after meeting your normal DM, so my style is heavily influenced by what he did and has done, as well as by certain campaigns that we have mutually suffered through as players.

Anyway, your normal DM did previously talk about DMing with Intelligence a little, but that was almost 4 years ago, so it never hurts to refresh.

He stated that:

Intelligence-based DMs are a step or two more comfortable with the hardest parts of the game. They treat a campaign as a thing to be built by one person more than a thing to be generated by a group, and they stick much closer to official rules and mathematical integrity than Wisdom-based DMs. It’s easy to think of them as uptight and distant, but my Int-based DMs always have a startling amount of internal story consistency, and they make sure that the gameplay is as fair as possible. Intelligence DMs treat the story as the most important thing; bad ones crush player opinion for the sake of the plot, but good ones integrate the players so they’re as involved as the DM is.

Your normal DM is, honestly, one of the smartest people I know, so I think an important thing to do, right off the bat, is to divorce the idea that DMing with Intelligence is about being smart or about actually being intelligent; DMing with Intelligence is about . . . I want to say it’s about the Plan, but I believe that most DMs have some sort of plan, and sometimes I have less of a plan than I let on (a fact that I’m sure does not in any way surprise your normal DM), so that isn’t strictly the difference, either. Everything I think of could be applied to DMing with other stats, so instead, I’ll describe what I do.

For me and how I approach the game, it’s about the details. I always build my world from scratch, because honestly, for me, world-building is the most fun part. I am a Simulationist first (I don’t know whether or to what extent that trait overlaps with my style of DMing), and so I want the players to feel as though they’re in a real place, I want everything to make sense and I want the players to be able to believe that everything is realistically connected to everything else, such that their actions matter and the world responds accordingly when they, say, blow up an important guard tower and its surrounding city wall. To me, the best thing is for my players to approach the world with the knowledge that it doesn’t revolve around them, that it will continue to exist and change (in general) regardless of whether they exist, but that it still does change because of them. There’s a reason that I like Majora’s Mask so much.

I’m at my best when I’ve made plans upon plans, both for the session and the setting, and at my worst when I just wing it. I am the kind of DM who made a small community of less than 100 people, and then used various tables to identify and stat out (loosely) every person in the village (and their relationships to each other), and then spent hours researching era-relevant population-to-acreage ratios so that the community was surrounded by a believable amount of farms. Now, I only did that because I thought every person might be relevant (it was a post-apocalyptic setting with strong survival elements at first), but that doesn’t change the fact that I still did it. That might say something about my time management, but to be fair, I did all of that before the campaign every started, so it never interfered with actual session planning.

So, the other thing mentioned is an approach to rules. I value consistency in the application of rules. I blame a family history of being lawyers, combined with my normal approach to world-building, as stated above. I maintain a WordPad document with house rules, including the date I added the rule (and whether it applies to a given campaign, or to all campaigns that I run), because I want to be fair in that application. Is it too much? Maybe, but it works for me. My extended interaction with my normal group has loosened me up a bit, and I try to be more flexible with allowing my players to do cool or interesting or amusing things, even if Rules as Written, they shouldn’t be allowed to do it. Law 0 is always in effect, after all, and I want them to have fun.

This entry may have gone a bit overboard. I think I’d like to believe that the very character of this post reveals as much as its overall content about the machinery underlying my thought process, and hopefully by proxy, into some of the approaches to DMing with Intelligence.

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Quis dominābit ipsos dominī?

Posted on 6 November, 2016 by MssngrDeath

It’s National Novel Writing Month again, and per tradition I’ve signed up. This will be my tenth NaNoWriMo in twelve years, eleventh if you could last year’s focus on writing a new mechanic for Pathfinder, and I’m going for my fourth win. This does mean I won’t have a lot of time to add to this blog, but don’t worry, I’ve got that covered.

In deference to the brave souls who have put up with such a vocal and opinionated player, I’ve asked every DM I’ve had in the last eight years to contribute guest articles to DMing with Charisma in the month of November. Three agreed, conveniently representing DMing with Wisdom, Intelligence, and Constitution. I’m not yet sure what they’ll say; most of the guidance I gave them was that this is a blog about tabletop roleplaying, and I think the most emphatic adult language I’ve used is ‘golly’. Beyond that expect a fairly robust array of topics and opinions. Hopefully it will be at least slightly lighter than my last post.

If you like what you’re reading, let us know. We may make it a thing.

Posted in Events | Comments Off on Quis dominābit ipsos dominī?

On D&D as a Brand

Posted on 27 October, 2016 by MssngrDeath

As I’ve mentioned before, I follow professional wrestling, and today I want to talk Sunday’s WWE event, “Hell in a Cell”. Its namesake is the Hell in a Cell match, which is the big brother of a steel cage match. It’s intended and expected to be vicious, dangerous, and often bloody. They say that anybody who goes into such a match doesn’t come out the same, assuming they come out at all. In storyline, wrestlers try to avoid it to protect their bodies and careers, and it’s saved for only the most important, feud-culminating matches.

Except that around this time every year, several wrestlers suddenly decide the Cell is the only way to resolve their differences. They don’t do it because they’re actually embroiled in important battles, or because they need to brutalize their current adversaries more than normal, or because they need to protect their matches from outside interference. They do it because it’s October. That’s the time of year when the Hell in a Cell event is, so that means it’s time to have Hell in a Cell matches. There’s no other reason besides “that’s what happens in mid-fall”.

I’m pretty convinced this is dumb. Treating the event like this is sacrificing the story for the sake of the medium. It’s like how television shows all come to a head around the end of a season, except TV shows are designed and written specifically to build their arcs for thirteen episodes and resolve them all at once. Wrestling doesn’t work like that; it’s made of several stories, all at different points and often overlapping, and hitting the “this is a blood feud now” button on multiple storylines at once does a disservice to the narrative, the viewers who expect a logical and interesting show, and the event itself by reducing it from a thing of some importance to just a thing that happens around Halloween.

So why the disconnect between what we expect and what we get? Because WWE’s goal isn’t to create a cohesive narrative, it’s something else. They tell viewers their goal is a story with conflicts expressed through specific athletic contests (“sports entertainment”), but that’s not what their goal actually is.

See, when you’re telling a story, your goal is that story. Everything else you use, from the medium and delivery to the characters and settings all the way down to the pacing and language, should be in service of that goal. If you make choices that actively disrupt the story to prop up one of its constituent parts, you’re not telling a story any more. You’re focusing on that element, and the story is just the catalyst to make that element happen.

That’s fine. But if you’re fully aware of your goal yet presenting a different goal to your audience, you’re either a cunning tactician or you’re in for trouble when that audience figures it out. It’s why so many television shows jump the shark when the male and female leads get together; the creator thinks viewers watch for the characters themselves or the snappy dialog or the actual plot, but the viewers are most interested in the will-they-or-won’t-they tension. Viewers think they’re watching the world’s slowest pre-courtship, and when the creator resolves it to focus on something else, that disenfranchises those viewers. The creator (usually) doesn’t actually tell them they’re wrong for liking the wrong thing, but it feels that way.

Regarding gaming, this disconnect between a game’s intention and the players’ knowledge of it is a running theme throughout this blog. If you’re so focused on making monsters powerful that you sacrifice the player experience, you’re not making a role-playing game about characters, you’re making a battle simulator, and you lose players who want something other than numbers. If you’re so focused on building a unique world that you lock players into prescribed roles, you’re not making a game to be played, you’re writing a script to be followed, and you lose players who want to influence the setting. If you’re so focused on making adventures for everybody, anytime that you limit how, when, and what players can do while preventing them from having any say in the overarching story, you’re not making a gaming system, you’re making a video game (and not even a modern video game, but one where you can only “touch”, “take”, “use”, and “lick” certain background objects), and you lose players who want freedom of choice. I feel very strongly that players deserve to know what a game is before they get into it, because suddenly finding out that a game (or TV show, or poem, or business, or person) isn’t and never has been what you thought is incredibly jarring.

I went through something similar recently with Pathfinder, where I finally realized that what I wanted out of Pathfinder wasn’t something the creators wanted to produce. I’m still trying to reconcile that. So you can imagine what I’m thinking now that I see D&D is doing the same thing.

The impetus for this is a smart but jarring article on Gnome Stew that basically argues D&D isn’t a roleplaying game any more, at least not in the way I want it. Part of the fun in a roleplaying game is playing a character I want to play. Based on the evidence, that doesn’t factor into D&D any more. Wizards (and, as the article says, this is probably more a Hasbro thing) is instead pushing D&D as a brand, with video games, online videos, board games, and an upcoming movie. And that brand isn’t based on letting players do or be who they want, it’s about pulling them into a unified, approachable story.

This is a weird place for me. I cut my teeth on 3E, which had various splatbooks with classes, feats, equipment, monsters, and new rules. 3.5E did the same, and so did 4E, and so does Pathfinder. There was a regular stream of new options to expand what I could do as a player and as a DM. In 5E that’s gone, replaced by the DMs Guild, which is somewhere between “third-party publisher” and “my personal Geocities page” in terms of quality. When I heard about the DMs Guild I was excited for what it meant for the hobby and the direction of future publications, but now I see there aren’t any “future publications”. I didn’t expect the SRD to come at the expense of official content, and I’m incredibly disappointed that I may never hold a D&D book in my hands again.

Wizards is still publishing material, of course. But it’s all adventure paths, per the Paizo model. If you want something you can run in your own game, Wizards is not interested in your interest. And it’s all in Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft, so if you prefer another setting or your own, the same applies. None of it is intended to let players do what they want. As with the WWE, it’s intended to bring players into the story Wizards wants them to want.

I’m not going to go so far as to say D&D isn’t a roleplaying game any more. I’m not that alarmist. It still is, but a far more limited one than it has been in previous versions. It’s more a gateway to a shared multimedia franchise. That’s fine from a business perspective, but it’s not what I want. I don’t want a brand, I want a game that gives me enough freedom to tell the stories I want, and the only way I can do that is by giving up on the system as written and making my own version of it.

Again.

Posted in Commentary, DMing, Game Design, Gaming Systems | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Making a Puzzle Boss

Posted on 20 October, 2016 by MssngrDeath

The steps for building a puzzle boss are pretty much the same as building any kind of encounter, or any kind of story, ever. That is:

  • Goal: The players want something
  • Conflict: The DM puts an obstacle in their way
  • Resolution Mechanic: The players and/or characters overcome the obstacle (or fail)

In most combat encounters this is incredibly simple:

  • Goal: The players want to go to a place or get a thing
  • Conflict: Monsters want to stop the players from going to the place or getting the thing
  • Resolution Mechanic: The party uses violence until there are no more monsters

The party could use diplomacy or stealth or magic or whatever tools they want, but the general structure of an encounter is the same. An encounter even uses the same steps from the perspective of the DM, but that’s another post.

What’s important about this structure is that it’s nested. As you drill down into it, you’ll find the same steps repeated over and over until we get down to a game mechanic. In D&D, that’s usually a d20 roll:

  • Goal: The players want to kill the orcs in the forest
  • Conflict: The orcs do not want to die
  • Resolution Mechanic: Combat
    • Goal: The ranger wants to use her bow
    • Conflict: Bow attacks provoke attacks of opportunity
    • Resolution Mechanic: The ranger goes to a place where the orcs cannot reach her
      • Goal: The ranger wants the high ground
      • Conflict: The high ground is very high
      • Resolution Mechanic: Climb check vs. DC
    • Goal: The fighter wants to hit an orc with his sword
    • Conflict: The orc does not want to be hit
    • Resolution Mechanic: Attack roll vs. AC

Most conflicts have fairly straightforward goals, conflicts and resolutions, and that’s important. The key to a puzzle boss is that it doesn’t:

  • Goal: The fighter wants to hit the orc with a sword
  • Conflict: The orc has a magic barrier around him
  • Resolution Mechanic: Disable the barrier
    • Goal: The party must stop the barrier
    • Conflict: The party does not know how
    • Resolution Mechanic: The party makes skill checks, or tests theories, or thinks really hard, etc.

The puzzle is in figuring out how to resolve the conflict. It’s not a matter of what the best answer is (for example, swords versus clubs versus fire) but how to answer it at all. The simplest way to do that is to make direct, obvious combat either impossible or just a very bad idea, but there are several ways to go about it.

Puzzles are too broad to have a clear set of creation steps. They’re not like a monster or a trap where you can say “this type of puzzle is this difficult, and it takes this long, so it has this Challenge Rating”. It’s more of an art, where you have to balance the combat, the story, the players, the schedule, and the mood at the table as it shifts. But like art, while there aren’t rules there are strongly-worded suggestions:

The party has to discover the puzzle quickly. Combat has certain expectations in D&D, and one of those is that it can be resolved via combat mechanics. Breaking from that is fine, but breaking from it in secret and expecting the players to read your mind is not. You don’t want your players to miss the runes on the floor and spend four rounds trying to hit the invincible necromancer with a sword. They’ll rightly consider it a waste of character resources and real-world time.

The answer can’t be too obvious. Things like “kill the healer first, or he’ll heal his allies”, or “the wizard has terrain advantage” aren’t puzzles, they’re complications. They’re a good way to make fights more interesting and dynamic, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. You have to escalate the difficulty until the players don’t have a evident answer. Consider “kill the healer first, or he’ll heal his allies, but everybody is acting similar so we need to find out who the healer is”, or “the wizard has terrain advantage because she’s on a ledge with no visible access point.”

There should be more than one answer. If the puzzle relies on an arcane leap of logic or an absurdly specific action, there’s too strong a chance the players won’t solve it at all. Continuing the above examples, if the party can only find out who the healer is by remembering that all clerics of the healing god have a small brand on the back of their neck, or if they can only make it to the wizard by throwing paint at the wall to reveal the hidden ladder to the ledge, that’s a bad puzzle. The key word is “only”. Both of those are fine answers, but when you reject other plausible answers because they’re not the one you had in mind, the puzzle you’re actually giving the players is “guess what the DM is thinking”.

You need to accept that the players are going to try something else, like using detect magic to find the telltale signs of a healing or illusion spell. Reward them for ideas that fit with the puzzle you’ve presented. I usually require that an answer have at least two of the following traits: it’s clever, and it shows the players are really thinking about their situation; it’s entertaining, and it gives us joy to see the characters try it; and it’s successful, because the players rolled high or set things up well enough that a roll doesn’t matter. A few examples:

  • A player suspects the enemies all worship the same god, but asks if their holy symbols are the same. With a good Perception check she notices (or declares) that they’re subtly different, and asks to use Knowledge (religion) to recall whether those symbols indicate different religious disciplines. This is clever because she’s considering and manipulating the backstory of the enemies and she rolled well enough to be successful, so she learns that only one enemy has access to healing magic.
  • The fighter can’t get to the wizard’s ledge, but he knows it’s attached to a wall. He starts attacking the wall, trying to bring it down. The party asks him to stop because it might destabilize the architecture of the rest of the room, but he persists and starts rolling damage. This is entertaining because it can add a dynamic element to the combat, and with good damage rolls he can actually break through a wall. It also helps that I have a soft spot for players who hurt themselves to fit their character, so if the fighter is a berserker who loves destruction despite the party’s comedic exasperation, I’d consider that entertaining.
  • The party decides to stack themselves on each other’s shoulders so the rogue can climb them and reach the ledge. That’s a clever use of party resources (time) and mechanics (carrying capacity, height, and weight), and it’s entertaining enough that I want to see it happen. If I’d ask them to make rolls at all the DC would be very low. I might give myself a bonus to attack players at the bottom of the pole, but that’s unlikely to impact the success of their maneuver.

Per the above examples, “entertaining” usually means “funny”. But it can also mean “dramatic”. A player who uses a forbidden spell, sets aside their code of honor to do something underhanded, or sacrifices themselves so their allies have a chance, and who’s willing to accept the narrative fallout of their decision, deserves success as much as somebody who’s trying to pick up an enemy and throw them into another one.

Have a purpose for the puzzle. The puzzle needs to fit in with the pacing of the campaign and the story the campaign is telling. Having a puzzle boss because “it’s time for a puzzle” isn’t a sufficient reason. It should happen during a battle where it makes sense that just hitting the opponent isn’t a complete solution. Often the best way to do that is to telegraph it in some way; if the players find out this group of fighters has never had a single casualty, they won’t be surprised when they see it’s because they have a hidden healer. The party goes in expecting something out of the ordinary and they’re mentally prepared for it.

In addition, the puzzle needs to work with the boss itself. The powerful orc warlord with a reputation for ripping his opponents limb from limb is not going to hide behind his defenders and take potshots with a crossbow. He’s going to wade into battle with supernatural fury, and it’s up to the players to find out why their blows are bouncing off his skin. This is a good place to toss in a plus or a minus; the warlord is all but immune to the barbarian’s axe and it falls to the sorcerer to notice the warlord’s necromantic aura and realize he’s actually a zombie powered by a magic item. A clever player might even swing their role as a minus into a plus, like the barbarian who realizes her axe isn’t working, drops it, and grapples the warlord to mitigate his attacks and buy time for everybody else. That’s a good kind of clever, even if it does mean I have to find my grappling flowchart.

Make it fun. This suggestion overrides everything else. A puzzle can be well-balanced, creative, and narratively meaningful but still be a tedious slog. If the party just has to pull a lever every round to keep poison gas from filling the room, all you’ve done is give them an action tax. There’s a difference between “I can’t believe we did it!” relief and “I’m so glad it’s over!” relief, and that line can move based on your campaign, your players, what happened last week, how tired the players are from work, and so on. One of your roles as a DM is to focus on the right thing: puzzle bosses, like everything else in the game, are a means for having fun. If yours isn’t fun, it’s wrong.

If you’re looking for a detailed breakdown on types of puzzle bosses, you’re out of luck. I don’t have one either. But I can recommend the following works that have some examples I’ve used myself, as further reading:

  • Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure – Starting in the third arc they get into the concept of “Stands”, which allow the main characters to fight with supernatural, usually external entities. Most battles boil down to “Who is my enemy, what is his power, and how do I survive it and punch him in the face?”
  • World of Warcraft – I’ve gotten a lot of ideas from browsing strategies for raid and instance bosses. The numbers don’t really mean anything (I don’t know if “3000 Nature damage” was meaninglessly low or an insta-kill in the relevant expansion) but the general ideas are good for keeping fights dynamic and adding an element the unknown.
  • Final Fantasy – Each game has several bosses that don’t fit the normal “grind and smash” mold. I’m told the single best game for this is the remake of Final Fantasy IV for some recent portable system, where almost every boss is an actual challenge because they each need a different strategy. Games that let you change your party, like Final Fantasy Tactics, may also work for general ideas, but I’m legendarily terrible at strategy games so I don’t have a ton of experience here.
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Puzzle Bosses

Posted on 13 October, 2016 by MssngrDeath

In my career I’ve seen the designers of D&D try to approach boss monsters in several ways. In 3E a boss is a monster with a CR higher than the party level, which usually means it has higher defenses, bigger attacks, and powers beyond the party’s scale. In 4E a boss has largely the same combat numbers, but has quadruple hit points and gets more than one offensive action per turn. In 5E it gets even more actions and some ability to ignore player attacks. Pathfinder uses 3E rules, but the conventional wisdom is to make a boss a standard-CR creature with enough allies or minions to ramp up the difficulty and keep the boss from being swarmed.

All of these share a common trait: a boss is a normal monster, but scarier. For the most part they use the same rules as any other creature, sometimes with a template or bonus stacked on to give them different abilities (“solo” in 4E, “legendary” in 5E). An aggressive way of saying it is “a boss is a normal monster who breaks the unwritten social rules of the game by being numerically out of bounds.”

That’s my big issue with them: not the phrase “out of bounds”, but the word “numerically”. A boss is defined by their numbers, and higher numbers challenge the characters rather than challenging the players. A boss who’s a normal creature, except it deals 50% more damage and you have to roll two higher to hit it, isn’t actually a boss. It’s just a longer fight. That can be dramatic if the numbers push it just out of the players’ comfort or competence zones, but it can just as easily be a boring slog or frustrating TPK.

In the Zelda campaign I hit the players with more bosses than I have in any other campaign, and I settled into a rhythm that I think made them more interesting than just being mathematically superior. In most Zelda games, the players gets an item in the middle of a dungeon. They use that item to beat the dungeon, and it’s usually required or helpful for the dungeon boss as well. The campaign worked the same way; every dungeon boss was in some way vulnerable to the item in its dungeon, and the players had to figure out how to leverage that. This included not just learning how the item affected the boss, but also when to use it and which player was best suited to it, in the middle of a standard pitched combat, and the end of an adventure where the players were running on depleted resources. Beating each one felt like more of an actual achievement than rolling slightly higher than normal for significantly longer than normal.

This is a puzzle boss, a boss fight solved by a strategy other than “hit it really hard until it falls down”. Often a puzzle boss works via some weak point the player has to discover and exploit, like an opening in the boss’ defenses after a big attack or a nearby object that can damage the boss when attacks cannot. I think my favorite version of this is the one in Zelda games or Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: the boss seems unbeatable, but once you figure out their trick you can open them up to one-sided, incredibly satisfying melee combat.

That’s where I find myself as I start to think about my next campaign, which will be in Pathfinder, the land of “if you ain’t doing a hundred damage a round, you ain’t trying”. I spent a good while trying to find published monsters immune to Pathfinder’s rocket-tag gameplay, and when that failed I tried to find monsters resistant to it, then gave up on that and just tried to find monsters that didn’t actively contribute to it. But instead of using the narrow subsection of the game that works with my style of play, I’m probably going to do what I normally do and make something new.

Part of my reluctance is that Pathfinder is still very simulationist. Monster design in 4E is like the Wild West, where you can’t assume that one monster’s swallow whole power works in any way like it does with another monster. Pathfinder doesn’t do that; “swallow whole” is a specific monster ability with a glossary entry and a programmed set of steps and results. The monster creation rules in the Bestiary actively discourage DMs from making something out of whole cloth:

Monsters should use abilities from the Universal Monster Rules whenever possible, instead of creating new yet similar abilities—when you do create new abilities, use the Universal Monster Rules as a template for how to present and create the new abilities.

The rules work on a very “like = like” system. For example, a character can break through nearly any barrier given enough time, and with the right tools they can usually make it trivially easy. Now consider a boss who is physically weak and controls minions or machines from behind a transparent wall. That wall can only be made of two things: a physical material like glass or invisible steel, which a strong character can destroy rapidly; or a magical material like force, which is impossible to break manually but falls immediately to specific spells. There’s no room for a surface that can only be broken by filing minions at it or tricking the machines into hitting it. That material would work unlike everything else in the world, and the rules don’t like that.

So I find myself in a situation where I’m planning encounters that work in a gaming system while deliberately subverting the intent of that system, skirting the line of “it works this way because the DM wants it to and for no other reason” without crossing it. It’s a strange kind of perpendicular design, making encounters with the feel I want by working despite the system rather than within it. That’s not bad per se, and I’m finding it a lot of fun, but it means I’m trying to come up with combats that marry both the existing mechanics and the gameplay I want without just telling the players that a given monster breaks the rules and leave it at that.

I don’t want to just hand-wave away Pathfinder’s simulationism, either. Say I’m committed to that magic wall that can only be destroyed by flinging a minion at it. I have to explain it somehow, so I’m going to say the minions are also magic. They could be magic in a similar way, which disrupts the wall because they overloads it or because they interact with it in a way other objects can’t, or in an opposite way, which damages the walls or exploits its weak points. I have to give the players some way to find out about the minion’s special properties—a previous encounter, a book of notes from their creator, symbols on the wall that match the symbols on the minion’s faces—and trust them to draw appropriate conclusions.

This trust highlights one of the big issues with designing puzzle bosses: they have the downsides of both a puzzle and a boss. If the players don’t figure out that the minions affect the wall, it’s over. If they figure it out but draw an incorrect conclusion, like thinking the minions enhance the wall and trying to drive them away, it’s over. If the get the right answer but fail on their rolls to enforce that answer, it’s over. If the players ignore or circumvent the puzzle entirely, like digging their way through the floor under the magic wall, the battle works but it’s deeply unsatisfying. And the whole time I’m trying to hit them with an exciting, dangerous encounter, so I’m taxing their resources even harder than normal. It’s not easy.

But the results are worth it. If the players succeed in the fight, and I succeed in designing and running it, we get an encounter that stands out from the rest of the campaign. It feels different because it is different, and the party has to adjust its tactics to compensate. If the players solve the puzzle in a way I didn’t expect, like tricking the minions into attacking the wall themselves, that’s even better. The players accomplished something, not the characters, and that feeling of legitimately deserving success lasts a lot longer than winning because your math outpaced the game’s.

I’m still trying to figure out if I have enough to say about making puzzle bosses to fill an entire blog post. I guess we’ll find out soon.

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