DMing with Charisma

A few years ago, my wife had the opportunity to take a short internship far from home. I could take my work with me as long as I had an Internet connection, so for a little more than five months we lived in a barn in central Florida. But the Internet where we lived was not up to par, so we made inquiries and found a business, associated with the internship, who graciously allowed me to use theirs. However, they really only had one place where I could set up in the relative privacy I needed to do what I did without getting in their way.

As such, I found myself gaming online for half a year from a storage closet, sandwiched between a shelf of home-jarred foodstuffs and enough items to cook them should a hurricane take out power for the better part of a month. I have never had an officemate as quiet and as creepy as a jar of meat two feet from my chair, unless you count the garden statue of a royal frog in the same room:

I don’t think anybody knew how it got there. It just was. Sitting there. Staring. All day. Every day of the week. For five months.

Around that time my players toppled a kingdom. Probably coincidence.

What hobbies go well with RPGs?

Anything that exposes you to ideas. I feel a little bad encouraging watching TV and playing video games over hobbies that involve craftsmanship, but craft hobbies don’t teach you ideas as much as they teach you very specific methods for expressing those ideas. Learning to paint minis will give you great minis to game with. Learning to follow and build stories will give you several campaigns’ worth of characters and plots you can use with pretty much any minis you want. From an investment/return perspective, I don’t see how there’s any comparison.

The trick is to do it actively instead of passively. Don’t just watch television; figure out how a show manages its emotional content based on how far it is into its season. Don’t just play video games; notice what kind of enemies they use and how they contribute to the rhythm of the game and the overall theme. Don’t just read books; focus on how authors introduce and build characters. When you understand how somebody puts something together, you also understand how to take it apart and do what you want with the pieces.

What makes for a good character?

Hoo boy.

I have strong opinions about what makes a good character, probably strong enough that I can’t do them justice in a post this small. Instead of a series of essays, I’m just going to put some requirements in bullet point format. Maybe in a while I’ll expand on them:

• A good character needs to grow given sufficient time. If the only things that change between L1 and L20 are numbers, you don’t have a character, you have a build.
• Every part of a good character works together. The character should feel like you say they feel, and their build should support that feeling, and you should play them with that feeling in mind.
• A good character works with the group. Lone wolves are for novels, not cooperative tabletop gaming, and a grimdark ranger will not gel with a table of jokers.
• A good character works with the setting and the campaign. They shouldn’t bring you out of the game by their mere existence, and they shouldn’t exist primarily to usurp or frustrate the DM.
• A good character should be unique. They shouldn’t be the same build, personality, name, or miniature you use in every campaign, and they shouldn’t be an obvious bootleg of a pre-existing character.
• A good character is fun. This is the most important part. You can have a one-note samurai Iron Man who constantly undermines the rest of the party, but if everybody thinks he’s hilarious they’ll probably remember that character more fondly than the inoffensive but boring cleric struggling with the family she left behind on her journey to retrieve the artifact her mentor stole. If you’re enjoying yourself and you’re helping everybody else enjoy themselves, that’s the point of the game.

This isn’t some scale I use to measure characters; I don’t compare each build to this list and decide a character who meets five points is better than a character who only meets three. If I did, I’d have several characters of my own who don’t qualify. But if I see a character and I don’t think they’re good, it’s probably because they’re missing more of these than I’d like.

What is the game you are most likely to give to others as a gift?

I feel bad giving people games I have or I want to play. There’s an implicit “we will do this together” in there, so I feel like I’m socially tying them to play the game with me lest they ignore the gift entirely. So the game I’m most likely to give is something I never want to play myself. Usually that’s because it’s designed for local multiplayer; in the last ten years I’ve played exactly five games with people in the same room, and three of those were one-offs. Other people don’t have this problem, so I don’t mind getting them games they can play with each other.

This does occasionally put me in the hilarious state of looking at a game and going “This looks fun. Do I have any friends who have friends? They can tell me stories about it.”

Share one of your best ‘Worst Luck’ stories.

I don’t have “worst luck” stories as much as I have a “worst luck” career. I’ve mentioned earlier this month how I have a handicap on rolling during character creation and how we have fast-resurrection mechanics to counteract how often I seem to die. Neither of these even touched on how well I roll as a DM; I’ve rolled an inordinate amount of 1s when I tried to show off a new monster and plenty of 20s when I tried to not kill a player. Heck, it even extends beyond gaming. My family would love to tell you about the time they were moving me cross-state, when I pulled off at a rest stop for a quick drink, found a vending machine that ate every quarter I had, then got back on the highway going the wrong way for fifteen minutes. To this day I don’t know how I found a way to do that from a rest stop with only one exit.

So instead of trying to pick a superlative out of that pile, I’ll just refer you back to the time I botched a roll to dial a phone for its perfect blend of bad luck, comedy, and memorability.

What are some random events in your games that keep happening?

We have an entire ongoing campaign where enemies keep getting staggered. In D&D, that’s when you’re reduced to exactly zero hit points, when your consciousness is on its last legs. At 1st level it wasn’t that weird, because everybody was only doing five or ten damage, so every fifth or tenth enemy should be knocked to exactly zero. But it kept happening at 4th, and at 8th, and at 12th. When we’re doing thirty or more damage per attack, every fourth or fifth monster shouldn’t be able to dive through that narrowing window. And it only happens in this campaign.

In the fine tradition of the Hallway Campaign, where a solid chunk of combat happened in two-square-wide rooms, and the Monster-Friending campaign, where the players looked at the campaign description and elevator pitch and collectively said “…nah”, we’ve come to call this one the Staggered Campaign. Honestly, if the DM doesn’t decide to tweak the campaign so the demons’ plans require sucking the souls out of creatures who became staggered before they die, taking advantage of that dim window of near-lifelessness, it’ll be a tragedy.

What was the funniest misinterpretation of a game rule in your group?

Do people normally have funny misinterpretations of rules? It doesn’t seem like a real source of comedy to me.

I guess the winner has to be Spirit of the Healing Flood, a shaman daily power from 4E. It’s a burst attack that barely damages every enemy within five squares. Its real function is to give all allies in that burst regeneration 2 when they’re bloodied. It didn’t seem like much until we realized that “bloodied” meant “at half health or lower”, including “at negative hit points”. In 4E, if a character at negative hit points gains any healing at all, he or she goes to zero hit points before the healing is applied. This meant a player at negative hit points at the beginning of their turn would actually start their turn at two hit points, always.

That’s still not too terribly bad, except we were running the intentionally lethal Delve Night, a series of one-shots where players came with overpowered builds and we responded accordingly. Most sessions had at least one character death, sometimes before that player’s first action. A power that made characters largely immune to death changed the meta entirely. It meant monsters had to go around beating on unconscious PCs to kill them before the regeneration kicked in, wasting everybody’s time and turning every session into DPS races against practice dummies. Sessions largely ran like a game of whack-a-mole with PCs continually falling down and popping back up, essentially playing a series of minions with a shared pool of powers.

It turns out regeneration doesn’t work when creatures are below one hit point, unlike how it worked in 3E. But for one month, that shaman and its hermit crab nearly derailed the entire campaign. I guess that’s kind of funny.

What is the most challenging but rewarding system have you learned?

Language.

See, it’s both a serious answer and a joke because the question is grammatically incorrect.

But relevant to gaming, I’d say D&D, mostly because it’s a complex system and the first I learned. By the time I started into other systems I had already cut my teeth on tabletop gaming, so learning smaller, simpler sets of rules didn’t bother me. And the reward technically includes every session I’ve ever run, so that’s too vast to ignore. Every other system I’ve played, even counting those outside tabletop gaming, both was easier to learn and gave me less return on my investment in terms of game time, social interaction, and emotional satisfaction. It’ll be a good while before something comes close to usurping it.

What is the best way to learn a new game?

I think the best way to learn anything is to actually do it. Reading the rules and watching play are great, and they’re an important part of figuring anything out, but I think the best way to learn a game is to play it. That way you understand what parts of it work or don’t work for you, you can ask questions about the parts you don’t understand, you see where you have fun, and over time you refine it all into an accurate opinion of the game. It’s even better if you can work with somebody who already knows what they’re doing, but you’ll still get a better picture of the system by slogging through it together than you would from watching those people do it without you.

I do need to point out that no matter how you learn a game, you won’t get anything if you don’t want to learn it. It’s the difference between watching video game speed runs because they’re fun and watching them because you want to learn and duplicate the tricks. If you just want to play a short campaign and never touch the system again, that’s fine, but if you’re going to spend ten years in D&D you may want to remember that a full attack action requires a full round. It’s in the name.

What innovation could RPG groups gain the most benefit from?

A lot of groups are already doing things like cooperative world-building, treating the DM as a fellow player instead of an antagonist and vice versa, and other things I talk about. These are innovations in gaming but they’re not generally applicable. For groups to gain the most benefit, the most groups have to gain benefit, not just a subset of players. So I say holograms.

A visual, three-dimensional representation of a game enhances just about every aspect of it. It makes battles easier by clearly showing you where enemies are, how they’re different, what you can see from there you’re standing, and even temporary bits like areas of effects or threatened squares. It deepens immersion by letting DMs show players how big or scary monsters are or how damp and run-down this factory looks. It increases player investment by letting them make moving representations of their characters including idle animations, combat styles, and taunts. It lets DMs be creative by letting them have pitched mid-air battles, design chaos architecture, or give the players a sense of speed, distance, or ambiance that isn’t possible with static miniatures beholder to gravity. With holograms like the ones in the Iron Man movies, we can even push one floor of a building aside to look at what’s going on below it, or rotate the battlefield so each player can see what’s happening from their character’s perspective. We haven’t even touched on the applications for competitive wargaming or board games. It’s the kind of thing that changes tabletop gaming into the spectacle it’s always tried to spoof.