Loose Session Design

Posted on 19 June, 2016 by MssngrDeath

One of the most daunting tasks for new DMs is figure out how much freedom to give the players. Campaigns operate roughly on a scale from “railroad”, where the DM confines the players to rails and sends them through a plotline with limited opportunity for choice, and “sandbox”, where the DM lets the players do whatever they want with little to no guidance. Usually the best way lies somewhere in between, where the DM decides some aspects of the campaign and determines the rest with the party during actual play.

But there’s a reason DMs have a tendency to railroad: planning is hard. If your players can visit an elven, dwarven, or orcish castle in the next session, that’s three different places to explore, three sets of NPCs to meet, and three potential sets of plotlines. If they can skip the castles entirely and go dungeon-diving or shopping, that’s even more content for you to prepare. Once the players hit a certain threshold of freedom it’s impossible to plan for everything they could do. Improvisational DMs can run a session with little or no notice, but most DMs need to know what they’re doing if for no other reason than they’re using the wonderful Live GameScreen and need all their NPCs to have portraits.

Here’s the thing, though: no matter what the players choose, you only need to plan one or two sessions. That is, no matter whether the players go to the mountains or the farms or the enemy base, they’ll meet a gruff NPC who helps them if they can prove they’re worth her trouble and they’ll be harried by the enemy archers. The specifics can change (the NPC can be a miner, farmer, or scout, and the archers can use the elevation to their advantage, set fire to crops from afar, or man enemy watchtowers) but the work you do planning the session does not triple just because the players have three options. If you create something sufficiently generic you can slot it in no matter where the players go.

That’s the basic concept behind loose session design: plan such that you don’t have to plan more. It requires a bit of making things up as you go, but you have enough of a structure that you only need to fill in the details live. For NPCs, pick a personality or motivation or occupation and leave the rest to become whatever fits the party’s situation. For monsters, build a stat block without any of the descriptive words; you know this creature has a +9 to attack and deals 2d6+5 damage, but you don’t have to know whether it attacks with a bite, a slam, or horns just yet. For maps, make something with labels but no descriptions so you can decide whether the manor’s parlor is “tasteful but old-fashioned” or “opulent and gaudy” based on whether the party visited the elderly noble or his prodigal grandson. You’re leaving intentional question marks in your session design and filling them in when you need them. Loose session design saves you time by only requiring the amount you strictly need to prepare for a session, and it doesn’t force you to improvise more than you can handle because you decide how many question marks to leave.

See, players have no idea what you’re actually doing (and, often, vice-versa). They don’t know you’re going to give them a gruff NPC anywhere they go, as long as you don’t do it everywhere they go. If your notes just say “Session 1: gruff. Session 2: helpful but ineffectual. Session 3: super racist.” they’ll meet three very different people, but you don’t have to build full stat blocks for all three of them right this second. Their actions determine whether the helpful NPC is a town guard, a lovable ruffian, or a traveling merchant. It’s the same with monsters, or maps, or even rules-intense things like magic items and rules-light things like plot threads. If you want to have an NPC task the players with stealing back an heirloom from a wizard and have him give the players a weapon in return, you can decide the wizard is a duergar and the item is an axe once the players tell you they’re heading to dwarven lands.

This works best when you design your next session with the players’ decision in mind and show them the results of their choice. You don’t want to give players the illusion of choice, you want to give them actual choice by letting their decisions have meaning. If they went to the mountains, they cut off the enemy’s supply chain for weapons and armor but the enemies at the farm might scorch the land out of spite. If they stormed the enemy castle, the enemy is in disarray but the remaining camps have time to shore up their own defenses. This isn’t about creating several branching paths or about creating a single path with a couple of mutable details, it’s about letting the players do something and deciding how the world reacts. Unlike railroading, where there’s only one path because the DM declared it, the players are guiding the story every step of the way, and unlike a sandbox campaign you’re only preparing things session-by-session instead of taking on way too much work at once.

Loose session design generally requires only two things: some item that has question marks and some resource to fill in those question marks. It’s easiest when each of these is self-contained; you decide an NPC’s personality but don’t decide their class or build, then when you decide what class they are during play you use a stat block from a book, website, or existing NPC. You can also use part of a stat block, like knowing the villain is a wizard but not filling his spellbook until you know whether he’s commanding the lizardfolk in the swamp or animating undead in the sewers. Maps with blank or incomplete keys work great, and the Internet is full of random generators that will give you names or descriptions at the drop of a hat.

This is applicable even in preparation-heavy campaigns. Consider the Zelda campaign I’m running, where most things are pretty solidly defined. NPCs have names and portraits far before they appear because I have to understand how they fit into the various quests the players can do. I have to have all my maps done ahead of time, including knowing where every treasure and puzzle is, because I have to have them ready to hand to the players when they come across the map and compass. I have to know what my monsters are doing, how they fit into the dungeon theme, how they complement or work against each other, and what their stats are so I can put them into Live GameScreen. Pretty much everything I listed above is already pretty rigid.

But I don’t have to decide what personalities or affectations my NPCs have until my players meet them. I don’t write room descriptions ahead of time so I can be as vague or specific as my players have patience for when they arrive. I don’t have to decide how many enemies are in each room, or of what types, until the players enter that room and I know how long we’ve spent on the dungeon up to then and what resources they have left. Even with all the planning I’m doing, I could be doing more, and I feel I’m better off leaving those bits until I need them. This will make things a little harder for anybody who wants to take my notes and run the campaign after me, but that’s not really my problem right now.

I think that’s the biggest argument against loose design. When you make things up on the fly it’s hard to remember what you said to the players and what you just thought about. It’s why a key NPC in this campaign changed names (twice) and why another failed to appear nearly as often as I’d intended. When my players ask a question, one of my common responses is “What did I say?”, which is equal parts “Did you listen to what I told you, or are you making up for your inattention by slowing down the game?” and “No, seriously, remind me what I said out loud because I don’t remember how I reskinned this puzzle last week.” It’s a problem that can be solved with copious note-taking, but that gets harder the longer the campaign goes and it’s never been my strong suit anyway. If you have time to make notes at the end of the session, do that. If you don’t, your players will set you straight.

Like any muscle, the more you use half-prepared, half-spontaneous session design, the better you get with it. In fact, you’re probably already doing it no matter what style you like. It’s one of the system’s assumptions, that a DM will prepare key information like NPCs and encounters but go freeform during the turn-by-turn combat and interaction. This is just taking that idea and extending it, but not so far that you reach “use the stats of a bear for every monster” levels. The point is to save DMs time and frustration while making the campaign more about and accessible to the players. The fact that it makes a DM look like a genius because like he’s sufficiently prepared for anything and everything is a side benefit.

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Session Design Styles

Posted on 8 June, 2016 by MssngrDeath

I’ve been pretty head-down these last couple of weeks working on the last dungeon for the Zelda campaign. Final dungeons tend to be pretty serious, but I’m also trying to keep it from reading like a normal dungeon to keep with our campaign theme. It means I’ve had to work on a bunch of monsters, a bunch of puzzles, several bosses, an aesthetic to tie it all together, and the props and bits that go along with the above, all at once while balancing the difficulty level and pacing appropriately. It’s a lot of work, but it means I can pretty much coast from here until the end of the campaign because the hard work is already done.

I have noticed that my design this campaign is more rigid than I usually like. Part of that is using software; the more our gaming program handles, the more I have to build within that program and the less I can make up in the middle of a sentence. Part of that is this campaign in particular; it has to feel like a Zelda game, which means the maps have to be done before the players walk into the dungeon, and I can’t suddenly add a room that isn’t on the map the players have in their hand. Part of that is the final dungeon; the biggest dungeons so far have been four sessions long, but this one is somewhere between seven and ten, which means I have to have more done beforehand than usual. There’s one particular set piece that took a lot of time and effort, and I’m still not really done with setting it up, so if the players want to do that first I’ll subtly, then forcefully, nudge them in another direction.

All told, I feel like I’ve had a higher planning-to-content ratio than I normally do. I don’t think that’s actually true, because it’s more like flurries of planning followed by a few weeks of not doing a darn thing because it’s already built, but it feels that way.

But it at least got me thinking about rigid session design, which isn’t about inflexibility as much as…actually, I think it’s easiest to explain via a chart:

  • Standard Process: Roughly equal planning for the amount of content you get out of it. This is a broad area because it covers a broad array of styles. Most beginner DMs fall in the northernmost areas here, in the lands of “I have to plan every feat this monster has, because that’s how I do it when I’m a player.” They tend to drift farther south as they become comfortable with the system, acknowledge the needs of the table, and/or accept their own inherent laziness.
  • Loose Design: More content than planning. You’re putting in work, but leaving yourself some wiggle room to adjust things on the fly and make it seem like you planned more than you did.
  • Rigid Design: High planning, high to moderate content. You’re doing a lot of work, but you’re getting a lot out of it.
  • Improvisational: Low planning, moderate to high content. You have enough of a grasp on your game to wing it. The problem here is keeping things consistent; if that wizard knew teleport six sessions ago, he should probably still know it today.
  • Bad Process: Moderate to high planning, low content. If you’re spending a lot of time working on sessions and not getting a lot to show for it, something’s wrong. Either you’re working too hard on minutia because you want to get things unnecessarily perfect, or you’re working on things that don’t actually matter for your gaming table.
  • Faffing About: Low planning, low content. You’re not sure what you’re going to do, and you’re okay with that. This is very close to intentionally not planning at all.
  • Haha, what?: High planning, low content. You’re too caught up in things that don’t matter to the game, even if they matter to you. You’re mostly working on backstory, or building monsters that have a very small chance of appearing, or preparing a lot of individual things that you could be preparing as a group.

This may be best illustrated by an example. Say our example DM has multiple kingdoms the players can visit, each with a set of guards the party is likely to meet and/or fight:

  • Standard Process: The DM designs a single stat block. She ignore all racial abilities and cultural factors, though if a player asks she may decide the dwarves are using axes and adjust accordingly. What’s important is that she has a “guard” stat block.
  • Loose Design: The DM plans one stat block, but intentionally doesn’t select a weapon and a feat or two. She’ll decide those when the players arrive so she doesn’t have to plan stat blocks that don’t matter. She could also adjust the numbers for racial powers (giving the dwarves a few more hit points, giving the elves a +1 with their bows), but that’s optional.
  • Rigid Design: The DM plans one stat block for each set of guards, including their racial abilities. This leads her to interesting situations, like acknowledging that orc guards might favor the double-axe or that elves might prefer light armor, so every set of guards feels unique.
  • Improvisational: The DM has an idea of what the guards can do and knows what makes each race different, so she makes a quick note about the numbers for a generic guard instead of building it via class levels, feats, etc. She expects to fill in details on the fly when the players meet a guard. This leaves her the freedom to say “dwarves have higher accuracy and more hit points but lower damage” even if she doesn’t have rules or a build to back that up.
  • Bad Process: The DM figures out that a fifty-person guard should have twenty-five second-level fighters, thirteen fourth-level fighters, and so on. She builds a stat block for each level of guard, even though the players are very unlikely to fight or even meet the higher-ranking guards. Much of her work is irrelevant to the session.
  • Faffing About: The DM knows there are guards but not much else. She’ll figure out the rest if and when the players meet them, either by using a pre-built stat block or by making things up wholesale.
  • Haha, what?: The DM designs custom weapons and armor for each set of guards, or does each guard’s stat blocks individually so they have distinct builds and personalities, or gets caught up in writing the history of the guard to explain where the organization is today. The great majority of her work is irrelevant to the coming session, and players are unlikely to ever encounter most of it.

I like running things improvisationally, though I know I can’t do it all the time and the players from my failed sandbox campaign will back me up on this. I also know it’s not for everyone. But I think loose session design is something everybody can do, and I’ll talk about that next post.

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Law A – Campaign Songs

Posted on 22 May, 2016 by MssngrDeath

I’ve talked about how I use music to help me flesh out story and character dies, but I haven’t shared what those ideas are. I think even my players don’t know a lot of the songs behind the campaigns unless I make them very explicit. But with all the work I’ve been doing on the Eight Arms wiki, I’ve considered how or whether to put those songs somewhere on there. As long as they’re on my mind it’s as good a time as any to list them.

In case you’re reading this on mobile and don’t feel like loading a million videos, the rest of the article is behind the link.

Continue reading →

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Railroading (the Good Kind)

Posted on 16 May, 2016 by MssngrDeath

In the process of putting together the world map for the Eight Arms campaign setting, I’ve also learned about some of the things that make a world go. It’s forced me to learn more about geography and politics than I did before, and I think that’s made the setting more interesting. That is, of course, my focus: I’d rather have something fun and dynamic that lets me set up good stories than something that cleaves to realism but plays drier than a desert. This means if you’re from the Worldbuilding subreddit and you expect me to say something like “I made sure all the mountain ranges followed local arrangements based on my world’s plate tectonics”, prepare to be disappointed.

So far the most interesting part for me has been trains. The Eight Arms campaign take place in a technologically-advanced version of D&D, an industrial revolution where mechanics and other non-magical opportunities are ramping up and nobody has yet stopped to consider whether it’s a good idea. Heck, the entire first campaign started when somebody said “Hey, I bet with a strong enough power source and sufficient gumption we could create a brand-new inner plane”. Nothing says “let’s do neat stuff and handle the consequences as they come” like a big, loud, powerful box belching smoke into the air of a world where we already have teleportation.

In that respect trains are very different from Eberron’s lighting rails, which are relatively clean and some weird hybrid of magic and science. I think they’re neat as anything, but that’s not what I wanted the setting to do. I was looking for something more like Final Fantasy 6 or maybe 5, a setting that’s a step beyond medieval fantasy, but also where nonmagical airships are a thing.

Initially I’d pictured trains as something rare, used primarily for long-distance travel across national borders, and the country in which the first Eight Arms campaign took place was something of an anomaly in that it had more towns connected by more rails than any other. But in looking into actual historical information about railways, I’ve found I was drastically undershooting how connected everything was. I’m still not going to link every little borough with each other, but I can at least connect every major city in most countries without worrying about turning disbelief on its ear.

This actually makes me happier, not because it makes it easier for players to get around but because it makes it easier for everybody else. Trade, and culture can bleed out farther and faster, so it’s not that weird to find people or things far from home. It alleviated one of the big problems I had with the setting, that I, who has frequently railed against race-based rules, built an entire setting around race-based cultures. Now that travel is faster and safer, countries are more like ancestral homelands. A human can say “I’m from dwarf country on my father’s side, and my mother’s is more of a mix” as easily as an American can say “I’m mostly Irish” despite never seeing Ireland more closely than a calendar photo, and both are equivalent excuses to drink.

I’m still of two minds on the “safer” aspect, though. If they’re safe enough for an average person to use them for regular business or personal travel, they’re too safe for a party to expect a combat on one. I’ll probably have to engineer a reason for a fight to break out, and knowing me I’ll split the party so the tough, strong characters are outside the train and the softer ones are inside, each fighting a different wave of bad guys, and the more I think about this the more excited I get.

The point is that railroads started as a bit of window dressing and a potential set piece, but with a little research grew into the most visible example of the setting’s differences from standard D&D. It’s actually kind of alarming how many ideas you can get from the most mundane sources. I could do an entire post on how song lyrics have built campaign villains, and I still have half a mind to run a campaign based on the Year Without a Summer. Of course, mine would have a magical, preventable cause because this is a high fantasy story, not a climatological study.

If I have any actionable advice from this, it’s to always keep your ears open. Inspiration isn’t something that happens to you as much as it’s something you find by looking for it.

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Houdini and Doyle (the Show, Not the People [Well, Kind of the People])

Posted on 12 May, 2016 by MssngrDeath

After all the gushing I did about Lucifer I thought it would be fun to compare it to the show that moved into its time slot, Houdini and Doyle. As it turns out, that’s the only fun thing about the show.

I can forgive the writers playing fast and loose with historical accuracy; it seems they’re just about right on with Doyle’s timeline, so they had to make some sacrifices to shoehorn Houdini into it. I can forgive the incredibly unsatisfying explanations for the mystical elements; they had to do something spectacular in the early episodes to hook viewers, even if the answers were a bit of a cheat. I can forgive how it’s fairly terrible at being a mystery series because they don’t give the viewer a fair chance at figuring out the solution; most ostensible mystery series don’t. I can even forgive the bad acting; I liked Painkiller Jane so I don’t really get to complain.

What I can’t forgive is how the advertising pitched the show as a bromance, when as far as I can tell it’s nothing of the sort. Our male leads don’t compliment and respect each other; they bicker relentlessly, denigrate each other’s opinions (and facts), and interact more meaningfully with their police liaison than with each other. It’s exactly the opposite of what I wanted and what was promised. I can understand taking some liberties with advertisement, but if viewers are explicitly told they’ll get one thing and but delivered another, I would expect those viewers to complain about it to anybody who will listen. I have to imagine this is a worse fate than disinterest. It’s the difference between “didn’t get good ratings” and “had one terrible but popular episode, then didn’t get good ratings”. At least you can build an entire career on the former.

The point is that Houdini and Doyle isn’t good, but more than that it’s not what I signed up for. I can tolerate a lot of problems if I’m at least getting what I want out of something, whether it’s a movie, a TV show, or a campaign.

Consider the One Piece campaign*. We snarkily called it “the hallway campaign” due to the number of battles that took place in a one- or two-square-wide area, something that has happened maybe twice in the source material. The campaign conflicted with the established setting fairly frequently. Several NPCs erred on the side of “goofy for the sake of goofy”, a recurring issue I have with the DM’s style (re: Slogg Sexipants, half-ton ladies’ man). And none of this takes into account the little problems I had week-to-week, like when the DM decided my character was going to charge down an elevator shaft so he could weld me to the floor so I couldn’t participate in the first stage of an arc-ending battle. It wasn’t perfect.

But the campaign was very good at giving us the feel of One Piece. We had arc villains who would pop up, do something bad just in time for us to arrive to stop them, and fight us on even footing. We had fantastic islands and creatures, including an actual giant enemy crab. We had naval combat as much about our weird powers and teamwork as about grid movement and turning radii. We had shounen abilities and growth arcs and hilarious arguments. And really, when I look back on it, the canon violations weren’t that bad, and they expanded the setting more often than they contradicted it. For the most part, it was exactly as advertised, and I think highly of it for that exact reason.

Contrast The Eight Arms and the Memento Mori. I pitched it to the players as “fight giant monsters”. They built characters to fight giant monsters. I came up with a plot that let them fight giant monsters and a villain who could control giant monsters. But as soon as the campaign started, it changed to a mission of diplomacy where the players wanted to understand and help every enemy they met. At one point we went four straight sessions without a single battle. That’s neat, and the players liked it, but it wasn’t what I signed up for. I wasn’t happy, and I still consider it one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever run.

I’m one of those people who judges something not by how good it is, but by how good it is compared to how good it could have been. If something exceeds my expectations I’m over the moon about it, even if my expectations are very low. If something fails to meet those expectations I don’t like it, even if it’s very popular or objectively good (links intentionally omitted; I’m not starting that fight). When you promise me something, I set an expectation for that thing. If you break that promise, you’ve failed to meet that expectation.

This is why I like having the occasional touchstone for long-running campaigns, where we step back and consider whether the campaign is still doing the job it set out to do. If it is, great, double down. If it’s not, we have to consider if it failed to meet its expectations or if the expectations have changed over time. It’s how we head off that sensation of falling out of love with a campaign and make sure everybody’s still having fun. It’s kind of like having a Session Zero, but between arcs rather than between campaigns, and it hits all the same points. If there’s a disconnect, it’s good for the campaign, the players, and the DM to catch it early.

So yeah, I’m really not a fan of being told I’m getting one thing and instead getting another. The best way to avoid doing that is to make sure your campaigns make promises they can keep, or at least don’t make promises you know they can’t.

* — There are a lot of links in this post. If you’re at work or on mobile, I apologize. If you’re at home and relaxing, you’re welcome.

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Eight Arms Setting Map

Posted on 5 May, 2016 by MssngrDeath

I haven’t done absolutely nothing over the last month while the A to Z Challenge was going. I’ve gotten started on some articles that will post at various times, including a few about the Zelda campaign that will post when it ends sometime this summer. I also finally hunkered down and did something I’ve been promising to do for a few years: making a world map for the Eight Arms campaign setting.

I followed a very nice tutorial at http://imgur.com/a/6K80W, which I think I found by way of the normally-far-too-deep-for-me Worldbuilding subreddit. I couldn’t do everything exactly as the tutorial recommended because I have Photoshop Elements 8 instead of Photoshop for Artists and Expensive People 2018, but I think I managed:

This is just the general map, with no cities or non-geographic landmarks, to lay out roughly how the countries work together. It also does what I promised I would do by integrating the elemental races into the continent proper. There’s no scale intentionally because I don’t want to be beholden to a travel time or distance I previously defined. I’d rather leave it vague so I can work it to the story at any given time.

In more boring news, I also finally got the campaign wiki to work with picture uploads, so I can start the legitimately thrilling process of getting character portraits done for the various Eight Arms characters. If you happen to know or be anybody who can art, let me know.

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A to Z Challenge Postmortem

Posted on 2 May, 2016 by MssngrDeath

The Blogging from A to Z Challenge was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. Going over all of my campaigns to pull out characters was a neat historical exercise, and figuring out which ones were interesting enough to warrant five hundred words got me thinking about how my gaming style and the styles of my players have evolved. I may go back and do some retrospectives for other characters, too. About fifty characters didn’t make the cut, and several of them really deserved an article but didn’t get one because their letter was taken by someone else. If nothing else, writing about them will give me something to link to whenever I say things like “half-ton ladies’ man” or “kobold werepanther ranger/sorcerer raised by goliaths”.

I will admit to failing one portion of the challenge, though I also admit no wrongdoing in that failure. See, one of the points of the challenge is to visit other blogs. The managing blog put it pretty well on day G:

One of the best things about the Challenge is meeting new people and finding cool blogs that are super-interesting. However, the only way people will know you’ve visited is if you leave comments on their blogs. That not only says that we’ve dropped in, but that we were engaged enough to introduce ourselves.

I tried to do this, I promise, but every time I tried to leave a comment something technical got in the way. One blog banned all comments from anybody who wasn’t signed into a Google account. Another pretended to let me comment, but when I tried to submit my comment it took me to a separate login page and erased what I had written. I’m not sure a technology designed to foster communication is doing its job if it limits that communication only to a subset of the audience. I ended up following a few blogs for the entire challenge, but I specifically want to give a shoutout to Fuzzy’s Dicecapades; it has a lot of interesting things to say that merit discussion, but its commenting system means I am in no danger of saying so on each post.

I also didn’t want to get into the habit of commenting along the lines of “yep, this post sure was a post”. I feel like if I’m not contributing to the discussion I don’t need to assert my presence in it. It’s why this blog doesn’t have many posts about updates on my campaigns or their settings unless they pertain to some greater conversation about gaming (or I just want to show off my swank Zelda maps), and why every post in April had to involve something about how the character made me an angrier a better DM. If there’s no advice in my comments I’m doing a pretty poor job of representing an advice blog, and if there’s no actual commentary then what’s the point?

Accordingly, if you made a comment here this month (or ever, really) just to say “my keyboard works, here is a link to my blog” and you’re wondering why it didn’t get approved, there you go.

I’m already trying to figure out whether I’m going to do this next year and, if so, what I’ll talk about. I thought about covering the most fun NPCs and villains I’ve run, but that feels like a month of patting myself on the back for being amazing. Another option is to spend each day telling a story about some monster in my campaigns. I know I have stories about a xorn, a zombie, a qlippoth, an umber hulk, and a jyoti, so that’s half the battle right there. Apparently the other half will be wrestling my auto-spellcheck into submission.

What I definitely won’t do is another month of characters in my campaigns. Even though I enjoyed it, I only had one options for F, H, N, O, Q, U, X, Y, and I’m not planning on asking my players to run characters only in the disused section of the alphabet. Since my next two campaigns are going to use mostly characters from earlier campaigns, I just won’t be able to get the volume I need.

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Z is for Zee, Extraplanar Bereaucrat

Posted on 30 April, 2016 by MssngrDeath

Name: Zee
Campaign: Unnamed Monster Campaign

We started the month with a character who started off looking one-note but became awesome accidentally through play. Let’s bookend it by talking about a character who started off one-note and intentionally stayed exactly that boring.

Zee was a cleric from the Plane of Law. Readers well-versed in D&D cosmology may have read that and said “oh, you mean Mechanus.” No, I mean a plane named “Plane of Law”, created solely for this character. This was the home of the zenythri, who lived in their capital of Zenythriopolis. It was here that Zee, a zenythri, joined the Church of the Lawful Pantheon and dedicated herself to law, religion, and good, in that order.

To this day I don’t know how much of the above paragraph is a exact and valid example of zenythri culture, how much is a joke at my expense, and how much is it is just incredibly lazy character design. See, zenythri only exist in The Book of Bad Ideas the D&D 3.0E Monster Manual II, where the full description of their race, philosophy, history, culture, and racial powers fits on half a page. This gave us a lot of freedom to design them, and Zee’s player decided they were direct in naming and pretty much everything else (almost—I think she decided her racial language was Bureaucracy, which is the least direct thing possible but did come up during play several times).

Her key personality trait was that she had purple skin. If you do not consider this a personality trait, you’re right. Zee had little to no character, again intentionally. She took a heavily bureaucratic race, applied a low Charisma modifier to it, and played it to the hilt. She didn’t try to understand the other members of the party because she knew they were wrong, and she only stuck with them because they were her best way to find the demon lord she’d been sent to kill. To that end she treated them as minions, mostly snarking at them whenever they erred and reprimanding them for not following the byzantine tenets of law only she knew by heart (take a drink).

The player, however, did not, and that’s the point. She was an irritating, stoic curmudgeon, but her player applied it in a way that was fun for everybody at the table. Zee didn’t refuse to participate in plots that didn’t further her personal objectives, she didn’t force other characters to pledge their allegiance to her, and most of her ire was reserved for the campaign’s half-dragon orc barbarian because that’s what was funniest. She was the blue oni to his red oni, and their sniping always had a comedic edge to it. Still, she went along with whatever harebrained schemes the party had, and if you’ve listed to the podcasts I linked during Thrae and Valitude you’ve heard most of them. She was the most likable unlikeable character I could ask for.

She did manage to kill the demon lord she was after, then got killed by that demon lord’s father, then killed him back. A few sessions after that the campaign ended, with Zee successful but still not entirely clear how to get home to a plane nobody else had ever heard of.

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Y is for Kalodal Ybarra, Halfling Bruce Wayne

Posted on 29 April, 2016 by MssngrDeath

Name: Kalodal Ybarra a.k.a. The Whisperthief
Campaign: The Umbrageous Sodality and the Ghost Opera

Normally I refer to a character by their first name, but that gives my spellcheck fits.

Ybarra was also a vigilante, and also the stealthy kind. He was known as the Whisperthief, Lady Evening’s consort, because when your epithets have epithets you know you have a reputation. He was a gambler by trade, wandering about from place to place looking for a good time. This served as his cover, explaining how Whisperthief could flit about the continent, dispensing justice under the guise of an innocent traveler. His vigilante identity was aided by his physical transformation into a creature of shadow, giving him mystical ability along with his skills.

If I had to pick a superhero analogue for Ybarra it would be Batman, not because he was a genius or combat expert but because he loved leaving fearful enemies in his wake. Ybarra is the mask and the Whisperthief is the identity; the gambler was a means to an end, explaining his movement and letting him get close to a city’s seedy underbelly so he could take it apart piece by piece. He focused on precise strikes, slowly getting into a position from which he could exert overwhelming force, and he supported himself with ambiguously magical powers. Even at the end of the campaign he didn’t reveal his identity to his allies or officially join their group, leaving it unclear whether he would be there to help in the future. He is most definitely the lancer.

Ybarra was also frustrating, but this time for valid reasons. One of my soft rules is “no summoners”, not because their power irks me but because I’m so tired of seeing them in every campaign. So, of course, in this vigilante-only campaign, Ybarra had four levels of summoner. A synthesist, no less. His form gave him several benefits: it let him change size, so figuring out his identity became almost impossible and negated one of the key dramatic tensions of the vigilante; it gave him concealment, so even if something could hit his absurdly high AC he had a change to ignore it, and he ignored sneak attack from any ruffians in the campaign; it gave him a climb speed, so he could make it almost impossible to pin him down or approach him in melee. I never came up with an opponent that could challenge Ybarra without that same opponent pancaking the party. The character wasn’t a person, he was a powergaming exercise in a flimsy person disguise, and the only reason I didn’t force a complete rebuild was because the other players didn’t seem to mind and I didn’t want to create any table drama. I don’t have the same problem between campaigns.

In addition, Ybarra started as a lone wolf and ended there. His justification was that he couldn’t trust the rest of the party with his identity, and from the standpoint of a vigilante he was right. But from the standpoint of Law 4 and the clearly-defined campaign theme he definitely was not. I expect this won’t be a problem the next time the character appears, or he won’t be appearing at all.

I did get him back, though. In eidolon form Whisperthief was tall, strong, covered in grasping shadows that could look like fur in low light, and good at stealth. Some of his victims started thinking he was a bugbear. He also attacked from above with his climb speed, so they gave him a new, criminal-approved superhero name: Dropbear.

Again, Ybarra will return when the Eight Arms Crafting Team fights the Umbrageous Sodality (take a drink; if you still have the same drink as yesterday, that’s cool). Normally I love paring good guys and bad guys off with each other, but in this case the synthesist summoners on each team will probably not fight each other. Ybarra is a lancer, so he’ll probably fight the Eight Arms’ lancer. I’m not sure if that fight will be clever and satisfying or a meaningless empty slog.

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X is for Xavier Beauchene, Elven Clark Kent

Posted on 28 April, 2016 by MssngrDeath

Name: Xavier Beauchene a.k.a. the Voice
Campaign: The Umbrageous Sodality and the Ghost Opera

Full disclosure: I started putting together the list of characters for these posts months ago to make sure it was actually possible. It turned out I had never run a campaign with a character whose name began with an X or a Y (though I did run for a character named the Roman numeral IX, which is so close). Around that time I was starting the vigilante campaign, so I asked the players if they could kindly help me out. Conveniently these letters are right next to each other, which lets me do a bit of comparison. You may even want to skip this post and come back tomorrow so you can read them back-to-back.

Xavier was, obviously, a vigilante. He didn’t start the campaign with a code name but was soon forced to adopt “The Voice” given his predilection for very high Stealth checks during conversations with characters who had very low Perception. A member of the town guard by day, he worked the beat so he could explore the city as research for his nighttime activities. As a build he was focused on the sap, which let him apprehend criminals without killing them, and mobility, using a vigilante trick that let him get a sneak attack during the movement he made to get into position for further sneak attacks.

If I had to pick a superhero analogue for Xavier it would be Superman, not because he was a top-tier powerhouse but because he wanted to do what was right both in and out of costume. Xavier is his identity and the Voice is his mask; he joined the guard to fight for justice, and when the legal system proved too corrupt to mete it out he starting doing it himself. Despite using stealth he still took his fight to his enemies up front, and he did no permanent harm when he could help it. Most of the time he approached the other party members to talk rather than the other way around, and he was probably more into the idea of a superhero team-up than any other character (which I appreciate, since that’s what the campaign was about and I made sure everybody knew that). He is most definitely the hero.

I’ll admit I was frustrated when I saw how easy it was for Xavier to knock out an opponent in a single turn, approaching an enemy and making two sneak attacks with bonus damage before the enemy even knew he was there. But that only really happened with low-level mooks, which is the exact point of low-level mooks. The more I saw Xavier work the more I liked him, and he could be the unofficial leader of the unofficial vigilante team if they ever got around to considering such things (this does make the fourth time this player has been the party leader, so I’m starting to think he has a type). I think it’ll be really interesting to see how he works when he’s not in a town where he’s working in the guard and how the character changes as he works with people who have his back.

The good guys won, so Xavier is still alive and active. One of the explicit points of this campaign was to build the characters as antagonists for a future campaign, where the two groups the players have in this setting face off against each other (take a drink). I’m looking forward to that.

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