The Superman Problem

Posted on 3 January, 2018 by MssngrDeath

After several weeks of illness and travel, my first D&D 5E campaign has finally wrapped up. But in the long stretch of time between last two sessions, I realized a normal campaign post-mortem wouldn’t really cover the things I wanted to say. I think it’s more helpful to discuss each issue separately so it has the space it needs, and I’d like to begin by telling you about a pro wrestling match I saw right after the penultimate session.

It featured two popular, skilled men in a match that had minor implications in their storyline but was more an excuse to give both of them something to do. It was a gripping, back-and-forth affair where both competitors pulled out surprising, athletic maneuvers, and they kept the action moving quickly and constantly. Commentary covered it well, the crowd stayed interested, there were no ridiculous shenanigans to take away from the match or the result, and both wrestlers came out looking like beasts, one for his skill and the other for his determination against great odds. It was fun, it was entertaining, it was excellently performed, and I hated it.
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The Secret Language of Character Sheets: Examples

Posted on 15 October, 2017 by MssngrDeath

Reading a character sheet isn’t easy, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for. “Longsword: +6 to attack, 1d8+3 damage” doesn’t actually mean anything without context, and that context is usually buried in gaming rules and minutia. Even if you have a frame of reference, like knowing you’re looking at a 2nd-level fighter in 3.5E, the context changes based on the campaign style (“Why don’t you have a magic weapon yet?”), the challenges (“You’re almost guaranteed to kill any goblin in a single hit, that’s ridiculous.”), the setting (“A longsword? So you’re showing off that you’re a foreigner?”), and too many other factors to list. I can’t give you a detailed primer on how to know if your character’s abilities, or the abilities of your players’ characters, fit the character or characters you want to play. That’s something you have to figure out for yourself within your campaign framework.

What I can do is give you examples of reading character sheets for information and what we learned from those examples. These aren’t direct recommendations like “if a character’s attack bonus falls below the recommended range for an attack bonus at the character’s level, that character is not interested in front-line combat”. Hard and fast rules don’t work for this. Instead they’re concepts, gentle nudges that say “here’s what we noticed, here’s what it meant, here’s how we reacted or did not react, and here’s the result” to demonstrate the general flow of this activity.
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The Secret Language of Character Sheets: Theory

Posted on 8 October, 2017 by MssngrDeath

There is perhaps no less fruitful question in my daily life then “what do you want for dinner?” The perfect answer is something direct and attainable like “grilled cheese sandwiches with ham like you made three weeks ago”. Acceptable answers include “pizza”. But the most common answer is some version of “I don’t know.” It’s frustrating, it’s unhelpful, and it is completely reasonable.

In my experience, rarely does it actually mean “I don’t know.” It usually means something much more nuanced like “I want a meal that’s warm and hearty but not too heavy, strong on umami but light on salt, preferably heavily sauced, but right now I don’t have the wherewithal to express that.” A person typically knows what they want to eat, but they can’t express it in language. They just know a particular dish or place or culinary style sounds good or bad, and they consider those dishes and places and styles rather than finding the links among them to get a picture of their current perfect meal. That’s neither wrong nor surprising. It takes knowledge of food to be able to say what you want in food terms, and it takes knowledge of self to be able to even begin looking at your wants in that way, and most people don’t have both in sufficient capacity.
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Campaign Write-up: The Eight Arms and the Day That Wasn’t

Posted on 27 September, 2017 by MssngrDeath

I don’t spend a lot of time here talking about how my current campaigns are going. I generally only mention what we’re doing week-by-week when it’s something I can apply to gaming in general or an opportunity to make fun of my bad luck. There’s probably some fun to be had in a narrative, in-character description of what we do each session, but that’s not really in keeping with a GMing advice blog.

Luckily there are other blogs, and one of my players is keeping an online journal for our campaign. Please thrill to the adventures of Dael, written by a player who heard me say “I want this campaign to be darker and more serious” and decided to play a drunken master of a monastic order founded on a typo. If you really what to go blog diving, this is the same player who brought us Egan Mospru, another character in the same setting, and Lao, Laotzu, and Lao!ze, the latter of whom is in this setting by virtue of becoming a god. I’m pretty sure this character will survive the campaign and complete his story, but it’s my first go at 5th Edition. So far I’ve only almost killed three characters in three sessions, so fingers crossed!

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Campaign Report – Monster of the Week

Posted on 18 September, 2017 by MssngrDeath

In July I finished my first non-d20 campaign. Having played in and more or less enjoyed campaigns in Fate, Icons, and a Powered by the Apocalypse system, I wanted to apply that sort of narrative, rules-light feel to a campaign in the Eight Arms universe and see how it mapped to somewhat stereotypical D&D. We’d already been giving the rules a bit of a light touch in Pathfinder and I thought running in a system that actually supported it was the next logical step. I settled on Monster of the Week as the system because it matched the feel and the presentation I wanted; most PbtA systems I see are about settings more than anything else, and finding a system that worked in multiple settings was an unexpected boon. Our group applied one of the ideas we’d had while faffing about one week, of a group of low-level folks who begrudgingly dealt with a high-magic world, and gave it a whirl.

It didn’t go great. To put it pithily, the campaign ended more than a month ago and I’ve only recently separated myself from it enough to have a logical opinion on what happened. It was not a crushing failure, but it wasn’t a rousing success either. I went through several rounds of blaming myself, blaming the players, and blaming the system, in that order, until I think I’ve come to a point where I can look at what we did, what went wrong, and how to handle it in the future, all without burying any of the people who decide whether my characters live or die next week. My general takeaway is that while the campaign might have had its good points, this confluence of GM, player group, and play style was not a good match and I’m probably not going to do it again.
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Static Representation of Constant Motion

Posted on 5 September, 2017 by MssngrDeath

We generally accept that what’s happening on the game board isn’t necessarily exactly the same as what’s happening in the game. The most common example of this in my games is usually when minis stand in for other minis, but there are several examples enshrined in the rules: creatures aren’t actually five feet wide, they’re moving around their space looking for positioning; monsters have reach based on their size, regardless of how long the arms on their figures are; attacks that deal hit point damage don’t always draw blood, etc. In our games we’ve added a principle to this pantheon to remind us of how the narrative is playing out and encourage more interesting, dynamic play.

We call this principle “static representation of constant motion”. Continue reading →

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Themes: Competitor

Posted on 18 August, 2017 by MssngrDeath

Actually I think I don’t have anything to say about this one.

COMPETITOR

You live for victory. You constantly seek to improve yourself, and your greatest triumphs come at the expense of others in your field. Your focus may be on individual accomplishment like a master of games, working with allies as in a team sport, or proving yourself in combat against ever-more-deadly threats. You won’t rest until you’re not only the best you can be, but the best in the world, with all the recognition and perks that entails.

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Themes: Atoner

Posted on 12 August, 2017 by MssngrDeath

This is the only theme I’ve written where I really, really feel like it should have an alignment restriction. I have a hard time believing a character could have this theme and remain non-good, and that bears itself out in the class features. But it is theoretically possible to take this theme and be some flavor of neutral or evil, so I’m not putting any such restriction in the rules themselves.

It’s also my first foray into Paizo-style design, where you take some existing character and try to write rules for them. I didn’t go fully down the nonsensical well of “you can play the character we had in mind and nothing else, so I hope you like Sherlock Holmes/Harry Dresden/Batman/etc.” but you can see glimmers of the character I had in mind here and there.

ATONER

You’ve hurt a lot of people. Through ignorance, apathy, or outright malice you have caused a great deal of suffering, and you’ve now seen the error or your ways. Whether you want to make reparations to the families of those you killed as an assassin, fight for the rights of a race you tried to oppress or wipe out, or help the people you used to rule as an evil overlord, your journey is fueled by a need to balance the scales. You may never be forgiven, and you may be a pariah until your dying day, but you have to try.

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Themes: Survivor

Posted on 9 August, 2017 by MssngrDeath

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about themes is that multiple themes can work for the same character depending on what the character’s focus is. Consider a person who grew up in a small farming village that was wiped out by orcs. That character could be a farmer, if they want to focus on their old profession; an epicurean, if they’ve recognized how fleeting life is and want to make the most of it; an expatriate, if they want to keep their small-town lifestyle and ideals alive even after they’re forced to move to a city; a pacifist, if they’ve seen enough death for one lifetime; today’s theme, if the orc attack itself drives them forward, and so on. Each sets a different tone for the character and provides wildly different powers. It’s not as simple as “I learned to farm, so I am a farmer”. It’s more like “farming is what I want to do with my life” and deciding how that fits into an adventuring career.

SURVIVOR

Your life is defined by disaster. Some natural, magical, or monstrous tragedy left it mark on you when you were young. Whether it left you an orphan, destroyed half your town, or only affected you deeply and permanently, it still haunts you wherever you go. You aren’t proud of your scars, but they do galvanize you and give you the focus and experience you need to help others in the same situation. If you can survive the worst of your past, there’s nothing the future holds that can stop you.

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Themes: Expatriate

Posted on 6 August, 2017 by MssngrDeath

I freely admit this idea came form the 5E Player’s Handbook, which provides the background “outlander”. But that background only covers people from the wilds, not people from civilized but remarkably different cultures. I’ve watched enough professional wrestling to know that “foreigner” isn’t just a character archetype, it’s also a personality and often an alignment. And a city mouse in the country is just as lost as the reverse, so there’s no need to split that into two themes.

More than most, this background relies on role-playing. A farmer might not always talk about farming and a dragonkin might not always talk about how great their ancestors were, but a person lost in a confusing culture is always lost in a confusing culture. As such, I tried to dodge a lot of the obvious cultural differences like “everybody from around here cooks weird food” and “I can’t understand anything said with that accent” and “the phrasebook says that word means something else”. In reality that’s frustrating and in fiction it’s hilarious, neither of which is really the scope of optional mechanics. It’s up to the player to decide how much of that they’re willing to tolerate, and it’s up to the theme to provide small but tangible mechanical effects related to it. As such, you’ll probably need to justify each of these abilities in-character. And that’s fine. In fact, it’s kind of the point of themes in general.

An aside: I think one of the abilities in this theme is among the best mechanics I’ve ever written. See if you can spot it.

EXPATRIATE
You’re not from around here. You were born and raised in a very different culture, like a nomadic tribe in the desert who have never even heard of iron, a small town deep in dwarven lands, or a secret underground society beneath the capital city. Uprooting your life taught you many important lessons, but you don’t want the old you to wither and die. You want to expose your friends and associates to your culture, fostering it and building acceptance for it in a new environment.
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