Starting in the Middle of Combat

One of the most popular topics in Role Playing philosophy is the initial encounter of any campaign. The “initial encounter” the event which kicks-off the adventure. Sometimes the heroes are all separate entities in a tavern and  stranger comes in attracting their attention. Other times, they’ve all answered an add at the adventurer’s guild. Maybe they were individually hired by an eccentric wizard. These situations all fall into the category:  “you find yourself at a table talking to some dude.”

Another type of initial encounter “is the party meets each other for the first time,” usually at a crossroads in town. This results in the awkward scenario of describing your character and convincing the other players why your characters should all instinctively trust each other. Because this awkward from both a logical and a role-play situations, it is often hand-waived and the adventure really gets going once they all agree to talk to the NPC that sets up the scenario (see above).

Since these are tired cliches, a lot of DMs have experimented with starting the adventure off with some action, which is a great thing.  Some examples are

• the party is walking down the street and a stranger runs up to them and falls over dead from a stab wound, or
• they are all part of a caravan guard and the adventure starts and the caravan is under attack, or
• everyone is on a boat in the middle of the ocean it suddenly starts sinking…

This is a great way to avoid the awkwardness of starting a campaign and getting going with some adrenaline. I think I’d like to start my next campaign off not right before battle, but right in the middle of a battle. It could start 4 rounds in already, with all the participants having taken a little damage and maybe a dead minion two. With this the players would have to jump immediately into action, and at the same time figure out who is trying to kill them and how to get to safety. If the PCs start off as strangers, it should be obivous to them they are all on the same side. It could be fun making introductions in the middle of battle; it seems like something they might do in a superhero cartoon.

In a system other than d&d you might be able to get away with starting the campaign just as the characters suddenly regain conciousness (in the middle of fight). They would have either temporary or permanent amnesia and have to piece together what the hell is going on. This extends extend the “middle of combat” idea from the players to their characters. I imagine a game setting where you can define your character’s prototype on the fly. By declaring your character is casting a spell gives them spell-casting ability, or if they run away, they would get the attributes of a rogue, etc. I feel like I’ve seen that kind of character building in a video game.

Have you started a campaign in the middle of action,  or in some other way that wasn’t in a tavern or meeting with a hiring NPC ? Was it successful? How was this experience colored by being a DM or player?

More on splitting the party: The Expert

The TV show Numb3rs is about a FBI team that occasionally gets helped out by a math professor. The five FBI agents form the group that goes on missions, hunts down bad guys, and gets into gun fights. Each member of the team fills a different specialty, and yet at the same time are pretty much interchangeable. What makes them work is their effort and teamwork, this is a different model from a team where each person contributes specific skills skills (e.g. the Leverage team). If the show were Star Trek TNG, the FBI guys would be the “away team,” and in d&d they would just be “the party.”  They are the ones going on adventures.

But Charlie the math professor is the main character of the show. He very rarely goes into gunfights with the FBI team. Instead he stays behind in one of the headquaters and hunts down murders through math. In a fantasy setting he would be protrayed by the beyond-wise sage or wizard (but more involved with the world than the stereotypical mystic). But as the main character, he is the cool character that I imagine most people would want to play if the show were a campaign.

I wonder if it is possible to play d&d where one of the party members takes on the role of the Sage that hangs out at HQ and crunches the numbers? In this hypothetical scenario the only the other players would go into the dungeon and get into fights.

I came up with three sticking points that I think would make it hard to play out this setup at the table:

1. Combat balance. Let’s say the combats are designed for 5 characters; with one behind, then the battle will be more difficult than expected. If we assume the sage will want some XP as well, a fight  balanced for 4 will make the party advance slower.The party members also depend on each other’s support in combat. The Sage can provide great out-of-combat support (intel, participate in skill checks, etc) but not so much in combat. For this to work, “Sage” would have to be a specialized class (probably a Leader) that can supply bonuses that act like single-use magical items. It might have a ton of dailies instead of at-wills and encounter powers, and those powers can provide party members with one-time buffs, saving throws, healing surge uses, etc.  To me, this doesn’t sound appealing as a character choice.
2. Split parties. There’s going to be a lot of game time where your expert is in a different location, which means the DM has to divide her attention between two different scenes. I don’t know if there is a good way around this, other than some magic items or rituals that connect the sage to the rest of the party. For suggestions cell the comments on my cell phone post.
3. Information Access. In order to make it worthwhile for the rest of the party to need a Sage, the Sage needs access to information beyond the regular means of the party. He should have an abnormally high knowledge check or a direct line to the Gods, Demons, etc. If there were a specialized class for this role, it could be a class power or feature. Maybe a Sage could cast divination rituals with reduced time or cost. Either way, he needs to get info from the DM beyond what is normal for the party’s level.

RPG Blog II had some good ideas for “low-magic wizards.” In that post he describes magic users as having a limited set of powers and are balanced out with fighting skills (perhaps even all the PCs have some limited magic). To get powerful magics, you have to find ancient temples, artifacts, extra-planar wizards, etc. In that world, I image that the Sage character would be one of the ones that had power well beyond the common magic-user. This would be a fun way to stand out and make a mark in world, but then you have the opposite problem with balance.

I like the idea of Sage character, but due to the team nature of D&D, he’s best suited to be a NPC that the PCs can consult with. It might be a good role for a retired PC though, if you play in a setting that spans multiple campaigns. Have people seen examples of classes or player characters that fill this role and overcome those enumerated concerns?

Critical Misses

Does anyone else miss critical misses? I’m not sure if they were ever a real part of the rules or if some sense of fairness and consistency wanted a critical miss to balance out critical hits. I know at somepoint “natural 20″ == automatic hit became a real rule, and by the time 3rd edition rolled around there were weapons and feats that expanded the auto-hit range. At or around the same time as 3E the idea of the critical miss was taken out of the official lexicon.

Critical Miss by !!! scogle, http://www.flickr.com/photos/scogle/1260802219

I understand the change. After all it’s easy to apply some sort of mechanic to a critical hit (times 2, max damage, etc), and much harder to mechanic a critical miss. After all you can’t do any less damage than 0. I suppose you could give temporary hit points to the monster; that would be more fun to justify than just “hit points.” When I did play with critical misses, the rules were pretty much arbitrary: a bowstring snaps, a sword drops and goes rolling, the arrow instead hits an adjacent ally. The exact effect never really mattered much when playing as these seemed to happen a lot less often than critical hits; also we could always pull another weapon off the belt or go and pick up a fallen one. Critical misses were more fun as a DM. I once had a big lizard creature break its fangs on a critical miss (it only had natural weapons). Of course that affected all future turns and not just that one, but he was pretty much dead anyway.

I guess there are two things I miss about CMs. (1) combats were a little riskier. Even with permanent (or heavily penalized) death, level drains, and other nasty things to worry about, there was always a turn-by-turn real fear of the die coming up “1″. (2) The random flair. It’s easy to inject color into any RP situation, but when it’s based on the die you can’t predict it, so we had to come up with a significant but not too-significant result on the spot. That led to  a lot of creative GMing.

What I don’t miss is the extra penalty. In 4e with all sorts of powers and implements, it’d be pretty tough to come up with a fair and consistent implementation of the critical miss anyway. There’s enough already going against the players… who needs one more?

I suppose a good compromise is that a critical miss bolsters the enemy, giving him a recharge on a spent second wind or a +2 circumstance bonus to attack you next round. Does anyone play 4e with critical misses?

What to do when a member of the party dies

There’s a lot out there on the web about dealing with your own character’s death.  You can try to get him resurrected, create a new character, or bring back your character and add a “2″ to his name. In the game session when he dies, you (as the player) can go home or hang around, play a NPC, or wait just a little bit while the rest of the party brings him back to life. For this post I want to focus instead on what you and your character can do if she survies , but one of her companions does not.

1. Have a funeral/wake for the character. This post is in part inspired by watching the episode of Stargate SG1 where Daniel “dies” the first time. The party characters should get together and celebrate the life of their companion in an honoring way. Would he have liked a solemn religious service or  a wild party? The characters can tell stories of their favorite moments, and with enough lead time important NPCs from the past can come by to pay their respects.
2. Avenge his death. The second most common scenario is getting a bigger boat and coming back  to the dragon’s lair. Let that red dragon know that he can’t push around The Party. That’s how Aeofel would have wanted it.
3. Bring him back to life. A dead character is never more than a ritual and few hundred gold pieces away. In past editions, the difficulty of bringing back a character depended on how much of the body was left and how long he was gone.  In 4th Edition you just need 50 x 10^teir gp and someone to cast Raise Dead [DDI]. Interestingly, bringing a pet back to life is only a 1st level ritual.  Personally I am a fan of having to complete a noble quest to bring a character back to life. However, the upshot of having an easy spell for this is that the player gets to spend those next adventures playing the character he truly cares about instead of a backup, which should in theory be more fun for him. In the 4e mindset, I recommend quests to raise dead for important NPCs rather than PCs.
4. Loot the body. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done, but you don’t want his boots (or gold and magic items) to go to waste. Depending on your characters’ ideals I suppose you could donate his stuff to a orphanage or adventurer’s shelter instead of keeping it for gain.  The only tricky part here is you want the player to come back with a new character and have party balance preserved.
5. Gone but not forgotten. This works well when a player leaves the group. The character can have a poignant death, such as holding back the onslaught while the rest of the party escapes. The surviving PCs can go on with their lives and save the world, knowing their friend’s courageous sacrifice allowed that to happen. You can honor and memorialize him with a small ceremony right away, and when the world comes back to normal, with a grand monument.

It might be fun to leave behind a party member because you think he’s dead, but somehow he survives and comes back. This would have to be cleared with the DM first, but he could come back at a higher level (Gandalf the White),  or just as he was, maybe missing a toe or two. It’s also fun to come back as an Evil character, either as a NPC or PC-NPC. That might be fun if your character started off happy-go-lucky but being left behind in the underdark twisted his mind to the point where he now seeks to provide the same torment to his supposed “friends.” Fantasy trope gold….

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. How else have you dealt with a dead party member?

How to not split the party

I have to admit a little mea culpa.  On this blog I try to press the point that players have a duty to work together as a team in order to ensure a smooth and enjoyable session for everyone. What I struggle with is how to do that without diluting one’s own sense of fun and Role Play. In last week’s game I split the party. Not to be an egotistical jerk, but because the obvious actions to me was to uncover the nefarious plots of the highly-suspect king’s advisor by gaining his confidence. To do that I wanted to distance myself from the rag-tag bunch of troublemakers that is The Party. As we know from the Wizard’s website neversplittheparty.com, the motto of 4e is “never split the party.”

You might ask “Why, Mike, is that a bad idea?” Well, I’ll tell you. You might find your character in a situation where he’s schmoozing over at one inn and the rest of the party is getting into big trouble at a different an inn on the other side of the town. Or, at least, I certainly did. Our DM tried a few times to get my back into the plot, but I didn’t take the hint, and so with a heavy hand I eventually wound up at the right inn too late to save the party, but fortunately still able to do something. What that something was was to willingly go along with the kidnappers in order to the keep the party together and the story moving.

My first instict in that case was to fight off the kidnappers and single-handedly rescue the party. This kind of thinking is usually a bad idea for the following reasons (A) single character odds of surviving a combat built for 4 are low, and (B) It wouldn’t be much fun for everybody else at the table sitting around and watching me play (see below). For the sake of the story and everybody’s precious time I voluntarily went with the kidnappers (as bonus for cooperating I got to act first when the action started).

Overall this situation was dissatisfying because I made the GM work to provide a good resolution, when I shouldn’t have gone off on my own anyway. I think this a mini-case of the larger issue of information-gathering scenes in D&D. It’s pretty natural to split up for each character to talk to his personal sources; it certainly doesn’t make sense to drag the paladin to an assassin’s guild meeting. I find when we do all go as party to meet with a contact the scene goes quicker because the DM doesn’t have to divide her attention between five people doing five different things. However, only one or two people usually participate in the scene (and the others just sit around or perform actions that are unnecessary in context). Now that Charisma is no longer a dump stat, this especially leaves a whole bunch of characters that could do the same thing, but don’t do anything because it’s silly for everyone to do the talking. Dungeon’s Master did a great job describing this problem earlier this week.

So to summarize, I’m still searching for a good way to balance separate acts with keeping everyone engaged. One thing I just occurred to me about my example of the lone character in a fight would be to have the other players play the NPCs in the  brawl–that way they can take the frustration of not actively playing out on the person who’s fault it is.

What does the Apple Tablet mean for d&d?

Today’s mass excitement gave us the iPad… Apple’s bigger than a iPod, smaller than a MacBook multi-touch internet device. I’m sure millions of nerds worldwide spun their brains about how this device will work for their game books.  I don’t like carrying around a ton of books, and I would be quite happy with an ebook reader that was both in color (for all the pretty pictures of monsters) and of large enough screen size, a test which the iPad passes.  I hope Wizards brings official iBooks to this device and that those books will support a reasonable search. The printed book indicies are barely useful, and I hate page flipping in the middle of the game.

A tablet also seems like a nice compromise between accessing tools (such as the d20SRD for 3.5 or D&D Compendium for 4e) and not being a laptop. Laptops at the table have physically separate you from the action on the table and the rest of the players.  I enjoy the i4e iPhone/iPod app for managing a 4e character at the table, and I hope they make one for the iPad. There’s a lot i4e doesn’t do and its screens are tight…but a larger screen is precisely what it needs; all the tables can be fit side-by-side on screen,  so you’re not constantly navigating during a combat.

I think the multi-touch aspect too will provide for a lot of useful tools such as combat and initiative trackers, dice rolling apps, and I really hope, interactive maps.  I don’t think its quite big enough for use as a combat surface, they way those CMU Microsoft Surface demos have shown, but that’s fine. If everyone at the table had one, it’d be great for “passing notes” or sharing information like treasure lists or stats.

I actually have a ton of ideas on this subject, a iPhone developer account, and a lot of experience putting together good gaming UIs. Unfortunately I don’t have a ton of time to devote to the project. If anyone out there knows of projects looking for help or want to get something started, let me know.

Reputation as a matter of system

I believe that as a reward for saving the kingdom the heroic characters should receive a bump in reputation. There’s little more rewarding than rolling into town and being recognized as a famous dragon slayer, given free drinks, and getting an instant audience with the duke. It’s also fun when you introduce yourself to a knight and he says something like “You can’t be William Wallace, he’s seven feet tall!” What I’m getting at is that if your character survives long enough he should get some renown, and for gain or ill, his reputation will proceed him.

I like the idea of a mechanical reputation system. If it’s tangible and measurable, then I get a sense of accomplishment every time my “reputation stat” gets bumped up. In some games you add a reputation bonus to social skills like diplomacy or intimidate. I recall there are even games where the reputation system was a little broader, and you could apply reputation bonuses to almost every type of roll.

The thing I don’t like is having to keep track of yet another modifier; there’s already too much to keep track of. So then I started thinking of what I a simple reputation system might look like. In 4e, you add 1/2 the character’s level to practically everything. For a reputation system, character level is a pretty good approximation for reputation if the kinds of things the party does for experience is helping out others. Take the Elder Scrolls series of CRPGs, where your character can earn fame and infamy by completing quests. The more quests you complete the more XP you get and the higher your level. It’s not linear like the 1/2 level score, but that’s okay. We’re only dealing with an approximation.

I think I like the level model of reputation. It’s not something that has to ever be kept track of since you add 1/2 level to diplomacy score anyway. It’s an easy way for the GM to figure out how new NPCs might react to your character. By the time you reach 20th level, practically everybody on the plane should have heard of you.

Are there any D&D-compatible reputation systems out there? I seem to remember some stuff to add on from the 2E splat books and the Birthright campaign setting….

Getting the party inside your character’s head

I just had a fun idea for an occasional flipping of table roles in a way that lets a player GM for awhile but keeps the campaign continuity. The idea is to  let the other players play parts in a story narrated by your character.  Two scenarios where this might happen in an existing campaign are:

1. Through evil magic the party is trapped inside the nightmare of one of the characters.  In this scenario there are real-campaign consequences (death or madness) and the other players can use their regular characters.
2. Your character narrates a vivid story from either his own past or from a legend and the other players temporarily play characters in that narrative.  For ideas here, see any Simpsons episode where they play out some myth or Shakespearean play. Also definitely see the Family Guy star wars spoof. The other players can either play temporary characters, or their regular characters performing the role of a character in the narrative.

What does this buy the group? Well, you give the GM a break on the story telling for awhile (he or she can play another character in the story or the NPCs). It also allows you to do character development in a shared way with everyone else at the table.  Fr example, if you go with option 1, you can play out the character’s darkest fears , and option 2 allows you to share a meaningful story with the rest of the party.  This might be a good way to get one’s feet wet GMing, as pulling this off requires a lot of structure and support from the regular GM.

When developing the adventure, work on the story with the GM. She’ll need to make sure she has something to do during the session, and she should have the final say on anything that lasts beyond the mini-adventure. For instance, if the story involves the regular party characters, they should receive XP for the obstacles overcome; the GM makes sure the rewards are balanced and fit into the overall game arc. If the back-story is how you got that magical frost sword, and the reward for successfully completing the adventure is actually having the sword (you had it the whole time but just forgot!). This is a good way to introduce some of the group items or lair items from Adventurer’s Vault 2, since the whole party can share them. Another way to share past rewards is to make them pay out in the present. For example, if the adventure saves a local church from a demon’s attack, and your character hasn’t seen the deacon until the present, then he can hand over 400gp reward, which you graciously share with your adventuring friends. If your character and the party is trapped inside your mind’s imaginings explaining XP is pretty easy, but the treasure is a little more difficult. A tangible, shared reward here is remembering a clue you once overheard to the location for a fantastic treasure.

When actually running the adventure, there are a few ways to play it. If the DM comes up with the plot just using the ideas you’ve given her, and she runs the adventure then there’s not much more for you to do.  If you wind up running the adventure or at least write the bulk of the plot, then you have to play your character as a GM-PC. I’m giving the okay for this one despite my long standing rule against GM PCs, because (a) this is only a side adventure and (b) the regular GM still has veto power. The most important advice is to let your friends at the table do the role playing, figure out the puzzles, and slay the monsters with at most gentle guidance from you. Don’t run their characters, please. Also be sure that the story gives every character a chance to shine; don’t put them in the background because it’s your character’s story. Narrating a legend works well here since you all can take on roles not directly related to the PC.

If the adventure is successful, the DM can extend any of the plot elements that come out as adventure hooks for the main campaign. If you want to try this out, I recommend reading the tons of DM guidance out there like www.newbiedm.com, www.dungeonmastering.com, www.gnomestew.com, etc (see the blog-roll to the right), and find articles on writing and running adventurers for first timers. Running a mini-adventure might give you appreciation for all the hard work put in by the GM.

Let me know if you have any corollary ideas. This just sprung to mind on my drive home, so I haven’t had time to really bake it yet.

Fantastic Phones

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While going through a little bit of an existential phone crisis, I thought about how much our lives have changed with an always-on connection to everybody else on the planet. In a world with dragons and magic spells it certainly seems possible that adventurers can stay in touch with their friends and family back home in Winterhaven. The ritual Sending [DDI] seems like the most logical in-game analog to a cell phone. It’s heroic tier (6th level) which is not too bad, but at 50gp for 25 words, it’s a pretty expensive tweet (that’s over 3 months’ lodging). The 20th level True Sending let’s you send 50 words to anyone, anywhere in existence for only 4,000 gold, making Sending seem like a pretty good deal. Unfortunately, there’s a pretty steep time and cost involved sending a message this way, and it requires a Ritual Caster. Sending Stones get a little bit closer to something like a phone. I guess they work like a 1-time Nextel phone, for only 9 grand.

We start really talking with the Psion’s short-range Send Thoughts and Wizard’s Ambassador Imp, which just sounds like a hell of lot of fun (pun not intended). In my games, I keep trying to find a use for Send Thoughts, but its range requirements make it hardly more useful than speaking.

I think even with these item and power restrictions, it’s interesting to think about who a character keeps in contact with and how. My character is a bit of a persona non grata, so he probably uses his minutes for bejwelled. But other characters might send letters home between adventures. To letter sending to be possible, homebase Inn would have to have somebody who coordinates with merchants passing through to carry letters and hope that they somehow make its way to the destination. You certainly couldn’t send anything confidential or time-sensitive that way. Maybe the King has implemented a postal service, or perhaps the priests of Pelor provide a postal service. If a letter could take months or a year to reach its destination, what would he or she say in it? What would your character do if he intercepted a letter or was asked to deliver one to a remote location?

In a world with a higher level of magic, temples or wizard schools could have magic spheres that let people communicate between them for a nominal fee like a fantasy Western Union. If it was easy to stay in touch, who would your hero send messages to and how often?  There’s nothing more fearful than a Dragonborn mother who doesn’t think you call often enough! (Now I’m imaging a dragonborn with thick glasses and an apron sitting in the living room waiting all day for you to call).

In the world with easy communication, what happens when that communication is suddenly cut off? Are you nervous that your friends might be worried about you? Having the magical communication network suddenly go haywire also sounds like an exciting plot hook.

Did I miss any of the other communication options available in 4e?

Snow and Ice

My morning commute provided me time to think of all the awful situations that can occur weather-wise in a d&d setting. Be it driving a lightning rail through a thunderstorm or fighting a white dragon in a icy mountain pass, bad weather can really ruin one’s day.

In my experience weather rarely comes up in an adventure. A long time ago I tried using the random weather tables in the 2E DMG to track weather on a daily basis;  since we never used it in-game, it was a piece of color that faded into the background to be forgotten. When weather does factor into combat, it usually provides some attack adjustment (like concealment or distraction). Personally, I find it annoying to have to keep track of yet another effect in combat. Especially in 4e, the number I announce as my result is so far removed from the roll of the die with all sorts of situational modifiers, that the extra flavor doesn’t seem worth it

This is too bad because when used appropriately weather can really mix things up and give a sense of reality to a fantasy world.  Since one of the reasons why I don’t like weather is keeping track of modifiers, I’ll try to explore non-modifier options.

The first thing that comes to mind is weather as terrain. For example, let’s say there’s a type of terrain called “slippery driveway” that counts as difficult terrain and any character moving more than 1/2 speed through it has to make an Athletics check or fall prone. Or there can be a constant sleet over a set of squares that does a set damage per round or slows characters caught out in it. How about a fog that emulates low light conditions? The DMG talks about extreme weather taking away daily healing surges, which is a good non-terrain option. In those cases, the DM should really try to press the party to make lost surges count.

Weather can have roleplay effects too. Some NPCs and mounts might not want to go outside on a rainy day, or frost can threaten to ruin the season’s crops, or a heat wave might kill off weaker villagers. Weather gives a character a chance to brag about how great it was back home or that he’s spent winters in Icewind Dale. Weather gives him something to talk to strangers about at the Inn.  Nature-y characters should be able to show off in bad weather with tracking monsters, finding food or shelter, or detecting unusual patterns of storms.

When going to to an ice planet, hopefully the characters know to buy coats and bring along some Tauntauns. But what if it’s an average spring and but the party gets caught up in a freak blizzard? Unexpected weather provides a great way for the DM to apply those effects because it catches the PCs unaware. Weather also gives the PCs an excuse to use rituals like Endure Elements and Control Weather, which hopefully don’t break the game.

D&D is a fantasy game, so I expect to see some magical weather. Make it rain donuts, have the snow fall upwards, and of course, the ocassional bout of Purple Rain.

While I’m talking about the weather, does anyone else think the monsters that live in extreme climates don’t make sense? If a Frost Giant [DDI] has resist cold, it’s reasonable to expect that the Ice Lions they eat also have resist cold. Therefore shouldn’t it make sense for the Frost Giant to use fire attacks instead of cold ones?