Player focus

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

In the recent Fear the Boot #168, the guys on that podcast focused on how to keep a player’s attention during a game. The arguments for wanting players to stay focused are good ones, and I can pretty much summarize them with the following statement: “people have limited time to game, and everyone has agreed to spend some of that time gaming together.” There was some back and forth about how much time at the table should be spent gaming vs table chatter and when those instances are okay or not. I am on the side of table chatter is good because I’m there to relax and have fun with friends. But I like to keep it contained because I want to accomplish something in-game as well (for me is fun and relaxing).

There are two consistent times when I feel my attention wandering while the game is going on. Either during combat when its not my turn in a long round or during an role-playing encounter when my character is on the sideline.  On analysis, these two are the same situation: I have nothing to do and what’s going on doesn’t affect me. One the hallmarks of a successful board or card game is that each player doesn’t have a lot of downtime. Since the activities in D&D are quite varied and DMs differ a lot in style, downtime isn’t inherent in the system, and so there are things that can be done to minimize (but not eliminate) downtime. Less downtime means less time for loosing focus and playing Wii while someone else is acting.

For better or worse, the DM is the de-facto leader in most groups and so most of the blogs, books, and podcasts out their give DM advice for helping players stay focused and keep the game moving. I personally like keeping an explodeable cart on every street corner as way of drawing players back into the game.

Here are suggestions to my fellow players on staying focused and keeping the game moving:

1. Respect the other players’ time. Come prepared; know your combat powers and rituals. Spend the time between rounds preparing in your head an A action (and a B action in case the situation changes). In an non-turn situation limit your time spent dominating the RP.
2. Provide hooks in the conversation so the DM can pause it or bring in other players. After striking up a conversation with the barkeep, take your drink back to a table and sit quietly for awhile. After prying information out of the lord’s chamberlain, take a while to look at the nice tapestries.
3. Don’t ramble on constantly and monopolize the game time.
4. Bring in your fellow players. If you’ve got a rogue, take him with you to scout out the rooftops. A wizard? Suggest that he go to talk to the town’s archmage. If two characters are charsima-y, do a good cop/bad cop routine on a prisoner. Of course that’s just sharing the spotlight with one other character. I’ll to take more time to figure out what you can do for a whole party.You can also bring in another player unwillingly. If two of you are out scouting the town together, punch the guard and you both wind up in jail. Speak on behalf of another to an npc, or start a little something like stealing the halfling’s breakfast ration. Player’s note: only do these things sparingly. Some people won’t take kindly to you forcing their characters to act or being negative towards them, and even a tolerant group gets sick of one player’s jackassery.
5. Get a combat buddy. Pair up with the guy next to you and help him plan his turn. Of course you have to make sure he/she is amenable to this type of gaming. It’s not about ego, but instead working together to solve a challenge.

What other tricks do you do help your fellow players stay focused?

Reaction powers

Many powers in 4e are reactions triggered by “you are hit.” This means you can immediately perform an action outside of your turn and outside of the standard/move/minor action paradigm. Some of these powers include buffs to defenses, transference of damage, or special move such as shifting out of the way. Many of these only make sense in the context of getting hit (“you get a +1 to attack the guy who just hit you”), but some abilities have neither flavor nor effect that have anything to do with being hit by an opponent. Or at least not all of the reaction power directly affects the attacker.

One such power is my character’s Cape of the Mountebank [DDI] immediate teleport reaction. If you have the cape on and an available item daily, you can teleport 5 squares when you’re hit. My question is, why do you have to wait to get to use the ability?

In last week’s extended session we were in a fight with the big baddie about to get away with all the treasure. We were on the roof, but there was a 10′ guard wall around the top between the party and the escaping villain. In order to get a clear shot to use a power, I wanted to take advantage of my cape’s teleport. Since no enemies were handy, I had an ally bash in my skull so I could use the reaction power. I took 6 points of damage for my trouble but I was able to be on top of the wall for my turn and got off my attack. Unfortunately those six points came up to bite me later when I went down to 1 hp.

It seems silly to take a hit from a friend to use the ability. Either the character should be able to use the ability as an equivalent action without the trigger, or my preferred house rule that an ally can make a zero-damage attack to cause the trigger. This shouldn’t come up too often as most immediate reaction powers do something directly to the instigator. In 3e one had the ability to deal subdual damage, and that seems like it would be handy here.

Anyone use a similar type of house rule?

What to do in an off-week

One problem with adulthood is that there are a lot of competing interests for one’s time. No matter what we might try, life happens and we don’t get to game every week. When we can, we still get together for some non-gaming hanging out. For those occasions I keep the D&D cartoon dvd set, runebound, and munchkin in my car. But sometimes we just punt on the week altogether.

On those occasions, I like to make up that lost time by working on my game. I l use that off night to spruce up my character sheet and update the stats on my power cards. Some other non-game night activities:

1. Reorganize my game bag. I always seem to wind up carrying an extra DMG or power cards for an old character for no reason. Also my dice bag seems to drop a die into the bowels of the bag from time to time.
2. Plan for the future. I like to review the feat and power options available for near levels and work on my back story and how that leads into a paragon class.
3. Look for inspiration in other fantasy sources. Watch some LotR, play a little Oblivion, catch up on some gaming blogs and podcasts (see the link roll on the right), and otherwise get ideas and pumped up for the next week.
4. Relax. Have a beer and watch some Law and Order. Sometimes its nice to just have a week off to recharge the gaming batteries. Plus there’s truth in absence makes the heart grow fonder

What do you guys do on an off week?

Wonderful Wondrous Items

My favorite treasure has always been wondrous items. Magic weapons and armor are always nice, but they pretty much have one use. Wondrous items can tickle the imagination and inspire creative uses. And I don’t just mean the 1,000 uses sovereign glue. I’m talking about the time we summoned a small boat to bridge a pit trap that was too far to jump.

This past week our DM let us choose a fresh magic item to round out some treasure parcels to get the party up to our power level. Choosing a free item from any book in the compendium is a challenge worthy of XP as any encounter with Trolls. My party is made up people passionate about their characters and who want the best chance of success for themselves as well as the party. Before I reveal how we really handled this is as a group, here is a real-life skill challenge, inspired by this quandary:

Photo curtosey http://www.flickr.com/photos/captaintim/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Take an item rusting in the party pool and exchange it for free with anything available in DDI; go! You have to make 5 successes before the DM decides to punish you all for taking too long or for fighting.

Arcana: You remember about a useful item from a Dragon magazine, get a +2 to your next History or Diplomacy roll.
Athletics: wrestle the Adventurer’s Vault out of your teammate’s hands.
Bluff: You get a party member to advocate for an item that really helps you although he thinks it helps him.
Diplomacy: You make an impassioned speech about why your character really needs an item and how much better off we’d all be if you had that Horn of Summoning.
Dungeoneering: The party is headed into the Underdark. Vote for an anti-Drow ritual.
Endurance: Everyone else is too tired to keep arguing with you. You automatically win.
History: You’ve been bitten by a Medusa the last time you played a 9th level Fighter. Argue for a mirrored shield.
Insight: Why does the wizard want a gem of soul trapping? He swore he wasn’t playing an evil character.
Intimidate: Let me have that Waraxe +2, or else!
Perception: You see that Deck of Many Things up the rogue’s hand. Call shenanigans, and he gets a -2 to Charisma-based checks.
Stealth: Where did Brad go? He must be a ninja. Give him a magic katana before he flips out and kills us.
Streetwise: How thoughtful of you to bring the DM glazed donuts. How’d you know they are her favorite?
Thievery: Steal all the handbooks. Now only you get to decide.

Of course that describes a hypothetical situation. What really happened was 20 minutes of us searching the books for the best item of that level for our characters in the current situation. I headed off the potential argument of which character should get it by suggesting we get a wondrous item that would benefit the whole party. Not only can such items be passed between players, but they are versatile: prone to creative uses in sticky situations.

Original photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/mararie/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The item we chose was the Map of Unseen Lands [DDI] from Adventurer’s Vault 2. This map draws the nearby surroundings at the large building/geographical feature level. I thought it would be useful for tracking down the rogue wizard we are hunting in her secret temple lair. It also shows potential danger/xp zones like monster lairs and known and secret travel paths, which make for great escapes from bad places. Unfortunately I think my party-mates still think this is the Marauder’s Map from Harry Potter. This particular map doesn’t show people or fine building details, but I think this will be a great thing to have story wise. I guess we still need to come up with an explanation as to why we have it. The only downside mechanically is that redrawing the map counts as a magic item daily.

I wonder how other parties figure out up-for-grabs wish-list treasure?

Choosing the peaceful option in an angry world

There seems to be a tension for a gaming group between an interesting plot, realism, player freedom, and prep time. Through the course of a campaign one of these concerns will beat out the others at various times. Last week we had an encounter, as described by my DM on her blog. The short summary is: the party came across a group of bridge-guarding Spriggans who demanded gold in exchange for passage.

I don’t want to speak for my fellow players, but I think as a party we were responding with “realism.” Or as realistic as it would be for a group of well-armed professional murderers to propose a counter-offer: “move out of our way and not die from our swords.” From her blog, our DM indicates the encounter was designed to be fought and so the DC to diplome the situation was quite high. The result was a good combat with some interesting terrain (there was a bridge with its walls broken in places) and a well designed combination of monsters. I made a few strategic mistakes, and got my character’s ass handed to me.

Despite not wanting to get into the fight, we wound up in a do-or-die battle against the brigands. We managed to capture one alive. The prisoner led us to his cache of treasure and gave us a password needed later in the adventure in exchange for his life. This was a tough situation for us; we did not know that this combat would be useful to the story. By trying to RP our way out of it, we got to make some rolls to see if we could. But the GM want us to fight ,and so we did. Now that we know (meta-game) that even the most “random” of encounters might have a use, we’ll probably listen a little more to the DM’s pressure next time [Editor's note: we did and it worked out well for us].

The question still remains however: how to get out of a combat if the DM is set on it, especially knowing that the combat moves the plot forward?

Mini skill challenges

In tonight’s all-RP session, we had what I can only surmise was a series of small skill challenges.  These were basically a series of skill checks followed by a short resolution which resulted in a prize bonus. As an example, we encountered a dancing Satyr and his friends in the woods; using diplomacy, “perform,” and athletics we provided them with a good time. In return they helped us with a Communicate with Nature ritual (+4 to the nature check). Earlier in the night we had a similar set of small diplomacy and intimidate checks to get some info about our enemies.

These encounters didn’t feel like formal skill challenges, and that’s why I’m assuming our DM was trying out something newer and more versatile. The reason why I don’t think they were standard skill challenges was that it was not always clear if we were succeeding or failing, and the consequence of success/failure was not apparent. Also it just didn’t seem like enough rolls, usually there’s a lot more rolls in a “x successes before y fails” situations.

These encounters worked very well for us. It didn’t detract from the story, and when things went well we felt pretty good. The downside from the more structured challenge is that we were sometimes scrambling to come up with the right skill to use for the check. For instance, we discussed for a long time what skill the bard should roll to entertain with a song, or the right skill for a monster knowledge or whether detecting an illusion might be arcana or perception.

The other issue (and this I think is common with regular skill challenges) was that the participation was uneven. I think tonight the warlock felt redundant to the bard and psion in the arcana department. What should the players do when three characters all have high diplomacy? It’s not really fair if one person does all the talking for the party. The social skills (diplomacy, intimidate, bluff) present this challenge to any group in any gaming system, and I would like to explore this area more in later posts.

The less obvious challenge is what do you do when three party members all have a high history or arcana skill? Mathematically it only makes sense for the guy with a 14 in the skill to make the roll and the one with a 13 make the “aid another” check. But it sucks to have built a character to be really into history and have that 13 score, but the party member have a higher score because of his race. In some ways it must be like having a masters in one topic and being on a panel with a guy with a PhD in the same topic. And unlike real life, d&d doesn’t have the nuance in the skill checks to have people be the experts in a sub-specialty.

The only solution I can think of is for the DM to present situations where each person can shine in that skill and somehow prevent the other from participating or being the lead. As a player I could suggest that the party members should take turns making the skill, but that is not the optimal solution and it feels a little sour and forced to me. The ideal situation would be that each player has to make a choice between using that skill and performing some other action, and so the guy with the 14 in history instead chooses to do a religion check, leaving the guy with a 13 to do the history instead. I can see this being workable when making skill checks during combat: the way disabling a trap or magical device comes up in the published modules. It’d be interesting to see a history check as an action in combat (it’d have been one where it was more useful than using an attack power).

How else can actions be restricted, without combat, so everyone gets a turn?

The party: aren’t they cute?

Bonus post! I took some pictures at today’s weekend session. Here’s the party just about to jump out and do their business.

Tiefling warlock, Half-Elf bard, Tiefling psion, and Halfling rogue

Can a player cheat when the GM rolls on the table?

I’m going to pre-empt my already written post for today to respond to a thread that came up on twitter with @newbiedm (blog), @chattydm (blog), and my intrepid DM, @sarahdarkmagic (blog).  They all seem to be in favor of the GM rolling combat dice in front of the screen, which is not my style.  When I was a very young GM I liked rolling behind the screen to allow for fudging rolls, usually to keep my players alive but also sometimes to punish them when I felt my monsters weren’t doing enough damage.  As a more experienced GM, I remained in favor of behind the screen rolls in order to guard against the whim of the die unfairly killing a player. It’s tough when a player rolls low five turns in a row and the monster rolls high every time.  Fudging rolls is a tool in the GM toolbox to control the pace of a combat.  Despite not yet GMing 4e, I can see from the other side of the table that fudging is not as necessary.  There is less chance of unintentional out-of-balance encounters; players have a lot more powers and more ways around different types of defenses, and more hit points.

newbiedm tweeted this great rebuttal:

I’d rather “guide” the story through narration than by fudging. If I smell a TPK, I’ll narrate them out of it, rather than lie about a roll.

He backed it up by suggesting removing monsters or adding allies; and I’m sure we can think of lots of ways to do this that aren’t obnoxious or deus ex machina.  As a nominally story-driven player, this is exactly how I’d want the GM to think.  But that’s why I still think rolling behind the screen allows for story to have more weight than random chance.  I do want to state without any confusion: I don’t mind when the DM does roll in front the screen.  It’s just not my personal style.

However, as player I also don’t like when the DM rolls in front of the screen.

1. I’d like for him/her to have the option of fudging the rolls to keep things exciting and well paced.
2. I’m too tempted to “cheat.”  As professional somewhat-math-guy I can can figure out that if the DM rolls a 12 and asks if a 20 hits my AC, the monster has a +8 to hit. Furthermore, I can guess that since the monster attacked me with a long sword (+3 proficiency bonus), that his “strength + 1/2 level” is 5, which means he has at least a 15 Fort defense. 

   With this knowledge I can choose powers and position my character on the battlefield accordingly to where I think he’ll be most effective, which is not necessarily in character.When the wargamer part of my brain takes over the roleplayer part of my brain, my character that should be afraid of a big-ogre looking thing with a rusty, bloody sword instead stomps right up to ogre.  All because I’ve inferred the odds.  This is no fault of the GM, I should be well-trained enough at this point to ignore that kind of stuff.  My character should act in accordance with the information presented to him instead of the information available to me, the player.  It’s difficult to do late at night with the gamedrenaline pumping.

   [as an aside, Fear the Boot episode 167 deal with RPing in combat, and I'll get around to posting about that]

3. If I see the GM rolling really well and yet the combat is going suspiciously in our favor, even if the monster starts making some real bone-headed mistakes or a robot centaur swoops in and save us, it feels like a failure. It feels as if we just weren’t good enough, even if it was because the dice were not in our favor. I am in the camp of “failed combats shouldn’t necessarily means everyone dies” and that failure leads to interesting and fun RPing: i.e. getting out of a sticky situation. But when that failure was just because of unlucky rolls instead of bad decisions, it somehow feels shallow.

What do you think? Especially you other players out there? Should the DM be rolling in front of or behind the screen?

Playing a Psion

I’m going to start this new blog by violating the golden rule of rpg blogging– talking about my character. Well, actually about my character’s class: the Psion. I decided to retire my Revenant Invoker in exchange for a character much more suited to the adventure and to The Party. My main constraint in choosing a character was keeping Controller role, while choosing a class that fit with combat style of the rest of the party. The problem with the Invoker was that most of his powers wound up either damaging his allies, which was  dangerous to a party without any high-hp Defenders. Also most of the powers pushed allies and enemies into less than optimal positions. I used the DDI tools to scroll through all the Controllers and settled on the preview PHB3 Psion based on the fact that its powers are as precise as any post-season baseball pitcher.

The nice thing about 4th edition is that each character now has a wide array of special powers, making one more class with a unique set of powers not feel as out of place as they have in the past. PHB2 already had a number of powers with the Psychic keyword, and “psychic” works in 4e just like any other keyword such as “fire” or “radiant.” One problem in 3/3.5 was that the standard array of items and powers did not help protect players from psychic attacks. Here psychic attacks are like any other attack against Fort or Will, so they fit in nicely with the feel of the rest of 4e and our established campaign. The big difference between the Psion and previous characters is that instead of encounter powers, the Psion is has a number of augment points to spend on beefing up his at-will powers. I think the system works pretty well and provides for flexibility in choosing powers I think a nice at-the-table touch would be to use physical counters to represent the the power points.

Playing a Psion will provide lots of topics for future posts as I figure out how to fit in him in a traditional fantasy world.

Retooling this blog

Previously, I didn’t have a purpose for this blog other than to rant about various Wizard’s activities.  I always meant to turn out sage advice for DMs in the same way so many of the blogs I respect. Unfortunately for those plans my next chance to master the dungeon keeps moving further and further away, taking with it ability to test my advice and theories. So… instead I’m going to write advice for players, as a player. Since my DM keeps abreast of all the major blogs on DMing, I can use this as rebuttal, counterpoint, or thumbs up to how all that new advice and theory stacks up against the player perspective.