Tabletop Gaming

Tabletop Highlight: What to Do When You’re Lawful Good

Chris 1 Comment

At one point, you decided that you wanted to give Lawful Good a chance. Everyone said you’re basically signing up to be the most frustrating person in the Dungeons and Dragons party, but you think that it would be fun to play the game with a strong sense of morality instead of just being some murder hobo in search of a paycheck. You even decide to go to the extreme end of the spectrum so there are consequences if you fail to stick to the morals you’ve chosen. Everyone jokes about the stick insertion that comes with your first level of Paladin, but you think you’ve clever enough to play to the nuanced alignment of Good over Lawful. So you roll up your character, assign yourself the role of the party’s moral compass, and then discover that you’re the main impetus behind the party’s decisions and everything you know is at odds with how you are choosing to play your character.

You manage to discourage the rogue from poisoning the well of a village you suspect has been behind the attacks on your colony, only to be found out anyway when your bluff is called and the Yuan-Ti (snake person) you’re talking to is actually a dragon posing as a god. You also manage to stay standing in a later encounter when everyone else falls only to lose your arm as you take all your hit points in damage from a single hit because the rogue got you into an encounter you couldn’t win. Later you stay out of the rogue’s business so they can do some clandestine research in the undercity, but they wind up wasting a lot of time and money because they go about doing things the most back-asswards way possible because they forget that other people can make sense motive checks and only survived because they got lucky, all while you take down what turns out to be a lich who is directing an attack against the city you’ve stopped in. A while later, you lose your cool and your fancy Paladin powers because you lost your temper interrogating the assassin who killed your friend and then told you not to take it so personally since he’s just a contract killer. Later, once you’ve atoned and aligned yourself with a god who not only helped you out in a pinch earlier but has a more proactive view on punishing evildoers, you sacrifice your life to buy the party time because the rogue accidentally woke an ancient proto-lich and even then only two members of the party survive because the Scout decided that keeping the proto-lich in the tomb was worth more than his life.

Finally, you’ve alive again, you’ve worked things out with the party so they respect your authority a little more, and things are finally starting to go well aside from the rogue who has a bit of a penchant for questionable decisions. One of which was to reveal your party’s goal to the prisoner you were interrogating and now you can’t just let this goblin cleric walk away to report back to his superiors. If the rogue had the stones or the sense, he’d “let the cleric go” by taking him over a hill, killing him, and hiding him in portable hole or bag of holding until a more permanent means of disposal became available. But you know the rogue isn’t going to do that and you can’t exactly tell him to because you’re supposed to be playing the moral compass of the party and there’s little point to doing that if you’re telling everyone how to get around you.

In this case, it seems like your options are extremely limited because all you can do is either keep him prisoner or let him go. Fortunately for you, there are actually a larger number of options open to you than you realize. For a complete description of alignments, check out this great video by Matthew Colville, but the thing you need to know is that the best definition of “Lawful” is that you believe society benefits from having laws and that the laws should be followed. “Good” is usually defined as “not evil” or, more usefully, as being willing to grant people the benefit of the doubt when they ask for or look like they need help. You can also see this particular comic page (specifically the last panel) from Tarol Hunt’s “Goblins” for the best definition I’ve found. This means that, as a Paladin, all you really need to do is believe in the usefulness of laws, support those laws to the best of your ability, and that you’re willing to give people assistance without needing proof.

This allows you some leeway depending on the world you play in. In some particularly religious game worlds, Paladins are allowed to act as executioners or judges. There’s even a whole prestige class in the three-point-five edition of D&D specifically for this available to certain divine casters (Paladins and Clerics, mostly). In that case, the Paladin could put the prisoner on trial and either permanently lock them up or execute them, if they’re found guilty of particularly heinous evil. Depending on the which religious order of Paladins your character belongs to, the idea of a trial by combat is a fairly typical way to resolve problems like evil prisoners. Especially for Paladin orders that are a little more focused on purging evil. Hell, if you’re a really anti-evil paladin, a simple “detect evil” is enough. Dungeons and Dragons has objective Good and objective Evil for a reason. The definition Tarol Hunt supplies is actually a really great way to cut through the potential subjectivity involved in defining good and evil so it still fits into a “yes or no” system like Dungeons and Dragons.

While a lot of this post (pretty much everything up to this point, honestly) is geared toward the Paladin in the party of my campaign, it’s honestly a problem I see a lot of Lawful Good characters run into. Sometimes it feels either like you need to resign yourself to having a stick up your character’s ass or wind up basically murdering everything evil just because it’s Evil. Really, though, you have more options than this basic dichotomy. A lot of it depends on the laws of the land and what has happened in the campaign you’re playing in (for instance, some particularly lawful characters might be granted the power to enforce the laws of the land as a part of acting on behalf of a ruler), but you always have options. If you’re not a Paladin but some other class and still Lawful Good, perhaps a Knight or a bounty-hunting Ranger, you still have essentially the same options. Lock them up while you drag them back home, find a way to control them using magic, invest in a jail wagon of some kind, hire people to hold onto the criminals you capture, win them over to your side by giving them Stockholm Syndrome, cutting off their legs and them giving them first aid so they can’t run away but also don’t die, killing them outright, a trial by combat, or just letting them go.

All that being said, it is so much easier when you’ve got some chaotic or neutral characters who are a little more willing to DISCREETLY dispose of an inconvenient prisoner without tipping off your character. That requires a certain type of player, though, and unfortunately for you, you chose to be a Paladin who can’t even suggest such a thing without running the risk of losing their divine powers. At least Knights (one of the only other classes with a Lawful alignment requirement) can act unlawfully without permanently losing everything unless they do it enough to change their alignment.

Like all things in Dungeons and Dragons, the sky is the limit. Ask questions, try to puzzle it out, spend some time considering how your character defines “Good” and “Lawful.” There are more options than you realize and Lawful Good doesn’t mean your hands are shackled when it comes to dealing with moral inconveniences.

Tabletop Highlight: Creating Fun and Interesting Characters

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Having played and run tabletop games for over 8 years, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to create a fun, interesting, and engaging character in almost any tabletop RPG. While the strict definition of those first two descriptors means there’s a lot of subjectivity involved in the process, there are a few things you can keep in mind while you figure out what you think would be fun and interesting that would help keep the game an enjoyable experience for you and those playing with you. For the most part, they fall into two categories I’d summarize as “the ability to be engaged in or by the story and other characters” and “a series of imperfections that expose them to risk.” These are two fundamental parts of creating a character that are generally built into tabletop games with a basis in hard numbers but they can often be overlooked in other games. Additionally, the later can be avoided in hard number games like Dungeons and Dragons if the player optimizes their character in such a way that obviates all risk.

For the most part, exposing your character to risk is part and parcel with playing a tabletop game. There are some characters who avoid most risks as a result of their playing making them cowardly or extremely self-centered, but those often include the risk of negative social consequences or a loss of advancement opportunities (advancing via level or ability progression, specifically). Risk is a pretty broadly defined word and the only real way to avoid it entirely is to find a way to make your character so powerful that nothing bad can happen to him or to play with a group of people who are going to enable your (the player’s) machinations and rule-lawyering (a term that means you rely on your knowledge of the rules, their exploits, and the various gaps between them in order to manipulate an interaction in the game, either as the player or as the character, so that it resolves to your advantage). Typically, the only players who do this are the ones who actually enjoy having a character who never fails, so most of the failure here is the fact that it often frustrates other players, by either wasting their time as you argue through some obscure rule with the GM (who is always the final arbiter of rules but often lets things slide just to get the game going again) or by making their characters essentially useless.

Risk is essential because it the main vehicle for growth and change in the story your character is telling. Even if they aren’t a central part of whatever plot is currently unfolding, being unable to make them strive or risk something means they’re going to remain unaffected by whatever happens. They might learn new information or they might gain interesting new abilities, but there’s no way for them to actually change their course unless they fail something. Failure is the best teacher there is and sometimes the price of the lessons we learn are steeper than we’d like. If there was no risk of failure or loss, then what is the point in playing out the scenario? We all roll dice because we’re not certain of the outcomes and removing the chance of failure removes the need to roll dice. At that point, you might as well be reading a book or listening to someone tell a story. Sometimes, you lose it all and your character dies. Sometimes they lose something important to them. That’s just part of the game and the sooner you accept that you might need to let go of a character you loved, the sooner you’ll be able to really enjoy the character you’ve created and their experiences in the world of the game.

Thanks to the structure of games like Dungeons and Dragons, your character is automatically a participant in the story that’s about to unfold. If your character wouldn’t actually leave their humble origins and go on an adventure, you don’t actually make them. There’s always some part of them that has a goal to accomplish or some reason to want to explore the world beyond their village. In other games, it isn’t always that simple. Some games, like any that use the Fate system, require a little more intervention on the player or GM’s part. A lot of the Fate system games are based a little more in real-world sensibilities. For instance, the Fate game I’m currently playing in is based in a fictionalized version of the city we all live in because we’re familiar with it and the game requires a certain amount of city knowledge in order to navigate the game and tell a story together (the Fate system is much more role-play intensive and gives more story-telling power directly to the players). As a result of this more real-world feel for our game, are people need to be functional adults in this game. We all have lives and jobs and responsibilities that existed before the game began and most of which still exist after the game has begun. If you weren’t careful, it would be possible to create a character who has little connection to the plot and the other characters, which makes it even more difficult to keep them involved in the story. The GM can only do so much. The rest is on the player to write their character in such a way that it is easy to involve them in the story or else they’ll spend more time sitting out than anyone else.

The easiest way to get your character involved in the story is build in some flaw that allows the GM or other characters to pull them along. Maybe they have really bad luck and a history of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, as my character in the Fate game does. Maybe they’re an insatiable thrill-seeker with little regard for their personal safety or the lives of others, like my first fifth-edition character was. Maybe they feel it is their duty to protect the overlooked members of society and are banished from their home for speaking out against their lord when the lord raised taxes too high for the peasants to afford. Maybe they’re easily swayed or they have debts they need to pay. Maybe they’re morbidly fascinated by crime scenes and bought a police scanner so they can go gawk every day. Maybe they are so meticulous that they can’t rest until they’ve reviewed every little detail that seems out of place. All of these things have one thing in common: there’s something that allows them to be easily put in danger, manipulated, or otherwise involved in whatever is going on at the time. If you’re having trouble thinking of something that would be applicable to your current game, just ask the GM for suggestions that would make it easier for them to set a plot hook or get the players involved in some story they’ve cooked up.

How you specifically apply these ideas is really up to your own interpretation. Like I said earlier, your definition of “fun” and “interesting” is probably different from my own and you should make sure your character fits into them. Including the two things I mentioned here, risk and engage-ability, should easily fit into your definitions, though. And don’t be afraid to give them more flaws or take more risks than necessary. Most of the fun in tabletop RPGs comes from success against all odds or when everything hilariously blows up in your character’s face.

Tabletop Highlight: When You get a Little Minmax in Your Roleplaying

Chris 5 Comments

As a player of Dungeons and Dragons, I prefer to roleplay. I like the idea of coming up with a novel character concept and sticking to a personality I’ve devised to fit that concept, no matter what. What can make me frustrating for other GMs, though, is my propensity for focusing on excelling at one or two particular things. Given my understanding of the game, I’ve found it relatively easy to maximize my potential for a couple specific things that fit my character concept, such as the 3.5 edition Scout who could move 210 feet as a move action (that’s 120 miles an hour in 3.5 rules) or the fifth edition rogue who couldn’t fail a search, perception, or trap disabling check thanks to high modifiers and the skill that lets you get no lower than a ten on your check for a certain set of skills.

While this falls short of outright min-maxing–the act of using the game’s rules in such a way to sacrificing things of minimal importance in order to maximize your character’s more important abilities, also known as “optimization”–it can still be a little jarring for people to deal with. Sure, I don’t do something crazy like sacrifice my character’s ability to spell their name right or make friends on purpose in order to increase their total skill, but I’ve clearly found some loophole or another I can exploit in order to game a rather ridiculous benefit. Fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons did a good job of cutting down the potential for loopholes, but 3.5 is the best edition for it since there are so many wonderful ways to break the game if you really want to.

For my part, I don’t really mind it when my players do a little bit of minmaxing so long as they can justify their reasons for doing it or how their character got it. The paladin wants to take a special feat that lets him add his Charisma bonus to his damage in exchange for his ability to use Turn Undead? Sure, we’ve already established he’s got a close relationship with his god since he’s one of a select group of Paladins who serve that minor deity directly so it makes sense that the god would direct him toward being able to better slay evil. The rogue wants a sword made of a material I’ve never heard of, that can only be found and forged on one of the deep layers of the lower plains which technically doesn’t exist in my world thanks to the customization of the planes. Sorry, no can do since the very material itself would be counted as evil and the current laws of Heaven and Hell prohibit the export of materials to the mortal plane. If he wanted to make a trip to one of the layers of Hell in order to get that material, then we could talk. But there’s no way some random shopkeeper in the capital city of a federation pretty much run by a lawful good religion is going to stock a material literally made out of compressed evil. The black market might have it, but then how can you trust it is what you want? And it’s likely they’re not just carrying it around, so you’d need to go on a minor quest to get it and then you have to deal with the Paladin who is already one his last straw thanks to the Hellhound you bought on the black market and trained to be your hunting dog.

Hell, my party’s Scout has the highest Armor Class in the party because his main attribute is Dexterity, the rules allow scale mail to be made into light armor if you’re a particular prestige class (some dragon champion thing that I’m forgetting the name of because I tweaked it to fit my world), and he got reincarnated as a Bugbear the last time he died. He got really lucky and a bunch of stuff came together to put his AC through the roof. If he’d down it on purpose, I’d have taken him aside and told him no since no ninth level character should have an AC of thirty-one (or thirty-five if he’s moving), but it was just the culmination of chance and some custom stuff he and I’d put in the game.

In this case, role-playing and minmaxing work out since the whole theme of this game is to make the players feel like they’re ridiculously over-powered. They’re supposed to be able to reshape the world by tenth level because I want them to eventually fight gods or demons and Ancient Dragons. They’ve encountered plenty of powerful NPCs as well, which helps them feel like their extreme power is more in line with the rest of the world. My big rule is we can work out pretty much whatever they want so long as they can justify it in-game. Which means the Paladin is basically an honor guard of a god, the Scout is the chosen champion of an Ancient Dragon, and the Rogue/Assassin has a dagger that can cut through anything and potentially drain souls, in addition to becoming a business magnate between dungeons. To be entirely fair to the rogue, he’s probably stuck the most to role-playing since he’s not sure how he can make his character as powerful as the Paladin and the Scout, but they all do it really well. The Paladin has been on his current course of serving this god since before first level and the Scout has setting himself up to be a slayer of evil dragons since his conception. The Rogue has had the most change in his character’s journey throughout the two and a half years we’ve been playing, so it makes sense that he isn’t as hyper-focused as the other two are.

As long as your intentions are good and you’re not doing it to break the game or mess with the GM, I don’t really have a problem with character optimization or minmaxing. There’s a fine line between breaking the game and minmaxing, but it’s there and I’ve known plenty of people who have managed to walk right up to it without crossing it. The best ones have always been people who were in it for the roleplaying. I wonder if that’s a coincidence or a startling insight. Let me know if you’ve had cases of good roleplaying going hand-in-hand with character optimization or if your experiences have differed! I’ve love to hear your stories!

Tabletop Highlight: How Many Players is too Many?

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The first campaign I ever ran started with six players, made its way down to four, and eventually settled at five with one more who’d play once every couple months. The second one had eight. The third one had almost a dozen, but only about six-to-eight ever made it to a session at any given time (it was specifically built for this). My main Dungeons and Dragons group in Madison was six players for a while, but then it shot up to eight and now sits nine after a couple years of jumping around. The campaign I currently run the most frequently, “Broken Worlds,” has three players. I’ve run a campaign for two people, and even ran a one-day campaign for a single player while introducing them to D&D. While a specific idea of a “basic party” exists for D&D, which is what the D&D rules expect when it comes to assessing difficult or setting up appropriate encounters, I have rarely had four players in my group and the party has almost never been “balanced.”

As I’ve said before, a good GM can find a way for any party composition to work, but what could bear saying is that even a good GM can’t always make any size party work. I know a lot of GMs who thrive in that four-to-ten player range, but who absolutely struggle to make the game work for fewer than four. I know a couple GMs who can’t handle more than four or five, but almost prefer the super small groups of one-to-three players. Personally, I struggle with anything over seven players, but can easily handle anything up to that point. What usually gets me is trying to manage combat and player engagement for eight of more people. There’s just so much to keep track of that I often can’t keep the turns going so my players can stay focused or I keep needing to pull people aside so they do their little solo mission because they feel like they’re getting lost in the crowd and thus start doing things alone to force their character to stand out. The latter is a slippery slope if people start doing it for unnecessary stuff, since it usually means more people start to feel like they’re not getting enough of a chance to act so they start doing solo stuff as well and then you might as well be running several small D&D sessions instead of one larger one.

To be entirely fair, that can be a way to manage a large group. If you know there’s a stealth section coming up that the Ranger, Rogue, and Bard want to do without the noisy Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Paladin following then around, call a separate session just for the sneaky people. Even if the non-sneaky people are waiting outside to start busting down the gate in the case of an alarm, you can always run the sneaky-people along until they either set off the alarm or finish with whatever mission they’re on. If they set off the alarm, mark down where they are and say you’ll pick it up when everyone is around.

Another thing you can do for player engagement is handle down-time adventures via some text format. There are plenty of forums that are set up for this kind of thing or you can just do it all via email. Heck, you could even do it via text message between sessions. Or set up a session day as half-hour increments of time people can come to you to do whatever they want when they’re in town. That way, they can include other members of the party in decisions or little role-playing moments just by going into the next room and asking for an answer or whatever. Anything works, so long as it’s happening outside of the actual session. This way, the time you’re all together to play is when your party is all together and everything that’d slow your group down is handle at another time.

For combat, managing large groups is trickier. You can tell everyone to have their actions figured out and establish a turn timer, but the longest turns are usually the GM’s turns (well, the turns taken by whatever it is the players are fighting). Because everything in D&D is set up for an optimal four-person group, doubling that number of players can mean that some encounters that should be challenging just aren’t. With a large group, few GMs have their players fight against a single tough monster. Instead, they’ll have them fight more, but slightly smaller, things. Or, as is more common, a huge number of much smaller things instead of the large number of medium things. Here, it gets tricky. If your players are all fighting the same thing, that makes it a little bit easier, but that’s rarely the case. Usually they’re fighting a variety of smaller hings so it’s not all spear-chuckers or sword-swingers or spellcasters. Sure, you can save time by making everything that’s the same move or act at the same time, but that’s still a lot of moving, acting, and rolling you need to do.  All of which needs to happen in addition to managing the players are they react to what is going on and need questions answered. The only real solution I’ve come up to this–aside from having super patient and understand players–is to have a second GM step in.

While that might seem difficult, it usually isn’t. All you really need is a knowledgeable player or someone who you can trust to avoid meta-gaming. If they’re knowledgeable, instruct them to handle player questions about the situation and you likely won’t even need to show them your notes. If you can trust them to avoid meta-gaming, have them play the parts of some (or all) of the enemies. If you get another GM to sit in on your session, then you don’t even need to worry about everything else. Just give them the enemies for the party to fight and make sure you set a reasonable expectation for the other GM on how you’d like the fight handled. If you trust them to mesh well with your game, you might even be able to get them to not only run the enemies, but also create them in the first place. They’ll probably want a little more autonomy then, but that’s not a problem if you trust them to carry your intentions into their monster/enemy creation.

After that, the only real problem you have for large groups is how to keep everyone playing in a friendly manner and where you can get enough seating. I suggest folding chairs and regular potlucks. Can’t hate someone if they feed you regularly. Though, to be fair, this is less likely to be a problem than anything else since GMs should be good at monitoring groups and understanding which people will play together. You’re unlikely to need to deal with inter-player conflict for long, though, since people tend to just leave. Good luck with your big groups and let me know if you’ve encounter similar problems before!

Tabletop Highlight: Player Fatalism and How to Salvage the Game

Chris Leave a comment

I honestly don’t know if I can speak for everyone, but it often feels like every tabletop gamer I know has a story about a game where someone was constantly pessimistic and fatalistic. Someone, perhaps even them, spent an entire session, or even several sessions, throwing their hands up in the air every time something bad happened and complaining that they knew this was going to happen or that there’s no point to them trying any more if they’re just going to die.

This happened recently in one of my games. There’s a player, the one I often bring up as the person who does some dumb stuff or makes questionable decisions (he featured heavily in the “Up for Interpretation” post from three weeks ago) who has been engaging in this kind of behavior lately. To be entirely fair, his character has died as many times as the rest of the party put together and he seems to always come up short when I roll to determine who gets to be the target of whatever is about to happen. Even his rolls tend toward failure when he tries something. He missed a sneak attack that would have insta-killed the enemy spell caster because he rolled in the single digits on his attack. He failed a skill check to make it back to safety afterwards and would have been knocked unconscious if not for an ability of his special weapon that gave him temporary hit points. The poor guy has had it rough.

To be entirely, fair, though, he makes a lot of assumptions and does a lot of stuff without thinking it through. He died during that same fight because he hopped over a barricade to attack an enemy he could have just stabbed from where he was. I let him live because he apparently didn’t realize he could do that and it’s pretty clear he wouldn’t have done it if he could have avoided it seeing as he was so low on hit points. Though, to continue being fair, he also didn’t retreat from the battle or take a back seat once he was down to nothing but his last few hit points either. He’d already seen how much damage his enemies could do with one hit and yet he continued to try to front-line them.

A lot of that behavior and those unneccessary risk-taking could have been a result of his expectation that his current character won’t be much longer for this world. He’s already created a new character to replace him, prompted by my jokes about a TPK, which I’ve managed to avoid so far since the players know when to run. There was a close moment, though, because they messed up some earlier stuff and had to deal with the consequences. That was probably the first time they were pushed to their limits from a marathon of battles rather than a single tough monster. It was winnable, though. I was never going to put them in a situation where they feel powerless or like they are being punished. If they screw up enough to get themselves killed, it will mostly be swift and decisive. Otherwise, they’ll always have options and only poor decision-making or bad luck will get them all killed.

It can be hard to keep again running, especially a story-drive one, when one of the players just lets go as soon as there’s any tension. I can’t make the game feel dramatic if someone is just giving up as soon as things look bad. They start to get angry if it keeps happening and a lot of drama and tension in story-telling is uncertainty or challenge, so I wind up trying to keep them invested without sacrificing too much story. I don’t think this player’s attitude is affecting the other players very much, but I’m hoping it’s just the recent string of bad luck he’s had (which is really just his perception of events, he’s also had some really good luck since he’s only come close to dying or getting captured).

I’m going to talk to him (and will have, before this post goes up) about what’s been going on and workshop some ideas on how to get through it. This isn’t a problem unless it’s making the game less fun for the other players and the person displaying the fatalistic behavior refuses to change. Usually when this happens, as is happening with my player, there’s something causing it. Before you try to address the problem, you need to figure out what this underlying cause is. Once you know that, you need to verbally (and privately) address it with the player so they have the opportunity to change. Not everyone realizes they’re doing it. I’m not even sure if my player recognizes that he’s doing it.

For him, the source lies in some of his first exposure to D&D and a long string of bad decisions compounded by bad luck. His first DM was very adversarial. He tried to manipulate the players constantly, forced them to act a certain way, did his level best to kill them constantly, and gave all of the good magic items and experiences to his closest friends so that other players wound up with under-leveled and under-geared characters who just died all that much more frequently. He’s had a few more experiences between now and then (most of which I’ve seen), but one characteristic of his gaming has always been making decisions without considering the consequences and bad luck on rolls. From the silly little campaign I ran to test out a book world I’d developed to a “Shits and Giggles” campaign I ran to fill my weekends, to my current serious campaign where he seems to constantly get the short end of the stick. Sometimes, it’s because he accidentally stepped on the large stick he had and wound up breaking it, but I’m sure that doesn’t feel very fun to him.

Problems with characters and DMing I can fix. I have no problem helping my players create the best possible version of their character (though I usually insist they stick to a personality rather than just minmaxing) and I generally try to avoid getting adversarial in any context. Bad luck and poor decision-making… There’s not much more I can do beyond being forgiving when he’s legitimately making a mistake as a player versus when he’s doing something reckless or risky. It’s a fine line, but I wrote an entire blog post about how to tell the difference so I’m confident I can manage it.

I hope we can figure something out. I’d hate to think he’s not having fun. That’s all I really want, as a DM.

Tabletop Highlight: What to do When You TPK

Chris Leave a comment

It finally happened. Because of some mistakes, poor decisions, or just a run of bad luck, you’ve encountered your first TPK. Don’t worry! A Total Party Kill isn’t the end of the world! You have options! But first, as you should do any time you have a serious, potentially irreversible character death or one that felt like a particularly stinky pile of bullshit, take some time away from the table to breath. Thankfully, only characters have died. The players can still play, the DM can still run, and the game can go on. However, it will likely be different. That’s okay, though. Every time anything major happens, the game changes. This will be just one more of those changes.

The first option is generally the easiest. Instead of being killed, the party has been captured and now must escape the clutches of some dreaded foe. Finally, the rogue can put that escape artist skill to use! The paranoid ranger who has a chime of opening hidden on his person is finally vindicated! The barbarian… well, they just hulk out like usual, but it’s still fun! They’re short on gear, don’t have many hit points, and are on a time limit! They need to escape quickly or quietly. If they’re spotted, they need to move fast. If they get stuck, they might need to make some tough choices about who lives and who dies. If they can remain hidden, they might need to find the hole in the guard rotation so they can escape undetected. Maybe they need to talk their way out and suddenly the paladin’s high charisma is good for more than never failing a save. Or maybe the wizard finally gets a chance to show just how capable he can be in a pinch, even without an hour to prepare his spells. No matter what choice you make, it’s sure to make a memorable adventure.

The next easiest option is to have a conversation with your players. There are three options most players take, sometimes individually but usually as a group. First, they might elect to create all new characters who are going to pick up from where their previous characters left off. Sometimes they’re intentionally recovering the remains, sent on a mission to find the now-dead characters by whoever sent the characters in the first place. Sometimes they’re doing their own thing and stumble over the remains of the dead characters and choose to pick up from where they left off. If they don’t do that, another option might be to just create new characters in the same world, doing their own thing, in a space far from where their characters died. Maybe they’ll eventually have to defeat the villain their previous characters fell to at some point, but maybe not. This is a new adventure and that doesn’t mean they need to even inhabit the same world, much less inhabit the same area of said world. The third option is to decide to stop playing. Some players might decide they want to move on to something else, now that the journey their character was on came to a conclusion. That’s totally fine, as long as they’re not departing angrily. If they are, or if all of your players are choosing to abandon ship now that their characters are dead, it might not be a bad idea to look back and assess if you were running a game they wanted to keep playing.

Another option, which would require a lot of work to keep the players from feeling like you just saved them for expediency, would be to have them wake up in a stronghold of an ally. Maybe they were brought back to life or maybe they were rescued, but it must have been for an important reason, whatever the method. Maybe this ally wants to use them for something and figured having a group of adventurers in their debt due to being returned from death would be sufficient motivation to get them to do whatever this ally wants. Maybe it isn’t an ally but a previously neutral NPC who wants the characters to work for them. Perhaps there’s even some kind of curse or geas placed on the characters that forces them to work for this NPC and now they need to not only pursue their given goals but figure out how to escape from the NPC controlling them. This would be a lot of fun because it’d require a lot of clever thinking on the part of the players, though I can understand that it wouldn’t work for every group.

There’s always an undead campaign. It’d work really well if they died fighting a necromancer or failed to disrupt some horrid ritual that would give the souls of everyone mortal on the material plane to some evil god. Maybe something didn’t go entirely wrong and some aspect of who the characters was before their transformation lingers. With the right kind of build-up, you could create an adventure where they either embrace their new undead forms or find a way to undo their transformations. Maybe they find the last divine caster in the area who was saved from the ritual because they were praying within a consecrated area and they can be returned to life. Or maybe they figure out how to save their souls and then take on the new undead overlords before (or maybe after) using a miracle spell to return the world to the way it was before the ritual went off.

There’s always retconjuration, the magic of changing how things happened, but that almost always feels cheap unless they died because they all rolled a bunch of fails in a row while their enemies rolled nothing but natural twenties. I’d recommend against it if you have literally any other option. You could also effectively un-do their death by stripping them of their gear and saying they managed to just barely survive, but they were looted and left for the vultures. Whoever beat them did to them what they’ve likely done to countless other humanoids and monstrous races. That would be a fun spin on things and I’d love to see how a group of players recovers from being stripped of everything that wasn’t hidden. I love creating moments for improvisation and outside-the-box thinking, so I’d really enjoy seeing what my players did in that case. I might do it as a one-off, sometime, just to see.

All of your options pretty much fit into three categories. Figure out how to get the current characters back into play (capture, not-quite-dead, or undead), create new characters (who may or may not encounter the corpses of their former selves), or just stop playing. If you have any ideas of other options, besides what I’ve listed here, I’d love to hear about them! I’m really curious about what other people do in TPK scenarios when they come up.

Tabletop Highlight: Slogging Through Open War

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I’ve always been interested in the idea of a D&D campaign focused around participation in a war. A lot of “classic” D&D campaigns usually include participating in a war, but that’s often tangentially. In version 3.5, the recommended method for including players in a war setting campaign is to give them specialized missions. Stuff like being a strike team sent to seize an important asset, protecting important figures, or capturing important enemy figures. There’s a feat that can be applied to building an army, called “Leadership,” but it is one of the feats that can be most easily abused by an unscrupulous player and all it really does is provide a character with a small army of a few hundred people.

What I’m looking for is to make the players participate in the actual war itself. Giant, sprawling battlefields filled with magic and mighty heroes like something out of an anime. Great battles with terrible consequences for all the poor souls who survived the battle. Rules of conquest, for conquerors and the conquered. The important moments and decisions that are the only things that separate success from failure. Diplomacy to end wars and failure diplomacy to start them. I want something enormous in scale that dice alone don’t really support all that well.

I’ve tried making my own rules. Role-playing through plan making sessions, mixing in a few strike missions to give them something immediate and impactful to do before sending them off to roll a bunch of dice to emulate a day’s worth of combat. Trying to send them into large encounters to have them act as a rallying force to either break through enemy lines or patch up their own lines. Showing how much difference a bard can make by letting them affect as many allies as can hear them over the din of battle and then watching as the relatively minor boost literally turns the tide. Watching the bloody hell that is a wizard or sorcerer unleashed on a battlefield of basic soldiers. The problem has always been that it inevitably breaks down into some rather boring math. There’s no real tension or suspense since the end is pretty much decided from the outset.

For instance, the tank in my current campaign has over 100 HP (the “average” human warrior has 8) and his armor class (how hard it is to hurt him in combat) is 27. Most average human warriors who appear on the battlefield are going to have a spear and a +2 bonus to hitting things and will do 2-9 damage per hit. Which means that, when they roll their die to attack, they will never get a high enough number to hit. If you’re using “natural 20’s” as “critical hits,” then that hit automatically beats whatever AC it’s up against. Statistically, my current campaign’s tank will get hit once out of ever twenty attackers. On the flip side, the same character has a +20 to hit, can hit more than once, and does a minimum of 8 damage per hit. He’ll hit the average warrior every time and kill them every time. If we assume the tank never gets healed, gets hit once every twenty attacks, and is in a position where he can only get attacked once per round of combat (which lasts six seconds), then he’ll get hit once every two minutes for an average of 5 damage, which he’ll be able to do for about an hour before he needs to stop or dies. If he has any kind of protection from damage, which he’d be sensible enough to get in this scenario, he can easily get it down to an average of 2 damage a hit, which means he could keep going about two and a half hours without a break before being overwhelmed. With the healing he can do on his own, he could get himself another hour, at least. With a little pre-planning and the right allocation of magic, he could double all of that, for six hours of fighting and killing. During all this time, he’s killed almost 2,200 enemy soldiers.

The numbers sound nice, but that’s just a talk through of what happened. I could tell him that he did those things, but they wouldn’t really mean much to him because there was no real risk to him and he did nothing terribly exciting. He just slaughtered a bunch of mooks. The same is true of archers. They can stand behind the tank and, with the right boosts, kill a target for every arrow they get to fire. Right now, if the tank’s ally did that, he’d kill almost 5,000 people and that’s without taking a single hit point of damage. After he did that, he could take the tank’s place and then fight for about four hours, bringing his total up to just over 6,000. Throw in a wizard of the right kind and he could probably double that number, over the same ten-hour period. Only the rogue wouldn’t have that level of combat efficacy, but you could easy send him to go kill officers because not even luck will save them from his sneaking abilities. He could easily kill one or more officers or important figures every five minutes. In ten hours, that’s 120 officers or leaders. That’s most of the army’s command.

Throw it all together and you’ve got a pretty typical D&D party taking out an entire army on their own. But it’s boring as hell and there’s no real tension. It’s just numbers on paper. I want more than that. I want to give them a reason to be excited about victories, rather than have them be a foregone conclusion. I want them to feel real fear as they figure out if their character will live or die. Unfortunately, as you can see here, having to chop your way through a bunch of mooks even when you’re already beat up isn’t a big deal. The only tension comes later when you have to fight the guys giving the orders.

Matthew Colville is producing a book for the fifth edition of D&D that’s supposed to include rules for warfare. He apparently uses them in his own games and, after seeing the internet’s response to some of his home rules, he’s now going to share them with us. Having not actually watched any of Colville’s games, I don’t know much about his rules. I’d really like it if they had solutions for the problems I’m facing because I sure as hell don’t. All I’ve got is math and one-off missions that miss the true scope of a war.

In the mean time, I’m going to just stick to large, unwieldy encounters segregated by rooms in towers or castles in lieu of effective warfare rules. It makes it a lot easier when it’s just a bunch of waves for the players to beat down.

 

Tabletop Highlight: Up For Interpretation

Chris 1 Comment

One of the things I’ve struggled with for my entire time as a DM is how to interpret what my players say. In this case, I mean everything from trying to parse vague statements so I can correctly describe my players actions to stuff like determining whether or not the player said the character did something versus having them assess the likelihood of success if they go ahead with that idea. Meaning has gotten fairly easy to ascertain at this point and I’ve learned how to ask them for clarification without giving them information they shouldn’t have, but I’m realizing more and more that the different between thinking out loud and making their character recklessly charge into a situation is mostly on me.

Before my current campaign, this wasn’t something that came up a lot. Since I preferred to run comedic campaigns, I just did whatever the group would find funniest so long as it was actually something they meant to say. Usually, players are pretty good at making it clear when something is a joke their character would never actually do and when it’s something they actually want to happen. Even if it is, most players in my shits-and-giggles campaigns understand that they might need to roll up a new character at any point in time and don’t get too emotionally attached to them. Even if it winds up costing them their character, they’re usually fine with it as long as it’s funny and I’m good at coming up with comedic but nonlethal consequences, so it usually doesn’t come to that.

In my current campaign, (which I’ve taken to calling “Broken Worlds” because the planes of my universe have been shattered by the war between the Good deities and the Evil deities so that only a handful are left in a precarious balance that could send all of existence spiral out of existence at the drop of a pinhead full of dancing angels), the stakes are a little bit higher and my players have more restrictive concepts for their characters. Laughter is always appreciated and silly situations make for excellent sessions, but they’re not going to break character in order to make a joke or exploit some comedic potential. They want to stay true to how their character would act and are more interested in the drama and risk of their current situation than a chance to make a joke. Here, my interpretation of their intent, when it comes to them discussing actions or plotting the course of action their character carries out, matters a lot. It is the difference between spending two in-game (and real-world) hours trying to burn down a wooden door and them spending a minute trying to unlock it.

If you started watching Matthew Colville’s videos on Running the Game, he says that he’s fine giving his players (and their characters) information that they either should know as a result of living in the world or that they’d be able to easily ascertain (that they wouldn’t need to use a skill check to know). I agree entirely, but I draw the line at redirecting their course of action when they’re making assumptions. For instance, anyone who looked at the aforementioned wooden door would have seen that it had a latch and a lock without needing to make a skill check. It is clear as day that the door is locked. To determine the type of lock and whether or not the door has any kind of magical or physical protection, they would need to make a skill check. If they decide that, upon hearing it is a wooden door, that they’re just going to build a bonfire in an attempt to burn it down, I won’t stop them. If I describe something they’re inspecting and they miss it because they aren’t paying attention, then I’m not going to stop them from doing something dumb. That’s an important learning experience for them.

Similarly, how they frame things is important. If they say they go do something, their character has gone and made an attempt at doing whatever it is they said. If they say they’re going to do something, I’ll cut them a little slack. For instance, if the rogue says he turns invisible, dives into the murky water, and positions himself at the last-known location of the octopus they’re preparing to kill, then his character has vanished and then jumped into the water. If he says that he’s going to do that, then I’ll let his fellow players stop him or tell him something the character would know that the player does not which might influence his decision.

I’m not an ass about it. I’ve made it clear to my players that their intent matters and they need to be more circumspect about how much time they spend dithering about or making plans. I even let it slide for the first five levels and gave them a little speech before I started. I was incredibly clear that I was expecting a little more from them and what exactly I was expecting. There’s no way they could spend two hours of real-world time discussing how to attack the next room without some time passing in the game. And if they take two in-game hours to burn down a wooden door they could have unlocked, then there’s a really good chance the people behind the door are going to be prepared for them. I could have just told them the door had a lock, but none of them checked the door for a lock and no one was listening when I told them it was a simple, locked wooden door with iron banding. As much as I love my players, I’m not going to take them time to re-describe something when they weren’t listening the first time unless they actually ask me to do so.

There’s no hard and fast rule about this sort of thing. If you’ve got more experienced players, they probably expect to be taken at their word. They’ll frame things as questions, ask for more details as needed, and try to make quick decisions–be warned: not all experienced players learn this skill. They’re generally good at making their intent crystal clear. If you have newer players, they’ll probably hesitate more and might not be good at policing their expressed intent versus their actual intent. Some players take longer than others and some new players just get it right off the bat. Some games don’t really care as much about punishing people for not being cautious and some don’t really require that much focus on people’s intent because the situations in the game don’t really leave much room for interpretation. There aren’t many ways you could misinterpret fighting a bunch of orcs.

As always, the big thing is to reflect on how it might fit into whatever game you’re running or how you play your character. There’s a lot of room in D&D for being a bit of a word-lawyer. My favorite point to make to DMs as a player is that you don’t need to make a bluff (the skill that lets you lie) check if you’re not actually lying. Most of my characters develop a certain amount of skill for skirting the true as it suits them and my favorite villains to play are the clever ones who get captured. Wordplay is one of my favorite games and not everyone spends their free time practicing how to artfully arrange words so I don’t really expect my players to take things to that level. I just give them a slap on the wrist when they do something dumb. I’ll never give them an impossible situation as a result of their poor decisions, but I will make things much more difficult for them.

After all, what’s the point of playing a game like D&D if doing something dumb doesn’t run the risk of getting you killed? There’d be no tension if they knew they’d be able to take back any wrong decision they make or that there were no consequences for taking too long. If you constantly leave the dungeon to replenish your spells and rest, then the dungeon is going to prepare for your return. They’ll be ready and waiting for you, this time, and heaven–or what’s left of it–help you if you leave again.

Tabletop Highlight: The Appeal of the Classics and Why Fifth Edition is Perfect for That.

Chris Leave a comment

Some days, all I really want to do is throw aside all of my current Dungeons and Dragons campaigns in favor of returning to what I always call the “simple roots” of the game. My main campaign is a complex game with political intrigue, long-term mysteries, a fully customized world, a huge history full of references for my players to explore, a whole range of villains the players can kill or continuously encounter, and is an absolute delight to run despite being completely exhausting. I put a lot of work into keeping the campaign running smoothly and making sure my players are enjoying themselves, so I often fantasize about running something a little simpler. Something smaller-scale, really.

I have a tendency to let my imagination run away from me so even something I’ve described as a “shiggles” (shits-and-giggles) campaign winds up with a complex political landscape and more customizations than I can easily manage without a lot of reference work. My main campaign was supposed to be a simple campaign, focused around a small area and with tons of adventure for the players to find without pulling in politics and “Grand Adventure Across the World!” so I could enjoy running without constantly exhausting myself. That plan lasted maybe half a dozen sessions before I thought of a great story I could tell my friends. I don’t regret it and I enjoy running my campaign, but I’m starting to crave something a little simpler again.

Starting to play the fifth edition of D&D has magnified the craving. The system is set up much more simply. For example, the numbers are easier to manage across the board in fifth edition versus any prior edition. My main campaign, using the 3.5 edition set of rules, has a rogue with an Armor Class (how difficult it is to hit someone with an attack) of 19 and a scout/ranger with an AC of 31-35 depending on how much he’s moved during his turn. Depending how much effort each character puts into their AC, this gap could shrink to nothing or grow to be even larger. As a result, it is difficult to give my players enemies that are a threat to the higher-AC characters without being over-powering to the lower-AC characters. The same goes for attack bonuses (the bonus a character gets when attacking that contributes to their attempt to overcome their opponent’s AC) since the Paladin can get a bonus of 20 or higher while most other characters of the same level are working with something in the 10-14 range. This also complicates things for the same reason the AC disparity complicates things.

In fifth edition, the bonuses don’t get much higher than 15 and ACs rarely hit 30 for anyone. There’s very little ability for a focused, driven player to get their character’s attack bonus or AC to a level that would make it almost impossible for an enemy to fight them. In fifth edition, it is super easy to fudge numbers as I need to since the players will have a smaller range for me to consider. In 3.5, it can be difficult to fudge numbers because they fudge for everyone and all stats were NOT created equal. This means I need to spend more time on the front end making sure the encounters are balanced so that the low-AC rogue who turns invisible before literally every attack (which means he can only attack every other turn at most) has the ability to not only survive the fight but contribute to the damage at a level that at least comes close to the amount the scout/ranger and Paladin can dish out in their frequently optimal situations.

In 5th edition, all I’d really need to do is make sure I’ve got a general idea of the location and purpose of whatever the players decide to explore. I can make up numbers on the spot, fill in encounters as dictated by the players’ ability to handle them, and even make an easy encounter a bit more difficult by just making everything a bit tougher. I’d be able to focus on maps and letting my players explore than needing to quietly direct them behind the scenes so they wind up someone I’ve got prepared for them. Hell, I could build the entire thing early on and just give them a continuous string of “the mayor’s daughter was kidnapped” and “there’s some gnolls out in a cave who’re raiding merchant caravans” quests until they got tired of playing or have literally bought the entire country they lived in with all of their fabulous adventurer wealth. The whole story would be about creating their legacy and achieving fame and fortune rather than some problem in the world that only they can fix.

In my mind, that’s classic Dungeons and Dragons. I’m willing to bet D&D has always been a pretty even mixture of the simpler style stories of just wandering around a world full of danger and treasure and of being sent on a quest to defeat a series of sequentially stronger Big Bad Evil Guys. I just have a tendency to run campaigns that are mostly the latter and hear about wonderful, fun campaigns other people played in that are the former. I want to run one of the simpler style campaigns, or maybe even a pre-made campaign. It would be interesting to be able to focus on the stuff specific to being a Dungeon Master instead of a story creator when running a game. I bet I’d learn a lot about what makes for good tabletop storytelling.

Tabletop Highlight: Misleading and Outright Lying

Chris Leave a comment

I know I probably use this phrase a lot, but one of the most important things you can do as a DM is to lie to your players. Selectively, of course. Good storytelling often requires that your readers or players don’t have all the answers and it can be incredibly tempting to give them to your players. If they want to know the answer to a question and have their character start hunting for it, sometimes they won’t find the truth. They’ll find a different answer instead. Even if your players are really good at differentiating between player knowledge and character knowledge, knowing the answer they found isn’t the truth with subconsciously alter how their characters interact with it. At the same time, actually knowing that they got the truth when they find an answer will also change their behavior. Like players in the real world, characters shouldn’t always know when something is for-sure true. There are a lot of uncertainties in life and creating a believable world often means maintaining a certain degree of uncertainty in your created world.

This sort of unreliability of “truth” can be difficult to include in a world where there is objective, measurable Good and Evil. There’s literally a spell or magical ability called “detect Good/Evil” and making them relative to an individual’s point of view will completely screw up a game. Paladins, a type of holy knight with powers granted to them by there god, are required to stick to a particular alignment. Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, and Neutrality make up the axes of the alignment chart and paladins are usually held to one particular combination by their class. A lawful good paladin can do what they think is the right and lawful thing but still lose their god-granted powers because it wasn’t actually good or lawful. Making it relative allows for some really murky and difficult play, especially if you have a player who decides to abuse the system.

The thing is, the same stuff applies to “truth.” There are spells for detecting lies, spells for getting answers to questions, and spells for forcing people to only speak the truth. How can that exist in a world where you need to leave some uncertainty? Usually, people relying on the old idea that you cannot compel objective truth from someone, only what they believe to be the truth. They can’t say something objectively true if they believe an incorrect answer is actually the truth. This works well for people without much information or who aren’t generally expected to know things, like the underlings of some dungeon boss or Big Bad Evil Guy. The problem is, these people don’t generally need to be compelled to tell the truth. They’ll often do it just to save their own behinds. The BBEGs, the people who plot and plan, will do everything they can to mislead the players, so they’re often on the receiving end of magical compulsion. If they just give up the truth, though, where is the fun in that? They’re supposed to be a threat to the players! How can they be a credible threat if they just buckled as soon as they’re not allowed to speak falsely or remain silent?

Hedging, double-speak, and misleading information. Being able to tell the truth without giving the players the information they want is crucial to any magically compelled villain. It is, of course, possible for the players to craft a question that leaves no wiggle room, but that’s part of the challenge! This is a test of intelligence and wordcraft rather than of strength and battlecraft. I wrote about this in a post back in February, so you can find some examples there, if you want more. I want to focus on the misleading information portion.

Part of the problem with misleading information is that there is a skill specifically designed for characters to use when they suspect they are being deliberately mislead. Sense Motive, or Insight in the more recent versions of D&D, lets characters get a grasp of what is going on in the mind of whomever they’re talking to. If they ask someone they’re interrogating a question, they will likely use their skill to tell if the answer they got was genuine or an attempt to mislead them. Fortunately, they don’t always think to use it and it doesn’t apply to information garnered from non-thinking sources. The villain’s motives can be sensed, but the journal they happened to leave behind as they fled their lair has no motive. You can’t use that skill on something written down, so the players themselves have to decide whether or not their characters will trust the information.

That’s why I prefer to direct my players to libraries and colleges or universities when they’re looking for information. They have no way to ascertain objective truth or to detect falsehoods when they get them out of a book or as secondhand information from someone studying whatever they are trying to learn about. Or when they learn something from a story passed down through the generations, as related to them by the Bard that just happens to follow the party around to provide backup healing and attack boosts. For oral stories, a good mixture of truth information and outright lies is best, since that’s generally what happens to stories as they’re verbally passed around. No one is trying to be malicious, but enough minor shifts (always to make the story more interesting, of course) happen along the way that a decent amount of information isn’t true. The same happens to ancient history. “History is written by the victors,” so histories tend to reflect well on whoever wrote them and glosses over the actual truth of what happened to do so.

Delivering the information the same way for both instances is key. If your players can tell the difference between what is false and what is true, their characters will know as well and act accordingly. If everything they get winds up being true, they’re going to stop trying to actually think about what they’re learning and simply take you at your word. If too much of what you tell them is false and they can never figure it out beforehand, they’re going to distrust everything you tell them and likely end up doing a different quest line. If you strike the balance just right, they’re going to get immersed in your world as they hunt down more information, try to verify its accuracy, and then figure out how to apply what they believe to be the truth. Hopefully, they won’t be right all the time. It gets really boring if they are, but some characters (and players) are really good at ferreting out the truth and that should be respected. If they’re playing a knowledge-hungry researched and they’ve already learned the lesson of not trusting everything they read in a book, chances are good that they’re going to verify their information before they act on it.

So lie when you can, tell the truth as much as possible, and make sure your players are always wondering which you’re doing. Curiosity and uncertainty are good. Players can thrive in an environment like that.