Tabletop Gaming

Tabletop Highlight: Figuring Out How Much is too Much

Chris Leave a comment

The fun of inventing new societies, creating entire civilizations, and developing cultures is what draws me to storytelling, at least when it comes to what I get the most from. As a result, I really enjoy playing Dungeon Master and one of my favorite parts of running my own Dungeons and Dragons campaigns is the prep work. The thing is, preparation work, especially world building, is one of those things that will take exactly as much time as you’re willing to give it. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as I’ve practiced storytelling, both as a writer and a dungeon master, is that there’s a fine line between over-preparing and creating a world that doesn’t feel real.

One thing that dungeon masters often need to do is create towns and cities for their players to encounter. If it is a sizable city, chances are good that there are multiple blacksmiths the players could hire to create them some new gear. Some of them might be better than the others, some might have a preference for particular kinds of work, and some might just hate adventurers. They all have names, pasts, business practices unique to their specialties and levels of experience, and they all have opinions about each other and each other’s work. You, as the dungeon master, can figure all of this out or you can spend the time working on the political situation that it is likely the players will encounter instead of the intricacies of business and the people behind said business that will mostly be ignored by the players who only want to know who the best smith is (which is usually easy to figure out). To be entirely fair, some players might be more interested in the business scene than the political one, so maybe that’s the system that’s more important to your next session. Or maybe they won’t be interested in either the business or political situations and will just want to kill some monsters and protect some peasants, so maybe you should spend more time focusing on the environment around the town.

The key to figuring out what you need to prepare the most is in figuring out what your players will want. I’ve never met a player who changed what they were interested in from one session to another aside from one player who was literally just doing it to point out the holes in the world and ruin everyone’s good time. All players, even the aforementioned asshole, tend to be very consistent. Your first few sessions with a new group might need a little more work because you’re not sure what they’re going to care about yet, but once you’ve gotten a feel for them you learn where you need to focus.

The way I view dungeon mastering is that I’m basically creating the world only about as far as the next few steps ahead of the players. There’s always a horizon, major geographical features, and a sense of society behind it all, but the majority of the world is an empty canvas I only fill in as the players move or discover. If you wind up preparing in the wrong direction or keep trying to push your players in the direction you want them to go in, they’re going to wind up walking into all of the blank spots and feel like the world isn’t as solid enough to really believe in. Some players are more willing than others to ignore the empty spots they find, but most of the reason most people play Dungeons and Dragons is for the immersion you can achieve when you set aside the concerns of the primary world and fully embrace the secondary world. These are the people I run for and this is the kind of player I am.

No matter what you do, there will always be hiccups. You can’t have every name ready and planning everything out in excruciating detail so you’ve got the name of every blacksmith and item shop proprietor prepared is a quick recipe for madness and frustration when 99% of it winds up going unused. I’ve even seen dungeon masters get angry with their players for not exploring and caring about the world as much as they did. I’ve even felt it myself, when I took the time during the week leading up to the session to prepare an exciting encounter and a new bit of the world for them to experience and then my players spend two hours dithering about who goes on what errands and what supplies they need down to the last copper.

It can hurt to put in a lot of work and not get to see it come out in your game session, even when you know it’ll come up in the next one or the one after that. It doesn’t hurt much, though, so long as you focus on making sure there’s plenty of world for the players to experience as they dither about and shop for really weird things you’d never have imagined they wanted. Really, it just give you a week off of preparation. If all you can see is all the work you’ve done going unnoticed or un-experienced, you’re going to eventually lose your temper.

Part of the problem is how the line between too much and not enough shifts from group to group and even from session to session. My players care a lot more about the names of the people around them if they know they’re going to be in the same place for a while. They also tend to care less about the actual layout of the town the longer they’re there or the bigger the city is. For over two years, they’ve gone through literally the same town every time they enter a civilized area without ever realizing that they’re all laid out the same. All I’ve had to do is scale it up based on how many people live there. I created my second city just recently because I needed something different for a future adventure they’re probably going to go on. They don’t care what the places look like because they’re more interested in the people and the plot than the exact geography, which works for me since I can create interesting characters with ease and I’ve got a list of random names sorted by race and status so I don’t need to spend any time trying to figure them out when I make up a new NPC for them to befriend/eventually fight.

If you’re trying to figure out where the line is for your group, I recommending starting with more detail and slowly scaling it back. That way, you can avoid subjecting your players to a campaign full of blank spots before you figure it out. Step it down slowly and you should be able to notice when your players start to feel like the world isn’t as real as they’d like. At that point, kick it back up a little bit more than you think you need to and work to achieve a level of effort you can still enjoy. You’re supposed to have fun, too.

 

Tabletop Highlight: Creativity in Monsters

Chris Leave a comment

There’s a D&D joke that’s gone around the internet a few dozen times about Mimics. “The barkeeper asked why we carried weapons on us in the bar. I said ‘Mimics.’ The barkeeper laughed, the party laughed, the table laughed, we killed the table. It was a good time.” It does a good job of illustrating the potential dangers a D&D party might face and why most tabletop players have a heavy dose of what we like to call “adventurer’s paranoia.” It’s the idea that almost anything can wind up wanting to attack adventurers and crazy things like chests that want to eat you, talking tables, and ceilings that decide they want to invade your personal space are all relatively normal.

If you spend any amount of time looking through D&D source-books, you find a whole slew of things specifically designed to be hidden until they’re eating you. There are all manner of horrible tree or stump creatures that will destroy an unwary party, not to mention all the horrific vines, lichen, and fungi that will kill you before you’re aware they’re trying. Then there are the ravenous beasts of the various wildernesses, territorial intelligent monsters, magical traps, and let’s not forget the Demons/Celestials/Fey who sometimes just want to screw around with mortals because they’re bored. Chairs come to life, the suits of armor in castles are almost always going to attack you, paintings can hide mesmerizing or mind-control magic traps, and even something as simple as a hallway can turn into a deadly gauntlet of hidden pits, spring-assisted blades, and magical fire at a moment’s notice. Carelessness causes death and only a screwy mind filled to the brim with paranoia can save you and your allies.

That being said, a lot of D&D campaigns don’t make use of all of these things. Traps are difficult to set up and often unrewarding from a DM’s perspective because two skill checks can bypass them entirely. Bringing the outer-realms of existence into the mortal plane is often a decision made by the story the DM has set up or the players have started, and that’s a hugely complex set of worlds to bring into any game without sufficient preparation. Everything takes a lot of work to set up and the players often wind up avoiding all of your preparation in favor of some unexpected route that doesn’t fit anything you’ve made. Monsters and encounters created off the cuff are rarely as creative and unique as the stuff you’d spent a week of evenings planning.

In my experience, you best bet is to always make sure to include a few intelligent monsters. If they’re smart, it means they have likely survived for a long time and have a wealth of experience to draw on when it comes to screwing with the party. Sure, the hallway doesn’t have any traps, but maybe a fleeing monster ruffled the carpet a bit because he knows the adventurers following him will be proceeding carefully. If they think there’s a trap, they’ll take the time to be thorough, giving the monster and its allies time to better prepare.

Ambush predators are almost always intelligent as well, with a whole history of successfully managing to prey on inattentive mortals. There wouldn’t be mimics pretending to be treasure chests if it hadn’t worked really well for a long time. Maybe one of them is smarter than the others and uses the shapes of its less-intelligent brethren to guide its own decisions. My favorite example of this was a mimic my party encountered. Elsewhere, there was a mimic as a treasure chest and a mimic as a door, so this one decided to assume the shape of the door frame rather than the door, because it knew it wouldn’t catch anyone off guard if it was just another door.

It is important to remember that, just because the creature is a monster doesn’t mean it’s fine dying or an idiot. Yeah, it would probably suck for your party’s caster if the monstrous stump attack it first, since the caster has so few hit-points and no ability to resist the monster’s poison, but why the heck would a tree stump smart enough to hide and attack opportune prey attack the armor-covered party tank who could shrug off all its hits? Controlled monsters require specific direction to differentiate, but any free-willed creature should be able to tell the difference between an easy target and a difficult one.

If you’re looking for ideas to justify your players’ paranoia, the internet has some really great ideas. Homebrew monsters are fine since all you need to do is make sure it isn’t going to be an unfair, unwinnable fight. If you’re looking for this sort of thing, you’ve probably gotten fudging things well in-hand, so being able to take the idea of an overly powerful homebrew creature and bringing it down to being an appropriate challenge for your player should be easy. If the world is really as full of dangers as they players think it is, make sure not to let them down, you know?

When it comes to other creatures, like goblins and kobolds and anything intelligent, the idea that they’re willing to fight to their death is a little far-fetched. Maybe the fight was brutish and short, like the time my party killed three rocs in the time it took for them to make a first approach, but any drawn-out fight should mean the losing party has the chance to surrender or flee. No squad of goblin soldiers is going to fight to the death without some level of magical compulsion or incredible fear of whatever is directing them. Or they’re fanatics. Fanatics love fighting to the death. Just make sure they’ve got weird tattoos, clothing, and jewelry.

Just make your monsters interesting if your players want a little depth or fanatical and crazy if they just want to kick down doors and kill stuff. Monsters should reflect the your setting’s level of realism if you want your sessions to be believable. Good monsters and enemies are an important part of making the game feel real for your players.

Honestly, I could probably do an entire week of posts on making good monsters. This catch-all post feels a little scattered to me, so I think I’ll revisit this once I’ve finished developing (and running) the dungeon my players are about to face since it is going to be all about realistic, intelligent, and creative monsters. This is going to be a lot of fun for me and will hopefully give my players the opportunity to rise to new challenges.

Tabletop Highlight: Running the Game

Chris Leave a comment

During my current break from running any Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve started following a YouTuber/Author/Game Master named Matthew Colville. I’ve followed him on twitter for a while, because I love what he has to say, but one of my good friends encouraged me to start watching his videos on YouTube. She’d started following him because she’s working on plans for running her first D&D campaign and he has an amazing video series called “Running The Game” focused around encouraging new DMs to run a game. As a moderately experienced DM, I can definitely say that these videos are amazing and everyone who will one day run/currently runs/or once ran a D&D session should watch them.

When I was first starting out as a DM, I only had half a dozen D&D sessions under my belt as a player. I had an amazing DM as my role model, but I still knew almost nothing about running the game. Since I was a quick study, I read the books, found some online resources for rule adjudication, and took it to heart when the everywhere I read told me that I was the final arbitrator of rules. Things only ever happened because I allowed them to happen that way. Unfortunately, none of these resources prepared me for the way story-telling changes because writing or speaking a story and running a campaign with a story. I was unprepared for the way my players would insert themselves into the narrative I was trying to create, I didn’t have a firm grasp of how I should be running sessions from an administrative point of view, and I was woefully unprepared to manage the social dynamics that sprang up as a result of the campaign. I learned by making wrong choices and it almost scared me away from running games entirely.

Nowadays, I’m a much better DM. I’ve learned a lot of tough lessons and while I still am not great at keeping all of the gears and wheels hidden from my players, I can do it well when it is important to. Still, those two years of campaign and the year of avoiding new games kind of hurt and I wish I’d had a resource that taught me not just the rules but all of the stuff you don’t think of until the shit has hit the fan and you’re wondering what you did wrong. Matthew Colville is such a resource.

His first few videos establish what he’s planning to do with the series. He also sets up the basics by creating a first dungeon and the handful of encounters and sessions that would encompass getting the party together and running through the dungeon. He covers the basics of the rules and how to manage a group of people, along with everything you’d need to know in order to start your own campaign. All of the videos after that are focused around particular topics like the use of maps, how to modify monsters, how to create your own adventure, managing player dynamics, and pretty much anything you might want to know as a DM.

He is a bit of a fast-talker in his videos, but not so fast that he is difficult to understand. His videos go from eight minutes to over forty, so he has a lot of ground to cover and slowing down would almost double the length of most of his videos. He uses a lot of specialized terminology, but he does an amazing job of explaining it as he goes along. His editing skills are top-notch and he keeps the flow of information going constantly, except when he’s working in a few jokes or anecdotes to give examples of what he just said or to show that even thirty-plus years of experience doesn’t mean you won’t still make mistakes. He likes to emphasize that he isn’t a perfect DM and that even he forgets to make use of the advice he’s giving in these videos. All he wants to accomplish is to encourage people to play D&D and to share some of the knowledge he has gained and traditions he has been a part of since he started playing in the eighties.

These videos are incredible. Even though I’ve learned most of the lessons he’s shared so far (I’m still working my way through the videos), it is an incredible aid to have them formally delivered in a way that makes me think about recent applications or how I can do better in the future. Even though I’d be hard-pressed to pick out even on thing specifically that I’m going to do better as a result of these videos, I’m really excited to get back to playing regularly with my group so they can see just how much I’ve improved. So much of it was just a sort of settling-in of what I already knew so it feels more natural. It’ll take a lot less effort to run well, once I start again, and less effort to prepare since the videos have a ton of great tips for stream-lining the process.

If you want to run D&D or know someone who does, I suggest checking out his videos! They’re so accessible that you don’t even need to have played D&D before to understand them! Like Matthew Colville, I just want to be a river to my people. Go, learn to run, and then share it with your friends!

Tabletop Highlight: The Narrative Imperative

Chris Leave a comment

I like to tell stories with my D&D games. Doing so can be tricky at the best of times because you’re merely the person setting the stage when you run a game, unless you’re willing to deny your players a significant amount of autonomy. If you let them have their freedom, the players are the ones who plot the story and direct it. You are all the actors, the camera man, the producer, the SFX artist, the prop master, and the scenic designer. And more! The hats you might be required to wear when dealing with a particularly willful group of playing is beyond my ability to describe, remember, or predict. There are simply too many things a good GM does when running a game to keep track of it all.

The thing is, though, you can have a lot more control over the story than most people think if you’re good at setting plot hooks. Plot hooks are for snagging players, not landing a story in their lap. You are hooking their attention and directing their actions toward a particular end that you’ve likely spent a fair amount of time devising. Most people stop that as soon as the quest has been given and the players have declared their choice. If they bought in, why spend more time on it? If they didn’t buy in, maybe you can recycle it later or find another way to pitch it once they’ve done something else. But hooks can be used quite frequently to help lead your players where you want them to go or to keep them focused on what you want them to be doing.

In my story-centric campaigns, frequent use of hooks can make the players feel like they’re at the center of the universe. Too much of that feeling can be bad because they don’t feel like there’s any risk, but enough can make them feel like the heroes their characters are. Carefully managing the frequency and type of the hooks allows me to keep my manipulation under the radar when I want it to be. It also lets me do things a bit more obviously if I know there’s something my players want that is in line with my goals. I can make them buy in a little more heavily for a portion of the overall story and they get to influence the events of the story in a way that makes their characters feel important.

My favorite way to do this is to give them an entertaining cast of characters that is invested in a particular outcome. If they care about these characters, then they’ll listen when they talk and be more willing to pick a path that helps them out. For instance, if you wind up protecting the bad-ass woman punching a hole in a stone wall because the god who saved your life told you to go do something that led you here and then it turns out that you discover the ancient, hidden tomb of a forgotten mummy lord while guarding her during a trip across a desert wasteland, the players might be pretty inclined to involve her in the tomb exploration (at least verbally, since she’s a busy woman) which means it becomes super easy to lead them in the direction of the other tombs the badass woman’s associates find since it turns out that their discovery actually explains why the blight the badass woman is investigating is happening in the first place. Now they’re all invested in doing what was essentially the NPCs job and they feel like they cracked the case wide open because they made one lucky skill check. Throw in a few hints as they go along at how this ties into the larger story and now all they want to do is figure out what is going on and fix what their main villain broke.

This isn’t to say, of course, that I don’t give my players the opportunity to go off and do whatever they like. If they want to ignore what is going on in front of them and do something else, they’re perfectly capable of doing so. I might not always drop some neat adventure into their lap (and definitely won’t if I sense that they’re being petulant or trying to derail the game on purpose), but I let them do as they wish. I just always make sure they know that time is passing and what they’re leaving behind might not be here when they get back. The passage of time and windows of opportunity aren’t exactly manipulation, but they do help keep players focused on their core quests.

The other main way I continuously hook my players is by giving them hints of what is to come and how powerful they could be if they follow down their current path (the one I want them to). Hints at alliances, potential gear, the experiences, and the in-world fame or glory for accomplishing mighty feats. The path laid out is not the only for growth and ever greater power, it’s just the easy way. Haring off in your own direction and doing whatever the heck you want can lead to growth and power, but it can also lead to dead-ends and unfortunate circumstances. I’ll never direct my players down a plot line they can’t handle, but the world is full of many dangerous things and they might run afoul something horrible if they stray too far from the places they know. If the party does something dumb, I will totally let them die. If they almost die or barely make it out of something awful because they did something incredibly dumb, they generally learn that there’s danger out there and wandering around willy-nilly means they might encounter it.

Thankfully, all of my players are very invested in the current story and they all want to find out what happens next, so it doesn’t take a lot of work to keep them invested or focused. For the most part. The “focused” bit can be tricky at times.

Tabletop Highlight: To Run or To Play, And Why

Chris Leave a comment

I love both playing tabletop RPGs and running them. When I run, I get to tell a story in a different format, hand-in-hand with a group of people who are just as excited about the story as I am. When I play, I get to participate in a story with a bunch of other people who care about what we’re doing and escape from my life for a while. Running a good game leaves me with a feeling of satisfaction and calm exhaustion that make me want to rest up so I can prepare to do it again the following week.  Playing a good game is exhilarating, whether I succeed or fail, because I got to do things I normally wouldn’t and think about things in new ways until I eventually return to myself, ready to coast through the rest of the day on the relaxed feeling I get from not being me for a while.

When you run a game, there are a million little things you’re doing to make it work out. Keeping track of the larger plot arcs as time passes, maintaining a world for the players, playing the part of any number of NPCs the players encounter, designing challenges for your players so they don’t get complacent or bored, telling a story so everyone can participate, and so much more. For every hour of game I run, I do a minimum of one and a half that many hours. Generally, it winds up somewhere in the two-to-four range. For instance, this week’s sessions was mostly travel, a chance to resupply, and a couple random encounters that wound up giving me an idea for an interrupt to the main goal the players are pursuing that also lets me bring in the requirements for a player’s prestige class. In order to get all that ready, I spent all of Sunday afternoon preparing a single item of legacy, adjusting the encounters to fit a party with tons of martial damage but almost no magical support, and digitizing some notes for the players to reference about their character. Throw in the time over the week leading up to that when I fleshed out the interrupt quest(s) and a couple of hours Friday night writing out my notes so I could see how they fit into the campaign plan. All of that adds up to about ten hours of work for four hours of play.

However, I now feel an immense sense of satisfaction that the players are moving along on their quest, that they feel like I’ve reminded them of the dangers of complacency and that they know there’s not just a goal, but actually feel tension because outside forces are quite capably working against them. It felt good to see my plans play out as I intended, to see my player get excited when I let him know we’d be able to get his prestige class stuff worked in soon, and how they all had to play their characters out in a situation that challenged their characters’ normal modes of addressing problems. I wanted to shake them out of their grooves without shaking up the story and I managed to pull it off, so now I’m excited to see what happens as a result of this.

As a player, I can ignore everything but the needs of the body as I place myself in the situation of my character. All of my knowledge except what my character knows and what might be applicable to the situation fades away. Sometimes the buzzing of my phone or my inability to remember the exact terms of an ability require me to break my focus, but those are quickly set aside so I can return to the game. Decisions are make, abilities are used, skill checks are made, and the story unfolds as I walk through halls and dungeons that exist in the murky, semi-transparent realm of my imagination. As a story-teller myself, my mind fills in all the little details as my character moves through their environment and I do my best to play by the rules of the game without breaking the illusory world I’ve created in my head.

Some GMs are better than others at letting this play out and some characters are better for it than others. If my character’s focus is on their own well-being, it is easy. If I need to focus on other characters because I need to protect them, it is more difficult. I don’t like filling in the gaps on other people’s characters and few people describe their character in great enough detail to create an image. A bunch of the people who don’t describe their will, instead, wind up drawing them, and that is better in some respects, but so solid an image can make it stand out from the murkier world I’m creating. Any character who takes the fore or who moves on their own is my preference. Sometimes, though, a character is so different it is hard to really get into their mind, so all of my effort gets focused on playing them correctly (or what I think of as correctly) that I don’t get quite as invested into the game as I would like.

Personally, I’d prefer to have both playing and running happen in the same week so I can get both the escape and the satisfaction, but I only have one group I play in with any regularity, and that game is a bit harder to get invested in for a few reasons that mostly revolve around totally valid stylistic choices by the DM and the fact that I don’t know any of the other players or the DM very well. I know one of them a bit better, and she’s the person who invited me, but everyone else is still basically a stranger. Running happens most weeks, but not every week because of the time and energy commitment involved. If I’m feeling worn out because of work or my mental health, I’m not really in a place where I can run a game and I’ve learned better than to try anyway.

In an ideal world, I’d have one night of fully-immersed play and one night of extremely satisfying running. In this world, I can generally manage one night of play and one or two nights of running, so that’s still pretty great, if more exhausting that I anticipated before agreeing to everything. Still, the benefits are worth the costs.

Tabletop Highlight: How to Waste Your Time and Destroy Your Relationships

Chris Leave a comment

Are you tired of your peaceful and content existence? Do you have valuable relationships you wish to destroy via petty arguments and baseless accusations? Do you feel like you have too much time on your hands and not enough to spend it on? Do you find yourself desiring to feel either the same penniless destitution my generation finds so common or the baron-ish wealth of the landed gentry from a time before anyone but a blooded noble was considered fully human? If you answered “Yes” to any or all of these questions, then I have the solution for you, you potentially masochistic misanthrope.

The solution to your lack of actual problems is clear, stranger. Simply go to the nearest book or game store and purchase yourself a copy of Monopoly! If you can convince your treasured friends and family to play it with you, they will not be treasured by the time your game is through. If you’d prefer to draw out this revolting and evil alienation you so desire, you need not worry. Depending on how many people you have convinced to join you in hell, it may take several days for them to realize their burning hatred of everything about you from your smug grin to their mental concept of you as a thinking, feeling individual. A single game of Monopoly, if played correctly by a competent bunch of adults, can take in excess of three hours, and it is only that short when one or more players is excessively more skilled at deception, betrayal, and debauchery than the others.

Despite the seemingly innocuous nature of this chunk of cardboard, the game of Monopoly is actually a clever device that was created by distilling all of the worst things in the universe, such as war, hunger, income inequality, the housing market, police brutality, the abuse of power by elected officials, the stock market, and anyone who walks around in a top hat and a cane as a part of their usual outfit without being able to understand that they look like a bit of a jerk. After that, a few other awful concepts were thrown in for flavor (capitalism, gambling, and vanity), and now any child can cry themselves to sleep at night as they listen to their parents arguing over whether the banker has been skimming off the top or not. Both adults know the banker has had their hand in the cookie jar, but one of them has no proof and the other is the banker who will refuse to admit it because they have gone from the sweetest, most honest person in existence to a horrendous and unrepentant liar in a matter of hours.

Wars have been fought over money and land in the past, and this game now allows you to bring the horrors of war to your family and home. You may go the entire game without seeing a bloody corpse, but that’s only because verbal eviscerations and emotional destruction don’t leave corpses, merely the hallowed-out husks of once-vibrant people. Argue with the people closest to you with such reckless abandon that problems from the very beginnings of your relationships will resurface and raise the stakes at the start of every turn, from who wins a simple game meant to emulate land-ownership by the incredibly wealthy into a competition to determine who has the moral high ground. Such vile hatred shall be spewed that you will find yourself dwelling on both what you heard and what you said for at least several days afterward. If you cannot shake it off and make yourself believe that it was simply a game and not a nuclear missile shot straight at all of your relationships, then such feelings will consume you until there is nothing left of who you once where or you have gotten extensive therapy.

Despite the giddy anticipation I can sense you feeling as you contemplate this mental and emotional self-destruction, I must urge you to reconsider. You may revel is such depravity, but please keep in mind that innocent lives hang in the balance. Sweeter souls than yours can be destroyed by Monopoly, if only be being caught up in the wake of destruction that follows this foul pastime. Spare yourself and these poor beings the wrath of capitalism pretending to be a family-friend game. Pick up Settlers of Catan instead.

Tabletop Highlight: Shout-Out to All the Games I Can Carry in My Pocket

Chris Leave a comment

From a deck of playing cards to small sack full of stone tiles, I love games I can stick in my pocket or in the side pouch of my bag. I’m a big fan of being prepared and how can you call your Bastion of Nerdiness (built at a time when I was the only nerdy person where I worked and maintained because it felt really nice to have all that stuff with me at all times) fully prepared if you don’t have a game or games you can play with one or more additional people? Sure, you’ve got a first aid kit, clothing/cosplay repair kit, energy bars, and a basic survival kit, but no games to play? What kind of amateur preparation are you trying to do?

One of the reasons I was so excited to buy Tak through the Kickstarter was because one of the options was a travel pouch and a clothe board for the game. The whole idea was to create a version of the game people could carry around with them. Entire sets were built around the idea of being able to travel to a location and find someone else with a traveling set to play against. In the book world the game is from, it is apparently a common practice to make or purchase your own Tak set to bring to taverns in case you want to get in a quick game while you’re having your drinks. The pieces are so simple, even, that you could probably spend fifteen minutes walking around outside and find enough material to play a quick game with someone. I value my really nice pieces, the wonderful stone set I purchased as an add-on and the sleek, beautiful wooden sets I originally pledged for, but I enjoy the fact that knowledge of the rules is all I need to play a game because I can imagine a board and play using wood chips and flattish stones. I still travel everywhere with my full stone set, though. They’ll hold up better in my bag that the wooden pieces.

I also like to keep two decks of cards in my bag. It used to be three, but I almost never play Magic the Gathering’s standard, 60-card style anymore. I keep my Commander deck (99 unique cards plus a single legendary creature card whose colors dictate what colors I can used in my deck”) plus all the dice I need for a game (a lot, thanks to several counter-dependent plays) in my bag, along with a deck of normal playing cards. The Magic the Gathering cards are mostly for use with my friends since I don’t generally play much and usually only play because they wan to. I’d use one of their decks, but I prefer having my own to tinker with when the mood strikes me. The regular playing cards are great for everything from a friendly game of poker over lunch to a game of solitaire when I’m bored and trying to stay away from phone games that appeal to my addictive nature. There are so many games you can play with playing cards that they can be an almost ceaseless fount of entertainment. As long as you enjoy card games and the basic amount of psychology that goes with playing cards against other people.

Another game I’m going to soon add to my bag is Bananagrams. My girlfriend is a huge fan of the game and I’ve got to say that it is growing on me. It is a lot more fun to play when at least three people are playing, but you really only need two people. You also really need to love words because the whole point of the game is to use all of your letter tiles (like scrabble tiles, but without point values) to create words. If you run out of tiles, you say “peel” and everyone has to take a new tile from the pile in the center. Once all of the tiles who have been used, the person who says “peel” when there aren’t enough tiles for everyone to take one wins the game. It is a very simple game and dependent on your knowledge of spelling and how many words you know. Possibly the best part is that there generally isn’t a clear winner until the end because it is possible that you saying “peel” is going to give one of your opponents the letter they need to win the game while you struggle to figure out what to do with the “x” you just picked.

My life has improved since I started carrying games on me all the time, beyond just the general feeling of confidence that comes from seeing myself as prepared for whatever comes my way. For instance, I like to keep to myself most of the time, not because I actually dislike people, but because I’m so often unsure of what to say or how to act. Keeping games on me allows me to create a framework for longer social interactions and makes it easier to get comfortable enough with people to not feel so anxious about saying or doing the wrong thing. Anything I can do to lessen my anxiety has a positive impact on my life, even if this comes at the cost of adding a few extra pounds to an already heavy bag. My mental health thanks me but my physical health is a still waiting to see how all this plays out over the next few years before it comments.

Got any small games I should check out? I’d love to hear about them!

Tabletop Highlight: Setting the Mood for Your Tabletop RPG

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An important part of every tabletop RPG session is creating the right mood and atmosphere. No matter the style of game, no matter what game, the atmosphere can make or break it. There are many ways of setting the mood, using everything from music, pictures, spoken word, play location, to tactile objects to represent characters (minis) or even three-dimensional environments for the miniatures.

The easiest way to set the mood and create atmosphere is to use miniatures for the players and enemies and to use what most people call “terrain.” Miniatures can be anything from little Lego people with customize outfits and items to carefully molded pewter statues with carefully molded armor and weaponry, all of which is painstakingly painted to match the player’s idea of the character. A lot of the time, the most common type of miniatures is any object that is small enough or a “close enough” plastic miniature of the kind that is readily available at any gaming shop. Terrain follows similar rules. It can be painstakingly created and highly detailed or super simple. The most common form, used for almost every grid-based RPG I’ve ever played, is a wet-erase or dry-erase mat marked out with a grid of squares, one inch long on each side. Both of things, terrain and miniatures, can create a great deal of atmosphere very easily. Even the least immersive players can get absorbed into the game with the right terrain and miniatures. The downside is that doing this stuff that well takes a huge amount of time or money. Stand-ins and a playmat is the most cost-effective way of doing it, but it doesn’t do much more than let the players see the shape of the world and where their character stands in relation to their allies and enemies.

If you had players who are willing to make more of an investment in each session, music can work amazingly. Music can directly appeal to people’s emotions, so you can help make your players feel the tension of harsh negotiations or the relief of finally reaching their destination by carefully selecting your playlist. Video game music makes an excellent background to battles and there are numerous YouTube videos full of nothing but the sounds of a city to make your players feel like they’re really in a bustling metropolis. Other sound effects, if you’re feeling really ambitious, can add an entire additional layer. The sound of horses, the blast of fireballs, the din of battle, even the moans of the dying or damned. It takes a lot of work to have everything up and in a form you can use without breaking the moment you’re trying to enhance, but it is still a lot easier than creating exact miniatures and terrain for your sessions.

Another great way to help set the right atmosphere for your players is to use pictures. There are a lot of resources available online, so you can find a picture of almost anything if you aren’t feeling up to creating custom images. Pictures of dark dungeons, great manors, the various enemies they’ll fight, and even weapons they find. If you’ve got artists amongst your players, you can encourage them to create pictures of their own characters (and maybe their allies as well) that they can keep up-to-date instead of a miniature. While not terribly immersive unless you’ve got a picture for everything that the players can always look at (which is a lot easier to do for online sessions or if you’ve got a big TV near where you play), it can really help the players fix the world in their minds more completely. Plus, you never know what good can come from encouraging the creation and usage of art. In one of my first big campaigns, a player was constantly drawing during each session and his humorous pictures and the renderings of some of the scenes he wanted to preserve added a lot of fun to the games for the other players.

My preferred method requires a great deal of participation from the players. Since I don’t always have the time to prepare pictures and playlists, I rely mostly on spoken words and descriptions in addition to simple miniatures and a playmat. Spoken words and descriptions take a lot more work and skill from the DM during the session, which can steal their focus from other things like tracking enemies, improvising numbers for their game, or even accidentally reveal something that was supposed to be a secret. To counter this, when I describe the atmosphere and give details on where the players are located, I also change my level of detail based on their level of observation and awareness. I also vary the level of detail at somewhat random, beyond the basics, so my players never know if I’m describing something more because its important or because I’ve picked this situation as my “slightly more description” moment. It requires very firm mental images on my part, which means I have to be pretty prepared for each session, but not in as detail-oriented a manner as I would need for music, pictures, or terrain. It can also be used to mess with my players by consistently giving greater-than-average detail on something insignificant.

There are definitely more ways to help set the mood for your session, but the above are the ones most commonly used. Not many people are willing or able to relocate their entire game and related materials to a remote location like a cave or the food court of a mall, so I’ve only ever heard of it happening once. To a friend of a friend of a friend. The furthest I’ve ever gone is to move the game into the basement or outside, but that’s mostly for non-game reasons like wanting to dampen our noise or wanting to enjoy the sunshine and cool breeze on a gorgeous day. While the amount of detail you want to put in will likely change from group to group and campaign to campaign, you’ll eventually find your comfort zone and generally stick to that level. Whatever you do, though, just make sure you don’t get lazy.

Tabletop Highlight: The Action Economy in D&D

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One the things I’ve noticed as I play more and more 5th edition D&D is that the changes to the action economy have a huge impact on the way the combat encounters play out. I can’t help comparing it to the 3.5 edition campaigns I run and play in. Overall, they’re very similar, sharing the same major points. Beyond that, the similarities start to break apart and each version tends toward the overall design patterns of each system. 5th edition tends toward simpler types of actions and broader classification while 3.5 tends toward greater variety but a rather extreme degree of complication required to access that greater variety.

In 5th edition, there are four types of actions a player can take in a single round (the time it takes for all characters and monsters in an encounter to take their individual turns): A “movement,” an “action,” a “bonus action,” and a “reaction.” There are also “free actions” but those are given at the DM’s discretion and can be used for saying something brief or certain skill checks depending on the DM’s decisions. A “movement” is exactly what it sounds like, plus a few other things. Your character can move up to their maximum per-term distance or do some sort of movement based action like standing up, climbing, jumping, or dropping to the ground. An “action” is a very broad classification encompassing everything from attacking other people to casting spells to interacting with other people or the environment. A “bonus action” can only be used as a result of a power granted to your character by their class or by a magic item. This can be any other classification of action, but only a specific action per power. For instance, a rogue gets a bonus action that lets them run away from enemies during combat or hide themselves after attacking. The last type of action is a “reaction” and that is a very specific subset actions that can be granted by your class or are one of a small set available to all characters: counterattacks as enemies pass you, cast certain spells, or use an action you prepared.

During the early levels of a 5e game, most characters use only movements and actions, occasionally dipping into reactions. At higher levels, most characters have a variety of bonus actions to pick from and sometimes ever class abilities or spells that give them additional actions. This keeps combat encounters moving relatively quickly for early levels but can bog down combat a bit at later levels. An added complication at later levels is the introduction of “legendary actions.” These are actions available to a certain class of powerful monster, typically used as boss monsters, that give them additional actions they can take when it isn’t their turn. This can help offset the ability for a group of high-level characters to gang up on a single monster and destroying it before it can do anything because they have so many actions they can collectively take each round.  That way a legendary monster is attacking the characters just as many times as they are attacking it.

In 3.5, there are a greater variety of actions. There are “full-round actions,” “free actions” (that function the same as the 5e classification of the same name), “standard actions,” “move actions,” “swift actions,” “immediate actions,” and the dubious titled “no action.” “Move actions” and “standard actions” are basically the same as 5th edition’s “movement” and “action” classifications. A “swift action” is similar to a reaction, but on your turn. It is used for certain types of spells or activating certain magic items. An “immediate action” is a specific subset of “swift actions” that can be used at any time, even when it isn’t your turn. The “no action” is used for minor shifts of footing (like turning in the space you already occupy) or for delaying your entire turn until a different time. The “full-round action” is a type of action that uses all of your other actions at once to do something big like cast a difficult spell or perform a few attacks at once.

From almost the very first levels of 3.5, characters have access to things that use all of their action types. While the number of things they can do with these actions is limited, a clever player can find a way to put them all to use. As the players level up, the opportunities provided by all of these actions only increases. The only thing preventing individual turns at later levels from lasting forever is how difficult it can be to parse through the actions available to a character and which actions are used by what abilities. The rules are often open to interpretation or buried deep in a seemingly unrelated section. The balance is that since most people can’t figure out how to exploit the action variety in 3.5, it usually never becomes a problem. While certain monsters can make use the variety of actions available, most cannot. Without legendary actions, most big, solo monsters are at even more of a risk than their 5e counterparts because they only get to attack once their turn and can be quickly killed before they have a chance to attack plenty of people. 3.5 counters this somewhat by giving solo monsters abilities to damage lots of people or have a chance to take people out of the fight temporarily.

As a DM, I prefer the simpler 5e action economy. Each action is its own thing and cannot be turned into a different action type. In 3.5, there is an action hierarchy and bigger actions can be used to get an extra action of a smaller type. A standard action can become any other kind of action, while a move action can become a swift action or immediate action. This means that a lot of tracking needs to happen so I can make sure my players aren’t abusing the system by taking multiple swift actions when they shouldn’t be able to do so. The action economy gets incredibly complicated once people start trading actions around or using abilities to change things so that something that’s usually a standard action now happens twice as a swift action.

The longer I play 5th edition, the more I consider swapping to use only that system. I’d miss the variety and options I have in 3.5, but it would make my individual sessions much easier to run. I’ll probably never leave 3.5 because I want to tell a good story more than anything, but I can dream.

Tabletop Highlight: The Importance Of Fudging Things

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The most important skill I ever learned as a Dungeon Master was how to Fudge It™. I cannot overstate the value of this skill. It has saved numerous sessions, countless player lives, and kept friendships alive that might otherwise have been destroyed by the capricious nature of small plastic random number generators. Yes, I am being somewhat over-dramatic. No, it is not nearly as over-dramatic as you probably thing. I’m a bit of an oddity when it comes to RNG using dice since I tend more towards extremes than is statistically likely (based on a log book of rolls I kept for two years of daily rolls for science purposes combined with weekly rolls for D&D purposes using a variety of dice and rolling surfaces).

Given that each roll of the standard RNG polyhedral (a d20) is always a one-in-twenty chance of any given number without any relation to the rolls previous, this is hardly conclusive evidence. Nevertheless, I soon discovered that I either needed to make every roll to even the odds, or I needed to learn to fudge the numbers as they came so my players wouldn’t accidentally get killed as a result of some nameless mook rolling three natural twenties (a phrase describing when a twenty-sided die ends its roll with the twenty facing up) in a row. In most D&D campaigns, repeated natural twenties means some kind of incredible success for the character that rolled it. In combat situations, it usually means automatic death for the target of the attack.

Fudging It™ has more applications than simply correcting errant probability. If my players throw me a curve ball during a session and I need to correct on the fly, you can safely bet I’ll be making it up as I go along. A lot of my favorite parts of the campaigns I’m running are a result of my decision to abandon the rules and just wing it as I go. I literally built an entire campaign around the idea of deviating from the rules everywhere I can without undermining player ability and just making the funniest things I can think of happen in any given situation. At the Orchestra and surrounded by the upper class? Well, get ready for a bunch of Phantom of the Opera style vampires to attack and the only tuba player left in existence (BLORNTH THE TUBA PLAYER was the only tuba player to survive the tragic battle of the bands) to use his magically enchanted tuba to batter vampires to death before eventually spewing a gout of fire out of the end to rival that of any dragon.

I remember the first campaign I ran and how hard it was on the players to deal with my weird probability. I wasn’t very good at fudging things back then, so the healer accidentally died, the archer fell off a cliff (and then teleported over the bard in an attempt to save himself only to nearly kill the bard instead) to his death, and the bard accidentally killed a zombie so hard he killed himself as well. I learned a lot running that campaign and have improved as a storyteller so that I can Fudge It™ at a moment’s notice.

Now, in order to properly Fudge It™, there’s a process involved. The exact steps vary from person to person and situation to situation, but it usually involves some kind of disbelieving chuckle on the DM’s part at the sheer absurdity of the moment followed by some silent bargaining with the dice gods. After that, solutions are proposed and discarded in rapid succession until the DM settles on an acceptable outcome that either allows the players to continue without knowing something was amiss or allows them their choice of fates. Not all DMs choose to Fudge It™ and that is their right. Sometimes, in a harsher setting, it even makes sense to be as brutal as possible, though it might be better to Fudge It™ and make things slightly more brutal.

That’s the important thing to know, I suppose. Fudging It™ isn’t just for fixing problems. It also works great as a way to create problems or bump up the difficulty of an encounter if the players aren’t having any trouble with it. It is incredibly versatile and I recommend picking up the skill.