Tabletop Gaming

Tabletop Highlight: Weapons of Legacy

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I love world creation. I like making up complex worlds with a lot going on and creating a sense of history for the world. I want to make it feel like it stretches beyond the story being told now and, if things go well, that it will continue one for ages to come. That can always be a tricky prospect in any story-telling format, but it can be especially tricky in D&D because no one cares about the past unless you find ways to tie what is going on now to the past. The same can be said of books, but generally the characters in a book are more easily maneuvered into seeing the importance of the past than people playing characters in a D&D campaign.

While there are an endless number of details you can use to draw attention to your campaign’s history and what went on before the characters showed up, not every player is going to be willing to let their attention be drawn. Even then, a lot of the historic information feels like it has been created just to add motivation or information to a present situation, so the depth is lost. My favorite way to add some depth beyond constant references to things that happened long ago and ancient ruins that weigh down their halls with history is a mechanic that D&D 3.5 called Weapons of Legacy. It even has its own book by the same name.

The idea is that certain weapons (or armor, shields, or general items) had so much magic and power invested in them by someone that they started taking on a life of their own. They became these immensely powerful things that show up throughout history, in the hands of different owners who just add to the thing’s legacy. There are a whole bunch of pre-made items in the book and each one has stories about how the legacy item came to bear its current legacy, what has been done with it since then, and where it might be waiting for a new bearer. It even has rules for making custom weapons of legacy, either for enterprising DMs who want to add depth to their world or for players who want to create their own legacies as their characters grow in power.

I enjoy creating legacies as characters grow because it can be really fun for their legacy item to suddenly manifest powers when they’re in a tight corner. It adds a lot of flavor to the characters as they grow and can help them find direction for their growth when players are otherwise struggling to figure out what is next for their character beyond the continued adventure. I prefer to make them myself, perhaps a little tailored to fit my players, so they’re forced to do some research and learn about the past. I like to tie them to plots going on so players become invested in resolving the plots and ensuring that everything eventually gets resolved rather than forgotten about.

The part I enjoy the least is the number of feats and penalties involved in a weapon of legacy. Sure, they’re often WAY more powerful than any other single item in 3.5, but I feel like the penalties take away from the fun and power the players are supposed to feel as a result of the legacy. I don’t mind if my players wind up a little over-powered because it makes them feel like they’re powerful enough to change history. That is, of course, until I throw a dragon turtle at them that nearly takes out the entire party and would have if the entire party besides the Bard weren’t strikers who can deal high damage to single targets. True story.

Honestly, the flavor parts of the legacy items are my favorite parts. I like coming up with the origins and history of the item, in addition to what the Weapons of Legacy book calls the “omen,” or the thing that hints that this isn’t just an ordinary weapon. Combining that with the Individual Magic Effects from the Goblins webcomic makes for some REALLY fun effects when a character picks up and uses a legacy item. They’re all-around fun for me to make and add to my campaign, my players love the power and history they add, and cool stuff (like a dagger made from the largest piece of a shattered Reaper’s scythe) is cool.

Tabletop Highlight: How to Please the Dice Gods and Other Useful Rituals

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As one of the many humble priests of the dice gods, I often field questions from supplicants, believers and non-believers alike, about how best to get on their good side. The first lesson you must learn is that the gods are fickle and the only way to truly get what you desire is to avoid their influence entirely. However, your companions who rely on the whims of the dice gods and any pastimes that depend on their influence may decry you for such heresy. Eventually, the gods will have their due and any heretical successes will only contribute to the eventual retribution against you when you finally re-enter the realm of the dice gods.

First, you must always take proper care of your icons and totems. Do not lose them, or else the gods may be angered by the lack of care you show their representatives. Keep them clean using proper sanitation techniques and do not lend them to individuals who practice poor personal cleanliness. If you lose part of a matched set, be aware that you can replace individual pieces without needing to replace the entire set. However, you must monitor the set to ensure that they properly bond as it is possible for the remnants of a matched set to reject all new pieces. You can increase the adoption rate by ensuring the new pieces are a visual match for the set.

Second, regularly handle and use all of your icons and totems. If a set goes a long time without use, the dice gods may come to look upon it with disfavor. A good practice is to include a single use as a part of icon and totem selection for each ritual or service. If the gods decide to bless a certain set, they will make their good will known through this initial usage. Such signs should be trusted without question and not second-guessed if find yourself not getting favorable results from the dice gods. They are merely testing your faith and perseverance will be rewarded eventually.

Thirdly, do not dispose of any icons or totems until they no longer represent the gods. Any disfiguring action, such as melting, shattering, or defacing with the intent to retire will be respected by the gods and you will incur no penalties or disfavor for tossing aside one of their representatives in the mortal world. Carelessly tossing aside an icon or totem can incur the gods’ wrath and all will come to recognize you as one so rejected and cursed by the gods for their disfavor will be written clearly upon any other icons of totems you use.

If you do not use physical icons or totems, instead relying on the electronic ones provided behind the scenes of your computerized rituals or services, you need not fear the gods’ wrath for carelessness relating to the icons and totems. The care for these totems and icons rests upon the shoulders of whoever generated the computerized rituals and services. Bear in mind that their care and maintenance can still impact the outcomes provided to you by the gods. Therefore, it is in your best interest to let the creators of computerized rituals and services know if you find a way to remove them from the realm of the dice gods. Their curses fall upon your head as well.

If you are currently under a curse by the gods or RNGesus refuses to hear your supplication, there are a number of rituals or penances you can perform in order to find your way back into their good graces. The easiest is to simply obtain a new set of icons or totems. It is possible that, seeing your purse support their church, the gods will grant you clemency. You may also speak with whoever leads your rituals or services in order to take a penance upon yourself, further worsening the results of the gods’ will so that you can show your contrite spirit. If all else fails, the wailing and gnashing of teeth accompanied by continued supplication of the gods during participation in their rituals and services will eventually bring you back to rest in their benevolence.

While I hope this guide was instructive, know that there is no one correct way to worship the dice gods. Consult with your local priests and ritual leaders to find what works best for you and in your particular case. Do not forget that the results of rituals and services, while not directly related to day-to-day life, are a good indication of what you can expect from the dice gods and their pantheon-mates in more ordinary situations. May the dice gods bless you and may you o in peace, all the rest of your days.

Tabletop Highlight: Working with Your Players in D&D

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I know I write about D&D a lot. I have a lot to say about it. Aside from general things like “video games” or “books,” I don’t think I’ve spent more of my leisure time on anything other than this campaign I’m running. I’m constantly running over details, thinking about what I think should come next, and trying to figure out what my players are going to want to see next. After the travesty that was the collapse of my first D&D campaign, way back in college (fun fact: it fell apart almost exactly 6 years ago), I take my players’ input, ideas, and desires much more seriously.

I did a good job, back then, of listening to what my players wanted and there were a lot more factors involved in the collapse of the campaign other than my DMing, but I know it certainly didn’t help things. Now, I listen, implement, and predict. I play mostly with people I know fairly well and I generally don’t get into “serious” story stuff until I know what everyone wants well enough to produce a story they want to star in. Before then, I keep it super generic, roll with whatever they respond well to, and do whatever I can to help them figure out where their characters are going.

My best example is a story I’ve referenced a few times now. How the Half-Elf (previously Halfling (previously Rilkan)) lost his body and why Raise Dead wouldn’t work on his Halfling corpse.

The campaign started simply. The players all made level 1 characters using my slightly-modified 3.5 rules and they were all acting as guards for a colony. Typical first-level stuff since this world sends colonies of mixed race out into the wilderness in order to expand the territory held by the federation and sent a large quantity of guards along because colonies had a bad habit of disappearing or falling to wilderness creatures. In exchange, the guards were given parcels of land, money to start a business in a new economy that was backed by the government, and any treasure they accumulated over the course of their duties.

They colony ran into the usual wilderness problems like kobolds, corpse-eating dogs, and zombies. It quickly became apparent that some force wanted the colony gone, so they players set out to discover what that force was. After a few horrible accidents that resulted in the death of a temporary character and the arrival of a permanent character for a new player, they settled in to figuring things out and protecting their colony.

I don’t know if you’ve ever played first level characters with new-ish players, but they often wind up changing their minds about the direction they want their characters to go in. Rather than scraping the character and making a new one, I usually let them make a few adjustments during the first half-dozen sessions. This time, the players got all the way through their first few levels before the Paladin and the Rogue told me they wanted to change-up their characters.

At this point, I had the basics of a story percolating and I instantly had an idea of how to work in their proposed changes AND give them a plot hook none of them would ever want to ignore. So the Rilkan’s subplot became a major plot and the necklace he inherited started becoming a bigger problem than he anticipated. Suffice it to say that, several failed Will Saves later, the demon inhabiting the necklace convinced him to free her of the last abjurations holding her in place and she then used her powers to displace his soul in his body.

After that, she trapped his soul, stunned the whole party (except the Paladin), and gave them to the rather old Black Dragon they were trying to trick. Bargains were struck, the Paladin learned that he couldn’t solo a Black Dragon, and the Black Dragon got to save on shackles because the Paladin had one fewer hands.

Eventually, they were rescued by the demon’s holy opposite. A “minor” deity saw their plight and a few other things that the players might not know about. Being concerned with Justice, he offered them assistance so long as they swore to do as he commanded–hunt down the escape demon and contain or destroy her. Needless to say, the party immediately agreed. Even the Rogue’s soul agreed. In exchange, they all got a measure of the deity’s power to bust them out of prison, the paladin got a divine-magic replacement arm that let him bypass some of the requires for a good prestige class, and the Rogue got stuck in the body of a recently-deceased Halfling that had similar, but slightly different training.

All-in-all, the party got exactly what they wanted, I got a plot hook to carry them along, and the Rogue’s player got to deal with the fact that a Raise Dead spell wouldn’t fix him because it’d call the body’s original soul back. Reincarnate was the only way to bring him back to life that time. Now, though, the new body is his and Raise Dead will work again. Only, it is a Half-Elf and they kinda suck in 3.5, unless you’re specifically picking it for character reasons.

I like to work with my players when I can. The rules are plain enough that adjusting or tweaking things is fine with me, so long as my players are doing it because it helps them create the story they want to tell. If all they want is bigger numbers well… Those are fun, but their place is in a different campaign. I am even adapting a fun prestige class for one of my players because it is super awesome for his character’s arc AND it plays into the story I’m telling so while I might as well have scripted it. A lot of the time, the players are your partners in telling the story, so hearing them out can’t go wrong. They’re just as invested as you are, especially if they’ve been your players for two years, now.

Tabletop Highlight: First Reactions to Fifth Edition

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Over the weekend, I took my first deep dive into D&D Fifth Edition. I’ve made characters and even briefly played it before, but this was the first time I actually explored characters rather than rushing through the process. Carefully considered each class and, after looking at what I had to work with, settled on playing a Sorcerer. The first D&D character I ever played and the most fun D&D character I ever played were both sorcerers, so the class is near and dear to my heart.

My initial impression was that the system is complex, strange, and makes very little sense. Over time, though, that shifted. The more time I spent with it, the easier the system seemed. So many of the 3.5 rules I know by heart and so many of the choices I’d made in a 3.5 campaign just aren’t options. Feats are entirely optional, ability scores cannot be increased over 20 via natural level progression, and everything in the system feels a lot more balanced. My past remarks about the 5th edition being more like addition than 3.5’s multiplication still stands, but that means that all of the classes still wind up in more or less the same neighborhood.

The biggest revelation I had while exploring the system more fully was the way it lends itself toward role-playing. 3.5 can be entirely numbers with no role-playing unless the players and DM are specifically making room for it. 5th edition doesn’t necessitate role-playing, but it does make it a much more regimented part of the character creation process. There’s room on the standard character sheet for flavor text about who your character is, the backgrounds provide a basis for less experienced players, and even the class features help you figure out who your character is based on what specializations you pick.

The hardest thing for me to learn is the new rules around combat and actions. I’m used to poison results being specific to the poison used and much more complicated skills that play off of each other and are full of conditional modifiers. The simplified “advantage, neutral, or disadvantage” system takes all of the conditional stuff and wraps it up in one neat little package. I can see combat and skill encounters are going to be much easier for new players to handle since the math isn’t as potentially complicated. I’m going to miss my ridiculous bonuses and OP bullshit that I can pull when I’m feeling petulant in 3.5, but I can see myself running a lot of 5th edition games because it’ll be so much simpler. Instead of spending time looking up rules players are asking about, I can focus on storytelling, good encounters, and keeping the game moving along. I’m really looking forward to how the pacing changes between the two systems.

That being said, I think I’m going to stick to 3.5 for my big story campaigns. 5th edition is still relatively new and I can’t find as many resources for it as I can find for 3.5, so it would be a lot harder to make up some of the stuff I have for 3.5.  5th edition’s power scales are too linear to be able to just fudge a few numbers and make it work, even at mid to high levels.

This past weekend, I stuck to mostly first level things for my sorcerer (and a rogue as a backup character for when my aggressive, “think’s he’s a tank,” sorcerer gets smeared on a dungeon floor). Next weekend, if I’ve got the time, I’m going to look into future levels, magic items, and how all the rules have changed so I can start planning out a campaign to run in 5th edition. I’ve got a lot of friends who want to play now and 5th edition seems like it would lend itself well to online play, so I might actually be able to help my friends who don’t have anyone to play with in their areas, finally. That’d be great. I like running big games full of organized chaos and laughter. Even if I can’t see everyone’s face, I think this would be a lot of fun to do.

Tabletop Highlight: Don’t Split The Party

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“Don’t split the party” is probably one of the most common lines throughout all D&D games. There is a built-in fear, for almost every (even moderately) experienced player, that splitting up will lead to certain doom for the party or members of the party. The idea of strength as a group holds true in common media depictions. Everyone dreads the moment in a horror movie when the future victims split up for whatever reason. Even in Scooby-Doo, nothing good happens when the gang splits up to search for clues. It is almost always the precursor to them getting chased around the mansion/factory/cave/woods by the monster they’re trying to investigate. The idea is also expressed in more real terms via phrases such as “divide and conquer” and pretty much any time someone conquered a bunch of Europe. However, history is also full of examples of when splitting up was a great idea. Guerrilla warfare has used successfully on numerous occasions. Breaking empires down into smaller administrative chunks for management is always a great idea until the person who built the empire dies, at which point the whole thing falls apart–providing a wonderful example of both sides of the idea.

In D&D, there are plenty of reasons to stick together as a group. Given that most parties have a diverse set of skills, it makes survival much easier since someone with decent perception skills is going to be able to spot the monster sneaking up on the party’s camp and someone else will be the one to go confront it. Generally speaking, the same person spotting the problem isn’t the same person solving it. At the same time, having multiple people able to attempt something like that perception skill check makes it more likely that at least one person will pass and only one person needs to pass in order for the group to know. Unless the person who passes is trying to get the party killed or keep something for themselves. There’s not much you can do about that degree of undermining, though. Most combat encounters and even the rules about combat encounters are geared toward groups. Flanking bonuses, assist actions, melee versus ranged combat, distractions, and mid-battle healing are all things that require a group to properly use.

However, when it comes to exploring, it is often a good idea for the party to split up. If there is scouting that needs to be done, it would be better to leave the tank behind. All that armor is only going to make too much noise. If there’s a door that needs to be held, the tank is great at that, and the rogue is better off finding another way around so they can hit the enemies from the back. If there is research to be done, perhaps the wizard or cleric should be left to their own devices while the rest of the party takes care of other business. Maybe there’s a maze and the party needs to figure out which way to go. If the routes are narrow, best to leave most of the party behind while one person scouts ahead. If there’s a combat encounter about to happen, maybe the rogue should sneak off to make sure the enemies aren’t going to receive any reinforcements.

There are a lot of times when splitting up makes a lot of sense for a D&D party, though they don’t always match up with the examples seen in the primary world. Guerrilla warfare utilizes strike forces and a D&D party is pretty much the epitome of a self-sufficient strike force, so there’s no need to break it down further. Additionally, few D&D parties ever actually form their own empire or conquer nations. There’s little need to delegate or decentralize your government if the most you’re governing is a base of some kind.

Party splits larger than the ones I outlined are a bit more difficult to manage in a D&D session, though. If half of the party decides to explore the underdark because they’re not good-aligned and want to figure out where their demon-adjacent target went, then you should probably come up with something for the paladin and super-good scout to do since they’re going to get instantly busted if they go to the underdark. I wound up running split sessions for a couple of weeks, and had to come up with some way to give everyone something important to do. Their decision to split the party helped give shape to the rest of the campaign because I needed something relevant for the above-ground party to handle. The more recent split I’m dealing with, the scout towing the rogue’s body back to the base of some druids for reincarnation and their subsequent slow trip back (a Halfling corpse is easier to carry than a half-elf person), will not be so easily managed. The other half of the party is currently camped right on top of a dungeon that is aware of their presence. They have captives from their previous forays into the dungeon. There’s at least one young-ish black dragon hanging around somewhere near them. All they have is a camp of NPC hirelings and a DMPC cleric they hired to Remove Curses and Raise Dead. Plus, the party-members waiting at the dungeon are the go-getters, so it isn’t like they’re just going to wait for the rogue and scout to get back.

Party splitting can be fun, but it can also make a LOT of extra work for the DM and slow down sessions to a crawl, since each sub-group doesn’t have access to the same information anymore. Splitting the players up is the easiest way to handle that, in my opinion. It just requires copious notes since it can be easy to mix up what everyone is doing and what each group knows. That’s usually why I try to reunite the party by the end of every session if I can. Makes my life so much easier and keeps things running smoothly.

Tabletop Highlight: Dungeons & Dragons Under The Sea.

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Underwater or otherwise water-centric (sailing) campaigns for D&D Are generally set up from the start as a campaign focused around the water or underneath it. Races will be adapted for wet environments, every actually puts skill ranks in the Swim skill, and everyone makes dexterity-based characters because no one wants to be the person in heavy armor who sinks and then drowns before they can get out of their armor. At this point, handling underwater combat, the drowning rules, and how movement works is fairly academic. It is just one more bit of math that needs to happen for the players to take their turns and determine their actions.

You generally do not see a lot of mixing water environments and non-water environments. It happens occasionally, as most land-based campaigns need to cross water at some point. Oceans, rivers, lakes, marshes, and underground lakes in dungeons are all fairly popular. At that point, the players are forced to scramble. If they have time to prepare, a typical Dungeons and Dragons part can figure out a way to get everyone across safely and have a few plans in place for accidents. If they’re just shown a bit of water they have to cross in a dungeon, they will still plan. Their resources are just somewhat more limited.

Unless the campaign established that water environments are going to be a big part of the campaign, most of the players probably won’t look up the rules for swimming. The rules are fairly straight-forward. The swimming skill check to move around in water is dependent on the type of water. Still water is very easy, while flowing water is harder, floods are harder still, and stormy oceans or rocky rapids in rivers are incredibly dangerous. When swimming underwater, there are a few more things to consider, such as how long the character can hold their breath, what can affect that (fighting something underwater makes them run out of breath more quickly), and then what happens once they run out of breath. The rules are pretty brutal, but so is water. If the water is still enough that the checks are easy, some good common-sense practices like having a plan for extra air (extra-dimensional storage spaces are often full of air) or knowing how far you have to go to get back to the surface are a must.

Unfortunately, those do not always happen. After a few sessions involving water, including a couple close-calls, on of my players finally had a character drown. The character was a Halfling, so his movement was barely worth mentioning underwater, even though I’ve house-ruled half-speed movement instead of the usual quarter, and though he had plenty of rounds for holding his breath, he spent a lot of them fighting something because he tried to be invisible underwater as a means of sneaking past the security octopus. Invisibility is mostly ineffective in water, since an invisible person still displaces water, and there’s very little other cover to provide a means of effectively stealthing your way up to an octopus for a sneak attack.

The rest of the party, of course, helped him kill the octopus, but the Halfling couldn’t make it back to the surface in time, failed his constitution checks to survive, and then died before anyone could get him to the surface since no one else was a very strong swimmer. Tragic, of course. The scout then set a land-speed record for getting his body back to the druids for reincarnation because that isn’t his original body and a standard Raise Dead spell wouldn’t exactly work the way they wanted. But that’s a story for another day.

Sticking aquatic environment adventures into my dungeons is always a tricky concept. I had two possible traps that involved water in the first dungeon my players encountered, but the plan for those dungeons was to radically shift the campaign if the party got trapped by them, since it would have swept them all away. I left them out for a while, because the party wouldn’t really have an answer for them and they’re difficult to deal with. Also, to be entirely fair, the number of monsters and creatures that’d maintain water features in dungeons instead of just living in underwater dungeons is rather small. There just isn’t much of a need for them in most low-mid to mid level adventures. There’s plenty of other ways to kill a party. At the same time, water can be a great equalizer. Unless they’re specifically prepared for it, a high-level party has no advantage over water that a low-level party wouldn’t have as well. Drowning can kill anyone, no matter their level.

If you want some good resources on water combat, D20SRD.org has some useful information and the SRD section of dandwiki.com contains a lot of important info as well. Otherwise, feel free to make it up when you need it. Just make sure to write it down so you’re consistent. As I said when the Halfling drowned, “Everyone has to follow the rules, even the DM.” Once you set a rule, stick to it.

Tabletop Highlight: Dungeon Building for D&D

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I’m not very good at building dungeons, though I should probably add that I’m also not bad. I’m alright. They take a long time, compared to preparing story elements, planning cities, and making up characters. It takes a whole lot of work to get a dungeon built, if you want it to feel customized and unique. Don’t get me wrong, it is probably the most fun I have as a DM, preparing for a session. It just takes a whole day of work or several evenings. Trap assignments, copying stats down, finding references, creating custom traps, designing passageways and rooms, filling the dungeon with residents, and then coming up with any puzzles. Treasure and stuff is usually an after-thought, since I usually just keep refreshing a random treasure generator until I find a hoard I like.

One of the easiest things for me is the entrance. Setting up a dungeon entrance depends on how the party is going to encounter it. Are they going to stumble across a random dungeon? Are they looking for it because they heard a rumor or were sent to find it? For the former, perception checks work great and all you need is some place that the party would reasonably go that not a lot of other people would. If you’ve ever played D&D, pretty much every party is constantly going places no one else would, so that’s easy. If they’re looking for it, that’s even simpler since they’ve got a general location and will be making skill checks until they succeed. After that, you just need some flavor about how they found it, what the door is, and then a hurdle for them to overcome before they can enter. Like spotting a secret door in what otherwise appears to be a simple hidden outpost that hasn’t been used in centuries or having the lookout notice that the sand dune they’re looking at isn’t shifting like the other ones.

After that, my struggles usually start. What traps are appropriate? How many are appropriate? I like undead dungeons, because you don’t really need to think about how dungeon creatures or NPCs would get around. Undead just stand around until they spot something to attack and even the intelligent ones don’t need food or air. My favorite dungeon was actually a tomb built to keep the undead inside it, and the party didn’t realize it until they’d set off or disabled all of the traps at the door to the boos room. More recent dungeons have involved intelligent creatures that need food and water and sometimes air, so I’ve had to be very careful with trap and puzzle placement. How is a gaggle of kobolds supposed to bypass a 30-foot pit trap without some way to go around? Also, how are the lizardfolk supposed to go through the puzzle-door unless they know the answer to the puzzle? Solving these problems would make it easy for the party to by-pass the actual traps and puzzles because they’ve got high perceptions and at least one of them isn’t afraid to do a little torturing if he wants some information.

There are, of course, other ways around this. Labyrinthine dungeons. They’re a pain in the ass to build and draw on a map, but they can be so incredibly rewarding. All of the creatures that live in the dungeon would know their way around and could find the easiest passageways, while the party is stuck trying to muddle their way through without running into another dead-end filled with the newly animated corpses of the last group to fall to the poisoned needle trap the party just set off. Once you’ve figured out the best way to build them (and start saving parts the party didn’t explore for future dungeons), the only real problem is drawing them out so the party has some kind of physical space to move through. Sure, there are any number of software programs that would allow this, but I prefer a more tactile experience when I can get it. Wet-erase markers, a play-mat, and one of my players as the map-maker since it makes more sense to have the players draw the map based on your descriptions rather than to do it yourself and try to guess on their sight-lines/spacial reasoning abilities.

As for filling a dungeon with creatures and NPCs… Well, that’s usually a bit easier since you’ve probably got a themed based on the location or the reason the party is there. Build a few encounters, stick them in the dungeon’s rooms, and then add a few advantages to them to reflect the fact that they’ve had time to prepare for invaders. Also, remember that just because a large creature takes up a 10-foot space doesn’t mean it can’t also squeeze through a 5-foot hallway. Dungeon Master’s Guides and/or Player’s Handbooks should have some rules on how squeezing works, so maybe sticking a large creature in a medium hallway could be a lot of fun for you! It’d be super interesting for a bunch of snakes to show up in the hallway. They’d be able to manage it fine and could maybe use their size to shove the party around as they slithering through the halls.

Just, you know, make sure to build your dungeons a few sessions in advance of when you think you’ll need them. Chances are good you’ll wind up wanting a little more time than you planned to finish building your dungeon and it is usually worth taking the time to do it right rather than rushing it. You’ll feel a lot better about it, that’s for sure.

Tabletop Highlight: Interrogating Prisoners in D&D

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Now that my campaign has reached what I would call “mid-level” and the players have gotten a handle on how to play the game, I’m starting to see them use new approaches to delicate situations. Previously, they’d just kill everything and figure out what to do afterwards (though that still happens sometimes). Now, they’ll actually plan how to kill everything and sometimes actually stop one step short of killing everything by just knocking everything out. This means they sometimes have prisoners and now need to practice interrogating prisoners. They’ve had a few instances of interrogation previously, but there’s a big difference between interrogating a grunt and interrogating a commander.

The time they interrogated a commander, a politician who had been working with their enemies, they had a lot of trouble. I, however, had a lot of fun. He was a sorcerer with a high intelligence, so he was able to use a combination of his charming personality, people/manipulation skills, and specific wordings that were always technically correct to avoid the truth compulsions they had set up. Eventually, they figured out how to trap him enough that he’d admit to something. Except they forgot about teleportation magic so he just ran away and went into hiding. Since he was a priority target who had a lot of information they wanted, it was easy to justify expending the resources they did.

During a much more recent session, they captured a few mooks and their mook leader. They managed to keep everyone alive and accepted the surrender of one of the less-combative troglodytes. After getting them out of the dungeon entry way and back to their camp, they set about doing a basic verbal interrogation of their prisoner, relying on Sense Motive skill checks (thanks to the addition of a DM PC support-only Bard to balance their party) to ascertain truth. It worked well for them because what they overheard prior to attacking this troglodyte and his companions led them to believe he was an unwilling stooge to a much bigger threat. They were eventually able to win him over with kindness, gentle words, and a good Diplomacy check from the party’s rogue.

Thankfully, they were able to keep the second interrogation tasteful. Though it’s not like the rogue had much choice, given that the paladin was looking over his shoulder. Still, they managed to solve their first problem without violence and learned enough to be able to prioritize their actions once they went through the door into dungeon proper. Unfortunately, they immediately used that information to plan violence and a hostile exchange with the other troglodytes and kobolds. It worked out alright for them in the end, since they were up against a bunch of low-CR (challenge rating: the difficulty of a particular monster or encounter to be used in comparison to a party’s equivalent number) monsters and only a couple of higher-CR monsters. Using the narrow hallways and a pit trap, they manage to isolate the various bits of combat and deal with the situation in such a way that most of the mooks got to live. Which they were then able to interrogate, much more easily this time since they’d already shown them all the spectre of violent death when the paladin obliterated the kobold captain in a single round.

Personally, I dislike violent interrogation. I would have a hard time walking my players through any kind of torture scenario because I have a hard time dealing with violence against helpless people. I don’t mind inventive torture, like the time one of my players invented taco bell and used the resulting–and revolting–mish-mash of rats, field grass, orc “cheese,” and acid splash (the 0th level spell) slathered between hardtack biscuits to successfully convince a captured orc to spill the beans. The character truly believed he was giving the orc a tasty snack. It was too back the rogue (who was the only who spoke orcish) had a bit of a sadistic streak, letting the poor addled wizard believe the orc was begging for additional tacos. Heck, if you can make a good intimidate check and are a convincing role-player, you can make a pile of wood shavings look like a terrible torture. You don’t need to skin someone while they’re still alive, using a cleric to continuously restore their hit points, in order to get answers.

Even outside of the disgust I feel at that stuff, there’s plenty of real-world examples, especially in modernity, of violent interrogation being not only useless but actively unhelpful. Better to befriend a prisoner and get them on your side than to make them beg for mercy and make up whatever they think you want to hear. Most D&D doesn’t go that in-depth, but I don’t mind putting in the extra work since it discourages unscrupulous behavior and creative thinking. Better a creative, challenging player than a blunt, simple one.

Tabletop Highlights: D&D 3.5 Versus Pathfinder

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To be entirely fair, there isn’t a big difference between these two rule sets at a macro level. Pathfinder was intended as the next step of D&D 3.5, trimming down the rules to remove complications and re-balancing the game’s power so the often under-powered martial classes could stay relevant during higher levels. As a result, it is fairly common to adapt things from one version to the other. For instance, most of my D&D games incorporate the character sheets and skills of Pathfinder, along with a few other rules–such as cantrips (the most basic, lowest-leveled spells) can be cast without limitation and all combat maneuvers are performed using the rules from Pathfinder rather than 3.5.

I find that combat runs a little more smoothly, skill allocation is easier, and general player satisfaction is higher when I incorporate these rules. It allows me to bring in a bit more power to skill-based characters without running into what I believe is the biggest problem of bringing Pathfinder rules and character stuff into 3.5. As a whole, the core components (character classes and racial abilities, mostly) of Pathfinder achieved a state of balance by increasing everything’s power. There are exceptions, of course, but it can be frustrating to try to balance a character built using 3.5 rules with a character built using Pathfinder rules.

3.5 can also be hard to adapt to Pathfinder because it has a similar problem. The core components may be weaker, but 3.5 has a wonderful array of extra feats, class variations, racial features, and poorly balanced errata that make breaking the game much easier. I can build character with limitless power in 3.5 and I’ve yet to find a way to even break the game on the same scale with Pathfinder. I can make a character that can easily move a mile every two minutes (and I know I can get it higher if I try) in 3.5 and that’s just silly. I can create cell towers and rail guns. I can do pretty much anything, if my GM doesn’t know to stop me and I’m feeling perverse. The only thing that redeems 3.5 is that it takes very specific knowledge (which anyone can now find online) to build those things and your average player doesn’t want to break the game.

When it comes down to determining which variation you want to play, 3.5 or Pathfinder, I find it breaks down fairly well. Either works great for role-playing and story-telling, but 3.5 works really well for players who want complex builds or have more experience. Pathfinder is great for people with less experience or if you want to keep your campaign simpler and more focused. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to remind a player in one of my 3.5 campaigns that, just because he found it in a rule book, doesn’t mean his character knows about it or would even be able to obtain it. This has been happening a lot in my weekly campaign, which can be frustrating at times because he keeps accidentally trying to min-max his character. If we were playing this campaign using Pathfinder, I doubt he’d be able to get up to even a quarter as much crap as he does.

The few times I’ve played Pathfinder, it worked really well for introducing new players. The abilities were much more clear and I didn’t feel like I needed to spend a few days browsing books, PDFs, and forums to figure out how I wanted to build my character. Every time I’ve gone and done a pick-up-and-play campaign at a game store, it has been a Pathfinder campaign. I’m certain the latest edition of D&D (5.0) would be just as easy to pick up and play, but I feel like Pathfinder has more depth to it for the people who want it. You can still get multipliers to your power level instead of just adding to it.

I really want to play more Pathfinder, mostly to learn more about it. I don’t own any of the books and everything I’ve read about it has been what they released online as part of their System Reference Document (search the version you want to learn about and “SRD” and you should wind up with all the rules you need to play). I’d like more experience, both as a player and as a GM. It can be fun to experiment with different rules and see how far you can go, but there’s also strong appeal to playing without all of the crazy extra stuff. Just like when I want to play Skyrim without any mods sometimes, despite loving what the mods do to the game.

Tabletop Highlights: Exploding Kittens

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I’m a huge fan of The Oatmeal. His comics are wonderful, he tackles some very difficult ideas in his stories, and he helps create wonderful games. I’ve been following him for a few years and have really enjoyed most of what he’s created. When I heard that he was doing the art for a tabletop game and had helped create it, I immediately ran to Kickstarter to check it out. True to form, the Kickstarter for Exploding Kittens was chock full of The Oatmeal’s particular art, wonderfully depicting all kinds of ways cats could accidentally blow you up through cat-like behavior.

Eventually, I backed it. I got the full edition of the game along with the hilarious (and very) NSFW version of the game. Since then, I’ve stayed up to date on the game. They eventually created an expansion called “Imploding Kittens” and another game called “Bears vs. Babies” which was not quite as fun and charming as Exploding Kittens.

In Exploding Kittens, the object of the game is to be the last player left alive. There is a deck of cards that everyone draws from at the end of their turn. If they draw an exploding kitten, they die unless they can play a diffuse card (like a laser pointer or kitten therapy). Before you draw, you can plan any number of other cards to do things like skip your turn, give your turn to another player (forcing them to take two turns), steal another player’s cards, or look at the top three cards on the deck.

Once you’re out of usable cards and you draw an exploding kitten, you’re out. Don’t worry, though, it wasn’t personal. The cat was just walking on a computer console that just happened to have a nuclear launch button on it or they were playing with a hand grenade and accidentally pulled the pin while tossing it around. I’m going to avoid going into the NSFW cards because that’s not something I want to write about on this blog, but I encourage the interested parties to check it out.

The game is a ton of fun when you’re having a game night with your friends and it only gets more fun if you’re drinking a little. Don’t drink too much, though. The game is a little more complicated and strategic than you’d expect, so too much alcohol is just going to make it easier for your friends to set you up for an explosion. Which is exactly what you should be trying to do, since you can place the exploding kitten wherever you like in the deck if you play your cards right.

The biggest downside to the game is that it can really drag on for a long time if there aren’t very many players. The game has instructions on how to tailor the game to the number of players, but I’ve followed the instructions with a small group before and wound up sitting around for almost half an hour while the last two players tried to end the game. Even in larger groups, where people get eliminated faster, the first player out can wind up spending a lot of time waiting if they were just incredibly unlucky. You can always cut the deck down for smaller groups, of course, but that can be difficult to get right as some cards only work when paired with similar cards.

Either way, as long as everyone’s relaxed and participating, the game is ridiculous amounts of fun. If you want a new game that will last around an average of 15 minutes per game, I suggest picking up Exploding Kittens.