Tabletop Gaming

Tabletop Highlight: To Run or To Play, And Why

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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

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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

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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.

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.