D&D

Tabletop Highlight: Weapons of Legacy

Chris Leave a comment

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: Working with Your Players in D&D

Chris Leave a comment

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

Chris Leave a comment

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.

The Order of the Stick Has Stuck With Me

Chris Leave a comment

One of my favorite webcomics, which happens to also be my favorite D&D webcomic, is Order of the Stick. If you’ve been in the webcomics consumption business or D&D business for a while, you have likely heard of it. It has been going on since September of 2003 and, despite a few setbacks and being the poster child of how too much success can be a bad thing, it has passed 1100 pages. What started as a way to joke about the rules for the new D&D 3.5 release has developed into an epic tale that still manages to find the time to make jokes about the rules.

The first comics are fairly formulaic, by today’s standards. The party is introduced to the readers and jokes are made about obscure rules or the tendency for player characters to fail simple checks, like seeing the monsters immediately behind them. Then Evil Opposites are introduced, a Lich at the end of the Dungeon is encountered, and then the party is released into the wider world to wreak havoc and eventually get railroaded into some new plot or another. They go from light-storytelling at the start so jokes can remain the focus to telling an epic story of personal growth, the consequential struggles of mortals in the matters of gods, and need of individuals to act even when they feel out of their depth. There’s on particular moment, as the webcomic approached and passed its 1000th update that has stuck with me. The combination of the art change and the focus on the growth of one of the characters culminated in a single splash page that still gives me chills.

For a long time, my idea of playing or running Dungeons and Dragons was to create a place for players to sort of just stumble through the world. There was supposed to be a story, but it was secondary to making sure the players got to make their jokes and kill a bunch of stuff. Reading through Order of the Stick showed me there was a lot more that I could do within the world of D&D since the writer/artist, Rich Burlew, manages to tell the entire story without departing from the world. It taught me a lot of how to trim a story to fit within the confines of a D&D campaign, how to ensure my players had agency, and how to even do a bit of railroading without ruining the story. Beyond even that, it taught me so much about how to play within the rule set, how to creatively express myself in a variety of character types, and how to add nuance to the rather black and white D&D morality system without making everything entirely relative or perception-based.

While it managed all of that, the story created a wonderful mixture of sympathetic villains, unsympathetic villains, good guys who get screwed over, and bad guys who get better than they deserve. As soon as you venture outside of the online comics, to the book only publications or the PDFs that were created as a part of the “too much success” Kickstarter (what started out as a cheap drive to fund reprinting a popular book wound up raising millions of dollars and forcing Rich Burlew to take time off of the comics in order to work on meeting the commitments he made during the event, some of which is still ongoing). My favorite story, about my favorite character, is one of those PDFs. How the Paladin Got His Scar is a tale about personal strength, commitment to something larger than yourself, second chances, and choosing to live for something while still being willing to die if it means that everyone else will be safe. I read it at a time I really needed it and I still go back to read it again when I feel like I need to strengthen my commitment to something that feels impossible. Such as updating my blog every day for a year.

People talk about stories or books that made them who they are today and Order of the Stick is one of mine. I would not be as skilled a storyteller as I am without this comic. I would not be the same creative, twisty DM and player without it. I would not be me without it. If you’re looking for something to read and enjoy jokes about D&D and learning about what it means to be a leader or the price of power, check it out at Giantitp.com. Also, yes, the stick figure drawing does improve over time, but it remains stick figures until near the 900 mark, when it improves without losing its original charm.

 

Tabletop Highlight: Don’t Split The Party

Chris Leave a comment

“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: Dungeon Building for D&D

Chris Leave a comment

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

Chris 1 Comment

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 Highlight: Critical Fails

Chris Leave a comment

Critical failures are some of my favorite parts of Dungeons & Dragons as a Dungeon Master. I don’t particularly enjoy my players failing at something because I generally want them to succeed, but it certainly opens the moment for some interesting improvisation on my part. A healthy dose of random interjection keeps even the mundane parts of a campaign from growing stale.

I’ve introduced new enemies, added a whole layer of complexity to my world, and even killed someone else instead of the person who just rolled three 1’s in a row. People really ought to be more careful when they’re shooting into melee combat, really. They also need to stop accidentally summoning Outsiders to the material plane, thereby ushering in the eventual collapse of the universe because Outsiders are pure entropy and cannot be killed because entropy can’t be killed without breaking every law of the universe. And then you have bigger issues than entropy.

Aside from attack rolls, there are a few other critical fails that can be a lot of fun. Catching something or throwing something is a stat check using dexterity. If a player rolls a critical fail on a toss or a catch, it can be a lot of fun to describe what got broken by the fumbled throw. My personal favorite strength check failure was the giant, manly barbarian getting a splinter from the door he was trying to break down and being unable to do anything until he got it removed. A close second was the drinking contest. The Dwarf was trying to bond with the half-goliath barkeeper and decided drinking copious amounts of alcohol was the best bet. The dwarf lost, of course, but the fun was in describing how he got blindingly drunk and accidentally drank the barwoman’s dishwater. He burped bubbles for forty-eight hours because he didn’t even fish the bar of soap out of it first.

For saving throw’s, the fails are often a little more catastrophic. Just last night, one of my players turned into a water-breathing creature so he could avoid drowning in the swamp (a crocodile had tried to drown him and failed). Since it was a bunch of still, disgusting water that he spent a while swimming around in without doing anything about his open wounds, I had rolled a secret save versus disease, just to see what would happen. He rolled a 1 and thus caught an ingested disease because he kept accidentally swallowing swamp water while trying to breathe it. Good times. Waking up blind is always a great way to start the day.

In less extreme circumstances, critical failures just make for great flavor. Have someone critically fail their save versus a magical attack like a fireball? Throw in a comedic moment where they miscalculate and take cover behind something that’s just going to make the explosion worse, like a source of tinder or something easily flammable. Crit failing their Reflex save to avoid a trap? Have them dive the wrong way or have them just leap straight up in the air. Crit failing their Will save to see through illusion? Have them enthusiastically participate in the illusion. The possibilities are endless if you’re quick on your feet.

Past experience has taught me that there’s an important line to walk as a DM between throwing in extra penalties for critical failures and just adding flavor. If the moment is super tense and everything rides on this moment, be wary of adding flavor. If everyone is caught up, they likely have their own mental images of what is going on, so you want generic details that will meld with whatever they’re seeing. Penalties make this easier as you’re adding a new aspect to the image rather than changing something existing, and you can always add flavor on top of a penalty. If someone just failed something very routine, penalties can cause the session to drag, so extra flavor is usually the way to go unless you have something important hinging on this routine task.

The great thing about being a DM is realizing that all rules are situational and that you are the ultimate arbiter of what is right when you’re running a session. Figure out how you like to use critical fails and hope you get enough opportunities to put them to use. All that really matters at the end of the day is that everyone is having fun, whatever form that takes.

Tabletop Highlight: House Rules and Homebrew for D&D 3.5

Chris Leave a comment

I’ll admit that I’m probably a little biased when it comes to which D&D version is the best. Almost all of my playing and running has been in 3.5 or the common mix of 3.5 and Pathfinder because the 3.5 set of rules is expansive. An expansive set of rules means it is relatively easy to find rules for something that can be nudged to fit what you want to add. Additionally, the patterns created by the existing rules make it easy to extrapolate how the system should apply to something without rules or how to change existing rules without breaking the game. As a DM who loves to tell a good story, these two things make 3.5 easily the most appealing rule set out there.

While I do all of my high-level planning and preparation ahead of time, there is a lot of small stuff that comes up during sessions I can never be prepared for. Particular shopkeepers, NPCs the players want to talk to, city layouts, the state of the black market, and so many other things my players will randomly and inconsistently want to know. In addition to that sort of thing, no amount of preparation is going to prepare me for what I need to have prepared when the players decide to take a path I hadn’t foreseen or do something that requires rules that either do not exist or that need to be modified so they’ve actually got a fair chance to fail or succeed.

For instance, I like to give my players options when they spectacularly fail certain types of rolls. A common house rule is that a string of critical fails on attack rolls can instantly kill the player’s character. I like the idea of this house rule, but a lot of players will get upset if they accidentally kill themselves like this because it feels just so stupid and random. If they died because of a choice they made, at least they feel like they earned it. So, instead of just killing them outright, I give them the choice of taking the death or taking something entirely random that could possibly be worse but would allow them a chance to survive. This way, they feel like they still have control of their character and, should they die as a result of the something else.

The only problem is that I have to make up whatever is about to happen without any preparation. A new monster, some interesting application of the rules, or even an entirely new encounter or dungeon. All of this stuff is the sort of thing I typically prepare beforehand because making it up is difficult. Without the expansive 3.5 rule set and all of the online resources people have created for the 3.5 rule set, it would be impossible.  Since I know how the basic rules are applied across the entire system and can find a bunch of different templates, abilities, and creature types, I can find a way to meld all of it together into whatever new creature or situation I want to introduce to my players.

This sort of new rule or new creature is called either “homebrew” or a “house rule.” Homebrew is anything made up by someone other than an official D&D source. A house rule is anything that a DM indicates is a rule that applies only to the particular campaign they’re running, though it may show up in multiple campaigns. Homebrew often involves house rules and most house rules are homebrew. A house rule that isn’t a homebrew rule is usually used to exclude something. For instance. I almost always ban the Tome of Battle because it creates these ridiculously over-powered characters. The only time I’ve used it was to create a tough fight for my players by giving a recurring character levels in a class from it and the one character nearly took out an entire group of six players of the same level. That’s too much power. Most of my house rules are exclusions, since a by-product of the expansive 3.5 rule set is stuff that is over-powered as a result of one-off campaign modules that introduce new rules and I have players who like to visit forums to find the best way to make their characters O-P.

My favorite house rule adds two homebrew systems to the game, called Individual Magic Effects and Character Legacies. The IME rule is taken directly from the webcomic that inspired it, giving characters a particular visual-only effect whenever they use magic or that affects the way their magic items work. Character legacies are a bit more complicated, but can give the player characters bonuses or penalties to their character depending on what the legacy means. Got a player obsessed with glory and hunting? He or She gains bonuses when they prove their prowess and bring back trophies, but gain penalties when their quarry bests them or they fail to find it at all. The bonuses and penalties can change depending on what the character hunts and how the player decides the character will act. An egotistical hunter might have charisma penalties for dealing with some people but a bigger bonus for dealing with most people while a more friendly hunter might have bonuses when it comes to bartering or doing hunt preparation.

Neither one of them has much impact on the game in the long-run since the bonuses for legacies are relatively small, compared to what magic items and feats can give players and IMEs are only visual effect (which only help or hinder in very specific situations). They just encourage my players to try to play their character more consistently and to stick to their role-playing when they might otherwise abandon it in favor of being more effective in a given situation. This is my favorite type of homebrew. Adding major rule changes or entire classes is hard to balance. If you ever want to see some ridiculous, over-powered stuff that puts the Tome of Battle to shame, you should check out some of the custom classes people have made and posted to places like the D&D Wiki.

Like a lot of storytelling, deciding how and when to modify the rules for an established game takes a lot of practice and it is easy to accidentally break something even if you’re very careful.  If you keep to a guiding principle such as “everyone should be having fun,” then you should be fine. The rules don’t really matter if everyone is having a good time and feeling like they have power in the world.

Tabletop Highlight: D&D 3.5 and Knights

Chris Leave a comment

One of my favorite classes to play in Dungeons and Dragons is the 3.5 edition’s Knight. This class is listed in the Player’s Handbook II and is probably the best class to use for the “Tank” role based on class abilities alone. Almost all of their abilities are geared toward grabbing enemy focus, surviving, or protecting their comrades. All of this comes at the cost of a lot of more the damage-oriented abilities or skills you might associate with fighter or barbarian tank builds. So often, a front-line tank fighter or barbarian’s skill set is focused around the idea of “if it is dead, it can’t hurt me or anyone else.” Yes, you can build a fighter’s AC (Armor Class: it determines how difficult it is to hurt you character with an attack) super high while still focusing on damage and you can get a Barbarian enough HP to tank a few disintegrate spells (which are as dangerous as the name implies) without healing, but Knights are focused on both of those things.

As one of the few classes with a d12 hit die (the die used to determine how many hit points the character gains each level), they can have almost as much HP as a barbarian before they start raging. Since their primary focus is staying alive and taking damage so other characters do not, putting the highest attribute score in Constitution is almost a requirement. The second-highest attribute score can work as well, but raising it with magic items as soon as possible is a must because a Knight can never have too many hit points. The alternative attribute for the highest attribute score is actually charisma. A lot of a Knight’s abilities are based on Charisma. Charisma can help a Knight challenge the boss to fight them and only them, grant them and their allies bonuses based on the Knight’s inspirational battle cries, and can help Knights come up with clever challenges to cause all enemies to charge them. Outside of battle, a Knight’s charisma can help them move through the social circles graced by royalty and nobility as they further their knightly cause.

As they progress through their levels, Knights enjoy a full Base Attack Bonus progression (one point per level) but, oddly, have only Will as a primary save. If you look through their abilities, you will find that Knights have abilities that can help them save allies who are being mind-controlled or mind-affected (made afraid, under the power of suggestion, etc), so having a high Will save means they are more likely to remain free long enough to save their companions. Other interesting abilities include being able to prevent enemies from easily moving past you (or using the common rogue trick of tumbling past the tank in order to attack the squishier characters behind them) by causing the space around them to be treated as rough terrain. This means that people cannot simply run past them or tumble past them thanks to the knight’s defensive capabilities. Other abilities include a boost to their AC as a result of using a shield and the ability to take part (and eventually all) of the damage dealt to an adjacent ally. If you’re protecting a spellcaster who gets shot by an arrow or stabbed by a rogue, you can opt to take some of that damage in order to mitigate what might have otherwise been a killing blow.

As far as combat goes, Knights get access to mounted combat feats, along with a lot of technical combat feats through a “bonus” feat system ever few levels. While a Knight may never do a lot of damage, compared to other martial classes, they can still dominate a battlefield riding about on a well-trained mount using a Lance in order to maximize their damage. They also have an ability called “Fighting Challenge” that gives them bonuses against a specific target they’ve challenged to a fight. The Fighting Challenge is a type of “Knight’s Challenge” which also includes things like the “Test of Mettle” which causes all enemies in earshot to focus on attacking you, the “Daunting Challenge” which causes weak enemies to flee in terror, and the “Bond of Loyalty” which allows a Knight to continue making will saves against mind-affecting spells or abilities until the Knight is free or out of Knight’s Challenges.

The most interesting use of the Knight’s Challenge, and what makes them the ultimate tank, is what they earn at 20th level: “Loyalty Beyond Death.” This allows a Knight to spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to literally continue moving after they’ve functionally died. At 20th level, a Knight will have over 200 hit points. A character typically dies once they pass -10 hit points. A 20th level Knight can spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to continue moving and acting once their hit points pass below 0 until their body is completely destroyed or they run out of Knight’s Challenges to use. This means they can still be healed back to the point of being alive or just sacrifice their live in one last glorious charge as they face down an ancient, all-powerful dragon or lich in order to buy a village or their allies time to flee.

There any number of other feats that can greatly benefit a Knight as well. Shieldmate lets you provide adjacent allies with an AC bonus based on the shield you use. Heavy Armor Specialization, a feat with dovetails in with a Knight’s ability to ignore movement penalties resulting from wearing Heavy armor, provides you with a permanent reduction to the damage you take as a result of wearing Heavy armor. The proficiency feat for Tower Shields also benefits a Knight because it increases the bonus provided by Shieldmate, increases your AC even more, and lets a Knight use their shield as protection from arrows or AoE (Area of Effect) attacks for anyone who isn’t tough enough to survive them. There is even a feat or a type of enhancement magic for armor and shields that lets your AC bonus from your armor and shield apply against certain magical attacks that normally just need to make contact with a character, rather than break through their armor. With the right builds, a Knight can because an almost unstoppable tanking machine.

I wouldn’t recommend using a Knight as the primary front-line combatant because their damage output is lower than most other martial characters, so they’re not always great picks for 4-person groups, but they work amazingly in larger groups, even if there are no other front-line martial characters. Especially if there are no other front-line martial characters. Next time you need a tank and don’t want to play the lawful good paladin, play a night! They can be lawful anything and their emphasis is more on their knightly oaths than obeying the rules of the land.