Dungeons

So, I heard You Like Goblins

Chris 3 Comments

If you enjoy Dungeons and Dragons comics but are not reading Goblins by Ellipsis Stephens, I honestly don’t really know what to say to you other than “you need to go read this amazing webcomic” repeatedly, until you actually go read it. I’m totally willing to make an attempt at figuring out how to explain why, but I what I really wanted was to give you the chance to bail out now so you can experience the entire saga without my interpretations, analysis, and commentary in the way of an unbiased first read-through. I suggest you go do that because people who enjoy stories and/or Dungeons and Dragons will find something to love.

The first thing you’ll see when you start the comic is a disclaimer explaining the art progression. This comic has been decades in the making, from initial conception and first pages to now it has slowly progressed through a complex and layered story with an end I can’t even fathom. Each page in the story is rife with potential and you’ve never sure when something is foreshadowing or just significant in the moment. As time passes and the story progresses, so much of what came before shows up again as a reference or as the comfortable repetition of a story slowly winding its way toward the climax. Where most stories are depicted as line graphs, straight upward movement through the beats of a story until it reaches its apogee, “THunt’s” Goblins is best thought of in three dimensions. while it shares the same upward climb of all good stories, the path is more circular. Each of the plots, the smaller stories taking place involving different characters, in the comic covers similar ground as they wind their way up a mountain, passing by each other as they go, sometimes without even realizing that their journey is overlapping with someone else’s. In the beginning, you’re not even sure they’re climbing the same mountain. Only by piecing together the various elements of the stories or finding the right bits of foreshadowing can you tell that they are. Or, you know, if you’ve already read it. Then it gets pretty clear.

As far the plot goes, it starts simply enough. There is a village of goblins preparing to be attacked by a party of adventurers. The Goblins are the initial focus and we get a peek into their daily lives that does more to humanize them, so to speak, than we get of the adventuring party when we meet them. While both groups are set up somewhat neutrally, the Goblins get the benefit of more jokes and more attention early on, so they wind up as the sympathetic party initially. It doesn’t hurt that they comic is named after them, either. When we see the adventurers finally get to the village who is ready and waiting for them, it becomes clear that the Goblins are just defending themselves. There’s even a moment where the survivors of the battle call it off because they realize just how horrible this fight is.

From there, as both groups deal with loss and the residual anger of their conflict, they go their separate ways and we begin to see the shape of the larger story being told. All we get is a series of paths unfolding in front of us and hints at the detail of the journey ahead of us. The story slowly builds a cast of characters with their own motivations, alliances, and beliefs about the world, sending them all in separate directions to grow and pursue their parts of the narrative. While the pace is rather slow for a story of this size, an unavoidable result of creating it in comic form, the actual beats of the story are incredibly well placed when you go through the archives. Stephens is an incredible storyteller and her comic is a testament to it.

In addition to her storytelling prowess, she’s also one of the most inventive world creators I’ve seen, given the amount of concrete detail and mechanics you can find in the parts of her world that don’t come from Dungeons and Dragons. She has mixed stuff brought straight from Dungeons and Dragons with stuff she’s adapted from various fantasy settings, and it all fits in seamlessly with what she’s created from scratch. The most impressive part of the story, in my eyes, is how smoothly she’s fitted every piece of her world together. There are no bumps, no cracks in the road that cause you stumble or doubt as you read. You can clearly see how the world works as a result of fourth wall humor and what we’d call “out of character” comments in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. All of the characters seem to know they’re in a world that obeys a bunch of mechanics you can study and manipulate using numbers or simple declarations. While no one talks about the numerical results of their rolls like they do in some D&D comics and they don’t strictly adhere to the basic rules you’d find in a D&D book, you can easily tell that they’re still in what we’d call a game world. Still, it amazes me constantly how well that knowledge fits in with the world, even when they’re arguing about what skill they’d use to cross a river because they’re making different skill checks to get the same result (as a result of their different attribute scores).

Aside from the petty arguments about how they crossed a river and why someone has such a huge attack bonus despite being at a lower level,  they also cover a range of difficult topics. Stephens doesn’t shy away from the horrific when she details what some of the less-than-savory (and downright fucking awful, goddamn that was a sadistic bastard of a shitstick) characters, but she draws clear lines between what is good and what is evil that are much clearer to the reader than they seem to be to the people in story. At least, to some of them. One of the big themes of the story is the nature of Good and Evil. Like in our world, most of Stephens’ characters believe themselves to be the good guys. Unfortunately for us, they’re often not actually Good. It takes a long time for Stephens to give us her idea of what makes someone Good or Evil, but it’s worth the wait. We’ve been given enough time to see the true natures of tons of characters across the spectrum and we even get to see some characters change alignment. So, when she finally gives us the definition, we can see how all of the characters fit into it and we won’t have to struggle with how Good people can sometimes come into deadly and often angry conflict. In a truly great moment that’s relatively recent in the comic, Stephens also shows us the struggle to define Good and Evil in a way we can consistently rely on and how difficult it can be to actually live up to that definition without abandoning what we’d all call sensible precaution.

Honestly, I started the comic for fantasy battles and Goblin Adventurers, but I’ve stuck with it through the years because of the complex storytelling and the way it covers difficult issues. I don’t have a problem waiting however long it takes for this comic to finish because I know it’s going to be amazing. I hope you enjoy reading it and I hope you get as much out of it as I have. There’s so much it has to give, I can’t imagine anyone coming away from it without something to think about.

Tabletop Highlight: Slogging Through Open War

Chris Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tabletop Highlight: Up For Interpretation

Chris 1 Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tabletop Highlight: Misleading and Outright Lying

Chris Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tabletop Highlight: Figuring Out How Much is too Much

Chris Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

This Book Stole my Attention for an Entire Day

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After I finished reading Priest by Matthew Colville, I immediately picked up the sequel, Thief. It takes place immediately after the first book, though the focus has shifted a little bit. Instead of sticking almost solely to the protagonist, the view shifts between him and a few of the other important characters. Haden is certainly an interesting character to follow–that’s kind of the requirement to be a protagonist–but it was also incredibly informative to see him through the eyes of the people around him. Beyond that, the second book was an incredible step forward in depicting the scenes and the fight descriptions were exponentially better. I had to put it down shortly after picking it up in order to play D&D, but I picked it up immediately afterward and accidentally stayed up way too late in order to read more of it.

The plot picks up immediately where the first book left off, throwing in enough background information that a new reader would be able to figure out what is going on but not so much that it gets onerous for an established reader to get through. The twists from the last book are still twists, as Colville often reveals the plot information by exposing other characters to either what happened in the first book or some offshoot of it coming back to bite someone else. There are still enough new twists and plot hooks to keep you pulled in and even more of the wonderful world-building that lets you feel the size of the history without spending more time than necessary talking about it. We’re still not sure what happened to split up the group of adventurers that Haden belonged to, but we do discovered more of what happened as a result of the split. We meet some more of his old friends and discover a little more about the life that Haden lived before he retired. We also get to see more of the incredible weapons, artifacts, and allies he has gained over the course of his career and they are just as incredibly powerful and crazy as you’d expect from a high-leveled D&D campaign. Demigods, wealth beyond the dreams of most mortals, and a casual arrogance when it comes to the importance of stuff. Who cares if your building burned down when you’ve got the money to build a new one or for a wizard to just make it not have burned down in the first place?

I honestly really enjoyed seeing the sort of crazy stuff that is so common to D&D enter into a more typical fantasy novel. The wealth thing I’ve already mentioned, but the incredible fights are also a part of it. Haden gets into it with assassins, a member of his old party who he never liked, a giant elf-creature that is basically a minor deity, and a bunch of weird “undead” creatures that aren’t really undead. He overcomes all of his opponents with the exclusion of the other adventurer. He almost dies half the time, but that’s how a lot of the fights in D&D go: you almost die, but that’s only because you focused on ending the fight as quickly as possible. You could have taken a little more time to avoid injury or fix a problem, but you knew that you’d be able to overcome anything but death itself as long as you were still alive at the end of the battle. He gets poisoned by the assassins he fights, but he doesn’t waste time healing the wounds or purifying his blood, he just kills every assassin in maybe half a minute and then finally fixes himself. Even the description of the fight feels short and brutal, reflecting the way the fight would have seemed to anyone participating in it. The big fight with his ex party member is equally brutal, each participant a hair from death at any given time, only surviving by relying on their instinct, guts, and luck. It was incredible to read.

I enjoyed the expanded cast since it brought a lot of interesting character development to the books and highlighted the way we tend to make assumptions about the people we encounter in our lives. I enjoyed one of the relationships, between Haden and a friend he made a dozen years prior to the novel, and how it develops in this book as Haden realizes he maybe didn’t know as much about his friend as he thought he did, but that doesn’t mean his friend isn’t the man he’d come to appreciate and respect. None of the characters ever feel one-dimensional and, while the villain does go on a bit of a stereotypical “I’m all-powerful and can do whatever I want without consequence!” bender, his megalomania is somewhat excused by the way he’s actually cleverly set up his organization and laid his plans. If it wasn’t for Haden and a few things that can be chalked up to back luck for the villain, he’d have been entirely right. No one would have been able to stop him, even if he walked up to the king and confessed his crimes.

There were more spelling and grammar errors in this one, but the only thing that actually threw me off was a couple of places where the wrong name or pronouns were used as it made it seem like the wrong people were saying things or showing up randomly in scenes they couldn’t have been in. That’s a small price to pay for two really solid, incredibly fun books. Since Colville has plans to make some changes and do some editing, I think they both (but especially Thief) have the potential to be incredibly fun reads.

I hate that I have to wait a while longer (probably at least a couple of years, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than that) for the next book and the updates Colville plans to make, but I really think Priest and Thief are both really solid already. I suggest picking them up if you’re looking for a fun fantasy book and don’t mind starting a series that doesn’t really have a release schedule of any kind.

Tabletop Highlight: Creativity in Monsters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tabletop Highlight: Running the Game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tabletop Highlight: The Narrative Imperative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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