One of the worst feelings I have that isn’t a result of my questionable brain chemistry and varying mental health is having a fun, interesting creative work that I’ve produced but cannot share with the people who would be most interested in it. I love creating stuff just to make it, but I want to share the things I create and like with other people. Partly to help make them (the stuff I’ve made) better, partly to share something I think people will like, and then also partly for the good, good serotonin hit I get whenever someone likes a thing I’ve created.
Continue readingStorytelling
Player Engagement Is a Key GM Skill
I have not always been a good DM. I think it might still be presumptive to call myself a good DM and that I would be more comfortable saying I’m a decent DM with a few specialities, but I think I wouldn’t argue against anyone if they called me a good DM. I think the lesson I learned that made me an alright DM was to never, under any circumstance, take away player agency. They’re free to do whatever they want in the game and I should support their endeavors, but they’re also free to suffer the consequences of their actions.
Continue readingSo, I heard You Like Goblins
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: Working with Your Players in D&D
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.
The Order of the Stick Has Stuck With Me
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.
NaNoWriMo Day 13 (11/13)
Well, I didn’t do much writing yesterday again. I’m seriously starting to wonder if I’ve doomed myself since I can’t seem to make myself actually prioritize my writing. At the same time, I did some wonderful prep for my D&D campaign that lays the groundwork for many sessions to come along with figuring out some of the murky details for the plot arc my players are pursuing. I also fleshed out the DMPC I’ve created to round out the party (weekly attendance is at three right now, so I’m just adding a safety on top of adjusting their encounters) and created a few instant encounters for the environments they’ll be heading through. I should be good on prep for the next half-dozen sessions if we stick to 3-4 hour sessions (instead of the 5+ hour sessions we’ve been doing lately).
I really enjoyed the session, even if it dragged on longer than expected. It gave me the opportunity to insert a random new element to the world and challenged me to come up with something effectively homebrew (rules for an entire new creature type along with the source of said creatures) on the fly. One of my players did the unthinkable and rolled three 1’s in a row on an attack roll, so I gave him the option of accepting the instant accidental death (house rule on three 1s in a row on an attack roll) or taking an unknown other result that could be worse than death but would give him the opportunity to possibly avert the problem. I decided that the sword he used, a longsword with the “vicious” trait (it does damage to him every time he hits something with it but deals extra damage to what he’s hitting), animated and started using vampiric style attacks to suck out the life force of whatever living creatures were near it.
Thankfully, they managed to kill the no-longer sword-shaped aberration (it looked like a 15 foot long caterpillar made of metal) and thus the whole crisis has been averted (for now). However, the addition of this powerful creature to what was already a tough fight (12 zombies and a mummy for a level six party) wound up dragging the session out so that, as 11pm passed and 12am approached, they finally wrapped things up and returned to their basecamp outside the dungeon to recover from their drained life force and wounds. And they leveled up!
This is why I love Dungeons and Dragons. As a DM, it can force me to be creative at a moment’s notice, encourages player participation in story-telling, and a good player will always take the unknown but interesting if they have a choice. I get to incorporate things from other stories I loved (the no-longer-sword-shaped aberration was an idea i got from a comic I love) and I get to see the reactions to my story-telling as it happens. The suspense and wonder, the dread and weary joy, the fear and bravery. I have, and probably will again, write entire posts about why I love Dungeons and Dragons. There’s just so much there to enjoy if you’ve got a good set of players and a good Dungeon Master.
Even if I don’t finish my NaNoWriMo writing goal this month, I’ll still have written more this month than in the past several thanks to my daily blog updates. I’ll have done story-telling I enjoyed every week. I’ll have fully committed myself to creating once again. I still plan to try and I’m confident in my ability to pull the necessary words out of my ass over my holiday next week if it comes down to that, but I think I can already count this month as a win no matter what else happens.
Daily Prompt
As a human, we can be wildly emotional. All you have to do is turn on daytime TV to see stories and reality shows of people doing incredibly irrational things as a result of entirely emotional decision-making. People who struggle with mental health issues often have first-hand experience in how emotions can entirely overrule reason and common sense. Even if your character isn’t strictly human or not even sorta human, the emotional side of every race/species depicted in story-telling tends to overrule the intellectual side. Write a scene in which your character’s emotional response to an event overrules their common sense or intellectual side so that they wind up acting when they probably shouldn’t. It can be anything from them leaping into action to protect someone, entirely blowing their cover, to them being unable to hold their tongue when they are being chewed out by someone.
Sharing Inspiration
One of my favorite musicians, who I listen to for just about every reason in the world (though the most common are because I need to de-stress and chill out or because I need something to make me contemplative but still action-oriented), is Andrew Bird. The absolutely breadth of genres he’s played over the years is surprising and his evolution as an artist is inspiring. He mixes wonderfully calm and meandering music with vocals that match the music but will make you think once you start to hear them past their part in the musicality of the song. He plays the violin, sings wonderfully, whistles, and plays the guitar, often using electronic delay and repeat recorders (they record what he plays when he holds down a pedal and then loop it back until he stops it again) to combine all four of those things at once during live performances. He’s a wonderful showman and an amazing musician. My biggest critique of him is that he can be hard to understand sometimes, when he’s singing, because he tends to blend the vocals with the instrumentals so much. If you need a little push, I recommend looking up his music (live recordings, if you can find them) starting with my favorite song, Take Courage.
Helpful Tips
If you’re struggling to get your writing done because you can’t focus when you sit down with a couple of hours to work, try breaking your time up into 5-15 minute chunks (10 is usually a good number). Set a timer to go off in ten minutes and challenge yourself to write as much as you can before the timer goes off. Once the timer goes off, record your results, take a short break to get a drink or check twitter (no more than a minute or two, timer-enforced if need be), and then start another. This time, challenge yourself to beat your previous record by as much as possible. Keep repeating this process until your reach or surpass your daily goal. These little sprints will help keep you focused and productive, giving you the bursts of creativity we’ve all felt where we write a couple (or a few) hundred words in only a handful of minutes because we’re very aware of how much time we’ve wasted. This way, though, you get the benefit without feeling like you’ve been failing.