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cheating yourself is fun

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

Some friends and I were playing a game that uses mana counters. We didn’t have any with us, so we each used a d20 as a counter.

When my friend Larry got his first point of damage, he started tumbling his d20 through his fingers. “I can’t find the 1. My d20 has no 1!”

As everyone knows, you can’t prove a negative,, so maybe that die had a 1 tucked away on some obscure corner somewhere, but when I looked at the die, what I did discover was that it had two 20s.

Larry’s girlfriend said that she had bought the die because she liked the color: neither of them had ever noticed that it was a trick die. Larry has probably played some D&D sessions with this cheater’s die, and – in all likelihood – he probably rolled some crits where he should have rolled fumbles. It probably added a little – say 5% – to the fun of the session.

It’s kind of sad that we discovered the trick die. Larry is an honest person, so he’ll never use that die again. That means that, from now on, his average d20 roll will be a tiny bit worse. He’s lost his edge.

Cheating can be fun – as long as you don’t know you’re cheating. And that’s really what D&D is based on. Especially in 4e, encounters are designed to seem like you’re on a thin knife edge of doom, a single roll away from death, when in fact you have a 95% chance of winning the encounter. 4e is great at making every session feel like another against-the-odds success, so you don’t need a trick die to cheat death.

I still wish we hadn’t outed that d20 though.

Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, game design, RPG Hub | No Comments »

Mazes and monsters playtest!

Monday, February 7th, 2011
This entry is part 23 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

Now that I have most of the Mazes and Monsters rules in some stage of completion, I decided it was time for a rules playtest.

The players assembled on a snowy Monday, ready to have their malleable minds molded or marred by the horrors of the Maze.

We watched a scene from Mazes and Monsters to get everyone psyched. Everyone seemed thrilled to be paying homage to this important film. Some of the players misunderstood and actually LAUGHED at it, like it was a comedy or something. Just a tribute to Tom Hanks’ irrepressible comic timing! He’s funny even when he’s not trying to be funny. That’s what made Philadelphia such a laugh riot.

One oversight we immediately noticed is that I didn’t bring the MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT, one thousand candles! We had to use stupid old light bulbs for illumination. I’ll have to remember to put a note to the Maze Controller somewhere prominent, like the back cover: “Maze Controller: Remember to bring candles!”

Character Creation

We ended up with a Fighter, a Holy Man, and two Frenetics. The lack of a rogue class was lamented. I know, right? If only there was some movie evidence of a rogue!

Based on the fact that Jay Jay’s frenetic was “the cleverest of all sprites”, the group decided that they could assign themselves fantasy races.

Character creation was very quick: after Hit Points were rolled, people just needed to roll for their Trait and Issue. One of the Frenetics rolled an 11 (a critical fumble) during Trait selection and got a negative trait: Bad Luck. The Good Luck trait lets you add a Trait die (essentially giving you a reroll) to one die roll per session. It wasn’t entirely clear what the opposite of that was, so I decided that it meant that once a session, the Maze Controller could demand a reroll of one of the player’s rolls and take the WORST of the two rolls. This led to an important rules doctrine for rolling a bad trait: “If it’s not clear what the opposite of a good trait is, the Maze Controller is encouraged to come up with the most annoying interpretation.”

Characters rolled Issues secretly, and jotted down their privatemost secrets on their character sheet, right under Hit Points.

Shopping worked pretty well. I had a list of gear and spells for sale, and people coordinated with each other to make sure the party had at least one rope, axe, awl, chisel, and basically one of everything that was for sale.

Introductions

As in the movie, the players each introduced their character in the most deadpan monotone possible. I’ll recreate the introductions as well as I can remember:

“I am Lothar the Frenetic. I am the toughest of all dwarves. My main power is a magical bag of fairy dust, which I may use to control my enemies and make them kill each other.”

“I am Wal-mart the Orcish Frenetic. I am very impulsive, and my bad luck will be my downfall.”

“I am Sansange, a Holy Man with excellent dental hygiene. I have many spells and powers by which I maintain that hygiene in myself and others for the glory of Marcia and Neville.”

“I am Sir Robert the Fighter. I wander the earth righting wrongs. I am irked by people who exhibit bad manners.”

Shall ye enter?

I described the maze as follows:

“You stand before the Tomb of the Twin Kings. It is said that the Twin Kings, one good, one evil, stand guard over a royal treasure. It is also rumored that mystical skeletons patrol the tomb’s winding passageways. Thus warned, shall ye enter?”

With one voice, the players cried, “AYE!” — which was a relief, let me tell you, because I didn’t have a backup plan for the evening.

The first room in the maze contained nothing but a book on a lectern.

I had explained to the players that, in Mazes and Monsters, traps were extraordinarily deadly, but the Maze Controller was required to note that any trap “could be a trap”. In other words, if you’re not warned that something is a trap, it isn’t a trap. The players, though, were taking no chances. They turned pages with the tips of their swords and finally pushed the book into a sack via a carefully-described remote-control Rube Goldberg maneuver. Clearly, 1st edition D&D had scarred my players’ psyches. They were in luck, because shit was about to get PSYCHODRAMATIC.

After ascertaining that the book was not trapped, the players wanted to know what it said. It turned out that every page had a single nonsense sentence, in the form
A man holds two doves
A goat jumps two valleys
A Holy Man blesses two beggars
A candle holds two flames.

Etc.

Etc. was not actually enough for the players, though. They kept turning pages and asking me what else they read. I came up with

A trap takes two lives
A wolf eats two sheep
A coin has two sides

all the while hoping they would not keep on turning pages and come up with HUNDREDS MORE SENTENCES, which it looked like they were planning to do. Luckily they finally ran out of interest before they finished the whole book.

The player running the Holy Man reported that she had sort of forgotten I had to make up all these sentences; she thought she was reading a real book. The lines of fantasy and reality? Successfully crossed! The rest of this playtest would be spent in the liminal realm between sanity and madness.

The next room had three doors, each opened by a pressure plate on a mysterious altar. The players correctly decided, based on the ample evidence provided by the book, that the number 2 was important in this dungeon, and chose to open Door Number 2. This was too bad, because I had cool stuff behind the other doors, including mind mazes and deadly traps that were sure to have wiped out several players!

In the next room, things got really weird – and it wasn’t entirely the game’s fault.

The room contained a vast pit spanned by a bridge. Walmart the Frenetic, whose player was in despair over rolling a negative Trait, HURLED HER CHARACTER TO CERTAIN DEATH in the pit.

Because Walmart’s characteristic was bad luck, everybody decided that Walmart should roll to see if her bad luck prevented her from ending her life. I rolled two dice for her Jump roll and took the least favorable. Fortunately for Walmart’s player (and unfortunately for Walmart) she succeeded, and fell to her death! Walmart the frenetic… was dead!

Death, Dying, and Skeletons

I explained the death and dying rules: When you died, you immediately started rolling up a new first-level character, and as soon as you were finished you could rejoin the others. The player of Walmart the Frenetic quickly started work on her new character, Walmart Jr.

The rest of the heroes had other problems. Attracted by the meaty thump of an orcish frenetic falling to her death, emaciated shapes began shuffling across the bridge. Skeletons — four of them! Just enough to give the combat system its first shakedown in a fair fight against four heroes!

Against three heroes, though, who knows what could happen!

Next week: The rest of the playtest!

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Posted in fluff/inspiration, game design, legacy D&D, news, other systems, play, RPG Hub | 8 Comments »

The Warlord of Ghandor is stuck in a tree!

Friday, February 4th, 2011

Warlord of Ghandor

I was going around in circles inside the tree kingdom! Perhaps this structure in the trees was not empty of life after all. I began to feel that I was being deliberately led from one blindfall to another by someone opening and then closing off behind me one passageway after another.

This is the kind of old-school dungeoncrawling trick that a Gygax-style DM would use.

One reason it’s hard to pull off in recent-edition D&D is that it works best when PCs are mapping. Otherwise it’s harder to get that dawning realization that the PCs are being shepherded forward; you just come to a point when the PCs say, “We return the way we came,” and the DM says “You can’t.”

I’m in favor of the occasional mapping-based dungeon, although a little goes a long way. It does allow for a different suite of DM tricks.

Opening and closing doors in response to PC movement is one of the few ways monsters can frustrate PCs without getting themselves killed. Good for a mastermind-type villain. Be fair to the PCs though: at worst, the PCs should be shepherded into exciting danger, not trapped in a boring dead-end.

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Why Ridiculously High Skills Ranks are Awesome

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

Dude, having super high skill values is super fun in D&D! Here’s why:

  1. It’s great for skill challenges: Having an abnormally high skill value or two is awesome for skill challenges, where you will make a hard DC every time. Some skills, like Perception and Diplomacy, are used frequently in skill challenges making for tons of guaranteed or near guaranteed successes. However, even if a skill isn’t often a primary skill, you can still often find creative ways to work it in.
  2. It’s surprisingly easy: With a good combination of background, race, and primary ability score, you can easily squeeze an extra +4 above an already high skill rank! For example, my level 16 bard is a half elf and took the artisan background to pump his diplomacy from an already high 20 to an awesome 24! With the bard encounter power that adds 5 to diplomacy once per encounter, that shoots up to a 29! And that’s without any item bonuses, which are readily available for a few thousand gold. (more…)

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squintspiration

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

I have an old-style CRT TV, like the Pilgrims used. The lack of high definition is not an obstacle to my normal TV pursuits, streaming Top Gear on Netflix and playing Final Fantasy 1. The only time it’s a problem is when I’m playing modern video games. Nowadays, video game text is optimized for HD, and, I’m convinced, not even tested on a CRT.

The game I’ve had the most trouble with is Dragon Age. Not that its fonts are any larger than, say, Assassin’s Creed: but Dragon Age has so much text. (In Assassin’s Creed, if you can’t read the subtitles, it’s no big deal: you’re like, “Oh no, now I’ll never know what ‘Molto Bene’ means.”)

Not being able to read in a backstory- and stat-heavy game like Dragon Age means that you occasionally equip the dagger that gives +3 to accuracy, thinking it says +8; and you occasionally get some weird ideas about the backstory.

I was startled by one passage in my quest log which declared that “a monumental table stands before you.” That seemed like a bold statement, since I could see that I was in a room containing zero monumental tables. It was like my Quest Log was playing D&D with me, or maybe interactive fiction. Imagine a game where half the gameworld was described in text: you might be fighting three onscreen goblins, and there’s a text caption that says “By the way, there are three more goblins.”

Of course, I had misread the text on the screen, which really set a monumental task before me. A monumental table is more interesting though. ‘Monumental’ suggests an inhuman scale, quite surprising for a piece of furniture. How big is this table anyway? Is it as big as, say, the Washington, DC reflecting pool (2000 feet long)? What would be the possible use of such a table? Maybe there’s some spell that gives a combat bonus to everyone who eats at the same table together, and this table was constructed so that an entire army could share the bonus. (BTW, Hero’s Feast is not a 4e spell yet. Time to introduce it?)

I also misread one of the monster names, “Warden skeleton”, as “wooden skeleton”. Since skeletons are undead creatures, an animate wooden skeleton is an intriguing enemy. Did someone carve a wooden skeleton and then animate it? or did someone’s skeleton turn to wood, and if so, was it before or after they died? Or is it an undead wood nymph?

OK, here’s a strange encounter for you, courtesy of my illegible CRT TV.

A monumental table stands before you, perhaps half a mile long, made of a single slab of marble. The table is surrounded by two or three thousand chairs. In each chair, there sits a slumped skeleton. The skeletons don’t appear to be made of bone; they look like they’re made of… wood?

As you enter the room, thousands of wooden skulls swivel to stare at you.

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

mazes and spells

Monday, January 31st, 2011
This entry is part 22 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

I’m pretty far into my Mazes and Monsters RPG draft by now. When it comes to actually writing, I’m finding that I have to make up a lot of stuff from whole cloth. The Mazes and Monsters movie didn’t do all the work for me.

For instance, I’ve figured out the spell system, but now I actually have to fill out the spell lists. I have a handful of spell names, mostly gleaned from screencaps of Robbie’s and Kate’s character sheets.


Click the picture to enlarge if you want to squint and try to read Robbie’s character sheet.

Robbie’s spells are neatly divided into “spells” and “powers”.

The spells are
invisibility
sleeping potion
stop motion
the Eye of Timor

The powers are
Raise the Dead
Instant Healing
read strange languages

and something that looks to me like

mister mister

but it can’t be, because that is an 80s band, not a spell.

Any other ideas what it could be? Misty Magic? Make Image? Make Maze? Make Movie? (Maybe this explains how Mazes and Monsters got made!)

Kate’s fighter also knows spells!

There’s a thumb in the way, but these spells look to me like

Melts Metal
Freeze Water
Make [tacos]?
Move [stuff]?

The tacos spell seems slightly implausible, because if there was a spell that did that, we’d probably see the gang eating tacos at their game sessions, to “stay in character.”

I’ve decided that spells are divided into three categories: “spells” (available to all characters), “powers” (available only to Holy Men), and “tricks” (mentioned once by Jay Jay, and thus probably available to Frenetics).

Today I’ll try to flesh out the Powers available to Holy Men. I’ll write one spell per level, from 1 to 10.

Instant Healing: Level 1 power. Restores 30 HP.

Healing is the bread and butter of the cleric-type class, so this spell should be available at level 1. 30 points of healing will probably fully heal first- or second-level characters.

Look! Where the light was pointing!


Read Strange Languages: Level 2 power. You can read any written language. The spell ends when you fall asleep.

This Level 2 spell will be less popular than the level 1 healing spell, but hopefully, to compensate, Maze Controllers will put in lots of important foreign-language clues.

Holy Water: Level 3 attack power. The character is able to prepare a number of vials of Holy Water equal to their character level. Anyone can throw these vials as a normal attack. Any undead or demonic creature hit by a vial of Holy Water takes damage with a trait die.

Each Holy Water lasts until the caster falls asleep, at which point it becomes normal water.

This is the first spell I’ve written that has no basis in anything in the movie. I’ll have to do a lot of this, if I want to produce at least 30 spells, powers, and tricks.

One of the problems with low-level spellcasters is that they must hoard their spells while their fighter buddies get to swing swords all day. Inspired by the spell named “Sleeping Potion”, I decided that some attack spells might be pre-combat spells that gave the caster a limited number of pieces of ammunition.

Imagine if D&D’s Magic Missile gave first-level magic-users multiple missiles, which could be spent over the course of the day. It would give 1e magic-users more staying power over the course of the dungeon, without dropping the limited nature of 1e magic.

Full Healing: Level 4 power. Restores a character to their full Hit Point total.

A Holy Man needs a suite of successively more powerful heal spells. I’ve boosted their power relative to D&D, allowing a fourth-level character to fully heal someone, because I think Mazes and Monsters characters can’t count on getting back to town and resting whenever they want.

Seal Door: Level 5 power. Lock a single door. The door requires a RONA to open equal to the caster’s level + 3. If anyone fails this RONA, they may not try again.

You! Shall! Not! Pass!

This spell isn’t referenced by name anywhere in the movie, but I imagine that when Robbie/Pardieux mystically lays his hand on the door of Jay Jay’s Halloween party, he thinks he is casting this spell.

Make Thunderbolts. Level 6 attack power. Creates a number of thunderbolts up to the caster’s level, which are all held in the caster’s left hand. The thunderbolts can be thrown one at a time, and follow the rules for thrown weapons. If a target is hit, it takes Lightning damage. The spell ends when the thunderbolts are used up, the caster lets go of the thunderbolts, or the caster falls asleep.

After a couple of levels of sealing doors and healing, the Holy Man should be ready for a straight-ahead attack spell around now. Lightning seems suitably divine.

Healing Potion: Level 7 power. Creates up to 5 Healing Potions. Anyone who drinks one of these potions is restored to their full Hit Point total.

Each Healing Potion lasts until the caster falls asleep, at which point it becomes normal water.

After giving full healing to Holy Men at level 4, the only way to escalate is to heal the whole party. Because the spell produces potions, the Holy Man is freed from the task of providing in-combat healing – he just hands out potions before the battle starts.

Make Maze: Level 8 power. Allows you to put a creature into the Mazed condition. You must be within throwing distance, but you don’t need to throw anything. You speak up to 20 words: the creature believes whatever you say. For instance, “The other monsters have been plotting to steal your gold!” or “The room is filled with tacos that you must eat before you can attack us!”

As with any Maze, the victim gets an immediate check to escape that Maze. The RONA to escape the Maze is equal to your level.

I decided that make maze was more likely than mister mister.


Fly: Level 9 power. The caster, or another character of his choice, is able to fly for the next hour.

A flying character who takes off from a sufficiently high point (at least 1300 feet off the ground) who flies straight up for the entire hour can reach Heaven.

Robbie climbs WTC because he believes that he can fly to heaven to be reunited with his brother. I guess the extra height of the WTC makes all the difference.

Raise Dead: Level 10 power. Restores a dead person to life, with half of their maximum Hit Points. It only works for a short period after the person’s death; after that, you need to fly to Heaven to find them.

Next time: Playtest!

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Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, game design, legacy D&D, news, other systems, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

cities of Warlord of Ghandor

Friday, January 28th, 2011


This was not like the village of the Bomunga. It was of stone, with tall, tiered structures, ending in rounded tops. … this city was built of a corbeled architecture that all outside structures were built so each successive stone projected beyond the one below it. This gave the city a perfect defense as no human could scale such a wall.

This description of a sword-and-planet city, with out-tilting walls with rounded tops, reminds me of the way that a very, very small person would describe one of those sugar roses on birthday cakes.

icing rosesActually, a giant sugar rose would make a very attractive city. The pastel-pink walls would rise outwards. There would be separate, overlapping sections of walls, like petals. They wouldn’t touch, but between them would be a narrow corridor barred with a city gate.

Also, the book mentions breastworks. I’ve never been exactly sure what breastworks are, but it doesn’t matter, because even if I look it up, I can’t use “breastworks” as a D&D location because my players will snicker. But it got me thinking about how medieval builders added -works to things: it seems to denote a factory, with the added connotation that what was being made was a Work, capitalized. Adding -works onto fantasy words might be a fruitful way to make new locations that sound mechanized, sinister, and possibly slightly German (which might amount to the same thing.)

The Ghostworks.
The Boneworks.
The Soulworks.
The Bladeworks.
The Painworks.

What exactly goes on at the Painworks? I don’t know, but I bet its employees enjoy the music of Trent Rezner.

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the ruin at Henders Farm

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

A treasure map of an ancient city leads you to Henders Farm, where Henders uses the ruined walls of the palace as his field boundary markers. Your map indicates that the entrance to the treasury is under his wheat field, and other interesting sites under his other fields.

Henders wants compensation for a year’s ruined crops before he will let you excavate. 500 gold for the wheat field? 100 gold for each other field you excavate, except 200 for the hay. He needs the hay to feed his animals over the winter. (These prices are double his expected return on his crops.)

Posted in fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

In Search of the Purrfect Villain

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Making a good villain is tough! If you aren’t careful, they can pretty easily die in the first session you introduce them! Sure, you can avoid getting them killed if they only show their face for a few moments before skulking back into the shadows, but if you want your villain to be able to get in the thick of things and properly taunt the PCs there are a few good things to keep in mind:

1. Make Your Villain a Lich: Liches are great! They can relentlessly fight the party over and over again and live to fight another day, even when defeated. Tracking down their phylactery is an exciting adventure unto itself and a delightful prelude to a final encounter.

2. Use a Flying Villain: Dragons, Onis, and humanoids with flying mounts are great. They can stick around in a fight until things start to get rough and then safely escape into the skies! A burrowing villain could do the same thing, but unless your villain is an umber hulk (which would be awesome!) that’s going to be a bit less common.

3. Use a Controller or Artillery: Most controllers and artillery can keep their distance from the fight, which makes it much easier to set up easy escape plans for them. If a Mind Flayer can stay effective while attacking from a balcony that is hard to get to, then it can simply walk away when it tires of the fighting. (more…)

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

character creation: dark elf vs dark knight

Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

D&D characters gain abilities in two ways: by choice and by chance.

In modern D&D, powers and abilities (feats, spells, etc) are generally chosen by the player, out of an ever-increasing set of sourcebooks.

In older D&D, the main special powers were spells, and they tended to be given out randomly or at the DM’s discretion.

Is one approach better than the other? Well, it seems to me that they reward different types of players. I’m tempted to raise the false dichotomy of “Roleplay vs Roll-play”, but I’ll avoid needless use of loaded terms and — nah, skip it! I WILL talk about roleplayers vs. roll-players. I think I may be trolling, guys! Am I doing it right?

In this context, I’ll define role-players as people who primarily choose their powers to support a specific character concept: a dual-wielding dark elf, for instance.

Roll-players are people who primarily choose their powers to make themselves effective in battle: a 3e Batman wizard, for instance.

Let’s see what Batman and Drizzt players do in modern D&D, where players can choose any ability they want out of the infinite universe of character options. The role-players are able to build their concept perfectly. Roll-players, though, quickly learn the “best” combinations and never choose anything else. They actually cheat themselves out of a wide range of character experiences this way.

On the other hand, what if we used a system where powers were assigned randomly, or discovered like treasure? Role-players would be frustrated when their dark elf ranger started accumulating longbow feats, so they couldn’t play the character they wanted to play. Roll-players, though, would be forced to optimize their character within arbitrary constraints, and would get the fun of facing different sets of tactical decisions with every character.

Modern D&D is a pretty crunchy, tactical RPG. Its totally non-random character creation, though, is better for actor-type players than tactical-type players.

In my Mazes and Monsters rules, by the way, I use a hybrid system. Characters choose special abilities from randomly-selected subsets of the available powers. 5e suggestion, guys! Might be a good way to go.

Posted in 4e D&D, game design, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

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