My friend has a blog called Shoot the Sea!, where she writes amusing stories and makes hilarious MS Paint drawings. She has captured the essence of one of the recent encounters I ran for a D&D 4th Edition Campaign I’m running!

Check out the her original post HERE!

I used one of my pieces of advice for running minions in D&D and had 1d4 ogre bludgeoneers rushing in from various hallways each round to dutifully be slaughtered by the PCs, who were fighting an Earth Titan king and his two Hill Giant guards. At this point in the battle, the Earth Titan and one of the Hill Giants had been slain, leaving behind only one Hill Giant, who declared himself the new king! In a desperate fury of revenge, the ogres starting running in at the rate of 2d4 ogres a round! When all was said and done, the party stood over the corpses of 40 ogres, having slain the final hill giant, and leaving the remaining ogres leaderless. The remaining 13 ogres (there were 53 in total to start with) wisely decided to flee and hide.

True to my philosophy of giving out way too much XP, I gave XP for each slaughtered ogre minion. So they got to split over 14,000 XP 5 ways! The encounter overall wasn’t super difficult; the ogres probably ended up increasing the difficulty by 1-2 standard monsters or so, but I think it did a good job of making the PCs feel pretty bad ass. There’s nothing like standing on a mountain of ogre corpses to boost your self esteem. At least, that’s what my father always told me.

Minor Quest: See if you can spot the littlest member of the party, Keeno, a Kobold Rogue!

Dungeonsmaster has an interesting post on avoiding TPKs.

It’s solid advice – build fair encounters; know when to fudge; etc. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether player death — even TPK — is necessarily something to be avoided.

One of my most fun D&D experiences recently was as a player in a near-total party kill. We were fighting an encounter we knew was a little too hard for us; and we chose to roll into it when our resources were low, rather than returning to town and resting. Our DM rolled his dice out in the open; if he was fudging in other ways, we didn’t notice.

It was a close battle. At the end, only our fighter and the enemy boss were left alive. Once he was bloodied, our fighter ran away.

It might be possible for the surviving fighter to slink back and get our bodies for resurrection, but a nice bit of improvisation from the (dead) party cleric provided better closure than that. “I go before my deity, the Raven Queen,” he said, “and tell her about all the blasphemies committed by the atheistic ardent.” [My character, also dead]. “The Raven Queen has the ardent broken upon a wheel of pain for all eternity.”

I joined the improvisation: “Every 1000 years, the Raven Queen visits my character to taunt him as he is being tortured. Every time, my ardent tells the Raven Queen, ‘I still don’t believe you exist.'”

That story pretty much precludes my ardent from ever returning, but not every death needs to be reversible. Similarly, not every fight needs to lead to victory. In this case, we joined battle knowing that we might lose – and we lost. And it was fun.

Instead of avoiding all TPKs, I’d say the DM should make an effort to avoid bad TPKs. Bad TPKs are:

• meaningless. Death at the hands of a major villain may be a tragedy, but a tragedy is still a valid and satisfying story. Death at the hands of some rats in a random encounter may feel like a frustrating negation of story.
• surprising. One of the keys to a fun TPK is that the players know what they’re getting into. In my recent near-TPK, we had warning that the battle was going to be a tough one. We chose to enter the battle because we wanted to take our characters to the limit and see what they were capable of. We could have avoided the battle and come back better-prepared, but we decided to take an extra risk.
• at the beginning of the session. An early TPK is the worst kind. Just as you fire someone on Friday, you should TPK a party towards the end of the scheduled gaming session. If a party is wiped out early on, what do they do for the rest of the session? Roll up new characters? Play Settlers of Catan? Go home early? These are all likely to be disappointing options. Therefore, TPKs should be avoided, if possible, until the last hour or so of the session.

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When a player misses a session, sometimes the best course of action is to make something ridiculous happen! This is often preferable to someone taking over for their character. Just make something wacky happen. You don’t even have to an idea of what will happen to them. Brainstorm that later.

For example, the session before last, one of my players couldn’t make it so I made him disappear in a flash of smoke and light during the combat. It was very exciting. Later the players discovered that he had somehow been transported into one of the Giant Titan’s eyes. After some brainstorming, I came up with this explanation for what the character (a gnome) was up to and emailed it to him:

Hi Sam,

So during the battle with the Giant Titan, there is a flash of light and you find yourself in a small spherical room. You can see the battle going on through a window in the room: your friends struggling to battle ogres and giants.

In the room is a single 6 shot revolver (old west style with a rosewood grip). It is not a weapon you’ve ever seen before but it looks strangely familiar. It has the following note on it: “Your people once crafted weapons like this thousands of years ago. Perhaps this knowledge will aid you in your test. Do not leave your fate to the whims of chance. Pull the trigger twice to rejoin your friends. Good luck!”

There is another slip of paper attached to the first one. It is labeled “A hint to your survival can be found inside. Be warned, however, that you will lose your boon if you open this note.”

You find you can open the chamber of the revolver. There are two bullets in it, one right next to the other.

Suddenly, you feel compelled to pick the revolver and put it to your head. You snap the chamber back in place, spin it, and pull the trigger. There is a single click. You find you cannot open the chamber again. You can either pull the trigger once more or spin the chamber again. Alternatively, you can wait here indefinitely. What do you do?

The riddle in plainer terms is provided here: http://www.bigriddles.com/riddle/russian-roulette-choice

Let me know if you look at the hint and if you outright cheat :).

Guys, the revolver is awesome! It’s an artifact with two bullets in it. I randomly determined what chamber it was on when he first tried to fire it. It’s point and click, so no rolling! If there is a bullet in the chamber, it destroys WHATEVER he points it at. However, solos have a little more beefiness so it takes BOTH bullets to kill them (first one bloodies them). He already used it once to destroy a false god that they were facing, making the combat much easier, so it’s ability to kill ANY god is gone (though getting halfway there isn’t bad). Here’s how I described the revolver to Sam:

Hi Sam,

Here’s how the revolver works:

1. Standard action to fire at a target.
2. The first time you fire it, I randomly determine what chamber it is on.
3. From then on, each shot advances the chamber. Thus, once you’ve shot one bullet, you know the next shot will fire another bullet (since they are next to each other).
4. If you fire a bullet, it is gone forever.
5. Firing a bullet at something is awesome, I promise!
6. You may, if you desire, spin the chamber before firing, in which case the chamber you are on gets reset.
7. You can’t (currently) open the chamber.

The inscription still reads “Two shots will kill any person, god, or beast.”

Good luck!

Feel free to steal this idea, since it is bawesome. Also, if there’s anything of substance you take away from this, it should be that player absences are an opportunity to inject something crazy/fun into a campaign or spin it in a different direction rather than simply a barrier to a fun play experience.

I’ve read in a few places about GMs who keep name lists with them so that at any given moment they can come up with a name on the fly and simply cross it from the list. That’s all well and good, and I’m sure it sounds like another cool way to make the DM’s job easier.

But really, why do that when you can just make up some ridiculous name on the spot? I do it all the time! It’s surprisingly easy and everyone respects you for it!

Some sample names below! I promise I didn’t spend more than 10 seconds on any given name, and if you can’t stall for 10 seconds before dishing out an awesome NPC name, why are you sitting on the other side of the proverbial DM screen to begin with?:

Arthoor Demanche
Littles Fairfoot
Tooro
Shenk Potbelly
Lathers Erranding
Lord Kathos
Boorby
Lampost
Shim Shaw
Tercy Maxwell
Lakespit The Hurt
Bloodcaller Melk
Limples
Serp
Youngings the Earth Melder
Jarcia
Vedrock

Of course, leaving things up to your imagination can have hilarious results, such as two rival NPCs in my world, one of whom is named Lord Veriketh and the other who is named Lord Keth, but hey, that’s D&D!

Interestingly, this also sums up my Strengths + Weaknesses as a DM:

1. Spend like 80% of your prep time making awesome encounters. Spend the other 20% painting broad awesome strokes for your campaign. I’ve been in campaigns where the DM had tons of wheels behind wheels going and it was awesome, but frankly I’m not any good at that stuff. And if 75% of the session is going to be a combat encounter anyway, it better be awesome!

2. Constantly challenge your players with tough fights and moral dilemmas. Be uncompromising, even cruel: I don’t know about you, but when I feel like an encounter isn’t tough, I’m not having any fun, and if I’m putting in, say, 2-3 times more work into a game than my players, i think I deserve to have some fun too.

3. Make a TON of things up on the fly. Just spew the stuff out. Don’t even wait for players to come up with a cool idea necessarily (though that doesn’t hurt); just follow your whims and see where they take you. I do this so much lately its ridiculous. On a whim, I’ll just make up an NPC or mention something crazy that the players can check out. Or if I get the slightest hint that the players want to do something, I’ll grab a few books and scratch together a fight (or even easier, a skill challenge) on the fly. I made up an encounter the other day that nearly sent the PCs 10 years into the future during an important quest and a tense time period in the campaign. It would have been awesome and only didn’t happen because of a few quick dice rolls (See rule #9).

4. FOLLOW THE RULES 100%!: When i say make things up, I don’t mean the game rules. D&D is a game with complicated and interesting combat rules and has plenty of avenues to allow you to do awesome things within the game without changing the rules. I absolutely encourage my players to let me know if I’m doing something wrong and we’ll either look it up right then or I’ll make a judgment call (usually in their favor) and then ask them to look it up while other people take their turns. I like the idea that D&D can be a storytelling game that is also a Chess Match (i.e. a game where everyone knows the rules and tries to gain strategic advantage using them).

5. All NPCs are eccentric. Sometimes an NPC is a bad ass but in a weird eccentric way. In any case, generally NPCs are weird, have weird motivations, try to get under the PCs skins, and generally are trouble. Eccentric characters are easier to roleplay. This is probably more of a weakness than a style choice, but hey, that’s how I roll.

6. World Build World Build World Build: It’s fun and rewarding, especially if you take a no holds barred approach of just filling your bucket of a world with grains of awesome.

7. House Rule: D&D needs houseruling so don’t shy away from it.

8. Kill a PC every so often: If your PC bad mouths a god, go ahead and have him shoot a bolt of electricity right into his face-

9. Rolls Rule: But at the same time, make an attack roll. Even if it has a +50 bonus, make the roll and see if it hits. Then roll out the damage. Even if it’s 30d10, roll it out and see what happens. It’s hilarious to put someone’s fate in the roll of the dice and sometimes the dice pull the game in totally awesome ways.

10. Be whimsical yet cruel: Punish players for being stupid yet give them plenty of opportunities to be stupid in different and fun ways. Reward them when their stupidity pays off. Punish them when they do the right thing and get a few crappy dice rolls. See yourself as that delightful antagonist, always there to clap at their misfortune and curse good naturedly at their success. Delight in everything they do and sincerely congratulate yourself when you engineer their destruction.

I didn’t put in anything there about having fun, because that should be obvious. The goal of everything in life is to have fun or survive long enough to have fun, right?