The Unexpected

Running a game is hard. What I'm finding from trying Storm King's Thunder is a new lesson in difficulty!
I love the book. I think it has wonderful options, I'm a sucker for giants, and the scale is as large as the adversaries. Unfortunately, the scale is enormous, and it has a multitude of options... and it leaves the DM and players to choose them. I knew there were three possible giant attacks on towns to choose from for the second chapter, and expected each to explain the lay of the land, then say "this is what happens when the giants attack." I'm finding there's a big difference between "the giants attack" and "this is how to run the encounter when the giants attack." I was expecting the latter, and the gave me the former.
Just to make things more exciting, I thought we'd have a setup encounter or two this week, then face the town attack at the next session... with time to prepare. Our party bypassed the setup encounters with little incident or fanfare, and there we were in town, being awakened by a screaming drunk who'd seen looters.
I thought, "this was always a possibility, I'll just look over the instructions for running the encounter, and figure out a way to make it work as we go." That's when I noticed the instructions were essentially "the giants attack." Now, there was more to it. The giants attack in three locations, treated as separate encounters, and once two of them are thwarted, the third runs. And so on. But let's get real. This battle is set inside a walled settlement with an 8-10 mile radius from the town to the walls. How do you treat for scale? How do you account for town guards and militia? Do the five character have to defeat all 6 giants, 8 bugbears and 60 goblins, or will the guards help somehow?
I pulled it out, and it seemed to go well, but it felt like it could have been more, but I just don't know how. I tried to prepare encounters for the session, and they were avoided. I expected to have directions on running the printed encounter, and there were none.
That's the essence of running a game, though. Anticipating two or three possibilities and preparing for them in as much detail as you can, so all you need to do at the table is make it happen. Then, when everything goes sideways, scramble to pull something together from thin air and expectations.
This adventure is much more open in concept than I thought it would be, so I need to better prepare beforehand in order to be ready to improvise when called on to do so. That is fine, it's just important to know it needs to happen. I wasn't ready for that this week, but next week I will be. It is a fun setting, with tons of options, and it will be fun exploring them, bearing in mind that prepping will be needed.

Playing Comments

Getting going on Roll 20 is a good idea - this is a chance to start playing regularly. Still seems to take longer than it should - I think a lot of that is just getting used to everything involved. we take a while to get started when we play in person; we're figuring out the logistics of the online site; figuring out the technology, and so on. It should smooth out and speed up with time.

Though even so: it didn't feel as long as it was yesterday. Once we got started, it rolled along pretty nicely. At least, I completely lost track of the time. I was actually surprised when Ryan said we'd been playing for 4 and and half hours - I had to look around, and notice it was getting dark... So we must be doing something right.

I think a big part of it was that main encounter. Probably the reason it took as long as it did, and why I didn't notice the time at all. It did take a long time to play, but for good reasons. We made plans - it didn't seem unusual at the time, but looking back on it, I can't help wonder how long it's been since we made plans before we charged into a fight? I don't know if we ever had the habit, but we've lost it lately. This time, though, we did. Not just plans, but plans aimed at avoiding the usual hack and slash stuff: create a distraction - grab a prisoner... All of which went off, more or less to plan. Not only that, but we used a much deeper pool of abilities than usual - the familiar - the grappling - the distracting spell (instead of the usual attack spells.) Attempts at stealth; critical failures. All very satisfying, especially now that we're done and I can think about it.

Finally - I'm very pleased with my character. I wanted to bring him in here because I want to play a bard, and this party seemed to need one, someone who can cast a little, fight a little, back the others up a little. And I wanted to play Chet Morton, bug gommy farm boy with a sharp tongue and a fondness for pranks.... I took tavern brawler for a feat because I thought it might be funny: Chet tackling people on the battlefield, that kind of thing. But having it, suggested the idea of grabbing an orc - and when we played it: damn - that's a cool ability. Collaring someone and dragging him off across the field? That feat lets you hit (with an improvised weapon or unarmed), then grapple as a bonus. There's no cost to hanging on to someone - so once you have them, you can pummel them, try to push them prone, attack someone else, grapple someone else, cast a spell - it has many applications. It's not a great way to do damage, I suppose - so it might not be so useful for a straight fighter, especially when you are fighting enemies who mean business - but it it a fine way to control the battle field. And the rules are, in fact, pretty straightforward. 5E has been bragging about making those rules usable - they did. And this one - unlike knocking someone prone or disarming them - brings immediate and obvious benefits to you and problems to them. I'm glad I stumbled onto that Tavern Brawler feat...

Mike Mearls on the Rules

I will put this up here: link from the Sage Advice tumbler (collecting D&D rules tweets) summarizing something Mearls' talked about at GenCon. Gist of it: that streaming and such have shifted the emphasis on game design from rules, and what people talk about in online discussion boards, to how games are played at a table.

It's intriguing, partly because of how it marks the changes in game design, but also in how it notes the changes in the internet's culture. Bulletin board-like things favor talking about the rules - how to build characters, how to exploit the rules - I can see that, skim through ENWorld - or back on the WOC forums, a place like Stack Exchange, and so on. People there talk about how to build better characters - not how to make a session flow, how to play an encounter and so on. But watching people play teaches you to play a different way (Mearls says) - true enough.

I am not all in on the new ways: I vastly prefer reading to watching, at least as far as people sitting around a table playing D&D goes - and I like the detailing you had back in 3E, to invent and work out characters. Though as Mearls mentions - that was ideal for inventing and detailing characters when you weren't playing. Playing - most of that stuff fades. If you get to playing right, you can do the things you had a skill check for in 3 without a huge amount of difficulty - you have the flexibility.

Anyway - a very nice summary of what they are thinking about with 5e, and the effects of changes in the internet, and the way people share their games online.

Adventure Ideas

I have a couple, though they need some work. I have ideas for a dungeon crawl involving giants - well suited for the Bono/Milo/Inky crew, a bunch of bruisers as they are... I have some ideas about setting it up that I have to work on as well. I was thinking you could do a lot of background stuff by making up Information Cards - 3x5 cards with a fact or event or rumor or whatever written on them. You collect a bunch of them, then pass them out, when characters do something - when time passes, or they roll a check, or they look for something or ask a question. I think adventures turn into campaigns, and build character personality and so on by building the world around the adventure - building that stuff out is a way to do it. Though in the end - it's all to get that bunch to go fight giants and monsters and whatnot...

Another idea, that might work nicely on Roll20, would be a maritime adventure where everyone starts with Nothing. Basically the idea is - the PCs are all locked in the hold of a ship. They could get there different ways - maybe they are prisoners; maybe they are stowaways. They could be prisoners of pirates, they could be pirates themselves, they could be passengers on a ship, etc. The idea though would be that the ship they are on is taken by pirates - then caught in a storm, and abandoned by the crew, leaving the PCs trapped in the hold/brig etc. With no gear, no tools of their own, etc. They would have to get out of the hold, deal with whatever is left on the ship, maybe get to shore before it sinks, etc., while collecting the equipment they would need to operate.

That would be the starting point: once underway, it could stretch out into a full maritime themed adventure. Fighting pirates and sea creatures, searching for the people who locked them up maybe, getting involved in whatever intrigues they find. I think it has potential...

New Dropbox files

I finally had a good breakthrough with my Character records for Filemaker, so I uploaded the files to Dropbox.

I figured out how to filter spells by class and level.

Upcoming Giant Path

The Rod of Seven Parts. Is this something from the new book, or just something from Acquisitions, Inc.? It sounds like something that would fit with the story as previewed, and certainly would fit with an element I've been working on, so maybe we could use it. It would give us an element to design around in anticipation of the book. It would also give us an item to work into (as separate pieces) each of our adventures. And, a reason to bring the separate groups together down the road. 

Dropbox folder with useful files

I've finished combining spell card decks into one big file. I've put it on Dropbox with other files I've set up: a form-fillable PDF character sheet; the master spellbook; and individual class spell deck files. Anyway, the link is below if anyone is interested. I use documents to go to put the pdfs on my phone. The spellbook file works great there (its better in Adobe Reader, but you can open it in Reader once it is on the phone). I've got bookmarks in it for level and individual spell (alphabetically).

Dropbox folder link

Map Inventory 2

Not a bad idea: so here goes.

Paizo Flip Maps:

Bigger Tavern (Just broke down and bought this - very neat)
Ancient Dungeon
Thornkeep Set (2 maps: Enigma Vaults/Dark Menagerie & Forgotten Laboratory/Sanctum of a Lost Age)
Bandit Stronghold
Pathfinder Lodge
Town Square
Slum Quarter
Village Square
Red Light District
Seedy Tavern
Warehouse
Watch Station
Thieve's Guild
Monastery
Deep Forest
Pirate Island
Pirate Ship
Mountain Pass
Swamp

D&D Maps:
Shattered Keep set (3 flip maps)
Haunted Temples (3 maps)
Market Square/Griffen's Roost Inn
(Plus a couple of the real old ones, though I don't know where I put them.)

Map Packs - I have a lot of these, but they are all mixed up - not easy to inventory them. I know I have these:
Sea Caves
River System
Lost Island
Ambush Sites
Shops
Boats and Ships
Wizards Tower
Waterfront
(And a couple more I think...)

Other Sets:
Legend of Drizzt tiles
4 of the D&D Dungeon Command board game sets - Sting of Lolth, Heart of Comyr, Blood of Gruumsh & Tyranny of Golbins
2-3 of the tile sets: The city one for sure; probably Shadowghast manor; everything else is too jumbled to know what's there...

Map inventory

I've started a list of the maps I've got, so that maybe I won't keep trying to buy the same one. For Flip-Mats, we have Pirate Ship, Pub Crawl, Hill Country, Warehouse, Cathedral, Waterfront Tavern, Theater, Dungeon, Bandit Outpost, Flooded Dungeon, River Crossing, Wastelands, and Darklands.
I also have 7 Map Packs downloaded, Ancient Forest, Jungle, Boats & Ships, Waterfront, Magic Academy, Lost Island, and Dungeon Chambers. We also have two actual decks, Sea Caves and Graveyard.

Dungeon Masters Guild

I can't pretend that this isn't interesting, though I don't really know what it means: Dungeon Masters Guild announcement.

And the site: Dungeon Masters Guild.

And Open Game License updates as well.

Monster Etiquette

I've been thinking about play testing parts of the adventure I'm working on, and wondered about what approach a "monster" would take in a fight. They could be given any motivation, I suppose, but it struck me that they probably work better if they are more aggressive, hitting hard early.

I was really thinking about NPCs, and how they might be run differently than PCs. As a PC, there is a tendency to be conservative about powers, like spells and special abilities. We try to hang on to them, waiting for an optimum time to use them, or the right level of fear or desperation to strike. But if you run an NPC that way, with the quickness of most battles, you're likely to leave powers out there unused. It seems more likely that they'll blast you right off with a fireball, then run down their list doing as much damage as they can. It might be more logical for them to play like a PC, make defensive moves, wait for the right opportunity to exploit, but what fun is a Wizard NPC that dies without blasting off its carefully prepared spell list.

I guess there would be reason to be selective if you intended to use the character as a recurring NPC, but even then, unless you wanted to use it over and again during the course of one day, you could reload it however you wanted anyway between uses. It's hard to envision a situation where you wouldn't just let the party have everything you had from round one.

One balancing factor should be that a party of NPCs should match pretty evenly with a party of PCs, making them more difficult to overcome than an ordinary "monster" and allowing the fight to draw out, but they don't seem to play out that way often. I don't know if it is a question of mismatched party strength, say four 3rd level characters against three 2nd level NPCs, or underdeveloped NPCs, but my sense is that they resolve about as quickly as any fight. I think we have a tendency to fear harming our characters, and so underplay encounters to protect them from death or severe damage. I noticed myself being tempted to do this with Thomas' character, and had to remind myself that going to zero HP isn't fatal, it is unconsciousness.

Perhaps pulling the stops would open up the need for PCs to pull the stops on themselves as well, gobbling up resources to survive the fight and come out on top. That poses an interesting question: what if we ran a party of PCs against their own doppelgängers to see just how explosive a battle could be had? Prep potions, scrolls, etc., go in full on, and do everything to survive while destroying the opponent. We note how brief fights tend to be, but what if you had a balanced set of opponents, using every available resource to fight as long a battle as possible? How long could it go? How would it look after the typical two or three rounds?