The Gaming New Year 2026

Happy new year, gamers! I am a bit horrified to see it has been a complete year since I have posted anything here - New Year recap posts seem to be all I can manage these days. Well - I had better post a recap then.

2025 was an awful year in a lot of ways. It was not awful for my gaming life, but it was not a very good gaming year. There was a triumph of sorts - the endless Icewind Dale game I was in finally ended. It ended with a big fight against the Frost Maiden that a couple of us fought while the rest fought a couple minions of hers - an NPC turned on the party, adding a twist - but it ended. By the end, I think we were all getting tired of it - we were glad to see the end of it. It was a tough one to get through, but we got through it - there were a few times I was not sure I was going to show up in two weeks. I did though. It's done. We followed that ump with a homebrew campaign one of the players ran - that lasted to the fall, then ended, as Real Life took out the DM, and the rest of us gave up. That was a surprisingly entertaining campaign, though he definitely overcooked it. We played it with 2024 rules, the first time most of us had used them - but he home-brewed the heck out of it beyond that, creating a game with very few stakes. Combats were easy and boring/entertaining, all flash and excitement, but nothing to do with the stories - literally - most of the combat was somehow outside the story. A gladiator pit, an extra-planar puzzle, or just throwaway encounters. The main thread was a mystery, which was very enjoyable, but probably insoluble, involving time travel and wild magic and NPC backstories - but I still found it very satisfying, for D&D. Unfortunately, when he dropped out, we all broke if up - though that was the end of the year, it might get revived. But after 6 1/2 years, the group is done.

The other D&D game went as expected. When Netherdeep ended, we went back to the Saltmarsh campaign we'd played before, with a different DM. We swapped in a couple new characters, we switched to 2025 rules, we tried for a while to play on Talespire, but couldn't make it work, so it was back to Roll 20. It ended as that DM's first campaign ended, in a total party wipe, this time by sahuagin - monsters who outnumber you, get multiple attacks, and can give themselves advantage all the time are a recipe for dead PCs. This time he did not exactly kill us - we are, officially, in limbo as prisoners of the Sahuagin - but we gave up the game for something else. Specifically, Eye of Vecna (if that's what it's called) - the high level, plan hopping last blast adventure path from 2014 D&D - which should give him plenty of chances to finish us off again. Don't think I am complaining - I have said before, this is a great group, and his games have just enough of that old fashioned Better Have a Backup Ready 1983 vibe to satisfy my inner college student, while maintaining the other things possible in D&D. This one promises a lot of entertainment. Even if it is D&D - we are getting bastions!

That is about all the D&D I care about. We did play the Icespire Peak starter set at home, with 2024 characters - nice little game, though we all got initiative on the dragon, and it never even got to breathe. That game too had a very 1983 vibe - not bad, kind of empty. That DM has been making noise about running again - I hope so, I am not going to run D&D, and it is fun to scratch that itch. We'll see.

All these games have given me enough experience with 2024 D&D to offer some conclusions - what do I think? Well - honestly - I don't see the point of it. It's 5E but slower and fiddlier and full of things you have to lookup or forget that don't really add anything to the game. It's not hard to transition, and has some interest, but most good things come with side effects, and overall, it just doesn't seem to matter. At its worst, it evokes too much of 4E, with its board game system and its array of abstract powers. It has some nice stuff in there that might have made good homebrew to 2014, but there is very little point in it. Granted, I am tired of all forms of D&D - so it's hard to really care what flavor we're playing. If I cared, I might like it more - though more likely, I would be lobbying to play Shadowdark.

So that was D&D. I don't know why I keep putting that up at the top - it hasn't been at the top of my gaming year for a couple years - this will probably be the last time. So let's move on.

To my shame, though - D&D might have been the most played RPG this year. We had a Traveller campaign going at the end of last year, but that is where it stopped. That one yielded some great scenes - but that was the last we played the game. That basically leaves Call of Cthulhu, which has been the primary home game for a couple years - we played it, mostly Gaslight - a slow burn investigation campaign that has been entertaining but sometimes harder to handle than any big blowout dungeon crawl thing. It's been sitting for a month or so - we're getting to the pointy end, and since it is homebrew, I have to get the kettle on. 

Beyond that - I got a few new games: Daggerheart; we got a couple of the Outgunned books; I have the Age of Vikings game from Chaosium - there could be more. We haven't played any of them, or even made up characters - kind of unusual. 

We did, however, play a zombie apocalypse one shot for Halloween, using the Alien system, though with the science fiction stripped out. It was very effective - it is a great horror game, and adapts well even to high action ideas like zombies. We maintained its atmosphere of regular joes in trouble, scrambling for weapons and trying to stay alive and functional - this one featured a contractor truck, with machetes and hammers and power tools and screwdrivers and even a blowtorch - then a general store with an infected shopkeeper with a shotgun, various weapons locked up behind the counter, and a chain saw - and, well, swarms of zombies, including a few old friends. It was a blast. Most of the PCs went insane and were out of action, so the party was basically saved by a 12 year old on a bike, who found the cop's pistol (the cop was curled up in a fetal position whimpering) and took out a zombie or two. Happy times!

But as you can see - I didn't play any new RPGs, and the only way I can claim we hit four total again is by making up Traveller characters. And all games? that's better - I am pretty sure I hit 5 new ones (Wingpan, Flame Craft, Boss Monster, Age of Comics - and some kind of cat lady game, I can't remember the name of), and definitely played 10 over all - the RPGs and those, plus the usual suspects - Catan, Ticket to Rude (at least three variations), Carcasonne, Terraforming Mars, Hearts, Poker, dominoes, Aggravation, Clue - plenty. 

And for the coming year? same as the last couple - get to five RPGs if I can; play at least some new ones. Play five new games total and at least 10 over all - should make it. I have to get my Gaslight campaign in playing shape; I have an idea for t Traveller scenario to run, which I should be able to do; hopefully someone will run those games, and something else - we might get another D&D game in. Should make it.

That answer post once in a while. Once in a while, not once in a year. You would think.

Have a good one, folks! May your crits be spectacular and your fumbles be funny!

 

On With the Games!

Hello world. I have been idle here for a long time - I am going to try to change that, but I promise myself that every year, so we shall have to wait and see. Lewt us look back at 2023 and forward to 2024 and games, games games games!

This has been an eventful year in the wider gaming world. Hasbro/WOTC have dominated the news, almost all for the worst. They started the year with that OGL Debacle - got smacked around hard, so backed off. Everybody won, right? Anyway, they did not stop with that. They held a "creator summit" in the spring and pissed off everyone they did not invite and then pissed off the people they did invite. Nothing much has come of that since. They sent Pinkertons after someone who accidentally received some magic cards. They published AI art in at least one book. They laid off hundreds of people across the company, both from the unprofitable Hasbro parts and the money making WOTC parts. They alienated a lot of people. There were better moments - the D&D Movie came out, made enough money to let anyone read anything they wanted into the results, but generally seemed to please the fans. Then Baldur's Gate 3 came out, was a smash success - though that was not WOTC, directly. But they will take it, I imagine. Meanwhile, they have a new version coming out - which isn't really a new version - I don't know. I don't know - that started all right, but got less interesting with every release, and after the OGL crap, I stopped caring. Does anyone care anymore? I don't see people talking about it all that much - though that may have more to do with YouTube's algorithms than whatever people are talking about. But it does not seem there is a lot of excitement for this thing.

Other things, however - maybe. Matt Colville's MCDM company has a game coming sometime, which is raking in the dough at its crowd funding site. Kobold Press has a game coming, Tales of the Valiant, which made money at Kickstarter and might show up sometime. The Critical Role people have a game coming - Daggerheart - a 2d12 game! They put another game out this year, Candela Obscura, a kind of Victorian to WWI horror game, that was not received with open arms. Paizo has been active, making up their own version of an open gaming license, then revising Pathfinder to get rid of all traces of the OGL. Can any of these actually knock D&D down a peg? None fo them will probably be able to do as much harm to WITC as WOTC can. Time will tell. But people do seem willing to try other things. 

That can serve as our transition! MY year in gaming! What did I play?

The same two D&D campaigns from last year - Icewind Dale and Call of the Netherdeep. The first continues to hit its biweekly schedule, the latter continues to start and stop maddeningly. The first has occasionally become unbearable this year, though I grin and bear it; the latter is a boring campaign, but an excellent table. That is all the D&D I have touched this year, unless you could making up Tales of the Valiant characters. 

At home, we have managed to get in quite a bit of Call of Cthulhu. A good run on an Egyptian tomb raider inspired game. A few sessions (mostly a haunted house) in our Ghosts of Bayport campaign. And a one shot from Nameless Horrors - which was itself a blast. The party outdid itself, setting fire to the town hall, a scientists house, a church, two cars and a couple houses near the cars, while somehow surviving (at one point, one character was in a coma, two others had 1 hp left, and they were all still trying to cross town to escape, and could not roll a stealth check to - literally - save their lives.) 

We also managed to get in a couple Traveller sessions - character creations, about half of the High and Dry scenario. Not as much as we would have wanted, but we got it in.

Finally, I got to play the Alien RPG - and then got it under the Christmas tree. So more of that coming. That is a great game, I have to say - probably ideal for one shots like I played - but very cool.

And we played around with the Marvel RPG, with Tales of the Valiant and Basic Role Playing, though none of those were full sessions. Still - that's a nice haul of games.

All right. 2024 is here. I think I will wrap this up while I still have things I want to say - maybe I wil come back to say them later! And I think I am going to make some resolutions, foolish though that might be. Still - here you go.

1) Play five different RPGs. I got 4 this year - D&D, Cthulhu, Traveller and Alien; I wiull surely play D&D and Cthulhu this year; Traveller is mostly a matter of getting a scenario together; I will definitely run Alien as soon as I can. One more: what will it be? Most likely Basic Role Playing - though that strikes me as most useful as a supplement for Pulp Cthulhu, which is my preferred game. Still - I have options: I picked up a bunch: Rivers of London, Pendragon starter set, Vaesen, Righteous Blood, Rithless Blades - I have Paranoia, Blades in the Dark, Monster of the Week, Cyberpunk Red sitting there, waiting. I think I can hit this mark.

2) Play a total of five new games - thought his can be any game, and I'd be freer with what counts as "playing." Last year I hit Alien, the Marvel game, Tales of the Valiant, BRP - plus Terraforming Mars, Mysterium - that's 6 I can think of. I think I can do that this year - just making up characters in a couple of the games on the shelf, maybe buying a couple new board games - should be easy!

3) And finally - post here on this damned blog! I say this almost every year and don't do it - the last time I hit a post a month was 2015 (ouch.) The last time I almost hit it was 2018 - thanks to 5 posts in January about an upcoming campaign. Ouch. Still - I am optimistic - foolishly? We'll see. Some of this comes down to playing those other games,a nd writing about those experiences - so - put it down, and see where we get to. I have another post in my head at this very moment! will I post it this month? We shall see! Good night and have a happy new year!

 

State of Playing

Ladies and Gentlemen, here we are, 2023. Another year in the books, and time, I suppose, to cast an eye backwards, regarding the games played and posts written and all else game related. Which this year I suppose should start with lamentations re lack of posts - I mean - 2? That is sad. I have things to say! Heavens.

All right. State of play from 2022:

We participated in 4 ongoing campaigns. The Icewind Dale game continues apace, every Thursday, the group now has maintained that schedule since 2018; we'll hit 5 years soon. We kept it up through the pandemic (online) and have survived a good deal of turnover, and are still at it. For all that, I can't say it has been an unqualified success - some of those WOTC adventure paths are troublesome. Wander in the wilderness for 5 levels, then catch the train to the end - or don't catch the train, and wander pointlessly - yeah. Blame WOTC. Add in some murder hoboing and things can go sideways. But it goes. It managed to generate some decided high points - a wild mage rolling the 01 and surging for a minute straight in the middle of a fight; two of us dimension dooring on top of a dragon to attack it; in a later fight, the same two dimension dooring into a bucket with a mad Duergar, who we then dumped into his own forge. Also, using rust monsters as blowtorches to get through an iron door - and the wild mage summoning a unicorn. It's had its moments. 

The Saltmarsh game reached an interesting stopping point, a massive fight that promised total party wipe but did not deliver, and then the DM decided he wanted to play, so we are playing Call of the Netherdeep now. The group is a good one, but the game is a slog, and I can't bring myself to care about Critical Role and its offshoots. And Sundays are harder to keep clear than Thursdays - this one is very hard to keep on a schedule. If Sundays are hard, Saturdays are even worse, so though the Tomb of Annihilation game has had some good stretches again this year, it has also disappeared for 6 months at a time. We have been playing that adventure path since 2018 - we've gotten through about 2/3 of that one book. Yikes. Still - the Saltmarsh game gave us an epic battle with a water elemental that we survived from the sorcerer making three straight strength saves and the druid rolling a 20 on her death save. That was fun.

And that is all the D&D we have played, other than poking the play tests. This year has been given to other games. We played Traveller a lot at the beginning of the year, learning it, and a bunch of the elements that can go into it - but then got interested in Call of Cthulhu. We started that one playing some impromptu scenarios, but found some cool characters and a scenario, and ran a decent campaign for a few weeks. More Hardy Boys than Lovecraft so far, but very entertaining, with some great characters, some nifty situations, and a string of torched cars. (In this game and others we have in fact managed to ignite a stalled truck, a wrecked car, another wrecked car, after someone tried to run us off the road and succeeded and running everyone off the road. We probably should stop trying to push drive auto rolls and mechanical repairs.) his went along fine, until One D&D came out - that interrupted us, and since a lot of it was improvised, kind of stalled it out completely. Still: we've played a couple other scenarios and are about to set forth on a tomb-raiding adventure in Egypt (very Pulp Cthulhu, I have to say), so this is going well.

And? We played around with Cyberpunk Red, making characters anyway, and looked over a few other games (Monster of the Week, for instance.) But haven't played them.

Okay. So back to the monster in the room, D&D, One D&D, WOTC and Hasbro ha ha! Well - it's the monster in the world; here, not so much. We are playing those ongoing campaigns - but those are mostly outside the house. At home, we have barely touched D&D. We played a couple fights, and when the playtests started, we dove in. But their returns have diminished. The first one, we downloaded and rad and argued about and made up characters and played them through two or three scenes, and hashed out the results and waited desperately for the survey and filled it out and waited for the next batch of rules - and waited - and waited. When they finally came out, we downloaded, read, argued, played, analyzed and when the survey came out, filled it in - and got more and more annoyed at the whole process. Way too long between rules releases, surveys that left out major rules changes, and just general drabness about the whole affair.

In the wider world, it seems people have stopped caring all that much about the rules and are more interested in arguing about the OGL and the prospect that Hasbro might want to make money on the game. And how they might try to make money on the game. That is a subject I could have opinions about, but I don't know if I do. What I have seen doesn't seem all that awful - a new OGL that charges for anyone making above a certain amount on their derivative products - that's not angst inducing. On the other hand, WOTC's reassurances that the OGL doesn't cover things like Roll20 are not as reassuring as they sound. That means Roll20 has its own license, one that can be revoked, presumably - right? So even if the OGL remains, there's no guarantee that you will be able to play D&D online anywhere other than D&D Beyond. That seems like madness, but who knows? 

None of it is likely to matter to me, not for a while. At the moment, I am not keen on playing D&D at all. When I am, I have all these old books and can play them to my heart's content. If those outside games don't switch, I guess I won't switch. 

Still... let me end on a more positive note. At the core of One D&D is in fact a new system. And so far, as far as I can see, it is fine. Will it be backward compatible? WOTC likes to say it will - probably in the end, it will diverge enough that people will likely choose between them. Right now, though, the new version looks like a collection of house rules - some better, some worse than what exists now, nothing to either force you to change or make you refuse to change. I don't know if that will last - or if it can last. WOTC will need people to buy new books to make this worth while. They will need to give you a reason to play the new game, to spend money on new stuff, and a bunch of somewhat more extreme versions of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything might not do it. But when the new stuff comes I don't think it is going to ruin the game. Even the digital stuff is not likely to ruin everything - Hasbro will find ways to make more money, and if there is money to be made, they will get it, and if other companies can get it too, they will pay their licensing fees, and everyone will - do what they will do.

As for me? This year, I expect to play mostly Pulp Cthulhu - at least to run Pulp Cthulhu. I'll keep playing the D&D I am playing now, maybe less enthusiastically, but it's still fine. And if anything interesting comes along from WOTC, I might give it a try. But right now, I think I need to work on some ancient Egyptian horrors for the crew to run into. 

Getting Things Moving

Things have bogged down in the RPG world. This blog is bogged down, but that's not new - but my actual gaming has been a lot thinner than it has been in a while. The outside games are going fine - the Princes of the Apocalypse group has moved on to Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden - which has so far been very entertaining. The other group (overlapping with that one) is playing a heavily home brewed Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign - which is also quite entertaining. We have not yet died - though it got very close, when we took on a water elemental and three electric eels in an interdimensional space involving the plane of water - everyone going to 0 at least once, 3 characters at 0 at the crucial moment and the sorcerer alone with 1 hp fighting the elemental, and having to make strength saving throws to survive - and doing it! Then the druid rolled a 20 on a death save - the second time she did that in the encounter - yeah... that kind of game. But if you're going to have boss fights, they might as well be boss, and that one was most epic indeed. So we have been playing....

But the home games have not been going so well. We played that heist back in the winter; we played to a reasonably stable point in the Desert Campaign - which involved a massive spic battle of its own, which turned on the cleric thunderwaving a necromancer off a balcony, and the DM (me) not noticing that he had a ring of feather falling. Still: even then, it took the fighter rolling a critical hit on his action surge attack after using his last luck dice to reroll a failure - though that ended the necromancer rightly! All that stuff was quite fun - but we have barely played anything since.

I am not sure why. I have had very little inspiration to try to work up something to play. At least for D&D. We did try some Traveller - that proved very entertaining, but has been on hold lately (mostly for NaNoWriMo, to be honest, as two of us were doing that). We should be able to get back into it soon - though it's harder than it looks. It's a neat system, but it takes some effort to learn a new game, and gear up to play it - it's taking longer than it should. We made up a ton of characters - and Traveller has by far the most entertaining character creation system I have found, even if you can't die in character creation anymore - and played a few basic fights, to get the feel for it. We played one scenario - High and Dry - which was great fun, and seemed to work quite well. (And was the source for the Saltmarsh campaign I started up a couple years ago - same plot - retrieving an abandoned ship...) But that is all. Once we're through the holidays, we should get back to playing - I certainly hope so. When we do, I expect it will be Traveller.

This has been a strange lull. There haven't been a lot of external factors causing it - other than NaNoWriMo, we've been getting together regularly, playing around with things. This is more a lack of - something. The main issue is that no one has come up with anything to run - everyone's willing to play, no one knows what to run. Speaking for myself - this is odd. Some of it is that the campaigns we were playing are either at points where I have to do substantial work to get them moving again (that's the Desert Campaign, or the Waynesburg campaign, mainly) - or campaigns that were always a bit more theoretical than actual, like my Saltmarsh game. I haven't got the bug to work on these things. I don't know why.

Though playing around with Traveller might drop some hints. That was very inspirational - and tended to make D&D seem stale. I think I am just tired of D&D - in a sense. Not in the sense of not wanting to play D&D - but in the sense of wanting to do something different. I have posted here before about skill based games, and played around with less combat heavy D&D games - so this has been in my mind for a while. Traveller scratches that itch - it opens up different kinds of games and scenarios, skills, and social and investigative stuff, exploration - things that are harder in D&D. It also has systems for things that are not very well done in D& D at all - trade and travel and keeping a ship running and everything else in there. It's appealing. 

The biggest problem it has is that I am not a particular science fiction fan. I like SF - but it's not as deep an enthusiasm as fantasy, or - especially - westerns, detective stories, history and wars and such are. It makes it harder to come up with what to do - and harder to build a world. Which means somewhere along the line we might have to try out Call of Cthulhu. Because the 1920s are definitely a period I am very enthusiastic about. I love the books, movies, comics of the era - everything from the Hardy Boys to Dashiell Hammett to Universal Horror films to Warner Brothers gangster films and melodramas to Terry and the Pirates and Captain Easy to Raiders fo the Lost Ark - to Lovecraft, though horror is not my favorite part of it. Which is one reason we haven't gotten into Call of Cthulhu - the horror is not the appeal. But playing the Hardy Boys? or The Continental Op? That would be cool.

Anyway. This is a mild lament over a case of burn out. Not a fatal burnout - I imagine 5hings will start moving again in the new year. But something. And as the most promising answer to it is to branch out into other games - might prove interesting in the long run.

Braving the Elements

I come back here today to report something very momentous: we have finished a campaign! We have been playing Princes of the Apocalypse, starting at a game store, moving online when the Plague hit, playing on roll 20 since. This started in May of 2018. It ended this week.

It's been a long ride. We started by showing up at a game store, finding 6 or 7 people already there, all ready to roll initiative. The two of us had ideas for characters, but found that there were a couple of each of the things we were going to play already in the group, and no one had bothered to make either a cleric or a wizard, so we took up the burden. I made a cleric; Jim made a wizard. We were used to the classes, we made the characters in the time it took to fill out a sheet, and off we went. 

I got extremely lucky - I had wanted a nimble fighter, and decided to make a nimble cleric instead. I made him a pirate, and wanted a class that let him use rapiers - tempest did that. That made sense for a sailor, I thought, so there you go. Then - a couple sessions into the game - I discovered what tempest clerics could do. I read Wrath of the Storm. I could do 2d8 lightning damage whenever I got hit? Ah - I get it! We've mentioned backstories here a couple times - this is one of the things that sometimes gets overlooked. It makes as much sense to find your backstory in your abilities as to make it up before you pick class and feats and all that. I had an idea who Josef was - he was an NPC I'd pulled in from a campaign idea I had (that I later wrote up as a Nanomo project) - a priest who was captured by pirates and either imprisoned or went over the the pirates. But when I discovered the features of tempest clerics - it hit me: he was a priest who went over to the pirates, then was struck by lightning, like Sam Shakusky - and survived, but gave off sparks, like Sam. Character. Great power, that came from a random bit of trauma, and he has no real clue how it is supposed to work. Being a priest already, he assumes some god chose him for something.... I remember in the early days the DM nagged me for a deity - I waffled for weeks. Partly because Forgotten Realms deities don't interest me - but also because the point of the character was that he got some of these powers from something completely outside his normal experience (even as a cleric.) The tempest stuff I tended to think of as almost a sorcerous power, something mysterious and uncontrollable. He eventually settled on a god, Valkur, mostly because his symbol featured neat lightning bolts.

Anyway. That's Josef. At the beginning this game had 7-8 players, with some fluctuation, as people came and went. It was fun, but that's a big table - and a couple of them were jackasses, and it took a while to weed out the twits. And even people who weren't so bad, took some time to fit in, and some soured and grew nasty over time, and so we shed a few members, added a few, and so on, until COVID hit. Playing online brought it down again - a couple people didn't make the switch, or dropped out; and then others - well, self-immolated. A bit of inter-party strife may have occurred, something that is a bit rare in modern D&D. But in the end - it kept going, and we worked our way from cult to cult and murdered cultists and priests and prophets and in the end, a couple gods, and won, and got to sail away into the sunset. Something like that.

Anyway: now it's over. That means we can finally start a long promised Rime of the Frost Maiden Campaign. 

It's something to note though. This is the first campaign I have ever finished. Which might be a bit less impressive than it sounds, since for most of my D&D playing life, we have thought in terms of dungeons and adventures, not campaigns. Even things that had some arc to them (an early campaign that started fighting orcs, then giants) were really conceived as their own things - a story within the overall game. Not a full campaign. Before this - we did try Storm Kings Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation, and made good progress on both - but neither is anywhere near the ending. And as my year end round ups might indicate - we have a lot of things started and underway but in limbo. It's not as bad a thing as it sounds - we've always assumed open endedness in this game - but still.

Finishing? Very nice. On to the frozen wastes (with that group)! That should be fun too. And back in person, as an added bonus. Good times indeed.

The Borrowed Book

Well - three months have passed... I wish I could say I have been so busy playing and something that I couldn't find time to blog - that would be a lie. What might be worse is that I have had two or three posts percolating in my head for a while, but just haven't had the energy to put them down. Sad. But this is not a post about sadness, this is a post about a game we played a while back.

I've been wanting to work up games in urban settings - we've managed to play a few bits in cities through the years - I should name the games we play. The Bard's Pants! Where in the World is Narvy? Trolls in the Sewer! Those are all urban adventures, a couple different kinds - The Bard's Pants was a kind of infiltration game - a trio of lowly thieves were tasked with breaking into a house and retrieving the pants a bard had left behind, preferably without being spotted. They did it - it was great fun! Where is Narvy was a different group of characters, three "detectives" sent from somewhere far away to Waynesburg to track down Narvy, a prodigal son, a university student gone bad. They came to Waynesburg and had to track Narvy down there - they did, eventually, and now they are about to find out why he went missing. Well - that's where we left the story a year and a half ago. Trolls in the sewer had the plot you would expect, and was more of a combat oriented game. Anyway.

This year, I conjured up another one - a heist scenario. Something simple - we have never really played a heist game, and were not sure how well it would work, so I made a very simple one. Used the three thieves from the Bard's Pants - gave them a simple assignment, involving breaking into a warehouse. The story was: an old man died, an old collector of stuff; his family removed all his belongings and stuck them in a warehouse until they could go through them and see if he had anything valuable; he may or may not have owned anything valuable - but when he died, he had a very valuable book, locked in a chest in his flat. None of his relatives know about it, but another old book collector does. The old man did not own this book - he borrowed it - but his relatives don't know that, either. The other book collector needed to get it back before they found it - he hired the adventurers to retrieve the book from the warehouse without letting anyone know that it was ever there. I wanted a simple McGuffin, something that would not really tempt them to steal it, but could give them something to think about if they wanted to, so a strange printed book it was - it worked out pretty well.

So they set about the task. I kept it simple - I set up the locations, the warehouse and the shops around it, drew some maps and set up the likely figures they could find, tried to just describe it, and let them figure out how to get in. They latched on a couple ideas - one, to rent space in the warehouse to case it, then come back and find the book; the other to go in through the sewers which connected to spaces under the warehouse. They did both - cased the place, making up an elaborate story about a traveling magic show; then sneaking in through the sewers and cellars at night. They knew there was a trap door from the cellars to the warehouse - they did not know it was chained down! That led to some scrambling to figure out how to continue, and some shenanigans inside. But in the end, they accomplished the mission without getting caught or starting a fight or anything. Success!

This was, I will say, a complete blast. We played it in three sessions. The first one was outstanding - it felt slow when we were playing, since they spent a lot of time talking in circles, coming up with elaborate schemes to get in, then after a lot of them, going and interacting with people at the warehouse, at neighborhood merchants and passers by, with a bookseller who could explain the book they were supposed to be retrieving. It felt slow, but it was also a huge relief - just walking around, talking to people, being able to spin yarns and characters on the spot, spill exposition and history, have them make up their own schemes and personae and all the rest - it was a joy. 

The second session didn't go as well. One of the players kept falling asleep - that didn't help. they also kept splitting up, one or two of them going off on their own, so there were quite a few times I'd end up running something for 1 or 2 people for half an hour, then switch to the other one, with the others left out. That can be a problem, and probably worse when their missions are as open ended as they were - the second session was mostly exploring around the warehouse, looking for secret entrances and so on.

But the third session made up for it. They made their final plan, then went in through the sewers, they found the door locked - it took a while to figure out how to get it open. Once they did, they found themselves in the warehouse along with the guards and some fops having a party. They snuck around and bluffed the guards and managed to get the book and run, though one fo them was trapped in the place. But he played drunk, and the guards were pissed at the partiers so they ignored another drunk, so he was able to get away without making trouble. Success!

It makes me want to resurrect the more elaborate urban adventure we started last year. (Where in the World is Narvy?) I find it very refreshing to have to interact with a city - as DM, it's great fun, though a ton of work - creating settings, people, events, and so on, then playing these things. It is a very welcome relief from the more common dungeon crawl style game we tend to play. Being able to devote the session to talking, planning, sneaking around, doing things, learning things, whatever it is, without fighting everyone, is a great relief. It's different, a different way of thinking, and it helps, it's good for you. It in inspiring - it makes you want ot find other ways to play in different kinds of games.

All right: I will end this with a few observations on running this kind of scenario. Not htat I am an expert - but I noticed these things:

1) For a heist game, you have to build a situation that let's you play this way. It has to be simple, flexible, and you have to build the setting, the place. The goal, the location, the obstacles have to work together, and they have to be flexible enough to accommodate what the players come up with. You have to create the problem for them to solve. This one was very simple - but I think you can scale it up, in size and complexity, with some practice. 

2) In the game itself - you have to find ways to keep pressure on them. This one did bog down, as they planned and replanned and planned again - you have to come up with ways to keep things moving. At some point they have to act. I didn't worry about it too much here, but a more trying heist needs to have some kind of ticking clock, for the players as much as the characters.

3) You have to be flexible with rolls. We went a long way in this game without making any rolls, especially the first night - but sometimes you have to make checks. To make this kind of game work, you have to be flexible sometimes. This was quite explicitly not meant to turn into a fight - they would have been obliterated by the people in the warehouse if it came to swords, anyway. But I think there are ways to do this. In this case - when the rolls went bad, I escalated the stakes, rather than starting a fight. I brought the guards down to where they were, so they had to do something to hide better; I brought the whole party down (party in the sense of booze and women and drunken aristocrats), which added lots of possibilities if they blew some more rolls. I also made a point of trying to play the guards - the drunks, the ones who were on duty and annoyed at the partiers, and so on. The goal should be to make the players come up with something to avoid trouble - make up a story, do something fun or daring, run, anything. They were pretty good at this.

(This is something of a pet peeve, by the way. In too many games, non-combat rolls tend to be far more consequential than combat rolls. I mean - you blow a stealth roll, and that's the end of trying to sneak past the guards; someone blows a deception roll and the bad guys know who you are and Roll Initiative! It bugs me. It means attempts to avoid combat all too often end up with a single point fo failure - with way too many chances to fail, since every character in the party ends up rolling that stealth or deception roll. There has to be a better way - ways of escalating, ways that players can try to recover from a bad roll. Otherwise, you just aleways end up fighting. That's fine when you want to fight, but not when you don't)

4) I should add that I can see places where you might want to bring in ideas from other games (besides D&D). Call of Cthulhu's pushed rolls are a pretty obvious way to address my previous point, say. Or bringing in ideas from other heist games, where you can retrofit - where you can say (or at least roll) That you have some object you didn't think of until then. On the principal, say, that the characters are smarter about this sort of job than the players - so if it makes sense that they would have thought of it ahead of time, let them have it. One of the players here realized he should have gotten some pine tar (or similar substance) before coming in - would I let him add it? Sure! It made sense - it is something the character would have thought of before. I think this kind of scenario rewards flexibility all through.

All right. That was that. A very enjoyable outing, one I hope we do more of. 

Year End Gaming Roundup

So if you asked, how could things get worse in 2020 - ha! well. I have a few posts on here, not completely abandoned. Still...

So - ignoring (as much as we can) the World Outside for a moment - how did this year go for gaming?

Well - you can't ignore the world entirely. The public games moved on line, but kept opn - more on that in a bit. We shut down playing at the house for a couple months, but started up again, and have proceeded intermittently. It has not been great, though; we play sometimes, but we have a hard time maintaining any momentum, and we end up talking about the games we aren't playing more than playing. We aren't playing other games all that much either, though we've made some progress there lately. It's been bad.

I could sum up things, like I have the last couple years, but the story is the same: Tomb of Annihilation - we managed a couple sessions in the summer, but that is all - we talk about it sometimes, but nothing has happened in ages. The Waterdeep and Jungle games are right where we left them, though both were sort of at good pausing places, two years ago. Sigh. We stopped the Saltmarsh home brew to play a city adventure - and have dropped both.

The home brew Waynesburg game went well - but I don't remember if that was late 2019 or the beginning of this year. It stopped, though it is there waiting. All fo these campaigns are there waiting - given the right combination of time and inspiration they could come back. Though sometimes having this many options is worse than only having one option.

The only home success this year was the Desert Campaign. The cleric owed a favor, so they headed off across the desert and hills to find out why the Hermitage fo St. Ignatius was not communicating any more. Off they went, fighting monsters and throwing boulders and gathering biuts of rumors until they arrived. A  village where everyone was paranoid; a missing baron, bandits and such; and something Bad at the old monastery. So they snuck in through the tunnels beneath the place, fighting various creatures, and getting into some big fights with drow int he cellars. Then that stalled out, a couple months ago. But it is there, and once it starts upwill flow pretty well. It is more combat oriented than I thought it was going to be - I thought there would be more intrigue leading up to some fine boss battles, but all the interruptions have pushed it to a more combat heavy game. That's the danger. But it works.

And? Outside of home - Princes of Apocalypse is still going, we are down to the last bunch of cults - we have shed a lot of the annoyances around that game, so things are all right. Though it is dragging - we are all starting to eye Rime fo the Ice Maiden with great anticipation.

A bunch fo us also got into a playing of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I told you how that went.  The group then picked up playing Ghosts of Saltmarsh. One character has already had to be resurrected there. Only one! Rot grubs, this time.

So there you go. I suppose I could look on the bright side: we have two steady ongoing games, and a third that was going all right for much of the year, and should be again soon. Given the circumstances, that's not half bad.

It's been odd, though. The virus has kept us out of the game stores - I have not spent hundreds of dollars in minis and maps this year, and what I did spent, has been mostly for presents - a couple books given away, lots of minis, a map, and so on. That's good, though I miss having that stuff coming in all the time.  

I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about other games, especially Call of Cthulhu, which looks very interesting - but we have not gotten around to playing it. I don't know if we will - we are all more fantasy fans than horror, so the mythos isn't all that compelling. What I love are the skill systems and the settings - 20s and 30s - we are all fans of Hammett and Chandler, not to mention the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew - and I can add a lot of 20s/30s comic strips as well. Terry and the Pirates! Wash Tubbs! I love that stuff - I would love the play a game set in that era, which Call of Cthulhu is. We shall see.

And so: what are my goals for 2021? 

First - play. Keep playing the outside games, get our own games going. The last year or so I have run all the games at home - I hope the rest fo the gang gets in on that action. But playing regularly is the best comfoprt.

Second - I want to develop some things. Especially short, one off type adventurers, either simple scenarios for ongoing characters on pure one offs. We talk about this - I talk about it. I want to do it. We weretalking about doing it for Christmas - that's probably the way to do it. build them around specific scenes, environments, times, events. A Christmas game - a heist game - a ship board game - somethign contained. I did one a year or so ago - The Bard's Pants - that worked very well. Do more fo that.

Third - I want to work more with physical things. Pain my minis; build some terrain. We'll see. 

Finally - I should add that I have been working on World Anvil, here and there, in spurts usually - but I do it. Getting masses of Waynesburg information piled in there this week, when I should have been working on a Christmas one shot. Yeah, that's how it goes. But it is good. Keep that up.

And try to keep this up. We are notorious for sitting around the house talking about D&D - we have to work on getting that stuff into something like a published form. Even just a blog; or a lousy video, buncha middle aged nerds whining about lack of skill guidance in D&D 5E! I don't know. I will try, though I say that every year, and you can see how well I follow up on it.

Wipe Out!

 Let's see - in 40 years of playing D&D I have been in two party wipes (or near party wipes - and both were near, not total.) The first came back int he 80s - kind of at the end fo the first stretch of playing D&D, when I was in college, my brothers were in high school, we played summers and holidays, and so on. This was one of the last games we played in First Edition. A Death Knight did the deed: fireballs and chain lightning finished off the party. There were reasons - good play by the monsters, maybe some carelessness by the players, I don't remember for sure, probably some bad roles. The party was decent - 8th and 9th level probably, which meant something in 1E. We had stronger characters, though - this was not quite the A team. Anyway: it's hard to reconstruct all the details of the fight, even who was in the party and who died, and how - but a few things are certain. Three characters were definitely dead - John the elven Fighter/Magic User (probably 5/5 or so), Simon the 8th level ranger, and Nathan, an 8th level cleric. I know, because Brandon the thief survived the fight - killed the Death Knight, even - took Simon's vorpal sword and rolled a 20 against the villain. I know who died because I have Brandon's character sheet - with John's Defender, Simon's Vorpal, and Nathan's staff of withering on there. Yep.

That was back in the day. The second wipe came last week. Hoard of the Dragon Queen - 4 characters, who'd gotten to 3rd level. We were in the caves by the cultists' camp - we ran into a bunch of guards and cultists and what not - we'd already been in a couple fights, and though we had most of our hit points, we had no spells. We were a decent party - a paladin, bard, monk and thief, all decent builds. But these frigging dragon claws, whatever they are, took us out in a round. I think there were three crits in there. The paladin, bard and monk went down. The thief scarpered. We rolled death saves - the paladin immediately rolled a 1, then somehow passed three straight saves! The other two - rolled 6 times and might have passed 1 of them. Oops.

We're going to play Ghosts of Saltmarsh next. This adventure - that was a frustrating ending. We had been having a blast with the characters - it was a good sized group, we were working together, we were working out personalities and stories, it was good. We had some good scenes, and some atrocious luck - a couple sessions ago, two characters went to 0 trying to cross a rope to a tower. Both were well suited to the endeavor - the monk and bard, both high dex characters with acrobatics or athletics skills - they needed to roll fairly modest numbers - 8 or 9, maybe - to get across. They did not roll 8s and 9s. The monk railed one check; got a saving thrown to not fall, and failed that, might have had another roll, and failed that - and fell 50 feet and went splat. The bard then tried it - and repeated the performance. 2s and 3s, maybe a 4. Splat. It was comical - we were able to save them, th paladin gave up on the acrobatics and just slid down the rope to the ground and healed them - but still. It was comic gold! 

Last week was not comic.

It raises issues: like - should DMs cheat? if he's really rolling 20s - does he have to use them? I don't think that's all that important - I would rather roll everything out int he open anyway, and if you do that, those 20s are even harder to fudge. More importantly - should he have asked for those death saves? We were down - he could have had the guards drag us off to whatever cruel fate they had in mind. Feed us to whatever is in there - give us to some NPC to torture or abuse or something - I don't know. Something to keep us alive and give the thief a chance to try to rescue us - give the paladin a chance to get his lay on hands back - things like that. Give us a chance to keep playing the adventure and the characters. It is disappointing.

Back in first edition - those characters came back. The thief lived, and I think a wizard did as well. The thief looted them, but let them take the treasure and the bodies and pay for resurrections. I know that's what happened, because poor Nathan failed the con save you had to make to be resurrected back in the day! But now? Those guys are gone - though I imagine they will be recycled. A couple of us decided to recycle characters from and aborted Strahd game for the Saltmarsh game - characters that had potential but never got the chance to develop. I suspect these guys might see the light again.

But it was still a shame. And an interesting contrast to that first wipe - which felt - epic, earned, a fair fight, and generated a really cool story line, with the thief winning the fight after the party was gone with a lucky role. This one? just ended.

Skills Mainly

Hello again, after al this time. All right. I should start by noting something about procrastination - I have elevated it to an art form. Here the world has been shut down for months, I have had plenty of time to play with D&D and what have I accomplished? Not a lot. Strange. Though I noticed something specific about this, in the last couple months. I have also tried to write, signing up for one fo the off seasons NaNoMo projects - got 100,000 words done! But without ever actually getting to the point of where the story I was writing started. All backstory, motivation, exposition; no one took any over acts, other than talking to one another about, you know, backstory, exposition, motivation, etc.

I run into that problem a lot, when I write, and when I try to develop a D&D campaign. I get bogged down on the backstory. I work through the characters and their motivations, their plots and schemes - but I have the devil's time shifting that to actual over acts. And so with D&D: I can worry about the background - I find it very hard to sit down and mark out where villains are on a map so someone can start fighting them. A bad habit, and hard to break. Which might be why I am so tempted to give up on writing adventures and just work on world-building. I can do that!

But that is not the main topic of this post, though this is another fine source of time wasting. I Want to think a bit about skills in role playing games.

The proximate cause of this is getting a couple Call of Cthulhu books, reading them, thinking about them - and watching lots of Seth Skorkowsky videos. Not just about Call of Cthulhu: he's recently started a series on the space adventure game Traveller, which has its own interesting skill system. Call of Cthulhu, in particular, has me thinking about skills, how games can handle them, ow their systems compare to the world.

I have not actually played Call of Cthulhu, but I love the way its skill system works. It's simple enough: PCs are given a rating in any skill, from the default than anyone gets to whatever level of training they have. The rating is a percentage - every check basically requires you to roll lower than the percentage you have. If you have a 50% skill in, say, climbing, you would need to roll under 50 to pass a check, to climb a cliff say. That's the basics. Setting the difficulty of the task is equally simple: the GM (the "Keeper" in CoC) decides if this is a Regular check, Hard, or Extreme - this sets the target for the player, but still based on the PCs rating. Regular = the rating (that %0% say). Hard = 1/2 the rating (25 for this example), Extreme = 1/5 (10). You can also use these degrees of difficulty to rdetermine how much of a success the PC might get, if that's relevant.

In D&D, this probably isn't all that different, other than the dice used: you roll D20, add modifiers, and try to beat a DC the DM has set. But that's a bit harder for the DM: they have to decide what that DC number is. What is a "difficult" check? In Call of Cthulhu, you don't have to worry about that: it's based on the PC's rating. There are guidelines in D&D to setting DCs, but they never seem to work right. Especially if you have to come up with them on the fly. Maybe this is something you can get used to in D&D - but I find it very awkward. I would love to say, this is a hard check - beat your hard check score! because that's what you do in Call of Cthulhu.

That's just the beginning, though. Call of Cthulhu has several mechanisms that make skills much more interesting (or, looking much more interesting,) than D&D's. Mechanics for "pushing" rolls (re-rolling when you fail), or for using luck to change rolls; interesting ways to improve skills. The reason for that is that Call of Cthulhu is a skill based game, and D&D is not. D&D is a combat based game. Or - actual play of D&D is balanced between combat, role playing and exploration, but the system is strongly oriented toward resolving combat. Partly, this is because role playing and exploration don't need the same mechanical support in D&D. Role playing is something players do - it should depend on the players' decisions and choices, and only occasionally involve a dice roll. In the early days of D&D, exploration was the same: you found traps and spotted hidden doors and the like by taking actions. Players controlled it, not the character sheet. You didn't roll to "investigate" a hallway for traps and secret doors - you tapped the walls and probed the floorboards with your dagger and poked that pile of garbage in the corner with a 10 foot pole. Maybe sometimes there would be a roll, but it would be simple, more of a saving throw than a check. And even now - most of the time, skill checks in D&D are, basically, saving throws with less at stake.

It's not like they hide it, either - D&D 5E does not have skill checks, it has ability checks, that sometimes allow skill training to add a modifier. In practice, this works fine, most of the time - but it does mean that skills are secondary in the game. There is less variation, less granularity in how good you can be at a skill; there are no ways to improve skills easily, and so on. Most of the time, again, that's fine - the system works for most D&D situations. (Especially if you let players drive RP and exploration, which they should anyway.) I could reverse all this if I talked about combat - D&D's combat system is very robust, easy to understand, easy to use. Armor sets a target to roll against - the attacker tries to roll above it. Simple, etc. Easy to set up, understand, use, with lots of variation within what you can do, hwat modifies those rolls,a nd so on. Call of Cthulhu combat looks very arbitrary, to me, too abstract - but again, you aren't supposed to go around fighting everything you see there. It's a skill based game.

The problem, for D&D, is when you move into a story line that feels more natural to skill games than combat games. The obvious example, to me, is playing an urban, investigation campaign: one where fighting should be a last resort, for whatever reasons. That is nhw most Call of Cthulhu games work, of course - sometimes, though, you want to do it with D&D characters and settings. That is where a more robust skill system would be a godsend. Everything from better mechanisms for establishing the effect fo the player's actions - "I talk to the guard and try to find the name of who has a key to this room" - to better mechanisms for searching for clues at a crime scene. Again - at the most basic level, D&D requires you to say, finding the kobold's footprint requires a DC 17; Call of Cthulhu says, the kobold's footprint is a Hard Check. That kind of thing is a lot easier on the fly, I think. The other difficulty is in PC building - D&D is based on combat, and what the character can do in a fight - that is the core. Trying to build a character who is genuinely better in other situations is not as straightforward - might not even be possible.

There might be another post in this: looking at types of stories out there and which ones feel are based around combat systems, like D&D, and which around skills, like Call of Cthulhu. Again - this doesn't imply that these stories are dominated by combat or skills - but that that is where the system is required. Like: westerns strike me as almost universally combat based - even if the characters are not fighting, when it comes to testing something other than their own wits and personalities, it's when there is a fight. And detective stories - even hard-bitten ones, with plenty of action - hinge on the skills. Marlow vs Canino in the Big Sleep is a test of skills, not combat prowess: Marlow's ability to charm his captors, his ability to hide, his allies willingness to help him - the fight comes down to getting the drop on the other guy. This isn't Matt Dillon drawing down on a guy, or Bruce Lee facing the big bad. But all this is a subject for another day. For now - building a Matt Dillon type in D&D isn't all that hard; building a Columbo type in D&D - that would be a challenge.

Backstories

I have been thinking about backstory in D&D lately. There were some remarks made regarding the Princes of the Apocalypse game I am playing in, and they set me to thinking. How important should backstory be in playing D&D? Well! I have thoughts!

1. The purpose of backstory is to shape how you act in the story. It explains the character's reactions, why they do what they do. That is how it works in fiction, where it shows why this character is the way they are; it works the same way in games, except there it guides the player in deciding how the character is going to act in the story. You don't need a lot for this - an outline, a few details. It's also something that is really only significant for the player - as much as you need to know to play the character. Maybe it comes up in the story, maybe it doesn't. Maybe your backstory is mainly to explain why you don't talk about your past. The short version is, backstory is a tool, for writer or player, to help shape the character, but it is always secondary to what the character does in the story itself.

2. Should backstories come up in the story? One of the remarks to set this post off was that a villain from a character's past was more interesting than a random monster. This is, in context, a very strange comment, since we are currently 9th level in an ongoing adventure, and we haven't had to deal with anything random since about 3rd level (a year and a half ago, more or less), but we'll pass that. The more general comment I have is that if the backstory is coming up in the story, then it is the story. Now: that can be a very good thing to build into the story - though it is mainly going to work if you have a session zero, and everyone participates. If you can build characters that have a pre-existing stake in the story, or the DM takes elements of the backgrounds of the characters and works them into the texture of the story - you have something, and probably something better than just dropping characters into the adventure. But that beginning stage is important. It avoids the dangers - the idea, say, that a villain from THIS character's backstory is part of the story, but not anyone else's; or maybe worse, that you spend all your time going around the table fighting the next character's childhood nemesis. Again - you can work this into the story if you do a session zero, if the whole group is in on the idea that one character's backstory matters, and so on - but it doesn't work so well in a more generic situation. It has to come up in the story, to work at all.

3. Along with session zeroes to work on complimentary backstories, I think backstory can enter a story easier in a home brew campaign than a published adventure. If the DM is making it up as they go - a series of situations, that aren't preset - backstory is a very good source of ideas for what can come next. Though even there - you would want to start working on this as soon as you can, so have a session zero, or at least push players to make characters that fit within the world of the story, so their backgrounds come up naturally. You still have the problem of why one character's backstory matters more than another, though there can be a lot of answers to that. And finally - if you work this way, you can make it so the backstory is, in fact, part of the story. I did some of this in my desert campaign - one character is a monk, who was a folk hero, who overthrew some kind of tyrant, and later, his monastery was destroyed, maybe in vengeance. That has come back - the party's enemies turn out to be working with another refugee from the monastery, and the two of them blame each other for destroying the place. But that means - the background element is in the story; it comes in from a different angle, so everyone has a stake in it; it is associated with other character's stories. And maybe most of all - in practice, interesting as this idea was as a way to move the story ahead - it was trumped by events in the story itself: the cleric was petrified! That is immediate, compelling and affects everyone in the party, and reminds us all - the story itself becomes what matters, in a decent campaign.

4. The fact is, unless you do the session zero, or some equivalent of to get the characters to fit the story - you don't need to worry too much about backstory. Backstories don't have to come up in the story that often, except as details about the characters, their motivations and so on. You probably should NOT use too many PC backstory elements, unless you have buy in from all the players, or set it up from the start. NPCs are different, though. I wrote about this way back when we were just starting with 5th Edition: how to use NPCs to drive the plot. I would still stand by most of that - PC backstories should be relatively open; they should not be determining the course of the plot - their actions in the story should determine how this story goes. If you need villains tied to the story, if you need to steer the story in a direction, you should use NPCs when you can - they can be focused on something outside the story (as it is occurring); they can have much more specific, narrow goals and motivations, that steer PCs toward the story the DM wants to tell. All that is true, now as much as then. I did this in the desert campaign, too - the party is working alongside a drow cleric, an archeologist type - and he is the one who brings in the plot twists I need, more than the PC's. If the PC's stories come up in the story - great; if not - I can still use elements from the NPC's background to steer the story around, if I have to. That's how I brought in the rival monk - tied him to the NPC's enemies, went from there.

5. All of this, I think, has become amuch bigger part of 5th Edition than it ever was before. It has become maybe - I don't want to say too important, but - it can be treated as being too important. There's a weird tendency in the modern game to make characters into bundles of background - they start up with the sense that they have lived these long full lives, full of adventures and traumas and Significant Events, that have somehow deposited them as first level clerics in this particular story, and that - all that background - continues to be the most important thing in these people's lives. That is very strange in a long, ongoing campaign, like this one. We have been playing it for a year and a half - we are 9th level - we are playing Princes of the Apocalypse, with its plot of literally saving the world from these elemental monstrosities - how can you still have people thinking that something that happened to them as children might be more interesting and important than this? This game has a massive amount of lore and history in it - the PCs have done all kinds of things, had all kinds of wild experiences, we have fought demons and devils, talked to liches and dragons, characters have come and gone and made weird deals with weird entities, in the game - how is anything outside the game supposed to be more interesting than what has happened in the game? People like to talk about immersion in a game, and lack of it - but this is one fo the most egregious lacks of immersion I can think of: to refuse to see the story you are IN. Especially something as epic as this one.

Now - all that changes when you are talking about first level characters (though even there, the backstory should not be more important than the story; but you might make your backstory be part of the story.) A session zero should work that way - to integrate those backgrounds, to make the story and backstories fit together. These characters setting out to Save the World should have some connection, some kind of connection to the world they are in - all that is absolutely the truth. But even there, at first level, you have not done much, and shouldn't try to make up too much in your past. And whatever happened in the past should quickly be eclipsed by what is happening in the present. Whatever your reasons for being there, once the story starts, that is going to put it in the background. The villains you encounter in this story are going to be more interesting than the villains from your past; you are very likely to experience things far more exciting, traumatic, horrifying, whatever than anything you could have survived as a non-PC. And not being able to see this, to think that something outside this world-changing story you are in is more important than it is - is a very strange thing to do.

Year End 2019

Hello world.

This has gone badly, huh? Here I started the year (or ended last year) talking about how I hoped to use this blog - and here I am, a year later and 3 posts later - what can I say? Life has, this time, complicated matters. Work has created odd scheduling issues that have made playing harder and more sporadic - which has spilled over into writing about playing, etc. Though last year we played plenty and I barely wrote anything, so I can't blame that. I can blame it for this:

Reviewing what we played last year I find:

• The Tomb of Annihilation game - mibght well be right where we left it. A couple more sessions - that has been very much neglected.
• The Waterdeep campaign - is right where we left it. We have a tavern, which we have cleaned out of its ghosts and squatters! what next?
• The Jungle Island game is right where we left it too.
• The Desert game, on the other hand, did go very well. A full on tomb raiding dungeon crawl, which ended with a wild fight with mummies and the like, then a rival gang of adventurers. The party is rich, though they have to move their ill-gotten gains to civilization. En route, they fought a gorgon, with dire results to the cleric.... This is the most likely of these campaigns to recover. It's got a great hook, it's got good characters and I even have a good idea how to proceed. This one should move ahead.

• Meanwhile, we have been playing in a Princes of the Apocalypse game at a game store for the last year and a half, still going strong, though sometimes going in circles. But it has been a success.

And this year, we have picked up a couple new ideas, though they have been marred by the reduced game time.

• The home brew city campaign - Waynesburg - generated a couple nice one off adventures ("The Bard's Pants"!), and now an ongoing mystery/adventure. That's worked all right, though it has been hard to maintain momentum, especially around the holidays. It has been interesting, a much more skill and talking based adventure, that I hope to maintain through the coming months.
• We started a campaign int he Saltmarsh area, out of that book - it was going all right, but ran out of steam, missing a month or so of playing... Scheduling has been a problem this year. Playing every other week instead of every week (unless something interrupts the weeks we would play) means it is very hard to have more than one thing going at a time. We could switch back and forth in previous years, and did. Now? we're stuck with one, really.

That is what it is. The only way to fic it is to find a better job.

In the meanwhile - once again, I do want to start using this blog. Writing something here. We talk enough about D&D; you'd think we could write something.

I also want to work on the World Anvil site: use it to build out the history and lore of our campaign world. Which, I confess, is a pretty generic world, but I made up the core sometime in the spring of 1982, so I am not going to apologize for it. What use it has, I don't know, but building it should help put the whole of it together in my head. Let's hope.

Otherwise? Another year - for all the gripes, we did play a lot this year, talked about playing a lot, continued to pump money into Wizard's fo the Coast and Wiz Kids and Paiso and whoever else is willing to sell me D&D related toys and gear. (Not to mention Papermate and Pilot and MMM and all the companies providing pencils, pens, paper, note cards... yeah.) So: the gaming vibe is still good, chez moi. I shall try, for my own satisfaction as much as the edification of the public, to post more here - we'll see.

Have a good new year anyway, gamers. May all your rolls be crits...

Classes We Have Used

Came across an interesting thread on EN World: Classes nobody wants to play.

The thread doesn't reveal a lot in general, except that different groups have different preferences and habits - though it's shocking to see multiple people claiming no one wants to play a wizard (or bard or druid.) But it got me thinking. We've had time to play a bunch of characters - 2 groups to 5th level, a couple others to 4th (or 3rd anyway) - even some one off groups to 2nd or 3rd - so we've got a decent sample size. And while we have our own idiosyncrasies in what we play, we've tried a pretty wide variety in 5E - so I thought I might see what I can learn from it.

(There is also this: we did this in ADD - made up tons of characters, played a fair number of them up; 3E we made up plenty of characters but didn't really play them. 4E - we might have made characters, but we ended up playing the same handful all the way through - none of us played more than 3 or 4 characters to any level (except David and Thomas, at the beginning.) Something about 5E - and those earlier editions - seems to make you want to make up characters, and play them...)

Anyway: a very unscientific survey of classes and what we've played.

• Barbarians
Inky
Magyar (goliath I played once...)
(Were there others? Was BPC a Barbarian?)
- I am actually rather surprised how few we've played. Though Inky tends to make a big impression, so it feels like we've done more. They feel very strong, at least at low levels - able to soak up damage like nobody's business. But for some reason, we haven't made a lot of them up. We never did, really - but given how tough they are at low levels, it's a bit surprising.

• Bards
Nancy
Chet
Dallas
Buster
- We have run out some of these. I have, and David. I like bards: I'll come back to them when I talk about other classes, I think - but they are extraordinarily versatile. They can mix it up (Nancy was the brawler in the sneak-into-the-village thing we played); they can cast, and cast either offensively or support; they heal - they boost the party. We haven't always gotten to play the full personality possibilities of them, but there is that as well. They are very good, and I think they make other classes seem redundant.

• Clerics:
Claire
(Misty)
Luth
Opus
Geldon
- This is interesting. we started out with clerics, the way we always do - but lately, we've kind of stopped using them. You have to have someone back there to heal - but having discovered the joys of druids and bards, we've tended to drop clerics for them. Claire and Luth are almost characters we’re stuck with - if I hadn’t been playing and running, I would have made Claire into Nancy, I think - and I noticed the last time David needed a healer he made a bard (Buster). Bards and druids are more fun. On the other hand, there is Geldon - who is a real, memorable character - almost unheard of with clerics. Oliver did it by virtue of always being there - and Eugene did some of it by being evil - and Geldon manages it, entirely by the way Ryan plays him. At this point, I would imagine unless someone had a strong character concept for a cleric, we would almost always go with bards or druids, or even a paladin or ranger, over a cleric...

• Druids:
Boedicca
Dzurkha (played with Wendell and Holmes)
- Playing 2 druids past 3rd level is 2 more druids than we have played, period, in 35 years. Once you saw Boedicca in action, why would you want to play a cleric again? I admit, I don't know how this is likely to work out once they start shape-shifting and all that - because I don't know how that works, yet. But odds are, it just makes them that much more interesting.

• Fighter:
Bono
Angus
Queequeg
Wendell & Holmes (All right - Carvallon and Arness, however they are spelled)
Tuffy
Ildebrun
- We have certainly taken to our fighters. We've played a mob of them. They are the staple, of course - but they are worth it in this version. And though a couple other fighter types have made an impression (Inky and Violet), we haven't done a lot of that - we've defaulted to fighter and not regretted it. Here's the real thing: for one of the default classes - all those fighters we have are as well distinguished from each other as any kind of class has been. Bono is a two handed tactician; Angus is a brute; Quequeg is an eldritch knight; Tuffy's a straightforward two handed champion - almost a 4E dual wielding ranger build; Ildebrun is a straightforward enough brawler, but with interesting racial abilities; and David's eladrin are a two weapon fighter and a two handed fighter. They are all distinct, in their personalities, as far as we've played them - but tactically, as well - which is what fighters do. It's the class that, so far, has produced the widest range of styles and flavors - that's a fascinating development in itself. We didn't do that with fighters in the past - we've always favored rangers and paladins, and let fighters be simple sword and board men - they got something right here.

• Monk:
Ichi
(Someone else might have made one up, though I don’t remember.)
- Another class we never played much in the past. Some experimenting in 5E, not much more. We haven't done much here - might depend a bit on how things start developing, or if someone else tries one too. Ichi is promising (especially when I start getting his kensei powers) - we'll see.

• Paladins:
Atilla (in two versions)
Edge (briefly)
- Another one we haven't done a lot with, though they are fine as a class. Attila got a lot more interesting when I remade him into a goliath - Edge didn't really get time to develop. They are all right, though they don't really feel like paladins until second level.

• Thieves:
Bill
- This is the strangest thing. I might be forgetting someone, but I think Bill is the only thief we have played so far. We leaned on thieves heavily in 4E - Perry was one of the major characters there (the definitive 4, really: Oliver, Hank and Perry, and Theresa - Vjarne, Fighting Eagle, etc., came and went too much to be definitive like that). We loaded up on thieves, especially hybrid thieves - Nancy, Dermind, one or two of Jim’s hybrids, all had some thief in them. But in 5E, we have not used them at all - other than Bill, who is definitely second fiddle to Inky. I don’t know if this is the kind of dungeon we’ve played - as accident of wanting to try out other classes - or something else. But it is notable.

• Rangers:
Violet
(and BPC maybe?)
- Violet is a fine character - 5E version of Theresa, basically, with most of the same virtues. But she's the only one we've played (I think) - odd. We loved rangers in 1E (Geronimo being, you know, The Man, after all) - I loved them in 4E, to distraction. So why aren't we playing them now? I can see some reasons: the big one is that the reason for playing a ranger has been usurped a bit by both fighters and bards. Bards get the finesse fighting and spell casting and do it better than rangers; fighters let you specialize in archery or two handed fighting, and you get all those neat options fighters give you. There’s not a lot of evidence that a ranger would be better than either of those. It's hard to give up the spells of a bard or the options of a fighter to play a ranger.

• Sorcerers:
- I don’t think we have played a single sorcerer yet - not for more than a one off here or there. They may come eventually - they are like they have always been - they should be all right. But so far - again, they are hard to justify against a bard. They get more offense in their spells - but bards cast the same way,they can heal, and they are much better fighters - why not play a bard? Bards have replaced a lot of classes.

• Warlocks:
- Another one we haven't used, or have used very sparingly. (I vaguely remember trying one - maybe...) They seem like a lot of work, and it's hard to justify picking them over the other spell caster options.

• Wizards
Milo
Alexis
Spencer
Fred
- Wizards are very solid in this version. You get all the spells (though you have to make choices - but you can change your choices). They can blast, buff, control - they are good at it. I'm not sure they are all that exciting - at low levels, as usual, they are kind of afterthoughts - but once you get second level spells - and especially third - they start to be indispensable. Less personality maybe than they could have - but they are just way more useful. For what they do, they are still better at it than Bards (which I would not say for any other spell casters except druids.)

So there it is: what we play and what we don't play. We play lots of fighters, in a lot of different styles - we use wizards like we always have - we have used bards regularly - we had clerics, but have shifted toward druids and bards lately - and we've had a handful of memorable rangers, barbarians and so on, but not a lot of those characters. We have avoided sorcerers and warlocks completely - and have almost shockingly not run thieves.

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.

Get Up Stand Up

Continuing the probably hopeless goal of posting something every day: let's try some House Rules.

There are a few things that annoy me about D&D 5 - some of which I have theories about how to fix. (Mostly, though, I have to say the 5E rules work pretty well. I generally get them.) One that bugs me is the way opportunity attacks work. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that as long as you are adjacent to someone you can move around at will. I don;t see why the 3x version wasn't kept - you get an opportunity attack whenever anyone moves in your threatened space. That worked fine - it an't even confusing - I don't quite know why they changed.

Still - I can talk myself into the current system, and it works fine. (As long as you maintain contact with your foe, why can't you spin all around? unless they have an ability to hold you in place. So all right...) But one thing I can't accept: how can they let someone stand up from prone without incurring an opportunity attack? I am trying to even imagine that, as a real thing: how can you stand up and protect yourself at the same time? unless you have some special ability to do so? or you devote your action (and all the real world actions that implies) to defending yourself? I can't believe it - and think it would be fat better to adopt a house rule like this:

Ane movement that costs more than 5 feet for a single square (using squares as the measure - I know, theater of the mind! - well, wait for it) incurs an opportunity attack for an adjacent foe. So - standing up normally costs half your movement - opportunity attack. So would difficult terrain - but that makes sense too. Imagine you are fighting in brush - on ice - perched on a roof - in mud or running water - moving and fighting at the same time can't be easy. OAs are a fine way to reflect that difficulty. (And since these rules are made irrespective of whether you are making a grid, they work - difficult terrain is always double movement; standing up is always half your movement. So it still works.) And, of course, feats work - agile lets you stand for 5 feet - eliminating the OA - which makes sense. Or you can use your disengage action - or some of the other feats that suppress OAs. All fits nicely with what is in the books, I think. So I say - do it.

Using NPCs

[Note to begin: since I hope we can actually play some around Christmas time, I want to start getting some things ready. To that end - I am going to try to post something here, every Single Day! I am not sure how well I will do that - but I am going to give it a shot.]

NPCs: since we picked up some henchmen in the last adventure, I have been thinking about how to use NPCs in a party differently from PCs. Part of it is trying to define NPC/henchmen differently from PCs - if they are all part of the party - how do they differ? Some of this, I think, addresses that; but I also want to address some of the ways NPCs can generate plot and so on differently from PCs.

1) One thing NPCs do is make it easier to define characters' motivations in terms of the plot and world-building. Though one of the things I have noticed with D&D 5, and with the modern games that seem to be feeding it - 13th age and Numenora and the like - is that this is becoming the norm for PCs as well. That is - you are expected to come up with a background for your characters, rooted in the world, and the storyline of the game. I'm not sure that's as helpful for PCs as it seems: it might lock you into the story of the world more than it should. PCs should not fill functions in the story - they should be experiencing the story. We were riffing on this on route 2 - the idea to me is that a PC is both a protagonist and a POV character - analogous to the narrator in a novel - they should have a personality that allows you to filter the story through it. There should be something subjective about a PC - when they have motivations and backgrounds and personality quirks and so on, they do so internally - subjectively - they should be derived from the character.

With NPCs, on the other hand, you can have this derived from the plot, or from some element int he world of the campaign. So - Sister Claire can be involved in the plot of the world more than Bono. The fact that she is an NPC means she is more appropriate to have motivations, connections and so on that are defined more externally than a PC would have. She can have narrower goals: to raise the money to get back to the Convent of St. Gertrude, for whatever her purpose is. (Playing her as a PC would entail much more flexibility - as an NPC it is easier to justify simply having her decide to leave. That kind of thing.) So - with NPCs, you can justify giving them external motivations. Make them part of some organization (spies from the pirates - members of the Black Friar's - agents of the Prince Regent), give them a specific goal - to recover a magic item from a shipwreck, something like that. Those kinds of characters can turn up as regular NPCs - but it might be interesting to use some of them as semi-NPCs - henchmen, hangers on - like Claire.

2) A more defined version of this is to give NPCs specific roles. To explai their presence explicitly: like - the party hired Claire to cast healing spells (anything else is gravy, and on her dime, so to speak.) Maybe they hired Bill to pick locks and disarm traps - Angus as Milo's bodyguard, specifically. Something like that. And doing that, lets them behave differently - they are justified in hanging back from the fight - doing what they're paid for and no more.

This is something of a problem - how to differentiate NPCs from PCs in the course of the action. From a playing standpoint it should make a little difference - probably good if we play them without thinking too much. What's the obvious action someone in their role would do? do that - don't worry about looking for the best action. Maybe. More than that, though - to make them interesting - it helps to explain why they are there. They are not PCs - "because they want to be there" isn't quite an adequate answer. They should have jobs: Claire is there to cast healing spells - Bill maybe to pick locks... But it would also be interesting to give them other motivations - Claire's desire to raise money and go home (and complete whatever task she has been assigned to.) Maybe they have enemies - maybe they have friends, or ties.

Again - a lot of those things are useful with PCs - but they need to be a bit more internalized. With NPCs, I think, you can be far more direct and shameless - he's a spy for the thieve's guild - is hard to work with a PC, but not with an NPC. He's a second cousin to the royal family - etc. Things that open up plot possibilities, without having to work through how you would have to play it.

Players Handbook

I had better luck with the Player's Handbook early release than the Starter Set - Pandemonium had them early, and now, so do I!

I'm very happy with it. The book itself is nice - the art is respectable - the prose reasonably well done. So far, the rules have made sense - haven't found any ambiguous workings, etc. That seems good. The organization is pretty good, though I sometimes get confused about where skills and feats and equipment are tucked in, relative to one another. Little things. It has an index - 3-4 pages of it, which may be very useful, though I can't read it without a magnifying glass... Lots of interesting material in the back - planes and gods, and a bunch of gods - different fantasy worlds, historical pantheons, and so on - a section on conditions, with helpful illustrations (in case you wondered what "unconscious" looks like) - even a set of beasts and undead, with their stat blocks - all of it pretty impressive.

But what really matters are the rules. The game looked promising from the starter set and basic rules, but they were missing a lot - this was the moment of truth. And I'd say - it works. In the broad sense - I already knew it played pretty quickly and easily - that still seems to be so. Even the optional parts run easily - there are quite a few classes with "dice" of some kind - inspiration dice for bards; superiority dice for fighters - but this is a reasonably obvious mechanic, and easy to keep track of. If you have 6 superiority dice, you can just lay out 6 dice, and play 'em as you go. Easy enough.

The options are key: the basic version of the game is okay, but would tend to go rather flat, I think, over time. It's nice to build some variation among characters - feats and 4E powers give you some of that in the old versions. Do they here? They do - I paid most attention to the fighters and rangers (sure that comes as a surprise) - and like the way they work. Fighters in particular have real choices - they may be something of the backbone of the game - but they can take on a lot of specific forms here. I like the way the game handles maneuvers - and seeing their feats, I think they have done that well too. Both often seem to be replicating 4th Edition powers (and some 3rd edition rules) - there are feats and maneuvers that replicate cleave (take an extra swing at someone else; or an extra swing if you drop someone), shield bash, powers to knock people prone or move them around, even features like charging - which is given some bite. Other feats replicate things like taking extra proficiencies - usually with a minor ability boost as well. (You give up your 2 points of ability boosting for a feat - though many of the feats give you one of the boosts, to a specific ability.) They're well done - they usually give you a fairly defined ability that has quite a bit of use. I like them. I'm not sure there are enough of them - but I imagine the splat books will take care of that when they start coming out. And frankly - I don't think they would be hard to make up for yourself - the principal seems pretty clear.

I found one of my hobby horses, too - Pole Arm master - for the halberd fans among us. which does 2 things, basically: 1) it gives you an extra bonus attack if you are using a reach weapon - you get to whack the guy with the butt end of the halberd for d4 damage. 2) And you get to make opportunity attacks against people entering your reach - now that is what a pole arm is for: keep people away from you. I am very happy, and intend to play a glaive or halberd wielding brute as soon as possible!

Going back - the book includes the stuff you would expect - the importance races are there (Goliaths might be the only one people played very much that isn't); the classes you would expect - bards and barbarians, druids, monks, paladins, rangers, sorcerers and warlocks, along with the basics. All of them seem to work the way you would expect - though I haven't really read through the warlock and sorcerer. They seem a bit complicated - we'll see. The options for the classes are fine - though some of them struck me as rather bland. Though most classes have an option or two that looks like it would be particularly appealing to play.

And finally - to go back to the game as a whole - I played around with some of this, played a little fight - and the more I play with it, the more it seems to be really easy to work with. It seems very easy to work out how to handle an unusual situation - the advantage/disadvantage rule is a godsend. I played a little fight, with my new rangers and pole arm fighters and what not: a simple brawl, 5 characters vs. 3 orcs and a bugbear in a tavern. The monsters were in a back room - I brought the PCs in, rolling for perception and so on until they found each other. The Orcs came out - they set to. The ranger and a magic user were on a balcony, shooting; the rest on the floor - the fighter charged, the orcs charged - the bugbear went around and went for the second line (cleric and thief). They all whack and shoot away at one another... One of the orcs charged the ranger, who was on the second level, at the top of a ladder -I had the orc char gem and figured he'd try to fight from the ladder. The ranger responded by trying to push orc and ladder over.

That's the sort of thing that would have taken half an hour to figure out how to play in 3E, and 4E too - what penalties does the orc have on the ladder? what check opposes what to knock the thing over? But here - easy: give the orc disadvantage. Disadvantage to hit; disadvantage when the ranger made a push check against his strength. Worked well. Then I tried having the orc do some derring-do - jumping off the ladder onto the thief: simple enough, jump check - he failed and fell, and so on. And again - all of this played quick and simple. It wasn't a big battle, but it was reasonably elaborate - PCs and monsters moving around the room; opportunity attacks with that pole arm; business on a ladder; attempted jump; a character 0'd out and healed (then 0'd out again), before the orcs were finished off - all of it done, though, in, oh - half an hour, including all the set up and fights with the cat? It was a fairly rewarding little encounter, that didn't drag, offered chances to experiment - I think it works well. The non-combat stuff too - I didn't emphasize that, but tried to think about it - and it should work well.

In short - the more I see of DD5, the more I like it. I think they have succeeded.