Adventure Outlines

One way to use this blog is to work out the background to actual adventures we manage to play. Given schedules and such, actual game time can be scarce, and when we have it, we're likely to want to get into the meat of the adventure when we can. Fighting, exploring, doing stuff - reasonable enough. But this is a good forum to work on the rest of the campaign - to use real world downtime to build out the glue for the adventures we are playing.

So this weekend: the party went back into the mine, from above this time - found an old pit, an open shaft, with tunnels and works leading down into the mine from the other end from the main entrance they used before. They descended, and then found 3 ogres (or an ogre and 2 half ogres), accompanied by a flock of flying kobolds - they defeated this lot fairly easily. They got a wand of magic missiles from one of the half ogres, then found a stash of stuff the ogres had been keeping. They found a treasure pile with 1500 or so coins (30 pounds, more or less), plus various objects. They also found human parts, though nothing recognizable. They headed into the mines, but were confronted by a black pudding that they saw first, so they decided to go out the way they came.

That's where we left it - and probably fairly complete unto itself. They still have options - to keep looting the mines, if they were of a mind to continue; or to go back to town and get their reward (assuming they can convince the family and/or the law that they have the leg of Black Bart.) Or - other possibilities, depending on what they have a mind to do.

In general - there are many stories lurking in this area: the pirates could use dealing with, and might be at Clamdigger Cove. There are factions in the area who would be trying to get a strong party like this one is proving to be to help them with various schemes - from fighting pirates to fighting each other. The pirates themselves are always looking for men. And the general lawlessness of the area would encourage new groups of monsters to infest the place. Once word gets around that someone has killed off the orcs living in the mine, there are likely to be other monster groups looking to give it a try for themselves.

Unique Treasure

One of the things I find both a little disappointing and maybe inviting, from a world building perspective, is the rather poor selection of items in 5E D&D. I can see they are trying to rein in the crazy magic of some of the previous versions, and simplify the rules and mechanics of fighting and such - but one of the side effects is that there is a fairly small list of weapon and armor types. If you want to limit magic, but still offer interesting things for people to find, it starts to be hard to do. You can work in expensive items - pate mail armor is obvious (which is why I made a set of plate one of the main parts of the treasure when we went into the dwarf mines), but it's one of the few items that works that way. There are ways - silvered weapons work - you can offer things that are particularly well made, which are more expensive. But they don't have mechanical advantages. A set of gilded armor might be worth 5 times as much as a regular set - but doesn't protect you any more. (Silver, at least, gives you the ability to hit some things - lycanthropes, some undead, and so on.)

So the challenge is to find things that are interesting for people to find, or carry. You can do some of it by giving things histories - names for swords or daggers, or stories behind them ("this is the sword carried by Lord Seamus McGlue at the battle of Old Navy"), or details and ornamentations. Those things create a sense of detail in the world - they don't really give any mechanical advantages, and that's a bit disappointing. I wish there were rules for things like masterwork weapons (from 3E) - or for more variation in weaponry. A way to distinguish a scimitar from a cutlass, a broadsword from a longsword, or rules to use all the 50 varieties of polearms some of the older books described. There may be ways to do some of this - distinguish a throwing dagger from a stabbing one, say - creating a non-magical +1 for a throwing dagger maybe (balanced by something like, -1 damage when not thrown; something like that.)

It's something to think about. And another thing to think about might be working out more story hooks for objects. Not always with weapons - but maybe there are repercussions to wearing a cloak or suit of armor that once belonged to Lord Seamus McGlue. There is some room in the DMG for things like works of art - some of that could be interesting. I poked at this a bit - the magic dagger belonging to the dead magic user, that is an heirloom, worth more for its place in their family than as a magic weapon. And there is Inky's suit of armor - which promises something, somewhere along the line. It's all something to work on.

Party Names

This is just something that occurs to me - something that should be easy, but for some reason is not. Adventuring bands, when they work together for a while, or when they have pretensions of importance, or when people get the fear of them, or they do great deeds - should get names. Mercenary companies used to have names - The White Company; The Varangian Guards or the Swiss Guards; down to the Flying Tigers or Blackwater - they still do have cool names. Gangs too - Crips and Bloods and The Firm, the Winter Hill Gang, Cosa Nostra, ISIS. Fiction of course does this nicely - Robin Hood and his Merry Men... the Order of the Phoenix.. the Second Sons... The thieves guild of Waynesburg comes off kind of bland. I came up with a bunch of gang names for Waynesburg, somewhere along the line - street gangs, rivals to the guild, these were: The Green Boys, the Yellowjackets, The Crimson Daggers, the Blood and Guts...

Adventuring associations should do something like that too - either naturally, because they have been going it awhile, or, probably, because someone wants to give himself airs. It's something to think about. Like a ship's name - you need your NPCs and outlaw bands to have some kind of identity. A lot of this, I think, is what ends up creating a sense of continuity in a setting - the interrelated groups, some official, some outsiders, everything in between.

Though for some reason it's hard to do, for me. I think it tends to come in bunches - you wrestle and struggle, then a flood of names come, just like that. Like when I was kid, and made up band names - sometimes it was hard - then sometimes you come up with 20 in a study hall. Anyway - it's a little detail I want to try to work into the game more - into the campaigns. Along with things like pirate ships - villages and village leaders - NPC parties as such - lords and their lands - guilds and their names - and so on.

You Are Here

Today I want to recap the situation of the adventure, and add in some of the background we glossed over.

You are, currently, on top of the hill above the mine, having just finished off the hill giant that was lurking up there. You have come back to the mine looking for Black Bart (or Black Bertrand - different people have used both names). He is a notorious highwayman who recently robbed the stage, and killed Trevor McGuffin, a wizard from a good family. His family rewarded you for returning a magical dagger (a family heirloom, worth more to them than its value), and offered a reward of 500 Pounds (GP) if you can get Black Bart. [No matter what I said up there, that's what they offered you.] They only offer this to you - they tell you this is between you and them, because you have proved your trustworthiness by returning the dagger. Meanwhile, there is a public reward of another 500 pounds for Black Bertrand (who is the same person the man who robbed the stage these weeks back), dead or alive. The law hints they'd rather have him alive; the family does not care - if he hangs or takes a sword, it's all the same to them. They also tell you that if you find anything else belonging to Trevor, you can keep it - they tried to stop him from going off to be a magician, but he didn't listen, and look what it got him.

Also, while you were in town, Sister Claire declared that since she had enough money, she was going home. Presumably you urged her to stay and get Black Bart, but she was insistent. However when she tried to find a boat to sail to Sidney, you found out that the last boat to leave harbor, the Beauclair, was taken by pirates. The crew and passengers slaughtered, according to the 2 survivors who came in, though it's not clear if they actually saw this. This is the closest the big pirate ships have come to the coast and all the other sailors are keeping to port until someone finds them. That is the responsibility of the king and his men, everyone says, but the king (or the regent) doesn't seem interested in the pirates. Much dissatisfaction in Whelker's Deep. This keeps Claire around, though she is dropping hints that she might head off cross country after all at some point.

You decided to look for Black Bart up at the mine, since that is where you found the dagger and so on. You hire 2 more men to come along, Angus and Bill - [if you have backstories for them, we should add them.]

You head out - on the way you meet 2 men who tell you Black Bart is definitely not in Clamdigger Cove - they have just been therem half thinking of the reward themselves... So you cut cros country, on a path Angus knew, to the mine.

And so - at the present moment - you are on top of the hill with a dead Hill Giant on your hands. Up here above the river, you are in moorland - hills, large, flattish ridges, all bare, covered ingrass, some shrubbery, a very few trees. This rises as you move inland from the sea - the hills in the distance get higher. There are small streams running here and there - and of course the larger river valley below you. Up here, you can see the undulations of the land. And you might also see something like smoke from half a mile or so away on the moor.

Campaigns

I've been working on an adventure, and actually sticking to developing it pretty well. Still, I had a moment this past week where I realized there were several elements I wanted to develop, but the prospect of tackling that felt overwhelming. That got me thinking a bit about the process of making a campaign, and some options to use in collaborative construction.
This is an issue we've bandied about before, how to parcel out the responsibilities of being DM so everyone gets the chance to play as well as run. It struck me this week when I hit that wall of realizing how many more pieces I wanted as part of the adventure but didn't want to develop, that the solution was to go on here and share the responsibility. I could say… this needs a side trip to an old mine that's overrun by wolves, David, you do that… and a band of Drow to interact with, maybe to capture and interrogate, Stephen, knock yourself out.
It was an off the cuff thought by someone who just wanted to go to sleep, but it makes sense in principle. I think it might be worth trying on some level. Someone sits down, outlines an adventure, and pass out pieces for others to work on. Like your campaign, we're chasing Black Bart, but there are possibilities with pirates, or other bandits, and so on. With the infrequency of our sessions, it would make sense to pass some of that out.
You've got the main part developed, but want an encounter with pirates in Clamdigger Cove, or an encounter with a hill giant or some bandits or wild animals. You say, I'll work on the main story and the bandits, but you take the hill giants, and you take the wild animals. You can set up the overall story arc, and pick out the key features you want, but give up the reins on developing some individual encounters, and develop a more textured campaign without burning out trying to do it all. It also gives an opportunity for more "play" within an adventure where you still feel like the DM. You can be running the game play without running every encounter.
I think ultimately there is a fun possibility in coming up with an overall setting together, parceling out bits to everyone and running it in turns, but this might make a nice step toward that. The trouble with a grander scheme is that it relies more heavily on collaboration before working on any ideas. We seem to have limited time together, and more individual time to develop pieces alone. It would fit our current setup better to have one DM and delegated encounters.
Using the blog may be the answer to collaboration issues and brainstorming, but it still requires regular attendance and input to do that well.

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.

Mini Dungeons

Just a quick note - The Worldbuilder blog features a post about "tiny dungeons" - inspired by the old Dungeon Delve book - one of the most useful supplements D&D has put out. Can't disagree with him - that was a very nice book, and a very useful way to put adventures together...

Swordfighting in History and Games

It’s been a stupid week at work, so I have been spending most of my time at home watching sword fighting videos - historical swordfighting stuff. (Mostly, though not exclusively, this channel.) Interesting stuff. Lots of information on what swords were used and when, how weapons were used together, when they were most effective, now they work - what qualities make a sword cut better, why thrusts are better than cuts - that kind of thing. It's addictive. Once in a while, you come across things that make sense, but you maybe hadn't thought about before - like the fact that while in D&D swords are usually strength weapons and bows dex weapons, in fact, you have to be fairly strong to operate a real bow effectively (and very strong, and well trained, to operate a long bow), but you can operate a sword pretty effectively with fairly minimal strength. And - extending the contradiction - a long sword (that is, a two handed sword) requires less strength than a one handed sword (even something like a rapier.) Long swords weigh what - 3 pounds? But you operate them with two hands - rapiers and one handed swords are a couple pounds, not much less than a long sword (a rapier particularly, because the real ones are much longer and thinner than two handed swords, almost the same amount of steel pounded out into a long thin blade), though you have to operate them one handed. Now, I suppose the D&D rules are all pretty abstract - "strength" and "dexterity" are somewhat general terms for something not quite the same as what the real words mean - dex being more like hand eye coordination, strength being pure force - but it's still fascinating. Makes you think about who should be wielding what weapons.

All this started because I was thinking about the rules for D&D, particularly 5E - especially, the things that seem to be missing. There are a couple things that seem like they should be there - either as historical references, or because they are staples of previous editions of D&D, or even fantasy/adventure stories. Some of the 5E options seem too broad, too generic - like 2 weapon fighting. This is either difficult, if you don't have feats or the right fighting style or the right weapons (impossible without the right weapons, if you don't have the feat) - or two easy. If you take the feat - you can fight with any two one-handed weapons, more or less equally. And it seems to me that the rules ought to be more nuanced. They were in 3E - there were limits on what kinds of weapons you could use in the off-hand (without feats) - but you could use a dagger or short sword with a long sword without special training. That seems logical to me - even with training, you would be better off with a smaller weapon in the off hand - and I think that is the far more common historical style. Sword and dagger, especially rapier and dagger, seems to have been a very common style of fighting. But that isn't really there in the rules - I mean - the specific combination is not there. You can either use 2 light weapons, or you can use anything you want; the most common actual combination is not optimized in the rules.

On the other hand: watching these videos got me thinking about the rules as they are - and makes me think that the rules in 5E are not half bad. The main reason for using 2 weapons in fact is defense - specifically for defense in circumstances where you do not want to carry a shield. Shields are better defense - but shields are big and bulky and you can’t walk around town with them. (And there are circumstances where a shield would be inconvenient - like on a ship.) Swords are easy to carry - you can sheath them and hang them from a belt very easily. Having two gives you defensive advantages. The 5E rules for 2 weapon wielding works nicely for that: it allows you to get one extra attack (or a better extra attack), but doesn't really double your attacks. The fighting style doesn't help with defense (which might be a problem) - but the feats do. The 2 weapon feat specifically gives you +1 for having the second weapon - that's about right: it is about as useful as having a small shield. (Big shields are +2; bucklers aren't in the rules but would probably be +1. Bucklers should be in the rules - they seem to have been very widely used. They are, like swords, quite portable.) The defensive duelist lets you use any finesse weapon as a one time shield (with your reaction) - which also seems very realistic.

Though that raises an interesting technical question: how narrow is the definition of wielding? if you are holding a dagger in the off hand - presumably you can use it for defense (if you have this feat) - though does that break the Dueling fighting style? That gives you a bonus for using just one one-handed weapon - but does holding a weapon in the off hand break that? or do you have to use the weapon on the off hand - and does defense count as use? I have to say - this piece of the rules is one of the harder ones to swallow. If holding a weapon in the off hand is enough to break the style (cost you your +2 damage) - it implies that you can, in fact, fight better with, say, a small live pig in your off hand than with a dagger. It is a puzzle.

In the end - D&D is a game, and has to work as a game. But it is also a game meant as a simulation of a kind of reality - so it's interesting to see how it compares to reality. And the game itself is more interesting when it can serve as a model for the real world.

More of the Same...

So WOTC is announcing their fall adventure theme, which is yet another hardcover adventure path for levels 1-15. Apparently, the plan is to endlessly create 1st level characters and run them up in a closed adventure system every six months. Why can't they create these hardcovers as campaign settings like the old Greyhawk box, or leveled mini-adventures like Dungeon Delve? Let the expensive books explore the cute and clever areas of the universe, or pack them full of encounters and skip the fluff. Better yet, do both! They've obviously made some nice adventure arcs, but how many 1-15 runs do you need? Ooh, let's do dragons! Ooh, let's do elementals! Ooh, let's do hell!
You can't count on an endless supply of newbies to the game to keep jumping in at the ground level and working up. At some point, they're going to want to continue with those characters at a higher level. Far more likely, they'll try it for a third of the book, then want to use their 5th level characters in a different adventures. These arcs aren't set up for that kind of play. They're set up to be run through fairly sequentially. If you start it, you stick with it to the end, or quit playing.
I don't want to quit playing, and I don't really want to be stuck with their flavor of the month setting. Everything about WOTC seems to be geared toward sanctioned adventures sourced out through game play stores. They aren't concerned for the home groups, or the do-it-yourselfers. They want you to fit a mold, and they want you to come to them to get pigeon-holed.
I hate the way they run this company, but the product is still top-notch, and I'll keep sinking money into it. I just wish they'd reward the long years of loyalty with something of more substance.

Dragon+

I'm going to take credit for this, deserved or not. WOTC has created a free iPhone/iPad app periodical. I've taken the last couple of surveys they've offered, and freely expressed my desire for the return of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Particularly, I've expressed the need for the kind of content they routinely provided, namely a mix of maps, game theory, adventures, and so on. This is a good start along that route, so I'm going to claim they listened to me.
Ok, the content is as thin as the website. Ok, there really isn't anything new that can't be found already on the website. But, it is the right direction to go, and seems to be a useful Newsstand item. The value will come as content is developed for it, and one hopes for a similar adventure based offering to come soon.

Keeping the Peace (Or Not)

I was reading this story a couple weeks ago, about ways to keep the murder hobos at bay in D&D. I've thought about that before - we've touched on some of the things that handle it - so I thought I'd write about it.

The game has taken a couple approaches through the years. The linked post notes a few. The game discussed in the post - The City State of the Invincible Overlord - did it by giving almost every NPC adventurer levels - not to mention deals with Orcus and such. here's also a link to a post about a couple Gary Gygax designed towns with legal and social systems intended to hold the characters in check. In later editions of D&D, things changed to steer PCs away from evil - limiting alignment, things like that... Or the way 4E just scaled everything to match the Characters - so in a 10th level adventure, you would run into town guards with an AC 26. That kind of thing strikes me as nonsense (and typical of the ways 4E obliterated any kind of actual world building) - 5E certainly seems to have adapted things like the flatter bonuses ("bounded accuracy") to address that. (A nice exchange about this is in the comments...)

I worry about this myself sometimes. Both questions in DM David's post: how to stop characters from going on a spree; and how PCs are supposed to relate to the general public in these worlds. But I don't think the problems are all that hard to solve. You can see it by reversing the terms: how do you stop an NPC party from sacking a village? that's what PCs are for! And that would work the other way. We've talked about this - PC's are not the only adventurers in the world. They are always a subset of the set of adventurers. I think PCs would be exceptional in their world, but not unique. From the start, they are probably tougher than most of the public - but there are always a few people around who are tougher than they are, and wherever they are, they are almost certainly not the only people at their approximate level. As they rise - maybe they become the strongest people in an area - but their presence there draws other adventurers, draws attention. If they start to abuse their power - what happens? Probably they get away with it, in the short term - the way the Orcs get away with their depredations, the way a dragon gets away with his - but they draw enemies worthy of them, by virtue of their actions. Just as an evil NPC party would draw PCs to fight them.

Still: for most campaigns, I think, PCs are probably going to fit, more or less. Take an example - the Clamdigger Cove/Dwarf mine adventure. How do PCs fit into this environment? This is a dangerous area - but it's a fairly low level danger. it's a relatively barren stretch of coast, rocky, with few inlets, with moors coming fairly close to the coast, making this uninviting for farmers - there's not a lot of people hanging around, not a lot of wealth in circulation. That makes it uninviting for powerful groups - inviting for less powerful groups. The threats out in the wilderness are significant for low level characters - orcs and goblins and bandits and so on, scaling up to ogres, giants, probably trolls - but not much more than that. The civilized population is similar - if you explored the towns and settlements, you would run into some character classes - but about the level of the monsters. The bandits and smugglers you are likely to find are 2L, 3L - not much more. I think that context provides the balance against PCs (or NPCs) getting out of hand - if the PCs decided to sack Whelker's Deep, they would find enough opposition to make it very hard, at mid-level anyway. By the time they could start to wreak real havoc, a couple things are going to come into play - on one hand - this part of the world simply doesn't have enough wealth to make it worth their while to lay it waste. And second - if they got the idea, they would start to draw opposition from people their own size.

Some of this dynamic was at play in the story of Clamdigger Cove - the idea that it was sacked by pirates gave it a couple features. I suppose the shameful truth is that it let me clear all the civilians out so I didn't have to run them just yet - but that's only part. But it also helps create the balance in the place: it creates that power vacuum, a place where crooks and monsters can operate - but it does it in a context where you know there are forces out there strong enough to wipe a town off the map. But those forces are absent for now - creating a place where low level PCs or bandits and crooks or monsters can hang around - but carefully. It should work like that - to offer a setting for adventuring that people can operate in, but with the awareness that there are bigger, stronger, darker forces just out of sight. And if you do something that attracts attention - get too rich, too powerful, or start behaving too badly - or in some cases, too nobly - you will start to draw those people in.

I think this sort of thing works even more clearly in larger towns and cities - we haven't really played in those kinds of places, but it would be fun to try. But it does require a lot more attention to these questions. First - the larger the town or city, the more adventurers there are going to be, and the more range of levels. A place like Whelker's Deep might not have anyone more than 5th or 6th level, and they are probably running part of it - but a large city can have anyone. You walk into a bar in Waynesburg and order a drink, see a tough looking old guy at the end of the bar with a longsword and the long bow and leather armor, and you think, A Ranger! but you don't have a good way of telling, at a glance, how much ranger it is - maybe he looks 5th level - maybe more or less - but the truth is, there's not going to be a huge difference between a 7th level ranger and Geronimo, Aragorn, Simon - and people like that might just turn up at the end of a bar in Waynesburg.

And more than that - most businesses anywhere are going to have muscle on hand: the owner might have a level or two, or be a veteran soldier (thus a Veteran in 5E terms) - or they might have a couple retired soldiers or rangers or such on staff. Or they have a deal with their neighbors, a neighborhood watch type thing. This is all more true in cities, and especially in the adventuring quarters of cities. In those kinds of places: bars and inns and businesses are even more likely to be owned by people with levels; to have guards on hand; to have powerful friends. They are also going to be more likely to be associated with a group - owned by the thieves guild; or paying protection to the thieves' guild. Or a member of the merchant's guild - which is almost certainly going to provide its own protection. Finally - in a city, especially in a pleasure quarter of some kind, the sheer number of establishments is going to serve to keep a kind of balance in operation. A fight starts, and everyone is going to come out into the street to watch the fun - so fights stay contained, or the mob takes out anyone who goes over the line.

So putting it together - I think that is how you can make this work. Especially in cities, though the same principals work outside cities - though probably a bit slower, and maybe more predictably. So start with the basics: why don’t PCs (or NPCs) go on killing and robbing sprees? Well -

1) sometimes they do - but see below.
2) in a city there are always people around - and in a city with adventurers, there are always people around ready to fight with you. If you start a fight, you will attract attention, and people may jump in, especially if things start to spread - if you start killing people, they are likely to do something to stop the killing.
3) in a city with adventurers and regular instances of violence, bars will have guards - most shops will have guards - if not by themselves, they will be part of guilds and the guilds will have guards. And in an area with thieves, the thieves guild will provide security. You should assume, in a big city especially, that bars and inns and brothels and gambling houses are owned by the thieves guild, or someone who had a deal with the guild. You should assume similarly than any merchants will have deals at least with their merchant guild, and possibly with the thieves guild. Etc.
4) Plus there is always the fact, in cities at least, that you don't know who you are talking to. It might be as simple as someone who looks like all the other 3rd level rangers or fighters, but it really 10L; it might be more deadly - someone who looks like a common thief or low level ranger who is actually a 12th level Bard; a common prostitute who is really a 7th level sorcerer. That kind of thing. This is, I think, far less likely to happen outside of cities - I'll come back to that...
5) The point is - if you start acting badly, you will draw attention - low level at first, but higher if you prove too much. And - as the threat or reward scales, so would the level of attention. If you start taking out the thieve's guild lieutenants, their hired killers will come after you; if you steal a vorpal sword, you will get attention from the kind of people who think they deserve a vorpal sword.

Now some of this changes in smaller towns, or outside of towns. But a lot of the principals are the same. Even in small towns, or rural areas, there will be others who can fight - even small towns will have guilds; anywhere with large landowners, there will be men at arms, to keep the peace (or maintain control). In frontier areas, things start to go back toward what they are like in cities - there will be even more adventurers around. There will be significant monsters, who may have dealings with whoever lives there. That dirty old prospector might be a 10th level fighter. That sort of thing. And drifting through it all, you will have powerful factions or people - take Clamdigger Cove again - isolated and barren as it might be, it is a nice harbor, and the offshore waters are thick with pirates, pirate hunters, all sorts of things. And any of them could turn up at any time. You could find some poor sap washed up on the beach, and think they are a lowly smuggler, an unlucky fisherman - but they might be part of a pirate crew. And the rest of the pirates might be looking for them. Or a naval ship. Or they could be an adventurer themselves, separated from their party - and the rest of the party might be looking for them. Being too quick to resort to violence can have consequences...

Hooks

I've been thinking about hooks and how to build them as a good launching point for an adventure. It strikes me that if the DM comes up with the idea, it is likely to be something that would draw them into the game as a player, not necessarily what anyone else would want to do. So the obvious question is what kind of a hook would the player's like to see?
Personally, I'm old school... I feel like showing up at the table is hook enough. It's good to have some sense of what to expect in an adventure, but I'm comfortable with "You're in a bar and a stranger asks you to fight monsters and find treasure over there." Anything more is window dressing to some extent, or flavoring, perhaps.
My point is that when I try coming up with hooks they feel like adventures I'd want to play in, and I expect everyone does the same thing. So, if you could name three story lines you'd like to follow as a player, what would they be.
I'd like to:
1. Quest after an artifact or special treasure, learning its history a little at a time, tying it in with backgrounds.
2. Infiltrate a thieving ring or some uncover some plot. Again, backgrounds can tie in very nicely.
3. Fight monsters... a dungeon crawl, taking on different types of monsters. I always like giants and dragons, but it takes time to get high enough to be able to take them on. Until then, bring everything else on, right?

Characters

David will be playing Inky, a Dragonborn (black) barbarian. Inky is a hermit who has led a life of seclusion. He is the caretaker of an ancient relic. When his family was destroyed, he grew up with a "migrant" dwarven family of barbarians, but left when he came of age. He lives to protect his family heirloom and its ties to his families. The heirloom is a suit of Hide Armor, that he doesn't know how to work, or what it does.
For personality traits, he is oblivious to etiquette and social expectations, and because of his long isolation, rarely talks and speaks only with the occasional grunt. His ideal power: solitude and isolation are the path to power. He has developed great insight into an evil only he can destroy, and his flaw is that he harbors dark and bloodthirsty thoughts that his isolation failed to quell.
His weapon of choice is a halberd.

On Motivations and Rewards

Some thoughts on rewards and motivations. The question starts with this: why should the party go off to some dark hole in the ground to fight goblins and orcs? And second - when they do - what should they get out of it? What can they get out of it?

I can think of three answers to this.

1) They go for the treasure. This is the simple answer - straightforward: they go because they expect to profit. And they do profit. That's kind of how we have always played - you fight things for the rewards, straight up - XP and GP. Magic. It's simple, logical enough, practical enough, but it does have drawbacks - it can become abstract: what do you do with your gold and magic? assuming lots of it gets handed out. And it warps the world around you - here's first edition Leif, with 193,685 GP - what's that - two tons of gold? You either ignore the facts or you invent an elaborate society that can accommodate a bunch of people shlepping around 2 or 3 tons of gold. Or you invent credit and banks and checks and the like, the way the real world did. That is - if you're going to play wealth and power, you have to figure out how it fits in the world - and you're off #1 whether you want to be or not.

2) Personal motivation. Backgrounds help with this. But this also gets to what I think is an important part of this problem - it's like this: why would some character go on some kind of high risk expedition without any idea what they are going to get out of it? Well - the truth is - because it's what they do. Why do adventurers go on adventures? because they are adventurers. But what this is doing, I think, is moving the question back a level - why is Bono heading off into the wilderness to kill stuff? because he's an adventurer - he heads off into the wilderness to kill stuff. The question is - why is he an adventurer? why does he do this? That's where the backgrounds come in what made these people adventurers? Maybe it's simple - they want power and money and women and castles; maybe it isn't simple - they want vengeance on the southern lord who drove their family off their land and left them impoverished and desperate in a foreign country. Or specific - they want to find the 6 fingered man and kill him. The idea is that these background motivations are ends, ends that provide short term motivations. To do those things - get wealth, power, vengeance, liberate their homeland, become king - they need to become strong. They become strong by adventuring - so in the present, they go off and kill orcs. The best thing about this is that it can go either way: thinking of backgrounds as motivations to take up adventuring keeps you moving through the normal run of dungeons and such; but the specifics of the motivations remain in the back of your mind. You fight orcs and you look for clues about the 6 fingered man. You break up a smuggling ring and win the approval of some merchant who can help you reestablish contact with your home town. You drag off a chest full of coin, which you can use to buy land and some cows. Etc.

3) The World’s Motivations. This is related to the others, but oriented toward the overall setting. For adventurers it might be straightforward - you're being paid to clean out a next of monsters and made the river safe again. But that second part is the world's motivation. That motivation (cleaning out monsters, say) can exists regardless of the character's interest. Now, it might be the character's motivation too - a paladin righting wrongs will share the desire to destroy the monsters - but it's still outwardly directed, and the character's motivations don't matter. The PCs can share it or not - they might be doing it for the money (and XP and such), but there is another motivation at work as well - which, against regardless of the character's commitment - is going to have further repercussions on the story. To be sure - if the characters don't share the broader goals, you have to find their reasons as well - so this is usually grafted onto the first two - but it still shapes the way the campaign goes.

So: when building an adventure, I think you can use any of these. Though all require some work and thought, to make them become important. For #1 - you have to have an economy. You have to understand the economy and work on making it all fit. That means - you have to think about how much gold or magic is in circulation, and how much of out might accumulate in some old mine or crypt. And you have to have an idea what happens if a party finds 10,000 GP somewhere - what are they going to do with it? I don’t just mean, how do they get it out of the place - I mean - how do they use it? what can they buy? That kind of thing.

Same with personal motivations, though this is clearly more in the hands of the player. You should have these built ahead of time, and keep them in mind. Granted, they may often be superfluous to the adventure at hand - but they should still be there - at some level the characters should be thinking about how this adventure is going to serve them in the future. Maybe it just makes them stronger and richer - maybe it takes them a tangible step closer to something they want. The more of that you can work into the game, the more interesting it becomes.

Finally - Campaign Plots and the like are worth keeping in mind. Maybe in the large sense (whether in an ongoing storyline, or just in terms of building the world around individual adventurers), but even in the smaller sense. If you can make one adventure feed into another - create situations that generate more trials for the characters, more challenges, opportunities and so on - that will help build a better world, a more engaging campaign. Even relatively loose links from one dungeon to the next give the game texture, make it better.

Party Building

I want to run an adventure, set in Lenay, on it's south-east, across a large bay from the city of Bayport. I see this starting in the same place we started in when we played in July - with a bit more detail. WE start in the town of Whelker's Deep, on the coast; this is 5-6 miles south of Clamdigger Cove, which has been sacked by pirates, and is now something of a lurking place for various bands of troublemakers - smugglers, pirates, orcs and goblins and kobolds, wandering monsters, bandits, etc. The part can meet at something called the Gypsy Arms, just outside Whelker's Deep, a little inn, and go from there.

What I want to do now is start to put a party together, so we can be set up to play when I get up there again. So I hope we can pick characters and work out their backgrounds, and so on, before we start to play. (If I could find a way, I'd try to play some non-combat stuff now, over the internet - not sure it works, but who knows.) Anyway - I'd like to set up characters now; work out backgrounds, and so on. For a couple reasons - to start thinking about D&D and see if there are ways to advance campaigns remotely like this - that's part of it... but also to get the party set up. People can use what characters they want - they don't have to be the same ones we played in July (though if you want to, go for it; those characters all hit second level, so I can see it...) But I know that one we put together kind of quickly, and with limited rules, so other characters make sense.

I want to set up the party ahead of time, with some care. I want to come as close to everyone playing one character as possible - and try to make it so everyone is playing the character they want to play. I am trying to make this more of a role-playing and exploration type of adventure (though with plenty of mayhem - I'm inclined to make it a dungeon crawl), and that works better with fewer characters and without multiple characters. And - if we all decide what we want to play ahead of time, we can figure out how to balance out the party if we need to. No harm in adding an extra character or two - someone playing two, or adding an NPC or so - but this is easier if we decide what we want, then fill in the blanks. So if we get a thief, a fighter, a barbarian and a wizard, we'll know we need an extra cleric - but better to add an extra cleric than to saddle someone with a cleric because they picked last...

And finally - I also kind of want to try to work out more of the background details of things, both the characters and the setting. even if it's just at the level of the old days in Waynesburg and Farmington, I want to try to relate where characters are from to where they are - involve them more in the world, etc. Backgrounds have some promise on this - and it's something we could work out ahead of time and online like this. (Here, through Facebook, email, IM, something.) It's also (and this might be very metagamy, but I don't care) a way to know how to pull the characters into the adventure - the kind of characters people play might change the purpose of the adventure - I haven't done this in a long time, and I don't trust myself to come up with a hook impromptu....

So I think this is what we need to do before hand:

1) Decide what we are playing - name, class, race, and so on.
2) work out backgrounds from the game - pick them, and the details (bonds and flaws and so on), etc. (These can be expanded maybe, if people like.)
3) add some additional background details related to the setting - where people are from, how they got to Whelker's Deep, and why they're sitting in this tavern with these other people.

For the third: I think we want to decide where our characters are from, broadly speaking; this information could lead to benefits or disadvantages - I'll try to note some as I think of them. Options might be:
1) strictly local - somewhere within 20-30 miles of where they are. This might give you extra knowledge about the area - might also give you enemies or entanglements to complicate matters. This is stuff to think about, I think.
2) Somewhere in Lenay, but not local - west coast, highlands, far south, capital city - again, this might let you know things; might create ties and so on - some of these details might fit with the book's bonds and flaws and such too.
3) A neighboring area - such as Oceanside (to the south) - or Bayport or its environs (to the east) - maybe the fjords and high mountains to north of the bay, etc.
4) Somewhere more remote - Waynesburg or Hillsburg maybe; the southern Kingdom; the south seas.

Again, these choices can influence the specifics of the backgrounds.

And so, this is an example - this is the character I want to play, with this kind of info built in:

I will play Bono - human, male, fighter. He has a soldier's background; he's from the west coast of Lenay. He is a pole-arm specialist. Basic story is - he was a soldier in some lord's army; but as Lenay's troubles mounted (the king is being held for ransom abroad; his brother is raising money to ransom him - or maybe not - and causing unrest), this lord's force broke up. Bono headed to the east coast to establish himself as an independent adventurer.

That's the basics, and the starting point.

Keystone rule books

"Dungeons & Dragons has always consisted of three books: The Player's Handbook, the Monster Manual, and the Dungeon Master's Guide. Of those, the Player's Handbook - colloquially called the PHB - has always been the keystone." (from a review of the new PHB in The Escapist)

I was asking myself this question a few days ago, I think because I had seen a similar comment in another location. It got me thinking at the time, and this reminded me of that internal conversation. I have to disagree. I loved my original Player's Handbook, but the book that stood out from first edition was the Dungeon Master's Guide. It had the combat charts, rules on random dungeon generation, not to mention rules on gaming and gambling. That is where I learned to rank hands in poker. But the most interesting section was the pages of tables and descriptions of magic items. The magic items were wonderful, but the ability to create intelligent weapons with special abilities, curses, etc. was a powerful aspect of the game which faded as the game aged.

For the second edition, the book that stands out for me is the Monstrous Compendium. Each monster had its own page, illustrated with great artwork, and as Karen points out, full of humorous and quirky details. I liked the non-weapon proficiencies, and playing with Ed, we got the most out of the PHB, but the book that sticks in the mind from that edition was the Monstrous Compendium.

In the third edition, the PHB came into its own. For that edition, the statement above is accurate. The DMG for 3E was relegated to obscurity. You could have played third edition with nothing but the PHB. That was one of the selling points of that version. Fourth edition carried on this emphasis on the PHB. It has become a truism of the game that the PHB is the keystone rule book, and given that the game has always needed characters to be played, it has always been relevant, but I still think it is Monday morning coaching to retroactively elevate the importance of the Player's Handbook over its companions.

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.

A Couple Links

A couple quick links today:

This is a nifty site - rules momentary; D&D history; resources. Today's post is very useful: 5th Edition DM screen inserts.

And - in the spirit of pet shaming - Dice Shaming. Yeah: "I made the ranger with a 20 dex fall off a ladder." That kind of thing.

New Website for D&D

Dungeons and Dragons has relaunched their website with a new layout. This was a very welcome thing to see after nearly four years of the same old page. Hopefully, the new design is followed up with new content...

Along this line, there seem to be encouraging signs. There are links to many of the new features of 5e that they have been touting of late, though most are still bare or dead ends. I'd like to think the paucity of info let out over the last few weeks and months is tied to this relaunch, and now that it is in place, actual relevant information will be more forthcoming. With two weeks plus until the actual release date of the Player's Handbook, I'm not expecting anything major. Still, there doesn't seem to be much point in redesigning everything without intending to update content more often than they have recently.

Many of the threads seem to point in that direction. Now, considering they are pushing their Adventurer's League and systems of organized play, it may not matter much when they start adding content, since it will enrich those aspects rather than general play. It is yet another tease of what the game can be with a taste of how wrongly it could be realized.

Given that I'm not likely to be playing at a local retailer anytime soon, and unlikely to attend any conventions, I'd rather see content geared toward home play... modules, backstory, encounter maps, etc. Still, its an encouraging thing to see, and I look forward to further updates and additions in the coming weeks.