Armor and Such

Lately I have been thinking about armor in D&D. The results of watching YouTube armor enthusiasts, Shadiversity and Skallagrim, that kind of thing, maybe, and idle time wasting.

I have been thinking about the ways D&D (and apparently every fantasy game ever made, from what I can see) distort historical armor. Studded leather! And how this matters, when it might matter. I have been thinking about how people might dress in a fantasy setting city - who would wear armor when? People going about their business in a city or town - how much armor would they wear? Adventurers going into dungeons - what would they wear? Full plate? Doesn't seem likely. I find the game unsatisfying in some ways. Mostly as a realistic simulation of medieval combat, and as a guide to how people would likely live in medieval (fantasy) settings. How can you fix this?

When does this matter? well:

1) This has nothing to do with the way the game (D&D 5th Edition, specifically) plays. It plays fine. There is lots you can say about D&D armor and hit points and the like, but I think the system works perfectly well for what it is meant to do. It lets you play fairly smoothly, it gives you variation among armors and abilities to get stronger, and all the rest. The level of abstraction in the game works very well at the table. I have no complaints there.

2) This matters for me because I do like realism in games - I like games that simulate reality. I would like to see a more realistic armor and hit point system than D&D. Should it use damage reduction? should armor offer something like hit points of its own? Possibly. I would like a game system that modeled real world historical armor, weapons, fighting methods and so on. I don't know if I would want to play a game like that - realism, accuracy and so on usually means complexity, and that is not always worth it for playing the game. I feel this way about 3/3.5 of D&D vs 5E - the 3's offer a superb simulation of character abilities, feats, skills and so on. But I found it almost unplayable, back in the day. 5E, while far more abstract, sometimes annoyingly so, is very playable, and all these posts don't add up to a real desire to change it. Maybe tweak it, though. And I wish a more complex and realistic game was out there to read.

3) Where this kind of thing really matters, I think, is in giving the game a sense of place. This splits in half, a bit.

First - in fiction, I do want to make the world as accurate and realistic and plausible as I can. To make everything deliberate, at least. Using games as a guide for fantasy stories has some uses - a kind of check on the possibilities in the story, a way to gauge how strong people and things are, a framework for adding magic to the world. In that context, though, you want to imagine how someone would really act in this kind of world - and if the game can't help you, or does something clearly wrong - that makes a problem. But this again doesn't really matter to the game.

Where this comes into the game, I think, is in the possibility of giving more flavor to the world. Specifically, to give it a sense of place. The abstraction of D&D can erase the variations in locations. In our games, we have campaigns set in large northern cities; in a desert with a definite North African/Middle Eastern tone; in the south seas; in the north seas, on the coast; in the jungles of Chult. As well as in mountains, moors, towns and so on, at times.

More variation in arms and armor, both in terms of the names of things and the mechanics, can create a sense of differentiation between them. The desert campaign should have different kinds of weapons and armor than the northern ones. Scimitars and lamellar or scale armor or whatever seems right; as well as the different environmental effects - heat and dust and so on. You want ways to specify the settings - the ways they look different, the ways people act differently - different clothes, different habits. A lot of this is just description - but sometimes, some mechanical differences are nice too. Some of this is purely cosmetic - the difference between a cutlass and a scimitar - even if they are identical mechanically. Some is more solid - there should be arming swords in this game. There should be stats for brigandine. Knowing how things work, how different things work, what choices people make, helps that. 

Anyway. All that said, I am not above taking a crack at redoing the armor tables to match what I think is more historically accurate. How about this?

Maintaining the existing categories and most of their rules...

• Light Armor:

AC 11

Leather jacket or tunic - this is a reinforced leather jacket, maybe with a layer of padding inside. Mostly cosmetic - it looks good - with some minor protection. Very flexible - realy just reinforced clothing.

Light Gambeson/Arming jacket - the kind of padded armor that is worn under chain or plate mail. Less protective by itself though still useful.

AC 12

Leather breastplate - boiled leather, breast plate or vest, only the torso. Stiff, solid, but somewhat limited. 

Heavy Gambeson - padded armor meant to be worn by itself; this should be very common - this stuff is, by most reports, very useful in fact. 

Buff coat - this is something from later, leather hide coats with padding inside; but stiff and useful.

• Medium:

AC 13

Improved leather - meaning in this case a set of boiled leather plates - cuirass, plus arm and leg protections, etc. Better armor, more complete, but a good deal less flexible, harder to move in. This might include things like leather lamellar armor, which apparently existed in fact as well. 

Hide Armor - hardened rawhide. 

Jack of plates - this consists of metal plates sewn into leather or cloth jackets. This is cruder than brigandine, I think, though working on the same principal. Metal armor, in fact, so probably noisy.

Chain shirt - chain, only to the waist, maybe with sleeves. 

AC 14

Breastplate by itself - the book's rules are fine.

Scale Armor - keep the book's rules. One of the problems though is that D&D makes this universal, when in fact, it tended to be used in certain places and times. It would be more interesting to make things like Scale or Splint and Banded armors more exotic - from somewhere other than the places that use chain and plate and the like. 

AC 15

Brigandine - this is not in the 5E books, which is too bad. This was fairly common in medieval Europe, used by foot soldiers archers and the like. It's good armor - metal plates riveted to cloth and leather facing - flexible, protective, convenient. Usually opening in the front or the sides, so someone could put it on by themselves - a common soldiers armor and good stuff. Of course this ends up being more or less the same strength as half-plate in the book. 

• Heavy:

AC 16

Chain hauberk - strength 13; dis on stealth - the book is fine.

“Half plate” - I would put it here. I would say this is chain or brigandine with added plates at the shoulders, on the limbs. Or this might be what they call "munition armor" - a kind of mass produced plate armor used by soldiers in the late medieval, early modern period. 

AC 17

Splint or banded - 15 strength, dis on stealth, etc. These are again more likely to correspond to Asian styles of armor - strips of metal bound together, rather than big plates. 

AC 18

Plate Mail - what the heck? full harness! Though as gets pointed out - really good plate armor is more or less impenetrable. 

I would change a couple weapons as well. The most annoying omission for me is the Arming Sword - what they called a Longsword in first edition. Gygax had the types of weapons more or less right - he just called them the wrong names. Longsword - Bastard Sword - Greatsword - should be Arming sword, longsword/bastard sword/hand and a half sword - Greatsword. Just bring it back:

Arming Sword - one handed, does d8 damage - there you go. This could cover most one handed swords - Viking swords, arming swords in the crusading period, and os on.

Longswords are fine as they are.

Another thing I think makes sense would be to make things like Longswords and Spears into finesse weapons when you use them with two hands. Getting that extra leverage makes them very fast and maneuverable - makes it easier to get in a precise hit. Why should't there be finesse two handed weapons?

Anyway: that is enough for now.

Feats and Character Creation

Backgrounds in 5e provide interesting flavor to character creation but have little value in game terms. In order to reflect this extra training, allow a new character to choose one feat tied to their background.

For each background option, tie three feats to it that can be chosen from at first level. It might even work to allow ability boosts instead of a feat.

It will be necessary to balance each background with three boosts that fit logically and offer varying effects. I like having one more powerful or focused feat, one that bumps an ability by +1, and the option of bumping two abilities by +1 each.

This is my initial attempt. I set it up so that each background offers unique options for the initial feat (yellow are basic feats, peach have prerequisites, and blue include an ability boost). There are multiple Magic Initiates, but each background is tied to a specific class of spellcaster.

Using this chart, the player chooses the background they want from the left-hand column, then chooses one of three options for that background. They choose Feat Option 1, Feat Option 2, or an Ability Boost in the two abilities listed (+1 to each).

I feel like it will need adjustment as we test it out, but it feels like a good start. It might not be necessary to keep the feat options unique, but I like the idea that each background offers a different skill set. I think this works best in place of the variant human option, as a variant character option for all races.

No.	Background	Feat Option 1	Feat Option 2	Ability Boost
1	Acolyte	Magic Initiate: Cleric	Keen Mind	Wis		Int
2	Anthropologist	Healer	Observant	Str		Wis
3	Archaologist	Dungeon Delver	Linguist	Dex		Int
4	Charlatan	Lucky	Actor	Cha		Str
5	City Watch	Grappler	Gr Weapon Master	Con		Str
6	Criminal	Skulker	Crossbow Expert	Dex		Cha
7	Entertainer	Magic Initiate: Bard	Tavern Brawler	Cha		Int
8	Faction Agent	Alert	Martial Adept	Con		Wis
9	Folk Hero	Innspiring Leader	Resilient	Cha		Wis
10	Guild Artisan	Skilled	Sentinel	Int		Str
11	Hermit	Magic Initiate: Druid	Durable	Wis		Con
12	Noble	Defensive Duelist	Mounted Combatant	Int		Cha
13	Outlander	Magic Initiate: Warlock	Sharpshooter	Con		Dex
14	Sage	Magic Initiate: Wizard	Ritual Caster	Int		Dex
15	Sailor	Dual Wielder	Athlete	Str		Dex
16	Soldier	Lightly Armored	Weapon Master	Str		Con
17	Urchin	Mobile	Tough	Wis		Con

Maps

I've been working on World Anvil and exploring map-making software. I downloaded Wonderdraft and have been trying to learn how to use it. Today, I. decided to use it to recreate our own map. There is a level of detail that it requires to really fine tune the edges, and I left off with that. If you were starting from scratch, you could whip something up pretty quickly. Since I was trying to replicate a map we already had, that made it more complicated. Still, I think it came out well. It is fun seeing it look more like an actual map.

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 Revisited

Tim had an interesting exchange with Anthony recently, presumably about backstory. The gist was that Anthony asked if Tim wanted the info sent to him privately, and Tim replied by saying "If you want… It's ok to play your character without secrets from the other players too." He followed this up with a second comment that was more philosophical, saying, "I've always wondered what the purpose to having character secrets that don't come up in gameplay is? If it isn't discussed in-character, is it relevant?"

I thought that was a fascinating point, and got to the heart of a lot of the discussion we've had over the last two year in and out of game with regards to backstory and character interaction. From the beginning of 5e, backgrounds have seemed really appealing, and yet they seldom have more than a cursory effect on actual gameplay. I think this last comment is telling and appropriate. We all enjoy choosing a background and developing a backstory, but rarely share the information with other players or reveal it in game to other characters.

It turns the background motivation that you thought important to creating your character into a secret backstory that has no bearing on the games they join. A disconnect between the intention and application enters the equation.

I think backgrounds are a good way to build a character, they help frame the character in your mind as a player, and allow you early insight into how to play them. Yet of the eight players in our game, I only know bits of most backgrounds, and probably only know Lyra's in anything approaching the detail of my own character. Most are broad sketches - Taman was a soldier, Nim is crazy and a long-time loner, and Josef is mostly a land-locked pirate. Lyra has read much more of her backstory, so I guess there is more there, but it gets to the heart of the other element of importance - relevance.

Lyra has a story of abandonment and cruelty from her youth that has limited her emotional and mental development. All that seems to give is an excuse for playing badly… I don't think that was the intent. Still, it exposes an interesting point, is there relevance to backgrounds and backstory? When I fleshed out Peren's backstory, I was trying to build a sense of his values and morality - how does he react to certain actions? Will he kill a bystander in order to take out the boss? Will he be greedy about treasure?

I think it helped me decide what I wanted to play, but I wasn't looking to bring in characters from my past to interact with. I wasn't trying to use my upbringing to emote with every NPC. I don't think that aspect of my backstory is relevant. It actually helps to talk this through, to realize that there is a big difference between a character's background and their backstory. I think I built a background for Peren in order to inform how I wished to play the character, and Anthony skipped background to develop a backstory for Lyra.

That suggests that what Tim is really looking for is backstory, and that he feels it should be public among the members of the party and the DM. That is probably an accurate position to take. What I've built is a background for my character, and that is the kind of information that should largely be kept secret. I'm starting to think that our biggest difficulty has been lumping the two together and treating them as interchangeable, which they aren't. On the other hand, after two weeks (or years for us players) together, how much relevance does any of it carry to the adventure at hand.

Reconsidering Tim's musing, what is the purpose of having character secrets that don't come up in play? I'm not sure. I think they should. That is what seemed so appealing at the first about backgrounds, the ability to interweave character arcs into a common backstory that could inform the campaign arc. Once the campaign is established, can those background elements be melded effectively? I think I need to revisit my character and think about this. There may be aspects of the background I gave myself that I can use as in-play backstory. I think one part that might surface soon is walking away from the fools in the party and no longer following their insane actions. Peren is sick of being underground, and feels the company he is keeping has held him there too long.

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...

World Anvil

I have been playing with World Anvil this weekend. I like it very much. World Anvil is a world building site - a database for world building for games or fiction, that allows you to create and track information about your world, and then present it in various ways to others. you can get a lot of use out of it without paying a penny - though the paid versions offer some very appealing features, and aren't all that expensive. I am likely to ante up for at least the first level of it.

There are plenty of places to find reviews (that one is on Nerdarchy): I want to write more about how I use it and what I wish it could do. Which might be best read as, what I haven't figured out how to do yet - it is fairly extensive, with lots of interrelated pieces and templates, that are sometimes hard to fit together (at least in the 4 days I've been using it.) I think it is a very useful resource, though, and am probably going to start digging into it hard.

It works very well at what it does, I think. It is a fine way to organize material and present it. The templates for different pieces of the world, types of information - people, places, organizations, etc - are full of options, collecting what you need to describe those pieces. Some of it is obvious - some of it works as a spark, to think about the elements you need. Ticks and quirks and tone of voice and date and conditions of birth for people; coinage of the realm, founding date, judicial systems and so on for countries or organizations. A lot of these are sparks to think through story elements - they are very useful. There are lots of options, but they are easy enough to figure out. It is possible to put down a pretty basic record, too, and come back to add what you need.

Where things get complicated is in how the different types of records relate to one another, and how they display. The software publishes its information in a Wiki-like format - but doesn't always quite seem to follow the flow I would like. The best example I can see is with a country or city. You can enter a place as a physical place, a "location" - Lenay, say; and you can enter it as a country, which is called and "organization" - The Kingdom of Lenay, for instance. Both types of record collect a lot of good and useful information - but as nearly as I can tell, they are both published as separate pages. What I would want would be one page that could present at least an outline of all of it - the land and people, weather and conditions, the history and politics and cultural factors, the people associated with it, all one one page. (At least outlined on one page, like Wikipedia itself.) To be fair - this strikes me as something that is probably possible with some advanced settings. I might have not figured it out yet. But it's odd, and so far creates some complication, I think.

There is also the question of what I want to do with it. The problem there is that I have way too much information to do anything simple with it. Getting what I want in there (assuming I can decide what I want and don't want) is a daunting task. There's also the problem of how to split information up. I have been doing this for 35 years, both for D&D and for writing. There's a lot of material, and it falls into both categories - fiction and game material. There is a lot that is only really applicable to writing; other that is applicable to games but not fiction; some that is different. Pieces can get moved around, characters and situations reused or changed. I want to be able to put the game material out where others can use it - but I also want to organize the fictional material. This is a good way to keep it all straight - but using it for both games and stories might just make it more complicated.

That's my problem, I suppose. And it's a problem created by the fact that this is a very useful piece of software, something I am eager to use to organize both D&D campaigns and fiction writing. So - I am very happy to have finally gone on the site and started playing with it.