Where To Next?

 Hello again, world! Whoever happens to read this. It has been a while, hasn't it - another rather shocking break in this blog. And I thought I  was going to start updating more - folly! 

I should have been. I have been thinking a lot about the theories of gaming - that should be ideal fodder for a blog. But those thoughts have tended to spread out, big unwieldy accumulations of ideas, that I can't wrangle into a postable form. Too bad. It doesn't help that gaming has been on a down stretch as well - the big games, the Icewind Dale game, the Saltmarsh game, have been chugging along - the Tomb of Annihilation game has even gotten back on a fairly regular schedule, after a couple spotty years. But the home games have all been pretty well dead in the water. We've tried playing Traveller - enjoyed it - but it's been hard to get it started, and to keep campaigns going. That is probably my own fault for being such a habitual home-brewer. I keep trying to make up my own adventures and campaigns, and doing this with a new system is not easy. 

So what do you suppose we have found as a possible solution? We've started playing around with Call of Cthulhu! At least, we rolled up a bunch of characters and ran them through some shenanigans - that was a blast, and promises more. And - well - this is going to steer me back into an essay, maybe getting some use out of the philosophizing I have been trying to do. 

I suppose this starts with D&D. It is a fact - I have been rather dissatisfied with D&D for a while now. Why? Well - combat, mainly - though not combat as such (which works very well in D&D 5 at least). It's more the way the game's focus on combat tends to squeeze out other ways of playing. I could go on about this a while - I have, and might still get around to posting some of that stuff - but lately, I have been thinking there might be a simpler answer. My complaints about D&D aren't so much about D&D as they are about settings. That D&D is fine in a high fantasy setting, in a dungeon call - but starts to fall apart when you try to play in a town. If you try to play social or political situations - even if you try to run something like a heist, instead of a raid. And the reason I complain about D&D is that I would rather play in a different setting.

And that brings us to Call of Cthulhu. You can see from a couple of the games we ran in the last couple years (the heist last year, the stuff we did two years ago), I've been trying to come up with more urban settings and games. Those worked all right - but using Call of Cthulhu brings us to the 20th century - and those kinds of settings really take off. That is one of the things that has always been appealing about Call of Cthulhu - the possibility of setting games in the 1920s and 30s - Hardy Boys and Sam Spade, Terry and the Pirates and Indiana Jones. Yes: that inspires me! It resonates - like fantasy stories, Robin Hood and Treasure Island, history and westerns resonated with me, and with what you could do with D&D when I started playing it. It's a world I want to play in.

This is also, maybe, the reason Traveller has been harder to get started with than it should be. I love Traveller's system - it feels so right, simple and fun - but I have never been a huge science fiction fan, especially not a space opera fan. I like that stuff - but it doesn't resonate the same way. Which makes inventing situations in that setting harder. While inventing situations in 1930 Bayport is second nature.

All right. I will stop here. I might try to post some of my thoughts on how these systems work, what they do well and less well, and what I like about them, some day - maybe. I might try to post some more on the joys of these other games - and on how we are likely to play them. For instance, I am not sure how much horror we want to play with Call of Cthulhu. A weird thing to say, for a horror game - but it's the investigative stuff, the pulpy stuff that interests me, and I think that stuff might work just fine without any eldritch abominations. We'll see. I want to find out.

Ring out the old...

It's the last week of 2021, and time for an annual assessment of the year passing in preparation for the year to come.

In gaming terms, this year has gone well overall. We managed to finish up a three year campaign for Princes of the Apocalypse. There were some odd moments in the final encounters, but it was nice to wrap everything up in a neat little package. We did try to tie everything up with some "sunset stories" to wrap up everyone's stories, but it was mostly theater.

Wrapping that game up allowed us to start Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, which has been very entertaining so far. It's basically the same group, with one less player, but we've been able to resume playing in person at the game store. These two aspects have allowed for a more relaxed interaction, so the game feels more alive.

The long-running game suffered from a lot of issues over the years, mostly too many players for most of the run, then too long online because of COVID. I've had a lot of fun playing online, but its not for everyone. With almost two years in person and 6-8 players for most of that time, switching online was a major shift in a game that already strained at its bounds. Still, we had a good group at the end, and were able to make it work out.

The new game has developed at a slower pace, and concentrated on playing the situations out without instantly resorting to combat. It has been fun to look for ways to avoid fights and explore using skills and other resources. There is an impatience in some of the play that is irritating, but not to the point of breaking the game.

Our other game, The Ghosts of Saltmarsh, has been going nicely (when it goes… we seem to get on a good run, then miss several sessions in a row). We've finally made level 4, and survived a couple of epic battles. There is a lot in this game that is improvised, which is fun, but it seems to slip into combat easily and works really well.

For our home games, we managed to push the desert game through a major point, basically finishing up the quest with the monastery. That involved an epic battle as well, but the game has stalled out since. We've toyed with other scenarios, and fought a few battles, but can't seem to get any game running consistently.

I finally restarted the online game for Tomb of Annihilation, and we got three or four sessions in before the usual fall distractions interrupted everything. Again, it's in a lull and needs to get rebooted again. We're only about two sessions from entering the final dungeon area. Once we get in there, it will be easier to keep the story going, I think. Ryan also expressed interest in returning to Storm King's Thunder. That would be fun, but I'd need time to pull it together. I think it would run smoother now though, after so long away from it. It would just mean extra time prepping it to run.

We've gotten distracted in the last two months by Traveller, a sci-fi game. It's been great fun building characters, but we haven't gone past that and a few skirmishes yet. It really comes down to the usual concern that we have with most of our games, everyone wants to play, but no one wants to run the game. That's a hard way to run games.

It's been fun and active this year, game wise. I think the new year will offer many opportunities for even more fun. What is going to prove pivotal is finding the motivation to start right out of the gate with Tomb of Annihilation and Traveller. We're in good spots with each game for capturing interest, but need to take action with them. I've begun getting flickers of ideas for other D&D adventures, but nothing has fully coalesced yet. Ideally, I'd like to start finishing off some of the adventures I've developed, with a mind toward publishing them online.

But next year's concerns will merit their own discussion in a future post looking forward.

Getting Things Moving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Braving the Elements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Borrowed Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year End Gaming Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so: what are my goals for 2021? 

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

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

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

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

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

Wipe Out!

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

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

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

Last week was not comic.

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

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

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

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