RPGaDay 2019: 14 Guide

This is a good product. Smart design.

The newest iteration of Dungeons & Dragons now includes rules for sidekicks. 

These are three simplified archetypes, the warrior (fighter), the expert (rogue), and the spell caster. These simplified character classes are easy to play, easy to follow, and do the workman’s job of propping up a narrative conceit. It’s good. Well, it’s fine. Okay.

I do it a little differently, and have for years. You still get to the same place, but there’s more variety and also some player agency. When the adventurers embark on their epic mission, they get a zero-level character. He’s got regular stats, four hit points, and one proficiency—usually the thing he can do.

That zero-level character joins the party, and works and behaves as normal. Typically that means he's the guide into the mountains or the cook or the stable boy, or whatever. He gets 1 X.P. each week that he stays alive. If he mixes it up or swings a sword or almost drowns but is saved by a party member, he gets 2 X.P.

At 25, the zero-level character becomes a first level…well, it depends on how the traveling is going. Are the players actively keeping the NPC alive? Who’s doing most of the protecting? Who does the NPC not like, and why. Using the existing character classes in the party, and looking at the adventures the NPC has participated in, I make a small list and randomly roll for it to see what the NPC will become.

And what’s interesting about that in a meta-game sort of way is this: you can create the new NPC’s background whole cloth out of the adventures your party has already been having. This really makes the character feel real and also ensures that he’s not left behind by the other players.

In the last game I ran, the cartographer’s guild hired the gang to clear out the cursed forest, and map the area and look for trade routes as you go. They were to be paid by the miles covered.

None of my miscreants had anything resembling mapmaking or wilderness survival skills so the cartographer’s guild sent a gifted apprentice along to help with the mapmaking. It was made abundantly clear that no harm was to befall the mapmaker, or they would not get paid.

With the motive and incentive clearly established, I sent them into the woods. Every week that Paidric the mapmakers stayed alive, he got one experience point. If he was in danger but escaped harm, he got two experience points. Their battle plans soon included a “where’s Paidraic” component. Would they squirrel him away from the fight, or just keep him in the back of the group?

When he finally racked up his 25 points, I did some calculating as to what he’d likely decide to be and it was pretty obvious that he needed to be a cleric of knowledge. So Paidraic the mapper became Paidraic the learned.  Mind you, by this time he was two levels below the player characters, and that was okay. He still mapped, and also healed, and helped them with puzzles when they got stuck.

It occurs to me that I could still utilize this system, and then transition over into a Sidekick instead of a fully realized character sheet. And that’s just what I am gonna do.

RPGaDay 2019: 13 Mystery

Jinkies! The Beholder!

The single hardest kind of adventure to write is the mystery, in any game. The reason is both simple and decidedly complex: too many moving parts. You can’t just drop a monster in a room and call it done. There’s a lot of plotting that goes into presenting a mystery in a D&D game. Also, role-playing, despite being descriptive and cinematic, is not suited for whodunnits. You can’t cut away from the heroes to show the killer’s hands as he takes off bloody gloves to reveal he’s missing his pinky. The players “camera” never leaves their side.

I tend to write all of my rpg mysteries the same way, with slight variations. These aren’t hard and fast rules; they represent what works best for my DM style, my way of telling a story. Maybe you can get some use out of looking at my process.

First things first. Figure out what the mystery is (usually, but not always, a murder). Figure out who did it, and why they did it, and how they did it. Simpler is probably better. Murder in a game with medieval monsters present need not be spectacular, but it should make sense. There should be a compelling reason for the suspect to commit murder, but really, any plausible reason will do.

Once you have those details established, figure out three pieces of evidence that scenario would generate. This can be a physical detail (muddy boot prints on the kitchen floor) or it can be statement from a witness to the crime. The evidence should be accurate and true. Ideally, the evidence must point to the killer in some obvious way, such as “the scrap of cloth in his hand is a perfect match for your torn cloak”

Now those three pieces of evidence are placed into your scenario for the players to find. I don’t ever make them roll to notice. They have to get this clue or they can’t solve the mystery. In fact, if it looks like they are going to miss a clue, I move the piece in question right in front of them so they can’t miss it.

That’s the structure, in its most basic form. You can certainly make it more complicated, but if this is your first mystery, don’t. If this is also  your player’s first mystery, then really don’t. Not until you can see if your players will enjoy such a thing. You need to gauge how challenging the clues were and how quickly they put the pieces together.

You can add more clues, or introduce false clues called Maguffins to baffle the party. These false clues seem important, but actually aren’t part of the murder. You can also introduce Suspects into the formula. Suspects must have a connection of some kind with the victim, and optimally, a reason to want them dead, however unreasonable. A murder plot should have at least three suspects, each with their own connections to one another as well.

These kinds of things get big and complicated real quick, which is why I think you should only do it if your group is really into being a Sword and Sorcery Scooby Doo gang. Most groups won’t be that hardcore. The basic outline ensures that players will need to engage in the back story but it won’t spiral out of control. That said, if you need to help a stumped group, have the murderer attack them for “getting too close.” They get to round out the evening with a brawl, and it looks like you planned it that way all along.

RPGaDay 2019: 12 Friendship

Starting a party of newly-created adventurers off was never easy, especially back when everyone had to have their own reasons to just happen to be in that particular tavern when the merchant comes barging in the door, saying he was robbed. This is doubly difficult if your players are of the “extra special” kind, with unique circumstances and strange NPCs and none of it goes with anything else and you have to struggle to make some kind of connection, however tenuous, to get the party started.

When the hobby was young, no one in Lake Geneva cared how they all knew each other. They had willingly skipped ahead to chapter five when they all agreed to help out the merchant, for suitable compensation, of course.

It was also assumed that, once the merry band of psychopaths got together and killed some shit, they would grow to love one another in the classic spree killer/couple killer idiom; great minds think alike, and all that jazz. It’s one of the reasons why the thief became the rogue and stealing your party’s loot became a no-no with every edition going forward.

A good game from a good company.

During the lean years, when everyone else was making better D&D than the people who owned the game, a company called Dungeon Crawl Classics, came out with one of the first Old School D&D clones, a deliberate throw-back to the first edition of the game, with a few notable style twists. It’s very much worth checking out for all kinds of reasons, but the thing I want to talk about is probably one of the best ideas to come out of the Old School Renaissance: the funnel.

I first heard about this at a Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference some years ago, before I was fully back in the hobby. The Pulps Studies scholars had made friends with the Game Studies scholars and we were talking D&D and someone suggested we just play. So we grabbed an empty conference room, handed out characters and went for it.

It was pretty cool, to say the least, but we were discussing this idea of the funnel and it was like a light went off in my head; players roll up not one, but four characters who are ZERO level. Minimal hit points, no skills, no real stats, nothing else. Just an occupation and maybe, if you’re lucky, a tool to go with it. Cannon fodder.

The idea is simple: all of these zero level characters are from the same place. They all, together, as a group, banned together to investigate some thing that has happened to threaten the safety of the village. Orcs raiding, daughter goes missing, livestock being murdered, you get the idea.

These zero level characters, out of a sense of little more than civic duty, agree to hurl themselves into danger and possibly—make that, certainly—death. In fact, that’s the point. With an average of 2 or 3 hit points, a single hit from a goblin sword is lethal. Oh, sure, three or four zero level characters with rocks and sticks can overcome a goblin, but not before it kills one of the group.

That’s the funnel. It's a game of attrition, like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory Tour. Start with a lot of zero level characters, and at the end of the adventure, you have a few left. They have survived the harrowing ordeal, but at a cost. They watched their friends die, they felt a sense of helplessness when they couldn’t do something, and felt a strong sense of accomplishment for having stayed alive.

Those survivors, then, become the players’ first level characters. If a player has more than one zero-level character, they choose which one they want to use. Their background is a shared thing, and now when they leave the village and strike out on their own, there’s all sorts of compelling reasons why they are adventuring together in the first place.

It’s a cool idea, right? And I can tell you from experience, it’s a hum-dinger way to start a campaign. The game I am currently running used a funnel to get the group together, and it was glorious. For starters, there’s a kind of freedom in not getting too attached to these smaller characters, even though the players all picked favorites anyway. But as a DM, it’s okay to kill these guys. In fact, it’s expected. So you don’t shirk from the crocodile damage when it does eight points, twice what the zero-level guy has, and you make it a spectacular death with the character getting pulled into the swamp, kicking and screaming.

The players, weirdly, loved the deaths, as much as they loved staying alive. Probably because it’s kind of a rarity in D&D. As their ranks thinned out, they started focusing and taking more time to plan and scheme.

After it was over, while we were all brainstorming on background details, everyone’s bonds, ideals, and flaws all revolved around the loss of their friends, or how important friendship was to them, or how they care only about the friends they have and everyone else comes second, and they are playing those details, as well. It’s been glorious. No inter-party skulduggery; they all saved each other’s lives before they learned how to fight and cast spells. No one else gets them like their buddies do. It’s their friendship that keeps the party together.

There are some great examples of funnels out there, but I found this one to be particularly helpful: Fifth Edition Funnel. You can also pick up a copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics and convert their funnel system to your own needs. I recommend starting your next campaign with it, just to shake things up, but also to nip inter-party squabbling in the bud. 

RPGaDay 2019: 11 Examine

Okay, this is the first prompt that does absolutely nothing for me. It’s too broad, too nebulous, despite its status as an action verb. “I examine…” What, exactly? I could write something about how D&D used to not have a mechanism for examining things in a dungeon, unless you were a thief, and even then, they could only look for hidden things and traps. The rest of the party was out of luck.

Over the years, the proficiency system has blossomed, morphed, and imploded into the relatively small and manageable stack of “skills” in the current iteration of the game. These areas of expertise are fairly broad, and the entire proficiency system is a simplification and a deliberate choice to help keep the flow of the game moving at a brisk pace.

Yeah, that’s pretty mushy, there. The history of the development of passive perception is not blog-worthy. In fact, I have an idea: since this is my first year doing this, there are five previous years I never had a crack at. So, for this challenge, I’ve taken it upon myself to EXAMINE the other lists of prompts and compiled them below, along with my answers:

#RPGaDay 2018 day 11 – Wildest character name?

I had a villain in Villains and Vigilantes named Mr. Devo. He was a computer whiz who bought into the band’s fictional identity and convinced himself he was a harbinger of the apocalypse. He carried a Roland Ax-Synth keyboard like Mark Mothersbaugh played in the 1980s, only it shot lasers and mood-altering beams and the like. My players HATED Mr. Devo. A lot. I used him sparingly, as a result, but now, in 2019, I guarantee you they are looking around and thinking, “Damn, Mr. Devo got some of this right!”

#RPGaDay 2017 day 11 – Which “dead game” would you like to see reborn?

This is kind of a moot question in 2019, when most of the big games have been reworked and re-introduced to the new generation, and the things that haven’t been updated have been supplanted by better systems doing much the same thing.

All that being said, I would love to see Gamma World  converted to the 5e d20 system, and while we’re at it, Star Frontiers, too. I know, they did Gamma World for 4th edition, and that’s my point, right there. One of the old school things that AD&D did was allow players to genre hop with Boot Hill conversions and Metamorphosis Alpha, and all of that. We need to get back to that. Mind you, I don’t think I’d ever run something like that, but I know other folks would and having it all ‘port straight over from 5e to 5e would be ideal.

#RPGaDay 2016 day 11 – Which gamer most affected the way you play?

Not as germane to me, since I mostly run games, and I have to be honest, I took something from every player I ever spent any time with. Those multiple sessions, countless hours spent laughing, talking, fighting; it all went into the bingo hopper. Those people, those gaming groups, are my points of reference when I, say, encounter a player who wants to wait until the fighting starts, or the player who insists on writing a complete character history complete with family scandals…you know, in case I want to use that for something. They all affected me. How could they not?

#RPGaDay 2015 day 11 – Favorite RPG writer?

My friend, the dearly departed Aaron Allston, put more great ideas into my head and sent me into hours of self-reflection and deep thinking about running games and using all of the tools in the box to do it. Lands of Mystery and Strikeforce remain key elements in my creative gaming matrix.

Second Place? Jason Morningstar.

Third Place is Robin Laws.

#RPGaDay 2014 day 11 – Weirdest RPG owned?

Psi-World, by Fantasy Games Unlimited. It was clearly wrought from the slew (more like a slurry) of Psychics on the Run from the Government movies that dotted the 1980s landscape. Movies like Scanners (1981), The Dead Zone (1983), Firestarter (1984), the Fury (from 1978, not even an 80’s flick), and….um…well, that’s about it.

The game was a collection of psychic powers and a sketch of an idea how to make that interesting. But it wasn’t, except for the cool Matt Wagner artwork. The rest of the game wasn’t bad, but it just wasn’t enough.

“Examine.” Boom. Done.

RPGaDay 2019: 10 Focus

I would be willing to put cash money on a wager that the cell phone is one of the most hated objects at the gaming table by dungeon masters everywhere. Worse than the guy who bangs the table for emphasis, worse than Mr. Cheeto-Fingers and his orange crime scene-dusted character sheets, even worse than “I forgot my dice” guy. The cell phone.  That infernal contraption that signals to you in real time that you have lost the interest of that particular player and they would rather talk to anyone else than listen to your table rap.

I don’t subscribe to the idea of any mystical significance to good dungeon mastering; it’s not magic, it’s practice. But I do think that keeping the players engaged is one of the most important things a DM can work on, whether it’s through the use of stirring oratory, animated description, or improvisational acting. Or all of it. Or none of it.

Deep in thought about what to do next.

Every group is different, every DM is different. Players are all different, and it’s hard to accommodate them for every second of a four-hour session. In fact, it’s impossible. And I think it’s folly to try it; you end up more frustrated and angry than anything else.

It’s not unexpected, after all. There exists in every game session and ebb and flow between in-game situations and the real world. Players need time to process new info. DMs need a minute to take useful notes that make sense and aren't gibberish. Bio breaks. Tension relief. 

Every player is drawn to some particular aspect of the game: Combat, role-playing, exploration. They come alive when you roll for initiative and glaze over when the NPC starts talking about the thing that happened fifty years ago.

Aside from the No-Cell-Phones rule at the table, I have a few things that I do to keep my players engaged during and between sessions.

1. Cliffhangers are my friend. I try to end every session before or after a major scene, or just as things go from bad to worse. Amid the howls of outrage, someone will ask, “We’re playing next week, right?”

2. Anytime I need to take a break, I give them instructions. “Okay, I’ve got to stand up for a minute, so while I’m taking a bio break, I want y’all to figure out how to get across the chasm.”

3. If there’s a way to bring the whole party into a role-playing scene, I will do it. Asking the people not directly involved in the conversation to do something, or roll to notice something that the people in the conversation wouldn’t notice ensures that everyone is engaged. “As Earl and the sage are talking about the book you found, I need you two to make a d20 roll and tell me if you get a 13 or higher. You did? And you didn’t? Okay, Hakim, you notice that as they are talking, there’s a shadow visible in the window, as if someone is listening to the conversation…”

Even if it turns out to be just the sage’s manservant, it creates a moment of tension and gives everyone something to do.

4. Whenever I am talking to the party, I vary my vocal inflection, tone, and speed to clue them in that they need to listen. “The crowd is busy, people milling about, and there’s a thousand smells all blending together. (Pause) But what you all immediately notice is…in the distance…there’s a ship pulling into the docks…and you all immediately recognize the red and black sails.”

That will put the shopping trip on hold as the group runs down the docks for a little payback. And it only takes one of the other sailors to drop the clue that you wanted them to get during the session.

These are things I do in nearly every session that keeps the players focused on the game at hand. If you think any of them would work in your game, give them a try. And as for cell phones…usable only during bio breaks.

RPGaDay 2019: 9 Critical

It’s impossible for me to associate anything other than grievous bodily damage to the word “critical.” In the cutthroat 1980s, there was no shortage of bloodletting. Critical hit tables proliferated and they were all designed to reward people with an instant, gory kill (or death, depending on which way the dice were rolling).

I never used them in my games, not because I didn't want to, but because no one ever wanted to play the one character class who could offset critical hit tables; the cleric. That was just NOT our group. The few times one player's character got close to death was always an area of great trauma, so I didn't feel like piling on.

Now? Nuke 'em from space. It's the only way to be sure. 

Clerics are strong, so strong, and they throw divine energy around like a toddler flings Cheerio's. Despite all of the ancillary fun stuff that clerics can do, they still have a primary purpose and that is to keep the party alive and intact. 

On the other hand...you can sometimes come off as churlish if you take delight in injuring and scarring player characters. I do think there is a middle ground, though; a place where you can make the critical hit more serious and something that has to be dealt with, but not so catastrophic (well, mostly) that there's no bouncing back. 

Here's a set of Critical Hit rules for your perusal. They are free to use if you are so inclined. Feel free to comment if you like. I wanted something that took no more than 3d6 to implement, and would be easy for a player to keep up with. I think this works well. If you try it, I'd love to hear some feedback.

Alternate Critical Hit System for 5e

RPGaDay 2019: 8 Obscure

As a first generation gamer, I didn’t know how good I had it. Especially since I didn’t have ready access to Lake Geneva, WI, or GenCon, or even the means to do that if I were so inclined. Later, in my late teens, I finally went to a convention by just, you know, going. But in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a map for me to follow. There were two areas of the gaming world; over there, where all of the good stuff was happening; and right here, in Abilene, Texas, which was the middle of By God Nowhere.

AND YET…

There was something weird about Abilene. I don’t know what it was; there were three colleges and an air force base, so some things make sense, like having several hobby shops in a town of 100k (more on this later). But in a cow town in West Texas, hours away from Austin and the Metroplex, I got a hell of a pop cultural education, the likes of which I didn’t grasp until I was an adult.

A quick example: back in the 1970s, there were three channels on your TV: ABC, CBS, and NBC, all broadcast from local TV station (sometimes paired with a radio station, thanks to Ladybird Johnson). If you lived in a large metropolitan area like Houston or Dallas, you got access to a PBS station, as well. There was also some broadcasting found on the UHF channel, but only if your local stations had a transformer.

Abilene didn’t have a transformer. What it DID have was this: we got the three stations in town, ABC, CBS, and NBC, but we ALSO got WFAA, an ABC affiliate out of Dallas. We also got KTVT, channel 11, out of DFW and channel 13, KERA from the metroplex as well.  I had seven channels to choose from as a kid—and while the two ABC channels had the same prime time content, the afternoon and weekend fare on WFAA was ten times better. They played Going Ape week in the summer; All five Planet of the Apes movies, in order. And channel 11 showed all of the Universal monster movies, and the Harryhausen films, and late night horror and SF movies on the weekends. On Sunday night, I could watch Star Trek in syndication and then change over to Dr. Who late night on KERA.

Better than average artwork!
Pinch me, I'm dreaming!

I told you that to tell you this: I had three full-fledged sources for my D&D materials and an underground fourth that still has me shaking my head to this day. We had a Waldonbooks and a B.Daltons in the Mall of Abilene, located at opposite ends of the mall. I got a lot of exercise going between the two. There was also a hobby shop in the other, old people mall, called The Hobby Shop. It was one of three, the other two being a train and a plane store, respectively. This shop was a catch-all, and its wares included plastic models (which I was into, of course), like the Star Wars space ships, and the reason I mention this at all: A whole magazine rack dedicated to all things D&D.

And back then, that meant a bunch—as in, a cornucopia—of small press offerings. This hobby shop is long gone now, but they got a lot of my money back in the day; I bought my first set of dice from that place, and I bought nearly all of my Dragon magazines there. The store stocked TSR products, of course, but they also carried modules and accessories by other publishers; Judges Guild, Gamelords, Flying Buffalo, and the like. There was also a trio of books from Bard Games: The Compleat Spell Caster, The Compleat Adventurer, and The Compleat Alchemist.

Yeah, I never heard of them, either. They DID advertise in Dragon, but I’d already committed by the time I saw their ads. There was something about The Compleat Alchemist that spoke to me. Not sure why. But I had to have it when I saw it, so home it went with me. This was my first time off the reservation, if you catch my drift. I’d never bought a Non-TSR product before.  It felt kinda like I was cheating, but at the same time, there was a real sense of freedom in knowing I wasn’t bound to just one company’s creative output.

This book was one of the first things that really opened my mind up to the possibilities inherent in the game; using some of the things in The Compleat Alchemist made my game a little more unique, a little different. And it made me sort of say, “What else can I do to make my game more interesting?”

I also bought The Compleat Adventurer, but it wasn’t as interesting to me. It was a slew of new character classes, many of whom I’d seen a version of here or there in Dragon or elsewhere. But The Compleat Alchemist was gonzo. It used every single element of historical alchemy and then some. If I’d implemented this as a character class, it would have been the most powerful thing in the game. Seriously. Player character alchemists could make golems and clockwork monsters, as well as craft potions, poisons, powders, and other compounds that did all kinds of wacky things.

Despite my lack of use, the Bard Games books were pretty inspirational to me. They were eventually reworked into a D&D clone set in Atlantis. But those original books were game-changers for me. However, there was another influence on my D&D game that was even closer to home: Dragon Tree Press.

If you know them at all, you probably know them through their association with David Hargrave and his infamous Arduin campaign setting. But when they weren’t publishing those every versions of Arduin, they had their own modest line of system neutral spells, traps and tricks, artifacts, etc. These little thought experiments were statted out in general terms and they were lethal, interesting, dangerous, and strange, in that order. The publishers of Dragon Tree Press, Ben and Mary Ezzell, published their home-grown chapbooks and sold them at the used bookstore they also ran—in Abilene, Texas.

Their bookstore, Kingston Paperback Exchange, was one of my favorite haunts as a young man. It’s where I bought the first Thieves’ World anthology, where I bought my first Tarzan paperback, and where I bought my first silver age collector’s comic. They also had a spinner rack at the front counter that was their entire game line.

I remember Ben; he was an engineer of some kind, or at least, he dressed like one, with short button down shirts, pocket protector, you get the idea. He also had shoulder-length black hair and a full beard and mustache, neatly unkempt under black horn-rimmed glasses. He knew stuff; he had a computer at the book store that he played Starfleet Battle simulations on, along with Sargon Chess, of course. He also had good book recommendations. But I never quite put it together that he was the guy who published and wrote all of that other cool stuff.