#honestly if I did not already have some experience with D&D 5e I think this game would be too complex for me

[dare-to-dm]

Still enjoying Baldur's Gate 3. My spouse is interested in the game too, though I think it's unlikely that he'll be able to get into it. He doesn't have much experience with turn based tactical games, and I think that ultimately the high level of complexity in BG3 is going to be a barrier to entry.

I can't even advise him to play an easy character like a fighter because you have to control every action taken by every member of your squad. Sometimes he watches me during combat and whenever I open up the action wheel and scroll through literally dozens of choices he's like "...this looks really complicated".

He loves Dragon Age, but honestly that series is far simpler to get into. It does have a lot of granularity in its tactical options, but you can also just choose to lower the difficulty and let the AI control your teammates and you can do just fine.

#honestly if I did not already have some experience with D&D 5e I think this game would be too complex for me #I think a better game to get him into turn based tactics would be X Com Enemy Unknown #he's more into sci fi than fantasy anyway and I think he'd love the base management aspect #but it does crucially lack romance elements #at least outside of my fevered imagination #video games #Dare Original

[ryqoshay]

TA Followup: RPG Night

Followup Post for Tri-Arame: RPG Night

Author’s Note Continued: I actually started writing this scene about halfway through writing Change Overnight, because I had I finally gotten around to reading Setsu and Ayu’s Bond stories in SIFAS. Then I got sidetracked a bit and have now finally made it back.

So, I suppose some of the promised character details are in order. This absolutely will get long, so it’s going to have to go under the cut.

First off, though I don’t bring up much detail in this scene, more may come into play if I write other scenes like this, this takes place in a world created by the DM with whom I’ve played the most over the years. All of the in-game characters, and many, many others came into being because what was supposed to be a two paragraph character bio for a character I was to play in one of their D&D games, turned into a two page story. Then twenty. Then two hundred... New characters. New towns. New spells. New artifacts. New classes. And much more.

And then I stopped. I honestly don’t even remember why, as it certainly was not for the lack of ideas or notes or outlines for new scenes or the like. But the characters and their many stories have been gathering digital dust on my drives ever since.

I still think about them often, though. Quotes in movies and anime and such regularly make me consider what character might say them and in what circumstance. My headcanons for NicoMaki were shaped in part by what I already had planned for RyqoYoza. The reverse applies as well, as I translated one of Ooshima Tomo’s works into something that would work for RyqoYoza.

And maybe writing this scene will inspire me to write more of my D&D story. Who knows. But enough of that, you’re probably here more to learn about the new characters than to read my ramblings. Well, I will apologize in advance, as I may end up rambling a bit about them. To more easily locate a given character, I will bold their name at the start of their entry.

Also, the mercenary guild, of which all of the characters below are members, is known as Ryqo’s Roughnecks. Yes, those Roughnecks, from Starship Troopers, because I loved that movie, that’s really the only reason. I already had Ricochet as a character, so Rico’s Roughnecks was a quick and easy choice for when I wanted to register a guild in City of Heroes.

Ryqoshay, real name Rebecca Bouteillevoix, is a young girl who took over a mercenary guild after her parents were killed. Her father was raising her to take over the guild after him anyway, but she ended up doing so a lot sooner than either would have liked.

Her original nickname growing up was Ricochet as she was always “bouncing off the walls” with her high energy and neigh eternal optimism. It was also a joke referencing a typically undesirable outcome for archery, which was a strong interest for her. Upon her parents’ death, she took the first letter of each of their names, Yuri and Quentin, and misspelled her existing nickname to create her mercenary call sign; she kept the pronunciation for those who might wonder.

She matured a bit with the weight of running a mercenary guild, but still maintains much of her high energy and enthusiasm of her younger years.

Were I ever to get around to commissioning a picture of her, I would likely describe her general appearance as manga-version Nico for her stature, hair color and hair style, but with Setsuna’s face and eye color. Her outfits generally consist of dark purple and white, as those are her favorite colors.

Yozakura, real name Hakume Yaiba, (given name first for the sake of consistency) was hired by Ryqo’s parents as a bodyguard. As part of the payment, she was to be trained by Yuri, Ryqo’s mother, in the ways of the assassin.

She is the type of girl who takes her duties extremely seriously, to the point that after Yuri was killed and obviously could no longer fulfill her end of the contract, she insisted on renegotiation so as to continue to protect Ryqo. There were probably other reasons affecting her judgement at the time, but she has loyally  remained by Ryqo’s side for years.

As for appearance, though younger than Ryqo, she is taller; think Maki and Nico. She wears her blonde hair long and takes pride in braiding it intricately and securing it with an ornate pin given to her by Ryqo years ago. Her standard ninja outfit is grey with pink highlights as they are her favorite colors. For covert operations where stealth and deniability are crucial, she would dye her hair and use the Shiftweave function of her clothes to change her outfit. She would also wear something to change her natural blue eyes to something different.

Nullsilver Luna, real name only known to a precious few, is a young elven girl adopted by the Bouteillevoix family and has thus taken the role of Ryqo’s younger sister, despite being decades older than her.

After one to many of her experiments exploded, causing too much collateral damage and injury, Luna was exiled from her ancestrial home and ended up wandering the human kingdoms for years. Upon adoption into the Bouteillevoix family, Quentin, the leader of the Roughnecks at the time, hired her to be their artificer.

Her inventions still occasionally blow up, but the Roughnecks have proven far more tolerant of this than the elves in her homeland. The fact that she can better weaponize the effect nowadays may play into things.

As for her appearance, as mentioned in the scene, her hair occasionally changed color, because reasons. Same for her eyes. She’s been exposed to so many wild magics and artifice through out her life that things are no longer normal for her, or stable. The only consistent part of her wardrobe is an oversized white coat with multiple pockets that she has effectively turned into a bag of holding. She cares little for color or style and will thus wear whatever else is handy.

Also, her personality is not all that unlike Rina, so it was an easy fit to chose her to be played by Rina.

Recipere, often shortened to Rx, real name Rachel Ira Xaviera is a cleric who joined the Roughnecks in hopes that working with them might regain her favor with her deity.

Rx is the sole survivor of a border town caught between two warring kingdoms. When one of the generals of one said kingdom found soldiers from his enemy being treated alongside his own, he ordered the town razed. She went on to gather others disillusioned with the war and proceeded to go on Roaring Rampage of Revenge (trope!) against the general. In doing so, she may have gone a bit overboard and lost her connection with her deity.

After some wandering, she came across a wounded Ryqo and Yoza who had just escaped the massacre that took the lives of Yuri and Quentin, and healed them with magics to which she had thought she had lost access. For reasons not entirely known to her, joining the Roughnecks has reinstated her standing with her deity and allowed her to be a cleric once again.

Rx wears her blonde hair short and neat, under a bandana or some other head covering. As her deity is that of the sun, she leans towards using yellow, gold and white in her outfits.

Lady Sanguine, real name Vivian Sexton, is a woman who was raised in a village of barbarians despite not belonging to any of their bloodlines. She is the child of the unlikely pairing of a healer and a necromancer, the former of whom gave her up to the village to keep her hidden and safe from the latter.

The traumatic experience of having to kill her fiance to protect the village from his betrayal caused something to split in her mind. Specifically, her bloodlust gained its own personality and voice within her mind and gave itself the name Sanguine. Sanguine is also responsible for Vivian’s barbarian rage.

Vivian left the village after the death of her fiance by her own hands and wandered for a while before coming across the Roughnecks. She joins the guild and earns the call sign Lady Sanguine because Ryqo thought it fit her. However, once Sanguine became known, most in the guild started using Vivian’s given name to reduce confusion over who was in charge at a given time.

Vivian has blood red hair and vivid green eyes. (yes, yes, totally original, I know.) As of version 3.5e, she wore blood red armor, but if I ever get around to translating her into 5e, that may change since the class now seems to get a bonus for forgoing armor.

So yeah, that’s about as short an intro as I can give for these women. I could easily write pages for each, but I started this whole post a bit later than intended and I’m rapidly running out of time to sleep. Anyway, thank you to anyone who’s actually read this far. But I should probably write at least a tiny bit about players and character assignments.

Yuu playing Ryqo was an easy choice. They’re both high energy cheerful genki girls. They both have dark hair that they keep in twintails, though Ryqo doesn’t dye her tips green. And as Ryqo is the leader of the guild and Yuu is the idol club president, that was yet another match.

Ayumu got Yoza as they are both childhood friends with their respective counterparts, Yuu and Ryqo. They do have a few personality differences, e.g. Yoza would probably be a better match with Maki, but she’s not playing this game. But they’re both diligent and loyal, so I think things will work out.

Rina was an easy fit for Luna. They’re both tinkerers with their world’s respective tech. They’re both emotionally challenged, so to speak, though I hadn’t considered emotively challenged for Luna; now I am.

With need of a tankier character for the group, I recruited Vivian and originally assigned her to Ai as I believed her energetic personality could keep up with a rowdy barbarian. And of course the punny name played a role in the decision as well, as did the fact that I already had Rina as a player.

Shizuku needed to be brought in because not only is she an aspiring actress, she expressed interest in playing a TTRPG hosted by Setsuna in Setsu’s bond story. The team needed a healer, so so got Rx. I figured any mismatch in personalities could be made up for by Shizu’s acting ability.

Then Shizu’s anime episode dropped. The inner dialogue between black and white resonated with me and the stuff I’d written between Sanguine and Vivian. I realized I needed to reassign things.

Thus, Shizu is now playing a barbarian with a split personality and Ai is playing the healer. I’m using the excuse that Ai takes pleasure in helping clubs succeed by filling whatever role is necessary, so to help this game she is taking up the mantle of healer to help ensure the game’s success.

And there we have it, probably the longest set of Author’s Notes I’ve ever written... deities help me if I ever do something like this in one sitting again.

#Tri-Arame

[pixelgrotto]

Underdark slogging

Last month myself and a group of other folks finished the Dungeons & Dragons campaign Out of the Abyss after about 18 months of playing nearly every week. Jinkies. This wasn’t the lengthiest campaign I’d ever participated in or run, but it was the one where we met most frequently, since all of my other long-running tabletop RPG games are either monthly or bi-weekly. 

On that note, I’d love to be able to say that it was nearly two years of weekly thrills, but I can’t quite do that. There was actually a lot of slog in this experience, and I had an internal debate a few times on whether or not I’d stick it out. (More on that later.) At the end of the day, I stuck around, and now I can look back and say that the overall experience was worth it. But I’ve also taken some time to ponder about what I didn’t necessarily like, and I think there were a couple of issues at work - the first being that I found Out of the Abyss, as an adventure module, to be grueling. 

Out of the Abyss is described by D&D writer Chris Perkins in the intro as heavily inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, where the player characters are constantly bouncing from one strange encounter in the Underdark to the next. That sounds interesting on paper, but in reality the adventure begins with the players captured by drow and stuck in a prison camp, and once you escape you’re constantly on the run without much of a chance to catch your breath. You hop from one dungeon crawl to the next, only occasionally stopping in Underdark cities like Gracklstugh or Sloobludop, and there’s not really any downtime. And then the demon lords break free, Demogorgon shows up and starts inflicting madness on everyone, and off you go running from the big bads once more. Eventually your party eludes the drow and demons chasing them and returns to the surface world, where it seems like the campaign should come to a natural end, but after a few months, Bruenor Battlehammer tasks everyone to return to the horrors of the Underdark to take care of the demonic invasion. 

In other words, Out of the Abyss is one of those D&D campaigns that railroads the players while pretending not to. You’ve gotta run through the Underdark at the speed of light without much time to smell the subterranean mushrooms, and later you gotta go back in. The second half of the campaign is, in fact, a series of fetch quests that the players are once again forced into to arrange a spell that gets the demon lords to fight against each other until there’s only one standing, and the final one will always inevitably be Demogorgon, at least if you’re running this adventure as written. 

There’s nothing technically wrong with all of this, since half of D&D 5e’s official modules are railroads that try very hard to convince you otherwise. But Out of the Abyss is specifically a railroad that leans very hard on the travel rules of the game, and frankly...it’s no secret that the travel mechanics in 5e aren’t great. Almost every game that I’ve been in (including the ones that I’ve run) either ignored or hacked 5e’s methods of tracking water/food, making survival checks and looking up setbacks on random encounter tables because generally speaking, that stuff’s the least fun bit of D&D. (If you want a good travel hack for 5e, look up Adventures in Middle-Earth.) Out of the Abyss, unfortunately, really wants you to use these rules for much of the campaign to emphasize the fact that characters are on the run in a bizarre underworld realm. 

You’d think that a ranger in the party, especially a ranger specialized in traversing the Underdark, might fix these issues. And this leads me to the other qualm I had with my Out of the Abyss game...I played just such a character, a Gloom Stalker (later re-rolled him into a Deep Stalker via the revised ranger rules) whose favorite enemy was fiends, no less, and despite all of his abilities designed for hiding in the dark, finding more food when foraging and hunting down demons...none of this really made things better. Two years ago, I didn’t buy into all those claims floating around the internet that rangers in fifth edition are a poorly designed class, but whoo boy, I do now. They depend just so heavily on very specialized tracking abilities that a DM has to emphasize over the course of a game in order to make you feel as if your character is special and contributing, and once our DM became aware of my skillset, he would generally just be like, “thanks to your ranger friend, you safely make it to the next area quickly.” Which sounds empowering in theory (and did remove a lot of the boring bookkeeping) but in reality, I couldn’t help but feel like my character was sort of a patch to fix a segment of the game that was naturally dull. And that’s not even getting into the fact that rangers in combat aren’t as great as fighters, nor as versatile as any other spellcasting class. 

So why’d I stick with the campaign for nearly two years, then? Well, I think it took a while for these feelings to solidify in my head, and once they were there, we were already pretty deep into the Underdark and I wanted to see how events played out. Also, though I haven’t touched upon them much in this post, there were some real highs during our adventure, like the time we befriended a gelatinous cube, stuck rope ladders in him and used him as a floatation device to escape a flooding torture chamber. Then there were all the quirky NPC friends that ended up dying over the course of our Underdark romp to the point where it became a running joke. (”What NPCs shall we murder today?!”) The only issue was that the slog began outweighing those highs for me, especially once the campaign moved online due to COVID and we lost some of the dynamism and magic that comes from playing D&D in-person.

Honestly, I also resisted these feelings for a while, because I figured that lots of folks struggle to find a long-running D&D game to participate in. Part of me felt like I needed to enjoy this one and make the most of my experience. But for a variety of reasons, it ended up being a 3 out of 5 campaign; or perhaps 3.5 at times. And you know, we should normalize talking about this, because if you look at tabletop RPG message boards and Discords, you’ll see a lot of people chatting about amazing campaigns or god-awful campaigns. What folks don’t talk too much about is a phenomena that is probably more common than the two opposing ends of that spectrum - and I’m referring to the decent campaign. The one where the story has some alright twists and turns, but not everything is to your liking, or maybe the group and DM doesn’t gel with you 100% of the time. The one where you kinda don’t realize this until you’re a few weeks in, and then choose to endure hoping that you’ll hit another high point, or because you feel attached to your character. The one where you complete, feel glad that you had the experience, but then look back on with fairly critical eyes, as I’m doing now.

After finishing Out of the Abyss, I’ve had to gently bow out from the group that I played with, partially due to the fact that my schedule has become way too packed in recent months and also because I didn’t feel like continuing into higher level content. (We ended at level 15, which is more than enough, since high level 5e is generally too bonkers for me.) I certainly appreciate the journey my ranger went through, but now I’m also ready for him to retire in peace. Not every D&D campaign goes on forever, and sometimes you realize after a period of lengthy playing that maybe you’re just having an okay time...and that it’s also okay to feel that way. 

#pixel grotto #musings #tabletop gaming #dungeons & dragons #d&d #out of the abyss

[dalethesnail-blog-blog]

I finally DMed for my Best Friend and his Wife. An open letter to under confident aspiring DMs

So I started D&D 7 years ago with my best friend, his wife, and his mother as our DM(she had serious DM mojo back in the day so her son convinced her to play with us, his wife did DM a session one night for shits and giggles). His Wife and I were new to the idea of d&d, I remember my only relationship to it was I knew a couple inside jokes from a few people I went to school with but I had no desire to try it until my best friend found out I hadn’t even tried it before.

We played 3.5 that first campaign, and I loved it. Freed a town from a tyrant, slated a wyvern and uncovered the secret backstory of one of our party members.

Eventually his life saw him headed to the east coast, and I, living on the west coast, was left to dream of playing another campaign with them someday or even continuing the one we already had(Azoth Drake my gestalt Knight/Fighter is immortalized in character sheet pdf form on my pc to this day). I can’t tell you how many ideas I had for settings and characters, how many homebrews I made with hopes I would show it off to my first d&d group one day.

One day we three reconnect and start playing a PS4 game online together, him, his wife and I that is. We decide next time we get a chance we will play a new 5e campaign(since I learned 5e and studied the books thanks to other d&d groups I recently played with in the past 2 years preferring those rules to 3.5 or pathfinder).

I get the news they are coming for New Years around September. I have months to work on things and I’m worried I will either overprepare and railroad them, or I’ll underprepare and it will be All Sunny in the Forgotten Realms(but in a bad way). Also CR, the hardest thing to do is make a fair CR for a party that is just two adventurers. We decided to do it gestalt(like our first campaign, just take two classes and get features from both each level, sounds complicated, really easy and it makes the player a bit overconfident despite still having a normal amount of health for their level and just one turn in combat) that way they can fit two roles of the party instead of having to play two characters or having me play a healbot for them. And my best friend loves the idea of making it a “Witcher” type campaign with bounties on monsters and a political plot in the overtones.

With New Years looming we tidy up the final loose ends as far as what we need to know about the world and the characters and I get the opportunity to write in a few new things for precise flavor. I even made a failsafe that I’m glad I had prepared in case of premature player character death(My interpretation of Terry Pratchett’s Death will meet them on the road to the afterlife and check one of many pocket watches, the particular one designed so that it reminds the character of themselves, he’ll then tell them their deity would be angry if he let them pass on before their time and direct them away from the light).

I got more than I bargained for for certain. They followed the first clues I gave them and solved the problems I posed in ways I didn’t expect, so I had to ad lib most of the first contract they had. At the end of it his wife’s character lobbed a rock at the fleeing commoner NPC that was the key to complete the quest, being capable of killing it with 1+ her strength mod damage. Still they came up with a way to make it work reasonably and I let them get paid.

The first night they roleplayed staying at a tavern inn. My best friend’s character off put by his traveling partner’s homicidal tendencies decided to sleep alone. His wife’s character stayed up all night partying and we rolled on the carousing table for the result. She apparently gambled and won a lot of money and became a local legend. We had a lot of fun roleplaying after that.

On the way out of town I rolled on a table for an encounter, 1d4 Goblins, and I rolled 1. 1 goblin, oh well,that’s all I would have them encounter then. I created a lovable scamp goblin who considers the roadside to be his personal kingdom, and I named him after the Tomb of Annihilation’s Queen Grabstab. They didn’t kill him despite his annoying posturing, in fact when he asked for a toll my best friend’s wife decided to toss him a gold peice, but more about him later.

The next contract I made too difficult, admittedly on purpose(not every story has to be a happy ending), they could certainly solve the mystery but getting the full amount involved saving children from an entire Night Hag coven that had already eaten them. They faced only one Night Hag and after a long battle the Night Hag retreated leaving the child they followed into the foggy marshes behind. Even then I had the payment come in the form of an IOU from that one child’s parents who weren’t able to scrounge more than a few copper at the time. They settled for a larger sum later. I plan on paying them more money the longer they give the family to earn it(and I want them to forget about it if possible so I can surprise them later with enough gold to get their characters something nice like 1d4x10 for every week they give them).

Then it happened, I underestimated 4 cultists and 3 cult fanatics. That battle was more brutal than the single Night Hag I had thrown at them before. The strategy could have used some work admittedly, they had ranged attack options they forgot about that could have been effective rather than getting overwhelmed by 7 weaklings. Also his wife didn’t move from the center of the dogpile, despite me giving her hints that she was the most logical person to attack for four out of seven enemies so long as she remained there, meaning she was taking a lot of damage every round, I was trying to convey the message without metagaming but she was confident that she could survive. Just before the end of combat her character died, a tense moment for me as I’ve never had a character die in one of my campaigns and her husband’s character managed to barely survive the final 2 enemies left after her death. He had 10 health and a new cart to carry his dead companion back to town with.

I continued the session by using my one time resurrection failsafe, I’m glad I thought ahead but I felt I had to really exaggerate that I prepared the way I would give them a chance to come back once they first died, honestly a party of two is easy to overwhelm. Hey, even all knowing gods can fuck up and install a reset button, even great DMs aren’t perfect? I don’t like fudging rolls so I had to think of a clever way to make it seem like Death itself(Kelemvor, if you will) was giving them mulligans.

Then we partied in the tavern again and her character once again made slightly less than a mountain of gold by gambling and my best friend’s character broke even. They found a royal missive asking for experienced adventurers to join an expedition to an island to investigate some strange goings on. They decide to head to a new location to hop on a boat headed for the island. On the way out of town they ran into Grabstab and allowed him to join them for the next part of the adventure.

They fought an ambush of giant wasps. Grabstab even delivered the killing blow to one of them. The fight was mostly interesting because it was on horseback while pulling a cart and the wasps could just barely close distance at full speed, it made for an action packed fight. The players even tried to get away at first, and their speed turned out to be the thing that saved them.

That was the session. I established a homebrewed world, had them hunt monsters that were in their own right the mystery to solve, I killed a PC, brought a PC back because of divine intervention(death is my employee and does what I want), and I gave them a companion character with a wacky personality.

We plan on continuing in discord, maybe in a month or two. I feel like I impressed them though, I could tell they were enjoying their time in my world.

In hindsight; convincing them to have a companion character would have been better to do sooner, I could have used it to save a character from death before having to blow a secret deus ex machina. Also, the cultists were searching for them in the background right after they entered the first town, I could have warned them that they were being hunted, it may have derailed things but at least the ambush would have been better justified. The Night Hag was a good fight, and the bleakness of the result of that quest could have been fixed, I’m thinking about having the Night Hag’s sisters strike back at some point and somehow they save more children than just the one. And I should be clear that a commoner has 4hp and a rock to the head can kill them.

If you’re ever interested in DMing I suggest you put yourself into it with the best intentions. Players will end up doing things you don’t expect, like holding their ground and fighting to their death, if you think you’re putting them in too much danger find a way to save them before they are dead, not after, I’m fine with the way I fixed it because it’s what I wanted to do eventually but I wanted to hold onto it for after a bigger fight than where I used it.

This experience was supposed to be my masterpiece but it really taught me that I have a long way to go before I’m we’re I want to be as a DM. But all the same, I appreciate my DMs more than ever. And if you are worried you might not be ready my advice is to try it out and be surprised. I wasn’t a failure, but I gotta work on this campaign for next time I run it, I know I can’t get it just right, and my players still seem invested. I can say that I’ve gotten pretty good at eyeballing the challenge rating of a fight at least. I could have killed both of them if I decided to put more than one Hag in the second quest and they reasonably could have beaten the cultists but one of them being overwhelmed without knowing it is something I didn’t see coming.

#d&d #dndthoughts #brightest timeline #dungeon master #dungeon master diaries

[annakie]

So this past weekend I went to GenCon for the second time.

GenCon is the largest gaming convention in the world with about 70k individual attendees every year, held in Indianapolis, Indiana.  The first time I went was in 2009, with a friend from the internet, and it was a blast.  This time I went with a bunch of my everyday friends, some of my favoritest people in the world, and it was even more fun.

Part one of my long recap, including lots of pictures, below.

SOME PRE-GENCON NOTES

Our group does love boardgames, but we do RPGs (like D&D) together even more.  D&D actually doesn't have a very big presence at GenCon.  There was some D&D going on, but it isn't a main focus of the con and my friends aren't super into 5e anyway.  (We're actually doing a 4e game right now since it's one friend's favorite system.)  

So when we signed up for events, we were trying hard to get into a bunch of Pathfinder stuff, especially Pathfinder 2, which was releasing the first day of GenCon.  We got into two events, but ended up filling more slots with Starfinder.  None of us were particularly interested in Starfinder, which is a Sci-Fi setting also put out by Paizio... it was always like "Eh, we might check Starfinder out sometime maybe." but we weren't that excited about it.  But since we had gotten into two games to fill up some timeslots, we decided to go ahead and at least learn the system ahead of time for those of us who'd be playing in the SF games.

That would be Marcus, who is our DM most of the time when we play RPGs, Jeremy, and Brian, who is Marcus' oldest daughter's fiancee.  We created characters the week before GenCon and got together twice to knock out some beginning level adventures.

What we didn't expect, at all, was to fall head over heels into Starfinder.  Three of us ended up picking the same race (Lashunta, who are basically Mantis from GotG) and decided our characters were siblings, then decided so was Brian's character, even though he was a Vesk... a lizard-man race.  Jeremy's Operative (Space Rogue/Pilot/smuggler)Zafo is the oldest, my Envoy (space bard/doctor/xenobiologist/archeologist) Vikiri, and Marcus' Technomancer (Space Wizard/Computer whiz/K-pop rockstar) Alissia are twin sisters, and Brian's Soldier Kronk (Space Meatshield/Master Chef) is our baby brother.

We fucking LOVE these characters and the whole world of Starfinder, and also our dear Father and Mother, who we always strive to make proud of us.  Starfinder is really so much fun and we're running official modules as we're a part of the Organized Play Starfinder Society and they're... so good?   Anyway, here we are, playing Starfinder for like six hours the Thursday night before Gencon because that's the only day we could physically be in the same room. (the other time we played via Discord.)

WEDNESDAY

So anyway, then we actually went to Gencon!  Jeremy and I got flights together and rooms (separate) at the same hotel to make travel more convenient.  Everyone else, which was Marcus, wife Laura, daughters Gwen and  Kirstyn and Kirstyn friend Ally, and Gwen's fiancee Brian, drove.  14 hours from Dallas to Indy... Jeremy and I have talked about it for next year, we'll see.

I took Wednesday off to finish packing and relax, and then just before Jeremy came to pick me up, our flight got delayed two hours.  We decided we'd then have time for a leisurely lunch instead of fast food, and so we went to one of my favorite places to eat, a Canadian cafe.  The service was slower than expected, but we were still tracking to be at the airport about an hour before our original takeoff time, three before our “new” takeoff time.

And then... while we were driving to the airport... our flight got UN-DELAYED.  What.  The.  Fuck.  

Our leisurely afternoon turned hectic as we got to the airport as fast as possible then, I checked in our bags while Jeremy parked the car, got in line in Security, and oh nooo the line was long.  I started to get nervous about making the flight.  Apparently, we weren't the only people who had done the same thing.

We hoofed it through the airport, though and made it to the gate with like 5 minutes to spare until boarding, just enough time to take a bathroom break and get a bottle of water.  We got on the flight though!  And sat there.  And sat there. And... sat there.  And then got kicked off the plane for an electrical issue.  Then sat in the gate for an hour or so until another airplane arrived.  Turns out, our flight ended up being delayed... about two hours.

ANYWAY.  We made it, de-planed at Indy, collected our bags, taxied to the hotel.  We were staying at a Red Roof Inn outside of the airport area, we were trying to do this cheap and with each of us paying for a hotel room, staying near downtown wasn't an option.  $65/night for a hotel is a lot better than $200+/night for being closer, especially when you can split Lyft fares.  (Could have rented a car but we did the math... especially factoring in parking at $20-30 a day plus the hotel charging for parking... much cheaper to Lyft everywhere.)

After settling into the hotel we had to go to the convention center and get our tickets.  I had my badge mailed to me, but all events require tickets and Marcus had ordered all our tickets... and you have to pick up your tickets yourself.  The Will Call line at 10pm on Wednesday night was... an hour and fifteen minutes long.  So we waited in that.  Nothing particularly cool or terrible happened, but it's just one of those GenCon experiences.  This year apparently 15% of the events had electronic tickets.  Next year that's supposed to go up to 75%.  Let's hope so.  The GenCon provided Wifi was actually pretty good.

We headed back to the hotel afterwards and were both hungry again at this point, so we ate at the only available option... Waffle House... at like 12:30 at night.  Seemed like a good way to end our first night, as long as we didn't get food poisoning.

...which we did not. :p

THURSDAY

So another fun thing about GenCon this year that we found out a day or two earlier is that the entire freeway from the Airport to downtown was going to be closed all weekend.  Adding lots of time to our commute (and thus $ to our Lyft fares, but we still saved money.)  So we got up extra early, discovered how terrible our hotel's free breakfast was (very... most days I had a cold bagel with a scraping of cream cheese and if I was lucky, a banana) and got a Lyft into town.  Except it took 30 minutes to get a Lyft.  From then on, we scheduled them ahead of time.  

But HEY!  Eventually, we were there!  We found the room for our first game and met Brian and eventually Marcus outside.  Our first scheduled game was Star Wars, the Fantasy Flight Games system (which is now known as Genesys).  This is a system that Marcus ran Jeremy and I and other friends a 2+ year campaign in, so the three of us were very familiar with the rules.   Kirstyn and Ally also joined us, and Kirstyn had played it once before.

So I've mentioned before that Jeremy, Marcus and I go to a local con called GamerNation Con every year.  Two years ago the guest of honor was a guy named Sterling Hershey who is a well-known loremaster for Star Wars and helped write the SWFFG system.  We played in a game he ran that year.  Hilariously, Sterling was our GM for this game, as well.  It was a good way to kick off the weekend.

Jeremy played a Jedi and I was his Padawan, Ally and Brian played Clone soldiers ( the game took place in the Clone Wars era) Kirstyn played a shark-race diplomat and Marcus was her "get it done" operative type.  

Ally, Marcus and Brian.

The Table setup

Brian, Jeremy and Kirstyn

And of course, our DM.

Our next game was a 13th Age, with Marcus, Jeremy, Brian and I, plus two "new friends" and a DM who was very good at and familiar with the system.  We've been doing a 13th Age game as our "Main Game" for about a year, since our SWFFG game ended and like Starfinder, it's a system that we were all very skeptical about at first and have found ourselves LOVING.  

I really enjoyed this DM.  He did a lot to challenge us to roleplay, I think the only time we spend game time making up backgrounds for our characters and making any character creation choices.  (They were basically premades but he had us choose names and do some history stuff which only makes sense if you know 13th Age.)

 He did some really cool mechanics as well, like one that made travel interesting... one person would say something bad that happened in our journey and the next would say "But it was all okay, because..." and use that as a way to bring depth to the adventure.  Like one person said "It was bad when the owlbears attacked us..." and then I answered, "But it was all okay, because our supplies had been running low, and now we had plenty of meat to eat on the journey!"  Then I said "It was bad when we came across a village that had been wiped out by disease." and the next person said "But it was okay, because we learned a vital clue, and kept the disease from spreading!" and the DM gave us a clue about what was coming up.

I played a Bard in this game.... okay the thing is, I love playing bards.  Support classes in general, but I always have to pull myself away from the urge to play a bard.  But there were only a couple of character sheets left when they came around and Marcus wanted to play a wizard so I did bard.  Apparently, Bard is one of most complex classes in the game, and the DM said I did great.  We were 5th level (out of 10) so they were already pretty in-depth characters.  We're only level 3 in our campaign at home, so it was fun to see how powerful we'd become.

Also what I love about 13th Age is that the world is just... weird.  You think that Anything Can Happen in D&D but honestly, the world of 13th Age is just so much broader and weirder and it was fun to see this DM's interpretation of it.  One of my favorite games of the con.

Our fighter, Jeremy the Monk and Brian the Barbarian.

Marcus, our rogue, and the DM.

So that night, we had had a 3-hour break scheduled then were supposed to go to Lucas Oil to play the Call of Cthulu board game that night.  But then Jeremy and I had been talking the night before and were thinking... maybe we could play more Starfinder.

We'd been planning on going to the Nerd Night (which is a thing where you go and play games plus support a charity with donations) to fill in those hours, so we asked Marcus if he'd mind skipping the board game so we could spend those hours doing Starfinder at NN instead.  He gave in.

So we stopped and got some dinner at a food truck (had a pretty good burger and fries, we were starving since we'd just had whatever snacks we had brought with us for lunch) and then it took a little bit of time but we found Nerd Night, which was held in a hotel that had turned an old train station into a ballroom.  It was very cool.  After eating, resting, drinking lots of water, and doing some Starfinder Society paperwork, we got to work on Starfinder, finding a quiet table in the corner away from everyone to play at.  And the module was SO FUN, our characters were on a reality-competition game show in order to bring glory to the Starfinder Society (and our family).  And then a loud group of people decided to pick the table RIGHT NEXT TO US in an empty side- room to play their loud game at (seriously... wtf?  THERE WERE AT LEAST A DOZEN OTHER TAbLES NOT NEXT TO US TO PICK!) so we packed up and moved to another corner, that was actually quieter and not as cold.

Then they kicked us out of Nerd Night at around 12:30, after it had closed.  So we walked back to the ICC (Indiana Convention Center) and found a near-empty food court, pushed some tables together... and kept gaming.  Until like, after 2AM.  

We didn't officially finish the module yet but we were kicking so much ass that we had basically won it already anyway.

So yeah... back to the hotel... asleep by um... three?

The actual quiet corner table.

The Empty Food Court setup

FRIDAY, PART ONE

So the next morning everyone but me did True Dungeon, meeting at 10am.  I bowed out because my back was too fucked up to stand for that long.  It was a hard decision, but the right one for me.  Instead, I spent a little bit of time shopping in the dealer hall, taking sit-down breaks against the wall when needed, and decided on what I'd want to buy later.  Mostly I just went to three booths and peeked at a few more.

After a short hangout break, I went to a lecture I'd had my eye on anyway, all about Eberron (one of the "official" D&D worlds) by the actual creator of Eberron, Keith Baker.  This was definitely my hidden gem of the weekend. He took a bunch of questions BEFORE the panel started that he jotted down and answered in his talk, which I thought was a great way of doing it, and still had time for more questions at the end.  All the questions were also great, I thought, in contrast to a lot of con panels.  I really enjoyed what he had to say, not only about Eberron, which is probably my favorite of all the official D&D worlds, but about worldbuilding in general.  It was only an hour, but it was an hour well spent.  There were only about 100 people there but I hope he enjoyed the panel as much as I enjoyed attending.

Afterwards, it was time to meet back up with the guys for my first of four games in the Paizo room.  First up: STARFINDER!  

We'd tried valiantly, but had only barely made it to level two with our SFS characters, so we each picked a premade "iconic" character who was the same class as our own, and re-skinned them to just say they were our characters.  The module was pretty cool, dealing with a world that was a simulation that the inhabitants believed was real.  I was a little frustrated with the DM at one point but otherwise had a very fun game.

This is the only pic I took of that game, damnit. And this was because my mom texted and said to tell the guys hi, so I sent this back to her.

And after that game... I parted ways with my friends once again.  Because I had tickets... to Critical Role.

Okay this post is already really long, I'll finish up in a second post! Which I've already gotten a good chunk of written, so look for that later tonight or tomorrow night!

#gencon #gencon 2019 #starfinder #star wars rpg #13th age #keith baker #tabletop games #annakie's misc stuff

[savrenim]

I'm so jealous of your gay elf murder bachelorette campaign that I now desperately want my own. Any recommendations on how to find people to play D&D with? I have several friends who are interested, but none of us have any questions experience (between my secondhand experience of reading about your adventures) so we don't know how to get started

oh gods so apparently I have A Lot Of Opinions and it got really long, so under the cut, also thank you for reminding me that I should probably properly type up the finale of Gay Murder Elf Bachelorette Campaign Book 1 because it was freaking epic and this is the one campaign that I can properly rant about on tumblr without worrying about spoilers

(I’m in three campaigns right now) (by complete accident) (on the one hand it’s a bad life decision in that I have zero free time anyways with grad school, but on the other hand it has become my sole social interaction with anyone ever and also coping mechanism for the stress and one good thing I do for me and, like, they’re not all weekly campaigns, so hours-per-week I’m devoting isn’t ridiculous) (and I miss my friends and it’s re-connected me with them and also has introduced me to upperclassmen in the department) (but sometimes there are character secrets and people who potentially follow me on tumblr so I can’t post the super long dramatic things about a character that I really want to)

OKAY SO HOW TO GET INTO PLAYING

I will be real, the three campaigns that I am in right now are the first time I’ve played DnD for anything that lasted longer than a week and a half at a summer camp type deal, like, arguably, this is my real first time playing DnD….ever. That being said, I’ve worked at gay theater camp for….six years now? And they do super intense super in-character LARPing that is far more roleplaying-heavy than mechanics heavy and has trained me to both have very good story instincts of, like, “this is how you make decisions that both fit with your character and support the narrative instead of oppose it, and either do not tear the party apart, or tear the party apart but for a very good and fitting narrative reason (i.e. if there’s going to be strife, make it mean something)” and in my opinion it is when you bring those sorts of instincts to a DnD game that you get the most satisfying story out of it. Character creation, team cohesion, and story and world development are all things that I do feel super comfortable speaking about because that is my literal jam outside of my math jam which is paying for me to be alive and stuff. So here we go.

There are a couple of questions that you need to immediately answer, the first being, “do you want to play Dungeons and Dragons, or do you want to start with a mechanically less complicated system?” Because there are a lot of pretty good systems out there that are high fantasy even (i.e. Dungeon World) that are a lot more streamlined in terms of “you don’t need to be as familiar with a set of rules in order to play.” That being said, Dungeons and Dragons is classic and is fantastic and I freaking adore it. (I will be completely honest, the only other two systems I know right now are Dungeon World, which is fantasy, and Mech Noir, which holy shit you are playing noir style detectives except in a SCI FI SETTING WHERE YOU PILOT MECHAS and the entire game system is around applying “adjectives” to people like, if you successfully roll against an enemy, you get to pick any adjective you can think of ever from “grappled” to “trusting” to “confused” to “located” and it just makes for such interesting storytelling)

which vaguely brings me to my first piece of real advice: you learn how to play best by witnessing playing happening. if you are a podcast person, I highly recommend either The Adventure Zone or Friends At The Table (or, honestly, if you have the time, both). The Adventure Zone plays DnD, 5th Edition, and it is a super quality family who are goofing off and having fun together and then the plot that arises is like “oh shit I am crying about a wizard named Taako, pronounced taco, how did this happen to me” and it’s great. The Adventure Zone is 100% the reason why I reached out to friends and was like “yoooo is anyone starting a campaign because TAZ has made me want to play again.” Friends at the Table starts with Dungeon World and it is some of the best storytelling and worldbuilding I’ve ever heard? And you will learn so much about how to set things up and go with the flow and the DM talks a lot about his process as offhand comments and you will learn so much. I’ve heard good things about Critical Role, but haven’t listened myself. But get out there, listen, and then don’t be afraid of copying things that you admire. Best way to learn.

If you’re going with Dungeons and Dragons, start with 5th Edition. 0th, 1st, and 2nd are all ridiculously unbalanced, 3 is “actually everyone uses 3.5,” or a combo 3.5/Pathfinder. While 3.5/Pathfinder is a great system and is what we’re playing both in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign and in the math grad departmental campaign, and was the game that I learned on, 5e is a lot more streamlined and they’re aren’t super picky exact rules for every tiny thing you could think of doing, which means you don’t need to be familiar with a vast system full of loopholes and counters and counter-counters to know how to effectively play the game. we don’t talk about 4th edition

Decide who is going to be the DM. There are sometimes comic stores that’ll run weekly or biweekly or monthly games of DnD, but those are almost definitely going to be less story-based and usually are one-shots? And if you’ve got a good group of friends, I recommend just playing with them and not trying to find an external group that you don’t know. I’m vaguely assuming that you’re volunteering to be DM because you’re asking? But if there’s someone in your group of friends who likes writing things or likes managing things or is interested, or if people want to take turns trying stuff out, go for that. The department group rotates DMs (and rotates games) just based on who has something written that they’re excited to try out.

You also might want to ask around to see if there are any people that you vaguely know, or that are friends of friends, who play. You’d be surprised how many people do. I’ve also seen blogs on tumblr sometimes going “hey, I’m running a Skype campaign and I need two or three more players, if people are interested fill out this survey and then depending mostly on times people are free but also what you say about what you’re looking for from a game I’ll pick the players?” or if y’all are in college there is almost always a DnD club somewhere, hidden semi-secret on campus, on the register to get club funding but under the radar because nerds. But you and your friends who are semi-interested will work just fine, as long as semi-interested means they’re actually willing to commit for a bit. So how do you get started?

Get the Player’s Handbook, and the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and read them cover to cover. If you’re playing and not DMing, eh, skip this step, and have the DM do it instead, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide especially will walk you through how to set up things mechanically very well and if you’re going in blind it will be good to have gone through and read it all once. I’ve read the 3.5 DMG cover to cover several times, haven’t read 5e yet, I know that I didn’t like their storytelling tips, but read through it once to get an idea of what mechanics might look like, it gives very good starting mechanical advice.

1. Speed and smoothness of playing are important, which means that sometimes, if you don’t know a rule, you want to make something up on the fly and deliver it with a completely straight face. Everybody does homebrew. Rules are great because they keep things from devolving into chaos and they can settle disputes, but also, sometimes you’ve just got to make a call, and if you make it while looking like you know what you’re doing, everyone will believe you. Similarly, don’t make the same rolls, or the same number of rolls, for NPC characters as you would for PCs. For example, in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, when Iria was both directing a full assault on a hobgoblin fortress as well as had put herself on the special strike team that was going to sneak in and open the portcullis, the DM made ~one or two rolls~ to see how successful the Caedic units were at each of the points of Iria’s plan, instead of rolling a full battle between ~40 hobgoblins and ~80 elves. screentime is important; if you’re spending too much time on not-the-players, it gets boring for the players, so roll enough dice to decide what’s going on with a tad bit of luck and so it seems like other characters have rules that they have to follow, but you don’t have to let the rules dictate every single thing that happens in-world. you dictate that.

2. Character creation is how you set yourself up for success. Do not underestimate the importance of party dynamics. You don’t all have to be playing best friends or even people who get along–in Spelljammer, Marian and Djin had the character backstory of “ten years ago we were captain and co-captain of a vessel and for Reasons got into a huge fight over nothing and split and Marian took half the ship with her and she thought she’d never see him again but now oops they’ve both ended up jobless on the same station and Marian was already pooling as many resources as she could to try to put together a new ship and Djin arrived a couple months into this and needed the work so joined this ragtag democratic crew, but there’s a shit ton of tension.” This worked because we were snippy to each other in dialogue, when push came to shove, Marian is professional enough such that her whole deal is putting personal feelings aside always no matter what, and Djin takes the passive in passive-aggressive super seriously, so it never meant that the party was sitting around arguing for hours or refusing to cooperate. Meanwhile, I’ve seen and heard of campaigns falling apart because “there are two thieves and one really wants to get to do all the sneaking so they argue all the time over who gets to do cool stuff” or “the evil fighter literally just wants to murder everyone which means everyone else can’t get stuff done.” You can have intra-party strife and have it be interesting, but only if players are doing it cooperatively instead of being at each other’s throats irl. Rule of thumb: if the party dynamics are frustrating the other players, you are doing something wrong.

2.5 That being said, if a party starts to develop into bad dynamics, it is fixable without betraying character! For example, in the department campaign, I’ve been playing a super sheltered youngest child elf wizard from a super established Elvin wizard family (of, like, oh the arcanic postlines that let mail be sent around the continent? Grandpa came up with that theory. Schools of magic identified and classified originally? That was the Maewels) so Seraph is a tad bit privileged and a tad bit sheltered and is uppity sometimes. There was a fighter in the party who liked his alcohol, once missed a huge battle that the rest of us had to cover for him because he’d seduced two women at the inn we were hanging out at before the town was attacked, and typically did things like walk around in the morning with no pants on. And he proceeded to interpret Seraph’s increasing shock and disdain for him (or rather specifically, how upset she was the first time she saw him pantless) as “yeah all women go for me.” The party was vaguely splitting into “Seraph’s side and Silas’s side” so I decided to aggressively interpret one of the battles we went through together as a bonding experience and lo and behold Seraph’s feelings started to change over the next couple of weeks to “you might be an inconsiderate asshole but you’re OUR inconsiderate asshole so only we are allowed to rag on you” and she became one of his biggest supporters esp when they got to his hometown. All you really need is one super solid, proactive player in a party to make sure that things are resolved in a solid manner, so if you’re not the one DMing? Be that player.

2.75 Okay but if you’re DMing, have the conversation with your players as they’re designing their characters about point (2) because good party dynamics are easiest when you get it from the start.

3. Design encounters around the party. You don’t need a traditional setup of “a tank, a mage, a healer, and a thief” to have an effective and fun party. Maybe everyone wants to play a thief, great, design the scenario to be “you have all been contracted by the thieves’ guild to sneak into this party and assassinate this noble, you have three days to prepare and these resources, make a plan” instead of “this is a traditional dungeon crawl where you are fighting big scary monsters despite the fact that none of you are melee fighters.” Similarly, figure out what sort of stories and settings and aesthetics your players are interested in, and then play that game.

4. Make it personal. Ask people about their backstory and then incorporate stuff in. Notice what they become invested in and adjust your plans to include more of that. Give characters individual arcs that fit vaguely into the overall story, but also that they are the semi-protagonist of. Right now in Spelljammer, we’re all dealing with “so there are weird tears in the universe that Password, this Extinct AI we found and befriended, says are reminiscent of literally the entire universe ripping apart at the seams and are possibly why the Extinct went extinct, oh and some random lady gave us this artifact called the Eye and told us to hide it from the Blind King? And now his servants are hunting us? We are literally scav elves this is so above our pay grade.” Except going on as subplots, Algol is being hunted down by this evil overseer of whatever place in Echoside he originally escaped from, Leif got a stone that gives her prophetic dreams, Kimi has been super close to Password and Leif dreamed about them stitching the universe together, and Marian is dealing with an "oh shit I’ve accidentally adopted these three kids even though I don’t do personal” along with “oh god have I literally become the captain of this ship because I AM THE ONLY ADULT LEFT” along with some old friends from her past trying to reconnect just after we got a prophecy about how the last thing the Blind King would send to steal the Eye was someone we loved turned against us. So yeah, sure, there are big Adventure Plotlines going down that involve the entire party, but we’re not doing things just to do them, everyone is personally invested in this for their own reasons. So when you plan a big adventure, both plan places where individual party members get to start both for who they are and what they can do, as well as along the way keep an eye out for things that you can tie in for them.

5. Consequences matter. And not just stuff like “Iria got stabbed really bad first session and nearly died, now every time she goes into rage at the end needs to roll a fortitude save to not fall unconscious, and whenever she rolls a one same deal.” But also consequences like “you were really rude to this person and now they don’t like you and they are friends with the owner of the apothecary, who now also doesn’t like you and marks up prices behind your back” or "you let one of the patrol escape and now the whole army knows that you’re coming” or “you saved this kid’s life even though you were in enemy territory and now five years later he recognizes you even though you’ve been captured and is making sure that the party is taken prisoner instead of killed.” Make NPCs (non-player characters, ie characters the DM controls) recurring characters instead of people that you meet once, and have the way that the NPCs feel and then interact with the players change based on how prior interactions go. Have them care about things and have them remember. It makes the world feel a lot more real.

6. Preparing for a session goes petty much "how much do you like improv”. If you’re chill improvising, you want written down the stats of the monsters/enemies your players are potentially going to encounter, and probably a vague idea of goals, and then just play it by ear. Jeremy (the person running gay murder elf bachelorette and spelljammer) has I think at this point 13 “Books” written for gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, will write long descriptions of characters, settings, has maps drawn, has customized his own random encounter tables, has made his own homebrew system for how spaceship mechanics works specifically so that we could better piece together our spaceship with fantasy duct tape during the Death Races, and overplans every last detail all the way down to “has different musical themes that he’ll swap out and play at different times.” like, Iria has a Trauma theme that is played every time her wound starts acting up. He has collected music for books in advance. He has multiple different theme songs for each of the players in spelljammer. He writes notes about what NPCs are thinking so that he can reference it later. But that’s because he knows that he prefers the things he comes up with when he has time to plan things out, instead of when he’s surprised. He knows his own storytelling style. “eh, an outline and some monster stats” would not work for him the same way that I’ve seen it work for other people. You don’t have to put a ridiculous amount of prep work and writing time into being a DM, you need to figure out how much prepared material you need to run something comfortably, and then prepare that much.

6.5 Understand no matter what you plan, bits and pieces will probably be derailed, and be okay with that. Nothing is more upsetting than when a DM does not respect player autonomy and invalidates the clever things they think of, because it goes against their own plans. I think being a DM/running a story is sort of halfway “you’re writing a novel” and halfway “oh shit except this time the characters ACTUALLY have minds of their own” and striking a balance instead of dominating the narrative makes it fun. Also, it means you can throw in problems that you have no solutions for. During the Death Races in spelljammer, our battery started running out of plasma, which meant that the pressurization was getting all wonky, Leif immediately goes over and says “I have a spell called Reduce Object, can I cast it on the internal casing to try to up the pressure of what little plasma we have left” and Jeremy goes “uummmm sure if Kimi is over there to help you rewire the rest of the battery on the fly because you are SHRINKING HALF OF ITS PARTS” and then that held for three minutes until oh shit it was still low on plasma and Marian ran over and went “wait a second guys I have a Flaming Sphere spell except Jeremy, Jeeeeremy, I’m technically a plasma variety of Light Cleric, my ~god~ that ~gives me my divine magic~ is the collective of star dryads which live in balls of plasma, we’ve established prior in this setting that some of my fire spells are actually plasma spells, not fire, Jeeeeeremly can shove my hand into the empty battery casing and cast a flaming, 10-foot in diameter ball of plasma to try to give us a fuel boost” and Jeremy went “okay fuck it, stick your hand in the battery and cast a flaming sphere of plasma to give the ship a fuel boost, Leif, make another concentration check to hold the pressure.” and it did and we won the race the end we’re the coolest space elves ever. moral of the story: your players will come up with clever things. Sometimes clever things that mess up your plans. Let it happen, it’s more fun that way.

(Iris has come up with a truly heinous but potentially really effective military tactic that gay murder elf bachelorette campaign is actually a bit more delicate because it’s set in a larger world that Jeremy is running multiple other campaigns in and I’m still not sure if Iria is legit going to be a villain that I face off as a good PC one day, or if she’s a historical figure, or even whether or not this campaign is set in the past, but either way the history of this world matters? and the idea that I came up with has the potential to re-shape history? and I told it to Jeremy and he was quiet for a very long time and then thanked me for telling him and so Iria told Talvus in-character and we’re going to see whether or not in a couple of books this ends up changing the entire history of the world that he runs multiple campaigns in or something drastic like that, but hey, player wants to do something you haven’t thought of, “I didn’t think of that” is not a good enough reason to not let them do it.)

7. Decide if you want to write your own adventure, buy/find online a pre-written one, or vaguely do something in the middle. If you’re going for something pre-written, edits bits and pieces as you go to personalize it to your characters. I have a friend who just wrote and published something for DnD 2nd Edition? And it looks great? http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/229248/War-Wizards-of-the-Wasteland Even if you don’t play a pre-written adventure, reading a bunch of them will give you an idea of what preparing for sessions is like and what sort of information you should have on hand.

8. Don’t be afraid to make up home-brew mechanics, either for the whole party or for an individual player. Jeremy ran a vignette session called “Flight of the Kalla Tukal” in which we were playing a trio of orcs that had fallen through a tear in space and had just managed to get back and were searching for our tribe, which left without us. Except in his setting, orcs are a super psionic almost hivemind race? You meet orcs outside of radiation space sometimes, but they’re usually Not Coping Very Well with the fact that they’ve been cut off from their community. But the Kalla Tukal were still all linked together so we weren’t all going mad. then the other part of being psychic orcs meant that we could at any point attempt to do telekinesis or mind-control something, and the way that it was determined whether or not that worked is roll a d20, except we’re not trying to get 20, we’re trying to roll as close to each other in number as possible. There was one dramatic moment when two of us rolled 4’s or something and it was a critical success. but it was so cool to have that weird drift-comparability mechanic, and, like, the more people in our group that wanted to contribute, the more likely two people were to roll the same number. it was just?????? so cool??????? so if you want your party to all be psychically connected and be able to throw stuff with their minds I totally recommend that.

on a more personal/one-player level, in the department campaign, it has developed that Seraph really wants to be a research wizard like her family before her, and so the DM and I had a long conversation about the topics that she would want to research and a particular narrative impetus for her to start researching, and he came up with five or six new spells that Seraph will be able to invent over the course of the campaign, except because it’s experimental magic it’s going to start out with a 40% partial-to-total failure rate that will go down the more she tries to cast the spells, because hey, she’s working out the kinks. to me, it’s more than “oh this is a cool new mechanic,” it’s the DM cared enough to take the time to work with me and put what I thought was interesting into the campaign. and you have a lot of room to do that by adding your own rules and conventions and what-not. don’t be afraid to experiment, see what works, and then keep those mechanics around.

9. Start small. Don’t try to start with a whole huge epic campaign, you want to start by running a bunch of mini-arcs in different settings so that you get a feel for how to play and how to run things. This also gives you a chance to figure out how your group of friends plays, who is going to be the person that gives you the most scheduling problems, some of them might like the fighting parts more than the “come up with clever plans” or “interact with NPCs” parts, and this will give you an idea of who you actually want in a long-term campaign. Because long-term campaigns go on for years. Like, gay murder elf bachelorette is probably going to be a year and a half if Jeremy and I keep going at this pace? and that’s vaguely on the short side for something that Jeremy runs. A proper full epic campaign can be a huge time commitment, so start out with mini-arcs just to have fun and get used to stuff and because that is something that people will actually be able to commit time to.

I interrupt this long list of advice for another list of advice of potential ideas for miniature campaigns you could run for your friends. or one of your friends could run, if they’re interested in DMing:

COOL IDEAS FOR ONE-TO-FOUR SESSION MINI-CAMPAIGNS THAT I CAME UP WITH RIGHT NOW OR STOLE FROM FRIENDS WHO CAME UP WITH SUPER COOL THINGS

  —as mentioned in a previous bullet point, “you’re a group of thieves planning an assassination. this is how much money you have. each of your characters has one character connection in the city who can help you get items or forge a document etc etc. this is what the castle looks like. this is what you’ve figured out about guard shifts and security for the party. you have a week to plan. go” and then, like. somebody wants to try to pretend to be a noble to get in? fantastic. someone wants to try to seduce a guard? fantastic. sneaking in the traditional way? fantastic. all three at the same time. faaaantastic. it’s fun, it’s short, the way that you would prepare this is you would think about guards, defenses, patrols, maybe some of the nobles at the party are trained in magic or have weird special teams of guards and maybe have agendas of their own, and then what the actual ball itself would look like and maybe make a castle map, but the fun part of this scenario is the players get to be as creative as possible and I guarantee they will think of the coolest things and then you get to figure out how to react to those things in interesting ways to figure out whether or not they work.

  —okay this is a one-shot I have only heard legends about but everyone was playing a rock band of monsters who were about to give a super huge concert in monster city and I think someone had stolen a drum set or a guitar or something and they were trying to dodge paparazzi and get their instruments back but it was also ridiculous sex drugs rock & roll culture and a comedy one-shot that apparently was the coolest thing in the world, but you can’t go wrong if you start with “crazy monster rock band superstars”. during the sequel they went on tour to the human lands and I think wrecked a couple of cities.

  —this one is stolen from TAZ but fantasy WWE, the intro plot setup that is exposition in the first 10 minutes was “a friend of yours who is a famous wrestler just had her partner assassinated before the biggest match of the year, one of you has been asked to fill in for the match, another as the manager, and then the rest of you are trying to solve this murder mystery super quick because your friend is worried she’s the next target”

   —honestly any sort of “huge gladiator/fighting tournament but there’s drama and foul play going down behind the scenes” makes for a really good short arc. there’s a game that actually Jeremy invented that is played irl at gay theater camp called “bloodrush” which is such a ridiculous game, it’s….vaguely fantasy football except everyone also has daggers and swords and stuff and you are allowed to stab members of the other team but only when they’re holding the ball, although cheating is basically a requirement when the refs’ backs are turned, oh, by the way, the refs are vampires. there have been cases at camp where teams waiting in the bleachers for the next match enemy teams have crept up behind them and slit all their throats with foam daggers while the refs were watching the game, or poisonings, or just. anything you can think of, it’s gone down. my little brother once jumped on the biggest baddest counselor’s back, stabbed him in the shoulder, snatched the ball from him, did a front roll, and ran off, and scored a goal and that is one of his proudest moments of his life to this day, basically what I’m saying is you can’t go wrong with “bloodrush tournament” or whatever your own crazy fantasy sportsball game you want to make up and play.

   —“we are a bunch of archeologists who have a little bit of combat or magic training but not too much because mostly we’re archeologists and someone poked a button in a pyramid and oh god we’ve accidentally summoned an ancient race on monsters that feed on human souls, which also apparently there’s a secret military conspiracy that has been watching this site to try to stop these monsters and have come here to contain them but oops also are ready to murder ALL OF US because WE have human souls, now we’re trying to run and hide from both groups and figure out if we can find anything to banish the monsters again” (this is 100% stolen from a LARP written by a friend of mine) (I’m pretty sure same one who wrote the monster band one-shot, actually) (they’re a really good writer, okay)

   —PRISON ESCAPE. Think Guardians of the Galaxy 1. You can’t go wrong with a prison break game. character design will be so fun. I swear I thought of stuff like this separate from Jeremy. Jeremy’s writing a prison break game and has promised that I get to play Captain Jennijack, a genderfluid space pirate who totally woke up in this prison a week or so ago and doesn’t for the life of them know why they are here, there are, like, eight or ten possible things they could think of but they’re not sure which one they’ve technically been convicted of, and I am holding him to that.

   —Honestly, you have a book that you like? A movie? A TV show? One that you haven’t convinced your friends to watch yet? (or one that you have and they will recognize halfway through.) STEAL THAT, write and run a fanfiction game, it’ll be fun.

ADVICE PART 2: PREPARING FOR A LONGER CAMPAIGN ONCE YOU’RE COMFORTABLE DMING AND HAVE FIGURED OUT THE GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT HAVE GOOD CHEMISTRY AND DYNAMICS AND WANT TO STICK AROUND. I’m assuming you want advice for getting something vaguely like gay murder elf bachelorette to run, so I’m going to talk about broad story-based things that I think are important for setting up good stories?

10. Scheduling is key and what is most likely to mess you up. Pick your players carefully, pick people who are invested and who will turn up. If there are people who didn’t get along during your mini arcs, or who just had very different expectations of what the game should be like re fighting/mechanics and roleplaying balance, don’t put them in the same party. Picking a party isn’t about picking your friends, it’s about picking people who work well together as players, and whose playing style matches your storytelling style. You’re better off with less people but who are super quality players and share a vision with you and get along, than letting someone into the game that’s going to mess stuff up for everyone because of outside-of-game social politics. It’s just not worth it. Not when this might go on for years.

11. There’s something really powerful about a story that isn’t about the Chosen Ones, but instead you’re just a group of people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and now oh shit it’s on you to save the world. Epic campaigns generally become epic, like, you invest that much time and energy into something and by the finale you usually are saving the universe, but be willing to start out not special. Let specialness develop.

11.5 There is also something really powerful about there sometimes being problems that magic can’t fix. Or that just aren’t fixable. If you haven’t read the Young Wizards series go read it and cry.

12. Write in arcs. This goes along very well with starting small, but have there be different parts of the campaign that are semi self-contained as you slowly build up to something bigger, this is also where you start dropping in personal arcs. Arcs also allow you to change up the feel of the game and keep things interesting and keep people on their toes. The Adventure Zone does maybe the best example of how to have self-contained plot-driven arcs that build to something eventually cohesive, all arcs with their own unique setup and flavor. (The Adventure Zone: Balance is a really great game and I really do advise you listen to it, it’s ~70 episodes but it will get you used to the mechanics of 5e, and holy fuck is it a story.)

13. Don’t be afraid to steal plot points from your favorite things. Hell, don’t be afraid to steal the entire plots of your favorite things. Especially if you’re worried about your own writing skills or creativity or whatever? Fanfiction is freaking great, and it’s fun; some of the best games I’ve ever played have been fanfiction of super obscure things that the writer has afterwards told me what it was fanfiction of and it was so freaking fun to go read/watch the original after I’d already played an even cooler version???? It’s also pretty easy to start out fanfiction and then through developing personal arcs and following party interest, ending up with a story by the end that is entirely original and you. So write fanfiction if you don’t have any ideas, or honestly, if your fanfiction ideas excite you more than when you sit down and try to write with a blank slate.

14. You’re not limited to a high fantasy setting. Honestly, standard high fantasy/dungeon crawl stuff has gotten pretty boring for me? (although the department campaign is pretty cool, but that’s only because it’s high fantasy but we slip in jokes like “Seraph marches downstairs in her pajamas and channels her mother to start yelling at the innkeeper about the utterly terrible customer service of getting poisoned, non-consensually, and that she would like to speak to the manager of the local thieves’ guild to lodge a complaint” because even though it’s high fantasy, it’s funny. TAZ does really good high fantasy too because of how they weave a whole bunch of other stuff in.) but, like, YOU CAN DO DND IN SPACE. you can do modern urban fantasy. you can go post-apocalypse. you can go post-high-fantasy-apocalypse. you can play a supernatural style game. it’s your world, make it whatever you want.

14.5 It is possible to play things that are mechanically the class in the book, but have a different interpretation in the setting. Or just to works differently in the setting. in spelljammer, elves don’t have gods, and I vaguely developed over the course of a couple of months an old belief system that was pretty old even when Marian was a kid that she just pseudo-learned and didn’t quite believe but is now revisiting, and the difference between divine casters and arcane casters is actually just “magic is vaguely a part of physics and most arcane casters are tinkerers who are doing it via weird cool gadgets or are pseudo-scientists/engineers in their training and approach to magic, while for divine casters it’s more of an internal, feelings-based thing.” I’m also very very excited because I have developed a super intense and specific lore that is canonically what elves used to believe and what Marian believes, but might not actually be how the world and death specifically works at all, so I’m bouncing up and down on my feet waiting to discover what’s going down behind the scenes with gods in that campaign, instead of it just being “oh yeah choose your gods from the gods in the book.” in the department campaign, Seraph is from a family of wizards and thinks that she is a wizard even though she is actually an arcanist, because the world doesn’t have words different types of casters esp niche types of casters yet. the DM and I are planning for it to be a huuuuge surprise now that she’s leveled up enough to have access to “arcanic exploits” which are at-will abilities that wizards don’t have, and it is going to be an in-character process of her discovering that she can do something that according to the known laws of magic she shouldn’t be able to do, and now oh shit she has to research it. even though mechanically, we’re going pretty much entirely by the book, the book doesn’t exist in the world! characters don’t know what players know! make it interesting to discover things that you as a player might otherwise take for granted!

14.75 make magic and fighting sound cool, and design how you describe it to be specific to the setting or the culture. in gay murder elf bachelorette campaign, the way that Caedic casting works is you first have to draw a rune in the air that then hovers there all glowy, and then you “thread the needle” which is projecting power through it in a very specific manner, I’m pretty sure that Surrians cast differently, magic works different in different parts of the world. having a melee fight scene? describe how people exchange blows back and forth or let them choose how their killing blows will look or just make them feel like badasses whenever they try to do a cool thing because it’s cool. I am used to playing magic/caster characters just because I generally am more familiar with magical mechanics than fighting mechanics and magic has always been more interesting to me but holy crud I have never had a fight scene so fun as the one when Iria had led a researcher from the Black Lotus Labs to a fae font that she’d found scouting in the woods and this seaweed creature eventually attacked them and she did a badass holding it off with her scimitar an then Vennikus, the researcher, tried to throw a cold iron knife at it but missed, and so Iria, who had been training in two-weapon fighting, saw the knife, did a front roll underneath the monster’s next swing, picked up the knife, exchanged a flurry of blows with the thing now two-handed fighting which eventually ended with her doing this super badass throwing both weapons in the air and catching them to switch hands, leaping on the things back, slashing so deep with her scimitar that it finally got through all of the seaweed and cleared it before it could get back to a weird, pulsating green heart, which then she drove the cold iron blade into all the way up to its hilt. which was so much cooler than “oh shit I rolled a crit on my scimitar hand and confirmed it and I guess that deals enough damage for this thing to die,” nah, I drove a cold iron knife into that thing’s pulsating heart and so that’ll be a scene that I never forget. Even when I miss Jeremy makes me sound cool because then when the enemies miss he talks about how good my footwork is or how well I’ve drilled to block these exact kinds of blows so the Surrian had no chance because my training kicked in type deal. it makes fight scenes more than just rolling dice, and thus easier to get engaged in.

14.8725 I swear I didn’t start out this essay as an “I’m going to sing the praises of Jeremy for several thousand words”

15. It’s always interesting when you have mechanical reasons for players leveling up. Or for what their classes are. That’s always a tricky one to balance, and it’s one that I’ve been doing aggressively as a player? And to be fair, if your players start out with young and fairly inexperienced characters, “I am gaining experience at doing a thing” is a perfectly good narrative reason to level up. You want to play an older character? One of my friends is playing a 150-year-old orc who was a Great Adventurer back in the day and retired to take care of great-great grandkids and is back in an adventuring party now but wheeee is starting at level 1 because they’re out of practice oh, and they have bad knees. There’s also always the option of “I hurt myself real bad and I’ve been recovering,” leveling up isn’t ~gaining new experience~, it’s slowly getting better through whatever your injury is. or just you can write this off as an unavoidable mechanical aspect of the game, eh, not that important, I just love it when tiny details match up. This isn’t actually an important point, I’ve kind of moved on to the “picky details that I care about” second of this advice rant.

16. Make the unexpected important. JEREMY GAVE ME THE MOST ADORABLE PET SPACE OCTOPUS AS A FAMILIAR AND I HAVE BEEN ASSUMING THAT VELO IS JUST VELO AND THEN JEREMY MADE SOME SORT OF A SIDE COMMENT ABOUT “YEAH VELO IS NOTHING LIKE YOU’D EVER HEARD OF BEFORE” AND YEAH DUH BECAUSE THE LIL’ BUDDY WAS SUMMONED THROUGH A MYSTERY SPELL IN A MYSTERY PIECE OF EXTINCT TECH BUT NOW I’M FREAKING PARANOID OUT OF CHARACTER THAT VELO IS SECRETLY AN EMISSARY OF RAT JESUS OR SOMETHING. but also just, like, nothing is cooler than “oh that tiny thing that happened when you were level 1 that you didn’t really think much of and it’s just been vaguely a thing you’ve carried with you for the adventure? turns out it was the most important thing in the world!!!!!” just. good foreshadowing. unexpected foreshadowing. it’s great.

17. Your players will invent stuff, either as a part of their backstory or as something that they’re interested in. Let them, especially if you don’t have a previously established canon opinion on the thing. This is 100% a self-serving thing of what I wants DMs to do when I’m a player of, like. I really love getting to write stuff into the setting, but also it’s because good improv means go with the flow. Someone says something? Work it in, oops, it’s canon now. This can be both on-purpose or accident; in the department campaign, I wanted to write in-character letters to an NPC in my backstory from the beginning, except goddamnit I didn’t want to have to deal with “and it’ll take a couple of months for the mail to travel across the country to get to them,” so I made an offhand reference in the email that I was sending the DM the letters of “can we say I just threw them in the arcanic postlines,” which then, like. After doing this about five times I sat down and wrote out the exact magical theory about how arcanic postlines should work considering how we’d said that they function in-game and the DM went “okay, sounds great, that’s consistent with how we’ve been dealing with these letters for the last two months” and that is why the fantasy world of the departmental campaign has a highly functional postage system. On the improv end of things, there is a beautiful moment in The Adventure Zone where the wizard just, in-character, teases another wizard about “ooooh, don’t want to burn your spell slots,” and the DM just went with it and suddenly it became canon that instead of spell slots being a behind-the-scenes mechanical thing that doesn’t exist in-world, it was a legitimate way that wizards referred to how much magic they could cast a day. Which I love so much, that’s so interesting for a high fantasy setting. Letting players add to the setting will bring in cool new things that you didn’t think of, and you should be open to it.

18. First priority is everyone should be having fun, and communication is key for that to work. Debrief sometimes after sessions. Ask people what their favorite parts are. listen to them chat about their theories. follow up on actively developing framework for the things that people think are fun. ultimately DnD is as much about friends getting together and having a good time as it is about telling a huge, epic, intricate, interconnected story, and the huge epic stories are a lot more fun if you’ve been having fun the whole way along.

All that all being said.

Don’t expect your campaign to look like gay elf murder bachelorette campaign, the way that I am playing in gay murder elf campaign is…..a bad way to play in a party? Being a conscientious player means being aware that the overall story arc isn’t just about you, it’s weaving together about everyone and there is always a part of me that is thinking about “is everyone getting equal screentime” and going “I AM IN LOVE WITH THIS NPC JEREMY SHE’S SO GOOD AT FIGHTING OH MY GODS THAT MURDEROUS LOOK SHE GETS WHEN SHE’S FACING OFF AGAINST SURRIANS AND SHE DOESN’T THINK ANYONE IS WATCHING JEREMY I AM IN LOVE” and, like, actively going over to try to talk with her any time I had the chance to ever and insisting on sparring with her any time we had free time and insisting on having a bunch of scenes with Talvus of “oh my god Talvus help she said three whole words to me what does it mean” which made all this the gay mess that it was would have been something that I wouldn’t have done if there were other people in the party with other agendas; gay elf murder bachelorette campaign gets to be gay elf murder bachelorette campaign specifically because Jeremy and I realized “….wait, there are only the two of us, we can get as ridiculous with this as we want” and have decided to commit. Fully. But that’s not the sort of shit you want to pull if there’s a whole other group of people who just kind of have to sit and watch every time you want to go over and flirt with your murder-rival-who-will-maybe-one-day-be-your-murder-girlfriend before they can do the stuff they want to do.

(As a secondary warning note if you’re doing any sort of roleplaying and are playing a fictional character in love with another fictional character being played by a friend of yours, you better be on the same page as your friend as, like, one of you not having a secret crush on the other in real life because shit gets messy and then real life and character stuff starts to blend and it’s just. I have been there and done that when I was a 17-year-old Gay Mess and I feel like it is my responsibility as a 22-year-old Slightly More Responsible Gay Mess to warn you against that. Jeremy and I know each other very well and have for years and know each other’s boundaries and talked about triggers and boundaries before starting this campaign, which to be fair was more because as a villain campaign dark stuff is probs going to happen but we have talked about fictional romance too , but I would not play this intimately with someone I didn’t trust intimately. So keep that in mind when designing things?)

ALSO THAT BEING SAID

if you want a gay elf murder bachelorette campaign, there is a game called Monsterhearts that I have never played but heard about friends playing and they all freaking love it and there are a lot of undertones about dealing with mental illness and being queer and in the closet and the entire setup of the game is y’all are monsters in high school having love life drama and everything I have heard about this game is how remarkable it is combined with stories about the most ridiculous teenage drama, sooooo possibly after I have ranted for 8000 words about how to set up a functional Dungeons and Dragons campaign which the party and DMing advice still I think applies to any game Monsterhearts might be the game that you want to start with.

BONUS: ADVICE FROM JEREMY.

#jeremy believes in you #so do I #wheeee that got long #dungeons and dragons #storytelling advice #gay murder elf bachelorette #if you stuck around through this whole thing wow congratulations I hope I wasn't too boring #I have a lot of friends who are very good at mechanics and who can speak a lot about good game design #this is what I can offer though

[swipestream]

The Edition Wars Inside My Brain

Nerd Wars always feel a little like kids arguing about whose hand makes a better laser gun…

Did you hear the big gaming news last week? Paizo announced they’re working on a second edition for Pathfinder. Cue the Sturm und Drang of the conflicting excitement and irritation that the announcement of a new edition always elicits. Have they released another wave of the endless Edition Wars upon us?

I am avowedly polygamerous. My passion for superhero RPGs is almost legendary, you can pry my science fiction games from my cold, dead hands, and don’t even think of trying to stop my monster hunting inclinations in modern paranormal games. While not every indie game hits my interests, I’m always excited to see what developers are coming up with. Thing is, though, when it comes down to it, D&D still provides a solid backbone for my gaming life. I never seek it out at conventions, but it and its variations are still a staple of my regular group. Currently, one of the less experienced GMs is running a 5e game, and we have several other 5e and Pathfinder games on seasonal hiatus.

For the new or the sheltered, what are the Edition Wars? Essentially, it’s the conflict that happens between the people who are excited for a new version of a game and the discontent of those that are perfectly happy sticking with what they already play. The extremes of both sides often get vitriolic and adamant that their preferred edition is the only correct choice.

Before I go any further, let’s talk a little bit about the history of the editions of D&D, as these are momentous events in the history of the game:

So many editions…

In 1977, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was released. While the original version of the game arrived in 1974, a large number of gamers in the late 70’s and 80’s experienced AD&D as their first taste of the game. There were a variety of ‘Basic’ versions that came out in the intervening years, but AD&D seemed to be regarded as the main version of the game. By the time I started playing in 1986, there was even edition-war-like grumbling about the changes introduced from Unearthed Arcana the year before.

1989 saw the arrival of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. I was still new to the hobby, but this was huge. Do you have any idea how excited I was to be able to play a bard without having to go through the ridiculous path laid out in 1e materials? My group even converted our characters from 1e to 2e so we could play with the new hotness. Beija Tavelar, my scrappy, red-headed, lute-playing mage-thief became the bard I had always wanted her to be. Then she died in a stupid pit trap with everyone else in the party and we had to make new characters anyway.

TSR, D&D’s original publisher, was struggling financially in the 90’s and was bought by Wizard of the Coast in 1997. It would take three years, but Wizards finally released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in 2000. This was BIG. If you want a more detailed look at the impact this edition (and its OGL – open game license) had on the industry, I highly recommend diving into Designers & Dragons entries on TSR and Wizards of the Coast. At the time, it had been way too many years since I’d been able to play regularly but even I heard about the arrival of 3e. While the d20 boom was changing the lives of many game companies and designers, it helped me realize that I needed gaming in my life and I couldn’t wait around for my old gaming group to suddenly find time and motivation to game again.

In 2003, things took a left turn as Wizards abruptly released Dungeons & Dragons v 3.5. The edition addressed a few different problems that existed in the previous edition while still retaining the same core concepts. Unfortunately, it caused a huge problem for many of the third-party creators of d20 products. Again, take look at Designers & Dragons entries on Wizards. It’s a fascinating read. This was also around the time I found a new group to play with and it doesn’t take a genius to guess we started playing 3.5.

Only five years later, Wizards released Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. Edition Wars had existed since the grognards of old complained about 2e back in the late 80’s, but 4e almost instantly developed a troubled relationship with the fanbase. While the bones of the game were still D&D, some of the concepts and mechanics went in a different direction meant to attract a new generation of player. The feel was often described as being more ‘video game’ than anything like previous editions. I actually thought 4e was fun. One of my favorite campaigns was run in the system and it actually did make it easier to introduce new players to the hobby. That said, there was still a lot of animosity towards this edition. I’m still irritated at some of my friends who would gleefully make fun of the game every time I mentioned a 4e game I was playing in. Not cool, folks.

At the same time as 4e was being released, Paizo released Pathfinder, a fantasy game based around the OGL of 3.5. Calling the game D&D 3.75 isn’t completely out of bounds. It tried to fix a few different rules problems from the original edition and worked to make the classes interesting at every level, but the game was still obviously an evolution of 3.5. Many of the players who were irritated at 4e flocked to Pathfinder helping the game become a huge success. In late 2011, when I started my Eberron campaign, the group was a bit tired of 4e, so we decided to use Pathfinder. The SRD available online provided most of the material I would need to run the game.

In 2014, Wizards released Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and quietly let 4e fade into the background. Work on the new edition was announced in 2012 which raised some eyebrows, but they did some serious playtesting and player surveys before they released their final results two years later. Honestly, the results of their work showed. While plenty of folks stayed loyal to Pathfinder, 5e rejuvenated interest in the D&D brand and has proven to be super successful. My group jumped into 5e headfirst (as we do with any game that catches our interest). We have one beloved 5e game we’ve been playing in seasons and I’m about to start a 5e game with the teens I’ve been GMing for once a month.

I can’t even get into all the OSR (Old School Renaissance) retro clones that exist out there. They’re not exactly in my wheelhouse, so I haven’t had an opportunity to play any of them (which I would with a GM I trust), but they’re out there. Everything from Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry, and many, many more.

To tally up, there were 12 years between 1e and 2e, 11 years between 2e and 3e, 8 between 3e and 4e (with an intermediary road bump with 3.5), and 6 years between 4e and 5e. Paizo waiting ten years to announce they’re working on a second edition isn’t really that extraordinary. Even if I can remember when Pathfinder was shiny and new, it has been a mainstay for a decade now.

Anyone that gets all pretentious about which edition is best gets an eye roll from me. Play what you want and what makes your group happy, but don’t be a dick about what makes someone else happy. 

I have my thoughts and preferences on the various editions, but I’ll mostly play whatever the people I want to game with want to play. Mostly. Anyone that gets all pretentious about which edition is best gets an eye roll from me. Play what you want and what makes your group happy, but don’t be a dick about what makes someone else happy. You won’t find me participating in any battles about which edition is king other than to tell people to chill out and stop telling people they’re having bad-wrong-fun.

That said, I do experience type of Edition War, but this one happens solo, inside MY BRAIN.

I’ve been gaming with a regular crew for close to 15 years now and in that time, we have started, finished and abandoned multiple games of at least four different versions of D&D (Pathfinder included). There’s only so much room for rules in this head of mine and I imagine it’s the same for most of us. It’s not that unusual for us to suddenly pause as we confuse the specifics of various rules between editions. Does flanking matter in this edition? How long does that spell last in this version? How many dice do I get to add to my sneak attack?

What do we do about the limited rental space for rules in our brains while playing multiple different variations of D&D? (Or any game system, really.)

Cheat sheets of the major and common rules is your friend. There are plenty of these out there if your google-fu is strong enough, but I always like creating my own when possible. It helps cement the info into my brain and is usually laid out in a way that makes sense to me. GM Screens often provide a great resource even when you don’t really feel the need to hide your rolls from your players.

Keep pertinent rules to your characters handy. Whenever I play a spell caster, I always keep a full list of available spells handy so I can quickly know the rules of whatever spell I’m about to use. The same goes for any special ability you’re going to use. Say what you will about 4e, but the ability cards the character builder created were damn handy.

Relax and just roll with it. Sometimes you or someone else at the table gets a rule wrong, and that’s okay. As long as no one is abusing the confusion to benefit themselves over everyone else, it’s okay to just roll with the mistake keep going with the game. No one wants to play a game constantly interrupted by rules lawyers, so unless everyone is cool with pausing the game to discuss a rule, just go with the GM’s call and discuss the issue after the game is over.

The confusion does get a little annoying, but in some ways, it’s a problem with an abundance or riches. We have a vital, thriving hobby with a version for almost everyone. I’m honestly looking forward to seeing what Paizo comes up with in their next edition of Pathfinder, even if I know it’s going to add a whole new set of rules to the jumble already in my brain.

The Edition Wars Inside My Brain published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[kayawagner]

The Edition Wars Inside My Brain

Nerd Wars always feel a little like kids arguing about whose hand makes a better laser gun…

Did you hear the big gaming news last week? Paizo announced they’re working on a second edition for Pathfinder. Cue the Sturm und Drang of the conflicting excitement and irritation that the announcement of a new edition always elicits. Have they released another wave of the endless Edition Wars upon us?

I am avowedly polygamerous. My passion for superhero RPGs is almost legendary, you can pry my science fiction games from my cold, dead hands, and don’t even think of trying to stop my monster hunting inclinations in modern paranormal games. While not every indie game hits my interests, I’m always excited to see what developers are coming up with. Thing is, though, when it comes down to it, D&D still provides a solid backbone for my gaming life. I never seek it out at conventions, but it and its variations are still a staple of my regular group. Currently, one of the less experienced GMs is running a 5e game, and we have several other 5e and Pathfinder games on seasonal hiatus.

For the new or the sheltered, what are the Edition Wars? Essentially, it’s the conflict that happens between the people who are excited for a new version of a game and the discontent of those that are perfectly happy sticking with what they already play. The extremes of both sides often get vitriolic and adamant that their preferred edition is the only correct choice.

Before I go any further, let’s talk a little bit about the history of the editions of D&D, as these are momentous events in the history of the game:

So many editions…

In 1977, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was released. While the original version of the game arrived in 1974, a large number of gamers in the late 70’s and 80’s experienced AD&D as their first taste of the game. There were a variety of ‘Basic’ versions that came out in the intervening years, but AD&D seemed to be regarded as the main version of the game. By the time I started playing in 1986, there was even edition-war-like grumbling about the changes introduced from Unearthed Arcana the year before.

1989 saw the arrival of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition. I was still new to the hobby, but this was huge. Do you have any idea how excited I was to be able to play a bard without having to go through the ridiculous path laid out in 1e materials? My group even converted our characters from 1e to 2e so we could play with the new hotness. Beija Tavelar, my scrappy, red-headed, lute-playing mage-thief became the bard I had always wanted her to be. Then she died in a stupid pit trap with everyone else in the party and we had to make new characters anyway.

TSR, D&D’s original publisher, was struggling financially in the 90’s and was bought by Wizard of the Coast in 1997. It would take three years, but Wizards finally released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in 2000. This was BIG. If you want a more detailed look at the impact this edition (and its OGL – open game license) had on the industry, I highly recommend diving into Designers & Dragons entries on TSR and Wizards of the Coast. At the time, it had been way too many years since I’d been able to play regularly but even I heard about the arrival of 3e. While the d20 boom was changing the lives of many game companies and designers, it helped me realize that I needed gaming in my life and I couldn’t wait around for my old gaming group to suddenly find time and motivation to game again.

In 2003, things took a left turn as Wizards abruptly released Dungeons & Dragons v 3.5. The edition addressed a few different problems that existed in the previous edition while still retaining the same core concepts. Unfortunately, it caused a huge problem for many of the third-party creators of d20 products. Again, take look at Designers & Dragons entries on Wizards. It’s a fascinating read. This was also around the time I found a new group to play with and it doesn’t take a genius to guess we started playing 3.5.

Only five years later, Wizards released Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition. Edition Wars had existed since the grognards of old complained about 2e back in the late 80’s, but 4e almost instantly developed a troubled relationship with the fanbase. While the bones of the game were still D&D, some of the concepts and mechanics went in a different direction meant to attract a new generation of player. The feel was often described as being more ‘video game’ than anything like previous editions. I actually thought 4e was fun. One of my favorite campaigns was run in the system and it actually did make it easier to introduce new players to the hobby. That said, there was still a lot of animosity towards this edition. I’m still irritated at some of my friends who would gleefully make fun of the game every time I mentioned a 4e game I was playing in. Not cool, folks.

At the same time as 4e was being released, Paizo released Pathfinder, a fantasy game based around the OGL of 3.5. Calling the game D&D 3.75 isn’t completely out of bounds. It tried to fix a few different rules problems from the original edition and worked to make the classes interesting at every level, but the game was still obviously an evolution of 3.5. Many of the players who were irritated at 4e flocked to Pathfinder helping the game become a huge success. In late 2011, when I started my Eberron campaign, the group was a bit tired of 4e, so we decided to use Pathfinder. The SRD available online provided most of the material I would need to run the game.

In 2014, Wizards released Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition and quietly let 4e fade into the background. Work on the new edition was announced in 2012 which raised some eyebrows, but they did some serious playtesting and player surveys before they released their final results two years later. Honestly, the results of their work showed. While plenty of folks stayed loyal to Pathfinder, 5e rejuvenated interest in the D&D brand and has proven to be super successful. My group jumped into 5e headfirst (as we do with any game that catches our interest). We have one beloved 5e game we’ve been playing in seasons and I’m about to start a 5e game with the teens I’ve been GMing for once a month.

I can’t even get into all the OSR (Old School Renaissance) retro clones that exist out there. They’re not exactly in my wheelhouse, so I haven’t had an opportunity to play any of them (which I would with a GM I trust), but they’re out there. Everything from Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry, and many, many more.

To tally up, there were 12 years between 1e and 2e, 11 years between 2e and 3e, 8 between 3e and 4e (with an intermediary road bump with 3.5), and 6 years between 4e and 5e. Paizo waiting ten years to announce they’re working on a second edition isn’t really that extraordinary. Even if I can remember when Pathfinder was shiny and new, it has been a mainstay for a decade now.

Anyone that gets all pretentious about which edition is best gets an eye roll from me. Play what you want and what makes your group happy, but don’t be a dick about what makes someone else happy. 

I have my thoughts and preferences on the various editions, but I’ll mostly play whatever the people I want to game with want to play. Mostly. Anyone that gets all pretentious about which edition is best gets an eye roll from me. Play what you want and what makes your group happy, but don’t be a dick about what makes someone else happy. You won’t find me participating in any battles about which edition is king other than to tell people to chill out and stop telling people they’re having bad-wrong-fun.

That said, I do experience type of Edition War, but this one happens solo, inside MY BRAIN.

I’ve been gaming with a regular crew for close to 15 years now and in that time, we have started, finished and abandoned multiple games of at least four different versions of D&D (Pathfinder included). There’s only so much room for rules in this head of mine and I imagine it’s the same for most of us. It’s not that unusual for us to suddenly pause as we confuse the specifics of various rules between editions. Does flanking matter in this edition? How long does that spell last in this version? How many dice do I get to add to my sneak attack?

What do we do about the limited rental space for rules in our brains while playing multiple different variations of D&D? (Or any game system, really.)

Cheat sheets of the major and common rules is your friend. There are plenty of these out there if your google-fu is strong enough, but I always like creating my own when possible. It helps cement the info into my brain and is usually laid out in a way that makes sense to me. GM Screens often provide a great resource even when you don’t really feel the need to hide your rolls from your players.

Keep pertinent rules to your characters handy. Whenever I play a spell caster, I always keep a full list of available spells handy so I can quickly know the rules of whatever spell I’m about to use. The same goes for any special ability you’re going to use. Say what you will about 4e, but the ability cards the character builder created were damn handy.

Relax and just roll with it. Sometimes you or someone else at the table gets a rule wrong, and that’s okay. As long as no one is abusing the confusion to benefit themselves over everyone else, it’s okay to just roll with the mistake keep going with the game. No one wants to play a game constantly interrupted by rules lawyers, so unless everyone is cool with pausing the game to discuss a rule, just go with the GM’s call and discuss the issue after the game is over.

The confusion does get a little annoying, but in some ways, it’s a problem with an abundance or riches. We have a vital, thriving hobby with a version for almost everyone. I’m honestly looking forward to seeing what Paizo comes up with in their next edition of Pathfinder, even if I know it’s going to add a whole new set of rules to the jumble already in my brain.

The Edition Wars Inside My Brain published first on https://supergalaxyrom.tumblr.com