Category: Being a Referee

Questgivers are Evil

Two thousand years after the fall of Oriac, seven adventurers came to Negune. Many adventurers had come before them, but all had either returned home or perished. These seven would prove different. […] For over thirty years, they traveled to every land of Negune. They slew monsters, saved villages, and bred good will throughout the land.”

I wrote that a few years back as part of the history of my Ascendant Crusade game. It’s the story that explained the way the nations on the continent were broken up. One for each of the heroic adventurers who had shown up out of nowhere and fixed everything. It’s a setting I was passionate about for many years, and I still have a place in my heart for it. But this particular tidbit is a good example of something that has come to bother me a lot about the stories that come out of D&D games. “Everything was bad. Nobody was competent. Fortunately, a small group of nobodies from nowhere fixed everything.”

I’m not a story guy. You wouldn’t have to try very hard to find quotes where I vehemently deride the over-emphasis of story in tabletop gaming. But I can’t pretend that story doesn’t play some role.

What really gets to me about this trope is the idea that players are SPECIAL. That even at first level, they’re basically the only instrument of change in the world. The only characters with agency. Of course, in matter of fact, they are the only characters who have agency, but rubbing it in their faces like this just seems gouache. How can you ever feel like you matter if the world is obviously constructed for the sole purpose of making you feel like you matter?

Which brings me to questgivers, an essential element to the game. They’re the folks who get stuff moving by giving the PCs something useful to do. There are a few essential elements that make up a questgiver’s character. First, they want something done. Second, they’re going to rely on strangers to do it for them. Third, they’re probably going to offer a reward for getting that thing done.

Lets start with that point about the PCs being strangers. We (as in you and I, looking at this text on a computer monitor) live in an anachronistic period of history. A period created by recent inventions such as the train, the automobile, the telephone, and the Internet.

These inventions allow us to buy our groceries & build our relationships outside of our immediate vicinity. Prior to this era, any community that wasn’t a cosmopolitan city would be tight knit. Strangers were immediately recognizable, and nobody liked or trusted them. So what would drive someone from that community to ask a stranger for help, when there are doubtless plenty of strapping young locals who would be happy to help?

We’re better at dealing with strangers now because everyone is a stranger. We don’t have a huge pool of neighbors to draw upon for every little thing. But that’s not true in a less modern setting, such as the ones we typically play D&D in.

Which brings up my next point: in any given place, there are tons of people who can get stuff done. Getting something done is a privilege. Ever notice how politicians will often stop other politicians from getting something done, even if they want to get the same thing done themselves? They don’t want the other party to get the glory of accomplishing this task. This is not a new practice, it’s as old as human society.

If you’re a king, you want your heir, or at least a strong supporter of yours, to do the cool things. Doing cool things strengthens their (and thus your) position. Likewise, if you’re a town of 30 people, you’ll want your own kin to handle a problem. It’s a matter of civic pride. And if a small town really can’t handle it themselves, then they’re going to expect the king to handle it. And the king is going to want to handle it, because if he doesn’t protect people from dangers, they’re going to start wondering why they pay taxes. It takes more than simple momentum to maintain an effective government.

Which brings us to the point of payment. People who do good things for money are not heroes. They don’t generate good will. Heroes are people who do good work without any promised reward. Heroes may be rewarded with positions, jobs, and land after the fact, but these things are not negotiated in advance. Certainly not out in the open, and certainly not for a simple cash payment. People who negotiate in advance for cash payment are called mercenaries.

Mercenaries are not heroes.

So when are mercenaries hired? In wealthy societies where the populace is unwilling to risk life and limb to protect their own lands, mercenary armies often replace home grown ones. But your PCs are not an army, they’re a handful of dudes with weapons who are willing to kill stuff for money. Who hires people like that?

People who want you to do some bad shit. People who want to deny knowledge of something. People who want to blame “those outsiders.”

In other words, questgivers are evil.

Now this isn’t a rule without exceptions. There will always be bounties on villains. There will always be towns at the end of their rope looking for 7 samurai. There will always be kingdoms ruled by despotic children who only send out soldiers to enforce tax collection. But there is pretty much NEVER going to be a long chain of dudes who want to hold your hand while you become an icon of heroic heroism and noble nobility, all while making sure your endeavors remain profitable.

Further, this doesn’t mean that players can’t be heroes if they want to be. It just needs to be their choice. They need to help people without being asked. When they do help people, they can’t then ask for payment, or ask for rewards that are not offered freely in gratitude. “Hero” is a tenuous title, and unless you’re dead, it can flip over to “tyrant” in a heartbeat.

It’s not my intent to argue that games should be more realistic as a general rule, or that this is the only way to play. Far from it. Anyone familiar with my work knows that realism bores me. The minute that somebody tries to justify a mechanic by saying it’s “more realistic,” my instinct is to just tune them out. But this idea of “the traveling adventurer” as an unambiguous hero shatters any sense of believability a story has for me. The way the word “adventurer” is used has become almost as cringe-inducing for me as the time I had an opportunity to have a one-on-one conversation with my favorite university professor, and I spent the whole time talking about why his favorite TV show was dumb.

Play the way you want to play, of course, but for me, accepting a quest should mean that you’re about to do some shady ass shit that will probably hurt some good people.

On a Red World Alone; Handling Factions

The other day I was getting ready for an upcoming session of ORWA. Much of the adventure was going to involve the players interacting with various factions. As I wrote up the notes I thought I would need, it dawned on me that over the past year of running this game I’ve come up with a fairly robust set of tools for faction management. It happened without me even noticing, so I never really put it all together in writing. It doesn’t have all the features that I want a faction system to have, but perhaps there’s something here that others will benefit from.

First you should know how ORWA is laid out, since it’s not your typical campaign world. The physical size is very small–a single biodome on mars. I’ve been intentionally vague about precisely how big the dome is, but the point is that there’s not a lot of room for folks to get away from one another. It’s not unusual for my players to spend time in three, or even four different sovereign territories in a single game session.

Given all that, the factions have ended up as cross between city states and street gangs. They have traditions and governmental structures, and wars. But their armies are measured in the hundreds at the most, and moving the boarder a few city blocks is considered a significant shift in territory. Within their territories they provide law and order, but unless you’re at the very heart of their turf, then you’re never more than two steps from anarchy.

I keep a simple map with faction boarders on it, which serves as my primary campaign map. There are narrow strips of no-man’s land between each faction, but pretty much all the space is the territory of one group or another. Each territory is keyed to a short description of the faction that holds it. These started out as 1-2 sentence affairs, but have slowly grown larger as the factions were developed through play. As with a lot of things in tabletop games, I’ve found it works a lot better to start simple, and let the details take shape on their own.

The Outsiders (group “E”), for example, began as giant dudes who’ve learned how to survive outside of the Dome for days at a time. Through play they’ve earned a sort of celtic flavor, and we’ve established that theirs is the best territory to try and start a new life in, so long as you’re okay with always being a second class citizen for lacking the biological advantages they’ve discovered. (Advantages your children will have a chance to achieve).

At some point I put all of the factions on a D% table. The amount of space each faction takes up on that table is weighted by how often they’re likely to have an impact on events beyond their own boarders. Five of the factions equally share about 70% of the table. These are the big, established powers. They provide the closest thing to stability the dome has.

Then next 20% of the table is for the two up-and-coming factions. Small territories with ambitions of expansion. The final 10% of the table is shared between three groups. There’s the Lords of Light, who are the vestigial remainder of a defeated power. There’s The Fighting Mongooses, a territory of mercenaries who are understood to be a neutral party by all the other territories. And, finally, there’s the territory of The Friends of Needletooth Jack, which is a completely insular territory. No one goes in, no one comes out.

Anytime I need to determine where something happens, or who did a thing, I roll on this table. Pretty much anytime anything happens I randomly determine who or where, because why not? It adds an interesting texture to the world. If I come up with everything myself it’ll make a bland sort of sense. But if you give me two dots and I have to figure out how to connect them, that’s where things start to get creative.

For example, a couple adventures back, my players needed to raid a building and recover a machine. Randomly determining where the building was determined which encounter table they’d be rolling on during their travels, and what sort of purpose the building might have been put to since the apocalypse. This particular territory happens to factor into one of the conspiracies that drive the campaign, so sending the party there on completely unrelated business gave me an opportunity to drop hints about what was coming.

In their last adventure, the party needed to rescue someone who had been captured, because I thought a rescue mission would be interesting. I rolled to determine which faction had this person, and that helped me determine why this person was being held, and whether it was an official act of the faction as a whole, or whether it was an individual acting without official sanction. The whole character of the adventure was determined by that roll.

In the party’s current adventure they need to protect a third party during a war between two factions. The location of the third party didn’t really matter, so long as it was fixed once determined. I randomly rolled an aggressor, then flipped a coin to decide which of their neighbors they were attacking. When that was done I rolled opposed d6s as a rough measure of discerning how successful each side of that conflict would be. The player’s goals really had no bearing on that, but the result of the war would have a huge effect on the territorial balance in the dome.

The different territories also correspond to different encounter tables, which allows me to show my players, rather than tell them, the difference between each faction. In the territory of the Redstone Lords (Faction “A” on the map), for example, the government is unusually organized. There are fewer encounters with monsters, and more encounters with thieves, aggressive agents of the state, or non-combat stuff, like slave markets. Meanwhile, in the territory of the Dukes of the Dome (“B”), where mutants are hated, there are no encounters with mutants. Or, if you do encounter a mutant, it’s being harassed / arrested / killed.

For interfactional relationships, I’m so far keeping things simple. Every faction hates the factions which boarder it, and are neutral with the factions that don’t. The simple fact of the matter is that everybody wants to grow, and there’s no territory to take that doesn’t already belong to someone. That means your neighbors want your territory, and you want theirs.

There are a few exceptions to this which are easy for me to just keep in my head. For example, the priests of Technotopia (“I”), have a particular grudge against the Lords Beneath the Black (“C”), because they are the two largest religions within the dome, and both would prefer to get rid of the other. Likewise, nobody likes the Friends of Needletooth Jack (“G”), but nobody is ever going to fuck with them either, because their territory is small and they’re scary as shit.

I don’t really have any means for tracking the player’s reputation with each faction, but I’ve found that I don’t really need it so much. Even with factions as small as these, the PCs are beneath the notice of the faction as a whole. I do track the player’s relationship with pretty much every NPC they ever meet, which serves as an adequate substitute. So while The Outsiders as a whole have no feelings about the PCs, the leader of the Outsiders (known as The Highlander) did once have a meeting with them. They brought him reliable information, but he repeatedly caught them lying about the details. So the party is useful, but he doesn’t trust them.

What I’ve put together for ORWA does lack a lot of the features I have always wanted from a faction system. Things like a reward/penalty track for building a reputation of working for or against each faction. But what I do have has been working surprisingly well, so hopefully others can get a little use out of it.

Where Does Story Come From?

The argument that a game’s story emerges during play, rather than flowing from behind the referee’s screen, is by now a settled issue. The referee creates the world, and the players create the story through the actions they take within that world. Others have made this argument more eloquently than I can, and I have no intention of retreading that ground. However, recently I had a conversation which posed a further question: how can you get a consistent story to emerge during play?

I used to run D&D as a more narrative-driven game, before I was convinced by the argument above. There are a couple people who’ve said they’d like me to run one again. One of these people, my brother, is a player in my ORWA campaign. After a recent session, he and I sat for several hours chatting, and he complimented me on ORWA’s narrative. Apparently, ORWA is precisely the kind of narrative-driven game he’d been wanting to see me run.

I had to take a minute to wrap my head around why he would say that. From my perspective, ORWA didn’t have any more or less of a narrative than any other game I had run in recent years. There’s adventure in every direction. I don’t push the players towards any particular hooks. I have no plans for how the game will proceed, beyond the scheming of my NPCs. And those schemes are as thwartable as those NPCs are killable.

Simply speaking, I have no “plot” in mind that I’m trying to weave into the game. So why would my brother say that ORWA has a better narrative than other games of mine he has played?

At this point it occurred to me that the gameplay of ORWA has been following a fairly linear narrative path. Not because I planned for it, but because my players discovered a narrative thread and bound themselves to it. (A thread, I might add, that I never intended them to find).

Without going into too much campaign detail, at the end of their first adventure my players discovered a shadowy cabal of wizards called “The Internet.” They were warned, repeatedly, not to mess around with The Internet, but they ignored that advice and confronted one of the secretive wizards anyway. The players demanded better payment for the work they had done, and the wizard agreed, on the condition that the PCs subjugate themselves to the will of The Internet. Under this agreement the PCs are allowed to pursue their own interests so long as they don’t conflict with those of The Internet, and the PCs must be available to perform jobs for The Internet when called upon. The players agreed, and ever since then nearly every adventure has been a mission conducted in service of The Internet.

The players are not bound to this story. They could spend more time pursing their own goals if they want to. They certainly encounter any number of adventure hooks they pass up in favor of waiting for the next Internet mission. They could work to break free of The Internet if they wanted, but aside from a single exception, they don’t seem interested. I don’t know if they’re just being carried forward by momentum at this point, or if they’re eager to see what The Internet will do next.

Whatever the motivation, the fact is that the players found a story that they thought was interesting, and they stuck with it. Every week they pursue the story further, and it grows and evolves accordingly. There are regular characters with whom they’ve developed relationships, not because I’ve decided that those characters will be recurring. But, rather, because those are the characters who live in this corner of the campaign world. And it’s the corner of the campaign world the players have decided to spend their time in.

In the course of any normal D&D campaign, the players will brush up against countless stories. Most of those stories will serve as vignettes. They’ll last an adventure or so, and then the players will be on to something else. That’s fine, because the story that really matters is the story of the PC’s adventures, whatever those adventures may be. Eyes of the Overworld does not suffer for Cugel’s constant motion from one adventure to the next. A great story can be told through many vignettes.

But if you’d like to see a consistent narrative that grows and changes over the course of an entire campaign, there’s no need for the referee to impose that narrative. All that needs to happen is that the players need to pick a narrative to pursue, and stick with it. It could be their own narrative–establishing a kingdom, becoming famous adventurers, exploring some new unknown country; or they could latch themselves to someone elses’ narrative by joining a conspiracy, or a pirate band, or really just joining any organization at all.

The players create the story of the game with their actions. But this conversation with my brother has made me wonder if I’m doing enough to make my players aware of how far their power extends. Perhaps more adventures ought to end in the style of a spaghetti western, with the townsfolk asking the players to stick around and become the sheriff. That would give the players an explicit choice: would they like to see how this story develops further, or do they want to ride off into the sunset to find something new?

What I Need to Improve On as a Referee, 2016 edition

What is the essential essence of being a good referee? I don’t understand it. Sometimes I think I do a pretty good job of playing at being a referee, but if a good referee is consistently good at refereeing, then I don’t think I’m a good referee. I’m trying, though.

In 2015 I played in a lot of games, but I didn’t run more than a handful of sessions. In 2016, though, I’ve started up a new campaign for an old friend of mine who was feeling D&D starved. As I was making my preparations, I thought about what I like in a referee. How could I emulate those qualities, or how could I fake them? Two things came to mind. I’m sure I have more flaws than just two, but two is the number of potential solutions I found for myself. Obviously these are specific to what my own weaknesses are, but maybe someone out there will find my own self improvement efforts helpful for themselves.

The first thing I like is a responsive referee. Someone who keeps the game moving by having answers for players almost before they’ve finished their questions. Someone who never (or almost never) needs to look anything up. It’s something I know I’m capable of, because it’s something I’ve done before. But it’s something that I don’t succeed at consistently.

I know there are some referees, (*cough*) who accomplish this with masterful planning. It’s a skill that appeals to me, and one I’ve attempted to cultivate for years. But my brain just isn’t shaped right for it. What I really need to do is avoid excessive planning. To leave more room for discovering the world at the table, either through random determination or through improvisational world-building.

Of course, an improvising referee is in danger of creating Quantum Ogres. Care must be taken to preserve player agency. Choices must have concrete parameters before they are presented to the players. But the color of the carpet hardly needs to be specified in writing. I have a history of attempting to write entire modules before each game session, and that’s just a poor allocation of time. And it was never even that fun. I was once told that my games were more entertaining when they were poorly planned. At the time I took it to mean that I needed to plan better. What I should have done is listen to the niggling whining of Occam, and set myself to run more poorly planned adventures.

Improvisation is one of my biggest strengths as a referee. And since the goal here is “do less work,” it shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Though I may benefit from preparing more random tables as well.

The second thing I like are referees whose worlds feel consistent. Who have recurring characters, and faction politics. Whose worlds adapt not just to the great deeds of the players, but also to the little things they forget they even did.

If I want my games to be more like that, I need to take better notes during play. For real this time. Note taking for me is like weight loss. I always say I’m going to start taking it more seriously, but I always give up before I see any benefits. I wasn’t even good at taking notes in school when literally all I had to do was sit, listen, and take notes. So you can understand that when you combine note taking with running a game, it’s something I’ve never done a very good job of. But the more I think about it, the more I think that taking notes during play is the most important preparatory work a referee can do for future sessions.

I could spend an hour crafting some fascinating NPC for my players to meet. But it will never impress them as much as running into the same random mook named Dave because “1d6 bandits” was rolled two weeks in a row on the encounter table. That experience communicates to the players that they’re in a world with depth and texture. It opens up their minds to the possibilities of making friends and building alliances. It allows recurring foes like Dave to develop organically. It gets them excited. It certainly gets me excited.

I’ve had some promising success with this already. Keeping index cards nearby to write NPC info on has helped. I’ve also taken to writing detailed post-mortems of every session, with treasure, session highlights, NPC developments, etc. I’ve found it helpful to think of taking notes as replacing the detailed pre-session prep I’m used to doing. It also helps that, because I’m not doing that detailed pre-session prep anymore, I don’t have as many papers in front of me to sift through. Which gives me more table space to devote to my notes.

There are other things I’d like to improve on. But these are the two things I’m really trying to get better at right now. And the three sessions I’ve run so far this year have been promising! Self improvement is a tough road, though. Wish me luck.

How should mind affecting spells work on PCs?

Mind affecting spells cast on players are a tricky business.

With NPCs, there are no wrong answers. Can Charm Person be used to turn the bandit into a loyal henchman, or will the spell be broken as soon as you stab his friend? We can argue about one method or another being more fun, but in the end it doesn’t matter which method you use. The NPC isn’t going to feel like they’ve been treated unfairly. But a player might.

Lately, my most consistent D&D game has been Saturday morning Necrocarserous with John Bell. My character, Urlar of Yellow Waters, has been possessed by dragon spirits, dominated by an intelligent item, and affected by a spell which convinced me that my companions had been corrupted and that the only way to give them peace was to kill and eat them. Far from feeling like I was being treated unfairly, these moments where I lost normal control over my character are some of the most entertaining highlights of my time as a cog in the Necrocarserous Program.

My character didn’t turn into a temporary NPC while I sat on the sidelines and watched the game unfold. Nor did John ever tell me what specific actions I had to take. Instead, my character was given a goal. With the Dragon spirits, it was fairly broad. “Act in the best interests of the dragon cult” or something. Being empowered by the dragon spirits, I actually got a ton of boosts to my abilities, and a whole cult worth of people doing my bidding. Unfortunately, the rest of the party was in the process of robbing the dragon cult. Obviously I’m on the side of the party, but right now, Urlar is on the side of the dragons. So I ordered ‘my’ cultists to destroy the stone dome the magic user summoned to protect himself. The MU was the one actually in possession of the cult’s property, and thus should be our primary target. When a hole opened that was big enough to shoot arrows through, I insisted the cultists continue to focus on destroying the dome. A small hole, I reasoned, only allows a single arrow to fire through it, but a large hole can allow a steady stream of cultists into the dome to overwhelm the intruder. Eventually, my intentionally bad tactics allowed the party to withdraw successfully. (I don’t recall how they extricated me, but they did. Once I got back to town I had the tumor that allowed me to see dragon spirits removed.)

Being mind controlled in Necrocarserous isn’t something that happens to you. The player is not a passive participant. Mind control is a puzzle that can be solved. The player knows what their goal is, and they are obligated to pursue it. (John often tells me ‘no,’ and clarifies the nature of my goal when I try to deviate too much.) But any path to the goal that makes sense will be accepted. And thus can a mind controlled player minimize the damage they do to the party’s goals. Or even work towards the party’s goals if they are particularly clever about their reasoning.

This is how I want to run mind affecting spells from now on. As a complication which forces the player to stretch their ingenuity to the limits, rather than a buzzkill that bums the player out.

How Saying 'Yes' to your Players Makes GMing Easier

I’ve been working on my time tracking in recent sessions, and as an experiment I included a boss which underwent a transformation as time went on. She was a sorceress named Anyetta the Many Eyed, and she had a peculiar fascination with spiders. That fascination led her to the decision to create a powerful ritual to give herself certain arachnid attributes. If the party encountered her within two hours of entering the dungeon, they would have caught her while she was casting the transformation ritual. Had they fought her, she would have likely been a moderate challenge as a level 3 sorceress against a party of level 1 characters. After the casting of the ritual, there was a 20 minute window of vulnerability while the transformation took place. She would have been immobilized, and easy prey (assuming the party recognized her as a villain). Following the transformation, the sorceress gained a number of powerful abilities that made her into a pretty dangerous encounter for 1st level players.

As it so happened, it took the party about 5 hours of game time to find her. They attempted diplomacy first, but after giving her some information they probably should not have, she attacked. Fortunately for them, the boss turned out to be a glass cannon She managed to nearly one-shot one of the characters, but the rest of them made better reflex saves. Since she was a sorceress it only took a few hits to leave her dead on the floor. There wasn’t even enough time for any giant spiders to come to her aid. The party looted her corpse, which had some of the best treasure I had placed in the dungeon, then began to search the room. They found a lot of strange alchemical stuff they didn’t understand, and a lot of books with notes about how the ritual was performed, but nothing of great value.

Or so their foolish GM thought.

“Hey Phoenix,” the ranger said to the party’s own sorceress. “Do you want to give this ritual a try?”

“Sure, that sounds fun!” the sorceress replied.

From behind the GM screen, I mumbled a quiet “oops!”

There was a time when I would have said no. I would have come up with some reason why it wasn’t possible for the player to make that kind of unconventional leap in power. Maybe I’d indicate that in studying the books the player would learn that Anyetta’s formula was flawed, and that she would have died of natural causes after a week or two. But that’s not how I GM anymore, and I’m not sure why it ever was. Usurping the villain’s plan is exactly the type of thing I would do as a player. It’s honestly thrilling to have players who are as madcap in their approach to the game as I am. So I told the sorceress yes. She would be able to repeat the ritual, but that it would require a great deal of time and preparation to complete.

We ended our session shortly thereafter, with most of the party returning to town to sell their loot (and, incidentally, establish a museum) while the sorceress remained behind to study. A few hours later when I was putting away my folding tables, I began to ponder the next gaming session. For a few days I’d been half-assedly working on an idea for the next adventure. Something to do with dwarves and giants, in which the party would end up in a large dwarven citadel where they could take care of city-things. For a moment I turned my attention to my sorceress’ desire to become a spider-woman. I was just as intrigued by the idea as my players were, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to handle it. It would be a significant jump in power for the player, once which could unbalance the game in her favor. It also didn’t seem right to simply let her gain the powers after spending a couple weeks casting spells.

That’s when I realized that by allowing my player to pursue an unconventional goal, I was no longer in a position of needing to provide them with an adventure to pursue. They had chosen their adventure: turn the sorceress into a spider woman. Now all I had to do was set the parameters of that adventure. I won’t go into too much detail here, since my players do occasionally read this site, but suffice to say that the task will require the players to go on a number of small side adventure. By the time they’re finally ready to start casting the spell, they’ll have spent somewhere between 3 and 6 sessions on the task, if they’ve remained focused. And while they pursue this goal, they’ll be far more engaged in the game than they ever would be if I was the one trying to create their motivation.

My players are the ones guiding my game now, and I couldn’t be happier that they’ve taken the reigns.

For the record, by the way, this is the template the sorceress is pursuing:

Arachnohominid Template

When a humanoid creature gains the arachnohominid template, six additional eyes grow at even distances from each other around the base creature’s head, and eight large spider legs grow from their back. These legs are large enough that when the creature is standing on them, their humanoid legs will be half of their height off of the ground (about 2.5-3ft for a human). An arachnohominid creature is also able to spin webs through nodules on their fingertips, and control other arachnids to a limited degree.

Unfortunately for the arachnohominid, these alterations are extremely difficult to hide, and are likely to cause fear and mistrust in most of the civilized world.

Type Type changes to Monstrous Humanoid (Do not recalculate Hit Dice, BAB, or saves.)
Senses Darkvision 60ft, +4 to perception checks, considered to be looking in all directions at once. (cannot be “back attacked.”)
Armor Class Natural armor improves by +2
Abilities Strength and Dexterity each improve by +2
Feats The base creature gains Toughness as a bonus feat.
Speed When on the spider legs, the creature’s speed increases to 60ft. The creature can move at this speed even when climbing along walls or ceilings.
Special Abilities

  • Able to climb on walls or ceilings as though affected by a permanent Spider Climb spell.
  • Can spin webs to entrap foes. Webs can be placed and hidden, or spun around opponents within 30ft during combat. In the latter case, a reflex save of DC [10 + 1/2 character level + Dex Modifier] allows the creature to avoid the attack. In either case, a DC 20 strength check can break the webs, or any attack which deals 5 damage to the webs (AC: 5, Hardness: 0).
  • A small, fast moving tendril of web can also be used to deliver touch spells up to 30 ft. The arachnohominid must succeed on a ranged touch attack [1d20 + BAB + Dex Modifier against Touch AC] or the spell fails.
  • Spiders obey the mental commands of an Arachnohomnid. Larger spiders are entitled to a will save DC [10 + 1/2 Arachnohominid HD + Cha]

A Learning Experience

This past Saturday was a day of firsts for me. It had been awhile since I’d been able to get a group together for a gaming session, so many of the things I’ve been thinking about and writing about got a test-run during this weekend’s game. I edited everyone’s character sheets before the game to make note of their current encumbrance, and I made sure all of my treasure had encumbrance noted. I prepared a few hex-crawl sections for the game, complete with detailed encounter tables. I also made an attempt  to include time tracking in my campaign, which I really had no idea how to do, but I tried to work off of some supposition. I also tried a few things which I haven’t written about; including weather in my games, using poker chips to track the party’s resources, and writing down treasure on index cards. I believe those last two were originally proposed by Telecanter.

Like I said, it was an entire day of firsts. Some things worked well, some things didn’t, and most others fell somewhere in between. So now that the game is over, it’s time to review, and revise. Experience is our greatest teacher so long as we take the time to listen to it!

Encumbrance

(Using my Encumbrance system). As I mentioned, I went through everyone’s character sheet and put a red underline under everything which would add to their encumbrance, then put their totals, as well as their light/medium/heavy load ranges on their character sheets. When everyone arrived, I explained the new system to them briefly. I asked them to keep track of their encumbrance during play and let me know if they started carrying a medium or heavy load. I was somewhat surprised that this did not really impact the speed of play even slightly. There were a few conversations about who should carry what, but they were brief, and entirely appropriate. Looking over their character sheets now (this group always leaves their sheets with me, for some reason. It’s not something I normally require), it seems like everybody did a good job. I can tell that the number was erased and increased whenever appropriate.

I don’t feel as though the system has been sufficiently stress-tested, though. Nobody is yet carrying anything other than a light load, so penalties have not come into play. However, for now, I’m completely satisfied with my encumbrance system, and look forward to seeing it in action more often.

Resource Tracking with Poker Chips

I actually did talk about this once before, way back in November when I said I didn’t like it. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more it seems completely reasonable, and the less my objections seemed to be relevant. That’s what I get for doubting Telecanter’s genius. I used white poker chips to represent arrows (and gave the ranger 24, which I only just now remember should have been included in his encumbrance. Whoops!), red poker chips to represent torches/lantern oil, and blue poker chips to represent rations. I had a large bowl on the table where everyone could toss their chips when they consumed a resource, and pull them out when they renewed that resource.

It worked fantastically. Better than fantastically; it worked perfectly! Everyone quickly got into the habit of tossing their rations into the bowl at the end of the day. They even did it when I forgot to tell them to. The ranger and I both forgot to toss his arrows in the bowl, but that’s only because it took a few hours for the party to engage anything in combat. Tracking torches has been a little bit trickier, but only because of my difficulties relating to…

Time Tracking

(Using my suppositions on the subject) Time tracking didn’t work as well as it could have, but it didn’t not work. During the first few hours of the game, while the party was hex crawling, I kept track of the when the day began and ended, which I think is plenty. I didn’t really take into account any time spent in combat, in town, or otherwise interacting with NPCs, but maybe that’s unnecessary. Later in the game, once the party entered the dungeon, my original plan was to keep track of time in 10 minute turns. I was only somewhat successful in this. I took a page from Magic: The Gathering and used a 12 sided die to keep track of time. After the first 10 minutes, I set it in front of me with the 1 facing up. After another 10 minutes passed, I turned it to 2, and so on. Once it hit 12 I would note that two hours had passed, and start the count over. When I decided to turn it was this issue. I typically assumed that each combat required enough rest afterwards to count as 10 minutes, and that if the players spent more than a few moments in a room it should count for 10 minutes. I also moved the counter up twice when the rogue took 20 on a perception check to find traps.

The whole thing felt messy, but I’m not entirely certain how I could do it better. This will require further in-game experience to fully evaluate.

Weather

I totally spaced on this. Didn’t even mention it during the game, let alone have it affect combat in any way. GM fail.

Treasure on Index Cards

I believe this is something I first red on Telecanter’s blog. Before the game I spent $1.18 on a pack of 300 index cards. Anytime I added a pile of treasure or a chest into my notes, I would write everything down on an Index card. A typical card would be headed with something like “Crypt of Bonegut the Stone Fisted; Chest in room 8” and would include the number of gold pieces, gems, and other oddities the characters found. I also wrote a number in red next to any item which would increase a player’s encumbrance.

I really think these cards improved play by a great deal. Anytime they made a discovery, I’d toss a card over the GM screen, and one of them would read off the items to the others. It was really fun to hear them wonder “what are these bottles of blue liquid?” (Healing Potions), and “A stick with a tiny ruby at the tip!?” (Wand of Fireball with 3 charges left). Fortunately the party’s sorceress, Phoenix Dark, was more than capable of identifying all of these objects. Having something visual seemed to help the players in dividing up the loot amongst themselves, and I really don’t think my encumbrance system would have worked anywhere near as well without these cards.

Obviously it would be more difficult to use these in randomly generated dungeons, but they were so useful in this game that they will certainly have a place in any future games I run.

Hex Crawling

(Using my thoughts on how to make travel more engaging, as well as my thoughts on creating an encounter table.) This did not go so well. At least I don’t think so. The players understood the concept well enough, and I won’t say that anyone appeared to be excessively bored. But with all the rolling, marking down of terrain type, and slowly moving the piece one hex at a time, I think everyone was getting a little impatient. More than once the player who was controlling the party’s marker would absentmindedly move it several spaces at once, which says to me that they were more eager to reach their destination than they were to know what they encountered while getting there.

I believe that part of the issue may have been the way I was marking down the terrain type. A friend of mine got me a nice table-sized, wet-erase hex map for Christmas, so I gave the party a little red bead to represent themselves with, and had them move one hex at a time. Once they entered a hex, I would quickly use one of my markers to identify what the terrain type of the hex was. It was a clumsy method of doing things. One of my players suggested that I let her mark the map, which now seems like a much better idea. It would both involve the players more in the process, and would force me to verbally identify each terrain type (which I was failing to do after awhile.)

If anybody has advice on this, or perhaps an audio recording of a successful hex crawl, I would be very appreciative.

Skills

This isn’t exactly new, but it is something I learned. The more I play with skills, the more I agree with my friends in the OSR movement: the elaborate skills system used in Pathfinder is bad. It’s better than D&D 3.5’s, but it’s still in severe need of being redesigned. Not only does it serve as a source of confusion for new players, but it can be a pain-in-the-ass during play. Having the rogue roll to search for traps at every door quickly became a source of exasperation. And often when I knew I “should” be asking for skill checks, I instead simply allowed players to perform tasks. The sorceress was able to identify magic items, the Ranger with Knowledge(Dungeoneering) was able to identify statues of gnomes as being real gnomes under a petrification spell, etc. I’m not ready to completely abandon a skill system, but I’ll certainly be devoting some attention to it in the coming months.

Funny Story…

That’s everything I’d like to share about what I learned from this most recent game. However, before ending this post, I would like to share one funny story / word of warning for other GMs.

The first boss in my dungeon was a skeletal orc with some fancy fighter abilities. When the players entered the room, it would be lying dead on a slab the way a good corpse should. On the floor around it was scattered a great deal of treasure. The idea was that the players would recognize that as soon as they touched the treasure, the orc would come alive and attack them. So they’d prepare themselves for battle, and carefully grab some of the treasure. When the orc never stirred, they’d figure they were wrong, and go on their way. 20 minutes AFTER they took the treasure, the Orc skeleton would come alive, and start hunting for them in the dungeon. It would be particularly good if he found them whilst they were engaged with some other creature.

When my players finally enter this room, they suspect a trap. So my party’s rogue, Poker, inspects the stone slab the orc is lying on. This I had not expected. Given that rogues receive the “trapfinding” ability at level one, which allows them to detect and disable magical traps, I figured the rogue might have a chance to notice something was amiss here. I told him that he detected a very faint, dormant necromatic aura. Upon hearing this, my players did the logical thing:

The Ranger, whose favored enemy was undead, smashed the skeleton’s head with his sword.

All I could do was bury my face in my hands and give the ranger 3 XP for killing the boss.

The Paladin's Oath, and GM Clarity

After purchasing the first book recently, I was prompted to re-read The Order of the Stick by Rich Berlew in its entirety. Odds are that if you’re reading this site, you’re at least somewhat familiar with the comic. If you’re not, go ahead and leave. Just click over to the giantitp.com and start at the beginning. Reading Order of the Stick is a far better use of your time than reading my half-assed ramblings is. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you’re done.

The story of one of the comic’s characters, a Paladin named Miko, got me thinking about how game masters should handle the unique challenges presented by a paladin character. I had already written a piece a few months back concerning how I believe a paladin should be played, but I realized that the way the GM treated the paladin mattered at least as much as how the player played their character. That prompted this past Monday’s post on how to provide ethics based challenges to a paladin. So now I’ve covered both how players should enact a paladin’s morality, and how GM’s should challenge a paladin’s morality, but I still haven’t covered the element which makes a paladin’s morality worth talking about in the first place: the code of conduct itself. The paladin’s oath which, when broken, causes the paladin to fall. (Which is precisely the event which makes Miko’s story so compelling.)

The oath is the central element of a paladin’s morality, which makes a thorough understanding of it essential to the task of testing a paladin’s morality. I’ve also got a few ideas on how to make the oath a bit more interactive and engaging. But before we explore those ideas, I think it’s essential to define unequivocally what the Paladin’s oath actually is. Because I don’t think we’re all on the same page here; that page being number 63 in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook. It reads:

A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class features except proficiencies if she ever willingly commits an evil act.

Additionally, a paladin’s code requires that she respect legitimate authority, act with honor (not lying, not cheating, not using poison, and so forth), help those in need (provided they do not use the help for evil or chaotic ends), and punish those who harm or threaten innocents.

Associates: While she may adventure with good or neutral allies, a paladin avoids working with evil characters or with anyone who consistently offends her moral code. Under exceptional circumstances, a paladin can ally with evil associates, but only to defeat what she believes to be a greater evil. A paladin should seek an atonement spell periodically during such an unusual alliance, and should end the alliance immediately should she feel it is doing more harm than good. A paladin may accept only henchmen, followers, or cohorts who are lawful good.

That is the extent of what the book states explicitly about the Paladin’s oath. (If I’m missing anything, please let me know.) Oftentimes the meaning of these relatively simple sentences can be a source of great contention, so lets examine them more closely before moving on. Note the wording of the sentence which makes reference to a paladin falling (there’s only one):

A paladin must be of lawful good alignment and loses all class features except proficiencies if she ever willingly commits an evil act.

It doesn’t say “A paladin loses all class features if she ever willingly commits an unlawful act.” Nor does it say anything about a paladin losing their powers for breaking their oath. Using a strict interpretation of the rules as written in the book, most of a paladin’s code of conduct is fluff. There is no mechanical penalty for using poison, or lying. Doing so would not be very paladin-like, but the rules don’t state that such actions should be punished. It seems unlikely that this is unintentional, since the Pathfinder entry is identical to the entry in the 3rd edition rulebooks. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to clarify things if this was not the intended reading.

Continuing on the assumption that we’re abiding by a strict understanding of the rules, what constitutes an evil act? Page 166 of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook states:

Evil implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.

Hurting, oppressing, and killing others. That’s what evil is. Those types of actions are, according to a strict interpretation of the rules, the only actions which should cause a paladin to fall. And unless you’ve had some conversation with your player about an extended list of fall-worthy actions, then you should abide by a strict interpretation of the rules. For the sake of clarity.

Clarity is one of the most important skills for a GM to have. It is the ability to communicate with your players effectively. To communicate in a manner which gives your players a solid understanding of what the consequences of their actions will be. Clarity is always an important skill to practice, but this is doubly true when the question of whether a paladin falls comes into play. If your player does not feel they were given a fair chance to avoid losing all of their class skills, they will be justifiably upset. If you’re in doubt about whether or not you’ve been clear, there’s nothing wrong with simply letting your player know explicitly.

“Do you realize that if you kill the city’s lord, and he is not in fact evil, your paladin will fall?”

It’s as simple as that. And if you’re worried about giving anything away, consider the possibilities of obfuscating your tells through volume.

Now, having discussed clarity, lets return to the oath itself. As discussed above, the rules state explicitly only that evil actions can cause a paladin to fall. But the rules also describe a number of other actions which a paladin “cannot” perform—though it describes no specific punishment for performing them. There’s no reason these can’t be included on the list of fall-worthy actions, so long as the player is made aware of it. In fact, there’s no reason any number of actions can’t be included in a paladin’s oath. Which leads me to wonder: what if a player could select from a number of different oaths, each with their own specific requirements, and benefits.

Dungeons & Dragons played around with this in the 3rd edition “Book of Exalted Deeds.” That book included a number of “Sacred Vow” feats. The idea was that your character took some manner of ascetic vow—such as a vow of abstinence—and so long as the vow was kept, the character received a mechanical benefit related to that vow—such as a +2 to resist charm effects. The vows were not specifically for paladins, but they functioned in a similar manner to the paladin’s oath. I always thought it was a great idea, save for the fact that it falls prey to my problem with feats.

So what if the paladin’s oath was extensible in a similar manner? At first level, a paladin could choose to add a vow of abstinence to their oath. So long as they kept that vow, they would receive some type of benefit. It could be a +2 to resist charm effects, but it need not be mechanical. There are already a lot of mechanics involved in each of the Pathfinder classes, and none of them needs to be made more complicated they already are. Instead, a paladin who takes a vow of abstinence could gain access to the services of certain monasteries scattered throughout the game world. And, of course, if this vow is broken, the paladin would fall. So the Paladin can exchange greater restriction on their actions, for greater power.

It’s an idea I find intriguing. What are your thoughts?

A Paladin's Fall

My paladin had taken a vow of celibacy. Not the feat from the “Book of Exalted Deeds,” mind you. It was simply something my character had done in-character, with no mechanical benefit. The villain in this particular campaign was an enchantress. It was a lame self-insert character by our GM, but the group tried to put up with it. In our last session I got separated from the rest of the party while we were hunting the enchantress. She jumped out at me, and cast Dominate Person. Once I failed my saving throw, and was under her power, she tried to seduce me. I told the GM that, since this was against my nature as a celibate man, I ought to get a new saving throw at a +2 bonus to resist. Do you know what she said to me?

“Deep down, all men just want to have sex with women, no matter what they say.”

She denied me the right to a new saving throw, and went on to describe my character and her’s having sex. Once she was done, she said that since I had broken my vow of celibacy, I lost all of my paladin powers.

So how can I get back at her for this?

-Paraphrased from a tale told by one of the Anon’s on /tg/.

Every gamer knows the rules. A paladin swears an oath. That oath demands that they do good, and fight evil. Any paladin who willfully breaks their oath will be forsaken by the gods who grant them their holy might. Their powers will be stripped from them, and they will go from being one of the most powerful melee combat classes, to being a fighter without any bonus feats. This fall from grace leaves the Paladin next to useless; worse than that: it represents a fundamental failure of the paladin to uphold the ideals to which they’ve committed their lives. It’s the kind of life-shattering failure which might actually make a person consider becoming a blackguard.

Playing a paladin means holding your character to a higher moral standard. Those who play the class take on an additional challenge for themselves. Not only must they survive the dungeon, save the captives, defeat the villains, and recover the treasure; they must do it all without compromising an ironclad code of ethics. I’ve written in the past about how I believe a Paladin should be played. In my next two posts, I’d like to discuss how I believe a game master should handle a paladin character. Because, after all, what is the purpose of a GM if not to challenge his or her players?

It’s always dangerous to generalize, but I think it’s safe to say that most players who play paladins want to feel noble. They want to feel as though they are the righteous fist of their god, meting out justice one moment, and mercy the next. In other words, people who play paladins want to feel like they’re playing a paladin. And as GMs, it’s our duty to facilitate an environment where they can feel that way. But we can’t simply hand it to them, any more than we can hand out free experience or treasure. We can try to, but when we hand rewards to our players for free, all we accomplish is diminishing the value those rewards have in our players’ eyes. If being an upright defender of all that is good and true is never difficult, then how can it be interesting?

But there is a danger in constructing this manner of challenge. Far too many GMs approach it as a question of how they can make a paladin fall, rather than asking how they can challenge their player. The example at the start of this post is obviously an extreme case. That GM is not only a bad at running a game, but is a pretty awful person to boot. It’s not an isolated case, though. If you’ve spent any time on gaming forums I imagine you know what I’m talking about. Complaints of game masters who force a paladin character to fall are disturbingly common. Sometimes spells such as Dominate Person are involved. Other times, the paladin is put into a situation where they’re forced to commit an evil act by circumstance. Still other times, a paladin falls for doing something the player didn’t even realize they could fall for—something a strict interpretation of the rules would not indicate they should fall for. Regardless of the exact method involved, all of these cases have the same root cause: a really terrible game master.

So the question becomes, “How do we challenge a paladin’s morals, without crossing the line into shitty game mastering?” And for that, I’ve come up with four possibilities.

Make evil the most obvious option. For any given problem, there are numerous solutions. But there will always be on solution which is most obvious. Someone without imagination might not even be able to think of another solution—but a paladin does not have the luxury of lacking an imagination. When the mind-controlled peasants have the players cornered, the rest of the party may give up and choose to kill the poor dominated folk. But the paladin must stand firm, and notice that the wall is weak enough to smash through, or that the second floor balcony is within jumping distance, or that the gem hanging from the chandelier is glowing the same color as the villager’s eyes.

Make evil the easiest option. Even when non-evil options are apparent, they may not always be easy. When the chaotic neutral bandits surrender, it would be easy to simply slay them, or to bind them and let the wolves have them. But a paladin cannot injure a foe who has yielded, not even indirectly. The paladin must make some manner of accommodation, whether it be taking them all the way back to the last town to face judgment, or placing a Mark of Justice spell on them.

Make evil the recommended option. Most often, the options available to a group of characters are implicit. The GM describes a room filled with monsters, and the players figure out for themselves what their options are. Sometimes, though, the players receive directions from NPCs, or even seek out NPCs to give them advice. If this advice requires an evil act, then it’s up to the paladin either to figure out alternatives on their own, or to find another source of advice. For example, if the destruction of an evil artifact requires it to be submerged in the blood of babies, a paladin might choose to instead seal the artifact away, or to seek another sage who knows an alternative method for destroying the item.

Make evil a Justifiable option. A paladin who is lax in their pursuit of justice may be led astray by small evil deeds with appear to serve the cause of righteousness. If a blackguard infiltrates the party disguised as a paladin, the villain may be able to convince the paladin to commit larger and larger evil deeds, all in the name of the greater good. The trickery is in convincing the paladin that the evil deeds are justifiable, rather than in convincing the paladin that the evil deeds are good.

Of course, there is one final element which is important to keep in mind when GMing: never, under any circumstances, try to force your players to take a certain kind of action. No matter how cool you think it would be. No matter how important it is to your ‘story,’ it is never acceptable for a GM to attempt to force a choice. We control the entire world. The demons and the devils, the celestials and the very gods themselves bend to our whim. The only thing the players control is the choices their own characters make. If you really want to make those choices yourself, then maybe you should be writing fiction, rather than running a game.

On Wednesday I’ll write in greater detail about what a paladin’s oath entails. Let me know in the comments if you can think of any more more good ways to test a paladin’s moral convictions.