Category: Being a Referee

Hex Crawling Encounters


(Order of the Stick courtesy of Richard Berlew)

In Monday’s post on making overland travel more engaging, I discussed how a hex crawl might work in practice. As I noted, the whole concept seems rather dull until you add two elements: survival, and random encounters. I was only able to touch on these concepts briefly in that post, so now I’d like to delve more deeply into the idea of random encounters on a hex map, and how they can work within the context of Pathfinder. I’ll try not to simply repeat Trollsmyth on this issue, since he also covered it in Hex Mapping 17: You’re Everything that a Big Bad Wolf Could Want. Though, while I’m on the subject: if you’ve read my posts and you’re becoming interested in hex maps, read Trollsmyth’s entire series on them. He recently posted part 20, and each post has been thought provoking and informative.

So we’re all at least somewhat familiar with encounter tables, right? They’re not as common as they once were, but sourcebooks are still full of charts to be rolled on, and we’ve all played video game RPGs where walking will suddenly result in a blast of noise and a transition to a battle screen. You’ve probably even had a GM at some point who said they needed to ‘check for random encounters,’ followed by some behind-the-screen dice clattering. But like Vaarsuvius says, these are boring. And it’s true. When the GM “fades to black” anytime the party travels anywhere, random encounters are boring. It’s like being a cardboard duck in a shooting gallery: you’re moving, and you might get hit by something, but you don’t really have much say in it either way. Random encounters only work when the player is in control of their own movement, which in the wilderness, means that random encounters only work when there’s a hex crawl.

Self determination (i.e. PLAYER AGENCY) is not all which is required for a random encounter to be compelling. Before leaping into the construction of an encounter table we need to get two misconceptions out of the way. First, it’s essential to realize that random encounters are not random. There is an element of random determination involved, but whoever creates the encounter table controls the probabilities of each encounter type. Not only that: they control what types of encounters are even possible. It’s not as though you’re obligated to pull monsters from the bestiary without rhyme or reason once you decide to build an encounter table. That would be ridiculous. You populate your encounter table with encounters which make sense. If orcs and trolls are fighting for control of the forest, then the encounter table for the forest will be variations on that theme. There can be troll hunters, orc worg riders, 1d4 trolls on patrol, a battle between orcs and trolls, a wounded orc separated from his fellows, the list goes on. Who knows? Maybe the half-assed “trolls vs. orcs” story will pique your player’s interests. Maybe they’ll take it upon themselves to settle the forest feud.

That’s what you want. Trust me: no matter how brilliant you think your game’s overarching plot is, you will never have more fun as a game master than you will when your players start making up their own quests.

The second misconception about random encounters is that all encounters are combat. Apparently the only reason we’re rolling at all is to determine what type of monsters are encountered, and how many of them there are. If possible this idea is even more ludicrous than the first one. There’s so much to encounter in the wilderness! Abandoned buildings, the bones of a long dead adventurer, a lost child, an undelivered letter, a magical fountain the list could go on. Adventure and exploration have a lot more to offer than hostile creatures in need of a good skewering.

The first step in creating an encounter table is to determine what area it covers. Presumably you’ve already got your hex map, so unless your game world is a homogenous lump, you can look at it and see plains, forests, mountains, rivers, deserts, and so forth. Within each of these biomes, a countless number of interesting encounters are potentially hiding, and the manner of those encounters will likely be completely different in one part of the world than they will be in another. While traversing the planes of Gibbledy-Gop, your players might encounter mighty centaurs, but while in the forest of Creepyscaryeek they’re more likely to encounter orcs. And, if your players go south of the river Fishnstuff in the forest of Creepyscaryeek, then they’ll encounter ogres instead, since the orcs are afraid to cross the river. It’s up to you, as GM, to determine how large an area your encounter table will be used for. If you’re working on creating a fully developed world, you may even want to create a second map with color-coded outlines of areas, based on which encounter table that area uses. If you wanted to get fancy, you could even have some areas which were under the effects of two separate encounter tables.

Once you’ve marked your encounter table’s “Area of Influence,” you need to determine what’s going on there. This will inform your decisions later on when it comes time to populate the encounter table. Above I gave an example of a forest where trolls and orcs fighting one another, and that’s as good a place to start as any. But it needs more detail. Let’s say that there’s a number of elven ruins from an ancient forgotten civilization which the two groups are fighting over. Given that trolls are much stronger than orcs, there’s likely going to be many more of the latter than of the former, or else the trolls would have won the ware a long time ago. And, just for kicks, lets say that the orc leader made a deal with a high-ish level wizard who is now supplying the orcs with some basic magical equipment.

At this point we have enough information to start sketching out what the encounter table will look like. There are a number of ways you can set up the chart, using any number of different dice, but I like to keep things simple: 1d20 to determine the type of encounter, and then another 1d20 do determine the specific encounter. This provides enough options that it’s pretty unlikely the players will exhaust all of them within a few hours of gameplay, but so many that it becomes unwieldy to deal with. Of course if you’re working with larger or smaller areas–or longer or shorter amounts of time the players will spend in those areas–it may be prudent to use a more or less complicated chart. If you really wanted, you could roll 1d100 to determine which of 100 charts (each with 100 options of their own) you would roll on. Or you could just roll1d4 to determine which of four different encounter types your players will face. It’s entirely up to you and what you need, but the “1d20 twice” approach provides a nice healthy average, so that’s what I’ll use here.

The first d20 roll, as I mentioned above, will determine the type of encounter, or whether there is an encounter at all. It’s important to make sure that there’s a relatively good chance of the players not encountering anything. Otherwise the hex crawl will slow to…well…a crawl. The players are on an adventure, yes, but they likely also have a goal in mind. Excessive distraction from that goal will annoy them. I like to have about a 50% chance of nothing happening. The nice thing about the d20 is that each number on the die has a 5% chance of being rolled, so if we want to create a 50% chance of nothing happening, we assign the numbers 1 through 10 to “nothing.” And that range can be altered to increase or decrease the probability somewhat, but I would advise not straying too far from the 50% median. Too many random encounters can become frustrating, and a serious drain on the party’s resources. Likewise, too few random encounters makes the hex crawl boring.

50% of the die is left to assign, so lets do combat encounters next. Since the forest is a Trolls Vs. Orcs warzone, combat encounters should be relatively common. 25% seems like a good probability, so we’ll assign numbers 11 through 15 on the d20 to “combat.” Unlike “nothing,” other types of encounters can vary as wildly as you like. The peaceful plains near civilization may only have a 5 or 10% chance of  combat encounters, while a party venturing deep into the territory of an evil empire may face a 30 or 40% combat rate.

With 50% assigned to “nothing,” and 25% assigned to “combat,” that leaves only five numbers left to assign, and there are a plethora of things we could put there. Interesting locations, traps, side quests, treasure, dungeon entrances, as with many things in tabletop RPGs, the limit is your imagination. For this encounter table, I think 16-17 (10%) will be Interesting Locations, 18-19 (10%) will be Special, and 20 (5%) will be Side Quests. And there we go, the first roll on the encounter table is taken care of. Rolling 1d20 will either result in “nothing,” or in one of four different types of interesting encounters. But the type of encounter is only half of the equation. Now we need to populate the second half of the encounter table, where we’ll determine specifics.

Combat: The combat chart should include a variety of different combat encounters. The obvious two are a band of orcs, and a band of trolls, but we can be more creative than that. And, more importantly, since combat encounters have a 25% chance of occurring, we need to be more creative than that. Since players are likely to encounter combat a number of times, we should have maybe 15-20 different possibilities on this table. They can include any number of things. The players could stumble onto a battle already in progress between orcs and trolls, which they could decide to participate in or not. They might encounter orcs riding worgs, or trolls carrying orc prisoners. Normal forest danger, like dire bears,can be on the list as well. Though your players will probably have more fun with the encounters that have a story behind them.

Interesting Locations: We’ve already mentioned that the orcs and the trolls are fighting over some ancient elven ruins, so those should be on this list. If you were so inclined, you could even include a number of different types of elven ruins: homes, government buildings, etc. Perhaps one might hide a dungeon entrance. Other types of interesting locations could include an orc village, a troll village, a reclusive wizard’s tower, an illusory copse of trees that one of the players accidentally walks through, or even just a meadow where the players can refill their water rations.

Special: Special is where you can put all the oddball stuff which doesn’t fit in your other categories. You might include a wounded orc warrior who was left behind by his comrades, or a fellow adventurer who got separated from their party and is now lost. If you are so inclined, you might even give your players a chance to find a treasure chest filled with gold which has been covered with dirt and leaves, or a powerful magic item dropped by some long past adventurer. Finding random treasure should probably be pretty uncommon though, and you may want to require a perception check to notice it.

Side Quests: You may not want to include side quests, but I think you should. First, the main questline is never quite as engaging to the players as we GMs would like to think it is. Providing them with occasional hooks to go off in a different direction lets them know they have alternatives. More importantly, showing that the world has a variety of tasks for them to handle, not all of which are related, helps encourage the players to think of your world as a living, diverse environment. Possible side quests include finding the entrance to a dungeon, finding a dead messenger with an important letter for a nearby king, or finding a village which needs the party’s assistance. And if you’d really like the players to continue on with the main quest before handling the side quest, you can always give them a time limit. E.g. “The world will blow up in 5 days and the dungeon where you can stop it from happening is 4 days away.”

A few final notes on using an encounter table:

  • How often? Once you’ve got the chart made, determine how often you’re going to roll on it. You could roll once per hex, once per hour spent within the hex, once per day, whatever you want. Personally, I roll each time the party enters a hex, and roll once more during the night when the party is at rest (ignoring any results which are not capable of self-mobility, such as an ancient ruin.)
  • A Gazebo Appears! Encounters should not simply “appear,” as though you’re playing a console RPG from the 90s. Take a moment to figure out how the players encounter whatever it is that you rolled. If it’s a location, do they see it in a valley as they reach the crest of a hill? Can they see it from a distance, or is it obscured by the treeline until they move closer? If it’s a monster, who sees who first? Perhaps you could figure out a simple third roll to determine whether or not the party is surprised. Trollsmyth has an excellent method for determining what a monster is doing when it’s encountered in the same hex mapping post I linked above.
  • Wow, this forest sure has a lot of wizards… Some things ought to be taken off the encounter table once they’ve been encountered once. For example, if your players have already encountered one reclusive wizard’s tower in the forest, you may not want them to find another. In these cases, re-rolling is fine. However, you might also consider that encountering something twice could lead to an interesting story that you never intended. For example, perhaps the wizard’s tower exists in several locations at once, or teleports around the forest at random, or maybe there are two wizards here who don’t like one another very much. All those options could end up being way more fun than simply re-rolling.

Making Travel More Engaging

As of late, I’ve been pondering how I can make travel more interesting for my players. It’s something I’ve always struggled with in my career as a Game Master. Sometimes I’ve tried just fading to black between points of interest, but that’s no good. If the players don’t somehow experience the travel, then there’s no tangible metric for how distant various locations are. And even if that’s not a problem for you (which it should be), it also deprives players of the opportunity to experience the game world outside of towns and plot events. Imagery of adventurers traveling together through a forest or desert fuels our imaginations, we can’t simply gloss over that part of an adventure because it’s difficult to present in an engaging manner! We can, of course, try to give the illusion distance by determining that a certain journey will require X days to complete, but even if you try to spice that up with random encounters, the players will get bored. After an unfortunate extended hiatus, my group is finally going to be able to get back together for a new adventure soon. The one I’m preparing will have a great deal of traveling in it, which has brought this problem to the forefront of my attention.

Of course, utilizing a hex map helps solve many of these problems, which I’ve talked about before. Making the players responsible for choosing each 6-mile step of their journey helps engage them in travel, because progress towards their destination won’t continue without their input. Giving them these choices also increases their player agency, which will always increase their engagement. And, as an added bonus, once you start asking your players to make choices, they’ll start making choices on their own. Before you know it, your players will be directing the course of their own adventure, and that’s when you know that you’re a good game master.

But how does it work?

I mean, when the whole group is actually sitting around the table, and you’ve got your filled-in hex map behind the GM screen, what happens next? How precisely do the players interact with the hex map. How do they know where to go? Does a single player just point to one hex after another until the end of the day? How are you going to describe each hex when the players enter it? These are questions which need to be considered, lest we be caught with our pants down at the table. We’re the GM after all, we need to give the appearance that we’re prepared for anything the players throw at us.

Step one is figuring out how the players are going to keep track of the map as they uncover it. Of course, I have a filled-in hex map which I’ll keep behind the screen, but there’s no reasonable way for me to show it to them without revealing information they have not yet earned. My map, after all, has notes on it indicating the locations of dungeons, treasure, and towns. So the players need a assign one of their number the duties of mapmaker, and that player will need a blank map which they can fill in as they play. A quick google search for “print hex graph” turned up a site which creates hexagonal graph paper for you. I printed off 25 or 30 sheets myself, just to keep on hand. I also have a very nice hexagonal battle mat which was given to me as a Christmas gift by a friend. It’s wet-erase, so I can actually have a nice visual “world environment” for my players as they explore. The only drawback is that the mat needs to be erased at the end of each session, so the players will need to keep a map as well.

As with most party decisions in RPGs, reasonable adults won’t need any GM guidance with respect to making a group decision. In my experience, a party leader most often emerges naturally, and when it doesn’t, players don’t have trouble coming to a consensus on issues like “which direction do we walk.” If getting the party to agree on things like this is a problem for your group, then your problems are outside the scope of this post. Likely outside the scope of anything I will ever write about, because I’m not from the “here’s how to handle your friends…” school of GM advice.

With that out of the way, the second step becomes determining the best way for players to interact with the hex crawl. What is the conversation that takes place between the players and the GM as they move from hex to hex on the way to their destination. For my purposes, in the upcoming game I’ll be running, the players will receive some very basic instructions. The first leg of their journey will first require them to travel in a certain direction until they reach a river, then they’ll need to follow that river until they reach a village. Pretty straightforward. Straightforward enough that it might end up being boring, but I’ll get to that later.

As the players begin to prepare for their journey, the GM should figure out what the slowest party member’s movement speed is. This will be the movement speed for the entire party, unless the faster party members are willing to leave someone behind. If the players are on foot, the slowest will likely be whatever character is a dwarf or halfling. If the players have mounts (which suddenly become a lot more appealing once you’re hex crawling) their speed will significantly increase. Remember also to consider whether the characters are encumbered or not. If you’re like me, you’ve probably never used encumbrance rules before. However, if we’re trying to make travel engaging, then using encumbrance rules gives the players something they’ll need to pay attention to lest their pace be slowed, and that’s too valuable to pass up. If Pathfinder’s encumbrance rules are too complicated for you, I did a mock up of an alternative a few months back which may be more to your liking. I haven’t got around to putting any spit or polish on it, though.

For simplicity’s sake (and also because this is likely what I’ll have in my game) lets say that the party is made up entirely of unencumbered humans, which have a movement speed of 30. According to Pathfinder’s movement rules (found in the Core Rulebook, on pages 170 through 172), this gives the party a daily movement speed of 24 miles. Now, if you like, you can simply say that since each hex is 6 miles, and 24 divided by 6 is 4, that means that a party may travel 4 hexes in a day–and that’s fine. However it fails to take into account that some terrain is more difficult to travel through than others. Fellow blogger Brendan recently wrote a post entitled “Wilderness Movement Costs,” (which itself was based on a post by Delta). In it, he outlines a basic system for tracking a party’s hex crawling movements which I’ve decided to rip off and adapt for Pathfinder/my own purposes.

Movement Points: Convert the number of miles the party may travel in a day into “points.” So, it the party can travel 24 miles in a day, they have 24 “movement points.” This may seem like a ridiculous extra step. However, its function is that it turns the party’s movement budget into an abstraction, rather than a literal unit of distance. This will help players understand the less-than-literal possible uses for movement points.The party can spend movement points on couple different things:

Travel: Travel is the most obvious function. (That is, after all, kinda the whole purpose of this post). The table below shows the cost in movement points for each of the four terrain difficulties. Since the players won’t know if the next hex will put them over their movement cost, it’s up to the GM to warn them when they’re about to do it, and let them know that continuing forward would constitute a forced march, meaning the players would not be able to move as much the following day. Note that traveling on roads actually allows the party to move at a faster speed than the standard rules would allow. This way, roads have an actual in-game purpose much closer to their real life one.

TerrainExamplesMovement CostBecoming Lost
Easyroad 4 No Check
Averageclear, city, grasslands, trail* 6 Survival DC: 10
Moderateforest, hills, desert, badlands 8 Survival DC: 15
Difficultmountains, jungle, swamp 12 Survival DC: 20

*There is no Survival check required to avoid becoming lost when following a well marked trail.

The movement cost happens to be evenly divisible for our band of unencumbered humans, though it may not be for all parties. If a party has some movement points left at the end of the day, but not enough to enter the next hex, give them some extra time to spend on other activities. Remember that in Pathfinder, a “traveling day” is 8 hours. So if you divide their total allotment of daily movement points by 8, you can determine how many movement points are spent during each hour of travel. From there you can easily figure out how much time they gain. For example, if you divide the human’s daily allotment of movement points, 24, by 8, you get 3. That’s 3 miles every hour. So if they have 3 movement points remaining, they have an extra hour to spend on tasks such as crafting, foraging for food, or researching spells.

Searching: A six mile hex is huge. A character could spend a week or more in the same hex without discovering everything there is to learn there. Every time they enter a hex, they see only a tiny fraction of what the hex has to offer. By spending one half of the movement points required to enter the hex, they can explore a roughly equivalent fraction of the hex. For example, a character entering a forest hex spends 8 movement points to make a beeline through the hex. If the party would also like to spend 4 more movement points in the hex (for a total of 12) then they can explore a little bit on their way through. They certainly won’t see everything, but they’ll earn themselves a second roll on the encounter table. Maybe they’ll find nothing, maybe they’ll encounter monsters, or maybe they’ll find something worth searching for. See below for more information on encounters.

That covers how the party’s movement through a hex crawl is handled, but how is it entertaining? At this point all we have is a mini game where the players point to a hex, and the GM tells them whether or not they have enough movement left, or whether they need to bed down for the evening. This is a structure, but without putting some meat on that structure, the whole thing ends up being completely monotonous, and players will leave. That’s where the final two elements of engaging travel come into play: survival, and encounters.

Surviving in the wilderness won’t be easy. First off, each party will need to rely on the survival check of one of its members. Each time a hex is entered, that player must make a survival check to avoid getting lost. If the character fails their survival check, then when the party attempts to move on to the next hex, the DM should roll 1d6 to determine which hex the party actually travels to. A roll of one means the party travels to the hex they intended to travel to (though they are still lost). Rolling a 2 indicates that the party travels to the hex one-space clockwise of their intended hex, rolling a 3 indicates they travel to the hex 2 spaces clockwise, etc. The party remains lost until their guide can succeed on a survival check upon entering a new hex. Items such as a compass or a map can help characters improve their survival checks to avoid getting lost. Once a character is an experienced enough traveler, their survival skill will likely rise high enough that becoming lost is no longer an issue.

Players will also need to monitor their rations in order to survive in the wilderness. If you’ve never forced players to keep track of their food supply before, now’s the time to start. Once the players run out of food 4 days into a 10 day journey, you’ll find they’re much more engaged in figuring out how to reach their destination before they die of starvation. Foraging and hunting are always options, but what if they can’t find anything? Will they eat their mounts? Will they eat…each other? That’s the fun! And don’t forget the elements. If the character’s journey takes place during the colder months, they may regret not spending the encumbrance points on those extra blankets when it begins to snow, and they start to freeze to death.

Lastly, there’s encounters. There are all types of encounters your players can have, which you can roll on a random chart. I won’t take the time to come up with a chart here, but I would say the chart should probably be about fifty percent “nothing,” which will allow the players to avoid getting bogged down in every single hex. The other half of the chart should be some combination of combat encounters, and ‘other.’ Other types of encounters can include walking in on a druidic ritual, finding the entrance to a random dungeon, coming upon a village of friendly or neutral wilderness dwellers, discovering a magic well, or any number of things you can come up with on your own. And for those times when combat encounters are rolled, there’s no need for them to be as boring as the standard “monsters appear” nonsense. Whose to say whether the monsters notice the players or not–or whether it’s a few monsters, or an entire village of them! Trollsmyth once posted an excellent chart which GMs could use to determine what monsters were doing when they were encountered. And don’t forget my Spicing Up the Battlemat series of posts to help make these combat encounters more interesting! (I really ought to do another of those. The last one was in December!)

As I’ve said a million times, keeping your players engaged is the number one duty of a game master. And whether want it to or not, travel is likely going to make up a large part of your game. You can either ignore it, or you can try to use it as another opportunity to challenge and entertain your players. After writing this post, I for one feel a lot more confident about running travel for my players in our upcoming game.

Player Agency in the Dungeons and Dragons Cartoon

I have a pretty odd hobby for a person my age. During the summer months, I spend every weekend in my car, driving through residential neighborhoods, looking for garage sale signs. I’ve always found Garage Sales to be somewhat romantic. There’s not much technique to searching for them, you just wander about, taking turns at random, following your gut and the signs which may or may not lead you to something you’re looking for. You catch a glimpse of sheet-garbed card tables down the road, and you pull in to take a look. You scan the tables, mentally screening out all of the junk to look for a treasure. You don’t really know what form the treasure will take. Maybe it’s an old book, or an NES cartridge, or a piece of kitchenware you’ve been lacking, or a pile of empty binders in good condition. Then there’s the barter. We have so few opportunities to barter in American culture. It’s something of a lost skill among our people.

This past summer I found a number of remarkable things. Useful things, like a bed frame, and a bike; items which could have easily cost me ten times more had I bought them new. Other finds weren’t so much useful as they were amusing. This latter type is how I classify the 4-disc DVD set of the 1983 Dungeons and Dragons cartoon ostensibly co-produced by Gary Gygax himself. At the time I was only really familiar with the show from screen captures posted on /tg/. Friends who grew up in the early 80s had told me they remembered it fondly, but everyone seemed to agree that the show was pretty bad. $2 to satisfy my curiosity seemed like a good deal.

I wasn’t exactly eager to dive into this show, particularly not after watching the first few episodes. But after 7 months, I’ve finally seen each of the show’s 27 episodes. And let me just say this: nothing gives me more hope that I can succeed as a writer than knowing someone actually got paid for writing this drek. Where can I even begin in picking it apart? The dialog is so stilted and canned that innocuous conversations sent me into laughing fits. Sometimes it seemed as though characters are simply reciting cliches to one another, since the lines they were reading didn’t form any substantive back-and-forth. And while a lack of proper continuity might be expected from a children’s show in the 80s, it was none the less painful to experience.When there’s an entire episode about the characters unleashing a cataclysmic force of evil, I expect more follow-through than “it got bored and left.”

And that doesn’t even take into account how legitimately offensive the show is. There’s only one non-white character, a black girl named Diana. When the Dungeon Master assigns all of the kids their classes in the show’s opening, he makes her the acrobat, and as we learn later in the show, she’s a world-class athlete. But that’s not even what really bothers me. Making the black character an athlete is a little stereotyped perhaps, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s overtly racist–even if Acrobat seems to have been specifically created as a class just for her character. What is overtly racist is what she’s wearing. Lets get this straight. All the characters show up in this world wearing adventuring gear. The ranger gets a green jerkin, the cavalier gets armor, the wizard gets a robe, the thief gets an admittedly sexualized skirt-and-leggings getup…and the black chick gets a fur bikini? Am I the only one seeing this? I get that this was the 80s, but I have a hard time believing nobody was upset about this. I suppose we can at least be thankful that she’s not a sexist caricature of a teenaged girl like Sheila, the only other female character in the show.

Honestly, the show is so bad that I’ve thought about doing a series of episode-by-episode mockery posts in the style of my Traipsing Through the Timmverse blog. But this isn’t a television review site, it’s a tabletop RPG site. So lets talk about this show from the perspective of a tabletop gamer. If possible, looking at the show through that lens only makes it worse.

I now find it ironic that when I first wrote about player agency, I used a picture of the Dungeon Master character from this cartoon. I cannot now think of any worse example of a GM who promotes player agency. Nor even a worse example of a GM who is vaguely competent. Even if we are not meant to take the kids as the “players,” or Dungeon Master as the literal DM, he simply does a shit job of facilitating the kid’s adventures. He is overtly controlling, and steps in to give the kids directions any time they don’t have a clear goal to pursue. And half the time he doesn’t even let them accomplish the goal, but rather lets them get within sight of the goal, so he can step in and impress them with his ability to solve their problems.

It was actually my ladyfriend Morrie who noticed this phenomena first. As we watched the show together, it became a running joke to point out instances of terrible game mastering. Such as the time the characters come up with an elaborate plan to defeat a horrible monster called Demodragon. Their plan ends up being completely ineffectual, but it doesn’t matter, because earlier in the episode Dungeon Master had put a wreath of “Dragonsbane” around one of the character’s necks whilst in disguise. The dracocidal herb takes care of the monster, nullifying any value the kids’ actions may have had. Then there’s the episode where Dungeon Master is captured by the villain, which causes the players to go looking for him. When they find him, Dungeon Master frees himself, and defeats the villains handily, because the whole thing was just a ridiculous test. There is episode after episode after episode of this shit.

And then there’s the riddles, or whatever they are. As if Dungeon Master descending from on high to deliver every quest wasn’t bad enough, he always leaves the kids with some ridiculous nonsense phrase. The “riddles,” (if you can call them that) are supposed to help the kids figure out what to do when they inevitably end up in a tough situation. Because telling them what to do, and often doing it for them, just isn’t good enough for Dungeon Master. He needs to be able to take credit even for the problems the players overcome on their own. Half the time they don’t figure the riddle out until pure happenstance has already caused the riddle to resolve itself anyway, which isn’t surprising. The riddles are so abstract and convoluted that the only way the characters could possibly figure them out is by being characters who are written by the same writers who wrote the riddles in the first place. If I’m ever so unclear in my communication with my players, I hope they have the decency to punch me in the face.

The essential problem is that things happen *TO* the players, rather than *BECAUSE* of the players. This is the cardinal sin of neglecting player agency. Let there be no ambiguity on this point: Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and most tabletop RPGs are games, not mediums for storytelling. The game is what puts the ‘G’ in RPG–literally. The stories which are created can be amazing, yes, but they do not flow in a single direction from behind the GM screen. The game’s story is an incidental element, created by a group of people who have real control over their actions and their destinies. And it is because of that control which the players have that the stories created when we play tabletop RPGs are so compelling. They are not carefully constructed narratives. Unnecessary scenes or characters aren’t edited out because they fail to support a predetermined climax. And those things which might be considered useless in a constructed narrative often build to a compelling climax all their own.

There is one episode, titled “The Dragon’s Graveyard,” where we get to see a small glimpse of Player Agency. As the episode opens, the players are just about to go through a portal which will take them home, only to have the portal blocked for some reason by the villain, Venger. This is a pretty common scene, but normally it’s at the end of the episode. As the players are sulking about how they’ll never get home, they start to get riled up. They’re tired of constantly having the path home snatched out from under them. On cue, Dungeon Master shows up, offers them some half-assed sympathy, the immediately starts outlining what their next quest will be. Something about the Duke of Dread. Hank, the ranger and party leader, cuts him off. He tells Dungeon Master that they are tired of his bullshit, and they’re done letting him treat them like toy soldiers. They’re going to find the monster which can kill Venger, and they’re going to convince that monster to kill Venger, and then they’re going to go home, end of story. And how does Dungeon Master respond to his players finally taking control of their characters’ destinies? He starts acting like a little passive-aggressive asshole. An act he keeps up until the end of the episode when the players decide not to hurt Venger, and to leave the magical weapons they’ve found behind.

I honestly weep for the players of any game master who got involved in the hobby because of this show. Most eleven year old GMs are bad enough without having been inspired by the single worst example of a game master in the history of gaming. I have a hard time believing that Gary Gygax was actually involved in this project. More likely, he simply received a co-producer vanity credit because his name was so heavily associated with the Dungeons and Dragons brand at the time. I cannot imagine him actually endorsing the Player/Dungeon Master relationship shown in this cartoon. Even if you consider that the kids and Dungeon Master were not intended as literal representations of players and DMs, it’s simply a poor representation of the product.

When will we learn that Dungeons & Dragons will never translate favorably into a linear narrative? How many terrible shows and movies must fans suffer through before the madness ends!?

Handling Overpowered Player Characters

I spent most of today working on a project which will affect the future of Comma, Blank_. Once completed, I think it will be a huge improvement for this humble blog. Until that time, however, I’m afraid that working on it is consuming much of the time I would otherwise be using to play tabletop games, and write about them for your amusement. I’ve actually been working on it since early December, and only mention it now because I accidentally let it get far too late on a day which I’m supposed to post something. So my options are to stay up really late to finish today’s post, or cop-out. And with work in the morning, I’ve decided to cop-out. So I hope you liked Gary Gygax’s story of the Jeweled Man from last week, because it’s time for another post based on The All-Father’s column.

This time it’s a tale of self-destructing PCs from Dragon #314, first published in December of 2003. Gygax reminisces about an overconfident player with a high leveled character he didn’t earn, and gives advice on how to deal with such players. Advice I don’t entirely agree with, in matter of fact. But we’ll get to that later.

Once again, I will reprint Gygax’s original words here, but I do so without permission. I’m doing this because this is from a seven-year-old issue of a magazine which has been out of print for almost 5 years (by Vecna’s Eye, has it been that long? ;_;). To my knowledge, it’s not currently possible to read this column unless you somehow manage to physically acquire an original copy of the issue. And once again, I will happily remove it if contacted by anyone from Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast, or the Gygax Estate.

Self Destructing PCs

Unearned Levels are the PC’s worst enemy

Many DMs have asked me how I handle characters that are obviously over-powered, “jumped-up” PCs that never really earned their high abilities and survive by massive hit-point total, super magic, and unearned ease in attacking with sword or spell. To such inquiries, I respond that in recognizing this sort of character I simply play the encounters a bit differently, mainly in the presentation of information, not in “fudging” of the dice rolls for monsters. Inept players will destroy their characters without having to resort to such methods. Allow me to illustrate this with the following account:

While at a regional convention in upstate New York, I was asked to run adventures in my campaign’s Castle Greyhawk Dungeons. An assembly of players gathered for what was billed a moderate-level excursion. One aggressive young chap came to the table with a 13th-level ranger, supposedly his least powerful character. Although the others in the group had PCs of about half that level and were chary about including the lad with the ranger, I assured them all would work just fine, even with experience division given by shares according to level.

There followed some initial exploration and minor encounters as the team worked its way down into the dungeon maze. The first real test came when the party came into a large chamber with many pillars and several doors. As the main group discussed what strategy they would follow in this locale, a bold dwarf broke off and opened a nearby door. Rather than telling the player what he saw, I told the players this:

“The dwarf slams the door. He reels back and comes staggering towards the rest of you, stammering something that sounds like. ‘G-ga-get back! W-wuh… Horrible! A bunch of them!’ He is obviously fearful and thus incoherent.

The 13th-level ranger hesitated not a moment. Without consulting with his fellows, the character ran to the door that the dwarf had slammed closed and opened it without concern. The four wights that were preparing to exit their lair confronted him, won initiative, and two succeeded in hitting. In the ensuing melee, these undead monsters managed to strike the ranger twice more, so at the end of the battle, the ranger was of a level more commensurate with the others, 9th as it were.

Much disturbed by that turn of events, but clearly not chagrined by his rash behavior and the results, the ranger insisted on leading the way. Soon thereafter, they discovered a staircase down, and beside it lay an alcove wherein a great clay pot rested, radiating heat and billowing smoke. The other PCs advised leaving the strange vessel alone, but the ranger determined to attack it. As he did so, all the other characters fled the area. With a single blow the ranger shattered the pot, and thus a really angry fire elemental was freed. It didn’t take long for that monster to finish off the ranger, and thereafter it departed.

I took the character sheet from the fellow, suggesting that he should be more careful with such potent characters in the future, for surely he had spent a long time gaining 13th level with his now dead ranger PC. He left the table without comment, and the rest of the group went on to several exciting hours of dungeon delving.

This shows that unearned levels don’t translate to playing ability. To the contrary, the power gained often makes the player overconfident. Any able DM can craft adventures that weed out unwise and inept players who think to bulldoze their way through problems by use of undeserved power. That’s possible only in computer games where saved games and cheat codes serve to reward such play.

Clearly, the culture surrounding the game in those days was significantly different than it is today. I can’t imagine a GM taking a player’s character sheet like that. But, then, neither can I really imagine arguing with Gary Gygax if he was my Dungeon Master.

This column struck a cord with me because my own character, Zalekios Gromar, is bursting with unearned power. Not only is he a Gestalt character with levels in both Warlock and Rogue, but a few years back my GM facetiously gave him a Ring of 100 Wishes, which rocketed his undeserved power level into the stratosphere. Of course, Zalekios is a very special case. He has no party–no companions to excel in the areas where he is weak. He’s got to be able to handle everything by himself. That being said, though, he could still probably out-perform four characters of equivalent level. The character is overpowered. I won’t argue that.

The way my GM and I have always handled it is simply to raise the difficulty of the challenges Zalekios must face. And, when we get it right, it works very well. A few sessions ago, Zalekios was very nearly killed when he was attacked by a level 16 gestalt Paladin/Barbarian character. My GM overruled the fact that Paladins must be lawful, and Barbarians must be Chaotic, because he’s evil like that. The combination of rage and smite evil very nearly ended Zalekios career. If not for some clever tactics on my part, using Dimensional Door and Eldritch Blast to keep my foe at range, I would not have survived.

And if all the players are overpowered, that’s a fine solution. But most often, that’s not the case. Players being different levels than one another is not often a problem in modern games, but power disparity will always exist. Sometimes players pull min-maxed builds off of the Internet. Other times, you underestimate just how effective a certain magic item will be in the hands of your players. Or, occasionally, a player just gets really stupidly lucky with a Deck of Many Things. And in this, I think Gary’s advice is eternal.

Let player skill determine whether your player deserves what he or she has. Give them opportunities to be overconfident, and pay for it. A player who has easily cut through challenges which the other players would have struggled with is going to come to expect it. So throw them a curve-ball. Drop a high leveled monster on them, and watch as they refuse to run away from a fight. Don’t take their power from them, just put them into a position where foolish action will cause them to lose it.

Of course, this may not always work. If your player is just as skilled as they are powerful, then you may need to reassess. You don’t want them to ruin the game for the other PCs who are left to stroll in their companion’s wake. But neither do you want to punish the player if they’ve made no mistakes. At this point you might consider making a loss of their power part of an important quest. Perhaps the artifact they acquired is evil and needs to be destroyed, or perhaps it is the lost blade of a celestial general who needs it to continue the battle against evil. If the deck of many things granted the player millions of gold, let him learn that an equivalent amount of gold disappeared from the coffers of a small nation, which is now unable to feed its people during a famine. If all else fails, you can just buff up the rest of the party, and the encounter level along with it.

As a side note, is it just me, or does it seem really uncool to take control of a player’s character? I know role playing games were different in those days, and the particular instance here is pretty mundane, but I can’t imagine ever doing that. The control a player has over their character is sacrosanct in my mind. I would have at least allowed him a saving throw versus fear.

Gary Gygax, the Jeweled Man, and Letting Your Players Fail

I’ve always had a love for magazines. During my youth, one of the most exciting days of the month was when my issue of Star Wars Insider would arrive. Magazines are like proto-websites. Which perhaps explains why many magazines have made the successful transition out of print, and onto the web. Still, there’s something about holding the monthly publication in your hand which feels a great deal more substantial than bookmarking a website does. It makes me sad that magazines are slowly dying off. Which might explain why I’ve occasionally been called a Luddite.

Of course, if we didn’t have the Internet, then I’d be trying to get these blog posts into a magazine, and probably having most of them rejected. So you don’t hear me complaining.

Given my love of magazines, I doubt anybody will be surprised to learn that I’ve gathered a decent collection of Dragon magazines over the years. (Funny Story: most of them are from the personal collection of Jeff Grub). They’re all piled into a cardboard box underneath my sourcebook shelves. I haven’t had the time to read even a tenth of the issues I already have, which is kinda nice, because I can always just pull a random issue from the pile and flip through the pages to find something new.

One of my favorite features of many of the issues of Dragon is a regular article called “Up on a Soapbox, All I Need to Know I Learned from D&D.” These articles were written by the Gary Gygax himself, and were often retellings of his earliest campaigns. It’s always fun to read about what he was thinking, and what he experienced, which shaped Dungeons and Dragons in those early years.

Today I opened up Dragon issue 290, from December 2001. In it is a story by Gygax entitled “Lesson #4: The One That Got Away. It tells the story of a golden man, encrusted with jewels and gems, which his players encountered in Castle Greyhawk. Back in those days, experience points were primarily earned through the acquisition of treasure, so a man made of gold was quite a find. Unfortunately for Gygax’s players, the man always ran away, and they were never able to catch him, though many attempts were made over the years.

I have some things to say about this story, but first, I think it would be nice if people had an opportunity to actually read it. Unfortunately, I can’t find it replicated anywhere online. And, unfortunately, issues of defunct magazines from over a decade ago aren’t something most people can easily find. So, after some consideration, I’ve decided to type up the article and include it in this post. I will happily remove it on request from anyone at Hasbro, or Wizards of the Coast. Hell, if the Gygax estate wants me to take it down, I will.

The Jeweled Man

When reminiscing about the “old days,” players in the original Greyhawk campaign still bring up the Jeweled Man. Although there were victories aplenty for those who adventured through the ruins of Castle Greyhawk, those veterans are still trying to discover who and what this figure was. That’s because nary a PC managed to catch this incredible thing, the Jeweled Man. All such speculation is to no avail, of course. Until some player’s character manages to discover the truth about him, the mystery will never be revealed. That’s a secret, and mystery is part and parcel of a good campaign.

Once the teams of PCs delving into the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk had made their way down to a moderate depth, all were after greater treasures. That was the natural way of things; in the original D&D and AD&D games, experience point awards were primarily based on the value of a defeated monster’s treasure hoard, not on the power of the monster. Of course, XPs were given for slaying foul creatures, successful use of spells, and other heroic acts. Even the most rigorous use of sword and spell, however, was insufficient to gain the large amounts of experience points needed to gain a level. In short order, the players learned that copper was dross, silver meaningless, and even gold a middling reward at best. Platinum? A bare cut above gold. Gems, jewelry, and magic items, those were the goal of every party’s explorations, the wherewithal to become more than one’s class.

It was around the dungeon’s 8th level that the first bold adventurers came upon something they had theretofore only dreamed of. Tenser, Robilar, and Terik were delighted when, upon entering a large chamber, they saw a figure apparently made entirely of gold. This sight was all the more wondrous not because the man-like thing was animate, but rather because the glitteringt yellow metal of the figure’s body was encrusted with faceted gems of all sizes and shapes. Even from a distance, it was plain that thousands of carats of diamonds, emerals, sapphires, and rubies–the whole spectrum of precious stones–were embedded in the thing’s golden body. Surely, the strange golden automaton represented millions and millions of gold pieces worth of wealth–and enough experience points to advance a large, high-level party to the next level of power.

Even as a spell was cast to keep the Jeweled Man from acting, warriors were rushing to come to grips with this marvel. Alas for the adventurers, the spell had no effect, and before the eager fighters were near, the figure was off and away, running so quickly that even boots of speed could not keep pace. Down a passageway went the glittering form, the party in pursuit. In all too brief a time, however, the Jeweled Man was lost, vanished into the labyrinth of the surrounding passages. Swearing to return, the adventurers went away empty handed, settling eventually for far less precious items taken from likely more fearsome opponents.

The players of course, embarked on a series of expeditions comprised of both the original team and other characters–even lone PCs. Most of the groups managed to make their way to the location, and of those finding the great chamber, the majority encountered the Jeweled Man therein. Each successive encounter saw the would-be captors become more and more frustrated, more aggressive, and more mystified at their lack of success. Their reason for failing to capture the prize might well have been the close-lipped nature of the would-be plunderers.

Almost everyone knew that it seemed impossible to take the creature by surprise, but teams and individual characters kept their own counsel concerning the success of other actions. Clearly the incalculable worth of the treasure and the repute to be had from gaining it worked to diminish cooperation, the one thing that makes success in adventuring most likely.
This effect was not foreseen, but the actions of the players made it easily recognizable. To reflect the attitudes of the PCs, it was natural to use innuendo to suggest one or another character was planning to capture the Jeweled Man alone. Solo adventures among the most able players were rare thereafter, as their peers were loathe to allow one of their number a chance to catch the Jeweled man alone.

To this day the begemmed thing–and I use that term advisedly, as no one has discovered exactly what it is–haunts the great chamber in the mid-levels of the dungeons of Castle Greyhawk. it has been years since any determined effort to capture the creature has been made, but the veterans of the storied times when exploration and derring-do were meat and drink to a large company still speak of it. Suggestions that it was an illusion fall flat because several different groups launched failed attempts to prove it unreal. there are growls about “DM cheating” too, but these complaints are half-hearted. Simply put, the players concerned know deep down that they never made a truly concerted effort, and each suspects they just might one day succeed.

Perhaps they will, and then the tale of that triumph will be told and retold. As it is, however, only sad stories of the one that got away are related.

Of course, I now realize that this was a terrible idea. Juxtaposing Gary Gygax’s thoughts on role playing with my own is not likely to create a favorable comparison. But what’s done is done. I can only hope Wizards of the Coast demands I take the post down.

Among the number of lessons to be learned here, I think the most important and the most clear is that it’s important for players to be able to fail. Gary certainly thought so, because as best as I can determine, he took the secrets of The Jeweled Man to his grave. I managed to find a forum post, apparently written by Gygax, which was written just about two years before his untimely death. In the post, he says he’ll discuss the concept in general terms in some then-upcoming modules, but that he does not intend to reveal how the encounter operated in his original campaign.

That’s dedication to the craft.

Personally, I don’t know how he did it. When I GM, and I make something cool, I want to tell people about it. Of course I want my players to figure it out on their own, so I don’t drop any undue hints. And if they fail to solve a mystery I’ve crafted, I have to bite my tongue to stop myself from giving it away to them right then and there. Then I have to bite my tongue again at the end of the adventure to avoid letting it slip during the post-adventure chatting. It’s difficult. I think I’m missing a few pieces of tongue at this point.

The best solution I’ve come up with is to tell people not involved in the game in question all about my brilliant game mastering. That’s not always advisable, though, because sometimes those people later want to join the games I’ve told them the secrets for. That has happened to me, and it’s a pain in the ass. But I’ve meandered off topic.

I feel that the importance of player failure is undersold by most of the modern sourcebooks I’ve read. Many people will agree that one of the best parts of role playing games are the stories you get to tell about your adventures. And the best stories always contain an element of failure or sacrifice. Like the time you were ambushed on the way to the dungeon, and killed in a single blow. Or the time your paladin died to foil the villain. Or, in this case, the way the Jeweled Man always managed to get away.

Players can always roll new characters. And if you let your players fail, then they’ll know that their successes are their own. Not just fudged dice.

Obfuscation Through Volume

GM: After falling through the floor above, you land about 10 feet below. As the dust settles, you see that you’re in a simple stone room which appears to have been used in the recent past as a large creature’s den. There are bones scattered about, and a nest of some kind in the corner. The walls in the South East corner have been knocked away, and a ten foot wide tunnel extends beyond them. To the north is a simple iron door.
Lirnef: If we just fell into the nest of the Forest Serpent, then we need to get out of here. We barely escaped that last encounter. Lets head out the door.
GM: Does the party agree to exit through the door?
*Party nods*
GM: What’s your marching order?
*Party looks amongst themselves*
Merrag: Sedger, you have the most HP. I think I have spell to boost your saving throw prepared, let me cast that.
Sedger: Alright, I think I’m ready. I open the door.
GM: When you place your hand on the door’s handle-
Sedger: Woah, woah! I didn’t say I put my hand on the handle.
GM: Then how did you plan to open it?
Sedger: I kicked it open.
*GM facepalms*
GM: You…kick it open?
Sedger: Yup.
GM: Well since you didn’t turn the latch, you’ll need to roll a strength check.
*dice clatter*
Sedger: 28!
GM: The door falls inwards. The poison dart trap in the handle fires impotently into the stone wall.

Every GM is familiar with the scenario above. It is our bane, but sometimes we must ask questions which allows the players to easily infer some knowledge which they shouldn’t know. As GMs grow more experienced, they learn ways to counteract the most common of these questions. Marching orders can be established at the start of the dungeon, requiring players to speak up beforehand if they think they’d like to change it. And common actions, like opening doors, are performed using common methods unless the players specify otherwise in advance. Yet the problem remains. Even players who try to avoid metagaming don’t want their characters to get hurt, and if the GM tips his or her hand with a poorly timed question, who can blame a player for taking advantage of that?

A few years ago, I scrolled down below the Goblins comic to read Thunt’s blog. Normally his blog is just comic news, convention news, life news, things like that. But on this particular day, it was a collection of dungeon mastering tricks which had worked for him in the past. Unfortunately, there’s not really a good navigation for the blog part of the site, and google isn’t turning up the specific entry I remember, so I can’t link to the original. In the post he mentioned an idea which has stuck with me: the problem of a GM’s questions providing players with unintended information can be solved by asking ‘useless’ questions.

As an example, lets imagine that a player who wields a sword and shield is leading the group through a door. After failing a stealth check earlier, the orcs on the other side of that door, which the players don’t know about, have been alerted to their presence. As soon as the door opens, a half dozen orcish bows will fire arrows at whoever is standing in front. Since the lead player’s shield will have a strong impact on how many of those arrows hit him, the GM might ask “What do you do with your sword and shield when you open the door? You’ll need at least one free hand to grasp the latch.” This is the kind of question which any competent player will recognize as indicative of something unusual going on. That doesn’t mean the players will always make the right choice. The lead player may decide that their sword will be important as soon as he or she opens the door, and will tell the GM that they set down their shield. Or they might also choose to stand to the side of the door, and open it from a covered position. The problem isn’t the choice they make, but rather, the fact that those choices are informed by information they shouldn’t have.

Now consider the same scenario. Sword & Board leader, door, orcs with arrows, and the question. But this time, imagine that the GM had been asking simple questions at many of the previous doors as well. Not all of them, and not always the same question either. Three doors ago the GM had asked which hand was used to open the door. Two doors before that, the GM said the the door was just slightly stuck, and asked how the player wanted to apply additional force to get it open. There had also been that wooden door, when the GM wanted to know whether the players opened it inward, or outward. None of those doors had anything special behind them, and at this point the players don’t expect there to be. So this time, the player won’t set down their shield because they think they’ll need their sword more, nor do they stand to the side of the door and open it from cover because they’re worried about traps. The player does whatever seems the most reasonable, which is precisely what you want them to do. Not because you want them to fail or to succeed, but because you want your players to experience the game without outside influences.

Asking questions like this has an added benefit as well. In addition to obscuring a GM’s important questions, asking players to describe how their character perform simple actions gets the players thinking the way their character would. I can imagine that after a few sessions, players might even start offering some information without being asked, if they feel they may be in danger. So even the ‘useless’ questions aren’t entirely without value.

I’ve put together some examples of situations where the GM might ask questions, along with a selection of different questions to ask so you don’t start to sound like a broken record. Bear in mind that most of the time, only one of these questions should be asked at a time, and not every time the action is performed. The goal is to ask often enough that your players don’t read into your questions, but not so often that you slow down the game.

Opening a door or chest

  • What do you do with the items in your hand while you open it?
  • Do you open it particularly quickly or slowly?
  • It is somewhat stuck and does not open immediately. [Then, if the player decides to apply more force] How do you go about forcing the door open?
  • Which hand do you use to open it?
  • It opens both inwards and outwards. Which way do you open it?
  • Do you step through/reach in as soon as it is open?
  • It is particularly heavy and requires more strength than one hand. How do you apply greater strength?

Moving into or through a new area

  • Do you look back to see if there’s anything on the walls you just passed?
  • Do you walk through the light entering in through the cracks high on the wall?
  • How close to the statue do you walk?
  • [If the players indicate a door they would like to exit through, or object they would like to inspect] What is your path through the room?

An inventory item is used

  • [If the item is small] Where do you keep this item on your person?
  • [If the item is large, or if the previous question was answered “it’s in my pack.”] How do you remove it from your bag?
  • Do you need to take other items out of your pack to get to it?
  • How many of those do you have left?
  • [For potions] What do you do with the container once you’ve used the potion?

An object is touched or picked up

  • Which hand do you use to touch it with?
  • Are you wearing gloves?
  • Are you touching/grabbing it more gently, or more forcefully?
  • Do you look at it first, or do you place it immediately into storage on your person/in your pack.
  • Do you let the other party members see it?

Crossing a bridge

  • How far apart do you walk from one another?
  • How quickly do you cross the bridge?
  • [For a rope bridge] When the bridge sways, do you stop and hold on, or continue walking?
  • Where do you direct your eyes? At the other side,or at your feet?

Walking down a corridor

  • [If the corridor is wider than 5ft] This corridor is wide enough for you to walk two abreast. Do you, or do you walk single file?
  • Are you making an effort to move particularly cautiously or quietly? If so, what precautions are you taking?
  • Are you testing for traps with your 10ft pole?
  • Do you attempt to break up cobwebs before walking through them, or do you just ignore them?
  • Do you try to shield yourself from the water dripping from the ceiling?
  • Is the bard humming?
  • Are you paying any particular attention to the architecture?

Setting up camp for the night

  • Do you make a fire?
  • Do you cook any food, or just eat trail rations?
  • Do you leave the campfire burning while you sleep, or not?
  • Are you keeping watch? If so, what is the watch order?
  • Is anyone with abilities requiring 8 hours rest (Wizard, Cleric, etc) part of the watch rotation?
  • Do you leave your food out, or do you pack it away before you go to sleep?
  • Are you sleeping around the fire, or within a tent?
  • What direction does the tent face?
  • What are the sleeping arrangements?
  • Are you sleeping with your armor off, or will you take the exhaustion penalties tomorrow?
  • About what time do you decide to go to sleep?
  • Do you explore the area around the campsite at all before settling down?

Breaking down camp in the morning

  • Does the Wizard / Cleric wake up earlier than everyone else to prepare their spells, or do they wake up with the others and make them wait?
  • What time do you wake up?
  • Do you put out the fire before you leave?
  • Do you attempt to conceal your campsite at all?
  • Do you have breakfast before you leave?
  • What time do you wake up, and how long before you set out?

Looking for something in a city, or “asking around”

  • What types of places do you go to ask about/find what you’re looking for?
  • Do you attempt to bribe anyone?
  • How open are you in your questioning?
  • How do you phrase your questions?
  • To you tell people your name?
  • Do you tell anyone that what you’re seeking is urgent, or of great importance?
  • Do you lie to people to get answers if necessary?
  • Do you speak to anyone in a guard’s uniform?

And one final note. The paradigm example of this problem is the perception check. The GM asks players for a perception check to see if they notice something, and the players roll low. But since players aren’t dumb, they know that the GM’s announcement that they didn’t notice anything only means that whatever is out there is too stealthy for them. This problem is easily solved by making note of each character’s perception skill, and rolling in secret behind the GM screen, without any announcements in the first place. I sometimes roll meaningless rolls and glance at the result just so my players won’t come to associate unannounced die rolls with missed checks.

My GMing Methodology for ToKiMo

Me: “Shortly after mid day, you hear some noise coming from behind a nearby shrub covered ridge.
Gibbous: “Doubtless more of those cowardly Kobolds we faced earlier!”
Rosco: “Probably. We should take a loo-“
Gibbous:“Ho there you cowardly lizards! Show yourselves, and let the might of St. Cuthbert judge thee!”
Me: *blink*
Me: “Um…the tribe of Kobolds is now alerted to your presence…
Gibbious: “Wait…what?”
Phoenix Dark: “I knew we shouldn’t have brought the cleric.”
Gibbous: “Nothing we can do about it now. Charge!”
*Gibbous charges over the ridge into the Kobold camp.*
*Roscoe and Phoenix look at one another.*
Me: “Don’t worry. You two both have abilities which work from range.
Phoenix: “Phew!”

A little less than a month ago, I wrote about my GMing methodology for The Ascendant Crusade. In that post I mentioned that I run a few other games as well, including one other major campaign which I’ve dubbed ToKiMo for my notes. The title is a portmanteau of the players names: Todd, Kiersty, & Morrie. ToKiMo has developed very differently than The Ascendant Crusade did. When I started TAC, I had a great deal more time to devote to gaming than I do now, and in fact I still rely on many of the notes I made back in 2009. ToKiMo, by contrast, started during a very busy time in my life, with a very different group of players than TAC has.

In this post, I’d like to detail. the process I undergo in preparation of a ToKiMo game. Bear in mind that ToKiMo has only had a handful of sessions to grow and develop, so in many ways I’m still experimenting with each game. Bear also in mind that I got Batman: Arkham City yesterday, and I’m god damned shocked that I’m writing this post rather than playing it right now.

With the first session of ToKiMo, I pulled one of my favorite tricks to pull on new players. I call it the “Generic Fake Out.” When I’ve got a group of mostly new players, I often present them with a task which is completely formulaic. The kind of task they’re expecting to see: attack the goblin tribe, attack the kobold tribe, attack the orc tribe…essentially they attack a tribe of something, normally on behalf of a village which is too weak to defend itself from that tribe of something. For ToKiMo it was Kobolds, and the village was weak because an ancient red dragon had bathed it in flame on a lark.

The players were then able to buy equipment, explore the world around them, and eventually decided to hunt down the Kobold village. And, just like every other group before them, once they found said village, they charged it with swords out, arrows notched, and spells on lips. Here’s the fake-out part: whatever kind of creature I pit my new players against in the Generic Fake Out, diplomacy is always an explicitly stated option. The quest giver always mentions that they’d accept a peaceful resolution, but players never go that rout. New players always have a predetermined notion of what adventure gaming is, and they stick to their script.

Once the deed is done, and the players are covered in the blood and gore of the fallen monsters, I step out of character for a moment to point out to them that diplomacy would have been an option. And that while attack the village was not necessarily wrong, it was a more “neutral” act than it was a “good” one. Most often the players are surprised, having ignored the hints about diplomacy because they assumed it was just flavor text. In the future they approach the game with more attention to detail, and a realization that they have more options than the first one which pops into their heads.

I employ the generic fake out tactic for three reasons. The first reason is to give players a taste of what they expect from adventure gaming. As a GM, it’s important that I’m running games for my players which they will enjoy, but when someone has never played before, I have no idea what they’ll like and what they won’t. Giving them an adventure which (likely) fits their preconceived notions of what D&D / Pathfinder will be like is a good starting point for me to judge what works for the group, and what doesn’t. The second, and primary reason for the generic fake out, is to help new players break bad habits before they start. Tactical Infinity–the ability to attempt anything you can conceive of–is the greatest part of RPGs, but many new players don’t even realize it exists because they’re applying the same logic to tabletop games that they apply to video games. And video games always have a very small, very specific set of tactical options for any given situation. By letting them go down the beaten path, then showing them that there was an easier & better option available to them, I help open their minds to the innumerable possibilities that await them. The third and final reason is that nobody expects the handful of Kobolds who escaped to show up in a later session. And they certainly wouldn’t return with class levels, hungry for vengeance. (Spoiler: that’s exactly what happens).

Since the first ToKiMo session, I’ve tried to give the players a completely different experience every time we gather around the table. With the second game, I wanted to give Roscoe, the party’s hunter, some time in the limelight. I also wanted to introduce the party to the concepts of puzzles and traps, as well as give them another opportunity to creatively handle a village of hostile foes. So the mayor of the town they’d rescued in the first adventure came up with another task for them: seek out the wizard Mahudar Kosepske, and beg him for aid on the villages behalf.

The mayor was not certain of the wizard’s precise location, but knew that a certain herd of wild horses would run non-stop to the wizard’s location if they heard his name. This gave Roscoe an opportunity to make use of his tracking ability, first to find the herd, and then to follow it when it outpaced the party. Once arriving at the tower, Mahudar insisted on testing them before granting them an audience. The players were forced to make it through five puzzle rooms before they were able to proceed to the wizard’s chambers. I must admit, I’m always worried when I make puzzles a requirement for forward motion. If the players get stuck, the GM is forced into the position of either giving them the answer (stealing their player agency, and their sense of accomplishment), or allowing them to beat their heads against the wall until they don’t want to play anymore. Still, I decided to risk it, and the players easily made it through all 5 puzzles by coming up with some very satisfying solutions. Everyone seemed to enjoy the change of pace, so I’ll probably be including more puzzles in the future.

Finally, once Mahudar was reached, he revealed that the spell the players needed would require a specific reagent. One which would be difficult to obtain: the branch of a tree which was struck by lightning, but did not burn. He directed the towards one, and even teleported them near its location, but warned them that the goblin tribe which surrounded it viewed it and it’s fire-immune wood as a gift from their god. And also that said goblin tribe had been at war with a neighboring human settlement for generations. To their credit, my players did attempt diplomacy. They just didn’t do a good enough job of it to convince the extremely prejudiced goblins to help them. And with stealth being out the window, the players opted to simply run into the village, grab a branch of the tree, and flee like the dickens.

Shockingly, through some of the most hilarious antics I’ve ever seen at the game table, the players managed to survive.

In our upcoming game, I’m continuing the trend of giving the players different experiences with each session. While I’ll not go into specifics, the upcoming adventure includes some hex crawling, small scale combat, a mystery, a few role playing encounters, and the largest dungeon I’ve ever made for level 2 characters.

Should be good times!

Sitting Behind the GM Screen

I’ve helped a lot of new players take their first shaky steps into role playing. In fact, nearly every group I’ve GM’d has been composed entirely (or nearly so) of new players. As sessions pass, it’s always exciting to see how those new players develop. Last weekend, during his third game, one of my players absolutely delighted me by fully jumping into the role of the goblin Poog. Other players in that group aren’t quite there yet, but I saw them all become a little more comfortable with experimenting once there was somebody besides me doing voices. I’ve seen similar things occur with most groups. Some surprise me with their ingenuity, coming up with quirky uses for their spells; others develop a go-to tactic, like performing a bluff check, which they build their character’s personality around; and still others start asking me questions about what they’d need to know to be a GM.

Nearly every group of new players produces a future GM. Most of them start out with some truly terrible ideas. Their brains are caught up in the planning of things: the heroes, the villains, how events will play out, and how good will eventually conquer evil. That’s completely fine, but if you prefer the planning part of things, then write a story. I love stories! I read them, I write them, but I don’t run them as games. Games give the players choices, and when the player has real choices (or “Player Agency,”) no plan will ever remain on track for long. Being a game master is 30% planning, 70% execution.

Below I’ve detailed several important elements which help me in the execution phase of running a game. They are divided into three groups: Note Design, Table Setup, and Adjudicating the Game. I would like to stress that there are many schools of thought, and different methods work for different groups. This is just how I do things. It’s my hope that this can serve as a resource for new GMs who are still trying to find what works for them. But I would certainly welcome any comments from veteran GMs who have suggestions for me, or who would simply like to compare styles.

Note Design may sound like the planning part of the game, and it is. Having some manner of plan beforehand is helpful for most GMs. The important thing is that the plan be fluid and easy to adjust on-the-spot when the players do something unexpected. But that’s not what I want to discuss here.

What I mean by note design is the way your notes are arranged before you. Whether you keep your notes in some kind of special software, or in a word document, or in a ratty old binder like I do, it’s important that those notes can be referenced as quickly as possible. Many GMs, including myself if I’m feeling absent minded, write notes as a sort of stream-of-consciousness exercise. When your notes consist of a series of paragraphs which mix player information, GM information, and game mechanics information, things are going to go poorly. If you don’t accidentally tell your players about the secret door they haven’t found yet, then it’s probably because you’re holding the game up with your incessant note reading.

Organizational tools are your friends. If you have any adventure modules around, take note of how they arrange their information. There are clearly marked sections for things which should be read aloud to the players, all the NPC stat blocks are normally in the back of the book, and miscellaneous information is kept in sidebars. With a glance, a prepared GM can filter out what is needed and what isn’t without stopping to read. Even if you’ve never seen an adventure module, it’s not too hard to use color, font size, boxes, and bold/italic text to separate information into types. As an example, you can always put monster stats in boxes, room descriptions in red, potential NPC dialogue in blue, and dice checks in bold.

Page number references are also important. Nothing slows a game down more than flipping through a rule book. If you need to use a mechanic or spell which you’re not intimately familiar with, put a page number in the notes. That way, if you have an ogre who likes to throw people into a nearby spike pit, you have a quick note reminding you what page number the grapple rules are on. I’ve even got a rule at my table that if a player can’t give me the page number for their spell, then the spell fails.

As a final note, if you’re making a map for your game, use nonspecific notations for it, or create a duplicate with nonspecific notation. Players may want to see the map, and you may want to show it to them. Only too late will you realize that there’s a big X marked “Villains hideout” which all the players have now seen.

Table Setup is how you set the table. Just like when you were a kid, except instead of plates and forks, it’s pencils and dice.

This is my gaming table right now. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’s functional. I’d like to make note of a number of things.

  • The central part of the table, where the battle mat is, is clear. Things may be placed on it during gameplay, but it’s important to try and keep this area free of clutter. Otherwise transitioning into a battle will require you to clean off the mat first, which will kill some excitement.
  • I use a mark-able battlemat which I got for less than $20. It has paid for itself a dozen times over already. It’s a great way to create environment detail quickly for the players.
  • Everybody has space. I’ve got these nice little folding tables which I constantly find uses for. Here, each player has their own personal table for papers, snacks, drinks, books, or anything else they’ll want close at hand.
  • Comfortable upright chairs. The idea is to keep everyone comfortable enough that they don’t feel compelled to leave, but not to allow them to get so comfortable that they don’t pay attention to the game.
  • Everybody has paper and pencils. These are not just helpful, they are essential tools which are too often neglected. Players will need them to keep track of their HP, make note of temporary inventory items, or help them remember what the tavern keeper’s clue was. I always make sure to keep a couple extra pencils behind the GM screen to avoid anybody needing to take time to sharpen the pencils.
  • Notes on the PCs for the GM’s use. Aside from all the normal things a GM needs (game notes, dice, monster manual) it’s good to have a few basic notes on what the character’s abilities are, to facilitate secret rolls and speed the game along. For example, I take note of my player’s AC. That way I don’t have to ask the player if they were hit, I can simply tell them that they have been hit, thereby keeping things moving at a faster pace. It’s particularly useful to know what your player’s perception skills are. Otherwise you need to ask for a perception check from your players, and even if they fail, they now know something is up.
  • A GM screen to keep my notes and rolls private. The GM needs to handle a lot of material which would spoil the game if players knew about it, so the screen helps with that. It also, handily, contains a bunch of quick reference charts for rules.
  • Monster markers. I keep these in the little wooden box which I got them in. I actually picked these up at a garage sale a few months back, and they’ve become an indispensable part of my games. Nothing beats the look on my player’s faces as they enter the goblin village and watch me put token after token onto the battlefield.

Adjudicating the Game is the main event. You’re sitting behind the screen, the players are in front of you. To be honest, I’m always speechless for a moment when this happens. I shuffle my notes and wonder how in the world I’m going to keep these people entertained for the next few hours. You would think I’d be used to it by now, but for some reason I lose all my confidence every time I stand on the cusp of starting a new game. I tentatively read the opening lines of the adventure, often something as simple as “You were at location X performing task Y, then event Z happened and now you’re in situation S.” Then there’s a brief pause as the players wait to see if I’ll continue, and in that second I’m positive that I’ve failed. Then somebody speaks, and I respond, and I suddenly remember: I’m good at this.

There’s no trick that makes you a good game master. There are lots of tricks which help to make you a great game master, but being a good game master is more a matter of philosophy than it is of method. A good game master recognizes that he or she is there to facilitate a fun game for the players. Such a GM realizes that their own fun is contingent on whether or not the players are enjoying themselves; and that the player’s fun is likewise contingent on the GM putting the player’s enjoyment before his or her own. This means letting the players drive the game with their actions. The GM should never have an ‘agenda,’ should never want a certain event to happen so badly that they manipulate the game towards that end.

Improvisational skills are extremely important in this regard. It is a universal law that players are unpredictable. The only way to combat their unconventional thinking is to think just as unconventionally as they do. And since you’re the GM, you’ve got to do it a great deal faster than they do. If they miss your clue about the evil cult hiding in The Gilded Goblet, and instead head to the local brothel to look for clues there, then by the time they arrive you should already know which of the women within is secretly a succubus who kidnaps her clients to serve as sacrifices for the cult.

I could go on for pages about other skills which have improved my GMing at the table, but most of those skills deserve their own post, and will get it someday. For now, I’ll end with the three cardinal rules of being a good GM which I’ve learned.

  1. Frequently look around the table to make sure everyone is having fun. If a few people aren’t, try to engage them in the game. If nobody is, change your approach completely.
  2. If something is holding your game back, identify it, and figure out how to overcome it. Always be critical of yourself in a positive way.
  3. Never, ever, stop looking for ways to improve the way you manage your gaming table. Blogs (such as this one) are a great resource in that quest.

Why Hex Maps Need to Come Back

Above is a selection from the wilderness map created for “The Endless Stair,” a TSR module for 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons originally published in 1987. Prior to the release of third edition D&D by Wizards of the Coast, maps such as this were commonplace. With that release, for reasons unknown to me, Wizards of the Coast apparently thought it was best to completely sever the connection between D&D and the noble hexagon. As a tabletop role player who started with D&D 3.x, I spent a number of years vaguely aware that some people liked hexes, but had to context as to how they could be beneficial.

It was Trollsmyth’s superb series of hex mapping posts which finally drove home for me the importance of hex maps. They are not intended as a replacement for maps constructed using squares, but rather, are intended to supplement those maps in situations where squares are less appropriate. Squares work best for dungeons and other structures, where walls and rooms and corridors often snap neatly into a square grid anyway. In fact, the module I mentioned above, The Endless Stair, contains a number of dungeon maps printed on a square grid.

What hex maps are intended for is the outdoors. Squares have no place measuring nature. If any of my readers are old enough to have played the original Dragon Warrior game for the NES, they know what I mean. The game was great fun, but the squared-off overworld map looked silly even in those days of primitive technology. And while the righteous hexagon may not necessarily be a more ‘natural’ shape, it certainly approximates a natural shape more efficiently than its brutish cousin the square. Through the use of its two additional sides, the hexagon is more uniform in size than the square. The the distance between the center of a hex, and the center of any adjacent hex, is equal for all six sides. Whereas the square, with its 8 adjacent spaces, allows characters to travel much greater distances when moving diagonally than when moving up, down, left, or right. The only way to compensate for this extra distance is to penalize a character somehow for moving diagonally. And while this may be a simple matter on a small scale map (each space moved diagonally is counted as 1.5 spaces.), it becomes more difficult on a larger scale.

Which brings us to the next point regarding hexes: scale. Maps of dungeons or other areas which utilize squares are generally done on a small scale. The most common measurement is that 1 square is equal to 5 square feet. It’s simple, and when a room is only thirty feet square, it’s effective. However, wilderness travel require a larger scale by definition. No one in their right mind would try to map a forest, a mountain range, or a continent, in five-by-five foot increments. To even attempt it would be ludicrous. The standard size for a single hex on a wilderness map is six miles across from flat side to flat side. While a GM can use any scale he or she pleases, the six mile scale has a good balance. It’s small enough that overland travel can be measured in a meaningful way (with most characters being able to travel between 12 and 18 miles in a day), but large enough to allow a good sized continent to fit on a piece of 8 1/2 by 11 graph paper.

The largeness of a six mile hex comes with other benefits as well. At over 30 square miles*, it’s impossible for a party to fully explore every hex. They can mark down the primary terrain, and any items which they come across, but there will always be more. This means that even a hex which has already been explored can offer new challenges for players. From wandering monsters which they didn’t encounter the last time, to dungeon entrances, or perhaps an entire community or fortress which was 2 or 3 miles away from the route the party took last time they passed through. The blog “I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow” has a great post which gives you an idea of just how large this scale is.

For all the arguments I can make demonstrating the benefits of hex maps, there’s one which I keep returning to time and again. An argument which, in my mind, is irrefutable proof that the D&D community needs to re-embrace hex mapping:

We don’t have anything better yet!

It baffles me why Wizards of the Coast would abandon a perfectly good system without at least attempting to provide a replacement for it. But they did nothing of the sort! Wilderness travel was downplayed significantly in 3.x, and that hasn’t been remedied in Pathfinder. On the rare occasion that wilderness maps are included in adventure modules, the best they can do is indicate scale with a measuring stick. Take a look at this map from one of my favorite D&D 3.5 modules, “The Standing Stone:”

What about this map is improved by the lack of a hex overlay? Nothing! Refusing to include an overlay of mighty hexagons forces the GM to add measuring tape to the already cluttered area behind the GM screen. And while it may be argued that the map is too small in scale for six-mile hexagons to be of use, I would reply that the map is perfectly scaled for three-mile hexagons. Wizards of the Coast had better options. Options which they chose to ignore for reasons I cannot even begin to guess at.

Hex maps provide us with the metric which makes world exploration possible. Without it, completely open-ended, sandbox exploration can seem like a daunting task to players and GMs alike. I know I certainly never had the guts to provide a world exploration game to my players before I learned about Hex mapping–despite being very proud of the maps I’d created! Nor have I ever been given much choice as a traveling player. Travel is always handled by indicating where I’m going, and then fading to black as I travel there. And you know what? That’s sad.

As the old saying goes: “The journey is more important than the destination.” Isn’t that the essence of an adventure?

*Yes, I am aware of the irony of using square miles as a measurement in a post decrying the use of squares as a unit of measure. Stop mocking me!

GMing For The Holidays

Just a few hours ago, my old friend and I got together for a Zalekios game. For those who didn’t read my post on evil in games, Zalekios is my character in the only game I’m currently in which I don’t GM. He’s a chaotic evil psychopath with a penchant gratuitous violence. The game is just me and the GM, though other players have cycled in and out during the six years this campaign has gone on.

As of late, Zalekios has been seeking a kingdom to rule. Nothing too grandiose. The plan was to subdue a tribe of goblins beneath my level 12 gestalt heel, then march those goblins on an unsuspecting settlement which I could reshape in my own image. To his credit, my GM has made me work for every inch of this goal. I had the good luck to happen upon some fire breathing goblins, only to learn they would freeze to death in temperatures below 100°F (38°C). And when I found a wizard who could fix it, he needed me to get the blood of an adult white dragon before he could cast the spell. It’s been nothing but work, work, work, and I don’t even have a village yet!

Anyway, one of the first events in this session was the report from one of my goblin scouts that a village had been found. It met all of the qualifications I had insisted upon: it was on the outskirts of civilization, with a population of about 100 people. Small enough to rule, small enough not to be noticed, but large enough to satiate Zalekios’ desire for power over others. At least for now.

I rode south for a day until I came upon the small village. My initial scouting revealed that the village was ripe for the picking. I wasn’t able to spot any exploitable land formations which would provide me an advantage in my attack, but that’s just as well. I wouldn’t want anyone to use it against me once I’m in control of the thorp. With my scouting complete, I took a room at the inn for the evening. Zalekios was enjoying his sleep, when he was awakened by a knock at the door. Angered, and ready to stab whoever was standing there, he flung the door open. And before he could say anything, a chorus of little voices shouted;

“Trick or treat!”

Yes, my GM had thrown me in the middle of Halloween within his game world. It’s not the first time he’s done this, either. A few years ago, I hunted down and killed Santa Claus right around Christmas time. I don’t actually recall why I did that, though I think it was one of the few times Zalekios actually did something which benefited people. The game world Santa Claus was an asshole for some reason.

Some might find this overly goofy, or even be angry at the break in the ‘fourth wall.’ People can take their gaming pretty seriously, and even those who don’t often prefer things don’t go completely off rails. But I, for one, have always enjoyed the sessions where a GM steps back and lets things be goofy for an adventure.

So what did Zalekios do? First, he scared the children off by exposing his mutilated features, and his fleshless skeleton hands. And for the rest of the evening he played along with the goofiness. Thanks to some magic items and a few Wish spells, he’s a ghost when it comes to moving silently and hiding. Houses had their candy stolen while the family’s backs were turned, children had bags snatched right out of their hands without noticing, and Zalekios ATE ALL THE CANDY!

Sure it was out of character. On a normal day, Zalekios would have been more likely to eat the children than to eat their candy. Seriously, he’s done that before. But the game was a fun departure, with the operative word being fun. A GM should never be scared to completely break with convention and be silly once in a while. It pays off. One of Zalekios’ most memorable fights was when he was chased by a dragon which had a breath weapon of bubbles. And despite being mostly a silly, out-of-character session, the evil (read: good) twin of Zalekios I fought today actually got me down to 9 hit points before I killed him.

I’ve never done it myself, but I think my friends can expect a Thanksgiving, or perhaps Christmas themed adventure in the near future.