Tag: Personal Stories

Tavern Tales 3 & Deadly Dungeons 15: The Funny Tea Room

The room is simple, largely conforming to the architectural style and level of dilapidation of the surrounding rooms. It is good if this room can be placed adjacent to a dining hall or kitchen, as when the dungeon was active, this room produced a drink which (for some reason) was favored by the lord or lady of the place.

It is dominated by a large pit in the floor, 5ft deep, filled with a swirling, bubbling, steaming liquid of a faintly brown color. On the wall of the room is a large rack covered in pegs, and from many of the pegs hang wooden mugs with a copper inlay. The mugs themselves are essentially worthless, being worth ~3cp each, for a total of 20-60 cups in all. The liquid in the floor both smells, and tastes, like a mild tea. If any one drinks it, they are affected by one of the following, determined by rolling 1d12. All effects are permanent, unless noted otherwise.

  1. The liquid is poisonous to your body. Roll a save v. poison, or a fortitude save DC 15. Failure causes death.
  2. A -1 to a random ability score. Use 1d6 to determine.
  3. Spend 10 minutes vomiting and shaking violently.
  4. Burn the roof of your mouth really, really badly.
  5. Antlers sprout from your head.
  6. Tiny, inefficient wings sprout from your back. They might be of *some* use keeping cool or jumping an extra 3-4 inches, but that’s about it.
  7. Skin turns orange.
  8. Feel pretty good about yourself for the rest of the day.
  9. A scorpion stinger grows in your mouth. It is not harmful to you, nor does it interfere with normal tasks. It can be used to sting anything you put your mouth on, delivering a poison which deals 1d6 CON damage per turn, for 3 turns.
  10. +20 to your strength for 1 hour.
  11. A +1 to a random ability score. Use 1d6 to determine.
  12. +1 level.

Players may continue to drink from the pit as many times as they like. Effects will stack with each other, and any effect rolled twice for the same character should be properly “enhanced” according to GM discretion.  However, once a character has rolled a 9 or higher, their body will have adapted to the effects of the brew. From then on, regardless of the mixture they create (see below), or what they roll, no magical effect will occur. The drink is still quite tasty, though. They’ll find they enjoy it even more than before.

Adjacent to this room is a room filled with barrels. These barrels each contain a mixture which, when combined with the tea-water in the previous room, will slightly alter the random roll. If a barrel is completely dumped into the tea-water pit, then the additive will become inert after 10 minutes. If any two of these are mixed together, then their numerical bonuses or penalties will average. Orange spiral overrides anything it is mixed with. If any of these are consumed without being combined with the tea water, it tastes so awful the players will reflexively spit it out. Forced consumption causes death.

The symbols on the barrels, and their effects, are:

  • Blue Square. Smells like meat-juice. -4 to the random roll.
  • Purple Triangle. Smells like a bowl of raw egg. -2 to the random roll.
  • Red circle. Smells like beets. +2 to the random roll.
  • Black “X.” Smells like coffee. +4 to the random roll.
  • Orange Spiral. Smells almost sickeningly sweet. The random roll is replaced by a 1d6 roll to determine the player’s skin color: 1. Bright Red, 2. Blue, 3. Green, 4. Purple, 5. Orange, 6. Transparent. This effect functions even after the player has become immune to the tea-water’s other effects.

The above room appears in the megadungeon my players are currently exploring, Castle Nalew. They discovered it yesterday, and I think we probably spent an hour or more there. They tried every concoction they could think of, and much of the above information is stuff I had to improvise when they asked questions I wasn’t prepared for. Other information I had to improvise was: what happens when you become transparent twice, and what happens when you feed the liquid to a green ooze?

I could write a rather lengthy post about how much fun we had with this, but much of it would probably come across as “you had to be there” humor. However there is one story which is so impossibly perfect, I could not resist sharing it.

The very first character to dare drinking from the tea was the party’s monk. He rolled a seven, meaning his skin turned orange. Later, when they discovered the barrels in the next room, the monk was the first to try the orange spiral concoction, rolled a 5, making him orange a second time. I said that while he had been “Trump Orange,” he was now a wholly inhuman neon orange. After popping around to a few different colors, he again hit orange twice in a row, causing him to actually begin to glow orange with the strength of several candles.

The character’s name?

“Karrot.”

Sometimes the dice are the best comedians at the table.

Tavern Tales 2: Ooze, Poison, and Near Death Experiences

It’s been awhile, but I have a few more Tavern Tales to tell, if you’ve got the time!

Underwater Ooze

Over the last few months, Brendan‘s Vaults of Pahvelorn campaign has become one of the best parts of my week. I love the game, I love the group, and I love having the opportunity to be a player as a change of pace. I’ve also enjoyed the challenging, and high-mortality style of Brendan’s GMing, despite the fact that it cost me one of my favorite PCs ever. As a group, we’ve learned to be cautious, and when its best to simply run away. I think we’ve become quite skilled at navigating the depths, but our explorations are far from done. And just this past week, we encountered a challenge which very nearly defeated us entirely.

In a large cave, amidst a forest of glass trees, we discovered a series of ziggurats. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say, we had reason to believe there was treasure in those ancient structures. We ventured down the stairs which led into the first, and were immediately confronted with an octagonal room filled thigh-deep with water. We could see a dry passageway leading further into the dungeon straight across the room, as well as a stone slab with a body atop it that we wanted to investigate. But the water was murky, and even a first level adventurer would know not to step into any water you can’t see the bottom of.

We tested the bottom of the water with our 10ft poles, and felt only thick sludge. We thought perhaps it would be safe to trudge through–but when we withdrew our poles, we noticed that the metal hooks mounted on the ends of them were completely gone. Our rat catcher, Beni Profane, pulled a rat forth from his pouch and tossed it squarely into the center of the room, and we all watched expectantly. At first the tiny cr5eature frantically swam back towards us, and dry land. But the rodent didn’t make it three feet before a grey, gloppish ooze rose up from the water, and came down on the rate, dragging it beneath the surface.

Now thoroughly convinced that we didn’t want to step into the water. we broke some of our 10ft poles in half, and used rope to tie foot hold knots to each half, thus constructing a crude pair of stilts. We tied a rope to Beni–as he is our most dextrous party member–and sent him staggering through the mucky black waters to the other side. Once he had successfully made it there, he used an iron spike to mount the rope to the wall, then tossed the end back to us. We constructed a crude bridge of two ropes–one for our arms, and one for our legs–and began to cross one by one.

The dice were not with us, though, and the second to cross–our beloved hireling Levis–caused the rope to snap from the wall. He fell with a splash into the water, and lost all composure. He miraculously managed to flee from the water without too much injury, and continued fleeing towards the ziggurat’s entrance, where we later found him dead from an unknown source.

The rest of us managed to reattach the bridge and make it across. The entire process took at least 40 minutes of game time. But it was well worth it!

…I’m kidding of course. We didn’t find a single copper piece in the entire Ziggurat. And in addition to losing Levis, one of the player characters–Satyavati–also lost his life while fighting a monster in that next room.

Without question, that was our most dismal delve into the depths yet. And I adored it.

Poisoned Journal

I’m not sure whether I’ve mentioned this or not, but recently my younger brother asked me to introduce him to the hobby.  I threw together a quick amalgamation of OD&D rules I gleaned from playing in Vaults of Pahvelorn, made a dungeon, and told him we’d play for three hours on the the following Saturday. Six weeks later, it has turned into a running campaign which I’ve dubbed Dungeons & Dragons & Little Brothers; or D&D&LB for short. Running the game has unfortunately pushed back a few other projects I wanted to work on, but I’ve also been having a great deal of fun with it, so I don’t mind.

In a recent game the party found part of an ancient manor house which had fallen into the earth in ages past. Most of it had been destroyed, but a few rooms remained largely intact, and could be accessed directly from the caves they were exploring. They had good luck finding treasures here, and when they encountered a largely intact, luxurious office room, they started to get pretty excited. Too excited to check under the desk as they normally would have. They didn’t notice the dire rat nesting there until it leapt out to defend its territory. My brother’s character, Garret, took a bite to the face which dropped him to -2 hp.

Now, the way I handle death in this game is thus: If the character reaches 0 hp, then they are unconscious. They can be revived after 10-60 minutes, but cannot fight or move quickly, lest they risk reopening their wounds and taking 1 hp of damage. If the player ever falls below 0 hp, they must make a save versus death. If their save succeeds, then they return to 0 hp and are unconscious. Characters who succeed on a save versus death also receive a permanent disability, based on the manner of their near death. If the save is failed…well…roll 3d6 for your stats, in order.

As it so happened, Garret succeed on his save. He was left with a permanent hole in his cheek which cost him 1 point of Charisma, and was reduced to limping around at 0 hp, but was otherwise none the worse for wear. Garret’s companion, Drako, urged that they should return to the surface so he could recover. But Garret insisted that they had cleared the room of danger, and it would be a shame to go back without looking through the room to see what they could find. As it turned out, Garret was correct. That single room held more treasure than the party had yet discovered in the rest of the dungeon combined. They found ancient books of law from before the fall of human civilization, and even managed to procure a piece of fine sculpture, dedicated to a powerful goddess.

Unfortunately, Garret had been wrong about clearing the room of dangers. For while there were no more vicious creatures there to attack them, there was a vicious poison dart trap. One which stung Garret in the palm when he attempted to open a locked journal. He failed his save versus poison, and had to be dragged back to town by Drako. Even before they made it to the surface, Garret’s mental state had been reduced to that of a vegetable, and it cost the Party every penny they had earned that day, just to restore his mind.

Near Death at the North Tower

For the most part, I’ve been very proud of how quickly my younger brother adapted to the dangers of OD&D. Despite his actions in the previous story, he’s made more good choices than bad ones. But even good players sometimes have bad tactics. And no player is immune from the occasional wrath of poor fortune.

While investigating those underground manor houses, the players came upon a deed to the “North Tower.” They did some investigating, and discovered that the building was still standing, the deed was still valid, and their new property was only a half day’s travel from the town they were residing in. Truth be told I didn’t expect them to find that deed as quickly as they did, but that’s the nature of the game. Sometimes players surprise you.

They decided to go investigate their new property, and promptly found themselves in a pitched battle with the bandits who had claimed the tower as their hideout. It was an absolute route. The magic user was the first to go down. His “Shield” spell gave him an AC of 3 against normal missiles, so he tried to stand in front and offer cover for his companions. The first volley of arrows overcame his increased armor class, and he went down, barely making his save v. death to remain unconscious at 0 hp. The players barred the door from the outside, dragged their companion around a corner, and tried to revive him so they could flee. The bandits immediately succeded on their first 1-in-6 chance to break the door open, and charged out swords and arrows blazing.

Drako held up a leather tarp to obscure her form, and ran for the trees, but an arrow hit her in the leg for 3, which is exactly the amount of HP she had at the time. Garret held out a good while longer with the help of the party’s two hirelings, but he and one of them were both dropped to 0 hp within a few rounds. The remaining hireling wasn’t about to fight on alone, and surrendered. For a moment, I thought my brother was about to learn what TPK stands for. But then I noticed something: Every single member of the party had miraculously ended up at 0 HP. Only one of them had even needed to make a save vs. death.

I couldn’t see why a group of bandits would kill a group of potentially valuable prisoners, so a few days later, the party awoke in a prison, and began to plot their escape.

System In Progress: LOZAS

My ladyfriend is 3 years younger than I am. It’s a little strange for me, since most of my relationships in the past have been with older women. And though the difference in our numerical ages is small, it sometimes feels as if those few years belie a massive generational gap. Particularly with regards to vidya games. My first  console was an NES, while her was an N64, how does that even happen? The poor whippersnap missed the greatest era of gaming: the one I grew up with! I often become frustrated when I make a funny reference, only to realize she probably never used the Konami code, or blew dust out of a cartridge, or heard of games like Doki Doki Panic!

So what in Oerth does this have to do with tabletop RPGs? I’m getting to that. Be patient, geeze.

Recently, because my ladyfriend is pretty cool, she asked me to recommend an oldschool game. Probably because she was impressed by all those cool jokes she’s too young to laugh at. I considered carefully which game would be a good introduction for her, and unsurprisingly settled on my favorite of all time; The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. That game has had a defining impact on my life. It shaped my views on fantasy settings, and informed my opinions about what it means for a game to be ‘good.’ It’s the first game I ever wholeheartedly fell in love with, and that love is part of what originally led me to pursue writing. Hells, the “L” in my monicker stands for “Link,” and I’ve been known by that name for almost half my life. Even ignoring all of the personal value the game has for me, it’s still one of the most polished, well-designed games I’ve ever encountered. And since my ladyfriend is already a fan of the later Zelda titles, it’s about time she was introduced to a proper dark-haired link, rather than the boyband reject seen in more recent games.

Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I think the game is best when played on the Super Nintendo, with that fantastic controller. But before I set her up with the cartridge, I thought I should take a look at it. The last few times I played through LttP I was either using a game boy, or an emulator. Because of that, my SNES copy hadn’t been used in a few years, and I remember experiencing some audio glitches the last time I played it. Plus, with the game being over 20 years old, I worried that the battery wouldn’t be able to hold a save any longer. So I drew the cartridge from its shelf, gently cleaned the connectors with alcohol, nestled it into the console’s bosom, and flipped the big purple power switch up with a satisfying “clack.*”

Yes. That is me. Dressed as Link for Halloween. I was a cool kid.

Yeah, she hasn’t gotten a chance to play it yet. I’m on the second-to-last dungeon in the game and having the time of my life. But again, what does this have to do with tabletop RPGs?

Well, one evening after I’d been playing, I was in bed with a notepad. I began to lazily jot down notes for a Zelda tabletop RPG rooted in the spirit of the pre-Ocarina of Time games. Those random notes quickly evolved into a project which I’ve dubbed the Legend of Zelda Adventure System, or LOZAS for short. It’s what I’ve been blathering on about for the past week. I originally didn’t want to be open about the source material I was working with, in part because I didn’t want to feel obligated to finish it. But it’s become clear to me that I want to take this seriously, so there’s no point in being subtle any longer. Though I don’t know if it actually counts as subtle, since I’ve been tweeting about ‘my zelda system’ every 15 minutes.

I confess, I feel more than a little arrogant announcing that I’m trying to adapt one of the most celebrated games of all time to tabletop. Who the fuck am I? I’m an untested, aspiring game designer. To be perfectly frank, I don’t think I’m up to the task. Oh, I’ll do my best, and I’ll finish the game, and maybe some people will like it. But this is just a goofy little project I started working on for my own amusement. When I do eventually finish LOZAS, it will be the first game I’ve ever designed from the ground up. And like any ‘first,’ it’s probably going to be terrible. But it will be a labor of love, and I can only hope that will help mask some of my inexperience.

So now that I’ve wasted 786 words telling you what the project is and how I came to work on it, why don’t I share a little bit about how the game is shaping up and what my goals are? That way future posts referencing the LOZAS system can at least have some context. While my list of goals is extensive, each one descends from this single goal:

Recreate the style and ‘feel’ of A Link to the Past in a tabletop environment, without forcibly including elements which are not well suited to tabletop play.

Given that, the question becomes: what is the style and feel of LttP? Exploring that question has been an ongoing process as I work on the game, but I do have my thoughts:

Dungeons Zelda games are about dungeons. Even though every game in the series has lots for the player to do outside of dungeons, the underworld is where the real meat of the game can be found. It’s where the player encounters the most varied enemies, finds the most interesting treasure, fights bosses, and achieves the most important quest-progressing goals. As such, the game will be geared towards exploring dungeons. Hyrule is an ancient land, where many forgotten kingdoms have made their home. It is riddled with dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of underworld citadels just waiting to be explored by heroes.

While dungeons can vary wildly, most dungeons will contain the following elements:

  • Lots of monsters.
  • Lots of traps.
  • Lots of treasure.
  • A wondrous item (discussed further below).
  • A heart container (discussed further below).
  • A Great Monster.

Great Monsters are special creatures within this world. In game terms, you would call them bosses. However, within the setting, they are monsters who have acquired an immense amount of power. They did this either by defeating their fellow monsters and rising to the top of the food chain, or by forging an alliance with a great evil being. Upon defeating a great monster, all the heroes who were involved in the combat gain a level. Defeating great monsters is the only way to advance in level in this game. There are no experience points.

Characters There are two big things about A Link to the Past which do not translate well to a tabletop environment. First, not every adventure can be set in motion by Zelda being kidnapped. Second, not every player can be Link. The former problem is up to the GM to solve, but I hope to give GMs a useful toolbox with my methods for creating dungeons and great monsters. The latter problem, however, is all on me.

Long story short, I’ve determined that the game will use only three classes. The Adventurer is the closest of the three to what Link would be. It’s a class with respectable fighting skills, but which focuses on special abilities. An adventurer can leap across long gaps, climb walls quickly, move without making any sound, etc. Soldiers focus purely on physical combat, and receive bonuses to their attack, damage, critical range, armor class, and battle maneuver score as they increase in level. Sages are the mystics of the game, and probably the class I currently find most interesting. At each level, the sage can permanently add one more spell to its repertoire. I’m doing my best to balance the spells at about the same power level, so that there will be no need for multiple “spell levels.” Each time a spell is cast, the sage must roll an ability check. They are currently allowed to fail the check a number of times per day equal to their level, after which they must rest before they can cast again. Though I worry this may become tedious at higher levels, even with a current max level of 10.

Numerical Simplicity There aren’t many bonuses or penalties in a Zelda game. Sure you might get an upgraded sword or new armor now and again, but the rest of your equipment provides a unique function rather than improving the effect of a function which already exists. So far, the only bonuses and penalties which currently exist in the game are either determined at character creation, or by a character’s class as they level up. The game will employ an maximum AC, and even at high levels health will likely be pretty low for most creatures. So including a lot of +1 items would just make the game messy. Instead, the game should be filled with items like a magic grappling hook which always finds something to latch onto, or a magic glove which lets you see through any wall you touch.

Heart Containers One of the staples of every Zelda game is heart containers. The player begins the game with 3 life. By defeating bosses, the player can gain heart containers which increase that life by 1. Minor as it may seem, I think this is a great idea to use in the game. A sword to the chest kills a great knight just as surely as it would kill a peasant. However, by delving into dungeons, adventurers can find magic items which absorb into their body, allowing them to survive wounds which would kill most people.

Those are some of the larger ideas which come to mind now. I’m sure I’ll continue to write about this project as it progresses.

*Seriously, why in the world did the SNES have such a loud power switch? It was as though Nintendo was trying to alert your parents of when you were playing rather than doing your chores.

A Post Without Value: My First Attempt to GM

WWL

The vast majority of the time, I like to think that my posts have a point. That I’m communicating ideas which might be useful to someone else. I endeavor to avoid anything which seems overtly self indulgent. And I always work to write posts of quality. Posts which do credit to my dubious claim of being a writer. But, life is not always so kind. One too many distractions have emptied my backlog of posts, and I’ve only got a short amount of time before my self-imposed posting deadline. So today, I’m afraid, you don’t get something even slightly well considered. All I have for you is a shitty story about my first serious attempt at being a game master.

It was not a great first attempt.

Here’s an excerpt from some of the notes I still have. I believe this is from our second game, after the players discovered that their first quest giver was evil.

“Four months have passed since you left the service of the dark lord Grome-Lah to join the goodly king of Taladore, Vladamier. The king’s daughter, Reina, has become quite fond of her father’s new bodyguard, the powerful samurai, and of the playful gnomish bard with his stories. All in all you, and the people of the city along with you, enjoy a new age of prosperity.

However, this peace is fated to be short lived, for you soon begin to hear rumors. Corpses walking in the night. At first it is passed off as a mere old wives tale. It is not too long, though, until the rumors persist enough that king Taladore sends you to investigate the ever growing belief that the dead are walking”

Aside from the lengthy writing of a kid who is far too impressed with himself, this isn’t a terrible start to the game. I had a bad habit in those days of using the names of Star Wars characters in my games (Grome-Lah was my clever adaptation of Nom Anor and Tsavong Lah), but so long as the players didn’t recognize them, there was really no harm. And even though I wince now at my clumsy attempts to get the players to care about the NPCs, I don’t think it affected the game drastically.

What did affect the game negatively was my poor understanding of the rules. Though I’m pretty sure every GM could say that about their first game. I’m curious to know: if D&D 3.5 was your first system, how long did it take you to understand when you should ask for a Spot check, and when you should ask for a Search check? Because I pretty much used them interchangeably in this game. I also allowed my players to do pretty much anything with their characters that they wanted. Which, truth be told, is still how I do things. But now I make my players work for the things they want. The next time I have a druid player who wants their animal companion in a forested setting to be a camel, they’ll need to travel to a desert first.

And speaking of letting my players get away with anything, I also didn’t know how to let them fail. When their tactics were bad, I would reduce the number of enemies in the room. When they failed to make any attempt at diplomacy, kings and emperors would go out of their way to be extra friendly just so the half-baked plot could be moved along. I even changed a few DCs just so they wouldn’t feel too bad about making poor rolls. I’ll never forget how dirty I felt when the bard attempted to scare some orcs with his bagpipe music, and I fudged the DC because I didn’t want him to feel underpowered.

But that’s all small potatoes. Everybody makes these mistakes the first time they sit behind the GM screen. Everyone thinks they’ve got a great story to tell, or believes their friends might get upset if things don’t go their way. As a person runs more games, they will grow into the role of GM. But these common failings are not my greatest sins.

For, you see: I had a DMPC.

His name was Zerek Mexiel. He was a Tiefling Lich, and a 20th level Wizard, and I thought he was such a cool addition to my game. Ostensibly, his purpose was to observe humans for research purposes. I made clear to my players from the start that the Lich did not care if they died. In fact, the effects of their deaths was a subject of great interest to Zerek, and he wished to study it. So, if anything, he would be happy to see one of them die.

Which might have been kinda cool if I hadn’t used him to repeatedly intervene on the party’s behalf.

Here’s a particularly poorly written bit from my notes:

“The corpse falls to the ground and lays still, finally at rest. As it strikes the ground, however, a welt on its neck is revealed. The red glowing eyes of your lich companion go wide. For the first time since you met him, he speaks: a grating sound, like a master smith’s saw against steel. [ed. WHAT?]

“That mark on the creatures neck, it is the trademark of a former student of mine! One who I banished from me over 30 years ago. If you wish to find him, you must involve the king’s powers.” And with that vital piece of information, the creature again falls silent, fading slowly from sight.”

Yeah, that’s not good.

I’ve reached the point where I don’t hate all of my old writing. Pretty much anything I’ve produced from 2009 onwards is decent. This garbage was written many, many years before that point, and I’m mortified that it came from my pen.

Are you not entertained? Does my humiliation not please you?

I Love Creative Players

When you’re GMing a game, what really makes you smile? What is it that your players do which makes you feel like as though the game is going perfectly? For myself, I love it when my players approach a problem from a direction I never considered. Or, even better, when they decide to tackle a problem I haven’t considered at all. I’m of the opinion that if they’re thinking that creatively, then it is because I was able to foster an environment where they felt like thinking creatively was beneficial. They recognize that the world around them has a certain kind of logic to it, and that logic is consistent enough that they’re able to think about problems diegetically.

I’d like to share three stories which I think encapsulate this idea really well.

Skeleton Feet: Different areas of my game world are keyed to different encounter tables. Everything which can be rolled on those tables has been carefully selected for that area. For unintelligent creatures, my reason for putting them there might be as simple as ‘this is where they live.’ For more intelligent beings, there will often be a small backstory, perhaps a couple sentences in length. If the players encounter 1d4 orcs, it might be because there’s a hidden orc village in the area, which was founded when a group of orcs was driven from the northern mountains by humans. Simple as it may be, it already solves a lot of problems. The orcs will react violently to humans, there is a village nearby for the players to find if they want to find out where the orcs came from, and I’ve added to the history of my world by saying orcs used to live in the mountains to the North, even if my players don’t find that out.

In my game world, 3 or 4 adjacent ‘zones’ all share a small possibility that the players will encounter a handful of goblin skeletons. The backstory on these skeletons is that many many decades ago, a necromancer passed through the area. He was still relatively inexperienced, and he experimented with his necromatic powers by raising a lot of dead goblins from a mass grave he found. The necromancer has since moved on, and is now a powerful lich in a tower in the far south. Given that you can’t really interrogate skeletons, I figured that if my players encountered them, they’d wonder why they were there, but not pursue the idea too far. To be honest, when I wrote that, I was really just looking for a way to make the encounter table more varied in those areas.

It took my players a few sessions of adventuring before they encountered the skeletons. They managed to defeat them handily. Here’s what happened, (roughly transcribed from a recording I made of the game):

Phoenix The Sorceress: Do any of our characters know about undead? What can we learn about these?
Me: Knowledge(Religion) is used for undead. Gibbous?
Gibbous The Cleric: Sweet, I’m useful! *roll* I got a 17.
Me: Alright! You’re able to notice two things about these goblin skeletons. First, they seem to have been animated for a very long time, and second, it doesn’t seem like they were being guided by any set of instructions.
Gibbous: [Sarcastic] That is super helpful.

At this point, the party very nearly moved on, figuring that there was nothing interesting about the encounter. But after a bit of chatter, some of the other players started to get curious.

Rosco the Ranger: Maybe they came from a nearby crypt?
Poker the Rogue: How old are the swords they were using? Can we tell?
Pumofe the Barbarian: I just woke up from a 200 year sleep. Do their swords look like something I would recognize from when I was around.
Me: Interesting! No, they don’t conform to any style you would have been familiar with 200 years ago. They are probably of more recent stock.
Pumofe: Can we see on the bottom of their feet how much bone is worn away?
Poker: [Joking] Check how worn their teeth are, check them for parasites…
Me: Wow. Um…well, you’re not CSI, but the feet seem to be worn down pretty thin. They’ve been walking around for maybe twenty to fifty years.
Pumofe: Do they have anything stuck to them which might tell us where they’ve been?
Me: Lots of little tree branches, leaves. A few tiny scraps of cloth, but its so deteriorated that it’s impossible to identify.
Gibbous: Is there someone we could ask about this maybe? Someone who would know the history of the area? I have Knowledge(History).
Me: Well, knowing anything about this would probably be too specific for your character to know about, since you’re not from around here. But make the check, and we’ll see if you know of anyone more familiar with the area’s history than you are.
Gibbous: I rolled a 16, so that comes up to 20!
Me: That’s plenty. Do you remember the town down South between the two rivers? The high priest of Obad-Hai is elderly and learned. He would know a great deal of the area’s history.
Pumofe: Is that on the way?
Poker: Yeah, we need to follow the rivers to get back to the Wizard’s tower anyway.
Gibbous: And we can still kill orcs along the way!

From there the players continued on to the town of Overton, spoke with the high priest, and learned of the necromancer who had passed through the area some 30 years prior on his way south. They added the Lich to their “list of things to take care of,” about 10 levels before I had planned on them doing so.

I love this story in particular because it demonstrates that my players don’t view the world as random anymore. I honestly don’t think I would have considered how worn down the skeletons feet were if I was a player.

Razorgrass: This incident occurred in my most recent game, actually. The players traveled to the Abyss to hunt for demon’s blood. Given their low level, I decided to send them to a rather innocuous corner of the Abyss. Instead of facing hordes of demons, I designed an area where the environment itself was hostile. One where divine (i.e. healing) magic would summon demons to attack them.

The players had only been there a short time when they encountered a large field of grass, which they quickly determined was razor sharp. Fortunately, most of the group is heavily armored, and those who aren’t only took a small amount of damage. None the less, the players didn’t want to squander their hit points in a place this dangerous. So Phoenix used her Gem of Fire Ray to burn a 60ft path through the field.

Shortly before this, the players had hast healing magics, and I had been tracking a band of demons as they approached the party’s location. They had only just begun walking down the path when the demons burst from the trees behind them. I described the demons as “About 5ft tall, corpulent, and naked. With a jaundiced-yellow color to them, and wicked claws on each hand.”

The barbarian wasted no time in shouting to the others: “Run into the grass!” The demons were some of the least intelligent of the Abyss, and were excited by the prospect of devouring mortal flesh on their home plane. They charged into the grass after the players, and promptly had their HP reduced by almost half as each step through the razorgrass dealt 1d4 damage to their naked bodies. The players were easily able to wipe the floor with the weakened demons.

Though they did pay a price: there was much less blood in each demon after the battle for them to harvest.

Zalekios and the Buildings: In this story, I actually wasn’t GMing. I was playing my chaotic evil Warlock/Rogue, Zalekios Gromar. None the less, this story marked a turning point for me as a GM. I felt such a sense of accomplishment and freedom after this encounter, that I decided this was the kind of feeling I wanted to enable my own players to experience.

Zalekios Gromar is, in a word, overpowered. And the GM who kindly runs games for me has often been frustrated by the difficulty of crafting encounters to challenge me. Zalekios himself is supposed to be an intelligent, but extremely overconfident character. He once leaped from the 4th floor of a tower simply because he was bored by attacking his enemy from range. And after being overpowered for so long, I the player had become pretty overconfident myself. Nothing seemed to be able to stop me. So when a Paladin appeared in a town I was resting in, and demanded I surrender myself, I charged him with eldritch blasts blazing. We battled for several rounds, each dealing a lot of damage to the other. But I quickly noticed that my HP was getting dangerously low. Zalekios was in very real danger of dying.

I was kicking myself for being so foolish as to charge a paladin head on, and frantically tried to come up with something I could do to get out of this alive. The paladin had already told me he’d tracked me for weeks, so running would only be a temporary reprieve. And since he could magically heal himself and I could not, that seemed like a bad plan. Desperate for some tactical advantage, I asked the GM what buildings were nearby. We were, after all, in a town. He said that the encounter was taking place in a largely undeveloped area of the town, but drew three houses on the map none the less. They were small, just one story high, made of cheap wood and clay.

That was all Zalekios needed.

He cast a special type of Dimensional Door which left a silent image behind, and ported up to the roof of the nearest house–just barely within his range. I attacked from range while the Paladin was distracted, and then again while he charged the house. Instead of climbing it as I suspected he would, the Paladin simply bowled himself into the supporting frames for the house, causing it to collapse just as I ported away. I tried to point out that the paladin should lose his powers for destroying someone’s home, but my GM replied that all three houses were abandoned, and that this part of town was sparse because all the buildings here were being taken down so nicer ones could be built. The pally did, however, take damage from a building falling on him.

I bounced between the remaining two houses that were within range of my Dimensional Door, trying to keep the paladin at range. He inexorably began to limit my escape options until he had me completely cornered. I was at 3 hit points, and had to make a choice. Either I could attack and be killed immediately afterwords, or I could run and be killed immediately afterwords. I decided that if this was Zalekios’ time, I’d rather see him go out with some fight left in him. I charged up an Eldritch Blast–

–and never, in all my years of gaming, have I been so ecstatic to see a natural twenty. The paladin was blasted, and Zalekios strapped the body to his horse just so he could resurrect and torture it.

The GM later admitted to me that the paladin had been specifically designed to beat me. He was a gestalt Paladin/Barbarian (which I pointed out should have been impossible) who was a good four levels higher than Zalekios himself was. The GMs plan had been to capture me and take me to trial or something. But my tactics had defied his expectations, and allowed a little bit of luck to make the difference between life and death.

That’s one of the best feelings I’ve ever had while playing a tabletop game. I was supposed to lose, the game was stacked against me. But because I made superior use of my environment and the choices available to me, I won the game.

I want my players to feel like that as often as possible.

Dragons & Warriors

Not too long ago I thumbed through my library of video games and pulled out an old favorite from 1986: Dragon Warrior. The first one. Not a remake of it, or a port of it, or even an emulated version of it on a computer. I’ve got a square gray cartridge and a boxy Nintendo Entertainment System; both of which I repaired and cleaned myself. The cartridge’s battery didn’t even need to be replaced after 25 years. In this era of red rings, it’s hard to believe a video game product was ever intended to last that long.

Objectively speaking, the game is terrible by today’s standards. Not just because of improvements in technology, but because of improvements in philosophy. If you didn’t grow up with the game, then needing to select “stairs” from a menu is going to drive you nuts. In its day this game literally revolutionized the way developers looked at creating console RPGs, but the 25 years since then have seen a lot of improvements to the formula. None the less, I’ve made it about 80% of the way through the game as of this writing, and this will be the second time I’ve replayed the game since 2009.

There’s something about the game which connects to the heart of what an RPG should be. Not just video game RPGs, but tabletop RPGs as well. When the game starts, you’re given no directions. Maybe there was some help in the manual–even as a child I didn’t have that–but in the game itself you’re just given a request from the king to save his daughter. He doesn’t know where she is, or what challenges you’ll have to face, but that’s what he wants from you.

After that, the world is completely open to you. You can go literally anywhere, and the only barriers stopping you are monsters who become more ferocious the further you travel from Tantegel castle. Combat is simple; painfully so. But combat isn’t really the game’s challenge, it’s just a function of how far you leveled and what equipment you have on you. The game’s real challenge is exploration and problem solving.

A perfect example of this is the Golem. Near the end of the game’s “plot,” the player is likely to come upon the town of Cantlin. The town is difficult to reach, with a veritable maze of impassable mountains surrounding it, and a slew of extremely tough monsters blocking the path. It’s all worth it, though, because Cantlin is the highest level settlement in the game. Aside from townspeople who give you vital clues as to how you can defeat the Dragon Lord, the best purchasable items in the game can be found there. Unfortunately, any time you attempt to enter the town, you are attacked by the city’s protector, the Golem.

The Golem can be defeated by conventional means if the player is very high level, but it’s unlikely that the player will reach that level before they want to visit Cantlin. The solution is found on the other side of the world, in a town which the player should have found and explored much earlier in the game. A villager there has heard stories about the Golem, and relates to the PC that the flute is said to soothe the Golem. If the player has found the flute, they can play it, put the Golem to sleep, and defeat it while it is incapacitated.

This is the kind of puzzle solving which oldschool console RPGs were known for, and some might call it Pixel Bitching. That is, a problem with only one solution which cannot be logically deduced. However, I would disagree. This kind of problem solving is translated directly from tabletop games. Players are given ultimate freedom to explore and learn about the world. That should be their goal. They can then apply what they learn about the world towards accomplishing goals, such as defeating monsters. It’s a method of gameplay which gives the player a sense of empowerment and accomplishment. They were not presented with a challenge for the purpose of having them overcome that challenge. They encounter challenges which they are able to overcome because they played the game well.

The necessity of imagination is another element of Dragon Warrior which connects to me as a tabletop gamer. The game has a distinct and interesting visual style. However, by the time the player has hit 3rd level, they’ve seen pretty much all of the visuals the game has to offer. In fact, the most impressive visual in the entire game is when everything flashes different colors for a moment as you summon the Rainbow Bridge. And it doesn’t even end up looking any different from normal bridges! My point is that the game didn’t need to feed players an elaborate story with impressive visuals to keep them engaged. Rather, it gave them a vessel for their imagination in the same way tabletop RPGs always have. The limited scope of the game’s visuals and plot allowed players to fill in the blanks. True the world didn’t react to our imaginations the way it would in a tabletop game, but that’s besides the point.

Dragon Warrior is also the first game I played where I truly needed to make a map in order to succeed. I had played games like The Legend of Zelda before I played Dragon Warrior, and I’m told a lot of people did make maps for that game, but I never needed to. In Dragon Warrior, though, the game is truly impossible without a pencil and some graph paper, and sketching those maps was an experience which honestly changed the way I look at games. Always before I had viewed hand-made maps as a sign of poor game design. I believed a player should never need to use tools outside of the game in order to complete the game. But I was wrong. Making my own maps so I could explore the pitch-black caves of Alefgarde gave me a sense of investment I’d never felt before. And that’s something I want to give my players when I run a tabletop game.

That’s all I really have to say. I know this post wasn’t strictly ‘on topic,’ in relation to tabletop RPGs, and if you didn’t like it because of that I apologize. What it all boils down to is this: every time I sit down with the original Dragon Warrior, I feel as though I’m connecting to something basic. Something which touches the heart of what a role playing game is. I’m not sure why I feel that way–perhaps it’s just because of nostalgia. I don’t know. Regardless, I wanted to try to express this sentiment to you.

My standard tabletop ramblings will now resume.

Paizocon Con Report Ort

Paizocon 2012 was the first convention I ever got around to attending. As such, I may not be entirely aware of the proper etiquette involved. However, my understanding is that I am now expected to write a ‘Con Report,’ detailing my activities during the event, along with any thoughts I have regarding the quality of the con.

So be it.

I currently reside in a little town called Auburn, Washington. There is little of value to be found here, which makes the town’s motto of “More Than You Imagined” depressingly ironic. The best thing I can say about Auburn is that it isn’t too far away from the really cool parts of my home state. Ya know…like Seattle. Paizocon was held a little further North than that, but still within easy driving distance. As such, the cost of attending the con ended at the price of the ticket for me. No airfare, no hotel room. That was really nice.

The night before, my ladyfriend and I printed out all of the events we were interested in attending, and put them onto a schedule. We then cut a few based on conflicts, or because there was no way we were going to wait around for 4 hours for something we were only mildly interested in. We discovered that there was really nothing we wanted to do on Sunday, so we decided to limit our attendance to Friday and Saturday.

We arrived quite early on Friday, and were given some toys by the convention staff. Posters, a map pack, a novel, and even a miniature! I’ve been told that this is a custom called ‘swag.’ I found it rather odd that I paid $40 to gain entry to the convention, only to immediately be handed perhaps $20-$40 worth of merchandise. But I have no complaints! I can only hope this entry in the Pathfinder Tales series of novels is a significant improvement over the others I’ve read.

We still had a great deal of time before our first seminar, so we wandered into the dealer’s room. Here I gleefully filled in the gaps in my Order of the Stick book collection by picking up On the Origin of PCs, No Cure for the Paladin Blues, and War & XPs. I also had a brief conversation about skills with a representative from Louis Porter Jr. Design, which I briefly discussed in an earlier post. I can’t say I was too impressed with the Neoexodus setting he was hyping (it sounded like a very generic attempt at ‘non generic fantasy.’) but I was intrigued by two of the other sourcebooks he had available, “Dangers & Discoveries” and “Debatable Actions,” both of which I purchased. Long time readers may recall that I am in search of an improved social resolution mechanic, and hope to perhaps glean some ideas from the latter of the two books.

Following this I briefly attended a sort of round-robin discussion group titled “Game Mastering 101.” It was focused on Pathfinder Society play, and I left after the second discussion group failed to offer anything of interest. Instead I sat in a hallway making notes for upcoming posts until it was time for the first workshop Morrie and I really wanted to attend: “Gaming Terrain: Working with Styrofoam. “

This is a hobby I’ve been interested in for a long while. Despite the fact that I’ve always felt reservations about the use of miniature figures, the prospect of crafting landscapes and environments is enthralling to me for some reason. Recently my ladyfriend learned about this craft, and became pretty excited herself! She spent the last month buying tools and materials, setting up a crafting table, and working on her first few tentative projects. Like this one pictured to the  left.

Sean K. Reynolds (one of Pathfinder’s developers) ran the seminar, and we probably learned more from him in an hour than we had learned from the several dozens YouTube videos we’ve been watching. I was particularly happy to learn about hot wire foam cutting tools, which we were able to try out ourselves. I also didn’t know that nailpolish remover melts a crater into the foam, though I don’t know how much of an application that has.

After the foam workshop was over, we were allowed to sit in on a second terrain workshop. This one focused on plaster. I’d never actually heard of this before, and it was fascinating to watch. It seems as though the molds are not difficult to acquire, and the results looked fantastic. I have no doubt I’ll be looking into this, and posting about it, more in the future.

Following this there was a seminar on freelancing which I wanted to attend, but during the two terrain crafting workshops we had made friends with another couple in attendance. We instead opted to have a nice lunch with them, wherein we discussed gaming groups, RPG mechanics, and stories of heroism (or lack thereof).

Once we had finished eating and parted ways, I was able to sneak into the last 45 minutes of ‘Everything You Didn’t Need to Know about the RPG Industry,’ which I must say I’m still somewhat confused by. This was the description of the seminar online:

“What was the dress code at TSR? What was playtesting like for 2E? Why did Gary make that table? All this & less will be revealed at our sekrit panel seminar! Expect nothing & be pleasantly surprised.”

I suppose I broke the rules by expecting something. But based on the description, I thought it would be a lighthearted bit of goofiness where some experienced industry professionals told amusing stories. And maybe I missed something in the first 15 minutes, but really the whole thing was just about maps. How much they can affect a game world, and how important it is for freelancers to include nice maps with their modules. And based on the large number of map samples they had on hand, it was obviously something they had planned to talk about.

On Saturday we again arrived early in the day, this time with the intent of finding a place to eat breakfast, since we had been unable to eat at home. To our delight, we found that there was a huge farmer’s market being run only a few yards from the buildings the convention was being held in. Thanks to this, all of our meals on Saturday were absolutely delicious treats prepared masterfully by some very talented cooks. Being the fat nerd that I am, I particularly liked the fresh banquettes which were stuffed with Italian sausage and bell peppers.

A few more vendors had set up since early Friday morning, so we again visited the dealers room. I picked up copies of The Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design, as well as The Complete Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, both of which have been on my list of things to purchase for a long while now. They gave me a free set of dice with my purchase, and I was able to spend several minutes talking to the Kobold Quarterly staff about their submission policies.

I also snagged “Zombiepocalypse Now” and “Thrusts of Justice,” two choose your own adventure books aimed at adults, both written by Matt Youngmark. I haven’t had a chance to dive into these myself yet, but I’m curious to see if it was handled well.

At 10am I made my way to the first seminar I was attending that day, which focused on how to create a homebrewed game world. Amusingly the panel was largely made up of Kobold Quarterly staff, one of whom I had been chatting with only a few minutes before. There was some very solid information presented here, particularly with regards to how magic items and religion can be used in a home brew game world.

Immediately after that was a panel on the art of Pathfinder. Not being an artist myself, I don’t really have a lot to say about this. It was very interesting, but we largely attended for Morrie’s sake, as art is a hobby of hers. Unfortunately much of the discussion focused on art as a profession, which didn’t really help either of us out. Though I did find it extremely amusing that one of the artists on the panel said they were a biologist by training, artist by trade. My ladyfriend is currently training in a lot of biology classes, but insists art will never be anything but a hobby. I prodded her in the ribs a few times when he said that.

Reaper Miniatures had a table set up out in the hallway where anyone could come up and paint their own miniature for free. This is something I’ve been wanting to attempt for awhile now, but I’ve always been a little bit nervous about ruining my nice pewter minis. I’m thankful I was able to make my first attempt with a free, plastic miniature. I’m sure my second attempt won’t be much better, but at least I know it won’t completely ruin the figure at this point. Personally, i think Morrie’s knight turned out a great deal better than my dwarf did.

After breaking for lunch (fresh pizza baked in a wood stove!) I attended a seminar on rules design by myself. Unfortunately I can’t discuss that seminar, but once it was over I attended my final seminar of the convention: Secrets of TSR.

As best I can determine, this is a bit of a Paizocon tradition. They get 4-6 fellows from TSR to just…sit around and talk about the old days. I actually had a little bit of small talk with the group of them before the panel started, not realizing who they were.

Once the panel began, I managed to score a seat in the front row, and get my voice recorder up on the podium so I could have the talk for posterity. It didn’t turn out very well, but that’s okay, because someone very kindly uploaded the entire thing to YouTube!

[EDIT January 27, 2019: This video seems to have been removed. Very sad.]

I’m pretty sure you can hear my laugh more than once. I’m often made fun of for the volume of my laughter.

So that was Paizocon. Conclusions? It was a lot of fun, even though it caused me to question my place in the Pathfinder community. It was educational as well. I do feel as though most of the content was geared towards someone who thinks about tabletop games far less than I do, but that’s not exactly surprising. And it’s not as though anything was ‘beneath me.’ I learned a lot about a number of subjects I’d never really thought about. All in all it was a good time, where I learned some useful skills, and had some great (though unrelated) food.

How Zalekios Gromar Learned Clarity

4.0.1

Today, for the first time in a few months now, I managed to get together with my friend Jeremy to play a session of our Zalekios Gromar campaign. For me, this is always a huge amount of fun. Not only is Jeremy an entertaining fellow to sit around and chat with, but he’s also the only person I know who is willing to occasionally take on the mantle of game master. Most of the time managing the game is my responsibility, and I love it. That’s why I have an entire site dedicated to running Pathfinder games. But being the game master can also be both limiting, and stressful. Taking some time to be a player rather than a GM lets me cut loose a little bit. All I really need to worry about is my own actions, and how I can survive and succeed with my own goals.

Being a player also allows me the opportunity to see the game from the opposite perspective. No matter how concerned I am with ensuring that my players are having fun, it’s always valuable to sit down, be a player, and figure out what I want. Are the things I want as a player being facilitated in the games I run as the game master? Which elements of the game am I enjoying, and which am I finding arduous? I find that my occasional jaunts to the other side of the GM screen are often more educational than a week’s worth of reading blogs and old Dragon magazines. And tonight, two lessons stood out to me.

First, some quick background on the game. Zalekios is currently working a number of angles within the game world, many of which are indirectly opposed to one another. Not only is he working for a kingdom, but he’s also working for someone else who wants to destroy all the kingdoms, whilst simultaneously attempting to establish his own kingdom. It can become a little confusing, but I’ve got 23 charisma and 10 wisdom, so what do you expect? Anyway, the kingdom Zalekios is working for (Angle #1) sent him to investigate some strange attacks which were destroying ships as they left a nearby port city. This worked to Zalekios’ advantage, since he needed to scout that same port city as part of a plot to destroy all the kingdoms (Angle #2). In the city, he booked passage on one of the ships, and sailed with it until it was attacked. He captured one of the Sahuagins, and forced it to lead the vessel to the mysterious “Wet Gnome Lord” who was behind these attacks.

So here’s a bit which will become relevant later. Having captured this creature, I began forming plans for how I might find use for it as a minion. So, when we left the ship to venture to the island home of the Wet Gnome Lord, I took the Sahuagin with me. Memory may fail me, but my conversation with the GM went something like this:

Me: I’d like to take the…Sha-hugga-mug with me.
GM: The Sahuagin?
Me: Yes. That. I’ll untie him from the mast, but leave him tied up with some loose rope for me to hang onto.
GM: Like a leash?
Me: Yeah, kinda like a leash. How long can he go without breathing water?
GM: Lets say 48 hours.
Me: Alright, well, we’ve been sailing for over 30, so I’ll let him swim to the island in the water, whilst I hold his leash from within a rowboat.

Now, what I understood to be happening was that the Sha-hugga-mug’s arms were tied to its sides, and I had a rope around its neck to serve as a leash. I figured it could swim well enough with its legs, and if it couldn’t…well, Zalekios is Chaotic Evil. Keel hauling a sea creature is far from the worst thing he’s done. Hell, earlier in that same session I’d committed a murder simply to enhance an intimidation check. Then killed the fellow I had been intimidating to keep him from pinning the murder on me!

Once we reached land, we entered the Wet Gnome Lord’s tower, and that’s about the time my ladyfriend joined the game, once again playing as Zalekios’ four faithful level 1 goblins. We encountered the wet gnome lord, and I completely ruined all my GM’s plans by negotiating with the session’s endboss. (Let that be a lesson to all GMs: players will always defy your expectations.) It ended up being well worth my while, because not only did I convince a powerful wizard to leave the ships alone (Thus fulfilling my obligation to Angle #1), but I also convinced him that we were allies, making him Angle #4. I am a devious little schemer, yes I am.

To solidify our partnership, the Wet Gnome Lord asked Zalekios to take care of a golem which had gotten a little out of control. Zalekios agreed, and climbed up into the locked attic, where he found the golem walking around in circles, paying the intruders no mind. Zalekios moved off to kill the creature, and assumed the four goblins would find some way to help (or, more likely, find a way to make things much more difficult) We rolled initiative, and I leaped into combat. It was then that the GM asked;

GM: So, wait a minute, you’re just leaving the Sahuagin there unattended?
Me: So what? It’s tied up.
GM: No, it only has a leash.
Me: …fuck, yeah, I guess that’s how you would have interpreted that. What I meant is that its arms were still tied to its sides.
GM: Then how would it have swam?
Me: It has webbed feet, I figured that would be fine.
GM: No, it would need its arms to swim effectively.

Oops.

I was already engaged with the golem, so I wasn’t going to bother with a low level creature like the Sha-hugga-mug when I was already facing something which could probably kill me. Fortunately, thanks to the marching order, my four goblin worshipers had the creature surrounded. So whilst I battled the golem, they subdued my prisoner. They even managed not to kill him! Though he will have a nasty burn on his face, and a bad limp from now on. Everything went better than expected, but this all goes to illustrate a point. I wrote recently on the point of GM clarity, but this story goes to show that player clarity is just as important. There was no clear point during play when my GM being more clear with me would have fixed the problem. Even if he had allowed me to have the creature’s arms bound due to the misconception, that would have meant changing a minor ruling from an hour’s worth of game time prior. (Namely, whether or note the creature could swim, and thus continue to survive on land). The entire problem could have been fixed had I, as the player, simply been more clear about my intentions.

On an unrelated note, a funny story from this game session: one of the four goblins, named Poog, is a cleric. He cast the spell Burning Hands on the Sha-hugga-mug during combat, and I quickly looked it up in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, where I was surprised to learn it was a 15ft cone. My GM, also surprised, said “Well I guarantee you it wasn’t that way in 3.5.” So, I got out my 3.5 PHB, and we looked it up, and much to our surprise, it had been a 15ft cone in 3rd edition as well! Flustered, my GM added “They must have changed it from second edition!” So, I pulled out my 2nd edition PHB, and he found the spell and read the description aloud.

GM: When the wizard casts this spell, a jet of searing flame shoots from his fingertips. His hands must be held so as to send forth a fanlike sheet of flames: the wizard’s thumbs must touch each other and the fingers must be spread. The burning hands send out flame jets 5 feet long in a horizontal arc about 120 degrees in front of the wizard.”
Me: …So, it’s a cone?
GM: Shut up.

Good times.

A Personal History of Role Playing

When I was young, I liked to play pretend. When we’re young, we all do. I played “Star Wars” a lot, putting myself into the role of Luke Skywalker, waving sticks around and making “vroosh!” noises with my mouth. As I got a little older, and my friends started to be more interested in bicycles and video games, I continued to enjoy playing pretend. Which isn’t to say I didn’t love video games or bicycles. I distinctly remember being a member of a “biker gang” which wasn’t allowed to cross any streets, so we just rode around the block over and over. But while my friends stopped playing pretend, my fantasies only became more elaborate. I even started making up my own characters, drawing pictures of them, and writing notes about their various abilities and weapons. Looking back on it, these pieces of paper were proto-character sheets.

I owe it to Bill Amend, the brilliant cartoonist behind the long-running syndicated comic strip Fox Trot, for first introducing me to the concept of tabletop role playing games. You see, one of my other passions as a young child was reading the comic strips in the daily newspaper. Even after my family stopped having the paper delivered, because my parents didn’t have time to read it, I convinced my grandmother to save the comic page for me. I even kept all of the comic pages in a box under my bed. If you’re not familiar with Fox Trot, one of the primary characters is ten year old Jason Fox, a geeky kid who excels academically, and is passionate about many “nerdy” pursuits. I can’t recall precisely when, but at some point during my childhood the strip featured Jason and his friend Marcus playing Dungeons and Dragons. The game wasn’t mentioned by name, but the core elements were all on display: a dungeon master’s screen, dice, and the DM weaving a world for the player’s character to explore.

The notion intrigued me. I was too young then to remember what precisely went through my mind, but I knew that whatever they were doing looked fun, and I wanted to play too. I constructed a GM screen out of black construction paper, and glued little pieces of note paper to the inside of it. On the note paper, I wrote the rules I had made up for the game. I also recall creating small tokens–doodles on pieces of paper–to represent adventurers and monsters. I also had a bowl with numbered scraps of paper to take the place of the dice. My parents warned me that the game I was emulating was an evil one–which would prove to be a major point of contention later in my life. But, to their credit, they didn’t go so far as to forcibly stop me from pursuing the project. I spent at least a few days working on my primitive version of D&D, but never really figured out how to make all the elements come together into a cohesive game. Nor could I convince any of my siblings to play with me. Eventually I gave up and largely forgot about the project, as kids are apt to do.

Eventually I joined my friends in growing out of playing pretend–though I never did stop quietly imagining myself to be someone else. That’s something I still do to this day. But so far as role playing is concerned, I didn’t take my next step until I was about 14 years old. That’s when my family finally got an Internet connection, and an entire world outside of my orthodox catholic homeschooler existence opened up. Writing about my history with the Internet and the impact it had on my life could be a whole other post altogether. But what’s important is that it didn’t take long for me to break my parents rule about never talking to other people on the Internet. In short order I found forums, and on forums, I found people role playing.

It was awful. The role plays I participated in those days were all themed around the Legend of Zelda mythos, yet most of the players were playing Final Fantasy characters. Not ripoffs mind you, characters like Auron, Sephiroth, and Red XIII were (for some reason) determined to save Hyrule. I hesitate to even mention the character I played, because I don’t think anyone directly involved remembers, but my character was actually named “Link Skywalker.” He traveled through dimensions living through other people’s lives. After living through someone’s life, he had all of their abilities and equipment. I honestly cannot tell you how tempted I am to simply edit this paragraph out and let my readers go on blissfully unaware of how shamefully bad my early role playing was.

It was around this same time that I joined a saber fencing class, which may seem irrelevant. However, this is the class where I first met Jeremy. He was quite a bit older than me, and in the advanced class, but we connected over our shared nerdiness. It wasn’t long before we spent more time talking than we did fencing, and I eventually learned that he played Dungeons and Dragons. I had always been interested in D&D, since I realized it was what Jason and Marcus had been playing in that old Fox Trot comic. However, my parents had made it very clear to me that such games were strictly forbidden–not just by them, but by “almighty god.” I wasn’t really convinced that D&D was evil, but at that time I was scared enough of my parents that I didn’t pursue the topic further.

My forum role playing continued for several years, and the quality of it improved a great deal. I abandoned my original character almost immediately in favor of one I dubbed Beloch Shrike (partially after the villain from Raiders of the Lost Arc, and partially after the villain from The Paradise Snare by A.C. Crispin.) The rest of the group similarly matured, and we experimented with a lot of different things. Some of the most important friendships of my life were formed during these early role playing experiences. Eventually, I even attempted to start a website, titled Epic Journeys, which would serve as a nexus of tools, information, and guides to help people facilitate running their own forum role plays. The project never really got off the ground, though I did actually manage to accomplish one thing. As part of the project, I coined the term “Online Text Based Role Playing Game,” or “OTBRPG,” and added it to Wikipedia (not then fully aware that this was a serious violation of Wikipedia’s rules.) Not only was the article never removed, but I have since actually met people who use the term without knowing I invented it. Seriously, google it. The phrase has entered somewhat common usage. This never ceases to crack me up, but I digress.

Everything changed for me, quite suddenly, in the last half of 2004. I was seventeen, still heavily involved in forum role playing, and starting to develop a taste for philosophy. My continued interest in Dungeons and Dragons led me to begin looking through the Catechism of the Catholic Church (big book o’ rules) looking for any mention of role playing or D&D. After finding none, I went online and found a forum dedicated to Catholics discussing their faith. I asked them what they thought about D&D being evil, and if you want to see something hilarious, the entire thread is still online and available to read. (Though apparently it now shows up as an unsafe link in most browsers. As best I can tell it is still safe to visit.) Most of the answers from other posters seemed to agree that there was nothing inherently wrong with D&D, so I printed the thread out and proudly presented it to my parents. After reading the printout, however, they summarily denied my request to be allowed to play the game. My parents were pretty terrifying people, and I grudgingly obeyed them.

Two months later, in September, I met Stephanie, and the changes in my life accelerated. We had a lot in common, including a shared interest in Dungeons and Dragons. At that time I had still never played, and she had played only once or twice. I won’t go into the details of our relationship, as is still somewhat painful, and certainly outside this blog’s subject matter. Suffice to say that I was head over heels. By November we were dating, and the relationship lasted for six years. In those early days of our relationship, I did a lot of things in order to spend more time with her. I bought a copy of Starcraft so we could have Battle.net dates. And, more relevantly, I took my fencing buddy Jeremy up on his standing offer to borrow his copy of the Dungeons and Dragons third edition core rulebooks. I hid them under some papers in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. Most kids are probably hiding weed, booze, porn and sex from their parents when they’re 17. I was hiding role playing sourcebooks. Some might see it as sad, but I’m actually rather proud of that.

The first little bit of D&D I ever played was with Stephanie. It was bad. I GMed a really short adventure for her where she fought a mummy. I didn’t understand any of the rules, and I was throwing stats around left and right without any idea what they meant. Fortunately, my parents and the rest of my family were out of town the following week, so Jeremy came over to give me a proper introduction to the game. Again: most kids throw drinking parties when they’re seventeen and their parents are out of town. I threw an adventuring party, and I’m proud of that. When Jeremy arrived he brought a gift with him: my own set of dice. They were a deep red with blue flecks, and they came in a plastic cylinder. He also brought with him his brand-new 3.5 edition core rulebooks, helped me roll up my very first rogue, and ran me through a simple Colosseum adventure where I fought some green needle monster things. It was glorious.

I continued in that way for quite some time. I purchased my own copies of the 3.5 rulebooks, and Jeremy would GM for me at his home. His ladyfriend, Jacie, eventually joined me as a gnomish cleric, and the two of us had many fine adventures together. I don’t remember how long it took for my parents to find out, likely just a few months if I remember correctly. I had just returned from a game at Jeremy’s, and went to find them to let them know I was home, my laptop bag filled with D&D supplies still in hand. They looked at me funny, and asked what I did when I was over at Jeremy’s. I tried to be nonchalant, and told them that we mostly just played games. They responded;

“Do you play Dungeons and Dragons?”

“Yes,” I said.

They didn’t really react much at all to that. Merely nodded and seemed to accept that this was a thing I was doing now. I never have been able to tell what things will make my parents angry and what things they can accept. For awhile I thought that, perhaps, they had mellowed out a bit, and become more accepting. That notion was proven wrong recently, when I asked them if I could buy my younger brother the Pathfinder Beginner Box for Christmas. They denied my request, adding that they didn’t like what “those types of games” had already done to one of their children. Cest’la vie.

Never the less, I took my books out from the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, and placed them lovingly on one of my bookshelves.

Jeremy and I continued to play together, and I tried my hand at GMing several times. I’ve always loved crafting worlds. In fact, as a young child I used to spend a lot of time drawing complex maps for a monster-filled series of caverns.* I was born to be a GM, but running games for one person can be a limiting experience. I needed a larger group, but I had been home schooled since the fourth grade, and didn’t really have the social tools to make friends. At least, that is, until I enrolled in college for the Fall 2005 semester. College is supposedly an eye opening experience even for kids who attended an actual school, so you can imagine what a change it was for me. I met so many wonderful people there, including Chris and Jeremy. They were my first gaming group. I was so happy to finally have one that I actually purchased Player’s Handbooks for both of them. We had some great games together, and they even invited some of their own friends along, giving me a nice full party to work with.

To repeat an old cliche, the rest is history. Gaming groups have come and gone, and there have often been weeks or months at a time when I don’t get to play, but my love for the game always remains. It’s been over seven years since I picked up my first sourcebook–which seems like such a short amount of time compared to the lifetime I feel I’ve lived as a gamer. Jeremy plays in most of my games, and still serves as my GM whenever we play Zalekios. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that there will always be people out there who want to play games. All they need is someone to suggest it, and be willing to show them how it’s done.

*Holy shit. I can’t believe I never thought of using these old drawings as a dungeon for my players before. I know exactly where they are.

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.