Why I Use Unearthed Arcana's Weapon Groups

Since purchasing the Pathfinder Core Rulebook earlier this year, it has almost completely replaced Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 in my affections. So many of the overcomplicated mechanics in 3.5 have been reduced to rules which are simple to memorize and enact. And many areas in which 3.5 was lacking (there were many times when “leveling up” only meant more HP) have been beefed up by Paizo. Resulting in, I think, a much more balanced and entertaining game. Pathfinder is not perfect, by any means. It even created a few new problems which 3.5 didn’t have to begin with. But the point stands that Pathfinder is an improvement.

So much so that I sometimes forget Pathfinder was designed to be compatible with Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 content. With a little tweaking, most of which can be done in the GM’s head, any D&D 3.5 supplement or adventure module can be used to enhance a Pathfinder game. So while Paizo is busy doing such a good job recruiting new players into our fine hobby, many of those new players may be interested in what D&D 3.x books are worth purchasing to add to their Pathfinder collection. It would perhaps be beneficial to construct a list of the best & most relevant 3.5 supplements. I would need to read the handful I missed before doing so, but I have no doubt that Unearthed Arcana would be damned near the top of my list.

Named for the AD&D first edition supplement of the same name, Unearthed Arcana is 218 pages of optional & alternate rules for D&D. You may recall the book from yesterday’s Colorful Characters 6. The Gestalt system I used in that post comes from Unearthed Arcana. Every page of the book is worth a dragon’s horde. It holds mechanics and fluff for anything from variations on race and class, to systems for reputation and sanity. A more descriptive title for the book might be “The Big Book of House Rules,” but it’s just not as snappy. It’s the book so nice, I got it twice. For serious.

One of my favorite segments of the book is a three-page alternate rule nestled in chapter three, called Weapon Group Feats. It has been included as an optional rule in every game I’ve run since, from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder. The exact text of the rule, pulled straight from Unearthed Arcana, is available to read on HypertextD20 SRD, but I will sum it up here for clarity’s sake just the same.

Using the standard rules, all weapons are classified either as simple, martial, or exotic. Most classes begins play with proficiency either in simple, or simple and martial weapon types. Characters who attempt to use weapons which do not fall into a group they are proficient with take a -4 penalty on attack rolls. Exotic weapons are a special type which are normally more powerful than other weapons, but each specific exotic weapon requires a feat be taken in order to wield it without penalty. On the face of it, the system makes sense. Fighters obviously receive more weapon training than wizards do, so they’re able to wield more advanced and deadly weapons. Unsurprisingly, I have a number of problems with this arrangement, but I’ll go into them in a moment.

The weapon group system appears somewhat more complicated, but is ultimately quite simple. Essentially, the 3 weapon classifications are replaced by more specific ones which identify the weapon’s basic group. Examples of groups might be Axes, Bows, Heavy Blades, or Spears & Lances. Mindful of the increased effectiveness of exotic weapons, characters are still considered non-proficient with such a weapon, even if they are proficient with the weapon group it falls into. Characters must take Weapon Group (Exotic) in order to gain access to those weapons. Thus, instead of each class starting the game being proficient in either one or both primary weapon groups, each class begins play with the option to select a number of weapon groups they are proficient with. Barbarians can select three, Bards can select two, etcetera.

I resolutely believe the latter system to be superior for the following reasons:

Increased Realism & Increased Simplicity Almost without exception, increased realism means increased complexity. Sometimes, this is an acceptable exchange, but with games like D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder, complexity is already high. And while the weapon groups rule would seem to be more complicated than the basic proficiency rules, it’s much more intuitive. If a character who has been using a dagger up to now finds a +2 hand axe they may be tempted to switch, but in order to determine whether or not they are proficient they need to crack open the rulebook and find the chart which details which weapons fit into which proficiency group. Using weapon groups, the player need only look at his character sheet to know what types of weapons he or she knows how to use.

Allowing Player’s their Weapon of Choice You don’t have to be a GM to realize that players care about the weapon their characters use. It’s often one of the first parts of the character concept they come up with. “A dwarf paladin who fights with a trident,” “an elven rogue who is a master of the kukri,” “a halfling fighter who specializes in spear fighting.” If players are so interested in the weapons they get to use, why should the game pointlessly restrict them from using it? It’s not as though a wizard who uses a longsword is going to suddenly rival the fighter in melee combat. The wizard still has a -2 strength and the worst base attack bonus in the game. He’s never going to hit anything. There’s no reason to add a -4 “screw your character concept” penalty to that.

Makes Weapon Specific Feats Less Lame There are a number of feats in the game which require the character to select a weapon to take them with, such as weapon focus, or weapon specialization. These are great feats which avoid all the pitfalls I hate about feats, players should be encouraged to take them. However, when you take Weapon Focus(Longsword), there’s always the nagging worry in your mind that you’re going to find a +5 Vorpal Scimitar in the next treasure pile. Replacing that with Weapon Focus (Heavy Blades) goes a long way towards reducing the player’s worry.

Treasure Hordes Don’t Seem Tailored Often, partially because of the previous point, GMs feel obligated to include direct upgrades to a player’s weapon. If a player has invested a lot of time in their battleaxe skills, then eventually they’re going to want +1, +2, & +3 battleaxes. But it starts to feel painfully contrived when players just happen to find treasure hordes which include those things. If players can switch freely between types of axes without penalties, this becomes much less of an issue.

I do have one minor issue with the weapon group system as written in Unearthed Arcana. The number of proficiencies listed for each class to select at first level is far too low. There are 17 potential proficiencies listed there, yet the highest number of first level proficiencies is four for the fighter. And Druids, Sorcerers, and Wizards benefit from the system not at all. I prefer to add 2 additional weapon group choices for each of the classes. This allows everyone more freedom. Classes with a small number of proficiency selections, such as the wizard, can still know how to use an exotic weapon (which they’ll still never hit with.) And classes which are supposed to be martial masters, such as the fighter, gain some depth to their weapons mastery.

Thoughts On Hero Points

Hero points, alternatively known as action points, have been a part of tabletop role playing games since days of yore. They’re a quirky and polarizing concept, often lurking around the edge of a game system’s rules. A hero point mechanic for any given game is either a very commonly used house rule, or it’s an optional rule presented in an officially published supplement. There are those games which use them as standard rules (D&D 4th Edition comes to mind), but in my experience those games are in the minority.

For those who are unfamiliar, a game which employs such a mechanic allows characters to gain hero points through [insert method here]. Once acquired, one of these points can be spent to bend the game’s rules. A missed attack can be re-rolled, a difficult task can be simplified, or a player who has exhausted a special ability can sneak in an additional use. Pathfinder’s “Advanced Player’s Guide” offers such a system as an optional rule, with points being gained any number of ways. From leveling up, to completing a plot arc, to performing a heroic act.

My biggest problem with hero point systems is that they are, by definition, a meta-game mechanic. The core of role playing games is establishing characters which act within an internally consistent world. It seems odd, then, that we would intentionally break the wall between the game world and the real world by introducing a mechanic which muddles the internal consistency of a world. After all, only player characters get hero points in most systems. Ergo, once hero points are an option, the PCs are no longer simple characters within the game world. They are, rather, avatars of otherworldly beings (the players) which grants them special abilities. Pathfinder is particularly bad in this area, and goes so far as to provide feats, spells, and magic items which interact with hero points. So not only do you gain access to a completely unique ability merely on the basis of being a player character, you can even build your character around this uniqueness which separates you from rest of the world.

Another reason which I don’t like hero points is the way in which they mitigate danger. By allowing players to re-roll when the result is poor, we give them a much higher probability of avoiding pivotal failures. While this may not sound like the worst thing ever, it creates three undesirable situations. First and foremost in my mind is that avoiding pivotal failures often means avoiding interesting failures. In a standard game, the cleric fails his jump over the pit of spikes. He falls 40 feet, takes his damage, but survives. However, his legs have been impaled by the spikes, and the other players must find a way to rescue him from bleeding to death at the bottom of a pit. Or, the wizard uses an action point and the game continues on without incident. Which story will the players be talking about after the adventure is over?

Second, avoiding pivotal failures makes the whole world around the character much less dangerous. Part of the thrill of stealing from a dragon’s horde is knowing that the dragon could wake up at any moment. If you know you’ve got a hero point in the wings ready to save you from a bad stealth roll, then the adventure’s edge is dulled. And that leads right into problem three: compensation. Any time players become more powerful, the GM gives them greater challenges. I’ve used that argument to defend giving PCs more power on numerous occasions, but with hero points I think the argument works in reverse. Giving a character a powerful magic weapon is fun for that character, and enhances gameplay. It’s worth beefing up the adventure for that. But given all of the ways in which hero points detract from gameplay, why give them to players when the end result is just a game which requires player’s to use Hero Points to survive?

Bearing all of that in mind, there is at least one thing about hero points which I find appealing. Hero points have the potential to be used as a kind of “Last ditch, adrenalin pumping, now-or-never” means by which players can attempt to pull a win out of an almost certainly deadly situation. I had such a situation in a game not too long ago. My players weren’t quite up to defeating the Corpse Sewn Hekatonkheires which ambushed them. The sorcerer was dead at -15 hp, and the Dawnblade (homebrew fighter/cleric class) was desperately attempting to hold the beast at bay while looking for a means to escape. After some arbitration between us, I allowed him to use his healing wand & make a standard attack (albeit at a -8 penalty)on the same turn, which would normally not be allowed. The attempt failed, and the Dawnblade was felled by the beast, but I decided then that I wanted my players to have some kind of option to better facilitate that kind of cornered-animal effort.

Hero points were the obvious choice, but I’ve always been turned off by them for aforementioned reasons. It wasn’t until last night when I was looking at the Star Wars Roleplaying Game rulebook that I struck upon an idea. West End Games’ Star Wars is one of the few games I’ve encountered where hero points are a central mechanic. It’s also the only system I’ve ever encountered where hero points actually make complete sense, and avoid being a meta game mechanic. But that’s a different post.

In the Star Wars RPG, ‘character points’ are primarily used as action points. Characters acquire a handful of them at the end of an adventure based on how awesome they were. A character might only receive 1 if all they did was make it through the adventure, but could receive 5 if they made it through the adventure by wrestling a shark into submission then throwing the shark at a stormtrooper. Aside from simply being used to add an extra die to a roll, though, character points can be used for character improvement. Since the game has no classes or levels, improving the skills by spending large amounts of character points is the only way for a character to permanently become more formidable. Essentially, Star Wars’ version of hero points also functions as that system’s experience points.

So what if I just switched it around?

Since I use the Pathfinder Simple XP System (and loving it, by the way), I’m already dealing with small, manageable numbers. All I need do is allow players to spend 1 experience point to gain the benefits of spending an action point. Here’s what that rule might look like:

Pathfinder House Rule: Using Simple XP as Hero Points

By pushing themselves the the limit, characters can sometimes perform feats beyond the normal scope of their abilities. At will, as a free action, a character may sacrifice 1 experience point (so long as this does not reduce the character’s level) to perform any one of the following actions:

Act Out of Turn: An experience point can be spent to take your turn immediately, permanently moving your place in the initiative order to whenever this action was taken.

Bonus: Prior to making any roll, an experience point can be spent to grant a +8 bonus to that roll. This ability cannot be used at all after the roll is made. Multiple experience points can be spent, and their effects stack.

Extra Action: During your turn, an experience point may be spent to grant you an additional standard action. This can only be done once per turn.

Recall: An experience point may be spent to use an ability which you have access to, but which has already been used up for the day, or was not prepared. This includes casting spells after the daily spell allotment is cast, using special abilities after their daily limits are used up, or casting a spell from a spellbook which was not memorized for that day. Bear in mind that if a wizard wishes to cast a spell he or she has not memorized, and they are out of spell slots for the appropriate level, two experience points must be spent.

Special: You can petition your GM to allow you to spend an experience point to perform a number of abilities. GMs should use the options presented here as a guide for how to balance this ability. Also, bear in mind, that an experience point can never be spent to re-roll a die.

On paper, this system looks like it fixes a lot of problems. It’s still something of a meta-game mechanic, as the connection between performing a spectacular action and losing experience is tenuous. But NPCs can also use the system, which removes the problem of the player characters being a class apart from the rest of the world. In theory, it also obliterates the danger problem. Hero points exist for the sole purpose of being used to perform great deeds, so that’s what players will use them for. XP, though, is far more precious. Players will not spend it lightly, because doing so will prevent them from leveling. Any player which did overuse this system would quickly be left in the dust as the rest of the party leveled higher and higher whilst the problem character remained low level.

Perhaps my favorite thing about this variation on hero points is the simplicity. By integrating it with the XP system, players won’t need to find a place for yet another number on their already cluttered character sheets. The GM won’t need to keep track of when to award hero points, because he or she is already keeping track of when to award XP. Aside from the “no re-rolls” stipulation, there’s not even any additional rules to memorize. The players regulate the system themselves, because they don’t want to lose experience.

I’ll be implementing this in my games for now. I hope it’s as effective as it looks!

WEG Star Wars: What It Was, and Why You Should Play It

I am a Star Wars fan. I’ve read every book based off the original trilogy at least twice. Some of them I’ve read five or even ten times. I keep the audio books around as well, which I’ve probably listened to hundreds of times each. At the age of 11, I wrote the editors with omissions I had found in the Star Wars Encyclopedia When I was 12 years old when I attended the midnight showing of The Phantom Menace, and despite how terrible that and Attack of the Clones both were, I was still at the midnight showing for Revenge of the Sith. I cried over the death of Chewbacca, and I cried harder over the death of Anakin Solo. And when Jaina Solo was forced to kill Jacen? That haunted me for days. I still break down crying every time I try to read through that chapter.

Star Wars is my great, lifelong obsession. And “The Star Wars Roleplaying Game” Second Edition published by West End Games is among the greatest tabletop role playing games I’ve ever encountered. You really don’t even need to read the rest of this post. If you don’t have it, you need to find it, and buy it, now. Once you have it in your hands, you can read the rest of this post to learn why the choice to make that purchase was the right one.

The entire system is designed to keep game sessions fast paced and exciting. The rules are very simple, the character creation is minimalistic, and any actions which requires a roll are handled with one of two basic systems. If a player is attempting to do something to another player or NPC, the two make opposed dice checks (such as “shoot” and “dodge”) and whoever gets the highest succeeds. For any other kind of action, the GM just picks a difficulty number (based of a difficulty chart which GMs should memorize) and asks for a roll. Simply put, that’s it. Much as I love Pathfinder’s more complex rules, there’s something freeing about switching gears and running something with almost no rules at all. To put it in the words of the system’s designers:

Keep the Game Moving Quickly. Star Wars is supposed to be exciting. Laser bolts fly fast and furious, starships dodge around asteroids, and speeder bikes race through thick forests at frightening speeds. Keep the game moving as fast as the Star Wars movies!

Even the core rulebook is fast paced. Chapter 1 starts off with a solo adventure where the book plays the role of game master, and the reader takes on the role of a player. It plays out sort of like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book with dice occasionally thrown into the mix. In whole, the player’s portion of the rulebook is sixty six pages long, including the adventure at the beginning. In comparison, the D&D 3.5 Player’s Handbook has 317 pages. Pathfinder’s core rulebook doesn’t get past the player section until page 393! WEG Star Wars is a definitely a game which adheres to the old school role playing philosophy of keeping most of the mechanics away from the players to better simulate the fantasy.

Like Pathfinder, WEG Star Wars characters have six basic attributes; Dexterity, Knowledge, Perception, Strength, Mechanical, and Technical. Each of these has a certain number of six sided dice attached to it during character creation. (WEG Star Wars only uses six sided dice.) For example, a human character gets 18 dice total, and has a minimum of 2 dice and a maximum of 4 dice in each of the six attributes. After filling the minimum requirements, players have 6 dice to spread between their six abilities. Once in play, any action which requires a roll will be associated with one of the six abilities, and the player gets to roll however many dice they allocated for that attribute. For example, hitting something with a blaster requires the ability to aim the blaster accurately, so you would roll your dexterity. If you went ahead and maxed out your dexterity, then you’d be able to roll 4d6 against your opponent’s dodge. And if he or she rolls lower than you did, the blaster bolt hits! And given how dangerous combat is treated in this game, there’s a good chance getting hit by that blaster bolt killed them.

There’s also a skills system for more specific tasks. Each character starts out with 7 dice to apply to skills. So even though you have 4 dice in dexterity, you could put another 2 dice in the Blasters skill, and be able to roll a whopping 6 dice whenever you try to hit somebody. Dice can also be split up. Each die counts as 3 “pips,” which is WEG’s code for bonuses. Essentially, if you’ve put 2 skill die into blasters, 3 into medicine, and 1 into starfighter piloting, and can’t decide where to put your last die, you can just break it up. Add a +2 to starfighter piloting (making the skill 1d6 + 2) and a +1 to blasters.

All praise aside, there is one thing about West End Games’ masterpiece which I really don’t like. I can’t find anybody to play it. New players curious about the hobby are normally the most interested in playing Dungeons and Dragons. It’s probably the only game they’ve heard of, and it’s the one which drew their attention to the hobby in the first place. Others are wary of playing a Star Wars game, either because they don’t think they’re familiar enough with the mythos to keep up, or because they don’t like games based on movies/television/etcetera.

I did manage to play a few sessions of the game once. In the first session, my player (I only had one) managed to steal a ship, which he painted bright orange and christened “Stealth Ship.” He was too lazy to hire a crew for it, so I gave him a wookie communications officer. By the second session he had been hired by the rebellion to free some prisoners from an Imperial prison camp. One of them as it turned out, was his psychotic ex girlfriend, who shot him. By the time the second session ended, he had recovered, been chased around the corridors of an abandoned Star Destroyer by the same psychotic ex, and narrowly escaped form said Star Destroyer just before it exploded. We never got to session three, which is sad, because the rebellion was going to commission him to find them a new hiding place “now that the Yavin base has been compromised.” I was going to let him re-shape the original trilogy by becoming an incredibly important, off-screen character. It would have been glorious.

Buy the game. You will not regret it. And, once you have it, all you need to do is move to WA state so we can play it together…

…forever…

We Be Goblins! (You Be Food!)

“We Be Goblins!” is a charming little Pathfinder module which Paizo has made available as a free PDF through their online store. I printed out a copy a month or so ago, and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. Despite the short length of only 16 pages, there are some remarkably charming touches which make this module memorable for me. The adventure is well designed with a good mix of challenges for the players. The pregenerated characters are interesting, and developed well enough to give players a baseline to role play from without being constricting. There’s a good sense of humor throughout the adventure as well, with a number of catchy songs scribbled in the margins. I must admit, I’ve recited a few of them to myself while driving. They are quite catchy:

We be Licktoads! We Make Raid!
Put the longshanks to the blade!
Burn them up from feet to head,
Make them hurt, then make them dead!
Cut the parents into ham,
Smush the babies into Jam,
All the rest in pot get stewed,
We be Licktoads – YOU BE FOOD!

Which brings me to one of the biggest draws to this module: playing as evil goblins. Players have never been prevented from playing as evil characters, or from playing as goblins; the Monster Manuals and Bestiaries even have racial traits for goblins which players could use if they liked. But as I’ve discussed in the past, while not forbidden it’s certainly not encouraged. Despite that, something about Pathfinder’s version of goblins has caught hold of players. As any sensible company should, Paizo is cashing in on that with a number of products. The artist who designed Pathfinder’s Goblins can be thanked for that, I think. He or she somehow managed to take the most generic-of-the-generic fantasy monster, and reinvent them into something which is both classic and novel, adorable and terrifying all at once. The song above is a testament to all four seemingly contradictory traits.

On a lark last weekend, I decided I wanted to see how this adventure played at the table. What’s more, I wanted to do it with enough people for all four of the pregenerated characters to be in play. So during the week I conferred with the players from two of my gaming groups. Remarkably, each of them had Saturday free. Considering how difficult it can be to get either group together for a game, I thought it might be a titanic effort to get both together at once. But everybody was open to my first suggested date and time. So this morning I got up, cleaned my apartment, and was going over my notes just in time for people to start arriving.

The opening of the adventure is somewhat wordy for my tastes. My rule of thumb is three paragraphs. If I’ve got more than three paragraphs to read before the players get to start taking action and making choices, then I edit down. I may pride myself on my writing, but my friends didn’t make room in their busy schedules to listen to me read aloud. They came to play a game. All the same, the introduction didn’t go off too poorly. The players got a good sense of who and where they were. But to be honest, if I were to run it again I think I would cut a lot of the introductory crap and jump into the bonfire as quick as I could. That’s where the game really got moving.

After the goblin leader provides the PCs with their mission in the opening scene, the tribe has a bonfire celebration to, as cheif Gutwad says, “burn bad luck away from [the PCs].” Essentially it’s a big rowdy goblin party in honor of the PC’s upcoming quest. Here, I think, would have been a much better place for a lot of the exposition which happened at the start of the adventure. Rather than have the goblin chief tell the players to avoid the creature known as Lotslegs Eat Goblin Babies Many, the PCs could have overheard frightening stories about it from other goblins during the feast. But this is a minor nitpick at worst.

The content of the bonfire are four “dares,” as the goblins call them. To test the bravery of the PCs, the tribe presents them with challenges. If they succeed, they are rewarded with the right to borrow a few pieces of magical gear. If they fail, or refuse the challenge, they are mercilessly mocked. I must admit I was somewhat worried that this was the kind of thing which sounded good on paper, but wouldn’t work out in play, but I was wrong. It was during this more lighthearted, role-playing heavy activity that my players really started to get into their characters. I’m not often fortunate enough to have excited, in-character conversations going on between players. More on that later.

My players ended up succeeding at each of the four challenges without much incident. It was then that I began to realize that the pregenerated characters were extremely overpowered. I honestly cannot comprehend how the rogue managed to have a +16 to his stealth check at level 1. [Edit: Okay, I see. The Goblin size bonus, and the Goblin racial bonus, stack.] This ended up detracting from the game somewhat, as I never really felt the characters were in real danger. Though, in fairness, I did significantly reduce the difficulty of each of the challenges. Not to make things easier, but simply because I can’t make it seem exciting to ask players to make a DC 15 ride check three times in a row.

In the morning, the players set off on the grand one mile (1/6th of a hex) journey to the grounded ship marked on the treasure map, and the cache of fireworks it held. They were nearly there when they were accosted by Lotslegs Eat Goblin Babies Many, a giant spider who hungered for goblin flesh! Two of my cowardly players hid from the beast, the rogue succeeding at doing so despite the bells which another player had secretly attached to her clothes. The fight was brief, with minimal damage on the part of the players. Considering that this is probably the second most difficult fight in the adventure, I was somewhat disappointed in how quickly the spider was felled.

From there, the players moved on to reach the ship. And that is where things took a turn for the awesome. One of the four goblins is a cleric named Poog. According to his character sheet, Poog is ashamed of being one of the worst animal riders in the clan. The character sheet also says Poog is brave to the point of being overconfident. So when Poog was acting as a scout into the the muddy area surrounding the ship, and was charged by a rabid horse, Poog’s immediate response was:

“POOG WILL RIDE HORSE!” Complete with my player’s best goblin voice.

As it turned out, Poog failed to mount the charging beast, but managed to deal it a crushing blow by bracing his javelin in the mud when the horse came around for a second charge. From there on in, the events of the game took a back seat to the hilarious role playing exchanges between the characters. The woman playing the aforementioned rogue took it upon herself to goad Poog on. She heaped insults onto him, and quickly discovered that there was nothing she couldn’t get Poog to do by simply telling him that he wasn’t good enough to do it. And all of this simply goaded Poog onward, culminating “POOG CAN RIDE ANYTHING!” being shouted several times. In one combat, Poog and the Rogue actually took turns mounting and pushing each other off of a very confused dog which the other two party members were desperately trying to kill.

The climax of the adventure came when the four goblins were attempting to flee the ship with their firework booty. Just as they were about to escape, they were accosted by Vorka, the goblin cannibal whose fireworks they had just stolen. She had cast Spider Climb on herself before the party reached her, so her first action in combat was to walk up the vertical mast of the ship high enough so that melee attacks couldn’t reach her. Unfortunately, this prompted Poog to remember that he’d earned an Elixer of Dragon’s Breath during the bonfire challenges. Before the rest of the party knew what was happening, the mast was on fire, and Vorka was quickly jumping down onto the deck to avoid the flames.

The rest of the adventure proceded entirely without incident. Vorka’s rolls were so terrible that she was killed without much of a fuss. And despite my attempt to destroy the player’s fireworks by having the chest catch on fire, they were all dexterous enough to get the prized explosives to safety before they were ignited.

Having now played through it, “We Be Goblins!” is an entertaining way to spend four hours. It suffers significantly from lack of challenge, though. When I run a one-shot game such as this one, my expectation is to see one or more players lose their lives. Since they’re never going to play these characters again anyway, what’s the point of coddling them? This failing is particularly bad since the game comes with its own pregenerated characters. If they knew how powerful the PCs would be, why couldn’t they make the adventure a little tougher to give it the edge it was missing?

I must reiterate that it was fun, though. It brought my group together and gave them a situation which they had a lot of fun with. I’d be a little wary of starting up yet another campaign, but I’m pretty sure everyone agreed that it would be fun to return to those characters (and that group) again someday.

Maybe I’ll run them through an edited version of The Sunless Citadel next…

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!

The Problem with Feats

In both D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, feats are special abilities which are gained once every few levels. They are roughly equivalent to a minor class ability. And, in fact, several feats are simply repackaged class features. The idea behind the system is a good one for a game which favors in-depth character building. While a character’s class controls their general progression, and the selections they make for their skills determines their effectiveness with mundane tasks; feats offer characters the opportunity to excel at something special.

Based on the title of this post, however, I’m sure my readers know there’s a ‘but’ coming. So lets get it over with: BUT, individual feats often suffer from poorly considered design. By which I don’t mean that there is poor balance between feats (though there really really is, it’s just not my point.) The problem is that some feats allow characters to perform tasks which they should be able to perform whether or not they have a feat.

The damage this causes may not be readily apparent, but it weakens the very foundation of the entire game. Anytime something which should be available to all players becomes a feat, it arbitrarily steals that ability from everyone who doesn’t take the feat. Such arbitrary theft of possibilities dulls the most potent edge tabletop role playing has over video games: a limitless amount of options.

I first noticed this problem years ago, when I was rolling a character who would go on to be named Zalekios Gromar. Among the many horrifying things I wanted this dark and evil character to be, was a self-mutilator. And, as it so happened, I knew that a feat existed in the Book of Vile Darkness called Willing Deformity. It was accompanied by a whole host of deformity feats which could be selected after you had Willing Deformity as a prerequisite.

I spent some time weighing whether or not the feat (which didn’t have a mechanical effect I was interested in) was worth it, or whether I should just give up on being a self mutilating character. It took some time before I realized that there was no reason a feat should determine whether or not I could take a knife and cut on my face. The act requires no great skill, it is not a feat by any stretch of the definition. Why should the game disallow me from mutilating myself simply because I don’t want to waste a feat on doing so?

I started noticing the same issue elsewhere after that. Feats which shouldn’t be feats, but should instead be handled on a case by case basis by the GM. Fortunately for me, Zalekios’ GM not only allowed him to mutilate himself, but gave him a mechanical benefit for it in the form of a +2 to intimidate, -2 to diplomacy. That was a pretty clear cut situation, though, and other players might not have such understanding GMs. One might point out that the Book of Vile Darkness is a D&D 3.0 book, but even the Pathfinder update did not fully address this issue. To illustrate that fact, I’ve included several samples of gameplay below. Each demonstrates a player doing something which would not require any special ability on the part of the character, and the GM granting them a benefit for that. Each of these will also represent a feat from either the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, or the Advanced Players Guide.

Player: “This giant slug monster can’t dodge for anything. My fighter is just going to swing at it wildly and as hard as he can, rather than attempting his usual finesse.”
GM: “Very well! Your fighter will take a -1 penalty on attack rolls for as long as he attacks this way, but will gain a +1 to damage on any successful hits.
Feat: Power Attack

GM: You’ve saved the Orc’s life from certain death at the hands of the grotesque mistress of webs. He falls to his knees and thanks you for helping him. He offers you anything you desire as a reward.
Player: “My cleric speaks Orcish. I would like to ask that the orc reward me by aiding me in my adventures henceforth. In exchange, I promise he will always be granted the fullest benefit of my healing ability.
GM: Make a diplomacy check.
*clatter clatter*
Player: “A twenty seven!”
GM: “The orc agrees to follow you henceforth, so long as you always treat him with the same kindness which you have shown today.”
Feat: Leadership

Player: “Since I use a rapier, which doesn’t really lend itself well to strong-armed attacks, I’d like to focus my weapon fighting style on quickness and style, rather than brawn.”
GM: “Sure, just add your Dexterity to your attack rolls rather than your Strength.”
Feat: Weapon Finesse

Player: “Geeze, there’s a lot of guys here. Um…hey! I’ve been using a Halberd for a long time now, and even have some feats to improve my ability with it. Do you think I could do a bunch of fancy moves with it to try and scare some of them?”
GM: “Make an intimidate check.”
*clatter clatter*
Player: “A 17.”
GM: “You’ve successfully intimidated those who can see your display. They seem demoralized.”
Feat: Dazzling Display

Player: “Since the humans in this city are xenophobes, my halfling rogue would like to disguise himself as a human child.
GM: “Alright, you can have a +2 circumstance bonus on that disguise since you picked one which isn’t far off from your current appearance.
Feat: Childlike

Player: I’d like to attempt to protect the wizard from the goblin’s arrows while he casts. The last thing we need right now is this spell getting interrupted!
GM: Sure thing. You’ve got a small wooden shield, so I’ll give him a +5 bonus on concentration checks while you protect him.
Feat: Shielded Caster (Teamwork Feat)

I could go on, but I think the above examples sufficiently illustrate the point. The players and GMs above were doing things right. The player was coming up with responses to situations, and the GM was altering the mechanics of those situations based on the efficacy of the player’s responses. There’s no reason any of those actions, or many others within the Pathfinder game, need to be feats. And yet they are.

Before you go thinking feats are all bad, though, I didn’t just pull these off the top of my head. I had to sit down with the books and carefully consider which feats made sense and which did not. The fact of the matter is that most feats do work. Feats such as Two Weapon Fighting allow players to handle a difficult task more easily, but it does not prevent them from attempting to fight with two weapons unless they take the feat. Skill Focus allows players to become unusually skilled at a group of mundane tasks such as diplomacy or wilderness survival. These types of feats improve characters which take them, but do not imply a restriction upon characters which do not.

The fact that most feats are good does not excuse those which are bad, though. As gamers, we have to point out failures such as this. Role Playing games are essentially nothing more than rules and imagination, so the rules must be well crafted. If a rule can’t be well crafted, then it should be left to the players and the GMs to work out for themselves.

On Character Generation V.S. Character Building

Yesterday I wrote regarding the general consensus I’ve observed in the OSR community regarding player agency and game master guidance. On that issue the OSR community is very much opposed to the emphasis on GM guidance they perceive to be more present in modern games than in older ones. And, while their criticisms have merit, I ultimately disagree.

Today’s post is similar. It again relates to the OSR community, this time relating to character creation and progression. The consensus is that the forms of character generation used in older role playing games are superior to systems of character building present in more modern RPGs. I’ll explore this in more depth below, but first I’d like to define these two terms as I understand them.

Character Generation is quick, simple, and requires a minimum of knowledge on the part of the character. Many character generation systems actively discourage GMs from allowing their players too much access to the rules, because knowing what the rules are will limit what the player thinks they can do. Often these systems are not much deeper than rolling dice for your basic statistics and picking a class. Generating a character is a great way to get into the game quickly, with a minimal amount of time spent on other things.

Character Building, by contrast, can be a very intensive process. Ability scores tend to be generated less randomly, with many of the most modern systems simply using a point-buy as the default. Players have a multitude (some might even say a deluge) of options available to them to customize and specialize their character’s abilities. Character building systems offer greater depth to a player interested in customizing their character.

These are less dichotomous than simple labels would imply. There are gradations between the two, as well as alternatives to either system. Traveler’s ‘lifepath’ system is both amazing, and unlike anything described above. However, in most games (particularly those closely related to Dungeons and Dragons) some variant of character generation or character building is used.

As a matter of personal preference, when I’m a player, I’m very attached to the character building model. That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy the speed, simplicity, and unpredictability of character generation. However, when Zalekios finishes a hard day’s work being a horrible person, and the GM goes home, I’m still on a role-playing high. I want more. Unfortunately, as a player, there’s not a lot more for me to do. The only thing I have control over is my character.

Which is why Zalekios often has written and diagrammed plans prepared for the next gaming session. It’s why I designed my own character sheet layout for him, I’ve made character sheets for NPCs in his backstory and sent them along to my GM in case he ever wants to use them. It’s why I’m level 12, but already have my character sheet ready-to-go for when I hit level 13. The fact of the matter is that I enjoy fiddling with my character.

Having said that, the OSR community is correct. Character building is harmful to RPGs.

When I think back over my career as a game master–a great deal more extensive than my career as a player–I have a hard time coming up with any of my players who enjoyed building their character. Many, if not most, have needed me to help them with updating their character sheet for every successive level. And that includes the group in which I purchased Player’s Handbooks for the entire party. Most people are far more interested in playing the game than they are in deciding where to put their skill points. Or at least most people I’ve played with feel that way. Anecdotal evidence is not hard evidence, after all.

This doesn’t mean that complex character building needs to go away. I enjoy it, and I know for a fact that many others enjoy it as well. But if we want our hobby to grow, then we need to make our favorite games more accessible. We need to engage people who are less interested in putting points into acrobatics, and more interested in leaping across a gaping chasm without caring why they landed safely. This is too big to house rule. It needs to be built-in to future systems.

I propose a theoretical system which offers players a choice between character generation and character building. Those players who want to spend their evenings pouring over rulebooks looking for the perfect combination of skills and talents should be able to do so. While players who don’t want to, shouldn’t have to. They should be able to roll their character ten minutes before the game and be ready to go.

This is a difficult, if not impossible task. In order for such a system to function, characters rolled using the shorter method will need to be just as effective overall as other members of the party built by dedicated players. Yet simultaneously, players who spend hours building their characters must not be made to feel as though their efforts have gone to waste. I think this would be best achieved by making a “general purpose” and “special focus” distinction. Whilst a generated fighter would be good at all the things fighters are good at, a built fighter might excel in fighting casters, or taking damage, or sundering weapons, while being less adept in other areas.

Considering the fact that games such as D&D and Pathfinder are unable to maintain class balance in the systems they’ve already got, my theoretical system seems like a pipe dream. I’m confident, though, that with sufficient ingenuity it can potentially be achieved. I fully intend to devote some of my attention to the problem. Until this magical system makes itself manifest, however, we’ve got to make due with what we’ve got.

I’m presently working within Pathfinder to try and devise a stopgap solution. I want to work out a method of character generation & leveling which functions quickly and simply. My current criteria for the system are:

-Characters created using this method must be reasonably well balanced with characters who are built within pathfinder. I’m never going to be able to make a formula for creating Pathfinder characters which will be able to rival min-maxed characters, so I won’t try. All I want is for a party of casual players to be able to contain both built and generated characters without there being an obvious disparity in power.

-The method must be able to easily create a character of any level, not just first level. And it must maintain its ease of use throughout the leveling process.

-Any mechanisms used in this method of quick character generation should be easy to commit to memory. At the very most it could require a single page printout to run effectively.

I’ve made some minor progress. The difficult items like feats, spells, and class abilities such as rogue talents are still hurdles for me to make a jump check at. However, I did come up with a quick method of generating skills that I like.

Each class grants x + Int Modifier skill points each level. Select a number of class skills equal to x + Int Modifier. These are the character’s skills. The modifier for any check is Level + 3 + Relevant Ability Modifier.

It’s a start.

On Player Agency, and GM Guidance

In an effort to educate myself further on the variety and subtlety of the role playing hobbyscape, I’ve spent the last few weeks trolling for good blogs. Many of the ones I’ve gravitated towards affiliate themselves with the OSR sub genre of role playing. To sum OSR up in a single sentence, it’s essentially a group of people who think RPGs reached their zenith with older games like first edition Dungeons and Dragons, or Hackmaster. And while I doubt you’ll hear me espousing a return to treating elves and dwarfs as classes rather than races, I firmly believe that history is an excellent teacher, regardless of the subject.

One issue discussed frequently is the conflict between what is called Player Agency (D&D’s version of ethical agency, for my fellow philosophy majors) and what I’ll call GM Guidance. This issue is particularly well illustrated by a post over at Hack & Slash. Stated simply, a player has agency when he or she is able to control their own in-game destiny. Any circumventions of a player’s choice, or arbitrary restriction placed on the choices available, reduces player agency.

The general consensus I’ve observed among the OSR community is that modern games fail at creating sufficient player agency. At best, this failure is the result of a failure to communicate the importance of player agency to gamers. At worst, it is argued, modern games actively discourage or prevent an acceptable degree of player agency. The examples given in the post linked above deal primarily with how fourth edition D&D discourages player agency. Any game, though, can suppress player agency if the GM fails to recognize how important it is to preserve.

On this matter, the OSR community has a point. Any game master of quality will warn new GMs of the temptations and dangers of railroading. And I’ve often told new players that the most remarkable thing about this hobby is that you can do anything with it. That freedom, that player agency is what makes these types of games so worth playing. To harm that freedom by telling a player who just wants to hunt for treasure “No, the king wants you to go on a diplomatic mission!” is bad game mastering.

Where I start to disagree with the OSR community is when they espouse unrestricted player agency. The idea that the GM should place no limits whatsoever on player freedom. It seems that many view the role of the GM to be one of world total world creation. NPCs may plead the players for help at a village to the north, and a sage may hint at a long forgotten dungeon to the east, but if the players want to go South West the GM damned well better be able to keep up. As fun as that sounds, I cannot accept it as the ‘correct’ way to play.

The work which goes into simply running a pre-written adventure for your players warrants some guidance from the GM. At a minimum, published adventures are thirty or forty pages long. That’s an evening’s worth of reading, plus any additional time the GM would need to create reference sheets, handouts, maps, or to integrate the module’s locations into the campaign world. And as much time as that would take, it is easily the least work-intensive method to prepare a game. Designing a high quality adventure from scratch requires creativity, and hours of preparation detailing locations, challenges, and so forth.

I always hesitate to use my own experiences as an example in an argument, because that’s simply anecdotal. However, in the years I’ve engaged in this hobby, both as a player and as a GM, I’ve never felt as though fun was lost due to the guidance of a game master. As a player, I make sure the GM knows what my player wants. If I want treasure, I’ll try to find a treasure map, or even just tell the GM that I’d like to go looking for some treasure. As a GM, I ask my players after each game what they liked, what they didn’t like, and if there’s anything they want to do moving forward. Much to my delight, they’re often too busy talking about how awesome it was when they ran away from the tribe of goblins to pay much mind to my probing.

That’s what’s really important: engaging your players. It doesn’t matter if you nudge them along a vaguely linear progression, or simply drop them in a sandbox. So long as your players are engaged and having fun, you’re doing it right. There is no excuse for half-assing your plot hooks and expecting your players to fall in line. Nor is there an excuse for dropping your players into a finely crafted campaign world and being frustrated when they want someone to give them some direction.

I don’t want anybody to think I dislike sandbox style role playing, however. I actually prepared a campaign world for one once, several years back, which I was going to play with members of my World of Warcraft guild. That game fell apart, but the more I learn from the OSR community, the more I want to give it another try with the tools and knowledge I’ve gained in the years since that first attempt. Both styles of play are an excellent way to spend time with friends, or to make new friends.

Above all, Game Masters should remember: players will always defy your expectations. It’s their job to break your game, and if you don’t know how to handle it, you’re doing it wrong.

lrn2GM

Pathfinder House Rule: Simple Experience Points

As a Game Master, I have always hated experience points. It is one of the most frustrating and poorly designed aspects of many role playing games. Including my beloved Pathfinder.

I understand function of EXP, and why it’s valuable. Players enjoy being rewarded for their work, and (along with treasure) experience points are the most direct and tangible form of reward in an RPG. Watching the number of accrued XP grow larger and larger, bringing a character ever closer to the threshold of the next level, is not only encouraging, but it gives players a sense of control over their own progression

For the GM, though, it’s nothing but a pain in the ass. Every encounter in the game needs to have an encounter level applied to it. Each encounter level is modified by the variables in combat. If the giant slime had a challenge rating of 6, and each of the two dozen skeletons had a challenge rating of 1/2, what was the encounter level of the combat? Should the characters gain more experience because the floor was covered in pit traps? Should they gain less because they have that powerful magic item which kept the giant slime pinned down for most of the combat? Should the total amount of experience gained change if the players find it unexpectedly more or less difficult than the GM expected they would?

I don’t shy away from using a complicated system if I can be convinced it needs to be complicated. But experience gain never struck me as having that kind of need. Almost every game I’ve run as a GM has used a kind of ad hoc experience distribution system. I look up how many experience points are needed for the characters to reach the next level, and I give them whatever percentage of that number which I feel like they’ve earned. Most of the time I base that percentage on what speed of progression is optimal to keep the players in-step with events in my game world, rather than basing it off of challenges they have overcome.

At best, the method I’ve been using make experience points redundant. At worst, my method reduces player agency. It’s an arrangement I’ve never been happy with, but not one I never thought of a good solution to. Maybe I was just being dense about it, though, because the solution seems damned obvious now.

Last week during my morning blog reading. I found this post over at Blog of Holding. According to Paul, Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition is normalized so that each level requires roughly 10 encounters to reach. So, instead of bothering to calculate large XP numbers, Paul simply gives his players 1 experience point for every encounter, and once they reach 10xp they get to level.

I immediately fell in love with the simplicity and elegance of the system. But, not wanting to rush into things headlong, I ran the numbers for Pathfinder’s own leveling graph. My formula was simple:

[(Amount of XP required to reach next level) – (Amount of XP required to reach previous level] * (XP awarded to a character in a party of 1-3 when overcoming an encounter with a CR equal to the Average Party Level.)

This should produce the rough number of combats required to reach each level. While it is possible to raise or lower this number by having more members in the party, or dealing with encounters with a CR above or below the APL, this should provide a reliable average.

Since Pathfinder provides groups with slow, normal, or fast leveling progressions, I punched in the numbers sixty times, and lo and behold, the numbers are consistent.

Slow progression levels every 22 encounters, normal progression levels every 15 encounters, and fast progression levels every 10 encounters. I have to admit, as the results started to become apparent, I started to get angry. It seems ridiculous to me that leveling is actually based on such an exceptionally simple system, which is hidden behind needless layers of complexity. I can understand that large XP numbers are perhaps more fun to talk about, but couldn’t they have let GMs in on this? Knowing would have saved me a lot of work.

Having now shown that leveling is simply a function of the number of encounters players have overcome, I will now be using a modified version of Paul’s Simple XP House Rule in all of my future Pathfinder games:

At slow progression, each level requires 44 experience points.
At normal progression, each level requires 30 experience points.
At fast progression, each level requires 20 experience points.
Characters receive 1 experience point for: overcoming an easy battle; escaping from a difficult battle or boss battle; overcoming a non-combat challenge such as a trap, or diplomatic negotiation; other misc tasks the GM would like to offer rewards for.
Characters receive 2 experience points for: overcoming an appropriately leveled combat encounter.
Characters receive 3 experience points for: overcoming a very difficult encounter or boss battle, or completing a major task such as saving a kingdom.

The major difference between my system and Paul’s is that while his system converts the number of encounters into the total amount of required XP, I doubled the number of encounters to get the amount of required XP. This allows for more more nuanced experience rewards. The baseline for most of the experience most characters will receive is 2, which means that the average number of encounters will remain unchanged. Characters who only fight monsters appropriate for their level will still reach a new level every 22, 15, or 10 fights.

However, with my variation on the system, a GM is better able to reward players for more minor actions. Something like successfully disabling a complicated trap, using stealth to avoid a ferocious band of orcs, or convincing a band of marauders that it’s not in their best interests to raid the village which is under the PC’s protection. I’ve never liked RPGs which punished players for skillfully avoiding combat. As a guy who likes to play rogues who rely heavily on stealth, I’ve experienced this in essentially every class based video game I’ve ever played. It’s just poor design.

Let me know what you think. I haven’t actually play tested this system yet, so I’m sure I’ll have cause to update it eventually.

On Zalekios Gromar, and the Undervaluation of Evil Campaigns

Everybody who plays RPGs is familiar with the harm that religious zealotry can cause. Thankfully, the general populace’s opinion of role playing has largely shifted from “satanic” to “dorky” in recent years. But as a person who had to hide his Player’s Handbook from his parents as a teenager, no one is more aware than I that this prejudice still exists. There are people, a lot of people, convinced that role playing games are the first step on the road to virgin sacrifice.

I suppose they’ve almost got it right. But it’s not “virgin sacrifice,” it’s just “virginity,” amirite?

Taking that into consideration, it’s only prudent that Dungeons and Dragons has spent a long time avoiding the subject of evil PCs. Player Characters are good almost by definition, and the evil alignments only exist as labels for NPCs. There are other games which are not quite so shy about evil, such as World of Darkness, but they have that luxury only because most people are unaware that there are pen and paper rpgs other than Dungeons and Dragons.

Even the excellent Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 book “The Book of Vile Darkness,” which was labeled with a sticker marking it as containing mature content, skirts the issue of evil PCs. It presents itself solely as a tool for GMs, to help them create truly vile villains for the truly heroic heroes of their gaming group. Though, to give credit where credit is due, I still think publishing the book was a courageous move on the part of Wizards of the Coast, and I applaud them for that–even if they did avoid a few issues I would have liked to see addressed. Publishing a book which covers topics as controversial as cannibalism, slavery, and incest had the potential to generate a lot of bad press. I like that Wizards of the Coast had enough respect for their product, and for their customers, to risk that.

Yet still, the very concept of evil PCs is relegated to a three page appendix in a 191 page book. Which saddens me, because I love evil PCs.

Who hasn’t imagined what it would be like to break the rules? To take what you want, eliminate those who frustrate you, or even force the world to march to the beat of your own drum? It’s only natural to think about these types of things. Musing about how nice it would be to punch a cop in the face while he’s giving you a speeding ticket does not make you a bad person. It just makes you a person. If anything, it’s a coping mechanism to deal with the sense of powerlessness being at a cop’s mercy can cause.

There is nothing wrong with playing the bad guy in a pen and paper role playing game. Nothing wrong with capturing damsels (male or female) rather than saving them. Nothing wrong with stealing the quest reward rather then earning it. Nothing wrong with constructing a fortress of evil, rather than raiding one. Of course, it’s important that everyone at the table be comfortable with the content of the game. Topics like rape, slavery, or racism should be verboten in groups where they would make others at the table significantly uncomfortable. However, villains exist in any D&D game, so any table should already have an acceptable level of villainy established.

Allow me to introduce you to Zalekios Gromar.

Zalekios is a level 12 gestalt character, with four levels of Hexblade, ten levels of rogue, and ten levels of warlock. He is the most chaotic evil motherfucker in the room, and that’s true even if he’s in the same room as Orcus. He’s committed every depraved deed you can think of from conceiving a child with the same succubus which gave birth to him, to using that child’s bones to fashion a sword. He is a murderer, a slaver, a cannibal, and a rapist. He is a highly intelligent sociopath with a penchant for taking unnecessary risks just to further pain those who cross his path.

He’s been my player character for half a decade now.

I was in Highschool when I first rolled up his stats. I only had one friend who shared my interest in D&D at the time, and as the more experienced player he did all the GMing. Sometimes his girlfriend would join the party, but most often it was just him and I. After playing several of the traditional hero types (like Tarin the Half-Elf rogue, or Xunil’Nerek Sharpedge the Illumian Fighter), I got it into my head that I would very much like to play an evil character. I had read about the Vasharan race in the Book of Vile Darkness–an entire species of pure sociopaths intent on killing the gods themselves–and I wanted in.

I won’t bore you with the details of a campaign which has lasted five years or longer. To be honest, a summary wouldn’t sound all that different from the summary of a normal D&D game. I fought an ancient civilization of phase-shifted trolls, infiltrated a magic college, explored a castle which sank beneath a lake in ages past, foiled a plot to trick two nations into going to war with one another, killed a dragon, and established a stronghold. Zalekios has even been taken through at least one published adventure (the Standing Stone) without completely breaking it. The only thing which really changes is an evil game is the motivation and the methodology.

Allow me to use a recent game as an example. For reasons unknown, the plane of fire intersected with the prime material plane. A rift was torn between the two dimensions, and now a large area of land which was once peaceful planes is a flaming hellscape. I don’t know yet how it happened, but when it did happen it burned down my secret apartments within the city. So, thus enraged, I set out to see what was up, and what I found was a tower filled with fire-breathing goblins.

Now, Zalekios had decided recently that he wanted to acquire some minions. Conquest was starting to sound good to him in his old age, and subduing a tribe of goblins seemed like a good first step. So what did Zalekios do? He kicked in the tower’s doors, melted the faces of the goblins which got in his way as he ascended to the top of the tower, and confronted the goblin king. Zalekios waited until a large number of the goblins had rushed to their king’s aid before cutting the king’s head off, picking it up, and taking a bite out of it as though it were an apple.

I then stood up at the table, and (blatantly ripping off a game I’ve never played) shouted “I am the blood god! Bring blood to the blood god! Brings skulls for his skull throne!”

This serves as an excellent example of how an evil game can function. Allow the player’s to revel in their bloodlust. Give them motivations like rage and vengeance to get them started on their adventures, and allow them to further their own evil schemes within the context of the greater storyline. The GM which runs Zalekios’ game does a good job of this, even if he does constantly complain about how difficult Zalekios is to plan for. I’ve promised him my next character in ones of his games will be a paladin named Kronus Mountainheart to make up for it.

Despite spending five years inside the head of an imaginary sociopath, sometimes to the point of excitedly shouting his evil proclamations at the table, I think I’ve become a better person rather than a worse one. It’s difficult to point to moments in time and identify them as when you became ‘more ethical.’ However, it’s only since I started playing Zalekios that I came to acknowledge and confront the fact that I carry a lot male/white/heterosexual/cisgendered privilege. I would call that an ethical step forward.

In closing, I’d like to offer a lists of “evil campaigns” which I’ve come up with. I’ve actually got a notebook filled with potential plots for future campaigns which I’d like to either run or play in someday. Evil ones probably make up about 25% of those. (Note that all of these below are for D&D/Pathfinder unless otherwise noted)

Band of Thieves The PCs would all play the role of thieves, and each adventure would be focused on stealing some item or items. At low levels they might simply be knocking over taverns or shops for money, but they could eventually build up to stealing great pieces of artwork or even the crown jewels.

Band of Assassins Much like the band of thieves idea, but rather than the object being the theft of items, the adventures would focus on killing people. At first perhaps they’re merely contracted by a jealous wife eager to have her cheating husband out of the picture. However, as their levels rise they could find themselves in the middle of political intrigue, or plots to usurp the throne.

Urban Vampires There are games specifically designed for the players to be vampires, but I would very much like to try it in Pathfinder. Vampires have such a unique blend of limitations: inability to go into sunlight, inability to cross running water, inability to enter buildings without an invitation, etcetera. I would love to throw all those restrictions at players, and watch them try to survive and flourish in a town. Particularly one in a setting where everybody knows monsters exist, and there are many out there eager to fight them.

Slavers Touchy as the subject may be, slavery is a reality in many D&D style games. And where there’s slavery, there is the slave catcher. Someone who needs to find people which can be taken without being missed–or who needs to be able to fight off those who miss them. Adventure variety could come from certain kinds of slaves being needed (such as ogre slaves for a large construction project) or re-capturing a specific slave which has escaped.

Pawns on the Overlord’s Chess Board I actually did start running a campaign based on this idea once. The PC’s boss is Dark Lord Evilguy, and he needs them to further his goals so that he might achieve the world conquest he’s so long desired. What’s great about this is that it’s just as open-ended as a standard campaign. While good heroes fight goblins to save small villages, these PCs would fight the small villages and tell the local goblin tribe to start sending tribute to Mount Scaryhorror.

BBEG* in training The PCs start at level 1. Their only task: to conquer the world. They could choose any method they find preferable. Perhaps they’ll construct an elaborate plan which is undetectable by the forces of good until its too late. Or, perhaps, they’ll immediately set out to conquer one small village at a time.

Imperial Navy This is for the old West End Games D6 Star Wars game. I don’t have much of a plan for it really, but I would really love it if all of my PCs were members of the Imperial Navy. TIE fighters, Star Destroyers, and greasing rebel scum. That’s the life!

There are more, but I think that will do for now. Thanks for reading.

*(You may see this on the blog from time to time. It means Big Bad Evil/End Guy)