I cold not limit myself to a single D, topic. I had three I had ideas to comment about, and didn’t want to wait for next year.
Dwarves are my favorite race. I don’t often play them. I read a fantasy novel in the 80’s. I won’t name the novel to avoid spoilers for those who might not have read it. I REALLYhate spoilers. One of the major characters was a dwarf. I identified with this dwarf and the author killed him off. The author did a good job of making me care for this dwarf, and I was mad that he had killed off my favorite character.
That experience may be part of it, but another part is that dwarves are limited and can’t be magic users or other kinds of characters I like to run. I am trying to think back and I don’t recall any characters I played that were dwarves. I have had characters that were human, elves, half-elves, and halflings. Of the old character sheets I have from back in the day, I am not finding any dwarves. I will play a dwarf for the next character I have.
I also want to play a paladin. In the rules they are only human, but why can’t other races have holy warriors? I know in my brother, Robert’s game, one of his wife’s characters is a halfling paladin. In my campaign I will allow paladins of any character race. I’m not sure I want to play a dwarven paladin, I was thinking more of a human for that. I suppose I’ll make a decision when next I get to roll up a new character.
Dungeons. I like maps of them. I played in a lot of them in the early days. Not so much from college on. Lots of underground, mostly caverns. A few passages under the castle, etc. I have never played in a mega dungeon. I am thinking of making a mega dungeon. I don’t want to put too much time into it, in case my eventual players don’t want to explore that much into it.
Dragons. As a player, I have rarely encountered dragons in the game. Large enough dragons are so deadly that only the most powerful characters can even stand and fight them. I have seen and heard of DM’s playing dragons like they are stupid. They are described as intelligent and some of them can cast spells. That does not mean that they can’t be vain, or manipulated if one knows the right buttons to push, but they are not stupid. I also prefer images of dragons that are more powerful looking, not the long, skinny oriental image of dragons. I am not persistent enough as an artist to develop the skills to draw them the way my brother, Robert does. Those pictures and many from Dragon magazine and the Holmes Blue Box cover art are my idea of what a dragon is “supposed” to look like.
Over the weekend I ran across a comment on a video that made a comment that is so common sense that I took it as a critical fail vs. the clue stick.
It is so OBVIOUS! Why did I not think of that or have read it somewhere in the early days or have other players and DMs suggest it to me?
For spell casters on their character sheets next to the name of the spell(s) they have selected for the day, write the _PAGE NUMBER_ of the spell in the Player’s Handbook.
How simple is that? It saves having to make copies of the spells, write them out long hand, etc.
As a DM, I really should do this for NPCs. I should also note the page in the DMG that lists the DM’s notes on specific spells.
I don’t recall seeing any character sheets that suggest the page number of the spell.
I would also add a note to page of the “original” spell if it says, “This is the same as the Nth level Cleric spell….”
I’m going to have to make a spreadsheet of the spell lists for each class and level, and the page in the Player’s Handbook, Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, and the page in the DMG for the DM notes on PH spells, and notes/links to spells that are the “original”. This would be a handy index to have in print for players.
I think it is a good idea to make a note of the pages you use most, a custom index, to speed any need for reference to rules. For example, for player generation, note the pages in the DMG for secondary skill, height and weight.
For the DM, note the page in the Monster Manual for monsters in case you need more detail than the stat block. This would be better used when building an encounter deck or placing creatures in a location, but would be handy for a quick review of a creature the characters have not yet encountered, to make sure you don’t miss anything. For example, I read on a forum a few weeks back where some characters encountered a clay golem and the DM did not take note of the damage done being only healed by a 17th or higher level cleric. That would be an interesting side quest. Beat the golem, but have to find super cleric to heal you. A tenth level character stuck at 5 hit points would be interesting.
Now, to be fair, in the old days, for my spell casting characters, I went to the library and copied the pages with the spells and for magic-users, basically made a spell book via cut & paste/tape, so I had all the information in one place. Ten cents a copy back then was a lot of money, but I poured a lot more quarters into pong, space invaders, galaga, centipede, etc. When I didn’t have the money, I wrote out spell information in longhand.
The availability of rules books in PDF makes search easy, but not everyone can run a computer or tablet at the game table.
We had the second session of play while my youngest son was here over his spring break on Friday. My oldest son’s girlfriend joined us.
There was a lot of delays, etc. but finally got underway. The boys’ characters had amassed some wealth and spent a lot to fortify the house they bought in town and buy iron bound chests with high quality locks and lots of supplies.
Finally, all that was done and they were on their way to check out a kobold warren they had cleared a couple months ago in game time. On their way out of town, they passed their favorite tavern and a woman rushed in to report her husband missing. They agreed to look for her husband, and artist, who went south of town, the same direction they were heading, to get his pigments and stuff to make his paints.
They ran into a couple of plains lions going to their stronghold. The lions messed them up, but they killed one and drove off the other.The hilarious thing is that my youngest son’s character, Fan the elven fighter/magic-user had a barrel of beer in the wagon of supplies. The other two jumped off to fight the lions. His first effort at helping was to throw his empty beer mug at a lion, he rolled a 19 and hit it in the head. You can’t make this stuff up. We all had a great laugh at that!
They got to the former kobold stronghold and the men they hired to guard it were gone, as they had not returned to pay or resupply them for a couple weeks past their expected pay date. Thankfully, nothing had moved in. They locked two of the doors and the druid cast fire trap on the third.
They then continued looking for the artist. They found his trail and managed to find him on top of a rock surrounded by kobolds. They killed all but one, and charmed one, so now they have two charmed kobolds.
They got almost back to town and had a random encounter with a bombardier beetle, but I rolled that it had a positive reaction so it was just going to walk on by, but the druid decided to do speak with animals. It was fun playing a creature with no intelligence talking about food. He tried to get the beetle to to understand marks on the ground to try and figure out how many beetles were back in its burrow. I had to say, “Me no understand differential equations….” before they got that the beetle was not smart enough to understand. We had a good laugh at that.
They finally made it back to town and returned the artist to his family.
They got healed up, etc.
The next day, my youngest’s character goes looking for a guy who sells treasure maps. He went to the bar he is known to frequent, but he went in the evening and then bright and early the next day. The next day, upon not finding him, he offered ten gold pieces to whoever could find the buy. That cleared out the tavern. Word soon spread that someone had a bounty on the map seller’s head and there was basically a riot in town. I had to give a very non-obvious hint that a lie that the map seller had been found and the bounty paid finally calmed the people.
We ended play on that note.
One can never tell what will happen once you mix in a few players. We may see about trying to play with Google+ Hangouts and Roll20 to keep this going. It is definitely a LOT of fun!
Picking a name for my characters, i.e. that I play when not a GM, seems to be tough. I have come up with a few good ones over the years, some I still remember without having to try to find old character sheets.
I start in a new Google+/Roll20 game tomorrow. We have a main character and a backup to use when the other is in training/unavailable/dead. I have a dwarf fighter and a human ranger. For the dwarf fighter, I used the name of my Lord of The Rings online dwarven champion, Thorfus Ironhand. As an aside, I started playing LOTRO so I could get a D&D feel on my own. It is not the same as D&D, and is far too repetitive. The dungeons, rescues, wars, and quests in D&D may have repetition, but the interaction of players and DM with the chaos of players running around the DM’s sandbox is rarely repetitive, except for some meme that develops among the players and recurring NPCs. There are few things that a single player can do on his own in D&D, unless working on things that below level. D&D is designed for team effort.
Yes, there are lots of random name generators online and I have some of my own, and lists of names. Sometimes, you just want to be creative, but often it is like only the sound of crickets is found….
I’m thinking of Rallan, rhymes with talon. Talon had come to mind, but if memory serves, there is some character in a book, TV series, or something that uses Talon. I don’t want to be accused of copying something I have not read/seen.
One of my son’s plays his character as if he is all that, and tries to hit on the daughter/barmaid or a powerful NPC who runs a tavern/inn. The characters know Olo’ (short for Ologran) is powerful, because they have seen him in a fight and other patrons of the tavern talk about him. He is a retired adventurer who got tired of the risks, but likes to help out other adventurers with good equipment and tries to steer them away from the dangers he knows about that green adventurers should avoid. Although the players are free to ignore his advice….
My son acts like his character is important and the rules of social convention don’t apply to him, so I throw it back in his face, and Olo’, charges him exorbitant prices or ignores him.
My son acts this way IRL, and my attempts to show him this is not right via his interactions with NPCs has caught his attention. Raising children is hard, but this is one way I can get through to him without him suspecting that I am trying to get through to him.
I have the wisdom of years and experience to know how to play the NPCs, in the character of the NPC, and not end up with a scene.
What is funny, is that since we play AD&D, there is training before claiming the skills and abilities of the next level. Olo’ trained him for 2nd level fighter and beat on him pretty good for a couple weeks. He made it to third level fighter and got beat on for three more weeks. He quit hitting on Olo’s daughter, but still tries to talk to Olo’ like he is his equal or his better. Olo’ believes in merit and honor, but is not above an tall tale, or embellishments of his exploits. Those who know him, are never quite sure when Olo’ is telling it straight, or stretching the truth, or just making it up.
I find playing with my sons to have a different quality than playing with my siblings and friends. I find that I am teaching them lessons about life, where the game parallels real life.
It is fun playing with my sons, and we still have moments of laughing at the silliness of some situations or things that happen with dice rolls. In our last session, if I made the initiative roll, I couldn’t hit, but if I lost initiative, I tended to hit.
I have read of other dad’d playing RPGs with their kids of different ages and there is a different aspect of teachable moments at different age levels. The youngest kids, it is about understanding the game, and making good choices about equipment, etc. From my experience, the teaching of teenagers and older, comes in the roleplaying and how they choose to have their characters interact with NPCs.
What sorts of teachable moments have you had with your kids, grandkids, nieces & nephews, etc?
I feel like a magic user who can cast a new level of spell!
I have to thank the D&D 40th Anniversary Blogging challenge for getting me back on track with my blog.
I find blogging about ideas and fleshing out concepts helps me to clarify and solidify them so that I can present them to players as a better DM.
Reading and commenting on so many other bloggers and G+ pages and Facebook RPG pages adds to the ideas.
I find that it is a banquet where there is so much to try or look at, there is no time to eat.
In other words, I am spending so much time gathering ideas and tables that I am not generating adventures and lists of pre-generated encounters. I like the idea of 3×5 cards with pre-generated encounters of whatever it is I have on my standard encounter tables, so it is ready to go. Don’t write on or destroy those cards. They can be re-used. I think one could have variations on an orc patrol. Have 6 variations of numbers, weapons, leaders and treasure. Roll 1d6 to see which one it is. Use pencil to check it off the players destroy it. For towns and cities and patrols on their frontiers, determine how much of the city guard is set aside for patrols and spec out one or more patrols. Instead of 3×5 cards, one can use a text file or spreadsheet to track the information.
My youngest is here to visit over his spring break and he, big brother, and I are wrapping up our last scenario and onto new things. I wish he was closer so we could do more. We had a lot of fun and hope to squeeze in another session before he has to go back to his mom’s.
A Bullette can kill an entire 2nd level party in 3 rounds. I found this out because I was DM for our next session. We rotated DM and characters were played. It was my first time as DM. I REALLY wanted to have a bullette in play, so I forced an encounter and it annihilated the group. My intent was not a TPK. I was not fully aware of the power of the combat tables and how hard it was to hit and how easy it was for it to hit back. We all called a do over and I did not DM for a long time after that.
A TPK where I was a player. My brother, Robert, was the DM. Brett and I were the players. There were just the two of us. We were in a desert campaign and headed to a canyon with a cave that was ten or twenty feet off the ground. There was some sort of treasure there. Prior to setting out, we learned of a vendor at Abdul’s (Abdul’s is another story.), that had semi-automatic crossbows that could fire several shots a round. It was based on the Chinese crossbow. Some orcs were in the area and spotted us. We figured we would be OK in the cave, but there were like 20 orcs to the two of us. We became lunch because we used swords instead of the crossbows that could unload several shots per round.
I ran across this post today that reminded me that my brother, Robert, and I used the game board from Avalon Hill’s Waterloo as a star map for a science fiction space combat exploration game we made up in the 80’s.
My planet/system had the brilliant name of Erloowat, I don’t recall what Robert named his.
There were two or three games we made up back then. A Science Fiction/Space RPG we called Scout, and a space pirate game centered around ship capture/combat. I don’t recall now if our space combat game built on the rules from our space pirate game. The rules for all of them were pretty broad. The space/interplanetary war game was actually more like an RPG without a GM. We didn’t have enough rules to cover certain scenarios to make it truly playable the way we intended. I think we just played at it for an afternoon or two and it faded away.
The problem with making your own game is defining the parameters and limitations of it so that there is an agreed upon framework to make it playable without a GM or the creators on standby to deal with scenarios as they develop.
The benefit of RPGs is that you only need enough rules to build enough framework to be able to have fun, and as play develops, the players and GM work together to fill in the gaps, thus the prevalence of house rules and homebrew games that are a freankensteinian combination of multiple ideas from other RPGs and the experience of actual play and house rules. Our Scout game was just such a one. We took ideas from Traveller, Star Frontiers, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, and probably others I don’t recall to get mechanics/rules for things we had trouble fleshing out ourselves. Robert also wrote great short stories that tied into Scout. We passed them around in high school and kept asking for more. (I wish he would publish his writings, he could even do the artwork for the book covers.)
As I was writing this I recalled another RPG we had was based on Androids, I think that was more of what would be a LARP. However, we did not run around in costume, it was more a sit around and talk about things our characters did. We drew ships and different kinds of androids and robots and wrote little scenarios and stories. I don’t recall if this preceded our discovery of Blue Box Holmes Basic D&D or not. I know one guy involved moved away at some point, and I don’t recall what grade. It was spring of 7th grade we discovered D&D, I don’t recall when David moved away.
I’m not talking about characters or NPCs out for in-game revenge. This is personal, where one player does something another does not like and gets back at them in the same or a different game.
In high school, my brother, Robert, and I played in a game of AD&D. We were in the school library. A member of our group decided he wanted a Drow character, an evil Drow character, and the DM allowed it. The problem was that my brother and I had good elf characters. We did not handle it in a good way, but when our group traveled and made camp for the night, when the Drow was sleeping we killed him. Brett, the player vowed that he would kill our Boot Hill characters, because he was the GM for that. So a week or so later, at our house, when we next played Boot Hill, he made good on his word. This was the same guy who ran the high level character mentioned yesterday.
I don’t remember all the details, but the bad guy rode into town with a wagon, and whatever started the conflict,the villain won because under the tarp was a Gatling gun. It sprayed so much lead that we did not stand a chance.
As I look back on this, I see two places where this should have been handled differently.
One, the DM should have advised on an evil character running around with good characters. We were a brand new party and there was no thought to how we would work together.
Second, if we killed him in his sleep, was that really a good thing? An alignment deviation should have been in the mix.
One can argue if the morality of the good players is to kill all evil things on sight, or only after they do something harmful. The DM needs to set the tone.
I don’t recall who the DM was, but they were not very experienced.
Google+ Hangouts are a way to do group conference calls online. They can be just voice, or mix the use of video and voice.
Roll20 is a Virtual Table Top (VTT). It works in your web browser, so it can work on a computer, laptop, tablet, or even a phone. From my experience, I prefer a larger screen. The display has an area that is the “table-top”. It can hold fancy maps of terrain, buildings, dungeons, etc, or just a grid to keep track of marching order or positions of objects, players, and monsters. Roll20 has integration with Google+ Hangouts. You accept the invitation to the G+ Hangout and sign in when it starts. You also sign into Roll20 when it is time. I signed into Roll20 early, so I don’t know if joining the hangout would take me to Roll20 or not.
I have seen YouTube videos of past Google+ Hangouts, and have had invitations to them before, but never had the time to get involved in one. It does not require the use of video. That it only useful if you want to see the other players. If you don’t have a webcam or don’t want to be on video, you just need a microphone so others can hear you, and decent speakers so you can hear them. A headset with a microphone would work, as it appears some other players were using. The nice things about using G+ Hangouts is that it showed who was speaking, either by the video of the speaker going to the center of the screen, or showing the picture displayed by those not using video. Having the hangout window open covers part of the screen. It is not required for it to be open, but I found it helpful to have a window just big enough open to see who was speaking. That made it more like a face-to-face session. If you have two monitors, it would work better to have it on one screen and the VTT on the other.
I have a Roll20 account, it is free to use, but for a fee, you can get some more bells and whistles. Those are not necessary to run or join a game. I have the basic, free account. I have gone through the Roll20 tutorial about how to do things. You can display different maps, with a grid. You can use tokens for players, monsters, and items. There is a library of free tokens and maps, and you can upload your own. For a fee, you can get specialized tokens and maps that give you more options. It also features a dice roller that just says what dice was rolled, pus any modifiers and gives the result. It has an option to show 3-D dice that roll across the VTT, but it is slow and slows down the game. To roll, you either have to type a command in the chat window, or set up a macro with frequently used rolls. For example, “/r d20” rolls a d20. As a GM, you can have multiple Roll20 campaigns/games, and as a player, you can participate in multiple games. There are multiple layers that can be displayed and the GM can see things on the GM only layer
The game I participated was Vault of Time hosted by the founder of the Friday Night D&D: Next Google+ Community. As the name says, it is Friday night. The game was slated to start at 9:00 PM. To play, you roll up a 10th level character using the D&D Next beta play test rules. I had signed up to the D&D Next beta at Wizards of the Coast, so I had the latest rules. D&D Next is D&D 5.0 and is slated for release this summer. This was the more challenging part of the whole thing. I rolled up a character using real dice, then I had to read through a PDF on character creations, then classes, then races, then equipment. I started about 6:30 PM and was “done” with my character about 8:30. I am old school, so I know how to roll up a character and get started in short order. D&D Next can be played that way, but it has been influence by all version s of D&D. I have played D&D Basic and 1st Edition, and had minor exposure to 2nd edition. I have no exposure to D&D 3.0, 3.5, or 4.0. As I understand it, the later versions of D&D, i.e. 3.0 and later, have all the feats, skills, and abilities that are not part of D&D or AD&D. I did not have time to read and understand what choices to make for feats, etc. so I had as close to an AD&D dwarven fighter as imaginable.
Playing the game.
I signed in to Roll20 early and there were only two other players. One invited me to play poker. Roll20 can simulate a deck of cards for situations that require use of cards. The actual game session started about ten minutes late. The GM had been sick last week and cancelled last week’s session. For this week, he had not had time to get maps, etc. uploaded to Roll20, so we just used a grid over a graphic of a stone floor. We have tokens with the names of each player to show marching order, etc. The VTT has a whiteboard type feature, so the GM could draw the rooms and doors we encountered. This game is just a group of players who get together and play through the same dungeon, and my character was just there, no explanation, etc. (I don’t have a problem with this, as the idea was for me to learn and have fun.) The regulars in this game may have started at tenth level, but had over 100 hit points, I only had 71. They were like 20th level or something. The all male group of players were in the 30 to 50 age range, give or take. There were several wizards in the group, and they had all kinds of spells going all over the place. My understanding is that you can play D&D Next with a subset of the rules to be closer to D&D/AD&D, or have all the bells and whistles and make a first level character that is a demi-god. I definitely see why later versions of D&D have been described as emulating video games like WOW or LOTRO. As a basic fighter, my character was only good for taking up space, moving, and fighting. I ended up being the only character in the session to take a hit, and lost 16 hit points, but was healed at the end of the damage inducing encounter of 15 hit points.
I deferred to other players a lot as I was there to learn how this online role playing format worked. I found a group of guys that reminded me a lot of other groups of gamers I have played with over the years. There was a lot of non play related banter, and meta-gaming. The players spent a lot of time trying to decide what to do in some situations, sort of like my ex and I got into when we were trying to decide what restaurant to go to. I kept expecting the DM to have a random encounter come and give us trouble for dawdling. There were no random encounters. We could have done a lot more exploration of the dungeon/caverns we were in, but were caught up in lots of back and forth over what should have been quick decisions. There was no elected leader, and the DM did not enforce order or keep us focused on the game. There was very little role playing of people speaking as their characters. That’s ok, I can play either way. I did try to roll play my dwarf in a way to move things along.
Our first obstacle was a slow moving underground stream about five feet deep and twenty feet wide. We spent 20 or so minutes trying to decide/figure out what to do. The next obstacle was a magic archway with an ominous inscription that could be interpreted as something good or bad. No one wanted to go through it, but we spent 20+ minutes with the wizards arguing about how to dispel a permanent magic item they had no clue what it did. Finally, we went the other way and the next ominous sign only delayed us for about five minutes. We went to a room with a brass door and opened it to find a room with two doors on the north, east, and west walls, total 6 doors. We started working out way around the room and two rooms had two wights we easily slew in two or three rounds, two more rooms had four juju zombies that took a little longer. The DM said that he levelled up the zombies so they would challenge us. I was hit in the second of those rooms. The next to last door had a passage. We decided to check out the other room and it had a wight. We slew the wight and ended the session about 1:30 PM. The DM said we each got 28,775 experience points. That is enough to put me to 11th level. The DM said he did not divide the XP. In earlier rooms we did find a +1 sword and a ring of levitation and one pair of wights was guarding a potion of flying. Not dripping with magic or treasure, but XP wise seemed pretty easy. What is odd is that I needed less than 28,000 XP to go from 10th level to 11th level. All classes use the same experience point advancement chart. The DM rolled actual dice and was on video, so we saw him look down to roll. It reminded me of DMs rolling their dice behind the screen.
My Take:
I had fun learning about the online role playing tools and playing and laughing with a group of gamers. D&D Next is not my thing, at least not all the feats, etc. The players tell the DM what they can or can’t do and what they need to roll to do things. I think the DM should set the parameters. There are so many options for a simple fighter, that it felt like I was playing a spellcaster in AD&D. A fighter should not be so difficult to create or play, but that’s because I learned how over 30 years ago.
As for the tools of online roleplaying I like what I see. Google+ is just the means of gathering together, and Roll20 is the table where we gather round. Roll20 is flexible enough to allow just a blank grid to show marching order, terrain/dungeon, objects, and monsters. You don’t need miniatures or a fancy map to play, but if you want fancy, you can do it. For the harried DM who is short of preparation time, I can see the value of using it to show basic positions and for rolling dice.
I have an AD&D/OSRIC game I plan to participate in on Wednesday to see how another DM does it.
I will do a few more sessions to get familiar with things before I dip my toes in the water to run my own game(s).
Here is a picture of what we saw when fighting the wight in the last room before play ceased.I forgot to mention that one of the wizards created a zombie from the remains of one of the juju zombies. No one seemed to have an issue with that, so alignment did not make a big difference in this game.
Friday Night D&D Next
[EDIT] I forgot to mention sound. Roll20 has a feature to allow you to play background music and sounds. There is a collection of royalty free music, and you can upload your own. There are also other music/sounds available if you join their fee plan.
During our play another player was playing music. I don’t have a problem with music during play if it complements what is going on. I found that in the environment of a Google+ Hangout it was distracting from play. It was not my kind of music, I’m not sure what it was, and to me, did not fit. Also it was louder than it should have been at times. A way to put it in the background would have helped.
The other issue was on my end. I live across the street from the house next to the train tracks going through town. We have about five or six streets from one end of town to the other that cross the tracks. The Federal law requires the horn to be blown at each crossing. I am used to it and tune it out, so I was then conscious of it and muted the sound when there was a train. I will have to use a microphone that I can limit what it picks up so I don’t blast out the others and have to mute my microphone to avoid interfering with play. This is a drawback to running a game of my own.
