I’m getting prepared for tomorrow night’s gaming session, the first weeknight game I’ve played in a long time.  To get ready for this week’s session, I’m continuing on my exploration of Dave The Game’s 5×5 method, seen over at Critical Hits.  Last month, everybody’s favorite Chatty DM did a guest post where he detailed a slightly different perspective to help plan shorter term games.

Great Minds Think Alike

It seems that great minds think alike!  I used the 5×5 method to outline my current campaign, but quickly realized there were some specific plot points that didn’t quite line up to a full epic plot arc so I opted for Chatty’s approach.  That’s one element that I love about the 5×5 method: you can use it to drill in to whatever level detail that you want to flesh out a specific encounter or plot point.

I used the 5×5 method to design some roleplaying encounters in town, and after my players significantly deviated from my planned activities I discovered a new aspect of this tool: it’s very easy to apply on the fly.  I had planned that the town had a council of five prestigious townsfolk, and the rogue started asking around about if there was any underhanded dealings going on that might offer some clues on a cult that the group was investigating.  I thought this was an interesting idea, so I quickly jotted down an idea that popped into my head and during a break, I generated the five steps that led the group back onto my prepared path.  This was pretty seamless, and provided an opportunity to reward the rogue for thinking to investigate a lead that I had not considered.

Is anyone else using the 5×5 method and meeting success?  If not, you really should be.  Let’s hear your experiences in the comments!

Last year after Gen Con, I dreamt of the guys from Critical Hits and the Chinese Olympic swim team. This year, my brain waited a few weeks, and then dropped a double-header on me.

Dream The First, In Which I Get Drafted

The dream I had Friday night consisted of me being at Gen Con 2009. Again. Apparently, they decided to hold it again two weeks after the fact, and everybody that was there before was back again. I decided I was going to do a lot more gaming and still hang out with friends and meet all the cool people I did before. Because I had a second chance!

Well, this found me playing board games in Andy Collins’ hotel room. Except he didn’t look, sound, or act in any way like the real guy (aside from being very nice). I don’t remember anything about what we played other than that it was fun. I do remember he has some secret paper covered in this gold paint that flashed when you touched it, because my 1 year old son Sam suddenly appeared (wearing my wireless headphones from work) and started banging on it.

At some point in this process, I became aware of the fact that I’d been drafted to go to war with some unknown enemy. So had every other male at the convention, and it was widely known that we had to report for duty on Sunday so we couldn’t go to any events then. Some of us had been given weapons and battle-suits to wear, and they were all brightly colored like anime stuff but they were too big and appeared to be made of canvas. The weapons were huge white laser rifles, but I never saw anybody fire one.

So we go through the convention, ending up for some reason at an old restaurant that gave me lots of 2-liter bottles of soda from the 1970’s, and then Yax and a bunch of other people helped me take them to a nearby Wal-Mart and sneak them onto the grocery shelves as some big joke. Some of the bottles were full of pink liquid and had jewel-encrusted crucifixes as caps, and were marked with some equation that made me assume they were full of acid or hormones or something, so we didn’t put those out. Mostly because we thought that was too obvious.

At last, the convention came to an end, and I found myself back in front of my grandmother’s old house (where a good 50% of my dreams end up eventually), and I’m marching in this big huge parade of people going to war, and we’re about to find out what the hell is going on. People are hanging out of their windows and lining the streets, cheering. Confetti is everywhere. This is the first time I realize how big this must be, and I’m getting nervous. My grandmother, for some reason, is our platoon leader, and she finds a little bottle with a scroll in it on the ground, which apparently has her orders in it. However, she won’t let me see it. We get into her backyard to a giant briefing, and they’re about to announce who the enemy is when I wake up GOD DAMN IT.

I would also add that anytime I went anywhere, I rolled a die to determine how many spaces I moved.

Dream The Second, In Which I Have Xbox-Themed Swimwear

Saturday night, my subconscious decided I needed a third chance at Gen Con this year – because once again I found myself there, 2 weeks after the real deal just like the last time. However, this time the convention was held at what appeared to be the beach resort from Beverly Hills 90210. I do not really remember a whole lot about the convention other than showing up to places and running around.

What I do remember is that I had orders from some shadowy overlord to find and neutralize a secret agent of Paizo Publishing who was actually a robot made of emeralds who wore little round goggles. And by the end of it, I wasn’t sure what side I was on, because I tracked the Paizo Emerald Robo-Agent into a small locally-owned supermarket, and he gave me a bag full of Super Bubble gum.

I would also add that I had Xbox-themed EVERYTHING on the whole time. Shirt, swim trunks, sandals, sunglasses, the works. And I felt as proud about this outfit as a 3rd grader with new tennis shoes does when he thinks they’ll make him run way faster than the other kids.

Take That, Freud

So, yeah. I have no idea what prompted all this other than a raucous night of boardgame-playing Friday night. I’m moderately certain I dreamt of Gen Con a little last night too, because I remember a lot of hotels (and one of my friends living in one year-round so he didn’t have to work to find one for the ‘con every year).

Up today is another topic from our GM’s Jam that took place at GenCon this year, continuing on from where I left off yesterday.  It was another audience question, once again relating to 4e D&D: How do you speed up combat?

Once again, we received varied excellent feedback from the panel.  This topic actually sparked quite a bit of discussion from both the panel members and people in the audience, which all seemed to share similar tales of long, protracted battle sequences.

To Retreat or Not Retreat

One of the options brought forth by the panel (sadly, not me) was to simply have a certain portion of lesser baddies or minions just up and take off after one of their leaders is struck down.  Or, if for some reason the players are putting up a particularly noble, valiant fight make the group of baddies make the equivalent of a morale check to determine whether or not an expeditious retreat is the better option.

At this point, an audience member asked what to do about the perception of lost treasure from the baddies that ran away.  Chgowiz replied back in very short order “just have them drop what they’ve got!”  and continued on to say that you could go so far as to make it a random roll to see if they dropped any treasure they might have had.  This is a very elegant solution to both problems: the players get a shorter fight (potentially easier too!), and they may get some treasure out of it for scaring the beejeezus out of some guards.

Fighting to the Death

My advice on the matter was to simply reduce the number of enemies in a given encounter, then taking the option to ramp up the number of battles to continue to challenge the player characters.  This gives the player characters the joy of fighting a baddie to the death, the thrill of rifling through his remains for treasure, and you can scale it throughout the game session to insure an appropriate challenge.

Mix ‘n Match

Probably the best option is to liberally combine these two concepts, occasionally ignoring this advice all together.  I don’t think the longer running combat of 4e is necessarily a bad thing.  You get the opportunity for your player characters to really explore their combat options, and you can always temper a long battle with a liberal dose of roleplaying time to even things out.

Oh, one other thing – Newbie DM posted a great article on imposing a thirty second limit on determining actions in combat.  That’s a good idea for tightening up the combat timeline!

I had the great opportunity to take part in a panel at GenCon called the GM’s Jam with Zach from RPG Blog 2, Chgowiz from Old Guy RPG Blog, Tony from RPGCentric, and bonemaster from The Bone Scroll.  It was cool, the first time I’ve ever been on a panel purely dedicated to giving the same style Dungeon Master advice that I give here only live.  We even had a room full of people!

Events like this are a veritable cornucopia of good blogging topics, so I’m going to take one of my favorite audience questions of the day: Do you kill players in 4e, and if so how?

Why yes, yes I do.

The question has its roots in the mechanics surrounding how easy that it is to heal yourself with healing surges and other effects, the person asking the question found it hard to inflict enough hardship to exhaust the party enough to make things threatening.

Thanks to some good advice from the rest of the panel, we generally arrived on an interesting solution: put the players in a situation where it is hard or difficult to retreat, then goad them on with milestones to push them past the point of comfortable healing.  You can expand this notion by ramping up encounters, or structuring your battles in waves where the party has a difficult battle nearly to the end and then the enemies raise an alarm or gain reinforcements.  This gives you a fresh batch of baddies and can put your players in a very bad way quickly.

Taking a page from The Master

The other option that I brought forth was to put the players in a Gygaxian Death Scenario.  Get them on the edge of a portal to the abyss.  Throw them off of a hundred story tall tower.  Kill them in a way that 36 points of healing won’t fix.  There’s a great example of this at the end scenario in Keep on the Shadowfell.  If you don’t want to know exactly what happens, read no further….

Fair warning…

At the end of Keep on the Shadowfell, an epic battle takes place right by the rift between planes.  A creature fights to get out, and each failed save within a certain range pulls you one square closer to the portal.  Touch the portal and you can forget about growing old with your grandkids.  No amount of healing surges will save you from getting sucked unexpectedly into an inter-planar rift.

Tread lightly, traveler…

Everyone on the panel had similar advice: indiscriminately killing your player characters can be jarring, and its generally a good idea to set some ground rules whether or not this is expected in your campaign.  If it is, slay away!  If your group isn’t a big fan of this, fear not!  It is rather hard to kill players via normal means in 4e, and you always have the rare circumstance that your players may eventually come to you asking if their character can go out in a blaze of glory.  Then you get the unique opportunity to engineer an epic player death scenario as a planned end to a character’s story.

I’ve gotten the opportunity to do this a few times myself over the years, and it is an interesting dynamic.  Most players are still sad to see their character go, even if you have planned it out ahead of time.

So what say you, gentle reader?  Do you kill players in your campaigns, and if so, how?  It’s always fun for us to sit in the lounge at the DM’s Social Club swapping stories of waxing scores upon scores of characters!  Let’s hear from you!

Over the last week, we reviewed item sets and immurements which were introduced in the Adventurer’s Vault 2.  As I mentioned early last week, I have a favorite item.

And without further adieu, Dante’s Favorite Item is…

The Cask of Liquid Gold!  While it might seem strange that a lair item would be my favorite item from this book, I have a good reason.  You see, a long time ago in a campaign far, far, away Vanir asked if his character could have a back-mounted keg that stayed full of ale all day long.  That character’s name was Lumbar, and that keg saw all sorts of use from the mundane to the extreme.  I will save the details for another time, but suffice it to say that was a fun item to have around.

Now, I intellectually know an ever-full keg is something that nearly every adventuring party has either joked about or had in some fashion.  The fact that I created something similar for our adventuring party clearly has very little bearing on this item existing in the Adventurer’s Vault 2 (even though its fun to think otherwise!).  What I like best is that the design team that made the Adventurer’s Vault 2 has their finger on the pulse of the type of thing that adventuring parties want.

The main difference between my ever-full keg and the one presented in the new book is the issue of portability.  The AV2 stipulates that lair items cannot be taken adventuring and must stay within the lair.  My first response to this was dismay, but after reading through the rest of this section with more care I noticed that everything in the section were larger items like furniture, door enhancements, statues, and even rooms or chambers that provide special effects.  The keg in my campaign probably could have been characterized as a “Pony Keg of Liquid Gold” and therefore could be carried like a pack, but after seeing the artist’s rendition I understand that this thing is BIG.

Anyway, back to my point: the lair items are excellent examples of roleplay-centric items that provide some benefit to the owner.  The fact that these items are bound to a specific location builds in some structure that campaigns can revolve around.  Players that come across a keep with these items in place are going to want to come back, and those that have paid to equip their own homes will want to ensure they are protected.  The lack of portability can anchor the campaign or provide some very specific benefits toward certain encounters happening in the player character’s own lair, which can be a pretty exciting plot hook in and of itself.

Wrapping things up

Our previous articles reviewing the Adventurer’s Vault 2 do so without even scratching the surface of the main section of the book, which augments the already impressive set of magic items available in 4e via the core rulebooks and the original Adventurer’s Vault.  This was done entirely on purpose… I mean, we have to maintain at least some mystery!  To me, the item sets, immurements, and lair items alone are worth the purchase price of the book.  You can rest assured that there is a wide variety of more traditional magic items to use in your campaign, so many that I haven’t even read through them all in detail.  Go get yourself a copy at your friendly local gaming store!

That’s all on this topic for now!

This year at GenCon, Dante & I played a couple of demo games with Playroom Entertainment.  And had a great time.  So here’s my recap of our game experience with the Ligretto and On the Double card games.

Ligretto

I love Ligretto.  It’s fast-paced and a lot of fun.  One box with allow 4 players to play the game; you can add expansions to add more players.  Each player gets a stack of cards that are numbered 1 to 10 on different colors: green, red, yellow & blue.  You deal yourself a “Ligretto” deck of 10 cards, then lay out three face-up, playable cards.  The rest you hold in your hand and flip through, three at a time.  Anytime you come across a 1 in your three face-up cards or in your hand, you move it to start a pile in the middle of the play space.  Then, anyone can add to that pile, sequentially matching the color.  So I play a Green 1, Dante or anyone else at the table could play the Green 2 on that pile.  If you play one of your three face-up cards, you replace it from the “Ligretto” deck.  The first person to run out their “Ligretto” deck wins the round.  Then, everyone counts the cards they have in their hand, multiplies them by two and subtracts that total from the number of cards they played on the piles.  The first person to 99 points wins.

The trick to Ligretto is being able to keep track of all the piles in play.  With four players, we easily had 7-10 piles on which to play, and trying to keep track of all of them is the key to winning.  So this game is great for those of us who can multitask and keep track of so many game elements all at once.  If you’re the kind of person who is most comfortable focusing only on one element at a time, this could be a frustrating game.

On the Double

On the Double is still a fast-paced card game, but it differs from Ligretto in one key element.  On the Double plays on a single discard pile, so there are few game elements to track.  The game begins by dealing the entire deck among all players.  Then, the youngest person plays their top card to create the discard pile.  Each card has a split personality: each side of the card has a color & shape combination.  So you have two different shapes and two different colors on each card.  You can play a card if you can match either the shape or color on each half of the card to the card on the top of the discard pile.  If the top card is a yellow-cross/red-diamond, you need to find a card from your hand that is: yellow and red, or cross and diamond, or yellow-square and blue-diamond, or blue-cross and red-star or anything that would allow you to match one element on each half of the card.  You still have to be quick to play your cards, otherwise, someone will play their card first.

Game Experience

Ligretto was my prefered game; I had a fun time keeping track of all the various game elements, and I won two of the three hands we played.  Dante preferred On the Double, as he could focus better on the one discard pile.  They were both very fun games, and we had a great time playing them.  Thanks to Frank who ran the demos for us.

I recommend both games, but I encourage you to consider your game-play preference and pick the one that’s best for you.  In the end, we brought home our own On the Double set, and we are looking forward to crazy amounts of fun as we introduce our friends to the game.

On occasion, I put my foot in my mouth. And by “on occasion”, I mean “frequently”.

In yesterday’s tale of Gen Con adventure, I made mention of us getting a “real” interview instead of just “some talking head from a game company”. Now, granted, I was in full on embellishment mode to make an interesting story, and I had fully intended to bring things back down to reality when the interview posted. The fact of the matter is, all the PR people we’ve ever dealt with have been super excellent to us (especially Emil and Katie), and the last thing I want to do is say something dumb and ungrateful that makes light of the work they do and then let it sit for a week.  I write code all day and rarely have to deal with a client face to face. These guys do things all day that terrify the crap out of me, and I really respect them for it. So, sorry about that.

And for the record, Katie, we were completely stoked to have an interview with you (although, admittedly, finding out about Bill and Andy changed our focus slightly as we were freaking out). And you didn’t even run screaming when you found out about the horrible things going on when you came up to say hi during our All-Bards adventure. In fact, you laughed. You can play with us any time. If we ever see you (or Emil) at a convention, you may expect to be bought lunch. For ROCKING.

So, anyway, now I can go back to being weird again. I simply did not feel right leaving that where it stood. Rathgar’s blessings upon you all.

This week, we’re going to be catching up on product reviews, letting you listen in on our interviews (when we get them transcribed), and telling slightly embellished Tales of Gen Con Adventure. Today’s post falls firmly within the third category. Gather ’round the campfire, it’s story time!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig

Wow, what a ‘con this year. We got to see lots of old friends, met so many new friends, got crazy high on hypercaffienated root beer, and generally had the time of our lives. We’re in a very strange situation where when we say where we’re from, most people go “Stupid Ranger? What’s that?” — but there were some people with WotC shirts on that went “Stupid Ranger! I’ve heard of you guys!”. It was like a splash of water to the face – people do know about us. I forget who it was referred to me as “the Tarrasque guy”, but I am simultaneously somewhat mortified and yet pleased to see my legend lives on. At any rate, I think I speak for the three of us when I say we’ve got a considerable morale bonus going on right now.

My other cohorts had the foresight and will to blog their Gen Con experiences while there. This is probably due to the fact that they stayed in the Marriott, close to everything. It was my intention to stay in the Marriott as well. Which is a damned shame because my brain told me that wonderful hotel was the Sheraton – which is a fine hotel located a mile away from everything. PROTIP: when the only exercise you got over the last year has been lifting an infant out of a crib, get a hotel close to the con. It took a great deal of careful diplomacy, but I did manage to talk my feet out of writing their congressman.

Shelly Is The Bomb

Those of you who have been with us awhile might have noticed that we haven’t done any interviews before. Thusly, we were very excited when we scored an interview with someone from WotC. Friday morning, we were walking about the sales floor and we met up with a very nice woman a few of you may have heard by the name of Shelly Mazzanoble. We talked to her for a little while and then the topic of what else we had going on that day came up, and she tells us that she saw our names on the interview lineup, and she was pretty sure we were going to be with Andy Collins and Bill Slavicsek. It was then that I saw all the blood drain from Dante’s face. At this point, all we knew about our interview was we’d be speaking to “someone from WotC”. We figured, being a small blog, we were going to get some intern who could answer some broad questions about their new products. The names hadn’t registered in my mind yet, but I knew Shelly had just dropped a bomb on us.

It was only after we sat down and started looking up the things our interviewees had written that we both felt our sanity crumble. We didn’t just get some talking head from a game company or the guy that used to get coffee for the WotC helpdesk. We were interviewing one of the guys that wrote the 4e PHB, and the director of R&D at WotC. This was the dream. If we pull this off, I could travel back in time to meet 12 year old me and tell him what I’d been doing, and he would look back at me in wonder and say either “gnarly” or “totally radical”.

Stupid Ranger, of course, was cool as a cucumber as usual. Mostly because she’d had the foresight to schedule being on a “Women of RPG Blogging” panel with E from Geek’s Dream Girl during the time we’d scheduled the WotC interview, leaving the two of us to handle it. You know, back before it became infinitely terrifying.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

And so it was that Dante and I found ourselves in the lobby of the Marriott, furiously writing questions that we thought were incisive, yet not too offensive. Questions we thought they would enjoy answering. Questions that would bring enlightenment to geeks everywhere and solve world hunger! Also I was trying to convince Dante that it was a good idea to let me ask them some really weird crap because that’s who we are, dammit. Fortunately, he talked me out of most of the strange ideas I was having, but we did decide to try to answer one long-standing argument from the archives. (You’ll just have to wait around for the interview to find out how that went).

About a half hour before our appointment with the lords of gaming, Bartoneus from Critical Hits finds us. He asks us why we appear to be making repeated FORT saves, and we explain our situation. He tells us he has interviewed Andy before, and that he is very nice and talkative and easy to interview. He’s met Bill, but never really got a chance to talk much to him and hopes we can find out how he got into the business for him. Smiling as if without a care in the world, he rides a sunbeam over to the nearby Starbucks kiosk. Bartoneus has clearly been around the interview block a few times. One day, we will be like that too – if we can survive the next hour.

Our time nearly spent, we race up to the big ballroom where all the RPGA events get held (and, as it turns out, interviews). We approach the counter only to find nobody there. We see our friend Shelly nearby, so we ask her. She calls someone and they’re not sure either, and a very nice fellow standing next to her offers to take Dante’s number and go down to the sales floor and give him a call back when he finds out. We realize we have just spoken to James Wyatt, one of the other names on the front of the 4e PHB, as he walks away – and we feel like total dumbasses. Fortunately we do not feel that way long. Right then, Shelly’s phone rings, and it’s the WotC rep we were going to meet with originally – and Andy and Bill are on their way.

It’s go time.

The Exciting Conclusion!!!

Well, you’re just going to have to wait until we post the interview! Don’t worry, we’ll have lots more stuff to keep you entertained in the meantime.

Unti then, tune in tomorrow. Same Stupid-time. Same Stupid-channel!

Dear Journal,

Today, we infiltrated the castle of Mildred the Miserable, a sorceress of some power but great evil.  It took a little bit of time and effort to track Mildred, but once we found her, we were able to eliminate her Miserable-ness from the world.  Having emptied the castle of its evil occupant, we claimed it for our own.

We finished exploring the castle, and we made some very exciting discoveries.  Apparently Mildred the Miserable had quite the shopping habit; her castle was full of amazing objects.

One wasn’t so much in the castle as the castle was composed of it.  While we were seeking entry, we tried climbing the walls but were unable to scale them.  We found a note in Mildred’s library, detailing the construction of the castle out of Shiftstone.  Apparently, these stones remove handholds and make it very difficult for intruders to scale the walls.  Now we know we’re not just incapable of climbing, and we feel a little more secure against others who might try to take our castle from us.

The library also revealed big trick from Mildred’s arsenal.  When we first entered the castle, we admired the stone gargoyle in the main hall; now we know it was a Vigilant Gargoyle.  Mildred was able to see through its eyes to spy on us… that’s how she knew about us.  Now, we can use it to see who’s coming to visit.

We explored the rest of the castle, then made our way to the kitchen; defeating evil makes an adventurer hungry!  There we found one of the most marvelous items: The Cask of Liquid Gold.  We all enjoyed its dwarven ale and drank it dry, but when we came back the next morning for breakfast, we found it full again!

In the end, we were successful in our efforts to destroy the Mildred the Miserable, and we are very happy turning her evil lair into our comfortable home.

Adventurer’s Vault 2 has a great section on Wondrous Lair Items, items that can be added to the adventurer’s lair.  The great part about these items is that they can be used in the “lair” before the adventurers take residence; they make great, built-in loot.

As I mentioned during yesterday’s coverage of the Adventurer’s Vault 2 release, one of the new magic item types is a new consumable class of items called immurements. Immurements overlay a portion of the map with different, strange, or difficult terrain.  Each of these different terrain types provide a different effect, some protect, some even do damage to your enemies.

When all else fails, drop them in lava

Immurements appear to have been created by the frustrated character that just wanted to leave it all behind and drop a freaking mountain or volcano on the current battle situation.

The paragraph that describes immurements cautions Dungeon Masters to use care when allowing immurements into their game, because it essentially overrides the terrain of “lovingly crafted set pieces” that you had planned for a given encounter.  The book conjectures that this may render your set piece less memorable, but I respectfully disagree.

If someone shatters a small piece of magical obsidian and turns the Witch King’s throne room into a FREAKING VOLCANO I’m not only going to remember it, I think I’m going to squeal with glee.  Several reasons:

1. It’s only going to last until the end of the encounter.
2. They just used a truly powerful magical item for the ONLY time they can.  The lowest level immurment is a Level 24 item.  That’s a lot of money for a lot of power.
3. It’s awesome, and gives you as the DM the opportunity to do the same thing to them at some point in your campaign.

Opportunity for Roleplaying

Has anyone else ever had an elf or eladrin that constantly pines away for the forest while they’re out adventuring?  I could see an immurement being an item of great worth to someone that might want to return to the trees, if even for only a short time, by using Immurement of Baleful Gossamer or Immurement of the Blood Vine.

Creating a quest around the acquisition of an immurement or set of immurements might be fun, and I can see some opportunities for making your own custom immurements (sadly, no rules in the book to do this). I could see using them as a plot piece where you have to recreate a portion of a long-lost temple to complete a magical ritual.

The options are endless!