My gaming group is a very dedicated group of roleplayers, however we don’t gather with a decent frequency.  Even with a recap, notes, session journals and as many remedies for remembering the details our group doesn’t have a tenacity for remembering where we were last session or the plot lines, let alone specific details surrounding either of those things.  For this reason we tend to have a fairly long social time prior to our gaming session, where food is shared, laughs are had, and then we get down to serious gaming… but it’s a journey.

Let me tell you about my campaign

Yes, I know.  Deal with it, you’re going to have to hear a little about my campaign to understand the point of this exercise.  The quest began with Keep on the Shadowfell and then evolved into one of my favorite homebrew settings.  I had a grand plan, which involved leveraging the time travel hooks of the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 to go back and rewrite the timeline of a previous campaign.  I figured this served me in a few ways, and them in a a few ways: the history of this setting is well developed, the characters were fun, and their enemy is known to them.  Add into the mix that at least one of the players had participated in the past campaign and I figured that I would be scott-free on keeping their attention and keeping them engaged.

Cue Summer of last year.  One of our group couldn’t make regular games and I had just gotten the Tomb of Horrors, so we agreed outside-of-game that we’d like to suspend any serious activity on the main plot and play some sessions of the module.  I even devised a way that it could be organic to the plot, so we did this.  This went swimmingly, and we had a few months at the end of last year to further dive into the original plotline.  All was well.

The Return to the Past

So the group tracks a cult along their plot to return back in time to prevent the destruction of the Big Bad Guy so they can bring him back to take over the world.  This goes great, and back to the past they go.  After interacting with the previous incarnation of their hometown for a bit, they follow the original threads of the plot to a few key points.  They had puzzled out the plot lines to follow, but didn’t really commit fully to one line…. instead they flipped back and forth between the plotlines and didn’t really accomplish much.

A few sessions of this go by, and before long my inability to plan a coherent way to get them back on course manifests itself… I had determined that enough time had passed that surely something must have happened.  The plotlines remaining would have stretched out for another year or so at the rate we play and the lack of general focus was annoying (at the worst) and obvious (at the best).  I decided there was no choice but to reboot the situation.

I chose a Hiro Nakamura style event to reboot.  I did a few very obvious SOMETHING HAS CHANGED time skips in the course of a single session, culminating in the group’s return to their now abandoned hometown (previously a bustling city).  The ranger and avenger opted to check out the temple, and found a man with a giant broadsword strapped to his back in strange clothes.  He was there to warn them that this timeline was doomed and they must leave it as soon as possible (they have a means to do this).  I also opted to use this opportunity to illustrate to them that excessive time travelling was detrimental, this gentleman was pretty messed up from the process.

Finally, they took the bait and we ended the session at the crossroads where they can choose where in time they want to go.

The Retrospecticus

So what could I have done differently?  Many things.  A word to the wise: when introducing time travel, have both an entry and an exit plan and give the players some real motivation to follow a plotline.  This could have easily been solved by a little more detailed planning on my part.  Also, there were many opportunities for me to nudge the group along (possibly even in narrative style) to get them down the line enough to pick up the proper path.

The other big thing that I could have done is used other means to keep the plotlines alive between sessions.  DNAPhil recently authored an excellent article at Gnome Stew entitled “Keeping The Home Fires Burning” covering this very topic.  There’s some great advice there, some I have even heeded in the past.  For the original campaign (the one that established the plot, characters, and setting that my current group returned to) we employed a group blog where the players could write articles in the form of diary entries or letters to their family.  It succeeded in giving the players another outlet to develop their characters and gave me an easy medium to collect additional side-plot ideas.

Suffice it to say I’m a little dismayed that I had to go so far as to reboot this portion of the campaign.  I can only look forward, because unlike my campaign there’s no way to go back and fix it.  More soon!

Friends of ours from Role-Playing Discussions are bringing the fun of GenCon to all of us trapped at home this weekend.  You can play along by participating in their Bingo contest.

Thanks, C and K, for bringing some of the fun to the rest of us!

Our gaming group reconvened for the first time in two months for our campaign.  They had left off just prior to a perilous battle with an unknown evil.  I was grateful as DM that they left off where they did, because I wanted to find them a particularly butt-puckering iconic encounter to welcome us back to semi-regular gaming.  As with most things these days, Real Life happened and I didn’t get time to prep very well but I did leaf through my Monster Manual enough to see that there was a like-leveled dracolich.  Yes, this will do.

Sadly, I didn’t read the fine print and just assumed that the terrifying dracolich of yore would provide an adequate solo creature to both frighten and challenge my players.  Frighten, yes.  Challenge, not so much.  You see, in 4e the dracolich is a controller.  This job it does admirably, having stunned most of the party for several consecutive rounds.  The trouble came in dealing the damage.  Unintelligently, I split up the yuan-ti’s that they recommend as being a Level 20 encounter into a second room and they were dispatched the previous session… so there was nothing in the way of big damage dealing to really threaten the party… what a shame.

So the moral of the story is this: when designing an encounter, be very sure to read what creature type you’re setting up to be your solo baddie… controllers don’t fit the bill very well, aside for dragging out combat extensively due to most of the party being stunned.

The upside: one of my players took the dracolich skull to ornament his bachelor pad with.  I really love my current group of players.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the face of our personal Game Changer.  In March, Stupid Ranger and I welcomed into our adventuring party a little girl named Eve.  The last two months have been filled with the machinations of learning to care for a sleep-eating, cuteness-oozing little bundle of joy, so our regular gaming efforts have been largely on pause and so goes our blogging inspiration.

The good news: we have taken a few opportunities in our own way to continue to game.  We have had our D&D group together for a session just recently, which also coincided with Free Comic Book Day and an outing to see Thor (which was much better than I expected).  This day of epic nerdity helped to restoke the fires.  Stupid Ranger has been spending her spare time diving headlong into Dragon Age 2, and she has mentioned more than a few times that she wants to write a review up on that to tell you all of her experiences in Ferelden.  The point of mentioning all this is that you might see a bit of variety to our posts, reflecting the type of nerdy behavior that we’re able to participate in.

The bad news: I had to use most of my vacation time this year to welcome our new addition, so Stupid Ranger and I will not be able to attend Gen-Con this year.  But fear not!  Our very own Vanir will be attending and will be sure to bring his ultra-special roleplaying expertise to the convention center and the surrounding three mile radius.  We will be sure to share liberally his event schedule so you can meet up with him and receive your own free hair trimming to improve your gaming fortune.

Finally, I’d like to thank our loyal readers who have stuck around during this sabbatical.  With any luck we will return to a more frequent blogging schedule as things return to normal and our gaming resumes in earnest.  More soon!

My good buddy Vanir recently posted a lament for his innocence over at Critical-Hits.  You see, Vanir has recently began filling the role of Dungeon Master and he’s having to grapple with the reality of how situations tend to unfold behind the screen.  It’s approaching a decade since I first took up the mantle and began running games, and one of the cardinal rules of filling this role was summed up concisely on page 18 of the 3.5 Dungeon Master’s Guide in a section titled “DM Cheating and Player Perceptions”:

Do you cheat?  The answer: The DM really can’t cheat.  You’re the umpire, and what you say goes.  As such, it’s certainly within your rights to sway things one way or another to keep people happy or keep things running smoothly.

Other editions of the D&D rules have stated the case in similar but slightly different ways, and ultimately the responsibility comes down to you and the DM to take the appropriate action to keep the game fun or running smoothly.  Please note: this does not define what “keep people happy” or “running smoothly” means.  In my games, I considered my plot an outline… a mere suggestion… so that the players can choose to stay in the lines or to color way outside them.  Vanir often chose to color way outside the lines, onto the table, all over the walls, and perhaps two or three houses down the block.  I have always enjoyed letting my players define the world that they act in to a certain extent, allowing them to define where the railroad tracks get laid down to get the story from point A to point B.

So what’s a man to do?

To address Vanir’s problem specifically: every good DM cheats.  The trick is to provide the players with enough breadth so they don’t necessarily see you cheating.  For example: we’re fighting a long battle.  The players are expending their abilities and skills and it is depleting them, but not far enough that they are in any real danger of dying.  Could I run this encounter out to the very last hit point that the bad guy contains?  Sure I could.  Would it be boring, providing that the bad guy can’t really do enough damage to exhaust the group?  Absolutely.  So you fudge the bad guy’s hit points a bit to make the encounter end.

What I don’t like doing is (unfortunately) what Vanir did in his campaign: not being used to his players acting off-script, he magically teleported them to the next plot point.  There’s nothing really WRONG with doing this, but I do like some cause and effect to occur if the players act differently than they should have.  Just leading them to the next battle or skill challenge can feel pretty obvious to the players and take them out of the story.  I’m not beating up on Vanir any more than he already has himself, but better ways to deal with this type of situation mostly come with experience.  Figuring out a few contingency plans for what will happen if the players don’t take the plot hook or interact with NPCs in a non-ideal way will help to smooth these bumps.

The other main thing that Vanir mentions in his article is the loss of innocence from being a player.  Now you KNOW the fudging that can occur, and you start to ask yourself if every fun or exciting moment in a campaign was because of the DM acting to favor the players in some way.  The only advice I can give is this: sit back and enjoy the ride.  Have some caffeine and sugar, and let the game unfold.

It’s actually pretty fun sitting in the player’s chair again to see if you can detect when the DM is making stuff up.  I’ve found a few of them have a “tell”… they shuffle some papers, roll some dice that have no outcome on the encounter at all, or stare at the players with a blank or angry expression when things aren’t going as they anticipate.  It’s also fun to see how they resolve the situations as well, you can learn something from their responses too.  If I possessed the insane ability to play off-script player characters like Vanir does, I would be doing that all the time and see how the DM reacts.

But back to the main point: you never really can “un-know” the fact that the DM does some trickery to make the game move forward.  Just know it’s part of his job, and it’s part of your job to enjoy the story and be invested in your player character.  That’s the real fun anyway… building up a hero based on your own imagination.  There’s no rule set or die roll that should affect that aspect of roleplaying games one bit.

We had a great first week over at Loot!, so we’ve decided to share the love with an exclusive treat just for our loyal StupidRanger readers.

Now through April Fool’s Day, use the coupon code: IMWITHSTUPID to get 10% off any daily deal!

Check it out now, and if you like what you see don’t forget to sign up to get each day’s offer via email.

I’m pleased to report that my sizable absence from the blogosphere was for a good purpose.  I have partnered with my buddy Ed Healy (of Gamerati fame) to present to you Gamerati Loot!, which will feature a deeply discounted product each weekday.  We’re focusing primarily on roleplaying games, board games, and gaming products initially, with an eye toward expansion in the future.

This has been a fairly large undertaking to get going, and I’m happy to report that we received our first order only 8 minutes after the site going live.  Ed and I happened to be on Skype and the time, and much rejoicing was done over the Interwebs.  The first product that we’re offering is Nobis: The City-States at a 50% discount, brought to us by the fine folks over at Pantheon Press.  Nobis: The City-States was nominated for Best Supplement at the 2010 ENnie Awards, and is a well-regarded high fantasy setting.

This book is only on sale until 11:30 PM EDT, so hurry on over and grab a copy.

While I am very excited about this project, I will limit myself to only posting up information about products that I know will be of interest (i.e. D&D, Pathfinder, etc).  I don’t intend on posting up every item each day here, so if you are really interested in keeping track of what Loot! has to offer, be sure to sign up for our mailing list at the website or via the Gamerati Facebook page.

Shortly after my last post on my Beholder’s Collector Set, Mike Shea provided a very moving eulogy for D&D Miniatures over at Critical-Hits.  As I have said in numerous articles, I am conflicted about this news.  Just as I started to embrace more miniatures in my game, now they are gone to be replaced with the cardboard tokens as featured in the Dungeon Master’s Kit, Monster Vault, and the D&D Essentials Red Box.  I really enjoyed the tokens upon my first experience with the D&D Red Box, at the time I wondered aloud whether this was going to be the next genesis of monster indicators.  Turns out I was right.

I am also interested in what this means for future miniature offerings.  If Wizards is focusing their efforts more on the collector’s sets and player miniatures, that could mean some iconic and very cool special edition miniatures are coming down the pipeline.  Personally, I think they should continue down the line of gods and produce more large scale figures, like say Bahamut or Llolth.  Pretty much any god or goddess that could provoke a pants-crapping response like the Orcus figure.  More of that would be excellent.

Rest in peace, random miniature booster packs.  Long live the tokens!

It was either this, or “it really is in the eye of the beholder.”  All terrible puns aside: I picked up the Beholder Collector’s Set.  Clearly, I resisted the urge to purchase this set when it came out last November.  But there it sat… at my friendly local gaming shop right next to Orcus.  Beckoning me.  What swayed my hand, you ask?  Up until today, my collection of minis was distinctly lacking any Beholders.  They are among my favorite classification of baddies, so I had to have them.

So what do you get for your $35?  Honestly, not much.  There’s a nice collector’s box, the four beholders (painted quite well and rendered in varying styles of transparent plastic for ultimate coolness), and stat cards for use in the miniatures game.

Is it worth it?  I don’t know.  As we have covered here, I have had a lukewarm relationship with miniatures in my D&D games.  I don’t collect them, but I do enjoy using them in my games.  In the past, I have struggled with the random nature of the miniature booster packs and balked at paying the going rate on Ebay for the desirable few.  In fact, at GenCon I was fully prepared to purchase a Beholder at the miniature booth and was stopped short by a $20 price tag.

I will fully accept the criticism that I am being too cheap.  I judge most of my gaming materials in the form of how much utility I am going to get out of them, and unless they have some serious bad luck or are set in a specific storyline your standard adventuring party doesn’t happen across a Beholder every day.  (Unless you make that happen, which… well… best not to get into that.  My players are reading.)

I suppose part of it is the Beholder Set being advertised as a “limited edition” although try as I might I found no edition number on the box or any of the figures.  Which likely means “limited insofar that it is limited by how many we can sell to people.”  I’ll happily retract that statement if someone can point me toward some way to determine how limited this run will be, but I view this approach as a convenient way to get people to ignore they’re paying extra for a fancy box and far less miniatures than you would get buying $35 worth of booster packs.

Don’t misconstrue this as regret for my purchase.  The set is very cool and I am happy to have them, I just would’ve been much happier with a cheaper price tag.  No doubt my opinion will change dramatically when I get to roast my adventuring party with those lovely little eye-stalks, but that is a matter for another day.  If you really like Beholders, you will not be disappointed by this set.  If you really like to get a lot for your dollar, you might be disappointed.

For those of you planning to attend GenCon this year (Aug 4-7), here’s your friendly reminder. Badge registration opens next Sunday, January 23 at noon Eastern, and housing registration opens on Tuesday, January 25.