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.

Learning by Doing

For those of you that don’t know, I am a somewhat experienced martial artist (as is Vanir). I have been training in Shotokan Karate for the last 18 years or so, and as a result I have had an opportunity to train with some very interesting people. After relocating to my current job, I was told of a sensei in our area that is one of the greats, so I sought him out to train with him.

Now, that in itself correlates heavily with most roleplaying games: the student seeks out a very skilled teacher to train him further in his chosen craft, but over the weekend I got the opportunity to participate in a few classes for their club’s annual “spirit training”. This involved an early morning training session with his entire school (around 30-40 people showed up) packed all in a tight little room to train intensely from the hours of 6 am to 7 am all week long. (I only participated in two days due to schedule conflicts.)

Stupid Ranger and I settled around 40 minutes away (during rush hour), so that meant I got the distinct pleasure of rising around 5 am to get ready and make the trip to the training session.

OK, that’s great, but how does it affect being a Dungeon Master?

It’s actually quite simple: if I was a player character and my DM simply just hand-waved my morning training rituals, the character development just wouldn’t have been the same. The whole experience of training in that way, with that group of people vastly improved my outlook for those days. I was tired and sore, but upbeat and mentally energized at the same time. This would’ve looked somewhat odd from a player’s perspective to just jump into that state with nothing more than a comment like: “Ok, ok, you get up and do your training in the morning, let’s get back to the plot” from the DM.

Putting yourself in the shoes of your character in a real way by acting out their training regiment from time to time, or asking the DM if there are any heightened opportunities for class training with others or a seasoned instructor nearby can provide an opportunity for roleplay and fun. Dungeon Masters should be open to this type of interaction and seek it out, it makes a big difference in the quality of your character development.

Originally Posted on 10/7/2007 by Vanir-

In a lot of gaming groups I’ve played in, it’s not an unusual occurrence for eyes to roll and mumbles of “damn it, not again” to be overheard when somebody decides to roleplay. Frequently, this is because the would-be roleplayer has decided to do something stupid and/or outrageous in the name of roleplaying. Having put much more emphasis on roleplaying in the last several years, I think I’ve figured out a major reason why — and how to minimize its effects.

Schtick
When some people roleplay, it’s more like they’re following a list of unchangeable rules they’ve established for their character. They’re dedicated to “fighting evil” and that’s what they do no matter what.The worst example of this is the dreaded “attack on sight” mentality.

I’ve also seen a lot of people who think a particular concept would be funny and that’s their character’s schtick for the whole campaign. For instance, their character is afraid of rats so they’d make a big five minute deal about checking for rats under every snowbank if they were in the middle of the Arctic tundra. These kind of characters seem to me like the player is telling a joke that takes six months or more to tell — but the punchline still makes everybody roll their eyes. It wouldn’t be so bad if this was something this character does somewhat regularly in the course of roleplaying, but when it happens without fail, even during battle, it is murder-inspiringly annoying.

You’ve probably figured out by now that I’m not crazy about this particular brand of roleplaying. Either the characters just get irritating or the players do things that cause things to go horribly wrong “because that’s what their character would do”. Like charging a dozen orcs all by yourself with a first level wizard.

Of course, there are always the characters that you didn’t mean to end up this way. These are the ones that you’ve honestly set out to roleplay fully, but either the concept didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped or the setting changes or doesn’t allow you to do what you had planned. And you end up doing the same thing over and over and over and getting bored. Bat Loaf is a very good example of this — he was a ton of fun to play for the first 5-6 sessions. The problem with Bat was that there were many, many roleplaying opportunities well-suited for him in the beginning and it was fun because his misadventures would spill over into what the other players were doing and vice versa. As the story progressed these roleplaying encounters dried up in favor of Major Plot Events — but there was still an inn, booze, and women in every town we’d travel to. Eventually the cycle of “go to inn, get drunk and find chick, run away, occasionally Inspire Courage +2 in combat” got old. For everyone, since it meant splitting the party pretty much every single session. And it just got boring for me.

Intentional or not, the problem with schtick is that it eventually gets in the way. One-trick PC’s are either a direct hindrance to the game for everyone, or they just aren’t fun anymore after awhile.

The Cure

I think schtick comes from three sources: lack of imagination, laziness, and an inability to sense danger. A little effort goes a long way when making your character. And the reason the other players get irritated when a Schticky player does things is because he’s not playing the same game they are anymore. He’s playing his own and doesn’t care about the consequences for everyone else. Which makes them want to hurt him.

Here’s a few ways to avoid personal bodily injury:

• Well-Developed Characters
  Well-developed backstory and character motivations and schtick don’t mix. They cannot exist together. A well-developed character with a frequent quirk is fine – it’s just a personality trait and doesn’t define the character. The difference? A one-trick PC is that same quirk armed with a battleaxe.
• Acknowledge That Your Character Has Intelligence
  Your character REALLY hates orcs. Your character is also, in most cases, an experienced warrior. They know it’s dumb to face a dozen orcs alone. Instead of attacking them all, think of strategies. You might even use (gasp) TEAMWORK. Or decide that you could do more damage later if you live to fight another day. Most one-trick PC’s are roleplayed as if their INT was about 6 or 7. Their INT scores are probably much higher, which means they wouldn’t think in such simplistic terms as “ORC! BOB SMASH NOW!”. Act smarter than that, and make your PC’s act smarter than that.
• Change Things Up
  Nothing says your PC can’t change if it’s not working as planned. Hell, an emotional crossroads makes for a good roleplaying excuse. Incidentally, that’s how I saved Bat Loaf from one-trick PC hell — I married him off, got him some new abilities, and had him start a bardic rock academy / militia. All of a sudden the old boring stuff became backstory for me to build on and he’s fun again.

Hopefully, this will significantly decrease the number of eye-rolls at your gaming table. Have you had problems with Schtick in your gaming group? We’d love to hear them, and how you deal with it.

In the next installment of Roleplaying Pitfalls, I’ll talk about another issue plaguing today’s modern roleplayer: the dreaded Spotlight Hog!

Until next time….

<evil laughter>

Oh wait, wrong column. My bad!

I consider that a dirty shame.

What is it?

The Silmarillion is essentially a collection of myths, legends, and histories of Middle Earth. This includes, but is not focused on, the Third Age of Middle Earth which contains the Lord of the Rings stories that everyone loves.

This work is considered by most to reflect the main body of Tolkien’s unfinished works. He started writing the stories that would eventually become this work in 1914, and continued revising and expanding them all throughout his life. At one point, he heavily desired that The Silmarillion be released alongside the Lord of the Rings stories but his publisher wasn’t biting.

Why you should care.

There are five main sections of The Silmarillion, and you can find out more about their contents courtesy of a very well crafted Wikipedia article on the topic. One of my favorite sections is the first, which mirrors an allegorical retelling of the creation story regarding Middle Earth and its races.

As the book progresses, its tone shifts first to myths and histories of the elves and we are given a wonderful love story, “Of Beren and Lúthien”. I will not do the story the injustice of being summarized by my clumsy hand, but suffice it to say if you want depth of characters and a lesson in epic storyline construction you really can start there and be completely satisfied.

I could go on and on about how excellent aspects of this text is, but that would take a long time and my hands would be numb from typing. Anyone who delights in world-building would benefit from the depth and grandeur that Tolkien (and his son, who edited The Silmarillion) gives Middle Earth beyond what most people are familiar with.

It is a shining example of how being passionate about world-building does not have to involve every last detail you ever conceived of in every storyline. If Tolkien had included 1/5 of the characters that he speaks about in The Silmarillion in The Lord of the Rings stories, it would’ve been fifteen volumes and nobody would’ve ever heard about it because the first person to start reading it wouldn’t be done yet. It takes a light touch to color a small portion of your landscape correctly with the right characters, and Tolkien gives a master’s course in doing this in The Lord of the Rings.

In addition to the world-building aspect, you also get some excellent character archetypes from the tales contained in its 365 pages. The aforementioned Beren and Lúthien are great examples, as are Fëanor and his line, who created the magical jewels called Silmarils that the collection is named after. The passion, motivation, and depth of these characters are excellent examples of how good character development can be in a short space. Taking a few of these stories, reading them, and reflecting on how you can build characters as dynamic as these would be an excellent exercise to prepare you for your next campaign, whether writing one or playing in one.

This article is clearly biased.

This week, I was able to add a first edition / first printing of this book to my collection and I consider it a true prize. It doesn’t trouble me at all that many of my Tolkien-nerd friends don’t apprecaite it. I do, and that’s the important part!

Great examples of developed characters

Without going into ultra-nerdly levels of detail, one of the aspects about this movie that I truly enjoy is the depth of the characters. Watching it this time around, I tried to identify some of the standard D&D related classes for the characters and how the interesting ways that they were being written relative to that role.

Take Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) for example. He is clearly a seasoned yet retired fighter, who reluctantly breaks the rules when given the proper motivation in Leeloo. I believe he plays a very convincing chaotic good character, willing to break the rules that he feels are unjust in order to serve the common (and ultimately his own) good.

The star of the show is clearly Leeloo herself (Milla Jovovich). Aside from awesome orange hair and a propensity for being topless (and bottomless, see Resident Evil for details), she is my gold standard for actual depth in an action-based character. As the Supreme Being, she is physically very strong and able to absorb information at an amazing rate, but this is tempered by her vulnerability and empathy that she feels for the human condition. Throughout this movie you see how her physical strength and her mental prowess continually get betrayed by her desire to find goodness in humanity. You even get a great example of D&D style language learning ability, as seen when she learns English while Dallas is boarding the flight. I don’t think I’ve seen the likes of that anywhere else!

Learn from examples like these!

There are two real lessons here. Player characters should take the opportunity to watch your favorite films and examine the journey that your favorite characters take throughout. Think about this as it relates to the decisions that you make as you roleplay your character. Do your best to filter out (or use sparingly) concepts that are schticky, unless you intend to temper them with actual character growth (or your DM is running an irreverent campaign on purpose).

Dungeon Masters can learn by watching the broader character interations and the story as it unfolds. Learn to engineer moments to let your characters explore their flaws or vulnerabilities, or get deeply engaged in what is happening on their own terms.

Take special care to allow your story to unfold in as many ways and across as many venues as needed. The Fifth Element covered many different sets and scenarios to get the level of depth and opulence to the futuristic world in which it was set, and in this depth comes opporunities for your characters to branch out and grow.

Finally, don’t be afraid to sprinkle in some colorful characters or fun action scenes to spice things up. The Fifth Element wouldn’t be what it is without Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker) or that deaf guy that ended up throwing Dallas billiard balls when he needed a gun!

Don’t Overthink It

For those one-time short campaigns, don’t overthink your character. These campaigns are usually less about backstories and long-term career goals; they’re more about generating a character quickly that will be fun to play. I prefer to stick to classes with which I am already familiar; familiarity with a class can reduce the amount of prep time, during both character creation and game time.

Now, I know some people like to play classes they haven’t had the chance to play; they try out something new on the short campaigns to see if it’s a class they might enjoy. Personally, every time I’ve tried this, I ended up frustrated at trying to learn new rules in a short amount of time. So if you’re looking for something quick that you will enjoy without a lot of effort, don’t overthink it; go with something you know.

Quick-Start Option #1

One of my favorite quick-start character options is a human fighter/cleric. Fighter L1 is a great L1 class to cherry-pick; combined with cleric levels, you will have a the fighting power and healing power to keep everyone alive early in the game. This is an easy option if you’re not sure what you’ll be facing or if the party is trying to fill the position of healer.

Quick-Start Option #2

Again, if you’re not sure what you might be facing in a short campaign (or if you expect there might be dungeon-crawling involved), try a quick-start with L1 as a rogue. Rogues have all those great skill points to give you an early boost. You can put a couple of those skill points to use to give you a passing familiarity with locks and traps; you never know when that kind of skill might come in handy! Then, depending on your preference, you can combine your level of rogue with some spellcasting levels or some fighter-y levels.

These are just a couple of options; of course, you can just pick a class and go, without the multiclassing options. Either way you choose to go, have fun!

In fact, the only characters that I know of who actively sought out roleplaying their off time all exist within our current campaign, and they run the gamut from scoring with local barmaids to providing extra prayers and service to their chosen deity.

Tomfoolery For Dummies

Unfortunately, too many DMs hand wave downtime or worse yet handle it like a cutscene from a film or a training montage from a Rocky movie. It doesn’t have to be this way! I can remember many satisfying days spent in campaigns just doing something in character to pass the time, usually while the DM was looking up a rule or arbitrating something with another few characters.

In one of our college campaigns, several of us took to inventing a dice game (complete with bets) while the DM was busy doing something one-on-one with another character. After he was done, he asked what we were doing as we had attracted most of the other five players into our game at that point, and he had an NPC gambler show up to play the game with us for awhile. This didn’t lead to any specific plot point, but we ended up making some platnium pieces off of the gambler before the night was over. We also got a chunk of roleplaying experience for doing something interesting with our downtime. It was fun for all involved.

In my own campaigns, I have taken to letting characters run with their downtime pursuits. Sometimes these activities, if given some time to grow, can be used as plot points or opportunities for impromptu fun. Other times, its simply a means for character development.

Everybody can get in on the fun!

Players can capitalize on this by really thinking out what their character does to unwind. Don’t take it as assumed that your character does this certain routine each night, especially if you are one of those players that claim to be bored for much of the night. Wander around town, find someplace interesting to go. You might even be able to ask your DM something like: “I’m looking for some adventure tonight! I wander around town to see if anything looks interesting.”

If you’ve got a good DM, they’ll bite every once in awhile and give you that something interesting. Who knows, it might even lead to places you didn’t expect!

Needless to say, the fire department indicated that we were lucky that things didn’t end “under much worse circumstances.”

What’s this got to do with D&D, Dante?

Well, after the initial shock of the situation, I started to think about why this was so scary. The answer, for me anyway, was the impending fireball that would have ensued underneath my house should the gas line burn through.

We are entering into epic levels in our current campaign, and our characters are able to summon some pretty incredible feats of elemental damage. Several of our characters possess fire based magical abilities, and this whole experience got me to thinking what the common guy would think if they saw something akin to a large gas explosion.

You know what? The mere NOTION of this happening to us in real life was pretty darned scary. That’s why I always have some trouble with the concept of magical gladiatorial combat, or people that would knowingly put themselves in the vicinity of two powerful mages doing battle.

The gravity that should go along with even a mid-level spell caster able to conjure up a 5d6 or more fireball should be enough to keep a “common” person at a pretty far distance. I would treat a mid to high level sorcerer with the same respect as I would someone with a big flamethrower strapped to their back.

Gravity

The key to this discussion is treating things with the appropriate level of gravity. As a DM, you can use NPC reaction and some colorful description to add weight to your epic scenarios. If someone enters the building that looks edgy and has demonstrated an ability to conjure a 20d6 fireball you’d better make some common folk leave the premises quickly.

I would also engineer activities that play up the uncommon skill required to weild this power. Create some scenarios where your mid to high level players must help a group of common people achieve some otherwise impossible tasks that exercises the players specific epic skills. This puts the players on guard not to accidentally flash-fry a whole group of townspeople, adds an opportunity for them to exhibit uncommon mettle and heroism, and more importantly is a distinctly different type of challenge than their common tasks of annihilating major forces of evil baddies.

Take an opportunity to step back and look at the abilities that your characters wield when viewed through the eyes of a common man. You may get some new inspiration that can add some interest to your sagging high level campaign!

Damn, That Guy’s Good

I try to think of people as neither good nor bad, just as people. Therefore, just like the “bad guys“, the “good guys” start as a blank slate and their experiences color how they view the world and what they think is right. A few ways a person could veer more toward the traditionally “good” are:

• Good Parenting
  Simply put, a person can be raised to be a good person. Little kids watch adults and emulate what they do. Their parents reward “good” behavior and punish “bad” behavior. Eventually, the child will form a value system in which they can usually put stuff in the “good” or “bad” column. Sure, there’s the occasional ambiguous problem, but by and large this person can assume things like “sleeping with your friend’s wife behind his back” and “killing babies” can go in the “bad” column.

  The interesting thing about this one is that many times what the parents believe follows their societal norms. So what one set of parents teaches as “good” behavior may be a lot different from another. A good example would be Klingon vs. Vulcan parenting. (I bet there’s a high turnover rate at the intergalactic daycare center.)

  As you may have guessed, this one makes for good character-building if the parents’ beliefs are a bit different from the rest of society because the parents will frequently raise a litter of misfits who will, as their name implies, have difficulty meshing with their surroundings. Conflict is the mother of Interesting!

• The Age of Reason
  Maybe it’s just a product of me starting to get a little older, but I can remember when I was a teenager. There wasn’t a whole lot of ambivalence about any subject, and I had an opinion about damn near everything. Looking back, I can’t figure out why in the hell I thought some of the things I did (much less acted on these thoughts).

  The best answer I can come up with is not that I got older. It’s that I got more experienced. I know now that running in guns blazing to most situations isn’t going to be the best solution most times, and I prefer a little more thought and planning before I make my move now. I’ve learned when to strategically retreat and come back. I don’t like burning bridges because sometimes I need to cross them again. I like being nice to people because I like them being nice to me back.

  Which brings me to why I think sometimes getting a little older and wiser brings the good out in people: it’s harder to do stupid things when you take the time to think about them, and it’s harder to be headstrong when you’ve had direct experience with that ending badly for you. If you’ve been bad all your life and you’ve almost died countless times and everybody hates you and you’re tired of running — well, it might make you consider changing your ways. Even if you don’t wind up “good”, you might mellow out to the point where you’re not actively “bad”.

• Atonement
  This one is more of a continuation of the last one, but taken further. If a person looks back on the things they have done in their life and goes, “oh crap, I’m a horrible person”, they may decide they need to try to make up for it. Where an average kind-hearted joe might just live life and be nice to his neighbor, a person who has devoted their life to making up for past misdeeds will actively seek out ways to do what they consider to be “good” things, usually that help others.

  Characters who are atoning for something are a lot of fun to play because they want to be good, but given that they’ve been an asshole their entire life, they frequently don’t know how to do that. Morality is an interesting thing — people generally have a sense to themselves of what’s right and wrong, and when you try to deviate from that, it feels unnatural. So you may have some, shall we say, creative interpretations of how to be good.

  I would add that when I say “atonement”, I mean a person decided to do this on their own — someone else didn’t make them do it. That’s something else entirely. For instance, a person forced to do community service for some crime they committed won’t come out a better person simply because they did a good deed because someone else made them. (However, if it exposes them to things that make them re-evaluate their choices, that’s different.)

Next time, I’ll talk about some of the qualities associated with “good” characters. Now I need something clever to say to end the post. Let’s see… um….

Be good, everyone?

Man, evil is so much easier to make a cool exit on.

But it’s irreverent!

Yes, it is. However, it is distinctive moments of color like those that go on to live fondly in the memory of everyone that beholds them. Several years from now when we recall our favorite moments from our D&D campaigns, I can pretty much guarantee that the trump card that will come out of Vanir’s mouth will be “Oh yeah? Well Bat Loaf humped on the Tarrasque.” And much laugher will be had by all.

It is pretty much for this reason and this reason alone that I embrace letting people be a little nuts like this and introduce crazy, obscene, or otherwise hilarious elements to our plot. For the record, I am fairly certain my co-DM would’ve lynched me on the spot should he have actually been there but that is a story best left for another time.

You too can unclench your butt-cheeks and enjoy this kind of fun!

I can respect wanting to keep some elements of your campaign “by the numbers” and keep the characters focused on the dramatic scenes, but I would like everyone to keep in mind that even epic tales of heroism and valor like The Lord of the Rings had their own comedic elements in Tom Bombadil (book) and Merry/Pippin (film).

The trick is to just let your characters be themselves. Let them take liberties however far they want to during certain times in the campaign, and quiet them down and focus them in others. The trade-off will work in your favor: if the players are allowed to have irreverent fun like Vanir outlined, they’ll be much more receptive to being asked to “tune in” during more serious moments in the campaign.

I find it helps to have a “serious look” that you can shoot offending players when you want to quell the silliness. It is much akin to The Look that Stupid Ranger possesses to quiet me down, and anyone else that is married to a human female will have a corollary upon which to draw.

So relax! Have fun! Don’t take things so seriously all the time, you may find that some memorable moments will be created in the process.