The answer is more obvious than you might think!

This may seem elementary, however in our scramble to keep our plotlines straight I often got into the habit of glossing over the abilities of these high challenge rating creatures that we kept introducing. Unsurprisingly, this led to our player characters being able to trounce them with very little expenditure of resources, causing us a continual problem.

This week, however, we had enough time to actually look at the abilities for the creatures (in this case, Ancient Deathshriekers, woot!) and devise a battle plan that included fully exercising their skills. Now, the resulting chaos might not have been extremely fun (at one point it involved an entire sofa-full of players having to pit their insane player characters against one another) but it certainly used up their skills in the appropriate way.

The battle took most of the evening, when combined with our groups standard propensity to talk and goof off on the first night back from a long hiatus but I think it was a great exercise in us DMs learning what to do in the case of epic characters.

Use all those monster skills and your life will be much better (and your PCs characters will be much, much worse)!

Often it comes down to timing…

In our campaigns, we tend to like to build up to big reveals. Unfortunately, most of our attempts to build suspense and create that “oh crap” moment end up taking place at the end of a long session when everyone is thinking about the drive home, or are floating off to dreamland at the table.

In the situations where we see this coming, sometimes we forgo the Big Neat Thing until the following session. This often works, however in times when there is a few weeks between sessions this can get diluted by our players forgetting where we were last session, or the tabletalk that inevitably drifts in after a break like that.

Pacing is an extremely important skill to learn to combat these two boundary cases:

1. Play regularly and know your audience.

   Knowing who has to work the following day, or who just got done with a 12 hour shift might help identifying when to launch the major plot point for the night. Playing regularly helps to cut down on the cycle of getting re acclimated to the game and keeps your plot-to-date fresh in the players minds.

2. Keep long battles to a minimum (or early in the session.)

   Lately much of our plot advancement has been slowed down significantly by the extra time required for battles at a high level. If your setting and plot allows, try to get major battles out of the way early in the night to get everyone engaged and leave plenty of time for the storytelling before your player’s off switches start to get thrown.

3. Design a plot puzzle.

   Sometimes the key to building appropriate suspense is simply not having a huge plot point to hatch. I have successfully used the “plot puzzle” design, where a series of small non-events get combined in a meaningful way to lead to plot advancement. These small elements can be sprinkled in with normal character development or in between battle encounters.

   This also helps character engagement and development, because often the pieces of the plot puzzle don’t make sense on their own. As the characters try to put the puzzle together, they may lead you into some scenes that you didn’t explicitly have planned. This can be a fun diversion for everyone and give you the opportunity as DM to work on your impromptu skills.

The final (and perhaps best) way to really build suspense is to not make every last piece of your plot obvious. Often, the thrill of the unknown is enough of a driver to really make the players engage.

Speaking of… there has been some suspenseful things going on around StupidRanger Central this week, you’ll just have to tune in next time for the reveal!!

The Arguments

In our current campaign, there have been a few times when effects occur to our players that they did not get a saving throw for. A specific instance of this was when our party encountered an evil goddess who froze them in their tracks in order to give a chilling speech about how the party fouled up her best laid plans and they would pay dearly…. essentially a slight plot advancement wrapped in some color.

Most of our players didn’t seem to mind not getting a saving throw to be frozen in place, however you will find that all groups contain That One Person that wanted an opportunity to try the throw anyway. I feel like those people are perfectly justified in wanting the saving throw, however in this particular case I was able to explain it away due to the fact it was a lesser goddess that they encountered.

That begs the question: how do you handle this when lesser characters or forces are involved that the players should get a saving throw for, but in succeeding could handicap or seriously disrupt your plans for the session on that given night?

A Solution in Pieces

In the vein of full disclosure, I will go ahead and state out loud that I don’t have a solution for this problem, and I consider it one of the fundamental difficulties of playing a high or epic level campaign. It seems under the current rule system, you can no longer necessarily revert back to some classic D&D encounters that the players could easily dissuade with their skills. You lose some of the ability to tell a story in a cutscene fashion, or using underpowered, crafty NPCs to add some interest.

I say this because as a DM I really don’t like overly suspending the rules in cases where they are warranted. For example, if a nimble thief picks Bat Loaf’s pocket and he is dexterous enough to give chase and catch him instead of leading you into the Elite Thieves Guild plotline you had laid out, that kind’ve rules out being able to do that without submitting yourself to a “shoot off the cuff” night.

When you’re dealing in a mode of co-DMing like we are, the difficulty of just ad-libbing like mad on the spot becomes more great since both DMs should have some say in how things progress in a given situation (at least, that is how we’ve been running it to this point).

I know there are seasoned professionals in our midst that do well in a high or epic level setting, so please give me a temporary +2 to WIS here!

Encounter Balance is HARD

One of the toughest things about getting into epics for me was figuring out encounter balance. The player characters have so many weapons at their disposal in the form of feats, skills, weapons/items, and class skills that the combination of our particular group is nigh on unstoppable.

There is a fall off point, however, which I’ve been unfortunately falling off of ever since we got back into the campaign in earnest: battles with enough firepower to threaten an epic party takes a LONG TIME. We spent an entire session this weekend on a single battle encounter.

Granted, a lot of very dramatic and interesting moments took place (my favorite was SR’s character surviving a Disintegrate) but still… it took a long time. I have a certain difficulty with just waving my hands at some point and determining that these followers of an evil goddess would just give up, run away, or disjunct at their goddesses will. I hate having to play obvious cards like that, but it is sometimes necessary.

The PC’s probably have too many tools.

If you are a DM like I am, I tend to like to add some pizazz to the gear that I give to the players, or at very least handwave downtime and allow them to travel and purchase whatever they desire with their treasure. That pizazz can backfire in a glorious way at epic levels, especially when you need to either add drama by endangering a player character (or even a highly thought of NPC).

One of our players, Sir Geekelot, used all of his treasure during our years of in-game downtime to procure a Staff of Life. I didn’t quite realize this until he quite humorously produced said staff and deigned that he would bludgeon the life back into two fallen NPC cohorts that had fallen to the aforementioned baddies.

Now was this a mistake for me to make such powerful items available? Yes and no. I should’ve kept tabs better on what they were purchasing, but if you release an 18th level character to the world with a pile of well-earned treasure and give him years to do whatever he feels like it stands to pretty good reason if he dedicated himself to getting that item then he should be able to do it. That run-on sentence makes a good deal of sense to me, but yet it adds extra complexity when trying to add suspense, drama, or simply just speed up the group by blowing out a few cohorts for good.

More Comin’

Well, I’ve taken only two lessons learned from dipping our toes into the epic waters and written a novelette, so I will leave it here for now. Expect to see more on this topic as weeks pass, doing some analysis to grow my skills in public will be interesting at the least!

What happened?

Several things were not aligning during this session for me… first off, I had planned a session to add a little depth to an overarching battle. It was more of a narrative night, which is not something I normally do. We had planned the general progression of events as we normally do, but we didn’t solidify some key details prior to the session so it put me into a bit of a scramble working with my co-DM over chat to iron out those bits.

A few of our players in the group weren’t feeling well that night (the flu is going around our area). They requested a shorter session, which limited some of our more crunchy plot elements from making an appearance that night.

In short, a lot of factors were aligning to result in a less than satisfying session.

Hindsight, engage!

Well, unless I start getting a degree in pharmacology I won’t be able to help the illness issues much, but I should have seen that the players were more in the mood for battle, plot progression, or something that wasn’t a narrative session. I could tell that not everyone detested the session, but it could have been a lot better.

The planning thing is what bothers me the most about the way this one unfolded. Usually I ask myself the five W’s- who, what, when, where, why – before I’m satisfied that we’ve planned something adequately to launch. Then I do a few cycles of “how can they crash this” and after that something is usually deemed ready for launch. Apparently, this time I missed the “where” and failed to connect the whole scenario to the wants of my players.

Next time I’ll be ready to go with something more satisfying for our group. One of the best things that can be done as a DM is to do the post-session autopsy to figure out what went wrong and how it can be prevented in the future. Thanks for joining me while I did just that!

Sometimes that goes well, and sometimes it doesn’t.

The Situation Gone Wrong

In our campaign, the drop-in gone wrong was the mysterious appearance of a dead gold dragon, a portent of Bad Things Happening in our world. It was iconic, neat, and generally a fun idea that we had late in our planning session and we decided to go with it.

We didn’t factor in that at Epic Levels, our characters might have the paltry ability to restore life to the fallen creature, forcing us into interactions we weren’t planned for. When someone mentioned Resurrection, both my co-DM and I threw up the “oh no” signal and quickly went to work via chat to spackle up the holes we had left.

Let’s look at how we can prevent this from happening to you!

Best Practices for Drop-Ins

1. Know Your Limits – If an idea is too complicated or too large, consider putting it off until you have the ability to flesh out the idea a bit further. If you practice writing episodic content, you can use the great idea that you had as an episode and drop it in later after you’ve thought it over. Discretion is a powerful ally!

2. Know Your Players – If you can come up with more than a half-dozen ways that your campaign group can derail a given idea, consider plugging some of those holes before you use the idea.
3. Keep Player Character Abilities in Mind – In my example above, if we would’ve kept the abilities of our party in mind we would’ve remembered that they had the ability to restore life. Important details like that can make or break your drop-in, so run a quick sanity check against major known abilities to prevent the “oh crap” moments.
4. Let Your Players Succeed – If you do miss something and your players capitalize on something that you didn’t consider, make every effort to let them succeed. Nothing sucks worse than railroading, so learn to think on your feet and let them have their victories.

There’s my road map to a successful drop-in! Go forth and run with all those fun ideas that you’ve always dreamt about!*

* Caution - Actually running campaign ideas that spring forth from your dreams may result in physical, mental, or social damage. Please consult a psychiatrist if you experience blurry vision, loss of appetite, or night sweats. StupidRanger.com is not liable for any damage caused from using dreams in your game.

Storyboarding

Our normal means of planning for a night’s session is laying out the major plot points that we have cooked up, this step usually occurs in our co-DM dynamic via online chat. Usually, at this point there isn’t that much detail but we have an idea of what we want to have happen, much in the same way that animators or motion picture bigwigs use keyframes to describe events within a film.

Vanir, The Great Equalizer

Where this mechanism for planning fails is the fact that the audience can interact with your movie. That’s right, Vanir’s character shows up in the middle of your slasher film and replaces the ceremonial knife that the killer uses with a rubber phallus, and then the Benny Hill Theme plays.

To account for this, you must constantly put yourself through the crash scenario with any of your plot points. How can the players circumvent this scene? What could they possibly dream up to derail this? Should I engineer something in to guide them to the proper goal? All of these questions should be considered before finalizing your plot elements.

Another important point to consider: what actually goes on without your players should they decide to just not follow a plot point? If a major battle is taking place that you wanted the players to be a part to aid the Forces of Good, what happens if they decide not to help or go some other direction? How should that affect the broader plot?

I like storyboarding, and then crashing the storyboard as a means of planning a night’s session. Unfortunately for us, this takes a bit of time to have all of the logic settled and talked out if you are operating in a co-DM fashion as we are.

Thankfully, Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band exist as a great contingency plan!

Learning the appropriate relevance of gifts

If you plan to give your players something, you should do it with certain guidelines in place. If the item they are being given is relevant to the plot, you should take safeguards to ensure that this item doesn’t simply pass immediately to the local merchant.

If you don’t safeguard these items in some way, or make them relevant enough that the players don’t desire to hock them, then you should plan some sort of a side quest to track the item down again or plan what path that item takes once it is out of the players hands. It can be a great opportunity for deep roleplaying, be it haggling with the merchant to get the item back or tracking it across country in order to divine its resting place.

Desire based gifting

If you intend to give your player that “item of affection” that they have always wanted to get hold of, you must be very careful (both in and out of game) to balance this gift against the rest of the party’s possessions. If you don’t provide either roleplaying opportunities or some other method of engagement for the rest of the party, this gift can appear like overt favoritism which is never a blessing for an adventuring party.

I have found that if you give the entire party a gift, they are quick to ignore the fact that Ceril the Barbarian got a nicer greataxe compared to what they got, they will likely just be happy with their present. This is generally a good opportunity to address level based inequity between different classes and generally even-up your party so everyone can effectively participate in roleplaying or direct conflict.

Narrative Elements

Much to the chagrin of a few of my more traditionalist co-DMs, I have often assumed the guise of an in-game Santa Claus or Easter Bunny in order to dispense with the merriment. Sometimes this has taken the form of a more “realistic” altruist merchant, but I prefer the little dash of whimsy that more familiar icons of gift giving can bring.

In the end, it is really up to what you want… my regular players have taken to expect a gift-giving entity surrounding the Christmas and Easter holidays, and I enjoy the Narnia-esque dash of fun that this interaction often brings.

Honestly, I have no idea if anyone else actually does this within their campaigns. Our college DM started the trend with an Easter Bunny visit one year, and I liked that encounter so much that it was just something that I continued out of the sheer fun of it.

Have a happy holiday season, everyone!

Up the ante

Obviously, near-epic characters can deal with near-epic topics and bad guys. Like-leveled bad guys help, however it is still quite difficult for any level rogue to sneak up behind a character that can have a listen check of 40+. You’re dealing very closely to “hearing a gnat fart” levels of auditory skill there.

Upping the ante works, but only when you utilize the skill set of your bad guys completely. I’ve found it is increasingly difficult to just snag a baddie from one of the Monster Manuals and go, because most of the elements that make a creature viable at higher challenge ratings are their specialized attacks, skills, feats, or spell capabilities. Something with complicated methods of attack or a complicated skills requires some planning which makes shooting off the hip somewhat more difficult (for me, anyway).

The Interactive Narrative

Lately, Kanati (my co-DM) and I have been taking the approach of having our party deal with the pantheon of gods in a somewhat direct way. This allows us the ability to take the “easy path” of freezing time or suspending reality as the gods interact to outline thematic elements to the party.

It takes some care to do this in a way that isn’t insanely frustrating for your characters… every time you take their skill checks or abilities out of the equation, they get irritated (rightfully so). In the last session, they were transported to an audience with one of their patron deities… as some flavor the encounter was supposed to start in a fog of mist that became a grey void around them.

Vanir, in all his wisdom, decided to use some weather controlling abilities that a magic item gave him to clear the mist away as he saw it starting to gather. After a few OMG moments in my head, I decided to let him do this but they could see in full their trip through the starry cosmos as the planes were folded beneath them.

Allowing your characters to interact with your narrative scene in a non-destructive way can help them remain engaged, but still allow you to tell your story in a semi-believable way. You’re not forcing them into your storyline with brute force, you let them control some elements and you control others. Hopefully this will aid you in being able to tell your story without sacrificing player enjoyment.

Energy: Your best friend and worst enemy

There are many times when the positive energy that exists between the members of your gaming group is an excellent and powerful tool. Now, IANAH (I Am Not A Hippy), but I do know that when these energies are collecting a certain special way it can equate to MAJOR distractions and lack of player engagement.

In our case, this usually takes the form of off-topic discussion, jokes/puns, sarcasm, or other non-value added discussion. For this particular session, we began with an excellent meal prepared by two of our players. Conversation around the dinner table was lively, and as the plates were being cleared I started in a bit on my pre-game check in: was everyone leveled up, what did they think of last session, etc.

It took three times to get three separate players to even acknowledge that I was talking, let alone give me some answers to these questions. This is not a problem, it happens commonly with our group, but then something else hit me.

The Partial Prep Blues

One of the perils of running a co-DM campaign is that it is fraught with dependencies. Recently, my co-DM Kanati sustained an injury while casting levitate on an automobile and had to undergo some surgery. As a result, his involvement in our sessions has become digital-only and we do our prep and in-game discussion via chat. Our arrangement is that he writes the plot and I run the incidentals of the gaming sessions.

We had done some pre-prep during the week and we had an excellent set piece for our plot all worked out. We even had a convenient hook, however in this case I was going to thrust heavily into “wing it” mode after this plot piece resolved and I knew that it would resolve early in the night. Normally Kanati would feed me some additional plot as the session went on, however this time he was away from the computer for the night convalescing and unavailable to steer the plot.

Instead of subject my group to a potential “big bang but end with a whimper” session, I explained this problem to the group and we all elected to forgo gaming for another week and enjoy pleasant conversation instead of playing.

Net results?

Opting to electively forgo a session once in a blue moon can work out well… our entire group had a good time just getting to hang out and catch up without the roleplaying involved.

I’m a major proponent of shooting off the hip, however the co-DM situation where one person writes and the other runs can hinder shooting off the hip for fear of fouling up the prepared plot. Kanati and I are working through our skills in this space still, I imagine we’ve got some room to improve.

Has anyone else out there electively canceled a gaming session, and did it positively impact your future gaming? I found that I got some out of game feedback that was helpful in aiding me to prepare the next session, so for me it was worth it for that alone.