The Fate Points

I’ve had a couple of DMs use the Fate Points.  The incarnations I’ve played allowed players to re-roll their bad rolls, or re-roll the DM’s good roll.  Fate Points give you that extra safety net for the bad dice moments.  For DMs running casual sorts of games, this is a nice option to give players a little more control over the dice.

The Player-Requested Option

Dante, as our DM, is a pretty easy-going DM.  And he’s been a pretty good guy during those battles when we have bad dice nights.  Like all groups, we’ve had nights where players have had REALLY bad dice nights, and Dante has given in to our fate requests.  Here are a couple of examples:

Double Rolls. When Tali the Barbarian went almost any entire night without rolling a hit, she asked if she could roll two d20s and take the best roll.  Low and behold, when given this fateful option, she managed to roll a crit.  It was a one-time Fate roll, but it made the night a little more fun for Tali.

Self-Roll. Akta the Warlord was running out of hit points rapidly, and she was having a difficult time trying to kill her attacker.  She’d used her second wind, all other healing options were exhausted, and no one was close enough to help her.  She asked Dante if she could roll her attacker’s attack roll.  That way, she could control her fate a bit.  Fortuitously, she missed herself.  Again, this was a one-time Fate roll, but it gave her control of her fate.

It’s tough to be a player invested in your character and watch that character die.  While these may not be rules you find in any source book, Fate rules give a player control over their character’s fate.  And even that little bit of control can make everything a little easier to accept even bad dice nights.

Always know the motive

When you’re trying to put a storyline together, often you’ve got a vague idea of the characters or encounters that you want to have happen.  The best part to string seemingly disparate elements of a story together is to figure out a motive why these events would be occuring, or the motive of a character or entity that can make these events happen for you.  The best part about this pattern is that you can weave storylines together.

In my current campaign, I’ve got three storylines that intersect based on the actions that my characters take.  They’ve already had an opportunity to fundamentally change at least one storyline, which in turn would’ve changed elements of the other two.  The best part about this mode of story design is that you can choose to accentuate a certain storyline if you find that one such thread is working better for your group.

Motive only gets you so far… and you don’t have to share the reasons!

You don’t necessarily have to explain every last aspect of the motivation of your characters within a story.  Once you get things going, I strongly encourage roleplaying with my characters.  It may turn out that they will take the plot that you begin in a different, more interesting direction.  This is the main reason why I award roleplaying experience… it writes aspects of my plotline for me!

In fact, I have some content written based off of an incorrect assumption that one of my players made.  They took a pre-written plot point from Keep on the Shadowfell and assumed it happened somewhere else.  The player wasn’t wrong, they were just working with the information they had.  Because this piece of the campaign would work anywhere, I opted to let them go with it.  Now another major piece of my campaign is built on this piece of player generated content.

This provides a fringe benefit of the player “being right” when they show up to find something important happening where they thought it would.

So think long and hard about the motives that drive your early storyline, and foster roleplaying to help them take flight.

Different Encounters Suit Different Needs

Battle encounters are pretty straightforward and there really isn’t much that can be done here aside from scaling the number or difficulty of bad guys up and down.  However, how you choose to tether these battle encounters together can make all the difference.  Within our dungeon, I built in puzzles, reward challenges (which I will cover in a moment) and standard battles all alongside one another.

Often when certain members of our group are putting their children to bed, the rest of the group can either choose to continue with a smaller non-battle challenge, or the game simply pauses in order to accomodate them.

Reward Challenges

This isn’t a new concept, however it is one that I have started to employ in lieu of treasure parcels.  So badly did I want to use the trap creation rules of the DMG and DMG2, I decided to accumulate a few parcels of treasure from bad guys in the dungeon and hang a easy-to-medium level difficulty trap around it for them to overcome.  You would be amazed to watch how many lengths your players will go through to get at some treasure, and how much they doubt that a giant treasure chest full of gold is safe to touch.

If I had a silver piece for every time I heard “this had better not be a Mimic” I would be a pretty rich Dungeon Master!

Pacing is your friend

In all, learning to structure your campaign to suit your audience is a fun process.  Figuring out what works, what makes your group crazy (in the bad way) and what makes your group crazy (in the good way) is a great process to sharpen your Dungeon Mastering skills.  As always, the cardinal rule of branching out into new territory is to listen to your players.  They usually do a fair job of communicating to you what is working and what isn’t.

Simple Rule: Varying your gaming schedule keeps the campaign moving forward.

We are all busy people, with day jobs, kids, other social obligations (for some of the more outgoing nerds), and other hobbies.  The simple dynamic of requiring a group to come together in order to roleplay is often one of the more difficult challenges that busy adult gamers often face.  Our gaming group is comprised primarily of busy, busy people so scheduling is a major issue.

This past week, we embarked upon a weeknight gaming session.  This is extremely rare for the gaming groups that I have been in recently, and since several of our group members have children I suspected it wasn’t going to be that successful of an endeavor.  I’m happy to report that I was dead wrong about this – the weeknight obligations were very apparent ahead of time, the group was aware that the session would be time constrained and planned accordingly.

Dinner orders were placed ahead of time and food was there ahead of the players, allowing us to quickly enjoy some Chinese food as we settled into the incidentals of getting ready to begin gaming.  We had started the session by 7 pm, and had a productive (albeit somewhat short) session.  We had plenty of time for roleplaying and got a good-sized battle accomplished before the game wrapped up around 10 pm.

These sessions appear as if they will be good for certain things like bridging minor plot points, small encounters, and some “town time”.  They might not be as well suited to large epic battles or very intense protracted roleplaying, as there still were a few distractions relating to food, the kids needing to get homework done, and the like.  But if you go in with your eyes open about the limitations around a weeknight session, it can be a powerful tool to prevent multiple-week long delays in getting together as a group.

It’s all about velocity.

This rule needs not apply only to weekday gaming sessions.  It’s more about varying your play schedule to ensure you can keep the momentum of your campaign up.  The worst thing with medium-to-large expanses of time between gaming sessions is that there’s always the rediscovery period that has to take place.  “What actually happened last time?”  “What was that guy’s name we talked to last time?  What was it he told us?”  “Why do I have an evil staff of power?  Should we be worried about this thing?” are some of the questions that might clue you in that its been too long since you’ve gotten together as a group.

Finding a way to have a shorter session outside of your normal group schedule can be a powerful tool in keeping the progress of your campaign moving forward.  If you’re an experienced Dungeon Master you might be able to plan things such that you have some smaller encounters or little gating plot points that can easily be made to fill this shorter session, its all about scope for you at that point.

Do you have any simple ideas that have made your campaigns or gaming groups run more smoothly?  Bring ‘em up in the comments, or email them to me and I’ll write an article about the good ones!

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!

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!

I spent a significant amount of time on Saturday reading through the initial plot notes and encounters that I had created for one of the best campaigns that I had ever run. This inspired me to really put some effort into my fledgling campaign that is just getting underway.

Keep on the Shadowfell gives you a loose campaign setting with some local color around the city of Winterhaven that was begging for me to add some elements to it as I hatched my own plot. I elected to do just that!

The Process

I always start with the important things first: the plot. With the help of my occasional co-DM Kanati, I laid out the general plot points that I want to unfold. From there, I worked backwards to higher level encounters – the bigger fights/events – that would define this plot. After that, I worked back to some glue encounters, which are smaller encounters designed to get the players on the appropriate path.

Encounter Design

All of these encounters are designed in such a way that the players can ignore them or come across them in nearly any order and they still lead them somewhere. A few of them they can explicitly derail and affect the plotline, however based on experience I suspect they will derail some other areas of the plot along the way and that will also change things.

To me, the worst possible thing a DM can do is make the players feel like the plot is unfolding despite their actions. For this reason I use events that are predetermined to happen sparingly in my plots, because in the end the players and their characters should be the focus of the campaign and not the campaign itself. That doesn’t necessarily mean the plot revolves around the players, but the main takeaway is that they should get to affect change within the story.

Last, but certainly not least, I have designed a few encounters entirely for fun and some character development. These are usually true episodic content, designed to be entirely modular and able to be dropped in whenever the fun is lagging or the players need some roleplaying time. These run the gamut from random encounters with friendly NPCs, to random encounters with unfriendly bad guys that can lead to a subplot, to the dispersal of one of the legendary Chuck items created for a specific member of the party. I’ve found that if you want quality roleplaying to happen, this is usually the type of encounter to foster that behavior.

Doing it is all of the battle

For me, the hardest part of doing this process is actually DOING this process. It’s hard to find the time to sit down and plan out plot related elements, let alone design encounters of the varying types I mentioned above. My advice to you is to spend an hour this weekend and try putting your plot to paper.

Work out the motivations of your bad guys, the places they will enact their plans, and some of the collateral damage they will do in the process. Then start stitching these elements together and I will bet you will find success.

These items would be exceedingly powerful. Some had a drawbacks, but in general they would be described as legendary, unique, or spectacular. We even took to calling them “Chuck Items” in the honor of our DM himself.

Usually these items were crafted outside the normal rules system for creating magic items. They would sometimes have complex combinations of effects or very specific rituals that had to be done to activate abilities. They often had significant lore surrounding them that would unveil itself as the campaign unfolded.

An example was a bow that SR’s character came across named Harvester. It had numerous colored gems inlaid in it that could be activated to do different types of elemental damage. Each time you used the colored gems, the bow was drained and it had to be recharged by killing undead. If you activated all of the gems at once, it would do an immense amount of damage. Unbeknownst to her, Chuck later told me that each time she did this there was a chance that the bow would be destroyed but it did not happen during the course of our campaign.

(If anyone is interested in the D&D 3.0 stats for this item, I am told that SR retains a copy she might be willing to share!)

Learning from the Master

I have employed this same pattern in my campaigns. The process of creating an “outside the box” awesome item tailored to your players is alluring, but I have often found that if you don’t temper it with a drawback or some sort of control mechanism it can heavily unbalance your game.

Since we’re quickly approaching the end of the Keep on the Shadowfell module and the beginning of my original campaign content, I am thinking more about how/if I am going to execute this process for my new campaign.

A few words of encouragement: making a tailored magical item that suits a player character is a GREAT way to heavily involve them, especially if you give the item a rich background or legend to go along with it.

The player feels special and gets that moment of sheer excitement every time their awesome toy does what it is supposed to do. To me this is essential to a satisfying D&D experience, especially for new players.

A question to those that have come before

For those of you Dungeon Masters out there: have you tried something like this yourselves? Players, have you ever received a tailor-made item? If so, did it improve your gaming experience?

Finally, if you’re reading this: thanks Chuck. They just don’t make D&D moments like that anymore!!

The end of the module as we know it!

We’re getting dangerously close to the end of Keep on the Shadowfell, and now’s the time for me to start infusing some of my own details into the module to prepare my group for life outside the Keep. I’ve got about 10 sessions worth of material storyboarded, which is a new tool in my DM repertoire.

Essentially I’ve been writing out the campaign sessions in a bulleted list outlining the setting, the key players, and expected paths that the group could progress along. If the group goes “off script” I will just make some new bullets for the following session and adjust as needed.

I’m taking several notes of inspiration for this idea from the encounter structure from Keep on the Shadowfell. I really enjoy the two-page encounter style, and I’m also taking some inspiration from Phil the Chatty DM‘s one-page dungeon contest. Succinct representation of roleplaying ideas is a really important skill for busy dungeon masters like me!

This idea lodged itself sideways in my brain… it strikes me that it could be done but I was having trouble how to logistically scope encounters for a single player. With the intent of trying this out, I’ve put together a few questions that might lead me to some solutions:

1. What plots are best suited to a single player character?
2. How do you scope single player battle encounters in a fulfilling way?
3. In this type of game, is it better to provide NPCs or downscale encounters?
4. For those of you that have done this before, what was the most successful aspect of the game? What was the least?

Thanks for any help you can provide! Hopefully SR and I will be underway before long!