For starters, I find the Weird West setting one of the more interesting settings I have come across in current roleplaying games.  It mixes fantasy with some anachronism and references to real historical figures, and this adds up to me always wanting to read more of the mythology.  It seems that in the old edition of Deadlands (which I played only briefly in college) there were several expansion books that gave the system a very rich history that evolved over time, and my hope is that they continue to do this with the new edition.

Curiosity got the best of me in this case, and I have to say I was excited (and terrified) to find that the Prairie Tick is included in the Marshal’s Handbook.  These critters provided one of the most insane total party kills that I have ever been witness to… a small group of ticks ambushed my college adventuring party and killed EVERYONE in fairly short order.  Reading through their description, not much has changed with the new edition… unfortunately it would be metagaming like mad if my current character just toted around a quart of castor oil!

This likely won’t be the last time I write about this book or our Deadlands campaign.  So far getting into Savage Worlds has been interesting, with any luck my skills at D&D Dungeon Mastering will translate well to this new setting and system.

You can read the poll to see my official reply, but I did realize something as a result of these questions.  Yes, I am more critical of other DMs because I perform that role myself.  I utterly detest railroading and can see it a mile away, even though I have been known to do so from time to time.  I fancy myself supportive but constructively critical of my fellow DMs.  I have been asked for some constructive criticism over the years by a few guys, however I quickly realized that most times even if you provide your honest opinion it rarely affects the behavior of the DM requesting this feedback.  I have found that I quickly become unsupportive of someone that asks my opinion and then fails to use any of it.

I have decided that this is because of a mutated form of Powdered Butt Syndrome.  For those unfamiliar with the term, Powdered Butt Syndrome is the inability of your parents to listen to you entirely because you are their children.  Nobody wants your opinion about anything if they’ve powdered your butt.  The same thing goes for DMing, only on rare occasion do any of your direct Dungeon Masters want your opinion as a player on how they are running the game.  Most times even if they do ask for it, any corrective actions they take are short lived.  Many times it isn’t a function of the person being unwilling to change, often the inertia of the game in progress can prevent any actual corrections from being permanent.  During the GM’s Jam at GenCon this year, I heard several stories that ended with the “I’ll never do that again, but I had to run out the rest of that campaign with the decisions that had already been made.”

That’s part of the reason I turned to providing my opinion on such matters right here at StupidRanger.com, I have found that providing your opinion in a public forum is just about the only way that people will openly seek and use new ideas without some sort of ulterior motive in doing so (at least, based on the feedback we’ve received from readers and commenters!)

Anyway, that was quite an inspiring discussion over on Facebook.  Thanks Shelly and all the other poll participants that got the creative juices a-flowin’.

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

To Retreat or Not Retreat

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

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

Fighting to the Death

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

Mix ‘n Match

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

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

Here are a few really simple steps you can take to provide your players some incentive to think outside the sheath.

Reward Them!

This one is easy: provide some in-game incentives for them to roleplay more.  I have used both experience rewards and items/gold to tantalize my players out from behind the sword and shield, and I have found it best to inform them up front of this potential reward.  Encouraging your players to write backstory, act in character, or explore non-combat options can be immediately rewarded with an experience boost.  I have heard of this done as lump-sum RP rewards, or a multiplier for the rest of the session that will essentially double or triple earned experience.  I tend to lean toward 100 to 150 xp lump sum awards for in-character blog posts, character portraits or art, or other tie-in items.

You can beef this up as you desire.  Once, Vanir actually created a set of audio tracks inspired by an epic battle that he and our other players participated in.  I gave him around 1000 experience and a cool item to enhance his character, because participation outside the battle aspect of the campaign should be rewarded greatly.  For item rewards, I find it best to provide it to the character through an in-between session narrative in an effort not to bore the rest of the group.

Provide Episodes of Non-Battle Content

By learning to create episodic content you can foster more roleplaying within your campaign.  You can choose to have a bad guy defect in the middle of combat, pleading with your players to help him defeat his ex-buddies or have the players run across a damsel in distress in between fights to lead them into some diplomatic intrigue, you can steer your players toward non-combat interactions.  Again, as before, ensure that you dole out equivalent rewards for non-battle participation to provide incentive for your players to interact this way.

If your group truly loves hack ‘n slash and opts to roleplay, reward them with what they love: a unique hack and slash opportunity.  Whether it is competing in a prestigious gladiatorial competition or destroying an evil creature of specific threat to the local townspeople, this can be an effective way to foster roleplaying.  The characters get to fight and win a special prize as a reward in either case.  If they warm to this idea, you can use those established plot hooks to further the story and provide your players with even more roleplaying opportunities.

If your players electively refuse to roleplay, you can take one of two actions: let them continue hack ‘n slashing, or restrict their ability to fight.  You can throw them in jail and take their items, enter a strange magical field that increases the weight of items by 300%, or whatever… if you do this, you must do it sparingly.  This can be seen as railroading your players if not done with the appropriate soft touch.  I would much prefer that you opt for trying to provide abundant opportunities and let your players warm up to the idea than I would force them into it, but it is a technique that can be used effectively.

More advice from the DM’s perspective will come later on this week, so stay tuned!

The feedback that we’ve gotten on the Sizzle Card idea has been extremely positive.  Post up those ideas for Sizzle Cards and we’ll roll ‘em up into a PDF similar to what Zzarchov has done.  I’m honestly a little afraid of what Vanir will come up with!  Thanks for taking this one the extra mile, Zzarchov!

Adding a little spice

Todd has employed a very fun method of adding a little flair to his already fun campaign: sizzle cards.  Each player gets to draw a slip of paper at the beginning of each session that contains a special action that the player can invoke to affect the game in some way.  I haven’t seen the majority of them yet, but I got one that said “That’s no monster, that’s a guy in a costume!” which I assume means I could’ve turned a monster into a costumed person.  Another player invoked a random rockslide.  Someone else in our group told me they had one before that caused a successful hit to cause arterial spray to blind the attacker for the rest of the battle.

The players informed me that this wasn’t all fun and games, and that the Dungeon Master had the option to interpret the card creatively.  My old DM used to do this same thing with any of the Wish spells, but it was certainly always fun to try!

There’s a lot of things that I like about this approach to adding some random behavior and fun to a campaign.  It gives the players a little irreverent control over their surroundings, and the element of surprise is there since nobody else knows what Sizzle Card you have but you.  I like that it keeps the DM on his toes too, I’m sure a lot of thought goes into the Sizzle Cards and how they can impact the planned portion of the module/campaign.  Finally, it allows the DM to use some of those random content ideas that invariably pop into mind when you have to run the game instead of play.

Todd informed me that this idea wasn’t originally his, so thanks to whoever originated this idea!  Also, thanks to Todd and his group of players for inviting us into their group.  I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of new post ideas originated from such a great group of people and much fun to be had as a result!

We’re happy to return to the webcomic world!  We’re also happy to welcome Kanati as our resident artist.  He is also my recent co-DM and often fills the roll of the little devil that tells me do to terrible things to my players.

This particular pearl of excellence is the result of a random series of non-sequitors in our last campaign!

I’m still getting used to this new web comic manager, so mind my dust as we get this all sorted out!

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.

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!

The Background

We have Toccata and Fugue, twin Goliath sisters. They are bards, play trumpets, and have multiclassed themselves as silly as possible at 5th level. They are ultra-competitive, which only adds to the relative insanity.

The campaign takes place at a remote Woodstock-like music festival, where a major act is headlining and the throngs of people that have shown up are drunk and in a party mood.

The following excerpts are from my Twitter, in chronological order for readability’s sake.

The Tweets

WARNING: Some content may be inappropriate. You have been warned.

“OK, we’ve got two Goliath Bards that were orphans raised by dwarves. One can summon a spirit bear with one eye named Bobo. What next?”

“We’re both big, so we need big… implements.” -e

“And I keep my holy symbol of Moradin between my tits.” -e

“The dwarves, they may not have the length but they certainly have the girth.” -e

“Dwarven girls can handle the girth, but just can’t stand the length” -e

“Do I hear screams of excitement, or …… excitement? -stupidranger

And now we’re discussing breast augmentation creams and now they would work in D&D.

“Barf is more potent than beer because it has stomach acid.” -e

Now I’m being asked the average penis length for a half-elf. Anyone know?

Now we’re fighting some ghouls. They’re mocking the ghoul’s bandana.

Thank God, this session is over for the night. Time to replenish material and rest my weary psyche.

A Cautionary Tale? Hardly!

As you can see, we had some fun. Despite all of the roleplay time, the two of them made it a fair way through my prepared content so I feel like it was a rousing success! As you can see, not much effort was made to constrain their desire to roleplay and be as crazy, and we still managed to progress the plot.

I think it was a pretty good attempt at a campaign in the style I discussed yesterday, I highly recommend you give this type of not-too-serious campaigning a try!