Behind the Screen: How do you keep an idiot in suspense...

All throughout our co-DM experience, we've been trying to cultivate excitement and leave our player characters wanting more. As our characters have become longer in tooth, it is becoming harder and harder to make those special suspenseful moments pay off in a meaningful way.

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!!

Behind the Screen: Suspending the rules for reasons of plot...

One of the other difficulties with running a campaign with high level player characters is how to control plot related elements when those characters can make saves or take actions that would fundamentally disrupt your encounters.

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!

Behind the Screen: The Perils of Being Epic

We are quickly approaching the endgame of our first venture into an epic campaign. My co-DM, Kanati, and I have both agreed that this has been quite an educational experience for us and I thought I would share some high level thoughts if you are considering such a foray on your own.

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!

Behind the Screen: Dealing with a misfire session...

Face it... as a DM, sometimes you're on and sometimes you aren't. Unfortunately, this weekend's session was one where I was not on.

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!

Behind the Screen: Drop-Ins - A Cautionary Tale...

In our campaign, our storylines tend to shape up by crafting a few major story elements and the rest gets filled in by our absurd crew of player characters. Occasionally, my co-DM and I will come up with some really great idea that we feel like dropping in at the last minute, just for fun.

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.

Behind the Screen: Storyboarding...

This week, our group encountered some difficulties in finding the time to plan for our session. This resulted in an impromptu gathering for the purposes of playing other (usually video) games known colloquially as "alternagaming."

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!

Zen and the Art of Giving...

As we enter the holiday season, I want to take a minute to discuss the art of giving within your campaign. Many times as DMs, we have the opportunity to structure battles, fudge rolls, and generally massage things in the favor of our players. Occasionally, I like to take the opportunity to actually give my players something within the scope of the game, be it relevant to the plot or simply something they have always wanted.

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!

Behind the Screen: The Interactive Narrative...

Dealing with higher level characters is difficult. Right now we're playing in a near-epic campaign... our characters are all knocking on the door of 20th level. That makes many common plot-telling devices fall flat, or be easily dismantled by the party's soaring feats and skills.

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.

Friends know when to say when...

This weekend I did something that I have only done a few times in my DMing career: called a session off. I have halted sessions early due to exhausting the source material and my tolerance for shooting off the hip for the evening, but rarely have I preemptively canceled a session ahead of time.

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.

Behind the Screen: Desigining a Great Encounter

Over the weekend, things came back around in a big way for our group and we were able to pull off a largely satisfying session. The interesting thing is that the session was centered around a single battle encounter.

It all starts with a plot point

Our players were suffering from a lack of engagement... they weren't able to see any personal tie-in to the larger world around them. So my co-DM and I set out to create a major plot point that would tie the actions of our characters during the first campaign to our current one.

We created a battle encounter that seemed relatively consistent with a few others that we've had during the session, but we added in the presence of a very, VERY evil aligned NPC. They jumped right into the fray, luckily!

And yes, I got to use some suspense and horror!

The encounter took place near dusk, and the spot check to see the baddies was pretty difficult. Luckily, nobody rolled high enough to see the evil NPC behind the standard baddies until they were entrenched in battle. A few more difficult spot checks to make out some important details made them curious, including the fact that she did not engage them in any way.

The NPC was an evil aligned goddess from the Book of Vile Darkness, and the baddies were her underlines that she put out there because she enjoys torture, pain, and inflicted suffering. The characters realized something was up when the baddies would laugh and writhe ecstatically with every successful strike. As they died, a tether would appear connecting their essence to the evil goddess.

This got them all extremely interested in what was going on.

The all encompassing power of flavor description

After the baddies were reduced to less than zero hit points, they were so overcome by their ecstatic pain that they fell to the ground. At this point, the evil goddess would re-assert her dominance and tethered them with a spiked collar that did nothing but break bones and sinew, causing a disgusting series of images for the players and their characters.

Then, one by one, as the characters attacked the goddess they were stopped dead in their tracks, mid-action. The goddess then had a speech explaining the plot as it concerned the characters, and her actions up until this point and the players were all very interested in what she was saying.

In fact, the two note-taking types in our group were writing so furiously I had to stop for a second to tell them I was going to post this talk on the forum that accompanies our game sessions so they could focus on what was being said. They were pleased.

Get to the point already!

The long and short of this story is this: much can be done to create a good encounter by mixing a whole lot of intrigue with a piece of the plot and sprinkle a battle in there liberally.

The session that I described was the first time in my DMing career that the entire group was engaged at some level and the entire night revolved around a single battle oriented encounter. Several of my players told me that the session was extremely good, and I felt extremely good while running it so I'm willing to chalk this one up as a success story.

Special kudos go to my co-DM Kanati, who found said evil goddess and made her speech positively hair-raising!

Behind the Screen: DMs metagame too...

In our new campaign, us two DMs are in uncharted territory: we have a 17th level party. In only one session, we've had to make adjustments on several occasions because some different challenges exist when attempting a campaign at this level.

We are faced with the conundrum of metagaming as DMs vs. creating an enjoyable and challenging campaign.

Culture Shock

Essentially, what we've got here is learning a new mode of game balance. Now our characters have the ability to inflict a fair to significant level of damage, heal quickly, and immediately neuter encounters that should've been very difficult. Case in point: we had a gathering of heroes to prepare for a coming war. The room was filled with "adventurers of note" from the realm, and we decided to have the whole shebang ambushed by a band of hired assassins.

These assassins had a series of nefarious goals, so they were adequately outfitted with various poisonous implements. They succeeded in offing several of the NPC heroes before our bard realized that he had a song from his Seeker of the Song prestige class that would grant immunity to poison. After he blew that off, my assassins quailed under the onslaught of our party (and a few of the other remaining heroes that were left over).

Operating in a mode where your players have abilities that can immediately nullify the challenge of your encounter is a two-edged sword.

Building a Better Bad Guy

I could sit and write a long diatribe on how to tailor your bad guys to suit the environment they are made to fight in, however I don't feel that this is always the correct path. You need to do this intelligently... if your character discovered a rare artifact that gives them immunity to fire and keeps it secret and does not flaunt it around, then will the evil evoker that they are fighting know to energy admixture his spells to ice? Not unless he makes on HELL of Gather Information check or decides to scrye in the appropriate way.

Personally, I like to operate in the following mode for directed encounters:

Create motive - Your individual or band of bad guys should have a reason they are doing what it is that they are doing. Without this, they'd be at home on their couch eating chips.

Create skills to fulfill that motive - This can be done on the fly, but should be done with what the NPC KNOWS about the party if they are the intended target. If they are not the intended target, then the NPC skills should be selected to perform whatever task they were bent on performing in the first place (such as a targeted assassination from my example above).

If they should know something, make them try at it - Simply put, they have to gather information or hire minions to do this for them... build your plot by having the NPC Baddie go through the effort of gathering information... leave clues to this end if the baddie or his minions do a poor job of gathering info, that way it won't be a major surprise when the bad guy shows up with admixtured iceballs.

Finding balance

I feel that the best solution for this is a justified balance of metagaming and plot-related preparation. There will be times when you will be required as DM to make a few things happen to ensure that the party is challenged or certain events take place, but I feel this should be done as organically as possible within the constraints that you have placed around your plot and NPCs.

By thinking about the motives of your NPCs, you will find much more success in making them seem like believable foes (or allies, as the case may be). Just remember, the bad guys that get away are usually good for a lot of information!

Whenever you run into a situation like the assassin scenario I explained earlier, try to learn from what happens. The characters got a great opportunity to annihilate some bad guys and I learned a few lessons about what they are capable of at their new higher levels. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Behind the Screen: Staying fresh...

This week my mind has been set on putting together materials for the second act of our campaign. This has presented me and my illustrious co-DM, Kanati, with the usual fun of dreaming up new things to torment our players with but the second time around things are proving slightly more difficult.

You Can Never Go Home

Epic storylines are fantastic because the events are so large and powerful that it should fundamentally change the people involved. In the end, it should feel a bit like Lord of the Rings: the characters are so different by the time they finally are able to arrive home that their lives are driven to a different purpose.

My players are embracing opportunities to re-invent themselves as this campaign gets underway... some have found purpose with academic or altruistic pursuits, others are completing some more personal stories in their down time. They are taking the opportunity to emerge from the first act of the campaign changed in some way, in the process rejuvenating their characters for a return to action.

Meanwhile, us DMs have been hard at work creating a new storyline. It has been more difficult creating content that hasn't been "done before" in this space. Earlier this week, I did a piece on the reinvention of characters and little did I know that a few days later I would be struggling to reinvent myself as a DM.

Throw that crutch out the window, Tiny Tim!

It is hard work to come up with content that is not hackneyed and derivative. I've found some fertile ground in some surprising places this week: indie rock, both re-runs and the premiere of NBC's Heroes, even my crazy coworkers. As this campaign goes on, I plan to share some of this new episodic content here in hopes that someone else might benefit from my glimpses of madness.

One thing that I'm doing to ensure freshness (aside from deoderant) is building plot points around new interesting NPCs. New non-player characters with a personality and a fleshed out motive just breeds perspective and allows the players to attach to the campaign in a different way. The resulting roleplay will likely open up new avenues for your players to walk down. Essentially, your players will make the scenarios fresh for you and that is a powerful thing.

I'm going to turn this one around on you, gentle reader: how do you keep your campaigns fresh? Where do you draw your inspiration from?

Co-DMing: Surviving the Game

In my last post, I told the story of how Dante and I teamed up to co-DM, and the lessons I learned from that experience. (Mostly, the experience of not listening to him.) Then, less than an hour before we were to start the final session of the mini-campaign, he suggested the following to me: "Hey, how about you run the last one since it's your baby?"

I almost told him "oh HELL no" and punched him. But Dante's known me long enough to know that he's faster than I am and can usually evade punches, and that he can push specific psychological buttons to make me curious enough about an idea of his to think I came up with it. And somehow, he managed to get me latched on to the thought that I could try to see this thing out the way I saw it in my head instead of him losing it in the translation. I suspect that his reasons for doing so were numerous, including being frustrated with my stubbornness, wanting to watch me wreck the train a little for a change, and giving me good valuable DM experience under fire. Even so, I decided to say the hell with it and give it a go.

Tracks? What Tracks?

I knew by this point in the campaign that the players were going to do whatever the hell they wanted. So from the first moment that I sat down at the table, I decided no railroading. If they decided to kill each other, set fire to the forest, and blow up the world, then I was OK with that. I would go down with my ship.

The plan for the evening was that the PC's would go to this lumber yard up north, revealing the identity of their Important NPC. This guy was the half-elven son of an evil Chancellor who was famously anti-elf, even trying to turn the whole nation against them. They'd get enough people realizing the Chancellor was a big hypocrite, and the bad guy would stage an elaborate setup to discredit the PC's, where they'd ultimately crash the party and bring this whole thing to a climax. It sounded great in my head, would have been a sweet novel.

"No railroading" turned out to be the best idea I had all night. About two minutes in, all hell broke loose and I found myself with one party member deciding to defect to the bad guys, 2 members of the party actively hunting him down to kill him, and our ninja character quietly knifing the Important NPC in the back with a poisoned dagger "to keep him out of trouble". No problem. They'd been trying to kill the diplomat for a few sessions, if they rolled right he was dead. Somehow, he escaped. They kept searching. I rolled for that, making the DC higher as time went on until they gave up since there were no seasoned trackers. So I let him get away.

When Life Gives You Homicidal Maniacs, Make Homicidal Maniade

Instead of going where I wanted them to go, the PC's decide the direct route is so much better, so they keep the half-elf knocked out and take him to the city. I decide to let the Chancellor's little kangaroo court happen anyway, and they'll show up as it's starting. The reason that it's going as planned is that our escaped diplomat has successfully made it back to the city and plead his case. And I offered him a chance to live: interrogate an impostor half-elf in front of the crowd to make the Chancellor look good -- or die. Seemed like a good opportunity for some roleplaying.

The player playing the diplomat clearly disagreed with me, as shortly thereafter he tells me he has hung himself in his cell. Well, so much for that idea. I'd seen it as an opportunity to pull out some incredible bullshit and roleplay his eyeballs out, but it wasn't fun for him. No problem. My original plan was to have an NPC run the tribunal anyway, so that was fine.

Well, until the PC's show up, sneak in a little bit, and then start killing all the guards in sight and a couple of civilians with fireballs. (Did I mention the wizard was captain of the city guard?) At this point, I am pretty convinced that I am not going to have a whole lot of recourse except for killing them all. So I have a senator show up with about 50 guards in tow, and he demands to know what the hell is going on RIGHT NOW.

Stupid Ranger gets credit for saving the party in my book. She casts Light on all of their clothes and claims they are all on a Holy Mission to expose the Chancellor's lies. I figure nobody's going to buy that but it's enough of an attention-getter to keep them alive for a minute (Tracy Hickman-style). Then they pull out the half-elf, who looks like the Chancellor but with pointy ears, Now THERE'S a reason they'd stop trying to kill them. The senator shits a brick and calls off the dogs. Then they round up a posse and dethrone the chancellor. VICTORY!

Post-Mortem

Yeah, I fudged a little. The story was weak in some places, and there were parts that weren't exactly plausible. But you know what? Pretty much everybody at the table was engaged and having fun. There was rampant roleplay (albeit kinda scary roleplay) happening, especially with our ninja and our psionic characters making some very memorable moments. ("Huh? Where am I?" "Don't you remember that awesome speech you just gave and everybody was cheering?" <psionic memory alteration> "Oh yeah, that was AWESOME!")

In short, everybody had fun -- even the guy who committed suicide, if that makes any sense -- and last time I checked, that means the DM did his job. (Somehow!)

And I discovered something too -- I was having fun the whole time. Once I finally let go and decided to let things happen as they went, things were a lot less forced and a lot more fun. Sure, I'd like to be a bit more prepared for the inevitable off-roading, but it doesn't bother me like it used to. I simply cannot see how a session could go wronger than this one, and if I survived this..... perhaps I can do this after all.

But for now, I'm more than happy to let Dante and Eric take the reins again.

Behind the Screen: Note-Taking, my perspective...

On Treasure Tables there was a very thought provoking post on adventure notes yesterday. This got me to thinking of the many ways that I've kept adventure notes over the years and I thought it best to share these various approaches today.

A Holistic Approach

My barometer for determining what makes a good encounter is usually based around how much fun my players are having. I have been known to rework an encounter mid-stream if it turns out being far too challenging or drop in an extra encounter or two fairly organically into the plot. If I think its going to be fun for the characters, I am happy to "wing it" and make up an encounter on the spot to scratch whatever apparent itch that I can detect.

This usually makes for a note-taking nightmare, that's why I generally tend not to do it. I will outline the basics: what they encountered, any excellent or creative steps that the players took to dispatch the baddies, experience and treasure. Most of my notes fit comfortably onto a 3.5" index card, but I usually just keep a notebook of half-sheets that show the progression of events.

The Lazy Approach

When embracing the glowing beauty that is shooting from the hip, I got out of the habit of note taking. We had a few natural secretaries in our group, one of which is our very own Stupid Ranger. Since I have the good fortune of living with her, there were times I would just ask her for her set of notes on the campaign happenings prior to the session.

In a real pinch, I would sometimes call a five minute break and sneak a peek during the session if I need to quickly craft up a plot point that tied together a few prior events from recent nights.

The Team Approach

There was a time when I fully embraced this hands-off approach to campaign outlining. We used a blog to track the progress of the campaign that wrought Lumbar, Goudy, and Skythorn, where each character would post their in-game thoughts in exchange for an experience bonus.

This provided many Good Things: a running tally of how a character was perceiving the plot, an extremely detail-based set of notes for me to refer to, and an engaging way to keep the characters in the game in exchange for what amounted to an experience pittance.

My players took to this extremely well, and we have adapted this to use some different technologies as the years have gone on. We are currently using a PHP BB bulletin board to track this type of information, and players are free to post their details as they desire to receive their experience.

We've been discussing the art of co-DMing this week, if you have a co-DM use them in this mode. Let them assist in keeping an outline or additional details, we've had some success in having a post-game rap session to jot down a posthumous set of reflections on how the session went and what we need to tweak to make it more engaging.

Notes are what you make of them

In short, you need to make notes your servant. If you thrive on the structure of keeping a detailed set of notes that are yours and yours alone, do that. If you are like me and prefer keeping a loose outline and going off of player perception to drive your stories, do that. If you have some other approach that nobody has thought of before, do that but be sure to leave comment and let us know what it is!

Co-DMing: Heed Your Dungeon Mentor

As Dante recently posted, he and I just finished up Co-DM'ing a 5-week mini-campaign for our group. Though I have played D&D for 20 years, I am admittedly not a particularly experienced DM. And as any experienced DM will tell you, you can take and dispense all the advice in the world -- but it's a whole different thing when you've got 6 players staring you in the face waiting for you to tell them what's next.

A Disastrous Maiden Voyage

A few years ago, I ran a very short-lived campaign that was chock full of story and good roleplaying opportunities. Unfortunately, it was also my first try ever at being DM, and I crashed and burned. I had no idea what I was doing, and my wardrobe contained absolutely no pink shirts. Mostly I stressed out over the mechanics of combat, playing arbiter for rules lawyers, and trying to keep the plot on track. I was convinced after about two sessions that that DM'ing was just Not For Me and we ended the campaign on a really strange note that involved the Stupid Ranger's character getting polymorphed into a gorilla and doing terrible things to the main villain. Terrible. I shudder to think of it even today.

A New Hope

However, Dante and our friend Eric recently co-DM'ed a campaign in which Eric wrote most of the story and Dante ran the adventure. This appealed to me because I really enjoy writing stories, and this way I didn't have to worry about choking in the heat of the action. So he'd run the day to day operations and I'd sit behind the scenes and roleplay most of the major NPC's. Easy, right?

And so, with Dante at the helm of this creaking juggernaut I'd created, we set sail for adventure. And the very first night, I learned a couple very important things about writing the backend in a Co-DMing situation:

• Even if you're not at the wheel, you still have to steer the boat.
  
  And to think I thought I could just sit back, relax, and watch events unfold!
  
  The party immediately started doing things neither Dante nor I were even remotely expecting. And the things they were doing that we were expecting were the ones we were hoping they wouldn't do. Within 15 minutes of play, the players had all smelled various rats and were on high alert for trouble, and it was clearly evident that the big surprise scenario I wanted to end the night with wasn't going to happen. Which brings me to my next point:
  


• Don't Railroad. It's Not Worth It.
  
  If the party wants to do something completely off the map, let them. If you're not prepared for what they want to do, tell them you need to quit and you can pick it up the next gaming session when you are more prepared.
  
  Why? Because if you make it such that the same result happens no matter what they do, you start to dig yourself into a trench of bullshit that even you don't buy. Your story starts to make less and less sense as the game goes on, everything seems more and more forced, and the players feel significantly less like they are in control of the events going on around them and more like they are puppets in some elaborate yet very poorly-thought-out children's program on Public Access Television.
  
  Unfortunately, this was the route I went (and made Dante go down, despite his protests). And sure enough, the very next session brought complaints from the players that things felt weird and forced.
  


• If You Split The Party, Make Sure The Two Of You Can Communicate
  
  We had a wonderful ninja-type character played by our friend Katherine who had a very wonderful ninja-type thought of hiding in the shadows and waiting 'til dark while the party was off doing something else. And I say "something else" because I took her upstairs to play out what she was doing leaving Dante and the others to do their thing. I sincerely wish I'd thought to bring my laptop with me so that we might have communicated with each other. One primary problem was that, upon our return downstairs, they thought they'd been waiting around for all of 15 minutes before their ninja came back -- when in fact, she'd not only waited until dark but had infiltrated the evil Chancellor's castle. And been captured and interrogated. And set free hours later. Though Dante said nothing, his eyes spoke to me in words consisting of four letters.
  
  There were other times, like when the party got captured by Elves, and I took everybody individually upstairs to be interrogated. This whole time, I had envisioned a big stone building with no windows, and that is what I started describing when the players asked me. And it was about then that it came to my attention that Dante had been describing the area like a well-guarded grove of trees. Outside. I received several more four letter eye-words.
  


• Especially If You Are A Newb, Listen To Your Dungeon Mentor
  
  There were a couple of times the first two sessions when I couldn't figure out why Dante was getting frustrated with me. And now, in retrospect, it correlated almost exactly to points where I had decided This Is The Way It Must Go No Matter What. And he would always tell me something like "I dunno man, I'm not sure they'll go for that." And at the time, I was thinking "he just thinks the story should go a different way but this is MY VISION!"
  
  Take it from me, your vision probably needs checked.
  
  In retrospect, it is glaringly obvious to me that this is where he noticed I was about to railroad people and tried very nicely to get me to relent. But as it always goes, you must let the train wreck happen before someone learns anything. And this is the way it went.
  

Fortunately, the campaign didn't completely self-destruct. It took me one more session before I saw the error of my ways and began to atone for my sins. The next session, the party hungered for some battle, so we gave them some in the form of some NPC assassins. That session ended quickly because people weren't feeling well.

We had planned to end the campaign with the next session, as we were nearing our finale. And when I arrived at his house, Dante spoke some terrifying words to me:

"Hey, how about you run the last one since it's your baby?"




.... But that is a story for another time.

Behind the Screen: The First Co-DM session...

Vanir and I had the good fortune to run a six-week mini campaign recently. Knowing that the first session of a new campaign is the most important, I would like to share our steps for preparing in a co-DM mode.

The Pre-Prep

The division of tasks for this campaign were clear: Vanir would write the plot, I would run the sessions. Since campaign writing is a collaborative thing, over the course of two weeks we spent some time throwing around ideas: a tyrannical dictator, an oppressed and generally clueless human population that was conditioned to think that the community of nearby elves were dangerous and barbaric, and so on.

Vanir had a great hook: the characters would begin in the employ of the dictator and be tasked to deliver a note demanding that the elves sacrifice their land to him or be destroyed. To further bring this point home, our characters were given a weapon of mass destruction to threaten the elves with if they did not comply.

Unfortunately for them, the dictator had bad information and the artifacts did not work the way the PCs were told. One of our characters was elected the party leader, and he alone was told that if the elves didn't comply he would utter the command word ("journeymen") and the artifacts would activate and destroy the elves.

This was a great setup for a fast paced campaign, so we were both very excited.

Knowing Thy Players

A great plot can be unraveled in ways unimagined by your PCs. Knowing this to be the case, we spent a considerable amount of time running "what if" scenarios by each other. This is one of the best opportunities that co-DMing provides you: the ability to run ideas past each other looking for holes and creating contingency plans should your players act randomly.

Since we know our players fairly well (some members of our group have been good friends of ours for years) we knew that there was more than a little chance that our group would do something that we did not expect. We knew one member in particular, my co-DM from another campaign that we are running, would probably be the one to attempt to blow the thing wide open.

The First Session

The player in question acted as we suspected. Immediately upon being given the artifact, our buddy immediately shared his secret duties with the rest of the group, and immediately when the chance arose invoked "journeymen" and found out that the artifact was a dud.

Thankfully, we had planned for this contingency and had some additional encounters planned to help keep the players progressing forward toward some of our other plot points, but with many of the "secrets" out of the bag it became a bit difficult. The normal rails that would've been hidden were a bit exposed, and the players were having some difficulty with their motivation to continue on.

The upside to these developments is that both Vanir and I could keep our cool under circumstances that normally would've led to catastrophe. Planning for sessions in an iterative way became very helpful during this campaign, and the combined efforts of two DMs helped to make it possible.

More to come!

Behind the Screen: The Perils of Improper Prep..

As mentioned earlier this week, we have been experimenting with the noble art of co-DMing. I would like to share a cautionary tale of symbiotic preparation gone terribly wrong in the hopes that nobody repeats the errors that troubled us for a brief while.

Let it not be said that I won't own up to my mistakes!

The Problem - Preparation Gone Wrong

A few sessions into our first experiment into co-DMing, Murphy came to visit and my co-DM was not able to come up with any compelling story advancing elements for the session (which started in an hour and a half). He suggested that we try a module that he had handy. It was a realtively intricate haunted mansion story, however it soon became apparent that there was Too Much Stuff in there for a one-session diversion like we had originally intended.

Using the principles of creating episodic content, we had placed the hook of this module in the adequate hands of the leader of the local thieves guild, who recruited our players at swordpoint to go and rescue his children that had gone missing in the vicinity of the haunted mansion.

Unfortunately, this worked too well... we had crafted a scenario that drove our players into our "prepared" content, however we had not left them with an out that didn't involve their organs ending up on the black market.

Oh no, whatever did you do?

After two sessions, our group was growing weary of the setting. It was a little advanced for their party level, so they were forced to go through the cycle of fight then go back to town to get healing at least twice. They scarcely made it 1/3 of the way through the floor plan of the haunted mansion after these two sessions so I did what any good self-respecting DM would do: started hacking stuff out of there.

All of a sudden the seven rooms that the players didn't go into on the main floor became a long wide hallway, which turned a bend to the basement stairs. The basement, which had originally been a giant cavern structure, got boiled out to its component teleportation puzzle that took them to the battle with the Big Bad.

Since they hadn't made it to these areas yet, it was a pretty easy decision and it led to a pretty spectacular moment for our fighter. The module eventually resolved, and the players appeared satisfied at the result. Due to some unexpectedly acerbic comments by our fighter and cleric, the party still ended up on the bad side of the thieves guild, but that is a story for another time.

The Great Post-Mortem

I would like to be very clear in saying that this was not my co-DM's fault. I should have opted to take the time to read through the module thoroughly and cut away the parts that were too time consuming ahead of schedule, but I opted to wing it.

As a result it became rather apparent to the players that they were inside of a module, which is something that is usually a pretty major gaffe. While my players generally embraced the hook that I placed before them, it would have been more appropriate if I had given them an out that didn't place them immediately in mortal peril.

In the world of co-DMing, preparation should be a two-way street. Always (and I mean always) have something prepared if the co-DM gets sick at the last minute, has writers block, or is otherwise incapacitated... it will be better for your players, your game, and your stress level.

Behind the Screen: Are Two DM's better than one?

Lately we have been experimenting with two dungeon masters in our group. The benefits and difficulties that arise when running "dual-headed" are many, and I hope by outlining some of the experiences that we have had in our group that we can better prepare for others hoping to take the plunge.

Definition of Tasks is important

One of the most important steps that helps co-DMing work is the clear definition of tasks. In our group, we have had two experiences with co-DMing now and they have both taken the form of "one guy writes the sessions, the other guy runs the sessions." This may not be the breakdown that you choose, however I highly recommend being extremely clear with who does what, and how to handle situations where liberties must be taken with details.

Preparation and communication is key

In both instances, we elected to arrive an hour and a half early for each of our sessions to prepare what we'd like to have happen for that night. During the week (we play on Fri or Sat most times), my co-DM and I would instant message each other with ideas and concerns, and we would generally have most of the plot details out in the open PRIOR to this 1.5 hour cram session.

Heavy communication and clear understanding of character motivations, plot progression, and the player experiences are key to making this partnership work. Often, we would have conversations outlining our thoughts on how everyone was responding to our campaign progress so far.

"They seemed disengaged, lets ramp up the battle this week. They're eager to hear what happened to our NPC wizard, lets get them to plot point A by the end of tonight."

Discussions like this led us to some very successful sessions.

There were some scenarios where the extra communication (or lack thereof) provided some difficulties. We use instant messaging to do "live" chatting about developments and plot points, and as previously mentioned this sometimes irritated our players because they felt that my focus was not on them when they were asking about events in the heat of battle. Also, there were a few instances where I just plain screwed up in my interpretation of the communicated plot, and we had a little conflict between the two of us as to how to proceed. This got resolved and everything continued smoothly, but trust me when I say that over communicating is better than under communicating in this space.

Leverage your ability to be in two places at once

One of the best things about having two DMs is the fact that you can literally be in two places at once. In fact, some of most exciting sessions were engineered in a fashion to allow us to divide the group and have our other DM take the split off group to some other location and run them through their scene while we would do the same. The suspense of not knowing what is going on in the other group, but knowing as a player that something IS going on in the other group is true roleplaying gold.

This setup also gives a very unique opportunity to have a fully fleshed out NPC in the other DM. Our last short campaign had Vanir as my co-DM and he also played an NPC character at the same time. He was able to use the extra focus that he could bring by knowing the plot to flesh out this NPC in a way that was enthralling, plus he had the time to commit to the character fully. This is sometimes difficult to do when acting as a single DM and is a major benefit to having an extra "man in the know."

Two heads are better than one

In my experience, having a two DM setup is generally better than having to haul the whole world around by myself. I found gains in character development, plot development, and player enjoyment comes from the addition of a second DM. We are about ready to start the second act of our first experiment in co-DMing, I will provide further insight into our successes and difficulties as they progress.