The Trivial Pursuit of Spell Selection

Over the weekend, Dante & I participated in a trivia contest for charity. On teams of eight, we answered questions (or attempted to, anyway) from 8 different categories. In our post-game discussions, it occurred to me that preparing for a trivia contest is a lot like selecting your spells.

Prepare for the Unknown

For trivia or for spells, there's usually two schools of thought that prevail. One, specialize. Two, jack of all trades. Specializing, you take as many spells of the same type; if you're a cleric, you might take several offensive spells, or you might take several healing/restoration spells. Option two, play the jack of all trades: take a little bit of every kind of spell and hope that the ones you pick are ones that will be useful.

The Power of a Team

When you have multiple trivia players, or multiple spell casters, you may have better opportunities to cover the requirements. Pretty obvious, huh? The more people you have, the more chances that someone will know that obscure bit of knowledge or the spell that will make the difference in that battle.

Harness the Team Mentality

If you're trying to conquer the trivia challenge or the Undead Lord, it helps to be coordinated with your other spell casters. Try to all follow the same preparation method; there is usually greater success if you are all specialists or all jacks of all trade. Try to coordinate your spells so they span the greatest range of possibilities. If you plan it right (and the other teams are not as smart as you), you might win that trophy!

Throw Up The Horns

Every now and then, I find out something that just transcends the boundaries of awesome.

I grew up in a time where the best musicians had big guitars and bigger hair. They saw a million faces, and they rocked them all. I love rock. I have been known to throw up the horns during meetings at work.

I never really gave much thought to the gesture's origins. I'd heard it was "devil horns" once or twice, but I never really worried about it (any more than I worried about, say, Black Sabbath's music corrupting me). Admittedly, when I was a teenager, I was accidentally throwing up American Sign Language for "I love you", which is about as metal as oatmeal. I have since rectified this.

And now, I come to find out that the Rock Horns are actually a Protection Against Evil spell.

Frankly, the part of the article that suggests that a rock concert is "forming an enormous shield against the evil eye" is the coolest thing I have ever heard. Although I must question why some more powerful demons would fear a minotaur. Perhaps shadow-puppetry is their secret weakness?

Regardless, I seriously think if I go outside there is going to be a motorcycle equipped with bat wings waiting for me right now.


---

Speaking of rocking out, we here at SR have become hopelessly addicted to the Guitar Hero series (and Rock Band) as of late. Me, I'm stuck on (ironically, The Metal on Expert).

If you'd like to compare scores or test your *ahem* mettle against the might of Bat Loaf, go ahead and shoot me a message or a friend request. BUT BE WARNED!!!! I choke in multiplayer!!!!!!!

Vanir's Xbox 360 Gamertag:


Vanir's guitarhero.com profile:
batloaf

Dante and Stupid Ranger's guitarhero.com profile (the family that rocks together, stays together):
Dante8

If there's enough interest, maybe we could even start up a tour group?

Either way, rock on, and keep on casting Protection From Evil!

<Vanir has left the building>

Regarding Magic Item Creation...

I have long wanted to make a sorcerer or mage dedicated to the art of magic item creation. I mean, who wouldn't want to be the D&D equivalent of Santa Claus that comes rolling into town with a new complement of toys and cool magical devices? I know I would. The trouble with such a character under the normal D&D 3.5 rules is that magic item creation requires two things: a lot of dedicated time and experience loss.

Both of these things are counterintuitive to the whole notion of an adventuring party, so I never really got to execute my vision of a traveling mage that specialized in the art of magic item creation.

Learning lessons from Technology Past

For several years, I was a huge fan of the Gemstone IV multi-user dungeon (or MUD, for you acronym lovers). They handled magic item creation in a much different way than D&D... in their system they had an Enchant spell that could be used to raise the enchantment level of a particular magic item effectively raising its to hit and damage.

The trick to this system is that it required incremental casting, meaning you had to prep the item with a special (somewhat expensive) potion and cast at the item multiple times in order for the final enchantment to take. The item was extremely brittle and unusable for the multiple days (sometimes weeks) that the item was being cast upon, but it could easily be stored in a pack or something while you were working on it.

Also, the Enchant spell was very much a black box process and there was a distinct risk of failure... there was conjecture that things like time of day, amount of weight that the caster was carrying, time period between casts, and whether or not any other protective spells were active all affected the success of the cast. If the cast failed, you ran the risk of being forced to start the time intensive process over, unenchanting the item, or blowing up the item causing severe bodily damage to yourself and anyone nearby.

I found this system remarkably interesting, and it had the notable bonus of being do-able while "on the road". The mystery surrounding the proper method for enchanting led to some very interesting rituals by those that chose to specialize in this spell, and personally I believe that all magic in roleplaying should have the same air of mystery.

Translating to D&D

I've seen several attempts to replace the current item creation system in D&D. I've seen point-buy systems, material based systems, and many other combinations therein. One system, that was created by our buddy Sir Geekelot (currently a player in our campaign, then DM of his own campaign) actually went as far as to create an entire player class encompassing this topic.

There was nothing wrong with any of these approaches, but most (if not all) were logistical nightmares, causing the player to keep track of a lot of materials, points, combinations of items, and the like. That, or the systems would be out of balance in some other way such as enabling the creation of low point cost and high power items.

None of them seemed to match the general elegance of the Gemstone style Enchant spell, and this is something that I hope D&D 4.0 addresses. If nothing comes of the 4.0 edition, I may try my hand at translating the elements of Gemstone's enchant system myself, but I'm always concerned about game balance when introducing major new systems like that.

Has anyone else had success with an elegant enchantment or item creation system? Please share, because I sure would love to get this character out of my head!

The Power of Zero

There came a certain point in my gaming life over the last couple of years where doing big giant things got boring. That is, I'd been in a couple of campaigns where the characters got to epic levels and were throwing down ridiculous amounts of damage. It becomes an arms race, and the monsters and you progressively get tougher and more able to kill each other. It's fun sometimes, but it lost its luster after awhile. So I decided to step away from the large and look at the small.

Paradise By The Continual Light

In the last campaign I played in (and that Dante and Kanati are continuing), I played a kickass bardic rock star named Bat Loaf. His stats, skills, and spells were not really set up for combat. He was a lover, not a fighter. I mean that in a very literal sense. In every town, he was hooking up with every hot barmaid he could find. I would add that we never got too far into roleplaying the details of these encounters -- because, well, EWW. Suffice it to say that the process was abstracted into a series of Perform checks. Heh heh.

My bard's love life is a tale for another time. What I will talk about, however, is how you can produce some very powerful results out of seemingly nothing if you just use your imagination. Being the lecherous dog that he is, Bat Loaf had a veritable arsenal of spells designed to aid him in his chosen lifestyle, including:

• Feather Fall - Let's suppose that Bat's current bedmate sleeps on the second floor, and her husband walks in. There will be no hastily-constructed bedsheet rope and probable falling damage for this bard! He will float gently to the ground and hope he remembered all his clothes.


• Percussion - Used during concerts.... and for mood music after the concert!


• Easy Math - Used to quickly count the proceeds from his concerts, because he was always running away from someone due to his after-concert escapades.


• Ventriloquism, Minor Image, and Ghost Sound - great for stage effects - and for convincing distractions when he needed to flee a lover's room in a hurry.


• Contraception - Surprisingly, the only spell I chose from the Book of Erotic Fantasy for Bat Loaf. He was, if nothing else, very practical in these matters. I'd have taken Remove Disease too, but it was not available to bards -- so he found himself at the temple a couple times begging for forgiveness and relief from burning sensations.

By now you may be wondering what all this has to do with getting "powerful results". Watch and learn.

Lost Boys and Gladiatorial Girls

One night, our party came to a village and Bat immediately set about his usual business of getting loaded on ale and taking the hottest woman he could find to take to his room in the local inn. The paladin of the party always spent the night in a local temple, cleaning everything to atone for his sins. It was at this time that our illustrious GMs decided to have the party captured and taken off to fight in some secret gladiatorial games run by an organized crime syndicate. Problem was, they just got everybody in the tavern at the inn - not Bat or the paladin. So, one GM went upstairs with the captured players, and it was up to Bat and the paladin to launch a rescue mission!

Once we found the place (it was secret, after all), we started talking to the people there. We weren't getting a whole lot of answers because most were just there to bet on the games, but one guy told us the city guard shows up and runs everybody off sometimes. The place was heavily guarded and had wards against spells, so here I am thinking this is the clue to freeing my comrades -- I have to make the bad guys think the city guard is coming so they all run away!

I don't exactly remember what Plan A was for accomplishing this. I do remember it resulted in a big mess where I was confused about where the guards (who helped enforce the no-spellcasting rules) were relative to Bat and it ended up with him getting killed with a battleaxe after he cast a spell. Fifteen minutes of argument later, the GMs and I had successfully made our Craft(Compromise) check and they used their godlike powers to reset time to right before Bat cast his spell. In this new and improved timeline, I metagamed slightly and knew the guards would totally kill Bat with a battleaxe if he cast a spell inside the arena. (It's just common sense, after all.)

Thusly, Plan B was born!

Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through

Bat went outside the arena, rolled around in the dirt a little bit and messed up his hair and clothes, and pretended to collapse at the feet of one of the guards outside the arena gates. But not before wheezing "the city guards.... they're coming... RUN!!.....". The guard didn't so much believe him, which I found a little strange, but I went with it anyway. Not to be stopped, he crawled off and hid behind a nearby tree. Then he cast Ghost Sound. At Bat's level, he could create as much noise at twenty normal human could with the spell, which was perfect for a believable city guard facsimile. Definitely enough to convince a gate guard that the sounds of angry soldiers coming over the ridge were very much the real deal - especially with Bat now screaming and running toward him yelling "I TOLD YOU!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!"

Everybody at the arena had a protocol for when the city guard showed up - they dropped everything and ran like hell. And so it was a fairly simple matter to free our friends, because they were still locked up in the fighters' quarters near the ring and there was nobody guarding them anymore. A few monster encounters later and a ton of looting and we were on our way. We figured out the puzzle and won the day! Right?

Well, as it turns out, Dante and Kanati had an entirely different night planned for us. The captured PCs would get to fight and show off their skills in the ring, and exciting monster battles, lots of cool stuff. And it also so happened that they had a very special encounter planned in case of emergency to give the PCs a way to get free -- the owners of the arena, knowing that the standard protocol when the city guard showed up was to drop everything and run like hell, would hire some mercenaries to pose as the city guard, not even telling their employees the truth. And then they'd pocket all the money people had placed as bets. All this was to have been revealed to us at the end if we'd talked to the right NPCs. But instead, my 0 level spell brought everything crashing to the ground, and we ended three hours earlier than we usually do.

This story has been clinically proven to stop "power gamers" dead in their tracks, and I have learned no fewer than three new four-letter words since it happened. This, my friends, is the power of roleplaying!

Use it wisely.