I happened upon John Miskimen’s post at The Call Of The Dungeon this morning. In it, he lodges a complaint against setting your characters inside an epic story larger than themselves.

The idea of some epic story running in the background tends to diminish the PCs in a game somewhat. To me, player characters are competing with non player characters for the spotlight in settings like this. Even in a Hyborean Age setting, players will measure their character’s deeds and worth against that well known Cimmerian. Playing a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away means living up to all of the iconic characters of that saga. And who can stand next to the deeds of a simple hobbit and his gardener in Middle-Earth?

I can see where he’s coming from to a certain extent. You don’t want to diminish the PCs’ importance in the story. But I feel this points to something of a cultural need to up the ante and make things more exciting by means of putting things in a larger scale — an entertainment arms race, if you will. Under this mindset, you could have an exciting adventure where the characters save the girl, defeat the bad guy, and narrowly avoid death countless times — but since nobody saved the world from total destruction, it’s now somehow boring.

I would submit that large, epic backdrops for your campaign give you a lot more options as to what your PCs do. The story of Star Wars isn’t just about the dozen or so epic battles we see. For every one of those we see, there were a thousand more in the war that we didn’t, and they didn’t have anything to do with the Big Story. (That’s why I love the Clone Wars cartoon. Mace Windu vs the robots FTW.) There are giant, untapped mines of action and intrigue everywhere if you pause to find them.

There’s no need to try to shoehorn your PCs into someone else’s story — they have their own to tell. If you can get the players invested in their characters and what they’re doing, it will be interesting. Your players are not unimportant in the grand scheme of things if you focus on their story instead of the grand scheme of things.

Occasionally, a reader will sneak in and drop an email in our poor, emaciated inbox. In accordance with state inbox cruelty regulations, I am required to elicit a response to this:

Peter Blood writes:

It has been 25 years since I played D&D in college and I still miss it. Now my 10 year old daughter loves fantasy, LOTR, and has read the whole Harry Potter series. I want to play D&D with her but do not know how to start. I am not at a level where I could set up my own dungeon and be a DM. I can’t remember all that stuff about how to attack and saving throw stuff.

How can I play D&D with just the two of us?

Is there an online game where the computer is the DM? Is there a video game without much killing?

I am all ears.

First, Peter, let me inform you that I am totally jealous of your awesome name. For a moment I thought a pirate or sorcerer was emailing us and, with a name like Peter Blood, the person sending the email could not have been under level 18.

Now, getting down to business. I have personal experience playing D&D one-on-one with someone else. I did so all through high school with a friend of mine, and that was the only way I knew how to play the game for years until I found a regular group to play in. I was 13 years old, and the adventures were ridiculous and terrible, and occasionally I get all misty wishing I could have that much fun again.

If you intend to run adventures for your daughter, I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to get around learning some game mechanics. However, I completely feel your pain on this one. When I run adventures, I feel as if I am going to choke to death on how many things there are to keep track of. Under normal circumstances, you have a couple of options.

Our group has relied on a two-DM system where one person primarily does story and the other handles the nuts and bolts of combat. This leaves the guy who doesn’t want to deal with the numbers free to roleplay his fool head off. However, this isn’t really a solution for you, because it’s just you and your daughter.

This means you need plan B, which is what I do to cope as DM in any size group: rules light, roleplay heavy. By this, I mean you need to learn the barebones of combat and a few other actions — but a lot of the time you will just make a judgement call or handwave a skill check. Make the game less about the rules, and more about the interactions between your NPCs and your daughter’s PC. What do I mean by this? For example: have some orcs capture her PC and make it clear that she’s going to get killed if she tries to fight her way out. Play an orc, and make her figure out how to get out of there (either by escaping somehow or talking her way out of the situation).

DMing is difficult, especially at first, but don’t get discouraged (and don’t forget nobody is expecting you to be perfect right out of the gate!) Everything gets a lot more comfortable after plenty of practice and mistakes. I know our group saw more than a few spectacular disasters when I was running last, but at the end of the night everybody was having fun so it was OK.

You don’t have to come up with the dungeon and everything in it on your own, either. Expeditious Retreat Press has a whole bunch of modules designed for one DM and one player titled, oddly enough, 1 on 1 Adventures. I would add that I think these are D&D 3.5e and not the new 4e, but it is somewhere to start (and you’ll probably want to avoid this one, for obvious reasons). If your daughter enjoys solving puzzles, you can sprinkle some into your adventures too. Cloud Kingdom games has some awesome books on this topic.

As far as videogames go, there are lots and lots of RPGs out there, but most are single-player. However, if you’ve got multiple computers, you could go with something from the Neverwinter Nights series or one of its predecessors. With videogame RPGs, though, you’re pretty much going to wind up chopping up lots of people and monsters into tiny little pieces to get XP. I’m having a great deal of difficulty thinking of one where that is not the case (unless you’re playing Myst or something). If you’re looking for nonviolence, my recommendation would be to stick to tabletop adventures where you can be assured of everyone’s peaceful demeanor via your omnipotence.

There is one other option that may terrify you, but it’s so crazy that it just might work: give your daughter the books, and let her run a game for you. She’s older than the age I was when I started getting into this stuff, and I guarantee you it’s a great way to spark her creativity. I would keep it super extra rules light though — perhaps eschewing the D&D rules for a much simpler set you two agree on (combat settled by rock-scissors-paper, for instance).

Hopefully, this was of some help to you, and you both will have a good experience like I did when I was starting out: ridiculous, terrible adventures — and lots of fun.

So it was that Dante, Stupid Ranger, and I found our characters wandering around Outlands in Hellfire Peninsula. We were freshly 60 and, as an enhancement shaman, I was thoroughly enjoying sending my spirit wolves to feast upon everything I could. The gear was so much better than the old world, and I was running around territory that looked like something out of a Doctor Strange comic. Life was good.

That is, until the night I met the greatest griefer who ever lived.

I was soloing that night, cheerfully mass-murdering the Bloodhollow Orcs over by Spinebreaker post, collecting a basket filled with their vas deferenses so this guy I knew could make stew. Then I noticed I was dead. I panned my camera to see what killed me, but did not see anything. So I found my corpse again, and had only collected one more vas deferens before suddenly I was dead again.

This time, I saw my assailant: it was a red-bearded level 80 human paladin, and his name was Mwxyywyxm. At least, I think that’s what it was. I think he designed his name specifically to cause cranial bleeding. I waited until he flew away, and then I resurrected. Two seconds later, I see him swoop down in front of me. Then I died again, and he made a rude gesture at me. I decided it was time to get the hell out of there.

However, my dear friend would have none of this. When I would get to my corpse, he would kill me. When I would rez at the Spirit Healer, he was somehow close enough to know and he would quickly find me and kill me (which made the 25% durability price ever so much more worth it). I eventually decided to hearth, but he got to me before I could leave.

This was starting to become upsetting.

Fourteen resurrections later, I managed to get on my horse and take off toward Zangarmarsh. I must have caught him when he was going to the bathroom or microwaving a defenseless puppy for dinner, because I found myself still alive after a couple minutes. Surely death was right around the corner, waiting to swoop in and kill me! Had I escaped?

Turns out I had. But that’s when the real fun started. I started to notice messaged showing up in the local defense channel:

Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
PhatLewts4Me> zomg wtf
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
Spinebreaker Post is under attack!
PhatLewts4Me> f@## ret pallys killing everyone
FredOrcWaffles> omg somebody come kill this guy

That continued for a few minutes, and then all was silent. Then, another tidal wave:

Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Aggrodamus> ZOMG HELP MEEEE
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!
PincheeLoafu> jessus everyone in thrallmar is dead
PincheeLoafu> f*#@(king ret pallys
Thrallmar is under attack!
Thrallmar is under attack!

Falcon Watch fell in a similar fashion several minutes later.

Then it hit me. Holy crap. He couldn’t find me, so he decided to mess with me by killing every quest giver in the zone. What a DICK.

So I went to Un’Goro Crater and farmed leather. For hours.

I told the tale to my dear friend SirGeekelot, who immediately pronounced: “That guy is my hero“.

A week later, I was back at it. The rest of the SR team and I had been doing quests in Winterspring. Sure, we could level quicker in Outlands, but we’re new to this so it was nice to see all the “old” stuff. Plus that asshole was still out there. But it’d been a week. Surely he’s gone. Right? Right?

So we went through the Dark Portal once again, and we were happily collecting the mutated fel-sphincters of some helboars when all of a sudden I saw Stupid Ranger suddenly fall over dead. Dante, as is his nature, immediately charged her assailant. I applauded his bravery, but I already knew the result. I saw the red beard. I saw the jumble of w’s, x’s, m’s and y’s. I saw enough damage to make Kel’Thuzad call in sick to work. It was that bastard again.

A half hour later, he’d killed all of us no fewer than twenty times each. We finally decided to call for help from our guildmates. SirGeekelot came to help us on his lvl 80 hunter, either from a desire to help his friends or to meet his new hero. He cheered as the epic battle began.

And then two seconds later, he died. SirGeekelot, that is. WHAT. THE HELL. This happened a couple more times. Then SirGeekelot checked his stats on the Armory. Oh dear, a full set of this year’s Arena gear. He was basically a walking PvP machine. Great.

So we called another of our guildies in, and he brought his lvl 80 mage in. And then both of our guildies died, because that asshole had awesome gear and apparently no soul. About 20 minutes later, he eventually flew off. Probably to go kick a nun in the shins.

We never saw him again. But Dengus and I have both sworn this: when we are level 80, we’re going to get geared to the teeth, and we’re going to find that guy and kill him repeatedly until he wishes he was never born. Then we will kill him again.

Congratulations on your recent acquisition!  You have a wonderful new dungeon, ready to fill with all your nefarious traps and your troves of treasure, or to keep as place to escape the pressures of the world and all those pesky adventurers.

As a Dungeon Master, often it makes sense to handwave events that are deemed too dull, too boring, or happen too often to “waste” time on during the gaming session. Over the weekend, I had an “a-ha!” moment that made me realize why letting some events like class training, cleric prayers, or other character specific events have their moment in the sun is important.

Learning by Doing

For those of you that don’t know, I am a somewhat experienced martial artist (as is Vanir). I have been training in Shotokan Karate for the last 18 years or so, and as a result I have had an opportunity to train with some very interesting people. After relocating to my current job, I was told of a sensei in our area that is one of the greats, so I sought him out to train with him.

Now, that in itself correlates heavily with most roleplaying games: the student seeks out a very skilled teacher to train him further in his chosen craft, but over the weekend I got the opportunity to participate in a few classes for their club’s annual “spirit training”. This involved an early morning training session with his entire school (around 30-40 people showed up) packed all in a tight little room to train intensely from the hours of 6 am to 7 am all week long. (I only participated in two days due to schedule conflicts.)

Stupid Ranger and I settled around 40 minutes away (during rush hour), so that meant I got the distinct pleasure of rising around 5 am to get ready and make the trip to the training session.

OK, that’s great, but how does it affect being a Dungeon Master?

It’s actually quite simple: if I was a player character and my DM simply just hand-waved my morning training rituals, the character development just wouldn’t have been the same. The whole experience of training in that way, with that group of people vastly improved my outlook for those days. I was tired and sore, but upbeat and mentally energized at the same time. This would’ve looked somewhat odd from a player’s perspective to just jump into that state with nothing more than a comment like: “Ok, ok, you get up and do your training in the morning, let’s get back to the plot” from the DM.

Putting yourself in the shoes of your character in a real way by acting out their training regiment from time to time, or asking the DM if there are any heightened opportunities for class training with others or a seasoned instructor nearby can provide an opportunity for roleplay and fun. Dungeon Masters should be open to this type of interaction and seek it out, it makes a big difference in the quality of your character development.

This weekend, Stupid Ranger and I were cursed with a prolonged internet outage. Thankfully, it is all resolved now but know that we put our time to good use meeting up with our new intrepid band of adventurers for our next campaign!

New beginnings, new social contracts…

Like all good campaigns, ours started with the simplest of discussions: what, when, where, and how often. We decided to pick up Keep on the Shadowfell since we had several newbies to 4th edition (myself included), and we committed to playing twice a month at minimum. The rest of the incidentals went along standard lines… they have kids so we’d likely play at their place more often, around dinner time like our old group was just fine with them… and the discussion went off without a hitch.

We did cover some more complicated matters on handling character death, playing of non-present characters (we elected to have them run by another member of the party in order to keep some party balance during fights), and just general approach to gaming. We entered into some discussion regarding gaming background in order to divine what type of gamers they are, and happily it seems like they fit the mold of many of our friends from back in the frozen plains of Illinois.

Regarding the module

Neither Stupid Ranger or I have much experience in running from a module. I’m looking forward to it as a learning experience and I’ve not yet loosed it from its plastic wrappings to find out what joys lie within. Our group seemed pretty excited to start into it with their own characters, so I’ve been wondering how much impact there would be in running the module with our characters instead of the pre-generated ones.

In the end, I suspect it will be fun regardless of the decision on that front, but I think I’m edging toward making it work with our own unique characters. They both seem pretty excited about that prospect, and I find playing with my own character much more involving than playing with a pre-generated character. Granted, just about my only experience playing a pre-gen was at Nascrag, which is an entirely different beast… but the point remains.

If any one has recommendations on how to approach running a module, I’d be happy to hear them. We start this weekend!! Wooo, game time!

In the GenCon newsletter this week, they announced that badge registration for GenCon Indy 2009 (Aug 13-16) will begin Feb 15, and hotel registration will begin Feb 17.  Mark your calendars!

E and I have received so much support for our book, and as of today, we have had 173 gamer girls and 185 gamer guys complete our surveys.  In addition to the basic survey, we asked the girls if they wanted to complete some follow-up surveys, and we received overwhelming response on the follow-ups as well.

I wanted to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has participated so far in the Gamer Girl survey for the book e and I are developing.  We have had such fantastic turn-out on our surveys, and we are both really overwhelmed with goodwill and support.

It has been a very long time since I’ve tried something completely different in gaming. Last weekend, I jumped at the opportunity to visit an old high school friend and her family and she recommended that we try Settlers of Catan from Mayfair Games.

Overcoming the Nerdgasm Effect

Now, whenever I have heard Settlers of Catan mentioned in nerdly circles, I was quickly met with the all-too-familiar “hurrrr” sound of nerd joy. This sound was usually followed with some fevered discussion of an expansion or version of the game that the person had heard of without a shred of explanation regarding what the game was actually about.

Going in, I had no expectations… for all I knew it was some sort of deep space RISK or involved trading cow udders for favor from Greek gods for some reason. I was happy to find out that it was a really fun strategy game containing none of those things that I mentioned.

Dynamics…

I like that Settlers is a game of both luck and strategy. The goal is to accumulate Victory Points by developing a settlement that consisted of roads, settlements, and cities. You buy upgrades to your settlement by spending resource cards, which you get relative to where your settlements are placed .

I have to admit that watching my friends set up the board was rather daunting, but the dynamics of the game are essentially dead simple but very fun. I really enjoyed the fact that both luck and strategy is involved, and that the game is structured such that there isn’t all that much direct conflict amongst the players.

Even though the game dynamics are simple, they produce a surprisingly complicated set of strategies for accumulating, controlling, and spending resources. Add in some friendly player interaction and you’ve got yourself a great gaming experience (even though Stupid Ranger won!)

Stupid Ranger and I are going to pick up a set for ourselves before long!