Memento Mori is a Latin phrase that means “Remember that you must die.” It has been used since ancient times to remind people of their own mortality, and I recently ran across this discussed by the always beautful Cory Doctorow in reference to a pinhole camera made from a human skull featured on BoingBoing earlier in the week.

Mortality is an important part of your campaign.

As a Dungeon Master, I really don’t like killing my players that much. It is, however, a required aspect of a good campaign… mortality should be a very dramatic thing. This could spiral off into a discussion about how balanced or unbalanced raising the dead is in D&D, but that’s not what I’m after today.

Today, I want to talk about various ways to remind your players that they are mortal.

The trick is simply to kill, poison, or otherwise terrorize them.

You can use disease, curses, or even temporary death (he’s only MOSTLY dead!) to reinforce that your Level 3 players are not immortal gods among men. Gravely injure them from time to time. Make them walk around with their arm off looking for someone that can restore the damage. Give them a particularly nasty poisonous creature to deal with. Kill them once in awhile, preferably in a way that they would be somewhat satisfied with (for example, no fighter wants to die by getting hit in the head with a rock after winning a battle.)

The beauty of the D&D rules is that most of these things are not permanent, unless you wish to make some special rules to make them so. Restorations and resurrections are only as common as the characters that have the skills to cast them. If used sparingly while the player characters are too young to resolve these issues themselves, you can get all of the drama from a system designed to make these devastating events temporary.

Why is this important again?

Because, quite simply, drama is what makes good campaigns. If you are dead set against giving your player characters setbacks, you can apply these rules to some NPC that becomes close to the players in some way, but they must be VERY invested roleplayers in order for this to make much of a difference.

If you spare the pain and suffering, your campaign will quickly be like playing a video game cutscene. Even if the building blows up, you know the next level hasn’t loaded yet and the game isn’t over, so something will happen to make the player characters be ok. If you bail them out every single time, they will start taking ridiculous risks (sometimes subconsciously) because they know you’ll bail them out of it.

This takes skill and guts to pull off correctly, so best of luck to you all. Memento mori!

Getting lost in a character is one of the most exciting elements of roleplaying. I love to roleplay characters with whom I feel a deep connection. For that brief time when I am in-character, I want to escape reality, and this becomes much easier and more enjoyable when I am my character instead of myself. Here’s are three quick, easy ways to connect:

1. A Little Self-Analysis – Review the information related to your class and race. Preview your career options. If you really were your character, you would know who you are and who you want to be. It’s merely a matter of knowing yourself.

2. A Little Geography – Take a look at your campaign setting. I’m not recommending that you memorize the capitals or the location of every river in the continent. But, depending on your character, you would probably have a general idea of your surroundings. The broad strokes of the setting can help make it a little more real, and if your world is more real, your character will feel more real.

3. A Little Creative Writing – I love writing backstories for my characters. The creative process involved helps me connect on a very deep level with the character I’ve developed. A stray memory from childhood, a rite of passage, any little thing that helps make your character unique will help you connect to your character. On of my favorite techniques is to tell the story of how my character came into her profession; not only do you create an insight into how you came to be who you are (Level 1), you have a great reason to keep doing what you’re doing (see #1).

Three little step to help me stay connected to my character, but each leaves a lot of room for personalization and adaptation to any character.

All this talk (and effort) surrounding moving has made me think about the transient nature of adventuring. It seems that in all of our campaigns, our adventuring parties are travellers that must seek out pieces to the puzzle, explore mysterious corners of the world, or otherwise save the world.

The Reasons, they are many…

It turns out that I am fairly lazy when it comes to planning my sessions. On the occasion that I do plan, crack a sourcebook and research a setting, I find it difficult to come up with street level maps, tavern names, a local government, and the like.

This is why I stick close to impromptu world-travelling type campaigns. I only need a few key facts to make those scenarios work, and I don’t get stumped by the unplanned questions that come inside of a city setting. Is there a bank? Is the mayor’s wife hot? Is there a place I can research Guatemalan insanity peppers? and so on.

Aside from online tools to help flesh out this type of information, what tips do you use to plan a city-based or non-travelling campaign? Is there any thought processes that you go through to drum out some of these obvious questions, and how to do handle it when your players want to go somewhere “off-script” that you haven’t accounted for?

In the past I have attempted to keep a general “city campaign ideas” notebook to capture episodes of city-based content that could be dropped in, but I tend to rope myself into a certain topology that tends to prevent me from executing these ideas. Any advice would be appreciated!

As previously mentioned, Stupid Ranger and I are preparing for a cross-country move. As a result, I’ve been forced to burn a few of my precious, precious personal days to prepare our current home for sale. The last two days of my life have been consumed by pointless repetitive tasks.

As a result, I decided to write for a few moments regarding the process of doing pointless repetitive tasks in games as a means to build skill, earn rewards, and roleplay. In many video games I have played, this process is known as grinding.

I might be biased, but I hate this.

In my case, I am grinding not to gain experience but for a monetary reward and to advance the plot of my life. The nicer the house looks, the faster it will sell, hopefully for more money. In roleplaying games, I have played in several systems that rewarded grinding a certain task to build skills (like fletching, masonry, or forging) or to gain rewards (sweep the floor one thousand times and you get a pass to join the thieves guild).

The particular game I’m talking about here is a MUD that I used to play named Gemstone IV. I loved this MUD, however I fell quickly out of love with the fact that many of its systems are built on grinding a task and then resting while your experience absorbed (the time at which it would actually be applied to your experience total). As the years went on, they attempted to tweak their system to allow much more of a constant flow of experience and skill building, but it grew too much for me.

How to avoid this

In my games, I tend to do a few things when tempted to present my players with a long task to “build character”. Firstly, don’t do it. Make discrete tasks equal rewards whenever possible, doing a certain task one thousand times is just going to be annoying and tiresome to the vast majority of players. Secondly, if you must force your players to grind make it a skill challenge. That at least gives some interactivity and randomness to their success.

Finally, if you are bent on forcing them to do a task in a repetitive manner give them the opportunity to roleplay while they do it, or do a cinematic storytelling moment where you explain that your players spent the next two weeks sweeping the floor and on the other side they are tired, weary, and have their invite to the thieves guild.

If anyone has experienced a satisfying experience grinding a task, please share your experience with us in the comments. If you hate it, let’s hear from you too, I’d be happy to spearhead the International No More Grinding Society. Maybe if I gave that name more than three seconds of thought I could’ve made a cooler acronym.

Oh well, I’ve got painting to do. *sigh*

As Dante & I prepare for our cross-country move, we are finding ourselves overwhelmed. There’s so much to do to prepare for this kind of move. I expect that over the next few weeks, as we’re trying to maintain sanity and sell our house and find a new house and try to keep up with the miriad of other details involved in the whole thing, our blogging schedule may be a little off.

Sorting and packing boxes has given me a bit of an appreciation for the sheer footloose-edness of my characters. In our campaigns, we frequently take off into the wide blue yonder with only the contents of our backpacks. If we’re really on top of things, we sometimes procure horses and other related traveling paraphenalia, but we’re not always that prepared.

I have a hard time imagining myself taking off on a great adventure with only the contents of my backpack. I’m a bit of a pack-rat though, so I’m sure things I would consider necessary might be negiotable. Excluding electronics (assuming no way to recharge them) and cash (move all funds to the First National Bank of Bag of Holding), I would probably pack:

1. Basic toiletry kit – ‘nuf said.

2. Towel – Gotta stay safe in case I encounter the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. Also, when I need to replace #1.

3. Hair pin – If Scooby Doo has taught us anything, it’s that a hair pin is singularily the most useful hair accessory one can have. But it’s not just for picking locks. Use it in place of a cloak pin when you wrap your towel around you for warmth. Plus, it’s an easy accessory to make you look fabulous.

4. Notebook (and pen) – I don’t travel far without my notebook, mostly because I have a tendency to forget things if I don’t write them down. It would be highly useful for keeping track of landmarks to keep from getting lost. Or if you are lost, to make paper airplanes to request help.

5. Bottle of water – even when it’s empty, you can use it as a canteen to transport water.

6. Scroll case with lots of useful scrolls – I’m assuming I’m an arcane spell caster. 🙂

Last week, I lamented my position of having too many old gaming books and paraphernalia laying around. We ended up with a box full of loot that we needed to dispose of, and I was none-too-picky about what we got out of it.

No Longer Trapped in the Closet

I made a cursory trip to my local game shop, Gamers’ Sanctuary. The nice lady behind the desk informed me that they would be happy to put up a “FREE” sign on my box of loot, but I could probably get a little bit out of it on their used rack. She recommended that I come back later on to speak with another team member who knew how to price things appropriately and they would help us.

So yesterday, SR and I made the trek back to the game shop, lousy with our box of old 3.0 D&D books, my previously mentioned and unfortunately maligned Deadlands, a Mage: The Awakening sourcebook that was never played (sadly), and some miscellaneous Gamecube games that hadn’t seen the light of day in a long time and the system to play them on (replaced with a Wii). Amazingly, they did some math and gave us $71 in store credit!!

I informed them I would be spending that store credit RIGHT NOW and picked up the new Forgotten Realms sourcebook for D&D 4.0 and two boxes of Against the Giants miniatures. Stupid Ranger practiced her awesome skills in divining cool gaming stuff and we pulled a Fire Titan out of one miniatures box, pretty neat stuff!

So whoever provided the advice to take my stuff down the FLGS, THANK YOU! We converted a whole box of crap that we never play with into a shiny new sourcebook and miniatures that we certainly will play with. We also reduced one box down to almost no cargo space, so that will help with the reduction in stuff initiative!

There is still the matter of what to do with the Magic collection, but I’m going to save that topic for another day. The jury is still out!

Dante shared his recent post on the macro puzzle… that over-arcing sometimes frustrating puzzle that has to be solved to advance to the next step. These are usually highly frustrating for me because if I don’t figure it out right away, I feel as if I’ve missed something very important.

I prefer riddles. To me, riddles are a much more satisfying intellectual challenge. One of the traditions of GenCon is to earn the Riddle Master badge from Cloud Kingdom as soon as possible once entering the sales floor. Because life as a Riddle Master is grand.

For the DMs out there, I’d like to share a riddle experience that I felt went very well from a player’s perspective. At GenCon, several years ago, we met up with a bunch of college friends, one of whom was there with his dad, who was an awesome DM and offered to run a short, one-night hang-out-and-have-fun kind of session. We all jumped at the chance.

This was the basic premise: we mighty adventurers encountered a sage of some kind, who provided us with charms to help us in our quest. To earn your charm, you had to answer a riddle, but you could get help from the rest of the party to solve your riddle.

There were two things I really liked about this approach. First, it was a gift – if you couldn’t answer the riddle, nothing bad happened. Second, you could get help; instead of stranding you there with everyone staring at you, waiting to see if you were going to make a guess, you got to ask for help from everyone. The bonus was that everyone stayed involved, even if they already had their charm.

Keeping everyone involved, making the goal achievable without making the stakes too high, and making sure everyone has fun keeps the challenge from being overwhelming.

Let’s face it, boys and girls… puzzles can sometimes be frustrating. In our recent Ravenloft campaign, we have been marooned on a strange island upon which we appear to be trapped. Our group made several attempts at paddling our lifeboat out into the sea, only to get repeatedly deposited back on the same shores from whence we came.

At this point, I don’t know if it is a puzzle or one of those magical effects intended to keep us within the constraints of the general plot, but suffice it to say several repeat failures was a wee bit frustrating for our group.

The cost of moving on

I have attempted to use these larger scale puzzles or traps within my own campaigns, and I constantly run into trouble with people not “getting the hints” or constantly trying the same thing over and over again hoping for a different result. This is actually Einstein’s definition of insanity, for those keeping score at home.

One of two things happen: the session grinds to a halt, with frustrated players quickly breaking character and discussing the plot reasons why they aren’t able to solve the approach with their best efforts, or they attempt to abandon the puzzle and move on to find out more about their surroundings hoping later to find the key that will lead them to success.

I have two pieces of advice for those wanting to inject this type of event into their campaigns: expect your players to be stupider than you give them credit for. The glaring hint that you have given them will almost never make sense unless you beat the players over the head with it, or give them several data points upon which to connect the dots. Secondly, you should always give your players an “out”, where they can move on to explore another part of the plot while they figure out the aspects of the puzzle that are currently unclear.

Luckily, our DMs for this campaign did the latter and allowed us a few leads to different areas of the plot, which we wrapped up the last session by following. Hopefully more will become clear next week, but the progress was encouraging and that is the benefit from this approach.

Last night, I was playing some Fable 2 Pub Games before bed. I’m not all that crazy about the game, but it’s a good timekiller if one is just looking for a little braindead entertainment. Most of the reason I play it is because the controls consist of pushing one button or another, and when you’ve got a baby in your lap that’s all you can use. I didn’t preorder Fable 2 to get a free copy, and I would certainly not pay 800 Microsoft points for the thing — but fortunately a nice lady at Gen Con had a big table full of free vouchers for the game so I didn’t have to. I’ll probably be picking up Fable 2 at some point after it comes out, but there are also a lot of games coming out in which I need to play a little plastic guitar, and my budget is currently limited.

At any rate, I suck at pretty much every game in the thing. Fortune’s Tower is my preferred vice. It’s basically a cross between Solitaire and Deal Or No Deal. The way you play goes as follows:

1. You place a bet.
2. Your cards literally burst into flames, and you lose all your money.
3. Occasionally, something will happen that gives you just enough hope to get cocky and think you can win your money back. Then go back to step 2.
4. Repeat.

If you buy Fable 2, your gold (or debt) can transfer to your character. The game has now started to remind me that excessive debt may have “in-game consequences”. I started last night 14,000 in debt, and I started to get on a winning streak. I started to feel hopeful about my character’s future, about my ability to play this game, about avoiding the loan sharks’ wrath! It was about then that the tables with the more expensive betting limits started opening to me, and the wave of good feelings I was riding convinced me that only good things made out of platinum would come of this.

Two hours later, I realized something very important. I had inadvertently started roleplaying during a game of chance. I created a character in my mind that didn’t even exist yet, and gave him hopes and dreams and a credit rating. I desperately wanted him to succeed, and got caught up in the moment. And now I am 70,000 chips in debt. The good news is that I have 5-star gambler rating, and I can borrow LOTS of chips. The bad news is that my poor character is probably going to need new kneecaps. Oh god, you can have a family in Fable 2! Are they going to come after my wife and kids and…. *choke* MY DOG? I vowed then and there to train my character as fast as possible so I could defend my family and lands from these scoundrels, while paying my debt honestly through hard work.

I’m thinking very hard about leaving my debt as is and allowing my character to inherit it just to see what happens. In short, the game itself was boring but I had fun in my own little fantasy world — and I would have probably done the same thing regardless of whether a “real” RPG was coming out associated with it or not.

The moral of the story here? To put it Yoda-style: Adversity leads to conflict. Conflict leads to drama. Drama leads to story. Gambling leads to depression. Which is not hard to roleplay when you’re 70,000 in the hole.

This weekend, Dante & I helped celebrated our niece’s first birthday! Let me tell you, watching a 1-year-old make a huge mess of her little “for me to destroy” birthday cake is pretty darn entertaining.

And as I’m sitting here, grasping for straws for something to write, I am thinking back fondly of the “adult” cake (and how oh-so-tasty it was), and I begin to consider how ritualized the birthday party is. In our family, there’s the socializing time, generally including food, followed by presents, then cake. It’s a very specific pattern of events that occurs every time, no matter who is celebrating a birthday.

And now to the point… All this reminiscing of birthday party rituals has lead me to consider ritual patterns in roleplaying.

In terms of mechanics, there are patterns of behavior governing actions. For instance, initiative to determine order of combat, actions taken in order. It’s the same pattern that is followed every time there is combat.

In-character rituals are a little harder to identify as they are generally subjective. One that comes to mind stems from both parts of our last big campaign. Various characters had their rituals to follow whenever the party arrived in a new town. Nathanial, the goblin-turned-human paladin of Horus-Re, would visit the local temple and clean it. Batloaf, the Rock bard extraordinaire, would scope out the population of available women and select his partner(s) for the evening; I won’t share with you the specifics of this ritual so-as to keep this post family friendly.

My character, Ari, didn’t really have any specific pattern of behavior to follow when arriving in town. I realize after the fact that this is one of the components of roleplaying that I neglected with this character. I was vaguely uneasy when reaching a new town as it seemed that most other characters had something to do, and Ari didn’t really have a ritual to follow. In a fluff-heavy group, not having something fluffy to do made it a little less fun.

It’s easy to say that the solution in this case would be to find something to do, but that may be difficult to accomplish, depending on the character’s personality. So, unsatisfyingly, I don’t really have an answer for this. But I would recommend that if you are involved in a fluffy campaign, take some extra time between sessions to consider your backstory (because it’s a fluffy campaign and I know you have a backstory). Is there something there that your character could use to fill those empty hours in town? Maybe you could write letters home or update your adventuring journal: these two options don’t require much (if any) in-game time but they can give you a ritual to complete. Plus, it leaves an opening for you to write that letter/journal entry between sessions as a character-building exercise; what would your character have to say about that crazy old oracle you visited?

As a player, if you’re having difficulty involving your character, try working with the other players to see if you might find something your characters can do together. Or maybe your DM can offer some insight on what your character could be doing or what areas of town that might be of interest.