I received some very interesting feedback regarding my recent post on prestige classes, so I’d like to take a further look at playtesting of new campaign elements.

My own background

In the sake of full disclosure, I have to admit that aside from a few Dungeon Master directed forays into extending or modifying existing prestige classes I haven’t done a lot of class creation. What I have done, however, is take an lesson from my former DM and create very tailored magic items as thematic elements to augment the storyline of my campaign.

Usually these items have very special features that emulate some of the progession abilities found in the Weapons of Legacy sourcebook (we did not have anything of the sort back then) and involved a very precarious balance between “useful and neat” and “way overpowered” that we often struggle with as Dungeon Masters.

Thinking about the comments that were left on Friday regarding the difficulty of balancing without extensive playtesting and the very real concerns about an individual player unbalancing a party made me start thinking about my own playtesting processes (or lack thereof).

A few things I like

When I would create these weapons or items for my players, I would usually tie them to some sort of uncertain providence, or make their magical auras indistinct. Add in a splash of roleplaying with the person performing the identify (it always takes someone skilled to identify an item of this power), or some archaic notes found in a ledger alongside the item and you’ve got a pretty good recipe for Room To Fudge Things.

Now before the tirades start, I don’t usually fudge things all that much. However, if the situation arises where the character wielding the new item is unbalanced I have an “out” for adjusting things slightly so they are not quite so overwhelming.

This is usually accompanied by an out-of-game discussion with the player and if the fix is going to remain in place. I tend to remunerate the player in some other way to keep them happy, but in general this has been a good way to tweak things on the fly.

Also, I have a general rule to adjust campaign elements slowly, and I tend to lean toward the “nothing permanent” rule. This rule simply dictates that it is best not to introduce new (DM-created) campaign elements that are permanent and can’t easily be removed from circulation. For me, it is always comforting to know that you’re one disjunction spell away from removing your new item problem if it happens, and people are generally a lot less upset about losing an item than they are a character.

Disjuncting a character is often messy. I wouldn’t recommend that.

Answer these simple questions to determine if your home-grown prestige class is satisfying to your target audience:

1. Question: Are the class abilities or features too simple or too complex?

   Correct answer: No. If your prestige class is too simple, chances are good that you will achieve the same results by simply rewarding the character with some magical item that will emulate the increased prowess that you desire (see the Weapons of Legend sourcebook for some great examples).

   If it is too complex, then you run the risk of overwhelming your player with too many decisions and even worse, you could introduce some wildly powerful combination of effects that could unbalance your game.

2. Question: Does the power level of this class make sense given the level, skill, and class prerequisite requirements?

   Correct Answer: Yes. Always be careful to balance the base character class requirements against common prestige classes of similar types. For example, the Duskblade is combination fighter/sorcerer. Notice that the class does neither area particularly well, and I am certain that is by design, so the fighter in you gets a taste of the magic, and the sorcerer in you gets to swing a sword around (and miss, at mid to higher levels). You shouldn’t have a fighter capable of taking on the Tarrasque and a sorcerer that can curl Elminster’s beard all in one package at the end, that would be what the common folk call unbalanced.

   Be sure to not overpower your prestige class just to add to the cool factor, or else you run the risk of having a single player character capable of “ruining the game” for everyone else with their superior skills.

3. Question: Does the player running your prestige class constantly ask you for an increase or adjustment?

   Correct Answer: No. If you have a certain player that is midway through your prestige class constantly asking for an adjustment of skills or prerequisites this can indicate that you got some permutation of your calculation incorrect. In addition to the “wow factor” of a prestige class, you should always aim for the “satisfying player experience” prerequisite that will make the cool class that you created fun to play.

   You don’t always want to leave your audience (in this place your player) wanting more. Prestige classes should gain skill and renown commensurate with experience, and not be handicapped in some aspect so much that they cease to be fun.

Tonight’s topic may seem a bit tailored to a given rule set, but if you’ve hung around this long you understand that we are a predominantly D&D oriented crew around here. As previously mentioned, we are in the late stages of an epic level campaign and are learning many lessons from our course thus far, and today I would like to examine epic character development and the challenges that it poses to both player and Dungeon Master.

As always, my inspiration is my Lovely Assistant

Well, not assistant so much as wife, but still… earlier this week Stupid Ranger provided a look at motivation behind epic level character development that touched on many important aspects of planning an epic level character.

She did directly mention the need to keep your epic character exciting, and that is something that the DM may be able to help facilitate. The real quandary that I can see is what to do with a character that has worked very diligently down a specific “career path” but finds themselves at an end as they get up in levels. That character has attained all the ranks of a given prestige class, and having topped out those ranks they now are forced to look at other avenues to continue down.

An example from my own past

When I was a player, I had one such character that completed his prestige class. I had built the notion of this prestige class so deeply around my character that reverting back to standard class ranks was far too mundane and didn’t even seem to make much sense given the progression of his personality. I decided to take another path: knowing that my DM was open to “out of the box” thinking I asked if I could forge an additional prestige class (of course, pending his approval) that would heighten my character’s skills beyond the published prestige class.

After several revisions, the result was satisfactory and the character finished out the campaign on his own unique road which happened to mean a lot to both the character and to me as a player.

Don’t be afraid of this stuff, but be careful all the same!

As DM’s, I challenge you all to be open to working with your players to do their characters the most service. If you’re worried about game balance, simply take a look at modifying an existing prestige class to suit your needs, adjusting skills/feats/spells/effects as necessary. If you are comfortable with crafting an entirely unique prestige class, allow your players that option. Be very careful to keep game balance in mind with either of these options, make sure you’re not over- or under-powering your abilities as you look at further development.

As players, don’t be afraid to ask your DM to work with you if you feel that it makes more sense to allow your character to continue going down the prestige path that they have forged.

The worst they can say is no! (Unless they decide to devour your character using vorpal rabbits, which is always an attractive option.)

Dante has share some of the growing pains he’s experienced as a co-DM for our epic campaign. And it surprised me when I realized that playing an epic character really isn’t the walk-in-the-park I had expected.

It’ll All Be Easier When I’m Epic

It’s very easy to fall into the mindset everything will come up sunshine and rainbows once your character reaches 20th level. Think of all those fabulous spells/feats/skills/etc your character didn’t have when they were younger. Life will be happy and joyful. Let me remind you that as your character gains awesome spells/feats/skills, enemies will also gain spells/feats/skills. You think your party’s wizard is pretty awesome now, wait ’til you see the spells the evil wizard can cast! Hope your character’s reflex save improved too!

When I Grow Up….

I’m a huge proponent of career planning, making decisions early so you know what your character wants to be when they grow up. Unfortunately, my optimism doesn’t usually survive to 20th level. I had a mid-character-life crisis upon realizing that I didn’t know what to do next in terms of career development for Ari. I have since overcome that particular obstacle by finding a new prestige class that compliments her combat style.

One of the harder parts of growing epic is the need to keep your character exciting, to have something toward which you can look forward as your character gains new levels. For me (and Ari), it was finding another prestige class; for you, it might be the need to start inventing your own spells. Figure out what keeps you excited about gaining a new level and build that into your character development.

Playing an epic character in an epic story to save the world is very exciting; I’m thrilled that Ari is awesome enough that wizards want to try to disintegrate her! I just caution you to consider that with great levels come great responsibility.

As I’ve mentioned before, since I’m a simulationist and I like it when things that happen in-game make a reasonable degree of sense, I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the idea that 4e is going to streamline a lot of stuff in the name of gameplay. Now, I’m all for gameplay — but when stuff doesn’t make sense, it tends to take me out of the game. Even when I’m being completely ridiculous and off the wall, what I’m doing generally tends to make sense in the game world unless I’m being deliberately anachronistic or something (as with my bard Bat Loaf, who prays to Sammy Hagar for spells). But that’s intentional). When I watch a bad movie because it’s a bad movie, I have fun. When I go to a good movie and I discover halfway through nothing makes sense, none of the plot or the characters mean anything to me anymore and I hate that like the sun hates the night. And don’t kid yourself, the sun despises the night.

I’m not the only person out there who thinks this way, and WotC knows it. But it’s not that they’re ignoring us. The guys at Critical Hits recently did a great interview with Rob Heinsoo, lead developer of the 4e core rules. In reference to us simulationist types, he said “You know what, don’t tell them that they’re wrong. They’re right, in a simulationist world, the system they want to use is RIGHT. That is exactly what happens in real life, but guess what, it’s a real pain in the ass.”

I suppose I can see that. The first thing that comes to mind that I really hate is camping and deciding who has what watch and how many hours of sleep everybody gets. Yes, it’s a fantastic simulation of figuring out who sleeps when. It’s also as fun as having my teeth drilled. I hope they severely gloss that part over in 4e. But combat? The new, more-official, very World of Warcraft-y combat roles they’re rolling out with 4e make me a little nervous. Making me more nervous is that they want to make what you do in combat “cooler” and “more like the movies”. This to me throws up about ten red flags that say “stupid things are about to happen that don’t make sense”. You know, like in almost every movie.

How A 500 Foot Monster Taught Me How To Love Again

I find the less I know about something, the more fun I have when I watch it. Sometimes I hate being a nerd. I saw Cloverfield a couple months ago, and shortly thereafter I read a very interesting article about what it might take to actually take out a 500 foot monster. Well, naturally that got me thinking about dealing with other giant monsters recently and how the lance our paladin hit the Tarrasque with wouldn’t have done much damage at all and eventually my mind wandered back to a scenario I always wondered about ever since I first started playing D&D:

How in the HELL does a 6 foot tall adventurer take a wee (albeit powerful) little sword and kill a dragon that stands ten times his height? All he could realistically reach would be the dragon’s feet! Maybe he could climb on there and attack an ankle. I don’t know. But most plate-mail-wearing fighters aren’t gonna pull a Legolas and climb and flip all over everything. Right? They’re gonna wade in there, hopefully dodge the fiery death and razor sharp talons the dragon throws at them, and try to cut the dragon until it dies. Somehow.

Uh oh. It seems my desire for “making sense” has painted me into a corner. At this point, the only way to kill a dragon that really makes sense is that he hacks the dragon’s toenail completely off. Hopefully the dragon is a hemophiliac, and bleeds out really fast before it gets a chance to have an order of fresh, delicious, flame-broiled Adventurer Nuggets.

It seems the concept of hit points has already abstracted out most of the battle for me. Because a fighter that winds up on top probably didn’t just do 400hp of Toe Damage. He probably did a lot of really incredible things to make that dragon keel over dead. Things that set dragons to bleed, princesses to swoon, and bards to write furiously.

It seems what I was worried about had already come to pass — several years before I was born, when D&D (and hit points) were created. And the world didn’t end.

So Now What?

This revelation gave me the ability to handwave some of my fears about the upcoming fourth edition of D&D. But I’m not cured completely. I still want everything to make sense, but sometimes it’s better if I don’t know all the details. Or if those details get somewhat exaggerated. With the things our characters do, we’re doing epic, legendary things. And let’s face it — a lot of mythology doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

I guess my chainmail panties are only in a half-twist now.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, one of the most drinkin’est holidays on the standard calendar (and one of my favorite days of the year). In that vein, I would like to look at a few fun and easy ways to spice up a layover at your campaign’s local tavern.

The Colorful NPC

One of my personal favorite things to do in a tavern is to introduce a colorful NPC to liven up the standard “I want a drink / I want to kill some time / I have nothing better to do” cycle that usually brings in our adventuring patrons.

These NPC’s don’t necessarily need to have a specific purpose or be particularly powerful or important. If you try this a few times with the focus on color and entertainment and less on driving home yet another plot point, you may find that your players interact more richly with the NPC and you can drive some storyline with them at a later time.

In fact, in our recent campaign a disposable NPC ended up married to Vanir’s character, Bat Loaf, precisely by this process. It works, people. Trust me!

The Random Item

If you’re up for a little excitement, you can always introduce an out of place item. Be it an expensive gem unexpectedly found at the bottom of your glass of grog, or a wondrous item found slipped under the door, you can start an excellent detached moment of intrigue and you gain the ability to practice your ad-libbing skills based on how your party reacts to this stimulus.

It might help in either one of these scenarios to have a chunk of episodic content woven around your approach, but it isn’t required. If you have a chaotic enough party, they might just pocket the extra bit of treasure and “fly casual” with the loot. Whether or not someone catches them is an entirely different story…

The Local Color

This is something that runs slightly tangent to my first point, but it is important to give your local tavern some life. How many bars have you been in that have touted to have the World’s Best of something? Your tavern should have some sort of a hook or special feature that makes it have a little curb appeal.

If you find yourself in a world where your party travels overland often, towns start blurring together and without some level of distinction you can get that cursed affliction that they warned you about in high school driver’s education: highway hypnosis. If every bar looks the same in every town, eventually your players will want to handwave that whole process and you will loose that opportunity to interact with them.

Just don’t skimp!

I highly recommend taking a few minutes before your next game session and map out an opportunity or two for your players to have some quality roleplaying time inside of their next tavern. The great thing about tavern encounters and color is that you can plan them and use them whenever they are needed, and it gives you some great practice to work on your impromptu dungeon mastering skills!

Luck favors the bold, so give it a go this week!

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!

I’ve been having some discussions recently with my cohorts about the concept of resurrection in D&D. Two of the guys in our gaming group, Sirgeekelot and Kanati, have vehemently argued that it is incredibly broken as it works now. Why?

Why resurrection Sucks

The primary complaint I hear on why resurrection sucks in D&D is that the players no longer fear death. This poses two problems. First, a player is far more apt to do things that may result in their death if they’re pretty sure they’re just going to get brought back to life after it’s all over. They might just charge recklessly into battle, they may intentionally sacrifice their lives heroically, or they may just be more prone to taking big risks. In gameplay terms, no fear of death means players won’t think so hard about smarter ways to fight something — which means it’s much more appealing to (as Kanati puts it) “swing your sword over your head and re-enact a scene from Braveheart”.

The other problem with no fear of death is that it greatly sucks the drama out of a situation. You’re going to be very, very interested in what’s going on if your 18th level character you’ve raised from a puppy is near death and there’s no bringing him back. Happy? Probably not — unless, of course, he wins and continues to live! Drama is exciting. Fear of character death gives players a vested interest in not doing stupid things, and when the party does overcome the big baddie at the end of the dungeon against incredible odds it’s like winning the Super Bowl. (Only better, and the rings give +2 to all saves.)

Why resurrection Might Not Be So Bad

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve played a lot of videogame RPGs in my day. In most of those games, if a PC dies, you can get them ressurected somewhere for a steep fee, or carry magic items to do it, or use magic. Just like in D&D. The only way the game ends is if the whole party croaks. But in videogames, you can typically restart at the last save point.

When you start getting into higher levels in both genres, they commonly start throwing enemies at you with abilities that can kill a character in one shot. The counter to that is to ressurect the dead PC. It’s a gameplay mechanic, the antidote to the poison of death. Sure, this kind of approach to individual character death is about as dramatic as an oatmeal breakfast WITH EXCITING PEACH SLICES. I get that. To a player, the thought of their PC dying is more frustrating than it is sad or traumatic.

However, if the whole party bites it in D&D, there’s no save. If the battle is close or going poorly for the group, it’s dramatic. The players are all worried about dying then. They’re all engaged. They all want to find some way to defeat the enemy and rise to victory. They could even engage in (gasp) team play in order to keep everybody alive.

Does It Blend?

In the end, I personally think resurrection fits the way D&D works currently simply because it’s a needed gameplay element. I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, just different than the real world. It does take away from the drama of combat in some ways and it prevents certain story plots from occurring, but in my tiny little simulationist brain it fits the world around it. (I tend to think of it as fantasy healthcare for the rich and powerful.)

As I said before, even in our gaming group there’s greatly differing opinions on this topic, so I’d love to hear yours. Please commence gentlemanly melee combat in our comments section if you so desire.

No matter how you feel on the topic — as roleplayers, I would heartily suggest that you do not simply take your PC’s lives for granted. Remember, you may not stay dead, but dying HURTS REALLY BAD!

I was spending some time tonight thinking about all of the different gaming systems that I have been adjacent to over the years and how utterly terrible our group is at adapting to new campaign settings or rules systems.

The Great Resistance

For some reason, our group is change resistant. We have tried several different systems over the years and despite the different flavors and genres we keep coming back to traditional D&D.

The reasons for resistance have been varied and numerous. I wanted to give Deadlands a try, however the strange character generation rules and utter complexity to combat made it fizzle out after only a session or two. Kanati, my co-DM for our current D&D campaign, wanted to introduce us to Call of Cthulhu. It lasted several sessions, but for some reason running a roleplaying game in a modern setting just wasn’t resonating with our crew. I actually liked the fear system and the ephemeral “X-Files” feel to the whole session, but I guess the rest of our crew wasn’t really feeling it as much.

Does your group have a comfort zone?

We’ve tried limiting the number of sessions for a new game system or campaign setting, and it really hasn’t helped the situation. It appears that our core group simply prefers the Greyhawk/Forgotten Realms classic D&D experience.

Does your gaming group have a comfort zone? Has anyone succeeded in breaking out of this comfort zone and trying some new things with any measure of success? Is there something (besides the obvious) wrong with us?

Lets hear it!!

There’s a hilarious bit on the current Presidential candidates as D&D monsters over at Boing Boing this morning. As a person who has contemplated his own magic resistance, this RULED.

As an aside, I was trying to clean up a double-posted comment on Dante’s post yesterday and apparently I was clicking like E. Honda because I have somehow managed to irreversibly delete both comments. Sorry ’bout that. We’re not in the business of silencing people unless they’re spamming or being abusive, so I just wanted to clear that up before someone called us evil Overlords or something.

Wait, if you feel like calling me that I totally did that on purpose.