Here in StupidRangerVille, we have been experiencing some very strange weather today. It is what is known as a thundersnow (or winter thunderstorm) where the primary precipitation of snow and sleet is accompanied by thunder and lightning… it is relatively rare and quite interesting to behold.

Sir Geekelot, one of our current campaign-members messaged me to confirm said strange weather and heralded it as a sign of The Apocalypse… and that got me thinking about weather in the context of our D&D sessions.

Wow, it’s raining again…

In most of my campaigns we have often hand-waved weather, or used it as a relatively cliche’ foreshadowing element to illustrate impending doom. I know that many rules systems exist for actually interacting with weather-systems and how to use it in your settings, but often having to look up those charts for movement encumbrance or situational modifiers to attack and damage is too much work for me so I regularly just use an ad-hoc method of doling out pluses or minuses depending on the situation in front of me.

I have found that as characters advance in levels, their level of concern for environmental conditions seem to wane. Flipping through a few of the Monster Manuals, I have found a few elemental based baddies that seem to be intense concentrations of (or elementals created by) terrible weather conditions. We had a seafaring campaign in college that actually got to experience some of those creatures first-hand, and I can tell you that it is a unique experience.

If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few days.

I haven’t loosed any of these terrors on our current campaign (yet), but I would be interested to hear if anyone has done anything cool with the weather based elemental creatures or used weather in an interesting way to color your campaigns.

Has anyone been able to make the environment significant enough that characters actually care how it impacts them as they progress to higher levels?

Before everyone starts sending us boxes of E.L. Fudge cookies and order-by-phone pizzas as provisions, never fear… its supposed to be 50 degrees here tomorrow! (Although donations of sugar and pizza are always readily accepted!)

Daniel over at Aleph Gaming posted a great article on what to do when a player doesn’t like their character. If you no longer enjoy playing your character, something should definitely change. Before making any drastic decisions, however, I recommend a little patience. Because I’ve been there, and I’ve survived with my character intact.

Gotta Wear Shades…

There have been times when I have conceptualized the best character ever! She’s unique compared to other characters I’ve played, she has a great backstory, she’s got a career path full of possibilities. I can’t wait to send her out on an adventure.

Then, the reality of the game sets in, and I realize that my character just isn’t going to work out.

It Can Be Lonely

Ari turned out to be one of those characters. I had figured out everything about her, then I discovered that nearly everyone else in the party was going to be worshipping Horus-Re, a sun god, whereas Ari would be worshipping Corellon. Hmmmm…..

Religion was only one of the differences between Ari and everyone else. The other noticeable difference is her personality; she isn’t near as outgoing as everyone else. This has made for some rough times; even after 20 levels, there are still times when she just doesn’t fit in. It’s difficult to be the odd-man (or woman) out. But, Ari is awesome, and I just can’t sacrifice her awesomeness for the sake of inclusion.

Surviving the Differences

By not giving up on Ari, I gave her a chance to grow beyond the differences. Ari has persevered and continues to try to save the world with her friends. Everyone in the party has learned to deal with our differences in religion and personality. I stuck it out long enough for everyone to find a place in the group, including Ari. She is one of the fighters, and considering the enemies we’ve collected, that’s a very respectable position.

So, the Moral of My Story Is….

It can be tough when your character doesn’t fit into the group. I know, trust me. But with a little determination and a little patience, you can try to stick it out long enough to find your place in the group.

Of course, if your character is detracting from your enjoyment of the game, consider some of the options Daniel outlined; these are some great ways to address a sticky situation.

If this gaze is upon you, STFU and listen or suffer 20d6 of PHB damage to your cranium. And you better believe that ain’t subdual, mister.

Here’s a preview of the actual design. Click here or on Dante’s cranium up there if you’d like to buy a shirt!

As a function of getting older, I have recently taken an interest in personal finance. I was pouring over some finance websites tonight and it got me to thinking about in-campaign money matters. It strikes me that dealing with game economics, treasure, and money are often glossed over.

Do Epic Level Adventurers have a 401k?

Historically, our characters have tended to keep what they need to live on them. They inevitably come across a Bag of Holding or some other mechanism to haul their booty around with them, in some other cases where they have acquired a homestead they tend to keep a certain amount of their adventuring loot there.

It strikes me that in standard D&D terms, there isn’t much in the way of financial establishments. I think this is due to the fact that these things are only really interesting to me and maybe one or two other people in the world, so there’s no Citizens National Bank of Greyhawk that manages platinum and gold as commodities.

In one campaign, we instituted a bank system because our characters came across a fairly sizable horde and wanted a way to keep it safe since they could not come up with giant wagons to carry their booty. Inevitably, though, the bank was viewed as a plot point. I don’t recall that there was ever a heist, but there was always that expectation and the whole thing didn’t ever go over like the service that it was intended to be.

Speaking of the Mighty Treasurepile…

This may be one area that I tend to fail as a DM: it seems that if my characters are adventuring across the world, invariably they will want to shop in the cities that they come across. They will ask whether or not Magic Item A is available in this town and usually it spawns a random roll to tell. If it doesn’t show up, they’ll just wait it out until they get to a major metropolis where there chances are better and eventually I relent and let them find their item of desire (at a much higher price than book value).

I always struggle with the centralization of magic items and how the Greater World generates cash to support a magic item trade, because it stands to logic that as you get nearer to the major population centers the chance to randomly find magical items in random encounters should increase. This does not gel with the treasure tables that exist in the DMG, rolling randomly on that chart can produce a magic item pretty much anywhere and given enough encounters the players will amass a disproportionate amount of money compared to the environment that they are adventuring in.

Barring any amount of just plain ignoring the charts, I never have gotten the balance of treasure distribution correct in my campaigns. I err on the side of more good stuff for my players because it is fun, but I often wonder if this isn’t just superpowering the entire campaign setting.

Thoughts, please!

I would love to hear creative ideas, thoughts, and responses on how to handle matters of money and treasure in your campaign setting. The obvious “well Dante, you control the entire world you can do what you want” mindset hasn’t worked out so well for me, so how do you balance these factors in your campaigns?

Last week, you tuned in to hear Vanir tell The Adventures of Batloaf and Lovin’ on the Back of the Tarrasque. While none of us were terribly surprised, handling this kind of departure from the norm can be a challenge as another PC at the table.

Take It In Stride

The toughest part of being the “Other PC” at the table is watching the action unfold without you. The good part about this is that nothing really important happens to the plot development. Now, the character in the spotlight will argue this last point because s/he thinks that whatever is happening is critical to the story. Just smile. It’ll be over soon.

Have Faith in Your DM

Remember, you’re all in this together, and your DM knows that. Have faith that while s/he may allow some crazy spotlight stealing, s/he will also bring things back to the group so that everyone has a good time. Of course, if you feel like it’s happening too often, talk to your DM; this game should be fun for everyone.

Plot Your Revenge…

Uh, I mean, plot your own spotlighting. Just because Batloaf took over the story for this week doesn’t mean that Ari can’t take over that spotlight for her own story. Just keep in mind a few recommendations for making your story experience enjoyable for everyone:

1. Plan ahead – decide what you want to accomplish with your character and what kind of story you want to tell
2. Talk it Over – discuss your thoughts with the DM about what you want to achieve story-wise with your character. If you spring that kind of surprise on the DM, s/he might not make the experience as exciting for you.
3. Don’t Go Overboard – remember that other people have stories to tell too. Don’t take up all the time with your own story.

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!

Well, it’s been an interesting week in the Stupid Ranger household. Without descending into too much detail, we had a situation involving carbon monoxide being detected in our bedroom and a faulty 36 year old furnace that was actually venting flames outside the firebox RIGHT BY THE GAS LINE.

Needless to say, the fire department indicated that we were lucky that things didn’t end “under much worse circumstances.”

What’s this got to do with D&D, Dante?

Well, after the initial shock of the situation, I started to think about why this was so scary. The answer, for me anyway, was the impending fireball that would have ensued underneath my house should the gas line burn through.

We are entering into epic levels in our current campaign, and our characters are able to summon some pretty incredible feats of elemental damage. Several of our characters possess fire based magical abilities, and this whole experience got me to thinking what the common guy would think if they saw something akin to a large gas explosion.

You know what? The mere NOTION of this happening to us in real life was pretty darned scary. That’s why I always have some trouble with the concept of magical gladiatorial combat, or people that would knowingly put themselves in the vicinity of two powerful mages doing battle.

The gravity that should go along with even a mid-level spell caster able to conjure up a 5d6 or more fireball should be enough to keep a “common” person at a pretty far distance. I would treat a mid to high level sorcerer with the same respect as I would someone with a big flamethrower strapped to their back.

Gravity

The key to this discussion is treating things with the appropriate level of gravity. As a DM, you can use NPC reaction and some colorful description to add weight to your epic scenarios. If someone enters the building that looks edgy and has demonstrated an ability to conjure a 20d6 fireball you’d better make some common folk leave the premises quickly.

I would also engineer activities that play up the uncommon skill required to weild this power. Create some scenarios where your mid to high level players must help a group of common people achieve some otherwise impossible tasks that exercises the players specific epic skills. This puts the players on guard not to accidentally flash-fry a whole group of townspeople, adds an opportunity for them to exhibit uncommon mettle and heroism, and more importantly is a distinctly different type of challenge than their common tasks of annihilating major forces of evil baddies.

Take an opportunity to step back and look at the abilities that your characters wield when viewed through the eyes of a common man. You may get some new inspiration that can add some interest to your sagging high level campaign!

I haven’t decided if the title of today’s post sounds more like some really hippie liberal arts college class or like the title of an Uwe Boll movie. Anyway, in my last post about Goodness, I touched on the subjectiveness of Good as a concept. Today, I’m going to discuss a few ways that Good people get that way.

Damn, That Guy’s Good

I try to think of people as neither good nor bad, just as people. Therefore, just like the “bad guys“, the “good guys” start as a blank slate and their experiences color how they view the world and what they think is right. A few ways a person could veer more toward the traditionally “good” are:

• Good Parenting
  Simply put, a person can be raised to be a good person. Little kids watch adults and emulate what they do. Their parents reward “good” behavior and punish “bad” behavior. Eventually, the child will form a value system in which they can usually put stuff in the “good” or “bad” column. Sure, there’s the occasional ambiguous problem, but by and large this person can assume things like “sleeping with your friend’s wife behind his back” and “killing babies” can go in the “bad” column.

  The interesting thing about this one is that many times what the parents believe follows their societal norms. So what one set of parents teaches as “good” behavior may be a lot different from another. A good example would be Klingon vs. Vulcan parenting. (I bet there’s a high turnover rate at the intergalactic daycare center.)

  As you may have guessed, this one makes for good character-building if the parents’ beliefs are a bit different from the rest of society because the parents will frequently raise a litter of misfits who will, as their name implies, have difficulty meshing with their surroundings. Conflict is the mother of Interesting!

• The Age of Reason
  Maybe it’s just a product of me starting to get a little older, but I can remember when I was a teenager. There wasn’t a whole lot of ambivalence about any subject, and I had an opinion about damn near everything. Looking back, I can’t figure out why in the hell I thought some of the things I did (much less acted on these thoughts).

  The best answer I can come up with is not that I got older. It’s that I got more experienced. I know now that running in guns blazing to most situations isn’t going to be the best solution most times, and I prefer a little more thought and planning before I make my move now. I’ve learned when to strategically retreat and come back. I don’t like burning bridges because sometimes I need to cross them again. I like being nice to people because I like them being nice to me back.

  Which brings me to why I think sometimes getting a little older and wiser brings the good out in people: it’s harder to do stupid things when you take the time to think about them, and it’s harder to be headstrong when you’ve had direct experience with that ending badly for you. If you’ve been bad all your life and you’ve almost died countless times and everybody hates you and you’re tired of running — well, it might make you consider changing your ways. Even if you don’t wind up “good”, you might mellow out to the point where you’re not actively “bad”.

• Atonement
  This one is more of a continuation of the last one, but taken further. If a person looks back on the things they have done in their life and goes, “oh crap, I’m a horrible person”, they may decide they need to try to make up for it. Where an average kind-hearted joe might just live life and be nice to his neighbor, a person who has devoted their life to making up for past misdeeds will actively seek out ways to do what they consider to be “good” things, usually that help others.

  Characters who are atoning for something are a lot of fun to play because they want to be good, but given that they’ve been an asshole their entire life, they frequently don’t know how to do that. Morality is an interesting thing — people generally have a sense to themselves of what’s right and wrong, and when you try to deviate from that, it feels unnatural. So you may have some, shall we say, creative interpretations of how to be good.

  I would add that when I say “atonement”, I mean a person decided to do this on their own — someone else didn’t make them do it. That’s something else entirely. For instance, a person forced to do community service for some crime they committed won’t come out a better person simply because they did a good deed because someone else made them. (However, if it exposes them to things that make them re-evaluate their choices, that’s different.)

Next time, I’ll talk about some of the qualities associated with “good” characters. Now I need something clever to say to end the post. Let’s see… um….

Be good, everyone?

Man, evil is so much easier to make a cool exit on.

This classic quote, from the well known Simpson’s episode “The Way We Was“, reminds me very much of what my good buddy Vanir was describing in his last epic post. Oftentimes when I think about this particular episode of The Simpsons, I don’t remember too much about the rest of the plot but being an ex-debater myself I distinctly remember that quote and Homer dropping trou to win his argument.

But it’s irreverent!

Yes, it is. However, it is distinctive moments of color like those that go on to live fondly in the memory of everyone that beholds them. Several years from now when we recall our favorite moments from our D&D campaigns, I can pretty much guarantee that the trump card that will come out of Vanir’s mouth will be “Oh yeah? Well Bat Loaf humped on the Tarrasque.” And much laugher will be had by all.

It is pretty much for this reason and this reason alone that I embrace letting people be a little nuts like this and introduce crazy, obscene, or otherwise hilarious elements to our plot. For the record, I am fairly certain my co-DM would’ve lynched me on the spot should he have actually been there but that is a story best left for another time.

You too can unclench your butt-cheeks and enjoy this kind of fun!

I can respect wanting to keep some elements of your campaign “by the numbers” and keep the characters focused on the dramatic scenes, but I would like everyone to keep in mind that even epic tales of heroism and valor like The Lord of the Rings had their own comedic elements in Tom Bombadil (book) and Merry/Pippin (film).

The trick is to just let your characters be themselves. Let them take liberties however far they want to during certain times in the campaign, and quiet them down and focus them in others. The trade-off will work in your favor: if the players are allowed to have irreverent fun like Vanir outlined, they’ll be much more receptive to being asked to “tune in” during more serious moments in the campaign.

I find it helps to have a “serious look” that you can shoot offending players when you want to quell the silliness. It is much akin to The Look that Stupid Ranger possesses to quiet me down, and anyone else that is married to a human female will have a corollary upon which to draw.

So relax! Have fun! Don’t take things so seriously all the time, you may find that some memorable moments will be created in the process.

When we play D&D, I really love it when I get a chance to step outside the box. I love it more when I can do it in character. And I really love it when I can do it without derailing the plot that our intrepid DMs have set before us.

(Not that it usually stops me.)

Class Is Now In Session

In our group’s current campaign, we now possess, through a series of strange events, a magical item that allows us to control the legendary Tarrasque. We weren’t exactly sure what we were supposed to do with it, just that we needed it to combat the forces of a dark goddess who was angry at us. So we were riding it back home so it could eat a couple armies.

As it happened, I had been hitting the E.L. Fudge cookies pretty hard before we started playing Saturday night and I was very thoroughly sugared up. I had reached a state of being Dante refers to as “Professor Vanir”, in which insanity starts to pour out of my mouth but I speak with confidence about it as if I was a college professor teaching a class. (I am told he imagines a graham cracker mortarboard on my head when I am like this, but that sounds like the ravings of a madman to me.)

The Inevitable Conclusion of Rock

In the throes of my delicious chocolaty berserkergang on Saturday night, I was possessed by the urge to roleplay. And by “roleplay”, I mean “let Bat Loaf’s freak flag fly”. For those who don’t know, Bat Loaf is my rock-and-roll bard. He has settled down (after a fashion), and gotten himself married. He and his wife are both epic-level rock bards, totally metal and totally in love. We had a legendary monster at our disposal with only moderate risk of being torn apart and eaten. We had been afforded the opportunity to do things you never get to do in the span of a normal character’s lifetime.

Thusly, the only logical conclusion for me to arrive at was to do the single most metal thing that has ever been done: conceive their first child on top of the Tarrasque.

You Want To Do What?

When I announced my intentions to the group, Dante got that glassy-eyed stare that he gets when he simultaneously thinks something is intensely funny and still wants to kill me. Several players (and my wife) simply put their head in their hands and sighed. But we were escorting the Tarrasque for hundreds of miles at a movement rate of 30 and it was literally swallowing every random encounter we had whole, so it’s not like we had much better to do.

Initially, I did not know how I was going to get Bat’s wife to our location, and I suggested to Dante that he and his wife had a thing that’s called “radar love”. I also submitted to him the fact that they had both “a wave in the air” and “a line in the sky”, and thusly she would know he needed him and would travel to him as quickly as possible. Incredibly, these arguments fell on deaf ears, and I was forced to come up with a more realistic alternative. (Like magic!)

Eventually, I asked the wizard of the party to use Limited Wish to teleport Bat Loaf’s wife to our location, and so they took care of the very serious matter at hand for the next 48 hours as we moved. The rest of the party assumed positions and cast the appropriate spells such that they would not be exposed to any adverse sights, sounds, or fluids, and thusly attempted to pretend all of this never happened. Many steps were taken to assure that the union would bear metal fruit, not the least of which was the use of the spines on the tarrasque’s back as a Liberator sex wedge to elevate his wife’s pelvis. Our paladin also cast Divine Favor to increase our chances of success and realized he should devote part of his life’s work to encouraging people to have babies. At the time of this writing, we do not yet know if the Bardic Torpedoes successfully entered the appropriate exhaust port or whether they just impacted on the surface. However, the attempt was pretty goddamned metal, and thusly worth it regardless of the results.

Our paladin, however, was moved to perform rituals of atonement because of the “wicked thoughts” he was having about how one might mate a human and a Tarrasque — and consequently that got us all thinking about one might harvest a Tarrasque’s genetic material. That conversation will haunt all of our dreams forevermore.

Making The Most of a Unique Situation

Having a psychic link to the Tarrasque making him your ally (sort of) affords you some interesting opportunities you might not normally have. One is to cast Haste on the Tarrasque. I wanted to do this for two reasons. One was to make him eat our enemies faster. The other far more important reason was so that I could imagine the Benny Hill theme song playing as he did so. There was some debate as to whether the Tarrasque was intelligent enough to understand that we were allies and thusly could drop his spell resistance, but in the end I have to think that Dante let it happen because it was just too funny not to.

Somehow, the baddies managed to make the Tarrasque fall over and roll on its back. Which was good for us, since we weren’t underneath it like about 500 of the bad guys were. Seeing this inspired me to use the psychic link via Bat Loaf remembering the last time he had the bedspins from too much ale, causing our gigantic monstrous legendary indentured servant to lose his balance and do a barrel roll on command. Gotta be careful with that one.

Just Smile and Nod

You may be wondering if there is a point to all of this. Not really! I just wanted to share some of the delightful retardation we had last weekend. D&D is what you make it . Even if you never get anything done, as long as everybody has fun you did it right. I’m pretty sure everybody had fun (after the initial shock), and somehow we actually DID stay on track for what Dante had in mind to happen during the adventure despite the box lying broken and burned by the side of the road, never to be stepped inside ever again.

And if Bat’s wife is pregnant, they’re naming it “Tarrasque Loaf”. Here’s hoping!