For Christmas this year, I decided to do something special for my two esteemed cohorts. I decided to draw all the characters in every party we’d ever had since we started playing D&D together, Evensbrook-style. Well, needless to say, it got out of hand really fast, so I settled for three groups.

For the other members of our party, I just framed a picture of our current group (the ones in the middle). This image is a flattened version of the photoshop file, but what I ended up doing is cutting out all the figures (with a ton of help from my lovely wife Efreak) and pasting them in a multi-layered glass frame so it was kinda 3-D (Had I any brains, I would have taken pictures of it before giving it away!).

At any rate, here it is!

Nobody but our D&D group knows who most of these guys are, so I’ll spare you the details (unless you’re just DYING to hear about them!), but you’ll find both Bat Loaf and Ari in the middle group. And obviously, the group on the left is our old friends from the Evensbrook campaign. That dashing fellow on the left is Swun, our friend John’s character from that campaign. You’ll meet him pretty soon.

Oh, that’s right, did I mention Evensbrook is due for a comeback here shortly? I can’t say it’ll be weekly, but it WILL be updated. Dante and the Stupid Ranger have been very cool about letting me scale back how much I contribute to make time for things like work and incoming little Vanirs due in March, but I really love writing for this site and drawing comics so you definitely haven’t seen the last of me. Sorry I was gone so long. I really missed this!

Have you ever noticed how relative and odd the concept of morality becomes in a D&D campaign?

A couple weeks ago, before the holidays completely annihilated our beautiful regular gaming schedule, Dante and Kanati sent our intrepid adventurers into a city ruled by women. The men were considered second-class citizens, and were not even allowed to speak without permission lest they be beaten. Since I was playing my intrepid formerly-womanizing rock star bard Bat Loaf (and I was under the influence of a lot of E.L. Fudge), it is not surprising that I landed us in hot water by mumbling something about it being “that time of the month” in the presence of the city’s Queen.

What? I was roleplaying!

At that point the guards held Bat Loaf down and had been ordered by the Queen to whip him when the proverbial feces hit the proverbial fan. Our paladin and his weaponmaster buddy got very, very angry and started ranting about how outraged they were that this could happen in a civilized society and that no human being (regardless of race, gender, or culture) should be treated with such indignity. Things got heated enough that I wasn’t sure if the players were angry (they claimed later not to be but at the time it was a little freaky). And then they declared that they would die before they allowed this indignity to take place, and both drew swords.

They were promptly subdued and placed into the same uncomfortable position as my bard.

There is a point to this post aside from fond memories of our last D&D session. In my experience, players tend to either eschew morality (as the feat) and do whatever they feel like regardless of situation or (ew) alignment — or they take morality REALLY SERIOUSLY, and blades get drawn at the slightest offense. Think about it, how many times have you witnessed a dispute between two party members, and one’s drawn steel on the other? Or decided that a character’s actions were “evil” so obviously they must be evil and OMG I’M SWORN TO DESTROY EVIL!!!!! KILL KILL MAIM CLEANSE!!!!!

The interesting part about all of this to me is that I don’t understand why this is. It’s like their PC’s morality programming consists of directives like Robocop’s, and they must commit endless, senseless violance against any violations of such. I believe this makes sense for some characters, especially paladins. Any time you’re on a holy mission to do something, sense tends to get left by the wayside. But when you get a 2nd level wizard charging a squad of orcs armed only with a dagger and righteous indignation, that’s just not good roleplaying. Also, it is stupid.

To finish the story, my bard, (who has no shame in times of need) promptly grovelled spectacularly and pretended subservience to the female party members to enough effect that he avoided a beating and managed to keep the other two alive (although not untouched by the cat-o’-nine). Our paladin swore to return one day to “educate these people in the ways good people live”. Which is sad, because our cleric can’t true res yet.

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon in their D&D groups? We’d love to hear your tales.

P.S. What’s that? You thought I had abandoned you? Of course not, I was just lying dormant, waiting for the perfect moment at which to strike! (Or five seconds of free time, which is sort of like that.)

Our epic campaign is approaching Level 20, and standing at the crossroads to this momentous occasion leads me to question where to go from here.

You may remember my brief discussions on Ari, my elven fighter. Ari progressed along the Fighter class until 8th Level, when she began the Champions of Corellon Larethian prestige class from the Races of the Wild supplement. After completing the prestige class, Ari returned to the fighter class, mostly because I didn’t have any plans for after finishing the Champion class.

So, Ari is on the threshold of 20th Level and will likely be taking the 10th Level of Fighter. And until I have any further idea where to go with her career development, she’ll probably continue to be a Fighter.

This is my first character cresting the 20-Level mark. And I’m throwing open the gates to ideas. What do I do next with my elven fighter? There is plenty left to gain from the Fighter class, but there’s also the thought in the back of my mind that another prestige class may give me an opportunity to further develop my character’s story.

Any suggestions?

In roleplaying, as in life, there are many things that are inevitable. A few of the common ones are death and taxes, however the one I want to focus on right now is family.

I’ve been around fantasy and roleplaying long enough to know that unfortunately, families run into some general stereotypes and I’d like to look at a few of those and figure out how to spice them up.

The Hands Off Stereotypes and What To Do

Families often fall into many generic stereotypes, such as: dead/gone, estranged, enfeebled/captured, and well-to-do. You find that often players will place their immediate family in the dead/gone or estranged categories when they don’t know what lineage to provide or they don’t care to put forth the effort to actually consider what their upbringing was.

A few notable examples are when a player wants to provide a strong bond with a non-parent entity such as an orphanage, monastery, or government agency that would have brought them up. I would challenge players that wish to leverage this storytelling element to provide a few ties to their past… some items they were left with, a story that the elder monk knows about how the character came to be in their care, and so on. This provides you as DM a hook for further exploration, and may provide a foggy window to how the player views the characters past.

The Hands On Stereotypes and What To Do

If you are lucky enough to have a player that has placed their family in the estranged, enfeebled/captured, or well-to-do categories then you are in luck. Your player has put some thought into how their family structure has formed (or fallen) and you have a bounty of material from which to work.

The difficult part as a DM is to determine how much to shake things up. Personally, I don’t like cookie-cutter “let’s go rescue Mom, who got captured by the Black Knight” scenarios because they are often somewhat tired and overdone, but if that is what the player wants out of the encounter you have to balance your wants for the player’s desire.

I suggest slight tweaks to the expected outcome to gauge the player’s reaction. Maybe Mom gets creative and is able to escape and then its a race to find her before the Black Knight does. Maybe Mom isn’t so helpless after all, and has dispatched the Black Knight herself but now the Black Lord is after her and anyone associated with her.

Watching the player’s response to these developments will be key, as well as some offline investigation into the success of these changes. If the player is into it, maybe you can up the ante just a bit. If they are resistant to the change or express some confusion, maybe its time to bring the plot back a bit closer to the standard “damsel in distress” expectation.

In the end, its really a judgment call and you have to be somewhat delicate when you mess with a character’s backstory in this way.

We’ve celebrated in the new year! It’s surprising to think that only a few months ago, we began stupidranger.com. You have all helped keep us inspired, and for that, we thank you!

As a community, we are all awaiting the introduction of 4th Edition and the modifications it will bring to our games. So I’m sure we’ll all have plenty to share throughout the year as we play through the new changes. You can expect that we’ll be sharing our thoughts, challenges and successes. Before that, of course, we’ll be finishing our epic campaign. And through it all, I’m sure you’ll see little changes as we continue to improve (hopefully) our site.

On behalf of all of us here at SR.com, thank you for your support in 2007, and we’re looking forward to sharing 2008 with you!

Happy New Year!

Being very close to the new year, I’ve gotten into several discussions today regarding how we demarcate and track time. This question entered into my brain once again as I sat down at the keyboard tonight, and I got to thinking about the relative difficulty of tracking time within a roleplaying system such as D&D.

It marches on, but sometimes at different paces

Often within our campaign, we accelerate segments of our time line or intentionally mask others (in the case of capture, drugging, or imprisonment) and this can pose some very sticky situations when it comes to tracking and measuring the time of year, or even the time spent on a given task.

This all becomes even more sticky when we start actually manipulating the time line of a campaign artificially, through time travel, deity intercession, or other means. When I am running our sessions, I do not sit with a “calendar” and mark off what time of year it is mostly because there are more important elements to be considered during a gaming session most times. In rare circumstances where seasons, dates, or other influencing factors make time relevant I usually task one of our players to perform the “measuring of days” task for me or I rely on our co-DM to handle that.

What to do when things change

In the cases where we artificially mess with the time line, I often come out and explicitly state any perceived changes in the season using the weather as a barometer. If the players happen into a city, they can easily derive the year, month, or day with a bit of investigation but I often leave it down into some form of NPC interaction to add a little more interest.

There are many different ways you can handle marking time and communicating changes in seasons, but I am curious to hear what methods and what levels of detail that you use in your campaigns? How much attention to this is too much, and how integral is the time line to your plots?

Sorry for the absence friends… there are just some times – and the holidays is one of them – when my brain shuts down. But I’m back, and ready to entertain you into the new year!

Yax recently posted a list of those things which are inevitable. They are so true. And here’s my list of additional laws:

1. The DM will unveil a significant plot hook at the end of the night when everyone has had too much sugar to have sufficient attention span to retain said important plot elements.
2. The DM will roll dice for no reason.
3. The wizard will either die early in the epic battle, or he will outlive everyone else and take down the Big Bad with a 1st Level spell.
4. When characters have money to spend, they won’t be in a town with a sufficient marketplace to find what they want to buy. When they are in a town with a good marketplace, they won’t have money to spend.
5. When you really need to roll well, your dice will betray you.
6. When players choose to cooperate with the DM, players will follow what they assume is the expected path; it will never be the path the DM wanted them to take.
7. The one time the party doesn’t have a rogue is the one time they need one.

I got into an interesting discussion on DMing with my brother-in-law tonight. He hasn’t played D&D in third edition, so we were talking largely on principle and not on mechanics of gameplay. He is not aware of this site, so I was pleased to hear some of my same advice for running a good game come from him!

Fun and the Participation Gap

We both agreed that one of the core principles for having a good game is the simple gauge of whether or not everyone was having fun. We talked in general about this for awhile, and I got to wondering about different ways one might be able to “bust the logjam” if it seems that people in your gaming group aren’t participating or aren’t having fun.

I have found that most people operate on some sort of an engagement curve. They start out having a lot of fun, and taper off as the night goes on, or vice-versa. Chances are pretty good you will have varying levels of engagement within your group at any given time, however I have found that my own group tends to peter out towards the end of the night. Realizing this, I have tried to keep away from springing any major events or plot points within a certain proximity from the end of our sessions.

Everything is more fun in real life

I believe that the occasional divergence into real world participation can be an excellent thing. A physical puzzle to solve, a real-world game of Three Dragon Ante, or a game-relevant scavenger hunt can get everyone excited, talking, laughing, and engaged without much effort on your part as DM.

The only thing that you must mind when introducing an element like this into your campaign is time spent… often, real world gaming elements tend to eat up time and there is usually a falling off point when the novelty wears off and the group just wants to get back to the normal gaming.

The brother-in-law approved rule of thumb applies: if the group is having fun, you’re probably OK to continue for awhile.

As the holidays came and went I found myself thinking periodically today about a slightly different type of giving within the realm of our roleplaying campaigns: that of roleplaying or experience rewards.

Avert your eyes, children, he could take other forms!

In our campaigns, these roleplaying rewards tend to be ad hoc denominations of experience for a variety of different reasons. I have rewarded my players for advancing the plot significantly more than I anticipated, innovative ideas to solve problems, extra in-character detail… essentially any “outside the box” approach to standard roleplaying fare. Sometimes the reward doesn’t even take the form of experience… in some cases I will reward the player with a certain item that they desire, or some plot point they have been longing after.

There are some who will argue that rewards of this type erode the system-designed means of rewarding experience, character class progressions, or any random combination of theoretical arguments that nerds make when pressed into a different way of thinking about a situation. I tend to believe that roleplaying and character development based rewards help further the amount of fun there is to be had both for that player and the group in general, while at the same time making my job as DM easier since I don’t have to write, engineer, and tweak a roleplaying scenario all on my own.

Its all a matter of taste

It really is at the discretion of the DM what approach to take regarding this topic, I tend to prefer liberal experience rewards and quicker character development because my players value both of these things as fun. If you have a different group that values the details or the journey of a long protracted campaign, and the delayed payoff of slower leveling, maybe this is not a good approach for your group.

I would love to hear some thoughts as to how you structure rewards for superior roleplaying or character development. What do you do in your campaigns?

Today the StupidRanger Crew is off celebrating the holidays with their friends and family!

Merry Christmas, to those of us that celebrate that particular holiday and Happy Tuesday to everyone else!