Over at the Chatty DM’s site, Phil & Yan posted a couple of posts recently about tweaking a class to create a cooler character. If you haven’t read about the Shaper class, I suggest you check it out, both Part 1 and Part 2.

Here’s What I Like About It
D&D should always be about having fun. And if it’s not fun, you need to take whatever actions are necessary to make it fun again. In this case, Yan & Phil developed a class that suited Yan’s character concept, making the game more fun… as it should be.

Here’s What I Love About It

Developing your character to the level that inspires you to create a class that meets your character’s roleplay needs is an exceptional concept. I have usually developed a character concept to fit a class, never the other way around. I think it’s a great idea, and I’m really excited about the possibilities this opens up for my own future characters.

So the Moral of Today’s Story Is…

If it’s broke and it’s not contributing to your roleplaying experience, fix it! Work with your DM and tweak something to make things better for you. That doesn’t mean you have to develop a whole new class… maybe you just need to adjust your spell selection, or work on a prestige class. Take control of your character’s destiny, even if that means you have to build that destiny yourself.

P.S. Phil recently moved to his new site, so if you haven’t already, be sure to update your bookmark!

This weekend I did something that I have only done a few times in my DMing career: called a session off. I have halted sessions early due to exhausting the source material and my tolerance for shooting off the hip for the evening, but rarely have I preemptively canceled a session ahead of time.

Energy: Your best friend and worst enemy

There are many times when the positive energy that exists between the members of your gaming group is an excellent and powerful tool. Now, IANAH (I Am Not A Hippy), but I do know that when these energies are collecting a certain special way it can equate to MAJOR distractions and lack of player engagement.

In our case, this usually takes the form of off-topic discussion, jokes/puns, sarcasm, or other non-value added discussion. For this particular session, we began with an excellent meal prepared by two of our players. Conversation around the dinner table was lively, and as the plates were being cleared I started in a bit on my pre-game check in: was everyone leveled up, what did they think of last session, etc.

It took three times to get three separate players to even acknowledge that I was talking, let alone give me some answers to these questions. This is not a problem, it happens commonly with our group, but then something else hit me.

The Partial Prep Blues

One of the perils of running a co-DM campaign is that it is fraught with dependencies. Recently, my co-DM Kanati sustained an injury while casting levitate on an automobile and had to undergo some surgery. As a result, his involvement in our sessions has become digital-only and we do our prep and in-game discussion via chat. Our arrangement is that he writes the plot and I run the incidentals of the gaming sessions.

We had done some pre-prep during the week and we had an excellent set piece for our plot all worked out. We even had a convenient hook, however in this case I was going to thrust heavily into “wing it” mode after this plot piece resolved and I knew that it would resolve early in the night. Normally Kanati would feed me some additional plot as the session went on, however this time he was away from the computer for the night convalescing and unavailable to steer the plot.

Instead of subject my group to a potential “big bang but end with a whimper” session, I explained this problem to the group and we all elected to forgo gaming for another week and enjoy pleasant conversation instead of playing.

Net results?

Opting to electively forgo a session once in a blue moon can work out well… our entire group had a good time just getting to hang out and catch up without the roleplaying involved.

I’m a major proponent of shooting off the hip, however the co-DM situation where one person writes and the other runs can hinder shooting off the hip for fear of fouling up the prepared plot. Kanati and I are working through our skills in this space still, I imagine we’ve got some room to improve.

Has anyone else out there electively canceled a gaming session, and did it positively impact your future gaming? I found that I got some out of game feedback that was helpful in aiding me to prepare the next session, so for me it was worth it for that alone.

As much as we love the core rulebooks, we are all pretty well set in our house rules ways. House rules give you that extra little help when the rules don’t quite fit your party’s needs. I’m always looking for good house rules to convince my DM we should implement, but here are a few of ours to share.

Re-rolling 1’s on healing and health. When rolling for healings (either potions or spells) or rolling your hit die each level, rolling a 1 is an automatic re-roll.

No changes after your turn is over. You can change the amount of damage you did during your turn only until the next person begins his/her turn. So, if you forgot to add the +2 from the bard’s inspire courage to the 3 attacks you made, you’re just out of luck… try to remember next time!

No food need while traveling. Except in extreme climates (ie. deserts, frozen tundras, etc), it is assumed sufficient time has been allotted during the day to hunt for food so tracking rations is not necessary.

So, what house rules do you have in place?

As you may remember last week I was suffering from writers block relating to our recent campaign. On the drive home, I got to thinking about creative ways that I’ve gotten past the writers block in the past.

What Dreams May Come

Aside from being a truly excellent movie, dreams can be a very interesting wellspring for new and creative ideas. One of the better original scenarios that I ran in the campaign before last was from a dream.

The trouble with dreams is that they may not logically flow together, or you may not remember the connecting pieces of the scenario. In this case, I took major elements and placed them into my campaign. The players ended up enjoying the trap and the scene, however they had the most unorthodox solution to it… but that is a story for another time.

And Pretty Much Anything Else

Over the years I’ve found seeds for campaign ideas from some very odd places: the back of a Frosted Mini Wheats cereal box, TV shows (both animated and live-action), even my workplace can occasionally spawn an idea or three.

I’ve found if you get writers block, its important not to focus too much on the fact that its there. Look in places that you normally wouldn’t. Try some writing exercises, like free word association. Try relating a random object in your home to your campaign in some way.

Anyone else?

I’m sure many of you fine readers out there have been in this situation, be it as a Dungeon Master or as a player trying to find new and exciting ways to roleplay their characters. How do you do it? What strange inspirations have you used to break your writers block?

Gorlag, a 3rd level barbarian, is accustomed to being in the wilderness and chopping up evil things with his battleaxe. Having performed heroic deeds with a party of adventurers, he has been invited by a local Countess to receive an award for bravery at her house in the city.

A half hour before the event, Gorlag got a fierce case of dry mouth, and drained his waterskin. By the time the awards ceremony rolled around, Gorlag’s mighty bladder threatened to explode.

Choose Gorlag’s Destiny

In order not to piss himself in front of his friends and the local nobility, does Gorlag have to make:

• a Fort Save, relying solely on his bodily strength and constitution to save his social reputation (and trousers), OR
• a Will save, proving once and for all the concept of mind over bladder?

YOU MAKE THE CALL!

So far in our Orientation series, we’ve discussed abilities and races. Over the next couple of orientation sessions, we’ll be exploring the classes you can select for your character. Your class is your occupation, and as a preview of the coming sessions, here’s a quick overview of classes:

Barbarians – fierce fighters from the wilderness

Bards – entertainers who use music to cast spells

Clerics – priests who use their divine connections to cast spells

Druids – protectors of nature who use their connection to nature to cast spells

Fighters – combatants who dedicate their lives to being proficient fighters

Monks – fighters from monasteries who have perfected the art of combat without armor and only basic weapons

Paladins – fighters crusading for the glory of their deity

Rangers – hunters who fight to protect their home from their sworn enemies

Rogues – jacks of all trades who can open locks, disable traps, and pick pockets

Sorcerers – spellcasters with innate magical abilities

Wizards – spellcasters who study the arcane arts

We’ll delve into greater details on these soon, so check back soon for the next orientation.

Over the weekend, things came back around in a big way for our group and we were able to pull off a largely satisfying session. The interesting thing is that the session was centered around a single battle encounter.

It all starts with a plot point

Our players were suffering from a lack of engagement… they weren’t able to see any personal tie-in to the larger world around them. So my co-DM and I set out to create a major plot point that would tie the actions of our characters during the first campaign to our current one.

We created a battle encounter that seemed relatively consistent with a few others that we’ve had during the session, but we added in the presence of a very, VERY evil aligned NPC. They jumped right into the fray, luckily!

And yes, I got to use some suspense and horror!

The encounter took place near dusk, and the spot check to see the baddies was pretty difficult. Luckily, nobody rolled high enough to see the evil NPC behind the standard baddies until they were entrenched in battle. A few more difficult spot checks to make out some important details made them curious, including the fact that she did not engage them in any way.

The NPC was an evil aligned goddess from the Book of Vile Darkness, and the baddies were her underlines that she put out there because she enjoys torture, pain, and inflicted suffering. The characters realized something was up when the baddies would laugh and writhe ecstatically with every successful strike. As they died, a tether would appear connecting their essence to the evil goddess.

This got them all extremely interested in what was going on.

The all encompassing power of flavor description

After the baddies were reduced to less than zero hit points, they were so overcome by their ecstatic pain that they fell to the ground. At this point, the evil goddess would re-assert her dominance and tethered them with a spiked collar that did nothing but break bones and sinew, causing a disgusting series of images for the players and their characters.

Then, one by one, as the characters attacked the goddess they were stopped dead in their tracks, mid-action. The goddess then had a speech explaining the plot as it concerned the characters, and her actions up until this point and the players were all very interested in what she was saying.

In fact, the two note-taking types in our group were writing so furiously I had to stop for a second to tell them I was going to post this talk on the forum that accompanies our game sessions so they could focus on what was being said. They were pleased.

Get to the point already!

The long and short of this story is this: much can be done to create a good encounter by mixing a whole lot of intrigue with a piece of the plot and sprinkle a battle in there liberally.

The session that I described was the first time in my DMing career that the entire group was engaged at some level and the entire night revolved around a single battle oriented encounter. Several of my players told me that the session was extremely good, and I felt extremely good while running it so I’m willing to chalk this one up as a success story.

Special kudos go to my co-DM Kanati, who found said evil goddess and made her speech positively hair-raising!

We’ve got good news and bad news about our weekly T-shirts. The bad news is that we’re not going to have them every single week anymore. The good news is that we’re now offering shirts for $10 (plus shipping) apiece. Just in time for you to buy one for your favorite nerd this holiday season!

There’s several reasons for these changes. One is that in the whole time we’ve been up, we’ve sold a grand total of three (3) shirts. Two of them were to Yax from DungeonMastering. With that single order, Yax became responsible for the vast majority of this site’s income (which, if I’m not mistaken, is about to crest $3). Thanks, Yax!!!!

What I’m trying to say here is, we’re not moving any shirts. Cafepress’s base prices on shirts are really insanely high, so to order any shirts we were offering you’d have to shell out almost $30. And we’d see maybe $2 of it. So we’ve gone with a cheaper shirt (their “value” t-shirt, which isn’t quite as thick as the ones we’ve been selling but still nice), and only marked it up a buck so maybe we can have a little money to blow at Gen Con next year.

Since we’re not moving any shirts, we’re also starting to wonder how much interest there is in them. A look at our site stats shows very little activity in the shop (and no sales). We’ve all got a lot on our plates right now, so we’ve decided our time might be better spent on doing the things on the site we know people come for: that is, good quality articles and comics.

Not to say that there will be no more new t-shirts. They’re still fun to make, and I think I might do a little dance and make a girlish squeal if I ever saw a random person wearing one at a convention. We will be making new t-shirts. However, we’ll be doing them a lot more sporadically.

If it seems like the winds of change are starting to blow a little around here, you’re probably right. When we first launched and were trying to get the word out about the site, we had several bloggers tell us “great site, hope you keep it up because a lot of them peter out”. I think we’re starting to see why that is, it’s so easy to go at this full bore for a month or two and then get exhausted (especially when Real Life starts getting in the way). But everyone here thinks we’ll be OK — and the main reasons why are that we’re starting to get a feel for what people are looking for, setting realistic expectations of what we can do, and adjusting accordingly.

It might be a little bumpy sometimes, but we’ll still be here giving you something to waste your time on at work and improve your gaming experience. Thanks for reading!

P.S. every time you buy a t-shirt you save a baby owlbear from a grisly doom

On the way home from work, I noticed, out of the corned of my eye, a marquee sign for the camper sales place. It blinked twice: Hotdog Forks!! And I knew that my muse had appeared in those blinking red lights. On the way home from a crazy day at work, the absurdity of the words “Hotdog Forks!!” made me smile, but most importantly, it reminded me how some of the littlest things make such a huge difference, even in the D&D realm.

Spice Things Up

How easy it can be to make your character just that much more interesting by adding a little spice. Add a quirk to your character with a small trinket that always gets lost and without which you won’t leave the campsite in the morning. Or maybe you have a lucky feather you have to have tucked securely in your armor or robes before you go into battle.

Add Some Comic Release

In the first half of our current campaign, Ari won a small necklace from the mysterious carnival. Most of the gains from the carnival would disappear in the light of the new morning, but the necklace, for whatever reason, stayed. Ari shrugged it off as bizarre, but it was pretty, and she decided that she would keep it. It was a few days later before she discovered the trick in the trinket. She said the word “necklace” and was transported to another random location, not too far from where she was standing. It was such a fun little item… but the best part was keeping the DM’s guessing if she was going to say the magic word.

So, if you find yourself in the situation where you feel as if your muse has abandoned you, try to add some fun to your character with your own “Hotdog Forks!!”

The reason I like writing this blog it gets me thinking about things in new ways. On Monday I posted some thoughts about how difficult that it is to adequately engineer situations that actually compel suspense, and some great comments were made that kept me thinking about this topic as the week progressed.

Getting outside the normal

One of our readers, reid, recommended a gaming system called Dread which puts each player’s actions and checks in the embodiment of a Jenga tower. This strikes me as an EXCELLENT way to have an evening of fun and appears to be a system engineered for one-nighters and short runs where the gaming area can be left in place.

I love the inherent risk of the tower falling and I can imagine this wrapping very nicely into a horror setting or one that has a lot of physical risks for your characters.

Some more traditional ideas

Several people (including our very own Vanir) recommended obfuscating or eliminating the fear based systems in favor of rewarding roleplaying. I like these ideas, however there will always be those naturally light in roleplaying that will want to have control over some system of determining the fear response.

We have used props in some of our campaigns up to this point to illustrate objects and add some reality to encounters. I’ve been toying with ways to combine the Jenga suspense with a situation specific prop to heighten the roleplay experience for those people that don’t really get into heavy roleplay.

Then I remembered our experience at Nascrag this year… they had essentially a paper diagram describing a puzzle, with a specific time limit to solve it. It wasn’t horror, but let me tell you the pressure was on. I imagine this would be equally cool with a real life prop, or a combination of puzzles and real props to add an air of reality to the situation.

Using some creative applications of concepts like this that many of you may already use may help aid in creating some artificial, yet realistic suspense to your settings and encounters.