I frequently like to step outside the box when I roleplay, and I read an article this morning that really got me thinking.

The great thing about roleplaying is that you can use your imagination and become whatever (and whoever) you want. Granted, in a gaming environment, you are subject to some limitations so there’s a sense of growth, realism, and challenge. But by and large, fantasy roleplaying is an exercise in wish fulfillment for the players. That is, they want to escape the drudgery and limitations of real life. They want to have exciting adventures, and to be more than themselves. A lot of people create basically a superpowered alter-ego for themselves and they can do what they’re afraid to in real life. D&D lets them live the dream to a certain extent, and that’s really cool.

Limitation as a Tool for Creative Thinking?

A different way to roleplay is to give the players a set of limitations with which to build their characters. A very light version of this is to restrict where the PC’s come from or their available races, etc. in order to mold how their backstories will work. In our last campaign, I restricted the party to being humans because the story required it. Another very common way to roleplay like this is to use pregenerated characters. While many use pre-gen characters in a more hack-and-slash environment because it’s faster and balanced, it can be a way for the DM to more easily control the story and for the players to step outside of the box they usually play in and try to identify with a new character’s way of thinking. If your players are in a rut doing the same thing over and over again, try keeping them away from the place they dug it.

My lovely wife Efreak, who is an artist, frequently tells me about how there are two kinds of artists: creators, and discoverers. Creators make something new from scratch. Discoverers tend to take existing things and blend them or find new meaning in something old. This type of roleplaying is discovery. It’s not creativity in the sense that the player gets to create a new character. It’s that they get to create their own version of an existing character.

Pros and Cons

I already know a lot of you crinkled up your noses at the words “pre-generated characters” and immediately thought of a bad experience you’ve had. It’s been sort of a mixed bag for me as well, but done right it can be fun. For instance, you use pre-generated characters at Nascrag. And despite it being some of the best fun on the planet, I will admit there’s a pretty steep learning curve handling those characters’ backstories and pre-planned motivations and feelings toward others. I saw a lot of people struggle with this, and it’s not for everybody.

That being said, you can hit the ground running if you play with pre-gen characters — especially if you give them out to your players well in advance so they can be familiar with the backstories you’ve written. We all know character generation can pretty much kill the first night of a gaming session. If you’re in a group that can’t meet often or you’re playing your once-a-year-only game at Gen Con with strange people from the Internet, this is a really good way to get started — fast.

Another good thing about writing the backstory for a pre-gen character is that you get to see how the player reacts to the cards he’s been dealt. A female bard character in Nascrag last year knew she was pregnant but didn’t want to tell anyone. And about halfway through, we were all going to be polymorphed to hide from the bad guys, which she knew (from her backstory) might be harmful to the baby. Watching that player wrestle with that decision and everyone dealing with her eventual decision not to do it made the game a lot more interesting because someone had to walk a few steps in shoes other than their usual ones.

Abandon All Hope All Ye Who Roleplay Here

If you really want to try something crazy, you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes entirely. I haven’t played it yet, but there’s a new roleplaying game out called Steal Away Jordan, where you play as a slave in the South before the U.S. Civil War. No wish-fulfillment here, guys.

The concept to me sounds intensely interesting, but I don’t know that it would be “fun” per se. It strikes me that games like this are the gaming equivalent of method acting, and you’ll walk away changed but not necessarily having had a great time. (The photo in that article is priceless!)

But, then again, games don’t always have to be fun, just like art isn’t always there to make us feel good. Yehuda wrote a fantastic article in his blog a couple months ago that you should definitely read if this sort of thing intrigues you. In actual practice, you probably won’t want to go this extreme. Unless you’ve sat down with your players and collectively decided you want to try something like this, you’re probably going to have a lot of people not having fun.

Finding the Balance

What you can do is come up with a setting for your players and characters that need played. For instance, Nascrag’s last story arc revolved around a royal family and the PC’s were either in the family or close associates. This allowed the adventure to be geared toward specific goals involving these characters. Having pregenerated characters certainly made that easier, but there’s certainly nothing preventing you as a DM from fine-tuning how much you want to limit the characters. It can be anything from only limiting where they come from or what classes to be, to giving them specific roles in the story that need to be played (and they flesh out the details), to giving them complete pregenerated characters and throwing them in the ocean to swim.

If you’re going to do this, you should absolutely sit down as a group and talk it over. As I said before, it’s not for everybody and it really stresses some people out trying to think outside the box. Some will bristle at the restriction of their creative freedom. Some players wind up roleplaying the same way they always do even with a new character, and you should be prepared for that eventuality. Some, like me, will have a ton of fun with it and want every game to be like this.

Find your balance within the group, and if everybody’s still having fun at the end, then it worked. Just like everything else in roleplaying games!

It’s one of the most difficult situations in which to find yourself: possessed with knowledge your character doesn’t have. Maybe you overheard Shadow the Rogue make a deal with a stranger in the middle of the night, but Ceril the Barbarian was asleep and had no clue that anything happened. Or maybe you know that casting a specific sequence of spells at a Prismatic Wall will destroy it, but there’s no way that Ceril knows what those spells are or the order in which they need to be cast.

Applying your personal knowledge to your character is one of those all important you-must-never-do-this taboo’s of D&D: metagaming. It’s also one of the hardest sins to avoid committing. And while I’m by no means infallible, here are some techniques that have helped me manage my metagaming.

#1. Take Notes. For me, the act of taking notes negates my creative (ie. roleplaying) impulses. When I take notes, I am less likely to act on the knowledge contained in them because I’m so focused on writing down everything; I don’t pay attention to how the details would apply to my character, and Ceril remains oblivious. By divorcing yourself from the proceedings, you have less of a chance to assimilate this new information into your character’s knowledge base.

#2. State Your Innocence. When it comes around to you to decide what action to take, reiterate what it is that you don’t know. By stating the absence of this knowledge, you have already eliminated options you might have taken based on this knowledge. Consider this: if you know the goblin is within 30′ and you don’t have the Point-Blank Shot feat, you’re not likely to attack with your ranged weapon. By the same token, if Ceril doesn’t know that the Mummy Lord has damage reduction, Ceril is still likely to make his normal attack.

#3. Remove Yourself from Temptation. If it’s just too much, if you just know that by overhearing this conversation at the table, you will not be able to avoid using this information, physically remove yourself from the environment. Take a quick break. Go get a snack. Let the dog out. If you don’t know it, you can’t use it to metagame.

I’m not promising that these will work for everyone. And I’m definitely not promising that following these techniques will eliminate metagaming; that’s why I titled this “managing” metagaming. But I do feel that if we as players make a personal commitment to manage our metagaming, we will create a better environment for roleplaying.

In my last installment, I touched briefly on the concept of allowing opportunities to allow your characters to reinvent themselves. There are many other ways that you can foster reinvention in your campaign, both directly and indirectly.

Give your characters options

In the first act of our campaign, Vanir played a bard that was quite skilled at attracting the ladies. The situation arose that he needed to rescue some local children from a house that was thought to be haunted, and with no ready source of reinforcements he decided to held a rock and roll seminar on how to be cool and score with the ladies in exchange for forming a magical rescue posse.

Now, it was hard to tell at this moment whether or not we were looking at an attempt to create a D&D version of Animal House or if something was going on here, but the notion intrigued me enough that I let him lay out his plan for me and enact it.

It was a completely different, surreal altruistic side to this character that never would’ve come to light if Vanir wasn’t given the option to try what he wanted to try. If you give your characters some breadth to reinvent themselves, you will probably be surprised how often they will take that opportunity.

That doesn’t mean you can’t force it

If you find that your characters are stuck in a rut and act the same way at most situations, its perfectly acceptable (and recommended) that you give them a hard decision. Make them choose between saving the orphanage or rescuing the damsel in distress. Sometimes forcing the characters to figure out how to think “outside the box” on how to resolve a situation will bring about some real reflection on how they would act.

The trick becomes creating these encounters so that the player and the character really relates to both sides of the equation. You will then see them work in surprisingly fresh ways to get to a happy conclusion for both sides. Whether or not you give them the option to save both the orphanage or the damsel is really up to you. It might be interesting to see if they’d stay to rebuild the orphanage if it was destroyed, or seek out vengeance on the baddie that offed the damsel. It is in these moments that your characters have the option to grow in new ways.

Artificial Reinvention

As I spoke about on Friday, we elected to let some time pass between story arcs in our campaign. We encouraged our players to tell us what happened in the years after the first adventure concluded, which created an artificial moment for the players to reflect on what the characters wanted to do next.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be years, you can engineer a few weeks/months of downtime within your storylines to let your characters settle with their decisions for a bit and see if they emerge at all changed from the experience. We’ve had a lot of luck in making these moments occur between game sessions, so the players can think about what has happened and what they want to happen next.

This can be good for you as a DM

I encourage you to find what works best for your group and give this a try, you will find that new character motivations are fertile ground for fueling future campaign ideas. Reinvention in this way becomes a mutually beneficial exercise for both player and DM, so give it a try!

In my last post, I told the story of how Dante and I teamed up to co-DM, and the lessons I learned from that experience. (Mostly, the experience of not listening to him.) Then, less than an hour before we were to start the final session of the mini-campaign, he suggested the following to me: “Hey, how about you run the last one since it’s your baby?”

I almost told him “oh HELL no” and punched him. But Dante’s known me long enough to know that he’s faster than I am and can usually evade punches, and that he can push specific psychological buttons to make me curious enough about an idea of his to think I came up with it. And somehow, he managed to get me latched on to the thought that I could try to see this thing out the way I saw it in my head instead of him losing it in the translation. I suspect that his reasons for doing so were numerous, including being frustrated with my stubbornness, wanting to watch me wreck the train a little for a change, and giving me good valuable DM experience under fire. Even so, I decided to say the hell with it and give it a go.

Tracks? What Tracks?

I knew by this point in the campaign that the players were going to do whatever the hell they wanted. So from the first moment that I sat down at the table, I decided no railroading. If they decided to kill each other, set fire to the forest, and blow up the world, then I was OK with that. I would go down with my ship.

The plan for the evening was that the PC’s would go to this lumber yard up north, revealing the identity of their Important NPC. This guy was the half-elven son of an evil Chancellor who was famously anti-elf, even trying to turn the whole nation against them. They’d get enough people realizing the Chancellor was a big hypocrite, and the bad guy would stage an elaborate setup to discredit the PC’s, where they’d ultimately crash the party and bring this whole thing to a climax. It sounded great in my head, would have been a sweet novel.

“No railroading” turned out to be the best idea I had all night. About two minutes in, all hell broke loose and I found myself with one party member deciding to defect to the bad guys, 2 members of the party actively hunting him down to kill him, and our ninja character quietly knifing the Important NPC in the back with a poisoned dagger “to keep him out of trouble”. No problem. They’d been trying to kill the diplomat for a few sessions, if they rolled right he was dead. Somehow, he escaped. They kept searching. I rolled for that, making the DC higher as time went on until they gave up since there were no seasoned trackers. So I let him get away.

When Life Gives You Homicidal Maniacs, Make Homicidal Maniade

Instead of going where I wanted them to go, the PC’s decide the direct route is so much better, so they keep the half-elf knocked out and take him to the city. I decide to let the Chancellor’s little kangaroo court happen anyway, and they’ll show up as it’s starting. The reason that it’s going as planned is that our escaped diplomat has successfully made it back to the city and plead his case. And I offered him a chance to live: interrogate an impostor half-elf in front of the crowd to make the Chancellor look good — or die. Seemed like a good opportunity for some roleplaying.

The player playing the diplomat clearly disagreed with me, as shortly thereafter he tells me he has hung himself in his cell. Well, so much for that idea. I’d seen it as an opportunity to pull out some incredible bullshit and roleplay his eyeballs out, but it wasn’t fun for him. No problem. My original plan was to have an NPC run the tribunal anyway, so that was fine.

Well, until the PC’s show up, sneak in a little bit, and then start killing all the guards in sight and a couple of civilians with fireballs. (Did I mention the wizard was captain of the city guard?) At this point, I am pretty convinced that I am not going to have a whole lot of recourse except for killing them all. So I have a senator show up with about 50 guards in tow, and he demands to know what the hell is going on RIGHT NOW.

Stupid Ranger gets credit for saving the party in my book. She casts Light on all of their clothes and claims they are all on a Holy Mission to expose the Chancellor’s lies. I figure nobody’s going to buy that but it’s enough of an attention-getter to keep them alive for a minute (Tracy Hickman-style). Then they pull out the half-elf, who looks like the Chancellor but with pointy ears, Now THERE’S a reason they’d stop trying to kill them. The senator shits a brick and calls off the dogs. Then they round up a posse and dethrone the chancellor. VICTORY!

Post-Mortem

Yeah, I fudged a little. The story was weak in some places, and there were parts that weren’t exactly plausible. But you know what? Pretty much everybody at the table was engaged and having fun. There was rampant roleplay (albeit kinda scary roleplay) happening, especially with our ninja and our psionic characters making some very memorable moments. (“Huh? Where am I?” “Don’t you remember that awesome speech you just gave and everybody was cheering?” <psionic memory alteration> “Oh yeah, that was AWESOME!”)

In short, everybody had fun — even the guy who committed suicide, if that makes any sense — and last time I checked, that means the DM did his job. (Somehow!)

And I discovered something too — I was having fun the whole time. Once I finally let go and decided to let things happen as they went, things were a lot less forced and a lot more fun. Sure, I’d like to be a bit more prepared for the inevitable off-roading, but it doesn’t bother me like it used to. I simply cannot see how a session could go wronger than this one, and if I survived this….. perhaps I can do this after all.

But for now, I’m more than happy to let Dante and Eric take the reins again.

This week, my good buddy Kanati and I are preparing to return to our original co-DMing experiment. We intentionally took a hiatus in order to collect our thoughts and prepare an exciting second act, which we decided to place four years after the conclusion of the first act.

In order to allow our characters to refresh and rebuild their “away from the group” motivations, we’ve asked our players to put together a story that outlines what their characters have done since the first act concluded.

Essentially, this is a functional reset of the campaign, albeit at a much higher character level and with a much more rich backstory. These characters have a shared history from the first act, yet depending upon what their individual histories were we could end up with a very different group dynamic as we begin anew. Allowing your players to organically grow their characters throughout your storyline will hopefully provide a much more immersing game for everyone.

I will certainly continue to explore this topic as this new campaign kicks off, hopefully this will work out positively for everyone.

We’re pleased to present a few new features today! If you direct your attention to the right, you will see the following new and improved elements for your enjoyment:

• Featured Links – We’ve decided to highlight some of our absolute favorite sites. Keep an eye out for new additions to both this section, and our original Favorite Links.
• Google Search – We have implemented a Google Powered search. It’s a great way to poke through the archives.
• Tag List – At the request of our favorite chatty DM, we have implemented a digest of the tags that we have used on our various posts. This should make it easier to find some of our recurring columns or get caught up if you’re joining us for the first time.
• Author Tags – You will now find our names in the aforementioned tag list, as we have added our names to each of the articles to allow you to sort by staff member… to help you find that particular article by your favorite columnist!
• Digg – We’ve added a post level widget to allow you to Digg articles that you really enjoy. We don’t condone self-digging, so its up to you, loyal readers!

We are constantly striving to make your experience more satisfying so keep the suggestions coming!

Porpoises are known to be fierce combatants, even able to defend themselves against sharks larger than themselves. A celestial porpoise is stronger, more intelligent, and has darkvision. Summoning one ensures that you are comfortable with your own sexuality.

When I first started playing D&D back in college, I had the good fortune to have a wonderful DM; he made it all look so very easy. After the first couple of campaigns, I was convinced that I, too, could be a DM. I planned out my first storyline, created my NPCs, and ran my first session.

I won’t say it was an entire disaster, but it was definitely a lot more difficult that I was lead to believe. I got bogged down in tables and charts, and I just got so overwhelmed. For me, being the DM was not as much fun as being the player.

After talking to my group and explaining my situation, they allowed me to dissolve the campaign. And since, I have never tried to DM. I learned a very valuable lesson that day: those who can, DM; those who can’t, play.

As I have been tagged by Elf, I will share my four. I’d have posted sooner, but I was down sick this week… and since I’m the last so tagged, I figure I better get to meme-ing!

Four jobs I have had in my life (not including my current job):

• Front desk assistance / mail sorter at the dorm
• Generic sales position
• HR manager for the local Sears
• Software instructors for a computer education center

Four Films I have watched again and again:

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
• Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
• Dogma
• Lilo & Stitch

Four places I have lived:

• Central Illinois
• Central Illinois
• Central Illinois
• Central Illinois

Four Programs I love to watch:

• House
• Bones
• Pysch
• Simpsons

Four Places I have been on vacation:

• Dresden, Ohio
• San Fransisco
• New Orleans
• Lake of the Ozarks

Four of my favorite foods:

• Five Cheese Ziti – Olive Garden
• Oriental Chicken Salad – Applebee’s
• Edy’s Loaded Butterfinger ice cream
• Chicken Quesadilla from a local Mexican restaurant

Four favorite drinks:

• Diet Coke
• Sweet Tea
• Steak & Shake milkshakes
• Sake – for special occasions

Four places I would rather be right now:

• Olive Garden
• Playing D&D
• Sleeping
• Sitting on the couch watching Simpsons …. oh, wait, that’s where I am!

Four People I Tag (unless you’ve already done this… then you don’t have to):

• Yax
• Phil
• Evil DM
• Jonathan Drain

On Treasure Tables there was a very thought provoking post on adventure notes yesterday. This got me to thinking of the many ways that I’ve kept adventure notes over the years and I thought it best to share these various approaches today.

A Holistic Approach

My barometer for determining what makes a good encounter is usually based around how much fun my players are having. I have been known to rework an encounter mid-stream if it turns out being far too challenging or drop in an extra encounter or two fairly organically into the plot. If I think its going to be fun for the characters, I am happy to “wing it” and make up an encounter on the spot to scratch whatever apparent itch that I can detect.

This usually makes for a note-taking nightmare, that’s why I generally tend not to do it. I will outline the basics: what they encountered, any excellent or creative steps that the players took to dispatch the baddies, experience and treasure. Most of my notes fit comfortably onto a 3.5″ index card, but I usually just keep a notebook of half-sheets that show the progression of events.

The Lazy Approach

When embracing the glowing beauty that is shooting from the hip, I got out of the habit of note taking. We had a few natural secretaries in our group, one of which is our very own Stupid Ranger. Since I have the good fortune of living with her, there were times I would just ask her for her set of notes on the campaign happenings prior to the session.

In a real pinch, I would sometimes call a five minute break and sneak a peek during the session if I need to quickly craft up a plot point that tied together a few prior events from recent nights.

The Team Approach

There was a time when I fully embraced this hands-off approach to campaign outlining. We used a blog to track the progress of the campaign that wrought Lumbar, Goudy, and Skythorn, where each character would post their in-game thoughts in exchange for an experience bonus.

This provided many Good Things: a running tally of how a character was perceiving the plot, an extremely detail-based set of notes for me to refer to, and an engaging way to keep the characters in the game in exchange for what amounted to an experience pittance.

My players took to this extremely well, and we have adapted this to use some different technologies as the years have gone on. We are currently using a PHP BB bulletin board to track this type of information, and players are free to post their details as they desire to receive their experience.

We’ve been discussing the art of co-DMing this week, if you have a co-DM use them in this mode. Let them assist in keeping an outline or additional details, we’ve had some success in having a post-game rap session to jot down a posthumous set of reflections on how the session went and what we need to tweak to make it more engaging.

Notes are what you make of them

In short, you need to make notes your servant. If you thrive on the structure of keeping a detailed set of notes that are yours and yours alone, do that. If you are like me and prefer keeping a loose outline and going off of player perception to drive your stories, do that. If you have some other approach that nobody has thought of before, do that but be sure to leave comment and let us know what it is!