The good news: we have taken a few opportunities in our own way to continue to game.  We have had our D&D group together for a session just recently, which also coincided with Free Comic Book Day and an outing to see Thor (which was much better than I expected).  This day of epic nerdity helped to restoke the fires.  Stupid Ranger has been spending her spare time diving headlong into Dragon Age 2, and she has mentioned more than a few times that she wants to write a review up on that to tell you all of her experiences in Ferelden.  The point of mentioning all this is that you might see a bit of variety to our posts, reflecting the type of nerdy behavior that we’re able to participate in.

The bad news: I had to use most of my vacation time this year to welcome our new addition, so Stupid Ranger and I will not be able to attend Gen-Con this year.  But fear not!  Our very own Vanir will be attending and will be sure to bring his ultra-special roleplaying expertise to the convention center and the surrounding three mile radius.  We will be sure to share liberally his event schedule so you can meet up with him and receive your own free hair trimming to improve your gaming fortune.

Finally, I’d like to thank our loyal readers who have stuck around during this sabbatical.  With any luck we will return to a more frequent blogging schedule as things return to normal and our gaming resumes in earnest.  More soon!

Do you cheat?  The answer: The DM really can’t cheat.  You’re the umpire, and what you say goes.  As such, it’s certainly within your rights to sway things one way or another to keep people happy or keep things running smoothly.

Other editions of the D&D rules have stated the case in similar but slightly different ways, and ultimately the responsibility comes down to you and the DM to take the appropriate action to keep the game fun or running smoothly.  Please note: this does not define what “keep people happy” or “running smoothly” means.  In my games, I considered my plot an outline… a mere suggestion… so that the players can choose to stay in the lines or to color way outside them.  Vanir often chose to color way outside the lines, onto the table, all over the walls, and perhaps two or three houses down the block.  I have always enjoyed letting my players define the world that they act in to a certain extent, allowing them to define where the railroad tracks get laid down to get the story from point A to point B.

So what’s a man to do?

To address Vanir’s problem specifically: every good DM cheats.  The trick is to provide the players with enough breadth so they don’t necessarily see you cheating.  For example: we’re fighting a long battle.  The players are expending their abilities and skills and it is depleting them, but not far enough that they are in any real danger of dying.  Could I run this encounter out to the very last hit point that the bad guy contains?  Sure I could.  Would it be boring, providing that the bad guy can’t really do enough damage to exhaust the group?  Absolutely.  So you fudge the bad guy’s hit points a bit to make the encounter end.

What I don’t like doing is (unfortunately) what Vanir did in his campaign: not being used to his players acting off-script, he magically teleported them to the next plot point.  There’s nothing really WRONG with doing this, but I do like some cause and effect to occur if the players act differently than they should have.  Just leading them to the next battle or skill challenge can feel pretty obvious to the players and take them out of the story.  I’m not beating up on Vanir any more than he already has himself, but better ways to deal with this type of situation mostly come with experience.  Figuring out a few contingency plans for what will happen if the players don’t take the plot hook or interact with NPCs in a non-ideal way will help to smooth these bumps.

The other main thing that Vanir mentions in his article is the loss of innocence from being a player.  Now you KNOW the fudging that can occur, and you start to ask yourself if every fun or exciting moment in a campaign was because of the DM acting to favor the players in some way.  The only advice I can give is this: sit back and enjoy the ride.  Have some caffeine and sugar, and let the game unfold.

It’s actually pretty fun sitting in the player’s chair again to see if you can detect when the DM is making stuff up.  I’ve found a few of them have a “tell”… they shuffle some papers, roll some dice that have no outcome on the encounter at all, or stare at the players with a blank or angry expression when things aren’t going as they anticipate.  It’s also fun to see how they resolve the situations as well, you can learn something from their responses too.  If I possessed the insane ability to play off-script player characters like Vanir does, I would be doing that all the time and see how the DM reacts.

But back to the main point: you never really can “un-know” the fact that the DM does some trickery to make the game move forward.  Just know it’s part of his job, and it’s part of your job to enjoy the story and be invested in your player character.  That’s the real fun anyway… building up a hero based on your own imagination.  There’s no rule set or die roll that should affect that aspect of roleplaying games one bit.

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Character Generation

As I postulated yesterday, character creation was a really fun aspect of the game.  We opted for the traditional no-holds-barred random character generation to excellent results.  Our party consisted of:

• A mind breaker / plant hybrid
• A highly intelligent yeti android with only three Charisma
• A human-sized felinoid / cockroach named Mittens St. Cloud
• A plant / gravity controller clad in cast-off street signs
• A rat swarm / empath named Thwack

Before character creation was even complete, the group was brainstorming ideas about how their characters would act.  “Can a length of highway guardrail be a heavy melee weapon?”  Absolutely.  Can my yeti android communicate by angry yelling even though he is Intelligent?” Sure he can!  “Can Mittens St. Cloud have a monocle?  Of course he can!  And so forth.  I didn’t even have a character to roll and I was already enjoying the carnage.

There were some confusing aspects, which were compounded by only two of us having the rulebooks from our box sets to go around.  There were some questions about whether we had healing surges or how that worked, and some digging around in the rules indicated that healing was stripped down even compared to 4e D&D (which was fine).  The skill bonuses were slightly confusing, with many wondering if they got BOTH skill bonuses from your origins or just one.  We worked that out fairly quickly, but the character sheet wasn’t extremely clear on some of those details.

Gameplay

Gameplay was very reminiscent of 4e D&D.  The provided adventure is a series of combat encounters (so far, we only made it through three combats) but the players made up several creative solutions.  No, they didn’t want to just open the locked tower doors… let’s have the android yeti ram their pickup truck into it while yelling furiously!  Naturally, that approach worked and they made quite an entrance into encounter number two.  The presence of largely improvised weaponry (outside of the Omega Tech) and random junk to use in their adventure lends a MacGuyver-esque quality to the game.  The players enjoyed finding random junk alongside their Omega Tech treasure, and made heavy use of their Alpha mutations to help them dispatch the angry band of mutant badger guards.

There has been some controversy around the trading card aspect of Gamma World.  I think they enhance the game, but are unnecessary to enjoy the game itself.  Matt, one of our players, generously donated each player (and myself) a Gamma World booster pack.  I matched this donation so each player could pull from their own Alpha mutation and Omega Tech deck, and I think they enjoyed having their own cards to use.  One player said “I’m attached to these mutations, so I sure hope you don’t want these cards back at the end!” so clearly there is some enjoyment to be had there.

First Impressions

In short, I am a Gamma World fan.  It breeds irreverent, fun, laugh-ridden game sessions with unique characters that change as much as the whims of our players.  It is fun to run, because of the creativity caused by random junk and the use of alpha mutations.  The rule system is lightweight and open to some interpretation which keeps the game light and enjoyable to everyone, there wasn’t a lot of digging around in the rulebook to figure out how things should behave (this was helped by the fact that most of our players were experienced in 4e).

I’ll be playing a LOT more Gamma World as the months tick by.  I hope that expansions for the game are plentiful, and it would be GREAT if we could buy the rulebook on its own for casual player characters to use during character creation.  I really want to play this game with Vanir, I can imagine that the fruits of his brain would lend themselves well to Gamma Terra.  In the meantime, you can check out the great Gamma World coverage over at Critical-Hits if you need more of a fix.

More soon!

This recent revival of the Gamma World game has been a very exciting happening here in Colorado, several of my cohorts ran out and bought the box set immediately but we haven’t had the collective time to actually sit down and play it.  I am a bit of a latecomer to the party, having only picked up the box set when it became apparent that the duties of actually running the game were going to fall to me.  I visited Black & Read (one of my friendly local gaming stores), grabbed the box, ripped into it and am excited that tomorrow is the big day to finally get to experience the joy, wonder, and hilarious mutations that makes Gamma World so unique.

First Impressions

The box itself is really great, with a comic styled nuclear waste motif.  The rulebook is very concise, interesting, and lighthearted bringing a lot of the irreverent  flavor of Gamma World through.  At first look, character generation appears to be a BLAST.  In fact, it is one of the things I am looking forward to most tomorrow.  The possibilities, coupled with the urging that all character generation take place by randomly rolling on a chart is a great mechanic to me.  It seems as if it will keep the players from the urge to min/max their characters, and seems to be a very creative process.

The game takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth where several realities have collapsed into one.  This causes terrible, interesting, or hilarious mutations to occur on a regular basis and has caused the rise of both high technology and strange creatures (human-sized insane rabbits, anyone?).  The provided Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards provide the mutagenic variety to the play experience, and have the possibility of expansion by purchasing booster packs with new mutations and tech (this seems to be completely unnecessary, but could be fun).  Basically, it seems like this game was borne directly from the brain of our good buddy Vanir.

Gameplay is based strongly on D&D 4e and presented in a format similar to the D&D Essentials line.  The stat blocks are simplified, the box comes with both maps and tokens to represent both players and bad guys, and the whole thing just looks like a lot of fun.

Tomorrow we are going to descend on our game shop, roll up some mutants, and have at the game.  Check back soon for further impressions and stories from the front!

What I Planned

The progenitor of DM Revolution, Justin (of Wombat Cast) encouraged us to be creative and go outside the box to try new concepts.  I decided that I wanted to try to run a roleplaying heavy set of sessions that included primarily Skill Challenges in lieu of combat.  I primarily used the notion of branching skill challenges to set up my plotline for these short sessions.  For tonight’s game, I had a three sets of branching skill challenges that would allow the players to pursue different avenues and two nested skill challenges.  (You can find excellent examples of how to structure branching skill challenges and nested skill challenges can be found at At-Will.)

I have never run a session with a goal of using all Skill Challenges, nor did I know if the group would be receptive to this type of game.

The Way It Went Down

The group followed only two of the “hooks” to these skill challenges directly, however they ended up at two others in a roundabout fashion.  Most of these Skill Challenges were designed to disseminate information, and one of our characters even came up with a creative “off-script” skill to use that resulted in success.  The group readily dove into roleplay, and much of the session was them interacting with both my planned NPC characters and some impromptu NPCs that they chose to interact with.

That was the best part of this experience… the players helped to write the story.  It happened that I used the revised Skill Challenge chart to allow the group to make their own encounters as they interacted with people of their choosing.  In fact, they even went into a few encounters expecting to have to fight based on the information they received during partial successes.  Thanks to not going in guns-blazing, they were able to roleplay their way to most of the rest of the available information.

The session ended up with an opportunity for a Skill Challenge that I suspected would turn to combat and it did (bandits running away from a smash/grab job are too tempting to chase).  Just as the game shop was closing, the group defeated most of the bandits (leaving one alive for questioning).  This led them to an unexpected ending for this session, but it sets up nicely for what I have planned next week.

In Conclusion

Skill Challenges are great for encouraging roleplay.  Using branching and nested skill challenges helps to outline a plot nicely, but still allows the players for enough deviation as not to feel extremely “on rails.”  I suspect some of the players tired a little of all the roleplaying, which is why I strongly recommend having some Skill Challenges that can devolve into combat if the group wants that.

I feel like we had a session that was wildly successful with mostly Skill Challenges.  The roleplaying was fun, people were laughing and creatively using their abilities and the players helped me to write the story.  A man can’t ask for much more than that!  I will be continuing down this avenue for next week’s session, but I plan to up the ante.

• Our characters began at level 11 with a small treasure parcel of gear.
• Each DM gets to run two weeks of encounters, each 1.5 hours in length.
• Creativity is encouraged in encounter design.
• It’s open to everyone, players can circulate in and out as their schedules permit.

The Campaign So Far

The campaign started out with an escape from a prison, which was later revealed to be a floating fortress guarded by a young dragon.  After exiting the compound, we traded with some roving merchants that had docked a floating boat near the edge of the cloud fortress but before we could negotiate safe passage we were attacked by young giantlike creatures.

The merchants escaped largely unscathed, but didn’t stop to take our group with them.  After wandering around the desolate floating fortresses region and nearly starving, we came across another docked floating airship inhabited by savage traders that attempted to poison and then kill us.

We got the upper hand, and succeeded in boarding and then crashing the airship into a barn outside of Waterdeep.  Last week’s encounter thwarted the owner of the barn, which was breeding demon horses for a reason not fully known. (I missed this session, so the details are unclear).

Now it’s my turn…

Starting next Wednesday, it’s my turn to pick up this strange storyline and put my own twist on it.  Our group tends to be fairly combat heavy and I have heard some complaints that there is not enough roleplaying, so I think that I want to do something more roleplay centered and skill challenge based.  The group is a very funny, raucous group of people and I feel like they’d react well to a chance to really be in character and not have to just kill things to pass the sessions.

So let’s collaborate together!  If you’ve got an interesting plot idea based on the synopsis above or some recommendations for creating short and satisfying roleplaying encounters for a group of around 6 players chime in!  I’d love to get some creative input or some advice.

I played “Shady” Doug Liveaux, a New Orleans huckster.  The huckster class is very interesting and still retained my favorite gameplay mechanic of the old Deadlands game: casting spells by drawing a poker hand and assessing the result.  I don’t know if they included these mechanics in the old system and we just didn’t know it, but as the game progressed we realized that you could counteract wounds with Vigor rolls.  This significantly reduced the high mortality rate that I experienced in previous incarnations of Deadlands, and you could always use Fate Chips to shake off wounds as well.  I was pleased that despite some difficult run-ins with manitou’s during spellcasting, “Shady” made it out of the night largely intact.

I enjoy the tactile experience of this game, being able to shuffle a deck of cards and play with poker chips really increased the immersion for me.  The one-sheet campaign that our DM ran us through was interesting and helped us learn the mechanics with just the right amount of storyline to follow.  Next week we’re going to generate our own characters that will carry on into an ongoing Deadlands campaign, where we will trade off the Marshalling (i.e. Dungeon Mastering) duties.

The Savage Worlds game mechanics take a bit of getting used to if you’re as used to D&D as I am, however I found it equally easy to get ramped up and learn the basics within one session as I could in D&D 4e.  I’m enjoying the change of pace, so expect to see the occasional Savage Worlds related post (perhaps some compare and contrast) as the weeks march by.

Luckily, there were a few great ones available in the first section of the Tomb of Horrors to try.  Despite my group’s penchant toward not getting started early, I found that the addition of the skill challenges really helped to make them feel accomplished.

My only complaint is one of my own creation… if I would have read up on the challenges ahead of time I would have been able to come up with some additional flavor text so it wasn’t so repetitious and didn’t devolve into blatent statements of success or failure.  Despite the repetition, I found them fun to run and the players found the challenges at the very least interesting.

Maybe a bit of additional preparation next time will make them even better!

The Solo Adventure and Character Creation

Stupid Ranger took them through the solo adventure, to help with character creation.  She reports that the character creation was very well done for beginners, but there were aspects of it that she was missing as a more advanced character.  I did notice that a few times that one of our new players (Paul) was asking a lot of questions about things that were physically next to each other on the character sheet and the solo adventure did a fair amount of “jumping around” that was somewhat confusing.

I liked that the solo adventure helped to set up the rest of the adventure, and the way it presented the decisions that controlled class and alignment were exciting for brand-new players.  Paul was already fairly “in-character” by the time the solo adventure was complete, embracing his elven rogue on a deeper level than I would have expected from more standard character generation.

The Adventure Begins

While Stupid Ranger was helping with character creation, I was busy reading the Dungeon Master’s Book in preparation for the adventure.  It was very easy to pick up, the layout of the book made a lot of sense.  In my best attempt to follow the rules, I started the group with the first encounter at the crossroads.  Combat mechanics were explained very clearly, and before the end of the first encounter Paul was already using “flanking” and “that combat thingie” (advantage) as part of his lexicon.  It was interesting to see positive reinforcement at work… the first time he got to roll extra Sneak Attack damage he was trying to invent ways to use it all the time.

Paul was quick to ask about whether or not he could use any of his skills to help out in the early part of the dungeon and aside from an active perception check and the discovery of a trap there really wasn’t much to use the skills on.  The group unfortunately traversed the dungeon in such a fashion to avoid the major skill challenge (the one thing I wanted them to do, rats!) but they had a lot of fun.  Since we only had one night, we stopped short of completing the entire adventure but it was enough to give the two new players a sense of what D&D is all about.

Running the game was very easy.  Some convenience things that I enjoyed: the Dungeon Master’s Book had nice full pages dedicated to each of the creatures in the adventure.  This made it very easy to show new players what a goblin or a drake looked like, by simply folding the page back and letting them see the artwork.  As previously predicted, the tokens were great in lieu of miniatures and I still hope they figure prominently in future D&D modules.

My criticisms: the adventure is combat heavy and a small group of three first level player characters got exhausted quickly.  The baddies do a considerable amount of damage for a group of that size and it was difficult progress.  The power cards, while attractive, are a little more flimsy than I expected them to be at first and I almost tore a few of them while punching them out.  Also, our new players wanted power cards for all of their skills, and certain class skills (like Sneak Attack) didn’t have an associated card.

As I mentioned before, running the game was pretty easy.  I was tripped up at one point by the Dire Rats, which had “Hit: 1d10 +5 damage, and the target is exposed to filth fever.”  Some quick looking around did not yield any information on what Filth Fever was or how to progress it, so I skipped it.  I accidentally found the information I needed later while leafing through the monsters section looking for a photo of another bad guy, separated 27 pages from where I needed it with no annotation to indicate that it was even there.  Frustrating.

Final Thoughts

The Red Box provides a solid starter set that is attainable to new players.  Character creation is straightforward, dare I say even interesting when presented via the Solo Adventure.  The DM’s Book does a decent job of presenting the tools that a new DM needs, providing a great primer on how to run a game.  The included adventure is easy to run for a veteran Dungeon Master and provides a significant challenge, even though more could have been done with skills.  A bit of additional roleplaying would’ve been nice as well, but that might have been more prevalent in the skill challenge that our group skipped.

Paul did a great job on his first adventure, playing a skillful and witty elven rogue.  His wife, Kara, wasn’t as “into” the D&D game and opted to bow out after a few encounters but it wasn’t from a lack of understanding how the game was played.  Stupid Ranger and I had a good time introducing the game to new players, and I had a good time finally exploring the contents of a D&D Box Set.