Industry! HUAH! *thump-thump* What is it Good For?

Skirting along the edges of the recent convesation about the state of the RPG industry is the obvious question: so what? What difference does it make, at the gaming table, where the rubber meets the road, whether or not there even is an industry?

Trust me, if it vanished tomorrow you'd miss it. Here's a list of five things the industry does for all of us:

Gives Us Some of Our Best Thinkers: The Jameses Raggi and Maliszewski are both member of the industry, professional writers with a number of books to their tally. I don't agree with everything the man says, but Ryan Dancey has had a profound impact on the hobby. And, of course, we had Gygax, Arneson, and Hargrave whose thoughts and theories still inspire our gaming. We all need to earn money to put food on the table and keep the lights on. The professionals have more time to spend thinking about games, playing with the bits and pieces, and really plumbing the depths of the hobby.

Spurs Innovation: Yeah, ok, so maybe that's not always a great thing, but the fans tend to be the conservatives in any group. They want what they love, and they rarely see a need to change things. Professionals need to always be expanding or shifting their audience, and so are always looking for new and neat ways to add to the experience. I'm not a huge fan of 4e, but their attempt to find a new way to think about things like hit points has intrigued me, and was part of the inspiration for how the Table of Death and Dismemberment works. The industry gave us Amber Diceless Roleplaying, the World of Darkness storyteller games, the genre fruitsalad that is Shadowrun, the cereberal plunge into the abyss that is Call of Cthulhu, and the claustraphobic madness of The Shab-al-Hiri Roach.

Draws the Attention of Outsiders: If it wasn't for the industry, nobody would have noticed when Gygax and Arneson had died. The fact that, for many people, roleplaying games are summed up by D&D speaks volumes for the industry's position as the face of the hobby. That face may be more mask than reality, but that doesn't change the fact.

Creates Fun Toys for Us to Play With: Most of us don't have the skills or time to make the bizarre dice, cool minis, bits of terrain, coffeetable books, posters, novels, and yes, computer games that we all enjoy as parts of or adjuncts to our hobby. We get art from the likes of Otis and Parkinson and Elmore and Reynolds and di Terlizzi and Widermann. They give us web pages and discussion forums like RPG.net. Most importantly for some, they give us things to argue about between gaming sessions.

Gives Us a Shared Common Experience and Vocabulary: Beyond hit points and armour class, we have universal mechanics, NPCs, skills-based vs. class based, stats vs. attributes vs. flags, adventure paths vs. sandboxes, The Tomb of Horrors, Car Wars, Gen Con, Men in Black, Knights of the Dinner Table, and Nodwick. The industry defines the baselines and borders we all use to communicate to one another, and the shorthand that is part of our community. They make it possible for us to speak about the sorts of games we prefer with strangers, and the shorthand of "I prefer the 2nd edition of that game" speaks volumes for us.

Photo credits: poolie, Pockafwye, and Benimoto.

Supply, Demand, and the Teetering RPG Industry

James Mishler has, in the past week, written three articles on the RPG market. The rebuttals have been many, and a few have been crass and brutal. Buried in the veritable avalanche of obscenities from the RPG Pundit (NSFW) is a kinda-sorta a valid point. The real issue is supply and demand, and when the demand falls low enough, the supply dries up because the price customers are willing to pay won't cover the costs of production. Or, in other words, it's too easy to make significantly more money working in academia or computer games, and too hard to earn a liveable wage with RPG books and PDFs, to make pen-and-paper RPGs a viable industry. I think Mr. Mishler was making the same point, just from a different angle.

(As an aside, the price you pay for a product is never, EVER based on the cost of production. Pricing is based solely on two factors: what the customers will pay and downward pressure from competition. Costs of production might limit how much of a product is on the market, or even drive a product out of the market entirely, but they are not factored. Of course, that's assuming the price is being set by people who are knowledgeable about business, and not in it mostly for the fun of the thing.)

I will take exception with Mr. Mishler's comments about the youth of today. I know a number of people in the teaching profession who do not wear body armour to school or live in fear of their students. The reason there are metal detectors in school has more to do with the parents of today than the students, who also insist their kids never get on a bike without donning more protective gear than we wore to play pick-up games of football when I was a kid. It's certainly not because shootings in school are a new thing. That canard about not being able to find their own country on a map is at least as old as I am. Even if everything he says is true, it doesn't matter. Why? Because there is a huge number of kids out there reading, writing, and yes, even roleplaying right now. A sizeable groundswell of interest in fantastical fiction and play that crosses gender lines has risen up in the Harry Potter generation, the likes of which have probably never been seen before.

But you'll notice I mention nothing about games. Regular readers know what I'm talking about: fanfic and free-form roleplay. It's easy to laugh and dismiss this sort of thing (just as RPGs were laughed at and dismissed in my youth, when they weren't being blamed for suicide and devil worship), but here are a bunch of kids so desperate for roleplay that they have built websites and software and communities to facilitate their play. They've done it all on their own.

Why on their own? Why didn't they take advantage of the 30+ years of RPGs that were available? Probably because they were never invited to. Since 2000, the "gateway" product has consisted of three 200+ page books costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 bucks. Even that might have been reasonable if the kids had been shown what benefits they would have received for their time and treasure. Was there even an attempt to overcome the fact that D&D was the game Dad played when he was in junior high? I never saw it. I never saw any outreach to these kids, any attempts to study their interests, or any attempts to adjust the game in ways that would appeal to them, as we've seen towards the MMOG audience which shares much less in common with the tabletop RPG crowd. We're constantly told that the biggest issues with making RP gaming happen are logistical. But these kids overcome those every day. They don't freeform by themselves, but use chatrooms and bulletin boards and other services to play with their friends. This is where Mr. Colville of SquareMans is behind the curve in attempting to predict the future of pen-and-paper RPGs. The future is now, and these kids have already, on their own, created the roleplaying experience he's talking about. While they don't yet incorporate things like augmented reality, they take full advantage of cellphone texting and similar technologies that are available today. That, ladies and gents, is all set to be the roleplaying of tomorrow, and it's got no interest in your rulebooks, dice, or character sheets, thank you very much.

So are things hopeless? Maybe not. Green Ronin has been leading the rearguard action, first with their attempt with Blue Rose (which was disastrously hamstrung when their distributor took the money and ran) and now with a boxed set for their Dragon Age RPG, which will likely be showing up in computer stores, literally targeting those computer gamers we've heard so much about. But I'm more intrigued by Witch Girl Adventures, which aspires to a demographic the industry should have been courting since the '70s. The game's probably a bit too heavy with game elements, since its target audience is almost certainly already involved in free-form play, but it's the most serious attempt that's come across my desk ever.

UPDATE: Go back to the RPG Pundit post, scroll past the argument-laced obscenities to the comments, and look for the pic of the cheerful, greyhaired guy. That's Ryan Dancy, and he's got two great comments worth reading. Like Noisms, he thinks I'm underestimating just how much disposable income kids have today, but he's got a lot more to say than just that. Here's a little something from the first that caught my eye:

RPG designers should not be paid by the word, obviously. They are not writing novels. The value in a game design is not volume, it is utility. The basic model used in the industry of hiring a freelance writer to create "x" volume of words for "y" price per word is of course absurd and has no relationship to the underlying value, which is one reason that it is a broken system and one reason that people in the industry sense that there is a fundamental "unfairness" about their compensation.

Photo credits: foundphotoslj, aka Kath, and Bombardier.

Where Did They Come From, and Who Do They Think They Are?

I was chatting with one of my players the other day when I pointed out to her that her character has the ear of the high priest of the largest temple in the biggest city where her adventures had taken place so far. Not only is he the most powerful clerical spell caster within hundreds of miles, but he's also the de facto temporal leader of the city. Their relationship had grown out of the events of the game and the choices the player had made. It wasn't a given thing; she'd nearly become his enemy by joining forces with a band of pirates intent on robbing the temple. Her first visit to the place was actually to get information about a treasure shipment the brigands hoped to intercept. Her decision to side with priests over pirates has affected everything that's come since in the campaign. Her relationship with this priest has made magic, knowledge, and even the current dungeon she's exploring available to her. The high priest isn't her BFF or anything, and doesn't give this stuff away for free, but just having some of it available puts her ahead of other treasure hunters in the area.

The thing that intrigues me, especially in light of recent posts about character creation and styles of play, is how this rather pivotal aspect of the PC's life doesn't even appear on her character sheet. There isn't even a spot for BFF, assuming she had one. Listings for family make the character sheets for variations on D&D like Oriental Adventures unusual. And yet, these sorts of resources can be vital to success. They can be sources of coin, political influence, ransom, information, henchmen and hirelings or esoteric skills that simply can't be found any other way.

I know I'm talking crazy-talk here. Most D&D adventurers "spring out of holes in the ground", full-fledged like Athena with their allotted compliment of equipment, spells, and skills. They have no family, nor any other real reference or ties to the world beyond the dungeon they're currently plundering or the adventure path their working through, and the home base where they resupply and heal up between forays into danger. If any family exists, there's an unwritten agreement shared by everyone at the table that such people exist primarily to supply adventure hooks and be used by the DM as a handle for tormenting and manipulating the PCs. If the player didn't do the standard thing and have his entire family killed off, the hope is that the DM will forget they exist. There's certainly no benefit to drawing any attention towards these hapless, useless NPCs.

Over the past few years, spurred on primarily by the female gamers I've been playing with, I've been exploring other ways these sorts of relationships can be used. And yes, they're great for getting the PCs to jump when they'd rather be slow, or to supply that vital bit of information they need to put the pieces together. Beyond that, however, they are great for building verisimilitude and creating an emotional connection between the player and their character and the world their character inhabits. Aunt May doesn't just serve as someone to be rescued by Spider Man. She grounds Peter Park in the greater New York area. Beyond that, she provides a certain emotional touchstone for Peter that most of us can identify with. She makes Peter more real for us, makes us care about him more, and in this way makes Spidey's adventures more exciting for us. We care, not just that he'll save the city or the day, but that he'll do so in time to make it back for Aunt May's birthday party. And when he does, that victory thrills us more than seeing Doc Oc hauled off to jail, or the Green Goblin bound up in web, his bombs rendered useless.

UPDATE: JB weighs in with how his group did write this stuff on their character sheets.

Elvis vs. Shub-Niggurath

Just listen to the lyrics. It's more blatant than that "Rainbow Connection" song from the Muppet Movie.

Central Texas Old School D&D Mixer on July 11

From Kutalik of Hill Cantons comes word of a social mixer this weekend for folks who enjoy ye olde versions of D&D at Scholz's Garten in Austin. I've got family coming into town either that day or the next, so I'm not sure if I'll be able to make it, but it sounds like a good time. Scholz and Dragon's Lair are a pair of Austin landmarks every geek in Central Texas should know, making them the perfect pair for the weekend.

UPDATE: Mr. Kutalik writes, "We do have an issue with the gaming space, Dragon's Lair, and our back-up space, Battleforge--namely that they are running tournaments at both stores at the times we were hoping to play. Trying to find another spot..." More news as it becomes available.

Photo by bespam.

Place Your Bets

So, if you can lay bets on someone's ancestry, I have to wonder -- what other kinds of things do people bet on in Pitsh? And where does most of that go on?

Well, there are the usual games of chance played with dice, cards, notched sticks, and shells. There are also variations on cock-fights. The most popular in Pitsh currently are games with scorpions, spiders, snakes, and lizards.

All of these games are fairly common in the taverns, inns, and brothels of Pitsh, but the best place to go for this sort is currently the temple of Tiamat just outside the city walls. That's also the best place to bet on gossip and scandal, such as someone's ancestry, or whether or not a certain lady's child will, in fact, resemble the father, when it's born.

Down on the docks and those places which serve sailors, there's a very complex system of betting around the arrival of ships and cargoes. This is actually part of a byzantine system of insurance and very localized futures trading. Widow Kat of the Oarsman's rest is involved in this.

On the southern end of town, there's a far more informal system based on the treasure hunters who head out into the jungle. The sums tend to be pretty small, and it's primarily about bragging rights. The adventurers also frequently engage in impromptu competitions to show of their skills. These contests always spur a flurry of betting.

Clerics of Hasrit can really swing the odds wildly, since most assume they have some inside information when it comes to matters of chance and fate. Some bookies refuse to take their bets, and there are very stringent rules on how they can get involved in the shipping bets. Hierodules and witches are watched with the same attitude when they bet on social matters and gossip, since they seem to know everybody and everybody's secrets.

Any bet witnessed by two others is considered legally binding. Failure to pay up can get the clerics of Aratshi coming down on you. Those who are unable to pay are handled like any other debtor: handed over to the clerics of Shkeen to be sold into slavery.

Photo credits: pepperfoster and pedrosimoes7.

Tackling the Big Questions

Yesterday, Mr. Raggi posted an interesting rant against the use of supernatural forces, especially those of ultimate Good and Evil, in roleplaying games. He's since then gathered his thoughts into a more coherent, abbreviated form. I can see where he's coming from, and while I was considering a rebuttal, my own thoughts are casting out a broader net. So this is less an argument against what James has written, and more thoughts inspired by his recent exploration of good and evil and their place in play.

Unless the players are, in fact, playing rat-bastards, James is right that offering the players a choice between joining the side of Good or Evil isn't really much of a choice. It works in Tolkien because, in the novels, there is no Good side. Sauroman, who's supposed to be leading the good side, has decided that Good can't succeed without adopting the methods and tools of Evil. He builds an army of even-better-than-Sauron's orcs and then sets about to conquer his neighbors like he's playing some sort of RTS. The elves are too busy running like rabbits (in the books, they don't show up at Helm's Deep) to put up anything like a fight. The dwarves are fighting to keep orcs out of their caves, and the leaders of the free Men are either thralls of wicked agents or too fallen into despair to organize anything like a true resistance.

The choice for Gandalf, Aragorn, and the rest isn't “join Good or Evil”, but rather, “Evil's all geared up to conquer the world, and there is no Good side. What do you do?”

“What do you do?” is the question of the sandbox. Can you tackle the big questions in a sandbox? Absolutely, though they do define a lot of the possibilities and the terrain if you bring them into the game. Granted, that's nothing new in sandbox campaigns. Sandboxing is like jazz; your players need something to riff from. The hardest part of running a sandbox is the beginning, when the players know nothing, but are supposed to make decisions about what their characters are going to do. After they've explored for a bit, they'll discover what the limits of the terrain are: these mountains can only be crossed with great effort while facing great danger, this ocean requires a ship to cross, this desert can be traversed only with excessive logistical preparation.

In the same fashion, as the players make friends and enemies, they find other doors opening and closing. They are free to visit the Duchess whenever they wish, ever since they exposed the plot to replace her son with a doppleganger. They avoid Kharé since the Master of the Thieves' Guild still wants to cut out their tongues and nail them to the guildhall doors. Or maybe they're afraid of running, and it's finally time to take down the Thief Master? Exploring those sorts of possibilities is what sandbox campaigns are all about.

The Big Questions are just more grist for that mill. Good vs. Evil isn't my personal favorite, but it works. Ms. Palette's Light vs. Dark is a fun twist on that old chestnut. So is Michael Moorcock's Order vs. Chaos, which has becoming something of a hoary chestnut itself. Just about any dichotomy will do: old vs. young, male vs. female, free vs. secure, heck, even dichotomy vs. universality, if you want.

And since this is a sandbox, there's really no reason for you to choose. Toss in a few threads and see what your players decide to nibble at. They will nibble, eventually, because these are the questions that interest all of us, the things we go to see in movies or read in books that give the cool special effects and amazing settings depth and meaning. These are the questions we enjoy poking at late at night with good friends, or that shape our creative endeavors, like, you know, making characters and playing RPGs.

Not only can you let the players choose their poison, but you can let them decide how they drink it, too. As a GM, your job isn't to provide answers, but to pose interesting questions. Yes, being too coy can lead to frustration, but nobody really expects a pat, easy answer when it comes to things like Order vs. Chaos. Evil may have been defeated in Middle Earth with the destruction of the ring, but as the hobbits learned when they returned to the Shire, it certainly wasn't banished. Elric never really resolved anything, and in the end was devoured by the apocalypse he'd set in motion. The players have to find their own way through these questions, and decide what answers are right for their characters. Maybe it's to die for a cause, or to fight on even knowing absolute victory is impossible. Maybe it's to surrender to uncertainty and become jaded. Maybe the answer is found in true love or just-good-enough love. You keep throwing interesting questions at them, and over time the players will find their own answers that fit their characters.

This is what we call character development in the sandbox. The character finds its place within the ever-shifting physical, social, and metaphysical geographies of the game. It'll take some time, but some of the characters in your campaign will stake out territory as their own. This isn't the end of the game, but the beginning of the end game, where they develop their position and you marshal threats to it. Whether we're talking armies of gnolls with siege engines or a green knight who calls into question a hero's courage and devotion to duty by instigating a game of beheadings depends on the sorts of choices your players make and how you all define a fun night of gaming.

Photo credits: Jorge-11, mikebaird, catsprks, and Oddsock.

Supernatural Evil

On Monday, James Edward Raggi IV (who still has the coolest name to say in gamerdom) tackled the question of supernatural evil. Faced with the broad panoply of evil perpetrated by humanity, he asked how anyone could really get their mind around an evil worthy of demons, fey, or other supernatural wickedness?

There have been some particularly creative and horrible ways people have devised to inflict pain on each other. These, however, have always been limited by the laws of physics and our own poor understanding of them. Is it more evil, for instance, to kill a person or, as Circe did, to transform them into a pig? Is it more evil to shoot a man's children in front of him, or to inflict him with lycanthropy so that he tears them to pieces himself? Once you introduce magic, the possibilities for evil expand to include what was once only imaginable.

I mentioned before the deal with the devil, where evil is embraced in order to achieve good (something which I think has some bearing on Mr. Raggi's example of the Normandy landings in his discussion of good today). There's also the evil that comes from granting a wish. The appearance of doing a good thing that is, in fact, evil (and possibly in order to promote a good outcome, just to add another twist to the braid) is something that fits my concept of the fey very well. Things like Stephen King's Thinner or the Midas touch, where a wish is granted, but in such a way that it becomes a curse.

There are deeper evils, I think, that go beyond the evils of the flesh and afflict the spirit. And this is where we get to the realm of demons and devils. Inflicting horrendous pain is certainly evil, but getting other people to simply not care that it's happening, or, even worse, to actively take part, seems even worse to me. The viral power of evil to spread itself to others, to expand simply by creating fear, apathy, or even more willing accomplices seems its most horrific aspect. This is why the succubus remains my favorite demon. Yeah, kinky sex is fun, but more than that, the ability of the succubus to appear to be anyone makes her the best tool to create a situation where the forces of good embrace the “necessity” of evil or despair, either through deceptive information or extreme emotions.

The triumph of evil in “Revenge of the Sith” wasn't the slaughter of the Jedi children, but that a champion of good was corrupted to the point where he would do such a thing without question. (I don't buy the journey that Anakin took to get there, but that's beside the point.) Granted, we see that in the real world, where mothers actively participate in the torture and murder of daughters who dare to date the wrong sort of boy. But if you want to get at the essence of supernatural evil, I think this is the heart of it. Pain and physical torment are only means to an end, and that end is the despair and hate necessary to corrupt a soul into embracing evil.

Photo Credit: Frau Bucher, and CobraVerde.

More D&D Advice from PvP

Say "yes" and then...

ApolloCon 2009

Lots of neat stuff to riff on in the gaming blogosphere lately. An embarrassment of riches I'm going to have to make the time to dive into soon.

I'm a bit behind on my blog reading because I spent the weekend in Houston, attending ApolloCon. It's a fun convention, with the usual convention goodies like a screening room showing geek favorites. This year, I think almost all of them were amateur offerings like “The Hunt for Gollum” and “Troops”, the Star Wars spoof of “Cops”. The tools available to amateur filmmakers is just amazing these days. I'm tempted every time I look at things like these, and remember the old Blake's 7 or Dr. Who from the '70s and '80s to grab a group of friends and try to make something of my own along similar lines.

While I did make a few panels, I spent most of my time chatting with fellow fans and writers about all those things we talk about when we find like-minded, thoughtful, intelligent folks who share our passions. Really, that's the great thing about cons.

There were some fun costumes at this one, my favorite being the Dalek Queen at the Wholigans party. There was also a Firefly LARP with some neat costumes as well, and a group selling some awesome gothy hats in the dealers room.

The gaming room always had at least two large groups going with fun stuff whenever I poked my head in, including a “table-top LEGO first-person shooter”, lots of Munchkin, and other fun stuff. I even saw one group of folks playing Torg in the hotel lobby.

The folks who have taken on the challenge of organizing AggieCon this year seem to be doing a decent job of shouldering the challenge. I'll be watching to see how things shake out over the coming months.

In the dealer's room I picked up a copy of some of the Flinx stories I've missed, plus a copy of Joan Vinge's The Snow Queen. Yeah, some of you who know my tastes are going to be shocked, but no, I haven't read it yet. It's an intriguing read so far, and I'm going to look forward to meeting her at ArmadilloCon in August.

Yep, that's a blatant plug, and having had the chance to chat with the folks putting together ArmadilloCon's Writers' Workshop this year, I'm seriously considering submitting some writing. The deadline, however, is July 1st, so if that's something you're interested in, you'll need to move fast.

Announcing Weird Enclaves and Black Pits

Announcing Weird Enclaves and Black Pits

A Swords and Sorcery Anthology produced by the staff of Fight On!

Fight On! (www.fightonmagazine.com) seeks tales of adventure for their first foray into fantasy fiction! Heroic fantasy, S&S, dark fantasy, historical fantasy, sword & sandal, sword & planet, post-apoc and old-school weird are all welcome, as are innovative variations on same. Max. length 10,000 words; all queries and subs in word, pdf, or rtf to iggyumlaut@gmail.com. Work that has already been published elsewhere is welcome if you own the rights to it, as are first-time submissions. All stories due for review by the staff of Fight On! by Halloween 2009; multiple subs welcome.

First prize is $100; second prize is $60; third prize is $30; all prizewinners plus all honorable mentions will receive publication in and a free copy of the anthology. All authors whose submissions are selected retain ownership and all publishing rights to their own submissions, except the right for their story to be published in Weird Enclaves and Black Pits in perpetuity. All selected authors will also receive a complimentary print copy of the anthology. Fight on!

"There's no sex in D&D!"

The title is a link. :p

Here it is again, just in case.

Catching Up to the 21st Century

Yes, I finally upgraded this blog to the latest version of Blogger. This means you can link to individual posts just by clicking on their titles, and it should be easier to search through the history to find old stories. I'll be going back and adding labels to my posts as well.

I really need to name by LL campaign, so it has an easily searchable title, too. Probably name it after one of the Eldest, unless someone has a better idea.

It went fairly smoothly. I didn't lose my links, but I did lose my StatCounter code, and Blogger thought I was running a spam blog for a while. Thankfully, I was able to get the code back in, and my status as a truly useful and worthwhile waste of your time established quickly and easily. ;)

Neo-classical Tactics: Alpha Strike

There have been some very cool posts lately about using extremely dangerous and overpowered monsters in neo-classical and modern gaming lately. I'd like to sound a cautionary note. First, understand that I agree with just about everything I've read about these sorts of encounters and how cool they can be. However, before you include them in your game, you have to keep in mind just how dangerous, and anti-climactic, they can be.

The alpha strike is a tried-and-true tactic from the earliest days of D&D. The name is stolen from Star Trek wargaming. In the game Starfleet Battles, a player launches an alpha strike by maneuvering into the optimal range (usually point-blank) and then cutting loose with every weapon on the ship. It perfectly recreates those moments in TV and movies where the ships crawl towards each other, and one is blasting, blasting, blasting while the camera shakes with every hit and someone is calling out in tones of escalating concern the worsening condition of the shields, the soundtrack rises to a tense pitch, and the captain yells, “FIRE!”

In D&D and similar games, the alpha strike usually doesn't involve that slow buildup. The PCs immediately unleash their most devastating attacks upon a single target. This makes sense, if you think about it, because a critter with only 1 hit point left is almost always as dangerous on it's turn to attack as a critter that still has all of its hit points. Focusing on one target at a time is usually the most efficient way to remove the monsters' offensive power.

Even in cases where the monsters do get weaker, players are encouraged to launch an alpha strike. The damage from most breath weapons in early versions of D&D is usually equal to that monster's current hit points. The quicker you whittle those away, the more likely you are to survive the blast. This is why, when you put together an encounter of a bunch of goblins and a hellhound, the players will likely ignore the goblins as much as possible until the hellhound is dead.

This can be annoying for the DM, because it's the reverse of a good cinematic fight. Instead of the danger ramping up as the players wade through the minions, you get a brief moment of tension, followed by a drawn-out mopping up phase. (You might be tempted to save your villain by declaring that he survives or even shrugs off this attack. But now the players are looking at a foe who hasn't been noticeably weakened and they've likely burned resources in their alpha strike that they can't get back without resting up. The players will probably retreat in this case, in order to come up with a better, more certain one-shot kill.)

Here's something else to keep in mind about alpha strikes: magic-users use 4-sided dice to roll their hit points, and usually 6-sided dice to roll damage. Your typical 6th level magic user has 15 hit points and her average fireball or lightning bolt will do 21 points of damage (10 if you roll your save). Magic-users are both scary and fragile. They usually end up on the receiving end of an alpha strike, because if you don't do unto them first, they will almost certainly do unto you.

(This also means that wizard duels in D&D-land are not drawn out battles of wits, or back-and-forth exchanges of spells. They look more like the gunslinger showdowns of the Wild West, where the fastest draw, er, I mean, incantation, usually wins.)

Keep this in mind when using magic-users in your adventures. The first time the players see how effective sleep is as a spell, it's going to make an impression on them. They absolutely do not want to go out to a coup de grace like those goblins in their first adventure. If they see a spell-slinger, they are going to pile on the hurt. This is why the guy in the pointy hat dies first, and usually with extreme prejudice.

Often, the best way to protect your magic-users, either as a player or a DM, is to make sure they don't look like magic-users. Obviously, once they start slinging spells, the jig is up, but by making the magic-users look innocuous, they might actually survive long enough to get off that first spell. Generally, the first and best magical protection that isn't armour goes the magic-users as well. They also usually carry at least one healing potion, since any hit they take is likely to be catastrophic. It's also common to give the magic-user a bodyguard of some sort, just in case somebody rushes in and tries to stick something sharp and pointy into his or her face.

Photo credits: Focal Intent, Benimoto, and seanmcgrath.

More Fun With Un-Level-Appropriate Encounters

It sounds like Oddysey and her crew had a fun time with an overpowered foe that was far beyond the the usual limits of level-appropriate encounters. I'm no fan of level-appropriate foes. Enemies you can expect to defeat don't inspire good gaming. They just encourage bare-bones grinding combat.

Pulling off a successful above-level-appropriate encounter requires you to be flexible and to give the players a chance to understand just how deep in over their heads they are before the hammer falls. Those are what separate a good DM from a killer DM in old school and neo-classical gaming. The PCs should have multiple avenues of survival, if not actual victory.

Once you've got that down, however, there's all sorts of variations on the theme of the portal guardian Odyssey used. Here are two of my favorites:

Things in the Walls
The PCs know there's something nasty stalking them. They know they can't take it (them?) in a fair fight. And they can't see it.

That last is key. You're playing on popular horror movie tropes here. The thing is nearby, but you can't see it. You can sense it, though. You can feel the chill in the air that happens whenever they are close, or the distinctive smell, or you can hear them scratch-scratch-scratching in the walls.

This works best in a complex terrain that allows lots of movement, chasing, doubling back, and maneuver. Places like haunted houses, warehouses, mazes, and catacombs. I prefer to use just one big monster for this sort of thing, as using lots of little guys can devolve into a drawn-out cat-and-mouse thing where the PCs work to isolate them in small enough groups to defeat. That looks cool on paper, but can easily eat up an entire evening's worth of gaming. Having just one or two big nasties is much more manageable.

Deal with the Devil
The players know the guardian is nasty. So nasty that even using their best tricks, the odds say at least one hero will die to defeat it. The guardian must be defeated or the quest is lost. However, there is a way to neutralize the guardian that doesn't require anyone dying. And it'll only cost you...

This one's great for the roleplaying value, but can be difficult to pull off. The players will look, and look hard, for another way around, and if you're too blatant about shutting down their attempts, they'll get justifiably annoyed at your railroading. The way I usually set this up is to make the offer non-event specific. That is, I have a powerful but scary NPC tell one or more of the PCs, “Hey, if you ever run into something you can't defeat, or a problem you can't crack, you can buy this get-out-of-jail-free card. And it'll only cost you...”

And I leave it there on the table, tempting them. Eventually, they'll face a problem that their collective ingenuity isn't overcoming. And there the offer will be, tempting them.

Photo credits: vintagedept, geishaboy500.

The Tomb of Song

"Tomb of Song," my entry into the One Page Dungeon Contest, is available for download as a pdf.

There's a whole mess of One Page Dungeon entries there as well.

Trollsmyth vs. the Volcano

Player: Are you planning on doing anything with the Volcanoe in the game?

Trollsmyth: Dude, you know the rule about showing a gun in act 1, right?

If, at some point in the game, somebody doesn't end up in a climactic duel with their arch-nemesis on the edge of the volcano as it bubbles and boils and threatens to erupt, with the fate of the world and their one true love in the balance, while dragons and ki-rin engage in dizzying aerial combat in the skies above and an army of mutant, four-armed white apes surrounds a regiment of holy warrior nuns engaged in a last-ditch and desperate defensive action on the slopes below, Jeff Rients, James Raggi, and the freakin' ghosts of Gygax and Arneson will all personally show up at my home and kick my ass.

There's No Wrong Answer

And no right one, either.

This great post over at Standard Hirelings about improv and good DMing, as well as recent events in my Labyrinth Lord game, inspired this post. Yeah, I know what it's like on the picture-side of the DM's screen. Every choice is fraught with peril and possibility. Even the most innocuous options seem pregnant with possibilities. And to make things worse, sometimes the things you assume are harmless are not. Every door is a potential deathtrap, and every NPC is a potential polymorphed villain.

So yeah, I can understand the hesitation, the deep thought, and I'll never speak against caution. On the other hand, I cannot be emphatic enough when I say there is no right answer. The game isn't a test (unless some NPC has set something like that up, and even then...). There's never one right answer I'm looking for. Some locks only have one key, yes, but there's almost always some other way to get past the door if you look hard and long enough.

I had a friend who went on to study physics in college. He loved puzzle-dungeons that reminded me very much of the old Infocom, text-based “adventure” games, like Zork. Every one of his puzzles had a right answer. We kinda enjoyed playing with each other and kinda didn't. Beyond the way the game would grind to a halt when we were stopped by another of his puzzles, I found his insistence on there being a right answer annoying. I was always looking for ways to slice through his Gordian knots and flood out his Augean stables.

So if I'm GMing a roleplaying game and you want to slay the dragon and rescue the princess, great. If you want to cut a deal with the dragon where you split the reward for rescuing the princess, that's cool too. And if you want to steal the princess, convince the dragon it was the king's men who were the thieves so the dragon burns down half the kingdom and keeps everyone too busy to stop you from sacrificing the princess in order to summon and command Nyarlathotep, well, ok, that's a bit extreme, but sure, why the heck not?

Photo credits: Big C Harvey, clairit.

Neoclassical RPGs

From Twitter:

@RobertsonGames: Since 1e #dnd is often called "Classic" D&D, does that make Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord "Neoclassical" RPGs? :)

Yes! That is perfect, since most of us aren't exactly playing these games the same way they were back when. It's a reinvention, a new style, based on studying those games, tweaking them, exploring what those structures and styles mean.

We can't go back to the '70s, even if we wanted to. But we can take what was best in the classical roleplaying games and imagine the heck out of 'em.

UPDATE: more here.

Wandering Monster Wrangling

I mentioned last time how so many things in the older versions of D&D just aren't explained. One of these that sometimes causes people angst and frustration is wandering monsters. First off, at their most basic level, wandering monsters are a strategic spoiler. They prevent the PCs from just holing up in the dungeon or the wilderness for as long as they need to heal up, rememorize spells, or whatever. They're a spur to prevent too much caution, since the longer you spend in the dungeon or the wilderness, the more wandering monsters you're likely to find. In the older versions of the game where you get most of your experience points from treasure, and wandering monsters rarely have any, wandering monsters are an annoyance rather than a prize.

That's only half the story. For the DM, wandering monsters are like the props they hand out at improv. As Chgowiz shows, they are spurs for your imagination, the seeds of new angles on the plot and fresh adventures. Most importantly, when the players zig when you expected them to zag, wandering monsters give you something to fill in the blanks. What's in that unmapped hex? The dice say: bandits. Are they a wandering band that infiltrates pilgrim caravans like the Thuggee Cult of India? Or are they unemployed mercenaries who have turned brigand? Maybe they're a military force from a neighboring kingdom come to infiltrate in preparation for... what? Invasion? Assassination? Cattle raiding? Or are they terrorizing simple peasant farmers like in “The Seven Samurai”?

The lists in the rulebooks are fine starting points, but you're probably going to want to make your own. If you do, don't feel constrained by the formats you've seen, especially if the whole improv idea leaves you cold. There's no reason you can't put more detail in your wandering monster charts. A group of six orcs might be the hapless minions of the evil sorcerer, busy screwing up yet another simple task given to them, or they might be a hunting party returning with fresh game for the stewpot, or gamblers looking for a quiet place to roll the bones and win or lose a few coin. In the wandering monster tables from D3: Vault of the Drow, Gygax tells us:

• the bugbears are “going about the businesses of one of the merchant clans, and they will bear a distinctive broach”


• pack lizards are docile grazers of edible fungus, if left alone


• trolls are “employed by the Drow to maintain discipline amongst their other servants”


• the edible fungus “ripens rapidly, and crews of workers must harvest the stuff for food (the tough outer skin being used for many other purposes)”.

If you need to define just why those orcs are wandering through when they bump into the PCs, go ahead. If you're fine with just jotting down “some sorta monster with 3 HD that flies”, that's cool too. These are your charts for you to use when you're playing, so do whatever's most helpful for you.

It's probably a good idea to weight your tables towards certain encounters. You can do this either by spreading single sort of encounter across multiple numbers (the orc hunters are encountered on a roll of 2,3, or 4 on a d8) or by using probability curves (the orc hunters are encountered on a roll of 10 or 11 on 3d6). That way your wandering monsters are more likely to express the makeup of your dungeon, and your players can use that information to guess something about the sorts of creatures they're likely to encounter.

Photo credit: bobster855.