Gentle Rumblings

The month is slipping away and the holidays fading into memory. With that the pressure is mounting to get back on track with playing.

That urge has got me looking at our online game. I needed to look into it and remind myself of where we were and what was going on. It's amazing to look back on something you haven't dealt with in two months and see how much you remember. It's also a little daunting when you realize you have no clue what the party can handle anymore, either.

It has been helpful to have a game that has continued through the season, and I think even now the process of restarting our online game is less stressful and daunting as a result. We still have to set a start date to begin playing again. I'd like to get a little more done before playing, just so I have a better feel for where to go with the game.

I've learned a couple of important points from running games online. First, over preparation can actually work against you. It can be easy sometimes to get caught up in creating scenarios, building all the variables, and so on, but often you'll get to use a third of it if you're lucky. A better way to prep seems to be to plot out two or three points, with a detail or two. Start things out, and let the course of the session, and in particular the players' actions, dictate how you develop things.

Secondly, while overdeveloping a session can be detrimental, it is essential to have some preparation done. Ironically, the better an online session works without a lot of encounter level prep, the worse the overall campaign seems to run on similar terms. It pays to be thinking two or three encounters out from where you are. I was watching a video recently discussing the difference between story and plot, and (presuming I remember the analysis correctly) that is the core of what I mean here.

Running online requires a good sense of plot. This is the goal, these are the bullet point locations of interest, whether for an encounter or some other kind of event. These need to be thought about and structured to some degree. They build a progression for the story to evolve through. The individual sessions become about the story being developed to fit the plot.

This may finally help me get a handle on the irritation that arises in me when people start talking about "railroading" and "sandboxing." I feel like there is value in plotting out an adventure path, knowing who the villains are, and where, knowing how they should be approached, and what order they should be dealt with. But there is equal value in letting the play of the game hold a stronger influence on the actual story that you are building.

The more memorable sessions we've had are ones where I said to myself "these are the pieces I want to use," and mostly reacted to the players' decisions within that arena. There are unique difficulties in playing online that make it difficult for too many things to happen or be said at one time. It is too difficult to hear and be heard unless everyone is willing to listen, and allowed equal opportunity to respond with their own thoughts. It is a good way to develop conversational skills like respect and attentiveness. The added benefit as a game master is to give you time to think on your feet and adapt the plot points of your adventure into the storyline developing as you play. It is a healthy trade-off.

Getting Started

It's been a slow start to the new year, mostly organizing and thinking. I bought a large toolbox, which works nicely as a case to carry miniatures. I've taken several of the smaller craft/tackle boxes I had and used them to separate and organize my minis. I've been able to fit all my minis (at least the small and medium sized ones) and dice inside the toolbox.

I took them all out and separated them first by monsters and characters. These I split up by race - elves, human, halflings, dwarves, etc. The monsters I separated by type along the same lines. Some of these were obvious, like lycanthropes and demons, but others are more general, like aberrations. Most of these are shapeless blobs that I've yet to use in combat ever, so they all feel like the same thing anyway. I did make an effort to keep all of the pieces I use regularly as PCs in the same box, so in a pinch I can just grab that one box and have what I need to play.

On the thinking side… it seems all of us have been considering the mystery angle with D&D. This is something I've been mulling over for years, and have tried to work out on several different occasions. I even tried making it the focus of a NaNoWriMo effort a few years ago, the idea of combining my love of D&D with mystery - Columbo or Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy setting. Oddly, it is a surprisingly difficult thing to manage.

"The jeweled necklace has been stolen, what do we do?" the victim asks. "Get a spell caster and cast locate object." Oh, ok… "Someone's killed Nigel! We need to find the killer." "I'll cast speak with dead and ask him."

Obviously, even in these examples, there are limitations on the spells and so on, but it does demonstrate how easily a lot of modern detecting can be negated with the use of spells. What we're working on now is a little different. With the focus on urban adventures surrounding the fall release of books set in Waterdeep, the interest has shifted to more of a heist adventure, something like Ocean's Eleven. It has the advantage of being a scenario that can work in D&D, and the disadvantage of being complicated enough to require some careful thought.

I think we have a consensus about wanting to play a higher level heist. My example is a formal reception/dinner party with a regional ambassador in town to display a treasured item or donate it to the town. There are invited guests, security, extra help, etc., as well as multiple interests looking to acquire the object. This offers multiple ways of infiltrating the setting, multiple allies and adversaries, but more than anything makes for a complicated environment to manage and resolve as DM.

We recognize the complications, and have turned to simpler versions in order to test some of the possibilities. Even these are proving to be complicated. I've been working on a bandit outpost with a rescue mission. I see three elements - observation, infiltration, and escape. The players need to study their adversary, get inside, and get away with the object of the rescue. What makes it difficult is that you find yourself playing all the roles, bouncing between them at every turn.

What are the players looking for? What can they learn? Now, you're plotting all the movements of the bandits. What are they aware of? What will they notice or ignore? Now you're back thinking about player movement. What if they fail, how will that change things? Back and forth, getting more involved and complicated as you go.

My son has been thinking about locked room scenarios. All the suspects in one place, how does the crime take place? What things can complicate the mystery? Silence, darkness, and other spells - how can they affect the story? Another problem here is motivation. Part of the reason these work well in fiction is that everyone has a secondary motive that they want to keep to themselves. That gives them a reason to lie. They suspect someone else and wish to protect them, they have a guilty secret they want to keep, they have an old grudge against someone and want to frame them, and so on.

This can be harder to get in game terms. I think it is part of the effort made in the 5th edition adventures to create factions and encourage players to align with them. It is related to backstory, but has a communal element that can be manipulated for reasons external to the individual. Still, these only work if the players buy into them and use them. Otherwise, the plot deflates and the adventure goes too flat to work.

To make the plot work, you need to plant ideas in the players' minds. That makes it feel like you're designing a new game more than a new adventure. It feels like it would be easier and work better as a one-off with pre-gen characters. That might not be a bad idea, and might be useful to refine the mechanics, but I think in the end it should be possible to create an adventure that could work without pre-gens.

2018 in Review

So, for the Daily Dungeoneer, I see there are five posts, with a long break between the end of February and the end of December. Now that makes for a long day...

For this post I reread the entries from the year, and was mildly shocked. This year has been extremely busy since the end of February, even though many of the sentiments I expressed at the beginning of January echo the way I feel now.

Basically, at this time a year ago, our Storm King's Thunder campaign had stalled since the beginning of December, and we had nothing on the table for regular gaming. We decided to stop where we were and begin a new game on Roll20 with Tomb of Annihilation. As of the last post, we still hadn't even begun that adventure!

As of the end of this year, we have advanced that game to 5th level, and are on the verge of moving into the meat of the adventure to explore the temples and attempt to destroy the Soulmonger. It's true that we haven't played since the beginning of November, but we've recognized that the busy retail holiday season has interrupted our schedule and have not tried to fret over it.

We have a home game going that is set in the desert and has reached 4th level. We have two Waterdeep games started that are right around 3rd level. We have another mid-level game going in Chult, with 2 or 3 others begun that we still hope to continue at some point. 

Most importantly, we've joined a group at a gaming store, and since June have been running through Princes of the Apocalypse. Initially meant to be an adventurer's league game, it has become a regular gaming group. With eight players, it is a huge party and has been challenged because of the size to keep focused, but it seems to be finding a true rhythm of late, and probably is still AL legal. That is good.

The last two months have slowed as the holidays approached, and everyone's time has been stolen by other interests. Unlike previous years, I've accepted that this is only a natural lull in an annual cycle rather than a waning interest in gaming as a whole. At this point, there seems to be a last opportunity to reflect on all of this and more before devoting attention to getting all these games and more back up to speed.

It's been helpful to have the regularity of the game at the game store (basically every two weeks) to keep gaming fresh in mind, and maintain an ongoing sense of continuity. There have been lulls, as in any other year, but within a week or two, there has been a game somewhere - game store, online, at home - to allay wild-running fears, and allow us to get to the next game session without outright panic.

It's been a more wonderful year than I could have imagined, and we are in a great place to make 2019 even more amazing. I hope you all find the same possibility going forward.

Starting Anew

We've reached a stopping point in our current campaign, and are setting it aside to start a new adventure! The allure of Chult has gotten in our blood, and we're finally acting on it.

For a different experience, we decided to run a "session zero" to build and introduce characters. In the past, we've all made characters on our own and brought them to the game. At most, we've talked beforehand to say "I'm playing a wizard... you should play a rogue... is anyone playing a cleric?" That has worked well for any of the games we've run before, and isn't necessarily a broken system, but one of the parts of fifth edition that we all were struck with immediately when it came out was the background feature of character creation.

Choosing the different traits, ideals, bonds, and flaws was enormous fun, and showed so many promising avenues of play to develop in our campaigns... but that never seemed to pan out. Occasionally someone remembers some element ("wait, I'm a former member of the city watch"), or dismisses their silence at the table as roleplaying ("my character is antisocial"). This falls short of the envisioned potential. We thought it might help to develop those elements together, so that we could share that excitement with the entire party, and to allow better cross-development among the characters, and within the adventure.

In order to speed up the number generation, we opted to use arrays to fill in our character stats. That way they would all be roughly equivalent in ability, easy to adapt quickly at the table to fit the desired class or party need, and far less time consuming to do as a group. We know from experience that in the time one person might take to roll up a character, another person might roll up 5. And, for it to work well to have four people making up characters simultaneously, the process needed to be streamlined. The hope was also that by taking the ability scores out of the process as much as possible, we could put more effort into developing the other aspects of the character, from skills and equipment to backgrounds and motivations. Ideally creating more fully formed and well-rounded characters.

To compensate for the homogeneity of the ability scores, we opted to use a variant character creation to start with feats. That would allow some individualization and give more interesting play options from first level. Treating the feat selection in the same way it is at fourth level, players have the option of taking a feat, or adding two points to their ability scores. That smoothed a feather or two balking at not being able to roll 4d6 to fill out their scores (and re-roll ones... and probably twos... and, oh, hell, just starting them all at 15... or something similar).

I'm sure we'll still end up with an anti-social outlander just coming out of their cave to join a party in this exotic, jungle city, but that's ok, we'll all know why they're grunting instead of contributing once gaming gets underway...

The Long Beginning

It has been too long since we last played. There have been skirmishes over the last couple of months, but nothing close to a game, let alone a campaign.

Now, the anxiety is creeping in on all of us. We want to play! We need to play! When are we going to play? Who's going to run... what characters are we going to use... are we continuing where we left off, or starting something new...

And sitting down to answer those questions, my mind goes blank. We spent all last summer thinking of new angles, new characters, only to sit here today with no idea how to begin? It doesn't seem right.

The trouble seems to be that we want everything at once. The further removed we get from regular play, the more we panic that it will never return. The response is to expect everything in one go. D&D doesn't work that way. Even at the best of times, there is often a slow build. It takes time to make characters, there are narrative conventions that need to be met before you reach the darkened cave, or roll your first initiative.

It is always difficult to begin, to get underway. But once that initial step is taken, it can be just as easy to play as it had been to avoid playing. Once one person starts running a game, others get inspired as their anxiety fades, and it becomes easier to get a second game underway, sometimes a third.

Running a game on Roll20 is daunting at times. It poses a unique challenge due to the technical elements, that sometimes overwhelm the general gaming aspects. For me, I feel like pre-game preparation is more critical. I need to know what we will encounter, estimate how far we will get in the session, then ready any pieces that are likely to be needed in connection with that.

Once in game, a major part of game play is maintaining a balance of play to keep the story moving. It is important not to become to weighed down by any one aspect - combat, conversation, exposition. Too much of one thing will bring the entire flow of the game to a halt. This is challenging, and very draining mentally.

At the end of these sessions, I have a splitting headache, and don't want to look at my computer for hours. Adding in the headaches that seem to come with online play - audio/video problems, freezing screens, images that don't load, increasing lag time - only increase the drain and exhaustion. I've learned that much of the difficulty comes from using a decade old laptop to host the game with a WebRTC client that bloats upload needs to accommodate multiple users.

Thinking about getting back into that is daunting, and requires tremendous willpower to fully embrace, but the game is worth the investment. The Roll20 system works so well for setting up and preparing a game, let alone running it, that I want to go back. But the headaches will come, and they need to be prepared for as well.

I'm trying to assess where we are in the campaign we're playing. I want to go back into it with a clearer idea of what we're trying to do, where we are trying to go, and what we hope to get out of the experience. I think it can be adapted and adjusted to keep it going, but not without some attention and proper preparation. Still, at some point soon, the best option is just going to be signing on and starting. That should break the jam of inertia and get us back to playing the game. And that is the critical point - games are meant to be played!

Terrain

Terrain can be an interesting factor in encounters, particularly any combat encounters. Unfortunately, finding an effective way to incorporate it can present difficulty. I think it's important to note that seeing how terrain can affect events is usually easy... the difficulty lies in finding a way to use it effectively.

5th edition is good about keeping combat fairly simple and straightforward. This is rewarding, keeping game play moving most of the time. The way it does this is with advantage and disadvantage, giving you an extra roll on the d20, taking the better or worse result. It is a beautifully simple solution to so many factors that arise. When I first saw it in the playtest rules, I was skeptical. I mocked it and didn't really understand it. But once we began playing in earnest, you quickly learn to appreciate the simple elegance it offers.

So what's the catch? The catch is that everything affecting an action is given equal weight, and since the effect doesn't stack, you end up with three options - extra positive, no effect, extra negative. There's no benefit to combining positive effects, or negative. When you start factoring in other elements, like terrain, you want to start giving varying benefits. But that creates a more complex system, and soon your encounter is bogged down in third edition minutia.

There's the dilemma in a nutshell. How to use terrain factors without over-complicating the game? I'm still working on that one.

Combat and Movement

My first thought was to talk about combat. I feel like so many of our games devolve into two sides lining up toe to toe, trading dice rolls until one is defeated. I don't think this has always been true of our game play, or I never would have engaged so fully with it. Face it, that kind of play is dull.

I first started noticing this in fourth edition, which relied heavily on powers for movement and positioning during combat. It was a curious effect. For one encounter, everything flowed and moved well, giving an exciting encounter. But the next battle would stall. Sometimes it was because of the powers - Hank was waiting for two opponents so he could cleave, or something similar. The structure of the game dictated the action. I have to believe its part of the reason why they developed fifth edition, to put control of action back into the players' hands. 

But that also requires them to act. A holdover from 3.5 was a fear of provoking opportunity attacks. In that system, they could be used multiple times from many triggers. With the new edition, there is a limit to how many actions one individual can take in combat, but we still have a fear of triggering opportunity attacks. Some of that came from playing first level characters with their fragile health with the mindset of previous edition. We got skittish and defensive.

All of these factors have made us flat-footed in combat. So my question is how can I, as GM, better set up the encounter in order to encourage a more fluid exchange?

I think a quick fix is to create space within the encounter so players have to move in order to engage. The best way to do this is to create an encounter that features multi-dimensional opponents. The average party has a fighter to engage in melee, a hybrid fighter that can shift easily between melee and ranged (rangers, thieves, etc.), and a spell caster of some sort that will need to keep its distance and avoid melee. A good monster encounter will have a similar construction, that is, a mix of fighting styles.

Sometimes, a quick encounter might consist of one type of creature. This is where the terrain and encounter space can be adjusted to fill the gaps. I've run encounters with spell casters and archers that positioned themselves on catwalks or balconies. In this case, the physical space can be used to maintain the distance these opponents need to be effective.

More recently, I've run a sea cave adventure with slippery rocks and unsure footing that turned a 10' x 20' tunnel into a space that was effectively double that in size. A simple trick that expanded the battlefield. For another encounter, I had a drow warrior levitate in order to direct the battle below, and fire at anyone uncontested. when I ran it, I botched it somehow, but there was a germ of an idea there. I'm working on a revised use of it that I hope to put in action soon.

I'm interested in finding a way to use terrain more effectively, but that's a thought for another day.