10 Saturday Oct 2015
Posted in Ask the Guild
In this weeks edition of “Ask the Guild”, we’re going to talk about a problem that sometimes occurs: What happens when some of your party flees from a fight and others stay? Should you encourage players to run? What happens when those players who do stay fight an enemy, which ultimately proves to be far too difficult for them and what do you do? This is especially problematic if the monster in question was beyond the DMs expectations or realization in terms of difficulty.
05 Monday Oct 2015
Posted in 13th Age, Dungeons and Dragons, Training Day
After a recent discussion about “What do I do if the party suffers a TPK”, which I intend to also elaborate on the blog later, I brought up a rule that I first saw in 13th Age. In 13th Age one of the interesting optional rules is that the adventurers can’t be killed by random “Chaff” type monsters. Instead, they have a “Named villain/nemesis/antagonist” rule where only the essential, named enemies can result in dispatching the players characters. When I first read this rule about “Named villains”, I originally entirely dismissed it.
On thinking about it after the discussion about avoiding TPKs, perhaps I was a bit hasty as there is actually some merit to the idea – especially depending on how strongly you tie your PCs into the overall narrative.
01 Thursday Oct 2015
Posted in Advice, Ask the Guild
Tags
5th Edition DnD, Ask the Guild, DnD, Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Questions, Roleplaying, Tabletop
In this weeks “Ask the Guild” I am going to cover a couple of related topics, revolving a little bit around conflict at the table and how to handle things. The first is how to deal with someone distracting the other players and you from the game by being repeatedly disruptive. Then I’m going to talk about how you, as the DM, handle another person not in your game coming and interfering in a similar manner. The first conflict is one that can happen with many groups, but the second is usually a spectator or bystander effect – especially if you’re playing in a public space. In the end, both are ultimately up to you as the DM to resolve and here are my recommendations.
05 Wednesday Aug 2015
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
To say that I am greeting the announcement of a new Dungeons and Dragons movie with skepticism would be an understatement. For one thing, the original attempts (yes I said attempts – as in plural) were utterly rancid in every conceivable fashion. They didn’t showcase anything that made Dungeons and Dragons great, let alone managing to be even remotely competent fantasy movies on their own merits. If there is one thing that still sticks out in my mind after all these years, is the absolutely dreadful CGI effects used in the movie such as in the climactic battle at the end (skip to 1 hour 30 odd mark to see the start*).
Of course the completely one dimensional villains, poorly written heroes and script that spends large amounts of time going utterly nowhere didn’t help this movie much either – despite an outright competent cast being picked for it. It completely bombed at the box office and notably has about 10% rating at Rotten Tomatoes, which easily made it one of the worst movies released that year. Honestly with a pedigree like that to compete against, it is hard for me to see them managing to do a worse job with this movie. Then again doing better than their original efforts shouldn’t be the goal, it should be to create a great fantasy movie on par with the likes of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings – or at least that’s what I would like to see attempted anyway. An actual fantasy epic worthy of the title “Dungeons and Dragons”.
When reading their press release, I wasn’t exactly left optimistic with the script being done by someone who wrote Wrath of the Titans. While Wrath of the Titans was at least entertaining, it didn’t exactly do well in constructing a compelling plot or interesting characters. Minding while the critical reception of Wrath of the Titans was largely negative, it does at the very least have some great action scenes and certainly didn’t completely bomb at the box office. Given that Hasbro are interested in making their franchises as profitable as possible, with movies being a key part of that strategy, it was inevitable that we would have another approach at a Dungeons and Dragons movie. So finding someone who has successfully written a fantasy movie and successfully made money on it at the same time, was probably their thinking with that particular choice.
At the most basic level, maybe we’ll get a reasonable action movie with some neat fights with various iconic Dungeons and Dragons. Possibly these fights will actually manage to look non-terrible while they are at it, unlike the original movies. That’s where I’ve set my expectations at least, because surely they can’t do worse than 2000s effort.
Surely?
*And yes that appears to be the full movie, which probably tells you a lot given that it is entirely up on youtube.
12 Sunday Jul 2015
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
Tags
5th Edition DnD, Advice, Curse of the Black Pearls, Dungeons and Dragons, Houserules, Roleplaying, Tabletop
Although I ended my 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons game recently, I have had some interest in some of the houserules and various changes I was using in that game. I’ve decided to put them all up here on the guild so others can see what I was doing. Note that this list isn’t entirely comprehensive and some of these rules require some DM finesse to implement well. For example the way I was using “Vitality” was as a way of making certain named antagonists and other very powerful creatures more dangerous over regular “Jobbers”. Enemies that damage or threaten vitality were exceptionally rare and even if they could, only on certain circumstances like critical hits or very specific abilities.
20 Saturday Jun 2015
Posted in Advice, Dungeons and Dragons
Tags
5th Edition DnD, Advice, Burnout, Curse of the Black Pearls, Dungeons and Dragons, Play Report, Roleplaying, Tabletop
So before I begin, this post is going to describe the end of my 5th Edition campaign, Curse of the Black Pearls. There are a myriad of reasons why you may end a game prematurely and move onto something else. For me, it was a lack of plot momentum, dwindling enthusiasm for 5th Edition as a system and just the desire to do something else – especially as I had a large amount of player turnover in this game disrupting a lot of my early plans. Now that I have stabilized my group and moved along a bit, I’ve decided that while I’ve enjoyed 5E the problems with pacing have become too difficult for the biweekly game. This is especially compounded by the play time available being around ~3 hours or so, especially when one combat of the style I enjoy is taking over 2/3 of that time easily.
Essentially with my enthusiasm low and the plot progressing at a snails pace, even with my attempt to pick it up a notch or two, I made the decision to end the game. So as well as being a finale to Curse of the Black Pearls, this play report will also intersperse my thoughts on why the game was ending and the way I chose to do so from the players adventures at level 7 to the power leveled final battle at level 14. In a subsequent post, I’ll talk about why you should choose to prematurely end a game and how to either avoid doing so, or if you feel you can’t avoid it, how to go about doing so in a fair way to everyone.
But most important of all: To you as the DM.
15 Friday May 2015
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
Curse of the Black Pearls: The Second Privateers Court
Returning to Dungeons and Dragons today, I needed to deal with one of the players formally leaving the game for other reasons: The cleric Narvarie. When players leave a game, it always presents a challenge and unfortunately I’ve had a few players drop out of this game over the time it’s been going. After some thought, there was actually a really good idea that came to mind: Have the player character not “leave” entirely, but instead step up into a permanent position on the privateers court. This of course might require a bit of engineering but has some logical consequences.
The first is it gives me a justified way to have someone who gives the other players a good idea how each member of the council “feels” about them. Narvarie on the council would have plenty of time to interact with the other members, then report back on how they generally feel about the players decisions at each council. This provides more direct feedback and feels like a tangible way to introduce the political mechanic, in this case saying “These guys hate or like you X amount” in a reasonable way in world. Especially because I was originally going to leave this up to the players general judgement, but with the council somewhat expanding in size and scope this felt like a fairer way to do it.
The trick was how to do it without this decision feeling entirely forced on the players?
07 Thursday May 2015
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons
I noticed today that Wizards have released some rules on waterborne adventuring.
A quick look over them seems to indicate that the minotaur with their bonus action shoves on melee attacks and goring charge are a nice option for melee classes especially. Mariner I think is a good option for my game, Curse of the Black Pearls because getting a consistent swim speed is pretty difficult – but it does come at the cost of heavy armor (which does make sense). The new Rogue style looks especially good as adding your charisma to your initiative is pretty huge (especially if you take the alertness feat for another +5 or whatever it is). Finally the storm sorcerer seems to be pretty cool as well and rather thematic. I’ll be interested to see if any of my players take these options.
28 Tuesday Apr 2015
Posted in Social Commentary
Tags
13th Age, 5th Edition DnD, Boardgames, Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu, Dungeons and Dragons, General, Inclusivity, Night's Black Agents, Roleplaying, Shadowrun, Social Commentary, Trail of Cthulhu
If there is a hot button issue in gaming right at the moment, it’s about how do we best include people in our hobby who aren’t strictly of a specific general white male persuasion? In particular that there is some required concession to have women, people of color and other minorities getting more recognition and inclusion within various game products. The most recent edition of Dungeons and Dragons for example has some excellent diverse art of both adventuring men and women. Most notably, a lot of the art of the female adventurers portrayed in the books is distinctly non-sexualized and depicts several women of color as well (not to mention more racial diversity amongst the male characters as well). Likewise, for a long time now many PnP RPGs have been switching pronouns though the text to refer to the GM or players as he/she interchangeably. A small but important way to tell anyone reading the book they could be either running the game or playing it.
Similarly, many of the roleplaying games I have run that have been set in historic periods like the 1920s and 1930s of Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu respectively, discuss using themes of sexism and racism appropriately. Most notably they discuss them in a way that ultimately suggests you shouldn’t just throw these things at players just because of the setting. Sure it might be interesting for a female investigator to have to deal with sexism in the 1920s or 1930s in some way – but it can also just be a reminder to an actual player about what they still currently face. It’s less important to be historically accurate over how uncomfortable these elements may be for the actual player. An important discussion to at least start and get potential gamemasters and their players thinking about if they are comfortable with it in their games!
For me, as a socially awkward straight white male geek who didn’t think of this a lot back in the early 2000s, I got my first real lesson in how other people could get a very different view of the same books in a FLGS*. While perusing some Forgotten Realms books, I got into a conversation with a man who had moved to New Zealand from Nigeria. While talking to him we got into a discussion about the different races in DnD and he (having dark black skin) pointed out something I had never considered before: All of the “evil” races in the underdark had black skin. Drow, Svirfneblin, Druegar and so forth were all black, while in the players handbooks generally speaking the “good” races were always depicted with light skin.
At the time it never really struck me what the significance of that conversation was or even why it bothered this man. I walked away back then with a “Oh well, I agree to disagree” attitude but not really realizing what the problem was. Eventually I did realize what the problem was: To him this was saying that people like him, who had the kind of darker skin tones he did were being depicted as evil and that light skinned people were always the heroes. It was subtly, albeit not intentionally, reinforcing a negative stereotype that he suffered in his day to day life. Today I wish I could have a chat to him again and find out his current thoughts on the game, especially with the efforts to depict more diverse heroes and characters Paizo and Wizards have been undertaking recently.
Unfortunately there is still a tremendous way to go in the way certain groups or people are viewed as “outsiders”. If the hobby is to grow, expand and develop further it’s important that old stereotypes that roleplaying is just “for teenage boys” and that women or other minorities aren’t welcome need to be debunked. Especially from mainstream media sources, gaming communities and the way we approach letting new people into our gaming circles.
26 Sunday Apr 2015
Posted in Dungeons and Dragons, Reviews
Even though they have been out for a while now, I wanted to give a bit of a wait before I wrote anything about these two adventures from Wizards of the Coast for the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Firstly, I have had a few opportunities to run a fair amount of Hoard of the Dragon Queen, seen much of it being played and have a good grasp of how some of it works out in play. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen a lot of how Rise of Tiamat actually works in play, but it does have some truly great ideas even if you don’t intend to run it. The core of that adventure, the wonderfully thought out Factions system and how it ties into the players decisions, is actually being actively used in my current Dungeons and Dragons game, Curse of the Black Pearls.
When doing this review I debated if I would split the two books up into separate reviews alone or if I would simply consider it as one large “adventure”, then review the entire thing as a whole. Obviously from the title of this post, I decided that I would go with reviewing both adventures as one entity and give my overall opinion on the campaign it ultimately produces. The way this review will work is that I shall consider how both books stack up individually, talk about some of the individual strengths and weaknesses, then recommend if I feel it is worth running the entire campaign, or just going with one or the other.
In part one of this review, we’ll talk about Hoard of the Dragon Queen. In part two, we’ll consider the follow up adventure Rise of Tiamat. Finally in the final part I’ll give my overall judgement and then recommendation of what I feel is worth your hard earned gold.
