First Full 4e Experiance

So one of our player in my regular campaign, the tank, couldn't make it this week so we decided to give 4e a try. I busted out "Keep on the Shadowfell" and gave the newness a test drive. Now I liked 4e a lot just from reading it, and I had done a test run over lunch at work with the rest of the design dept, and been a player in a 4e campaign on Saturday. But either it was too short (one encounter) or mostly RP (not very systemic) so this was the chance to get the real feel of 4e. I rolled up some character based on what the party wanted to play and we got down to it.

I had a blast.

Now I will confess that the most fun I have as a DM is to push the party to the breaking point, get them right up to the brink of what they feel may be a TPK (Total Party Kill) and then watch as they get their act together and get out of trouble by the skin of their teeth. So tonight's session went well from that perspective. It was the vindication of anyone who said 4e was too easy with all the hit points at first level. A player was dropped in three of the four encounters, and the last one they were down to just the wizard left standing. It instilled a real threat of death, and from the lowliest of the Monster Manual's creature, the kobold.

I love those shifty guys. They skitter, they leap, they used their little superpower of a minor action shift to great effect, running all over the battlefield, surrounding the over eager ranger who ran out early on the initiative, they all skittered back after granting the dragonshield a +6 to hit so the poor bloodied soul could wolverine strike them dead. Judging just from this one creature type I'd say that the 4e designers did a great job in giving creatures personality just through their mechanics.

The patry soon learned some hard lessons of the 4e game map; yes you can run all over the place you are far more mobile, but if you don't stay together and coordinate your actions you quickly get surrounded and the beat down happens. But if you do co-ordinate, a shift here, an extra action there, a bonus granted at just the right time and you have set the enemies up the bomb.

I had gone out and bought a bunch of cheap poker chips and a container that had red, green, white, blue, and yellow chips. Invaluable! Red was for bloodied, yellow what a mark, curse or hunter's quarry, green a status effect, while combat advantage, blue an ongoing effect. I'm glad I spent the money or I wouldn't have been able to keep track of all that. My only complaint was that the chips were a little bigger than 1x1 inches so the map was a little crowded. If someone were to release 1x1 status chips I'd spend the money over again for them.

At least at low level the different races and classes were able to really distinguish themselves. The dragonborn made a great fighter with his breath weapon (good for blasting minions) and when he got bloodied (as tanks often do) he strarted hititng harder. The tiefling blast wizard was great with fire, and was hyper aware of when enemies were bloodied as he cruely picked on the hurt enemies. The warlord has some problems at first until he got synced up with the party and got them to move with him and then he was able to shift them into position and pluck out squishy enemies with his longspear. And once the melee ranger stopped leaping into the fray without backup he was able to act like a steathy assassin beating down critical mobs before they could react.

So I liked it, it was fun and cinematic the characters seemed to be powerful but couldn't just mow down their enemies, it required team work. Mobs had a nice synergy in their abilities rather than just having to turn things up to 11 to make them feel a threat.

If only the digital tools weren't non-existant to awful.

The Dungeon of Snakes

At the end of tonight's session, "The Campfire of Two Good Skeletons" my son and I sat down and used Jamis Buck's Random Dungeon Generator to create the next adventure. Now normally I would never use this; way too 1st edition. I like my dungeons to have a sense of place and theme. But again, Hoija is played by a five year old. So a dungeon of snakes filled with goblins, wolves, beetles, etc... SURE! A twisty turny dungeon that feels like it was designed around the amount of space on the graph paper? Why not? It's all fresh to him.

So I generated the random dungeon and we both sat down and filled it in with monsters, traps, and treasure. 4e does not have a lot of low level snakes so we chose a high level one for the boss and changed the needlefang drake swarm to be a swarm of snakes. put in some traps and treasures and you've got an adventure. I've put another friend in there for him to find (the elf) and put some magic treasure of his choice (but appropriate level) for him to find.

I am having way too much fun with this.

The Dungeon of Snakes

Dungeon Level: 1

Room #1:

• Door (west, 1 from north): wooden, simple, stuck, magically reinforced
• Door (north, 5 from west): wooden, good, stuck
• Door (south, 2 from west): iron, locked
• Monsters
  • Goblin Cutters (4)
  • Goblin Warrior (2)
• Features
  • sack
  • claw marks
  • scorch marks
  • hook
  • platform
  • gong
  • trash (pile)
  • shrine
• Trap
  • poison needle trap (CR2) (Find/Disable DC 21)

Room #2:

• Door (east, 2 from north): wooden, simple, stuck
• Door (west, 2 from north): (secret) down-sliding, magic word trigger, trapped [trap: arrow trap (CR1) (Find/Disable DC 21)]
• Door (north, 5 from west): wooden, simple, locked
• Door (north, 1 from west): (secret) side-sliding, magic word trigger
• Monsters
  • Death Rattle Viper (Boss)
• Treasure
  • 380 gold coins (380 gp)
  • Snake Key
• Features
  • equipment (broken)
  • scorch marks
  • flask
  • cage

Room #3:

• Door (west, 3 from north): wooden, simple, stuck
• Door (east, 2 from north): wooden, simple, free
• Monsters
  • Fire Beetle (3)
• Treasure
  • 168 gold coins (168 gp)

Room #4:

• Door (east, 3 from north): wooden, good, stuck
• Features
  • paper
  • pipe (smoking pipe)
  • equipment (usable)
  • equipment (usable)
  • chandelier
  • loose masonry
  • firepit
  • furniture (broken)
• Hidden Treasure (Search DC 21)
  • +1 sylvan robes
• Trap
• Rockslide
• False floor pit

• Monster
• Needlefang Snake (Drake) Swarm (2)

Room #5:

• Door (north, 2 from west): wooden, good, stuck, trapped [trap: poison needle trap (CR2) (Find/Disable DC 21)]
• Empty
• Monster
• Grey Wolf (3)

Room #6:

• Door (south, 1 from west): wooden, simple, free
• Hidden Treasure (Search DC 21)
  • Captured Elf
• Trap
  • Magic Crossbow turret.

Room #7:

• Door (west, 5 from north): wooden, strong, locked
• Monsters
  • Hobgoblin Soldier (2)
• Treasure
  • 95 gold coins (95 gp)

Room #8:

• Door (west, 1 from north): (concealed) wooden, simple, stuck, behind rubbish
• Empty

Room #9:

• Door (west, 3 from north): wooden, strong, free
• Trap
• Spear gauntlet
• Treasure
  • Magic Shield (+1)
• Features
  • pouch
  • evil symbol
  • gong
  • mound of rubble
  • weapon rack

Hoija Fullop, Halfling Knight of the Realm

Yes that's right, I taught my five year old son how to play D&D 4th edition. And as reports of other kids playing proved out, he picked it up rather quickly. He totally grokked that he had powers that he could use and the difference between daily, encounter, and at will. He got the concept of using skills to accomplish non-combat goals, and also making character choices to model a type of archetype; he chose diplomacy over intimidate because he wanted to be nice to people and make friends.

Hoija Fullop was a young halfling lad of 10 years who wanted to do good in the land, so he traveled to the King of Manawydan and asked if he could be a knight. The king was unsure about letting a young halfling be a knight, but the young lad was so persuasive (26 diplomacy check) that he gave in and gave him a quest to investigate some strange happenings to the south, farmers were being hurt by monsters and needed someone to protect them. So Hoija traveled to the farmlands to the south, and indeed there was a giant scorpion by one of the farms, trying to attack a man who had taken refuge on a haystack from the beast.

Hoija charged up to the giant bug and dispatched it easily, using his shield to deflect the blows of the giant bug as it tried to grab him, and smiting it with his curved scimitar. The man turned out to be Maelstrom the Wise, a cowardly but friendly wizard (me playing an npc). Maelstrom told him that the vile beast was sent into the land by Clarke the Bad, an evil wizard.

Now this is the point where my son did something different than my normal campaigns, rather than investigating or waiting for the next plot point to appear, he instead grabbed a bunch of the skeleton legos and placed them on the battle mat. "And then the skeletons attack!"

... Ok! We can do it that way too. A bunch of skeletons attack Hoija and Maelstrom. The two of them fight valiantly, but Hoija is getting beaten up pretty bad, mainly because Maelstrom is a bit of a coward and hide far away without using his big blasting spells. But Hoija convinces him to step up and help him and blast all the skeletons back so Hoija can heal (He totally got the concept of healing). And with both of them working together as friends they beat the skeletons. The most powerful of the skeletons though had a dire warning upon his destruction; "Hoija Fullop, Clarke the Bad cannot be stopped, he waits for you in his evil tower protected by the key."


Me: You want to play again?
The Boy: Yes. Next episode will be level two. "The Skeletons at the Campfire."
Me: Ok we'll play that.
The Boy: No! "The Good Skeletons at the Campfire." They're not bad skeletons, they're good.
Me: Ok, that's the adventure we'll have. Now it's bath time, let's wash that face paint off.

I am one proud geek papa.

Interview: The New Dungeon Masters (corrected version)

Gamespy: "So will you have all kinds of customized tiles to show the player they have entered a room?"

WotC: "Well that depends on what you mean by 'show the player they have entered a room' I mean if the DM wants the players to enter the room our gametable doesnt know what kind of room it is, or how big or anything, because what if it is a special room or something, like a wooden room or a stone room, or a magical room, the DM has to be able to use the tools without us saying "No you have to use a stone 3x3 room'. I mean if I wanted the players to know that they entered a room I would just type 'you enter the room' that way they know theyve entered the room without us doing 'visual' adjudication.

Gamespy: "so basically you wrote a chat program for DM's because it was the minimum amount of work possible to soak up money"

WotC: "we actually just made an IRC frontend that says D&D... really its all just IRC"

Gamespy: "I really hate you guys, no, no I really mean it you guys suck"

WotC: "We didn't want to force the DM to.."

Gamespy: "You need to stop talking... like now, and give me you dice, your geek license has been revoked... Ass"

You can read the uncorrected version at Gamespy, full of lots of excuses that will lead to eventual disappointment.

(Special thanks to Evan for writing this as a response to a rant of mine over chat.)

The Lost Room

I should be packing. I move on Sunday. I start a new job on Monday. If all parties sign the paper I'll be divorced next week. But instead I'm sitting here reading blogs and drinking homemade Micheladas and watching The Lost Room.

This is one of those shows that I feel would be the basis of a good campaign. A d20 Modern or maybe as the MacGuffin in a regular D&D campaign. It's got that nice "Gotta Catch 'em All" plot device that can let players both act and react. It's got a stable of nice magic items that are numerous enough so that every minor baddie can have something trixie up their sleeve, but rare enough that they are something you may want to fight to the death to posses. It's got all these secret societies and cabals fighting it out and betraying each other. A perfect environment to run a campaign where you can let the players run loose and chart their course towards the end.

Would it work in a fantasy campaign? Does the mundane world give the magical objects their power? Or can these be artifacts? That when combined will power up along with the rapidly increasing power of the PCs. Hmmmm I could integrate this into my first Taliesin campaign for the 4th edition, make it part of the event that destroyed the Eladrin empire. Would changing the items from mundane objects of the modern world to kingly regalia ruin their power? Though enough of the objects can be mundane, and due to the nature of them a kingly crown can have little power, while a shoe horn can have ultimate power.

Ok campaign figured out. Pack a little, last day of old job, pack a lot, move, first day of new job, finalize divorce, then onto new life.

A Witch Shall be Born

I just finished reading the Savage Sword of Conan's version of "A Witch Shall be Born". I'm reminded again that this would make for an excellent arc in a campaign. There's a number of good adversaries highlighted in the story, Salome; the lost twin of queen Taramis, Constantius the Falcon; leader of the Shemite mercenary company, Olgerd the greedy and cruel desert chief, and the monster that Salome had summoned within the dungeon bowels of the desecrated temple of Ishtar. While it's not something that can just be translated verbatim into an interactive adventure, it has nice starting points. A fallen city, political intrigue, scandalous and titillating debauchery by the villains, environmental hazards after being abandoned in the desert after being defeated by the Falcon and his men, a dungeon crawl to rescue a beautiful queen and finally a large raid battle against a giant hideous monster that had grown strong from human sacrifice to it.

This is definitely making it's way into my next D&D campaign.

I wonder though if it would make a good MMO adventure? Warcraft has gone for the far more traditional dungeon crawls for all of it's instances. You run through a hallway and fight things in the way until you clear through to the end and fight the boss. There are very few alternate strategies to these adventures. Rogues can't sneak past the guards and drop the defenses at a critical moment, characters can't enter town and have the "face" guy make some critical alliances (not that Warcraft has any social skills really aside from the half ass faction system), nor can one do much of anything other than choose an alternate pathway to a boss.

Actually that's not entirely true. You can use skills like stealth to play the game in a different manner, but that has the feel of unintended content bypassing rather than having different party makeups having a different experience. These stealth runs are fun because they do change the experience from the typical (and very much near exclusive) party of tank, healer, DPS. But this works despite the design intent, not because of it. And often the designers must go back into a zone and make changes to prevent players for daring to use their stealth to sneak past enemies.

I think that there is a lot of room for experimentation in this area. Warcraft has shown us how simple dungeons where you kill everything from point A to point B can work when you polish them up. Don't feel that I'm being dismissive of this, the polishing was the hard part, most other MMOs can't seem to get that part down. But there is so much more that could be done in terms of dungeon and adventure design and remain a simple Hierarchical State Machine and not branch out the possibility of action, or introduce a million ways to exploit. Here's to future adventures in MMOs to ramping up to the bar of the pulp serials of the 1930s.

Samurai Champloo

So Adult Swim is broadcasting the first episode of Samurai Champloo again tonight. I like the anime a lot, but mostly I like this as an opening episode. It's an amazing way to begin a campaign. The main characters wander into town already secure in their skills, they seek out danger and cause themselves trouble, the plot throws a little trouble their way to get the protagonists together, but mainly it's the characters driving the action, rather than the action driving them. There are some great fights against the town guards, scions, assorted flunkies, some of which will come back to haunt them in later episodes, and even a fight against the other protagonists. But by the end of the episode they are all thrown together on their MacGuffin of a quest that keeps the disparate personalities together.

This would be a great way to start interactive fiction. Make the players feel like a bad ass by showing them that they are capable of taking on the structures of society and the world, especially if those structures turn out to be corrupt and evil. They players also get to test out each other's abilities by engaging each other in combat.

This would be how I would start my next campaign. I also like it as a guideline for starting a computer game. Get the players into the action, let themselves get into trouble, and once things couldn't get any worse, let them do the most awesome things to extract themselves out of the situation and get going on the main storyline. Rule of cool is a good way to plot out interactive fiction.

Gary Gygax RIP

An Analysis of an Encounter

So since my players complimented me on the encounter from last night, I thought I'd do an analysis of it, if only for my own knowledge. My group uses straight up D&D 3.5e rules, and I'm running a campaign set in, during the time of the last war. It's an evil campaign, and the players are members of the Emerald Claw, a group of elite fascist necromancers. Their previous adventures had taken them deep into enemy territory to recover an eldritch machine that can summon creatures from the plane of Shavarath, the extra-planar plane of war and conflict. It's the place where Eberron places the Blood War in their universe.

Now their villainous patron has some circuitous plot involving demons, which are found on the Shavarath, but Angels and Devils also inhabit that plane. Since this was a small adventure that comes after a really long, multi-session grand adventure where they infiltrated a big city, and since it may have been the last session for one of our players (he's got one more) I wanted to make a straight out brawl. So this became a good time to introduce some new enemies, and throw out some plots for future use. Since I've set the campaign during the time of the "Last War" I had gotten the supplement "The Forge of War", this has been a good book for fluff, but I haven't used that much of its crunch, which is fine; it's paid for itself in terms of generating interesting plot ideas. One of the bits I found interesting was the "Messengers" that joined with the Silver Flame and lead a successful, though inscrutable and self-serving, crusade near the end of the war.

So there we go, we have our hook; the players bring back a machine that accidentally lets in the four horsemen of the apocalypse into their world. It's an enemy type that they hadn't fought before in this campaign, powerful enough that it would present a challenge to them (they are now level 12), and would have someplace to go if they wanted to pursue this plot line, I can make more powerful angels for them to fight as they rise in level.

Now to make up the specific encounter. Their machine was delivered to their patron's evil castle in the mountains, and placed into a big artificer's laboratory. So we have cauldrons of bubbling alchemical components, Kyber shards with bound air elementals sparking electricity, a real mad scientist laboratory. So I drew a rather large room with lots of columns and tables and other equipment, a good mix of total and partial cover. And in the center, the machine that makes a portal to the plane of conflict. What I tend to do is get a general design of what I want, and then draw it out on the battle map live.

Next I need to get a group of enemies. I know it's angels, so I'll use angels and archons as my basic types. The players have just turned level 12, and there are two opponents around that level, an Astral Deva and a trumpet archon, both at CR 14. Now this is close, but it will be a tough fight, since I can have only this fight during the session the players can go all out it should be ok. I fill out the encounter with a bunch of mooks, some hound archons. Lately I've been making an effort to use lots of minions in my encounters, and it's worked out well. The fill up the battlefield and make it look like more of a dire situation, they soak up player's actions from the main opponent, and when the players drop them they can feel like a bad ass. But if they are ignored they tend to cause problems. This time the choice of hound archons was good because the players remembered dog headed angels from a previous campaign, and remembered that they were difficult. Then at the last second, as the PCs were going on a shopping spree (Eberron has lots of magic, so I generally allow them to buy standard magic items so I don't have to dole out the entirety of the magic items) the players started bragging about how awesome they were now, how they had vastly increased their killing power. So I did what any DM in that position would do. I added another Astral Deva to the encounter.

So that brings us to:

• 1 Trumpet Archon - Healer, buffer/debuffer
• 2 Astral Devas - Frontline meelee.
• 6 Hound Archons - Mooks

When the encounter started it was preceded by the Messangers, whom I described verbatum as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. With the wizard's knowledge (Planes) roll, he could tell that these were solars, and so no one started attacking. I got my little cut scene to drop down some plot. Then they blew a hole in the ceiling, and all the other floors of the castle, said their lines of ominous prophesy, and rode off after telling the angels they left behind to destroy the machine that the players just spent all last adventure stealing. So I had my bit of story that laid the groundwork for future adventures, the players made the choice themselves not to interfere, and then the big threat left, leaving the party to feel that there was an opening that would allow them to take the guys that I had originally planned for anyway.

Then we got into combat. The angels took this general tactic, they laid down a blade barrier in a radius around the gate. This was also (coincidentally, really) the distance that all the players had positioned themselves in the round before combat started. While they all made their saves, they did have to pick a side, in or out, and for the most part they were stuck with that decision lest they face 12d6 of whirling death. This had a nice effect on the battlefield, the ring made two distinct sections, but since most players got to choose which area they would be in, there wasn't any cry of foul. Since the angels could all teleport (note: I seem to have misread the astral deva and given them teleport. oops) they were able to move in and out of this circle of death, while the players were constrained for the most part.

The players were each able to come up with a unique and interesting strategy that contributed to victory. The fighter has a real tank build, with his newly purchased Cape of the Mountebank, his spell resistance, and his naturally high HP, was charging all over the place chasing the teleporting angels, trusting on his defenses to keep him up. The angels tended to stay away from him, but since he was always a charge away, and the teleportation used up their turn, chasing them prevented the angels from doing too much damage to the party. The Wizard lay down the AOE and specialized attacks, when he wasn't being bashed around by the angels, I targeted him since they could teleport and effectively choose their targets hitting him made many of the other characters jump and prioritize the monster tanks that were on him. The ranger had gotten a new bow of seeking, this turned out well for him since it effective negated the blindness he was afflicted with for most of the combat; I'm just glad they didn't have time to bane his arrows. The rogue sat in the back and sniped, until one of the Astral Devas decided to focus on him. He was dropped until near death, fled but then returned to score an amazing series of sneak attack head shots that finished them off later in the fight before they had a chance to use heal. And finally the face character of the group, a beguiller had a very intriguing strategy. After a fantastic roll on an opening bluff where he told them that he and his friends would be willing to fight against the evil Karnathis.

Now I don't have any problem about letting a well placed bluff bypass an encounter. But this was the only fighting encounter I had planned. Plus the angels weren't lawful stupid, so poison arrows and magic spells flying all over the place were kinda a tip off. But I think that a DM should reward inventive uses of skills that players have dumped in. So the archon reached out and gave him a great big loving embrace and grappled him for the duration of the combat. And our beguiler let himself be grappled for the entire combat, and instead tossed around stilled, silent, spells that helped to control the battlefield and debuff the enemies. Nice. I like the beguiler, and that was well played.

So looking back over the encounter why did it work? I think it was the frustration. Just the right amount. The players felt it was a threat from the opening setup, and as the rounds continued the threat manifested itself. But because of the initial fear, the players felt they played well (which they did). The archons could teleport around the battlefield, frustrating attempts to beat them down or control them, but since the players kept the pressure on them, forcing them to use their actions to move to safety. The frustration of a slippery enemy became overturned. And finally each of the players found a time when they overcame the specific foil of the encounter, pushed through it, and suceeded. The blind ranger used the new seeking bow to kill off guys purely by hearing them, the tank brazenly charged through deadly barriers untouched, the rogue ran away after getting his ass kicked only to head shot two of the big brusiers dropping them both in one round. And the beguiler conned an angel into grappling himself. Every player experienced great frustration, and was able to overcome it brilliantly and look like a badass in the process.

And I think that is what makes a good encounter.

Our Band of Villians

A group shot of my group's character's on the eve of what was the most
challenging combat they faced in the campaign. As I posted previously
I didn't have a lot of time to get an encounter together, so based on
their rave reviews I think I did pretty good.

The players came back from an extended adventure in Sharn (hello New
York) where the had managed to capture an "Eldritch Engine" from the
enemy (hello plot device) and brought it back to their patron for his
nefarious plans.

I like the Eberron setting a lot. I like to play the parrallels to
20th Europe very stongly where possible. Karnath is Germany, the
Emerald Claw is the Nazi party, Sharn is New York, Aundair is Harry
Potter set in France. These are all good things as it allows me to go
for inspiration outside the setting materials.

We use Legos as minis as you can see. Back when I starting playing in
2000 I had no collection of miniatures built up from years of play,
but I did have a lot of Legos. So I used those to great effect these
past eight years.

Getting Ready for my Players

So my gaming group is meeting today after a hastily scheduled sessions, two of the players may be leaving, some for good reasons, others for not so good reasons. So I'm trying to whip together a session of awesomeness, with role playing and tricky combat, that ends with treasure and hot supernatural babes of loose morals. You know every geek's dream.

The way I plan out my campaigns I choose a long overarching plot that leads towards a very specific climatic ending. But then I just kind of wing it along the way, jotting down signposts of note as I think of them. This campaign they are playing evil members of the Karnath army during the last war. I've dubbed it my "evil nazi vampire campaign". It's been pretty fun to think up ways that they can be super villains, last adventure they killed D&D versions of the Invaders, they've encounter an Eberron version of Hellboy, and got to spit in the elven god's eye. So while this means I can usually plunk down an adventure pretty damn quick, I can't bring this thing to an end any time soon. There's lots more that has to happen in the narrative.

So the fate of our group may be shaky after today. Will we continue on with new members, leaving only three of the six original members? Or will we start over. I really want to bring these narratives to a close. My campaigns tend to be run like television show that get canceled before the big secret is revealed. In some ways that's good, they are always remembered fondly. But I yearn for closure on the ideas and sharing the way that I think it's going to come out.