So, why do I read people bitching about Psions everywhere? They don't seem broken to me...is it just a grognardism issue?
Mind Thrust and Dishearten are the two most broken powers in 4E. By epic, they impose a respective -8 penalty to all defenses or attacks until the end of the psions next turn and can be used like this at-will for the entire encounter. This is basically chronically game breaking because with the way 4E is designed, a -8 penalty to all defenses is an unstoppable tactical nuke that prevents that creature from functioning as a coherent threat again for the rest of the encounter.
This has been fixed simply with better power design - all of the most broken powers come from before psionic power and will be addressed (IIRC) in the October errata.
So, in preparation (and, fine, excitement for getting to seriously GM a game again) I've been poking about the world of D&D Blogs. And aside from the usual crazies poking and prodding and playing pinata with the 3e hive, all I've really stumbled upon are blogs upon blogs of mechanical stuff.
Now, you may not know me from such roleplaying sessions as "Wait, What Did My Character Do?" and, "Man, I Want All The Beer In The World!", but you'll know that I'm the kind of guy that thrives off of fluff. I like mechanics to the degree that they're there, and they do the job they're supposed to do, but I'm not into the sort of crazy engine tinkering, reviewing, and kvetching I've seen most places do. And if they are going to talk fluff? It's all their personal campaigns that don't seem to get very far before they're dropped for whatever reason.
This is mostly the reason that I plan on running the two campaigngs I was outlining earlier entirely as six session affairs; anything more, I'll get bored and start clawing at the wallpaper.
Why such a dearth of fluff out there? Is it because there's more common ground when you're talking mechanics? Or do we really need the nth iteration of "Here's why 3e sucks when compared to 4e" or "here's how to make your players pay attention."
About the only one that I've stumbled upon is My Girlfriend's A GM, and that's because they do quick little blog entries about their campaigns and utilize tons of art to do so (and their banner is from the Shadowrun 4a core, and it's one of my favorite illustrations in gaming right now).
Is it really that hard to get a fluff / inspirational blog off the ground for gaming? I dunno.
Meanwhile, I'll just start filling my blog with all of the useless stuff I'll be writing for Project Fire or Water...
Did you not read the campaign archives I posted? They have a lot of fluff in them...
Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
edited September 2010
They should have just kept it to Augment 1 and 2, with maybe a 3 or so and cut the number of PPs you gain as you level in half. That way there's no encouragement to keep early heroic at-wills and augment the fuck out of them with your bajillon power points because the later ones will have better effects for the same cost.
I man really, encounter powers "cost" the same all the way up the scale; you get one use per encounter. Psionics OTOH effectively get half-price encounter powers by the end of the tiers, plus they have ridiculous flexibility in that they can "burn" an unfavourable "encounter power" to get back one they really need, any number of times. For most classes that's a mid-paragon daily effect, not a level one class feature.
I figure that if I'm going to post one negative nancy post, that I should at least do something positive paula post to make up for it. So, I'll give you the blogs I actually do read for whatever reasons...
4eblogs.com is an aggregate of a bunch of DnD4e blogs that cover the basics. I check in here for news I don't catch from you guys.
Greg Bilsland's blog. One of the designers for 4e, who always seems to have something interesting to say, usually a nice twist on either playing, campaigning, or monster creating. Dude behind parts of MM3.
Sly Flourish. Lots of creative DM'ing tips, with reviews every so often.
Points of Light. Lots and lots of reviews, occasional discussion of what games he's running. Also does good summaries of material in Dungeon and Dragon, which is good way to remember that there's more to DDi then just the character builder (guilty).
My Girlfriend Is A GM, which I've already mentioned. Some reviews, lots of talk about the campaigns the two are running, highlights of particular artists (which I'm a fan of) and also talks a little about the gaming scene in the Phillipines. My favorite find so far, and not just because they have a great Shadowrun image as their banner.
Squaremans. Which is mostly a movie review blog, but when he talks about gaming, he's usually pretty spot on about things. His most current post about rebuilding the gaming network is spot the eff on. I know I've linked to this dude before.
Keep On The Gaming Lands, Mike Mearls' personal gaming blog. He doesn't update this or his Livejournal often (what? I'm not a stalker) but he does talk some interesting 4e stuff when he does. He comes up with a lot of great "twists" on baseline 4e, and occasionally he likes to talk about 4e through the lens of grognardia, which I always find interesting.
Sarah Darkmagic is good for gaming from a newbie GM point of view.
And finally, if you're craving some old school inspiration and lore, Grognardia, and Jeff Rients' blogs are for you.
That concludes my positive paula posting for the day. Thank you.
ravensmuse on
READ MY BLOG - Web Serial Fantasy - Tabletop Gaming Snips & Reviews - Flea Market Hunting
So, in preparation (and, fine, excitement for getting to seriously GM a game again) I've been poking about the world of D&D Blogs. And aside from the usual crazies poking and prodding and playing pinata with the 3e hive, all I've really stumbled upon are blogs upon blogs of mechanical stuff.
Now, you may not know me from such roleplaying sessions as "Wait, What Did My Character Do?" and, "Man, I Want All The Beer In The World!", but you'll know that I'm the kind of guy that thrives off of fluff. I like mechanics to the degree that they're there, and they do the job they're supposed to do, but I'm not into the sort of crazy engine tinkering, reviewing, and kvetching I've seen most places do. And if they are going to talk fluff? It's all their personal campaigns that don't seem to get very far before they're dropped for whatever reason.
This is mostly the reason that I plan on running the two campaigngs I was outlining earlier entirely as six session affairs; anything more, I'll get bored and start clawing at the wallpaper.
Why such a dearth of fluff out there? Is it because there's more common ground when you're talking mechanics? Or do we really need the nth iteration of "Here's why 3e sucks when compared to 4e" or "here's how to make your players pay attention."
About the only one that I've stumbled upon is My Girlfriend's A GM, and that's because they do quick little blog entries about their campaigns and utilize tons of art to do so (and their banner is from the Shadowrun 4a core, and it's one of my favorite illustrations in gaming right now).
Is it really that hard to get a fluff / inspirational blog off the ground for gaming? I dunno.
Meanwhile, I'll just start filling my blog with all of the useless stuff I'll be writing for Project Fire or Water...
Did you not read the campaign archives I posted? They have a lot of fluff in them...
No, I've followed the link, and I'm slowly reading through them. Only so much time in the evening, especially when you've got a hurricane bearing down your way
ravensmuse on
READ MY BLOG - Web Serial Fantasy - Tabletop Gaming Snips & Reviews - Flea Market Hunting
So, A personal opinion, I think the only Dwarf Fighter is a Battlevigor Fighter. Well not the ONLY, but they're fantastic.
However, since you've only got the option to retrain this guy, Lets work with what we've got.
Grabbing two dragons at once and holding them down for several turns while your team pummels them from relative safety is about as badass as a dude without magic will ever be.
I saw the Ravenloft boxed set today at my FLGS. If there wasn't a combination of "I'll never have a group together to use this" and "ow, $65" I might have picked it up.
I'm just imagining a goblin with a hardhat and clipboard demanding that the fighters wrap their swords in Nerf and that everyone (including enemies) put on eye and ear protection before the wizard can use bursts and blasts.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
I kept toying with a plotline where someone was trying to unionize The Guild, but I never actually ran it.
I wanted to run a late-paragon adventure in which one of the party remembers is invited to be the keynote speaker at a Khorvaire Adventurers Convention, and all hell breaks loose.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
edited September 2010
Also, Conrad would have been such a union buster. Oh my god.
My current side project is fleshing out an idea I've had for a while. A setting that is basically a plane-hopping corporate hell. PCs would be prospectors or security forces or something. Each of them sponsored (or wholly owned) by a corporation. Arcane classes would need service providers, Divine characters would buy into holy (or unholy) franchises, etc.
The problem is that it's a lot more work than putting out something closer to traditional fantasy. For both me and the players.
I think one of the less obvious reasons I don't see people talking about fluff is that there's not so much understand of the mechanics of story, especially interactive story.
A lot of people can do maths, especially geeks, and realise that 4d6 has a similar average to 2d12+1 and that the curve is different, but less of us think about what that means for a player, e.g. if a monster is swingier it's scarier, plus it evokes randomness and so might work well thematically on a chaotic or berserking monster. If a monster is more predictable it lends itself to planning - even if it outclasses the PC planning may save the day.
Another example is foreshadowing. I've been getting steadily better as a 4e DM, I think, and this is one of the ways. For example, when my players are going to fight in a room with terrible hazards, I've had them walk through it (unoccupied) on the way somewhere. Then they get into a fight on the way back. They accept it much better this way. Sometimes it's quite subtle - a lot of green things followed by a poison trap. An encounter with squabbling, selfish goblins foreshadows a later betrayal by an NPC ally.
I've been using NPCs to take the blame for DM fiat and railroading. At the moment my PCs are trapped underground. They were exploring an old building buried in a cave, which became accessible due to an earthquake. There have been lots of small quakes all the time (foreshadowing). After a semi-conclusion to the dungeoneering, they get an Animal Messenger message from their patron (a divination specialist) telling them there's a big quake coming and trouble with the local mercenary Free Company, and they should get out ASAP.
On the way back, they run into some of those mercs, throwing their weight around, demanding the PCs loot as taxes for the local Duke, and generally being dicks while blocking the exit. Eventually, of course, a fight breaks out, and the roof caves in, trapping the PCs. But now they blame the mercs, not me. And while they are delving even deeper in order to find another way back home, they are planning how to fuck over the mercs.
Hell, even my Skill Challenges are designed to be mathematically simple but evocative and create story.
I'm not saying I'm a great DM or anything, but I think some of this stuff is just alien to most geeks. In one of the long campaign stories, there's someone trying to do The Spanish Prisoner con on the PCs. I'm a little obsessed with cons, and a lot of DMing does remind me of cons, the selling, the manipulation of the marks to get them to believe it's their own idea etc etc.
Another part of fluff is world-building, and I find most D&D world-building to just be terrible, literarily speaking. That's why I'm so impressed with Dark Sun. It's evocative, it's easy to imagine, it recalls other powerful fictions, it has some of the Aristotelian Unities kinda going on, it has colours and smells and other sensory info which feed into storyline, it has imagery that isn't trite...
My world-building is rubbish, from the traditional D&D PoV. No maps, no histories, no homebrew anything. But the little I have written is chosen for foreshadowing, imagery and evocation. (e.g. a couple of adventures ago some people in a tavern were going on about how an adventurer found a dragon's egg in a cave and got rich, which helped the PCs to end up in this cave that is going oh so badly for them).
Anyway, I'm rambling even more than usual but my real point is fluff is awesome and we should talk about it more.
One of those links ended up linking to the Escapist.
It was an interesting read, talking about agency and fun and how the DM can't railroad forever, no matter how good a manipulator he is.
At first I wanted to disagree, and then I remembered Peter Jackson talking about LOTR and the hobbits. About how if a magician uses the same tricks every time he gets found out. So he used a bunch for making the hobbits look short.
So of course that made me think that a DM needs to vary the tricks. The stuff I talked about in my last post, and giving the PCs agency, and more.
one of the principles i use in games (like movies) is that things happen at "the speed of plot"
for example, you're galloping at full speed toward whatever terrible danger you're trying to thwart
or you're trying to attack the death star to stop in from blowing up Yavin IV
or you're being pursued by wraiths with a sick hobbit with little time left
do you make it just in time?
were you just a little too late?
did you show up just early enough to make preparations and turn a terrible loss into against-all-odds victory?
it's not a matter of mechanics... it's that you arrive precisely when you are meant to. At the time when its' best for a good story or the right kind of drama.
My current side project is fleshing out an idea I've had for a while. A setting that is basically a plane-hopping corporate hell. PCs would be prospectors or security forces or something. Each of them sponsored (or wholly owned) by a corporation. Arcane classes would need service providers, Divine characters would buy into holy (or unholy) franchises, etc.
The problem is that it's a lot more work than putting out something closer to traditional fantasy. For both me and the players.
That sounds really fun.
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
edited September 2010
Unless you are an unusually gifted improviser, your only real options besides railroading are 1) the illusion of choice or 2) real choice that is in some way constrained (you can go here, here, or here. pick one)
Unless you are an unusually gifted improviser, your only real options besides railroading are 1) the illusion of choice or 2) real choice that is in some way constrained (you can go here, here, or here. pick one)
Well, the nature of the game itself imposes constraints.
I talk to a lot of GMs that claim to run a "freeform, sandbox" game, but when it's really examined those games really just break down into a regular game with extra, unused plot hooks. The reality of the situation is that even with "absolute freedom" players are still constrained by what they know of the world, and they get that from the DM.
I mean, one guy might decide he wants to run out into the street and dance a jig for the rest of the session, but you've still got to tell him where that street is, whether he's dodging traffic to do it and what passes for a jig in his native culture.
Unless you are an unusually gifted improviser, your only real options besides railroading are 1) the illusion of choice or 2) real choice that is in some way constrained (you can go here, here, or here. pick one)
Well, the nature of the game itself imposes constraints.
I talk to a lot of GMs that claim to run a "freeform, sandbox" game, but when it's really examined those games really just break down into a regular game with extra, unused plot hooks. The reality of the situation is that even with "absolute freedom" players are still constrained by what they know of the world, and they get that from the DM.
I mean, one guy might decide he wants to run out into the street and dance a jig for the rest of the session, but you've still got to tell him where that street is, whether he's dodging traffic to do it and what passes for a jig in his native culture.
As long as you only come up with the initial plot hooks and keep everything loose, you can let the players dictate a lot of how the hook continues to unfold. Give them a nebulous goal and let them figure out how to execute it.
Unless you are an unusually gifted improviser, your only real options besides railroading are 1) the illusion of choice or 2) real choice that is in some way constrained (you can go here, here, or here. pick one)
Well, the nature of the game itself imposes constraints.
I talk to a lot of GMs that claim to run a "freeform, sandbox" game, but when it's really examined those games really just break down into a regular game with extra, unused plot hooks. The reality of the situation is that even with "absolute freedom" players are still constrained by what they know of the world, and they get that from the DM.
I mean, one guy might decide he wants to run out into the street and dance a jig for the rest of the session, but you've still got to tell him where that street is, whether he's dodging traffic to do it and what passes for a jig in his native culture.
As long as you only come up with the initial plot hooks and keep everything loose, you can let the players dictate a lot of how the hook continues to unfold. Give them a nebulous goal and let them figure out how to execute it.
Often, their speculations becomes better than when you might not have planned in the first place.
And then, when whatever insidious plot they had suspected rears its ugly head later in the campaign...
They are going to be so stoked that they had figured it out, and also think that you are a pretty great DM.
Unless you are an unusually gifted improviser, your only real options besides railroading are 1) the illusion of choice or 2) real choice that is in some way constrained (you can go here, here, or here. pick one)
Well, the nature of the game itself imposes constraints.
I talk to a lot of GMs that claim to run a "freeform, sandbox" game, but when it's really examined those games really just break down into a regular game with extra, unused plot hooks. The reality of the situation is that even with "absolute freedom" players are still constrained by what they know of the world, and they get that from the DM.
I mean, one guy might decide he wants to run out into the street and dance a jig for the rest of the session, but you've still got to tell him where that street is, whether he's dodging traffic to do it and what passes for a jig in his native culture.
As long as you only come up with the initial plot hooks and keep everything loose, you can let the players dictate a lot of how the hook continues to unfold. Give them a nebulous goal and let them figure out how to execute it.
Often, their speculations becomes better than when you might not have planned in the first place.
And then, when whatever insidious plot they had suspected rears its ugly head later in the campaign...
They are going to be so stoked that they had figured it out, and also think that you are a pretty great DM.
I have done this more than a few times.
My players have Xanatos Gambited themselves into near TPKs on several occasions.
Edit: I even had one campaign set in the ruins of the old campaign after the first set of PCs had failed to foil the plot they came up with.
Unless you are an unusually gifted improviser, your only real options besides railroading are 1) the illusion of choice or 2) real choice that is in some way constrained (you can go here, here, or here. pick one)
Well, the nature of the game itself imposes constraints.
I talk to a lot of GMs that claim to run a "freeform, sandbox" game, but when it's really examined those games really just break down into a regular game with extra, unused plot hooks. The reality of the situation is that even with "absolute freedom" players are still constrained by what they know of the world, and they get that from the DM.
I mean, one guy might decide he wants to run out into the street and dance a jig for the rest of the session, but you've still got to tell him where that street is, whether he's dodging traffic to do it and what passes for a jig in his native culture.
As long as you only come up with the initial plot hooks and keep everything loose, you can let the players dictate a lot of how the hook continues to unfold. Give them a nebulous goal and let them figure out how to execute it.
Often, their speculations becomes better than when you might not have planned in the first place.
And then, when whatever insidious plot they had suspected rears its ugly head later in the campaign...
They are going to be so stoked that they had figured it out, and also think that you are a pretty great DM.
I have done this more than a few times.
My players have Xanatos Gambited themselves into near TPKs on several occasions.
Edit: I even had one campaign set in the ruins of the old campaign after the first set of PCs had failed to foil the plot they came up with.
hahaha they came up with an plot that was too insidious to thwart... they did it to themselves!
Or you can throw a bunch of plot hooks at a group and have them take a throwaway comment as a plot hook. Which is how our group ended up "freeing the booze". It was a glorious campaign that included us crashing one of the mountain city things - all in the name of freeing the booze.
Kistra on
Animal Crossing: City Folk Lissa in Filmore 3179-9580-0076
I saw the Ravenloft boxed set today at my FLGS. If there wasn't a combination of "I'll never have a group together to use this" and "ow, $65" I might have picked it up.
I was taken aback by the price tag, too. I instantly went from "I want to buy this" to "ZOMGWTFUX?!".
I just went to a store that has lots and lots of RPG stuff, including stuff from older editions of D&D (such as the Player's Option series for AD&D 2E, that weird Jakandor setting, and one of the old Dark Sun box sets). When I have time I'm going to go back there and look through the older stuff for ideas that might be interesting in 4E.
I wonder how well a PbP of the Ravenloft box would go.
It'd be fun with good RPers, but it'd be weird int he sense that there's no real GM. I'm going to build the game in Maptool and get some people playing it. Probably be really easy to homebrew scenarios too.
I don't actually get to buy it for another month, though T_T
smeej on
IT'S A SAD THING THAT YOUR ADVENTURES HAVE ENDED HERE!!
My players have Xanatos Gambited themselves into near TPKs on several occasions.
Edit: I even had one campaign set in the ruins of the old campaign after the first set of PCs had failed to foil the plot they came up with.
I'd love to hear more about this. What did they do?
It's kind of a long story, like you'd expect.
Basically, I had a homebrew world that was kind of an Imperial Japanese, European Crusades mashup. The twist was that the entire campaign setting (as far as the players knew) was ruled by elf clans, each dedicated to a specific type of dragon. Just chromatics and metallics, none of the weird ones, and not all of them were represented. But there were 8 or 10, I can't remember. There were also no true gods, clans just had clerics that served their dragons. Nobody but elves (and the occasional half elf) were allowed to cast spells at all. Dwarves were farmers and required to shave all their hair and facial hair, as a permanent punishment for a rebellion millenia ago. Halflings were completely unknown to the world at large, and were kept alive as a species for use in inter-clan assassinations. Gnomes were an under-race of bureaucrats, etc. It was supposed to be a huge departure from "traditional" D&D because by that point (this was like 2003) I'd gotten pretty tired of playing straight 3rd.
Anyway, I had these grand plans for this setting. Players were going to be the ones that first contacted the deities of the plane, united the underclasses in a rebellion, tore down the empire and built something better in its place, etc. Big battles, roleplaying of treaties and all that jazz. I didn't know exactly where it was going, but I knew it was going to be awesome.
So we set off. And the players head out to the hinterlands, meet the dwarves, get in some scuffles with the local wildlife. Now, remember, the point here was to do stuff I hadn't been doing. For me specifically, that meant using monsters I hadn't use. Specifically, I used a lot of stuff like otyughs and beholders and things. Aberrations.
Moving on through the campaign, PCs encounter the gods, which I play up as the congealed psychic residue of the sapient species in this world, broken up into aspects that each took a couple of domains not unlike the gods from other worlds. Importantly to the metaplot, one of the PCs becomes the first cleric of the god of healing and restoration via multiclass.
So now the PCs are on a crusade. They're spreading the gospel and fighting the occasional imperial patrol while working to build an army. And in their travels they consistently run into more odd creatures that they weren't seeing in my other games. It's important to note at this point that while this was my plan, it wasn't some nefarious metaplot thing. I was actually just trying stuff out that I hadn't gotten to before with my plot driven games having rather tight spectrums of enemies and I had all these books full of great stuff that never got played. Cue the aberrations again, since that was the stuff I never used.
So after a few months of play they've got their army, backed by their new gods, and they're taking the fight straight to the empire. Lots of scenes of the PCs valiantly fighting against elves and their draconic allies, pushing from the hinterlands in toward the capital city. Pretty soon, it's the big showdown. PCs vs the draconic council (made up of the highest ranking mages of the elves and some actual dragons). The players are gearing up for this fight, which I had totally intended to happen, when the guy who was playing the cleric of all people decided "no wait, this is too easy."
So he lays down this stream of consciousness shadow plotline based on the early encounters with aberrations, the centralized nature of the society, various social observations they'd made (creation myths of various races and whatnot) and basically convinces the rest of the party that there's a deeper threat at work here that they need to deal with. One that he hasn't completely pieced together, but which involves a vast conspiracy of mind controlling aberrations and a false history for the entire world as they know it.
Cue a complete switch of modes for the campaign. Dude renounces his god, who he is convinced is manipulating him to for its own gain (which to his credit was entirely true, but not in the way he thought). The PCs send emissaries to the empire, barter a truce, then set about picking the brains of any NPC who might know about everything related to the creation of the world and the odd creatures that inhabit it (note that these character wouldn't have actually found them odd, that portion was metathought by the players). I drop a few vague hints, let them piece things together, as the human mind is want to do, and suddenly we're off again.
Where? The hinterlands. Why? Because the gods are actually the psychic constructs of the true masters of this realm, meant to coerce and control all sapient life. Masters? Oh yeah, it's the Aboleths. Aboleths? Seriously, what else enslaves creatures on the Astral Plane. Astral Plane? Oh, that's where we've decided we are now. This entire campaign setting is an island in the astral plane set up by aberrations as a brain farm.
Cue GM mouth agape.
So we rolled out, rebel and imperial, to fight the insidious aboleth conspiracy that I as DM was just now finding out about.
I spent the next month and a half disassembling their coalition with one mind-control based intrigue after another until it fell apart. And without the help of the gods, the rebels had no way of standing against the imperials and their magic, so they got reconquered just in time to be used as cannon fodder against the waves of illithids and beholders that started swarming up out of the very earth (or not earth, since this was the astral plane now) to assault the newly reformed empire.
We picked up the next campaign during the siege on the the imperial capital city.
Posts
Mind Thrust and Dishearten are the two most broken powers in 4E. By epic, they impose a respective -8 penalty to all defenses or attacks until the end of the psions next turn and can be used like this at-will for the entire encounter. This is basically chronically game breaking because with the way 4E is designed, a -8 penalty to all defenses is an unstoppable tactical nuke that prevents that creature from functioning as a coherent threat again for the rest of the encounter.
This has been fixed simply with better power design - all of the most broken powers come from before psionic power and will be addressed (IIRC) in the October errata.
Did you not read the campaign archives I posted? They have a lot of fluff in them...
again: http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=116836
I man really, encounter powers "cost" the same all the way up the scale; you get one use per encounter. Psionics OTOH effectively get half-price encounter powers by the end of the tiers, plus they have ridiculous flexibility in that they can "burn" an unfavourable "encounter power" to get back one they really need, any number of times. For most classes that's a mid-paragon daily effect, not a level one class feature.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
4eblogs.com is an aggregate of a bunch of DnD4e blogs that cover the basics. I check in here for news I don't catch from you guys.
Greg Bilsland's blog. One of the designers for 4e, who always seems to have something interesting to say, usually a nice twist on either playing, campaigning, or monster creating. Dude behind parts of MM3.
Sly Flourish. Lots of creative DM'ing tips, with reviews every so often.
Points of Light. Lots and lots of reviews, occasional discussion of what games he's running. Also does good summaries of material in Dungeon and Dragon, which is good way to remember that there's more to DDi then just the character builder (guilty).
My Girlfriend Is A GM, which I've already mentioned. Some reviews, lots of talk about the campaigns the two are running, highlights of particular artists (which I'm a fan of) and also talks a little about the gaming scene in the Phillipines. My favorite find so far, and not just because they have a great Shadowrun image as their banner.
Squaremans. Which is mostly a movie review blog, but when he talks about gaming, he's usually pretty spot on about things. His most current post about rebuilding the gaming network is spot the eff on. I know I've linked to this dude before.
Keep On The Gaming Lands, Mike Mearls' personal gaming blog. He doesn't update this or his Livejournal often (what? I'm not a stalker) but he does talk some interesting 4e stuff when he does. He comes up with a lot of great "twists" on baseline 4e, and occasionally he likes to talk about 4e through the lens of grognardia, which I always find interesting.
Sarah Darkmagic is good for gaming from a newbie GM point of view.
And finally, if you're craving some old school inspiration and lore, Grognardia, and Jeff Rients' blogs are for you.
That concludes my positive paula posting for the day. Thank you.
No, I've followed the link, and I'm slowly reading through them. Only so much time in the evening, especially when you've got a hurricane bearing down your way
Grabbing two dragons at once and holding them down for several turns while your team pummels them from relative safety is about as badass as a dude without magic will ever be.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I saw the Ravenloft boxed set today at my FLGS. If there wasn't a combination of "I'll never have a group together to use this" and "ow, $65" I might have picked it up.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I was expecting something in line with the old boxed sets, but this was like .5 cubic yards of game.
It was precariously balanced on the shelf with the other books. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some sort of an OSHA violation.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
This reminds me.
One time we cracked a joke about it being a serious OSHA violation that we didn't have a cleric in our party.
I haven't been able to get the idea of adventurer OSHA out of my head since. Maybe someday I'll run a light-hearted campaign and include them.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I wanted to run a late-paragon adventure in which one of the party remembers is invited to be the keynote speaker at a Khorvaire Adventurers Convention, and all hell breaks loose.
The problem is that it's a lot more work than putting out something closer to traditional fantasy. For both me and the players.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
A lot of people can do maths, especially geeks, and realise that 4d6 has a similar average to 2d12+1 and that the curve is different, but less of us think about what that means for a player, e.g. if a monster is swingier it's scarier, plus it evokes randomness and so might work well thematically on a chaotic or berserking monster. If a monster is more predictable it lends itself to planning - even if it outclasses the PC planning may save the day.
Another example is foreshadowing. I've been getting steadily better as a 4e DM, I think, and this is one of the ways. For example, when my players are going to fight in a room with terrible hazards, I've had them walk through it (unoccupied) on the way somewhere. Then they get into a fight on the way back. They accept it much better this way. Sometimes it's quite subtle - a lot of green things followed by a poison trap. An encounter with squabbling, selfish goblins foreshadows a later betrayal by an NPC ally.
I've been using NPCs to take the blame for DM fiat and railroading. At the moment my PCs are trapped underground. They were exploring an old building buried in a cave, which became accessible due to an earthquake. There have been lots of small quakes all the time (foreshadowing). After a semi-conclusion to the dungeoneering, they get an Animal Messenger message from their patron (a divination specialist) telling them there's a big quake coming and trouble with the local mercenary Free Company, and they should get out ASAP.
On the way back, they run into some of those mercs, throwing their weight around, demanding the PCs loot as taxes for the local Duke, and generally being dicks while blocking the exit. Eventually, of course, a fight breaks out, and the roof caves in, trapping the PCs. But now they blame the mercs, not me. And while they are delving even deeper in order to find another way back home, they are planning how to fuck over the mercs.
Hell, even my Skill Challenges are designed to be mathematically simple but evocative and create story.
I'm not saying I'm a great DM or anything, but I think some of this stuff is just alien to most geeks. In one of the long campaign stories, there's someone trying to do The Spanish Prisoner con on the PCs. I'm a little obsessed with cons, and a lot of DMing does remind me of cons, the selling, the manipulation of the marks to get them to believe it's their own idea etc etc.
Another part of fluff is world-building, and I find most D&D world-building to just be terrible, literarily speaking. That's why I'm so impressed with Dark Sun. It's evocative, it's easy to imagine, it recalls other powerful fictions, it has some of the Aristotelian Unities kinda going on, it has colours and smells and other sensory info which feed into storyline, it has imagery that isn't trite...
My world-building is rubbish, from the traditional D&D PoV. No maps, no histories, no homebrew anything. But the little I have written is chosen for foreshadowing, imagery and evocation. (e.g. a couple of adventures ago some people in a tavern were going on about how an adventurer found a dragon's egg in a cave and got rich, which helped the PCs to end up in this cave that is going oh so badly for them).
Anyway, I'm rambling even more than usual but my real point is fluff is awesome and we should talk about it more.
It was an interesting read, talking about agency and fun and how the DM can't railroad forever, no matter how good a manipulator he is.
At first I wanted to disagree, and then I remembered Peter Jackson talking about LOTR and the hobbits. About how if a magician uses the same tricks every time he gets found out. So he used a bunch for making the hobbits look short.
So of course that made me think that a DM needs to vary the tricks. The stuff I talked about in my last post, and giving the PCs agency, and more.
What other 'DM tricks' do you guys have?
one of the principles i use in games (like movies) is that things happen at "the speed of plot"
for example, you're galloping at full speed toward whatever terrible danger you're trying to thwart
or you're trying to attack the death star to stop in from blowing up Yavin IV
or you're being pursued by wraiths with a sick hobbit with little time left
do you make it just in time?
were you just a little too late?
did you show up just early enough to make preparations and turn a terrible loss into against-all-odds victory?
it's not a matter of mechanics... it's that you arrive precisely when you are meant to. At the time when its' best for a good story or the right kind of drama.
that sort of thing.
Everything is more powerful when the players think they have a direct impact on the outcome, regardless of the reality.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
That sounds really fun.
I talk to a lot of GMs that claim to run a "freeform, sandbox" game, but when it's really examined those games really just break down into a regular game with extra, unused plot hooks. The reality of the situation is that even with "absolute freedom" players are still constrained by what they know of the world, and they get that from the DM.
I mean, one guy might decide he wants to run out into the street and dance a jig for the rest of the session, but you've still got to tell him where that street is, whether he's dodging traffic to do it and what passes for a jig in his native culture.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
As long as you only come up with the initial plot hooks and keep everything loose, you can let the players dictate a lot of how the hook continues to unfold. Give them a nebulous goal and let them figure out how to execute it.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Often, their speculations becomes better than when you might not have planned in the first place.
And then, when whatever insidious plot they had suspected rears its ugly head later in the campaign...
They are going to be so stoked that they had figured it out, and also think that you are a pretty great DM.
My players have Xanatos Gambited themselves into near TPKs on several occasions.
Edit: I even had one campaign set in the ruins of the old campaign after the first set of PCs had failed to foil the plot they came up with.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
it would be cool if you gave preference for new players IMO
since... well, that's kinda the thing for the essentials box
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
hahaha they came up with an plot that was too insidious to thwart... they did it to themselves!
I was taken aback by the price tag, too. I instantly went from "I want to buy this" to "ZOMGWTFUX?!".
I just went to a store that has lots and lots of RPG stuff, including stuff from older editions of D&D (such as the Player's Option series for AD&D 2E, that weird Jakandor setting, and one of the old Dark Sun box sets). When I have time I'm going to go back there and look through the older stuff for ideas that might be interesting in 4E.
I'd love to hear more about this. What did they do?
Yeah, except there aren't a lot of new players who post in this forum. :P
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
Yeah.
I don't actually get to buy it for another month, though T_T
Anyway, I had these grand plans for this setting. Players were going to be the ones that first contacted the deities of the plane, united the underclasses in a rebellion, tore down the empire and built something better in its place, etc. Big battles, roleplaying of treaties and all that jazz. I didn't know exactly where it was going, but I knew it was going to be awesome.
So we set off. And the players head out to the hinterlands, meet the dwarves, get in some scuffles with the local wildlife. Now, remember, the point here was to do stuff I hadn't been doing. For me specifically, that meant using monsters I hadn't use. Specifically, I used a lot of stuff like otyughs and beholders and things. Aberrations.
Moving on through the campaign, PCs encounter the gods, which I play up as the congealed psychic residue of the sapient species in this world, broken up into aspects that each took a couple of domains not unlike the gods from other worlds. Importantly to the metaplot, one of the PCs becomes the first cleric of the god of healing and restoration via multiclass.
So now the PCs are on a crusade. They're spreading the gospel and fighting the occasional imperial patrol while working to build an army. And in their travels they consistently run into more odd creatures that they weren't seeing in my other games. It's important to note at this point that while this was my plan, it wasn't some nefarious metaplot thing. I was actually just trying stuff out that I hadn't gotten to before with my plot driven games having rather tight spectrums of enemies and I had all these books full of great stuff that never got played. Cue the aberrations again, since that was the stuff I never used.
So after a few months of play they've got their army, backed by their new gods, and they're taking the fight straight to the empire. Lots of scenes of the PCs valiantly fighting against elves and their draconic allies, pushing from the hinterlands in toward the capital city. Pretty soon, it's the big showdown. PCs vs the draconic council (made up of the highest ranking mages of the elves and some actual dragons). The players are gearing up for this fight, which I had totally intended to happen, when the guy who was playing the cleric of all people decided "no wait, this is too easy."
So he lays down this stream of consciousness shadow plotline based on the early encounters with aberrations, the centralized nature of the society, various social observations they'd made (creation myths of various races and whatnot) and basically convinces the rest of the party that there's a deeper threat at work here that they need to deal with. One that he hasn't completely pieced together, but which involves a vast conspiracy of mind controlling aberrations and a false history for the entire world as they know it.
Cue a complete switch of modes for the campaign. Dude renounces his god, who he is convinced is manipulating him to for its own gain (which to his credit was entirely true, but not in the way he thought). The PCs send emissaries to the empire, barter a truce, then set about picking the brains of any NPC who might know about everything related to the creation of the world and the odd creatures that inhabit it (note that these character wouldn't have actually found them odd, that portion was metathought by the players). I drop a few vague hints, let them piece things together, as the human mind is want to do, and suddenly we're off again.
Where? The hinterlands. Why? Because the gods are actually the psychic constructs of the true masters of this realm, meant to coerce and control all sapient life. Masters? Oh yeah, it's the Aboleths. Aboleths? Seriously, what else enslaves creatures on the Astral Plane. Astral Plane? Oh, that's where we've decided we are now. This entire campaign setting is an island in the astral plane set up by aberrations as a brain farm.
Cue GM mouth agape.
So we rolled out, rebel and imperial, to fight the insidious aboleth conspiracy that I as DM was just now finding out about.
I spent the next month and a half disassembling their coalition with one mind-control based intrigue after another until it fell apart. And without the help of the gods, the rebels had no way of standing against the imperials and their magic, so they got reconquered just in time to be used as cannon fodder against the waves of illithids and beholders that started swarming up out of the very earth (or not earth, since this was the astral plane now) to assault the newly reformed empire.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.