Stop Talking About 6th Edition Or I'll Burn This Place to the Ground: A Rant

I am starting to see it more and more, now: despite the fact that there are no stated plans to do this, a small but insistent clutch of Internet pundits and YouTube Personalities are calling out for a 6th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Nate Howe's article on CBR and Professor Dungeon Master on the Dungeon Craft Youtube channel are the most vocal champions, but there are a lot others out there. I'm no Internet influencer or Big Name Personality in the Gaming world, or any other world, really; I'm just a guy with a small following and a 'zine I am working on. But I have to say this, as respectfully as I can, in the hopes that my small cadre of fans might see fit to amply my voice with the following directive: please shut the fuck up about this.

Monty Haul #1 is Alive and Kicking

You can scuttle over to DriveThruRPG right now and pick up a copy here!

Monty Haul #1 is a 'zine dedicated to expanding your options for fantasy table-top role-playing. Issue 1 focuse on magic-users and includes campaign notes on creating magical cities that feel magical, new archetype options for warlocks (the King in Yellow patron), sorcerers (Eldritch Ancestry), and Wizards (the school of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know). 

Two new backgrounds are aslo including, along with a new rule set for dealing with alchemists and apothecaries. A rules light NPC reaction system and a collection of magical pests to plague your mages with rounds out the issue. 48 jam-packed pages in all!

It's a kaleidoscope of usable options, written in a conversational style and grounded in the gaming days of yore. If by "yore" we're talking about the early 1980's, that is. Monty Haul is suitable for discerning DMs and players of the fifth edition of the world's most popular fantasy rpg. 

If you pick up a copy, please let me know what you think. Also, please consider writing a short review on the site. It really does help. Okay, I'm working on issue 2 as we speak! Lots to format. I may not get everything into the issue...what to do, what to do? 

Monty Haul Zero Issue now available!

For those of you were on the fence about whether or not to back my recent Kickstarter campaign, you can now take a look at what I was driving at: Monty Haul #0 is now digitally available.

Monty Haul #0 is a Proof-of-Concept issue, full of assorted optional rules, backgrounds for characters, and more! Featuring a new take on familiars, two new cleric domains, a simple and not-so-deadly critical hit system, the Divine Archeologist archetype for rogues, and several new backgrounds including an expanded trio of options for the noble: dilettante, disgraced noble, and knight errant! Also included is a Noble Family House generator to quickly design interesting families to plague your nobles.

It's a cornucopia of usable options, written in a light and conversational style and grounded in the gaming days of yore. If by "yore" we're talking about the early 1980's. Monty Haul is suitable for discerning DMs and players of the fifth edition of the world's most popular fantasy rpg.

You can get it here, on DriveThruRPG's website.

D&D: Your Dice Will be the Death of Me

In anticipation of the newest hardcover book to drop out of the Official Hopper, the rocket surgeons over at Hasbro have let us in on the newest Official Dice Set that is dropping alongside of the book. Here is a picture of that product.

It's nice, right? Good packaging, and clearly based on the last set to come out, which was the Avernus dice for last year's book. Red dice, for devils, and with a felt-lined box and with some bonus cards or a map or some other damn thing that no one cares about. But, whatever. This is fine, right?

So, why do I want to Thunderwave whoever is in charge of their dice program?

Let's back up a bit. Strap in. This is a dice rant.

It's Official: We're the Cool Kids, Now

I don't know exactly when it happened; maybe sometime last year, around the middle of the summer, but there was a gigantic clicking sound that knocked my vinyl glow-in-the-dark Cthulhu piggy bank right off of my shelf. By the time I'd picked it up, the world had changed.

No, I'm not talking about The Snappening. This wasn't Thanos doing his infinity-gauntlet-beatnik-hand jive. But someone somewhere did something. Maybe it was a tipping point. Maybe it was Joe Manganiello making some talk show appearance in a Tomb of Horrors shirt. Maybe it was Stephen Colbert getting to play D&D for charity with Matt Mercer and geeking out about it. I don't know what, but we aren't a sub-culture any more. Hell, we're not even popular culture. D&D and tabletop gaming are officially mainstream now. And I can prove it with math.

1+1=Pandering 2U

The first salvo was quiet, and you like as not didn't hear it unless you're deep into The Nerdist, Monte Cook, and the Amazon series Carnival Row, one of Amazon Prime's new exclusive series set in alternate history steampunk Victorian London and starring Orlando Bloom. Yeah, I know, I'm practically ovulating just typing those words in sequence.

The series is okay to great, depending largely on where you come down on the topic of alternate history steampunk Victorian London television series starring Orlando Bloom. But it seems that Legendary used its relationship with the Nerdist to do a little demographic mining by getting Monte Cook (yes, THAT Monte Cook) to whip up a splat book for his Cypher System set in the Carnival Row Universe.

This isn't a half-assed effort, either; they put what appears to be production art (though it could well be original material) and stills from the show into this detailed setting designed to get you steampunking with all due expediency. If this sounds like something you'd dig, you can get it for free right here.

If you didn't hear about this, no worries. It's cool, and surprisingly fast (though having the inside track certainly helps with the timing), but the real indicator that we are across the Rubicon is the newest tabletop RPG from Wendy's.

Yep. Wendy's.

I don't know who did it (there is no writing credits listed) but I can very well guess why. Gamers eat fast food, and many of them drive to games every week, and I'm sure a great many of those folks pass by a Wendy's and maybe even swing into the drive-thru lane for a quick burger and fries on their way to thwart evil. I mean, I'm sure of it; I have no real numbers, and neither does Wendy's, for that matter. But someone is clearly (forgive me) rolling the dice that they are achieving heavy market saturation by putting out a complete, full-color role-playing game, available as a free downloadable pdf (and they even did a small print run for New York ComicCon), complete with branded dice (again, at the convention), in the desperate hope of looking cool to their customer base.

The premise of Feast of Legends is simple: you are part of the Kingdom of Wendy's Trademarked realm, which involves flames and fresh meats. Your enemies live in a deep freeze, where their meats are frozen and bear passing resemblances to Wendy's real-world fast food competitors and their somewhat concurrent brand mascots. You resist the powers of cold and ice by belonging to one of the Orders of Wendy's Trademarked Menu Items, which gives you different powers and abilities.

Are you getting this? See, it's a role-playing game! You like those, right? Only, we've cleverly inserted all of our registered trademark shit into it. But you still want to play it, right, because we're subverting expectations by taking pot-shots at our competition, even though the very same battle is being waged daily on Twitter in 280 characters or less.  So it's clever, right?! But we're not trying to be, you know, which is why we paid at least three people to design this game system, do full-color artwork and fifth edition-style layouts, and package this into the most expensive, and yet also most legit-looking freebie in the history of happy meals.

I haven't felt this conflicted since I first saw the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon in 1983. On one hand, I knew that something significant had happened, and on the other hand, I felt like (for the first time, and most certainly not the last) like they had completely missed the point. A little yoda-like old man, called the Dungeon Master? Uni the Unicorn? This was not my world. I didn't know who this was for, really; the younger siblings of the older kids who were actually playing AD&D?

That's how Feast of Legends makes me feel. Only with much better artwork.

The tone of the game is somewhere to the left of tongue-in-cheek, and to the right of outright parody. They play it straight, but the very idea that I can be a character belonging to the Order of the Chicken Nugget is absurd, and that may be what they were aiming for. I don't know.

The game itself is beer and pretzel fare; good for a few hours, and best used in the hands of an expert seat-of-the-pants game master with a quick wit and a penchant for punnery. This, then, becomes a performance piece as your group attempts to out-funny one another, and oh, yeah, the monster is attacking, roll to hit, while you're at it. I can't see playing it more than once under those conditions.

I mean, to make it work right, you'd really need to re-write the enemies so that there's no doubt as to who your players are fighting. And I'd make more of them, too; a horde for every shitty fast food company out there. And of course, the navy is controlled by Long John Silver, who can't stay on deck because he's constantly slinking off to the poop deck, which is, let's be honest, what LJS makes everyone do; shit like a goose). Get it? He's pooping on the poop deck! I got a million of them!

This almost works as a pocket universe to get your existing group sucked into, and play it straight until they figure it all out. Again, one or two nights only. They put a lot of background material in the book, and it's still not enough. To do anything to it would require more effort than the task is worth.

Content-wise, the setting is designed to riff on A Game of Thrones ("you kids are still watching that show, right? About the blonde with the dragons? What's her name again?")  It's too bad that the twitter bots didn't do a pass over the manuscript, because the parodies of the other fast food places don't go nearly far enough. But you can see McDonald's if you squint. It's just not that funny.

So, from a cultural standpoint, this is the Hardware Wars of the 21st century. It gets some stuff right, but it gets a lot more wrong. But this is the place it occupies in the zeitgeist at the moment, a kind of Well-What-Do-You-Know-About-That that's more of a sociological signifier for the uninitiated than the faithful. But they still want you to play the game. And, you know, maybe stream it, with hashtags. Because that's what the cool kids are doing.

And speaking of streaming, the folks I feel the most sorry for are the Critical Role cast. They had to do a dog and pony show with this rule set (I think it was a charity event, but still...). That's not even a double-edged sword. That's a good old-fashioned dagger in the back ("Dance, you circus freaks! Dance for your corporate overlords! Ah Hah Hah HAH HAH HAH!"). This cannot possibly be what Matt Mercer envisioned for himself, nor anyone else on the show, for that matter. It's one thing to be a working voice-over actor in L.A. with a side gig that gets you more likes than your day job; it's quite another to be so good at the side gig that you are courted by the very people who would not put you in one of their commercials. Queen Wendy, indeed.

Well, it's already made the news cycle, and generated a crushing wave of publicity for Wendy's when they most needed it. You can expect that we'll see more things like this in the next 2-3 years. The flood of products and games and pandering is only just beginning. Now we are a demographic, and they have identified a dollar amount that they can reasonably expect to extract from us, like squeezing a naval orange. It's only a matter of time. What form will the Destructor take? No idea. Your only hope is to clear your mind. Don't think of anything. Please...

RPGaDay 2019: 31 Last

I was hoping to stick the landing, here, but this word just…well, again, there’s too much real estate to realistically cover and I am tired. So, in keeping with my brand-new, just-made-it-up tradition of re-writing the 11’s to better serve my needs, Here’s my answers the previous year’s questions for Day 31.

#RPGaDay 2018 31 Why did you take part in RPGaDay 2019

I caught wind of this at the end of last year, when it was far too late to participate, and I vowed to do it up for real next year. This year, in fact. I think I did!

#RPGaDay 2017 31 What do you anticipate for gaming in 2018 2020?

We will know that the industry is out of ideas when Toon gets reworked for “the world’s greatest fantasy role-playing game.” I think more and more people are going to bring their campaign worlds to life using the D&D OGL. That model is what will keep the interest high and also keep the money pool shallow. A perfect cottage industry.

#RPGaDay 2016 31 Best advice you were ever given for your game of choice?

If you don’t like the rule, don’t use it.  That freed me up to concentrate on the stuff that mattered to me.

#RPGaDay 2015 31 Favorite non-RPG thing to come out of RPGing

I love that game theory and game studies are now a real thing at colleges and people far smarter than myself are digging down into the underpinnings of this hobby. It’s fascinating stuff.

#RPGaDay 2014 31 Favorite RPG of all Time

My heart will always belong to Call of Cthulhu. The system is largely unchanged, the mechanics are simple and effective, and the rules reflect that world with just a couple of simple precepts. It’s the only game on the market, before or since, where character death is a fun, interesting and awesome thing because it’s built into the game world and stated up front. Despite its subject matter, it was a tonic during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s because no one ever flipped out when their investigator went mad or got slurped up by a monster. Everyone just laughed about it. Which is good, because it’s just a game.

But it’s a great game. My favorite.

Thanks for playing, everyone. We have some lovely parting gifts. Please sign the guest book on your way out. It would be great if you subscribed to this blog or bookmarked it, too. I'll put more stuff up soon. I promise.

RPGaDay 2019: 29 Evolve

Looking at the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons is pretty interesting. Forty years. Let’s be charitable and say there have been seven iterations of the game, with each successive edition being a zeitgeist of the times. That’s what makes fifth edition so interesting. Sure, in many ways, it’s everything that forth edition wasn’t, but in terms of tone and can-do attitude, it’s more like vintage D&D than any other edition. In this regard, we’ve kind of come full circle.

Likewise, the players have evolved with the game—sort of. I think that gamer larvae start out pretty much the same: “I kill it with my sword!” But thanks to the rich vocabulary that has developed to support role-playing as a cultural pastime, and the highest levels of engagement in the hobby to date, and also a proliferation of tutorials and op-ed YouTube channels and podcasts and all of it, gamer larvae grow into gamer butterflies much faster these days. Or they leave and go back to Grand Theft Auto. But most, I would venture to say, see the value and the appeal of true freedom in gaming. My groups all have. They love God of War, but they talk about their table adventures with the same fervent and reverent tone of voice.

I can’t think of any other game that has tried so hard to keep up with the times. There’s a reason why D&D rules the roost; they have put the sweat equity in. Let’s throw a little love out.

First Edition/BEX/AD&D

This was the awkward, wonky, uneven, crude and strange version of the game and you know what? I still love it. I think it more for nostalgic reasons these days, but there is some great stuff still in the original game system. And there are a lot of old school players who feel that way, because they keep re-re-re-reprinting their version of the game, over and over, changing flavor and updating artwork but keeping all of the charts and tables that seem so quaint in the modern age.

There is still a lot to like about the original game, no matter how tangled its origins. It gets the credit for being the first and it really could not have gone down any other way. The language for role-playing games hadn't been invented yet. The systems for keeping track of things, combat, experience points, even skills--none of it was there. Not until this. And as creaky as it seems, if you sit down with a few friends and start playing it, it'll all come rushing back on you, muscle memory, and you'll be transported again--maybe not to Grayhawk, but definitely back to 1982.

Old gamers, the grognards and the neckbeards, often grumble and kvetch about these kids today not knowing their roots, and my first thought is always, "Oh, you make sitting down with you lecturing them for four hours seem so bloody interesting, it's a mystery why they don't."  I get the seed of their frustration, and I sympathize with it, but I don't blame all of the new gamers. Au contraire, I welcome them. For one thing, they are way less grumpy than a lot of the guys my age, so, right there, I'm on board with the new blood. And if my group gets a taste of the "old school" style adventures and classic modules via 5th edition, they are way more appreciative of my age and experience because I'm not talking down to them. But I digress. We were throwing love, not shade.

Second Edition
Okay, well, we might as well get this out of the way: I felt about this the way most Millennials feel about fourth edition. I didn’t like any part of what happened in Second Edition. Well, except for the artwork. The artwork stepped up, way up, and has stayed great ever since. But I hated the Monster Manual three-ring binder. I hated To Hit Armor Class Zero. I hated the “neutering” of the monsters (no demons or devils—and while I never used them in my games, this was all part of the same campaign that wanted to censor Warner Brothers cartoons and other such nonsense).

By this time I had moved on to other games. We still played AD&D, just not second edition. I did this up until probably 1991 or 1992.  Second edition was for the youngsters, with the new math and all of the fancy artwork. What a weird line in the sand to draw, but hey, that's what your twenties are for, right? 

Third/Three Point Five Edition

While I wasn’t in it at this time, in hindsight, creating the Open Game License was the smartest thing they ever did. I know that because I was selling it to game and comic shops at this time, and it was like a whole new game. Now, did that kinda backfire on them, eventually? Yeah, it did. Players (and DMs) felt the “keeping up with the Joneses” vibe in that there was always a new book coming out with new feats and three spells and you just had to have it all. Might have been great for Wizards of the Coast's bottom line, but it looked like a cash grab to me (at the time).

There are still a number of people walking the earth that think D&D 3.5 is the superior form of the game, no take backs. I mean, where do you think Pathfinder came from, anyway? I did appreciate what 3.5 tried to do, which was fix stuff that was wrong with 2nd edition. Well, that and the very idea of giving the core game away for free and allowing all of these small companies to prop up and support your product line. I never took advantage of it, but I always thought it was a genius move.

Fourth Edition

The dreaded 4th ed. This is so taboo that we’re not even supposed to talk about it, especially if we liked 4th ed. It’s like how the Klingons aren’t supposed to talk about the smooth-headed versions from the original Star Trek series. They acknowledge it with their stony silence.

This was actually my re-introduction into D&D. I bought the Starter Box for my niece one Christmas and I ran a game for her and my brother, cold. It was a lot like my initial introduction to D&D in that I had to stop and stare at the rule book and try and decipher some of the changes while my two players rolled dice and drew elves on scratch paper.

It wasn’t my favorite, but I did like some of the things they tried to do. Stepping back from it, I do think that they were trying to mimic the feel of turn-based video games, and it was a great success, as a simulation of that. But I think maybe they forgot that they were, at their core, not video games. They were Dungeons and Fucking Dragons. They don’t copy everyone else, they let everyone else copy them. 

Fifth Edition

Here we are. The current version of the game; simplified and also expanded greatly with just a few interesting concepts. Gone is Thaco, and instead is the elegant armor class that we should have had all along—a target number. And speaking of “all along” the idea of advantage and disadvantage is so simple to grasp that it feels like it’s been there forever. I love the idea of conditions that are hung around character’s necks. Simplified skills are all folded into proficiencies now. And there aren’t a string of plusses you have to count up.

The esprit de corps of 3.5 is present, in the DM’s Guild, a marketplace for anyone to publish their additions to D&D for anyone to try. Most of these additions are inexpensive and some are even free. This means that there is support for the game on a daily basis, freeing the developers up to concentrate on big ticket items.

Looking back, it’s weird to me that character classes like the Barbarian—a class no one would dream of leaving out of the mix—was a class I remember being introduced in Unearthed Arcana as a new thing back in the mid-80’s. There’s a lot of seemingly vintage ideas that are back in, the biggest of which is the role-playing part of the game. If fourth edition went too far into skirmish and tactics, fifth edition is practically touchy-feely with all of the different ways you can make a character part of the overall story.

And I’m sorry, but the background system is kinda perfect. The idea that you get to walk onto the stage having already done something is just brilliant. It’s the thing that keeps your players from rolling up dead-eyed baby killers who burn down villages. It’s much easier to apply consequences to actions. It’s accessible and playable as a referee with just a few tables in your hand.

I really do think it’s the best version of the game we’ve ever seen. It embraces everything from the last forty years and takes the best parts of itself and leaves the rest. Few other game systems have the longevity to even try that as an experiment and the ones that do have the history haven’t tried to overhaul themselves more than once, maybe twice. I mean, the seventh edition of Call of Cthulhu is out, and while there are certainly more rules than ever, the basic game still looks almost identical to the one I first picked up in 1983.

I don’t know what the sixth edition of D&D will look like, or when if ever we’ll see it. I can’t fathom what that would be or why they would need to get away from what they have settled on here. I mean, there was almost a perfect storm of 5e hitting the marketplace, timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the game, and the outing of all the celebrities in geek culture who were “secretly” playing D&D. You couldn’t make that up.

It brought so many people back to the game, myself included, in a big way. And with few modifications, I was able to drop my old stuff into the new game and hit the ground running. Smart design, simple concepts, and a wide-open game license. It’s no wonder D&D is at the top of the food chain, the apex predator of role-playing games. And as of this writing, there is no meteor in sight to topple the old dinosaur’s reign anytime soon.

RPGaDay 2019: 26 Idea

I recommend keeping a notebook with you as a DM at all times. You never know when something cool is going to come to you and you will need to write it down. I know you don’t think you do, but trust me, you do.

There’s all kinds of studies about the positive effects of journaling—writing something down by hand—as an aid to increasing your memory and also in making connections, linking ideas, and so forth. Keeping a journal is going to free you up to create.

I would suggest you look at the Bullet Journal as a system. Here’s a great starting place to learn all about it, and of course, there’s this book right here. But before you go buy a twenty five dollar German blank book and expensive colored pens and all of that stuff, stop for a minute and think about if you even want to go that route first.

This may have cost me 50 cents.

What I’m saying is this: start cheap. If you lose interest or come up with a better way to do something, then you’re not out a lot of cash. If you love it and want to do more, then you can easily upgrade. What follows is my cheapo way to set up a journal based on me doing it for a year and a half and finding it to be absolutely essential to my creative process where gaming is concerned. The bullet journal method is great because you can switch it up so that it makes sense for you. And that’s really what we’re doing here; we are making a map of your internal creative process.

Okay, all you need to get started is a notebook and a decent pen that writes reliably.

Your notebook needs to be something with a decent number of pages in it, at least 80. It can be a spiral notebook, a sketchbook, or whatever you like so long is it large enough for you to write comfortably in and ideally, inexpensive. At least for now. If you really like this, there are no limits to the amount of money you can spend on special notebooks, stationary, and other accouterments.  I like graph paper, and there are some inexpensive notebooks made of graph paper from the big box stores that cost all of 99 cents. If you want to split the difference, here is a notebook aimed at DMs doing this exact thing. It's nice because it's got a mix of lined, graph, and hex paper included. Pretty swanky.

You don’t have to have a pen. Just use what you most like to write with, as long as it works for you. You don’t want to have to scribble on a page for five minutes to get your cheap Bic to work every time you need to write something down. I like gel pens because they are reliable, but you do you. I got one of those four ink in one pen pens and I love it. They were my favorite as a kid and I like them even more now. 

Write in the middle, not the corner.

Step 1

Go through the entire book and number the pages. Make them easy to see and in the same place. You will need these numbers to make the system work.

A rookie mistake is to write in the corners, you know, like every book you've seen before in your life. But there is a reason not to do this that has to do with linking your pages together. So resist all of that conditioning and write in the middle of the margin.

Use both pages; you may need them.

Step 2

Open the notebook up to the first two-page spread. This is your index. Write the word “Index” across the top of one of the pages. If this is a notebook for your game and nothing else, you are done. 

In a regular bullet journal, you may want to create divisions for larger topics. It’s hard to know what you will need without doing anything first, so I would leave it alone for now. Just set the two pages aside as your index.

You can break up your index pages
into sections if you need to.

Step 3

For a gaming notebook, you are pretty much done. You might want to create a calendar page so you can mark important dates, like when school starts again, so you can make plans accordingly. But it’s not necessary, unless you are a calendar person. That said, let me add: if you are running multiple games, or your sessions change regularly, or you keep getting caught flat-footed and running by the seat of your pants because you forgot to work something up, then you really should look at the calendar module for bullet journaling. It's quick, easy, and useful. Trust me on this. 

Using the notebook

This is the thing—it doesn’t work unless you use it. So take it with you everywhere you go. If you get in the habit of always taking it with you, it will serve you well.

Whenever you have an idea, open up to the first blank page and start scribbling. If you need to draw a map, draw a map. Or make a to-do list. Whatever you need. If you have another idea later in the day, open to the first clean page and write away.

Now, either at the end of the day or the beginning of the next (or whenever you have a couple of minutes of down time), you will look at what you wrote down, flip back to your index, and note it there. Leave room for other topics and page numbers. I’d go every other line until you know what you will need. So, you’d make a note like this on your index:

City-State Notes, Pgs 4-6

Map of Main Sewer, pg 7

Magic Items, pg 8 (sword of chaos)

As new ideas occur to you, grab a blank page and write everything down. At the end of the day, index it. You will quickly see that your City-State notes are going to be spread out throughout the notebook. So, just go back to your entry and add page numbers, like this:

City-State Notes, Pgs 4-6, 18-20,

Map of Main Sewer, pg 7

Magic Items, pg 8 (sword of chaos) pg 12 (wand of trickery)

The index is what makes the notebook truly useful. You can find what you are looking for at a glance.

There’s an advanced trick you can do with your page numbers that will keep you from flipping back to the index. It’s a little more work, but not much. On the city-state pages, you will drop down to the page number and draw an arrow pointing forward and write down the next page number that deals with the same topic. If you’ve come from a page with the same topic, you’ll write an arrow pointing backwards and the page number you came from to get here. That way, if you’re paging through your notebook and you spy something that interests you, just glance down at the page number and it’ll tell you where the threads of the idea continue.

I know. Mind Blown, right?

With the index in place, you are not limited to just holding ideas and plots. You can use the book to track session notes, too. Open to the first blank page, date the page, and then go to town. Every new NPC, every extra side note, all of the great ideas you had mid-session, put them all down there. Afterwards, go back and index the page as above. You're already using the notebook for planning. Why not keep session notes with your plans? 

That's the point: anything you need for your game can go in the journal. It's all in one place, organized by your specific needs in the way that makes the best sense to you. It's like a road map of your brain. 

When you get to the end of your notebook, grab another one, make a new index, and keep going. If you want to pre-designate areas of your index for things you know you need a lot of room for, you can do that. Otherwise, it’s lather, rinse, and repeat.

Tips and Tricks

One of the things that confounds people new to the journaling process is the idea that they can only write down the good ideas. Well, how do you know if it’s a good idea until you write it down? Trust the process and put it all on the page, even (and maybe especially) the half-baked ideas or the tiny thoughts.

Doing it this way ensures that you capture what you were trying to articulate, and it also frees your mind up to think about something else. I’ve rewritten the same idea with only slight variations down in my journal three or four times. Each time, it cleared the decks for me to expand on the thought or simply move on to the next thing on my mind.

Because I’m that-guy, I’ve got a campaign notebook (separate from my journal) wherein I write down all of the finished ideas and usable content I come up with. Anything good from my notebook gets transferred over to the campaign notebook, which is much nicer and far less chaotic. Eventually my campaign notebook will get re-organized into a pdf document with a searchable index and a hyperlinked table of contents and oooooh, it’ll be so fancy. Until we get there, though, this system works like a charm.

Get in the habit of going back through your notebook every three to four weeks. You’ll be surprised what looking at these pages with fresh eyes will do. In some cases, I’ll see something I wrote down and forgot about and think, “that’s brilliant!” Other times, I’ll look over something I agonized over and realize it doesn’t work. But that might lead me to another, possibly better idea that will work instead. It’s all part of the process.

RPGaDay 2019: 25 Calamity

This is a war story.

My group was on the second level of a classic module. They had been slogging through it for some time and had just gotten out of a major trap and were pretty beat up. Half of the party wanted to go back to camp, and the other half wanted to stay and clear more rooms. This turned into a longer-than-normal table discussion.

One of my players (we’ll call him Cain) was built for action, not talk. He routinely zoned out if a discussion ran longer than a few minutes. Cain was a druid, but he was about as druidic as a goblin assassin, which he probably would have enjoyed playing.  He was in the “go back to camp” group. The other player (“Abel”) was a big, thick fighter and he wanted to clear more rooms. The four players were gridlocked at two and two.

While the rest of the group was yelling, Cain said to me, as quietly as he could, “I’ve got rope, right? Fifty feet?” We checked his character sheet and sure enough he had 50 feet of fine adventuring rope.

The party was on the second level, about 100’ high into the mountain tower. Their exit was an opening with a ledge on it and a straight drop down, or a careful spelunking with a Dex check at the end.

I naturally assumed that Cain was going to just start setting up the rope for everyone to descend. One of the party had a ring of feather fall, so he was fine. The others would have to solve this relatively minor logistical challenge.

As it was, I was trying to referee the discussion when Cain said to me, “I want to tie the rope around Abel’s leg.”

That got Abel’s attention. “What?”

Cain refused to look at him. There was a prank in progress. It was how they operated, this group. “Okay,” I said, “you need to make a Stealth roll, and you, Abel, get to make a perception check.”

They rolled. Cain rolled a 19. Abel rolled a 3.

That rope was now tied around Abel’s boot. “What now?”

Cain looked right at Abel and smiled. “I grab the other end and run for the opening and jump out.”

Abel said what we were all thinking. “Why?”

“I’m sick of talking about it. We’re leaving!” Cain looked at me and said, “I jump and take him with me.”

Howls erupted from the table. These guys were always doing stupid shit like this, but this was the first time that hit points were going to be lost. “Okay, fine, but we’re doing this in slow motion. First off, make a Strength save to yank this giant guy off of his feet.”

Cain rolled. “Sixteen!”

Dammit.

“Okay, Abel, you have been yanked off of your feet and you are sliding as fast as Cain is falling toward the opening and the ledge.”

“Can I grab the ledge?”

“You can try,” I said. “Make a Dex save.”

The d20 rattled into the tray. “2.”

“Okay, you can SEE the ledge as it zooms away from you, and now you are falling.”

The other players are now starting to laugh, mostly because they aren’t the ones about to take a bunch of falling damage.

Cain was not to be denied. “Can I pull Abel down faster?”

Abel said, “I throw my arms out, trying to grab anything I can.”

Sure, why not? “There’s a tree limb sticking out of the side of the rocks. Make a dex save.”

Dice rolled. “18!”

“Okay, you’ve got the limb, and you’re hanging on for dear life.” I turned to Cain and smiled. “Make a Strength save to keep hold of the rope, because you’ve just jerked to a stop about halfway down the cliff.”

Cain rolled. “15?”

“Yeah, you can keep hold. So, now…”

Cain interrupted. “I want to brace my legs and pull Abel off the limb.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really!”

“Okay, so, make a strength check. Abel, you, too.”

You can guess how it went down.

“Abel, you are falling straight down again,” I said.

“Am I closer to Cain now?”

“Yes, you are.”

“Can I catch up to him in the fall?”

“We’re in slow motion. Sure, why not? Make a Dex save.”

“Natural 20!”

Who am I to argue? “Okay, he’s within your grasp.”

“Wait, can I get out of…”

“No, you can’t. Abel, what do you want to do?”

“Are we close to the ground?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I want to position myself so that I’m on top of Cain.”

“And I want to be on top of Abel.”

Of course you do.  “Strength versus Strength. Go!”

Abel lost. Abel hit the ground first, and took enough damage to knock him out. Cain made a saving throw and took half damage from the relatively soft landing. The character with the feather fall ring floated down and threw the ring up to the last member of the group. Abel was healed, and Cain got punched, but they were all too busy laughing and telling me what an epic encounter that was.

It was like running a game for the Marx Brothers, but they loved it. And that effectively ended the session for the day. Oh, we did a little more, but we all knew nothing was going to come close to matching the intensity of the Tandem Slo-Mo Rope Fall.

RPGaDay 2019: 20 Noble

One of my favorite Erol Otus characters.

As much as I love the Backgrounds system in D&D 5e, a few of the options are hit and miss for me. The most egregious misfire to me is the Noble. I can see why they wanted to include it in the Player’s Handbook but I think that as it is written, it tries to do too much in the limited framework it has and as a result, it doesn’t do enough.  In a section with soldiers, local heroes, and urchins, the extra lifting and gymnastics required to make the noble work without setting one player high above the others is a little outside the scope of new DMs.

My solution to this was to split the noble background up into three distinct categories.

The Dilettante -Someone who comes from wealth but isn’t interested in being wealthy, or at least, do not want to live their life according to their family's expectations. This is for role-players who want lots of family interaction as the filial obligations of their upbringing can potentially clash with their adventuring career. I was specifically looking for a way to create a D&D version of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and this pretty much covers it. 

The Disgraced Noble- I think this is the closest in function to what the PHB was trying to do with this background. The difference is mainly that this background really leans into it. It’s good for plotting and hooking players into the story, as there are plenty of options, secrets, and interesting bits to tease out. It should be noted that the Disgraced portion of the background can come from any  source; as simple as “you joined the bard college against the wishes of your family” to something like Athos, from The Three Musketeers. 

This background also works well for setting the kinds of political situations that were the bread and butter on Game of Thrones. Tyrian Lannister is a disgraced noble in the eyes of his father because he drinks and whores and plays the part of the imp. Jaime Lannister is a disgraced noble because he killed the king he swore to protect. 

Bill may very well kill me for using this.

The Knight Errant— for all of you paladins and cavaliers out there, here’s a background that is right up your alley, supporting action and combat, with plenty of things to do, and as silly (Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail) or as serious (Robin Hood) as you want to make it.

Breaking them up along these lines makes the player choices more nuanced and also better supports most, if not all, character classes. The Warlock Dilettante, for example, might have stumbled into his patronage during one of his fantastic benders. The Warlock Disgraced Noble clearly brought shame upon his house by invoking dark magicks, and the Warlock Knight Errant is a monster-hunting tyrant-killing man of the people. All of them come from this noble class, but they actualize it in very different ways.

Anyway, that’s my fix for the Noble. I’d love to hear any feedback you may have on these backgrounds. Share your thoughts, people.

As a bonus--call it a "thank you," if you will, for all of the great responses and shares I've gotten from all of  you, I've included my Noble House Random Generator. It will build you a family history with just a few die rolls. You can grab free PDFs of the "Expanded Noble" backgrounds below:

Dilettante

Disgraced Noble

Knight Errant

Noble House Random Generator

Try these out and let me know what you think.

RPGaDay 2019: 18 Plenty

I have plenty of dice. If I never bought dice again for the rest of my life, I’d never want for any more dice. In fact, I’m going to say something that I never thought I’d say: I have too many dice.

This is tantamount to heresy and is punishable by excommunication. I know this, and yet, I would have you hear me out, for this is not a situation of my own making. It’s not my fault. I am not weak.

It’s the dice maker’s fault. Aha! J’ACCUSE!

Allow me to elucidate: The industry standard for a set of dice looks something like this, right?

Seven dice. One of each polyhedral: d4, d6, d8, d10, %d10, d12, and d20.

You buy those dice and you think, “I’m set! Now I can finally play D&D, just like my favorite movie stars!”

Only, the first game you play, you quickly realize that you need 2 d20s, because, let’s face it’s easier to roll two dice and take the higher number than it is to roll one die twice. 

Two sets, then. Probably way more dice than you'll ever need. But whatever, NOW you can play the game!

What's that? Rolling up characters? With what? FOUR six-sided dice? Who do they think you are, anyway, a Rockefeller?  

Well, then, you need three—no, four d6 dice, because, you know, characters.

But the other dice? You can just borrow those. Cool. No problem.

Oh, you’re playing a wizard? With Magic Missile? 

*sigh* 

Can everyone please pass their d4s to the new guy?

 See what I mean? So a new player doesn’t need just one set. They need two sets, minimum. That’ll get you maybe halfway there, which isn’t bad, but it’s not great, either.

You really need three—no, four sets of dice in order to cover the full range of what you can expect in a campaign that goes up to level five. That will get you character builder dice, plus enough spell damage dice for whatever you’re throwing, or extra feature dice like for bardic inspiration or battle maneuvers.

Unfortunately, you will end up with some dice you don’t need. Like this.

So, in conclusion, I have a lot of dice, but it’s not my fault.

If I were a dice manufacturer, I would over a set of dice that is designed specifically for actual D&D play, and I would advertise it as such. Here’s what it would look like:

3 d4

4 d6

2 d8

2 d10 + 1 %d

1 d12
2 d20

15 dice, total.

That’s a bare minimum number to ensure that you can cast anything, use all features, make characters, and roll with Advantage or Disadvantage.

Now, any veteran player knows that the above list is a good one, but it’s not comprehensive. Here’s the real and true numbers for seasoned campaigners:

5   d4

10 d6

4   d8

3   d10 + 1%d

2   d12

2   d20

=27 dice.

I know, it’s a lot more than 7 dice in that little acrylic box. And the numbers are weird, but you have to trust me, this is not unreasonable. I know a lot of people who keep a separate set of 4d6 dice just for character building.

To be totally fair, some dice manufacturers are making overtures already by including 2 d20s or 4 d6s (or both!) in their starting set. It’s a nice idea and for an introductory set, need not be super expensive. 

This is the set of dice that come with the new D&D Essentials box set. They are simple, well-made, easy to read, and functional for a starting player right out of the box. It’s not hard to do!

In conclusion, I think you’ll agree that none of this is my…what’s that? Those Kickstarter dice I just backed? Well, those are very different, aren’t they? It’s a whole other motif, and…wait, what are you doing? DICE JAIL!? That’s not for people! Wait! Stop! I’ll be good! I Prooooooooomiiiiiiiiise…

RPGaDay 2019: 6 Ancient

Webster’s defines “gothic” in several ways:  the Teutonic Barbarians, which are certainly cool if you're into that whole history thing; the style of architecture that dominated France and Western Europe from the 12th to the 16th century; and the one that I want to talk about, which is "...relating to a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents."  

Characteristics of gothic art and literature can include, but are not limited to decay, haunted locations, curses, madness, powerful emotions, and the presence of the supernatural. 

Sounds like a hell of a campaign setting, right?

I think the best parts of classic D&D are gothic in nature. It’s one of the over-arching principles that drives the game even now. Consider that of the mere handful of skills allowed the player characters, there are three knowledge skills that relate directly to gothic elements: arcane, religion, and history.

I’ve always preferred the Howardian ideal of dim antiquity and fell sorcery, lying fallow beneath the ruins, weighted down by the crashing eons, waiting in blind indolence for the lone and unsuspecting fool to life the stone, trace the carvings or dig up the skull of the long-forgotten sorcerer so that evil will one day stalk the land again.

Buscema and Alcala. Click to enlarge.

And why not? That’s one third of the game’s primary adventure milieus, isn’t it? The crypts, the ruins, the dungeon! Of course, they are unfailingly gothic and ancient—no one raids the newly-constructed underground lair (though I suppose they could), or visits the brand-spanking-new temple of elemental evil. Those are nowhere near as fun to traipse through. And why? New places can’t have ghosts, supernatural and macabre things, or curses or madness.

Again, I’m sure if you worked at it, you could probably come up with some new evil warlord who JUST put the finishing touches on his labyrinth of madness and he’s now killing all of the workers so they won’t divulge his secrets and the widow of the town’s stonecutter wants you to go pull his carcass out of the abattoir so it can be interred in the family crypt. There’s most of the elements that go into a gothic setting, only fresh and new, but how many times can you go back to that well? And yet, every kingdom, every duchy, every principality has its own mouldering crypt, abandoned keep, ancient ruins, etc. It's part of the creative DNA of Dungeons & Dragons.

I think gothic elements work best when you file the serial numbers off; or to put it another way, I think Ravenloft is overkill. It’s too “on the nose,” and moreover, in danger of sliding out of the low fantasy setting I prefer. I get why it’s popular and why they chose to freshen it up for 5th edition, but I’d rather be more subtle, if not judicious, about my gothic trappings.

The Appendix N author who got this the most right was Robert E. Howard. His successors, Fritz Lieber, Michael Moorcock, and Karl Edward Wagner, got this idea, as well. More of that stuff in your game is never a bad thing.

RPGaDay 2019: 1 First

I’ve written before about the blue box Dungeons & Dragons game; I now know it to be the fourth printing of the Holmes rewrite, which included a copy of BI—In Search of the Unknown, and a set of chits that completely and utterly failed to capture the excitement of rolling platonic solids.

My step-father bought the game for us, no doubt intrigued by the concept; he was a sword and planet fan and one of the first things we bonded over in our nascent relationship was fantasy and sci fi books. I remember our first game: we had been handed character sheets, and in front of us was several Dixie cups full of chits (I know, sexy, right?) and he began narrating the adventure. We were at a door. It opened into a dark hallway…and then he said, “hold on a second,” and started flipping through the rule book.

We waited patiently. Where were we going to go? Mom was dealing with the other two kids, who were five and seven years my junior. I asked if I could see one of the books that came in the box. I was told no, because he needed both of them to run the game.

This was intriguing. I watched as Paul flipped through the rule book, and then consulted the module, and back and forth for several minutes. Then he got up, lit a cigarette, and took the rule book with him, saying, “Just a minute. I think I forgot to do something…” and he walked into the other room, muttering.

And that was my first Dungeons & Dragons game.

Two weeks later, I casually migrated the box into my room and began my examination of the rules. It was fascinating in the extreme—I had never seen a rule book laid out in that particular style or typeface. It looked different. It felt different. The artwork was a little messy, but also evocative.

The section I read more than any other in the book was the example of play. That, I thought, was where our game went off the rails. I didn’t know what to say, and Paul didn’t know what to do. I tried to match up the cross-section of the sample dungeon with the sample layout and of course, none of it was supposed to match anyway, but it kept me from playing that much longer until I did.

That summer, my other step-brother, from my father’s re-marriage, came back from Boy Scout Camp with all kinds of life wisdom and a new thing: he’d been playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Not the basic stuff; that was for kids, Jack. For hard-core gamers only. It only took a couple of weekends before I was hounding my mother to buy me a Player’s Handbook.

I can still hear it in my head, like a voice over an old-fashioned telephone… “It’s HOW MUCH?...for a book…? What’s this…that game you never played? I know, Paul bought it, but…and this is for what, again…Mark, we’ve got dice at the house…I don’t know…Okay, but you’re paying me back for this…”

My copy of the Player’s Handbook was $18.00, from B.Dalton  Booksellers in the mall. By Christmas, I’d acquired copies of the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide ($24.00, NOT on sale), and bought a set of Armory gem dice. Mom said, as we were picking up Christmas paper wrapping, “I hope you play the hell out of that game, because that’s all the money I’m going to spend on it.”

The next day, I conned a ride to the mall, where the hobby shop was located. I bought the most recent issue of Dragon Magazine with Christmas money, and I bought a module, too: The Tomb of Horrors.  I was hooked. There was no going back.

Lankhmar: An Appreciation

I mentioned this before in my litany of stuff I used to play, but I wanted to drill down on this because I'm going to be talking about campaigns and how I run them and why I run them the way I do. It's mostly because of Lankhmar: City of Adventure.

Back in the 1980s I was a good li'l consumer of TSR's stuff. I kept up with new releases, back when you actually HAD - TO -  KEEP - UP with stuff; there was no button to click, no page to "like." You had to remember to call the hobby shop or the bookstore once a month. You had to read magazines and actually look at the ads. You had to look on the backs of modules for lists of other products. You had to talk to human beings in meat-space. You had to beg rides to the mall (or gas money, when you could borrow the car).

There is a reason, terribly misguided, why some older neckbeards feel a predatory sense of ownership and do that Gatekeeper thingie; it's because they are resentful that they had to do everything that I just rattled off and modern day gamers simply watch YouTube and get much better intel on what's new, and what's coming out.

I am not saying I agree with Gatekeeping tactics, because I don't...but looking back over that list, I understand where some of the ire comes from. Still, it was the 1980s. We barely had cable. There was no internet. Our brains could handle the strain of thinking about stuff we liked, I assure you. So their anger isn't really at new fans, or girls. It's at step-father Jeff who used to call them "fairies" for reading J.R.R. Tolkien and for not taking them to the mall when he clearly wasn't doing anything but sitting around eating Fritos and drinking Busch beer all day..."private contractor," my ass...

Reviewing Strongholds & Followers

 I have been a little busy with real world stuff these past couple of months—the kind of things that are health-related—and so I have not been as active on the blog as I would like. Sorry about that. But I am still working, writing, and thinking about gaming and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. To that end, I will point you to Matt Colville’s YouTube channel, because he eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff and I find myself in agreement with him, like, 98% of the time, when it comes to running D&D games. This is very likely because we are about the same age and have experienced many of the same things, and also we have very similar tastes regarding First Edition Stuff (such as Appendix N) and how we use it in gaming.

Colville is also very sincere and genuine in his discussions (really a monograph) of running and playing D&D. It shows, and it’s one of the things that makes him so likeable. It almost makes me forgive him for mispronouncing “archetype” every single time he says it.

Dragon Magazine Was Our Internet

It’s difficult to get teenagers, or even twenty year olds, to care about things that happened four decades ago. I get it. Forty years in the modern world might as well be a hundred, and the speed with which we develop continues to its inevitable terminal velocity. Talking about anything more nuanced and complicated than the music of the 1980s will send most Millennials screaming from the room.

But it’s interesting to me because—and this is a micro-example of the larger questions being posed to mass media today—our sources of information were extremely limited. We had three or four channels, if we were lucky: ABC, NBC, and CBS. There was also PBS, in case you needed help with your reading. And you probably did, because there was a lot more of it. Magazines and newspapers were still everywhere. What’s worse, you had to BUY them. With MONEY.