Let's roll some dice, watch some movies, or generally just geek out. New posts at 6:30 pm ET but only if I have something to say. Menu at the top. gsllc@chirp.enworld.org on Mastodon and @gsllc on Twitter.
FYI, I’ve updated my (modest) 4e resources page. It includes support for the Masterplan campaign manager. For those that don’t know, some guy (a pro software engineer) built a campaign manager for 4e and left it on GitHub for all to use. It’s a great tool. The glaring problem it has is that some of the monster files cause the application to crash if you try to open them. (A good example are several of the hobgoblin files from the Monster Manual.) Well, I’ve fixed a lot of those. I can’t say whether I’ve fixed even half of the issues, but I’ve made a ton of progress. I’ve also updated a lot of the stat blocks to Monster Manual 3 format. My edited libraries are available on that page.
In addition, I ran convention in 2010 and 2011 (synDCon), and one of the events I created was a dungeon delve we called synDClash. These were common in cons. All combat. Just try to finish three combat encounters in 45 minutes. Rather than have only one adventure that people would have to play over and over again, I created six, each based on a classic 1e adventure. (In hindsight, I wish I had added “Revisiting the Mountain” or whatever as a homage to S2: White Plume Mountain.) Those files are up there too as separate Masterplan projects.
In other words, there are project files and libraries available for download. Moreover, the character sheets — both the ones used for synDClash and the offline Character Builder versions I created over the past couple days — are linked to there. (Please let me know if the link to my dropbox file works.)
All of this is a work in progress. I’ll continue to create whatever fixes are necessary and update sourcebook stat blocks to Monster Manual 3 format, but if you’re running an in-person 4e game and weren’t aware of Masterplan, you should consider it for tracking initiative, etc. We use it with a big screen TV as our battle map. This was my goofy way of letting everyone know that the set up was ready for what was the upcoming session: Reveal.
Last night, I hosted the 7th session of a 4th EditionD&D (“4e“) campaign that’s being run by my friend, Luddite Vic, but is based on a campaign setting that he and I created (still a work in progress). We’ll be alternating DMing duties, so I’ll get to run and play the game. As always, this led to reminiscing about the 4e days. For example, one of the players is almost finished converting Teos’s Ashes of Athas adventures to 5th Edition D&D. The conversations got me thinking (as always). I know that 4e is probably the most maligned edition of the game. It’s accused of not being “real D&D” by those who constantly complain when others say “you’re playing D&D wrong.” The hypocrisy keeps me from caring about that, but the reality is that it wasn’t nearly as popular as the other editions during each edition’s heyday. Nevertheless, for the Washington, DC area, the era of 4e was, as far as I can tell, the golden era of organized play and was the best the TTRPG community was ever organized.
Vic and I were two of the founders of the Gamers’ Syndicate gaming club that boasted about 250 members. With a lot of help from too many people to list here, we organized gamedays every single Saturday at, if I recall correctly, six different sites. We additionally organized and ran Wizard of the Coast‘s Encounters program at some of those sites one weekday a week. We (and Stephen and Cassandra) put on a convention, synDCon for two years. Nevertheless, I realize my experience is ultimately anecdotal, and I haven’t taken any polls to back up these claims, so take this with a grain of salt.
So, during the 4e era, we had two events regularly occurring every week in Chantilly, VA; Woodbridge, VA; Rockville, MD; Ashburn, VA; and some other spots occasionally. Every event had two to six tables of games being run, but we occasionally ran special events (i.e., battle interactives) that doubled the number of tables. (Somewhere out there is an embarrassing video of me being forced to LARP the introductory scene to a battle interactive. LARPs have never been my thing.) I can’t explain how, but we never turned away a single player. If someone showed up without registering, either Vic or I immediately organized another table and ran it ourselves if no one else could. We always organized with that possibility in mind.
What Edition Warriors Don’t Get
Our success came not only through organizing the 4e living campaign, Living Forgotten Realms (“LFR“), but also by including Pathfinder Society, Greyhawk Reborn, Shadowrun Missions, and Heroes of Rokugan living campaigns in our organizing. I even ran my own 4th Edition Gamma World adventure at one weekend gameday. Community interaction exploded even beyond what we experienced for Living Greyhawk, and everyone was happier for it. I don’t think anyone in the DC area brought TTRPG gamers together more than we did, but even after they formed home games from their new connections, these players still showed up to our events. They were just too much fun.
There were a couple other gaming groups nearby with whom we didn’t coordinate at all. We shared members with these groups, so it’s hard to really know who organized more people, but I’d bet good money we organized more events. We were at it literally every weekend for years.
Fast Forward to Today
This isn’t happening nearly as much today as far as I can tell, and if I’m right, there are at least a few reasons I can think of for the waning of these events. First, to a non-negligible extent, gaming is moving online. Face-to-face gaming, while still a majority of gaming, is slowly being chipped away by modern technology. Second, despite all its PR disasters, Wizards of the Coast (“WotC“) still dictates the industry (and by extension, the community) because they have the most valuable TTRPG trademark, Dungeons and Dragons. Because there are more people playing in general, the need for supporting game day organizers, or even game stores, has diminished. It simply makes less fiscal sense to worry about whether people like Vic and I are putting butts into public play seats. To the extent that’s still useful, WotC is going to rely on conventions, not game days, for organized play, and those are neither cheap nor as personal (but see Winter Fantasy hosted by Baldman Games). The Encounters program and the true DM rewards program no longer even exist, so what’s the point of game store gamedays? Third, this has led to a reduction of the number of game stores, at least in the DC area, so there aren’t a lot of affordable places for large crowds to organize. Fourth, and most importantly, I don’t think anyone was willing to work as hard as Vic and I at putting these events together. As I said above, we had a lot of help, and sometimes those people did an admirable amount of work without compensation, but every single one of them would tell you that they weren’t willing to do nearly as much work that Vic and I did. Today, neither of us has time for that, nor do we have the motivation considering WotC‘s approach, but if someone else did, I think the first three causes I mentioned would be rendered moot. Hard work cures almost all that ails us.
Change is Inevitable
It’s really not like this.
This is largely just an old guy rant, but not in the stereotypical way. I’m not angry. In fact, I’m doing great. I’m hosting a 1st Edition D&D game I run, and I’m hosting the 4e game I mentioned above. I’m getting exactly what I want. As for the newer gamers, if they don’t realize what type of an awesome community we had in those days and and are happy because they don’t know what they’re missing, that’s fine too. I do feel bad for my contemporaries from those days that no longer play because what I’m describing is no longer largely available, but ultimately that’s their choice, and if they’re weren’t happy, they’d make another choice. As long as everyone is happy, regardless of what they’re playing or whether they’re playing, all is well, but if they ever ask me, I’ll make it clear to them that it could be better.
My thoughts on Gary Con will be brief. I doubt I’ll return. This isn’t a criticism of the con anymore than a non-football fan not liking a football game is a criticism of how good of a job the NFL is doing. It’s simply something that doesn’t appeal to me. I know a few industry insiders — two were my roommates — which means I’m within a degree of separation of almost all of the legacy ones. For me, the highlight of the trip was talking about the past, present, and future of the industry with Stephen Radney-MacFarland, James Lowder, and Dave Christ. The direct topic is interesting to me, but even more, this conversation inevitability leads to a back-and-forth on intellectual property law (usually copyrights). So, yeah; I’m in for that. Other highlights are conversations with Stephen and Jason Dandy (a non-industry friend) and with Jason and his friend, Mark, on sociopolitical issues. These guys think very differently than I do on most issues, but we engage in a form of constructive dialogue that’s very rare today. I even discussed abortion and Citizen’s United with no fear of generating anger from any of them.
But I can do all of that over Zoom. I don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on airfare, lodging, a convention badge, and grossly overpriced convention food to have these conversations. One could say the same thing about Winter Fantasy, but that’s a different animal. Just eyeballing it, I’d say I know about 50% of the people that attend, and when I’m not hanging out with them, I’m relaxing. It’s a genuinely relaxing vacation. The food is good, and the whole trip is just an awesome ritual. While Gary Con could become the same thing for me, I don’t need two of them. Winter Fantasy is enough.
YMMV
I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying I didn’t have a good time, and it’s certainly not to say that you wouldn’t. It’s a small-ish con, which is what I like about Winter Fantasy. I went with a mission to get to play (as opposed to DM) 1st Edition AD&D, and I played in three such games. I actually got to play the Dragon #56 bard in two of them. How many people can say they’ve done that? I got to play Stephen’s Delve game that uses a few mechanics that Vic and I added to our 4th Edition D&D game (e.g., “gang-up”), so I liked that. I got to finally make use of my Star Trek Adventures purchase by playing that game (granted, mere months before it’s rendered somewhat obsolete by its second edition). The only objective criticism I have is that there were too many tables in the rooms, which made it very difficult to hear your own DM/GM/judge, and I’m not alone in expressing that concern.
I saw only one celebrity (Pat Kilbane formerly of MadTV, with whom I spoke briefly), but I wasn’t looking for them. If that’s your thing, you may run into them for a selfie. The con was fairly easy to navigate, and I had no administrative difficulties at all.
All of this was good, but now that I’ve been there and done that, there’s no need to go back. I’m quite happy to have left Saturday so that I have all day Sunday to recover, and I return with added appreciation for both Winter Fantasy and my home gaming group. I don’t need this to be a regular thing, or even a sporadic thing, but if you’re a gamer, especially with an appreciation for its history, this is as good a con as any to attend.
Just expect to be inundated with some silliness. Every attendee got one of these.
When I started running 1st Edition D&D again two years ago (first time in 40 years), I gathered and took an inventory of my 1st Edition material, and then went on a spending spree. Then I went on another. About a year ago, I somehow made a purchase that blew my mind. It’s a mint condition (you read that right) Wilderness Survival Guide by Kim Mohan but signed by James Ward. It was such an unbelievable haul that I had to contact James, before I even received it, to make sure the signature was legit. James verified his signature for me. (I’m sure many of you have even better stories of James, but that’s mine.)
Shortly thereafter, Kim died. Yesterday, the community lost James. I didn’t know James, but he shaped my childhood. Of note, I didn’t study mythology because I played 1st Edition; I played 1st Edition because I was already a mythology buff, and that drew me to the game. You can imagine how much I loved Deities & Demigods when I was a kid. When I returned to D&D after 23 years away, it was for the tail end of 3.5 Edition, and despite that edition’s Deities & Demigods being even less useful than the original, it was still my favorite book. He also wrote the “zeroth” edition D&D sourcebook Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes (which I never used), and the TTRPG Metamorphosis Alpha (which I played once). That’s just to name a couple.
James is just the latest entry in a long list of TTRPG gaming legends we’ve lost, but as I didn’t know any of them personally, everything they’ve ever meant to me will exist for me as long as I do. No one can take that from me. But last month, I lost yet another family member in a long list of ones that meant a lot to me, so I get that I’m not the one grieving today. There’s a piece missing from each of their family members and friends, and I get the impression James had many. It’s hard to find a picture of the guy by himself. He seems always to be hanging out with someone, shaking hands, etc.
My condolences to all who’ve lost something so significant yesterday.
My return to 1st Edition AD&D (“1e“) is now two years strong, and now I’ve added a 4th Edition D&D (“4e“) game to my schedule. So, it was a nice surprise for my friend, Mike, to let me know that he was offloading his old school D&D material. Before you get too excited, he’s giving these materials only to people he knows well because we’re getting them on the honor system. The only cost is to make a (tax deductible) donation to a cat or dog charity that represents the approximate cost to buy them in the store or on eBay. Considering I’m going to get a cat in early April, that’s an easy ask of me.
So, what did I get? First up, the box sets and hard-covers.
Menzoberranzan box set, Star Frontiers Alpha Dawn box set, Greyhawk Adventures, Dragon Lance Adventures, the Scarlet Brotherhood, a reprint of the Second Edition Player’s Handbook, Oriental Adventures, and Dragon #56
In general, I never owned any of these in the day, and I bought the PDF of Oriental Adventures from the DMs Guild during my recent rebuy because the hard cover wasn’t on sale. I’m glad I now have a hard cover without paying through the nose for it. I’ve been intrigued by Star Frontiers based on the relatively recent chatter it’s generated — the less I say about that chatter, the better — so I picked it up out of curiosity. As for Dragon #56, I told Mike I wasn’t interested in any of the magazines except perhaps the one that has the 1e bard in it, redone as a character you can play at 1st level. Sure enough, he had that issue. Score!
Next up, some soft covers.
I was planning to buy the Book of Lairs and Book of Lairs II, so that makes this supplement all the sweeter. I never owned any of these materials either. Now for the minis.
Yeah, that’s quite the haul, ain’t it. Of particular interest . . .
I never owned this guy. In fact, I never knew it existed, and I was quite the mini collector during the 3rd Edition D&D and 4e days. Somehow this one escaped me. Right now, the cheapest I see it on sale is $20 + about $6 shipping, so this one will set me back a bit.
These are just a few of the minis that I’ve never owned.
These are a few of the minis that I own but could always use more of. My players may not appreciate multiple Balors on the field of battle, but them’s the breaks.
One of my Living Forgotten Realms characters had a giant owl, so I was a bit disturbed when the stand for that mini broke. No amount of crazy glue could fix it. Now, I’ve replaced it. I think I took the second one out of some sort of cosmic spite.
Importantly, I have every intention of using these goodies in my 1e and 4e games, so this is quite the haul.
Some animal shelter is going to be very happy very soon.
Timing is apparently not my strong suit. A few days ago, someone mentioned how much they loved the graveyard scene in the Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Watch the scene here before it disappears.
I wasn’t as big a fan of the scene. Sure, it was funny, but it exemplifies the difference between legacy and modern gamers. Okay, I mean old people and young people. Whatever. As D&D players, we all want this movie to emulate the game, so our different approaches to the game affect our reactions to the movie or individual scenes. In the old days, failure was a thing in RPGs. If a magic user (that’s a wizard for the young’uns) wanted to learn a new spell, the player rolled percentile dice with a target number dependent on the character’s intelligence. If the roll failed, the wizard not only didn’t learn the spell, but could never learn it. Ever. That’s failure. The dice giveth, and the dice taketh away.
Nowadays, failure has fallen out of favor, granted to different degrees depending on the individual. Today, if a player were told that they could never learn the fireball spell, they’d be furious. If they couldn’t deduce a password from a riddle, it’s possible they’d quit your game. As I’ve discussed before (see the section, Another Example: The Puzzle Encounter), I once had players get angry at me because they couldn’t solve a puzzle trap, and as a result, the trap went off doing zero (0) points of damage to them.
Yeah, you read that right, but read it again if you don’t think you did.
Play whatever game you want — that’s the name of this blog — but I find this approach boring. I don’t try to solve easy sudoku puzzles; I go for the hard ones. I want the chance of failure because that’s how I improve. But even from a purely entertainment perspective, what’s the point of rolling the dice or even showing up to the game if you know the outcome? The players should instead tell the DM how they want the session to go, and the DM respond, “Sure, that’s what happened. Congratulations. You won D&D. Now get out of here and play some miniature golf or something.” Where’s the excitement in that? I really don’t get it, and it’s why I’m not involved in organized play anymore. Most tables just hand the players the victories.
This is not to say that I enjoy the notion of a character dying during character creation as in Traveler. There should be a chance of success, and the chances should tilt in favor of the players, but when the players don’t start enjoying my game until I remove all the challenge from it, I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
Nowadays, players don’t accept near enough failure in their games for them to be of interest to me, and the graveyard scene demonstrates this point. The point of the scene was to do something funny, and it succeeded, at least at first. I have no problem with that. However, after they failed, they simply tried again. And again. And again. The resource allowing them to speak with the dead was apparently unlimited, which means they couldn’t fail. Not only did that remove all consequences, and thus appear non-heroic, but it also detracted from the joke itself. Repeating a joke too many times is one way to ruin it. Why is the screw up funny if this is an unlimited trial-and-error.
The resource.
I would have written the scene in one of two alternative ways, and this is how my game would play out. First, they fail, so they have to be clever and come up with a different way to learn the information they need. Because this is a movie, that may not work. The movie could get really long, and no one really wants to watch a movie about people studying at a library. Second, they fail, but they get only one more bite at the apple. This time, they plan it out, come up with the five questions, assign one person to ask them, and everyone else shuts their annoying mouths (that’s another issue altogether).
That’s funny and heroic because the characters still had to rise to the occasion. But I really don’t think people want true heroes anymore, which is also demonstrated by this scene. They want to see idiots . . . .
. . . like him . . .
. . . win the day despite having none of the tools, including the personality and strength of character, to succeed. The only reason he succeeds is because the script says so. There’s nothing about him, even in a world of magic and monsters, that justifies his success logically. Even within that world, he’s a screw up, but he suddenly succeeds, because the screenwriters know that’s what the modern gamer wants to see, and they’re the foundation of the audience for this movie. After his success, he returns to being the same idiot that shouldn’t have succeeded in the first place. He didn’t improve; he was just handed success by the writers. This reminds me of another example.
None of us are perfect; some of us just can’t handle being reminded of that.
A while back, I told you I was preparing for a return to 1st Edition AD&D, and to do so, I had to update my stash of 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons (“1e“) materials. Fast forward a couple of years. I’ve been running a 1e game for the first time in 40 years, and the only addition I had to make to my stash was the Egg of the Phoenix. Now, I’m less than 24 hours away from hosting a 4th Edition (“4e“) game (alternating DM duties with Luddite Vic), finally finishing my unfinished business, but I already have all the 4e stuff I could even need.
On a related note . . . .
Even though I can no longer stand 3rd Edition (“3e“), there were some books that were fantastic that I wish I had never sold. Serpentine Owl, who’ll be playing in the upcoming 4e game, gave me the reprint of Deities & Demigods (in perfect condition with the 3.5e conversion in the back); Erik (who left Twitter/X) gave me Hordes of the Abyss and Tyrants of the Nine Hells (both also in perfect condition); and then Jason (on Twitter/X but doesn’t appear to use it) gave me the Book of Vile Darkness (in pretty good condition). If I had gone through eBay, I would have paid almost as much for those four books as I did for all the 1e reprints I bought combined, but I got them all free.
If you click through the Book of Vile Darkness link, you won’t be able to view it without logging in and removing filters for adult content.
<gears turning>
So, after mulling it over, I realized, “The universe has provided so much in this regard, I think I can justify doing something stupid, especially something that isn’t too stupid.” I went to eBay and purchased the mediocre-at-best Book of Exalted Deeds just to have a match to the Book of Vile Darkness. I don’t know if I’ll ever use the material, but it’s nice to have that matched set, and I didn’t have to pay anywhere near USD$100 to get it. Now, I think my stash is complete, but who knows what I’ll be writing in a year?
My buddy, Vic, and I are getting ready to share dungeon master responsibilities on a new 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (“4e”) campaign set in a game world of our own creation. The subject of my Dungeon Crawl System (“DCS”) came up, and it had me thinking about a change I should have made to it back when people were playing 4een masse.
For context, the DCS is a method of 4e encounter design that speeds up 4e’s notoriously slow combats and eliminates the need for the so-called “15-minute adventuring day.” The PDF can be found here.
There are two things you need to know to understand the change. First, in the DCS, NPCs were granted a +10 environment bonus to initiative assuring they’d almost always go first, and when they didn’t, the result would feel remarkably satisfying for the players. Second, there was a flaw in 4e’s math that didn’t manifest for most games because epic-level play was relatively rare. NPCs didn’t keep pace with PCs, such that by the time you reached epic level, the PCs were walking through NPCs as if they weren’t even there.
This, of course, assumes that you built your epic encounters as instructed. Sly Flourish provided some excellent (and free) advice on how to design your encounters so that they could keep pace with the PCs’ power curve. The short answer was cheat. Pull out all sorts of terrain, traps, and other tricks. “Gone are the days where monsters out of the book could threaten PCs.” If you’re completely unfair, the end result will be a reasonable challenge for the PCs. The long answer provides far more precise science than that.
The fact that the NPCs couldn’t keep pace with the PCs detracted from the game as written, but it fit nicely with my DCS. To put a point on it, epic level 4e as written in the sourcebooks was the DCS. Build encounters as written, don’t allow short rests more often than every other encounter, and epic level was fast and furious and reasonably balanced.
The Change
Put another way, as the PCs approach epic level, there’s less of a need for the DCS. 4e itself slowly morphs into the DCS, so the DCS needs to slowly eliminate itself. There was one easy way to do that requiring an insignificant conceptual leap.
For the NPCs’ environment bonus to initiative, the bonus shouldn’t be a flat +10. Instead, use this formula: ((30-[PC level])/3)+1 always rounding down. In Excel, use column A to list the levels from 1 to 30, then populate column B with =MAXA((ROUNDDOWN((30-A#)/3,0)+1),0), where A# is a placeholder for cells A1, A2, A3, etc. In English, it’s this: For levels 1-3, the bonus is +10; levels 4-6, it’s +9; 7-0, it’s +8; etc. Each set of three continuous levels has the same bonus, and it’s one less than the previous (i.e., lower) set of three levels. For those who work best with charts, it’s this:
Level
Bonus
1-3
+10
4-6
+9
7-9
+8
10-12
+7
13-15
+6
16-18
+5
19-21
+4
22-24
+3
25-27
+2
28-30
+1
This creates enough of an improvement that no further tweaks are strictly necessary. So, as for the rest of the numbers, until you hear otherwise, use my system as written for levels 1-20, but when you hit 21st level, build encounters the way the Dungeon Master’s Guide instructs you. That’s probably precise enough because, if you’ve bought in to running the game, you’re already committed to the notion that you’re bound to tweak your encounters anyway. My system’s precision is close enough for dungeon master work, even at high paragon and epic.
I will definitely be using this system quite a bit when I running this campaign.
My buddy, Vic, and I are starting a new 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (“4e”) campaign for which we’ll be alternating as dungeon masters. The campaign will be set in a game world of our own creation called Baledaar (BA-leh-dar). I spent all weekend entering the cosmology into Masterplan. Doing so required that I fill in some (not all) of the gaps in our, well, master plan for the campaign setting. I’m really happy about where were taking this.
We created several Twitter/X handles for many of the deities and locations of the campaign world. To keep them active, I posted some goofy, soap opera-like back and forth, but going forward, a lot of the tweets/exes(?) will represent updates for the progress, as well as some in-character interaction that isn’t necessarily as goofy. The idea will be to give people a feel for the setting elements in case we ever publish it.
In light of the direction in which Elon is going, I’ll probably create a few of these on Mastodon as well.
Play What You Want 