alexandraerin | Entries tagged with dungeons and/or dragons

...which is that as much as I loathe the "everything is optimal and nothing hurts" school of power game theory, I've spent enough time around those types of gamers that I've subconsciously internalized a lot of their thinking about things.

One of the things I have striven for in my game design for both AWW and Adventure Song is to present players with interesting choices about what to put where, and how specialized they want to be. But after calibrating so much of the game around the deep end of the stat pool, I always seem to end up overcompensating on the side of "make sure they have enough points".

For instance, after having almost reflexively calculated the sweet spot for the intersection of dexterity and strength given the armor system I'm using in Adventure Song, I ended up designing the attribute allocation system around making sure every character hits their class's sweet spot... perfect defense for everyone at level 1, with no room to grow outside of magic.

I've ended up scrapping that attribute allocation system in favor of one that is radical by my standards, though fairly conservative: distribute 60 points among the 6 attributes (using the old stand-bys), minimum 5 and maximum 14, then apply bonuses (with humans getting 5 points to spend anywhere, as long as nothing's above 18.) Yes, I'm starting with the idea that the human baseline should mean something. I still subscribe to the idea that a heroic adventurer should be larger than life from level 1, but that's what the 5 bonus points are for. My original scheme was 70 points and then +5, which is pretty firmly in Lake Wobegon territory (you know, where the halflings are strong, the dwarves are good-looking, and all the player characters are above average).

And as I write this, I realize that one of my qualms in nerfing the attributes to be based on the idea of average as... average... is that I've written into the game a very generous initial armor listing for each class that was also based around hitting that sweet spot. I did it because under the pricing scheme I'm using, metal armor is prohibitively expensive for starting characters. But as long as every character class either gets free armor or is optimized to have similar miss rates without it, those numbers are really just numbers. I honestly didn't intend for the best armor to be in player hands at level 1, but it fell into a blind spot.

So clearly I have some more adjustments to make here, in myself and the game.

After playing around with the 60+5 attribute system, I think I'm going to stick with it. I came up with a suggested quick matrix for humans that goes 15, 13, 11, 10, 9, and 7. It's the kind of numbers that look like something you might get from a random number generator, but you've got three attributes that are above average and two below, so things are stacked in your favor. Half your attributes are about average... everything but your freakish 15 clusters perfectly around average, in fact. There's going to be one area where your character is great but with room to grow, and one area where someone else should take point.

(I should also probably point out that my check system is 1d20 + attribute rather than 1d20 + a derived mod, so the difference between 15 and 10 isn't a 10 percentage point increase in success rate, it's a 25 percentage point increase in success rate.)

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/602048.html

I've heard people saying that 5E completely scrapped everything that 4E did, and when I read the basic guide and then the PHB, I really couldn't believe that this was the general impression. Yeah, the presentation is more old school, but they've incorporated so much of 4E's overall sensibilities and ideas.

And the other day, I think I hit upon the word that sums up the real big difference between 4E and 5E, and I think it's the word that is the substance at the heart of a lot of the grumbling about 4E being "video gamey" or "non-immersive".

The word is interface.

4E, in its quest to standardize information and make sure you always had your options at your fingerprints, created a much more obvious, visible, and tangible interface between the players and their characters, between the players and the world.

When I talk about this, I'm not talking about the computerization of the game. Or even the physical props like cards and tokens that they were pushing. I'm talking about the system itself, and the assumptions it made about how the players would interact with the game.

And it was meant to simplify things, but it was often confusing. Because players didn't just need to understand the game, they needed to understand the interface. They need to internalize what the colors on the colorful cards/stat blocks mean, what the things encoded in the keywords mean, et cetera.

And the interface has always been there... dice and character sheets and sometimes maps and sometimes maps and minis, use of game-specific or hobby-specific standardized notations, et cetera.

At times it's been klunkier and more cumbersome than others (looking at you, 2nd Edition AD&D), but it's always had a relatively low profile. Then 4E came along and made the interface a huge part of the game.

And it worked for me. It worked for a lot of people. I had the mental connection that the interface was not the game, and the interface didn't get in the way of the game for me. But in retrospect and when I compare it to 5E, I can see how the interface had the ability to distract from the game, to slow the game, to slow the learning process for people who weren't getting the interface.

While there's a lot to be said about the way 5E is written towards newbies versus the way that 4E was presented (essentially, like a puzzle with no edge pieces... if you don't already know what the picture is supposed to be, how would you even know where to start?), I think that shifting the focus back away from the interface made a big difference in making this newbie-friendliness possible.

It's something to keep in mind with my own game design experiments. I spent a lot of time emulating the interface of 4E because I saw it as an integral part of the ideas it supported. I was already re-examining that assumption before I gave 5E a proper hearing, but now I think it can be completely laid to rest.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/601687.html

...and here are my impressions now that I've had a good look at the PHB.

First, I'm very surprised by how well they hit the mark for "unifying the editions"... with the caveat that I don't see much of 2nd Edition in there, aside from the stuff that's been in every edition. It's like someone took the good ideas from fourth edition, ported them back into third edition, and them streamlined it down to be as approachable and simple as Basic before running the whole thing back through third edition's "coherent/consistent engine" filter again.

(While also cribbing a few ideas from Pathfinder. But hey, what goes around comes around.)

Second, I'm kind of gratified at how many of their design decisions parallel my own take on a D&D-esque-but-better game. No numbers stacking to infinity, plus a multi-level training curve for character classes that both cushions things for newbies and protects against overpowered multiclass combos? Inexhaustible cantrips for everybody? Yeah, those are things I can definitely get behind.

Third, I'm really impressed by how seamlessly they geared the game towards abstract movement/positioning while leaving everything perfectly situated for tactical battle maps. If they wanted the game to be ambidextrous, I would have expected them to present the rules as if you're going to grid everything and then have the sidebar mentioning that you can dispense with the maps and just use approximate distances... i.e., what they did in 3E. I don't think it would have occurred to me in a million years how simple it is to reverse that, or how well it would work.

I was disappointed by the return of vancian magic, but really, on closer examination... spell-preparers have more flexibility in this version than they did in 4E.

The level of customization present at launch is pretty impressive. While I'm disappointed to see that the Warlord (my favorite new core class from 4E) has been relegated to a grow-into-it build of the fighter, I'm impressed that they got every other PHB1 class from 3E and 4E into the book as a primary class. And I like the idea of the Warlord and Swordmage essentially being specializations of the Fighter, with the arcane trickster similarly being a build of Rogue. It's a neat extension of 4E's idea of giving every class a spell-equivalent: literally every class in the book can (but does not have to) gain explicitly supernatural abilities, and I'm pretty sure every class except Barbarian can become at least a minor spellcaster without multiclassing.

And while I've got some worries about the pricing and marketing of the books themselves, I'm impressed with how newbie-friendly they've made everything, both by putting out a starter set and actually making PDF versions of a basic version of the game available for free.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/600535.html

I saw a conversation recently about economics in D&D/Pathfinder that was interesting and amusing (as things so often are), but just reinforced my desire to leave such things as an abstract background element in A Wilder World.

Yeah, it's terribly amusing to hear about adventuring parties who do things like steal the adamantite gates from the entrance to a dungeon and leave the rest of the loot to the deathtraps and the monsters because it can't be worth a tenth as much as the giant pieces of ultra-rare magical metal, or the party who upon getting a "knowledge was their treasure" ending looks up the price of old parchment in the rulebook and sells the library of the ancients for list price. That kind of thing is part of the culture of D&D, just like rolling into town and selling the leather shirts that ten kobolds died in is. Looting everything that's not nailed down (and bringing a +2 crowbar of prying for the rest) is just part of the culture of gaming.

But this is the kind of thing I mean when I talk about how D&D is better at simulating a game of D&D than it is simulating a fantasy adventure story. If someone behaves like that in a fantasy story, you know it's a self-aware D&D/gaming parody... outside of those things, this kind of behavior is a highly distinct character trait, not just normal behavior.

None of this is to bag on D&D. I like D&D. I play D&D. And I know it's possible to run the game in a way that deprecates looting and/or mitigates the need to scramble after every last copper. But I think there's room for systems that are built from the ground up to tell a different kind of story.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/447356.html

If you’re playing (or running) a typical fantasy adventure focused roleplaying game, how important is the concept of experience/achievement levels to you? Do you like having a means of keeping score/measuring overall ability, or does it add nothing to the experience for you to know that your character is level 1 or level 11, as long as the game gives you ways to grow in power and ability?

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/389663.html

So, in just about every story with a dragon ever--including D&D spin-off novels--there's a moment when a dragon is about to unleash its destructive breath, and it does what you would expect someone to do before an explosive exhalation: it inhales, deeply. Sometimes it rears up and throws back its head or even closes its eyes. Other times there's just a sharp intake of air.

Regardless, this is treated as a significant thing. It lets the reader know what's about to happen so that the blast of fire or whatever doesn't come across as casual as a swipe of the claw, but it's also often significant in the story. It gives the hero time to scurry back, or twist to the side, or try for one last desperate blow, or whatever.

But if you look at the actual D&D rules, the dragon's breath weapon isn't treated like this at all. There will be a limitation on how often it can be used/how many times it can be used, but other than that... it is as casual as a swipe of the claw, or any other attack. The idea that there might be a moment of warning is abstracted away in a roll of the dice (saving throw/hit roll, and "Feats" or advantages that allow characters with better reflexes to better avoid the effects of the breath).

This idea would be nearly unthinkable in 4E's action economy, where the medium of exchange is attacks-per-round and big solo threats like dragons are supposed to be able to attack swiftly and often, but... what if a dragon's breath were a two stage affair? Round one, the dragon quite obviously prepares, using the action that would be spent attacking to inhale in a big, obvious way. Round two, the dragon lets loose with a giant attack that's powerful enough and big enough to make up for the lost opportunity.

Of course, the players can scurry out of the way and dive for cover... but isn't that potentially more engaging than a roll of the die? And maybe the dragon can hold its breath in for a few rounds before it has to unload it. Maybe the act of inhaling can also be used to pull everyone in closer, making it slightly harder to get away.

The "Oh no, the dragon's about to breath fire! *react*" thing is already potentially part of the combat system in A Wilder World, because of the fact that actions are declared in advance. But I think for big dramatic attacks like dragons, it should go a step further... either make it so that they have to be declared first even if the dragon has the advantage (the side with advantage normally gets to hear what the other side is doing before finalizing their actions), or just go with the two phase thing described above.

I'll probably go with the latter, so as not to further complicate the tactical phase of combat. And maybe make it so the dragon can only initiate a breath attack if it has advantage for the round... give another consequence to advantage, and incentive to keep a dragon pressed back on its heels as often as possible.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/382584.html

It's weird, no matter how many people he kills, the audience still thinks he's lovable.

Rich Burlew, I feel your pain.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/254321.html

Writing about the whole thing with the wands was challenging.

I didn't want to stray too far from the standard and age-old D&D tradition of a magician's wand or staff being a piece of junk that stores "charges" of spells for later use, but the 4th edition version... a permanent implement that is as much part of a wizard's character as the weapon a warrior chooses to wield... just appeals to me on such a~~n arcane~~ primal level as being right that I hated to ignore it.

But ignore it I did, because there would be problems with suddenly introducing this facet of magic at the start of the second year. The charge-wands are just one more thing you can do with magic; implement-wands would be an integral part of using magic, and would have needed to be there from the beginning.

Also, there is another writer out there who did the "school of wizardry" thing with wands being a permanent and personal part of a wizard's channeling of magical power and she made them such an iconic part of her universe that I'd hesitate to tread on her robes.

(Hmmmm, tangent: now I'm wondering if that widespread and popular depiction of wands as tools didn't influence the direction of "implements" in 4E... one of the problems D&D has had through the ages is that it's gotten worse at depicting fantasy in general as it became better and better at giving us a simulation of D&D. With so much other fantasy stuff taking its cues from D&D, it's hard to imagine where else the "Wizards carry wands and use them to cast all their spells" rather than "Wizards carry wands because they can use them to cast the spell the wand is charged with" came from.)

As Mackenzie's education advances I will be getting into more wizardly tools like the powerstones, which some readers will no doubt identify as being an obvious GURPS influence. All of this is part of why I was eager to get to the second year, of course.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/251994.html

Cat Valente has a new book out. I haven't blogged about it because I haven't yet read it; that'll probably come some time next week. But it's on such a fascinating subject that I think it might pique a few interests even without a more specific recommendation than "Cat wrote it"

The first time I remember hearing about Prester John was in a world history class in high school. The text book had maybe two or three paragraphs about him. The teacher gave him maybe one paragraph's worth of attention, but I was intrigued. Mythical personages? Lost kingdoms? This was way more interesting than actual history... and it was actual history, because people actually believed in the kingdom of Prester John and they acted on that belief in ways that changed the world. Hoax, rumor, myth, whatever... Prester John was a part of history.

And of course, mythical priest-kings were only one of the things that medieval people believed might be lurking off the edge of th map. My history book didn't even deal with them at a glance, but the world of Prester John was inhabited by the sorts of creatures that inspired the minds of E. Gary Gygax, C.S. Lewis, and other people with letters both in front of and behind their names. Because of such modern fantasy works, I was already well-acquainted with the inhabitants of medieval bestiaries by the time I got my first tantalizing glimpse of Prester John, but I never thought much about the connection between the two. That I learned of Prester John in a history book kind of skewed the context for me.

So who was Prester John? Well, one of the more tangentially interesting things about him is that his title has the same root as "priest" and "Presbyterian", but this is the sort of serious subject that deserves a serious explanation. But watch this instead:

And check out the official website, and if that's enough to get your interest, consider ordering a copy.

There are times when I ignore my physical limitations and push my body too far, until it pushes back. Then there are times like what happened tonight. I haven't been moving furniture or going for long walks in hot weather (I'd have to go for a long walk to find some hot weather), I had neither missed meals nor binged in any way, I haven't been skimping on sleep... but at some time just before six yesterday evening, I just hit a wall and started going into a decline. My pills didn't help. Caffeine didn't help. Eating didn't help. I was tired.

By game time (three hours later), I was exhausted. My typing was starting to go wonky and my focus was going wonkier. Dorian, my Giant Monster Kitty of Doom, was trying to climb in my lap and I didn't have the arm strength to push him away. Jack helpfully pointed out that I could put his snuggly blanket next to me and he'd climb into that, but by that point Mr. Dorian had absconded with several shiny spoons.

I ended up falling asleep in front of my computer. I woke up when one of the players tried to call me on Skype, but I didn't have the wherewithal to actually sit up or reach for my keyboard. My computer setup is actually on the floor not far from where I sleep, so I felt very comfortable where I was.

That was like six hours ago. I still feel a deep-down weariness, but I'm also hungry so I suppose I'm going to have to go downstairs and get some food. I'll see if that wakes me up or puts me back to sleep.

I hate to do this especially two weeks in a row, but I'm not going to be able to do the game tomorrow night. My schedule for the end of the week has changed due to external events. I'm not inclined to fight to rearrange them because I'd be massively underprepared... the same things that kept me from getting much writing done also kept me from getting any prep work done on the game, and with how widely things diverged from the ways I expected they might go that's not good.

I've got work I've need to get done, but tomorrow during the day I'll be making a roleplay thread for the game so we can get some story continuation and at least some of the planning out of the way. If I can see how things are generally going I'll be able to plan better.

I'm going to be spending the next three weeks house/dog sitting for my folks, which means not only will I be staying put but I'll be staying put in glorious isolation. Nothing and no one around to affect game night, my sleep schedule, or work regimens. I'm looking forward to it.

I kind of overdid it on physical activity this week, hence the lack of tasks/updates last night.. it was one of those things where I was going, "Why am I so tired?" and then I stopped and thought and it was like, "Oh, yeah. Right." It's kind of a testament to my growing self-awareness that I do that so rarely.

So, anyway, there's going to be a few small updates this weekend, but since so few people watch for them on the weekends I expect it'll be more like a bonus for most readers on Monday. :P I'm also going to get the D&D transcript formatted for reading and posted, and make a "business" post for the players.

Not necessarily in the next few hours, though... I'm still a bit fatiguey and should probably drink some water and lie down somewhere cool.

Under the theory that more eyes are better than fewer, I've decided to post the draft of my abstract combat system for D&D. This system owes a debt of inspiration to the "SARN-FU" system (detailed here), for showing me a good model for handling abstract distances. My original plan was to use SARN-FU, but I had a few issues with it:

The movement system is unnecessarily mathematical and precise. If things are abstract, let them be abstract. My system has more of a fudge factor when it comes to movement and distance.
The flanking system (though refreshingly simple) seems like it would be brutal in combats with large numbers of enemies.
I wanted to have clear guidelines for adjudicating bursts and blasts, to keep them from either being total DM Deathtraps ("Oh, too bad... you hit your entire party with a fireball. Again.") or laser-guided multiwarhead for the players ("I position my fireball so that it hits every Kobold but misses all of us.")
Likewise, I wanted rules for doing interesting things with forced movement that didn't turn pushes and slides into the equivalent of a Green Lantern Power Ring.

While I started out just adding rules for blasts/bursts and forced movement stunts to SARN-FU, when I was finished the only thing it had in common was the basic idea of using relative distances, so a new name (and better acronym) seemed to be in order.

This has not been playtested. It has not even been thoroughly checked by anyone who isn't me.

( Cut for nerdery that may or may not be relevant to your interests. )

Some Explanations, or What I Was Thinking:

It would be the DM's job to keep track of where everyone is and give an overview of the combat field every round. This should ideally be presented in a visual form that players can refer back to, rather than having to keep the whole battlefield in their head. My thought is that for an online game, I would describe the battlefield positions in a block of text and for an offline game I would list the clusters on a white board or a sheet of paper.

The change to flanking (that you can't flank while being flanked) is to keep the number of flanks going on at one time, since each one is something that has to be kept track of (unlike in a tabletop game, when you glance at the board and see that your opponent is flanked.) The flanking rules and boxing in rules together are designed to create a sense of a dynamic combat with warriors jockeying for position, as tends to happen in 4E tabletop games. They also give more meaningfulness to the "shift" mechanic, since so many powers allow free shifts.

Guarding is meant to allow Defenders to do their job without the game devolving to something even worse than "I shot you!"/"No, you didn't, you missed!" -- "I stood in your way!"/"No, you didn't!"

...I'm going to be restarting my online group(s) in the near future, with a couple of changes. For one thing I've been thinking about an abstract combat system that will allow most of the awesomeness of 4E but without requiring a battle map. This should make combat faster, eliminate problems with players who have slower connections not getting map updates on a timely basis, and allow me to host the game from anywhere, even my laptop.

The system I'll be using is inspired by a "positional" system I read, though the movement and distance calculations are simplified from the one that served as the original model. I've also come up with some quick and simple ways of resolving stunts involving forced movement and figuring out how many enemies you can catch with a blast or burst (and how to know if you're going to catch an ally in it).

I'm sending a draft to some of my gaming friends to see if they can spot any hideous glaring holes in it. If it looks good, I'll put it up and see what other people think.

It's basically a series of modifications to the 4E combat rules, so it looks kind of complicated when all laid out, but I think the end result is simpler than the system it's modifying. I'm going to be rewriting my draft a bit even before I get feedback to make it more readable... after thinking about the first version I hammered out, I realized it will read better if rather than an unorganized series of "replacement rules", it gives the basic movement/positioning rules and then gives the nitty gritty details in terms of things like how to read a power card.

This is more of a general roleplaying/GMing post than specifically a D&D or 4E one. It's about my players getting me to do something I never thought I'd do. :P

( But it's still being cut. )

I found an interesting gaming site via Twitter, and specifically found this article (edit: fixed URL, had a little copy/paste error), which outlines an interesting concept. I've said before that I have an abundance of ideas that aren't themselves stories: vehicles, gimmicks and gadgets, locations, characters... this could prove to be an outlet for them.