5e Game - Part 14

The party, having defeated all of the baddies in the keep, proceeded to perform those actions familiar to all dungeon-delving crews - loot the bodies, look for shinies and magic. They found plenty of both (the original adventure creators admit this is a bit of a Monty Haul windfall, as the rest of the adventure is a bit light on the treasure), lots of coin, nice shiny baubles, and even a few magic items. Oh, and the deed to the keep. Just icing on the cake, really, as the keep is quite a ways away from the fortified manor they are still building in the minor border province to the south, but the adventure tossed it in and I figured it would give the players a chuckle. Which it did, the paladin's player (the paladin being the only one of "noble birth" and thought it automatically became his) chortling about it the rest of the game and into our after game discussion. What is more interesting (to me as the DM, at least) is if the party is going to realize the deed is better used as some collateral on their current campaign than they are trying to keep it and make something of it from a distance.

The ranger's player has decided he wants to be the trickster of the group and the rogue, the original prankster, has decided it's just as interesting to let the ranger play the pranks and catch heat from the rest of the party. The ranger, having decided he doesn't like the paladin or his new squire, has targeted them specifically, first putting poison ivy oil in the back of the squire's pants a game session or so back, and then putting tiger balm (which he used to kill an aged halfling way back in the first session... that one needs further explanation, gimme a second) on the rungs of the ladder into the keep's secret treasure room. The paladin and the squire, having had quite enough, decided to chop down the tree the ranger was "meditating" in (remember, whatever you can do, elves can do better), and when the ranger started running, the squire who is an archer specc'd fighter planted a crossbow bolt into the ranger's spine with a devastating natural 20 critical hit. The paladin healed him back into life, but I doubt the ranger is going to let it go.

Yes, I am totally letting the ranger's player make the ranger as unpopular with the rest of the party as he wants. This game is about friends having fun together, and if you ain't having fun except by making your friends miserable, maybe it's time to move on to another group. But the players have to decide it on their own. I'm here to referee the game and tell a story, not make the players get along if they don't want to. It's a tough love, but it's fair. Besides, if they mess around enough, I get to run over a small collection of villages with 20,000 angry, violent humanoids. It's the small things in life that bring a DM pleasure.

Oh yeah, the tiger balm story. The first session, I tasked the party with escorting an old halfling to another country to act as ambassador there. The night they arrived was cold and snowy, and the old halfling showed like he was coming down with a cold. The ranger (a druid at the time) tries to help the ambassador by rubbing him down with tiger balm, who turns up dead the next day. He was going to die anyway, he was just a plot point to get the party to the other country to start up that arc of the campaign, but the party still believes to this day that the tiger balm killed the old halfling. Sad really, that old halfling (Master Teagallow) was this crotchety old grump who kept sending the party off on side explorations the entire trip, kinda hoping to kill the party off and kinda just to get them out of his hair. Still my most memorable NPC to date.

Anyway, the party found some more history about the keep and the surrounding area along with the treasures in the keep's basement. Namely they found bits of history that point towards the clan of giants that were driven to destroy the keep and kill the last lord. Having confirmation from the local guide, the party decides (after their long rest and almost-fratricide of the ranger) to go talk to the giants and see if they can get some help from them, as the hobgoblin army had not used any giants in their warbands to this point. And if nothing else, maybe they can convince the giants to stay neutral in the coming invasion. They trekked north while the ranger grumped that he had not run into any dire wolves. He stated he wanted one as a mount, but in reality he was trying to get a message to his long lost sister. I had explained that the party hadn't seen much in the way of any non-monstrosity animals since leaving the last vestiges of civilization - large numbers of hungry, blood-thirsty raiders tend to drive away animals as well as locals - but he still grumped.

I relented and let him run into a lone mated pair of dire wolves not fair off their path to the giants. "Dire wolves always travel in packs!" "Leave off, bud, you're lucky these two are too stubborn to leave their den with the rest of the pack. Roll your animal handling checks." Natural one, and natural one. Oh yeah, not an attack roll, so those aren't an automatic failure, but when you can't even meet a DC10 skill check with all your bonuses, it's not tragic, that's comedy gold right there. Fortunately (for him, I think at this point even I was ready for the ranger to be turned into dire wolf poop), the druid had accompanied the ranger and he intervened and the ranger eventually convinced the wolves to deliver a message down the "wolf chain" towards where his long lost sister was rumored to be. One wolf left with the message, and the other followed along, stating she wanted to watch the giant step on the party.

And that's where we ended. We already had one player step out two hours early, and another (who didn't show up until two hours after start because he forgot we were playing, even with my weekly reminder text) left an hour early, so I said this was a good place to stop.

Politics at the Table - The Nicer Discussion

A while back, I ranted and raved about forcing your politics down other peoples' throats. I don't suggest you go read it, mostly because it's out there, read it or not as you see fit, and I'm not going to convince you to read it (or not) at this point in time. If you must read, you can find it here.

Anyway, here are a couple of gaming-focused gentlemen who have this exact conversation without being a huge, raging asshole about it like I was. Or even mention that particular company or product, and never raise their voices, and talk calmly about the situation in a logical, well-mannered fashion.

Did you catch it? The scary thing about that conversation? It's the same thing I said about the ridiculousness of the whole debacle. That's the best word I can come up with, debacle. I enjoy Paizo's offerings so far, but really, trying to enforce your politics in a game should be the last thing on your mind as a game maker - you can't enforce anything the minute anyone buys your product, so don't waste your time or possibly piss everyone off trying the impossible. Focus your time, instead, on making as good a game product as possible.

And for everyone else out there who feels ostracized for whatever reason from playing tabletop RPGs, these games we play are about having fun with our friends. Go find some different friends, or make new ones, who do want to play with you.

Zero Session or Level Zero Thoughts

A recent post in a 5e DM's chat area has got me thinking, and we all know how dangerous that can be. The thought percolating inside my skull is, in addition to a Session Zero (which many of us agree is a good idea), you also run the party at Level Zero. Session Zero, as you may or may not know, is the practice of sitting the party down and hashing out the details of the next campaign (or series of campaigns) with them. What the flavor of the campaign is, what the party is going to consist of, how the party gets together, etc. Playing Level Zero comes after that - you run the PCs at Level Nothing to take care of introductions and give the players some more meat to latch onto. I did this to a limited degree in my last Session Zero, running each PC through a short little solo backstory session that gave them ties to the rest of the group and the campaign. It was pretty effective, but pretty specific to the campaign, as it tied the party to the Musketeers-like organization I'm using to fight murder hoboism in the current campaign.

Anyway, my thoughts on the subject. If you do want to use a Level Zero start to your campaign - for me I would use this if I wanted to start out the campaign with a story of aspiring adventurers coming together to go take care of a problem threatening their village or whatever - here is what I would do. First, everyone is level zero (d'uh, right?) of whatever class they're going to be at level one. Second, everyone rolls 1d6 plus their CON bonus (see below) for HP. Yes, rolls it, not "automatically gets 6 HP". Third, everyone has a proficiency bonus of +1, and only skills from their background. Fourth, if they are a caster class, they get whatever cantrips and ability to cast cantrips as if they were 1st level, but no more. Fifth, starting money is purchased with half their class's and background's starting money (and no magic items, like healing potions). This is a good time to let the Crafty McDIYertons in your party explain how they're making their own healer's kit and other useful bits they'll likely need but can't afford. Sixth, when rolling stats, they get their racial bonuses, but only if any human PC does not take feats. A zero level PC with even one feat is way out of balance. Seventh and last, each PC has -300 XP. You read that right, negative 300 experience points that they have to earn back to zero to reach 1st level.

After the party reaches 1st level/zero experience points, the members get everything that they normally would at 1st level - full HP, full starting money, full skills, all their class's abilities at that level, and any feats (though if you have a human PC and they took the racial ability bonus, don't let them trade it in for a feat). 

The Zero Level session(s) itself must be low level, low challenge - a few goblins, a few kobolds, very low CR humanoids or monstrosities or beasts, and never outnumbering the party (less than is preferable). It won't take many fights or monsters (basically 6 times the number of party members) for your PCs to reach zero XP, especially if you remember to award XP for non-combat encounters and provide said encounters. The most important part of the Zero Level is making this arc of the campaign pertinent to the forming of the party itself, and as an intro to the rest of your campaign. If you fail those two, hopefully you and your players can use it as the tutorial portion of the campaign, learn important house rules, get used to each other's style of gaming, that kind of thing. And have one more interesting/funny story to reminisce about.

Don't Be a Troll

On the internet, two things are unforgivable sins - not fully reading/consuming what someone has typed/produced, and not providing anything constructive (otherwise known as being a troll). Given that you can't make anyone click over to your content much less consume it in its fullest, and there's no real way to force someone to do so, there's not much you can do about the first one. Due to the anonymous nature of the internet, and the confrontational nature of humanity as a whole, being a troll is far too easy these days, but there are things you can do to curb the habit.

Before I get into the meat of this rant, let's talk about being a troll. I don't mind if you have a different opinion about anything than I do, that's what makes life interesting. I for one love fried okra, and you may not, but that's perfectly fine to have that opinion. However, if I say "I love fried okra", and you reply, "you suck, fried okra is nasty", you're being a troll. If instead you say, "I don't like fried okra, and here's why..." or even just, "oh, I don't like fried okra" without being nasty about it, that's not being a troll, that's just having a different opinion (and more yummy fried okra for me). The first part of that, being nasty just because someone has a different opinion than you, is downright silly because if you can't stand any idea that goes against your own, how do you honestly expect anyone else to accept your opinion on anything? Everybody's different, and if they want to believe whatever they believe in, as long as it doesn't affect your bank account, why do you care? The second part of that really only applies to the 'net - you can have a different opinion than I do, but as it takes too much effort to try and have a constructive conversation online, if you don't even try to explain your different opinion, why did you bother? Explain what you find wrong about my idea, otherwise you're not being constructive and should just keep your thought to yourself. I'll gladly discuss our differences, because I may be utterly wrong or may have missed something you've known all along, but just saying "you're wrong" full stop, is not going to change my opinion and is more than likely going to piss me off.

Here, I'll let Key and Peele work their magic on the subject:

What have we learned? You engage trolls, invite and encourage them to have an actual discussion, and you keep doing it. Either they open up and rejoin the rest of us in intelligent discourse, or they get scared and leave.

What brought all this on was I replied to a blog post by the Angry GM, which is very thought provoking, you should check it out. I'm not going to post my whole reply, you can find it in the above blog post, but in it I related one method I was already using, another possible method I vaguely remembered from a previous edition of the game, and another method that popped into my head on the spot. And someone replied to my comment. No, the names have not been changed, why anonymize those who already hide behind anonymity? Here's the replies to my comment.

Nerdsamwich - There are more elegant ways to take crafting out of your game, but I can think of few that would be as efficient at destroying player buy-in.

Angry GM - [[ Comment deleted as it was completely nonconstructive. Thanks for your input, Bill, but I’ll decide whether someone’s comments are useful or not and if anyone needs to be yelled at, I’ll do the yelling. This thread is done. Drop it. – The Angry GM ]]

Yep, Angry didn't reply to Nerdsamwich, I did, and Angry felt the need to correct me. From what I can remember, here is my original reply - Bud, don't offer up "constructive criticism" if there isn't any. If you have an issue with what I've typed, that's fine, but at least give some critique. What part specifically made you think I was "destroying buy-in"? Why? What would you have done differently? Because what you've done is the internet version of driving by and yelling at someone "you suck!"

Maybe I was a little harsh, but, well, you decide for yourself - who was trolling who here? Whose comment was useful and whose was merely noise? Whichever way you decide, I'll be glad to discuss it with you. Don't want to discuss it? Keep it to yourself. Please, give me discussion, but we already have enough noise on this information medium. Nerdsamwich, if you're out there, I'm still curious to hear where you think I "destroyed player buy-in".

5e Game - Part 13

The heroes trekked thru the wilderness. They must find the hobgoblin army to figure out its size and intentions, much less verify if it even exists. They traveled north, along the ancient trade road, avoiding trouble when they could, and fighting when they had to. They fought the ettercap and the giant spiders, and won. They avoided the trolls, deciding not to mess with the regenerating nuisances and instead sneak away from them. They negotiated with the old timer in the woods and gained a guide familiar with the area. The ambush came suddenly, the hydra rising from the swamp and threatening to charge. The druid cast his spell, bringing thorny growth up from the muck and blocking the hydra's path, so it went around (it passed its INT check, what can I say?). Right into the ranger who was scouting ahead of the party. The hydra, huge and menacing, missed many of its attacks on the ranger, and quickly succumbed when the paladin expelled all of his high level spell slots in one round of furious attacks.

The party continued on, an abandoned keep possibly harboring vanguard elements of the hobgoblin horde a mere few hours past the hydra's swamp. They were right, the hobgoblins were here, along with a manticore, a minotaur, worg riding goblins, and a bugbear sorcerer. The party waited until dark, because they forgot that most of those had darkvision and it didn't matter either way, but it at least gave them a chuckle when the hobgoblin in the tower started howling like a ghost and swinging a dead goblin around a magical light. Then they did the thing that all DMs want their PCs to do - they split the party.

Half the party shimmied up the outside of the tower, and came down the stairs, taking out the lone guard pretending to be a ghost (if you're occupying a supposedly haunted keep, might as well enforce the misconception and keep the locals away), and continued on to find the keep's BBEG, said bugbear sorcerer. Having partially surprised him, the Sneaky McStealthertons sent one of their members back up to signal the others to rush the courtyard. Back in the tower, 2 PCs spent 4 rounds convincing themselves that beating up the bad guy's fists with their faces was a bad plan, but not before he got tired of their shenanigans and left to go see what the ruckus in the courtyard was.

Pulling back from the story a sec, let me relate some technical parts of this, and let me tell you, when the party wanted to pull a coordinated assault on a keep that was just a little too big to fully represent on my board (see episode 9 to see the board I made up), I panicked just a wee bit. But the players were insistent, and I remembered what Matt Colville said about it recently, so I let them split the party. I explained several things before they got started - this will all be happening simultaneously, but we are going to run this part first and then pick up the other, and finally join the 2 where it's natural for that to happen; and these PCs and only these PCs will be involved in the first part, and the rest will be in the other, so don't break the meta too much.

I didn't go as far as he does, but you get the idea.

The first part, the attack on the tower, I began tracking rounds from when the first half of the party signaled the 2nd half to begin their assault. When the BBEG got tired (bored, really) and left the tower, I stopped that portion and flipped to the courtyard assault, redrawing my map. The only real confusion was one player, in the first assault force, cast one concentration spell at the BBEG but wanted to be able to cast another concentration spell at the bad guy's in the courtyard. I saw that problem coming and warned him, drop the first concentration spell when you want to because you won't be able to cast the 2nd one until after the first is gone. Since we were playing out the 2 encounters separately, but treating them as happening simultaneously by winding the clock back (as it were) on the 2nd encounter. He finally understood, and not knowing how long until his 2nd concentration spell was desperately needed, he dropped the first early.

That last has to be confusing, so let me try explaining it this way. Round 1, the Sneaky Squad signals the other half of the party to attack, and pushes their own attack on the BBEG (though they had not figured he was the BBEG yet). The non-sneaky squad blow their hunting horn (alerting and hopefully drawing out as many bad guys into the courtyard as possible) and charge towards the keep. Round 2, the druid casts his concentration spell, but then heads away from the fight with the BBEG back to the top of the tower to support the assault on the courtyard. The outside team is still charging, and I've decided they will arrive next round. At this point, I have the conversation with the druid, and he finally decides he will drop his first concentration spell next round. Round 3, still focused on the fight in the tower, the Sneaky Squad fiddle farts around for this and the following 3 rounds with the BBEG, who finally gets bored and leaves. I redraw the map, and we wind the clock back to the end of Round 2, beginning of Round 3, and shift focus to the courtyard. If the druid had not decided to drop his first concentration spell in Round 3 back when we first ran it inside the tower, I would have been forced to deny him the opportunity to cast the 2nd concentration (man, that is a long word to type) spell until we got to the round in this half of the fight that he dropped it in the other half of the fight. Especially if his 1st concentration spell had done something positive for the party, there is no way I'm letting anyone pull a fast one and do something useful with a different concentration spell somewhere else.

So, TL;DR, if you plan on doing something like this, keep assiduous track of the rounds and what happens where and hope the stuff that happens in the 2nd half can't spill over into the 1st half. Otherwise you gotta rewrite history, and that's just a huge pain in the tukhus.

The 2nd assault party hits the courtyard, and receives the charge from pretty much the entirety of the keep. Fortunately, the wizard's ball of hot expanding gas takes out the hobgoblins, and the druid's 2nd concentration spell starts working over the stragglers, continuing to do so till the end of the game. Many rounds of  fighting here, the paladin's retainer falling multiple times, finally into the Land of the Almost Dead, requiring swift intervention from said paladin, before all the baddies (minus the BBEG) succumb to the party's martial and magical prowess. The BBEG immediately bursts from the base of the tower, puts a hurting on the wizard, blinds the druid, and is about to take Billy Bigsteps back to the horde when the party finally corners him and ends him.

We ended the session there, having run over our usual time limit by half an hour or so. Everyone seemed to have fun, though the player of the party's rogue who is out of state on business, missed his PC finally using his bag of 1,000 ball bearings, something he has been waiting for ever since he acquired said bag. The other players taunted him over text, as is only right. But I have to say, as much of a pain in the butt splitting the party was, I think it worked (not tactically, no, but in the sense of the players felt they had say in the game) and I'd definitely allow it again. They really seemed to like it, and other than a little boredom as we reconciled the part they weren't in and some rules discussions, I think they found it intriguing. How do you communicate between the halves of the party? Who is doing what, where and at what time? If you run into something too powerful (much more likely when you don't have your full complement, much less entire skillset) or something you just can't handle, what do you do? And of course, deciding what to do when the bad guy's just won't cooperate and do something you don't expect.

As for the tactics of the baddies, I played the BBEG smart and didn't engage the party except at an advantage to him. This is a very experienced and nasty spellcaster, I'm not going to let him stand toe to toe and trade blows with better armored and numerous foes, the party had to maneuver around him and finally corner him to finish him off. The rest of the baddies simply dogpiled onto the party and used numbers and advantage giving flanks to whittle away the party's HP pool. Do I feel any remorse for doing that? No. Another gripe of mine with 5th edition is how easy the players have it, especially after they get out of Tier One play, and it's true. A 6th level paladin, a 6th level wizard, and a 3rd level fighter (with a 6th level druid calling down lightning from a hidden position) faced down 6 hobgoblins, 4 goblins on a like number of worgs, a minotaur and a manticore, and except for the fighter going into negative HP off a lucky crit from one of the worgs (40 damage in one blow, we run the crit/fumble tables I stole borrowed from Seth Skorkowsky, who you should watch, he's funny and informative) and immediately getting healed by the paladin and not rolling one death save, the party was otherwise fine. Oh sure, low on HP, but really not breaking a sweat over the encounter.

This very combat is a fine example of how out of touch 5th edition's XP, CR, and building encounters by both of those systems really are. I didn't run the numbers before the game as I'm running an old 3rd edition classic adventure, and I ran it straight out of the book. But if you go into your handy-dandy DMG and look at page 82 for XP Thresholds by Character Level, this encounter (the baddies minus the BBEG) is an XP Threshold of 10,400. The four PCs (well, three and an NPC retainer) have a threshold of 6,000 for Deadly encounters. Yep, more than 1.5x the threshold, and that part of the party really didn't have a lot of problems with it. I have very little remorse for throwing all the monsters at the party, and have for a couple of sessions now. I have to admit, though, I have no fix for the CR or XP system in 5th edition - you're never going to nail down what skillsets are in a party, as there are far too many options out there, and even if you narrowed the option you can't keep a party from doing something strange like playing all fighters or rogues or whatnot. Because of that, I wouldn't try to fix XP, I'd develop tools to provide modifiers to XP depending on said party makeup. {hmmm} Going to have to think on that one. 

Tactical considerations - if the party is slinging a lot of AOE (area of effect) spells and don't have anyone with Sculpt Spell, make sure to line up the monsters so the party has to hit each other. Does the BBEG worry about that? No, that's what "chaotic evil" means, those other monsters are there to be ablative meatshields for the BBEG, they can catch a lightning bolt as long as it also hits an adventurer or two. High AC monsters need to be in base contact with the PCs, and flanking positions if there are multiple monsters. Low AC monsters need to use the high AC monsters as cover. Found a fascinating blog called The Monsters Know What They're Doing that does deep dives on individual monster tactics, you should read through it if you're looking for some help.

DMing 5th Edition for Dummies

Not that it's required of me, but I like tabbing my books to the important bits for fast reference. I use Post-It brand flags (this exact pack, as a matter of fact) and write on the flags what it is they're marking. Almost six months into my current game, and I've finally gotten around to tabbing my books and gotten done 5 out of my 6 main books (Player's Handbook, Monster Manual, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes) in a short amount of time, and my last reference, the Dungeon Master's Guide, has taken me the longest. The DMG has also used the most flags as I'm up to 60 and still have 80-some-odd pages to go, but that's neither here nor there. What bothers me most is that there is a lot of good info in the book for DMs, as you would expect, but it's so haphazard, and missing so much that should be in there, it feels like a huge missed opportunity.

I have talked about this before, and I am definitely not alone in my critique of the current edition in general and the DMG in particular. To me and others, this tome should be the guideline to all starting DMs, the expander of knowledge to the journeyman, and the honer of skills to the master. To that end, you would think that the DMG would start off with the small stuff - this is an encounter, the basic unit of all RPGs - but it starts right off with Building Your Gameworld, followed by the Planes, getting around to dungeons (which are made up of encounters), and then finally encounters themselves. Which they immediately screw up and only talk about combat encounters, leaving out exploration and interaction encounters entirely. This isn't new for WotC in this edition - the PHB puts the Options chapter (you know, the stuff that isn't a part of the game until the DM tells you it is) smack between character creation and the actual, not-optional rules, like Combat and Spellcasting. 

In the same vein, it does not look good when, instead of tabbing two whole sections, I used one of my flags to lock off those sections. Why? It's the Traps and the Downtime Activities sections, which were so bad that WotC has already replaced them/updated them with passages in XGE (and I at least have gone one farther and given my players the Downtime section of Pathfinder's Ultimate Campaign Guide, because the expanded activities in XGE still don't go far enough), so I don't need to stumble into those sections at all.

Having worked further into the DMG, I found social encounters! They're buried back in Chapter 8, Running the Game, between Exploration and Objects, followed immediately by Combat, so they kinda do have all the D&D encounter types in one (or two) places. Exploration and social encounters are both anemic entries and need some serious improvements. Again, combat gets more love than exploration or social (and is in an even bigger section than the first one), but that has been an issue with D&D (according to some) since before even my ancient bones entered the world. Combat is easy, it's exciting, it really is the focus of the game, and there are other RPGs out there that are made from the ground up to handle exploration or social interactions better. That's still not an excuse as WotC has had plenty of time (near two full decades and 3, almost 4, separate editions of the game) to improve this lack.

If I was in this to make a living off of (sorry, had to go have a 15 minute roll on the floor while clutching my sides, laughing), or even had the time to do more than pop in here and rant every now and then, I'd be tempted to write a DM's Guild release called, oddly enough, Gamemastering for Dummies. Yup, couldn't title it like I titled this article as that violates WotC's IPs/TMs/copywrites/etc (this article is free, so I'm claiming fair use here), and not only that but if I wrote it as deeply as I want, they'd also get me for copying huge swaths of their work. Don't mistake me, the DMG is flawed, but there is a lot of good information in it, I just wish it had been laid out better, focused on rules over flavor bits, and improved many of said rules. Oh well, I definitely won't be writing the treatise out and selling it long form, but that won't stop me posting bits and pieces of it here. Stay tuned.