Gamemasters, Please Kill Your Characters

Ah, I love it. About once a month, when I see a devilishly good idea, like throwing something as nasty as Warduke from the halcyon days of D&D's history directly into my players' path, someone has got to tell me how awful my ideas are. It is like they feel my month is not fulfilled unless I hear a rousing chorus of "you're destroying your players' fun!" Let me repeat this, again - if your players are not worried about whether their characters are going to live or not, the game is boring. Without tension, without challenge, you may as well narrate to your party what they did and how they did it, and then roll right into rolling for treasure and doling out XP. Why bother rolling dice or trying to figure the best tactical plan to overcome a foe if your victory is assured? Why even play the game at all, wouldn't it be more efficient to merely read The Lord of the Rings trilogy to them with their characters' names in place of Frodo and the rest?

I see the glazed look in your eye. Yes, yes, I have trod upon these boards many a time, worked a veritable rut in this subject I have gone over it so frequently and often, but here we are again. Yes, I like to find those monsters that annoy my characters. It was not my find, but part of the adventure I was running recently, to throw a night hag at the party, and they have a nasty ability that denies one party member the benefits of a long rest, plus knocks down their max HP until they receive some major healing most parties don't normally have immediate access to. And the only way to stop it from happening is to kill the hag or chase her off the plane you are on. It is quite nasty, and the players, while frustrated at the time, enjoyed the encounter and still talk about her. Now, I didn't pile her and enough of her sisters to deny a long rest to the whole party, plus other big nasties they wouldn't be able to overcome, just one at a time that presented a different challenge from the standard "see bad guys, roll bunch of dice, bad guys die", rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. That is what I am trying to convey to you, worrying your players is what you want.

The Wardkue thing that started this whole rant. I mentioned I liked throwing challenges at my players where it is so tough that I don't even bother starting up the big nasty at all, just put in my notes "if the characters fight this, they die". Warduke, for those of you who did not grow up in the 80s, was this awesome evil character who was famous for showing up in the D&D cartoon. He was a badass fighter who didn't fear anyone. I would totally throw him against my party, and picture him, at least in 5e terms, as something of a high teens/low twenties CR. But I would not stat him up, because as overwhelming a fighter that he is, the party would be TPK'ed if they fought him, or they would get lucky and kill him. Neither of those outcomes is what you want from that NPC/monster, so don't do it. No, he is not there to fight the party, he is there to intimidate them and cause them to work around him, get him to go somewhere else either by sweet talking him, paying him, or taunting him into being led away via a chase. But he is also not THE big bad, he works for the big bad, and is just a roadblock of an encounter set between the party and the big bad that the party cannot solve by fighting it. Puzzles and traps do the exact same thing, minus the intimidation factor, but still makes the party worried and stressed, plus they have to do something other than roll a bunch of dice. Plus, because he is not the big bad, the party can feel satisfied once they "defeat" him and he gets to show back up at a later date because he was not killed, which is win-win: I get a repeatable character and because he gets even scarier as the PCs level, they stay scared of him. Will this encounter be the one where he snaps and kills us all? We got him to go away last time by bribing him/pointing out the squirrel (SQUIRREL!!) outside/jingling our keys, will that work this time or will we have to come up with something new? Why does he giggle and say "stop tickling me!" when we hit him with our swords?!

Come on, my fellow DMs, don't be afraid to at least threaten to kill off your PCs (just the characters, mind you, you don't want to face the trial for killing a real human being in our world), it makes the game more interesting.

Steampunk or Arcanepunk

I confuse my players on a regular basis. I do not mean to, but I know what I like and do not like in my medieval fantasy RPGs, and you will have to come up with something better than "it's tradition" or "we did it this way in last edition" or my personal favorite, "you're ruining your players' agency!" to get me to allow things into my game that I don't approve of. So I don't like bards, because I believe that if you can make magic by singing, why can't I make magic by painting? Or carpentry? Or lighting my farts on fire? So I am weary of gnomes and half-elves/-orcs, due to the former not having a strong enough racial identity, and the latter just beg the question where are all the other half races at, because I wanna see what a half-halfling, half-elf looks like. So I don't like dragonborn because we had half-dragon as a perfectly viable template back in 3e (and honestly, in a game called Dungeons and Dragons, having a mostly dragon character race means too many people play them... think of it like Star Wars, everyone plays Jedi, and now Jedi are boring and not special), and warlocks are still just creepy if you aren't a part of their religion. Don't get me started on monks, I'll let GM Word of the Week tell you about that one. And last but not least, while I love me some arcanepunk, I really don't like steampunk in my games.

First off, let us explain some of our terminology here. When I say "steampunk", to most people that is a mix of our own world's and history's technology from about the Victorian Age (or is it Era, I can never remember), but instead of changing over time to petroleum distillates and electricity, taken even further down the steam engine rabbit hole where everything - vehicles, communication, computing devices, and even military technology - is powered by steam. "Arcanepunk", on the other hand, to most people means that technology develops just as we know it up to a certain point - basic metal working and forming, simple machines like horse drawn carts, and military technology no higher than hand spanned crossbows and swing arm trebuchet type catapults - and anything beyond that has a magic element tied into it, as "magic" replaces "physics" and "chemistry". Printing presses become powered by imps and Mage Hand spells, photographs are taken by devils bound into a box, air ships float through the air with air elementals tied to the ship, trains ride rails of magical lightning, and so on. Everyone tracking? Good. This is where it gets tricky.

The "steampunk" that bothers me in D&D, or at least what I think of as steampunk when I run into it, is science from our world that goes too far past the basic metallurgy of decent weapons and armor, and basic physical machines like catapults and crossbows. Anything considered to be chemical, really, like black powder and explosives. I know, that's not actually steampunk, but that's the best term I can find in common use. Why does it bother me? Yes, I realize that Pathfinder has a class that makes their own black powder analogue, and even 5e has an option for it in the DMG, but to me, that is just too anachronistic to the setting. I realize how odd that sounds about a fantasy RPG setting, trust me I do, but trying to talk about firearms in a D&D world just does not sit well in my brain. Think about it - why would you waste time researching the right mixture of sulphur, charcoal, and saltpeter, when your local wizard/sorcerer can cast Magic Missile all day long, and Fireball just to add flavor? Ditto with explosives. Why go through all the trials and tribulations of refining your glass recipe and the mathematics of light refraction when True Seeing and Eagle Eye spells so readily available? Why develop electricity and long range communication when Sending is so much cheaper and easier to do? There are a hundred more examples of magic already replacing what we consider science in the core rulebooks, which is pretty much why they exist in the game, so i won't cover them here. It just does not make sense to me, which is why I don't like them and won't allow them into any game I am running.

Which is all why I like arcanepunk and not whatever it actually is, but what I've been calling steampunk for years (and in the rest of this article). The Eberron setting all the way back in the halcyon days of 3e/3.5 has interested me for a long time, not just the fact that it embraces the long-standing human tradition of warfare, but also for the arcanepunk elements strewn throughout it. If you want to have guns and explosives in your RPG, go for a different setting. Your stock medieval fantasy setting just doesn't fit well with more advanced physics and chemistry. Go arcanepunk instead, otherwise pick a new setting. 

Best Laid Plans of Yada Yada

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just cannot keep a gaming group together. Like Dell Paxton said in That Thing You Do, "Some bands last for just one album and even then that is one album too many." It seems like my group has taken this to heart since its inception - we added a member shortly after forming, lost another member to have him replaced, lost the replacement but only after gaining a new member and then getting back one of the original crew, and most recently losing not one, but two (possibly three) other members. If you wondered why I have not been as active on the blog these past few months, this has been a major portion of it.

The most frustrating part of all of this shuffle is that my own plans for the group have gone pretty much out the window. Yes, I can add in even more players back into the group, and set them up with equivalent level characters, continue and finish out the campaign plans I have in place. But it's awkward as one, possibly two, of the original players are out of the group and I already feel uncomfortable finishing without them. Especially as the one that is definitely out, that player's character's name is part of the party's name. Yeah, he may come back, but it's going to be a long time and I just don't want to let someone else play that character in the meantime.

What is a Dungeon Master to do? Continuing with That Thing You Do and Mr Dell Paxton, speaking of bands and their propensity to disintegrate with no warning, "Ain't no way to keep a band together. Bands come and go. You got to keep on playin', no matter with who." The plan at this point is to get the remaining party members together, find out who is actually still in and up for a game, maybe send out some invites to a few former coworkers who are up for the nerdy pursuits, and determine where we go from here. I do have to admit that I have built in a logical reason for anyone joining the group in my current campaign, so we may stick with that (the current party belongs to a Musketeers-like organization, so they can be "assigned" in or out of the chapter house at my whim), but as there are so many good, long 5e official campaigns already printed we may go with one of those. Or the new Eberron core book is coming out soon. Or Cyberpunk Red just had a "lite" version put out, and everyone expects the main, full versions to come out in the very near future. Or I have been (slowly) building up a Savage Worlds worldbook based on SM Stirling's fantastic Emberverse series of books, I could finish that off and we could run it. Or I backed the Planet Mercenary RPG, based on Howard Tayler's excellent webcomic Schlock Mercenary, that is full of sci-fi and mercenary goodness, been dying to try that one. Or... the list goes on. Think I have a post about how pursuing hobbies in a modern, 1st world country knocking around, need to finish that up.

We have options, that much is clear. Figuring out what we are going to do is going to be the issue. And who is going to be playing with us, that of course is the bigger question. Stay tuned for more thrilling adventures!