Politics at the Gaming Table, Part Tres

I've talked about politics at the gaming table before, even pointed out other people talking about it, and I've come to a realization. Instead of what Paizo put in their Pathfinder Playtest, the Gaming Is for All screed of the regressive progressives, I would put something in my game that reads like this:

Gaming Is for All

What you hold in your hands is a game. It is a fun excuse for you and your friends to gather together and enjoy each other's company. If what you are doing is making one of your friends uncomfortable, they need to be adult enough to ask you to stop doing it, and you need to be adult enough to talk it over with them and fix the issue if there is one.

We cannot make you do anything. Let us face it, even as the game company that worked very hard on the game rules you hold in your hands, we cannot even make you follow any of the rules in the book, so we cannot make you be a better person with your friends, in your game, or anywhere else in your life.

That being said, we still feel that everyone has the right to be treated like a human being and that everyone has the right to enjoy our game without feeling uncomfortable while playing the game. If you or your friends are actively making someone else in the group uncomfortable, that does not speak well of you as a person. We cannot make you change, but we do not condone those activities and hope that your friends are talking to you about your actions and helping you become a better person and friend.

Our game can deal with some very adult situations - rape, murder, cannibalism, slavery, just to name a few - but that does not mean you or your friends have to use any or all of them in the game. Be mindful that what you may find as slightly unsettling, others, even your friends, may find unacceptable. Do not force the issue, your friend will talk about what is bothering them when they are ready to talk about it, and be a good friend and listen when they talk about what is bothering them, their issues and feelings. But do not force the confrontation, unless you are a licensed counselor trained to deal with the situation, just be as good a friend as you can.

That of course is just silly, of course. I would put no such thing in any RPG that I wrote. Even as honest as it is, about how we as human beings should treat each other and especially our friends, it is as much bullshit as what Paizo wrote. Why? What you are investing your money and time is a game. There is no requirement by anyone or any legal body for a game company to try and force anyone to be better people. All the game company has to do, one hopes, is to provide a concise, easy to understand set of rules and hope they are enjoyable enough that you come back for more. That's it! Even what I wrote above, while honest and attempting to be as non-commanding as possible is still trying too hard to tell you how to live your life. You don't buy an RPG book for that, the libraries and bookstores already have an entire section of self-help books for that.

It isn't that I disagree with the sentiment behind Paizo's words, it has never been that I disagree with what they said, it has always been that I disagree that they thought they needed to say it at all, as well as their tone in the presentation. I don't need to hear Milton Bradley's stance on race relations in America to play Battleship, just the rules, four grids, and some plastic ships. You don't need to hear Hasbro's stance on abortions to enjoy Monopoly. Hell, even Axis and Allies, a classic board game recreating World War 2, comes without a diatribe about anti-imperialism, a major theme of said major global conflict.

Can I just enjoy my silly, imagination fueled, fantasy trip without the political extremists fucking it up?

Bad Endings

Recently, while I had played through a majority of the fantastic video game Alien: Isolation, I had never quite managed to complete it. Not wanting to play all the way through it yet again just to see the last hour or so of content, I decided to watch someone else do it on YouTube. Imagine my surprise to find that, while I thoroughly enjoyed the mechanics, story, plot of the rest of the game, that the ending went 180 degrees back in the other direction and I hated it.

What does this have to do with RPGs? Upon seeing the ending, I realized that as a DM, I need to make sure I don't give my PCs the same short stick of an ending, as well as warning my fellow DMs away from same ending. Don't get me wrong, the ending of A:I is fantastic... for a book, or a movie, or a TV show, especially one that you want to leave a cliffhanger to grab everyone's attention before you continue the story at a later date. I guess it would work for an RPG as well, but you better have the next part of the story ready to tell your players or you'll be facing an empty table.

I've been talking about the ending of the game in vague generalities of A:I's ending, but now it's time to slap on a big old *SPOILER WARNING* and get down to particulars. If you haven't finished the game yourself, or never played it, you are the daughter of Ellen Ripley, our heroine from many of the good Alien movies, and some of the so-so ones as well. As Ellen's kid, you haven't heard from her in 15 years and everyone thinks she and the crew of the Nostromo are lost to the depths of space. A corporate flunky from Weyland-Yutani (company that sent the Nostromo to LV-426 to find the xenomorphs in the first place) brings word that your mom's flight recorder had been recovered and is at a remote outpost on the edge of civilization. You head out there to find the outpost (a space dock hovering above a gas giant, where they are mining the clouds for useful materials) is in ruins and hardly anyone aboard her is alive. You make it onto the station to find that not only did they find your mom's flight recorder, but they also found the xenomorphs, which have been rampaging around the outpost, killing almost everyone. Oh, and the artificial intelligence running the outpost has been corrupted by Weyland-Yutani, and is working to feed as many humans to the xenomorphs to make more alien nasties.

With me so far? So you fight through the humans who don't trust you as an outsider and want to kill you; fight through the AI robots trying to kill you to protect the xenomorphs; and avoid the xenomorphs, cause you can't kill them, they're too tough and nasty. Finally, after crawling through, and over, and around, and past all of the above, you manage to send the outpost into the gas giant, narrowly escaping back to the ship you came out here on, way back at the beginning of the game. You breathe a sigh of relief and head for the bridge, not even bothering to doff your EVA suit. Of course, when you reach the bridge, one last xenomorph is there to greet you. Here's the part that I think makes it a bad ending - the game makes you do little button presses, quick time events is what they're called, as you back away from the alien. This doesn't matter a bit, you either fail to do the button presses and die, or succeed in doing them, only to get blown into space where you are dead. Or alive. Because that's where the game ends - Ripley the younger floating in space, her status questionable. Lights out, scroll the credits.

Fantastic cliffhanger, don't mistake me, but if there is never any follow up, even just to tell us that character is dead, it's a bad ending. And that is what we you get with this video game, as the creators expected it to sell like gangbusters that they could make a sequel or some DLC to continue, the game never sold well enough for that. So that is your reward for playing all the way through the game, an uncertain fate for your character. When failure is the only option (the ending of the game, as it stands, is you failed, you struggled your hardest and the best that got you was a slow death while your oxygen runs out in the vacuum of space), you could have ended it at any other point. Empire Strikes Back is arguably the best of the Star Wars trilogy, but it would have been the worst if there never was a Return of the Jedi to follow on its heels. Don't get me wrong, you have to have danger and potential for failure, but when your two final options are death or possibly dead with a side helping of ambiguity, why did we do this again?

Of course, this brings me back to the other side of the spectrum, where the only options are utter success with a side of tickertape parades and fame, fortune and all the rest,  or success with a pat on the head and a hearty "good job!" If there is no chance for failure, why did we do this again? This, actually, is a lesson I'm teaching the players in my 5e game, and it is a hard set of ideas that I am having to pound through their skulls.

At the table, you have to balance these two extremes - you can't just kill off the party (so easy to do as a DM/GM/what-have-you, just throw everything in the Monster Manual at them at the same time, and they will die), but you can't throw underwhelming forces that the party easily overcomes without any real work on their part, either. That is the dilemma of the modern DM, and why the CR system in 5e being broken and unreliable is so frustrating. Not, really, that the 3e/3.5 CR system was much better, so maybe this is harder than we first imagined it to be.

One last note before I go - A:I does have a continuation coming out. Dark Horse Comics is releasing later on in 2019 a sequel comic book series entitled Aliens: Resistance. So we do know that at least Ripley the daughter survives the jettison into space. See? Suddenly A:I doesn't look all that bad with its ending, but it takes the follow on story to turn a bad ending into a good one. Be good to your players, Masters of Games, and don't kill them off too easy but don't let them win too easy, either.

5e Game - Part 17

(This is becoming a habit of mine - this post contains the report from the last two gaming sessions, again because there is not a lot of out of combat action going. And yes, again, because I am lazy and didn't get around to writing up the first session by itself. Part of this was that the first gaming session was only about half the time of a normal session as I was expecting the session to be the last of the year due to holidays cancelling out the last two weekend games of the year. So I threw my players a party, cooked them lots of good food and forced them to watch a favorite movie of mine from the '90s, PCU. Then we gamed with the time we had left, at which point I said, "happy holidays! see you next year!" and my players were like "no, we'll be back next weekend to game, right?" So we gamed. The things I do for my players. *sigh*)

The party moved on from the site of the chuul attack, the more adventurous of them munching contentedly on giant, lobster abomination claw (in butter and lemon). I've long said that Kenzer Co's Hacklopedia of Beasts for their Hackmaster RPG is doing it right, by providing not only the usual monster stats (hit points, armor, etc), but also a "yield" box that tells you what you get from the monster. For instance, the Owlbear (Common, Lesser, Great Horned, and Spotted) will yield up the following:

• Medicinal (what medicinal components can you gather from the beast) - Nil
• Spell Components - Although the Owlbear is a very magical creature, no magic-user has yet determined the possible uses of its fur, feathers, bone, horn, blood or eggs
• Hide/Trophy Items - Nil
• Treasure - Nil
• Other - Common Owlbear eggs are worth 200gp and the young are worth 500gp alive. Lesser eggs are 100gp and young are 300gp. Great Horned, 300gp and 700gp. And Spotted, 400gp and 900gp.

I have been planning on adding this to my own copy of the Monster Manual, Volo's Guide to Monsters, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, if for nothing else than to make my own games quicker when the players go to plundering the bodies of the dead bad guys. In addition to all of the above, I would also add in Food, just to also note what monsters you can eat the flesh of and those you can't. Note, I am not here to argue cannibalism in a fictional game, or the implications of the psyche's of the players who may or may not have their characters participate in those acts in game. I am merely interested in trying to figure out which monsters are edible, and which are not. Plus, I like the manga Delicious in Dungeon, which is all about a party of adventurers living off of the monsters in a dungeon to make it through, if you hadn't heard of it before. I like the idea, iron rations are so boring (hey, I did my time in the US Army and MREs, the modern version of the iron ration, will fuel the fire, but definitely not as appealing as real food) and do weigh down the party that can't fit a pack animal into whatever environment they are exploring.

Anyway, enough of my rambling on about projects I wish I had time to complete, not just contemplate. The party continued on, drawing closer to the lake that now covered the capital city of the long dead empire. As the party drew near to the lake in the middle of the swamp, the ranger began using his Primeval Awareness to suss out the various baddies in the area. Unbeknownst to the ranger, the big bad of the area, also a ranger, was doing the exact same thing, and immediately began chain casting Pass Without a Trace on himself, covering his presence and those around him who the ranger was also detecting (humanoids and fiends, favored enemies). The big bad's spell covered only so much area, leaving plenty of uncovered space that included a watchtower full of hobgoblins and patrolling lizardfolk bands. Many little bands of lizardfolk, scattered around the lake.

"We are so close to leveling up," the party told each other, as they sat around my table, ruining the 4th wall meta and any sense of immersion any of us might have had to that point. "Let us slay the lizardfolk and level before we face the lieutenant in the middle of the lake." Yes, the muderhobo in my players took front and center stage at that point, as they had not even begun to think whether or not the lizardfolk were peaceful or working for said lieutenant (they were evil, these lizardfolk, and under full sway of the lieutenant, but the players weren't thinking about any of that beyond the XP gain). They sneak up and ambush a small party of the lizardfolk, easily dispatching the low CR creatures, and patting themselves on the back, say "this is an excellent plan! on to the next patrol, we still have a few more to reach next level!"

Onward the party traveled, sneaking up on two more bands of lizardfolk and slaughtering them in turn. One of the players did start questioning if they were being a bit overzealous and not even offering the lizardfolk parlay before offing them, but it was also about this time that the party started noticing a dragon (not very big, but big enough) flying around the center of the city. The ranger exclaimed that he was checking his Primeval Awareness again, and I informed him that now the band of hobgoblins he had detected earlier was gone, but a fiendish presence had now appeared in the city inside the lake. The dragon had been seen heading in the direction of the hobgoblins, and the party shrugged their collective shoulders, declared that the dragon had eaten the hobgoblins and forgot about it. In reality, the lieutenant, still with his magical protection against detection up had been moving about the city on his friend, the dragon, and giving orders to his underlings while the party was killing some low level lizardfolk. The party didn't wonder too hard at this whole change in the numbers of the bad guys, so I figured that meant the bad guy was wise to the party using his lizardfolk minions as XP boosters and so he gave out his marching orders.

I ran the first two encounters with the lizardfolk as normal, give the players the feeling they were doing something, but both of these fights were so bland that I decided the third fight went off without too many complications to skip past the boring and get to the good stuff. And good stuff it was. The lieutenant, while the party was busy slaughtering evil minions, had gotten word to all his remaining lizardfolk minions, ordering them to converge on the party's location and eliminate them with extreme prejudice. Flush with killing yet another little band of lizardfolk, the ranger turns on his Primeval Awareness one more time to find no less than 42 lizardfolk bearing down on their location from two different directions, a mere 30 minutes away. Suddenly taking this very seriously, the party gets their shit together and finally starts trying to act stealthy to ambush the lizardfolk. The ranger casts his Pass Without a Trace and the party sets an ambush. The lieutenant knows when the party disappears from his own Primeval Awareness, but what does he care about some mere lizardfolk?

The lizardfolk, knowing they faced a superior foe, spread out in a skirmish line at the edge of the lake and headed inland. Yes, the party had concealed themselves and removed their tracks, but the lizardfolk knew the boss goblin had moved the rest of his forces into the buildings at the edge of the sunken city, so if the party had gone that way, they were his problem. That left only inland (well, inswamp) from the lake, so inswamp the skirmish line of lizardfolk moved. The party launched their ambush, killing all but 8 of the lizardfolk (who ran away, terrified but still alive). The wizard fried many with a couple of fireballs, which attracted the attention of many lizardfolk, and he almost died. The paladin and his squire made as much noise as they could to attract attention, and attention they got, with the paladin going down from a triple critical strike in one round. The druid summoned an allosaurus, which occupied the attention of one flank for a bit before succumbing to multiple attackers. The ranger and the rogue killed their fair share, firing their bows from concealment. But, like I said, the party overcame and survived, even the paladin (just down and only one round of making death saves before he was healed) and the wizard (who never got to negative HP, merely coming awfully close).

Yes, yes, CR 1/2 creatures aren't terribly exciting for characters on the cusp of level 7, unless you throw 42 of them at the characters at the same time. It was either this or have them attack along with the lieutenant and all of his lackeys, which is going to happen next session and be bad enough. Dragon. Big bad ranger with the same powers as the party's ranger. Spell caster hobgoblins. Lots of regular hobgoblins who are going to engage with bows at range. An ettin. And ogre bolt launchers, because when I saw them in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, I couldn't say no.

I did not have the conversation with the player of the ranger like I thought I would in the last post (or couple of posts). I think he is realizing that always winning (at least, when winning is "doing more damage than the rest of the party combined") is boring and that there needs to be some excitement, some chance for failure. My next 5e campaign is going to be a lot different than this one but that is at least another 13 levels away in this campaign before I switch over, but this is good training for what I want to fix about the ruleset. No, the biggest problem I had was another player, the recent joiner of the playing group, the wizard's player.

This particular player is known to me, as we had gone to Iraq together as part of an Army deployment in the same Company back in '05. He had some issues in his life, and wandered about the state ever since we got back, just recently moving into the city I live in and joining the game. I thought he had left most of his life problems behind them, but instead, while he was good for the first month or so of game sessions, his old life issues have caught up with him, full force. The first session, he literally passed out for large portions of the game, and this most recent session, he was noticeably drunk - slurred speech, talking too fast, random changes in the conversation with no warning, and playing the game so badly I basically had to take over for him. On that last, I'm not saying he was playing tactically wrong or insultingly to any of the other players, but he was so out of it that he couldn't remember the initiative he had rolled, what spells he was going to cast or even if he had gone that round or not. I am unsure how to proceed. He had been going to Alcoholics Anonymous for a while, but has fallen off the wagon rather hard for at least 3 weeks now, going on 4.

Do not misunderstand, I am an adult of legal drinking age, and I too drink alcohol. But not all the time, I do not "need" it, and I only enjoy it when I am not required to do anything else. Plus it's been a very, very long time since I was what anyone would consider heavily drunk, like my player was. As long as it's legal (and yes, I think marijuana should be legal, it's about as damaging and addictive as alcohol is, but until it is legal, I do not partake), and you partake of it in such a way as to not harm others (no drunk driving, etc), then enjoy away. However, if you have altered your mental state enough that you are not functional, you are not being a good friend to the rest of the party (unless everyone is playing drunk, at which point, are you really playing, or just having a drinking party with your D&D books out?). If this describes you, damaging yourself and others with your addiction, seek help. There are many programs out there, seek one out and if you can't do it for yourself, do it for your friends, your family, or anyone else that matters to you.

I honestly don't know what to do. I did what I could back when this player was still in the Army with me, but what responsibility do I have as a mere DM now that we're both out of the military? The game is suffering (it won't die, but the other players are going to kick him out if this continues), and if it was just a bad player, I'd ask them to leave. The game is held at my house, after all, and if you're not welcome in my house, you can't play the game. However, I think this would only worsen this player's situation, not improve it. He is on the edge of it, he's got no car (and due to many DUIs in the past decade, no legal vehicle for a long while), a job that's nothing special, and the game seems to be the only bright spot in his week. I need to have a talk with him, preferably before the day of our next gaming session so I can encourage him to show up for the game sober.

5e Game - Part 16

(This post covers three gaming sessions since the last session post, partly because the combats have grown so large that not many combats take up a significant portion of each session, and partly because I'm a lazy bastard and didn't get around to typing this up in time.)

The party was in dire straits - one bad round of combat saw the wizard down, several of the party's other big guns hovering close to negative hit points as well, and only a few goblins and worgs down on the other side, and those at the hands of a hobgoblin devastator, not the party. That last was a mistake on my part, I didn't read the stat block close enough and didn't realize that devastators can sculpt their spells to miss comrades, but in afterthought I realized the devastator, leader of this particular raiding band, was tired of the little bastards and their smelly dogs and wouldn't have sculpted the spell for them anyway. He probably would not have also hit the hellhound and chimera, but eh, they were still standing and the party was hurting.

As predicted though, the party rallied, got the wizard back on his feet and proceeded to mop the floor with the remaining monsters. They did receive some help in the form of the dire wolf that had been shadowing the party as they (particularly the ranger) amused the large wolf, who came swooping in to challenge the devastator head-to-head, keeping him from fireballing the party for even more damage. The devastator did return the favor, dropping the dire wolf (the druid healed him not long after, so no big deal) before finally dying himself.

The attack in broad daylight in front of the townsfolk, plus the attackers killing and burning many on the other side of the river, the once wishy-washy townsfolk are convinced and they are leaving. The party, heady with success, head on towards the north, see if they can't break the blockades on the northern trade roads, take care of this pesky lieutenant, and get the elves to throw in on the side of everyone else in the vale.

They travel through many little villages, some taking the storm warnings seriously and preparing for war, others scoffing at the very idea of it. The party drives on each day, passing out warnings everywhere but moving on no matter if the warnings are heeded or not. Eventually they find the blockade on the trade route north, a small, hastily constructed fort containing a few ogres and some hobgoblins. The druid summons giant owls, the rogue and ranger sneak up for ranged attacks and the lobbing of fire bombs, and the paladin, his retainer, and the wizard gallop up from afar to clean up. The hobgoblins and ogres did not stand up long to the onslaught, and the party, intent on unblocking the road to the northlands, burned the block house to the ground ending that particular threat.

Having also sensed other raiding parties in the wilds around them (thanks to the ranger's Primeval Awareness) and still having some owls conjured, the druid decides to use them to capture the party someone to question. The owls bring back a hobgoblin, leader of that particular raiding party. To question the hobgoblin and stay within the boundaries of most of the party's alignments (killing a bad guy, acceptable; carving bits of a helpless bad guy? not cool), the paladin stuns the hobgoblin and then forces it to drink - and I can't believe I've never thought of doing this before - a Philter of Love. The hobgoblin is male (I rolled for it, not a misogynist bastard, I'm just an asshole to everyone) and so is effectively charmed for the next hour, no save. The hobgoblin spills as much as he knows - the lieutenant is here (and a goblin, quite a feat for one so small to command hobgoblins and other dangerous monsters), there are ogres, and ettins in attendance, the local lizardfolk are working for them, and there's a dragon, because of course there is. The lieutenant is also breeding things, demon like things, in his lair, a horde to unleash on civilization. The elves in the area, isolationist, owl-riding wood elves who have been living in the swamps since the end of the last empire in the area, are also being avoided to keep them from joining up with the communities to the south. Having asked their questions, the party slits the throat of the hobgoblin and discuss their plans from here.

They head towards the swamps, hoping to find the elves and convince them to help in the war, but if nothing else, help them find the bad guys' lair and stop his plans. At the edge of the swamps the ranger detects something nigh fiendish (his Primeval Awareness again, pegging to favored enemies) that "smells" like a devil, but not quite, and it's nearby. The party creeps up to find what looks like a mutated abishai, a devil servant of the dark goddess Tiamat, something they have fought before, but this one is different - larger, more aggressive (if that's even possible), acid breathing, and amphibious. They slay the beast and find that it was feasting on a giant owl and en elf that it had slain. Detecting even more elves flying in, the party searches the area while waiting for them to arrive.

The elves arrive, the party gracefully placing their dead comrade and his owl in full view, along with the monster and their empty, non-threatening hands. The elves, suspicious isolationists long separated from other peoples, treat the party brusquely, but finally consent to guide them to their city in the swamp, fairly certain the party was not to blame for the death of their comrade. The party follows on their own giant owls while the elves gather up the three dead bodies, two to bury and one to study. The swamp elves ask the party to relax in their guest accommodations while they (the swamp elves) hold a funeral for their fallen comrade. The elves in the party immediately decide they're going to the funeral (they're elves too, not outsiders...) and everyone else watches, the druid as a squirrel in a tree and through the eyes of the wizard's owl familiar and a handy illusion spell. The party then wonders the next day why the swamp elves don't automatically drop everything they're doing and join them in hunting down the horde's lieutenant.

Having at least put their request to the elves for help, both for themselves and the other communities elsewhere in the vale, sincerely and graciously enough, the party does manage to secure a map to the location of the lieutenant and some boats to haul them through the swamps. The party begins their trek towards the lake containing the sunken city, capital of a long dead empire, and now home to the lieutenant they're hunting and possibly a breeding nest of dangerous devils, like the one they fought earlier. Along the way, they run into some chuul and kill them. The chuul weren't part of the original adventure's random encounter chart for this area, can't remember off the top of my head what they replaced, but whatever it was doesn't exist in 5th edition and the chuul can sometimes be found in swamps, so I put them in. It also has the added benefit of letting the players know that their adventure isn't the only game in town - chuul are escapees from the aboleth, former slaves run away from terrible masters. Where there are chuul, there is an aboleth (or are aboleths) somewhere not too far away. It was a random roll on the encounter table, but it did give an interesting flavor to the evening. Will the party divert from their current goal and see if they can find the aboleth(s) nearby, or will they stay the course?

Next session, I'll be talking with the party. Combat needs to speed up, drastically so, as we are spending a lot of time on small combats. I tried to adopt a faster initiative system to keep combats interesting, but the meta discussion before every action has gotten too much. On top of it, the next big bad they're to face, the lieutenant, is going to use a lot of the tricks they are using and the party is not going to get to sneak up on this group. Yes, I said group, this big bad is bringing friends to the party, and some of these friends can't be detected by the party's ranger, of which they have been relying on too much lately.

5e Game - Part 15

The party finally reached the giant's lair, a very aged keep in the woods. This particular tribe of stone giants had taken to the ways of the forests for several generations, but this last remaining patriarch was all that remained of that tribe. His descendants had left and returned to the mountains from whence they had originally sprung. He was still strong, the old bull, sickly and old yes, but still dangerous. He greeted the party over roasting giant boar, not caring if they stayed for dinner or died under his boots.

We come in peace, the party cried, handing over pilfered treasure from the keep, the magical, giant-sized gauntlet the former lords of the keep had hidden in their secret treasure room, lo these many years. The giant was intrigued, he cared not for the masters of the hobgoblin horde nor their goals, and impressed the party had the guts to come ask him personally. He would help the party, he said, with but one condition - you now own the keep, and I'm dying soon, bury my body in the courtyard of the keep. His father died to those in the keep (which is where the gauntlet came from) and many others of his family also died assaulting the keep, it would only be fitting to be buried there. Like I said last game recap, the deed to the keep would be more useful than the keep itself.

It was also this adventure that the wizard changed for the 3rd time. He was first a human war mage (that first player suffered a mental event and decided to leave the party), then for one session became a female dwarf evoker (that player thought they would enjoy the game, but didn't really try to fit in with the rest of the party, so I asked her to leave), then went back to the original character with a new player who had just moved here, and finally this game session we got that player in early and rolled up a new wizard, a human diviner. This is a very odd choice, but can be very powerful, as you'll soon see.

The party, having convinced the giants to help as they can, trotted off to find the bridge the hobgoblin horde was bound to take. Not only was it the logical choice, but having found intel pointing out several key pieces of the horde's plan, the party moved quickly to beat the horde to the bridge. Fortunately, they had not dawdled quite so much and did beat the horde to the bridge, but not by much, as the vast horde's campfires brightened the horizon as night approached, even from several miles away. They found an advance guard at the bridge, many hobgoblins, some hell hounds, and a wyvern. The plan was set - some of the sneakier PCs would get close and start off the show, and everyone else would pile in at that point - and the party executed. The icing on the cake was the diviner giving the archer-specced ranger a natural 20, which he used to wipe out the wyvern in one round of combat. Yes, we still use an alternate critical/fumble table, and not only did that nat 20 on the to hit roll give them a crit, they rolled on the table for quadruple damage.

Yeah, pretty anti-climactic, but that's the double-edged sword of a min-maxer - they can be so effective in a combat that they make it boring for everyone including themselves. Yeah, it means the party "wins" but if it's boring enough that no one wants to play anymore, did you really win? Let's talk about this player for a second, so you understand that I'm not just picking on him out of spite. This player is my biggest grumbler, and there's a reason for it - out of my players, he has the most experience of playing D&D, but it's more as a DM than it is as a player. Another double-edged sword of the game - if you have been a DM and go to play a game, you have to remember the game you are playing in IS NOT YOUR GAME. It's hard to separate the DM from the player, but it has to be done. Otherwise it's just not going to be fun for you or your DM (and possibly the rest of the party, too), at which point you'll leave and run your own game again, or be unhappy in another group. I'm still working on him, I haven't booted him right out of the group, as honestly it took me until now to figure out what the issue was with him.

After the wyvern fell, it was but a pittance to clean up the rest of the baddies, find the weakness in the bridge, and bring it down to keep the hobgoblin army from crossing the gorge. The original plan was for the party to discover the bridge's weakness and position themselves so the wyvern could bring it down for them, but my party went a different way and still accomplished the mission. And the ranger's player grumbled more because, as he put it, "I guess I'm only good at shooting stuff" when other players tracked down and slew the last of the bridge guards as they tried to escape back to the army. That's another issue you have to deal with as a DM or a player - not every character can be good at everything. Characters can be good at one or a few things, but they have to be bad at something. Yes, I realize that the ranger, out of your average party, should be good at tracking down prey, but this party also has a druid who was a dire wolf at the time, and again, if one character is doing everything, it's boring. After one-shotting the wyvern, the ranger would have been a better teammate by just letting the druid have their moment. 

That's where that session ended. Another very busy week passed out here in the real world and I didn't get this update typed up before another game session happened. The party, flush with success decide they need to tell the giants they have dropped the bridge and then get back to civilization to convince those idiots to run as far and as fast as they can. They arrive at the giant's keep, to find no one there and set up their protective magical sleeping area and take a long rest. Before they come out of the bubble, a very large, hirsute man wanders in and sits down to watch their bubble. They communicate through the bubble with the man who passes on the knowledge that the giants are coming and will harass the horde after it works its way around the now bridge-less gorge, and also reminds the party of their promise to bury the head giant in the keep they now own. The party says they remember, thank the man, and back the way he came he summarily disappears. After leaving bear tracks. My players still think he's a druid and haven't pegged to a possible lycanthrope which I felt was an interesting use of a werebear - he can't really hurt stone giants even as a bear and can't turn them into lycanthropes (at least in my world and in this edition... oh, how I miss 3rd edition's templates that made any monster so much more interesting - yup, wrote up my share of half-dragon vampiric ogres back in the day), so he finds hanging out with them less full of guilt - but it wasn't of direct import to the campaign so I let it slide.

The party immediately packs up and begins the day and a half march back to civilization. They run into a small band of raiders and lose even more horses (I've regularly killed the paladin's magical steed, and been whittling away at the party's supply of everyday, average horses) but kill them handily. They eventually make it back to civilization and present the evidence they have - "Look, here's the map from the bad guy's lair showing where the army is gathering at!" "Sure sure, looks like you made that one up, to me." - and even talk to a soldier who came from a different part of the northland with dire news of hobgoblin raiders and roadblocks in the area the party is looking to go next, but the townspeople are still just not believing the danger they are in. That's not me being difficult, that's just how the campaign is written and the party is playing it right - these people cannot hold back the coming horde and the only way they'll live is to fall back and regroup in the only city in the area with any physical defenses. But the campaign provides the final proverbial straw in a raiding force, which the party faced at the end of the session, taking much damage due to some really good initiative rolling on my part and some really crappy initiative rolling on their part. The combat only lasted one round, however, with the party wizard down but many of the goblins and worgs dead (from their own side, no less - friendly fire isn't, and hobgoblins give zero fucks about stupid goblins and their dogs) and a bit of damage to several other heavies. Looking forward to this weekend when we can finish out the combat. I may actually get a player kill, but I still doubt it. We roll initiative fresh every round - it slows down combat just a bit, but it makes every round more interesting as everyone's order in the combat changes constantly - so I expect the party to come back, swinging.

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.