Courtney Cambell, of Hack and Slash fame, recently published a new D&D supplement for dungeon masters, On the NPC. The book is essentially a look at two things: creating interesting non-player characters, and then managing the interactions between your players and those NPCs.
The later section of the book is probably the least likely to cause consternation from D&D fans. To start there are a plethora of random tables to help construct an NPC quickly, or help get the creative juices flowing. For example, Bulgar the Brave has large hands, thinks the gods are constantly watching him, and loves his pet excessively. I’m sure you can picture this fellow already. Once you have your ever so slightly fleshed out NPC ready to go, you then set up up some personality “locks and keys”: things the NPC will do or give the players based on their interactions with character. (i.e. if the players gamble with Bulgar he will tell them the location of his secret McGuffin.) Following that you can also set up a reaction track: things the NPC will do as their reaction to the players changes. This section of the book is about producing something you can use at the game table right away, that can be fleshed out more during play if required.
The discussion on interacting with NPCs is probably the more interesting of the two. The book opens with a look at the reaction roll: rolling 2d6 and adding a charisma modifier to determine how people and monsters the players encounter react to them. Courtney takes this idea and runs with it—very, very far.
Interactions with NPCs are governed by performing social actions, the number of actions determined by the number rolled on the initial reaction roll, which also determines a reaction modifier (as usual). The basic social action rule is as follows “Make a reaction (2d6) roll, modify by Charisma and current reaction.” The results are tabulated as follows depending on the roll: Failure, Rejection, Undecided (Counter-offer), Success, and Total Success. The GM can decide what these things mean in the context of their game and the action being attempted. If you are playing a version of D&D without more explicit skills, this seems like a good way to adjudicate situations you want to roll for.
These ideas are then further expanded upon to produce a more complex rule mechanic for social interaction. Various social actions (Drink, Grovel, Converse, etc.) are described in greater detail: each requires different rolls modified by different values to succeed or fail with varying results.1 A small one page table presents all the rules in one place. The specific details feel very much like something out of AD&D 1st Edition. That’s both a complaint and a compliment.
A PC might declare the action he in attempting to take explicitly, or a DM may map what a player describes his character is doing back to this set of social actions. The goal seems to be to turn an encounter with an NPC into any other puzzle that can be navigated through careful play—that doesn’t hinge on social skills of the player. You might know the thing to do in a given situation is bribe the guards and then lie to them, but you don’t know how to articulate that well. Instead a player could declare the actions she wants to take and see where the dice takes her.
I’m still not sure how I feel about resolving this aspect of the game mechanically. It feels a bit retrograde, but I’m having a hard time articulating what I don’t like about it. I don’t have any problem with someone saying “I hit it with my axe” in combat, so I don’t see why I should complain if someone simply wants to say no more than, “I grovel to the goblin,” outside of combat.
I’ve been playing a lot of 4th Edition D&D over the last few years, and it’s very common to see players reaching for dice in situations I personally feel they shouldn’t be. Everyone wants to use the skill on their character sheet their trained in. A part of me feels that itemizing the actions one can take is limiting, even if the goal is simply to highlight a sampling of the limitless things one can do. Sessions end up becoming a handful of dice rolls between long bouts of combat.2 I’d be curious to see if the rules presented here might actually encourage those sorts of players to do more when out of combat, or to treat what happens outside of combat as a first-class citizen in D&D. Adding this extra mechanical weight to the social side of the game might actually get people to treat it as important. A lot of people think D&D is a game about combat simply because the rules for combat are so fleshed out.3
One complaint I have is how the book is organized. The FAQ is in the middle of the book, and discusses stuff that comes after it. It probably should have been an appendix, perhaps the last one. Similarly, Appendix D is general advice which would probably have been better suited to be part of the actual contents of the book. There is a lot of good content that shows up after pages and pages of random tables. The overall format of the book is quite good, though. It’s a small A5 booklet. A lot of information in the book is summed up neatly in a handful of tables you can quickly reference.
The amount of dungeon mastering I do as my gaming approaches infinity is a big fat zero, so this is definitely a book I could do without. Nevertheless I picked it up because I enjoy Hack and Slash and buying the book seemed like a reasonable way to say, “good job on that blog”. More so, I’m always up for reading something interesting about Dungeons and Dragons. I haven’t actually sat down and used these rules in a game, so i’m not sure how qualified I am to say much of anything about this book. That hasn’t stopped me thus far. Buy this book: it’s full of interesting ideas, and who doesn’t love random tables?
Brendan, from Necropraxis, has written a review of the book that discusses this stuff in more detail. ↩
To be fair, this is in part the nature of D&D encounters. The constraints on what you can do in a weekly drop in game are severe. ↩
The D&D Rules Cyclopedia is quite the book. Released at the end of the 80s, just as AD&D 2nd Edition was about to begin its reign as the premiere edition of D&D, it collected all the rules for playing “basic” D&D in one giant hardback. Previously, all these rules were available as a series of boxed sets by Frank Mentzer, sometimes referred to as BECMI D&D after the name of each set: Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals. The Rules Cyclopedia was a much more convenient repackage of almost all this material and more.
The Rules Cyclopedia has everything you need to run a D&D game from levels 1-36. I have never played in a game where a character has advanced beyond level 7, so there is a lot of potential gaming there. Beyond the rules of the game, you have a big collection of magic items, a sample mythical world to adventure in, one of the biggest collection of Basic D&D monsters available, rules for mass combat, rules for running domains, etc., etc. It’s so thoroughly self-contained you really wouldn’t need to buy another book to play a game of D&D. This is very much at odds with how game publishing seems to work: part of what keeps publishers in business is their customers buying new books. It certainly seems at odds with how TSR operated at the time.
My first exposure to D&D was through the Rules Cyclopedia. My friend had a copy, which he used to run the first campaign I participated in. I played a Cleric, more or less modeled after the one pictured in the book: some White chick with a mace. We would all share this one book. I regret not buying a copy then. I ended up buying the 2nd Edition Players Handbook at the time, and then buying other 2nd Edition books from there. I don’t know if I thought the systems were the same or not at the time.
The Rules Cyclopedia is available as a PDF once again. The scan is very so-so, but reads well enough on an iPad. The fact they released it on dndclassics.com suggests it’s not going to get a fancy re-print like the other older D&D books. So if you’ve been waiting to pick this one up, now is the time to do it.
Random Wizard has written a couple interesting posts about player choice in Dungeons and Dragons that are well worth a read: Shades of the Quantum Ogre, Two-headed Quantum Ogre, and Shaving the Quantum Ogre. The Quantum Ogre was a term I had never encountered till I started reading gaming blogs. People who think very hard about games—and why shouldn’t they!—use the term to describe the following scenario, more or less: players are presented a fork in the road; they can go left or right; regardless of which path they take they’re going to fight an ogre. In this situation the agency of the players is an illusion: why even bother with the fork in the road? For a lot of people the appeal of D&D comes from the open ended nature of the game. It’s quite easy to make the argument that the Quantum Ogre is bad (and such arguments have been made quite well countless times). At the very least, it seems like a waste of time to pretend to offer up choice when there is none.
Ultimately, one needs to optimize for fun when it comes to playing games. Increased player agency might be one way to do so, but it’s not the only way. Does it matter if this ogre battle was predetermined if it was awesome? I’m not so sure.
Updated 2013-06-25: Random Wizard wrote an additional post on this topic.
I had another successful Free RPG Day this past Saturday. In addition to getting some free RPG books, I got to play a some D&D Next, the new fangled version of D&D coming out in 2014. Derek from Dungeon’s Master was the Toronto organizer for a public play event from Wizards of the Coast, an adventure entitled Vault of the Dracolich.
The set up is straight forward enough: a Wizard needs a group of adventurers to find a magical staff he had been unable to retrieve when he was a young adventurer. He gives the party a rough map of the caverns the artifact is located within and warns the party they won’t be able to retrieve the staff without first disabling four wards that protect it. To do so they’ll also need to find four idols hidden in the caverns. With that brief intro we were teleported off to the caverns in search of adventure. Our motley crew numbered forty odd people. What!?
There were five tables participating in the adventure. It was designed to be tackled by multiple groups at the same time. Each table was teleported to a different starting location. We each had a team leader whose character had a magic item that would let them talk to the leaders from the other tables. In this way we could communicate things we had found or encountered while traveling through the dungeon. Occasionally the groups would bump into each other while adventuring. This happened at my table while we were fighting a giant Hydra. Our DMs coordinated things like how many hit points the monster had left, and ended up having half the Hydra’s heads attack one party, the other half attacking the other. We would also come across places other parties had passed through. My group had to fight this giant Treant because a previous party had apparently harassed the monster: our attempts to reason with it were for naught. The session ended with a giant fight: we split into groups of four, each group had a different objective. My table had to fight this Dracolich simulacrum, whose ass we kicked.
This was my second time playing D&D Next. I hadn’t played a game since the very first play test rulebooks were released. The game has evolved a fair bit since then, and is a bit more complicated. That said, on the whole it is much more straightforward than 4th Edition, and plays much faster. Our 3-4 hour D&D Next session would have probably taken four times as long using 4th Editions rules. Not using minis for most of the combat sped things up considerably. The lack of long lists of powers and complicated combat mechanics helped as well. I felt like we got a lot accomplished during our session. Even though no one at our table had played Next before things went fairly quickly.
I am curious to see if Wizards of the Coast can maintain the appeal of the game to people who enjoy 4th Edition. One of the ladies I played with has only ever played 4th Edition, and she found the combat in D&D Next a bit boring. I think a lot of people enjoy the extremely detailed and tactical combat of 4th Edition. If your only experience with D&D is 4th Edition, I can see how the simpler combat mechanics of all the other editions might seem like a step backwards.
I’ll be playing D&D Encounters this season using the D&D Next rules. It seems like a great step forward. It’s probably one of the easiest versions of the game to teach, especially if you don’t play with any of the feats. Thus far I have to say i’m a pretty big fan.
The game day was a lot of fun. Although i’m quite happy playing D&D online nowadays, there is something to be said for actually playing in person.
As a follow-up to my previous post of getting back into D&D, I thought I would look back at the logistics of playing D&D as an adult. When you’re young you have all the time in the world and no real responsibilities. As adults my friends and I had a much smaller window of time to waste on D&D. Whether my friends and I used that sliver of time as wisely as we could have remains to be seen, but we certainly had a lot of fun.
Getting six adults together to play D&D proved more than a little difficult. Initially we were playing about twice a month. That pace slowed down after half a year of gaming, presumably after some of the novelty wore off. Eventually we started playing once every month or so. The time between games slowly crept up and up till the campaign came to a halt, about a year ago. Our D&D campaign ran from about November 2009 through to August 2012. During that time there were a couple of longer breaks due to weddings and babies.
We used Doodle almost exclusively to schedule games. People would fill out when they were free for the coming month or two and we’d try and find a few days that worked each month. Doodle is fantastic. I don’t think we’d have played anywhere near he number of games we played without it. If you are still trading emails like a chump to organize any event you are doing it wrong.
Meeting up in person got trickier when Dave and Sarah moved out to suburbs. (Dave and I both don’t drive, for starters.) We switched to playing online via video chats almost exclusively for the last few sessions we ran, meeting up occasionally when someone had access to a car and we could car pool. We used Roll20 as a virtual table-top, which works quite well for 4th Edition D&D. Playing D&D online is a pretty good substitute for meeting up in person.
We also used Google Wave (seriously) to takes notes about what had happened during a session in case someone couldn’t make it out, and just so we could keep track of things as the game progressed. It actually worked fairly well for that purpose. If it wasn’t insanely slow and confusing Wave might have fared better. We switched to using Google Docs once Wave shut down. Google+ also has lots of cool services that lend themselves to running a campaign: hangouts, communities, and events being the most notable. I am going to assume there are a bunch of D&D nerds at Google working on tools to help them play D&D using their computers.
The inability of my friends and I to settle on a regular time to meet up and play is what ultimately led to our campaign coming to an end. The amount of effort it would take to schedule a game eventually proved too great. I’ve probably played more sessions of the Vaults of Pahvelorn game I play online over the last year than my friends and I managed to play over three years. Having a consistent schedule for the games has meant we rarely miss a session.
I think a big part of the fun we had playing D&D was probably just getting together to eat greasy take-out food. Our DM Dave lived next to one of the best fish and chips shops in the city for a good chunk of the time we were playing together. That was both fantastic and dangerous.
Kim Mohan was interviewed on the D&D podcast. He was a figure involved in Dungeons and Dragons I had never heard of, but there is apparently no one out there who has worked on Dungeons and Dragons longer than the man. He was a managing editor at TSR and then Wizards of the Coast. There are lots of great quotes. On Ed Greenwood: “For every word that he gives you, you feel like he’s holding fifty in reserve. And for every ten that he gives you he probably could have kept three or four.”
It’s been a few months since I last wrote about Kickstarter: I thought I should check back in. A few projects I backed have indeed shipped since that mostly gloomy report. I got my Weird West Miniatures a month or two after posting my original article. The Crawler Companion was released. I am hoping to pick up a copy of the LotFP 2013 Free RPG Day Adventure this weekend, and I’ve already received two modules as PDFs as part of that project.
I’m still waiting for quite a few projects. The two other LotFP projects I backed are still outstanding. It sounds like the Rules and Magic book is on the cusp of being shipped. Updates aren’t as frequent as I like, but it sounds like there is good progress being made on most of the projects. Some of the modules I backed sound like they are shaping up to be quite great. The Seclusium of Orphone went from being a 32 page booklet to a 160 page hard cover book! Dwimmermount looks like it might actually be finished before the year is out. The goal is to get the version I backed out by Gencon. The recent updates on the project sound both interesting and promising.
I have so much stuff outstanding from Brave Halfling Publishing in addition to the Appendix N Adventure Toolkits. The man behind the project has had a very hard year, so I find it hard to get worked up about, but i’m not sure I’d have backed this project or bought anything in hindsight. Champions of Zed continues to be the most lacking of all the projects I’ve backed, though Machinations of the Space Princess has also had some pretty lackluster communication about what’s been going on. (Update 2013-06-19 A few days after posting this I got a PDF in the mail for Machinations of the Space Princess, so that’s that.)
I have backed one new project since my last post, Domains at War, which are rules for running a war game. Learning from their past mistakes with Kickstarter projects, it looks like Autarch went into this Kickstarter with the manuscript for their book almost complete and play tested. They are estimating the book will ship in October, and I almost believe them.
In October of 2009 my friends and I exchanged a few emails.
Dave: I’ve been listening to the Penny Arcade/PVP/Wil Wheaton DnD podcast and it’s made me really want to try playing a game for the first time since high school. Does anyone else want to give it a shot?
Me: I am totally up for playing Dungeons and Dragons. I have been waiting for this day for AGES.
Me: I still have a shit load of second edition books, though I heard that 4th edition is a bit easier to play. (Though, they apparently got rid of THAC0 and other things at some point in time.)
Dave: Yeah, I’m definitely interested in playing. I just got my GST tax rebate back and could totally splurge on the required manuals. Pretty sure I still have HeroQuest back at my parents’ place, so I have a bunch of generic miniatures and dungeon-board pieces that could be used.
Sarah: I have no idea what any of these acronyms mean. I think I’m in trouble.
Dave: It’s just like Munchkin, only with more numbers and acronyms and complicated rules you constantly need to be cross-referencing in a large appendix.
Me: My cousin Jana might be interested. I can check with him and see if he’d want to play. He’s a serious ass D&D dude. He used to come downtown back in the day to play Vampire with goths. Hah.
Dave: One of the guys at work, Andrew, wants to play. He also has a friend who’s interested. That’d be six of us.
And so it came to pass that my friends and I started playing D&D again.
My friend Dave received his GST rebate cheque in the mail and decided to spend his new found wealth on the then new Dungeon and Dragons 4th edition rule books. I had thought about buying the books myself when they were first announced because I too enjoy nerdy things. In the end I couldn’t justify spending money on books I probably wouldn’t use. When Dave said he would run a game that changed and I decided to grab the Players Handbook, the only book players need to play.
I was apprehensive about buying new D&D books because I already owned a metric ton of 2nd edition D&D books. This is the edition that was available when I was much younger. Beyond the core books, I owned a slew of books about Dark Sun, one of the 2nd Edition campaign worlds, and a Forgotten Realms expansion called the Ruins of Undermountain. Considering I was completely broke-ass at the time this outlay in cash for RPG books was ridiculous. I wouldn’t say I wasted my money on AD&D books, but I certainly didn’t put them to much use. I suppose I liked reading about D&D more than I liked actually playing the game. (I suspect this isn’t that uncommon.) I was all set up to run a kick-ass Dark Sun campaign I never got around to running. My new Players Handbook, unlike my 2nd edition books, has seen plenty of use over the last few years.
Playing D&D is arguably the nerdiest thing a person can do. My friends and I are all full-on adults. I had thought that these two things taken together would have meant that finding a group to play with would be hard. This was not the case at all. It was shockingly easy to find people to play a game of D&D. It’s quite possible I just know other particularly nerdy people, but we ended up with 5 players fairly quickly. When other people found out about our game they wanted to join as well. I think we could have probably grabbed 4 more players if we had wanted.
My friends and I would meet at Dave’s place whenever we could coordinate our schedules. Actually getting everyone together was by far the most difficult aspect of playing the game. We would have scheduling Doodle’s that covered huge spans of time, and would find days that worked for everyone once in a blue moon. We’d almost always meet on weeknights because weekends were usually busy, and we often played longer than we probably should. When I broke my leg we shifted the venue to my condo. We still managed to play reasonably often. Then Patrick got married, Dave got married, Andrew started dating a girl, we had a baby, Dave had a baby, etc.
Our 4th Edition game is more or less on hold at the moment, but I think most of us are interested in starting it up again. A lot of people gripe online about how 4th Edition ruined D&D, but it got my friends and I back into a game we hadn’t played in over a decade. I suspect this is true for a lot of people. For that it deserves more praise than I can give it.
I was off in England when this blog had its one year anniversary. The first post on this site was May 29th of last year. My original goal was to have a space I could talk about D&D that wouldn’t bore the people who read my other website, A Funkaoshi Production. I have tried to avoid forcing myself to write on a regular schedule. D&D has become a much bigger hobby in my life recently, so it’s still often been the case I have something nerdy to discuss over here.
A lot of the more interesting things on this site weren’t actually produced by me, really. The biggest hits to this site are now people looking for the Hexenbracken, the Kraal and the Colossal Wastes of Zhaar. Those community hex crawl projects were a lot of fun to work on.
I suppose my bigger contribution to the online gaming community is actually my random character generator. It’s probably one of the most used side projects I’ve worked on. I’m hoping to do more interesting things with it this year. The other two tools I wrote this year, Random Carcosa and The LotFP Summon Spell, are probably much more niche, though I am quite happy with both.
This last year actually went quite fast. I’ve got to play much more D&D than I thought I would. Hopefully that keeps up this year.
I bought a new printer a few months ago that lets me print double sided. Shortly after I started printing my own little booklets. A lot of RPG material is available online, formatted to be made into digest sized books. I find making booklets relaxing.
Lacking a long-arm stapler made the process tricky. Normally I would fold all the pages in the booklet and then bind them together. For thicker books I would saddle stitch them with some waxed thread. For thinner booklets I would punch holes for staples and then push the staples down by hand. That worked reasonably well.
A couple weeks ago I stumbled on the MAX HD-10V Swivel Booklet Stapler. It’s a fancy stapler from Japan whose shaft swivels 90 degrees. This lets you staple the spine of the booklet from above and below the book, rather than the side, using what amount to a pretty small stapler. It works incredibly well. What’s more, the stapler is much cheaper than your typical long-arm stapler. If you print your own D&D booklets there is no reason not to own this stapler.
