Valiant Swords of Greyhawk: Our Heroes - Part One

 Given the amount of time we've spent on the campaign I thought I ought to break out some talk about the party and how they function in the game. This will be more about mechanics and roles than background though I might have the players write something up about the rest of it themselves later.

In no particular order ...

Sir Lantor - Lantor and Kentor appear to be related somehow though they do not discuss it with the others. They are both from the same region (the Shield Lands) and appear to have already known each other. Lantor is the classic two-handed weapon fighter, eschewing greater protection for bigger hits. He is almost always the first to drop in a big fight, partly because of this and partly because he and Kentor are the front line and get hit the most. He doesn't lack for armor but he does lack a shield but he is pretty ferocious in battle. 

The player here is constantly upping his offensive power with little regard for defense besides the occasional magic item. By the end of the campaign he is getting multiple swings, then an extra swing if he crits, with an expanded critical range, and then a bonus action to sneak in a punch on top of that, and I don't know if there is anyone in the world who loves to shout ACTION SURGE! as much as he does, as he blenders through the bad guys.

Lantor's player is Kentor's player's son and while he is the youngest he's been playing with us since 2017 so he is not a newbie in any way. This experience does not stop him from occasionally charging into a room, greatsword swooshing, while the rest of the party is still debating, but he can't use inexperience as an excuse! We do lose him near the end as he heads off to join the Marines but he is here for most of the run and hopefully we will get him back soon.

Sir Kentor - Mysteriously tied to Lantor, Kentor is a sword and board paladin who does occasionally drop despite his ridiculous defenses. Between his magic sword - first Vermithrax, then Zwei, then finally the flame tongue - and a willingness to use every spell slot for smite, he does some ridiculous damage while also maintaining a ridiculous AC. If Lantor is all-offense Kentor is is the yang to his yin putting most of his effort into defense. This means he pushes into the mid-20's pretty early and the high 20's before the end. This is a bit of a competition with the cleric through most of the campaign as each tries to have the highest AC in the party.  By the end he is giving people close to him bonuses to saving throws, putting disadvantage on a first strike near or on him, and generally annoying the DM with interrupt type abilities.  

Kentor is a paladin of justice (subclass) and loves to pronounce judgment on his opponents, usually tying it to the "judgement" channel divinity ability he picked up at 3rd level which gives him extra damage and advantage and probably some other annoying bonuses when he uses it. See why he focuses on defense?

Early on he was the first to start using his background ability to grant bonus hit points to the party and this quickly took the form of a big bowl of chili cooked over the fire before setting forth, typically made up of whatever the party butchered in the previous fight - spiders, wyverns, carrion crawlers ... it all goes in the pot. 

As part of a deal with one of the town elders he was convinced to take on of their daughters to dinner and this turned into a romance that carried on through the rest of the campaign and their wedding was one of the big parts of the epilogue to this initial campaign (trust me we will get there).

The player here has played a lot of paladins and fighters over the decades I have known him so he figured out how to run this class mechanically pretty quick. Then it was just a matter of adding the shine - what kind of attitude will this guy have? We've known each other since the 80's so we go way back and he has played in nearly every campaign I have run since then - and I've played in a few of his. When Kentor starts his monologue there is a bit of eye-rolling around the table but we do love it as it is totally in-character for this character. 

Jaric the Cleric (no he doesn't go by this) is a - well, you get it. He is a priest of Trithereon the god of vengeance in the world of Greyhawk and is a nice mix of religion and a very practical outlook. He is pretty much third man up when it comes to the frontline and is often found in battle next to Lantor trying to undo whatever trauma the optimistic fighter has suffered. When not trying to un-kill the fighter he will typically open with a spiritual weapon and then proceed to wade in, swinging his staff of striking as needed and not hesitating to use its power at all to achieve victory. He was a war cleric (subclass)He seems less concerned with vengeance in general than in increasing his personal power and giving rival clerics some tough talk before and during battle. He is also very much concerned with his personal survivability and constantly seeks to improve it with magic.

In Hommlett he mostly dealt with Terjon and the church of Cuthbert - with some exasperated sighs along the way. In Verbobonc he met the lone priest of Trithereon who maintained the Garden of Vengeance and learned some more about the area, and who sent him off with an "alright alright alright my brother"

When he has played a cleric before he has often leaned into "healbot" but for this campaign he really broke out of that and for once I never heard a complaint that his character just didn't work. A staff of striking and a 20+ armor class will do that. The ToV war cleric gets a chance to make a second attack once on a short rest so you can imagine the amount of damage one could do with two chances to triple-charge that thing. Then of course once he discovers the awesome power of Spirit Guardians at about 5th level he can cause carnage as well as anyone else in the party. 

We've known each other and been playing together since the 90's and he is the least predictable of all of my players as to what he will play in any given game. 

Braedon is the master hunter and tracker but mostly master archer as it turned out as he was the party's back line for the campaign.  We went for many sessions without ever seeing him draw a blade, then when he finally did it was dual shortswords and he was damn near as capable with them as he was his bow! He was a hunter (subclass) so no animal companion which in party this big was not missed. He mostly stayed back, watched the rear, and shot whatever the nastiest target was at the time. 

His background bonus ability involved telling stories which quickly became the repeated re-telling of how he had lost his brother to a werewolf out in the woods one day. There were groans around the table of course, every time, but when the party met a new NPC that had not yet heard the tale of  the not-so-valiant they were quick to steer him over and then snicker as they walked away. 

In town he mostly stayed in the background, mainly befriending Jaroo the druid and taking the search for Conn Shaunnery - his apprentice - as a personal quest.

The ranger was a welcome addition as we've all heard complaints about the 5E ranger and I wanted to see if Tales did it better. I don't think he had any complaints. His character was stupidly deadly and by the end was shooting 3 or more times per round - I'm not sure what it officially ended at as he was hasted quite a bit of the time. He also got a bonus or advantage when shooting a damaged foe so often the plan was to wait for the wizard to fireball a group and then start annihilating the survivors with bow fire. 

He might be the least experienced player in the group  - I believe he played a little 5E and then joined my Deadlands game a few years ago, then Mechwarrior, then this one, so he's not new by any means - just less jaded. He's played BattleTech and other similar games for decades so he's no slouch on picking up the rules.

Scheduling for the New Campaign and a look back at my Agile-Style Gaming Posts

 

Schedule Magic!

A few years ago I was working through some schedule angst and came up with an idea that managed to cover just about all of the bases I needed. I brought it up again a year later and talked about how it had gone and in general it worked pretty well and looking back years later I can confirm that it really did. It's not a solution for everyone - I doubt most people are going to have the combination of things I did at the time but hey, if someone does and those posts help them figure out something that works for them then great! I'd love to hear about it. If you have people at home that play and friends that come over and everyone is on conflicting schedules it's worth considering a matrixed approach to keep the wheels turning.

I haven't said much about this style in the past few years because it kind of faded out as life changed. It's been 6-7 years since that was the problem I was trying to solve and as things have changed and kids have grown up and moved out and moved on I don't quite have the schedule chaos I was facing back then. I moved to a new place, set up a new game room, added some new players to the mix, and tweaked up the rest of life as well.

For about two years now RPG time has settled into a far more predictable routine. We meet once a week  on Saturday nights and after some experimentation with rotating through multiple games we've settled into that most basic of scenarios: we have one main game. Sometimes we have had a backup game for when part of the group missed but for this run I am looking at dropping even that. Whoever shows up can take whatever characters they want in whatever direction they want. This should especially help with the last-minute cancellations which are not a regular thing here but can really cause chaos when they occur. This means I have to enforce a little more structure than I normally do - i.e. they must get out of the dungeon if they are in one -  but it pays off in having the session-to-session flexibility. I think this will pay dividends in improved focus and immersion in the campaign so I think it's worth a try. 

I have a little more preparation to do in having things ready to go at different levels and for varying numbers of players but a) I have more time to do that with only one game in play and b) it's D&D so there is no lack of material to co-opt for my game. I don't think it will be a problem.

I do occasionally cancel for vacations or family stuff and that means no game that week but I try to keep that infrequent. Consistency and predictability go a long way towards keeping the game going and on people's schedules so I'm willing to set things up to get us there.

So yes, all of that complicated calculating has now boiled down to one game we play once a week, every week, on a set night. The Agile Approach is what I needed for a few years but time marches on and things are simpler now.  Change is inevitable and life is funny but it works for all of my friends and for me so this is a good place to be.

Players, Characters, Habits, and Choices

 

With a new campaign kicking off, particularly a D&D campaign and the associated character generation I got to thinking about my players and their characters and the mix we have had over the years. Some of them are remarkably consistent. Some of them change it up and never seem completely satisfied with any character. I find that often this applies regardless of the rules or genre.

One of my players in D&D terms is almost always either a Paladin or a Fighter. This habit/preference/tradition goes back to at least 2nd Edition AD&D because that's how long we've been playing together. In superhero games he tends towards a Superman-style Brick. In Deadlands he's always been a straight-up gunfighter, even when there are supernatural options available.  Now he has surprised me a few times - mainly when we ran multiple characters per player in a given campaign - by branching out and trying out a wizard or a sorcerer but it's always in addition to a fighter type, not instead of one. I know when I propose a new game that he will likely be playing a martial character of some type so that role will be covered by at least one player. 

In the new campaign he's playing a Paladin so the tradition continues and I am just fine with that.

In contrast I have another long-time friend who is the one who never seems quite settled in to whatever character he has chosen and he is the one most likely to switch out his character partway through the game. When 3rd Edition D&D was new he started out as a Halfling Wizard, later changed that out to a Fighter who was focused on breaking weapons and knocking people down, and then ended up as something completely different by the end of the campaign. In Mutants and Masterminds he tried to play a Batman-type but was repeatedly frustrated with how it played and what he saw as  its ineffectiveness and if the campaign had continued he probably would have asked for a change. He is unpredictable from campaign to campaign, which is not that unusual I think, really, but that restlessness even within the same campaign keeps things interesting. This often springs from some encounter early on, usually a fight, where he determines that his character is just not that effective. Now I often disagree with him and make him work through it a while longer because he has done this as quickly as the first session of a campaign and I'd like a little more stability than that! 

That said I have let him swap out characters multiple times over the years and not necessarily due to a character death - though that is an obvious opportunity if he wants to. Sometimes it's just not being happy with how a character works and wanting to try something different. In Deadlands he chose a Chinese martial artist - we've never really had a dedicated Kung-Fu character in our DL games before so I was looking forward to trying out those options - and he might have made it to Session 3 before declaring that the melee focus was not working in a world full of guns but I pointed out that a) you knew it was an Old West game when we started and b) there are defensive powers and movement powers as well as the punchy stuff. He stuck with it and after acquiring some XP and applying it to the problem he quickly became a very dangerous combatant who was fairly tough and stupid fast so he was quite capable of getting into hand-to-hand range and doing terrible terrible things to his opponent when he did and I would say he was pretty happy with things for most of that campaign. 

In the new campaign he's chosen to play a Cleric (of a war god) and we will see how that flows for him.

My son has been playing for almost 15 years now - still a strange thing to hear yourself say - and when we started with old school Moldvay Basic D&D it was "Elf" and then usually "Fighter" when we had a second character in play. Later when we had more options it was Elf-something, usually Ranger.  In both 4th and 5th edition the Bladesinger class was tailor-made for him. though in the last 5E campaign I ran he went with a Cleric and "Sacred Flamed" anything that came in range.

 Outside of D&D type games though he has not been all that consistent. In superhero games he likes his battlesuit guys/PAGs. In Deadlands he chose to play an Indian Shaman and had a lot of fun with that. In Star Wars he's a Jedi (even a barely-trained-wannabee Jedi) or he's a lot less interested in playing.

In the new campaign he's going full Wizard so  this will be interesting.

My other long-time friend in the game does have a recognizable pattern in that he likes to be "the ranged guy". He's usually inclined towards a fighter type character in D&D terms and from early on in 3E I don't remember a real tendency other than big melee weapons. By 4th Edition though that had changed as he discovered the power of the 4E Ranger which could participate in combat from an  entirely different table with all of the Bow power he could put together. In Deadlands he went for a rifleman approach moving into full-on sniper as the game went on. It has definitely become a theme for him.

In the new campaign he's playing a Mechanist, one of the new ToV classes, and maybe he's stepping away from the ranged thing this time - or maybe he's just looking for a new way to do it. We shall see.

It's funny to  call him one of my "newer" friends when I've been playing games with him for six years but my other regular kind of falls into that compared to the others. He may be the only other one that's been doing this as long as I have and it's a lot of fun because he gets my obscure RPG references and vice versa. He has played and run a ton of other games and is the most active "other DM" in the group. He is the one most into the "role-playing" part and will come up with interesting backgrounds for whatever kind of character he ends up playing and that's another key - he is unpredictable in that he could play any kind of character buuuuut he doesn't change his mind once he's committed. he is also very open to "what does the party need?" kinds of discussions with the rest of the group when a game is starting up. To him I would say it's less about playing a particular type of character than it is about just playing. He's also an asset to have aboard because I know if I propose trying out a less well-known game he will likely be the first to jump on board. In Deadlands he played a Mad Scientist. In our Marvel Multiverse tryout he played Beast. In our 50 Fathoms campaign he played the sailing expert and duelist and that character might be his archetype in my experience - a "sharp-tongued swashbuckler" that is capable in both social and combat situations.

In the new campaign he is playing a bard because ... that's the kind of player he is - give him something with some flexibility, that's not locked into one role in the party, and he will shine. I just don't see him ever playing a basic-style sword and board fighter - not because of a power issue but because other types of characters let him flex the muscles he enjoys the most. 

For me, "playing" has been far less common than "running" for at least the past 25 years. I'd say I had a fairly even mix of both through the 80's and 90's because I was fortunate enough to have another committed DM in my main group and we traded off for 20+ years. Starting with 3E D&D I really shifted over into running the games far more than playing. Some of this was less time with kids and spouse and career all eating into game time but I stuck with it and that's the side I chose - if you want to make sure there is a game then you'd better be prepared to run them. 

I'd say for 2E  mostly ran Clerics, with some Druid and a little Paladin sprinkled in. For 3E I played a little Wizard, some Barbarian, and some more Cleric and Druid when I had the chance. For 4th I played very little but I went with Fighter to fit a concept I wanted to try out. For Pathfinder I ended up with one of my longest-running characters played for years and up to about 11th level which was a cavalier of all things - originally just to try something new and then because I really liked his schtick and the campaign (Kingmaker) was not dungeon-heavy at all in my opinion. I've played very little 5E so no strong opinions there. In 50 Fathoms I played a Kraken Water Mage who could also fight so maybe my tendency is "some kind of spellcaster" given the chance but with the cavalier leading for actual time in the saddle in the last ten years who knows? 

A few other general observations:

• We used to get a lot more non-humans in D&D but that has really dropped off over the course of 5E. I think they ended up making it too obvious of a "power" choice as it seems like there's a lot of effort being made to strip away the things that made each race mechanically unique and this left Human as the default best choice mechanically speaking. Not a real fan of this approach but I'm going to take it as it is for this run.
• We didn't see a lot of Rogues, Sorcerers, Monks, or Warlocks in the last few editions. I'd say we don't see Bards or Artificers either but I have a Bard and a Mechanist (close enough) in this game so I can't really say that for now. Even Druids have been pretty sparse around here for a long time and I thought they were one of the stronger classes this edition according to online opinion. Barbarian is another surprise given the regularity here of Fighters/Paladins/Rangers  - they were popular in older editions but I haven't seen one played long-term since 4E 10+ years ago.
• Another quirk is that we do not see a lot of duplicate character types in the party. Even into 2nd Edition AD&D we would have multiple fighters and even multiple clerics (of different deities - in 2E a specialty priest of Mystra and a specialty priest of Tempus play very differently) in a party at times. Now I don't really see that. We do have more classes now but we also have more subclass options as a way to differentiate two of the same class but I just never see it.

Well that's a lot of idle thoughts and observations but sometimes the inspiration strikes. More on the campaign down the road.

Deadlands, Star Wars, and the Sentinel Comics RPG

 

It's been an interesting year so far. Besides working on mini's in anticipation of the new edition and catching back up on STO I've managed to run a fair number of games. So far that's 4 sessions of FFG Star Wars, 4 sessions of Deadlands, and 1 session of the Sentinel Comics RPG.

We play on Saturday evenings and things have settled into a steady average of 3 out of 4 weekends in any given month. It's not bad considering everyone has jobs and families and I no longer have my in-house crew to run for in between the big sessions.

I talked about scheduling issues here and how I planned to overcome them and the plan is working pretty well ... with a few adjustments.

• Deadlands is still the "main" game and is still set for the 1st and 4th weekends. We miss one here and there but this is working.
• Star Wars is 2nd weekends and has been hit and miss but the players are still interested so it's still in the rotation.
• 3rd weekends ... for some reason 3rd weekends have been a regular gap for us. I'm not sure why but for now I've decided to stop fighting it and just stay flexible. 

To adjust to this we discussed options for a backup game and for a while we leaned towards something like Battletech but there is a certain amount of setup time and haggling over when and which mechs and tonnage or points and it just was not feeling like the right answer. This led to the re-realization that a supers game has near-infinite flexibility for characters to come and go each session and with the 3rd weekend - penciled in as a supers game - not happening it was an easy call. So that's how I came to run a SCRPG game last weekend. 

I'll post up a session report later since it's a new campaign and I really need to get back in the habit of doing those. For now though it is the ongoing, intermittent, backup game. I have 5 players. If at least 4 of them can make it we will run the scheduled game. If we are at 3 or less I will run the Superhero option and we will get back on track the next weekend. 

Of course I get all this figured out and then realize this month has a 5th weekend ... ah well we will figure something out.

Interesting Times - Part 2

 

As more came out about the OGL situation and various responses to it I thought most of it was pretty encouraging including WOTC's final back-down on the whole thing. A bad decision was made, the people/customers spoke, and the decision was altered based on this. That's how it's supposed to work, right? Ideally you stay in tune with your fans well enough to avoid the whole bad decision thing in the first place but sometimes companies think they know better or that people will just go along with whatever they decide. In this case I expect there will be some long-term damage but the general outcome is looking pretty good.

Even as this was taking shape though I was seeing a lot odd takes. In particular I saw several versions of "well now with the ORC/Black Flag/C7d20/etc. we can finally have an alternative to D&D" 

Say what?

Really?

I was seeing this mostly in comments on social media posts which just reinforces my opinion on the usefulness of those as a forum for discussion. 

How does someone play D&D for any length of time and not hear about Pathfinder ... of any edition? If you knew enough to care about the OGL kerfluffle how do you then -not- know about the vast majority of games released under it which are someone's version of D&D? I hardly ever see a conversation about D&D anymore where "OSR" does not make an appearance in some way. Outside of all of those there are Conan and Lord of the Rings (5E-flavored and non-5E flavored) and Forbidden Lands and Runequest and fantasy options for Savage Worlds, GURPS, and Hero. Dragon Age? Warhammer? Pendragon? Legend of the Five Rings? Palladium Fantasy? Chivalry and Sorcery? Some of these are fairly new and some have been around for decades. 

This ignores all of the non-fantasy options out there too that I went on about last time. 

We knew about a lot of other games out there back when our only sources of information were Dragon magazine and the local game stores. How does one remain ignorant of these things 25+ years into the age of the Information Superhighway? Going back to the days of 3rd edition WOTC itself published a different RPG with Star Wars  -surely some of the people playing now were around for that? Let's not even mention when TSR published multiple other RPG lines from old west to superheroes to sci-fi to post-apocalyptic alongside two -different- versions of D&D.

I suppose it boils down to a question or maybe a viewpoint - is your hobby "D&D" or is it "roleplaying games"? That's been a potential division for as long as I can remember but I always felt like the trend was for people to start with D&D and then branch out as they became aware of other options and things caught their interest or addressed shortcomings they found in D&D. I'm wondering if that flow is not as present these days. Maybe for a lot of people the pull of D&D is more of a social thing than recognizing the coolness of the RPG concept. 

I don't know. It's disheartening to some degree to think that this big influx of newer players over the last 9 years may stay in that "casual" state, never exploring beyond the current version of D&D. This light attachment does make me wonder how an edition change will go over with them. "Oh there's a new Player's Handbook? Can we just keep playing what we have"? I suspect that will be a common conversation next year. 

When you do something like a new edition of a game system it's an opportunity for players to look around and see what else is out there. When a new version of 40K is released there's always a fair amount of chatter about other miniatures games, for example. I hope that this mis-step by WOTC and Hasbro has at least started some conversations and exploration of things that might come into play when someone's current campaign wraps up or when "OneD&D" launches and people are thinking about making a change anyway. Time will tell I suppose.

Interesting Times

 

One of the side effects of the OGL Hubbub has been the explosion of "there are other games like D&D that are not D&D" discussions online. Forums, blogs, YouTube ... I've seen a bunch of them and even though it probably shouldn't it still kind of surprised me. I still assume to some degree that other people are at least somewhat aware that D&D is not a unique thing. We have 45+ years of other RPG's (you know, "it's like D&D but...) and they are easier to find than ever in electronic form, yet so many people seem unaware of them. How?

I get it ... we have a ton of people now who came into the hobby through 5th Edition D&D. It's the only game they've played and it's the one their friends play so it seems like its own thing. I wonder what that percentage is? Say, of all the people who will roll dice for a combat or skill check this month, how many of them would have their minds blown to find out there is a <gasp> Star Wars "like D&D" game? What about Lord of the Rings? Marvel and Marvel-like properties? Is it half? I'm not even saying "played" another game or bought a book or a PDF - I'm just talking about awareness. 

I always thought the big franchises would bring new players in at a significant rate - Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, you know the list. When the MCU started being referred to as "The MCU" I thought it had achieved a big enough status to bring new people in there but apparently not. Who knew the hottest ticket for bringing in new RPG players would be ... the oldest RPG ... again. 

Now that the boat has been rocked there seems to be a lot of interest in broadening the horizons of these neo-gamers. I'm still not sure if it's truly new players showing a real interest or grizzled veterans like me desperately hoping we can break some of them away from the Forgotten Realms and into some of the other awesome options out there. Hopefully at least some of the less-involved are discovering that these exist. 

What's the easiest "other" RPG to drag 5E-only gamers into? The easy answer is something very similar to D&D like Pathfinder or one of the OSR games but I think that's misleading because if it's more swords and spells you're going to get asked at some point "why don't we just play D&D"? My best candidate is Star Wars - pretty much everybody knows at least some of it and it can accommodate a wide variety of campaign styles. Maybe the FFG funky dice edition isn't your favorite but there is plenty of support for d6 still out there and it's pretty easy to grasp and there is still material for the d20 versions if you want to go class and level with it. 

I don't know that I have more conclusions than questions here. It's just been an interesting thing to watch. 

Greatest Hits #12 - Missing Players in an Ongoing Campaign

Still a good discussion - it's not like the problem has gone away!

I've been running two ongoing campaigns the last few years, both more narrative than sandbox. What happens when a player can't make it? We deal with it and the game goes on. But how do you deal with it? OK let's discuss some details. Here are three rules I go by:

1. Never end a session in the middle of a fight
2. Set a minimum number of players who need to show to run your game
3. There's always a plausible explanation why Character X isn't here right now

Another wave?

Reasoning for Rule 1:
(This is really more about avoiding the awkwardness of having a missing player next time)

Say you have a 5-person party in the middle of a huge fight = "alright, it's two in the morning, we're going to have to call it til next time." Sounds reasonable, except that someone won't be able to make it next time - better hope it's not the cleric! Maybe two someones won't. Then another week goes by and someone else has a conflict. Odds are you're going to end up finishing the fight either a man down (or more) or so much time will pass that no one can remember the details from the first part of the fight and spell or power usage, hit points, and maybe even consciousness state are all very fuzzy. It dilutes whatever dramatic impact your fight might have and for me anyway is just an unsatisfying way to handle things.

Most people who give this advice don't do it because its's a nice theory - we do so because we've tried it and found how many ways it can go wrong. After a few years go by you might be tempted to try it again - nope, it still sucks.

Solutions:

• Never start a combat 5 minutes before "quitting time". My weekend night games generally run til midnight, but we've called it as early as 11:35 when it felt right.
• If you know they're starting a good-sized fight and you could freeze-frame before it starts but are tempted to push on, tell your players the situation and let them have some input. They might be cool running over a bit or they may already be running on fumes. 
• If you find yourself in the nightmare of fight-started-with-plenty-of-time-but-now-taking-way-longer-than-expected-and-it-needs-to-stop here are some emergency ideas:
• Bad Guys all beam/teleport/vanish out
• Bad Guys retreat through a hidden secret door to some new room you may need to map before next time. Darkness spells and smoke grenades can help here.
• Bad Guys heads explode and all fall dead - could be real, could be an illusion
• Bad Guys surrender - players never really expect this in the middle of a fight. If you can tie it to the death of a particular bad guy leader or a nasty move by one of the characters, so much the better.

These are much more satisfying without built-in excuses like "but the cleric wasn't here"

Reasoning for Rule 2:

Maybe your sessions are "game night" and you play something regardless of who and how many show up. That's cool and I envy you. Here it's "Campaign X Night" and we either play that or we don't play at all. The concept of the "backup game" has never really taken root with us. That said we very rarely cancel at the last minute, so setting that minimum number lets us figure out in advance whether we're going to run next week or not.

Examples

• I was running Red Hand of Doom in 4E with a party that varied from 5-6 players. If at least 4 can make it we play, if 3 or fewer we don't. It does mean you miss some sessions but it also means you don't have a TPK destroy your campaign because the groups was a man or two short the night they ran into a really nasty dragon. 
• In Wrath of the Righteous I knew I was going to run it mainly for two of my players, so they each made two characters (it's Pathfinder, so it's easy enough). Adventure Paths are written for 4 characters - presto, we're solid. If both of my two can't make it, we don't play that weekend. If someone else can make it on a day we do play, they can make up a new character or continue with the one they had created last time. If someone else starts showing consistently they might get to make a second character if they so desire. It's easier to adjust upwards on the fly than downwards, at least for me. 
• The Exception To This Rule: Superhero games - I've run sessions with only a single player running a single hero and still had plenty of fun. 

Spock's player couldn't make it that night - look at how that worked out

Reasoning for Rule 3:

If you've seen The Gamers then you've seen "Mark". Mark just appears in the background of the scenes, motionless and doing nothing. Then his player shows up and the character goes into action for one fight.  The player then has to go and his character pretty much disappears from the rest of the story. It's dumb but very true to life. 

Speaking from my personal view as a DM, I'm not here to run your character - that's your job and I have enough to manage. So I'm not going to run your character, Spock's Brain-style, in the background just because you're not here. My rule is pretty much "if you're not here then your character's not here". That pretty much eliminates the issue of characters dying in a session the player didn't attend, treasure shenanigans, and "I wouldn't do that!" conversations. 

Practical Considerations for Rule 3

• It's incredibly easy to explain character comings and goings in superhero games - they were "called away" or Lois is in trouble again or they had to go take some pictures for their day job. it's trivial and should never be a real problem. Unless you're running Time of Crisis, then it's a little tricky. 
• Wilderness adventures are great for this kind of thing - communing with nature, following some interesting tracks, leading a hostile monster away from the party, gathering some rare herbs, celebrating a high holy day in private, heading back to watch the road, spending quality time with his new dryad friend, acquiring a new familiar - these are all pretty easy to do. 
• Cities make this even easier - it's not hard to figure something out. Shopping, stealing, or carousing are all popular options.
• In contrast dungeons can make this really painful, especially the big ones. When the party is six levels deep, the DM still checks for encounters even on "cleared" levels, and there's no shortcut back out (Hello Town Portal!) then it can really strain belief to come up with a plausible reason why the fighter suddenly isn't going to fight for awhile. My advice is to think about this beforehand and try to come up with some possible explanations. Some ideas:
• Fell through a trap door into another room or another level - hey megadungeons are supposed to be "living" right?
• Taken prisoner by some group on this level or the next one
• Ran into a rival adventuring party and didn't want to lead them back to the group until he checked them out
• Wizards are studying in that last library/laboratory/summoning room the group discovered
• Clerics are purifying a defiled temple, defiling an enemy temple, or communing with their god in some other room
• Thieves are off sneaking around looking for more loot - you know how they are. A good candidate for "taken prisoner" above. 

Sure, let the DM run your character while you're gone ...

Final Thought: If you're really stuck for ideas ask the player what their character is doing while they are out. Their third or fourth idea is probably good enough to use.

Agile-Style Gaming - One Year Later

Captain Jack's ship the "Tinasi Fire"

I posted this almost a year ago about adapting tabletop gaming to a new model: Instead of announcing that I am going to run Game X on Date Y I ask who can make it on Date Y and then, based on the available player pool, run Game X, Y, or Z. It's a fairly common expectation to try and build a game around a set group of players, and it's a pretty common reason for games to get cancelled when one (or more) of those players can't show up. This approach is an attempt to get around it.

Now you may say "press on!" and in the past I have done so, but if the party is 3 levels deep into the lich-king's dungeon and the cleric can't make it there is usually some resistance to forging ahead. This is not just a D&D thing either - if Tech Sergeant Chen was taking the lead in escaping the work pits of Saladar-9 it doesn't make much sense for him to completely vanish from the adventure when his player can't make it. So there are plot-reasons, campaign coherency reasons, and game mechanical reasons for wanting a consistent group of players for an ongoing game.

I ended up running two different 5E games this way: I was running one for Paladin Steve, Variable Dave, and Apprentice Blaster. Dave couldn't make it for a while but we wanted to keep digging in to 5th edition, and Steve's oldest is ready to try out D&D. So we started another 5E campaign, this one set in the Realms, and it's going really well. It's now the "D&D game we play when Dave can't make it" campaign.

I've tried this approach for the past year and let me tell you - If we don't have the mix for the "main" game we will still have the mix for *some* game and that means we're playing that week instead of not playing. We may have to wait an extra week or three to see how it goes for Tech Sergeant Chen but it between we're going to find out how Smuggler Captain Jak Daniels, his First Mate Gim Beem, and Jedi Knight Jon-E Wahkker do against the Fearsome Bounty Hunter Rum Chata in the days of the Old Republic instead.

Captain Jack's droid - "Old Number Seven"

So as a solution to the "no game this week" problem it works. As a solution to the inconsistent party problem it works. That said there are issues that arise:

• A good game draws attention. "Hey I like Star Wars too, I want to play that too" says the player who is not part of the list for that particular game. Do I bring him in and muddy the player/game matrix? Or do I start a new one and create a new entry in the matrix?
• One player who is part of 3 of your 6 games is out for a month. Then a second player is out for most of that same time and wipes out two more of your six games. 
• For one thing, this cuts out a huge swath of your options. This approach is resistant to damage, not immune
• Additionally this creates a situation where it may make sense to start a new campaign with the available players, but realistically how likely is this particular configuration of available/not available likely to occur again? So you start a new game that gets played a couple of times then never happens again. I'm thinking it's better to make it a branch-off of an existing campaign so it can be routed back into an existing game when the time comes.
• The last-minute cancel: You know Jim-Bob can't make it this week so you plan on playing Game Y. Then suddenly Jason cancels and now the matrix says Game Z but you haven't touched that one in a few months. 

It's tricky being a GM sometimes.

Jon-E Wahker's Green, Blue, Red, Gold, Purple, and White!

The main advice I can offer here is this: Resist the temptation to let every player join every game. If you do that you're circumventing the whole reason for taking this approach. If somebody can't make it you have a game tailored to just the people that can. Don't screw that up!

Also: Don't run multiple campaigns for the exact same group of players. I ended up doing that last year and all it does is create conflict. I have a D&D game and a Deadlands game that is based on the same group of 3 players. It's dumb - don't do it!

The Final Challenge: You're going to run a lot more games as in "campaigns" but you're going to spend less time on each one over the course of a year. How much "more" and "less" depends on how often your players miss. You do have to pick a "main" game - "if everyone can make it then this is what we play" and then things branch from there. Decide the others as the schedule issues come up. If you get into an interesting run and then that particular group never seems to get together again go ahead and schedule a special run to wrap it up! If a group wants to drop one game and play something else instead let them!

It's mostly working for me so I'm going to keep doing it. More to come as things develop.

Agile-Style Gaming

Agile development has been a thing for a while now and if you know what it is you don't need to hear anything more about it from me, and if you don't you probably don't care. That said there have been some interesting parallels between work and hobby recently so bear with me.

We've had a lot of talk here about games we'd like to play more and the downside of being locked in to a set game for every available session time. I had a new plan but as it turns out we're only really following about half of it so far.

The first weekend of the month is Mutants and Masterminds. That's held steady. I was originally thinking we would rip through Time of Crisis in a few sessions and get on to the "main" campaign. My players though are having a ton of fun with the adventure which means more RP and talking and more deliberation over choices and also means it's just a really meaty campaign. So I have stopped worrying about when we will "get through it" and just started enjoying the journey instead. That's kind of the real goal, right? I have it! Right here! So all is well with that game.

We also planned to run Deadlands on the second weekend each month. That worked for January. For February, one of my three players was going to be out that weekend so I opened up the conversation about what to play. Apprentice Who was going to be around  and based on the past that meant Marvel Heroic sounded like a good idea. Then Apprentice Red ended up coming home that night while Apprentice Who had a school dance to attend. We didn't have a pre-existing "default" game for that particular combination of Paladin Steve, Apprentice Blaster, and Apprentice Red so now it was really open.

I ended up running Runequest, second edition to be specific.

So now our "gaming matrix" looks like this:

• Two of the boys usually means ICONS
• All three of the boys is Star Wars d6
• Steve + Blaster + Who = Marvel Heroic (Red has played in this too)
• Steve + Blaster + Red = RQ2
• Steve + Dave + Blaster = Deadlands
• Steve + Dave + Tsai + Lady Blacksteel = DCC

So instead of having a set game I run all the time and drop players in and out of - or have them ignore because they are not interested - I pretty much run a set game based on which players are available. Now this does mean I have a ridiculous number of campaigns that are technically "live" but they may not have been touched for 2-3 months. 

To touch on the "agile" parallel this is my backlog: Each system is an Epic, each specific campaign is a "feature" (because theoretically I could have multiple campaigns in the same system, like I sort of have with Deadlands and do have with M&M). each session is a "story". It's not a perfect analogy but I needed to call it something. It's not a traditional campaign setup. It's not really an open table/west marches type of game. It's really its own approach in my view. It just kind of developed over the last year or two and now I'm embracing it as an actual plan rather than happenstance.

How do I organize it? well, each campaign has its own binder with notes on prior sessions, ideas for future sessions, comments on using some published material where I can, and probably some character sheets. I keep a folder with material on the computer too, from notes to HeroLab files. I'm also playing around with some online resources for the players too - more on that if it becomes a real thing. My memory hasn't completely failed so once I skim through some notes it's not difficult to pick up where we were when we ended last time. I have started having the players tell me what they remember first, going around the table, and then I sum up with what I have noted myself. It seems to work and gets everyone's wheels turning about where the game is right now. 

One of the side benefits: this helps handle any "Gamer ADD" I am feeling by ensuring that we rarely play the same game three times in a row.

Of course the maximum flexibility approach here means that we may only play some of these a few times a year. No one seems to mind. Yet. It's something I will be watching for, and I have no problems with trying to "force" a session on occasion - "Hey, I have an open Friday night coming up and we haven't played X in a while - can you 3 make it Friday night?".

Anyway, that's how things are going around here.

Attack of Opportunity

We have a session coming up where one of the usual Pathfinder players won' t be able to make it but Apprentice Who will be available. Since we won;t be able to run Pathfinder, I asked them what they'd like to do instead. My players actually said "what do you want to run?"

So, a limited run (with the holidays approaching) or a one-off session? Alright!

Leading candidates right now are beginning another chapter in our Marvel Heroic campaign or giving FFG Star Wars another try with a slightly different group than last time.

More to come!

Motivational Monday

Missing Players in an Ongoing Campaign

I've been running two ongoing campaigns the last few years, both more narrative than sandbox. What happens when a player can't make it? We deal with it and the game goes on. But how do you deal with it? OK let's discuss some details. Here are three rules I go by:

1. Never end a session in the middle of a fight
2. Set a minimum number of players who need to show to run your game
3. There's always a plausible explanation why Character X isn't here right now

Another wave?

Reasoning for Rule 1:
(This is really more about avoiding the awkwardness of having a missing player next time)

Say you have a 5-person party in the middle of a huge fight = "alright, it's two in the morning, we're going to have to call it til next time." Sounds reasonable, except that someone won't be able to make it next time - better hope it's not the cleric! Maybe two someones won't. Then another week goes by and someone else has a conflict. Odds are you're going to end up finishing the fight either a man down (or more) or so much time will pass that no one can remember the details from the first part of the fight and spell or power usage, hit points, and maybe even consciousness state are all very fuzzy. It dilutes whatever dramatic impact your fight might have and for me anyway is just an unsatisfying way to handle things.

Most people who give this advice don't do it because its's a nice theory - we do so because we've tried it and found how many ways it can go wrong. After a few years go by you might be tempted to try it again - nope, it still sucks.

Solutions:

• Never start a combat 5 minutes before "quitting time". My weekend night games generally run til midnight, but we've called it as early as 11:35 when it felt right.
• If you know they're starting a good-sized fight and you could freeze-frame before it starts but are tempted to push on, tell your players the situation and let them have some input. They might be cool running over a bit or they may already be running on fumes. 
• If you find yourself in the nightmare of fight-started-with-plenty-of-time-but-now-taking-way-longer-than-expected-and-it-needs-to-stop here are some emergency ideas:
• Bad Guys all beam/teleport/vanish out
• Bad Guys retreat through a hidden secret door to some new room you may need to map before next time. Darkness spells and smoke grenades can help here.
• Bad Guys heads explode and all fall dead - could be real, could be an illusion
• Bad Guys surrender - players never really expect this in the middle of a fight. If you can tie it to the death of a particular bad guy leader or a nasty move by one of the characters, so much the better.

These are much more satisfying without built-in excuses like "but the cleric wasn't here"

Reasoning for Rule 2:

Maybe your sessions are "game night" and you play something regardless of who and how many show up. That's cool and I envy you. Here it's "Campaign X Night" and we either play that or we don't play at all. The concept of the "backup game" has never really taken root with us. That said we very rarely cancel at the last minute, so setting that minimum number lets us figure out in advance whether we're going to run next week or not.

Examples

• I was running Red Hand of Doom in 4E with a party that varied from 5-6 players. If at least 4 can make it we play, if 3 or fewer we don't. It does mean you miss some sessions but it also means you don't have a TPK destroy your campaign because the groups was a man or two short the night they ran into a really nasty dragon. 
• In Wrath of the Righteous I knew I was going to run it mainly for two of my players, so they each made two characters (it's Pathfinder, so it's easy enough). Adventure Paths are written for 4 characters - presto, we're solid. If both of my two can't make it, we don't play that weekend. If someone else can make it on a day we do play, they can make up a new character or continue with the one they had created last time. If someone else starts showing consistently they might get to make a second character if they so desire. It's easier to adjust upwards on the fly than downwards, at least for me. 
• The Exception To This Rule: Superhero games - I've run sessions with only a single player running a single hero and still had plenty of fun. 

Spock's player couldn't make it that night - look at how that worked out

Reasoning for Rule 3:

If you've seen The Gamers then you've seen "Mark". Mark just appears in the background of the scenes, motionless and doing nothing. Then his player shows up and the character goes into action for one fight.  The player then has to go and his character pretty much disappears from the rest of the story. It's dumb but very true to life. 

Speaking from my personal view as a DM, I'm not here to run your character - that's your job and I have enough to manage. So I'm not going to run your character, Spock's Brain-style, in the background just because you're not here. My rule is pretty much "if you're not here then your character's not here". That pretty much eliminates the issue of characters dying in a session the player didn't attend, treasure shenanigans, and "I wouldn't do that!" conversations. 

Practical Considerations for Rule 3

• It's incredibly easy to explain character comings and goings in superhero games - they were "called away" or Lois is in trouble again or they had to go take some pictures for their day job. it's trivial and should never be a real problem. Unless you're running Time of Crisis, then it's a little tricky. 
• Wilderness adventures are great for this kind of thing - communing with nature, following some interesting tracks, leading a hostile monster away from the party, gathering some rare herbs, celebrating a high holy day in private, heading back to watch the road, spending quality time with his new dryad friend, acquiring a new familiar - these are all pretty easy to do. 
• Cities make this even easier - it's not hard to figure something out. Shopping, stealing, or carousing are all popular options.
• In contrast dungeons can make this really painful, especially the big ones. When the party is six levels deep, the DM still checks for encounters even on "cleared" levels, and there's no shortcut back out (Hello Town Portal!) then it can really strain belief to come up with a plausible reason why the fighter suddenly isn't going to fight for awhile. My advice is to think about this beforehand and try to come up with some possible explanations. Some ideas:
• Fell through a trap door into another room or another level - hey megadungeons are supposed to be "living" right?
• Taken prisoner by some group on this level or the next one
• Ran into a rival adventuring party and didn't want to lead them back to the group until he checked them out
• Wizards are studying in that last library/laboratory/summoning room the group discovered
• Clerics are purifying a defiled temple, defiling an enemy temple, or communing with their god in some other room
• Thieves are off sneaking around looking for more loot - you know how they are. A good candidate for "taken prisoner" above. 

Sure, let the DM run your character while you're gone ...

Final Thought: If you're really stuck for ideas ask the player what their character is doing while they are out. Their third or fourth idea is probably good enough to use.

Kingmaker!

Hey, I'm a player again - a Pathfinder player this time. One of my players who occasionally DM's has started up a Pathfinder game where he's running the Kingmaker Adventure Path and I am playing in it this time. It's been quite a while since I sat on the other side of the table but I had a lot of fun figuring out what kind of character to make and then even more fun actually playing it. For those interested I am playing a Cavalier in this and I'm going full-on knight when it comes to abilities and attitudes.

The part of "Sir Ivan Zhukov" will be played by Robert Taylor

I won't go into tons of detail - I am not documenting another campaign right now - but I will talk about the campaign in general.

It's obvious from the online activity that it's one of their most popular campaigns, maybe second only to their original Rise of the Runelords, and it's funny to me because Kingmaker's selling point is pretty much what AD&D was about.  The idea at high levels was to carve out a place for your character in the world, recruit some followers, and build a keep/base/tower/lair. The idea back then of being a perpetual dungeon-crawler was certainly around, but it was not the primary goal of most of the people I knew and it was not really what was shown in the books. Somewhere along about 3rd edition that difference in "higher level play" was lost and the standard expectation became 20 levels of dungeon hacking and I'm still not sure why they changed that.

The capabilities of a character in the double digit levels are so much more than loot-grabbing and fighting bigger monsters. What kept fighters and wizards more on par at higher levels in the old days? Well, among other tings was that the fighter often had an army!

Also, as much as people talk about becoming invested in a setting,well, there's not much more "investing" than trying to carve out a realm in said setting. One of the many things Pathfinder has done right is bring back some emphasis on that , first in Kingmaker and then later in Ultimate Campaign.

That's enough for now - I'll have more to say as we get farther into the campaign, but for now it's fun just to roll from the player side for a change.

Campaign Troubles - Getting Back on Track

Having figured out where some of our structural problems were I decided I needed to find out if my players still cared - so I asked them. Things fell apart as we were coming to the grand finale of heroic tier D&D 4E with a city under siege depending on the PC's to pull off a miracle. I hate leaving things like that, over a year's worst of campaigning, unresolved. Don;t get me wrong  - they could lose, die horribly, and expose the rest of Impiltur and the Bloodstone Lands to a horde of evil, but at least we would know how it ended!

So I sent an email asking if they

1. Wanted to finish the siege 
2. Wanted to continue into paragon tier 
3. Wanted to keep playing D&D4E in particular
4. Wanted to keep playing fantasy in general
5.  Wanted me to keep DMing

I wasn't sure where things stood and there might be varying feelings on each of these within the group. I was hoping they would at least want to finish out the "arc" we're on and any more than that would be gravy. With WOTC putting 4E out to pasture 2 years ago this month there is not a lot of energy around 4E these days online or in the FLGS so if they wanted a change I would understand. If they were tired of  D&D or fantasy or me being the DM I get that too since we've all been playing it together for a while and I felt I had to ask.

As it turned out the answers were yes to all of them so I am cracking open my notes once again, making sure I have what I need, and figuring out where things might go next. I figure it will take around 3 sessions to wrap up the siege and determine the fate of the Red Hand.

After that there is much interest in working through paragon tier and I have an outline for that too. I shared some of my thoughts with them. Here's a hint:

I expect it to be epic - well, you know what I mean. I can get on board with running 4th Edition for at least the rest of the year, likely longer. We may be the only ones playing it after Next comes out, but we don't care.

I haven't totally resolved the schedule issues but I'm working on it. It will still be on fixed weekends but we are moving back to Friday. If I can just find one more player it will feel like balance has been restored.

In the meantime the Wrath of the Righteous campaign will continue, the occasional superhero games will continue, and whaddya know I actually get to play in a friend's upcoming Pathfinder campaign! Things are shaping up pretty nicely as the new year gets rolling. I'll keep it up to date here.

Campaign Troubles - Sorting Out the Train Wreck

Keeping a game going can be tricky. You settle into a routine where you're meeting on a regular schedule, things are going well, and then you miss one session, then a little bit later you have to cancel again, and then the holidays hit and a month goes by and suddenly the game is not a priority anymore.

We had a pretty steady twice-a-month thing for the first half of 2013 and then in the second half we had all of 3 sessions. Yep, Mr. DM Advice's main campaign slowed down to a bimonthly schedule. I did run some other games in there and started up a new and unrelated campaign, but the Big One almost died.

There were a lot of reasons for this.

• One, the summer seemed to mean everyone took a turn not being available. It happens. 
• In the fall I had to switch from our traditional Friday nights to Saturdays because I have two kids tied into Friday night football stuff. 
• I also went from a rolling schedule where we decided the next session date at the end of the current session to a set schedule of 2nd and 4th weekends. That was partly because game night kept tripping over kid schedules, partly because it was impossible to plan any other game if this one took all of our open time and partly because it was tough to plan anything more than a week or two in advance. The lessening of flexibility really cut down on rescheduling options when someone had a conflict and pretty much guaranteed a 4-week gap if we had to cancel a session.

Besides my schedule challenges our current group consists of five players: we have one guy who's almost always available, another who has very few conflicts, two who have a few - more on that in a minute, and Lady Blacksteel, who is on pretty much the same schedule as me when it comes to availability, though not always.

Early on I set a cancellation policy. D&D 4th edition assumes a 5-man party, and unlike a game such as ICONS or Marvel Heroic the numbers do matter. I build my adventures assuming a 5-man party. As long as we have at least 4 players, I will run. If w have 3 or fewer then we call it and either do something else or just regroup the next time. Early on in the game we had 6 players so this worked well - at 6 the players have an advantage, at 5 they are even, and at 4 things will be more challenging but still possible. At 3 the system starts to get swingy and it gets to be really difficult to handwave why 2 or 3 characters disappeared in the middle of the dungeon. I really did not want to have to cut down encounters to accommodate 3 characters either and the XP gets off significantly if it continues. 

This all worked well when we had 6 players as we rarely missed a session. Once we lost our 6th though, things got a little sticky. Two of my players are part of the same organization, and quite a bit of the time if one has to miss, so does the other for the same organizational activity or event. This absolutely destroyed our previously neat little system as now we typically went from "5 and fine" to "3 and a cancel" and it was only occasionally that we had a party of 4. Combine this with my limiting the game to two weekends a month (instead of "when can we play next" and we lost a lot of sessions. Moving game time to Saturdays also meant that if before they were able to delay their participation until Saturday to keep Friday open, well, that was out the window now too. Previously the only reason a game was cancelled (usually) was if the DM had a conflict. Now we had all of my conflicts AND a pair of players also impacting the schedule. 

Now I don't hold this against them - that's been a thing for them for a long time and that's just how it is. It did reveal a serious weakness though, and I think the best way to shore it up is to pick up another player. We did use the Apprentices as fill-ins a few times and while that worked this is supposed to be the "grown-ups" game and it's hard to throttle back when we drop the kids in on short notice. 

Other than adding another regular player the only workaround I see is to relax my "4 to roll" rule. If I build the encounters around a 4-man party then having all 5 gives them an up, 4 is even, and 3 goes back to challenging but not suicidal.

Also, I think going back to Fridays will help too.

So with the problems identified and some possible fixes in the works, it was time to see if anyone still wanted to play.