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picaresque adventure pitch

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

Here are the rules for my upcoming picaresque one-shot 4e game, using my item quality rules:

Welcome to Setine!

Setine is a beautiful desert city of gardens, beauty, and riches. The gardens and beauty are nice, but you’d REALLY like to get your hands on the riches.

Come to Setine with a level 1 character (or just show up and grab a pre-made character!)

Special Poverty Rules

Instead of the normal starting money (100GP) you start with 10 GP and a ragged set of clothes. You’re too poor to afford most normal equipment, but you’re in luck! For every piece of equipment from the Player’s Handbook, there is a “bad” version that costs 1/10 the price! Every piece of bad equipment comes with some flaw: bad weapons break on a natural 1, bad food has a chance to make you sick, etc.

Room and Board

Normally, D&D characters don’t have to worry about their next meal, but in Setine, you’re only a day or two away from starvation.

The Golden Grapes: A fine inn in the respectable Silver District. 7 SP per night or 30 per week.
The Ragman: A disreputable inn. Keep an eye on your possessions! Located in the beautiful Baths District, where all the streets are flooded with a foot of standing water. 7 CP per night or 3 SP per week.
Sleeping on the streets: FREE! But you won’t heal or get your daily powers back.

Traveling in the City

When traveling between neighborhoods, you can either take the high roads or the back streets. On the high roads, the guards will let you through if you have appropriate clothing (normal clothes for middle-class neighborhoods, fine clothes for rich neighborhoods). If you take the back streets, you might run into a gang or other unpleasantness.

Everything below here is optional! You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to!

OPTIONAL: Backgrounds

You can take one of the following 10 backgrounds, which give you unique advantages and disadvantages, or you can skip the backgrounds and come up with any backstory you want.

Traveler: You’re not from Setine. You might be a sailor, merchant, con man, mercenary, or any other type of fortune seeker. You heard that Setine was paved with gold, but that doesn’t seem to be true in your neighborhood. Advantages: You speak the Southern language. Also, please tell me about the moneymaking opportunity that drew you to town. It might still work out! Disadvantages: You’re not from around here. -2 to Streetwise checks.

Honest Guardsman: You work under incorruptible Captain Pike (“The Tarrasque”). You can barely survive on your guardsman’s salary. Advantages: Start with a free low-quality spear (breaks on a natural 1) and low-quality chain mail (breaks if you’re critically hit). You have access to patrol schedules, so you can always summon a guard patrol within a neighborhood. Half the guards are honest, and inclined to be friendly. Disadvantages: Half the guards are corrupt, and inclined to be unfriendly.

Corrupt Guardsman: You work under good old Captain Falstaff (“The Wine Cask”). You make a little money on the side, but that’s the only way to survive on a guardsman’s salary. Advantages: Start with free chainmail and spear and guardsman uniform. You have access to patrol schedules, so you can avoid the guards within a neighborhood. Half the guards are corrupt, and inclined to be friendly to you. Disadvantages: Half the guards are honest, and inclined to be unfriendly.

Guild thief: You’re a low-ranking member of the respected Thieves Guild. Advantages: Access to “safe houses” in each neighborhood, and a fence that buys at 2x the normal fence price. Disadvantages: Half the people and houses in their city pay their dues to the Guild, and you are not allowed to rob them.

Guild beggar: You might be a pretend cripple or a plucky street orphan. You work for Vomit, the eccentric leader of the Beggar’s Guild. Advantages: Free access to the sewers (from every neighborhood except the Baths, where the sewers are underwater). You can beg (a minigame that can make you money). Disadvantages: You start with 3 GP instead of 10 GP.

Struggling Artist or Student: You’ve been living in a garret working on your play/painting/translation/performance. If you could just get some rich backers, you could release it to the world and probably be a huge success! Advantages: If you can raise at least 300 coins, you could release your masterwork, which could pay you back ten times over if it’s a hit! Disadvantages: Success is based on your artistic skills.

Orc: Orcs are commonly used as bodyguards and mercenaries. You’re between jobs. (For orc, use the stats of either half-orc or goliath). Advantages: +2 Intimidate. Free entry to the orc camp. Once a day, you can get 1-6 orc friends to help you on a job. Disadvantages: Poor orcs are generally regarded with suspicion, because when they’re hungry they smash things.

Noble: You’ve sold your lands, pawned your heirlooms, and your friends are avoiding you. If you could just raise 5000 GP you could pay off your debts and get a fresh start. Advantages: Start with a set of fine clothes. You also have a masterwork weapon (+1 to hit), but it’s pawned. You can redeem it for 100GP. Disadvantages: Half the merchants in the city refuse to do business with you. Debt collectors are combing the city for you. If they catch you, prison is the best-case scenario.

Disgraced Paladin: The Order of Tima (the “knights in white satin” are a pretty easygoing group of paladins devoted to courtly love. I don’t know what you did to get under their skin, but they’ve kicked you out of the Citadel of Love. Advantages: You start with your uniform, a fine suit of white clothes that gives you a +8 AC bonus as long as it is immaculately clean. Disadvantages: Becoming Bloodied or travelling through the filthy Baths district has a chance of dirtying your uniform.

Illegal Necromancer: You’re a wizard or cleric who worships a certain god who is unjustly suppressed in these parts. You’ve been kicked out of your former church or wizard’s college for your progressive beliefs. Advantages: When you find a corpse, you can raise it as a level 1 skeleton or zombie helper. You can only have one helper at a time. Disadvantages: Necromancy is illegal; the guards had better not find out about your little helper.

Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, play, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

Malcolm Gladwell vs. Ryan Dancey on the fate of TSR

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Mike Mearls, whose retrospective “Legends and Lore” columns always seem to be sidling towards a “We’re relaunching OD&D!” announcement, posted a link to an interesting Malcolm Gladwell TED Talk about the history of spaghetti sauce. Apparently, once upon a time, companies sought the One True Spaghetti Sauce Recipe, until a forward thinker discovered that people were different! And companies have achieved great success by splitting their product lines into different sauces catering to different tastes.

It seems obvious when put that baldly, but it also seems to contradict another seemingly obvious story that’s central to the modern D&D mythos.

There’s an analogy that’s commonly quoted to explain the death of TSR. I’ve seen it attributed to Ryan Dancey and Bill Slavicsek:

“Picture it this way,” Slavicsek says, “it’s raining money outside and you want to catch as much of it as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets — either way, you’re never going to make more rain.” In plain English, TSR, by putting out a lot of product lines instead of supporting the main Dungeons & Dragons line, fragmented the marketplace.

So the path to massive corporate success leads either through diversification or through consolidation. Which is it?

Here’s something that Ryan Dancey said about the death of TSR:

No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No “voice of the customer”. TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn’t know how to listen – as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do – TSR lead, everyone else followed.

On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell says: “Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make them happy – is to ask them. […] People don’t know what they want. A critically important step in understanding our own desires is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down.”

I think the takeaway from Gladwell’s quote is not that companies should ignore surveys (and message boards and blog posts); it’s that they shouldn’t be used as road maps. I think TSR was right to make a lot of decisions on instinct and gut feelings. No one would have filled out a survey and asked for D&D before it was invented.

Perhaps the purpose of the customer survey is not to tell a company what to do: it’s to tell a company what NOT to do. While no survey can tell a company to “make D&D”, a survey could plausibly say “stop making Dragon Dice”.

Posted in 4e D&D, game design, legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 11 Comments »

3 Badass Haunted Rooms

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

A week or two ago Paul asked me to write some quick room descriptions to use for a Haunted House in his campaign on the off chance his players decided to enter it (despite being warned not to). I wrote up the following rooms. They are all non combat puzzle type encounters.

Room Number 1: This room is shrouded in darkness. No light source illuminates the area. A long table sits in the center of the room, set up with the remains of a feast long since eaten. There are utensils, broken plates, tureens, and mostly empty platters on the table. The entire room smells of decaying trash. Indeed, the floor appears to be covered in trash: rotten fruit, broken pieces of furniture, and tattered pieces of paper. Less savory elements are also scattered about the room: a chunk of wet meat, a human hand, and a skull still moist with flesh and skin! The room is littered with human body parts.

If anyone is determined enough to root through the slurry of rotten decay (Easy Perception Check), they recover a potent cursed magic item: A tome infused with the blood of those who died here that communicates with its bearer by writing. The bearer may ask it questions, but it always tells the bearer exactly what it thinks they want to hear, which may or may not correspond to the truth (Hard Insight Check to tell when it is lying).

Room Number 2: This is a small nursery, complete with all the trappings. There is an infant in its crib in this room. It is crying and shrieking at the top of its lungs. Strangely, its crying could not be heard outside the door to the nursery. If someone picks it up, it stops crying immediately. However, should it leave that persons grasp even for second, it immediately begins crying and shrieking again until it is back into that person’s grasp. Only finding the baby’s original mother and giving it to her will wean the baby off of its rescuer and break this strange enchantment.

Room Number 3: This room is bare, save for a thick rope hanging in the center of the room tied into a noose. There is a trap door in the floor right under the noose that swings open if anyone puts their head in, killing them instantly (No Check. This is some old school D&D shit). However, the trap door reveals a small cache where a VERY potent magical weapon is hidden, perhaps an artifact of some kind.

Posted in 4e D&D, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

Table Cost

Wednesday, April 13th, 2011

Next time you design a new rule or game element, calculate its Table Cost. That’s a measure of the strain it places on the players around the table, in terms of time, brain stress, and suspension of disbelief. Rules with low Table Cost are less annoying to use. Rules with high Table Cost are more annoying to use, and they’d better have something else going for them, or they Get The Axe!

Recall Cost
+0: Not easily forgotten, because it’s obvious when should you should use it. (“I need healing, let me see what healing powers I have left!”)
+2: Somewhat easily forgotten. Your CHARACTER could be reasonably expected to remember it. When it’s not the focus of attention, you don’t have to think about it. (“I can activate Fire Form to get through the lava!”
+5: Easily forgotten. The PLAYER has to remember it, because it’s based on a generic or a meta-game trigger. May require something to be tracked from round to round. (“I became Bloodied, so my Animal Fury kicks in!”)

Speech Cost
+0: You don’t need to bother anyone else with the details (you roll 3d6 extra damage when flanking)
+2: Requires you to specify a game term aloud (“…and I do 15 fire damage”)
+5: Requires you to specify a game term aloud EVERY TURN (“…and I’m using my minor action to sustain the Flaming Sphere”)

Belief Cost
+0: Provides a vivid mental picture (“I slam into him and push him back a step”)
+2: Abstract (“When I hit this guy with my mace, I give you an AC bonus”)
+5: Defies imagination (“So I guess the fog is prone?”)
(more…)

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, game design, RPG Hub | 10 Comments »

How to Design a Combat Encounter in Less than 1 Minute

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

A while ago I gave a guide for designing a combat encounter in about 5 minutes. But what if you can’t be bothered to wait that long? What if your players are itching for a fight and you want to deliver it right now?

Follow these simple steps to get started immediately:

Pick up the Monster Vault or Monster Manual of your choice.
Go to the index. Spend about 20 seconds looking up a standard monster of the party’s level or up to +4 levels higher.
If there happens to be another monster around the same level on the same page, you’ve lucked out and can add it to the encounter. Either way, you are using a number of monsters equal to the number of players in the party.
If you have D&D dungeon tiles, draw 3 random tiles from your supply and arrange them in an interesting configuration. If you don’t, draw a weirdly shaped room on your grid map and put a couple of pillars in it.
If you have minis, pick random minis the same size of the monsters you plan to use. Otherwise, use whatever tokens or dice you would normally use.
Make everyone roll initiative while you describe the scene! If you are at a loss for words, say the following: “On your travels you suddenly encounter a group of horrible [INSERT MONSTER NAME HERE]. They are in no mood to talk. It would be a shame to die today, but every hero meets his or her end eventually!” See, it’s nihilistic. The players like that.
Do your best to kill the players. That will really piss them off.

I recommended printing this list out and keeping it in your back pocket in case of an emergency.

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

nervous giggling

Monday, April 11th, 2011

A hyena freaking everyone out.

I’ve been working on the Bestiary for Mazes and Monster but don’t quite have it ready. Since I’ve been thinking about monsters and madness, I did have this creepy – potentially horrifying – D&D idea:

When you’re running a gnoll battle, keep up an irritating nervous giggle during the PCs’ turns. (Did you know hyenas giggle when they’re overexcited or nervous?) Then, during the gnoll’s turns, while you’re busy rolling dice, get the other players involved. Have all the PCs, except the one getting attacked, cackle at the targeted PC. What will that do to the psychology of the person being isolated? What about to everyone else? I can imagine it creating a weird Stanford Prisoner Experiment vibe.

Luckily 4e turns are too short to do lasting psychological harm. PROBABLY!

Posted in 4e D&D, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

The Infamous DMPC

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

DMPC. Kind of a misnomer, really. Also, more or less universally despised by those familiar with the term. In this article, I will explore the following questions:

What is a DMPC?
Why the hell would anyone ever run one?
How should you play a DMPC?

1. What is a DMPC?

In D&D, a DMPC is a Player Character run by the DM. “Isn’t that an NPC?” you may ask. Well… kind of. A DMPC is built using the same rules as a player, generally sticks around over the course of a campaign, levels like a player, and often demands its fair share of loot. So, aside from the fact that it is played by the DM, who is running the rest of the campaign, it is basically another PC.

It should be noted that there is nothing specific to D&D about a DMPC. There could be one in any rpg with a traditional GM and Player structure. (more…)

Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools | 6 Comments »

upcoming D&D books I’m excited about

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

Unannounced Feywild book: Despite its dorky name, I like the Feywild. It’s one of my favorite parts of 4e cosmology. A DM can introduce fantastic elements in the Feywild: even larger-than-life than the usual larger-than-life D&D stuff. Still, three years into the edition, it doesn’t have a sourcebook.

According to the D&D release calendar, there’s something called “Heroes of the Feywild” scheduled in November. That looks to be a book of “player options”, though: not details about unsettling faerie courts, clashing cliffs, palaces in strange intoxicating clouds, jeweled beaches, and haunting monsters both beautiful and terrible, but classes and feats that you can give your PC. Lame!

There’s a shred of hope: This year, “Heroes of Shadowfell” and “The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond” are both being released. “Heroes of the Feywild” is at the end of the release calender. Maybe the next year will bring “The Feywild: The Court of Stars and Beyond” or some similar book.

(more…)

Posted in 4e D&D, news, RPG Hub | 6 Comments »

the cave girl: earthquake fight!

Friday, March 25th, 2011

The Cave Girl by Edgar Rice Burroughs

In Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Cave Girl, lovely cave girl Nadara is saved from the clutches of hideous cave man Thurg by a well-timed earthquake.

An earthquake during a fight sounds like a fun complication to me, but we can’t be relying on all sorts of coincidences. Our D&D must be rigorously realistic!

The obvious way to stage an earthquake fight – the way these things usually go down – is to have the PCs trying to stop a ritual.

In order to provide full scope for earthquake fun, the fight should be in a setting with lots of earthquake-destroyable scenery. Perhaps a Greek-style temple with lots of pillars. Let’s put a river through the temple too: water or lava, depending in the god!

After a turn or two, if the PCs haven’t killed the ritualist, the ground shakes – a fortitude attack that knocks people prone. A few turns later, the same thing happens, with a stronger fortitude attack and maybe some damage. If the PCs haven’t stopped the ritual by the third check, the whole battlefield changes.

When the major earthquake happens, suspend the battle and, ignoring the battlemat, run a skill challenge where people try to avoid being swallowed by rents in the earth, run to high ground, etc. When the skill challenge is done, whip out a new map – a post-earthquake map, complete with chasms, fallen pillars, a water- (or lava-) fall, and a few pieces of unbroken ground. Depending on how everyone did, they’re at various places on the battlefield: hanging from exposed roots in a chasm, trapped under a pillar, or standing on one of the untouched areas of ground.

Tags:everybook
Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, news, other systems, RPG Hub | 3 Comments »

super simple mass battle mechanics: saving throws to save the world

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Like any rules hacker, I’ve tinkered with complex mass-combat rules. The other day, when I actually ran a battle encounter, I threw away all my precious rules in exchange for rock-paper-scissor mechanics, and it was a great success.

One of our players is moving away, and to see him off, I ran a one-shot epic adventure to kill Tiamat. Everyone took a beloved existing character, leveled them to 30, and I rolled the timeline forward a couple of years, to a day when Tiamat’s armies were poised for total conquest of the world. Only the PCs and their armies stood in the way.

I decided to Epic It Up, and go for over-the-top heavy metal high fantasy. Here’s the plot. Over-the-top Epic elements are in CAPS.

THE ENTIRE WORLD HAS BEEN CONQUERED by Tiamat’s forces, except for the encampment containing the PCs and their armies. The PCs are fiddling with a device that will let them TRAVEL TO THE MOON and KILL TIAMAT ON THE MOON surrounded by her DESERT EMPIRE OF DRAGONS AND DRAGONBORN SLAVES ON THE MOON. Tiamat is so big that, from Earth, she is VISIBLE SITTING ON THE SIDE OF THE MOON.

Tiamat’s UNSTOPPABLE ARMIES contain LEGIONS OF PRIMORDIALS, EVIL GODS, legions of cultists, dragonborn infantry, and an AIR FORCE OF DRAGONS THAT DARKENS THE SKY.

MASS BATTLE MECHANICS

PCs Leading Armies

There are 3 kinds of troops, set up in a rock-paper-scissors relationship: flying troops have +2 against infantry, infantry has +2 against ranged, and ranged has +2 against flying.
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