in search of the unknown

May 4th, 2012

I’ve heard a lot of references to the 1981 module “In Search of the Unknown:” it came with the first edition of Basic D&D, and a lot of people have fond memories of it. I’ve never read it. When I got a heavy box of D&D books in the mail, it was the first module I grabbed.

I’ve been on a search of my own lately, exploring the D&D I missed before I entered the hobby. As a kid, I played in bizarre junior high versions of Red Box Basic and AD&D, and as an adult I’ve mostly played third and fourth edition. It’s been fun playing OD&D: I’m slowly getting a handle on a different style of D&D than one I’ve ever played.

I was delighted to find Mike Carr’s lengthy “how to play D&D” essay at the beginning of the module. It’s pretty similar to advice in the OD&D and Dungeon Master’s Guide books, but since I’ve never read it before, it’s fresh. I have two other fresh experiences with which to compare the advice: my OD&D games with Mike Mornard and my extremely close study of Gary Gygax’s Random Dungeon Generation tables from the Dungeon Master’s Guide. There are a lot of parallels to draw here.

mapping

Here’s what Mike Carr says about the dungeon in In Search of the Unknown:

The dungeon is designed to be instructive for new players. Most of it should be relatively easy to map, although there are difficult sections – especially on the lower level where irregular rock caverns and passageways will provide a real challenge.

I didn’t realize until Mike Mornard spelled it out for us that mapping was intended to be one of the big challenges of D&D. The labyrinth is as dangerous as the minotaur. In Search of the Unknown is explicitly teaching mapping skills. The assumption is that more advanced modules will be bigger mapping challenges.

It is quite possible that adventurers (especially if wounded or reduced in number) may want to pull out of the stronghold and prepare for a return visit when refreshed or reinforced. If this is done, they must work their way to an exit.

When we play in Mike Mornard’s D&D game, he makes us use our maps. We can’t say “We leave the dungeon.” Every time, we have to specify our twists and turns back to the entrance. This still feels foreign to me. I think I’ve quoted Baf of The Stack before: a game is about what you spend your time doing. OD&D is a game about mapping. Exploration takes more game time than combat. Coming from 3e and 4e, I feel like I’ve been playing a different game.

I love the 1e Player’s Handbook illustration of the troll re-winding the twine trailed by the fighter. (I referenced it in my poster.) Mornard related this story: Once in Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor game, some guys decided to leave string behind them instead of mapping. Eventually, the rope jerked out of their hands and started unrolling, and then they heard a slurping, like someone eating spaghetti. Mapping is a necessary skill: don’t try cheat your way out of it.

caution

One player in the group should be designated as the leader, or “caller” for the party… once the caller (or any player) speaks and indicates an action is being taken, it is begun – even if the player quickly changes his or her mind (especially if the player realizes he or she has made a mistake or error in judgment).

Before playing in Mike Mornard’s game, my eye would have skipped over this classic bit of old-school advice as irrelevant to me. Now I’ve seen it in action:

DM: There are passages north and west.
US: We go south.
DM: Bump… bump… you bump into the wall.

More ridiculously, I recently had my thief start down the magic staircase into the chamber of Necross the Mad, even though I knew that the stairway hadn’t been summoned yet. A merciful DM would have reminded me of that fact – what adventurer would step off a ledge? – but Mike Mornard took me at my word, and I fell. Mike only gave me one point of damage, where perhaps Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson would have assigned more.

Mike says that his game is pretty close to the Gary and Dave game in rules and in content, but where their influences ran more to swords and sorcery, Mike brings more Warner Brothers to the table. There is a lot of laughing in Mike’s game, where Gary and Dave’s were grimmer. But in all three games – and in Mike Carr’s game as well – you need to listen to the DM, and visualize what you hear – and think. As Mike Carr’s introduction says elsewhere, “Careless adventurers will pay the penalty for a lack of caution – only one of the many lessons to be learned within the dungeon!”

time

Every third turn of adventuring, the DM should take a die roll for the possible appearance of wandering monsters at the indicated chances (which are normally 1 in 6)… Some occurrences (such as noise and commotion caused by adventurers) may necessitate additional checks… Wasted time is also a factor which should be noted, as players may waste time arguing or needlessly discussing unimportant matters or by simply blundering around aimlessly. … You set the tempo of the game and are responsible for keeping it moving. If players are unusually slow… allow additional chances for wandering monsters to appear.

This passage will feel very familiar to the players in Mike Mornard’s game. We’ve all grown to fear the d6, which comes rolling out at us whenever we’re “needlessly discussing unimportant matters or simply blundering around aimlessly” – which is often. Wandering monsters disappeared from 4e (and from many 3e games) because they slowed down the game pointlessly. What Mike Carr is suggesting here, and what we’ve learned from Mike Mornard, is that wandering monster checks are actually a way to preserve pacing. Once you’re in the dungeon, you can’t afford to get bogged down in bickering over minutiae. How I wish that work meetings came with wandering monster checks.

mysterious containers

The dungeon includes a good assortment of typical features which players can learn to expect, including… mysterious containers with a variety of contents for examination.

The typical D&D treasure announcement isn’t “You find 1000 GP in a chest:” it’s “You find an old wooden chest. What do you do?” Containers are important. The Appendix A random generator has three separate tables for rolling up characteristics of treasure containers. Here are a couple of the ones I’ve encountered in OD&D:

Contact poison on trap: One of the cardinal OD&D rules is “check the chest for traps.” As the party thief, I make sure to incant this formula. I think that the Greyhawk supplement has rules for finding traps, and I imagine that my odds of success are quite low, but in the last game, Mike told me, without requiring a roll, that the lock was covered with a brownish paste. Good enough warning for me to wear gloves. This transforms a 50/50 chance at arbitrary death into a game element that rewards a methodical, cautious play-style: quite in keeping with the mysterious OD&D “player skill.”

We considered taking the chest with us so we could brush it against opponents, but Mike’s beatific expression – that of a DM who’s thought of flaws in PCs’ plans – warned us to leave it where it was.

Invisible chests: Invisible chests are are oddly common in dungeons made with the Appendix A random generator – and hard to illustrate. They always seemed to me oddly pointless. Why include a treasure you can’t possibly find?

In our case, we passed the invisible chest on the way into a room, but tripped over it on the way out. I can imagine it working like OD&D’s 3 in 6 chance to fall in a pit: there are rewards, as well as dangers, you might never know you passed.

Our invisible chest contained 1000 or so gold, but we were all struck by the advantages of owning our own invisible chest. My character in particular, who frequently leaves his bandit hirelings unsupervised at home, has every need of a way to hide his treasure.

There’s probably a lot more of interest in In Search of the Unknown, but I’ll leave the rest unread – just in case I can get someone to run it for me. After all (says Mike Carr,) “this element of the unknown and the resultant exploration in search of the unknown treasures (with hostile monsters and unexpected dangers to outwit and overcome) is precisely what a DUNGEONS & DRAGONS adventure is all about.”

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Portable hole, leveled

May 2nd, 2012

Portable hidey hole: This is just like a Portable Hole, but a creature may enter the portable hole and seal it up behind them. Every day, the creature must make a Stealth check with a +10 bonus which is used against all Perception checks. A creature in the hole may make Perception checks at a -10 penalty to hear what’s going on outside.

My old houserules for leveling magic items mean that every piece of magical treasure has the potential to gain power in ways that the players can’t predict. Furthermore, WOTC recently invented the concept of the “rare magic item,” but we don’t yet have lots of examples.

While some items may get mechanically better (for instance, a +1 sword becomes a +2 sword), it’s more challenging to improve items that don’t have numeric bonuses. I thought I’d go through the Wondrous Items in the 4e Player’s Handbook and give examples of how each could gain powers that reflect their history.

Inside the hole it is cramped and dark, with enough air for one Small or Medium creature with no fire. It is possible to eat and perform other quiet activities inside the hole. Loud activities will grant perception checks to nearby creatures.

Portable hobbit halfling hole: This portable hole is not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it is a halfling hole, and that means comfort.

Notch’s Portable Mine Shaft: At the bottom of this Portable Hole is an unusually soft stone surface that, with proper mining tools, can be tunneled through quickly but loudly, in any direction, at a rate of 1 foot/hour. Tunnels and shafts can be excavated up to a maximum distance of 15 feet from the portable hole. If a tunnel breaks through into an area of open air in the real world, the digger can step through into that space. When the portable hole is removed from the surface, all tunnels are removed and the original surface is unharmed.

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

Scans of some kid’s D&D notebook from 1989

April 30th, 2012

As I mentioned, I recently came into a windfall: 45 pounds of D&D stuff that comprise some kid’s D&D collection from the 80s. From the Dragon magazines, it looks like he subscribed from about ’83 to ’89, and he stopped playing around the time Second Edition came out.

I was excited to get the books and magazines, but the first thing I opened was the spiral notebook, on the cover of which were scratched the letters “D+D”.

It’s a peculiar, and brief, notebook. I might need a little help prizing out its secrets.

It starts very strong, with an awesome map of a land called ARCAUEN:

There are so many kickass names here, including, but not limited to, Drosifer Tower… Doricus… Isles of Clakoron… Drafek…Okioxion… Mount Flinkorst… Garroten… Dracorius Hill… Blueis Lake… Bay of Bengal… Straight of the Dragon. It’s like an episode of He-Man, in the best possible way. My favorites have to be Bay of Bengal – yeah, it is an awesome name for a bay, even if it is real! and Straight of the Dragon. Straight of the Dragon isn’t even a strait – it’s a peninsula. Spotmarkedx suggested that the world of Arcauen is two dimensions, which you can traverse with the right spell: an island, in which the Straight is a peninsula, and a landlocked sea, in which the Straight is – well, still not a strait, actually. Maybe some sort of bay. Anyway, a good idea.

Other locations of note: Black Ledge, which protects Drosifer Tower, the home of (I suspect) the greatest evildoer of the campaign, and Plathister Tower, where good wizards weave great magics using the poetry of Sylvia Plath. That’s just a guess.

The other interesting thing about this map is the scale: it’s not a continent, as I first thought, but a pretty small island. It’s maybe 30 miles across – approximately the same size as Mauritius. There are a lot of great locations packed together pretty tightly here.

On the next page, we have an Encounter Table!
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literary source of the brooch of shielding?

April 27th, 2012

The Brooch of Shielding (which absorbs 101 HP of Magic Missile attacks) was useful in early D&D editions, when evil wizards filled so many slots in the wandering monster tables and when there were so few low-level attack spells. By third edition, with the proliferation of monsters and spells, it was significantly less so. I bet that during the run of third edition, nobody’s Brooch of Shielding ever took 101 points of Magic Missile damage.

It’s not necessary to posit a specific literary model for the Brooch of Shielding: it’s not too hard to come up with an item that protects against missile attacks. Still, here’s a plausible literary source: a passage from Gardner F. Fox’s 1964 Warrior of Llarn, written by an author Gary Gygax admired (and who is part of the Appendix N pantheon) at a time when Gygax was reading practically all the sci-fi and fantasy that came out.

The Llarnians carry ornaments on them – the medallion on a chain was such an ornament – that counteract the deadly efficiency of the red needle beams. These roundels perform somewhat the same service to their wearers as do lightning rods on earth. Their peculiar metal absorbs the awesome power of the red rays as soon as they come within a foot of anyone wearing them.

I take the Brooch of Shielding’s 101-HP maximum to be a game balance thing; and I’m not sure what to make of the strange specificity of its description: “The Brooch of Shielding appears to be a piece of silver or gold jewelry, usually (90%) without gems inset.” I guess sometimes you just like to roll a d100.

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look what i got in the mail

April 25th, 2012

A friend of my wife’s said, “My dad has a giant box of D&D stuff in the basement. A friend of his gave it to me but I never played it. Do you want it?” Casually flicking some invisible cigarette ash off my perfectly-creased lapel, I murmured, “sure, if it will help him clear out his basement.”

I got the box in the mail today – a banker’s box filled with 45 pounds of Dragon magazines, books, and modules. Here’s the haul.

The previous owner of this stuff seems to have been playing D&D right before I got into it. His Dragon Magazine collection goes from #87 to around #140, overlapping with mine for a few issues. He has the same hardcovers I had as a kid – I never re-acquired most of them, and I’m glad to see them back.

What’s really new to me is the modules. As a D&D-playing kid in the 80s and early 90s, I never had a single module. For years, I’ve heard people talk with bated breath about their experiences playing Against the Giants, In Search of the Unknown, Vault of the Drown, Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Isle of Dread, Ghost Tower of Inverness, and the rest. I’m excited to read them.

Finally, the original owner’s D&D notebook and a few characters are in the box. Check out this sweet world map:

It would be totally great to share this random 80’s kid’s campaign world. Next stop: Arcauen!

Besides Arcauen (obviously), what should I read first?

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try an easy rpg: d4 basic

April 23rd, 2012

I’m a big fan of easy D&D, which means, for me, two things: “easy for the dm to prep” and “easy to explain to a first-time player”.

For me, the ideal prep for a game involves brainstorming a few characters and gimmicks. My DM notes generally look like this: “whenever the PCs search a house, they have a 1 in 3 chance of finding the black-handled knife. Whoever owns the house is the witch.” and I never get around to looking up the Night Hag stat block.

I’ve also played a lot of D&D with first-time players, and the more rules they need to learn before they start playing, the more ashamed I feel for wasting their time. I think the ideal situation for a new player is to choose between a few pregens of recognizable archetypes, each of which has a couple of cool, simple attacks.

Experienced players should have lots of customization options, but experienced players can look after their damn selves.

I’ve been trying a playtest version of Jason Hurst’s d4 Basic game. It’s sort of a D&D-style RPG/board game which takes the “easiest” elements from each. From the RPG corner, it keeps the idea of the game master who makes judgment calls and referees actions outside the rules. From the Descent-style board game corner, it uses pregen characters and scenarios, clockwise play, and win conditions. The result is a rpg manual that’s about 7 pages long: and actually, when you subtract art, table of contents, and the usual “what is an RPG and “what are dice” sections, it’s probably 3 or 4 pages of rules. There’s more text in the scenarios, treasure cards, and so on, but it’s still probably 1/4 of the length of the Descent rules and a tiny fraction of the length of any D&D edition. You could play it with zero prep, and you could probably have a RPG n00b run the thing.

D4 Basic is in open beta right now.

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playing D&D with mike mornard: better to be lucky than good. third best: be amusingly incompetent

April 20th, 2012

Last time I played D&D in Mike Mornard’s campaign was over a month ago, and I never got around to describing the game. I’ll see what I can remember now. I should have detailed it at the time, but my kickstarter’s taken up all of my time for the past month or so.

I took a look at my last “D&D With Mike” blog post to refresh my memory, and found this interesting passage:

When TSR printed 1000 copies of D&D, Mike said, people thought they were crazy to print so many. Today I feel an especially strong kinship with the guys at TSR, because my D&D poster kickstarter is driven by very much the same sort of loving pastiche, [although] I’d be crazy to expect to sell 1000 of my posters.

Since I wrote that, I sold 1000 posters! I am officially as good as TSR! Right??

OK, maybe not. I think my kickstarter’s success was one of those freaks of fate. But hey – it’s better to be lucky than good. And, best of all, my good luck means labor for Mike Mornard, since I convinced him to provide a dungeon as a kickstarter stretch goal.

On that note, here’s what happened in that month-ago D&D game in Mike’s dungeon:

I’ve mentioned before that in Mornard’s game, some of the dungeon’s denizens are significantly more powerful than we are. A few sessions ago, when we crept into a dungeon room and saw an unarmed old man scribbling away at a desk, I was terrified. I was convinced that this was one of those guys you don’t want to mess with.

Last session, the group convinced me that we should at least go TALK to the guy. Somehow my 11 Charisma makes me the party negotiator, so I walked down the long, straight corridor to his study (thinking all the while about my chances to evade a lightning bolt in such a place). I cleared my throat nervously, and started babbling about how one rarely gets a chance to find such civilized company in the dungeon, and were there any errands we could run for him in town?

Our host introduced himself as Necross the (ha ha ha!) Mad. (As well as a dweller in the dungeon, he seems to be a character from the late 70s Cerebus comic.) Necross did have a quest for us: he wanted us to pick up some pipe tobacco in town next time we were in the area. OK, as quests go, that one sounded like it was within the capabilities of second- to third-level characters.

He also offered us a unique moneymaking opportunity. He had access, he said, to a private entrance to a rich part of the dungeon. He’d show us the entrance for a nominal fee of only 100 gold pieces.

This sounded a lot like the beginning of a confidence scam, but we decided to take the risk. It was only 100 gold pieces, after all.

Necross summoned a djinn and gave him a command. The genie summoned a set of wooden stairs that climbed to a doorway high on the wall of Necross’s chamber.

We weren’t sure what to make of this. Everyone knows that lower dungeon levels were more dangerous: what do you make of a dungeon level that’s higher than level 1? One thing we all agreed on: we were glad we had talked to Necross, and not gone in swords a-blazing. Any wizard powerful enough to command djinn was probably a match for a ragtag group of low-level PCs, bandits, and muleteers.

We climbed the stairs and ventured into the new section of the dungeon. Somewhat to my surprise, we found that Necross had played straight with us about the richness of the treasure. We lost a character to monsters, but found a bunch of treasure, including a piece of jewelry worth 1000 or so gold.

With our loot and our fallen companion burdening our mule, we returned to Necross’s chamber. And that’s where we hit the “if I was smarter, I would have seen this coming” moment that I’ve experienced a few times in Mike’s game. No doubt you know exactly what’s coming, but hey, I’m not as smart as you.

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Kickstarter reward progress!

April 18th, 2012

I’ve been working hard in the random dungeon mines, mining random dungeons! I’ve got a few bits and pieces to show you.

First, here’s a small version of the Random Dungeon poster file I sent to the printers:

All the backers will eventually get a big PDF of this, and most of you will get one, two, or more paper copies as well. The printer schedule is later than I’d like: I’m still hoping for late April delivery. We’ll see. I’d planned for the poster to be available for WOTC’s reprintings of the First Edition books. It looks like WOTC has pushed the reprints to June, so even if I’m late, I’ll still beat them.

I’m working hard on all the other backer rewards too! I’ve got a lot of draft versions of things: I’ll show you some samples of what’s coming.

Dungeon Robber: I spent all this weekend playtesting Dungeon Robber, the solo board game played on the poster. (As a reminder, everyone who donated $5+ will get a PDF of Dungeon Robber.) Here’s a sample table from the Treasure section:

USELESS ITEMS TABLE (roll 1d6)
1: Bad Art. Heavy. You are convinced it is worth 500 GP and will carry it in preference to any Heavy treasure of lesser value. You will only drop it if you are fleeing from a monster; while carrying it, you will not flee if you are at full health. If you get it out of the dungeon, you’ll be unable to sell it. Still, you’re convinced it’s a masterpiece. You’ll keep it in your house, and no one will ever appreciate it like you do. High Wisdom: You recognize this item as worthless and leave it where it is.
2: Moldy clothes. They’re worth 1gp, but when you pick them up, you must save or take 1d4 damage.
3: Flawed weapon. It does 1d6 damage, and breaks the first time you hit with it. Worth 1gp.
4: Spoiled food. You can only throw away spoiled food if you’re being pursued by a nonintelligent monster, and you’ll throw away good food first. If you leave the dungeon with it, you get sick for 1d6 days, during which time you will not heal hit point damage. Worth 0gp. High wisdom: You recognize this food as spoiled and leave it where it is.
5: 1d20 cp.
6: 1d20 sp.

And here are 9 ways I died while playtesting:

  • After killing two skeletons and finding a 500 GP piece of jewelry, I was killed by a third skeleton. Stupid skeletons!
  • I used a Charm spell to gain a troglodyte henchman, but then we were both killed by an arrow trap.
  • Unarmed, I was pursued by a kobold. I was trapped and slaughtered in a dead end.
  • On level 3, I was crushed by a falling-door trap.
  • My level-one dungeon robber found himself lost on level 8, through an unfortunate succession of chutes and elevator rooms. I managed to find the stairs to level 7, where I was paralyzed and eaten by a carrion crawler.
  • After a successful dungeon run where I romped down to level 3 and came home with 500 GP, I went back in the dungeon and was killed on level 1 by a kobold.
  • Delved to level 3, where I ran from a bandit. He cornered me in a dead end, and in desperation I attacked him with my flawed short sword. I killed him with a critical hit, but my sword broke. I quickly headed for the exit, but I was killed on level 1 by a skeleton.
  • Fell in a pit with closing walls. Because I was wearing plate mail and I refused to drop my heavy stone coffer full of nigh-worthless copper coins, I was unable to climb out before the walls crushed me.
  • Took my 5th-level thief down to level 8, snuck up on and killed a su monster and manticores, and fought, sneaked, and fled my way back upstairs with 10450 cp, 3300 sp, 5000 gp, 700 pp (6,834 GP total), and only 2 hp left. A few rooms away from the stairs, I fell in a spiked pit and died.

    Conclusion: The most dangerous place in the dungeon is level 1 when you’re returning with treasure!

    Interactive version of the poster: Haven’t started on this yet. Eventually, $5+ backers will get it.

    All-Star Dungeon Master book: $17+ backers will get this PDF containing adventures and rules from heavyweight DMs Mike Shea, Mike Mornard, Tracy Hurley, Tavis Allison, Jared von Hindman and James Maliszewski. James Mal has shared with me a rough draft of level 1 of Dwimmermount: as a preview, I’ll send that separately to you $17+ backers. Players from my campaign, DON’T LOOK! Actually, go ahead: it will do you little good, now that we’re on LEVEL TWO of Dwimmermount!

    D&D Stickers! $22+ backers are all getting a sheet of 20 stickers by various awesome artists. The guy at Stickeryou.com was so excited about how the stickers looked that he sent me a blurry photo from his cameraphone of them on the assembly line. It doesn’t do them justice, so I’ll wait to show you a scan of the actual stickers. But, on a related note…

    Virtual Table tokens! If you’re getting stickers, you can also get WOTC Virtual Table versions of all the stickers as hero and monster icons. Most of the icons are cropped portraits of the original stickers. Here are a few!

    Paul’s DM Notebook: This is an ever-growing reward for $22+ backers: I keep on thinking of things to add. Here are two pages from my current draft (click for PDFs):

    That’s where I am right now. I’m going to keep working on every reward until it’s time to put posters in tubes!

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    new category of magic item: magical map

    April 16th, 2012

    At the foot of the little rise there was a map of the world, carte du monde, mappamondo, karte der welt, with the countries marked on it in brilliant colors. I knew that if I wanted to go anywhere, from Angola to Paphlagonia, all I had to do was put my foot on the spot.

    This quote from Sign of the Labrys got me thinking about how few magical maps there are in D&D. (Between proofing my Random Dungeon poster and working on my stretch-goal board game rules, I’m in a mappy place right now anyway.)

    Maps are very important to the play of OD&D. Graph-paper maps are the primary archaeological product of an old-school D&D game, along with empty Mountain Dew bottles. Furthermore, in-game maps (treasure maps) are a big part of OD&D treasure. Nevertheless, there are virtually no magical maps. There might be one or two in splatbooks, but I don’t think any core Dungeon Master’s Guide has ever featured a magical map. (The 1e DMG, on the other hand, has four different magical periapts.)

    Contrast this with computer games. A magical map is one of the ubiquitous items in computer RPGS: so common that it’s part of the user interface. Nearly every game comes with an auto-map. I’m splitting hairs here a little: I know that, within the fiction of the game, most auto-maps represent the cartographic efforts of the main character. Still, if you’ve played old games like The Bard’s Tale where you did your own mapping on graph paper, auto-maps feel pretty darn magical.

    Here are some magical maps for D&D. They join a proud tradition of D&D’s brilliant “you now have permission to ignore the rules” magic items. They don’t really give the players new powers: they enable a free-and-easy play style that some prefer. Don’t like encumbrance? Have a Bag of Holding! Don’t like tracking light sources? Everburning torch!

    Along with each magic map are notes about what play style it might support.

    AUTOMAP PAPER

    Automap paper looks like ordinary paper until a drop of ink is applied to it. The ink will crawl of its own accord, drawing a small overhead map view of the PC’s current location. If the PCs are inside a structure, the picture will be scaled so that the entire floor of the building could be drawn on one sheet of paper. If the PCs are outside, it will be scaled so that the entire island or continent can be drawn. Detail level will be appropriate to the scale.

    Once the map has been started, it will automatically update itself whenever it’s in a new location. It can’t map while it’s inside a container: it needs to be held in a hand or otherwise out in the open.

    Players can draw annotations on the map if they like.

    Using automap paper in a game: Start a campaign for a new-school D&D group (3e or 4e) and make them map the dungeons. If they haven’t done so before, every group should map a few dungeons. However, not every campaign is dungeon-crawl focused, and so, once the players have run the gauntlet a few times, let them find a sheaf of, say, 50 sheets of automap paper. From then on, let the players peek at your DM map if they ever get lost. This strategy goes with the general progression of level-based games: start with lots of restrictions, and slowly lift them.

    This item also works well in games where the DM draws out the important locations on a battlemat.

    Because every magical item should have a leveled version, here are some improved versions of Automap Paper:

    Architect’s Map: This superior version of automap paper is blue, and requires white chalk to activate it instead of ink. It draws a whole dungeon level at once, without requiring you to visit each part, and automatically shows hidden and concealed doors, as well as any trap that was built as part of a building’s original construction.

    Using the Architect’s Map in a game: Give the PCs a copy of the DM map. It’s up to them to track their journey and to notice your notations for traps and secret doors. While automap paper can be given freely to PCs, an Architect’s Map might be a limited resource: players might find 1d4 sheets at a time. An architect’s map is especially good when you don’t mind letting the players making informed decisions about where to go.

    Living Map: This is the Harry Potter version of the automap. It uses moving dots of ink to represent all living things on the map. A cluster of 10 hobgoblins might look like one large dot, and be indistinguishable from five hobgoblins, or from a dragon.

    Using the Living Map in a game: Like the Architect’s Map, this should be an expendable resource. It’s handy in an ordinary dungeon: it’s nice to be able to check the map to see if there’s an ambush behind the door. It’s even more useful for heist, stealth, or chase adventures. It’s a nice magic item for groups that like to outthink obstacles instead of killing everyone in their way: in other words, give it to your Shadowrun group when they’re playing D&D for a change. Keep in mind that a single piece of map paper only graphs one floor. If a creature goes upstairs, it’s off the map.

    Travel Map: If a character touches a point on this automap, he or she will instantly travel to that location. Keep in mind that the automap only charts visited places, so a character cannot use it to travel somewhere new. Also, a travel map can only teleport a single player: since the map travels with the player, it can’t be used for party travel.

    This map’s special properties are only available if its owner is in the mapped area: in other words, a player can’t use a travel map of a dungeon to teleport into the dungeon. He or she may only teleport from one point in the dungeon to another.

    This map is especially useful as an outdoor map: travel between cities is usually more time-consuming and difficult than travel between different rooms in a dungeon.

    Using a travel map in a game: A single piece of travel map paper, used as a continental map, can expedite the kind of fast-travel used in most computer RPGs. The first time you go somewhere, you have to go there the hard way. Once you’ve been there, you can hand-wave any future travel to or from that location. A single travel map allows a single character to take intra-continental jaunts, allowing for lots of communication and resupply options; more useful fast travel requires enough maps for the whole party. A pack of travel-map paper is a pretty good find for a high-level party which is outgrowing wilderness adventures.

    A fun trick: Don’t let the players know that their map is of the “travel map” variety. Watch the players during the game. When someone touches a spot on the map to make a point, tell everyone that that player’s character has disappeared.

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    Posted in 4e D&D, advice/tools, game design, legacy D&D, RPG Hub | 15 Comments »

    Mass Effect 3 and the plight of the Information Age

    April 13th, 2012
    Mass Effect 3

    My Shepard was female AND an infiltrator!

    MASS EFFECT 3 SPOILERS AHEAD

    This article is only kind of about Mass Effect 3:

    Why didn’t they like it? My principle theory: The ending was too grim. People felt like they put all this hard work into their character and made all the “right” choices only to end up having to sacrifice Shepard in the end. Essentially, the ending was too sad and there’s a perception that if you can change a bunch of other parts of the story, why shouldn’t you be able to achieve an ideal happy ending?

    This got me thinking about how there are certain kinds of computer/video games “choices” that kind of don’t work. Or rather they don’t work for me or, I imagine, most people I know:

    • If a game has a “sad” ending or choice that could be avoided, and I can reload to prevent that sad ending, 90% of the time I will do so. The only time I won’t do so is if neither ending is “correct”; i.e. maybe I have a choice between sacrificing myself or others, for example. Neither choice is obviously correct, so I will go with the one that feels best to me.
    • If a game has a “sad” ending or choice that could be avoided, and I can’t reload BUT I can look up a guide to preventing the sad ending on the internet, I will do so, providing I have warning ahead of time, such as by reading a review or talking to a friend. Or at least I imagine I will; I’ve never really played a game that has those kinds of choices and doesn’t give you the opportunity to reload.

    Essentially, when it comes to storytelling in a computer game/video game format, I can’t stand a sad ending or outcome IF I HAVE A CHOICE to change it. Basically, I feel like a failure in those situations. I’m playing a game after all, and I will choose the ending or course of action that feels most like winning to me, reloading or checking the internet if necessary. I use this kind of thought process in most tabletop RPGs too (the exception being some indie rpgs); however, in those cases I do not have the luxury of reloading or checking the internet for the correct course of action.

    To return to Mass Effect 3, I think it was okay that the endings were so grim no matter what actions you took. That is the ONLY real way to craft a narrative in a computer/video game if you want the vast majority of players to experience a less than perfect ending.

    Why not just offer a perfect happy ending if that’s what everyone wants? Short answer: it’s bad storytelling. Sometimes a story, even one presented through a game that gives you choices to affect the events of the story, works best if it ends on a bittersweet or downright depressing note. For an obvious example, look at the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex; he has already killed his father and married his mother at the beginning of the story, and so there is no way for it to end happily!

    I felt like that was the case with Mass Effect 3, which is incredibly dark from the beginning, a desperate struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds; while not Greek tragedy level inevitable, ending the story with the sacrifice of the main character (in all but one of the endings) seems quite appropriate.

    So what’s the take-away from all of this? Craft computer games with nuanced endings and consequences! Instead of having an obvious success or failure (you save the peasant’s life or let him die) make the consequences cool and interesting (the peasant dies but he stops the fire from spreading across the village or he lives but many more homes in the village burn down, leaving villagers without homes). If you don’t, then keep in mind that most people will just reload to get the happy ending.

    I feel like Mass Effect 3 achieved this with its endings. Even the so called “perfect” ending where Shepard lives has her (I played a female Shepard) destroying all synthetic life in the galaxy! Not exactly a happy ending. Mass Effect 3 also achieved this dynamic with some of the choices you are presented with. For example, since I played with a new character my first time around, I was presented with the choice to to cure the genophage and risk the Krogans being the next big threat when the war dies down or pretend to cure it and curse the Krogans to eventually die off as a species. For me the choice was obvious, but this was a legitimate ethical choice with pros and cons! In contrast, some of the Mass Effect 3 outcomes felt more like rewards or punishments based on your paragon score, which were definitely not as interesting and left me disappointed that I didn’t import my character fully Paragon character from Mass Effect 2 so I could succeed.

    Maybe I am not giving people enough credit, and a lot of people play games without reloading often and without checking on the internet for hints when presented with choices that could dramatically alter the flow of the game or result in less than perfect outcomes. In some ways, I kind of wish I played games that way, but I don’t! I’d kind of like to be forced to play a game that way, and in fact, that is one of the things I like about traditional table-top rpgs, that there is someone running the game ensuring that choices have permanent consequences. However, in the world we live in, I think creating computer games that present cool nuanced choices and outcomes without incredibly obvious “right” answers is the way to go.

    Posted in game design, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

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