Burrowowl

I rather like the general idea of skill challenges; they encourage a DM to reward players for solving problems without resorting to combat. This encourages players to see each other’s characters outside their combat roles and fosters a more rich, varied, interesting, and thus entertaining play experience. The general idea is lovely, a welcome addition to Dungeons & Dragons.

In practice, skill challenges as presented in the rules are a mess. I’m not talking about the math of target difficulties. Whether you need to roll a 5 or a 15 to advance the challenge is immaterial. The problem is that poor rolling necessarily results in failure. The tactical combat system of Dungeons & Dragons when implemented as suggested in the rules assumes player victory. Take 600xp worth of bad-guys from the Monster Manual and throw them at five 2nd level adventurers and you will almost always see the adventurers succeed. Repeat this two more times without allowing the player characters to reset their daily abilities and healing surges, and things can get a little hairy but victory is still the most foreseeable outcome. Skill challenges as presented in the DMG and the errata introduce a significant chance of defeat without a mechanical means of building up player tension.

Some assumptions I work with when doing prep-work for a campaign:

1. The characters will be advancing through levels during the course of the story.
2. As characters advance in level, they become more competant.
3. Players generally prefer to have their characters succeed overall.
4. It is important that the characters be competant enough to have a reasonable chance at success.
5. Success that comes too easily is rarely satisfactory.
6. It is important that the characters not be so competant as to make success trivial.
7. When preparing for play, some preparation for the players bypassing or failing in regards to certain xp-yielding challenges should be taken to address points 4 and 6.

If I am to incorporate one or two skill challenges per game session, each worth the experience points rewarded for a level-appropriate tactical engagement, I face the very real possibility of the players failing several encounters. If I pepper in skill challenges every second fight or so, the player characters will advance a level after six fights. That tends to take two to three game sessions for my group. Fail one of those skill challenges and the rhythm gets broken up. Instead of doing the character advancement busywork at the beginning or end of a session, maybe the XP threshhold is broken mid-session. No, thank you, but I still want to use skill challenges.

Does this mean I should force the players to succeed their skill checks? Oh Lord, no. When players roll badly they know it. Just as they expect their characters to be awesome when they roll a 20, they expect their characters to suck when they roll 1. Rather than stonewall on a skill failure (or series of failures), I add complications and require that everbody gets in on it.

“Everybody grab a d20, somebody give me a Nature check, somebody else give me a Perception check, everybody else give me either an Endurance or Athletics check.” The players pick who’s responsible for which end of things. If most of them succeed, a consequence is avoided. Consequences could involve the passage of an undue amount of time: you found a good route through the swamp, but Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck about a half-mile in.

If enough failures amass over multiple passes through the group (let everybody have a chance to roll at least a second time; people love a chance at redemption), they fail the skill challenge and are faced with an additional combat encounter to make up the XP gap and slap them on the wrist a little. After Mr. Shinypants Paladin got stuck in the muck, Mr. Smartypants Wizard picked the wrong path, and Ms. Stabbity Rogue didn’t notice the Gnoll ambush before it was too late. Oops.

Depending on the nature of the challenge, it may be more or less easy to come up with a narrative justification for this. How does haggling with a merchant over the price of apples result in fisticuffs in heroic fantasy? Pretty easily, really, but in many of those cases there’s really no reason to pick up dice in the first place or give an experience point reward for a success.

1. Think before negotiating: If you fire at them with everything you have, could you remove the need to negotiate?
2. If negotiation is a necessity, think while doing so: what is the best way to cleave the enemy ambassadors in twain?
3. If all else fails, fighting is always the answer.
4. If fighting fails, you are not fighting hard enough.
5. If you are not fighting hard enough, fight louder.
6. The best approach is always from the front.
7. If the enemy has left their flanks open, feint and then attack from the front.
8. If the front is heavily defended, they are expecting a flank attack. Attack from the front.
9. If their flanks and front is both heavily defended but they are vulnerable to an aerial strike, distract them with aerial bombardment and then attack from the front.
10. If attacking from the front does not work, you are not fighting hard enough. See point 5.
11. If attacking from the front is still not working, you’re obviously not attacking their front! See point 6.
12. If there is no possibility for victory, attack from the front as furiously and loudly as possible. Remember: the greater the defeat, the greater the moral victory.

Diplomacy is over-rated.

So I was knocking around some of the suggestions from the 4th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide regarding the distribution of treasure. When following the advice of the DMG, a DM basically ends up distributing one less magic item than there are player characters every level, each of increasing level-value (level +1 … L+4). For four characters, the book recommends dropping the level+2 item, yielding an item output of L+1, L+3, and L+4 by the time the party advances.

As an issue of basic fairness, you wouldn’t want the person who got the level +4 item (ostensibly the coolest material reward that level) to also get the most super-neato-von-awesome stuff during the following level. It seems to me that a round-robin approach makes a lot of sense. But which direction to spin the wheel? Does the character that got the L+4 item this time get the L+3 item next time? Then the L+1? This would allow whoever missed out to get the L+4 next time. It also means that starting at 1st level, some guy is going to end up with multiple same-level items repeatedly during his career. Odd.

Here’s how the downward-stepping round-robin breaks down:

And so forth. An upward-stepping round-robin goes like this:

In both cases, naturally, the same number of items show up, of the same power levels, at the same rate. When descending, an individual’s gear clusters up into tight little clusters of general potency. When ascending there’s a lot more scatter.

Descending, I observe that if you look at each character’s best gear (at the tail end of level 6), Player A gets at 10th and 6th level item, Player B gets two 7th level items, Player C gets two 8th level items, and player D gets two 9th level items. All else being equal, I’d expect Player B to feel a little put-out at that point.

Ascended, Player A gets and 8th and a 7th level item, Player B gets a 9th and a 7th level item, Player C gets a 10th and 8th level item, and Player D gets a 9th and a 7th. Player A is right behind the pack and player C is a little ahead. I suspect this is the approach that would be most likely to yield a defensible appearance of fairness at the game table.

Previously I whipped up a demonstration that the “classic D&D party” (Cleric-Fighter-Rogue-Wizard) can cover the skill spread quite easily. With the Player’s Handbook 2 out today, it is now possible to make a couple of power-source-themed adventuring parties, with all four party roles covered but without having to mix your peanut butter and your chocolate. There’s no reason to avoid such delicious flavor combinations, but sometimes you just want chocolate, right?

What we find, pretty quickly, is that there is a lot of overlap in each power-source group. The Arcanists all have Arcana, History, and Insight. The Divine classes all have Religion. The Primal classes all have Athletics, Heal, Nature, and Perception. Some of this overlap is reinforced by requiring characters to train spefici skills as part of character creation (Arcana, Religion, and Nature being the big culprits for obvious reasons).

With the exception of the Bard (which has every skill available save Endurance, Stealth, and Thievery), each of these groupings have big gaping holes in skill availability. If you want to have a broadly-skilled Divine adventuring party, you will probably have to sink a fair number of feats into skill training, or resort to creating a gang of Eladrin.

Moral of the story: mix up your power sources. Most DMs and players have been stitching together traveling-circus hodgepodges of adventuring parties for years, of course.

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In Dungeons & Dragons, not all skills were created equal. Each is intended to be of moderately-equivalent value to a player character, so that there are no completely-wrong choices to be made at that phase of character creation. Sadly, this isn’t entirely true. Of the skills presented in the Player’s Handbook, some stand out simply by virtue of their availability:

Acrobatics, Bluff, Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Thievery are all only available to two classes. For each of these (aside from Nature), the only classes that have the skill available fill the “striker” role in a party. In a typical four or five-character adventuring party, you probably won’t have more than one or two characters filling the same role, so failing to train one of these skills would leave your party short a potentially-valuable skill.

By contrast, Heal, History, Insight, and Intimidate are available to five classes each. It would be difficult to put together an effective multiple-role party without having every one of these skills available. These, then, would be good skills to just presume a party is going to be reasonably good at. E.g. out of five player characters three or four of them probably have Heal available, and one or two of them probably have it trained. This makes placing a somewhat difficult Heal DC into an adventure a pretty darned reasonable thing for a DM to do.

What should we take away from this? If you’re a player, kindly make sure you’re covering the skills your party needs you to be covering; you cannot expect your Wizard to be intimidating any more than you should expect your Paladin to be sneaky. If you’re a DM concocting a clever skill challenge, try to think of ways that the more commonly-available skills may come in handy, and whether you should set the bar high or low.
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The game developers over at Privateer Press have been busy. Not busy producing new IKRPG material, but busy juggling what was once a nicely streamlined skirmish game WARMACHINE. Every year since its launch, Privateer Press has released a major expansion to the product, from Prime to Escalation to Apotheosis, then Superiority, and most recently Legends. Each of the four original factions has grown into new niches and fortified early strengths. It’s quite a good game.

But after six rule books and the introduction of the HORDES product line, things have gotten unwieldy. Each of the several-dozen models available has its own special rules, often creating exceptions to a core set of rules that is quite streamlined and almost elegant. The reminds me of a beautiful woman putting on makeup and jewelry. She puts a little something on to draw attention to her eyes, maybe a pair of earings. That’s all nice, but taken a little too far she’ll look like a tramp or a clown. The interactions of special rules had crossed the line at some point. The Privateers had to put an online FAQ up to keep the errata and rules-interaction rulings straight.

So they’re hitting the reset button. In April, we’ll see previews of the rules revisions. Every model’s point cost has been adjusted, unit and warjack rules have been revised, power attacks are being overhauled, and all your stat-cards will be obsolete when the second edition hits the shelves. I eagerly anticipate not the new release (I haven’t played a game of WARMACHINE in over a year), but rather the fanbase reactions. The pro-skub and anti-skub enthusiasts will be pouring out of the woodwork on this subject.

Oh, and here’s to the Juggernaut getting an tune-up.

There’s an army platoon assigned to garrison Forest Watch 21, defend adjacent territory, and prepare for recapture of Forest Watch 20. A quick overview:

Current commander of FW21, has two subordinate officers, each with his own crack team.

Lieutenant Donkey’s team is specialized in close engagements.

Lieutenant Richter’s team Includes multiple ranged-attack specialists, allowing them to project force without needing, necessarily, to change positions to engage. As such they will frequently be called upon to hold positions such as the watchpost itself.

Please note that the rank system used only loosely follows those in use by contemporary militaries. That the second team consists entirely of non-player characters is totally coincidental and not a metagame ploy to keep the spotlight on the player characters at all. Really.

Shortly after the death of Pvt. Leucis, 48 reinforcements arrived, consisting of one Lieutenant, six sergeants, and forty-one privates. In total, this brings FW21 to four Lieutenants (including the commander), seven sergeants, and fifty privates.

It’s been too long, but more horrible character names have come to my attention, so I must pass them along. Today’s list is aiming for “ridiculously masculine” in some way or another.

• Manpower von Thunderjunk
• Diego Brando
• Baron Praxus
• Longrod Von Hugendong
• Ezra “Thunderbolt” McClintock
• Heironymous Imperiol
• Max Steel
• Inigo Montoya
• Butch Deadlift
• Thick McRunfast
• Rex Gatling
• Blast Hardcheese
• Axeface McBeardfist
• Woodcock van Treeslayer
• Dr. Grimbeard Ironcock, Ph.D
• Barrel Locstoc
• Brick Hardmeat
• Fighter McWarrior
• Lance Manthrob
• Chad McSexxington
• Corporal Studly
• Max Fightmaster
• Rockhard Morningwood
• Chuck Steak
• Trent Asunder

As always, additional suggestions are always welcome. Clearly, I just can’t wait for my kid to be in grade-school.

A roleplaying game is, at its heart, a collaborative storytelling mechanism. Some games lend themselves towards a lot of hacking, slashing, shooting, and blasting tactical simulations. Some games lend themselves towards a lot of player-generated narrative and creativity. Most games contain several elements of both. Something that is present in the introduction chapter of most RPGs, but is frequently glossed over and not spoken of again, is that it is not only collaborative but cooperative. When five people sit down in somebody’s mom’s basement with some books, clipboards, and dice bags and start spinning yarns about elves and dragons and spaceships and giant robots, everybody has a pretty solid idea of who is going to win. Everybody and nobody.

Most games have a game master — certainly the most popular ones do — whose role is to control and present the world to the other players. The other players control and present a far more limited set of characters and objects and actions, typically limited to those of a single fictional character in the game master’s world. The players, through their characters, collude to overcome the challenges set forth by the game master. Everybody, including the game master, is pulling for the ultimate victory of the players. This is the norm, but not always the case.

Sometimes the players’ characters just at odds with each other. One wants to go slay the dragon. One wants to go unseat the evil king. Another wants to stop the dread necromancer’s horrible scheme. When one or more of these can wait, and the players are willing to be reasonable, this is not a problem. When two or more just cannot wait, you’ve got a problem. When two or more will necessarily preclude each other, you’re not talking about cooperative play any more; if the players cannot figure out a way for both their characters to get along, cooperation becomes competition.

There is something basically dishonest about entering into a roleplaying game intent upon meddling with and confounding the goals of the other players without being quite up-front about it. When you play Chess with somebody, it is understood that you will take your opponent’s king. If the game you’re starting up revolves around political maneuvering and conflicting interests, everybody needs to know this heading in; you’re setting up a situation where some of the players will win at the others’ expense, and that’s a different sort of game entirely.

Why the hell aren’t you playing Dwarf Fortress? Seriously. What the hell?

“But there’s a learning curve!” you complain. Use the wiki.

“But what’s with the ASCII art?” you whine. Well, when I was a kid we didn’t have fancy bump-mapping and realistic lighting techniques. Take your ASCII art and like it, or if you just don’t have the stones, try one of the tile sets.

“What the heck is this all about?” you bleat. It’s about mining. And booze. And craftng. And fighting. And beards. And murderous elephants. Good stout-hearted Dwarf stuff.

Dwarf Fortress. What can I say about this wonderful, horrible game? Well, it’s free. That’s an important point.

It’s an economics / strategy simulation game. People have called it a RPG, but that’s because there are Dwarves and the occasional goblin siege, not because there’s any actual role-playing going on. It’s also an adventure game, but I find the fun to lie with building and managing a settlement.

It’s also ugly. Very ugly. That horrible picture atop this post is a screenshot of the first floor of my current project. I understand that some of the weaker-stomached folk out there don’t remember Rogue and NetHack and the eyestrain-inducing splendor of staying up all night playing video games on a green monochrome monitor. Such people are weak. Beneath my consideration, unworthy of even my disdain.

It’s also tremendously deep. Not deep as in “the Dwarves delved too deep and worked the accursed adamantine veins” — though that happens too — but deep as in many-layered, characterized by nuance and complexity. Dwarf Fortress is a wondrous sandbox for you to play in, unconstrained by a set scoring system or victory condition. There’s no wrong way to play Dwarf Fortress, and no right way. You can build your settlement above ground or dig deep into a mountainside. You can erect self-aggrandizing monuments to your own genius or establish a humble community of poor dirt-farmers. You can erect stout defenses and staff them with expertly-trained axedwarves and marksdwarves, or you can take a more pacifistic route. The pacifistic route can result in genocide by goblins, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong approach. Just because there’s no right way to play doesn’t mean the game won’t exert some pressure on your bustling little community.

If you can bear with the learning curve for, say, an hour, and you can suspend your desire for 21st-century computer graphics for the duration, Dwarf Fortress is a tremendously rewarding game. Go get it; it’s not even six megabytes, and runs on Windows and Macintosh.