"Rules? Where we're going, we don't NEED rules!"

If you don't know Axe Cop, you don't know Awesome!

Last night's game felt like one of the best sessions we have had in a long time and I felt it was largely because I played fast and loose with the rules, often ignoring them altogether. The bulk of last night consisted of a mass combat encounter. My players were tasked with delaying a charging horde of orcs for as long as possible to buy their allies, who were readying an airship for evacuation, time to make the necessary preparations.


Massive combat encounters like the one last night can quickly become unwieldy if too much emphasis is placed on game rules and rolling dice. So, I decided to take a much more narrative approach to the night and, judging by my players' post-game comments, the results were satisfying to all.


When I did need to crunch numbers, I used the Rule of Fives to speed things up, but if it wasn't necessary, I turned instead to the Rule of Cool (i.e. what would make this situation more awesome?) I should qualify that my interpretation of the Rule of Cool is not to use it to gloss over plot holes, but rather to allow my brain to emphasize storytelling over game rules. For example, last night I had several orc druids materialize on a cliff-side out of clouds of flies and begin hurling pillars of flame at the fleeing heroes. Could they have actually moved fast enough to get there in one round? Who cares!? The end-result added to the sense of danger in the scene and so was definitely worth it. On the flip side, my players were slinging area of effect spells into the path of the horde. Is it necessary to roll grapple checks for every orc when the ground beneath their feet erupts in 10 foot-long writhing tentacles? No! just describe how most of them are being hurled into the air, or slammed against the canyon walls.


The thing that was really clicking for me last night was the realization that players (or mine at least) don't play for the rules. They play for the stories, and as long as the story presents a level of excitement that makes them feel like badass heroes, everyone will come away happy.


On a more bittersweet note, I used last night's game as an opportunity to usher one of my story's main characters out of the game. A temporary hiatus by the character's player, who is in an uber-rigorous post-graduate program, became indefinite a couple months ago. Since then, I have been gradually working on an exit strategy so that the group is not burdened with a permanent non-player character drawing time and glory from the real people who are still attending game nights.


My strategy for working the character out was two-fold:
1. Make it Epic
2. Leave the exact nature of the exit open to some interpretation


I wrote a sort of cut scene for the game which came at the climax of the orc battle, and it couldn't have punctuated the event more perfectly. Here it is:


Dramatis Personae:
Lanna - A half-elf paladin of Ehlonna, the goddess of nature
Ceffyl - Lanna's unicorn mount (The unicorn is also a symbol of her goddess)
Ignus - Lanna's magic, flaming longsword
Steponas - The prince of Cydon, a traveling companion to our heroes

The press of orcs becomes more intense, threatening to overwhelm your defenses. It is clear that you will need to abandon your station soon.

Steponas calls out, "There are too many of them, we must return to the ship!"

Lanna shouts, "If we flee, they will overtake us! You go! I shall hold them as long as I can!

Do not argue, Ceffyl has the best chance of outrunning them. Now go!"

Lanna turns to face the sea of onrushing orcs. Ceffyl rears as she raises Ignus above her head and cries out, “I am the tempest over the sea. I am the quaking of the mountains, I am nature’s wrath! For the glory of Ehlonna!” and then she charges into the orcish ranks, her sword scattering bodies in all directions.

As the tide of orcs closes around her, a radiant light seems to cover Lanna and Ceffyl. Perhaps it’s a trick of the mind, but it seems to have the shape of a great celestial charger.

Anyway, game sessions like last night's always leave me feeling energized and ready to jump into the next phase of creative awesome. The dread of my previous post has faded and been replaced with an icy cool sense of determination to make the final act of this story arc super epic.

The Rule of Fives!

First off, L.G. Smith over at Bards and Prophets tipped me off to a new blogfest that looks to be right up my alley.

However, since this blog makes my favorite game pretty apparent, I think that I will instead post about some awesome game night alternatives. Keep an eye out for Monday’s post.

So, last night was game night and my group was properly lured into a sense of complacency, having just killed a big ol’ dragon, so what did I do? I threw a rampaging horde of orc barbarians at them! YAY!

Anyway, I had really been wanting to try my hand at running a defensive encounter, similar to this one. In the typical D&D format, players are usually the invaders, breaking in to the homes of unsuspecting monsters who are just trying to mind their own business and eat a few villagers. Well, I decided to turn the table on my players, giving them two days warning of an approaching horde of orcs. They had to prep their defenses and hold them as long as they can.

Now, as implied by the word “horde”, this encounter included a LOT of combatants, which has the potential to severely bog down the play rotation as the GM has to resolve every roll made by every creature not controlled by a player.

To make my job easier and keep the pace snappy, I devised a mass-combat system, which I have dubbed the “Rule of Fives!” Now, five seems to be a magic number for DMs. There are a variety of planning techniques based around fives, from the five-room dungeon to the myriad of applications of the five-by-five technique. My Rule of Fives, however, is different.

In summary, this rule takes the base hit points of every NPC and monster, and makes it a multiple of five. More importantly, whenever damage is dealt to that NPC or monster, it happens in multiples of 5, with each 5 being recorded as a check-mark on my combat tracker (i.e. 1-5 hp = ✓, 6-10 hp = ✓✓ and so on.) When the tally marks reach the total hit points of the creature divided by five (e.g. ✓✓✓✓✓ for a 25 hp monster), it dies.

The Rule of Fives simplifies the mental math every GM must churn out down to the quick and easy task of counting by fives. However, it still accounts for variation in the amount of damage dealt by different attacks (i.e. a fireball can kill in one hit, while an arrow is unlikely to do so.) When implementing the rule last night, I combined it with a couple other shortcuts to speed things along. The first was my random attack roll sheet I mentioned back in April. The second is a simple mechanic, whereby NPC minions only deal a single ✓ of damage to each other when making basic attacks. Big spell effects are different, but this rule works well for arrow shots and sword hits. This also helps emphasize the importance of the players. They are the heroes. They deal the most damage, and they can dramatically swing the tide of battle.

Anyway, the system worked beautifully last night, and we got through an entire combat session at the players’ first defensive line, and the group killed almost 20 baddies in an hour. If I had hand rolled everything, I doubt we would have made it through a single round.

You know what? three can suck it, five is the new magic number!

B is for Bending the Rules

As I mentioned in a previous post, rules systems for tabletop roleplaying games work best as frameworks on which to hang the trappings of your imaginitive world. As frameworks, they do not cover everything, and occasionally have bits that need to be glossed over or shaped to fit the needs of your own personal...

Idiom, sir?

Idiom!

Sound advice from basicinstructions.net

In order to fit your own personal idiom, some rules need to be bent from time to time. Bent rules are also referred to as "house rules" by those in the know. One of the rules from 3.5 edition D&D that has been bugging me recently, and which is about to get a whack from my bending hammer is regarding exotic weapons and weapon proficiencies.

According to the D&D rules, in order to use a weapon effectively, your character must be proficient with it. Each character class is assumed to be proficient with a certain number of such weapons. Fighters are proficient with anything from a knife to a greataxe, while rogues have a more limited selection focused mostly on concealable or light weapons good for stabbing people in the back or buckling swashes... and so it goes for each class.

Now, characters can become proficient in a weapon they are not otherwise able to use by taking a feat when they gain certain levels. This feat represents a concerted effort to train in the use of that weapon. If they choose to simply flail about with it, they suffer a penalty to their attack rolls during combat.

Here's where exotic weapons come in... Exotic weapons are a class of weapons in the D&D game with which characters generally don't automatically have proficiency. Certain types of characters might start out knowing how to use one or two exotic weapons (e.g. a bard can use a whip and a rogue can use a hand crossbow.) however, there is a whole slew of these weapons that nobody can use.

Here are the problems with this system:

1. Because characters can only become proficient with these weapons by taking a feat, they will probably elect not to do so. There are tons of cooler powers that they can gain with feats, so adding the ability to hit someone with a differently shaped piece of metal doesn't make sense 95% of the time.
2. Only some of the exotic weapons actually make sense as... well, exotic. A spiked chain, for instance is an excellent example of an exotic weapon.  You'd probably whack yourself in the face for several months before learning how to use it. However, a barbed dagger is also considered an exotic weapon. A regular dagger is a simple weapon that anyone can use, but rough up the edges a bit and you have to go to a 12 week dagger certification course before you can get your stab on.
3. Probably 90% of all the weapons described in the supplemental source books are listed as exotic. So, you get the main rulebook with all the basic weapons. Great! Then you pick up a supplement to give your game some added flavor... ooh! look, a bunch of new pokey things... exotic!? Aww crap! Nobody can use them. Essentially, Wizards of the Coast included a whole chapter in each of the bajillion supplemental books which is full of fundamentally useless stuff... good times!

GET ON WITH IT!

The point is, weapon proficiencies and exotic weapon rules are perfect examples of rules just asking to be bent... which is what I'm working on at the moment. One of the most common ways to address this issue is to make an exotic weapon not exotic for certain cultures or regions in your game. Just as the Scots knew how to use claymores while Salish whalers used harpoons, an instrument of death that seems exotic in one region might be over every mantle in another.

Another way to handle it is to ignore the "not really exotic" weapons. For example, a repeating crossbow likely works very similarly to the non-repeating kind. Point it at the thing you want dead and pull the trigger. The exotic part is not fighting with it... the exotic part is reloading the darrned thing. Same with the barbed dagger from earlier. The exotic part is getting the gibbets of flesh out from between the serrations when your done with it.


I am currently working out some specific bending of this rule as I continue to work on the world-building for my current game. However, this is only the latest in a series of bent house rules that I have worked out for my game. In order to help me keep track of them all and to help counter any cries of foul from my players should they say, "No, that's not how you said it would work!" I wrote up a nifty little house rules section over at my gaming group's wiki.

I personally find it easy to forget that the game's authors were not perfect. The books were not dictated to them from on high. Ultimately, if a rule needs to be changed, eliminated or added to in order to enhance the awesome factor of your game. Just do it. You are in charge. Your imagination should be the only true limit to the story you build in your game. The rules provide brushes and colors, but you lay down the paint.

Anyway, this post was a pretty gamer specific rant. I promise that Monday's post will have a broader appeal. That is when I plan to unveil "C" for Cartography!

Now with Sprinkles!

...in sickness and in health, stunned or shaken,
blessed or cursed with lycanthropy?

Any tabletop RPG system is really intended to serve as a framework for the game. Rulebooks and the like provide a play-tested foundation on which a GM and his/her players can build their interactive story. However, regardless of the chosen framework, each individual game’s true nature is determined by what the GM and the players bring to it. Often, it is the extra touches added above and beyond the core rules that help push a game into the realm of awesome. They are the icing on the dungeon cake.

In my own gaming experience, I have had the good fortune to roll with GM’s (roll... get it!?) who are not afraid to add custom elements of awesome to their games. Now, a list of examples! Yay!!!

Last year, I had the opportunity to play a session of Adventure! in a group run by a friend of mine. This particular group had developed a system by which the players could influence the course of a scene. The Adventure rules include a system for “will and inspiration”, which this group had combined into “willspiration” which acts similar to action points in D&D 4E. Essentially, each player is allotted a certain number of points (in this case represented by poker chips). They can spend these points to influence the outcome of a scene in which they are involved, bending the very reality of the game world to their wishes. Well, this particular group added an additional element, called “shadow willspiration” by which any player could influence a scene in which they were not involved. They could throw a metaphorical or literal banana peel under the feet of their fellow adventurers, or nudge circumstances in their favor.

The 4E game I just began playing with GM Tendrilsfor20 includes a system of cards, dealt out to the players at the beginning of each session. The cards each describe a situation that can alter an in-game scenario. For example, one card reads “You spot a tactically advantageous piece of terrain. Describe what you see. Final decision is up to the GM.” Another card says “The cavalry arrives. A group of 5 npcs of your level shows up to lend assistance” During my first session, nobody got the opportunity to use a card, but the concept is intriguing and I long to witness the conversion of potential to kinetic awesome.

For my own game, (that’s right, toot toot goes my horn!) I have added the rule of awesome. In order to encourage my players to think outside the rules, I have developed a system by which they can make a single dice roll to determine the outcome of complex feats of daring-do. The roll is modified by any relevant character skill the player utilizes, how well they describe what they are attempting and how awesome I think the whole situation is. So, when the group’s monk wanted to charge across the deck of an airship, vault off the cargo crane and land on the back of an escaping wyvern rider, damn straght I let him try! When he rolled a 96 out of 100, the results were EPIC!

Then, there is this guy. I’ll let you read the interview for details, but it sounds like his idea for “open in the event of” envelopes adds a wonderful layer of mystery to a game session. You never know what secrets your fellow PCs might be hiding!

Anyway, custom rules and game mechanics like these are some of my favorite elements in role-playing games. My biggest challenge is learning to add them in moderation so as not to overwhelm my players with added flavor.