CMV Session Report 3: Four Beams at Midnight

This report will unfortunately need to be truncated, because it’s taking way too much time to produce.

First Two Sessions

The first two of these sessions were not terribly impressive, nor were they content rich. The first was cut short by another game I had to get to, which was the fault of my poor prep. The players flew up past the frost wall, to journey inwards and attempt to locate another sun shrine. This was after the party learned from their wizard liason Corrigan that the sun shrines he “located” on the map were actually just things which could stop the frost; there could be more than just the shrines out there!

• Maia and Sierra on a cobalt dragon

• Jaster and his Warden on a white dragon

• Jaster’s mage and mage apprentice on a white dragon

• Perra and Gunther on a white dragon

• Morgan on a white dragon

• Zhianna on a white dragon

While searching, the enchanted golden plate these party’s been using to find sun shrines begins vibrating, but not glowing, as it has in the presence of sun shrines. Diving beneath the cold mist, the party finds an underdark spire, collections of rock reaching up from where the surface has sunken into the World Below. But something’s different about this particular spire; it’s covered in coral, an

Within the coral spire is a chamber with 4 small doors, 1 large door, and an additional chamber (no door). This additional chamber holds a colossal organic structure resembling a heart, made of the same coral as the spire. It beats irregularly, at most once per minute.

Jaster Sokolov, the party bloodhunter, uses a a rite to turn himself ethereal. When he enters the first room small chamber, he can see signs of seawater, even through the ethereal plane. There’s a tremendous pressure he can feel in this state, the sign of something supernatural.

“Like pressure from the bottom of the sea?”
”Precisely like that. The hairs on your arm are practically transparent, but you can feel them stand on-end nonetheless.”
”I’d better not go back to normal in here.”
”mhm.”

The rest of the sesison was uneventful; the warden came back with a suggestion (Lord above I love hirelings).

The second session was slightly more eventful; the party decided to track the beams of light impacting the coral spire. What’s more, their Deep Elf allies from House Kreilus wish to tag along. They send a unit of wyvern riders along, allowing the party to coordinate their efforts. Because the wyvern riders are actually quite sneaky, they prefer to operate alone; the party agrees, and sends them to follow a different beam of light. The implication is, the party will cause some noise, and give the wyvern riders a better shot at dealing with whatever they expect to find.

Speaking of which, the riders are expecting to find more deep elves. They’re not aware of which house is (in their words) “starting trouble”, but they’re happy to make introductions with a show of force.

The party moves on, and discovers a 10-story tower embedded at the edge of the underworld spires (the edge of the 24 mile-wide hole). From its bottom, a beam of light is streaming out towards the coral spire.

I’ll be real with you folks, I really screwed the pooch on encounters here. The party found nobody in the opening foyer, nobody in the hanger (except for a sick wyvern), nobody in the mess hall (except for a single, whistling cook the party decided to spare and didn’t pick up until later), and everyone in the barracks were sleeping. Morgan activated an elemental ley tap, doubling all elemental damage vs anyone. The party then started slicing throats, some of the guys wake up, and the party tosses fireballs too potent for any of the deep elves to survive (along with a dawn spell).

The party goes up the next level to find an observatory, another level up to find a room of total darkness, and up another level to find the command room (which has been cleared out). They travel back down to the 0 floor, and progress to the tower’s sub-levels. The first floor beneath is a checkpoint; the party is fireballed by 2 drow mages upon coming out of the elevator. Due to the still-active elemental tap, the drow immolate themselves and nearly wipe out the party. If you take enough damage to equal your current hitpoints and maximum hitpoints combined in 5th edition, you die instantly. A few of the party got uncomfortably close to this threshold, and would have died if not for successful Dex saves. The second floor beneath has a teleportation circle. The third floor beneath has holding cells, in which a summer sylvan, winter sylvan, and merchant are being held. Nothing of import happened here, because this tower (and session, by extension) were ill prepared. The party freed these 3 captives, and perhaps they will make an appearance in future sessions. The party ventures to the 4th level, which is a control room for the room housing a massive crystal beneath.

While examining the controls, the party hear’s a large explosion echoing from far away. Maia at this point receives a missive from her diplomat’s pouch. It’s signed by the commander of wyvern riders from House Kreilus, who accompanied the party here. He tells the party of a way to overload the crystal, which brings the tower down (along with two of his men). A short missive appears a few seconds later, to follow up: it reads “three men”. Perra decides she doesn’t want the tower to detonate, and has a different solution in mind. She (using an artifact recovered many sessions prior) casts teleport on the crystal, sending it to one of the artifact’s teleportation circles. The beam instantly shuts down, and the party returns to the coral spire, successful.

Change

This two sessions got me to declare no creature under CR 7 in the game should have more than 50 hitpoints. I chose CR 7 because creatures of a higher CR tend to be more exotic. Most of the critters below that CR (especially between the CR 4-7 range) are suitable to deploy en masse, were it not for their ridiculous hitpoint bloat.

Session 3

We’re going to speedrun this session, because it lasted 6.5 hours with a ton of encounters. This was the most fun I’ve had in the campaign up to this point. The party started this session intendeding to visit another Drow tower. Ever since they shut down the previous two towers, the coral spire has been growing outwards. Gone is the dead and pumice-like ashen coral. Renewed are all the colors of the rainbow and more, shimmering as they feed on dust and floating algae through the air. Two of the primary chamber’s doors opened as well, containing a small horde of gold (10k) and one of the Dreaming artifacts (which the party learned about ages ago). This one is a compact boat that turns into an airship. It’s magnificent! The coral animals are also returning to the spire. The party sets off, and I have them all make intelligence saving throws. Half the party fails, and follows what they think is the beam of light. The rest of the party sees them fly off towards nothing. They’re indecisive, so by the time they actually follow their party, they enter our first battlemap at a different end!

Amethyst Dragon

Our very first encounter was an amethyst dragon being ridden by a drow favored consort. Both are nasty on their own, but the spellcasting focus of the drow and the unique attack options of the amethyst dragon were stunningly complimentary. Remember, the party is riding dragons; this was a dogfight between the massive pillars within the underdark. The party quickly resorted to spells of their own in hope of defeating the pair of baddies as fast as they could, which was much appreciated on my end. The number of combat encounters I include in a given night usually depend on how fast the first encounter goes. If it takes longer than an hour (if it’s a relatively simple/straightforward encounter), I’m likely to not bother with any more. The party managed to chase off the dragon (and its rider), before running the amethyst dragon down and killing it. Thanks to invisibility and dimension door, the consort got away. Harvesting the amethyst dragon netted an egg from the dragon. I can’t wait to see where that goes!

Landing at the Tower

The party arrived at the tower, and (correctly) assuming it was fortified and its guards were active, attempted to draw the combatants within outside. One of Landie’s characters (I can’t remember which) cried for help and crawled up to the door. A guard opened the door, failed his insight check, and indeed believed there was a human woman on the tower’s doorstep, crying for help!

This was the opposite of “task failed successfully”. The deep elf laughed, and closed the door. Combat started off, and the party quickly got one of the ranking officers to surrender. Once the grunts had barricaded themselves inside another room, they killed the officer, and moved on to an alchemy storeroom. Inside was a green hag and another deep elf officer, and a gelatinous cube the party didn’t notice (which was currently levitated above the doorway). During this combat, Maia (one of Landie’s characters) took the elevator to the top floor.

The Matriarch

The party ventures up the elevator, going straight to the top. Nobody’s seen nor heard from Maia since the previous encounter started. When they arrive, they see Maia bound in dimensional shackles. There are 6 deep elves in the room with her, one or two of which is dead, and another of which is badly injured. Maia is at half health, sitting between a drow matron and her favored consort (which escaped from the party earlier).

The matron has a simple proposition for the party; help her kill the matron of House Marda, and she’ll shut off both remaining towers. The party gets some information from their allies in House Kreilus via diplomacy pouch, and while Kreilus was initially quite willing to investigate who was stirring trouble up north, they don’t want to get directly involved in a war between House Caene and House Marda, if it’s just about to pop off. Unfortunately for them, the matron of House Marda isn’t the real target, and the party is none the wiser.

Betrayal!

Normally, gate doesn’t work on the same plane as you. But as the matron of House Caene knows, Sierra (and her allies) have quite the haul of unicorn horns. These horns can be used to bypass spell restrictions, if used as components. They can even serve as diamonds for the purpose of resurrections! The matron pulls through the supposed matron of House Marda. I have all the players make history checks; they’ve never met the matron of House Kreilus, but they are allied with the faction. I figured a history check would serve as a nice proxy for recognizing any identifying creatures of House Kreilus. All of my players rolled low, and didn’t recognize the What follows is a round of beating on the new matron, until her turn comes up. Matron-K casts gate herself! Matron-C casts counterspell, Matron-K counterspells her counterspell, and the gate goes off successfully. Enter a pit fiend, just in time to watch the last of Matron-K’s hitpoints fall. One of the remaining deep elf inquisitors takes a few swipes at the pit fiend, and even manages to crit until I’m reminded the pit fiend has a fear aura, which the inquisitor fails their save against. Most of the damage is restored, and the pit fiend murders the inquisitor in about half its turn.

The remaining deep elves run for the elevator, along with Jaster’s hirelings (Jaster’s player has turned in for the night at this point). All except Matron-C and her consort, that is; the consort casts dimension door with his matron, making a swift and smug exit.

The players meanwhile spent 9 full rounds trying to not die vs this pit fiend. The module of Chill Mist Valley roughly doubles player resources off the bat (thanks to secondary class progressions and exploration abilities, not to mention the greater presence of magic items and companions), and the party was still almost completely tapped out just at the start of this encounter! The players immediately attempted to corner the pit fiend, with martial characters surrounding the pit fiend, and Perra using one of her last available slots to cast guardian of faith. The martial characters opened up with a decent salvo of damage, so the pit fiend decided to avoid eating the guardian of faith’s damage in favor of focusing down the monks and druids in front of it. About half way through, it made the fight even more intense by casting wall of flame, to counter the players attempting to box it in. Several party members got yo-yoed up and down, just narrowly missing death by failed saves or massive damage. Additionally, the pit fiend’s bite is poisonous! You can’t be healed while poisoned by a pit fiend, and the save DC is quite high (even for 10th level characters)! Perra attempted to cast darkness on the pit fiend with her artifact-cloak, but pit fiends have truesight; this resulted in the pit fiend getting several advantage attacks (and several critical hits) before Perra remembered she could drop concentration on the spell between turns.

The fight ended with everyone on their last hitpoints, and permitted the players a single round to resurrect what they now assumed to be the matron of a different house than what the matron of House Caene said they’d be fighting. Using some consumable resources, the players searched down the druid spell list until they found an appropriate spell to solve their problem (with not a moment to spare), casting revivify on the matron.

Saliel, Guardian of the Reef

When the party returns to the coral spire, they find all 5 doors have been opened (one of which they didn’t actually investigate), and watch as the heart contained here bursts open. The whole chamber is filled with salt water that tastes like taffy, and they have no trouble breathing in. The creatures calls themselves Saliel, Daughter of Kalinne (the previous Queen or Consort of the Clover Court). In one of the adjacent rooms the party finds Iscarious, Outcast of the Hyboreal Court, who stopped by for some fishing (and to see the birth of his implied relative). Saliel gives them a bunch of information, and warns the party she’ll be attacked by Baenassus, Lord of the Chained Runnel, Hunter of the Hyboreal Court soon enough.

XP for this last session was 18,450 xp per character.

CMV Session Report 2: The Great Horn Heist

The Backdrop

The player who owns Maia (from last session) is Landie, who has two other characters in the campaign. The character relevant to this session is Sierra, who owns a keep and has spent the majority of her downtime preparing for mass combat and managing trade with a nearby faction of deep elves. Prior to this session however, Sierra went looking for new jobs for the party! There’s always the idea of going into the frost up north, but Landie also inquired as to whether a heist was possible.

Now normally, every West Marches I’ve ever run (along with every campaign I’ve ever run) has opened with a heist. This campaign is the only exception. So I gave Landie a few different options to make up for it! He could loot the following:

• A tuatha cairn

• A mage college (of which there are 3 in the area)

• A port city

Landie chose the port city, and had Sierra engage in the Research downtime action. I’ve done a video on research as downtime, and I have a handouts entry for it as well.

If Maia completes the heist successfully, it’ll count towards “confirming” the bits of information Sierra collected. Having multiple characters in this game means they can more or less net each other additional experience and progression, rather than one character consistently falling behind! Sierra nets plenty of info by stealthing around Marellan, listening in on criminal affiliates and their private lives.

• There is a shipment of unicorn horns coming in.

• The shipment will accompany an expeditionary force from 5 mercenary companies, all traveling to Samheide in search of work.

• The shipment of unicorn horns will be confiscated at the docks as suspicious cargo.

• There is a decoy shipment.

• The horns are actually already in Samheide, but they’ll be arriving by boat to Marellan.

The mercenary companies are:

• The Red Hand of Doom, the remnants of a wider hobgoblin dictatorship.

• The Order of Veils, a elite group of psions and seers dedicated to containing extraplanar influences.

• The Knights of Lylivyn, a collection of high elf dragon tamers in search of legendary dragons across the worlds.

• Mercy’s Chapter, a collection of pilgrims here to visit sites of religious significance (and defend them against desecration).

• The Powder Horn Legion, a military force of hobgoblins from the continent my players are usually adventuring on. I think Landie recognized them, but I’m not sure.

Arc 2, Session 2

The players have their first session in Marellan, the port city at the very bottom of Samheide. I started my prior test campaign here, but found it ill-suited for the module’s scenario.

Prep

For prep, I told the players they had 3 days until the shipment supposedly arrived. To give them clear guidelines on what was possible within those 3 days, I decided my downtime action procedures would work well for a shorter time scale with fewer rewards. Research was a fairly obvious pick, but I went through some examples of using the other downtime actions to represent the party’s preparation. Using Taming to represent recruiting animals, meditation to have a hard think on the info collected so far, or pray for visions.

Perra went around with a locate object spell. She got 1 ping while in the city, which she narrowed down to a run-down tavern called the Running Goat. The ping disappeared after awhile, and Perra filed this away in her memory.

Maia sneaked into the various dockhouses to check up on shipping manifests; out of the 5 merc companies, only one item was circled red. The Order of Veils was bringing a shipment of dry ice. The item is so different from the others being carried, and is marked as alchemical ingredients; something the Order usually doesn’t deal with, according to notes.

Zhianna engaged in carousing; she made a charisma check (to roll on the table of better results), and got a perfect result for me to improvise.
From the classier carousing table:

On the third day of Zhianna’s carousing, some random thug in a drunken state takes a liking to Zhianna, and starts asking her for help on a job. He offers her a flying carpet in exchange for a small favor; he needs a distraction the next day around a bar called Trilly’s Tavern. Zhianna agrees, and tries to pry for more information, but her questions are too pointed and direct to avoid setting off the thug’s alarms. This works in the party’s favor later on! The thug closes out the conversation, but their deal is still on.

Morgan decided to take notes from the Taming downtime action, and sought out critters who could case out the boat without drowning. He comes across a large number of nutrias! These water rats are roughly the size of a possum, and I only saw them recently for the first time in real life. A few successful checks later, he builds up a small swarm of the critters.

Morgan’s secondary class is ley keeper, someone who collects ley taps and takes advantage of the various ley lines around the world for power. Both of the ley taps Morgan currently holds are from a forecast line, a ley line keyed into the weather. With the taps, Morgan can make the weather more or less severe, or make the weather magical. Lucky him! He decides to increment the already unpleasant weather within 24 miles of the docks twice, conjuring a powerful storm cell right over them.

Action!

It’s go time, and the 5 merc companies are just visible over the horizon. They anchor as the storm cell passes over them, lighthouses are activated, and the many escort karves are sent out to help them reach shore. Bands of stabilizing energy wrap flow out from the Order of Veils’ ship, wrapping around the other vessels in an effort to keep them from smashing into one another. Two mages from the Red Hand of Doom and Mercy’s Chapter begin casting a spell; the party correctly guesses it’s a Control Weather spell.

The party gets into position! Morgan sends the nutrias in to case the boat, and turns into a giant crawfish himself once they give the all-clear. Maia hops onto the crawfish and rides along; being a dhampir, she doesn’t need to breathe. On the way, several of the escort craft are taking on water. One of them speeds past Maia and Morgan, taking no heed of them.

Perra is watching over the docks to see if anyone brings cargo in.

Zhianna sets up at Trilly’s Tavern, and chats with the barkeep. The barkeep tells Zhianna her reward it waiting for her as soon as the job’s over, but the thug wants to talk with her. Zhianna goes into the alleyway, and hears the thug calling from around the 4th floor. They chat back and forth, and the thug wants Zhianna to come up to his room! He drops the flying carpet down, stating she can’t be seen coming up the stairs.

Maia and Morgan arrive at the boat Order of Veil’s boat. Maia has magical x ray goggles, and uses them to peer through the ship. There’s a lead box in the hold; jackpot! Maia enters while Morgan remains latched to the boat’s underside. Maia sneaks up to the crate, labeled dry ice. She pries it open silently, then picks the locked lead box. Peering inside she finds…a large collection of dry ice.

Remember, the party was told the horns were already in Samheide. A few minutes before Morgan and Maia return, a karve pulls into the docks. They unload a single crate before getting stopped by Port Authority. Around this time, a creature much larger than the incoming ships begins attacking the merc companies. Steam vents erupt from the bay’s surface, and the boats are battered against one another. The party takes this as their cue to run.

At Trilly’s Tavern, Zhianna’s conversation is interrupted by shouting from the thug’s room. He calls down after a short commotion, telling her to get ready.

Double Cross

Perra contacted Maia and Morgan at this point, I believe by way of a sending. They catch up quickly, because the Port Authority has found themselves in an argument with a Knight of Lylivan. Curious that the knight has arrived ahead of their expeditionary force; the party notes this and continues following. The knight unsuccessfully argues some procedure by which he must takes authority over the crate, and store it in their recently developed embassy; I roll for the Port Authority’s reaction, they’re having none of the knight’s nonsense. Some vague threats do nothing to advance his cause, so he relents. The Port Authority moves on to the same street as Trilly’s Tavern.

The thug shouts down to Zhianna; “Now, distract them now!” Zhianna goes out into the streets, shooting fireballs and scorching rays about, putting on quite the lightshow. The Port Authority is equal parts threatened and confused. Before they really have a chance to react, thugs burst out of Trilly’s Tavern, and knock overt he Port Authority. Perra casts darkness, and the thugs make off with the cart. Zhianna turns invisible before running after the thugs, and the rest of the party follows!

Triple Cross

The party tracks the shipment to a warehouse, and what do you know! That same Knight of Lylivyn is waiting for the thugs.

'“You know, unicorn horns can be used for more than just war and impressive spells. They’re potent curatives in their own right. For instance, all poison is rendered inert when drunk from a unicorn’s horn. “

The knight takes out a vial, and commands the other two thugs to grab their boss. The knight menaces the the boss for about a minute before the boss breaks, threatening to make the boss drink poison from (what the knight assumes is) a fake unicorn horn. The boss “confesses” the real shipment is over by the other side of the city. The knight is satisfied, and leaves. The party leaves as well, but Perra overhears the thug boss on the way out.

“He was tellin’ the truth y’know! Watch, I love doin this! “

The sound of a clattering glass follows.

“Tastes just like banyan preserve! Let’s get outta here.”

Perra gets the party to stop, and fills them in. They go back to the warehouse, just in case. What do you know! There’s no dead thug, and an empty vial sits on the floor. The party realizes what the knight (having failed an insight check) did not. The thugs did have the real unicorn horns! A chase ensues, but visibility and the winding streets (combined with the thug’s head-start) sees the party fall far behind.

Perra casts locate object. The party knows the horns are being kept in a lead box, but they’ve seen the cart it’s carried in. Perra targets the cart, and the party follows the spell’s ping. Perra notices they’re closing in on the Running Goat tavern; circling once or twice confirms the cart is probably below the first floor. Zhianna enters (still invisible, causing some brief notice by the tavern’s scant customers) before the rest of the party. Zhianna notices a staircase behind the bartender, and starts creeping down while Maia distracts.

The three thugs are in the bar’s basement, arguing about whether to leave now. The “sea dragon” has made them afraid, but they’re apparently on a clock. Zhianna can’t see the thugs from her current position, and she moves further down. This triggers an alarm spell, and the thugs panic, trying to get (what Zhianna can now see is) an arcane engine strapped to the back of a dingy ready. The barkeep upstairs goes nuts, screaming and pointing a threatening-looking (if scrapped together) wand at the party. Initiative is rolled, Perra casts darkness before a finger of death spell ruins the ceiling, and Maia knocks the barkeep out.

Zhianna casts hold person on the Thug Boss and the fellow manning the engine. There’s a brief confusion as the underling freezes up, and the boss notices Zhianna. A brief discussion follows, in which the boss makes it clear he’s delusional, thinking Zhianna wants to join him in his newfound wealth. He even shoves “Frank” (still paralyzed) into the grey/brown water face first, urging Zhianna to hop in. Zhianna kills him with a scorching ray spell (nearly missing all of her shots), and instructs the other underling (Tony?) into the corner. The rest of the party gets downstairs, recovers “Frank”, and instructs him to get into the corner as well. A brief, funny conversation (in which Tony keeps turning around to ask Zhianna questions (where can we find you, we don’t know what to do for work, etc etc) ensues. They inform the pair of thugs they should get to Bronloch, and the party teleports out with their crate.

This is the best compliment I’ve ever received as a referee, I love it!

Resolution

The party teleports back to Sierra’s keep, with 64 unicorn horns. This is a prize too impressive to actually sell (at least all at once), and they recovered it with some degree of ease. It’s a massive amount of wealth, desired by many different factions, held in one place.

What fun!

Players and Settlements

Rewards

64 unicorn horns, maybe 2 new hirelings (we’ll see if they make it to Bronloch), and a flying carpet.

Characters

Maia

Maia’s resources and planning kept this session from dragging, making sure folks had a good handle on their objectives and complicating factors!

• Ancestry: Dhampir

• Class: Monk (Shadow) Rogue (No subclass yet)

• Secondary Class: Minstrel

• XP: (To be filled in)

Morgan

Morgan didn’t have too much to do this sesh, after the initial boarding action was finished. But he had a good time nonetheless, and upon recovering the unicorn horns, it’s clear he has ideas on how to use them.

• Ancestry: Human

• Class: Barbarian (Bear Totem) and Druid (Moon)

• Secondary Class: Ley Keeper

• XP: (To be filled in)

Perra

Perra also didn’t have too much to do this sesh, but it seems like she also enjoyed herself! Clever use of her magical cloak (which provides neat things like darkness and teleportation spells) is really keeping campaign momentum up, and I always appreciate her presence.

• Ancestry: Kobold

• Class: Cleric (Life, of Tweiflangr)

• Secondary Class: Herbalist

• XP: (To be filled in)

Zhianna

Zhianna was the star character this session, collecting plenty of info, managing social encounters, and making this a perfect heist session!

• Ancestry: Half Elf (Dragonmark)

• Class: Sorcerer (Divine Soul), Warlock (Celestial, Tome Pact)

• Secondary Class: Scholar

• XP: (To be filled in)

Settlements

Unnamed Keep
Level 1 Stronghold

Will have more details in the campaign catchup.

• Owner: Sierra

• Income: None

• Resupply: 1 unit per season

CMV Session Report 1: Trickery and White Dragons

Hello all, it’s been far too long since I’ve posted a session report (or anything on my main feed), and it’s a new year! 2022 may have been filled with financial chaos, couch surfing, and roommate troubles, but this year is shaping up to be secure, successful, and fun (with quite a bit to write about).

I’ve been running Chill Mist Valley since around October of last year. The campaign has gone through a number of sessions, roster changes, and world events since then. I’m not going through a full campaign history in this post; the first “arc” of the campaign will be summarized in a separate post for catching up.

Just to get everyone on board, here are the spark notes.

Campaign Background

Chill Mist Valley occurs in the valley of Samheide. Samheide underwent a terrible calamity around a thousand years ago, which drastically altered the topography of the surface world and the World Below.

Shortly thereafter, the valley was blessed by a now-forgotten deity of the sun. The sun rises and sets between two twin peaks at the region’s northern edge, rather than the east and west (in this valley). This completely changed the natural climate, led to the introduction of a massive fey population, and increased the local natural magic ten-fold at least. The valley repelled invasions, made pacts with the fey, and its inhabitants have enjoyed unparalleled prosperity in their quiet slice of paradise.

That is until now; the local fey have largely fled, and the wildlife are growing increasingly aggressive in this points of light region. The twin peaks, from which the sun rises and sets, have begun freezing over. Frost has begun spreading from the twin peaks, ruining the local environment. The players have discovered High King Zephain of the Hyboreal Court (the local collection of winter fey) has begun freezing over the valley to return Winter to its rightful place.

The players (and some NPCs have successfully stalled the frost by activating Sun Shrines, which banish the frost from their local region. It’s only able to spread slowly along the Valley’s flanks, letting the player roster focus on other tasks and adventures.

Arc 2, Session 1

The wizard Corrigan, who first tipped the party off about the sun shrines of Samheide, recently purchased a shipment of young white dragons (of the not-sentient variety). The frost is dangerous, and while he’s happy the frost has been stalled, he’s not taking time off to relax. A trustworthy party of adventurers could surely use the dragons as mounts, flying into the frost and bypassing a great number of challenges.

But alas, the shipment is late! Corrigan lost contact with the ferry carrying his shipment around three days ago, and is guessing the many lakes and deltas near the town of Oarton may have seen the ferry lost or worse. From the time Corrigan brought this to Perra (official cleric of all adventures in the realm), around two weeks passed in-game (thanks to 1-1 time). Still no word! Corrigan sends our adventurers (a cleric, a warlock, a monk, a bloodhunter, and a druid/barbarian multiclass) out to find his missing shipment of dragons. He lends the party a ferry, staffed entirely by Unseen Sailors.

Exploration Segment

We begin our session with the party buying a few supplies (rations and travel packs), as the party prepares for the exploration system. The party chose their exploration roles. These are specializations for character during travel and exploration, things the characters are in charge of during travel. Furthermore, all classes have unique benefits for selecting exploration rolls. Was developing 104 boons for 13 classes annoying? A little. But it was fun! When the cleric takes up the role of tracker, a star guides them to their target at night, whereas a moon on the horizon guides them during the day. It’s a less reliable GPS, with which weather (and the providing deity’s will) may interfere.

Thanks to their successes, the party has no encounters to worry about on the way (and net additional experience during travel).

Morgan the druid/barbarian is a ley keeper, a secondary class which allows the detection and manipulation of ley lines. While on the way, he detects a Forecast Line, which indicates the current weather, and is filled with signs of impending weather. The current weather is magical; an eerie calm, during which no animals may be found. On top of that, the Winds of Magic are approaching in 3 days. Morgan knows the violent, magical thunderstorms will cause any spell to be cast 2 levels higher, or fail completely. The party has their time limit!

Shipwreck

Splitting off the main river, the party travels through the various creeks of the local area. They discover a bunch of geysers, springs, and other sources of fresh water filling this area. About an hour of travel leads the party to discover the original ferry’s wreck. It’s over a short waterfall, only 10-15 feet high. A few rocks are keeping the wreck steady in the water. Two cages are sitting in shallow water, holding some (non-sentient) young white dragons. Zhianna investigates the wreck, and concludes it’s taken far more damage than its minor fall.

Zaibatsu and Morgan approach, calling out to anyone inside the wreck. To their surprise, the entire crew is alive, and has (apparently) just woken up. The party interviews the crashed ferry’s crew, who keep insisting the crash just happened. Zhianna continues investigating in response; several clams and mussels have wedged themselves into submerged portions of the hull, and algae has taken to the hull as well. She’s able to conclude the ship has definitely crashed earlier than the crew testified. Zaibatsu even takes to questioning the captain further, and concludes the captain isn’t lying.

To my surprise, the party filed this in their back pocket, and resolved to recover as many dragons as they could. I was quite happy with their decision! They recognized a more pressing, time-sensitive objective was in front of them. The party probably figures they can investigate additional leads later, during downtime, and that standing around wondering for too long will cut down on how much they accomplish. Excellent decision, and an example of good play. It’s a perfect counter to groups which waste time on randoms slices of dungeon dressing!

Dragon Hunting

10 dragons are missing. Two are within line of sight. There are 3 hours of session time remaining. How is the party going to fare?

One of the downtime actions available to the party is the Mini-Adventure. We do a condensed play-by-post to handle additional objectives in downtime (with reduced XP and treasure gain). I’ve had trouble clarifying exactly what’s possible in the context of mini-adventure, and without an explicit upper limit, players are likely to avoid the activity. It makes perfect sense; the upper limit might be far lower than your intended goal, or it might be so high as to make you feel like you’re getting away with something.

I improvised a rule in this session, and will maintain it going forward:
A mini-adventure may accomplish only what was accomplished in the prior session.

If the party manages to acquire 4 dragons in a given session, they can reasonably be expected to catch another 4 dragons in the mini adventure. While the rule can be interpreted in a variety of ways, I think it serves to narrow the downtime’s scope. The party sets their goal at catching 5 dragons during the sesh. They can devote enough time per dragon to ensure success, while ensuring their mini-adventure snags more dragons.

The party starts off by recovering the two dragons nearby. They’re basically a freebie; no special effort beyond pulling them via the ferry’s winch is required. Another star begins guiding the party north; they follow, and happen across a nearly-sunken cage. The dragon within has accidentally set itself afloat by way of its breath weapon, forming an awful lot of buoyant ice around the cage. The party correctly guesses its muzzle has been knocked off or removed since. Without skipping a beat, Jaster (the campaign’s bloodhunter) jumps into the water to try and rescue it. Seeing as though Jaster has been killed in a comparable manner (and later had to be resurrected) in his second session, the party elects to enjoy some popcorn and watch. Jaster deftly swims under the water, and removes the lock from the cage’s rear. The dragon takes a minute to notice before it lets itself sink, and swims out.

For situations like these, I like to use the mentzer reaction roll table.

I roll a 4! Possible attack, the dragon looks agitated. The party is in stiches at the thought of Jaster dying again to a dragon. I roll once more, and get a 7. The dragon leaves, and the party stops laughing.

“Maybe we should’ve helped him.”

There’s always next time. The party moves on, to the next spot of divine guidance on the horizon!

Medusa Cave

Arriving at a cave, the party sees animals for the first time in a day! Before the ferry, slithering through marsh and creek, are snakes. Lots and lots of snakes! Morgan casts animal friendship, then speak with animals on one of the snakes, making friends with it. The snake helpfully informs him (in the impression of Jerry Seinfeld) two white dragons were dragged in.

I make the players aware of a condition unique to this lair: any creatures attacking a surprised PC will hit automatically. I’m debating whether to put this in an update to Chill Mist Valley’s encounter manual, but broadly, I liked its results. It shaved the party’s hitpoints down to the danger zone a little faster than typical combats would. One other note; I didn’t reset the intiative order this entire session! I just maintained places and had the party keep going. I think it allowed us to move through combat faster, but the jury’s still out. I’m going to do a comparison with by-side initiative, and see how 5th handles it.

The party travels inwards; there is a large cage in the first room, along with a small horde of flying snakes (which were quickly dispatched). All of the harnesses and restraints are there, but there’s no dragon. Only a mess of piled blankets remains. The party thinks nothing of this, and moves on! They fight snakes, spawn a a small horde of secretary birds, and fight basilisks before they find a second cage. And look! There’s a white, reptilian creature within the cage! Alas, it’s a giant constrictor snake, and the party fights vs it (and yet another basilisk) before they finally discover the medusa. She’s standing before a white dragon, spread eagle and chained to the ground above a magical glyph. No words are exchanged, it’s initiative.

A fight with the medusa and her 5 gargoyles ensues! Morgan turns into a bear and begins raging, but the medusa uses wall of stone to keep him at bay. None of the enemies are terrifically effective. Their saves suck, their attack bonuses suck, and the gargoyles have no special abilities relevant to the fight. It mostly just takes awhile, and I’m ashamed to say the snake fights appeared to be more entertaining. Who knows if my internal compass for these things was in working order, though. We did have a few weeks of hiatus.

The medusa tries to flee, but a fireball and assault from Maia see the foul creature slain. Her head is taken, loot is counted, and the party prepares for their mini adventure. The mini-adventure sees them capture 2 white dragons, a stray cobalt dragon (also non-sentient), and 2 white dragons again. The last pair was severely wounded, having been attacked recently. Perra teleported them to a safe locale in Eshauraus, their primary base of operations, and all was well. No word on the reward from Corrigan as of yet.

Loot and Rewards

Loot was only recovered from the medusa’s lair this evening. It was a sizable amount of loot, far outstripping the proper amount for a medusa and some gargoyles. In fact, this entire session (and the resulting mini-adventure) has been all too easy.

Something’s going on in Oarton.

• 2k gold in jewelry.

• Bloodhunter's Compass: Crimson Rite damage is changed to 10 for every die. This benefit extends to all bloodhunters within a mile.

• The Operator's Crossbow: A self-loading +2 volley crossbow, can be wielded as a light weapon.

• Hearthwand of Stone: Casts wall of stone, stone shape, erupting earth.

• Petrichory Rapier: +3 rapier. Can turn misty weather, fog, or rain into pleasant weather.

Players and Settlements

Characters

Maia

Maia acted as caller for the exploration activity, organized everyone, and did great in combat! I loved running for Landie (Maia’s player) as always. One of Landie’s other characters spent this week’s downtime using Research to spy on some criminal activity in the map’s southern region.

• Ancestry: Human

• Class: Monk (Shadow) Rogue (No subclass yet)

• Secondary Class: Minstrel

• XP: (To be filled in)

Morgan

Morgan performed great as always, though I loved teasing him in combat. Druids are (turns out) vulnerable to the ever-reliable wall of stone spell.

• Ancestry: Human

• Class: Barbarian (Bear Totem) and Druid (Moon)

• Secondary Class: Ley Keeper

• XP: (To be filled in)

Jaster

Jaster had a rocky start to the campaign, but he made up for it this session. His exploration role was well chosen, he improvised in session, and did a great job in combat. I hope he enjoyed his loot!

• Ancestry: Dhampir

• Class: Bloodhunter

• Secondary Class: Scholar

• XP: (To be filled in)

Perra

Perra might have been MVP this session, on account of her exploration role. Additionally, restoration and healing spells restored both dragons and injured party members to fighting shape.

• Ancestry: Kobold

• Class: Cleric (Life, of Tweiflangr)

• Secondary Class: Herbalist

• XP: (To be filled in)

Zhianna

Zhianna has only played a few times as of yet, but I adored her willingness to tackle investigations for the party, as well as her combat participation. Whenever players step out of their shell a bit, I try to reward them quickly for doing so!

• Ancestry: Half Elf (Dragonmark)

• Class: Sorcerer (Divine Soul), Warlock (Celestial, Tome Pact)

• Secondary Class: Scholar

• XP: (To be filled in)

Settlements

Unnamed Keep
Level 1 Stronghold

Will have more details in the campaign catchup.

• Owner: Sierra

• Income: None

• Resupply: 1 unit per season

Play Report: The Eels in the Keep are Free

You can take them home

I tagged along in Prince of Nothing’s B/X game, run in Aaron the Pedantic’s discord server. It’s the first game I’ve been able to enjoy in a month or so, on account of no internet access.

This play report is filled with descriptions of play without context. I was dropped into the middle of the game without context, and to convey the experience, it’s quite appropriate to detail what happened without a massive introduction to setting lore, mission details, etc. Any context I provide is done as I learned of it.

As a final note regarding the game’s context, I found dropping in without it ideal. I wanted to focus on the game’s mechanics (or lack thereof).

Prince first suggested I play a henchman, but then considered a PC was absent; one of the campaign’s only two level 2 characters. Isildur the Thief was available, 50 XP away from becoming the only level 3 character this campaign had seen. Obviously, getting this guy killed would’ve been awful. It’s my first B/X game, too. Will I walk in the wrong door and extinguish the last flickering hope of anyone progressing in this campaign?

I Have 475 Eels

We begin the game in a corridor, within a partially flooded keep. Apparently a Castellan wants an enchanted horn here, which (according to legend) has the power to summon armies. We come to a Dead Soldier, add loot to the list, and continue down the corridor. Not much happens as we bumble along, it’s empty rooms.

We met up with some Friendly Bugbears, giving us a pittance of information and a potential resource for a future encounter. Not much happened there, just some talking.

We continued on to a tower’s spiral staircase. Our treasure was likely on the lower levels, either the first or the basement level. Unfortunately, the basement was completely flooded, and the first floor was covered in 2 feet of water.

Edit: while in the tower, we discovered a nest with threevery large eggs, and a smattering of gold and silver coins. As Prince points out, we wisely ignored it for the time being, both to avoid an unnecessary encounter and to hurry in finding the horn. We weren’t the only ones looking for it!

Someone other than me asked if we could bring the party’s canoes in, which was a brilliant suggestion I was immediately in favor of. This is where the session turned; from here, it was action all the way through to the end of the session. It’s about 2-3 in the afternoon, the canoes aren’t all that far away, and we could have all our extra supplies, men at arms, wounded PC, and canoes inside the keep for any use we could think of. Whoever suggested we use canoes was expanding the future space of possibilities.

Traveling down the corridor, we came across a room with some schools of fish (a nearby river was feeding the flooded levels, keeping the water relatively fresh). A backpack was floating in the corner, and playing the thief, I couldn’t resist. Not resisting turned into an eel encounter. They dealt a small bit of damage, and inflicted a save vs -2 to hit poison on hit. The thief I was playing had a net in his inventory, so I spent my first round of combat recovering it. Another party member threw a ration out to distract the eels, which worked on one of them. Nicely done! I asked them next round to help me spread out the net, back the party into a corner of the room, and hold the eels at bay. Prince updated our AC to 2, attacks were rolled, two eels were killed, and the rest fled. We tried catching the ones which hadn’t died, to no avail. Oh well!

I collected the two remaining eels. The next room had a few kobolds fishing, who were adamant we leave. I handed them an eel for safe passage.

Lovely.

The most exciting portion of this game was the arrival of a barge carrying roughly two dozen cultists. This conveniently took place as we sought out our canoes, having finally reached the keep’s exit on this side! Two men of arms (heavily armed archers) the party had left to guard the canoes were pointing and shouting, and grabbed a wounded PC from his makeshift canoe bed. The MAA made it into the keep, dragging the PC behind us.

I tell everyone to retrace our steps through the keep, ignoring the kobolds we passed earlier and running into the southeast tower. We flee to the second floor, where I and another party member were split on whether to explore the second floor, or retreat into the third floor. The party had ostensibly cleared the floor in a prior session, and I wanted to bottleneck the enemy as much as possible.

After brief argument, I was declared the Caller, and we moved on to the top (3rd) floor. I asked the magic user to pick up one of the eggs, prepare to 1) smash the egg onto the staircase and 2) cast sleep. The magic user failed successfully; he shouted while holding the egg, directing the cultists to our position. After some clarifications on what he’d be throwing the egg at, the MU finally egged the steps. A great shriek, like that of an eagle was heard, and my heart soared at the prospect of success.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party smashed oil flasks at the stair’s top, at my instruction. The magic user refused, instead wishing to wait to see who was coming up the stairs. This was a mistake, and quickly got him killed by a griffon, coming to avenge its friend.

My hope for how this would’ve gone is detailed in the next section.

The griffon continued its rampage against cultists coming up the stairs, and so we were given brief reprieve to plan at the other side of the keep. I directed the fighter to take his potion of invisibility as I did the same, and we progressed down the stairs. We found diseased Kobolds (whom the party had befriended prior), armed and waiting by a barricaded door.

The second group of cultists were beginning to bust down the barricade, so I took out a grappling hook and escaped to the water. I then swam to the barge, plan in mind, while the party was stuck trying to decide on what to do. They did nothing for about four rounds, listening to the sound of whimpering, yelping kobolds and the clang of metal on metal. Some stripped in preparation for a jump, while others attempted (and succeeded) in setting the barge on fire.

The party spent then swam, sunk, and drowned their way in my general direction. I had boarded the barge (still invisible), looted the captain’s quarters, tossed a strongbox out the window (with a silk rope attached, for later retrieval), swam back around to one of our canoes, swam it out to the back of the barge, retrieved the strongbox, and started rowing.

This was more or less the end of my participation; I was escaping. The surviving two PCs caught up to the canoe and started rowing back. The character I was playing began suffering ill effects of plague, but was saved (barely) by a cleric back at home base (which of course charged us out the nose for it).

The Elites Don’t Want You to Know This

Common among boomers is the assumption their having grown up with books, and inability to use cellphones must translate to the reverse; young people, being able to use cellphones, must not be able to read books!

This obviously stupid position, which is in no way defensible by anyone with two brain cells to rub together, is nevertheless the subject of smug chortling, which you may hear echoing through retirement homes and fishing clubs across America. The truth of the joke is of no concern to boomers, who are enjoying an imagined lead in a pissy status game no one else is playing.

Similarly, average fanboys of the Old-School Renaissance assume their tactical stupidity, bafflement at classes with more than one character ability, horror in the face of feats, and (most importantly) inability to get past New School character creation must translate to how new players would react to a game like B/X.

I don’t think this position describes anyone I played with, and among the players was another 4e enjoyer, pictured below.

Cheers, Adlyn

Folks who play New School games (and to a far lesser extent Legacy Games) are to some extent judged on their tactical skill with regards to encounters, meaning they have to think, plan, react, and make good decisions to do well. Your game has an OODA loop, and your success is measured by how far and quickly you progress. Obviously, this skill can be translated to Old School games. In lieu of granted character abilities, you focus more on practical uses for equipment and the occasional spell, especially as they pertain to your environment.

It’s not that difficult, especially since all of the stumbling and bad play OSR types have already done for 50 years is out in the wild and easy to learn from. Not only that, I found New School strategy and tactics were easily applicable to situations in game, where OSR players were more inclined to scratch their heads.

The Tower

Here’s how the tower encounter was supposed to go.

1. Cultists approach up the tower’s spiral staircase, a bottleneck which is easily filled with hazards and bodies (literally their purpose).

2. The egg of a presumably large creature is smashed upon the stairs, hopefully luring whatever laid it through the tower’s open roof, back to its nest.

3. Oil is poured upon the doorway leading from the staircase’s summit, keeping whatever creatures and cultists coming from the towers from exiting it.

4. When the cultists approach, the MU may cast sleep, bottlenecking the cultists further and keeping them at bay to escape.

5. If a creature then returns to the nest, it may fight the cultists, preventing an entire encounter’s worth of combatants from approaching.

This almost went as planned. Had it gone as planned, we would’ve retained a magic user. This magic user would’ve provided a Charm Person spell, several pieces of treasure, use of scrolls and potions on their person, and an additional warm body’s worth of hitpoints to be expended in the name of powergaming.

New School players think this way; the OSR apparently has catching up to do.

The Barge

This was the second encounter with a host of rather hideous mistakes, the majority of which could’ve been avoided merely through acting in any fashion whatsoever.

To recap:

• There were 6 armed and diseased kobolds waiting by a barricaded door.

• The enemy gave us ample (accidental, via shouted order) warning they’d be breaking the door down.

• The other invisible player informed the other players of this, while I went down to sabotage the barge and secure our escape.

Rather than help the kobolds, or act, or do anything, the remainder of the party fumphered about and took off some of their armor, as they listened to the sound of kobolds valiantly fending off cultists for about 4 rounds (very impressive on their part). To the party’s credit, they did eventually decide after the moment of opportunity to set the barge on fire from afar. It helped my character alive, but we missed out on a great deal of loot and men to carry it out. Additionally, an enemy force remains at the keep, with far more men than needed to live. This forced us to leave the area entirely, rather than doubling back to finish off additional cultists and hauling off even more loot. A charm person against the cleric would’ve been tremendously handy as well.

The party had three options to make this set of encounters go more smoothly, suffer less losses, and keep more strategic possibilities open for future sessions. This was the key; the party’s decisions in this last section of the game narrowed possibilities for future sessions (with these characters) substantially.

1. The party could’ve themselves continued doing nothing by and large. However, the two men at arms could’ve been sent into the lower level to assist the kobolds in their defense, softening up the enemy will well defended archers, and making their future decision (whether to fight the cultists or jump out the window) far easier.

2. The party could have (again) done nothing, but had their hired archers shoot at the cultists guarding their barge.

3. The party could’ve traveled down, prepared with the kobolds for forced entry, and used them as meat shields to (again) destroy cultists trapped in a bottleneck, at little or potentially no cost to the party (certainly not compared to the cost of players drowning immediately afterwards).

Option 3 produced the most backlash when I mentioned it to the party afterwards, but seriously; they had the opportunity to prepare, trap or reinforce the barricaded door, fight at ranged at no cost to themselves, give themselves a better chance of breaking the enemy’s morale, etc etc etc. What’s a heavily armored fighter going to do in the water anyways? Drown, that’s what! Might as well kicks some ass on your way out. The archers also died pointlessly, might as well have them shoot before the no-win scenario.

Final Notes

1. I’d like to thank Prince of Nothing for letting me attend on short notice, adjudicating fairly and quickly, responding well to my improvisations, and performing well in a long list of ways being a good DM.

2. You can find his recount of the session here.

3. I’m going to attend next session if possible, with a character of my own. Might as well flex the RPG muscles, be the example of #EliteLevel play, and lead other players to powergaming.

4. My thoughts on B/X:

B/X, on first impression of playing it (as opposed to observing it), is a Role Playing Activity (or has a culture of playing it as such). Its specific focus (or again, culture of playing it as such) is to practice deciding, communicating, and negotiating actions with a given referee. Because it has little to no structural elements to make it an actual game, the only potential subject of focus is the character's equipment and how they relate to the environment.

For some folks, this is perfectly entertaining and will keep them sated as far as RPGs go.

Remember folks, play to win!

Session Report 2: Chill Mist Valley

9/2/2021 and 9/3/2021, sessions 7 and 8 of my Chill Mist Valley playtest campaign.

The sessions took from 2/27/1261-3/4/1261 by the in-game calendar.

You can read the previous session report here.

Report

Alright, these sessions did not go terrifically well. The party set themselves upon a fey hollow, an unnatural cave structure which doubles as a lair for a noteworthy sylvan creature (though by no means are they necessarily the most dangerous creature within it). They set base camp outside the entrance, leaving a few hirelings (their cook and hunter) with an absent player.

The party entered the hollow, waltzing through a tunnel to come upon a door. Of sorts. it’s a set of interlocking vines, tied around a large glob of dew. The players poke the dew, the vines retract. Standard video game BS. I show you a thing, you interact with it, you see how it works at a surface level, and now I can place it anywhere. Now I can use it for puzzles, alterations, etc and the players know how it’s supposed to work.

They move into a new room; the floor isn’t flush with the walls, they can head the sound of running water and see a river is moving beneath the platform they’re standing on, growing out of the bottom. There are three more doors, only this time, the other two freeze up when one is poked. Normally I don’t do this kind of choose-your-path stuff, but when there’s a sentient being causing the effect (the lord or lady of this particular hollow) , I can get away with it.

Desmond crosses the bridge; the lights in the next room fade! They later discover they’re small illuminated dew globs hanging on vines, which retract into the ground when they detect the part approaching. Before Desmond can do anything, Karenna immediately walks up (not stealthing) with an active light cantrip. Desmond turns around to see Karenna, as Karenna brings the light up to see a black pudding fall from the ceiling with a loud schlop! The party is now surprised. Oh well!

Oh well was not the end of it. Karena keeps slashing at the black puddings, which splits them into smaller oozes. Said oozes have half as much health, which she thinks will make them easier to wipe out all at once. Unfortunately, they now have twice as many attacks as 4 turns to 8, all of whom are doing 20-30 damage per round. The (at least) two crits I got dealt even more damage. I’m not going to go into a ton of more specifics as to how the combat went, other than the party’s hitpoints were nuked with 1 or 2 exceptions, two players came within a bee’s dick of death, and poor Desmond died.

Luckily Deltannu has gentle repose prepared, a spell which suspends a body’s state of decay, thus extending the window to use life-restoring magic like Revivify. Deltannu has the revivify spell, but no 300 gp diamonds with which to cast it. So, Moss takes Desmond off on a Tenser’s floating disk, in charge of getting him restored to life and buying a few diamonds with the money provided to him. Both tasks are accomplished with haste, and the party goes back into the dungeon (now slightly rearranged. Pocket realm of a sylvan, they can pull shenanigans like this).

So, the party learned a valuable lesson about goofing around in the dungeon. So I thought, anyways.

The party has noticed during travel that the weather is very abnormal. Constant rain, constantly pouring. Floodwaters could get nasty. They’ve been keeping it in the back of their heads until now, when they reach a new room. It has a large obelisk with 8 pools around it, all at various states of being filled. A few knowledge checks later, it’s a weather control obelisk. Congrats everyone, now I wonder how the party will-whoops, everyone is dicking around.

“I’d like to do some blood magic since everyone else is distracted.”

Fine.

Out of the pools comes a marilith. Out comes another marilith. Out comes a nalfeshne(?) An hour into combat, it’s 1 am, and I’ve got a call waiting for me. So I declare the session ended, all remaining combatants retreat to their respective camps, and session over. Dissatisfying overall. I’ve since decided who “retreats” will instead be contingent on the losing party. I too, am mortal.

The next session is the next evening; everyone has agreed they’re dissatisfied, and wish to amend it. They all agree to go tackle the fey hollow again. This time, with passion, intelligence, and an implied (but nevertheless understood) intention to live through it. The party enters, once more through the opening tunnel, knowing the dungeon has likely undergone some minor restocking process (it’s only been a day, they don’t get everything back, but I liked their caution). They reach the vine-door; the dew in its center is frozen. A sylvan appears before them, similar to an elf in appearance and floating. The fey introduces herself as Hessian, and demands the players leave. What do my players do? These brave, determined souls? The height of courage personified? My titans of greed, ambition, and all other holy endeavors where adventuring is concerned? My darling players, upon whom I was about to lavish a gorgeous dungeon complete with dynamic lighting?

They walked out. Bastards.

We then did a whole bunch of procedural stuff regarding the settlement buildings. The nearby elves came to the players, and offered some diplomacy. If the party agreed to unite or compel the other elf cairns into resisting the coming invasion of winter fey (because that’s now ongoing), they’d become staunch allies and financial patrons. To sweeten the deal, they threw 2,000 gp and flying mounts at the party. Instantly sways them; the party now has a means of getting around quite a few barriers they’ve been facing in the exploration system.

Not that they dislike the exploration system, mind you. They love it! Too much, in fact. They get distracted interacting with it. I shouldn’t say distracted; they’re focused on optimizing their travels, and it’s a fine method of play. But you know what everyone’s obsessed with when it comes to exploration?

They fish. They fish! The party loves to fish! There are two exploration activities with nearly identical mechanics (hunting and foraging), along with their own suites of materials. Not interested, just fishing. Catch anything yet?

Just you, darling.

All that being said, this does have a happy end to look forward to; session 9 has (just, at the time of this writing) taken place, and it was fantastic.

Players

Deltannu
Notes: Deltannu’s downtime this week was to go back to the hollow with gifts for its ruling sylvan, and try to cast baleful familiar on it. He succeeded, by the way! He’s worried some of the allowances and advantages made for the mass combat system are easily exploitable, and I’d normally agree with him. Luckily, this module comes with a hand-crafted encounter manual designed to punish every build both conceivable and inconceivable by myself. There was a discussion about whether he could split up skeleton units to bring them in as henchmen. I’m okay with him doing this (many critters in the encounter manual are devastating the more people are involved in combat). At the same time, I told him at some number of skeletons I would transition to mass combat. It’s annoying to be told “you can’t take your individual turn”, but you’re not entitled to individual action resolution outside of situations it’s meant to resolve, whether you’re doing mass combat in a dungeon or a battlefield.

• Ancestry: Dhampir (Halfling)

• Class: Druid (Spore)

• Secondary Class: Scholar

• XP: 43740 (+4120 XP these sessions)

Desmond
Ah, poor Desmond. He’s had a rough go of things. Not terribly proactive, tried to be proactive in the dungeon by serving a role, and WHAM: another PC kills him. I’ll probably chat with him soon, just to make sure he knows he can take risks, do stuff, adventure, do stuff, chase loot, do stuff, etc without fear of it being a waste of time. Probably.

• Ancestry: Halfling (Stout, I think)

• Class: Rogue (Soulknife)

• Secondary Class: Ley Keeper

• 43740 (+4120 XP this session)

Karenna Frosteye
As of last session, Karenna’s been made into an NPC (Warlord). Karenna’s player (we’ll call them Liberty) has created a new character, a Dwarf Paladin (Vengeance) and Herbalist, who you’ll meet in next week’s report.

• Ancestry: Aasimar (I’m not aware of the subrace, though I think it’s scourge)

• Class: Fighter/Barbarian (Eldritch Knight/Tiger Totem)

• Secondary Class: Trailblazer

• XP: 43740 (+4120 XP this session)

Moss
Moss has been very interesting to DM for. He’s intelligent, very keyed into min-maxing, but simultaneously very engaged with the game (as all min-maxers are, when not being dragged through an F-rate comic book someone is trying to run as a 5e game).

• Warforged (Do these have subraces? I’ll ask)

• Artificer (Artillerist)

• Secondary Class: Craftsman

• (+4120 XP, total XP)

Robin Goodfellow (Not Present)

• Ancestry: Eladrin

• Bard (Glamour)

• Secondary Class: Minstrel

• XP: 35,020

Henchmen

• Olesm
  Level 1 Lizardman Bodyguard

• Relc
  Level 2 Lizardman Bodyguard
  515 XP

• Seyls
  Level 1 Lizardman Bodyguard
  0 XP

• Zevara
  Level 2 Lizardman Bodyguard
  515 XP (+515 XP)

• Delramien (Not Present)
  Level 8 Drow Mage
  Delramien is a mage the players captured in the World Below and convinced to come to their side. He is currently back at Liscor preparing the construction of a mage tower. I told Karenna he didn’t actually need to be there for the majority of the construction, but I think she forgot he’s even present. Oh well!

• Omari (Not Present)
  Level 1 Anupine Tracker
  Anupines are a folk with fine black fur and the heads of a very recognizable canid from egyptian mythology. They occasionally filter into Samheide for work and trade from across the sea, where they’ve made their homes in the desert. Similar to Karenna, I believe Desmond has completely forgotten about this NPC, so they’re chilling in Liscor.

Settlements

• Liscor
  Level 2 Settlement (Under Construction, will be complete 2/27/1261 in-game)
  
  

• Unnamed Lizardfolk Tribal Camp
  Level 1 Settlement
  Seasonal Income: 50 gp
  Seasonal Trade Value: 50 gp

Session Report 1: Chill Mist Valley

8/27/2021, Session 6 of my Chill Mist Valley playtest campaign. Five of our current six players were present.

The session took place from 2/15/1261-2/20/1261 by the in-game calendar.

I’m not really sure how much information to post on the prior 6 sessions we’ve had, to be honest. I’ll probably do the equivalent of a clip show, but if you have a specific question just drop it in the comments. I’ll get the hang of this in another essay or two ;)

Report

We’re playing through the Chill Mist Valley module I’ve been designing with my cowriter Knight and a host of freelancers since last December, and tl;dr? It went really well!

To understand the events of this session and those prior, there are a couple things you need to know.

1. We’re using 1-1 time rules. That means the world progresses 1 day in-game for every day that passes in real life. Given we meet on a weekly basis, players usually have 7 in-game days between the events of each session.

2. Players have a list of downtime activities, along with a few they tend to improvise. Given the average 7 days of free time the characters have, this list is put to use on a weekly basis.

Our party’s wildling Karenna went searching the local area around their in-progress settlement Liscor (the second person to do so). She was in search of dungeons specifically, and managed to do so; she also found two dangerous monsters on her way! One was a mercury dragon, the other a strange looking metal spider. We can’t well have monsters threaten a settlement just as it’s being built, say the players, so they go off to hunt it down. They travel a few days, do a bit of fishing, and find a wrecked wagon along the way. It looked like claws or forelegs were raked across it, the axel was broke, and something had broken the carriage inwards. There was quite a bit of blood, but no bodies. The players investigate for a hot minute, and find a note addressing House Naius; it says the summer fey are leaving, High King Zephain intends to take the valley by freezing it over, and the elf cairns should make ready for war or subjugation. They move on, after one of the characters (I think Moss) explains elf cairns are not burial grounds nor markers, though the name was chosen for symbolic purposes. They’re castles or cities hidden in small realms of their own. Samheide is dotted with them.

So the players move on! After a little while, they come upon another wagon, this time with several elves wounded and scattered about, along with a giant metal spider currently 1 (one) away from tearing an elf a new one. The players leap into combat, giving the elves time to scatter!

Truth be told, the retriever performed poorly for its CR. The paralysis beam failed, which would’ve been fine had the damage been more impressive. A legendary action or special reaction of some kind would’ve really brought it together, but alas, that’s the trouble with 5E monsters. I can’t be too unfair to it though; by the time the manticora joined the fight, it was on single digit hitpoints. Oh well! It did manage to plane shift out though, to my delight. I’m a sucker for recurring bad guys.

The manticora on the other hand performed more than adequately. The variant I used (native to Samheide) has a gecko’s body, butterfly or pixie wings, and an elf’s face (rather than a man’s). They had a regular claw-claw-bite, which they largely didn’t use in favor of their tail spikes. The tail spikes were made of the jade-like glass, which drained Dexterity on a hit. Ability drain (or damage, depending on your play history) isn’t super common in 5e. I can’t remember it outside of the Shadow, truthfully. But I remember reading the shadow entry and thinking “it kills you if you reach 0 STR? Too cool.” 5e could desperately use some death spirals, given the present alternative is yo-yoing players up and down because they never fail enough death saves to actually die.

For dexterity drain, I decided reaching 0 would instead permanently paralyze the character. They would then need to regain their dexterity by way of potions, restorative magic, etc. Beyond that, if a creature was reduced to 0 hp by the jade, they detonated with the stuff in a 5 ft radius.

And this could chain. In fact it did chain; Moss, the party artificer, has a cadre of awakened shrubs at his command. He’ll use them to toss magic stones at enemies, doing impressive damage! Alas, they have only 10 HP, and a single shrub going down caused a chain reaction which killed the rest of Moss’s retinue and damaged Moss heavily. This also happened to Deltannu and his retinue of lizardfolk bodyguards; all but one guard was knocked, as were several elves hiding behind a berm.

Three of the 5 manticora facing them had additional abilities; two were glass-makers, who could fire back when attacked as a reaction. They proved exceedingly effective! The other manticora was a glass heart, which could raise a 10 ft radius, 20 ft high spike of glass from a surface (provided it was on the same aforementioned surface). Also quite effective! The players all grouped up so Deltannu could could place a wall of fire around them, forcing the manticora closer. Walls of fire are opaque, thus inflicting disadvantage on any ranged attacks. We saw a lot of great tactical decisions from the players this session, actually. It only came to bite them when the glass heart manticora repeatedly spiked the wall’s (formerly safe) center.

The players managed to give as good as they got, and the encounter wrapped up. It took sliiiiiiiightly longer than I wanted, but this was our first major combat in the game (along with 5 players, 4 hirelings, and some NPCs to work through). I have total confidence our next few are going to resolve faster, and the player will pick up the pace insofar as their other activities are concerned. It’s a reasonable assumption as far as I’m concerned; we’re headed to a fey hollow next session as players look for riches with which to fund their armies.

The elves the players rescued were actually from the nearby elf cairn, and were able to provide more information, along with an introduction to the cairn itself. It’s where the players have spent their downtime for our upcoming session, with quite a few interesting results.

Players

Deltannu
Notes: Deltannu’s been a blast to DM for. I retained him from my Lancer campaign, which was largely a disaster, but he was my favorite part of it. As a 3.5/Pathfinder player, he’s the most interested in managing the more minute mechanics, extra modes of play, and providing direction to the two other original players. Liscor was largely his invention, as was the plan to gain an army. I’m looking forward to sending him the new spells available.

• Ancestry: Dhampir (Halfling)

• Class: Druid (Spore)

• Secondary Class: Scholar

• XP: 39,620 (+3,090 XP this session)

Desmond

• Ancestry: Halfling (Stout, I think)

• Class: Rogue (Soulknife)

• Secondary Class: Ley Keeper

• 43740 (+4120 this session)

Karenna Frosteye

• Ancestry: Aasimar (I’m not aware of the subrace, though I think it’s scourge)

• Class: Fighter/Barbarian (Eldritch Knight/Tiger Totem)

• Secondary Class: Trailblazer

• XP: 43740 (+4120 this session)

Moss

• Warforged (Do these have subraces? I’ll ask)

• Artificer (Artillerist)

• Secondary Class: Craftsman

• (+4120 XP, total XP)

Robin Goodfellow (Not Present)

• Ancestry: Eladrin

• Bard (Glamour)

• Secondary Class: Minstrel

• XP: 35,020

Henchmen

• Olesm
  Level 1 Lizardman Bodyguard

• Relc
  Level 2 Lizardman Bodyguard
  515 XP (+515 XP)

• Seyls
  Level 1 Lizardman Bodyguard
  0 XP

• Zevara
  Level 2 Lizardman Bodyguard
  515 XP (+515 XP)

• Delramien (Not Present)
  Level 8 Drow Mage
  Delramien is a mage the players captured in the World Below and convinced to come to their side. He is currently back at Liscor preparing the construction of a mage tower. I told Karenna he didn’t actually need to be there for the majority of the construction, but I think she forgot he’s even present. Oh well!

• Omari (Not Present)
  Level 1 Anupine Tracker
  Anupines are a folk with fine black fur and the heads of a very recognizeable canid from egyptian mythology. They occasionally filter into Samheide for work and trade from across the sea, where they’ve made their homes in the desert. Similar to Karenna, I believe Desmond has completely forgotten about this NPC, so they’re chilling in Liscor.

Settlements

• Liscor
  Level 2 Settlement (Under Construction, will be complete 2/27/1261 in-game)
  

• Unnamed Lizardfolk Tribal Camp
  Level 1 Settlement
  Seasonal Income: 50 gp
  Seasonal Trade Value: 50 gp

I don't care what GMs say about improvisation.

The question of improvisation has yet again opened the floodgates to a torrent of bad faith arguments, hidden agendas, ludicrous claims, and every other nuisance plaguing my daily stroll through tabletop Twitter. Hence I feel the urge to write and deal yet again with perhaps the worst nuisance of all: game masters who are too smart for their own good. The specific and selective stupidity we'll be dealing with today is centered around whether games need or even benefit from players having access to modifying abilities (like maneuvers, meta-magic etc.), or whether that stuff can all (or should only) just be improvised by the players at their leisure. Let's begin with the game master’s specific blind spot as it relates to this question.

The GM (often times) has access to an entire book of challenges designed to oppose their players.

The GM can switch between these challenges at will, deploy them at will, and enjoy them at will. They have access to a much broader range of experiences within the game at their fingertips at most conceivable times with very limitations imposed by the game. For the GM, the only real barrier to improvisation is willpower. That is their only obstacle. The fail state of their improvisation is composed of glares or groans from the players, maybe somebody takes him aside in particularly egregious circumstances. All of this is (of course) no real obstacle at all. Folks are usually forgiving when it comes to GM mistakes, and so the GM is free to fail forward. Consequently, the GM has no need to systematize their own improvisation, and the failure to recognize this unique situation at the table is what often leads otherwise intelligent GMs to believe systems wouldn't benefit their players.

Social Formulae

I'm a designer first, a player second, and a GM last. I enjoy beating my head against the brick wall of rules and designs, and only recently did my primary outlet for that become designing rules rather than playing through them. As a designer, my job is to translate player feedback into actionable data, then sorting through the mess and deciding what takes priority and what needs to be ignored.

Most GM feedback is to be ignored.

But the point is, across the course of developing this skill set I've been able to condense more general feelings and player behaviors into something that can be identified and even actively tracked. I've done this here because a common accusation of the ostensibly pro-improv DM is how mechanically diverse games are wasting both ink and time; the players could just make that stuff up. It's on the players to be creative rather than the game to cater to them. This is completely absurd and false on the face of things to anybody except people who've been a game master for at least a decade, but it's often difficult to verbalize why this is the case (as is common with any accusation so foundationally mistaken).

To help, I've begun listing obstacles to player improvisation which have nothing to do with player creativity. These alternatives are wrapped up in self-evaluation, an aversion to being disruptive, or even meta-reasons around GM behavior and the specific game folks sat down to play. Let's take the example below;

Carol’s table has decided to switch from 4th Edition to 5th Edition, at Carol’s request. She says players are looking at their character sheets too often, and solve too many problems with their abilities. As they start this new game, Carol says her players can ask to do the things they did in 4th Edition, rather than make a declaration. How do her players react?

1. If the leading parties at the table wished to reliably include those elements which are now only accessible via improv, they could/should/would play games which included them.

2. If the player were to engage in constant improvisation for the sake of accessing those elements, this would be met with irritation, disapproval, or failure.

3. Therefore, those elements are a source of annoyance rather than enjoyment for the party who wants them struck from the game’s structure.

As you can see, the thought process you just read has nothing to do with player creativity. It instead has everything to do with the fact Carol has explicitly stated she dislikes the maneuvers and tricks and companions of the party’s characters. Asking Carol to simulate those elements of the new game would be a guaranteed no and waste of time at best, or an exercise in self humiliation at worst.

Let's walk through another alternative.

We turn again to Carol's table, still playing fifth edition. She set her party against a tough but simple encounter. The enemy is largely big bags of hit points with respectably high armor classes. Her players are reasonably confident they can beat this encounter through sheer stubbornness. All they really have to lose is their hit points, and they have ways of getting that back. But while they play, her player Dutch notes one of the particularly nasty bad guys is positioned under what you might call an environmental hazard. He thinks to mention it when his turn comes up, but decides against it and rolls a regular attack instead. What was going through Dutch's head?

1. The game’s methods of action resolution are likely sufficient to overcome the obstacle or encounter.

2. Improvising outside the game’s structure relies on both the GM’s successful interpretation and the action succeeding.

3. Furthermore, the GM faces several obstacles to successfully interpreting the improvisation even if they agree to it. The set DC could be too high, the additional penalties or resource cost too extreme, the resulting damage too low, the final outcome a waste of a turn.

4. Because improvisation is unlikely to change the final outcome positively, but has a good chance of prolonging the inevitable, the player correctly deduces the cost of committing to unknown and out-of-favor variables is too high for the likely mediocre benefit.

Clearly Dutch made the right choice here. Even if we forget Carol's hostility towards abilities which modify player activities (most of which simulate the first and second levels of what players would come up with on their own, were they inclined to improvised), why pointlessly stretch out a likely victory? Dutch is being considerate of the other players at the table here, including the GM. Alternatively, he has little to no confidence in Carol's ability to properly adjudicate his attempt to improvise.

In either case, this has absolutely nothing to do with creativity on the part of the player, and we can safely put that irredeemably stupid argument to rest. Removing what players knew was possible in the context of game mechanics has created an exclusively chilling effect in these scenarios.

The “Improv” Problem

As with most online TRPG discourse, people obfuscate their hostility to fleshed out New-School systems (like maneuver selections, feats, and other modifications to “standard” actions and abilities) behind seemingly well meaning desires. Have you heard any of the following?

• “I miss the days when the majority of cool stuff you could do came from loot, not your character sheet.”

• “The game doesn’t need to be so complex, the players can ask to do a trip attack whenever they want.”

• “I wish players didn’t think of their characters as a series of buttons to mash.”

• “I want the players to come up with their own cool things to do, not look at a system.”

If you have, my condolences. You've run into the regrettably disingenuous people this essay is intended to rebuff.

Let's make the simple. I’m not sitting at the table so I can have a more boring experience than what’s possible with video games. Granted, the fact I’m sitting with friends can alleviate the sensation of boredom with anemic systems. Even then, whether it’s front and center or in the back of my mind, a little thought nags at me and says “Couldn’t this be so much better?” I have no interest in RPG systems which fail to (adjusting for the medium) keep up with video games in meaningful options and variety, just as I wouldn’t have interest in an RPG which failed to permit improvisation. I’m sure you could find an exception if you locked me in a room and forced me to play hundreds of games, but that’s besides the point.

The whole genesis of new school design was the intersection of two ideas:

• A variety of options can enhance the play experience, add replay value, and provide new layers to modes of play.

• A profound majority of improvised actions can be categorized and consolidated to provide option variety. This allows new improvisations to use the old as force multipliers for creativity and effectiveness alike.

Getting a displacer beast at level 1 in 4th Edition was awesome, and I rarely (if ever) experience anything like that in 5th. Not only was the displacer beast cool on its own, I started improvising uses for it with little to no mechanical precedent. My go-to example is a crafty solution to an encounter we wanted to stealth past. I had my displacer beast climb up a wall to reach a landing two flights up from the stairs we were on. A guard was posted there, so I had the displacer beast grapple the guard’s neck and drag him over the side. The choking guard was unable to call for help and hung there, a convenient biological ladder for the rest of the party to climb up and bypass several other guards. This is something I probably never would have done in TSR D&D, and I owe it to the designers trusting players to generate new levels of improvisation. I owe that experience to the new school of design, and I want people in this era of design to follow it.

I dislike the notion we can’t tell people what they can or should do when designing TRPGs. It’s a medium of entertainment, with its own unique combination of quirks and conceits. You can do things in TRPGS which you can’t do elsewhere. I expect those things to appear in TRPGs, just as I expect the movies to feature moving pictures, and a painting gallery to include images which were painted and sufficient means to perceive them. My default reaction to something not utilizing its medium is disinterest at best, and disgust at worst. Don’t worry about the exceptions, they can probably stand on their own two feet.

So when it comes to TRPGs developed today, I expect them to include variety without losing the capacity to improvise. I’m not going to throw out the massive library of video game mechanics and only use the base set of TRPG mechanics. The decisions and improvisation of people who already have more mechanics than they know what to do with is what interests me.

90% of the actions and abilities people invented on the fly over the past 50 years of tabletop gaming can be consolidated into standard abilities. I'm sorry, you will not experience the feeling of cool the first time one of your players asked to trip somebody in combat and it worked. Trip attacks can just be a maneuver now. But you can experience that same feeling of cool with your players today; it's just that the creative ideas they will come up with today will incorporate the trip attack they know they can perform in order to do something you have to resolve.

Solving Improv for New School

This deserves its own post, frankly. It will get its own post, certainly. In spite of my desire to make essays like this overly hostile, cranky, and condescending to people I see as keeping the hobby mired in bottom rung of tabletop discussions, I have a solution to this.

The simple answer is to explicitly gatekeep readily identifiable bonuses, abilities, rewards, and events behind improvisation. Tell the player they can only play this card which grants them extra damage or a bonus skill check when they improvise an action. Tell the player they can only get an ability from this magic item by coming up with one and practicing with it. Tell the player they can only survive the room filling with water if they come up with something, because you sure as hell don't know what the right answer is.

Perhaps paradoxically, these rewards must have a loose or ephemeral quality to them; they can't be achieved through the lowest levels of player improvisation. They can't be things the players shouldn't need to improvise, things everyone knows how to adjudicate (like trip attacks).

Like I said, this will get its own, much larger post where I will be happy to go in-depth on this discussion. I'd prefer not to kill the naturally elated mood of my benevolent revelations with the dour purpose of this essay (among other things).

The beatings must continue until GMs improve.

Improv, Summarized

Frankly, the GM shouldn’t need to know why improvisational tools and resources exist. It has little bearing on whether they can execute on the task set before them, which is to provide as little friction between my design and my players as possible. They are not to be tinkered with unless the GM has an absolute understanding of their purpose within the game (and perhaps not even then). Under no circumstances are they to be discouraged or removed.

Improvisational tools are for me to develop and for you to play along with.

Lucky me, I just read an article by the Angry GM in which he shits all over the idea of called shots, why can’t GMs just do things on the fly, isn’t Angry special for doing things on the fly, insert self aggrandizing BS. Angry goes on to explain how he actually does have a called shots rule (not system), and it sees use at his table! See, Angry cleverly introduces specially designed monsters which are practically begging to have called shots used against them. They have special attacks connected to weak points in their anatomy, in his example. I’m not being sarcastic when I call this clever by the way, it’s the product of a smart person generating a specific opportunity for players to engage with something outside the rules.

Do you understand that? The called shot table isn’t for the GM. The cards that let you make a free skill check when you improvise to play them aren’t for the GM. Any modifying system meant to simulate or advance improvisation isn’t for the GM.

They’re present for the players. The players. Not for you. The players. That’s who these things are present for. The improvisational elements specifically made for the players. The players’ improv. I know GMs could handle all that stuff on the fly. I also know GMs could decide attacks hit or miss by fiat alone. Aren’t we so smart for figuring this out? No, because the maneuvers or trip attacks or metamagics or whatever aren’t here for the GM. They’re here to cover the next base of actions players were likely to attempt, just like the first actions in the first system were.

I’m not interested in whether GMs can make clever monsters and setpieces or are good enough at telegraphing and making on the fly rulings for players to try improvising. Pat yourself on the back if you need to GMs, I’m sure you’re all smart enough to deal with your players if they come up with something outside the rules. Have a cookie from the bottom shelf. I’m interested in whether it’s worth it for players to attempt the kind of swing-on-the-chandelier-and-kick-the-orc-off-the-balcony shenanigans improvisation generates in the base game.

I’m interested in making sure the shenanigans come up. And I’m especially interested in keeping you from sabotaging them. Remember: this is not your game. These are not your players. This is my game. These are my players. The rulebook is a holy text, a work of divine artifice designed to impart knowledge and fun in the form of superior gaming to my players. Take careful note of the TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT sign above the “Edit” column of your preferred word processor.

And keep your unclean hands away from my trip attacks.

I don't care what GMs say about rewards.

Welcome to a new series I’ll be sure to abandon in two months given how often I actually post on this site. Kidding! I actually kinda like the idea of this series (henceforth tagged as GM Says), and a lot of my posts could be boiled down into posts along these lines. And because I’m boiling a lot of these more vague post ideas into this particular, more central theme, I have to give you a spoiler as to what most essays will have in common.

The people who run our games (who we dearly appreciate) are actually furthest removed from many of its best components.

The snarky followup to this premise (as it will also be repeated through most, if not all of these) is the unreliability of GMs in soliciting feedback, tips, and tricks for improving games both on the whole and according to a table’s specific needs and wants.

But why run through that process here when I could just do it with specifics people could actually attack or endorse? Let’s talk about rewards in tabletop rpgs.

First off, I consider rewards to have a reasonably broad potential set of applications that are nevertheless united by a common property: assets or abilities which benefit the state or potential state of the players’ capacity to interact with the world around them. Obviously, this covers magic items, archers, supplicants, spells, spaceships, that one of a kind rocket launcher, titles, castles, baronies, exclusive access, etc. Rewards span all modes of play, and many types of rewards exist for each mode of play.

Why do we give rewards out to begin with? I could’ve asked why we need to give out rewards, but that’s a red herring GMs and even some designers fall for; practically nothing in rpgs is done out of necessity. Do you need dice? Nope, you could flip a coin. All action resolution is done by coin toss now. Wait, you don’t even need a by-chance action resolution method at all! You can just compare higher stats. Do you even need stats? You can-

You get the idea, we don’t engage in this silly “need” thing. Does the mechanic add value to the game? Is it worth the effort to implement? Is it worth putting alongside a conflicting system, or booting that other system out? We work with incentives! Incentives for players to push on instead of taking a rest. Incentives for players to take an active role in the campaign. Incentives for players to improvise their actions rather than just use everything on their character sheet.

Rewards can incentivize all of the above and more. Rewards help remind us why we’re playing this game, and not videogames when we’re going through an utterly predictable set of scenarios. That’s our worst case scenario. “Well we could be playing divinity, but I couldn’t get this cool sword or spell in divinity, so this is cool. Oh neat, this knight pledged loyalty to me, that’d have to be scripted in skyrim. Oh nice, I got a castle. I can’t usually get those in a game where I play a single character.” These are band-aids for games which don’t themselves offer anything which wouldn’t be served better than videogames, with the sole (but powerful) exception of interacting with your friends around a table or on a call.

In good games, these rewards take on a completely different meaning. They’re not just novel (if they even manage such a lofty goal in bad games), they become accelerants. The sword turns you into a monster in combat; and it becomes a more viable method of resolving encounters (and minimizes losses when it’s not). The knight who pledged loyalty to you can act as your lieutenant in your domain, and as a backup character when yours dies. Plus, they can take additional hits in combat, and potentially give you access to mechanics you’d need to switch characters in order to access. The castle allows you to begin (or even better, simply advance) the domain game, where you begin changing the map of the campaign.

Rewards exist for every mode of play your game supports. These rewards can function off of existing mechanical features (improving to hit chance, boosting your results when hunting), use existing features as mechanical hooks (trading health for damage, improving military might through your typical spells), or introduce new modes of play altogether (wizard towers letting you research spells, or guild ownership introducing new faction play variants.

These rewards can span very grand and incredible gradients depending on the number of mechanical hooks. In Lords of Brackas, we’ll tackle magic users, and the stuff they can get. Magic users can first off acquire material components, which inflate their chances of successfully using magic, and (provided they did their homework) can inflate the general effectiveness of it. One level up from that, they can also be used to produce additional or unique effects according to specific rewarded components. They can acquire formulae which alter or produce specific materials as part of magic. Casting a transmutation spell to control water could instead turn the water into a hydrogen dominant gas, perhaps to set it on fire or lift a balloon higher. Scrolls and other inscriptions can of course provide mages a larger library of magic to access or provide to retainers (like apprentices). Retainers themselves are a reward. Additional magical power or a bodyguard are what every enterprising archmage needs. What if your mage dies? The apprentice becoming your new player character is just the excuse you need to ensure all of the components, spells, scrolls, wands and staves, towers, etc you built up as you mage didn’t go to waste. Ah yes, towers and similar strongholds for magic users. They let you summon magical beings, research spells of your own, provide enchantments to your armies and use battle magic, etc etc. You get the idea.

Point being, I’m developing a game in which players can chase, acquire, and multiply rewards for their achievements every single session. They’re so embedded into the game, that they’re not all up to the purview of the Historian to dole out. Lots of these are just there for the players to carve out once they take the right actions, and the Historian can include extras of those rewards for shopping or loot.

Why did I do this?

I did this because rewards are part of playing a game. They tickle parts of our brain so I can interpret the activity in front of me as being “fun”, and help distinguish the activity in front of me as worthwhile in comparison to some other activity which would normally fill my “fun” slot. Titanfall is fun, but there are very few titans and weapons and weapon mods available that hold my interest, and I unlocked them all in about 6 months. The gameplay loop maintains my interest because it’s also fun, but titanfall drops out of play for a few months when I tackle another game that provides me with rewards. Those games are tickling the part of my brain which says “good job, you accomplished something, here’s a cookie.”

What I will at all costs prevent is some complete jackass who is present (as a baseline) to facilitate and manage the shenanigans and solutions of my players of my game trying to keep rewards away from the players as a cheap trick to maintain interest in the campaign. It’s not happening. My players are not your opportunity for a sociology experiment. A GM who thinks they’re testing “how much can I reduce the loot pool/markers of progress before the game isn’t fun” doesn’t actually have the ability to run that test. More likely than not, they’re actually testing “how heavily can I lean on the fun of being around a table with your friends” and “how shitty do I have to make the game before someone gets disagreeable enough to take the reins”, or perhaps “How willing are my players to embrace popcorn fantasy in lieu of a better game”.

I can give you the answer to all of those questions here, to sate your curiosity and keep you from ruining a good thing. The unfortunate answer to all is; quite a bit. You can screw up incentive/reward, turn the game into a passive popcorn engagement, and make the game pretty bad overall before your friends take you aside and say “Let’s do something else.” More likely is they’ll put up with the campaign as it goes, hoping it ends sooner rather than later. You’ll notice them get bored, sit back with their arms crossed, pay attention to their phone to the exclusion of the table, and be non-participatory.

It’s theoretically risky for me to tell you this, given you might decide to try it anyway. Lucky me, I have a game of my own, which is so suffused with the incentive/reward structure, you’d have very little game left over if you tried to get rid of all of it. Not only that, you’d have less players! I don’t plan on sourcing my playerbase from the existing RPG market. It’s infected with competing egregores and memes focused on removing anything not identifiable as one of their own. I’m not even touching whether that already fractured and (frankly insane) market is practical to advertise to from a business perspective. No, I’m sourcing players from video games! I’m handing them a product that feeds them all of the incentive reward structures of video games. I assume from the get go the Historian of my game is a wonderful opportunity to expand the design of my game, keep the game distinct from being a board game, facilitate improvisation, and manage complexity. I also assume the Historian can screw that up unless I build safeguards into the system, and influence the social setting of the table through the design and maybe even direct contact.

TL;DR: I love game masters, I appreciate them, and I want them to have great campaigns they can reminisce over in which they made fond memories with friends around the table. But game masters are not designers, and too many campaigns are hobbled or outright ruined by GMs venturing where they shouldn’t. The moment they cross the line to carelessly editing basic functions of games, they become a problem for the players to suffer through, and a problem for me, the designer to solve.

The question of whether players get rewards in games about kingdoms, spaceships, or killing monsters which include said rewards need to be walled off with a complement of generous barbed wire and TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT signs.

Can't the GM just DECIDE?

This has come up a few times (including from my usual muse, Digressions and Dragons). One day I was scrolling twitter and spotted a random weather table. Replying to the tweet was someone who apparently very much felt there was no need for such a table, shouting “Can’t the GM just DECIDE what the weather is?” Seemed silly to me at the time, but I thought I’d go on my way and ignore it. Something about that statement kept bugging me, though. Why should we rely on the GM to provide all of that stuff? Especially when we know they tend to forget the extraneous stuff not covered in the rules, it just didn’t make sense. Clearly whoever came up with the weather table thought it was important enough to demand the GM didn’t forget about it. Ah, the crux of the issue, I bet. See I was designing the exploration system for Lords of Brackas, because I wanted an exploration system.

Points to me for efficiency.

While I was doing so, I sought feedback in my discord server. As I did, one of my buddies suggested the following:

Now to be clear, this is a perfectly fine solution. For what I’m specifically going for, it’s insufficient. See, weather is important in this game. I want supernatural sandstorms and tornados and waterspouts decades old. I want mists which force plants to blooms, thunderstorms which open portals, etc etc. Deciding by fiat, constrained by region, is perfectly serviceable in a sci fi game or some low-fantasy games. If I’m going to toss in events like this which can chaotically interact with the party, I want them to be random. I don’t want the players to see the GM’s hand in setting them up, or for the GM to get nervous about deploying a cool weather effect and ignoring the system all together. The dice did it, oh well. Can we chuck the cabbage cart into the tornado?

Game masters are not game designers. Let me clarify, because there are all sorts of very stupid arguments that arrive from that statement. GMs are not the same kind of designers that actual game designers are. Their design differs in time, quality, focus, scope, scale, and any number of other modifiers to say with absolute confidence they are using different skill sets.. There’s overlap, yes. But there’s also overlap between being a player and a designer, and being a player and a GM. We wouldn’t say all players are designers anymore than we would say all players are GMs.

So, when real designers determine they want something to in some way debut in a game, they make it a feature of the game. They don’t just leave it blank. Yes, the GM can decide to implement that feature. But the GM can implement lots of features, and choose to do so based on time, preference, perceived reception at their table, their perceived competence in making the feature functional and entertaining, etc. So if you want them to prioritize one over another, it should in some way feature in the game. Maybe you didn’t need to do this back in the 70’s, when folks were reading the Chronicles of Amber and The Dying Earth and who knows what else. If you had a similar background and cultural touchstones in common with whoever would run this thing, it’s easier to expect things which aren’t actually in the rulebooks to make an appearance nonetheless. We don’t live in that culture. Sorry, we have to use a shortcut.

Let’s use an example: technically speaking, GMs don’t need to make an attack roll. They don’t! They can just decide, based on whatever the hell they please at the time, the attacker hits or misses. Now, they can also just decide that some are up to sufficiently random chance to warrant making a roll. If you, as a designer, want everyone to resolve attacks with the dice (as a default), what do you do? You write it into the game. You tell the GM “attacks are resolved by rolling a d20 and adding a modifier”. You tell the GM what’s expected of them, because that’s what everyone who doesn’t need an excuse to throw out the rulebook whenever they want to play will expect when they show up to the table.

When we come to something like weather, the GM could absolutely decide to use it. More likely though, is that they’ll forget to use it. It’s a bit cynical to say, but RPGs (especially in the d20 scene) are increasingly flooded with the lowest common denominator of game. People don’t pay as much attention to the optional rules, much less things which should feature in the games. The game I’m currently developing has a travel system. That travel system is important. It has a huge impact on crafting, spellcasting, certain elements of martial classes, animal taming, mass combat and other warfare elements, etc. Even if you consider lots of that stuff superfluous, it has an impact on combat. It’s pretty big impact on combat, frankly. If you roll up to the desert outpost you’re trying to recue a prisoner from, whether the skies are clear or if it’s engulfed in a sandstorm produces a completely different encounter.

Maybe you think the GM needs total narrative control because they to be able to make the coolest situation, and blah blah blah. I wholeheartedly disagree with that school of thought and generally consider it a cancer to be driven out of the hobby with pitchforks and torches. Consider how easy it is to get stuck into ruts and wear blinders when you have total control over something! Maybe you demand total narrative control to run a game, because you can’t stomach the thought of your shitty d-rate novel going off the rails at any moment. None of your players would read it though (assuming you could even write it), so you make them play through it instead. If that’s you, wouldn’t you want to have all of the neat narrative bits available to you? Wouldn’t you want a reminder of what’s possible in “your” story? Wouldn’t you, cancer on everything I love, want to be a little less terrible?

How to design 5e group initiative encounters (or, Making combat take 10 minutes).

Can it be done? Truly, can it be done?

I’m largely done designing products for 5th edition. The junk has seriously gotten to me, playing 5e feels like sewage is clogging my brain and has for awhile. I can deal with that, provided I’m hanging out with friends, but it’s even begun to affect my design work. Every roadblock I run into generated by this corporate garbage designed to keep you playing it and only it takes my mind off whatever I’m trying to design at this point. I still design free content though, so I continually tinker with the 5e rule set.

When I stumbled on this idea though, hoooooooooooooooooooo boy I legitimately considered making a product out of it. I may still do that, whenever 5.5 or whatever comes out. For now though, I’d like to hand you the tools I developed across the past week or so, which are robust enough for you to rapidly adapt encounters accordingly.

What I’ve stumbled into creating is a template by which several, maybe even dozens of monsters can have their actions adjudicated within a single statblock, and without the use of a grid. That’s not its only use, but that’s the output of solving a very specific problem 5th edition has.

What got me started on this?

Imagine for a moment you tell the players “there’s a horde of zombies coming down the corridor.” You draw a map, the players are going to get tactical after all. Then you spend about 3-5 minutes in total putting 50 minis or tokens down and adjusting the map all the while, answering questions the players have about their situation. In the best case scenario, the combat ends in 10 minutes. The party lobs a ton of fireballs or other AOE effects, and half of your zombies are done for within the first three turns. You spend a few minutes clearing tokens off the board as players take their turns. At the end of the situation, the zombies are dead within two rounds, and the players aren’t even scratched. They’re just down some spells, maybe. In the worst case scenario? The exact same combat plays out, but the players deal damage that’s just low enough to prevent the zombies from dying outright. You now have to roll saving throws for the zombies. Some of them don’t die to the fireball. Some of them get knocked down by melee weapons. Those have a chance to come back to life, and however did the designers of 5e decide this would be adjudicated, but by a saving throw? The zombies don’t hit, they don’t do damage, the end result is practically identical. It just happened to take a stupidly long period of time.

Funnily enough, this GM/Player interaction actually causes the GM to adjust, typically. They begin changing the types of encounters they throw at the party, in their set of linear combat encounters. Instead of engaging in 5 or 6 combat encounters, which is surprisingly far more healthy for the game, the GM grows dissatisfied with their collection of trash mobs. They begin consolidating encounters. They throw fewer of them in a day, with fewer monsters that are more highly leveled to compensate. You can’t really blame them; running tons of monsters is inefficient at face value. They’re not hurting the party, after all. But three or four encounters with a decent number of enemies (not a ton) can help wear down the party in preparation for larger encounters. As the shorter number of encounters fails to prove more effective, but becomes far easier to run, the GM doubles down on following the path of least resistance, bringing out statblocks two pages long for monsters that die in 3 rounds anyways.

Already we can see problems with this structure, even in the context of a combat-centric game. Why do the linear set of combat encounter need to end with the largest encounter? Why can’t the big encounter be number 2 or 3, with the remainder showing off how deadly minor encounters can be when the party doesn’t have all of their resources? The ineffectiveness of low-level monsters and the frankly stupid amount of time it takes to resolve using a horde of them combined leads to degenerate play. I used stupid given D&D has been around for almost 50 years or whatever, WOTC’s had control of it for something like 20 years, and no one bothered to fix this. The only “solution” was keeping player hitpoints low, and that literally never lasts.

Stupid.

Solution?

Alright, enough screwing around. What we’re going to do is develop a system of group-vs-party combat. It’s not mass combat, and it’s not completely individuated. The party is partially individuated in their actions, the monsters are (by default) something of an amorphous blob. We don’t say how many monsters there are. We don’t worry about monsters making individual attacks, or even against individual party members.

Step 1: Scenarios

First thing’s first, this combat scenario is theater of the mind. We need to know what conditions make this system work. Spoiler: none of them are really tactical.

If you have a map functioning as a visual reference or piece of art, that’s fine. Frankly though, you shouldn’t. Not unless there’s some visual detail you want to convey beyond your description of the room players can spot. The players don’t need a piece of art to know the room is 20x40. If the piece of art has a barrel next to a torch sconce, that could be important to someone. If you can manage providing the piece without a grid on it, great. I understand if you can’t though, whether the room had a group combat, individual combat, or no combat at all might’ve been up in the air.

Step 2: Initiative

I promise this is important to do before the encounter statblock.

Let’s talk about how the initiative normally works. Every creature (sometimes a class of creature, if you’re keeping things simple like me) has a spot on the initiative order, and as the phrase suggests, turns are taken in that order. This is the optimal solution for tactical, individuated combat scenarios. We on the other hand are taking care of party vs large number of creatures.

Not only does this pose challenges foreign to the current initiative system, a focus on theater of the mind also permits us to reinforce certain themes through a more complimentary initiative system. Spoiler for the monster statblocks, they don’t take turns so much as they take reactions. Said reactions are specific to when the PCs fail whatever it is they’re attempting to do.

What this nonsense translates to is as follows: players need to make decisions as a group. The actions they take impact one another, and as such, they take their turns together. The players are going roll initiative, as they generally do. The players will huddle up, discuss their plan of action, and detail (in order) what it is they’re going to do. Only one person tells the GM, and this person will be referred to as a Caller going forward. Because the monsters are purely reacting to player actions, players have a distinct advantage in combat scenarios. To compensate for this, we’re going to force players to commit to the actions their Caller relays to the GM. Because these scenarios don’t consider positioning, committing to actions is far less onerous. Furthermore, this teamwok-focused initiative is (I think) more engaging than sitting around and waiting for your turn to come up. Everyone has some part of their turn dedicated to thinking about what they’re doing (even if they’re already fairly certain) before they move on to adjudicating those actions. In this system, that segment of everyone’s turn is compressed into one collaborative segment at the start of each round. Not only do individual turns go by faster, the amount of time each player is guaranteed to spend engaging with the combat is increased.

Step 3: Group Statblocks

That’s enough teasing for one essay. In reality, you can probably run this type of encounter without the first two sections. But of course, it would be worse, and would probably interfere with the point of developing this system in the first place.

Group statblocks don’t have hitpoints. They rely on a “harm” system which determines the DCs for player actions. When a player succeeds on some harmful action against the monster, the monster takes one Harm. When the players accrue Harm equal to the number of players (we could also say number of friendly combatants), the enemy group is defeated.

On the flip side, group statblocks don’t have actions they take either. Group statblocks instead react to the party accruing a certain number of failures. If a party of 5 were fighting a horde of zombies, and they accrued 5 failures, the GM would slap them with…6d6 bludgeoning damage. Some group statblocks have a different number of reactions that occur on different numbers of failures. All statblocks have at least one for a number of failures equal to the number of combatants, and it’s usually going to be the most punishing.

Let’s make the zombie fight a little tougher, shall we? Now, zombies are constantly grabbing and groping at whatever drifts nearby. That includes swords and other weapons, which is super inconvenient for the wielder. The zombies apparently don’t know these weapons are bad for your health, so they go on annoying the intrepid paladin or beserker, putting their hands all over your melee weapons in a rude and non-consensual fashion. So, we’re going to give our zombies a reaction to a specific event. When a combatant misses a melee weapon attack, they have disadvantage on their next attack. See how this goes?

This is also how we begin evaluating the difficulty of group statblocks. Here’s a rough guide for difficulty, and actions taken.

The easiest group encounter would feature a DC of 10-12, and only a reaction upon a number of failures equal to the number of player combatants. I doubt I’d use this for anything other than a first level party, truth be told. A medium encounter would include a DC of 12-16, and have either a halfway-point reaction or a minor reaction to a single type of player failure, in addition to the end-point reaction.

A hard encounter is going to have a DC of 16-20, and will have both a minor reaction to specific player actions, and a halfway-point reaction (again, in addition to the end-point reaction). Finally, a deadly encounter will feature a DC of 20+. It will feature a reaction to specific player actions, a reaction for every 1-2 player failures, a halfway-point reaction, and an end-point reaction.

Step 4: Player Actions

Player actions can be broadly grouped into things done to hurt the enemy, things done to assist their friends (directly or indirectly), and things done to avoid suffering attacks and other harmful effects from the group enemy. So, whenever your players take an action, they’ll fall under one of these three categories, each of which have their own effect.

Harm
The player attempts to damage or substantially impair the group of enemies. If the player makes an attack, treat the Harm DC as the creature’s armor class. On a hit, the player must deal damage exceeding the group enemy’s Harm DC to inflict Harm.

If the player attempts to inflict Harm by using magic or a psionic manifestation, it must be able to significantly impact multiple enemies (whether directly or indirectly) to succeed. If the spell accomplishes this by dealing damage, the damage must exceed the group enemy’s Harm DC.

Finally, any attempt to harm the group enemy which forces them to make a saving throw or otherwise forces them to make some check considers the result to equal the group enemy’s Harm DC. For instance, instead of a group enemy rolling a Dexterity saving throw upon suffering a fireball, simply consider their saving throw to be (for instance) a 16, if that was their Harm DC.

A successful Harm check inflicts one Harm against the enemy group. A character can only inflict one Harm against the enemy group per turn.

Help
The player assists themselves or another combatant directly, or does so by impeding the enemy.
A successful Help check allows the targeted combatant advantage on their next saving throw or check, or to change initiative with the player which helped them after their next turn. Attempts at healing or providing similar benefits to other players through magic and other means falls under this category, as do spells meant to “buff” the combatant. Failing the check wastes any resource spent to accomplish it, without any benefit.

Fortify
The player attempts to avoid the damage dealt by the enemy group’s next reaction. On a successful Fortify check, the player ignores the next negative effect inflicted on them by the group enemy.

Now, 5e has lots of actions players can take on turns other than their own. Just kidding, I think there’s only 10 at base, then maybe 15 or so counting supplements. Any given player can only make use of 1-4 of them, usually. That’s okay, and you shouldn’t nuke these reactions from the player’s toolbox. In fact, in some cases I’d recommend letting your players use these reactions proactively. We’ll get to other considerations on action economy in a second, but again, resolving actions in this system is fairly easy provided you stay within the general bounds of these following principles":

• Things that give you a free attack or spell on a reaction: Attempt to Harm.

• Things that allow you to avoid damage, or attempt to avoid damage: automatically succeed on a Fortify check, or attempt a Fortify check, respectively.

• Things that allow you to diminish or potentially negate damage dealt to another creature: attempt or automatically succeed on a Help check.

Some of your players are able to use things like bonus actions, or are able to swing their weapon multiple times in a round. That’s fine, let them! Remember, a combatant can only deal one Harm to the group enemy per round. If the fighter has already managed to do this, and wants to use his remaining two attacks to Help his buddies, or even himself! That’s totally fine. It’s more opportunities for them to accumulate failures after all, potentially dooming his brothers in arms.

Okay, so we’ve been through at least one or two sections of this article where you might notice I’m getting tired of it. You can probably intuit I’ve been writing about a sentence to a paragraph per day pas whatever the initial burst was (about 1200 words I nailed out before I had to go do something else and never got back to it). So, I’m going to attempt to wrap this up quickly, so I can get tired of writing other articles. I think there are two questions people are going to have when it comes to working within this system:

1. (Player) Why do I need to make checks for things I can usually do for free?

   A: This is easy. You’re using a different combat system! But seriously, the system is meant to properly represent how much more deadly, fast, intense, and likely interesting an encounter with a large group of enemies ought to be. Narratively speaking, if there were zombies swarming all around you, and you wanted to heal your pal on the ground, there would be some difficulty in reaching him, casting the spell properly, avoiding damage along the way, etc. This system condenses all of that time consuming nonsense into a single check, the results of which you know the second the dice come to a halt.

2. (GM) What do I do about characters who can avoid damage reliably?
   A: This is easy too! So if your archer player is 600 feet away, they can still hurt things, and the group monster can’t hurt them. Fine! Usually, when people can’t be harmed by the group enemy, it’s due to some circumstance under which the character can’t reasonably contribute in some ways. Taking our archer player, let’s say they probably can’t take actions to Help their party. Additionally, we can reduce the number of failures needed for the group enemy to take a reaction! After all, the reactions only consider those they can actually harm. If the archer is missing from their 6 person party, I think it’s reasonable for the group enemy to only need 5 failures in order to respond with their end-reaction or whatever. Oh, and the archer missing still contributes to that failures.
   Besides all of that, it’s fine! We’re not actually looking to punish the archer here. The point of group enemies is to make combats with groups as fast and deadly as they ought to be. If we weren’t using this system, the archer player could do the exact same thing, with some pros and cons to their long distance firing just like in this system.
   

I’ll get to other questions later, as well as some additional thoughts on the article later this week (I think). Truth be told, there are plenty of thoughts I have on these subjects that don’t fit into a long-form structure, and aren’t worth interjecting my own train of thought with across the course of the article. Far better to spend them on a “Notes on ___” article. In fact, that’s what we’ll call it. In fact in fact, I bet I can do that to other articles. Hm. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

See you later.

How Lords of Brackas handles trainers.

Scrolling twitter, therefore essay. You know the deal by now.

So this tweet pops up in an OSR group chat, and I pop over to have a look.

Now this stuff always interests me, because the questions of “How do RPGs handle levels” and “How did everyone do it better 5e” are on my mind frequently. It’s one of those super easy things to take for granted when developing games. For instance, it’s common in the D20 games to put what you might call “trainer” or “learner” levels at the beginning of your level progression. If you want people to learn the game as they play, why not put the best levels to do that first? But wait! Most people start at level 1 regardless of whether it’s the best way to play that particular RPG. Even folks who are normally skeptical of WOTC’s design choices will approach this in a total uncritical state of mind. “It’s level 1, of course it’s the level you start at.” WOTC got everything wrong, but where to start? Nah man, they nailed it.

So as designers, it’s probably best if we think of how people are actually going to engage with our games. If you include training levels in your game, and you know people usually start at level one, maybe don’t include those training levels as part of the core progression. Unless you want every campaign to start off with a sloggy death march.

If you know people are easily confused, don’t start your essay on level trainers with an analogy on levels designed to teach you the game, known as training levels. Unless you want your audience to see you as having a total lack of or at best minimal sense of self awareness.

Crap.

Why have level trainers?

The first thing we need to address about level trainers is their unambiguous, specific value. What’s the criticism of them, again?

The purpose of level trainers in your game is to localize advancement within NPCs, demand a return to civilization or strongholds at given intervals, and give the PCs breathing room. In one of my favorite 5e games as a player, we were constantly moving to the next location and quest hook, because that’s how you play 5e. When another player and I wanted to make a potion, which we unambiguously had the resources, time, and expertise to do, the rest of the players said “No, we don’t have time, we have to go to (whatever it was).” Realistically speaking, not only did we have time, but we had no limits (that we were aware of) whatsoever!

It didn’t matter. Other players wanted to move on to the next thing, therefore we moved on. You just get dragged from place to place, chasing the next action high. You erode strategy from the game, long term goals can only live within the lowest common denominator of action sequences. What’s that lowest common denominator? Combat. You don’t overthrow the local baron in a clash between armies (none you’d have a meaningful impact on, at least), you face the baron down in an “epic” individualized combat. It lasts 3 rounds, and for some reason the baron is the toughest guy in the room. But that’s okay, let’s go do it again.

“We literally just need a few weeks to level here. You’re telling me we can’t wait that long to immediately go traipsing around the countryside?”

Having a level training mechanic isn’t so much to save players from themselves as it is to save players from other players, on the face of it. If you’re playing AD&D as intended (which is where the tweet thread comes from), the game is designed to kill stupid and foolhardy players who can’t think strategically. Taking as many notes as I can stomach from the OSR, Lords of Brackas will be following this trend.

Having a level trainer inflates the cost of not having downtime (which good games always address and meaningfully support) so severely as to make the choice not to take a break in town palpably stupid. Even the most gung-ho player will recognize this. Even if they want to go out and avoid leveling anyway, they will be shouted down by everyone else, much as the one person who wanted to stay put for a few days was shouted down in the reverse situation.

“It’s a bad simulation of how people actually learn”

Lewis probably has more sophisticated criticisms of level trainers, especially not when limited by 280 characters. This is not about poo-pooing him, we’re playing the ball, not the man. So I’m not insulting him when I say the idea your mechanic needs a narrative justification to exist is unambiguously stupid. The mechanic helps along the game. A simple “who cares” suffices to shut down people interrogating the narrative validity of a clearly and obviously beneficial element of your game.

A fellow I discussed this with in my discord made the same mistake.”They are a crude abstraction to represent a mispercieved lack in another abstraction.” But that stuff doesn’t actually matter. None of it matters! Downtime is good. Even in action heavy combat games like Lancer, they give you downtime actions between missions. They’re incredibly fun, they build up the tension for whatever action comes next, they reward you for thinking strategically (both in the moment and later on). They take full advantage of the player’s capacity to make choices. They don’t need a narrative justification, this is a game. We’re not simulating real life, we’re simulating Corwin and Merlin from the Amber Chronicles, Jack of Shadows, Cudgel the Clever at best, if we’re simulating anything at all.

So how does LOB do level trainers?

We’re going to start this off from an odd angle, given everything I’ve said so far: the narrative justification for level trainers.

There’s a few elements to note in this exchange. First, I have to note how genuinely stunned I am seeing Lewis understands what leveling up actually represents. Every time i have a conversation about multiclassing in trpgs I have to deal with (generally) otherwise intelligent people claiming it doesn’t make sense to “suddenly” gain some benefit not from their class package, a standard they never apply to the core progression itself. I have to walk through the same conversation each time on why they’re mistaking a mechanical nominal overlay for the actual narrative at the table.

In-narrative, your fighter could always make a bunch of attacks. But 5th level (in 5e) marks the point where your fighter can do it without reliably failing, at least so reliably they would suffer penalties in addition to just missing. This actually matters to to the level training we’re about to dive into. First though, we’re gonna finish commenting on the exchange. While Lewis is absolutely correct, leveling up is a condensed milestone of improvements, it happens without any fanfare. Nothing to commemorate the event. If someone were watching, they would have no indication the character had changed until they busted out something only a character of that level would have.

You might ask, who’s watching? That’s easy, the players are! See, while I agree with Lewis totally, he absolutely missed what I think Jeffro was getting at. Jeffro isn’t calling for level trainers to justify themselves to a narrative, presumably meant to simulate people learning in real life. He’s identifying the level trainers as adding to the narrative that already exists. Level trainers are NPCs! When you include them in your game, you turn the act of leveling up into an event, focused on a character you can interact with. Training montage’s aren’t “realistic” or anything, nobody thinking straight has that qualifier. Training montages appropriately fit an event the game is incomplete without.

So how does LOB do level trainers?

Please be the shortest part of the essay, I’m begging you.

First thing’s first! When players reach enough XP to level up, they receive hit dice and (if applicable) additional MP and PP (huehue). They do not receive new spells or manifestations know, new maneuvers, or skill points (which is what you spend to earn class features and feats). So you still get something for reaching an XP threshold, which is likely to help you finish whatever activity you’re currently engaged it, and then go back to town. But you still need to return to civilization.

In order to get all of the other benefits I mentioned, players must go to a civilized area to train. The training lasts a number of weeks equal to the player’s number of hit dice. The training has a pre-set cost, which grows along the same lines as increasing XP cost for levels. There’s a set of time per day players have to train, but that training can encompass a very large range of activities. Your Warlord player can wage a short military campaign in that time, and provided he has a trainer helping him with the campaign (like an advisor style character), he gets the rest of the benefits of leveling up.

We mentioned the ability for players to take actions multiple times by inflicting greater penalties for failure, remember? We’re going to start off with the penalties for failing those actions. Succeeding at these actions provide very strong benefits in relation to training, which we’ll discuss in a moment. Because of that, I want to show how terrible the potential failures are. You don’t really need to know the terms, just know they’re awful. Side note: we’re just going to refer to this class of actions as “extra” actions for the moment. I don’t care to set their final term in stone for the sake of an essay.

When a character fails an extra attack or maneuver they don’t know, they:

• Ends their turn immediately

• Provokes attacks of opportunity from all creatures within 10 feet

When a character fails an extra spell or other magic action, or a spell which isn’t prepared, they:

• Lose a component of 1d10 level (if any in inventory)

• Roll on the Major Wounds table

When a character fails an extra manifestation or other psionic action, they:

• Lose 1d10 psy points (if any available)

• Decrease casting score by 1d4. A successful extra manifestation or other psionic action removes this penalty.

When a character fails an extra skill check, they:

• Ends their turn immediately

• Treat the skill check as a critical failure

Got all that down? Suffice to say the cooler the action you try to take when you normally couldn’t, the more permanent the penalty. The more it would help your current situation, the more the penalty inconveniences or even screws you outright. So, why attempt this except in the most dire situations?

Well, there’s more than one reason, but only one is relevant to the current discussion. Here we go:

When a player succeeds an extra action, their XP gained for the day is increased by 1%. For each day xp is gained in this way, their next level’s training costs are decreased by 1% (up to 15% total). Benefits from successes against insignificant challenges are subject to removal from the Historian.

You get to decrease your training costs, and you get to launch yourself upwards faster! That’s honestly it for the moment. Until next time!

How Lords of Brackas does Monster Challenge Rating.

I’ve been plodding around in internet circles for awhile now, and some mechanics get a bad rap. The mechanic leads to degenerate play, or it brutalizes what ought to be well supported playstyles, or leads the GM astray, etc. Since I’ve begun my design/research/design journey, I’ve found some of these to be deserved, some undeserved, and some passed over by any ostensibly critical eye.

As I’ve been designing a roleplaying game, I’ve found one such mechanic to be mocked and ridiculed from the strangest angles; challenge ratings. Challenge ratings are rough approximations of the difficulty a given monster poses in combat. There are some systems which thoughtfully apply this to traps, social encounters, and exploration-based achievements, but they’re overwhelmingly applied to combat. More often than not, the designers do a poor job of it. Challenge rating is ballparked by designers thinking about how much the rough math of the game (who has what bonuses at a given level, players succeed at actions roughly 65% of the time, etc) interacts with players and how they typically act in combat.

This painstaking process results in CR values which, when plugged into a formula provided by the designers, tells you how deadly a given encounter can be. Lots of people (very stupidly) interpret CR as therefore being prescriptive with regards to what monsters a DM should deploy against their players. This is at best a misinterpretation, and I’m aware of very few people who balance their encounters for (all else being equal) a 1-1 match in power. No one does it, if for no other reason it’s a colossal amount of work for no payoff.

For most GMs, CR tells you what the XP value of a given monster is. That’s all. Well, maybe not, because when GMs are just looking for rough approximations of how difficult a given encounter is, CR throws you way off.

A few of my players in the 5e West Marches game I ran this past winter/spring were investigating an elven temple, which was producing wraiths for a variety of reasons not relevant to this essay. I like including plants with or adjacent to any given encounter with elves, so busted out a shambling mound (CR 5) and corpse flower (CR 7) to attack the players if they ventured in a specific area. They did (to my delight), and the combat began! There was just one problem; the shambling mound was a way more effective monster than its counterpart, despite the corpse flower having legendary actions and the ability to summon minions of its own. This wasn’t just a function of circumstance; the shambling mound has a +2 to hit on the corpse flower. Despite the CF having more attacks and hitting like an absolute truck, it wasn’t able to scratch my players most of the time.

I understand why the designers placed it at CR 7. It has an aura feature that can diminish the party’s competence, provided some of them don’t immediately succeed on their save against it, which renders them immune for 24 hours. It has minions it can summon, and while they’re just zombies, the undead can soak up an extra attack or two. This would be a waste of actions, but the corpse flower has legendary actions, meaning it can utilize its minions without completely ruining its action economy.

So on first glance, the CR is justified. There’s a problem, though. Because the players can’t usually trade blows on a 1-1 basis with monsters, players tend to prioritize bumping their armor class and hitpoints, as well as items or features that provide bonuses to saving throws. In combat, players make use of features imposing mechanical penalties on their enemies, such that the monster is more likely to miss a given attack or is circumstantially unable to target a player character effectively to begin with. In other words, players have a tendency to stack the deck in their favor once they understand how the game plays. That’s fine, we should expect that as designers.

We should expect that as designers.

5e’s monsters are assigned a CR as if they’re doing it in one pass. There’s no real thought put into “alright, but what about once the players know what they’re doing?” Should a CR 7 creature miss its shots against a level 5 or 6 party? Of course not, that’s absurd. The issue with this CR stuff is it doesn’t provide reliable information for the most basic elements of the challenge they’re supposed to pose. How many hits can this creature take? If I can answer that question, I can get a rough estimate of how many times my players need to smack it for it to go down, which tells me how many rounds before it goes down. What’s this creature’s minimum bonus to hit? If I can answer that question, I know how likely the monster is to hit players before modifiers.

What if we designed CR from the ground up with these questions in mind? None of the extra trimmings factor into it. Just “How many hits can it take” and “what’s its bonus to hit?” We can still tack extra stuff onto the monsters, but when the GM is looking down the monsters by CR list, all they see is the two most important questions answered with regards to combat. “Can this guy deal damage with a basic attack”, and “How long can this guy last in a fight?”

Enter Lords of Brackas, my current TRPG project.

First thing’s first, we simplified hitpoints. If you surpass a certain amount of damage, you score a “hit”. It’s a threshold, so your players can still be goblins fawning over the shiny polyhedrals making click-clack sounds. But we’re not doing the “well which of the 20 monsters on the board has 36 hitpoints instead of 39 hitpoints?” It’s just a tick mark. You can (and should) have the players take care of it. Just a little slip of paper on or near the base of the mini (if you’re using a tactical map) will do, dash, done. Flick of the wrist. That’s how long it takes to resolve a player’s successful attack on your end as a GM.

How many hits can a creature take, you ask? Easy! It’s an amount equal to their CR. First question answered! We mentioned thresholds a second ago, may as well explain that a bit. In order to score a hit against the creature, you need to deal a certain amount of damage which surpasses the threshold. This is always an integer of 5.

• CR 1-4: Threshold of 5

• CR 5-9: Threshold of 10

• CR 10-14: Threshold of 15

• CR 15-19: Threshold of 20

• CR 20-24: Threshold of 25

Part of the reason I developed the simplified “hits” system was to make combat go faster. Less math, more swords! No need to look down at the sheet more than once or twice, let’s keep things punchy. Additionally, this system of hitpoints is truly universal. 3rd party supplements don’t have to rewrite HP scaling for combat encounters, they can just scale up in a very practical fashion what the game already does.

Let’s switch over then to the second question I mentioned earlier; what’s the creature’s minimum bonus to hit? Well, we go to the CR table again. It’s easy! It’s equal to the monster’s CR. If I say as a baseline the monster will never have a bonus to hit lower than its CR, the GM can calculate the minimum chance to hit based on their individual players at their table.

But while we’re on the subject, we’re taking a pretty proactive approach to CR, aren’t we? Instead of ball-parking and making guesstimates that don’t really have any use to the GM, we’re saying “the moment we set this creature’s CR, we already know x number of things about it.” So why not do more? We’re turning CR into an actual mechanic, something that matters outside edge case summoning spells. Lords of Brackas assumes players have two actions at any given time. They can’t take more than one of the same action on a given turn (splitting them into a morale check and a spell, for instance) until they pick up specific features allowing them to do so, but that’s not the case for our monsters! One of the most annoying aspects of running higher level monsters in 5e is the disparate action economy. Sorry, your dragon spends their action on casting a spell or using their breath weapon. That’s all, and then your 5 or so players precede to spend an hour beating on it before it goes again. Cool. Lots of monsters get multiattack, but that’s never used for the coolest things the monster can do. Not so in LOB, we want our monsters to do cool stuff. How do we decide how many actions a creature gets? Why, with challenge rating again.

• CR 1-4: One action

• CR 5-9: Two actions

• CR 10-14: Three actions

• CR 15-19: Four actions

• CR 20-24: Five actions

It’s also a nice way of telegraphing information to the players in a subtle fashion. “This guy has fewer actions than you, not as dangerous. This guy has as many actions as you, he’s probably competent. This guy has more actions than you, be careful. This guy has twice as many actions as you, you’re in even more danger. This guy has more than twice as many actions as you, you’re boned.” Of course, we’re packing things into the system such that a given group of CR 1-4 monsters are always going to be a threat, because LOB is more about exploration than combat. But we’re not going too in depth on the actual design of said monsters.

There’s one last thing we can do with CR (that we right about here), and it’s actually a second order function of the prescriptive CR system we’ve developed here today. Legendary actions were created to make particular creatures more threatening by giving them access to actions not taken on their turn. I wanted to make this option available to LOB creatures as well. You might think a CR 20 dragon who already has five actions might not need legendary actions. You might think that’s overkill, if you’re a little bitch. But the point of this legendary action system isn’t for specific powerful monsters; it’s turning any creature into something more threatening than it was before. How do you adjudicate legendary actions? It’s simple, they just count as another creature as far as the XP of the encounter is concerned. How do you determine the additional XP? Simple again! Each legendary action counts as a creature worth XP equal to the number of actions the legendary creature has. For example, the aforementioned legendary dragon has 5 actions. If we give him a legendary action or reaction, it counts as a CR 5 creature insofar as the encounter is concerned. A legendary action counts as a creature of CR equal to the number of actions the legendary creature has.

I think that’s all we’ll write about today, next time I’ll do HP on the player side of things. As a final note, I’ve mentioned once or twice I intend Lords of Brackas to have a focus on exploration. If that’s the case, why spend so much time on developing an in-depth combat system with a healthy mix of strategic and tactical support? Two reasons. First, the combat engine can’t be accidentally clunky. I need to pay careful attention to a few core concepts and make sure the whole damn night doesn’t get flushed down the drain every time a fight with more than 10 people breaks out. That doesn’t mean I need to micromanage everything, and then risk the whole thing coming apart whenever some idiot GM who thinks they’re a game designer tinkers with it. No, I just need to put a few safety systems the GM or players can demand be used when it looks like a fight with a horde of zombies breaks out. “Looks like you guys stacked the deck in your favor enough to win, but we’re not gonna spend all night figuring out by how much. We’ll use the Quick Fight rules.”

The game will expand far beyond players and whatever group of monsters are standing between them and loot at any given moment. I wouldn’t make resolving what happens between them take the whole night unless I wanted to cross out the big scale. This is what leads to the misconception that the presence of tactical gameplay strikes out strategic gameplay; not so. I went in-depth on that subject in an earlier article, so I won’t address the debate of tactical vs strategic gameplay. What I will say is combats which take all night to resolve push out strategic gameplay by necessity, whether those combats are tactics-heavy or not.

The second reason feeds into the first; lethality. I find myself tired of the hitpoint inflation induced by modern games. Players and monsters have low hitpoints, but eventually players learn how to game the system (as they can and should). Their low hitpoints fail to matter as much! The GM and players engage in an arms race of hitpoints, until they stop playing that game. The designers themselves get wrapped up in this self-destructive spiral as well, as more supplements for encounters and adventures are released! It’s all nonsense. We’re making a mechanic out of what hitpoints are supposed to represent, and doing away with the middleman. No more worrying about “well my paladin can stack these 15 dice with this spell slot and with the salve the ranger gave him he’ll do 100 damage and-” nope, he deals a hit.

With that in mind, I can start stacking features which are more lethal in the other direction! All creatures are much more reliable in terms of how many rounds they’ll last in a fight, and it takes far less time to track their damage. It’s hard to keep combat threatening if everything goes down in a round, and now we have a hard-stop mechanic in place. At least, when it comes to the monsters and players starting out on equal footing. Thje’ll still be able to mop certain encounters through surprise and guile, which means they’ll naturally stray away from direct confrontations, and become extra scared at the prospect of getting surprised themselves.

Just as I planned. Player character hitpoint mechanics coming in soon, maybe next week.

A simple change to 5E's monster design

I was in the mood to write today, as I am every day, and was having trouble building momentum, as I do every day. It’s been two months since my last essay so I figure, why not type something up in order to get myself going? I was running my 5E West Marches Campaign a few weeks ago, and the players were headed to the base of several rogue scientists. It was about three days travel by air, so I had them roll on the aerial encounter chart 3 times, allowing the players to make some modifications thanks to specific characters they have within the party (a Ranger with a background in sailing).

Among finding a redhead woman in a barrel and a portal to the cloud realms, they have a very special aerial encounter. A cloud rushes to meet them, everything goes dark, and a warm, ambient light slowly builds around them. Passing through the cloud above the vessel is a creature I described as a six finned whale-like entity singing softly as it swims through the air. Its belly is covered by thousands of blue gemlike barnacles, hundreds of which fall off and onto the deck of the ship. The players took one look at their bountiful gift, shouted “man the harpoons”, and turned around to pursue. The combat was very short; the players quickly decided to flee, thanks to some encouragement by the whale.

The creature began its unhappy response to this unprovoked assault by slapping off the prow of the ship (using its tail). The players still might’ve continued their attack were it not for the whale’s second course of action; singing. Here’s the effect of its song:

After the party got hit by this, they turned around as quickly as possible. Fantastic! To be clear, I didn’t mind if they killed this thing, they would’ve gotten a huge bounty depending on how much of the whale’s carcass they could salvage. The whale on the other hand did mind, and I was pleased at its capacity to defend itself.

So why am I bringing all of this up? How often have you as a GM deployed some monster that causes fear, causes nausea, etc only to find that 5 out of your 6 players made their saving throw and nothing happens. The dragon appears on scene, roars in all of its terrifying might…and the PCs stand there, stoic and unfazed. Okay, maybe that’s not the actual fiction of the game. But it sure is annoying for the monster to bust out some tremendously destructive feature and…nothing happens, because the player succeeded. Now, I’m on the player side of the GM screen often enough to know the player still feels tension and relief when the monster’s big screw-you doesn’t do anything. The trouble is primarily on the GM side of the screen, where your impression is “oh, the monster did nothing”. It’s also annoying on a mechanical level. The monster attempts to do a thing, spends their action doing it, and nothing happens. Whether the encounter was random or designed, that’s incredibly annoying and disappointing. It just makes for bad gaming, frankly. It’s well known the 5e monster manual is 200 pages of “big sack of hitpoints that doesn’t do anything interesting, unless it’s casting a spell”. So in the instances where a monster uses a save-or-suck feature, your expectation of the monster to be interesting clashes with the reality of “they just wasted their round”.

Boring. Don’t do that. It’s a tremendous obstruction to running more lethal games. Imagine for the moment if we took all of the monsters with a “fear aura” style feature in the game, and edited them as follows. If you succeed on the saving throw to avoid becoming frightened, you take psychic damage. Maybe it’s only the first saving throw that produces this effect, folks who save later were punished enough with the frightened condition.

Think about it; the dragon pops out and roars at your players. They make their saving throws, and avoid being frightened! But the act of overpowering their natural instinct to flee was so intense it literally caused them harm. Gritty!

It also helps the mechanical side of things. A lot of the monster manual is diminished in its effectiveness because there are so many opportunities for the monsters to fail in doing anything. I don’t worry about whether a creature is too high of a CR to fight my players, but I like to know going into the combat how effective it’ll be. If there are huge gaps in the creature’s damage output and negative impact on the party, I’ll have literally no idea how tough of an encounter this will be. I can’t imagine how much more difficult that makes life for GMs who do design all of their encounters!

5E made a “damage is king” game. You’re not supposed to end a fight without the monsters either dropping to 0 HP, or fleeing because they took too much damage. So why are there all of these gaps in the monster’s destructive potential?

So, look at your monster manuals. Look at your homebrew monsters. Do you want them to be more enjoyable to run? Do you want them to feel more lethal? Pick a save-or-suck feature. Do this especially if failing its saving throw produces a condition. Now, add damage for succeeding the (at the very least initial) saving throw! We don’t even need to do any crazy math or make any charts for a rough estimate of how much damage it should be.. Just look at the damage the monster deals with an attack, and model it after one of those. Done! Easy.

You’re welcome. Oh, and here’s the creature’s full statblock, in case you wanted to use it. Yeah, it’s chunky.

Class Design 2: Building Dynamic Core Features

We’re back! Let’s talk core features. What did we leave off on? That’s right, the first core feature for our artificer.

You can infuse objects and weapons with magic. When you cast a spell that targets only yourself, you can choose to forgo the effect and infuse a small or smaller object with the spell for one hour. Any creature who holds the object can gain the spell’s effects by using the appropriate action, expending the magic in the process.

We designed the above in this series’ previous entry. This is I think a less wordy modification of how Infuse Magic in the original Artificer UA worked, with an additional restriction or two (which helped bring down the word count). It’s why I think the original article had the right direction when it came to realizing the artificer in an edition with no crafting system; instead of forging flametongue and frostbrand swords, you’re putting a bit of magic into a small object to let other people use it. Sure!

Lets go over the general principles this class feature adheres to. We’ll go about demonstrating those principles as we flesh out the class writ large, but here they are to start:

1. The class feature interacts with basic features.

2. The class feature establishes character role.

3. The class feature establishes character archetype.

4. The class feature leaves space for additional features.

5. The class feature leaves space for divergent abilities.

The class feature interacts with basic features.
Let’s define out terms; basic features I’m going to define as things the class can use that aren’t unique to the class. Weapons and spellcasting are good examples. Ditto for features like armor, you don’t need to be a specific class to take advantage of these by and large. So, when I create a class’s core feature, I want it to interact with the class’s proficiencies. The player otherwise starts wondering “Wait, why do I have this other stuff?” If I give your artificer spells, weapons, and armor, then lead off with a spider-bot-gun-turret for your first class feature, it’s gonna feel out of place.

The feature I’ve provided here matches the principle perfectly. You have a new way of utilizing a basic feature (spells) and can combine it with held objects for later use. Great! Your player just learned what the basic features they have access to do, and their character sheet’s first additional burden is just a different way of using them.

The class feature establishes character role.
Some people are averse to the language of roles, which have existed literally since the hobby began, and accurately describe both basic styles of play and narrative implications. Those people are wrong. 5 man band’s been around for awhile folks. Nothing wrong with gamefying it a little.

The character’s role isn’t prescriptive, it’s descriptive. We’re laying out the basic tendencies of how the class will act for people who want to follow it. People who want to go their own way (“well I want to be a tank with my artificer”) will do so anyway, and will appreciate the class spelling out what it is they will actively not conform to while playing the character.

Our Infuse Magic feature plays off a few different aspects of the game, and as with most support characters their role is ever so slightly obscured by the mechanics. That’s fine, the players can discover it. Infuse Magic takes magic you already had access to, and makes it portable. Anyone can use it. So, clearly the class’s primary advantage is granting other people magic!

The class feature establishes character archetype.
Artificers are referred to as “mechanics” in some media with a spellpunk or sword and planet bent, which is what we’re going for. It’s the superior theme in fantasy, sorry not sorry. It’s been said the artificer is the person who leans down next to a locked door, pulls out a pouch, and rummages through 90 different variations of keys, files, picks, wedges, glue, you name it, except all of the tools in the pouch are wands. They’re solution oriented spellcasters and tinkerers. As such, the artificer through accomplishing their “job’ present themselves as mages fundamentally invested in the mundane world.

The artificer doesn’t want a spell to summon an arcane cannon; he wants 2 minutes with your cannon so he can turn it into a mess of glyphs that’ll obliterate its target in one hit. He doesn’t want to forge a new magic necklace using ancient formulae and rare components to protect its wearer (okay he does, but some situations call for more expedient solutions), he wants to etch a protective sigil onto something you’re wearing right now. The artificer “hacks” magic, they take shortcuts for less impressive but more reliable effects than wizards, and cut out a lot of the risk and investment involved. This is why they can combine martial studies with their study of arcane magic. If you have a shortcut to making a magic gun, you may as well learn how to use it.

The class feature leaves space for additional features.
This is hardly an all-encompassing class feature. It doesn’t turn your regular mage into some behemoth, or a sentient though bubble, or a blur on the battlefield, or…you get the idea. The feature modifies something the class gets as part of its basic progression. This honestly doesn’t need all that much explanation, truth be told. Because the feature modifies something the class already gets (like features modifying sorcery points), it leaves space for additional features to get tagged in whatever its level spread is.

The class feature leaves space for divergent abilities.
Okay, this one is obvious. We have endless ways to alter how this ability functions both for the class as a whole or for specific subclasses. Actually, let’s do a miniature version of that right now.

First, general progression features.

Directed Implements: You can now use Infuse Object with spells that target a single creature.

Scaled Production: You can now use Infuse Object with spells that have an area of effect.

Living Implements: You can cast spells through friendly creatures within 30 feet of you, as if they had cast them. For instance, you can cast Shield when an ally within range is targeted by an attack.

Second, subclasses.

Alchemist: You can infuse potions with spells with a target of self. Whoever consumes the potion gains its effects and the effects of the spell, with whatever action it takes to consume a potion.

Bombardier: When you infuse a spell with an area of effect into one of your munitions, the spell is cast by the munition detonating. The spell’s new area of effect is the munition’s area of effect, and its duration (damage and other harmful effects) is the munition’s duration. A save is only made against the munition; a creature must save against the munition’s DC to save against the infused spell.

Foreman: You can infuse spells with a target of self into constructs you control. The construct can cast the spell when you command it to.

Additionally, when a spell you infused into a construct is cast, the spell affects you as well (the construct holds concentration for it).

Sharpshooter: When you infuse a spell that targets a single creature into a piece of ammunition, any creature struck by the ammunition is affected by the spell. Regardless of its duration, the spell ends at the end of your next turn.

Get the drift? The original feature was worded very carefully. It gave any designer just enough restrictions on what it could be used for and simultaneously enough narrative and mechanical leeway to build off of later without needing to be the artificer’s only shtick. We’ll move onto different class features next week, I have some other things to clean up before then.

Fixing Experience

“It’s all about combat”, they whine. “Only get XP for combat”, they screech.

Fine, I’ll hand you the solution.

See, I can sympathize with not wanting all XP to come from combat. Not necessarily killing stuff, but generally combat involves killing stuff. It most often involves killing stuff. I will give credit to the 5E devs for mentioning a monster can simply be defeated to gain XP from the encounter. Why is that?

Later. If you want to introduce XP for discovering locations, crafting items, getting hirelings, building strongholds or vehicles, or really any number of things, you don’t have anything to go on. Yet another strike against “You can do anything in D&D”, a perspective shaped by blinding you to other mechanics and modes of play 5e either doesn’t or can’t support. I won’t harp on that much in this essay though, don’t worry. See, this is another place in which designers can take all of 20 minutes to write down actionable advice the GM could modify as they see fit. So from here on out, you’re guilty if you don’t.

There are good reasons for wanting XP gain from sources other than combat. Your players should want to level up. If combat is all that grants XP, they’ll focus on combat, whether they like combat or not, as a means of following all of their goals. In a game whose only progression and mode of play is locked into combat, I can understand doing that. But in a game ostensibly built to support the whole of fantasy gaming? Not okay. Point being, if you want your players to view activities other than moving onto the next thing and killing it as being worthwhile in a mechanical sense, you need to adjust how XP is gained. It’s not enough to simply have some people at the table who personally value these things; establishing their value in progressing the game sets the tone for the whole table. Otherwise, you risk those people who personally value things being outnumbered, and therefore not engaging with the alternative actions or modes of play. “We can’t craft that potion, that’s two whole days of us not killing stuff. Sure, if we die, that’s a lot of days of us not killing stuff, but those two days of not attempting to kill stuff is the real problem.”

Ugh.

So I think we all understand changing how XP is gained will change player priorities, no need to harp on it. I don’t have any special insights we’ll gain from diving into that, so let’s make this essay as short as I think it can be. Back to an earlier question; why do players gain XP from monsters defeated, rather than actually needing to kill the monster?

It’s simple, and I’m going to answer it with another question: what does XP mean? It’s experience, a word I’ve avoiding (title excepted) until now. See, when your players force a monster into surrendering, they’ve actually done a few different things at once. First, they’re using their talents and skills and putting them into action to accomplish a goal. When they defeat the monster, they’ve accomplished that goal, providing positive feedback and acting as practice for the next battle. They’re witnessing the consequences of their actions, taking the events in. All of these things fall under experience; the players have gained something that better prepares them on the whole for the next battle they face. Just like everything else.

The solution is in the term, experience. How do you decide whether to give a player experience for something they’ve done or that’s happened to them? Ask yourself; does accomplishing this aid the players in the future? Yes, that’s open ended, but we have to start with open ended. Let’s go down the line of examples. Your players have discovered a location. Is it a dungeon? Is there adventure there? A monster lair? Potential stronghold? Then the players have discovered something of use to them. Give them XP! Did they discover herbs or plants useful for crafting during wilderness survival? Give them XP! Did they craft something? Give them XP!

You guys get the idea. I’m not going to go into the math of giving XP for some of these things, I think I’ll do that in another essay. This is just permission for using experience as it’s honestly meant to be. There’s a final note I wanna put here, though. I honestly can’t in good conscience end the essay without it. If you want to specifically put a focus on exploration and provide incentives for players to minimize combat’s prominence in the game, implement treasure as XP. Some people think it’s explicitly gamist, but that falls flat to me. First off, it’s a game, it’s okay to have a gamist element or two. Second, it’s easy to explain away treasure as XP. Treasure is necessary to maintain your equipment, component pouches, lifestyle, health, etc. It’s a very effective stand-in for mechanics dealing with the maintenance aspect. I’m on the record as saying treasure=XP would work tremendously well for a Witcher style game. Geralt doesn’t keep all of his cool stuff or features from game-to-game. If we were coming up with a narrative explanation for why this happens, it’s that whenever he falls on hard times, he’s unable to keep his health, equipment, or spirits in proper order so as to maintain his previous level of skill. Geralt enjoying the attention and coin of nobles is better at some things than Geralt drunk off his ass, starving, and penniless in a gutter.

You guys got it? Give people Experience for things that give the character experience. Alternatively, you don’t need to rework any of this stuff, just turn the character’s net-worth into their XP and save yourself from a ton of work and a game exclusively focused on combat.

Tactics and Strategy, and Strategy and Tactics

Back on the essay train. I’ve got a lot of thoughts, and you people are gonna hear about em. Several months ago I was chatting with a few OSR folks I’m fond of about the modern incarnation of D&D, resource management, and the lack of strategy in said modern incarnation. People are spending their encounter/daily features in a fashion that’s still quite similar to 4th edition, going to sleep, and getting back up for the next 15 minute adventuring day. That’s the pace of the game, there’s no strategic element to the combat, they’re too balanced.

Nonsense, I said! The party’s resources must be managed appropriately in response to encounters, and parties who overextend in response to combat and other obstacles are punished. I said these things like an idiot; because this is not strategy. This is tactics, as I was then helpfully informed.

See, tactics is the element of managing an individual set of obstacles, and the resources (or lack thereof) you expend to overcome it. But in the earliest iterations of D&D, combat was a thing to be avoided! I was admittedly dumbstruck. There are a lot of elements of OSR gaming I implement in my games (more as of recent), so I always interpreted differences in style and design as being right of center/left of center. This really threw me for a loop, though. I always saw combats as a thing to eventually prosecute. I’m way more cautious than the rest of my gaming group when it comes to “can we take this on?” in sandbox games (mostly as a counterweight), but I rarely think to say “Let’s accomplish x goal without fighting at all.”

Makes sense, 5e is about killing monsters. Slowly. Very, very slowly.

But man, this intrigued me. See, the mindset of “The point is to fight them” is how tactics butt out strategy, especially as players get higher level. You become less and less afraid of fights, and therefore the element of danger is inherently diminished. Right?

Well, it depends on your game. And I don’t mean style (but also yes) at your table, I literally mean the design of the game. See, what we have to discuss is how resources are regained and how frequently, how permanent the consequences of fights are, and the scale at which these fights take place. I’m going to start with the low hanging fruit, because it’s the least noodly, the most concrete. I really don’t think anyone would disagree with what I’m about to say.

Expanding the scale of conflict ensures strategy is always present within your game. Players aren’t as afraid of fights in dungeon crawls? Their hirelings find themselves in more dangerous situations. Hirelings improve enough to hold their own? The players have to worry about mercenary companies, militias, and standing armies they can’t hope to fight alone. The players can take on a dragon? Doesn’t mean their boat or airship can. Players have a nice standing force? They need a place to garrison those forces. That place can be attacked. The players can expand their domain, and have good incentive to do so. Other people can make the same conclusion, about the players’ domain.

You can maintain a sense of strategy in your games by giving your players assets they can’t protect via round-by-round combat. Even if the players regain their HP by finishing a long rest (they shouldn’t, more on that later), their assets don’t. Let’s start out with my favorite; vehicles. My ever growing love for sword and planet along with spellpunk has led me to force tons of vehicles into my games. Steam based trains, magical and engineered airships, spelljammers, boats, you name it. I’m still looking for a good excuse I mean opportunity to put tanks in. These things need to be repaired! They’re not on a daily/encounter/at will timer for their resources, they need to be supplied, maintained, and repaired. Not asking the players to bust out spreadsheets mind you, this stuff can be reduced to a simple gold or resource cost at regular intervals. Making my players manage how many cannons had how much ammo for how many months and replaced to increasingly volatile gunpowder how often would actually hurt the strategic element of the game, because the players would stop engaging with it. For good reason! Don’t they have a lieutenant or first mate to pass this stuff off to? Give him the gold and have him handle it, there’s loot out there waiting for our greasy, soot-stained, and blood-soaked embrace.

Provided an asset like a vehicle is an object of convenience, desire, and/or purpose for some larger goal, the players will get attached to it. The players will approach threats to the asset to some degree on the asset’s terms. Even if they decide “We’re going to basically sacrifice our ship pursuing the dragon”, the decision will come after deliberating on the long term consequences of that choice. The players must stick to travelling via rail lines if they want to avoid wilderness encounters. They’ll be at a disadvantage facing flying creatures. What are they going to do with the crew? It doesn’t matter that between rage, a haste spell, several potions, and the aid of his +5 greataxe +10 vs dragons +1d4 cold damage the barbarian could solo the dragon, if your game supports that sort of thing. Engaging in combat at this scale will have effects felt days, weeks, or even months later.

Let’s use an example I’m less familiar with across play but has some literary precedent I can lean on. I’ve recently started re-reading the Chronicles of Amber a few weeks after I finished the 10 book series, but I’ve skipped the first book on this second pass (in spite of it being a masterpiece). The princes of Amber are all heroic in their talents and abilities, you can easily consider them mid to high level characters. But let’s say (and I’m keeping everything spoiler-free) these princes go at it with one another not just one on one, but with armies? One prince may well win a duel with the other, even several! But what happens when the stronger brother’s force is still defeated? Well, the stronger brother is still defeated. He can get captured, be executed. Even if he gets away, the man just lost an army! Will he be able to raise another force, now that he’s lost this prior fight? Will he be able to do it on the run from his enemies? It almost certainly won’t be a bigger force, with these additional complications. How does he tip the odds in his favor?

It doesn’t matter that the stronger character is stronger on an individual basis, because the conflict is on a vastly bigger scale than what he can deal with individually. Is this a daily/encounter/at-will problem? Even in a game with those mechanics, strategy reigns supreme the second the game scales upwards. I should also note before moving on that the larger scale actually allows the GM far more leeway in reacting and adapting to the players’ actions. It doesn’t matter what your game’s skill system is or how you implement it, you’re not learning the enemy’s troop movements, secret alliances and patrons, and special units off of a perception check. What’s more, the resolution of larger scale conflicts tends to take more time to resolve in the fiction of the game, meaning events have more opportunities to be introduced (improvised). A volcano exploded, another domain decided to invade, supernatural storms are cropping up, all sorts of modifiers you can’t really bust out in a dungeon crawl.

It’s also important to note a wider campaign scope doesn’t make progress as a simple party moot. There’s no reason you need an army to find out the enemy wizard has been feeding virgins to a demon a few hexes away for unlimited* spells. Nor do you need an army to find out where that demon is! The new scale doesn’t make dungeon crawling as players useless at all. Expanding the scope of conflict correctly modifies (not nullifies) the individual scale, providing an endless series of hooks for your players to chase and conquer.

Was that long enough? Don’t worry, I don’t think I have nearly as many thoughts on the other points.

Next up: how permanent are the consequences of a fight? This is tricky and it has some overlap with the final question, but I have a way around that. Obviously, players generally have access to or can retrieve resources which allow them to mitigate or fix the consequences of a fight. So, the question of when they get those resources and what they look like is important. But, first is figuring out what those consequences are, on which the final question rests.

So, what are some consequences that are more long term by nature? I’ll steer away from examples of assets being destroyed, as I think we all understand those to be long term. Your castle wasn’t built in a day, we get it. So, we move to more personal examples. Best one? Save or die. Save or die is everything it says on the tin; you’re threatened by an effect or attack, you make a saving throw, and if you fail, you die. Pretty damn permanent! There are some attacks and effects the measure of your heroism isn’t relevant to. Either you got out of the room, or the arc pylon turned you to ash. Even if you have things like resurrection (which only idiots say cheapens death by default), there’s a good chance they’re not getting resurrected during the event that killed them. How fares the party down a man in combat?

Poorly.

In fact, this is a pretty large category of consequences to deploy. Consequences the party can probably deal with after they’ve cleared the obstacle but not before. they’ve dealt with the obstacle. You may at this point be saying “But wait! We’re trying to discourage the players from treating all obstacles as problems to be solved, rather than avoided.” You’re right, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten. See, if getting your arm lopped off across the course of combat is about a 1 in 5 chance, you’ll start looking at options other than direct confrontation. Ditto for save or die, or getting teleported away from your party, or losing your magic item or….you get the idea. See, it doesn’t matter if you can fix the things I mentioned after dealing with the obstacle, because they make it exponentially more likely you won’t beat the obstacle. That’s the basis of strategy over tactics. it’s just that many devs never considered how to retain it beyond 3rd level, when folks started getting ballsy thanks to hitpoint inflation. Know what doesn’t care about hitpoint inflation? The ankheg with a 20% chance to lop off your leg when it hits an attack. “Oh, but there are prosthetics in Uruzaki, we can get him a new one!” Lotta good that does you in the third level of a dungeon slowly filling with water.

Roll to doggy paddle.

Bottom line is, obstacles need to inflict consequences that generate a death spiral. The players may escape the death spiral, but its effects need to be felt before the party can fully recover. Moreover, they need to ensure the next death spiral will reach its final conclusion without some fantastic luck. Maybe the party survives an encounter in which two characters fail a save-or-die, and another character loses a limb. Maybe those characters are even brought back to life, and the party has to spend a bunch of resources to get them ready for another fight. Think they’re rearing to go at another, similar obstacle? If they are, they’ll learn, provided the game is willing.

We come to our final question; how often does the party get the resources back? My buddy Matt’s second campaign was a mixed bag for me. Had a slow start, but once it picked up (about halfway), man did things absolutely take off. Shot into domain level play, mass combat, tons of loot, and a fairly epic story (even I can enjoy those). Something that imprinted a feeling of levity (and resulted in what became the most lethal campaign we’d experienced up to that point) was an optional rule in the 5e DMG. Basically, you didn’t get HP back once you finished a long rest. You had to spend hit dice to get your HP back, which you can spend on a short or long rest. You get half of your total hit dice back when you finish a long rest, but it was still brutal on the party. We cleared out a tower of vulture riders, having expended literally all of our spells and hit dice to regain most of our HP. After we ignored my suggestion we rest in the fortified tower with a drawbridge, sturdy doors, beds, etc before traveling, we hit the road. Along the road we failed our perception checks, got ambushed by gnolls, and almost had a TKP. We had the fear of God after that, one of the few 5E campaigns where everyone was in agreement; we need to be careful, or we’re dead. Usually in agreement. Mistakes were sometimes made. In any case, whether your game grants your players their most important resource (hitpoints) back on a long rest, or whether they have to use other means to get it back, changes how players approach situations. The funny thing is, you can introduce multiple different ways of regaining HP when this happens. Resting at an inn or similar civilized locale? That gets you to full HP, congrats. Visiting a whorehouse? Regains half HP and half of your hit dice, provided you take a long rest afterwards (very important). Hey! Stay on topic.

Let’s take another element of resource management; spells. Spells usually come back on a long rest, and I’m honestly not inclined to change that as of yet. Maybe it’s something an optional rule could impact, but that’s for another time. See, spells can be and should remain a way to overcome obstacles with ease, provided they work. You hear me, everyone? Provided they work. Where am I going next?

I’m not going to get into the type of resource management or how it would work, but given that spells produce lots of effects, what if there were harsher consequences (and hopefully, better rewards to balance things out) for spells failing? Spell reversal has enticed me ever since I read an excerpt from Cudgel the Clever(? Maybe it was Jack of Shadows) where attempting to encyst someone beneath the earth accidentally unearths everyone ever affected by the spell. Beautiful. What an extra twist of drama when someone fails their save-or-die! Be a real shame if the cleric or pontiff failed their roll. Bigger shame if they fail and the spell reverses. Now you’re two party members down.

More importantly, the presence of this mechanic means the party’s means of fixing their problems after the fact suddenly isn’t as reliable, and could actually turn out worse while prosecuting their endeavor, makes them less likely to attack whatever obstacle it is they’re thinking about! “I’m out of diamonds, guys, Maybe we sneak around this one? Just in case? I don’t know what’ll happen if you get cut in half again.” You don’t need to keep spells from coming back on a long rest (let them stay there, I think). Just introduce a secondary resource management system (which is preferably material in nature, definitely doesn’t come back on a long rest) to prevent spells from producing catastrophic failure. Spells are still cool? Oh yeah, even cooler. Spells are an “I win button?” They weren’t, but definitely not now.

So, let’s wrap everything up into some simplified principles you can pursue TTRPG design with, provided you want strategy to remain competitive with or even dominant compared to tactics. First, increase the scale of your game. Introduce assets that take lots of people to produce, maintain, and repair. People that are hard to get back if things go tits up. These would be hirelings, vehicles, businesses, strongholds, combat units, kingdoms, etc. They’re not coming back at the end of a long rest, so your players don’t want to lose them, so your players are more likely to avoid certain conflicts if it means losing them. Second, give monsters features (or play something that does this for you) that inflict permanent or “pemanent unless someone __” consequences for attempting to fight them. Ditto for traps and curses. Even if your players can fix it afterwards, they’ll be scared to death there won’t be an afterwards. If they choose to fight anyway, you’ll know it wasn’t just because it was the next fight on the list, and it may well be there last. Third and finally, ensure resources don’t just come back to the players on a long rest, or require some additional expenditure to function properly. Things like health should require more work to get back than just taking a nap (still a big fan of the bordello providing HP and hit dice). Spells should have a chance to reverse or harm the caster when they fail, unless they spend something to avoid that scenario. That thing they need to spend should be in finite supply, and whether the player has it should directly impact their enthusiasm to go up against a fire giant or something.

“Cast a spell, keep us safe from the fire!”

“I asked you for three fucking weeks if we could get a single fucking mandrake root, and you said no. No time, you said! Either the spell works, or we’re going to be extra crispy.”

All of these are incentives for players to choose their battles, and pursue goals other than fighting for the sake of it.

Goals like, dare I say it, exploration.

Class Design 1: Core Features and Modes of Play

We’re going to leap into a few ground rules, or guidelines, or something of that sort for an intro here, largely because I don’t know precisely where to begin. We’re discussing classes today, how to design class features specifically. I should note this won’t discuss much in the way of probabilities and what damage a class ought to provide at certain levels, because even if I did have some attachment to writing out targets for class damage at specific levels, I don’t know that any such targets exist for 5th edition. Besides, I’m sure as hell not going to figure those out before those of my own game, not when comparing a 20 level progression with a 12 level progression.

I suppose I’ll start off with core modes of play. I’m going to define a core mode of play as something in which everyone is supposed to participate. In 5th Edition, that would be combat. It’s not Exploration, or Socializing. Exploration doesn’t exist as a system in 5e, beyond mention of “If you have this feature, you get to ignore what we can only assume would be the focus of an exploration system, if we had one, which we don’t.” This will not be a snark-free essay. In other games (earlier editions), there’s an argument to be made exploration was the core mode of play beyond combat. After all, exploration is pretty solid if you’re diving into a megadungeon. If you have a map in front of you, you’re planning and forming a strategy about where to go next. I’m on the fence about this argument; on one hand, exploration is largely modifying the preparation for and conditions under which you engage in combat. On the other hand, other modes of play could be dismissed under that kind of reductionist qualifier, and there’s no reason I couldn’t turn it on its head. “Combat largely modifies the materials with and conditions under which you engage in crafting.” Doesn’t work. Socializing has a greater presence in the game, but isn’t a core mode of play by default. Why? Because social interaction is, by the game’s assumptions, locked behind a stat. Charisma excludes social interaction from being a core mode of play. You know, I think there’s an argument to be made that since players can huddle and confer on plans of action, all players can prepare for an upcoming social interaction, pass notes, whisper, you know the deal. In that sense they’re all participating in social interaction, but we can still distinguish this method of play from the true, core mode of play in 5e: combat.

Combat tends to take up the lion’s share of session time in a lot of new school games, at least when they appear. You can go sessions without engaging in combat (even if you’re up against hostile parties), but when combat does appear, it tends to take awhile. Say we have, in a hypothetical game, a diplomat class. Chances are, he doesn’t have much to do in combat. This is okay, we can give him a hireling to play (his bodyguard, for instance). If we place a class in the game which isn’t terribly competent in combat, we should be clear that’s the case. I’m not saying all classes should be competent in combat; quite the opposite. If a class isn’t going to do much in combat, the lack of competence should be obvious. This way, the player need only get another character asset (such as a hireling) to participate in combat if they wish.

For today’s example, I’ve chosen a character concept which straddles two modes of play; Combat, and Item Creation/Crafting. It’s the Artificer. I’ve DM’d for two artificers now, one using a homebrew class, and the other which used an Unearthed Arcana (the original UA expression of the class, if I recall correctly). I should mention we made use of homebrew for the UA-based character (a lot of it; I have my own firearms system, so we ripped out the one found in the class at the time). The UA was unsatisfying to a lot of folks who played it back in the days of 3/3.5(?), but I thought it was at the very least on the right track for 5e. An artificer is a sort of mage-smith. I’m glossing over the finer details, but there are a few component parts to the character concept:

• Artificers can imbue mundane materials and equipment with magic for a time.

• Artificers can craft items, both mundane and magical, and partially rely on magic for this process.

• Artificers can make use of the assets they create in martial practice.

So artificers are mages, smiths, and fighters rolled into one. We’ve got something of a small problem when it comes to the crafting element of the artificer. Whereas earlier editions featured robust crafting systems, 5e has “Gold + Shopkeeper equals item (shopkeeper component is not expended in this recipe)”. I never got around to responding to the comment on my crafting article (sorry Michael, I didn’t forget about you buddy), but any system which has you spend gold to create the item is not crafting. Ditto for “50 gold’s worth of materials”; the only identification we’ve been given for the material is gold cost! Players just go spend the gold to acquire the materials at that point. This is not crafting. So let’s say I didn’t do the work for you during my last crafting article, and we need to design an artificer which doesn’t key into a crafting system. Technically, you would have to list out the homunculi, constructs, etc the Artificer could build. So I guess I didn’t do that work for you. Actually, I don’t need to! All those things exist from earlier editions, and all you need to do is adapt the rarity of the creation (in my opinion, the easiest part of adapting them).

Back to the point though, we’re not going to start off with writing up abilities and features which key off the supplementary mode of play. The artificer is defined as someone who can bring their tools and magic to bear in combat, so we begin with features that key off combat. It’s okay if the artificer doesn’t exist on a 1-1 with another class in combat, but we need to be careful with how we organize the character features. I’m going to adapt and paraphrase a discussion I heard ages back involving the ranger and the value of redesigning a class. Say for a moment we took the artificer, the beloved spellpunk arcane smith, and keyed most of his abilities off of the game’s….garbage collecting system. The artificer is now a garbage collector. Every other class is focused on combat, but the artificer is split between combat and garbage collecting. Understandably, some people might complain. They might say things like “This doesn’t come up in my game”, or (if the class was hilariously enough suffering from an even worse design) “This class’s features don’t make a difference even when the system does come up.” If the designers are smart, they say things like “Oh, we’ll fix that, because we value you playing out game, and realize the class as-is turned something you loved into a deeply negative experience. Some people are okay with the class, but those people will be fine with the fix as well, since their standards are clearly low.” If the designers (and by extension the people who parrot them) are short sighted, snarky, and mean spirited, they’ll say things like “Oh, well GMs just don’t use the garbage collecting rules enough” or worse, “You just don’t understand the garbage collecting rules.”

There’s a simple, fast response to the oxygen waster masquerading as a dev for your roleplaying game of choice, or whoever happens to be defending them at the time. “I don’t give a shit about the garbage collecting rules, give me back my class.”

Moving on. We begin with combat! What are artificers proficient in? Start with armor Given how often they work with metal, I wouldn’t be surprised if they could move up to medium armor, but they’re also half casters, so we might leave medium armor to a subclass or other character choice. We’re definitely giving them light armor though. Shields also seem appropriate; I personally think of artificers having more of an investment in ranged combat (particularly when it comes to crossbows and firearms). We’re ostensibly creating this for a new school style game though, and the capacity to invent character archetypes is the staple of a good new school game. For spellcasting, we’re going to give the artificer half progression. He increases his caster level once every other level, by default. In Lords of Brackas, he’ll have the option of stacking on more martial or caster levels as he pleases by changing hit dice, but he’ll still start out at a 1d8 progression. Third progression casting works terribly in a locked spellcasting system (like 5e), so that’s out the door. This class will have enough of its own dynamic class options, so we’re not making them full progression casters either. Far too much crap to keep track of without tossing a ton of spells onto them. Their spells should focus on bonus actions and enhancing weapon attacks. Since we’re adding a new class to the game, we should obviously add new spells designed for it, rather than stupidly try to cram something like wizard spells onto a martial class. The last of the basics is weapon proficiencies. They get everything. Simple, right? Well, they get “everything” in 5e because both of the existing half-progression casters have proficiency in all weapons. Seeing as though artificers will likely make use of firearms and pneumatic weapons (and possibly even more outlandish/spellpunk weaponry), we gotta give them the defaults as well. In LOB, I can do things like restrict general weapon and armor proficiencies based on martial level, and certain universal character options (feats I guess, lacking a better term) will let you get them faster or avoid taking martial levels to get them. For something like 5e characters, who remain largely static past level 3, we can’t take such liberties.

Now we get to the meat of the matter: our first class specific feature, which will also end this first essay. Yes, another series, though you should’ve expected that by now. If we’ve any hope of getting an in depth analysis of what abilities make for better class design, we’re not going to write 15k word essays. These things work better in chunks!

But for real, the class feature. This is the thing the original 5e UA got mostly right, but didn’t properly build on. It’s Infuse Magic! We’re going to make our own right here.

You can infuse objects and weapons with magic. When you cast a spell that targets only yourself, you can choose to forgo the effect and infuse a small or smaller object with the spell for one hour. Any creature who holds the object can gain the spell’s effects by using the appropriate action, expending the magic in the process.

We’re going to go through, step by step on what qualities make this feature character and party role appropriate and worth building the class on. Then, we’re going to build the class on it. Next time, that is!

What makes magic interesting?

So the class design essay is on a slight hiatus while I purge this cold from my system, but a recent discussion (and flame war that preceded it) has magic items on my mind (yet again).

I responded to the tutorial boss of internet shitlords, Kasimir Urbanski, who released a video on the commonality of magic items making them necessarily more boring. You can find the video here, but I’ll sum it up: “rarity makes magic interesting”. Why, you ask? Well it just does. If it’s rare, it’s therefore interesting. In our back and forth, Kas repeatedly went back to this point. He provided a few examples like “Well if you eat truffles every day, they cease to be interesting!”, which is A) wrong and B) a non-sequitor.

You see, if I eat crackers once per year, they don’t become interesting. Plain crackers are, by their nature, bland. They have a consistent texture, little in the way of taste, and do not change from cracker to cracker. If you’ve eaten one plain cracker, you’ve pretty much consumed them all. Now consider for the moment, a meal like steak. Steak (even on its own) is a more dynamic meal. The cut, the fat, whether you cooked it to rare (as you should have), medium (lol), or well done (remove yourself), provides a degree of inconsistency. Eating steak every day for a year might make the experience of eating steak less interesting, I’ll give you that. The experience is still leagues ahead of eating crackers every day for a year.

Inconsistency, I’ll then pose, is more reliably interesting than rarity.

But let’s takes a step back, for a moment. If we dig around in the foundations of the question, we may well answer it without the back and forth. Let’s start with the following; what is magic? Magic is the exertion of supernatural forces over nature, to produce supernatural effects. Magic is paracausal, in a word. I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to then say, magic is most magical when it most diverts from the natural.

That’s lovely and abstract, but what does it mean when designing and running games? Well, let’s take a +0 magical sword. Theoretically speaking, it has a fairly substantial impact on play. You go from being incompetent against entities immune to non-magical damage to being competent against said entities. In practice, however? Practically nothing has changed. You’ve gone from swinging your sword to….swinging your sword.

Mostly. After the twitter back and forth, I had a conversation with two friends in our D&D group. Matt, one of the two DMs for our current campaign (as well as our group’s first DM), and Caleb (who’s DMed for us as well). Our discussion was funny in that Matt was the one who initially convinced me +X to hit and damage was boring, and magic items (weapons in particular) were most interesting when manipulating or providing abilities similar to core class features. He was largely the inspiration for a video I did on magic items ages ago. Caleb on the other hand ran for our highest level campaign yet (while broken into two campaigns our players went well past level 20), which featured a shameless plurality of magic item bloat. I think his was the only campaign in which I got a magic item before level 6 or 7, I damn near kissed the man.

Being delightfully intelligent as they are however, they took up the position of Devil’s advocate! I’ll pick out the highlights, partially because as I write this it’s been many days, and the highlights are all I have left at the forefront of my mind.

We started going over the various situations in which people had magic items, didn’t have magic items, gained additional magic items but decided not to use them, etc. There were instances (including in the current campaign) where the fact only one of us had a magic item while facing a creature with immunity to non-magical damage was important, notably because we were primarily a team of frontline fighters. In one of those instances, there were various items in the environment we had to seek out and utilize to damage and defeat the creature. This, Matt posed, was interesting! I’m inclined to agree, but it’s interesting in small doses. One of the measures of progression in a game is the kinds of challenges you face, and the challenges you used to face falling by the wayside as new situations present themselves. Clever sets of rewards tie into these shifting challenges or at least ride parallel to them.

Finding ways to damage a mundane-immune creature at level three is potentially interesting. Doing so at level 8 is boring, and runs contrary to the concept of playing a game. At that point, you’ve not only been doing the same thing over and over, but you start to become increasingly aware of what could be happening at the table instead. Inconsistency has a negative connotation, so I’ll switch to the word I posed to the aforementioned tutorial boss; dynamism. As mentioned, Caleb’s campaign was heavy on the magic items (to my joy). Matt brought up the point we received a number of items which piqued our interest, but he in particular didn’t use because the items were inferior to the maul he was using at the time (and essentially used through both campaigns; it kept getting more powerful as time went on). That’s a negative imposed by a plurality of magic items. But is it so bad? What’s worse; getting locked in an arranged marriage with someone you hate, or picking from 20 potential spouses and wondering on occasion if you should’ve enjoyed the variety. It’s something of an intentionally silly analogy but hell, given how infrequently 5e characters change and how short marriages are nowadays, the difference in commitment is closing the gap.

So magic items can get bloated and impose some negatives on your campaign, but they’re not as bad as a campaign with too few (again, evaluating the game as a game, here). So, we have some gradations in what makes magic (and magic items by extension) tickle our fancy. Makes sense to me, we don’t want to hand the players a staff that blows up continents at level 3. Funnily enough, that wouldn’t be fun for the same reason playing a martial character with no magic weapon at level 8 is boring! The player sits there and thinks “Well there’s fighting dragons, and building an army, and building a stronghold, and the epic defense on the bridge and making potions”, etc. The player is to some degree aware of the breadth of the fantasy adventure genre, and how much of it is being kept from them. That’s a nasty thought to creep into a players head, and it tends to zero in on whoever they think is responsible (whether they meant nothing by it or. We’re not responsible as designers or GMs for teaching people better social skills or insulating them from bitterness, that would be absurd. It’s good to know when you’re leaning into people’s vices, though.

Awful conundrum in front of us, isn’t it? Let’s back up again before I give you the solution, though. We need to run through some proofs of the more general, obvious experiences I mentioned.

1. Magic items are typically rare, and also interesting.

2. A mundane item can be rendered artificially rare without making them interesting.

3. Therefore, rarity is not the deciding trait in evaluating interest.

Basically what us sane folk already knew, rarity doesn’t turn something mundane interesting, only novel at best. I hate to leave you on a cliffhanger, but this article’s gonna need a part 2, or part 3, or just be a series. Next article will likely touch on how to find these different gradations of interest, more accurately map when a character should feasibly access more potent magic, what its scale should feasibly be, and the fun (and consequences) in breaking the mold. My buddy Mildra did a short video response as well, in a far more timely fashion than I did. You can find it here! I’m in his 4E Zeitgeist campaign on Wednesday nights, and the dude’s a monster when it comes to creating. Toss him a sub while you watch!

Making a basic crafting system.

Today in “I became a game designer out of spite”. We’re making a basic crafting system for players to engage with, and for GMs to build upon. I’ll make two quick points here. First, this has probably been done elsewhere. Someone’s made a “basic” crafting system, which allows you to make the thing. Congrats, and I don’t even mind someone tossing it in the comments section. This is just my particular stab at it. Second, this “basic” system works (I think) best with Alchemy. Alchemy (to my mind) has the largest number of unprocessed sediments you can gain without shooting something. That’s it.

Recipes

First thing’s first, this is a recipe based system. I bet you’re groaning in disappointment, this was supposed to be basic! But this is basic, because we’re not listing ingredients. Instead, your given “recipe” for an item is going to be region-locked. Regions or biomes take the place of material components for the recipe. If you manage to get the recipe for a healing potion in a forest, congrats! That doesn’t mean you know how exactly which components you can use for a healing potion while you’re in the desert. Might your character have a sneaking suspicion the pulp of a black tar cactus (known for its use in salves) could functionally substitute for the potent mistal stalk? Maybe. But they don’t know for sure until they research in the particular biome.

This a list of biomes. It’s not exhaustive or made for Goodall or Whitaker, it’s a list. For you. Funnily enough, the Ranger in 5e gets a list of favored terrains he can choose from. You can use that in place of this. Or use this in place of that (don’t).

• Forest

• Tundra

• Desert

• Jungle

• Grasslands

• Savanna

• Marsh

• Swamp

• Caves

• Underdark

And for marine biomes:

• Freshwater Bodies

• Saltwater Shallows

• Saltwater Shelf

• Saltwater Depths

• Coral Reefs

The rule looks something like this.

The player must researches components for an item in a particular biome, and acquires components for that biome’s recipe in the specific biome.

Research

Now we come to research! How does this come about? The character spends time looking for ingredients, which they can screw around with when their long rest comes around, or during a work day. The player makes a research check each day they travel, or twice if the player spends their workday researching. During this time, the player is asking locals for tips, scouting out ingredients, grabbing everything they can carry, all so they can mash them together in ways that hopefully resemble whatever they’re looking to create.

The player needs 6 successes while in the biome they’re looking to pillage for this biome’s particular recipe.

Yeah, basic, but it probably doesn’t hurt to have a vague idea of what your player needs to hit to succeed. Here are the DCs according to item rarity:

• Uncommon: 15

• Rare: 20

• Very Rare: 25

• Legendary: 30

These DCs are universal to the system, btw. Item DCs.

The rule looks something like this:

The player makes a research check once per day while travelling through the biome, or twice while spending a day’s work to research while in the biome. Upon a number of research checks equal to the item DC, minus the player’s bonus to whatever tool is used in crafting the item. Spells and other features that grant advantage on skill checks with a cumulative duration of fewer than 8 hours have no effect on this process. If enough successful checks are accumulated, the player adds that biome’s recipe next to the item description.

Two additional thingies, just to give you an idea of how stupidly easy it is to scale this upwards.

If the player fails no research checks, they may also mark one set of components next to the biome’s recipe, having wasted little to nothing of what they gathered in the recipe’s discovery. If the player has some feature which grants advantage on knowledge or search checks related to the terrain, they may make the research check with advantage.

Eat your heart out PHB rangers, you poor, serially abused bastards.

Acquisition

Now we come to actually getting the ingredients. This is a very simple process. The player can pick up an ingredient while travelling, or can go out hunting for them during a work day. They need to pick up a number of ingredients, determined by the item DC.

The rule looks something like this:

The player collects ingredients by rolling a search or research check once while travelling, or twice by hunting for them during a work day against the item DC. Each successful check nets one ingredient. The player must collect a number of ingredients equal to the item DC, minus the player’s bonus to whatever tool is used in crafting the item. Upon collecting the necessary number of ingredients, the players marks one set of components next to the recipe (consumed in crafting).

Creation

So, we move on to item creation. Your player has their components, tools, and they’re ready to set up. The player needs to spend some time working on the object, and then they get the object. I wish I had more to say in these last few sections, but I did say basic.

The rule looks something like this:

The player can begin crafting by expending a set of components.

The player can make a crafting check once per day while travelling, or twice during a work day. The crafting check’s DC is the item DC, minus the player’s bonus to whatever tool is used in crafting the item. If the player succeeds a number of checks equal to the crafting DC without failing three checks, the item is considered complete. If the player fails three checks, the components are wasted and the player must start again.

Full Text/Modifying the Sytem

So here’s the full text, cleaned up, edited, etc. We’re introducing two official terms here; Item DC and Crafting DC.

The Item DC used when the player is engaged with stages of crafting in which their individual skill has less sway compared to the limits and rules of the world, tied to the item’s rarity. The Item DC’s are as follows:

• Uncommon: 15

• Rare: 20

• Very Rare: 25

• Legendary: 30

The Crafting DC is used when the player engages in more refined processes over which their individual skill has greater sway. The Crafting DC equals the relevant Item DC minus the player’s bonus to whatever tool will be used to craft the item.

Recipes: the player must researches components for an item in a particular biome, and acquires components for that biome’s recipe in the specific biome. Recipes successfully researched and components successfully aquired are written next to the biome in which they researched/acquired.

Research: the player makes a research check once per day while travelling through the biome, or twice while spending a day’s work to research while in the biome. Upon a number of successful research checks equal to the Crafting DC, the player adds that biome’s recipe next to the item description. Spells and other features that grant advantage on skill checks with a cumulative duration of fewer than 8 hours have no effect on this process.

Aquisition: the player collects ingredients by rolling a search or research check once while travelling, or twice by hunting for them during a work day against the item DC. Each successful check nets one ingredient. The player must collect a number of ingredients equal to the Item DC. Upon collecting the necessary number of ingredients, the players marks one set of components next to the recipe (consumed in crafting). Spells and other features that grant advantage on skill checks with a cumulative duration of fewer than 8 hours have no effect on this process.

Crafting: the player can begin crafting an item by expending a set of components. The player can make a crafting check once per day while travelling, or twice during a work day. If the player succeeds a number of checks equal to the Crafting DC without failing three checks, the item is considered complete. If the player fails three checks, the components are wasted and the player must start again.

Short. Sweet. Simple. Doesn’t take much time away from the table. A dice roller could handle each stage in one go. Doesn’t even need to happen at the table, can be rolled online/away. But we can flesh the system out a bit more, I think.

Rule (Well Travelled Adventurer): For each biome already known for the recipe the player is researching, the DC for the research check is diminished by 1.
Reason: This reinforces the prowess of the craftsman engaged in research. They’ve confirmed the link between the Eshin’s Wood’s variety of mistal and the Necronir Desert’s breed of black tar cactus. Because of what they’ve learned already, it’s easier for them to narrow down more reliable leads. To a less experienced alchemist, the delocke fish might look promising for the next biome’s recipe, but our more advanced player knows the vorus coral it lives near is the proper ingredient.

Rule (Favored Terrain): If the player has some skill which provides advantage on search or knowledge checks for a specific biome, the player has advantage on checks made to research and acquire ingredients in that biome.
Reason: As mentioned before, PHB Rangers. If you’re willing to use outside content though, they should be playing a Revised Ranger or one of the many other reworks (like mine).

Rule (Batches): The player can attempt to make multiples of a given craftable item. This increases the Crafting DC by 2 for every additional item attempted. For each additional 2 components spent on the process, the DC decreases by 1. For each separate biome the components come from, the DC decreases by 1 again.
Reason: Allows more skilled craftsmen to make more stuff! Who doesn’t love it?

Rule (Composite Parts): A recipe can be designated as needing multiple sets of components to craft, specifically from multiple biomes. The recipe must be researched and ingredients must be acquired in as many biomes and in as great a quantity as designated before crafting can be attempted.
Reason: Incentivise travel, more restrictions on higher quality items, just a way to delay access without spending game time itself on jumping hoops.

Rule (Prerequisites): A recipe can be designated as needing one or more recipes to be researched and crafted before this recipe can undergo the crafting process.
Reason: Lead players into crafting specific items, which should make sense within the game world to begin with. You need to research a basic healing potion before you craft a greater healing potion, unless you discover a formula to it.

Rule (Unique Components): A recipe can be designated as needing specific, named ingredients in order to be considered complete. Acquiring a named ingredient counts for at least one check in the acquisition process, though it may be designated as counting for more.
Reason: You need dragon scales for Dragonscale Armor.

Final Thoughts

Why did I do all of this? Because I hear this constant shit about “We left this space blank for you to make the game your own!” But that’s not the case. Because making a crafting system is actually kinda difficult! Most games we encounter nowadays handle crafting by virtue of handling inventory management and ingredient lists in the background. They’re large and obtuse, and don’t translate well to tabletop games. Not when the first instinct is to copy those systems. Not when the GM isn’t a game designer. Not when you’re asking someone who has a job, has other things to worry about, who hoped it would be in the damn $50 book to begin with. Guess what; designing the system and keeping it constrained and easy to manage takes thought and experience. Preferably, the experience of people who designed the whole damn game to begin with!

You CAN go off and start designing specific recipes for specific items, because that’s actually intuitive thanks to the video games we play. But it also keeps people from designing a crafting system, because they come up with 3 fantasy names for ingredients out of the four they want a healing potion to required, realize they’ll need to design recipes for every item they want to be craftable, and stop designing the crafting system. There’s a Goldilocks Zone for encouraging additional modes of play without doing all of the work for the GM. “Blank space” isn’t it. Hell, you literally can’t get worse.

Anyone who looks at this system can say “this is BS, this needs to be changed” or “that’s cool, but I’d like to change this according to the type of item (alchemy vs mechanical equipment)”. They can introduce more modifiers. They can introduce unique ingredient requirements. It’s just big enough that you can experiment with it, it’s trivially easy to alter and scale upwards. Know why? Because it’s there, in writing! This is a lot less difficult to do for designers, and look how short the whole damn thing is! Was this really too much page space? Was item creation so far outside the expected norm? You’d think the “World’s Greatest Roleplaying Game” would have more modes of play than the occasional satisfying combat.

Hell, it’s not even the best edition of D&D.

Maybe a designer says “That’s great, our system allowed you to make this!” That’s wrong, first off. You can use this for any check based system, and the more work needed to create a subsystem, the more that mode of play is discouraged. Second, I’d rather no one know my fucking name and this be in the game to begin with so others could have a better time, explore new frontiers, run more creative games, inspire better art! I think teams like WOTC’s need help from outside sources who are better at spotting legitimate player/GM grievances without getting dragged down in poorly worded criticisms.

Or that’s how I started designing, at least. Nowadays, I’ll be eating my cake after I bake it. Speaking of baking my cake, my fantasy novel Eyes of the Forest is now available on Amazon. If you found this helpful and want to support my work, or just want an action-adventure pulp novel for an afternoon read at a low price, consider buying it!

GM Tunnel Vision

Do you have any blindspots as a GM? I do. I’ve talked in the past on my difficult in setting up a satisfying adventure. Even hooks in sandbox campaigns, I’m terrible at that stuff. It’s not that I don’t have it ready to run; I just can’t seem to get it in front of the players in any fashion beyond “hey go do it”.

What I’m describing is an area of poor performance on my part, which causes some detriment to my players. Additionally, I didn’t realize it until sometime into my first campaign. Someone had to point it out to me, albeit in a subtle fashion. I would’ve noticed eventually, after all player dissatisfaction gets written all over their faces at some point or another. That facet of play produces player feedback, whether they intend it or not.

But what if I wasn’t aware of it? What if the players’ feelings on that facet of play were obscured, or worse, difficult to express? This is GM Tunnel Vision; a lack of awareness of the players’ experience at the table, particularly related to your decisions as a GM. If I didn’t pay attention to what my players wanted, which I could guess at being a frequent player myself, it could seriously degrade their experience at the table. Even if other aspects of play I had power over were fantastic, my simple disregard for one section of play could erode trust in general.

Eroding trust is a companion essay to this one, so let’s go back to GM Tunnel Vision. The reason I spelled all of that seemingly self evident stuff out is because it’s easy to fall into as a GM. The GM can ban race and class options, right? Well within their rights to, as a matter of fact. It makes more or less sense depending on the world or setting they’re running. There’s no reason to assume the class spread of the PHB is perfect for every world, after all. Let’s not even get into the trouble of cramming dozens of races together in one world.

So we go to our players in this hypothetical situation, and say “I’m banning the Sorcerer and Druid. I’m also ditching gnomes, tieflings, and dragonborn.” Races are usually easier to get past more experienced players, but banning classes really rubs folks the wrong way in a far more common fashion. Let’s now say some folks make their disappointment known, whether they’re anonymously commenting on your decision online, or they’re your actual players complaining. There are any number of responses to give, so we won’t go over the list; just the one that spurred this article on.

“ Every time you talk about banning races and classes… (players say) the GM’s just trying to screw me out of my favorite thing. Really? I wrote this whole campaign book, because I wanted you to not have the one choice you enjoy. That’s why I did this! You sir have greatly elevated your importance in my mind.”

There’s nothing malicious in that statement at all. Boiled down, “I did what I wanted, screwing you over didn’t cross my mind” is quote’s essence. But does that player feel better, now? My favorite modern philosopher often devised a hypothetical situation for comment as follows: a man with a gun and a tiger are both hunting you in the woods. One is obviously sentient doing this on purpose, the other is not, driven by instinct. Does it matter which one catches you first? The obvious answer is no, you’re dead either way.

Let’s pull a more relevant example out of our posteriors; a player creates a character who incessantly asks “why would my character do that” at every prompt and prodding to go out and adventure. They’ve created a character who does not want to adventure, unless likely prompted by some very specific detail or event that you, the GM, in all likelihood to not have time to divine. But wait! Our player here didn’t mean to be an obstructionist shitheel, causing problems for you where there were none and diminishing your free time. They did in good faith! You sir, have greatly elevated your importance in their minds. Has the problem gone away, now? Simply avoiding maliciousness isn’t enough . Granted, one could make a case that ignoring any thought of other people’s fun in a group activity centered around having fun is a conscious choice and therefore malicious, but that’s besides the point.

It doesn’t matter if you’re actively out to get someone or not, there are plenty of ways to needlessly be a dick. I’ve banned/restricted races plenty of times, placed different restrictions, etc. Knowing it was a potential negative for a player didn’t stop me from making the decision; it was a decision I felt was best for the game at the time. Acknowledging the fact it was a potential negative allowed me to look for potential rebalances, giving the players other means of fun (tailored to them) across the course of play.

I take this approach because it isn’t “my game”. I didn’t gather friends, acquaintances, colleagues, etc to sit through my b-novel. We got together because in some fashion or another we enjoy each other’s company, especially in the context of this game we came together to play! I’m not saying to never ban classes, races, features of play, etc. For the record neither am I some god-tier GM; I’m still a beginner. But consider, just for a moment, that thing on the other side of the GM screen is a person, a person you may actually care about, who is impacted by your decisions in the game. If you want to bypass GM Tunnel Vision, consider making additional decisions that positively impact the player’s enjoyment or experience at the game. It’s just a simple exercise in empathy. It may not have much of an impact on your decisions to begin with! But in this mindset, you’ll at the very least be aware of what your players are thinking and how they’re reacting internally.

What’s the worst that could happen?