Ben Stovall Blog

Tag: ttrpg

  • OneD&D: First Impression

    OneD&D: First Impression

    In another classic display of arriving tardy to a new topic that fits perfectly for my blog, it’s been about a month since OneD&D was announced as the next evolution of the game from Wizards of the Coast. But! If there’s any benefit to this lengthy of a delay, it’s that I’ve had a lot of time to digest the news and organize my thoughts on the first set of rules (PDF here). So, here’s my first impressions: the good, the bad, the somewhere in-between.

    The Good Stuff

    One of the most overt adjustments made in the ruleset is the movement of a granted increase to ability scores away from a character’s chosen race and into their background. It’s effortlessly elegant, adjusting D&D in a much needed way to be less oddly restrictive. An ASI from a character’s race was a long-outdated idea, but that bonus to a character’s ability wasn’t something the player base wanted to see stripped away entirely. It coming from the character’s life before they became an adventurer is the perfect adjustment.

    They also stepped forward with grace, clearly outlining that these bonuses from a character’s background should be their choice entirely, with a few template examples included. It’s an open invitation to consider how your character’s life shaped them, and what skills they’ll have gained that will help them attain success as a hero.

    In a different space of the game, the Grappled condition had its effects changed. Previously, it did nothing more than reduce a grappled creature’s speed to 0. Now, in addition, it imposes disadvantage on the grappled creature making attacks against anyone other than the grappler, it is much more thankfully clear how a grappler can move a grappled creature, and, my favorite of all, escaping a grapple has been added as a repeatable save at the end of each turn. Since 5th edition’s release, attempting to escape a grapple cost a creature’s entire action.

    A new mechanic I’m excited to use is the exciting momentum of granting the adventurers Inspiration on every roll of a Natural 20. When you crit, you get a floating reroll, but you can only ever bank one. Should you crit again before you spend it, you get to hand it off to another character. I’m downright excited to see this in action, to see the heroes really swing combat with a wave of inspiring strikes.

    Now, for a bit of utter speculation, this ruleset included an adjustment for the Slowed condition applied by various spells and abilities, while containing no mention of the Stunned condition. Hard crowd control abilities is something my players and I have discussed ad nauseum, and I’m hopeful that Stunned‘s absence from this document might imply that it is going to be replaced by the softer but still very useful new interpretation of Slowed. Reason being, it sucks to lose an entire turn. Stunning foes for the party feels great, but the second a foe stuns a party member, it feels horrendous. Were these effects lessened to halving your movement, granting advantage on attacks against you, and imposing disadvantage on your dexterity saving throws instead of all of that in addition to denying your entire turn, I believe it would make for a more enjoyable experience on either side of the screen.

    And lastly, Wizards has created a new delineation for their spell lists. Rather than a completely unique list for each class with some spells available in addition based on your subclass, they’ve divided the lists down to Arcane, Divine, and Primal. I like the change, and I’m extremely curious to learn more about it. Historically in D&D, some classes have had reduced options for their spell lists to push them toward certain roles: i.e., a bard in 5th edition does not get fireball unless they burn one of a very limited amount of “Magical Secrets” to gain it. It’s created flavor for subclasses, such as only a Fiendish patron for a warlock allowing them access to fireball, or the Genie patrons being the only one to put Wish on their spell list. Flavor, though, is a small price to pay for many more interesting decisions players can make when building their characters.

    Now, on to some changes with which I find concern …

    The Questionable Stuff

    One of the first things I found myself quirking my brows at was the entry for Dragonborn character traits. A recent book from Wizards had some very welcome rules adjustments to their innate Breath Weapon abilities: they can replace a single attack on their turn with them, and it scaled in power based on character level. In the OneD&D PDF, it has returned to requiring an entire action to use a breath, and its damage has no scaling. Hopefully these were oversights. I allowed a dragonborn character to use Fizban’s rules in my campaign when they were released and it did not cause any problems in my game, so I hope they did not decide to revert those adjustments.

    Next, level one feats. I think, ultimately, this is a great addition to character creation. Feats provide so much value for defining a character’s talents that I love seeing them available earlier. Additionally, creating new “tiers” of feats with prerequisite levels will help define their power in a very useful way. So, why isn’t this paragraph in the previous section? Well, I’m worried about their balance against one another. In 5th edition, there’s tons of feats in the game, and some of them are so stand-out strong, they are a contender for many players even if they don’t fit thematically for the character: like, Fey Touched and a free cast of Misty Step, which contends on supposedly equal footing with something like Chef (which gives you +1 Con or Wis, a tool proficiency in Cook’s Utensils, an extra 1d8 hit points of healing for anyone spending hit dice on a short rest, and then 2-6 temporary hit points based on level). (And don’t get me wrong, that’s got some serious value in certain situations. But it’s also up against Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master and Sentinel …)

    There’s also a lot of expansion on Inspiration as a concept, but one piece I didn’t like was their rule to remove it from the PCs when they take a long rest. With how much more liberally the rules want Inspiration to be used I can see what their thought is, but I also think that Inspiration, once earned, should last until used.

    And, on the topic of Long Rests, the rules now mention that combat of any kind will utterly and completely prevent the completion of a long rest. I’m more tentative than critical on this one for a few reasons. For one, the party is likely low on resources when they decide to risk a long rest in dangerous territory, and failing to complete a rest might be overly punishing for a few bad rolls. However, this might lead to more consideration and better decision making from the party when they seek shelter for a rest. It could also greatly improve travel through wilderness – for the most part, overland travel in D&D seems to come down to a single encounter a day, if that, and going into each engagement with full resources can make challenging the party difficult. I can think of a few other ways to counter that, however, so we will have to see.

    Wizards also proposed some interesting adjustments to Natural 20 rolls that I personally intend to utterly ignore. The first is a rule in the PDF mentions that a Nat 20 always succeeds on a roll when made, and a Nat 1 always fails; the intention here is that a call shouldn’t be made for a roll if the characters have no chance to succeed, but I believe there’s value in the characters not knowing if success is possible from the simple call for a roll. I’ve had a post about the Role of the Dice rattling around in my head for a while now, so I’ll have more to say on this later.

    Another adjustment is Wizards wants to remove the ability for spells to critically hit. As-is, only a spell with an attack roll is currently capable of such, and I think it just isn’t nearly as fun for a player to throw a Nat 20 and then deflate when they remember their Firebolt cantrip doesn’t crit anymore. Spell crits are sticking around at my table.

    Then, Wizards came gunning for my crits. The majority of my experience in D&D comes from behind the Dungeon Master’s screen, and Wizards wants to remove critical strikes from monsters. The current assumption in the community is that this will step in tandem with new, powerful abilities on monster stat blocks that will threaten the party without the need for a lucky roll, so I’ll hold my full judgement for now. We’ll see in time.

    The Whatever Stuff

    Lastly, there was something I had some thoughts on that don’t cause me worry for the game’s direction or excite me. Just an adjustment I realized occurred. The new rules for backgrounds don’t include the features that they had in the 5th edition PHB. With backgrounds being built from the ground up by the players, that makes sense, but there was some good thematic stuff there that could provide some texture to different styles of games. I, personally, will be sad to see them gone – but luckily, I can invite my players to simply include characters that might aid them in those ways in their backstories.

    So, there’s my first impression of OneD&D (well, actually, my first first impression was that’s-a-silly-name). I’m looking forward to learning more. Worst case scenario, I’ll steal what I like and retrofit it for use in 5th edition and keep running games the way I have been.

    As always, thanks for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

  • Ben Recommends: A Starstruck Odyssey

    Ben Recommends: A Starstruck Odyssey

    It feels like every time I write about media on this blog, it’s in a negative–or at least critical light. Partially, there’s something easier about criticism; it’s really apparent when there’s something you don’t like. It can be harder to parse out the specifics of a piece of media that made you appreciate it.

    And it’s unfair, because there is a lot of media these days and so much of it is crafted with care and passion. So, that’s where this comes in. I want to celebrate works (movies, shows, etc.) that really resonated with me; I want to share out some positivity, some reinforcement. I want the things I love to get the recognition that they deserve.

    Welcome to Ben Recommends. Today, I want to talk about Dimension 20’s A Starstruck Odyssey.

    What is it?

    I’ve mentioned Dimension 20 and other “actual play” RPG shows on my D&D blog posts before. These days, Dimension 20 is my favorite of the bunch (more on that later). For the uninitiated, these “actual play” shows are a bunch of people playing a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) on camera.

    Naturally, this isn’t something everyone will be interested in. You might love TTRPGs but watching someone else play will do nothing for you. You might have no experience in D&D or its contemporaries, and that lack of knowledge might cause the inherent limitations of the content to fall flat. However, there are tons of people who are fans of these shows despite never dabbling in RPGs themselves, so it might be worth a try regardless.

    Dimension 20 began after long-running Internet content creation company CollegeHumor picked up Brennan Lee Mulligan, featuring a mix of new and old CollegeHumor alumni as the cast (seven total, Brennan and six players). Unlike many other actual play shows, Dimension 20 has a staffed production team making their battle maps and miniatures and a set number of episodes each season (usually 17+ episodes for the core cast, and between 6-10 for “sidequest” campaigns with guests).

    In this specific season of Dimension 20, they used a heavily modified version of 5th edition D&D to run a crazy, galaxy-spanning adventure full of exciting shootouts and climactic space battles. This is the core D20 cast at their absolute best (yet). It is one of the most entertaining and compelling TTRPG shows I’ve ever seen.

    What do I like about it?

    Dimension 20 has explored a vast selection of settings since their first season. In Fantasy High, we have teenage heroes in a strikingly modern setting; the Unsleeping City is an urban fantasy in New York City; Escape From the Bloodkeep is an adventure about Not-Sauron-For-Legal-Reasons’s death and his lieutenants and advisors trying to keep everything they’ve fought for (evil) from collapsing.

    A Starstruck Odyssey is their first foray into the stars, and it couldn’t have been a more perfect setting for them to explore. It is an age of anarchy and the chaos gremlins are off the leash. The electricity of their first time at a table together since COVID-19 began fuels the game and their energy never comes down.

    It’s fast paced. It’s hilarious. I’ve never had more fun watching a show.

    How does it compare to similar shows?

    I mentioned earlier that D20 is my favorite show of its kind, and that’s for a reason others might view as a mark against the show.

    I like Dimension 20’s production. My longest-standing gripe with Critical Role (and even my own D&D games) is when the party waffles around, uncertain of what to do next. With Dimension 20’s limited seasons and driving narratives, there’s no time for that aimlessness. It is more of a “show” than Critical Role: less of a group of friends just recording their game and uploading as-is. But I’ve come to appreciate that artifice immensely.

    There’s less room for a long-term character reveal or mysterious overarching plot that spans several months of games, but for the trade they gained a show that I find vastly more watchable. I can actively view D20 with no distractions. Critical Role I generally listen to when I work or build maps for my own games. Where you fall between those two comes down to personal preference.

    Potential Cons

    There are some facets of this show that might be a dealbreaker for you.

    • Beyond the 1st episode, the show is behind a paywall on dropout.tv

    I think it’s entirely fair for the company and the team behind D20 to ask for compensation for their show, of course. But Dropout isn’t likely a service you’re using if you haven’t already seen A Starstruck Odyssey. I personally think the service is a great deal, and there’s other fun shows on there, but that barrier to entry might prove too high for some. (But! Those three other seasons I mentioned before? All of them are entirely available for free on Youtube!)

    • These are long episodes

    And the length is really variable. I didn’t have trouble keeping up week-to-week (or catching up on older seasons while I was unemployed), but there is a lot of content here. It might be unfeasible, even, depending on your schedule. But if I didn’t think it was worth the commitment, I wouldn’t have written this post.

    That seems to be the most critical and compelling talking points I could conjure. I’d love to hear from you if this post convinced you to give the show a try. As always, thank you for reading! It’s a tough galaxy out there, but someone’s got to live in it. It might as well be you!

  • D&D: Presentation and Assumption

    D&D: Presentation and Assumption

    Dungeons and Dragons leans pretty hard into stereotypes when it comes to encounter design. When a hulking, plate armored warrior with a greatsword comes lumbering out from behind a door, you don’t expect them to be able to dance their way out of a fireball unscathed. When a frail, elderly wizard is in your grasp, it’s the easy assumption to think they won’t be able to worm their way out of a grapple without magic.

    And this isn’t a mark against the system – this is a good thing to have. Even less detailed descriptions can still communicate the shorthand for these ideas. I don’t need to say anything more than “rogue” to fill a player’s mind with a dozen assumptions about the opponent’s appearance, demeanor, and tactics. Nearly everyone in the world knows what a dragon looks like and what it’s usually capable of.

    It’s a system strength, but it can trip up an unwary DM when they deviate from these stereotypes to present something unusual or uniquely challenging. So, to alleviate the potential for frustration, here’s some things to keep in mind when it’s time to exercise your right to break the damn rules however you like.

    Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Opponents

    Recently, I found a retrospective video about the differences between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II from a former Bioware Executive Producer, Mark Darrah. In the video, he describes a change in the development philosophy of the two games’ combat systems. In Origins, the combat was symmetrical: the enemies had the same abilities you could access through the talents of the classes. In Dragon Age II, they flipped the system into asymmetry with the characters’ abilities doing much more damage than the monsters’ attacks with adjusted health pools to match (Mark Darrah even mentions a specific problem where some of the companion characters might become hostile to the party and deal excessive amounts of damage, more than they’re built to handle).

    At first, I didn’t realize how this articulated a bias I had buried into my subconscious with D&D. Many of my old and current players, and even when I am a player myself, expect humanoid enemies to have symmetrical rules to the party, but with monstrous enemies I assume they have asymmetrical abilities. I inherently designed encounters with this in mind, only breaking the rule when designing a significant boss (such as recently adding Blood Hunter class features to a Loup Garou as a boss). In the first games I ran, I had players express frustration with humanoid enemies doing things they wouldn’t be able to do – perhaps this was a learned behavior that became part of my toolset.

    Regardless of where it came from, it’s been an unspoken, unwritten, informal rule at every table I’ve sat at. So, how do we break it?

    The Power of Presentation

    Breaking these norms can be an important part of designing an adventure, and it all comes down to ensuring that these peculiarities are implied beforehand. If a king tells the players about a rival nation whose soldiers have all sworn themselves to a dark entity, and now they have access to dark magic that has left the king’s army unequal to the fight, you’re more than halfway done. The players know to expect unusual stuff from the run-of-the-mill soldiery of the enemy faction. A classic, normal looking fighter might suddenly cast a spell of some kind! Awesome! It might go without saying that higher ranking soldiers have greater magic to hand, and the enemy ruler might have the greatest level of these powers of them all.

    Providing information to the players that doesn’t give away all the details about their foes, but prepares them for the abnormal abilities those enemies will have is invaluable. There’s a middle ground between surprise and perfect knowledge that’s ideal for the first few encounters with a new type of enemy. And it doesn’t always need to be well ahead of time, at the adventure’s introduction – it could be as late as when the opponent appears when initiative is being rolled to give those hints.

    It seems too-obvious, right? When you introduce a monster the players haven’t battled before, you might describe its long limbs and claws to give them clues as to how it will battle. Yet, when a humanoid opponent is introduced with something unusual in their statblock, a moment might not be taken to describe the arcane focus dangling at their hip just beside their sword scabbard. An aberration using magic to appear like a humanoid might be skilled enough that the characters can’t see all the through its masking magic, but they will be much happier knowing there is something off about their foe.

    With these tricks, you’ll be able to keep your players on their toes, but in a way that feels more fair and balanced. As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • D&D: Your Boss Needs Minions

    D&D: Your Boss Needs Minions

    In my Running Dragons blog, I briefly mentioned the danger of an imbalance in the “action economy” during a boss encounter. A lot players coming into D&D might have their expectations for boss fights shaped by video games, where one extremely strong enemy takes on the party despite a numerical disadvantage. For your bosses in D&D, this is suicide.

    Even the game’s own mechanics for making this more available fall short. “Legendary actions” (special moves the boss monsters may take at the end of other creature’s turns) only go so far: a lone dragon with only the legendary actions listed in the official statblock will be destroyed by an appropriate level party without a problem. Hell, the two dragon encounters I’ve run in my current game both featured clusters of minions, and they were a tier above the players – at level 8, they fought an adult black dragon (a CR 14 monster), and just a few weeks ago, at level 14, they battled an ancient black dragon (a CR 21 monster). The party slayed both dragons with only one casualty between the two encounters (during the latter, and easily reversed with a Revivify).

    Part of that is because of some of the shortcomings that exist in the Challenge Rating (CR) system that we’ll get into in a moment. My table also consists of a lot of bona fide gamers that work hard to conserve resources and adequately prepare. They knew well ahead of time what kind of dragon lair they were walking into, and both times obtained some tools to mitigate the damage it could deal with its breath attack. All this to say that my advice here will not be good advice for every table: it could be that where I see failure in challenge ratings, they’ll be perfectly workable for your table. A crew of careful, calculating players, however, might want for a bit more difficulty when they roll for initiative.

    Here’s some tips to give them that.

    Reexamining Challenge Rating

    The first things to take to heart when trying to make a more challenging encounter for D&D is to take CR less seriously. It can be very useful for determining whether a creature is an accessible foe for your players at their level, but it doesn’t mean it can hold its own without allies. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide example of this, they mention a Rakshasa (CR 13) being something that might prove more difficult than you think against a party with its limited magic immunity trait, but with its low pool of hit points, any well-balanced group will annihilate one of these fiends no problem. I think the Rakshasa works best as a late tier 2 antagonist, for a party of 8th to 11th level, despite the spellcasters at this level having no ability whatsoever to damage the creature without some kind of physical weapon.

    And! With minions included in an encounter with a Rakshasa, your spellcaster players will have a valuable task to undertake once they know of its magic immunity while the more martial characters deal with the fiend himself.

    Perhaps the worst problem the challenge rating values suffer is how hard they crash the second your players obtain combat-oriented magic items. That fighter finding a +1 shield? Your barbarian getting a +1 greataxe? Your wizard finding a wand of the war mage? Banded accuracy is thrown out of a window.

    Your fighter is suddenly much, much more difficult for CR-appropriate creatures to strike. Your barbarian and wizard are both now landing their attacks much more often than the game was balanced around. Consider this: the scaling component included in the player characters’ power, their proficiency bonus, scales one point every four levels. An item granting them a +1 bonus accelerates them that much further ahead.

    Now, I’m not advocating for holding these items back from the party. Magic items are a lot of fun to have – especially homebrew items that are on the cusp of breaking the game. It’s just another factor that contributes to CR faltering in the mid-to-late stages of the game.

    Ultimately, I think bosses can comfortably sit a tier above a party playing strategically in combat and provide a healthy challenge. There’s a few cases that can cause that to fall short – spells that will pancake the player characters or attacks that deal an amount of damage they won’t be able to play around, but I think it’s easier to adjust those outliers than to try and scale a numerically-appropriate monster up to boss viability. I suppose that brings up another question …

    How Powerful Should the Minions Be?

    I generally include a creature or two very close to my boss’s listed CR as their lieutenants. In my ancient dragon encounter, I included a Blue Abishai (a CR 17 creature) as the primary lieutenant, with a homebrew dragonborn fighter opponent that I set at CR 11. The dragon and the abishai both began the battle away from the room’s entrance, hidden in the darkness of the cave, so the fighter and a few guard drakes (CR 2 creatures) were present to oppose the party while the big monsters got into position.

    The party ended up successfully locking the fighter lieutenant down with a Banishment spell, removing them from the battle until well after everything else had been handled. The abishai used its Greater Invisibility to fight unseen, but the players managed to break his concentration and used a Stunning Strike to keep him grounded long enough for his elimination. Even the additional bonuses I gave my dragon – an antimagic darkness zone lair action, an ability to use an action and legendary actions to heal if it was at its hoard, an immunity to movement speed reduction when using its Wing Attack legendary action – couldn’t make this monster powerful enough to battle the party alone.

    Create an array of additional enemies for your boss with a variety in their challenge ratings. Give them some chaff, weak monsters that can be eliminated with well-placed area-of-effect abilities. Give them an ally that’s dangerous, but wouldn’t be a problem without the heavier hitters in the room aiding them. And give them a powerful lieutenant almost as dangerous as the boss themselves to force a division of the party’s attention.

    Building Complex Encounters

    Another option for adding difficulty to an encounter is to ensure the goal isn’t just reduce all the enemies’ HP pools to zero. If every battle in the game runs that way, it can get stale regardless of the challenge you’re building. One of my most successful encounters in this campaign was earlier on (I believe they were around level 6, it was well over a year ago now). They had infiltrated the compound of an extremist group of zealots bent on using an ancient magic ritual to call radiant fury down on a village the party sought to defend. In that battle, I included a cleric NPC enemy as the boss, and calculated her to be about CR 9, gave her a martial ally based on an adjusted Champion statblock (down to what I thought to be CR 7), and a handful of CR 2 swordsmen and several priests. These priests, however, were first-and-foremost working on the ritual. The party needed to split their focus on interrupting the magic and defeating the dangerous enemies in the battle. Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has several other ideas for diverse encounter goals.

    The trick to these kinds of encounters if to ensure there’s a clearly defined win condition for the players – but not necessarily one that you’re responsible to prescribe. Your players can deduce a lot about your encounters on the scant amount of information each dice roll will tell them. They can calculate where the enemy’s AC might lie, they’ll know when a foe is putting out more damage than they can sustain for multiple rounds, and they can react accordingly.

    That said, one of the hardest things for newer players to learn is when they should run from an encounter. There are some situations that truly become untenable, and unlike a video game where everything is usually balanced around you being able to overcome it with the tools you have to hand, some battles in D&D might just not be feasible for you to win. I was in a game once where at level 4 we came across an ancient white dragon (CR 20). I had the most experience of all the players at the table, including the DM (who had rolled the encounter from his module’s table) and I immediately knew we needed to split. If it weren’t for a successful saving throw and a ring that conferred resistance to cold damage, one of our party members would’ve been killed outright by the breath weapon. (But we all made it out with the clever use of an illusion and Rope Trick.)

    A Never-Ending Education

    By the very structure of its rules, D&D is a more combat-oriented tabletop RPG than other contemporary systems. Encounters are something you as a DM will spend a lot of time cobbling together. All of your dungeons, your factions, and your wildernesses will be expected to have their own unique array of enemies to overcome. And designing these battles is a process that will never run out of things to teach you, and not just because every table is different.

    At my table, it would be blasphemous were I to on-the-fly adjust an encounter I designed and make it easier. That doesn’t mean that design stops when initiative is rolled for every party. If you had enemies in reserve, but the players are getting thwomped just fine already, maybe they don’t need to show up. Maybe that high level spell slot lingering up their foe’s sleeve got used on something before this battle. My advice in these instances is to keep any of these adjustments under wraps, and whatever you do, don’t begin making tactical blunders that the enemies don’t have a justification to make. Nothing has killed a mood at my tables quicker than them being able to tell when a battle got easier.

    Don’t be afraid to try new things with your encounters. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. There will always be another roll.

    As always, thanks for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • RPGs: Introducing Your Villain

    RPGs: Introducing Your Villain

    Villains are integral to any great narrative. Whether they stand atop a battlefield and glare at your players, or they threaten them directly for a slight imposed, or if they are nothing more than a whisper on the lips of their soldiers in their final moments, your villain matters. But they need to do more than strike an imposing figure – if your characters never meet the villain, why would they care about him? Why would the heroes throw themselves into danger to stand between them and their goals? Why would their name ever pass the player’s lips with a hint of trepidation?

    There’s a delicate balance to strike, however. You could have the villain show up, blade (or spellbook) in hand and have him thrash your players in a deadly encounter with the intention being your characters performing a narrow escape – but that’s … risky. Playing through a no-win scenario (or a scenario with an unclear victory objective) often leaves a bad taste in players’ mouths. Once you let them know that the villain has hitpoints, they’ll think they can kill him. And what if the fight goes poorly? How many characters will they lose in the attempt?

    Or, even worse, what if they succeed? What if your villain who you’ve spent weeks preparing, whose plans will be the focus of the next several months of sessions, dies at their hands? What if they become the big damn heroes, the ones they’ve been working to become due to a turn of the dice?

    But your villain must do something. There must be stakes. In most stories, the heroes need to lose before they can win, but there must be a way for the players to accomplish some kind of victory; otherwise, it won’t incite fear against your villain, but frustration against the whoever’s behind the screen.

    So, what do we do? How can we pull off something this delicate?

    Defining the Stakes

    Number one: clearly define a path to success. If they can’t win in a fight, make it clear from the beginning – cause something that makes it clear they need to flee. Give them villagers to rescue and mooks to fight, don’t throw the villain and his lieutenants at the party. Two, don’t force the villain onto your players. Not yet. Have his stats ready but leave the decision to roll initiative to the players this time. The heroes aren’t even on your villain’s radar yet. Three, take something away from the players – now, I don’t mean steal their magic items or their armor; in fact, don’t try to take anything that has to do with playing their character away. Put a mentor or other NPC that the players have come to trust and love in mortal danger.

    As I mentioned in my Beginning the Adventure blog, I like to leave the first few levels of my games very open-ended. I lay seeds all around with various enemies and storylines to pursue, then either pick one the players have become invested in, or one that I’ve wanted to flesh out.

    In the game that went on to inspire Ebonskar, I focused on using hobgoblins. The eponymous general approached the game’s starting town, a fixture of the campaign for six or so weeks of play full of fun and loved characters, and he set the town to the torch. The characters woke in the early hours of the night to the scent of smoke and bright flames licking the buildings all around the home they’d come to know. People were screaming, the heat was oppressive, and hobgoblin soldiers (several types of which they had encountered in the early stages of the game) patrolling the streets with bloodied weapons in hand.

    This scenario met all my earlier criteria. The objective was immediately clear – one, save as many people as they can and escape the town before it’s death throes take them with it. Two, the general never even acknowledged the party until the end of the event, and by then there was a street covered in burning debris between them and him. Three, the town they’d spent most of the campaign with was reduced to ash, and only the NPCs they managed to save survived.

    When morning came and the villagers looked out at the burnt-out husk that had once been their home, the characters had a villain they hated, and they had become heroes to all they had saved. And as they learned what the hobgoblin general was after, they did all they could to stand in his way.

    The Visage of Villainy

    Another thing to consider is your villain’s appearance. Your players will assume a dozen things from that first glance they get of their foe – what kind of capabilities they might have, the way they might fight, perhaps even some guesses at the kind of things they value or idolize.

    From that first look at Ebonskar across the burning field, they saw him bedecked in black plate armor, they saw that nearly featureless ivory mask with its painted lines, and they saw his greatsword, sheathed on his back with no shield in sight. They knew immediately he was an in-your-face swordsman, aggressive and determined to strike his foes down. They’d learned a lot about the usual hobgoblin statblock, which meant the hints were there for how that might be emphasized for a soldier of his station.

    If your villain is a more subdued flavor of evil, present the places that disguised devilishness shines through. In my current campaign, an early-game villain was a zealot that had co-opted a benevolent deity’s doctrine for hateful and destructive motives. She looked disdainfully on the nonhuman members of the party – and the players were ecstatic when they finally had the chance to strike her down before she could accomplish her goals.

    This is your excuse to steal the spotlight for your villain. The players will have their moments, and they will be all the sweeter with a clear picture in their minds of their foremost opposition. Portraying a villain my players came to truly despise allowed them to latch on to pursuing their defeat both in-and-out of character. There is something to be careful of with that level of investment, however …

    Portraying Adversaries Vs. Being Adversarial

    As the game master, your role is to control all the bad guys. Sometimes you get to toss in a good guy too, but you’re almost entirely relegated to the forces opposing your heroes. But that doesn’t mean you’re actively working against the party. It’s a collaborative medium, and there’s a delicate balance between challenging the players and battling them.

    It’s something that can creep up on the table – you won’t always notice when it’s happening. A quick as-you-go rule of thumb is to remember that while you are trying to play the bad guys as faithfully as you can, you are at the heart of it all rooting for the players to succeed.

    Now, I allow the dice their seat at the table unshackled. If I were playing at a physical table with my current game, I’d be rolling in the open. But the players can still hear the excitement in my voice when they throw a wrench into the carefully laid plans of my antagonists. I’m always ready for something crazy to happen that I never expected. I’ve even played into some jokey antagonism when they slay one of the big monsters in a battle or lock it down with a loss-of-control effect to communicate how much I enjoyed their maneuvers to accomplish those ends. My players rise to the challenge time and again, as I set them against harder and harder foes week-to-week.

    I will often acknowledge it outside of game when just hanging out with my players, or even allow myself a little slip to say something to the effect of “we’re not out of the woods yet” when the tide is shifting into their favor in a battle. They know I want to see them overcome the deadly opposition I’ve designed, and knowing I’m in their corner while still allowing the dice to have their say allows the relief of every hard fought victory to be something the whole table shares.

    For my next post, I’ll be throwing together some tips to ensure you can construct a truly incredible encounter when it does finally come time to face those villains down. Until then, thanks as always for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • RPGs: Beginning The Adventure

    RPGs: Beginning The Adventure

    Running a tabletop RPG for my friends is the most instantly gratifying creative experience I partake in. Each week I get immediate feedback on worldbuilding, narrative construction, character development, arena building, and several other things from people in a collaborative setting where the implicit goal is improving the experience for everyone present.

    I’ve written a handful of blog entries already about my love for this hobby, but none of them have provided much information that’s useful to begin running a game. That’s the goal today. I’ve started up at least a dozen games since my first time sitting behind the screen over a decade ago, two of which have actually reached a conclusion (which is rare, believe me), and I’ve thought a lot about ways to begin a game well.

    Here’s what I’ve got.

    Before the Beginning

    There’s a lot of things to consider before inviting everyone over and setting out the dice. The foundation, the first question, is, simply, “What is the adventure?” What is the driving action that throws the players’ characters together? The answer truly depends on how much work you want to do before the game begins. Running an adventure entirely from scratch (a “homebrew” game) isn’t right for every game master, and running from a published adventure is not inherently worse than a homebrew campaign in any way. I’ve run both in my tenure, using the Tyranny of Dragons two part module back in 5th edition’s infancy, and it was one of the two games I’ve run that ran to its conclusion.

    One of the best games I’ve had the privilege to be in as a player is my friend’s current game that started as a run of the Rime of the Frostmaiden module (which has now shifted into some homebrew after we reached the module’s conclusion and our DM wants to see if he can take a game to 20). Neither style is intrinsically more valuable than the other. It will all depend on the table.

    Where’s the Beginning?

    The backdrop for the start of your adventure is immensely important. For some players it will grow into a place that feels like home. Published adventures do a lot of legwork here, but even they can be improved.

    My best beginning towns have all provided a handful of smaller stakes hooks to pursue and investigate. I use them to determine what the table as a whole is most drawn to. In the game that inspired Ebonskar, sightings of hobgoblins had been noted by the town and the party had latched onto it pretty well – but their primary antagonist at the time was a hag that had just stolen a child.

    That’s not to discount a more linear beginning experience. When I ran Tyranny of Dragons, I used the opening straight from the book, with the party arriving at Greenrest as it was razed by the Cult of the Dragon and their blue ally in the sky. There’s several things I’d do differently if I ran that module again, but a lot of that attack on Greenrest would survive the transition.

    One of the most important things, unless your entire campaign is set in a big city, is to start somewhere that’s a shithole. My best towns – Borno’s Crossing, Saltwallow, Longmire – have all been in a decades-long slump. They’ve been forgotten towns that were once on a major roadway now bypassed by a trader’s highway or set in a forbidding locale that made them undesirable to visit. It helps to have that humble start, and it gives a lot of room for that first settlement to grow in response to the players’ actions. Even in big-city campaigns, beginning in the worse parts of town still aids in that feeling of becoming too big of a fish for the pond.

    Session Zero

    The first time you gather your party to venture forth, you really shouldn’t do much venturing at all.

    Seriously.

    Getting everyone together to lay the foundation for the game is massively important. It matters more than all the prep work in the world. It gets everyone on the same page, and can help you massively understand the type of game you’ll want to run for your table.

    You need to discuss what everyone’s idea for the game is. Do they want to be heroes that start from humble beginnings that go on to save the world? Do they want to fight liches and hydras and dragons, plumbing the depths of the darkest dungeons that ever were buried and forgotten? Or do they want to plan out the best party and make inroads with the nobility to affect change on a systemic scale?

    D&D might not be the perfect fit for every type of game out there. If you guys want to run something focusing less on delving into dungeons and swinging swords and spells at monsters, this is a good time to discuss other game systems.

    And you need to discuss what is and isn’t on the table. One of my current players has arachnophobia and asked that I avoid spiders as much as I could, while giving me the pass to use them occasionally. When they do show up, if he just says the word, I’ll stop describing their spindly little legs racing up and down the sides of the cavern walls or how restrictive the webbing is. It’ll be glossed over with no loss to the game. I have a few other things that aren’t going to be in the games I run, some rules that are hard and fast, and others that are malleable, at least to a degree. Listen carefully and take notes.

    Once you’ve got that squared away, you’ll be ready to truly begin your game. Just, one last thing …

    A Time and Place for Taverns

    Cliché, sure, but for good reason. Don’t let anyone rag on you for beginning your game in a tavern. It can be, and is, a perfect opening for many different games. I’ve started some that way, started many others, and some of my favorite times as a player began in taverns. Just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done again.

    A lot of the alternatives I’ve seen presented online seem like going out of one’s way to avoid the tavern. Some ideas take a really specific group of players to work well. But even those aren’t without merit. Beginning in the midst of a siege with the players all needing to take up arms can be exciting! In Dimension 20’s Fantasy High, the players’ characters didn’t interact with one another much until they all ended up getting detention. (Which, when watching I figured they’d all be told beforehand to try and land themselves detention day one – but that still doesn’t detract from how effective it was to group the PCs together!) Even Critical Role’s 2nd campaign began in a tavern – if Matthew Mercer can “get away with it”, then maybe he’s not really “getting away” with anything.

    And, hey, maybe during session zero your players decided they just wanted to have known each other beforehand anyway.

    Before You Go

    A few last-last minute things I wanted to include here.

    First of all, remember that as the game master, you are still a player too. If you aren’t having fun, there’s something wrong. Find whatever you need to find to alleviate that.

    Second, there is a lot of times that bending or ignoring a rule can provide a fantastically cool moment. Go for it! The rules are guidelines, right? And everyone will talk about it forever! The inverse, however, is also true. There will be times that you need to enforce the rules, things that are too janky or overpowered that they can’t become part of the game. Try not to beat yourself up over it, even if you get them wrong on either side.

    As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • RPGs: Creating an Adventurer

    RPGs: Creating an Adventurer

    Recently, I found a topic on Reddit that got me thinking about the trend of players making characters without input from either their fellow players or even the Dungeon Master running the adventure. I’ve experienced this in my own time running this game, leaving me stuck between a character that feels disconnected from the world or adventure, or telling a player that the character they spent time making won’t fit.

    It’s a difficult situation with no clear answers*.

    Do you as the DM accept whatever the players put forth, despite how it might chip away at the cohesion of the setting you’ve made? Do you as a player accept that you might need to adjust your character of choice to fit the DM’s world, even if it goes so far as to remove what you hoped to explore?

    I’m hoping to provide some tips that can help you keep your characters off the cutting room floor and on the tabletop, from both sides of the screen.

    Be an Adventurer

    First and foremost, make sure you have a character that actually wants to participate in the adventure. Everyone who’s had any experience with the hobby has heard the stories of the lone wolf rogue who has no interest in being part of the game. There is a time and a place for saying “It’s what my character would do,” and explaining why your character doesn’t want to be part of the team or go on an adventure isn’t it.

    The simple fact of the matter is: it isn’t only up to the DM to give you a reason to go on the adventure. We’ve all agreed to spend our time together playing this game, part of that means you have to decide why and how your character would do something you think they normally wouldn’t. Because if that’s all you give the DM, they might just agree with you, and ask you to try again. That’s what I’d do.

    Another facet of being an adventurer – at lower levels, at the very least – is being someone without resources. Delving into dungeons and fighting aberrations, monstrosities, and undead is an insane thing to decide to do. For most, there’s got to be something to prove, or a lack of alternative options. Don’t try to give your character the means to solve the party’s problems with their connections back home. You shouldn’t have such standing that you can muster an army before you’ve ever seen a battle.

    Also, remember this is a collaborative game. Don’t fall into tropes that would make your character vastly more important than the other player’s creations. The world might come to revolve around the party’s actions, but it shouldn’t ever be focused on one of you alone, always – everyone should get their time in the spotlight. Build out someone who has strengths that makes them valuable, but not someone who will be able to solve any issue by themselves.

    Anchoring Yourself to the World

    As mentioned in the post referenced, there is something to be said for the minigame of building characters in 5th Edition D&D. It’s a fun little pass time to tinker with when you’ve got the game on your brain but you’re between sessions. Maybe you were in the mood when the game got canceled last minute. Whatever the reason, there’s value in the process.

    Unfortunately, the cool characters you design in a vacuum do not always translate well to a table.

    When I was setting up my current game, I warned my players ahead of time that several of the races that had received official releases were not going to be available, but I hadn’t gone through the entire list. I had good reasons for each: some didn’t fit the setting because they would lend themselves too easily to a character that is a punchline more than a hero and while levity is welcome, I didn’t want to pull away from the more grim tone of the world. The race’s origin didn’t fit with the way I’d structured the planes for the setting. Or I just didn’t have them in mind since they didn’t all exist when I built the world, and there wasn’t a good way for me to retroactively add the entire race into my world’s history.

    And, unfortunately, my lack of preparation led to me having to reject one of my player’s first characters. He wanted to play a Loxodon hero, and I rejected him. He settled onto a Goliath instead, and while he’s assured me he loves what his character is now, I still feel a slight twinge of remorse that I didn’t allow him his want.

    I actually had an entire game collapse because of this. It was at our session zero (a pre-game meeting of all the players that I absolutely recommend every table engage with), and my players all wanted to play characters whose lineages I didn’t originally have plans to include in the world (I was hoping to run a game in my setting for the Red Watch books to help me flesh out a lot of the world). It ended well, though – I just ran a different game a couple weeks later in a setting with less restrictions.

    I think the best way to engage with the world is to come to a session zero of your game with no preconceptions – well, maybe you can pick a class. Maybe. Magic might not work the way you assume, after all … And never stop thinking about the life your character might’ve had before they became an adventurer. Talk with your DM and work out where you would have been born, where you were raised and how, what kind of people you might know. Create connections for your character, people that they will want to help and protect – or people they will stop at nothing to find their violent satisfaction against.

    The Clear Answer

    Before, when I said there was no clear answer, that was misleading.

    These issues, like all issues in a tabletop RPG, have an answer, a process, that will always help everyone come to a satisfying conclusion: discussion and compromise. Talk to each other. It seems so reductive to say that every piece of RPG drama can be solved by talking, but I have yet to encounter an issue that isn’t addressed after an earnest conversation. At the very least, it’s worth a shot.

    Thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • D&D: Running Dragons

    D&D: Running Dragons

    When I first started running D&D, I managed to learn how to construct a dungeon with success fairly quickly. My players were quick to engage with these delves and I had no trouble discerning what was working and what wasn’t. But, there in the name lies something I felt was equally essential to the experience: dragons.

    It took me much longer to parse out a successful dragon encounter, given their relative rarity to the near ubiquitous dungeon. My first attempts were beasts that did not display the intelligence present by the stat arrays, going toe-to-toe with the warrior clad in plate armor instead of taking to the skies and raining fire or acid or lightning down upon them. My encounters were in barren, mostly circular caves not shaped in the least by the dragon’s whims or needs.

    I hope to save you some time and failures. Learn from my mistakes. Become the dragon your players will fear to engage.

    Fight and Flight

    Dragons have a natural tactical advantage over most playable character lineages in D&D – their natural ability to fly. There is no greater disservice you can do to your dragons and your players than to have their foe linger thereupon the ground, its wings forgotten. A calculating dragon might only ever choose to land when it believes its claws and teeth can prove the end of its target. Instead allow the dragon to focus on finding a position for its breath attack to cause the most damage, and landing only afterward to tear apart the foe most damaged by the discharge.

    In 5th edition, dragons were given the option of using their wings at the end of a foe’s turn, potentially knocking their assailants prone and taking to the skies once more. I prefer to allow the movement granted by this legendary action to supersede any movement speed reductions, like those from the sentinel feat. This allows the dragon to escape from a tight spot when needed, without entirely stripping the feature of sentinel should the dragon be choosing to shift away from such foes without using this action.

    Stay out of reach of the heaviest hitters, pick your targets to put them on the ground, and don’t linger beyond what’s necessary for the dragon to accomplish its goals. If the dragon is amused by the party, allow them the chance to recover. If its beginning to feel threatened, show the party no mercy.

    Minions

    The true threat any boss encounter in D&D fears is something outside of the scope of dice and decisions: the action economy. The number of creatures on either side of a battle influences the outcome like a finger on the scale. A dragon fighting alone, unless its of a much higher difficulty than the party can handle, has already accepted its death.

    To preserve the difficulty of such an encounter, grant your dragon minions and allies to help keep the fight in its favor – at least until those creatures have been slain. In my setting, dragons are supported by armies of soldiers – kobolds, lizardfolk, and dragonborn. A powerful martial fighter sworn to the dragon’s personal safety could be included in the fight. There are also the abishai, presented as fiendish creations of Tiamat in the hells that are sent to support her servants. Additionally, in my setting, many of the eggs in a dragon’s clutch hatch into offspring that are not full dragons. This is where guard drakes and other reptile-adjacent creatures come from. Your dragon could call to its young in such battles.

    Lairs and Arenas

    One of the most important pieces of any dragon encounter is the arena. Has the dragon flown out from the heart of its domain to a place it believes it can weaken the intruders challenging its claim? Does it lie in wait at the heart of its lair, resting upon a hoard that would make the richest kings blush?

    Each type of dragon is different, and would prefer different lairs to operate in. A black dragon with its amphibious nature would want a locale it can puts its enemies at a disadvantage by submerging itself in the murky depths of the waters. A white dragon would wish for a forbidding mountaintop cavern with icy stretches of floor that put any who would assail it at odds with unsure footing. A green dragon may wish to battle in an enclosed space that slowly fills with the poisonous gas it exhales with its breath attacks.

    A font of inspiration I’ve visited time and again for dragon arenas is the game Dragon Age: Inquisition. Every zone with a dragon battle managed to create a unique locale to encounter the creatures, with an excellent AI that uses the terrain around it to allow for a incredible and dynamic fight. Each of those lairs were immensely helpful when it came to designing my own encounter spaces for D&D.

    Expectations can be at an all-time high when it comes to a battle with a dragon in your D&D game. With these tips, I hope you’ll be able to create encounters that will be the talk of your table for years. Thank you for reading.

  • D&D: Level One Characters Are Still Heroes

    D&D: Level One Characters Are Still Heroes

    In the past, I’ve seen the sentiment that in 5th edition D&D, a level one adventurer can’t accomplish much. I recall even having a sympathetic read of this idea. I know of many whose games begin after skipping level one, or structure the game in such a way that a single encounter or session might give additional experience to bump them beyond to level two. I’ve run games like this.

    I have entirely and utterly been shown the error of this idea.

    I started running my current game via Discord (and Talespire once it released) back in November of 2020. My group is mostly people I’ve known via online video games for a few years, with the single exception of my cousin. Two of them had never played a tabletop RPG before.

    It’s one of those two, so grateful for the fun he was having in the game I ran, who decided to begin running his own game, and invited me to play. There’s another two people in our little community he invites, as well as the other player who is green-as-grass to D&D from my game.

    Our brand new GM decides to run a published adventure to ease him into everything – he reads online a bit and chooses Rime of the Frost Maiden, which is pretty new and it’s been well received. (So far for me? It’s been a blast.)

    I’m playing a rogue named Cole. I’m joined by another rogue, Aero; a wizard, Lady Hemlock; and a cleric, Ajani (who is indeed named for the MTG character). And this team shattered any preconceived notion I had about level one being unmeaningful. Long D&D story following below.

    We arrived in Brynshander on the eve of a New Moon. In the module, these are auspicious nights, with the towns each offering a sacrifice to their angry goddess who has plunged them into an unending winter. But, it’s lucky for our characters, because the innkeeper we speak to is kind enough to offer travelers free rooms for the night to keep them off the streets.

    Over time, we each arrive at the Northlook. Our GM has me enter first, and after the party is each introduced and given a few moments to interact with one another and the innkeeper, and a dwarven woman we learn to be named Hilm scatters the regulars out of the bar with her own entry leaving only us.

    She’s looking for someone to find and apprehend one “Sephek Kaltro.” She claims to have witnessed him killing someone – a murderer, with at least three victims attributed to him by her. She tells us there’s information that these killings are linked by these village lotteries – intended sacrifices that were not made, for one reason or another. This is the first time our characters learn of the New Moon sacrifices.

    “So, you want us to track down one murderer when this town is full of them, committing one this very night?” Cole asked.

    Hilm was stumped by that. Whether she condoned the lotteries, we never found out. We debated long, but uselessly, as Hilm was not actually anyone with authority in Brynshander and couldn’t have stopped the lottery regardless. The town’s mood in general wouldn’t prove much different. These people had been battered by two years of winter. No one had been able to break it. They believed the Frost Maiden implacable, her power absolute. Ultimately, we agreed to find Sephek, but none of us were happy with the town’s decision to sacrifice and murder their own. In time, we all found our way to our rooms. Our GM described the procession of people marching down the road toward the gates very near the inn. Cole watched them from the window. I didn’t think he’d be able to stop it alone. He was only level one, after all.

    But I knew he’d try.

    Ajani was the first to leave his room and return to the inn downstairs. I followed, then Aero and Hemlock. Our innkeeper sat at the bar, weeping. The choice for the lottery had been one of his workers – Maleena, who’d served our food and drinks.

    We stepped out into the crowd. Aero and I edged around and into the alleyways branching from the overrun road. Ajani and Hemlock navigated through the crowd to the opening, where they walked Maleena toward the gate. Cole and Aero found the wall, scaled it quick and quiet. Ajani and Hemlock stopped the procession and spoke with Maleena. She tried to reassure them that it would be okay, that they didn’t need to do anything on her account. She says she’s sick, that she doesn’t have much time left anyway.

    Ajani asked the people who’d led her to the gate if he could go with them, and they agreed. They withdrew, leaving Ajani, Hemlock, and Maleena as the gates began to open.

    I reached the top of the wall, and discovered a blizzard just beyond its stones. It encircled the town entirely, a pure wall of whirling white and ice. (The GM was playing some ambient music, and a Bloodborne track hit just then. It was incredible.) I looked at it with wide eyes, stunned for a moment, then set to work. I knotted a rope around the crenellations and tied my crowbar into the loose end to weigh the rope down. GM has me roll survival, and I get a middling result, around 12-15. The crowbar is torn from the rope as I toss it over the side, and the end is dancing restlessly in the wind, but the loop around the crenellation is secure.

    Aero, who is an aarakocra, noticed that the two guards on our side of the gate looked over toward us, but one of them grabbed the back of the other’s head and twisted it back down. He sees the rope below, grabs it from the top, and begins to fly down.

    The wind of the blizzard throws him to the ground and nearly kills him then and there (it took about 7 or so of his eleven hitpoints).

    The gates close behind Ajani, Hemlock, and Maleena, leaving them in the blizzard. The cold is shear and unrelenting, and Ajani holds Maleena close, though his own warmth is fading. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the end of the rope flailing in the air. He begins marching them toward it. He snags hold of it and keeps it still so that Maleena and Hemlock may climb. He finds Aero and gets him up, before climbing himself.

    As Maleena is brought to the top, I throw my own cloak onto her, pick her up, and run to the nearest tower where I deduced a fire would be kept burning through the night for the guards to use. It didn’t matter if anyone saw us – we needed to get her warm. The others filtered in quickly.

    Then the guards came.

    They were her brothers.

    We finessed a story, the younger of the two having gone out after his sister in the night to die beside her, the older as the witness. We took them back to the Northlook, and the innkeeper used his own contacts to get them on a carriage southward and away before the next day’s over, closing the Northlook to customers the following day “in grief” so they have a place to stay.

    It had all gone so perfectly, I honestly thought it was part of the module.

    Our new GM revealed that it wasn’t. He’d decided in the last hours leading to the game to make the night a New Moon, just so that one of our players whose character’s chosen background didn’t come with gold could stay at the inn that night. That everything we’d done, he’d not had anything to go off of.

    His first game as a GM.

    Experience isn’t the only thing valuable in this hobby. Level one characters can be just as heroic as they are at level ten, or twenty; the only real difference is the scale. And a first-time GM can create one of the most incredible scenarios in a game I’ve ever had the privilege to join in entirely by accident. If you’ve wanted to start running a game but been hesitant, I recommend you take the plunge.

    Damn I love D&D.