D&D 5E - Player Facing Critical Success Options

Somehow, while talking about D&D 5E combat, and our dissatisfaction thereof, Thomas and I started talking about Critical Hits. I mentioned that I found it easy to make Hard GM Moves (ala Powered by the Apocalypse Games) when a player rolls a Natural 1 or Critical Failure (or conversely, when a monster rolls a critical hit) but I didn't have as satisfying a solution for when players roll a Natural 20 or Critical Success. We decided to each tackle the problem separately, each writing our own blog post without consulting the other to see the different strategies we'd come up with. Naturally, we could help but bend that rule a little bit in our conversations over the next few days but for the most part we kept mum on our plans, so neither of us have seen what the other is proposing. We're considering other cross-blog shenanigans in the future, so this is a bit of a test.

Here's his take: Gussying up monsters (the Ogre!) and crits and mine is below the jump... (and my comments on Thomas' take can be found here)

Internet Tables I have Stolen from and/or Consulted Recently or that I intend to Steal from and/or Consult in the Near Future

• Strange Gang Motivations and Descriptions
• d100 Angry Mobs
• d100 Tragic Old Murder Hobos
• Ruined Building Contents
• Random Graffiti Generator
• What's in the Dead Orc's Pockets?
• Signs Your Party is Not the First in the Dungeon
• Weird Taboo Generator
• Random GM Move Tables for Dungeon World RPG
• Yeah, but This Manticore...
• Name That Barbarian!
• d20 Table of Wizard Obsessions
• Giant Slugs!
• Megadungeon Random Area Name Generator
• d30 Table of Taxes, Fines, Tariffs, and Fees
• Fiasco D&D – Desires & Needs
• Lost Cities of the Fallen Empire
• The City of Beggars
• Strange Land/Plane Generator

H/T - Many tables found from On Never Being Able to Find a Table When You Need One

The Shattered World - Pitch and Icons

Back in June I started a new D&D 5E game, or D&D 5E-ish game... See, 13th Age has thoroughly corruped me, so I shoe-horned in 13th Age Style Backgrounds (using a ridiculously complicated system that I may post later), the Escalation Die and 13th Age Icons and also Numenera style GM Intrusions in place of the default (and uninspired, in my opinion) Inspiration rules.

The setting was a reboot/homage/hack of the last D&D 4E campaign I ran and I pitched it to players as "Final Fantasy Airships meets Isla's Mist Sea meets Zombie Apocalypse meets Battlestar Galactica meets Mad Max with some Glen Cook Black Company/Garrett PI tossed in too" and "so you're stuck on a giant flying airship that the 'good guys' only have partially under control, there are sections of engineering that are infested with undead, sky pirates attack and you have to drive them off". (Isla's Mist Sea is the 4E campaign where the PCs were on a wizard's floating Island).

The final setting pitch ending up being: Pre-Shattering the world was in the midst of a war between powerful wizards over silver mines and hordes. Wizard rulers/generals were taking ever increasing gambles, raising hordes of dead and making war machines to fight while they floated above the earth in flying castles and city sized flying ships. I deliberately had the PCs put into stasis by a "neutral" wizard during the actual apocalyptic Shattering so that they awoke three years after into a strange world and players wouldn't need to worry about detailed setting information and would get to discover things along with me.

A portion of the Airship dungeon explored during the most recent Shattered World game.

With that loose premise, I decided to make my own Icons and since I was also running an Apocalypse World game and drawing on Apocalypse World's flavor/tactics for some of my inspiration, I decided to base the Icons on the AW Scarcity/Lacks that AW provides as motivating factors.

• Hunger
• Thirst
• Ignorance
• Fear
• Decay
• Despair
• Envy
• Ambition
• Greed

But the new realization I had with Icons is how it serves the GM's interest to set up a PC's relationship with an Icon as a choice about game narratives. For example, one of the Icons I created is Father Machine and I set up the PC choices of Positive, Ambiguous and Negative relationships as follows.

• Positive: You want to work to spread the machines as replacements for the old arcane magic, you are a warforged who is visted by Father Machine in your dreams.
• Ambigious: You find the mechanical devices and innovations of Father Machine and his followers useful, but worry about what Father Machine plans. You are a warforged who wants to break free of Father Machine.
• Negative: You blame the machines and warforged for the Shattering just as much or more than you do the Wizards.

So as the players choose Icon relationships they were also telling me something about how their PC's would react to the world. So far this has worked well, as I can remind myself of the Icon relationships and weave in scenese, places, items and NPCs to bounce of them.

You can see all the Icons here, or rather all but one as I still need to write up my Icon version of Blunanda the Kelp Queen, who was stolen shamelessly from Thomas.

Expect more about the Shattered Worlds as I continue to run.

Shattered World Icons

GM Intrusions - Too Good to Leave in Numenera

I’ve run Numenera 3 times now and one of the things I’m finding most revelatory is the GM Intrusion Mechanic. Succinctly, the Intrusion mechanic is this: The GM offers the player two XP, one of which the player gives to another player, in exchange for creating a complication for the player’s character and the player can refuse the intrusion by spending one of their own XP. Note that I used complication instead of problem, disaster or damage. The intrusion is not there to punish the player or character, but to allow the GM to intrude themselves back into the narrative of the game. In practice, I’ve discovered it allows me to have a mechanic to support something I’ve done before as a GM and allows the players to feel like my taking back narrative control is less arbitrary.

An example:

In D&D if the PCs were crossing a rope bridge and as the last PC got to the middle the ropes snapped, threatening to send all the PCs to the bottom of a gorge, that might feel contrived to the players. A discussion might erupt about how the PCs weren’t all crossing at the same time, or players might try and back track to say that actually they were tied together and finally the situation might just come down to the GM declaring that it happened and the narrative picking back up from there. But with a GM Intrusion the blow is softened as the mechanic rewards the player for going along with the GM instead of setting up a confrontation.

Or a social encounter example:

The party is talking with a local sorceress, trying to wheedle information from her about a nearby dragon. The PC doing the talking is rolling really well on social checks and might be on his way to getting exactly what the party wants. Here a GM intrusion could be the sorceress becoming smitten with the PC and causing complications or deducing that the PCs are interested in the dragon in order to slay it and asking for a specific treasure. Less “obvious” an intrusion that the example above, but still a complication to make a social interaction more interesting than relying just on a few skill rolls.

What GM Intrusions really do is create a compact between the GM and the players that when the GM decides to be arbitrary or create complications there’s a reward for the players to go along with it. This softens the blow of GM choices or narrative changes that might otherwise cause player grumbling. They function quite a bit like moves from Apocalypse World or Dungeon World, in that they are opportunities for the GM to seize the narrative again, and in fact, many of the moves from AW or DW work excellently as GM intrusions (“reveal an unwelcome truth”, “insult, affront, offend or provoke someone”, “put someone in a spot”).
Another nice benefit is the second point of XP must be given to a different player, creating bonds between players. Though I am going to start having the player say why they are giving the other player the XP point.

So what use is this to me? I’m not running Numenera.

Ah, but you can easily port the GM Intrusion mechanic to other games. Case in point, several weeks ago I ran a game of D&D 5E where I used the GM Intrusion mechanic to give out Inspiration points instead of using the default role-playing guidelines of 5E.

GM Intrusions for 5E – 

• Use instead of (or in addition to, if you wish) the default rules for giving Inspiration.
• Give out two Inspiration points to a player when you use a GM Intrusion, just like in Numenera with XP, the player receiving the Intrusion gives one of the points away immediately to another player. 
• If the player does not want to allow the intrusion, they can spend an Inspiration point to refuse the intrusion.
• Unlike Numenera where the XP from GM Intrusions are normal XP that can be spent like any other, I’m leaning towards only allowing D&D Players to keep a single Inspiration point between sessions, to encourage players to use them instead of hoarding them for “boss fights”.
• Some observations on using GM Intrusions in D&D 5E – 
• I like it; obviously, I never really got into the default Inspiration for RP rule as it rewards players who are more into acting/RP than quieter players and/or rewards splashy/flashy and potentially disruptive actions/RP/personality traits than more subtle actions/RP/personality. 
• There is the potential to be giving out more inspiration than usual, previously I feel like I was giving out one or two inspiration a 5E session, the Numenera book suggests one GM Intrusion per PC per session, which would result in 10 Inspiration points given out for a 5 PC party. I’m largely okay with this as I’m fine with PCs having a chance to be awesome (“Be a Fan of the Player’s Characters” as the principles of Apocalypse World command).

Here’s more info about GM Intrusions:

• A podcast devoted to exploring the GM Intrusion Mechanic
• The Art of GM Intrusions

Power your game with the Apocalypse - a list of GM Moves

Made this for myself and thought I'd share.  Simply a list of 208 GM Moves from Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Sagas of the Icelanders and Monsterhearts, all powered by the Apocalypse.  Use as inspiration of things to do in your games... *Updated to include 17 moves from Adventures on Dungeon Planet and new moves from Planarch Codex: Dark Heart of the Dreamer.  Link to Google Doc spreadsheet for easier printing.

Last Rest Setting: Grit and Inspiration

So in my GM Commentary for Episode Two, I mentioned Digetic thinking and needing to establish a "Grit Level" for my home brew Last Rest setting that I'm running my Reign campaign in, this post is my attempt to help set a "Grit Level" by going over some of my inspiration for the setting and the kind of grittiness I'm taking from those sources...

DREAD Thoughts & "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement" Preview

So, gentle reader, as you may have noticed, I reference DREAD quite a bit on the this blog.  Here it is again, in case you forgot..

Currently unavailable from Amazon, which I have not seen happen in a while and they're still publishing slim scenario books, so hopefully it's just between printings, but it's also available in PDF from DriveThruRPG and when I think to look in my local game shops, I usually have no trouble finding it.

Dread is a game of "diceless horror" where the schtick is that the sole mechanic of the game is a Jenga (or generic tumbling block) tower, which is much more interesting and intense than it might sound.  The players pull a block when they want to take an action where success or failure matter.... So trying starting a car on a bright sunny day, not a pull...  Trying to starting a car whose battery is run down as the ax-wielding maniac is smashing in the back window, now that's (at least) one pull.  When the tower collapses, bad things happen, injury or misfortune early in the game, death.

The other place where Dread shines is in character creation.  Here again is the example I gave in my Character Creation - True Background vs. Limited Future Choices post.

The GM comes up with characters for the scenario, in my last game the players were all circus freaks, and then comes up with questions for each character that the player answers to define the character.  For instance, in my Circus Freak game, one of the un-played characters was the Circus Strongman, below are his questions:

• What happened to you when you were nine that made you swear to yourself that you'd never be weak?
• Even though you're the strongest person you know, you hate physical violence, why?
• What intellectual pursuit of yours would surprise people if they knew about it?
• Why don't you feel comfortable socializing with the other performers?
• You don't enjoy being a circus performer, but why don't you leave the circus?
• What nationality won't you admit to being descended from and why?
• What happened that made you afraid of being underground?
• When the going gets tough, how do you respond?
• The elderly clown Juventas died of a heart attack recently, what shameful thing did he see you do three months ago?

As you can see, in answering the questions, a player gets to determine many of the details, secrets, fears and emotions of a character.

Well, last night, Citizen Ben his first game of Dread, an zombies in a blizzard scenario of his own creation, that I got to enjoy playing in and it reminded me of some tips, tricks and thoughts I had about writing/running a good game of Dread and then a preview of the next Dread game I'm running, a 19th century Whaling/Nautical inspired game, "Left Wing of the Day of Judgement"