Wait, What? – Perplexities as RPG Hooks

Talking with Thomas about the Day of Al’Akbar, a module he’s running for our ongoing AD&D 2nd Edition al-Qadim Church game. He was asking if it felt like there was too much going on in the city for the party to keep track of and that led to us discussing how NPC’s give clues and just what hooks and focused are needed for the PCs in an adventure. I haven’t read the Day of Al’Akbar yet, as we’re still playing through it, but our party headed to the city of Khaibar, thinking it was an abandoned ruin with perhaps a small bandit camp. Our goal was to find the cup and talisman of Al’Akbar, in order to cure a disease in a city we’d like to be able to visit without fear of catching a plague and to charge the rulers a massive amount of gold to do so. Instead of the ruined and empty (or nearly empty) city, we arrived to find a re-established city with at least 500 inhabitants, multiple inns, mercenary soldiers, a bandit king and his followers and a terrorist waging a magical bombing campaign. Needless to say, this threw us for a loop and we spent two sessions exploring the town, speaking to dozens of NPCs, exploring a dozen or so labeled shops and such and trying to figure out if the tensions in the town were going to interfere with our mission of obtaining the two artifacts we had come in search of. The third session was largely us stumbling onto the aftermath of some NPC theater and using it, as well as several overpowered spells, to loot the palace of the town and locate the first part of the artifact, but we still don’t quite know what happened between the bandit king al-Farzikh and his enemy, Mad Dog, and if the mercenary take-over after al-Farzikh’s death was planned or just opportunistic. But, since none of those NPCs seem to be searching for the artifacts, it’s likely that we play next we will continue to ignore them as we move our hunt for the second artifact elsewhere in the city.

This got me thinking of two modules that I’ve run recently where I feel like the PCs were drawn into the plot despite a relative paucity of hooks, the excellent Dancing in the Ruins module for Godless, and the first published Planescape adventure, The Eternal Boundary. At 6 pages, Dancing in the Ruins, is wonderfully economical, it offers a few NPCs who can serve as quest givers, but mostly relies on the mystery to be compelling. For The Eternal Boundary, it starts with a quest giver, either faction or non-faction, but both those starts give the PCs basically the same information and send them on a quest that is largely a red-herring and then the PCs discover the real plot of the module in the course of tracking down their MacGuffin. Instead of detailed hooks what both modules rely on are Perplexities, tangles of clues that convince the PCs and their players that there has to be something more (and oh boy, there is plenty more lurking beneath the surface in each module.)

MINOR SPOILERS FOR DANCING IN THE RUINS,THE ETERNAL BOUNDARY AND N1 – AGAINST THE CULT OF THE REPTILE GOD BELOW.

Dortherdoreft: Initial Thoughts and Lessons

Spoiler: the Derro babies in cages totally stole the show...

So, Thomas and I ran our two session, same dungeon, themed New Year's D&D, Dortherdoreft. First he ran a party of all Dwarves through and then 48 hours later I ran a party of all Drow through. We wanted to both have some iconic player character class choices, like Dwarven Cleric and Drow Priestess of Lolth, and also to feature some icon Underdark features. We also decided to try and provide both some challenges for the PCs but also some places where their iconic abilities could shine. Here are my thoughts about how it went and lessons learned, both as player of a Dwarf Battlemaster Fighter and as a GM. We're hoping to tweak and write up the adventure for everyone to take a look at, but for now, here's some initial thoughts. You can find Thomas' thoughts on Dortherdoreft on his blog.

State of the Blog and Games / Battlerager Blues

I can't recommend the DesignsByMiranda Etsy shop enough; I got several XMAS gifts for friends from it and they were shipped promptly and high quality and now I'm wishing I'd gotten more for myself.

I did a great job keeping this blog up to date, from this last August (2015) up through November, averaging a little over 9 posts a month. Then the dreaded Holiday season descended from the (mostly) snowless skies and games were postponed and rescheduled due to illness and the holiday business and I didn't keep up my blog posts.

Here's the state of my games in the order that it occurs to me this afternoon.

• My Shattered World 5e-ish campaign continues apace, just let the PCs hit 5th level and plan on accelerating the plot now. Managed to make use of this swank Dyson hand themed dungeon, but not this other one... (yet). Eventually I'll get back and update my campaign log.
• Back in early November I began running Out of The Abyss. We're 2ish sessions in, in that we did a character creation session plus short "test" dungeon for the players to get a feel for their PCs, then did about an hour and a half of play in a second session before it was cut short due to illness and finally a short-ish session on 12/20 to finish up Chapter One. So most of the PCs have escaped into the Underdark (one player was only at the character creation session so far, so her PC will be somewhere in the Underdark) with weapons, armor and rope they captured from the Drow, but without food or water. Expect at least one blog post on OOTA (which is how I've decided to abbreviate Out of the Abyss) next week when I sit down and share all the game aids I've found to use and share a few of my own that I've made.
• Our Antagonist Relations Actual Play: A Red & Pleasant Land Podcast should be returning the first week of January, as the players face off against that Pudding. Maybe someday the Ginger Giant and I will do an Antagonist Relations podcast that isn't an actual play again, but right now time constraints on the Thursday evening's we're free and the joy of the actual play makes that hard as we end up spending most of the two hours playing and then don't get to just sitting around shooting the shit.
• Thomas' 2nd Edition Al-Qadim Church continues to be quite enjoyable to play and I really ought to write a full post on it. Someday soon I'll have a chance to get my thoughts down right after playing, but running OOTA on 1st and 3rd Sundays has made that a little tougher.
• Speaking of Thomas, since he is back in the (semi) frozen wastes of MN, we decided that instead of our traditional New Year's D&D we'd each run a session of D&D, using the same maps and tying our two sessions together, because we are overly ambitious. So on New Year's Day, Thomas will run a group of Dwarves through the dungeon of Dortherdoreft and then on January 3rd, I'll run a group of Drow though the very same dungeon. We'll be re-using some of the same elements and we're hoping to write up the adventures once we've run them. 
• Also due to the aforementioned over-ambition, I'm toying with a bunch of new ideas to put up on the blog for 2016, but I probably will keep that all to myself since I should be continuing all the things I've started like GM Commentaries, Campaign Summary Updates, Gussying Up 5e Monsters and such before I do wacky things like creating custom 5e campaign settings with new (sub)races, class builds and what-not. Though since Thomas has started putting up more stuff for 5th edition Planescape conversions, I know that I'll have at least a few things in that vein coming soon

Since I needed to come up with a 5th level Dwarf PC for the first session of Dortherdoreft I took a closer look at the Battlerager Path as introduced in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide (SCAG) hoping it would combine my love of Dwarves and Barbarians but instead it was... disappointing... to say the least, but instead of continuing to pepper Thomas with my problems with the build, I'm going to cover them here and then propose some fixes. Warning, I'm really harsh on the build as presented in the books, because in my opinion, it's awful. Way more awful than the Ranger or other by the book 5th edition classes/sub-classes that have gotten a lot of crap. And it hurts me, because Dwarf+Barbarian should be AWESOME and instead it is so sub-optimal that it isn't even worth playing as a joke. And I should know because I made a bunch of jokey less than optimal 5th edition PCs recently...

Thought of the Day... #2 - Is it worth being a bit of a "Jerk" about Alignment?

This meme is a total lie, P. Bubs is totally not Lawful Good by any stretch of the imagination... 

Listening to a recent Play on Target podcast on Character Behavior and Alignment while in the car and trying to move between a dozen reports at work and started thinking again about Alignment.

I have a pretty tortured history with Alignment and Morality in D&D and other Fantasy Heartbreakers, which is told partially through my previous (and often snarky, fair warning) posts on Alignment, as well as two of my character's from the Ginger Giant's games, the often equally hated (by other PCs, at least) Sid and Uwain.

What I'm thinking about now, is how much I should push players to play Alignment/Morality. In my Shattered World game, I made the decision to leave Alignment off, figuring that the Icons and NPCs would be able to enforce any moral issues I decide to make an issue of.

Now, I'm gearing up to start running Out of the Abyss with my Sunday group, and I'm wondering how much I should enforce their alignment. Do I just have them choose a few Ideals from the D&D 5e Backgrounds? Do I try and write up something like the Dungeon World Alignments, which seems like time I could spend on doing other prep for Out of the Abyss (which is incredibly prep heavy for a DM already) or for my two other ongoing games or for my upcoming Dread one shot. Or I could try and steal the Noble, Fear and Rage Passions from Unknown Armies? Do I just admit that of my playing group it seems like I'm the only one who feels like Alignment is an important part of the game and let my players choose various Good or Neutral alignments as they wish without trying to enforce "alignment" morality and keeping my mouth shut when "good" characters decide to be cruel or dishonest because they think they can get away with it?

One thought I have is to reward players who play close to the alignment they put on their sheet by giving them a mechanical boost against Madness, which will be a huge part of Out of the Abyss, but I also need to read the Madness section of the 5e DMG again and decide how by the book I want to go with Madness or how much I want to change for ease of play and/or avoid the Malkavian problem of people playing insanity as "wacky". But then, if we don't define alignments well, it becomes more of a case of "are you playing that alignment the way Zack imagines it?"

In any case, the podcast has it in my mind again, that I really do wish I could have each PC commit to a moral code they would hold to, more like Vampire morality paths than D&D's alignments, but I know that is utterly unfeasible to try and pry that out of most players.

Further complicating things, in Al-Qadim Church, I'm playing an Evil priestess of a Chaotic Evil goddess, Ragarra, and I find myself thinking that I need to work with Thomas to come up with a good well-written code of ethics to abide by. Last session there was a moment where one of the other players went with a very "traditional" D&D Heroic Good impulse to risk his PC and the party save a fairly helpless NPC and my PC argued against it and almost ordered him not to, as if the NPC was weak enough to die, then that was that and he should be left to die in the river or re-captured and murdered by gnolls. Now, my problem is when I play non-good characters, I tend to think a lot more about what code of ethics/behavior they actually hold to, which I haven't really done yet with Thema.

Anyway, this has gotten way long for what was supposed to be a quick "Thought of the Day" but y'all can consider it as an open thread to discuss Alignment with me.

Fiddly Bits - Old and New

An early illustration of a Medieval Elephant Drop?

Fiddly bits have been on my mind lately.Between running my Shattered World 5e-ish D&D game (as discussed here), running World of Dungeons 1979 with Planarch Codex for my non-D&D games and playing in Thomas' Church of Al-Qadim Sun-AD&D 2e game, I've been noticing more and more about the fiddly bits that make play more difficult, are easy to sweep aside when needed, easy to create and add in or just weird little things that make the game more enjoyable or at least more interesting. Then on this last Saturday I ran a last-minute-ish Birthday D&D game for a friend that brought a lot of the fiddliness into focus for me.

Extra Life - PCs I'll never be allowed to play - Recent Reading

Why aren't you reading Kaptara? 

The planning for the Ginger Giant's Extra Life event continues apace, and you can read and hear all 'bout it on his blog. 

You can also find our event/team donation page here and my personal donation page on the top right corner of THIS VERY BLOG (or here if you're too lazy to scroll elsewhere or use RSS or mobile). If you're a regular reader, please consider making a donation, even if it's only a few dollars. It goes to a good cause and the sooner I start getting a few donations, the less I'll need to spam my blog with pitches over the next month.

Ben had been making a few noises about not wanting me to play so ridiculous a character that I took over the game, so of course that was A GAUNTLET THROWN DOWN, and I had to come up with characters so ridiculous I'd never be allowed to play them in the event. Originally I had thought I could do a hundred but that was overly ambitious, so instead below are 23, two of which I originally pitched in my first Extra Life post.

Also below is some of my Recent Reading with a few thoughts.

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode 13

Because I've been a terrible blogger, here's another Antagonist Relations Podcast. We bring on our good friend Bob who's recently been making the leap from player to Game Master.

In the Lair of the Ginger Giant: Antagonist Relations Podcast Episode 13 - Sternly Worded Letters

PS. you can leave your complaints here.

The Murder Hobo's Dilemma… "Are we in the Dungeon yet?" - Dungeon World

(Full disclosure, I'm sure this is more an issue for me, with my wanting more realism in characters and plot than realism in rules.

I've know played in three sessions of Dungeon World and I've been enjoying them but last night I realized that there was something that kept me (yes, I managed to let the group decide I was their leader, must to my chagrin) from leading the group full force ahead into adventure. The premise of the game is a modern day Twin Cities metro, but with magic and dungeons, where Adventuring Companies (emphasis on the company) send adventurers into dungeons but otherwise it's straight forward fantasy version of the present. The GM was explicit that the normal humanoid fantasy races, goblin, orc, kobold, weren't inherently evil, and that is leading to some quandaries. I had gone in expecting a fairly lighthearted game, and tenor of play-wise, it's been fairly lighthearted but the plot has been drifting much grittier.

In the first two session, the party, with the conceit that we were the local "neighborhood watch" went into a dungeon near a graveyard and fought a mixture of goblins and an elf (or two, I don't rightly recall if there was more than one) who were in what the GM described as a teenage party pad (wrecked furniture, oil barrel fire, empty keg) and while the elf was a member of a previous adventuring party to disappear into the dungeon, the goblins were definitely high school kids, ya know, wearing letter jackets and such. Now, there was a lower level of that dungeon with a definitely evil undead creature of some kind, so I think we partly rationalized things as "oh yeah, the evil undead thing was controlling them, so we're not total murder hobos for slaughtering those unarmed teenagers".

6am Sunday Morning - Time to game! (13th Age thoughts)

I've now played 13th Age twice through the FUTURISTIC MAGIC OF THE INTERWEBS. Though long discussed between John, Thomas and I, we never managed to get an simultaneous online game going (though we did play my troubled VtDA game and may still play a hopefully less troubled Vampire game that Thomas has been threatening to run for half a year now.) but now we have and it's been a blast. Due to wacky time zone differences we play at what is my 6 or 7am in the morning (Thomas is 10 hours ahead of me and John is 5 additional hours ahead of Thomas...) but it's been well worth the early rise, mostly because Thomas and John are two of my favorite people to game with. So here are my thoughts gathered so far based on two early morning sessions of 13th Age played with Roll20 online.

Play Report 1: Poor Player Decisions

     I'm 23 days into my GM-hiatus and I've managed to finagle my way into three games. Because I'm a jackass, I'm playing a Dungeoneer, Izotz Sendoa Harkaitz Mael or Ish, in a newly started Dungeon World game set in a fantastic version of the present. Because I'm not good at going with my gut or putting two and two together I'm playing a magic user in an ongoing AD&D/OSRIC campaign that I've joined. And because I didn't do a good job of considering the play style or potential story lines and didn't ask, as a player, what the game was going to be about, I built a Troll for a new Shadowrun campaign that I will be completely scrapping in favor of a character better suited to the game and group. Finally, because the scheduling gods are cruel and fickle bastards whose rituals I no longer have the patience to perform, I had to take a pass on playing 5E D&D for now.

     Overall, as I reflect on the play I've gotten in over the last few weeks I've realized that I've been making (1) Poor Character Choices and (2) Letting my GM burnout prevent me from bringing my experience to the table.

1. Poor Character Choices

     In Dungeon World the poor character choices I've made are minimal and mostly limited to my choice of Dungeoneer, a non-standard class from DW1 - Lair of the Unknown (parenthetically, this looks like an excellent little Dungeon World Module, so maybe I'll have to try it out at some point or at least beg, borrow and steal from it) instead of taking one of the unused playbooks from the basic DW book.  I could have chosen Bard, Cleric, Druid or Paladin (or even Barbarian) but instead I had to be a special little snowflake and choose a non-standard class.  It would have probably been fairer to the other players if I had chosen one of the base classes, but with DW that's probably the least of my sins as a player.

     In the AD&D/OSRIC game, the DM was subtly pushing me towards playing one of the existing henchmen, but there weren't any thieves among them and I had my heart set on a thief.  So, instead I rolled up a character and rolled extremely well and paradoxically not well enough (multiple 15s and nothing under a 10, but no 16s to be an illusionist or paladin).  Because the talk around the table was that there were no PC magic users in the party and there was a PC thief, I ignored my desire to play a thief and built a magic user instead.  I decided to make a former scholar turned magic user named Horatio, but ignored all the context of the party and spend 60% of my starting funds on six daggers so that I could potentially make it through 3 rounds of combat.  I would have been much better suited to plan on avoiding combat at any cost and putting that 120 silver into supplies like extra flasks, bottles and multipurpose adventuring gear that would have fit a scholar background, but alas, I let myself get sucked into the idea that when combat occurred, I would need to be able to defend myself for a round or two.
     Of course, I completely ignored that there were several 4th level PCs in the party and that there were at least 8 henchmen at least two of which were also Magic Users, so Horatio was never in any danger during combat.  In fact, during the three combats in the game, all I had Horatio do was "watch closely" to better understand how the various molds and fungus we were encountering behaved.  Would have been far better to have stuck with my gut and been a thief and had some scouting to undertake and a chance to make an attack or two during combat.  But now that I've committed to the Magic User, what I'll do instead is see if the GM will be kind enough to let me change my many (relatively) expensive daggers for a cheap and useful staff and to retroactively purchase a better set of adventuring equipment that better reflect a scholar exploring the world than a half a dozen daggers.

     Most grievous of my poor choices as a player was the creation of my initial Shadowrun character, Tallow, a troll ex-police officer who was going to refuse to use any weapons aside from his fists.  Seriously, like a fool, I had to have the GM badger me before I even gave Tallow a shotgun.  Most of the poor choices here flowed from not being proactive about asking about what kinds of stories would be told in the game.  Fortunately, the brief, non-canonical sample scenario gave me a feel for how much more procedural and simulationist the GM was planning on run things and quickly dissuaded me from making Tallow my actual PC.  Instead of working with the GM and other players to make a PC that would fit the group and the game, I let myself focus, laser-like, on a character I'd like to play, not bothering to figure out how my character would fit into things.  Because of this, I let myself craft a character who might have an interesting back story and personality, but who will be utterly useless on the runs the game will revolve around.
     Tallow might have been an interesting character for another game, but I don't think he'd last long or have much to do in the Shadowrun game I'm actually playing in.  Better then, for me to go back to the drawing board and craft a character who might actually fit into the party and the story of the game, a character who'd actually be useful on a run.  To that end, I'm thinking I'm going to create a Face, a smooth talker who would actually be able to talk his way out of the situation that Tallow found himself in during the sample session.

2. Poorly Shared Experience

     This wasn't really a problem in the AD&D/OSRIC game, as it's established and has been running for many months, but I for the Dungeon World and Shadowrun games I definitely let my GM burnout prevent me from applying any of my experience as a GM to help shape and start the games up, except, of course, in ways that were probably unwelcome and intrusive.
     How often, on this very blog even, have I wondered how to make more cohesive parties, how to tie player characters together, how to build good group backgrounds?  Did I bother to try and help either my DW or Shadowrun DM shape the groups into cohesive groups? No.  Instead I very selfishly and short-sightedly focused down on my characters, not even trying to build the group around them, more focused on not trying to butt in with suggestions (for whatever stupid reason) than with really assisting with character creation.  Of course, during Dungeon World that didn't prevent me from making a few obnoxious rules-lawyer-y remarks and arguments.
     So, for DW I pushed a little to have the GM explain the premise of the campaign, but did nothing to really help the other characters build their characters and to shape the party as a group, leaving the GM to declare by fiat that we were basically the neighborhood watch because the players didn't come up with any real reasons why we knew each other.
     This seems to be the biggest issue I have with the DW bonds.  They work well to tie PCs together and mechanically to give reasons to resolve intra-party interactions, but as far as initial backgrounds they need a preface statement.
     For example, one of the bonds I used, I stole from the Fighter sheet (did I mention I felt I was a special snowflake during character creation and didn't let the base book restrain me at all?) is: "I worry about the ability of _______________ to survive in the dungeon.".  Ironically, I chose the fighter for the bond, but while the bond explains some of our current relationship, it still doesn't explain our past relationship.  What it needs is a preface like "because I saw <Fighter Name> fall into a pit trap when we went into the haunted woods, I worry about the ability of _______________ to survive in the dungeon."
     Or another, for the Dungeoneer bond"I will show __________ that the underground world can beautiful as it is dangerous." I chose the elf wizard.  But that bond alone doesn't really explain how I know the elf wizard or why I'd feel that way.  Better to add a preface sentence like, "Elf Wizard is like most other Elves who hold that the underground world is to be disdained as ugly and dangerous in favor of the so-called splendor of the above ground world and it's forests.  I will show __________ that the underground world can beautiful as it is dangerous."

3. Goals for Next Sessions  (aka be a less cruddy player)

Dungeon World: 

• Work to coalese the group, hopefully by declaring someone else the leader and then supporting their decisions and serving as a tactical lietenant and advisor.  
• Rebuild bonds to add preface statements explaining the bond and better fleshing out the connection.
• Intrude less with alternate rules interpretations, unless asked.

AD&D/OSRIC:

• Work with DM to adjust initial equipment purchase and weapon proficiency to better reflect scholar background and non-combat role in party.
• Take better notes.  If I'm going to play a scholar, I should probably take better notes about the research and discoveries I make.  I glanced at my notes from the first session, and I have a sentence and a half.  Horatio might not care too much about mapping the dungeon, but he probably wants better notes on the endothermic mold they found. 

Shadowrun:

• Create a new character that will better fit into the group and expected story as a Face.
• Build relationships between new character and the other PCs to create a more cohesive group.

For All Games

• Minimum of time on the phone/ipad/laptop.  Since I plan on demanding this from my players, I better model it now.