100th Post! - 2 Possible Extra Life PCs...

It's my 100th post on the blog, so here are 2 PCs that I might inflict on DMs in Extra Life, if they'll let me... Though it'll be easier to do if people donate... wink wink...and then I can blame popular demand...

Prince Dartor

Prince Dartor (need to update the sheet to reflect his Princeliness). Bask in his majestic nobility, marvel at his potential to do 36 points of damage per round with only Blowgun darts... Or to disarm a foe from 100ft with only a blowgun dart.

Laddie

Based on the Really Good Dog class from Goblin Punch. Laddie is a Really Good Dog with a couple levels of fighter.

I'll post more of these as I start to get donations.

Extra Life Supporter Rewards + Scattered GM Prep Thoughts + Recent Reading

First, an appeal for dedicated readers of the blog to make a donation to Extra Life. As you've all no doubt gotten tired of reading, I will be playing as part of a 24 hour charity Extra Life event with the proceeds going to Children's Miracle Network on with most of those 24 hours falling on Saturday 11/7/2015. I've actually donated $25 myself, just not to my own profile. I run this blog without asking for any donations or support, mostly out of my own obsessive need to bloviate about RPGs, and while I do have ads at the bottom so far this year they've netted me less than a dollar. Each time I put up a post, I see that it usually gets 10-15 views within 24 hours, so even if only five of your donate $5 we'll double the donation I've already made. It's for a good cause so please donate, even if it's just a dollar or two.

If you do donate because of this blog, let me know and if I can generate $50 of donations from the blog I will let supporters demand that I do wacky (but not game ruining) things during the game sessions that I play and/or run. Here are some options:

• Force me to play a wacky character off my list of Characters Too Ridiculous to play if I can (the DMs get veto power on PCs, so the intensely wacky characters might require a bit of finagling on my part but I'll try my damnedest or trick one of the other DMs into running a 5 minute mini-session or something or have them show up in a session I run as an NPC)
• Record a video of myself speaking in character, in an accent determined by donors during play. Those of you who listen to the actual play podcast or who game with me in real life know how mortifyingly bad my accents/voices usually are.
• Determine my PCs for sessions. I've got one character I definitely want to play (spoiler, it's Alice), but I'm hoping to play in at least 3 of the 3 hour sessions and I've already got 18 potential PCs made, well, 14 if you count the 5 versions of Alice I've made as a single PC.
• Pick out dialogue from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass (the books only, not any movies or other adaptations please.) that I have to utter in character as Alice.

I'm also waiting on more details about the location and scheduling, but I may be able to do things like live-blog sessions I play in, and if the schedule works out right, I'm hoping to run one of the 7 versions I've drafted up of the True Tomb of Isidore Philokrates which will be largely improvised and which, if I receive donations, I could allow sponsors to make decisions about what happens in the Tomb, perhaps even in real time through one of the many social media platforms available. 

Perhaps you've got your own idea of something you'd like me to do as a reward, if so donate and propose it and remember that if it's something really wacky or embarrassing for me, the more you donate the harder it will be for me to say no.

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.

More than 11 Ways - Recent Reading and Re-reading

So I see that the 11 Ways to be a Better Roleplayer from Look, Robot is going around again. Not that I have any problem with this, it's an excellent post and I actually recommended it back in December of 2014 when I first came across it (and paired it with a companion piece from Gnome Stew on how to help your players if you're a GM) but I've been wondering if anyone sharing the link has been delving deeper into the RPG Advice on Look, Robot because there's plenty of other great stuff there.

So here's five more posts I'll recommend that I went back and re-read or read for the first time after seeing 11 Ways to be a Better Roleplayer make the rounds again.

For Players

• Your dice don’t hate you – they love you. (Maybe a bit too much.) TL:DR if you don't read anything else, read this one.
• Six questions that will help you make a better character
• My Mother’s second-best sword: Small things, big echoes
• Stanislavski vs Brecht in tabletop roleplaying

And one for the GMs

• How I learned to stop worrying and hate the plot: Improv is kinder than planning
• Even if you're a player, you might want to read this one, as it has one of my favorite paragraphs I've read on an RPG blog lately.

And across town, the other half of the group are in the invented-on-the-spot schoolgirl pitfighting bar called The Slap And Tackle, and the ex-schoolgirl Barbarian is getting ready to beat up a tamed owlbear in single combat, and we’re formulating the four stages involved in an owlbear duel (Hooting, Circling, Face-Slapping, Arm-Ripping) and the fighter is blind drunk and betting his share of the pirate ship on the owlbear after he fluffed a Gambling check and it’s happening, you know, the whole scene is buzzing and we can smell the owlbear blood and hear the booming hoots and feel the sawdust under our feet.

Recent Reading - 02/13/2015

(1) The party comes across the remains of a caravan, still carrying the skeletons of people who failed to make the journey. (Dark Sun)

(2) Do you trust your gamemaster enough to:

– Dive into that unknown portal…

– Listen to the mysterious voice in your head telling you to do something…

– Trust the completely untrustworthy NPC that just gave you advice…

– Not have someone stand watch at night since your group is so tired…

– Flip the switch with an unknown purpose…

– Separate the party…

– Deal with a dragon…

(3) “We have been seeing a big uptick in these lately,” the Diviner at his kiosk says as he pushes the scroll over the tiny desk to the Paladin.

The Paladin feels confused. The little Wizard is alone. There are no other Wizards in sight.  Perhaps the Diviner refers to himself in the Royal We.  He is a Wizard and Wizards are weird.

“This scroll casts Leomund’s Tiny Hut.  If you cast it, you get about eight hours of protection.  Useful, because it’s portable, but it doesn’t manifest any particular creature comforts.  See this mark here?”  The Diviner points to a small scrawl and a happy little printed cartoon mage on the base of the scroll.  “Ozmo’s Magic Hospitality Company produced this scroll.  We’ve been tracking these scrolls with great interest.”

The Paladin thanks the Diviner, pays for the identify spell and leaves.  The Paladin doesn’t share that he has eight more identical Tiny Hut scrolls in his pack.

(4) Wandering monsters. There's a few reasons to use random encounters (somewhat synonymous with wandering monsters), and one is to keep the action going. Sure it may seem like you're slowing things down with another combat, but even if the PCs are hiding in a dungeon room, the locked doors may draw the attention of a wanderer. And if its the right kind, one group of goblins can bring all hell down (or at least the rest of the goblins) on the PCs. Just make them reasonable: goblins patrol their encampment or just get drunk and need a piss (or a fuck?).

Recent Reading...

As I consider restarting my Shattered Lands campaign and starting a new campaign (possibly Planescape, possibly not) as well as determining if I'm running a second Sunday game, I've been thinking more about how best to capture what the players want and if I could ever get a group to agree to a charter.  These two links are all about that, though the second link is part of a longer series on Dungeon Design that is also excellent.

• Gaming Charters and Social Contracts in Detail
• Dungeons Part Two: What Players Want

Mostly right now, my hesitance is that many of my players tend to treat surveys and questions as busy work and I'm not sure that many of the casual players would see a charter as necessary and/or agree to some of what I'd like in a charter, namely that phones are put away for the majority of the game.


Since I'm playing a lot more (currently 13th Age Game, AD&D/OSRIC, Dungeon World and Shadowrun) the 11 Ways to Be a Better Roleplayer is a good reminder of things to focus on.  And since having players roleplay more increases my enjoyment, the 11 Things to Help Your Players be Better Roleplayers will be something I keep in mind and strive for as I start running again.

• 11 ways to be a better roleplayer
• 11 Things To Help Your Players Be Better Roleplayers

On the non-article side, I recently read Odyssey, The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management, which gives a good framework for starting and organizing a RPG campaign.  While I'll probably never read it straight through from cover to cover again, I'll probably pull it out and re-read several chapters and use it as reference material as I start building and re-building campaigns.

• Odyssey, The Complete Game Master's Guide to Campaign Management

I've been reading the Drama Systems SRD and I'm really intrigued by the character creation and especially its approach to PC Desires and building relationships fraught with tension. I probably just need to give in and pick up a copy of Hillfolk

• DramaSystem SRD Now Available

For non-RPG stuff, I just finished William Gibson's The Peripheral, which was incredible and I'll definitely need to re-read another time or two as it is wonderfully intricate.  Though first I've got Glen Cook's Instrumentalities of the Night to read.  For comics/graphic novels, Warren Ellis and Jason Howar'ds TREES continues to draw me in, the first volume of Kelly Sue DeConnick's Pretty Deadly hit all the right spots to be a great Weird Western and wishing I'd started reading Fraction's run on Hawkeye earlier as Clint as a "mere" mortal superhero is fantastic and funny ("This looks bad").  And of course, Saga and Sex Criminals both continue to obsess me in their own ways.

And of course, my musical obsessions are meticulously cataloged on my Last.fm page.

Why Aren't You Reading?: What Does the Protagonist Want?

A new feature for Antagonist Relations, "Why Aren't You Reading?", where I'll blab about some book, blog, comic or some other thing(s) that I think that you (yes, YOU!) should be reading.  First up is Todd Alcott's fantastic What Does the Protagonist Want?

Alcott is a screenwriter who puts up great posts where he dives deep into the screenplays of many movies and other media artifacts, like his great series on episodes of the Venture Bros.  Recently he started an incredibly detailed series diving deep into the Avengers, which as of my writing this post is already at Part 6 and only 30! minutes into the film.  Alcott's screenwriting observations on what works and what doesn't in a script are not only fantastic and interesting reading, they're also easily applicable to GM'ing.  Reading the series on the Avengers, where he discusses how the movie manages to juggle the various ensemble characters without letting the audience become disinterested, has already made me think about how I can juggle the PCs in my ensemble Reign game without the other players getting bored as each gets their moments.

So, what are you waiting for, go read his first post on the Avengers and then dive deep into his very excellent archives.