Things keeping me from playing and how to get around them

I've been giving this a fair bit of thought lately. I like gaming, a lot. Yet it has been a few years since I had a regular group, and that was a couple (great fun, but) sadly abortive attempts back in Wisconsin that only lasted a few sessions before I had to move.

That was years ago now, though. Why don't I still have a game? I have a few roadblocks:

1. Grad school. This one's new, but it's a bear. I'm now devoting the lion's share of my time here.
2. Other hobbies. Most of these are things like video games and other computer-based past-times.
3. Creation is stressful. I get fired up about ideas for things in play, but actually putting pen to paper and drawing up maps, keys, encounters, and even just descriptions is emotionally draining, rather than restorative. This is especially a problem because of #1 meaning I need restorative time.
4. Setting. I want my own homebrew setting with its own set of things that make it unique. This is one of the things I love about DMing. Unfortunately, coupled with #3, this can be a lot of work to pull off.
5. Regardless of everything else, recent moves mean I don't have a group.

That's a fair list. There's probably other stuff involved too, but that's the most of it.

#5 is the most important. I need to start advertising that I'm interested in playing a regional game and put together connections for folks who might be interested in giving mine a try. This should be easy once I know some people in the area, especially because I like inducting completely new players. (They don't come with preconceptions about how D&D should play.)

For #1, there's not much I can do. Grad school is grad school, and it's more important than gaming. It also takes up a large amount of my time. However, maybe I can work around it.

Instead of shooting for weekly sessions, I could go for one every two weeks, maybe one a month. Generally I get uncomfortable with this level of play, because it saps engagement from the players (and me) and it takes forever to get anything done. One way to get around this (if I can find a group) would be to run my game parallel with another DM, either as a co-op (long ways away, that) or on an alternating schedule. That could work.

For #2, something's gotta give. If I want to run a game, I need to dedicate some time to it. Plus, I probably should spend more time with the wife anyway. I'll think over some way of restricting my (non-work) computer time. Probably a schedule with a once-or-twice-a-week acceptable computer day... or something.

#3 is tricky. I am under the impression that most members of the OSR don't share this problem, and that for you guys creation is a restoring outlet that you go to to recover from the stresses of the day.

I've never really created a lot of dungeons or encounters. While I was a 'GM' for a long period of time in middle- and high-school, it was for a one-player over-the-phone game. I'm fairly good at improvisation, so coupled with a few GURPS Fantasy Yrth modules (Orcslayer anyone?) and a focus on overland travel and social interaction I very rarely got out the graph (hex) paper.

Part of the problem is also that I tend to aim too high. I want a cohesive idea to my dungeon, and that comes with specialized random encounters that draw from the local population and detailed faction maps and careful room descriptions and asking myself if this map makes sense for an old stronghold and where the privies are and how the denizens eat and and and and and... which might be great if it didn't keep me from getting things done. Finished dungeons with holes and static encounters are better than a bunch of really cool half-finished ideas.

I'm hopeful that setting myself some basic goals and meeting them will help with this. I mean things like 'This week we're going to create a three-flour dungeon with ten rooms on each floor,' or, 'Make a four flour dungeon with fifty rooms on each floor; you have to complete at least two rooms a day.' For one, this will get it done regardless of stress, if I can bring myself to prioritize it. Secondly and more importantly, I suspect this is the sort of thing where practice makes it less stressful. You probably learn to go faster, feel easier, and not sweat the small stuff.

I think I'll set myself a goal: I have a megadungeon with a side drawing already worked out. I want to get at least the first level and part of the levels above and below drawn and stocked before I begin play, since this may very well be the tentpole dungeon of the setting. In an upcoming post I'll outline my goals for this in detail with deadlines, and give a brief overview of the concept.

#4 has been a major stumbling block so far. The Desolate North setting I've been (oh-so-slowly) developing in this here space is my choice for a homebrew. I'm not exactly satisfied with it, though, which has retarded work.

For one thing, hexcrawling through wilderness is fun, but so is over-arching political tension. Native settlements, other towns (with the possibility of re-basing the PCs if they so desire), skirmishes, wars, and the like are fun. I want the world to feel alive. Unfortunately as originally conceived, the Desolate North wasn't really set up to support that. It was based on an Arctic Circle feel, which just doesn't leave much scope for the population necessary for frontier geopolitics. I've changed that by lengthening the growing season, and I'm shifting the 'feel' of the place from Alaska or Antarctica to Central Asia (with a touch of Siberia and Alaska still). I still like the cold, but I want more people.

For another, a homebrew setting makes it difficult to take tings whole-cloth from other sources, especially if you have design goals like 'no goblinoids.' Something like that is fun to think about - it helps make your place unique - but something needs to replace orcs or all your dungeons will be empty. Which means you have to work that up, with little help from established TSR/WotC support and modules.

Finally, I aim high here, too. For making my own setting, I want custom encounter tables, a grand sweep of history, hidden mysteries, fleshed-out cultures, etc. My first inclination is to go all M.A.R. Barker on the thing, but then creation-as-stress comes back to bite me.

I'm not yet sure about my solution for The Orc Problem. Probably what I'll do is keep them entirely and just call them something else with an aesthetic reskin. Men of some sort; maybe they're neanderthals or savage elves or mutated dwarves or whatever. Or maybe I won't, and I'll have orcs and goblins (but seriously, cut back on the huuuge proliferation, Gary; we don't need hobbos and buggies and and and) but have something different about them.

My solution to overcreation, thanks yet again to +Chris Kutalik over at the Hill Cantons, is to enforce on myself bottom-up creation. Have an idea for a setting element? It goes on an index card and you stuff it in a binder. Once you have players, then you can play around with the setting elements as they explore them.

Beyond that, I've set myself a strict limit: all I need to begin play in the Desolate North is the town of Queen's Landing (now done), a starter dungeon (nearly done), house rules (basically done), 30 rumours (without bothering with true or false), and a hundred rooms or so of the tentpole dungeon. At some point soon after that, I should put together a DM hexmap.

Which I guess means it's around time to start soliciting players...

The fifth and last problem is the easiest to solve. I just need to meet some new people, and either find a local group or put one together. That just means finding and devoting the time. Once the rest of these problems are solved, it'll be easy.

Afterward

Whew, that was much longer than I intended. I guess when I have something to say I really can write a large amount in a single sitting...

For the three of you who've made it down this far: have you faced similar problems? If so, how do you deal with them? If not, what kinds of problems do you face as a GM?

And do you know a gaming group in the DC metro area looking for another member?

No relevance

A supplementary theory of rule generation

I've seen a lot of posts on the nature of the shift from O/BX/AD&D to 2nd and beyond both in the nature of the rules and their proliferation. Many of these posts have been very helpful for formulating how I want to play D&D, and enlightening besides, because I'm interested in this stuff. (Learning about the history and evolution of your hobby is fun in itself.)

The general consensus seems to be, broadly speaking, that the earlier versions of D&D were naturalistic (according to a pseudo-technical definition evolved in the OSR), 'objective' (by which I mean the world didn't change to accomodate plot or narrative, but rather treated those as emergent qualities), and action-focused, rather than character-focused.

One of the myths of the OSR is that rules proliferation was driven by an attempt to make the game "fair" and curtail the power of the GM as used for evil. By myth I don't mean to imply its falsity; I mean something like a cultural story. Personally I think there's good hard evidence in the way certain rules and mores in our hobby evolved for this myth. Further, even beyond questions or truth or falsehood of the essential facts, the myth is good and useful, because it makes us think about social interaction at the table and form the correct response to the spectre of social friction.

However, I don't think it tells the whole story. To that end, let me offer another explanation, meant to go side-by-side, rather than replace the above.

Most OSR bloggers I have read got into the hobby as kids in the 80s. These folks cut their teeth on B/X or AD&D with their brothers and neighbors, with lots of time and the general social difficulties children have influencing their gaming. It's true, there are bloggers out there who started in the 70s, or as adults, or in the 70s as adults, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that the lion's share of the OSR bloggers out there to whom I have been exposed either are the children of the 80s or strongly influenced by them.

I have a different perspective. I started gaming in the 90s, with GURPS - with adults. (I was three.) By the time I started regularly playing with people in my own age group, I was in college. So I largely side-stepped the difficulties of gaming with (other) children, who haven't fully developed a social consciousness. I never really experienced the difficulties of an unacceptable adversarial GM relationship, or gaming with people who can't be 'adult' about things.

One of my other hobbies is mucking about with computers. This is hardly surprising; there's a large intersection of gamers and computer hobbyists of all stripes. One thing about computer hobbyists, no matter what distinct strain they adhere to, is that they like tinkering with things and building things. For some it's more mathematical constructs, others play with soldering irons, still others like creating and refining software.

I think those urges spilled over into the hobby of gaming as well. People started making new rules not just to fix what they considered broken but because they wanted to improve the system they used. Tinkering with improvements and redesigns, while putatively useful, is actually often an end in itself. Some people garner enjoyment from the tinkering.

This same thing happened with rules. I posit that some of the rules-creep that happened happened because people enjoyed making rules and having rules.

Unfortunately, while the process of making rules can be fun, and being able to say you have rules is enjoyable, the actual use of those rules can be a real bear. Especially when those rules were made at root for the fun of their own making, with actual play being secondary. (c.f. AD&D's weapon speed factors)

This urge is still with us today, and while we have a cautionary tale against changing the game to make it more 'fair' I haven't yet seen anything like a consensus narrative addressing this problem. (Peter's Has that come up in actual play? is the pioneering exception, for which the man should get massive kudos. Everyone coming here already knows about that post, but go read it again.)

Post-mortem on a blog (and campaign)

Those of you who were following this blog before have by now no doubt noticed that it is dead. Dead, dead, dead. It was merely wounded, once, and the surgeon did all he could, but after hours of frankly gruesome work on the operating table, up to his elbows in readership, he finally relented and declared it dead.

The campaign it chronicled limped on, at first unharmed by this admission. But it too died, grown alien and bizarre to the wishes of both its creator and its players. It reached a natural point, and so we graciously led it into the stall and quietly shot it in the head. We were all agreed: it was a mercy killing.

Here's the autopsy, in no particular order, for both the blog and the campaign.

Part of the problem was just the group and the group dynamics. Rather than being a gaming group, this is more a group of friend(ish) people who get together to game. The distinction I'm making is primarily that the attitude toward actually getting down to brass tacks and playing your character is much more relaxed, and at least two people are there primarily to shoot the shit with friends. Also, the social order comes first, meaning you can't, for example, kick people out of your game if they're not a good fit for whatever reason. Problems that stem from this were in no particular order:

• Some players never bothered to really learn the rules. This in turn made not only play but character creation a chore.
• There was one disruptive player in particular, who could not be excised without probable dissolution of the game anyway.

In addition, character creation was a chore. GURPS, with templates, computer assistance and good knowledge of the options, is not hard to make a character for. However, even with those assumptions it still doesn't beat 3d6 in order. It just can't. Even if you shave it down to take less time (say, experienced GURPS player vs. never rolled up a character in D&D) it still involves more thought and complexity. This is bad for a game where life is cheap, not only because it raises the barrier to entry, but it also shifts some of the emphasis of player decisions into making the character rather than playing the game. (More on this in another post, if people want.)

Further, creating content for the game was becoming a chore. True, I'd already converted the Moathouse and portions of the Temple, come up with random encounter tables and cool stuff, and so forth, but still. The difference in the systems got to be too great. As an example, in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the emphasis on tactical combat is at odds with D&D's low-level focus on exploration and problem solving, which meant that I had to do a lot of 'sprucing up' of the dungeon in order to make it both interesting and a challenge. Another way to look at it is that the Temple became not only a chore, but a boring one - I would have been better off writing a dungeon for DF from scratch. The game assumptions, from how to play to how rewards work, were too fundamentally different for me to remain interested in the task of reconciling them.

Am I saying that you can't play 'Old School' GURPS DF? Absolutely not. Not only do I still personally believe that is possible, but +Peter V. Dell'Orto's group proves that it can be done. But I am saying that method wasn't right for me at the time, and wasn't right for my group.

All of that also makes it pretty clear why the blog died, with a couple of added points:

• The blog itself began to feel like a chore. When I started running out of things to say, I kept trying to push myself to say more. I forgot that I intended to be a gamer who put stuff here to help myself and other people out, not a content provider. In particular, scheduling myself and expecting myself to stick to the schedule was a bad idea.
• This fed back on my natural cycles of industry, laziness, and guilt. Especially as unfinished draft posts and unwritten play reports backed up, crying out to be written.

Postscript

For those who absolutely, positively must know what happened after Calowas died, what follows is a hyper-abbreviated run-through of the rest of the campaign.

The player of Calowas brought in a bard, and they all went back out to the Moathouse again. They found that it was now populated by a group of gnolls, previously down in the basement and now broken with Lareth. They ambushed the gnolls pretty effectively and had a fairly one-sided skirmish before the surviving gnolls retreated. While they were picking through the bodies, they discovered that there were also some goblins when the gnolls sent in their goblin thralls to make a truce.

A truce was made, involving non-aggression and information on the one side, and money on the other. The party proceeded downstairs and found Lubash the ogre, who killed the scout and the druid (new player) before being brought to bay. Picking through his stuff they found enough treasure to call it a day.

Coming back, they went down again, skipped past the zombie crypts once more to check out what was beyond the ogre, and found in a large dead-end room a bunch of bugbears. The bard went to 'talk' to them, and found they were pretty well set up, being bugbears - hiding behind an overturned table, ready in ambush by the entrance, etc. They quickly negotiated a monetary truce, and while the bugbears were waiting for the party to throw in the money the party instead threw in a Stench cloud. Bugbears stumbled out wheezing one at a time and the party whacked them all.

Wandering around a bit more, the party found the other end of Lareth's guards and had a long conversation that ended with the party apparently agreeing to go see Lareth. The sergeant told them to put down their arms and follow him, which is when the bard (same player as Calowas) again shot one of them. Cue pitched battle in the hallway with the wizard saving the day with a Mass Sleep spell. After this they go to see Lareth, who is presented as pretty hoss (like he is in the Temple - fourth level Cleric with magic plate and a rod of striking), so they listen to him and are on the verge of possibly joining up when they (still primarily elves despite casualties) find out he worships Lolth.

Cue another battle, this time in magical Darkness against a death-touching cleric (Rod of Striking = 2d deathtouch per blow) which ended well for the party due to a couple lucky hits from the Knight and then the Barbarian getting her big mitts on Lareth and smashing his head into the ceiling repeatedly. His guards didn't have a chance to come in and help him because the party was wisely blocking the door at the same time.

After that, the party looted all the stuff in Lareth's room and on his body (a very nice haul indeed) and we called that the end of the campaign.

 

So what now?

Some corpses are not quite what they appear.

Re-stocking the Temple

"Any group of humans or small humanoids within the dungeon is able to replace its losses (to adventurers) at the rate of one per day. Larger humanoids (3 + 1 or more Hit Dice) can replace one each three days; monsters can replace their numbers at the rate of one per week.

If the Temple forces are not heavily pressed by the party, they actually grow at the rates given above." - Temple of Elemental Evil, by Gary Gygax and Frank Mentz

I feel comfortable saying that, with Dungeon Fantasy's different off-time pacing, this would be downright murder on a party. You go back to town for a week and the dungeon is back at full strength! Well, at least the parts you visited are. The other levels? They're stronger. Enjoy!

No, thanks. So, what to do? After all, the dungeon should restock and change at least somewhat. At the same time, I can't reveal everything here, because I have at least one player who reads this blog.

First is to split the dungeon up into sections. Rather than restocking the dungeon as a whole, I think it makes more sense in this case to treat different parts of the dungeon as different groups. Decide what geography belongs to which groups, and note down whether a given group has a particular character - for example, one group might be composed more of brigands and normal demi-humans, while another might lean toward subterranean monsters, and a third toward  undead.

Each section should have a source that can be dealt with by PCs. This could be a single leader, an inner cabal, an attractive resource, or whatever. If something happens to the source, the members of this section either desert or join another section over the next week. Assume that half the remaining members desert regardless, and that the other half is split between compatible factions that have room. By 'compatible' I mean that the section doesn't have an emphasis contrary to the emphasis of the section it's poaching from; brigands are unlikely to join eldritch horrors. Special cases (e.g. conversion of those brigands into skeletons for the undead section) are at the discretion of the GM.

Then, for each section, decide how much capacity they have, and where they are now in filling that capacity. This is probably most easily done by counting empty rooms that could be turned into full rooms and fudging a bit for dungeon backstory. The Temple was sacked fifty years ago; at that time it was a major force of evil in the land. Lots of structural damage was done, and the Temple is nothing like what it was once. Knowing that, I'm going to eyeball it and say that most or all of the sections are at 80% capacity. This means both that each group of creatures could grow by 1/5th before being at capacity, but also that 1/5th of the number of populated rooms is how many empty rooms could be used to house new recruits. (Example: let's say section 1 has 20 populated rooms and 33 not populated. This means that 4 of those empty rooms could have recruits move in.) Once a section is at 100% capacity, it won't grow any further. (If you like, continue to roll to restock and instead of adding replace monsters.)

Each section can also have modifiers on either the Restock Chance or the Restock Roster table. For example, one section in the Temple has a Restock Chance modifier of -1 but a Restock Roster modifier of +6.

Once you've done all that, roll weekly on the table below:

Restock Chance

Roll (2d6)	Result
2	Catastrophe! Roll twice on the restock table and lose that many forces.
3-7	No change
8-9	Roll once on the restock table. Recruit for losses only; do not gain extra forces.
10-11	Roll once on the restock table.
12	Roll twice on the restock table.

Restock Roster

Roll (1d6)	Result
0	Appropriately-sized group of local fauna moves in. (E.g., horde of rats, 1 bear)
1	1 easy to find recruit. (E.g., 1 brigand)
2	1d6 easy to find recruits.
3	2d6 easy to find recruits, or 1 uncommon recruit. (E.g., 2d6 orcs, 1 gnoll)
4	1d6 uncommon recruits and 1d6 easy to find recruits.
5	Either 2d6 uncommon recruits or 1 rare recruit, and 1d6 easy to find recruit. (E.g., 2d6 ogres or 1 werewolf, plus 1d6 brigands)
6	Roll twice more.
7	1d6 rare recruits and 1d6 easy to find recruits.
8	1d6 rare recruits, 1d6 uncommon recruits, and 1d6 easy to find recruits.
9	1d6 rare recruits, 2d6 uncommon recruits, and 1d6 easy to find recruits.
10	2d6 rare recruits, 1d6 uncommon recruits, and 2d6 easy to find recruits.
11	2d6 rare recruits, 2d6 uncommon recruits, and 3d6 easy to find recruits.
12	2d6 rare recruits, 3d6 uncommon recruits, and 3d6 easy to find recruits. Alternatively, 1 unique monster.

Any new group will have only their own equipment and pocket-change as treasure, along with whatever was already in the room. (Plug for Dungeon Fantasy Adventures 1: it has a random pocket-change loot table in the back.) However, any new group that gets another batch of reinforcements will have appropriate treasure, to represent their successes.

Feel free to assign modifiers, especially to the second table's roll. If a section is particularly strong or well-known, it should get plusses, as everyone wants to join the winners. A weak section should get minuses. There might be situational modifiers as well - for example, the Cult of Our Aquatic Masters might get a hefty bonus after a local flood. 

Consequences of Success

What happens when the PCs knock out a section? For 1d6 weeks, nothing. That area remains deserted. After that time is up, roll another d6. On a 6, a new faction takes up residence; make it roughly as strong as the surrounding factions. This can either be a completely new force, or defectors from the other factions making common cause and setting up their own power base. On any other roll, divide the empty area between the nearby factions. This will probably be a roughly equal division, but if one faction is significantly stronger than the others it might claim more. Move one or two groups from their current places in the section to the new area, but otherwise wait on restock rolls to add recruits.

Notes

The tables above aren't organized by foe difficulty, but instead by ease of recruitment based on the fuzzy factors of likelihood of joining the cause and the population of the realm around the dungeon. "Easy to find" doesn't mean "mook" and "uncommon" doesn't mean "worthy", though the categories probably roughly track one another. This reflects my bias that the behaviour of the world should track only loosely with the capability of the PCs. If you disagree, the wording is easy enough to switch, I think.

Where did these numbers come from? Nowhere. I thought them up out of the blue. If you're inclined, please playtest this and give me feedback, but use at your own risk. Still, I hope it's helpful, and I did at least familiarize myself with the probabilities involved beforehand.

Also, as an aside, does anyone know how to make tables in Blogger without editing the HTML? I'm fine with doing that, but it'd be nice if I needn't.

In which elves steal, dwarves are hairless and I'm sorely tempted to use horde pygmies: After play 4

I have some catching up to do due to my hiatus. Fortunately, today at work everyone left me alone so I could get my actual work done. And now I'm home at a reasonable hour. Yay!

Cast:
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Calowas' player couldn't make it tonight. Since I don't have the luxury of having each session be a different trip into the dungeon, but I don't want hangers-on, the first thing that happened during the session was that an urchin-boy came running into the moathouse, exhausted and dirty, and handed Calowas a card. "Oh no!" Calowas moaned, "I"m late for the Thieves' Union meeting!" and he ran off into the wilderness, putatively back to Hommlet to attend at the local chapterhouse. (Obviously, they're an outpost from Nulb.)

Anyway, the party was nearly done with the top floor of the moathouse; there was some discussion as to whether it was worth finishing the place off, or if they should just try the door they found earlier that led downstairs. After not too much discussion, Volbak took the lead and opened the last door...onto a very moldy kitchen. It was obvious that this place hadn't been cared for for ages.

There was some interest in the mold from the usual suspect, but it turned out both to be not magical nor particularly hallucinogenic, so interest was quickly lost after Volbak took a salutary essay into the kitchen to look for something of value - old cutlery, pots, or something. No luck, but then, they didn't want to stick around to search. I can't say I blame them; the place reeked something awful.

That accomplished, they headed down the stairs, where it quickly became clear that the door had swollen shut due to long exposure to moisture. (The moathouse is in a swamp, after all.) With much banging (and a little hinge-oiling) they finally managed to slam the door open, whereupon Volbak stumbled through the arch...and some green goop fell on him.

Let me say here that I run green slime nasty. The AD&D Monster Manual states that in 1-4 melee rounds you're basically screwed, sorry, that's it. I ran this as 4d cor per turn until you die, and non-sealed armor protects for two turns as it seeps in. (I think in future, if there is future, I'll run it as 2d, but after 1d6 rounds the only way to make it stop is with a Cure Disease and Remove Curse.)

Volbak quickly went down while the party tried to figure out what to do. Isildel tried apporting it off, and got some, but it quickly grew to replace the lost mass. A quick Naturalist roll told them this stuff is vulnerable to fire, and they had ten gallons of lamp oil, but they were using Continual Light for a light source, and the wizard didn't have Ignite Fire...

Turns out, though, that he did have a lit rope. (It's his Signature Item; we discussed this beforehand and I okayed him having a 'comestible' Signature Item, simulating the fact that he always has some around.) So, with a splash of lamp oil (taking 1d6 seconds) and the application of an open flame (taking 2 seconds), the slime-covered dwarf went up like an effigy of Guy Fawkes, still making his various HT rolls to stay alive while the cleric, Amalia, poured holy energy into him as fast as she could.

After the slime was gone, the barbarian tackled him to the ground to put out the fire - and discovered the second dollop of green slime over the archway. Fortunately, the party was prepared, and Chief just lost her hauberk and gained a few scorchmarks.

That was enough of that. The party decided discretion was the better part of valor and carted off their severely wounded comrades back to Hommlet, where Canon Terjon (standing in for the absent Canoness Ydey) agreed to care for the wounded dwarf for a suitable donation to the Church.

The party spent the week in town. Unfortunately they didn't hear much they didn't already know, mostly because Hommlet is not the place to go if you want news. However, they did contact their debtors in Verbobonc, the local Wizard's Society, and they learned that they could erase their debts from underwriting the expedition by returning the book they had found. After their comrade was recovered, they returned to the Moathouse, determined to get at least something out of this debacle by claiming the Manual of the Sea. So, they rented a draft horse and a wagon, and they apported the huge chunk of valuable stone out of the Moathouse and onto the wagon. 

While they were dragging the book back, when they passed Burne's castle-in-progress, they were summoned to meet him by a page. Turns out, unsurprisingly, the local wizard is also interested in magical artifacts. While they couldn't come to an agreement (Burne was willing to offer a goodly amount of coin, but not quite enough to rid them of their debts), they did pawn off a few things they'd found in the Moathouse thus far, including a vial of pacified green slime.

======

From judging how things looked and sounded at the table, pretty much everyone had a good time.  I do badly need to work on my treasure document. At the moment I have it interspersed with the pages of the module, which works fairly well for linear treasure procurement, but doesn't work if someone has questions as to value or weight. I think instead I'm just going to have two folders - one with the module and monster/trap stats interleaved, and the other with treasure, for easy reference.

Also, I need to put together an Excel doc to keep track of treasure weight, so I can watch that appropriately. Best of all would be if each of the players had one, so they could track weight in real-time, but that might be asking for too much accounting at the table. I'm not sure how fun that would be for them.

Finally, I was glad that my post on portage for Dungeon Fantasy got some play. They needed to rent a horse and wagon. I knew how much that would cost, and I knew how much horse they would need, with a simple lookup.

Honey I shrunk the PCs: After play report 3

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Last session ended with the ignominous death of my beloved bandits. (Actually brigands - there is a difference.) The thief, undeterred by his wounds, immediately set about casing their quarters, finding some small change, a few rations, and the Manual of the Sea, a manual of Shiphandling written by the mad Dwarf Durgin Ulubad. It's quite ornate, quite magical, quite valuable (the letters are inlaid aquamarines!) and also 1,400 lbs - the pages are slabs of stone. Yep. This was actually the slab that Calawas was tossed onto for later interrogation in the last session - the book protector is just light enough that the Barbarian could move it without herniating himself.

Cue appropriate amounts of dickering about treasure, spurred on when the party found silver and even a bit of gold on the bodies of their enemies. (I'm using the bog-standard DF values for copper, silver, and gold, which makes gold very valuable.)

Funnily enough, the thief and the scout (who were, for pretty much the whole session, in single-digit HP range - more on this later) were stuck in the bandit hole-up when this noise attracted a swarm of dire rats from the pantry. Things were looking a bit sticky, because your typical ROUS brings friends, until the resident Problem Solv-err, I mean wizard Glued them to the floor. Let's see: rats with ST 9 need to make a ST-5 check to move one hex, then do it again to move another...nope. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Or rats in a trap. Still, this stirred up the indigenous wildlife a tad, so that after folks were done looting the bodies, things had been riled up.

Rather than waiting for healing, Calawas hobbled ahead, going down the southern corridor to check out - oh, hey, wait, is that a bloated decomposing body? Awesome! Does it have any stuff? What? No? Sure it does! Let me squish around in it a bit!

And that's how he didn't notice the Huge Fierce Green Snake Barring the Way! -I mean, curled up in the corner. Or rather, shortly afterward he did, after it missed him. Cue hijinks that involved setting a corner of the moathouse on fire, the already half-dead thief getting poisoned and narrowly escaping with his life thanks to the attentions of the party cleric and the barbarian not killing everyone simply because the wizard prepared Sleep that day. (As noted before, Berserk and Sense of Duty to Adventuring companions creates some powerful synergy for DF.)

Well, that's all well and good - off to the nearby room! What's in here?

At the same time, the scout and wizard, who had wanted to go down the other hallway, get ambushed by a tick. Yes, not that impressive, though it was the size of a human head. More of a freakish annoyance than anything else. After that, there was serious talk of going home - it was around 1900 game time - or at least resting. They eventually decided to clear out one of the rooms, bring the horses into the Great Hall, and post a watch, hoping for the best. Well, what do you know, the best happened - they weren't molested in the slightest, despite the swamp being thick with prowling wildlife. Good thing, too, because the cleric is their only source of healing, and she's beginning to feel stretched. Part of that is that she didn't even focus on healing so much as being a "divine caster" - i.e. the one who deals with undead and other icky stuff.

Afterward they tossed more rooms, finding a few pieces of worthwhile treasure but not much. They finally approached the last room, having already found the stairs and cordoned them off for later exploration, and discovered that the room was an old barracks with a giant lizard. Well, that was easy. The barbarian and the knight took care of him, and we broke there. I fully anticipate the thief going through its guts and trying to swallow anything he finds.

===========

Okay, so I'm coming to realize that I need to help rein in Calawas' player. He likes the limelight, and most of the time other people enjoy him having it up to a point, because he's a good actor and a funny guy. However, other people need to be able and allowed to do things. I need to work on including them.

Also, I need to work on presenting random encounters in a better way. The Moathouse is especially egregious, what with wandering nasty wildlife and ghouls and so on, to the point where there were a few jokes about Gygaxian ecology and spontaneous generation. I think this will die down as the random encounters make more sense, i.e. are more able to be rationally integrated into the backdrop. However, we'll see. It's still an area to work on.

The party badly needs a leader. This is related to the first issue, but the whole session was effectively them flailing around - getting things done, certainly, but mostly because everyone was rescuing the thief when he went off and did stupid stuff on his own. It's in some way self-correcting; if he keeps wandering off alone while bleeding out and barely able to move, something will eat him. As it is, he only survived because I drew the interior of the Moathouse two sizes too small.

Finally, the Manual of the Sea really makes me happy. It's quite valuable, but also quite heavy, and a little crazy to boot. It presents a conundrum to the players and is also the reward to that conundrum. There was talk of clearing out the Moathouse and setting up a museum, even. And it's all thanks to the random tables in Dungeon Fantasy 8

Into the Moathouse: After play report 2

Wow, it's been far too long here. Explanations are in order: first I lost my car to a roadside glacier (because it was better to hit that than the schoolbus), and then my wife got sick. With work ticking up on top of that, I simply haven't had time to do justice to this blog.

Hopefully now that I have a new car and my wife is on the mend, we can return to a normal posting schedule.

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine) Player absent, character present

We had our second session last night. I'm quickly learning the virtues of preparation beforehand; I didn't have much chance to prep anything new or even look at my old stuff, so this was successful only because I had previously done a lot of thinking about what the entrance to the Moathouse would be like.

Last session ended in the middle of combat with the frogs outside, with Lamaevhun in bad condition in the belly of a frog. At the same time, Calawas was charging into combat with a spear, barely keeping astride his ill-trained pony, looking set to go out in a blaze of glory.

Fortunately, Lamaevhun managed to wriggle his knife out while inside the belly of the beast. With his strong right arm, he quickly dispatched the beast and got down to the messy business of cutting himself an exit.

Meanwhile, the rest of the party marshalled well, cutting the frogs to shreds in short order. They even managed to avoid losing their horses, due to some amazing rolls on my part for horse morale. (Basically, I was having them make Fright Checks every other round - and they all passed. Every single one.)

Frogs dispatched, they fairly quickly decided to butcher and cook them. French cuisine is, after all, appreciated by all delvers, even the most uncultured. This was fortuitous for more than rations, though, as in the belly of the largest frog they also found a one-caret amethyst, in finest Gygaxian tradition. (How you find a rock about the size of a pea in the guts of a frog the size of a horse, I don't know. I don't question these things.)

Little did they know at the time that there was a pair of bandits watching them despatch the frogs, and then periodically poking their heads back out to see what the ruckus was about. So, when Calawas got bored and wandered into the Moathouse courtyard to poke about, he was shot several times and silenced before he could get a sound out. The bandits thereupon dragged him back to their hideout for questioning, to get the exact disposition of the forces outside, purpose, etc. (At this point, Katz, the guy who plays Calawas, started playing the barbarian instead, who is normally played by my wife. She was home sick.)

Fortunately for Calawas, the Lamaevhun noticed his absence not too long after he left, and Ilsildel even thought he heard a scuffle of chain against stone in a lull in the conversation. (I called for Perception checks; Ilsildel made his by six.)

In short order the party hobbled the horses, banked the fire, and went to take a look. The bandits for their part were mostly prepared, figuring the party would come in after their comrade.

For those of you who don't know or don't remember the first floor of the moathouse, the courtyard doubles as an abbatoir. The walls are pierced by murder holes, and the only entrance to the inner keep is up a small set of stairs and through a set of stout double doors. However, the bandits didn't have enough men (only eight) to take full advantage, and the doors are in bad disrepair, one completely off and the other only holding on by one rusty hinge. So when the party entered the courtyard, they bided their time until the party was close enough, at which point the four with crossbows let fly while four others set up a two-man deep blockade on the stairs.

They missed, causing the Ilsildel and Lamaevhun to drop to the ground. Neither of them care. Hooray for Heroic Archer. Also, they failed to consider the effect a raging barbarian with a Reach 2 weapon would have on their formation. Oh, and with someone behind you it's very difficult to retreat for +1/+3 to defenses. What should have been an easy victory for the bandits quickly turned into a slaughter, and then a rout. The bandit leader called for terms after Lamaevhun dropped one of the front line with an arrow, and Volbak split his head open like a melon.

Terms were accepted...sort of. Volbak made his roll to check his Bloodlust, but our barbarian didn't snap out of the berserker rage, which led to the line of the night:

Volbak, stepping up after a wounded bandit who has already dropped his weapon and is stepping back out of combat: "You realize she isn't going to stop." With Jim's delivery in a Nolan-esque Batman voice, it was very scary, especially if you were a bandit.

At that point it was every man for himself. Lamaevhun and Ilsildel worked together to light up the great hall with an arrow, and Amalia put a Sunbolt through the leader's shoulderblades for max damage, earning her first kill. Shortly thereafter they patched together one of the footmen and found Calawas, alive and hastily bandaged, tied up and slung onto a large block of stone.

We ended there, because it was ten o'clock. Everyone earned five character points (the first milestone being penetration into the moathouse and dealing with the bandits). Volbak earned the MVP point for 1) being awesome on the front line, and 2) having the best quote. Next session will start with finding and divvying up the loot, then deciding whether or not they want to go back to town.

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Notes:

The players have taken fairly well to me giving tactical suggestions. It both speeds along the fight and makes them more effective. At the same time, I've put in an effort to have more narrative flair. I feel it's pretty weak so far, but with time and practice I'll get better and more comfortable again.

One thing about the barbarian: I realized about halfway through the session that I'd brought the wrong character sheet. Instead, I had a higher-powered one (by 25 points) that had a maul instead of a mace. Normally, being 150 points, he wouldn't have enough strength to attack every round with a mace. I let it slide for this session though, because it was awesome. However, had he been played correctly, the bandits would have been much tougher opponents.

We got through one and a half fights in three hours, shoving in a fifteen minute break and some roleplaying/logistical discussion in between. It's a pretty good pace. I think it's helped along by a) me getting more comfortable with the capabilities of my NPCs, b) help provided by me and one of the players on tactical decisions, and c) an interest in fast play instead of strict rules-correctness.

I made a mistake in the mapping of the Moathouse: rather than remembering that the squares on the map are actually 10' squares, I went with 5' squares in my transposition to hexes. This means the moathouse is about 2/3rds the size it should be. (5' = 2 hexes, and 10' = 3 hexes, or close enough for government work.) Whoops. Maybe I need to take the maps, blow them up, and put them on hexes, but that seems like a lot of work. Either way, the first and second floors won't line up, if anyone cares.

I need to figure out what to do with players when their characters get killed. Fortunately, in this instance, there was another PC to jump into. However, generally speaking between sessions I want PCs to drop out (stay at camp, feel sick, whatever) when their players aren't about. The party so far has refused to hire on help; should I give them some hirelings who usually stay with the horses anyway? I'm not sure. One thing I know I don't want is for someone to have to just sit there and watch everyone else.

Know your options:

Next up: Bard and Cleric! These two are both less complicated than your front-line combatants, and so require less advice.

Bard

Before we get into this, understand: you are not a combatant. If Knights are front-liners, and Clerics and their ilk are second-string, you're assuredly third rank. Stay out of combat if at all possible.

Now we'll discuss your options.

In melee, your primary skill starts out at 14. This gives you a parry of 10, possibly with a +1 from a buckler. Frankly, if you're forced into combat and are the focus of something's aggression, your best bet is to take All-Out Defense for the +2 to your defenses, retreat for another +1 to parry and +3 to dodge, and get out of there.

If you aren't the focus of something's aggression, what are you doing in combat? Oh well, we'll assume you find yourself in that situation anyway. Your primary task will probably be to soak up a defense roll so the Knight or Barbarian can land a hit. If you're certain you won't be the focus of retaliation, you should go ahead and take All-Out Attack (Determined) and trade the +4 for a -2 to your foe's defense. Or, for heavily armored foes, don't forget All-Out Attack (Strong) for the extra damage.

For ranged combat, your primary skill is a 13 or 12. You must aim in order to hit anything. This means you'll be shooting every two to four seconds (most favorable is with Fast-Draw (Knife), least is with a Bow and without Fast-Draw (Arrow)). That sounds grim, but let's be clear: this is where you should be. You should never be in melee if you can help it, and if you're not slinging songs about (which, frankly, is a perfectly good thing to be doing - it's your schtick) you might as well be shooting things.

Your primary goal in ranged combat is to soak up defenses so someone actually good at fighting can hit something. Don't bother aiming for a specific location unless you need to to be considered a threat. Just aim, subtract the range penalty, and fire.

Cleric

You're a second-tier fighter, nowhere near as good as a Knight or Barbarian but still not totally helpless in a fight. With a skill of 14 in both weapon and shield, you can hit your opponent %90 of the time and defend competently. Congratulations; you meet the baseline required to be considered a threat. Unless you have compelling reason to do otherwise, aim for the torso. Don't worry if they defend against you - unless they're dodging, that's one more defense they can't use against the Knight.

On the defensive, always remember to retreat for the extra +1/+3. With a shield, your defense is 12 or 13, which gives you a %90 chance of success with the retreat. If facing opponents doing Deceptive Attacks, switch to All-Out Defense - as a cleric, you want to keep your FP instead of using it for Extra Effort. Someone will be along to help you shortly, since a cleric under attack is a high priority issue.

Let's talk Sunbolt. This is your go-to ranged option. The most important thing about Sunbolt is, you want it to hit. Unlike the Scout, for whom landing arrows is nice, for you landing Sunbolt is necessary. You spent a lot of energy and time to get it up, and all that's wasted if you miss or your enemy defends against the attack.

This means two things: always Aim for at least one second to get the +2 Acc, and pick a target that's already being harrassed or otherwise can't defend well. Don't bother with aiming for the face or eyes; the special effects are a trap.

Know your options

This is less a post and more asking for help. You have been warned.

As was pointed out to me by my most knowledgeable player (who may be more knowledgeable than me about GURPS, quite frankly), one of the things that could help immensely in convincing my group to make the switch from, "I hit it with my axe," to, "I take a Rapid Strike with the Flurry of Blows option to Feint once and then aim a swing at the leg with -4 for Deceptive Attack, which puts me at 14 because I have Weapon Master and Axe-Mace at 21," is to come up with a condensed list of tactical recommendations. However, y'all collectively have played a lot more GURPS than I have. So I need some advice from the community; I'm trying to boil things down.

Preferably, I'd have a class-by-class list of recommendations for different situations, along with explanations of why and wheretofore. For example, "As a Barbarian, you'll be relying on beats,"..."As a Scout, don't forget to aim for body locations, and try to take multiple shots,"..."As a Knight, remember Weapon Master makes you badass for reasons a,b,and c,"..."As a Wizard, stay out of combat," etc.

Before I start out, I should point out that +Douglas Cole has already done the groundwork for me, as well as some of the synthesis, and +Peter V. Dell'Orto has some reflections on making that useful to the GM.

(Who am I kidding? Is there a single one of you out there who didn't find out about this blog through one of those two? Still, it's polite, and I enjoy crafting links.)

The first principle, no matter who you are or what your profession, is this: you almost always want a skill of 14 when attacking. That's not at least 14; that's 14. Though even here there's a decision; maybe you want a 16?

Decide: is it more important for you to critically hit, or for you to hit? The rubric for this decision is simple: if you're unlikely to do damage with a simple hit (either because defenses or DR are too high), then you need a crit. Aim for skill 16. Otherwise, you don't; aim for skill 14. (There are a number of exceptions to this: for example, it's okay to go for skill 13 with multiple attacks, or even dip down to skill 12 if you're desperate, but the rule is pretty firm.)

From here, setting aside the people who shouldn't see combat at all, we naturally divide into two groups: melee and ranged.

Melee consists of Barbarians, Clerics, Druids, Holy Warriors, Knights, Martial artists, Swashbucklers (I won't be covering these two), and Thieves. Ranged consists of Clerics, Druids, Scouts, Thieves, and Wizards. (I'm only considering DF 1. Sorry, Innkeeper fans!)

For this post, I'm going to try covering Barbarians and Scouts. I'll be aiming this squarely at the templates as written, despite the fact that my PCs will have lower skill levels due to having lower point totals. Also, I'm totally ignoring grappling.

Barbarian

As a barbarian, your asset is your strength, not so much your skill. At best you will have Combat Reflexes and Weapon Bond along with skill 17 with some weapon. More likely, you'll have skill 16 or even 15. The basic threatening monster will have skill 14, which means defense of 10, +- any special abilities, like a high dodge or a shield.

In combat, Beats are your friend. (MA100) Especially important is that you can Beat without an extra action, if your attack was blocked or parried. If an enemy blocks, this means you (or the Knight!) will be more likely to hit him next round.

As a rule, try not to go below skill 14 with your main attack. Also, remember the Extra Effort options (especially Heroic Charge, which lets you move ant attack with less of a penalty, and Flurry of Blows, which lets you Rapid Strike better); you'll need them.

In combat, decide if your foe is high-skill or not. If he is, stick with Skill 16 and shots for the torso. If not, your go-to maneuver is a Deceptive Attack (-1), for -2 to hit (giving you skill 14 or 13). If he's tough to hit, consider a Telegraphic Attack (+4 to hit in exchange for +2 to defend). Don't worry so much about aiming at particular spots; you do enough raw damage that it doesn't matter that much.

Defensively, seriously consider taking the Defensive Attack option. For -1 damage per die (and you're doing a lot of damage already), you get +1 to Parry or Block, or the ability to parry with a U weapon.

With High Pain threshold you'll never suffer shock penalties, but you still don't want to get hit. Your defense is probably somewhere in the 11-13 area, which is decent, but not as good as a Knight's. Remember to retreat while defending, which gives you +1 to parries and blocks, and +3 to dodges (bringing your 10 to a 13, possibly your best score). Also, you don't want to get hit, because while you have a lot of HP you probably don't have a lot of armor. Don't forget your Luck or Extraordinary Luck, if you have it.

For berserker barbarians, embrace the beast! Remember you get +4 on rolls vs. knockout and death, meaning you'll practically never fail. (Only on an 18.) Your combat options are limited, though. You must attack the nearest foe, and you must All-Out attack. If your foes are highly skilled, take the +4 and trade it for Deceptive Attack against their defenses (usually for a total of -3). If they're not, go with Double, possibly also trading one for a Rapid Strike (with Flurry of Blows, costing 1FP) for -3 to your skill for three attacks, split how you like.

Scout

You're a ranged character. With skill 16 or 17 in melee, that might not seem true, but don't believe it - it's a lie. You're a ranged character. Those 20 points you sank into Heroic Archer prove it. Speaking of which, remember Heroic Archer and what it means. Here's the breakdown: no penalties for footing or positioning or actions, and if you don't move you've already aimed. So unless you can't avoid it, don't move. That takes your skill 18 and drives it up to skill 20, and you'll need that extra skill to overcome range penalties.

Unlike the combat monsters, you'll want to aim at body-parts or at chinks in armor; your base damage is too low to do much otherwise. Chinks in armor is tough at -8, but against large foes might be worth it.

The base effective skill you want is 14, because if you don't hit your foe doesn't even need to defend. Memorize the Size and Speed Range table from 2 yds to 20 yds, which is your maximum effective combat range. The further along this scale your target is, the fewer options you have. At 20 yards, just shoot once a turn for the torso.

While it depends on the exact nature of your opponent (high defenses? high DR? lots of people?) With high defenses, you'll want a lot of arrows on one target, to soak up defenses, or maybe a ranged deceptive attack, which is allowed. With high DR, you want to find weak spots and drill on them. With lots of foes, you'll want to send out a lot of arrows.

Also, remember: if you aren't being attacked, there's no reason not to claim the extra +1 from All-Out Attack (Determined).

One of your hallmarks is rapid fire. For a Fast Draw and two Bow rolls at -3 (or -1 if you have Weapon Master (Bow) or use 1FP) [*Note: Use of FP for this isn't RAW, but it has a nice symmetry with Flurry of Blows, so I allow it.] you can fire every turn. Do this every turn that the range is 7 yards or less. (Skill 18, +2 because you stood still, -6 is 14. 14 is your magic number.) If you use the FP or also have Weapon Master (Bow), aim for the vitals.

Speaking of aiming for the vitals, aiming for the vitals is your go-to maneuver. Expect to pretty much always soak that -3 to skill to aim for the vitals; the x3 damage multiplier is too nice not to. Other options are either not as good for you (arms and legs take less damage from impaling and piercing) or have better modifiers but are harder to hit (like the skull and eyes). In fact, a lot of the time you will be balancing aiming for the vitals with shooting every turn. Average damage through chainmail to the vitals is 3.5 x 3 = 10.5, or enough to take an average man down to a consciousness check in one turn.

What should you aim at? There are two schools of thought. The first is to aim at whatever's attacking the melee fighters; forcing it to use a defense against your attack makes their attacks more likely to get through. Another is to focus on whatever might be able to hurt them (or, say, the wizard) but that they can't hurt, like enemy archers. Which you subscribe to should depend on the situation.

If you're ever in a situation where you need to roll melee combat skills or defenses, leave. That is not your role. All-Out defend and get away.



You can think of that as a sort of first draft.  The hope is that I'll be able to both pretty them up and add more to them, like what the Knight should do. Most will be simple, e.g. "As a Wizard, your main combat experience should be missile spells, and you want skill 14 with them if possible. Don't forget to All-Out Attack (Determined). If you're ever in combat, leave."

Is there anything I missed? Are my recommendations contrary to your experience? Do you have a better, clearer, more concise way of saying what I need to say? Please, let me know.

Communicate the Threat

Spurred by a long comment by one of my players on my first after-action report, I've come to realize that there are a few specific things I can do better both for my enjoyment and for the enjoyment of my players.

As I said before, I'm interested at least on some level in what I'll call "tactical play"; that is, in making combat and the exploration of the dungeon that interfaces with it into a realm of interesting, relevant choices.

There are a few prerequisites for this to work. The first is that communication of the tactical reality is clear. Decisions made without input aren't decisions; decisions made on faulty input aren't meaningful.

This is in fact one of the great boons to using monsters straight out of the monster manual, and also potentially one of the great sticking points for a conversion. It's obvious to anyone who has played D&D for more than one session that goblins are less dangerous than gnolls, and bugbears trump both. You don't mess with a dragon unless you brought serious firepower. Medusae are a sticky business. And so on. So, one of the goals of my conversion should be (and is, to a large extent) to preserve at least the relative threat-level these monsters present. When PCs meet an ogre, they should expect a tougher time than they had with the three kobolds in the last room. (Especially with large NPCs in GURPS, this is difficult but not impossible.)

Let's take an example where this broke down: the frogs outside the Moathouse.

Giant frogs aren't immediately evident as big nasty creatures. The mere fact that they're simply dire versions of animals tends to put them on a lower rung than, say, evil humanoids or the undead. Without other input, their threat assessment is inferior. However, that's clearly not the case. So, what could I have done, as a GM, to properly establish that this encounter was meant to be dangerous?

First, let's talk about what I did do. I made it very clear, several times before our first session, that without smart play this could very well turn out to be a high-mortality game. Also, I helped with character creation as much as I could in the communal format we used, and tried to make it clear that there was a vast difference in combat performance between roles specialized for it (like the Knight or Barbarian) and those not (like, say, the Scout).

...but that's it.

I gave them no useful information about this specific encounter, save that a) they're giant, dog-sized and larger frogs, and b) they're ravenous and will attack without quarter. (I believe I very clearly quoted from the book there, because it amused me.) So, quite naturally, my players assumed this might be a bit sticky, but that they would probably walk over it with only some little difficulty.

Those of you who know T1 know that's not true. The book is very clear - this is throwing the characters in at the deep end. So what could I have done, proactively, to make that clear, especially to players new to  tactical play?

First, there should have been more environmental clues. Bones near the pool, divots in the road, or generally something to indicate that they are now in dangerous territory.

Second, I can and should specifically call for rolls vs. the appropriate monster-recognition skills, Naturalist, in this case, and then given the PC(s) with those skills the rundown on these monsters. "Oh, these particular frogs have the dark-blue spotted backs of the Greater Voracious Lump-Backs - very dangerous, even to a patrol of armed men, especially in large numbers!" (Or whatever.)

Third, if in my judgment the encounter is liable to go completely foul without some crucial bit of knowledge, I should just straight-up give it to the players. "Guys, these frogs do 1d+1 cr with their tongues some can swallow SM+0 creatures. Also, there are six of them." Realism be damned if it leads to a bad night. (Note: I don't think we had a bad night. Actually, it seems like everyone had fun, even if the Scout's player is a little disappointed in his character's already-imminent death.)

None of this is the same as coddling the players or playing in easy-mode. In no case would I give away information that would reduce the necessity of my players to make decisions as to how to achieve their goals. Also, if surprise is an essential element of the encounter, so be it - you wouldn't know that bugbear is hiding in the rafters because you didn't look hard enough and he's sneaky, sorry. However, when that bugbear makes himself evident, unless bugbears are meant to be some strange exotic creature people have never heard of, the players should know - even if I have to straight-up tell them - that bugbears are almost as strong as ogres and are smart enough to use guerilla tactics.

In Which Hommlet is Left Surprisingly Intact: After play report 1

Cast:
Calawas - Elf Thief (Katz)
Amalia - High Elf Cleric (Paraj)
Volbak - Dwarf Knight (Jim)
Lamaevhun - Wood Elf Scout (Tim)
Ilsildel - High Elf Wizard (Martin)
Chief - Wood Elf Barbarian (Catherine)

Our intrepid group of adventurers made it down the road from Verbobonc to see the little village on a hill with its strange new Church, bringing only some little gear and their travel-worn ponies. They came originally from a sylvan community on the shores of the Nyr Dyv, being a sort of extended family that was sent out "to make something of themselves" and, perhaps more importantly, to stop being near home. (The dwarf was adopted because his parents have strange ideas about the origins of the species; nobody's had the heart to tell him yet.)

They came with a decent amount of debt underwriting their expedition from the purser's Guild in Verbobonc, and so were quite interested in employment, and fast. (The pursers are known both for their usurious rates and for their legbreakers.)

Riding past the Church, their druid (not pictured above) spotted the standing stones of Jaroo's grove in the distance and set off in a beeline to, "Contemplate the inner mysteries of nature," over the wizard's objections that, "You can do that here, dude! I brought, like, fifty feet of rope!"

Instead of messing around in the town, they made a beeline for the Inn of the Welcome Wench, hoping to find lodging and, well, some wenches. What they found instead was more expenses, but Master Gundigroot was kind enough to put them up for the night with a basic meal in exchange for the party wizard making all of his lighting require no oil for the next week or so. During their copious conversation on the nature of the fare and serving staff, Lamaevhun and Isildel shared this gem:

"Dude, try the turnips, they have awesome turnips."
"I prefer the stuff I can kill myself."
"Dude, you can kill turnips! Can't you hear their screams when they bite into you?"

This went on for a bit, until the traders entered the establishment and managed to garner instant dislike from Calawas. Nevertheless, after a bit of verbal sparring, it was made clear to the greedy little bug- I mean, the party thief, that a chance for coin was afoot, so they repaired to the trading post for a bit of more private conversation.

It seems that Lareth is the leader of a band of ruffians that Gremag is convinced is harming business. After some wrangling the PCs secured the right to keep anything they find (of course!) and even a pouch of a hundred copper, which elicited quite the interest from Calawas when Rannos, the slow stupid one, went to open the safe. Also, they completely blew off the offer of a man-at-arms to go with them for only $15 a day.


After that, they decided to retire. Early and fresh next morning (at about ten o'clock, after getting rid of hangovers and having breakfast), they set off for the half-day's journey to the old moathouse everyone had been telling them about, passing by Burne's construction with only a few glances and leaving the druid behind to his contemplations.

It all went well and I read some box text (we're enjoying the box text), until they came upon a pool that the scout discovered was home to a colony of voracious monstrous frogs! He got off a shot, but then was quickly snared and swallowed, discovering that the larger ones had teeth. This caused Chief (an otherwise unassuming individual who has both Berserk and Sense of Duty (Fellow Adventurers)) to go a little crazy and start playing golf, smacking one of the dog-sized frogs straight into the side of the moathouse. The rest of the party dithered and got ready while the horses miraculously stayed their ground, sealing the scout's doom. (He was around seven hexes ahead, which was great for the rest of the party, but very bad for him when he missed his perception roll. Also, we discovered that our dwarven knight has a move of 2 with encumbrance. Whoops.)

===========================
Notes:

1. Three hours is enough time to do some roleplaying, but not enough for serious dungeon delving it seems. I should probably be prepared to stop in the middle of combat pretty much always.
2. They didn't have a lot of interest in intrigue in Hommlet. I'm okay with this. They willfully stumbled into the one truly interesting thing going on, and none of the module requires that they care about Hommlet in the least.
3. My players are prone to distraction. I knew this before; our last GM (the guy now playing the scout, poor man) basically had us run riot over his campaign with some nights where we didn't even play but fifteen minutes or so. Fortunately, they also respond well to direction. I don't want or need to be tyrannical, since half the joy of this group is getting together to talk about stuff, but they're attentive when I take the reins to get back to the game.
4. I need to brush up on GURPS combat a little from a GM side. I know the rules, but it's been a while, so I have some trouble remembering to apply them all at times. There were definitely a couple moments where the frogs did some things they oughtn't be able to. Also, I need to firm up their stats a bit to deal with corner cases.
5. I badly need to teach my players how to play, or they're all going to die. For example, our scout had a full second to himself to react to these frogs. He knows also that he's out in front, a goodly number of yards away from help. So what does he do? He shoots one frog once in the torso. With skill 16 and 5 yards away, without help coming, he should have at least gone for the vitals, or (if standing still instead of doing a Move and Attack to retreat) maybe use 1 FP to shoot the vitals twice (Heroic Archer makes that a 10 or less, or 11 if you don't want to defend - low, but when faced with a bunch of enemies without backup, quantity has a quality all its own). None of this occurred to the player, though, nor to anyone else at the table. However, my work is predicated on the idea that the players know their options.

Striking the balance between preparation and improvisation

So, my dirty little secret is that I'm terrible at preparation beforehand for my sessions.

No, really, terrible. That's why I started this blog - in the hopes that it would force me to work on the Temple instead of procrastinating. (It's working, though the conversion is slow going what with my life up in the air. Still, I get a little done every night.) In fact, I'm so terrible at it that more often than not I find myself just completely winging sessions.

Fortunately, I'm good at improv. During the last WorldCon I ran for a table of players who ambushed me with a game. (They called me on my phone and asked me to come to the con suite. Once I was there, they wouldn't let me leave without running something. Crazy people.)

However, I don't feel comfortable relying on improvisation entirely when running a game I want to be consonant with the tenets of the OSR (so far as such a disparate hobbyist group has tenets, anyway). Why? Improvisation leads easily to things that look like illusionism, or, in long-running cases, to a world that is inconsistent. (You try remembering the intimate details of an NPC's temperment or the constitution of a town square from six months ago and see how well you do.) The crux of the matter is, giving power to the players relies on them standing on firm ground at least in some respects; they can't make meaningful decisions if any given previously-reliable piece of information turns out to be unreliable because you're not writing things down.

A little digression: I'm not talking about preparation like creating balanced encounters or plots. I don't play that way. I try my best to prep situations, not plots, and so I'm not getting bogged down in the details of how to predict player actions. Rather, I just have difficulty with my innate laziness.

Anyhow, the problem with improvisation is that it doesn't lead very well to a consistent world in which the PCs can move, and it's downright terrible at pro-active offering of options, which are the vital component of a game that purports to be player-driven. Unless the players can know something beforehand to guide their decisions, they aren't really making choices; they're just flipping coins.

That said, by no means do I intend to do away with improvisation. In fact, I cherish it; it breathes a life into the game that otherwise wouldn't exist. Reading the oracular dice (or my internal mercurial demon, which is frankly even more random than the bones) brings the world to life and provides entertainment for me and for the players. Furthermore, it is the other vital component to allowing player action to matter; if everything in your world is pre-scripted, then the players aren't agents, they're subjects.

How do I balance these competing forces, especially in the face of my natural bent to procrastinate and make it up around the gaming table? I'm still struggling with this question, but so far here are the rules of thumb I've come up with (and that I'm trying to implement):

• Build important NPCs and decide why they're important. This means, most accurately, who they are in the situation (e.g., village elder, blacksmith, ogre on 3rd level) and with whom they have what relationships. This does not generally mean "why they are important to the PCs" - I figure the PCs themselves will decide that. If they're combat NPCs, stat up their combat-relevant abilities and tactical inclininations, as well as treasure.
• Build important locations and sublocations, with at least a few hooks for the PCs. This changes a lot based on the nature of the location - if it's a dungeon, it must have rooms, and a story/rumours/inhabitants/surroundings for the PCs to know about. (There's a lot out there about how to make dungeons.) If it's a dungeon room, it has details on geography, current inhabitants and uses, traps, and treasure. (Bonus for history, but that can be made up on the spot if necessary.) If it's a village, it has relationships with surrounding areas, local geography, and starting attitudes of citizens, as well as at least a vague idea of the strength and focus of the economy.
• Build tools for randomness. This means random encounter tables, reaction tables, and the like. Only focus on those things it wouldn't be fair for me to make up on the spot, or for things I'd be tempted to bias, or for things I honestly can't decide. For example, random encounters with monsters is good tool fodder. So are rumours, though somewhat less so. NPC reaction tables are good, but I've no need of NPC knowledge tables. I can decide fairly well what a local tanner knows about The Crypt of St. Genevieve.
• Do other preparation if I want, but that's not necessary.
• Once the session is over, write things down. I struggle with this at times.

I'm curious what others do. I'm aware that after-action reports are popular; do folks have other methods they employ in addition or as substitutes for this in order to track important information? What sort of pre-session preparation do you engage in, and how do you do it? Do you find that it helps?

P.S.: I hope to have more Temple-centric posts soon. I'm just trying to avoid giving away too much information to players who might read this.

Things Eric taught me about GURPS (and gaming in general)

First, I should say I'm sorry; I try to update regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, with maybe a post or two in between, but I've missed that schedule twice in quick succession. Work is in overdrive right now; hopefully things will die down soon (unless my life changes, like it might - we'll see).

Anyhow, Eric was my old game master. We played a game set in Yrth, though we weren't much for gritty politicking; it was very much a swords and sorcery dungeon-delving game. Actually, originally, it was set in a cyberpunk world, but I only learned that from my dad. See, I joined this campaign when I was three years old and played until it ended in 14 and a half years; I'm given to understand it actually ran for something like 17.

To call this a formative experience in gaming is something of an understatement. It informs the whole way I look at gaming, and it explains a lot about my priorities, both at the table and beforehand. So, without further ado, lessons I learned (as a GM) by playing and talking with Eric.

All rules are suggestions. Many are good, some are not; none are necessary

No, seriously, all rules. We played GURPS in Eric's game of course, but we rolled 2d10 instead of 3d6. Why? Because Eric wanted to; he liked the curve better and wanted a good excuse to use those dice. Also, we never used the shock rules. Those aren't optional rules; they're core functionality. So what? Eric didn't like bothering with them, so we didn't. There are numerous other examples, especially in monster design. I really don't much care about exactly statting out the Affliction or Innate Attack (Emanation); all I want to know is that if the PCs walk within 5 yards of the slime they have to roll vs HT-5 or be nauseated and take 1d-3 damage because it's spewing out nerve gas.

At the same time, it's good to know the limitations of the rules and the designs that stick to them rigorously, in case it comes up. (PCs have to follow the rules in character creation, for example.) I just don't blink twice at making exceptions.

Player/character actions matter

Had a plan of something really cool that could happen? Did the players mess it up? Good for them.


Here we enter the dangerous waters of gamer reminiscence...

We had an over-arching quest to gather the pieces of a magical hammer so we could destroy a powerstone fueling the transformation of Keyhole Bay into a pocket dimension for various reasons. Along the way, there was a huge, nasty dungeon complex; we attempted it and were soundly thrashed by venemous animated trees in the vestibule. Further, we knew some very nasty folks lived there, who would be very upset if we took their hammer-piece. What to do?

We eventually settled on the plan of teleporting two people in, grabbing the hammer, teleporting back out, and then teleporting in a 2,000 pt Exploding Fireball. This was a risky plan; people had to go in to grab the hammer beforehand, which included finding it. (We knew roughly where it was because of a Seeker spell, but that doesn't give you exact location in a room, and it was guarded.) On top of that, this is on a 5-second timer, because that's roughly now long we have before the ubermenschen figure out they no longer have their piece of the hammer and come looking for it, by our estimation. Plus, there's a chance of teleporting into solid rock, etc.

Needless to say, when we pulled it off, Eric was not particularly happy. He had spent a lot of time preparing that dungeon. However, he let us do it, because we planned it out meticulously, we took advantage of a high-risk high-payoff strategy, and he operated by a policy of no-take-backs.

Conversely, this was all a problem in the first place because we'd accidentally warped the nature of magic by over-abusing the Catastrophe tables. Also, Black Cat.

Black Cat, to be succint, was a former PC-turned-pirate who was the bane and nemesis of the party. She was competent and brutal, and an enemy because of several mistakes on our part, including leaving her in the tender care of a demon while too far down on our priorities list (underneath figuring out what was going on in Minder and killing a local dragon, etc.) Furthermore, she recruited our cast-offs, even occasionally having them show back up to spy on us. (In fact, in the end, she won...)

I could go on (and on, and on), but the point of this post isn't to air my fond memories.

Rulings should be fair, not necessarily consistent

Certainly, the former often includes the latter, but not always. If a player is trying to tie you down with precedent in order to break the game, don't let him.

The game is about having fun, and that happens when people are playing

Sure, there's probably a rule for it somewhere. And you should know the rules fairly intimately, so as to pull it out if you can, and have a good background if you can't. However, if you're not sure what the answer is, it doesn't matter: make something up that sounds fair. Not sure if the PC had that potion in his backpack or somewhere else? Contest of percentile dice. (Sure, that works out to a %50 chance, but rolling competitively when somthing is on the line is fun.) Not sure exactly what the minus is for shooting in the dark with a full moon but cloud cover? -4 sounds about right. How about the minuses to hit your enemy while you both are standing in a cart barrelling down a mountainside and under attack? -3, because anything further is an un-fun series of misses. (See point 1)

Characters come and characters go

Seriously, you don't have to pull punches to protect the kid's special snowflake. He'll make another. What's more, he'll remember that time his favorite fighter lost precisely 2 more points than the -10xHP resurrection threshold, and come to appreciate it later. Besides, everyone has three characters anyway, right? (We engaged in something I only later came to know as 'troupe play' - often, there would be about five players, and about fourteen characters. It worked really well.)

You can always up the ante

Always. It doesn't matter if a player wants to bring in a completely twinked out psi squeezing every last drop out of very optimized point allocations. That just means you get to put a pair of mind flayers in the room. There is not a single thing a player can do that you can't deal with.