Dialogue

"You push the heavy, wooden door and it opens slowly, hinges screaming into the silence of the dark corridors around you."
"Great," says Adam, looking at Chris who plays the impatient Fighter. "I told you we should check the door before opening it. My Thief would have noticed the rusty hinges!"
"What's the matter?" replies Chris with a smile, "afraid from the dark?"
(The players look at the Dungeon Master, who rolls some dice behind his DM's screen)
"The echoes of the hinges shriek slowly fade away. The chamber behind the door is dark."
"I push my way forward, and use my torch to light up the room," says Ron, who play the Cleric. "What do I see?"
"The room is filled with old crates covered with dust. The air is dry and cold. A pile of rags rests on one of the crates."

Sounds familiar? How many similar scenes you have played throughout your gaming career? Dozens? Hundreds?

99% of what we do around the table is all about Dialog. We speak. We describe our characters actions. We ask the DM questions. We debate rules, options and tactics. We role-play, we argue, we socialize.

Think about your last session. How much of the dialog was between one player and the DM? How much of it was between one player and another? In my humble opinion, almost all dialog around the table (game related, that is) is between one or two players and the DM. I can count on one hand the number of player vs player moments per session I had throughout my entire DMing career. And I had (and still have!) some great players around my tables throughout the years.

Why is that so? Well, most players assume that the DM, being the one running the game, has all the answers. Even if the DM is running a pre-make module published for one official setting or the other, he still have absolute control of the happenings, so it's only logical to direct all questions to him. Moreover, the DM is the guy playing all the NPCs, so if an NPC comes and presents himself, it's only logical for the players to engage with him - and the DM, as a result.

This way, players go through whole sessions ping-ponging with the DM, with only occasional breaks to discuss something with their fellow players.

What a waste!

Players drive the story, not the DM. It's something I repeatedly say to every group I run games for, and with good reason. The collective mind of 6 people (5 players and a DM) can blow away anything a single DM can do. Think about it - a game run by the DM is railroaded by definition. The DM makes the calls, the DM decides where the story goes. Players make choices, no doubt, but at the end, it's the DM who orchestrate the story, making the game a series of "left or right" decisions in a scripted story.

As I said - a waste.

As I wrote in my last Campaign Workshop post, I ask my players to write backgrounds for their characters, and then I use it to create the story of the campaign. But how can these backgrounds come to life unless the players talk to each other? If the players don't share with one another bits of their backgrounds during the course of the campaign, when these backgrounds come to life in the form of events or NPCs, no-one other than the background writer have any idea what's going on, and it's a waste, because that moment is a private moment between the player and the DM.

I believe that any role-playing game can benefit from scenes in which characters engage in a dialog that excludes the DM. One can start it, the others can follow if they like and make their characters come to life within the story. It doesn't need to be an award-winning, actor's studio moment full of emotion and Shakespeare-like prose. Two or three sentences between several characters is all it takes, and it might lead to interesting scenes and "ah-ha" moments later on during the campaign.

Think about the following example:

After a gruesome fight with Gnolls, the players hear Chris (playing the Fighter) describe how he wipes the blade clean on one of the corpses with a nasty smile.

If you were a player in that group, how would you respond? Would you ignore that role-playing opportunity, or would you "pick up the glove" and say something like "You really enjoy it, do you? Where on earth do they teach the love of war?"


photo credit: Sharon Drummond via photopin cc

Campaign Workshop - Character Background

In the last Campaign Workshop post, I discussed a useful mechanism to kick-start your campaign building process.

Once you have the campaign slogan, it's time to start developing the campaign theme and story. Since Roleplaying Games are all about fun, and the definition of fun is different for different people, it's time to talk to the players and get their idea of what's fun and entertaining. The rule is simple:

Engaged players => Great game sessions.

At this point, all you have is a slogan and a half-baked idea of the campaign overall story. If you jump into the campaign development process (creating a full-blown story, detailing locations and NPC, thinking about sub-plots, power-groups, and all the other cool stuff we DMs drool on), you might end-up with a campaign that nobody wants to play. You might spend a lot of time building something your players would not find engaging. They will either suffer quietly, or just leave.

So how do we make sure that the campaign is engaging? Simple: we ask the players to provide backgrounds for their characters.

Now here is the tricky part: some players find it infinitely boring/useless to write backgrounds for their characters, and for good reasons. A lot of DMs ask their players for lengthy backgrounds that get stuffed inside the DM's binder, never to see the light of day again.

Big Mistake.

The campaign is all about the players, and without player input, the campaign will go where ever the DM will steer it. Some find it a perfectly valid gaming experience, but I personally like (both as a DM and as a player) to be engaged, to have a lot of control of the setting, the action, the story and the events around me.

Character background is probably the first opportunity you (as the DM) have to learn about the player and find out what interests him. So how do we get the players to write good backgrounds for their characters?

Some guidelines:

1. Character backgrounds can be short - even as short as a few sentences.
2. The background should include a short-term, achievable goal.
3. The background should include a complication.

That's it.

Think about it: all you need is something to start with. Make no mistake - if a player produces a lengthy background that include some goals and some interesting complications, by all means, thank him! But a few well-written sentences can also do the trick. Tell your players to come up with several sentences with a goal and a complication, and have their characters end up in a small town called Lakeside.

Here is what you might get:

• Loan is the daughter of a once capable wizard, now a drooling madman due to a magical experiment that went really wrong. Placing her father is a sanatorium (with all the money she had), she seeks the aid of Magnus Amandas, a great wizard and a researcher of mental afflictions. Upon her arrival to the town of Lakeside, she found out that Magnus was recently assassinated, and now - probably due to her inquiries - she is being followed by the local assassins guild.
• Tardas Longhorn - the dwarven prince of the kingdom of Ironfoot - is leading a small emissary of dwarves to the town of Lakeside, to deal with the growing threats of bandits on the trade road. Lakeside's mayor - Lord Arbor Gos - has hired a group of mercenaries to clean the roads of bandits, but the dwarves suspect that the mercenaries are actually working with the bandits. As Tardas and his dwarven guards enter the town of Lakeside, some rough looking men take note of them.
• Pilir Devengil have just reached the town of Lakeside for the annual drinking contest. Overweight, smelly and broke, he has to win it to collect the prize and pay his step-mother for his lodging at her cabin. Dragging his large body on the way to the inn, he bumped into a noble, accidentally breaking the old man's glasses. The noble demands an absurd sum of money, threatening to use his connection with the local militia's commander to arrest Pilir for his rudeness.  

Taking the slogan you have in mind - what can you do with the above backgrounds? More importantly, what do these backgrounds say about the players?

You might notice that both Loan's and Tardas's players like a mystery. Loan's player might be interested in magic, and Tardas's player might like some diplomacy and nobility. Pilir's player might be in for some goofy moments, but he also might be interested in making money.

You might want to start thinking about linking the backgrounds, building a framework that will unite the stories and make them work together. Maybe Pilir's noble will make him work for him, sending him to work as a mercenary with the rough men that "guard the roads". Maybe Magnus Amandas was assassinated because found he out about a scheme to murder the dwarven prince about to come to town? Maybe the local assassins guild did not kill Magnus, and a guild-member who was an old friend of Magnus hopes to use the young woman to lure the real assassin?

Given good backgrounds, it's not hard to wrap your mind around them and create a basic story that will kick-start the campaign. You can always ask your players for background refinements if you find it hard to squeeze a good story out of them, but that refinement should be worked out by the player, after you explain the guidelines and why you need them.

Don't be afraid to tell your players that you want backgrounds that will help you create a better story for the campaign! If these stories will come forward at the very first session - the players will be totally engaged, making the first session unforgettable, and establishing a good basis for the rest of the campaign.


photo credit: quirkybird via photo pin cc

Where Are My Glasses?

It's been a while since I wrote, mainly because of a major change I went through in my professional life. So long Polycom, it's been a great ride! Outbrain, here I come...

But that's not what this post is all about...this post is about the brand-new Macbook Pro with the Retina Display that was waiting for me when I got into the office on my first day.

As expected, I was dazzled by that truly amazing display, spending hours at home just browsing for hi-res photos to marvel upon. The quality of this display is so good, that my little daughter, from the height of her 3-year life-experience, stared at it for whole 5 minutes before saying: "Dad, I love you - and your new laptop".

The problems began a few days later, when my wife called me to help her get something done on her own laptop.

I frowned at the screen, trying to understand what's wrong with it. Everything looked blurry, full of jagged edges and rough corners. I could see lines and dots everywhere, as if I was looking at a CRT display from somewhere in the 80'...

The same happened when I turned on my first generation iPad, and even (heaven forbid!) my mid 2011 Macbook Air.

After making sure my contact lenses didn't fall off my eyes (and then realizing in terror that I never owned contact lenses, or reading glasses for that matter), I raised my arms, lifted my head and roared: "Noooooooo................."

Great job Apple.

Now I grumble every time my eyes rest on a non-Retina display. And guess what, other than my iPhone and my newly acquired (yet not really my own - I hope I won't have withdrawal symptoms when the guys at Outbrain will take it from me) Macbook Pro, all other 99.999999 displays I stare at now fall under the category of Totally Crap, Barely Usable, Eye Scorcher Piece of Junk.

As long as I use that truly amazing display, I'm in paradise, but on any other (non-retina) device - cyberspace never looked so murky...

D&D Next: D&D is Back!

I was very excited to get my copy of the D&D play-test material. The roller coaster that was 2e to 3.5e to 4e was about to end, and I was very interested to see what the captains of D&D have in mind.

Well, it looks like they had this in mind:

The booklet reads like old-school D&D while taking the best of all the editions out there. You can see 2e's one-line monster stats right next to 4e at-will cantrips. You can see Basic D&D "Vancian" spell-casting next to a slightly modified version of the healing-surges system found in 4e.

Another great idea was the inclusion of character backgrounds and themes as a way to create unique, 3.5e like PCs as opposed to the cookie cutter approach found in 4e. The play-test material gave us the most archetypical heroes, but I can easily see how the system will be expanded and extended to support great character customization.

So in my opinion, D&D is now back to being D&D. The core of it - in the form presented in the play-test material - will be probably tweaked and modified, but it looks solid enough and D&D enough to my personal taste.

Taking a look at the included adventure, I was shocked at how much it reminded me of all those old, pre 3rd edition adventure module I still own. It even looks like I could run those old modules with little or no modification. In addition, it looks like the fine-tuned encounters found in 4e are out of the window, with rooms with "up to 40" kobolds in them.  The monsters stat blocks are mostly one or two liners, a thing I was really happy about - until I saw the "Special Traits" entry for each monster in the monster booklet.

I never liked the way monsters in 3.5e played out. In addition to the clearly stated melee and ranged attacks, they had this section in which tons of special abilities were listed. During the excitement of combat I usually forgot all about them, which was really annoying. Even more annoying was the fact that some of the special abilities encapsulated several traits that I needed to take into account. For example, 3.5e incorporeal means immunity from all non-magical attacks, but they are effected by supernatural attacks. And then the game was halted to look at the books to see what supernatural meant. So in that sense, I really hope that Wizards use the traits section wisely, giving just a few, self-explanatory, "classic" traits and move all other "cool stuff the monster can do" to an appropriate section (attacks, defenses etc).

To be completely honest, I really look forward to play-test D&D Next, and I really hope that Wizard's plan of providing a solid core that is easily expanded with rules modules will actually work. If they decide to revive the old Mistara campaign setting (or create a brand new old-school setting) I will be thrilled.

After all, it looks like D&D is built with an eye to its original roots, roots which I discovered when I was just a little over 6 years old, almost 30 years ago...

Hey, you know what? Proofreading my post I just realized that I unintentionally dropped the "Next" out of D&D Next in the last sentence. Yes, it feels like D&D. Not 2e, not 3e and not 4e or 5e.

Just D&D.

Campaign Workshop - The Campaign Slogan

One of the tricks I've been using to conceptualize a campaign is the Campaign Slogan.

A role-playing campaign can take years to play to its end. Unless you're building a very short campaign, one that will end after a couple of sessions, you'll need to come up with a considerable amount of plots, NPCs, story arcs, locations and adventure ideas.

Facing so much unwritten material, a lot of GMs freeze, unable to even start working on their new campaign. Even if we have this great idea, we sometimes find it hard to mature it into a fully grown campaign. We start with one story, jump to the next, introduce an NPC or two, and kickstart the campaign hoping for the best.

More often than not, this approach creates a spiral of death effect. As the game goes on, the connection to the original story dwindles, until nothing remains of the original story. At this point, many campaigns die, having too many loose-ends and unrelated strings of adventures that are going nowhere.

To solve this problem (and to help solving many more, as you'll see shortly), I use the idea of the Campaign Slogan. I can't say I invented it - I probably picked it up somewhere, but I cannot remember where...

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about the Slogan:

A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a political, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose. 

The slogan serves a similar purpose in the context of campaign building. It creates a general, memorable frame for the entire campaign. When building the campaign, it can be used as a phrase that conceptualize the campaign, giving it flavor, meaning and theme. When running the campaign, it can be used to make sure the campaign is still going to the right direction. If you read the campaign slogan during the course of a campaign, and find it valid - you are still on course.

Note that my slogans are there to serve me, therefore they are somewhat different from the slogans we all know from ads and commercials. My slogans are short sentences that capture the feel of the campaign in one short sentence.

Here are two examples of slogans I used in my recent campaigns:

• A demon convinces a high-priest to free it from its eternal prison, claiming that "You need to free me in order to fight me."
• A great emperor - in the face of a terrible invasion by otherworldly beings - conquers more and more lands as a way to unite the population against a terrible foe. "Rule them or lose them"

As you can see, the slogans are very abstract while providing the identity of the "main villain" and his reason for being one. They are general enough to spawn endless plots and adventures, but focused enough to provide a frame in which the campaign takes place.

I already discussed the importance of the villain, and talked about how the villain is the story initiator. 

Here I would like to stress the importance of abstraction: an abstract slogan helps you build arcs, plots, sub-plots and adventure that are seemingly unrelated, until you decide to let the players see the connection. 

If the campaign slogan is abstract enough, it would easily contain the backgrounds of the heroes, their stories and their goals, which - if you follow my steps so far - are not even in your possession yet.

Writing a good slogan is not difficult. Try to summarize your favorite sic-fi or fantasy movies in one sentence, and slogans will pop up quickly. 

Can you identify the following?

• An alien entity is using humans as slaves-laborers by utilizing advanced technology which is based on a rare mineral the humans are mining.
• An archeologist is working of an evil army commander,  questing for occult power that will make the army invincible.
• A power-hungry emperor is constructing a terrible weapon that can destroy planets, but the plans of the station falls to the hands of a group of freedom fighters.