D&D software reviews

• DM Genie - the best so far just because it seems like a complete product but very big. Not really sure its something I want to spend money on if I don't end up using. Happily there's a 60 day evaluation so I can try a few things.
• Official D&D demo software from 2002. Unfortunately in many regards this software is completely broken but its simple and clean and works.
• RolePlayingMaster - uses a closed format for generation, not too many options -- couldn't seem to make much use out of it
• PCGen - seems broken. I've talked about this before. Annoying that so much time was put into an obviously huge collaborative effort that simply doesn't work. Every time I try to add items it complains I don't have the money or that I need to customize it. When I read the help on how to customize the items or get money, its useless. The help menu/documentation seems always a version or two behind. I gave up.
• Autorealm - very basic, hasn't been updated in a while, not very easy to use. I gave up pretty fast.
• jMapEditor - so simple its almost unusable. Drawing walls is very unintuitive and slow and it doesn't appear to output to anything printable or other formats. Seems more like a proof of concept program than an actual level-editor.
• Dungeon Crafter III - blessedly simple with some nice, basic map settings. Unfortunately no undo function and the output looks NOTHING like the screenshots. How did they come up with those?
• DM Cheatsheet - A great idea but really ugly on my windows firefox browser. Unusably so and definitely not going to see any more updates since the last one was in '05
• Storybook - untested but might be a good way to keep track of major characters in a more political setting.

Using Paint.net to create D&D maps

I find even just a little preparation setting up maps makes my life SO much easier. Graph paper is adequate but I'm trying to do everything digitally and current D&D resources on this topic haven't done the trick. If characters want to go back the way they came, I need to know where they were and what was there.

I'm currently trying out resources but here's one trick using Paint.net:

1. Create a simple 100 x 100 pixel map
2. Zoom in 1200%
3. In the menu, select "view" and choose "grid"
4. Use the fill tool to create a dark grey background

Then, draw out some areas and designate different available colors for different map symbols. I picked some that seemed right to me and then put a legend to the side of the page.

To add more detail to the map, change the canvas size to 700 x 700 or take a screen capture of the picture using FastStone Capture. Those tiny boxes will now become very big ones that you can draw more detail into or type text explanations.

What's your AC?

Based on suggestions over at KingsWorkCreative, I created a character quicklook spreadsheet.

DM "smart sword" trick

Your players are going to do what they're going to do and its hard to put them in the right place at the right time for something you planned on happening. To not give them choices means they're on a "rail" system of gaming, which is boring.

Example: characters come across a huge door. I want to use it later for something but the characters are bound and determined to figure out some way to get through the door. I want to tell them "wait a second" but I have no way of doing that without giving something away. We waste like 20 minutes and the characters are frustrated nothing would open this door I've introduced. Frustrating.

What do you do?

Solution: A "smart" item. The item can either see into the immediate future or has advanced senses like heat vision, scry, detect alignment. Whatever powers I give it, in the game its really just a way to pass the characters hints about what to do without being overly obvious. How is it that this section of the dungeon has never been discovered before? Nobody had a sword like yours.

This trick has more than one use: imagine the characters have just encountered an enemy that is far more powerul than they. Their most recent encounters have been successful and they're feeling like a good fight. Realistically if they take on this enemy, they're going to get pummeled. I pass the characters a note explaining the sword is self-lowering itself. The characters get the message and try diplomacy instead without having to pay out big time in healing potions and magic with no return.

When the DM isn't having any fun

The obvious next step is to change -- when you're the DM and you don't like the way the game is going, you set the stage differently. You can't control the actors but you can certainly push them in directions you want to go.

Making a sharp, left turn is disruptive to the flow that the game has taken on. My characters have been wandering around a very well-developed setting, finding all sorts of side events and adventures to occupy them. There's nothing wrong with this but its becoming one long series of distractions away from what I originally planned and was excited about. I had a basic direction and a creative arc for the game that's not happening.

The initial drive was to get them to the "great hope of civilization" and put them under the employ of my central character. Now, I'm finding all these side adventures kind of tediously slow and I just want to get them somewhere that we can have more coheasive games. I'm having to stay extremely flexible and I'm pulling out all my creative powers. That's fine for one or two games where your characters go somewhere you didn't expect and you've got to pull shit out of thin air but how did it get here?

Possible reasons:

• Too easy Somewhere along the way I've neutered the major antagonist by making her minions a bunch of ponces.
• Too clear I gave away too much true information and its completely killed the mystery. Misinformation makes it harder for me to keep track of but it also creates a puzzle the characters must actively try to solve.
• Easy and getting easier My characters are rapidly going up in level and I still don't feel prepared to handle or play out high level adventures or challenges. My characters in effect are running rough shod over my plans. Just dynamically rebuilding enemies in a game to be more powerful than the characters feels a little wrong.
  

Thoughts and ideas are of course welcome if anyone's reading this.

Colors

Many of my adventures are more exploratory and political rather than problem solving and stabbing, I've gotten a lot more interested in the details and nuances of things. Descriptions, colors, tastes, and so forth.

As such, lame as it may be, I sort of enjoyed this: tavern chatter.

Update: Another post on reading in-game text.

Bulldozer

My characters were walking around a town that I hadn't planned out well enough. I tried to keep the action moving but I was basically pulling things out of nowhere as the action progressed. The characters felt directionless and vague and because I didn't expect any of this, neither did I.

So I came up with the bulldozer.

He is slow moving, destructive, and scary. He looms in the background when the characters dally too much and helps keep things going. He's been in quite a few shows but the best example I can remember is the sexy evil girl Andrea Parker from The Pretender who was always chasing the hero, but always just missed him. Her job wasn't to catch or hurt the hero, it was merely to push the story forward: she's a bulldozer.

I'm not sure what the bulldozer will actually be in my game but a few ideas came up:

• In the town everyone's visiting, a scary group of Dwarves who are guarding a caravan might do the trick. The dwarves are growing in power in the north west so their newfound power is turning into a gruff adversarial nature.
• I'm also considering a magic user who is pursuing them either because they have something he wants or he thinks they have something he wants.
• Maybe the characters worked for someone in Quartz who had a lot more ties than anyone thought. Those ties make even former employees dangerous.
  

Wil Wheaton's DM suggestions

Some thoughts that indirectly spawned my last post.

DM Styles

My friend Kris wrote:

I don't know a lot about game theory, but I do know something about giving form to creativity - a structure of some kind. The dice rolling provides an objective structure upon which an elaborate foray in creativity can be had. I would think simple rule-making would not be enough, since rules, by being made of language, which is in itself ambiguous and arbitrary, can be bent, broken, disregarded, etc.

Going to pull back the curtain a little bit about how I work all this stuff out.

Kris' idea here has been a tension for me basically since I started DM'ing when I was 14. How do I tell a cool story while at the same time letting people decide the direction of that story? The interactivity makes it hard for me to plan.

To handle this tension, there are actually different DM styles that I'm balancing currently. First is a strict rules structure, which can be tedious but *absolutely* fair and controlled. There's a "rail" (like a railroad -- only going down one track) structure where there's less interactivity on the part of the players and more of a storytelling component. There's a "referee" style where the DM is very hands-off, giving the characters a situation and then lets the characters choose on their own what happens. He's only there to stop them when they do something illegal. There's also a more freeform style that relies very little on the rules and is much more about style.

Rail systems fail for obvious reasons: if there's no interactivity, its just watching a movie. I've had some incredible DMs tell some astonishingly cool stories, but our characters were very, very secondary. Entertainment factor was high but I didn't care about my character. Elf? Minotaur? Who cares? We're still getting into the castle. Now tell me what happens.

Freeform oddly fails because there is no real danger in dying. This is because if someone's going to lose their character, they want to know that they *really* died and you weren't just punishing them for something intangible and casual. People take that personally and quit playing so DMs can't kill anyone. When you hold death over the head of your players, they're more concerned about what's going on, get deeper into the game, and avoid needless risks. Success and failure in freeform games are mostly based on real human charisma (not some kind of in-game charisma). You often have to talk the DM into it, which is a bit silly and absolutely vague. Here's an example freeform scene:

Player: I'm going to jump off the cliff. I'm going to aim for that little outcropping.
DM: You're @#$% dead.
Player: I hate you!

The Referee style sucks too because there's no direction:

Team: Where are we going?
DM: Wherever you want.
Team: I want money. Where's the money?
DM: In the dungeon.
Team: To the dungeon!
DM: How do you get there?
Team: Is there a door?
DM: Maybe.

Since the DM doesn't seem engaged, the players aren't likely to come along with him. Like a Freshman trying to decide his major in college, players want direction. Very creative players can thrive in this situation but too much freedom is like asking the players to do your work for you.

Strict rules systems involve lots of looking up of information. You're continually pulling up a book and looking for the table that does whatever. If there's no table, what do you do? Sometimes you make one. You have to have a lot of patience for this and be very focused on the game mechanics and usually you fancy yourself a role-playing-game-system writer. On the upside, the DM is not culpable; when something goes wrong, the players might as well argue with the book authors.

Player: I want to shoot him.
DM: You missed. Roll to see which direction it went.
Player: Uh. Left.
DM: Your team mate is to the left. Roll to see if you hit her.
Player: Oops. I hit her.
DM: Roll dexterity check.
Player: Still hit.
DM: Roll for damage.
Player: 5
DM: Roll to save vs. death
Player (to teammate): Idiot! Why were you standing there?!