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.

Digital books are your friends

I posted a defense on Stupid Ranger for using digital documents versus their paper counterparts:

A book is nice but its also nice to:

1. Have a search function.  Try finding a random spell or odd phrase in 10 seconds or less with the paper version.  It can't be done.
2. Save a tree.  In 3rd edition, about 1 in 10 of the monsters in the monster manual are meaningful to me.  Why do I have to carry around the other 9/10ths?  Instead, just print out what I need.
3. Keep it forever.  Digital books don't get stolen, lost or damaged.  You make a backup and save it on to a key drive the size of your fingernail.
4. Modify it digitally.  Skim (Mac) and PDF XChange (PC) both edit a book without actually damaging or modifying it.
5. Digital readers.  Book reading tools (like the Kindle and others) are gradually getting better and better.  They will eventually get down in price enough to be comfortable to read, last weeks on one charge, and hold millions of books.

Keeping track of the rules

I'm posting my rules Cheat Sheet, which helps me keep track of how things work. Will hopefully add to it as time goes by with my own custom stuff.

Campaign Setting

Time for some details about the Wasteland scenario I've spent months on. These are still very unfinished and are constantly being updated.

If you don't wish to spoil the surprise if you might ever play, please do not read them. This info is only stuff a DM would care about.

• The Wasteland Campaign Setting - very rough draft -- spoiler warning!
• Map of the Wastelands - currently an ultra-basic map.

They are released under a "BY-SA-NC" Creative Commons license, which means you are free to use and modify the material for your own purposes so long as you use a similar license. I reserve some rights for commercial use. Read more about this here.

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.
  

Attributes

One of my players suggested that attributes didn't make any sense. I remembered one of the tricks for using 3 six-sided die to determine stuff like strength, dexterity, intelligence ...

The idea is to answer the question: could an average human do ___ action? All they have to do is roll their attribute or below. Someone with score 10 (an average person) has a 50/50 chance while a person with a score 20 has a 100% chance. As much sense as that makes, that doesn't come up in D&D.

So I guess I'm not really sure why that system is still used.

PCGen frustrations

Really annoyed with PCGen software, even though it should be everything I like. A big open source software and Java fan so it was almost required that I try to make this go. Unfortunately, I cannot figure out how to buy items and the manual that comes with it is useless. Its as if someone created the most amazing, complete, detailed software and forgot to make it anything but a confusing mess.

• The support doesn't exist (sign up for an e-mail list -- and you can't read the archives)
  
• The online manual doesn't correspond to the latest version so you know they haven't been updating it.
• One reference to changing buying tools in the option menu doesn't exist.
  

Its free so I suppose I'm not supposed to complain but got am I annoyed. I'm going to look into the non-free rpgxplorer.com.

Update: this post from 2005 makes some good points that an open system is still necessary. Ugh -- so once more into the breech of PCGen dear friends.