Recent Lessons

The Dungeon Purgatory campaign may soon be ending. I am moving to another city, so I won't be around to insist that we stick with it. We are also getting to miss the narrative consistency of a more traditional campaign. So Dungeon Purgatory is prolly not long for this world.

anyways, here are some lessons I've learned from running my last few sessions

1. Randomness on the DMing/encounter generation side of the screen does not necessarily equate to randomness on the player/experience side of the screen. Rather, the players can be given a sense of disorder or mystery from events which are actually carefully planned on the DM side. But if the DM expects off-the-cuff randomness to perform well and hopes to surprise himself, he is likely to be disappointed, and what the players experience will probably be meaningless and boring.

2. If you want a monster to stick around and cause trouble for a while, don't make it easy for the PCs to push it off a cliff or into a pool of lava or something. At least not until that is exactly what they are supposed to do.

3. Dungeons are like fun-houses. The aptness of Alexis-senpai's comparison is more apparent to me now. Except I would say it's more like an amusement park haunted-house ride. \

Things need to be obvious. The monsters are supposed to pop out on their creaky hydraulics. If there's a mystery or a secret, it needs to be apparent that there is a problem to be solved. It's ok to hand-hold in dungeons.
Yeah, I am usually for lots of freedom and player-driven action. But dungeons really aren't the place for that. Open ended adventure requires an open environment. Once we are in a dungeon the game is not about getting into character or storytelling. It is about killing stuff and getting treasure until the course is cleared.

4.That said, whether an area is visually mapped or merely described to players has a huge effect on how they are prompted to explore and interact with the environment.
I had a certain area mapped very neatly, but lost it before game. I felt this loss very keenly as I had to describe verbally what I had expected to present visually.

A map encourages players to be more proactive in their exploration. What they already see is clearly marked and the "blank" areas of the map show where there is more exploration to be done.

But when players are dependent on a description farted out of my hazy and disorganized imagination, they really lack prompting. If something is not specifically mentioned in plain language, it may as well not exist. On the other hand, something mentioned as mere window-dressing may utterly fascinate or boggle the players. The tale of the Gazebo comes to mind.

Does it see us?

 

This distinction between visual representation and descriptive representation may seem obvious. But I am still learning it. In the future, I will make a conscious decision about how I intend to present an environment. This distinction also pretty much dictates what sort of preparation will be necessary.

 

5. Mixing monsters is cool. Encounters with multiple distinct monster types are a good way to make a combat more interesting. Having more than two factions involved simultaneously in one encounter can be very unpredictable for players. Especially when one faction is an unknown quantity. It gives players the opportunity to make quick decisions and feel particularly clever when things work out well for them. 

Killing Gently

Though my rate of posting has slowed significantly, the Dungeon Purgatory campaign is still going, and the party has come once again to one of my areas. I am playing my cards close to my chest at the moment, but I will share reflections on this level later.

Until then, I've been immersing myself in the Dune universe lately. Even going so far as to listen to the prequels co-authored by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson. They are not nearly as esoteric or perceptive as the writings of Frank Herbert, but are sufficiently interesting for describing the underpinnings of the universe.

 



Dune is one of those science-fantasy settings where it is the future, in space, but people are still fighting with swords for some reason, which is cool.
Dune's justification for swords-in-the-future is the Holtzmann-Effect shield. The Holtzmann shield is a energy barrier which deflects any object which enters the field at a certain velocity. A person with a shield equipped is invulnerable to any projectile or explosive force. A shield can be personal, or large enough to cover a city.
The only way to penetrate a shield is by moving into it at a sufficiently slow speed. This necessitates a particularly disciplined form of melee combat. And as shields are ubiquitous, military tactics are based around the necessity of close combat.


Shields- as depicted in the 1984 movie. When CG was new.

Holtzmann shields do have some serious limitations however: For one, they attract and enrage the giant worms of Arrakis. So using one in the open desert is practically suicide.
For another, if one is shot with a laser, the interaction creates a detonation equivalent to a nuclear blast. So beware of suicide troops with lasguns. Depending on who you are fighting, that could be a thing.

There have been several attempts to make a Dune rpg. The ones I've perused don't seem too promising. But the schools and disciplines of the Dune universe seem well suited to the Class and Level model.

Thank you, internet.

I got to wonder about Dune Larping. The action in a Dune novel is mostly talking, or intense chemical-aided introspection, punctuated by spying  and the occasional assassination attempt or duel. It seems like it would lend itself well to live-action gaming, so I did a quick search to see if anybody else has wondered about this.

 

who to credit on this one.

A few have, and fewer still have attempted it.  One of these bold souls wondered aloud how the particular character of holtzmann-shield fighting could be simulated.
I've done some fencing and boffer and SCA combat here and there, so I thought about it.

In shield-fighting, only an attack which enters slowly can penetrate the shield. This is the trick, because in conventional melee combat, the faster hand has the advantage. It seems that this sort of combat would emphasize subtlety, deception and precise control. And that is what we would need to simulate to get the "feel" of shield-fighting.

I noticed that impact or mass-weapons don't play into shield combat. It's all rapiers, bodkins, crysknives, poison needles and hidden blades. These weapons can be manipulated with special finesse, and don't need to be moving fast to deal their damage. Hacking and smashing weapons such as maces, axes and broadswords pretty much need to be moving fast for their mass to play into the damage, as such they don't get used in shield fighting. I don't know much interest Frank Herbert had in martial arts, but he seemed to have realized this distinction when he was building his world.

What occurred to me was a form of boffer-fighitng or fencing where the object is to touch the opponent so that they feel it, but in such a way that it doesn't hurt or even sting a little bit. Every other aspect of the sword-play would be full speed. But being required to pull one's blows would, I think, simulate the challenge of slow-blade shield fighting.

I am actually pretty tickled by this notion. It's a bizarre form of counting coup. Some time when it's not blazing hot out, I will have to get some people together so we can figure out how this works in practice. Things like what kind of weapons to use, what protective gear, if any. Is grappling allowed or not? how to properly gauge a "hit" and so on.
I think there could be a lot of appeal in a martial game where the object is to not hurt your opponent, just show that you could have if you'd wanted to.

anyone seen this episode? it seems relevant.

 

 

Hopefully I will have some results to report on this experiment sooner rather than later. I am pretty excited about it.

 

Something for Everybody

A friend in the Dungeon Purgatory campaign ran in one of his levels last friday.

I would call the session a success, and it had a very basic lesson to teach.

In the little scenario, there was something for everybody to do.
Or nearly so. The character-players had plenty of action. The rogue had a heist to perform in the background. Only the fighter, who suspected a trap was really left out in the cold.

This is a basic idea. Its so obvious, it is in certain editions of the DMG. I guess I am just getting back  to basic lessons after taking such a long break from game.

I mean, I wouldn't  make Something for Everybody the primary principle of my process. But for set-piece encounters or important areas, I will try to keep it in mind.

One thing I noticed about the recent session, was that we split the party without fretting about it. Keeping the party together is like the first rule of dungeon survival.
But somehow, in this scenario, we sensed that we had license to do so. I think it was when the party had found an are which was not technically a "dungeon," And he took a moment to describe several objects, people and simultaneous events at the same time, which was likely to pique and divide our interests at the same time.

Simple stuff.

The Underloft-grid-map lessons learned

After a hiatus out of respect for Med-faire season, we resumed the Dungeon Purgatory campaign.

Over the last two sessions, we returned to and completed one of my levels.

The Underloft.
The Underloft may be thought of as the flooded-basement of the castle complex. A vast, subterranean space, wet, cold, dark and dripping.
Something like this image of Dwarrowdelf from LotR, except flooded.



I liked the idea of the Underloft. it was very archetypal. I thought the atmosphere would translate easily, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to use the Zelda-Grid style map.

The players recently made their second expedition to the Underloft, in search of a key which would grant access to new areas.
And I swear, it was the most boring couple of sessions I have run in recent memory.

One of the problems was misuse of a random encounter table. As the party progressed from gridsquare to gridsquare, I would roll away on a d20 encounter table to see what appeared in adjacent grids.
This gave me a lot of nonsense and things that Either I didn't feel like running, or else some nonsense encounter.
Fortunately, the table producd a merchant with a boat for sale. So the PCs could traverse the waters without suffering hypothermia.
Then it so happened to yield the Boss with the McGuffin they were looking for.

I went in thinking that adherence to a random table would produce an organic experience that would surprise everybody. What I got was either nonsense, or unappealing. Really, it would have been better if I had simply plotted to a certain extent.

We are using a spell failure table for this campaign. Spells require a spellcraft check with a difficulty based on the spell level. This makes it possible to fumble spells. Fumbled spells call for a roll on a  d100 table listing various effect, some benign, some terrible.
Somebody failed a spell, and as a result evaporated all water in a 1 mile radius.
This Dried up the whole level. The party was able to walk to the exit.
Near the exit, they stumbled upon the same merchant. How the merchant got there before them was not explored. But the only reason for it was my use of the random encounter table.

I think it would have been better to track the significant objects over time according to the reasonable natures of the object, rather than relying on the random encounter table. It would have created a greater sense of depth to the level. Even if this would have been imperceptible to the players, I would have felt better about it. Adherence to a random table for generating encounters off-the cuff was a bad idea. I use random tables when populating areas beforehand, but I don't obey them if I don't feel like the result is appropriate. Why did I have this temporary lapse? Must have been too long since I last DMed.

Next time will be better.

They're finally remaking FFVII

myth building- apocalypses.

And I pray, oh my god do I pray
I pray every single day
For a revolution
                     - 4 non blondes

This post is an observation about mythologies, which I expect to be useful for contriving mythologies for a gameworld.

I've already written some about apocalypses, especially concerning millenarianism in American culture.
But millenarianism isn't restricted to one time or place, or even one form of ideology. Belief in the "end times" is generally associated with religious outlooks. But it seems that even political or ethnic ideologies have some notion of this. That would account for pretty much all ideologies.

Ideologies form their own views on history, that is, they customize a mythology. This mythological history would naturally interpret past events. And it would also develop conjectures about the future and the direction history is going in.

Basically, no matter what your outlook, whether you are Jew, Gentile, Hopi, Sioux, Republican, Anarchist, Burner, Evangelist, Progressive, Positivist, Luddite or Flower-Child, you probably have some notion that something is going to happen. And probably soon.

People imagine this thing differently. They have different words for it: apocalypse, rapture, the technological singularity, when the Shit Hits the Fan, The Transcendental Object at the End of Time, The Age of Aquarius, The Revolution. Ragnarok.
And then there's the one where the internet stops working and we all don football pads and grab our ARs and kill eachother for the last bottle of coke. Plot twist: the last coke will be warm and taste awful.

It seems to me that all these various apocalypses hold Anxiety as their common origin.
It is uncertainty or a perceived threat which causes people to make these guesses that something serious is going to happen.
The nature of the anxiety reflects on the principle concerns of the rest of the mythology.
For instance:
Who will be saved, who will be damned.
Environmental concerns or concerns over limited resources.
Concerns about group-identity or social position.
Civil liberties or political power.

The term "Apocalypse" has come to mean the end of the world as we know it. But in the original sense, it meant a revelation. Apocalyptic literature was a genre of religious writing in which people wrote about the bizarre visions they had while fasting or in trance. In this state, they believed that God was revealing things to them. So in a more basic sense, an apocalypse is how-things-are-going-to-turn-out.

In this view, when the apocalypse happens, questions are answered, things turn out, and the anxiety is resolved. That is why people are fascinated by the idea. It is appealing in a sense.

People take for granted that a mythology will have a creation story. But don't forget that they almost always have some future which they expect as well.

Priest-Craft

There's hardly anything actually useful in this post. Just musing on worldbuilding for general purposes.

I left the last post on a bit of a question mark.

In short, I made distinction between the domains of craft, science and technology on one hand, and ineffable magic on the other. In game terms, One field is more or less understood and under the control of the character. The powers of the other field are unpredictable, and they strike like the inspiration of a muse.


This left me in a bit of a muddle as a Game Master, since it is difficult to create a system to regulate divine inspiration or a character's affinity for the eternal tao.
The other field is easy to regulate: a character knows this much science and has such and such resources. A character has the mental endurance to memorize and cast so many spells a day. It's straightforward and rational.

The first thing that occurred was simple DM fiat. But nobody wants the unbridled whim of the DM as their character's main source of power.

Also, I was writing like I was imagining the source of magic-magic as the one ultimate reality of the universe. God in short. The sort of polytheistic set up common in science-fantasy settings were not really being considered.

In standard D&D, clerical magic is channeled to Clerics from their deity as sheer spells per day.
I figured his could be interpreted either as technology- where the deities are super-powerful wizards who distribute their extra-planar energies to their acolytes. Or it could function as magic-magic, where the deities embody more abstract principles which a devotee "tunes in" to. So I left it undefined.
One of these models could suit your campaign world better than the other, depending on the statement you are trying to make.
Heck, you could have both; creating a distinction between "true" and "false" gods of which the players may not even be aware.

Then my buddy came over, the same one who go me thinking about the proper distinction between technology-magic and magic-magic.
Somehow, we got to talking about ritual magic, basically that practiced by priests and magicians in our own history. Imagine a pagan priest attempting to invoke the power of Athena or Mars or somebody like that. They invent a ritual which involves the trappings associated with the given deity in an attempt to attract their power. This is something like sympathetic magic, which operates on the theory that like is affected by like.
Thing is, even with such a ritual, the practitioners are never really sure whether it worked or not.
If the desired result appears, then maybe it is due to the god's intervention or maybe not. It is with this uncertainty, that priest-craft becomes a mystical , mysterious, ineffable process; the success of which possibly attributable to the skill of the priest or the whim of the god or both.

At this point, I noticed that Priestcraft is like hunting or fishing in this regard; you could be doing everything right, but still not get what you want. Possibly simply because of forces beyond your understanding or control.
It doesn't necessarily have to be understood by the players, so long as the DM understand the whys and wherefores.

I argued that the theory of the existence of gods and the ritual associations used to influence them were a sort of cultural technology- a sort of rational formula based on a given understanding of the cosmos. But I also agreed that because the "science" of it was so vague, that this was kind of a moot point and the whole pursuit is in the realm of the mystical.
If there is am unproven hypothesis with only limited evidence to support it, acting on that hypothesis would be rather like relying on magic, wouldn't it?

I realize, I already proposed a reasonably good system for distribution of clerical magic where anybody can do cleric stuff regardless of class. Mechanically, it's built on the framework of standard D&D. Needs Playtesting.