Just in case anyone was missing it — most of my D&D commentary will wind up over here, since I wanted my compatriots to be able to post as well.
Category: Gaming
I recently got a new text processing program called Scrivener. It’s oriented towards the writing process; you don’t use it to format text and produce final output. You use it to outline, shuffle, and put down words. I think it’s awesome for pen and paper gaming work, and I wanted to document my current workflow with an extended example.
I tried using a stack of index cards instead of an initiative tracker last session, and it worked out pretty well. I put most of the monster stats on each card, plus checkboxes for hit points. I think it was smoother than using the tracker.
I may need to put more of the stats on each card; I kept having to go back to the book. Maybe only for more or less simple monsters, and Big Bads can still require book reference?
I really like the ease of having defenses and hit points all in hand, though. The checkboxes in particular fit how my mind works.
I’m still trying to fuse the brilliant combat engine from D&D 4e with the brilliant narrative engine from Gumshoe. You may not have known I was trying to do this. But I am.
Let’s skip over the skills question for now and pretend that we have a Gumshoe adventure all mapped out, with the multiple paths and the clues and the major and minor scenes. It’s a flowchart, basically. None of these scenes are directly combat-related, although it may require combat to reach a given scene. Here, have a PDF example. Contains spoilers for the Esoterrorists sample adventure, though!
Now: for each scene, we may (not must) attach either a prerequisite combat, a resulting combat, or both. A prerequisite combat is a fight you need to engage in, or possibly win, in order to get to the clue scene. The clue scene might be really brief; e.g., maybe the fight happens and one of the combatants has the clue on him. Or, say, you have to fight through the kobolds to get to the secret lair in which more information is available.
A resulting combat is when they come after you for finding a clue. Actions have consequences. I think it’s important to make the linkage super-clear for the best narrative effect.
The idea is that by strongly pairing investigative scenes and combat scenes, you reduce any chance that the players will feel like they’re playing two different concurrent games with the same set of characters. This is just a theory right now. I should probably test it sometime.
Another tangential note: you could maybe keep skill challenges as long as you went with the current WotC approach, which is that failed skill challenges result in problems rather than failures. This is attractive in that skill challenges seem to be cool, but I think it’s too much of a departure from the Gumshoe skill model. Or you could ditch the Gumshoe model altogether and make clue acquisition into skill challenges? I don’t know how to run skill challenges well enough to do this, however.
Running: one straight-up 4e game. We’re working through WotC’s module series. This is fun.
Playing: one 4e game which I’ve played in no sessions of but I like the writeups. Should be fun.
Will be running: online 4e game heavily influenced by The Shield and The Wire, or possibly the Scales of War adventure path instead, although I’d need a couple more people for the latter. Sort of leaning towards Scales of War for the sake of easier prep, but undecided.
Thinking about running: something, since certain people are not inspired, which is OK. But I don’t know what. I was thinking about a 60s flashy spy game, but the more I think about it the more I think I’m trying to shoehorn the wrong stuff into the wrong stuff. And when I strip away the Orlando Trash-related overarching plot and the Seven Houses stuff I realized I’m not as jazzed; there’s no hook there for me.
So maybe the modern mysticism Seven Houses game I’ve wanted to run for a while. Heavy influences are the background to 100 Bullets — the intrigue, not the noir stuff — and Mystick Domination, which nobody ever played but it was evocative.
Heresy: Kingdom Come? Shadowrun? Dogs in the Vinyard?
Eclipse Phase looks like fun but is not out yet.
Hm.
Jere ran some more Gumshoe for us over the last couple of weeks; it was once more a bunch of fun. The scenario was more Cthulhoid this time around, not so much from a villain perspective but definitely so in terms of locale and threat.
The PCs (a retired cop, a linguist, a spirit photographer, a stage manager, and an NSA analyst) were a motley crew attending a Shakespeare festival in New Hampshire. At a party a couple of days before Opening Night, the actress slated to play Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra killed her understudy under suspicious circumstances. By virtue of our collective failure to run away screaming, the local sheriff deputized us to solve the murder.
Over the next few days, we found out that two of the directors, the local patron family, a suspicious sculptor, and a 70s cult rock band were all involved in a plot to open the way and allow Horus to run rampant. The phrase “crack the shell of the world” was bandied about more casually than we found pleasing. Once we had a reasonably firm picture of what was intended, questions of history (how this group of cultists came together, who perverted and corrupted who, and whether or not the Lost Folio was real Shakespeare) went by the wayside and stopping the various Opening Night performances became paramount. Said performances being the components of the way-opening ritual.
I felt more or less completely outclassed by the cult at most points, which was fairly satisfying. See my opening comment regarding the Cthulhoid nature of the game. I like the sensation that the Outer Darkness is imminent with little hope of total success. In this case, the cult will be back in 17 or 33 years, and it’s not as if we made any real dent in the infrastructure of the town. We had a ton of freedom to determine the best way to stop the performances, and all we managed was to convince the actors to go home. No actual cultists were harmed.
Jere removed the combat system entirely; we just ranked our physical skills like investigative skills. I’m not sure if we got any clues via physical skills — Jere, did we? In theory we might have been able to; in practice we were a very non-violent lot.
As I noted after the game, there was far less feedback on which skills were producing which clues than we got in the first game, which left me feeling a little bit more at loose ends. I suspect that any given group is going to get to about where we were in terms of that feedback; it’s a trust relationship built up between GM and players. In this case it didn’t bug me per se, but I’d yellow flag it: much of the value of Gumshoe for me is getting rid of the “guess the clue” mechanism. This is a group issue, by the by: players are as much responsible for pushing their skills as GMs are.
I am pensive about my roleplay. It’s pretty easy for me to slip back into humor. In this case I was deliberately going for a slightly goofy approach, which in retrospect may have been wrong. I’m not sure. I pulled off my usual arc with such characters, which depicts them as mostly ineffectual with a core of resilience; said core manifested this time in Edward’s purchase of a gun “just in case.” This satisfies me but I worry that it hampers immersion for others.
I’m finding myself tempted to open up a Web site for Gumshoe in the tradition of my old Shadowfist and Feng Shui sites. I don’t know if there’d be enough interest, but I like the game a lot and I think there’s good scope for fan-created scenarios and rules, which I’ve always felt have something to do with the success of a game. Pelgrane has some pretty good forums. Hm.
Nothin’ ain’t somethin’ till there’s mashup DLC.
As per request, quick summaries of the tools I’m using to GM D&D 4e:
First cool tool: the GameMastery Combat Pad Initiative Tracker. It’s a wet/dry erase board with a steel core and a bunch of magnets that you shuffle around to track initiative. It works very well; in the first session, I was pretty much able to run combats with the module and the tracker held in one hand. However, it’s got a lot of wasted space.
This last session I added the printableDM Encounter Manager to my toolbox. It’s nice; I tried the ones without the initiative trackers but I think I’m going to swap over. As noted, the GameMastery tracker is a bit clunky in that half the space is chewed up in ways that simply aren’t useful in combat. Holding two full page sheets in one hand is obviously a lot harder than holding one full page sheet; if I can track initiative easily on the Encounter Managers, that’s a win.
I think the right thing to do here is find a slim steel clipboard of some kind, clip the Encounter Managers to it, and use the GameMastery tracker magnets to track initiative. That gets me back to one sheet. Unfortunately, steel clipboards are hard to find.
The Wizards Dungeon Master’s Screen is very good. I just need a better place to put it, since I’ve been DMing standing up. I’ll figure that out with time.
Alea Tools is good magnets for tracking status effects on miniatures. I didn’t use them enough last session, but I will.
Jim Goings’ Condition Cards (scroll down a bit) are great easy reminders of which PCs are undergoing which conditions. Also it’s nicely intimidating to say “you’re weakened” and slap down the big indicators. There are a bunch of other nice tools on that page, btw — I particularly like Kiznit’s character sheets.
Unfortunately the local Living Forgotten Realm group’s plans to run bi-weekly Sunday games fell through, and I can’t make the regular weekday games. There’s a big weekend event coming up in a couple of weeks that’d get my puny level 1 cleric up a couple of levels, and thus perhaps enable him to play in the next tier of adventures — but I’d still have the same scheduling issue, so it’s not really worth it to burn a day on that.
Possibly at some juncture the Framingham group that was discussed will get underway. Until then I’ll get my 4e kicks from running the modules. Since I was so jazzed about LFR to start with, I figured I’d toss out the update.
The thing that really surprised me about running 4e was how amazingly simple it was in practice. Setup is perhaps a different story, which I can’t speak to yet, but assuming you have an adventure in hand and a bunch of players, it’s nearly frictionless to run.
A well-presented adventure, as per WotC’s example, puts stat blocks for each monster with each encounter. These literally have 70% of what you need to run the encounter. You get each attack listed clearly, with the bonus to hit and the damage included, along with any other effects. Everything the monster might do is right there.
Each encounter also has tactics and of course room descriptions, which is another 15% of what you need. Tactics aren’t absolutely necessary but it’s handy to have the script for monster actions available. The room description gives you special features, treasure, and all that. Note that traps and such are statted up as monsters, so you continue to have the stat blocks handy and the mechanics aren’t any different. Skill challenges also fall into this chunk of material.
All in all, an encounter is going to be two or three pages. I haven’t checked but I bet the vast majority of encounters are two pagers.
The other 10% is condition modifiers, attack modifiers such as cover, and so on. I think I’ll have these memorized pretty soon, but in the meantime there’s an excellent Dungeon Master’s Screen which is stable and laid out in landscape format. The latter means you can see players behind it. It has all the charts you want. Literally. It’s impressive.
I added in Paizo’s GameMastery Combat Pad, which is a magnetic whiteboard designed for initiative tracking. I didn’t need it; I could have tracked initiative on the battlemat. But being able to slide counters around when people hold or delay is handy.
So what I discovered was that I could run the whole game standing up, with the combat pad tucked in the adventure booklet, in my left hand. Right hand’s free for dice, moving minis, checking off hit points. This may sound really trivial, but I ran four combats in five hours and I didn’t have to look anything up more than once or twice — OK, having players doing some lookups for me was handy, but even so. 4e is ridiculously easy to run.
I’m thinking about more tweaks. I found some full-sized 1″ maps for the WotC modules that some people did in Dundjinni and Campaign Cartographer (note to players: spoilers, try not to peek too hard), and I think I can use those to good effect to cut down on the time it takes me to draw maps. Also they’re pretty.
I’m definitely gonna use these encounter worksheets next time. It’ll make it easier to track hit points. I’m considering backing one of ’em with magnetic paper so I could use the initiative magnets on that instead. We’ll see.
But it’s all gilding the lily. The core smoothness lies in the game. Kudos to WotC and the designers.