A bit unbalanced

Steve Winter's latest blog post got me thinking about game balance or the lack thereof.

So, question: Should every encounter be balanced to the adventurers who stumbling into it?

NO! says I.

I am a simulation gamer, which is to say, I believe that the game should represent the DM's vision of a fantastic reality and to that end, the game should hold as tight as possible to that vision.

Part of that means that The World is not Fair. Which is to say, The Game is not Balanced.

If you wander into the Trollhaunt Woods at level 1, ghost-trolls will probably rape you to death, eat your flesh, and sew your skin into a tablecloth.

However, the DM's job is to have fun and help everyone else have fun. In my experience, neither goal is accomplished by having a black dragon repeatedly murder everyone.

So, what is a DM to do?

I  try and give adventure hooks to my players that lead them toward what I think is probably a level appropriate encounter.

Notice the lack of trying there. Not trying is key. Just do what makes sense, consequences be damned.

As a DM you're no more obligated to keep the party alive than you are to murder them. Ideally, one finds a happy medium.

Throw things at them, let them sort it out. A smart group of players will triumph or flee.

Above all, do what makes sense.

The frontier

Doing some writing on my home campaign, realized I have no unmapped areas on my map. That is to say, so far, there is no frontier.

I think adventurers should want a frontier, a vast untamed land full of possibility and mystery.

I'm making two maps now, one says SHOW TO PLAYERS the other says NEVER SHOW TO PLAYERS.

I think it is important for the DM to at least have an idea of what awaits over the next hill, but players should be setting off like Bilbo. They might have a guide, or even a map, but all they really know is that they're going Out There, and they might not come back.

Games I run, games I run in, all games I play.

I didn't have a job.

Now I have it back.

And I've been running Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

So far, the game has been a series of dungeons, nothing too amazing.

The whole time I'm running the game, I find myself trying to calculate THAC0. More than a decade of running the calculations in my head has left a mental void when it's no longer needed.

My current crop of players seem to enjoy the more simple mechanics, however. I'm weaving a plot thread through the adventures that will eventually lead the players to Death Love Doom, but I'm trying to beef them up a bit before they face the horrors therein contained.

The thing I wrestle with most is the experience point system. With such a de-emphasis on monster slaying, recovering treasure is the only real way for the players to gain a level. This is counter-balanced by the expense of choice items and the cost of researching spells and scribing scrolls, but years of running games with boot-strap adventurers gaining most their xp through slaying and using their hard earned gold pieces to feed themselves and replace ruined equipment make me feel as if I'm running a Monty Haul campaign, especially when I have to add treasure to a prefab dungeon.

In other news, In my buddy Eddy's homebrew adventure, our characters are approaching the cusp of heroism.

We have recently become the champions of forgotten Gods, gotten guidance from our own personal Obi-Wans, and been outfitted with some magical do-dads. We're approaching the stuff of legends and it feels allllright.

Into the future, through the past!

Long time, no post.

I haven't ran or played a game in a while, at least a few weeks, and have been putting around the country on my motorcycle.

I ran a vampire adventure for a couple of friends last week using the storyteller system. Seems to me, unless you're heavily invested in melodrama, that system is really for the birds. My players spent most of their time in pursuit of wealth so that they could start their own porn studio and weren't very interested in vampire politics or exploring the tragedy of their unlife. This in itself is interesting, but not really what I think the game designers had in mind.

Other than that, I got my physical copy of Lamentations of the Flame Princess in the mail. I was going to do a fancy un-boxing post with pictures and what not, but then I didn't.

I'm really excited to play the game and like the books themselves. I heard a rumor that the game would come with a golf pencil? Mine didn't. It did however come with a set of dice so tiny as to be comfortably smuggled into prison.

I'm probably going to order a copy of the adventure Death Love Doom today, as I hear it is fantastic.

I'm hopeful for LotFP (hereafter, FP). My background is primarily in AD&D2E, a system known for its rules that govern everything from the useability of a broken chair as a weapon to the saving throws of mundane books. In comparison, FP is very minimalistic and streamlined, taking the things it needs and discarding things it doesn't.

An example: Every weapon in 2E has two sets of damage dice, one for small to man-sized creatures and one for things over 7 feet tall. Each individual weapon has its own dice values and sometimes special rules.

FP has a few weapons that have their own special rules and dice, but all other weapons are lumped into weapon categories by size and each weapon in each particular category has the same dice value.

I'm excited to give it a spin.

Players meet world: Concerning the alchemists

If I can hate computer RPG's for one thing, it's the over abundance of potions. When you have players that come from that sort of background, they just seem to expect every town to have one dude whose sole vocation is to constantly crank out healing potions in the hopes that maybe, some day, a group of wounded or soon-to-be wounded adventurers will show up.

It makes no Godsdamned sense, and I hate it.

I like my worlds low-magic, and that goes for potions too. When things like magic and potions are common, they are no longer special.

The Magic Potion becomes the band-aide and is no more special than the 10 foot pole. Less, even, because the magic potion has an obvious use, is disposable, and generally uninteresting. No one every gives a healing potion a second thought.

Additionally, when a player is toting around a bag of healing potions, he knows, he fucking knows that he only has to give up a single combat round and he's got hit points back. If the roll is good enough, maybe he'll drink another next round. All the while, the orc is smashing him in the face.

Furthermore, think of the applications to the world if healing potions were plentiful? All war would be almost constant stalemate, and alchemist facilities would be huge targets. Furthermore, the market for materials used in the preparation of potions would also be huge. An entire industry.

Fuck healing potions. /rant

All potion hate aside, my world has Alchemists. Though not available as a character class, alchemists have an in-game history.

Before the Consolidation, when magic was wild and free, The Alchemists were a brotherhood of thinkers and experimenters who specialized in the mundane sciences. Many of the members of the Alchemists were mages, but the group was dedicated to unlocking the secrets of the natural world without the use of magic. Their pursuits were not limited to just science, however. Mathematics, philosophy, architecture, and many other fields of study were explored inside their lodge halls.
Their arguably greatest creations were forged by a group known as the Hyperzenians. The Hyperzenians crafted the deadly firelances, unparalleled weapons of terror.
However, when the Alchemists opposed the Consolidation, they were destroyed and many of their secrets, including the methods used to construct the firelances, were lost.

The ancient lodge halls of the Alchemists can still be found scattered throughout Skovorod, however these ancient ruins are perilous to say the least. Many an experiment was left half finished and the promise of forgotten knowledge has undoubtedly lured foul things to these haunted sites.

Into the Underworld

Over at Howling Tower, Steve Winter posted his Kobold Quarterly column regarding that venerable D&D locale, the underdark.

When I read it, I realized that I'd fallen into the same trap that many a DM has been victim to, cutting and pasting the Forgotten Realms underdark into my home campaign without a thought.


It's an easy thing to do, and in my experience, it's what players expect. This is precisely why no DM should ever do it.

With all the time I've investing in crafting a the world above ground, why shouldn't I do the same with the subterranean elements? I'm lucky in that my players have yet to venture into the earth. I've established that drow exist, and worship a spider demon, but other than that, my canvas is still blank.

I could easily make drow a warlike race of raiders that have been driven to the fringes of the subterranean world, which is why they sometimes raid the surface. I'll probably spend some time digging through the monstrous manual to get ideas for what sort of creatures inhabit das unterworld.

And by "inhabit", I mean what nations struggle against each other below our feet.

Theme? What theme?!

On many of the blogs I stare at for 15 minutes and claim to read it has been said that D&D has a theme of adventurers who gain wealth and power by plundering the countryside for valuables and danger.

While I will certainly not dispute that this happens in an overwhelming majority of games, and to some extent in my own, I do contest that this style of play is somehow built into the D&D game.

In my experience, the rules for dungeons and dragons are a framework onto which players and DMs can weave their own scenarios. The theme of a game may be the fall of a nation, the danger of ancient knowledge, or anything, really.

One needs only to look at the fabled Appendix N and examine the themes explored in the material from which the game draws.

Will your players become more powerful? Most definitely. Will they gain fabulous wealth? Maybe. Will they seek out adventure? I hope so.

Wealth and power are tertiary, however, to the adventure. The great draw of any RPG is to see what happens next and to decide how your character reacts to it. Everything else is just fluff.