How I Prep

 I'd been seeing some RPG bloggers responding to this Roll to Doubt post and discussing their prep process. I decided I would give it a shot. My gaming has been erratic, but I have been able to muster some one-shots, so this is focused mostly on that sort of prep. I have been dong some playing, but I do feel like I have a GM brain.

How do I prep?

An interesting question that I haven't really thought about. I don't know that I have a good answer because I don't know that I have a really refined process. And I admit that I spent a fairly long period as a terrible GM. Enthusiastic, perhaps, but terrible.

The first thing I do is get an idea. This typically comes from random tables, but sometimes an actual idea will occur to me.

Then I engage in a little something I call "Backwards <-> Forwards." This means that I think about the backstory of the scenario and what happened previously to set up the scenario and project into the play experience of the scenario itself. And then I think about the play experience that I want to create and work out how the backstory and logic of the scenario need to work in order to support that. Repeat as needed.

Not really after that, but somewhat apart from it, I build the structure for the adventure. This is not necessarily consistent from adventure to adventure. Sometimes, I'll use the Beat Chart method that appeared in a couple of R. Talsorian games. I do that for D20 Modern, predominantly. For my apocalyptic zombie scenario, I built a series of escalating zombie encounters and a separate progress tracker for the *actual* conflict of the scenario. For my "Expendables save Christmas" adventure, I devised it as a series of "layers," flexible objectives that the players had to move through to save Christmas.

And as part of all of this, the mechanics need to be considered. For D20 Modern, I needed to make sure that the obstacles all had Challenge Ratings and XP values worked out. My zombie game was in Fate, so I statted the opposition and the progress bar in those rules and put some thought into Aspects and other elements that could be used. All Outta Bubblegum was the hardest. The mechanics are so loose that you can't have a lot of structure. No method to really set difficulty levels or stat opposition. So that scenario had to be particularly loose and flexible.

This is also the point where I consider my Laws of Gaming. Specifically, 3 and 4. "Respect player agency" and "Never roll the dice unless you are willing to abide by the results."

Where do I need to make sure that there's room for players to make decisions and take action? Where do I need to trim options that don't lead where I want to go? If I'm running a campaign, this should be fairly open. In a one-shot, which is more common for me, I will generally try to have more control. A simple version of this is to think of the 3 "pillars of D&D" from the current rulebooks (Exploration, Combat, and Interaction) as verbs that are applied to each encounter. For example, if the party encounters a squad of orcs, our expectation is that it's a Combat encounter. But what if they try to Explore the orcs? What if they Interact with the orcs? This doesn't mean that those approaches are viable, but making the effort to have an answer for what happens if they try will make your scenario stronger.

Also, be looking for die rolls. If there is something that the players can do without as they move through the adventure, it's okay if there's a die roll to determine if they have it or not. If there is something that they need in order to resolve the scenario, they don't need to roll for it. Again, this is something that is more relevant in one-shots than campaigns, but still something to think about.

Another Year Gone

 Hello 2025!

I'm a little disappointed, since I did not achieve my New Year's Resolutions for 2024.

My main resolution was to run a campaign. Specifically, 2 sessions with continuity between them. That's not to say that I didn't do any gaming. I ran a number of one-shots and Fiasco's, which are GM-less. I just didn't get anything with continuity. I also played in a campaign of Blades in the Dark, which was a lot of fun. The campaign is technically on hiatus, as the GM is a busy student and hasn't had time to do the proper prep. I look forward to getting back to that once he's free.

Secondarily, I took on #dungeon24, an attempt at creating my own megadungeon.  I decided to use random tools to generate a room for every day of the year 2024, with each month comprising a level.

It didn't always go smoothly. I actually lost the material I had originally created for March. And then the RPGaDay blogfest in August took up the writing time and energy I had for that month. I almost took another hiatus for my annual Apothecaria sessions for November, but I was sufficiently far behind on my megadungeon that I didn't want to risk getting even further behind.

As it stands, I still have most of my December level to complete. Well, the encounters for the level, anyway. I still need to draw the map and devise the random encounter tables for each level. One of the things I've been doing to keep encounters manageable has been to redirect some of the monsters to wandering.

It's my intention to finish it, even if it does take me a little over a year to do it.

Running it would also be nice. It might wind up being my campaign if I can make at least two sessions of it happen.

I do also want to explore other games when I can. I've had a Stars Without Number sector waiting to be campaigned in for some time. Or maybe some classic Traveller. I'm really getting a sci-fi itch that needs to get scratched.

WIR 13th Age #6

 The adventure is the last real item in the book, so I'll go over that and then address some final thoughts.

"Blood & Lightning" is such a simple adventure that I'm not going to worry about spoilers.

The adventure opens with the party traveling to a location called Boltstrike Pillar. There are three different descriptions of this pillar, based on which of 3 Icons controls it. Which is one of the things that can be decided when you roll your Icon Relationships at the start of the adventure.

Another plot-relevant element that can be determined at this time is which of the Icons is backing the goblins that try to prevent the party from reaching the Pillar. Stats are provided for the goblins, including variations depending on which of the 3 potential villainous Icons is backing them.

Which brings up my only real complaint about this scenario and 13th Age scenarios in general: How much work is the GM expected to do to accommodate the different Icon Relationships? It would be one thing if the GM could roll them while doing their adventure prep and work from there, incorporating them from the start. But it looks like Icon Relationships are rolled at the beginning of the session, once everyone has sat down to play. And this adventure sets an example that the relevant Icon has a mechanical effect, giving these goblins some cool little extra power.

Once the goblins are defeated, the party arrives at Boltstrike Pillar. And depending on which Icon controls the Pillar, the commander and their lieutenant are different. Different names, different career paths, different everything. Not that it matters too much, because they mostly exist for plot exposition.

The goblins weren't supposed to be able to get that close to the Pillar, so divination spells are cast and another group of interlopers is identified in an area called Greenstand. But the area is basically loaded with magical mines that just need someone to say "Shazam!" to set them off. So the party is sent on this mission and provided with a bit of magical kit to help them on their way.

But by the time they arrive at Greenstand, the interlopers have all been slain. The party can do some investigation, but there's also the risk of errant magical defenses going off. They discover that the area was attacked by a lightning breathing blue dragon and its lizardfolk allies. And that dragon is flying towards Boltstrike.

So it's back to Boltstrike for the final showdown. The defenders of the Pillar have been slain or routed, there's a dragon flying around and something magical seems to be going on at the top of the Pillar. The dragon seems pretty dangerous, but the fierce fighting before the PCs showed up has softened it up and made it beatable by a 1st level party.

Once that's done, they still have to deal with whatever's going on at the top of the tower. Which turns out to be the lieutenant performing a dark ritual of transformation. There are stats for him before and after transformation into some sort of dragon monster.

All in all, it's not a bad starting adventure. It's pretty linear, but it doesn't feel constrained.

One beef that I have specific to this adventure is its handling of rewards. After the goblin fight, you are instructed to give the characters an advance. Once you slay the dragon, you level up. There are suggestions that the characters be given magic items at the beginning of the adventure from their Icon Relationships and in the middle when they're hanging out at Boltstrike Pillar, they are handed some of the garrison's magic item stash.

I have 2 thoughts here:

1) It feels like each of these rewards is too big for what is done to earn them. Offering consumable items, like the potions or runes seems more appropriate. Something like a metacurrency would also work.

2) The Tyranny of Fun. It might still be a loaded term in some places, but I'm using it here to mean the idea that the game must continually be "fun." In between cool battles, you get cool stuff and your character gets cooler and more powerful.

Using a dragon as the climax of the adventure actually leans into this idea. Dragons are cool and fighting dragons is fun. Slaying a dragon is epic, and you get to do it at 1st level in your first adventure!

Overall Thoughts on 13th Age

Believe it or not, 13th Age has grown on me a little. It's gone from something that I wouldn't want to play to something that I might play.

Things I Liked

The Combat System: I actually give a lot of props to the combat system. It's designed for Theater of the Mind play and still offers fun options for players. Monster stats are simple and generate interesting results even if the GM is just making an attack roll for them every round.

Incremental Advancement: The fact that there were only 10 levels was a bit of a turn-off for me initially. Making the GM decide when to advance the characters and making the advances so chunky felt like it would be hard to the GM to manage well. Creating multiple smaller breakpoints gives the GM more flexibility in how their campaign is paced.

Things I Disliked

The Combat Focus: I have a lot of respect for a game that knows what it's about and does that thing well. But just about everything outside of combat was either handwaved or a really neat idea that didn't have a solid implementation.

Icon Relationships: This was a neat idea, but like nearly everything else that wasn't combat, it wasn't very well developed. And in the sample adventure, having each Icon give a different combat advantage to the monsters is a neat idea, but signals to the prospective GM the degree of design work they have to do.

No Metacurrency: I admit this is a personal taste thing. But I feel like there were shortcomings in how certain things were addressed that could have been better handled with a metacurrency. Rewards, especially, have the ability to feel very coarse-grained or chunky.

Now for the next question: If you are going to play or run some sort of D&D, is this the kind of D&D you should play/run?

13th Age is a great game if you:

Don't like bean-counting: There's fairly little to manage. There's very little to buy with money past a certain point. There's no XP to grind. Casters don't have to worry about filling their lower level spell slots because they disappear.

Love combat: This is the one area where the game really shines. It's not complicated, but players are sure to have cool things to do every turn.

Prefer Theater of the Mind combat: While other version of D&D can be run Theater of the Mind, 13th Age is really built for it.

Want characters to feel cool and awesome: Your character is going to be kicking butt and taking names right from Level 1.

RPGaDay 2024 #31 Game or Gamer You Miss

I took a bit of time in my last post to talk about people that I haven't gamed with in quite some time.

But there is much shorter list of people that I'll never be able to game with again. At the moment, I'm aware of only one person among my gaming circles that has passed. My good friend Meghan. 

When the university gaming club suspended operations over the summer, she helped keep the group together by letting us meet in her father's church (needless to say, he wasn't one of those anti-gaming preachers). During games, she was a wonderful assistant cat-herder.

The strongest memory of gaming with her was my GURPS Technomancer game. I don't remember all of the details of her character, but she found the rule for "bulletproof nudity" and decided that it applied to her character. Her character wore a simple wrap so it could be dropped in a moment when combat broke out. "Am I naked?" was a frequent refrain.

The peak of this was one session where she excused herself for a few minutes, I think just as a combat had broken out and it was time for her character to remove her wrap. She returned to the room wearing a flesh-colored body suit with a stole of red mesh fabric to represent the blood that we often joked got all over her for being naked during fights.

My friend Jordan (who had a bit of a crush on her) was so overwhelmed by this that he had to leave the room.

As for games I miss, that would be a lot of them. I mentioned earlier this month that the majority of my physical collection is still in boxes even though we moved to San Diego 5 years ago. One day ...

RPGaDay 2024 #30 Person You'd Like to Game With

Lots of people, really.

It's been far too long since I've gamed with Kris, but I do get him in my earholes thanks to the MegaDumbCast. To be honest, he's really the only person out of that particular era of my gaming life that I would say I miss.

Meanwhile, I think I would gladly get everyone from my OSRIC megadungeon campaign back together. The only downside would be that I don't have my notes anymore and I know Erik would really want to pick it up where we left off.

Looking to the future and contemplating the realms of possibility are things I really struggle with right now, so forgive me if I don't have a "dream team" of people from popular culture and history that I would want to invite to my table.

That said, I look forward to gaming with the group I have now and all of the wonderful people I have gamed with, and will game with in the future.

RPGaDay 2024 #29 Awsome App

 As I said yesterday, I do have a couple of recommendations to make.

My main recommendation for apps would be Obsidian.md for campaign information management. I'm using it as a repository for all of my prospective RPG campaigns. It's available on a variety of platforms, so I can access it from my main Windows machine, my Android phone and tablet, and even my Raspberry Pi based "lunchbox laptop." Because of that wide variety of platforms, I keep my Obsidian vaults stored on a flash drive which I plug into whatever device I decide to work with.

At its most basic level, it's like having a personal campaign wiki. It uses the same markup language for formatting and linking. But the thing that makes it really exciting is the plugin support. There are plugins for nearly every need. You could easily do a Google search for "Best Obsidian plugins for .." whatever your interest is and come up with some good options.

There was a fantasy calendar plugin as well as a conventional calendar plugin depending on whether you want to track fantasy dates or real dates. I also found a convenient plugin that allowed you to add "pins" an image that could link to articles. Great for overland maps to let you click on a pin for a city and open up your article on that city, maybe even with its own clickable map.

RPGaDay 2024 #28 Great Gamer Gadget

 I do have a dice tray that I really like. It lays flat during transport, but holds together with magnets while in use.

A dice tower would be fun, but coming up with something portable would be ideal.

Without much to talk about on this front, though I'm not technophobic about my gaming and do have some app recommendations for later, I think I'll take a bit of a mulligan and talk about my final Law of Gaming.

Doug's 4th Law of Gaming is: Characters can have secrets, but players shouldn't.

This is a new one, and not too thoroughly tested like the others. It's mostly a response to my wife watching lots of RPG Horror Stories on YouTube.

Players creating secrets for their characters can be a lot of fun, but if they are dedicated to keeping that secret for themselves and revealing it on their terms, there are a lot of ways for that to go wrong.

In conventional narratives, there's a thing called "dramatic irony," which means that there's information that the audience knows that the characters themselves don't, which can affect how they perceive the scene. For example, in a horror film, the audience may have a view of where the killer is headed next. So when the scene switches to that location, they get a heightened thrill knowing that the killer is coming into this scene at any moment.

At the gaming table, this is somewhat tricky to pull off, since the players are both the actors and the audience for the action. But if they're willing to buy in, it can be rewarding.

If the players know the characters' secrets, they can work towards playing entertaining scenes involving them without necessarily blowing the secret wide open. Like all those Silver Age Superman comics with Superman going through elaborate ruses to keep Lois Lane from discovering his secret identity.