I have never been fan of systems that dictate building encounters in roleplaying games.  I’m the kind of GM who has always relied on the “eyeball it” method that comes with enough experience with games.  While this gave me great freedom in how I approached things it also meant that I was often adjusting stats and scores during the encounter when things turned out too tough or too easy.  I thought this was the best way to do things because, let’s be honest, any balancing system is going to have trouble accounting for the near infinite possibilities that can happen in an rpg.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered how much fun I was having building encounters in 4e using the standard system.  Let me start by saying that it’s no holy grail of encounter design systems, but it is very, very robust and, most importantly, consistently gives good results.  And by good results I mean really fun encounters, of course.

I think a lot of the breakthrough here is that monsters aren’t just given a power rating, like Challenge Ratings in 3E, but are given a role along with it.  By looking at creature’s level and role you instantly know what it’s going to be doing on the battlefield and how tough it’s going to be for the players to take down.  This means you don’t have to have a lot of experience with either the system or the creature itself to know what it should be doing in a battle.  While this is by no means rocket science, this simple bit of explicitness makes designing an interesting encounter fairly easy once you know how to apply all the new information.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide does a fantastic job of walking a Dungeon Master through the ropes, even giving example encounter setups that one just needs to plug the monsters into. The later advice on customizing monsters, particularly about reskinning and adjusting levels just adds more tools to the toolbox.  Using these is an excellent way of getting familiar with what works and what doesn’t in scenario design.  Really, as long as you take in the advice in the DMG, it’s pretty tough to run a really poor encounter.

That said, experience still plays a huge role, as does group composition.  A party with a bunch of strikers may have a great time taking on a monstrous brute and his crew while one made up of primarily defenders and leaders would find that fight a long grind.  The DMG is a great guide, but it doesn’t tell you that nor a handful of other useful encounter tidbits.  So, here’s what my experience as a 4^th Edition DM has taught me: Read the rest of this entry »

Villagers: A sweet and tasty treat!

As a gamemaster, you must never discount that player motivation will often trump character motivation.  Sure, everyone likes to brag about games with “deep roleplaying” and “staying in-character” and most of the time experienced roleplayers have little trouble separating their desires from the character’s. However, sometimes there’s a carrot dangling that no player can resist breaking character to grab.

In our last game, the carrot was a handful of Gobstoppers.  In the last encounter of the session on Sunday, the party found themselves in front of a crowd of charging villagers who were being run down by marauding orcs.   They were tasked with intercepting  the orcs and holding them off while a ferry slowly crossed the river to pick up the villagers. To represent the villagers, we used Gobstoppers that one player had on hand since they were plentiful and easily identifiable on the board.

The orcs started right behind the villagers and quickly began their slaughter.  As the Gobstoppers were pulled from the table, the players immediately ate them.  With this, I set a bad precedent by positively reinforcing the death of the villagers. I think the potential reward of sweets lulled our heroes into laziness, as far more villagers found themselves eaten by players than I had imagined.  It wasn’t a complete slaughter, but it was close.

Plus, I barely got any!  I should have let the PCs eat the ones they saved and taken the ones the orcs killed for myself.  That’s the only fair way to resolve such a fight, right?

Next time we use food as miniatures I think I’m going institute the Riddick rule:  You keep what you kill.

As a GM, always keep in mind that you must appease both the character and their player.  If you can’t do that and the two come into conflict, be ready for the player’s needs and wants to take precedence.

Alternatively,  just don’t use food as a gaming prop.

Last time I told you all about two of the ways to handle overland travel in D&D (and other fantasy games).  Today we’re going to jump headfirst into even more techniques.   Again, think of these as different knobs and dials you can adjust in order to make overland travel as easy or as complicated as your campaign needs it to be. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome, weary internet travelers! The kind overlords at Ideology of Madness have given me this new column as a place to spew my incoherent babbling about gaming.  Some would say I already do that enough over at The Podge Cast, but some brain droppings are better consumed in a visual medium such as this than through the audio ambrosia that is podcasting.  In other words, this is where I can talk about that stuff that doesn’t lend itself to roundtable discussion.

As a bit of background, I am currently running a D&D 4e game with my group.  A lot of this column is going to be about exploring the concepts and themes of whatever I’m running or playing at the time.  As someone who has spent the last few years mainly running and playing intense player-driven, plot-focused, intrigue-laden games, going back to my gaming roots with D&D has been a nice change.  No matter what edition you enjoy, I think we can all agree that there’s no feeling like slicing off a dragon’s nuts and then stealing his hoard while the halfling juggles those man-marbles. Read the rest of this entry »