Posts from April 2009

My published adventure modules bear little resemblance to the adventures I run for my friends. For the most part, the published modules are fairly straightforward dungeon crawls – fight some monsters, do a little investigation, move onward to find some sort of big MacGuffin, and defeat the Menacing Evil lurking somewhere towards the end of the adventure. I find them to be a hell of a lot of fun, but not terribly complex. When I’m writing these, I tend to err towards what I call the “lowest common denominator”, meaning that a smart teenager who’s relatively new to gaming should be able to pick my adventure up at a store and run it as his or her first adventure, without too many problems.

Some gamers find this approach too limiting. Cries of “railroad!” can be heard at many a gaming table whenever there’s a DM using a published module. Railroading – or, forcing a bunch of players in a game towards a given outcome, regardless of their stated actions – can be a valid criticism, but it’s one that gets a bit overused when it comes to modules. (In my own opinion, at any rate.)

When I write a module, I have no idea if a DM is going to use it as a one-shot, or if it’s going to be inserted into part of an ongoing campaign. I have no idea if the backstory of the player characters is important. In that sense, I’m trying to keep things fairly simple and generic. As a DM running published modules, I always wanted simple as opposed to complex. It’s much easier for me as a DM to add complexity to something simple, rather than rip away stuff from something complicated in order to simplify it. In that regard, that’s why the published adventures that I’ve written can lean towards the railroad. By pointing the players towards a given goal, I’m simplifying the job of the DM. If I build in multiple goals, with no clear way of getting there … well, remember that smart teenager who’s relatively new to gaming? He or she – or any other newbie DM – might find the adventure bogging down and going bad because there’s too many options. I’d rather provide just a few clear goals in adventure, with rough adventure ideas and seeds for other optional goals, which can be used at a DM’s discretion.

My own adventures for my friends essentially are three or four modules, run simultaneously. My latest campaign began with the players being hired to steal something valuable from a warehouse. When they got there, they found themselves presented with a number of options. It turned out that the “crate” that they were hired to steal contained some sort of powerful creature, which was in the process of escaping; they ran into a bunch of rat-men who had also come to the warehouse in search of the crate; they found that the actual crate contained a metal cage and a bunch of interesting clues; and, later on, they found that the thief who had hired them to steal the crate in the first place wound up dead in a river.

Each of these provided a good starting point for an adventure. (Do we go after the creature? Who are the rat-men, and why did they want it? Where do the clues we found inside the crate lead? Who killed our employer?) More importantly, even though the various adventures themselves can be considered something of a railroad, they’re invisible railroads. There’s choices involved. Don’t care who killed your employer? Fine. Don’t care about the rat-men? Fine. By providing the opportunity to your players to let them say no to certain avenues in an adventure, and yes to others, you let them take ownership of what’s happening, which I’ve found leads to a better game.

The unused adventure threads never really wind up unused, either. It just means a little reworking to loop one adventure thread back to another. If the players eventually hunt down the creature and capture it, they might find it was a creation of the rat-men, which means that they might be better served pursuing that thread sometime later on in the campaign. If the players investigate the death of their employer, they might find some connection to the clues they found inside the crate, which lead elsewhere to adventure. Or they may find no connections between anything. If they seem to be advancing the adventure just fine on their own, I don’t bother trying to reconnect other adventure threads to what they’re doing. If things are starting to stall, though, that’s when I nudge the older adventure seeds towards them, and things tend to start happening on their own. (“Isn’t that the seal we saw on the crate? You don’t think those things are connected, do you?”)

I also include what I call “tangent points” in adventures like this. These are clues or adventure seeds that are pretty ambiguous – when I throw them out to my players, I often don’t have a clear idea of where they should lead. Instead, I just watch what the players do with them. Sometimes, they go exactly where I think they should go. Other times, they take an idea and go in a direction I never expected … and usually one that’s better than what I had in mind. A module’s only a railroad if the DM lets it constrain the players; if the DM thinks what the players have in mind is way better that what’s written on the pages of the module, follow the players, not the module.

I haven’t had many opportunities to write an adventure for publication that better resembles the ones I write for my friends. (When you write adventures for a line called “Dungeon Crawl Classics”, though, I suppose that’s to be expected.) While I love the dungeon crawl-styled adventures, it’d be cool to try and come up that’s got the layers of complexity – and some of the more subtle nuances – of the investigative-styled adventures I normally run. The closest I’ve come to it so far is a Call of Cthulhu adventure that (hopefully) should be published sometime later this year … but it would be sweet indeed to write a fantasy-themed adventure in that style.

Still, I can’t complain. Not at all. I get to write some adventures that some people seem to like, and at the end of the day, that’s pretty cool.

Have fun at your gaming tables, whether the adventure is simple or complex.

The fun’s the best part.

It's out. It's available at your local game store. And it's fantastic. Buy it.

That's all.

The alleged purpose of this site – besides being an excuse to ramble, of course – is to discuss writing, gaming, and all sort of related ideas and influences.

By influences, I mean games I’ve played, books I’ve read … and the friends and acquaintances with whom I’ve gamed. Gaming is only as good as the people who choose to play. A group of good gamers can make the world’s worst game a genuine pleasure to play. Take a group of bad gamers, though – or, to put it another way, a group of dysfunctional gamers – and even the world’s best-written, most fun game can’t make the experience even remotely interesting or entertaining. I’ve been privileged enough to sit at a few gaming tables with some great gamers, which is why I continue to play and write roleplaying games. I’m always searching for that next great experience with a bunch of my friends.

So I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t talk about the best gamer I’ve ever met – my friend Doug.

I first met Doug somewhere in between my junior year and senior year of high school. My friend Eric had just wrapped up his long-running “Tunnel World” AD&D campaign (which was a few straight years’ worth of weekly gaming), and was looking to start up something new. His new campaign – which later simply got called the “Paris Campaign” – was something new for us. It was set in an alternate-universe version of Paris during a Renaissance-styled era, except this version of Paris had dwarves, elves, and magic. Magic was low-key and low-level, though, since there was an Inquisition going on … so casting that magic missile spell could cost your character’s life, if it wasn’t done with enough subtlety.

As long as we were starting fresh and trying new things, Eric decided to bring some new people into our gaming group. My friend John – who had just started taking classes at the local county college – roped these two guys he knew, Dan and Knute, into joining our group. In turn, they brought along an additional friend to the game, on one of the first nights we started playing – Doug. Dan and Knute didn’t last very long in the game, but Doug sure did – he became one of the mainstays of our gaming group.

Doug was that rare kind of gamer – a rules lawyer who understood the importance of group dynamics … and of fun. He was a math genius – eventually, he got a doctorate in mathematics, and he’s the only person I’ve ever met to fully understand abstract concepts like string theory, or to be able to do complex physics computations in his head. (Which made him a godsend for games like Shadowrun – he could correctly add up the biggest dice pools I’ve ever seen in about a nanosecond). So math and logic came second nature to him, and if he chose to do so, he could ruthlessly exploit loopholes in the rules – hell, he’d find loopholes nobody else could even imagine, let alone see.

But he never let that get in the way of a good game.

In one of my Rifts campaigns, he made an Atlantean Undead Slayer who received power from activating magical tattoos. Well, of course the rules for Rifts were broken, and Doug discovered that by “stacking” certain tattoo powers, his character could virtually become invincible, making my design of combat encounters for the group quite challenging. Make something tough enough to give Doug a worthy challenge … and that same opponent could dust the rest of the group without a second thought. Make some worthy enough to give the rest of the group a difficult challenge … and Doug could defeat it without trying.

So one night, after a long gaming session, Doug and I headed over to the local diner for coffee and cigarettes (the mainstay diet of my high school/college years). While talking about the game, Doug said something that still sticks with me to this day.

“You know, the rules for tattoo magic … they’re just ridiculous,” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered. “But they’re the rules. I’ll live with them.”

“If it’ll help the game, you can say that the tattoo powers don’t stack. Or I can make a different character. I love playing this character, but I don’t want to fuck things up for everybody else.”

I thought about it … and ultimately, we left everything alone. Doug did indeed love playing that character, but I’d managed to work around it long enough to where I didn’t see the point of making a change. But the fact that Doug was willing to take a tricked-out uber-powerful character – and give it up for the good of the game, meaning myself and the other players – meant a lot. He was one of those rare players that “gets it”, meaning that he understood the game is never about just yourself, whether you’re a player or the guy running the game – it’s about everyone involved. While he could be a complete bastard of a rules lawyer, he never did so with the intention of ruining other people’s fun – he did so to make the game better, and that’s a distinction I think gets lost by many gamers.

Gaming wasn’t my only source of interaction with Doug. We got to be pretty good friends without the need for funny-shaped dice and imaginary characters as well. When I attended the University of Notre Dame, Doug attended Indiana University – so there were a bunch of road trips where we got to hang out at various places throughout the state of Indiana. (I think this was also when I introduced Doug to the concept that beer was a viable and tasty breakfast beverage). After college, we both headed back for the wilds of New Jersey, where we continued to game and hang out – which was fantastic. Always a guy with eclectic interests, Doug is probably the only person I’ve ever met who could engage you on a detailed discussion about the tactics used Battle of Thermopylae while watching an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on pay-per-view. He was equally adept talking rocket science – literal rocket science, complete with the physics to back it up – or about why Black Flag was a better band with Keith Morris instead of Henry Rollins. He was truly a gifted individual, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met … and a great friend, which was more important than any of that.

As time rolled on, we hung out less and less, which was somewhat understandable – I was working full-time at a “real” job, he went to graduate school, I had moved, he had moved … and the excuses roll on. They all made sense at the time. Besides, many times when you hit changes in your life – where you begin to pursue new things in life and step away from the old – it’s not really a conscious decision. You always feel like you can go back and do the things you used to do – all it would take is a phone call. Except, of course, you never really make that call.

That’s what made the news of Doug’s death so hard.

It was a sudden thing – he went into a hospital complaining about a loss of hearing, went into a coma, and died just a few days later. Apparently, Doug had some incredibly rare and nasty form of cancer called acute myeloid leukemia that had literally spread everywhere in his body – brain, lungs, heart, you name it. In a weird way, that was about the only good thing to come out of that hideous situation – Doug got to enjoy most of his life to the fullest, and the end came with a relatively merciful quickness. If it had been diagnosed earlier … well, he probably would’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals and undergoing treatments that wouldn’t have worked, and the result would’ve been the same.

The four or five people who actually read the credits to “Gazetteer of the Known Realms” and “Talons of the Horned King” will note that both of these were dedicated to Doug. In particular, I think he would’ve liked “Talons” a lot – I somehow picture him running a fighter with a laser gun, finding some fiendish use for the gun that nobody else would’ve even imagined … myself included. But were it possible, I’d trade all my relative successes in the gaming industry over the past few years – every single one of them – for five minutes with Doug during those last few days. Just to be able to let him know what an amazing person he was, to say how much better my life was for being privileged enough to know him … and to say goodbye.

Because gaming is only as good as the people who choose to play.

And Doug was the best.

Last year, around the time most gamers were waiting for the Fourth Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game to be released, I started taking a closer look at the earlier editions of the game – the ones I had first started playing in grade school. Part of this was a nostalgia trip, to be sure, but part of it was to get a better handle of the beginnings of the game, so I could better processed how it had evolved over the years.

The culmination of this first “close look” came last year when Rick Maffei was gracious enough to run “Tomb of Horrors” for a bunch of gaming grognards like myself, using the original First Edition rules of the AD&D game. I re-learned quite a bit about the game, after not having seriously played it for nearly 15 years … and learned some new things about it as well. It was an interesting experience.

One of the things I realized was that I’d never really sat down and gone through the rules in great detail in my younger days, even when I played the game on a weekly basis. I think it’s how a lot of people learned how to play roleplaying games back then. You learned the basic rules of the game from the rulebooks, but you learned how to play by actually playing the game with your friends. And a lot of times, your friends had been playing for a long time before you, and had been using their own house rules, or ignoring lesser-known rules in the book. (Who really used the weapon speed factor charts?) So you accepted whatever hybrid of official rules and house rules as the “real” version of the game … even though it was very different than a literal reading of the rulebooks.

I suspect that this way of learning roleplaying games was more prevalent during the Eighties and Nineties, prior to the widespread use of the Internet. Back then, your sources of information about how games worked tended to just be from the gamers you knew. With the Internet, the ability to directly ask companies questions about their games became possible, and a small group of gamers in Peoria can share their questions about gaming with just about anyone in the world.

(Of course, that’s just conjecture on my part.)

Despite the realization that the actual First Edition AD&D game was slightly different that the houseruled version I’d played in my youth, I still enjoyed it a lot. It was interesting to note that a lot of the rules that many gamers consider “modern” – attacks of opportunity (or opportunity attacks), for example, are in the First Edition rules, as are rules for flanking, grappling, and many others which tend to be considered more recent additions to the game. It impressed me enough to the point where I know if I ever run a “serious”, ongoing D&D campaign again … it’ll be for the First Edition rules. I like the later editions of the game – all of them – but for the way I like to run games, First Edition fits my style and gaming sensibilities the best.

And it also impressed me enough to want to write an adventure using First Edition rules. Not an outline for an adventure, but a full-blown, in-your-face detailed adventure module.

However, after a couple of half-hearted attempts, I just couldn’t bring myself to write something totally from scratch. So I compromised – I decided to convert one of my existing published adventures to 1E. “Talons of the Horned King”, my sci-fi pastiche to “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks”, seemed the most logical choice. While I had a lot of issues writing that particular adventure, I’d grown to like it over the past few years … and for whatever the reason, I always felt like it was better suited for 1E anyway. So over the past couple of months and weeks, I took to rewriting sections of the original manuscript, figuring out how to take the crunch of D&D 3.5 and translate that into First Edition goodness.

The one thing that jumped out immediately were all the damn Spot and Search checks. (Or Perception checks, if you’re into Pathfinder or 4E). The more modern iterations of D&D assume that anything hidden – or at least not obvious – to the player characters can be discovered with one of those skill checks. Many published adventures rely on the fact that a character will make one of those checks to learn something important. It’s a staple of the modern game – “I make a Search check”.

First Edition doesn’t have skills for most classes, though, unless you’re a thief or a barbarian. And no one has a Spot or Search equivalent. Considering how prevalent - and important - Spot and Search checks are for Third Edition (and how important Perception is for Fourth), I decided to dig back through some old modules to see how it got handled back in the day.

And here’s the thing. It was handled, although not in the way you might expect. The old modules, to put it simply, trusted the DM.

If you go through a lot of the Gygax-penned modules, he mentions that important things might be hidden in a room. But he doesn’t rely on a roll of the dice to reveal such things to the players. Rather, he relies on the DM to describe the room, to mention areas where things might be hidden … and then expects the players to show some initiative to look for those things.

“If the players look carefully through the pile of bones, they find …”

I imagine many players – and DMs – would find this vague way of doing things maddening. After all, “carefully?” How do you measure that? Is it a matter of the players just saying how they look through the pile carefully? Should they describe their actions in detail?

In a sense, I don’t think it matters much. Because I think First Edition looks at it like this: if it advances the story, and the adventure, they should find it. If it doesn’t, then it’s up to the DM.

When I run my Warhammer game, my players wind up making a lot of Perception checks throughout the course of the game. (Probably more than they would like.) But these are all checks designed to help them notice clues, and to help them make decisions (sometimes the wrong ones) about what they should do next. If they fail to notice something, it might not be good for them, but it’s never critical to what they’re doing.

If there’s something that I think they definitely should know, however, I don’t leave that to the dice. I’ll make sure the players find it, Perception checks be damned. I don’t think a game should ever suffer because someone failed to roll a high enough number. Modern gaming, I’ve found, tend to rely more on rules to define things. Classic gaming tends to place more responsibility in the hands of the DM. Neither approach is wrong. In the hands of a bad DM, or an inexperienced one, such responsibility can be disastrous. So can a game run strictly by the rules, even when the rules don’t make sense. A DM and the players in the gaming group ultimately need to find an approach that works best for them.

Myself? Well, let’s just say that while I like the 3.5 version of “Talons” … I think I’ll like the 1E version better.

And I happen to trust DMs to tell a good story.