Roll a d20
It tumbles on the table
I pray for a crit

I am running a 4th Edition D&D game and one of the suggestions for 4e is that the players write up “loot lists” for magic items that they desire. With the way buying and selling magic items works in 4e (they are only worth 1/5th their value when you sell them), it makes it very hard for a party to “convert” found magic items into the ones they actually want. A loot list is the solution.

Players can write down the magic items they want and then give it to their DM who should seed the adventure with the items from the lists. Of course, the DM can ignore the list and put whatever he wants in the dungeon instead, but that defeats the point.

One of the other concepts of 4e is the “treasure parcel”. These are “all the loot” of an adventure, split up into 10 digestible parts. An encounter can yield one, two, or no parcels, depending on the DM. The only hard and fast rule is that by the time the characters gain a level, they have earned all 10 parcels of treasure.

Now, in the game I run, I tried to run it this way, but I found that I constantly was losing people’s loot lists and asking them to gimme something “real quick” so I could outfit them. This worked amazingly well, so I adapted that into the current iteration of how I am distributing loot.

The current iteration is this:

There is a list of parcels. For the Magic Items, it is just the level of the magic item. For the money, it’s as the DMG suggests. These are numbered 1 thru 10.

There is a list of Player Characters, and their Magic Items. This list is in an order that was established randomly at the beginning of the campaign.

When treasure is found, I roll a d10 and look up what parcel it is. If it is money/potions, I hand that out as normally. If I roll a magic item, I then consult the list of PCs.

I look at the PC who has the least amount of magic items. If there are multiple PC’s with the same, least, amount then I look at who the highest one on the list is. Eventually, everyone on the list will have the same amount of Magic Items, and I can just use the list as an order of distribution for magic.

I then ask that player to come up with at least THREE items of the LEVEL I rolled on the parcels. This way, I don’t need to track someone’s loot list and they get some insight into the items they might get (the level anyway). Once I have the items from the player, I roll a d3 (or higher if they gave me more), and that determines what item is actually found. This way, it might not be the “Best Spec” item on the list, but it will be the same level as the Best Spec, and it will be something that the player wanted.

I usually inform the other players that they find “A magic item for John” or somesuch, and work out with John on the side what that item ends up being.

Once the parcel is distributed, I cross it off the list. Once all parcels are distributed, I generate 10 new parcels and start the process anew.

A while back, I was asked to contribute to the third in a series of books on narratives. This book, Third Person, would contain a chapter by yours truly on how we handled storytelling in City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

Product Description
The ever-expanding capacities of computing offer new narrative possibilities for virtual worlds. Yet vast narratives—featuring an ongoing and intricately developed storyline, many characters, and multiple settings—did not originate with, and are not limited to, Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Marvel’s Spiderman, and the complex stories of such television shows as Dr. Who, The Sopranos, and Lost all present vast fictional worlds.

Third Person explores strategies of vast narrative across a variety of media, including video games, television, literature, comic books, tabletop games, and digital art. The contributors—media and television scholars, novelists, comic creators, game designers, and others—investigate such issues as continuity, canonicity, interactivity, fan fiction, technological innovation, and cross-media phenomena.

Chapters examine a range of topics, including storytelling in a multiplayer environment; narrative techniques for a 3,000,000-page novel; continuity (or the impossibility of it) in Doctor Who; managing multiple intertwined narratives in superhero comics; the spatial experience of the Final Fantasy role-playing games; World of Warcraft adventure texts created by designers and fans; and the serial storytelling of The Wire.

Taken together, the multidisciplinary conversations in Third Person, along with Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin’s earlier collections First Person and Second Person, offer essential insights into how fictions are constructed and maintained in very different forms of media at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Contributors: Rafael Alvarez, Richard A. Bartle, Michael Bonesteel, Stanford Carpenter, Monte Cook, Paul Cornell, Anne Cranny-Francis, Sam Ford, Chaim Gingold, A. Scott Glancy, Richard Grossman, Pat Harrigan, Matt Hills, Kenneth Hite, William H. Huber, Adriene Jenik, Henry Jenkins, David Kalat, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Norman M. Klein, Tanya Krzywinska, David Lavery, Robin D. Laws, Sarah Lewison, Henry Lowood, William E. McDonald, Matthew P. Miller, Jason Mittell, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Orman, Sean O’Sullivan, Lance Parkin, Robert M. Price, Ren Reynolds, Trina Robbins, Ken Rolston, Dave Sim, Greg Stafford, Tamiko Thiel, John Tulloch, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Walter Jon Williams

About the Author
Pat Harrigan is a writer and author of the novel Lost Clusters. He is also the co-editor, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, forthcoming from the MIT Press. He is also the co-editor, with Pat Harrigan, of First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (2004) and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (2007), both published by the MIT Press.

• The power went out the first afternoon, when we were in the middle of a game of Battlestar Galactica. Everyone grabbed their iPhones, fired up their Flashlight app, and continued playing like nothing happened. The lights came on over an hour later.
• The first D&D game I played in almost went horribly, horribly wrong when one player “in character” set the entire town against us. Fortunately I negotiated with the NPCs a truce while the player in question was out of the room.
• I got to throw the dagger that killed the Mind Flayer boss in that game literally AS we were being kicked out of the room by the next game.
• The first burger I had from the hotel’s “gamer buffet” was beet red in the middle (as in raw). I avoided the burgers after that.
• I bought dice in the dealer’s room to put into the BSG board game, so there would be plenty of d8’s with it, after realizing I had taken all the dice out of it before Friday’s game.
• I had a great time hanging out at the bar with Randy from Cryptic, catching up on what’s going on at the studio I used to work at.
• I got to play Descent, playing someone else’s character in a Road to Legend campaign.
• I bought a T-Shirt at the gamer geek shirt table in the dealer’s room. I was told I wasn’t going to be yelled at for “messing up the shirt pile” because I was wearing an AC/DC shirt.
• I (hopefully) convinced several people there that getting the .pdf versions of the D&D rulebooks at www.rpgnow.com was a great idea, espiecally when I could search-find rules faster than people who had the physical books.
• I played in a GREAT game of 4e D&D, which was loosely based on the Amber “Throne War” scenario. If anyone ever tells me that 4th edition D&D is just a miniatures game and they took all the role-playing out if it, I now have proof that they are idiots. I didn’t get the throne, but got set up with a very nice duchy by helping the late King’s vizer get who HE wanted onto the throne.
• My wife was AWESOME for letting me go, and I have no idea how to thank her enough for not getting completely pissed at me for coming home super late on Monday.

Ok, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (4e) has been out for 3 months and in that time I’ve had a lot of opportunities to play and run, and hear about the games other people have played and run, so I guess I should give it a “review” of sorts.

On the surface 4e is a much simpler game from 3.5. A lot of the fiddly-bits (albiet more realistic) simply don’t exisit in 4e. I couldn’t find any mention of you dropping your held object or weapon when you are stunned or dying for instance. It makes for a faster, funner game. One of the concepts in the DMG is “Consider Yes” which we have translated to “Yes you can” in our games. As the DM, if someone comes up with an idea that sounds fun, moves the plot along, and isn’t game breaking, by all means let them do it! That is simply awesome, it puts the onus of the game less on the DM and makes the players part of the storytelling experience. If you ignore this and hold a draconian rule over your game as a DM in 4e, you will quickly find that you are doing nothing but running a chess game against multiple opponents, and it gets boring fast.

We are just at the beginning, but there are already a bunch of prepared modules and scenarios for DMs to use, and, as always, they vary in their quality. DMs who are designing their own encounters and worlds will find “prep” to be much easier this time around, and actually kind of fun. One of the things we learned pretty quickly was that when you are designing an encounter, count the terrain or room features as part of the encounter. For excellent examples of this, look at the sample module in the DMG. Most of the rooms there have a “schtick” that the players must deal with in addition to the creatures in the room. This makes for more colorful fights than “I hit the monster with my axe”. When you have to worry about a giant boulder that is making crushing circuits around the room, suddenly you are trying to manuever opponents into the boulder’s path, while avoiding it yourself. This is way more fun for the players and more engaging for the DM to run as well.

As a player I am really getting into my Rogue. She’s 5th level now, having run through all of H1, and the very beginnings of H2. I love the powers exploits that she has available. We don’t have a Wizard (Controller) in that party, so my rogue has been concentrating taking powers that reposition herself and her opponents, to better control the combat situations. This has saved party member’s asses on more than one occassion. One thing to watch out for is your party’s Defenders getting Damage Envy of the party’s Strikers. Strikers can output a TON of damage every turn if their dice let them. So much so that Defenders quickly feel inadequet in that department. The fact that Defender’s defenses are generally WAY better than a Strikers is nowhere near as apparent as the damage disparity. If you play a Striker, make sure you reinforce how awesome your party’s Defender’s AC is or how the fact that he Marked that guy just saved your character’s life. This will lessen the sting when you do 30 points of damage on a non-critical hit, taking a foe from “Uninjured” to “Bloodied” in one attack.

The last thing I want to talk about is MapTool. This is a piece of Java software that connects players across the country to the DM’s campaign and maps. You have customizable tokens for your characters and the monsters, and the DM can make very elaborate maps with MapTool with very little effort. There are also dice rolling Macros you can program that can put numbers into the rolls straight from your character’s token (like your Strength Modifier for instance). It really is an awesome piece of software, and I hope that Wizards is paying attention to it as they designed their upcoming Game Table. It really does make playing D&D over the internet as close to (if not a little better in some ways) playing in the same room.

Yeah, that’s right this heirloom piece is made for GAMING. Space for books, drinks, and even has a light up 1″ grid (so you can lay grid-less maps over it and get a grid pattern on it). I want this so bad, but I don’t even know where I’d put it. At work for now I guess!

Anyway if you want to get your order in ahead of me, head over to www.geekchichq.com and plunk down the 50% deposit that’s required to get your place in their order queue.

The Clone Wars animated movie doesn’t really work as a MOVIE, but it kinda works as an RPG Campaign, so here is my review, as if it was:

The game starts off with Obi-Wan and Anakin on some far off planet, having just “won” the previous session’s planetary battle. The GM is a dick, however, and it turns out that reinforcements have arrived, and they are NOT theirs. The GM’s girlfriend has wanted to play for quite some time, so he lets her in the game as a Jedi Padawan. Anakin thought she was going to be Obi-Wan’s new Padawan, but the GM curveballs them by making her Anakin’s!
 
Totally didn’t see that coming, didja guy-who-named-his-character-Annie?
 
Anyway, Anakin’s player is kinda perturbed at this, since he knows he can’t just kill the GM’s girlfriend, or even do things to get her killed. Anakin is forced to drag her along on her first real mission, and along the way she totally saves his life using her Force powers. The GM is proud of his girlfriend, even if Anakin’s player is still pissed he had to face all that shit alone since she was off on the other side of the map doing god-knows-what.
 
After they solve their intro mission, the Voice of God (aka Yoda) comes down and tells them that Jabba’s son has been kidnapped. The players think this is cool, since we’ve never HEARD of Jabba’s son before this could mean that this is a trap, or even better yet, it’s real and the kid could honestly die and not fuck up the movies. The GM doesn’t even need to fudge anything.
 
Obi-Wan’s player has to miss the next session, so the GM says he’ll run his stuff over IM… and split up Anakin and Obi-Wan. Anakin takes his new apprentice to some backwater planet where Jabba’s son was tracked to. Here the GM has set up an AWESOME assault up the side of a cliff. He’s been working a while on this combat. Special rules for climbing, what it takes to get shot off the cliff, etc. It pays off in spades as well as the players have a blast just getting up the side of the cliff.
 
Once in the monastery where Jabba’s son is held, we get a typical dungeon crawl until the kid (“stinky”) is found. The GM put a 24 hour clock on getting the kid back in the first place (he did that with Obi-Wan’s player over IM), but seems to have forgotten that and made Stinky have some deadly sickness that was killing him quickly, thus they need to get him medical attention ASAP.
 
The other player in the group, playing clone commander Rex, finally shows up, so the GM throws a bunch of battle droids at him while he waits for Anakin. He loses of course, and gets captured. Anakin has R2-X-Machina find a “back landing pad” (which for some reason they never SAW in the first place), and he goes there with Stinky. At this point, Obi-Wan’s player has shown up, so the GM has to throw a bunch more battle droids into the mix so as to screw with them. So many so that the players never can really hook up again at this point.
 
At THIS point in the game sessions, Padme’s player comes into town from New Mexico, so the GM decides that she will be the one to uncover the ultimate deception, that Count Dooku was framing the Jedi for the kidnapping, and if they don’t succeed then Jabba will let the Seperatists use the outer rim space lanes instead of the republic. It’s a total side game that you can tell was pissing off Anakin and Obi-Wan’s players. So much so that when Asaaj Ventress shows up to fight Anakin, he just jumps on a bug and flies over to HER ship (which is of course a piece of crap cargo ship) on another spire.
 
This leaves Obi-Wan to fight Asaaj, since someone has to.
 
Anakin escapes in the freighter and after being reminded about the sickness that Stinky has, he has the magic pill in the auto-doc on board. Whew! I was getting worried.
 
Anyway, Anakin gets to Tatooine only to get shot down by Grievous Guards. He pretends to have Stinky, while he sends his Padawan ahead to deliver the kid. Dooku shows up and assumes, like an idiot, that Anakin still has the Huttling. Anakin steals Dooku’s swoop after Dooku tells him that his Padawan is already dead by now by the OTHER trap he laid.
 
Anyway, it seems that the GM is going easy on his girlfriend. She isn’t instantly killed by 3 Grievous Guards, and even gets to destroy a couple eventually. She finally makes it inside Jabba’s palace with the kid and everything looks like it’s going to work out, except Jabba wants the Jedi dead anyway.
 
At this point, Padme calls on Anakin’s Holocomm, and after some Holosex talk with Annie, she gets down to detailing out how Dooku decieved Jabba. The day is saved by a player in New Mexico! Yay!
 
Roll credits.

I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons most of my life. I remember my best friend Peter and I playing while his older brother Rob was DM at the age of 4 or 5. Calling it 5 for good measure, I am fast approaching 32 years of elves, dwarves, dungeons, and dragons occupying a part of my life. I’ve done a lot when it comes to gaming in general; played in many Monty Hall games, played in diceless RPGs (R.I.P. Erick), played RPGs where you needed a calculator to make a character, played RPGs where you needed Excel to make a character, played miniatures games, played war games, played card games, played dice games, and I even made a career out of computer RPGs.

When Wizards of the Coast announced Fourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons last August, I was excited to see what they were going to do to the game. Don’t get me wrong, 3.5 is a great system, built upon the solid foundation that was the third edition of the game. I still play in a 3.5 game that is trying to wrap up before the group moves to 4e. But 3.5 has flaws, flaws that 4e recognizes and attempts to fix.

I’ve played a few games of 4e now, and have run a session as well, so I have a good grasp of what they did. One thing that strikes me right off the bat is how balanced the game seems to be. It seems that math, averages, and statistics were not afterthoughts in this edition, but incorporated from the very beginning. Sure there are some “optimal” choices and min-maxing that can be done, but in the end a lot of things balance out. To illustrate this, we can look at the Rogue.

When I was rolling up my rogue for John’s Keep on the Shadowfell game I kept seeing powers that keyed off of “light blade”. I checked the weapon list for the best light blade I could use, and it appeared to be the trusty Dagger. Doing 1d4 damage, it has an inherent +3 to hit if you are trained to use it (all Rogues are). The Sickle on the other hand, is a light blade doing 1d6 damage. It does not have the +3 to hit, it is only +2. What it does trade that extra +1 for a larger damage die. That is pretty balanced right out of the box, but we need to start applying some of the bonuses Rogues get to clarify the picture. In the hands of a rogue, daggers are +1 to hit. Now the +3 is a +4, a marked improvement. In addition, they increase the damage die from 1d4 to 1d6. Now daggers are superior to sickles when wielded by a rogue. They are essentially +2 to hit better, while doing the same damage. Rogues and daggers fit together nicely.

Then I noticed the Rapier, way down on the Superior Melee Weapon List. Whoa. They do 1d8 damage, and are +3 when you are proficient with them, what does it take to get proficient with them? A feat: Weapon Proficiency- Rapier. So now a rogue, by spending a feat can essentially trade the +1 to hit that the Dagger gets for a larger damage die (average damage will be +1 over the smaller die). Kinda like a mini-always-on Power Attack.

I liked that. It gave my rogue options, even when trying to be “optimal” there was no clear path. I really like the sense of math behind a lot of these choices. It doesn’t feel that anything is arbitrary for the sake of being different. Each weapon on the weapon list brings something to the table.

There was a lot of talk over the past couple months about how 4e was turning D&D into an MMO. They took a lot of terminology from MMOs, and even some core concepts. I agree with their designers take on how MMOs were based on paper and pencil RPGs and improved upon them. Now is the time to cherry pick the better ideas that MMOs brought to the table and incorporate them back into the paper game. Ideas like Damage over Time, defined “roles” for classes, Elite monsters that were overall better than your typical specimen, etc. I think overall they make the game more entertaining, and more accessible to the masses of MMO players who may find an easier time transitioning to the tabletop when they realize Encounter powers are simply powers with a slow recharge, and Daily powers are powers that are kind of the “once per session” powers that have really long recharge timers.

Right now I am really liking 4e over 3.5. It simplifies the system into fewer die rolls and more engaging combats. I like it.

Oh, and Andy, it’s Sly Flourish, not Sky Flourish. lrn2read n00b.

* the paper and pencil kind.

Wow. I almost forgot to write this blog post after I reminded myself and everything. Anyway, with the approach of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons a scant 46 days away, I’ve gotten to thinking about the systems that RPGs use.

I classify RPG players into two kinds of groups: Those that need a map, and those that don’t. The “Mappers” are the more tactically minded players, they want to know every nuance about thier character, where they can go, and more importantly, what they can do. The “Minders” are more cerebral, theater-of-the-mind types. These guys don’t play around the kitchen table, they play in the living room sprawled on couches, loveseats, and recliners. They don’t have a miniature for their character, and they don’t take feats that give you a bonus when flanking.

I’ve been a Mapper most of my life. I’ve dabbled in Minder gameplay on occassion. Several of the d6 Star Wars games were run Minder-style. The Amber game that Sean Fish and I were in together was full on Minder, never once was a map even sketched to illustrate a point. When I moved down to LA, I ended up with a gaming group that was almost all Minders. It was a unique kind of torture for a Mapper, to suddenly lose that visual dimension that the map brings, but these guys made it work.

I went back down to LA recently, and wanted to play and/or run for the Minder group again. I had picked the scenario I wanted to run for them, and they all started discussing what system to use for it. I was amused, because I already had a “system” in mind. In my opinion (your’s may vary) if you aren’t going to bother with a map, why bother with stats, skills, feats, hit points, those sort of things. You’ve boiled off the mapping from your game, trying to get to the essence, so I just boiled things down even further into a thick sauce.

Last June, at the game Auden ran over my birthday, Randy (of Ask Randy) was running a “Zombie Apocalypse” game in-between rounds of Auden’s game for a couple people at the table. He was using a single die to resolve anything. High=Good, Low=Bad. I saw this and was enlightened. This is the perfect distillation of “rules” for a Minder game. I inquired about the system and was told this:

“Assuming Matt was talking about what I think he was talking about, you don’t really have any concrete rules or character sheets or anything- based on discussion with the players, the GM has an idea what the player characters are good at and what they aren’t. When a task needs resolving, the player rolls a d10, higher being better. Based on the GM’s perception of the character, he decides on the spot whether the roll succeeded or not, and to what degree.”

and this:

“I rolled a D10 with a base outcome (5 or below, 6 and above) for the success of the action.
The farther away from the number you are deteremines how much you succeeded or botched.
 
Ex.:  Tina(my NPC) is walking across a ladder from rooftop to rooftop.  I figure it takes at least a five to do this.  I roll a 1, she fails but fails the worse possible; she fall, breaks her neck and is dead. ”

That was the perfect Minder system. I ran the game, everyone had a blast. The rules, er rule, never got in the way of fun. I had a good idea on what the characters could “do” based on their backgrounds, and so they tried to play to type. Minder games are not for powergamers, munchkins, or monty hauls*. They are more cerebral games that a mature player can get into, and when you are that cerebral, I don’t need to know EXACTLY what skills you have, or EXACTLY how many Hit Points you rolled. I just need to know “are you any good at what you are trying to do? Ok, roll a die, and we’ll see how much you succeed/fail at it.”

Now if I was running this for a different group, a Mapper group, things would have been FAR different. A system would have been chosen, miniatures procured, and the game would have probably taken twice as long, but just as much fun. I don’t discount either type of game, each has strengths and weaknesses, but I was happy that my experiment with a Minder game being reduced down to the core essence of the experience, worked.

*Apparently this needs a definition for some people: Monty Haul was the host of Lets Make a Deal, and his name became synonomous with overpowered characters in the 1980’s. When DMs would shower their players with +5 Vorpal Defenders while the players took the Dieties and Demigods book as a catalog of “who to go kill today”… that was a Monty Haul game.