A Lesson Not Learned By the Gaming Industry

Grumpy Wizard

At some point in the 80’s, someone at a game company called TSR noticed that there were more players than game masters. They came up with a hypothesis: If you make books for players instead of game masters, you can sell more books. That seems obvious but it turns out that this is not a very good long term strategy.

The first game book that was largely for players that I can think of is Unearthed Arcana. There were probably others that I am ignorant about. UA’s big selling point for players was the new classes and rules for weapon specializations. There are old timey DMs who still hate on that book.

During the 90’s, Player’s Options books and the Complete Fighter/Thief/Wizard books were popular. White Wolf did the same thing. They published clan books for Vampire, tribe books for Werewolf, and tradition books for Mage. Each…

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What Do I Know About Gameplay? Core Competencies, One D&D, and Project Black Flag

What Do I Know?

Both Wizards of the Coast and Kobold Press currently have playtests going on to produce a new version of a game based on the 5e SRD. I’ve already talked about this in my look at Kobold Press’ second playtest packet, but I was a little surprised at how many conventions introduced in Wizards of the Coast’s One D&D have been adopted as the baseline for Kobold Press’ version of the game.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some strange narratives floating around online that I can only assume stem from some people either not fully being able to express what they were hoping for, or that some people are only paying attention to some of the bigger highlights of the playtests. For example, I’m hearing that Kobold Press isn’t making enough changes, or that they are effectively making no changes, and honestly, I was kind of surprised at the number…

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Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy: Expediency and Expendability

Chamomile Has A Blog

This essay is about why labeling necromancers as inherently evil aligned is dumb. To summarize, since True Resurrection works whether or not the target’s original body has been turned into an undead, animating an undead clearly does not affect the target’s soul at all (also, in D&D souls are definitely real, so we don’t need to worry about that argument at all). In most editions of the game, mindless undead like skeletons and zombies are completely unable to act without the command of a necromancer. They’re given an evil alignment, but this doesn’t make any goddamn sense at all because they take no actions whatsoever of their own volition.

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Elves Are Dicks

Chamomile Has A Blog

So I’m going to talk about some Forgotten Realms lore. Specifically I’m going to talk about how elves are total dicks. Like most fantasy worlds riffing on Tolkien, Faerun used to be ruled by elves back in the era before humans were a big deal. Before that, though, was the era when dragons and giants battled one another for control of the world. How did we get from one to the other? How did elves take over from a world ruled by dragons? Numerical superiority? Aid from friendly metallic dragons? Alliance with the giants?

Unfortunately, the answer is dickishness.

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Elven Lifespans Should Be A Bigger Deal Than They Are

Chamomile Has A Blog

Elves are dicks. I wrote an article about it and I stand by it — in nearly every D&D setting, elves have been somewhere between moderately and extremely dickish (Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, two of the biggest D&D settings around, lean towards the extreme side). So, when I say that elven lifespans should be a huge deal and that middle-aged elves should logically have crazy-high character levels even if they’re bog standard elven guards or the local apothecary or whatever, that’s not because I’m an ardent supporter of the «misunderstanding Tolkien» school of worldbuilding, it’s because being able to live for a very long time is a huge advantage which is pretty thoroughly underestimated by D&D. I use elves as an example here, but dwarves are quite similar.

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Darkest Dungeon Heroes Are Not Cannon Fodder

Chamomile Has A Blog

Darkest Dungeon seems almost like it was designed with me in mind. It has a grim atmosphere and a setting that is at least slightly non-standard, going for a 17th century vibe over your standard 15th century high fantasy affair, using Lovecraftian reimaginings of standard D&D monsters like skeletons and orcs to populate its dungeons. It lets the imagination run wild with who your heroes are, using a few stray lines of characterization to provide an outline for the player to fill in, creating a personal attachment to them. Being defeated has an actual cost, which means if you mess up, you can keep playing and let that defeat be part of your story, instead of constantly reloading, backing up and retelling the story over and over again until you land on the version where you are never once defeated, an invincible juggernaut. The sting of defeat is enough to…

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How Dungeons React to Intruders

Chamomile Has A Blog

Generally speaking, a dungeon has enough firepower in it to completely slaughter a party. Generally speaking, a party beats the dungeon. Why does the party win? They have a number of key tactical advantages that players tend to get good at over time. They aren’t usually able to articulate why the things they’re doing work, but they figure out what works and stick to it, leveraging these advantages without even being able to tell other people what they are. So what are they?

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GM’s Guide: Building an Interesting Dungeon

Chamomile Has A Blog

Variety

Enemy Variety

The second key to good dungeon design is variety. Dungeons are big and players don’t want to fight the same encounter over and over again while clearing them. Even if you have a one-page dungeon that’s just the lair of some orcs, you should still include enough variety to keep things interesting. Use an Eye of Gruumsh and an Orc Warchief as boss encounters in certain rooms, give some orcs longbows instead of greataxes and have them engage at range while their standard orc buddies hold the frontline, give some orcs dire wolf mounts to make them into powerful cavalry, and now you have five different encounters (including the standard “just a bunch of orcs”) without even dipping into room design, traps, making unique monsters, or having multiple factions in the same dungeon.

Room Variety

Room design is an important part of encounter variety, but make…

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GM’s Guide: Building an Interesting Dungeon

Chamomile Has A Blog

Variety

Enemy Variety

The second key to good dungeon design is variety. Dungeons are big and players don’t want to fight the same encounter over and over again while clearing them. Even if you have a one-page dungeon that’s just the lair of some orcs, you should still include enough variety to keep things interesting. Use an Eye of Gruumsh and an Orc Warchief as boss encounters in certain rooms, give some orcs longbows instead of greataxes and have them engage at range while their standard orc buddies hold the frontline, give some orcs dire wolf mounts to make them into powerful cavalry, and now you have five different encounters (including the standard “just a bunch of orcs”) without even dipping into room design, traps, making unique monsters, or having multiple factions in the same dungeon.

Room Variety

Room design is an important part of encounter variety, but make…

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GM’s Guide: Building a Believable Dungeon

Chamomile Has A Blog

Building a Dungeon Crawl

There are three keys to building an effective dungeon crawl: Believability, variety, and non-linearity.

Believability

The first key is believability. Dungeons are sometimes laid out essentially (or even literally) at random, with the first room containing a pack of goblins, the second room containing an ogre, and the third a displacer moose. If the players attack the goblins, the ogre won’t hear and come to investigate. If they kill the goblins, retreat, rest up, and return, the first room will still be full of dead goblins and the ogre will still be waiting around in room two. The dungeon will have no notes for what the ogre and goblins and displacer moose are even doing there. They’re just the dungeon, a bunch of monsters camping on a bunch of treasure for players to kill. This problem is getting more and more rare as published modules…

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Video GM’s Guide: Combat Encounters

Chamomile Has A Blog

Today in the video GM’s guide, we discuss combat encounters, and the actual video part of the video creeps towards being relevant. Not particularly close, mind you, but closer than it was before.

In Iron Fang Invasion, the party scouts out the Hollow Hills in a string of random encounters that Paizo apparently thinks are thrilling. In fairness to them, these encounters might serve a pacing purpose for parties who didn’t turn the cheat codes on and make all encounters trivial.

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GM’s Guide 5: Stealth Encounters

Chamomile Has A Blog

The video GM’s guide continues, this time without an accompanying Iron Fang Invasion video. My grandmother’s funeral landed direct on the day we usually record that, which means there isn’t one from that week. It turns out there are some occasions that can interrupt my usually impeccable schedule. Anyway, today in the GM’s guide we’re talking about stealth encounters, something which really would’ve benefited from actually relevant video footage, which I did not have time to record and do not happen to have lying around from my regular games.

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Calmer GM: How To Make Better Traps

Chamomile Has A Blog

The Angry GM has a tendency to write 500 words of good GM advice buried under 5000 words of schtick and digressions. Calmer GM (props to Captain Person for the name) is an Angry GM article with the schtick written out. Occasionally this results in interesting but irrelevant anecdotes on like the history of video game emulation or whatever being left out. Usually it just means cutting entire paragraphs of effusive self-praise that’s supposed to come across as comedic hyperbole but which make you start to wonder if maybe this guy is an actual narcissist after the third straight paragraph.

Today’s Calmer GM is Traps Suck (original). I don’t know if there will be more.

The Problem With Traps

The standard way for adding traps to D&D is to have lots of dice rolls, at the end of which someone is either hurt or not. You compare the trap’s…

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Elven Lifespans Should Be A Bigger Deal Than They Are

Matters of Critical Insignificance

Elves are dicks. I wrote an article about it and I stand by it — in nearly every D&D setting, elves have been somewhere between moderately and extremely dickish (Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, two of the biggest D&D settings around, lean towards the extreme side). So, when I say that elven lifespans should be a huge deal and that middle-aged elves should logically have crazy-high character levels even if they’re bog standard elven guards or the local apothecary or whatever, that’s not because I’m an ardent supporter of the «misunderstanding Tolkien» school of worldbuilding, it’s because being able to live for a very long time is a huge advantage which is pretty thoroughly underestimated by D&D. I use elves as an example here, but dwarves are quite similar.

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Alternative Party Structures

Matters of Critical Insignificance

The overwhelming majority of tabletop RPGs rely on the same basic party paradigm that’s been with us since the hobby was some house rules for Chainmail: Three to seven dudes with varying skills work together to accomplish some shared goal. Even if the goal is something mercenary, like amassing wealth, it’s a conceit of the game that the party will work together rather than double-crossing each other for a bigger share, and the game goes very poorly if that conceit is ignored[1]. Even if one person is very noble and idealistic and another is very mercenary and cynical, it’s assumed that this is going to be a buddy cop story where the two overcome their differences and learn to work together (and also there’s a third guy, but he doesn’t roleplay so much, mostly just swings his sword at the orcs).

There’s a reason that’s the norm and it’s a…

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Learning Spells vs. Learning Fighting Styles

Five Moons RPG

For the purpose of this blog post, a «fighting style» is a combat-related martial ability you can learn, such as Power Attack, Combat Expertise, Dodge, or an actual fighting style feat from Ultimate Combat such as Snake Style. And a «spell» is… a spell, just like what you think it means in PF/D&D (fireball, magic missile, and so on).

(Update September 23, 2014: If you like this post and where these ideas are going, please check out the kickstarter for my Five Moons RPG, which uses these ideas. Thanks!)

Learning Wizard Spells

In 1st edition AD&D, it was expensive and time-consuming for a wizard to learn spells.

A wizard’s main ways of getting new spells were (costs are according to Unearthed Arcana, fuzzed a bit by my memory):

* Copying spells from other wizards (usually 1 for 1 plus a fee to the other wizard).

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Spells Per Day Tables Are a Lot of Work for Little Gain

Five Moons RPG

This is a thought exercise. There’s a TLDR at the bottom.

In the Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook, the spells per day tables for spellcasting classes are a weird place in the game rules. You get X spells per day for each spell level, but there’s a separate table (in a different chapter) to determine how many extra spells per day you get for having a high ability score.

(Update September 23, 2014: If you like this post and where these ideas are going, please check out the kickstarter for my Five Moons RPG, which uses these ideas. Thanks!)

It’s set up that way because you might have a character who doesn’t meet the ability score minimums for certain levels of spellcasting, . For example, a level 5 wizard with Int 11 has access to 3rd-level spell slots, but can’t actually prepare 3rd-level spells in those…

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The «Triviality» of Death in 3E and the 5,000 gp Diamond Cost

Sean K Reynolds

The recent article about familiars prompted a question about death in Five Moons RPG. Namely, should coming back from the dead have a significant cost to it like it does in 3E/PF (5,000 gp diamond, negative level, and so on)? Does the lack of this sort of cost make death a trivial issue for adventurers?

I was involved in a discussion on the Paizo boards a few years ago about this topic. This article is a summary of my thoughts on the matter[1].

(And special thanks to all the people involved in the discussion—many of whom I’m paraphrasing in this post—it was fun.)

(In all of this discussion, nobody was able to come up with a game mechanics reason why raise dead should have a 5,000 gp material component cost, but plane shift and teleport—both 5th-level spells—should not. There were plenty of «I don’t like the feel of…

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Trivia & Anecdotes: D&D 3.0 Monster Manual

Sean K Reynolds

In 1999, I was the first person outside of the 3e design team who got to write monsters for the new 3e Monster Manual. At the time, the 3e design team was Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams; Jonathan was the lead on the PH, Monte was the lead on the DMG, and Skip was the lead on the MM. Writing three huge books and getting them ready for publication in a short window of release dates was a big endeavor, and the MM was the most «modular» of the three, in that you could have another designer come on board and design a bunch of monsters without having to worry too much about how they integrated with the rest of the system. By then I had established reasonable design chops on other projects, written a long document analyzing the 2e spells for the 3e team…

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Trivia & Anecdotes: Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting 3E

Sean K Reynolds

(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on, in chronological order of when they were published. If you see a number in brackets like this [1], it’s referring to a footnote at the bottom of this post.)

cover of the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting

This is the first of several T&A articles about the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting—a big book with a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff I want to talk about, and I’m more likely to finish writing about it if I break this into several small articles instead of one big one. 🙂

Set the Wayback Machine to early 2000. The D&D team has just about wrapped up the design for the three core 3E D&D books (Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, and Monster Manual), and it’s time…

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