Online Dungeon Master

May 31, 2010

The Death of Zod

Filed under: DM Lessons, In-Person D&D — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 10:16 PM

I was planning to write about more advanced MapTool macros that I’ve created for player characters today, but my plans changed after our in-person D&D game.  This is the first time our group has been able to get together in almost a month, and we decided to use the Memorial Day holiday as an opportunity to barbecue,  hang out and do some adventuring.  The food was great, if I do say so myself (I did the cooking).  Barbecue ribs with sauce from Sonny’s Barbecue (a chain that we know from Florida), plus burgers, grilled veggies, baked sweet potatoes – good times!

As for the gaming, the last time we played was when we fought the infamous down-leveled Troll Vinespeaker that nearly destroyed us.  Fortunately, we finished that guy off at the end of our last session.  Our group returned to the rebel camp that we were assisting, rested, and helped the rebels relocate their camp (since the bad guys now knew where the old one was).  My wizard, Zod, used a ritual for the first time ever to conjure Tenser’s Floating Disk in order to carry some of the wounded rebels.  The rest of the party carried supplies, helped navigate through the woods, and inspired the camp onward, with great success.  We then set off to a nearby cave that the rebels were hoping to dig into in order to create a secret tunnel into the city that they were rebelling against – but which had been discovered to contain a cave troll.  Fire supplies at the ready, we ventured into the cave.

The troll’s lair was interesting – it was a giant lake with a narrow path running around it.  The troll was tall enough to stand and walk in the lake, with the goal of grabbing adventurers, using them as weapons against one another, and dragging them underwater from time to time.  The water made our use of fire a little more difficult.  If the troll was under the water, for instance, Zod’s flaming sphere couldn’t hit him.  Still, with good tactics (and some crazy-awesome dice rolling from Barbara’s ranger, Violet), we finally defeated the cave troll and got some good loot.  Most of us had used up our daily powers and action points, but we still had plenty of healing surges left and we figured that the troll was probably the nastiest thing we would encounter, so we decided to explore a little further.  After all, if the rebels were going to be digging a tunnel in this cave, we should let them know what to expect up ahead.

A short while later, our party came to a small waterfall, behind which was an area that looked like still water.  We spotted an amulet in that area, but Zod’s Mage Hand wasn’t able to penetrate the surface.  Our warden recognized the “still water” as some type of slime creature, so I cast a fire burst at it, and the battle was on.

We were fighting a whole bunch of slimes – a big yellow one, two nasty green ones that liked to engulf us, four gray ones that sucked our Fortitude defenses down, and something like 15 slime minions that slid us two squares every time they hit us.  Bree’s defender was soon slid to the far side of the chamber and was unable to get back.  Zod tried to take out multiple monsters with Thunderwaves, but with mixed success.  Eventually we were surrounded and found ourselves in trouble.  We ended up with Kyle’s bard alive and the other three of us unconscious.  Barbara’s ranger made a miraculous natural 20 on her death save, which helped immensely.  The bard healed the warden, who was planning to come administer a potion to my wizard, Zod – when the yellow slide decided to attack Zod while he was unconscious.  That, friends, is called a Coup de Grace, and it’s an automatic critical hit – and a dead wizard.  Oops!  I didn’t feel that badly about it, honestly.  These things happen.

The rest of the party was able to escape the slime cave, and I headed to the computer to print out a character sheet for a Warlord I had rolled up a couple of weeks back (we needed more healing).  In a few minutes, though, the rest of the gang called me back into the room.  They had decided to call this an end point – not just for our session today, but for the campaign.  I was worried at first that somehow my letting Zod get killed caused the party to collapse, but it turned out that Barbara and Kyle were both rather unhappy with how they had built their characters from the start (Kyle because he was brand-new to Fourth Edition and really wanted a Monk, not a Bard, and Barbara because I had interfered too much when she was creating her character and it never really felt like HER character), Bree wanted to try her hand at DMing, and Nate was itching to play rather than DM.  So, we called it a campaign.  Bree will probably start us up again in three weeks with a pre-published adventure to get us going anew.

What lessons did I learn?  Well, first I learned that the death of a character is not catastrophic.  I’ll admit that I’m not great at role playing yet, so I probably wasn’t as attached to Zod as I could have been, but the thought of bringing in a brand-new character didn’t sound so bad to me, honestly.

Second, I think that character death is more acceptable when it feels fair.  The cave troll we fought was challenging (mostly because of the water) but fair.  The slimes were very numerous but fair.  Dying there didn’t seem like anything went horribly wrong – some bad luck, some tough monsters, maybe a questionable decision to push on without daily powers.  Had we ended up dying to the troll druid from our previous session, I would have been bitter, as I felt that monster was unintentionally overpowered.

Third, I’ll have to think about how I feel as a DM about the possibility of the campaign ending, perhaps abruptly.  While our DM, Nate, was happy for the chance to play instead of DM, he seemed to take the decision to end the campaign after this battle somewhat hard, as if it were his fault.  We were having fun with the campaign itself, but having two players with characters that they didn’t like all that much was a problem.  The notion of me rolling up a new character when Zod died basically got them thinking, “You know, a new character might be fun!” and things went from there.  It wasn’t Nate’s fault.  I think he worried that the encounters he put together were overpowered for our party, and maybe they were a little bit, but that’s because he used to work at Wizards of the Coast and was used to playing with people who ran super-optimized characters that would blow through any encounter equal to their level or even a little higher.  Did he make things too hard today?  No, I don’t think so.  Sometimes it’s right to flee, and we didn’t do that soon enough in the slime battle.  So it goes.

I had fun with my first real D&D campaign, and I’m glad that I’ll get the chance to hang out with this same group of friends to adventure together.  I find the idea of a new character, new DM and new campaign to be exciting, not depressing.  The only down side is that now I won’t get to play any D&D at all for several more weeks – but that’s mainly because I have some business travel coming up the weekend after next.  After that, game on!

May 30, 2010

MapTool macros – simple monster attacks

Filed under: Advice/Tools, Macros — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 1:48 PM

Over the past few days, I have become intensely interested in the MapTool macro language.  I started with the desire to have one-click access to my monsters’ attack powers.  I decided to write a macro for each monster that would create an attack roll (d20 plus whatever the monster’s attack modifier is) and a damage roll.  I’d add in text describing additional effects on a hit and even some buttons for non-attack macros just to remind myself what the powers could do (such as an Ooze’s ability to shift its speed).  For all of these attacks, I don’t want them showing up on the players’ chat boxes (hiding them behind the DM screen, so to speak), so I have all of the results go only to the GM.  Here is an example – an Adult Kruthik’s Claw attack:

[gm: “Attack roll: “]
[gm: 1d20+8] [gm: ” versus AC<br>”]
[gm: “Damage roll: “]
[gm: 1d10+3]

The fact that everything is within brackets that begin with “gm:” is the way that the output is hidden from the players.  Because the text is within these brackets, it must be enclosed in quotation marks (outside of brackets, you don’t need to put your text in quotes – it will just show up to everyone in the chat window).  Note that this also applies to the line break indicator from HTML <br> – outside of brackets you can just write it as <br>, but inside brackets it has to be put within quotation marks as “<br>”.  The dice programming is pretty straightforward.  1d20+8 is just what you think it would be.  The output from this macro will look something like this:

Kruthik Adult: Attack roll: 24 versus AC
Damage roll: 6

Here’s a slightly more involved example – the Kruthik Adult’s Toxic Spikes attack.

[gm: “Recharge 5/6; Result: “] [gm: d6 ] [gm: “<br>”]
[gm: “Two attacks against 2 different creatures<br>”]
[gm: “Ranged 5<br>”]
[gm: “Attack 1: “]
[gm: 1d20+7] [gm: ” versus AC; “]
[gm: 1d8+4]
[gm: ” damage and ongoing 5 poison damage and slowed (save ends both)<br>”]
[gm: “Attack 2: “]
[gm: 1d20+7] [gm: ” versus AC; “]
[gm: 1d8+4]
[gm: ” damage and ongoing 5 poison damage and slowed (save ends both)”]

The first line reminds me that this is a power that recharges on a roll of 5 or 6 on a d6 and then rolls a d6 to tell me whether the power recharges or not this turn.  If it doesn’t and I’ve already used it in this encounter, then I’ll just ignore the rest of the output.  The next two lines just remind me about what the power does (two attacks against two different creatures, within a range of five squares).  Then the macro generates two separate attack rolls, with the damage for each put on the same line.  There’s also some extra text explaining the ongoing damage and slowing effect.  The output is as follows:

Recharge 5/6; Result: 5
Two attacks against 2 different creatures
Ranged 5
Attack 1: 23 versus AC; 10 damage and ongoing 5 poison damage and slowed (save ends both)
Attack 2: 14 versus AC; 12 damage and ongoing 5 poison damage and slowed (save ends both)

Another example: the Blue Slime’s Stench Pulse burst attack:

[gm: “Once per encounter only.<br>”]
[gm: “Attack roll: “]
[gm: 1d20+6 ] [gm: ” versus Will<br>”]
[gm: “Hit: Targets are dazed and weakened (save ends both)”]

This just rolls the attack a single time, even though there could be several targets in the burst.  By D&D rules, each target should have a separate attack roll.  So, I would need to click the button once per target.  That’s okay, but it’s not very efficient, and the “Hit” line will be reprinted for each target instead of just one time.

Now, I hadn’t noticed this problem when I first put this macro together – it only became clear after I had put together some player character attack power macros.  Maybe my players will want to roll their own dice and telling the table what their results are, but I couldn’t resist – I wanted to program their powers in MapTool macros.  That’s for my next post.

May 27, 2010

I think I love MapTool

Filed under: Advice/Tools — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 10:58 PM

I’ve had a day to play around with MapTool.  When I first discovered this program for playing D&D online, I was very impressed, but still a little bit wary.  It seemed to do everything OpenRPG did, but better (with the possible exception of easy networking).  It had some slick features that Gametable lacked, but I didn’t know if it had dice macros.

Does MapTool have macros – that’s a good one!

MapTool, as it turns out, is all about macros.  See, I’m a very experienced programmer in languages such as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA – mainly for Excel).  When I discover the potential for programming in a game, I begin to salivate.  (I’m a former casual interactive fiction programmer.)  It turns out that MapTool lets you tie macros to individual tokens as well as to your campaign as a whole (for all of the players to use) and to your installation of MapTool (global macros).  This means that, for instance, you can put a monster token on the board and then start writing as many macros as you want for it.   Each macro will create a little button that’s available whenever you select the token.

I created a macro called “Simple Attack” and then imported it to every new token on the battlefield.  This would put a button connected to the token called “Attack” (in red letters, just for style).  When clicked, the Attack button would send messages to the chat window that only the GM can see, first with an attack roll (d20+0 versus AC by default) and then a damage roll (d6+0 by default).  I would edit this macro for the new token.  For instance, on a Giant Rat, I edited it to be called “Bite” and changed the attack roll to d20+6 versus AC and the damage to 3 (no roll).  On an Ochre Jelly, I changed the name to “Slam”, the attack to d20+8 versus AC and the damage to 2d6+1 and ongoing 5 acid damage (save ends).  This will all automatically show up in my chat window whenever I click the appropriate button.  No more looking up the attack modifier, what defense it’s attacking, how much damage, etc.  Just click the button and inform the player of the PC’s doom!

Naturally, the same can be done for player tokens.  I haven’t created any macros for the players yet, but I fully intend to do so.  I’ll be interested to see whether the players use the macros for their powers or not –  I’m guessing they probably will.

I’ve also set up each token with appropriate properties – hit points, defenses, speed, ability scores, etc.  Whenever you mouse over a token, a little portrait shows up with all of these stats next to it.  When I roll to hit Reflex against Barbara’s character,I can just mouse over Barbara’s token and see what her Reflex defense is.  Way, way cool.

MapTool ConditionsI’ve also customized the conditions I’m using in my campaign.  To the left, you can see what I’ve set the various conditions to look like.  Whenever a character is bloodied, I’ll set the “Bloodied” state to be checked, and a red dot will appear in the bottom right corner of the token’s picture.  If they’re prone, they get a blue ring.  Slowed, a red yield sign.  Dazed is a green cross.  I’ve added a purple triangle to remind us of ongoing damage.  Unconscious characters will have a gray X, which will become red if the character dies.  I absolutely love this.  I know there are more conditions I’ll need to add (I just realized that I need to show which tokens are marked, for instance), but these should get the game going.  Honestly, this is an area where MapTool is superior to a real life game.  It’s a pain in the butt to put little beads next to minis on a physical battle map to show which ones are marked by our warden, which are tagged by our ranger as her Hunter’s Quarry, which are bloodied, etc.  In MapTool you can’t miss it (as long as you know what the shapes mean, of course).

The down side of MapTool is that I do have to have map files prepared to import.  I found a great site with beautiful Keep on the Shadowfell maps called the Mad Mapper.  While I love the maps of the Keep that I built myself in Gametable (mine are more colorful), I’m having tremendous trouble with Gametable’s Export Map function.  This function is supposed to export the map as a JPG file, which I could load into MapTool after resizing, but for some reason the exporter either exports a blank map or a map with just a few objects from the top left corner of my map.  I hate going with screen shots, so for now I’m stuck with maps I find online.  I’d love to keep building maps within Gametable, but if I can’t export them as images that’s just not going to work.

What do you use for building map images?  Do you just draw in Photoshop?  That seems like it would be tremendously difficult if you want to stick to a grid.  I’m open to suggestions!

I should also mention that I’ve discovered the DND 4e Combat Manager, a totally slick little tool that lets you import your characters from Character Builder and your monsters from Adventure Tools and then run combats.  There seems to be a bug that prevents the Combat Manager from importing many of the Character Builder stats (max HP, defenses, ability scores, etc.) but it does import names and powers, and I added the numbers for my three PCs manually.  The monsters import perfectly.  With this tool, I can roll initiative, see what powers are available (including tracking encounter and daily powers for the PCs if they like), keep track of HP, and manage conditions that have certain end points (save ends, end of next turn, etc.).  I love the condition reminders for things like ongoing damages or saving throws.  I don’t know if I’ll end up preferring this program over my homebrew Excel tracker, but I’ll admit that it’s looking pretty attractive.

As always, I love getting comments, so please let me know your thoughts.

May 26, 2010

MapTool – my new friend!

Filed under: Advice/Tools — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 3:09 PM

My online D&D game is currently in the middle of a three and a half week (at least) hiatus.  We last played one week ago when Barbara and I were in Boston and had to use OpenRPG instead of our preferred Gametable because of problems with networking from the hotel connection.  Lane is busy with work every evening this week, and then she and Zach are leaving for a two week vacation (though fortunately we’ll get to see them this Saturday as they pass through Denver).  So, we probably won’t be able to actually play again until mid June – unless Lane and Zach decide they want to spend some vacation time on the computer playing D&D.

What’s an online DM to do when he can’t run a game?  Research!  I’ve gotten more involved in the broader online D&D community (I’ll put up a links page eventually).  I’ve discovered lots of blogs that I really enjoy, all via the RPG Bloggers Network.  I’ve applied to join the network, and I really hope to be accepted.  I’ve been reading lots of posts on ENWorld and keeping up with new info on the Wizards of the Coast D&D home page.

In a few of these places, I’ve seen references to MapTool.  Now, I had briefly encountered MapTool early on, before I ever thought I’d actually be running a D&D game online, and then promptly forgot about it.  Seeing all of the people who said that they use MapTool for their games online, though, I knew I had to check it out.

I haven’t run a game yet, and I haven’t even tried any of the networking yet, but so far all I can say is “Wow.”  MapTool appears to be OpenRPG except much, much better.  In common with OpenRPG, it assumes that you’ve created your maps in advance, which you then load into the game.  Gametable, on the other hand, is better for drawing maps on the fly.  Maybe MapTool can do that, too – I don’t know yet – but I’ll admit that even in Gametable I’ve created maps in advance so far.

MapTool really shines in the token/mini/pog department.  First, a note on nomenclature: Every program calls the representation of characters and monsters on the map something different.  OpenRPG uses “Miniatures.”  Gametable uses “Pogs.”  MapTool uses “Tokens.”  They’re all the same thing.  MapTool’s are flat-out better, though.  You can use any image you like as a token in MapTool, and when you drag it onto the game table MapTool will resize it automatically to one square (“Medium” in D&D parlance).  If you want it to be a bigger monster (two squares by two squares), simply right click on the token, select Size and change it to “Large.”  With other objects (tokens too, though I think it’s less useful for tokens) MapTool will let you resize them freely just by clicking on a corner and dragging.  You can distort them this way, too – making a square object rectangular, for instance.

Token Conditions

An elf token that's prone (flipped), bloodied (red dot), incapacitated (gray X) and dazed (yellow triangle)

MapTool has built-in functions to let you change the way tokens look and how they’re named.  For instance, when playing in Gametable or OpenRPG, I would literally change the name of a token whenever it was bloodied from, for instance, “Goblin 1” to “Goblin 1 – Bloodied.”  This was a pain in the butt, and it made the screen very cluttered with all of these long name boxes overlapping with one another.  In MapTool, you can put a red border around the token to show that it’s bloodied if you like – done.  There other similar options – a black X over the token if it’s dead, a gray X if it’s incapacitated, various dots and shapes to put over it to show any conditions you want (slowed, dazed, etc.).  You can even flip the image vertically (which I’ll probably use to show prone) or horizontally.  You can show a life bar if you like (I can’t imagine using this, but hey, you never know).  Also, you can create your own conditions and markers for them – dots of any color in any corner, shapes of any color over the token, etc.

When moving tokens, you can drag and see how long a given path is, add waypoints to show that you’re going up diagonally three squares and then down diagonally three squares to avoid an enemy, measure the distance between two points, etc.  There’s just a lot of power and flexibility when it comes to tokens.

Of course, MapTool doesn’t have EVERYTHING that I want – or at least I have not yet found everything.  It does have a built-in dice roller using the text box – you type “/roll” followed by the instructions for what you want to roll.  For instance, you could type “/roll 2d8+4” and get the result of rolling two eight-sided dice and adding four to the total.  There’s also an add-in called Dice Box that gives you a slick-looking interface for rolling dice, with images of each die you’re rolling (but using fundamentally the same built-in functions in MapTool).  I have not yet found any functionality that replicates the dice macros from Gametable, and I have to say that I grew to love those dice macros.  As a DM, I would create macros such as “Goblin Warrior Spear Attack,” “Goblin Warrior Spear Damage,” “Goblin Bombardier Javelin Attack,” and so on.  Once I set these up, I never had to look them up again.  “The goblin stabs you with his spear – the attack roll is (click) 18 versus AC, and deals you (click) four damage.”  The players could do the same thing for their own various attacks (though Barbara prefers to roll physical dice and tell us the result – I trust her).  MapTool doesn’t seem to have this, though I know that you can program your own macros.  Maybe I can figure out how to set this same thing up.  If anyone out there has used MapTool and has advice for me about it – especially rolling dice – I’d love to hear it in the comments.

Over the next couple of weeks I plan to play around with MapTool to see how good it might be compared to OpenRPG or Gametable.  I’m pretty certain that it’s strictly superior to OpenRPG, and if I can figure out the dice rolling it might even replace Gametable.  We’ll have to set how the networking goes, too, but I’m very optimistic so far.

May 23, 2010

Fourth Edition for people who prefer earlier editions

Filed under: DM Lessons, Editions — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 8:40 AM

Karl (one of the people I had the pleasure of playing old-school D&D with last week in Albany) made an insightful comment on the blog that got me thinking.  He pointed out that some people don’t like all of the emphasis on tactical movement in D&D Fourth Edition, and also that there has been a collapse of many different skills into a smaller number (with the “taking ranks in a skill” concept radically changed to just a zero-one binary of being trained in a skill or not being trained in it).  It got me thinking: What should a person who doesn’t like some of these elements of 4e do?

The simplest option (and the cheapest), of course, is to play an earlier edition.  OSRIC lets you play something like First Edition for free, and as I understand it the System Resource Document lets you play something like Third Edition or 3.5 for free.  So, if you prefer an older edition, you can play one.  That’s what Shawn’s group does, and it seems to work for them.

But are there things you could take from 4e and combine with earlier editions to make something more to your liking?  I think there are.  When I think about it, 4e feels like it could be quite modular if you wanted it to be.

First, flavor.  If you just love the flavor of Fourth Edition and want to use it with an earlier rule set, that’s obviously very easy.  Sure, you’ll have to change around numbers on monsters and so on, but their descriptions can be identical and their powers can be adapted to a different set of rules.  If you like the 4e gods, use them.  Setting information, dungeon maps, whatever you like can be easily transferred to another edition’s rules.  I’ll admit that I don’t personally have strong feelings about the flavor of 4e, but if you do, have at it!

Next, powers.  This is one that I think you either love or hate about 4e.  In Fourth Edition, characters start with (in general) two at-will powers that they can use as much as they want, one encounter power that they can only use once every battle, and one daily power that they can only use once per day (and they get more as they go up in level).  In earlier editions, the only equivalents you had to at-will powers were melee or ranged basic attacks (I swing my sword, I shoot my crossbow, etc.).  You could also do something that’s pure role playing (I talk to the bad buy or my allies, I try to hide, I jump onto a table, etc.), and that’s still there in 4e, too.  Magic users in earlier editions had a certain number of spells they could cast per day (very few at low levels), which gives them a little bit of a daily power feel, but other classes don’t seem to have any equivalents.  I like the whole power system in 4e, partly because everyone has at-wills that are useful in combat and partly because I like the tension of when to use dailies and encounter powers versus saving them for later.

Could you use this power system in an earlier edition?  I don’t see why not.  Some powers have certain ranges on them or a number of squares that they affect, but I think a good 1e DM could handle that stuff without breaking out a battle map.  Weren’t there the equivalent of bursts and blasts in earlier editions, such as with a fireball?  I assume the DM would say, “Okay, these three bad guys are clustered together, so your fireball hits all of them, but the other two are far enough away that they’re safe.”  Same idea here.  Powers that generate something like difficult terrain would be tougher without a battle map, and you probably wouldn’t want to use those unless the DM really liked mentally keeping track of this stuff.  Even there, you could rule that a power that created difficult terrain around a bad guy would make it hard for them to charge you on the next turn, and it’s up to the DM to say whether they can get to you or not.  This is basically playing 4e without a map or minis, and while I like the map and minis, I think a group could absolutely play a great 4e game without them, as long as they weren’t nitpickers for EXACTLY how close imaginary point A is to imaginary point B.

How about the collapse of skills?  Here’s an area where it’s almost totally unrelated to combat, so you can separate the two.  If you love the powers and maybe even the map-and-minis combat of 4e but you prefer the larger number of skills where you spend ranks in them, as you had in 3e and 3.5, then just go with the older skill system.  I think the new skill system was probably designed to be easier for new players to grasp, and I agree that it’s likely a sign of Wizards of the Coast de-emphasizing role playing to emphasize tactical combat.  If you are cool with more complexity in your skills, though, use the older skill system and enjoy!

Now let’s talk about numbers.  I must say that the transition to “higher AC is harder to hit” in Third Edition was a good change, period.  Maybe someone can convince me that the old system, where you want to lower your AC and you have to figure out your THAC0 and all of that, makes good sense.  But I personally don’t see it.  This is something I would adopt wholesale, even if I wanted to play an older edition.  I also think that having to use a table to look up whether an attack hits a monster, depending upon the class of the PC who hit, seems overly complex and doesn’t add anything to the game, at least as far as my limited understanding goes.  But hey, if you love the tables, stick with them.

I don’t know enough about the other numbers in older editions to say how they would differ from 4e, but I get the impression that HP totals are lower (for both characters and monsters) in 1e, and that it’s probably true that battles are swingier (you get lucky and kill a bad guy right at the start, or you get unlucky and he kills you with one hit).  That’s fine if you like it, but I imagine that if you didn’t like it, you could probably use 4e as a guide for hit points and damage output.  Of course, some people complain about “grind” in 4e, with battles taking too long due to the high hit points all around, so maybe there’s a good middle ground.  I know that I personally wouldn’t want to be a wizard running around with 4 HP and scared of my own shadow, but hey, maybe that’s just a great opportunity for role playing!

There are lots of other little details that could probably be taken from 4e by themselves if you wanted, and I think doing so would be easy enough if you’re cool with house rules.  Character creation using a point buy system is something that’s not unique to 4e, and I would personally use it over rolling dice (now that I’ve had a chance to try it both ways).  Using Fortitude, Reflex and Will as defenses other than AC that an attack might go after is something I could take or leave, and if you preferred using them as saving throws as in older editions, you certainly could do so.  Conditions that “save ends” seem fun to me, and you could easily introduce those to a First Edition game, and so on.

Ultimately, you’ve got to go where the fun is for you and your group.  If you’re happy with the rules of one edition (or one non-D&D game) as written, then life is easy for you.  If there are things that annoy you about the rules of your current edition, you might be able to pilfer different rules from other editions.  Me, I like 4e just fine as written, but if I got to the point that something about it just grated on my nerves, I wouldn’t hesitate to use house rules to change it.

May 21, 2010

Old-school Dungeons and Dragons

Filed under: In-Person D&D, Play — Tags: , , — OnlineDM @ 9:38 AM

Barbara and I are on a trip to the northeast from our home in Colorado.  We spent five nights in Boston, where we found time to get together twice on OpenRPG to play in our main online D&D session with Lane and Zach.  On the sixth day, we drove to Albany to meet our friend Sara and her family.  Sara just had a baby (her second) via C-section on Monday of this week, but three days later she was home and ready for her weekly D&D game with her husband Scott and their friends.  Since she knew Barbara and I liked D&D, she invited us to join them for the evening.

The game was first edition D&D, which we’ve never played before.  I found a document online called OSRIC, which seems to be an attempt to build an open, freely available rules system that more or less mirrors D&D first edition.  I glanced at OSRIC a little bit, but didn’t spend much time on it.  When we arrived at Sara’s place (and the baby is adorable, by the way!) and got ready to start playing, I chatted for a few minutes with Shawn, the DM.  He explained that, since all we have really played so far is Fourth Edition, we haven’t really played Dungeons and Dragons – we’ve just played a miniatures game.  He’s definitely an edition purist, and not at all a fan of Magic: the Gathering (a game I played for years, though I’ve pretty much replaced it with D&D now), which he sees as being related to Fourth Edition.  Fair enough – I’m always up for learning something new!

Barbara and I would be playing the characters of Ert and Bernie, who are hired henchmen of the main party.  We were brothers, a half-orc and a half-elf (apparently our mom got around).  We were only paid to carry stuff, and would defend ourselves if need be, but weren’t looking to get into the fray.  The game session lasted about four hours, of which we spent about three hours goofing around and joking with the group.  It was fun, and we fit right in.

The gaming itself, I have to say, was not meaningfully different from what we’re used to in Fourth Edition.  Sure, we didn’t use minis to show where our characters were standing on a map, but that didn’t feel like a big deal.  We only got into combat a couple of times, and the flow of combat was more or less what I was expecting.  Now, the specific numbers are wildly different from Fourth Edition.  Our wizard had four hit points, and our barbarian had a massive 16.  Armor classes are the opposite of what we’re used to (lower ACs make you harder to hit), and when you roll to hit a bad guy, the DM has to look up a table to see, based on your class, whether your attack hits or not.  There were some occasions where I felt like some of the things that exist in Fourth Edition would have helped, such as a nature or history check here or there, but those are minor quibbles.  The battles were a little underwhelming – usually just one or two bad guys, with nothing more exciting than swinging a sword or shooting a crossbow bolt going on – but I’m guessing that’s just because those were the encounters that happened to come up this time around.  The role playing was the same, and just as fun.

My guess is that old-school players don’t like Fourth Edition largely because it’s entirely possible to play Fourth Edition without any role playing.  You could play it as just a game where you move tokens around a board and play cards that make something happen (your powers).  You don’t HAVE to play it this way, though, and we don’t – we emphasize role playing, creative thinking, etc.  It’s way more fun that way.

Another complaint of Shawn’s is that all of the Fourth Edition classes are equivalent to one another in a lot of ways.  The impact of a first-level at-will power is going to be pretty similar across various classes, as will a third-level encounter power, etc.  He feels that the only differences are in the flavor text (one is a wizard casting a spell that causes a missile of force to hit an enemy while another is a rogue throwing a rock at an enemy using a sling, and so on).  First of all, I disagree somewhat here – there are actual mechanical differences, especially in daily and utility powers, but I do agree that the game is built to be balanced so that you don’t have one class’s abilities totally outshining another’s.  I actually like the balance, though – if you want to be a wizard, great!  You have useful things to do at all times.  Cleric?  No problem!  Whatever you want to be, you’ll be able to do something interesting.

I’ve heard of earlier editions as having the “linear warriors, quadratic wizards” phenomenon, where wizards are pathetically weak at low levels and crazy powerful at high levels, while warriors are pretty good at any level.  I think Fourth Edition gets away from that, and this is a good thing in my opinion.

So, D&D is D&D as far as I can see.  You role play, you fight stuff, you have fun.  The details differ, but the underlying game is the same.

Hotel room Dungeons and Dragons part 2

Filed under: Maps, Play — Tags: , , , — OnlineDM @ 8:01 AM

I’m hoping to get up two posts today, as I’ve had two different sessions of D&D in the last two days.  I’ll start with Wednesday evening, when Barbara and I in our hotel room in Boston got online with Lane and Zach from their home in Florida to continue our adventures in the Keep on the Shadowfell.  In our first session in the Keep this past Sunday, we had to improvise in a hurry as we learned that we wouldn’t be able to use Gametable due to networking issues in the hotel, and I switched things over to OpenRPG in a rush.  This time, I was prepared – I had already converted the maps over to OpenRPG and was ready to go (the OpenRPG map of the first level of the Keep is available here or on the downloads page – but my players shouldn’t go poking through it just yet!).  We called each other on Skype, connected to the appropriate room on an OpenRPG server, and we were gaming!

We started with some back story.  When we first began playing together, it was a big rush and no one had any ideas on back story for their characters, why they were adventuring together, etc.  I had thought about this over the past few days and filled in the party (since they were willing to hear my thoughts).  All of the characters are female, so I explained that they had all been approached when they were younger girls (the human equivalent of 10-12 years old) by a Deva named Juni Lamplighter (or one of her allies) to come to the Academy of Adventure.  Juni, being a Deva, remembered times when the world was not so dark and chaotic and wanted to bring some light and order to the world, so she decided to set up a place where individuals with talent, primarily girls who felt like outcasts, could train to become adventurers and work to do good in the world.  The PCs were all pupils at the Academy, and Juni had sent them to Winterhaven after they finished the main body of their training as a way to get started in making a difference.  Yes, it’s a bit Hogwarts-esque, but that’s not a problem.  The players seemed fine with this, and it provides both a reason for adventuring as well as some future plot hooks, so we’ll run with it.

At the end of the previous session, the party had just cleared out the goblin torture chamber and decided to rescue Splug, a goblin prisoner who had been put in a cell for cheating (or as he called it, “being good at playing cards against”) the other goblins.  He offered to serve as a porter for the party and tell them what he knows of the Keep if they would free him.  They let him out, and he told them about the excavation where goblins were digging for some unspecified treasure (but hadn’t found anything), the stairs that lead down to some caves, the main door and the secret door to the chamber of the goblin leader, and the door that led to the deeper part of the Keep, where Splug had never been.

Balgron the Fat

Balgron the Fat

The PCs decided to use the secret door to sneak into the sleeping quarters of the goblin boss, Balgron the Fat, to surprise him while he was asleep.  Zach’s rogue rolled great on her Stealth checks to get into the bedchamber, and they decided to try to tie up Balgron while he slept in order to interrogate him about the rest of the Keep.  This was awesome – the players were thinking outside the box!  They had rope in their packs, so I ruled that this would require a Dexterity check (figuring that Balgron would probably wake up while being tied).  Well, the dexterity roll was crazy high, so I ruled that they succeeded in tying up Balgron, but he woke up as they finished.  Balgron was confused for a moment, but as soon as they started asking him questions, he yelled for his guards and we rolled initiative.

There was only one other goblin in the room with Balgron, and I had that guy poke his head into the curtained area that surrounded Balgron’s bed, see the situation, and run for the door to get the other troops.  The door was locked, so it took him a little time, during which time the PCs attacked him to try to stop him.  Lane’s character had been hanging back, keeping an eye on Splug, but when the battle began and Lane’s character ran into the fray, Splug skedaddled.  The party wasn’t able to stop the goblin guard before he opened the door and raised the alarm.  A bunch of other guards came running down the hall, and the party decided to try to close and re-lock the door rather than just fighting (creative!).

I ruled that Balgron had another copy of the key on him, and since the rogue had decided to sneak attack the crap out of him while he was tied up (not very nice, but brutally effective), Balgron decided to cooperate to save his own hide.  He told the PCs where the key was, and they locked the door.  Naturally, the goblins began trying to bash it down, and wouldn’t you know it, one of the little minions got a critical hit in throwing himself at the door, so I ruled that it broke off its hinges and was now open again.

Balgron was willing to answer some questions now, and also willing to tell his guards to go away, which they did.  The party started asking him about the Keep, who hired him (Kalarel), what he was doing there, etc., and he answered more or less honestly.  Then the party opened up his treasure chest and he started bargaining for his life.  The chest had some gold, an enchanted short sword (which Zach’s rogue coveted) and some potions of healing (which the party had none of, and I figured they could use them).  Balgron was willing to give up the potions in exchange for his life.  The rogue held out for the sword, and Balgron grew enraged, burst out of his ropes and called the guards back in.

The ensuing battle was actually not all that interesting.  Balgron was already badly bloodied, and the fact that all of the goblins were coming down a narrow passageway made them easy fodder for Barbara’s swordmage’s enlarged dragon breath.  A few got into the bedroom and Balgron did his goblin shuffle once, but that was all she wrote. There was barely any damage to any of the PCs.  They rolled really well, and used smart, creative tactics.

Next up, the party knew about the excavation going on, but they weren’t interested in taking on those goblins – they wanted to go down into the caves.  They wanted the digging goblins to leave peacefully and debated whether to charge in and fight them, try to reason with them by telling them that their leader was dead and they were free, or something else.  They decided to leave Balgron’s severed head (yuck) where the goblins would be able to see it when they left the excavation chamber, and then head into the caves, figuring that the goblins would see the head as a sign to get out of there.

Well, I had the goblins roll Perception to see if they noticed the head while they were still working, and they did.  As the adventurers started heading down the stairs, the goblins quietly moved into position and started throwing Alchemist’s Fire.  The battle was on.

Guard Drake

Guard Drake

Two guard drakes charged up to the top of the stairs, and the PCs were basically hemmed in on a stairway.  They came perilously close to backing into the caves at the bottom of the stairs, at which point they very well may have been set upon by more enemies from the back, but they just barely stayed on the staircase and thus only had to face the goblin bombardiers and guard drakes.  This battle was tougher, and Barbara’s swordmage actually fell to zero hit points before being healed by Lane’s druid.  It was a close call, but once the drakes were dead, things turned in the party’s favor.  The last goblin bargained for his life, offering a dirt-covered object that he had dug up in exchange for being allowed to leave.  The party agreed (though not before the rogue observed that they could just kill the goblin and take the item), and the goblin was escorted out of the keep.  I’ve decided that he was named Steek.  The item turned out to be an enchanted totem with some healing powers, which is useful for Lane’s druid.

At this point, we called it a night.  I have to say that this adventure is beginning to feel like a success.  The players seem to be having a good time, and the technology is pretty much transparent (though I’m feeling like the OpenRPG dice roller tends to roll on the high side quite a lot; probably my imagination).  The players are definitely thinking creatively, and I feel like I’m doing pretty well at rolling with the creativity.  They’ve now gone through four encounters with no extended rest and only using one daily power.  I’m pretty sure I need to ramp up the challenge level a little bit (though we discovered that we had been playing Zach’s rogue a little bit wrong on Sunday, letting her get combat advantage too easily with the sling), but everyone seems to be having a good time, so I don’t want to go nuts.  Zach and Lane are going on a two-week vacation soon, so it might be a while before we get to play again, but our in-person game in Denver was just canceled for Sunday, so who knows?  Maybe we can play one more time then.  I’m up for it!

May 18, 2010

Downloads are getting organized

Filed under: Advice/Tools, Maps, Minis — Tags: , — OnlineDM @ 8:32 PM

I’ve decided that it’s time to organize my downloads page.  Rather than just leaving everything on one main page, I’ve created separate pages for Gametable maps, OpenRPG maps and monster minis.  I plan to later add pages for character minis and environmental elements (stairs, treasure chests, etc.).  Most of this is content that I’ve posted into individual blog posts as I’ve created it, but I hope that this blog will eventually become a useful resource for other online dungeon masters.  If that happens, I want it to be easy for new DMs to find the content and use it on the blog.

As a side note, I’m still in Boston and planning to play our second online session within the Keep on the Shadowfell tomorrow, if everything goes according to plan.  I’ve got the whole first level of the Keep set up in an OpenRPG map, so we should be ready to go.  I’ve also done some more work on the party’s back story and given a lot of thought to what comes AFTER the Keep on the Shadowfell (even though it will probably be late summer 2010 before we get there).  I’m having a great time with all of the planning – the hard part is knowing that I have to wait to reveal it all to the players (and therefore to my blog audience).  I can be patient.

May 16, 2010

Improvisation is important

Filed under: Advice/Tools, Maps, Play — Tags: , , , , , — OnlineDM @ 8:08 PM

Barbara and I are now in Boston for a business trip of mine, so what do we do on our first day in town?  Play D&D online with our friends in Florida, of course!  Hey, we’re all on the same time zone now, so we might as well.

At 11:00 AM, we all met online to play.  I called Zach and Lane via Skype, which worked great.  My maps in Gametable were ready to go, so I loaded up a map and hit Host.  I checked my IP address and told it to Zach… and realized that we can’t use Gametable when the host doesn’t own the internet router that they’re connecting to.  As you may recall from my earlier article about connecting to your players via Gametable, I had to go into my router settings and forward internet traffic that came to my IP address to my computer in particular, rather than to Barbara’s computer or some other device on our network.  Since I didn’t own the hotel router that I was connecting to, I couldn’t go into its settings to forward internet traffic to my computer.  Zach and Lane could host on their computer, but that wouldn’t work since they’re not the DM.  I could send them the complete map with all of the monsters revealed and everything, but that’s a less fun experience for them.

So, I improvised.  Back in the earliest days of my blog, I thought we were going to be using OpenRPG rather than Gametable for running our online games.  Gametable is far easier to build maps in, but OpenRPG is easier on the networking side.  As long as everyone can connect to the same server, OpenRPG is good to go.  So, we could play via OpenRPG – but all of my maps were in Gametable.  What to do?

I started by asking Lane and Zach to give me 20 minutes to get everything set up.

  • I then opened up Gametable, set the view to show the first area of the Keep on the Shadowfell (the entry chamber guarded by goblins) and took a screenshot.
  • I pasted the screenshot into Photoshop Elements.
  • I trimmed the canvas so that the top left corner was on the top left corner of a grid square, and the same for the top right.
  • I resized the map image so that the grid squares were 64 pixels wide (that’s where they started, but I had to zoom out in order for enough of the map to show up on my screen shot).  In order to do this, I counted the number of squares across in the image, multiplied that number by 64, and resized the image (keeping the proportions constant) so that the width equaled the number of squares times 64 pixels.
  • I erased the areas of the map that weren’t part of this first encounter.
  • I saved this image file on my Dropbox public directory (more on Dropbox in a later post).
  • I opened OpenRPG.
  • I set the General property of the map so that the map was plenty large enough for my new image.
  • I set the background color of the map to gray (not necessary, but nice).
  • I set the grid size to 64 pixels and made the grid lines invisible (since my image file had the grid lines from Gametable).
  • I loaded my new map image as the background, using the public URL from the Dropbox directory.
  • I also copied all of my Gametable character and monster pogs to my Dropbox public directory so that I could load them into OpenRPG. (I suppose I could actually do the same with environmental pogs… hmm…)

Once I had this set up, I opened a new room on an OpenRPG server, called Lane and Zach back and told them how to connect to my room in OpenRPG.  I assigned them the role of Player, and they could then move their minis around the map.  Huzzah!

The map image I created is below.  It’s messy, because I had to manually erase the parts of the map that I didn’t want the players to see, but that’s okay.

Entry chamber

We played through the entry chamber and the torture chamber (which I created in the same manner and had to load as a separate background image when they went into that area), and I have to say that it all went pretty well.  I had to manually add each monster as they encountered them rather than revealing them from the private map as I would have done in Gametable, but that was easy enough to do.

It’s worth mentioning that the party ripped through the bad guys like a knife through butter!  Zach’s rogue successfully stealthed down the stairs and got a sneak attack with a sling on the first goblin warrior, then rolled the highest initiative and finished the warrior off with more sneak attack damage before he had a chance to warn his friends.  I had already removed the pit trap and the swarm of rats from the encounter in order to level it down for a party of three PCs, and I was planning to remove one of the goblin sharpshooters as well.  But since the party was handling everything so skillfully, I left the second sharpshooter in the battle, and the PCs had no trouble at all.  The torture chamber was a little more challenging, but it was awesome when Barbara’s swordmage shoved a goblin into the iron maiden and slammed it shut on him to start the battle.  I removed just one goblin from the battle, and that was all I did to level it down (well, I also forgot about the daily power of the hobgoblin’s magic armor, but oh well).  After the two battles, we had played for two and a half hours (including technical difficulty time) and decided to call it a day.  The party did decide to release Splug, cautiously, which should be interesting!  Best of all, they were still excited about the game and want to get together tomorrow evening to continue!  I’d call that a success.  They were within a few XP of leveling up, so I awarded them a few extra points for good roleplaying and general cool moves so that they could begin tomorrow with level 2 characters.

Since I’ve now had a little more time to prepare to run the game in OpenRPG, I’ve figured out the fog of war function and decided to use it for tomorrow’s battle.  I created an image of the entire first level of the Keep on the Shadowfell (even though there’s no way the party will get to all of it tomorrow), loaded it into OpenRPG, and used the fog function to hide everything that the players haven’t discovered yet.  This is a little imperfect, as Barbara can see my screen (we only have the one laptop here in the hotel room), but that’s okay – she’s good at playing based on what her character knows rather than what she as a player knows.  Tomorrow should be even smoother!

May 13, 2010

My artistic skills are developing!

Filed under: Minis — Tags: , , , , , , — OnlineDM @ 10:48 PM

I’ve mentioned before that I am not artistic by nature.  Okay, singing and acting, sure, but not the visual arts.  However, being an online dungeon master (hey, that’s the name of the blog!) has forced me into the visual arts on a small scale, and I have to admit that I’m having a lot of fun with it.  Gametable comes with a lot of pre-made artwork to use – dungeon walls, trees, character and monster minis, etc. – which helps a lot.  But if I want my game to look right, I have to do some artwork.

Sometimes this involves drawing large, freehand features like rivers, roads and mountains.  These don’t need to be too detailed, so a rough outline of what they should look like is all I really need.  Witness the maps from my first online session:

Kobold Lair Exterior Kobold Ambush

However, we’ll soon be getting into the Keep on the Shadowfell itself, which deserves higher-quality artwork, in my humble opinion.  Having the dungeon walls pre-made helps.  I was able to add some simple features like doors.  I shared in an earlier post (and on my downloads page) some basic game elements like tables, prison bars and stairs.  For the next part of the dungeon, though, I needed some artwork.  Specifically, I needed a rune that appears several times on the floor of one section of the dungeon.  The runes are background elements, but they’re important.  I really wanted to get them right.  There’s an illustration in the adventure manual of what they should look like, roughly, but not the type of illustration that I could cut and paste to use in the game.  No, this time I had to actually draw the runes in Photoshop:Rune from Keep on the ShadowfellOkay, I know I’m not a pro, but come on – that’s a badass-looking rune!  And I really did have to draw it more or less freehand.  I first drew the top triangle-thingy, then copied and rotated it so that I had three of them, then drew the other symbols in part using the line tools in Photoshop and in part just freehanding it. I learned a lesson about combining layers in Photoshop, too.  By default, every time you draw a new shape, Photoshop Elements puts it on a whole new layer.  This is convenient much of the time, when you want to enlarge or rotate just one piece of the drawing (you don’t have to worry about selecting it perfectly – it’s on its own layer).  It got annoying, though, when I wanted to shift and resize the hand that I drew and I found that each finger was on its own layer, as was the palm.  Eventually I just merged all of the visible layers and selected the hand independently, which worked just fine.  And now I have a rune!

I also have some new environmental elements, most of which started with photos online that I resized or modified in some way.

ShelfThis shelf, for instance, started from a schematic of a bookshelf that I found online.  It’s surprisingly hard to find overhead views of lots of the items I’m looking for in the game, so the schematic below was where I started:

Bookshelf schematic

From there, I used the eyedropper in Photoshop to pick up some of the brown color, then used the line tools to make the top solid, then got a little creative with making the 35″ measurement on the front of the middle shelf disappear.  Sure, my dungeon shelf has particle board, but that’s okay!

I also needed some suits of armor.  There are tons of great pictures of suits of armor online, but again, it’s hard to find one from overhead.  Fortunately, I was able to experiment with the tools in Photoshop to distort the image of a straight-on picture of armor so that it more or less looks like it’s coming from overhead.  I started with the picture on the left and ultimately turned it into the image on the right.  It’s not great, but it’s better than nothing (and it looks fine at its usual 64 by 64 pixel size).

Suit of armor - original Suit of armor - overhead

Finally, I created a few other miscellaneous minis that I’ve shown below without full write-ups.  These are things I’ve created from images I found online.  From left to right, my improved fire pit, a coffin, a tent, a blue slime (I love Dragon Warrior!), an ochre jelly and two kruthiks (yeah, I had no idea what I kruthik was, either).  Also, an awesome giant rat.

Fire pit Coffin Tent Blue Slime Ochre Jelly Kruthik - full body Kruthik - face close-up Giant rat

I’m pretty happy with myself, I have to say!  I hope we get to play this dungeon soon.  Lane, Zach and Barbara have said that they want to play sooner rather than later, even if we can’t get our full group of five players together.  We may run some more side quests – perhaps even some that I’ll try to build myself – or we may delve into the main keep and pick up other players for future adventures.  Frankly, I’m getting a little too excited about what I’ve created in the keep NOT to run it!  But we’ll see how things play out.  Barbara and I will be traveling next week, and we realized that there’s nothing keeping us from playing our online game while we’re on the road.  We’ll have the laptop, and that’s all we really need.  Plus, we’ll be in Boston, so we’ll be in the same time zone as our friends in Florida (as opposed to Mountain Time here in Colorado), so that might even be easier.  Our next session will likely be played from our hotel room!

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