Back in Canada

It’s snowing outside.  I just returned from a business trip to California, now I am cold.  I don’t like it.

I thought I would take this time to update everyone on my progress with RPGKids and my son.  He did eventually get over his distaste for being attacked and start playing again.  We ran a few sessions this morning using dungeon tiles (up to now we had been using a dry erase grid map that I have).  He really latched on to the idea of the dungeon tiles.  He likes that they can be put together in different ways to create a completely different map.

We ran a scenario where his heroes were just adventurers, exploring the next room for treasure and glory.  I made a simple random monster table and let him roll to see what monsters would be in the room when he kicked open the door.  He really got a kick out of that.  The table looked something like this:

Die Roll	Monsters
1	4 Goblins
2	6 Kobolds
3	2 Minotaurs
4	4 Grick
5	A Black Dragon
6	A Red Dragon

 

Like I said, really simple.  As it turned out, it was the most difficult dungeon ever conceived as it consisted of 5 Red Dragons and 2 Black Dragons.  I suppose that isn’t the most difficult ever concieved, but it is the most difficult 7 straight encounters for sure.  Watching him use the random encounter table reminded me of my old days of playing D&D.  Where the DM would roll randomly on tables for everything.  Monsters, Loot, Morale, it didn’t matter.  I think that if I ever do get a gaming group together I will start with a BECMI D&D Campaign.

I know a lot of people have been running their own games with their sons/daughters.  Let me know in the comments how that is going.  I would love to hear what variant rules you are using, and what stories you have of funny/interesting things that happened when you played.

World Building – Why do it?

For the past 6 or so years, I have been running all of my campaigns in a world called Myrador.  I can’t for the life of me remember where I came up with the name.  I do remember quite clearly that when I was a younger DM I used to have a world called Thesonia.

Player: “The sonia?  like Sonya Red?”

Me: No.  “It’s pronounced ‘ce-sOn-ya’ ”

Player: “Oh.  Like Sonya Red?”

Me: “FFFFFUUUUUUUU………!”

So I changed it.  There are a few reasons why I choose to run adventures in my own world, rather than in a pre-made campaign world.  As a DM, I often like to do drastic things to get the characters attention.  Maybe I want to have an entire town burned to the ground and all of it’s people killed except for one person who will tell the characters who did it before also dying.  This is a lot harder to do if I am, for example, in the Forgotten Realms.  Suppose I want to completely destroy Waterdeep, this might happen:

Player:  “No way!  Kelbhan Blackstaff would protect the city to his dying breath, or maybe he would teleport the whole city to another location to prevent it being destroyed!” 

Me: “He was on vacation.”

Player: “Great, he will be super pissed and help us destroy whoever did this!”

Me: “FFFFFUUUUUUUUU………!”

I should probably note at this point that this actually happened in a campaign I was running.  Yes, I know, I tried to destroy Waterdeep.  My players never forgave me.  While the players were able to keep going and eventually avenged the all of the lost lives, because they know the world so well, and what I am suggesting is so unlikely in that world, it makes it much harder for them to suspend disbelief.  It takes them out of the story and reminds them they are playing a game, and it ruins the sense of immersion.  So if I want to be able to have true free reign over the world as a DM, it has to be a world that the player’s characters can be attached to, without the Players themselves having too many preconceived notions about how things work in that world.

This year, I have decided to give Myrador a complete overhaul, starting with the map of the world.  I am not sure what method I will use for the world map, whether I will simply Hex Map it, or draw it on paper and finish it off with Photoshop.  I will keep you posted.

Let the players be the story

I have a strange relationship with campaign design, in that I do a lot of it on the fly with little to no preparation.  I really only take one step towards designing a storyline for my campaigns, and it starts with my players.  My first sessions are always a character creation session.  I like all the characters to be together and to discuss ideas for how their characters are together ahead of time, while we are creating characters.  We don’t always do this, but I find it helps the players figure out who their characters are, and how they know each other, if they discuss it among themselves rather than having me tell them how they got together.  After the session, I ask each player to fill in their characters background and get that to me before the next session.  I will use my last campaign as an example.

During the first session, the players all decided they were from the same town, and that they knew each other fairly well having lived together in the same community for so long.  That was fine.  We had a Tiefling Warlock, an Eladrin Warlord, and a Dwarven Cleric.  While none of the characters were very close with each other, they at least were familiar with each other.  It gave me something to work with for designing the first night’s adventuring.  We left it at that and then I asked each player for a back story for how they all came to be in the town, and what happened in their life up to this point.

I got some great answers.  The Tiefling Warlock decided he wasn’t a true Tiefling, but rather the progeny of a Half-elven Swashbuckler from another plane and a succubus.  The Swashbuckler was an old character of his from a different campaign which I had also run, and the Succubus was a recurring NPC from that campaign, so I already had something to work with there.  He decided that he was sent away from them and was raised by the only other Tiefling in the small town where they lived, who was a librarian of sorts.

The Eladrin Warlord decided that he was actually a clone of a vicious warlord who was terrorizing the Feywild.  Again, it gave me a lot to work with.  He also decided that because of this he had some of the same tendencies as that warlord, one of those tendencies was greed, especially for magical items.

The Dwarven Cleric decided he was the son of a Dwarven King who had been killed, but he had turned his back on his duties to his people in favor of devotion to the god Erathis and to the quest for Revenge against Grom, a terrible goblin lord who was uniting all the goblin tribes under his banner in a quest to eradicate the dwarves once and for all.

So from this I crafted my story.  By the time I moved they had discovered that the warlord was a clone and met with his creator.  They had traveled to another plane and met the Warlocks father, and discovered that his mother was trapped in Hell, being punished for the sin of loving a mortal man.  The large-scale battle that I ran two weeks back was against the forces of Grom, who had gained a foothold in the form of the players starting town, enslaving all of their former neighbors and putting them to work diverting a river so that Grom could get his hands on a mighty weapon rumored to be at the bottom of a lake near their hometown.

The result is that all of the players feel very invested into the story, because they are the story.  It may not be the way for everyone, but I find it creates a really memorable experience for all of my players, because their own stories slowly unfold to become an epic adventure.

Finding a gaming group

Oh to be young again.  It was never hard to find a gaming group when I was younger.  In school I was always attracted to friends of like mind, and inevitably at least some of them would role-play.  When I went away to university it was no different, I naturally got together with people who enjoyed the same things as me, and role-playing ensued.  When I moved half a country away to be with my girlfriend I lucked out.  She had friends who had similar interests and that gaming group carried me through to where I am now.  I have again moved away, but this time I am not so lucky.  My girlfriend has turned into my wife and we have a great son together who plays a scaled down version of D&D with me, but no group my age who can help me.  So what is a guy to do?

If you find yourself in a similar situation, I am here to help.  I have tried a few things and hopefully with a combination of them I will be able to find a group soon and get my game on.  I will tell you about three of my favorite sites for finding other gamers in your area.

Pen and Paper Games

For those who don’t know, Pen and Paper Games is a forum/social networking site for gamers.  It lets DM’s post games that they are looking for players for and then it notifies people in the area that a game has been posted.  I just recently posted a “Looking for Players” announcement for my new area, and hopefully I will be able to find some people that way.

There are things I like about this site, and things I don’t like.  It lets you search for games within a certain distance from you, which is great, but it does not let you search just for Dungeons and Dragons game.  You can filter your searches, but if someone chose to say D&D in their post instead of Dungeons and Dragons then you are out of luck.  They also send you an e-mail any time a new game appears in your area, or when new players join who are in your area.

Dungeons and Dragons Meetup

This is actually part of the larger Meetup.com network.  It unfortunately did not have anything in my small town, but it did have results for Toronto, Canada.  Toronto is only about an hour’s drive from where I am, so it could be possible to find someone here.  Plus, with two meetup groups in the Toronto area, each with 200+ members, it is possible that I will find some other people near my town with the same problem as me.

I have had the least amount of luck with this one.  I like that there are groups, but in order to create your own group rather than join another one, it seems like their are fees, so it’s not an entirely free service.

Nearby Gamers

Nearby Gamers is a neat little site that lets you create a profile where you say what games you like to play and if you are a DM or a Player, and then you put your spot on a map.  If you look on the map you can also see which other players are in your area and what they are interested in and then you can contact them, or they can contact you.  Very simple, clean, and useful.

This is by far the cleanest, easiest way to find gamers in your area.  It cuts out all the fluff that sites like Pen and Paper games have, but at the same time doesn’t give you any of the perks (like the e-mails when people join in your area).  Still it is great.

 

There are a lot of other ways to find gamers, and despite my love of these three sites, I have had the best success by using Kijiji for my area.  I have found 1 player certainly, and possibly one more from Kijiji, while I have yet to get a bite from these other sites (though to be honest, with the exception of Pen and Paper Games I am fairly new to each of them).

home sweet home

It’s been a busy week.  The new house is coming along nicely, my office is almost totally set up, though there has been an almost complete lack of D&D.  I played another game with my son yesterday, and something strange has developed.  He has become a sore loser.  We were playing and all was fine until his sword guy got hit.  He immediately decided he didn’t want to play anymore.  I suggested that he should finish this game before stopping, but he wouldn’t roll dice anymore.  He didn’t like that his guys got hit.  I’m really not sure where to go with this, but I am hoping it is only a fluke and that next time we play he won’t mind again.  There is really only one way to find out right?

I am working on getting a new gaming group together, but it’s difficult as you get older and everyone has more responsibilities.  I have found two potential people and we will start a game as soon as we have at least four.  I am not sure yet what system we will play, though it will likely be 4th edition.  It’s hard to think of going back to another system after playing 4th.  I am not one of those DM’s who thinks that 4th edition has just become a battle game.  Certainly the rules are more suited to combat, but there are opportunities there for everything else.  I am still not a fan of skill challenges, but there are ways around that as well if you use your imagination.

The main choice I am trying to make, is will I try a premade adventure or will I create my own.  I am thinking of doing the Scales of War adventure path from Dungeon Magazine, so if anyone else has tried it, let me know what you think.

still alive

Wow.  It feels good to have internet again.  The move went well except for one little hitch with our internet provider which left me without any internet from Saturday to Wednesday.  Now that it is back it is hard to know where to begin.  We did manage to get a game in on Saturday night, and so I got to try out the large scale battle.

It started well, I decided that the Players forward scouts had managed to locate the positions of the enemy troops, and I lay those out on the map before we began, and then allowed the players to lay out their troops.  We then rolled initiative and played it like a normal 4th edition battle, with the troops representing swarms, and each round representing a day.  There were some things I liked and some other things that I didn’t like so much.  Because the enemy troops were all swarms, they were taking massive damage from area of effect spells.  Technically this makes a lot of sense, but it made the battle far too easy for my players.  The objective of the first encounter was to destroy some towers that the goblin army had set up to rain fire down on the human city.  My players threw me for a loop when they decided they wanted to capture the towers and use them against the goblins.  I decided that they could storm the towers and we played it like a mini encounter inside of the regular encounter, where they had to fight their way up to the top of the tower and take out the goblins stationed there.  That worked well, but left the players in control of towers that could rain down fire on the goblin troops for massive, area effect, damage.

The players all seemed to really enjoy the encounter, so I guess by those guidelines it was a success.  In the future I would make a few small changes, which I will do and then detail here as variant rules for anyone who wants to use them.

Aside from that, with the move I haven’t had a lot of time to play D&D with Ash.  Once we are settled into the new house I am considering starting a small, simple campaign for him, where he can see his characters grow in experience and maybe start to develop personalities for them.  It may be a little early to start getting into that, but I am now a Dungeon Master without any Players and I am starting to get the itch to run a campaign already.

moving day

Tomorrow is moving day for me.  The plan right now is to pick up the truck around 1 and then load it up.  Moving is such a hassel and doesn’t leave a lot of time for playing D&D.  Since I didn’t get a chance to run through the large scale battle, we are hopefully going to run it tomorrow night.  I will try to remember to take pictures and update again on Monday with how it goes.  It’s a tight schedule, but I think we can manage it.

1pm – Pick up the Truck

1:30 – 5:30 – Load the truck

5:30 – ???? – Either drive 4 hours to the new house, or play D&D.

Most likely, since moving never goes smoothly, we will be playing D&D tomorrow night and driving to the new place on Saturday once we are fully rested.  Then if we can get everything unloaded maybe we will be able to play more D&D Saturday night.  Leaving friends behind is always hard, but leaving gaming friends behind is really bumming me out.  You forge bonds with your gaming friends that are different from the bonds you forge with other people.  It’s hard to think about starting over with a new group, even if I can find a new group to play with.

Wish me luck.