KoL

I’ve been bad to you guys.  I know I have.  I haven’t been posting as much as I should, and the reason is really a lack of content.  I am a DM without a game right now, and without a game to run I have been falling behind on my insightful D&D related thoughts.  I figure there are two ways for me to make it up to you.  I can start posting more (which I intend to) or I can try to distract you so you don’t hold it against me (which I intend to).

So, I have set myself a rigid schedule of two posts every week, starting today.  Two will be my minimum, and I will also post when I think of other things to post about.

To distract you, I present Kingdom of Loathing.  KoL is a browser-based parody RPG.  I have been playing it since about 2004 if my stats are to be believed, but really I had taken a few years off in the middle and just recently rediscovered it thanks to my wife.  Make a character and try it out.  My characters name is Salazararar, and you can join my guild if you want to.  The game is rich with pop-culture references, some of which you won’t get, but some will delight you.  Sometimes it can be devilishly hard to figure out some of the puzzles, but the answer is always within your reach if you take the time to think out of the box a little.  I highly recommend it.

I have started a little side project, where I am trying to squeeze the world of Pokémon into the 4th Edition D&D rule set.  Ash is becoming more and more interested in Pokémon (something which I support) and I thought that we might be able to encourage further roleplay by adapting something he likes to the game.  I plan to make a very simple version of the game for him to start with.  I will let you know how it goes.

Fickle Fickle Dice (Part 2)

In the last installment of Fickle Fickle Dice, I described a little bit about die mentality, and how to train dice for the types of rolls you need.  Whether that means rolling high, or rolling low.  With proper care and a little patience, you can teach your dice to perform well in any situation.  But what happens when Dice go bad?  This can happen, sometimes it is because of die envy, or because you were neglectful of certain dice for too long.  Today I am going to describe two situations.  First, how to introduce trained dice to your old dice and, secondly, how to punish dice when they behave badly.

Introducing Dice

So lets pick up where the last post ended.  By repeatedly training your dice you should eventually have dice who will roll the way you want them to.  So lets throw them in with the rest of the dice right?

Wrong!

This is an amateur mistake that many people make.  If you have taken the time to painstakingly train your dice to roll well, why would you immediately throw them in with other dice who you have been using for a long time?  Those dice have been with you through some very stressful situations, and they have come out on top.  Those dice are going to be a little smug, and un-accepting of newcomers.  They will have doubts, and wonder what they did wrong that made you get new dice.  They don’t understand that more dice is a reward unto itself.  No one needs more dice, we want more dice.  So throwing your newly trained dice in with your old dice can have disastrous consequences.  Your old dice could start rolling poorly out of spite, and your new dice who are so desperate to fit in may follow suit and suddenly you have an entire dice bag rebellion going on.

So what do you do?

I suggest introducing your dice one by one into the new population.  During your next game, use your old dice along with one of the new ones.  Don’t replace any of your old dice.  For instance, if you are introducing a new d20, don’t leave out your old d20.  Use them both.  This gives your old dice a bit of security, they are still being used, and it gives the new die a chance to see your old dice in action.  Do this for 1 or 2 sessions and then introduce a new die.  It will get easier with time, as your new dice are still being used and your new dice are getting in on the action too.  Once they are all together, all of the new dice and all of the old dice, use them all together for at least a couple of sessions before you start using one set or the other.  This will ensure that they share some experiences.  There is nothing like toppling a dragon to bring dice together.

Punishing Dice

This is a difficult area to talk about.  Dice, being the fickle creatures they are, will sometimes roll poorly in order to get back at you for some slight.  Sometimes a particular die will roll poorly for an entire session.  My advice is to wait it out.  Your die is angry, and by continuing to put trust in it for an entire session you will show that you are sorry.  Hopefully the die will get over it before the next gaming session.  But what if it doesn’t?

If a die continues to punish you for another gaming session, it needs to be punished.  I said in my last post that the relationship between player and die is like one of equals, but that wasn’t entirely true.  The relationship should seem like one of equals, but really it is still master and slave.  Your dice are there to roll well for you, and while you can forgive the occasional outburst, sometimes a die needs to be put in it’s place.  There are a few ways to do this.

1. Segregation

Take your die out of the regular rotation.  Take it out to play for a session, but don’t roll it, instead choose other dice to roll in it’s place.  For minor infractions, this should cure most dice.  Seeing other dice get chosen for important tasks while sitting on the sidelines will show it that you have had enough, and that it has damaged the trust relationship between the two of you.  Usually you only want to segregate a die for 1 or 2 sessions, and then give it another try.  When a particularily important roll comes up, use the segregated die for that roll, if it rolls poorly, put it aside for the rest of the session and try again next session.  Eventually the die will come around.

2. Squirrel it

We all know the guy.  The one who comes to a session and forgot his dice…again.  That guy is the dice squirrel.  Squirreling your dice to another player is always a hard thing to do.  These dice have been your friends, and have gotten you through some trying ordeals.  Letting someone else use them is cruel and unusual punishment for a die, but sometimes it is necessary.  When squirreling your dice to another player, always choose dice that have been rolling poorly for you.  The dice don’t know the situation is temporary.  When they are returned to you at the end of the night, they will be relieved.  Now…this is important.  USE THOSE DICE IN YOUR NEXT GAMING SESSION.  Use the squirreled dice and only the squirreled dice the next time you play.  You won’t believe the results.

3. Torture

I don’t endorse torturing dice anymore, though I did once.  Torturing dice is a difficult thing to do, and the results can be horrendous.  I had a friend who put a group of dice in a jar of coca-cola for over a month.  Those dice were never the same.  At the time we thought it was great fun, but those dice were ruined beyond compare.  Their minds snapped.  They were physically and mentally marred from the experience.  This is the wrong way to torture dice.  We know that now.  So what is the right way to torture dice?  Well, there isn’t one.  This is a last resort.  Submersion is the only choice that I would go with, but I prefer coffee submersion.  This is what it looks like.

I didn’t actually dunk one of my dice into the coffee, but this is the setup.  Make a cup of coffee, put the die in the coffee with all the other dice around the mug.  When the coffee is cold, take the die out.  None of this “1 month submerged in coke” stuff.  Just a hot bath in coffee.  After it comes out, dry it off and make sure you use it in your next game.  It may still roll poorly, which means that it didn’t survive the torture and that die has to be retired.  I no longer use the torture method, because of it’s habit of destroying dice for good, but I include it here for you incase you have the stomach for it.

That’s all for today.  I hope you have learned more about dice, and are beginning to appreciate the subtle nuances of working with them and understanding their personalities.  Next time we talk about dice, I will attempt to explain some different die rolling techniques that can bring your game to the next level.

Gaming Lull

It’s good to be back.

Work has been keeping me pretty busy for the last little while.  Last week I was in Hong Kong (where my favorite video game arcade has been closed down).  This week I am busy recovering from that trip and getting ready for next weeks trip to Phoenix.  It’s hard to find time for gaming when work keeps getting in the way.  That doesn’t however mean that gaming is far from my mind.  As a DM, I find that I can be inspired by just about anything.  Things I read, things I see, things I hear.  There are always opportunities for great adventures all around us.

One of the things I like to do is always keep a list of things as they pop into my mind.  This used to mean always having a journal and pen handy, but now it is more likely to mean a quick note on my blackberry, or an e-mail to myself.  The most recent inspiration I got was from the city of Hong Kong itself.  It provides a wonderful setting for adventure.  With not a lot of land, and an enormous population, the only option was to build up.  The city is absolutely full of towers, and in many ways reminds me of Sharn, the city of towers in Eberron.  Add to that the MTR (Mass Transit Rail) system and you have a high-tech (or high-magic) city where you can find influences from every corner of the world.

I had been thinking of doing a campaign that was based in just one city for a while, and with my love of Hong Kong it was only natural to start adapting the city to a 4th edition campaign city.  Hong Kong is already split up into districts, each with it’s own flavor and culture.  So that is where I started.  I made a list of all of the districts and what one could find there.  Wan Chai is the sleazy, red-light party district, where everything has it’s price.  Causeway bay is a market district, with all the most expensive items available for sale.  Mong Kok, the other market district, is a less expensive place to find what you need.  The list goes on.

It becomes very easy to start to create stories in this type of environment.  I had been thinking of putting together an organized crime campaign for quite some time.  This was mostly influenced by games like Mafia Wars and Gangster City on facebook.  Why not combine the two, the players could start as low level thugs for a crime organization in Hong Kong, and as the campaign progresses they would gain favor with the mob boss, but also notoriety in the criminal underbelly of the city.

Ideas can come from pretty much anywhere.  As I complete my plans for my city adventure, I will post the maps and campaign hooks here on the blog. 

Fickle Fickle Dice

In my last post, I mentioned that I was proud of Ash for realizing that dice have their own agenda.  Sometimes, if a die is rolling poorly it needs to sit the night out.  In my younger days I was much more harsh with my dice.  So I figured I would tell some of my dice rituals and stories.

I will start with one of my younger stories.  The game was Star Wars, and I was playing a force sensitive Ewok named Teddy Ruxbin.  It was the old d6 system, and we were playing at a friends cottage.  They had a wood stove.  I’m not sure who started it, but every time that we rolled a 1, we would pitch the die into the woodstove as punishment.  We probably went through a hundred dice before we had to stop since no one had any dice left.  This is one of the darker moments of my relationship with dice, when I believed they could be swayed by fear.  I now know that your relationship with dice is not that of master and slave, but of equals.  Let me tell you about some of my rituals for when I get new dice.

1.  The meeting.

When you first get dice, whether you buy them from the store, get them as a gift, or wake up next to them after a night of binge drinking, it’s good to get to know your dice.  Some people would just dump them into their dice bag right away, mixing them into the rest of their dice.  In my experience, this is a huge mistake.  Dice who are young and inexperienced don’t know which way they are supposed to roll.  There are games where it is good to roll high, there are games where you are supposed to roll low.  Dice need to be taught and nurtured.  The first step is to find out which way your dice naturally roll.  This is simple, just roll your new dice.  Take them one at a time and roll them to see which end of the spectrum they gravitate towards.  Lets take an example, lets say you have a d20, and you roll it ten times.  You might get results like this:

9

7

3

16

4

19

7

6

11

6

 

There are a couple of ways to look at this.  You could do a simple equation, adding all of the results and dividing by 10 would give us 8.8.  That seems to indicate a low to average result.  But lets look at the results in terms of Dungeons and Dragons.  Typically, your average monster of equal level will be hit on a roll of 10.  That means that for your average monster you would only hit it 3 times out of 10 with this die.  That’s way below average and not what we want in an attack die.  Now if we were playing first edition dungeons and dragons and needed to roll under a number to make a saving throw, this die would succeed 7 times out of 10.  Context is everything.

 

2. Training

 

Now that we have determined how the die rolls, how do we change its behavior?  There have been many methods proposed for this.  The Hackmaster rulebooks suggested rotating the dice slowly in a clockwise motion on the table for high results and counterclockwise for lower results.

I’m not convince this has any effect, but I will give it a try, rotating it twenty times in a clockwise direction before performing this test again.

11

11

19

1

5

17

20

17

13

18

Promising results to be sure.  Going by our original guidelines, this die would now hit 8 times out of 10 against an average monster of equal level.  Maybe there is something to this rotating thing.  Just to be sure I will try rotating the same die 20 times counterclockwise to see if I can induce low rolls.

7

19

15

5

6

16

7

11

4

8

Not bad at all, with 6 out of 10 being low.  I may have to go back and look at the Hackmaster rulebook again and see what other forms of training I can glean.  Despite how admirably the Hackmaster method has performed, I have my own preferred way of training my dice.  The Pavlovian method.  That is, I reward my dice for good rolls while providing no reward for poor rolls.  This can be an arduous task.  It is not as simple as just rotating the dice on the table, it requires some planning and thought.

The first step is to find out what your dice likes.  The answer to this is almost universally to be used in game.  Find a game that rewards rolls of the type you are looking for.  Oftentimes, I will do this by bringing my new dice to a gaming session along with a tried and true, fully trained set of dice.  When the new dice roll poorly, they are forced to sit out a few rounds.  While they are sitting out, I will roll them once a round, and if they roll well they get to come back in.  When they roll poorly they sit out again.  They quickly learn to associate good rolls with being used in game, and low rolls with being left out.  This is a powerful teaching technique.

After training, the next step is figuring out how to integrate your new dice with your old dice.  This can be a difficult process and I will go over that as well as what to do when dice just don’t want to behave in a later post.  Thanks for reading.  Let me know your dice rituals in the comments section, and happy gaming.

Another Day another Dungeon

The other day Ash asked me if it was ok to play with three sword guys (I suspect that the fact that they get a d8 while everyone else gets a d6 or less for attack and defense had something to do with this).  I told him that of course it was ok.  I kept showing him Sword Guy type miniatures, but he eventually decided he wanted them all to be identical.

We put together a simple dungeon using the dungeon tiles from the D&D Miniatures starter set and filled up the rooms with monsters and off we went.  The first room was filled with kobolds, which the Sword Guys made quick work of.  I did something a little different as well and introduced monsters who had ranged attacks.

Ash didn’t like that much, since now he suddenly had no one who could attack from a distance, but he managed to close the distance without taking too much damage.

With the kobolds out of the way, it was on to the next room, which had an Immolith and a Bulette.

Ash focused on the Immolith first, and learned the laws of probability when his dice wouldn’t roll higher than a one. 

He asked me if he could change dice (which made me very proud because it shows that he understands that dice are not devices of randomness but instead are foul temperamental creatures that hold grudges like no others).  I convinced him to give the die another chance and he did.  I guess it understood that this would be it’s last chance because it rolled admirably.  With his d8 back on his side, Ash made quick work of the Immolith and the Bullet.  

That left only the Earth Titan guarding the treasure.  With his d8 having gotten over it’s grudge, the Titan proved no challenge.

 

Far from being chivalrous, his sword guys danced on the Earth Titans corpse.

  

Afterwards Ash build a city out of dice.  While I was putting this post together, he insisted that this also belonged here.

 

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.