Animated Spellbook: Marriage

Dungeons and Dragons: HAT

 I gotta be honest, Hasbro/WOTC have been dicks lately, but this movie was good.

Matt Colville: On Being an Evil Character

The Real Central Tension to Your D&D Game

I've been listening to Matt Colville for a long time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_) In case you aren't interested in skipping over to YouTube, he has a great series on running Dungeons & Dragons games (and tabletop RPGs in general). He's got about 30 (40?) years of experience running games and it's a subject he's obviously enthusiastic about. It's a joy to watch.

Matt talks about how to scale monsters to match your player characters(PCs). How to coordinate conflicts between players. The central conflict of a setting. The merits of reviled things (4th edition) and the flaws of beloved things (3.5 edition). Those topics each have their time in the sun, but they also bleed over into one another to create a tapestry of Matt Colville's Philosophy of Running a tabletop RPG.

In that tapestry, there's a deep conflict. One thing Matt talks about is how the dice are the dice. Players' characters take their chances in a dangerous world: and if a trap would deal more damage than their hit points, or a non-player character would execute them, or if a card from the Deck of Many things would randomly make a player's character unplayable, then that character--and their years of experience and adventuring--would be gone. There are real stakes to the events which happen, and to some extent they are "natural" to the world that he, as the Dungeon Master, is creating.

The other thing is fudging dice rolls and drama. He regularly covers how bad guys can choose to affect less vulnerable characters in combat and how the events of the world occur in ways that are dramatic and centered around the characters. Players are playing to have fun, not to get a Sopranos cut to black ending because of an enemy who kills them with no foreshadowing via a completely unknown mechanism.

Both are good, but they are in conflict. It's a razor's edge for any Storyteller (Dungeon Master, whatever you want to call it). Players want rules with real chances of failure to feel like they've accomplished something, but they also want to have fun. For some people, the feeling of accomplishment is synonymous with fun. I believe most of us see ourselves as being that type of person.

I'm not sure you can have it both ways. You can't overcome the indifferent clockwork of a universe that runs on dramatic narrative conventions. If you fail at the drama, it's because you were railroaded. If you succeed despite the drama that's ludonarrative dissonance. 

It's no surprise that gaming has these terms to hand--railroading and ludonarrative dissonance--because they represent conflicts which come from the tension of smushing consequential game decisions into traditional, satisfying narrative structure and saying "now kiss."

Neither one of those things is bad--not even railroading. Players can pull the old improv standard of "yes and" to a good railroading and have fun with it just as easily as they can get disgruntled. The same applies a character who is bad at lying rolling a "20" to deceive the Prince of Lies. Lots of characters would have fun with that, but some wouldn't.

Y'know, your mileage may vary. Talk with your group before playing. Ensure your play group understands what each person wants outta the yadda yadda yaddah. 

I'm not sure if it's possible.

Obviously, everyone can sit down at a table and have fun with their friends. You can play Cards Against Humanity or gin rummy or...I dunno, Crack Cocaine Chess and have fun with your friends (as long as your friends can keep it together when the cops come around).

Is there any real story if nothing matters? Copy that previous sentence and replace "story" with "accomplishment." Fictional events can affect us and make us feel very real emotions. The illusion of overcoming a problem, like solving a puzzle, can be satisfying. 

On the crust of slow-bake planet, between the vacuum and the magma, in the stellar film upon which we live like the universe's black mold, human feelings are the only things that matter, the only things that are real, I mean, after you get over the food, shelter, and water stuff.

The delusion of story and accomplishment are real, yeah.

I talk this as it relates to video games, too. I'm sorry, but there's no accomplishment in defeating a video game. There's not anything remarkable about getting video game achievements. You're supposed to win. That's how video games work. Even if there's a bell curve of people who can master a video game and people who can't, huddling under the proficient arc of that curve means diddly squat. 

You were supposed to win and all you mastered along the way was...reflexes? memorizing a level? a moveset? reading a wiki? following an instruction like a dolphin who can sort shapes?

Whoopty fuckin' doo.

This is a bit of a self-roast. If you follow me on twitter, I've been humblebragging on my fell-off-the-wagon Stellaris run for a few weeks under the thin veneer of poking fun at the game. It's just a distraction to learn and interact with the rules of a completely false, contrived world. 

D&D is that same kind of masturbatory exercise with some token challenge and a few consequences waved around like a drunk with empty gun. Even if the consequences are real, they aren't. If your character dies and their belongings are scattered towards the winds, it doesn't matter; you'll get up tomorrow and go to work.

Or maybe your DM is creating a world with consistent, discernible rules which you master and then they'll give you a few extra virtual shekels for your dolphin-like obedience. 

The truth isn't that you need to balance story or challenge; it's that you can't really have either one. Not with conventional tabletop RPGs. Not without some delusion. 

And that's fine. Delusion is, debateably, essential to how we live. Refusing to consider existential dooms and living as though they aren't present helps to focus on the present as it is instead, of considering the many things that might wipe this algae out.

I've been leaning hard into FATE these past few years, because the story is the challenge. What you overcome is the blank page in front of you and your own reticence to accept other peoples' ideas.

Ideally. I haven't overcome shit while playing FATE and as I'm writing this I realize I've always been a bit too comfortable blaming other player's lack of enthusiasm.

For someone who felt I needed to define "dungeon master" a few paragraphs back, I'm comfortable blowing past was FATE is. FATE is a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, but whereas D&D game mechanics include status effects, ranges, spell components, and the linear probabilities afforded by a single 20-sided die, FATE's mechanics are about drawing broad characters, using drama as a currency, and creative a story collectively.

I've also thought about picking up Microscope. Another tabletop RPG--which isn't a game, so 'Another tabletop RP'--where players agree upon the theme of, ground rules of, and events which will bookend an era in a world's history. They then take turns adding periods, events, and scenes in the era of that world. The game is the creation of the world itself, with players roleplaying historical characters during specific scenes.

For the past few years, I've told people "I haven't been in the right headspace" for roleplaying. I wasn't before I started saying it, but then I didn't realize why I wasn't having fun with it anymore. I don't feel like throwing on the skinsuit of an elven ranger and listening to Important NPC from a generic fantasy world talk about Task to Retrieve/Discover/Destroy the Notable Item/Person for STAKES and then accomplishing that Task via overgrown tabletop wargaming mechanics and negotiating reality with the DM. Worse, it's actively aggravating.

You might say, "VanVelding, you have depression." Obviously, reader-slash-listener-slash-watcher. Obviously.

That tension isn't a gamebreaker for most players. Players show up and appreciate a little bit of story, a little bit of gameplay, and a little bit of...what I can only see as trolling the world out of genuine curiosity. Even when they love it, in a lot of ways the DM's world is set in opposition to the player. The combination of our world's DNA and the need for basic conflict makes no part of that world come into sharper focus than when it's set against them.

No one asks the color of the tickertape when they're throwing the heroes a parade.

It's the Storyteller who is shouldering most of that tension. They create not just the story (usually) and the game challenges, but they're also engaged in worldbuilding that's satisfying for every Storyteller I know. And if they're doing it in Dungeons and Dragons, it's all built on the caprice of a 20-sided die.

Have I bitched about that before in this essay? Probably, but it's a flawed system and one that 5th edition's advantage/disadvantage system really improved.

The Storyteller is often saddled with the additional burden of keep up the delusion--pretense?--of events being relevant. Now, that might be baked into "making a story that's good" and "making gameplay events which are good," but it's more than that.

There are plenty of stories which are just fine without pretense. NBC's Community snarked its way through six seasons kind of aware it was a TV show and subverting TV show tropes. Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is sublimely self-aware. 

There are games which are satisfied with saying, "this is a game." The Stanley Paradox.

But for players who are playing characters, you're telling their story, and you can't schlep it out or turn to the camera and wink when they're doing things they enjoy. The point of playing a cool character in D&D is to play a cool character. DMs don't say, "You reduced the dragon to 0 HP. You've won Dungeons and Dragons," then shake everyone's hand and end the campaign by reading the credits of the adventure module.

So the Storyteller keeps the story, pretense of relevance, worldbuilding, and game part of the game going. It's a lot and it's a lot to put on the shoulders of one person. So while we're doing that Session 0 talk to your group set expectations rigamarole word salad, maybe consider not playing D&D?

Do your friends want to spend time together while killing dudes and comparing builds? Path of Exile is free and fairly fun.

Do you want to explore an interesting world that your DM friend has created? Just fukkin' ask them about it.

Do you want to collaborate to make an interesting story? Microscope is fine, but so is just chillin' out and making a world. 

Or maybe you all want to work together to build a world with some ground rules and play through some challenges. Maybe play D&D, but instead of showing up once a week and dropping 2 quarters into your DM so they amuse you for a couple of hours, you can heckin' talk to them and start picking up some of the storytelling. Maybe offer to run or co-run a few sessions. Pitch in on worldbuilding so you're familiar with it.

If you're trying to wrap a story around a game, there's always going to be tension there, but unlike the tension from Matt Colville's Politics 101 primer, you don't want that tension to boil over and snap into a big, cool, fictional war. You want to acknowledge it and build around it to ease it. The best way to do that is to share it.

Edere Vir: D&D Implementation

So a few weeks ago I started talking about a monster type I made called the Edere Vir. Originally envisioned as a part of the World of Darkness, they were humans that preyed on other humans for power and advantage within society. I'm still turning the idea over.
 
As a D&D monster, they wouldn't be a monster so much as a template applied to a species already found in the Monster Manual. A few regeneration abilities, a severe bite attack limited to members of their own race, and an attack or two that induces a status effect would probably be enough.

Edere Vir Part 2

So two weeks ago I started talking about a monster type I made called the Edere Vir. Originally envisioned as a part of the World of Darkness, they were humans that preyed on other humans for power and advantage within society. I tried to adapt them to a D&D mileu without success.

Initially. In D&D, the Edere Vir would be the town baker who finds a wounded traveler with a broken leg and is overcome with a taboo desire. They give in and find their old bum knee is healed. Much to their own horror, they feel neither revulsion nor remorse.

Time passes and their small village sees travelers savagely attacked. The local mayor--a former baker--reluctantly calls the party in. The adventurers eventually discover the baker-cum-mayor has been quietly trying to cover the entire business up. That the limping baker is suddenly more than fully ambulatory is a surprise. That they can bite through the fingers of their fellow elf as though they were made of butter[1] is downright shocking to the party.

The party triumphs and the baker is publicly hung by the neck until dead and interred with all appropriate rituals. The party calls it a side-quest and rides off into the sunset.

Edere Vir Part 1

So last week I put some some Magic card based on some monsters I made up called the Edere Vir. Well, not monsters. Monsters in the sense that anything from White Wolf's World of Darkness is a monster.

 

The Edere Vir are based on a very simple idea. You ever hear something on the other side of a glass door, look over, and see nothing? The Edere Vir are based on the monster that's invisible until you open the door to see what's out there.

It was just a little concept until Terry ran a mixed supernaturals, classic World of Darkness campaign. I wanted to use the Edere Vir. Good monsters represent parts of the human psyche. Werewolves are our primal instincts. Ghosts are the summation of our deeds undone and wrongs unavenged. Vampires move around a lot, but they're done everything from repressed sexual desires to the thin, empty veneer of civilization to doing the whole "mutant and proud" message True Blood tried for.

The Joys of Spellbook Ownership

So, I have this thing where I don't usually play D&D (or Pathfinder, which is D&D). It's not my thing, but whenever I do play D&D I often like to do it as a wizard. A specific wizard. The best wizard. Lucio Pavlec.

Now, Lucio is my go-to wizard because I kind of grok him better than most of my other characters. If this seems familiar, there's an older blog where I go on about him at length. I never know which particular version and level of D&D I'll be using Lucio in, so I've prepared an exhaustive, if not comprehensive, collection of them.

If you've played D&D before, you know that spells are kind of a big deal for wizards. Now, I like the plethora of D&D spells as much as any other reasonable human being but it's a constant struggle to keep up with what spells I have and what they do exactly.

Conventionally, a player would just copy-paste the spells from an online source and make a reference document. I did that, but then I realized I could take it a step further and found a parchment image from the internet. An hour's worth of working with Microsoft Office and a lifetime's worth of cursing later, I opted to just give my reference document a quadruple pass through the printer to make:

A spellbook. 

Linkstorm: Nerditry

 
io9 has complied a list of great performances in geek and sci-fi roles. I don't know acting, but this article definitively proves that you can list about five of the ten shows on this list and I'll still agree with you because I'm preparing for an age where no one knows what Star Trek is anymore.

Hugh Jackman. Psy. It's cool.

Exit Past Through Doors on Right, Part II

Last Monday, I started a blog with the intention of talking about the best things of 2011[1], but ended up waxing nostalgic about one of Earth’s few female specimens which had gained my attention and respect.

After the assertive, confident woman I'd come to expect act so demure in a new setting, uncertainty was all I had. To this day, it's all I have. This isn’t a story where an omnipresent point of view reveals the full depths of each person’s character and the audience comes away with a clean resolution and an appreciation behind the A-Type personalities they encounter every day. It’s a real story, and like most real stories, we can only read the tea leaves and divine our own meaning from it.

People aren’t constants; a person isn’t a static value impervious to other factors. It’s easy to see people that way:

It's the Magic: Ajani, Lucio, & Bolas

New Hotness

Alright, so Innistrad is out. Enjoy that.

This Week’s Best Thing Ever

Ajani vs Bolas is the best ever fight between a furry and a malicious magic dragon you’ve ever seen/witnessed/historically reenacted. Ajani is slippery, but powerful. Bolas is implacable and deadly. That the two decks fight in different game spaces and still manage to...grapple so well creates a feel that I just don’t get tired of.

The Game’s The Thing: Collective Settings

So, raise your hand if this is familiar: You’re running a roleplaying game. You’ve put a lot of work into the setting. It’s not modern day Earth or a popular franchise everyone is familiar with. Your characters don’t know where they came from, have no idea where they are, and don’t @&$^ing care either. They don’t engage the setting and since in most roleplaying games, you can’t go too far wrong by rolling initiative against the guy with the thinnest mustache, they make a habit of driving the razor blade industry and wenching with Dwarven women.

Not their fault. No one wants to play the political game and get tripped up on some nuances they missed because either the storyteller didn’t make it clear enough or because they forgot, what with having a life, family, job, etc..

But what if players got to help make the setting?

The Ciaren Campaign: Cartography

The DnD game I've been running that I may have mentioned a time or two has thus far been without a (published) map.

This is that map.


Each square is more than a month's travel time.

Ta'ae(far right) is where the first adventure took place; the characters assaulted the city, fought its defenders, and watched its citizens flee even as their own army was destroyed in the battle.

Lot-U is the subterranean city the players arrive at halfway through the second adventure. It is where, in all liklihood, the characters took a little trip and left a bunch of cavedwelling hippies with a sack of baby Kobolds. It is virtually right under Ta'ae (as in "beneath it"), but is depicted in its own square for the sake of visual clarity.

Caul d'cath (mispelled on the map) is a quiet crossroads town that's only gotten quieter since the start of the war and the drop-off in adventurer traffic. There, the adventurers likely left a mysterious woman with her wolves in the woods around the unsuspecting town. But they totally drove off those Marauders.

Sevel is a trading post/fortress in the wilderness that serves as a source of protection and supplies for the wizards who study and maintain the ancient Gate. It's about two weeks travel from The Gate, but is depicted in its own square for the sake of visual clarity.

The Gate is the destination for the players. While the wizards who tend the gate were tricked into letting the Droves Army through the Gate by the Ciaren commander Behqueru (who died at the end of the first adventure), they aren't exactly Ta'ae citizens and tried to remain neutral in the conflict. That means they may not be too angry since Ciaren still exists and Ta'ae doesn't, but who really knows? I guarantee you right now that the characters' passage through The Gate won't be dependant on completing some redemptive fetch-quest.

Ciaren, the characters' homeland, is, relative to this map, in the nearest bathroom.

The Game's the Thing: Three Campaigns, Part Two: The Father

The Ciaren Campaign

My first DnD game and the only game I'm currently running (technically). While I've only run three full adventures over eleven sessions or so, I think it's been a success. I attribute much of that to two factors: frequent play and minimalism.

MHz

Frequent play does a lot to keep momentum up. Players remember facts and characters. They stay energized and anticipate playing. I picked up a regular schedule (mostly), which keeps me pushing forward on stories and gives players time to get their own affairs in order for play. Especially for me, learning a new system, it keeps the rules fresh in my mind and running the same adventure over and over again helps. Even better, I'm running on a six adventure timer. I don't have to worry about Adventure 7 or 10; I don't have time. If I there's villain in Adventure 2, he's going to have to show up again by Adventure 6 or not at all. There's aren't--and can't be--a lot of interwoven plot threads where X affects Y because it's just six sessions and I don't have time for that bullshit. Sure, there are vague ideas about the second arc, assuming the first ends well, but I'm simply refusing to think of it until I'm done with this one. I'm focusing on, maximum, six stories at a time, usually self-contained. I've found it very liberating, which brings me to my next point.

Field Manual Kris: The Talk Circuit

Interior, Oval Office. President Barak Obama sits at the president's desk with full suit and tie. One of the classic white couches has been moved to The President's left, facing outward.

Pictured: George W. Bush trying his hand at theater in a production of "Return to Oz."

PBO: "Welcome back to the White House everyone, today we have a very special guest. Well...Joe, is he important?"

*Cut to Joe Biden behind a set of drums, his jacket draped over the back of his chair and sleeves rolled up. He smiles and laughs with an 'I don't know' gesture.*

PBO: "Well, he is a voter. Everyone, welcome Kris."

There is no applause.

Kris: *Sits on the middle of the couch.* "This is...really uncomfortable."

PBO: "C'mon. It's a great couch. Hilary was just sitting there this afternoon."

Kris: "...less...comfortable."

Updates

Most of my Christmas shopping is done. Guess I need to...wrap this stuff or something.

Did some DnD Sunday. It went pretty well, but the adventure needs some polishing. The next story begins with a tavern tale from one/some of my players, which could go terribly wrong. I also need to give everyone some slightly better equipment, since my dragons, kobolds, and zombies don't come packed with treasure (not that it would matter, as they've only killed kobolds thus far).

Haven't done much with Magic because I am pretty Magic-ed out.

I am not, however, video gamed out. Double Dash is awesome enough to make me contemplate buying a TV (and a Game Cube/Wii), but only in transient fits. I also bought the Humble Indy Bundle for Child's Play this week, which really worked out. Braid and Osmos are tons of fun in that they're challenging and make me think while I'm playing them.

Osmos: It's not science; it's fun science with dodgy menus.

Cortex Command is aggressively bad, but it tells you that it's just a beta and you should cut it some slack so I don't hate it. It'll be a nice ragdoll physics Real Time Tactics game just as soon as you stop getting curb stomped and watching all of your reinforcements crash their rockets in the tutorial. Getting beaten like a clueless, drunken Bane stumbling to into an S&M scene is not informative. Well, it is informative in a "let's never do that again" kind of way, but that's a very specific kind of information.

Cortex Command: It's okay; it's still in beta.

Revenge of the Titans is a passable time-killing castle-defense game, but I kinda ruined it by considering the fact that it might actually be a cunning twist on the castle-defense genre. The general who briefs you about upcoming missions suddenly becomes despondent ("Faceless Commander, the next battle is in Stockholm. Expect waves of enemies from all sides...sometimes it feels like this bloody, pointless war will never end.") or the scientist who explains your new technological breakthroughs starts getting to familiar ("These cooling towers will increase the firing rate of our turrets...but Faceless Commander, whose cooling off your turret?" replete with little pixelated hearts.).

Sadly, I know that's not to be. The generic levels will keep getting generically harder until the time and attention needed to beat a level well exceeds what I'm willing to put in on a cookie cutter game with no emotional investment and enemies who actually look kinda like the Night Fury from "How to Train Your Dragon". I'll just say "fuck it all, I'm playing Dawn of War" and then do just that.

Revenge of the Titans: In all probability, it's what you play before you start playing Dawn of War again.

Machinarium is an adventure game that, like Yahtzee once said, requires you to rub every item on your inventory in each item in the game world before you move on to the next room. While they do parse down the whole "ton of inventory items thing," the best way to skip the indeterminable time you spend clicking everything around you, you can consult in-game hints (which you are encouraged to do only when you're really stuck, which would only change the hint-seeking habits of the most impressionable and idiotic of Catholics). The hints, however, are safely locked away behind a crappy, three-button mini-game about key that shoots lasers to kill spiders in a randomly-generated map of bricks and spiders, both of which will kill you when you touch them. Which is an interesting idea to deny the fact that if no one gets your game, then they can just beat it by completing a slightly better game. The hints don't "hint" anything. Which is glad because the first time through I naturally thought was doing all this key-navigating, spider-shooting bullshit for nothing, or rather for the chance to see some high-sounding, vaguely worded hint or an esoteric picture of a few components around me. No, the hints are just how to beat the level in words.

Machinarium pretty much plays like so; look at all the charming things that happen when you're retarded robot enters a room, decide how much of this room's arbitrary bullshit you're willing to deal with, kill some spiders, die, die, die, punch your computer, die again, finally kill all the spiders and don't get killed by bricks until you get a picture of what you're supposed to do, then try to do it, and punch your computer.

Machinarium: It's two games that will both make you want to punch your computer.