"When I'm God Everyone Dies"

More than an amusing lyric from a satirical rock opera, this line almost became grim reality in my campaign last Friday. During this past session, the players (Barlow the fighter, Fallgrim the cleric, and Tyrone the rogue) were tasked with investigating, and then clearing out the bandit population from their cave hideout a few day's walk into the Shadowvale Forest near the settlement town of Shady Creek.

Still on the first level of the cave, the players stumbled into the sleeping quarters of the bandit denizens, and faced an encounter that was a touch beyond their abilities - namely one level 2 bandit skirmisher, and ten level 4 bandit minions (of my own creation). I gave the players every opportunity for them to try and bluff their way out of the situation, and, in fact, the headstrong fighter, Barlow Boneslasher, made a bit of an effort to try and bullshit the party's way past them (and managed to roll a 19 on his effort too). Unfortunately, either the player couldn't think fast enough on his feet to complete the deception, or it wasn't in the character's nature, but for some reason the conversation ended with Barlow taking a swing at one of the bandits with his greatsword, and then all hell broke loose.

I learned a few things during this encounter. The first thing was to make sure all encounters are balanced. This particular one was designed with four players in mind - an oversight I neglected to fix, as one of the players recently bowed out of the campaign citing real life commitments on his time that would keep him from being able to play reliably each week. The second thing I learned is the overwhelming force of focused fire. In fourth edition, minions may literally be one-hit wonders, but when you have six of them focus-firing on a single target with +9 to hit (these minions were created with WotC's own NPC generation tools), player characters can go down fast.

I found myself in a pretty bad situation -- within a few combat rounds, two of the players were at zero HP and unconscious - and the third was on his last legs. For their efforts, they managed to take down maybe six of the 11 bandits. Now, I'm all about letting the dice fall where they may, but I really really didn't want a TPK on session three of my campaign, so I did what any good DM would do in this position. I fudged some rolls, and I made some of the bandits pull some pretty asinine tactics, like trying to loot one of the PCs bodies before the fight was over.

The one important thing to note is I told the players that I didn't fudge any rolls. That's right - I flat-out lied to my players. Why? Because if they knew I was fudging rolls when the going got tough, that would completely remove any tension or fear that death was a real possibility in my game. And to be honest, I want death to be a real danger in my campaign - I just don't want a TPK when the players are level 1 and in the middle of a few major plot points.

Of course, there are other ways I could have resolved it. My fall-back plan when things were looking grim was that if all the players bit it, they'd be captured by the bandits and have an opportunity to escape. It wasn't a bad way to go, I suppose, but it would also be seen as an obvious use of the DMs power to help them cheat death - and that could lead to bad habits.

So tell me - as either players or DMs - what have you witnessed/done in similar situations? Obviously this was mostly my fault for not balancing the encounter right, but I think I handled it reasonably well. What's your call?

Messing with Your Players

Now, I'm not a total bastard - I never set out for a TPK, or fudge rolls with the intent to kill off a player, but I do like making life interesting for my players, and sometimes that means keeping them on their toes.

For example, I took one of my players (the rogue) aside at the beginning of my last session, and set up a scenario where one of the shadier elements of the town the PCs were currently in wanted this player to transport some ill-gotten goods to a settlement town that they were heading toward anyway. The player was promised a 10% cut for his efforts.

The player jumped at the opportunity, and when he delivered the stolen goods, he was well-received by his contact who ushered him into the basement of the local tavern. Among the goods was also a sealed note that advised the contact that he should use his judgment and discretion as to whether he should pay the player what he was owed, or simply kill him outright. So, the contact offers the player a drink, and makes him an offer: Take another set of goods to a port town, and upon completion of said task, the player will be provided with full payment, ushered into the fold of this underground criminal network, and more importantly be given the antidote to the poison he just drank.

Of course, the player was taken aback - but seeing as he had no real option, he agreed to the request forced upon him. This poison is of my own design, and I'm quite pleased with it -- here's a rundown:

Witherleaf Poison:

After 24 Hours: Dreams become muddled and cloudy; -1 to all saves.
After 48 Hours: Nightmares begin; -1 to all to-hi rolls.
After 1 Week: Upset stomach and chills; -2 to all saves.
After 2 Weeks: Sporadic vomiting; -2 to all to-hit rolls.
After 3 Weeks: Blurred vision, violent shakes; -3 to all saves and to-hit rolls.
After 4 Weeks: Patient lapses into a coma and death soon follows.

So now the player has a "ticking clock" of sorts, but he has plenty of time to get the antidote. I was a little surprised to find out that he intends on keeping the goods, and trying to find the antidote on his own (in my notes, the plant that the antidote is made from is only known to grow deep in a place known as the Darkwood, which is an awful pit of despair that the players really have no business being in. Beyond that, he hasn't even mentioned this episode to the other players, but they will undoubtedly begin to suspect something's amiss when blood starts shooting out of his eyes.

God, I love being the DM sometimes.

Wingin' It

Ugh. So, to compliment my lack of preparation, a few things went off the rails that were out of my control. Namely, my fourth player that was supposed to be introduced in yesterday's session for the first time couldn't make it because of a mis-communication and conflict with work. The deeper problem with this was that I had planned to use his introduction into the campaign and to the rest of the players as a bit of an adventure hook for the game. Instead of the usual, generic "you meet at a tavern and for some demented reason decide to go off on quests with complete strangers" setup for getting new players in with the group, I had planned for something a little more dramatic.

See, the original three players were traveling toward a port town a good 150 miles away, with a small settlement town in between. On their way to the town, I had planned for them to stumble across the fourth player, an eladrin bard, and his NPC fiance' being accosted by highwaymen. In a robbery gone bad, one of the bandits has rough hold on the bard's female companion, who refuses to give up a broach around her neck, and manages to stab the bandit deep in the thigh with a hairpin. The players were supposed to stumble across this as it was happening, and by this point it was supposed to be clear that the bandits were actually arguing with each other - with the leader trying to maintain control over his men. Finally, the hairpinned bandit releases the woman to the eladrin, but out of spite shoots her in the back with a crossbow and kills her.

From this point on, chaos was to break out - with the bandit leader killing the wounded bandit soon afterward, enraged that it had come to bloodshed and that this woman had been killed. He would then toss the bag of coins he liberated from the eladrin into the middle of the road in disgust, setting this bandit leader up as a sort of tragic antihero - a swashbuckler that steals from wealthy travelers, but never, ever wants it to come to violence. This action prompts some of the other bandits, who are falling under the sway of a rival of sorts of the current leader, to take up arms, and a chaotic exchange of crossbow fire was to break out, killing several on both sides, before the bandits melted away to settle their differences elsewhere.

You know, a nice, dramatic, and tragic enterence for a new player. Of course, it was also a prime adventure hook. So, without him, I had to wing it. I had to play the part of his eladrin bard, as well as everyone else in the encounter. It didn't go as smoothly as I had anticipated, and one of the more overzealous members of the party tried to intervene, but thanks to careful placement of figures on the battle map and a bit of forethought, his impact on the scene was negligible and amounted to the deaths of 2 minions for 88 XP.

I guess the one thing I learned out of all of this is that you will almost always have to "wing it" sooner or later, and if you remember that you are essentially the god of this world you've created, you'll be alright. Just do it with confidence and your players will pick up on that. It also shows the risk of basing adventure hooks off of individual players - it's satisfying, but involves that X factor.

Banditos... & Preparation Redux

So, it's been a few days. Happy 4th if you live in the US, and hell, even if you don't, I hope you enjoyed your weekend!

Haven't done too much painting this past week, what with visitors and all, but I did manage to crank these four bandits out, which pretty much tested my ability to paint the entire dirt spectrum on four models. I think I used six different shades of brown. I'm ready to not paint any more brown!

My second session is tomorrow, and I'm trying something new this week - namely lack of preparation. Usually I over-prepare, but due to circumstances this week I wasn't able to do any real concrete work on tomorrow's adventure (planning encounters, working out the details of a new town, drawing a dungeon map, etc.) until this morning. Thankfully I knew more or less which way the adventure was going to go, but the details were all jumbled up and swirling around in my head, and didn't get ironed out until today. In fact, I've been making changes as recently as an hour ago, and probably will continue to right up until I'm sitting at the table.

This will be a new experience for me though. As I said, my usual vice is over-preparing, which doesn't sound bad, but it can leave you bogged down in too many details, and set you up for a "missing the forest for the trees" kind of scenario. Of course, I don't like ad-libbing, and would feel naked without some amount of preparation, but this is unusual for me. I'm pretty sure I can pull it off.

Details at 11.

First Session - First Impressions

So, I ran my first session in ages yesterday, and you know what? It wasn't a catastrophe! I more or less had an answer for anything the players wanted to do, and despite having to thumb through the DM guide a few times to look up a rule on inclimate weather or the specifics of how a trap works (next time I'll use post-its), the game went pretty seamlessly. And most importantly, all my players seemed to have a damn good time. The intro went off well, along with the typically awkward "how do you know each other" or "let's play out you meeting for the first time" scenario, and the players seemed to be enthusiastic both about the campaign, and about getting into the mindsets of their characters.

So how does 4e play? I gotta be honest - I'm digging it. While building encounters in 4e can feel a little clinical, they play out well, and so far the pre-planned encounters I made with WotC's encounter builder delivered what they promised. They gave my players a good challenge all around, while not being insurmountable. At one point each of my three players was on death's door, with the fighter down to 2hps at one point, the rogue at 4, and the cleric I'm unsure of, but I know he blew through a lot of healing on himself at one point. And yet they all managed to come back from the brink to achieve a meaningful victory. That's the kind of balance I hope scales with levels.

The only real difference from previous editions, beyond the inclusion of miniatures, is those pesky healing surges, which actually seemed to be a blessing in disguise. Why, you ask? Well, after the first major encounter the party faced (2 kobold slingers and six minions), they were looking as if they'd seen better days, and in previous editions they would have had to head back, or camp up until the cleric could heal them all. But in 4e, they could heal up and press on. They played it safe and opted for a six hour rest, and then dove right back into the dungeon. I'm starting to think that healing surges actually give the DM more control in terms of pacing, because if I feel my players are advancing too fast, I can always take those healing surges away by making sure they can't get in their extended rests.

Now, I've only put the new system through its paces with a grand total of four encounters, so I'm sure there's some rough edges I've yet to discover, but I gotta admit, most of my apprehension has melted away. Now, who knows, it could all come crashing back potentially, but I'm starting to warm up to 4e. We'll see what happens at the second session next week.

Preparation

28 hours to game time. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't the least bit nervous - you know, having not run a game in years, and having a bunch of players demanding to be entertained at the table tomorrow - in a public forum too.

As a result, I'm trying to cover all my bases. I have a plan, a story arc, and an idea of where I want the players to go, but just like how no plan survives contact with the enemy, no plot survives contact with the players. At least not entirely. For players aren't computers - they're unpredictable creatures that will resist being hemmed in. They will come up with their own ideas and motivations that may not entirely be in line with what your plot demands, and in most cases, fighting against this tendency is a bad idea. Players resent being told what to do - and in my limited experience the ideal is to provide the illusion of freedom while slowly and carefully nudging them in the direction you want them to go, without them realizing they're being so nudged.

Of course, it doesn't always go that smoothly. Sometimes things just go, to borrow a phrase, tits-up, and in that case it's best to have a contingency plan. Enter Grozzy's Random Dungeon Creator. This fantastic web-based applet allows you to produce a sound, well-laid out random dungeon in seconds, with a lot of tweakable options from aesthetics (color/black and white) to maximum room sizes, etc. This program generates dungeon maps of "small," "medium," "large," and "immense" sizes, and though sometimes it'll generate a map I'm not completely pleased with, all I have to do is click the "generate" button again, and most of the time the next one it cranks out suits me just fine.

Now all you have to do is have some encounters prepared for the appropriate level of your PCs (assuming you don't want to randomly generate encounters on the fly). One of the best tools for this is WotC's own encounter generator (the only downside is it requires a D&D Insider subscription). A more budget-friendly tool is Asmor's Encounter Generator which may not have all the bells and whistles of WotC's, but it gets the job done.

So now I have several random dungeon maps of various sizes, and some generic encounters planned out. This took very little time to put together and stick in my campaign binder, and it's a fantastic safeguard if my players want to wander off the beaten path for some reason. Hopefully, I won't need it, but better safe than sorry!