Regaining the touch

One of the troubles with DMing - and yes, there are many - is that every so often inspiration fails. For week after week, the adventures you present your friends with are repeats of the last, which wasn't so good in any case.

My definition of a "bad" adventure is one where the PCs kill monsters for no good reason and take their stuff, without having to think at all. I'm very good at giving my players bad adventures. Why should the players have to think? I didn't when creating the adventure!

(Incidentally, this is one reason I've been running RPGA and other published adventures for my other groups - designing adventures for one group is difficult. Doing it for all of them is near impossible, at least for me).

I really am best when I have several sessions of lead-up preparation work done. When the campaign's NPCs are realised in my mind from having used them many times, and when there are many plot threads weaving in and out of the sessions. Just starting off cold is something I find difficult.

A couple of months ago, two of my friends moved to Melbourne, and a third suddenly discovered that being at university required study - so the group was cut in half. This disturbed what I was planning. Then, one of the other characters turned really evil, and was retired - and the rest of the party fled the kingdom. Hmm. Only two continuing characters, and they were no longer in the area I'd been running. Yes, that stopped my plans dead.

For the next few weeks, I ran several bad adventures - either expeditions into Castle Greyhawk (Greyhawk Ruins), or another dungeon of my own design (Maze-Tomb of Karak'zhn). Most notably, I did hardly any preparation, there were no interesting NPCs, and very little thought was required from my players.

Eventually, even I woke up to the fact that the games weren't really that fun. I'm not above using published modules, and there was one I really wanted to use: Gary Gygax's Necropolis. Yes, it's a killer dungeon, lair of the dread Rahotep, but I think it's an entertaining one... and there was a gimmick I thought of to get them there.

That gimmick was the Stargate. Once upon a time, back in the early days of 3e, I created a Stargate-like artifact for my PCs to discover. In fact, they discovered several of them around the Flanaess. We'd never quite used it to its full extent, however.

This time around, I'd have an invasion begin from there. I was helped greatly by Sandstorm here. There's a great prestige class in that book: the Walker of the Waste. Eventually the walkers become undead "dry" liches who want to expand the desert. What a system of minions for Rahotep to use!

So, the PCs learnt of the Bright Desert beginning to expand from the local druids (Gofa's new PC is a druid). Of course, they went to investigate...

That made the next session good, didn't it? No, it didn't. For all the interesting encounters that were there, I'd forgotten an important factor: this is a RPG.

Role-playing is not always the thing that makes a memorable session, but it helps. It helps differentiate between all the encounters that are just "slash and kill".

Luckily, I remembered that for the second session of the adventure. The first encounter they had - as they pursued the track of the Salt Mummies deeper into the desert - was with a Androsphinx named Andre. That was fun, and my players enjoyed it. Immediately, they were more interested in the adventure.

Then came Sir Ulric, a Knight of Rary the Traitor, and finally a big combat with the Walker herself - one that slew a PC and saw the Walker escape. Next session I hope to actually have her say something to the PCs, and thus engage their interest further.

The campaign is looking up again. One wonders what they'll do when they find the Stargate?

Things don't suck

There are times when I despair at the actions of some of my fellow gamers. When new products come out, instead of racing out to see what they're like, they sit at home and say, "it will suck."

What depresses me even more are those who go, "Oh, I flipped through it in the store, and it sucked."

Really - you can tell whether a book is good or not by just flipping through it in the store? Well, good for you, I suppose.

There are times when people accuse me of being on the Wizards payroll. Oh, I only wish. It'd help my normally impecunious state no end. No, I just think that Wizards are doing a pretty good job most of the time. No, not all of the time. There are some Wizards products I think needed a lot more work - Races of Destiny and Map Folio II come to mind. I don't know if I gave MF2 a review of 1 out of 5, but it came very, very close.

There is one product I've been buying for the past five years that probably would count as one of the least useful of any D&D item I've bought - that would be Dragon Magazine. Its sister magazine, Dungeon, is far more useful to me. Dragon, on the other hand, goes into my evergrowing collection of D&D stuff after a few hours perusal, and rarely gets pulled out again.

On occasion I pull it out again because of a really stellar article that has suddenly become useful in my campaign, but those occasions are rare. Why then, do I continue to buy it? Mainly because it keeps me in touch with a segment of the D&D community, and you never quite know when an article might actually be good. With Erik Mona now at the reins of both magazines, I do think things may be looking up.

However, I normally don't go around saying how bad Dragon is. I just don't talk about it at all. I figure that there are people out there who get a whole lot more use out of it than me, so why not let them enjoy it rather than constantly harping on about how it isn't the magazine it used to be.

That is, if it ever was the magazine it used to be. I've got the Dragon Archive (issues 1-250), and most of them don't seem that useful, either!

Conversely, I find most of Wizards releases for D&D to be very useful indeed. All right, I admit I'm not that fond of Libris Mortis and Lords of Madness. That's mainly because the subject matter isn't interesting to me in the first place. (Why do I have them? Temporary madness or the completist urge in me - you choose!)

This isn't to say that all the books I like were always immediately useful. Frostburn is a case in point. At the time I got that my players were on the definitely tropical Isle of Dread. I'm yet to run an ice-themed adventure of my own design, but Frostburn has been very apparent in some recent RPGA adventures I've run. That's good!

Material in a D&D book or article really needs to serve one of two purposes:
* It must inspire an encounter, adventure or campaign
* It must inspire a character

What helps it is if the material is inspiring to a large number of people. Material that only inspires one player is something of a waste. That's on a global scale, of course - it is rare that material will be useful to everyone in a group.

One of the important things to remember about D&D in particular is that the variety of adventures it can support is quite wide. Some of the possible areas of adventure require specific support that will not be useful to everyone, but will be very useful to those who want to run such adventures. Books like Frostburn and Sandstorm are good examples of those.

Do you need Sandstorm to run a desert adventure? By no means! What Sandstorm does is cut out a lot of design work that otherwise you might have to do, and address issues that you might not have thought of. Natural game designers - of whom I am not one! - will just happily invent away and come up with a perfectly enjoyable desert adventure with no need for Sandstorm. For us less gifted types, we use the shortcuts given by Sandstorm and other books of its type.

What then if you disliked Sandstorm and can't think of anything better for yourself? Well, we have a classic conflict of stylistic needs. What you needed couldn't be filled by Sandstorm. Does that make Sandstorm suck? No.

At this point, the more annoying members of the online community start popping up with threads like "Sandstorm sucks!" Arrrggghhhh!!!!

However, a thread like "I didn't like Sandstorm and here's why" is far more interesting.

One of the big traps that people fall into is making generalisations. "Sandstorm sucks" implies that no-one will find it useful. "3e is too complicated!" is another one that keeps on popping up. Neither is that useful. The confrontational tone of thread titles is one of the biggest reasons for flamewars about the quality of books.

However, discussing something like "The complexity of 3e" or "Thoughts on Sandstorm" are far more neutral and likely to generate good debate. After all, plenty of people don't read anything about a thread except the title before replying...

Can something suck, then? Oh, my, yes!

When the target audience for a product almost uniformly reject it, then you can pretty much say that a product was a complete failure - and yes, it sucked!

There a point to this article that probably has been buried under a lot of words above, and here it is: constructive criticism is hard to do but very useful; generalised statements are easy and stupid wastes of time.

Which as a couple of generalised statements themselves are somewhat suspect! Add a "most" and "normally" in front of "generalised" and "stupid" respectively.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to pick up Heroes of Battle in the next few days. I've already seen one particularly obnoxious poster declaim that it has nothing useful in it. Thankfully there are several contrary opinions from people I actually respect and given my optimistic view of such matters, I may well find that it is a book that I like.

A weekend of gaming

Last weekend was fun. I met with several friends and played a lot of games. Paradise!

The weekend began on Friday afternoon withthe Living Greyhawk adventure War of the Dust. The adventure involved wilderness adventuring, dungeon-crawling, some role-playing, and a bunch of combat. My players love the combat part.

What really distinguished this adventure from the others were the way that the terrain played a big part in making the combats different from each other. There was aerial combat, a combat in the mountains (with slopes and rubble), and a combat underground in confined spaces. All of this I was modelling on my battlemap with my D&D Miniatures figures. Very useful they were, too!

The end of the module could have been a huge role-playing encounter, but the paladin stayed very true to his vow and suddenly it was over. 5 hours of gaming, and the PCs were heroes!

Then I went with Sarah and Daniel to their house to see where I'd be gaming on Saturday; and ended up playing some games of Killer Bunnies and the Search for the Magic Carrot. I don't think I recommend this game highly enough. It's very silly and very amusing. I still haven't won a game, though. That will have to change!

Saturday afternoon I had planned to run a session of the old AD&D classic, Against the Cult of the Reptile God. A couple of the players that should have been at the session weren't, but another old friend of ours turned up and filled the place. My friends have never played AD&D (1st edition) before, so creating characters took longer than it should have. They gained much entertainment from the archaic form of the game - though not often in the way that the 1e supporters would appreciate.

"Females have a maximum Strength? Huh?" Sarah almost said, when creating an elf fighter/magic-user.

Eventually, we were all ready. Sarah, Ben and Daniel had two characters each, and Mick had one. Into the village of Orlane they went, seeking the Evil Wizard of the Woods and the Source of the Killer Alligators of the Swamp. So, of course, the first place they went was to the inn that was run by the evil cultists...

One long combat later, the PCs were victorious, and none of them had died! This was especially surprising given that Daniel's druid had 1 hit point. Dinner was beckoning, so we ate.

I was lacking somewhat in sleep, so after the pizza, we decided to instead play some other games: Munchkin (that's one I own, and a great game it is), and Zombies! (Another game Sarah owns, and equally excellent). Unfortunately, I lost both games.

Everyone else left at that point, and I kept saying that I was about to leave... but the lure of my Magic: the Gathering cards kicked in, and Sarah and I sat up to near midnight playing game after game. I've now been playing the game for eleven years - I still love it. Although D&D is my first love, and I do so much to promote D&D Miniatures, when it just comes down to a fun game, Magic is too good. (I won most of the games, btw).

Sunday is the day of my regular World of Greyhawk campaign, of which I've written more elsewhere. Of late, I've run a regular RPGA scenario beforehand. This week was the turn of a Star Wars RPG game in the Living Force campaign. The players and I had a great time. Star Wars is one of those games that, regardless of the edition, I have fun playing. It was a well-written adventure as well - Force Convention, the third of the Forces of Cularin trilogy.

After that, finding that I'd left some of the pieces to Settlers of Catan at home (arrrggghhh!!!), I introduced my friends to the game Diplomacy. I was first introduced to Diplomacy during my university days and I haven't played since. As that is now ten years or more behind me, I wanted to see what they thought. They liked it.

Diplomacy is an interesting game. It's like a simultaneous game of Chess with six other people, and where backstabbing is the rule. I'd forgotten a lot of the strategy of the game, and Gofa seemed to pick it up fairly quickly. Although Diplomacy really requires seven players, it can be played with fewer - especially when they're just learning. We only played for an hour or so, but enough to see that I need to practise more!

We finished the weekend's gaming with our regular D&D Greyhawk campaign. The PCs were stuck down the bottom of a dungeon, low on hit points and spells, and with Hill Giants coming after then. Unfortunately for the Killer DM in me, they escaped - freeing an imprisoned eladrin and then getting him to teleport the rest of them out.

The Greyhawk campaign's been in an odd place, recently. The group has been undergoing a change in membership and that always discomforts me. As a result, I'd prepared less than I really needed to and so the session was lackluster. We discussed what the group wanted to do after the session. It seems they want to (a) find a relic and (b) have a wilderness adventure.

Hmm. Perhaps this would be the proper time to use Sandstorm?

I'll be inviting Daniel and Sarah to the next session; we'll rearrange the times to suit them better. This weekend is only my Eberron game.

Oh, I'm also performing with the Ballarat Choral Society in their autumn concert this Sunday - Autumn and Spring. We're singing a lot of German songs by Brahms and the Schumanns, and there'll be some piano music as well. I love singing - it should go well.