I mention this to you because I want you to understand and appreciate how much I think about D&D and game design.  My newborn son is almost 3 months old, I have more work at my day job and in freelancing than I could shake several sticks at…and here I am, unable to sleep because I have to say something to you.

For the underwhelming love of fantasy deities, STOP spending time making hard encounters.  I listen to many frustrated GMs who spin me this tale (tell me if it sounds familiar):

“I spent five hours building this encounter and the players tore through it in 2 rounds. The players weren’t challenged at all, and I feel like a failure for not being able to challenge them! It was supposed to be a tough fight!”

I’ve heard this, and I’ve been there.   What I’m up early this morning to say though is that when we’re feeling like this, we as GMs are looking at our jobs from the wrong viewpoint.  We are also misunderstanding combat to a degree.

Running a game is a perverse business.  On one hand, it’s a candy store; look, sunshine and saccharine! The other hand is a punch in the mouth; why were you taking my candy?  If you give players too much candy, the whole enterprise goes rotten as you turn each PC into a candyman Fonzerelli, riding through your dungeon on a Gingerbread bike going “Aaaaaaaay!”  If PCs get everything they want whenever they want, the game no longer compels anyone to play it.

But how much face-punching can you get away with?  You can string face-punching out a little longer than you can candy-giving, but in the end, no one really wants to be on the receiving end of Manny Pacquio each session without a chance to even hit back.  Too much face-punching also makes the game less compelling.

I think all decent GMs for any game system knows the formula RPGs;  put out some candy (or the opportunity to grab it), punch some faces along the way.  If players don’t get candy, there are no incentives to get punched in the face.  If PCs don’t get punched in the face, they don’t appreciate the candy.

Combat isn’t a punch in the face in D&D. It’s candy. Fighting is a reward, because that’s how the game is designed.  Part of what D&D has always been about is the thrill of overcoming monsters and getting stuff.  It is open in other areas so is open to creative hacking to do other stuff, but every edition of D&D includes copious rules for killing stuff. It is the reward even though monsters are trying to take you out, because the monsters trying to take you out is part of the thrill of the fight.  The more the monsters come at me, the more exciting it is, and the more awesome I feel for overcoming it.

If combat isn’t a punch in the face, what is?  When the bad guy gets away…that’s a punch in face.  When he steals a sacred artifact, when we fail to protect the townspeople, when the tyrant’s army wins a key battle, when an adventurer sacrifices himself to protect the world — these are punches in the face.  When we finally get a chance to put our hands on the villain or his minions, we can best describe that as a catharsis.

Imagine you could punch out someone critical in the country’s financial woes.  There are a lot of bad consequences flowing from that, but can’t you imagine that it might feel good right before they put the cuffs on?  The central conceit of fantasy adventure is that violence works. Violence rarely fixes anything in real life, but works about a dozen times every level in D&D.  At the end of the day, we get to hit something and good comes of it.

So, back to the hard encounter.  Do you ever notice that 9 times out of 10  in your hard encounter, the players are having a good time?  That the only person feeling like crap about the whole thing is you?  You tried to build a fight that would make the characters feel fear or intimidate them, and they ran you over. That in turn left you feeling a bit abused.  You spent so much time on it!  It wa supposed to be hard!

Listen, if you want a hard encounter, do this:  Let every monster stun as a minor action, no hit roll required. Or hey, triple the damage each monster deals.  Infinite hit points? I guarantee that using one of those ideas will push your PCs right to the brink….oh, but you are trying to make it “hard but fun”, right?  Or “hard but balanced”? You want an encounter that drops characters but won’t necessarily cause a TPK?

I’m not saying that it’s not possible to do that; I’m saying it’s not really worth your time.  In games as we talk about them, there is a perfect balance to strike every time between monster threat and player satisfaction.  In games as they are played, people go on hot streaks with dice. People go on cold streaks.  People discover crazy power synergies. DMs forget auras and players abuse solos.  A few good dice rolls turn a mildly challenging encounter into a very challenging encounter or a very challenging encounter into a TPK.

Players are going to whale on encounters, and that’s ok!  The game is actually designed in just that way. As a DM, you can make the combat interesting for yourself by upselling the player and monster actions through narration.  You can make the combat awesome by adding different twists that aren’t combatants. Interesting terrain and unusual parameters for the fight are  great. You can work towards unconventional consequences to your fights.  Spend your time making your fights compelling.  I’ve run a lot of fights where players have mostly had their way, but because of cool environment or cool parameters (or both), still ended up being memorable.

“But Gamefiend, the BBEG is supposed to be super tough!”

No, the BBEG is supposed to be super INTERESTING. He threatens and cajoles; he schemes and plots against the PCs; the PC foil the BBEG sometimes, but sometimes he foils them. When they face off for the final time, all sorts of crazy stuff should be going on.  Maybe after they navigate the chaos, they take the BBEG down in a round or two, but they will remember all that chaos.

Work to make your fights interesting instead of challenging, and your sanity will increase.  Maybe not much, but hey you’re a DM, so you were a little crazy already.

The biggest reason improv seems near impossible in 4e is the game’s dependence on maps (we won’t get into gridless right now ). The assumption for many with 4e is that every fight is a set piece, with more “production” placed around the battles than any other edition of D&D before it.  To even get part of the way to a nice looking battle requires planning. What happens when your characters get into a fight all of a sudden? What then?

Most 4e GMs take great pride in building awesome and elaborate set pieces with Dungeon Tiles, Dwarven Forge, and more I used to print custom color maps with Dundjinni.  I own an automated paper cutter just so I could build scenery. Have you looked at the sets that Mike Shea uses? Seriously awesome. I don’t expect GMs to give that up — I don’t — but what you should have is a good backup.  If players want total freedom, they have to cut you at least a little slack on presentation.

What I suggest is this:  build libraries of maps in different locals. In part I do this by hoarding poster maps (generally means buying lots of adventures though) and combine those and Dugeon Tiles to have a collection of maps for regions we’re in or near. If players are in a city that’s near a swamp,  it’s reasonable to have a few city maps and a few swamp maps on hand. If you can, recycle these maps whenever possible — you can always add different terrain and objects to vary the terrain. Most players aren’t going to stress repeats, especially if it means you can more easily support whatever crazy things they are going to do. When you have this base of extra maps, you can still build something that looks decent without fearing players will go off rails, leaving you totally unprepared.

The other thing you need are monsters to fill those maps with. This is very easy if you subscribe to DDI; just keep your laptop nearby with the compendium and you are just a few clicks away from filling out an encounter. What I recommend that you do on top of that is to prepare a list of the basic encounter types according to the DMG, along with the encounter XP budgets appropriate for your PC’s level. It takes a few extra minutes of prep, but here’s how it can work in play:

You see that the players are investigating a topic that you meant as a minor detail. Rather than stifling their efforts, you decide you can expand on it. The investigation is going to bring the ire of some thugs, you decide. So, while the PCs are discussing what they will do, you use the compendium and your  encounter list to draw up a quick encounter. You want it to be a quick skirmish, so you use half the XP of a normal encounter. As the PCs make their skill checks and roleplay, you’ve gotten a little encounter for this new direction that they’ve taken. They take a turn into an alley, and you pull out your reserve map…

With a little bit of forward-thinking and structure, you can turn even the heavy prep aspects of 4e into something more conductive to low-prep, on the fly GMing.

What tools do you use to prepare battles on the fly?

I promise not to be annoying with this…but have you checked out Etherkai yet?  For $2 you can support the site and get an awesome solo to terrify your players with.  

A very good question that people sometimes ask:

When do you use a skill challenge?

My answer:

You use skill challenges when it isn’t necessary for the players to succeed in order for the story to continue, and when the prospect of failing or succeeding is interesting.

Article done, right? OK, I’ll elaborate.

Implicit to a challenge of any sort is the notion of failure.   It seems completely negative and something you want to avoid at all costs, but failure is actually a powerful tool that enriches good stories.  Sometimes you have to break up that straightforward progression of the story and force the heroes to do something else.  Corner the players, force them to display character and perseverance. Judiciously used, failure becomes a positive and powerful feature for your D&D games. If you want your PCs to roleplay and deepen their experience, they have to be at risk of failing something that they really want to succeed at.  It takes only the briefest look at storytelling in any medium to see that this is true.

In D&D, the traditional place for risking failure has been combat, which is problematic.  Failure in combat has deep ties to the ending of a campaign.  Failure usually means death, and it’s hard for players to perceive when the reaper is coming for the party. The anatomy of a total party kill is such that it’s difficult for your players to analyze or assess that it’s happening until they are firmly in death’s clutches.  The healer goes down, then the defender…and soon those initial minor failures (minor for everyone but the players of the downed characters!) slide down the slope into complete failure.  Combat failure is typically what we as DMs pull punches to try and avoid. Combat can be an interesting source of failure, but it is often fatal.

Skill challenges to the rescue!  Skill challenges give us ways to offer failure, sans fatality.  Your party can completely botch a skill challenge and still be up and around.

So when should your characters be at risk of failing? It clearly can’t be every action they take. Being at risk of failing for everything that you do makes your characters feel like everyday schlubs or worse, when they should feel like heroes. You don’t want your characters rolling to tie their shoes, or to walk in a straight line. This would get tedious so quickly that you as a DM would be at risk of failing to organize another session.

Failure for complex actions needs to be interesting in its process and interesting in its end-result.  Players need to be engaged in the actions they are taking that lead to the eventual failure, and the meaning of them falling short needs to be clear and, well, sort of painful. To generate interest in the process, what you need is tension and a proper setting.  It could be relatively mundane (a town on fire, with people that need saving) or wander into more exotic locales (playing a game of fantasy poker with souls as the wager). The end-result of a skill challenge becomes interesting when it has weight or consequence (“People might die if I fail, or a person loses his soul if I can’t win the game”).  Those consequences are a real as anything in your fantasy world.  When debating whether to make a situation a skill challenge or not, ask yourself if there is sufficient tension and consequence in the scene to warrant making your players work for it.  If it lacks tension or consequence, you either let the scene be a straight role play or you tweak it until it gains the attributes it lacks.

Players haggling with a merchant to lower the price on a sword is not, on its own, worthy of a skill challenge.  They can easily negotiate with roleplay and a few choice dice rolls. Or…we could increase the stakes by saying that the merchant doesn’t just take gold, and the sword is not just a sword.  The merchant is actually (unknown to the PCs of course) a cultist of Vecna.  He’ll take some material wealth but is mostly concerned with arcane power and secrets.  The sword is an ancient sword of prophecy that the PCs have searched for in multiple locales and risked their lives to find numerous times.  The merchant doesn’t know the true value or properties of the blade (yet), and the players must carefully negotiate with the merchant and not reveal the sword’s true nature, lest he refuse them and keep it for himself.

That…is skill challenge material.  The merchant doesn’t just want money — he demands something of the players, something that they may not be willing to give.  The sword is something they want to have, and failure means they are going to have to do something else to get it.  Will they steal it?  Will they fight him? The easiest way for the players to get that sword is to bargain with him, successfully, right now.  I’ll repeat: tension and consequence make a scene appropriate for a skill challenge.

The only thing that you have to watch for is that skill challenges are not bottlenecks.  Every skill challenge you place needs to have an alternate path.  If the characters fail the skill challenge, they can decide to do something else, or are forced into another action.  Be careful about having failure of a skill challenge fall into a combat.  The only time that’s really appropriate is if avoiding the fight in the first place is the main goal of the skill challenge.  Also, make sure that the rewards of the skill challenge are such that winning the skill challenge is more profitable than the combat encounter.  If you have a skill challenge that gives you 400 XP, and not succeeding gives you 600 XP and a bunch of loot…what do you think PCs want to do, really?  You get what you reward, so ensure that skill challenges, when you use them, give bigger rewards than swinging swords.  You’ll drive the PCs to go all out to win every challenge.

Skill challenges are best used when you want the PCs to possibly fail at a complex action of sufficient tension and consequence.  Don’t use them just to complicate simple actions, and don’t use them as bottleneck encounters.  Ensure that your rewards are sufficient to motivate your players.  When you meet these conditions, the skill challenge will reward you and your players with a rich gameplay experience.

Epic Characters should routinely be forced to do the impossible.  But let’s break down what it is I mean when I say impossible.  Obviously when I say impossible, I mean impossible for normal inhabitants of the world.  If it was truly impossible, then no one could do it. Impossible tasks only seem that way at first.  They threaten to overwhelm the characters initially, but then the characters start to use their powers creatively and break down the seemingly impossible task bit by bit.

When I think of  designing impossibility in games, I’m thinking about a few things: Bigness, Complication, and Walls.

A Foe No Sword Could Kill.

Dragons are really cool. They do classify as ‘big’ enemies, huge even, but when I speak of  ’Bigness’ I’m thinking even bigger than that. When I want to amplify the scope of an epic-level task or encounter,  what I’m looking for is to make something so large that the thought of putting a sword to it seems ridiculous and absurd.  Maybe that dragon is the size of a small planet (hello Unicron).  Maybe the solitary dragon is an armada of dragons.  You can amplify size, but an even better way to make something big at epic is to conceptualize it.

What if our epic-level dragon was the spirit of dragonkind, the very essence of draconic might?  That is so “big” you can barely even touch it.

What does Bigness get us as DMs?  Why ‘super-size’ creatures in this way?  My two reasons are:

– separates epic tier as a unique play style.  At heroic, you hit things.  At paragon, you hit things with more finesse.  But just hitting things at epic with all that power just seems…wrong somehow.  When we can’t just hit something and make it go away, then we…

– encourage lateral thinking and creative power/skill usage. Last time I said that we need to embrace the characters’ power.  We short-circuit combat effectiveness in the short-term by making enemies to large to go down in regular fights but let the players make it up by doing even crazier things with their powers.

Bigness is great, but sometimes, things just get complicated.

I Need you to do 100 things, ten seconds ago.

I think truly memorable encounters are made memorable for clever use of complication.  When I say complication, I don’t mean having multiple status effects for your players, or even stacking up multiple hazards for the players.  When you need to complicate things, the first place to start is with goals.  Once you have a goal (or multiple goals) in mind, you then start chaining additional parameters and sub-goals to it.  An example:

First we start simple — just our goal: Defend the Heart of Light from the undead army. Simple, but boring.

Now, we complicate: Defend the  Heart of Light from the undead army while protecting the citizens of the town in pitch blackness as they fend off the corrupting effects of shadow. Now we’ve got something to work with.

I’d suggest out of the three methods I describe for building impossible tasks  that complication make its way into your game most commonly.  You can complicate in so many ways that it never gets predictable. You can only fight world-sized creatures and conceptual creatures so long before you strain credulity with your players.

You definitely don’t want to set up a bunch of Walls for them, though Walls might be the most interesting of the concepts I’ll discuss.

The Whole Entire Universe is Behind this Wall.

I think you know that I don’t mean a literal wall.  Here’s what I’m thinking.  A Wall is something that is on one or more dimensions, impenetrable.  It is the foe you can’t kill or reason with, the item you can’t destroy.  It doesn’t matter how big it is.  You just can’t touch it. There’s no way in. There’s pretty much nothing you can do but try to find the door.

The doors are actually what makes the wall interesting.  A crucial factor for me is that finding the door into and through a Wall should be part of the fight/encounter itself.  If it’s merely a case of  ”I am invulnerable unless you retrieve this item” then what you’ve got is a quest. Nothing wrong with that, but different from what I’m thinking about (though I’ll talk about quests later if you like). The Wall’s weakness is there in front of you to be discovered.  Interesting doors include:

–Sacrifice . The Wall opens up and becomes vulnerable when something is sacrificed to it.

–Chain of Events.  Players must discover a sequence of effects that makes the Wall vulnerable.

–Weak Point.  The PCs must access some difficult to reach spot to open this wall’s door. Combine with Bigness for Shadow of the Colossus style fun.

I also suggest that you use these as spice and not your main encounter design. Players could lose that sense of surprise and wonder if they see too much of it.

That’s all for this week.  What other epic matters should At-Will theorize about?  Let me know.

To break it down further, a situation puts together many elements and lets the players create a scene from the elements in play. The difficulty is in creating quality situations — not every situation is not created equal, after all.

So what makes for a good situation?

Suggestive. Remember how I said that a situation has no predetermined ending? That doesn’t apply to the beginning at all. To get characters into the situation, we funnel them into a scenario that suggest a certain flow of events. Leading in this way hooks PCs immediately. It increases immersion by offering something immediately provocative to work with. More importantly, it gets them wondering “Where is this going to go?” which is what you want.

Picture: An orc walks into the tavern. He grabs a patron and drops him to the floor with a headbutt. He stomps, punches, and kicks his way through the tavern until he arrives at the party’s rogue. Coming face to face with her, he grunts “You’re the one I’ve been looking for!”

Ok, we’ve got a violent orc who needs something from the rogue. Is he looking for blood, maybe a stolen item? Right now, the rogue probably has a million questions, and we know that the situation is going to start with figuring out what the heck the orc does want. Hopefully, the rogue can do it fast.

Twisting. Quality situations start one way and then after the first “beat” become something else. It doesn’t have to be a 180 degree switch — our orc doesn’t have to become an orc of peace after the rogue asks, “What do you want?” — but you should be looking to take the situation somewhere the players didn’t anticipate it would go. The orc in our previous example could travel in multiple directions from his first assertion. Maybe the orc was looking for the rogue because he heard she was great at disarming traps and…don’t tell anyone…the orc’s brother got his foot caught in one (embarrassing!). Or maybe this orc seeks revenge for an orc that was killed as a minion several levels ago in the adventurer’s career.

Whatever the twist is, let it come out shortly after the situation starts, getting adventurers more and more interested in creating the scene.

Motivated Participants. We will take for granted that your PCs are motivated to take action on their own, and they have goals they pursue. But what about the characters you bring in? Do you understand what motivates your NPC and what he will do to get what he wants? This is vital to keeping your situation open and flexible to player input. When you understand what your NPC wants and needs, you can react to what your players do based on the guidance that motivation provides you.

Going back to our orc and his poor brother, we know that the orc wants to help his brother, and he is going to the rogue because of her skills but also because if goes to anyone else in the village, it will be a source of major humiliation. Also, the orc is cheap and sort of violent. He’ll low-ball the players at first, then maybe threaten, but any character who guesses at his need to keep this incident on the downlow gains the upper hand in negotiations.

There are a lot of places to go with this situation, but I would feel prepared to improvise as long as I knew what the orc wanted in the situation.

These are the major elements of a good situation. But now you may be wondering…how do I run my sessions like you propose? And what about my set pieces? Combats?  More on that later, promise.

What is a skill? What is a power? Are they two different things? Are they the same thing? Yes.. and no.

Let’s start with tumbling. No, not the power Tumble, we’ll get to that in a second. Tumbling is the simple concept of rolling around on the battlefield to avoid being attacked. This is an action, not a skill or a power. It’s something the character does to interact with the game world. Like a chemical element, it’s the basic unit of role-playing, independent of whatever way the action is resolved mechanically.

Skills and powers exist on conceptual levels above actions; they’re the manner in which actions are mechanically resolved. Specifically, powers sit on top of actions, and skills sit on top of powers. When performing an action, you first check for a relevant power specific to the action. If the power is not present, you move up another level to the relevant skill. Skills and powers cover the same ground in different ways. Where a skill represents the character’s ability to attempt a wide variety of related actions effectively at any time, a power represents the character’s ability to execute a specific action perfectly at specific intervals. Nowhere better is this described than in skill powers. You’re trained in Arcana? You should be able to use it to gain the edge from time to time in discussion (Arcane Mutterings). The general competence gives berth for a specific expertise.

Now let’s go back to tumbling to give a more concrete example. You have a 2nd level Rogue with the Tumble power. This means that character can always tumble up to his or her speed once per encounter without a chance of failure. The power defines a narrow portion of the character’s expertise that would normally be otherwise covered by the general skill category. If the rogue wants to try tumbling again after the power is expended, can (s)he do that? Of course – the tumbling action is covered by the Acrobatics skill if a relevant Power (such as Tumble) is not available. The difference is that the skill check comes with a chance of failure and that failure should have consequences. At the end of this post, I have several example actions, including tumbling, and how they can be adjudicated using a skill check.

Before that, let’s cover some hang-ups or questions that immediately arise when thinking about this structure. What about attack rolls? You can miss an attack roll, right? Doesn’t that go against what we’ve just said here? Not at all. Look at Spinning Sweep. The Spinning Sweep power is the ability to knock an enemy prone on a hit once per encounter. It involves certain body positioning, movement, outside circumstance and weapon technique to accomplish in the game world. If you have that power, you can execute all those parts correctly once per encounter. Whether you hit, though, is not a factor. The power is the execution of the action, not the resultant effects. If a player in my game said “hey, I’d like to try Spinning Sweep again – can I make an (Athletics, Acrobatics, Intimidate) check to do it?” my answer is “hells yeah, go for it.” It’s now a stunt and I’m probably going to have you make a Moderate Lv 1 (level of the power) check to pull it off. The DC might be different if that character isn’t actually a Fighter, but the idea is still valid.

That begs the question, “if a player could keep using encounter (or utility or daily?) powers with an appropriate skill check, why not just keep doing it?” First, combat is dynamic. You’re probably not going to stay in that situation over and over again to make repeating the power worth it. Second, you have a chance of failure and consequences besides just missing on the attack. The stakes are higher. Finally, you have other powers. You picked other awesome things for your character to do. You’re going to want to use them. Never underestimate the power of “ooh shiny” on a character sheet.

Another retort I can already hear through the time/space continuum between when y’all read this and I write it is “but isn’t this against the rules?” I respond with “why do you think that?” Is it because there’s no rule for tumbling in the combat section? Perhaps you feel that the presence of a power precludes all uses of that action otherwise? I would direct you first to page 42 of the original DMG in which a 8th level rogue named Shiera swings on a chandelier and kicks an ogre into a brazier for 2d8+5 damage.  Now look at the Monk Lv 3 Encounter “Fallen Hammer in Repose” – shift 1 or move 3 (swing on the chandelier) then deal 2d10 + dex mod damage and push the target 3 (into the brazier).  An 8th level Rogue just performed a 3rd level Monk attack with a skill check and it’s in the Dungeon Master’s Guide as an example. Now am I saying you’re playing “wrong” if you don’t pull these sorts of stunts on a regular basis? Of course not. Your playstyle is your playstyle; enjoy the game the way you see fit. I simply wish to point out that not only is the intermingling of effects by powers and skills OK by rule 0 (DM’s discretion), it actually carries precedence in the official game material.

“What about magical or esoteric powers? What if my Wizard wants to make a Religion check to drop a Divine Challenge? What if the Psion wants to cast Sleep? Why bother having classes if you can just steal each other’s powers?” My answer might be surprising: “So?” As we said before, powers individually define narrow areas of expertise. Collectively, they help distinguish classes and roles from one another to provide niche protection. It’s a meta thing. However, if your players aren’t really concerned about spotlight-stealing, why not just run with it, see where it goes? 4E’s math is stable enough that, given the table of regular damage expressions, you could probably run “powerless” and have a workable game. I suspect that once the novelty wore off, the vast majority of players would return to the regular power structure anyway. Drop me a line at ryvencedrylle@gmail.com if you run even so much as a single encounter this way. I’d love to hear about it.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. As stated above, I leave you with some common examples of skill/power crossover to try in your own game. ‘Til next time, peeps.

Tumble

Move Action, Acrobatics, Moderate DC, Level (equal to nearest foe)
Success: As per the Tumble skill, shift your speed.
Failure: Lose move action OR move speed, grant CA on opportunity attacks OR shift speed but fall prone

Move Light Object with Magic

Minor Action, Arcana (trained only), DC 20
Success: As per the Mage Hand power.
Failure: Object rolls into enemy’s square OR object breaks/takes damage OR grab similar nearby object instead

Set Small Trap

Standard Action, Dungeoneering or Nature (trained only), Hard DC, Level (equal to foe intended for trap)
Success: As per the Invoker’s Grasping Shards power, no radiant, trigger when target enters square.
Failure: Trapsetter triggers effect OR trap goes off the second time triggered instead of first OR trap slows but does not deal damage

Healing by Encouragement at a Distance

Standard Action, Insight or Diplomacy, Hard DC + 2, Level (equal to intended ally)
Success: As per the Warlord’s Inspiring Word, according to level.
Failure: Loss of action OR heal, but you grant CA (are distracted) OR heal only allows surge (those extra d6s get more important as you get higher in level)

@john_harper

You know what I’ve stopped doing? Plotting. I’ve been at this place for many years now, but I’ve recently found words to express my thoughts.

When I say plotting, I mean I’ve stopped thinking of the games I DM as somehow being my story. I move away from creating a story that my players interact with.

I do it because it causes problems.  Stop me if you’ve heard this before.  DM creates a huge, epic gllobetrotting epic.  Players look in the other direction, chasing some other detail that the DM thought was  throwaway but the PCs are absorbed by.  DM pulls out hair.

I do it because, even though 4e feels on the surface like a game that depends on massive amounts of prep-work, in the end that’s not true.  4e robustly supports a game with stronger blends of improv and set-piece encounters.

I do it because I hate secrets.  Things that I hide from the players are potential wasted; If I have good ideas, I will use them, and create surprises and interesting situations that spark interesting play.

Lastly, because story really can’t be pre-made in a roleplaying game.  Story is what  happens after we play.  Narrative is generated by our table decisions and by the roll of the dice. Our games are our stories.  The players bring characters with goals and interests and histories, and the DM presents the PCs with situations, obstacles and danger.  The DM weaves together these elements so that we can generate stories through this deft interplay in this wonderful hobby of ours.

Yes, even in 4e (there’s no roleplaying!). Here are some thoughts specific to D&D.

Death by a Million Branches

Let’s look at DM plotting at a basic level:  I am making a story but as it starts it is a railroad.  Event follows event follows event. No choices.  Your players are going to hate you and quit your game.  To prevent this, you incorporate space for the players to make choices in.  But that space you carve out of your story?  That actually adds more areas for you to potentially fill.  What to do if the players go left instead of right?  Or they choose the dark side instead of the light? Under a “must have plot” model, you are making almost endless contingencies.

Where do you stop?  How deep do you go?  There’s always a point where you make the cut, but my personal experience has been that you always make that cut-off a little later than maybe you should.

Even if all you do is generate a high level story arc, you still have all this material that may or may not be used.  You’ve created a bunch of material that may not be touched or even thought of.

All these forks and branches, and for what?  The players are only going on one path — the one they choose. You should react to that, and build along the path they provide.

Here’s the Situation

What you end up designing then are situations.  How is a situation different from a story? The fundamental difference is that a situation imposes no outcomes and presumes no choices  whereas a story must, by definition, presume actions.

Here’s a story:

The adventurers hear rumors of a dragon roaming the countryside, terrorizing the  populace.  The players are asked by the mayor of the nearest village to stop the dragon.  They take up the task and then after much searching, they find the dragon’s lair, defeat the dragons, and steal his treasure.

Here’s the situation:

There is a dragon terrorizing the populace.  The mayor the nearest village has put out fliers with a large rewards for those that seek out the dragon.

In the former, there is a nice, strong flow. This to this to that. The problem here is that the game hasn’t been played yet.  The characters can bust loose from the story in so many ways, going “off the rails” at any point.

The situation on the other hand, eliminates that possibility.  It requires the players to take actions to pursue it, and then relies on the players taking actions to complete it.  The players say “hey, I need that money!” and the adventure begins.

The cool thing about the situation is that you can generate a few for each session, based on things that have happened before and/or tossing in new situations.

But I Need My Set-pieces

“But Gamefiend,” you cry, “I love me some set-pieces. I NEED set-pieces.  I’ve got this awesome dungeon full of traps that I need to build and spring upon players.”

Me too.

But think: what is a dungeon (or any site for that matter) but a bunch of situations?  I can’t talk about dungeon design at this moment, but I think the design of a site that the players choose to go to is a pretty safe bit to work on.

I need to reinforce that I’m not saying “don’t ever prepare a game in advance”. What I’m saying is “prepare less”.  Shrink that time of building endless scenarios and plot into building the framework for you next session.

What I’m about to say next is for players, so PCs? Line up.

Plotless? Oh, I meant “Player Driven”

You may think that if you play a more traditional plotted game, I am telling you “you are an awful DM” implicitly. Not even remotely true. I am advocating a style that I’ve been using.  If you like what you’re doing, please continue, whatever it is.  If you decide to move towards more “plotless” Gming however, make sure  you know that it means your game is becoming more player-driven.

Sort of obvious, right? It is, but your players need to know what is expected of them.  I’ve had games that died because I forgot to explain to players that they are the ones making things happen and I, as a GM, am simply “master of surprises”. The players pursue goals, they pursue the things that interest them and their characters, and I do my best to make it not easy.  But if players are looking at more traditional ways of playing D&D, they are expecting me to delivering the hook, the interest, the progression, and the obstacles (note to DMs…are you doing all of that?  Are you feeling burned out? This might be why).

You’ve got to be clear that the game is about the characters do, not about what the world builds around them. You can’t have more than one or two PCs “along for the ride”.  People have to make decisions, players have to agree to not just sit in a tavern and wait for adventure to fall in their laps.  The characters need desires, they need goals. The characters need the motivation to go after these goals and see if they can overcome the challenges you put in their way.

Sounds Like Fun/Crap.

At this point I’ve either totally lost you or you are total agreement.  It could be that this style is just not a fit for your play-group, or maybe you already do this (in which case you wonder what took me so long to write this). Anyone who I haven’t alienated,  let’s talk:

How are your games already like this?

How could  you have less plot, and more story?

What tools can you use in 4e to assist you in a more free-form game?

Like always, if there is interest in the comments I will discuss this more.

This “hands-off” approach to powers is understandable, but limiting: Some people get so into that mindset that they will say things like there are things the characters can’t do because there is no power for it. With this mindset, D&D becomes quickly limited in scope. Fortunately this is extreme (but I swear to you people have said this to me) and people lie on a spectrum. What I want to do is get you to join me on the coolest side of the spectrum: Powers aren’t limiting; powers are everywhere.

If you think of a power as a frame of action, how the system can be used to do what you want leaps right at you. You want to kick down that wall? Your fighter is using the ‘kick down the door’ power implicitly. Other rules regulate this action, so you don’t need to make a new power to express this, but just thinking of it in this way forms a pattern of thinking that makes it easy to create powers on the fly when you do need it. When you put a real world action into the frame of a power, you “freeze” and turn it into a token that can be used in the system to link your game’s fiction and the mechanics.

When exactly do you create a power on the fly? Two situations come to mind:

Roleplaying award. I use this most frequently. If someone has a moment of exciting roleplay, maybe I give him a boon or maybe I provide the player with something that gives a small bonus or situation on the spot to “freeze” that moment and manifest it in the game. Something your player does often can become a bit of a schtick. Say a player’s character pulls pranks often. After she pulls a particularly effective and funny prank, you give the player the power “Always the Jester”. Let’s say it is a daily power that you can use to gain a +1 bonus to an attack. Weak for a daily power, but let’s say that it recharges when you pull a successful prank. Now you have a power that rewards the player for roleplaying and working within her character’s personality.

Treasure Replacement. Here’s my secret: a few months ago, I stopped giving out magic items in my home games. I use inherent bonuses, and then I give out effects based on what the story dictates. Players might find a magical weapon, sure, but when they do it is more likely to use artifact rules or my tragic imprint rules than a standard magic item. Otherwise, I’m giving the players special powers that relate to what is happening in the story. Sometimes I give the players “narrative loot” –I’ll ask them to describe what they found within some parameters — and then let that narrative loot come into the story later. That crystal ball they found earlier can come into play when least expected or most needed. We can decide what it does then and give it a power on the fly.

Most people might not feel comfortable with this, and much of what I suggest requires trust between the players and the DM — I don’t recommend this at your local encounters — but in the end it’s worth the squeeze. Viewing powers as omnipresent frames for action waiting to be plucked out of the air whenever needed is much more interesting and useful for RPing than viewing powers as a limitation.

Ever try something like this? How did it work for you? Talk to me.

So when I learn something that I think might be worth sharing I’ll write it up here in three parts. First, The Setup. This is where I describe the story that leads to the unique and interesting encounter. Story always drives my design, so that’s where I’ll start. Second, The Design. Once I have a story I need to design mechanics to support what I’m trying to do. That’s what is described here. And last, The Experience. Once I’ve run the encounter I’ll come back and let you know how it went, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d change if I could do it again.

So let’s jump in as I throw an endless horde of aberrant monsters at a city of eladrin…and the PCs.

The Setup

The party’s elven ranger was prophesied to some day free the Star Elves (a group of eladrin). This ranger was distantly related to Star Elf nobility and so he could control the mythal (magical aura and barrier) surrounding the city.

The party had slowly discovered more and more of the situation over the course of the previous few levels of game play and now they were ready to go to the city and see what this was all about.

The city was abandoned long ago when the pocket plane it resides in started to collapse. But by creating this plane they had accidentally created a rift in reality to the Far Realm from which the aberrant horde called the Nilshai were threatening to come through. So while most of the eladrin (Star Elves) left the city some stayed behind and sealed themselves in to maintain the mythal, using it and the city as a cork in the rift. If they could hold out until the plane completely collapsed then the horrors from beyond wouldn’t be able to use the plane as a window into the world.

This was also going to be the encounter that would conclude the paragon tier of play for my players and would bring them into epic, so I was looking for something on a grand scale that would allow the PCs to be powerful and important. The PCs were going to fulfill the prophecy, save the city, bring it into the world (giving them new epic allies), seal the rift to the Far Realm, and save the day for everyone by doing the impossible.

The Design

So early on I thought that this would be a good chance to highlight two PCs at the same time. The ranger, who is nobility in the city, allowing him to open the mythal and control it’s defenses and the wizard who’s paragon path (and up coming epic destiny) were all about planar magic, travel, and creation. So I figured I’d let the wizard shine in the ranger’s story, two for one.

I wanted to have the wizard do what the eladrin never could…seal the rift. He was going to cast a grand ritual, collapse the plane, transport the city to the world, and stop the Nilshai from coming into the world all at once, fulfilling the ranger’s prophecy.

This sounded like a good time to try one of those battles where the point isn’t to kill all the bad guys, but to hold them off while someone else does something important. In this case, the wizard casts the ritual, but needs the mythal opened to do it, so the PCs are going to hold off the endless horde of nilshai until the ritual is done. But that sucks for the wizard’s player. Sure he does the impossible but he doesn’t get to be involved in the fight. Enter allied minions!

I stated out a bunch of Star Elf defenses to hand out to the players. Most were minions with relatively simple powers and all of the powers HAD to be things that required no tracking. So all at-will powers or powers that triggered on circumstances like  death. A few of the defenders were not minions, like a series of arcane towers that could “cross the streams” for a super-beam (when you really want to take down one baddie fast) and the mythal itself, which only worked inside the confines of the mythal (so it’s awesome, but has it’s own limitations).

With these defenders there was enough for everyone to get one and the wizard would have something to do even though he was personally spending most of the combat making Arcana checks to complete the ritual (hit a moderate DC to get 1 success, hard DC to get 2 successes, and every success increased the DC by one, once you hit 5 the ritual is over).

Then I needed Nilshai. They’re aberrant spellcasters first created in the 3e days of the Forgotten Realms (they were originally ethereal, but that’s neither here nor there). I created one for a few sessions back, the one that became the Nilshai Brute (guess what it’s role was) which worked well but lacked some flavor. After talking to Greg Bilsland on an episode of The Tome Show I started to figure out what would make these guys cool.

First, when they teleport they get to be insubstantial. Second, they get a counter-spell that allows them to hit you with any effect you hit them with that allows a save. It doesn’t negate your power…but it makes you think twice about using it. So I tagged those into the Brutes, I used the discussion with Greg to come up with the Nilshai Lurker. I threw together a simple Nilshai Minion, I reskinned and tweaked the Spellweaver monster to be the big bad casters of the horde, and then came up with a Nilshai Giant as the occasional really scary threat (to make sure it was a threat I gave it an aura that grants all aberrant creatures within 10 a resistance to all damage of 20…and it could eat you).

I had the defenders, I had the horde, I had the ritual. Next I needed to represent that this horde was endless. So I decided that I would make a chart. On each PCs turn they would roll a d20 and the result would determine what and how many more Nilshai enter the fight. Not every round, mind you, on every single PC turn. This was needed because they could drop a lot of baddies fast with their defenders and because I wanted this threat to be real and large.

Last step, the map. I drew up a mythal barrier with a hole in it. I put some ruins of walls in front of the whole, not sure what I’d do with them or why they were there, but it seemed to provide an interesting maze area for the fight to take place, and then buildings around it to place archers and for the ritual to take place.

Encounter…designed. Check out my session notes complete with creature stats. I printed this out and ran my game right from it.

The Experience

So how did it all go?  Mostly really well. The Nishai Giant was a big threat and got all the attention that I wanted it to. The counterspell came up just enough for the PCs to notice it. The insubstantial when teleported came up a few times, but not much…which was probably for the best since there were so many monsters that it would have been hard to track it all if it was happening a lot. All in all, the monsters worked pretty well, although the Lurkers never did get to pull off their cool trick of grabbing someone and taking them to another plane.

The PCs got to do their cool stuff too. The minion defenders worked really well. They were designed for simplicity but to evoke their flavor and that all went off without a hitch.  I was extremely pleased with it since I thought this could be the one area where it would all break down. If I had it to do again I would have counted how many players I was going to have that night and come up with another type of defender so the wizard could have two and everyone else would have one. I didn’t know, when I designed it, that I’d have a full house that night. So when the wizard took two (as expected) one of the players had no defenders to play besides his own PC.

The ritual mechanic worked as well, it wasn’t horribly exciting, but that wasn’t the point. Adding a full skill challenge in the middle of a horde of allies AND enemies would have been a bit much. There was enough to keep track of so a simple Arcana series was fine and to the point.

The map worked well in terms of getting the players to think strategy and I came up with a good reason, on the fly, that the ruins were there. When the mythal was opened then there was an influx of Far Realm energy that destroyed that building. This is where I could have seriously improved my encounter.

You see, my players brilliantly bottlenecked the whole fight at the entrance to the Mythal and they held the Nilshai there the entire fight. A few of them got past the front line with teleportation, but were quickly taken out by the archers and mages who were left behind. This meant that the threat to the wizard never quite happened. The battling through the maze of the city and the ruins never played out (until the last half of the last round of the fight).

After thinking through it, if I had given the Nilshai a surprise round to move into the city it would have made TONS of sense. I had already explained away the ruins with a burst of energy, it could have easily also temporarily stunned the defenders allowing me to bring the front line to them, inside the city. One of my players also said I could have had the rift manifest as a hole inside the city and then there could be no bottlenecking, enemies could come out in a multitude of areas to threaten the city.

All in all, I’m calling this encounter a success. It was good…but with one little tweak, I think it could have been GREAT!

This is the second in a series of blogs on Aquatic Adventures. This article provides some advice and options for underwater encounters.

Encounter Advice

The hardest part of planning underwater encounters is dealing with 3D combat. Characters and monsters are able to swim up and down, attacking from different angles, which is hard to represent on a 2D battlemap. Dungeon masters have a few alternatives.

Tracking Elevation

The first way is to simply run the game on a normal battlemap and track how many squares above the ground the character is. This works best for fights where there is a flat plane, such as the seabed or in an underwater cavern. It gets complicated if characters can move both above and below the battlemap, such as in open water.

Dice are useful for tracking elevation, positioned beside the character’s miniature. However, this can clutter the battlefield. If you plan on running a lengthy underwater game, buying a set of dedicated elevation dice might not be a bad idea. Dice that are smaller than normal work best, as they stand-out and are not mistaken for dice that have just rolled onto the battlemap. If you plan on having a fight with characters both above and below the battlemap, colour-coded dice work well.

Index cards are another alternative. They can be cut to fit under a miniature, with just enough space left to write the elevation. Or the GM could prepare a series of cards with elevations written in advance. This can further clutter an already potentially busy battlemap, and can require much lifting and shifting of miniatures, which can lead to misplacement or toppled minis.

If a wet-erase mat is used, it’s also possible to just write the elevation beside the character. However, the numbers will continually change, cluttering the map with erased elevation.

The problem with just tracking elevation is that it’s possible to have characters atop each other, which is difficult to represent without props. There are a number of products – both intended and improvised – that can be used. These vary from fancy plastic towers, clear-plastic dice boxes, Lego bricks, or even the plastic guards that come with delivered pizza to keep the cheese off the top of the box.

Layered Encounters

An alternative is tracking elevation is having a combat that takes place over multiple tiers of elevation, each with their own map. This works best for fights with a small horizontal area but that can have a greater vertical area, preferably with consistent features that can be used as a frame of reference.

Instead of moving up or down individual squares, characters instead move between layers, with the space in-between being abstracted. Characters are assumed to move up and down on the layer they are on with no mechanical impact or movement cost, only changing layers requires movement.

For example, in a fight in an underwater cave, there could be three layers of combat. The cavern might have pillars that cover all three maps, located in the same squares in each map while the walls of the cave and other features vary. Or the fight could take place in central hall of the castle of a triton king, with matching walls and the ramps in the lowest tier leading up to the balcony of the second tier.

This type of encounter can be a little more map-intense, with more set-up time required. It works best if the DM has the time to draw maps in advance. It can also require a little more table space, with 2-4 small maps instead of one large map.

Rules on layered encounters will be included in the second blog of this series.

Vertical Encounters

A third option for underwater encounters works best as a variation. It flips the battlemap on its side and tip the minis over, making the encounter a vertical fight. Instead of moving north and south the characters instead move up and down.

This can be done a couple of ways. The simplest is to have the battlemap be a cliff face and add minor details, such as outcroppings. The characters might sink a square or two each round based on their weight, adding a dynamic element and touch of forced movement to the fight. Unless they spend time actively treading water they sink farther down, possibly being blocked by rocky ledges.

Another way is to have a vertical dungeon, with no side passages but branches leading up and down. The characters come to shafts and must swim up or down or narrow chambers where they face foes more manoeuvrable than themselves.

Mapless

One final option for underwater combat in 3-Dimensions is to simply dump the battlemap and go abstract with combat.

My personal favourite system for doing so – while retaining much of 4e – is known as SARN-FU, was proposed on theWizards of the Coast community site here. In addition to the main blog there were three follow-ups further detailing this method of mapless combat, which would lend itself well to undersea action. This requires a little more attention from the players, as they cannot take a break or becomes distracted and rely on the battlemap to fill them in on what has happened. And it requires a GM that is skilled enough to track multiple opponents and PCs at once.

Quinn “Gamefiend” Murpy has also written his own system on this very blog, Fluid 4e, which can be found here. Fluid, being a more mechanical version, lends itself well to an underwater conversion, replacing Athletics checks to swim with a modifier on the Move Save: convenient currents give a bonus with opposing currents or waves confer a penalty.

Accessories

As mentioned earlier, there are a few simple accessories that can make 3D combat easier to manage without investing in a complicated frame and stack of maps.

There are a number of gaming aids designed for aerial combat, which are also useful for aquatic combat. These can be an investment and take-up valuable storage space in cramped living quarters. A few examples are a dedicated elevation tracker or a fight stand or a series of stackable and modular platforms.

One cheaper option is Chessex dice boxes, at least if you bought several boxes of dice already and have the cases handy. They’re handy for multiple things, such as using the lids as horses, sticking 4 together as a gelatinous cube miniature, or transporting metal minis to the game. They’re also handy for aquatic combat as you can have one mini on the top and one underneath inside the box.

Dungeon tiles are a final option. The 3D tiles can be used but it’s harder to see minis underneath, but it’s possible to remove a side or two leaving the space underneath accessible. If you have too many tiles, it’s possible to take a craft knife to spare tiles and make your own 3D tiles. Other firm cardstock could also be used, constructed in the same manner as the 3D Dungeon Tiles.

Look for the third blog in this series in a few weeks, which will finally be a crunchier blog covering rules and mechanics of underwater combat, including rules for layered combat, more Athletics skill options, and more rules on the underwater world.