Speeding up the end of a campaign

PC still down, so posting still limited:

However there has been an unusual turn of events that should be blogged. We may end the campaign early, due to no one's fault (perhaps everyone's advantage). It's going to be a planned end, so we can start another campaign we are all excited about- the Council of Thieves Adventure Path.

We're putting it to a group vote, which I am pretty sure will vote for us to speed through book #5 of ROTRL (Sins of the Saviors) #5 is a pretty nice dungeon crawl, but at the character level we are playing at dungeon crawls aren't really what we want to be doing. Sure, it could be fun, but not as fun as the rest of the campaign. We'll still do all of book #6 and finish out the campaign with the scripted conclusion.

So this Sunday I am going to cram the best parts of book#5 into one session and we're going to rock through the runeforge in lightning time and finish up the adventure path before the end of this semester. Particularly important since 3 of my 4 PCs go to the college in town.

None of this affects the blog at all. It's just neat from a meta gaming aspect that we are realizing that this portion we want to skip through, nail the great conclusion to the campaign and then start the really cool new thing around the corner. It's a group decision.

Just have to hear back from my brother to see what the college vote says.

Fortune Telling in Games

Fortune Telling in RPGs can be a bit hard to present as a GM. It either comes across as being out of place or if you get it right and it's intresting and the players ACTUALLY PAID ATTENTION, it can be even harder still to make sure that the future happens the way it was predicted... or at least have a plasuable reason why it did not.

Play with a fully writen, pre-fab campain the way we have with Rise of the Runelords allows me to pretty much assume how thing will generally work out, so I can at least get the perdiction of what the future will be pretty close to what will actually happen. Also, the Varisian area is known for fortune tellers that read "Harrow" Card, so fortune telling really can fit into the campaign and help with the local flavor.

I can gaurantee that the future will work out a certain wayand the card reading fits the setting. All that is left is to make sure my random future predicting method gives me results I can work with.

Randomly ending up with "tarrot" style cards and trying to fit them into a game is HARD. So don't do it. Cheat! I stacked the deck and made sure I could give the players exactly the reading in the picture, with the meaing below. (Harrow Cards, meanings and all the Harrow jazz belong to Paizo)

The cards on the left is the past events affecting them
The middle Colum is their Current events
The Right Colum is the Future

The Past (Left Colum):

The Betrayal – is selfishness incarnate. Envy twists the spirit and leads ultimately to devastation. It can also indicate a person whose loveliness hides an evil heart.

The Liar – is love at its most treacherous. This is not the love that moves mountains, this is the love that rips the heart in two and causes lovers to leap to their deaths. This lamia (depicted on the card) can mean obsession, unrequited passion, or doomed love.

The Tyrant – indicates a ruler who is a blight upon those ruled. The dragon might indicate a monarch, overseer, or head of a household. Whoever this person is, he does harm to those over whom he holds sway, whether he realizes it of not.

The Present (Middle Colum):

The Hidden Truth – symbolizes the ability to see past the obvious and the banal to a greater truth within. Sometimes this discovery is an esoteric one, sometimes it is a literal find, such as an item revealed within a room. Regardless, it is a card with the power to reveal secrets.

The Tangled Briar – is a card of ancient deeds. It indicated an object or person from long ago that will somehow have great influence on the situation. The object or person in question is one lost or murdered in some foul way.

The Fiend – depicts a devil swallowing innocents. It can indicate the deaths of many in a great calamity or, if misaligned, the salvation from the same calamity. The Fiend can also indicate that some sort of dark and intelligent creature is in the area, endangering the populace.

The Future (Right Colum)

The Mountain Man – signifies an encounter with a physical power outside of one’s control. The giant could personify an authority, an army, an earthquake, or even a desperately needed rainstorm in a parched land. Acceding to the force might be wise, but surviving it is paramount.

The Uprising – represents being caught in the clutches of something much more powerful then you. It is an overwhelming strength that often crushes what comes in contact with it. The crown held high signifies an overthrowing of a leader of some sort. In the spread, it indicates a force much stronger than the person receiving the reading.

The Empty Throne – has a sense of loss that is palpable. The ghost signifies that those who are gone will always be with us. They taught us important lessons, if only we choose to listen. This card can bring information from a far-off or ancient source. This card is misaligned in the spread, meaning the ghosts of the past are restless, and might require effort to set at peace.

If you are familair with the Runelords campaign, (avoiding spoilers) it all fits in very nicely!

Wednesday's Game (Stupid Unicorns)

Picture is from the last time I made this mistake. Will I never learn?

Wednesday's Game was nice and educational for me as a DM, but its the same lesson I have sat through before. A Unicorn trashed the game as far as evil is concerned.... but the players had a nice big old epic battle. We all had fun, but once again, unicorns got out of control.

The major fight (only fight) of the evening involved the following:

1. Demon with a CR in the Teens, that successfully summoned another of the same type of Demon
2. An evil "melee-cleric" type with a lot of time to buff himself up before combat
3. Various Summoned creatures the cleric summoned while invisible (and finishing his buffing)
4. A pack of Shadow Mastiffs with a template on them

All of the above ended up being rolled into one encounter because of how over-the-top (in a good way) the encounter unfolded.

The First Demon was neutralized by a high level cleric spell. (Well done!) while the summoned demon companion started to close on the party while the cleric's summoned (via summon monster) spells came into play. Shortly after the Cleric's invisibility was destroyed by an invisibility purge and then I made a bad call. The bad call was "Sure, you can summon unicorns."

It turns out that in the Pathfinder rules, Unicorns had been taken off the list of creatures to summon. I thought I was making a good player friendly call by grandfathering them into play.

So, my brother summoned 1d4+1 unicorns. We got all 5 and laughed, because... well.. unicorns are silly.

Turns out their circle of protection against evil is no so silly.

The circle's affect on the party was

"prevents bodily contact by evil summoned creatures. This causes the natural weapon attacks of such creatures to fail and the creatures to recoil if such attacks require touching the warded creature." and when you toss in the AC + Save bonuses, plus how hard it is to get a mind affecting spell to stick, the spell was killer.

So many of the creatures in the fight were classified as summoned that the party could just focus on the non-summoned creatures and trivialize the fight. Will 5 mobile circle of protections in play, it was near impossible for me to neutralize the unicorns with the assets I had in play.

In conclusion, Unicorns... There is reason the party cannot summon them. I just have to remember it!

(In the picture attached, months ago I had a big monster represented by the black disc. The Unicorn's aura of protection really helped them beat an encounter sane players would have run from)

On Rules, the GM and "Us"

There has been an abnormal amount of chatter about the impact of rules with the implication that rules heavy systems take away power from the GM, combined with chatter about the impact of GMs on a game. I think we all agree that the GM has the greatest impact on the quality of a game when compared against any other game component.

That being said, the rules are just the mutually agreed framework that the GM and players agree on about how the world should work. When we decide to play Smurfs and Sandwiches 3rd edition, we are deciding that those roles are what we think enforce the reality we want to play in via group consensus. In S&S 3rd edition we have rules for gravity, Smurfberries, cats and the amount of force required to throw a Smurf out of camp. If the GM and players are arguing that maybe you need a few more pounds of force to end up in the lake vrs the briar patch when thrown out of Smurf village, it’s a sign that the rules are not agreed upon and do not help.

If the GM and players are arguing about the rules in a way that is not adding to the game or enforcing a believable reality that all involved can accept, they should consider playing another game or another set of rules and being the conversation by talking about why they are playing the game.

It’s not about the amount of rules you have or the rules changes between the games. It’s about talking with you players and saying “Hey, I like S&S 3rd edition but I am a little bit rusty on the applied physics. Can you guys just trust me on that?” Rules don’t transfer power. It’s made up stuff we agree upon, even if it’s just by consenting to play at the same table. Like all made up stuff, we throw in purple smurfs to fix the problem (make stuff up) because it’s just a game.

Rules are just the frame we use to display our imagination. Rules help adults with the willing suspension of disbelief, they shouldn’t be some sort of weapon. If it’s being used as a weapon something else is going on socially with your group beyond your choice of game. Rules as a weapon isn’t a rules or game version problem, it a group social problem where the solution might be to choose a different set of rules or to just talk out expectations and concerns.

I run games with the same shared story telling feeling under 3.75 that I did before someone decided to tack “advanced” on some rules that they agreed to play with.

We all have different preferences on rules and rulesets. There is no one answer for everyone and some people may want more rules to help with that willing suspension of disbelief.

I do not think the solution is to create better GMs, but to create better groups. Groups that communicate with each other and try to appreciate the fact that we are playing a rules heavy game of cops & robbers in a make believe world. Groups that don’t say “I didn’t land in the Briar patch due to in-game physics!” but maybe “Why did my briar patch happen?”. Groups that express disagreement in meaningful always and use their differences to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the game they play.

It’s not about “I” or “Him”, it’s about “Us”.

Character Questionaire

Some time ago I started cobbling together ideas and questions from the Internet for a character questionnaire to give my D&D players. It started off as a nice way for me to organize background info and became a great way to grow my adventures into character focused epic campaigns. Every few adventures I like to read through each of my PCs's completed questionnaires to look for grains of info to mine and use in game.

Its hard to force players to complete it, but usually by offering to give them a few bonus XP or a few freebie potions you can bribe them into completing it.

The following is the questionnaire I currently use: Once again, this is from multiple Internet sources over the years. I claim no credit for any of it. It's been 10 years in the making at least, so I sadly cannot give anyone credit for the questions.

Character Questionnaire:

Part 1)

1) Who were the character's parents?
Did they raise the character?
If not why?
If not them who?

2) Did the character have any childhood friends?
Any siblings?
Where are they now?
Does the character stay in touch with them or have they become separated?

3) What was childhood like for the character?
Calm and peaceful or turbulent and traumatic?

4) Does the character have any or did the character have any role models?
Describe them?

5) What did the character do before he / she entered the story?
Who trained the character to do what she / he does now?

6) What are the character's moral and religious beliefs?
What lengths will the character go to defend those beliefs?
Who or what taught those beliefs to the character?

7) Does the character have any unusual habits or physical traits?
How do others tend to react to them?

8) What is the general reaction to the character to others?
Why, in the character's opinion, do they act that way?

9) Can the character kill?
Why would the character kill?
Does he / she have any enemies at all?
Would or could the character kill them?

10) What kind of relationships does the character currently have?
Does he / she have any close friends?
Bitter enemies?
If so who?
What are they like?

11) What is the character’s favorite color?

12) How does the character generally treat others?
Does she / he trust easily?
Or not?
13) What does the character look like?
Does he / she have any scars or tattoos?
If so how did she / he get them?

14) What is the character's normal daily routine?
How does he / she feel when it's interrupted for whatever reason?

15) What are the character's dreams?
Ambitions?
Goals?

16) How does she / he seek to obtain them?
How does adventuring fit into this dream, or does it at all?

17) Does the character ever want to have a family of his / her own someday?
If so with who or what type of person?

18) Has the character ever considered the possibility of his / her own death?
Has he / she made a will?

Part 2)

Look at your PC's character ability scores - does he/she have any high/low
scores?
Did these scores result from circumstances in his/her early life?
How did these scores affect the PC's life?
How did they affect him/her in their chosen character class?
Why did the PCs come to choose his/her chosen character class?
Where is the PC's home town?
Look at the PC's weapon and non-weapon proficiencies - how did they
acquire them, especially the unusual ones.For example was fishing just a favourite pastime, or does the PC come from a fishing community?
What are the likes and dislikes of the PC?
Does he/she have any rational or irrational fears or phobias?
What are the origins of or reasons for those fears or phobias?
(There does not have to be a reason!).
Favorite food, style of clothing, of wearing their hair?
Does the PC have any affinity with an animal of some type?
Does the PC have any heroes, either from legend, contemporary, or from
his/her past?
What are the physical characteristics of the PC?
Does he/she have any scars, tattoos or birthmarks?
What are the origins and/or significance of these?
Does he/she have any striking features or dominant personality traits
(definitely should have at least one if the charisma score is above or below average).
Does the PC have any strong opinions about the other sex, people’s habits,
particular types of races/monsters, or politics?
Does the PC have any hobbies?
How did the character become the alignment they have chosen?
Were the people he/she grew up with of similar alignment?
What is the religious persuasion, if any, of the PC?
How is the PC with regard to material wealth?
Is the PC a supporter of the current ruler, or is he/she anti-government?
Is she/he who they claim to be?

The GM Binder

The GM Binder (Alpha Version)

My GM binder is big and pretty; all leather bound with metal rivets and a cool twisting locking mechanism on the cover. I bought it at GenCon two years ago I think it is very sexy to have out on the gaming table and play from. Sometimes I sleep in the basement and not in bed with my wife just so I can be next to the binder...

Of course, though the appearance of a GM binder may help the eye candy quotient of your table, it isn’t there to be looked at. The pretty binder in the post is my “Alpha” binder and has all the functional items I need to run a fully planned out campaign. The focus of my Alpha binder is to make a planned game shine at the table. My “Beta” binder will be the subject of a future post.

The “Alpha” binder is the only thing I keep infront of me while gaming, except for pens, markers, dice and maybe a book full of monster stats. Yes, I am a screen less GM. I try to minimize the junk in front of me to only what I need. Here is what I keep inside


Notes:

All the notes I need to keep nearby and review before each game. They include:

My Session checklist for the game: I try to hit the following items for a perfect game on a Saturday (longer) game: World (Where are in the world setting?) Recap (What did we do last time?) Prelude event or a cut scene that leads into the session, Description of where we are picking up the game (in town at the bar, in the caverns underneath the ropers) and then Action! (something happens, even if it is not combat)

A post-it that says “Exciting!” “Action!” “Drama!” “ They are Heroes!” to remind me of those facts.

One that simply says “Magic is always special”, because it should always feel that way.

A “To Do” list with things I want to work on, like “More Foreshadowing”.

Notes on things to just keep in mind, usually stuff I threw in (aka, made up on the spot) that I can tie back to future events. Like when the glowing salamanders predict the future to the silly druid using magic to communicate with them. Yeah, you should have remembered what they said Nate. Too Bad!

Character notes about PCs or NPCs until I put them in the PC’s folder or add the NPC note to the adventure somewhere.

I even have a note to “make tonight’s game awesome”

Adventure:

The binder has a printout of the current adventure we are playing through. In the picture, it is the Fortress of the Stone Giants, which I have added liberal pen notes and highlights to. I’ll also tack on any print outs of monster stats, such as those for some stone giants, so I can minimize the amount I need to refer to hard cover texts while gaming.

Loose pages

I will include loose notes of NPCs, random worthless but fun items, a wilderness encounter I want to throw in and a few maps.

The inside of the back cover has notes that the PCs have given me in game. I like to keep them for sentimental value and sometimes to come back to. (“Oh.. remember how you stole the blue glass swan… well…”)