Making Success Interesting, Part II

"They've got us surrounded, the poor bastards."

Last time, I wrote about avoiding the urge to counter a player's success. If the game takes a sudden, dramatic turn in the players' favor, take a moment to collect your thoughts and think things over. It's easy to make a snap judgment that simply denies the players their victory.

So, you're taking a break, sipping your beverage of choice, and wracking your brain. What now? Take heart in the quote above. You're the GM. Any difficulties you face are only temporary.

To start with, success comes with consequences. This is a great rule to keep in mind for things like social checks and character influence, but it applies to things like dropping a balor with a single, lucky crit.

A lucky check or crit can spell the end of an adventure, but it's just one part of your campaign. As a GM, you're always playing the long game. Resist the urge to try to resolve things at the table in the current session. Great campaigns are what keep gaming groups going. Your goal is to make sure that this turn of events feeds into your campaign.

Hang some long-term consequences on to a great victory and make it all the more memorable and pivotal to your campaign. Take a step back, think about what's happening, and turn the event into the flashpoint for your campaign's next act.

It's actually pretty easy to implement, and best of all you don't need to think on your feet in the current session. Just play through the PC's epic victory, and work the consequences of their success into the next session.

Use a little aikido in your campaign. Don't fight against the character's success. Lean into it, turn your thoughts in its direction, and accelerate it out of the characters' control. Fighting against the flow of the game is the surest way to bring a campaign to a halt.

The PCs kill a balor. An alchemist tracks down the body and uses it to create a virulent poison used in a series of assassinations

The good-aligned PCs charm the socks off the evil warlord. He puts them in charge of sacking and burning a halfling village.

The PCs evade every trap in the Tomb of Bror and claim the Hammer of Damnation. The high priests of Jagra dispatch 33 unholy assassins to reclaim it.

Not only have you preserved the PCs' success, but you made it even more important by tying it into your campaign's larger story. By answering a tactical twist in your campaign with a strategic shift, you keep the characters and their successes (and failures) as a central piece in shaping the campaign.

Next time, what to do and what to avoid when you absolutely must respond to a game changing event in the midst of a session.

Making Success Interesting, Part I

I had the chance to play Dungeon World over the holiday break. The game went well, even if we did mar it with our typical propensity to turn any RPG into the plot of a Marx brothers movie.

Dungeon World emphasizes making success interesting, which is a pretty nifty approach. A lot of RPGs and bloggers spill ink about making failure interesting. We've all heard the tale of the investigative adventure that went south because the players blew the Spot Hidden check they needed to advance the plot. In fact, Robin Laws designed an entire RPG system around that problem.

In my experience, making failure interesting is fairly easy once you understand why to do it. It doesn't even come into play in some campaign styles.

In a sand box campaign, a roadblock merely propels the group to some other path or location. Can't unlock a door in the Caves of Thuum? Then head over to the Burning Fortress and come back when you level up. In many ways, choke points and barriers help make a sandbox come to life. They encourage the kind of adventure browsing and strategic thinking that make sand boxes come to life. If there's no one, single path, you can't derail the campaign with a roadblock.

Even in more story oriented games, it doesn't take too much for a DM to set failure outcomes to keep the action moving forward. That blown Spot Hidden check in Call of Cthulhu gives you directions to the cultist's hideout, but you miss the clue that points to the the real, unguarded entrance to her base. Like I said above, I think most GMs learn to work around this once they see the underlying issue for what it is.

Making success interesting allows you to unclench your sphincter as a GM. It lets players feel cool about what they can do, while also driving the action forward. You don't have to worry about salting a player's success with failure, or fear for a spell or combo breaking your game.

My first, and most important piece of advice, is this: If your first reaction to player's die roll or action is to try and deny the success, stop the game. In the heat of the moment, it's easy to panic and try to derail the action. Maybe the players threaten to mess up your prepped material. Maybe they threaten to turn your carefully crafted, scary monster or NPC into a complete joke.

The first step to keeping things interesting is to never be afraid of pausing the game. Not everyone is awesome at thinking on their feet, and your first reaction is rarely the best possible one. As long as you don't pause the game too often, it's a great tool to catch your breath, think about things, and come up with a good idea.

Best of all, if your group is anything like mine pausing the action is easy. Call for a bathroom break. Stop to pour yourself a drink. If anything, the question of what will happen after that natural 20 on a Bluff check will only increase the players' anticipation and engagement with the game. The break gives you a mini clilffhanger while you sort out what to do.

So, the first rule is this: Don't panic. If you're about to panic, stop the game, get a fresh beverage, put your feet up, and take five. You're the GM. It's your right to pause the game whenever you want.

Tomorrow: Now that you've bought yourself some time, what the heck do you actually do?

A Dungeon of Random Tables

As a DM, I like to improvise from a set of fairly loose notes. I like being surprised as a DM. On the other hand, improvising requires a level of energy and invention that's not always there.

To get around this issue, I designed a dungeon as a set of random tables. An entry in the dungeon looks like this:

2. Audience Chamber
Visitors to the cult's lair wait here until their audience with the high priest. There are four bedrolls, a barrel of water, a bucket, and a small cabinet stocked with food and drink (6 days worth) here.

1d6-2 visitors are here. (Allows for an empty room.)
50/50 that they are simple hunters or trappers here to trade, or dark pilgrims seeking to join
Use bandit stats for either
Hunters aren't looking for a fight. Even chance that the cultists try to trick or attack PCs

This isn't rocket science, but it had two benefits to me in play.

First, it was fun as a DM not knowing what was in he room until the PCs entered it. It made the adventure more interesting to run, as I was as much an audience for it as the players.

Second, it makes for a very dynamic environment. It made the dungeon feel like a living place with only a small amount of effort on my part.

I used randomness in a few ways:

• Absence/presence of inhabitants, plus their numbers
• Attitudes/general initial reaction (violence, talking, deception, flight)
• State of traps and other features (recently trigger, broken, normal)
• Odd events, like whether the two rival ogres in a room happen to be fighting when the PCs approach

Overall, so far in play it has worked well to make the dungeon come to life. As long as your dungeon map is reasonably non-linear, it can have interesting effects on the flow of play.

Digital Toolkit: The Evernote Dungeon

Right before GenCon, I ran a dungeon crawl adventure using my iPad, a set of dice, and monster stat blocks written down on index cards.

On my iPad, I had GoodReader loaded up with PDFs of the rulebooks I needed to reference. For the adventure, I tried something different. I wrote up the dungeon using Evernote. It worked out pretty well.

If you're not familiar with Evernote, head over to its web site to get a basic overview. I've read that it started as someone's attempt to create an app to help keep track of a D&D campaign. Whether that's true or not, it's been invaluable in organizing my own campaigns.

For dungeons, here's how I use Evernote.

1. I create a new notebook, using the dungeon's name as the notebook's name. For multiple levels in a single dungeon, I create multiple notebooks.
2. I grab an image of the dungeon map and pop that in as the first note in the notebook. I also insert any general notes about the dungeon in this note, like random encounter tables. I use a leading character in the note's title that ensures that it's in the notebook's top position.
3. During the game, I keep that note open to track where the party travels and such.
4. I create a separate note for each dungeon room, and inside that note write down all the typical stuff you normally need to run that chamber. The irritating thing is that using letters instead of numbers makes it easier, as Evernote breaks out notes in separate rows for each letter of the alphabet, by note title. Numbers work OK, but you end up with all of your notes shelved into a single row.
5. In play, I close out the dungeon map note and open the corresponding room note when the characters enter an area.

So that's basically it. I don't bother with monster stat blocks in the notes, instead handling them the old fashioned way via hand written index cards or print outs.

So, that's my experience with mapping dungeons in Evernote. It worked out well in play.

GenCon Wrap Up Part I: Avoiding Con Crud

Or: Why I am happy to shake hands at a con.

The last con crud I picked up was in 2008, and I'm pretty sure it was from a meal. I've been to dozens of shows over that time, shook a lot of hands, and even had a roommate come down with the flu in mid-con. So what's the secret? It's super simple.

• Hydrate. Drink plenty of water, soda, or whatever.
• Aim for six hours of sleep each night. I try to avoid caffeine after mid-afternoon to help with this rule.
• Eat well. I eat at least one salad per day and fruit whenever I can. You can usually find a place in the con center selling apples or bananas alongside breakfast foods.
• Wash your hands. Hot water, soap, and recite the alphabet A to Z to time scrubbing.
• Resist the urge to touch your face, eyes, and nose. You can't catch a cold from germs hanging out on your hands. Those little buggers need an entry vector. Don't give them one.
• Assume no one else is washing their hands. It's kind of paranoid, but it's an easy way to remind myself to avoid touching my face and to wash up before eating. All it takes is That Guy to shake your hand before you chow down on an apple.
• I know some people don't shake hands, but really if you do all this stuff you don't need to worry about. Even if you avoid handshaking, you're still exposed to tons of stuff that you can only counter by washing your hands and taking care of yourself.

GenCon Resolutions

A lot of us use the New Year as a marker for various resolutions. We make promises to ourselves, usually regarding things that are supposed to make us better people. Almost always, a New Year's resolution comes salted with a sense of challenge or reluctance. We never resolve to eat more chocolate or watch more TV. We instead plant a flag in the ground and swear to do something we know is out of our comfort zone.

I think that's dumb. Life is hard enough as it is. I say we make resolutions to do fun things, and use GenCon as the yearly marker for how we're doing.

Here are my GenCon 2013 resolutions:

• Keep my "for fun" D&D game going for the entire year.
• Start a second campaign that hits at least level 10.
• Play at least six RPGs I haven't tried before (new editions count).
• Play at least four miniatures games.
• Paint the miniatures I bought at GenCon: a pack of bullywugs, a set of beast men, and a set of three barbarians.
• Use the painted beast men in at least one RPG or miniatures game.

What's on your list?

Aedric, Sire of Beast and Storm

As the gods crafted mortals in their own image, so too did Aedric craft the beasts in his. The strongest of the gods had little use for words, so his children could not speak. He fought with his fists and teeth, and so too did his children rely on tooth, claw, and talon.

In time, Aedric's children came to hunt the humanoids crafted by the other gods. The crude spears they clutched did little to ward away the griffons, chimera, and other beasts Aedric had crafted. The other gods grew angry. Looking upon Aedric's creations, they crafted a mighty spell to undo their power.

Each of Aedric's creations were split asunder, their power scattered across their new forms. The soaring griffon yielded the eagle and the lion. The vicious ferreg gave rise to owls and bears. Hydras split into swarms of snakes, while perytons spawned deer and vultures. All of the most common creatures of the world so arose.

Few of Aedric's children escaped this scourge. Only the most common of them survived, and stories persist of truly terrible beasts that still lurk in forgotten corners of the world. Each and every last animal can trace its roots to Aedric's brood, and few can imagine what creatures they once formed.

For his part, Aedric swore revenge against the gods and their children. He threw himself into the sky and transformed into a swirling vortex of air to rend and tear the first cities to rubble. Before the gods could stop him, he become one with the cloudy, peaceful sky. Thus, the first storm ravaged the land. Since that day, Aedric appears again and again to punish the land, rising from the serene clouds to deal his punishment before fading again before his brethren can catch and punish him. Over the long years his wrath has faded, but at times it boils up again into a blizzard or hurricane.

Needless to say, the worship of Aedric is at best met with suspicion and fear if not outright persecution. As the lord of storms and beasts, he offers his worshippers protection from his wrath and the brute, physical power his creations embody. His clerics forswear metal armor and prefer simple cudgels, clubs, and maces to more sophisticated weapons. More tellingly, they refuse to bathe, cut their hair, or engage in similar trappings of civilized behavior. To the clerics of Aedric, embracing the way of the beast is key to achieving their god's inner mysteries.

In battle, the lesser priests can take on the forms of common beasts. The more powerful of his followers can adopt the forms of his true children, such as hydras and griffons. The highest ranking clerics conjure air elementals and take the form of terrible, living storms.

Aedric's clerics war against the other gods' mortal followers, though they can set aside their grudge if a greater threat presents itself. In particular, they view gnolls, manticores, and other abominations spawned by The Defiler as a heretical mockery of Aedric's creations.

Aedric's worship flourishes in the distant barbaric lands, far from the Realm of Ten Cities. Rumors persist of hidden cults that lurk in the cities, plotting to unleash a great invasion of beasts to overrun the civilized realm.