Tag Archives: Conventions

Kid-Friendly RPG at TactiCon 2013 – Part 1

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Labor Day weekend in Colorado is a special time. Sure, it’s a great time to enjoy outdoor activities as summer wanes, but for me it’s exciting because it’s TactiCon time!

There are two big local gaming conventions here in Colorado each year. The bigger one is Genghis Con, which takes place over Presidents’ Day weekend in February. The smaller one is TactiCon. Both have lots of RPGs, board games and miniatures games, complete with a good-sized exhibit hall.

They also have Con Jr., which provides kids of con-goers with gaming of their own. I don’t have kids,so I’ve never been involved with Con Jr., but this year I decided that I’d run a game for kids.

You may have seen my post about the Kid-Friendly RPG (KFRPG), the simple game I designed when my young niece and nephew were visiting last Christmas. I figured I should bring this game to Con Jr.

Preparation

To get ready for the game, the main to-do was to create more characters. I said I could have up to six players, and I only had eight character sheets prepared from last December’s game. I wanted to make sure the kids in my game had more choices.

Basically, I created male and female versions of the existing eight characters, with a few tweaks to make the characters match the pictures I found online.

As a recap, KFRPG characters are pretty simple. They consist of:

  • Race and class
  • Attack die and defense die
  • Three skills
  • One special power

I always include a big picture of the character (using a Google Image Search, for personal use only) and a spot for the player to name the character.

I put my copy of Masks in my bag for the game. This is a cool book in general, but I keep in on hand because of the running lists of random character names at the footers of the pages. What is that NPC’s name? Let me look that up (flip, flip, flip…).

I also had to make sure I had the physical supplies on hand that I would need:

  • The printed character sheets (half page each)
  • Three red poker chips (hit points), one green poker chip (healing potion) and one blue poker chip (special power) for each player
  • Dice that I didn’t mind giving away (I bought a pitcherful at Gen Con)
  • Minis to represent the player characters (I bought a bunch of plastic ones on day 2 of TactiCon)

Finally, I had to make sure my projector setup was ready to go. The projector and rig still work great after three years. As for a MapTool file, I use this one. It has a bunch of different maps on hand, so that my players can go wherever they like. I also have tons of monster and NPC tokens set up in MapTool that I can drop onto the map at any time.

KFRPG is intended to be very free form, letting the players go to bizarre places. And as you’ll see, they did!

Setup

My game was scheduled to start at 11:00 Sunday morning. On  Saturday afternoon, I found the room where I would be running the game, just so I would know where to go. I made sure I arrived about 20 minutes before the scheduled start time on Sunday, so that I would have enough time to set up.

As it turned out, there was a Ticket to Ride game that lasted all the way to 11:00 AM in that room, so I had to set up the projector and my supplies quickly when that game ended. The organizer gave me a few extra minutes to get this in order before sending in the kids.

I had a table of six boys, ranging in age from about 7 to 11. All of them had some familiarity with fantasy role playing, many having played D&D before. I had never met any of these kids before.

I started by passing around the character sheets, letting the kids pass them back and forth and swap with one another until they were happy with what they had.

One kid had this gigantic dragon mini that he wanted to use for his character. I told him that he could be a druid and the dragon could be his animal companion that he could call upon with his special power.

The other kids picked a wizard, two rangers, a dwarf paladin and a wolfman warrior (although I didn’t have a wolf mini, so he was really an elephant man).

Scene 1: The Rusty Lantern Inn

Since I’m going for a straightforward game when it comes to KFRPG, we all began in an inn, the Rusty Lantern. There were a couple of dwarves in one part of the inn, a couple of elves in another part, a human woman (Val) running the place, and a burly human man fetching food from the outdoor kitchen.

Web of the Spider Queen Session 1 - No Grid

The Rusty Lantern Inn

I had an adventure hook ready for whenever the kids needed it: An evil wizard known as Kalor the Terrible is rumored to be active in the area. No one ever sees Kalor himself, and accounts vary as to exactly what he looks like, but he leaves his signature in flaming letters in places where he has wrought havoc.

But rather than forcing this on them, I asked the kids what they wanted to do. Some wanted to chat with the elves, so I had the elves tell them that they were fleeing their homeland because Kalor the Terrible had been there.

The dwarves had heard of Kalor, but said that he was more of a legend from hundreds of years ago.

Val the innkeeper said she had some information about Kalor being active in the same region as the Rusty Lantern, which freaked out the elves.

The kids thought this sounded pretty good, so they wanted to press Val for more information. But before she was willing to trust them, she had something she wanted them to do for her first:

Kill the rats in the basement of the inn.

Yes, I wanted the adventuring cliches to flow thick and heavy! Let’s kill some rats.

Time for a cliffhanger!

Since this post is getting so long, I’m going to break it into two parts. Tomorrow, the battle begins!

Michael the OnlineDM

@ClayCrucible on Twitter

TactiCon 2012 Recap: Fiasco, Ashes of Athas, Chaos & Alchemy and impromptu D&D

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Labor Day weekend has been a lot of fun for me the past three years, as I’ve been attending TactiCon. This is the smaller of the two conventions put on by the Denver Gamers Association each year (the bigger one is Genghis Con over Presidents’ Day weekend in February), but the 2010 edition was the first gaming convention I ever attended, so it always has a place in my heart.

I’ve done the “Marathon GM” thing in the past, where I run a D&D game in all nine of the convention’s four-hour slots over the weekend, but I was taking it a little easier this time – only being signed up for seven. Yes, I’m still nuts.

Thursday

Thursday night, I had signed up to run a session of Fiasco. I had only played once before, but I think it’s a cool system and one that I want to get more comfortable with. I’ve been playing around with creating a playset of my own, but since it wasn’t ready in time I just brought the four sets from the base Fiasco book, plus the D&D-themed set, the rock band set and the set played on Tabletop a couple of months ago. My players, two of whom had never played before, opted for the Antarctica set. Since there were four other players plus myself, I decided not to participate as a player, instead just helping them along. I think Fiasco plays best with four.

The players had a good time, setting up a web of relationships and secrets. Things were going swimmingly until the radioactive penguins started growing tentacles at the end of Act One. Amazingly, the players all rolled pretty well by Fiasco standards at the end of the game, so none of them ended up dead and one ended up coming out smelling like roses. We finished in under two hours, too, which was great – I still had a little prep for the rest of the weekend’s games to finish.

Friday

Friday was Ashes of Athas Day One. I was running the three adventures from Chapter Three of the Dark Sun-set organized play campaign. I was delighted to discover that three of the guys whom I’d run Ashes of Athas for back at Genghis Con had returned, and they were stoked to play at my table again! They really made it fun for me last time.

This time was no different. With my projector setup running (and attracting lots of admiration from passers-by, as usual), we kept the fun flowing all day long. I felt bad for my core three players when they were bumped to another DM’s table for the middle session, but the reason was that we had a group of new-to-D&D players and the organizer knows that I love running games for new players (and that they tend to keep coming back after they’ve been at my table). I did love the new folks, too. Something about new players just gets my energy up.

My core three players were back at my table for the final adventure of the day, and it was mostly a big, two-part combat encounter. The second part had a very interesting environmental effect: Any PC starting or ending a turn in a zone of evil ashes had to make a death saving throw. This was in the Athasian plane of death, so it made sense. The cool thing about this was that it made it possible for a PC to die while still at full hit points, but not randomly out of nowhere as in a pure “save or die” effect. It really affected player tactics once they found out about it, and made things tense when they otherwise might not have been.

Saturday

Saturday was going to be an interesting one. I was signed up to run Ashes of Athas from 9:00 to 1:00, from 2:00 to 6:00 and from 7:00 to 11:00. However, I was also signed up to run demos of Chaos & Alchemy in the board and card game room from noon to 3:00. I had asked the D&D organizer ahead of time if maybe I could bow out of some of my Ashes of Athas games, but he told me that he was really short on DMs.

Fortunately for me, he was wrong. Saturday morning, we had three DMs and three players. Easy solution: I would bow out, one of the DMs would play and the other DM would run a table of four! This let me get some much-needed coffee, check out the vendor hall, and then start showing people how to play Chaos & Alchemy.

Chaos & Alchemy cover art by Chris Rallis – Logo by Bree Heiss

My lovely wife came to join me in the demos at noon, and she was very eye-catching (like I said, she’s lovely). We had two tables of demos running non-stop, with lots of folks deciding to buy a copy of the game. One guy started telling all of his friends that they needed to come try this game, and I believe four of them bought copies. One of THOSE people also sent another buyer my way! Players are teaching one another to play the game.

A guy who owns a very new game retail store bought a copy and asked about carrying Chaos & Alchemy in his store. Two guys turned out to be involved with the organization of Denver Comic Con and wanted to talk to me about having a table at next year’s convention, with a “local game designer” angle on it. There was a lot of enthusiasm, and I ended the weekend with just 25 copies from my original 125 copy print run on hand. It’s off to a really good start!

As you might guess from all of that, I was able to spend most of the afternoon running Chaos & Alchemy, in part because there were only two tables worth of players for Ashes of Athas and the other two DMs ran the games. However, when the evening time slot came around, we had two tables of players but one of the other DMs was nowhere to be found, so I set up the projector and ran the adventure.

The players for Saturday night were the same six I’d had for Friday night. The adventure was the conclusion of Ashes of Athas Chapter Four, and it was my least favorite of the Ashes of Athas adventures I’ve run so far. It was really long, with too many skill challenges and combats for a standard convention time slot, and one of the combats ended up wiping out the other table of players (my table had a very hard time with it). We still had fun at the table, though. The party didn’t mind when I switched to some brief narration rather than actually running through some skill challenges, and they rolled with the bizarre “desert peyote trip” ending of the adventure.

This adventure also gave me my favorite gaming moment of the convention, when a new player who was running a spear-toting Ardent was trying desperately to figure out what she could to to help her allies while she was standing on a bridge and the gargoyle menacing them was 20 feet below her. Answer: Jump off the bridge, spear pointing down, and hope for the best. I gave her a +1 bonus for charging (sort of) and a +2 bonus for combat advantage (the gargoyle did NOT see this one coming!), and ruled that if she hit with the attack, it would count as an automatic critical hit.

Boom – gargoyle pieces everywhere! What a great ride.

Sunday

I had nothing scheduled on Sunday, which was a first for me. I decided to sleep in, have an early lunch and get to the convention around 11:15. I got in on a game of Smash Up, which I knew had been a big deal at GenCon. I love the theme of the game – you play with a 40-card deck that’s made up of two 20-card decks smashed together to give you something like Alien Dinosaurs, Ninja Tricksters, Zombie Pirates or Robot Wizards. The mechanics of piling up minions and playing actions to take down some shared bases, with points awarded based on who contributed the most to breaking the base, were pretty good. The balance seemed fine, too, with the final score being 15-11-11-8 (I was one of the 11s).

However, I just didn’t have that much fun during the actual gameplay. The Robot Wizards, for instance, had really long, involved turns. The Ninja Tricksters got to do interesting things at unexpected times. The Zombie Pirates both had things popping out of the discard pile. The Dinosaur Aliens… were big. And they could return things to players’ hands. My turns were short and a little boring. It’s a game with lots of potential, but it didn’t quite do it for me.

I ran a couple more demos of Chaos & Alchemy, then headed over to the D&D area to see if maybe I could play in a game in the last time slot at 2:00. The organizer asked if I could run something instead. I didn’t have my laptop with me, even though the projector and rig were in the car, but since I’d never tried running module cold, I agreed to go for it.

I was loaned a wet-erase mat and marker and was seated at a table that was mostly empty, since the players (mostly kids who were friends and family of one another, with one adult) were apparently in their rooms leveling up their characters. Once I realized that they didn’t care what module they played, I decided I’d run one that I wrote – The Stolen Staff. I downloaded it from my blog to my iPad. I used the backs of business cards for initiative trackers. I wrote down monster hit points on a sheet of paper. I borrowed some minis from one of the players to represent the monsters.

And we had a rollicking good time! I soon realized that these kids really just wanted to fight stuff, so I gave them plenty of interesting things to kill. We had gotten off to a really late start, but we still fit in three fights and some role-playing, finishing on time. I did have a weird moment afterward when one of the kids asked me, “So who did the best?” I didn’t understand the question, so he clarified, “Who did the most damage and killed the most monsters? Who was the best?” I told him that my favorite moment was when one of his friends had his character jump off a tower to land on a minion (I guess I have a thing for PCs throwing themselves off of stuff). Maybe he’ll get the message that D&D is about creativity, not just numbers. Here’s hoping. It was a very min-maxed party, so I’m guessing I won’t change any opinions, but so it goes.

Afterward

Once all was said and done, I still wasn’t quite finished. A couple came up to me as I was packing up from my last game and asked if I was Michael (I am) and if I could teach them about Fiasco. Apparently they had bought the game and weren’t confident in jumping in, and they had seen my name in the program as someone who had run Fiasco. So, after the GM appreciate ceremony, I met up with the two of them and taught them about Fiasco before heading home.

Yay for more new gamers!

-Michael the OnlineDM

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

Between GenCon and TactiCon 2012

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Just a quick update since I haven’t written in a while.

GenCon was an awesome experience. The highlight was getting to meet so many of my friends from the online D&D world, mainly from Twitter (d20Monkey, Jennisodes, LawOfTheGeek, deadorcs, FELTit, GeekyLyndsay, d20Blonde, Squach, TheIdDM, SlyFlourish… the list goes on and on). A lot of these were at the Thursday evening GenCon Social, with more coming at the Saturday evening recording of the Tome Show and dinner afterward.

I sat in on several seminars during the convention, with the highlights being a Kickstarter panel, the Law of the Geek panel and a panel on board game design.

I was on an episode of This Just In From GenCon as a sponsor.

I did some informal demos of Chaos & Alchemy in the general gaming areas with some good success. I was only able to do about 30 or so demos over the course of the weekend (not having a booth makes it hard to do that sort of thing), but 10 people did end up buying the game after playing it – a pretty good conversion rate! It was enough to make me want to keep going with this thing, and I’m currently talking to some small publishers and also doing the research about maybe running a Kickstarter for a big print run.

I’ve learned that my Wednesday bowling league that usually keeps me from running D&D Encounters in the fall and spring is going to be on Tuesday instead this year, which means that I’m DMing Encounters again. Yay! No write-up for this week, except to say that my table full of evil drow did a good job of role-playing. They’re scheming and backstabbing and having a lovely time.

Now I’m on the eve of TactiCon, one of the two local conventions each year. I’m running Fiasco tonight, followed by two days of Ashes of Athas (the D&D 4e organized play set in Dark Sun). I’m going to try to find time on Saturday between Dark Sun games to demo some Chaos & Alchemy as well.

So, I’m still out there, still gaming, just very busy!

-Michael the OnlineDM

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

GenCon 2012: OnlineDM’s plans

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I am fortunate to be able to say that I will be attending GenCon this year for the second year in a row! Last year was my first GenCon, and I had a blast (those posts are available here and here and here and here). This year, I was not planning on going until my wonderful wife convinced me that the card game I’ve been developing, Chaos & Alchemy, was good enough to deserve a GenCon debut.

What do I look like?

If you want to find me at GenCon, it will probably help to know what I look like! I’ve had some Chaos & Alchemy T-shirts printed, and I’ll probably be wearing them most of the time, so I’ll look something like this:

Michael Iachini, the OnlineDM himself, wearing an awesome Chaos & Alchemy T-shirt

If you see me and want to talk to me, please do! I’ve never been recognized by a stranger before. That would be cool!

Chaos & Alchemy

Obviously, I’m going to be demoing the heck out of Chaos & Alchemy, the game that inspired me to come to GenCon. Unfortunately, I don’t have a booth or anything like that. This means that I’ll be camping out at vacant tables wherever I can find them. I plan to hang out in the board game area somewhat, but since I’ve discovered that Magic: The Gathering players seem to love my game, I plan to hang out there, too.

Chaos & Alchemy cover art by Chris Rallis – Logo by Bree Heiss

My general plan is to put myself at a table and invite passers-by to sit down and play. It’s not a well-thought-out plan, I’ll admit, but I’m going for it! If you see me and you want to try out my game, please do! Really, I would love that.

As I write this, I have pre-sold about 40 games, and I have about another 10-15 that I don’t plan to make available for sale (complimentary copies for certain folks, or copies that I plan to keep as extras for myself, just in case I need them later). Since my print run is 125, that means that I plan to have about 70 copies available for sale at GenCon. If you know you want a copy of Chaos & Alchemy and you would like to pick it up at GenCon (and get the special GenCon promo card for sure), you can order in advance and just let me know that you’ll pick it up at GenCon. Several people have chosen this option already.

Edit: Since I put up my original post, I’ve learned that I won’t be allowed to run anything that resembles a formal event, which means that my banner is a no-no. I’ll do my best to be easy to find, but I’m new at this!

Marketing

As I mentioned in my Making the Game post about marketing, I’ve signed up to sponsor two GenCon events.

On Thursday at 5:00 PM, I’ll be in the CSO-4 room of the convention center (wherever that is) to be part of a recording of This Just In From GenCon in which I’ll get to talk a little about Chaos & Alchemy (and GenCon so far). I believe this recording is open to the public, so if you like the show you can come to the recording and have the bonus of seeing me there, too!

Later that evening, at 7:00 PM, I’ll be over at Rock Bottom Brewery for the GenCon Social. For those astute GenCon schedule trackers out there, yes, this conflicts directly with the D&D keynote address. Sigh. Still, I definitely want to be at the social since this is where folks will get their dice bags containing goodies, including the GenCon exclusive Chaos & Alchemy promo card! I’ll reveal that here for the very first time:

Social Convocation – the GenCon 2012 promo card for Chaos & Alchemy

Those of who who have been following my game know that the card illustrations are black-and-white, but since Social Convocation is a special one, I hired an artist to do it in color. She did a fantastic job, too! Everyone who buys a copy of Chaos & Alchemy from me at  GenCon will get one of these cards (while supplies last – I’ll have about 65 of them).

Seminars

I do have tickets to a few seminars that I may or may not attend depending on how things are going with the Chaos & Alchemy demos. If I have a line of people who want to try the game, I’ll probably keep playing rather than stopping to attend a seminar.

  • Thursday 10:00 AM: D&D Digital Future, ICC room 139
  • Thursday 6:00 PM: Kickstarting board games, ICC room 210
  • Friday 1:00 PM: D&D “The Sundering”, ICC room 139 (most likely to be skipped, I’d say)
  • Friday 3:00 PM: Law of the Geek recording, ICC room 201
  • Friday 6:00 PM: The Tome Show advice episode with Robin Laws, Crowne Plaza Victoria Station C/D
  • Saturday 10:00 AM: Board game design with Rodney Thompson (Lords of Waterdeep), ICC room 211
  • Saturday 6:00 PM: The Tome Show Gamer to Gamer with Chris Perkins, Crowne Plaza Victoria Station C/D
  • Saturday 7:00 PM: The Tome Show Behind the DM Screen, Crowne Plaza Victoria Station C/D

I’ll be interested to see how many of these I make it to. I think that the board game Kickstarter seminar might be useful, since I might be doing one for Chaos & Alchemy soon, but it’s right between This Just In From GenCon and the GenCon Social. I really want to attend Law of the Geek since Geoff Gerber was kind enough to talk to me on the phone about general legal stuff with my game, and I’d love to attend the Tome Show recordings to meet Jeff Greiner and Tracy Hurley in person (since I’ve been on their show a bunch of times now).

The board game design seminar with Rodney Thompson mainly interests me because Rodney was one of the main people behind Lords of Waterdeep, which I think is an excellent game. I’d love to pick his brain about the design process.

Wrap-up

Naturally, I plan to spend some time in the vendor hall when I’m not otherwise engaged, and I’d like to at least play a few board games or indie RPGs while I’m at the convention, too. The vendor hall might be especially interesting, since one company has already asked me for a copy of my game. Who knows – maybe a publisher will decide to pick up Chaos & Alchemy and run with it!

In any case, I know I’m going to have a blast. If you’re looking for me, watch my Twitter feed – I plan to post updates on my GenCon whereabouts regularly.

-Michael the OnlineDM

OnlineDM1 on Twitter

Genghis Con 2012 Recap

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As I sit down to write this post Monday morning, I’m exhausted and happy for the past three-plus days I spent over the weekend at Genghis Con 2012. The Denver Gamers Association puts on two conventions each year: Genghis Con over Presidents’ Day weekend, and TactiCon over Labor Day weekend. I think they’re very smart in having each convention begin Thursday night and end Sunday evening, with Monday off for all of us to recover before we have to go back to our day jobs on Tuesday after the holiday.

Last TactiCon, I decided to be a Marathon GM and run games in all nine time slots (Thursday evening; Friday morning, afternoon and evening; Saturday morning, afternoon and evening, and finally Sunday morning and afternoon). For Genghis this year, I decided I wanted to run just three sessions (of games I’d written myself) and then play the rest of the time. I signed up for two specific games to play in – a Dresden Files game and a Hero System game based on Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. I wanted to keep my options open for the rest of the time.

I received an email a few weeks before the convention that the Dr. Horrible game was canceled. Oh well. Then I got an email two weeks ago letting me know that the person who was supposed to have been coordinating the D&D 4th Edition games at the convention (mainly Living Forgotten Realms) had gone incommunicado, and lots of games needed DMs. I was asked to help out.

So, I went from running three slots to running seven. Seven slots, seven different games. Two of them were Ashes of Athas, and I knew next to nothing about Dark Sun. Two were paragon tier LFR games (one of which, thankfully, I had run before and so already had prepared in MapTool). A couple of weeks of frantic prep work followed, including taking last Thursday off work to get ready. And then away we go!

Thursday

I got to the convention at the Red Lion Hotel around 6:00 PM to pick up my badge. The awesome RPG coordinator had arranged for me to get a refund for the sessions I had originally signed up to play in but was now running instead. You rock, Linda!

This was one of the two times in the convention when I was a player rather than a DM. I jumped into an LFR game that could be run for characters of levels 1-10, but the table has to agree on a four-level band. I really wanted to play Factotum, my beloved bard, who was fifth level. Unfortunately, there were a couple of other players who really wanted to play their 9th and 10th level characters. And thus I turned to Rhogar, my first-ever LFR character – a half-elf paladin of Ilmater. I hadn’t played him since Genghis Con 2011.

The adventure itself was set in Elturgard, and I should have known better. Rhogar’s last adventure was the Paladins’ Plague adventure in Elturgard, and I ended up having the least fun ever with that adventure. This adventure was somewhat similar, in that it was a very dark adventure with some no-win plot choices at the end. I left feeling victorious in the adventure, but kind of bummed out at the same time.

Friday

Friday was the day I was originally scheduled to run games, and I brought my projector rig on down to the convention. I was running the Staff of Suha trilogy (The Stolen Staff, Tallinn’s Tower and Descent Into Darkness). This was the second convention in a row where I’d run all three games, and I was excited to see that I had three players who would be involved in all three games and everyone else would be involved in two of the three. A fun twist in this particular series is that one of the players needed a fifth level character to play, and I offered to let him play Factotum the bard, which he totally ran with.

Things went pretty well in The Stolen Staff. I was happy that this party became the first to find the secret entrance to the orcs’ keep via the garbage pit, and the encounter down there was fun. It did take a long time to get to that point, though, so I ruled on the fly that the secret entrance let the party bypass most of the skill challenge through the stronghold. The fight in the orc temple was also cool, as this party was the first to let the orc shaman live more than a couple of rounds, which made the other orcs much more deadly. The fight against the orc leader in the end was only so-so; I still need to work on making him more interesting.

Tallinn’s Tower went smoothly enough, with the party eventually figuring out how the puzzle on the first floor worked, and then disabling the trap on the second floor very quickly, which made that fight much easier. The third floor got a little bit brutal, but the party whomped on the leader in time to prevent folks from turning to stone. Barely.

Descent Into Darkness went just okay, I’d say. The party solved the rune puzzle quickly, but not so quickly as to be trivial. They were a little bit tempted by the decoy sword but moved on before getting into too much trouble. They also took more of a negotiation approach with the halflings before Factotum decided to attack. That battle was more lethal than I intended it to be with the thieves; I need to tweak those guys. The climax fight against the beholder was a little anti-climactic, as the beholder got held in Bigby’s Icy Grasp and stayed there for three rounds. The party fought well, though, grabbed the Shield and got out of there, leaving the beholder alive (as most parties have done).

There was one player at the table who wasn’t having as much fun as the rest, and I tried and failed to get him more excited about the game. This was a bummer, as I like the guy, but he wasn’t having a great time. Oh well; I can’t blame anyone but myself, since I wrote the modules!

Saturday

Saturday was Ashes of Athas day. I had prepped my two sessions a couple of days before the convention and had thoroughly read one of them, but I had to finish reading the second during the hour-long break between sessions. I got there, though!

The Ashes of Athas modules are definitely more role-play heavy than most LFR modules, and that demands the right sort of players (and a prepared DM, which I just barely was). Fortunately, I had an awesome table. They were really into Dark Sun and spent way more time in-character than I’ve ever experienced before in D&D. I could tell that they really saw the various NPCs as actual characters, not just names and stat blocks. I felt successful when I realized that they truly hated one NPC, grokked another’s focus on the bottom line (her quote about profits being down 18% became a recurring bit), felt sympathy toward another, etc. The combats were only so-so, but I don’t think anyone cared – they loved the world. They were actually possessive of me as their DM, too; when we were talking about the possibility of players having to get moved around to other tables in the afternoon, they insisted that they get to keep me. That’s a good feeling!

Unfortunately for them, I was not running the final part of the Ashes of Athas trilogy in the evening; instead, I was playing a Dresden Files game. I’ve heard lots of great stuff about the game and wanted try it out. As it turns out, the GM was actually running a game using the Dresden Files rules in a different setting. The abbreviation for the setting is UA, and I thought the GM said this stood for “unearthed arcana” but that doesn’t seem right. Anyway, it was a setting with an occult subculture, and our characters were insiders of that culture.

Impressively, we did world creation, character tweaking, and a full adventure in the course of a three-hour session! As a party, we established three groups in Denver that had secret occult plans:

  • A biker gang in Cheeseman Park that was seeking an item called The Devil Rose in order to summon the devil to serve them
  • A group of metaphysical book shop owners who were focused on cleaning up the Cherry Creek Reservoir (where occult groups would dump bodies) and wanted to find the Cagliostro Seal, which would allow them to unleash nature and destroy civilization
  • A group of LGBT activists who maintained Elitch Gardens amusement park as occult neutral ground. Led by RuPaul, they were seeking the Alchemical Eye, which would give them full knowledge of all goings-on in the city

And we’re off! My character managed to get himself firebombed when he tried to chat up a book shop owner to warn her about the biker gang, but he only sprained an ankle. I learned how the Fate system works, doing some role playing to earn fate points. Getting to play NPCs and establish in-world facts as being true was a very cool mechanic. I don’t think I’d want to play a “story game” like this all the time, but it would be a fun change of pace now and then. I will note, however, that you need a DYNAMITE GM in order to make this work. The GM has to be able to make up all kinds of stuff on the fly, and our GM definitely did not disappoint. He rocked.

Sunday

For the final day of the convention, there were only two sessions, and I was running paragon-level LFR games for both of them. The first, CORE 2-2, is a game I had run before at Enchanted Grounds. I arrived just before the start time and discovered that the mount for my projector had popped off. I only needed a screwdriver to fix it, but I didn’t have one. Fortunately, one of my players was nice enough to go out to his car to get one, and the game went off without a hitch. That guy definitely was awarded a bonus point! (And writing this has reminded me to go put a screwdriver in my projector bag.)

My afternoon game had a great table of players, a number of whom I had DMed for at past conventions (in a couple of cases, with the same characters). This was NETH 3-3, and I have to say that this was WAY more fun than I expected it to be. I loved running this module. The players did some creative thinking during a skill challenge, and the combats were super-interesting and very well balanced. The party could have played at either level 12 or level 14, and they were ultimately happy they chose 12 (14 might have killed them).

My favorite moment of the convention came in this game, where a fighter decided he wanted to climb onto a table, make a running leap onto a bookshelf 10 feet away and then drop down the far side in order to attack an enemy. The jump was a masterful success, but since he wasn’t trained in Acrobatics, the fall down the far side of the shelf left him on his butt. And just to be a rat-bastard DM (to a player I know and like and whose character was plenty tough enough to take it), I ruled that the fall off the shelf involved the PC moving through a threatened square without shifting (falling from two squares up, next to a bad guy, down to the ground), which provoked an opportunity attack. We had some great laughs at this table, and it was good to end the convention on a high note.

After the sessions are done, the organizers always have an appreciation ceremony for the GMs, and I managed to pick up a free copy of Masks, a book of NPC ideas from Gnome Stew. Good stuff, and I can’t wait to use it!

And now I can stop my frantic convention prep work and relax. Ahhh!

-Michael the OnlineDM

TactiCon 2011 – LURU 2-4 Need to Know

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LURU 2-4 Need to Know – Spoilers ahead

The final adventure I ran at TactiCon 2011 was LURU 2-4 Need to Know. I had a full table of six players, including my friend Nate, another couple of players who I knew from Enchanted Grounds, a player I knew from other convention games, and a couple whom I hadn’t met before.

I began by asking the players to introduce their characters to one another, and Nate led things off by doing so in-character. This set the tone nicely for the rest of the table, as all of the PCs came to life. All of them mentioned their race (although the changeling in the party explained that she claimed to be an eladrin, hinting that she wasn’t really), though most did NOT mention their class. Instead, they let this become clear from the way they behaved in battle. One introduced himself as an actor (later revealed to be a hybrid bard-warlock), one as just an adventurer (later revealed to be a rogue), one as bloodthirsty bug (a ranger) and one as a princess (a hybrid bard-warlord).

The princess in the party is my favorite PC I’ve seen so far in an LFR game. She rode around on a Tenser’s Floating Disk and made excellent use of Direct the Strike to boss people around and make them attack. It worked really well. She was also able to leverage her “royal status” to bluff her way into a guarded city along with some of her allies during the adventure.

The best part of this adventure was the opening combat encounter, which took place in an inn that was soon set on fire. The growing fire and the lava elementals that arose from it were a ton of fun.

The final encounter was less fun, as it involved a beholder in a pretty boring 10 square by 10 square room (with an attached sewer area). Every time a player started their turn, they were subject to an eye ray attack (unless they ran into the sewers). They couldn’t flank the beholder, nor could they take opportunity attacks against it when it used its eye rays.

It got frustrating, but having learned my lesson from an earlier adventure I started changing the beast up a little bit. I tried to cut way back on the most devastating control effects from the beholder – the sleep ray knocked out the fighter for several rounds, and the petrification ray took away at least two PCs’ entire turns. The adventure made it clear that you need to go easy on those during the beholder’s turn, which I did, but when it rolls a random ray at the beginning of a PC’s turn, the odds are good that a controlling power is going to come up. So, I switched to more damage and less control later in the combat, even on the random rays.

Ultimately, everyone had a good time, and using MapTool and the projector to project the spreading fire onto the map in the first encounter was a big hit. It was a good way to end an awesome TactiCon.

TactiCon 2011 – MyRealms adventures

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MyRealms adventures – Spoilers follow

All day Friday at TactiCon 2011 was devoted to my MyRealms adventure trilogy: The Staff of Suha in the morning, Tallinn’s Tower in the afternoon, and Descent Into Darkness in the evening. I only had one player who played in all three adventures, but my tables were full throughout.

I feel confident in saying that these were a hit. I’m constantly tweaking my own adventures, and I was taking notes as I ran them, but they were all little things to tweak here and there – nothing that needed a complete reworking.

My favorite moment of the convention came in the final battle of Descent Into Darkness, which involves facing a beholder in a room that includes a river of magma. The party was doing their best to keep the beholder locked down, and at one point a rogue decided to jump onto the beholder’s back. He stayed aboard for four rounds.

In the first round, the beholder was stunned, so the rogue stabbed away.

In the second round, the beholder got up from prone and tried to shoot an eye ray at the rogue (tough to do when he’s on top of the beholder) and missed.

In the third round, the beholder flipped upside down and flew just over the surface of the magma, but the rogue made a great Athletics / Acrobatics check to scramble around the ball of eyes as it rotated and avoided the magma.

In the fourth round, the beholder had had enough of this nonsense, decided that it could handle the magma better than the fragile humanoid on its back, and dove into the river and back out. The beholder and the rogue both took 30 fire damage and ongoing 10 fire damage (save ends).

The rogue’s player asked me, “So what happens if that takes me below zero hit points?”

The whole table replied with “Oooooh….”

Yes, he fell unconscious while in the river of magma, which meant that he lost his grip and floated just below the surface. The beholder survived the bath, but the party ran out of options to rescue the rogue without killing themselves. Thus passed the short-lived rogue, may he rest in peace.

I’m not much of a killer DM, but PC do die at my table from time to time. In this particular case, it was worth it. I knew that was true Sunday evening when some players at a different game I was running said they had already heard that story about the beholder and the rogue and the magma river. When your players are telling stories about your games to their other friends at the convention, you’ve done something right! Well, unless they were saying, “This jerk of a DM killed my character…”

TactiCon 2011 – CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way

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CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way – Spoilers Follow

I ran three sessions of CORE 2-4 Lost on the Golden Way at TactiCon 2011 – Thursday evening, Saturday morning and Sunday morning. My biggest worry was that there wouldn’t be enough players for the Sunday morning game, thus denying me the Iron Man achievement, but no worries there – I had a full table. Actually, the Thursday evening table was the only non-full table I ran all weekend (only four players). Saturday morning’s table actually had seven players!

I hadn’t run this adventure before TactiCon, but by the end I was quite a natural with it. It’s a fun little adventure, where the party has to track a missing caravan into the feywild, dealing with a thieving elf who accidentally got the caravan into trouble. They rescue the captive drivers and caravan workers from gnomes who were planning to deliver them as slaves to some eladrin – and then fight off the eladrin as they try to escape from the feywild.

The first table decided to take a different approach to the final encounter. Rather than dashing for the portal out of the feywild, they decided to literally circle the wagons and shelter in place. No problem – I adapted the existing maps I’d prepared in MapTool, and they fought from within the wagon circle.

The second table, with seven players, had four people who had never played LFR before. As my regular readers know, I LOVE introducing new people to D&D, so this was a great time for me. The highlight was when one player, having thrown his only (non-magical) dagger at a foe in an earlier round, decided to try to take out the enemy by springing off one standing stone to kick the bad guy off another stone. Good Athletics and Acrobatics led to success, with the PC standing atop the stone and the bad guy prone at its foot, taking decent falling damage, after which he was soon dispatched. Awesome.

The third table had my friend Nate as a player (yay!) as well as a father-son pair who had approached me on Thursday or Friday, admiring my projector setup and asking about the game. I told them that the Saturday morning and Sunday morning games would be ideal for new players, so they signed up!

This was a solid little adventure, and I could see using it as a good introductory adventure for new players in the future. Also, I found myself using character voices in this adventure – something I don’t usually do much of as a DM. The thieving elf Harelahur somehow developed his own voice, which I think made the players feel a bit sympathetic toward him (they all let him run away instead of turning him over to the authorities at the end). The cold eladrin leader’s voice was fun to do, too. I’m not usually a big “voices” guy, but I could see doing a little more here than I have in the past, if the character is right for it.

TactiCon 2011 – SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds

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SPEC 3-2 Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds – Spoilers follow

I’ve already written extensively about my experience running this adventure at TactiCon. In a nutshell, it was a mostly-fun paragon tier adventure that my party decided to take on at a high challenge level. This came back to bite them in the final encounter against a hydra, which they eventually had to retreat from. This meant that they received a negative story award, which left them with a lousy feeling about the game. And it led to my only non-perfect DM evaluation scores of the convention (two people gave me a 9 out of 10).

I did learn later that the hydra’s attacks and defenses and damage should not have been scaled upward by 1 according to the adventure, so I made a mistake there (but the boss monster in the other adventure branch does have instructions to adjust his attacks and defenses and damage, so it was an understandable confusion on my part). And ultimately I should have changed whatever seemed unfun to me as we went along at the table (a lesson I took to heart in the last game I ran a the convention).

I guess I’ll have to shoot for perfect scores next time instead. 🙂

TactiCon 2011 is in the books

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And on the fifth day, OnlineDM rested.

TactiCon 2011 started Thursday evening at 6:00 and wrapped up Sunday evening at 6:00. 72 hours from open to close for me (plus a little extra time at the end for the DM appreciation ceremony). I spent 36 of those hours at the game table, running games.

And I had a blast!

I got some dubious looks when I said I wanted to Iron Man the con (running games the whole time), but I can honestly say that I came out of it feeling energized, not exhausted. I did run a little short on sleep over the course of the convention (I had a 30 minute drive each way, so that cut into my sleep time a bit), and I’ll admit that I feel asleep at 9:00 PM last night and slept until 8:00 this morning, but I wasn’t getting headaches or feeling drained or anything like that.

Ultimately, TactiCon was a lot of fun. I was running games at tables in more public areas for most of this convention (in the past I’ve often been in individual hotel rooms), which meant that a lot more people got to see my MapTool / projector setup in action. It was a great feeling to have people stop by to say how cool they thought it was, or to ask questions about how they could build something similar themselves. Some of them even brought friends back later to show my setup off to them.

I’m looking forward to the next convention!

Individual game recaps

I’ve decided to break my detailed recaps into separate posts, rather than putting it all in one massive post. The links to those posts are below.

Lost on the Golden Way (Thursday evening, Saturday morning, Sunday morning)

MyRealms adventures (all day Friday)

Roots of Corruption – Dark Seeds (Saturday afternoon and evening)

Need to Know (Sunday afternoon)