Author Archives: Michael the OnlineDM

Genghis Con 2011 begins

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I’ve only been to one gaming convention before – TactiCon 2010, last September (the debut of my projector setup for DMing). Today marks the beginning of Denver’s main gaming convention of the year – Genghis Con.

Now that I know what to expect from a convention, I’ve figured out what I want to do with my time there:

  • I’m running three sessions of Living Forgotten Realms (two of them with a module I wrote myself)
  • I’m playing in an all-day (three-session) LFR game on Saturday
  • I’m playing sessions of three non-D&D role-playing games: GURPS, Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds

Since there are a total of nine sessions on the weekend (one Thursday evening, three on Friday, three on Saturday and two on Sunday), that’s my whole weekend planned out. I wasn’t planning on having myself completely booked before the convention started, but it worked out that way when I realized that the only real LFR option on Saturday was the all-day event.

Needless to say, I’m excited! I volunteered this morning to help the con organizer, Leif, get some supplies from a friend’s basement to the convention hotel. I’m taking two days off work, and I’m ready for games.

Depending on how well my wife is feeling, she might be coming, too, which would be great! She’s volunteered to make some pre-generated characters for me to have available for players at my games, just in case someone doesn’t have a character ready to go.

One of my friends from my regular in-person game will also be coming for sure – we’re playing GURPS together. Another friend from that game might be coming on Sunday.

It should be a great weekend, and I’ll be sure to blog about it whenever I have some time.

Gamma World – My group’s experience

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The past two sessions with my in-person group have been devoted to playing Gamma World instead of our ongoing D&D 4e campaign. We were at a good pause point in the main adventure, so we decided to try something different.

Normally I’m a very prepared DM. I run my games using MapTool and, for the in-person games, my projector setup. This means that I need to put all of the maps in place beforehand as well as program in all of the monsters. For Gamma World, I intentionally decided to wing it.

The Gamma World box comes with a rulebook, tokens for PCs and monsters, four blank character sheets, poster maps and cards (alpha mutations and omega tech). This gave me enough to run everything without MapTool.

My cat approves of Gamma World, too.

We began with character generation. The best way to do this is to use the interactive character sheet over at Wizards of the Coast’s web site. Begin by randomizing the whole sheet. Then have each player roll a d20 twice to determine their two origins (yes, you could let the sheet handle this part, but it’s more fun to let the players do it). Pick those origins from the drop-downs. Have them tell you what they want for weapons and armor, name the character, and you’re done. It takes literally about a minute.

I’ll note here that the rules let the players pick whatever they want as far as weapons and armor go, though I could see some groups preferring to start players off with fewer weapon and armor choices and then giving them the chance to find better gear as they go through. One player, for instance, decided to have a two-handed heavy ranged weapon (non-gun) and decided it was a trebuchet. That’s awesome for Gamma World – totally gonzo – but it was really powerful compared to some of the other players’ equipment. I could have been tougher on ammo (throwing giant rocks with no reload time… well, maybe I should have been stricter), but I let it all slide.

As for the actual adventure, I ran the one in the Gamma World book. The plot is simple: The PCs live in a village at the bottom of a big hill, and every day for the last week or two a robot would roll down the hill and explode near the village. They go up the hill to investigate. That’s enough plot to go on! From there, it was pretty much an uninterrupted series of combat encounters.

My players (and I) enjoyed the mechanics of Gamma World as a change of pace from our usual game. It goes like this:

  • Each character starts with two at-will powers, one from each of their two origins.
  • In addition, each character can have a melee weapon and a ranged weapon of their choice (and they can describe them however they want).
  • On your turn, you have the usual 4e standard, move and minor actions available to you.
  • Everyone can use Second Wind as a minor action, and it restores the character’s bloodied value worth of hit points (like spending two surges in 4e).
  • There are no healing surges to keep track of – after each combat, everyone heals back to their maximum hit points.
  • Everyone starts with one alpha mutation (wings, flippers, metal skin, etc.) and one piece of omega tech (various guns and doodads from an ancient civilization – ours). Some of these have ongoing properties; most have powers that can be activated.
  • Once you’ve used the activated power on your card, you tap it (turn it sideways) but it stays in front of you and still counts as “readied” (though you can’t use it again).
  • If you roll a 1, you mutate – your alpha mutation goes away and you draw a new one to replace it.
  • At the end of most battles, you’ll find new omega tech cards.
  • Any omega tech that’s tapped at the end of a battle gets a saving throw. If you fail, it goes away. Otherwise, you get to keep it and it recharges.
  • Also at the end of each battle, everyone mutates – pitch the old alpha mutation and draw a new one.

The constantly changing alpha mutations and omega tech were fun. Players don’t have a whole lot of different options in front of them at any one time (unlike 4e), so having one or two new things per battle is fine. (I see this as different from Fortune Cards, by the way, where they’re in addition to a huge number of existing powers and they change every turn.) The simplified healing was good, too, for keeping things moving.

The game is intentionally not well-balanced. Some origins are stronger than others. The Doppelganger origin showed up in our game, and it was quite powerful – that character survived all the way through. The same goes for the various cards – some of them are super-powerful, and some of them are just funny and do very little. That’s okay – they change quickly.

The origins never change per se, but characters are intended to be much less hardy in Gamma World than in 4e. We had five character deaths in eight encounters in our game (with four players), and whenever a character die we had a new mutant rush in to join the battle – the player would roll up a new character, and off we go. If you’re lucky enough to have an origin with Constitution as its stat, you’re ahead of the game just because you have more hit points. You can end up with a Con score of 3 in Gamma World – not a MODIFIER, but a SCORE. Those characters don’t last too long!

At the end of our eight encounters of mayhem spread over two sessions, we were all pretty happy, but also ready to get back to 4e. I like Gamma World as an occasional way to mix up the gaming, but it’s not really intended to be played with a long, ongoing campaign saga. Combat is fast and a little bit silly, and character death is just an opportunity for a new character to come to the rescue. If you’d enjoy that type of game from time to time, you’d probably like Gamma World.

Add a new player, and the adventure moves on

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As I mentioned in my last post, we recently bade farewell to one of the five players who had been in our online War of the Burning Sky campaign since its inception last summer. The player behind Thorfin the dwarven fighter was moving to a time zone that would make it impossible for him to continue with the group, so we needed to find a new addition.

I advertised the open spot here on the blog and over on EN World (where the group originally started). I quickly had one player express interest from the EN World post. He asked about the campaign and the rest of the party, and he soon created a new human fighter, Dorian, complete with a back story that would fit into the game world. He was the first to respond and therefore would have first crack at joining our group. We had to take the next Friday off as I was traveling for work, but we agreed that Dorian could join up for our game last night.

In the mean time, I was contacted by three other people. One was not a good fit, and the other two are on the “waiting list” effectively.

I’m happy to say, though, that it looks like Dorian the human fighter will work out just fine. We got together yesterday evening for our usual game, with three of the four pre-existing characters plus Dorian. I sent the party on a bit of a side quest, just in case things didn’t work out – I didn’t want things to be too plot-heavy if the character who had joined wouldn’t be there in the future.

We did start with some role-playing. The party was invited to try out for an acting troupe. One was flat-out rejected. One was accepted for a small role. One made it onto the stage crew. And an NPC that had been traveling with the party for a little while won a spot in a lead role (she’ll be leaving the party now).

After the audition, the group was contacted by an NPC who had previously traveled with the party. She had taken up with a half-elf woman who was trying to smooth over religious strife among various groups of refugees by starting a pan-theistic temple. The written adventure lays out a skill challenge to talk to the various religious groups to get them to agree to put aside their differences, and we still may run that (though this is a group of non-religious PCs – no divine characters – so I’m guessing we’ll skip it). However, the adventure doesn’t talk about a physical temple building, so I saw an opportunity for a side quest.

The PCs were asked to rid this forgotten temple of the undead monsters who had taken up refuge there. Straightforward battle premise – destroy the undead. I used a map I found online (I was in a hurry) and populated it with a variety of monsters. One monster I chose was the ghast – a monster the party had fought many levels ago, and I was delighted to see them remember the beast with dread.

Since this would be a two-combat day, I ramped up the challenge level, and I think I hit it just about right. The first fight left one PC unconscious at one point and everybody bloodied. The second was less brutal but more fun (the skeleton lord they fought was surprisingly fun to play).

So, it looks like our table is full once more – huzzah! Now I just have to figure out how to handle the fact that the leader in the party wants to switch to playing a striker…

Meet the Monster Vault solo

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I’m writing this post at the urging of two of the players in my Friday night online game in the War of the Burning Sky campaign. That’s unusual – I’ve never had someone tell me, “I can’t wait to see what you write on your blog about this!” but that’s exactly what happened this evening.

Well, I hate to disappoint my players – and I loved the solo I used from the Monster Vault tonight, so I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Lots of people have written elsewhere that solo monsters from the Monster Vault are vicious and exciting, and I have to say that I agree. My players had a run-in with a slightly modified Young Blue Dragon – a level 6 solo artillery creature. Since my party consisted of four level 8 characters, I nudged the dragon up toward level 7 (raising the defenses and attacks by a point or two, as I saw appropriate). I left its hit points alone, though. Also, since the encounter with the dragon was taking place in a semi-submerged temple, I gave it a swim speed equal to its fly speed.

I also threw two Stormlizards (level 9 brutes) into the mix. The encounter began with the party seeing the Stormlizards coming out of a hole in the temple floor. The dragon was sleeping farther down in the hole, and I intentionally gave it an initiative at the bottom of the first round. The Stormlizards emerged, the PCs set up their strategy and positioning for fighting them…

And then the dragon emerged.

This was the first solo my party has faced, and they’re at level 8 now. I wanted this to be special, and it was. The things that I especially loved about this monster were:

  • It gets an instinctive action at 10 plus its initiative roll, which lets it move its speed and make an area burst 2 attack. If it’s dazed or stunned and can’t make that attack, it instead shakes off the condition.
  • Both its breath weapon and its at-will lightning burst (area burst 2) deal lots of damage on a hit and half damage on a miss. They also target reflex, which was a scary surprise for my AC-heavy defenders.
  • When it becomes bloodied, it becomes scarier. It recharges and uses its breath weapon, and it develops an aura that deals lightning damage to anyone who ends their turn in the aura. Nasty.

The fight would have been easier if the dwarf fighter in the party would have been able to get to the dragon and mark it earlier, but he was stuck dealing with the Stormlizards. This initially left just our warlock and our shaman to face the dragon, and they were quickly bloodied.

I had a few simple terrain features in this encounter as well. I hand-waved the difficult terrain for the waist-deep water in the chamber – I didn’t want everyone moving at half speed throughout the battle. I included an altar that PCs could climb on for an attack bonus. I also had the dragon’s chamber include a magic fountain, which had long since stopped running, that contained two doses of magic water that would fully restore HP and shake off any negative conditions. My PCs used up both doses during the battle (and ironically didn’t get attacked again after that).

This was probably the most challenging fight my party has faced in eight full levels of play, and I think we all enjoyed it. The dragon fought hard – he was out to kill the PCs – but the heroes fought back harder. Winning was in doubt right until the end, and the party definitely considered fleeing. Victory was hard-earned and sweet.

In short, I really like my experiences with Monster Vault solos so far.

Post Script – farewell Thorfin!

This was the last session for the player who runs Thorfin, our dwarf fighter. He’s taking a job on the other side of the world that’s going to make it impossible for his schedule to line up with the rest of the gang for gaming, and we’re all sad to see him go. I tried to send him out in a blaze of glory by killing Thorfin off tonight, but the heroes wouldn’t be denied. Thorfin lives to fight another day, just in case our friend returns in the future.

And on that note, we now have an opening for one more player in our Friday night MapTool game in War of the Burning Sky. We could really use another defender. If you’re interested in joining the game, drop me a line at onlinedungeonmaster@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.

Out of the gaming closet

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I put up a post a few months back that talked about the gaming closet – the fact that I didn’t really talk to my co-workers about my gaming hobby. I felt a little bad being closeted like that, but working in finance in a somewhat senior position, I was worried that being known as a D&D player might hurt my reputation.

I’ve since decided that I’m comfortable with who I am, and I’ve started letting people know that I’m a gamer when it’s appropriate. I first mentioned it to a co-worker who knew that I used to play Magic: The Gathering. He asked if I still played, and I told him that I had moved on to D&D. No bad reaction from him – that’s one good sign.

Next, a co-worker of mine who works in another state was visiting Colorado for work and I invited him over for dinner. He already knew that I liked board games, so I talked about D&D (and we ended up playing Castle Ravenloft). It turns out that he used to be a big D&D player several years ago, and he asked to be included the next time I start up an online game. Cool! The fact that I’m his boss probably means that the DM-player relationship would be too awkward, but still, it’s nice that he was enthusiastic about it.

Now we come to today. I’m excited about my plans to attend GenCon for the first time this summer. I work in Colorado, but my company also has offices in Indianapolis (home of GenCon). I travel for work from time to time, and I asked my boss about maybe making a business trip out of a personal vacation that I wanted to take to Indianapolis in early August (okay, so I haven’t told my boss about my gaming yet). He put me in touch with a co-worker in Indianapolis who could coordinate my business trip.

When I called that guy on the phone and explained that I was trying to schedule some work either before or after my personal trip, he asked about the dates and then what I was in town for. I said that my wife and I were going to a gaming convention, and he said, “You mean GenCon? I’ll be there, too!”

It turns out that he, too, is a gamer, as are some of the people he works with in Indianapolis. He invited me and my wife to join him for a game while we’re in town. How cool is that?

So, to sum up, I’m taking some confident strides out of the gaming closet now, and I’m glad for it. The air smells sweeter out here!

Length of 4e combat – Decision time, not calculation time

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Geek Ken has a post over at This is My Game today talking about an idea for speeding up combat. He suggests doing away with rolling dice for damage and instead having fixed damage for each attack with some variety for crits, near-crits and barely-hits. The variety sounds like fun, but as I commented on that post, I don’t think the time it takes to roll and add up damage adds much to the problem of long combats.

What slows down combat is the time it takes to make decisions.

When I first started my Friday night online campaign in August 2010 with first-level characters, combat seemed to move at a pretty good pace. Lately, I’ve noticed that we’ve had some battles that have taken two hours to finish.

What has changed? The PCs are now eighth level rather than first level, and they have a lot more powers to choose from each turn. They have more interrupts on one another’s turns. They have magic item abilities to think about.

It’s probably also true that I haven’t had quite as much time to prepare for sessions as I did back in August, so maybe I’m fumbling around a little more on the bad guys’ turns. But I think I fumbled around back then, too, because I was a new DM. The time it takes me to run the monsters’ turns now is probably similar to what it was back then.

One of the reasons I’m so confident that it’s about decision-making time rather than mechanical time to roll and add dice is that we use MapTool macros that automatically handle the rolling and adding. When the fighter decides to use Crushing Surge, he clicks one button and the attack roll and damage roll show up for all to see, with the math done. Even if he’s rolling 12 dice for damage, it takes no longer than a single die.

What to do about this? Well, I don’t really know. Suggestions to streamline the math of combat won’t help me, since the computer is handling that part. Could I raise monster damage and lower monster hit points/defenses? That’s a possibility. I can have monsters flee or surrender when the fight is clearly lost (and I do that where appropriate).

In the end, it takes time for players to decide what they want to do on their turn. I have great players, and they pay attention and keep their heads in the game. They just have a lot of options at their disposal, and they enjoy the process of making the best decision on their turn. That’s the fun of a game that’s tactics-heavy, and I don’t want to take that away from the players. But it sure does take a long time!

Fortune cards – Second impressions

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I played in a Living Forgotten Realms game this morning at my friendly local game store. One of the guys who works there (a person I consider a friend) had a stack of the cards for players to look at. He knew that I wasn’t all that excited about the cards, and he was eager to tell me that I was wrong – the cards were AWESOME, in his opinion.

I looked through the stack of about 50 cards (some of which were duplicates, of course). Verdict: I’m still not impressed.

The cards seem to give minor bonuses to attack or defense or have a minor effect on the board. I think that’s the appropriate power level, since they’re pure add-ons to the powers that player characters already have. If they were super-powerful, the game would be warped and the DM would have to increase the challenge level of encounters significantly in order to make things interesting.

However, with these minor bonuses, it just feels like too much extra stuff to keep track of without enough benefit. On your turn, you now have your full array of normal powers PLUS one more card in your hand to keep track of. That card changes every turn (generally speaking, as I understand the rules of Fortune Cards), so you never get to the point that you’re totally familiar with your character’s abilities. Heck, I kept forgetting that my elf hunter ranger had Elven Accuracy this morning, and that power is always there! Fortune Cards would be one more thing that I would be likely to forget about (and then kick myself later).

Overall, I don’t think the cards add anything meaningful to the game. It’s another layer of complication on a game that, in my opinion, has enough complication already, thank you very much. If you want more twists in your game and bonus powers to give out to players, then Fortune Cards might be a great fit for you. For me – not so much. And that’s even ignoring the whole cost and rarity aspects (which bum me out, too).

By the way, Wizards of the Coast has cleared things up a little bit (in my opinion) about what organized play events will require the cards. They’re starting a new series of events in September that sound similar to the competitive Dungeon Delve events that have been held at several conventions. These are really tough adventures that you’re not expected to be able to just win. It’s strongly implied that Fortune Cards will be required for these events.

Some players will probably love this. If you’re a big-time tactical gamer and want to survive the hardest possible encounters with your min-maxed character, this is right up your alley, and building a powerful deck of Fortune Cards will help. That’s not my cup of tea, but I know some players will love it.

Disease – Delirium Fever

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Edit: Thanks to a suggestion from Kingreaper on EN World, I’ve edited the Intermediate State so that hit points can go up to the PC’s surge value rather than being capped at 1.

Two areas where I wish there were more official Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition content are traps and diseases. To help remedy that, I’m sharing a disease that I put together for my home game: Delirium Fever.

Delirium Fever

  • Description: The patient is afflicted with a high fever accompanied by profuse sweating and weakness. As the disease progresses, the patient may fall into unconsciousness with periodic bouts of delirious wakefulness, babbling incoherently. Left untreated, Delirium Fever can be fatal.
  • Level: 6
  • Exposure: Via the venom of giant spiders (either at range via spitting, in melee via a bite, or after a hit from a weapon with spider venom on it)
  • Progression: Saving throw to avoid infection after initial exposure. Endurance DC16 to maintain, Endurance DC 21 to improve.
  • Initial state: The patient is weakened, and their hit points cannot go above their bloodied value (temporary hit points can still be gained as normal).  Improvement from this state represents the disease being cured.
  • Intermediate state: The patient is weakened and slowed, and their hit points cannot go above their healing surge value.
  • Advanced state: The patient is unconscious, with occasional bouts of waking delirium.
  • Final state: The patient dies.

In my game, the party encountered this disease when they ran into some duergar.  The duergar use giant spiders as mounts, and the venom of these spiders exposes the target of the attack to delirium fever (based on a secondary attack against fortitude). The party came upon a mining camp where some NPC dwarves had been attacked underground by duergar. The survivors came down with delirium fever.  The PCs went underground to rescue a dwarf prisoner and to try to get some spider venom in order to craft an antidote to the disease. In the process, one of the PCs ended up contracting the disease after a number of spider bites.

I was pretty happy with the role of the disease in my game, so feel free to use it in yours!

Bonus points – reward your players for awesomeness

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I like it when players in my D&D games do awesome things. Being an economist by training, I know that incentives matter. Therefore, if I want my players to do more awesome things in our games, I should give them an incentive to do so.

Enter Bonus Points.

Whenever a player in one of my games does something that, in my opinion, is awesome, I will give them a bonus point. They can save these points over time or spend them as they get them.

The rules for bonus points are simple (and open to DM reinterpretation on the fly). A player can spend a bonus point at any time (no action required) to add one to a die they’ve just rolled or to subtract one from a die that was just rolled against them.  Common uses of bonus points include:

  • Turning a miss into a hit
  • Turning a 19 on the die into a critical hit
  • Turning a 19 on a death save into the spending of a healing surge
  • Turning a failed skill check into a success
  • Making an attack that just hit you miss instead

If a player wants to do something that would stretch the rules a little too much, I might also allow them to spend a bonus point to make it work.

For my online game, bonus points are just another property on the PC’s token.  Players have a button on their tokens to spend bonus points, and I manually add them as needed.

For my in-person games, I created tokens following NewbieDM’s method (even using his bonus point images) of gluing printed one-inch circles of photo paper onto metal fender washers.

So, what earns a player a bonus point?  Whatever I feel deserves an extra reward.  Some situations in which I’ve given out bonus points include:

  • A party of new players completing a quest (just to make them feel good about their accomplishment and to get some point tokens in their hands)
  • A PC approaching a room full of archers behind arrow slits by teleporting through the slits into their midst, all by his lonesome
  • A PC avoiding the bottleneck of climbing down the narrow stairs into the bandits’ hideout by doing a Dungeoneering check to look for loose floorboards and then hacking a new entrance to the underground lair through the floor of the room above
  • A PC deciding to play Robin Hood when confronted with an NPC who was price-gouging poor refugees, thus derailing the adventure for a while as I put together an impromptu map of the NPC’s home with guards and a treasure chamber (this escapade was worth two bonus points!)
  • A PC surrounded by bad guys telling the wizard in the party to go ahead and shoot the whole area – he’d be fine! – at which point the wizard promptly critted that PC while missing all of the enemies

Basically, whenever my players do something cool that breaks from the standard mold of, “Let’s see, my optimal tactical position is here so that I can use this particular power and try to push the bad guy into a flank…” I want to reward them.  Creative behavior, in or out of combat, makes the game more fun for everybody.

I’ve started doing this in my Living Forgotten Realms games, too, now that the Rewards Cards are gone (and the Fortune Cards aren’t out yet).  It’s a little extra something for creative thinking.  So simple, and yet it really improves the fun at the table.

Bonus points are a house rule I highly recommend.  I know I’m not the first person to use them, but I don’t care – they rock!

Fortune cards – I plan to ignore them

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Since it’s the current big uproar in the D&D community, I thought I would give my two cents’ worth on the Fortune Cards news:

I plan to ignore them.

Yes, Wizards of the Coast seems to be trying to make more money by adding a collectible card game element to Dungeons and Dragons.  I understand why they’re doing it.  It doesn’t sound like much fun to me, so I plan to leave them out of my games.  Players will not be allowed to use them in games that I run.  I only DM right now so I’m not a player in a regular game at the moment, but if I were, I would vote to exclude them (and I’m pretty sure the people I play with would do the same).

I’m a little bummed about the part of the announcement that says, “For some Wizards Play Network programs aimed at experienced players, Fortune Card purchase will be a requirement to participate.”  They say that this will not apply to D&D Encounters (although this page talks extensively about Fortune Cards with Encounters, which confuses me), so I’m left to wonder what they mean.  I know that they required the purchase of Gamma World boosters for the Gamma World Game Day (which I did not participate in); is the plan to require Fortune Cards for future Game Days?  What about Living Forgotten Realms?

I’d be especially bummed if you had to use Fortune Cards to play LFR, especially since it seems that LFR is sort of run by the community now rather than by WotC.  I like LFR, and if I HAVE to buy Fortune Cards in order to play, then I’m not playing.  I’m just not interested in the cards.  Maybe someone will give me a stack of commons that I can put on the table and then not use.

Anyway, for people who don’t care about Organized Play (which is most D&D players, since most of us play home games), you can freely ignore Fortune Cards.  The two they’ve shown so far don’t seem that interesting anyway.

Is this a money-grab by WotC?  Yep.  They’re a business and are trying to maximize profits.  Is it distasteful?  Sure, but I don’t mind ignoring it.  I like D&D 4e without Fortune Cards, and no one can require me to add them to my home games if I don’t like them, so I won’t add them.