What ROLE-PLAYING have you been doing?

Another 1st edition AD&D session last night. Getting closer to at least knowing who to kill but if our ranger and thief hadn't made their poison saving throw it would have been a TPK situation.

This is the fourth installment of our monthly Dungeon World campaign. I don't typically write up session reports, but this was just so delightful that I couldn't resist. I hope it will also serve as an example of how to introduce cross-genre elements -- in this case, the revisionist western -- into a typical heroic fantasy campaign.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

• Kadius, neutral elven fighter
• Morgana, evil elven wizard
• Taeros, neutral elven druid
• Dahlia, evil human cleric

PLAYER BACKGROUND

(I'll refer to the players using their characters' names, for simplicity):

• Taeros has a little RPG experience -- he comes to the hobby through Skyrim and other CRPGs. He vaguely knew that CRPGs are descended from D&D, and about a year ago decided to buy the books and muddle through learning the game with some coworkers.
• Kadius is also primarily a CRPG player, but without any RPG experience before joining the group.
• Dahlia has some D&D experience, but I don't know the extent. I don't know her super well.
• Morgana has no D&D or CRPG experience to my knowledge, but thought it would be fun to join.

GROUP BACKGROUND

We all know each other from work -- all the players work together at the same office. I work at a different office for the same company. Taeros asked me to run a game for him so he could see how an experienced DM does things. My schedule and other commitments only allow for a once-a-month game, so I picked Dungeon World for the system -- it's rules-light enough that I can wing it easily without worrying about complicated rules or tactical combats with monsters who all have multi-paragraph stat blocks.

We've played one session with the current lineup. When Morgana and Dahlia created their characters, I was a little iffy on them wanting to be evil. I don't normally like games with explicitly evil PCs -- it usually degrades into inter-party infighting and other nonsense that is antithetical to the broader interests of the group.

As part of talking through the characters' relationships, we established that they are all friends who have adventured together, and who are willing to put aside philosophical differences to pursue common goals -- mostly goals involving looting tombs, of course. It's also made easier by the fact that (a) we don't have a paladin in the group, and (b) alignment in Dungeon World is not as central to the game as it is in D&D. In D&D, it's part of the eternal war of the cosmos. In DW, it's a way to get XP.

E.g., for Morgana, as an evil wizard she gets XP if, over the course of a session, she used her magic to instill fear and terror. You can, of course, terrorize goblins (etc.) which is perfectly compatible with even a paladin in the party.

Harder to integrate is Dahlia's background -- she decided that she is an evil cleric of Ba'al, lord of the undead. There's not a lot of room for flexibility on that, but I decided to roll with it and see what happens.

GAME BACKGROUND

We created the setting as a group. It is a typical fantasy world in most respects, although a little less civilized -- only one major city survived the cataclysm of a century ago, and the elven and dwarven kingdoms are insular and withdrawn. We established a mix of problems -- one minor and nearby (a heretical cult), one somewhat troublesome and a ways away (a dragon up in the distant mountains), and one serious and far away (a roiling cloud of some kind that kills everything it passes over; it's currently on the other side of the continent but slowly drifting towards the main city).

As far as my approach, I'm running it very sandboxy. It is not quite by-the-book DW. At the beginning of the session, we do a recap of last time, then I present three rumors/events/etc. they can respond to. One of them will be related to one of the three established problems; the other two will be either organically related to something that happened in the last session, or a rumor of an adventure site to go loot.

The party decides what to do and then we play it out. Due to the breezy nature of DW it's trivial to improvise almost everything. If I need a dungeon map, there's online generators that can create one in seconds. I stock it with whatever makes sense story-wise, without worrying if it's too weak or powerful for the PCs. If it's too weak then they get a gimmee (but not much loot); if it's too powerful then they need to realize this and run, or face the consequences.

The three hooks I gave them last session were:

1. The heretical cult is putting up roadblocks into the city and extracting tolls from everyone.
2. A merchant came back into town, gibbering, frothing, and incoherent. He kept pointing vaguely to the west. In his hand was a ruby the size of a hen's egg.
3. The duke had a sign up at the usual taverns looking to hire stout hands for a special task. Reward: 200 gold.

They chose to go to the palace and offer themselves to the duke for hire. Speaking to the duke's steward, they learn that the village of Eagle's Bluff, a day's march southeast and the main source of food for the city, has stopped sending their normal wagonloads of grain. They accept the job and get a writ, signed and stamped by the Duke, allowing them to act in his name while in the town.

EAGLE'S BLUFF

This is essentially a social noir setup. I used the structure of town creation from Dogs in the Vineyard, where you start with one person making a small (but bad) decision, and then people react to that decision in a gradually escalating cascade of bad decisions. Eventually everything is a mess and it will implode without the intervention of the PCs.

So the situation:

• Hester, the wife of Nephi, a farmer, was cold and unloving to her husband.
• So Nephi started making trips to the house of ill repute up in the city.
• This gave his wife reason to leave him. She shacked up with the mayor's son, who is young, dumb, and loyal.
• With Nephi spending too much free time out of town, and without Hester to pick up the slack, his crops started failing.
• So he turned to worship of Ba'al to reinvigorate his farm. It worked, but the price was that Ba'al reinvigorated them with life force stolen from all the other crops in Eagle's Bluff.
• The other farmers, not knowing why their crops were failing, decided that Nephi's wife was a witch and had cursed the town.

I wanted to add the Ba'al angle to see what Dhalia would do. It is maybe not strictly within the established conception of a god of the undead, but stealing life force is kind of in there.

ENTER THE HEROES

The PCs march into town. They see the failing crops on the way in. They arrive on the village green, with villagers and peasants gawking at them.

The mayor, Jared, comes up and introduces himself. In addition to being the mayor, he also runs the dry goods store. The PCs show him the writ from the Duke, and start asking him and the other townsfolk about the situation. They immediately point out Hester, the "witch," standing at the edge of the crowd.

Interrogating Hester, she denies being a witch and blames the villagers for being superstitious bumpkins. She says she left her husband, but he broke their marriage vows first by fornicating with women of the evening.

In keeping with the DITV aesthetic of revealing towns, there are no secrets and everyone tells the PCs what they want.

• Nephi, the farmer, wants the PCs to support his worship of Ba'al.
• Hester, the "witch," wants the PCs to make her husband knock off his philandering.
• Jared, the mayor, wants the PCs to restore order and bring his son back, to work the dry goods store and be mayor after him, instead of working some hardscrabble homestead with a homewrecker.
• Seth, the mayor's son, wants the PCs to annul Hester's marriage so he can marry her.
• The villagers want their farms to flourish, and they think Hester's death is the best way to accomplish this.

The PCs decide to talk to the mayor. They use the writ to search his store, and his apartments above them. The mayor's wife, Sarah, is open about her distaste for the PCs pawing through her (thoroughly innocent) stuff, but proactively cooperates while knitting furiously and glaring at them.

The PCs think she is super creepy and I had a lot of fun hamming it up. They searched the house and then asked if the store had a basement. It made sense that it had a root cellar, so they went down the stairs (creaky, and ominous, of course). While there, Kadius rolled a "discern realities" (the DW equivalent of search) and was able to ask the GM one question that I had to answer honestly. He asked "what here is not as it seems?" I improvised that one of the bags of potatoes was not just produce -- each potato had a slit cut into it and a gold coin pushed into the middle.

This immediately made the PCs suspicious, but really it was just honest profits from the store -- no banks in town. The mayor and his wife can't convince the party of this, though -- they see it as profiting off the misery of the town. The PCs confiscate their gold "just in case."

The PCs finally call it a night and go to the local tavern, where they hem and haw over whether or not to get separate rooms. They were really freaking themselves out and it was fun to watch.

THE NEXT MORNING....

The PCs decide to go out and confront Nephi. His farm looks great! He is open about his love of the ladies and doesn't much care that his wife left him. The PCs ask about his worship of Ba'al and he happily leads them to a shack out back where he's put up an altar to Ba'al. Dahlia can tell that everything is right and proper, and he appears to be a true co-religionist.

He has no idea why everyone else's farm is floundering, but thinks that maybe if they worship Ba'al too, then they'd have the same success he is enjoying.

The PCs discuss a little more. Dahlia thinks that turning the whole town onto Ba'al worship sounds fantastic, and attempts to convince the other PCs. The non-evil PCs are a little dubious, but the stakes are pretty high, since the city might starve without the grain shipments. So, you know, what's the worst that can happen? They call a big meeting in the village green and announce the plan. The village is willing to try about anything at this point. Dahlia leads them all in a "how to construct your dark altar" instructional session.

Meanwhile, the mayor and his wife become increasingly nervous about their future, given how the PCs have stolen their life's savings, and are casting pretty dark aspersions on their character. They secretly steal away while the village is learning the finer points of properly worshipping the god of the undead.

There's now a leadership vacuum, so the PCs decide that, what with the villagers looking up to Nephi as the guy who led them to the true faith, he'd make a pretty great mayor. They appoint him to the position, and he is pretty pleased with his lot. They also use the Duke's writ to give him the store.

FINALLY....

The PCs walk out of town. They can already see that all the farms of Eagle's Bluff are starting to look lush and verdant, hooray! However -- instead of Ba'al sucking the life from neighboring farms to invigorate one farm, He is now sucking the life out of the entire region to invigorate the small village and its environs.

As the PCs keep hiking back to the city, they notice that the land around the city is looking ... pretty dang sickly. They get into sight of the city itself, and there are now yellow quarantine flags hanging off the ramparts. The guard is not letting anyone in.

---

"That's where we'll end it for today," I say.

The players look stricken and dumbfounded.

"I had no idea evil was so powerful," says one.

---

The great thing is how this all flowed organically. Much like how the village got into its situation by making a bunch of small but compounding bad decisions, the PCs kept making slightly questionable choices that just snowballed into insanity.

It was abetted slightly by the typical player tendency not to protest too much at fellow party member's actions. I am looking forward to seeing if they continue to passively let an evil cleric wreak havoc in the name of her god. I am also curious to see if the evil cleric has limits. How does she feel about turning the one city that survived the cataclysm into a miasma of plague? If her god asks her to do more, will she?

We find out in four weeks.

Wow! That's a session report and no mistake!

Ran a two-part Dread (the Jenga tower horror RPG) session these past weeks. The players were a variety of passengers on a cruise to the Arctic at mid-winter when the nights are long and the light short. Most of the crew and a handful of passengers were cult members looking to sacrifice the rest to an ancient Norse bear-man trapped beneath the ice. To prepare and make willing the sacrifices, they were heavily plied with sex and other pleasures of the flesh. After a few people went missing, the players went straight for murder, killing the captain and seizing the bridge. When the remaining crew sank the ship, the players escaped on a lifeboat.

Kind of fell flat unfortunately. The block-pull mechanic is exciting, but you really have to reorient yourself to what actions demand checks since collapsing the tower generally means you’re dead. Can’t really ask someone to make a check then when searching a room. It didn’t help either that the players made their characters made their characters separate and with no reason to be together while I spent too much time setting the atmosphere before getting to the good stuff.

I’d like to give it another shot, but this was deflating.

Dread is a game I used to love and am now kind of lukewarm about.

The physical symbolism of the tower is fantastic but it presents a lot of pacing issues. The tower needs to get rickety alongside the rising tension of the story, so if you realize that the physical tension has diverged from the story tension, you either need to call for a bunch of bullshit pulls (I.e. pulls for things like searching a room, where the action doesn’t really matter) in order to catch the physical tension up, or allow the players to get away with lots of automatic successes in order to catch the story tension up.

The issues of pacing while preserving meaningful player choice is not unique to Dread. I think it’s a common issue to most horror RPGs.

DarthJoJo wrote: The block-pull mechanic is exciting, but you really have to reorient yourself to what actions demand checks since collapsing the tower generally means you’re dead. Can’t really ask someone to make a check then when searching a room.

I'm only familiar with this game from an episode of the One Shot podcast where they used this system so take my suggestion with several grains of salt, but would it work to use multiple Jenga towers? One of them could be the "lethal" tower that you only use for dangerous skill tests and the other one(s) would be for more routine skill checks.

SebastianBludd wrote:

DarthJoJo wrote: The block-pull mechanic is exciting, but you really have to reorient yourself to what actions demand checks since collapsing the tower generally means you’re dead. Can’t really ask someone to make a check then when searching a room.

I'm only familiar with this game from an episode of the One Shot podcast where they used this system so take my suggestion with several grains of salt, but would it work to use multiple Jenga towers? One of them could be the "lethal" tower that you only use for dangerous skill tests and the other one(s) would be for more routine skill checks.

Probably not, unfortunately. For one, you lose the symbolic immediacy and centrality of the single tower.

Two, what does it mean if the non-lethal tower falls? Something bad, I guess. Do you pull a bunch of times from the lethal tower? But then why not pull from the lethal tower in the first place?

The game has some suggestions for mitigating the lethality of the system. The main one is the “dead man walking” rule. This states that if you pull from the tower, and it falls at a stupid point in the story, then your character doesn’t actually die, but is living on borrowed time and can die due to GM fiat whenever the GM decides it is appropriate. Which is ... fine? But I doubt that dying by GM fiat is much more satisfying than dying by random dexterity fumble.

I’ve been playing some D&D with the There Will Be Games All-Star lineup of Ubarose, Engineer Al, Egg Shen, and Repoman. I’ve been playing the game for 20 years now and this has been some of the best times I’ve had with it.

I’m lazy and I work 40+ hours a week, so I’m running a published adventure. Goodman Games (of Dungeon Crawl Classics fame) has a line of 5E adventures and, in an act of putting their money where their mouths are, has a 2 for $2 offer on them. So I ran one of those. Fairly straight forward, some good variability in outcomes, and a handful of memorable encounters. Most important, it oozes that old-school charm. Without all the swearing we did and the group murdering half of people they were supposed to save, this could have been an episode of the D&D cartoon, and I *LOVE* that kind of stuff. This was my first contact with a Goodman Games product and I am now a full on fan.

Here’s that limited time 2 for $2 deal.

Josh Look wrote: I’m lazy and I work 40+ hours a week, so I’m running a published adventure.

I don't see any problem with a DM running a published adventure. DM is a complex job, potentially requiring someone to be a storyteller, a referee, an improv actor, a writer, an artist, a gambler, an actuary, a cartographer, and an event coordinator. Nobody is going to be good at every aspect of the job, so if there is an efficient way to cut a couple of corners and still entertain the group, I am all in favor of it.

ubarose wrote: I stopped playing D&D when it and the people that played it turned it into more of an tabletop miniatures game than a story telling adventure game.

I've intentionally kept miniatures and mapping out of the picture so that my boys can focus on the Who more than the Where when we game. I really like the personalities to come through, even in combat, and not having little guys on a grid keeps everyone focused on the parts that you describe verbally.


When I moved to Annapolis years ago the group I fell in with ran their adventure on a big sheet of graph paper and minis, and the game became very mechanical. They had a hard time adapting to me, and I had an even harder time adapting to them. We were trying to take different things from the game and often they didn't match. It really became a different game when the minis came out, I think as much to generate revenue as anything else. Certainly doesn't enhance the RP part of RPG.

I'm starting back up for the Summer with my boys, with two potential adventures on the list. I paid a bundle of money as they're hardback books, but one of them carries characters through 11th level and has about 8 modules in it. A nice back story too. Storm King's Thunder. Looks like a good one. I need my wife to go away for a weekend so we can get a good start on it.

Different kinds of role-playing games work better for different kinds of play style. I will give two extremely different examples to illustrate the differences:

1. GURPS Fantasy. GURPS is notorious for a being a crunchy system. Players get points (usually 100) to purchase skills and attributes, and they can get some additional points to spend if they take disadvantages, like a low attribute or two, mental illness, physical handicaps, etc. Combat is very tactical, and requires hex maps and minis/cardboard standees/tokens. Critical hits, critical misses, and hit locations combined to make combat dangerous to player characters. The fantasy setting had the usual Tolkien races, plus imported human cultures and religions (Christianity, Islam, and the Greco-Roman Pantheon), and magic. Most of my players loved GURPS because they could really customize their characters and the combats were exciting. However, adventures often went awry in social situations, because players usually took mental and social disadvantages instead of physical handicaps or dump stats.

2. Amber diceless. Like in GURPS, players start with points, usually 100. A campaign starts off with players bidding competitively in auctions for their attributes. This establishes which player character is the strongest, toughest, etc, and sets up rivalries between the players. Then players are supposed to come up with detailed back stories that will subsequently justify any skills allegedly possessed by their dimension-hopping immortal characters. There is a big focus on role-playing, and nobody ever uses maps or miniatures. Combat consists of players making a case for relevant advantages in a given fight, and then the gamemaster simply describes the outcome. Maybe round by round, or just a quick summation to keep things moving if the fight is lopsided. Some players can't stand Amber because the system lacks crunch and the GM controls so much of the game. Other players love Amber because it emphasizes role-playing telling an interesting story through collaboration by gamemaster and players.

As a gamemaster, I like a well-written crunchy system like GURPS or D&D 3.5. As a player, I really enjoy a diceless game, if the gamemaster is really good.

Last week I was able to play Edge of the Empire for the first time as a player. We played the introductory campaign and it was awesome. I like the narrative dice and it was fun to be on the other side of the screen. I doubt we will get to play that system much due the GM being in med school, but I hope we do! My favorite moment was when intimidating a junk yard dealer my buddies smuggler/pilot Wookie ripped the dude's ear off ala Ponda Baba. I played a Trader and if we continue I'm gonna switch to a Politco character now that I know how the system works.

I also ran a second Tales from the Loop session. It was the fall season adventure from the rulebook, I figured we'd finish in one night but we didn't. Everyone had a blast (except my wife who was a bit under the weather, she checked out after about an hour which was a bit of a bummer) and we introduced a new player who had never played RPGs before. The group was 3 girls and 2 guys who all play the same gender for their characters and we got into a serious girl vs boys in-character dynamic about choosing what to do and where to go in the adventure and that led to some interesting role-playing. I REALLY like the Tales system for running the kid adventure genre style games, not sure if I would dig it as much in Mutant Year Zero or Coriolis but I'm thinking about picking up the book for the latter. My favorite RPG thing I've ever done is running the group of Preps that act as the bully/rivals for the group. They gave me a lot of character development so I will bolt that on to flesh out the next session, even though they are like 80% done with the mystery.

Also a while ago, maybe about a month or so, my players took two sessions to complete Frozen in Time module in our DCC campaign. I bolted on a lot of time traveling mind control stuff toward the end of the module. The result is that they have befriended a very powerful entity that uses psychic power to time travel and gained the ire of the technological based time travel police force. They took out a time police agent who tried to stop them with stronger versions of the party members from an alternate timeline. The alternates had been recruited by the time cop claiming the actions of the party would cause the timeline of their future selves to not exist. It was great and sets up lots of other shenanigans with time altering stuff in the future if I want to go that way. A friend from NY is going to visit and we will run a one shot adventure with him, then we are going to play Fate's Fell Hand for a few sessions and I'm really excited for it.

Really digging RPGs, and feel like I'm still getting better each time I run or play in a game. Hope the time for these types of sessions continue.

I never had the chance to play it extensively, but I really like GURPS. Purchasing skills and attributes with points is fun and intuitive and the way the game works, with the curve created by the 3D6 and so on is actually quite elegant. Always wanted to try it more, even though I'm increasingly about pre-made stuff and loose roleplaying.

It also has one big flaw: It's English-only.

Erik Twice wrote: It also has one big flaw: It's English-only.

www.sjgames.com/gurps/foreign.html