Ravenous Role Playing

Sorry folks. No time this week for a Friday Five. I’m pretty sure you’ll survive.

7 Tips For Running an All-Zombie Campaign

With Halloween coming up all sorts of nasties will be walking our streets (for one night, as least,) and among them will be zombies. How about folks get together to play an all-zombie campaign? Sounds like a blast for a one-nighter or a short-term game. Heck, if done right, it would even work for a longer stretch. Need some tips on how to do this? How about seven of them?

The Old One-Armed Man’s Monster Guide

This pictoral guide is a fantastic representation of what people should (and, more importantly, should not) go up against when considering the whole fight or flight question. Well done!

Law, Disorder, and Player Characters

This is a fantastic post because it bring some seriously need realism into the world of magic. It’s a rather lengthy post, but it’s well worth the time you’ll spend reading it!

Character Concepts: The old hero…

This is a great idea! I just might give a concept similar to this one a swing for my next character. I’ve played the young, the forever young (magical curse, not glittery vampirism,) the “fresh recruit” and more things along those lines, but never the old geezer that’s past his prime and yearning to regain it.

DF: Stuff I learned from my PCs

This is a wonderful example of allowing the players at the table to form the world around them within the bounds the GM is willing to allow. I love seeing stories like this about actions and activities around the gaming table. It makes me proud to be a role player when I see this type of cooperation.

How to Remember Time in the Dungeon=

I love the idea of using scenes to track time in a dungeon since time is so nebulous anyway. This allows for easy tracking of time, resource consumption (torches, oil, etc.), and even spell durations for those long-lasting spells. For more details, check the link out!

1st Level Magic-Users Suck?

Yes. First level mages suck. So do first level fighters, first level thieves, first level clerics, etc. They all suck. They’re supposed to… unless you’re playing DYD 4e, then no one sucks ever. This is part of the charm of previous editions of (A)D&D. At low levels you have to think, charm, cajole and use your wiles to get through tough spots. Just charging ahead and slaughtering everything and everyone really isn’t an option. By the time the characters get to higher levels and can actually pull off the “attack everything” tactic, they’re in the habit of not doing so. That makes for more role playing and less roll playing.

More Thoughts on Magic Items!

I love the two basic premises of this blog post: Magic items are special are not needed for game balance. This is how I’ve designed magic items in my RPG. As a matter of fact, a single character can own a single item (armor, sword, shield, bag, whatever) and it can be blessed by the Whispers (controllers/creators/progenitors of magic) through heroic use of an item to become magical.

Mark of Station. (Blog Carnival: Loot as Part of the Plot)

Loving this idea. Magic items (and even non-magic items) can be a mark of station. Finding said items can mark a player as a powerful person, a traitor, a savior or so much more. For specific examples clicky the linky.

Use Teamwork, Aid Another

This is a pet peeve of mine. No, not the use of aid another. The lack of use of aid another. Most parties think that “helping” each other is to take everyone with a skill (say, Spellcraft in Pathfinder which is used along with the Detect Magic spell to identify items) and have each person roll an independent roll. Then the highest number is announced to the GM and he’s kind of backed in the corner to use that. That’s not really how it’s supposed to work. The person with the best total bonus in a skill should roll a d20 and add in their skill total. Anyone else with the same skill and/or abilities can roll to aid another to give the primary PC a +2 on their die roll. Multiple people, up to a reasonable limit, can assist. Next time I run a Pathfinder (or similar) game, I’ll be requiring the use of a primary PC’s die roll plus aid another from any supporting characters.

Review: The Ruins of Undermountain

Ruins of Undermountain is one of my favorite box sets of all time and at the top of my list for megadungeons. This is a pretty good review of the box set, but doesn’t quite cover everything about the sandbox. I think it was done on purpose to prevent giving away spoilers. I highly recommend the review, and if it tickles your fancy to go out and buy the box, good luck finding it!

Enabling Player Fun – Changes After Character Creation

I always allow my players three sessions before their characters are “locked in” and considered stable. This allows minor tweaks or wholesale replacement of characters if it’s discovered that the character doesn’t mesh well with the party, game style, story line or campaign setting. After this third session, I rarely allow replacement of skills/feats/powers/spells/whatevers unless a new book comes out that allows for logical changes within the character. If a player ends up being totally dissatisfied with their character, I will allow them to retire the character and replace it with something more along the lines of what they want, but there is usually an XP, power level, character point or some other cost to it.

Waiting for the New Character: How Long is too Long?

I’m in this boat right now! I’m the player in our Pathfinder game with a dead character and no immediate way to bring him back to life. Our druid can reincarnate me “tomorrow” but there are two issues. We’re in the middle of raiding the ogre fortress and this could take several sessions to resolve. We also don’t have the 1,000 GP of essential oils necessary for the reincarnation ritual. Not sure of the GM is going to be nice enough to allow us to find such a thing as part of our loot or not. While I love my character, it was may fault for squaring off against two ogres and an ogre barbarian. It was the dice’s fault, too since a critical roll was done by the ogre barbarian. We rolled on our homebrewed critical hit chart the resulted in my instant death. *sigh* As a player and fellow GM, I can see bringing me back into the game sooner rather than later, but as someone who’s a realist, I hope that the GM “allows” me to stay dead for a reasonable period of time… at least until the druid in the group can acquire the required material components.

Testing Balanced Dice Power

Ahh… The math geek in me reveled over this post. It’s a fantastic breakdown of testing dice, the math behind things, some Java (ugh) code and all sorts of goodies that get my juices flowing. I loved this post and had to share it!

how my players rewrote my pantheon without me doing anything

This is a great example of player-created content within a GM’s world and how the GM rolled with it. There is no better gaming than collusion between everyone at the table to come up with something wonderful like this. I love it, too!

In order to satiate your hunger for comments and cool links, I’m back on track this week to provide an actual Friday Five. As an apology for the past few weeks, I’ve tossed in three more links that I just couldn’t go without calling out and linking to.

Enjoy!

Annotating Every 1st Edition D&D Adventure

This is a great list of every 1st Edition adventure ever made. I love it. If you bookmark the page and come back to it (or just follow metaDM’s RSS feeds) you’ll find that he updates the page with links to pages where he goes into great detail about each adventure in the list. It’s really cool stuff for anyone interested in adventures from the “good old days.”

The Fantastic Through Obscurity

I’m a security expert (a fance certification and a masters degree in the area, plus I work in the field) so the phrase, “security through obscurity” caught my eye. This style of security is never a good thing, because nothing on a network or the Internet stays obscure for very long. I love the idea of “fantastic through obscurity” though because it allows the GM more free reign to come up with whatever he pleases. This, of course, requires a high quality GM with a great imagination in order to do this kind of thing. Like most people, I tend to avoid the mediocre GMs, so I love it when my GM comes up with a bigger, better or more bad-ass way of “creating” a magic item or artifact and dropping it on the party for them to figure out how to use and apply to their situations.

Piledriver: The Most Popular Game Ever Played

When I first read this title, I thought, “But I’ve never even heard of it! How could it be the most popular game ever played?” After reading the article, I’m now fully aware that I’ve played this game damn near every session of every game that I’ve ever played. I’m sure you have to. Oh, wait? Not sure what the game is? Follow the link!

Traps: Challenge the Players and the Characters

One of the best traps that I ever encountered at the gaming table was at a conference back in summer of 1991. The GM tossed out a 2D Tetris-style puzzle, and we had to fit it together. Between the six players at the table, we were all either spatially challenged or exhausted (it was near the end of the conference) and we just couldn’t get the puzzle to go together properly. However, for each of the squares that we put in place to cover the baseboard of the puzzle, a square hole in the prismatic wall in front of us vanished to allow us to pass… kind of. Since we didn’t complete the puzzle, we had parts of the prismatic wall intact in front of us and had to roll dice (dex checks, if I recall) to get past the wall without touching the light. If we failed, then we rolled on a chart (per prismatic spray) to see what color of light we touched and suffered the ill effects. It was a great moment in gaming for me. I highly recommend this style of approach for traps for all GMs. Make the players think their way through it, and make the characters roll their way past the rest.

No rules lookups in play

I love this concept as a way to speed things up. I really need to do this more and more often. Of course, I’ve said this plenty of times and still haven’t managed to make it a hardcore rule of mine. Maybe if I announced it at the start of each session it would remind everyone (including me) to not touch the rule books during the play of the game.

OSH Original Template Motives

This is a great list of motives for all sorts of characters out there. I highly recommend taking a gander at this (even if you’re solely a GM) because of the great ideas that can be culled from the list.

Monster Blood!

Wow. What to say about this one. I’ve skimmed this article three times and read it through once, and I’m still trying to absorb everything it says. If you follow the link (why wouldn’t you,) I highly recommend that you read the whole thing. Yes, it’s a long article, but don’t pull a “TL;DR” on this one. It’s worth your time!

Top 10 Tricks to Make your Villain Stand Out

I love long, in-depth articles that make me think. This isn’t one of those hefty tomes of a blog post, though. It’s a quick in-n-out kind of read that really highlights what a Bad Guy should be if he’s going to be a memorable person in your game. PS: If you’re a fiction writer (like me) then this isn’t a half bad list of things to apply to your “Shadow” character or Major Villain.

The Most Dangerous Site in Gaming

I’ve been using the PRD for a while for our games, and I haven’t a clue why I haven’t linked to it before…. Ah well, I’m linking to the blog post that tells all about it. If you’re a Pathfinder player or GM, you really need to check out the Pathfinder Reference Document.

Old School Module Name Generator

I love this post because of the name generator tables that are included. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s elegant in its simplicity. Go check it out!

Why Are We Doing This?

Why do we role play? For me, it’s to get a sense of the fantastic, to accomplish things that I never can in real life, to escape my real life for a few hours a week, to hang out with friends and to enjoy myself. It’s that last one that is most important to me. I’m not sure why it’s at the end of the list as if it’s an afterthought. There are so many reasons for gaming. What’s yours?

Redesigning an Adventure

Having a party raid, fail, return and raid a single location again is a rare occurrence, but it does happen. How do GMs have their NPCs react to this kind of thing? Well, it all depends on the situation as to what a GM should do. For a breakdown of what a GM did do, check out the post. It’s a good one.

Say What? – Languages in D&D

Languages are always key for me in my role playing. It doesn’t matter if I’m a player or a GM. I always bring languages into the core of the adventure. When I first started running games for my current group, they weren’t expecting it, so I allowed them to retcon their characters a bit to add in some languages that they didn’t think they would need. Now, they know that choosing those “free starter” languages and taking a few extra on top are vital to their smooth success in an adventure.

Sorry folks. No Friday Five today. I’ve barely had time to keep up with the blogosphere this week beyond skimming about half of the articles in my RSS feed. Work has been kicking me in the head today. The only reason I have time to post this right now is that I’m between calls with network engineers. Hopefully next week there won’t be as many issues and I can do more than skim.

Have a good weekend!

Sorry folks. No time for commentary this week. The in-laws are in town, and I’m eyeball deep in dealing with them. Don’t get me wrong. I love ‘em to death, but they always make a ton of plans for us when they’re in town. I’m off to get to bed early in preparation for the long day tomorrow.

Magic Items Belong to Somebody
Dungeon Doodles & a CrossHatching Tutorial
Ask The GMs: How to Deal with Players Who Disagree with Game Calls
time as a pc resource
Campus Maps are Solid Gold

The Light Fantastic … and Eight Other Fantasy Esthetics

The main reason I’m linking to this page is for the matrix near the bottom of the post, but the rest of the post is a great one to read. I love the matrix. I’m not sure I 100% agree with the placement of every item on the chart, but it’s a great start and a good way to judge RPGs in general to find what you want to play.

Campaigns Set in One Location

When I first read this title, I thought, “I’ve done that!” Once I got deeper into the post, I realized that I’ve had story arcs that follow this concept, but not entire campaigns. This is an intriguing idea to say the least. I’m not sure I have the chops to pull it off or the right group at the moment to survive a long-term campaign that is set in a single location. Even if you don’t attempt to do something like this, it’s still a good read for getting ideas for how to make a single location much more interactive in the long run.

Mythic Monday: The Vampire

I couldn’t agree more with Beedo on this post. Vampires should be dark, scary, downright horrifying in fact and something of nightmares. This is true of all undead, but especially so of those that have free will behind them. Vampires have haunted our nights for far too long for them to be demeaned and brought down to a “sparkling” level that they are today. Having a creature tear into your friend’s neck and release the life blood contained within them should rank high enough on the Scary Meter to make you shit your pants right away. No saving throw. Period.

World Building Part III: History, Mythology and Stocking Dungeons

Stocking dungeons is so hard these days. When I was a kid, you could throw in a random monster from the manual and your friends got all excited to fight the hippogriff in a 20×20 room that was nine levels underground. Why? Because they hadn’t seen one actually used, so it was exciting! Well, we’ve all seen (or read) every monster there is in the book and things need to be logically placed within the dungeon. Borrowing from mythology can help guide you through this process. I could go on for a while on this topic, but I’ll leave it to the link to do the rest of the talking. Go check it out.

Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work

I love and hate PC dossiers. My reasons for hating them is that when I see a blank on a sheet of paper, I feel the need to fill it out. Even when the character has never been played. This adds an extra burden on me during character creation. I also love PC dossiers because it gives me a place to record events that happen to a character as they happen. I guess I need to do a mix-and-match approach of storing character information. Start with a character sheet and when the game play starts, shift to a dossier. Either way, if you’re looking to create your own character portfolio, I’d suggest checking the link and seeing what information Mike suggests you track. It’s good stuff. Trust me.

Ok. So maybe I can’t count, but I have six links for you today. They were all so awesome, that I couldn’t help but include all of them.

Unlike past weeks, I actually have time and energy to comment on each one. Yay!

Here goes….

Fantasy Cuisine – Get It While It’s Haute

This is a fantastic post with tons of information and charts about eating and possible dishes to have during fantasy-style times. If anyone wants to spice up (pardon the pun) their environments by surrounding the players with top-notch food, this is a link to bookmark!

The Cyberpunk Sandbox

The title of this article is what first caught my eye because I thought to myself, “Is there any other way to run Cyberpunk?” When I’ve run CP2020 in the past (and I used to run it quite a bit,) it was always a sandbox game within the limits of the city (usually Night City or a modified version of my hometown.) Because of the rapid transit possibilities, a GM really can’t push the PCs from hex to the next in any orderly fashion. I would just allow my players to run amok to their heart’s extent, and see where things went. There were a few times that I tried to follow a pre-planned storyline with CP2020, but it never did turn out too well. I’ve learned my lesson from those games and will now only do sandbox-style games for that system.

World Building Part II: Communities and Politics

Cities and nations are made up of more than just locations and NPCs. There are many interlaced relationships going on that mold the world and environments into what they are. This post is full of great information and awesome links to books and other web sites about how to go about doing this in your world or nation or city or whatever. It also applies to more than just fantasy games. All of this advice can be well applied in many different genres.

Quick and Dirty Location Template

I just said that the world you’re running is made up of more than locations and NPCs. While this is true, the locations that you decide to drop into your world need to have some detail and importance to the PCs. Otherwise, it’ll feel like you’re just showing off your creative muscles for no good effect in the game. This template is a great one for detailing pretty much any kind of location that you can imagine dropping into your game.

Listen To Your Players When They Aren’t Talking

I’ve had many a new player join my games in the past and I always get to know them as a player, so I can try to customize how I run the game to help fit their desires. Even after doing this, I sometimes become complacent and start running a game that I want to play instead of ones that my players want to be in. The best way for me (and other GMs) to avoid this is to listen to them. Not just their voices, but their inflections when they speak, their body language, how excited they are to be involved in the game and many more things. Go check out Callin’s post for more details.

Learning The Game

There are many approaches to learning a new game, but this one post seems to incorporate all of them. The key piece of advice that I can echo here that is mentioned near the bottom of the post is to create your own GM screen. Don’t just scan charts from the book and tape them to a card stock screen. Actually type out (or write out) the charts from the book that you feel are important. Dropping things into an Excel spreadsheet, adding borders and printing it out is immensely helpful. It really helps you focus down on what you think is important and by typing/writing the charts out yourself, you’re more likely to remember what the chart is all about. Don’t forget to include page numbers for reference when putting a chart on a GM screen!