An Ugly Stick

Creating monsters,

2011-03-02T13:22:00.000-08:00

There are hosts of websites out there talking about how to create great monsters and what their philosphy on how to do it is. I think I'm going to skip all that and just go straight to an example of mine. This is one part of solos monster's powers who will be hunting the party down.
Minor Actions
R Soul Quarry • At-Will

Effect: Range 10 (Targets 1 living mortal creature in range.); The Crature is marked until the end of the monster's next turn. While marked the Soul Reaver does +2 damage when he hits his quarry.

R Power Word: Cripple • At-Will
Requirements: Must not have used Soul Quarry this round.
Attack: Range 10 (Targets 1 Marked enemy in range); +17 vs. Will
Hit: The target is weakend, slowed and only recieves 1/2 healing from healing effects(save ends all).

So this what I like to call powers that trigger off each other. Not a very flashy name, but you get the idea. I have my people working on that name. Basically, what this allows is really powerful abilities to be used by the monster while still retaining a semblance of fairness for the player. In this example the first ability marks the creature, but because this guy is a solo he also quarries his target, but not an over powerful quarry. The second ability has to target that same character in order for it to work. When it hits the marked target it's like both powers full stregth come to fruition. It will literally cripple the target until they save.

Now this is a blatent example of one power triggering off of another but what I'm not showing you here is that this solo has another ability that triggers off this which really makes things scary for the character. The monster can summon som minions that have an aura which gives a -2 penalty to saving throws for any enemy in the aura. Which just means that crippling power will be harder to remove.

This is how I like to create monsters. I make their powers play off each other. I make their powers play off other monster's powers. And why not? The players create their character to do just the same thing. We DM's need to take a page from their book.

I think my next blog will be about creating powers that go outside the normal limits of what the monster manual uses.
Here is a teaser: Death Checks!

New Design, New ideas, Fresh start.

2011-02-28T12:03:00.000-08:00

I'm going to kick start this blog again. My goal, 1 blog a week. What day of the week this will come will depend on my time. If I can post this durring work, my most productive time of the week, I think I can really get this thing going. (I know I'm unproductive at the work I should be doing, yet being productive at something in which I shouldn't be doing. Says alot about me.)

I've talked about game theory before and I may go back to that some time, but for now I'm just going to post some awesome encounters for 4th ed D&D. Since I'm been running and playing that mostly, thats what I'm going to talk about. If I start playing something else, I'll talk about that instead. Its my blog, I'll do what I want!

If your unfamiliar with the 4th edition of D&D (I'm talking about dungeons and dragons here) you should definitely check it out. You can start with their brand new spiffy Red box if you would like to try it out before really committing yourself or you can go ahead and get the rules compendium for full experience and game. If you have any questions about it you can leave a comment here and I'll tackle your question to the best of my ability. I may even make another blog about it if its a good question.

On to the topic at hand.

How to create a great encounter

The first thing that a DM should do when creating their encounter is to visualize the encounter. The DM should have an idea of the environment the encounter will be in already, whether its a dungeon or forest, city, town, lair, etc. From there they should also have the party's enemy or opponent in mind. If its a dragon's lair they should be fighting a dragon, if its an orc cave, some orcs, etc. Pretty basic stuff. The environment, though, could also narrow down the selection of type of enemy that the party could fight too. Maybe the orc's have trained an owl bear, or teamed up with an ogre. This is where some of the brainstorming starts.

A DM needs to think about the orc's and why they are there. Have they dug up to the surface from their dwellings from the deeper dark? Or have they captured a mining cave from the locals miners? Once you have figured out why they are there and why the players are in conflict with them the dm needs to figure out the 'what'. Which is one of the fun parts, IMO, of 4th edition DMing.

What is there? You have a general idea of what environment this encounter is taking place and you have an idea of who your party if facing so what else is there to do? Give the players something to interact with or something that will interact with them. Given the orc example, if they are in a cave or a mine, that would be a perfect place to put a rock slide or cave in. Perhaps the players could cause it to come down on the orcs or maybe the orcs planned it out to come down on intruders. Regardless, the DM will want to give the players the opportunity to spot the potential cave in and either thwart it or use it to their own means. This will make the encounter more interesting. It will ass an added element to the encounter besides, kill the orcs. When designing an encounter your goal should be to have 1-3 things that the players can interact with besides just the swords and punching bits.

You of course don't want to go the opposite direction either and create too many things happening. This makes it too hard to keep track of for you the DM and it creates too many choices for the players and probably confusion on what exactly is going on. My recommendation is never have more then 3 interactive bits in one encounter, besides, you don't want to use all your good ideas for encounter anyway. Spread them out among other encounters. Always remember that if your encounter gets too confusing your players aren't going to have as much fun and neither are you. If your stopping to explain that swinging, flaming platform for the third time, its probably too much. Which leads me to my last piece of advice for interactive encounters:

Keep it Simple. Don't make the interactive part of the encounter too hard to figure out or too random. Having random magic circles providing different magical effects is fine, just make sure that the players are able to figure out its trigger after, at most, the 3rd round. Don't make too many triggers either, limit those to just one or two.

Here is one of my examples of a simple interactive encounter bit that I used pretty successfully. Hope you like spiders:

Spider Encounter

The place is dark and mostly dry here. Moving through this area you can start to smell decay and death. (Moving anywhere in this area tips off the spiders they are here unless a Stealth check DC 21 is made). Fitted on one of the decaying bodies is a suit of Chain Mail along with 200 gp. The chain mail is a suit of Briartwine Armor.

Spider webbing

Hazard level 6

Spider webbing makes it difficult to move and creatures may get stuck. A spider webbing will take up an entire square usually from the floor to the ceiling and clinging to any object nearby. (like a wall)

Perception DC: 20 to notice the very fine webbing in low light or DC 12 with a bright light source.

Effect: Area is considered difficult terrain.

Effect: Fire/Acid damage may spread to other adjacent webbed squares on a roll of 5 or 6 (1d6)
Trigger: Whenever a creature moves more then 2 squares in effected terrain on their turn. (not including special movement)
Attack: +11 vs Fort; target is immobilized and suffers -2 penalty to defenses (save ends)

Counter effects:

Any Fire or Acid effects will remove the webbing from the area (or target) but will deal +2d6 points of Fire/Acid damage to any creature in that square.
Athletics check DC 25 to move through an area with out suffering any effects (including the attack).
Acrobatics Check DC 16 to jump over a terrain square.

zombies!

2010-04-25T19:23:00.001-07:00

zombies are fun a zombie dnd game tends to be fun for the 1st combagt but gets old quickly. im going to come up with a fun way to play an entire game with zombies typical of action horror movies.

animated dragon taxidermy

2010-03-19T13:47:00.001-07:00

Here is an idea I used recently in a game. Take any dragon that want and split his attacks up. For each attack, assign hp and defenses equal to the dragons level but as a normal monster insread of a solo. Have each body part represent a body part of the dragon. So you can have 2 claws, a tail, a head and possibly two wings. For the head, I would give it elite defenses including the action point and saving throw bonus. You'll want to give each piece a speed as well. For the head, you can either let it float psychically, or mount it on the wall, like a true taxidermist would.

I'll post the statistics that I used later.

Elite Minions

2010-03-18T13:51:00.001-07:00

omething that I've tested and seemed to have worked out really well is something that I call elite minions. In 4th ed, minions go down after taking 1 hit. They fill the ranks and make up the grunts of any adversary party. The only problem that I have with them is that once the players figure out which monsters are elites, they focus fire using their at-will powers and try and blown them away with their aoe attacks. This is a good stratagy for them, but as a dm, we need to stay a step ahead of the players always!

Here is the mechanic for Elite Minions:
HP: 2, Bloodied: 1; Threshhold: 10

What is threshold, I hear you asking, well it a new key term that I'm introducing where the number it corresponds to is how much damage needs to be done to kill the monster outright. Otherwise, if this damage is not met, the monster becomes bloodied and then the rules of normal minions apply. In essence, Threshold acts as a sort of damage buffer.
The exact number for the threshold can change per monster I think it should be a constant throughout each teir of play. I'm still playing around with the numbers but it should be either. I tested it at level 7 with a Threshold of 15 and it worked very well. Exp-wise I would just double the exp of the minion to bump it up to an Elite Minion.

TO sum up the Elite Minion Mechanics. They have 2 hp. If the first hit does more then the threshold value in damage they die instantly like a normal minion would. If the damage is less then this threshold they only take 1 point of damage and become bloodied, even if the damage comes from a missed attack. From here, they act as normal minions, with missed attacks not dealing any damage to them. Elite Minions cost double the Exp from their normal minion counter part.

As as side rule to this, you could add for flavor that any critical hit automatically kills the Elite Minion even if the damage is less then the threshold.

I'm back!

2010-03-18T12:24:00.001-07:00

I'm going to start writing again more regularly. This time I promise to keep it up. I know I said that before but this time I mean it. For reals! I have a new phone that lets me post using it, so now I don't have an excuse. to prove it, here is my email adress: obcflocal@gmail.com

If i don't post somethng once a week, feel free to shoot me an angry letter demanding that post right away!

Also, I am going to be doing things differently. I still have my musings about rpg theory along with some real life stufff thrown in, but mostly I'm going to use this as a place to post encounters for 4th ed Dungeons and Dragons. There will be stuff that I've used in my games but also just some fun ideas that might or might not work. I'll let you know what I've used and what worked when I have tested it out.

Game Theory Part 2

2008-04-02T09:42:00.000-07:00

Here's some real conversation for your ass

Roles

What is a role in regards to role playing games? What roles do you play? Which roles transcend your character and your group?

Be aware of the roles in your group.

Well, a role describes the type of actions that a character would take in regards to other people in the party. But, it also describes the type of actions that a person takes in regards to a gaming group. Roles divide up the tasks that need to be completed for success. I think roles are something that you should be aware of, but you don't necessarily need to assign. I do think that if you see that someone is always the group organizer or leader, for instance, you should ask them whether or not they enjoy that post and if they would like to try something else. Its natural to lean towards one role to play in character because its a role you normally take outside of the game.

What role do you tend to play?

Besides game roles, there are other ways to help your group that I'll touch on briefly. For instance, ask yourself this: Who normally calls the group to get everyone together? Who normally gets food that everyone likes? Who normally takes notes for the game session or is the map maker? Who normally makes the witty comments? (In my group its everyone...) Who normally gets things back on track to the game?

From Benne and Sheats [1]research, several roles which relate to the completion of the group's task:

Initiator-contributor: Generates new ideas.
Information-seeker: Asks for information about the task.
Opinion-seeker: Asks for the input from the group about its values.
Information-giver: Offers facts or generalization to the group.
Opinion-giver: States his or her beliefs about a group issue.
Elaborator: Explains ideas within the group, offers examples to clarify ideas.
Coordinator: Shows the relationships between ideas.
Orienter: Shifts the direction of the group's discussion.
Evaluator-critic: Measures group's actions against some objective standard.
Energizer: Stimulates the group to a higher level of activity.
Procedural-technician: Performs logistical functions for the group.
Recorder: Keeps a record of group actions.

As you can see these can all easily relate to role playing. Of course you can have one person be in more than one role at at time as well.

That's all for this post. Part three coming up (sorry part two was late, all two of you that read this)

[1]Benne, Kenneth, & Sheats, Paul. (1948). Functional roles of group members. Journal of Social Issues, 4, 41-49

Game Theory Part 1: Character Creation

2008-04-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

OK so, where should I start here?
I promised an article about game theory and I am damn sure I'm going to deliver!
(rereading this article I realized this is pretty narrative and lecturey. So if your bored, I apologies)

I like to dabble in game theory. And by game theory I am of course referring to how role playing games are played. I don't necessarily mean mechanics either.
I guess I should start with character creation as that's where players start right?

Players should create their characters with interesting and unique ideas that pertain to the setting and campaign of the game. I highly suggest, and in fact require now in my games, that players create their characters together when starting a new game. Players should be encouraged to engage in discussion about each others ideas of their characters which would allow cohesion and more immersion in the game. When creating your character's background, you should try to implement something from the setting into your character's history.

When creating your character you should try implementing something called a kicker (taken from the game Sorcerer). A kicker is: "...an event or realization that your character has experienced just before play begins. It catalyzes him or her into action of some sort." I suggest that this experience or realization should be culminated between everyone at the gaming table. Your DM/GM probably already does this, but what I'm suggesting is that you should give the players a shot at it. Let them narrate the start of the game. They should combine their kickers so that the first actions are ones that bring their characters together.

Further, a character should have interesting unresolved points throughout their background that could spark "adventure". (I use the term "adventure" lightly because not all games are about adventure.) These points are called "bangs". Again, defined by Sorcerer originally: "those moments when the characters realize they have a problem right now and have to get moving to deal with it." This realization should come from a conflict of interest for the character. Such as the classic heroic example of: Does the hero save his one and true love or save a multitude of innocent people?

As a DM/GM, you have more control over these bangs on when they arrive in play, but as a player these bangs should be given as options to your DM/GM to enhance the play experience. And as a player, these bangs need to deal with those conflicts so even a no action reaction still has consequences.

Something else to consider when creating a character is setting goals. Character goals are different from game goals (and yes I think games should have goals). A character should have multiple goals. If he/she doesn't have any goals then why is he/she on the adventure? That's boring! If your character is already the most power wizard what is she doing here? A character should have short term and long term goals. A short term goal may be something like saving the local village from ravaging orcs, but his long term goal may be ridding the land of all orcs. But, his long term and short term goals don't have to coincide. In fact it may be even more interesting (and entertaining) to have conflicting goals. Also, a long term goal should have small victories within the goal so that the player and the character can feel as though they are accomplishing their goal. He/She should have many achievable goals, and may be even one non-achievable goal. An unachievable goal maybe something like becoming the highlander; "There can be only one!"(though, that in itself sounds like a really cool game!)

Along with character goals, a player should help create party goals for the group of players (if its a cooperative game). Party goals should be something that everyone buys into, and something that each character would want to do. However, you could have one or more characters have their party goal(s) be conflicting with their own personal goals. "The big bad evil guy is actually the character's father! ::gasp::"

That's all for now folks! I'll come back with Part 2 tomorrow!

For more info and insight on RPG theory, a great podcast that I started listening to about a year ago or so is http://www.sonsofkryos.com/ . They do a about weekly podcast dedicated playing RPGs. Another podcast I came across is http://havegameswilltravel.libsyn.com/ . This a one man show where he talks about games in general.
Sorcerer was written by Ron Edwards. http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com/

Steer away from these rocks

2008-03-31T10:40:00.001-07:00

So I'm sitting here at work realizing I'm not going to be here for much longer. Like 4 days. Less than that technicly. Ok, well...I'm not sure how to feel about that. I'm sort of a mixed bag of emotions: excited, scared, contemplative, nervous, closed off, even a little ashamed. Whats that about?

On to some fun stuff.

I'm getting more and more excited about the release of 4th edition D&D and the consaquent start of Steven and my's new campaign. I think we have some great ideas. I must say Steve is the driving force with his ability write so well. He's like the dart board and I the dart thrower. I just throw ideas at him and see where they land.

We ran our actual first game together last Wendesday. A thrown together idea of a Star Wars game, the premise of which Steve came up with and we put together in about an hour. I was more along there for the ride as he knows much more about Star Wars than I do. I like Star Wars, but Steve loves it. The game I thought went pretty well. I ran small section of it, of which I thought was the low part of the game as I didn't ahve any ideas so I merely tested the system and their characters with some endurance rolls under a hot desert sun. I quickly threw it back to Steve and he was able to make the game interesting again. I got to help him with NPC's (which I think I is my strongest assest) and we did some combat towards the end. Finaly I had a good idea at the end playing of Steve's free style play and thats where we stopped. It will be an interesting first few sessions for the 4th ed campaign as we all learn a new system and setting, and play with two DMs instead of one. Intersting indeed.

Only two players showed up, which might have been for the best but for the fact that it actually went well! Funny thing is I actually am looking forward to that game than running Ptolus again.
Ptolus, the bitter sweet setting in which I can do no good. ::sigh::

I think my next blog will be on role playing theory. Invigorating, I know!

Blahg

2008-03-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

Ok back on the horse.

Some news: I have found a new job.
That sounds strange doesn't it? What I mean by that is I have recieved an offer for a new job at a new company and I have accepted the position that they have offered me. I start in a week.

I'm a bit excited becuase, well, its more money. I am a bit nervous because, well, I don't know anyone there.
Other news, I have moved into my friend Sean's place. Hurray! It chill there and we get along fine. I get to use his big screen tv for WoW, which is fantastic, and he gets my free beer. This works out great for both of us.

So, I told myself that I need to write an letter to send via email to all the peeps that I have gotten to know at my current job (remember I start the new one in a week). I keep putting this off and now i have 5 days to do so. Strike that, 4 days. I just don't know what to put in it. I don't want to be unoriginal and say things like "oh Ive had such a good time here, blah, blah blah, I'm going to miss everyone, blah blah blah".

Thats all I've got for now. Its too early for any of this right now. I need sleep, but I'm stuck here at work not answering the phone and not doing work. GAH!

What I got. (not two turn tables and no microphone)

2008-01-10T12:32:00.000-08:00

So I think I want this place to be full of my creative spirit. Not sure what that might be yet, but that is my desire.

Stuff on my table:
Creating a new RPG system with my good friend Jeff.
Creating a board game from the idea that I got from Oathbound, a D&D rpg setting.
Creating a new setting for the 4th ed iteration of D&D with my friend Steve. (very dungeon punk, so Steve says)
Trying to move out of my parents house.
Trying to start a band with a guy named vinnie whom I've never met....this is not going so well.
Continuing my Ptolus campaign.
Eventualy would like to start a podcast.

Thats quite a bit.

The board game is almost in its alpah stage, to where I can start play testing enternaly. I just need a map, or game board, and some game peices really.

The new RPG system, called Prententious (irony at its best) has come to a halt. I think Jeff and I have sort of different visions of where it is to go next.

The 4th ed setting is going pretty good, considering we don't have any rules yet. Though I seem to be putting out more content then my partner has. I believe this is because he has a lot on his plate as well. That or he has become un-inspired. Not quite sure which it is.

The pod cast is simply an dream right now. No hard plans at all. Simply desire.

Ptolus has been start over and needs to be kicked in the pants. Really we just need to play again. 3 weeks since last game now? Thats bad.

I'll shall have to comment on the rest later.

Work, Work.

2008-01-07T13:42:00.000-08:00

So, I am at work. Sitting in my imaginary cubicle. Its is imaginary because there are no actual walls to divide me from the rest of the office world, just my tempral and social walls that I put up when I don't want to be desturbed. Its quite interesting. Almost a scientific study that no one, including myself, is really aware of.
(someone walks by)
Alt tab
"Please repaint the restrooms by...."
Alt tab
I think I only do about 15 min of real work a day here.

Beh, work is undesirable. The actual work anyway.
::ring::
Alt tab
"Hello. How can I help you?"
Alt tab

Wait what was I doing? Tryin this business out of blogging. A sharing of thoughts to the anonimity which is the interweb.

My Birthday is this weekend and I have no plans. I turn 25. Where did my ambition go? I think I lost it somewhere in the middle Jr. High and High School. Its got to be around here some place.
Alt tab
"Can I borrow your key to the closet?"
"Sure! Here. Is there anything your looking for?"
Alt tab
Blog
Alt tab
repeat.