Month: July 2017

Art of Campaigns

We spoke about theme when discussing adventure construction. Now we need to talk about worldbuilding in general. An interactive story is comprised of five things: Plot, setting, characters, mechanics, and theme. While the first four are fairly distinct things, the theme is what ties them all together, so it’s a sort of meta-element. Campaigns are big things and can (and should) have multiple themes, but it’s important that as many elements of plot, setting, character, and mechanics tie into one or more themes as possible. Themes are the gel that make all of it connect to all the rest. A character detached from the themes is like a character detached from the plot or the setting. If they don’t do anything in the story or don’t have an actual presence in the setting, your players have no reason to care.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Introduction to Campaigns and Running Serial Campaigns” →

Terrain

Different terrain types have different effects on units currently inside them. Unless otherwise stated, terrain has no effects on units entering it. The speed cost is to leave the hex, not to enter it, and of course the bonuses to attack and defense apply only to those units currently in the hex.

Aquatic: Impassable without a swim (or fly) speed. Units without a swim speed who end up here anyway will sink and be unable to move (and also usually drown).
Hills: Requires 2 speed to exit, +2 defense in melee.
Forest: Requires 2 speed to exit, +2 defense, -2 attack.
Mountain: Requires 3 speed to exit, +4 defense in melee.
Swamp: Requires 4 speed to exit, +4 defense in melee, -2 attack.
Town: Requires 2 speed to exit, +2 defense.
Underdark: Requires 3 speed to exit, +2 defense at range, +4 defense in melee.

Some terrain features can be added to any hex. These aren’t terrain types (and thus, for example, cannot be selected as a favored terrain for the Terrain Master trait), but provide bonuses to the unit occupying the same hex as them.

Castle: Requires 2 speed to exit, +4 defense.
River: Requires 3 speed to exit for units without a swim (or fly) speed.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Mass Combat Terrain, Traits, and Sample Units” →

Building a Mass Combat

In a mass combat, the party is in command of a large army and opposed by another, similarly large army. The mass combat is played on a hex grid, each unit occupies one hex, and in general the size of a unit is about four hundred soldiers of medium size, or half that for each size larger and half again that for each size smaller. This is a rough estimate. Some indescribably powerful creatures, like ancient red dragons or the mighty Tarrasque, can serve as a unit unto themselves, and some creatures of small or medium size tend to form swarms or hordes of larger than average size.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Mass Combat Rules” →

Building a Wilderness Journey

The Lord of the Rings (and to a lesser extent the Hobbit) is foundational source material for tabletop roleplaying, and its primary quest is getting an evil ring from Bag End to Mount Doom. That’s a campaign, not an individual adventure, and some of the individual adventures in the D&D version of that story are a dungeon crawl – Mines of Moria and Shelob’s Lair for sure, and arguably Osgiliath (if we’re using the movie version) and Cirith Ungol (if we’re using the video game version) – and some of them are possibly mysteries, although those mainly come up in Gandalf and Aragorn’s branches of the story (the intrigues with Grima Wormtongue and Denethor were more like social encounters than full-on mysteries, but if you want Lord of the Rings to be a campaign and not a book, turning these pivotal moments into full-on mystery adventures is a very defensible choice).

There’s several adventures in the Lord of the Rings which are just a microcosm of the greater campaign, though. The adventure of going from the Shire to Bree, and then from Bree to Rivendell, are just about getting through locations. Get through the Old Forest. Get through the Barrow Downs. Get through Midgewater Marsh. Get through the Trollshaws. Most of Frodo and Sam’s journey following the breaking of the Fellowship at Amon Hen are similar: Get through Emin Muil. Get through the Dead Marsh. Get through Ithilien. Get through Gorgoroth.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Wilderness Journeys” →

Building a Mystery

As we mentioned earlier, mysteries make up a much larger portion of adventures than many people realize. Any time players want to find out something they don’t already know, whether that’s solving a crime, uncovering the location of a lost artifact, finding blackmail material on an unhelpful member of the king’s council, or whatever, it’s a mystery.

The Three Clues Method

What most people do realize is that it is very easy to do mysteries very wrong. Just the idea of a mystery adventure conjures up for many an image of the party sitting around for hours trying to figure out what clue they’re missing to solve the puzzle the GM’s put in front of them. A well-designed mystery does not have this problem, and the secret is the rule of three. If you leave three clues in one location, players are probably going to find and correctly interpret at least one of them. If you leave three clues all pointing to the same conclusion, players are probably going to find and correctly interpret at least one of them. This doesn’t mean you should have a set of three clues in one location all pointing to the same, next location, though (unless you want your mystery to be very short, more of an encounter than a complete adventure, in which case it’s fine to have all three clues point to the same conclusion).

Instead, you want to have a starting scene, whether that’s a specific location or a conversation with a specific person or what-have-you. This scene has no clues leading to the ultimate conclusion, but has three clues, each one leading to a different one of three intermediary scenes, which we’ll call scene A, scene B, and scene C. These scenes can be visited in any order and it’s even possible to skip up to two of them, although due to the three clue rule players will typically see all of them (although just because it happens more often than not doesn’t mean that it’s going to happen a lot). The players probably won’t find every one of the three clues in the introductory scene, but they probably will find one of them, and that will give them a lead to follow. If they do happen to find two or all three, so much the better.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Mysteries” →

Variety

Enemy Variety

The second key to good dungeon design is variety. Dungeons are big and players don’t want to fight the same encounter over and over again while clearing them. Even if you have a one-page dungeon that’s just the lair of some orcs, you should still include enough variety to keep things interesting. Use an Eye of Gruumsh and an Orc Warchief as boss encounters in certain rooms, give some orcs longbows instead of greataxes and have them engage at range while their standard orc buddies hold the frontline, give some orcs dire wolf mounts to make them into powerful cavalry, and now you have five different encounters (including the standard “just a bunch of orcs”) without even dipping into room design, traps, making unique monsters, or having multiple factions in the same dungeon.

Room Variety

Room design is an important part of encounter variety, but make sure your monsters are able to use the room’s layout to their advantage. For example, if you have a sneaky orc ranger in one room, you might make it a large natural cavern, but give it a lot of stalagmites for him to sneak off behind to lose the party if they find him. An orc sorcerer with lots of fire magic might fire on players from a ledge above a cramped corridor where they can’t spread out to avoid his AoEs, then retreat into the side-path leading to that ledge if the players turn out to have some serious ranged firepower of their own. Monsters live in a dungeon, so even if they’ve only been here a week or two they probably know the place well enough to have figured out what areas are best suited to their abilities, and will be assigned there (or just gravitate there naturally if they’re too disorganized to have any assigned patrols or guard stations).

You can squeeze more unique encounters out of the same set of monsters by taking advantage of room design. Using just regular orcs and orcs using longbows, you can have a brawl in a mess hall where the ranged orcs use their melee buddies to keep their distance, a room split in half by a chasm where orc archers on one side will attack the players with impunity if they come into the opposite end, but will be forced into melee if players come through the door on the archers’ side of the chasm, and a bridge surrounded by arrow slits that archers use to soften up the party while a mob of orcs rush across to meet them.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Building an Interesting Dungeon” →

Building a Dungeon Crawl

There are three keys to building an effective dungeon crawl: Believability, variety, and non-linearity.

Believability

The first key is believability. Dungeons are sometimes laid out essentially (or even literally) at random, with the first room containing a pack of goblins, the second room containing an ogre, and the third a displacer moose. If the players attack the goblins, the ogre won’t hear and come to investigate. If they kill the goblins, retreat, rest up, and return, the first room will still be full of dead goblins and the ogre will still be waiting around in room two. The dungeon will have no notes for what the ogre and goblins and displacer moose are even doing there. They’re just the dungeon, a bunch of monsters camping on a bunch of treasure for players to kill. This problem is getting more and more rare as published modules and adventure paths are getting more and more popular, and they almost never make the mistake of having a dungeon whose inhabitants don’t even have any reason to be there, but in the interests of being thorough: Your dungeon should have a reason for existing. The monsters should live there for a reason. They should have treasure for a reason. Preferably they should pose some kind of actual threat to the surroundings rather than just being murderhobo targets.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Building a Believable Dungeon” →

Adventure Frameworks

Just like with encounters, having a framework to help guide the construction of an adventure is helpful. There are, however, a much smaller number of types of adventure than you might think. In fact, the overwhelming majority of adventures are one of three types, and one of them isn’t very good.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Continuing to Introduce Adventures” →

Art of Adventures

What is an adventure? An adventure is a series of encounters that all add up to and ultimately resolve some overarching conflict. Every adventure should be significant enough to make a difference to the overall arc of your campaign. No adventure should be so trivial that no matter the outcome the rest of the campaign won’t be affected, and no adventure should have such a massive impact that it obviates the results of one or more earlier adventures. As with all rules, this one has exceptions – maybe you want to spend a few adventures patrolling idyllic forests for petty bandits before that setting is completely obviated mid-arc by an extraplanar invasion and the rest of the campaign is about resisting your new Baatorian overlords – but stray from the general rule at your own risk: Every adventure should make a difference to the rest of the campaign, and no adventure should be so important that the outcome of earlier adventures don’t matter by comparison.

That’s not to say you can’t increase the stakes and scope as time goes on, nor that you can’t threaten everything players have done so far, just that what they’ve done so far should impact the adventure that threatens to end everything. For example, if players spend low levels defending a specific town from a goblin king and the arc ends with the goblin king attacking the town, the town’s ability to defend itself from the goblin king should be informed by the players’ success (or failure) earlier. NPCs they helped should contribute their skills to defense rather than fleeing town, lieutenants of the goblin king they failed to defeat should show up again with additional forces (and not merely replacing similar generic enemies, although replacing defeated lieutenants with significantly weaker enemies is fine if that helps maintain the pace of the climactic adventure), and so on. If one adventure threatens every adventure they’ve had so far, then every adventure they’ve had so far should have some impact on their odds of success.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Introduction to Adventures” →

Running Chase Encounters

There’s three ranges a chase can take place at. A close range chase is probably what you think of as soon as the word “chase” is brought up. The pursuer and the quarry are both within sight of one another. The quarry can attempt some daring feat of Athletics or Acrobatics to try and get away, and the pursuer must either match pace or do better. The quarry gets to set their own DC for the check, because they’re choosing what fence to jump or rooftop to leap from or river to dive into. If the quarry fails their check, they stumble and fail and the pursuer catches them automatically. If the quarry succeeds, then the pursuer must either attempt the same stunt at the same DC or else must attempt an even more spectacular stunt with a DC 5 points higher. If the pursuer fails the check, then regardless of what DC they chose the chase moves to long range. If the pursuer passes the check and picked the same DC as the quarry, the chase continues at short range. If the pursuer passes the check and picked the higher DC, they’ve out-stunted the quarry and caught them. Note that this isn’t an opposed check. If the quarry picks a fairly modest DC 15 but then rolls a natural 20 and gets a total result of 27, the pursuer is still picking between a DC 15 stunt to keep up or a DC 20 stunt to catch the quarry immediately.

In a long range chase, the pursuer catches only occasional glimpses of the quarry as they sprint through tangled underbrush or narrow alleyways. At this stage the quarry must attempt to disappear before the pursuer rounds the corner and catches another glimpse. The quarry can roll either Athletics, Acrobatics, or Stealth, in the former two cases to pour on some extra speed and round a corner before their pursuer catches a glimpse, so that the pursuer has no idea which corner they turned or what way they went, and in the latter case the quarry attempts to hide before the pursuer catches up and sees where they’ve gone. Either way, this is an opposed check, with the pursuer rolling their choice of Athletics or Acrobatics against a quarry’s Athletics or Acrobatics and rolling Perception if the quarry rolled Stealth. If the quarry succeeds, they are out of sight and the chase moves to extreme range. If they fail, the pursuer is gaining ground (either because they’re moving faster or because the quarry stopped to hide and was then spotted) and the chase moves to close range.

In an extreme range chase the pursuer can’t see the quarry at all and is instead following tracks. The pursuer first makes a Survival check to find tracks at all, and must beat the navigation DC for whatever terrain the chase is taking place in. If the quarry likes, they can roll their own Survival check to set the DC, but they must accept the results of their Survival check even if it is worse than the navigation DC of the terrain. If the pursuer succeeds on their Survival check, the quarry sets the DC for an Athletics check, and just like at close range, the chase moves to long range if the quarry fails their Athletics check, and if they succeed, the pursuer can either make an Athletics check against the same DC to maintain pace or raise the DC by 5 to move to long range. If they fail either check, the quarry has escaped completely. If they maintain pace, the pursuer must make another Survival check before making the next Athletics check.

Continue reading “GM’s Guide: Chase and Social Encounters” →