Today, in Petals and Thorns, the party returns to fight with the spiders and clear the nest, and find a ranger and a vampire arguing with one another they had not anticipated:
In Iron Fang Invasion, the party storms the tower of a wizard with evil tables:
Seeing as how the last thing I posted before going dark for two days was broody and sad, people might be worried about me. No worries, I’m doing perfectly alright, funerals just take up more time than I’d anticipated and I was unable to get any blogging done. I might’ve been able to squeeze out the usual Sunday YouTube posts since the real work of running and recording a game session was done in advance, except that this week’s Iron Fang Invasion requires some editing before posting, so I’m doing that on Monday (should go up just a few hours after this post), I’ll figure out an article for Tuesday, and we’ll be back to Dungeon Born on Wednesday.
I have mentioned at least once over the last few months my grandmother’s failing health, and also mentioned the death of my grandfather last year. Later today (provided this posts on time), I will be pall bearing my grandmother, at which point I will have run out of grandparents to bury. These occasions give me a generally morbid attitude, but I wasn’t close enough to either of them to be grieving too badly. I do get sad about it. I can see elements of both of them in my creative ambitions now. My grandfather’s art was music, specifically the oboe, rather than anything as nerdy as game design, but I like to think I’ve inherited something of his single-minded dedication to that art. He played in several orchestras and taught music at a reasonably prestigious university, and most of his expressed opinions on the world were informed by metaphors to music, in much the same way as mine tend to rely strongly on game theory and other board/video game metaphors.
My grandmother had an undaunted sense of independence. When I was a teenager, she was still in good enough health to visit our house, and survivor of the Great Depression that she was, she hated using more cups than was absolutely necessary, and would hide the first cup she used in the guest room so my mother wouldn’t put it in the dish washer and give her a new one the next meal. She’d wash the cup out, of course, but use the same one all day. As her health declined, she still insisted on doing as much as possible for herself. When I was watching her throughout this year (which happened only occasionally, as there are plenty of others able to help in the area), I’d offer to make every meal for her and she would refuse every one and do it herself, moving at a snail’s pace, but under her own power. I can see some elements of that in my desire to get away from having to answer to a single boss, who can threaten my livelihood whenever the whim strikes them.
I should also add, despite a general attitude of mild melancholy, I’m not that broken up about it, so I’ll mention in advance that an outpouring of sympathy isn’t really necessary. I’m typing up some brooding thoughts on this because yes, it has been on my mind, but also because I’m out of other article ideas (since my grandmother died I have written and published two different articles on how much I like XCOM: Enemy Unknown, so clearly the grief isn’t overwhelming), and the funeral and wake are taking up some of the time I’d normally be spending on brainstorming these things. It certainly didn’t help that I spent most of the afternoon (Thursday, as I’m writing this, not Friday, when it will go live) heading to my grandparents’ old house in response to an evacuation notice which, it turned out, had been sent to me and every other person in the county in error. They didn’t deserve to die, but they lived fifteen years longer than most people get.
Chapter 14
This chapter opens with Dale having developed a Spidey sense from having cold water dumped on him on random mornings by Hans, he of the inconsistent accent. Apparently this has leveled up Dale’s ability to anticipate surprise attacks, and he wakes up early to grab the bucket out of Hans’ hands and toss it on him instead. Immediately afterwards there is a meeting with the chef, who has this weird quirk where he yells at maximum volume on auto-pilot and has to remember to lower his voice. This is apparently because he’s used to talking to soldiers, who I guess have terrible hearing? He also threatens Dale and his group into collecting herbs from him (again, it was a quest they did last time, not that it wound up making a difference much at all).
Now not only was he able to keep up in his heavy plate armor, he had a good handle on the skills and abilities he needed to decidedly defeat the deadly denizens of the dark dungeon.
That alliteration at the end feels like the author has gotten bored with his own story and is throwing in little tricks like this in the prose just to keep himself entertained. I have no idea if that’s actually what happened here, but that’s what it feels like and that’s a problem by itself. The narrator shouldn’t suddenly come to life and have specific speech patterns like this unless it’s first-person or third-person limited and matches the voice of the character, which this doesn’t. This sounds like Cal is still talking, showing off his basic linguistic abilities like an eight year old for Dani, but he doesn’t narrate Dale’s chapters. Having it crop up in chapters where it’s not Cal narrating feels less like those things were meant to be Cal’s narration and more like Cal just so happens to talk pretty much exactly like the author. Which is weird, because while the characters are kind of shallow, Dungeon Born doesn’t have that problem where different characters have near-identical mannerisms, with sometimes the addition of a single agonizingly terrible quirk (not that Dungeon Born is shy about attempting to characterize its supporting cast with agonizing quirks, like the chef who yells for dumb reasons or Hans’ terrible on-again off-again accent, but it’s not actually necessary, characters have noticeably different personalities on their own).
Chapter 13-Dale
Dale is super tired and goes straight to sleep after the dungeon raid. He is then woken up by a guy tossing a bucket of water over his head.
“Good morning sunshine!” A grinning menace, Hans was the group member who had been wielding daggers the day before. He loomed above Dale, holding an empty bucket.
So on top of a bunch of characters not being named at all, some of them are picking up names a full chapter after they’re introduced. Really does feel like the author is just naming people as he goes, not bothering with characters who aren’t important, slapping names onto people who turn out to be more important than anticipated, and not bothering to edit their newly given names into the chapters where they previously appeared.
Hans and Dale talk about the benefits of being in the guild. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, except that we do confirm that a drastically extended lifespan is one of the benefits of a working chi spiral. Dale is shocked to hear this. It is not clear why an ability this useful and this easy to teach isn’t common knowledge. There is both large demand and large supply, but instead of being a huge market that turns a massive profit off of charging everyone and their dog, it’s instead a rare technique apparently not for sale. I’m guessing this is pilfered from xanxia. You wouldn’t expect the really awesome chi techniques to be taught for money. Real life monastic training is regarded with reverence so it usually makes sense for chi wizards with superpowers to have the same perspective on teaching the techniques. Indeed, I’d expect most people who want to buy chi cultivation techniques would be inherently unable to learn them.
These adventurer guys, though? They’re mercenaries, and the techniques they’re teaching are pretty much just basic meditation. Why aren’t they teaching chi cultivation for profit?
I’ve mentioned in a previous article that XCOM: Enemy Unknown’s basic mechanics are, with a few exceptions, easily transferable to the tabletop and would be a significant improvement over D&D mechanics for just about any edition you care to name. Today I’m going to talk about something else tabletop RPGs can learn from XCOM, although this time it’s going to be less of something where you can copy and paste the existing XCOM material in with only minimal changes and more something where a general design philosophy should be learned from, even though the specific implementation cannot reasonably be copied. Today, I’m going to talk about NPCs.
In XC:EU there is a steadily escalating stock of enemy aliens, with new aliens introduced each month. XCOM also gets new funding each month depending on performance so far, and research into alien technology to be replicated and construction of new facilities also takes time (and money, the accumulation of which takes time), so there is a constant arms race between XCOM and the aliens. Here we already see how the direct analogue to D&D breaks down. You could set up a specific campaign whose premise was an XCOM style arms race where the party is under pressure to level or gear up in response to escalating monster threat (I might actually do that sometime), but that’s a specific campaign premise, not something you can generalize to all of D&D.
That said, the way in which aliens become steadily more deadly as time goes on does map to NPCs getting stronger as level goes up. Rather than an arms race where players must level their characters fast enough to keep up with the NPCs, in most D&D games either the NPCs automatically level to match the players or else their levels are static and the players are expected to seek out encounters appropriate to their level.
What can and should be learned from XC:EU’s enemy design is the way the game changes as the power level goes up. As an example, let’s look at a series of three enemies, all from the base game, the sectoid, the muton, and the sectopod. These three enemies are your main bruiser enemy at tiers one, two, and three of the game respectively. You fight sectoids at the very beginning with regular body armor and mundane assault rifles, you fight mutons with carapace armor and laser rifles, and you fight sectopods with titan armor and plasma rifles. Or maybe you fall behind the gear curve and get murdered horribly. What’s important is that, although the sectoid has three health, the muton has eight, and the sectopod has a staggering twenty-five, that is not the beginning and the end of the differences between them.
Chapter 12
<People are on the stairs, Dani. Get ready for an incursion! This is gonna be awe-soome.> I nearly sang, enthusiasm dancing in my mental voice.
Hey, Dani, remember how an adventuring party stomped in here and completely wrecked my shit? Well it’s happening again, but this time, I have rabbits!
It’s entirely unclear what kind of party we’ve got entering the dungeon this time. Seems like we’re probably looking at Fighter-y fellows just on the grounds that only those types of guys appear to have arrived right now, but numbers are unstated and it’s not clear how many of them are properly geared up and how many are using hand-me-down chain or leather armor or whatever.
Taking direct control of the largest [rabbit], I launched my new body at the back of someone’s knee. A direct hit in the tender pressure point, and the man fell. The attacks on the other humans had varying degrees of success, with a few landing decent hits against legs, some bouncing off armor, and one even being knocked away by a shield that moved when the guy wasn’t even looking!
So, yeah, they’re not Monty Python style killer rabbits, they don’t have any special powers or anything. Cal is seriously just taking totally ordinary rabbits and using them to try and bludgeon his opponents. And he seems super stoked that this is gonna be super effective. His thorn-spitting, fang-mawed mushrooms are way more threatening, and to the extent that the rabbits are helpful at all, it’s that they might keep a target busy while a thorn ‘shroom lines up a shot.
Today in the video GM’s guide, we discuss combat encounters, and the actual video part of the video creeps towards being relevant. Not particularly close, mind you, but closer than it was before.
In Iron Fang Invasion, the party scouts out the Hollow Hills in a string of random encounters that Paizo apparently thinks are thrilling. In fairness to them, these encounters might serve a pacing purpose for parties who didn’t turn the cheat codes on and make all encounters trivial.
Chapter 10
Having taken a couple of days to spend nearly all my free time replaying XCOM in its entirety, I’m pretty sure I’m quite finished half-assing my projects, so let’s dive into Dungeon Born with a proper, full-length post.
It had taken a few weeks of hard travel, but the group of mostly C-ranked adventurers had finally reached a city large enough to have a Guild office, an Elven embassy, and a church with a B-ranked priest.
Okay, so we’re following these guys again. Have we seen the last of Dale? Because he didn’t seem like he was done yet, narrative-wise. He ended his introductory chapter all full of ambition, and so far all he’s done with it is write a letter and show these other guys to the dungeon entrance. I like the idea of having Dale as the consistent face of Cal’s opposition, staying the same while the adventuring parties are usually or always new characters after the last ones die or flee. Since the whole point of a dungeon heart story is that you’re seeing it from the dungeon’s perspective instead of the adventurers’, you might expect that this makes the adventurers the antagonists, and it’d be cool if it turned out that no, the dungeon side equivalent to an adventurer is actually a minion, and it’s the quest givers who are the dungeon’s true antagonist.
Maybe we’ll hop back to Dale and get that dynamic going at some point.
Continue reading “Dungeon Born: Foreshadowing of Five Armies”
New editions for D&D and things that wish they were D&D continue to come out at a steady pace. 5e is a few years old, and now Pathfinder is gearing up for a second edition. One thing that frequently gets changed between editions is some tinkering with the combat system. Hit charts gave way to THAC0 gave way to BAB, saves went from five to three to six, HP is constantly inflating, and so on.
And it’s weird to me that none of the more recent edition changes have drawn any inspiration from XCOM: Enemy Unknown, because those guys nailed it. Obviously you can’t just do a wholesale conversion because there’s a lot of guns and cover and so on in XC:EU, but the basics are really strong.
Continue reading “Turn-Based Squad Combat: XCOM Did It Right”
Chamomile Has A Blog 