Campaigns I'd Like To Run: The Demon Dreams

I've been wanting to participate in the Age of Ravens Blog Carnival for "Campaigns I'd Like To Run," but up to now I've had a hard time coming up with anything. The thing is, for the most part I'm currently running the campaigns I would want to run, between Dust to Dust, Aurikesh, and (every once in a very long while) Over the Edge. This covers high medieval fantasy LARPing (with some dark elements, but not "dark fantasy" as such), late Renaissance fantasy tabletop (some weird elements, but not "weird fantasy" as such), and modern esoteric thriller tabletop. Also, my Mage chronicle is still pretty recent, so that's another modern esoteric fantasy. Of my general preferences, what am I even leaving out?

Aside: Plenty of things, but I don't have specific ideas for most of them. Ahem.

Well, I haven't run anything that went all-in on weird fantasy lately, or ever. The closest I've come to that is the MK ULTRA one-shot I ran as a Christmas special one year. There's also this one game I've mentioned, on and off, wanting to run for about five years now: Noumenon. For pure weirdness, there aren't many games that outrank Noumenon, to my knowledge, though Itras by gives it a run for its money. This crystallized for me today thanks to a phrase written by someone who hated the Georgia Renaissance Festival: Enchanted Demon Festival. What can I say? Inspiration comes from the strangest places. All by itself, Enchanted Demon Festival is an amazing and awesome idea for a Halloween party or one-shot LARP!

I want to combine all of these weird sources of ideas with my substantial supply of Dreamblade minis. I've wanted the minis to do more than gather dust on a shelf for a long time, but as you see from that second link there are some major tonal rifts between Dreamblade and the games I'm running. For what it's worth, I'm also about to have a whole shitload of Reaper Bones minis, and I'd like to make sure I can use those.

The Demon Dreams

System: Heavily hacked 4e - the classes and races are barely relevant, but the structure and dynamics of powers are central. The powers available to each player change pretty often; it's important for the math to stay easy to handle on the fly.

Concept: The players are dreams given life, sapience, and something like stability, thanks to a seismic shift in the landscape of dreams. Now that they have an independent reality, they begin to explore the dream-world around them, where they clash with others like themselves. Once they have gained a certain familiarity with how the world works, a city begins to form within the dream-world, a neutral ground where dreams can meet and trade without (as much) fear of violence. An NPC ruler rises to power among the dreams of the city, and the whole place becomes increasingly like the city of Sigil in the Planescape setting. Still later in the game, creatures of something other than dream enter the dreamlands - fey lords, cosmic entities, angels, and gods.

All PC dreams spring out of the same Sleeper, and the players cooperate to protect and strengthen him or her (typically represented in the form of a shared holding like a castle or tower). Over the course of the campaign, the players learn the bizarre secrets of the dreamlands, including ways to transform themselves into the forms taken by other dreams, changing their outward forms and capabilities so that they can tackle a wide variety of challenges. Ideally, figuring out the system would be interesting in itself. Much of the game revolves around the same kind of surrealist exploration as Noumenon. There should be tons of room of new and weird revelations, such as the nature of the players' Sleeper and the Sleepers that enemy dreams come from.

How Many Classes DO We Need?

We've had the druid, paladin, and ranger in the last couple of playtest packets. These three classes have a greater burden of justifying their own existence than many other classes in the game. They need to differentiate themselves from the classes of which they were offshoots, way back in 2e - otherwise, they should probably be folded back into that parent class or treated as an in-world role that results from some admixture of one or two classes, a Background, and a Specialty.

For example, here are a few ways to build a functional druid, ranger, and paladin, all from the latest packet, with the addition of some kind of multiclassing rules, but without the new classes themselves.

• Druid: Cleric, Stormcaller deity, Guide or Priest background, Ambusher or Survivor specialty.
• Slightly more adventurous: Do a little class-dipping into Rogue for the Scout scheme and access to skill tricks, or Barbarian to represent a totemic-badass kind of deal.
• Ranger: Fighter, Rogue, or Fighter + Rogue multiclass. The great thing about the Rogue multiclass is that this Ranger does get to be the party's traps guy. Barbarian + Rogue is... questionable, but possibly doable. 
• Bounty Hunter, Commoner (Trapper), and Guide are all kind of amazing Background options. 
• Pick a fighting style from the Specialties list - 3.x wants you to take Sharpshooter or Two-Weapon Fighter, while 1e wants you to take Durable.
• Paladin: This one pretty much explains itself. Fighter with the Mystical Healer specialty, or Cleric with the Defender specialty (or really any melee fighting specialty), or a multiclass of the two.
• Noble or Knight are the classic options for Backgrounds, though the paladin from my college game was a bounty hunter by trade. (Poor guy... I was not remotely prepared to support his character concept as much as I should have done.) Soldier is also a great choice.
• Since the Warden and the Blackguard (side note: can we please discuss changing that name to Shadowguard?) are a thing now, the Warden works well with the Guide Background, and the Blackguard works just fine with the Soldier or Knight Backgrounds.
• Bonus: This is obvious by now, but you could also cover the Avenger, one of 4e's most stylish classes (it's like an assassin... with a code of honor that I guess you could call some kind of creed) with a Rogue/Mystical Healer, Cleric/Ambusher, or Cleric/Skirmisher. It makes me miss the Acolyte, an early Theme that granted a smite-like damage bonus. Spy, Guild Thief, and Bounty Hunter are all great choices for backgrounds here.

Experience and Engagement

Earlier today, I read the latest post over at Room 209 Gaming, and it got me thinking. You should absolutely go read the post, but if that's a lot to ask, I'll sum up the parts that grabbed me: experience points are the way you get players to do the thing you want them to do. This is not the least bit new, but this time I got serious about trying to rephrase that into a broader statement. Said effort brought me around to a few thoughts that I want to explore.

I absolutely agree that experience points are intended to be a primary carrot that motivates the players to do whatever the game or the GM "wants" them to spend their energy doing. The past few decades of game design have seen that develop from "amass treasure, and fight monsters on the way" to "just fight some monsters, and maybe get quest XP rewards also" to solely quest XP, rewards for things that uphold or alter your character's nature, rewards for things your character learned about the world, and so on. What I wanted was a summary that inclusively expressed what the designer and GM both want from that model of XP.

Experience points are the carrot for engaging with the game's content.

The different ways and reasons for awarding XP are attempts to do one of two things: either direct the engagement toward channels that interest the person making the decision, or simply quantify that engagement. Directing the engagement is what Ray Watters talks about in the Room 209 post, and most commentary on XP, dwells on: if you reward something, you must want lots of it. I was a little perplexed by Ray's argument that giving out XP for more things creates an environment that is stressful for the players. I would generally think of giving out XP for more things as the GM recognizing more actions as contributing to the game. I guess one could think of XP as getting graded on a test and aiming for an A; that line of thinking makes a lot more sense in published modules, where the module likely hands out additional XP for engaging with optional parts of the module's content, so any content you miss is like points off.

Quantifying the engagement is a goal that people don't talk about as much. The way I run Aurikesh, I need to award numerical XP, because players have multiple characters and don't play every session, so they advance unevenly and I want to track that in a way that is fair to everyone. What basis should I use for awarding XP, given that party members range from first to third level and many sessions involve no combat? As it happens, I use an arbitrary combination of combat XP and story-advancement XP; this sometimes sends mixed messages to the players, because there's not a detailed reason that they get 20 XP more or less than last time. The good thing about almost any kind of system is the resultant transparency and the feedback that XP totals represent.

As a side note, none of this applies in a LARP, except that player XP nominations as used in CI/Ro3 theoretically allow players to reward one another for game-improving behavior. Stands-in-Fire's discussions of other ways we could be handling advancement have their own merits, of course.

For a lot of games - for what D&D presents as its default, basic game - basing all XP on resolving encounters is a pretty logical approach. Given 3-6 moderately- to highly-distractable players and only so many hours to play in, focus is at a premium. To get them to pay attention and minimize distracting table-talk, the game gives them more XP for getting through more encounters. Given how long it takes to resolve a situation through combat versus how long it usually takes to talk your way out of a fight, the "optimal" solution might be to bullshit your way though as many encounters as possible, Miles Vorkosigan-style.

Still, I don't recommend hanging all XP on the number of encounters resolved for more mature, engaged groups. It requires tallying encounters, defining their boundaries and victory conditions, and so on, in a way that becomes intrusive once everyone is comfortable with their characters and goals. Below the cut: the next realization.

A Setting Idea for Divine Magic

So D&D has always had this thing where wizards have to research or seize their spells from others, but clerics automatically get access to all spells of each new spell level. (4e is the exception, since it had a totally different approach to spell levels.) Everything else about the two classes' approach to preparing and casting spells is basically the same, though. I can't help but find this disappointing - there's a huge opportunity to get clerics interested in adventures to gain new spells, but any such additions have to come from outside the published material.

I do kind of get why it's done that way, from a nominally simulationist perspective. D&D's default assumption is that wizards are solitary and competitive, while clerics operate within the structure of organized religion and have obligations (these are great for adventure hooks, so I can't complain) and a support network. That infrastructure has had centuries to codify and duplicate all of the prayer-books, and then provide and teach those prayers to novices. Further, arcane magic is supposed to be arcane, esoteric, and difficult (hence the whole "memorization" thing, because D&D copied every part of Vance's wizards), while divine magic is a prayer, either in the common tongue or in some cognate of Church Latin. Given those thematic assumptions, there isn't a lot of room to make divine magic difficult or hidden. Since questing and research for spells are things I want in the game, this is a post about an alternate theme and explanation for divine magic.

To get to that point, let's talk about the word channeling. Many, many systems of magic describe the spellcaster channeling and shaping energy from elsewhere, including the D&D Next cleric's Channel Divinity powers. The word suggests two things: the image of a river of power (with tributaries, stream beds, and so on), and immediacy. On the latter note, when magic is described as channeled, I expect the spellcaster to make very few decisions beforehand. The caster decides what to cast and the relative power with which to cast it (if that is variable - metamagic is what I have in mind here) at the moment she exercises that power in the world. The decisions are less strategic and more tactical.

The image of the river suggests that the power is more straightforward in its function than subtle, wherever possible. If power is the water, the spellcaster must be the earth of the river itself; something about the spellcaster is the limit to how much power can move from the headwaters (the godhead, in the cleric's presumptive case) to the ocean-that-is-the-world. What happens when the volume of water is greater than the riverbed? A flood, reshaping of the riverbed, and erosion: uncontrolled alteration of the world outside the caster's body and soul. Many channeling systems include overchanneling mechanics, drawing more power than the caster can manage or tolerate, with some kind of detrimental effect.

LARP Design: Combat Encounters

Today I thought I might say a few words about the design of combat encounters in LARPs, and some rules elements to treat with greatest care during rules design so that creating enjoyable encounters in years to come is as easy as possible. Chalk this up to a lot of lessons hard-learned over the years. I'm mostly be discussing the games I've personally played and run, so the terminology and specific examples come from CI/Ro3 rules or NERO Wildlands South. If you're coming from other games and need clarification on these terms, the Comment field is your friend.

In boffer LARPs, it's common to see PCs of widely divergent power levels. The health of the game relies on both challenging the long-term players and making sure the low-powered characters feel that they can contribute, especially in the climactic scenes where everyone should feel fully engaged. Some new players enjoy the fear and drama of huddling behind the powerhouse PCs, and the powerhouse PCs almost certainly enjoy showboating, but let's not kid ourselves, that's a non-solution and a recipe for stagnation.

Not all powerhouse characters are equally combat-focused, either: dedicated scholars, entertainers, and so on often have limited combat capabilities. Such characters are mostly in the same boat as low-powered characters, except that they have consciously chosen to focus their efforts on other aspects of gameplay. (Let's set aside for a moment the complicated issue of boffer LARPing for people with physical limitations - an entirely valid topic, but outside the scope of this post.) Assuming that they didn't make these choices in an uninformed way, it's tempting to say that they should just derive their enjoyment from other parts of the game; for some of them this will be enough. The much superior approach, however, is to look for ways to engage those players in creative and exciting ways, such as giving them an unusual way to interact with the environment of the fight.

The "absolute" case, if you will, of challenging all players equally is an encounter with no rules interaction whatsoever, or one in which PCs cannot use any of their abilities. This might appeal to the new players, and might even be worth trying as a one-off situation, but undermining the usefulness of the abilities players spent all that time earning is mostly a very bad idea. After all, the old-guard players who bought up non-combat abilities still enjoy the full benefit of their powers, since they apply outside the span of that encounter. The general rule here is that if your plan involves invalidating a player's ability, think really, really hard about why you're doing that, make absolutely sure it's the right thing to do in that situation, and try to devise a few alternatives. Your first alternative should always be to make some other power or power set more-than-normally effective instead of shutting the other one down.

The Exception to the Above

Once you really, seriously know what you're doing, in game design as in all pursuits, you can start breaking the rules. The problem is that a lot of people - sometimes including me, and I'm awesome - think they have a situation where an exception to the above is called for, but they haven't thought it through well enough. The right time for an exception is the puzzle encounter, where you want to stop the players from resolving it as a head-on battle. The most common pitfall is failure to sufficiently telegraph what you're doing, both the invalidation of the ability and the alternate path that you want the players to pursue. The frustration of "my abilities don't work" and the tension of "we're getting beaten up" do not combine into "we're having a good time," in my experience. Creating good puzzle encounters deserves a post of its own - maybe I'll get around to writing that one someday.

Aurikesh: Expeditionary Logistics

This week in my Aurikesh campaign, I'll be trying something new. Thus far in the campaign, the players have been based in the city of Chardecum. Some of their adventures have taken them up to a week's journey out of the city, but I expect their next adventure to involve establishing a new base for a month or more in the wilderness while they explore some ruins. This will also be the campaign's first experience with an extended dungeon crawl: the Monastery of the Blessed Scroll.

Actually, let me back up. "Normal" in this campaign is unlike any other tabletop campaign I've run before, and I'm not sure I've explained it in detail. The campaign has nine active players and three emeritus players, and we may be adding two more active players at some point. D&D Next runs quickly and all, but nine players is still more than I generally want to have at the table at once - my ideal party size is still three to six, and that's how many players join in any given session. Since the whole group works for the same mercenary company, though, there's no problem with the party makeup changing - it feels more like "who showed up today?" and less like "okay, every session is the party's first session." D&D Next does a pretty solid job (so far) of supporting party compositions that other editions would generally discourage, which works great for us. This approach to the roster means that we very rarely miss sessions due to player absence.

I've also implemented Upkeep rules. For each week of in-game time that passes, the PCs pay an amount of silver based on the standard of living they prefer to maintain, according to the chart below. As you see, it's heavily reliant on the Hit Dice mechanics we've seen in D&D Next to date.

Weekly Upkeep	Effect
0 sp	-2 hit dice per day of healing available
10 sp	-1 hit dice per day of healing available
50 sp	No modifier
100 sp	Minimum roll on all hit dice for healing is set to 2
250 sp	+1 hit die per day of healing available
500 sp	Minimum roll on all hit dice for healing is set to 3
1000 sp	+2 hit dice per day of healing available
5000 sp	Gain the skill High Society at +1d6, or increase existing bonus by two die sizes
10000 sp	Gain advantage on all saving throws against disease effects
50000 sp	Gain the Backgrounds Noble or Knight if you maintain this status for six months

The majority of the time, the PCs pay 100 sp in weekly upkeep, though we've also see some 50 sp and 250 sp weeks. In the future, I might tweak the numbers and effects on this chart, just to see if it inspires more variation and interest. Of course, the PCs are still not all that flush with cash - I think the richest PC has somewhere around 2500 silver, late in 2nd level or early in 3rd. Thus far they have had exactly one opportunity to buy magic items, taken from a very short list, so I hope they're not all saving their money to buy magic items. (I'm pretty sure they're not.) I realize that this approach to upkeep is not, in itself, the most revolutionary of thoughts, but I feel pretty good about the tenor (if not the precise balance) of the benefits derived from paying the steeper prices.

Feats, Skills, and Class Options

In yesterday's Legends & Lore post, Mearls talks about feats, skills, and class options. The Big Deal of it is that they're making a Big Change to skills and offering a little more explanation of the Big Change to feats. All of this springs out of their fundamental principle that the game has to remain approachable for new players, which is in itself a solid tenet - but I'm not at all sure it's going to hold up as well for the "standard" and "advanced" modes. More importantly to me, the design continues to move away from the initial architecture of class/race/background/specialty that I liked so much.

Feats

So first let's talk about what they're doing with feats, since I didn't post about that last week. Initially, feats weren't part of the game at all - instead, the game had Themes, later called Specialties. At certain levels, they granted powers that were essentially feat-like, but were never repeated from one Specialty to another. Specialties initially represented how your character handles combat; the most compelling options were the really incongruous ones, like pairing up Necromancer with anything other than Wizard (on which note, I can't wait for them to bring feats of a similar theme back into the game). As the packets have gone along, the focus has shifted onto individual feats and the option to purchase them individually.

As Mearls points out in both posts, feats are a major roadblock of choices for new players, and only somewhat less of a roadblock for any player that isn't heavily invested in system mastery. In itself, this is a valid point. The proposed solution is a problem, though: passive bonuses are just better than active abilities. They recognize this, so they're planning to make all feats as powerful and appealing as +1 to an ability score.  Permit me to dissect some of the problems here. Once it's possible for all characters to have a 20 in their attack stat, there's no excuse for not having 20 in that stat. The principles underlying bounded accuracy reinforce this; the current design makes it so hard to garner a +1 bonus to hit (much less the adjustment to damage and all checks and saves for that stat) that other choices just aren't valid. 4e is a clear example of an edition in which having a primary ability score be something other than 18, 19, or 20 at first level just isn't a valid choice over the life of the character.

It's great and all that they're capping ability scores at 20, but when the player culture dictates (and yes, this is really how it comes across with players in the groups I know) that you must cap out your attack stat first, that means that players who start below 20 are just playing as if they never really earned those first several feats. There's also the problem that half of the time when you spend a feat on ability scores, they do nothing because you're turning an even number to an odd number. Talk about unsatisfying - it's a good thing they're pairing up feat slots with other class abilities. (Though from the looks of things so far, this means there will be a lot of dead levels, so that's a very surprising choice.) Mearls's comments about not making ability score feats just be a tax is... theoretically possible, but I think they'll have to work very hard to prove that they can accomplish this. Appropriately, Mearls says that "Feats are now more powerful than they have been in prior iterations of the playtest materials" - so we're going all-in on power creep even before the edition's release? How about just pursuing a different model, but keeping feats at about their current level of power - if not just a touch less?

It would help, though, if he were offering any crumbs of information on how many feats a character might receive over the course of their career. We can probably assume that the current packet's "no feats after 9th level" model is out the window, since they're shifting prestige classes and paragon paths - you know, late-game stuff - into feat progressions. Though I initially disliked that idea, I now see it as giving characters a second Specialty, probably starting somewhere between 6th and 9th levels.

My ideal case, so that I've mentioned it, is for Specialties, Feats, or whatever to give players and DMs more clear hooks for stories. D&D's approach to progression is at odds with requiring particular story developments in order to purchase things, until we get into the training-as-treasure items of 4e. I'd like to see rules support for training as 1-3 "slots" in a character's inventory, into which the character equips skills, feats, or class options earned through play. No matter how well they support gameplay, I'm happier with any system element that clearly and comfortably supports the game's story.