More home game

Recuperating from the cold-type thing I brought on myself.  Sleep and fluid are working their wonders.  Slowly, but steadily.

Baldwin having a contempletative moment

A bit of an update then, on the home game.  At present, we only have the one running.  It's a small party and we've just hit level 4.  This means we're starting to hit the gaming sweet spot - i.e. a lot of the stuff we do works and we can do major kicking if we have to.  That gives us a bit of extra confidence (or foolhardiness) going into situations and as a result we're more relaxed about trying out new things. 

Roger the Feegle, our Pixie skald.  Normally resident on Baldwin's horns for day to day travel.

I've got a vested interest in this campaign (apart from playing in it) because it is the sole creation of my son.  He does not have a particularly high opinion of Wizards of the Coast's adventure output, so he's built his own homebrew, complete with an entire bestiary.  This is fairly normal.

Where it gets interesting is his encounter design.  He tends to use his encounters a pieces of drama.  There is no such thing as an encounter existing in isolation.  Each is a mini-story.  A bit like a well-structured stage fight, we're learning more about our opponents and our own characters every time we run into people.  Encounter, in this context, does not necessarily mean a fight.  Our last session saw no combat at all.

All this makes the campaign feel very organic.  As a fellow GM I know what he's up to and admire it.  As a player I sit back and enjoy, knowing that whatever Baldwin comes up with will feed into the whole story.  Very satisfying.  What we do has consequences.  Unpredictable ones.

The cthonic water sample we decided to bring with us to examine at a later date might have been a mistake, mind you.  Asking about it has already got us turned out of a shop and brought worried looks from the local high priest.  Now we have to find some way to get rid of the stuff.   That and it seems to be alive and trying to escape.

The boy done good.

Who wants to play? (gaming for beginners)

Feeling heroic?

Siegfried having a normal day by Wilhelm von Kaulbach

 Want to tell stories?

Story-telling ape

Need some therapy for the general frustrations of modern life?

There are a lot of reasons people play RPGs but I'm convinced that the most basic is this:  we are story-telling apes.  While everyone encourages children to use their imaginations and play, once we get forced into adulthood, the emphasis changes.  You have to be a responsible person.  Playing gets lost in the mess.  The thing here is that the people we are at the age of 8 when everyone tells us to use our imaginations are still there when we hit adulthood.

That is where drama and gaming come in.  Two subjects very close to my heart.

An RPG* can be set anywhere.  A character can be anything.  Anyone.  There are systems for those who adore number-crunching and systems so loose they consist of two rocks and a piece of paper.  A game can run for a couple of hours or years.  They're all valid and what they have in common is the notion of interactive story-telling.

This requires actual communication between the referee* and the player or players and thus is not the same as a computer RPG.  However hard it tries, no programming can be completely responsive to the suggestions of a group of players.  Another human being can.

An important point to make here is that RPGs are not competitive in the sense that there is a winner or a loser.  It is not players v GM*.  While it is entirely possible for your character to die horribly, such death should be the result of story.  And dice.  Did I mention dice?

You can have skills coming out of your ears.  You can be equipped for all known situations.  You also have to have a little luck.  Chance comes into it.  Dice.  They represent the quirks of fate.  If you try to do something with an outcome that might have unpredictable consequences, you or the GM roll some dice.

Gamer sweets

All that sounds very pompous and optimistic for something that is just plain fun, but they are important things to note.  A lot of GMs tend to forget this in the face of a set of monsters that resolutely refuse to save their own sad-sack-selves by rolling above a 5.  A lot of players tend to forget this when they come up with a wonderful plan that falls flat on its face.

At a practical level, this means that I've somehow managed to talk Suze into letting me GM her through character creation and a solo adventurette.  We're doing this via the ancient mechanism of email until she finds her sea-legs.

So far, I've introduced her to the notion of rolling dice to create a character and offering her a choice of skills and background for this character.  We're working our way through the ruleset for Stars Without Number - which is sci-fi based.  The system is as new to me as it is to her, but I've figured out a lot of game rules before and this one is streamlined and easy to learn.

Today, I'm going to look at her PC (player character, not personal computer) and get her on the road to adventure.  I've no idea what will happen along the way.  Finding out is most of the fun.

*Role Playing Game
*Also known as the GM or DM - short for Game Master or Dungeon Master

As you were

Trapped in the strange limbo of the A-Z challenge, I've nonetheless been doing other stuff this past month.  Even if it doesn't feel like it.

First, a warm welcome to the new followers and friends.  This is where reality hits and you all discover just how tedious and ranty I can be.  To give you fair warning, this blog's title is not merely alliterative.  It is descriptive.  Who'd have thought?

Drama - is my bread and butter, so you get a lot of stuff about rehearsals, casts, costuming, directing, performance and so on.

Dice - gaming is another passion and I currently run four online games using D&D 4e rules.  It also covers my attempts to build an RPG setting.  Mikelmerck.  So dearly loved, so often the bridesmaid.

Damsons - is a kind of catch all phrase for my ongoing attempts to organise my home and garden.  We have a damson tree which fruits heavily and is a kind of emblem for the chaos that ensues when I try to keep things under control.

The next few days are going to be interesting.  At the end of this week, the Malfi cast have their final rehearsals and then perform on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.  Based on recent efforts, the audience will have a treat in part one and a horrible let down in part two, so that needs to change fast.  I am no believer in things being all right on the night.  I prefer solid preparation, but then I'm stodgy like that.  Unsurprisingly perhaps, some of the cast appear to think differently. 

Costuming for Malfi  is on target with the exception of boots.  I need many, many pairs still.  Failing that, we may just have to go with black shoes, but it will be wrong and will grate horribly.

Dream option

Likely reality

First though, I need it to stop raining long enough to mow the blasted lawn.  Unfortunately, I have a special relationship with the weather gods.  If I even think about getting the mower out and finding the extension cable, clouds rush to my aid and prevent my doing anything so energetic.  While this is a great excuse, I'd like to get the grass cut before it becomes impossible to find my way into the house.

K is for Knack

K

The letter K was causing me problems in my mild A-Z planning, but this is where I've ended up.  

Collins English Dictionary offers these definitions:

1. a skilful, ingenious, or resourceful way of doing something

2. a particular talent or aptitude, esp an intuitive one

Knack covers positive and negative, which is always useful in a word.  My knack for baking cake is matched by my knack for rolling bad dice.

I've also found giving NPCs a knack or two an easy way to bring them to life.  A physical description is all very well, but I run out of hair colours and voices long before I run out of interesting knacks.  Meeting up with that strawberry blonde bar wench is fine, but give her a knack for being always in the right place to overhear what she shouldn't and a mean line in home-brewing and you have a story in the making.

Knacks.  I'm a fan.

Study for the Bar at the Folie Bergere by Edward Manet

D is for the Dice on my Desk and Deliveries

D

Yes, I have this set of dice.  No, they are not the ones on my desk.  I couldn't find a picture of those.

Ah, the dice on my desk.  There they sit, cluttered up with telephone cables, old post-it notes, pencils, tippex bottles, dead lighters, security passes, the wooden penguin I use to hold my headphones, the exciting geode I like to keep there, the mini-stapler, the funny putty, the copy of Sims 3 Pets that broke my computer, my ashtray and all the other paraphenalia of a computerised life.

These are my GMing dice.  As distinct from my player dice.  Those live downstairs.  They even have a bag.  Lucky them.  The desk dice just sit there waiting for the many moments throughout a day when I'll need to roll them. 

Unlike a lot of gamers, I'm not particularly anal about people touching my dice.  This is not reciprocal in the home group.  My rolling is so universally horrible as a player that everyone does their utmost to keep their dice away from me in case I infect them.  I do see their point.

Everyone knows that a die has a finite number of high rolls in it.  If someone borrows your die and rolls well with it, that's one good roll gone.  Everyone also knows that bad luck is contagious.  Don't let the person who spends entire sessions rolling single digits touch your treasured dice.  Particularly don't let them near your lucky d20.  Logically it would make more sense to pass your lucky dice to the unlucky player and get them to use up the stock of horrible rolls for you, but nobody seems to do this. 

Not my study.  Nor my desk.  It looks good though and I've always loved this picture.  Vittore Carpaccio painted it on the wall of the Scuole degli Schiavoni in Venice. 

The desk belonged originally to my grandfather and then later my father.  It's heavy, Victorian and much loved.  I love the fact that it has seen my grandfather planning out his assault on the Derby fruit and vegetable market and my father think his way through the early days of cybernetics.  I love that it has now come to me and I use it in ways grandfather would have loved and my father predicted.

On a random, but irate note, today I must wait in for a delivery.  Joy of joys.  I swear some delivery firms just wait around the corner in their vans, telescopic lens trained on the house to watch for the one moment you are in the loo and can't answer the door.  That is when they hurry past, dropping a  "Sorry you were out" note through the letter box.  Then they drive away laughing, leaving you to negotiate the minefield of automated phone system hell.

"Hi!  We're so glad you have to call us about the enormous box we couldn't put through the door.  Just tap in the 13 digit number at the top of the card and we'll be right with you."

Tap in 13 digit number.  Wait for inevitable cheery "I didn't quite catch that, would you like to try again?"


"Great!  I have some options for you.  To select a new time for your delivery, press 1.  To collect your delivery from our depot, press 2.  To get your delivery delivered to another address, press 3.  To have your delivery destroyed by our special services team, press 4 ..."  

And so on.  At no point does the option "speak to an actual person" appear in all this.

I cannot possibly be the only person who finds this sort of thing drives them into a tooth-gnashing rage.  Support group anyone?

The home game

The home game is on the go again, which is a source of happiness.  Much as I love my PbPs, there is still something special about playing face to face.  It's the social aspect and the chat and the cheers and groans and general interactiveness that is so wonderful.  Nothing says D&D like rolling out the map, finding the biscuits and using random bits of tat to represent monsters.  We discovered long ago that anything edible is a bad idea.  "I'm sorry, I think I just ate kobold 7".  "Was the paperclip you or the enemy archer?".

Thanks to UK Games Expo and GenCon, we now have many more minis and paper models around.  In theory at least, it should be easier to identify who is who, but despite some serious attempts at labelling, combat is often held up while we hunt for the bag of orcs we know someone put somewhere safe last week.  After 5 minutes or so, we substitute.  "So, these kobolds are rats and the purple worm is a troll.  Everyone clear on that?"

Due to the various family commitments of the original players, the group is currently down to four (five if work permits) and son and heir is GMing it.  He's very good and the campaign is a lot of fun.  Son writes a lot of his own monsters.  I rather like this.  It adds a big element of uncertainty and makes sense of using knowledge checks.

Our group of four contains the following.  Anandor the eladrin wizard.  He lurks.  He lurks really, really well as he has a high Dex and his favourite tactic is to lean against a wall and pretend it isn't him firing magic missiles at minions.

Brian Flowerbuds the battlemind is our melee specialist.  Also, for some incomprehensible reason, our diplomat.  This makes no sense at all as his player nearly got us all killed by the Thieves Guild when we went on a polite visit and he diplomatically offered to fight them all.

Roger the skald is our healer.  As a pixie, he spends quite a lot of time riding around in backpacks, but when the dice start rolling, he charges into battle screaming warsongs.  It's terrifying.  He is clearly a feegle.

His best friend is the satyr pictured above.  Baldwin is a warlock.  His sole ambition for many years was the acquisition of a wine cellar.  Sadly, he and Roger were captured by agents of Vecna and spent some time not quite themselves.  Since their return, they have a strong interest in finding out exactly what happened to them.  They'd quite like whatever it was to not happen to anyone else either.

Thus are adventuring parties born.

Getting the dice out

Our potential recruits came around today.  There was much joy as piles of dice were pulled out, piled up, test-driven, rejected, re-selected and finally banished to the outer darkness.  The outer darkness in this case being the two daughters who took a huge fancy to the glittering piles and made them into an impromptu jewellery shop.  The dice were hugely popular.

Many minis reappeared as well.  "Oh, this is my one sci-fi mini.  And this needs repainting.  And these I should paint sometime."  A whole lead mountain. 

It was a fun afternoon.  You could see the old memories flooding back as ex-gamer started making fire-ball noises.  Wife and children took it well, but I don't think they're necessarily converts.  Not yet anyway.

We left in in the middle of the final battle with all to play for as attention spans were failing.  So far only the healer has been unconscious - impaled by a gigantic ambulant thorn bush - but the rest of the fey themed party are doing nicely.

The rogue is being a bit more cautious after spending the first two rounds of the introductory encounter neck deep in mud being hugged by a mud slinger.  He punctured it in short order and got out, but he's low on surges now.  Brian Fightbrain was a weak link for wilderness wandering.  He fell into huge nettle patch and got attacked by insects.  The ardent, rogue and fightbrain are (of course) the experienced players. 

For the record they are an eladrin wizard with few social skills, a drow outcast rogue, an elf ranger, and two half-elves - a battlemind and an ardent.  They are an efficent group who diced up the first encounter very neatly and wrapped up two skill challenges with some good teamwork.

We'll see how things go once we mop up the encounter - hopefully in the next week or so.

EDIT:  One final thing - I may not be able to make a fey panther sound like anything other than a very feeble cat, but I have a deft line in mud-slinger gurgling.

Numbers

Numbers are looming over me.

Costumes:
Number of Antigone trousers made and fitted - 6
Number of Antigone trousers to make -  10
Number of Antigone tops made and fitted - 3
Number of Antigone tops to make - 13
Number of Malfi costumes made and fitted - 0
Number of Malfi costumes being made - 5
Number of Malfi costumes that have unassembled parts - 11
Number of Malfi costumes that don't exist at all yet - 15 (Urk.  This is a bad number.)
Number of Faustus costumes that can be made - 8 (I know what the devils will wear)
Number of Faustus costumes unconfirmed - 33 (there are many changes and it is a big cast)

Rehearsals:
Number of rehearsals to Antigone get in - 6
Number of rehearsals to Malfi get in - 12
I'm not even thinking about Faustus in those terms yet.
Number of words learned for Twelfth Night -  0 officially, but about 50% in reality

Gaming:
Number of online games being run - 3
Number of online games played in - 3
Number of live games prepared for - 1
Number of pre-gen PCs for live game printed - 0
Number of Mikelmerck posts achieved in last week - 0

I look at this and realise why I don't like maths.  It keeps telling me things I don't want to know. 

Potential new players

For various reasons, our home gaming group has been depleted lately and our live games are rather in abeyance.  In an interesting twist of fate, I went to husband's work Christmas party and discovered in passing conversation that one of his colleagues used to play D&D.  It was the work of a moment to invite him and his wife to come on a taster adventure.

Sunday is the day. 

The colleague hasn't played at all for years (but has kept his minis).  The wife not at all, but is intrigued.  One of the old guard and my husband will be on the player team to hand-hold and help out, I will run a short adventure for them.  There will be food and hopefully it will be great fun and they'll want to come back.

We will provide pre-gens based on expressed preferences and I'm sleuthing for an entertaining short adventure with lots of variety - preferably involving a dragon. 

The only problem is that I'm terrified of stuffing the whole thing up, making an embarrassing mess of it all and putting them off entirely.  It's stage fright with bells on.

Testing, testing

Band of noble, but morally inferior wood-elves

I am not much of a one for wargaming, mainly because I have the tactical sense of a doughnut, but I do enjoy watching others pushing little lead soldiers around.  That and I paint the occasional mini and it's always nice to see them in use.

This afternoon saw a playtest on our table and very entertaining it was too.  Good and Bad (with a definite capital "B") faced up to each other across some randomly assigned terrain. 

Using trees for camoflague, the good team consisted of the wood-elves pictured above, a small dwarf unit, Donaar K'Baab the dragonborn hero, Friar Ducaine the robust healer and some random halflings teleported in from an alternate dimension. 

On the other team, assorted dark elves, some leftover scaven, a few rats, a selection of blood cultists masquerading as ghouls, Karolina the vampiric bard, Davy Powys the mighty dark elf hero, a giant toad and Madskillz the troll.  They appeared from behind a small hill and around a (possibly) strategic tower.

As it happened, most these units were ranged, so battle joined fairly fast.  Unlike some other minis games I've witnessed it was not only speedy, but pretty lethal. 

The dwarf unit dropped almost at once due to good rolls from the ghoulish cultists, but revenge was taken almost immediately when they were wiped out in turn by the wood elves. 

At the centre of the battlefield, the heroes good and bad accummulated to challenged each other to duels.  Donaar and Karolina both fell and the wood elves were so demoralised that they turned and fled.  Madskillz never even made it into combat, felled by the anachronistic halflings.  "Big, smelly chap at 4 o clock.  Take him down."

Considering the whole combat was bodged together on the fly, it was amazingly well balanced.  The whole thing took about an hour and a half including setting up.  I'm seriously tempted to give it a go.

What was I doing?  Making a costume is the answer to that one.  We have a big table.  The sewing machine behaved impeccably.  Clearly all it needs to keep it happy is a battle raging two feet away.

A new favourite

The bizarrely talented JasonS's blog is a constant source of amusement and inspiration.

The Dungeon Dozen

Brazier of infinite imps?  I think so.

I have a very soft spot for randomised lists and these are wonderful.

The reading pile - more brain mapping

As we settle in for the great family blob, I am looking forward to my reading pile.

By the bed and dotted strategically around the house are the following:

Printed versions of character creation rules for the RPG formerly known as Runequest and Elric of Melnibone.  This in anticipation of a Google+ game intended to enliven the festival.

The Popes - John Julius Norwich and Saints and Sinners by Eamon Duffy

Reader's Digest book of British folklore

High Spirits by Robertson Davis, because what is Christmas without a ghost?

How to be a Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson - because who knows when the bakery urge may strike?

A random selection of Chalet School stories.  I love these.  If anyone knows where I can find a copy of Redheads of the Chalet School - just tell me.

Heroes of Shadow - D&D 4e handbook to update my bard with

As many plays as I can lay hands on, because being prepared is good.

The Lord of the Rings - an annual re-read.

Dracula - another one.

Everything I can find by Diana Wynne Jones and Georgette Heyer.  Never failing delights the both of them.

This list is pure joy.

Words of doom

I'm a shocker at finding plots.  Dialogue I can do.  Plots, not so much.

In the spirit of "what the hell" that overcame me when I signed up for NaNoWriMo, and in the absence of any better ideas, I've gone with an old staple to give myself a plot.  And a genre.  And characters.  Dice.  What else?

Most helpfully, ckutalik over at Hill Cantons has a lovely set of random adventure title generating charts.  I used them once before to create the epic adventurette, Against the Hawk Giant so I've got a certain faith in them. 

Here are the rolls:

1d10=1.

Promising so far.  "Search for the [place chart] of [adjective chart] [being chart]

1d12=8

"Search for the Undercity of the [adjective] [being]"

1d12=5
"Search for the Undercity of the Forgotten [being]"


1d12=8 (again)

"Search for the Undercity of the Forgotten Demon"

Hmmm.  So, by my own rules, I now need to incorporate this into my story.  Sometimes I do very dumb things in an effort to make my own life easier.

Gamery update

Last Sunday I finished off the delve encounter with the mind flayer.  It proved suitably challenging, which is always good, but also ended with a character death - my first tabletop kill.

Technically, I didn't kill the character in question, another player did.  The real culprit, however, was this:

Mind Flayers are nasty.  They have a bad habit of turning their victims into thralls.   Oh, and eating their brains.  In this respect they resemble zombies, but in no other.  They're basically highly intelligent calamari on a revenge spree.

Lulled by meeting two less than super-charged specimens in the early part of the dungeon, the group were unimpressed at the sight of yet another set of tentacles appearing behind a pillar.  They resorted to their tried and tested approach of battering it into the ground before it had time to act.  Mr Squiddy proved to be made of tougher stuff.  He also had backup.  Earlier visitors had already succombed and he had a team of drider and drow on tap to keep the gang occupied while he lined up his prime victim.

The optimal choice from Mr Squiddy's viewpoint was to enthrall the most destructive party member and turn him loose on the rest of the group as an enthralled slave.  Amazingly, this went exactly as planned.  Enter Midrath the goliath barbarian.   Midrath is a nice enough chap apart from his lichen covered toes, but he takes more actions out of his turn than most players make from one end of a session to the other.  He is built to interrupt and do massive damage.  Normally he belts in and half the monsters drop dead before they have time to go "mwhahahaha", slain by the head-butting, spiked chain wielding menace.

He has one weakness.  Low Will.  Squiddy attacks versus Will.  Setting himself up as an inviting target, Squiddy awaited the inevitable Midrath rush and took the damage.  Then he throttled him, used an action point, bored into his skull and had his very own guided missile to send against the foe.  It was at this point that the party realised just how bad things could be.  Midrath is quite capable of killing all of them in two hits.  A point proved very thoroughly on his ranger pal.

I've had issues in the past with some of 4e's encounter design, but this one was a honey.  As it happened, the players did the normally sane thing of holding a choke point in a corridor.  That didn't work against the drider who simply crawled over the ceiling and surrounded them.  The monsters were nicely balanced.  They had good effects that could be used together to cause mayhem.  The players were genuinely in danger.  It felt visceral and cinematic and exciting. 

The fallen player will be revived.  Unfortunately by her least favourite ally, Karolina the vampiric bard, but there isn't much choice.  Karolina was brought up in the spirit of noblesse oblige.  She will perform the ritual and never mention it again.

I do just feel I should mention that the good guys did win.  Narrowly, but narrowly is really the best of all possible worlds.

Just how good are 4e pcs compared to 4e monsters?

Warning:  Possible spoilers for Tombs I

Some of the Tombs I players read this thing and I don't want to give too much away, but I've got a truly interesting fight going on right now.  The group in Tombs II are busy fighting two of their number and are finding it tough.  So am I.

They are meeting exact replicas of themselves with a full set of powers and equipment.  That's complex enough before you even go into the mechanics of it.  Today has been a feast of immediate interrupts and immediate reactions.  Since this is the one and only outing of the false characters, they (unlike the real things) have no need to nurse their powers and can let rip with all the best stuff at their disposal.  Amazingly, I'm rolling well enough to make that a good threat.

While that is satisfying in itself, of course (thank you, GM dice), it's also interesting how powerful they are compared to the average monster.  Now, I knew this in an abstract way, but it's very interesting to see it in practice.  I'm also incredibly glad that not all fights work out like this.  The sheer volume of stuff to remember and things to do to get the best from these particular monsters is daunting.  Don't forget that this is using a system which makes it comparatively easy to do. 

Back when I started playing D&D using the AD&D system, creating monsters was a nightmare.  Well, actually, it wasn't a nightmare as I was a very antisocial teenager and spending hours creating monsters and dungeons nobody would ever play was just fine.  I could think of very few better ways to spend the summer holidays.  At that time (and onwards into other iterations of D&D as far as I'm aware), creating a high level magic user or fighter or paladin on the enemy team meant creating a character and knowing it well enough to run it.  Inevitably I'd forget to cast some vital spell and kaboom, end of encounter.  Alternatively, I overcooked them and kaboom, end of party. 

Now, however, time is a luxury I don't have so much of and the simplicity of creating and running suitable encounters is vastly easier with 4e.  It's also possible to run a paragon level character you don't know the details of and make it threat without too much preparation.  That is a robust system.

I need to remember this for the future.  Next time I want to really challenge a party, I may just hit character builder and see what I get.

Half term - oh how shall I fill the hours?

Bar the casting of the nativity play on Friday, I have no rehearsals or classes for the next two weeks.  This lull should be used profitably, but I'm afraid it won't be.  Or not as profitably as it would be used if I was a better organised person.

The brain says that now is the moment to get some concrete work done.  Such as finding out how to work the sewing machine I've been loaned.  Such as making a proper business plan for the future.  Such as ordering logs for the rapidly approaching winter.  Such as continuing to empty the house.  Such as making sure son has trousers that fit.  And so on and so forth.

The heart says that most of this will, in fact happen, just not in a particularly orderly way.  I'll get distracted.  I'll find myself looking at the contents of the freezer and making piles of useful, but not needful danish pastry dough.  I'll get side-tracked by another gaming system and build myself a character or two.  I'll chat endlessly to the online friends I chat endlessly too (you know who you are).  I'll read a lot of books.   Plan a lot of shows.

I will also, of course, do a lot of game updating.  Tombs I and II are both mid-battle and I want both encounters to shift along a little.  Rune Stones have just defeated the Jeevesian cyclopes and now need to find their way into the old mines.  Lost City is just kicking off and will take some watching as I don't know their powers yet.  Plus the games I'm in, which are all chugging along.

Actually, when I think about it, I'll probably do more than I plan to do, but it will somehow feel as if I've done less.  That doesn't seem right.  A list maybe?  I just need something to convince myself that I'm not really sitting about doing nothing.

Initiative rolled

First combat in The Lost City is imminent.  This is a challenge for me and the players and is in the nature of a shake down cruise.  They get to find out how all their powers work, I get to find out how the monsters work and what will challenge them (or not, as is so often the case).  At the end of this fight, they all get the opportunity to do some rebuilding based on experience.  With the plethora of powers and feats now available, it's fatally easy to pick something that doesn't work the way you hoped.  It seems only fair to allow that to change at the outset, given that leveling in PbP is slow.

So is combat.  That can't be helped, but I try to move things along as fast as I sensibly can without out-running the players.  In practical terms this means a 24 hour spot in which to post after any given player's turn comes up.  Then (in theory, at least), I either delay or act on their behalf.

One suggested way around this is to turn all the players loose and let them roll and narrate their actions at will.   This simply does not work under 4e rules when so many of the powers are interactive and dependent on what everyone else is doing.  By the time someone has taken their immediate interrupt three moves after the trigger occurred, you may well end up reconstructing the entire encounter.  Frustrating for everyone.  One at a time then, so I can update the map and narrate between turns. It is labour intensive, but much less so than endlessly backtracking.

On the subject of leveling up - I award either double or 50% over normal XP budget which normally works out at about 5 encounters per level.  Half the recommended number for a table game, but still taking around 3-6 months.  It's the best compromise I've come up with so far, but the system continues to be tinkered with all the time. 

Meanwhile, the map is ready and monsters await.  It's like having stagefright every single time.

Return of the heroes

Most unusually I did some tabletop DMing this evening.  It's been a long time since I did that and I'd forgotten how different it feels.  Not bad, just different.  Far more improvisational - there isn't time with 6 people looking at you to do much more than make an on the fly decision and hope it works out.

Mr Rev is running our main campaign at the moment, but he ran out of time this week, so I offered to run a delve for our paragon pcs - minus Karolina the incomprehensible bard.  Our DM for these characters stepped up to the plate as their temporary leader - an elf warlord who appeared at breakfast and greeted his long lost half-sister.

A delve in the pure form consists of 3 linked encounters of increasing difficulty.  This one is pretty much straight out of the book and will link nicely into the next cycle of adventures for the party since it involves a missing drow caravan.  There has been the usual adjustment of higher damage output and slightly lower defenses for the monsters, but so far to no very obvious effect on the party.  The first two encounters have been pretty much sluiced through, but I'm hoping that the third one will be tougher.  We'll find out next week.  I have Drider, a Mind Flayer and a couple of fairly butch drow on my team, they still have most of their dailies.  It should be close.

Gods and monsters - more on 4e encounter design

An interesting discussion just started up one of my game threads.  The player in question mentioned that I run extra-hard monsters - and that the way to counter them was not so much to have higher defenses, but to pick powers that interrupt their attacks or smack them with an effect.

That intrigued me, because he's quite right, but I hadn't thought of it in precisely those terms before.  I thnk of myself as a complete softy as my kill rate is extremely low, but I look at some of the encounters I've run recently and I do see what he means.  The monsters are tough to deal with.  There are probably a couple of reasons for that, but I'm now eager to hear other experiences.

When I'm designing (or tinkering with, in the case of pre-written material) an encounter, I am rigorous about the XP budget allocation.  I'll often push it as far as I think it can go, but I will never deliberately outface a party.  More often though, I aim for a middle ground.  Tough, but tricky/bypassable with cunning/feel-good killery (yes, it has a place, not often, but it does.  Sometimes heroes need to feel awesome). 

Note that I'm not set in stone about how encounters will end.  If the players take a route that allows or suggests that the bad guys may change sides, surrender or run away for reinforcements rather than simply battling to the death, I'll take it.  Golden rule - combat is storytelling too.  My drama head is never that far away.

I'm raising this point about XP budget because it is an extraordinarly flexible and very effective tool for determining if the party should or should not be able to cope.  It is by far the best yardstick I've found and hasn't failed me yet.  Mechanically it helps hugely.  What I do tend to do however, is shift the numbers a bit.  Typically I like monsters to have lower hit points and higher attacks and damage.  They won't stay around as long, but they'll be devastating until the party get rid of them.  It's a good incentive for the party to act as a party and decide where to focus their fire. 

On my side of the coin, I try to make it hard for them to decide where to focus their fire.  That enormous lumbering bod may be able to knock 30hp off you if he hits you, but the real danger this turn might be the agile chap at the back who can push you into a pit and leave you as easy pickings for something else.   Synergy works for monsters too.  This is a large part of why I like intelligent monsters better, although a mixture can be very good. 

Some favourite fights?

The kenku who had a group of gelatinous cubes buries all over the floor and dragged the party into them.

The fight in the hotel lobby (long story) that ended with the baddie being killed by a thrown pot plant.

The epic fight to quiet the land at the end of one group's heroic tier path.  It was massive to play and run, but was appropriately epic feeling as a rite of passage.

A recent fight with wraiths in Tomb of Horrors which was on a real knife-edge right the way through.

The fight at the end of Courts of the Shadow Fey against the Moonlit King and his followers.  That ended when the King was forced out of his madness, but not before most of the party were very badly beaten up.

I think this one is to be continued.  Many thoughts are burgeoning.

Cake

I have a couple of cakes to make in the next few days.  Mr Rev's birthday cake and a cake for a dear friend who weds his partner next week in Edinburgh Castle.

The end of September sees the start of the birthday season in our primary social circle, with everyone born at one end of the year.  Our gaming group are a cheerfully social bunch, so in the past we've done a lot of celebrating with themed cakes.  My usual partner in crime for these events is hors de combat due to the recent arrival of her son, and the gaming as a whole has dropped off a little, but we continue to go to some trouble to celebrate birthdays.  Go us.

Not the right wedding cake.  This was a white chocolate monster made last year for two of the gaming group who got married to each other.  Or rather, the first of the two pairs of gaming group members who married each other.  Shutting up now.  The caption is practically longer than the post.

Sunday is Mr Rev's mumblety-mumblety birthday.  I'm being cautious about this not because he's paranoid about his age, but because I can't remember how old he is.  For that matter I mostly can't remember how old I am either without serious thought.  Anyway, the gamers are coming around on Sunday evening and we'll let him try to kill us as a treat.

The cakes in question will both be fun to make.  Mr Rev wants a toffee apple spice cake and the wedding thing is going to be the darkest of dark chocolate sloshed through with homemade plum brandy.  I need, therefore, to do some shopping.

Coxes apples - the sort that disintegrate gently on cooking
Bag of Werhter's toffees
85% dark chocolate
Edible gold leaf or similar


This is a good list.  Every item is absolutely needful and all of them look indulgent.  Well, maybe not the apples.