Dice Deliberations

Cover art for Grimtooth's Traps  by Flying Buffalo   Despite being a certified Evil GM (tm) I've never really been a fan of traps. I throw them in occasionally, but just mundane ones designed to keep people out, not the subtle ones that people have concocted over the years. Grimtooth's Traps is the grandfather of all trap books, and in it, and its many sequels, it brings the art of trap making to new heights. They are not just examples of how the traps look to players, but show the implementation of them and what it would take to create  (and possibly defeat) them. Traps like these are designed to be encounters on their own, with significant resources put into their creation and with a goal of not just deferring intruders, but often ending them. Still, they have just never been something I wanted to put into my dungeons--which makes it all the more surprising for my players when I do. Today, I'm going to be talking a few of my standard traps, and the innovations I'v...

  The Strongest Enemy Ever by Ry Spirit Nothing spices up a game like a good villain. They motivate the party, give the GM a legitimate way to annoy his friends and create story arcs that are memorable. For this essay, I'm going to go a little bit different than usual: I'm going to list some characteristics of a good villain, with some examples, but I'm also going to provide some examples of villains who were lessened because they didn't have these qualities. Personality The first, and most important characteristic of a villain is a personality. They can be arrogant, aloof, obsessed, deranged or even cheerful--but they have be something that makes them memorable when the party meets them, especially early on. There are so many wonderful examples of this, but I'm going to point to Joker in The Dark Knight as played by Heath Ledger. To me, that character comes into his own with the infamous "pencil trick" which cements him as dangerous and totally in charg...

  GURPS Complete Collection (with joke titles) - Uncredited Supplements are the backbone of the RPG industry. They not only offer more opportunities to build out a game system, but provide incremental revenue sources for the publisher and/or secondary creators. Today, I'm going to be talking about what I look for (or don't) in supplements. For purposes of this, I'm going to assume that there is a core book (or two core books) for the game. D&D has the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide as separate core books. Numenera split their one core book into Discovery and Destiny. Dungeon Crawl Classics has one book with everything. The Critical Few After I've read a new game's core book, the first supplement I reach for is its "Monster Manual" equivalent. After 40 years of gaming, I can bring up all the fantasy creatures I want for a game, but if  the game is Cthulhu horror, Science Fiction, Steampunk, Cyberpunk or surreal, I really want a...

  "Safety" by Griffstuff My pinned Tweet has been unchanged since I put it up last November, and I have no intention of changing it anytime soon. Its message is simple, and I'm reposting it and my response comment below: I just commented about safe-space gaming to someone. And I just want to reiterate: Every game I run is a safe table, regardless of race, gender, LGBTQ status, being an introvert or anything else. And if I don't know the players, I tell them that explicitly.   I have to add two things: 1. My table is also welcoming. I really appreciate people being there. 2. It also includes being welcoming to people who are new to the game we're playing. Everybody was new once.   Nobody should ever feel they made a mistake sitting at my #TTRPG table.   To carry these ideas forward, I'm going to describe a topic that is very dear to me: how I ensure that players always feel safe, comfortable and welcome at my table as a GM. I'll also touch on how I do that...

  The Old World by Alyn Spiller For the last three years, I've put header art on all of my essays. I do this because it adds an interesting graphical element to my text-only essays. But very quickly, I realized that the art actually inspires some essays or brings in detail that add more depth to the articles. This is one of those. I had decided that "flood " was a great launching point for one type of essay, but on seeing this piece by Alyn Spiller, I realized I had to write a completely different essay to do it justice. Beneath the Waters of Our World Water is an amazing and often underutilized element for Role Playing Games. In the real world, we have  thousands of marine biologists, oceanographers, educational, corporate and private diving expeditions. Snorkeling and scuba diving are an hugely popular pastime for vacationers. And yet, we honestly know almost nothing about what is in the ocean. We can make maps of the bottom of the ocean, and have little idea what's...

  The very first thing that came to mind when I read "Think" as the word for today was Aretha Franklin's 1968 song of the same name. She made Think universally famous through her performance of it in the Blue's Brothers movie. She explained things in no uncertain terms to Matt "Guitar" Murphy, and when the queen of soul has something to say on the subject, it's best to let her do the talking. Sadly, she wasn't talking about RPGs and so I was forced to come up with my own essay. What came to me next was "Give me an INT check" which is a common GM tool for remembering a fact, getting a hint, or showing knowledge or an understanding that exceeds what the player knows. Each of these is a completely different circumstance, and that's what I'll be reviewing today. Remembering A Fact During the course of an adventure or even a campaign arc, many details will come up. Some characters record important information in a book; campaign summari...

  I'm not a fan of random encounters. As I mentioned in my previous essay, I love random elements coming into a game, and making it go in an unexpected direction. But I've never liked the feel of rolling on a table then creating something the parties need to deal with just to give them something to do or to push them along. I have to say that these wilderness pacing issues aren't unique to RPGs, though; authors have the same issue. One of my friends describes a certain fantasy novel as being "15 pages of 'they were on a hill, and it was raining'." So when parties travel, especially over several days, it's easy to get into a tedium of repetition, and it's important to put something into the story so that "it's the journey AND the destination." I'd like characters to look forward to travel.  Here are some of the techniques that I use to make travel through the wilderness more interesting. Wilderness Encounters I identify hooks...usu...

  Tabletop Role Playing Games are collaborative storytelling. A few of those games are pure storytelling, but most of them have elements of chance that affect the outcomes from a static narrative. Whether these are dice, cards or typing a command into a computer those random elements are seen as a critical part of the story: Random generators provide the chance to succeed when no reasonable analysis would result in a positive outcome; in the other direction there's always a banana peel. Today, with the word "Trust" as the prompt, I'm going to explore the idea of fudging, and so for the art today, I found this picture on Pixbay. Sadly, it did not come with attribution. But the reason I chose it was because the 20 is sitting there mocking the roller. It's pretending that the result might be spectacular, but the "2" is clearly face up and not going anywhere. And yet...because of the way the die is positioned, it would only take one tiny nudge to make it a ...

This is Prevel, my 5th level hobgoblin bard. He was rendered using  HeroForge's miniature creation software, and he is doubly important to today's word: "Medium." A Channel of Communication The bard has always been a strange class--in 1e, the class was an overpowered master of many things, able to bring fireballs and backstabs to any situation as desired. In 3e, it became a master of intuition and suggestion, a helpful buff-bot, and was pretty average at everything else. In 5e, it became a skill master with some really interesting variations of abilities. But regardless of their true in-game role, the bard has always been a master of performance and a teller of tales. And this aspect is what I've had a revelation about, recently. Prevel is a gossip-monger, with an impressively unimpressive grasp of the implications of what he learns. (In game terms, this means he has a great, always-at-advantage perform check, but gets minimal bonuses for insight checks to unders...

Preface: Synergy for the Win I've mentioned before that I don't write articles ahead. There are several reasons for this, but one of them is that sometimes situations come up that write my essay for me. This is one of those times. Today's work came from a completely unrelated conversation with my Trinity co-creator, last night. We were talking about our next worldbuilding projects, and got talking about the Old Gods of the world, and one god in particular. That conversation was instead of writing my daily essay. At the end, I said that I was heading off to bed, especially since I didn't have any ideas for "Stream" yet. Then I paused, and it turned out that I did in fact have a topic for this essay. The River God Modern Trinity is a land of the New Gods. The old gods were mostly elf lords with massive dream powers who warped reality around them. The most powerful and influential of those gods were killed by the Dwarves in a world-changing act of vengeance. Mino...

  Imagine signing on as ship's surgeon on a 17th century vessel, running into issues and washing ashore barely conscious. Now imagine that you wake up surrounded by 6-inch people who have you fully constrained and under their power. This is the well-known first adventure of Lemuel Gulliver and his experience on the island of Lilliput. An island of small people, both in stature and, as is revealed, their character. The Lilliputians are also an example of something small which have more influence or effect than one would expect, given their size. That is my theme today...various creatures who, by nature or implementation far exceed their stature in the effect they have in the world of RPGs. Kobolds Long the brunt of jokes, bullying and wholesale slaughter by adventurers, kobolds have been in every edition of D&D since the beginning. They are small reptilian creatures between 2-3 feet tall, and in 5e, the only stat they have that isn't single digits is dexterity. If a party me...