Friday, July 29, 2011

My Realms

So, amidst all of my other half-finished projects I've got the rumblings of a low- to mid-heroic My Realms adventure. I have the rough outlines, which I pulled together from about two weeks of my brainstorming sessions. Now I've done some concerted work on stitching the disparate elements together into a cohesive story and laid out the broad strokes of the encounters. My next step is to pick creatures for the encounters and run some playtests.

I decided to set the adventure in High Imaskar in the city of Skyclave. The idea of all those extradimensional spaces, giant flying insect transportation systems, and defunct magical architecture really hooked me. I won't give too much away, but I hope to write a series of MYRE mods set in Skyclave that make use of all of those elements. Just imagine - the rulers have forbidden access to large parts of the city because of dangerous magic. Who might want to get into those forbidden areas, and what sort of trouble might they cause if they do? That's what's been on my mind. Here's the teaser intro.

Our heroes are enjoying the breathtaking views from their redwing gondola on a trip to Skyclave for some much needed R&R, when suddenly there is a cry of alarm from the gondola driver as he is thrown overboard by a group of armed men. The redwing veers off course, and unfamiliar ground looms ahead as the gondola lurches under the startled redwing. Who are these masked men, and where are they taking the gondola? Our heroes must answer these questions, restore order, and get the gondola back on course if they want to live through the day.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Birth of New Gods

Here is a setting idea I had a few years ago. I DMed about 2 sessions of the story in early 2008, right before 4e dropped. I never converted the setting (not that there is much to convert), and I don't think I'll use it again. The stories it has to tell are all longer than the games I have been playing lately.

Elevator Pitch: The world is in disarray because a new god has been born, who has yet to mature and find a way to control its desires and fit into the pantheon. The heroes must contend with a radically changing world as existing powers vie for control of the new deity and basic assumptions about the world are turned on their heads. Time passes oddly, plants and animals are relocated or combined, elemental forces are introduced into the mortal world, and anything is possible during a time of new beginnings.

Long Version: I envisioned the main villain of the story being a wizard (natch) who had imprisoned this infant god and was trying to steal its divine power before it matured. The PCs would begin their careers normally enough by investigating bandits and the like, but as time went on they would encounter more and more of these abnormal occurrences which would lead them to the infant god and a confrontation with the wizard.

I had read Beowulf around the time I was making this setting, and I wanted to play up a few elements from the book: bragging, treasure-giving as a method of creating loyalty (Beowulf, ring-giver), and family obligations. I'm not sure if that last one was actually present in Beowulf, but it was on my mind. I wanted players to get into their genealogy a little, know that their characters should respect such and such a person because he was so and so's cousin. I'm not sure how much fun that would be at the table, but I am intrigued by those relationships whenever they come up in fantasy stories.

There were no large kingdoms in this world. City-states control small areas of land, but there are vast swaths of unregulated territory. Even if someone claims it, unless the land is close to a large settlement the law enforcement is lax at best.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Thoughts on brainstorming

It has been a long time since I've written anything. I've been busy with work, but I have still managed to get some writing done on my D&D projects. I haven't made any headway on the Slave Lords conversion, but I have been working on some adventure ideas for a Living Forgotten Realms "My Realms" adventure.

I do most of my initial brainstorming in a google docs file. I just date each entry and keep a long running list. I try to write down five to ten ideas every day. Sometimes I choose a theme, like 'villains' or 'strongholds', but sometimes I'll just flip to a random page in whatever book is at hand and use the first word I see on the page as my random seed.

I brainstormed like that for a few weeks with mixed results until I had a few days when all of my ideas started to fit together during the brainstorm session. I took those ideas and created a new document and just cut/paste to organize them a little, then started a focused effort to focus and refine my ideas. I like using the computer for doing some writing, but it gets to a point where I prefer the feel of a pencil on paper. That's where I'm at right now. When I like where I've gotten the ideas on paper, I'll type them up and try to get a group together to run it. I hope to have it ready by the time I get back to NYC this fall.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Quick update

I've been pretty busy lately, but I'm getting back to writing now so here's a quick update of what I've been up to in preparation for a longer post soon.

I've been running the DM Rewards Tomb of Horrors, which has been a lot of fun. It is a truly inspired dungeon, with a lot synergies and excitement that come out during play that don't really read well on the page. I've still got three more sessions of the Tomb (assuming everyone survives) and I'm really looking forward to it.

I was recently invited to DM for the New School Games Club. I ran Into the Shadowhaunt from the first 4e D&D Gameday back in '08, and a good time was had all around. I updated the monsters using MM3 math, and prepared Essentials characters for the players, who were either new players, or players whose last D&D experience was 2e. It was a very close fight, with three out of the four heroes making death saves. The tide was turned back to the players' side by the rogue rolling a 20 on his death save and hopping up to trigger the knight's second wind.

I also haven't forgotten about my conversion project. Tonight I've started to choose monsters and build up some of the encounters 4e style. More on this later.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Converting A1-Slave Pits of the Undercity -part 2

Last time, I was setting my overall parameters for the design of this mod. I determined that I would need to cut or combine encounters to fit the mod in a reasonable amount of play time. Today, I'm using going through the mod in detail to determine which encounters to convert directly, which encounters to combine and which encounters to cut.

To do this, I printed out the map of the dungeon and made brief notes on each room about what it contained. That gives me a quick, 'at-a-glance' overview of the mod without me flipping back and forth through the whole thing. The first thing I noticed when I did this is that there are way more encounters in the mod than I thought! From the description and my brief reading, I was planning on having to cut from 18 encounters down to 12 or 14. My new count has upwards of 24 encounters! What to do?

Further analysis of the map shows that there are multiple paths through the dungeon, and it is possible for a clever party to miss entire sections of it. That will let me include a few extra encounters, because a party won't necessarily face all of them. I'll say that taking the multiple paths into account will allow me to include about 18 total encounters, hoping that a party will only encounter 3/4 of them.

That still leaves me with a few too many encounters. To make the first round of cuts, I'm going to use some tricks I learned playing a conversion of the original Ravenloft adventure a few weeks ago. The DM had converted some of the single monster encounters, which in earlier versions of D&D would have represented a legitimate challenge for a party, into an effect more like a trap. For example where the original module called for a banshee to appear, instead of running an entire fight against a single banshee, the banshee made a single wailing attack against us all and then disappeared back into the mists. This saved time at the table, maintained the fast pace of the original, and still had an impact on the PCs. There are a few encounters of this type in A1, so I'll convert them to an effect like a trap (some ideas: a group of archers fires a volley then retreats to another position, a group of monsters rush the party and deal some damage even as they are cut down).

Still a few encounters over, I turn next to combining encounters. In earlier editions of the game, encounters with a handful of weak enemies were common. The 4e equivalent would be to happen upon a group of minions. In 4e, running all of those individual fights would take too long, and not be interesting enough to be worth spending time on at the table. Without giving too much away, I can say that there are several areas in the original mod that list encounter statistics for rooms like this that are very close together, and that for my purposes I will treat these thematically linked mini-encounters together into a larger encounter. Basically, I will use a suite of rooms as the area instead of a single room.

That brings me down to my magic number. Now I'll need to convert the remaining encounters to the new rules and away we go.  Stay tuned.

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Don't Negate Player Choice

Well, with being out of town last week, and catching up from being out of town this week, I haven't had a lot of time for writing. I have played a couple of games since then, though, and I've had some thoughts.

Last week I ran the first part of the Dungeon Magazine adventure Lord of the White Field. From my read of the adventure, it looked like a few of the toughest encounters were loaded into the front of the mod. The party was faced with a level+2 and a level+3 encounter, each with secondary objectives, and they seemed to just waltz through them.  I'm not sure what the player perception of the difficulty was, but it seemed to me that the monsters just weren't hitting often enough, even on the 'soft' characters, and this is using the new MM3 monster math. It just didn't feel right.

Looking at the math when I got home, the encounters were built so that the individual monsters were of party level or party level+1. The threat (on paper) was from the quantity of monsters. But for whatever reason, the party was built with defense in mind. The lowest AC in the group was 22 (for a melee ranger with no magic armor even! He should have been down in every fight!), so on the softest character the average monster had a hit range of 11-20 or 45%. Meanwhile, the PCs have a hit range of roughly 8-20, which means the baddies are sitting ducks.

The encounters so far have been designed with the monsters to come in waves. This has absolutely reinforced the 'zombie apocalypse' vibe that the mod is going for, but it means that the threat is spread out over the encounter. Unless the party has an unlucky round, the monsters don't have enough time to group up, position themselves and wear down the PCs.

When I first got home after running this game, I started brainstorming ideas on how to beef up the adventure to make it more of a threat. I could level up the monsters, or add some situational bonus that would let them hit more frequently. I could up their damage, so that when they do hit they have more of an impact. But then I looked at it from the player perspective: people usually build their characters to be good at doing things they think are fun. If someone chooses items, powers and feats that improve their thievery and stealth skills, they probably want to sneak around and open locks.

This party chose to design hard-to-hit characters. If I made adjustments to the mod to bring the hit range of the monsters more in line with my expectations, that would effectively negate the choices those players made when they created their characters. As frustrating as it seems to me to be unable to hit the PCs, they should be rewarded for choosing defensive options for their characters. In the long run, it probably means that they are each dealing slightly less damage per hit, and are healing slightly fewer hit points per surge, or their skill bonuses aren't as high as they could be.

I'll have to find a way to challenge them by making them feel those sacrifices: let them be hard to hit, but emphasize their weaknesses in other areas.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Converting A1-Slave pits of the Undercity - Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts about my process updating A1-Slave Pits of the Undercity for use in 4e D&D. I'll be explaining how I approach the process as I go along. To be clear, I'll be writing about how I work, not about how I think everyone should work. Your mileage may vary. Let's get to it.


Converting a mod is kind of a big project, so to make it more manageable, I’m going to break it into steps. The first step of any project should be to clearly define the end goal. Here is how I went about defining my goals for the conversion.


Here are the requirements that I set for myself:
  • The mod should run in 3 or 4 sessions.
  • The mod should accommodate 4-6 players
  • I want to maintain as much of the original ‘flavor’ of the mod as possible
  • Possible contradiction: I want to move the adventure to the world of Dark Sun – some cosmetic details will need to be changed, but the main antagonist is a group of slavers which seems like a perfect fit for Dark Sun.
  • I want to maintain the pace of the original mod (no 5-minute workday)
  • I want to maintain the challenge of the original (character death must be a possibility)
Next, I read the mod (and reviews and a little bit of history) and gathered this list of facts:
  • A1 is the first of a series of four modules
  • A1 was originally a written as a competitive tournament mod
  • The focus of the adventure is a dungeon crawl through a twisting, multi-leveled dungeon complex
  • It was written for a party of 9 characters,
  • It was written in two parts, each part having nine encounters*, with each encounter designed to be deadly enough to kill one of the characters if they players weren’t careful.
  • Each part ran in a single 3 1/2 hour session, for a total of 7 play hours. Not every party was expected to face every encounter.
  • The mod was printed in two places: as a standalone product and in an omnibus edition called Scourge of the Slave lords that included all four mods in the series.
  • It was intended for characters of level 5-7 (AD&D)

To boil that down to defining the scope of this project, I’ll go through my lists and try to make them fit together.


Run-time
I assume that a well-balanced 4e party with moderately experienced players will finish 3 or 4 encounters in a 4-hour session. Optimized parties might blow through a little faster, and inexperienced players may take a little longer, but that will be my starting point. To fit comfortably into 4 sessions, I should be looking for about 12 total encounters.

Already there is a time conflict – if I directly convert all 18 original encounters, it would take a party 4-6 sessions to finish. Right off the bat I know I’ll need to either cut or combine encounters to make the mod fit into my time-frame. I haven’t decided which I’ll do, but I’ll keep that in mind as I go forward.


Level Range
In AD&D, the maximum level for a human PC was 20, so the 5-7 level range was about a third of the way through the range. In 4e terms, that translates roughly to the high heroic or low paragon tiers. I eventually want to convert all four mods in the series, so I’ll set 11th level as the target for PCs starting the fourth mod. If they gain 1 level per mod, that puts the first mod starting level at 7.


Lethality
In the original, each encounter was tough enough to kill at least one PC if the players were not careful. In 4e, lethality and pacing are linked. Tough encounters slow down play, but easy encounters are rarely a threat. However, if a party never knows when they will be able to rest and regain healing surges and dailies, even a weak enemy becomes threatening. I want the game to move along quickly so I’m going to use pace to control lethality more than encounter level. Most of the encounters should be be within one level of the party, but it should be difficult to take an extended rest.


Pace
The adventure pits the characters against a maze-like dungeon defended by a well-prepared and intelligent enemy. The players should feel the need to accomplish their goal all at once, without leaving the dungeon or taking an extended rest. If they leave the dungeon to rest and resupply, the defenses will almost certainly have been bolstered by the time they return. If they try to take an extended rest inside the dungeon, they will find that there are few places to safely do so, and it may be quite challenging to access those places. In either case I want to push them to face as much of the dungeon as possible without resting. This could be problematic for a 4e game – the rules assume that the PCs will be able to renew some of their resources every now and then, so to encourage the pace of exploration that I want, I’ll have to find a different way for PCs to recharge their daily powers and regain healing surges. I don’t know what that is yet, but I know I need to figure that out.


Flavor
This mod is a little light on story, but has a very well designed dungeon and some interesting NPCs. The dungeon looks like a really fun crawl – there are clear objectives, multiple levels, and multiple parallel paths that lead to the final objective. All of the paths are interconnected as well, making it possible for parties to run into a tough obstacle, choose to avoid it, then double back and try another route. The players should be free to overcome challenges in a variety of ways, not just by hitting things until they stop moving.

That covers my basic guidelines for the conversion going forward. Next time I am going to review each original encounter, get my XP budgets sorted out, and start designing encounters.

*Here I am using the word encounter to refer to traps, puzzles, combats, parleys, skill challenges or any other discrete unit of the story.