Well, the school year has finally come to an end and I find myself out from underneath piles of papers to grade and paperwork to file for the demonic taskmasters otherwise known as the Department of Education.  With my new-found freedom and modicum of free time, I thought I should dust off the old blog and see what’s been going on since my post waayyy back in September.

Weekly gaming has continued here on Fridays with 4th edition passed by we have stuck with 3.5 and are dipping our toes into the world of Pathfinder.  Hopefully, this August our excitement that was so thoroughly crushed with the release of 4e will be rewarded with the publication of the Pathfinder Core Rules from Paizo.  Presently we are playing Monte Cooke’s Dungeon-a-Day megadungeon which has been quite a romp.  I’m DMing after an almost 8 month break which was very nice.  While a player we played the Sunless Citadel module (which none of our group had done) as well as the first installment of the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path.  Mixed in there was a stomp through the first couple levels of the updated Maure Castle from Dungeon magazine.

Looking back at the list it would seem that we have focused primarily on dungeon crawls but our group always seems to find a way to work roleplaying into adventures that would appear to be most point and shoot type adventures with Crimson Throne being the exception, of course.

As things start to slow down for the summer, I am looking forward to continuing the Dungeon-a-Day mega-dungeon.  Last year we had a big blow-out to our Ptolus campaign that saw us do the old-school marathon session broken up with a BBQ supper which I am hoping to hold again this year.   Hopefully, we can get to a point where we can finish a major section/level of the dungeon that will give us a nice break point.  As school gears up again, I think I’ll be handing the reins back to one of the other DMs in the group who can run things while I get back into the teaching groove.

What are your summer gaming plans?  Do you find that you get to game more or less during the summer?  How do you handle vacations/missing players?  Do you soldier on or just plan breaks?  Any mega-sessions going on?

Hope to hear from some of you who still might have me in your feeds.

It’s September so its been a return to work for me as the students return to the clasroom.  This is the busiest time of the year for most educators as we prepare for the students to return as well as learn all the new policies and procedures for the upcoming year.   Because of these tumultous time everything else takes a backseat including blogging and gaming.  In the past few weeks we have had a hard time getting our group together for a full session.This week one of our group, Darren,  announced that he had accepted a new job in another province so he was going to be leaving our weekly game.  Two of the other players were not able to make it to the session so the Darren, myself and one other player, Denis, were left to fill the evening.  Usually we just while away the night talking about games but last night we decided we would just improv a D&D game.  While Denis and I made up characters which we generated randomly, Darren made some jot notes and framed out an adventure.

Denis and I decided we would randomize the characters a bit and let the dice decide what we were going to play.  I ended up with a half-elf Lawful Evil rogue while Denis was playing a Lawful Good Elven Ranger.  So, the first challenge was to figure out how to have these characters work together at all.  We decided they would be half-brothers from different mothers.  We quickly fleshed out that dear old Dad was a bard who liked to spread happiness wherever he went.  The problem was that he usually got himself in trouble doing that resulting in the hook for the adventure: bring dear old Dad back to Elven lands before he gets himself killed.

The evening was a blast.  The game moved along quickly with both Denis and I quickly falling into the bickering brother roles as we each chaffed at each others approaches to life.   We fed Darren stuff and together we built a fun little world in a couple of hours.  We finished off finally finding Dad but there’s a problem – he’s scheduled to be hanged in the city square during a festival for knocking up the local Duke’s daughter!  We had such fun that we have decided we will try to keep the game going online.

The point of this rather long-winded post is that we had fun without worrying too much about crunch.  We used 3.5 rules but point was the building of the story and the more complications got thrown at us the more fun it was.  It was a throw back to days gone by.  Nostalgia is fun and a nice palette cleanser every once in a while.

Where to start?  New conventions need to figure out everything from the ground up but you can probably steal ideas from other successful conventions and apply them to your situation.   A convention is a business after all, in that it has to be sustainable and not cost the organizers their life savings to run.  The business has to market to customers, provide product and/or service to the customer and look after all the backend arrangements that make the convention run.

So, what do you need?  Again, with no con running experience myself I am thinking that you need to find a location to have a convention.  Starting small you might want to use a Student Union building if you go to university or college.  Setting up a recognized club at the school beforehand will also mean you get a good rate on rooms or perhaps even get some for free depending on when you run your event.  Otherwise, you can partner with a hotel to encourage those travelling to the con to stay at the facility hosting the event in exchange for a reduced rate on the larger rooms you will need to run the event.  Other options are community centres and schools.

Timing of your event is important as well.  When will you hold this event?  If you are appealing to those in school, try to plan around the crunch times at university so that your target market is more likely to take the time out of their schedule to attend.  Travel can be an issue on the East Coast so weather might be a factor in your area that you want to consider.  If your target market is covering a wide area, nothing will kill your attendance like a blizzard so try to plan for a less volatile month.

Okay, we have a time and place.  Now we need to figure out how long the convention will be.  For a start-up convention, running a Friday night, all day Saturday event probably is as large as you want to go.  In fact, only running on Saturday might cut your costs significantly.  If you have a successful event, you will gain some recognition and then can perhaps expand.  Better to start small and build up than crash and burn because you were too ambitious.

While you are looking at the above particulars, one important aspects of the convention must not be overlooked: the games!  You will need to find people to run events at the convention for people to do once they get there.  This is where your extensive list of friends will come in.  Get everyone you know to run something at some point.  Advertising will be key here to gather others to run events once you have pestered and exhausted your own list of friends.  Also, are you going to have any panels or guests are your convention?  These events will all have to be scheduled and costs of any guests will have to factored into the costs of the con so that you don’t go broke putting on the event.

Now that you have all your events in place and your schedule drawn up you will need to advertise your event.  Traditional print advertising works but can be expensive.  You will have to do some of that but target gaming and comic shops with posters.  Set up a web page, Facebook groups and e-mail newsletters that you can keep people updated with.  You can run polls and get feedback from potential attendees of what they would like to see at your con.  After the event is over you can get feedback on how things went so you can start planning next year’s event. 

Again, as I said, I have never run or organized a convention but these are the things that I think I would do if I were going to do it.  Anybody have any other suggestions, pointers? Is there anyone out here on the East Coast that is planning an event?

It means that I realized that I was feeling out of my depth on how to run a game at that high of a level.  Now some (or most) of you might snicker at that but for the most part, none of the games I have played in as either a player or a DM have made their way to this height in levels.  Usually a game peters out by the time the characters hit 5th or 6th levels.  I have been gaming for over 25 years and I can count the number of campaigns that I have been involved in that have gone over the double digit mark in levels on 1 hand with fingers left over.

So, what’s the big deal, you might ask?  You just throw higher powered monsters at the party and move on, right?  While that might work to a certain extent the issue I have is that the players now have more options available to them that they didn’t have before.  Wizards are flying everywhere;  fighters are being hasted and enlarged and getting many more attacks a round.  Suddenly, there are a lot more variables for the DM to consider.  The issues of which characters perhaps have become unbalanced starts to rear its ugly head as you develop stronger foes to challenge one player only to see a different character go down because they have been over-powered.

When we started this campaign, we said that we would see it through to level 20.  No one in the group in their entire gaming career has taken a character from 1st level to 20th.  The highest level achieved was 12th for one of our players.  For everyone else, this campaign now ranks as their highest level character developed from 1st level.  This is a bit of a saving grace for me as they are learning how to take maximum benefit of their abilities as I figure out how to appropriately challenge them.

I would assume other DM’s have run into this issue before and overcome them.  The Epic rules for 3.x D&D are there for a reason so someone must have figured it out.  For me, I am trying to use more intrigue and character driven stuff while I figure out how to get a handle on the much-more involved combat process.  Let’s hope I figure it out before the next big battle.

It has been  few days since I last wrote so I thought I would update on the preparations for the big gaming marathon that is happening tomorrow which is the big ’season finale’ of our Ptolus campaign – The Night of Dissolution module.  I have been working on prepping for the game (my weak spot as I tend to run on the fly).  It makes me respect those endless preppers who have tons of material ready to go.  Usually our sessions are about 5 hours in length but we’re a chatty group so if we get in 3 hours its a good night.  Tomorrow I am faced with 10 hours to fill and a clear objective to reach the finish line of the module.  How does one plan for that much time?

My first thought was to try to make it a special session so I am providing a meal at the halfway point.  BBQ is a quick way to get a meal into everyone and with disposable plates and such it will be an easier clean-up as well.  All of this gets us back to the table quickly and ensures by ‘banished-for-the-day-wife’ does not come home to a messy house.  Saves everyone cash as well and the interruptions of various delivery guys showing up breaking up the game flow.

Next I decided to move the game out of the basement area we usually play in and around my hopefully large enough kitchen table.  I am hoping this will keep the side conversations at a minimum as people feel a little less relaxed but more focused on the maps and such.  The seats are padded and quite comfortable so hopefully we can make it work.

With the extraneous parts of the gaming experience settled I then had to look at what I needed to do to actually run  the game.  As I said, I am a horrible at game prep as I am a storyteller, character player so I play fast and loose most of the time relying on my imagination and ability to think on my feet to get me through most sessions.  A cursory look at the module that I run is usually the best that I do for prep.

So far, I have read through the module twice and have taken the pdf of the sections of the module we still have left to run and printed out the sheets that had significant monsters and NPCs.  I cut these out and put them on colour coded index cards to make them easy to distinguish as I run on the fly.  I used red for enemies and green for NPCs.  Hopefully this will cut down on the page flipping during key scenes/fights.

With my ‘bad guys and allies’ ready I have been also working throughout the week on my secret project to make the finale something special.  My wife is the ‘crafty’ person in the house so her knowledge has been helpful.  I’m keeping things vague here as I don’t want my players to read too much before tomorrow.  I’ll post some pictures after the event so you can see what I was working on.  I had to scale back a bit on my grand plan due to time and skill constraints but I still think it will work out okay.

Today, I have to do the grocery shopping for the BBQ; look for some special miniatures for key villians the party will face tomorrow; get some more supplies to finish the special project; finish the special project and; level up the party’s NPC cleric.  Tomorrow morning, I have to get all the burgers made up and ready to cook so that we can just break; cook and eat in relatively quick order.  I also have to get all my necessary gaming supplies upstairs so they are on hand for easy access.  All in all its going to be a busy 24 hours as we launch into the game at 1pm Atlantic time tomorrow. 

To make things extra interesting, there is a huge all day outdoor concert going on featuring the Eagles which is going to draw about 80,000 people which almost equals the population of the city.  Needless to say I expect traffic today and tomorrow to be a nightmare.

I had planned on the next post on Hacking 3.5 to be about various feats and skill changes our group could make as we look to fresh up 3.5 for continued play.  However, on Friday something came up during our session that made me stop and look at the bigger picture of the game.  It occurred to me as we were discussing making possible house rules that we were approaching the game from totally different viewpoints BUT all felt that everyone was viewing the game the same as we did.  Confused?  Let me explain. 

Our knight player, Kevin, in his never-ending quest to improve the playability of his character was campaigning to use more feats in the game.  Essentially, he wanted to open up the door to just about any feat published by WotC and give everyone a feat per level while the fighter would keep his bonus feats.  He argued that this would allow for more variety because people would stop remaking the same character over and over because they HAD to have certain feats in order to maximize effectiveness.  He argued people would be encouraged to try different stuff because they could cover the necessary stuff and then add things for flavour.

It was at this point that I started to see the player motivations coming through that I hadn’t really considered as a factor in house rule designing.  As a seasoned DM I have tried to consider my player types when designing and running adventures.  For an excellent primer on character types all DM’s should read Robin’s Laws of Good Gamemastering from Steve Jackson Games.  It’s out of print but the pdf is available for a decent price.  For a good series of posts examining these Laws check out the ChattyDM’s 5-Part series on Robin’s Laws.

Once we realized that we were arguing from different perspectives but assuming the others were in basic agreement with us we shelved the talk of specific house rules and began looking at what is what that we enjoyed most about gaming.  I started asking questions like, "Do you enjoy levelling up?  Why do you enjoy it?  What do you want most out of a session?" 

What I found out was that Kevin, the knight player, wanted to see progression in his character to a point of mastery.  He also wanted to be a hero and do heroic cool things.  He said that he is an ordinary guy everyday so he doesn’t want to be one in his gaming. 

Denis, who plays a myraid of characters, likes the core rules because he knows them well and doesn’t want to have to learn anything else because it takes him out of the game.  He likes to focus on his character first and foremost but likes the story as well. Having to think about how to do a mechanic takes his away from the story and his character’s place in it.

Darren, our elder statesman and resident rogue ‘negotiator’, doesn’t see the need for much alteration and approaches the game from a computer programmer viewpoint.  Try a rule and see if you can push it until it breaks.  He seems to play fast and loose with the rules when he DMs but always to service the story.  Usually the story will help him flesh out his character from its initial concept.

Our other usual player, Todd, who plays the wizard, was not able to make it to the session so we didn’t have his input on the subject. 

 If you aren’t sure what type of player you can take a quiz on it HERE.  Several of our group took it and felt that the results were pretty accurate but your mileage may vary.

What does all this boil down to?  I think for our group it was a reminder that although we share a passion for gaming and enjoy getting together, we all look for slightly different things when we finally sit at the table.  As the DM, I need to put those motivations first and foremost in my mind not only when designing adventures but also when choosing the setting, house rules, gaming times, etc. One’s philosophy is the lens through which we view the world and as a DM you have to know how each player is going to view your gaming world through their lens.

The group has decided that we are going to have a full day session to serve as a season finale of our Ptolus campaign.  If I time things properly we can get to this by next weekend (August 2nd).  So, the plan is to make this an event.  I have shuffled the wife and daughter off for the afternoon and early evening to avoid distractions.  I am planning a suppertime BBQ (burgers and hot dogs with potato salad) which will allow for easy cooking/cleanup and then back to gaming quickly.  So, the event is prepared now I must prepare the session to make it something worthwhile.

The season finale of our campaign is going to be the end of the Night of Dissolution (NoD) module from Malhavoc Press which we have been running since we ran out of the adventures in the Big Book (BB).  The party just crested 9th level so I am looking to make sure that the module is challenging enough but that they can achieve success after some tense moments. 

Usually I use my Tact-Tiles for mapping.  These are great for large maps but the company is no longer in business so you can’t buy them new.  You can try second hand or go the do-it-yourself route.  For this session I have decided to do something a little different.  For those of you who aren’t my players, read on.  Players, please stay out.

My plan is to built a scale model of the room where the Final Ritual takes place.  My players are quite visual and I think this will be a fun thing for them to see.  I started construction last night in the wee hours of the morning and at 3:30 had a rough looking scale model.  Just for the record, it is not a good idea to do this work in the wee hours of the morning when you have an 18-month old daughter who wants to brighten your day at 7am.

Today, I will finish some stairways and side flourishes before I spray paint it black to cover up all the tape and other imperfections.  I’m going to take pictures of the process and will post them here so you can see how I did it.  I am not a crafty guy so the underpinnings look a little rough but black spray paint will cure all.

After painting I will need to redraw the gridlines for combat purposes, install the double dias altar on the second level along with the tanks and tubing.  The bleeding hand level needs the big hand that bleeds and a custom miniature job for the big villian. 

I am making a checklist of figures I need to represent the bad guys and will be heading out to the gaming stores to see if I can find some that match or are close that I can mod.  If anyone has some of the legwork done on minis for this encounter and wants to post the mini # and set, I’d be eternally grateful.

It’s a good thing that I am on my summer holidays because I can see this thing taking up a lot of time to complete!   I think that it will be worth it to see the players’ reaction to the big finale scene and I am having fun putting the model together.  More to come!

Now that our group is sticking with the 3.5 ruleset we are faced with the task of figuring out what hacks/tweaks/changes we will make to freshen it up.  So far we are looking at Monte Cook’s Book of Experimental Might I and Book of Experimental Might II from Malhavoc Press as well as the new Pathfinder RPG from Paizo.  The biggest issue is to help the melee types (mostly our group Knight) to have more to do in a round especially since he was the biggest supporter of a change to 4e.

When deciding to hack 3.5 the questions most on our minds were: what needs to be freshened up and what is broken in our opinion?  Foremost on our knight’s player’s mind was that he had little to do in a round other than swing his sword and absorb damage.  He also found that he was absorbing a lot of damage for himself so he had little chance to use his abilities to absorb damage for others negating much of his classes’ special abilities.

From this we decided to look for some other alternatives to the hit point system other than Healing Surges (I really don’t like that system.  Sorry 4e lovers!).  There are many alternative HP systems out there but I do like the options presented in the first Book of Experimental Might.  The idea of the Grace Points being similar to 4e HP in that it regenerates fairly quickly (1 per minute) while the rest of your hit points working like the traditional hit points (1 per day) called Health Points. Healing magic restores grace points first so that your fatigue and superficial wounds restore faster than the deeper wounds. 

In the Book of Experimental Might II, the idea of Grace Points is expanded to allow PCs to burn them to do extra maneuvers.  This gives more flexibility and does add to the options that PCs have when in combat which might help our fighter but it doesn’t seem enough by itself.

Finally, the Pathfinder RPG seems to offer some interesting changes to the standard hitpoint rules.  However, these are all based on beefing up first level characters and since we are headed to 9th level next session they really don’t offer a lot of help at this point unless we retcon them. 

Right now we are using at least half of maximum per level and bleeding to the PC’s Constitution score as a way to give a little extra but that does not address the need to rest up between encounters which has been the knock to 3.x edition.  I am leaning towards employing the Grace/Health model at this point.  What are some of the alternative Hit Point systems out there that others have used?

In Part II, I’ll take a look at Feats and Skills to see if there are some answers for our wayward Knight lack of round to round activity.  In Part III, I’ll look at the other house rules we are considering adding to spice good old 3.5e.  Have a house rule suggestion that has worked really well for your group?  Have some suggestions on how to get that knight some more round to round action?  Feel free to post it in the comments.

One thing that I always struggle with as a DM is to build the right amount of frustration to challenge.  I think we have reached the point tonight where I need to payoff some of the trials and tribulations the party has gone through and reward them for their hard work.  The party is on the cusp of 9th level which for us is a rare feat since our campaigns usually stall out around 4th-5th.

So, a big showdown between the Runic Street Boys and the Temple of the Ebon Hand cultists tonight.  Let’s get ready to rumble!