You push your way shoulder-first through the packed cobblestone streets, your minds and mouths a touch weary from haggling. It’s been a successful venture, and it’s time to make your way back to the inn. The crowd parts suddenly in front of you, and a man crashes into one of your party. Both tumble to the ground, but the entanglement is brief. The man leaps up, bows his apology, and continues to run. As your party member dusts himself off, he realizes that he is a bit lighter than before.

And here you thought you were only to be robbed by the merchants!

The thief leaves a wake of staggering people as he makes his retreat. Act quickly or say farewell to the item he stole.

Synopsis: The PCs must chase a cutpurse through the streets and over the roofs of the city in order to recover their possessions.  This requires street savvy as well as physical skill to keep up with the thief and spot their belongings.

Goal: Make your way to the thief through the crowded winding streets of the city before he can get away, retrieving your stolen items in the process.

Complexity: 2 (6 successes before 3 failures).

Wrapping up

Failure in this skill challenge could lead to the party having the stolen item placed at the scene of a crime. They might also see the item in the employ of one of their enemies…

Standard Checkmate

The Standard Checkmate scenario is pretty easy to set up. You need a somewhat vulnerable King, probably a higher-level Skirmisher or Controller with a Leader subtype and then a bunch of baddies that won’t stay down. The normal enemy subtypes aren’t as important as the King’s. There are several options for how to justify unstoppable enemies.The first one is your basic unending wave scenario. Every round, two or three new baddies will show up to replace the ones the PCs wiped out. Alternatively, you could make the support enemies unkillable or at least seemingly so – the Living Forgotten Realms module CORE1-5 “Touched by Darkness” does this very well, so if you have access to that adventure, see Encounter 5.

It might even be as simple as placing entirely too many enemies on the field and making it obvious that they’re not minions. In any event, you want to cue to your players that this fight is not ‘balanced’ in the conventional sense – they will get overwhelmed if they don’t figure out the trick.Keep the King pretty low-key and inoffensive until the PCs figure out that there’s something terribly, terribly wrong.

The King should also have an invisibility or teleportation trick to avoid getting accidentally killed before the secret is let out. After the PCs learn the gig, the King should fall in maybe two to three rounds and the rest of the troops surrender, die, run away, etc.

Pacifist Checkmate

The King’s cronies are unwilling or somehow innocent. The PCs don’t actually want to harm them. As a DM, you give more experience for a live enemy than a dead or injured one.

To set up a good Pacifist Checkmate fight, you need minions, and I mean LOTS of minions. In fact, nearly the entire opposition team should be minions, so you’re looking at maybe 4-5 enemies per PC. This serves several purposes – first, minions are worth fewer experience points than a ‘normal’ monster so it’s less tempting to just go nuts and kill ‘em all, especially if your PCs know beforehand that they’re not supposed to, either for story or XP/treasure reasons. Second, scads of minions on the field that can take opportunity attacks but are themselves verboten slow your PCs’ movement down and give the King lots of places to take cover from your PCs’ ranged and area attacks. Third, if the King or his non-minion buddies are willing to take down a few innocents to damage the PCs, the players can get very emotionally invested – those are innocents being killed! Or if nothing else, it’s XP lost.

The minions should not hesitate to take attacks against nearby PCs – their lives or loved ones are on the line! – but will probably not be aggressive or move much if no PCs are nearby. They’re essentially mobile terrain features. The King here is either a Skirmisher or a Lurker – once the PCs get to him, he needs to drop. The challenge is not so much defeating him as it is getting to him “safely.” He should try to remain adjacent to at least one or two minions at all times to discourage big AoEs and keep cover/concealment penalties. Smart PCs will use Bull Rush, Grab, Cause Fear or similar non-damaging slide/push/pull effects to clear a path to the King.

Particularly sadistic DMs can include controllers with slow effects, but avoid immobilize. The PCs do have to be able to move to get to the King and you don’t want them to get so frustrated that they turn it into a Rout. Said Controllers may also launch their own AoEs, knocking out a couple minions in the process just to raise player ire. Consider not penalizing the players for minions killed by ‘friendly’ fire.

Stalemate

The PCs simply aren’t powerful enough to stop the King. They don’t have the magic weapon to pierce his armor or he regenerates until you destroy his phylactery or something. Perhaps the PCs would be out of their jurisdiction or social rank to hurt him. All they can do is corner the King, keeping him temporarily contained (grabbed, immobilized, prone, etc) until the cavalry arrives. The PCs should be star of the adventure and this is kind of a deus ex machina, so I wouldn’t use it often. It is, however, a great way to set up a recurring or future villain that the PCs can take on properly at some later time.

The Stalemate is a very different animal from its other Checkmate siblings in that it’s best run as a Solo fight with very few if any side baddies. Grab a relevant Solo Soldier and crank it up two or three levels so that it’s clearly out of the PCs’ abilities*. You’ve at least now created a grind-fest that the PCs will want to avoid. You can also ‘put the fear of god in them’ by giving the King a high-damaging Melee or Close attack with a 5 recharge, but avoid ranged attacks – the PCs need to be able to retreat and regroup somewhere relatively safe. The PCs might be able to simply Rout the battle if they roll well or have some really fantastic power (Grasp of the Grave, I’m looking at you) but more than likely the panic and/or grind factor will convince them to do something more interesting. Finally, drop the King’s save bonus to at least -2. Yes, negative 2; Teach them that status conditions are actually good for this Solo, but not at first. They need to figure that part out.

The Endgame

Finally, determine what the endgame is. Do the PCs simply restrain the King? If so, make sure they have some kind of item that lets them overcome the King’s high defenses to do so. Also, there must a be condition progression of some sort. For instance, their +6 handcuffs of Citizen’s Arrest only work if the King is Helpless, so the PCs have to figure out on their own how to get him to Helpless. Preferably, Helpless should be the eventual outcome of first being Prone and then maybe Grabbed or Dazed or something. Terrain powers are also important since some parties don’t have a lot of status-inflicting capability.

Make sure there is stuff in the environment for the PCs to use (long rugs, falling rocks, obscenely loud horns, whatever) to inflict conditions if they can’t do so naturally. A quicker way is just to put out some kind of hazard or trap that the PCs have to maneuver the King into to defeat him – pits, bodies of water and lava are standard tropes here. They still might need toys to help them move the King around, or Slow him or what have you, but the progression idea is already built in – you can only push him 2 or 3 squares at a time at best. Once the endgame trigger occurs, it’s Game Over for the King, regardless of HP.

An optimized low Heroic Tier weapon fighter for this purpose has an attack bonus of about 1/2 level +8 (+4 stat, +3 weapon, +1 feat), a low Heroic tier implement fighter is around 1/2 level + 6 (+4 stat, +1 implement, +1 feat). Aim for hits on the King by this character on rolls of 15 or higher.

I’ve been gaming for a long time.  Just a touch over two decades, which makes me a bit old.  I never really saw the point of having music at the table, but over the last year I’ve mad a concerted effort.  There’s just something about 4e that makes you want to go all out on the “production” of your game.  You’ve set out the dungeon tiles, you have the minis, why not add the soundtrack, right?

I figured it was worth the experiment and after a few sessions I haven’t turned back.  Music creates great ambiance for your game.  The main obstacles for you as the GM are keeping control of the music (as opposed to the music holding the leash) and what do you play?  I’ll talk about the former first and over the month I’ll make recommendations for how to get playlists at the table.

Setting up

Basic tips for setting up your music:

• Fill the room with sound. For the best effect, you want music at a volume where it can be a part of the experience.  Too loud, and you drown out the conversations that need to occur, but too soft and your ambiance is just white noise –meaningless at best, a low-pitched distraction at worst.  You need music that won’t go away the second people start gabbing.
• Get speakers. I know it’s tempting to just play off your laptop, but the acoustics are horrible.  It’s impossible to get it set up at room-filling volume without drowning out your players. Since the music will be right there with you, your players will constantly be competing with it for you to hear them.  Get speakers.
• Put the speakers under the table. This is a trick that I found after much experimentation.  It lets you fill the room, but since the sound is under the table, lets you and your players easily converse while the music is at a considerable volume.  Since speakers with decent subwoofers are cheap these days, get a set of those and get a little bass that the players can feel as well.
• Keep your music at hand. I really don’t suggest using an ipod or other mp3 if you can help it –it’s a little too fiddly.  A computer and music software is perfect.  You can set up playlists, set up shuffling of the playlist songs, even set up layered soundscapes (with the help of a program called Softrope which I will cover later).  You don’t ever want to Spend  several minutes tinkering around with your music selection.  Have a game plan of what you want to use beforehand, so it’s quick and fluid.
• Keep it varied. The only bad thing I can say about music is this:  If you have a weekly game, you and your players are going to get bored of the same old stuff.  I think that the help of the lists I’ll share will help build a library for you, but don’t expect to get a few CDs and just use them over and over, unless you pride yourself on a high player suicide rate.  Easy ways to keep the music varied is to solicit suggestions from your players.  My players have gotten some great stuff into the game, stuff  I never would have thought of.  Don’t take the burden of this on yourself.  Get players involved in the music selection, and get them to bring in the stuff they suggest.  There’s no reason you have to go broke (or spend a ton of time on torrent sites for you really naughty people out there ) trying to keep a wide music selection.  Make it a group effort.
• Keep it familiar. I love giving contradictory advice.  What I’m saying here though is that familiarity can work for you.  If you have one song that is for a recurring villain, or a song that’s attached to a town or an event…you can evoke these things without having to say a word.  Players can know parts of the game world through not only your descriptions, but with sounds and songs.  It’s powerful.  If you get into this I suggest you make short playlists appropraitely labelled so you can push one button quickly to evoke the desired place or person.

Next Friday we’re going to look at some software that can help you out, and then…playlists.  A lot of music will be discussed.

Let me know what you want to see, and share your tips for using music in your 4e games here!

Aware of the dangers, you foolishly seek entry into Ishaarl’s demense and expect to exit. Protected by the field of magical force that allows the galleons to traverse the volcanic sea, fortune for a time blows a gentle and quiet wind in the ship’s mast. In your second day of travel, fortune’s wind grows still.

The captain cries orders to his men that are half-lost in the hissing and battering of lava waves against the galleon’s wardings. You steady yourself, seeing where you can assist in the sudden chaos. For moments all sense is lost, the ship whirling and bucking through the tides. All anyone can do is clutch the railings, and pray as the captain had warned you previously for the swift coming of death.

The chaos ebbs. You look up and see a creature of flame in the distance, hip deep in lava. It wades through fire to cross the distance between it and your companions.

The burning lord rises.

Synopsis: The players are crossing the Flaming Sea and must face the gargantuan fire elemental Irshaal.  They must defeat or evade the burning lord!

Encounter level: PC Level+3 (This Skill challenge is designed for high paragon/epic tier characters)

Complexity: See Goal, below.

Goal: Destroy the Fire Elemental before you ship is consumed in flames. You are attempting to get ten successes (or six escape successes) against the fire elemental before the fire elemental gets ten successes against your ship.

The Battle

In this skill challenge, all PCs will make their checks, and then Irshaal will make his attack.  Play will continue this way until the skill challenge is defeated.

The Ship “The Dead Forge”

Crimson galleons are ships specially prepared to cross the Flaming Sea. They are regular wood and sails galleons that possess a “heart”. A Crimson galleon’s heart generates a magical forcefield that encircles the ship and protects it from the sea’s destructive nature.

In this encounter the PCs will be aboard the ship attempting to evade or defeat Ishaarl. PCs can use their own powers to fight the elemental, but also have access to many features in the ship that can aid them.

Staging: Make sure that the PCs are aware of the various components of the ship, detailed below. The challenge isn’t for them to discover what the ship can do. The challenge is using the ship to the player’s advantage.

Skill Used:

The skills used will in part be based on where on the ship the characters are.  It is assumed that the PCs are on the upper deck.

Movement

To get from one place to another on the ships in this turbulent situation is difficult.  When moving from one portion of the ship to another, a PC must make an Acrobatics (moderate DC) or Athletics (moderate DC) check.  If the check is failed, the player gets tied up and is unable to make it to the desired location.

The Heart

Below deck, in the center of the ship is a small room where the heart of the Dead Forge lives. As the ship’s hull takes damage, the forcefield will gradually lose power, leaving the ship to quickly burn up in the sea.

A player can spend his turn to reach the heart (using the rules for movement below). He can refuel the heart by using his own life force or arcane/divine powers.

Feeding the Heart

Expending an arcane or divine daily power deprives Ishaarl of one success.
Expending three healing surges deprives Ishaarl of one success.

Skills Used:

Arcana (hard DC):  With magical sight you peer deep into the heart.  You divine its true nature, making your contribution to it more efficient.  When feeding the heart, you can deprive Ishaarl of one additional success. If this check fails you must lose a healing surge.

Religion (hard DC): You contact the heart’s essence and the divine simultaneously. The instant of connection generates a tremendous amount of energy from just a tiny, divine spark.  you may expend a Channel Divinity encounter power instead of a divine daily power when feeding the heart. If this check fails you lose a channel divinity power with no effect gained.

Ice Cannons

Another magical construct aboard the Dead Forge, the ship’s ice cannons are mounted on the port and starboard hulls, meant to deal with mephit hordes and other creatures known to waylay ships making the hazardous crossing.

Characters can make a shot with an ice cannon by moving under the deck (using the rules for movement) and manning the ice cannons.

Making a successful shot with an ice cannon requires making a basic ranged attack against AC (16 + average PC Level) and scores one success for the PCs. A critical hit counts as two successes.

Skills Used:

Distracting Shot (Insight, moderate DC, maximum two successes):  You shoot a burst of ice to get the burning lord’s attention somewhere else temporarily.  Ishaarl suffers a -4 to his next attack.

Vitals Shot (Perception, hard DC): Even a creature of flame has weak points.  You aim for Ishaarl’s ruby eyes.  Make a basic ranged attack against AC (16 + average PC Level).  If this attack succeeds, you score two successes against Ishaarl.

Calm the Tide (Nature, moderate DC): Instead of attacking Ishaarl, you shoot the the ice cannon at the lava below.  Temporarily cooling it, even for a fraction of a second, makes traversal a bit easier for a time.  +2 to the next Navigation check.

The Helm

The ship is normally navigated by the captain, but a successful Diplomacy (hard DC + 4) or Intimidate (hard DC +4) check can convince the captain to give up command of the helm temporarily (2 rounds) to a PC.  Moving to the helm require movement checks as normal. The PC at the helm can make Navigation checks, detailed below.

The Captain, Ritom Kiv

The duergar Ritom Kiv has encountered Irshaal before.  His body bears the burns and scars from that encounter.  Just barely managing to escape in an ash-skiff, he survived his crew and seeks revenge on Irshaal.  If PCs do not take control of navigation, Ritom will take direction from them on what navigation checks to make each turn.  He will ignore any orders to flee, choosing to take a pass action instead.  If Irshaal ever scores 7 or more successes against the ship, Ritom will steer the ship right at the elemental, on a suicide pass.

Staging:  As the battle escalates, you want to play up Ritom’s rising madness.  As the ship takes more damage, Ritom becomes more consumed with battle lust and becomes more and more unhinged.  If Ritom takes the ship on a suicide pass, you can also stage a combat with the captainand his crew versus the PCs.  The PCs will have eight combat turns to defeat or pacify them to have time to steer the ship on a new course.

Navigation:

All navigation checks are Dexterity checks.  The additional numbers on each check is what Ritom needs to roll if he is in control of the ship. Navigation successes do not count toward total successes against Irshaal.

Flee (hard DC) (N/A): you seek to do the impossible –escape from the grasp of the burning lord. With clever navigation, you might be the first.  If successful, you earn an escape success and raise the DC for the next flee check by one.  If the check is failed, Irshaal gets a +2 to his next attack.

Evasive Actions (moderate DC) (11): Escaping is not an option, but you buy yourself some time to come up with a suitable attack. Irshaal gets a -4 to his next attack.  If this check is failed, all checks for PCs on the ship suffer a -2 next round.

Far Pass (moderate DC) (11): The ship circles the fire elemental, setting up shots from the ice cannons.  PCs may use powers against the elemental with a range of 20 squares or more.  If this check is failed, Irshaal gets a +1 on his next attack against the PCs.

Close Pass (moderate DC) (11): you risk a bit more, but seek to gain more in your assaults against Irshaal.  PCs may use powers against Irshaal with a range of 10 squares or more.  +2 to ice cannon attacks.  If this check is failed, Irshaal gets +2 on his next attack.

Suicide Pass (automatic three successes) (NA): You drive the ship into the god of the flaming sea, hoping your end will bring his.  PCs can use any powers they have.  Make 1 round of attacks, and then the Dead Forge and everyone aboard is incinerated, whether the flame elemental is destroyed or not.  The forcefield is immediately overwhelmed and the ship is immediately burnt to nothing in the lava.

The Crow’s Nest

The crow’s nest allows a PC to get a clearer view of the battle. A character in the crow’s nest can, on his turn, make Perception (hard DC) to provide a bonus success to any other PC’s successful action taken.

The crow’s nest is also close to the shield’s borders , and precarious position in general. Any time the ship is hit by Ishaarl, a PC in the crow’s nest must make an Athletics check (hard DC) or be tossed out of the crow’s nest.  The PC takes 3d10 falling damage and suffers a -2 on his next movement check.

Upper Deck

The middle of the ship is where the crewmen are running around frantically trying to keep the ship in order.

PCs can use their powers most easily from this location.

Skills used:

Diplomacy (moderate DC): “Did you think this was a recreation in the Flaming Sea?  Fight men, fight for your lives and souls!” +2 to the next round of checks.

Thievery (hard DC, maximum two successes): Quick jury-rigging of the masts optimizes them to catch the rapidly changing thermal winds more easily.  Adds a permanent +1 to Navigation checks.

Powers

Players may wish to use powers to assault Irshaal.  The defenses for Irshaal are:

AC (16 + PC Level)
Fort (18 + PC Level)
Reflex (10 + PC Level)
Will (16 + PC Level)

Forced movement will result in a penalty to Irshaal’s next attack equal to half the number of squares moved, rounding down.
Any power with the cold or psychic keyword adds 10 to the damage rolled against the fire elemental.
Irshaal is immune to attacks with the fire keyword.

Damaging Irshaal

If a PC inflicts 40 damage in one attack (or one round of attacks) he scores one success against Irshaal.
If a PC deals 80 damage or more in one attack (or one round of attacks) he scores two success against Irshaal.

Ishaarl

The burning Lord has several methods of attacking the ship. He can make one attack each round.  The number in parenthesis is what he needs to successfully land each attack.

Lava Tide (8): Irshaal pounds his fist into the sea, battering the Dead forge’s shield with lava.  Counts as one success. Each PC takes 2d6+8 damage on a successful attack.

Fire Breath (12): Irshaal exhales and releases a searing flame gout.  The force field sparks and crackles under the assault. Counts as two successes, and each PC takes 3d6+8 damage.

Fist of the Fire God (16): Irshaal rakes the ship fiery claws.  Counts as 1d6 successes. Each PC takes 3d6+8 damage and ongoing 20 damage (save ends).

Success (Escape): You can tell your descendants the epic tale of how you tricked and evaded the fire god Irshaal!  The captain does not seem happy, but you’ll accept keeping your life for one more day.

Success (Defeat): You have defeated Irshaal!  But is the burning lord ever defeated?  He will rest for a long time, that’s certain.

Failure: As the Dead Forge’s force field fades, you and your companions flee to the ash-skiffs.  Powered by miniature hearts, they allow you to sail away while Irshaal savors the burning of the crimson galleon you fled.  you arrive at the shores alive but fatigued from the fire and ash.  You begin your next encounter weakened (save ends).

(Special Thanks to Mike at Sly Flourish for getting me going on this. )

“The best condition to put on your enemy is dead. The sooner you figure that out, the better.”

Now I’ll give that forum member the benefit of the doubt that he (or she) wasn’t intentionally being rude, simply stating a point.  The best thing to do to an enemy in D&D (or many RPGs for that matter) is just straight out damage, because a dead enemy is no longer a threat.  When everything is dead, you have a victory condition known as….

Rout

Rout is  the baseline.  This is ‘defeat all enemies!’ Note that it’s “defeat” not “kill.”   Discussions about the 4E “grindspace” have talked this topic to death (pun intended), so I’ll just skim it here for review and then move on.  Even if the objective is to take out every last badguy on the field, they don’t all have to die.  They can be knocked out.  They can surrender.  They can run.  They can turn traitor or attempt to bargain for their survival.  In this sense, a defeated enemy is one who is no longer attacking you, whether they’re alive or dead.  Most of the time, though, Routed enemies are simply out of HP.

The more I thought about, the more I agreed with him; the only reason you stun, immobilize, daze, push or do anything other than damage an opponent is to prevent it from damaging you while you try to damage it.  In that light, the whole thing seems very underwhelming, eh?  Why not just do more damage?

So that train of thought came onto the platform and got pointed down another set of tracks.  Why wouldn’t I want to deal more damage?  Is a push, pull, stun or restrain meaningful on its own?  Sure, you may have roleplaying reasons to not kill your enemy.  Maybe he’s worth more money to you dead than alive.  Maybe she’s royalty or should receive a fair trial in the local justice system.  Heck, maybe he’s your own family!  But mechanically speaking, what incentive do I have to use a less-damaging power or inflict a condition for its own sake?

Enter Fire Emblem.  For those who are not familiar, Fire Emblem is a highly-acclaimed series of tactical RPGs that has spanned the entire lifetime of the Nintendo console line.   One of the things that makes Fire Emblem unique among strategy RPGs are the Victory Conditions –what you need to do to win any particular battle.  Not all battles are simply ‘defeat all enemies.’  There are in fact a wide range of ways that the game measures combat success, many of which fit perfectly well into  4th Edition D&D.  In this series of articles, we will be offering to you various battlefield victory conditions to add variety to your combat encounters and make your PC’s Ranger actually decide that Twin Strike might not be the best option for once.

But here’s the thing:  Like real-life, there are a lot of potential gamers but very few GMs. I am excited at the response as one of the “first generation” of gamemasters on the wave, but I can’t help but think…we need more games.  People want to play, but few people are actually running games.  I’d love to run twenty games for everyone, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

So here it is, a contest:

Pitch  a 4e game you want to run in the comments below.  I have two invites (one of my own, and one pledged by the charitable and awesome JesterOC).  We will look at the best pitches and select the two people with the coolest pitches to receive an invite.

UPDATE: We have four five invites available, so we can have four winners! Thanks to Quinn Conklin and the fine folks over at Softrope !  Also, Critical Hits has pledged another!

Once your invite comes through, we’ll get you set up on a wave with instructions on how to get adjusted, and start up a GM’s “support wave” where we can discuss ideas and implementation.  We’ll ensure that you have players.  And then you are free to run a great game on the next big thing in terms of platforms.

The contest will run until Friday, November 6th with winner’s announced on Tuesday, November 10th.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who’s entered thus far, but due to some new pledges and interest, we want to extend the contest just a little longer.  Wednesday, November 11th is the last day to submit and Friday, November 15th is the announcement day.

Keep your pitches brief!  Preferably a pitch will be 100 words or less.  Wow us with the high level concept, don’t give us every detail.  And remember: 4e DnD is the game.  This won’t be the thread to pitch your Gumshoe game (though I love it so).

So You Think You Can Judge?

Do you also want to see more games on wave?  You can help by pledging an invite.  If you’re interested, please use the ‘Contact Us’ form on the site and pledge an invite!  We’ll open up one more potential winner with each invite.  More games equals more choice equals more fun.  We appreciate your help!

Already on the Wave and Want to Run a Game?

You might be on the Wave and already thinking about doing this yourself.  We don’t want to leave you out.  The plan is to make a support wave where we can give you any info or tips to get a game started and run.  Use the Contact Us form and drop us your wave address and we’ll get a hold of you.

The Warlock

Hellish Rebuke

The night had not gone well for Jinx. His diabolical plans dashed to pieces by that do-good, diminutive ranger of the city. With Dok’s blades pressed to his gut (for he couldn’t quite reach Jinx’s neck), the encounter had ended. Like so many times before, Dok Tortran had saved the day. But like so many times before, Jinx would live to scheme another day.

“You may have won the battle, wee one. But the war rages on!” Jinx shouted and waved his hand. The rope that held a cage of nuns and orphans above a pool of liquid magma caught flame and burned most of the way through. The cord unraveled slightly, the cage dipped, the innocents screamed, and an unholy red glow smoldered on the smoking strands.

“You won’t get away with this, Jinx.” Dok shouted and pressed his blades forward for the kill. But the look in Jinx’s eyes made him hesitate.

The warlock waved his finger at the halfing. Each word passed slowly from his lips, like an adult would chastise a child. “Don’t be so hasty. My blood fuels the fire. Strike me down and flames burn the rope through. Let me go and the devilry will leave with me.”

Dok backed away and Jinx slid across the wall towards the exit.

Just as he was about to leave, Jinx grabbed the frame of the exit with one hand and spun around. “Do you know what makes you weak, halfing?”

“Are you going to make another short joke?”

“Oh no. Your height is a challenge, but not your greatest flaw. Your weakness is your inability to make sacrifices. This deadly game could have ended tonight, but now it goes on.” Jinx turned back and slammed the door without removing his hand from the frame.

The warlock let out a yelp of pain as he withdrew his injured hand. The flames erupted on the rope once more and burned through.

“Gods save my poor little body,” Dok muttered as he leapt down the pit after the plummeting cage.

With the encounter over and Dok Tortran waiting to take the evil Jinx into custody, the warlock made one last gambit and cast Hellish Rebuke on the rope holding the cage. While the first blast wasn’t enough to break the thick binding, the rope would certainly not withstand another blast of fire. The at-will deals additional damage if Jinx is damaged from the time he casts Hellish Rebuke to the end of his next turn. He now has more than enough time to make his escape without fearing Dok’s blades.

Dok holds his action to see what Jinx will do. Jinx takes a move to leave the room, gives a villainous monologue, and attacks his own hand with the door, dealing a slight amount of damage to himself and a large amount of fire damage to an already burning rope.

Unfortunately for Dok Tortran, I can’t think of an at-will that would keep the cage from falling or preserve him from burning up in the magma. This could be the end of our heroic halfling.

Starting a Game

How to get a game started?  Pretty easy.  There’s already a ton of gamers on wave, so the process is simple.  Find the public wave “An Index of Wave-borne RPGs” and announce your game.  After you do that, invite some people.  Encourage them to invite people. You may consider making your wave public so people can stumble into it.  The warning here is that wave has absolutely no access control.  I personally don’t think of it as a problem at this stage, but when wave goes live, you’ll definitely want to think twice before opening a wave up to the general populace.

In general though, treat a wave like a party.  Once you’ve got the “venue” set up, get people over and have them bring people.  Not everyone can play, but you’ll have a built in audience to your wave who you can involve in other ways.  Having an active audience allows you to call in for replacements of people who have likely followed along with your story and can quickly get up to speed.  It also lets you do som interesting audience participation.  More on that later.

Four Waves to Rule Them All

I talked about setting up a “venue”.  What does that entail?  Well, you want to make a folder for the game, and then you will create four waves and place them in the folder.  Keeping any and all of your games compartmentalized like this will preserve your sanity and make overall work a snap.

The four waves you want to create are:

• an OOC (Out Of Character) wave –”Name of your Game OOC”. Here is where you can handle recruitment, character creation, and table talk for your game
• a reference wave  –”Name of Your Game Reference” Here you can place more background on your world and story, any houserules you use…think of it as a “style guide” for your game.
• The main IC (In-Character) wave –”Name of your Game” This is where the meat of your story is going to live.  All in-game posts go here.
• Combat Wave –”Name of your Game Combats”.  If you are using mapboard images, I’d suggest keeping another wave to hold them all.  Just place the title of the fight and the map you are using in a wavelet for each fight, and refer to that for fights in the main wave.

Dice

Let’s get to the crunch.  Any 4e game needs  dice.  Wave allows you to insert gadgets and bots into your waves, and surprise, some intrepid geeks have already built some bots for you.  Personally, I don’t like how bots work in general on wave.  They’re slow.  I attribute this not to the bot writers themselves but to the platform itself.  Wave is sort of buggy, but that’s what beta/preview implies.

What I’m doing at the moment is using invisible castle and having players insert the link  into their posts.  It’s simple, clean and works well.

If you’re dying for a bot though…may I suggest randomleetwenty@appspot.com ?  He’s a pretty cool little bot.

Combat

This is the elephant in the room, isn’t it?  For 4e in particular, where the game assumes a battlemat of some kind, you need to have something to use.  One of my buddies and players, Dan over at Save vs Geek, is working on an incredible gadget, Fighty.  Fighty will let you use Google Maps technology to make a “live” battlemap right in your wave.  We’ll be testing it out in at least one of the games we’re running, but until it is ready for public consumption, let’s assume the following options:

Gridless, pure narrative. I actually have something written up for this, but I cannot disseminate it to you quite yet.  Yes, I am annoying in that way, but please be patient.  You can certainly do this on your own though.  Just make sure the players are cool with it since you can  change the behavior of the rules dramtically. Certain powers can become very good and others, not so much. To keep confusion to a minimum concerning placement and positioning, use the napkin gadget that comes default with wave to draw quick diagrams. Until Fighty is ready for use, this is what I’ll likely be doing.

Numbered grids in Combat Waves. You could insert this into your main wave, but I suggest that you have a separate wave in which you keep all of your battlemaps. Numbers across, letters running down, and you’ve got something you can use.  If you put the map in your IC wave, you will have to keep scrolling up and down to move the combat along.  That is irritating.  If you have a seperate combat wave, you can have two waves up simultaneously (tip: Ctl-click on a wave to open multiples) and then you can track the positions on one wave while tracking the combat narrative in another wave.  Much easier and much less irritating.

At any rate, assume that after combat you are going to clean up all the mechanical “mess”, leaving only story behind.  Feel free to ask whatever is needed to run the combat because it’s easy to clear it out of the way.  No matter which method you use, you should have a narrative thread full of spells cast and swords clashed.  If you use action tags, it will be even easier.

Action Tags

There’s a lot more to post about how to maintain your game, but first I want to mention action tags.  This is a great way to reference mechanical, rules bit of your games in a way that’s easy to transfer into narrative.  Think of an action tag as  embedded “game talk”. Use an action tag by inserting the mechanic bit in a pair of square brackets like so: [Perception:26].

What does this do for you?  Well, it lets you turn that reference from game speak to narrative.  I used this example previously, but I’ll use again in its full context. In “Revenge of the Waves” we had the following:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. [Perception 26]

Which became:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. He sees some unusual markings along the neck of the leader, a strange glyph branded into the flesh. Primus also makes note of the scraps of metal plate adorning his shoulder and intended to be armor of some kind. It is the same brand of metal that the blade is made of.

There’s no need for a seperate post telling the player what they saw — just edit the post in-line!

Returning to combat, action tags are useful as well.

Khalil roars, then releases his frostbreath on the goblins [I'm hitting the goblins in b3, b4, and c4...roll 15,20, and 21 respectively, 10 damage].  He raises his spear and prepares for his next assault.

This becomes:

Khalil roars, then releases his frostbreath on the goblins. Two of the wretches freeze mid-warcry, while the last uses his comrades as shields.  The goblin snarls and brandishes his sword with renewed relish as Khalil raises his spear and prepares for his next assault.

Magical.

Color-coding

Another tip to help you manage the chaos that is wave:  Color code your players text and your own.  Choose a (non-black) color for your DM text, and have each player choose a color for their character.  Whenever you are posting in the in-game wave, each participant uses that color.  Black is the default, non-game color so you can make your action tags black, or people in your audience can quickly comment.  When you go back for maintenance later, you can pretty much eradicate everything in black as soon as you see it.

Pruning

This is the most important thing.  Your game is not going to look great and read well the first time through!  Set aside a time, whether it’s once a scene, once a day, or once a week, and edit out any non-story text.  You can also use this time to clean up grammar or spelling.  Snip snip.

Don’t give any thought to your OOC wave.  That is general gabber and is meant to be noisy.  Focus all your energy on keeping you IC wave nice and free of mechanics cruft.

Schedule

Because a wave is non-linear, setting a posting schedule that works for everyone is much easier.  If someone gets busy and falls behind, you can always leave him in the background in a scene.  He can catch up and insert his posts later.

If you are a late-comer to a scene though, don’t make everything warp around what you’re doing.  It’s your job to fit what you are writing into what is already there.  You need to fit yourself into what everyone else already did, not change what happened entirely.

Since a wave can run like a chatroom as well with it’s live updates, consider scheduling times with the players to chat in realtime to resolve combats or handle dialogues.  That will keep the game moving at a pretty brisk pace.

Audience Participation

Two great things about having extra people that are not playing in your wave are:

• You have possible replacements if a player no longer wants to participate.
• You can illicit comments and votes on story decisions from the audience.

If you want to get crazy, you can let the audience decide an NPC’s reaction to the player’s plea for help, or what’s behind that rock.  The possibilities are endless.

Can I Has Waves?

Those are the tips I have for you now.  I’ll have more for sure.  Tomorrow, I will tell you how you can get a wave invite of your very own. Stay tuned!

Want to speak to me on wave?  quinn (dot) murphy (at) googlewave (dot) com.  I’m mostly harmless.

Special Thanks to the PCs in my “Revenge of the Waves” game, as a game without good players, err…sucks. You’ve kept it fun, and I expect more of the same.

Aaron Broder (Allgeektout)

Asmor (Encounter-a-Day)

Dan Clery (Save vs Geek)

Ethan Duty(At-Will )

Wyatt Salazar (Spirits of Eden)

I’m not here to tell you that it will change everything (it will) or that you should get on immediately (you should).  I’m here to tell you that wave can let you play the most incredible play by post style games you can think of.  Unable to keep a schedule for face to face games, or having difficulties with getting people together in the first place?  Wave is your friend.  Like the thought of a play-by-post or play-by-email 4e game, but can’t reconcile the implementation of such games?  Wave is also your friend in this.  It’s going to change everything (didn’t I say I wasn’t going to say that?)including the way we play.

What’s a Wave?

Let’s start with the most fundamental bit.  What’s a wave?  Is it chat? Is it e-mail?  Is it a wiki?  Is it a forum?

Yes.

Really, if you’re not tuned into the exact nature of what a wave is, do yourself a favor and check this out. I’ll wait.

This is a gaming blog, so let’s fast forward and talk about what a wave can do for your game.  Why is it better than doing a play-by-post game?  What makes it so special?  Why is gamefiend frothing at the mouth?

I’ve no answers for you on the frothing, though last I checked it was some sort of condition.  What makes wave so damn special? That, I can tackle.

I’m running one wave game now (”Revenge of the Waves” if you’re on wave), and looking to start another soon.  Here is what I’ve learned from a few weeks of pretty heavy immersion.

A Wave is Non-Linear, but Sequential

You know how a play-by-post (PbP) runs.  The GM posts something, then players post,  the GM responds, players post.  Even though stories are sequential, a linear medium like a forum or an e-mail or even a chatroom fits like a poorly-tailored jacket on your story’s sequence.  It works, but the shoulders droop, the sleeves are a little too long.  The logistics always involve some basic form of time travel unless you are stalking your thread/game with utmost vigilance. You either have to write in micro clips to let other people hop in, or write large blocks of text to cover every. fricken. contingency.  It makes the process of telling the story a non-fluid affair.  I’m not saying that PbP is bad –I’ve done it and enjoyed it — but it does have its limitations.

Now imagine that when the GM posts, you can post a comment from your character within the scene.  Or when your character talks, the GM can interleave the NPC’s response in shape to your dialog.  The shape of the game is completely different.  You’re no longer looking at call and response.  You have a persistent yet fluid gaming experience.  GMs and PCs can put their responses and actions where it is appropriate instead of where it has to be by the nature of the medium.

It looks something like this:

The blue text is the GM.  The players wrote their posts earlier that day, and I came in and inserting my posts in later.  Imagine that in a play by post.  I would have to do some wrangling of text just to reply, and I could never really get that naturalistic flow that wave allows me so easily to have.

When you tear down the scaffolding and read it later, it reads just like the story you were trying to create.

A Wave is Story Scaffolding

As excited as I get about the non-linear nature of a wave, what really revs me up is this:  A wave is easy to edit. Wonderfully, spectacularly easy.  Double click in a post and select edit, and there you are.  Why is this important?  well, for starters, never forget that the prime goal (past having fun) for a game is to tell a story.  What gets in the way of a story? The rules.  What do we need often to tell a good story?   The rules. A typical PbP is littered with the artifacts of the rules, interspersed between otherwise compelling bits of character dialogue and storytelling.  Wouldn’t it be nice if that could just…disappear?

It can.  I’m going to cover conventions for running your own wave game later, but for now take a look at this:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. [Perception:26]

Standard example of what you might expect to see, correct? But ten seconds in google wave turns that into:

Primus leaps astride the nearest giant and shifts back into his humanoid form. The warforged picks through the giant’s clothes with care, looking for any sign of anything strange or out of the ordinary. He sees some unusual markings along the neck of the leader, a strange glyph branded into the flesh. Primus also makes note of the scraps of metal plate adorning his shoulder and intended to be armor of some kind. It is the same brand of metal that the blade is made of.

I saw the skill the character was trying to use (Hi Asmor) and transformed that into the results of the roll. As a GM, I can go back and interpolate the results of a skill check and transform it into narrative. With active pruning of your scenes, there is no trace of a game, even though you used a game to get to the story.

You can use this “scaffolding” around the structure of your story and tear it away so all that’s left is for people to witness the beauty of your story.

And it gets better.  “What if I want to see something that gets deleted later?”  Wave has a nifty playback feature that lets you examine the history of a wave from beginning to end.  Every wave is a miniature Wayback Machine.

I hate to mash metaphors together, but if you really want to make a strong use of waves, you also need to understand that a wave is a draft.

A Wave is a Draft

How self-referential is that?  Writing a wave is like the writing process itself?  It’s a touch strange but it’s really true. A wave is never “done”.  While you may go back and add an extra e-mail or post on a forum to clarify or add detail, you can’t change what you put out there.  What’s sent was sent, so you better do all your fact-checking and response totally up front, because you cannot change what you did once you hit “send” or “submit”.  If you’ve got a blip, you can change it at any time.  If you can change it at any time, why not make it the best it can be?  If you don’t make it perfect at first, go back and make it better.  If you have all this game rule jargon cluttering up your nice scene, chop it out.

The way that your wave starts is most certainly not the way your wave has to end.  The final product should be a fine piece of story that you and your players created.  You can expect to go through a revision process and strip what doesn’t need to be there.  My players and I refer to the process as pruning, and is basically a semi-regular maintenance.  Waves can get messy, so you must maintain a basic vigilance in making sure they are what you want.  Revise, revise, revise.

Running a Wave Game

“Blah blah blah, gamefiend.  How do I run a game in wave?”

First you have to be on wave. Once you’ve conquered that, it’s pretty easy…and also something I’m going to cover in Part 2.

The Rogue

Deft Strike

Wukong had been standing beside the side of his master’s cart. Had, being the most important to the immediate dilemma.

And from that location, Wukong had not seen who cast the illusory flames under the horses. Not too long ago, a much more violent and spiteful Wukong would have found that immensely important and dashed through the crowd to batter any suspicious persons to paste.

But no, who or why someone had spooked the horses was not important now. What was important was that Wukong HAD been standing beside the cart and if he didn’t do something soon, he would have HAD been protecting the priest on his journey, he would have HAD known where the priest was, and he would have HAD the opportunity to save his immortal soul and lost it along with the priest.

And all the while Wukong HAD been thinking about this, the horses, the cart, and the priest HAD charged just shy of a hundred feet ahead of him.

Wukong burst into a sprint, covering 40 feet in a bound. Then he sprinted some more for another 40 feet and in a sudden burst of action, drew his knife and lunged another 10 feet at the back of the wagon.

The blade sunk deep into the luggage at the back of the cart and held. Wukong smiled and was quite pleased with himself. His feet flew behind him in the air as the scared horses carried him forward through the streets of the busy town, but enjoying the ride would have to wait. Because now that Wukong had pinned himself to the back of the cart, he HAD to climb up and stop the horses.

After the horses were spooked, they moved 18 squares ahead of Wukong through the crowded streets. To catch up to the cart, Wukong took two double moves at a run, covering 16 of the 18 squares. In desperation, Wukong used an action point to use Deft Strike with the cart as his target. He drew his knife with the quick draw feat and moved 2 squares before the attack due to the at-will. This put the reformed rogue within range to bury his knife and hold onto the cart.