Teaching D&D to Matthias and Stephanie

I wanted to play a game with my family on the weekends the kids are home from their dad's. Since Anna plays Wardancer in our Shadowrun game I thought it would be fun to continue some Shadowrun at home, so as not to switch rulesets on her, but the overly complicated character generation of SR was daunting when I sat down with Matthias, my 14yo stepson. So, taking a feather from the cap of Dungeon Craft, I had he and Stephanie (my wife) roll up super-fast characters.

Choose ability scores on a net +7, don't worry about the scores, they're never used anyway. Just assign the modifiers. (This is based on the pregen characters from the box set of D&D5E, where all premades have a net +7 modifier score)

Pick an occupation from a random list. Stephanie picked conman, Matthias picked warrior.

I assigned them equipment, a leather shirt and a short sword. I put them on the road, the warrior became a city guard, the conman his prisoner for breaking the law.

Boom. Character creation done, playing, in less than 10 minutes.

I set them up with a common situation, on the road to the next city that actually has a jail, they come upon a coach beset with bandits. The bandits are just finishing up, and when they see a city guard they take off, a young woman over their shoulder.

Matt and Stephanie go to see what is going on, and find a man with his head bleeding. Matt tries to offer aid, but the man yells that they took  his daughter! go find them!

Stephanie asks to be cut free so she can help, the guard says no. He pulls her through the brush until they hear arguing, the woman is berating the men. Matt tries to sneak up and watch, Stephanie bursts through the brush and falls to the ground, hollering that she is being chased and needs someone to help her.

The bandits distracted, the woman takes off. One bandit chases, the other advances on Stephanie. Matt steps out and knocks the man out with a headbutt.

Stephanie scoots over and cuts herself free. She says they have to go after the woman. Matt insists that they have to go to the city. She tackles him and tries to tie him to a tree, but he breaks free. She runs off into the forest, but instead of trying to follow the woman, backtracks to the road.

Matt gets hopelessly turned around and lost for several hours.

Stephanie finds the man on the road, and wants to rob him. She has the sword of the bandit. The man pulls a small knife and attacks, she rolls max damage and kills him dead.

She rifles through the carriage, taking some nice clothing and a signet ring, and heads back to town, a new ploy brewing.

Matt is lost for hours, finds a stream, follows it, is attacked by a boar, barely manages to kill it, eats, climbs a tree, finds the direction back to his town, and returns.

Stephanie gets a room at the Inn, Matt has to explain to his guard captain how he lost a prisoner.

The next day, Stephanie heads out, back on the road, to the city.

Matt takes a leisure start, sleeps in, has mead for breakfast, grabs his horse and then heads back out to the woods to see if he can find the woman. He gets hopelessly lost again, this time wandering into the village of cannibal goblins. He is attacked, has his legs badly cut up by goblin daggers, tied, and thrown into a hut. He manages to break the terrible ropes of the goblins, smashes through the side of the hut Koolaid Man style, grabs his horse and takes off before the goblins can get him again.

Stephanie makes it to the city, dressed and disguised in men's clothes, passing as a man, and shows the signet around until she finds someone who recognizes it and gives her directions to the estate. She shows up there, bearing the terrible news of the death of the master, offering to watch the house while they go look for the daughter, which is shot down, but she is offered a pallet in the barn to sleep on. She manages to convince the stable boy to steal borrow her some things from the house to sell, and kidnap him and go with her on her adventure.

Matt makes it back to the road, and decides to see what he can find in the city. He is almost dead, and it shows when he gets to the city. The guards direct him to the temple district, and he wanders into the temple of Pelor, the Sun God. The priest is empathetic, but asks him if he is a follower of Pelor. When he says no, they name a healing sum greater than he has, but tell him if he enters into service of Pelor they will heal him and give him a place to belong (he will become a cleric of Pelor).

+++

After testing out the super-fast character creation process, I love it. two characters, less than 10 minutes, straight into play. All skill checks were just ability checks, with target numbers reasonable and made up in my head. This for sure won't work for Shadowrun, where you are expected to be an expert in your field from the beginning. But for D&D, works great.

Props to Professor Dungeon Master from Dungeon Craft on his simplified rules. Watch his videos for some great content. Like, Share, Subscribe.

Happy gaming!

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Everything I needed to know about DM'ing I learned in Prison

Ok, let's talk about this. When I was out before, we played once per week, and I did my best to put on a good game, to come up with interesting challenges, and have some fun. But I did so at a severe disadvantage: I played once per week.
When you only play once per week, you don't necessarily have time to compile the lessons learned from previous sessions.
Its like watching a tv series one episode per week as compared to marathoning the whole thing back to back in an afternoon. Little things you didn't notice before just jump out at you.
So when I went to prison and found a few players, they wanted to play every-freaking day. So we did. I had a lot of chances to try out new things and learn what works and what doesn't, to put together a long term cohesive game, and grow at an amazing rate.
How fast of a rate, you might ask?
Let's do the math:
I used to play 1x/week, and depending on the day, for 3 to 10 hours in that one week. Lets average it to 6.
While inside, I played six days per week for 4 hours per day.
So in one year, on the old math, at 52 weeks times 6 hrs per week, we played 312 hours.
In one year, inside, at 4 hours per day for six days for 52 weeks, we played 1248 hours.

Here are some of the lessons I learned:

• Stick with point system or basic set - (15,14,13,12,10,8) or, for a more powerful game, (16,15,14,14,13,10). That's it. Don't do 4d6, reroll 1's. Someone will end up with low scores, someone will end up with (3) 18's, and someone will feel like the other players are superfluous and treat them badly, with many comments about, "Stop sucking."
• Keep challenge ratings appropriate. - Yes, its fun to get your ass handed to you and feel like you came out on top. But not in every encounter. Some encounters should be simple, some a decent challenge, and boss fights should almost kill you, but in the end you can overcome. If every fight is about to kill your players, then the players feel like it is only dumb luck or DM fudge rolls that are saving them, and discouragement happens.
• Take copious notes - I created little booklets that I could jot down notes on player questions, wish lists, investigation things that had to come back to them, etc. This way at night when I was preparing for tomorrow's game, I could come up with the answers to keep them on the trail (or throw them off). Yes, out here I can go to the store and buy a small spiral notebook for 35cents. In there I had to make them.
• Don't give away lots of magic and gold - It is fun for the players to find treasure. When you try to be nice and hand out cool stuff, it comes back to bite you in the end. Yes, they should have something special about their character, such as an awesome droid, a special weapon, a power that no one else has, but keep it small and retain balance in your game.
• Hold something back - Don't make all the powers available at the beginning. Don't have all the gear available, even if it is in the player's manual. Hold it back as a reward for later on. If they ask about it, tell them it isn't available, or they will have to find someone that knows it to learn it from them. Holding back will give them something to search for and give them a goal.
• Throw in a treasure hunt, even if you aren't sure what the treasure is yet - I had a random encounter with a derelict freighter that had obviously been in a pirate raid. The players searched the captain's quarters and found a datapad that had notes about a lost treasure, and included three possible locations. No matter which location they went to in what order, the third one had the next clue. After 9 locations, and they were to the place where the treasure should be, that's when I had to decide what it was, and I picked something that would help them in the final battle against the Sith Lord, a few crates of clone embryos. Now they can have their own troops to lead against the Shadow Lord's armies.
• Create custom prestige classes that are designed just for them. - I'll post mine later, but that was a big hit. I created a special prestige class designed specifically for each of my players that made them unique designed around something that happened to them in the game, such as Konan becoming a Werewolf Lord, or Lone Wolf becoming a Dragon Rider.
  In prison I did not have the books, and it was actually against the rules to play, so we had to make up everything. If some of these prestige classes exist in books, I didn't have them, and I'm sure mine are quite different.
• Sometimes what makes a player happy to play his character is a simple boon - Try giving him a 'Frost Giant' bloodline, so he gets a Cold Resistance 2. Simple, but it helps the player feel special, different, and adds to background.
• Try playing without the books - As I mentioned, I didn't have access to the books, and if I wanted anything, like Spell Descriptions or class abilities, I had to spend 3.50$ and call Skipp and hope he stopped talking about Warhammer long enough to look up what I needed before the end of the call. Monsters, had to make them up. Locations, had to make them up. Vehicles, had to make them up. We made up new spells, items, powers, equipment, modifications, rules, everything. Our game was loosely based on 3.5, with a twist of pathfinder, and we were constantly tweaking and testing new rules to find what works. Creativity flourishes when you don't have resources. Try it.

Well, those prolly aren't all the things I learned, but its a good amount of them. I hope someone learns something, and if you don't agree, that's okay. These are the things I learned after finding that it didn't work out, and came back to bite me in the ass.

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GM Styles, Part II

Venka. 

I met Venka in prison in 2002. 

He's a slender man, seeming almost frail in body, but his mind was sharp. He was always running a game of some sort, be it CarWars, Starfleet Battles, Battletech.. 

When we got out he invited me to a Shadowrun game. I've always loved Shadowrun. The gritty cyberpunkish world with a mix of fantasy rolled in to a thousand d6 and a dash of Karma. 

Of course Sage and I jumped at the chance to play. I created an elven decker and wrote up a background in the format of a media interview. Sage ended up with an orc street sam and there was a joke in there somewhere about taking it for the team that she didn't appreciate but was really funny at the time. 

Venka's GM'ing kept us interested, kept us moving, got us into some serious roleplay that even my shy wife, playing with three strangers, stepped out of her shell for a bit to experience. It was prolly the third adventure before I realized that Venka was running us thru premade modules. He had all the details from the module written on notecards so he didn't have to keep checking it. Probably one of the best GMs I've had the pleasure of. 

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GM Styles, Part I

I've had a few GMs in my life. Some good, some bad. Today I'd like to start a mini-series and discuss some of the GMs I've had and what I thought made their styles good or bad. I'll mostly use handles or nick names, because i think its better to keep them anonymous, plus i like handles better for the interwebz. Volgren. 

One of my longest running game masters. He led us through dungeons hand drawn on 30 sheets 8x11 1/8" graph paper taped together in a monsterous 6-sheet x 5-sheet map that made our palladium RPG characters cry, sweat, and bleed. His adventures were epic in scale, endless in detail, and fantastic in creativity. He was thoughtful to the rules, using those that worked and ignoring or changing those that didn't, and he was good at making his point. 

He was an excellent artist, intelligent conversationalist, and a good friend. (Miss you, man. If you're out there and you read this, drop me a line.) 

One time after a very long argument between Volgren and his twin brother, Shrine, about the feasability of making a powerful laser out of a leather wrap, a couple magnifying glasses and an eternal ball of light (yes, some GMs would have allowed this to be a flashlight, but Shrine was set on it being a laser, and we were 15, so yeah), he was fed up and ready to make his point that he was the game master. 

Instead of continuing on our D&D game, he opted for a side of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So we spent the next couple hours rolling up our mutant animals and outfitting them as completely as possible, writing backgrounds and how they know each other, etc. 

Our mutant animals were in a world populated by their kind, so there was no hostility to deal with, no hiding. We were mercenaries for hire, and damn good ones, at 4th level, and ready to rock. Our first mission we meet with the contact and he tells us that an object of his is being held in a secure warehouse on the other side of town. 

We agree to a price and head out. Volgren gives us the time we need to plan and purchase any additional gear, and we head out. We reach the warehouse without incident and case around it, looking for trouble. Finding none, we approach the side entrance and jimmy the lock, entering quietly. 

The warehouse is packed with crates and boxes stacked high overhead. We stealthily move through the shadows of the warehouse in search of our target. Suddenly, there is a loud metalic clang on the door we entered, and the high windows are shuttered with metal slats. A skylight opens in the roof and no less than twelve grenades are dropped around us. They begin to spew a sickly sweet smoke. 

"Do you have gas masks?" 

Hurredly we check our inventory sheets, only to discover that we do not. 

"Aww, that's too bad. The nerve gas begins to work its sinister magic and you die slowly and painfully, crippled and paralized, until your body is unable to work the muscles that breathe. Suck to be you." 

Shrine is pissed. He begins yelling and throwing dice. 

Volgren leans back and smiles. 

I laugh. 

Hours of creating these characters, only to have them killed in the first encounter without ever seeing our enemies. Harsh, yes. Immature, sure. 

We were only 15. But definately effective for the situation and the stubbornness of his brother. His point was he is GM and he has the power to play nice or not. He has the power to decide the rules and we must understand and live with that. Shrine wasn't interested in playing nice. He wanted it his way. But after that he was more accepting of Volgren's rule. 

Sometimes the only thing that works is an object lesson with nerve gas.

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