Key Our Cars

To steal Icosahedraphilia’s DM’s phrase, Prop Shop, I just had to share these.  [FYI:  Decent podcast and very 'clean' so you can actually listen to it with children in the room much unlike a lot (most?) of the rest.] Tangible potion props for inventory.  I won’t tell you what they cost but let’s say sellers on Amazon should be taken out and shot for what they’re charging for these kinds of bottles.  No I didn’t buy mine on Amazon, I’d shoot myself for paying that much for something like this.

Anyway, now I can hand out actual potions when the players pick up or make potions. And if the slaver they’ve got on the airship ends up joining the party then they might have access to quite a few potions as he’s a master alchemist.  Of course you have to get over the idea that he’s a slaver of course. Or ex-slaver.

They’re filled with nothing more than a little food coloring in some water.  In retrospect the first ones I filled have too much coloring.  The blue and the green are pretty hard to tell apart at a distance.  I briefly considered using some kind of silicone or epoxy to fill them since they are made of glass and could conceivably break if they hit the floor just right but they’re fairly thick and small enough and light enough that I think you’d practically have to fling them at the floor at top speed to get them to break on the average floor.

I think I’ll pick up some more and get some of that ’swirly’ shampoo.  WIth a little food coloring that make a pretty cool visual inside one of these. 

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.9.2 this morning or tried to, so if you see any issues with things not working please drop me a note.

It’s not easy to upgrade to 2.9.2 on 1and1.com.  They’re using MySQL 4.0.x and 2.9.2 requires 4.1.2 and better.  But they do give you access to MySQL 5.0.x you just have to migrate your existing database over to it. Manually.

I was able to find some notes on workarounds but they didn’t work as well for me due to the size of my database.  I ended up having to create the new database in chunks, not difficult since I’m pretty familiar with SQL (certified by Microsoft even) but annoying.  But eventually I got it all working.  I think.

On the plus side I was able to do a lot of database cleanup, dropping old unused tables and optimizing existing ones so the new database is much cleaner and in theory should be a little faster.  Although it’s on different hardware so it’s a crapshoot.

I also took the downtime to update the ‘captcha’ mechanism which seems to generate less obscure, aka hard to get right, human verification checks.  But with 100’s to 1000’s of script based spam, primarily porn and grey market drugs, in comments a day I’m just not able to have an open comments (non admin approved before it posts) section or an easy to bypass mechanism.

Just a quick note to say I’m voting with my wallet on this one and refusing to buy Bioshock 2.  Three different DRM systems are installed to get this thing to work properly.  I’m appalled. Until I get the stupidity to set up a game machine that’s JUST a game machine that I can reghost after every game to start over clean I’m not installing something that loads down my WORKING machine with this much crap.

In a year or so if they remove the DRM (and the price drops subsequently) I may consider it.

I have a ‘friend’ who bought Bioshock Uno and didn’t even unwrap it and instead downloaded a cracked version to avoid this bullshit.  My ‘friend’ refuses now to continue to support and pander to this kind of thinking.

<rant off>

It’s been brought home to me recently again just how much better your custom content can be if you spend just a little time each day between sessions thinking about what you have going on in the world, past, present and future.
I can’t stress enough really that if you’re going to be creating your own content you really don’t ignore it until game day.

As much as everyone gives lip service to a ’sandbox’ world, “OMG you’re railroading them!”, etc. as a DM you, IMO, HAVE to railroad to some extent in order to give them the best possible gaming experience you can.  Mature, complex, interesting campaigns have a hard time finding fertile ground in a sandbox.  Sand just isn’t conducive to growth.

A sandbox is “Hey peasant, where’s the nearest dungeon?  No we already cleared that one, where’s the next one.” typically.  Or out of character, “Okay guys I have three modules for your level, which one do you want to do?”.  These can certainly be entertaining at the player level, social dynamics, the mechanics of the fights etc. But they’re hard to engage the characters.

I can improv aka play in a sandbox as good as many, better than most I think but I can certainly tell a difference in the quality of experience I can give the players by just spending a few minutes each day thinking on how things are going in the world.

By devoting a few minutes going over current events (assuming you’re doing more than dungeon crawling, a fine past time in and of itself) and putting yourself in the shoes of your NPC’s and their interactions with the PC’s you can come up with some pretty cool stuff I believe.   As an example, Biminey has transcribed details of their trip through Darkmith and sold it to the Temple of Eris (god of knowledge). As I was documenting his payment (125gold for the curious) on the campaign sheet for Biminey’s character I thought about one of the high priests reading these descriptions and realized from my one line personality note I’d scribbled out on him weeks ago that this could have a profound effect on the man.   And that effect is now going to flavor and color multiple interactions  that deal with the PC’s in specific and the NPC’s in general that might be affected.  And flavor and color add a LOT to a session.  No one likes bland white toast all the time.

Your own content also really really has to be flexible. Case in point the group in our last session derailed my story arc by getting captured. [Through all fault of their own. ]

Luckily this happened at the end of our session or it might have either resulted in less interesting events than I think it will now or I’d of had two options. Either called a time out while I rapidly regrouped or improv out the remainder of the session, the first has the advantage of better results, the later of keeping the flow of the game going.

Drastic events like the party getting captured by the bad guys when you’re not expecting it can certainly throw a kink in things. Or perhaps you have one key character in the group that your story arc is founded upon and that character dies. Do you have a backup plan to keep the story on track? Or do you toss out what you have and work out another arc? Do you sink to the level of “A wandering healer comes across the scene and agrees to resurrect the poor man if only you’ll go fetch him 10 belts from the orc tribes in the next canyon.”?

You have to consider these things when you’re working on your storylines. And you cannot possibly consider everything that a group of players might do or things they might simply not figure out, or figure out wrong and be unable to see other clues as result of their wrong conclusion.  But by taking the time to build up this gestalt image of your world between sessions you have a much better stronger tapestry that you can reweave around snags in the thread that might occur.

That’s not to say though that as a DM you don’t have to be prepared to lose work, some things you’ve worked so hard for just can’t be salvaged after the party goes off on a tangent. And that’s okay. There’ll be other times, other places, other campaigns if needed for those events to happen.

Look at every side trek, every derail not as an issue, but as  an opportunity to weave a stronger storyline that integrates the characters’ actions into your world. And integration is something that will involve your players.  This issue with the players being captured in my personal campaign is going to I think really expand some NPC’s in an interesting way, create at least a couple of memorable encounters and has sparked an idea that will have a domino effect that might see wrack and ruin in the region from yet another possible source than those already planned and that might actually cause a redirection of a regional force into a force of while not good, at least not evil.

All this because the players split up like so many chickens with a weasel dropped in their midst during a fight and got taken out by a group they should have been able to beat.  Players definitely get a ‘we always win’ complex and as a result not really take tactics or even thought into consideration.  It’s nice to throw them a curve like this and drive home the fact that they’re not always going to win and there are going to be consequences to losing even if it was unintentional.   In this case they’ve lost 1000’s of golds worth of magical gear, not to mention their basic gear that will have to be replaced from very limited funds.

Improving though with 4th edition can be hard, especially if you lack experience with the system in specific or gamemastering in general. With older editions it was pretty easy to ‘fake it’ with monsters you had to add at a certain point. You just needed a to hit number, a defense and some damage. Monsters were boring, the vast majority of them simply swung, bit or clawed at the players for ex damage in a Flinstones Boxing methodology (aka stand there taking turns swinging till someone died) And those were very easily faked, especially if you had any experience with older editions as faking things is mandatory for a DM as the math was so broken overall.

But 4th edition improv is harder. Sure you can come up with a basic creature fairly easily, just use the basic monster value formulas and you’ll have balanced monsters quickly. They’ll just be a bit boring until you have enough experience under your belt to knock them out.  And remember battles that contain a single creature type can also contribute to boring battles so you have to knock out, print out, look up several creatures per battle.

As a result of the more interesting monsters in 4th, it helps if you have some basic creatures printed out of an appropriate level range for you group, pick a couple of of each type, then just ‘reskin’ them as needed. A level 3 orc can just as easily be a level 3 guard, a war dog, an undead abomination, whatever. Just print out a few in preparation just in case.

So to wrap this up, remember, think about your campaign when you’re not playing it, just a few minutes a day can work wonders.  Think about your NPC’s and what they might want and their reactions to the actions of the PC’s.  And be flexible, be prepared for the party to jump the tracks by having a good idea of the world in general and being prepared with materials as filler/stop gap to give you time to work the derailment into your campaign and make it stronger as a result.

A derailment doesn’t always have to mean a train wreck….

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[Warning this is a rambling post that doesn't stay on topic very well or at all really...]

I was explaining my style of DM’ing to someone and thought it might be something that someone else might get some usage out of.  Or might just rile them up if they think differently but I’ve been riled up by the ‘wrong’ way that other people play only to eventually make a change in the way I play. [Ramble Alert!] As a prime example, I had a long discourse with someone about when to grant experience in Neverwinter Nights modules.  I was still very much in the ‘per monster killed’ mindset.  You kill a monster, you get experience.  His was you awarded experience when the players reached a certain point in the game.  Eventually, not then because he was being an ass about it but eventually, I decided that made a lot more sense to me as a DM.  It takes away the [True Story Alert] meta-gaming aspect of XP “I only need 10 exp to level?  I lean out the window and throw a dagger at someone on the street.” and makes it easier to balance things out if you have any kind of branching encounters planned.  If there’s no way the players are going to be anything but 5th level by the time they make it to the Sacred Tombs you can build the Sacred Tombs way in advance and not risk them being 3rd level or 7th level.

I really don’t do trivial encounters; even back under older editions I stopped pretty early.  I lean heavily toward combats that mean someone might get really hurt. (And yet I’ve killed fewer characters in 3 decades of GM’ing than I have fingers).  My harshness is I make the players work for their victories and I enjoy the reputation I have as being harsh and deadly in spite of the fact that in reality I rarely kill anyone.  I just make them know they were in a fight.  You do have to kill someone every now and then though just to show them that they’re not immortal…

4th Edition really lets me go to town in this regard.  Since the players are back to full after each fight and with limited options for them to spend their ‘working resources’ aka Healing Surges this means a) their work day is long enough that sleeping periods fall naturally rather than being forced by lack of resources and b) they can keep going typically for a few encounters even at the level+3, 4, 5’s that I toss at them.

Granted I haven’t really used a ‘dungeon crawl’ yet with 4th edition.  Where there are encounter after encounter after encounter.  But I have problems with those anyway.  I’m as guilty as the next person early on in my career of having a series of rooms connected by passageways with essentially random monsters tossed into each one.  Each battle very sandboxed, you fought these creatures and the ones just down the hall ignored the fight and patiently waited their turn to be slaughtered.  Part of that was definitely a bit of “Oooh the party hasn’t fought one of these before, or this, or this, or this.” and I’d munge them all together.

Then I started doing themed dungeons, waaaaay back in the day when even the commercial modules were still very much a list of encounters built by rolling percentiles.  The Swamps of [Clare] Grogan (Scottish actress that I thought was hot and I thought the name was very dungeony) which was a swamp themed dungeon, lizardmen (and women), giant snakes, crocodiles that went down for like 5 levels.  The Lair of the Eternal Trickster, a dungeon comprised of probably 50% traps combined with creatures.  Party would find or trigger a trap that alerted mechanical guardians or undead, creatures that could be ‘realistically’ parked in an alcove to wait for their queue and didn’t have any intelligence or programming that would allow them to respond to anything other than their set queues.

It was about this time that I started making dungeons smaller in terms of overall population and larger in terms of encounter population.   Or I’d do the ‘obvious’ and stream the bad guys in as a seemingly never ending fight.  Attack the guards in the front room and the guards down the hall would take a round or two to wake up, grab their gear and charge up, yelling for help which would get the guys in the next room up etc and so on.

I find myself now with fourth edition expanding further on this.  Fewer encounters but more meaningful encounters.  Perhaps I’m merely playing to my thoughts or the inclinations of my group but a series of trivial, everyone is down a surge or the cleric used up a couple of CLW’s fights bore me and I presume/assume they bore the players if there’s no story arc reason for the fight.

With 4th Edition I can fairly safely assume that the party will have a full set of hit points after each fight, when they reach the point they don’t then they’ll rest and recover them.  Sure they might be down a Daily power or out of their Action Points but numerically Dailies just aren’t that big a deal, sure they can cut a round or two out of a fight or if everyone burns them on one boss cut that fight out of the day in short order.  But they’re not a valid excuse to have a 5 minute work day.  The only real valid reason to extended rest IMO is when you’re out of surges, not because everyone’s burned their daily powers.

But I digress. [Hence the disclaimer at the top of the article now]

To get back on point, I don’t personally see a need for trivial encounters.  They spend valuable limited game time on something that is a foregone conclusion that the players will win and win without threat.   The only time I plan on using trivial encounters, trivial meaning anything that’s not on the Moderate difficulty scale at least, is when they’re strung together as a series of encounters without a break or when they forward the storyline or add another element to the story.

Case in point, the [I've Got Crabs] encounter in session 2 of this encounter (yes I give my encounters goofy names in my notes), it was a fairly trivial encounter, the party was never in any real danger.  But their focus on dealing with the crabs charging them rather than the crabs menacing the other huddled survivors of the slave ship on the beach cost one of those NPC’s their life.  Perhaps a point lost on the group but still a point that I wanted to make an effort put out there and try to broaden their scope and awareness.  Did it work?  Doubtful.  But I feel better for making the effort.

In my upcoming session I’ve got a skill challenge among others where the characters will try to escape the city.  If they fail on any of the three rounds (I use my own skill challenge design) then it triggers an encounter or two with the ferals of the city.  But these will be narrated out and the party will simply start the next round of the challenge a couple of surges lower.  This will continue throughout the skill challenge.   The only times I have planned to break out the miniatures is when it’s a fight worth playing through tactically.   There will be days in their overland trek that will have them facing encounters but these are again just narrated out, “Over the last three days the lands have changed from tundra to low hills as you continue your homeward bound journey.  Through the use of your skills you’ve managed to avoid most of the dangers of the lands although dusk of one night found you battling for you lives against a wolf pack lead by a strange black eyed wolf with boney spikes protruding from its joints.  They were fought off through the use of your talents and the black wolf seemed to really fear the Torel’s abilities that were infused by the power of his god.” [Just made that part up but now I'll use it Saturday.]

In this particular instance the success or failure of the challenge will cost them surges that they won’t have for the next round.  And of course, obviously?, there will be a tactical encounter at the end of the skill challenge and their success or failure at the challenge will have a direct impact on that encounter.  (in more ways than one but I won’t spoil that right now in case they read this before Saturday).

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I’m listening to a podcast and the group has an obvious new player into a group that’s been together for awhile.  Their character is playing essentially an ass.  This leads what are obvious to me listening to certain gaffes and reactions from players that match their characters and becomes almost painful to hear at times.   They can be asses to each other because they have long running familiarity and friendship with each other.  Someone for all intents and purposes they do not know who’s an ass to them is going to strike irritation which doesn’t make for a good time.

Listening to this has me pondering my own experiences.  Frankly even with long term gamers I’ve never found intra-party conflict to be viable. It’s just a lot better, in my experience, for the characters to get along so the player’s get along.

Having characters that are argumentative to other characters seems to be very dangerous territory because it invariably seems to lead to players that are argumentative to other players.

While it could be said I suppose that such parties are self correcting in that eventually the majority of the party that does get along will split off, arrange for the ass to die in some fashion or otherwise deal with it, this can lead to the group self destructing.

I know I’m likely to get comments about the “We had an assassin and a paladin and they hated each other and we played around it and it was a blast.”  But for every time that it works I wonder just how many times it doesn’t and groups split or break up.

I think most people tend to reflect their character, if someone’s being an ass to their character then it’s hard for them to disengage the player from the character and not take affront.

As a very strong warning sign if it devolves into one player rolling dice and going “would that hit them?” then you know you’re approaching the saturation point where character emotion becomes player emotion.

So I’d like to offer the thought for consideration, that as a player you maybe not play the lone dark elf with a chip on their should to everyone including your party and instead perhaps treat the other members of your party like the people that are literally going to save your ass.

On a related note, from a DM’s perspective, at least this DM, don’t be a ass to the NPC’s.  I have to either ignore it, or do the realistic thing and have the powers that be take care of the problem.  You don’t have to be nice to NPC’s but at least be realistic in your behavior.   Because NPC’s have feelings too and they might just have some pretty powerful friends.  And a knife in the back is pretty easy to arrange in a crowded street.  And since I use this house rule, it might mean a little more than 1d4+3 damage.

Of course your group may thrive on conflict but if it does I would wager a small bet that it’s a long term group.  For you new players to a group, I’ll offer this advice, ease into the group dynamics, let them get to know you, much like you’d ease up to a dog.  Until you know if it’s going to bite or not, why take chances and yell at it and hit it with a stick?

Anyway, just wanted to put it out there that in my opinion, a party that gets along with other and is civil to NPC’s is much more likely to be a long term group on average.

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I’ll be upfront and honest, I’m a harsh Gm. Not vindictive or competitive but I do tend to draw out the most from the players.  I’ve very rarely ever killed a character though and the ones I did kill deserved it.  After 30 years of doing this I can still not run out of fingers counting characters I’ve killed permenently.

But harsh?  Definitely.  I once had a specialist archer lose half his hand to critical fire damage (because he thought the flames were illusionary) and be unable to use a bow for half a campaign.  I once had a fighter lose his bonus attack for several episodes because he lost ‘his’ sword and had to make do with substitutes that weren’t as balanced or designed for him.  I once had a paladin pick up a cursed box and become a fighter until he atoned for his ’sin’.   I’m harsh, there’s no getting around it.

Players as a rule tend to push the boundaries of what they can and can’t do.  DM’s tend to push back to keep things in check.  It’s a lot like the parent – child synergy.  No you can’t stay out till 3 in the morning.  Yes if you’re back by 9:00 you can drive the car.  The primary reason is, or at least for me is, to keep the party in balance so that it doesn’t devolve into one person doing everything and the rest sitting back and playing second fiddle. So when the problem child wants to do a triple back flip through the bar and be able to backstab the BBEG because ‘he’d never expect it’ I have to raise the eyebrow and go “Orly.  You think that would really work? No.”

But I’ve mellowed with age. Or perhaps more factually I’ve got more experience at what will really unbalance a campaign and block it and what would simply be unrealistic, cool certainly, but unrealistic and go ahead and allow it.

And you should try to hit the same balance.  It can be a hard line to stick to and fraught with peril.  Allow something too overpowering and the player is going to want to do it all the time.  Don’t allow anything and you’re stifling the creative flow and removing those ad hoc high points that get talked about for years.

Sometimes you don’t see the ramifications of your actions and have to retro them out somehow. As a example is the one time I actually played in a campaign the DM gave the dagger specialised fighter a ring of vampiric regeneration.  This made the fighter invincible as long as he hit about one out of two times he’d get back any lost hit points.  This nullified both the encounters and the other players as it became a “Let Temple get them all, we’ll sit back here playing chess.”  The DM solved the problem by having a fish leap up while were were crossing a lake and bite his finger off taking the ring with it.

As a general rule, you should try very hard not to lock a player out of playing.  This means no long term stuns or disabling conditions.  Don’t kidnap one player and not the others.  Don’t ’steal’ items from them for anything but very short term.  Keep an eye on your monsters so that they don’t have uber defenses against what the party is putting out.

A player’s turn shouldn’t consist of making a saving throw or worse being able to do nothing but wait for someone else to get to him.  Granted this is going to happen from time to time but do what you can to reduce the frequency of it. You can’t always save the stupid though. Some players (or characters) are just not bright and as a result they will through their own actions lock themselves out of playing.  And that’s okay.

I’m very much not a fan of the Stun condition in 4th Edition and I’m retconning it out as dazed on every monster power. I’m not a fan of the Dying condition and the death saves to be honest which is why I came up with the Weebles Wobble rule where I came up with a Mostly Dead condition.  This lets a player be dying and still be an active participant in the game.  I’ve had a couple of notes from people that have tried it with pretty good success and their players reportedly really approved of it. And it makes for a pretty cinematic visual.  Rarely in action movies do you have people laying around dying and not doing anything.  But tons of examples of the heroes limping forward barely concious, blood streaming off them but refusing to lay down as they blow some rubber suited monsters cojones off and snap out a one liner as they do so.

So in closing, don’t screw your players.  Let them play, it’s why they’re there after all.

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I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately and thought I’d ramble on about players from the DM’s point of view, mostly in a bad way of course…

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  You’re not going to be the sole focus of attention so when it’s not your turn let someone else have a bit of spotlight. It’s discourteous to the other players to not give them their chance at the mic.

As a player you should remember that you’re part of a group.  Step up and be heard, get involved.  Don’t just sit back observing or staring off into space. It’s really discourteous to your DM who’s gone to the trouble of creating something for you to ignore it.

I’ve had to deal with both types in my career as a DM/GM.  They’re both more than a bit of a pain after months and years.

Things I’ve found annoying from players in large quantities, and that based on the voice inflections and reactions from Dm’s in the podcasts might be fairly universal.

Constantly going “No he can’t/doesn’t/wouldn’t” to the DM in any form as a common reaction to the DM.

• DM: “Okay the fell necromancer shifts his gaze at you, Alofel and necrotic energies flare up and blast outwards at you.”
• Player: “No he doesn’t.  He doesn’t have that power any more.  It’s a typo.  Wouldn’t he hit Steve instead?  He misses.  I duck out of the way.  I’m immune.”

Once is okay, twice is within reason but constantly over and over ‘retorting’ with some variation on the above every time the DM announces a NPC’s attack gets old fast.

Immersion breaking ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ between a character and an NPC.

• DM as Necromancer: “I shall have your soul chained in a everlasting fire for daring to interfere you pathetic mortal.”
• Player: “U r gay.”

Once in a while, sure it CAN be funny.  But constantly chanting how gay what is supposed to be some scary evil dark wizard is, gets very unfunny pretty quickly to most DM’s I’m betting, myself included.

Most DM’s do what they do to bring to life a cooperative story set in a ‘real life’ world where characters, pc and npc, act in realistic ways.  It takes interest and energy to do all the extra work involved.  Players who show up so they can be the asshole (or pschopath/klepto)  in the game they can’t be at the office tend to be a bit of a burden on the creative energies and interest required to be a DM.

What I call psuedo-cheating (don’t get me started on real cheating).

• DM: “Does a 22 hit you Barkil?”
• Player: “No.”  a minute goes by, “Yeah it hits.”

• Player: “I rolled a… 23.”
• DM: “Okay that hits.”
• Player: “No it was really a 3.”
• DM: “*sigh*”

Please remember during my little mini-rant, that I’m ranting about consistent, frequent, constant behaviour of this type. Like any decent DM I can overlook, ignore, or go along with a reasonable level of this kind of thing.  But constantly doing it gets old.

And no this isn’t some sly subtle jab at my players, due to RL, lack of interest, medical reasons, I don’t have enough consistent players to have a group of players that I can enjoy being with to have a RPG group going on.  At best I get to DM the occasional one-off or playtest or ‘delve’.

As a player remember the DM is supposed to be having fun too.  Try to gauge his or her reactions to your behaviour and adjust accordingly.

Because if the DM isn’t having fun, especially over the course of several sessions, then you’re going to be looking for a new DM.

Any gaming group whether it’s chess, bridge or rpg’s is a social group with the implied social contracts that are always the price of being in that group. You have to be social and sociable.  If you like roleplay then deal with there being rollplay going on.  If all you want to do is roll dice then deal with there being roleplay going on.  And as a DM I know this can change per player on a session basis.  Sometimes a player just wants to roll dice and loot the corpses of the bad guys.  And sometimes they just want to sit back and have an animated discourse on the qualities of the rope they’re purchasing.  But remember you’re one of a group and they also vary in what they want to do.

Know what your character can do.  I personally find myself questioning why players want to bother showing up when they show no interest in the mechanics of their characters much less the game system that’s being played.  Constantly having to wait for a player every session while they ‘re-learn’ their characters abilities or worse, just ’spam’ a single abilitiy over and over regardles of its effect or efficiency simply because they don’t want to be bothered to learn more can be annoying.

It’s not very enjoyable for DM’s who spend excess hours over and above the actual session hours coming up with the adventures, plots, hooks, bad guys, who have the not so easy task of juggling tens of ‘characters’ during every combat, of keeping things in balance for the players so it’s not a cakewalk as well as not instant death, of remembering what’s happened before, what they want to happen and steering a plausible path between those points to have players express a serious lack of interest in what’s going on at the table.  [Massive run on sentence of the day.]

I have a saying, “Looks like apathy has reared it’s head, we’re done for the night.” and it’s had to be brought into play more than once.  When computers started to intrude on gaming sessions, whether it was Doom when we first got PC’s or Ultima Online when we first got MMOG’s  or whatever.  Once the conversation’s saturation point became something other than the game at hand, I’d shut it down.  When I’m running something, I’m there to run it, not talk about the current hot topic.

So as a final wrap up, I think this can mostly be summed up with “As a player in a group game, be courteous.” or in layman’s terms: “Don’t be a dick.”

Or the odds are very good there won’t be a social group anymore.  At least for you.

I have four dice towers for sale. One is not up to my standards it ended up with a bit of lean. It’s one of nondark ones. That one is $20. The other three are $30.  That will include shipping as I want to try a new design and I want to move these out the door.  You can assume anywhere from $5 to $10 of that price is going to shipping.

I can and will provide more detailed pics on request.

Current supply limited to these and first come first served.

Contact me for more details or with questions.

If you’d like to ask questions on how you can make your own I’ll be happy to answer those as well.

I’m going to be making some dice towers in the next week or so and will probably have a couple of spares.  If there’s interest I could make these available for purchase.

As they’re ‘alpha’ bare bones basic designs I’m thinking $25+shipping ($5 to $10 depending on zip for USPS) for them, its roughly $12 for materials counting waste and the rest is for my time which works out to well below minimum wage on an hourly basis FYI.  You’d need to have a Paypal account in order to pay for them as that’s the simplest and least risky for me and it’s strictly as supply is available on a first paid for, first served basis.

If the $12 seems high for materials well you try cutting 3/16″ slots in 2′ boards that are straight and uniform using nothing but a circular saw and see how much waste material you end up that’s good for nothing but template spacers.

The tower will include a catch tray that will be of a size that tower will nest into it when you’re not using it.  You could line it with cork, rubber, foam or felt to reduce the clatter noise but I’ve found personally that the noise isn’t too bad and anything but hard polished wood just causes the squarish (d6’s, d8’s, d4’s) dice to tend to pile up at the mouth of the exit hole.

They may be unstained or stained with black walnut or golden oak depending on what I want to try and will be coated with two coats of polyurethane (either gloss or semi-gloss depending on my on hand supply of poly).  The plexiglass will probably be left clear although I’m going to try a frosted look using an orbital sander on the inside portion and see how that looks.

If you contact me while I still have unfinished towers then you can try requesting specific finishes and stains.   As mentioned the only stains I have on hand are black walnut and golden oak (I might have a honey oak somewhere) and for finishes I have semi-gloss and gloss in polyurethane and I might have a  semi-gloss in crystal coat which adds very little coloring to wood unlike poly which has a tinge of yellow.  Really on matters for unstained wood in either case.

If you’d simply like a more detailed photo log of  the process I use to make them so you can build your own I’ll be happy to post that if there’s any interest pending me getting more raw materials as all the material I had on hand I cut already over the weekend.

Use the contact form to send me an email or you can send it to my anti-spam account which is spam at armsnake dot com.

Made this over the weekend.  It’s a dice tower (I know, duh right?).  I prefer this style I think over the other one I made as you can watch the dice tumble down it.  And they really do tumble like no body’s business, hitting at least one peg per layer and really spinning like mad.

[Note: I have tried the tube tower but the lack of a drill press leaves me with lopsided holes making it tough to make pretty.]

It started with a piece of 3.5″ x 48″ x 1/4″ birch from the local handy Lowes.  Cost about $4.  I added a piece of 8×11 Plexiglas roughly 1/8″ thick which cost like 99 cents which I think I also picked up at Lowes.   I bought two pieces and lucky for me I did as I learned how to NOT drill thin plexiglass with the first piece.

I started with the piece butted up to another piece and that butted up against a thicker piece to act as a guide rail for my circular saw.  No I don’t have a table saw. I had to add two shims about 3/16 of an inch to gap it out so that the notched I was cutting would hit the right place. 

Down one side and up the the other and a couple of other cuts and I ended up with this.

Next I cut out a ramp using a thicker piece of wood again using the circular saw to cut one of the 45’s and a jig saw the other 45 degree angle.  Circular saw only has one 45 angle.  The jig saw as you might imagine was a little wiggly but a quick hit with a random orbital sander fixed it right up.  I then glued these pieces together and waited.  Ending up with this.  Note the unclamped piece is there just to help insure straightness.

Sadly the next day after unclamping it I managed to knock it to the ground and one of the sides came free.  Gluing it back up I was in a bit of a hurry and as a result it’s a tiny degree non-straight.  This had the end result that my plexiglass pieces don’t fit flush.  I could sand those down but decided not to.

Next up was coming up with a pattern for the dowels and trying to drill those in the plexiglass.  I scribed the plexiglass in half to get 4″ x 11″ pieces.  I then had to trim roughly 1/2 an inch off the ends to make them fit in the grooves I cut in the side pieces.

First I tried drilling them just clamped down to scrap wood (both at the same time mind you to insure perfect alignment).  The plexiglass broke as the drill would catch in the hole right as it went all the way through.

But clamping the two pieces of plexiglass between two scrap pieces of wood and drilling through all four pieces I ended up with good holes.

With the addition of a few bracing pieces cut from 5/16″ square stock and 17 pegs cut from 1/4″ dowels I ended up with this -

And the dice look so pretty falling through it.

So for about $6 in parts, about 1 hours worth of work (not counting drying time for the glue and polyurethane ) you too can have a pretty sweet dice tower.  Note I haven’t yet made a catch tray as I want to see if I can make a heart shaped one.  This tower is for my wife after all.

This might seem like a pretty minor thing or have you going, “Uh duh?” but believe it or not after thinking up all kinds of magnetic flags, chips, and other indicators it hit me, “Dumbass why don’t you just put a number on each miniature and avoid more clutter on the gaming field?”

So one Silver Sharpie later most of my large groups of miniatures have a number on their base.  I don’t have the best penmanship, comes from years of writing books, modules, dungeons, notes and all that longhand but hey I can probably read it most of the time and hopefully if I misread it I’ll misread it all night.

These are a couple of Gnolls, #8 and *15 I grabbed out of the gnoll bin in one of my humanoid cases.  I highly recommend you pick up these compartmental cases, it makes it way easy to pick out what you need.  I have cases for mass humanoids (orcs, goblins, kolbods, gnolls etc), a case that holds nothing but undead, cases for PC figures (male/female), a ‘beast’ case, a ‘Icky” case (oozes, bugs, wth) and so on.

All this so a player can go “I hit Gnoll 8.” rather than “I hit the gnoll next to Tak, no the other one, no the one between him and Tik. Yeah that one.”

And yes I’ve bought a lot of miniatures.

I’m looking for a couple of players to start a mini-campaign that would last perhaps 3-4 months of weekly sessions. Women and older (30+) players given preference, not for any perverse reasons on the woman part, my wife is one of my players and I’m in love with her but because in general I’ve found women and older players to be less likely to be square pegs and less competitive and a lot less inclined to say something like “This is boring when do I get roll dice.”  They’re also less likely to come up with Dick Tuna* jokes where my kids can hear it.

I do have some caveats -

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I went to Home Depot at lunch (really prefer Lowes but there’s no Lowes near me at work) and scoped out the plumbing department and found some pretty nice things.

Using any combination of 3″ PVC + Couplers + Reducers + Elbows a person could EASILY make a dice tower or as I’m calling it now, a Chaos Cylinder.  Since it’s a cylinder shape and the dice would bounce chaotically around in it. The only really hard part would be a base for it to stand on but a piece of 1×4 and some hot glue or screws and you’d have a decent base.

My thought was something like this.  Take a 3″ 90 degree elbow ($3) and a piece of 3″ tubing (10′ for $6) cut to the height you want.  Drill a series of holes around the 3″ tube and insert some wooden dowels ($2-$4).  Glue a 3″ to 2″ reducer ($3) upside down on one of the 3″ tubing, this gives you a ‘feed tube’ and makes for a neater appearance (as in cleaner). Stick your elbow on the end of the tube as the ‘outflow’.   Now mount this to a base of some kind and work up some kind of catch basin, a simple box made of a pice of 1×4 or 1×6 with some 1/2″ square hobby boards used to build a fence around it. and then mount a 1×2 on one side and clamp your tower to that.

Another option would be discard the elbow and cut a 45″ slope on one end of your tube.  Now take a piece of 3″ post  and cut it at a 45 degree and put that in the bottom of the tube so the dice hit it and fall out.

So for about $20 give or take and a little work you too could have a Chaos Theory Cylinder…. *dun dun dunnnnn*

If there’s any interest I could do one of these with some of the options and post some step by steps.

Image Credits

I blatantly stole the name from PVPOnline’s July 30th cartoon but I was noodling with something a little more phat lewt’ish in terms of dice towers.  Rather than a series of ramps it has pachinko influenced rods that bounce the dice around inside.  A square one would be doable of course but the round tower is kind of cool don’t you think?

I like to 3D stuff before I start conspiring to build it as it just helps me visualize things and greatly decreases issues with the design in terms of workability.

I think it’s hilarious when you google dice tower pachinko my site is (or was at the time of this writing) number 2 in the results.  You know how many people kill for page 1 google results. 

Found a source for some old school maps.  Pretty nostalgic looking at these maps as they’re typical of my first decade of DnD gameplay for me. Lots of rooms connected by the ubiquitous 10′ corridor, just the right size for a gelatinous cube to keep clean.  One room might have undead in it and the next room down might have orcs.

And there were typically no larders, grocery stores, bathrooms or whatever.  It was really one discrete encounter after another.  Which is why I laugh when people say 4th Edition is ‘combat oriented’ and ‘nothing but one fight after another’ or ‘kills roleplay’.   But that’s a dead horse of another color.

Anyway, more resources is rarely a bad thing. Unless you’re extremely indecisive and then I suppose having more options might be a bad thing.

I’d like to post some hands on reviews of some items, Magna Map by Dark Platypus and Magnetic Markers by Alea Tools.

I ordered ’sample’ pack of the Alea Tools, specifically “One-Inch Neo-Markers – Game Master Pack 01″ and “One-Inch Neo-Markers – Red 10 Pack” along with some of “Miniature Conversion Circles – One-Inch”.  The order was shipped prompty and correctly.  Each set came in a clear plastic tube with a higher quality than average stopper.  Odd thing to notice I know but there you go.  The tube itself was typical of the type and if you’ve ever bought a tube of dice you’ll be familiar with it.   Each set of markers also included a few of the conversion circles.

Quality on the markers was decent but it’s hard to be awesome or crappy with what’s essentially a molded two part plastic disk.  Each has a ‘rare earth’ magnet inside that allows them to stick together.  The magnets are fairly strong and I had no problems with their stickiness.

The conversion disks are essentially the same flexible magnets you’d find in any craft section of a department store but with an adhesive backing that’s pretty good or seems to be.  There is an issue, not with the quality but with the purpose.  They’re designed to stick to the bases of the miniatures.  Well the bases of the miniatures are ANYTHING but standardized and on many (most?) you’ll find the magnet is too big and sticks out a bit.  That’s a fault with the lack of a standard base size on Wizards part and not with the idea directly.

Another issue that may come up is that the bases have a lip on the bottom of them.  So when you stick one of these magnets to it, you really have a very small surface area that is going to be attached.

But they’re cheap enough I suppose that eventually if you do lose some you can replace them.  I will offer the observation that if you filled the bases of your mini’s with something, maybe Mighty Putty (RIP Billy), they’d probably be a lot more secure and probably permanent.

All in all I’d recommend them, they make marks, status effects and all that very easy to keep track of.

Now on to the Magna Maps.  These were as well shipped promptly and correctly.  I ordered two of the 2′ x 3′ maps because that covers about 75% of my map surface.   My map level on my gaming table is roughly 35″ by 55″ so I did have to cut one inch from the long way but it cut very easily.  And now I have two two foot rows of 1″ squares I could use for something.

The material is very much the same rubberized substance that refrigerator magnets are made of. Except it’s not magnetic per se. It’s also not terribly ’sticky’ in terms of magnets sticking to it.   The more powerful rare earth ones have a decent grab to them but the weaker ones like the conversion disks barely stick at all.  I think that’s a combination of two factors though, the material is just iron impregenated rubber, not iron and the conversion dicks are also just iron impregnated rubber albeit magnetic iron (or something to that effect).  Two weaks don’t make a strong in this case.  But if you’re using Alea’s Neo disks or something similar then they’ll stick well enough.

With all that said I think they’re both useful.  Are they worth the money? Meh, you can certainly get by without them.  They add a bit of geek chic to your table but that’s about it.  But sometimes geek chic is worth the cost to me. You’ll have to be the judge of that for yourself.

Image Credits

Mass Combat Rules

[Disclaimer:  This is a stream of thought idea, read it with that in mind.]

I had the thought of having a larger mostly melee based battlefield swirling around a party, an ‘epic’ encounter but at the heroic level.  The party would help direct the forces of the battle by using minor actions to make skill checks and these would add bonuses to the embattled forces.

To that end there needs to be some quick and fast rules for massed combat that are easy to keep track of and yet allow for varying degrees of ‘quality’ of the combatants.

Yes I know there are published rules for this kind of thing and they may be awesome but half the fun of a DM is coming up with your own stuff.

My initial though is each side will have units of troops.  These will be under the control of the DM but can be influenced by the players.

The units will make opposed rolls but their ‘turn’ takes place over the course of the players encounters so they’re several minutes long typically.

The players will be directly involved in a series of encounters, waves of the bad guys and will be performed as normal.  The other forces will have a single simple die roll that will be performed at the end of each of the PC encounters.  The players will get a 5 minute rest between waves.

My current idea is each unit will have an Attack and a Defense value.

These attack and defense values will range from 1 to 20 although I see typical units falling into the 1 to 10 range.  

When two (or more units) attack each other there they make an opposed roll, attack versus defense.  Each side can make this roll or not although obviously if neither side does then it’s a little boring.  But a side with a strong defense but weak attack may decided not to attack but only make defensive rolls.  If both sides want to make attack rolls damage is determined at the end.

The difference between the opposed rolls is divided by X .  For my needs I’m making X = 5, 1 for each minute of the mass combat round.

Both sides in a fight take 1 base damage.  The loser of the opposed roll also takes the computed difference. In the case of a tie, both sides take just the 1 base damage.

Once a unit hits 0 or less in both attack and defense they’re considered destroyed or otherwise out of the combat.

Example:

Kings Guard squad a A:7 and a D: 7
Bloody Hand Orc squad has an A:8 and a D:2

Both sides are going to attack so it’s two sets of rolls.

Let’s do the guards attack roll first – d20(16)+7 = 23
The orcs make a defense check – d20(6)+2 = 8

The difference is 15 and we divide that by 5 and end up with (15/5) =3.

The orcs currently will take 4 damage to their attack and defense at the end of the round and the guard take 1 for the base.

The orcs make an counter attack:

Orcs attack – d20(14)+8= 18
Guard defense – d20(11)+7 = 18

It’s a tie so sides take (base 1)+(0/5) or 1.

The orcs will take 3+1+1(computed damage)+( base damage).
The guard takes only the base 1+1 damage.

Round two –

Guard – A:5 D:5
Orcs – A:3 D:-3

Orcs attack –
Orcs attack is (11+3) = 14
Guard defense is (20+5) = 25

Defense wins by 11 so the orcs will take 11/5 or 2 damage +1 base or 3 total.
Guards take 1 base damage.

The guards counterattack –

Guard attack is (4+5) = 9
Orc Defense is (11-3) = 8.

Even results (1/5) = 0 so both sides take an additional 1 base damage.

That’s a total of 4 damage for the orcs and 2 damage for the guards:

Guard – A:3 D:3
Orcs – A:-1 D:-6

The orcs are decimated/routed/slaughtered whatever you wish to have had happened.

But the guard unit is not looking too good and if the orcs have another squad or two to throw at them then the guard could very easily go down and that wall of the keep could be ripe for the taking.

I need to actually try it out and get a feel for it.  It’s simple enough I suppose unless without be so simple as “This side beat this side, that side is destroyed.”.  It allows for units to be drained of power over the course of time and allows them to be ‘healed’ up by simply shoving men from the reserve units into their place.  

Probably needs defensive bonuses for cover.  Perhaps a +2/+4/+6 if they’re in cover but they can’t attack from cover only defend.

Bears consideration I suppose.

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Just a quick session card to go with the Quest Cards to let the player build their campaign journal with.  Form fillable if you like or just print out a bunch and hand them out and let the players write on them in pencil (or crayon scribbles for that matter if they’re an illiterate barbarian or something…)

Like the others I plan on putting together a small binder for the players to put these in along with their quest cards so at the end of the campaign they’ll have a nice log of their character’s lives and times.

You can grab it here – [Download not found]

Image Credits

Although you can get a copy of the original idea for these cards here, they’re too small for me.  My idea was to make half sheets and then put tin a 5×7 3 ring binder for the players as a kind of quest journal or quest log along with session note pages (not done yet).

So with that in mind I took Kiko’s basic format and just made a bigger version of it.   Nothing ‘awesome’ but it works for me.  And you might find it useful perhaps.

You can get it here – [Download not found]

The PDF is form fillable although you’ll need version 9.0+ of Adobe Acrobat to be able save the filled out version, otherwise you can only print it apparently in earlier versions.  Stupid non-backwards compatible issues.