QUIZ!

Guessing game. Try to match the player to the preferred character class (without cheating and looking at old blog entries). Winner gets to tell me what to write about for my next blog entry.

A.

B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
I.

1. Wizard, but keeps trying to hit things with a crowbar instead of using spells. Did you know there was a crowbar on the 3.5 basic equipment list? I didn't.

2. Just went from dark-elf rogue to dark-elf cleric, but keeps trying to sneak around and backstab anyway.

3. Is into totally random character generation. Will play anything.

4. Started out pretty much like what you expect--Tiefling rogue. Then diversified into Tiefling cleric (nonorthodox). Then, for a solo game, an elf wizard, the cleric, and a dwarf fighter (short lived). Then got into this thing of dwarfs. Two dwarfs in a row. I don't know what's up with that.

5. Wood elf rogue. Recently ate a mushroom that turned PC blue. Will be disappointed when I explain it's temporary.

6. Totally married to half-elf barbarian. On a second one and the first one isn't even dead yet.

7. Was a half-elf and then decided to go halfling "because they're itty-bitty" (and because the half-elf's character sheet got lost.)

8. Wizard. Always plays a wizard in video games. Decided to call first character "Little Wing" because the wizard miniature we have looks like a hippie.

9. Half-orc wizard. who knew?

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Addendum:
Nobody won. Some people got close--it was fun though.

Answers:
A-7 Connie
B-6 Kimberly
C-2 Frankie
D-4 Mandy
E-3 Caroline
F-8 Daniel
G-1 Sasha
H-5 Satine
I-9 Justine

Evolution Of Thinking About Character Class in D&D

...presented in roughly chronological order with, no doubt, some timeline errors since I'm not James Mal.

OD&D -- The Categorical Era

The idea in this era was that every kind of PC fit into a broad category, and the classes were just ways of defining these broad categories.

In the beginning: D&D Is A Kind of Wargame

Therefore, everyone on the battlefield can be divided into:

Fighting Men, who generally fight things with weapons, and

Magic-Users, who generally fight things with magic.

(Note that this isn't necessarily automatically limiting. Theoretically, all PCs ever made could fit into one or the other of these categories. There's only a problem once you say that magic users can't use weapons or armor. Then suddenly all kinds of characters known in literature [or not yet known, but imaginable] don't fit the scheme.)

(Also, this is why they aren't called "wizards" and "warriors". Just because you can't use spells doesn't make you a warrior, and just because you do, it doesn't mean you're a wizard. This naming convention would become outdated the second that the next class came around...)

Wait, D&D Is A Game Of Dungeon Exploration

So it might be useful to have a class that's useful in a dungeon, despite not being much in a fight. Thus: The Thief.

Oh, Wait, I Read A Book That Makes Me Want To Put Fighting Priests In But They Don't Fit The "Everybody Uses Magic Or Uses Weapons But Not Both" Post-Wargame Schema

Thus: Clerics.

Oh, Also, I Like The Idea of People Being Able To Be Elves or Dwarves But I Think That Should Make A Mechanical Difference In The Game And There Is, As Yet, No Way To Differentiate Categories Of PCs Except by Class

Thus: the Race-As-Classes. The Elf class, The Dwarf class, etc.


AD&D--The Archetypal Era

Hey, Wouldn't It Be Cool To Invent Some "Specialist" Classes, Where The PCs Could Trade Being Able To Do One Thing For Being Able To Do Something Else?

Thus, the sub-classes: paladin, druid, ranger, illlusionist, assassin, and many of the classes presented in Dragon Magazine. Plus, arguably, multi-classed characters.

This was a big deal.

What then happened was a shift in the thinking about class--the idea became that class represented, essentially, not the broad category into which the PC could be sorted for certain purposes, but rather a sort of "genre" of PC. That is, the class wasn't there so much there to place limits on the PCs mechanical function in the game, but to define what kind of character the PC was.

In the original scheme, a knight was a kind of fighter. In the new scheme, a knight was like a paladin, but--fuck--less religious. Could he just be a fighter? Well, but why should the paladin get its own special subclass with attendant powers yet the knight doesn't? Damn, we'll need a new class...

After this happened, having, say, a "druid" as a subclass seemed less like a fun bonus extra for people who wanted to play a specialist cleric and more like a sort of promise that one day every sort of fantasy archetype would have its own subclass with special powers.


By This Time The Game We Invented Was Making Us Lots Of Money So We Bought Some Weed

Thus: Monk and Bard.


Oh, Wait A Second, If The Idea Is To Have A Class Representing Every Fantasy Archetype, There's A Whole Bunch We Haven't Covered Yet

Barbarian, Cavalier, Thief/Acrobat, etc.

The '80s D&D cartoon is actually a leading indicator here--each character on the show was a different class--implying that character class and personality type were essentially one. I suppose it's even possible that the cavalier (paladin without religion) and the acrobat (thief without stealing) were invented for the show--anybody know for sure?


Some Other, Non-D&D, Games Being Made Around The Same Era

Hey Wait, This Whole Categorizing-PCs Thing Seems To Be Kind Of Unwieldy, Let's Just Go With Another Thing Entirely

Thus: skill-based systems.


Ok, But Class Is Kind Of Fun, Like I Know Being Defined By Your Job Is A Drag, But There's Something Kind of Interesting About How These Archetypal Professions Help Describe The Game World...

Thus: profession-based systems like Warhammer.


Later D&D--The Customizable Era

By this point, the people running D&D have to balance two considerations--one one hand, they feel class is an important and defining feature of the game that sets it off against all other games (How do you know it's D&D if you can't say "I'm a 3rd level cleric"?) but, on the other hand they want to give the players the same freedom that PCs have in newer systems.

Ok, We Have Classes But Hey It's Not Like There's A Character You Can Build In Any Other Game That You Couldn't Also Do In D&D

Thus rules that "soften" class divisions: skills and skill points, trading armor protection for spell-failure chance or armor-class bonus, etc.

Hey, Wait, I Bet We Can Make Money Off This...

Thus: prestige classes.

Careful examination of published prestige classes (which, I admit, sounds like the title of the chapter right after "Waterboarding" in the Geneva Conventions on Torture) shows that the people writing them not only decided to (or were forced to) mine every imaginable fantasy archetype for new classes, they also mined every imaginable fantasy character.

Many prestige classes are so detailed that they could basically describe your character for you, soup-to-nuts. "The prophet of Erathaol is a seer and visionary, a medium of the heavenly will, pronouncing judgement on corruption and evil in the world, speaking words of comfort to the oppressed and downtrodden, and announcing the work of the archons in the world."

It's a trade-off--you get power, you give us your personality (and $32.95 for the book you found the prestige class in).

I never played D&D with prestige classes, but I imagine it's possible it could actually produce an interesting dynamic, with the PCs changing over time as their role became more defined. Those of you who did--did the PCs tend to become more like players wanted them to be as they got prestige levels, or did their roles suddenly take big left turns when they got a prestige level?

A Delicate Subject

Anybody following Kimberly Kane on twitter may have noticed this gem on february 3rd--
"Three girls in my DnD group started their periods today. We're starting to cycle together..."

Yay.

Events from the Feb 3rd game which might be plausibly (maybe? possibly? please don't hit me) blamed on this:

-a player threatens to quit playing because the objective of their quest turns out to be easier than she originally thought

-a player argues that I'm not being fair because, in a certain enemies-waiting-to-see-what happens situation, instead of rolling initiative I rule that the PCs just automatically get to go first

-a PC sits out an entire fight to hang out in the room next to the fight reading a book about mushrooms.

Some Pictures

So that's a picture that KK made on her character sheet while we were playing yesterday.

And today Charlotte Stokely came over and shot some stuff with Mandy.

So then I made her into a monster.

The Road To Hell Is Paved With Randomly-Generated Content

So after sleeping through an entire session, Little Wing, the only guy in the party, awoke to discover that all his companions had been whisked off into a no-boys-allowed campaign that will, if the stars align, all be televised soon.

So there he was, alone in the sandbox.

He stepped out onto the street, and, by a miraculous coincedence (would you have played it another way?) ran into a bunch of new PCs being run by the same players as his old friends!

KK's got a carbon copy of her other half-elf barbarian, Rookia (this one dubbed Lady Smashalot). Frankie, after a very great deal of deliberation, decided on a dark elf cleric--of Titivilla . Mandy dug up a half-elf wizardette she'd used a couple times before.

They headed off to the local temple of Vorn. While Mandy and KK mucked around in the library, Wing cornered the High Priestess of Vorn and tried to use information he'd gathered in the campaign so far to try to negotiate with her.

...which ended up with Wing looking a lot like Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, with John Malkovich playing the High Priestess.

..and with all the girls metagamily going "What the fuck are you doing in there, Wing? You're totally blowing it!" the whole time.

"I know what I'm doing, I know what I'm doing...Ok, I say to her-I have, uh, certain, information and, uh..."

"She casts a spell on you to read your mind, roll a Will save."

"D'oh!"

It would have all ended in tears if it weren't for the fact that lunatic D&D savant Wing then went and cast Charm on her and the august high-level cleric then rolled a fucking 3 on her save and thus was indeed charmed enough to not only let the party go off on their own business but also lend them some muscle in the form of one Sister Mildred (73 years old, 2nd level cleric, sounds just like me doing an impression of sister Wendy, the BBC art history nun).

___________

So then the party's like "Ok, so where do we go now?"

East, they decided, to the Isle of Oth. I think the main factor in the decision was the font I used when I wrote "Isle of Oth" on the map.

So the DM pulls out his random wilderness encounter chart and prays for something interesting.

(roll roll)

"White elf."

Well, of course. The pitiless and toothy White Elves have been chasing the party ever since I randomly made that dungeon out of tarot cards.

"So as the wizard and the cleric prepare to rest and you start hunting, you notice what appears to be a White Elf scout spying on them."

Cue fighting some elves.

The last elf begs for mercy and says if you kill him, more will pursue them later. The White Elves are worried about...

...well it's all terribly complicated. Point is, the Elves are worried the party's gonna fuck up their shit and the party actually has no intention of fucking up anybody's shit, actually, so they cut a deal:

Ok, Mr. Elf Scout, we cut off Sister Mildred's head, then send you back with it, as a sign of our good faith that we don't have any quarrel with all you White Elves.

(This actually makes perfect sense if you know the whole backstory about why the White Elves are chasing the party. I won't bore you by explaining it though.)

A charisma roll and 3 melee rounds later, the Sister M is headless and the deal is sealed.

The players admit to feeling kind of bad about offing Sister Mildred. In addition to calling everybody "Dearie" all the time she was awfully handy with the rain and rust spells.

________

After a brief pause to stumble ass-backwards into some plot tucked in among Sister M's belongings, the PCs find their way to the completely randomly generated town of Olgrayne, where the beer is...(d6)...a 6!, the drunk who KK sleeps with* and then robs is...(d100)...a veterinarian!, the old lady that Frankie stabs in the back is...(d20)...a rich poet!, and the local temple Frankie has to go to to get healed after being mugged in the pub bathroom is...(d20)...a spider cult!

So then (after a trip to the real life bathroom where I basically just washed my hands and screwed with my hair while trying to think up what should happen next) comes a scene straight out of one of those "What do you, as a DM, do, to try to make a horror adventure truly scary?" articles you read around Halloween.

I narrate the spider-priests dragging Frankie's corpse onto an altar (with architecture by the same guy who did the Temple of Lolth in Vault of the Drow), and the whole congregation chanting an eerie chant that brings a small and innocent child out of the forest, and then sacrificing her to an albino drider, and thus...(roll roll)...Frankie, you get 4 hit points back!

Even before then, it was getting pretty clear that the PCs had gone way past Lovable Chaotic Neutral Rogue territory and were heading south fast, but I didn't feel we were in total Jack Chick country until the head Spider Priest explained that in exchange for this healing, the cult asked no fee, but only that the PCs convert to the Cult of the White Web, and Mandy and Wing immediately were like "Hey why not?"

So, yeah. The initiation ceremony turns out to involve chasing a puppet down a hole--long story. We'll see how that works out.



__________

*His opener: "Hey wanna come upstairs and see my collection of teeth?". Fans of KK's movies--especially the ones she directed and cast herself--will be in no way surprised to hear that she genuinely found this pick-up line intriguing.

Scavenger Hunt Sandbox

So in a Quest campaign, the PCs need to do some thing like get the ring to Mount Doom or assassinate Colonel Kurtz and then they're done. The DM has to place The Ring, Mount Doom and/or Colonel Kurtz and then assemble obstacles to getting this done. The advantage to this kind of campaign is the PCs always know what they're after and feel a sense of excitement as the goal approaches.

By contrast, in the Sandbox campaign, the DM designs the world in as much detail as s/he feels is necessary, then lets the PCs loose in it to do whatever they want. The obvious advantage here is the freedom the PCs have.


People who like fun (and I sincerely hope this includes all of you) are likely to be interested in finding ways to combine the urgency and drama of a quest with the creative openness of a sandbox.

In one hybrid, the Epic Sandbox, the DM places several quest-worthy objectives in various places on the map and then tells the PCs more-or-less about all of them simultaneously and lets them decide what order to tackle them in.

For my campaign, I'm using a similar, but slightly more open, hybrid I'm gonna call The Scavenger Hunt Sandbox.

In the upper left there is a list of ingredients (found on the body of a nun that my players' characters had, of course, just killed) for a ritual spell that will supposedly prevent a plague of undead from consuming the gameworld.

Since my group is very into self-preservation, when they saw this they took notice.

Now the "Tears shed on the Isle of Oth" and the barrel of Spider Queen venom are both the kind of thing you might find in the Epic Sandbox--specific objectives in specific places.

The other items on the list, however, give the PCs a lot more freedom. Every PC worth her salt knows there's more than one way to get 3000 GP worth of rubies. And the head of a king? So many kings to choose from...

So this, hopefully will keep things interesting for a while. I just need to populate the gameworld with enough gods, kings, minotaurs, murderers, and black dresses that the players can really scheme the hell out of it.

Minotaurs

There are some things that are really hard to sculpt properly at miniature scale--foxy women, hydras.

And then there are some things that are very easy to get right--or at least people regularly manage to do it.


Dwarves come out ok quite a bit--and minotaurs.

Man are the miniatures people good at making minotaurs.

I am firmly of the opinion that there should usually be minotaurs. Minotaurs hang out in laybrinths, which are the coolest places to hang out.
Even that Warcraft-looking anime-ish guy up there looks fairly decent.

For more information on minotaurs, visit your local library, or just click
here.









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Video is Kyle Kinane. He rules almost as much as minotaurs, and his first CD just came out.