Oh My God I'm Drunk and I Have To DM In The Morning

I wrote this last night: ____ "The entrance is a big skull, like a robot skull..." This is Mandy explaining to me about She-Ra. Which she's watching. This is what happens when I go out drinking--I come home and find my woman watching She-Ra at 3 in the morning. The explaining she's trying to do is about how She-Ra is not actually all a lot of suck but actually was the only cartoon when she was growing up which was for girls that prominently featured skulls and lasers and violence and therefore was actually a good thing. It is a difficult perspective for me to accept, especially if you consider the number of beers I have just had, which number is considerable. "Even the Whispering Woods are not safe from the Horde..." Shut up Adam, you have a terrible bowl cut and lavender boots. If you're gonna die, die with your lavender boots on. Anyway the point of this is tomorrow I have to DM a game. A during-Thanksgiving-dinner game. And I am not sober. I must brainstorm. I think I'm going to use the medusa/halfling vampire dungeon which I am able to use because none of the players who will be playing tomorrow read this blog. Unless they do read this blog secretly. If they do then they are reading these words right here now. In which case they are bad and should stop. Anyway. I have to figure out how to make this dungeon into a one-shot... So--last time I ran it, it took four days. So the question is: how do I make this into a short one-shot? Because there is like tryptophan in turkey and this game isn't going to last that long. (This is what He-Man is saying on the episode of She-Ra that Mandy is watching right now: "Magna-beam, what's a magna-beam?" You should know by now, He-Man. Be more educated about your world. Also: no-one likes you, go put on clothes.) Here's my dilemma: if I don't eliminate something the players won't get anything done, if I eliminate too much, it ceases to be a sandbox and becomes essentially a linear dungeon. Hi! Do this. Happy Thanksgiving. I don't want to be that guy. Every time I try to write a one-shot this happens--I make it too complicated. Okay: Eliminate the wandering monsters. Eliminate the minotaur. (I hate eliminating minotaurs. There should always be minotaurs.) Make all the clues point toward the... Oh my god, Beastman just wheeled in a cake and then Skeletor just used a magic spell to turn himself into a chef and his henchmen into sous-chefs. With moustaches. I can't think anymore. Good night. Happy Thanksgiving if you're American and care.

Snack Management Is A Fundamental DMing Skill

Let us not ignore the white elephant at the gaming table: snacks.

All Games Considered knows it.

The default is: many snacks. Excessive snacks. More snacks than can reasonably be eaten.

It's game day, your free time will be taken up by the game, no reason not to just spend the pregame hours at the 7-11.

Fresh mozzarella cheese. Mozzarella cheese is good and goes well with anything, but: you have to slice it and it's moist to the touch. If you're handling paper it gets the paper wet. Plus there never seems to be enough. The amount that would be enough to last the whole game is also too much cheese to eat all at once. Plus you'll want tomatoes--which have all the same problems all over again.

Although perhaps less "mature", a simple cheddar is versatile--and can be sliced thinner without losing coherency.

Salami is a delicious snack, but has the oiliness of mozzarella, and thus many of the same drawbacks. Ham will be eaten if it is there, but is preferred by few. Better to avoid snacking than to snack by necessity on undesirable meat. Sliced coins of deli sausage would appear to be optimal, if money is not a consideration.

Popcorn is excellent, but may encourage simulationism.

Chips: chips are fine and good. The only problem with chips is they cannot be combined into a multi-classed snack. They crumble and fail when stacked into a small sandwich with other foodstuffs. Better a cracker.

A cracker? What kind? The triscuit is undervalued, I find. As is the wheat thin. Less exciting than the Ruffle or tortilla chip--to be sure--yet infinitely more versatile.

The Ritz? Perhaps. A compromise between the baked saltiness of a chip and the stoic healthiness of the wheat thin. The Ritz is the half-elf of grain-based snacks.

The Cheeto is to be avoided at all costs: it is hollow, less tasty than true cheese, and stains exposed surfaces with despicable orange dust.

The Frito is by far a nobler snack, and surprisingly filling.

Gummi Bears are toothsome, do not crumble or quickly melt, and, when properly bitten across the lower extremities to create a smooth surface, can be placed on the tabletop and used as goblins or henchmen. And the related Gummi Worm is truly an imposing beast at 28 mm scale.

Some pine for immersive foods: trail mix, suckling pig on a spit, ratmeat and orcflesh. These people are hippies.

The cheap wafer is an intriguing snack--in strawberry or vanilla flavors. I would not disdain it.

A baguette--a fine long loaf of crusty bread. This is a superior snack! And the French, wisely, eat them with chocolate.

Chocolate should be present in some form, or female players may turn sour and cruel. M&M's, though initially tempting, are difficult to combine, and frequently scatter to the floor, like small dice.

Chips Ahoy or Oreos are good, but the urge to dunk them may be overwhelming, and this leads to twin evils: wet spots on the maps and open-topped glasses of drinks rather than bottles. Should you enlist them, guard your table well.

If, like, mine, your gaming table includes those professionally obliged to remain fit and healthy, you may provide Healthy Snacks. Of Healthy Snacks I know little, and will say less--only this: I have yet to find a healthy snack that is not either too tasteless or too small to distract the players from hunger.

On the other end, the temptations of both the donut and the pastry are well known, and deceptive. A man may eat a single donut, or a man may eat ninety donuts, but either way the donuts will not last throughout the session. Place not your faith in them. Also: donuts cause discord--for who gets the jelly? And who the creme?

Of utmost importance is the heartiness of the snack. If the snack be too hearty, then players may tire of it, and want to stop for a genuine meal. If the snack be not filling enough, players may get hungry, and want to stop for a genuine meal.

The integration of a true meal is the mark of an experienced DM. However, timing is key: a meal at the beginning and the players will be hungry by the end, a meal at the end and players will decide to end the game when they get hungry.

By far the best arrangement is a planned delivery of lunch or dinner in the middle of the session. A mysterious door, the precipice of a terrifying encounter, and then--Thai? Chinese? Pizza? A brief take-out menu interlude, and then back into the fray.

Pizza is traditional, and not unwise. Beware the complexities of half-pies, particularly when ordering by phone, however, and of the lactose intolerant.

The various deliverable foods of the Far East are likewise desirable--but soups at the gaming table are treacherous, and cold noodles are to be despised. Therefore, those who would eat noodles while gaming would do well to eat them fast. Also, gamers are a superstitious, cowardly lot--they may be unduly influenced by fortune cookies.

Deli sandwiches are simple, inexpensive, unsloppy, and can be eaten cold.

Of the dangers of mexican food, enough has been written.

Oh, right...

So I just noticed all these people (or, in some of your cases, all you people) talking about me over on this post. (And saying nice things, so thank you.) Anyway, it hadn't occurred to me that I haven't really talked much about how I ended up playing old school D&D with professionally naked women.

The only reticence I have on this subject is I want this blog to be for us--that is, people who play games--and not a sort of gossip-mine for the porn press. Porn press is weird: there are, for example, robots that cruise the web for the word "porn stars" and automatically create new porn websites out of whatever content the sentence was part of and they've already done it with my site.

Meanwhile, the human people in the porn press also take any scrap of gossip about anybody in porn that's remotely interesting or stalker-friendly and repeat it endlessly and distort it to make porn people seem even stupider than they sometimes are, which particular headache I and my friends don't need.

And don't even get me started on snarky lunatics who post random hate on porn blogs. You don't want those psychos next to you in the "comments", trust me.

Plus, if you want to know non-Dungeons-&-Dragons-stuff about me and the people in my game it's really easy to track down info using the posts on this blog tagged "players". I mean, most of you reading this can probably find FASERIP-converted statistics for Vecna's best friend's cleaning lady in less than fifteen minutes--I'm guessing you're all googlicious enough to be able to find some porn on the internet.

So anyway, here's how this started:

Satine Phoenix, who I've worked with many times, was talking about how she wanted to play D&D ever since she broke up with her D&D-playing-boyfriend.

I said, "Alright, let's do it."

Then I wrote an adventure.

Then it sat in a drawer forever while we tried to schedule it.

Then I ended up using it with Mandy Morbid and some other (non-porn) friends while I was visiting New York.

When Mandy and I got back home to LA we were all jazzed because we'd had so much fun, we started kicking it into high gear finding players. Since most of the people we know in LA are from her work or mine, they're all people in the Industry.

That's that.

McCormick and His Paladin

So McCormick has a paladin.

"What god is your paladin dedicated to, McCormick?"

"Ummmm..." [on-the-spot tumble into existential spiral of performance anxiety at the thought of whether he can think up the coolest possible god on such short notice] "...uhhh..."

"Ok, McCormick, unless you tell me different, your paladin is dedicated to Vorn, god of iron and rain..."

[dubiously]"Vorn? Ok. Vorn."

"So what's your guy's name?"

"Ummmm..." [more existential dread]

"Ok, well let me know if you think of a name."

It took him three months to get a name.

In action, McCormick is slightly more decisive:

"I pray to Vorn for guidance."

"You don't get any."

Although McCormick has kind of a love/hate relationship with Vorn, and can never remember what he's the god of, he likes praying to Vorn and saying stuff like "I show no fear, secure that Vorn will protect me from these armed and foul-smelling heathen."

Actually, in-game, Vorn is shaping up to be kind of a sucky god. Not only is he constantly being blasphemed against by whatever local usurping demon cult stumbles through the campaign, he does a terrible job of keeping an eye on his people:

One of his clerics (in a rare and tactically foolish display of pure role-playing) ended one game on her knees howling "Why Vorn? Why have you forsaken meeeee?" while her brother and sister were busy stabbing the big boss in the next room, and his other cleric, Mitchell, had, on his first day at work, his arm ripped off by a minotaur, and then, in his second, was knocked down to zero by a hydra. Likewise, McCormick's paladin can't seem to catch a break either--despite being armed with the impressive Tooth of Vorn he's hardly managed to kill anything big. He did kill a bunch of 1 hp peasants last sunday...

It takes forever for AD&D paladins to level up, too, so McCormick's paladin still has to roll high to hit anything--and usually doesn't.

So what does he do? He lays on hands (curing 2 hit points of damage) an awful lot (which is good, considering how useless and accident prone the clerics of Vorn so often are) which, at first level, is nothing to sneeze at.

"Can I lay hands on myself?"

"Sure, um, but do you want the rest of us to, like, leave the room first?"

"Do you get experience for laying hands on yourself?"

"Some, but not as much as if you lay them on someone else..."

"I don't know, if you're a girl and you lay hands on yourself until you get it right and then you show someone else the right way to lay hands on you, I think you should get more experience..."

Another paladin function: detecting evil.

McCormick loves detecting evil. Here are some things that he's sure are evil:

-the vampire
-the skeleton in the black robe with the one black eye and one red eye that sets you on fire when you look at it
-the goblin who was rifling through his pack while he was asleep
-the rug on the second floor of the tower

"You notice the rug has a bizarrely intricate pattern."

"Is it evil?"

"Yes."

"It's an evil rug?"

"Yes, it's an evil rug."

McCormick also often takes point and parleys when the party encounters something that isn't evil.

"I see, thank you sir. Can you tell us anything about the evil rug on the second floor?"

"'I know nothing of such bizarre things, my lord.'"

"'Bizarre things'? You're a talking swan."

"And you're a man who's covered in blood and waving a giant tooth and talking to a bird while laying hands on himself, what's your point?"

McCormick is also developing a talent for the metagame:

"While, I--as a paladin of Vorn--would never suggest such a thing, a less pious and self-sacrificing man than I might perhaps suggest that we use that healing potion on me rather than the half-orc since I'm down to only 3 hit points..."

However, for all his foibles, the paladin is the rock of the party:

"Fear not, I shall cover your retreat! Zorn will protect us!"

"Zorn?"

"Avant-garde jazz will protect us?"

"I mean Vorn, Vorn will protect us! Fly, you fools!"

So, yeah, that's McCormick. Long may he ride. I love my players.

Mechanical Peach, Pulp Magic, Hard Science, etc.

It's Friday, I'm far from home on pornographic business, and I'm paying a dollar every 6 minutes to update from a Dunkin Donuts. But, because I'm such a great guy, instead of just giving you no update at all I'm giving you all my laziest update ever.

Here's some links I like:

A nice mechanical apple.

A really good idea for spells.

Excellent "hard sci-fi" resource, if, for some reason, you want to make spaceships that work the way spaceships really would work.

Free audiobooks of Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, De Quincey, Gibbon, and lots of other stuff in the public domain. Read by random volunteers.

A Review of The Grinding Gear Plus Things It Made Me Think About

Intro

So this is going to be two things:

-A Review of the one-shot adventure The Grinding Gear by James Edward Raggi IV, put out by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, (WITH SPOILERS) and

-some rambling about things it made me think about.

So bear with me...

First, The Tomb-Of-Horrors-Issue

Now, The Grinding Gear brings up what I call The Tomb of Horrors Issue, which goes like this:

There's a doorknob.

Turning the doorknob the right way opens the door to the next room, turning the knob the wrong way activates a trap that kills you and your whole family and your cat.

The knob looks normal and has no reliable and certain clues as to which way is the wrong way or even that there is a wrong way. The only way to deal with it is to either to:

A) Be very lucky, or

B) Realize there might be a trap there before going anywhere near the door and then dream up a clever, safe way to test the door, or

C) Die, roll up a new character and do it the other way the next time.

If you imagine a whole dungeon full of things basically like that, that's Gary Gygax's Tomb of Horrors--a module created because everyone was complaining earlier modules for D&D were too easy.

Some people hate Tomb of Horrors and think it's just a sadistic joke because it will kill you if you don't scrupulously prepare and don't go slowly and methodically and don't use every resource at your disposal and don't try to think just like the person who built it.

Some people love Tomb of Horrors and think it's an awesome intellectual challenge because it will kill you if you don't scrupulously prepare and don't go slowly and methodically and don't use every resource at your disposal and don't try to think just like the person who built it.

Now there is an internet controversy, which I hope is settled by now, about whether it is even possible to beat Tomb of Horrors (without knowing the module beforehand) using the rules as they existed at the time the module was written. According to the Internet, not only is it possible, it has actually been done--in public--with official TSR people adjudicating. It's just really hard.

(There are many other people, of course, who claim to have done it or seen it done, but there will always be controversy about whether they did it totally by-the-book and with no prior knowledge. The Gen Con example, however, is a seemingly totally legit historical example of a successful finish.)

A more interesting question is whether it is fun to try to beat Tomb Of Horrors--that is, whether it's fun to go through a dungeon slowly and methodically and largely without combat and all the while trying to pre-empt the thousands of ways any given architectural feature you see might be trying to kill you.

The answer to this question is, of course, entirely subjective, and depends on your players' temperament.

You could accurately call Tomb of Horrors a Death Trap Dungeon because it's full of death traps, but it's not a very useful name because nobody likes to walk into a death trap. (Hey, you wanna go into the Death Trap Dungeon? Uhhh...) and you can accurately call Tomb of Horrors a Funhouse Dungeon because it's full of gimmick architecture, but that's not useful because everybody likes a funhouse. (Want to go into the funhouse? Sure! Fuck, I'm dead.) The most useful name for Tomb of Horrors is a Puzzle Dungeon because only players who like puzzles will like it. (Which is not to say all players who like puzzles will like it, but you get me.)

So anyway, know now that The Grinding Gear is a puzzle dungeon--though it's not designed to be nearly as hard as Tomb of Horrors. Knowing that, let's take a look at it:

Format

I love the format of the thing--a short, 'zine style, stapled adventure in between a few unattached nested covers. The maps and a handout are printed on the covers and there's a short, pleasant, honest description of what kind of dungeon TGG is at the beginning. Efficient, transparent, and easy to use. In a perfect world, there would be thousands of inexpensive one-shot adventures printed up in exactly this format at every train station in the world written by thousands of different DM's all over the civilized world.

But enough of my utopian babbling--I don't want to waste space describing the production values--let's just say they do their job admirably.

So, Anyway What's In It...

The Grinding Gear a puzzle dungeon written for low-level characters. It is well-written, clearly presented, and has, so far as I can tell, no lapses in logic (though, as with any puzzle dungeon, an unexpected magic item or homebrew spell could be used to bypass a particular gimmick's logic, but there's nothing anybody can do about that).

It's perhaps not truly a full-on sandbox because it's largely linear--that is, there are many rooms that can only be accessed in order, and there is a certain point past which, if the PCs haven't already been certain places, they will probably die. You can't really just romp around in there--it has a beginning, middle and end, a sort of "plot" that is built into the structure of the dungeon.

This is similar to Death Frost Doom, by the same author. However, in DFD there is a distinct possibility that the PCs will spiral off the rails into their own semi-self-created lunacy before reaching the "decision points" in the dungeon. The Grinding Gear doesn't have nearly as much entropy-fuel (though between the random-encounter charts and standard PC behavior, anything's possible). Whether or not it is in any given game session, The Grinding Gear seems to want to be mostly a series of dungeon-puzzles presented more-or-less in order with a few familiar-type encounters in between. That is, the designer's creativity went mostly into the puzzles.

So...

What Kind of Puzzles Are In The Grinding Gear?

First off, this is the kind of dungeon where players will want to remember to roll to find secret doors and will want to succeed at these rolls. In fact, if there is a major mechanical "bump" in this adventure it's that DMs will need to know exactly how they want to adjudicate the "find secret doors" rules for whatever system they're using before they run The Grinding Gear. Is finding secret doors active or passive? Do the PCs know when they've failed? Are there circumstances under which players are allowed to roll more than once? The answers to these mechanical questions could easily mean the difference between life and slow death for the PCs. Before publishing this review, I sent Raggi an e-mail asking how he ran it, here's his response:

Players have to declare a search and where they are searching. If
they describe how they are searching, and that description seems
like it would make the secret door easier to find, I give them a
bonus to their chances.

If the secret door has no special method of opening it listed, a
success finds the door and the opening mechanism. If there is a
specific way to open it mentioned (say, "removing x book from the
library shelf opens the door in the west wall for 60 seconds"),
then the success finds the door but not how to open it.

For example, if searching the statue in the beginning for secret
doors or compartments, a success would find that one side seems to
be moveable, but I wouldn't tell them that pressing the plaque is
what causes it to open.

I don't tell the players if they succeeded or failed in the roll,
just if they found something or not. If they didn't find anything,
they don't know if it's because nothing is there to find or they
just failed to notice it.

I absolutely allow re-tries. Each search takes one turn. I thought
that was the D&D standard... But with all the different editions
and clones that all change minor details, it very well may not be
standard...

I recommend that--in addition to the other very helpful introductory notes on rules to pay particular attention to when running The Grinding Gear--Raggi includes something like that passage if TGG is ever printed again.

Ok, so there's looking for traps. What else?

In addition to monster encounters (most of which are, if not easy, at least fairly straightforward in their tactical set-up) and various dungeon features which will probably have no direct effect on the outcome one way or the other, I count 26 distinct puzzles.

Allowing for overlap, borderline cases, judgement calls, and Gordian solutions by players ("I ask my precognitive belt buckle which door to take"), these puzzles break down into:

10 tests of caution, in one form or another--2 of which are of the you'd-be-better-off-just-staying-the-hell-away-from-this-dungeon-feature-altogether type,
2 tests of thoroughness,
1 (long) test of resource management (the whole second floor),
8 tests of gullibility (most of which are non-deadly in themselves and will generally only waste time if the PCs go for them),
4 puzzles that test perceptiveness, memory and thoroughness simultaneously,
1 that tests thoroughness and caution simultaneously.

So, although this is a puzzle dungeon, it's a puzzle-dungeon of a very specific kind: the players aren't being tested on their ability to solve riddles, figure out mechanisms, figure out obscure uses for magic items, or find hidden meanings in things. It rewards methodical thinking rather than flashy thinking--it rewards people who really crawl through their dungeoncrawls.

...which is exactly what it claims to do. So here we have a product that is what it says on the tin: a low-level one-shot puzzle dungeon that tests the player's dungeoneering skills.

But...

Where it somewhat falls down for this reviewer is in the style department: a few of the the set-pieces that make up the adventure are excellent, and none of them are bad, but, likewise, none of them deliver the suggestive weirdness Raggi's capable of. He set the bar pretty high for himself with creepy and inspiring products like Death Frost Doom and People of Pembrooktonshire, both of which point to depths far beyond what's presented in the text, so when you find out that the premise of Grinding Gear is simply that somewhere off the beaten path there lives a crazy innkeeper/inventor, and this guy created the dungeon specifically to test adventurers, it's a little disappointing.

As a villain, there's something tediously provincial about Garvin Richrom--the dungeon's fictional designer: he includes puzzles requiring you to spell out his own name and remember how many guest rooms are in his inn. It ain't Lovecraft. In terms of overall tone, The Grinding Gear ranges from dungeon-standard at best to Harry Pottery at worst. While GG could be run in any number of ways, and the second-level could, if tuned properly, be a great ticking-clock thriller, it isn't pre-packaged with the black magic that I want from a LOTFP product.

Or, to put it another way, when I first read Death Frost Doom, I wanted to run it immediately to see how my players would react; when I read Grinding Gear, I wanted to cannibalize it for parts (which its relatively simple structure makes fairly easy). So: I'll take the engine, but that matte-brown paintjob has got to go. As one-shots go, I give it a 7 out of 10.

Easiest Hit Location System I Could Think Of

You can use this system whenever you want. In my games I use it for hits on PCs and for most monsters, but if I'm pressed for prep time I only use it for monsters in the big battles.

• Get a picture of the creature in question--this can be one you drew yourself or one you printed out or photocopied. It can be any size as long as it shows all the parts of the monster that'd be accessible to an ordinary attacker. (Different pictures will produce different results but, hey, different ballparks produce different ballgames.)
• Draw lines to the different limbs or other hit locations.
• Distribute the creature's total hit points around the body in an intuitive manner. (For low level humanoids, I generally assume 1 hit point per limb, with extras going to the torso, legs, and arms in that order.)
• Creatures with more locations than hit points get extra hit points up to one h.p. per location (lucky them)
  


• When a creature gets hit, lay the picture flat on the table and roll a d4 on the picture. The creature gets hit wherever the corner of the d4 closest to the center of the creature points*. (The actual result on the d4 is irrelevant.)



• If the player wants to hit a certain location, he or she can try rolling the die him or herself.
• Losing all hp on a given hit location renders that limb useless until it heals at least one hit point.
• An attacker who rolls the maximum damage possible for his or her attack with a slashing weapon and causes enough damage to render a hit limb useless severs that limb.
• Depleting all the hit-points on a creature's head--presuming it has only one head--knocks the creature unconscious. Creatures wearing a helmet may be allowed a save.
  





















• In major battles with large creatures like dragons or giants where hit location is important, if a PC's dex is higher than the monster's then the PC may be allowed to roll a number of hit-location dice equal to the difference between the PC's dex and the monster's and choose the result they like best.
• The same system, optionally, can be used for determining attacks by small, intelligent creatures like pixies on normal-sized opponents.
• You may want to give 1st-level PCs and 1HD monsters extra hit points or the maximum allowable for their class or something because this system fucks people up fast. You'll be up to your neck in limping, bandaged PCs in no time. But it's fun.


____
* The center of the creature--from the attacker's position--is not necessarily the center of the picture as in the flail snail example. Choose the location that is closest to the center of the attacker's crosshairs, so to speak.