E6: Overleveling yourself for fun & profit

I haven't been blogging as much of late because I've spent all my time prepping for our online q-teen game in the City-State of the World Emperor. I have a big pool of players and it's a lot of fun, but we are playing more frequently than I'm used to! As the game develops I'll eventually have a backlog of material that I can share, but for now I am focusing on the most immediately useful stuff.

Here's a post I've been thinking about for a while, as I look to the future of the Land's End game:

What Happens After 6th Level?

Epic 6: The Game Inside The World's Most Popular Roleplaying Game.

Go read it, I'll wait.
Back?
Good.

This modification to the core of 3.x/d20 is the only way I will consent to playing damned Mathfinder. It allows me to chop, flog and edit the system to my heart's content without fretting overly about the rules not working consistently across all 20 levels. If it works with normal humans and 1st level characters, a modification will probably be fine at level 6.

The party just reached level four, and I have to start thinking about how to handle the PCs reaching level 6. More feats will be necessary, obviously. But I think the fun of E6 will be attempting epic-level stuff. Killing legendary monsters, stealing the golden fleece, things that heroes of legends do. When all you get is one fireball, you'd better make it count. How else can the players make the best use of their power in the game world?

First of all, the core tenets of E6 won't change:


Six Hit Dice
It doesn't matter how many cool abilities you have - falling off a cliff, being swallowed whole by a dragon or chopped up by a motivated mob of lowly orcs are all deadly. That doesn't mean you can't take feats like Toughness to get more hit points, of course.


BAB +6
Feats could give situational bonuses and modifiers, or allow fighters to chain up to feats that require a higher BAB. But the whole idea is that the best swordsmen in the world are only a certain degree above a normal human.

Look at it this way: a 0-level peasant with a +5 sword (a godlike weapon, impossible for normal humans to make) is almost even with a 6th-level master armed with his old campaigning sword. I love that symmetry.


No Generalized Power Increases
Bonuses after 6th should improve specific aspects of the character, not upgrade their overall power level. Anything that increases a character's power across multiple dimensions (like lycanthropy increasing hit points, attack bonus, armour class, etc) should come with stiff drawbacks or be only situationally useful.


Extraordinary Results Require Extraordinary Effort
Not a core tenet of E6, but it flows from what I'm thinking about. Taking your allotted feats after sixth level is the natural order of things. Spending a feat or two to take abilities from a prestige class or something takes extra XP, but no extra work.

PCs who want to go above and beyond need to go on quests, consult sages, spend money, peruse forgotten tomes, take risks, utilize lost treasures, risk sanity loss, etc. in addition to gaining the required XP. All the good player-directed adventuring sandbox stuff that I try to encourage!


A Dangerous World
It should be obvious, but things ramp up at this level. Not as dangerous as your standard level 1-20 world - after all, part of the E6 magic is that the ecology of the game world can be at least a bit fucking comprehensible. The world nevertheless needs dreadful monsters that can't be defeated readily in a straight-up fight. Why bother opening up the Necronomicon and risking mutation & madness on the off-chance your wizard can make all his rolls and learn Finger of Death - unless you really need it to kill the dreaded Sludge Dragon of the Drowned Lands and your solitary 3rd-level spell won't cut it?

Players that reach 6th and become "epic level" might think they have no need to take risks. Epic 6 should be more like finishing an apprenticeship: a license to take on bigger challenges, and a sign that your initial 'adventurer puberty' of rapid learning and growth is over. Development now takes hard work.

Epic Problems require Epic Solutions.

E6 POWER-UP METHODS

Finding The Weird Stuff
The most basic option. The epic-level dungeons in Land's End are plentiful: the Tomb of Abysthor, catacombs beneath the lost city, serpent-men ruins, other dimensions, crashed alien... well, I've said too much already. All of these ultra-dangerous dungeons are crammed with as much cool shit as I can fit, and none of it is available anywhere else in the setting. Balancing that out are brutal traps and hordes of tough foes. Most of these locales are optional, extremely hard to find/get into, or both.


Magic Item Creation
A classic of high-level play. In E6, level limits on feats still apply. Based on the feat requirements in the PF core rulebook, 6th-level casters can create scrolls, potions, wondrous items, wands, magic arms & armour. Rods, staves & rings are beyond mortal abilities completely (LotR anyone?).

Of course some items in each of these categories are beyond a 6th-level caster anyway. A +2 enhancement bonus and a handful of special properties (distance, merciful & thundering) are all the magic weapons a 6th-level enchanter can create. This is perfect for me - even aligned weapons (axiomatic, etc) are beyond the PCs' ability, as they're products of extraplanar energies.

If the PCs want even better magical gear, they need to pick up the various lost relics & demon-haunted weapons throughout the landscape, grappling with their personalities, properties & curses.

Of course the long & more fun way is available also. Through mighty deeds, the players may create weapons normally impossible for mortal 6th-level heroes, and these weapons will hopefully pass on into song & story after their adventuring careers are over, where a more straightforward sword +2 created by choosing a feat and spending money (yawn....) will not.


Covenants
You all know how much I love Dark Souls and Warhammer!

Entering into a pact with one of the ruinous powers usually helps out. For a while, anyway. None of the PCs are Lawful, so it seems pointless to even detail the benefits those entities would grant. Instead, I'll work up more chaos patron tables for Abraxas, Tsathoggua, Jubilex, maybe a few others as the setting demands. If the PCs want to sign on with the forces of darkness, that's fine with me (they aren't too far off as of now).

Meanwhile, some ancient beings survive from the times before mankind. If they could be bargained with, perhaps their secrets can be learned (this is a subset of Finding the Weird Stuff). For example, the sorcerous giant Nibolcus (see The Man From Before) knows magics long lost to the world. At what price would he take on a new student?

Mutations
I mentioned a giant mutation chart in an old post a while back. Very difficult to control, but maybe a "potion of beneficial mutation" (or an updated version) could be found or created that would limit the number of really harsh effects. Probably too risky for the fearful players in my game, but might come up as a desperate gambit or side-effect of something else. The Metamorphica will come in handy here.


Night Hag
Wouldn't give your witchy PC more levels, but upgrades your Hit Dice and give you more spells at the cost of stat & alignment change, some new vulnerabilities, being cast out of polite society and having to help your coven with various tasks. The process for this will be similar to lichdom - an esoteric ritual known only to few. There is a witch in the swamp attempting this right now, maybe she can be persuaded to give up her secrets? (also see Witchy Wednesday)


Lycanthropy
Easy to contract, hard to get rid of. We know the rules. The dread forvalaka roams the wilderness, so the changing disease could be contracted during the normal course of the game if the PCs aren't careful. The weakest form of transformation probably. It's hard to control and comes with serious drawbacks (I'll be using that chart in the AD&D DMG) but it could be narrowly useful for a fighter or barbarian who needs an edge from time to time.


Vampirism
So far there is one vampire in the setting, a hold-over from a bygone age. Trapped in a lead coffin, it has been waiting for centuries, hopelessly mad. Letting it out is probably a big mistake... but in a land covered in perpetual clouds, being a vampire might not be so bad? Increased stats, undead immunities and some great special abilities make this transformation a great move in a setting with very few high-level clerics. This option is open to PCs, but then we'll have to mess with templates and it will be a real fiddle-fuck. And of course the trapped vampire might just kill them all.



Lichdom
There are a few liches in the region. Mostly they are happy to kill anyone they see, but one of them can be negotiated with. Prying his secrets will be a serious challenge but it could happen. Certainly this would lead to some great immunities, better hit dice and perhaps some more spell slots - I'll have to give it some thought, and dig up PF's stupid rules for templates.

Vagelis Petikas

Other Undead
Servants of Orcus (see link above) might be turned into skeletons, zombies or ghouls up to 6th level, or perhaps wights if they have a great deal of experience beyond 6th. There are other undead in the wilderness that might strike the players and transform them - shadows, ghosts, etc. Still, this is more of a fail state than anything the players will likely aspire to. If they do get transformed, I will offer them the option of continuing play as an undead character with all the relevant drawbacks or relegating the unfortunate to NPC status (possibly a new villain).


Brainstormer/Fuse Meister
Sort of like special cases of lichdom. These two are much more difficult to make work as PCs, and perhaps I'll leave as antagonists, unless someone is really that crazy!


Destiny
As I said back in this post about the black pyramid:

"Ivory Tablets: One of the many long term sub-sub-subplots of the campaign. My attempt to fix the stupid Deck of Many Things into a powerful divination tool & force to rewrite one's destiny. Created by the high elves 5000 years ago. The individual "cards" must be assembled and brought to the shrine of Divine Providence deep beneath the Lost City where the Chthonic Elves dwell. I haven't decided what each card does yet, but I really dug myself in deep with this one. All the major arcana and 4 cards from each suit, for a total of 38!"

Well, luckily Mithril & Mages pointed me in the right direction. Dragon Magazine #77 has rules for an expanded Deck of Many Things based on all the tarot cards. Awesome! The powers aren't annoying things like "dead" or "gain 100,000 xp," rather stat changes (I'll rule that this can increase above normal maximums), strange events in one's life, saving throw modifiers, gaining tremendous wealth or losing all your money, getting pranked by magical creatures, etc. Very cool stuff and if the PCs ever assemble the deck (a tall order indeed, considering where a few of the cards are kept!) they can try their luck with it.


*****

[EDIT: I forgot about the cards! Getting back into a setting you haven't looked at in a few months can take a bit of work...]

As you can see there are plenty of options for the power-hungry player character. Whether they take any of these, well... that remains to be seen. My next move is to seed clues, hints & fragments pointing towards these options throughout the world. Off I go to do that, and write up some more big dungeons. Excelsior!

New Language rules / More borrowing (sorry)

First off, 'linguistics' is an absurd skill in Pathfinder. Spend a single skill point to speak a new language?? I think not. Secondly, languages in RAW D&D are boring and lame, and have always been so - but Pathfinder makes it even worse. Who wants to speak aklo? Zzzzzzzzzzz nobody I wanna play with.

I liked Gary's bit in the 1st edition DMG on alignment languages as limited tools that only cover relevant concepts or brief functional conversations. It made sense but still wasn't what I wanted. Then I remembered A MOST THOROUGHLY PERNICIOUS PAMPHLET. Those language rules were pretty close, but not quite what I wanted for my setting where the PCs explore a lost wilderness completely different from their home civilization.

So with all credit & apologies due to Mr. Torres, here is my try:


*****


Languages that are related to one your PC knows give you a bonus to understand them: roll your Linguistics with a +5 bonus, and you will always understand at least a word or two even if you bomb the roll terribly.


IMPERIAL COMMON - Speech codified in the Empire around 250 years ago, all the PCs know it. Nothing exciting.

Descended from OLD HIGH IMPERIAL - the ecclesiastical language spoken and written by all the lost faiths outlawed and replaced by the Imperial 137 gods. Many old ruins in the wilderness have writings in this language. There are also other human languages descended from Old High Imperial that might be encountered in the wilderness.



WILD ELVISH - Spoken by feral elves & half-elves, who are all stone- or iron-age tribesmen, second-class citizens of the Empire living on reserves or in the roughest wilderness.

Descended from TRUE ELVISH - Spoken by the entire Elven race before its fall and division into warring sub-races. Ancient ruins, lost knowledge, spellbooks and scrolls will have True Elvish writing. Other descendants of True Elvish are DROW and BOG ELVISH.



OREMOUTH - Spoken by dwarves, gnomes and certain lesser elemental spirits. Often these spirits are bound into constructs, so golems, gargoyles, and animated statues can speak, or at least understand it. The higher elemental beings (water, air and fire) don't have their own languages.



LIZARDFOLK - Spoken by these swamp-dwelling primitives, it doesn't have a written component.

GRIMSCRIBE - The secret language of wizards, it is written only and has no spoken dimension. Not the same as the magic words they write down their spells with, it's just for communication between wizards - not sorcerors, witches or anything else. Demons who deal with wizards all know it, and contracts are often written in Grimscribe.

Both are descended from DRACONIC - Lizardfolk who are literate read & write in Draconic characters, but rarely can speak it. It's almost unseen as dragons are quite rare, but occasionally a magic item, book or legendary weapon will have Draconic writing.




SKELETONGUE - spoken by thieves, rogues, criminals and young or lesser undead. All over the Empire criminals have been executed & buried without funeral rites. So many thieves & bandits rose from their graves, they brought their secret speech from this life to the next. 

Intelligent greater undead will speak whatever languages they did in life, depending on their origins.



WILD SPEECH - The high ritual pagan language of Neutral human tribes, before the Empire subjugated them and brought them 'up to date', outlawing their nature gods or incorporating them into the offical pantheon. Spoken by druids, rangers and some other humans who yearn for the old ways.

Related to the languages and dialects spoken by the wild tribes of the wastes. They don't have writing and their speech is much less sophisticated.

Both are descended from SKINCHANGER - the high language of all lycanthropes.



GOBBO - Spoken by goblins, hobgoblins and similar creatures the world over. They travel through the caves & dungeons under the earth and get absolutely everywhere, so PCs can start with this monster language if they want, and goblinoids in the wastes will speak almost exactly the same. There are dialects, but they amount to accents and regional slang.



HISSING - The language of the serpent-men of old. When they carved their mysterious monoliths and standing stones they used these hieroglyphics. Almost nobody knows it anymore, although nagas, yuan-ti, boa constructors and other beings speak dialects of it amongst themselves.

Descended from ELD - the language of all intelligent aberrations like aboleths, Deep Ones, etc. Even more rare, you would have to learn it from one of their servants, and it's probably better you don't meet them.



*****

There will be no Celestial, Abyssal, Infernal or nonsense like that. Beings of extremely high or low spiritual vibration, described by mortals as 'angels' and 'demons' can either speak telepathically, automatically learn your language, or don't/can't communicate with squishy humankind in a way you'll understand. 

Also, thanks to my buddy 4th for a good back & forth on the topic and giving me that crucial bit about Skeletongue I was missing to get things going! He said it best:

"Warcraft, Tolkein, Games Workshop and DnD have just confused the whole orc situation honestly. Like orcs are fine and hobgoblins are fine but do you think it ever happens that an orcish marauder has a fight with a hobgoblin slaver and they both stop and just wonder how it all came to this?"

*****

While you're pondering these absurd new rules, jam this one next time you have a good GOBBO-BEATING in your game:

The RETURN!! OR A Hard Lesson About Creativity

Okay, soooo I am not playing with this other group nearly enough. And my roommates wanna play Pathfinder again. Thus, we will return to the storied, super-old setting of Land's End with new characters, and I get to throw in a ton of new shit I've discovered since we played last, like monsters from Fire on the Velvet Horizon, MotBM and all that other great stuff!!

We will play Pathfinder again but in order to retain my sanity, I'm cutting out a bunch of stuff and going with EPIC SIX. That's a .pdf download. Read the link and then come back.

If you don't wanna click, it's about "EPIC SIX: The game inside the world's most popular roleplaying game." Player character levels max out at sixth instead of 20th. This idea made me feel great the SECOND I heard about it. All of a sudden I don't have to worry about goddamned teleport, +5 plate mail of etherealness, wish spells, or the fighter rolling 7 attacks per round or whatever. Goblins can still be a threat, and we'll never be slashing through 15 hill giants on an afternoon's jaunt. Every fight matters, and rolling barrels down the stairs at the dudes chasing you can still work. Meanwhile your fighter doesn't need an arsenal of 30 magic weapons to keep up - one cool item could make his career (Wow... Just like in the books! Imagine that), and for that 6th level fighter a legendary artifact could be the same +2 sword that your 13th level dude has piled with 10 more in a corner in his basement.

This keeps stats at a (somewhat, for PF) manageable level, but the boys are happy as hell with the insane level of customizable options at their disposal. Also I can create a world that's at least somewhat fucking comprehensible!

I used this article I found at WWCD? to give me some ideas about how things might have changed. Rivers twisted in their courses, landmarks crumbled or were swallowed up by the lake, things like that. The guys will look around and say "ohhh, I remember what this used to be..."

I'm thinking 50 years later, the PCs that didn't die (or move on to play in different games and level up too far to come back) are now NPCs, retired and/or moved up the ladder of their organizations, pulling the strings from the shadows. This'll make the players shit themselves when they discover what's going on... if they ever do! I will have to reconstruct a few dungeon layouts from memory since I can't bloody find my notes, but whaaaatever man, the point is I'm FIRED UP.

Click to bleed for the devil

This relates to something I've been pondering recently: why is it I can think about this setting for a day and the ideas are like a firehose coming out of my brain? I struggled for so long to come up with cool shit for Arthur vs. Chthulhu and I think I know why: THEME.

Bizarrely, starting with a strict setting and theme can also be a straitjacket, especially for a guy like me. I let the setting (and the rules, hence Labyrinth Lord, but that's a different argument) creep inside my head and take over my thinking. I guess a lot of us do. With my Mythic Britain setting, 85% of ideas get tossed out because they don't 'fit.' Knowing too much about the setting actually impedes my creativity!

In Land's End, I didn't bother asking or answering many questions about the world. I just started with the RAW races/classes, except monks, fuck them, and drew a map of the first two days' wilderness travel, detailed the town and one or two dungeons. I expanded from there as needed, but that's ALL I KNOW. Anything at all could be around the next corner, and I find I can RELAX a little bit. Themes developed as I continued to add things I thought were cool, because I'm into the same stuff all the time of course, but I was also able to surprise myself, especially using random tables to throw my ideas in a new direction. I was always afraid to ruin things in the somewhat more historical setting, and all it did was cripple me.


To improve on this in the future, we can look at some guidelines to remember:

-bottom-up instead of top-down. Write up what's around the next corner before you spend more than a few paragraphs on the whole world.

-more random tables. EVERY time I do this and get something that makes me go "hmmmm! Fuck, what now?" it ends up way cooler than it would have otherwise.

-stop obsessing. Especially over thematically- or naturalistically-consistent random encounter tables. This is a weird weakness of mine, and there are only 24 hours in the day man.

-player-directed creation. Not only the classic "the guys want to explore the haunted castle, better finish writing it up!" sort of prep (I'm an old hand at that). Also character creation! One of my players, hearing only two minutes of game-world exposition, went off with a cool character concept that expanded the world and made it more interesting. I could have sat around and written that stuff up for myself, but who would have noticed or cared? When the players get into it, the material is instantly relevant.

-Maybe all these rules can be summed up as: surprise yourself. This really shouldn't be news to me at this point I guess.

ANYWAY, more fun stuff coming up in the future: additional NAMELESS CULTS, general musings on pacts with dark gods, some copying of other better dudes' work, &c.

*****

Enough talk. Play this the next time your players stumble into a Yoon-Suin opium den:

argh

so this thing...

One of my players reads this blog, and he was explaining this post to me the other day. There are some things to like about it: "Treat The Environment As Another Enemy" is a great way to make things interesting and might be rule #2 of good encounter design.

But "Make Sure Each Player Will Have Something To Do and Give Each Player A Unique Role"? Come on. The only example given is for D&D, so since we're not playing GURPS (where we spend several hours doing math so that each character is different), we'll talk about that. Cross-posted from my comment:

"There’s a reason the classic D&D party is a Fighter, a Mage, a Cleric, and a Thief."

Try playing Original D&D with only one fighter. I dare you. See what happens.

This kind of thing is a direct result of the edition power creep that we've had over the last 25 years. In 3.x D&D we have 2000+ feats to choose from for "infinite customization," but every fighter just chooses Power Attack because it's the best. If you have two fighters in your D&D party, of course one will be better than another, because they'll both prioritize Strength, then CON or DEX, etc. And they won't roll exactly the same stats. One will likely have a higher strength and since so much emphasis is placed on stat bonuses to create a "viable" character, the guy who rolled low is left in the dust. This is the "my precious character" sort of thinking which characterizes the current state of the hobby.

This is, by the way, in direct opposition to your other stipulations: to not say "this monster's invulnerable to swords!," "avoid the roll-fest" and "treat the environment as another enemy." In these contexts, whether your fighter has a +1 to damage rolls or a +6 won't affect the solution you, as a creative player, come up with.

And if you *can't* come up with anything to deal with a monster that's invulnerable to all your plusses, well... I don't know how to help you.

"Evil will always win. Because good is dumb."

Dark Helmet just hates paladins.

OK, I had this long, pissed-off and kind of boring rant written, but I deleted it and wrote this instead.

I've been playing Temple of Elemental Evil for PC recently and barring a few irritating bugs I'm having a great time with it. One of the dudes in my Friday night Warhammer Fantasy RP group recommended it to me, saying it was the best D&D computer game he'd ever played. I wouldn't go that far (I'm all about Planescape: Torment) but I'll give it 2nd place with confidence.

What initially bothered me was my Paladin character. I had a long rant written about the bizarre morality and 'paladin code' of the game, but what it boiled down to was this:

Anyone evil basically gets told to fuck off and I can't interact with them, but it's OK to kill them without a conversation. I thought it was odd that I can kick in the door and kill everyone I see with no 'Paladin Code' violation, but if I accept a quest from one Evil Temple leader to kill another Evil Temple leader, I'm now Fallen. It's not as if I was going to leave any of them alive anyway. I know, I know: it's in the Paladin code! But it didn't make much sense at the time.

This bugged me until yesterday when I was reading Chretien de Troyes and of course remembered that the Paladin class is rooted in chivalric legend. In the stories of Arthur's knights some of these idiosyncratic traits exist. Brutal battles are fought against evil, but nobody considers trickery, strategy, divide-and-conquer tactics or the like except in extreme cases. Siding with one evil man to destroy another is unheard of; a knight simply runs through the first evil man before moving on to the next.

This is combined with the traits most lacking in most D&D paladins: politeness & courtesy. Even the most evil knight is treated with mercy until he has proved several times over to be unrepentant, and finally might lose his head (in De Troyes' version, Meleagaunt duels with Lancelot three times and imprisons him by trickery before Lancelot will finish the job). Most villains are allowed to say their piece and argue with the knight before they decide to do battle. These traits don't combine well with a group of various roguish dungeoncrawlers looking over their shoulders for gelatinous cubes while scooping treasure into a sack, so the result (the D&D Paladin) is a fusion of differing genre expectations, history, myth and pragmatism that can stumble in practise.

Too cool to be a PC.

"I say you sooth, said the damosel, for ye were this day the best knight of the world, but who should say so now, he should be a liar, for there is now one better than ye, and well it is proved by the adventures of the sword whereto ye durst not set to your hand; and that is the change and leaving of your name. Wherefore I make unto you a remembrance, that ye shall not ween from henceforth that ye be the best knight of the world. As touching unto that, said Launcelot, I know well I was never the best. Yes, said the damosel, that were ye, and are yet, of any sinful man of the world."
-Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur

This reading and thinking on Paladins in the Arthurian canon gave me another idea. In any one knight's story, barring a few exceptions he is the best, strongest, toughest of all knights he meets in his travels. During Tristram's tale he beats all comers except Lancelot and when it's Lancelot's turn in the spotlight he can't lose. The stories are structured so the better knights come later in the saga and each can have his spotlight as the best while his story is told (Arthurian power creep!).

This fits in well with the harsh ability requirements for Paladinhood in 2nd edition D&D: Str 12, Con 9, Wis 13, Cha 17. Back in my 2nd ed days, I don't remember anyone playing a paladin over almost 10 years. Even with 4d6 drop the lowest and arrange as desired, what kind of fool frontliner puts a 17 into his *charisma*? One who wants a certain flavour of class, obviously, but no one I knew rolled rich enough stats to gamble survivability like that.

The Arthurian term for Paladin is "The Best Knight In The World," but it amounts to the same thing. A man endowed with strength, skill at arms, grace, beauty, chivalry, chastity, mercy, piety, all the virtues of knighthood. Only with his death or fall from grace can another knight assume Paladinhood.

In other words, there can only be one Paladin in the world at a time. Sir Lancelot is The Paladin for most of the Arthur stories, but his adulterious relationship with Guenevere causes his Fall, and opens the spot up to his perfect son Galahad (in the Malory version, Galahad is taken to heaven by Joseph of Arimathea before he can get old and lose his edge like Elvis). Lancelot can still beat most of the other knights, but he's just a very good Fighter from then on and everyone knows it. He fails to reach the Holy Grail and can't stop Mordred from tearing the Kingdom apart.

I don't know if this idea will fit into my Pathfinder game - the players get upset if they see something in the book and they can't have it. I like to indulge them in this, like a loving parent indulges their simpleminded child, so denying Paladins as unique in the setting won't work in that game.

However, I'm working on a fun one-shot for my Friday group which I hope to develop into an ongoing game - and there will definitely be only one Paladin at a time in this world.

hunt the pixel

I read about this thing.

It got me thinking about last month, when my brother Tim came to visit for a week and we rolled him up a cleric for my Pathfinder game at home. Within the first few minutes of his introduction, I saw that his methods of play were drastically different from my regular group. He drilled me for background information on the setting, and I had some prepared but I really had to be quick on my feet to build up the details of the Empire the PCs all lived in. Before his character even had equipment!

Now Tim and I grew up together, obviously, and had the same formative experiences in the hobby. What I didn't realize is how much difference it makes. While the 'hunt-the-pixel' gameplay of the old Sierra adventure games has been mentioned (and sure, that aspect wasn't very good), I think those very same games trained my brother and I to play D&D the way we do.

A few examples:

-my regular players (there are three), upon arrival in the tiny frontier town where my game is based, did not bother with anything except the blacksmith and the inn. With equipment on and rooms paid for, they headed out into the wilds. Following an old treasure map, they fought a few randoms, went past a waterfall and finally reached the ruined fort (the evening's dungeon).

-Tim scoured the town for clues: he entered the barracks for an interview with the guard-captain (finding the town notice board in the process); went inside the church to see the town's records and pump the clergy for info; wandered around outside town speaking with every peasant and farmer he could find; and finally checked into the tavern for the night. He woke up the next day, did it all again, and THEN headed into the wilderness. While traveling through the forest, he peered (no one else bothered) into the waterfall, tried to climb behind it, took his armour off and swam down into the pool at the bottom! I never said anything about the waterfall, it's just there! It's there because there is a river and a cliff and waterfalls are what happens when you combine them.

But this is what Tim and I learned from those Sierra adventure games: look everywhere, try everything, talk with everyone, take anything not nailed down. That's how you gather information and how you solve puzzles, and I think D&D is the same. Didn't stick your hand into the dirty water at the bottom of the old fountain? Well you missed a few coins, and maybe some other cool thing. Even when I had to ask my dad for help in those games (I was pretty young at the time), the solutions made sense when they were shown to me. You need salt water? Well, Valanice starts crying every time she looks at that memento of her lost daughter Rosetta... get it?

Yes, sometimes this devolves into hunt-the-pixel bullshit, which everyone hates. But it doesn't have to. If you do your homework and the DM (or game designer) is playing fair, you'll have at least an idea of how to tackle any given puzzle, because you're learning about the game world and its logic all the time. And that key you picked up 3 adventures back? Well, it just might unlock that big adamantine vault...

on and off the wagon

Today's been pretty busy, and now that I have a new dungeon filled with vegetable mold-men to torture the PCs with (I hope they don't get too cocky at 2nd level), it's time for a relaxing blog post about some of my own experiences with the roleplaying hobby.

I was first introduced to D&D by a kid on the bus to school. I can't even remember his name now. This was the beginning of 4th grade, which I think is when I started going to a different school, so I would have been just short of 10 years old. All this guy had was one six-sider and the most tenuous grasp on the rules; no books or anything. I recall being captured by gnolls and failing my d6 roll to escape - game over.

For some reason, I found this experience compelling enough to repeat. When my family moved to the next town, I found quite a few friends that knew about D&D. I got the Forgotten Realms boxed set for christmas, and for the next 7 years or so, all we did was play AD&D 2nd edition. Sure, we had a few rounds of Magic: The Gathering and Warhammer 40,000, but AD&D was the only roleplaying game on the map. It was all we had and we fucking loved it. I met some of my best friends in our middle-school lunchtime AD&D group.

Later on in high school I branched out. I started buying weird-ass old games at the used bookstore: Paranoia, a few Palladium books and some other things I don't recall, although I could never get anyone to play them with me. I got a copy of Champions from my aunt (and fuck did I ever love it). Somebody brought some White Wolf games to our lunch-hour group, and they blew our minds at the time.

Vampire and Werewolf I could take or leave, and Wraith I never bothered to play, but both Changeling and Mage had a feel that was unmatched in my experience. They were a total package, with production values a lot higher than I was used to. The artwork, the (at the time) out-there systems, the sidebars packed with obscure bits of flavor text, leaving you with more questions than answers (it's difficult to maintain this feel in actual play with real people, which is why our high school White Wolf games were totally gonzo). Through all this, we still played 2nd ed AD&D.

When 3rd edition came out, I thought just like my friends: bullshit. Those corporate weasels would never take any more of my hard-earned allowance! Until one day when I actually opened up the books and found a lot to like. Regularized XP tables, the new skill system (no more weapon proficiencies), and a more streamlined approach to rolling (no more bend bars/lift gates) all appealed to me. The clutter had been swept away; it was a new format, the art was different, there were new mechanics but it was still D&D.

It took me years to actually play it.