Unnatural Twenty

I was annoyed a while back in my D&D game because I felt i was being pulled along by other player characters, and going along with schemes I wasn't interested in. Eventually I came to the realization that it's a game about escapism. Players play to experience things they wouldn't get to experience in real life. I decided that if another player wanted to do something in game I would go along with it, rather than hold them back. At that point I assumed that this would mean that I'd get support when I wanted to do something for myself, and that has generally been the case. So rather than each player having the power of veto to exclude anything from the game, I saw each player as having the power to bring in whatever they like. But this seems to be a problem now too, where many players want to include something that nobody else wants. My go to example of this is a player who wants to play a dragonborn. I generally ask such a player, "Do you want to play a dragonb...

I seem to be thinking about the end of campaigns and character death a lot lately. I remembered the idea of rolling or your character's life expectancy around the time I was using the D&D Rules Cyclopaedia. I just had a look through the Dungeon Crawl Classics book and saw something about wizards burning through ability scores. Warriors in DCC get to perform mighty deeds, and I'm sure there are other aspects to the character classes to make them all interesting and cool, but I straight away found myself coming up with a new homebrew mechanic for getting yourself killed. This whole concept might need to exist in a campaign where the player characters are headed for some great destiny. At the very least there needs to be collaboration among the players to get everybody moving towards the same goal: the end of the story. So, I initially thought that warriors would have an ability to deal a massive blow to a single enemy. Something like "reduce a target to 0hp, and...

If the players agreed to play an RPG based on a TV show, e.g. Star Trek, Angel, or Dark Matter, then it seems logical to structure each session as an episode of that show. I don't know if there would be mechanics to support this, but I can see some benefits in doing this. First is timing. Many episodes last for about forty minutes, but my game sessions can be three to four hours long. Perhaps these sessions actually cover less plot than an episode though, depending on how 'efficiently' we play. I'd like to analyse whatever TV show we model our game on, and count how many scenes there usually are. Then in the game sessions we can actually count out each scene, expecting to get to the final scene in time for the last bus. We might have romantic scenes, exposition scenes, combat scenes, stealth scenes and so on. Second is the gradual revealing of plot. In a show like Supernatural, each season (at least lately) has its own big bad. They are introduced early on, and grad...

For the game of D&D Fifth Edition that I run on Roll20 I have introduced the concept of chapters. A chapter consists of 3-5 sessions, and usually deals with a set section of plot, like exploring a new location. In game mechanics terms, the characters will not get the benefits of a long rest until the chapter ends, and they usually level up after a chapter. At the end of each session they get a short rest. They still deal with about 6-8 combat encounters between long rests, so I don't feel that they suffer because of the restrictions on resting. So this lets me plan the next section of the story, without having to worry too much about the long term consequences. After a chapter is over we have a review, and they generally decide what they want to do next. I plan the next chapter and then we play through that and so on. If a single session were a self contained story then I could think of it like a novel or a film, but our stories are spread out over several sessions. If I ...

Considering how little free time I now have for games, I find myself more and more concerned with how much of a time commitment I ask from players in any game I run. The length of a session usually depends on the venue and the travel arrangements, although I find my weekly real world game has much longer sessions than my online Roll20 game (5 hours versus 2-3 hours). Maybe the players want to get more from a session when some travel was required. The convenience of online play means we're not concerned with how long we play for? So, I thought the Same Page Tool was a great resource, but it doesn't mention the length of the campaign. My ideas for this so far are: Fixed number of sessions, so a once off, 5 sessions, 10 sessions etc. Fixed real world time, maybe one year, two months, or until Christmas. A certain amount of in game time passes, e.g. one season, or one year. Until a game world event happens, e.g. until the great dragon is slain. Indefinite. I think my p...

I think the long term effects of the single game of Microscope that I played are still being felt! I was thinking about starting yet another campaign, this time a fantasy setting, some sort of city under siege. I had been reading through the Apocalypse World rulebook and liked the kind of tone the book suggested. My previous concept of a campaign in a fantasy city surrounded by a besieging army had been grounded in a very D&D mentality I think. It would have been all about attacks to be repelled, missions over the walls, and probably some epic shenanigans from monk and rogue characters. The overall goal would have been to lift the siege, obviously. My reading of Apocalypse World put me on to Night Witches , and my concept of the campaign changed a lot. Instead of a city surrounded by a traditional besieging army, the city could somehow be cut off from the rest of the world. Maybe a dangerous mist rolled in and now everyone is trapped. Maybe monsters roam the lands around the c...