What Was I Saying...?

It’s hardly a secret that I love martial arts action. I’ve practiced (on a dabbler level) Shaolin style, wing chun, tai chi, and judo at varying times in my life, and famously hold Big Trouble In Little China as my favorite movie. So, it should hardly be a surprise that I frequently want to play a monk in D&D.

(Which is weird, because historically D&D has hated monks, and I don’t understand why. But that’s for another post.*)

So when my buddy InkBlitz announced his much-hinted at Spelljammer** campaign, telling us to create a character at 5th level with a single common or uncommon magic item, after mucking around with a handful of different ideas, I finally settled on Aurora: an aasimar monk of the ascended dragon who, ain’t gonna lie to ya folks, is pretty much Yang from RWBY. Her fists are on fire and she punches stuff until it explodes—or shoots fire bolts at it if she can’t reach it to taunt it into coming close enough for her to punch it with fire until it explodes. Ascendant dragon monks can do a breath weapon a few times, but to get the real ranged boom I went with a wand of magic missiles reskinned as gauntlets. They do force instead of radiant or fire (which would be more thematically on point), but force is resisted by fewer things anyway so I’ll say its channelled ki bursts and call it a day.

But of course me being me, I wanted her to have interesting RP opportunities out of combat, and as I’m one of the most natural faces in the player group*** I figured I’d make her a facey monk. Ascended dragon does have a free reroll of a Persuasion check built in, so of all the monk subclasses, it’s the only one that supports a face roll face role at all. Buuuuut monks got no ability scores to spare on Charisma: they need to pour everything they’ve got into Dexterity, Wisdom, and Constitution, in that order. I managed to eke out a 12 and give her proficiency in Persuasion and Intimidation at least, giving her +4 in both of those, which is competent, but she’s not gonna be going Full Clooney on anyone any time soon.

Also, monks punch a lot, but they don’t punch very hard, something I’m keenly aware of after DMing two campaigns back to back where the barbarian does All The Damage In the Universe each turn, and everybody else is like “Oh, and I attack too.” As an experiment I made a build that was a zealot path barbarian, with an eye towards reskinning a flametongue sword as her burning gauntlets, and that was some sweet damage but… flametongue is a rare weapon, she can’t have it. Oops. XD Since “her hands are on fire” is a central conceit of the character idea, it’s back to monk.

So once again I’m fighting the system. I swear I don’t do this on purpose!

But! Blitzy told us to use the character building variations from the new One D&D playtest, which means she gets a free “first level” feat! There’s only a tiny number of them actually in the playtest document, but in the accompanying vids Jeremy Crawford basically implied that the main thing that makes a feat “first level” is that it doesn’t have any stat bumps. I started with Tough, since monks are often on the squishy side for front-line (or even behind-the-lines) combatants, but I was still shopping around for something to boost her faceyness. Wait! Skill Expert gives you expertise with a single skill! She could take that for Persuasion! Except no! She can’t! That has a stat bump and so can’t be a 1st level feat! *facepalm*

Back to Tough? Fighting Initiate to get a d8 with Unarmed Fighting? I’m still waffling and the game is tomorrow night! Skip both and go with Mobile? She already has 40′ of movement and can fly for a minute three times per day. Ask Blitzy to let me homebrew a feat that would take two half-feat parts of Skill Expert and Athlete to give her the ability to kip-up? Haven’t I tortured Blitzy enough??? XD (And in case you’re reading this Blitzy, no, I don’t actually want to do that. XD )

It wouldn’t be so much of a conundrum if feats weren’t so rare. As a monk, Aurora absolutely needs to channel her ASIs into Dexterity and Wisdom in order to scale with the rest of the party (or at least as much as monks do), and so she can’t afford to spend them on feats. In the final analysis, I think I’m going to end up going back to Tough. There’s no feat she’s able to take to buff her faceyness, and starting next level she’ll be taking either fighter or ranger to boost her damage output, so I can wait for that.

FWIW, I attempted a version of this character in PF2E just for comparison, assuming 3rd level PF2E was roughly equivalent to 5th level 5E. I think I succeeded? With my limited system mastery, I’m not sure if an ifrit monk with the Rain of Embers and Stoked Flame stances is what I’m going for or not. >.> But at least her feat selection was more granular! XD

-TG

*Seriously, WotC? d4 base damage? d8 hit die? Step of the Wind costs ki? Rogues get it better for no cost and don’t have to trade their extra damage to do it.

**Homebrewed extensively, but still recognizable.

***Not exclusively so, but noticeably so.

Wow, has it really been August since I last posted here? Crazy. >.>

Anyway! We’re nearing the end of Tomb of Annihilation, so victory or defeat, we’ll soon be heading back to the characters from Storm King’s Thunder, all waiting patiently at 11th level for the story to roll back around to them. And, NGL, I’ve got cold feet. High level D&D and I have not had a smooth relationship over the years, in that kind of “our star signs don’t match” way that isn’t anybody’s fault but still gums things up.

Leaving out my philosophical/aesthetic problems wrapping my head around high level play, there’s also the fact that 5E’s rules just plain break. This was evidenced most dramatically at the end of Storm King’s Thunder when, after hearing about what a damp squib the fight against the campaign bigbad was, I buffed it like crazy and they still curbstomped her. This was an 11th level party going against a CR 23 monster, mind you, with big buffs on either side, yes, but at the end of the fight most of the support characters on either side were a wash.

It’s not so much the outcome of the fight that bugged me about it… I would have liked the baddie to last one more round, maybe? But she did get to do a few things. What bugged me was that this was a fight that, on paper, should have reduced the PCs to a thin yellow spray, and they knocked it out of the park. Good on them for knocking it out of the park, but that clearly means that I can’t trust the encounter building guidelines, period. This is a huge problem because, with so little high level content available, I’m gonna have to homebrew 85-90% of it, and I don’t have any tools to work with other than eyeballing everything and hoping for the best.

Just, ugh. :P I can do it, but the whole point of using The Popular Game™ is that I shouldn’t have to be building everything from scratch.

So earlier this week, I decided to give Pathfinder 2E a look. I keep hearing about how it has so much more robust math and so very many character options that we wouldn’t have to homebrew a new race for InkBlitz and SirFox every campaign, the rules would just cover it. When 5E came out I literally gave away almost all my Pathfinder 1E books because I was so burned out on the 3.x engine I knew I would never willingly run it again; when PF2E came out, I didn’t even give it a look, because I was quite comfy running my (at the time low-level) 5E game. By a weird quirk of synchronicity, I found a bunch of recent YouTube videos with titles like “Why Are So Many 5E DMs Switching to Pathfinder Lately?” which gave me a lot to chew on. By an even weirder quirk, Paizo just announced earlier this week that they are releasing a 5E conversion of one of their most popular PF2E adventure paths, which amused me.

So I dove into vids from prominent PF2E creators and I picked up a copy of the Pathfinder Beginner Box on Roll20 to give it a look. I built a PF2E adaptation of Shade-Of-the-Candle, and generally gave it as thorough a poke around as I could without starting a whole new trial campaign. These are the thoughts I had on the topic:

Running the Treadmill

5E and PF2E have fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings. Thanks to bounded accuracy, 5E is “static,” with the 10-30 DC range being pretty dependable across all levels. Even the advantage/disadvantage mechanic doesn’t change the range of numbers you can hit, just the probability that you’ll roll high. A completely cheesed-out high level character in 5E might make a check or attack roll with as much as +6 proficiency, +5 stat bonus, and a dizzying +3 gear/circumstance bonus, turning their average roll into a 25. But a skilled low-level character could also conceivably hit a 25 in something they’re good at! Since most creatures’ AC tops out around 20, the effect of this is that high level characters hit their target more often, but low level characters aren’t necessarily locked out of being effective at all.

PF2E, on the other hand, adds your level to every check with which you’re proficient—and to balance that, DCs and monster AC goes up by the same amount. As long as you only fight on-level stuff, this is a wash, but it means you will ROFLstomp anything just a few levels below you, or get ROFLstomped in return by anything just a few levels above you. This effect is magnified by the way PF2E handles critical successes and failures, and PF2E leans into that by having crits explode in effectiveness. High level creatures aren’t just hitting low level creatures more often, they’re pouring crit after crit into them. As a result, you get the MMO-style world that either quietly levels up around you based on your stats, or the challenges around you rapidly get trivialized as you level past them.

That’s something that used to bug me in 3.x/PF1, where it was less pronounced. In PF2E, you have to be all in on that design, or you won’t have a good time. Bring on the Level 15 stirges, baby!

Oh, and since it only effects things you’re proficient with, by the time you’re 5+ levels deep, the chances of succeeding a skill check you aren’t proficient with rapidly fades, leading characters to hyper-specialization in short order.

Razor’s-Edge Encounter Balance Cuts Both Ways

From all reports I could find, the encounter creation rules in PF2E have their rough spots but are mostly as accurate as described. And like D&D 4E, PF2E is balanced mostly around the encounter rather than the adventuring day. This makes story-based adventures (where there may only be one fight per day) work much better, as you don’t have a big imbalance between the casters/paladins/monks who can go nova, and the lowly “dependable martials” who can’t. On the other hand, it means that the only three encounter difficulties are “Trivial,” “Challenging,” and “OMG.” The best description I heard of it was “Every encounter in PF2E feels like a boss fight.”

As the DM, this can be super-freeing, because all you have to do is grab monsters that match the math and you can be confident you’ll get what you want out of the encounter. On the other hand, it can be super-limiting, because you can’t just toss whatever you feel like in there! You have to run the math for everything so you don’t accidentally put in the one owlbear too far that turns it from a good fight into a one-way trip to Boot Hill for your PCs. Where 5E is so loose as to be shapeless, PF2E is so tight that you run a regular risk of overtuning.

Swords and Spreadsheets

Pathfinder 2E is a game that is daunting to look at, period. Every character sheet or monster statblock is a sea of keywords that you have to either memorize or have quick reference for. Building your character requires choosing a Background, a Heritage, a Class, an Archetype, feats attached to all of those, and then any extra feats or proficiencies you still have left over at the end; then every time you level up, all of your proficient values change and you gain at least one new ability, whether that’s a class feature, a racial feat, a personal feat, etc. Running the game is an exercise in tracking “+2+1-4+2+2-2 = +1” calculations for everything you do, and because of the importance of critical success/failure, each one of those +1’s or -1’s is important. Now most of this calculation is just done up front (or when you level up), but if you have players with a short attention span—or you’re a DM who can’t hold more than three things in your head at once—there’s going to be a lot of “What was that modifier again? What does this condition do again? Wait, does insert spell name here apply?” going on, which is exactly the sort of thing that slows games and why 5E created the whole “advantage/disadvantage” system in the first place.

Basically, you’ve got to think about the mechanics a lot more often, and having a rule for EEEVERYTHING makes it a lot easier to “do it wrong.” The system gives you a solid framework to build custom creatures/items/character abilities on, but it’s like a giant erector set with a bunch of weird-looking little pieces. What do they all do? Why is this one at this weird angle? Why are there four different types of connectors??? I’m sure it works beautifully once you’ve got the hang of it, but from the outside it just makes my eyes swim.

My Fallacy Cost Sunk! (or, “Trading One Kind of System Pain For Another”)

Honestly, one reason I was considering PF2E was to bring back crunchy magic item rules for SirFox; 5E has worse-than-nothing systems on this topic and it’s caused us headaches in the past. But when I did a quick-and-dirty canvassing of opinions from group, he was the first one to argue against learning a new system so far into an established campaign. It surprised me, but other players said basically the same thing, and they’re not wrong. Jumping into Pathfinder at any level higher than 1 would probably be a disaster in terms of learning the system. But there’s also the fact that I’m just not convinced that it wouldn’t be just trading one set of problems for a different set.

I still have to come up with adventures that will work for these characters in this campaign. 5E is going to be mostly silent on this front, with me grabbing what third-party stuff I can find to use from the DM’s Guild, but mostly making it up as I go—with useless encounter building guidelines. Pathfinder has high-level content and great tools, but its adventures are as dense as the rule system they’re built for, and when I’ve run them in the past I usually end up throwing out large chunks and homebrewing the rest anyway. Even at higher levels, 5E is mostly-transparent at the table and fairly breezy in combat… the idea of going back to hour long fights does not appeal. O.o

So for the time being at least, I ended up deciding to stick with 5E. When we someday reach the end of the Storm King crew’s campaign, maybe I’ll look at running some PF2E just to see what it’s actually like… but I suspect by then we’ll either be at or near new editions for both. We’ll see.

-The Gneech

THIS JUST IN: I have opinions about D&D. I know, shocker, right? The latest that I’ve become aware of, is that I am growing increasingly reluctant? Distrustful? Resentful of? Skill checks. Both as the DM and as a player.

As a DM, it’s been kind of poking at me for a while; I don’t know when I first noticed, but somewhere along the line, “I make a _____ check” became group shorthand for “I skip to the end, what’s the result?” Talking to NPCs? “I make a Persuasion check to get them to do what I want.” or “Can I make an Insight check to see if I trust him?” Searching for clues? “I make an Investigation check, what do I find?” etc.

And I’m guilty of it too as a player—I think it’s just a habit we just sort of developed as a group—but it’s starting to grate at me. I’m not sure how or when it became a thing, and I don’t really care; but when I’m DMing, it’s something I’m moving away from. (The “Insight Check Lie Detector” is one that’s been a particular worry for me lately. My current campaign has had a lot of very dishonest NPCs, and more than once I’ve gone out of my way to wave red flags, only to have the players lean on their Insight check instead of just coming to the conclusion that the NPC is lying to them. If that Insight check is botched, well, the character believes and steps into the chipper/shredder, the player is frustrated, and so am I.)

As a player on the other hand, I’ve found it a severe handicap for years, because (as is well documented) I can’t roll dice for shit. Give me +15 to a check and advantage, and I’ll still find a way to botch the roll. My most famous incident was rolling 16 on 8d6 during the climactic battle of a CHAMPIONS session back in college, but I’ve had plenty of rangers who couldn’t damage their favored enemy, burly fighters who couldn’t knock down a door, cheesed-out skill monkeys who couldn’t pick a lock, and so on. To combat this, I’ve started being very meticulous in my descriptions about what my characters do and say, searching every nook and cranny of a room, drawing out every conversation with everybody, and so on, fishing for an auto-success so that I never hear that awful phrase, “make a skill check,” which translates to “you almost certainly fail.” I don’t want to have to pay a Feat tax of giving all of my characters Lucky just to get around my dice curse.

But philosophically, the more I think about it, the more it bugs me on principle as well as for any selfish reasons. It’s like the pay-for-shortcuts packages in MMOs, where you’re effectively paying to not have to play the game. The real mechanic of every TTRPG, what makes them a distinct and awesome activity, is the flow of the Game Master presenting a situation, the Player attempting to achieve something, and the Game Master adjudicating the result. That is the game, not your AC and hit points, not your 18 STR or your 8 WIS. “Roll Perception to search the room. (clatter) With a 10 you don’t find anything,” is just as boring as “Make your attack roll against the monster. (clatter) With a 14 you hit for three points of damage.”

As a player, there’s not much I can do other than make my best case to the DM and hope. As the DM, tho, I have started to change the way I handle skills. First and foremost was to institute a “please don’t roll dice unless I ask for it” policy at my table. And then, I try to set up my adventures such that I don’t have to ask for it. My policy for that is “ask for details, not dice rolls.” When players are being vague or evasive about what they’re doing, I come back and ask for specifics. I don’t demand that players who lack confidence in real life give speeches for their high-Charisma characters any more than I make players swing real swords in combat, but I do at least require them to tell me what it is they’re trying to communicate and/or get from the NPC, and what means by which they’ll try to get the NPC’s cooperation.

Now there are times when playing out every room search/enemy looting/secret door searching would get old, and particularly as we get into the back half of Tomb of Annihilation I expect that will be pushed to its limits. There has to be a certain allowance for the fact that it’s just not fun to detail the poking of every corner of every hallway. I generally get around this with my third policy, “assume the characters are competent.” And what I mean there is, if someone in the party is trained in Survival for example, assume they are good enough trackers to find trails and food/water unless there’s a particular reason why they might not. If they’re creeping through a dungeon, assume they’re watching the shadows and looking for traps, etc. In terms of game rules, this boils down to the “passive skill check” mechanic as a way to bypass “routine” things. The comedy of “Big Damn Hero Is a Stumblebum Because Fuck Dice” has long lost its appeal for me, if only because I keep building Big Damn Heroes and they keep stumbling instead.

-The Gneech

Enigma Sector is intended to be “big tent” space opera the way D&D is “big tent” fantasy, so it pulls from a lot of sources, and of course Star Wars is a big one. One of the things I’ve been trying to fit into the game is “ion damage” as it’s presented in Star Wars. We see four clear examples of it:

• Jawas zap R2-D2, he keels over


• Controls of Luke’s snowspeeder become ionized and he crashes


• Hoth ion cannon disables a star destroyer and the transport ships breeze past


• Y-Wings hit a star destroyer with ion torpedoes and disable it, allowing a hammerhead corvette to play billiards with it

It could be that ion damage is the “stun setting” that knocks out Leia in Ep IV and that she uses on Poe in Ep VII, as well, that’s harder to say. That’s how I’ve been treating it, anyhow.

But the common element of all of these is that ion damage, while not inherently lethal, is presented as a one-punch fight ender*, which can have its place when it’s a plot device, but poison when you want to have a playable game. The biggest question it leads to, however, is “If you have a cannon/torpedo that can one-punch a star destroyer, why wouldn’t you just do that all the time?” Or to put it into game terms, if you give the players in your game an “I win!” button, they’ll just press it over and over. And if you give the enemies the same button, the only real contest becomes the initiative check to see who can hit the “I win!” button first.

(*Sort of. The Hoth ion cannon fires four shots, and we see two connect, while the Y-Wings in Rogue One just pummel the star destroyer with something like six hits. But in both cases, the star destroyer goes from “fine” to “dead in space” in a matter of seconds.)

So this brings us to ion weapons and spaceship combat. My original idea was that a hit from an ion weapon would knock down a ship’s shields, which is kinda-sorta what we see in the case of the star destroyers: the first hit mucks up the shields, and the followup hit(s) muck up the controls. Since all the hits happen in rapid succession, we don’t get to see if the star destroyers could recover from the first one in time. But that led me to imagining my players, in their own little not-quite-the-Millennium Falcon, being swarmed by enemy fighters with ion guns that lead to a super-fast death spiral of the shields going down and staying down. I’ve already established that ion weapons have shorter range and do less damage than blasters, but that add-on effect is still hella powerful.

(In the case of Luke’s snowspeeder, there’s no indication that the walkers are firing ion weapons, so I’m assuming that would come under the heading of system damage: the regular blaster hit incapacitated the ship for a round and, being next to an enormous obstacle (i.e., the planet), the snowspeeder crashed into it. That incapacitation just happened to come in the form of ionized controls.)

So how do I fit ion weapons into that Venn Diagram sweet spot between “doesn’t add math,” “is worth doing sometimes,” and “doesn’t become the only thing worth doing”? I started looking at monster debuffs for inspiration here. 4E was full of “controller” monsters, who all pretty much did the same thing: “Piddly damage, and the target is dazed (save ends).” Dazed in 4E was roughly analogous to 5E’s version of the slow spell: attackers had advantage on you, you could move or attack (but not both), and you couldn’t use bonus actions or reactions. That’s not bad, honestly. (Slow tweaks the numbers and adds some stuff about spell failure that isn’t really relevant here.) 5E’s major monster debuffs come from grapples, poison, or petrification, which all do variations of the same thing. Grapples hold you in place, poison gives you disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks, and petrification starts with being restrained (can’t move and attackers have advantage) and gets worse from there.

So let’s break these down…

• Grappled (immobilized): Having a movement speed of 0 can range from being immaterial (if your plan was to just buzz around shooting anyway) to being a game-ender (if your plan was to escape to the jump-point). There is a vague vibe of “moving fast = hard to hit, not moving = sitting duck” that isn’t reflected in the rules per se. That leads to…


• Restrained: Your speed becomes 0, as above, but attackers have advantage against you, and you have disadvantage on Dex saves. This is a heck of a debuff, especially when the enemies pile on, but while you can’t move, you can at least still act. This pretty accurately reflects ion damage as presented, but it’s also dangerously close to the “becomes the only thing worth doing” category.


• Poisoned: You have disadvantage on attacks and ability checks. Probably the worst thing you can do to a rogue because it tends to kill sneak attack, but is mostly a nuisance for everyone else, and also doesn’t model the desired result.


• 4E-style Dazed/5E-style Slowed: You have to choose whether to move or attack (choices are interesting!) and have a fairly significant debuff, whether it’s advantage for your enemies, or -2 AC/Dex saves for you.

Of the choices, I think I’m liking the 4E dazed the best. (Hey, 4E wasn’t all bad.) In 4E, “save ends” meant that at the end of your turn, roll 10+ on a d20 and the condition went away (rather than being impacted by your stats like a 5E saving throw). This was a key part of the design: debuffs were meant to sting, but they were also meant to be something you could shake off fairly easily, on the grounds that being hamstrung through the whole fight was anti-fun. And I still want that to be the case here: tying recovery to a Constitution saving throw would make it way too hard for small ships to recover, and way too easy for big ones. So how about something like this…

Ionized (Condition): The vehicle’s controls are locked up by ionization. The vehicle can’t take reactions, and it can’t move unless it uses the Dash action. Attackers have advantage against the vehicle, and it has disadvantage on Dexerity saving throws. At the end of the vehicle’s turn, roll 1d20: the ionization effect ends on a roll of 10 or higher. The vehicle may also end the effect by using its action to spend a hit die as damage control.

This could also work for droids being hit by ion weapons as well. Whattya think?

-TG

Continuing where we left off…

I feel like there’s a weakness in the core premise. One shipment of munitions by itself hardly seems critical enough for all this skullduggery. Time to refine it a bit. EVENT MEANING ROLL: Focus is 56: “PC negative” (something about Shady herself? O.o), action and subject are 4/93: “Fight of weather.” Um. What? XD The L.P. doesn’t think Shady can navigate storms? That doesn’t make any sense.

Reply hazy, try again! EVENT MEANING ROLL: Focus is 19: “NPC action,” action and subject are 13/85: “Decrease of technology.” Okay, so what NPC? Characters List 4: Ainsworth, or Persons of Interest 6: Cardinal Maraldo. Well huh, what could I do with that?

Maraldo is a high official in the church of Pholtus (“The Blinding Light”), paladins and crusaders who are sworn to seek justice, law, and order. And Maraldo believes in this creed, even if in his own case he tends more to an authoritarian streak, favoring the law and order part over the justice part. Why would he pursue “decrease of technology”? He believes in “might for right,” and also conveniently believes that what he does is right, because he’s the one doing it. If there’s munitions to be had, his view is going to be “We should have it, to keep it from ‘falling into the wrong hands’, and also to better smite evil with.”

Soooo… what if the secrecy is to avoid conflict with the Cardinal? The Lady Patrician would love to have munitions for Everkeep, but she might very well love a pile of gold from Dragonwatch Keep even more. What if the munitions were captured (from pirates/smugglers/gunrunners, whatevs), but instead of confiscating and using them, the L.P. has decided to sell them to Dragonwatch Keep over Maraldo’s objections? The “Judge/Balance” result from Scene Two isn’t about the whole region—it’s about the balance of power within Everkeep itself!

That could also explain why Ainsworth actually put “munitions” on the wharfmaster’s log—maybe it wasn’t supposed to be a secret at first, but the decision was made at the last second, “The answer is ‘no,’ I am therefore going anyway?” But Ainsworth knows Shady well enough to know that she has no love for Maraldo, and isn’t likely to go stirring up trouble with him, which is why he didn’t try to take her prisoner to keep the secret.

Okay! I dig this. :) But now the big question: what actually IS the next scene? Shady’s been cut off here and doesn’t have much in the way of a path to pursue. She doesn’t care about the munitions qua themselves, she just wants to find some kind of angle to profit by, as her ship languishes on the docks. Attacking the Dragonfly to pirate the munitions is a winnable battle but iffy prospect, plus it would probably cost her Ainsworth’s friendship and definitely get her blacklisted in Everkeep. BUT, if Shady finds out about the conflict between L.P. and Maraldo, she can work that into a win/win for the L.P. by stealing the munitions back for Everkeep after they’re delivered, IF she can do it anonymously. That seems very much a Shady thing to pull, but she has to find out about the conflict first. And that means she needs to do more poking around.

The Moonlit Horizon is faster than the Dragonfly, so there’s no real time constraint in letting Ainsworth go ahead and leave town; Shady has some time to investigate. But where will she go? She knows the other privateers are also in the dark; she could try to find some kind of information broker type, or go straight to the Lady Patrician herself. Telekain?

Hmm. That’s a promising angle! So, next scene will be “Shady goes to Telekain,” assuming there is no modification or interrupt. But I’m out of time (and words) for this session, so I’ll have to start there with the next installment!

GeekQuery! A new web channel featuring InkBlitz and myself, talking all things geeky. We jump right in this week, discussing what it’s like to switch to being a player in tabletop RPGs if you’re used to being the Gamemaster—or vice-versa. We’re just getting started and we’d love some feedback!

-The Gneech

I’ve been running a somewhat-modified Tomb of Annihilation lately, and while my players seem to be having a good time, I must admit that I’m not quite feeling the connection with it that I would like. Perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the group has had some seriously bad luck with navigation rolls and so keeps getting lost in the jungle, the game largely feels to me like a string of random fights, with little or no through-line of story or character development, which are famously the parts of any game that I’m the most interested in.

While I was looking for ways to address this for my next session, I happened across this video from Runesmith, in which he enumerates “five things an adventure should have.” What immediately struck me is that I’ve seen this concept before: the first time was in West End Games’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game, way back in 1987, but it’s also a core conceit of the Five Room Dungeon concept. Some of the specific bullet points of the five items vary, however, and if we map them to Dungeons & Dragons‘s “Three Pillars of Adventure” (Exploration, Social Interaction, and Combat), we get…

Why five? First, it’s complex enough to be meaty without being so complex that it bogs down in detail or analysis paralysis. Second, it nicely maps to the familiar five-act story structure of setup > rising action > complication > climax > denouement. Finally, it’s a handy pocket size. The Star Wars example doesn’t quite map to the other two—”firefight,” “ship combat,” and “chase” are all more-or-less specific flavors of “fight something”—but the Star Wars setting, with its alien creatures and exotic worlds, has “go somewhere cool” baked into it universe design assumptions (and the inherent reward of any adventure assumed to be “victory for the Alliance”).

Looking at my Tomb of Annihilation game, I actually think that most of the individual sessions have hit the five points fairly consistently: the Burning Coast is an exciting region with dangers and wonders galore, there have been plenty of colorful NPCs, and so on. It has leaned a little heavily on the combat and exploration, but I think the point that may be falling down is rewards. Not just in terms of treasure (because there hasn’t been much, but in this setting gold and such is largely irrelevant), but in terms of the inherent reward of “moving the story forward.” The party came to the Burning Coast to find (and hopefully end) the Wasting Curse, and so far they’ve gone dino racing, rowed up the Amazon Soshenstar River, and now they’ve gotten entangled with the troubles of a lizardfolk village that may or may not have anything to do with the Big Problem. The barbarian, of all people, is wondering “Are we getting anywhere?” and maybe he has a point.

With this in mind, I think I’m going to remix a few of the elements of the next session to tie them more closely to the Big Problem, but more importantly, to show the players that it’s tied to the Big Problem. In an adventure where “loot” is not a metric, “plot coupons” are the actual reward, and I think maybe I’ve been too stingy with those. So I will address that.

-The Gneech

Back in 2008, I was a huge fan of Star Wars Saga Edition, and in some ways it’s still my favorite iteration of the d20 engine. For this game, I created a Call of Cthulhu tribute game, Uncanny Midnight Tales. With Halloween a mere two weeks away, I thought now might be a good time to once again share it with the world!

What’s presented is not a complete game– it requires the Star Wars Saga Edition rulebook to play (and of course, SWSE was not OGL, so there isn’t any SRD for it), but for the most part it could be played in 5E with little alteration. But it does include character creation, equipment, and a Gamemaster Guide with a ready-to-go adventure and a collection of creature and monster stats.

Really, the entire project was more an excuse for me to create “my vision” of what a d20-based CoC might look like, but I had a lot of fun with it and creating all the handouts, and I don’t want it to be lost to the world. So go forth! Click on any of the images and have some spoopy fun this Halloween, on me!

-The Gneech

As folks may know, my day job is a success coach. I work with people in lots of different walks of life, but my native tribe is, was, and ever shall be creative types! 🙂 To that end, I’m opening three slots for artists or writers to get 90 days of coaching at no cost.

YOU GET: 1-hour weekly sessions via phone or internet hangout where we look at where you are in your creative pursuits, what obstacles you are facing and how to overcome them, and the possibilities that will open up for you to get you where you want to be.

WHAT I ASK IN RETURN: Feedback! I want to be the awesomest, most kickass coach ever– which means I need to learn what I’m doing right, what I’m doing wrong, and how I can do it better. 🙂

NOTE: This service is coaching– i.e., helping you reach your goals; not art tutor, editor, or similar services. Adults only, please. 🙂

Comment here or send me an e-mail via himself@gneech.com if you’d like to set up an intro call to talk about nabbing a spot! 🙂

-The Gneech