Encounter building: Part 1

Recently I've been thinking a lot about some of the challenges I face when creating encounters, especially combat encounters, for my pathfinder campaign, my party is reasonably powerful with nine players running level eight characters (plus one animal companion and an eidolon), and consequently they can easily deal with challenge rating 12 encounters as long as no individual opponent is more powerful than challenge rating 9 or so.  If individual opponents get too powerful player characters can start dying with very little warning.

My main issues are:

1. Running a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. Balancing the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

As I began to engage with the process of seriously thinking about these challenges I found myself deconstructing the notion of encounters to see if the root of my issues perhaps lies with some misunderstanding on my part of what an encounter should be. This led me to realise that game masters have quite a bit to think about before we start adding mechanics to encounters. Thus I suspect that there might be a lot of thinking to do before I can start getting close to grappling with my two key questions.

So what is an encounter?

In meta game terms it seems to be some instance, I'm going to call it a scene, that prompts a dialogue between the game master and the players as opposed to game master exposition. In less meta terms, an encounter occurs when the player characters interact with the game world and the outcome is uncertain. An encounter will not necessarily invoke the mechanics of the game although many times it will.

To illustrate, imagine a situation where the game master describes a marketplace including some history about the site and activities that routinely occur there - this is game master exposition. In addition if one or more party members were to visit a weapon smith in the marketplace and purchase some goods - this isn't an encounter as there is no uncertainty as to the outcome.

In contrast, if the players characters spoke to Stanislaw the Baker, a stall holder in the marketplace, who told them about how Sozakc the Bugbear was finally captured and executed right over there, 'you can still see the blood stains on the cobbles' and the cleric of the party then asked what happened to Sozakc's axe (the demon possessed one) - the players have engaged with the scene and learnt something about the game world that has furthered their quest, this is an encounter.

Note that no game mechanics were invoked in this example but they could have been if a player wanted to make a sense motive on Stanilaw's statement for instance.

Why then do we break up the narrative structure of role playing games into encounters?

If we think about other storytelling media we find that they also consist of a series of scenes following encounters between the story's protagonists and their environment. The main reason would seem to be that there are lots of things that happen between encounters that aren't necessarily very interesting or that contribute much to the story at hand. While it might be interesting to role play walking from the marketplace to the keep from time to time, but if nothing is going to happen that would distinguish this from any other walk between arbitrary locations there is not a lot of point to doing it every time.

Adopting a 'role play everything that happens' approach would also generate a ton of work for the game master, and without discrete scenes to work on where would you start?

What role do encounters serve?

Encounters are important elements for driving the story forward, and without the story there isn't much to motivate role play. A well thought out encounter creates conflict between the player characters and the world around them as well as potentially between player characters (maybe even between a player and their character?).

Encounters can also serve an important role in world building, the little details that go into encounters can create the illusion that the world the player characters inhabit is alive, and help to make the story meaningful to both the players and their characters.

When encounters engage the mechanics of the game system they create opportunities to roll dice and exploit the abilities of the player characters and even when they don't, they provide role playing opportunities.

Another aspect of encounters bringing game mechanics into play is reward.  Without encounters there is no treasure and no experience points, and these are what empower the characters to face more dangerous foes in the future.

This week I unpacked encounters to try and understand them better and help to answer the two questions if began the post with

1. How to run a fast paced and engaging combat with at least twelve entities in the initiative order.
2. How to balance the combats so they contain an element of risk that I can easily calibrate.

While I think I've gained some insight into encounters I don't have any answers to my questions but over the coming days I will continue to work towards them and hopefully by next post I will have a some satisfactory solutions. If you have any insights of your own feel free to leave them in the comments.

Implementing the Draconic Method: Part 2

Last week I discussed some aspects of the Draconic Method that I was planning to incorporate into my game.  This week I’m going to discuss how I think that went.

Overall Friday’s session went really well, everyone had fun and some good progress was made.  We did decide to cut the session short though. The party was about to enter a mausoleum, they knew there was a trap on the door and the player who runs the rogue of the party was away sick.  Should he be away again next time they’ll have to bite the bullet and take a risk with the trap.

Who cares about Atlantean glyphs – The weird limbo stone, coupled with an encounter with a pair of reasonably powerful demons has galvanised the party into finding the Axiom. My challenge for the future is to be a bit more subtle about inserting these important story elements into the game while still making sure that they have an effect on the PCs that is great enough to ensure that they pay attention to them.

Building encounters – Last week I broadly described an upcoming encounter with a pair of demons that that had the twin goals of encouraging the party to search for the Axiom and also to set up a meeting with a new player character.  The extra work I put into describing the setting and what the demons were up to really helped the players understand what was going on.  We use dungeon tiles and miniatures for combat and my description allowed the players to set the tiles up with practically no supervision from me.  I'm definitely going to continue using the rule of three for future encounters.

The illusion of a lot going on – I think my description of the wooded lake shore has given the players an idea of how desolate the area is.  I also threw in an encounter with a pair of wardens (who are the law enforcement agents of the kingdom they are currently in) who were fleeing a large group of bandits. The players seemed to be quite interested in this little nugget of extraneous detail and went on to wipe out the bandits just to help the wardens out. With a little more effort I can apply this technique more widely within my game and enhance my players sense of immersion within the game world.

The saving grace of 33% – The party had to cross several miles of lake to get to the mausoleum I mentioned earlier. It was clearly too great a distance to countenance swimming and I had been expecting that they would find a boat to use (they had hired a fisherman previously who was waiting about one days walk south of their present position, so they could have gone back to him or borrowed a boat from a lakeside croft). The cleric suggested that he could cast water walking on everyone. I didn't make a roll to see if this could walk, instead I simply decided to fudge the distance to the island so that the spell would give the party just enough time to get there. In the past I have occasionally shot down ideas like this but forcing the party to spend time locating a boat wouldn't have added anything to the story and getting the party quickly across the lake has advanced things to a nice point. I'm sure that there will be times in the future where things aren't so cut and dried so I’ll keep the saving grace of 33% in mind.

Attack descriptions – At the beginning of the session I asked the players to try to make at least three attack descriptions during the session. This drew a mixed reaction with one player in particular scoffing at the idea.  However a couple of players really took to the idea and provided fantastic descriptions of what their characters were doing. One, the cleric, described the physical manifestation of his spells as he was casting them and the other, a ranger, rolled her attacks and then provided colour commentary of her character's actions once she knew the results. This encouraged the others to also describe the actions of their characters, and by the end of the session even that one guy had started to join in. I'm going to remind the players about this at the beginning of the next few sessions and hopefully it will become a habit for everyone.

I think that so far my implementation of the Draconic Method has been a success. I was especially impressed with how asking my players to provide attack descriptions has gotten my players to do more during combat than roll dice and ask ‘Is it dead yet?’.

Moving forward I will continue to do what I’ve started doing and will use How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss as a reference to keep improving my game. Thank you Mr. Satanis.

Implementing the Draconic Method: Part 1

Recently I read and reviewed ‘How to Game Master like a Fucking Boss’ by Venger Satanis. I enjoyed reading the book and decided that I’d try to make a deliberate effort to implement at least some of the Draconic Method and possibly get a little bit closer to game mastering like a fucking boss. This is the record of my efforts.

The Draconic Method consists of a lot of moving parts so to start with I've picked five tips that I think will go a long way towards improving my game.  I'm not going to stop with this five though, adapting and improving my game mastery style will be an ongoing, and probably lifelong, process.

Who cares about Atlantean glyphs (p.14) – This piece of advice is all about getting the players to pay attention to exposition that doesn't necessarily have an immediate bearing on their characters but that will be important in the future by having it directly affect their characters now.  If you want to incorporate foreshadowing into your game you need your players to pay attention to this stuff.

I had an issue where I wanted the party to realise that they needed an item called the Axiom, which had been created in times long past by a guy named Euz, in order to successfully deal with a demon invasion. I started dropping Euz’s name into the game long before they needed to find the Axiom in an attempt to establish him as an important historical figure, and someone whom researching might lead to solutions to their problems. Unfortunately, the one player whom I could depend upon to pick up on and remember this stuff kept missing the sessions where I was doing most of this history building. 

In order to solve this issue I've given one of the characters a weird stone from Limbo that acts as a power source for the Axiom along with a persistent urge that is pulling them towards an encounter that will hopefully nudge the party in the right direction.

Building encounters (p.15) – When creating an encounter I think it is quite common for a game master to have a strong mental image of the situation but then fail to adequately convey it to the players. The Draconic method recommends breaking the encounter down into at least three elements and giving each element three descriptive aspects. If a given aspect is important it can be given three further characteristics.

This tip has prompted me to add more description to encounters and to think a bit more about why the encounter is happening and what should be achieved by it.

As an example, I knew that in the upcoming session of my game that the players would almost certainly encounter a pair of demons on the shore of a lake. I also have to introduce a new PC to the party. So for this encounter I have the elements of the demons, a ritual and the lakeside. The demons have a physical description (borrowed from the Bestiary), an activity (crazy dancing around their sacrifice), and a sound (a caterwauling cacophony). The ritual has a purpose (breaking the protective magic of a nearby tomb), a method (sacrifice the new character) and physical manifestation (the sacrifice stretched over a slab of stone surrounded by burning driftwood). The lakeside has the water (freezing cold, lapping gently against the shore, and dark and foreboding), the shore (a stony beach, bordered by light woods and a light mist hampering long distance vision).

Creating an encounter this way takes a little more thought and a little more time, but I think it will pay off in the playing.

The illusion of a lot going on (p.18) – Venger Satanis suggests giving a moderately large number of things a brief mention rather than dwelling in great detail on one or two items. I think this works in a couple of ways.  Firstly, as Venger suggests, it makes the world seem full, secondly, if as the game master you’re mentioning lots of things, the players will have to pay that much more attention if they’re to realise which ones are important.

I've prepared a description of a trek through the woods bordering the previously mentioned that mentions game trails, bird song (or lack thereof), the occasional croft and a remarkable lack of humanoid inhabitants. Hopefully it will give the players a mental image of their environment that is a bit closer to my own.

The saving grace of 33% (p.30) – When situation arises that requires a decision, and where there could be a sensible, logical outcome but where you have an idea for something a bit left field.  Roll a d6 (or percentile) and if the chosen 33% comes up, go with the odd.

I don’t have a particular situation prepared for this one, but I want to keep the concept in mind for when the players have a weird idea. I won't want to run with their idea all the time but I reckon that 33% will help to keep them all entertained and engaged.

Attack descriptions (p.34) – This tip suggests aiming for three attack descriptions per combat; I try to provide attack descriptions during combat, particularly for critical hits and killing blows. However, I do sometimes feel like I'm the only one at the table making any effort at this. It's not unusual for a player to say ‘I attack him’ and I then have to ask what kind of attack they are making just to understand if I need to apply any special rules such as those for cover or concealment.

I'm going to ask my players to try to provide three descriptive attacks per combat and see how it goes.  Hopefully it will add a little spice to a process that can devolve into just taking turns to roll the dice.

If I can get these five pieces of the Draconic Method to stick I think my game will be improved and I can confidently move on to adopting other components of the system. My next game is this coming Friday so I’ll follow up next week with how I think things went.

Computer aided character design

You may have guessed from the title that this post is about computer programs, possibly on the internet, that step a player through the character creation process and that output a character sheet. It’s not really about the programs themselves, but focused more on the effect they have on the game.

I first encountered computer aided character creation when I started playing Dungeons and Dragons 3^rd edition. There was a CD in the back of the player handbook that had a nicely presented program that I played around with but that I didn't make serious use of.  I think at the time, pen and paper was more convenient, I knew the rules inside out, so the program didn't really add anything to my gaming experience.

A number of years later when the D&D 3^rd edition campaign I was playing in switched to 4^th edition I used computer aided character creation as I didn't own the 4^th edition books and had decided that I wasn't going to keep up with each new edition as it was released.

Right now, I'm running one Pathfinder campaign and playing in another, and since I have the books, I'm back to pen and paper, while most, if not all, of the other players are using PCGen to create their characters.

The main benefit that I can see with computer aided character creation is that it allows players who don’t have the relevant books to easily create their characters before the game. It also can produce some very nice, easy to read character sheets. From my limited experience it also greatly expands the amount of material available to draw from when creating a character. This is something of a double edged sword however, as it gives the power gamer more scope to find exploits within the rules and forces the game master to specify which resources can be used if they want to have access to the entire rule set being used in the game.

I am aware in my game of one instance where a character had a feat on their character sheet that was not legal. This was discovered when it became obvious that he had suddenly acquired a huge advantage over the other players, and I had to tell him to rebuild his character without it. Has this occurred with the characters of other players, but with more subtle results? Maybe, I have no way of telling without going through all my players character sheets to check, a task I have little enthusiasm for.

I'm also not entirely confident that bonuses to skill checks and such are always correctly applied, especially conditional modifiers; this seems to have arisen in my group on at least one occasion. I think that players should be able to explain the bonuses they have and be able to calculate them themselves. This brings me to an issue that arises most commonly with players who aren't fully conversant with the system they’re using and the one that causes me the most concern. The description on the character sheet of an ability/power/feat/skill may not include a complete description of the rules associated with it, leading to the incorrect use of said ability/power/feat/skill.

If your group creates characters together, having one or more players engrossed in their laptops at the time would of course be detrimental to the experience.

In my experience with creating 4^th edition characters, I found that I would tinker with my character, swapping feats and powers to observe the results and make better choices for my character. This could lead to players indulging any tendency towards min-maxing that they might possess, but it seems unlikely that most normal players will suddenly transform into power gamers as a result.

In conclusion, I think that as long as everyone knows from which sources rules are to be drawn from, and those rules are close at hand should an adjudication be required, computer aided character creation is a positive thing. Especially when it allows players who would otherwise struggle to get a copy of the book to engage in our glorious hobby.