On Combat as War or When Things Go Wahoo!

Wizards of the Coast's announcement that a new edition of D&D was in the works and would include a public play test period sparked a lot of vigorous debate on the internet. I've written about it before elsewhere so I won't belabor the point with my feelings about it (let's say lots of schadenfreude as I watch 4e fans work themselves into a froth). But at least one very interesting thing came out of these discussions. Someone theorized why 4e went over well with some people while not with others, and his thought was it depended on whether or not you viewed the fights in the game as Combat as Sport or Combat as War.

This idea may depend a lot on remember how 4e is promoted in its own literature and what it grew out of. D&D, in 4e, is heavily focused on The Encounter as the unit around which virtually everything revolves. There's a lot of emphasis on getting encounters designed in interesting ways, balanced ways, with fancy terrain and mixed units of enemies. Character abilities are often focused on the encounter as well - usable once per encounter and recharging when the encounter is over. This made me feel that 4e, more than any previous edition, was a lot like a fight bill for Wrestlemania. What's the next relatively closely seeded match? That's the essence of Combat as Sport - relatively balanced and relatively fresh teams squaring off in a prepared testing ground, consequences holding over from one match to another are relatively minimal. The DM acts as referee, but has a lot of rules to govern pretty much everything that could happen, in part because there are rule structures to help with oddball situations, but also because the player characters have powers that are fairly narrowly defined and limited in scope.

Combat as War, by contrast, doesn't worry about extending consequences nor about balance, per se.  There may be balanced encounters, but part of the charm is bringing in tactics and plans, many of which require substantial DM adjudication, to do whatever it takes to resolve the encounter. If the player characters can unbalance the situation in their favor, that's fine, in fact it's probably a good idea. Characters have much wider ranges with some of their powers and abilities with fewer guidelines for how to limit them to level-appropriate or balanced results. If the party wizard wants to use a fireball spell to start a grass or forest fire and burn out the bandit encampment without facing so much risk, great. It's definitely not a question of a balanced match of the day on a prepared field. It may start that way (because every encounter is set up by the DM at some point), but it isn't expected to stay that way. The gloves come off and we see how things play out. The players apply whatever Wahoo they think they can.

In the Council of Thieves game I run, the players did something modestly Wahoo that I don't think 4e could have really done. It made perfect sense for them to do it given the powers they had, but it ran roughshod over any semblance of balance in the encounter. And it was glorious.

At one point in the campaign, a potential ally of the player characters is besieged out in the wilderness by a small army that includes bandits, ogres, and giants. That would be a tough group for four characters to take on, particularly with the giants. So the characters are well-advised to find other allies and bring them into the fight. One of those allies is a giant bombardier beetle - a gargantuan creature that can really much through the opposition. If they activate it and send it at the camp, it causes substantial chaos, enough to get them about a quarter of the way to forcing the besieging army to pack it in and leave. That's if they send it off and let it do its thing in an abstract, DM-narrated sort of way. But my players did something different, they went with it, literally riding it into battle to give it some slinger support. They also used some magic to make it even more formidable (barkskin and mage armor, to be precise, improving its Armor Class by 7 or 8 points). The rogues could hardly hit it (I had to roll a 20 on a d20 to get a hit). Even the giants throwing boulders needed a 20 to hit. That beetle was hell on wheels. It totally messed with the balance of the encounter but the players also clearly had a good time with it.

It's events like this, going a bit Wahoo, that make me all the happier that I decided to shift to playing Pathfinder rather than continue on with an edition of D&D that doesn't really support that kind of play - one in which the balance matters less than having things work based on how you think they should no matter how unbalanced the consequences.

If balanced combats are your thing, and there's nothing wrong with that, 4e's certainly not a bad game for it. But I don't really feel that's what D&D's always been about. Combats figure heavily, sure, but even more important is the conceit D&D (and now Pathfinder) has that the game is more than that. It's an epic story with heroic people, not just a sequence of balanced matches. Honestly, when I feel the urge to play a more balanced combat game, I turn to the superhero genre. That's a far better fit, if you ask me, than D&D has ever been.

Taking 10... on Everything

The d20 family of games, 3rd edition D&D and now Pathfinder, introduced a couple of dice rolling shortcuts in the interest of managing and pacing the game.

For skill tests that can be retried without significant penalty (other than successive failures), a player can take a 20 on the die roll. They do the best they possibly can and take 20 times the normal amount of time (usually 2 minutes or so). This works pretty well for thoroughly searching rooms, for example. You can search quickly (about 6 seconds per 5' x 5' space) with a die roll and take whatever the die comes up with, or really toss the room in 2 minutes (also per 5' x 5' space) and perform your best search. Pretty sweet option. And it takes the place of repeatedly rolling the same check until you feel satisfied you've performed your best at the task (in other words, until you roll high enough that you feel you can't do better without wasting everyone's time).

But there's a potentially more useful option as well... And that's taking 10. Initially, that seems a lot lamer. Instead of rolling, which gets you a result at least as good as 10 55% of the time and better for most of that, you settle for a mediocre result. But one nice thing is that you can do this as long as you are not immediately threatened (largely meaning under direct attack) so it can make certain kinds of frequent, routine skill tests very fast. For example, the scout in the last campaign I ran took 10 searching for traps as he advanced down dungeon corridors. He had invested a lot of ranks in his Search skill so his modifier was pretty high. He still had an excellent chance of finding most traps. Anything over his Search+10, he couldn't find and most likely triggered. This saved us a RIDICULOUS amount of time in the game. I knew what his Search result was and we didn't have to roll and roll and roll some more to find the traps in the corridors.We still do this with the rogue in the current campaign, though the nature of the campaign differs in that there are a lot fewer dungeons being explored.

I also use the Take 10 mechanic for my NPCs on a routine basis. In fact, I set any skills they may use for opposed checks (Perception, Sense Motive, Bluff, Stealth) to 10+their skill modifier. This means I don't have to make any opposed rolls, I just use their skills to set the difficulty number. Faster and easy.

More Tools of the Trade

I like some kinds of manipulatable accessories in my RPGs as long as they don't become too cumbersome nor are absolutely necessary. I like them simple and helpful but dispensable for times when I don't feel like using them. 4e power cards are a bit too indispensable for me to like them much. I bristle at them because I can't avoid the encumbrance.

But there are currently two sets of accessory cards I use when running Pathfinder - critical cards and condition cards, both of which are available from Paizo.

We've been using the critical cards longer of the two sets. When a PC or significant NPC confirms a critical hit, they can draw one or more crit cards from the deck. Each card lists an effect for slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, and spell-based weapons. Most do at least double damage, some do more including imposing penalties on the target or inflicting minor ability damage. Characters wielding heavy crit weapons (x3 or better) get to draw an extra card for each multiple higher than 2. Then they get to pick the one they like best.

The system for the cards is easy to use and not too outlandish in effects, however, not everybody likes critical hit systems in principle. If you don't mind them, this could be a worthwhile product for the extra little effects that critical hits can generate.

The condition cards are a lot newer so I haven't used them much yet. They can come in pretty handy though. Pathfinder, like D&D 3.5 before it, has a lot of conditions that can affect a character in specific ways. Some are fairly complicated like grappled, others simple like shaken. These cards summarize the condition's rules. I can hand the card to the player whose PC is affected and we then have an easy reference to remember the effect the condition has on the PC.

The deck includes 2-sided cards, illustrated with goblins, describing the conditions - one to a side. Most are related and mutually exclusive. Shaken appears on one side, frightened (the next step up from shaken) on the other, for example. And there are 4 copies of each card for when multiple PCs are affected by conditions.

To make matters even better, on the horizon (estimated in May), Paizo will be coming out with buff cards that detail the various enhancements a PC (or NPC) might temporarily have on them so that I don't have to whip out the rulebook to summarize it every time. That's going to be a useful accessory that I will buy and use.
 

Tools of the Trade

Pathfinder, and the D&D edition it's based on, makes a lot of use of a grid and figures to represent characters, particularly in combat. It's really helpful, given the way certain combat rules work, to have some decent representation of the characters, their opponents, and the surrounding terrain. For some players, this means miniatures - sometimes made of metal, sometimes plastic - ideally painted to represent the characters and monsters.

Back in earlier days of the hobby, particularly when D&D was just growing out of its wargaming roots, miniatures were fairly common. The 1st edition of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules used miniature scale measurements for movement, attacking ranges, and so on (10 feet = 1" of scale). But the use of miniatures fell out of vogue with the second edition of the game when most miniature scale measurements were removed in favor of unscaled, descriptive ones (100 feet was listed as 100 feet, not 10").

Then with more detailed combat tactical elements in late 2nd edition materials and 3rd edition, emphasis was put back on using some form of grid and representative tokens to manage the detail. Miniatures were back in style. Sometimes we used dice to represent out characters because we didn't have personalized miniature figures or monsters. They were kind of expensive and a hassle to cart around. Then came another solution, one I was already familiar with... the chit.
Chits have been around a long time too. Cardboard chits are a staple among certain types of wargames or other strategic board games like Civilization or Advanced Squad Leader. But there was at least one RPG I played a lot in middle and high schools that regularly incorporated them... Villains and Vigilantes, the superhero RPG.
Fantasy Games Unlimited, publisher of V&V and its adventure scenarios back in the day, included a couple sheets of cardstock chits in most of its adventures. They'd be drawn in comic book style, often by Jeff Dee - game creator and comic book illustrator, sometimes by Patrick Zircher (also a comic book illustrator). We'd use them again and again. They'd pick up sweat on a hot summer day and stick to our fingers as we played in the non-air conditioned kitchen of our friend's trailer. They weren't as cool as actual miniatures, but they were cheaper to produce and they did the job.

The chit made a comeback for D&D with the products from Fiery Dragon. They sold cardstock packs of chits drawn mostly by Claudio Pozas, Brazilian RPG illustrator and author. And thanks to the game licensing by a friendly Wizards of the Coast, they could base their illustrations on D&D intellectual properties. I bought a bunch of them (they even had some for Call of Cthulhu). Then they took another great step forward and released graphics files for the chits on CD. Suddenly, I could produce my own, in any number I wanted. I could even resize them (useful for some variations on creatures like dragons or especially large specimens of common monsters). And they look fantastic.

Now, when I'm running an adventure and plan on using a battle grid to manage fights, I make up a set of chits, print them on a color printer (they look best from a color laser printer), cut them out and away we go. Since I'm making them out of regular paper, they're pretty cheap (and recyclable). I don't mind writing on them as well, jotting down how much damage a figure has taken or if there are any hampering conditions put on them like fear or some other weakness. They're super handy. And using them as inspiration, I can also make up my own graphic files, a few hundred pixels per side, with screen shots of anything I want. I sometimes cull my Pathfinder PDFs for chits based on their own illustrations for NPCs and new monster types. And I can tote them all around in a zipper sandwich bag rather than a big tacklebox full of miniatures (which saves wear and tear on me, I ain't getting any younger).

On the Importance of Wasting Time

Yesterday's Pathfinder game was mostly about marking time than about adventuring... and I'm happy with that.
One of the important things about running a role playing game campaign, particularly when you're working with published adventures or adventure paths (interconnected adventures that advance a character through a significant adventuring career with a drawn out plot), is to allow for character down time, reflection, and exposition. I think these elements help build depth into the campaign so that players have more opportunities to embed their characters into the situation. If there are riots on the docks between noble houses trying to flee the city, the players can decide how their PCs feel about it which helps them develop their characters and their relationships with the game world. It also helps me foreshadow information to them, in this case, that there have been more murders of noble class offspring and heirs, sparking at least a couple of families' efforts to leave the city and a minor riot over who could get space on a ship leaving the port.
Campaign downtime also allows the calendar to advance. In the current situation, a moderately expensive magic item had been commissioned and required time to complete. They really wanted that in their possession before sparking any more trouble. So we came up with things for the PCs to do to chew up the time in a realistic manner. That allows the item to be completed, but it also allows me to report on other things going on in the background without compressing the timeline too much (something that happens a lot in campaigns). I always felt that Pendragon's wintering phase was always a nice way to handle things like this. You go on an adventure which is usually assumed to take the bulk of the good weather seasons and then spend the winter holed up in your home base recovering, expanding your skills, and spending time outside of the rush of the adventure.
Finally, the great thing about playing low-adventuring time is that you can have plenty of research and exposition. One subplot I've introduced to the Council of Thieves campaign is heavily inspired by a plot element in one of my friend's long term campaigns. In that one, a character had recovered an artifact when he was a low level adventurer - a purple gem that showed you a vision of yourself as ruler of your homeland when you looked into it. In that campaign, the gem was a lynch-piece of a greater artifact - a magical weapon known as the Helix. In the Council of Thieves, I drew some inspiration from the Ghost Tower of Inverness and called it a Soul Gem - the Imperial Soul Gem to be precise. Drawing more on the Golarion campaign setting for Pathfinder, I worked up a series of Soul Gems (one believe to have been in the possession of Galap-Dreidel of Ghost Tower of Inverness fame) that served as the inspiration of the ioun stones of D&D tradition. I related the notes recorded by a Pathfinder Society Venture Captain on the legend of the Soul Gems (all devised while I was out shoveling snow one day - physical home labor is a great time for thinking about this stuff) so they have some ideas to chew on. Ultimately, the Soul Gem subplot is tangential to the main plot of Council of Thieves, though any of the gems would be helpful if used by a PC to achieve the campaign's goals. This subplot, should they choose to pursue any of it, gives us things to do when the main plot of the adventure path is resolved (and being 2/3 of the way there at 9th level, they'll probably resolve the plot around 12th level).

The real trick with playing up the downtime and exposition without adventuring is to not do it too long for your players. And so next week, we're on with more of the main plot action as the PCs try to intervene in the Council sending a hushman to quiet an informer...

It never ceases to amaze me how determined gamers can be to keep their characters from being dominated, charmed, controlled in any manner, or imprisoned. I shouldn't really be amazed. I expect I'm about the same way. But it sure is fascinating when you get reminded of it and, yesterday, it was my turn to be reminded of it.

One of the subplots I've got going in the Pathfinder Council of Thieves campaign that I'm running involves a succubus. One of the characters, ahem, got it on with her in order to obtain an object important for achieving the goals of the chapter being played out. She, in accord with her nature, dominated him and even bestowed her profane gift upon him as well (he chose +2 to his Strength). And, being someone who also DMs a lot, the player was willing to see where this was going to go. For my part, I was determined not to abuse this but milk it for all I could get out of it.

The other three players, however, when they figured out what was going on were determined to get the dominated character free of the succubus's influence. They tried multiple times to break the dominate spell, failing each time due to poor caster level checks. Admittedly, the spell was cast a higher level than the witch trying to dispel it and that means less than a 50% chance to succeed. But the dice were not being lucky in the slightest. Knowing this can't keep up, the succubus managed to dominate the witch a few days later. But now that TWO characters were under domination, breaking the enchantments became priority #1 - with a bullet.

That's all fine with me. I can do other things with that subplot and it may decline in prominence in favor of other subplot options. All gamemasters have to come to terms with the possibility that their prep work and plans will have to be put aside because the players decide to go off on a completely different tangent. That's part of what's so fun with role playing games. You try to predict what your players will do so that you can plan most likely contingencies ahead of time and be ready at game time. But no matter how well you know your players, you'll never be able to think of everything they can, you'll never have the exact same priorities as they have, and they'll always find ways to surprise you... at least a little bit.

I know that there are some sorts of game master who really don't believe that or who feel they need to plan or prepare for everything. I acknowledge that's fundamentally a difference in gaming style, but I can't resist saying that those GMs really need to stretch themselves a bit more in service to their games and their fellow players. Some of the best gaming experiences happen when players go "off script" completely. You may worry that doing so will disrupt the game (sometimes it can if the events lead to hurt feelings or abuse of other players) but usually that's not the case and a bit of creative work by the GM and other players can make a shift in directions an opportunity to shine.

As an example, back when I ran Oriental Adventures in the late 1990s, the characters were on a long slog through jungles and other rough terrain to find the general of a lost army who had gone nuts and cut a swath through the peasantry before heading out into the hinterlands. One obstacle they needed to deal with was a deep and wide river. Rather than look for a ford or boat, some decided to swim. Unfortunately, there were also venomous snakes in the river. The evil samurai in the party was stricken but was brought to shore alive if in bad shape. Now, this samurai had a pair of evil spirited blades that were, frankly, a bit scary. One of the characters decided he had to do something about it and stole the blades, intending to hide them in the reeds along the river so they wouldn't be found. He found help from at least one other character and they concocted a story that the blades were lost in the crossing. For a samurai, this theft wouldn't be a mere faux pas. This is serious business. The wu jen (wizard) in the party realized this and, while the party slept during his watch, used his magic to recover the blades. He returned them to the samurai who decided to keep them hidden. When they finally returned to the samurai's homeland a few weeks later, he said "Well, I can't be seen without these now," pulled out the blades, and put them on. When asked how he found the blades, the samurai returned "They found me!" And we (me the GM, the wu jen's player, and the samurai's player) watched the other jaws drop in amazement. And this event that could have split the party and derailed the campaign turned into a crowning moment of awesome for the samurai.

That's one of the major reasons I play RPGs. Those crowning moments of awesome.

Two years?!? Really? Two years have passed since I posted anything here? Where did the time go?

Ah, well.

So, I said I'd be posting stuff about the Pathfinder game I'm running. And while I sit here, digesting lunch, I'll spend a few minutes doing so.

We started playing an adventure path published by Paizo called Council of Thieves. And without giving away too many spoilers for the players of mine who may be checking out my post, the general plot involves a large thieves' guild going through something of a leadership coup and the implications that has for the politics of the city at large. So far, the player characters have gotten themselves through 2/3 of the intended path. Only 2 major chapters remain.

I started running adventure paths for the Sunday Night game on a bit of a whim. We weren't sure what to start playing next at one point, so I grabbed up my hardcover compilation of The Shackled City adventure path that had originally been published in serial form in Dungeon Magazine. My players were interested and I've been running adventure paths ever since. Granted, since they can take a while to play out, this is only the 2nd one we've done. There's a lot of content to get through in a weekly 4 hour game. It takes many weeks to finish.

One thing about adventure paths, as published adventures, they can be pretty generic. They have to be designed for groups who play with a variety of styles and you never know what sorts of characters people will play. All humans, maybe an elf or two? Fighters, wizards but no clerics? Maybe all rogues? The rigors of the game itself will push players to adopt certain roles within the party - having someone good at hand to hand combat is usually good, same with magic, healing, and so on. But there are many, many ways to accomplish this that the original publishers can't account for in any specific fashion.  That's the job of the group's referee - the Game Master. And I try to take that responsibility - customizing an adventure for the players - seriously.

I've created a few sub-plots not related to the adventure path directly and also expounded on other things going on with the player characters to add to the experience. I've stolen from other games I've been in and done so shamelessly. It's all part of the fun.

The party, first of all, is made up of a variety of short individuals. At first, it started with two players making up halflings - one a ranger/barbarian, the other a rogue. Halfling rogues are pretty traditional and date back to earlier editions of the D&D game. Ranger/barbarian halflings are a bit different because, given their size, they're usually at a disadvantage in hand to hand combat. In this case, he's mostly a slinger. Problem partly solved.

Then another player started looking at playing a gnome witch - mainly a user of arcane magic - the witch also has some healing powers and oddball hexes that act as supernatural abilities rather than spells. That's another short character. So I started joking about it and how the players should make up a party of all small characters. The fourth character did things a little differently and made up a dwarf monk. Dwarves in PF are technically medium sized rather than small, but they are still shorter than your average person on the street. He's also a hand to hand combatant, filling the niche left open by the ranger/barbarian's focus on the sling.

As a result of having a 3 out of 4 small characters, I had to think about how to get them appropriately-sized treasure. Most treasure found in hoards in your typical D&D game includes medium sized gear - weapons and armor, mostly. That stuff's too big for a halfling or gnome to use. So I took a potential secondary story line from the first chapter of the Council of Thieves and expanded on it. Whitechin, the goblin king, has a domain in the sewers of the city of Westcrown, the site of the adventure. Goblins are small like the halflings and hoard some treasure. Ergo, the Whitechin subplot would be a good method of funneling some appropriately-sized treasure into the hands of the characters. Fortunately, I've been able to keep Whitechin on the lam so I can use him again when I feel it's time to inject some more gear into the PCs' hands. That should be soon, as well.

That's probably enough for a first outing, or more accurately, return to this blog. More in the not too distant future (I hope).