[D&D 3.0/3.5] Monster fight on the open sea!

[Zak Arntson]

Wow! So after a long hiatus (last gamed at Dragonflight 2004, running Donjon and InSpectres), I started up a game of Dungeons & Dragons 3.5/3.0 (we have both sets of books, but we try to look things up in the 3.5 book). We're all workmates, three artists and two programmers, playing after-hours in a conference room.

Before Play
My initial plan was to get the players amped about playing their characters. I offered them the option of answering three questions about their characters through email, which none of them did. Granted, we've been very busy with a deadline (playing with workmates), but I was only asking for single-sentence answers.

Rather than get discouraged that the players weren't excited to play, I figured it was an indication of their play desires. Their PCs wouldn't be platforms for exploring , but rather complicated game tokens. This helped me adjust my expectations.

I then discussed with them individually, face-to-face, that since the new D&D is miniature-combat oriented, we'll focusing on that. All four players understood and were excited to play.

For actual prep, I simply found some old Heroquest minis, printed up the Zombie, Human Commoner entry from d20srd.org, and printed a homemade map to cardstock.

Character Generation
All I can say is thank goodness for class packages in the Players Handbook. The one experienced player went ahead and created a Gnome Fighter with a War Dog mount. The other three used the packages to create two Human Fighters and one Human Cleric. This was easy and painless! Short of pregenerated characters, I have to suggest class packages for newbie D&D players.

Test Run
We started at 6:30 in the evening, and finished characters by about 7:45. That left us nearly two hours to try out a combat. Before we started I realized that the party had a cleric with the Extra Turning feat, so I quickly ran back to my desk (we're at work, remember) and printed up Goblin stats.

My map was line-work on cardstock, a small ship with the fore and aft portions 1" higher than the main deck (cheap, but a bit of flavor). A few 1" square "rope" tokens indicated difficult ground. I told the players to stick their characters anywhere on the boat.

We started with the Surprise round, with everyone making a Spot or Listen check against a DC of 15 (whichever skill of theirs was better). Success meant you weren't flat-footed to start.

Play moved into plain-old combat. Which was really fun! We of course made mistakes, but since the general attitude was one of learning, there was no bickering or arguing. A lot of book-consulting, but that's to be expected for a bunch of newbies (including myself, this was my first D&D 3.0/3.5 DMing).

To sum the action up, zombies and goblins stormed up out of the ship's hold and launched an attack. Though near death, the heroes managed to slay them all. Four zombies and three goblins is considered "Very Difficult" against four 1st-level heroes. And it was!

Lessons and Thoughts

• Aligned Expectations: We were all very focused on a specific play goal: FIGHT MONSTERS. And with the constraints and rules of the D&D system, there is a sense of a level playing field, so we all have the chance to "step on up" without feeling cheated. I focused on sticking to the rules-as-written rather than allow for crazy hand-waved actions in order to keep that sense of balance.
  
  This was very much a conscious decision, bolstered by pre-game discussion and actions during play.
  



• Quick Character Generation: Starting with 1st-level characters, with the newbies using class packages, was a lifesaver. I would recommend this to anyone starting up a D&D campaign. Lesson for designers: If you have a complicated setup process, provide some shortcuts for the new players!
  



• Cardstock is Cheap!: I have an old version of PagePlus which makes mapmaking very easy. Light-gray gridlines, a ship-shaped outline, and a pair of "step folds" to make the fore and aft decks higher, and we were fighting on a ship! And because its just printed on cardstock, it's not like I have to treat the map with reverence. I figure in the future I'll be drawing, cutting and otherwise ruining maps during play to represent the world.
  

For Next Time ...
I'm going to be very up front about what an actual "adventure" entails with the players. I'll have a set of maps, a set of encounters, and a simple setup. That way we can all work together to steer the adventure towards what folks want. What I don't want to worry about is trying to balance an illusion of PC free-will and my pre-planned adventure. That seems to me a recipe for disaster when the PCs hit the edges of what I've prepared for. Giving players foreknowledge of my limits allows us all to work together towards solid play.

[Bankuei]

Hey Zak,

Did you guys have any tripping points, like Attacks of Opportunity, Full/Standard/Partial actions, or Grappling, etc.?

Chris

[Pôl Jackson]

Stop it! You're going to trigger my "desire to play D&D" reflex.

I focused on sticking to the rules-as-written rather than allow for crazy hand-waved actions in order to keep that sense of balance.

During the game, were there any rules that all players (DM included) agreed to change or ignore? Were there any rules that you remembered while you were playing, but didn't bring up because it would slow down the game?

[Zak Arntson]

Bankuei: We purposefully played only a subset of the combat actions to keep the learning curve low. We allowed the following:

• Move, with optional Attack at end
• Move, with optional Spell at end
• 5-Step to prevent AoO
• Attacks of Opportunity
• Feats

When one player said, "I want to charge him from here and push him over the rail," we did find the Bull Rush rules, but that pushes an opponent back not sideways, so I said, "Okay, if you kill him in this hit, he falls off the rail." He didn't kill him, so no over-the-rail.

Our tripping points were:

• How to handle a 5-foot drop when moving through squares. The experienced player said anything under 10 feet is inconsequential, so we ran with it.
• Damage reduction for zombies. I had some trouble remembering to apply it. Luckily the players helped me out.
• Initiaitive: I made two initiative rolls, one for the zombies and one for the goblins. The experienced player said that it's easier for all monsters to move at the same time, so we quickly changed to this.
• During chargen, we almost allowed the Improved Critical feat, but a way more experienced person (who happened to be watching for a few minutes) pointed out the +8 BAB requirement. Oops!
• 1 minute = 10 rounds. I had 2nd edition in mind when I saw 1 minute and thought 1 round. So the Bless spell lasted for one round only, until I saw something else (when reading turning durations) that keyed me in. So we re-started the Bless spell.

Pôl: We did ignore a ton of options (see above), but the rules we did follow, unless I'm mistaken, were all played as written. I can't think of anything we saw that we should have been doing and ignored it. Our rule of thumb was: If we didn't know how to do it, and we couldn't find it in a quick flip-through of the combat section in the book, we didn't allow it. We figured we had later sessions to learn more complicated things.

Thanks for the question! Hope that helps!

[Callan S.]

Test Run
We started at 6:30 in the evening, and finished characters by about 7:45. That left us nearly two hours to try out a combat. Before we started I realized that the party had a cleric with the Extra Turning feat, so I quickly ran back to my desk (we're at work, remember) and printed up Goblin stats.

I've got to be careful not to spoil this thread. But does this contradict the players expectation of 'fight monsters'? It's eliminated one of their methods (strategic feat selection), which is as much a way of fighting monsters as rolling to hit.

On the other hand, you probably sensed player desire for a combat that wasn't prematurely climaxed (one good turn roll and everythings done). Am I way off?

[JasperN.]

Hi Zak,

thank you, this sounds exactly like what I have in mind for my upcoming short D&D campaign. Using the starter packages seems like a good idea indeed, I'll remember that, especially in this style of gaming, in which characters are just "complicated tokens" (love that term!) anyway.

Despite this very focused agenda, did you do anything at all besides fighting, even if just for a few seconds of in-game time? Did you maybe  have "in character" - dialogue or any other moments during which the characters were more than "complicated tokens"? Moves that were not the smartest, but cool anyway, because they fitted the caracter, anything like that?  In other words, did that "occur", though somewhat outside the agreed upon agenda, and did you enjoy it?

[Paul T]

I'd like to ask a couple of questions, and I hope I won't be taking this thread somewhere undesirable. There's just a couple of things I'm really curious about.

My questions, then, as well as the relevant bits from your post, are as follows:

1. It sounds like you inferred something about the players' interests from their lack of response to the character questions, and then presented them with a type of game you thought would be suited to that inferred preference.

Rather than get discouraged that the players weren't excited to play, I figured it was an indication of their play desires. Their PCs wouldn't be platforms for exploring , but rather complicated game tokens. This helped me adjust my expectations.

I then discussed with them individually, face-to-face, that since the new D&D is miniature-combat oriented, we'll focusing on that. All four players understood and were excited to play.

Is this correct, or were there some other indications that led you to make this decision? I suppose I'm just asking you at what level you were guessing at their preferences, and how much you had gotten from them before beginning. It certainly sounds like it was successful, in any case.

2. Do you plan on introducing them to other types or RPG interaction, such as less combat-oriented material, as time goes on, or is the plan to stick to the more standard tactical dungeon crawl thing indefinitely (i,e. as long as everyone is enjoying it)?

In the same way,

[li]Aligned Expectations: We were all very focused on a specific play goal: FIGHT MONSTERS. And with the constraints and rules of the D&D system, there is a sense of a level playing field, so we all have the chance to "step on up" without feeling cheated. I focused on sticking to the rules-as-written rather than allow for crazy hand-waved actions in order to keep that sense of balance.

This was very much a conscious decision, bolstered by pre-game discussion and actions during play.

is this something you're planning to stick to, or are going to open up the options and possibilities for lateral thinking as everyone gets more familiar with the system?

3. I'd like to hear more about:

For Next Time ...
I'm going to be very up front about what an actual "adventure" entails with the players. I'll have a set of maps, a set of encounters, and a simple setup. That way we can all work together to steer the adventure towards what folks want. What I don't want to worry about is trying to balance an illusion of PC free-will and my pre-planned adventure. That seems to me a recipe for disaster when the PCs hit the edges of what I've prepared for. Giving players foreknowledge of my limits allows us all to work together towards solid play.

How will you be presenting adventures and outlining those "limits"? Something like the old-school dungeon crawl adventure format, or something more explicit (for instance, "if you go off the map, there'll be nothing there")?

Thanks! I always find these kinds of games interesting to read about.

Best,


Paul

[Zak Arntson]

Oh, wow! Thanks for the interest! Let me handle them one-by-one.

Callan: This first combat was more a test run of the rules, so we'd be more comfortable when the "real" gaming happens. When one of them decided to play a cleric, I said, "Well, shoot, I'd better go print up something other than zombie stats!". They agreed on the decision (i.e., no grumbles, some laughter of agreement) since they didn't want to potentially end the combat with a few good turn rolls. That would ruin the whole point of our test run!

Jasper: We didn't have any in-character dialogue. It was all pushing miniatues around. And the only "cool, but not within the known rules" action was a request to "Jump off the aft deck and kick the zombie off the side of the ship!" Which boiled down to (using the diagram below): b moving towards a and forcing a to move up one square.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
. a . . < b
. . . . < .

< = 5-foot drop
~ = water

Since we couldn't find a rule to push someone in a different direction than "directly away from attacker", we abandoned that option, with me instead saying, "If you kill the zombie with this attack, you did just what you said."

Paul: To answer your first question, it's important that you know the relationships I have with this guys. They're all workmates, and I've worked and bullshitted with them for anywhere from a couple months to almost two years. We all get along, are mellow folks, and our professional requirements (video games have short development cycles, with little wiggle room) bleed into our gaming requirements: No beating around the bush, if you can't figure it out in five minutes then work around it, etc. etc.

That said, here is the initial email I sent:

So we're talking about starting some D&D 3.x gaming. (I have the 3.0 books). Four players is perfect (the rules gear all the rewards and diffculties and stuff against a party of 4).

First: How often do you want to play? I can commit to twice a month (say, Thursday, 6:30 or 7:00 to 9:30). Or once a week for an hour-long lunch.

Second: What are you looking to get out of the game?

And for consideration, here are my initial thoughts on character creation (which we'll all do together the first session so we can all re-remember the old rules and learn the new ones):

• Start at 1st level (or maybe 2nd or 3rd, if 1st seems too low to y'all).
• Pick any class/race combo from the PHB.
• Any alignment is fine, so long as you can justify working as a team.
• To speed up character generation, we'll just grab skill and equipment packages from the PHB.
• The DMG expects a level-up every THIRTEEN encounters, which sounds like a LOT. Because we won't be doing the whole "we meet twice a week for 6 hours in Mom's basement" thing, I'll scale up the XP and treasure rewards so we can level up faster.

And here are my thoughts on the gaming world:

• I'm purposefully not going to flesh out some insanely detailed campaign world. I'll probably draw up a rough map. When you create your character, if you want them to come from some kind of specifically-styled nation or city or something, we'll add it to the world.
• There's an Empire (the size of say, the Holy Roman Empire http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Holyromanempire.png). You're a part of it. You're all members of the "Chimera Guard". As a party of the Guard, you perform the will of the Empire. They'll be things like, "Stop the demon shark attacks in Shadowbay, a fishing colony to the north." or "One of our own agents has betrayed the Empire. Kill him and disband his cult."
• For some "safer" early-level play, we'll start out in a city, where you should be able to recover after one or two combat encounters. The city is an island port near or along the Empire's northern border. I hope you all saw Lord of the Rings? Imagine if a giant scooped up Minas Tirith (not delicately), flung it down onto an island, and let the Pirates of the Caribbean live in it for a few decades. The Empire has since swooped in and spent the last ten years reclaiming the city, but peace is still a bit hard to maintain.

If any of this is at odds with what you're looking for, let me know! I'm a big proponent of getting everyone (players & DM) to have fun.

Lastly: Our baby is due sometime during October, so if we do start D&D soon, be ready for me to split for a month. As much as I'd love to (and will try to) come in during my month-long leave for some gaming, I can't promise anything. :)

And here are three responses to "what do you want out of a game?"

I enjoy adventure, not super fond of really long drawn out intellectual/social questing in the game. For example... I probably wouldnt enjoy a session where I didnt Stab something to death. I would prefer to slay goblin hordes for fame and fortune vs sway the local senate to make a decision on local laws

I don't really have a ton of expectations. Let's have fun.

Dungeon hack type game with maybe a good story thrown in for measure. Maybe some role-playing of the characters...dunno.

I wrote some follow up "flesh out your PC in three sentences questions", which is what the players didn't respond to.

Phew! All THAT said, those were the attitudes I had to start from. And since only one had played 3.0, two had played 2nd edition, and one had played 1st edition, the first combat was really only a combat learning session.

I'l have to answer the rest in a little bit!

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Note how the initial email sets out my expectations, and allows everyone to provide their expectations before we even roll up characters!! Also note the time-slot commitment is being done up-front with special conditions (i.e., me having to bow out for some time) placed immediately on the table. I think both of these are near-requirements for functional gaming, especially people who haven't gamed together.

[Zak Arntson]

Paul: Okay, lunchtime, so I'll answer questions 2 & 3 for yah.

2. Do you plan on introducing them to other types or RPG interaction, such as less combat-oriented material, as time goes on, or is the plan to stick to the more standard tactical dungeon crawl thing indefinitely (i,e. as long as everyone is enjoying it)?

I found the second email I posted concerning gameplay expectations, which should answer your question.

Sounds like we're all golden on at least getting started on this. If you want to refresh yourself on some rules, this is a good reference: http://d20srd.org/

I can't start this week, but I could do Wednesday 6:30 - 9:30 next week for a long bit of character generation, rules familiarizing, and deciding on a regular time.

And of course, we can all do some email prep. Like: What kind of PC do you want to play?

And it sounds like we're going to do some pretty regular D&D FIGHT MONSTARS play. Which is good! That's what D&D does best.

I want to run things without railroading, but definitely with things happening, so we get as much oomph as we can out of our time. To that end, I'd like to try out scene-based gameplay:

Gameplay occurs in scenes. We'll all talk and agree as to what will make up the next scene. A scene needs a goal, and the scene ends when the goal is met, unable to be met, or the goal changes. And don't worry, a scene can be as simple as me saying, "Okay, on your way to the sunken abbey, giant crabs pile onto the deck." And the goal is KILL ALL DEM MONSTAR CRABS!!

But it also gives you the ability to ask for scenes. "Hey, we should really meet up with the head priest. We'd like to convince him to go with us to the sunken abbey." That would be a very quick 1. You meet up with the priest at the church. 2. Diplomacy, Intimidate, Bluff, or whatever skill roll. 3. Priest goes with or declines.

The reason for doing scene-based gaming is this:

• We get straight to the meat of play. No lame "let's roleplay for two hours of sailing. What do your characters say to each other?" I think we all want to get shit done.
• Anything that's necessary but not very exciting can be done with a really short scene. Say you want to go shopping for cold-iron weapons: "Okay, you're in the shop. Make a Bluff skill check. If you succeed, knock 10% off all your prices. Tell me when you're done shopping."

3. How will you be presenting adventures and outlining those "limits"? Something like the old-school dungeon crawl adventure format, or something more explicit (for instance, "if you go off the map, there'll be nothing there")?

I plan on creating a "stable" of items combined with a relationship map. You can read about it at my LiveJournal (http://zakarntson.livejournal.com/19594.html)

As far as outlining the "limits", I am going to tell them before the session begins, "Look, I've only prepared these NPCs (lay out the statted NPC list), and these maps (lay out a map list), and so on. If you decide to go out of these boundaries, it's totally cool, but be ready to wait for a little extra preparation while I run back to my desk to print stuff out."

Since it's scene-based, rather than map-based, we'll hopefully do alright. If they decide to go down into the Undercity, I can throw together a scene like "Location (Alcove) + Monsters (Spiders, Very Difficult option) + Bang (Webbed victim is the baddies' brother)". Alternately, the players can be more explicit. Rather than say "Let's go to the Undercity," they can say "We'd like to fight on that Abandoned Glassworks map", or "Let's meet up with another gang of skull-faced goblins!"

[Paul T]

Zak,

Thank you very much! That sounds like a great set-up, and a very robust, clear presentation, with everyone on-board. Reading this sort of thing gets me excited about roleplaying as a functional, serious hobby.

I look forward to hearing how the whole "player-initiated" scenes thing works out for you--just as planned? Will the players leave it up to you most of the time instead? Will the importance of the story take over at some level?

Thanks for the writeup--inspiring and informative.

Best,


Paul

[ffilz]

That sounds really cool. I've had similar success with well thought out expectation setting invitations.

I'm curious, did any of the players take you up on your invitation to accept setting contributions? I like how you have offered invitations, but also made it clear you will always have a plan in mind, so the flexibility is there to deal with player offerings but there is no pressure.

The adjustment of the opposition to the actual set of PCs sounds like it went very well. The cleric's turning ability is an example of a type of ability that is tough to balance well. It definitely can be anti-climatic to end a battle before it's even begun, on the other hand, it's also no fun to never get to use an ability. So you neatly set it up so the ability could turn the battle, but doesn't set up a battle for one roll resolution (and correspondingly, also lowers the risk if the turning attempt fails).

Frank

[Callan S.]

Callan: This first combat was more a test run of the rules, so we'd be more comfortable when the "real" gaming happens. When one of them decided to play a cleric, I said, "Well, shoot, I'd better go print up something other than zombie stats!". They agreed on the decision (i.e., no grumbles, some laughter of agreement) since they didn't want to potentially end the combat with a few good turn rolls. That would ruin the whole point of our test run!

Oh, I assumed (from the looks of the account) that you decided this by yourself, trying to accomidate both player desire for strategic input and also a player desire for it not to be prematurely climaxed. Which is probably impossible (each desire conflicts with the other). But you instead pitched it to the players (essentially). It would have been intersting if they had said 'no, it's okay, leave the goblins out and we'll see how it goes'. You'd have rolled with that I imagine? Cause I think they were deciding what exactly the point was of the combat about then.


Frank: He didn't actually balance it all by himself. He pitched it more like a proposition to the players. Which is interesting to me from my own gaming history of trying to balance things off all by myself. It's funny, I think I get into meta game quite alot, but I don't think I've really looked at the avenue of pitching out propositions to the players for them to decide for themselves.

Hmmm, I think I've always wanted to 'win' at game mastering, so I'm probably a bit blind to the idea of just handing away (parts of) that challenge.

[Ricky Donato]

Jasper: We didn't have any in-character dialogue. It was all pushing miniatues around. And the only "cool, but not within the known rules" action was a request to "Jump off the aft deck and kick the zombie off the side of the ship!" Which boiled down to (using the diagram below): b moving towards a and forcing a to move up one square.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
. a . . < b
. . . . < .

< = 5-foot drop
~ = water

Since we couldn't find a rule to push someone in a different direction than "directly away from attacker", we abandoned that option, with me instead saying, "If you kill the zombie with this attack, you did just what you said."

Hi, Zak,

You can do this using a bull rush. Now, a bull rush specifically states that you can only push directly away from the attacker, as you said. However, the character b in your diagram could take a move action to move himself diagonally, like so:

~~~~~~~~~~~~ 
. a . . < .
. . b . < .


Then he can make the bull rush as a standard action to push a off the ship. The character would not get the +2 bonus from doing a bull rush as part of a charge, but he could still make the attempt.

[Zak Arntson]

Frank: Callan's right. The players did agree, and whether that was because they agreed or they're in the habit of "DM has power," I'm not entirely sure. I'm hoping that with a few sessions under our belts, the players will be comfortable in requesting elements (monster types, maps, etc.) and scenes.

Callan: Yeah, if they had wanted zombies only, I would have rolled with it. And if the combat ended too quickly, it would have been a "Okay, combat's over. You want another one?" situation.

Hmmm, I think I've always wanted to 'win' at game mastering, so I'm probably a bit blind to the idea of just handing away (parts of) that challenge.

Oh, don't get me wrong. When combat is on, my goal is to win by killing the party. But only through well-balanced encounters that the players agree on as a 'fair fight'. One of my players has expressed a few times that the best combats are ones where you're characters are threatened (his character was at 1 hp by the end, so he was pretty excited). Outside of combat, my DM goal is to facilitate player interest in short, to-the-point, non-combat scenes.

Ricky: Thanks! I sent that along to my players. I'm hoping that as our group gets familiar with the entire ruleset, we will be able to think on our feet and come to that kind of solution.

[ffilz]

I wasn't discounting the input of the players, my point is that you balanced your desires and player input very well for a successfull encounter.

Frank