I’m not sure if this will be of interest to anyone or not, but Ron suggested I do an Actual Play post (while I was pestering him in a series of emails), so here is my attempt.

I play D&D with a small group of old friends; we’ve played for many years, regularly but not frequently, and we just started a new campaign after a four-month hiatus from gaming. (Well, the group itself was on hiatus, which led a couple of us to actually reach out and play with some other gamers for a change, including a fun game of Burning Wheel, and a truly horrible game of GURPS).

I had been planning to use a couple new ideas I’d picked up from the Forge (and the Sons of Kryos), chief among them the Keys from ‘The Shadow of Yesterday’ (which Clinton Nixon has generously converted for us d20 gamers). But I was surprised to realize how much a lot of indie-game-design ideas had altered my thinking about RPGs. We ended up having a pretty different session from ones we’ve had in the past.

We didn’t actually play at our first session (which was today), it was just campaign-creation and character generation. This itself was something of a change; we tend to make characters independently of one another, since, you know, its hard to get together. But it seemed important to actually get together to work all this stuff out, so I harped on it until everyone gave in.

We spent most of the time (about three hours) just discussing the characters and what we wanted the game to be about. In fact, aside from selecting character classes and rolling ability scores, we didn’t actually do any “making characters” at all, in the sense of stats and weapons and spells and stuff. (We discussed using a point-buy system, which seems more in keeping with the idea of “Forge-style D&D”, but that was rejected because rolling for ability scores is fun.)

In addition to myself, the GM, the two players were Troy and Dave. Our third player recently moved away, so we are a man down. Jaime (after much coaxing) consented to play with us once earlier this year, and had a good time, but she was unable to make it today. Which was sad, because I was excited to have someone with no preconceived ideas about what D&D character creation sessions are “supposed” to be like, but it’s also hard to convince a non-gamer to show up for a game session where you’re not actually going to play.

The main new game element was the Keys. Troy and Dave were both into the idea (Troy constantly creates the sort of plot-driver characters that are not well-served by D&D’s rules, and Dave is a professional theater nerd), and it was a good experience overall. I found that just talking about them led us to create a very cool “plot” and some neat characters.

Troy decided to play a half-rogue, half-spellcaster, and Dave decided to play a monk swordmaster. My only idea to get the ball rolling was that the campaign should begin with them returning to the city from which they had been exiled five years previously (part of our homebrewed campaign setting), and finding it badly changed for the worse. Going over the Keys definitely made us talk about the characters in terms of who they were and what they were going to be after in life, instead of the usual talk about partly balance and who was gonna have healing magic and stuff.

Troy decided that his character would be somewhat mentally unstable, which he tied into his shadow magic, and he took keys about seeking vengeance on a figure from his past, and uncovering mysteries. Dave decided his character was a political exile, and he was trying to overthrow the regime that had betrayed him and exiled him, and took keys about doing that. (I’m excited that the adventures will actually be about these things, instead of us all pretending that they’re about these things when they’re really about killing giant demon spiders.)

Being at the table together and coming up with this stuff was good, and it made ideas flow well. Dave took a key that gave him a “love interest” in the organization he was trying to bring down, and Troy decided that his brother, the evil wizard, was her new lover. Neat. Now these characters have a reason to go after a powerful band of wizards and bad guys that’s more involved than “we’re gonna get their money and stuff”. And I don’t have to introduce an old man with a bag of gold or someone’s mentor to make them go.

(The only problem we ran into with the keys was that, given the relatively high starting level of the characters, they ended up picking five keys each. Since we’re not used to them, it was a little overwhelming to select so many, and they both ended up with two or three that were important to the character concept, and a couple that were kind of tacked on. Maybe we should just play with three each until we get used to them. On the plus side, we all adjusted quickly to making the Keys work for us, rather than the other way around, and Dave even made one up that he felt better served his idea).

For my part, I tried to push decision-making power away. You don’t realize how much TOTAL AUTHORITY D&D invests in the DM until you try to avoid it. When they asked what level the characters should start at I said “up to you guys”. When they asked who the main villains were I said “I don’t know. Let’s come up with that now.”

It was actually a little weird to give that power up, too. I had thought we’d start characters at 4th or 5th level, but Dave said 10th. And I had decided the main bad guys would be a sinister noble family from our old campaign, but Dave was interested in his character having been part of a people’s liberation movement that had become corrupt. After so many years being the ultimate decision maker at the game table, it was hard to not do that, just out of habit. But this was much better. Instead of me inventing stuff for weeks that the players would end up ignoring, we ended up with a campaign that was just as good, except everyone was invested in it. So much better!

(The freedom to do “whatever” was also contagious. Dave was trying to decide what his character’s position would be in this underground resistance movement, and Troy said “Dude, be their leader. It’s cooler to be the leader.”)

In summary, today wasn’t drastically different from our previous character-generation sessions, but I feel like it was different in significant ways. The dynamic of “we have to do what the DM says” was dismantled pretty easily (although it took come concentrating), and it led to good things.  Aside from the keys, there weren’t many specific rules we used to make this different from previous games, but I was definitely thinking about things in a new way, which was both weird and refreshing.

Man. I just realized how freakin' LONG that post is. I have trouble with the length of some AP posts, but I guess maybe that's the nature of the beast. I'm sure there's a lot of irrelevant stuff in there, though. Sorry.

BWA wrote:
For my part, I tried to push decision-making power away. You don’t realize how much TOTAL AUTHORITY D&D invests in the DM until you try to avoid it. When they asked what level the characters should start at I said “up to you guys”. When they asked who the main villains were I said “I don’t know. Let’s come up with that now.”

Hi

BWA wrote:
For my part, I tried to push decision-making power away. You don’t realize how much TOTAL AUTHORITY D&D invests in the DM until you try to avoid it. When they asked what level the characters should start at I said “up to you guys”. When they asked who the main villains were I said “I don’t know. Let’s come up with that now.” ]

Ricky wrote:
Brian, I completely understand this point of view. I commented on this thread that players who are used to having very little power go over the top the first time they try a game that explicitly gives them a lot of power. They push a lot of boundaries just to make sure that they actually do have all that power, that it's not an illusion. Did you observe that in this case?

Lamorak33 wrote:
Its been my experience that some players will want some mystique in their games.

Hey Brian,

Let me know how the game works out for ya.

Taking a more democratic approach to game set-up is awesome but don't confuse that with not being a leader at the table.  You don't have to be a stern father or an alpha dog but leadership during a creative endeavor is a good thing.

Hope you have fun.

I'm pretty interested in the idea of jazzing up D&D play like this, and I'm considering how to approach my gaming group with a mod or two. I found Clinton's Sweet20 page which has the alternate experience system using Keys. I definitely want to shop that one around to my group. Question to Clinton, are there more components to Sweet20, or more planned? I know it says it's a work in progress; I guess what I'm wondering is, is it still progressing? :)

Peace,
-Joel

Paka wrote: Taking a more democratic approach to game set-up is awesome but don't confuse that with not being a leader at the table.  You don't have to be a stern father or an alpha dog but leadership during a creative endeavor is a good thing.

Melinglor wrote: Question to Clinton, are there more components to Sweet20, or more planned? I know it says it's a work in progress; I guess what I'm wondering is, is it still progressing? :)

I'm sure Clinton can correct me if I'm wrong, but as a fellow admirer of Sweet20 I will deliver the bad news that what you see is what you get--it's a dead project.  Luckily, The Shadow of Yesterday could be seen as a complete re-working of D&D along the Sweet20 lines.

BWA wrote:
That is good advice (naturally, considering the source). Our campaign-creation efforts have continued all week on email, and I was ignoring my natural inclination to throw ideas at the players for a couple days, but then I figured "What the hell? I have cool ideas."

Also, I have had some luck with requesting things I want to see (ie - "Hey, can one of your main NPC relationships be with an untrustworthy parent-type, because I have a cool adventure idea."), which I guess is exercising a kind of authority.

It's a little hard to find a happy medium at times.

Brian, this is an awesome AP. Thanks for posting it. It's exciting to hear about groups like yours.

You probably heard this in a Sons of Kryos podcast, but Judd has a great idea for handling Key XP with new players:
Put a bowl in the middle of the table, with gaming stones in it. When someone hits a Key, they take the proper number of stones from the bowl. At first, they will likely ask permission of the DM. But as time goes on, the repeated motion of taking stones will help break down their shyness, and they'll start feeling more comfortable about just grabbing the XP stones as the Keys come up.

I look forward to hearing about your next session. Please come back and post more if you can.

James_Nostack wrote:
I'm sure Clinton can correct me if I'm wrong, but as a fellow admirer of Sweet20 I will deliver the bad news that what you see is what you get--it's a dead project.  Luckily, The Shadow of Yesterday could be seen as a complete re-working of D&D along the Sweet20 lines.

Thanks for the positive feedback, all. I wasn't sure I should post an AP about a character-generation session (it sure didn't sound like "play" to my girlfriend), so I'm glad it was well-received. I will certainly post again after Sunday night's game.

I do remember the episode of Sons of Kryos where they discussed using physical markers, but I had forgotten it. Thanks for the reminder, John. I just bought several of those "giant bricks filled with tiny d6s" for a Mechaton game, so maybe I will use those if my players are down with it.

(I freakin' love that podcast, by the way. I listen to several others, including the Durham 3 and Have Games, and I dig those too, but there's something about Judd and Jeff's dynamic that just makes that show extra awesome).

One point I'd like to make is that using the Sweet20 Keys isn't my way of stealthily changing our playstyle ("We've secretly replaced their regular games with narrativist games...let's see what happens!"). I pushed the Keys on my group because I think they will be cool, and so far everyone is down with it.

But we like D&D. I totally understand the problems that many people have with some traditional games, and if I got to game more often (sad face) I would definitely want to play something other than all D&D all the time. But I look at this change as my group trying something new that we think will bring the fun, rather than me trying to sneak indie games in under the radar.

We had our first game using the Sweet20 XP system last night, and here's a few comments on how the Keys worked in a D&D game.

Jaime joined the game (yay!), and came over a couple hours ahead of time to create a character. We spent about an hour just coming up with a "story" for her character. That was really awesome, since Jaime is essentially a rookie (she's played D&D once with us before), and she felt kind of intimidated by the idea of "coming up with a cool story", but once I got her going she invented tons of awesome stuff that tied in really well to the themes that the other players had already settled on.

Jaime created a thief/assassin hell-bent on freeing Dave's character from the impregnable dwarven prison, but she threw in lots of extra neat stuff, like stowing away on a ship when she was ten and being a street thief and becoming the apprentice of a mean master-assassin guy who may be after her. Unlike the other two characters, where we had some trouble figuring out five Keys, Jaime's character was so well-thought-out that she easily picked seven or eight Keys that seemed to fit, and narrowed it down to five. Actually rolling the dice and getting her stats and gear and spells and stuff came last.

Since she's new to the rules she let me suggest a lot in the way of feats and such, which I tried to do in the spirit of making her character effective in the ways I think she intended the character to be effective (ie  "You should take Feat X because it will let you do that thing you want to do well in the game"). The one "mechanical" aspect of character creation she was very into was picking spells. The newer D&D books have a little one-sentence description of the spell in non-game-rule terms, and you can read through and pick cool spells without worrying about all those rules you don't understand anyway.

The players had decided that their first adventure would be escaping from the prison where two of them were held, and that was what we did for our entire four-hour game. So it was pretty much standard old-school D&D, using their various spells and powers and skills to defeat the guards and disarm traps and stuff like that. I was already resigned to that, and we discussed before the game that this particular session wouldn't really take advantage of the new game techniques that we were using, which was a little disappointing.

The Keys worked well enough in practice. I told the players that I wouldn't be keeping track of them, so they had to give themselves the XP for hitting their Keys. That was a little weird, but we got used to it quickly. I didn't use physical markers for them, but I think I definitely will in the future.

No one really "played to their Keys" that much. We just did standard fantasy-prison-break stuff, and sometimes that triggered a Key. Most of Dave and Troy's Keys had  to do with long-term goals, very few of which came up, so they finished the session with less than five experience points each.

Jaime, on the other hand, had taken an assassin key, which gave her XP every time she whacked somebody using her bad-ass ambush and sneak attack skills. Which she did very effectively several times, so she ended up with twice the XP as the others.

That was a good example of the Keys working out well, because Jaime's character gained XP not for just killing guards, but for killing guards in a sneaky assassin style. Which played well to her own concept of her character ("She'll do whatever she has to do to complete her mission.").

All in all, I feel like this particular game session didn't really make use of the Keys all that much. It felt a lot like our games using the standard kill-bad-guys XP system. But we ended the action with the characters in the big city where all their conflicts and NPC-relationships are, so hopefully the next game will be much more Key-driven (and thus much more player-motive-driven).

Another new rule we used is "Action Points", where you can add bonus dice to an important roll by spending an Action Point, of which your character has a limited supply. I like that because it puts more power in the player's hands for significant moments. It had the effect of making them almost always succeed  when they deemed something important enough to use their points (killing a key guard, disarming a serious trap, etc). That feels wrong to my D&D-trained brain, but I think it's probably a good thing.

Hey Brian,
Thanks for posting, I'm interested!