Cramulus's D&D Game

[Cramulus]

yep, fully zoomable.

and I'm not sure exactly how, but there is a way to create/import your own scalable map icons. I haven't needed that yet, it comes with a library of about 100 different icons.

I'm used to Campaign Cartographer; I found this to be much much easier to learn/use. And is free!

[Cramulus]

Ran a really epic encounter last night.

tl;dr summary:

-the players crossed six feet of map and faced like 35 monsters in one encounter
-they had to deal with a lot of obstacles, and a killer demon slowly moving closer to them.
-they had to find the treasure as they ran through the map, balancing defense and speed and loot
-it fucking rocked



Scenario: the players have been on the road for 48 days. They are trying to deliver the Flame of Erathis (an artifactual torch) to the city of Aedremere. A demon is on their trail. The only thing standing between them and their goal is Mt. Tunder --- which happens to be absolutely crawling with zombies.

I set up map #1 on the living room table. The players had to fight their way past a shitload of zombies and one undead mage. While we were getting set up in the living room, I secretly went into the kitchen and unfurled the Big Map I've been working on. It's about 4 feet long, and includes cliffs, pits, treasure chests, a rickety rope bridge, and a sealed gate house which blocks the way forward.



As the players finish the first map, they agree that they can make it one more encounter without resting. They have this secondary quest, you see, which raises the power level of the artifact they're carrying. If they make it through six encounters without taking a full night's rest, they gain concordance with the torch. So this was encounter 5 and 6... most characters are very tired, fatigued to the point of collapse.

So they finish the first map, and they ask what's next... I point to the kitchen, where they see another 4 feet of hell unfurled in front of them.



Their plan was "Let's take it really slow and careful. Use ranged attacks where we can. Conserve healing, because we don't have a lot."




So after they had two rounds to dick around and "be careful", I introduced the next element:



The demon Qadaar appeared on the map in the living room, about 20 squares away from them. Every round, I advanced him 4 squares. They have faced Qadaar before, and they know they can't take him. Everybody started shitting themselves. If Qadaar sees them, he will certainly nuke their asses.

So now the fun part begins: the frenzied race across the mountain. Is there time to pick the locks on the treasure chests? Maybe! They managed to loot 2 out of 3 of them.







here comes Qadaar, slowly moving over the bridge



As they move through the board, they see a door. There's a puzzle on the door, which they solved mid-combat. It opens. They know it leads to a boss fight (been foreshadowed earlier). The fighter wanted to charge in and do it. The other two party members, who are flirting with single digit hit points and no healing left, make the case that they should come back later.

The gate house at the end was very exciting too. The party didn't have the strength / time left to lift the gates, so they made a desperate push to climb over it. Timing was critical here, because at the end they had to run past a bunch of monsters they didn't have time to fight. As they scrambled up the wall, the zombie horde surged around them. The resolution of the fight came down to the last die rolls - had the warlord rolled any lower on his athletics check, he would have gotten dragged down off the wall by the zombies and definitely would have died.

When the warlord made it over the wall, everybody sighed a big sigh of relief. It was one of those white-knuckled D&D sessions that everybody'll be talking about for years.

In total they killed about 35 monsters - 25 of them were 1 HP zombies, the others were either zombie hulks infested with rot grubs or undead ice mages.

[Don Coyote]

Jesus Fuckballs Cram. Sounds epic.

[Triple Zero]

That really does sound epic! Great work, Cram!

What was with the demon though, couldn't it move faster, or did it not see or sense the party?

[Cramulus]

The Demon knew that they were somewhere in the general area, but it didn't know exactly where. That's why he was only moving half speed every round (as opposed to taking a double move). When they peered at Qadaar from a distance, it looked like he was examining foot prints, inspecting dead bodies, that sort of thing. Clearly tracking them. Had he gotten within line of sight of them, all hell would have broken loose -- but the heroes managed to stay one step ahead. Their next challenge will involve losing him in the mountains as they make their way towards the city.

[Luna]

Holy shit, Cram, that sounds amazing!

[Kai]

random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

[Kai]

Also, your campaign sounds awesome, Cram.

I think the reason I got out of playing tabletop rpgs is because I got tired of the incessant commentary on /everything/. The old tired jokes, the munchin players that know every single thing about the game, the distracting side talk. But it looks like you run your campaigns really well and keep all that to a minimum. I loved it when it was serious.

[Don Coyote]

random: http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Katanas_are_Underpowered_in_d20

To be fair, the katana and wakizashi were not meant to pierce armor. The katana was not used so much for killing on the battlefield as it was for cutting the strings of armor. The wakizashi, with it's shorter blade, was then used to deliver the killing blow. This is of course the traditional way; when Musashi Miyamoto made dual wielding became popular, all of this went out the window.

I've had quite a bit of experience with both weapons, since my father collects pre-WWII Japanese swords. The blades are nothing like European blades, they cut with a downward pulling motion rather than a swinging motion. In that sense, they do much less damage against an armored opponent than a European blade; their weight and the way they are used just isn't heavy enough to damage metal armor. Once the armor is off, however, the Japanese blades are far superior. Any damage rulings have to take that into effect. Or something. Or maybe I'm full of it.

Just no.

As the entirety of RPG combat is an abstraction to add "more realism" would bog the system down in minutia.

Nevermind that when armed with a sword, and only a sword, a man-at-arms, or knight, or dude in armor, when fighting the against the same, would not be attacking his foe with the edge, unless it were in friendly sport, or he was untutored in the art. He would instead grasp his sword with one hand upon the hilt and the other midway on the blade and seek to the thrust into the gaps in the plate harness, the face/eye slits, the armpits, or the palms of the hands. This of course assumes a one on one scenario in the 15th to 16th centuries. A man-at-arms would not be using a sword as his sole weapon when in an open battlefield but either a spear or some manner of polearm, such as the pollaxe.

A nihonto of similar length to a European sword would weigh more as they are thicker in cross-section.
Sharp is sharp when encountering unarmored flesh. Japanese or European.

Furthermore to state that a wakizashi was used only to deliver killing blows after a bushi had cut the strings of the armor with his katana disregards the wide variety of ryu that dealt with fighting in armor during the feudal age in Japan.

[Cramulus]

Also, your campaign sounds awesome, Cram.

I think the reason I got out of playing tabletop rpgs is because I got tired of the incessant commentary on /everything/. The old tired jokes, the munchin players that know every single thing about the game, the distracting side talk. But it looks like you run your campaigns really well and keep all that to a minimum. I loved it when it was serious.

I used to enjoy running really detail-oriented extremely long epic campaign arcs.

I was into a really serious D&D experience.

Then I chilled out.

These days I'm running a very casual game. We drink a case of beer while we play. There's a lot of story, puzzles, combat, character development (for characters that want it)... but I'm aiming for a game first and foremost FUN and easy to get involved in. I don't punish people for not remembering setting details, I'm cool with "cameo spots" where a friend checks out the game with us for 1 session, and a number of my NPCs are goofy or are based on running jokes.

I'm finding that I like the casual/hilarious style of play a lot better than the totally straightfaced We Are In A Tragic Drama style I used to run. We still have really intense white-knuckled story moments--it's just that the focus of the game is on exciting encounters and hanging out with your friends.



I have a friend who I'd really love to game with us, but she's hung up on 2nd edition. She is really only interested in the D&D experience she had when she was like 13-18... she was so excited to hear we were playing D&D --until she found out it was 4th edition.

I tried to reason it out with her -- "You know, regardless of the rulebook we're using, we have a lot of fun. D&D's mainly about doing something creative while hanging out with your friends. And we rock at that. Everything else is minutiae" but she wouldn't have it--- she admitted that she was just really stubborn about it and wasn't interested in finding out if 4th ed it was fun or not. Really a shame!

If she actually SAW us play -- if she saw the fighter sitting at the campfire frying up Hill Giant Dick and sharing it with an imp -- if she saw the fight against the Net-Wielding Trolls' Interns (yes, the Intern Net Trolls) -- if she saw the intense cold-sweat inducing encounter I posted above, she'd probably love to game with us.

But meh! Grognards! C'est la vie.

[bds]

godDAMN, this thread makes me want to start playing again so much. my friend has a bunch of 4th ed books and I have the 3.5 stuff, but I've never really properly played a full campaign -- we've done bits of encounters and false starts, but never properly got into it, and I really want to


EDIT: in case I wasn't clear, holy shit Cram, your campaign looks fucking awesome

[Elder Iptuous]

me too!
my kiddos were digging through the closet last week and found a bunch of painted minis and thought they were the tits, so we made up a little game with them.  then i read this thread.  then they found a monster manual and were eating it up.

now i'm jonesing for some dnd, but have no dnd buddies... 
i must find/convert some, stat.

[Cainad (dec.)]

There's definitely a sweet spot to be found between focused roleplaying and just hanging out with a weird centerpiece, and it's different for each group. All of my best sessions have involved some silliness, but we also actually played the game. Lousy sessions tended to degenerate into multiple simultaneous conversations about unrelated crap, with the game all but forgotten. Those usually leave one or two quiet players waiting ten minutes for the DM to pay attention long enough for them to hit the goblin with their axe.

[Cramulus]

I went through a hell of a cycle.

In 1999, I started staffing at a LARP chapter, Avendale, and eventually became the lead storywriter. For seven years, we ran six events per year in Milford, Connecticut. Our chapter had highs and lows -- but I managed to grow the game from 30 players (average) to almost 100. In 2005 I started working for the parent company (NERO) full time, doing national cross-chapter coordination and running demos at conventions. It was my dream job .. for a few months. Then the money dried up, my boss kept giving me the carrot & stick routine, and I suffered a lot for what I thought was my dream job.

In 2007, I quit Avendale. It was just too much work. Everybody wanted to play the cool game, nobody wanted to run it. We had 2 writers and we needed at least 6. My buddy Wes and I ran some of the best LARP events in New England (IMHO), but we burned ourselves out.

By the end of that run, I had become really jaded and cynical. The heartbreaking thing about running games like this is that you can write awesome plot, you can design the most exciting encounters, you can build props and atmosphere that makes people's eyes bulge out of their skulls --- and at the end of the weekend, when you ask your customers how they liked the event, they focus on the shitty weather, the lack of things to do at 4 in the morning, and the moron players that ruined the event for them. It's like - the quality of game you run is only vaguely correlated with people's enjoyment of the event. They tend to focus on details which are largely out of your control.

I mean, sometimes people run shitty games, but if the weather is good, and there are cute girls there, it'll be a great weekend!

I took a big step back. During this period I became "plot agnostic" -- I realized that the story is just a vehicle for the encounter. Encounters: that's the real meat of the game. It's all that people remember, anyway. They won't remember the dialog they had with an NPC in the tavern, or the history of the item they carry, they won't remember the name of the prince they rescued... they will remember that great teamwork moment when the rogue was in the right place at the right time and killed the mummy from behind.

So fuck story. I paid too much attention to the really slow-building long-term rewards of the game. The kind of things you can only appreciate on a long timeline. The momentary experience of fun, that's the real meat.

This is why I piss off other LARP plot writers... they pitch an encounter at me, and they explain it like, "Okay -- so if the players entertain the undead king with at least 30 minutes of stories, he will share HIS story. And in that story, he'll mention the True Name of the Lich, which they need." and my reply is, "So this encounter involves going to a potentially dramatic place and running the clock with war stories everybody's heard before. And the victory condition is that they pick up on a minute detail in an otherwise irrelevant story. Sounds BORING."

Anyway, I'm rambling --- the point is - build your games around immediate fun. Use the story to justify those awesome encounters, but generally speaking -- the story is completely secondary.

After I quit Avendale, I took a long break from running LARPs. I'm back in the saddle again - I'm actually running three encounters at a LARP this weekend - but my focus has changed considerably from what I was interested in five years ago.

[Luna]

Hill giant dick?   

Yeah, I've tried to convince some people that the system is just a system.  Some are better than others, but the main thing is that everyone's having fun.