Better Player #2: Genre Conventions

(In case it's not obvious, the numbers are simply the order in which I'm posting things, rather than a measure of how important they are. Still, #1 was pretty fundamental.)

Gamers like to win. That's hardly a shock. And in my experience, most gamers really hate leaving loose ends because they know that the GM will inevitably pick up on them and use them against them later.

And so, if one of the PCs were Batman, and after a long hard fight they'd finally captured the Joker, the player in question would have his character immediately, and very efficiently, kill the Joker. Because of course the Joker will escape from any captivity that might be devised for him, and that cannot be allowed.

Similarly, if the game is "Star Trek", the players will inevitably come prepared with at least half a dozen ways to use the transporter as the ultimate weapon in the setting - transport someone into space for a quick kill, or transport their head half and inch to the left, or use the transporter to de-materialise them and then just delete the buffer, or...

(Likewise, if the PCs were the villains in a Bond movie, they'd go get the gun, shoot the agent, and move on. If the villain starts monologuing, of course they're going to shoot him before he's done. And so on and so forth.)

The fundamental problem with all of these actions is two-fold: firstly, they're an entirely sensible reaction to the situation in hand; secondly, they're entirely at odds with the genre being played.

Yes, it makes sense for Batman to kill the Joker; in fact, one can argue that it's hugely irresponsible for him not to do so, especially after the first or second escape. But Batman doesn't do that.

In the same vein, there's no real reason why the Star Trek transporters shouldn't be used in the manner described. (Yes, one can argue about safety protocols, but those can always be turned off, or one could argue that the Klingons or Romulans probably wouldn't have them, or...) But what it basically comes down to is this: characters in the universe don't do that. The Star Trek transporter is used to transport stuff, and that's it.

No RPG universe is entirely logically consistent. And if one ever were, it frankly wouldn't be much fun to play in. And so a player who signs up for a Superheroes game, or a Star Trek game, or a "knights in shining armour" D&D game really should look out for the conventions of the genre, and then rather than trying to use every advantage to make an end-run around the adventure (to get the 'win') should instead embrace those conventions and play accordingly.

Yes, your character can use the transporter as the ultimate weapon. But that doesn't mean you win; it means everyone loses.

(There's a corollary to that, of course - the GM should be open and up-front about the genre conventions in play, and shouldn't be calling on them to outlaw certain actions that he just hasn't considered. It's about making a better game for everyone, not just an easy life for the GM.)

XP Budgets vs Rewards

One of the things that really annoys me about recent WotC and Paizo Adventure Path offerings is that they include lots of 'filler' encounters. These are, as the name implies, encounters that add absolutely nothing to the adventure being presented but which exist for the sole purpose of giving the PCs enough XP to get to the next level, so that they're ready to face the next batch of bad guys. My understanding is that much of this is driven by customer feedback: the customers don't like 'milestone XP' or similar, viewing it as somehow 'cheating', and so they insist that PCs must 'earn' those levels. Which is fine for them, but poison for my games, especially in systems where a mid- or high-level encounter might well take the better part of a session to run through.

Worse, one of the consequences of a strict "XP by killing things" policy is that the reward is tightly coupled to the encounter difficulty, which means that as system mastery goes up and the players learn to beat monsters more easily, the game just gets faster and faster - to challenge the players you need tougher encounters, which means more XP, which means faster levelling, which means you need tougher monsters, which means...

I've been pondering this for some time, and I think the conclusion that I've come to is that while XP budgets for encounters are a good thing, and while XP rewards for encounters are also a good thing, they probably aren't the same good thing - that is, it would be better to divorce the XP budget for building an encounter from the reward you gain from overcoming it.

In D&D 5e, the game is designed assuming that PCs will face roughly 4 'hard' encounters for each of 1st and 2nd level, then 8 'hard' encounters at 3rd level, 10 for each level from 4th to 10th, and then 6 for each level thereafter. I'm not sure exactly why those numbers were arrived at, but there they are.

Consequently, a 'hard' encounter for a 1st level party has an XP budget of 75 per PC - that way, once the group has faced 4 such encounters they'll have earned 300 XP per character and so reach 2nd level. All of which makes some sense.

What I'm proposing is this: leave the encounter building rules exactly as they stand currently: a 'hard' encounter for a 1st level party should continue to have a budget of 75 XP per PC. However, the number of experience gained from an encounter should be handled very differently.

In particular, encounters should be split into 'incidental', 'milestone', 'pivotal', and 'climactic'.

An 'incidental' encounter is one that has no bearing on the party's progress in the adventure. So if the party goes out and picks a fight, that would be an incidental encounter, as are encounters with wandering monsters, random groups of mooks, and so on and so forth. If the encounter could be removed from the adventure without noticably affecting the plot, it's an incidental encounter. And incidental encounters are worth no XP whatsoever.

A 'milestone' encounter is the common-or-garden encounter that will be faced most of the time - in order to progress through the adventure, the PCs have to deal with this encounter. (Note that milestone encounters don't have to be, and indeed shouldn't be, only those encounters on the 'critical path' through the adventure. If the PCs divert from Path A to Path B, and complete the adventure that way instead, the encounters along Path B are still milestones.)

A 'pivotal' encounter would typically be a sub-boss or end-of-chapter encounter - it's one that has especial significance to the adventure. And, similarly, a 'climactic' encounter would typically be the end-boss or end-of-adventure encounter.

I would argue then that incidental encounters should not give XP at all, milestone encounters should give a tenth of the XP for the next level, pivotal encounters should give two tenths, and climactic encounters three tenths. (Except at 1st and 2nd level, where it should be a quarter or a half - at that level you probably want to treat pivotal and climactic encounters as the same thing.)

Of course, there's a neat side-effect of doing this: it makes it easy to award XP on the other two pillars of play also. It's fairly easy to see how a social interaction or exploration step could be described as being incidental, milestone, climatic, or pivotal, and XP awarded accordingly.

(And this also has the effect of encouraging PCs to avoid, rather than seek out, wandering monsters - since these are incidental encounters they no longer award XP and so serve only to soak up resources, resources that would be better saved for more important encounters later. Conversely, it means that the DM no longer needs to worry about a wandering monster giving out "too many" XP and consequently skewing the game.)

One final thing (before the numbers): I think I'd be inclined to also have some other XP awards. In particular, I'd be inclined to use 4e's notion of Quest Awards, where the PCs are issued a quest that they may or may not want to follow up on, but where completing the quest was worth a milestone XP award (ideally, an adventure would have several quests available, potentially including some mutually-exclusive goals). And I think I'd also include a "default activity" that was worth a quarter-milestone. (In D&D, that would be "finding treasure" - in a standard dungeon crawl I think I wouldn't give XP simply for moving from room to room, but would instead include several hidden, and unaccompanied, caches of treasure. If the PCs find and loot one of these caches, they get the XP. But you don't get the XP for looting the corpses of monsters you kill - that's already handled with the XP award for the encounter itself!)

And so, the numbers to go with this:

Level	'Hard' Encounter Budget	Milestone XP	Pivotal XP	Climactic XP	Quarter-Milestone
1	75	75	150	150	20
2	150	150	300	300	35
3	225	180	360	540	45
4	375	380	760	1,140	95
5	750	750	1,500	2,250	185
6	900	900	1,800	2,700	225
7	1,100	1,100	2,200	3,300	275
8	1,400	1,400	2,800	4,200	350
9	1,600	1,600	3,200	4,800	400
10	1,900	2,100	4,200	6,300	525
11	2,400	1,500	3,000	4,500	375
12	3,000	2,000	4,000	6,000	500
13	3,400	2,000	4,000	6,000	500
14	3,800	2,500	5,000	7,500	625
15	4,300	3,000	6,000	9,000	750
16	4,800	3,000	6,000	9,000	750
17	5,900	4,000	8,000	12,000	1,000
18	6,300	4,000	8,000	12,000	1,000
19	7,300	5,000	10,000	15,000	1,250
20	8,500	5,000	10,000	15,000	1,250

How to Be a Better Player: Lesson #1 - Be There

There's a huge amount of DM advice out there, covering just about every conceivable topic, and even a few that are inconceivable (or, at least, I hope someone's written about how to run a game like "The Princess Bride"). However, there's relatively little out there about how to be a better player, which seems a bit of an oversight given that players outnumber DMs about 4-to-1.

So, I figured I'd start an occasional series about how to be a better player. And I figured I'd start by repeating something I once saw on another column in another age - a lesson so simply it probably should go without saying.

Lesson #1: Be There

Now, at the most basic level, this is obvious - if you're not there, you can't play at all! But it also covers such basic things as committing to the things you sign up for: if you sign up for a campaign, you need to be able to commit to attend sessions regularly; you shouldn't no-show without good reason, and you certainly shouldn't no-show without notice (especially in an era of ubiquitous communications).

And so on and so forth. But that's all just such basic courtesy that it really shouldn't need said. And, frankly, if it does need said then I think I'll play with those guys over there instead.

But there's a second aspect to the advice beyond simply being physically present, and that's about being mentally present - if you're there to game, be there to game! That means avoiding distractions like the internet, the TV, off-topic chat, and so on and so forth. And if you can't do those things (as sometimes people can't), maybe it's better to take the night off the game and go fix whatever the issue is?

(Of course, as with all things, it's worth noting that I'm not calling for perfect. Like's a tricky beast at the best of times, and it simply won't be possible to attend every session, to be 100% focussed every time, and so on. That's all fine. Really, the goal is an effort in good faith, which is no bad thing. And every so often, it can help to have these things spelled out as a reminder.)

Short and Long Rests and the Adventure Clock

One of the things I rather like about 4e and 5e is the formalisation of rests, and especially the introduction of a 'short' rest as well as the pre-existing overnight (or 'long') rest. Of course, I'd be inclined to go one further and introduce an 'extended' rest for between adventures, but that's another topic for another day.

One of the things I don't particularly like about 4e and 5e, though, is that these rests are basically nothing events: the players say they're going to rest, the party applies the effects of the rest, and the DM says, "an hour later..." and on you go.

Having said that, I think the issue there is really more about adventure design rather than game design as such: basically, I think each adventure (or each part of an adventure for something like "Out of the Abyss") should really apply some thought to two things: under what conditions are the PCs able to take a rest of the various sorts, and what are the consequences?

I think this really should be an adventure design issue because not all adventures are created equal - in some cases, taking a short rest may simply be a matter of slumping down and waiting, while others may result in changes to guard rotations or a call for reinforcements, or something.

I'm also inclined to think that most adventures (though not all) should have some sort of "adventure clock" defined - if the PCs do nothing to stop it, what happens and when? So perhaps Day One sees the bad guys take the captured princess back to their Death Star, on Day Three they blow up Alderaan, on Day Five they break the princess's will, and on Day Seven they blow up Yavin IV (game over).

In effect, then, this gives something like:

Short Rest
Prerequisites: Party must find a safe place to wait undisturbed for 1 hour.
Consequences: The party's incursion is detected, if it has not been previously, and the alarm raised. All opponents are on heightened alertness (advantage on perception checks to avoid surprise) until the adventure clock advances.

Long Rest
Prerequisites: The party must find a safe place to rest undisturbed for 8 hours. The party must have, and must consume, 1 day of rations and water. The party must have access to tents and bedrolls, or similar, and must be able to sleep.
Consequences: Advance the adventure clock. Opponents return to normal levels of alertness. However, the following reinforcements arrive...

Obviously, it's all a bit vague at the moment, but that's my basic thinking on that one...

Opening a New Tabletop

Once again I find myself pondering a new game. This one will be fairly standard D&D 5e, using a homebrew (but very 'light') setting and using a minimum of house rules. It will also be for very occasional play, and will be an "open tabletop" game. Basically, it will be an outlet for those folks in the group who are looking for a game but who are unable either to get into one of the existing games or are unable to commit to regular play. Of course, there's a real good chance that this won't get off the ground anyway - it's just the core of an idea right now. Anyway, here's where I am at the moment on characters:

1. Each player needs two characters, which should be "sufficiently different" from one another. It's fine to have a preferred character and a backup, but you need to be happy to play either. This is so that we have a decent chance to form a coherent party for the session - if everyone brought a Wizard then there would be a problem! (Think of it in the same way as a football team has 'home' and 'away' strips to avoid colour clashes.) Both characters gain gold and XP at the same rate, but other treasures don't transfer in the same way. If a player doesn't bring a character, or brings only one and clashes, then the DM will provide a character, but those guys suck - don't do that!
2. All characters start at 1st level. You may use any race, class, spell, or other option from the PHB, but no other books.
3. Characters should be created using the standard array or point-buy options from the PHB. Stats cannot be "random" rolled.
4. Don't bother with alignment, traits, bonds, ideals, or flaws. Waste of time.
5. You get the starting equipment from your class and background, plus a trinket (you can choose from the table or roll for yourself).

And four other things:

1. Advantage Tokens: Each player will be issued with two Advantage Tokens at the start of each session. These can be used on any d20 roll, in which case they negate Disadvantage (if any) and then grant advantage. (You can also use them after a d20 roll to gain a reroll. However, only one AT can be used on any single d20 roll.) And yes, you can give them to another player, but you only have two for the session, so choose wisely!
2. Staring Fresh: All characters start each session at full strength - a full load of spells, maximum hit points and hit dice, etc.
3. Rests: Each session is a single "adventuring day". The group can take two short rests over the course of the day, but cannot take a long rest. However, in order to benefit from a short rest you need a suitable supply of rations and water, and a relatively safe place to rest for an hour.
4. Encumbrance: You can carry 10 items, not counting containers (backpacks, sacks) and anything you are wearing (your boots, cloak, armour...). Multiple identical items will count as a single item, no matter how many are carried. However, those multiples do need to be identical - an arrow and an arrow +1 count as two separate items. Your armour might reduce your movement rate, but encumbrance otherwise doesn't affect you - pick your 10 starting items, and you're good to go.
5. The Small Stuff: Don't bother tracking mundane ammunition, rations, water, oil, torches, or any coin less than 1gp. If you have these things on your character sheet, it is assumed you will never run out. (But you can't lend these things to another character - for encumbrance reasons, each character needs to carry their own rations, etc.)
6. Group Treasure: In addition to each individual characters "10 things" there will also be a track of group treasure. This is handwaved - it doesn't count towards encumbrance. However, items in group treasure can't be used - they have to be claimed (and added to a character sheet) first. A PC can, of course, add any of his own gold or magic items to group treasure if he so chooses. However, mundane items cannot be placed in group treasure.
7. Between Sessions: At the end of each session, any unclaimed group treasure will be turned into gold and divided equally by the number of players involved in the session. Each player may add that to the total for both his characters. (But note that pre-gen characters provided by the DM immediately spend all their gold on ale and whores and don't keep any of it. Seriously, those guys are the worst!) However, any magic items claimed are not duplicated. Similarly, experience points for the session are calculated normally, with the gain added to both 'home' and 'away' characters. The difference here is that pre-gen characters do gain experience from their adventures, giving them at least some chance to keep up in future sessions!

Revisiting Spelljammer

After finally getting a copy of "The Ultimate Helm" recently, I have embarked on a re-read of the old "Cloakmaster Cycle" of Spelljammer novels, which in turn has got me thinking about that setting again.

Personally, I'm inclined to view Spelljammer as one of those crazy ideas that TSR threw out that had a lot of potiential, but which just didn't quite work. The basic idea of "D&D in Space!" is good, and a lot of fun, but the execution just feels... off, somehow. There's probably just a bit too much weirdness going on there, but also there's probably rather too much emphasis on the aspect of it as a meta-setting - that is, it's a way to join up Dragonlance and Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms and...

Of course, all of that makes Spelljammer ripe for a possible remake, and since WotC aren't likely to come back to the setting any time soon the corollary to that is that it's ideal for a homebrew reimagining. So, some thoughts...

1. Its Own Thing: The first and most important change that I would make is to divorce Spelljammer from any of the other settings. Yeah, maybe "Realmspace" is out there... somewhere... but the campaign will never go there.
2. Ditch the Pretendy Physics: The Spelljammer novels and sourcebooks spend a fair amount of time talking about gravity planes, air bubbles, and other bits of fantasy-physics intended to provide some sort of veneer of realism to a setting that is fundamentally about sailing ships in space. That's rather a waste of time.
3. Many Small Settlements: One of the things I've found is that 'naval' games generally work best with lots of little islands rather than a few major continents. Basically, you want lots of reason for the crew to use ships rather than walking, and that's the easiest way to achieve that.
4. Non-flammable Flow: One of the conceits of the setting is that the Phlogiston (the rainbow river between spheres - basically, hyperspace) is highly flammable. I don't really have a problem with that, except that I need to change it so I can...
5. Advance to the Age of Steam: One of the things I always find very jarring about any D&D/Pathfinder 'naval' setting is that they tend to fit out the ships in the style of the Golden Age of Piracy (which is wise), but they also insist on fitting out the ships with catapults and ballistae rather than the cannon that were ubiquitous at the time (and firearms too, of course). This never really sits right with me, and so one of the changes I would very definitely be inclined to make would be to fit out the ships with those cannon. And, similarly, at least some ships (the Dwarven and Gnomish ones, and probably Human ones too) should have steam-powered Helms. In fact, I think I'd be inclined to make the whole thing a rather Steampunk setting, in much the same style as Eberron.
6. And Post-apocalyptic, too: In the setting as written, there's a grand Elven navy that seems to provide law and order for the known spheres. Yeah, not in my setting - in the remade version the elves did indeed win the Unhuman Wars... but they probably almost wish they hadn't. Because the legacy of those wars is that their power has been utterly broken, such that pirates, slavers, and raiders of all sorts are now rife.
7. Everyone's a Rogue: And, of course, one of the conceits I'm probably adopting in all my campaigns from now on, in every game and in every setting - the PCs are rogues, tricksters, bounty hunters, private detectives, or detached agents. They might work for an established power, but only in the loosest possible sense. That gives them huge autonomy... but also means they can't rely on the backing of a fleet when they need to throw their weight around.

Of course, I may well just play the new Star Trek game instead. That's probably less work!

Trolls and Fire

The question of metagaming has raised its ugly head on ENWorld once again, and once again the inevitable example of trolls and their weakness to fire has been raised, with the endless back and forth about whether an experienced player with a newbie character should know about the fire.

The unfortunate consequence of which is that people have proceeded to argue the example rather than the issue - because trolls are such a common monster, ever D&D player who has even a little experience knows about them and fire. So a DM who uses that as some sort of a 'reveal' is basically copying George Lucas' great 'reveal' that Anakin turns into Darth Vader in RotS - it's basically the single best-known spoiler in film history, so it's not going to have much of an impact.

Basically, if a DM wants to use trolls in an encounter, he should start with the assumption that the players know about the weakness to fire. From there, he can go one of two ways: either he can build his encounter assuming that they'll use that knowledge (in which case he should treat the trolls as any other "big bag of hit points" monster, to be battered into submission) or, better, he should structure the encounter so that using fire is a judgement call - maybe the fight occurs in a cave filled with exlosive gas, or something. And that way the players get to choose between several imperfect solutions to their problem. Simply pitting experienced players against trolls and expecting them to pretend not to know is madness of Star Wars prequel proportions.

But there is a bigger issue as regards metagaming. (Which is defined in this particular debate as the use of player knowledge to bypass character knowledge, which itself is a case of definition drift. But never mind.) What if the example isn't the classic trolls/fire example, but something more extreme? What if the player has read the adventure and "just happens" to look for treasure in all the right places? What if the player is a former DM with the MM memorised? Heck, in an extreme case, what if the player has all the books on his phone and is looking them up in-game?

Ultimately, I think it boils down to a very simple answer: don't do that.

Basically, players should endeavour to play their characters in good faith (which is a usefully vague term). And, yes, the DM should seek to throw a few changes their way so that simply looking at the books won't help so much - use some custom adventures and/or custom monsters, mix up some of the encounters or treasure locations, or something of that ilk.

And when all else fails, it's probably better to embrace the metagame rather than try to fight it - know your players' levels of experience and build accordingly, so that applying that knowledge leads to something more interesting than simply pretending that they don't have it.