Volo's Guide to Monsters

When this book was announced, I was hugely disappointed, on three counts. Firstly, I very much enjoyed the 5e "Monster Manual", and so the single supplement I was most hoping for was an MM2 of the same sort of size and quality. Instead, what was announced was a book that sounded like it was one-third a Monster Manual, which not only fell short by being full of other things I didn't want, but also meant that that MM2 is definitively not happening - it's just not in WotC's plans. Secondly, this book saw them adopt a higher price-point for 5e books - they'd already been right at the top-end of the scale at $50 for their 256-page adventures, but now they were charging $50 for 224 pages.

So I was all set to skip this book. Fortunately (?) though, Amazon had a very large discount available on the pre-order, and since I received some vouchers for my birthday it became a very easy buy. But that very much sets the tone for this review: this is an okay book, but very much non-essential, so the question is entirely one of determining at what point it represents value for money.

The book starts in the worst way possible: with a foreword written by "Volo" - a fairly annoying Forgotten Realms character who serves as a travel guide and lore-master - coupled with 'witty' annotations by Elminster. Such joy. Fortunately, the contribution of these characters after that introduction (which is, fortunately, a single page) amounts to a handful of notes in the text, and is therefore much less intrusive than I'd feared.

Thereafter, the book is split into three chapters.

Chapter One is about 100 pages of lore about nine iconic monster types: Beholders, Giants, Gnolls, Goblinoids, Hags, Kobolds, Mind Flayers, Orcs, and Yuan-ti. These are very similar in style to any of the Paizo "... Revisited" books or the old "Ecology of the..." articles from Dragon Magazine. These are all fine, so far as they go, except that too many of them seem to rely on "the gods made them this way" as an explanantion for why the monsters are as they are. Still, that's fine - the selection of monsters is decent, the amount of lore per monster is about right, and it's all fairly interesting. In fairness, I mostly prefer Paizo's take on most of these, but it's nice to have alternatives.

Chapter Two is very short, and provides some additional playable races for the game: Goliaths, Kenku, and a few others. The chapter also includes support for several monster-as-PC options for DMs who are so inclined. I was actually surprised by these: I had intended to ban all of them out of hand, but I found the new races sufficiently interesting that if a player came to me having read the book and wanted to play one of the new races then that would be fine (but not if they just wanted to play the stat-block). The monsters-as-PCs are not something I'd allow, though - I don't care for the concept, and the book notes they're not balanced anyway.

Chapter Three and the Appendices, then, amount to about 100 pages and provide new monsters for the game. Well, new to 5e that is - I don't think there are any genuinely new monsters here, which is no bad thing. The selection here is fine, with some odd choices (apparently, each designer was allowed to nominate one personal favourite for inclusion - which gives a nice weirdness to the book, and is a good thing). I was particularly glad to see personal favourites the Dark Ones and Chitine make the cut. Unfortunately, there are very few high-CR monsters here - it seems WotC once again have no meaningful intention to support high-level play. One of these days they should probably just drop levels 16+ (or even 10+) from the game.

One big criticism that I'll level at the monster chapter, and that I also levelled at "Tome of Beasts" is that the book doesn't have the table showing how the various traits affect monster building. Including such a table would have been a massive boon to a DM building his own monsters or building variants. It really should be a standard feature (or would be a really nice web enhancement).

And that's that.

So, a recommendation...

In some ways, this is really three books in one, as represented by the three chapters: monster lore, new PC races, new monsters. If all three of those appeal, this book is worth considering. If any one of the three does not appeal, you should probably skip this book unless you can get a huge discount. (Fortunately, the presence of Volo in the book is marginal, so shouldn't be a turn-off!)

Having said that, I don't think this book is worth buying at full price anyway. I got it at something like a 35% discount, and it feels like I paid about the right amount for what I got. Make of that what you will.

Better Player #4: How Much to Roleplay?

I've recently come across a near-perfect answer to the pesky question of how much a player should roleplay their character. That is, should the PC be considered as nothing more than a playing piece to be used to 'win' the game, should the PC basically be you in a fantasy universe, or should your PC be a whole other person with their own motivations, personality, and quirks?

The answer I came across is pretty simple: as much as you want.

That is, if you want to go full immersion, you should go for it. If you want to treat your character as just an extension as yourself, that's fine too.

There is one caveat to that, however, and it is this: don't be a jerk. If your character is an anti-social jerk who alienates everyone else in the group, that's on you - "I'm just playing my character" isn't a valid defence, because you chose to play that character rather than a myriad of others. (Likewise, if your character is resolutely determined not to get involved in adventures, that's your call - but it's not my responsibility to involve your character in events. Your choices are two-fold: play your character differently (or a different character), or don't play.)

And, yeah, there's a corollary to that: it can be a bit depressing for the DM to see players choose a non-human race for their character based purely on game stats, and then play that character as just a soulless playing piece to 'win' the game, but that's the player's prerogative. It's their character to roleplay as much, or as little, as they want. If it really bothers the DM, maybe the answer is to ban the use of non-human races... which may in turn lead to players choosing not to play.

Roleplaying After "Rogue One"

One thing that came out of viewing "Rogue One", that wasn't so much the case with "The Force Awakens", was that I was left with a burning desire to run some "Star Wars". More than that, though, I found myself particularly interested in dusting off the old d6 "Star Wars" RPG from West End Games, and giving that a whirl.

The use of the d6 system is probably key to this. One of the traps I think I'd fallen into was the thinking that "Star Wars" was basically all about the Jedi - probably due to the influence of the prequels, the "Clone Wars" series, and indeed "Star Wars Saga Edition". The old d6 system handles everything except the Jedi very well, with the Force being the one area where SWSE has it beat. (I discount the FFG version entirely, for the entirely arbitrary reason that it requires custom dice. That's one of my entirely irrational deal-breakers.)

Of course, this leads me to three or four key questions: will I actually do this? If so, will it be a campaign or one or more one-shots? And what will the PCs do? And, indeed, who will be the players?

In answer to those questions: probably not, if I'm honest; one-shots at least to start; see below; and dunno.

The most interesting of the questions concerns what the PCs will actually do. Where, initially at least, I'm quite attracted to the notion of them being an autonomous Rebel cell covering a fairly small area of space (but multiple star systems - maybe half a dozen inhabited locations?). Their mandate would be to disrupt the Imperial presence in the sector, disrupt operations, steal plans, and build a proper infrastructure for the Rebellion. Oh, and they'd inevitably have to deal with crime bosses, bounty hunters, and all the other figures on the fringe...

But, right now, it's all very nebulous - "Rogue One" left me keen to run the game, but didn't necessarily give me any insight in what exactly to do with it!

The Christmas Game That Never Was

I'm still hoping to run this year's Christmas Game, albeit not this year and not at Christmas. By which point I suppose it will just be "a game", but I digress. Anyway, that being the case, I'm not going to share many great spoilers here. However, there are a few things I can talk about.

Over the last several years, the Christmas Games have occurred in a version of the 'Verse set a long time after the events of "Serenity" - in fact, I've been advancing the timeline roughly in sync with the passage of real time. So, "Memoirs of a Companion" took place ten years after the film (in 2528 AD), and "Book, and His Cover" will be set in 2529. Though that's largely irrelevant - for the most part the characters are assumed to exist in a sort of comic-book stasis. The only major factor in that decision is that it means Wash and Book are dead and gone, and Zoe now has a daughter.

Anyway, "Book, and His Cover" was going to find our heroes right back where they started - on the raggedy edge, with Serenity falling apart, and picking up passengers on Persephone after a job went south. At least the heat is off, for the time being.

Enter a young man looking to book passage, who picks Serenity seemingly at random... and who later reveals that it was anything but. He claims to be the son of the departed Shepherd Book, and has come seeking Mal Reynolds looking for some answers.

And that's more or less as far as I'd got. Obviously, Shepherd Book was one of the more mysterious characters on the show, and I was inclined to dig into that a bit, especially in light of some of the material in "A Shepherd's Tale". But I hadn't quite decided just what Book's "son's" agenda was going to be...

(The key, I think, was probably to mix in just enough truth with the various lies that get told in amongst it all. In particular, I was strongly leaning towards the young man actually being Book's son, rather than that being the very first lie. Plus, I was going to suggest that that character be one of the PCs for the session, which in turn suggests he shouldn't be entirely in control of all the agendas...)

Departing ENWorld

After something like fifteen years, I've finally decided to step away from ENWorld. Part of that is that the site has become increasingly less useful with the release of 5th edition - there are so few releases that there's little incentive to visit for an update on news. But, mostly, it's due to the character of the place.

Unfortunately, one of the consequences of the Edition Wars seems to be the formation of two armed camps - the pro-D&D and pro-Pathfinder groups. And although open hostilities seem to be a thing of the past, the tensions have never gone away. In particular, it seems that you are indeed allowed to criticise one of the games... but only if you're already part of the tribe. For the rest, even the mildest criticism can be met with vitriol. Which is pretty hellish if your opinion of 5e is "yeah, it's good... but..."

But the biggest problem is not the character of the place, but rather my character at the place. It really started to seem that all I was doing there was engaging in pointless, increasingly bad-tempered arguments over minutae...

The bottom line is that I've decided to step away, probably permanently. I've come to not particularly enjoy being part of that community, and I've really come to dislike the part of myself that that community brings out.

It's a shame, and the end of an era... but I think it's also a positive move.

N.E.W. Science Fiction Role-playing Game

In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why I backed the Kickstarter for this game. Amongst other things, the offer of a 'crunchy' new roleplaying system (when my tastes are leaning towards the more free-form) and a generic sci-fi game (which generic sci-fi has never exactly inspired, and when Firefly was more than hitting the spot), should by rights have dissuaded me.

Still, back it I did, and so eighteen months later I received my shiny new hardback book - 280ish pages of glorious full-colour. The only thing I'd say about that is that the text size is pretty big, meaning that those same 280 pages are perhaps closer to 200 in an equivalent D&D 5e/Pathfinder book (if there was such a thing).

The book is well-written and easily digestible. The system it presents is actually not as complex as the pitch had made out - while it is indeed 'crunchy', that doesn't mean 'complex'. Rather, it means that things have stats, and the group are expected to care about those stats. But I daresay you could quite happily play this game in a very freeform manner and be quite happy.

But the big weakness of the game, and also its great strength, is that this does indeed try to be a generic sci-fi game - there are elements here that are clearly nods to Star Trek and Star Wars, Doctor Who, and references to many other novels and TV shows. This means it's trying to cover an awful lot of material, and it means it does so very briefly.

And in that respect, this game reminded me more than anything else of "d20 Modern" - it's less a game in its own right than a toolkit for a game. This means that for a GM willing to put in quite a lot of work (or, indeed, if a third-party supplement is available), it can do an awful lot for you. But for the time-stretched GM it's of less use.

That means that any recommendation is necessarily conditional: if you have something in mind (and, especially, something that hasn't been otherwise covered by a dedicated game), and are willing to put the work in, then this is a good candidate to consider. And if, as the publisher hopes, this game sees lots of third-party support, it's utility will improve with time. But absent that support, and absent the time to do the work yourself (or, indeed, absent a clear idea of what to do with the game, rather than just "let's give it a go"), this is one to miss.

Proposed House Rule: Untrained Skills

One of the lesser issues in 5e (and also earlier editions) is that if you have two characters, one with proficiency in a skill but a low attribute and the other with no proficiency but with a high attribute, the second of these has a better chance to succeed at relevant skill checks than the one who has invested actual resources in getting 'good' at that thing.

For example: Fred the Fighter has a Cha of 10 and is trained in Intimidate. His skill modifier is therefore +2; Bob the Bard has a Cha of 18 but no proficiency; his skill modifier is +4.

Of course, it's valid to declare this to be a feature rather than a bug. It's also valid to either have a bunch of things that either a proficient character can succeed at automatically or that, conversely, an untrained character automatically fails.

But here's a proposed alternative: if you do not have training in a skill (tool, whatever), you get to apply your attribute bonus up to the maximum of your proficiency bonus.

In which case, both Fred and Bob would end up with the same skill total of +2.

This has the effect of allowing an untrained character to be as good as, but never better than, his trained companion. And, since most characters will also have at least a small bonus in their relevant attribute they'll usually be just a little behind.

Plus, it has the advantage of being a nice, simple rule that cleans up a minor annoyance.

(Of course, it does also raise a question: does this also apply to attack rolls, saving throws, and armour use, all of which have a proficiency mechanic? Though, in this case, I think I'm going to say "no".)

Wizards' Three Last Chances

For all that I like the core of 5e, it's fair to say that I've been less than impressed with a lot of what surrounds it - in particular, I've felt that the storyline books peaked a year ago and have gone backwards quite badly, I'm disappointed by the relative lack of support, and I'm particularly disappointed with the lack of support for Eberron and Dark Sun.

All of which means I'm thinking of giving up on the edition, or at least on the official releases for it, in favour of other options.

But I'll give it one last chance. "Volo's Guide to Monsters" has been out a couple of weeks, and is hopefully due to arrive from Amazon this week. I don't have high hopes for this book at all, but it might impress me. And if it does...

Actually, no, I'll give them two last chances. There's supposed to be a "major mechanical expansion" coming soon, probably next year. Maybe that will have the support I'm looking for?

Three! Three last chances: I'm not planning to buy any more of the storyline adventures set in the Forgotten Realms. However, at some point WotC might publish an adventure set in Eberron or Dark Sun (it's unlikely they'll do both in the next year or so). If they do so, I'll give that a go and see how it is.

But if none of those come to anything, it will be time to step away from this edition, just as I did with 4e. There's no foul there; it will just be that WotC won't be producing the game for me, and that's fine. All things considered, though, I kind of hope that it doesn't come to that!

The Missing Classes

The class lineup in 5e is pretty good for the most part, with only a few glaring holes. If I were to do a big book of rules charged with filling those gaps, then, I think I would introduce the following:

At least one, but probably a few, psionic classes. I think this only really needs two: the Psion and the Ardent. The Psychic Warrior should be a Fighter subclass, the Soulknife is probably a Monk subclass, and the Lurk a Rogue subclass. (Wilder is a subclass of Psion.)

An Artificer class. Subclasses would be the technomancer (the 'classic' Artificer), tinkerer (a non-magical variant - like Dragonlance's Tinker Gnomes), the alchemist, and the mountebank (think Jarlaxle - and if you don't know who that is, lucky you!).

A Warlord class. This one is mostly a matter of principle - the Warlord is the only class to appear in a 'base' PHB for any edition that doesn't currently exist in 5e. So it should exist, and it should be a class, not a subclass.

A Mageblade class. Again, a matter of principle, although a lesser one - the Elf 'class' from BECMI is also unrepresented. Plus, the advantage of this class is that then I wouldn't feel so bad about banning multiclassing.

(Though, actually, it occurs to me that the Assassin doesn't exist as a full-blown class in 5e...)

And I think that's it - just a few more classes to fill some gaps, and I think that's enough. Of course, there would be room for more, as will always be the case, but for me I think those are the big gaps.

Tome of Beasts

Of the three 5e core rulebooks, my favourite is the "Monster Manual", which has a great set of monsters, lovely artwork, and just the right amount of lore. If the MM has a weakness, however, is that it is a very 'classic' set of monsters: giants, and dragons, and orcs, and beholders, and so on and so forth. This pretty much had to be the case, of course, but it did leave me looking for something new.

Consequently, my most-wanted supplement for 5e for a long time was simple: a "Monster Manual 2", which could be crafted very easily - take the MM, remove all the monsters, replace them with other monsters, and we're done.

And that, right there, is "Tome of Beasts", a third-party book of monsters by Kobold Press, published under the OGL. It's basically another "Monster Manual", vastly expanding the range of available critters. And, at $50 for 432 pages in hardback and full-colour, it's a heck of a buy.

The book isn't quite perfect - I noticed at least one monster missing from the Table of Contents, there were a few cases where a sub-heading wasn't correctly bolded, or the chapter heading was offset by one, or a wrong word was used. (And I'm sure there are at least a few mistakes in the stat-blocks.) But those are mere quibbles. Likewise, it would have been really nice to see a table similar to the one in the DMG indicating how all the various creature traits affect the monster's effective stats, so that a DM building a variant had a good place to start. Again, though, it's always possible to find more that could be included!

This is a great, great buy - I recommend it above any other supplement for 5e to date, including both those from WotC and over other third-party producers. (If you can buy both this and "Fifth Edition Foes", then do so. But if you have to choose, this is the one to go for.) This book also probably satisfies my desire for any more 'general' monsters for 5e - I'm now potentially in the market for setting-specific books, and there are some WotC-IP monsters I'd be keen to see updated, but I'd probably not buy a simple "Tome of Beasts 2" or similar.

One last thing: I have "Volo's Guide to Monsters" on pre-order from Amazon and due to arrive in a couple of weeks. It's really going to have to go some to compete!

Encounter Distances

In the second-last session of the "Dust to Dust" campaign, I made a mistake when setting up one of the key encounters. Specifically, I had the bad guys start an excessive distance from the PCs, meaning the combat started with several rounds of the two groups moving towards one another, punctuated with ranged attacks that were, for both sides, fairly sub-optimal.

In hindsight, I think what should be done is as follows:

Missile and spell ranges should be split into two: short and long. Broadly, any thrown weapon should be short range, while bows, crossbows, and slings should allow long range attacks. (For spell and other attacks, I think I'll place the threshold at 100ft, that being a nice round number - a spell with a range any less than that is short range, anything longer is long range.)

When an encounter starts at long range, there should be one round of the two groups moving together prior to the 'real' combat, unless one of the features of the encounter is that something prevents them from coming together. In this single round, only attacks with long range can be used.

In the second and subsequent round, ranged attacks with both short and long ranges can be used. In addition, however, any combatant can use his movement to close the gap entirely, thus bringing them into melee combat range.

(Obviously, this assumes a continuation of "theatre of the mind" play - if miniatures are used then more accurate measurements are probably important. However, as I don't really intend to switch back to minis...)

Better Player #3: Do Something!

One of the great joys of RPGs is the immense freedom that they give to players. Whereas with a book or a movie you have to watch the story unfold the way the writer has decided, with an RPG the player has the agency to determine his or her own path. (And, indeed, the tabletop RPG has an advantage over even the computer version here, because a PC can deal only with the actions the coder considered when writing the game, while the DM can adapt on the fly.)

All of which is to the good, but it does give a certain responsibility to the player: you've been given the agency to decide what to do... use it!

From the "better player" perspective, then, there are a few sides to this, then.

The first of these is that, especially in combat, the player should seek to take action promptly. Whatever the situation, there probably isn't a single 'right' answer. And, especially in combat, you're character certainly doesn't have huge amounts of time to ponder the options. So, in short, GET ON WITH IT! Yes, you might not make the best choice, but you'll probably make a good choice, and that's enough.

The second comes with more open-ended situations such as exploration, mystery solving, diplomacy, and the like. In these situations, there's a risk that the party will get bogged down, not knowing how to proceed, where to go next, or they might find themselves trapped debating options endlessly (actually, this is the same problem as above, just on a party, rather than an individual, scale). Well, do something. Whether that's a case of finding some NPC to talk to, or applying pressure to the story somewhere else, or asking a question of the DM, or something. Because until the PCs do something, the game's going to sit there. But you'll find it's actually easier to change direction once it's moving than while it's stationary.

The third is the resolution of a pet peeve of mine - the player who expects the DM to bring adventure to him. Basically, a player should have some sort of actual motivation for his PC. Presumably, your guy chose to become a Fighter rather than a blacksmith for some reason - he wants something out of it, be it revenge, fortune and glory, or whatever. So, if you find yourself between quests and the DM asks "what do you want to do?", you should probably have some sort of an answer. The actual answer will depend on the character, of course, but you'd think there must be something. And if there isn't, maybe there should be.

All of which is an awful lot of words to say very little more than is in the title: to be a better player, do something!

D&D in a Post-Game of Thrones world

One of the things discussed in the development of 5e is that we're now in a world where most people's primary fantasy touchstone is no longer "Lord of the Rings", but rather "Game of Thrones". This means that the expectations people will bring to the game table are likely quite different, and also means that what people are looking for from the game are also probably different.

While D&D is not "Game of Thrones", any more than it ever was "Lord of the Rings", I do wonder to what extent that should perhaps influence the game?

Humans Only: It's an interesting fact that Gygax actually wasn't a huge fan of "Lord of the Rings". He actually preferred the stories of Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Elric, and the works of Lovecraft. In fact, I suspect he would have omitted the 'demihuman' races (as they were then known) entirely, except that the player base expected to see them.

However, in the post-GoT world, I wonder if it isn't time to significantly re-evaluate whether the non-human races should be de-emphasised, or even eliminated? I have two reasons for this. One of these is that GoT probably has deeper characterisation than has been the norm in fantasy stories. Meanwhile, in D&D it is sadly not uncommon for players to use their character's race as a substitute for character - they're playing "the elf", and that's enough.

The second reason for this is that an awful lot of the character work in GoT deals with several inter-related houses of nobles in the setting: the Starks, Lannisters, Greyjoys, Boltons, etc - and note that the inter-related nature of those houses is often fairly crucial to the plot. But where the 'houses' are replaced with different species you lose those inter-relations. Which means the setting then either needs to duplicate the setup several times for each species in turn, or it loses a key chunk of the campaign.

Low Fantasy: A long time ago, some bright spark drew a distinction between 'high' fantasy such as the King Arthur myth, Lord of the Rings, and the like; and 'low' fantasy like the Lankhmar stories, the Black Company stories, and Game of Thrones - settings that, while distinctly fantasy, tend to deal with human-scale issues. While magic, and even quite powerful magic, does exist in GoT, it does tend to be fairly rare and fairly subtle.

D&D has always had a somewhat tricky relationship with those two influences - the level structure tends to mean that characters deal with low fantasy issues at low levels but then 'graduate' to high fantasy at higher level (with the switch-over point moving down with each successive edition - in 1st Ed it was around level 10; in 5e it's closer to level 5).

(But, on the other hand, while D&D is now in the post-GoT world, it's also in the post-Harry Potter world, so maybe this is a case where the game should embrace that side of the equation?)

Mature Themes: Tricky one this - in D&D, "mature themes" has only really appeared in a couple of official products (3e's "Book of Vile Darkness" and "Book of Exalted Deeds"), where it more or less boiled down to "boobs and blood". "Game of Thrones", of course, isn't exactly short of boobs and blood. On the other hand, though, there's rather more to it than that - there's all manner of shades of grey, deals and betrayals, and characters who go from heroic to deeply flawed to back again.

So what does all that mean?

I'm actually inclined to wonder whether WotC would be well-served to bring back the short-lived "Birthright" setting. Though if they were inclined to do so, I'd suggest that they don't simply reprint and/or update the setting, but instead re-imagine the setting in light of the post-GoT world. And, in particular, they might be well-served adopting both the human-centric and mature themes elements - I do think there's potential for them to do extremely well if that were done.

In terms of my own table, though, it doesn't mean too much will change... for now. I am pondering the possibilities of homebrewing an entirely new setting, as I'm no longer convinced 5e does Eberron terribly well and I'm not a fan of FR, in which case I'll probably adopt some of my thoughts here. But it's really early days at this stage.

Lessons from "Dust to Dust" (and "Imperial Fist")

The Eberron "Dust to Dust" campaign ended in a TPK on Tuesday. That's somewhat unfortunate, in that it's never the preferred way to end a campaign (and I had an actual plan for bringing it to a real end for perhaps the first time), but on the other hand it came at a convenient time. So that's fine.

The biggest lesson I've 'learned' from this campaign is actually something I've 'known' for some time but managed to ignore. And it's the same lesson I should have learned from the "Imperial Fist" campaign, which suffered from many of the same frustrations.

And it is this: to have a successful campaign you (well, I) have to do significant underlying preparation work.

That preparation work doesn't guarantee success, of course - it's entirely possible to do loads of prep work and still have it go wrong for any number of reasons. But it does seem that not doing that preparation work does guarantee... not failure, as such, but more a less-than-satisfactory result.

And it's notable the difference between the quality of the prep work I did for "The Eberron Code" versus the work I did for either "Dust to Dust" or "Imperial Fist", and also the quality of the end result in all of these cases.

I think that's the biggest and best lesson from that campaign. In "Dust to Dust" I had a fairly solid (but, alas, underbaked) image for the start of the campaign, I had vague notions for four acts for the campaign story, and I thought I had some neat stuff in terms of factions and anchor NPCs. As it turned out, though, none of those things really came to anything - once we were underway, I just didn't have the time to properly flesh out any of the material, which meant most of it quickly fell by the wayside. A real shame.

So, what's next? Well, nothing. There remains the possibility of this year's "Christmas Game", but I'm not going to give that much, if any, attention until at least after we move out of the flat (and probably not until after we move in to the new place). That means it will probably be cancelled this year, as I just have other things to do. In terms of campaign play, I don't have anything in the hopper. And it will be the middle of next year, at the very least, before I even consider starting something off again.

Proposed House Rule: Stun-lock

One of the best innovations introduced in 3.5e was a change to the hold person spell whereby the victim gained a save to throw off the spell every round. This was a small change, and applied only to that one spell, but it made a huge difference to the way it worked and brought it back into balance (more or less).

This idea was then adopted much more thoroughly in 4e, and now 5e, where lots of conditions operate on a "save ends" basis. Indeed, in many cases, these effects no longer have a stated duration at all, but last until the victim makes a successful save.

But there was an unfortunate consequence of this, which was that some 4e players responded to the change by seeking out every means possible to boost the save DC of their powers. And this gave rise to the practice of "stun-locking" - hit a target with an effect that stunned it until the save ended the effect, but boost the save DC to a point where the creature needed a nat-20 for the save (which meant that almost no creature ever made the save).

My proposal for the house rule here is quite simple: for every failed save, the target gains a cumulative +1 bonus on the next save.

This means that the save becomes progressively easier as time goes on, and it means that the effect eventually will end. And it means that even a creature (or PC) targetted on a weak save can only be taken out of the game for a limited time.

(That said, I think I actually favour an alternate form of this, especially for effects with no fixed duration but instead a simple "save ends" - which is simply a "three strikes" variant, whereby the target is allowed to suffer the effects of a failed save three times, but is considered to automatically make the fourth save.)

Where I Stand on 5e Now

Having now run most of a campaign under 5e, I think it's a good time to take stock of where I stand on the issue now. Because some of my views now don't match up with my initial impressions, and it's worth considering how things have actually panned out compared with what I expected.

The bottom line is that I'm not overly impressed with 5e. It's okay, and there's a lot that is good about it, but... every time I think of some positive aspect of the game I'm immediately provoked to think, "but...". I don't think there are any unalloyed good aspects of the game, and that's a real shame.

Probably the most damning aspect of the game is the sheer physical quality of the books, or lack thereof - every single one of my 5e books has had a visibly weakened spine before I've even finished a single read-through. Indeed, every one of my 5e books is in noticably worse condition than my 1st Edition "Unearthed Arcana", and that book was notorious for its binding issues - and many of my 5e books have had no at-table use at all. (I find this extremely poor, and especially since 5e saw above-inflation price rises compared to previous editions. I don't begrudge paying the money; I object very strongly to paying more for a less-good product.)

I'm also not terribly impressed with the adventures, which is rather a weakness when those are the core focus of the edition. In fairness, I thought "Lost Mine of Phandelver" was brilliant, as was the first half of "Out of the Abyss". But "Princes of the Apocalypse" and "Curse of Strahd" were only okay, while "Tyranny of Dragons", "Storm King's Thunder", and the second half of "Out of the Abyss" were poor.

I do think that the core game is decent, but it's also very limited. 5e does what it does well, but it's really good for the vanilla D&D experience and that's about it - everything that's unique about Eberron (or, I would presume Dark Sun, Spelljammer, or other "out there" settings") either doesn't exist or falls flat. Which means that a campaign that is anything other than 'normal' D&D, or a repaint of the same, is likely to fall flat.

Certainly, it is not my intention to run another Eberron campaign in 5e unless and until WotC formally support the setting. And I have no expectation that they will do that any time soon (and there's no guarantee that I'll like their 'support', of course). Indeed, if I run the game again, it will be casual games only - either games for less experienced players, or an open tabletop, or something like that. For any more 'serious' play, I'd be inclined to revert to 3e... or just not bother at all.

Additionally, the game is frequently quite poorly presented in places - although the rules for monster building are reasonably decent, they're also poorly explained. A good rewrite, without the need for any real changes, would make these significantly better. Likewise, the guidelines for creating encounters are poor - a huge step back from 4e's fairly robust system.

Tying into that, and despite my initial enthusiasm for the "Monster Manual", I've found that a lot of the 5e monsters are not terribly well designed. Part of this is the return of monsters with 'spellcasting' being presented with a long list of usable spells - something 4e very wisely did away with. But that could be fixed simply by better presentation; harder to fix is that the monsters just don't seem to be very good in the first place - too many seem to oscillate wildly between walkovers or overly deadly, which is possibly the worst of all worlds.

Ultimately, my conclusion is that 5e is better, but more limited than 4e - while 4e very much wasn't for me, I find myself really wanting to like 5e, but constantly stymied by its weaknesses.

(Which means my rating for the editions runs something like: 3.5e, 3e, BECMI, 2nd Ed, 5e, 4e. But that's maybe a little harsh - 5e is better designed than either BECMI or 2nd; it just doesn't 'grab' me in quite the same way.)

Right now, I don't foresee running any more campaigns in 5e. As noted, I'll probably use it for some more casual games, be they for less experienced players or open tabletop games. But I'm hard-pressed to see what they could do, practically speaking, to make me really happy with the edition, especially since some of what I'd like to see would essentially require a "5.5 edition" that I don't think anyone really wants to see.

Storm King's Thunder

I had high hopes for "Storm King's Thunder", which promised a lot with its "Shakespearean Giants" premise - the writers had basically combined the plot of "King Lear" with a Storm Giant's court, which could be interesting.

Unfortunately, it was not to be.

Had WotC described this book as a "North Faerun" setting book with associated adventure material, it would probably have done very well. The centre-piece of this book is a large chapter giving a very brief but surprisingly good overview of a significant region. Good stuff. Of course, if WotC had described this as a setting book, I also wouldn't have bought it, it being "not for me". Unfortunately, they described it as an adventure... and as an adventure it is poor.

The other problem I have with the description of this adventure is that it is advertised as a storyline for PCs of levels 1-10. However, the real adventure is actually for characters of levels 5-10, with the first full chapter providing some material to advance characters from 1st to 5th. But that section then manages to fall flat - not only does it not contain anywhere near enough adventure to justify all those levels, but it also doesn't give enough space to let that material breathe. Bluntly, WotC should have dropped that first section, started the storyline at 5th level, and used the freed up space to bulk up the rest of the material.

As for the 'real' adventure itself...

I should start by noting some positives: the concept of this adventure is very solid, with lots of characters, factions, and intrigues throughout. And there's a lot of material that's worth salvaging - the three villages, the five quests "against the giants", some of the Storm King's court, and of course the gazeteer in chapter three. Indeed, this book provides a huge array of ingredients that a good DM should be able to assemble into a truly great campaign.

But there are two big problems with that:

• That "good DM" should equally be able to come up with his own 'ingredients' pretty trivially. There's very little here that is particularly new or exciting, or put together in a particularly innovative way.
• Even that "good DM" would probably be better served by starting with a better adventure to disassemble and construct.

But probably my biggest disappointment in the campaign is this: throughout, there are large numbers of factions and characters described with their own secrets and agendas. There's plenty of scope for the PCs to work with various NPCs, or reveal various secrets, and thus to talk their way through the campaign rather than just kill everything. Indeed, the premise practically promises that. Except that it never really delivers - with only a few exceptions, there isn't really any way for the PCs to find out those secrets and agendas, and thus reveal the intrigues and betrayals.

Nowhere is this most obvious than in the chapter detailing the Storm King's court, where there's a lot to discover, and where the PCs are ideally placed to find things out - being "puny folk", they could easily go unnoticed and so hear conversations between the various plotters that would allow them to discover the evil plots that are afoot. But, as written, there is no opportunity to do that, because that chapter spends most of its pages on a detailed room-by-room description of the area (which is simultaneously too small to host a real court and also too sparsely populated - where are the servants?), with the various NPCs in fixed locations waiting for the PCs to bring them on-stage. The whole thing really needed more pages, and it also needed to be a much more dynamic environment - describe scenes rather than rooms.

I'm also rather dismayed about the end of the adventure, where once again WotC have pitted the PCs against a foe who is way too powerful for their level, meaning they have to be backed up by powerful NPCs who both serve to detract from the PCs' spotlight and also make the final encounter harder to run. If WotC want to use these top-tier BBEGs (and I applaud that) then they should also pitch the adventures to higher levels so the bad guys fit.

(Also, in a campaign strongly themed on giants, shouldn't the climactic encounter have been against a giant or giants?)

Ultimately, I found this book very disappointing. As I said, there's a lot here that's salvagable, and as a setting guide to the region it's pretty decent. But as an adventure, I'm afraid I can't recommend this storyline - it's the weakest of the 5e campaigns except "Tyranny of Dragons" (but without the excuse that that was developed in parallel with 5e itself), and it's weaker than Paizo's comparable "Giantslayer" path. A shame - I had such high hopes.

Closing an Open Tabletop

Well, my "1d6+1 Adventures" open tabletop game failed to get off the ground - everyone who expressed even the slightest interest had other commitments. I'm actually not particularly disappointed by that, in that it was something I felt I had to at least give a go, but if people aren't interested then that's fair enough. Maybe in a year or so I'll try again. Maybe.

In the meantime, I've decided to bring my "Eberron: Dust to Dust" campaign to a conclusion, and as a consequence have scheduled a final five sessions to take it up to the "baker's dozen" of thirteen. That seems to be a motif in Eberron - you have twelve of a thing that are mostly alike, and then one more of the thing that is somehow different. It will be good to bring that to a decent conclusion.

(That assumes, of course, that it gets that far. We're still finding it difficult to find a quorum for sessions. I've set myself an internal threshold: if we try three times to schedule a session and fail to play, I'm going to end it at that point.)

Endgame

It's funny how things work out: just as I regain some measure of enthusiasm for my "Dust to Dust" campaign, I find that my circumstances have changed and I need to bring it to a conclusion. On the plus side, I now have at least some idea of how I'm going to do that.

So, I have three plot threads needing some resolution:

1. What's Justice Abdiel up to in Greywall, and how can he be thwarted?
2. What is the fate of the Ebon Flame? Can it be used to damage Ashtakala, or is it a failed weapon?
3. What is the agenda of the mysterious Spell Weavers?

Technically, there is a fourth, which is about the truth or otherwise of the segment of the Draconic Prophecy that was found, but one of the good things about prophecy is that simply because they haven't happened yet doesn't mean they're false - anything might happen in the future.

In any event, I'm now projecting five sessions to go, taking the campaign to the thirteenth session (a baker's dozen, which is apparently one of the motifs of Eberron). Which should also take us to the early part of 2017, which feels like a good place to stop.

(Also, I should note that the "baker's dozen" motif in Eberron is actually twelve of a thing plus one more that is not quite the same. Which also sits quite nicely in with my plans to wrap up some of what remains...)

The PCs as Rock Stars Metaphor

I may have mentioned before that D&D, for all its pseudo-historical trappings is actually closer in sensibility to the modern world than anything else. That's probably an inevitable consequence of the game actually being played by people steeped in the modern world - no matter how much research one might do, none of us can ever really be a person living in the 14th century, after all!

Fortunately, the modern world provides an almost perfect metaphor for PCs: the rock star.

Under this model, the first level PC would be any kid who has formed a band and, crucially, has taken the step of actually performing for someone (other than family). They're reasonably common, but they're not that common - most people don't take that fateful step, but equally most people know someone who has at least given it a go. And the motivation is nice and obvious: it beats getting a job, right? (It's also a field that you can at least try to get into and maybe succeed based on raw talent rather than formal qualifications, which is a plus for young people, and especially young people with few other prospects.)

Of course, the majority even of those who do take the step of going out and performing never get anywhere - most bands crash and burn pretty damn quickly.

Higher level PCs are therefore those bands who do manage to keep going, with their level reflecting their relative level of success. At low levels (the Apprentice tier) they remain very much a local concern - people might know about them, but they're hardly going to be stopped in the street. And while there are jobs out there, most of the time they're going to have to find their own work. By and large, low-level PCs really have to make their own opportunities.

Once you get to the Heroic tier, things get a bit easier. Having gotten a few miles on the clock, the PCs are now known and established as adventurers. Suddenly, they have a fame that extends beyond just the few hundred people who happened to be at a gig. People come to them with offers of bigger and better work, and they have a platform to move forward. (And, in the music industry, finding equivalents is easy: just look for any one-hit wonder of the past, and you have a mid-level adventurer. Bearing in mind, of course, that any modern artist who currently has one hit may be on his way up through the mid levels, or might be a one-hit wonder of the future...)

The next step up, then, is the Paragon tier, and those bands that have global fame, and a number of hits to their name, but who don't warrant legendary status. Most of the people who are big in the charts now would fall into this category. (Because the 'legends' tend not to be active much of the time, so tend not to be in the charts, while the music industry has degenerated to the point where it's very difficult to get anywhere unless you're already big.)

And then, finally, there is the Epic tier, which is equivalent to the legends who everyone has heard of - the bands who appear every few years for a massive concert that sells out in seconds, who get dragged out for Olympic closing ceremonies, or similar: Elvis, Queen, the Beatles, the Stones...

There's one other interesting aspect to this metaphor, and it's best represented by "The X-Factor" and its kin: the notion of a patron who for his own reasons wants to manufacture a group of adventurers by pulling together talented people, providing them with the very best equipment and facilities, and basically trying to bypass the whole Apprentice tier altogether (and the Heroic tier, too, if that can be done). Which would basically give us the adventuring equivalent of One Direction. There's got to be some sort of adventure in there somewhere...

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.

Hypothetically...

There's a new "Star Trek" RPG coming out. I'm probably going to skip it, for various reasons, not least that I'm kinda hoping to play, rather than run. However, hypothetically speaking, if I were to run a "Star Trek" campaign, what would I do?

Era of Play

I'd set the campaign in the era of the Original Series movies. In fact, to be more specific, I'd set it in 2295 - two years after the first section of "Generations", and so two years after the end of that movies series.

The Ship and the Crew

The reason for that specific year is that it would allow me to set the campaign aboard the Enterprise-B without also being laden down with lots of fixed lore to work around - that ship only has two (or three) named crew-members, any of whom could have been re-assigned in the meantime, but it also has the famous name.

The players would be free to create pretty much any suitable character for the campaign. In the event that they chose to play the captain or helmsman, then the characters from "Generations" would be re-assigned; if not, those characters would remain as NPCs. (In general, my preference for a ST-style game would indeed be for the captain to be an NPC, with the bulk of his/her decisions made by the consensus of the players, thus allowing the players to drive the campaign without having a pesky chain of command to worry about.)

Campaign Structure

The campaign would see the Enterprise out in deep space on another Five Year Mission, at least initially. In keeping with the series, it would be mostly episodic, maybe with some arcs being added to the campaign later. (Indeed, there's an argument for using the game as another "open tabletop", with many players each bringing their own crew-member to the table, and with the selection of players determining which characters are in focus in the session.)

Perhaps importantly, because the ship will be "out there", they'll be in a position where (1) they can't rely on the might of the Federation for backup but will have to deal with problems themselves, but also (2) they won't necessarily be constrained by the Federation's rules all the time - sure, there's the Prime Directive, but if they break it, who's to know?

Other Stuff

Star Trek has always been fairly optimistic, and when it has gone wrong that has tended to be when it has gone too dark. Even when facing off against world-ending threats, the feeling has tended to be quite upbeat. Heck, even "Voyager", where the crew faced the prospect of living their entire lives on the ship, remained optimistic. So I'd certainly intend to maintain that feeling in the campaign.

Equally, though, Star Trek has tended to draw quite heavily from the zeitgeist - in particular, an awful lot of the Federation/Klingon interaction in TOS was a parallel for the Cold War. Of course, that tension largely came to an end in "The Undiscovered Country". Consequently, I'd be inclined to draw from the spirit of our times, where the main threats tend to be smaller-scale and also not really amenable to being solved with big guns. Plus, I'd be inclined to have the Federation (and the crew of the Enterprise) face some measure of existentialist angst - they're in the most advanced ship in the fleet, a heavily-armed warship... and now the threat that the ship was designed to counter has been largely removed. They find themselves on a scientific and exploration mission that the Excelsior-class isn't really designed for. So, what are they for?

Oh, and of course the powers-that-be will have insisted on installing a plaque in deflector control, which has turned out to be a spectacular mis-step. Especially since everyone wears red shirts in the movie universe...

Lessons for My Younger Self

Earlier this week, I was asked what I would advise my younger self to do differently, if I had the chance to go back and make changes. Of course, the problem with this is the Butterfly Effect - change one thing, and everything else changes around it, and you can't know what would result.

But, as a thought experiment, and in the field of RPGs only...

#1: Books

Right, you see all these books? These are the wrong books - not only will they not improve your game, they'll actually make it worse. What's even worse, you won't recognise that - you'll think they're making it better for a long, long time. And the effect is that they'll warp your thinking about what makes for a good or a bad game.

Instead, you might want to consider some of these books instead: one setting (not little bits of six), some few adventures from across the level range, and maybe those lovely "Green Cover" historical books. Oh, and get a subscription to Dungeon magazine and read it cover to cover... even if you never run even a single adventure from the magazine.

(And while we're at it, don't buy lots of little bits of several different games, either. If you're going to run it, fine, and if you're going to play in a campaign buy the Core Rulebook(s). But if you don't have immediate plans to do one or the other, let it pass you by.)

#2: About the Rules

While I'm at it, read the damn rules of the game you're playing, and actually use those rules in play. Seriously, kid, you got away with soooo much crap that it's not funny. But when you get to university, you're going to have your eyes opened.

Besides, the game is better if people don't have to play variants on the same three character types because none of the others can actually use their powers because you don't know how they work.

#3: Wasted Time

Every time you've ever sat down to write your own game system, or some heavily-modified version of an existing system, you've been wasting your time. Every. Time. (Yes, including the work I did on "Nutshell" on this blog.) Either you get bogged down in the work, lose interest, and abandon the project or, in the one case you actually finished it, you promptly abandoned it and went back to the 'real thing'. Just stop.

Likewise, you don't need a dozen settings all doing much the same thing. There actually is a place for having multiple settings - but only if they're significantly distinct. There's a place for Ravenloft and Dark Sun and Spelljammer and Planescape, but Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance are too similar for all to be worthwhile. (NB: those weren't my settings, but if I named those then the names wouldn't mean anything to anyone who reads this!)

What you should be spending time on is adventures, and characters, and storylines. Those serve the dual purpose of being things you'll probably actually use and also making you better at writing adventures, characters, and stories.

#4: Reading Material

You're going to hate me for saying this, but your English teacher is right - the fantasy books you're reading are crap. It's not even that they're fantasy that's the problem. There's some good fantasy out there; it's just that you've somehow missed all of those and picked out some of the worst of the worst.

For fantasy, go read some David Gemmell, the first few Lankhmar books by Frizt Lieber (but only the first few!), RE Howard's Conan novels, and the first few Elric stories (again, only the first few). Plus, you can stick with the Terry Pratchett and Tolkien books - those are good stuff. (But when you're in Smiths in Glasgow and there's a signing by Terry Pratchett, go and buy the new book and get it signed. You damn fool.)

Oh, yes, and skip "Wheel of Time" completely... and don't bother with "A Song of Ice and Fire" either - thanks to some interminable waits, you'll be better off just watching the TV series.

But you really should branch out beyond fantasy. Get and read some good horror, some better sci-fi... and you'll want to be tackling other genres too. Something to watch out for, though: you'll want to start small, because trying to dive straight to a thousand-page novel is a real quick way to avoid the classics for a decade or more.

#5: Got That? Good. Now...

Forget everything I've just told you. Because here's the thing: there's no one true way to have fun. And just as what seemed good at twelve no longer seems appropriate at forty, so too does the advice of forty-year-old me have little bearing on what twelve-year-old me should do. We're so separated in time as to be, essentially, completely different people.

Besides, it's not like I won't have time to fix some of the mistakes you'll make. When I'm not busy making plenty of mistakes of my own...

Picking Up the Pieces

In the last session, I had a strong impression that we were heading for a TPK - the party had got themselves in way over their heads, and it strongly looked like they were on their way out.

Instead, we suffered what may be the only thing that's worse: two PCs died but the rest escaped to fight another day. This fell just short of my "let's call it a day" threshold, while leaving two players without a PC with the rest of the group in a location where bringing a new guy in would be difficult.

Fortunately, there's a way around this: we're going to advance time a little from the end of the last session to the start of this one, gloss over the exact details of the party's flight through Ashtakala, and have them return to Sharn ready to set out again.

My projected Four Acts for tonight's game, then...

1. The party returns to Sharn. Not everything is well at the station - the Spider-Eye Goblins have made an incursion. The PCs are introduced to their new allies.
2. The party investigate the "Ebon Flame", the curse that surrounds it, and may get some help from an unexpected quarter...
3. A new course is plotted. But an old enemy makes a reappearance (and ties off an obselete plot thread).
4. The party arrives in... Greywall? Fairhaven?

Of course, it's entirely like that things won't go quite according to plan...

In Which I Have Psychic Powers

My game for tomorrow night has been cancelled again, due to the lack of a quorum. I kind of had an inkling that that might happen - I just had a feeling.

I'm actually not sure that's the worst thing. During my prep work for the game last night I was finding it hard coming up with any sort of a coherent structure, and ended up with something that was basically headed to a TPK. Which may well be the thing that happens, but probably shouldn't be the plan. So having a couple more weeks to think this through is probably a good thing.

I'm also now leaning increasingly strongly towards bringing this campaign to an end sooner rather than later. I think I now have the core of a story arc that will allow me to bring it to a sensible resolution and thus put it aside. And given how badly I've screwed up the campaign as a whole, that's probably about as satisfactory as I'm likely to get. But we'll see - maybe the campaign will suddenly spin off in another new direction, or maybe we'll get that TPK after all...

The Next Campaign (I'll Probably Never Run)

A couple of weeks ago I was grabbed by an idea that's now busily fizzing away, and may make up the basis of my next campaign, if indeed there is such a thing. (That said, that's looking increasingly unlikely. My interest in D&D has been waning fairly dramatically for some time, and with the potential house move in the offing my involvement may be coming to an end. At the very least, it's likely to be a while, by which time I may favour something else.)

Anyway, the premise of the campaign can be described as follows: One part "The Night Manager", one part "Nineteen Eighty-Four", and one part "The Demolished Man", all set in the continent of Sarlona on Eberron. The PCs are agents of the rebellion against the repressive thought-police state of that continent. Fairly grim, very paranoid, with lots of sneaking around and skullduggery.

The biggest problem with the concept as it stands is that it depends pretty heavily on psionics, which 5e doesn't currently support (and the ideas WotC have floated for psionics in this edition seem to take it in a very different direction). That means the campaign would probably have to be 3e-based, and I'm not entirely keen on stepping back into that morass...

But it's a cool concept, no?

Curse of Strahd

I have a theory that when doing a cover version, reboot, remake, or retelling, it's best to choose something that had good potential but which was significantly flawed in the implementation. If you remake a classic, you have the problem that even if you do everything right, you'll almost certainly end up with something that is as good, but without the originality.

"I6: Ravenloft" is a classic D&D adventure. It is one of, if not the, greatest D&D adventures of all time. Heck, it's one of the best RPG adventures of all time. So the team at WotC were really up against it when trying to remake this. (On the other hand, they practically had to - Ravenloft is one of very few D&D adventures to exist in some form in all the 'main' editions, assuming you count the boardgame as the 4e version. So there's tradition to consider...)

The result is a fine, fine adventure. But it's just not as good as the original, on two counts. The first is simply lack of originality - Ravenloft already had a lot of Dracula about it, and this version cleaves much closer to the original than some of the ones in other editions. That may not be a bad thing for people who haven't seen the original, but for those of us who have...

The second weakness (for me) was one of sheer length. The original module is a densely-packed 32 pages. This version is a slightly less dense 256 pages. Of this, the biggest chapter is Castle Ravenloft itself, which is very close to the contents of the original module. That leaves a hundred pages of extra material that, while good, feels significantly bloated. Quite a bit of it feels like it exists to pad things out and, in particular, to let the PCs build up levels before they start the 'real' adventure. (Of course, part of that is inherent in using a level-based game to tell a story like this. 3rd level PCs can't stand against the BBEG, so there's a need to get them to a point where they can. But, honestly, I think I'd be inclined just to start them a bit higher in level and cut the padding.)

Don't get me wrong - there's an awful lot of good material here. But there's too much that feels extraneous. (Though, ironically, in the past I've complained about 4e adventures having no extra material, leaving only the critical path and thus being a railroad. Hopefully, there's a happy medium there somewhere.)

All in all, I'll recommend this one quite highly - especially to anyone who hasn't experienced the original. In my opinion it's the second-best 5e storyline to date, behind only "Out of the Abyss" (and it doesn't have the big weaknesses of that storyline's climax, which is good). It's just not as good as the original. On the other hand, I'm very much looking forward to WotC's next effort, because the trend definitely seems to be upwards.

One last thing: the binding on my copy has already started to weaken after only a single read-through and no at-table use at all. That's really very poor.

The 5e Cheat Sheet

Back in the mists of time, when I was running 3e for my previous group, I used to maintain a "cheat sheet" for each PC containing key bits of data - their Listen and Spot modifiers, three AC values (normal, flat-footed, touch), the running total of their hit points, and their current Initiative score.

I've actually stopped tracking that information, but I'm becoming increasingly inclined to start doing so again for 5e. My motive for this is actually pretty simple: every time one of my PCs casts a spell, I inevitably have to ask the save DC, which is a pain.

It's fair to say that 5e is slightly different from 3e in a number of ways, and so the "cheat sheet" will likewise need to change. And so, I'm considering the following items: Passive Perception, AC, Spell Save DC, Hit Points, and Death Saves. I'm now having the party roll initiative when combat starts and using a much more free-form round structure than previously, and so there's little point in tracking initiative the same way.

There may be a few more items. I'll update this post if I think of them.

Campaign Theme

When designing a new campaign, I have traditionally come to it with questions about the type of story I want to tell, or some notion of the characters involed, or something of that sort. "The Eberron Code" started with a core mystery (pretty much lifted from "The Da Vinci Code", though it went in a different direction from there); "Imperial Fist" started with the notion that the PCs would all be Imperial agents tasked with hunting down Jedi.

However, I've recently been considering adding another dimension to campaign building, which is the idea of adding a theme to the campaign as well as a concept. The idea here would be that the campaign would pose a question at the outset (or possibly start with a core statement of values, or philosophical stance, or whatever), and then all the major elements in the campaign would be riffed off of that theme.

For example, Spider-Man's theme can be best encapsulated with the saying "with great power comes great responsibility", and most of his enemies then reflect that as they use various forms of great power mostly without that responsibility. (And then, just to twist things even more, sometimes you get sympathetic villains who do try to act with responsibility, or allies who shirk that responsibility.)

Of course, one of the consequences of setting up a campaign theme is that it would extend to the PCs also - when creating a character, a player would be challenged to answer the question "how does this character fit in with the theme?" (and, of course, things like Inspiration should also be tied into the theme - in addition to gaining it for acting according to Ideals, Bonds, etc, the player should gain it for acting in keeping with the campaign theme).

At the moment, it's all a bit nebulous, and is robbed somewhat of relevance by the fact that I'm not planning another campaign any time soon. But I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

So What Now?

Last night the PCs managed to chase down one of the villains of my campaign, who I'd planned to use to introduce a twist - she was a fairly disgruntled enemy agent who they could potentially turn to their side, but who they could certainly use to provide some very significant information to move the plot forward.

Alas, that didn't quite go according to plan - the interrogation ended in a shocking moment of violence and a body on the ground, inconveniently while only about half the information had been revealed.

But, almost miraculously, there was a get-out clause - in order to protect against telepathy, I'd given the villain a brooch of mind shielding (like the ring, but in brooch form). On reading the description of the item, it turned out that that item has a quirk where if the wearer dies then her personality is stored in the brooch, and can communicate with the new wearer. Captain Exposition lives!

But at the end of the session, the PCs decided to pack up and leave Sharn for the Demon Wastes, which had been planned as the location for the climax of the whole campaign. I'd certainly intended for them to go there eventually... just not really while they were still fourth level!

So I'm at a bit of a loss as to what should happen next. I have a couple of inklings... but there's also the fear that a nasty TPK is just around the corner...

Rumour Has It

Reading the latest Pathfinder adventure has reminded me of something I meant to talk about:

Very often in published adventures, and especially in Pathfinder ones, there is a provided list of rumours. Usually, some of these are rumours that turn out to be true while others are red herrings that actually turn out to be false. (Though the PCs may well never confirm the falsehood of the latter sort, of course.) So far, so good.

But where I think these adventures go wrong is in the means of giving the PCs access to these rumours: generally, the adventure says that if the PCs ask around then they can roll Gather Information (or equivalent) and if successful they are rewarded with a random rumour. Which may, of course be false - some reward that!

I'm inclined to think that there are at least four ways this can be improved. In order, from best to worst:

1. If one of the PCs is trained in Gather Information (or proficient in the D&D 5e equivalent, or whatever), just give that PC the entire rumour table. No roll, and it's assumed they're automatically doing the "ask around" bit as a background task... but there's no guarantee that the rumours are true.
2. If the PCs ask around, just give them the entire rumour table. No roll, but no guarantee that the rumours are true either.
3. If the PCs ask around, select (randomly or otherwise) a rumour for them. But in this case, all rumours should be true.
4. If the PCs ask around, have them roll Gather Information, and if successful give them the entire rumour table. But in this case, all rumours should be true.

The point here is that the rumours help flesh out the adventure - in general, the DM should want to have the PCs have access to them. That being the case, you want the barrier for entry to be as low as possible. Hence the above.

(Of course, this also ties into my view that characters trained in the various 'knowledge' skills should equally be given some sort of "Five Things You Know..." regarding the current adventure. This serves the dual roles of adding depth and flavour to the adventure and also rewarding clever play, as players may then use that information to their advantage.)

Evil PCs: The Job Interview

I've been giving a little thought to the question of evil PCs recently. Granted, I no longer use alignment, which means such PCs wouldn't get the official label, but the concept still applies.

Broadly speaking, when creating an evil PC I think there are two important questions to answer:

• What is it that makes this PC evil?
• Why should the other PCs continue to work with this guy?

(Of course, the second question is something that can be asked of any PC, and especially for any 'jerk' PC, not just outright evil ones. But that makes it no less valid to ask it of the evil PCs!)

In particular, it's worth considering whether this PC will be a lone evil PC in a non-evil group, or if he'll be part of an evil party. And, in the latter case, it's worth asking whether this PC has his own agenda, or if the group as a whole has a common goal - the latter case makes answering the second question easier, while the first may make for a more interesting party dynamic. ('Interesting' in the sense of 'explosive', that is!)

And it's probably worth noting that "he's really good at killing things" probably isn't a good enough answer to the second question. After all, that would be equally true of a PC who was exactly the same except for being non-evil. So you'll need something else - maybe he's related to another PC, or maybe the group's employer wants him along, or maybe the others simply don't know about his generally evil ways. It doesn't necessarily matter what the answer is, only that there is an answer.

Of course, there's also the common issue of players choosing an evil PC because they just want to cause trouble in the game. But I've talked about that previously, and it boils down to an obvious rule: don't be that guy. So that's enough about that, I think!