A DMing Principle

I was having a discussion earlier about PC race, and I noted that my preference is for players to 'default' to human characters but that my players have a very different view and will basically never choose a human PC. And then I found myself imagining that I'd been asked the question of what happens if these impulses come into conflict.

My answer is actually simple on this one: the player gets their way.

The principle that I work to is that the PC is basically the only thing that the player gets to control. And the PCs are the only thing in the game that the DM does not get to control - the DM gets to choose literally everything else.

And so, my principle is that when it comes to what players do with their character, the DM's position is "hands off!"

(I'll also note that while I may come here, or other places online, to complain about this and other things, I don't do so at the table. When I say this is the players' choice, I really do mean that - there's no passive agressive grumping that they didn't do what I wanted.)

I may well have posted on this topic before. But I couldn't find it. So if it's a repeat... oh well.

A Next Campaign

"Isles of Dread" isn't going terribly well - after two sessions we hit a major scheduling issue and haven't managed to get together to more than a month; the second session ended in a near-TPK; and we're in a position where our quorum is more or less the entire group, which isn't a place where I'd like to be. Hopefully tomorrow we can make a bit of a fresh start; if not, we'll postpone until the new year and then give it one more go.

And the upshot of that is that I'm more certain than ever that this will be my final campaign with this group, and with no other group on the horizon and no time to form a new one, my options are limited.

And yet, and yet...

I find myself liking the adventure/campaign format I hit on for "Isles of Dread", I enjoyed the process of putting it together, and I'm very much drawn to that Eberron/Spelljammer campaign I've been noodling around for a while. The vandalism of Spelljammer in the new boxed set hasn't dampened my interest in the setting much - I'll just need to do my own version.

So... once I've completed the writing of "Isles of Dread", maybe I'll start writing up that Eberron/Spelljammer campaign in the same sort of vein, aiming for a nice mid-level mini-campaign assuming much the same group - and then keep it ready should I ever get the chance.

And if I don't, hopefully the writing of it will be of interest enough.

Dungeon Delver's Guide

I had been intending to skip the Kickstarter for this one - since I'm unlikely ever to actually play Level Up, I don't really need to be buying in to supplements. But the previews persuaded me otherwise, and I'm glad that they did! "Dungeon Delver's Guide" is an outstanding book, containing content of value not just with Level Up, or even 5e, but for D&D and D&D-like games in general.

The book is split into three sections: a moderately large section on PC options (that is, frankly, largely forgettable), a moderately large section on DM tools (that is also, frankly, largely forgettable), and a huge middle section on dungeons - and it is this that holds all the value in the book.

The centrepiece of the book is a method for building dungeons (and, I'd imagine, dungeon-like settings) termed NODES - each location might have a Novelty, Obstacle, Discovery, Escalation, or Set Piece. It's a really strong, flexible way to construct these things, and exactly the sort of thing that should be going in to the next DMG in 2024.

The book also has several example dungeons, lots of random tables of varying utility, and other bits and pieces. But, basically, it's that NODES system and the surrounding material that makes the book - that's where the value lies, and it is why I recommend it unreservedly.

And now I'm hoping they'll do two more: one each for wilderness and urban adventures.

The Tyranny of Important Choices

It didn't seem so at the time, but one of the smartest decisions the D&D designers made recently was to remove ASIs from character race and instead make them free-floating. (They really should complete the job and just build them into ability score generation more generally, or indeed just drop them, but that's another rant.) The net effect of this was to make race a largely unimportant decision, which seems counter-productive, but was actually very wise.

The thing is, in D&D the choice of class is, by an order of magnitude, the most important decision that will be made for the character. (If multiclassing is used, the choice of classes has that distinction, but that's pretty much hair-splitting.) What that means is that traditionally players will choose their class first, and then build everything else to fit that choice - and since the ASIs were by far the most valuable part of race design, that meant choosing the race for the best ASIs for the class. You'd see lots of elven rogues, but no orcish wizards.

By removing the ASIs from class, they made the choice of race very much a "free hit" - players were suddenly free to choose any race that they felt was interesting, without having to worry that the choice would compromise the effectiveness of their character.

(And that, incidentally, is why the decision to move the ASIs to backgrounds, and indeed to tie backgrounds to feats, is so terrible - the choice of background was until recently another "free hit" because the package of stuff was relatively trivial. But by tying it to two important things, they've now made the choice extremely important. Or, again, they would have had they not also made backgrounds entirely customisable, and thus binned any and all value they have.)

The lesson here is to be careful about making decisions 'important', because doing so has a perverse effect of reducing variety - players will make the most important decision first, and then make all the other important decisions to reinforce that.