The Strand of Prayer Beads is one of the best magic items out there. Why? Because it provides a +4 caster level bonus for 10 minutes. Very few items provide this kind of bonus. Another aspect of this item is that is does not take a magic item slot so you can have and use multiple strands. Combine this item with one of the best offensive divine spells, Holy Word and what do you get?
Any opponent with fewer hit dice than your level is instantly defeated with no saving throw (aka paralyzed at least a minute). Any opponent that isn't at least 4 levels higher then you is blinded and this typically means they are severely limited. Sure, they get spell resistence, but you have that extra +4 to overcome it.
It seems the primary reason people don't use Holy Word is that it will hit their own party members that aren't good aligned. Simple solution: screw em. Eventually they will convert.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Designing a Campaign World
One aspect of the gaming hobby is world creation. This actually stems from a literary tradition started by authors like Tolkien. Tolkien created a rich fantasy world in which to set his story. Other authors have followed suit and you will now rarely find a fantasy story that isn't set in an alternate fantasy world.
The reason for this is because the world can be a story element in itself. In fact the setting can provide a great deal of the story as well as background color.
Dave Arneson was one of the gaming pioneers who took this world building element and moved it into gaming with the development of Blackmoor. Greyhawk and Mystara followed and it became commonplace for game masters to have a fantasy setting to set their games in.
Now a setting could be something as simple as some names for coins, months, towns, kingdoms, and gods or it could be as complex as a long history. One very rich game setting is Battletech. They published several books that were essentially just histories of the various empires. I remember reading these and being incredibly impressed by the depth of the history.
But is it useful to have this depth? Is it really that useful to use a different set of names for coins and gods? I think the question becomes, do these changes in setting actually impact your game? Some obviously do. They are important plot elements in the game. For example, one game might have no elves and forbidden magic that has dire consequences when used. This kind of thing can have a big impact on the story. So big that when you consider a campaign or adventure, you should work those changes in. Gaming is, in part, tellling a story, and the setting can have a major impact, but the setting exists for this impact. That is a key point, the setting exists to serve the story. In many ways games have lost this and game companies have encouraged this separation by pushing defined campaign worlds. Now I am not against the published settings that often have a depth and breadth that a setting made by a single hobbyist can't really compare to. These settings often offer a lot of story ideas, but it helps to hide that fact the the usefulness of a setting is primarily in helping to tell a story.
One thing I want to say about campaign worlds is that little details can also be fun in a game. I remeber during a trip to China I learned about a practice of having a stew that was constantly going with water and new ingredients added, but the pot was never emptied and cleaned out. I adapted this to a game where dwarves did this (instead of Chinese muslims) and it became a whole thing in the game. The dwarf character's family offered them the ancient soup. Later on, when their house was burning they all wanted to save their ancestral soup. Anyway, little campaign world details can be very fun even though they have fairly minor story impact.
Now that I have had a little rant about how the campaign world has to fulfill it's function of adding to the story, I want to take it all back. I think world design can be fun and interesting in and of itself. For example, all those battletech books detailing history would have very little impact on any game, but I thought they were cool. I have also had fun building and detailing campaign worlds. So world design can almost be a separate hobby, but if a world is made to support a game you should remember that the world was made to support the game and details about the world the don't impact the game aren't particularly useful.
The reason for this is because the world can be a story element in itself. In fact the setting can provide a great deal of the story as well as background color.
Dave Arneson was one of the gaming pioneers who took this world building element and moved it into gaming with the development of Blackmoor. Greyhawk and Mystara followed and it became commonplace for game masters to have a fantasy setting to set their games in.
Now a setting could be something as simple as some names for coins, months, towns, kingdoms, and gods or it could be as complex as a long history. One very rich game setting is Battletech. They published several books that were essentially just histories of the various empires. I remember reading these and being incredibly impressed by the depth of the history.
But is it useful to have this depth? Is it really that useful to use a different set of names for coins and gods? I think the question becomes, do these changes in setting actually impact your game? Some obviously do. They are important plot elements in the game. For example, one game might have no elves and forbidden magic that has dire consequences when used. This kind of thing can have a big impact on the story. So big that when you consider a campaign or adventure, you should work those changes in. Gaming is, in part, tellling a story, and the setting can have a major impact, but the setting exists for this impact. That is a key point, the setting exists to serve the story. In many ways games have lost this and game companies have encouraged this separation by pushing defined campaign worlds. Now I am not against the published settings that often have a depth and breadth that a setting made by a single hobbyist can't really compare to. These settings often offer a lot of story ideas, but it helps to hide that fact the the usefulness of a setting is primarily in helping to tell a story.
One thing I want to say about campaign worlds is that little details can also be fun in a game. I remeber during a trip to China I learned about a practice of having a stew that was constantly going with water and new ingredients added, but the pot was never emptied and cleaned out. I adapted this to a game where dwarves did this (instead of Chinese muslims) and it became a whole thing in the game. The dwarf character's family offered them the ancient soup. Later on, when their house was burning they all wanted to save their ancestral soup. Anyway, little campaign world details can be very fun even though they have fairly minor story impact.
Now that I have had a little rant about how the campaign world has to fulfill it's function of adding to the story, I want to take it all back. I think world design can be fun and interesting in and of itself. For example, all those battletech books detailing history would have very little impact on any game, but I thought they were cool. I have also had fun building and detailing campaign worlds. So world design can almost be a separate hobby, but if a world is made to support a game you should remember that the world was made to support the game and details about the world the don't impact the game aren't particularly useful.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Four Aspects to the Game
There are essentially four aspects to role-playing games. I will go over them briefly.
1) Wargaming. This is the act of creating a stimulated combat that obeys a specific set of rules. It is a tactical exercise and also involves mastering the rule set. In games it can range from rock-paper-scissors to chess to 3.5 edition D&D. For this purpose the ruleset is very important because you want this tactial game to be relatively fast paced, balanced, but at the same time to have a rich tactical depth. One thing I have noted about this aspect of the game is that it is important for the players to understand and be interested in the rules, otherwise this aspect of the game fails.
2) Interactive Storytelling. Most games have a central story behind them. While some are very free form with no structure, most center around a plot with the players playing the role of the main characters. Most players will try to fill the role of the main characters, but there are some who prefer to go their own way instead of the expected path and there are a few who delight in trying to disrupt any planned story. Games can range in terms of story structure. Some have a specific plot and the players have a fairly narrow course. Other games have less of a main plot and are more focussed on a series of character with their own motivations. It is important for the game master and the players to be on the same track when it comes to how free form their story will be.
3) Role Playing. By this I mean actual role playing, the act of pretending to be someone else. This can be as simple of having an idea of who your character is and having them act and see the world as you would think they would or it can be more intense with acting, speaking in character, and so on. This process is often fairly subtle and is largely controlled by the player. You can play most role-playing games without this element at all, but you can also play any with it.
4) Character Building. It may seem weird, but a major part of many games is making your character more powerful. Acquiring new powers and items in order to meet previously unbeatable challenges and to laugh in the face of old challenges is a part of the game. There are some games that don't do this very well. One of the successes of D&D has been that despite a poor rule set that it allowed for this character building quite well. This is also one of the key principles behind the compelling nature of many massively multiplayer games.
1) Wargaming. This is the act of creating a stimulated combat that obeys a specific set of rules. It is a tactical exercise and also involves mastering the rule set. In games it can range from rock-paper-scissors to chess to 3.5 edition D&D. For this purpose the ruleset is very important because you want this tactial game to be relatively fast paced, balanced, but at the same time to have a rich tactical depth. One thing I have noted about this aspect of the game is that it is important for the players to understand and be interested in the rules, otherwise this aspect of the game fails.
2) Interactive Storytelling. Most games have a central story behind them. While some are very free form with no structure, most center around a plot with the players playing the role of the main characters. Most players will try to fill the role of the main characters, but there are some who prefer to go their own way instead of the expected path and there are a few who delight in trying to disrupt any planned story. Games can range in terms of story structure. Some have a specific plot and the players have a fairly narrow course. Other games have less of a main plot and are more focussed on a series of character with their own motivations. It is important for the game master and the players to be on the same track when it comes to how free form their story will be.
3) Role Playing. By this I mean actual role playing, the act of pretending to be someone else. This can be as simple of having an idea of who your character is and having them act and see the world as you would think they would or it can be more intense with acting, speaking in character, and so on. This process is often fairly subtle and is largely controlled by the player. You can play most role-playing games without this element at all, but you can also play any with it.
4) Character Building. It may seem weird, but a major part of many games is making your character more powerful. Acquiring new powers and items in order to meet previously unbeatable challenges and to laugh in the face of old challenges is a part of the game. There are some games that don't do this very well. One of the successes of D&D has been that despite a poor rule set that it allowed for this character building quite well. This is also one of the key principles behind the compelling nature of many massively multiplayer games.
Following up a little bit on my last post. One of my players also pointed out a major imbalances in third edition. He found that any battle that focussed around fighting a single entity almost always was easy. This seemed especially true at later levels. Imagine a high level battle. Healing is so powerful that a major bad guy has to dish out enough damage to kill a player every round. If his damage is below that a healer character can easily negate his damage potential because healing is so strong.
One of the tactics is the final battle was for the cleirc to wait invisibily after having used a feat that would allow him to heal from a distance instead of touch. He simply readied his heal action to go off when anyone was badly injured. The big bad guy could have gone after him, but any round lost was a major loss because the players would get an action each while the bad guy got a single precious action.
This is one aspect they tried to fix in 4th by introducing 'elites' and 'solos' as well as focussing encounters as several units against several units.
One of the tactics is the final battle was for the cleirc to wait invisibily after having used a feat that would allow him to heal from a distance instead of touch. He simply readied his heal action to go off when anyone was badly injured. The big bad guy could have gone after him, but any round lost was a major loss because the players would get an action each while the bad guy got a single precious action.
This is one aspect they tried to fix in 4th by introducing 'elites' and 'solos' as well as focussing encounters as several units against several units.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Swing
So I have closed the final chapter on my Shackled City campaign. It was fun at times, but I often became very frustrated with the game system. The biggest thing is the swinginess of combat. One thing I noticed in 4th was that there were no make or break spells. There weren't any pre combat buffs to stack. And there wasn't a ton of resource management like a huge number of spells.
Well all that makes a lot more sense after running a 3.5 game to 20th level (technically 18th level).
It is very hard to balance an encounter when there are so many game-changing spells. For example, in my campaign the final battle involved a demon prince. His first action was to use a spell, Blasphemy, that instantly killed all the players except one. The players had been given plenty of time to buff so they actually had a spell on that basically soaked up one death (Fortunate Fate froma splatbook). So they lived. His second casting of the spell was neutralized by silence on a friendly melee fighter and a caster readied to silence whenever he went outside the silence. Then melee went to town on him with Haste and Brilliant Aura and copious amounts of two-handed power attack.
It points out several things. Individual spells can swing combat a lot. Wihout the specific preparation they had Blasphemy would have caused a total party wipe. As it stood they survived it without any issues. Save or die spells in many cases can massively swing the game. One of the jokes of the campaign was that Glitterdust was the ultimate spell. It ignores spell resistence and you always fail one a 1. Many a 1 was rolled against Glitterdust and it turned dangerous foes into essentially helpless targets.
Another major swing factor is the remaining resources of the characters. Characters tend to not know how dangerous their next battle will be so they can decide to push on or not. A high level party with full resources is MUCH more powerful than one at 25% or 50% resources. Also, if you give a party several rounds to prepare, stacked buffs make a huge difference.
All these factors tend to collide at high levels. It makes it very difficult to make balanced encounters. I found encounters were often too diffcult or too easy. And this is using published materials. Mostly they were too easy.
So I feel like I have a lot more insight in to why they made the decisions they made with 4th edition, and although it looks like a stripped down game I realize that the things they stripped out made it un-balanced and difficult to play.
Well all that makes a lot more sense after running a 3.5 game to 20th level (technically 18th level).
It is very hard to balance an encounter when there are so many game-changing spells. For example, in my campaign the final battle involved a demon prince. His first action was to use a spell, Blasphemy, that instantly killed all the players except one. The players had been given plenty of time to buff so they actually had a spell on that basically soaked up one death (Fortunate Fate froma splatbook). So they lived. His second casting of the spell was neutralized by silence on a friendly melee fighter and a caster readied to silence whenever he went outside the silence. Then melee went to town on him with Haste and Brilliant Aura and copious amounts of two-handed power attack.
It points out several things. Individual spells can swing combat a lot. Wihout the specific preparation they had Blasphemy would have caused a total party wipe. As it stood they survived it without any issues. Save or die spells in many cases can massively swing the game. One of the jokes of the campaign was that Glitterdust was the ultimate spell. It ignores spell resistence and you always fail one a 1. Many a 1 was rolled against Glitterdust and it turned dangerous foes into essentially helpless targets.
Another major swing factor is the remaining resources of the characters. Characters tend to not know how dangerous their next battle will be so they can decide to push on or not. A high level party with full resources is MUCH more powerful than one at 25% or 50% resources. Also, if you give a party several rounds to prepare, stacked buffs make a huge difference.
All these factors tend to collide at high levels. It makes it very difficult to make balanced encounters. I found encounters were often too diffcult or too easy. And this is using published materials. Mostly they were too easy.
So I feel like I have a lot more insight in to why they made the decisions they made with 4th edition, and although it looks like a stripped down game I realize that the things they stripped out made it un-balanced and difficult to play.
Monday, March 2, 2009
3rd edition tricks: Memorizing spells
So one aspect of spell memorization that is rarely used is the fact that you don't actually need to fill all your slots at the beginning of the day. After a rest (or after a specific prayer time) you generally memorize your spells and pick a specific spell for each spell slot. But you don't have to. At any time, you can spend 15 minutes and memorize a spell for an unused slot. This applies to both Arcane and Divine spell casters.
So how is this useful? An empty slot is useless in battle. But many spells you might cast are non-combat spells. For example, you might leave a slot open for a knock or comprehend languages spell out of combat. If you did not need to use these spells and were running low, you might instead put a combat spell in the slot. Rope trick is a great spell for camping, but you never need to memorize that spell until you start camping, so it is always better to leave that slot open just in case you need another spell.
Changing your spells mid adventure can also be used to respond to things. Maybe you discover that you are going to be fighting undead in some crypt. Death ward can make a huge difference.
So how is this useful? An empty slot is useless in battle. But many spells you might cast are non-combat spells. For example, you might leave a slot open for a knock or comprehend languages spell out of combat. If you did not need to use these spells and were running low, you might instead put a combat spell in the slot. Rope trick is a great spell for camping, but you never need to memorize that spell until you start camping, so it is always better to leave that slot open just in case you need another spell.
Changing your spells mid adventure can also be used to respond to things. Maybe you discover that you are going to be fighting undead in some crypt. Death ward can make a huge difference.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Economics: Fabricate
One of the more interesting spells in terms of economics is Fabricate.
| Level: | Sor/Wiz 5 |
|---|---|
| Components: | V, S, M |
| Casting Time: | See text |
| Range: | Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels) |
| Target: | Up to 10 cu. ft./level; see text |
| Duration: | Instantaneous |
| Saving Throw: | None |
| Spell Resistance: | No |
You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material. Creatures or magic items cannot be created or transmuted by the fabricate spell. The quality of items made by this spell is commensurate with the quality of material used as the basis for the new fabrication. If you work with a mineral, the target is reduced to 1 cubic foot per level instead of 10 cubic feet.
You must make an appropriate Craft check to fabricate articles requiring a high degree of craftsmanship.
Casting requires 1 round per 10 cubic feet (or 1 cubic foot) of material to be affected by the spell.
So say your PCs are travelling along and come to an ocean. The 9th level wizard rests for the day, memorizes Fabricate and then turns 90 cubic feet of wood into a boat. Your PCs can then keep going.
But what about the theoretical 9th wizard who stays home. He can use this spell to construct large ships in a couple days. Maybe he stops by the shepherds every year to cast this spell to generate 90 cubic feet of clothing for the village. Maybe he is actually 11th level and can cast Wall of Iron. This gives him enough raw materials to quickly zap up arms and armor. Or maybe the local castle needs siege engines zapped up immediately.
So if you have a 9th level wizard they can do the work of hundreds of skilled craftsmen and be one person factories. So if you had a society with a handful of these wizards the nature of society would be greatly changed. Typically cities are places of manufacturing and trade, but manufacturing does not require large numbers of people anymore so wouldn't this affect cities. People would shift from being tradesmen to being responsible for producing raw materials...
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