::A Geek in Korea::

Since my campaign got started up a week ago, I’ve been running through a series of homebrew solutions for gaming. Dungeons and Dragons might not be Warhammer 40k, but there is some preparation involved in making a game run smoothly by finding ways to represent characters and players in an efficient, and importantly for me, cheap, manner. I think I’ve finally found an adequate solution to how I will be representing the features of the terrain, players, and the monsters from now on.

The first game we played at someone’s house. They had a grid on a white board, which was really nice, but it was the wrong scale. The game maps had to be adjusted to work on the board, or you’d have to go room by room and redraw everything twice as large. It was a little difficult to transport this board anywhere too, so we would only be able to play at their place. It wasn’t portable, and while it was adaptable, I wanted to see if I could do better without spending too much.

The first thing I tried to do was make my own tiles. Dungeons and Dragons have official tiles that are sold based on themes and come in a book. You punch out these tiles and use them. You need multiple books, and multiple copies of books if you want to make large dungeons. I found free, legal sources of tiles online, then went about trying to find materials to make them. I had a friend do this with some foam boards and expensive color printing. He made some awesome sets, totally in scale and beautifully made, but they are of limited use. He had one theme, dank blue dungeon. If you didn’t want to run something in a dank, blue dungeon, you were going to need to make new tiles.

I tried to make some of my own dungeon tiles. I decided to use some hard board, like tough cardboard, and some things I printed out on a copier. The ink started to smear, cutting out things to make them fit together was difficult, and trying to coat them so they wouldn’t get damaged proved problematic. My first attempted at covering tiles was done with scotch tape and some clear packing tape. This became a bubbling mess. Once placed, it couldn’t be repaired either. That idea went nowhere. I scrapped the idea after only using half of one sheet of hardboard. I’ll keep the hardboard around when I need to make 3-d map elements or something, but as a replacement for store bought or foam tiles it was useless.

Next I tried paper maps that would be laminated. They would be portable, and easy to store. They could also, theoretically, be made in advance for every encounter to make each fight unique. I don’t have a lamination machine, so I bought some giant sheets of plastic coating that claimed you could protect pictures without the need of a lamination machine. This was no joke. It was “A3″ sized paper meant to protect a giant photo. This is for protecting things the size of two sheets of normal copier paper side by side. I bought some A3 sized paper, went in to use the copier at work, and printed out something to see how well these lamination sheets would work. Once I got it printed successfully at the right scale, I tried to do a double sided sheet stuck between the lamination paper.

You know how when you buy a screen protector for your phone, it comes with a sticky sheet and a stiff sheet that is somewhat tacky? You know how hard it is to apply that to a small screen without bubbles or messing it up? Now imagine that process made fifty times harder because of the surface area that has been increased by around twenty times. I learned that If you don’t cut the paper down to smaller dimensions, the A3 paper was too big and didn’t let the static part stick to the sticky part. I’m still not sure if I am supposed to remove the two static parts and only use the sticky parts or what. There weren’t any real instructions or anything I could figure out. After failing once at this a few times, I got a reasonably good sheet to stick together, but it wasn’t ideal. There were bubbles, and the designed couldn’t be swapped out. Once you made a map, you’d have to use it the way it was because writing on the laminated sheet with a dry erase marker didn’t work well.

Defeated, I gave up. I was just going to use my giant A3 paper I had for each battle and just toss it after each game. If I needed to draw on it I’d just not reuse it later on and print out some more. I would just keep my eye open for a way to make a reusable battle map in the future and leave it alone. I had too many attempts and too many failures clouding up my vision of what I needed to do.

Back when I first got into D&D, I found these little hard plastic cases for individual pieces of paper. You’d slip the paper between the plastic, then you could use a dry erase marker on them without needing to erase it with a rag or eraser. It was great for tracking initiative or hit points on a character sheet. I have two for small B5 sized paper. Stationary stores sell them for students, and they come in various sizes. I thought about looking at a stationary store to see if I could come up with something to replace my previous attempts today, and I struck gold. I went to the store where I purchased my original cases and was in luck! There were A3 sized hard paper cases! I had A3 paper! I could simply print off a map and slip it between cases, or buy multiple cases and put them together for a large battle map. I bought two, which makes approximately a 60 cm x 84 cm battle map. (Yes, I went metric long ago.) Since it is modular, I could continue to add different sized sheets too, but right now it is as big as the whiteboard we started with and a lot more flexible. I think I reached my goal.

All I needed was for the image on the paper to have a grid marking twenty five millimeter squares and I could even use Dungeons and Dragon miniatures to represent characters in battle. Since I can draw on these paper cases with dry erase markers, I just used some graph paper I made from the Internet for a generic battle map. Now all I need to do is find a nice set of thin and fat color dry erase markers and I’ll be set. Erasable, portable, adaptable, and cheap. It’s perfect for my needs.

Since I won’t be buying miniatures, my next goal is to find cheap ways to represent players. I’ve been using Tokentool, which lets you create small tokens that are easy to print out at the right scale. Then I drop them onto a sheet and print out a bunch of them. Since I like a variety of monsters, I don’t even bother doing anything but printing and cutting them out. I could be using the hardboard to make chips or tokens, but I haven’t had them fight off the same creature twice yet. I also have small metal clips that can hold the pictures of the creatures, but this hasn’t worked out since it isn’t viewable at all angles. Right now simple paper printouts represent the monsters in the campaign.

The players started using dice to represent their characters last game, which was fine. Once conditions started stacking up, I wish we had some actual miniatures to denote who was who, because it got a little busy on the board with the abstractions. I have small glass pebbles for marking creatures, but bloodied conditions, or vulnerabilities needed to be noted by hand. If I can find a hobby store with different colored stones or pipe cleaners with the right colors, I might be able to make the current marking system work. If I get a colorful set of markers I’ll be able to note it on the board as a temporary fix. I’m pretty happy with my homebrew solutions now. There are some things I could print off from the Internet and incorporate, and I’ve already decided to work on a homebrew “achievement” system for players that feel they’ve accomplished something without needing lots of magic items.

This is all after I was a Dungeon Master for two games. TWO. We are still trying to nail down specifics about the frequency we want to play and where to meet, and I’ve already gone batshit crazy trying to find out how to represent the perfect game table on a budget. This is why I don’t do well on vacation. Without something to focus my attentions, like work, I’ll just get more and more focused on the minutiae of my hobbies and slowly go crazy.

The D&D campaign I started on Saturday had it’s second game. YES! Players that are interested in a game I enjoy! People who have a hobby and want to spend time together making time for one another. People who trust me to present them with interesting situations, and enjoy trying to share a story telling experience with me. All of these things are awesome. All the investment I’ve made into the world of D&D’s story telling techniques, following the D&D subcultures on the Internet, and generally geeking out about the game for the past few years has resulted in an opportunity to play it at a table again. I’m very pleased by this turn of events.

I set up a reservation at a room that had air conditioning, was close to the majority of players, and had an unlimited drink service. Needs met. I even had a series of coupons so we’d play cheaply. Perfect. Everyone was prompt, and ready to play. I had prepared a battle map from scratch, and set up the scenario throughout the week with a daily email explaining how they are being perceived by the people in the keep that serves as the local base of operations for this group of adventurers. The group had to navigate through the alliances and the different factions to eek out a living for themselves. Right now they are item starved, low level characters just trying to hang on until they reach the next level.

I’m enjoying the brutal combat encounters I can manage without too many tricks simply because the character’s don’t have the ridiculous number of magical items, spells, feats, and powers that upper level characters can take advantage of later in the game. Right now, a band of goblins torturing their source for magical items from far away lands will pose a serious threat, but in a few level’s time won’t even be worth the time to describe how they look in combat before they would be brutally slaughter. A bad die roll will fell characters and force desperate decisions.

I like the challenge of being a Dungeon Master. There is a lot of things beyond the mechanics you need to think about. It is mentally draining playing three and a half hours of role playing for me. I have to keep character’s motivations in line, think of adequate challenges, work on the next step of the story, build plot points, remember things from previous games, adjudicate rules, and provide combat challenges. Balancing the needs to tell a story, the time required to tell that story, and making sure it is the story the players want to participate is also important.

I’m pleased that all the players are clever, know their characters, and are up on the mechanics. They don’t shy away from trying to do awesome things either. They are always discussing their options, working as a team, and have a strong tactical presence. They might need me to explain things from time to time, and sometimes they hit a barrier to my understanding of the rules, but as of now they’ve been outstanding. Just today a player sent me a two page background explaining her character’s motivations, and a simple throw away line she made on that sheet with have profound implications for things I am laying the groundwork for levels later. That kind of thing makes the players interested in the possible twists and turns things take, and helps the story become more than the sum of it’s parts.

Right now I don’t even know where I’ll be taking them the next time I see them. I have two weeks to figure it out, which is plenty of time for it to stew in my brain. I have time to think about what might be happening with the characters, the keep they inhabit, and help them level up their characters for the next series of battles. They’ll have more hit points, more surges, and will be more adept at combat, which means I’ll have to be more brutal, more diabolical, and more punishing with my choices of monsters and situations.

In the past, I was so worried about the story, or the rules, that I didn’t enjoy just telling a story to some people. Now that I’ve got a basic idea of how to run a game, I can start to branch out and get more creative with my encounters. It’s great when I slap down a series of creatures on the board and the player’s reaction is, “Oh…really. We’re going to fight….all of them?” and I simply say, “I don’t know yet. Let’s figure out what happens.”… and we do.

A reader to this very website contacted me about a game of Dungeons and Dragons. I agreed to be the Dungeon Master of the adventure, as long as they could provide a couple of players willing to sit around and play. I had two weeks to find my adventure setting, set up the plot, make tokens and game representations of the characters and monsters, and generally get back on top of all the rules required to play the game. I’m not going to lie, it took me a few tries to start thinking like a DM instead of a player, but I think I achieved that brain-space long enough to put together an set up and series of encounters.

I knew I was in good shape when the elements of my campaign were all in place before I started listening to the GenCon lectures about how to make interesting adventures, villains, and encounters. I pulled heavily from different online sources for tips and tricks, and I had an idea of the setting I had in mind before I started. Instead of bogging myself down in details, or trying to guess what the players were going to do, I set up a few different competing interests, gave them a motivation I could consistently base their actions around, and set them loose. It’s up to the players to build on what they’ve been given and see how they can put their character’s interests into the game. There were a few character build issues, but other than that it went fine. No one died, and only one character got swallowed by a giant evil frog man. Twice.

Despite the hot weather, and a few encounters that went on a little longer than I realized they would, the afternoon gaming session was a great success in my opinion. The players were talking about how they wanted to deal with the aftermath of their looting spree, and how they were going to deal with all the competing interests that were vying for their attention and their items. They want to play again this week, while all the players are still on vacation! A guy who is moving back to Canada wants to squeeze in one more game before he leaves. They were talking about turning it into a regular gaming night while I was packing up my bags. I didn’t know any of them before we started playing, and now I have a gaming group with an addition to feed. I must lay the smack on pretty hard, because they it looked like they were already going through withdraws.

This party would rather play in person than online. I also greatly enjoy player interaction over dice and a board, but getting a schedule cleared is a huge issue. Finding the time to set aside several hours is going to be tough, let alone finding the time to plan out adventures as the DM. I can run the encounters I find, as long as I can keep coming up with threads that put them together, otherwise, Eek! Time investment overload! I don’t even know if that’s possible. I’m going to be busier than ever this upcoming semester if my current class time demands are any indication. This new semester is going to be a little weird, schedule wise, so unless I lock in something regular now, I might never get fit it in.

I’ve taken to the DM role a lot more than I did in the past. I think running and making monsters is a skill I’d like to develop. I had a few “OH CRAP!” sort of reactions to one of the monsters I built for the game today, which is encouraging. The next series of encounters shouldn’t be much harder to prepare. I already have an idea of where the story will go for the adventure this upcoming week, and the party will resolve the next few steps of the campaign via email before we get to the table. As long as people continue their interest in the game, I’m more than willing to put a little time in for now.

One of the things that unifies some of my interests is the nature to which you can make them your own.

Blogging is something that I get to decide how I want to do every time I post. The general framework remains the same, and I get to do what I want in that space. The amount to which I am successful is a testament of my creativity and willingness to work at finding new materials. This blog has been a diary, social meeting place, center for emotional therapy, stress reliever, and long standing amusement. If other people enjoy reading it, I’ll consider that payment enough.

Teaching is similar. I use a general syllabus and plan the base of my class on covering those materials. I set goals, then work to find the best ways to explore that material that gets those points across. If I explore tangents, revisit materials, or work with students to increase their understanding, I still start with something simple and work to improve it. Luckily for me, I get paid for something I find interesting all by itself.

Dungeons and Dragons is something else I enjoy that is a performance for other people, that lets me express my creativity in different, extremely nerdy ways. When I am a player, I get to tell the story of a single character and their relationship to the world. I get to pick story elements that I find compelling and weave them into a core, tie them to mechanical elements and roll some dice to kill some monsters.

As a Dungeon Master, I get to breath life into an entire world. I get to pick a location, decide on elements I want to include, write the history of a region out of whole cloth, and set down other people in my creation as they interact with the elements I’ve described.

For example, after I got my housework done today, I played around with the D&D Monster Builder software. This is a complete list of all the released monsters so far in materials for the D&D platform. With this software I can take a creature that has been built by some designer and customize it specifically for my story. I made a humanoid frog … thing .Z.. that eats people.

I took elements of different monsters and combined them into a entirely new monster that filed the role I needed in a battle. I played around with mechanics and made my own completely new creation that looks and acts like a monster made by someone that designed the game. I’ll slip those creations of mine into a game made by another professional designer and only I’ll know that these creatures came to life because of my imagination.

D&D can be as personalized and imaginative as you want to make it too. They provide the framework, and you provide the imagination to make that framework come alive. It is not just the inhabitants of the world that you bring to the table. You can actually bring the world itself to the table, both metaphorically and physically.

If you want to set your game in a far flung future world, or a chaos driven realm of madness, all you need to do is find the time to plan out the descriptions, write down whatever few mechanics you want to govern the world, and tell a story. You can have it all exist in the theater of the mind, or you can find physical representations of those ideas and put them on paper to give people a way to visualize your creations in another way.

I took a trip to Emart to find some supplies so that I could better represent to my players the ideas I wanted to share with them. I needed things like a ruler with a metal edge for cutting, some hard board paper, and some clips. These stand-ins for officially licensed products would let me make my own set of tiles. I can print out things I need and design other things if I have the time.

I am not going to get extremely elaborate. I can make a series of generic, stand in tiles for my own games. Once I finish with the materials I have, if I do it right, I could recycle all of the materials for any future setting I wanted. I can make tiles to save off my artistic boredom, while working on story elements for any future game I might be involved in.

Right now I’ll need to measure out tiles, work on making sure they work with the tools I have on hand, and settle on a series of designs. Then I can start coloring and cutting them out. It’s like a recursive hobby within a hobby. I don’t even own any miniature figures, and I don’t want to start collecting them either, but making map times is something I enjoy.

Someone contacted me about playing Dungeons and Dragons 4e. Yes, actual geek to geek contact via this website exists. A reader requested information about dice, and that turned into a discussion about playing a regular game that would be starting up whenever I was available to come…which got me thinking that I could be a Dungeon Master for a little bit while I was still on vacation. While I’m happy I can play in a game in real life instead of on the Internet in a post by post manner, I don’t know (most of) these people at all! I just promised to plan a series of encounters for a group of strangers!

What have I done? Isn’t this how people end up committing suicide when their elf dies to a poison trap (R.I.P Dark Leaf)?

After all the stuff I’ve heard about different ways to design games in upper level settings, I’ve got a party at level one that have several fresh characters. Of course, there are loads of new character classes from Player’s Handbook 3 that no one in the previous group has ever used before, so I’ll have to read up on how their powers and class features work. Then I’ll have to pick monsters and write a simple introductory scenario to set up the world. What if this thing becomes a recurring game? Do I approach this as a one off adventure and let everyone reroll once I decide on a story? Do I really want to fall back on the tavern cliche? No way! I’ve got a solid week to geek out on all things Dungeons and Dragons related before the thing gets kicked off. New players or not, I simply do not half ass my games. Things are going to be dicey. Players will face death. I will roll d20s and laugh at their misfortune.

Luckily, I got one of my gamer friends, to join us. He’s got cred with me, and I know he can play the game. He’s got his own dice too. I’ve got to sell off some of my pound of dice to these new players when I see them the first time.

Ick, imagine sharing dice. I can’t believe I had to crawl so far out of the geek basement to reach where I am today, selling excess dice instead of borrowing them from kind strangers that let me into their games. Now that the last DM I played with has left the country, I feel like the torch has been passed. A very geeky torch, like one that is full of dragon fire or something. Whatever. That part isn’t important. Anyway, WOOOOO! I’m a DM again. Thankfully the work of a DM is pretty easy with digital tools and online programs.

Now, all I need to do is work out a cool story.

Previously…

I got a request from my DM to take over the online game we play via a private forum for a few levels starting at the end of the month. There is a lot involved in playing D&D on the player’s side. My wife calls the game “homework” when I set out to write an in-depth bit of dialog, or to work through the multiple steps it takes simply to post my actions for the day. I might make three posts a day on the forum, depending on my time commitment and how deeply involved I might be in the the story or combat. I’ve been letting the game slip a little since I’ve been on vacation, and I also need to do a lot of stuff around the house and for work.

Now that I’ve got to take over the other side of the game for a limited period of time, I get to see what my DM has been doing all this time. He’s written a long story, and he has characters interacting with us. He has to give them voices, describe the area around us, make maps, choose monsters, prepare encounters, decide on treasure parcels… all sorts of crazy, tedious things. We, as players, have the duty to interact and mess things up whenever possible, but we are just characters. Good players help create the world, but the DM has to give a bit of firmament to the void so that the players can hang their stories on something. At the game table those sorts of decisions might take a few minutes, or a few hours. There are tips and tricks that any DM can use to make the game go quickly, but online you need to wait for each player to take a turn, read them, move their pieces, post a new map…It is a lot more work for the DM to post online than it is for the player. Getting started now means that when my schedule starts to get a little more hectic I can still keep up.

As always, my mantra is “Prepare, Prepare, OVER PREPARE!” My friends are demanding. If I get too busy, I can always slow the pace down and keep playing whenever I have free time. I’m sure the DM that is taking a break will be able to take back over if he needs to. Right now, I’ve got this story in my head, and now that I have to actually start putting it together mechanically and trying to wrench out how I want to tell it, I’m struggling. There are some events I know will happen, and a lot of other things “up in the air” at this point. I think that’s how it should be when their are players involved in the story telling process. If I went into the game trying to push them too hard in one particular direction it wouldn’t be fun. I want them to get from point A to point B. If they get there in an unusual or interesting way, that’s good. I just need to give them a reason to go to point B.

I’ve learned a lot of lessons following people on Twitter and listening to D&D podcasts. Most of those shows tend to focus on how to tell a cool story, how to use new material at the table, and how to structure combat. Right now I’m still struggling to use the applications I want to get them to do what I need. I’ve got a few more tricks, story telling and mechanically, to get the players to do what I want. If I can find the time to get started telling my story, I’m sure I’ll get as engrossed as I do in all my other hobbies that I’ll find them time for whatever I need to do. I think I can take care of just one more bit of “homework” during the week.

Imagine this, but with a mustache and a top hat. Classy.

My brother and I went out for indie music and drinks with his friends. Bought a bad ass shirt with a beholder in a top hat and handlebar mustache. Well, that’s what it looks like to me anyway. Geeky shirt quota nearly met. I tried, in vain, to connect to a WiFi spot for most of the night so that I could tweet and get onto a huge monitor shown over the concert. Damn my luck, the first time I got to put something snarky on the board was when I was too far away to read it.

We ended up staying out later than expected, and I crashed at my brother’s apartment. We woke up early for a country diner breakfast, and it was an assault of ‘MERICA! Bottomless coffee and ridiculously delicious food. While we waited for our order, got the most patriotic place mats EVER. I brought it back just to share. It’s hard not to feel patriotic while this is on the table as you devour some eggs and bacon:

(Can you spot the Statue of Liberty?)

D&D Monster Man: Part 1

One of the things I really enjoy about teaching is that I can always be creating new things to share with people. I’ve woke up for the past six months on Sundays with the goal of creating a week’s worth of creative material to use in my classes. Today was the first time in this year where all my materials were done and I don’t have a deadline to create new things looming over me. I have a week left in the semester, my classes are all planned, and all that is left is for my students to show up and take an exam that I must grade. I got to sleep in and make it through the day without anything pressing on me with a deadline.

It was nice, but frankly, so alien, that I was throwing myself into different things to keep myself busy. My wife commented I was extra aggressive  finishing the house work because I was trying to occupy my time. I need something to occupy my creative urges (thus, this blog) or I get restless, cranky, and bored.

Then I got a message from the DM of my current Play-by-post D&D game who asked me if I wanted to take over the reigns for a little while. At the beginning of the day I didn’t have a clue what was going to be occupying my creative juices for the time while I was on vacation. Now I know I have an adventure to write that I didn’t have time for while preparing my classes!

I’ve started using Masterplan to start planning my story. I only have a mini-campaign to play. Perhaps one or two levels, max, but I’ve got a lot of elements that I’m going to throw together, and I hope they are of sufficient scale and scope to occupy the party’s time. We’re approaching the second tier of play, where events start to go beyond the heroic and become larger. Instead of saving a town, you are saving a nation, or an entire civilization. I think my adventure will fit that scale easily. By the time they’ve finished my adventure, they will have reached “Paragon” levels, where things get a little more bananas. Lots of dangerous, weird monsters everywhere, and death at every corner. I hope I can live up to that!

I hope to set the tone for that level of adventure with the right bit of direction from people that do more encounter building than I do. I’ve got to admit I’ll be listening to a little advice while I set out to build my encounters. Here are some of the places I have bookmarked right now. I’m usually a player, so I am boning up on my DM skills by checking out the following places:

• Sly Flourish
• Critical Hits
• The Tome Show Podcast
• Sarah Darkmagic
• Daily Encounters

Hopefully from these combined sources I’ll be able to pull together an assortment of encounters so that I can recycle their materials into something approaching a balanced and fun campaign. I’m not above building something entirely from scratch, but I’ll need some sort of basis for comparison. This will be the first time I’ve been a DM in years, and the last time I got started it basically consumed my attention for weeks because I had to learn how to do everything. Now that I have some vacation time, I’ll be able to sit down and write a few ideas every now and again to polish them up before I present them to the group. I’ve already got a series of events planned that will set off my adventure. Now all I need is to flesh out some encounters, make some memorable characters, and get to mapping out the world to present it. This should keep me occupied for a few weeks.