::A Geek in Korea::

Thanks to the help from the last character related post I had inspiration to come up with a nice backstory for my character. It turns out I had all the different themes I wanted to build into my character, and just didn’t know how to organize them well enough to make a backstory.

The first thing I did was roll his stats, which was a bit of a mistake. Taking a purely “power gaming” approach to something is probably not the best way to play the game. Of course I want my guy to kick some ass, but without a compelling reason to play him, what is that worth? I decided to check out some of the other areas of the world of Forgotten Realms, our game setting, to see if any of the various locals inspired anything I could work into my character.

As I mentioned before, I wanted the character to be working under the idea that positive change is always possible. I decided I’d write koans to describe his motivations. Since he is literally made of the elements in human form, this is what I came up with:

Right now, he manifests the Watersoul traits. This I picked for strategic and power gaming purposes, but instead of trying to maximize everything, I picked a second trait, Earthsoul, even though I can’t take full advantage of it at low levels. This change let me pick a region from Forgotten Realms more easily and thematically.

My character will now be from Calimshan, which is a desert ravaged into factions. One supports an efreet, while the other backs a djinn. They had warred with each other, and the Genasi, the race of Elemental beings on both sides, had taken human slaves and continued their bitter war long after those powerful creatures had disappeared.

I can be a resistance fighter, trying to free the human slaves from my very own people. Perfect! Now I have a motivation. The problem was that my party was meeting for the first time thousands of miles away from where I would have been otherwise. What would explain my character’s presence in this first meeting?

This was actually pretty easy. Since there are gladiatorial games where humans are forced to fight for their lives for the amusement of the Genasi, I decided to say I had sabotaged a menagerie that was collecting exotic beasts for the arenas. The boat I had been on mysteriously sank not far from the port the other people in my crew happened to be meeting at for the first time.

I think I actually made a compelling, cool character. I get some gruff for my name being “Brash”, but I lived up to my name when I pressed the party to continue on for a fight instead of resting up between every single encounter. It’s a shame that daily powers are one use wonders in an adventuring day. People in my party freak out every time they go into battle without one. Perhaps that over-confidence was misleading, since we didn’t get down to business nearly as much as I would have liked.

The first time back to playing a game of D&D for experience points and for a campaign our party got it’s ass KICKED on nearly every encounter. The DM decided he wasn’t running a character in absentia, so we were a man down from our normally short four man party. The problem is that most encounters are build for five characters. He had scaled the encounter to be for four players, representing “hard mode”. We normally welcome the challenge, but there were special problems with this.

While my character is a stand alone leader that has some amazing powers in later levels, without a fighter or defender to soak up damage and redirect some fire from time to time, I’m not tough enough to stand up and fight for the entire party. While the wizard was dropping foes, and the striker was picking people off, my character isn’t designed to go toe to toe with everything we encounter. My character is supposed to augment everyone else. Make the knife hot, you can cut through butter more easily. When I need to be the one fighting everyone I’m just not tough enough to get it done. We were running three characters, but really without someone to hit people I can back up, it was like we were only two and a half characters. I need a fighter out in front to turn the tide of battle if were going to be fighting shorthanded.

When we played simulated games, we had assumed I’d have help holding up the front while the other characters played their roles. This time, the gaps in our party were apparent in the second encounter onwards. We got caught in a pit trap. All of us landed with a thud and lost 80% of our health right away. Next, we get ambushed by goblins with superior positioning. EVERY battle we ended up blinded and couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn. We had no choice but to run. We ran from three straight encounters. Some heroes we turned out to be.

Anyway, there was a clear need to roll up a new character we’d need to fill some slots in our lineup at the moment. Since the roll of my character is to make other characters kick more ass, I’m the one lined up to make this new stand-in character. If we had a fifth player, it wouldn’t fall to me, but now it seems like I’ve got to go through the character process again and make a new character for the party once again. The last one took me the better part of a MONTH to figure out, and I’ve got till Saturday this time around.

The DM had brought back figures, and dungeon tiles. We could actually visualize the battles very easily and it was a lot of fun to see the lay of the land in a clear way. This was pretty cumbersome to play at our normal place due to space issues, so there is a chance we’ll be finding some other venue next time. There was even talk of going to a love motel and getting a cheap room that didn’t have a bed to use the floor as our warspace. Four dudes hanging out at a love motel playing with little figurines. Nothing strange about that.

All this work coming up with characters. This is starting to feel like homework.

I’ve got a strange problem. I don’t lack for imagination. I don’t mind writing. However, creating a character out of the whole cloth of the mind and pretending to play this character in a game has been causing me all sorts of grief.

My D&D group is going to start using the Living Forgotten Realms as it’s backdrop for adventures. We can use lots of free content to play short, 4 hour self-contained story adventures that have an overarching continuity to them. We get a character that exists in the world and is recognized by an outside organization. The actions we do in our party potentially affect the entire world. It’s like a Tabletop MMORPG in it’s own little way.

We’ve got to create an official character. I’ve gone through optimizing my character. I know which attacks he’ll use. Which armor or sword he should carry. I know his individual stats and which ones I should boost to get the most out of every level. I have spent time on all the mechanics and the number crunching. That stuff is fun for me.

All that remains are some feats which give some perks and add some flavor, and a backstory. The “fluff” that makes a bunch of numbers into an interesting character that people interact with and use to tell a story.

This backstory is killing me. I’ve gone through variation after variation of making up stories for my character. My last character was basically handed to me by one of the other players. He was a death machine that didn’t have any sort of charisma necessary to play correctly.

I’m not strong on characterization or actual “role playing” outside of combat. I pick classes and races that get the job done in combat. If the party needs something dead, I can usually help facilitate that. This is by far the easiest part of a role playing game. Throwing dice and seeing if you can kill the dragon. But this isn’t all the game is about.

Outside of combat I want to leave my mark in the party as well. No one playing complains about table talk, or expects us to stay in character the entire time. More often than not people make offhand comments that their character never actually “says” in the game.For whatever reason it’s hard for me to come up with a personality for my character to play.

My new character is a Genasi Warlord, which is a being that has been changed by living in the Elemental Planes into a sort of living embodiment of a particular element. My character currently manifests water for its tactical advantages, but with feats and more levels could change into another element. I think I want him to be a crusader for the oppressed, and a revolutionary for change. Someone that fights for the oppressed class, or sows the seeds of rebellion from within to bring down the unjust. You’d think this was enough, but their are more decisions to be made before I’m finished crafting this character.

I’ve got a rough idea what my character is about. All the other players have ELABORATE stories about people that know, loves they’ve lost, and all sorts of neat hooks that provide a way for them to get people into the story. I envy them for being able to make characters with motivations and desires that sound plausible out of nothing. Right now I’ve only got the basics.

Trying to tie all the ideas together has been really difficult. I don’t know which themes I should build on, or which ideas seems the ripest for exploration. Mostly I’m worried that a theme or idea I have will seem cool at the time, only to get old quickly and make me want to start over with another character.

I’ve got a guidebook for creating thematic and creative characters, but they ask detailed questions about the very core beliefs of a character, and I just throw my hands up when I get to the point where I have to answer about the childhood friends of my fictional character and say, “I don’t know! Do I really need to plan it all this deeply?!”

Right now, all I have is a simply credo that sums up my character, “Like waves breaking rocks upon the shore, change is inevitable. Do not fight change, you will only surely drown instead.”

No one is going to quiz me, or throw me out of a game for not having a detailed plan for my character, but I’d like to do more than play a murdering psychopath for once, and that doesn’t come without developing a character that is more interesting than the sword they carry and their moves on the battlefield.

D&D: Serious Business (Click picture for full size)

One of the members of my D&D group mentioned that there were Touhou based power cards for D&D 4.e. For those of you that don’t play D&D, Power cards are basically rule reminders that allow you to keep track of all the powers and abilities that characters have in a turn in D&D 4e. The idea behind the cards we made before were to speed up the game without needed to flip through the books to clarify what the power entails.

This is a thickly nested layer full of geekiness. The Touhou cards are based characters from a style of bullet-hell video game shoot ‘em ups.  A niche Japanese style video game with an over the top anime style character serves as a placeholder image for a Japanese card game based on a shoot em up video game. Then, someone adapts this unrelated card game using the template with Touhou characters to make the powers cards from a fantasy role playing game. Make sense?

Regardless of how the things came into being, the power cards are prettier than ours.

I found a Touhou style character creator, which allows you to create your own character. I decided to explore this to see if I could make a character. Then it sort of got out of hand and I made the entire party. The picture above was the results.

The nerdiness has taken a bizzare twist. Now that one of the members of our D&D group is back in the United States, there is no way for us to effectively play. While he’s back in the States collecting D&D playing accessories and dungeon tiles to really pimp out our gaming experience, we’re back in Korea working on how to make our group extra lethal. I’ve ended up with D&D “homework”, as we work around our player limit testing out how to maximize our strengths in a party by running some test scenarios.

What we discovered switching to D&D 4th edition was that most of the scenarios and encounters that I put the party up against were designed for a part of five adventurers. Scenarios are easily scaled, if we choose, but I ran them for a part of five. I followed the urging of the group to not dumb down or simplify the adventures due to party size. One of the players doubled up and played two characters at the same time, but we were always a adventurer short. It’s like playing a man down in soccer. You are always going to have a whole somewhere in your party, and a group needs to work together to stop from falling behind and being completely exploited by their lack of manpower.

The party was concerned that without tight coordination between players, we would get slaughtered as soon as we started the Living Forgotten Realms campaign. That would be embarrasing.

One of the people in the group wanted some experience in being the Dungeon Master, so he will design some scenarios to test our newly redesigned, ready for Forgotten Realms characters. I’ll also be playing as a character for the first time in 4th edition, handing over all the planning of the monster encounters and everything else to him. I’ve got a Genasi Warlord build that I need to complete before the test scenarios in a few days. Not only do I need to do a single build, I’ve also got multiple levels to plan for, as the test scenarios will be at levels 1, 3, and 5, to see if we are working as a team.

I’ve actually got a really busy weekend, and squeezing in a game, pre-game paperwork, and all the planning and strategy involved in building a character. When did my hobby become work?

I’m returning to my roll as DM for the rest of the weekend. One of the players is heading to the USA for a month, so we’re trying to wind up an adventure I started while he’s here by doubling up our game session this weekend. I showed off my new dice, and we did some trades for some dice people liked.

It started off with a near disaster, as my players charged some well prepared hobgoblins and tried to carve them up. I kept the tactics tight and used good positioning to overwhelm the player characters for their arrogance. They had to retreat after they all missed with their encounter powers. They weren’t willing to go all in on the battle, so they got beat up and bruised for it. Luck was not on their side, and they set up a trap outside the dungeon to give it a second shot.

I decided to throw the players a bone and set up some minions for them to bowl over to build their confidence back up. They took the encounter seriously and wiped the floor with them. A trap that really wasn’t much to worry about had them skittish. I shouldn’t have made it the big deal it turned out to be, but they weren’t moving into the dungeon deeply after their first room almost lead to their death.

Eventually, I got them into another encounter with the goblins that nearly killed them which went a little better. They took down a goblin soldier and forced two crossbow wielding underlings to go running for reinforcements. After routing the goblin warren, they totally failed to heed my warnings about a strange tapestry hanging on a wall and started to check it out. This caused an ochre jelly ooze to seep out and rock their faces.

The ooze was aided by some specters that chased down the retreating party and melee with them until the ooze could catch up. The specters got turned by the cleric, which basically saved the entire party. Once the specters retreated, the ooze arrived and totally rocked the paladin’s world. I rolled two consecutive 20’s for maximum damage. The second twenty was a called roll. “Wouldn’t it be terrible if I rolled a…TWENTY! DAMN.”

The paladin fell. The warlock and cleric headed for the first room in the encounter, and wizard left to try to lure it into a pit they discovered. Eventually the cleric raised the paladin through healing and then fled. The Wizard and paladin stood together against the ooze, which had by this time split in half. The diminished ooze was no threat to the party at this point, and they slaughtered it. The collected the magical tapestry portal off the wall and rolled it up for future loot.

Later, they discovered two Rage Drakes (large T-Rex like dinosaurs) in a room with lots of magical mushrooms. These particular mushrooms either caused sleep, poison, or exploded to provide cover. The Players wisely decided to try to force the oversized creatures to fall asleep. This bought them time. The cleric ran for a door that I said marked the end of the encounter for the day, while the paladin ran for the hills. The wizard and warlock took out a drake by forcing it into a small passageway and peppering it with shots while they retreated. The drake would be charging them, get stuck right before it could land the final blow, and they’d skate away from the chomping claws of death to try once again. It was pretty awesome.

They’ve only reached the third milestone of the adventure, but since they were having so much difficulty I decided to let them level up in the middle of the adventure. It might be bad form, but it’ll be more fun. This will let them have access to a few more utility spells and abilities that will hopefully allow them to deal with some of the challenges in this premade dungeon. They haven’t yet put a dent in the rest of the rooms, and there is some stuff that is going to really get up into them later.

I keep making it out like it’s “me against them”, but it’s not. We’re working together to make a kick ass adventure story, and it’s working. I’m really enjoying the hosting and “it goes to 11″-ness of the adventure so far. I like that every room is a struggle to survive, and that if they don’t make the right calls they’ll get punished for it. None of my Player Characters escaped damage, and all of them had to make the good calls they chose to avoid falling victim to the challenge I set before them. They are playing on “hard mode” being one man down, so if it wasn’t overwhelming them, I wasn’t doing my job. If they could just roll better the tide would be turning in their favor as much as it turns in mine as DM.

Tomorrow I’ll be playing the game again, same time, same place. They’ll be attempting the impossible to get throught the entire dungeon in a day, but without the full allotment of characters, it’d be suicidal to continue this campaign. Since one of the guys is leaving for a month, I’ll step down as DM and get to run my character for once while we do some light weight side adventures. Role reversal, as I go from DM to player character and someone else takes me spot. While I want to finish this adventure I also want someone else to take over. I want to try out the new Warlord class and see how it’ll fit into the party.

Dice for D&D

I have completely gone off the deep end. A few weeks back, I ordered an entire pound of dice after being the first Dungeon Master for our group’s move to D&D 4.0. This was something of a “Feast or Famine” situation. The only way to get dice was to order them from the United States, and that required ridiculous amounts of shipping and handling fees. If I ordered a small set or two of dice, I’d pay nearly the same amount in shipping as if I paid for an entire POUND of dice. I decided to go all in and get the large set of dice.

There are seven dice needed for a game of D&D. Someone in the group was missing a pair of dice they needed to resolve some of the most common actions their character performed. He had been borrowing a spare d12 and some d8s to resolve rolls. Now with my excessive number of dice, I’ll be able to sell him a complete set he can use. It’s true that I could just give him the dice he needed, but then I’d break one of the sets I could possibly make. I have gone from no dice to having far too many, but if I start selling off the harder to obtain dice I’ll be stuck in the same situation he was in.

I myself now had two nice sets. One is black and semi-transparent like smoke, and the other is white with green flecks. I’m selling off a set of red dice that looks a lot like the dice picture above. I’ve got several more sets that fit a general color scheme, but are mixed and matched. In addition to that, I’ve got several dozens of spare d20’s of various colors.

My wife looked at all the dice I was sorting through and arranging and gave me the standard “Spousal non-pre-approved purchase questions.” She wanted to know how much I paid. Too much. How many dice I actually needed. Far less than the number I got. If anyone else was going to help me paid. In part. If I was happy I got it, and if I was going to use them. Absolutely, and yes often,  if possible.

She said that even thought she thought buying lots of dice was fine, as long as I was happy with it. She said she thought it was a lot of dice, but that she understood that I couldn’t get them in Korea easily so it wasn’t a problem I ordered so many.

This has sort of been a long time coming for me. Way back in middle school, I got exposed to Dungeons and Dragons. I had a basic D&D book, but had no way to play with anyone else because I lived in the middle of nowhere Ohio. Without dice to roll and play, I carried around a Scattergories d20 with letters and adapted it to a number it if I ever ran into someone that wanted to play. The only kid that played D&D in middle school was a demented pervert. I don’t use those words lightly, and I got creeped out by him big time. I gave up the game to start collecting comic books because those could be delivered to our house.

Now I’ve gone and purchased dice, and I live in a city with a foreigner population large enough to support a regular group of players. Better yet, no creepy perverts are involved! Horay!