Okay, two things that have been occupying some of my brain space lately. The first is the role of rehearsal in preparing for DMing a session of D&D. It strikes me that I do this all the time; whenever I have a free moment and I start thinking about the upcoming session, I run through scenes I have planned in my head, playing both sides to see how things might come out. This is useful for two reasons. The first is that it helps me to get into the heads of my NPCs to some extent, and to help me find a hook for each character to differentiate them from others. The second is that it helps me to prepare for things the PCs might do. They frequently surprise me regardless of this, but I find that, the more eventualities you mentally prepare yourself for, the more able you are to improvise and think on your feet during the actual game.

The second thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is a series of videos on D&D Insider in which the writers from Robot Chicken play D&D in a game DMed by Wizards staffer Chris Perkins. It’s pretty amusing, and each episode is a bite-sized ten minutes, which is nice. The thing that strikes me, though, is how these guys play D&D. Most of them have little to no experience playing D&D, which means that they have few preconceptions about how D&D should be played. This seems to have the effect of freeing them up mentally to try things that more experienced D&D players might not even try. In the first encounter, the party doesn’t even attack the only monster in the fight; instead, the ranger tries to monkey with the construct’s workings while the wizard tries to use arcane knowledge to command it. There’s also a lot of problem-solving while the party tries to disable a trap by breaking statues, and there’s a lot of to-do from the ranger in trying to open a door so that the encounter can simply be circumvented. It’s interesting, because I think that my group might have just attacked the arcane ballista (though I don’t know this for sure), and would have taken it down quickly as a result, but they wouldn’t have wound up with a new tool in their arsenal the way the Robot Chicken guys did. Food for thought; sometimes the creative approach can net you benefits that you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten.

In the next D&D session–which is on Sunday–I’m going to try a couple of new things.

The first thing I’m going to try is a new system of tracking initiative and conditions. I’ve heard about this on other blogs (namely Sly Flourish, Critical Hits, and Newbie DM), and I figured I’d give it a try. What I’ve been using is a big whiteboard with small, dry-erase magnets representing combatants. The problem with this is that it’s big and unwieldy (without an easel, at least), and doesn’t really make condition tracking any easier. So, I went ahead and printed out a bunch of folding cards representing combatants, which I will hang over my DM screen in initiative order. On my side, there’s relevant information such as passive Insight and Perception scores (for the PCs) and defenses and resistances (for the monsters), while on the PCs’ side are portraits representing each combatant. To track conditions, I’ve got smaller folding strips with the condition names on them. When a combatant is saddled with a condition, I grab the strip for that condition and pop it on top of his initiative card. We’ll see how it works in practice, but I’m optimistic.

The second thing I’m doing is trying to make terrain matter more. I really like the idea for terrain powers presented in the DMG2, but I’ve been at a loss as to how to get the PCs to actually use them. Then it hit me: they have cards representing all of their own powers and items and such; why not make cards representing available terrain powers so that they know exactly what effect they’re going to produce. This way, they can make a more informed decision as to whether to use the terrain power or one of their own. I’ll let you know how that goes, too.

The latest session report is up, a few months late.

It was a good session, and ended with a dragon fight. It was my first dragon fight, and I learned a few things. First, dragons are complex to run, and it’s easy to forget some of their abilities. Second, dragons should be mobile; I made the mistake of having the dragon stay relatively stationary, and I think the encounter suffered as a result. Third, go easy on extremely debilitating conditions. The dragon was using a lot of darkness-themed powers, causing players to be blinded a lot. There were also some minions that I had created that immobilized the PCs with one attack, and with the other slid them and dazed them. The tactic I kept using was to slide a PC into the water, after which he would be dazed and have to spend his entire turn getting out of the water. This was effective at locking down certain PCs and keeping them from attacking the dragon. I don’t think it was that fun for those PCs.

In general, I think that conditions like blinded, stunned, dazed, and immobilized should be used sparingly; maybe one or two monsters in the group should be doing those things, and not every turn. The problem is, because those effects are fairly powerful, attacks that utilize them tend not to do that much damage. Because of this, you wind up with an encounter that is long and potentially frustrating to the players, but doesn’t make them feel like they’re ever in that much danger. I think it’s probably a better idea to use those kinds of abilities as window-dressing to harry one or two powerful PCs, and to focus more on monsters that have the potential to hit really hard. I’d rather have a quick encounter that makes the players afraid for their characters’ lives than a long one that doesn’t.

When I got my Nintendo DS two Christmases ago, I got The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass along with it. I loved every single minute of that game. Twice. It was, and is still, the yardstick by which I measure other DS games, and I doubt that I’ve enjoyed another DS game as much since. So, you can probably imagine that when The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks was announced, I was excited. Oh, yes I was.

I bought it with a Best Buy gift card over the holidays and started playing it immediately. At first, i really liked it; it was more of the same, which was exactly what I wanted. However, the more I play the game, the less enamored of it I become. Things that I found fun in Phantom Hourglass have analogs in Spirit Tracks that simply seem tedious, and where the former game seemed to have a lot of personality and charm and soul, the latter seems somehow soulless. That’s not to say it’s a bad game; mechanically, much of it is very sound, just as much as these same mechanics were good in Phantom Hourglass. The dungeons and temples, too, are well-constructed and enjoyable. But something is missing.

I’ve been pretty bad about keeping this blog current lately. I’ll make an effort to try not to do that anymore.

At any rate, I just thought I’d post quickly to let everyone know that I’m still alive, and also to talk about what’s been on my mind and what you can expect to see posted on this blog in the next couple of weeks. In no particular order:

1. Steam. I love me some Steam. Steam, for those who are unfamiliar, is a digital video game distribution platform on the PC. Over the holidays they had some killer deals and, as a result, experienced serious growth. Because of this growth (I assume) they’re offering more great deals than ever before. They used to always have a weekend deal, which the still do; now, though, they have mid-week madness, too. Good stuff. Some games that I’ve purchased since the holidays on Steam, some of which you might hear about in more detail later on: Dead Space, Far Cry 2, Freedom Force, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Torchlight, Medieval II: Total War. All for cheap (as in, not one of them was more than $10).

2. D&D, as always. Haven’t played for a while (the last time was in November, I think). I’ve got a game day scheduled for later this month, toward the end, and I’m pretty excited. We’ll probably be wrapping up the current adventure in that session, which will give a friend of mine a chance to step into the DM chair for a little while. Also, if you’ve noticed that the most recent session report is not yet up, you’re very astute. Here’s a cookie. It will be going up soon, don’t worry.

3. Indie RPGs. I recently donated to Haiti through DriveThruRPG and, as a result, got a coupon for a bunch of free RPG PDFs. I got some indie RPGs that I’ve been wanting for a while, including Don’t Rest Your Head, Chronica Feudalis, Full Light Full Steam, Beast Hunters, and 316. I’ve read all of DRYH and played it once (more on that in a future post), and I’m in the process of reading through both Chronica Feudalis and Full Light Full Steam. I’d also like very much to get my hands on a copy of the Mouseguard RPG, but that may not happen for a little while.

4. Other games. I got various and sundry video games for Christmas, some of which you will be hearing about. Expect to hear about Dragon Age: Origins, Left 4 Dead 2, Metroid Prime Trillogy, and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, and possibly some others.