If residuum is the powdered, raw stuff of magic, then a dweomer stone is what happens when you compress that residuum into a solid, gem-like object using a magical process. Few know this magical process in the current age of the world; that, like many other things, has been lost to time, to the rise and fall of civilizations. In the current age, dweomer stones are most often found in treasure hoards and the magical laboratories of studious wizards, and rarely created.

But what is a dweomer stone? What does it do? Most people assume that it is simply compressed residuum, and use it as such. A dweomer stone has a gold piece value equal to a magic item of its level (for example, a first level dweomer stone has a value of 360 gold pieces), and this value can be used in place of residuum–or any other ritual component–when casting a magic ritual. The process of drawing power from a dweomer stone is difficult and ultimately flawed, though; when you siphon the power of a dweomer stone to fuel a ritual, you only get half the stone’s value in equivalent components for the casting of the ritual, and any value left over after the ritual’s casting is lost; the entire stone is consumed in the casting of a ritual.

Why use a dweomer stone, you might ask, when residuum is more flexible and useful in casting rituals, then? Because there is one ritual that dweomer stones excel in casting, so much so that mages theorize that this was there intended purpose when they were first created. Simply put, a dweomer stone can be used to fuel the creation of a magic item. When one does this, the stone takes the place of the residuum cost of the ritual, allowing one to create a magic item of the stone’s value with the ritual effectively for free. Further, the time required to cast the ritual is cut in half, and the caster is not limited by his or her level when creating a magic item with a dweomer stone. For example, if a 6th level wizard found a 9th level dweomer stone, he could use it to create a 9th level magic item in half the normal amount of time, for free!

Dweomer stones are not quite as potent as you might think, though. Common dweomer stones can only be used to create common magic items (though they can be used to create any common magic item of their level, with no other limitations. There are also rumored to be imprinted dweomer stones, stones designed to create specific uncommon magic items; while less flexible than their common brethren, they are more potent. Many theorize that there might even be dweomer stones capable of creating rare items, but if there are, nobody has ever found one and told about it.

Last time I discussed how skill checks can be adjudicated such that failure becomes an interesting and compelling part of the game, similar to the way it’s handled in Mouse Guard. Today, I’d like to discuss how this methodology can be applied to a much larger and more prominent part of the D&D game: combat encounters.

Combat Encounters: Setting Goals
Combat encounters are the bread-and-butter of most D&D games; they’re fun, exciting, tactical, and they get you loot and experience points (and what adventurer doesn’t want those things?). Often, however, they follow a very similar template: two sides compete, with the loser being completely wiped out. This has a couple of problems and risks. First, it can get a little bit repetitive and boring. If you know that every encounter is going to be a battle to the death for both sides, then things become somewhat rote. Second, such encounters don’t necessarily drive the story any further. This might be fine for some games, and in most games it might be fine for a lot of encounters, but sometimes you want an encounter that contributes to the greater narrative of the story in some meaningful way. Further, sometimes you want to flesh out the narrative of the enemy side a little bit, and if all enemies are trying to kill you, then what’s the difference between them? Third, and possibly most important, if every enemy is trying to kill you, then failure results in total annihilation of the party, and the end of the campaign. This is very bad.

Failure is a part of life, and it’s a part of dramatic fiction. In books, TV shows, movies, and so forth, the heroes don’t win every fight; sometimes they’re driven off by a stronger force, sometimes they have to retreat. How often, though, do you see this in D&D? Most of the time, both sides are fighting to kill, and the PCs win. If they lose, they lose big, and it’s catastrophic for the game; very few parties will willingly retreat from a fight because of the mentality that, if the fight was put in their path, there’s some way they can win it. This, of course, leads to GMs doing just that: they’ll never give the PCs anything they can’t handle, because to do so would invite a dissatisfying end of the game for everyone.

So, how do you make failure an option? By setting goals and victory conditions for both sides. This is similar in nature to setting the stakes of a skill check or a skill challenge. First, ask the PCs what they want to get out of the combat. Do they want to drive the orc horde away from the town? Do they want to push through the enemy ranks and escape through a portal on the other side of the battlefield? Once they set a goal for the encounter, set a victory condition that attains that goal. This victory condition might be killing the leader, making it to a specific spot, or simply holding out for a certain number of rounds. Once they’ve satisfied the condition, the encounter ends in victory. For some extra punch, let them narrate their victories.

On the flip side, you’re going to do the same thing for your monsters. You’re going to tell the PCs what their goal is (though you might keep it somewhat vague, in case it’s important to keep parts of the goal a secret), and you’ll tell them under what conditions they lose. Perhaps the leader of the cult is performing a fell ritual, and the cult’s side wins when he accrues a certain number of successful Arcana checks. Perhaps, once the orcs successfully break down the front gate of the town, they overrun it and sack it. Feel free to be specific about the consequences of failure. The trick, though, is to try to use failure results that are not simply a total-party kill. Even if it would make sense for the monsters to want to kill the party, unless it’s an extremely important encounter, use alternate victory conditions. This is another area where conditional success can be useful. For example, if the party is defending against the depredations of a pair of rampaging dire bulettes, they might use the following goal and victory condition:

• Goal: To drive off the dire bulettes before they destroy our airship, or kill us and eat us
• Victory Condition: Both of the bulettes are either bloodied or dropped to 0 hit points

In this situation, once they’ve achieved their victory condition, they get to narrate their PCs driving the bulettes away from their encampment, or even killing them (since you’ll be giving them the same XP and treasure either way, it doesn’t much matter unless those bulettes are going to be recurring threats).

• Goal: To cause the party to retreat from their encampment
• Victory Condition: Half of the party is unconscious, or all of the party is bloodied

Note that your goal, as the GM, might be different from what the dire bulettes want. The bulettes, of course, want to kill and eat as many of the PCs as possible. Since that’s kind of a serious failure state for what is probably a random wilderness encounter, your goal should instead tell the PCs what’s going to happen if they do poorly. In this case, once enough of them are badly beaten and it looks like the fight is going to end in their deaths, their survival instincts kick in and they run away, leaving their equipment and airship to be destroyed by the rampaging beasts.

When you’re using alternate fail states like this, it helps to play things a little looser when it comes to unconsciousness. A PC might, by the rules, be unconscious and bleeding out, but if the goal of the encounter is not to kill of a PC (or all of them), then you should still allow them to escape. Narrate it in such a way that it makes sense; perhaps a friend wakes them long enough to help them limp to safety.

This approach has a few benefits. For one thing, when you’re clear about the consequences of failure, your players are going to be more likely to take risks and do interesting things that they might not otherwise do if their life was on the line. If you know that those bulettes aren’t going to kill you, you might do something crazy like try to ride one into another one, an action that might otherwise be suicidal.

Another benefit is that this adds additional weight to important encounters. The default assumption of this method is that most encounters are not going to risk the PCs’ lives, but are instead going to make their lives more difficult or interesting in some way if they lose. When an encounter comes along that has a goal like “Kalarel wants to kill you for meddling in his plans”, the players are going to sit up and take notice. The stakes are suddenly very high, and the encounter carries with it added risk. This creates additional drama that isn’t there when that’s par for the course.

Differing fail states can also help to tie disparate encounters into the overall narrative, and can help to make random encounters more fleshed out. If you’re clear with your PCs that these goblins want to drive them out of their holy site, you’re telling them what the goblins are fighting for, what’s important to them. If they simply attack, they’re just another gang of goblins looking to beat up on the PCs. A situation like this might even cause the PCs to end the fight prematurely, turning it into a roleplaying encounter where the PCs try to explain to the goblins that this was all just a misunderstanding, and that they have no desire to defile their holy site.

Be creative with your goals and victory conditions, and encourage your players to do the same. You may wind up with some truly memorable encounters as a result!

As most of you know this is, primarily, a D&D blog, focusing on 4th Edition. This is because D&D is my favorite RPG, and it’s the RPG that I get to play most often. It is not, however, the only RPG I like or have read. That’s what this column is going to be about: when I read (and like) other RPGs, and I think they have some application to D&D, I’m going to give advice to that effect.

Recently, I’ve been reading The Mouse Guard Role-Playing Game, which I’m absolutely in love with. I may review it later (preferably after I’ve played it), but for right now, I’d like to discuss how the game handles failure, and how this can be applied to D&D.

In Mouse Guard, as in many indie RPGs, failure does not stop things dead, and never causes a null result. Let me explain that a bit. If you make a skill roll or engage in a conflict, failing to succeed never causes nothing to happen (e.g., “I try to climb the wall.” (rolls dice and fails) “Uh, yeah, you fail. Next?”), and rarely causes the action to stop dead (such as with a total-party kill). This can be applied to D&D, as well. Today I’ll talk about how to apply this to skill checks.

Skill Check Failure: Make it Interesting!
D&D already has a mechanic similar to the one in Mouse Guard, but it’s built into skill challenges. In a skill challenge, failure often achieves a similar result to success, but at a cost. For example, if you’re engaging in a skill challenge to escape from a goblin prison, failure might mean that you still escape, but you’re injured or pursued, too. This mechanic works well in skill challenges, because it means that failure does not stop the adventure dead, and it potentially makes the PCs’ lives more difficult and, as a result, more interesting.

Now, how do we apply that mentality to individual skill checks? One way is to do the same thing that Mouse Guard does: introduce a twist. In Mouse Guard, when a roll is failed, the GM can introduce a twist: an additional obstacle that results from the original failed roll. For example, let’s say that the PCs are trying to bully their way past a guard using the Intimidate skill. If they fail the roll, rather than just saying “He doesn’t seem intimidated”, escalate it a little. “He seems offended rather than frightened, and starts looking toward the other guards nearby. You have the feeling that, if you don’t calm him down soon, he’s going to bring them into the argument and possibly try to arrest you.” This method of escalation will keep the PCs lives interesting, and it may have the side effect of discouraging skill checks for the sake of skill checks.

What I mean by that is, if everyone in your group always makes an Arcana check when you call for a check from one person, escalate the result of the failure for each failure, even if some of them succeeded. Maybe the successes grant some good information, but each failure grants some bad information, or makes existing bad information worse. make it clear to the PCs that not all of their information is good, and that everyone’s arguing and disagreeing about what’s true and what’s not. This might help to reign in players who make untrained checks all the time simply because there’s no reason not to, and it might also lead to some very interesting situations that make the game more fun.

Another thing that Mouse Guard does is it allows a PC to succeed despite a failed roll, but at a cost. To continue the example of the guard from above, if the PCs fail to intimidate the guard, you can choose to have the guard be intimidated anyway, but things don’t necessarily go as planned. Maybe the guard lets them pass, but he tells his buddies afterward and there’s a much heavier guard presence looking for the PCs a little later on. Again, make it clear that they’ve succeeded despite a failed roll, and that even though they got what they wanted, they’ll pay for it somehow, either immediately or in the future. This method has the advantage of allowing you to bank on a specific skill roll being made, and to not have to plan for failure; you just have to plan for the added complication that comes with a conditional success.

One final method you can use is to introduce stakes to skill rolls. This isn’t specifically mentioned in Mouse Guard in relation to individual skill rolls, but it is mentioned in the conflict rules, and can be applied to skill rolls. The idea is that, when a skill roll is called for, you ask the player making the roll what he or she stands to gain from the roll. What is the goal, the roll’s end result if there is a success? Then, you tell the players what the result will be if they fail. Let them know what the stakes are. You don’t have to be completely clear; goals can be vague and open to interpretation. This is really just another way to introduce twists, except that you’re introducing them before the roll is made. Try to shy away from setting mechanical effects as goals; go with the story instead. This method is best reserved for really important rolls; you shouldn’t set stakes for a roll to search a room for treasure, but feel free to set stakes for a roll made to convince the duke that you’re not a traitor.

Next up: Failure conditions in combat encounters!

I just can’t help meddling with game mechanics, and Castle Ravenloft is just so modular that it presents a lot of opportunities to meddle. You’ve likely already seen my Rust Monster for the game, if you’re a regular reader. Well, here’s a whole adventure, starring said Rust Monster.

First, a caveat or two. This is not a final version of this adventure. I’ve playtested it once, and what I’m posting here is a direct result of that playtest. You may notice that the Rust Monster contained in this adventure is pretty different from the one linked above; that’s deliberate. The original version just didn’t work in play; its AC and hit points were a little too high, and it just didn’t engage heroes often enough. Worse, it never really brought its most feared power (the ability to eat your gear) to bear. I’ve changed that (hopefully). The adventure has also been modified slightly from its original form. Originally I had item drops keyed to named tiles, but they were happening too often. I did a quick count of tiles and found that there were just as many named as unnamed tiles, making the chance of an item drop 50%. Too high. I instead keyed item drops to tiles with white triangles; there are fewer of these than those with black triangles, so the drop rate goes down to around 40%, which is a little more acceptable.

I also increased the goal requirements to escaping with all six lost relics rather than just four, for a couple of reasons. First, getting four took me about twenty minutes, which is way too short a time. Some of this was luck and some of it was because of the aforementioned drop rate, but I don’t want the game to be won that quickly (and I did win). Second, because of all the item drops, this is an item-rich adventure. You’re probably going to have quite a few on you, including the lost relics, so if that Rust Monster eats something, you should have plenty of stuff to throw at it that isn’t a lost relic. Again, playtesting may change this. I’ll have to see. The beauty of this game is that I can playtest it all by my lonesome.

Anyway, here’s the adventure, Lost Relics.

In honor of the immanent (and, in some cases, already past) release of Castle Ravenloft, I thought I’d try my hand at creating a villain for the game. This one’s a classic. I should mention that none of the artwork is mine; I cribbed the template for the villain card from Ignazio Carrao on BoardGameGeek, and the rust monster image is pulled off of Google, from Wizards.com. The mechanics, on the other hand, are mine. Enjoy.

Here’s a departure: this house rule isn’t for 4e. It isn’t even for D&D, or any other roleplaying game. It’s for Magic: The Gathering. See, I like Magic quite a lot, but I have one major gripe with the game: you can get royally screwed on mana, through the simple luck of the draw. This works both ways; sometimes you wind up with too much mana and not enough cards, but more often I feel like you end up with a bunch of great cards to play, but not enough mana for any of them. Meanwhile, your opponent is beating the crap out of you with 1/1 creatures, because you don’t have anything to block with.

So, here’s a simple house rule to help circumvent the problem of not enough mana. Once per turn, you can burn any non-land card for mana. When you do this, you get mana equal to what you’d have to pay in mana to cast the spell. For example, if you were to burn “Mnemonic Wall”, which costs 1 blue and 4 colorless, that’s what you’d get: 1 blue and 4 colorless. If you burn “Disentomb”, which costs 1 black, you get 1 black. When you burn a card, it goes into your graveyard without having any of its effects. Any unused mana from the card that you burn causes mana burn as normal, and goes away at the end of your turn. Burning a card for mana is considered a sorcery, so you can only do it during your main phase.

There, easy-peasy. I’m aware that this isn’t a perfect solution; it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem of getting too much mana, for example. I’m also aware that it’s entirely possible that someone has thought of this before; if that’s the case, mea culpa. Although I like Magic, I’m hardly what you’d call a devoted fan of the game; I’m a casual player. I play mostly with themed, pre-built decks (I’m not very good at building my own decks), and I don’t do tournaments. That said, I think I’m going to try this out the next time I play the game. Hopefully it’ll solve my biggest problem with the game.

There is a new session report up.

Overall, the game went really well. I tried a few things that I’ve mentioned on this blog. The first encounter included a variant of wild magic rules; unfortunately, I forgot to utilize them as often as they should have been, but when I did it was interesting. During that encounter, one I got a chance to make use of two house rules that I’ve posted on the site.

First, when Chance was dominated, he made use of grit. It worked pretty well. The dominated condition still affected him somewhat, and he deliberated over the choice for a little while before deciding to do it; he was only going to be dominated for a turn, after all, and damage equal to your healing surge value is a lot in the middle of a fight. I think that, if it had been a save ends effect, the decision might have been easier, but still not a foregone conclusion.

Then, when Kraygin was dropped to negatives, he made a last-ditch effort. This one I’m still not entirely sold on. I think it might have been more dramatically interesting if he had dropped in the middle of the fight rather than being effectively staggered, running over to the rest of the party, and getting some healing. I think that, if you’re going to get that extra turn to save your bacon, the urge to heal yourself (or even for others to heal you) is pretty strong. I might balance this by making any healing you get during a last-ditch effort temporary hit points instead of real ones, but I’m not entirely sure.

Finally, I ran a combat that was partially a series of skill challenges, used for pacing. This worked really well, prodding me to change the dragons’ tactics as the fight progressed, making for a more dynamic and interesting encounter. I don’t think I’ll use this technique a lot, but certainly it has some merit when you’re doing a solo encounter that might not otherwise be all that interesting.

I’m a big fan of the fey. There, I said it. I like faeries. I like the way the fey are portrayed in games like Changeling: The Dreaming or Deliria, or in books like The Dresden Files series. I like fey, but I like my fey vicious, unpredictable, and alien. It should be no surprise, then, that I quite like what 4th Edition has done with fey. They have moved from being somewhat trivial window-dressing to being a significant part of what makes the world of D&D dangerous, mysterious, and fantastical.

So, what do I mean by making your fey “more fey”? Traditionally, fey have a number of traits that aren’t really translated into D&D to my satisfaction. First, fey are often portrayed as being vulnerable to iron (or cold iron), and resistant to the magic of mortals. Second, there’s the whole idea of the fey bargain. Some of this is captured in the fey pact warlock, but what about fey bargains that don’t involve pledging your eternal servitude in exchange for power? I like the idea of fey bargains that are binding to both parties. Further, fey are often portrayed as being tricky, duplicitous, and deceptive but, paradoxically, there is often a prohibition on lying placed on these creatures. The idea is that a fey creature cannot actually lie to you, but that doesn’t mean you should take what he, she, or it says at face value. Lies of omission are, of course, fair game, as are misleading turns of phrase.

So, since I like to follow the mantra of “show, don’t tell”, here’s something I whipped up. A note to players in my game: this is an NPC that you have met. The fact that I statted her up as a monster doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll fight her (I frequently stat up major NPCs, even if I don’t plan on any encounters with them any time soon). Also, if you do wind up fighting her, you shouldn’t necessarily expect her to have these stats. They’re subject to change. So, if you want to read it, go ahead. If you want to remain spoiler-free, stop reading now.

There’s discussion going on about certain conditions in D&D. I gather that a lot of this discussion happened on Twitter, and it’s being continued in the blogosphere. The premise of this discussion seems to be that two conditions in particular–dominated and stunned–are responsible for too much down time at the table. I have to say I agree. A few sessions ago my players ran afoul of some Far Realm monstrosities, including a mated pair of carrion crawlers (I know; who wants to think of carrion crawlers mating?). Carrion crawlers have a particularly nasty at-will power. It does very little damage (1d4+5, for a level 7 creature), but but it imposes a three step condition that starts with ongoing damage and slowed and ends with being stunned. Worse still, PCs take a -5 penalty to the saving throw, meaning they could wind up stunned for a very long time. This was actually the case for my fighter, who was hit by this attack in the first round and stunned three rounds in. He never recovered (at least, not during the encounter), so he basically sat the whole fight out. Not much fun, right?

However, I don’t like the idea of changing the way the stunned condition (or the dominated condition) works. I think these conditions work well in the PCs’ hands, and I don’t like the idea of applying conditions differently to PCs than I do to monsters. I feel it would undermine the PCs’ victories somewhat, to know that they were not really playing on a level playing field. Instead, I thought I’d give the PCs a power that is similar to what I often give my solo monsters.

Grit
You summon your inner reserves of sheer determination to shake off a debilitating condition, lessening its effect on you.
At-Will
Immediate Interrupt * Personal
Trigger: You are affected by the stunned or dominated condition.
Effect: You take damage equal to your healing surge value. This damage cannot be reduced in any way. In addition, if you are stunned, you are instead dazed for the same duration. If you are dominated, you are dazed for the same duration and must attack an ally of your choice on your next turn; you are marked by that ally for the duration of the daze.

Sarah Darkmagic, presumably of the New Hampshire Darkmagics, has an interesting self-review of a very cool encounter she’s creating for a delve. In this article, she’s trying to figure out how the PCs would wrest control of a bunch of hostile flying sawblades controlled by a gnomish psion of some sort. Her thoughts are that it would require a check using Arcana, Religion, or Psionics. The trouble is, there is no Psionics skill. She effectively hand-waves this by simply saying that anyone who is a member of a psionic class has this skill. At first, I had the knee-jerk reaction of, “Hey, you can’t do that! That’s not in The Rules!” But then I actually sat back and thought about it for a second. Here’s what I came up with.

Aptitudes
It’s fairly well known that the D&D skill list, while it covers most things you’d want to do in most encounters, doesn’t cover everything. There are a number of mundane skills not covered, as well as a number of very nitch or situational skills that are absent. This is fine most of the time; most of the time you will not need these skills, so it doesn’t make sense for your players to have to spend their precious skill training on skills that are unlikely to be used more than once or twice.

But what happens when you do need those skills? What happens when the PCs are trying to land a rapidly descending airship after the pilot has been thrown overboard? What happens when the PCs run out of arrows in the wilderness, and they must make their own? There is no Pilot skill, nor is there a Fletcher skill, so what do you do? You could just hand-wave these things, or you could try to shoe-horn a somewhat related skill into that role. Perhaps Athletics is used to turn the wheel of the ship, or Nature is used to find the right kind of wood and form it into the shaft of an arrow. But neither of these solutions is completely satisfying.

That’s where aptitudes come in. Aptitudes function much like skills: you are either trained or untrained in an aptitude (gaining the +5 bonus or not), you get a bonus from a relevant ability score, and you get a bonus equal to half your level. They are used the same way, as well: when an aptitude check is called for, you roll a d20, add your aptitude bonus, and compare the result to a DC. Aptitudes can be used in combat encounters, and they can be used in skill challenges.

There are a few differences, however, between aptitudes and skills. First, there is not a limited number of aptitudes. Aptitudes are very specific, and may apply only to a single encounter during an entire campaign. There is not a set list of aptitudes as there is with skills; the DM (or players) create an aptitude when the situation warrants it. Most importantly, you do not spend skill training slots to train in aptitudes. Instead, you are considered to be trained in an aptitude when it makes sense for you to be so.

Let’s look at our two examples above, the crashing airship and the arrows in the wilderness. The players ask you, “What skill should I roll to try to pilot this ship?” You think for a moment and say, “Roll a Pilot check.” They look back at you, confused. That’s not on their character sheets. How do they know whether or not they’re trained? Take a look at your players. The artificer is well versed in creating all manner of magical things, and may have knowledge of airships and how to use them. He doesn’t have anything on his character sheet or in his backstory that contradicts this, so you ask him if he’d like to be trained in Pilot. He says, vehemently, “Yes”, and you ask him to explain why he’s trained. Maybe the two of you do a little flashback sequence to explain it. Now he can contribute to the skill challenge to land the ship in a meaningful way, and you’ve created a little bit of background for him together. The wizard, on the other hand, established in his backstory that she grew up as a hand on an airship, and even apprenticed to the captain for a time. It would make perfect sense for her to be trained in Pilot, so you simply tell her that she is. You tell them that Pilot is Wisdom-based, and ask them to calculate their bonuses.

While tromping through the woods, the party needs to make more arrows. It would make sense for a Nature or Perception check to allow players to find the base materials: good, supple but strong wood, stone or metal for the arrowheads, feathers for the fletching. But to assemble the arrows, neither skill makes perfect sense. Instead, you call for a Fletcher skill. The ranger in the party is an archer, so it would make quite a bit of sense for her to be trained in Fletcher. The fighter, on the other hand, knows a lot about weapons, carries a bow as a backup weapon, and spends a good deal of time whittling during short rests. You ask him if it would make sense for his character to know how to make arrows, and he says, “Sure. My character is a master with wood-carving.” He’s trained, too. You tell them that Fletcher is Dexterity-based, and let them make rolls.

The beauty of this system is that it allows you to call for non-standard, very specific skill checks, does not require your players to spend mechanical effort on being trained in these very specific skills, and it can even generate some background or flavor on the fly.