Sly Flourish has a great post/discussion going on right now about providing players meaningful choices. I agree completely with everything said there.

I think that a lot of DMs, particularly new DMs, are extremely daunted by the prospect of the players being able to steer the narrative; this often results in very linear storylines in their games. This is compounded by the fact that D&D requires a lot of preparation to really work well, particularly if you have a lot of combat in your game.

I think the thing to realize here is that in D&D, more so now than in the past, mechanics can be pretty effectively divorced from narrative flavor with little effort, and re-skinned quite easily. Something you can do to make providing choice easier on you as a DM is to construct your encounters in such a way that they can be easily re-skinned. Get the encounters to work the way you want them to mechanically, then come up with window-dressing in various flavors for various eventualities. Then, during the encounter, focus on really describing the window-dressing and bringing it to life; if you do it right, the players won’t realize that those fire elementals are really the bugbears that they would have fought had they made a different choice a few encounters back. It also helps to be able to re-arrange the order of your encounters.

This, of course, is even easier to do with skill challenges and other less mechanically-involved encounters. In my first 4e session, I had a skill challenge planned where the players would have to negotiate their way past a bunch of thugs to talk to their boss. The players opted not to do that, instead going to talk to a nearby influential merchant to see if he could get them in to see the boss. I thought this was a great idea, so rather than say, “No, he really can’t do that for you”, I just used the negotiation skill challenge I had planned already and tweaked the flavor to suit the situation. Easy peasy.

The DMG 2 introduced the concept of terrain powers. These are pretty much what they sound like: they’re effectively environmental effects structured as powers, to make them easier and clearer to use. I like the system quite a bit, and actually utilized some props to encourage their use in my last session. To encourage the players to use these powers, I printed out power cards for them. This allowed them to see just what a terrain power could do before they used it, and allowed them to weigh cost versus reward. I tended to err on the potent side for terrain powers (since they can be used by either side), but I also tended to make them limited in their ability to be used; that is, most were single-use, while others had a limited-use mechanic.

Overall, it worked fairly well; the players used the terrain powers, and they used them to very good effect. There was one thing missing, though: my monsters never really used the terrain powers, because I forgot to. While the players had a handy visual reminder of what they could do with the terrain, I had neglected to give myself one; as the DM, I had a lot of powers to keep track of, and without something to remind me that they were there, I tended to focus on what my monsters could do by themselves. There is, I realized, a very simple solution to this problem: put the terrain powers right in the monster stat blocks.

Thanks to the Monster Builder, it’s easy enough to modify monster stat blocks and to copy terrain powers from one monster to another. Having terrain powers in the monster stat blocks acts as a handy reminder of what tactics are available to your monsters, as well as a good reference for how powerful those powers are in relation to their own. You can also use this technique to remind yourself of specific tactical tendencies of monsters. If you’re running a combat with a lot of different terrain powers, it’s easy enough to only put the powers in a given stat block that that monster is likely to use. Is there a mounted ballista that does less damage than your artillery monster’s own weapon? It doesn’t need that power. The skirmisher or brute might, though, until the PCs close the distance. Zombies aren’t likely to utilize the environment a lot, but orcs and goblins probably will, and you can bet your bottom dollar that kobolds will.

Here is a very simple example, an encounter from my last session that I modified after the fact. I encourage you to experiment with this technique, and I also encourage you to share your results and modifications here on this blog.

The Newbie DM has a really nice post up about an analog initiative tracker that I like. It’s good for heroic tier games, but would require some modification for paragon and epic.

This has prompted me to share what I do for initiative tracking. I’ve actually gone through three different methods, and I’ll share them all here.

Method one was extremely old-school. I would print out this initiative tracker and hand-write characters and monsters in their initiative slots as initiative was rolled. It was time-consuming, especially when someone moved around in the initiative order via a delay or readied action. To save time, I’d often pre-roll monster initiative and write them in before the game, but that delay/ready problem was still a factor. It does allow you to track conditions and hit points, but things got overlooked a lot, and I ran into problems when two or three combatants had the same initiative count.

This prompted me to move to method 2. In method 2, I used a magnetic whiteboard and a number of magnetic index card-style tiles (all of them dry-erasable) to track initiative. Each PC, monster (or group of monsters), and trap/hazard would have its own card, and the cards would be arranged in initiative order as it was rolled. Hit points and conditions could be written directly on the cards, and they could be moved as initiative counts changed. There were a couple of problems with this method. First, because it was a dry-erasable product, text often got smudged and erased. Second, without an easel, there really was no easy way to prop it up so the whole group could see it, and it kept falling down. Third, I had to dragoon one of my players into being responsible for it, because it was too distracting for me while I was trying to run the combat. Below, you can see what it looked like in play.

So, because of the above issues, I only used this method for a few games before adopting a new one. I cannot, for the life of me, remember where I heard about this method, as it took a while for me to adopt it, so unfortunately I can’t give credit where it’s due. Suffice it to say, I like it quite a lot. It does take some prep before-hand, but now that the bulk of it is done, future games should be easier to prep for than the first time I used this method (I’ve only used it once, so far). So, what is it? First, I created this file, and another file like it with the monsters I was using. Then I printed everything out on card stock (a DM’s best friend, by the way), cut it all out, and folded everything along the center line. I used a bead box to organize my condition cards. During the game, as initiative is rolled, I drape these cards over my DM screen with the pictures facing the PCs and the info facing me. If someone changes their order in the initiative, I can just pick up a card and drop it in the right place. If someone applies a condition to someone else, I drape on of the condition cards over that combatant’s initiative card until the condition no longer applies. It works great, gives the players a nice visual representation of all of the combatants, and gives me a lot of useful information. It’s also easy to use in play, and doesn’t take up a lot of space or time at the table. Again, you can see it in action below.

So how do you track initiative?

So, it’s no secret by now that I’m running a D&D game. I believe I’ve also mentioned that I’m taking a short break from DMing to allow a friend of mine to step into the DM’s seat, and so that I can just sit back and be a player. What I may or may not have mentioned (I’m honestly not sure) is that both of these games are happening in the same world, at roughly the same time.

In the game I’m running, the players are members of an organization called the Queen’s Wardens (or just “the Wardens” for short): sort of a professional adventurer’s guild that receives funding, authority, and special dispensations from the crown in return for completing missions for the crown when necessary. During their first adventure they took on a somewhat modified version of Keep on the Shadowfell, and during the second adventure they quelled a plague in Fallcrest.

Now we’re at the beginning of my friend’s adventure, and it’s a little bit different. We’re all members of relatively primitive tribes, or we’re people who live in the surrounding area. The game takes place in a remote part of the continent, relatively far from the Demesne (where my game is set), and not nearly as advanced, either technologically or magically. We’ve all been called together for an Allthing, a gathering of all the various clans and tribes to deal with a problem.

For those who are playing in the game right now, spoilers follow. I’ve written said spoilers in white, so you’ll have to highlight the text to read it.

The problem that we’re dealing with is an invading army, and that invading army has designs on the Demesne. Our characters just happen to occupy territory between the invaders and their real goal. In all likelihood, our characters will win some small victory but will not repel the invaders on their own. The invaders will likely march through our tribelands and attack the Demesne. And here’s the cool part: that’s going to happen in my campaign, when we go back to it.

Not only that, but I’d really like to have the characters in my campaign hear about, or even meet, some of the characters from my friend’s campaign. I’m also toying with doing a short series of adventures where the players play people on the other side, sleeper agents sent by the invading army to pave the way for their invasion.

What’s nice about this is that it underlines something that I’ve been trying to make clear since day one: this is not my world and my game, it’s ours. I’d like to encourage my other players to run their own mini-campaigns in the world. I’d also like them to help flesh the world out in other ways, by coming up with places that their characters are from, or people they know, or organizations that they are or were a part of. I really like the cooperative world-building aspect of RPGs, and I’m hoping that more of this kind of thing happens in the future.

I went to play D&D Encounters last night, which was a blast. I played a human monk with a heavy emphasis on control, and I think it worked out pretty well. I started strong, had a nova round in which I inflicted almost 50 damage spread amongst three enemies (first level character, by the way), and then proceeded to miss for the rest of the fight. It was fun anyway.

At any rate, after the game I got into a lively conversation with the DM about the huge number of races available in D&D. He was of the opinion that, with all these fantastical races available (he pointed to the tiefling and the dragonborn in particular, but I think there are others to which the label applies), it somehow dilutes the fantasy of the whole experience, making everything else a little less fantastical by comparison. After all, he said, if you can walk down the streets of Waterdeep and see a dragon-man walking with a drow, then why is it exciting when you meet dragon-men or drow out in a dungeon somewhere? They’re just regular people, after all.

I can definitely see where he’s coming from, and I think it’s a perfectly valid point of view. He likes his fantasy a little more traditional, even going so far as to say, “If it wasn’t in the Fellowship, you can’t play it in my game” (though he bends the rules a little for races that are at least passingly similar to Fellowship races, like gnomes and half-elves). I respect his stance and, were I to play in one of his games, I’d respect it with the character I chose to play.

I do not, however, agree with his opinion. I take more of a shotgun approach with race selection. I tell my players that every race is available, and I see what sticks. I find that, once everyone’s made a selection, I’m left with a number of characters for which rich backstory can be crafted, and for whom race can become an important story consideration.

I should mention at this point that, in the game I’m DMing, there’s not one human in the group. Elf, half-elf, dragonborn, tiefling, and warforged; that’s my party. And I like it that way; I’ll tell you why.

For the elf and the half-elf, race is not really that much of a factor, their races being fairly common. The dragonborn is big and intimating, and I like to imagine that a large part of that is because he’s a guy who looks a lot like a dragon and, in my setting, those guys aren’t that common in most civilized areas. So he turns some heads.

Tieflings are a little more common, having been in control of the Demesne’s territory a hundred years or so before it was founded, and they are not well-loved (though not hated, either). My tiefling player plays a proud, ambitious scion of an ancient noble house, and he’s determined to see his family and, by extension, the entire tiefling race returned to their place of power in the world.

The warforged thought he was, until recently, the only one of his kind in existence. He was created by an old hermit to act as a son and legacy in the world, and when the hermit died, he went out to find his place in the world. When he ran into another warforged who called him “brother”, that caused him to take notice. When he fought a mind flayer with warforged thralls, he noticed even more.

I think the thing that I like the most about all these available races is the same thing that I like about any instance in which player choice is expanded. The more choice a player has when making his character, the better he’s able to express the idea in his head in mechanical and story terms. If that means I have to find a place for a race that I hadn’t thought of before, I’m more than willing to do that; after all, it’s not my world. It’s ours.

I agree with nearly everything in this post, save one point: that every encounter in your adventure has to further the plot of the adventure.

I’ll clarify my position by saying that every encounter should have a specific purpose, but I don’t think that that purpose must be attached to the current plot. After all, if every encounter has something to do with what’s currently on the to-do list, you run the risk of making it seem like the entire world revolves around the PCs (which it does, but it shouldn’t seem like it). Sometimes it’s good to pepper your adventures with seemingly random encounters in order to add verisimilitude to your game world; sometimes, in a dangerous fantasy world, the owlbear is just hungry.

But, as I said, every encounter should have a purpose. The lion’s share should be tied to the current plot, and should be furthering it in some way. A few, though–probably no more that two or three in an adventure with 15 encounters–should not. They can be there to add color to the world, to introduce an enemy faction that you plan to use later, or they could be a form of the spaghetti method: throw a few different encounters at the PCs and see which one “sticks”; that is, which one do they latch on to the most? That’s a plot hook for future use.

I’ll clarify one further point: when I use the term ‘encounter’, I don’t mean ‘fight’. In D&D, there’s a tendency, I think, to treat every encounter as a fight, but it’s often more satisfying to vary things somewhat. Social encounters are encounters, too, as are periods of investigation or even research, and even long-distance travel through dangerous terrain, like a desert or mountain range, can be handled as an encounter in 4E. Also, if all 15 of those encounters are fights, it’s going to take you a long time to get through your adventure. Social encounters, travel encounters, and other non-combat encounters tend to be quicker to run, and can be used to build tension and world color just as effectively–if not, in some cases, more so–than combat encounters.

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.

The most recent session report is up. The encounters in this session got me thinking about ways that you can use encounters.

The first encounter of the session was just a fairly straightforward fight against some gnolls. It was fun, but nothing too out of the ordinary. The second encounter was where things got interesting. I’ll set it up for you.

The players were tasked by some druids to go and investigate a clearing that was imbued with an otherworldly presence. They got to the clearing, which contained a circle of standing stones, and saw that there was a large glyph on the ground in the center of the stone circle. Shortly afterward, some floating balls of light descended and attacked.

Ok, so the glyph was a prophecy mark, an idea that I lifted from Eberron. The balls of light were custom creatures called ‘prophecy motes’, and they didn’t so much attack as try to make you understand the prophecy, forcibly. The motes, themselves, were minions, and they had a ranged attack that did some psychic damage and dazed the target. The trick was that, if you killed a prophecy mote, two more appeared on their next turn. I had set this combat up so that a straightforward fight would not win the day; there was simply no way to beat it through strength of arms alone. In a way, the encounter was kind of a puzzle, and the players figured this out very quickly.

As soon as they saw additional prophecy motes appear, they decided to investigate the prophecy mark. I hadn’t anticipated how closely they would investigate it (they tried to read it), but I had enough prepared that I was able to easily improvise. And this really highlights one of the most useful rules of DMing that I’ve learned: whenever possible, say ‘yes’.

‘Can I read the prophecy mark?’ Sure. Here’s what you manage to decipher. And that allowed me to drop clues as to the nature of the mark. The players soon figured out that they were supposed to enter the mark, which they did, thus succeeding the encounter. It was a lot of fun.

The third and final encounter was actually two planned encounters that wound up happening concurrently because of the way the players planned out their ambush. They were trying to catch an assassin in the act of killing the Lord Warden of Fallcrest, and they all hid around the manor and laid in wait. It was a tough encounter–three elites and a solo, all of them higher level than the PCs–but I never really intended for it to continue until one side was dead. In this encounter, both sides had very specific goals. The PCs wanted to catch the assassin and save the Lord Warden, while the bad guys wanted to assassinate their target and escape. It became a very tense affair, with the fighter holding off the three elites downstairs (fade assassins, custom creatures modeled after the myrdraal of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series) and everyone else focusing on the assassin and his target.

In the end, the assassin succeeded and escaped, and this highlights something else: recurring villains. I love recurring villains, mainly because I feel that players will get attached to their dislike of those villains. You don’t want every villain to be a recurring villain; that makes the players feel like they can’t seem to stop anyone for good. But if you do want a recurring villain, you can do a lot worse than use a solo and have him escape when he’s bloodied. If you’re going to do that, make sure he’s got an escape contingency. My assassin (Judgement, a warforged former avenger of the Raven Queen) had a long-range teleport ability that would take him 20 squares, provided he ended in an area of darkness or dim light. Because it was dark outside, he was able to teleport out the window and escape precisely when I needed him to. The reaction I got from my players was priceless; I can tell they really have a vested interest in stopping Judgement now, or at least confronting him again.