Augury

We started playing an Iron Heroes game this week. Had a bit of a rough start as far as getting everyone to get their characters rolled up and such, but eventually we got things rolling and had some fun. I’m pretty excited about this game and hope it turns out well.

I’ve been looking for a bit of art to try and represent my character. I’ve got in mind a sort of germanic looking Ranger — I was thinking of using a screencap of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings … But, well, there’s just too much other stuff surrounding Aragorn for me to want to play a character presented as him.

Right now I’m thinking I will photoshop this image into something I like…

As for crunch…

Human / Hunter 1
Traits:
Intelligence (Mental)
Forest Born - Ghost in the Green (Background)

28 point buy (Original array in parentheses)
Str: 12 (14)
Dex: 14 (14)
Con: 12 (12)
Int: 16 (14)
Wis: 12 (12)
Cha: 10 (10)

HP: 9 (4+1d4+1)
AC: 15 (Light Shield +2, Dex +2, BDB +1)
Studded Leather, 1d3 DR

Fort: 2 (Class +1, Con +1)
Ref: 3 (Class +1, Dex +2)
Will: 2 (Class +1, Wis +1)

Initiative +2 (Dex +2)
Speed 30′

Melee +4 (Class +1, Str +1, Int +3)
Ranged (Class +1, Dex +2, Int +3)
Grapple (Class +1, Str +1, Int +3)

Scimitar +4 attack, 1d6+1(Str) damage, 18-20×2
Dagger +4 attack, 1d4+1(Str) damage, 19×20x2, 10′ inc, Small
Longbow +4, 1d8 damage, 20×3, 100′ inc

Skills: 6+3(Int) = 9 ranks. 9×4 (1st level) = 36 ranks

Groups:
Athletics (Climb, Jump, Swim) 4 ranks. (+5/+5/+5)
Perception (Listen, Search, Sense Motive, Spot) 4 ranks. (+5/+7/+5/+5)
Stealth (Hide, Move Silently) 4 ranks. (+6/+6)
Wilderness Lore (Handle Animal, Ride, Survival, Use Rope) 4 ranks. (+4/+6/+5/+6)

Miscellaneous
Heal 4 ranks (+5)
Knowledge(Nature) 1 rank (+4)
Balance 2 ranks (+4)
Escape Artist 2 ranks (+4)
Tumble 2 ranks (+4)
Bluff 1 rank (+1)
Diplomacy 1 rank (+1)
Gather Information 1 rank (+1)
Intimidate 1 rank (+1)
Bluff 1 rank (+1)
Disguise 4 ranks (+4)

Feats:
1st: Tactics of the Mind (1)
Human Bonus: War Leader (1)

Class:
1st: Tactical Pool, Hunter’s Eye, Terrain Advantage

As I mentioned in my previous post about WoAdWriMo, I’ve been thinking about starting up my D&D campaign again in a few months, and so am starting to think a little bit about GMing topics again. Add on to that the fact that our group just started up another new campaign (Yeah…) and it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.

One of the other guys in our group has begun his new campaign in DragonStar, which I previously talked about here, and it’s going pretty well. I’m still kind of worried about how it’s going to work out beyond these few initial steps — We’re drawing from about 20 books total, including both magic and technology, and in essence there is a counter to everything. Fantasy D&D itself is already quite problematic with the obscene number of spells in unforeseen combinations it has, adding technology into the mix just makes it that much more troublesome. Anyway, I’m starting to drift.

Playing this campaign has gotten me started on thinking about GMing voice as an important factor in the game. Now — I basically take it for granted here that “the best” campaign is one in which the GM is doing as little as possible, meaning the players are so engaged with their characters and the campaign world that they don’t need pushing and prodding. But getting to that gaming nirvana is no easy matter, and one certainly can’t expect to start there. The degree of a push any game needs to get rolling, though, is up to the players, how well everyone interacts and plays off of each other, how much each person’s creative vision overlaps with everyone else’s, and so on.

One of the things I was noticing while playing in the DragonStar campaign is how much a bad GMing “voice” so to speak, can hinder involvement in the game. Now for the purpose of structuring my thoughts I’m dividing up “voice” into three categories:

- Narrative style
- Vocabulary
- Demeanor

Narrative style refers to basically how you tell your story. How much description do you use, do you “act” out the lines NPCs say or merely describe them? My general feeling here is that if you’re running a homebrew campaign setting you definitely need to step up the description. Now I’m not advocating writing up a block of text such as you might see in a prewritten adventure (unless doing so will help you remember the description better on the fly), since nobody really listens to the block of text. The idea here is that if someone asks a question about the environment you need to be able to field that question.

On a similar note, when you are using NPCs by and large I think it’s much more immersive to “act” as the NPC rather than to describe what they say or do. I know I personally have trouble doing this, as I’m not particularly dramatically inclined. On the other hand, it really does improve the game for the players to feel like they are interacting directly with the NPC rather than through this distancing membrane. Discretion, of course, is required, as not every NPC should be so readily accessible. For mysterious characters, distancing will add to their mystique.

Vocabulary is raw word choice, and when done wrong is probably the single easiest thing that can undermine your “GM Voice” authority. I know I personally tend to use stopgaps such as “Uh”, “Um”, and “Like” too much. Controlling this tendency is something I’m always struggling with. My friend running the DragonStar campaign has a similar problem with “Basically” — The word, when used frequently in descriptions, conveys a sense of hemming-and-hawing, a sense of uncertainty that is a stumbling block for immersion.

Demeanor I’m throwing in here to indicate what I consider intangibles or extras that can affect your game. If you’re such a nice guy that you will refuse to kill off characters this will definitely affect how players interact with your campaign. The alternative is being ruthless, which can encourage competitive “Beat the GM” play.

All of these categories are rather fluid and flow into each other. For example, I think a GM’s ability to do, say, comic character voices falls into a general sense of his demeanor — But it also influences the descriptiveness of the game when used with the right intent. In the latter case this becomes acting, which is effectively character description by demonstration. Despite that the categories are fluid, in thinking about how I want to conduct my campaign in the future I find them somewhat useful to think about as they give me general areas I can focus in on and improve.

It’s been awhile since I’ve had time to sit down and write anything substantial for this blog and longer still since I’ve managed to do anything substantial regarding D&D. Awhile ago over at Treasure Tables Martin made a post spotlighting a little venture called WoAdWriMo or Worldwide Adventure Writing Month. It’s a simple basic idea riffing off of the popularity of NaNoWriMo, with the goal of writing a 32 page adventure during the month of June.

I’ve been contemplating starting up my campaign again, or at least moving into a pre-game planning stage so I’m ready to start it up in a few months, and the WoAdWriMo project offers me a convenient way to multitask my efforts at planning for my campaign as well as making something that other people might find useful. Of course how useful anyone might find what I do will vary — I see this little venture as a way to get back into my campaign setting, so whether someone else can make use of it will depend on how much room their game has to drop in a small-to-moderate sized slice of another game setting.

I’m pretty sure what I’m going to be doing is running the campaign, when it starts up again, out of the Iron Heroes rulebook. I like a lot of things Iron Heroes does — Plenty of skillpoints to balance out characters, dynamic combat utilizing the token system, armor as damage reduction, no dependency on magic items to balance the game… It’s much closer to what I really want for my campaign setting than core D&D is. That’s not to say I don’t have reservations about Iron Heroes — It’s a lot of extra effort to learn the new rules and make new NPCs in that, not to mention the extra bookkeeping that running any classed-NPCs would entail (regarding tokens, etc). Still, I think it’s a lot simpler to just run out of one book and keep the houseruling to a minimum, which is really the reason why I stopped the campaign in the first place last time. Rewriting D&D’s entire Magic system is just too drastic a change to spring on the other guys. In any case, since none of the Iron Heroes classes have magical abilities this really makes my life easier, since I can reserve Magic as the domain of powerful NPCs.

Back to WoAdWriMo — I’ve got a pretty good idea what I want to do for this. Starting up the campaign again with the Iron Heroes rules means either recreating or making new characters (I’m leaning towards insisting on new ones, but some could still work). That also means I need to have a basic adventure to introduce the players into the gameworld and the factions of the gameworld. I think I’ve got a pretty good idea of how to do this too — I was listening to one of the D&D Podcasts and Dave Noonan and Mike Mearls were talking about adventure ideas. The one I really like is the idea of hooking the players into the service of one NPC who then goes missing and everyone in the city eventually comes calling for him, leaving the PCs to deal with the trouble left in his wake. Although it’s pretty simple in concept, what I really like is how it introduces major factions to the PCs and also leaves conflict resolution entirely up to them. I think I’ll be lucky if I can keep this thing even remotely close to 30 pages.