Back-story is your friend

I had a great moment last weekend that, at least for me, proved the maxim that "A solid backstory is more useful than a million stats."

We only had two encounters:  One, a random encounter while journeying... and the dice (well, an online random encounter generator) selected... a young green dragon... I quickly decided his motive was simply hunger, quickly read his stats, and we're fighting... and I'm reviewing stats.... and we're fighting... and I'm looking over abilities... and we're fighting, and I'm trying to decide if my players creative solution might work... back and forth, back and forth.

The second encounter was the one I "planned."  And by planned, I mean I knew my players would be heading to talk to NPC-Z, to get information about Macguffin-X*... I wanted to use the lego bride minifigure, and I wanted an NPC that was probably friendly, but had a weird twist and could go badly for the players... I remembered another bride (Zack Smith's Hollow Bride), so I stole a lot of the idea from that, and decided that NPC-Z had been replaced by an interdimensional traveler who really really wanted to socialize and make friends, but who had a really nasty temper and would freak out and revert to her natural form (the hollow bride) if the players offended her.

The face of evil-ish.

So of course the rogue looked up her dress.  And got caught.  And couldn't bluff her way out of it.

Battle ensued.    

There were 7 creatures involved in this battle, and figuring out what they'd do and why, was about 100x easier than the "simple" dragon battle.  And in both situations I spent about 30 seconds looking over their stats, but in the latter, I knew why the monster was doing what she was doing, and that meant the stats were secondary to the story I wanted to tell, and I worked less.

So note for self:  Next random encounter, spend an extra minute and make up a quick backstory.

*The gang found an elvish wizard, he managed to open a planes gate between earth and fairy.  They managed to kill him and steal his tome, but they don't have the skills to understand it.  They took it to the NPC who explained she needed 3 other tomes to figure out how to close the gate (of course.)   I know, Troperific.  

Chess

I just saw this chess set over at my favorite DND blog (NSFW, sometimes) and it really threw me... it's a completely normal chess board (same number of squares) but the varied heights make it look much more complex, and my brain defaults to "higher is better."  It would be interesting to make (and play) on a board with the actual important squares higher (ie, highest at the center) and see how that changes people's play.

Best Lego MOC ever

If you're any kind of Lego fan, you have to go check this out:  Mini-Fig Scale Serenity.

If I ever manage to build anything that awesome I'll be able to keel over and die afterwards in complete satisfaction with my life.  Make sure you flip through all the pictures (there are many), the interior shots of the kitchen, cockpit, and bedrooms are absolutely fantastic.

Great table for when a player misses a session

I'm putting this here, so I never ever lose it again.  (Zack's site is generally not safe for work, but this direct link SHOULD be okay... no blaming me if you just can't wait to get home and open it at the office and get fired... although, if you do, can I have your job?)

Er, sorry, anywhere, here it is:   Where the Hell have you been Flake Table, at DnD with Porn Stars

Review of Shelob Attacks

Eurobrick has a great breakdown of the build, so I"m going to skip it, and jump right into talking about it as a DnD mini's set.

So, first off.  Hobbits.  Well, Halflings, since we're playing Pathfinder or DnD, but let's not quibble.  The important thing here is that we have short little guys with curly hair.  That makes me happy.  I don't have anyone playing a halfling in my current campaign (sadly), but now that I have a dozen of these little guys, they may meet some.  

The set comes with 3 minis.  2 halflings, and Golum.  Golum is pretty... I dunno, strange.  Kind of harmless looking and withered and strangely adorable.  I'm sure I can find some purpose for him (for some reason he reminds me of the treasure goblins from Diablo 3, so maybe I'll make my players chase him around a map for ages?)  

The Hobbits are hobbits.  The new curly hair is great, and I'm always up for some new capes and short legs. They each have a sword, although Frodo's is curvier.  I'm pretty sure "sting" isn't a unique model, but I'm always happy to have more stabby bits.

There is also a little "cave" thing.  Yay map flavor bits.  Nothing to write home about, but it won't go unused either.

The real joy here is the spider.  Shelob is awesome.  I almost passed on this set, because I have two of the spiders from the Harry Potter series, and why have another big spider?  Giant spiders are a little "meh" in my mind to begin with, so I wasn't sure I wanted to invest in another one.

But check it out... it's HUGE.  And scary looking.  It could eat the Harry Potter spider (whose name escapes me) for lunch.  I'm going to have to save this bad boy for a truly epic encounter somewhere down the line, because it's just too awesome to waste.  

Shelob towers over Sam and Frodo, and the ruins of our last game.

Shelob is making a light snack of the Harry Potter spider.

DND 4E Tonight

I gotta say my buddy Andrew does the best role-play voices ever.  Fat Marlon Brando as a disturbingly sexy 600 lb fishmonger?  Yes please!

On the DND Starter Box

I'm playing DnD 4E with some friends on Sunday, and using the starter box to roll up a new character...

The "Choose your own Adventure" thing is cute, but can also be a little confusing, and I think it would be easy for new gamers to miss important stuff...

For instance, my rogue apparently gets "Bump and Run" which does normal damage and moves my opponent 5 feet away from me... so far so good... but then it also tells me I can move half my normal distance away from my opponent... is that part of my regular move action?  or part of Bump and Run?  It's unclear in the book... maybe it's clearer on the little cards?  Would a new gamer think to look there?

Hmm... okay, healing surges, fine...

Alignment... man... if Alignment and I were on a long drive, and she (alignment) was bitching about her boyfriend (Wizards), and showed me this, I'd tell her to break up, move on, he's just not that into you... For the record, I'm of mixed feelings on alignment myself.  I see it as a role-playing aid.  That is, if noting down on your character sheet that you're "evil" reminds you to stretch yourself and "be evil," then more power to you.  But as a DM and player, I'm not going to enforce (or even set up) your evilness.   Which brings up something else... check this out (I scanned it, because I want to make sure you believe me...)

Okay, I understand that, for new players (and new DMs) Good characters are (a lot) easier than Evil ones.  And I understand that some players read "evil" as "I get to be an asshole at the table and nobody can call me on it," but that's got nothing to do with evil pcs, that has to do with assholes at the table.  If you have asshole at the table, ask them to leave.  Evil PCs can work way more often than rarely.  Poor, poor alignment.  You just aren't loved anymore.

Okay, fewer skills than Pathfinder, but they make sense, the book explains them well enough I guess... no problems there... the little skill check in the book is cute enough (poor dying goblin...)


Hmmm... my rogue gets 12 Reflex save + my dex modifier... but the character sheet says the base is 10... I assume the other 2 is a class bonus?  No way for me to know for sure... 


Hey, I get 2D6 added to my attack rolls when I have combat advantage!  I wonder what that is...


I guess I'll figure it out when I play...


Okay, so the Choose your own adventure thing is cute, but it took me an hour to wander through, and I did it ALONE.  The Pathfinder starter is less cute, and sometimes a little more confusing, but at least it wasn't designed to isolate you from your friends.  It just seems odd to me, to make something that's designed to be done alone, to kick off such a social activity as DnD.  That said, it works, I have my rogue ready to go for Sunday night! 

Never bring an Ostrich to a Druid fight...

We managed to play for a few hours on Friday night.

Our intrepid adventurers were standing in a dark hallway, with a large door at one end... from behind the door came scratching sounds... like the scratching a cat would make... like the scratching a cat the size of a small elephant would make... but that's where they left...

If I were a mean DM it would have crashed it's way through the door before Friday nights game, but that'd be mean, and I'm categorically against mean DM'ing, so it was still scratching away when we started.

They made the wise decision to leave, and when they ran into a group of Deep Gnome guards they gave themselves up, which, in true Return of the Jedi style, brought them right to a crazy old king, who made them participate in an underground ostrich race for his own amusement.  

The rules were pretty simple, but I think if I do another race I'll change it a lot...

So, first off, the rules as I ran it:

Everyone starts with a D6

For every 5 points of Ride or Handle Animal you get +1 to your dice rolls

Heavy armor drops you 1 dice (so from a D6 to a D4, etc)

Being small let's you move up one dice.

At any time you can move up one dice, but have a chance of falling off

At any time you can move up 2 dice, but have a bigger chance of falling off

You can move down one dice for a 2 ac bonus and +10 to perception.

Combat works as normal, the Ostriches, however, are well trained racing mounts and won't attack.

There were 4 riders on the players side, and 2 riders on the gnomes.  If the players win they get to ask the king for a boon.

And this worked well, everyone had fun, although it went completely differently than I expected.  Primarily because only one PC had to finish the race, and there were only 2 gnomes competing against them.  So 2 pcs raced, and 2 pc's stayed behind and locked the gnomish competition down.  (Fighter killed one, druid did a sexy Ostrich dance to distract the other's mount.)

So the other 2 had no problem waltzing through the traps and other minor encounters of the race track.

If I were going to do it again, I'd make everything bigger.

Every starts with 3D6.  For every 5 ranks in Ride or Handle Animal you get another D6.

You lose a D6 (or 2) for heavy armor.

You get a D6 (or 2) for being small.

Etc... so instead of moving up 1 or 2 squares, you'd move up... a lot... or down, a lot... 

I'd also have changed it so if one player wins, that player gets a boon, but anyone who beats the gnomes gets a prize... and I'd have more gnomes... at least 4, maybe 6 or 8... 

Our rogue and Barbarian running the gauntlet... we ended up setting the starting line off to the side with the druid and fighter boring the gnomish competition to death... 

They also fought a slightly leveled up Bulette... and rolled 4 20s in a row, and completely destroyed him.  

The "Bulette" is actually a Megablocks Dragon... I won't tell if you won't.

And now for something completely different...

I swear I'm going to review the DND 4e box, but I've decided I want to DM the starter mission from it, before I review it.  So I'll have to dig up some victims, actually put the starter box through it's paces as it's meant to be used, then review it.  I think that's fairer.

I'm also working on reviews of the Lego Lord of the Ring sets (tl;dr: They are awesome).  I've managed to acquire all but two of the currently released sets, so you'll probably get a big rush of reviews.

In the mean time, check out my friend Jamie's podcast.  It's all about British History, and it's brilliant, and it's highly inspiring, particularly in keeping my medieval campaign medieval.

The British History Podcast

On the Pathfinder Starter Box

Both Paizo and Wizards of the Coast make it really easy and inexpensive to get started playing their respective RPGs.  When we were trying to decide which game we wanted to play, it quickly narrowed to DnD 4e or Pathfinder for this very reason, but then we were stumped... which one did we want to play?  What was included in the box?  How good is the stuff in the box?  Is it really all we need to play?  Luckily for us, our local game store (Guardian Games, if you happen to be in Portland, Oregon) had open boxes, and let us paw through them.  I know that's not an option everyone has, so I wanted to do some quick reviews.

So I'm going to look at the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Beginner Box today, and sometime this weekend I'll do another post about  Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game: An Essential D&D Starter (4th Edition D&D).

The Pathfinder Beginner Box is really impressive.  It's regular price is 34.99 (You can buy it here, direct from Paizo), but you can usually find it cheaper on Amazon (linked above), so it's a little more expensive than the DnD box, but the contents, in my opinion, are completely worth it.

The (slightly abused) contents of my Beginner Box

 A quick run down of the contents:  4 pre-filled character sheets (Warrior, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard), and a few blank sheets.  A full color GM guide.  A full color player guide.  A two-sided plastic battle map (one side has a cavern for the starter adventure, the other side is blank).  A set of dice.  Paper monster cut outs with plastic stands.

The GM guide and player guide have all the information you need to play to level 5.  There's a truly impressive amount of information here, from a healthy variety of monsters (with the corresponding paper tokens), to a robust feat list, item list, even adventure seeds and tips on writing your own adventures.

Two things really jumped out at me from the moment we opened this box:  The first was that this set is really meant to get you excited about the game, and playing.  It's really a complete game unto itself.  If you run high lethality adventures (you know, the kind where you don't make it to level 6...), then you never have to buy anything other than this box.  Yet, it's all very accessible.  I'd played a grand total of one gaming session before opening this box (A game of Call of Cthulu which we completely derailed and killed a god, was awesome), and yet I felt right at home when we opened this up.  It doesn't present itself as anything more complicated or intimidating than monopoly.  It's appears to be just another game with all the normal accouterments.  I'm tempted to send a box to my mother, without telling her it has anything to do with DnD, and see what she does with it.

The other thing that really stands out, is that it is a quality product.  Everything is full color.  The books are solid construction and heavy paper.  The plastic mat is, well, a plastic mat... I expect it to live more or less forever.  The paper monsters and player tokens are full color, and printed on a heavy stock.  Barring being stepped on or drowning in soda, there's no reason to expect them not to survive regular use.

It all just adds up to a really solid opening salvo.

To be completely honest, I love this beginner box.  In fact, I love it so much that I was slightly disappointed to see that the box's clean designs and style aren't carried over into the GM guide and Player Guide.  I assume the box was done after the big books, so I have hope that future revisions of the books will be more similar to the box, because I think the box is hugely accessible, in a way that the books aren't (although, by the time you invest in the books, maybe they don't need to be.)

About the only thing I think could be added, maybe (I'm of two minds about this) is something along the lines of the "power cards" that come with the DnD Box.  (I'll do some more comparing of the two boxes later this week.)  On one hand, I can see the advantage of having simple reminders for new players.  My group is pretty mellow and helpful, so we helped each other remember what powers and feats we had, but simple reminders are nice.  As a GM, I've began writing down monsters abilities on 3x5 cards, so I have something simple to refer to when I need a quick reminder.  On the other hand, I can see how cards could cause players to get into the "video game" mindset, of "these are my options" and lock them out of the creative cheating, er, thinking, that makes pen and paper RPGs special and fun.

Have you used the Beginner Box?  Any thoughts?  Feel free to tell me in the comments, particularly if you disagree.  I'm so in love with this thing, I'd love to hear from people who hate it.

Paper monster tokens, on their plastic clips.  I was too lazy to count all the monster tokens, but there are a lot... 

The selection of monsters is really impressive.  

Pretty Character sheets.  I was a little sad when we printed out some of the official character sheets from Paizo, and they aren't the same.  I really like these.

Lego Lord of the Rings Set Review #1: Gandalf Arrives

If you're into Lego at all, you've been looking forward to the LotR sets.  If you're into Lego, and a huge fantasy geek (like moi), then you've REALLY been looking forward to these.

Local toy stores have started putting the sets out of the shelves (our local lego store says they'll have them next week), so I'm going to be picking them all up (of course) and doing short reviews of them.  I'm doing the review thing a little different:  I'll review them as lego toys, and then as their use as DnD/Pathfinder/etc minis.

The first set I picked up was Gandalf Arrives.  It's the least expensive set (I picked it up for about 12 bucks), but it's quite a bit of bang for the buck.  

Boxed

The unboxing, with the reveal of the awesome new horse.

The set, built.  I love the mass of stuff overflowing the cart.

All the accessories laid out.

Okay, review time.  As a lego set, it's great.  Two minifigs, a new poseable horse, and a ton of random little accessories is all great.  The cart thing has been done before of course (I think I have at least 3, and I'm missing at least 1), but this cart has a unique build, with some great custom touches.  (I love how Gandalf sits off to the side of his bench, and how it all overflows.)  I think it would have been pretty easy to get away with making a generic cart that was good enough (in the movie the cart isn't particularly unique or exciting), but Lego did a nice job making it exciting and interesting, but still accurate.  I was worried that Gandalf wouldn't be able to sit on his cart without removing his cloak, but it seems more flexible than most, so he sits beautifully without removing it. 

As for using it as minis:  12 bucks for a horse, wizard, halfling, and cart, seems pretty awesome.  I'm also a big fan of backpacks (It makes me want to make one of those "treasure goblins" from Diablo 3 and run it through my pc's... any tips on making that work in a fun way?).  I have tons of barrels (they occasionally show up on the wall at Lego stores), but they're great flavor for dungeons, so the more the merrier I guess.  Another Asp is useful, it's basically another monster miniature, but can also be used as a weapon or staff topper.  I'm a big fan of books, and they're fairly rare (mostly just from the Harry Potter series, as far as I know) so I'm pretty happy to have another.  I'd love a few hundred of them so I can build a library dungeon set up.  I've yet to find a good use for carrots, and I'm no sure about the fireworks, but I'm sure they'll come in useful for flavor somewhere. 

This has nothing to do with DnD or LoTR, I just love my little comic book motorcycle cross over...

A quick preview of this week's bad guys:

Cloaker

Dark Creepers and Stalkers

The gang just entered the dungeon, ready to go

Reddit Dinner Party

We FINALLY were able to play again last Saturday!

As I previously noted, I was inspired by (read: completely stole from) this thread on Reddit, wherein people submitted descriptions of dinner party goers.

Let's back up just a little bit though, before we get to the chaos that was the dinner party.  A reminder of where we we're at (I should have reminded my players where we were at, after the long break... apparently they don't spend hours reviewing their notes before each play session like I do... ).  Our party had just ventured from the newbie starting zone of Sandpoint into the great metropolis of Withersea, a magocracy with a strange form of non-government.  Withersea is a coastal city, but it resides on a cliff 300 feet above sea level.  An island exists just off those cliffs.  On that island is a tower, so tall that it's spires vanish into the clouds.  Three bridges extend from the tower and across the gulf into the city, and become the city's three main thoroughfares.  Often, sometimes every day, sometimes every few days, a swarm of identical servants cross the bridges into the city, and buy ... things.  There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to their purchases, they just buy, paying in solid gold coins, and then vanish back into their tower.  The entire city of Withersea is built on this commerce.  The servants rarely speak, and they never divulge information of any sort about the tower, however, on occasion they have come bearing instructions about the governance of Withersea.  They never threaten or suggest any consequence for failing to abide by their instruction, but such is the power of their commerce, that their rules have always been followed.

Our heroes had barely set foot in the city before they were recruited (actually drafted) away to combat a rebelling Baron (The Paizo module "Tower of the Last Baron," a mission which they concluded successfully.

They've returned to town, and although their mission is a secret, they're the secret guests of honor at a dinner party, held by the Lords of Withersea.

So there were are, we're caught up.  My players are walking into a fancy dinner party, rather out of their element.

All of the guests, at our lovely dinner party.

Against the right wall you can see "Lord Reddit," the silent host of the party.  For some reason I decided he's a leprechaun.

 You can read my complete notes here (WARNING: my players should NOT read this)  Withersea party guests.  I took quite a few liberties with the characters that Reddit came up with, to fit my campaign settings and drop my plot hooks.

Okay, so two big failures in this, and one "failure" that probably really isn't a failure.  The first:  I didn't remind my players what a unique setting they were in.  I assumed they'd be asking specific questions about the city, and they didn't, so some plot hooks weren't picked up.  No big deal, they'll get them later, but it did make playing the scene less fun than I'd hoped.

The other was that I overestimated my abilities to have the NPCs interact with one another... I didn't want the PCs to wander around the room chatting with each NPC in turn, picking them clean, then moving on... I wanted a dynamic room where things happened outside of the PCs locus of control, and I just BARELY managed that... my real failing was just having too many NPCs, and losing track of who was who.  If I had to do it again, I'd probably drop 4 or 5 NPCs, and give each NPC a flag with their name on it.

And the non-failure, was that my characters were just a little lost and didn't really pull as much information out of the NPCs as I expected.  However, all of the PCs have crappy social skills (game state wise, not real life wise), so that actually maps out okay... they were a bunch of adventurer's stumbling around a fancy dinner party, just as they should have been.

So what did work:

I think the most interesting thing I did was to have social groups form at the party, with each group changing over time.  So my PCs were interacting with, at the most, 4 NPCs, not the whole room full.  This also meant there were conversations happening that they weren't a part of, so they had to pick which group to talk to and which groups they could afford missing.  This also helped me keep track of who was who, and what was going on.

I also had some NPCs with costs and benefits associated with hanging out with them... The best example was the NPC that my players fondly referred to as "Mr Stinky"  (Baron Kleiner, I think, in the Reddit thread).  An extremely wealthy man with a fondness for adventurer's and their tales, who was not fond of bathing, but loved alcohol.   Each time my players chose to join his group, he made everyone drink (which could cause you to pass out if you drank too much), but if you could get him to like you he'd award you with a random gift to assist you in your adventures.

He also traveled with the elven whores, which one of my players enjoyed a little too much, and left with, and was promptly robbed... gotta watch your back with those random hook ups...

I also had some scripted events... my players caught a pickpocket, and chose to let him go in exchange for some insider information about the Tower of the Magus.  I have a feeling that will come back to haunt/help them in the future.

If I had to do it again:

I'd drop a few of the NPCs.
I'd script out a major conversation topic/conflict for each little group for each "hour" of the party, so the NPCs were interacting with each other, and the PCs could jump in .  I overestimated my abilities to keep track of who was who and all the relationships, when I should have just said "At 9pm in Group 1:  Major Smith will start a loud argument with Lady Rose about nosy adventurer's sticking their nose in other's business."  Sandboxes are great, and all my notes about who hates who may come in useful in the future, but I could have made my life easier.

My players did get the major plot hook and did go stab some stuff, so I'll post about that next.

I'm not dead...

Had some non-DND weekends, but we're playing again Saturday!

Working on a really really long, complicated adventure for Saturday's (and on) Pathfinder game.  A whole module really.  It's crazy... I'll post it on the Blog sometime this weekend...

It's inspired by this thread on reddit, and is going to be awesome.

This past Friday I completely railroaded my players.  My brain just failed to enter creative mode and I couldn't come up with anything amusing, so I turned to Paizo modules for inspiration, and found "The Tower of the Last Baron" which happens to mesh pretty well with the world that I've thrown my players into, so they were forced, in game and out, to go solve this little political squabble.


So let's talk Lego:  For my amusement I decided to see how well I could reproduce the map from the module in Lego.  Here's the first floor map:

And here's a few pictures of my Lego map:

Throne Room

Bedroom, stairs to 2nd floor

Overview of first floor

Quick pictures of the 2nd floor (I tore out the interior walls and rebuilt them while everyone grabbed a soda.)

And here's the original map of the first floor for comparison:

Overall it worked out okay.  I squared off the tower walls, rather than have it octagonal.  The diagonal hallway I was able to recreate, but it was a very tight fit with the door, and trying to place the lego minifigs.  Overall, just working with actual walls rather than lines on paper that the minis can "step on" makes everything a little more complicated.  However, compared to other 3d options, like using Dungeon Forge tiles, I think I was able to reproduce it pretty closely.

One last note, next time a module map has a bathroom on it, if I bother to build it, I'm going to put something in it.

And sometimes they do something completely unexpected... okay, not sometimes, they ALWAYS do something unexpected...

So we went on quite the little adventure last night, and tried out the modular (but not yet modular enough) dungeon.

You can read my DM notes here:  Good Goblins Notes

There aren't any monster stats, because I made them in Combat Manager, and they were pretty tweaked to suite our rather over-equipped party.  Which would be my other note:  I tend to be overindulgent in the loot.  I blame WoW.

So I stole Sandpoint from the Pathfinder universe, and moved it into mine, because we started out there (via the newbie box).  Ameiko (from Pathfinder), the owner of the local Inn and fellow adventurer had gone missing.  My players decide to go rescue her.  So the gang wandered Sandpoint looking for clues, which suggested that Ameiko had gone south to investigate rumors that local farms were being raided by goblins.

So they jumped on their horses and ran south, to discover a kind pair of young goblins working on a farm that they'd bought fair and square from some lying and duplicitous humans.  surprisingly (to me anyway) they didn't automatically cut the goblins down, but actually talked nice to them, and managed to avoid any bloodshed (and in fact got a goblin escort into the goblin lands for the price of a shiny dagger.)

The gang fighting some random thugs  in the forest

The gang approaches a completely normal, functional farm

They also checked on another farm, and tried to make nice with an Ogre that had taken up residence there, but he was having none of it.  Despite our fighter going blind for half the fight (yay critical hit deck), they still managed to survive the day.  And kill the ogre.

Die Ogre Die!

 On the way to the goblin fortress they ran into a goblin watch, which was basically a wizard.  They also negotiated with him successfully, but he still made them fight his pet Fire Elemental.

Sad fire elemental can't cross the stream.

Finally they reached the goblin fortress.  The wizard had graciously given up the password, but the guards inside still recognized human voices, and wouldn't let them in.  Instead of trying to sound like goblins (which is what I'd anticipated) they managed to convince the guards they were goblins from the far away tribe of "Farmountain.)  A ruse they managed to keep up even AFTER the goblins had opened the door and seen the party... dumb goblins (and lucky dice.)

Modular dungeon!  I actually set each piece on the table as the group "discovered" it, which was easier and cooler than I expected it to be.  They're held together with lego technic pins.

The modular dungeon design worked really well.  My next step is to make more "hallway" pieces.  I think if I do it right I can make almost any size hallway or room with pretty minimal effort.  (slightly more than drawing, but about the same as tiles.  I think.)

The gang meets the Goblin King!  

 The team found Ameiko hanging out the goblin king (King Fatmouth the Goblin Slayer, taking credit for the gang's actions during the starter box adventure), planning a sting to find out who is really causing the tension between Sandpoint and the goblin kingdom.  Our thief was (finally) able to sneak up and hear the conversation, which allowed our group to, again, diplomacy and bluff their way through, avoiding any combat.

The gang escorts a "caravan (aka the king's carriage ambush toy)  through the forest.

 Our rogue did her best to make sure that the carriage arrived at its destination empty of valuables, but only slightly avoided getting caught by the NPC guards, then got distracted by a "goblin" attack.  The gang beat the halflings-in-bad-goblin-costumes into the ground, and managed to get the caravan to the next (yet-to-be-named, bad DM!) city safely.

Some notes:  The players really liked having more role-play options.  Being able to talk your way through or completely avoid encounters was definitely appreciated.  

A few high HP bad guys are way more fun than a bunch of low hps ones.  I had more fun playing them, and the players got to roll more dice (instead of waiting for me to roll them), so that's definitely the way to go, at least until the pcs level up a bit and have a quicker ways to deal with hordes of minions.

Two bards in a party is a pretty sick.

Rogues like stealing stuff.  Who knew?  

The highlight of the night?  Finding random pickles on a random farm.  DnD can be wierd...

If you DM or play and read through my adventure notes, and have any suggestions for improvement, leave me a comment, I'm new to this, so would love some feedback!

So you drew the short straw...

...and have to DM.  But you've never played DnD  so you're completely panicky!

Don't worry!  You're not alone!

Some quick resources for new DMs, particularly those who have never DM'd before!

First, I recommend watching these:

PAX Celebrity Game

Dungeons and Dragons:  Robot Chicken

There are other PAX DnD videos (and hours worth of audio at Dungeons and Dragons.com).  If you've never played a pen and paper role playing game before, they're an incredible resource for how a basic game should go, and since the some of the Robot Chicken guys have never played before, you can see what the normal learning curve should be (so nobody should feel stupid.)  If you're playing 4E it's even better, since that's what they're playing, and Chris explains some of the rules (and occasionally Wizard's reasoning behind them) explicitly.

If you're DM'ing with your laptop (which I am, because it's awesome) there's some great DM programs.

Combat Manager

If you're playing Pathfinder (or I imagine 3.5, possibly even 4E), this makes combat about 10,000 times easier (well, if you're an organized person, then it may be only slightly easier than just being prepared with a pen and paper and notes about your monsters).  

Combat Manager does a great job of helping you keep track of initiative, turns, and my favorite: Monster Stats.  I was keeping all of my stat blogs in my adventure notes on my pc, but once I started using this I just let it handle that for me.  It's working pretty well so far. 

For Character creation I found two programs, one of which I liked, and is free, but ran really really slowly, and then quit working completely.  But I recommend giving it a go and see how it works for you, since I found a lot of praise for it online.  (If anyone gets it working well, let me know, I'm curious if it's just me.)

PC Gen

What I ended up going with, is a non-free solution, but it does run really well.  

Hero Lab

Hero Lab is a fine program, I have no bones about it at all, except that it's not free.  It's not super expensive either, but you do have to pay for each system you use it on, and each source book that you want to use.  As far as I can tell there's no way to add custom feats or anything either, so you're at the mercy of the books you've purchased through their website.  Not a huge deal, but I'm a pretty laid back easy going DM, so I've told my players they can use any Feat/Power/Spell/Race/Class they can find in any pathfinder or 3.5 source book they can get their hands on, something the NPCs of their world won't be able to do.

And finally some super necessary web sites that you should learn to love:

Reddit's RPG Reddit is pretty awesome

Pathfinder Treasure Generator (Combat Generator, linked above, also has a treasure generator built in)

The Hypertext D20 SRD - A fantastic resource for looking up the rules for 3.5+ fantasy games

The D20 Pathfinder SRD- Similar to above, but specific to Pathfinder

The Pathfinder Database - All sorts of useful tools for pathfinder (a lot of it would be useful for 3.5 or 4E also)

Abulafia - A random list generator.  Many, many of the lists that have been created are DM tools.

A couple of other notes:

I chose not to DM "town" interactions that aren't part of the campaign.  By that I mean:  I don't DM the pc's trips to the store to buy and sell loot, or pick up new torches, etc.  Do you want to DM being a shopkeeper?  I don't.  I want to DM being an orc about to crush someone's head in.

So between sessions I've been sending out a facebook update with everything the store has on hand "today."   I told my players items sell for 50% of their value, commodities sell for 100%.  They can do their own math, they're smart people.  I figure if anyone wants to cheat, they can cheat, but that's no fun (and my group is all cool people, so I'm not at all worried about it.)

I also include any "news."  For instance, in my first update:

As the five of us go about our regular business, we discover that news of our adventure has spread throughout our small town, and we've all become a bit of celebrities. While the attention is nice (and the free rooms at the inn are great for hook-ups), it also means that people are coming to us with their problems, and problems they have!

A number of options for adventure present themselves. We can do one of these adventures, or something else entirely. All choices have their consequences though, so choose wisely.

Missing Dwarves:
Some Dwarves passed through town a few days ago inquiring about an old gold mine just outside of town. Unfortunately, nobody has seen or heard from them since then. The Mayor would like us to go investigate.
Time Frame: No Travel time, 1-2 days to complete 
Rewards: 100 gp each, plus any items we find along the way.
Possible Costs if we avoid: Dwarves may not survive.

After that there were 5-6 more distinct jobs that people wanted their troupe to do, as well as a few general rumours.

Skill Challenges & what DND has in common with Lego

There's a thread over on Reddit about skill challenges, which got me thinking about my attempt at a skill challenge in our last game.  Here's my comment:

Is this a case of "skills for the new GM"?
By that I mean, is a skill challenge a thing in and of itself, or is it a way for a new GM to block off a section of the adventure he's put together and toss out some bonus experience?
If you're an experienced GM and don't need the structure of a skill challenge, great, ignore them, but for a new GM I can see them being a useful way to make pockets of action.
Of course, the downside is that a new GM may not be able to make them interesting.  I'm a new GM, I tried my first skill challenge last session and while it wasn't a complete failure, it wasn't the nerve-wracking pulse-pounding moment that I'd hoped it would be (possibly because nobody could roll anything above a 3, so I could blame the dice...)

Basically I didn't plan it out very well... there was only one solution, and only 2 of the party members could even attempt it.  There was a long hallway with pressure plates that set off fire traps that did 1d6 pts of damage every round.  The walls had shelves (for corpses), so climbing along the wall to the spot where the trap could be disabled should have been easy for our rogue, but her dice hate her, so she tried and fell, tried and got 1/3rd of the way down the hallway, failed and fell, failed and fell onto the floor, and got burnt as she hustled back to the group.

My bard was the only other one with disable device, and he managed to make it 2/3 of the way down the hallway before he fell... he got burnt and ran to the end of the hall and disabled the trap.

It was amusing, but not very dramatic.

Next time I'll be sure to involve as many party members as possible, and be more open to alternative solutions to the problem.  (Can a bard with mage hand and disable device disarm a trap from a distance?)

In a bigger, philosophical sense, the thread got me thinking about how lucky I am to have an easy going group.  Everyone plays to have fun, and the rules are just tools to use to have fun.  DND rules are just like legos, if you want, they serve a specific purpose, but really, you can build with them whatever you want.

On Lego Dungeons

Two dungeons down, and I wasn't happy with either one.

So I decided to go bigger and use the 10x10 lego base as my "standard" room size.  Using a 4x4 flat as a grid square I was able to make 8x8 maps (so a scale 40x40 feet) which is a workable size for a dungeon crawl battle.  Unfortunately I didn't have the right plates to create an actual floor grid, so the floor is all black, which made spacing a little problematic, but we worked with it, and overall it was pretty cool.

Each room is modular in this dungeon, and they're held together with pins.  I didn't use any hallways on this build, and there weren't a whole lot of options for the party (They could go right or left at the very beginning, and then there were two rooms off the "southern" wing, but overall it was a pretty linear little dungeon.

Since I had the whole thing laid out from the very beginning, I used cardboard to hide the actual rooms until the party got there.  In the future I'm going to do it differently.

I'm building a number of "generic" dungeon rooms and hallways with a grey and black flooring grid, which should make moving, flanking and touch attacks a little clearer.  I'm building the grid on the 10x10 inch plates, on top of 4x4 bricks (yellow, because they were cheap, yay cheap) because that feels more solid, and gives me room for pin hole bricks underneath the floor.

A 10x10 Base with 4x4 brick foundation and 4x4 blue grey plates.  The missing plates will be black.

An unfinished room with a river and waterfall.  The river will have semi-transparent blue and white dot pieces eventually.

A hallway with finished grid, visible pins and architectural flavor.

I'm new to this whole Lego thing (well, aside from playing with them as a kid of course), so if any lego master builders out there have any suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments!

For our first session we used the (really, quite nice) grid map that comes with the Pathfinder starter kit.  Since we were using the adventure from the kit, the map was pre-printed and awesome and got us going, well, right out of the box... 

At the time I had no intention of building lego dungeons or maps.  I was just thinking of using the lego figures as avatars and using whatever happened to be laying about as monsters.  I started searching about for custom figures and monsters, and ran into Brickquest, and fell madly in love with his dungeons.  Peter (the Brickquest guy) made an actual custom game to play in his lego dungeons, which I wasn't interested in doing, so I quickly realized my dungeon tiles needed to be bigger than his.  (Also, I think some of the pieces he used are no longer in production.)

I decided to use Lego's 10" base plate as my "regular" room size, with smaller plates as connecting hallways.

So setting down with the random lego I'd managed to pick up, I built this, my first dungeon.

I liked it, it was cute... but it wasn't going to work.  

For one, I had a large back wall, to show off my awesome lego building mastery (that's sarcasm), but as soon as one of my players saw it, she pointed out that nobody on that side of the table would be able to see over it.  

For two, and more significantly, it was just too small... our party would barely fit in the first room, let alone our party and enough combatants to have a meaningful fight (and forget flanking!)  

So it came down.  

As an experiment I built the map from another pre-written adventure from Paizo (Something about saving a pair of dwarves, I think it came from a starter kit expansion that I grabbed from their websites).  Using a 4x4 plate as one grid square, I was able to build it to scale, and everything seemed to fit okay.  (Although a giant spider - aka Aragog from one of the Harry Potter sets) is much bigger than 10 feet by 10 feet at this scale, at least if you count his legs...)

Of course compared to the figures, he's definitely lives up the name Giant Spider, right?

When we did actually get together to play, we played at a pub, which I have to admit being nervous about, but (noise issues aside) went pretty well.    I was a little worried we'd get beat up (too many DnD stereotypes in my brain apparently), but everyone seemed to think it was cool.  I do live in Portland though, so your mileage may vary.  We ran through this with lego figures on the bar table, with no grid, and I just drew the map on a napkin.  So we never used that dungeon either, but at least it proved I could build a reasonable sized dungeon.

Why Lego? Because I don't know any porn stars...

I should mention that this whole DND/Roleplaying thing interested me because of the blog Playing DND with Porn Stars.  Someone somewhere linked something about how creative Zak is and I ended up reading 2 years or so of posts in one sitting, and it's on my "must read" list ever since.  And it made me want to play DND (specifically, it made me want to GM DND).  If you're at all into roleplaying, or really, any type of creative endeavor, you owe it to yourself to check him out.  (And if porn stars scare you, don't worry too much, they don't take their clothes off very often while playing dnd.   And we can always hope that after getting to know Zak through his blog they'll scare you a little less.)

So, thanks Zak.

I've been getting a lot of questions about the Lego DND game we started recently, so I figure I'll just make my logs of our adventures public, maybe ramble a bit about my thoughts on Lego and role playing games, and archive a few zillion pictures.

We started back in early February.  I was getting ready to celebrate my birthday with some friends and we were trying to figure out what to do, and he noticed some Lego in my living room.  I mentioned I've always wanted to play DND with Lego, and he ran with it.

First we had to figure out what game we wanted to play.  We talked about trying to play 3.5 with some old books he had laying around, then got talking about Pathfinder and 4th Edition.  After chatting with the guys at Guardian Games (who are awesome by the way), we picked up the Pathfinder Starter Box, the Core Rules book and the GM guide.

That night we played through the starter kit mission (using lego minis as our avatars and the cardboard cut outs that come with the kit for the enemies, which worked out pretty well) and everything worked pretty well. Sadly, I don't have any pictures from that game.

The Pathfinder starter kit is pretty awesome.  It was my first time GM'ing and it went find, with minimal "Load" time as I looked up rules or figured out what I was supposed to do.  The starter kit is really well done.  I love the layout for the NPC stats in the starter kit, and if Paizo is smart, they'll use that layout for every NPC stat block going forward, it's super easy to read and find what you need.

The player book is a little less user friendly, but it manages to do the job.  We got lost a few times figuring out how to make our characters, but eventually we (mostly) figured it out.

I've since picked up the 4E book, and it's also pretty well done, although it's a little less robust physically (cheaper paper, round little tiles instead of cardboard and plastic stand ups), but it's also a little cheaper, so pick your poison.  One thing I really like is the cards that come with 4E.  I know for a lot of old school players they're this horrible heresy, but as a new GM/player, they're pretty helpful (in all the obvious ways).  I've started making myself cards for my NPCs, so I have a better chance of challenging my much too intelligent players.