#RPGADAY2020 26. Strange

#Strange

I love the unexpected, so strange is hard coded into to my game play. 

I like to introduce mini-games and new concepts into my campaigns. I have missile fire procedures which are stolen right from Car Wars. I have a system of rules to set up weaponless chases, a la Indiana Jones. And silver is always magical. 

Do you have any strange things going on in your games? Let me know in the comments. 

#RPGADAY2020 25. Lever

#Lever

Not sure where to go with lever, except to give a session update. My kids are playing B2 = Keep on the Borderlands with me. All three of my kids are of the age where they make adult choices for themselves.

This tendency is playing out in the game. They took down the ogre in area E, moved into his cave and started playing house. Other than fix up the cave and spy on the other residents, they didn't want to do anything else.  

The characters are aware of the orcs and kobolds, but haven't discovered that there are two orc lairs. They know about the goblins, but don't know where they are coming from. They can hear their voices from the east and sometimes see them out and about but don't know their cave is connected to the goblin's home. 

Time for a lever. 

I had the orcs from area B attack the goblins. The goblins were overwhelmed and ran to the secret door yelling: " BREE-YARK!" The party was surprised when the door opened and bag of gold was thrown at them. After a moment or two, the party found how to open the secret door and unloaded a bunch of arrows into the orc's backs. The orcs charged them, but the party hid using the secret door and water barrel. When the orcs ran down the long hall, the party hit them again. 

The party retreated back through the secret door, leaving the goblins mystified. They have no idea the party is there and believe the ogre got his hands on a bow. 

The orcs lost 8 of 12 attackers and are thinking of pack it in and joining the second orc group. The characters were able to track them back to Area B and are thinking of attacking them. However, they are a little nervous with the goblins so close at hand. 

That was a nice lever for inaction. 

The Simple Things - Printing

I love books, but the oldest and the newest stuff is hard to get in print. Invariably, I wander DriveThruRPG ordering stuff left and right. It never ends. Once I read through something, it goes in one two places: into a hard copy or stays in my "Library of (Digital) RPG Titles" on my Kindle. 

Qualitatively, they are different places. One I expect to read again, while the other is something I might want to read by candlelight after the Nuclear Apocalypse. 

Anyway, reading preferences aside, printing books yourself is really dependent on your printer. I have an HP all in one inkjet printer. It's good for most things, most of the time.

In the picture on the left, look how sharp the text is. It's really nice. Perfectly acceptable for reading by nuclear candlelight. Inkjet are very good on plain paper for text. You can see a little blow through because I printed two sided, but it's still very legible. 

What inkjets are not good at are large, color images on plain paper. Things could not be worse. And since I print a lot of my own stuff on plain paper, the result is less than satisfactory. 

Here is a photo of Cult of Diana: The Amazon Witch for Basic Era Games by Timothy S. Brannan. I just love the covers of his books and this one is my favorite. 

And with inkjet on plain paper, it just sucks. Can you say mud? How did it go so wrong? 

It's the paper. 

Check out this next image. It's the same printer and settings, except I used photo paper.  

I'm very happy with this one, the colors are much brighter in real life, but I didn't want to alter the image with different settings to accentuate the colors. Where I went wrong is selecting my favorite cover rather than one that would highlight how good good can be. 

Take a look at this next image from Mr. Brannan's The Basic Witch: The Pumpkin Spice Witch Tradition. 

That 100 times better. We have blues and reds, and stuff in between. I can totally see the how this is different than how it appears on screen, but even using my cheap inkjet printer, the photo paper gives it far more color than plain paper. It's far more satisfying. 

Ah, the simple things. 

#RPGADAY2020 24. Humour

Or #Humor

I love laughing at the game table. However, I try not to force levity on the players. Often, I set up scenarios that are very funny, but almost always require the players to do something to cause it. 

For example, I am a big fan of the antagonist party. Done right, it creates drama and intrigue. Done wrong, it's just like high school.

In one campaign, I had two parties hostile to the party and the players manipulated them into a brawl in a bathhouse. It was hysterical. 

Sometimes, the players themselves are just comedians. As a DM, I gave a druid a magic charm to communicate with animals. The party's thief stole it and started talking to every animal they encountered. That was pretty funny, but then I gave him a talking donkey, so everyone could both sides of the conversation. The thief decided to play it as if he was oblivious to the fact that everyone could understand it. While this seems like a copy of Shrek, years before Shrek was a thing, the thief player behaved more Starlord in Guardians of the Galaxy, with the donkey providing lots of bad ideas which would be warped into something more zany. 

Good times. 

#RPGADAY2020 23. Edge.

#Edge

I'm a huge fan of coming up with outrageous scenarios for my players and their characters, but I always try to think of three game changers that the characters could use for a significant edge over their enemy. 

It's kind of laughable, because I'm batting exactly zero when it comes to predicting how the players react and what they will use to get an edge. 

The benefit of thinking about how the main antagonist's plan could fall apart is not putting things on a platter for the players, but being able to react appropriately when it happens. Because he or she isn't the hero and the default winner, the party is. 

In the Avengers film, they nailed Thanos's reactions. He told the heroes that their knees would be weak when they failed. Sure enough, Tony went down when he lost. When Thanos failed, he too sat down, weak-kneed. 

That's good for a movie with an necessary ending, but the party's adventures don't always end with the defeat of the bad guy. Very often my Big Bads are made completely irrelevant by the characters and the mechanism of how that works is often tied to whatever edge they had in the conflict. 

In one campaign, I had the party endlessly antagonized by a ghostly voice that whispered, "Silver is your enemy." The paladin made a very good leap of logic and asked if the voice sounded like their antagonist. I totally mean it to be the voice of their enemy, but the paladin pointed out that those words were only said after whatever ominous threat was given. In his mind, it sounded like a retort. I had meant it to be a tag line, but could those words be spoken by someone other than their enemy? 

Well, after hearing a rather well reasoned argument from the paladin, I decided that it could be someone else speaking. So who's voice was it and what was it talking about? The paladin surmised that his god didn't like his minion threatened, so his god was issuing a threat to their tormentor. 

"Silver is your enemy," did actually refer to many traits the paladin used to define himself. A silver decked horse, a silver sword, a silver symbol. Since their antagonist was extraplanular, silver was an effective defense. 

Originally, I had meant for this extraplanular enemy to have an immunity to silver, at the cost of having a weakness to iron making the party's obvious strengths a weakness. But, once I had the player's input, I dropped that idea. It was going to be a straight up slugfest between the party wielding silver and demonic forces harassing them. 

The demon was supposed to punch through into this dimension, but I flipped that around. The characters would be going to the demon's dimension AND they would possess all of the nasty, dangerous attributes of a demon on the prime material plane while there, with the Silvered Paladin acting as a locus of the power.

The party used that edge to the fullest, dishing out horrific damage on the forces of evil. But then they lost the fight and were dispelled back to the Prime Material Plane, forbidden from entering that dark realm for 999 years. They were startled to be back home, whole and healthy while the demon was horribly weakened and unable to strike at them directly. 

That turned the whole adventure into a detective story, where the party had to figure out who the demon was using to continue it's attack. They managed to neutralize the demon at the cost of all of their levels. I had thought they were going to find away to pursue him home or lure him out, but instead they picked a different edge and tactic. They used their knowledge of the campaign settings as an edge to speed run experience to get back to level. 

That was super fun.