Don't Play the Sheet...

Skerpies at Coins and Scrolls once said this about the Glog (a game with features per level like 5E).

In play, class features and abilities don't actually come up as often as you'd think.

I've read a lot of comparisons to OSR play that talk about not playing the sheet and this sounded about right to me. Now I've GM'd a few sessions of 5E and found my old AD&D gang doesn't look at the sheets during play (except to find where to click their attack/damage/init which on Roll20 are done by clicking the sheet). 

I had to remind my players about the Second Wind and Action Surge features (after the battle when they almost lost two PCs). This makes me appreciate Lamentations and other Basic variants that just give you a better to hit, or better skills or whatever, and leave the rest up to the player as it seems the problem will get worse as they get additional features each level. Also the features feel a bit video-gamey.

Session 3: Phandelin

The players made it to Phandelin, turned in the wagon and goods for some cash. Turned over a bugbear head, checked into the inn and listened for rumors and such. Learned mostly about the Redband Ruffians. Visited the retired adventurer/apple farmer and decided to pop over to the Taphouse and see the Redband to judge them with their own eyes. A fight ensued and one of the Redband raced off while the group cleaned up the street and prepared to defend the taphouse against a retribution attack. That's when we cut for the day.

The module doesn't mention anything about revenge attacks. The assumption is the party will come into conflict with the Redband gang at the taphouse or elsewhere and finish them off? Or charge immediately into the Redband hangout which would be daft. The module would be better if it gave defensive values for different buildings (with the mining company being the best) and had the possibility of hunkering down for a counter-attack as a possibility. Such a thing should also include what happens to the town if the PCs head for the hills to avoid a counter-attack.

The info in the town section is not organized for the DM very well. I applaud them for putting a little urban adventer into the starter set It would be better to have each NPC listed in a printable roster with roleplay notes, statblock and what they know/rumors/sidequests. Then the town info would be tighter and the DM could have all the NPC info up at the same time. They also need a random encounters table. This is a great place to introduce the concept even if its just who's walking about.

A large number of the encounters in town are womenfolk. For a frontier town with goblins and orcs around that seems odd but it's never mentioned why. Are the men all miners out in the hills? Were a large number of men killed? Is there something about the Shrine of Luck that drew a lot of women to the area? Or did the designers just want to have more women NPCs and didn't really think about the repercussions? or did I miss something?

NPC, especially Goblins should be given names/descriptors. Really anything that will help the GM describe the NPC (one-eye, three fingers, Short sword goblin, etc) so the players can indicate who they want to attack instead of just 'the Goblin in front of Bjorn'. Instead they are all functionally clones with the same weapons and everything. I think using the same stat block is a nice savings in space and all but it wouldn't have hurt Wizards to make Weak Goblin, Goblin, and Strong Goblin and give them different HP and AC. Roll20 should have added to this by changing the weapons and armor on the different goblins and giving each a different character sheet. As is all encounters in a group share the same character sheet which means they roll group initiative, otherwise one initiative roll overwrites the next. Each can be given a different character sheet, I'm pretty sure, but they didn't set up Lost Mines that way (at least the Cragmore Hideout). Its nice how you can roll for weapon hits from the character sheet but the NPCs in Lost Mines are not set up to roll damage from the sheet the way players are which is lame. 

When you show up at an Inn the DM shouldn't be told to look at the game rules for pricing. Again this was probably to save space but it's a hassle. Even if the hardcopy couldn't do it right they should have done better in the Roll20 version.

Also in Roll20 its very visual. The module doesn't need building interiors but for Roll20 they really should have them.

Roll20 initiative needs some work. If a player has two character sheets up and they touch one it becomes active, then if they click initiative on the second it rolls initiative for the first. The first touch should make the sheet active, then a second touch would roll initiative. This would be intuitive and not accidentally overwrite another characters initiative. Also clicking on a token should bring up the Character sheet right away, the fuddy controls should be a second click since you rarely use them.

Lastly having a frontier town with a gang defined by red is a bit to Tombstone. To really make this work they should have given each member of the gang a bit of personality and mixed them in with the random encounters table (that they should have included but didn't) and had the players get to see them being dicks instead of just hearing about it. Show don't tell, that sort of thing.

That's all for now, it was a short session but a good one.

 

Game Design - Mini Dragon Slayer

So I have a degree in Graphic Design (never used professionally) and a career in Technical Writing so I developed some kind of sickness in which I write and rewrite games. So many games are full of unnecessary and often confusing stuff. So many sentences are passive, or tangled, or generally awkward, so I try to see if I can make them better. I'd like to think that I usually do but then toss the results.

Then I came across a challenge on Venger Satanis' blog. He has a game called Crimson Dragon Slayer and he's recently cut it down to 3 pages and challenged anyone who wanted to format it. I took up the challenge, he sent me the Word file and and hour later I had hacked together a nice little game. 

I used art by Kim Diaz Holm, who makes incredible art that he releases under the Creative Commons license with attribution. He has a Youtube channel so you can see him create art from scratch, it's amazing.

I doubled the page count but its still a clean little game that I think would be good to include with modules and such that ordinarily require one own an RPG. I sent it to him and he seemed to like it, he gave me a free pdf for participating, and was generally agreeable about the whole thing. He also said I could post it or change it or do whatever I wanted with it, so I edited a bit more (removed some art and cut a few bits that seemed Cha'alt specific) and got it to 4 pages (2 pages of content as 1-4 is the title page, and 4-4 is the credits).

The main way the game is cut so short was ditching attributes and leaning on other games for spells and monsters. This works for a beer & pretzels pick-up game, or for a game bundled for free with a module. I might follow this up with some kind of Spell book crafted from the Glog. So here is the core game.

Mini Dragon Slayer

Session 2: Cragmaw Hideout continued

One player missing so we had his PC hang back as an NPC. The rolls balanced out this time and we had one near death and one PC that couldn't hit to save his life. Still the YouTube guy that said Lost Mines is brutal had a very different group because 5E is so forgiving. Perhaps he's a Gen Z. 

Our kid said "his generation could not be as detailed as we are when approaching a dangerous situation."

Maybe that had something to do with it. They went in with military precision, and scouting, and old school tactics like we used to do. I was lenient because the sound of the stream covered most of the talk. still, if you weren't killed in a single blow it would be hard to die. I mean Roll20 auto-generated Elf started with 2 healing potions and Warriors get a Second Wind and even a short rest brings you back up almost the whole way if you're first level.

I upgraded to the Dynamic lighting and that was worth it. It still will take some getting used to, Tokens fill out the full 5 foot square so they don't hide as well as I'd like. Still lots of fun. Next on to Phandalin, probably.

Session 1: The Lost Mines

The first meeting of the old group was on Zoom, which has a 40 minute deadline on free meetings. So we were cut off and reestablished a second meeting right after. You can pay a bit of money to have endless meetings but I knew we weren't gonna use Zoom as there are better options out there customized for RPGs. 

What we did straighten out is that everyone wanted a fighter, and all but one wanted humans. After joking about how one player cheated his rolls he suggested I create the characters and hand them out. 

I decided to use Roll20 because it is free for 5 or less players. I wasn't sure if that included the GM or not but we still fell within the limit. I bought Lost Mines since it was all set up and I didn't want to create my own adventure for the first 5E game. So that cost money but not a lot and Roll20 has a nice character generator and the way it handles the character sheets/rolls made it easy for the players as well. I sent out copies of the characters to each so they could pick which one they wanted and told them to log into Roll20 ahead of time. Two of the players and I logged in and I showed them how things would work and they seemed to like it. The colonel waited until the last minute to do anything which was a bit of a drag but it worked out eventually.

The only real issue was nobody went through the tutorial and I had to explain everything. I used to train engineers to use writing software as one of the tasks in my old job so it wasn't that big a deal except I was learning 5E, Roll20, Lost Mines, and would have appreciated one of them stepping up and taking the tutorial to explain to the rest. 

So we started up on Game Day and with everyone there we had bandwidth problems. Once we reduced the size of everyones video screen (you can even remove it and just have their name if necessary) things ran smoothly. 

When we played long ago I had a pretty steady ramp up from middleschool DM who was barely competent running TSR modules using AD&D to a University Student GMing during summers who was pretty good at running political games across Harn using modified RuneQuest rules (at least I think I was, playing with the same group makes that hard to really know). So I was starting over again with new rules, new adventure, new virtual playground, and old players who didn't know the system (and one new player). Everyone had fun, but I felt it could have been better. There were two faults with our first session. 

1. The fog of war was awkward. The entire crew saw the entire map for a moment. Luckily one said something. Roll20 really should have a PIP showing what the characters see instead of forcing the GM to login as a Player, and then back. Of course horrible Fog of War naturally leads to purchasing a subscription with the Dynamic Lighting. So I did that afterwards and I'm curious to see how that works out. 
2. I heard the Lost Mines could be deadly, and the group was all fighters so I added a Cleric NPC to help heal them if necessary. The NPC was mostly bored in the back of the group. We'd always joked that one player cheated at die rolls, but here we had pre-generated characters and the rolls are all handled by Roll20 and they still had amazing luck. Sure they loved it, they saw the ambush before it was sprung and riddled the Goblins with arrows before they could attack. They cleared out the left half of the caves without taking any damage. I'll see how things go in the second half of the caves and if its still too easy maybe I'll add an extra villian or two to future encounters.

I'm looking forward to Phandalin and a bit of actual Role Playing/Sandbox style play.

Of note, the Roll20 character generator didn't seem to list arrows in the characters inventory which seems like a miss.