101 Days of D&D: Drifting, Falling

So yesterday it hit me, the wave of “uh oh” that’s been building for the last week or two. I’ve been spending a lot of my brain cycles that are dedicated to RPGs thinking of ways to drift D&D in a narrativist direction. I realized today that I’ve been spending too much time worrying about it. I’d gotten myself a little worked-up about it, in fact. I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out where this game is going to go, and I’ve been failing miserably. I ended up canceling the D&D part of our group tonight, and we ended up playing Munchkin instead (which is really fun, by the way). I can identify a few causes and at least a couple of things we as a group are going to do in order to help me remedy the situation.

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101 Days of D&D: Setting stakes and conflict resolution in D&D

There’s a great thread on The Forge right now about setting stakes for conflicts in RPGs. Getting a good handle on setting stakes for conflicts in roleplaying can help any group get the conflict and excitement levels of their games cranked up a few notches so that things really sing. D&D players (and I lump GMs in with non-GMs here) often think more about task resolution than conflict resolution. Play becomes about rolling dice to see if an action succeeds not if a character succeeds at his goal.

Ja’el struggles with the lock on the door. The trio of hobgoblin mercenaries are charging down the hall, screaming and slavering, intent upon hacking Ja’el into tiny little wet bits. Ja’el’s task is to pick the lock. BUT, the conflict isn’t between Ja’el and the lock; it’s between Ja’el picking the lock before the hobgoblin’s get there. What’s at stake isn’t that Ja’el doesn’t get the door open; it’s that Ja’el doesn’t get the door open in time to get through it and down the stairs to safety before the hobgoblins arrive. [editor's note: apparently, I stole this example (more or less) from the BW Revised book. I didn't realize that until I saw a related message pop up on the Forge thread linked above. I carry a LOT of BW around in my head, I guess.]

By outlining stakes based on task resolution instead of conflict resolution, a metric assload of tension is inserted into the scene. It’s a seemingly little change, but it gets the players focused on what’s really going on in a game.

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101 Days of D&D: Web resources for Eberron DMs

I am unabashed in my enthusiasm for the Eberron campaign setting for D&D. I think it’s the best thing to hit D&D in a long time. In addition to the seven or eight sourcebooks for the setting, Wizards puts a lot of interesting stuff on their website for Eberron, too.

I use the following sources for adventure ideas (and to enhance my trivia and flava knowledge of Eberron, too) all the time:

• Dragonshards: billed on the website as “Keith Baker, creator of the Eberron campaign setting, gives us the lore of Eberron, providing information about day-to-day life in Eberron, personalities of interest, history, and geography of this newest game world.” Each one has either great flavor to drop into your campaign or a great adventure hook. Some have additional rules (feats, spells, etc.) in them, too, but they tend to be flavor and not crunch.
• Steal This Hook!: “This column brings you, the DM, a bevy of Eberron ideas to steal for your campaign. You’ll find several entrée-sized hooks and then a bevy of bite-sized mini-hooks in each installment.” They do these for the other campaign settings, too, but this is the Eberron one. Some of the ideas just don’t appeal to me but a surprising number of them are really good. The best session we’ve had so far in this campaign came right out of a Steal This Hook installment. Very useful for when you’re running out of time and are short on ideas for this week’s session or just for sparking ideas in general.
• Sharn Inquisitive: “A weekly series of articles that might appear in the Sharn Inquisitive, one of Eberron’s largest daily newspapers. Use them as adventure hooks or local flavor in your Eberron game. ” I haven’t really used any of these yet, but I’m thinking about ways to use them in my campaign. If all of my players checked their email more often, I would consider sending them out (and perhaps expanding them some — I am a newspaperist of sorts, after all) to either add some background flavor to the game or to spur them to come up with adventure ideas themselves. I need to study on this some more.

Even if you naturally come up dry a lot — and it happens to all of us at one time or another — the sources above can get your Eberron game moving again. And, even if you’re normally overflowing with cool ideas for your game, they can still help you make connections and give you some alternate ideas for locations and things.