It’s interesting to look at the various rpg communities online. I’ve observed some tendencies in those consituencies. RPGnet has a LOT of D&D coverage (including its share of d20 haterz), ENworld is practically ALL d20 all the time, the Forge is focused on indie games, etc. Amongst the people who profess to play a lot of indie games, they’ve played a LOT of games in general and nearly all of them (especially the older guys who started playing in the 70s or 80s) started with D&D.

D&D is often referenced — not always kindly — by players discussion other rpgs, be they indie or the other popular “mainstream” rpgs (World of Darkness, Exalted, Shadowrun, Savage Worlds, etc.). Among the D&D-only crowds, though, there is rarely — if ever — any mention of other rpgs. And that is a phenomenon I find very interesting. For a lot of D&D players, D&D is the ONLY RPG IN EXISTENCE. And those players have a huge world that caters just to them: Dragon and Dungeon magazines, the whole of the Wizards.com website (with their extensive forums and resources), 3rd-party supplements and accessories, etc. It’s one of the things that was very attractive to me about D&D (in addition to the not-to-be-discounted nostalgia factor).

Of course, there are great communities built up around other games, too, but almost none have the “industry” behind them like D&D, but that CAN be a good thing at times. For example, The Burning Wheel is one of my favorite of the “indie” rpgs. In fact, it’ll probably be what I run next. Burning Wheel has a GREAT community in the forums at The Forge and at burningwheel.org (and it’s getting more popular at RPGnet, too), but the game itself consists of two smallish (by RPG standards) and one bigger books plus some PDF supplements (and some very short-run print supplements). Luke even says in the BW book that there’s no supplied setting in BW because he couldn’t come up with anything as cool as your group can. Of course, BW has a pretty powerful implied setting embodied by the rules, but there’s not literally thousands upon thousands of pages of supplements of varying quality out there like there is for D&D. Luke doesn’t have to depend on selling BW supplements to support himself, much less a legion of employees and facilities like WOTC. NOT having an industry “supporting” a game can be good for a game, and I think BW is an excellent example of that.

It sounds like I’m bagging on the D&D market, and that’s only partially true. There are a lot of excellent WOTC-produced supplements (Eberron, for example), and there are good 3rd-party products, too (like Monte Cook’s stuff). And Dungeon is the best it’s EVER been these days, thanks to the steady hand ands sharp eye of editor Erik Mona and his crew.

So, was there a point to all this? Not really, which is why I never got around to writing this post during the actual 101 Days of D&D. Still, I wanted to make the observation(s).

First, read the thread. If you’re at all interested in role playing games, it’s worth reading through the thread. If you’re interested in narrativist role playing (and I mean that in the least confrontational way possible), it’s just about essential.

I’ve already covered some of this in previous posts, but it bears repeating, I think. When I re-started my interest in RPGs about 15 months ago, I had never heard of The Forge or the GNS model (or any role playing “theories” at all) or any sort of indie RPGs. I completely missed the start of all that when I was away from roleplaying. So, when I got back into roleplaying last year, I started exploring those sorts of games just to check that stuff out. [There was also a local guy (hey Roy! Miss you!) who was really into those games that helped me a lot. He moved away last year and our local gaming community is worse off for it. But, back to me.] I ended up loving several of those games (esp. Burning Wheel) and sorta snubbed D&D/d20/etc. for a while. I have a tendency towards snobbery sometimes. Those of you who know me in real life will have a chuckle at that. The rest of you will just have to trust me.

I didn’t get to play as many of the indie games as I bought and read, but I really enjoyed that style of play. Then our group sorta fell apart over this past summer, and I wanted a palate cleanser of sorts to clear the bad taste of the final few sessions. So, being in a nostalgic sort of mood, I turned to D&D, the current edition, though, not the stuff I played “back in the day.” I figured I’d give it a shot, especially since I was very interested in the Eberron campaign setting.

I started this blog series with the idea that it would make me work on my D&D game more often and would motivate me to learn the rules better and spend more time thinking D&D. What I’ve spent a lot of time doing is trying to figure out how to turn D&D into something else. It’s been really interesting, but has shown me that it’s not easy and and — more importantly — not worth it. D&D should be D&D and _____ should be _____. There are already systems out there that do what I want out of RPGs (more or less). There’s no point in trying to make D&D do that.

So, fast forward a half-dozen sessions of D&D 3.5 and 42 days worth of this 101 Days of D&D project to right now. I’ve covered a number of topics in this series that have helped me work through some issues I’ve been having with my roleplaying. Heck, just reading through the posts again, it’s so obvious that, despite my constant wish to “let D&D be D&D” I’m just not that into the D&D style of play. One of the players in my group (the one who’s been drifting D&D toward something else with me) recently said the reason I started up the D&D thing was because of nostalgia, and I think he’s right. But, it’s been really useful besides that. It’s shown me what I really want from my roleplaying, and, unfortunately — in some respects — that’s not the sort of play that D&D provides.

First, let me say that D&D 3.5 is REALLY good at what it does. There are a lot of reasons it’s as successful as it is. It’s the best at being D&D that D&D has ever been.

Second, the group I’ve been playing with has been really great. Except for Tim. He’s the one who’s been encouraging me to drift D&D towards something more narrativist and causing me all this RPG angst. :) But the group’s been great, and I hope to continue gaming with them in some form or another for a good long while.

Third, as if it weren’t completely obvious by now, I’m going to end the 101 Days of D&D project at 43 days. I don’t foresee a breakthrough of any sort that would “turn me around” and I’d like to explore some other rpg approaches now instead of in a couple of months. More on this below…

Fourth, I’m NOT sure about what to do about my Eberron D&D game. It’s been going in fits and spurts (some great sessions some “meh” sessions) for the last few months (it predates this project by a bit), and I’d like to bring it to some sort of conclusion instead of just ending it abruptly. I plan to talk to my players about it before tomorrow’s session. I don’t want to spend the next several months of sessions running D&D and not enjoying it just for the sake of the campaign, but I would like to get some resolution for as many of the characters — and players! — as I can. I guess I’ll have a follow-up post this weekend about that.

Lastly (for now), I’m not going to stop blogging about role playing. Heck, doing this project in public on the blog has gotten my interest in blogging back some. I hope to post more here about what I’m doing as far as roleplaying is concerned, and I’m also going to be blogging more in general, I hope. I also hope to get engaged in some of the great roleplaying discussions going on right now. The Forge thread cited at the very beginning of this post is a great example (though I think that one’s about played out). So, I’m not leaving, even though I am ending this project early.

See you around the internets!

UPDATE 2005.12.20: okay, so the weekend has come and gone and no post. I’m still suffering from a touch of burnout but also from last-minute Christmas prep and a LOT of work at, you know, work (that thing we do between RPG sessions). I hope to be back with something before Christmas, but it may be a bit longer.

The Causes.Out of the four “adventures” (scattered over five or six sessions) this group has played I’ve run them through two published adventures that are very much gamist D&D in style, and a couple of minimally-prepped, “wing it” style, more narrativist adventures. The first two were okay, but a little dry, for a lot of reasons: I didn’t really get behind the material, I didn’t know the characters very well (nor did the players), atrophied DMing muscles, etc.

Feedback was a resounding “meh.” The second two adventures went pretty well (#3 better than #4). At least two of us (me and the player I’ve gamed with the most out of this group) really enjoyed the latter two adventures a lot more than the other players. Enthused by that, I started exploring more ways to drift our game in that direction.

I’ll skip most of the navel-gazing angst, but I came to two realizations:

• I had abandoned one of the primary tenets of this campaign and this project: let D&D be D&D.
• Why try to drift D&D towards a more narrativist style of play when there are plenty of good systems out there that already do this well for fantasy roleplaying, especially, Burning Wheel, The Shadow of Yesterday, and The Riddle of Steel?

My main goals in running this D&D campaign and starting this 101 Days project were to learn D&D on its own terms and play it the same way. I wanted to do this for several reasons:

1. the nostalgia factor (not to be discounted)
2. get a bit of a palate cleansing from the last few rough sessions of Burning Wheel at the end of the summer
3. do some gamist gaming to see if 8-10 months of playing mostly Burning Wheel had altered permanently the way I think about and play RPGs

With all this recent drifting stuff, I had been undermining a lot of what I had set out to do, even though it was interesting and useful. I want(ed) to try to get back toward the original intent of this campaign and blog series.

So, I got with my group and talked about things a little more in depth and out in the open. The result is that we’ve planned to alternate games: my D&D Eberron campaign alternating with… other stuff. The first dose of “other stuff” will be a Riddle of Steel one- or two-shot run by one of the players in my D&D game. We may then start a TROS campaign in that slot or do some more one-shots. We’ll see how it goes.

I think with the D&D game settling back towards its roots and the more narrativist stuff on alternate weekends, I’ll be doing much better soon. I guess we’ll find out in a few weeks!

[EDIT: oh, yeah. One more thing. Can anyone ID the subtitle of this post? It's unrelated to gaming. It's musical.]

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.

A lot of the more narrativist games developed in and around the Forge (you know ‘em: Primetime Adventures, Dogs in the Vineyard, Burning Wheel, etc.) are often more about conflict resolution rather than task resolution (almost always, actually). D&D is typically NOT about conflict resolution. Tim Kleinert defines the differences between the two on the Forge:

Task Resolution is when the dice (or whatever) decide the success of an action, independant of of a meta-game goal.

Conflict Resolution is when the dice decide whether a character/player’s interest is realized, most often in contrast with another character/player’s opposing interest.

The question — as is relevant to this blog series and my own current game — is “how can you apply conflict resolution concepts to task resolution-based games like D&D and use those methods for setting stakes to crank up the intensity of your D&D game?”

D&D is a strongly task-resolution oriented game right out of the box. But, I think it’s fairly easy to use conflict resolution models for D&D play just as it is in narrativist games. What becomes important is not what the character does (pick the lock) but the ramifications of either succeeding or not succeeding (does he pick the lock before the hobgoblins get there).

Out of the box, D&D is about opening the lock. You can make it about opening the lock in time, though. Settings stakes helps you define what the outcome of a die roll means to the player.

Instead of setting the DC for Ja’el’s open locks skill check based on the arbitrary difficulty of the lock (though that can be a factor), make it an opposed test against the fastest hobgoblin’s running check (i.e., a Strength check), adding modifiers based on things like the difficulty of the lock, things in the path of the charging hobgoblins, etc.

Think about what’s at stake every time you roll the dice, and keep those stakes high.:

Player: Ja’el picks the lock on the door.
GM: He needs to get it unlocked before the hobgoblins get there or something wet will happen. (stakes are escalated by the GM with an evil grin)
Player: Maybe so, but if Ja’el opens the lock before they get there, he can slam it shut and escape down the stairs, getting away with the dragonshard he stole from them (Player escalates!)
GM: Roll!

Setting stakes and conflict resolution vs. task resolution are definitely things I’m going to be thinking about during my D&D session this weekend, which may be the last session we have until after Christmas, due to players having holiday things to do the following two weeks. I’ll continue to update this series, though.

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.

While I’ve started weaving in some action from what I sorta put forth as the core story for the characters in a previous post, I need something bigger that all of these smaller story threads will be working toward, and I think I think I’ve seized upon an endpoint.

While the general idea for D&D campaigns seems to be that years-long slog from level 1 to level 20 (and beyond), I’ve never managed to do that, though I have tried. I’m okay with shorter campaign arcs, though, even as short as a handful of sessions. Mostly it’s because I have lots of ideas for campaigns (and not just in D&D), but I have scarce gaming time. I’m pretty much limited to one session per week due to work and family obligations (I have a rambunctious 2-year-old son), so I usually feel that I’d like to get in, get some stuff done, and get out without letting things drag on too much. Then it’s off to the next game/system/group/campaign.

My current Eberron D&D campaign was originally conceived as mid-length game, maybe six months or so, and even that would be pretty long for me and most of the people I play with. I wanted to play with a pretty definite endgame in mind, then the concept sorta wandered, and the game has been much more generic D&D in flavor than I intended or anticipated. However, I’m coming back to the idea of a definite place I want them to end up. What’s ironic, is that, for most of the characters in this group, I can see some really long-term play (e.g., one character is pretty much doomed to lead a nation or a Dragonmarked house), but I think I’m going to go for something shorter and faster and maybe more tragic.

Of course, since some of my players are reading this blog now, I can’t reveal that endgame. Yeah, yeah, I know, player knowledge isn’t character knowledge, and there are situations in which I can definitely see planning out that endgame with the players and then all of us working toward that goal together. However, this group and this game are a little old school, so more of the burden is on me for plotting purposes, and more of the burden to step on up is on the players. So far, it’s working out okay.

I’ve realized that there are a number of other sorts of games I’d like to run in the Eberron campaign setting. I really enjoy this setting, and I’ll definitely return to it in the future (and maybe not just with D&D as a rule system — I definitely see a Savaged Eberron in my future). In fact, I’m already planning a very different sort of campaign to run after this one finishes (more on that later). So, some ideas I was trying to fit into this current campaign will get filed away for that other game, and now that I’ve got some focus back, it’s time to start plotting some situations and NPCs who will — I don’t want to say “lead,” but I really do want to say that, too! — okay, play roles in the endgame. But, there are several months of gaming to go before we get there…

• Save My Game: is Jason Nelson-Brown’s weeklyesque column at the official D&D website about advice for DMs who are having problems in their campaigns. Many of the topics come from posts on the D&D forums where DMs have asked the community for help with a particular problem she is having in her campaign. I don’t always agree with Nelson-Brown, but his columns always give me something to think about in regards to my D&D campaign, and he has helped save my bacon at least once. In some upcoming posts about particular topics (as opposed to particular resources — the othe axis), I’ll have more to say about some particular columns. In the meantime, his column is a good place to start when you’re having problems with a D&D campaign — or a good place to skim and read BEFORE you start having problems.

But, now I’m playing a lot of D&D again, and D&D 3.5 is a game with combat that’s pretty tactical in nature and is designed to be played with miniatures. I’ve done it both ways now, and I really prefer playing with minis. It makes things like Attacks of Opportunity and dealing with reach so much easier to deal with. Sure, you can play just fine without them, but I think it enhances the tactical nature of D&D combat.

While I like minis, I don’t have the time or patience to paint metal minis (and I don’t really want to spend the money, either), and the way WOTC markets the plastic minis is a pain in the ass for us roleplayers. If they’d market them individually, I’d get the plastic ones. However, I’m too short of time (or too lazy, more likely) to hunt down singles or trade for the ones I need. I’m lucky that one of the players in my game is also a D&D Minis player, and we usually play at his house. So, I can just use his minis (and I usually do). I don’t, however, own any miniatures or counters or a battlemat.

Yet.

I’ve been thinking about what to do about the minis situation. I’d really like to have something of my own to use in our weekly games (and other games as well), but I hadn’t really sat down and looked at all my options until this week.

Since you can’t (affordably) get pre-painted metal miniatures (and I’m too lazy to paint them myself), and the pre-painted plastic minis aren’t marketed in a way that’s convenient for us roleplayers, I’ve decided to go with counters.

Counters, on the other hand, are cheap and useful. If you have something like Fiery Dragon’s Counter Collection Digital (nearly a 1000 different counters), a ream of cardstock, and an ink-jet printer, you can print out all the ones you need for a session and not have to do any substitutions like you might have to with plastic minis. They’re also a lot easier to store and transport.

So, I’m going with counters (specifically the Fiery Dragon Counter Collection Digital, mentioned above). I’ve used a few I’ve gotten from other sources and samples, and I think counters rule.

Of course, once you pick your counters/minis, you need a field to play them on: a battle mat. I’ve played on the vinyl battlemats, and I’m not impressed. I think every one I’ve played on had some sort of “memorial” feature due to someone using dry erase instead of wet erase markers on it. That and they’re expensive and ungainly to transport and store. So, that leaves pretty much two options: Tact Tiles and the Flip Mat. Both are cool in different ways. I’ve got a set of Tact Tiles on my Christmas list, but I’ve already ordered a Flip Mat since they’re inexpensive and über-portable.

In addition to mats and counters, I’ve found one other cool related accessory: Fiery Dragon’s Battle Box. The quick-reference cards are worth the price alone, but you also get some spell effect overlay counters, some optional rules, and a single d20 (not sure why, but there it is).

So, there’s the physical landscape. More on the other stuff coming this week.

[NOTE: I started this last week, but we played our weekly session last night sans minis and I REALLY wished I'd had them. I'm addicted.]