Chris Mortika's page

While I pronounce "Drow" to rhyme with "Poe," I remember a friend of mine filking:

"Beth, I hear you callin', but I can't come home right now.
"Me an' the boy are playin', and we just can't find the Drow..."

I suspect that virtually everything Wizards has published about the "Far Realm" (in the LORDS OF MADNESS book and other places) could just as easily apply to the Anarchic Outer Planes.

Back when I was getting certified to teach English, I studied a lot of what they called "sub-literature": romance novels, comic books, adolescent girls' books, horrible "Flowers in the Attic" thrillers, and westerns. And westerns have a number of genre conventions, not just in setting but in themes, and in what's considered "the right kind of decisions."

In Westerns, conflicts are settled one-to-one (when teams meet to fight, characters pair off to fight "their opponent"), and bravery is an important factor. Heroic decisions, doing things because they're right, even though the character knows there'll be bad consequences, are expected.

The protagonists do things for the common citizens, but are never really part of the common citizenry (for example, "Shane"). Indeed, the common folk will often turn their back on the protagonist just when he might need them. (for example, "High Noon.") The protagonist is also separated from the common people by some unusually high degree of skill. This skill is usually gunplay, but it doesn't have to be. (O. Henry's short story "A Reprieved Reformation" is a perfect example of a Western with a different kind of skill: safe-cracking.)

Just being set in the Western Territories during the 19th Century doesn't make a story a Western. "Little House on the Prairie" is not a Western. (Neither the book -- which is a classic example of a different genre: the girl's book -- nor the TV show.) Neither were the TV show "F-Troop" nor the movie "Dances with Wolves".

We've had Western films which were set in Australia ("Quigley Down Under") and in outer space ("Outland").

Firefly was a Western, as well as a SF show. In particular, it was an early, post-Civil War Western.

That served two purposes. First, it gave us watchers a easy-to-decode hook on the setting: the society and expectations. The culture has just gotten over a major, bloody war; Mal's side lost; there's a frontier out here, with little towns surrounded by lots of nothing; life is hard, and dangerous; there's reavers / indians who'll kill you if they can catch you; people are self-reliant; people live by individual moral codes; there's probably a couple of fortunes in treasure buried out there somewhere, their locations lost in the war; etc.

Secondly, it gave us an expectation about genre. There would be heroes, and villains. People would be wounded, and people would die. (I didn't mind Wash's death in the movie; it's the way folks die in Westerns.) The important combats would be one-on-one. Courage and talent would count.

Even "high-tech" episodes like "Ariel" had some good Western touches. Jayne's behavior, and Mal's reaction to it, are fine examples of the genre. Jubal Early, from "Objects in Space", is a bounty hunter, and however else that episode goes off-genre, the encounter with a bounty hunter is at its core a Western plot.

The Serenity movie isn't a Western. The opening heist is a good Western motif, but otherwise, Serenity is only a good SF movie, stuck in Western wardrobe. The Operative doesn't make sense in a Western. (That may be intentional. One of the reasons he's so devestating is his shocking breaking of taboos, his "sins".) The Pax work the Alliance did on Miranda, the kind of misbehaving Mal decides to do ("We have to get this information to The People!") and the majority of the scenes in the movie just wouldn't happen in a Western.

The particularly glaring problem, was, for me, the character of "Mr. Universe." In a setting which is half futuristic and half 19th-Century, Mr. Universe is neither. With his TV's, and his robotic sex toy, his wardrobe, and his willingness to betray Mal for money, he's a 21st-Century anomoly. What are we supposed to make of him? How does he fit into the post-war culture?

Could the role have been envisioned as a war veteran / comm officer? Alternatively, a thoroughly futuristic character from the Alliance who'd owed a favor to Book, heard about what the Operative had done, and decided to help spread some vengeance?

Anyway, that's my take on it.

One transition from Firefly to Serenity bothered me, but not enough to wreck the movie: the reason the Alliance wanted River, which changed from "she's been trained to be a magically good living weapon," to "she knows a Big Secret." I think that had to change, because the movie had to resolve with the Alliance no longer seriously hunting River (The good guys had to "win.") and the change allowed the bad guys to no longer care about her.

The recent DRAGONs (and by that, I mean the last five or six years) have contained a tremendous amount of really wonderful material, but the most influential issues hit me a couple of years after I started reading the magazine. (My first issue was #48.) So I think back most fondly to them.

Somewhere around # 109, there was an extraordinary article about building do-it-yourself character classes by cherry-picking the abilities you wanted the character to have at given levels, and then assigning experience-point costs for each level, based on the abilities chosen. (Remember, this was back in 1st Edition, when different classes popped levels at different experience totals.)

(So, if you wanted a magic-user who had d8 hit dice for the first five levels and could wear light armor, you could design that, and calculate the new experience point totals.)

This really opened my eyes to what WotC now calls "development," the nuts-and-bolts of how gaming systems work.

Roger Moor's article, reprinted in one of the "Best of DRAGON" anthologies, which charted the abilities of character classes based on experience points, rather than levels, was also eye-opening.

And as for paladins of varying alignments, the article in #108 did it first and, in many ways, best.

Oh, and which issue included "Fedifensor"?

For what it's worth...

I think this is a poor choice on Wizards' part. And I think the poeple there are handling it even more poorly.

But over the years, I've liked a lot of their on-line content. I've learned a lot about design and (especially) development from Mike Mears' essays, and Wolfgang Baur's six-part series on Adventure Design from a year or so back. And several others. The rare adventures that they publish on-line -- like the 3.5 updates for Tomb of Horrors and White Plume Mountain, the return to the Temple of the Frog, and Monte Cook's short adventures -- have been pretty fun.

I disagree with the posters here who assert that nothing on WotC's website is worth the electrons it's printed on. If you sift through the "articles" that are ads for upcoming projects, and the rambling Sharn Initiative stuff, there's some good ideas to find.

Then again, there was the fiendish gelatinous cube Monk....

I fondly remember:

"Gnome, gnome on the range...
Where the beer and the whiskey flow free,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word...
'Cause gnomes only know two or three."

I concur.

Adventures compete with one another. Every session you spend playing one pre-written adventure is a session you're not in the market for a new one.

Once PATHFINDER #7 comes out, there will be a whole bunch of people still working through the first $120 campaign, who probably won't be interested in buying the next $120 campaign.

(That's a good aspect of PATHFINDER: the price point is high enough to discourage casual readers / players from purchasing issues out of curiosity and spoiling the plotline for themselves.)

Not that anybody asked me, but my thought would have been: Produce the first six monthly products, then wait six months. On the other hand, this may splinter the Paizo fan base: not everybody here will be intimately familiar with all the adventures / material published. A couple years from now, some of us will have bought the psionics / mind-flayers / Far Realm adventure path, and others will own the time-travelling / wereboars / mass combat adventure path; very few will have spent the hundreds of dollars necessary to keep up with all the campaigns.

Then again, these are books, not magazines; they'll last indefinitely on the shelves at my Friendly Local Gaming Store.

Responding to Fletch's:
"$20! Yikes!"

James Jacobs had this to say:
"When compared to one magazine, maybe. Less jarring when compared to two (which is basically what Pathfinder is replacing). And a pretty good deal when you compare it to what it's closest analogue is ("Red Hand of Doom")."

But, James, RED HAND OF DOOM managed to tell a story from beginning to end, in a single 96-page adventure. A six-part saga, where each part is 96 pages, is really a different kind of thing.

I think the nearest equivalent is --depending on what aspects of Pathfinder people think are important-- probably either the "Ashardalon" series of adventurs for D&D 3.0, or the PTOLUS hardcover.

By the way, I see two advantages of an Adventure Path that takes six $20 books, rather than parts of twelve $7.00 magazines:

One: The DM can see where everything's leading more quickly. As a DM, I would never run an adventure path before the last installment was published, because I'd want to know what's going to be important later on, which NPC's to portray in what kind of light, and so on, in case I need to modify something for my particular PC's or campaign.

Two: The high price point is going to push casual players away from buying the books. As a D&D fan, I have bought issues of DUNGEON which include three adventures I'd never run, because I'm willing to gamble $7.00 that there's *something* in there (maybe a "Dungeoncraft" article...) that I'll use, and since I've bought it, I'll probably read through the adventures, and that would discourage any DM's from someday running me through them. But if I'm not interested in running a particular AP, I won't be tempted at all to buy a $20 product devoted to that content.

According to the Binomial Theorem, if a critter attacks three times with a 35% chance to hit each time, then the liklihood of getting:
3 hits is 0.042875
2 hits is 0.238875
1 hit is 0.443625
0 hits is 0.274625
(This doesn't take into account criticals, or a clever critter deciding to Power Attack after two hits...)

Some years ago, I was at a gaming convention where people were looking over a list of a couple hundred "You know you're a Gamer Geek if..." Purity Test-type questions. One of them was, "You played T.S./SI". The next question was "You know what we meant when we said 'T.S./SI'." The guys with the list laughed.

I went over to them and asked "What does that make me, if I was one of the freelancers who wrote for 'T.S./SI'?"

I kinda won that purity test.

I was going to post in this thread about the way I run character generation in my campaign (neither point-buy nor roll-and-assign) but I figured it was a little off-topic here, so I made it its own thread.

Check out the "27 dice stat buy" method and tell me what you think.

Way back in 2nd Edition, there was a version of rolling for stats that I kind of liked, and I adapted it to my current campaign, and it works pretty well. I thought I'd explain it here and offer it to anyone who'd like to try it:

The player starts with a given number of dice. Right now, I think 27 is about right. The player assigns all the dice to her character's stats, with at least three dice per stat.

For example, Alice and Ben apply their dice as follows:

Alice (hoping to play a paladin)
STR 5d6 DEX 3d6 CON 4d6 INT 4d6 WIS 5d6 CHA 6d6

Ben (who's sick of playing rogues who keep dying on him)
STR 3d6 DEX 5d6 CON 10d6 INT 3d6 WIS 3d6 CHA 3d6

The roll, taking the best three out of their nd6 for each stat.

It's always a nice surprise when those "3d6" stats turn out high. And it's been fun to play them when they're pretty low, too. A "5d6" provides a 84% chance that the stat will be at least 11 (averages to about 14.5). I'm recommending that players commit 6d6 or possibly 7d6 to any attributes they want to make "very likely" to be above 13.

If I wanted to encourage unbalanced characters, I'd rule that any additional die roll of "6" past the first three "6"s, would add 1 to the results. So an 8d6 roll of {3,6, 2, 6, 6, 5, 1, 6, 6} would be interpretted as a result of "20."

But I don't encourage such things.

Dwarves...in...Chemo!

Three answers:

1) Cure Disease just, y'know, works.

2) Dwarves more than any other race are physically resistant to change. That includes genetic mutation.

3) Establishing that dwarves and elves and such long-lived folk are continually suffering from various cancers would break the spirit of the fantasy world. Not much fun, there.

Instead of trying to couter or cancel the party's reasonable use of available magic, why not give them credit for it, and assume they're able to handle a more serious threat?

They're going into the no-holds-barred battles with a serious advantage. So assume they're functioning one or two levels higher than the average party level, and run them through more difficult challenges.

That would be my advice.

Don't forget the visitors from Temple of the Frog.

When I ran a dwarven weaponsmith, I always manufactured +1 holy weapons.

Why?

Because I wanted to put some check against them falling into evil hands and being used in some terrible and spectacularly public crime.

You can balance things a little without resorting to compensatory feats and abilities:

Every character should have a chance to shine. If there's never any ranged combat, the bow-meisters feel useless. The simplest answer is to put in ranged combat, rather than give the archers special feats to make them useful in hand-to-hand melees.

Likewise, give the party some encounters where the magic-shunning character comes into her own. Anti-magic fields, rust monsters, disenchanters, and so forth.

I'd also place a really cool magic item, tailor-made for the character, in an upcoming encounter, but I'm just mean like that.

I am a githyanki on a bad hair day.

Off the top of my head:

Hobgoblins. More hobgoblins. No, more than that. Four doom fist monks. Two talons of Tiamat. Four doom fist warpriests.
Bugbears, both an assortment of the traditional brown and a set of the gray ghosty bugbears.
Goblins. Three worgs. Five wolves. Three bhargests.
Six to eight ogres.
A couple of hill giants.
Three hellhounds.
Two owlbears.
Manticore.
Medium to large green dragon. Small to medium black dragon. Large red dragon. Large blue dragon.
Six blackspawn exterminators. Four greenspawn razorfiends. Five bluespawn thunderlizards.
Perhaps something representing an old coot swamp ranger.
Perhaps a halfling wizard.
A dozen or so lizardfolk.
Giant owls.
An assortment of wild elves.
A behir.
Thee aren't any pre-painted D&D minis of bonedrinker undead, but there's an undead with oogily tentacles coming out of its backside that works well; six of them.
I found a nice dire lion pewter figure and didn't paint it, which worked for the ghost dire lion. The hellcat works for the ghost brute lion; two of each.
A lich.
A night hag.
A bone devil. Two bearded devils (or, the recent Blood War expansion has a mezzoloth figure...)
Five of something that can represent blue abashi. I found some generic devilish monster minis from another game.
Five wyvren.
Two erynies.
An aspect of Tiamat. (If you don't want to spend a hudred dollars on a single figure that'll go down in three melee rounds, I have a spare...)

What a terrific topic!! This is how I explain the concepts to my players:

Let's start with the fighter and the command word that lights his flaming spear. I've always considered that to be the equivalent of, say, the triggering event for a Magic Mouth or such. It's a condition the spear is always "looking for," rather than anything the weilder "does." It would be just as easy for the creator to have installed a command gesture, or a command "color of hat." (Wouldn't that be a hoot? A weapon which crackles with electricity, but only when held by an elf wearing the badge of Twilight's Valley.)

Spell Completion is a lot like MS Office's "Wizards". Most of the heavy lifting of the spell is already set; the caster fills in the last few "arguments" (the effect's location, etc.) and hits "cast." It takes somebody who knows how magic works --either through class abilities or the Use Magic Item skill -- to interact with the scroll.

Spell Trigger is, as people have said, somewhere in the middle. I assume that "wand use" is one of the first lessons that wizards learn and sorcerers intuit. There's still some decisions to be made when operating a wand or a staff (distance to effect location, and determination of staff effect, come to mind), so a fighter without any skill in use Magic Device isn't going to know how to "answer" the basic questions the item "asks" and successfully pull the trigger.

The warlock doesn't necessarily know how to work these things, 'cause she doesn't cast spells per se, but she has an inside track in learning how, because her invocations are similar.

(Which makes me think that "ability to use spell trigger items" might be a racial feat for, say, a fey character ...)

Remind me, 'cause I don't have my books here: can the alternate magicians in the Tome of Magic use spell trigger items? What about spellthieves?

And runestaves, fom this week's new WotC hardbound, are kind of like wands or staves with the batteries removed. They can create effects, but they need to be fueled by the release of raw arcane energies. Which makes me wonder if there are "high magic" or "ley-line" locations that might fuel a runestaff without the user having to sacrifice a spell.

Moff Rimmer, you wrote:
After this, at each level they can choose to either advance in a class or in a racial "class".

In Savage Species, the rules stated that a character must complete all racial levels before entering a class. Has this changed?

Dross is important.

Dull encounters are bad, whether they have to do with the main plotline or not. If the battle with the chief lieutennant bad guy is a tedious toe-to-toe whack-fest, its importance doesn't ameliorate its tedium.

Encounters should be interesting, whether they're essential to the plot or not.

And, here's the thing, if you eliminate all the "dross, non-essential to the plot" encounters, then the players come to understand that *ALL THE ENCOUNTERS ARE IMPORTANT IN SOME WAY.* And that leads to weird meta-gaming during those encounters that don't seem to be important.

I'm finishing out running "Red Hand of Doom", and I tried to take all the "random terrain encounters" and use them to tell the players something about the world, the army, some other factions (there ended up being a cult of Erythnul running around, harrassing the Lawful Evil army and the human settlements as well).

When I wrote:
(I might, in fact, start the character at -1000 experience points....)

Sebastian asked me in return:
Why? The penalty in terms of levels that most +x ECL races get already makes them a suboptimal choice.

On the sub-optimal choice, agreed. It's called "losing at least one hit die." When you're tenth-level and all your pals are twelfth-level, and something growly and abyssal is gnawing on your thigh, you'd better hope that your once-a-day darkness power and token spell resistance make up for those hit points.

As for the additional penalty, it, too, is token, a way to express my concerns without outright banning the character. Whether I would impose it depends, I think, on the character and the situation. Let's say someone decides to play something absurd like a celestial two-headed Fey'ri ranger. (No, that's not likely to happen...) I think that the character ends up with a +6 Level Adjustment. It will be a long time till that PC rolls another hit die, and maybe the player isn't intending to. Maybe he figures that the character will last for a while and then just succumb to random damage or wander off. Fine.

But if the player's planning to continue that monstrosity along for the entire campaign, (making third level ranger at about the same time the wizard is maxing out her 10d6 Fireballs)then I might decide to employ that 1000 xp penalty, just to make sure the player knows the situation.

Fatespinner said: I believe that the attack must also deal some form of damage, whether hit point damage or ability damage, in order to benefit from sneak attack. You cannot sneak attack with a ray of exhaustion, for example. On this point, however, I might be wrong.

A couple of examples from WotC have suggested otherwise. /yeah, I thought it was funky, too, but there it is.

Apparently, a high-level spell-thief knows just where to land those ray attacks to kill people.

There's a very large sidebar in the 3.0 Edition Forgotten Realms hardcover that is written in vague terms. I might have misunderstood it. But it suggested to me that the GM might allow characters with positive racial CL, but treat them as higher level characters for experience.

So, a first level party might include a Fire Genassi (+1 Level Adjustment) Sorcerer, but that character would be considered second level and receive less experience, and level-up more slowly.

(I might, in fact, start the character at -1000 experience points....)

As RPG rules go, a game's Rules-as-Written have some obvious advantages:

1) On the whole, they were written by one or more people whom other people are willing to employ as game designers, and might begin with the presumption of competency.

2) They're the rules that we players might reference, and might find familiar.

Neither of these is an absolute. There's also one disadvantage to the Rules-as-Written:

1) The game designers don't know you; they don't know us, your players; and they don't know our group's style.

Easy example: let's say we're all up for a mercantile D&D campaign, trying to amass wealth by plying trade routes. The RAW don't address this deeply, and the rules that do address it seem arbitrary and counter to fun play. So you need house rules to deal with situations the campaign will encounter.

More complex example: let's say that in our group, we all like chaos and drama in our games. Changing rules so that the encounters are more random --perhaps with extended critical and fumble tables, or re-rolling initiative every round -- would be good rules for us, but not necessarily for other parties.

It's interesting.

I think that I, as a player, would feel enough revulsion to leave a campaign if a DM had thrown a powerful lich against us and gone to the trouble of parading our inevitable deaths in front of us.

This isn't the GenCon Dungeon Delve. These are characters which your players have been trying to keep alive. That's not dramatic; it's tragic.

But.

If
(1) there was some "playing fair" hints thrown out by the DM. (For example, if the players were to roll up / build new characters a little while ahead of time, with the idea that they were all servants to a major bard...and if some sessions were to reference those "dormant" characters' studies...)

(2) the lich were to appear, and start threatening the party, and then the world were to fade out *without* walking people through theyr characters' murders

...I think the transition might work. There might be cryptic hints about the original PC's. Each of the new characters might be given some heirloom of the departed legends (maybe a magic item; maybe just a mundane quiver or boots, or maybe a fingerbone).

I like the idea of something Really Powerful, but I also like the idea of ending a campaign with the same themes it saw at the beginning.

I've run a campaign where the party spent their early levels exploring a region's dungeons; mid-level, defending the land against an underdark incursion; high-level, administering and building two kingdoms (This was a Birthright campaign); and the final adventure was an encounter with Ravenloft, as the Demiplane of Dread manifested its world-laws over the PC's realms. When the abomination High Lady of the Thieves' Guild starts accessing Darklord abilities, and the local citizenry begins to realize rewards for being evil towards one another, the PCs take a keen personal interest in freeing their (!) territories from the influences of the Demiplane.

I don't know how you'd write that up as a Dungeon adventure, though. It really has its keenest impact when the PC's see aspects of the campaign that've been there since the beginning, shift and corrupt. The more the DM can personalize the NPC's who shift towards disloyalty, the dungeons cleaned out at 3rd level which suddenly become threats again twenty levels later, the isolation from allied kingdoms and the creepy new neighbors; the better.

...which leads to the question: do you allow characters to *not* rise in level once they hit the XP point?

(So, a 5th Level character hits, 15,000 XP and is ready to advance to 6th, can she choose to wait at 5th level? If so, does she still accumulate XP? As a 5th-level character or 6th?)

My campaign: yes, for some of the reasons mentioned above. She is still functioning at 5th level, so she accumulates XP appropriately (with a cap at 21,000, so she can't ever pop more than 2 levels at once), but she *could* be 6th level if she chose, so I choose the EL of parties as if she were 6th.

I won't allow characters to gain the full benefits of some Prestige Classes in the field. If a character has never met a member of the Order of the Bow, for example, she'd need to find one and petition before being initiated into the Order's mysteries.

Blostaf--

I think those references were directed towards core classes like monk and paladin, which don't allow characters to take levels in other classes (core or prestige) and then return to progressing in the original class.

I'm...not dismayed, exactly, but unimpessed.

I have no problem with the Grey Guard being considered a "good-aligned" character.

But everything about the class tells me that the character is no longer "lawful".

The way i see it, and *of course* your mileage varies, killing sleeping people, even if they aura-identify as evil, is not a lawful act.

Deliberately fouling someone in basketball isn't "lawful." And choosing a class that can "foul" (fall in need of atonement) without it being such a big deal may still be good, but is not lawful.

There is some published material that deals with specific genres (Heroes of Horror, or Libris Mortis), themes (Book of Exalted Deeds, or Powers of Faerun), or settings (Eberron, or Stormwrack). I think those books work best in campaigns with those elements.

For example, I'm currently running an abreviated campaign, sending a party of characters against the "Red Hand of Doom" in the tropics of the Forgotten Realms. I allow most of the material in the "Complete" series and the "Races" books, except for those prestige classes that don't seem to be compatable with the Realms. I allow "Heroes of Battle," because the campaign's focus is a large-scale armed struggle, but I wouldn't allow material from any of the books mentioned above. This isn't a horror campaign, it isn't a "mature material on the subject of good and evil" campaign, and it's not set in Eberron.

While I think Mr. Otis' art style and the D&D game's have moved in seperate directions, I think his work would add terrific flavor for any of the Far Realms and aberrations work.

There's Slayer powers, and then there's Slayer training.

To see what the powers are, it's probably most useful to examine a character before and after she becomes a Slayer. In the TV show, we've got the examples of Buffy, Kendra (whom we don't see pre-Slayer), Faith (ditto), and the potentials in the final episode.

The powers might be a template (potentials who become slayers get stronger (+4 STR), hardier (+10 to any Healing check attempted on a Slayer), and more keenly aware of their surroundings (+2 on Fortitude and Reflex saves). They get an Exotic Weapon profiency with a particular double-weapon. Given the origin of the Slayer powers, I might add some fiendish flavor-text.

--
Slayer training depends on the particular mentor. I can imagine a Slayer Sword Sage/Crusader, or Ranger. I can imagine some Slayers taking the Assassin or Vigilante prestige class. (Have any Slayers ever learned any magic?)

Have you considered simply taking a level as a cleric?