Sealed Deck League Awesomeness

Several weeks ago we started up a casual Magic sealed deck league - and by "we" I mean "me" and the several reluctant people I cajoled, needled, and bludgeoned into joining. We all used to play Magic back in the mid-90s, and off and on again since then. Most of the others had been clean for a while, but it was fairly easy to get them hooked again. And thus we returned again to the paper crack...

Limited formats (draft and sealed deck) are awesome because everyone has invested the same amount into their card pool - no one has a significant advantage based on how much they've spent or netdecking. Sealed deck league is when everyone starts off with the same size collection of cards (typically a tournament pack and 3 boosters, or 6 boosters, or a precon deck and 2 boosters), builds a deck out of it, and then adds a new pack to their collection every week. Depending on the league rules, trading may or may not be allowed. Likewise, prize structures vary. In our case, at the end of a night we just crack open all the new packs for the week and take the pack of our choice in rank order. The league usually ends after several weeks, although in our case it looks like we're going to just keep cruising indefinitely.

It's a fun format because it's fairly balanced, rewards skill, and is very challenging to evolve your deck in small but meaningful ways in response to the metagame.

In my case, I started off with the Grixis precon deck from Shards of Alara (all of the other players took a precon from a shard as well). I took it because I thought it was the worst deck of the bunch, but it also had lots of potential to grow. I think my assessment was right - I got pretty badly beat at first. But this is where the game gets fun - why did I get beat? How, exactly? What can I do about it?

If you look at the Grixis precon decklist, it's kind of a mish-mash that doesn't really jell. Some "Unearth" graveyard goodness, some disruption, some removal, some pingers, some nasty creatures, and some truly terrible cards. And slow... Molasses slow. Like, by the time I could do something useful I was already dead slow.

Everyone else had faster, more aggressive, more creature-heavy decks than me. And with my card pool there was no way I could outrace them. I had to come up with a way to win on my terms while denying them their's. So I came up with a game plan to try and manage the board with a ton of removal and pingers until the other player ran out of steam. Assuming I didn't run out of steam as well, flyers or Cruel Ultimatum should be able to win me the game from there. I took out half of my creatures, put in every last shred of removal I could, a Courier's Capsule, and a single, wonderful, Tidings that I got in a trade from the Esper player.

Wow.

When I pilot this deck, I feel like I'm on a sinking ship that's being boarded, desperately bailing out water and trying to shoot back at the same time, and yet somehow seizing victory. Albeit a battered, shaky sort of victory. It does well. Really well. But I invariably end up winning with only a handful of life left. It's crazy stressful but awesome.

As the weeks have passed and we've opened new packs and done some trading, my standing in the ranks always remains at or near the top. My latest changes have been to add in another Courier's Capsule and a Cancel (two, against certain decks). The Cancels have proven themselves against certain game-winning Indestructible creatures and Ultimatums. However, I was recently dethroned by the Esper player - since he was struggling I took a look at his card pool, made some dramatic changes to his deck, and suggested some key trades. Unfortunately, my advice was rather good and he is now handily kicking everyone else in the groin. Now the whole metagame rethink begins again...

I highly recommend this format. Sometimes the pack-per-week isn't quite enough and people get bored with their decks, and don't quite have the cards to pull off a major change. In that case, change it up with a draft (a very nice way to add a cohesive chunk of new cards to your pool) or by introducing a limited number of proxies. Also, as card collections get larger, you should increase the deck size gradually up from 40 to 60.

It's been loads of fun. And it's made for a great excuse to get together on Monday nights to drink beer, laugh, and hang out.

Minis: 6mm Carthaginians - Libyan Phalanx

As usual, I have way too many hobby projects going on. One that has dragged on for several years is my 6mm ancients. I've got an Early Imperial Roman army pretty much complete (1000 pts in Warmaster Ancients, 700 pts in Field of Glory terms), although about halfway through I changed the way I based them. The new method looks much better, so I need to go back and redo a bunch.

Anywho, they need someone to fight, don't they? Well, even though they missed each other by a couple hundred years, I think I've got enough Carthaginian figures around to scrounge together a fight. Today I start on the Libyan Phoenician Phalanx (figures are Heroics & Ros, MAC04).

Step 1: Research & Inspiration
Painting Carthaginians is tricky. People are unsure about their skin color, the color of their clothes, the shield designs, and the uniformity of appearance. Some quick skimming of my library and the internet reveals:

• The Warmaster Ancients rulebook has the Carthaginian infantry painted up as having very dark skin, red cloth, bronze helmets, and white, undecorated shields.
• Osprey Campaign Series 36: Cannae 216BC depicts an African infantryman as fair-skinned and with a bronze helm. His armor is captured Roman legionary chain and the shield can't be seen, unfortunately.
• P. Connely's Greece and Rome at War has all kinds of eye-candy in it, but no illustrations of Carthaginians.
• This blog has lots of good Carthaginian miniatures painted up. Very ornate shields, Greek-style, large variety. Lightly tanned skin colors.
• The Corvus Belli site has them in white linen armor and red cloth, and either white shield or solid bronze. Bronze helmets.
• This gentleman's site depicts the Libyan soldiers white lighter skin, white linen armor, bronze helms, and a uniform shield motif of an abstract palm tree.
• Baccus, a manufacturer of nice 6mm minis, has their African spearmen with bronze helms and shields with a wide variety of designs on them.
• Firezone Studios painted his 6mm African spearmen the same way.
• Another blogger also has his painted like so.
  

I am going to with the Warmaster Ancients painting scheme: a medium dark skin and stark white shields. Because the only solid historical reference I could find (in my admittedly cursory review) was in Plutarch's Timolean: "...and then ten thousand footmen bearing white shields, whom they guessed to be all Carthaginians, from the splendour of their arms, and the slowness and order of their march. " If it doesn't look good I can always go back and add designs.

Undercoat: black
Skin: GW Tanned Flesh
Armor: GW Skull White
Shield: trim GW Brazen Brass, center GW Skull White
Helm: GW Brazen Brass
Spear Shaft: GW Snakebite Leather
Spear Tip: GW Chainmail

I suspect these guys should have greaves but the sculpt doesn't really seem to accommodate that, so I'll skip it.

OK, ready? Here he go:

2:35 - 3:10pm: Prep (clean-up, gluing to painting sticks, and priming)
3:10 - 3:50pm: Drying time, second coat of primer (also painted up some Roman archers)
3:50 - 5:00pm: painted 250 legs. That's a 3.5 legs per minute. If it seems excessive to take 17 seconds on a single 2mm tall leg, I think it's because there's a lot of non-productive time. Snacking, fiddling with iTunes (the Radio Lab podcast from WNYC is awesome), etc. Still, I'd like to pick up the pace more.

That's it for now. I'll pick up the brush again in a bit.

Magic: Pauper NetDeck Experiment

So it's been a long time since I rapped at ya. Not for a lack of gaming - still playing D&D once every three weeks or so, playing board games every two weeks, painting a couple minis, and the occasional video game. But what has changed is work - I picked up a second client and that's cut into my writing time.

But I got something for you today: Magic the Gathering. Every now and then I get the itch. Well, now is one of those times. I started playing casually with a couple friends and that got me excited enough to fire up the Magic Online account.

Lo and behold, Wizards has now formally embraced the Pauper format. This is awesome. Pauper format consists of only commons. No rares, no uncommons. It's a format that really rewards deck synergy and not bomb rares and $20 multilands. It's really fun, and very, very cheap. The "official" site for Pauper Magic is http://www.pdcmagic.com/.

So today's post kicks off a fun little project for me. I like to take a tournament winning decklist and make the closest approximation out of my generally much cheaper and inferior cards. But now that Pauper is legal, I'm going to take one of the tourney winners and see what I can do with it. I don't know if it'll work with Pauper, but we'll see. Without further ado - here's "It's Just A Flesh Wound", winner of a tourney on 12/18/08:

MAINDECK
Creatures
4 Gravedigger
4 Mulldrifter
4 Oona's Gatewarden
4 Phyrexian Rager
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Warren Pilferers

Spells
4 Agony Warp
4 Terror
2 Unmake

Lands
13 Swamp
5 Island
4 Esper Panorama
4 Terramorphic Expanse

SIDEBOARD
4 Peppersmoke
4 Recumbent Bliss
3 Mournwhelk
2 Oona's Grace
2 Plains

This thing went 6-0. It's a seemingly simple control deck using card advantage, creature kill, and graveyard recursion with comes-into-play effects to slowly beat down an opponent.

Unfortunately, I am missing most of these cards. Now, the nice thing about Pauper is I could run out and get all of them for probably a buck. But that's not what I'm aiming for. Ignoring the sideboard for now, here's what I got:

CREATURES
1 Cabal Surgeon
1 Faceless Butcher
4 Gravedigger
4 Highway Robber
1 Merchant of Secrets
1 Mesmeric Fiend
2 Mistblade Shinobi
1 Ninja of Deep Hours
4 Ravenous Rats
4 Sage Owl
1 Whirlpool Rider

SPELLS
2 Agony Warp
4 Last Gasp
4 Rend Flesh

LANDS
1 Ancient Spring
4 Dimir Aqueduct
5 Island
1 Sulfer Vent
13 Swamp
2 Terramorphic Expanse

It's a much weaker deck, especially on the card drawing and recursion fronts. I try to make up for this with the Ninjitsu cards to get some creatures with comes-into-play effects back into my hand to reuse. Let's see how it does in the Casual room:

Game 1: 0 - 1
Close game though. Something of a mirror-match, the other player had a White-Blue deck with lots of comes-into-play effects and removal. However, he had the awesome card Momentary Blink to get multiple effects. I checked, I don't own it... :( I was simply outpaced in this game.

Game 2: 0 - 2
Red-black aggro. Lots of burn, fast creatures, and some discard. I got stuck with a bunch of 2 black casting cost cards and only one source of black mana. The few creatures I got out where instantly shocked away. Annihilated in 7 turns.

Game 3: 0 - 3
Green-white aggro. Cheap good creatures like Wild Nacatl, Akrasan Squire, and Knight of the Skyward Eye. I had land issues this game as well (again was wanted a second swamp), but put up a good fight with the Sage Owl/Mistblade Shinobi groove going. I had draws of Faceless Butcher, Gravedigger, 2x Sage Owls, 2x Mistblade Shinobi, Last Gasp, and Merchant of Secrets. But only got 2x Islands and 1 Swamp.

Game 4: 0 - 3 - 1
Mono blue. Nothing but draw, counterspells, and bounce. I'm sure there was a combo in there but I couldn't wait - I had brought the guy down to 12 life, but the game was soooo slow and annoying I quit. I'll call it a draw.

Game 5: 0 - 4 - 1
5-color madness deck. The game started in my favor as I beat him down to 7 while he tutored for tons of land and forced me to discard my hand. But eventually he got enough guys on the ground and enough discarded Fiery Tempers to overpower my weenies. Great card advantage clearly overpowered me, and the fact that low toughness guys can't win a long game.

Conclusions
Pauper seems to be a very competitive format. Unlike Casual Standard or Casual Extended, where there are lots of people playing decks with various degrees of efficiency and fun-ness, all the Pauper decks I encountered were well-honed machines. There's no room for tier 2 cards. This is both the appeal of Pauper and what makes it daunting.

Specifically, I think I encountered mana issues which would have been solved with Esper Panoramas and more Terramorphic Expanses. The Dimir Aqueducts were poor substitutes - often a hindrance, particularly when I played second.

I also had a tough time with all the 4-mana cards - I often felt like I had a cluttered grip. 10 4-drops is a lot. The last thing that killed me was card advantage - not having Mulldrifter or Phyrexian Rager hurt.

Notes from the Other Side (of the DM Screen) 3

Teamwork, Teamwork, Teamwork

I've run enough 4e games and read enough blog posts to understand that 4e really rewards players that use teamwork. And by "rewards" I mean, "let's them live". In my brief stint as a player, I was struck by how profoundly difficult teamwork actually is. I've seen my players struggle with it, but now I think I have a better idea of why it happens. I think it comes down to:

1. Know Thyself
2. Know Thy Companions
3. Inertia of Maximizing Bonuses
4. Real-Time Pressure

Know Thyself: clearly if you don't know your own character well, much less the 4e game mechanics in general, then your ability to work in a team is limited. As a player, it is your job to know what you can do and to understand the rules well. Besides knowing your strengths, know your weaknesses. This seems to be a fairly frequent issue.

Know Thy Companions: there is tremendous synergy between classes. If you are playing a Star Pact Warlock and several of your powers will reduce a foe's Will defenses, then ideally the party should be in a position to exploit this. If you are playing a Tactical Warlord and you can give a +5 bonus to hit to an ally, do you know who has the best power to benefit from this? (hint: it's generally not the character who does the greatest raw damage - look for someone with stunning, blinding, buffing, etc. powers, even if it does markedly less damage.)

This can be a bit weird for roleplayers - in previous versions of D&D I sometimes liked to keep my exact abilities and bonuses secret so as to not diminish roleplaying. Having everyone else in the party study my character sheet is a level of transparency that can be discomforting. Especially if I have a concept like a Changling pretending to be human, or a character who wants to keep his warlock pact a secret. Also, there's a tendency for people to focus on game effects over flavor, so when you start to describe your Dread Star invocation in vivid roleplaying terms, the GM is already writing down the game effects and another player handing you the damage dice. That kinda takes away from the immersiveness of an RPG and is a subtle shift towards tabletop wargames.

Inertia of Maximizing Bonuses: probably not the best label for this, but it's what I'm using to describe when a player takes an action that maximizes their potential damage output or potential effects, over doing something that is less impressive but is of greater tactical benefit to the party. There is a certain inertia to bonuses - "oh, if attack this guy I'll do an extra d8 damage, and if I move here I can get +2 to hit", etc... Things like targeting a quarried/cursed foe to maximize damage or targeting a certain foe just to get a better bonus to hit. It can also be a matter of moving into a bad/vulnerable position so as to make an attack, in the belief that making no attack is worse than being dangerously exposed. By maximizing bonuses, a party is quite capable of dealing a significantly greater amount of damage overall (at low levels, I'd say a solid 10 extra damage per round), however it tends to be divided among multiple foes or often the wrong foes. Dealing less but more strategic damage is better.

Real-Time Pressure: the last point is pretty obvious, players are reacting in real-time. Combat should be moving quickly, yet new information is coming at the players really fast, and they have to assimilate it and react to it immediately. And they have a ton of options to choose from. In addition, it’s hard to coordinate in the constraints of the 6-second round. Think of it this way, as a DM, I’ve usually had a chance to spend at least 15 minutes with a cup of coffee, casually reading an encounter description and examining the map and monster descriptions to come up with some tactics. The players tend to get all of a couple seconds between miniatures appearing on the table and the three magic words being uttered: “roll for init”. How spontaneously coordinated can they actually be?

So that's all coming from the player's perspective. What does that mean for the DM? You should encourage them to develop teamwork. Try to have your players create characters together and discuss synergies while making them. My group is using the infamous near TPK incident as an opportunity to build characters that play nicer together. Those who actually regularly read and reply to their email (all but *ahem* two of them. You know who you are.) are going to really benefit from this.

You should also encourage your players to dissect what went right and what went wrong. Many players will do this on their own, but not always. I like to make sure we wrap up a game a bit before we absolutely need to, so that there's time to sit around and chew the fat about the game. I focus on getting feedback on the adventure, but it's also an opportunity for the players to make tactical critiques. And rewarding a player who takes the time to post game summaries and suggest tactical revisions is a great idea (if anyone if my group is reading this, volunteers are welcome).

I think you can also get players to better learn their powers by making it relevant in-game. Many years ago I played Robotech and one of the modules had a series of adventures that took place in a simulator. One of the adventures had the players getting shot at from a random weapon and direction and having to react accordingly. Something along the lines of:

GM: "Klaxons blare in your cockpit. Your radar picks up a missile streaking towards you from the very edge of your radar! What do you do?"
Player: "I, uh, take evasive action and fire a mini-missile at the launch site!"
GM: "What kind of missile?"
Player: "Uh, armor piercing? No, wait, Plasma!"
GM: "You dodge a direct hit from the enemy missile but its fragmentation warhead damages your mecha. Your missile falls far short of the target - your radar has five times the range of your missiles. Do you think it is funny to waste expensive munitions, Private!?!"
Player: "Aaaah! Sir, no Sir!"

It was hard as hell but you learned your mecha's weapon systems really quickly. I think I still have all the sensor and weapon ranges of the Excalibur memorized to this day... Next time I start a new campaign with all new characters, I'll consider finding a way to integrate something like that into my D&D game. Whether it's a retired adventurer taking the PCs under his wings, or a War Mage Academy Illusory Combat training course, I like the idea of finding a way to get characters to quickly learn and choose from their powers in-game. A key part could be including hints in the combat descriptions to guide the players in their decisions - suggesting what a foe's lowest defense is, or giving them objectives like preventing enemy movement, for example.

The last thing that you as a DM can do is be fair when it comes to teamwork. When I DM, boy can I get some teamwork going! The poor players have to shout tactics to each other asynchronously in short 6-second bursts. I have telepathy baby! The Kobold Skirmisher wants the three Kobold Minions to surround the wizard PC, being sure to leave the lower right square open and occupying the upper left square to set up a flank for combat advantage? Oh, and after you get into position, delay your attacks until after the Skirmisher so that everyone gets combat advantage all around? Done and done, without so much as a word.

Yeah, look – it’s really easy to be clever as a DM, you can almost always be more clever than the players*. What’s hard is not being too clever. You need to look at the Int, Wis, and descriptions of the creatures you are playing and be sure to roleplay them accordingly. Kobolds don’t exactly have high Intelligence scores, but they are pretty darn cunning and fight as coordinated mobs so maybe it makes sense for them to work really well together. But you should try and impose some of the communication lags and coordination difficulties that PCs suffer from to be fair. In the game I just played in, the DM did a great job of having rats and their kin behave in combat like rats, not mini-rodent versions of Sun Tzu. Flanks against PCs only occurred because a player was truly mobbed, not because of wolf-pack maneuvering. Rats triggered OAs because they didn't know any better. Great job.

I try to do this too. In my last DMing session, the Kobold leader started shouting out commands. Namely, keep away from the big, armored guy with the sword, and attack the wizard (who had strayed a bit too close to the battle line). But there was a one turn delay before the Kobolds really started to act on it – I tried not to use my instantaneous one-brain telepathy and have them act with some kind of creepy hive mind. (Although, one of my players thought they were still too coordinated, which could be true.)

So there ya go. Those are my thoughts on how hard it is for players to use teamwork and what the DM can do about it. Technically, it's the players' problem not the DM's, but I genuinely believe that any thing the DM can do to make for a better game is worth looking at. Even if it means finding ways to cajole players to learn something as obvious as the rules and their companions and their own capabilities.


* “Almost always" be more clever is an important distinction. Odds are good that your players are clever bastards. The SOBs will regularly figure out your plots prematurely, hijack your story arcs in ways you never imagined, and ask to do ingenious things that aren’t even remotely covered by the rules. They will find ways to skewer your major villain while you are still describing his appearance. Players are remarkably, evilly, clever. They are not, however, consistently clever. Yes, in a 4-hour gaming session, it is practically guaranteed that at least one of your five players will have an idea that is stunning in both cleverness and malevolence. But that’s different from being clever every single round of every combat – the DM definitely has the edge there, simply because he is generally better prepared and is hopefully capable of coordinating tactics with, um, himself.

Notes from the Other Side (of the DM Screen) 2

We encountered a What?!?
or
Sometimes it's fun to run away

As I mentioned in my previous post, I got be a PC instead of DM the other day! Yay! It's not like I'm never a player, but it really is like a 90/10 split. So when I do play, it's a big deal for me, and I try to use it as a learning opportunity to become a better DM.

It may seem like I bagged on the DM's black dragon encounter in the last post for not quite fitting in with my plot/balance expectations, but that was just focusing on one particular nuance of the encounter. Another facet of the encounter, namely how absolutely scared s---less we were and how awesome that was, is highly praiseworthy. Let's recap:

The party is off to find a dangerous and evil orb in a cave. The party does indeed find an orb, but it hardly seems dangerous and evil. The orb is suspended by the spray of a magical fountain. It bobs atop the water, and the water is pure and refreshing. The party's paladin and cleric sense no evil. Runes etched into the ceiling contain references to Moradrin and Corellon - the antithesis of fearsome, evil deities (there are also runes for "undead" and "protection" but I just assume - correctly, it turns out - those are related to a trap).

At this point, we think it's the orb we seek, but it just seems too darn "good" compared to what we were expecting. I think too many of us grew up on Gary Gygax modules where the obvious often equated with death. So we decide to press on for a bit, to explore some more and be sure the "real" orb isn't hidden deeper in the cave network. It's still early in the day, so we meander through the cave network for over three 3 hours (big caves).

At this point the DM utters something like "a loud whoosh of air from massive, leathery scaled wings rushes over you" as he places a figure on the table. It's a Black Dragon. "In Draconic, the dragon says 'You have trespassed into my lair - I may yet allow you to leave with your lives.'" Almost everyone succumbs to dragon-fear.

The players begin to chatter amongst themselves (something our characters didn't do, but the DM let it slide) debating if we could take on the dragon, but it becomes clear there's a misunderstanding. "Whups, no - the only Black Dragon miniature I have is medium-sized. This guy is actually large. Here, this is better." as the DM swaps out the 1x1-based mildly alarming dragon for a 2x2-based figure of plastic-injection-molded terror.

Unfortunately, the only guy in our party who speaks Draconic is the not-terribly-bright Dragonborn paladin. While most of the party shakes with puddles of urine at their feat, he summons the courage to overcome the dragon-fear and speak (having worked with reptiles, I'm somewhat alarmed at what might be in the Dragonborn's undergarments). The paladin says something along the lines of "Mighty cousin, we have come here seeking a magical orb of great evil, do you know of this orb we seek?"

When combined with a poor Diplomacy check, the black dragon interprets this as something along the lines of "Cousin whom I insult terribly by speaking to as an equal, we think there is a magic orb in your treasure that we wish to take from you. You cool with that?"

The dragon's eyes narrow and it hisses "I know of many magic orbs, and I see one more that I shall add to my trove. Leave it and I will spare your lives." The dragon was looking at the magic orb currently being held by the party's wizard...

There was some back-and-forth where the wizard genuinely contemplated trying to palm the orb and use Prestidigitation to hand over a fake orb so as to save a few hundred GP and perhaps some dignity. Eventually, however, the sheer statistical improbability of pulling that off made him relent and hand over his orb. The party tip-toed out the way we came in.

That encounter was awesome.

As a player, I am generally expecting to be able to defeat anything we encounter, though sometimes it may be harder than other times. But we're still gonna defeat it. I generally only experience, erm, iris-puckering fear, as it were, when the dice have gone terribly wrong and we're losing to random luck, or perhaps we've made a stupid decision or missed an important clue that is making our fight harder. I never really expect to be just plain ol' outclassed by an encounter. It's frickin' scary.

Sure, we could have taken on the dragon and won, though somebody would likely have died, and if the dice went against us, it could have been a TPK. But it was so much more fun to be scared and to have to turn tail. I know it doesn't sound like much fun when you put it that way, but it was a really memorable encounter. I'm just glad no one did anything stupid. And the DM did a good job of playing up how menacing the dragon was, and gently coaching people about potential consequences.

I might add an encounter like that to my games. The two concerns I have are making sure the party has a realistic out and making sure the party knows what they're dealing with. I'd hate to have the party die due to some failed Diplomacy checks or saying the wrong thing. Likewise I'd hate for the party to die because one of the players unilaterally decides the party can take 'em. In other words, the problem with introducing something that can kill the party into the game is that just might happen.

Notes from the Other Side (of the DM Screen) 1

I'm almost always the DM, I rarely end up being the player in a campaign. But last Sunday I got the chance to play in a friend's one-off 4e game. I'm in his 1/month main 3.5 campaign but it's on temporary hiatus due to scheduling conflicts and childbirth (or some such lame excuse), so he's cobbled together some of the players from that game and a couple other random people to run short "prequel" sessions in the interim. The results of these games actually have a minor effect on the main game. Pretty cool. The characters were premade - I ended up with the human rogue (level 3) - and the plot simple: fetch an orb from the nearby caves once inhabited by cultists.

Because I'm fascinated by game design and want to be a better DM, I made some observations from the player's perspective. In this post I want to address the sad fact that players will notice your adventure's plot holes and/or realism deficiencies.

This is unavoidable. Don't feel bad. It's just part of the game. It doesn't matter how much effort you put into your story arc, there is always going to be at least one niggling little detail which makes as much sense as the Chewbacca Defense - in other words, none. And invariably someone will notice it.

If you have rats deep in a limestone cavern, someone will point out that we haven't found any organic matter in half a mile that could possibly support swarms of rats. There's a reason a rat infestation will be in your attic, floor, or elsewhere nearby - they live near their food, not an hour-long trek from it. If you run into a dragon as a random encounter (this happened, by the way), a player will invariably voice bewilderment that no one told them about the @$^%! dragon living 10 miles from town which, based on the size of both the dragon and its hoard, must have been feeding on cattle and travelers for quite some time.

This is a problem - suspension of disbelief is important to RPGs. The DMing lessons I learned from this are to never use truly random encounters and to listen to your players and think on your feet.

By "truly" random encounters, I mean when the DM decides the players have been

* pissing about aimlessly and becoming bored to the point that playing Wii Looney Tunes Acme Arsenals begins to sound good (Why do I have this game? Oh, that's right - the guy I bought the Wii from gave it to me for free. Then he gave the sign of the Cross, muttered "Our Father..." and slammed the door in my face. It's that bad.)
* making so much noise that some poor monster trying to get some sleep is going to stomp all the way across the dungeon to tell the party to STFU
* willfully avoiding the GM's carefully crafted plot so that he needs to smack them around a bit to remind them who's the boss

so that the GM rolls on a chart or picks a random mini to keep things moving and/or punish the players. It's the "random" part that I don't like. Because you might end up picking an encounter like, say, a Black Dragon. This happens to present some glaring realism issues ("Dude, how the %^@$& did the mayor forget to mention this?!?") and also plot inconsistencies ("So the mayor is in a tizzy about an orb that might possibly be recovered by a presumably destroyed evil cult who could eventually use it to raise an undead horde that might some day raze his village. He is not, however, concerned about the scaly winged death that could raze his village tomorrow &#^%@ morning. Either the orb is more powerful then the mayor lets on, or the village idiot and village mayor are one and the same.").

If I have enough prep time, I prefer to roll up random encounters in advance and put in a little forethought about how these fit into the story and setting, making changes as appropriate. The technique I use is "3x Why?". Ask yourself "Why?" three times before including anything in your game. If you can't, or your answers don't really work with the adventure, ditch the idea.

For example, just in case I need a random encounter for next week's game, I'm rolling one up now. I put together a short list of creatures based on level and environment and I just rolled... a Shadow Hound encounter. Why is there a Shadow Hound here? Um, it's prowling for food and picked up the party's scent. Why? It got here by slipping into the natural world from the Shadowfell and is lost and hungry. Why? Hmmm... Longshadow's Eve was a mere three days ago. A player with Arcana would know that Longshadow's Eve marks the cyclical occasion when the presence of the Shadowfell is stronger than normal and beings can sometimes cross over. It also explains why there were paper lanterns hanging around all over town - a superstition for warding off ill luck around this time of year.

At this point, I probably won't roll any more encounters at random, but instead choose ones related to the Shadowfell. By asking three Whys, I've shored up the encounter plausibility. More importantly, it's forced me to take the time to think about the encounter and hopefully identify any other issues. As I'm going through the 3 whys I'm checking for logical inconsistencies. And it's given me a new idea for my games - I kinda like the Longshadow's Eve idea and think I'll work that one into my current game...


Back to my other observation - listen to your players and think on your feet. Look, coming up with great ideas all by yourself is actually hard. You know how sometimes you can spend hours and hours racking your brains about a problem, and finally you'll mention it to your wife or someone, just venting not really expecting any help, and within 2 seconds she'll say something like "why don't you try it this way?" and it totally works.

Yeah. As a DM, that happens all the time. At least once per session, a player is going to look at a situation and interpret it in a way you never would have thought of. And frankly, it's often better than what you thought of. If you can think on your feet, it's sometimes a good idea to shift gears and run with what the players come up with.

In our game, the mayor became more and more suspect in the players' minds. The chamber with the orb was clearly not evil, the orb itself seemed to have benign powers, the orb was much better defended where it was than it would be in the hands of the village mayor, and of course there's the little issue of not mentioning the [expletive removed] Dragon living in the caves. For like, years. What's going on? Something's not making sense, so we of course start looking for in-game excuses (as opposed to out-of-game excuses, like it's a only one-session game so the DM didn't go crazy with hours of preparation, so just cut him some slack, shaddup, and roll with it).

Now, I believe the reality was the mayor was a perfectly nice plot-giver and not a villain. The orb is actually a dangerous device in the wrong hands, it's just the way it was described that accidentally made it seem so benign. But as we sat about the table discussing our quandary, we started making a good case for the mayor to actually be a villain. Thinking back to when he sought us out for the quest, we wondered was he being secretive out of fear the terror-- er, sorry -- cultists might overhear? Or was he being secretive because he was furtively executing his own plot? And he clearly knew that only a Dwarven priest of Moradin could recover the orb - anyone else touching it would awaken the undead defenders. What else did he know that he wasn't telling? In our mind, only half-jokingly, we began to think the mayor was actually a cultist and that he was unable to recover the orb himself. So he needed to dupe a dwarven cleric and friends to do it for him.

Maybe I just play too much Eberron, but I think that interpretation is so much cooler than the classic "the mayor asks you to fetch him a nosegay" adventure arc. If I were the DM, I would have seriously considered scrapping my ideas and running with the players' interpretations. I've done that before and, while it's sometimes tricky to think on your feet, it can make for great games.

As a player, I definitely learned the importance of cutting your GM some slack. It's hard work to come up with even a single-session adventure, even without worrying about the ecology of rodents. If something doesn't seem right, unless it's important, let it go. Don't be the Comic Book Guy nerdy complainer of your group.

Don't get me wrong, I had a great time in the game and the DM did a great job running it, especially how he played the monsters very true to their stats and background. He was able to keep things moving in a friendly, efficient way. This post is really more about playing "backseat DM" and wondering what techniques I would copy, and what I would do differently than criticism. It's a great exercise for every DM who gets a chance to see things from the other side of the DM screen.

Analysis of a TPK

OK, technically it wasn’t a true TPK since one of the characters got away. So I think I can still say with a straight face that I’ve never had a TPK. But to the extent that it wasted a ton of the players’ character development efforts, and a lot of my campaign planning, it was pretty much a TPK. A campaign reset. This is kind of a big deal – it’s not fun for anybody, it wastes a lot of work, and may be reflective of a problem. It’s especially alarming since another character was killed a couple sessions previously (to be fair, that one was just a random crit from a BBEG for a truck-load of damage). So I thought I’d take a little bit of time to understand it.

The background:
The group consists of a bunch of guys who haven’t played an RPG in 1 or more decades, much less 4e D&D. Mortgages, wives, babies, careers, graying hair, the works (I’m the odd guy out – a regular gamer for years, no mortgage, no baby, no gray, and I don’t think you can call freelancing a career. Thank god I’m married though.). We sit around, grill, laugh, drink and game. Their characters are all level 2 and consist of a Fighter, Cleric, dual-wield Ranger, Wizard, and Warlock.

I’m running the players through the Keep on the Shadowfell module and the players get to the kobold lair (spoiler alert, don’t read on if you are planning to play). In the module, the party runs into a large cluster of Kobolds outside the lair, and presumably one of them escapes into the lair to sound the alarm. The party sends its stealthier members forward to spring an ambush on the unsuspecting kobolds, but unfortunately this goes awry as Tostig the Fighter slips on loose rocks near the creek-bed. The party sprigs into action and begins to slaughter the poor kobolds.

I think I play the kobolds as being pretty smart and cunning. They fall back and take cover leaving the PC’s long-range attacks without good targets. They dart out, hurl javelins, and then shift back into cover. Some kobolds start sneaking around the flanks. When the PCs get strung out of formation, they rush forward and mob a single character to maximize their mob attack bonuses, combat advantage bonuses, sneak attacks, and concentrated damage. But ultimately, the characters are Heroes and the kobolds are, well... kobolds. They get mowed down. But the Kobold Slinger gets away to raise the alarm. The party splits up to gather thrown weapons, search for loot, etc.

Red Flag #1: when the kobolds mobbed Tostig, they did a large amount of damage – managing to bloody him. This should have alerted both the players and myself that “Hey! Being surrounded by kobolds just might get you killed!” But other than that one incident, quickly rectified, the kobolds weren’t really a threat.

Red Flag #2: drinking. I definitely enjoy having beers while we game and so do the players. But I do wonder if that clouds our judgment too much and we miss important cues like the above.

Red Flag #3: metagaming. Everyone has now played about a half-dozen sessions of 4e D&D and has come to expect the post-battle recharge – regain all your encounter powers, heal HP, etc. They feel comfortable with splitting up and letting their guard down. What the players don’t know is that when the Slinger ran away, that started a countdown to reinforcements. They aren’t going to get a complete rest and they squandered some encounter powers in the first part of the battle.

A couple rounds later, the first wave of reinforcements comes streaming out of the cave. OK, those of you who have read the module know that I’ve deviated a little from the script. Mid-way through the battle I went back and reread the encounter description. Somehow I ended up with the impression that if one of the kobolds got away to raise the alarm, the kobold reinforcements came outside in two waves. Otherwise, the two waves were encountered inside. Oops. In the module the party is supposed to be able to rest after taking care of the kobolds outside. However, because the party was still kicking ass and taking names, albeit strange hissing- and yipping-sounding kobold names, I didn’t worry about it too much. And the party was already level 2 due to some earlier adventures and the module is intended for level 1 characters. In my head, I decided to weaken Irontooth a bit (those 100+ HP BBEG just get boring to fight after a while anyway) to balance it out.

DM Mistake #1: the first real outright mistake was not giving the PCs a rest between waves. Even with the party being level 2, they just didn’t have enough powers to wade through that many foes.

So, the first kobold wave comes streaming out of the cave. They split up, half engage the PCs directly, the other half move off a ways to hurl javelins at exposed targets. The party is caught out of formation and the kobolds gun for the “squishies” like the Wizard and the Warlock. Thankfully the players are able to get out OK and get the Fighter, Ranger, and Cleric up front. A back-and-forth melee ensues where the players continually cut down the kobolds. The players were continually mobbed by the concentrated attacks of the kobolds, and took a lot of damage, but nobody went down. So the second wave started off a little sketchy but the players rebounded.

When there were a handful of the wave two kobolds left, wave three arrived. At this point, the players were all still above bloodied and handling the encounter fine so I still wasn’t worried (in fact, I was vocally rooting for the kobolds because they were getting annihilated). But the situation went bad really, really quick. The party still hadn’t found a way to restrict the kobold movement. When possible, I had them avoid the axe-wielding armored horror that was Tostig the Fighter, and instead attack the weaker party members. The Wizard strayed too close and got sacked by a mob of kobolds – down he went. The Warlock was mobbed and dropped right after. A couple attempts to heal the fallen members were considered, but the party came to the conclusion that they’d just get immediately killed again, so the healing was reserved for those who were still standing. It was a moot point since the kobolds were finally able to completely surround Tostig and with the massive mob bonuses and concentrated damage, whittle him down. That left the Cleric and the Ranger who attempted to run. The heavily armored Cleric didn’t make it. Surprisingly, Irontooth took so long to wade into the fight that he had almost no impact – he only landed one solid hit.

DM Mistake #2: I don’t yet know 4e well enough to know when the players are in trouble before it’s too late. It’s easy to know the party is in trouble when half of them are bloodied or dead. A good DM knows this is going to happen several rounds in advance, and can take action accordingly (even if it’s only to remind the players that they can attempt to run away).

PC Mistake #1: never let cunning foes get at your squishies. They know this from nearly having lost the Wizard once before. There are a couple chokepoints on the map that the players never tried to occupy that could have limited kobold movement.

PC Mistake #2: party composition. I got the impression that the party had very little battlefield control. There was only one Defender, so the front line wasn’t very “sticky”. Both the Wizard and the Cleric focused more on direct damage powers than they did on control or healing powers. And only one of the characters was a truly melee character, with decent AC and HP. The Wizard and Warlock were of course ranged attackers, the Cleric was OK in melee but had better ranged powers, and while the Ranger had the AC and HP to support a more “front-line” role he preferred hit and run tactics. So this created two major issues: the kobolds could get at the more vulnerable party members fairly easily, and the single melee character was simply overwhelmed without support.

PC Mistake #3: maximizing short-term damage over concentrated fire. This may not be an entirely accurate recollection, but I swear I saw the party members repeatedly choose to make attacks that dealt the most damage to different foes, rather than concentrate fire on a single target till they drop. For example, I believe the Ranger and the Warlock repeatedly attacked targets that were closest to them so they could get the extra damage, rather than attacking the more distant kobold that Tostig had hit. Likewise, on a significant round the Wizard opted to do an AOE attack on a cluster of kobolds, which certainly was a nice amount of damage, it would have been better to pick off some of the wounded ones already engaged in melee. On any given round, the 5 players would seemingly attack 3 different targets.


In summary, I think I made a big mistake, but it was exacerbated by the fact that the players are still learning how to play 4e. They don’t yet have good tactics and party synergy. Interestingly, none of us had much warning that the encounter was going to go so bad – it happened very suddenly. The party went from slaughtering the kobolds to getting slaughtered in the course of two rounds. I think it was a combination of decent rolls and the party running out of steam (encounter/daily powers). Because it happened so fast, the party didn’t even know they were in trouble until it was too late.

I hope you find this review useful. Take the time to review your games, especially when they go wrong. I learned a lot by examining this. As a DM or a player, you will make mistakes. Learn from them.