Hey! first article posting from Jon. Good to see. His post cntains thoughts about the most recent session and some solid ideas for improvement. I encourage the Tales of Exandria participants to read and discuss in the comments thread for this article. ~Joe
House Cleaning
I really enjoyed this game but I’d have a couple things brought up generally for smoother game play. I’d like to stress that I’m having a blast and I’m not frustrated with anyone. But there are some things I’d like to look at to make the game run smoothly.
This is going to be a long post. Just know that I’m not mad, this is tuning up an already fantastic game that I’m truly enjoying running. But if we can focus on these 4 things, we can probably nip some worse things in the bud and improve the game as a whole. But just don’t misunderstand the long post for a rant. I am utterly thrilled with how this game has been going.
I just want to bring some stuff up so we can make this even better. And I’m DM so if I don’t, no one does.
[11:37 PM]
#1) Checking for Traps and living with failure.
This one is a toughie, because I understand the stakes of having failed a trap investigation. But there’s a big thing to say about accepting your rolls regardless. If you roll a 1 on investigation your character does not know they have failed just trust me as your DM not to immediately kill you for a bad dice roll. Furthermore, failure is a big part of D&D. Just gotta roll with them. They can be fun and even lead to greater successes.
Also, I’d like to point out that opening doors likely shouldn’t be a 4 person endeavor. For every single door. Think of this in the perspective of your characters: Each time you approached a door, you asked the smartest person you know, to grab the second smartest person you know, and the cleric so that their combined observational prowess could be brought to bear upon learning if the 15th door you’ve encountered this hour has been trapped. And the Brawniest man you know to swing it open.
Just roll yourself and live with the results. Our game would move faster. We easily spent one of our 4 hours inspecting the doors of Exandria. I promise, this game is going to be a blast for everyone and failure is a part of the experience. I completely understand the caution of wanting to avoid a task you know you'll fail at. But the very second you ask me to make the check, you've committed to the action. Let it play out. Maybe when you fail at something, you learn something new. Maybe your friends can come up with solutions to overcome the challenge, giving them a cool moment to shine.
[11:38 PM]
#2 Giving everyone time in the spotlight
The group we’ve got here is absolutely fantastic at this in person but over discord let’s make a special effort to let everyone speak.
Also, if someone has a class ability or spell that uniquely qualifies them to overcome a challenge, let them be the ones to narrate what they did. An example that comes to mind would be when we hand waved Mav’s identify spell and didn’t give her the chance to RP it. If needs be, we can slow down a tad to give everyone these awesome moments. These are the best parts of D&D for everyone. Let’s let them have them. (I’m guilty of this also. If I hand wave something you want to RP, stop me. I’m making this game so that you all have fun. I’d be happy to stop and give you your moment in the spotlight.
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#3 Metagaming
I touched on this for #1 when I said you don’t know if you rolled bad. But other moments are when someone spots an enemy and the whole party lines up in battle formations. If someone calls out an enemy, everyone needs to freeze. Initiative takes a second to prepare.
Try to act as your characters would. It’s cool to see yourself succeed with flying colors, but low dice rolls aren’t something your characters are aware of. If you investigate your 71st door today and roll the dreaded natural 1. Your character didn’t just suddenly realize they hate and distrust the specific door. They’d open it. Only you know that their investigation may have missed something. Likewise if you fail an insight check. You simply are unaware of deceit. It shouldn’t make you more suspicious, for another example.
As a rule, just keep everything in character. If your character doesn't know it, you don't either. If you follow that golden rule, we'll avoid so many pitfalls of metagaming and the game will be all the better for it.
#4 Cross Talk and that magical chat window
It’s discord. We are going to talk over one another because we can’t read social queues.
We can limit it though. Let’s try to be respectful of everyone. If someone is talking, let them speak.
If you have a great idea, please type it!!! I will absolutely interrupt a question being asked to respond to a written one.
And the chat window is awesome for character reactions to stuff happening around them. Shannon gets inspiration for using it all game last game. Seriously it’s awesome if we off load the mic time into the chat window.
These are smaller issues and I’m super fortunate to DM this incredible group. You guys are awesome and this game has been a total blast. I’m so excited to show you guys what I have in store for everyone!
So on doors, I end up of mixed opinion here. First and foremost, we don't need to devote tons of time to doors. They just are not interesting. On the other hand, I am happy to have us not opening doors willy-nilly (as a player). My character, loves order and process it makes him feel safe and confident so he'd support doing it (almost anything) the same way every time.
ReplyDeleteDat is all about always using guidance on a thing worthy of using guidance on. If it's part of the door cookbook, he is gonna want to do it every time. Although, he might come to believe that he is bothering his deity to frequently, in that case, he would be much more selective about using the spell.
From a game management perspective, having guidance cast on special occasion is probably a good thing. I'm inclined to bend Dat's beliefs in this direction, unless someone objects.
Oof. My last attempt at commenting errored out and I lost the comment.
DeleteSo here's the long and short of it.
1) Guidance
I will always assume you have guidance unless a circumstance prevents it. That speeds the game along and allows Dat to be a real boon to the party. Circumstances where you will not have guidance are when Dat is concentrating on something, the check is private (insight, for example), you are separated from Dat, or when you are talking to someone and the idea of openly casting a spell in front of them seems silly.
2) Doors. My point with doors is to cut back a bit. We don't need to have the two best investigators combining their skills upon greeting each new door (and asking for guidance... and asking Tyran to walk through first... just in case). As a DM, one of my primary goals for creating games is to allow each member of the party to be uniquely qualified to tackle certain situations. Mav identifies things and can fly and climb (and more you haven't seen yet). Windy can open locks and sneak. Dat can heal and receive divine guidance. Tyran is bonkers strong and his pecs are made of titanium. Padhall is "wicked smart" and is a swiss army knife of spell utility.
I can create circumstances to allow each person to use something they have to achieve something. That can be languages, tools, skills, spells, features, etc.
That brings me to doors. There's quite frankly a lot of doors in Wildemount. More doors than monsters and people. If we hold strategy meetings and treat each door like an active landmine, we'll blow tons of time pointlessly. I want to be able to trap some doors occasionally because they likely would be. But I don't want to sully your character's innate trust of doors.
Joe is correct that wantonly opening doors is a hazard. But the reverse can be true as well. Where treating each door like it's radioactive isn't good either.
You don't need advantage when approaching your average door. If you see an *obviously trapped* door, go for it. But if you're simply opening every door like it's cursed, we won't get anywhere.
Let's find a middle ground.
I was actually starting to feel uncomfortable throwing guidance on everything. Squaring Dat praying to Bahamut for assistance every 30 seconds just isn't right. That cantrip is amazing utility, something Dat has very little of otherwise, but making it automatic treads close to unimportant. It'll just be assumed and that feels wrong.
DeleteI'm leaning toward wanting it more special. Something Dat needs to offer when it seems worthy or when someone else feels it is worth asking for.
Basically make it a bonus for important stuff, not part of the baseline.
That's fair, actually. We can restrict it.
DeleteMy intent by assuming it was on was to prevent the slowdown of either asking for guidance or you needing to interject to grant it.
If you'd like to be more sparing with it, that can obviously be respected.
I think that's a good idea. From a meta-game angle, if guidance is always used, the difficulties will tend to inflate a couple points to obtain the right result. I'd rather it be a helpful advantage when it seems useful than become background noise.
DeleteKeeping it reserved also means you get to be more impactful of your own choosing. Instead of making light of something that you can do which is hugely important to our success.
DeleteOK, so doors. That was a lot of our time this last session. I blame Jon for having so many doors.
DeleteMy proposed solution is maybe inspect the door first encounter, but any that aren't interesting after that Tyran opens and makes a perception check (either passive or active roll, Jon you can whisper for the roll). I think it's OK to have Guidance as well, if it doesn't come into play no harm. Maybe Jon whispers to me to roll d20 and to Dat to roll d4. We whisper back and I progress accordingly.
Inspections can come back in to play when we run into strange doors like we did in the basement.
I think that saves time and keeps most of the game moving ahead. Besides, I'll take the damage.
Now Windy exploring the chest room door during combat was well handled I think.
Meant to say "Tyran opens and makes a perception check, IF THE DOOR IS OF INTEREST for some reason, even though it looked normal."
DeleteWindy definitely handled that well during the encounter! That encounter was seriously my favorite. It was supposed to take time. Vine blights are slow. It was supposed to take time to raise the stakes and such.
DeleteAs for handling doors. The simplest way to handle them is to have whoever wants to give me a check. Don’t ask for help unless you have severe suspicions about the door. And don’t ask for guidance. And don’t ask Tyran to operate as a fail safe and walk through. It’s just a door. It doesn’t need defcon 5.
Also, I don’t really think we need a system that makes Tyran the designated door opener. Doors exist everywhere and it’s not the end of the world if Mav or Datdaar or Tyran open a door. The most important thing is that the group agrees that you’ll be going through it.
As your DM, I will make a special effort to only trap doors in narrow circumstances. Just because when I trap one door, suddenly the rest become incredibly dangerous.
Traps are a part of dungeons and dragons, and the best solutions for them is to designate trap finders and disarmers. But doors are almost certainly just doors. If you’re in a rich man’s manor and you’re trying to rob him, you can certainly apply that level of suspicion. But generally, it’s overkill.
I joked this week with Shannon that I could prepare weeks of content with a single map containing 100 doors. Just need a single trap.
Point being, if you suspect a door, just roll it. Don’t ask Padhall and Windy to come over and ask the cleric to pray for your success and then have Tyran there as a fail safe in case you miss something on every single door.
Windy working on the chest during combat was actually pretty perfect. It let her have a moment of high stakes pressure doing something only she could do. Super glad she got to have that, it was super tough and she eventually got it!
DeleteFor dungeons I’m not sure we need a designated door handler, Datdar and Mav are both tough cookies too. Not suggesting we start opening everything at once but allowing some sort of natural flow. Allowing whoever is there so everyone can get a chance to take the risk and see what’s behind the door.
I have a minor comment on the door opening...as the one person who didn’t get to contribute at all to the repetitive procedure it’s awfully boring. Frequently I would entertain myself by having Mav scurry around the corner and barely peek out to watch. All her friends seemed to be concerned about opening doors so they must be deadly which means she should hide.
ReplyDeleteI do think doors should be checked but I think we got a bit carried away with our four man team of door opening. I don’t know what the middle ground should be, maybe we feel it out every session. If there’s lots of traps then we bust out the four man team to check everything. If there’s only been one trap maybe we use caution but not everything? It’s a hard thing to determine without using specifics and specifics aren’t general.
My other comment would be on the party saying we would identify these items we had and glossing over asking Mav to do it. I could be wrong l but I believe she is the only one who can in our party. Under that assumption I missed an opportunity to tell the group her ability to do so comes from Averyl and is precious to her. Something she would not want to do in front of those that she didn’t not know well. I didn’t want to bog us down as it was already late and figured I would create a moment in the RP channel for myself to take the items and identify them in private away from prying eyes. I certainly think if we as a group are attempting to utilize someone’s class or special abilities that we need to ask if they would. Even if the answer is an obvious yes.
I just learned that you can comment (Comment) on the tread or reply (Reply). That allows us to keep thoughts together and have multiple active threads under the same article. Choose wisely: Comment or Reply ;-)
ReplyDeleteOh goodness! This new knowledge is powerful
DeleteIt rather amazed me when I saw Jon's reply to my comment neatly tucked away in a thread. Technology!
Delete#4 That chat window is useful for inserting emotes and some such. I like the voice chat, I even like video feeds, but that text chat is useful to. I'm still learning to use it.
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it "/me" results in an emote type thing, different font and format that seems useful.
/em = emote
Delete/ooc = out of character
/me = character action description (although it seems to be identical to /em)
/talktomyself = post a personal note that nobody else can see.
/w [name] = whisper to another player or GM
I heavily used the chat to portray things Mav was doing. As I’m on the quieter side and I don’t want to step on someone. Being that it’s discord, there’s very few moments where no one is taking and when we are all excited trying to do things it’s even harder. Using the text chat to create a queue or backlog of things to occur kept me in the loop without having to try to voice over anyone. Sometimes things would be missed in the moment but it was simple enough to say over voice I did that a few moments ago in chat to get it addressed.
DeleteIf you want to enter text into your emote, there's a way to do it, but it's unintuitive. Otherwise, you can just use ""
Delete/em glares at the dwarf menacingly. ["Don't push me, stunty,"](!:) she growls.
#3, I kinda liked how everyone jumped in front of Tyran to protect him. I felt so loved. :-)
ReplyDeleteThat said, agreed.
Jon, I am sorry if I was a cause for much of the concern regarding doors. I think it was due to the fact the the first door I opened revealed a boulder! I will work on just trying to play my character and not paying so much attention to the roll. Next, I’m sorry for so much meta gaming on my part. I’m still trying to learn and I’m slow to it. I never want to disappoint anyone by doing the wrong thing so I question everything and I understand that delays game play. I will work on that. I think I tried my best, failed a bit, and learned a ton from my experiences during the last session. So, going forward I will carry that knowledge into the next game. Thanks for having me as a member of this party and your game. I love you as a DM, and I love the game! It is a great distraction from everything we have going on in our lives!!! I’m so thankful to be able to play while we are stuck at home!
ReplyDeleteHey Jen, I wasn’t calling you out for this. All in all everyone has been playing this really well and I’m having a blast running this game!
DeleteI definitely don’t want you to feel targeted. I just wanted to point out that we should keep in mind these topics (everyone) so we can keep the game running smoothly. You were by no means the only person doing this.
I am thrilled that you’re enjoying my game! And I want to keep the game running like a well oiled machine. I just wanted to bring to light that these kinds of things can bog down the game.
I am excited to have you in my game and I’ve loved how you’ve brought Windy to life! This campaign will be a lot of fun.