Build Your Own AWESOME

Posted on : 04-04-2011 | By : Brian | In : Advice, D&D, Guest Posts, The Great Seamus

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The Great Seamus comes back to us, with a fantastic article about how to build your own crazy-awesome looking terrain for D&D. Pictures included.

Make your own D&D Terrain, Made of WIN.

In my ongoing attempts to be everybody’s favorite DM, I found myself looking at the paper 2D maps used for D&D Encounters and feeling woefully inadequate. Things like cover and line of sight don’t mean as much to players or even to the DM in a lot of intense combat situations. For a while I was getting around this by incorporating some of the specialized terrain used in our FNGS Warhammer games. This left me at the mercy of what was available – surprisingly, no rocks, and only a handful of different buildings (most of which are 40K and don’t really fit in to the D&D universe). One of my “rival” DMs began printing his own 2D maps on cardstock with removable magnetic houses and stairs – cool. I felt a twinge of jealousy, since my printer doesn’t even print documents and his prints magnets . . . I WILL NOT BE ONE UPPED. THE BLOOD OF TIGERS RUNS THROUGH MY VEINS.

I set off to make my own terrain (on the cheap, we are in a recession after all). The first thing I needed was a base. Warhammer uses poly-styrene boards as a base, so I was off to Home Depot. I found a large pack of medium thick poly styrene for less than $10, which has enough in there to make enough terrain to encompass at least two whole dungeons if cut properly. Also at Home Depot I found a lot of options for flooring. The nicest looking option is ceramic tile, some of which is already split in 1” squares. This is incredibly costly, and limits creativity in that colors and patterns aren’t as varied as some of the lower budget options. I wound up picking up six pieces of vinyl flooring at $0.45 a sheet. I picked out a nice stone pattern. Also available (completely free!) are numerous smaller samples of most of their patterns, which can also be incredibly useful for smaller rooms or even for elevated terrain. Leaving Home Depot feeling considerably more masculine than I felt walking in, I traded that feeling in by heading to Michael’s for more supplies. I was able to pick up a Styrofoam cutter for less than $10, which allows me to cut and stylize my poly-styrene into any shapes desired. I also picked up some gold beads (large ornate ones and small ones), clear applied / drying Elmer’s glue, and a special gold glitter glue loaded with large flecks of gold, glitter, and metallic colored shapes. Also at Michael’s I got a bag of decorative sand and some small decorative pebbles. Judging myself prepared, I put on “Eye of the Tiger” and spread out my materials to get started.

Wanting to start small, I picked the map used in the final battle for this season of Encounters (SPOILERS), a pretty basic dragon lair – specific enough to be needed, but conventional enough that it could be used and re-used whenever desired. I cut a large piece of Styrofoam and used basic acrylic paint to paint it gray. Taking two pieces of my flooring, I used a sharpie marker to draw 1” lines horizontally and vertically, connecting them with a straight edge to form a grid that covered the whole sheet. From there, I draw the necessary borders of the cave within the grid, just as one would do on a dry-erase battlemat. I then painted all of the unused flooring the same gray color as the foam base, so the only part with the grid was the available terrain. From there, I cut a smaller portion of foam out to serve as a large platform of stone which the dragon’s hoard would rest on. I took a quick hike in the woods outside of my apartment and found five serviceable stones which would serve as boulders – they were then cleaned and painted that same shade of gray, and super glued to the vinyl. Two patches of difficult terrain were manufactured by applying some of the Elmer’s glue to the desired portions in the shapes and sprinkling the decorative sand and pebbles on top of the glue, spreading them out thinly. A small pool of water was made using blue and white paint, which was then covered with the Elmer’s glue, which when dry gives it a shiny and wavy look. To add some finishing details, the gold flecked glue and various gold beads were heaped onto the smaller piece of painted foam. Using a paint brush I spread that glue around over the edge to give it the appearance of spilling off the edge. Finally, I used a larger paint brush to spread Elmer’s glue all over the areas of the cave that were not in use, which were then also covered in the sand and pebbles to give it a rock like appearance. When all the glue as dry, I dry-brushed various shades of gray all over the pebbles and sand wherever they appeared on the map to make them blend in with the natural stonework.

The result is magnificent, and didn’t take all that long or cost that much – compared to, say, Dwarven Forge terrain, or even the requisite sets of WotC Dungeon Tiles.

Before you embark on your own terrain, a few tips from my own idiocy

  • Do not use spray-on primer on poly-styrene. It corrodes the foam, smells bad, and scares the wife.
  • The same goes for super glue on poly-styrene.
  • A rock the size of your fist is scaled to be a boulder the size of a huge or even gargantuan creature. Simple pebbles from your neighbor’s garden will serve as good sized boulders.
  • It is very hard to cut through vinyl, especially vinyl with an adhesive backside. There are a number of tools to do it, but it’s much easier to cut your foam to match the size of the tile and simply put in the portions of the tile you don’t need.
  • The Styrofoam cutter is HOT. Do not touch the wire when it’s on, and do not leave it on unattended, especially with kids / pets / clumsy dungeon masters in the house. In case of clumsy DM, make sure spouse has hospital on speed dial.
  • The foam is light and easy to transport, but it is delicate and can be easily broken. When transporting, do so safely and carry it with both hands on the edges of underneath from the center.






Guest Post: Crafty Gaming

Posted on : 16-02-2011 | By : Brian | In : Advice, D&D, Guest Posts, The Great Seamus

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Another guest post by The Great Seamus. Today he talks about playing D&D on the cheap by making use of local craft stores. As an aside, Seamus and Marcelo are both contributing pretty regularly to the blog, so I think it’s time I made them honorary members of the Guild. Their posts will no longer be prefaced by “Guest Post” (though they’ll still be in that category, for easy finding of things). I will, however, be including little intros like this on any posts I don’t write myself.

I sometimes feel that the hardest thing to convey to players these days is perspective. In our digital age, simply telling a player that a colossal black dragon is rearing on its hind legs, acid dripping from its maw, eyes glowing a hateful red . . . players today want to see it. I know many “old-school” gamers decry this, saying that back in their day, all they needed was imagination. I say that this is that natural progression of entertainment and technology. PONG doesn’t cut it anymore, and neither (necessarily) does imagination and dice. And while there is no substitute for a healthy imagination, these days there are a number of tools at a player’s and a DM’s disposal to help make the game come alive.

The two biggest aides one can have are maps and minis. Thinking up a character is great, but it is a little more endearing to put down your perfectly crafted mini on the table, geared for war. The same can be said for monsters – that same black dragon is much more impressive set dead center on the map, towering over your players’ minis like some dark god. Minis range from metal to plastic to paper, and obviously the quality varies accordingly. Some DM’s are perfectly happy have a round disc-shaped token on the field – me, I’ll take my dragon. The maps are another key addition. Most modules come with nice paper maps, featuring excellent artwork on a 2D surface. Some companies even make modular dungeon pieces for you to collect and assemble. Of course, this gets very expensive after a while. Dwarven Forge, for example, makes some of the most beautiful modular gaming terrain you will ever see – and for hundreds to even thousands of dollars, you can have it all. That black dragon I described to you can be bought, too – for around $75, straight from Wizards of the Coast. So how does one do all of this on a budget?

I find that craft stores like Hobby Lobby and Michael’s are the perfect place to do gaming on a budget. Michael’s sells and distributes toy figurines from a company called Safari Ltd, which produces both real and fantasy based animals that are in good scale with our friendly neighborhood D&D game. I myself purchased three dragons of equal size to the Wizards black dragon for a fraction of the cost. Do you need a blue dragon? Grab some paint and brushes, too. The best purchase you can make there are plastic tubes filled with miniature versions of their larger animals – perfect for medium and large sized creatures, and also able to be painted to look however you like.

Moving on to maps and terrain, you can also find a myriad of things to help out your game at these stores, too. Numerous stones, shells, and small plants can be purchased for less than $5 and added to your 2D maps to give perspective on cover, blocking terrain, and even difficult terrain. There are even trees and bushes made by those same toy makers that can be added to your map. Do you need castle walls? Get yourself some building model bricks and stack them however you need them. Another good resource would be looking online or at local garage sales and thrift stores for dollhouse furniture or accessories from the now defunct games Heroscape and Mage Knight. These accessories can be resurrected and help breathe life into your game.

Of course, some things you may need to get from the source. You will probably never find a beholder at Michael’s, and those maps need to come from somewhere. Also, if gamers fail to support the company, the company goes out of business and the game suffers an irrevocable loss. Try to balance your purchases. By all means save some money, but remember not to bite the hand that feeds you, as it were and support Wizards and your FNGS as much as you can.

Other links:
Schleich S
Reaper Minis

Guest Post: Game Breakers

Posted on : 17-01-2011 | By : Brian | In : Advice, D&D, Guest Posts, The Great Seamus

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The following is a guest post from friend of the blog, The Great Seamus. After the line you’ll see the entirety of his guest post, followed by another line. After that line, I’m going to insert some of my thoughts on the topic.

I’ll open with a story from a campaign I was DMing in the last few weeks. I had taken the module from the Monster Vault and modified it to include in my campaign world.

My players were adventuring in the mountains. They had come into possession of a relic, The Staff of the Winter King, who had been awakened from his icy slumber and had draped the land in an unnatural and unforgiving winter. He was demanding the return of his staff, of course. The players had the responsibility of locating this staff and bringing it back to the king, and then finding some means to ending this winter. Learning some of the history of this individual, the party had come to the consensus that they would have to defeat him, as he was a terrible warlord who sought to dominate the earth. So the players sailed on the magical dragon ship (nearly dying in the process) and managed to crash it into the area just outside of the king’s fortress. Upon reaching the gate, they were stopped by a guardian (a modified elemental solider, ice of course), who silently demanded that they hand over the staff.

So they did.

Being a dutiful creature, the guardian glided off, returned the scepter to the king, and then brought back a half dozen of his friends to kill the interlopers. Now, this combat was originally designed for the party to either sneak past the creature, or simply fight the one brute and several summoned minion allies. But the situation, played out honestly, resulted in what was nearly a total party kill. Two characters were killed in the first three rounds of combat, and two more ran for their lives. The other two gave their lives so that the runners could survive. One of the survivors ruled her character so traumatized that she was retired, while the other went into hiding for a time. The players simply resigned themselves to rolling new characters for the next session and giving it another crack.

And this is where the problems begin. Sometimes players are a pain. As the DM, I put a lot of work into this campaign – from integrating the module into my world, to simply doing the paperwork that comes naturally to the process, and to have the players simply hit the reset button wouldn’t work for me. So what does a good DM do when his players break the campaign? In my mind, there are three options, all of which revolve around a central core – there need to be consequences. Players cannot simply hit the reset button. It throws out a lot of the hard work the DM has done, and oftentimes adds all new work – new characters to track, generating new treasures off of their wishlists, incorporating their new backgrounds, new stat cards, new minis, and getting them all together for a start. Not to mention that they all need to get on the road and get to the objective all over again. Real world consequences, however, teach players that their characters’ actions matter, even well after their characters have passed on.

I. Your life doesn’t end just because you got whupped
What villain worth his salt simply lets the dead bodies of his enemies go to waste? Raising them from the dead to torture for information is always a fun idea, though the souls of the PCs may not necessarily be willing. The next step is to raise them as undead servants, who regain their faculties (if not their lives) and must now progress as zombies or worse. The rules were made to be modded, of course, and simply adding the undead keyword and a few token resistances can adjust combat to accommodate their new unlives – though in the future it would be very difficult for them to get around in civilized society as, say, zombies.

II. Fudge the story
This is my least favorite option, because it presents less in the way of consequences and more of an inconvenience for the players – come back the next session and say that the players were not killed outright, but taken prisoner. Stripped of their weapons and armor, they were thrown into an icy prison to rot away. From there, the survivors may mount a rescue mission, while the captured PCs have to try and execute a daring escape. That way, the players keep their characters, and have a chance to salvage the adventure.

To modify this, perhaps the PCs were captured alive, though the players didn’t know it. Their characters become generals in the army of the Winter King, and help him to wreak bloody havoc across the land. The new party needs to stop the old party in order to even get a crack at the king and his staff.

III. What does this mean for the rest of the world?
he option I ultimately chose, I allowed for the players to hit the reset button – new campaign in a new part of the world (they wanted a nice, temperate jungle adventure after freezing in the north) so they picked new characters and decided on traveling south, towards the jungles.

Along with thousands of refugees.

The winter king, in his glory, is expanding his empire, and the lands he takes are swaddled in the embrace of that same terrible weather. Ice, snow, and sleet that destroys crops and makes life almost impossible have sent the residents of those now occupied lands to villages and cities in the south. Other nations and races are sealing their borders, and food is getting scarce. Bandits plague the roads driven by hunger and desperation, and many towns and villages simply deny the party entrance. As a DM, this means more wandering monsters, higher DCs to forage for food, and more difficulty performing social skills checks – especially against other races.

The most important thing a DM can be is flexible, but there is a line not to cross. You can’t let the players treat your work like a game of Final Fantasy. There are no save points, and certainly no reset button.

Having an entire campaign go down the tubes because of some choices the players made is pretty frustrating. It means a lot of extra work for you as the DM, and means that the story you were trying to tell may not get finished. And I agree that there should be consequences for the players’ actions. There’s one thing that, having read the above post, I feel is missing from that core conceit.

Actions should have consequences, but consequences should be fun
Fun may not be the best word, but it’s the most concise and perhaps the closest to what I’m trying to say. Here’s my train of thought.

D&D, and other RPGs like it, is a game, and games are designed to be fun, first and foremost, for everyone playing the game. If the players make some bad decisions that cause a TPK (or a near TPK, as the case may be), then that’s probably going to hurt the DM’s fun in the long-run because of the extra work and the wasted effort put into that story. What you have to remember, though, is that–once the initial rush of an epic combat is over–getting clobbered by the monsters isn’t all that much fun for the players, either.

Combat should have consequences. If players don’t feel any tension as a result of their characters’ lives being imperiled, that’s a problem that you have to solve. That said, if your consequences are simply meant to punish players, or to encourage them to take the safe route, then your consequences might need adjustment.

A lot of indie RPGs subscribe to a particular philosophy. The idea is that success is, largely, inherently good. Failure may not be inherently good, but it should be at least as interesting as success, and it should lead to situations that are at least as interesting and fun for the players (even if they aren’t fun for the players’ characters). I think that applying this philosophy to D&D is, in general, a good idea, especially when it comes to game-breaking events like this.

If the players have really bungled things and it looks like the bad guys are going to win, don’t think of it as a negative. Think of it as an opportunity for drama, an opportunity to tell the story in a way you hadn’t thought of before. In the above example, I particularly like the idea of bringing the PCs back as undead creatures in the service of the Winter King. Not only do the PCs get to play for the other side for a bit, but eventually you get to give them the choice of betraying their master and trying to do the right thing, even if it means their destruction as the necrotic energy that animates them is dissipated with the Winter King’s demise.

Guest Post: A DM’s Perspective on D&D Encounters Season 3 “Keep on the Borderlands”

Posted on : 15-12-2010 | By : Brian | In : Advice, D&D, Guest Posts, The Great Seamus

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By The Great Seamus

SPOILERS AHOY

Though this review on the current season on Encounters may seem a little late to the party, I can assure you this was intentional. The previous two seasons of the program suffered from a detached sense of story – seemingly, a heaping of random encounters very loosely tied together at the end for the sake of satisfying a story. Season 2’s Dark Sun outing suffered especially hard when each week was taken individually, rather than viewed as a whole. With this season, I wanted to get a few weeks under my belt before I judged.

At this point, I have read 4/5 of the season, and I have run players through 3/5 of the story.

I can honestly say at this point that the lack of direction and continuity from Dark Sun has improved a great deal. The encounters each feel more linked. Each chapter has a noticeable and clearly defined endgame scenario, and each final fight segues into the next chapter flawlessly, moving the story as a whole to what I assume is going to be a very climatic final fight. I have noticed my players responding more to the story as whole, investing themselves in their characters and also in some of the support characters – Friar Benwick especially. His betrayal at the climax of chapter three genuinely shocked and surprised even my most hardened and jaded players.

That’s not to say this season of Encounters is flawless.

Other dungeon masters and some higher caliber players at our store have hypothesized that, as a direct result of Dark Sun’s amped up difficulty having turned off a large number of players, Wizards of the Coast “dumbed down” this season, using weaker monsters or serving up over-powered “twitter buffs” to make the experience easier for players. Many dungeon masters have resorted to “tweaking” each encounter, modifying enemies, adding reinforcements, or even inserting environmental hazards to balance out the weakly designed combat encounters. Additionally, there is still a distinct lack of roleplaying available from the beginning of the season. This may largely be due to the time limit imposed on the idea of the game – supposedly, it is meant to be a one to two hour game session focused primarily on simple combat to acclimate new players to 4th Edition D&D. It succeeds at that, as I have noticed a significant influx of new players come in and quickly pick up the basics of the game and develop an appreciation for it. These people have spent their hard earned dollars on books, The Red Box, and minis to most likely run their own home games. The rest of us, however, are left wanting something more substantial. DM burnout is high in Encounters to begin with, and very rarely do the DMs come back for the next season. This season will be no exception to that.

To troubleshoot some of these problems, I have been running my own re-tooled version of the materials in a home game. Having a fixed group of people playing their own characters (rather than pre-generated ones,) allows for them to become more invested in the story around each encounter. As a DM, it gives me more creative license to expand on the setting and the characters within it, which keeps the players even more interested in the story. I find that I am less burned out than some of my compatriots are, and actively look forward to running the sessions at home. The Encounters sessions at the store serve as excellent practice for tactics, and also to see the strengths and weaknesses of each encounter ahead of time, rather than simply trying to anticipate them on paper.

As far as troubleshooting in-store games, I have a few suggestions. Following the recommended “add another monster” formula Wizards gives for larger parties is a must, even if you only have five PCs at the table. Even newer players who started with this season of Encounters have figured the game out by now, and they are generally more than ready for what is being thrown at them. Adding one or two more monsters to the mix would even the odds for them. Additionally, modifying the minions in each encounter to make them a little tougher would be a game-changer. Even simply giving a minion some temporary hit points is a huge help in getting players to take them seriously. Finally, environmental hazards or active terrain are a huge plus, especially with minions to exploit them. Simply adding an arbalest or boulder hazard can change the battle plans of an over-powered or over-skilled party and make them focus a lot more on tactics. Also, adding some role-playing spice of your own is easy. Have a villain go into a monologue and taunt the players. Have them attempt to parley, and force the players to use those skills they picked out months ago. Try to encourage players to think outside the box, and use the rules as much as you can to do so. If your rogue wants to somersault over three enemies to try for combat advantage, use whatever rules you can to let him try. And finally, having a reward system in place for excellent roleplaying is tantalizing for players who love the current “achievement” system in video games. Maybe set up a way for players to spend their renown points for in game benefits.