Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar

Like many adolescent geeks, I fell in love with my first computer game back when I had lots of time and very little money.  I mowed lawns for many weeks (probably around 12) to save up for Ultima IV: Quest for the Avatar to play on my Commodore 64.   The game came on, I believe, four five inch floppy disks, and a nifty metal ankh and fabric map were included in the box along with two instruction books.  I felt like I’d got my money’s worth.

The object of Ultima IV is to live well and in accordance with eight virtues:  Honesty, Valor, Honor, Compassion, Justice, Spirituality and Humility.  This leads to becoming the “Avatar” of those virtues and positioning your character as an example to the rest of the world.  I was just impressionable enough to invest quite a lot of myself in the game’s core principles.  I took it so far that I stopped reloading at previous save points, when I made a mistake and lost some rating in the virtues.  A simple typo when dealing with a blind vendor would cause me to lose ‘an eighth’ of my avatar hood.  One cannot be the avatar of honesty if one rips people off.  It wasn’t a terrible hardship:  even if you took a step backward, you could always redeem yourself, though this took hours.  I probably added 50 hours of game play by compensating for typos provoked by an interface that I wouldn’t tolerate for ten minutes today.

After I completed the game, naturally I took my tricked out party back and slaughtered town after town.  At that point even the town guards presented little challenge.  After all those weeks spent tightly following a path of virtue, it was quite a relief to just go evil for awhile.

This reminds me of life in a long term Dungeons and Dragons campaign.  I like playing and developing the same character over long periods of time, but sometimes it’s fun to change things up by creating a character who thinks a less and cares little for authority.

Game Prep and Digital Pictures

Today I’m doing some more prep for my game next Saturday.  This time I’m using a lot of maps and Dungeon Tiles, which makes encounter design different for me.  Before I would draw maps on paper, then transcribe it them onto my battle mat.  This time I sorted through my box of tiles and maps, and worked out how I want it all to look.  I took a few digital pictures, so I’ll remember what it looks like when game time comes.  I also put some miniatures on them, just so I’d have a sense of scale for each battle.

If you’re one of my players, there are some vague spoilers, but it shouldn’t ruin anything if you look at the pics.

Birthday Haul

I had a birthday last week and received a gift certificate for Paizo Publishing (thank you, Zobmie!).  Much of Paizo’s recent efforts have been in support o f their Pathfinder Role-playing Game, but they sell many kinds of gaming goodness.  Since my group is strongly (and happily) entrenched in Dungeons and Dragons 4^th edition, I steered away from the Pathfinder stuff and took it as an opportunity to take experiment with some other kinds of items.

I ordered Issue 3 of Level Up magazine by Goodman games and Issue 13 of Kobold Quarterly by the Open Design folks.  I was a long time subscriber to Dragon Magazine in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s and have been curious about the current generation of gaming magazines ever since I returned to the hobby with 4^th edition.  I also purchased a Game Mastery Map Pack: Ancient Forest set.  I have some of Wizards of the Coast’s Harrowing Halls and Fane of the Forgotten Gods Dungeon Tiles and was looking for something I could use for outdoor encounters.

I’m pleased with my haul:  I had forgotten how nice it is to have a gaming magazine to leaf through and read at leisure.  I appreciate what Wizards is doing with their online content, but I miss a Dragon Magazine that’s an actual magazine.

Kobold Quarterly has a notably higher print quality than Level Up, with an expectedly higher price point:  $7.99 and 3.99 respectively.  Kobold Quarterly covers a variety of games, mostly of the 3.5 and 4E spectrum, while Level Up is 4E specific.

The Game Mastery Map Pack will definitely suit my needs.  The pack is made of 18 different 8” by 5” cards.  The cardboard isn’t as thick as Dungeon Tiles, but I think that’s okay.  How thick does it need to be?  These cards come ready to use: none of the perforation punching and associated waste that you’ll find with Dungeon Tiles.  The colors in this set are a little dark and muddy; I wonder if something was lost during the design translation process.

Character Sexuality

As a combat oriented role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition holds a tension between the tactical parts of the game and the character elements. I’m a fan of both, so I constantly try to inject flourishes into my player characters.

One often overlooked and avoided way to inject true character into your PC is to reflect on and identify a sexual orientation. Many gamers avoid anything to do with sex in their game: for some of us, our early gaming experiences were as teenagers when we knew little about human sexuality; when the topic came up, it likely to descend into adolescent silliness. There is also the concern of the gaming group becoming creepy or feeling threatening to those uncomfortable including sex in the game.

These concerns are fair. While it is reasonable for a group of adult gamers to focus on romance and other aspects of human relationships, most D&D groups frankly aren’t interested. As an aside, the Book of Erotic Fantasy by Gwendolyn Kestrel and Duncan Scott is a supplement that is compatible for the 3.5 rule system that focuses exactly on “intrigue and manipulation, marriages of power, dangerous seducers, sex and magic.”

Even for standard hack and slash Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, simply identifying your character’s sexual orientation is a large step toward making him seem more real. It is then interesting to flesh out a character’s interest in relationships. Consider Westley’s situation before the action really started in The Princess Bride. He is clearly straight, but when he was away, becoming The Dread Pirate Roberts, he had no interest in pursuing other relationships. Spielberg’s Indiana Jones, Wildstorm comics’ Midnighter (member of Authority) and Moorcocks’ Elric of Melnibone are other characters with established sexual orientations that added something to their personas.

If your group isn’t in to it, there’s no need to role-play any of the details. This doesn’t mean you can’t add story elements to the back story or into the out-of-play scenes.

Hallowed Halls Dungeon Tiles

I have a pretty sparse set of dungeon mastering supplies.  Since I’m only on that side of the table about once a month, I’ve devoted my gaming resources in other other directions.  I do, however, have the basics:  a Dungeon Master’s Guide, both Monster Manuals (plus Dungeon Denizens by Aeryn Blackdirge from Goodman), a few modules, plenty of dice, a battle mat and a small to moderate collection of miniatures.  The battle mat works fine, for the most part, though there are a few times I wished it were larger.

My regular DM, however, has a few sets of Dungeon Tiles from Wizards of the Coast, and I must admit, that there is an added fun factor to maneuvering our minis over the cardboard grids.

A few days ago, I splurged a bit (though around $10 per set, they aren’t tooo expensive) and came home with a set of the Hallowed Halls Dungeon Tiles.  I didn’t know that this set includes a three dimensional element.  There’s not much mention on the outside of the package, and there are no real directions inside.  After punching everything out, I spread the pieces across my table and started playing.  It took me a bit to understand how they fit together, so I’m including some pictures that may help the rest of you along.

To make this table...

Use the round top and middle two, lighter pieces shown here.

Photo of Fantasy Wargaming by Bruce Galloway

Here is a picture of my copy of Fantasy Wargaming, The Highest Level of All, which I wrote about a week or so ago.

Fantasy Wargaming

As I mentioned in my previous post, I found a copy of Fantasy Wargaming at Half Price Books last week.  This brought back personal memories for me, but also represents a slice of gaming history that I’d like to write about here.

This book is delicious with its old school gaming weirdness.  The modern gamer in me finds it nearly incomprehensible.  It rips into D&D because its ‘scenarios exist in a vacuum, and that is why we call them unsatisfactory,’ and ‘the sheer unlikelihood of such a motley crew being able to agree…’  I suppose this may have been true in 1980, but wasn’t Gygax using Greyhawk and wasn’t Ed Greenwood using his Forgotten Realms, even then?  The difference is that Fantasy Wargaming roots itself squarely in the European middle-ages while D&D of that era requires dungeon masters to create their own worlds.

Other oddities include:  ‘I’m no great advocate of women’s lib but . . . [John Norman’s Gor novels] are sufficiently strong in places to be more than mildly offensive . . .  For heaven’s sake don’t let a “liberated” wife or girlfriend read them, though, or you’ll never hear the last of it!’  Later, in the character generation chapter, readers are instructed that ‘Players wishing to play a female character must unfortunately take the penalties of a patriarchal society.  Make the following adjustments …  physique and endurance -3, charisma -2, social class -3, bravery -2 [!], greed/selfishness/lust -3.  They will be excluded from combat . . . and expected… to adopt a domestic position as wife, housekeeper and servant.  These factors are invariable.’  Oh dear.

There’s some entertainingly odd stuff in here too:  a character’s characteristics are subject to astrological sign based alterations.  There are also rules for conjuring demons, angels and gods, and it offers advice that ‘Characters in Fantasy Wargaming should live their lives in continual awareness of salvation and damnation.’  You don’t see this sort of thing in 4e.

My experience with Fantasy Wargaming reminds me how delightful it is to live in the here and now, where 4^th Edition D&D is balanced and fun, and there are a legion of other games should I need a break.

The Dawn of Gaming

My gaming life started in the early 1980s, when I was in the fifth grade.  We lived in rural Washington State and for awhile, I had to ride the bus to school.  Those rides were little pockets of Hell for the most part, but there were some advantages to being one of the last kids dropped home each night.  There was almost a little fraternity between some of us and the driver.  I didn’t understand it then, but it was one of my first experiences of being in the ‘cool group.’  After all, some of the others were High School Students.

One of my fellow riders was a young man named Al Willet.  He and the bus driver discussed military history, naval tactics and the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States.  One day, for reasons I never really understood (perhaps he overheard me babbling on about Clash of the Titans or something), Al offered to let me look at some of his 1^st Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.  I couldn’t really comprehend it, but it was blowing my mind.  The Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II were the most accessible that I can remember.  He probably showed the Player’s Handbook, but I can’t really remember.  The character sheet he showed me was hand written, on college rule notebook paper, and the spot for hit points had been erased and re-erased so many times that a hole was worn through the paper.

D&D eventually lost favor in his group, because one day, Al showed me a different kind of gaming book:  Fantasy Wargaming, compiled and edited by Bruce Galloway.   Again, I was blown away.  I was already struggling to figure out what gaming was about and how the rules fit together.  The difference between D&D and AD&D caused all kinds of confusion with me and my other 5^th grade friends.  Fantasy Wargaming impressed me because it seemed to have everything all in one place.  Combat, magic, character generation and role-playing all have homes within.  It seemed, almost, more perfect than D&D.

The world moved on, my family changed houses and my friends started playing AD&D.  I noticed copies of Fantasy Wargaming in book stores and game shops, but in that era of very low disposable income, I left it alone.  Just this week, however, I ran across a copy of the book for $7, and I couldn’t resist.

In my next post, I’ll write more about what I found within that ancient tome’s covers.

Anatomy of a TPK, Addendum

I made a key dungeon mastering mistake during last week’s near total party kill in my Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition campaign.  I share it here as a warning to those who follow.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m using Harley Stroh’s Dragora’s Dungeon in my home campaign; for the most part, it’s been a great success.  I have, however, had recurring challenges of information management.  Sometimes related encounter areas have key pieces of information in different sections of the book that don’t reference each other.

In the wandering monster portion of the module, there is a stat block for an elite mad wraith that caught my eye.   I didn’t want to use it as a truly random encounter because I don’t think it’s a good idea to let the dice decide encounter details, unless it’s related to a skill check or challenge.  When combined with a couple of the hastati zain-kin minions running around, a mad wraith encounter would be big fun that effectively conveyed the constant threat of life in the city.

As a part of my normal prep, I enter monster defenses and hit points into an Excel spreadsheet for tracking.  Each has its own tab that I slide around to match initiative order.  I use a simple formula to calculate hit points, because I hate doing math on the fly.  I had entered this information several weeks ago, using the module’s stats.  As I prepared for last week’s game, I started using the Monster Manual as a reference for the encounter.  The module only has a stat block, the MM has lore and tactics.

When I calculated the experience point budget for the final version of the encounter, I used the MM, non-elite version of the creature.  It hadn’t occurred to me that Stroh, would have added the elite template to the wraith.  I didn’t even really understand the difference.  At this stage of my DMing life, I shy away from adding templates or changing monsters beyond adding or subtracting a level or two.

As a result, I thought I was giving my players an encounter that ranged from very easy, with one wraith, to low level normal if they fought all three.  Instead, it was high level easy with one wraith, and very difficult if they fought all three.  It’s no wonder they wiped.

The obvious lesson is to always double check stat blocks when switching between sources.  What mistakes have you made as a DM?  What did you learn from it?

The Anatomy of a Near Total Party Kill

My players recently continued their journey through Dragora’s Dungeon by Goodman Games.  I integrated the module into a larger home-brewed campaign setting, but this section was almost entirely from the book.  With one encounter, my perspective on the game has changed:  I didn’t believe that player character death was possible within a normal strength, Dungeons and Dragons 4^th Edition encounter, under relatively normal circumstances.  Now I understand that it is a real possibility and not only in a climactic boss fight.

From a design perspective, the encounter was pretty good:  one mad wraith was discovered in a cramped and quiet back alley.  There was a moderate amount of difficulty terrain, which favored the floating, aura-using wraith.  When a wraith kills, it spawns an additional wraith, so I included two minion NPCs with the party as ‘guides.’  If the PCs could keep the minions alive, the encounter would be worth 250 experience points, which is in the very easy XP budget range for a party of five third level characters.  Even if both of the ‘friendly’ minions were transformed, the encounter would be worth 750 XPs which is still well within the ‘normal range.’  On the other hand, mad wraiths are 6^th level elite controllers, and they were on their home turf.

The first problem occurred long before the battle when the player with the invoker swapped out for a warlord.  This made sense in a general way, because the group needed more up-close abilities.  In the specific, however, it removed the group’s only radiant-keyword abilities.

Anafos, the group’s warlock has a good passive perception, so he spotted the wraith early.  They had a chance to try and evade the encounter altogether.  They chose not to hide (though I use the word ‘chose’ loosely.  I’m not sure it occurred to them).  Their religion knowledge checks are the only parts of the encounter that may not have been entirely by the book.  I don’t remember the exact rolls, but they were in the moderate success range.  Rather than following the strict guidelines in the Player’s Handbook, I gave them some broad information including some general vulnerabilities.

Shortly thereafter, one of the minions (a Zain-kin hastati) rushed into the fight and was killed by the wraith’s aura.  The second held back as instructed by Quinn, the party’s warlord.  A moment later, there were two wraiths to contend with.  The battle soon clustered around the difficult terrain in the middle of the map.  When combined with the aura’s three square dazing affect, the players’ mobility was devastated.  That aura really tore them apart, and, again, the group had exactly zero radiant based abilities to mitigate the trouble.

As the encounter enfolded, things got worse: the second minion died at the edge of the aura.  When he returned as a wraith, the group suddenly faced a battle on two fronts.  When Quinn first went down, Trackless the seeker leapt from the roof in order to provide some healing, got stuck in the honey pot of dazing aura and difficult terrain, and never escaped.

The PCs decided to flee.  Dent the fighter was in reasonably good shape, Anafos and Orsik the shaman were outside of the dazing aura, but Quinn and Trackless were pretty much toast.  Dent had to make a decision:  stay with Quinn and Trackless, or flee.  True to character, Dent stayed.  Not long after, Dent died as Anafos and Orsik fled.

This example shows that death in 4^th Edition is a real possibility, even with encounters that are well within budget.  All it takes is a string of unconnected events such as suboptimal party composition, poor dice rolls and minor tactical errors to make a situation deadly.