Prison Break Successful

Old School gaming isn't dead as long as there are Old School DMs.  I had 10 players last night, a personal record.  Two were relatively new to gaming.

Why are those two dudes over there eating instead of excitedly taking part, Telecanter?!

These youngsters and their technology, videos were on Facebook and receiving comments before our session was even over (There were dramatic morality play distractions involved in the session). 

Of course, there were several things I could have done better.  I don't feel like writing it all up now.  I'll just give you one clear example: reconnaissance should probably be a session of its own.  Thinking about it now, many heist movies start with the crew knowing all the info they need already, Ocean's 11, for example.

My heist map and record sheet in a report cover

Jenga didn't get used, prisoners were saved, but the 12,000 in silver was left behind.  With that, I think I'm taking a little blogging vacation folks.  Take care.

The Heist, The Con, The Special Mission

Take the idea that D&D can be heist-like, add in the idea of a wary location where an alarm can be raised, a clock, and the idea that at every tick of that clock something might go wrong, and you have the recipe for a badass subgenre of D&D.  Think Ocean's 11, The Sting, The Dirty Dozen.

This Friday may be the last I get to play with some of my best and nicest players (one couple is moving to Arizona, one to Indiana).  I thought it might be good to end things with a bang-- A heist to free some prisoners and all the coin that was confiscated from them.

So, I've tried to assemble all the great ideas from the bloggers above into a simple system.  Think of this as a draft.  Here's a pdf.

The Event Clock is used to schedule events like guard changes and executions.  The Trouble Meter goes up when PCs do things that draw attention to themselves.  You can use paperclips to track movement on both of these.

The pips in the Trouble Meter represent the chance that complications occur.  So, for example, if PCs drop a piece of clothing, the chance of something going awry goes from 1 in 6 to 2 in 6.  If the result says there's a complication, you roll on the chart to see what kind.  I left them general and tried to think of the most obvious/important.

If a roll came up "Obstacle Harder" you might decide a wall PCs knew about is actually taller than they thought. Maybe they couldn't see its base from where they were observing.  I realize it doesn't make logical sense that leaving out a piece of clothing would make a wall taller, but I think it models the way bad breaks or sloppiness can snowball.

I also think this is a good place to use the Jenga mechanic.  Any time the Trouble Meter is incremented all of the team involved need to pull a block.  You  could actually disregard this if you wanted to simplify things, but I like the way it will make the likelihood of general alarm more apparent to players.  Plus it's tactile and dramatic.

Should there be ways to lower the Trouble Meter?  I'm not sure.  I like the idea of tension building and building.  If you did allow for it, it would probably be based on context and require a DM ruling.  For example, the guard who spotted you is neutralized before he let's anyone else know.

I tried to leave spaces on the form for you to adjust these things to your taste.  Now, the hard part is setting up the detailed system that the players will attempt to crack.  I want to brainstorm here what kind of things I might want to include in a heist scenario:

Teams: players separated, vulnerable and dependent on each other succeeding at their sub-tasks.  What can I include that would require teams?  Raising portcullises, multiple objectives, distractions of patrols required to stall them.  Chgowiz had a post recently that suggested handling multiple parties by switching focus at cliff hangers.  I think this might work, although it would give players in tight spots more time to cogitate on solutions.  Which could be good if the goal is to help them be awesome.

Specialists: Assemble a team.  Determine what needs to be done and get the best for each job.  This might apply less to us because all the PCs will presumably be involved but they might hire help.  But, then, parties in D&D are already very team-like.  Thieves are the obvious example; forgers; high charisma persuaders; MUs with sleep, charm person, knock; Clerics with command, hold person, sanctuary; shape-shifters; the invisible.  The DM should probably design it so that some obstacles are obviously suited to certain specialists

Interesting Environment: Having to dig a tunnel under something, swimming in the sewer, scaling walls, hiding in wagons of goods, disguised as common passers-by, smoke, darkness, fog.

A Time Crunch: A limited window, a one-time chance to make this happen.  But not too rushed because preparation, scouting and planning are important parts of the genre.  Maybe give the players one in-game week to do all this and then they get one shot.

Predictable Systems: For complications to work, they need to be exceptions to an expected routine.  For planning to matter there need to be things that can be learned with some certainty.  Guard schedules, lights out, meal times, deliveries, vistors, local weather patterns.

I haven't play tested this but, hopefully I'll get the chance tomorrow.

The Jenga Mechanic

Apparently, using Jenga as a mechanic was pioneered by an indie game called Dread.  I've never played it.  I first heard about it on Playing D&D With Porn Stars.  I instantly thought this could be a useful tool for a DM and want to brainstorm a little on when and how you might use it.

So, I went and bought two sets, the official and the off brand.  The off brand is about half the price but not as good in quality.  They cleverly stacked their blocks to obscure the fact that they are actually smaller than the standard Jenga block.  But, I really don't think it's going to make a difference for our purposes, hell, you could use your own wooden blocks if they are uniform enough.

Some Things I Like
1) It's likely to be lying around somewhere like old monopoly games and checkers so can use what you have (rather than buy it like me).

2) It's a very social mechanic.  I can't think of any other resolution system that is quite as showy and dramatic.  So, it's easy for everyone present to watch and be interested in the results.  Harder to achieve that with dice.

3) It's interesting because it's a different kind of mechanic.  It's about seeing how far you can push your luck, not diminishing returns, but a dimishing chance that the risk you just took won't blow up in the party's face.

So, When do we use it?
Seems like, because of #2, it would be best with something involving the whole party.  Yes, you might use it to determine when an individual player makes a lycanthropic switch, but it wouldn't be capitalizing on the group aspect.  So what then?  It seems it would be best where the actions of any of the party would affect all the party.  So maybe:

• Reputation or trustworthiness in a place - caught in lying or stealing
• Going incognito or not/fitting in - breaking taboos
• Raising an alarm - individual noises
• Overusing a resource - rubbing the lamp too many times and the djinn is freed, how many chests can you load on the barge before sinking it (in a way it's a greed mechanic isn't it?)
• Come to think of it, lycanthropy or going berzerk might be well suited - one pc's transformation will affect the whole group.  Have a list of things that set them off (challenges, being hurt, hurting someone else) and make them pull each time one of them happens.

One thing that would be necessary is to know about how many pulls until failure. I have probably played this game once in my life.  I'm guessing 15-30 moves?  Anyone with more experience please weigh in.

So, for example, if the role playing situation is scoring political points against opponents at court by making cracks about them without pissing off the monarch, each pull gives you something good but means you're closer to getting thrown out of the court.  30 wisecracks seems like a lot in that case.

Using Color
You might utilize the colored blocks somehow here, if a jibe is red and a compliment to your allies was blue, the courtiers would soon be shifting their verbal strategies as all the easy to pull red blocks are pulled.

By giving a certain category of trigger a color we limit the amount of those triggers that pc's can get away with before calamity.  How much we limit depends on what pattern you stack the colors in, but if you stack them randomly (say, drawing them from a bag) I think it would divide that number by three.  So, from 15-30 down to 5-10 red blocks.  Does that sound right?

Who Pulls? You might make the person who caused the pull to do it as a kind of punishment, or allow the players to nominate someone to pull for all of them (although this might soon lead to one person pulling every time).

Other Considerations
I don't want to keep setting the blocks back up, so this mechanic should represent something dramatic and consequential.  It should be the focus of the rest of the session if not, multiple sessions after.

But . . . not campaign-ruining, because my sense is if you set the blocks up, people are going to keep pushing until they fall, especially my drunkie players.

Other ideas about when or how you might use Jenga in your old school games?

Into the Pilgrim City

Toral -- Divine-Petitioner stripped of power
Mollie-- Divine-Petitioner stripped of power
Z - Fighter

So, last session left the party in kind of a jam.  I was stressing about whether the players would fight to the death or go into custody and then only three players showed up Friday night.  You just can't predict as a DM can you?

The players ended up going into custody quietly.  In preparing for the session I needed to know how to handle the legal aspects of the situation.  I know that the Waterdeep boxed set and the City System boxed set had legal systems in them (or at least I think they both did), but mine are in storage.

I have the Judges Guild Ready Reference sheets, which has a few pages on the outcomes of crime. But, and this is one of those rare instances, I think it is too simplified.  What I mean is, the punishment for all crimes is rolled on the same table with modifiers for the severity.  So, you can be drawn and quartered for peeing in the road or merely be fined for murder.  Now that might fit the chaotic, random character of certain fantasy cities, but I wanted something that fit more with the context.

It so happened that I had just received Vornheim in the mail.  And I wondered, hmm, does he have anything in there about crime and punishment.  And lo and behold he did.  Now, it amounts to a single chart to roll on, so it doesn't really solve the problem of crime severity above, but it tackles a problem I didn't even know I had.  In a nutshell, Zak says that playing in a city your players are likely to get into trouble with the law and that punishments should be fun and interesting because they are part of the game.  That was new to me and made great sense.  So I decided to roll on the table.

If I might digress a bit.  I don't really grok cities.  I'm thoroughly suburban. In fact, I would argue that the boring surroundings of my youth contributed to my desire to explore imagined worlds.  This doesn't mean I don't like cities, I think I would love to live in Krakow, but I don't intuitively get them.  This is probably why Nidus, my first city after coming back into the hobby, is completely abstracted and also probably why I have had weeks to prepare and I still don't have a map of the city my party just docked at.

So, I rolled on Zak's table of legal situations and got 6: the defendant is set free to run for an hour, after which the militia comes after them, unless they find a hidden sanctuary stone.  Zak also provides a technique elsewhere by which you can create city streets as you go.  But . . . I chickened out.  I was wracking my brains on how to make that hour of searching abstracted streets exciting for my three players.  I couldn't think of anything because the city is still nebulous to me.  (I think maybe what I should do is grab those old Lankhmar city geomorphs and build a map then randomly decide what each neighborhood consists of.)  Hopefully I'll get better at stuff like this.

But don't fret, friends, because right under 6 was entry 7 which requires the defendant to put on a play.  I knew that was exactly perfect, both for this smaller player count-- they would be more comfortable being goofy, and for this city-- it is a very important religious pilgrimage city so the play could be allegorical or a morality tale.

And I was right.  I gave my players 15 minutes to create a play they would put on for a throng of pilgrims and if it was good (read: amused me) they would be freed.  The beautiful piece of art that they came up with was called Why You Shouldn't Have Sex With A Whore and met with great jolliment from the crowd (read:me).  They were released.

It was awesome to hear them stressing about the political and religious implications of their little drama, stuff like: "No, we can't have the whore burned at the stake we don't want to encourage that kind of behavior."

Now, I might want to try and produce a system of laws that would deter players from doing really heinous things (say automatic execution for burning down a neighborhood) but allow for Zak's chart to handle everything else.  I have to give you props sir, your experience and insight into city play made for a better night for me and my friends.

As far as events went, I'm twisting things a little as DM-- the party did something pretty drastic to a member of a holy fighting order, how could they get off with so little punishment?  I decided that there is some friction between the Holy Order of St Letholdus and the regular Church hierarchy.  Seeing as Roger wasn't harmed in the assault, the release of his assailants is a poke in the eye from the Church.  And the Church got to confiscate all the cargo which was about 12,000 sp  ; )

This Friday we'll see if they decide to do the right thing and rescue the laodah, his crew, and the heretic.

Public Domain Images II

Spawn of Endra asked how I found some of the pics I do. I posted about a year ago about that.  It's been so long that Archive.org changed the interface of their online reader.  But for the most part I think the steps hold up.  A few more thoughts, especially if you're bypassing OBI and going straight to Archive.org:

Finding Cool Stuff is Mostly Just Luck
If you want to find generally interesting pictures the best way to start would probably be to search for "Fairy Tales" or "Arabian Nights" in the search bar of the texts section.  A lot of the great illustrators did work in those spheres and they are subjects that are far more likely to have illustrations.

If you want to search for something specific like a knight or a shield, you'll need to be clever with the key words you use and get lucky.

For example, Gorillas were apparently unknown to Westerners until around 1860, with scientific study not taking place until the '20s.  Good luck trying to find a nice gorilla illustration in the public domain.

You can improve you specific search luck if you can come up with keywords in different languages that's good, there are a bunch of great French, German, and other language books up.

Tracing a Pic's Source
Theoretically, if you like a picture I post, you can find more like it.  I try, as a practice, to leave picture file names as I found them so you can figure out the original source.  (In a perfect world I would post source and artist information for every picture, but that seems so much like work I doubt I would post much).  So, for example, the first pic from the last post is called:

giantcrabotherta00jataiala_0073

What do you think I was actually searching for? : ) I'll give you a hint: its a creature in OD&D.  Hopefully, you can figure out from that info that the book is: The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India (1897) and there might be other illustrations in it that you like.

Search for Artists you Like
You can also look on the title page to find the artist listed as W. Robinson.  That's too common a name to help, but a search on Wikipedia brings up W. Heath Robinson. Put that in the search box and Bingo!, a list of books to check out.  ('Course this only works if the uploader was diligent enough to tag the illustrator) Searching through all those, I found a couple quirky pics:

But check this angel with five-o'clock shadow out, it appears to be by his brother Charles:

And, coolest for me, I found a nice silhouette of this "very distinguished lobster":

If it were a Crab, the cyclical serendipity would have been perfect, but it's still pretty cool.

Enough of that.  One more tip:

Google Sucks
They kinda do these days.  They go to the trouble of digitizing thousands of books and then upload images so contrasty I don't know what people even do with them.  The illustrations are too jacked up to be useful to me.  Project Gutenberg is a great project but doesn't handle images well.  MSN or any named university claiming a digital upload means it will suck.  Also, the same books are often scanned and posted multiple times, which, inexplicably don't always show up in searches.

Pop quiz, in the image above which link do you follow to find good illustrations? First one is MSN, no.  Then two by the Google, nope.  The last two should be okay.  I gravitate to the last one with more downloads.  This seems trivial, but if you are looking for art on Archive.org it will save you hours and hours.

Hope that helps.