The Broken Plot Chain

carefully crafted encounter with little or no effort. Alternatively, the party has the “perfect weapon” at hand, ready and able to easily defeat the encounter. Whatever the reason, the plot’s chain of events shatters and the game is off track. Here are a few examples I ran into over the years.

• Attacked by undead using 3.5 OGL rules and the cleric is a negative energy turning machine. Every monster is not only turned, but controlled!
• Monster desperately wants the plot Macguffin and advances on the party with murder on its mind. Rather than fight, party threatens to vaporize said Macguffin. DM now has a problem.
• Mighty beast stands under a freestanding stone gateway. The gateway is a 20-ton block supported by two 10×10 pillars. Sorcerer wins initiative and gets off two disintegrate spells. Freestanding stone becomes free falling and the monster does not move quite fast enough. Sponges required for cleanup.
• Party enters room and room seals, water floods the room. DM cackles as the lethal 3.5 OGL drowning rules kick-in…on some other party. Entire party either has gills or water breathing magic item. Party more annoyed at smell of wet dwarf than frightened by encounter.

This post is not about how to break an encounter or how to write a break-resistant encounter, it is about recovering from a broken one. First, do not invoke “DM privilege” and execute some plot stupidity in an attempt to “un-break” the encounter. It is insulting to your player’s intelligence and is egomaniacal. Player cleverness, preparedness or blind luck deserves encouragement, not elimination by fiat. The classic example for me emerged at a convention. Suddenly, sewer walls in a major city started blocking outbound teleportation because teleportation trashed the module’s plot. Admittedly, it was a poorly conceived encounter with a glaring weakness, but the DM’s solution was even worse.

I prefer a more nuanced approach to my broken encounters. Take the examples above, escaping the flooded room is the encounter. Without imminent death from drowning in the equation, the encounter is an annoyance…until that door opens and the undead swarm of Piranha start snacking! Perhaps a giant spider lurked on top of the pillar and now sees some new prey. When the monster could no longer get what it wanted through violence it stops and negotiates. A good DM needs mental agility and here is your moment to shine. Prove to your players that no matter how clever they are you can handle it.

Broken encounters are as much opportunity as problem. Look beyond your existing plot and to what might happen after the encounter.  Take our stone gateway example. When the encounter breaks, transform the gateway from a piece of terrain into a holy site for the local death god. Nothing like vaporizing a holy relic  to encourage a friendly holy war against the party. As they say, no one ever gets away clean. There are always consequences.

No matter how bad it gets, remember a broken encounter is not a broken campaign. Learn from it and move on. Ever forward!

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

The setup is dead simple and actually a bit cliched. A local king charges the PCs with penetrating a jungle, a foul morass and determine what happened to a previous exploration party. Both parties seek a rare herb said to bring great power and knowledge.

Our party fearlessly charges into the jungle morass and after a few days encounters a tribe that might have some information about the herb.  There is, of course, a catch before they will give up their secret. The party must undergo a ritual and “speak” with the local god, aided by a shaman.  Lead into the deep jungle by the shaman, the party reaches the sacred grove and the ritual begins in earnest. The shaman does much dancing and the ritual culminates with the party breathing deeply of the “sacred smoke.” As the ritual completes, the shaman dies due to a snake bite, heart attack, poison dart or whatever. It is critical to get him out of the picture.

As the shaman falls to the ground, he melts to bleached bones in seconds and the bright jungle light goes dark grey.  Then the PCs notice that the jungle itself begins to move and quiver with unnatural life. Vine creepers twitch and flow across the ground, seeking warm flesh. Soon, a green tide seeking to devour the PCs begins a brutal pursuit. Every step is a battle against the living jungle to reach the safety of the village.

The jungle is not magical or possessed by demons. In fact, it is a totally average jungle with the normal assortment of plant life.  The sacred smoke did not bring the jungle to life, it slowed the PCs down by the factor of 1000. A subjective second for the PCs is now weeks or months of real time.  The jungle is not any more mobile than before the ceremony, but now the PCs are on “plant time” and perceive the plant growth.   A grey sky results from day and night  flowing faster than the PC’s perceptions.

I like this encounter idea for a couple of reasons, notably it is unexpected and better than the “triffids” that populate every RPG campaign jungle. A “slow” encounter also allows PCs to time travel foward in time, years if need be.  Time jumps in a campaign allow those newborn messiahs to reach a useful age and deadlines in the far future to suddenly arrive.

“We don’t have to worry about the demon lord’s awakening, that does not happen for another 10 years…. What? Tomorrow? How did that happen?”

It gives me a warm DM fuzzy just thinking about the look on the party’s collective faces.

Let me know if anyone uses this idea, I would like to hear how it goes.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

If you are unfamiliar with “Diplomacy,” take a moment and download the rules. The mechanics are incredibly simple and easy to learn and teach.

Now that you understand the mechanics, here are my thoughts on integrating “Diplomacy” with an RPG. I always thought that “Diplomacy” was a good fit as a role-playing encounter because at its core “Diplomacy” is a role-playing game with nations instead of characters.

I suggest using “Diplomacy” to resolve a big war between several nations, or even a large skirmish where nations maneuver for position. Instead of the GM just telling the players how it turned out, make the players directly influence events.

There is some preparation to make the integration work. First, you need several nations (at least one for each player, though you could play more than one nation if you have more nations than players) that have opposing goals. Since most role-playing worlds tend to favor conflict between nations for story reasons this is trivially easy. Next, either create a map or use an existing map of your world. Assign starting army and navy setups based on your world’s reality. The big, militaristic nation fields more units than a smaller nation or an island nation that has a larger navy than army. Look to the initial “Diplomacy” setup rules for inspiration and guidance.

A word about balance. “Diplomacy’s” map and starting unit placement balance relatively well, but it is not perfect. Do not worry too much about balance in your setup. So what that one of the players only has two armies and others get four. If your world has a military imbalance then the 2-army player had better make friends with a neighboring country fast! Such is politics.

Assign players to specific countries and get the game going! “Diplomacy” is usually a solid 4-6 hours depending on negotiating speed. To keep things moving, I suggest a 5-10 minute limit in the negotiating phase. Setting an end condition (10 countries taken) or a specific time is also a good idea.

Once the game is over, integrate the results into your campaign. Conquered nations, scorched and defeated, now cover the land. Perhaps a new alliance, forged of necessity, emerged victorious. Regardless, players directly impacting the fate of nations is far more entertaining than a GM deciding winners and losers by fiat.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have never tried this idea. If someone does give it a go, please let me know how it goes.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

I played a “Living Forgotten Realms” encounter last week that really annoyed me. I mean it REALLY annoyed me. And that annoyance haunted me for the better part of a week until I decided to post about it. Nothing like a nice, spleen-filled post to really make a gamer feel better.

The encounter seemed simple enough. The party walked into a sewer temple with some dire rats. Combat ensued, but every couple of rounds, more rats popped up from nowhere. Soon enough we figured out that an invisible wererat summoned a pair of dire rats on his turn, assuming his power “recharged.” That is, the DM rolled a 5-6 on a d6. Sadly, he recharged…almost every round. The fun part was we had no cleric and each rat had 50 hp! Roughly every other round 100 hp of monsters popped on the battlefield. After a few rounds, we ran like little girls. Four PCs in 4E D&D cannot dish out enough damage to get through that many critters.

The module designer failed to account for the potential of the summoning happening nearly every round. It is one thing for a breath weapon to recharge every round. It only does damage. Creature summoning is another matter entirely. A creature controls movement, moves tactically, does damage and absorbs attacks. This is far more powerful than a 3d6+4 breath weapon.

Which leads me to my point; never allow a dice roll determine how difficult an encounter becomes. If you want a tough encounter, look at your party and throw enough NPCs at them to give them a challenge. Letting chaos decide how many creatures appear on the battle map is a recipe for a TPK and a very angry game group.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

A Broken Gamer that Failed His Save VS. Boring Combat

The battle continues…the players groan.

Combat is an integral part of many role-playing games.  It adds an element of risk, tactics and randomness to an otherwise sedate hobby. There is, however, the possibility of too much of a good thing. More precisely, combat encounters that go from challenging to tedious in a few short rounds. Often it is not the fault of the DM when the encounter goes stale. A combination of bad luck, bad encounter design or unforeseen game mechanics can make a good combat go bad.

Here are my thoughts on how to identify when an encounter goes flat and possible solutions besides just “calling it.”

I refuse to set a “10 round” limit on an encounter. That is too arbitrary and many systems just take longer than others. Instead, I suggest that certain characteristic clearly mark when the encounter needs a “nudge to completion” from the DM.

Combat encounters are all about winning. Therefore, every round their must be a winner. One of the main reasons players lose interest is when they do 10 points of damage per round and the bad guy regenerates 10 on his turn.  Endlessly pounding on a bad guy with no results is disheartening and most importantly, dull.  Even if the bad guys wins for a few rounds, at least that will focus the player attention better than a dull status quo round.

Change is good in a combat encounter! Keep some variety flowing and keep the players motivated and interested.  I played several encounters where the monster, clearly doomed and incapable of significant threat to the PCs, insisted on fighting to the death. Normally this is fine by me, but game mechanics (insubstantial/regenerating creatures) greatly limited our damage. Many rounds later, with little threat of them damaging any PC, the entities died. For DMs, when there is no threat to death to the PCs, move on to something else.  Even if you want the PCs to expend resources during the adventure, do not make the players spend three hours of real time for the sole purpose of draining their healing potion supply.

Power/resources expenditures are also a great way to gauge how much longer the combat encounter should last. When the PCs are down to throwing rocks and harsh language at the enemy, a good DM will end the encounter. Not to pick on 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, but the extremely limited encounter/daily powers make for  incredibly dull combats after about 10 rounds. I played in a couple of games where most of the combat was every player using the same “at-will” power, over and over again. They simply had nothing else left.  Other systems have more options in terms of attacks, but you get the idea.

This last item is a personal pet peeve. It is so simple, yet I have countless examples of module writers and DMs repeating this mistake over and over again.

They make the monsters too hard to hit.  PCs that optimized their characters for combat have a blast. The remaining players sit on their hands for 3 hours during the combat waiting to roll a natural “20.” This being the only way to hit the monster. Do not make your players go watch TV, keep them in the game. You are the DM, fudge the numbers and make the game fun!

Bottom line is that the DM needs to take control and really manage more than the NPC hit points. They need to manage the entire table so that everyone has fun. As long as you do that, everything else will go just fine.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

In my module, “Tree of Shadows” I made the first encounter a tornado. I thought it was better than the usual “OTA” (Obligatory Thug Attack.)  Some new  mechanics were required to deal with this unusual beast, but I think it worked out well.

The setup is that the party was escorting a group of monks when the tornado struck. Several monks were thrown into the twister’s path, unconscious.  The PCs, being PCs decided to rush in and rescue the injured.

I labeled  our battle map with  vertical and horizontal axis, numbered  1 to 20.  Due to debris and poor visiblity, half movement is the maximum inside the grid. Outside the grid is only 1/4 movement.  This discouraged the PCs from going “off grid” to avoid my lovely tornado.

I spread some victims out in the grid and the PCs went in to rescue them. Every round I randomly rolled 2xd20 to determine the vertical and horizontal location of the tornado for that round.  Just to make it really interesting, it had reach 10. A near miss, inside the “reach” allowed for a fortitude save. Failure meant the tornado ate the PC for 1d6 rounds until spitting them out in a random direction. I applied damage every round to the PC while in the funnel.  It if landed on the square with a PC in it there was no save. It is a tornado, after all.

I have to relay this humorous gaming anecdote. One of my playtest groups had a mount (a war horse) picked up in the first round. A few rounds later it was ejected, landing on a random square…occupied by its original rider!

The encounter ends after 10 rounds or when all the victims are rescued.

I have more detailed instructions and graphics in my module, linked above for those needing more information.

Just another encounter suggestion from my dark and twisted mind.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer