d20 Poker

The adventure I have planned for my Dungeons and Dragons group this coming Sunday hinges, in part, on a sort of poker game-- that would be the Old West part of my proposed genre trio High Fantasy, Old West, and Steampunk reasserting itself. The problem, of course, is that I don't actually know how to play poker, and that I'm not sure if my players do either, and, hey, we came here to play D&D anyway so what's with this poker, what's next, are we suddenly going to find ourselves playing a high-stakes game of Acquire against a bugbear so you can finally stop yammering on about you can't find anyone to play it with-- and, geez, I guess that's three or four problems, after all. So, um, problematic, that.

But I don't really want my PCs to play poker, but rather, "poker"-- that is, the art of lying to your opponent, of knowing when to bluff and when to call. That part seems to be a lot more fun than remembering what card trumps what, and that's the part that actually gives them something to roleplay. Which is kind of the point.

So, what I'm going to present them with on Sunday is what I'd call d20 poker. The characters in the game are playing some variation of a card game, but the players will just roll their d20, with the highest number winning. Once they've rolled the die, they can up the ante, match that ante or fold, bluff their opponent(s) into folding, and call it when the ante isn't being upped.

I won't know until Sunday how well it works, but it seems, from a purely mechanic standpoint, to be a fun, accessible and fast-moving way to simulate that sort of conflict in a role-playing context. I'll be sure to let you know how it goes after we've given it a try...

CALL OF THE WEST campaign setting.

Call of the West is a D&D campaign setting that melds high fantasy, the mythical Old West, and steampunk elements in more-or-less equal measure. In the mythos of this world, the gods split the great continent into two thousands of years ago with a river. East of the river, the land was civilized, ordered, prosperous, good, and safe. West, the land was a desolate waste filled with danger, mystery, evil, and monstrous beasts. The West has largely remained unexplored and forbidden. Until now.

Now, some children of the East feel drawn to the West. Some might be thrill-seekers enraptured with the promise of discovery and adventure. Some might seek understanding of the West or the reviled (perhaps unjustly) tribal gnolls that roam it on the back of giant turtles. Some might relish the chance to reinvent themselves in a strange new land, while others might be running to escape the responsibilities (or consequences) of their past. All the players are Easterners, and the first batch (more on this later) set out together on a wagon train.

I like this set-up, and it's intended to accomplish a few different things. First, it gives a bunch of strangers a more compelling reason to be in the same locale than, "Hey, you're all in the tavern and someone gives you a quest". (Of course, the first thing one of the players did when they got to the Dwarven mining community of Firepalm is look for a tavern and ask if there were any jobs that needed doing.) Secondly, at least potentially, it gives each player a specific motivation for being in the area, and thus a specific impulse that they can role-play. That also makes it easier for me to craft stories coming out of the characters and their motivations. Thirdly, the "let's just see what's out there"/road trip/no home-base-of-operations vibe allows for a more episodic "Dungeon-of-the-Week" structure. That way, it's alright for a player to miss a game, for new players or guest stars to join, without upsetting the sense of a cohesive world.

None of this is new stuff, of course-- but I find that by foregrounding it, making these features a deliberate part of the campaign setting itself, it makes it easier. The setting also makes ample room for my own personal D&D leanings. For example, with few civilized outposts the farther west the players move, there are no shops and thus no reason for the players to accumulate wealth; I never found "I just got 400 gold!" a particularly compelling reward. Instead of buying things, they'll find them-- a lot of hand-crafted pieces of loot. Instead of stocking up on supplies, it's up to the players to find the resources in the natural world that they need to survive (this is a harsh, barren West, after all).

The West also gives me more options, story-wise: not only do I have fantasy tropes to call on-- cursed tombs, monster-ridden dungeons, powerful artifacts, hordes of undead beasts, nefarious traps-- but I can throw in stagecoach robberies, revivalists, prospectors, temperance, Cowboys-and-Indians, drunken doctors, hookers with hearts of gold, showdowns at noon. This setting-- not exactly our West, but not exactly Medieval Europe, either-- allows for a more colloquial sort of speech than the sometimes stilted and flowery speech one associates with a fantasy milleau.

The Steampunk elements were a late addition to the setting-- one that's been shoehorned in, though with very little difficulty, because of player interest. One of my players created a Tesla-like Wizard named Irving, while another requested that his Filliam be an inventor with a repeating crossbow in place of one of his hands. You should have heard the giggles of glee when they crossed paths with an atypical gnoll in victorian dress wearing a bizarre pair of glow-in-the-dark goggles.

It's more, however, than just a bit of player fan-service, as it were. I soon came to realize that the steampunk elements bridge the gap between the two perhaps disparate settings of the Old West and your standard D&D fantasy world, in that certain aspects of steampunk are grounded in the West but that it possesses, above all, the thrilling sense of discovery and wonder that is part and parcel of D&D at its best.

The Cavalry Just Over the Hill.

Having presided over exactly one complete adventure, I'm still very much a newbie as far as Dungeon Mastering is concerned. While it has some things in common with other sorts of game design-- be it board-based or electronic-- I can't really test it the way I can other designs. It's meant to be played exactly once, and if something's off-- if, say, an encounter is too easy, like my big epic boss fight that ended three rounds in without any players sustaining any damage-- then it kind of spoils the experience. There's no way for me to tell if something's not working until we break out the battle grid and start rolling some dice. (Or, story-wise, until their eyes glaze over or they respond to a serious NPC with some wisecracks.) (Or, puzzle-wise, until they miss the "clue" that I thought, wrongly, was obvious.) (Etc.)

I'm sure it's something that I'll develop a better knack for as I get more experience with it-- I'll be able to eyeball an encounter and say, yes, I better nerf this down a bit, or, alternatively, beef it up. But until I get to that point, I'm still faced with the idea that I might be sending my players into the jaws of certain doom-- certainly not something I want to happen to a group of mostly-newbies their second or third time out.

So I've built in a fail-safe to each of the encounters for my second adventure, one that I can call on should the going prove to be a little too tough-- a sort of cavalry that comes to the rescue. They're not an actual cavalry, despite the campaign's Old West flavour. What they are, precisely, I won't spoil here, in case one of my players is reading. But I will say that they're specific to each encounter, and that they're set up, in a non-obvious way, within the story of the adventure.

That's the important point, I think. If the players are getting their butts whupped, and all of the sudden, a giant dragon flies down and scoops up the baddies in its talons, it'd feel kind of cheap and obvious. But if there's a sudden influx of allies that make sense within the context of the storyline that enable the players to turn the tide, if just barely-- well, that's something exciting and epic and thus an altogether appropriate conclusion to an evening of dungeoneering, yes?

D&D Adv. # 1: The Curse of Firepalm Mine!

So, after roughly sixteen years of hemming-and-hawing, I finally ran my first game of Dungeons and Dragons today. It is, in fact, only the third or fourth time I've been present at a D&D game-- a grievous lapse in my geekery, to be sure. How did it go?

It went okay. At the start of the session, I tried too hard to set a certain atmosphere that ran counter to the rather goofy, rambunctious mood of the players; I also tried too hard to try and get them interacting with each other.

Things got better once they descended into the dungeon-- the Firepalm Mine in question. I made a few pretty questionable lapses in design that only became apparent roughly five seconds before they came into play: among them, the fact that, in giving them the quest to discover what was going on at Firepalm Mine, the mayor of the Firepalm settlement asked them to return with a bag of Firepalm Ore, and that said bag of ore was part of the loot on the body near the entrance to said mine. One of the players tried to convince the others to just go back to town at that point-- which was a nice bit of role-playing on his part that gave the others a foil to bounce off of. I could, I suppose, have just conveniently "forgotten" that that particular piece of loot was on the body, but I figured since it would come in handy in the big fight, it was better to let them find it. Of course, because it was something that was needed to complete the quest, they never took it out of the bag.

Speaking of fights, I had two of them. First, was a tense ambush encounter in which six gnolls (four level one, two level two) close in on the players from two sides, trying to pincher them in. This one was pretty tough, and took up most of the session in resolving. I figured it would be longer but far less challenging than the second encounter, which pit them against three "firedwarfs"-- that is, insane dwarfs who are constantly aflame and catch the players on fire with their melee attacks, made up of two level twos and one level three.

But the players never came close enough to the firedwarfs to be on the receiving end of one of those melee attacks, using a number of ranged attacks to chip away at what I thought were impressive health numbers. The other problem, though, is that I had given the players a custom-made Ritual Scroll just before this final encounter. And while, yes, I totally intended for them to use The Ritual Scroll of Blunderbuss Time, I thought it would give them a little edge in a tough battle. For some reason, it never occurred to me that giving the players two turns in battle for every one of the enemy's turns would make it ridiculously anti-climactic.

So: my enemies weren't tough enough, my loot was too good, and my ability to improvise-- which led to me pulling a last-minute and not-entirely-consistent-with-the-story-clues What-A-Twist finale pretty much out of my ass-- was kinda sucky.

But, the players seemed pretty satisfied with my dungeon-mastering, and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun (even if interest lagged from time-to-time). So, I'm very glad I did it, and I very much look forward to running my next (and hopefully improved) game a fortnight from now.