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There are signs you have a good player at your table. I came across one a few weeks ago. A player was ill and his character was turned to stone in his absence. Petrification aside, that’s nothing remarkable. What is remarkable is that my player thought this was a great time for role playing. The first thing he did was make an endurance check to avoid being chipped as the party hauled his stony ass back to a library.

Since then I’ve been talking with Stone Boy about what should happen to his character. See, the party is currently trapped within an extradimensional ship with no way of escaping except through bloody combat. Since the only defender is currently nothing more than a place for pigeons to shit, they have a vested interest in fixing this. The major problem is that no one knows the Cure Affliction ritual and they aren’t exactly in a place where they can look it up. My players opted to try and fix it on their own. I’ve given them a skill challenge wherein each character has to make a single check. The difficulty was hard, I gave the players roughly a 70% chance of failure. If everyone succeeded, the party tank would be restored to life with no ill effects. That wasn’t enough, though. I needed a way to make failure interesting.

One of the core elements of the Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files games is that the dice should only come out when the outcome 1) matters and 2) all of the outcomes are interesting. Basically, it’s saying that a good story has interesting failures that help advance the story. I had my work cut out for me. How can I get the party adventuring again without having them succeed?

The answer came in the form of graded success. For every failure during the skill challenge, the party’s defender had something taken away from him. The first to go was his beloved magical axe (which had recently been revealed as a sentient artifact). If someone in the party failed, the sentient artifact would sacrifice itself to make the ritual work. After that things got even more interesting.

See, my campaign has never featured a warforged I love the idea of them, sentient magic robots with souls! What’s not to love? I spoke with Stone Boy and got approval to turn his character into a warforged if multiple people failed their skill checks. The upside is I let him keep certain dragonborn qualities but took those away as further grades of failure.

In the end, Grint lost his axe and he was turned into a warforged, could use either Dragon Breath or Warforged Resolve once per encounter and still counted as a dragonborn for the purposes of meeting prerequisites. The great thing is that his player LOVED it. Grint has had a fundamental personality shift since the transformation that has been a blast to see in play.

I need to turn people into stone more often…

Every player has a favorite skill or attack or quirk for his character. I know some players who invariably play rogues. Others have characters that always charge headlong into battle. My favorite skill is often overlooked by people in 4th Edition D&D and I can’t really figure out why.

I love streetwise. It’s versatile, flavorful and not used by many people. When someone is creative, streetwise is a great skill. It’s not just for sniffing out rumors and spreading tales, it’s about knowing people and being known by people. Streetwise can let you drop names, move an angry mob or get you out of a lot of trouble by flashing a gang sign. If George Costanza had a better streetwise, he may have been able to get of of trouble with the Van Buren Boys. If given the opportunity, my D&D characters almost always have streetwise, though I rarely get an opportunity to use it.

This past Friday my normal group was down a few players so we took a break from the main campaign. One of the players suggested we try out the introductory adventure for the upcoming 4E Dark Sun campaign setting. He took the role of the DM and invited his dad over for a night of gaming. It was one of the more interesting games I’ve been in for a while. The adventure comes prepared with six characters who are initially divided into two groups of three. There were only three players, so we each grabbed one character from each team and jumped into the game. Much to my surprise, not only did one of my characters have streetwise trained, but she had an incredible charisma score to back it up. It was on.

The initial skill challenge had the two parties vying for favor with the man who runs the gladiatorial games. He had recently acquired a talisman of power; one group saw it as a reason to get out of a city that was slowly and assuredly falling into chaos while the other group wanted to use it to regain knowledge of the green time, before Athas was transformed into a wasteland. When it came time my for warlock to contribute to the challenge, I declared my intent to use streetwise to convince the Master of the Games that the talisman was essentially worthless. She was basically name-dropping well known merchants and using her social connections to make it seem like she knew the true value of the trinket. The DM thought this was a great idea and let me do so.

Later we were chasing someone through a crowded stadium. The big, burly fighter used intimidate to clear a path. My warlock took a different tack. She used her knowledge of the people in the city, their habits, fears and quirks, to her advantage. When we needed a path out of the stadium cleared, she yelled out, “The Templars are coming!” Fearing for their lives, the general populace fled or hid.

Two very different uses of the same skill. Both were effective, both were a lot of fun to describe. This is why streetwise is my favorite skill.

Ed. Note: my other character had a fun moment where he attempted to use endurance to just bull his way through the crowd. I say attempted because it doesn’t matter how cool your idea is, if you roll a 1 on the d20 you can’t expect success.

Table top role playing games have always had a special sort of immunity to unwanted changes. Don’t like the latest rule book? Ignore it. The prevailing thoughts of the community was that there are no dead games – only games that don’t get meddled with further. Once something is in print, the publisher can’t take it back. This is a double edged sword. As a benefit, it means that a publisher can never take back your favorite class or feat or spell or whatever. You don’t get that with WoW or EQ. On the downside, if the game has something that is horrendously game shattering, there is no way for the publisher to fix it for you. It’s up to the players to find their own coping methods.

Except this isn’t true anymore. Wizards of the Coast has given players a truly remarkable tool with the Character Builder. In a game with literally thousands of choices before the player, the Character Builder has made character creation easy and even fun. Almost everyone I know who plays 4E uses the Character Builder because it’s the quickest, easiest way of ensuring you have a complete and legal character. I use it myself whenever I want to make a character. Most never get played, I rarely get to roll the bones on that side of the screen, but I enjoy plotting out characters and playing with thematic builds. It’s handy to have all the character options from all the books, magazines and various sources at my fingertips when I want them.

Enter the errata. Now that WotC has their Character Builder, they need to keep it up to date, right? Once a month, they release a new update with all of the rules and information that have come out in the past thirty days. This also means that they build the errata right into the program. Again, double edged sword. Players get what should be the most balanced and fun rules with which to play. However, they are also forced to use errata or rule changes they may not agree to.

Of course, this is all only affects players that choose to use the character builder or play in RPGA-sanctioned events. It’s still possible to create a character without it, the prospect just becomes more tedious and… old fashioned? Players, GMs and groups still hold the ultimate say in which rules and which version of rules they wish to play. WotC can’t take away our favorite rules, except when we let them. It’s just the same as it’s always been. Only easier.

Is this the future of table top games?

Trans-Siberian Orchestra is one of my favorite bands and my favorite album is Beethoven’s last night. Needless to say, it was a great treat for me to see that album in concert after ten years. The band explained before the show began that the show was experimental and something they are calling Rock Theater. While they admitted to not really knowing what that meant, they certainly put forward a lot of effort into making a production that fit the term.

The show was wonderful. Seeing the singers in character really made the narrative much more coherent. Putting faces to characters and characters to voices was a great leap beyond the album. It was a bit like listening to Tommy and then watching the film. Having the narration between the songs also fleshed out the story wonderfully. There is a big difference between having the liner notes and hearing the narrator. Specifically, the narrative of the songs “Vienna” and “I’ll Keep Your Secrets” made much more sense during the show than on the album. For Vienna it was having a younger Beethoven perform the song that really did it. “I’ll Keep Your Secrets” was a song I had always assumed was sung by Fate. Going through the liner notes again revealed that I just made that mistake a long time ago but it was nice to have that cleared up.

Many of the emotions in the concert were very different from the album. This is neither good nor bad. Beethoven, in particular, had a much different emotional range. The album portrays him as a bitter man filled with rage at the impossible choice he has been given. In concert, he is more contemplative and unsure. Seeing a new interpretation really made me think about the character in a different light. That performance, more than any other, carries the concert and required immense talent and effort.

Jeff Scott Soto’s Mephistopheles was likewise thrilling. He was able to carry smooth, seductive tones and turn them on a dime to be menacing, sinister or just plain brutal. I found him to be a much more convincing Mephistopheles than the album’s portrayal, which does not have the subtlety one would expect from the Prince of Lies. The album’s rendition always has a hint of sinister to it, which is brilliant in its own right and I think necessary for that medium. When given a visual presentation and the accompanying narration, however, the menace can come from the stage presence.

While the show was fantastic, I don’t think it is as good as it could be. The theater elements should be given more prominence. As great as it is to see the different singers performing individual characters, it would be even better if they didn’t each exist in a vacuum. Put them on stage together, let them interact. All of Mephistopheles’ songs are directed at Beethoven; let him berate, seduce and bully the composer. Have Twist mock him to his face. “A Final Dream” would be such a sweet and touching scene if you had both Beethoven and Fate upon the stage. Put Beethoven on the wings of the stage as he watches Therese during “After the Fall.”

My biggest hope is that a DVD is produced of the show so I can buy it and watch it at home (or, more likely, rip the video and put it on my iPhone to listen to at work).

I’ve been replaying Mass Effect. Again.

My thought this time was to give the power gaming and insanity difficulty a shot. There is a GameFAQ that describes the process by which you can obtain a maxed out charm/intimidate skill without ever spending points on the skill. Sounds great, right? By maxing out your combat skills and replaying the same character, you get maximum charm!

Here’s the problem: I didn’t like the story. The choices I made weren’t the choices I wanted to make. My previous playthroughs have all focused on being the most persuasive person i can manage to be and using that to full advantage. When not spending points on charm/intimidate, I am forced in my first play through with this character to make choices that aren’t how I want to resolve situations. Jhong gets shot on Feros. Jahleed goes to jail. It’s just not satisfying. After eleven hours (level 42), I dropped out of that game and started over.

This time I’m going to play the way I like to play, not get experimental. Shepard is going to be my Shepard, power gaming be damned.