Started a new D&D campaign

So, on Thursday, I started a new D&D campaign, adapting the Curse of Strahd adventure I've reviewed previously. I've taken liberties with some of the elements (for instance, writing a new intro) to adapt to my personal style, as well as make things flow more smoothly. It's the first time in years that I've run a full adventure over a non-text based medium, for all that I talk about how excellent it is to play D&D over the internet. As a result, many of my skills are incredibly rusty, but hopefully I'll get back into the swing of things.

However, I'd like to take a moment to talk about some of the technical and logistics problems that I encountered while setting this up and running it, not to bemoan their existence, but rather to address possible fixes, as well as marvel at how we finally did get this together.

First, some background: I don't have a lot of friends that play D&D who have a lot of free time anymore. As I am a relatively old man by Youtube standards (and getting ever older), most of my old players have moved on, and I've had to pick new ones up. And thus I have long turned to online solutions to set games up. I've been running a long running series of campaigns over IRC with a fairly steady core of players, but unfortunately about half of them won't do video chat or even voice chat, despite the various advantages thereof. So for years I've been running games either wholly over IRC, or occasionally through forums. Neither is conducive for getting much done.

Forums, by their nature, take a long time to play over. Their main strength: allowing people of vastly different schedules to interact, is also their main weakness. I could estimate maybe  1 or 2 rounds of posts a day in the fastest of the forum games I've played in, and many times somewhat slower, which means that your average combat could take a week or so to finish. If you have any miscommunication, or if someone asks for clarification on something, then it can easily kill a day just passing information back and forth to sort things out. Furthermore, this slow pace means that you're likely to lose members, either through disinterest or life events that can pop up over the sometimes months that it takes to run even one minor adventure.

With IRC and similar chat programs, interaction is theoretically only limited by reading and typing speed, but in practice it is much slower. People tend to AFK or not pay attention to the screen as much as they would be in a face to face game. If they are a slower typist with a lot to say, it can take a few minutes to type in something that could've been stated in seconds verbally. Because everyone who thinks ahead can have access to logs, sometimes players will rely more on logs of the chat than notes, and thus whenever they need to refer to some sort of specific mention, they might be paging back through MBs of text files, rather than just a page or two of relevant information. Further, you still have to rely on some sort of virtual tabletop if you want to share maps. It makes for a sometimes awkwardly slow play session.

So when I decided to run a campaign over video chat, I was quite excited. Here was a chance to finally get some D&D over the internet without having to wait for a day between posts, or for someone to decide to come back to the keyboard after an unannounced absence. Unfortunately, scheduling reared its ugly head, and thus it took me over a year and some change to actually get a D&D group together.

I pulled a few players in from my IRC based D&D/Pathfinder group, those who were willing to at least try video chat. The other two I drew from another chat channel I mod in, and whom I knew had video capability from past experience. And thus we set a day and actually managed to get everyone to show up for a game. The first game is always a real accomplishment.

Unfortunately, one of our players was sick when the day finally came. An unexpected roadblock, to be sure, but he was a real trooper. He agreed to play regardless of being ill, but did ask about not using his webcam so as not to look terrible. I readily agreed, so long as the audio worked fine. It did, and thus we were down one player's smiling face from the very beginning.

Then two of our players ran into technical and logistics problems. They are signing on from the same residence, but their place is currently undergoing  remodeling, so they only had the one room to work from. Compounding this issue was the fact that one of them was on a laptop with no working webcam, so we were down another face. Fortunately the mic worked just fine. Unfortunately, the other player in the same room was using a built in mic rather than a headset mic or other directional mic. Thus, the problem of Echoing. It was horrible, Godawful really, but about halfway through the play session, we figured that we could just turn the mic off on one of them, and let the other broadcast both voices. With the lack of visual feedback, this meant that sometimes we kind of lost a voice, but it wasn't enough to present a real issue.

Just as we got started with play, the internet connection on the two sharing a mic and cam began to bomb. But by then we were ready to start, and I really, really didn't want to put the game off anymore. After a year plus of trying to get some sort of 5th edition game together, I was desperate. So we went ahead even with all the problems we were having. I was intending to get some overlays done, and drop the appropriate areas into it, but I didn't get them done in time, so everything you see in terms of overlay and graphics is done in post. And of course, the 'buzz' is back, because I ended up recording in OBS, which made for difficulties in cleaning up the audio.

Speaking of audio, the echo caused by the two players in the same room was only one issue. Roll20 tended to break up audio a lot when multiple people talk, and there doesn't appear to be anything that can be done to fix that, so in the future, we'll have to try to keep crosstalk to a minimum, or use another audio solution. The video seems just fine for now.

Also, because of my hectic week prior to this, I didn't get to refresh my memory with the actual Ravenloft content that I was likely to use, above and beyond the new intro I'd written. I hadn't initially expected to get to it, because I had grown so used to the pace that IRC and forum games run at that it didn't occur to me we'd actually get that far. I suppose that it's a testament both to how much faster the video/audio method is over plain text, as well as how focused our group was.

Of course, we have solutions incoming for almost all of the problems we encountered. First and foremost are things I can do on my end: better time management so that I can have time to prepare, taking my time with narrations to set a better mood, recording my own audio separately so I can clean the 'buzz'. The ill player should be up and running again next week in terms of a camera, and supposedly the player with no webcam now has one, and should be able to get it working.

For audio, I'm going to try to get one of those two players to get a headset, which should also cut down on their echo and crosstalk. Failing that, I'll have one of them mute their mic again, as I did in this particular session, which seemed to fix things. I'll also have my own audio recorded separately, and at the end of the day the only real problem (besides the variable mic qualities) will be the cut offs and dropouts during crosstalk. A few applications to use instead of Roll20.net's a/v service have been recommended to me, so I'll be trying those out in the future.

All in all, I'm rather pleased with how this session went. It'll be at least a week before I'll know the group's schedules to try to pick another day, but I'm optimistic that this will be a good, ongoing thing. And in the meantime, it's helping me identify problems and correct them, so perhaps I can run another campaign besides this one, if people are interested.

At the very least, it feels damn good to be in the DM's seat again. This feels so much closer to the tabletop setting than the IRC and forum games I've been relying on thus far.

Review - The Siege of Grimm Iron Peaks (DM's Guild)

Product: The Siege of Grimm Iron Peaks

Published: Feb 5, 2016

Author: Donald Thompson

Editor: Andrew O’Brien

DM’s Guild Link [Affiliate link]

First things first. I had thrown around the idea of reviewing some of the lower rated or rating-less content on the Dungeon Masters Guild as a feature on my Youtube channel. While I am not certain that this adventure merits that sort of treatment, I felt that it would be just fine for a blog entry, so here we are.

The Siege of Grimm Iron Peaks is a one-shot style adventure for 4-8 characters, designed to take 4-6 hours. It was released on Feb. 5th on the DM’s Guild site, and is currently a ‘pay what you want’ style release, meaning that it costs just as much as you care to spend on it. The pdf is just 31 pages, about 20 of which are pre-generated characters, one of which is a map, and one of which is a title page, leaving just 9 pages for adventure detail. As short as it is, it just doesn’t require any more than that. There are no detailed maps for combat encounters, as this adventure very much fits the old theater of the mind style.

The plot of the adventure is relatively straightforward, as befits a short one-shot adventure. The player characters are survivors of a war band, composed of various ‘evil’ races. While out on patrol around their mixed-tribe town, they are ambushed by adventurers. The adventure picks up just after the battle, where they are the presumed victors, though the rest of their war band was wiped out. Upon scavenging the bodies, they recover some miscellaneous gear and a map that details a settlement being built dangerously close to the PCs’ home. They are then left to push back the outsiders and basically ensure that settlement doesn’t take hold.

The content actually starts with some tips for DMing the adventure, most of which are pretty basic. Between that, and the pre-generated characters, this module seems ready for even a relatively novice DM to pick up and use for a night’s play. Indeed, since the characters are all of evil stock (of which only a few have been made proper playable races), these pre-made characters are pretty much required for proper enjoyment of the scenario. They are of varied classes, and there are two drow, two goblins, a bugbear, a gnoll, a hobgoblin, and a kobold. Which brings me to my first real problem with this adventure. What kind of town has that sort of varied group of evil races managing to live in close proximity without killing each other? That aside, I suppose there had to be some way to get multiple race types for people to choose from.

There’s a random encounter table, which has a series of basic encounters that all feel connected to the storyline. They can be run basically everywhere within the valley, and while an encounter chance is given, the rate you are expected to roll for them is left up to the DM, based on how much time they have to run that one shot adventure. It’s a good choice, in my opinion. Static encounters include an orcish village with rules on befriending them or coercing them into providing support, a gnomish tinker and trader, and the settlers’ buildings. The latter include a few options for how the player characters might deal with them, and a win condition for the adventure. The adventure itself is short and sweet, definitely suitable to run in a single night.

The hand drawn map included is not great, to put it bluntly, but it’s not supposed to be great. It is, after all, the in-character scribbles of some random adventuring band, updated by the random scribblings of some humanoids. The formatting is simple, with just enough variance to tell the separate sections from one another. It works for an adventure this short, but would need improvement for anything longer. Of more concern are the wording, punctuation, and grammatical errors throughout the adventure. Some errors are more grievous than others, and while the meaning can be understood from the context, it is distracting. It could all definitely use another editing pass.

That having been said, it is a pretty neat little concept, and I could definitely see busting this out when I’m short a person for my usual games, or just to try to break up the monotony of a campaign to avoid burnout. I could see a followup to this adventure being fun as well. While the quality is definitely far from professional level, it still might be worth a buck or two from the generous. Either way, I do recommend taking a look at this for a night of amusement and a break from playing the ‘good guys’ that is easy to just pick up and run.

You can grab it on the DM’s Guild here [Affiliate link].

Alignments: Portraying Good

Just in case folk missed it, I've got my video on some topics pertinent to playing Good alignments in D&D and similar games up on Youtube.com now:

I'll probably have another post re: the importance of details in role-playing coming soon, as well as a new review later in the week.

Gravity: A Cruel Mistress (How much falling damage is too much?)

So, my Tuesday night Pathfinder game ended up running two and a half hours over, due to various misadventures which will likely be fodder for a video this week, but it got me to thinking about a certain thing that always seems to crop up in adventures I run, whether I have written it myself or have selected a published module. And this thing, this event that always seems to plague my players, regardless of where I draw my material, is a long fall with a sudden stop at the end.

My players (whatever group I happen to be running at the time), their companions, and various NPCs they may have hired seem to just love throwing themselves (or being thrown) from high places. Now I will admit to a love of negative space. When my players are in a mountainous terrain, I love having steep slopes, cliffs, rope bridges over gorges. I love rickety catwalks over black pits, multi-tiered caverns, vertical mine shafts, narrow ledges, and bridges with no railings. I love balconies, terraced gardens, and soaring towers with rooftop overlooks. I love designs which feel three dimensional.

And three dimensional designs seem to love falling damage.

In my most recent game, no less than three characters (well, two PCs and a samurai's mount) fell victim to falling damage, and all during critical times. At first, the samurai's mount (a tiger, due to various reasons) attempted to charge an opponent who was on the other side of a stone bridge across a deep gorge (while the samurai was dismounted). Due to a few obstacles in the way, the only 'unbroken' path had a gap of approximately fifteen feet to jump and land safely. I generally allow all types of movement during a charge, even jumping, so I simply called for an acrobatics check. A check which said tiger failed miserably at. After exhausting all options to try to keep the tiger from falling, it fell into the gorge. The tiger then attempted to climb out of the gorge for the remainder of the combat, falling on at least three separate occasions, thus incurring more falling damage each time. The exchange of spells and the crashing of debris down into the gorge from the battle distracted it enough to keep it from taking 10 to climb.

During the same combat, a flying sorceress was knocked unconscious, could no longer maintain forward movement (being unconscious) nor succeed at a fly check to hover, and thus fell. It was not enough to kill  her, but nearly so. A few rounds later, a second samurai in the party attempted to leap down from a second floor balcony to engage the enemy, only to roll extremely low and fall flat on her face. Hilariously, she fell into the same square occupied by the unconscious sorceress from the prior example.

Now, setting aside all amusing tales of failed tactics and daring deeds gone awry, the real question should be: 'Just how much challenge did the terrain itself add?' Now, I can understand factoring in fortifications into the difficulty of an encounter, or even cliffs and gaps when they are part of the defenses of the encounter. But just how far should you consider incidental terrain elements in a map's design. What do you do if the characters engage in a moving battle, and as a result end up running into falls or mixed-level rooms that were not originally part of the encounter?

Negative space, gaps, cliffs, steep slopes, can be used to define and bound an encounter area as readily as stone walls, but they are not equal from a design standpoint. They are both supposed to limit character movement, but walls (usually) do so in a much more effective way. Walls block line of sight, they can be used as cover, and unless your party is exceptionally destructive, they generally do a better job of requiring characters to go another way.

Open space, on the other hand, presents a hazard that can be avoided. Characters with fly speeds or exceptional acrobatics can attempt to leap over a gap. Open space doesn't block line of sight, an archer can easily fire over a chasm to a target on the other side. A character who chooses to ignore the danger and fails to bypass the hazard, or one who is pushed off of a cliff or otherwise forced into the falling hazard, doesn't have their movement merely blocked as a wall might. Rather, they are saddled with some damage if they fall far enough, potentially quite lethal damage. Furthermore, if they survive, it's entirely possible that they may now be out of the encounter for a while, until they can find some way to extract themselves from the bottom of whatever pit they have fallen into.

Even for a relatively high level character, a fall into a 20' pit can effectively remove them from combat entirely. An encounter where the main warrior, for instance, gets bull rushed off the side of a keep's walls, could end up going very bad very quickly. While the warrior's trying to climb back up the walls or running around back to the stairs, their opponent has free rein to wreak havoc upon the rest of the party.

After considering these factors, on the balance I would tend to give more weight, in terms of the challenge of a particular area, to designs incorporating falling hazards as bounding spaces. They remain a surprisingly dangerous addition to the terrain until the entire party can fly or climb easily. This applies not only to Pathfinder, but to most Dungeons and Dragons derivative systems. A wall is usually just a wall, but even a relatively shallow pit can be a party killer.

Does this mean that I'm going to be more careful about putting high places, narrow ledges, and treacherous precipices in my future adventures? Am I going to ditch them in favor of simple walls or barricades?

Hell no. That's what they make acrobatics checks and feather fall for.

Curse of Strahd Review & Synopsis

Hello, this is the RPG Crawler, and welcome to a tabletop review of Curse of Strahd: the new horror adventure released by Wizards of the Coast based on the old AD&D I6: Ravenloft module and the AD&D 2nd edition Ravenloft material. If you intend to be a player in this module, I would urge you to stop reading this review, because while I have tried to remain vague on a lot of the specific details, you still might very well find quite a bit of it to spoil the experience for you.

I’m assuming that the rest of you are curious as to how this stacks up with the classic adventure it’s based off of, and whether it’s worth buying. Well, I can’t answer the last question for you, only for me, but let’s go over the content and I’ll tell you what I thought, and hopefully you’ll come out more informed.

Any time you want to remake a classic, you’re going to get a lot of people who will doubt your efforts or hate it just on principle. Having played the original, and the 2nd and 3.5 edition remakes, I have to say that this version really tries to capture and expand upon the feel of the original, and for the most part, it manages to do so. It incorporates just enough of the lore of the old Ravenloft setting to make oldschool players of that campaign world feel at home, yet doesn’t go so far as declaring an entire cluster of linked domains, and honestly? I feel that it’s better off for not doing so. Aside from the content itself, the adventure does make mention of some techniques to heighten and defuse the tension in your game, some of which are similar to what I covered in my Horror in Roleplaying video, as well as some I did not mention, and their inclusion is much appreciated.

Chapter 1 sets up the classic Strahd story. If you're familiar with I6, House of Strahd, or (to a lesser extent) Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, then you'll be familiar with the story in question. There are a few surprises here, which I'll leave off so as not to provide spoilers, but much like prior versions of the adventure, there are tips on how to roleplay Strahd and a card reading mechanic to determine the location of key story elements (which has been expanded to encompass the larger realm). There are more adventure hooks to get the characters involved, including the original Vistani messenger from the original I6, as well as threads leading from the Forgotten Realms setting (I really liked this one, but it may not be suitable for 1st level characters), Adventurer's League players, and a generic 'fogs sweep you into Ravenloft' style no-choice lead in.

Chapter 2 gives an overview of the people and the land, touching on the expanded areas of the domain. Now, while the town of Vallaki and the village of Krezk were both mentioned in prior materials, this book goes all out in fleshing them out (albeit later in the book). This chapter also covers such favorites as the mists of Barovia, how sunlight works, the alterations to magic -- not as restrictive as 2nd edition AD&D version but fairly flavorful. It touches on the people of Barovia and the unique qualities inherent to them, and how they treat nonhumans. The lore of the land and the Vistani are detailed here, as well as random encounters that occur while exploring the domain. Further, detailed descriptions of static encounters and common mechanics of features in the domain are listed here.

The map of Barovia is in this chapter, and after some examination appears to be a fleshed out and detailed subset of the northern part of the domain as previously described in Ravenloft supplements. The eastern part of the domain is that which was detailed in I6, and closely resembles the original maps, while slightly more liberties were taken with the maps from the Ravenloft boxed set. It does, however, fit the setting. Between the maps and the static overworld encounters detailed here, a DM should be relatively confident in allowing his players to explore the domain at their leisure.

Chapter 3 covers the Village of Barovia in depth. It does a good job of presenting the classic feel of the village from I6, sticking closer to it than to say, the zombie nightmare from Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. It includes all of the old quests from Barovia village, in addition to a few new ones to help connect the new adventures and areas so that PCs can make their way up from level 1. One of the newly added areas, Death House, is covered in Appendix B as a separate adventure in itself.

Chapter 4 covers Castle Ravenloft, which might seem like the last place characters will visit in this adventure, but might very well be returned to again and again over the course of the campaign. It includes random encounters, including new NPCs, as well as most of the old NPCs and locations from I6. In fact, if you or your players are familiar with the iconic floor plan of Castle Ravenloft, it is largely unchanged from previous releases. The maps have been cleaned up and detailed out a bit more, but appear nearly identical to prior versions of the adventure. A few npcs have been fleshed out or added, as stated above, to support the new range of levels. Of particular note is the artwork in this chapter, which can be very useful in setting the mood in a game session.

I will breeze over the rest of these chapters, since they contain a lot of new material, and would enter serious spoiler territory if I were to include too many details.

Chapter 5 fleshes out the town of Vallaki, which had been mentioned in previous sources, but I’m not entirely sure I’ve seen it filled out as much as it is here. It has random encounters, general information, NPCs and places fleshed out like Barovia village, except this is content that did not appear in I6 or House of Strahd. Being a larger town, there’s more relevant NPCs to interact with, and many form sort of mini adventures unto themselves, just waiting for the PCs to stumble across them. Overall, the town is very well written, and includes a Vistani camp and a few special events that can occur during the course of the PCs stay, ones which will undoubtedly leave their marks on the party’s memory.

Chapter 6 involves an adventure area, the windmill Old Bonegrinder. Its inhabitants can either be somewhat unwholesome allies or a challenge for PCs to overcome. Chapter 7, meanwhile, details the ruins of Argynvostholt, the former  headquarters of a knightly order now fallen into ruin and corruption. While some quests might tend to indicate this could be treated as merely some dungeon crawl, it is a little more complex than that, resulting in a tragic place the players may want to redeem. Chapter 8 includes the village of Krezk and the Abbey of Saint Markovia, a place that is less fleshed out as a settlement and more as an adventure area, with a number of surprising twists that I honestly don’t want to reveal.

Chapter 9 and 10 are more adventure areas, a pass and a ruined settlement where quests or the characters’ own curiosity might take them. Chapter 11 is the former home of Rudolph van Richten, now rendered into another encounter area. 12 is a winery with troubles the characters may solve,  13 is both an expansive dungeon area, as well as ground zero for the story of Strahd’s transformation. It introduces a lot of lore that went long unmentioned. Finally, Chapter 14 and 15 cover more lairs for the allies of Strahd out in the wilds, adding dark druids and werewolves to the mix of things the PCs might have to face on their way to defeating the lord of the domain.

Finally, an epilogue gives details on what happens if various ending conditions are met: If Strahd wins, if he dies, and if he dies while certain other things are active. It also includes  information on what happens thereafter, should other parties wish to brave the land of mists or the main party just want to continue onward. Overall, the adventure structure is very nonlinear, with several entry points and leads that might take characters crisscrossing across the haunted countryside. There is certainly an optimal way to progress through these adventure areas, but even then a great many of them are optional.

The book wraps up with a new character background, the Haunted One, as well as some gothic trinkets starting characters can take. An introductory adventure: ‘Death House’ allows characters to rise from first level to third, for a better chance at surviving the rigors of the land, while a further appendix updates many classic items from I6 to fifth edition format. There’s a section with monster stats for monsters and NPCs found in the adventure, including many classic Ravenloft creatures such as the Strahd Zombie, and finally graphics for the Tarokka deck, handouts for the players to receive during play, and fold out maps.

As far as the book itself, I have little to compare it to, since this is the first non-core 5th edition rulebook I’ve purchased. Overall, the quality of the book itself is on par with the core rulebooks, with similar bindings and trade dressing. The artwork is beautiful, evocative of the setting itself. The sheer amount of content over the original adventures it is based off of, combined with the more than adequate build quality definitely makes this a valued addition to my collection. Overall, I am extremely happy with my purchase. While I was uncertain whether the additional material was worth the price, if you manage to get it from Amazon or another retailer that shaves that 49.95 sticker price down a bit (I paid just over 31$ as a pre order, not sure if you can still get it for that anywhere), I’d say that it is well worth it. While there is a notable quality difference between some of the new material and the old material, it’s not bad by any means, and quite a bit of it is well integrated, expanding the backstory of Strahd and his ties to the land in a way that allows the players to experience, rather than simply be told about it.

I would have to say that, in my humble opinion, Curse of Strahd is the definitive version of the Ravenloft adventure, at least once you get into the meat of the accessory, and it is definitely something I am proud to have on my gaming shelf. I look forward to running this for various groups for years to come.

This has been my first review of a tabletop product, and I hope that it’s been informative. If you have any feedback on the review format itself, do let me know. If you’d prefer to see this in video format, I have a version of it on my Youtube channel, which I encourage you to check out. Until next time, take care!

Curse of Strahd

Wizards of the Coast

Released: March 15, 2016

Price: $49.95

Product Page: http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/rpg-products/curse-strahd

Amazon Link [Affiliate Link]: http://amzn.to/2d6BvNa