New Campaign: Deadlands

My online RPG group has unfortunately been put on indefinite hiatus due to health problems I’ve been having since the end of last year. (Right before I was going to start my Kingmaker campaign, too.) This led to a dearth of rpg content in my life. I tried to balance it out with a playthrough of the Dragon Age series, but that could only do so much.

Luckily, however, the problems that keep me from running my online game don’t really extend to playing in an in person game. With Josh moving back into in person range, it was inevitable that we’d try to play with dice and minis on a table again.

The result is this:

A Deadlands campaign that Josh is running. This will also be the first recorded game I’m a player in that’s being made public.

I’m slicing each session into smaller bites to see if shorter videos might get some more traction on YouTube, but in the end I’m just glad to be playing again.

Dragon Age Retrospect: The 360 Era

A new Dragon Age game is supposed to be coming out this year. I say “supposed” because delays are to be expected with things like this. Delays or no, a new Dragon Age is coming, so that means I need to replay the series to establish my canon playthrough for Dreadwolf. It’s like the law – new Dragon Age game, new canon playthrough or you’re going to jail, buster.

This time however, I found myself in a peculiar situation. Due to personal circumstances, I did not have access to my gaming PC for this run, so I found myself playing on my Xbox. Something I have not done since the Awakening expansion first released. So, this won’t just be my thoughts on Dragon Age: Origins and 2 after not playing them to completion since preparing for Inquisition’s release, but also my first time playing the games on console since before DA2 even released.

It was a mixed experience for sure. The games still hold up narratively, this was the tail end of golden age Bioware after all. Gameplay was a little more questionable.

Origins is meant to be played on PC, full stop. The console ports do the best job they can, but the importance of positioning in the combat system presupposes use of the tactical camera, and I was playing a dual wielding rogue so that importance was amplified (at least until I got to a high enough level that my abilities could negate that concern).

Playing on normal, none of that was more than a mild annoyance, and I always take the time to customize my party members’ AI so I can focus on my character as much as possible. I almost think I would prefer Dragon Age as a more action focused game like God of War mixed with Mass Effect, but I just started Inquisition which does play more like that and I’m already chafing against its mechanics.

All this is to say that the best part of Origins gameplay is really missing from the Xbox version and while playing I found myself wishing I was on PC.

I also found myself hoping for a remaster I know will never come, because Origins is not a pretty game. I am not a graphics snob, but Origins–particularly on console–is a muddy, blurry visual experience. It’s like reading a comic with amazing writing, but plain-but-sufficient art… and the pages keep giving you papercuts.

Overall, I still enjoyed my experience, but it felt like the game itself was getting impatient and prodding me to leave, as once I reached the expansion and post game dlcs, difficulty plummeted. “Hurry along now,” Origins said, “it’s time to visit Kirkwall.”

Speaking of Kirkwall, most of the pains of playing Origins on console after years of playing on PC were reflected in DA2 like a proper mirror image. I had never played more than a few minutes of DA2 on console before this. I sort of regret it now. The game was clearly geared more toward console play with a greater focus on controller movement and a shift away from tight positioning tactics.

I literally won the 1v1 against the Arishock by running in a figure eight and hitting him with miasmic flasks/twin stikes until he died. That would have been annoying with keyboard and mouse. With a controller I only had to deal with the little voice in my head calling me a wimp for running around in circles.

Screw you, inner voice. I won, the Arishock died.

Playing the game on console, I was left only with the handicapped design choices from the rushed dev cycle. Limited and heavily reused maps, limited enemy types and fights that up the difficulty by just throwing more people at you, no armor customization for your companions, etc.

Most of these only mildly annoyed me. I wish I could change my party members’ armor or that there were more than two cave maps, but what I enjoy about the game is the atmosphere.

I think DA2 is the most Dragon Age of the series, if that is a sentence that can even make sense. Origins is heavily inspired by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie adaptations, with epic music and massive armies led by a small fellowship fighting the good fight against a pure, unsympathetic evil. Inquisition is heavily inspired by Game of Thrones with its grounded art style and focus on political backstabbing and an encroaching apocalypse. DA2 is the only entry in the trilogy that stands purely as Dragon Age, having given the series its distinctive art style after Origins was somewhat generic. At the very least, if DA2 is heavily inspired by anything, it is something I’ve never seen, and so, to me, this is Dragon Age.

In DA2, you are just a person trying to survive and prosper in the world of Thedas. You have a group of friends you pal around with or annoy. Everything is very personal, because you make Kirkwall your home, then you defend Kirkwall from an outside force, then you watch Kirkwall tear itself apart from the inside and you can do nothing but try to land on your feet after the slide into chaos. Hawke may be the least customizable of the three (to four) protagonists of Dragon Age, but their story is the most relatable.

I really do think that if DA2 had been given more time in development, it would be considered the greatest of the series. It had so much potential—few modern mainstream RPGs tell such a personal story these days. This is something I think it shares with Baldur’s Gate 3, because while Baldur’s Gate 3 does drag the player into a much larger conflict, it keeps it personal because you (and most of your companions) will die if you don’t fix this problem. DA2 is about watching your home fall apart despite your best efforts and BG3 is about fighting against the fantastical equivalent of terminal cancer. They are presented through a fantasy lens, but they show an emotional journey that most of us can relate to.

As I make my way through Inquisition now, I find myself missing elements of both these games (particularly the AI tactics system). Dragon Age is a series that is constantly changing, for better or worse. I’m holding my breath for what Dreadwolf will bring, as it might be Bioware’s last shot. In any event, I’m glad I decided to replay the series before Dreadwolf, even if it is legally required, because these are good-if-flawed games with a rich world that I would hate to see disappear. Given the current state of the video games industry, however, who knows what will happen.

GM Retrospective: Descent into Avernus Session 31

Every game master has to make a decision about how much information they’re going to give the players. Are you going to go old school and literally only tell the players what they’re characters can determine with their five senses? Are you going to treat it like a video game and tell the players exactly what their options are and what they’ll need to do to get the result they want? Neither end of the spectrum is wrong as long as GM and players all agree on the level of information and everyone is having fun, but it is still a decision that every GM has to make. It’s a decision that has been one of my biggest conundrums as a GM.

I’m a very analytical person. Analyzing a situation and discussing it is a large part of how I socialize. This doesn’t stop when I’m the game master; I end up analyzing the player’s situation and explaining their options to them. That would be fine if that was the kind of game I wanted to run. But it isn’t.

See, I want to run a game where I give the players enough information to understand the scenario they’re in – with no misconceptions – and allow them to make their own decisions. I would not enjoy my GM spelling out my options to me, so I don’t want to do it to my players.

Where this becomes a problem is knowing how much detail is enough. How do you make sure the players understand the situation they’re in and make informed decisions without feeling like you’re hand-holding them?

So, what does any of this have to do with Session 31 of Descent into Avernus? This is a session where I completely crossed the line into hand-holding and it frustrated the hell out of me.

On this solemn game day, the players were down a man. Josh, Fytch’s player, was sick and had to cancel. We’d played without a member of the group before, the party was used to it. That party member would just stay back with the war machine or boat base they’ve been using. Whatever was most convenient at the time. We use sidekicks, so the party was still four characters deep. It really should have been no problem.

Damn, did Josh pick a bad day to be deathly sick.

In this session, the party was set to go after Red Ruth. A night hag from the original adventure who was meant to just shoo the party off to their next destination, I had transformed Ruth into a boss holding a magic item the party needed for their quest.

I gave Ruth lair and legendary actions and a few minions. I wanted it to be a memorable encounter. Oh, it was – just not for good reasons.

Red Ruth lairs in an area of Avernus known as the Bone Brambles. It’s a corrupted dryad grove that Ruth dragged to hell. The spirits of the dryads roam the grove as banshees. This is all from the adventure standard.

Turns out, banshees are designed to make you regret all your life choices. They have a once a day ability, Wail, which drops a target to 0 hit points immediately if they fail. This is a single fire ability, and the DC isn’t very tough – DC 13, the bare minimum according to the Creatures by Challenge Rating table. Almost every member of my party has a bonus to constitution, the save in question, and the creatures are in the default adventure.

I say all this to establish that I had every reason to assume the party would be fine. Maybe one or two fail the save, which would ratchet up the tension as they scrambled to save their friends, but it was very unlikely to be a TPK. Sure it was possible, but it’s always a possibility with the randomness of the dice. Let’s just say, if I didn’t give my players free natural 20s as birthday and Christmas gifts, Fytch would need to be recruiting new allies when Josh got back.

Still, the party experienced the dryad banshees, almost wiped, then exited the Bone Brambles to rest before heading on to Ruth’s lair. While they were doing that, despite warnings and prodding from me, they neglected to take the treasure trove of health potions they had in their bag of holding and distribute them among the party. This was the beginning of a very bad time.

When the big battle began, Ruth had two banshees with her and a weeping treant. A challenging fight, as a boss fight should be, but not unmanageable. When the fight began, I offered the party no advice. This was their battle to win.

Knowing what banshees could do, they stayed clumped together and let them both fire off their ultimate ability on the entire party all at once. I’m not here to bash my players. They were stressed after almost TPKing once already and probably just didn’t take into consideration that banshee’s might have a range limit on their wail. If I was being smart at the time, I would have just reminded them that they may not want to be clumped together with banshees on the field. That one action might have prevented what was to come. But I didn’t want to hand-hold them.

So, what ended up happening was that the party found themselves in a cycle of characters dropping, getting brought back up, just for the character that brought them up to get dropped next.

Adamant that I would not wipe the party while a player was missing, I began coaching the party. Gently at first, “You should use a potion here.” Then, progressively more annoyed and frustrated, “If you don’t use a potion now, you will die and the game is over.” I’m not sure when I crossed the line into being a bad GM, but I know I did at some point during that game.

The real kicker is I’m still not sure what was the greater wrong, aggressively hand-holding the party or just not giving them better information to begin with. Maybe it was in the encounter design, or maybe it was because the party’s overpowered in Hell paladin was missing that game, and they didn’t have time to adapt their strategies to his absence. I’m sure someone from outside the situation could look at it and break it down for me, but not me.

On the bright side, the players didn’t hold my frustration and crabby attitude against me. They understood where they had gone wrong and were too busy wallowing in their own mistakes to call me on mine. And, at the end of the day, the party survived and the game continued on giving me opportunities to do better.

GM Retrospective: Rogue Element

Two years ago I had an idea for a Halloween one shot. I wanted to do a mansion murder mystery, but with a twist. The players would be trapped in a time loop. Every time they stopped the murderer, the scenario would restart. That’s not the real twist. I’m pretty sure that’s been done before. No, the real twist was that the time loop came about because the players were NPCs in a rogue-lite video game, and the murderer was the human player.

At the time I was finally able to run the game, my group was experimenting with Call of Cthulu. While we only had the quick start rules to work with, we had previously run The Haunting and enjoyed it. CoC felt like a good fit for the mystery scenario with a single boss combatant.

The session actually ended up working well as a true test of how well CoC and my GMing style meshed. CoC gave the game a true tension – partially from the lethality of the game, but also because both my players built non-combatants – and made the fact that there was only one bad guy work without much issue.

Scalability was simple. The rogue-lite concept meant the villain grew in power with every loop. With how CoC works, setting this up was as simple as making a few copies of the killer’s statblock and changing the skill percentages.

Where CoC and me butted heads is that I’ve been running D&D and Savage Worlds the majority of my game mastering career. Those are both tactical rpgs. CoC is decidedly not a tactical rpg. That isn’t necessarily a negative for CoC, but I found myself trying to run the game as a tactical rpg.

Possibly the greatest thing playing CoC has done for me is make me realize that minis (or tokens in this instance) on the grid is part of what I enjoy about playing rpgs, and I prefer games that support that play style.

Still, the game was fun. My players weren’t optimized for combat, but they still managed to get right to the end of the scenario. They didn’t win, but that’s perfectly fine for a horror one shot.

I Don’t Care About OneD&D

Back when I heard the first rumors that Wizards was working on a new set of core books for 2024, I got very excited. I’ve been running 5e for years now. Long enough for the system’s problems to start outweighing its strengths. Fifth edition is still immensely popular, and the company hasn’t run the system into the ground with splat books. There is still space for 5e to expand and grow. This, and the fact that Wizards wasn’t acting like they were gearing up for a new edition gave me hope.

I like 5e. It addressed most of the problems I had with 3e and other games I’ve played while maintaining the structure I’ve come to expect from my RPGs as someone who came into the hobby though D&D 3.5. It’s not a perfect system. A quick search online will provide a list of issues the system has, but it solved my problems with RPG systems.

Because of this, all I wanted from the new rulebooks in 2024 was a fix what’s broken revision of 5e. Solve the system’s biggest problems while adding in all the new rules that have been accumulated through later releases, like vehicles. So long as the 2024 rulebooks followed this general guideline, I would be happy. I’m willing to bet there are plenty of players like me. The edition wars never die.
Then the first playtest packet came out and it became abundantly clear that this was a new edition. A new edition that maintains the math and general structure of 5e, but still a new edition. It’s not just trying to fix what was broken or missing from 5e, it wants to put a new spin on it.

Unnecessary changes is the name of the game with OneD&D. We need look no further than the proposed changes to roll mechanics. Guaranteed success when rolling a 20 on a d20 for ability checks and saving throws is a common house rule in 5e. OneD&D decided to make that a built in mechanic in its first test packet. Add in things like inspiration being granted on rolling a 20 or a 1, depending on the packet you’re working with, and you have a whole slew of new mechanics hanging on a d20 roll when most of the time I just need to know if the roll is a success or failure.

I want to be clear. I’m not making a qualitative statement about these new rules. Plenty of people liked these rules, and I am neutral to them in isolation. They are only a negative for me in so much as they show a deviation from what I wanted out of the new core rulebooks – fix what’s broken. These rules don’t fix what’s broken, they change something just to change it.

The things that are broken in 5e are the challenge rating system, the action economy, reliance on DM fiat, and magic items. Obviously my opinion, but hey, this is my essay, and I’m talking about why I don’t care about OneD&D.

They’re broken to different degrees, requiring different levels of change, but this revision was the perfect time to just focus on fixing problems like this. At least as of me writing this, though, I haven’t seen any efforts to fix most of these problems excepting maybe a little of the DM fiat problem.

The CR system is by far the most universally agreed on problem based on my truly scientific ability to remember things I’ve read on Internet forums. It just doesn’t work that well. Now, I’m not the kind of DM who demands that every encounter be perfectly balanced, but I need a way to know how threatening a monster I’ve never run before is. 5e’s CR system doesn’t do this well, leading to situations where you have to run interference for your group to ensure they don’t die to a monster that should be much higher CR than listed because the system didn’t take into account it had a death spiral ability, or that it has an ability that can literally one shot lower HP players.

The only proposed fix I’ve seen for this problem so far is taking away monster crits. Maybe this is just because the DMG side of the playtest won’t be for a while, but it’s a bad sign. Player facing rules are being tested and balanced against old 5e enemies. This implies the CR system will remain unchanged, because fixing it would require a complete reworking of how challenge is calculated. I hope I’m wrong, but it doesn’t look good at the moment.

Action economy plays into the CR problem. Because of bounded accuracy, solo boss monsters are likely to be destroyed by a party ganging up on them, leaving a DM to either tack on more HP or throw in fodder – both of which just drag out the fight rather than keep it exciting. The best solution 5e has to this problem is lair and legendary actions. I think these are a good solution, but 5e doesn’t provide a DM with the tools to easily add these things to more monsters. The current playtest doesn’t show any sign that this problem will be addressed, being as player focused as it is.

The reliance on DM fiat is one of the areas OneD&D does seem to be trying to improve, but I think it’s for different reasons than I would want. The playtests are borrowing a page from Paizo’s Pathfinder 2e and formalizing actions players can take. This does mean the DM has more hard-coded rules for how things work, but I think it’s being done to help players understand what they can do – to try and avoid player paralysis. DM’s are benefiting, but peripherally; and may even suffer when they want to break away from the listed actions. A player who relies on the listed actions might fight with a DM who doesn’t want to run things RAW.

Magic items is a personal preference of mine. It plays into the problem of relying on DM fiat, but I really just want proper values for magic items and for their magical auras to be listed like in 3e. DMs can just ignore this information if they want magic items to be rare and special. Trying to enforce this playstyle on all players by just not including the details needed for an older style of play is reminiscent of Gary Gygax trying to keep people from playing dwarves or elves by limiting what classes they could play or what level they could achieve.

I see no sign that Wizards is planning on changing this, but this is something that could be addressed later in the playtest. Unlike the CR system, current playtests don’t make me think Wizards is going to just ignore it. Wizards being Wizards makes me think they’re going to ignore it.

So, Wizards has made a bunch of changes in their playtests, but almost none of them have addressed the problems I have with 5e. Most of them change systems I was perfectly fine with already or simply needed to make minor changes to.

OneD&D is a small step from 5e compared to 4e to 3.5, but it functionally has the same problem that led me to Pathfinder 1e. It is changing things I’m fine with at the expense of leaving problems I do have alone or just creating new ones. Wizards is still at the playtest phase, so this may change, but this is the reason I don’t care about OneD&D.

As a final thought, I’ve not discussed the OGL fiasco here because my interest with OneD&D was already nullified before that came along. That series of events merely destroyed any trust I had in Wizards as a company, and while that impacts my decision to buy OneD&D or not, I have to care about the system before I will play it.