Author: Bauxtehude (Liam Gallagher)

Bauxtehude is known by the birth name Liam Gallagher. He is the creator and producer of the Shattered Sea Blog and podcast, which is home to numerous actual play podcast episodes and series.

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Friday Favourites Humour

Friday Favourite: Confessions of a D&D Camp Counselor

On Friday we comb through our extensive archives to find an older article that we feel deserves another look. From July 12, 2010, Dungeon’s Master once again presents: Confessions of a D&D Camp Counselor.

I have a great job, I’m a counselor at D&D camp, which is to say that I have the best job ever. I don’t mean to gloat, but my time as a D&D counselor has been incredibly enjoyable and I’m sure if you read along you’ll share in the fun of the last week.

Before camp began, I spent a week learning about how to spot child abuse (very important!) and care for kids. Before I met the kids I went over to the camp director’s house in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Myself and the other counselors met up and we played some D&D; I taught the old schoolers how to play 4e, while the director of the camp gave me a refresher on how to play 3.5e. After four hours of being paid to play D&D and think up campaign ideas it was time to get ready for the first day of camp.

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Epic Level Encounter Design – Part 2: Developing Challenges Appropriate for Epic Level Characters

At the epic level the PCs are capable of acts that can change the path of history forever. The aim of this article is to help you embrace the capacity of the party and set a stage appropriately large for their abilities. This article is about spectacles that are just as big as PCs who can come back from the dead every day.

Enter: The Renascence Man, Woman or Child

In order to challenge the PC you need to respect their capability. By level 21 the party has a bag of tricks so deep that attempting to anticipate them is a fool’s errand. There are things that the PCs had to tackle at low levels that are, by now, tasks that are beneath them. The PCs at this point should not have to make Diplomacy checks to convince people that their task is important. Epic level characters shouldn’t have to make knowledge checks to recall simple details, their experience and access to information is so vast that such checks are just a waste of time and any attempt to withhold such information won’t add difficulty or strife, but will just annoy. The only time an epic level PC should be forced to make such checks is to demonstrate how far above such tasks they are.

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Epic Level Encounter Design – Part 1: Cut the Fat

Recently I’ve been charged with the task of running the first epic level campaign for the Dungeon’s Master crew. This series of articles will outline my process and some of my ideas for creating that high level campaign you’ve always wanted to run. This first article is about trimming down the game of D&D so that it runs well at the epic tier.

Picking the Right Tools for the Job

The game of D&D is like any other device in that it’s designed with a purpose in mind, and as per the demands of the design it meets some needs and not others. I think of these things along the lines of automobiles, where a station wagon and a race car can both be very effective though not at all compatible. Likewise 4e D&D is very different at level 2 and level 22. Heroic tier D&D is like your mother’s station wagon, if you put another dent in the bumper there’s a good chance that she won’t notice, where epic D&D is like a fine Italian F1 land rocket, which you can destroy in an instant by using the wrong fuel and oil.

Heroic tier D&D has a lot of features that make play interesting at that level that don’t really translate well to later play. We’ll review some of them now and you can decide if you want to cut them or not in favour of a more high performance and race worthy game.

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Understanding Initiative and Surprise in D&D

D&D characters experience time very differently than we do in real life. Their world takes place in distinct 6-second rounds. How they can behave during these 6-second rounds is controlled by which part of the round the universe is currently in. As a player I have frequently witnessed the poor adjudication of Surprise Rounds, which is very understandable as the Surprise Round takes place in a weird moment in the already hard to fathom flow of D&D time. Beyond the problem of conceiving time in D&D, I think a deficit exists in the Surprise rules of the system, which takes Surprised to mean “has been successfully ambushed.” Due to this deficit, it is my opinion that DMs often intuitively but unknowingly house rule the Surprise Round rules to fit a variety a situations that the actual rules do not address.

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Humour

Confessions of a D&D Camp Counselor: Year II – Best Bits

Well D&D camp is over for another year. Looking back it seems to me that the best way to share stories from D&D camp without a lot of superfluous context is to use the “Hey, do you remember when…?” approach. So for the final time this year I would like to share some of the best bits of fun, excitement and hilarity that happened this summer at D&D camp.

Video Games!

Obviously the kids come to camp to have fun first and foremost. Playing and learning the game of D&D is the secondary objective. A lot of the rules can be adjusted to suit the situation at hand if it’s going to make thing more fun. Each week as new kids come to camp we assess their level of play and do our very best to accommodate people so that everyone has a good time. Many of the issues that arise are because some kids just want to play even though they don’t know or don’t want to know the actual rules of “how D&D is supposed to be played.”

That being said, every year we get kids at camp who have never played D&D before and don’t seem to have any interest in it as such. Instead when their parents said “You’re going to camp, pick one!” they picked the camp that sounded most like video games. Well at camp this year we had quite a few Mine Craft kids and it made for some pretty strange in-game interactions.

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More Confessions of a D&D Camp Counselor: Year II

This year at Dungeons & Dragons Camp we took a new approach to running the games. All the DMs agreed to set their campaigns in the same setting. By doing this we hoped to create a common experience that all of the kids could share in. In retrospect, I have to admit that I was extremely naive, or at the very least idealistic.

Burn Baby Burn!

What I envisioned was a common campaign setting generating stories of how each party solved the same problems in their own way. The kids certainly overcame problems but not in the way I imagined. Where I’d thought they’d meet and interact with common NPCs they instead opted to kill them over and over again, week after week.

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Confessions of a D&D Camp Counselor: Year II – Finding the Ideal DMs

For the second year in a row I find myself fortunate enough to have one of the best summer jobs in the world – I’m a D&D camp counselor. That’s right; I get paid to play D&D every day!

This year I’ve moved up in the world of D&D; I am now the director of D&D camp. I’m the DM’s DM so to speak. Upon leveling up to my new position as D&D camp director my first task was to hire three DMs to help me shoulder the enormous task of running D&D camp. I began setting out the criteria by which to judge the ideal candidates vying for jobs as DMs for D&D camp.

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Building Better Monsters Part 4: Monster Themes and Implementing Your Designs

If you’ve read this far you’ve got the goods to design a monster, so now it’s time to think of your creation as part of the bigger picture, as a denizen of a universe. You’ll need to consider how your monster relates to the world around it as well as other monsters so that you can determine how to role-play them and how they will act in combat.

There are loose themes that the most monsters will fit in if your campaign fits into any of the better-known genres. The themes for monsters are based on creature type, location and its association with other creatures.

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Building Better Monsters Part 3: Making the Monster Fit the Bill

One thing that keeps coming up is the idea that monster design should be elegant, graceful, smooth and all these other flowery and juicy sounding words. What I mean to say in more direct terms is that your monster needs to realize its design goal with as little effort from you while DMing as possible. When your monster hits the grid and it’s time to throw initiative, the party is going to immediately do its best to murder your new creation. As a result your monster is going to have very little time to make a good impression.

In music one of the mistakes young musicians make all the time is not playing expressively. They practice a piece for ages before they perform it and come to know its subtleties and complexities very well, but their audience doesn’t. In order for people to understand the piece of music on first hearing the way that the musician has come to understand it over a period of weeks, the musician has to accentuate its good qualities so that they are readily apparent.

As the DM you have the very same problem with your monster. Any trimmings that don’t further your goal for the monster should be removed. Strip the monster down to what abilities it really need because it’s only going to get a few rounds of combat to use them.

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

So you’ve got your idea for your monster and you know what you want it to do and how you want it to function in your game. It’s time to put those plans into action. There are a lot of considerations to be made and it can be daunting to figure out where to begin. My outlook is that the best place to start is anywhere. The following considerations are not placed in any special sequence. As you read each heading remember that you can never be too creative.

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Building Better Monsters Part 2: More Than the Sum of Its Parts

In Building Better Monsters Part 1 we talked about the inspiration for monsters and how to identify the ideas that make up a monster design, mainly the monster’s form and its function. This time around we’re digging into the stat block. Every DM has read a stat block before but they’re worth paying close attention to. Stats are the functional manifestation of the monster, and stat blocks are the way that your ideas about monsterhood will be recorded. As such stat blocks are a sort of monster design fundamental, a rudiment for DMs.

You’ve come up with your own idea for a monster so it is time to realize these ideas mechanically. You want to have your design support your plans for your creature as elegantly as possible so that when you get to the table your creature behaves how it ought to with as little effort from you the DM as possible. You have an idea of what you want that monster to do, and good design will let you do that more easily. In order to put all the parts together gracefully a monster designer needs to have a good understanding of what all the parts at their disposal are so that they can put them together creatively.

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