Mistakes – ones you’ve made in the past and how you got past them, one’s you’re making now and don’t know how to solve. That’s the theme for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival.

I remember reading some great advice awhile ago: it’s ok to make a lot of mistakes as long as you don’t make the same one twice. At the game table it’s easy to forget stuff, make a bad judgement call, let emotions override polite behaviour.

One of my biggest mistakes was actually away from the game. For the first few years of Roleplaying Tips I also got a new job that required quite a bit of overtime, I was getting writing contracts, and the ezine was chewing up a lot of hours every week. I decided to stop gaming for awhile. That “while” turned into a five year hiatus. That’s five years of non-gaming I’ll never get back!

Today my schedule is no different. There are not enough hours in the day to do everything I want. However, I made a conscious decision to claw a game night out every two weeks, plus some prep time on weekends. I’m busier than ever before, but the sky has not fallen and giant fires have not flared up because I take this time out for gaming. And I’m actually less stressed because I’m getting my gaming fix in again.

I’ve been keeping this up since 2005 and still going strong. Real life has its pressures, but a bit of planning and protecting my time lets me game without problem. This is healthy for establishing better life-balance, maintaining (and making new) friendships, and keeping my creative juices flowing in all aspects of my life.

Long live RPG!

Remember to check out the previous RPG Blog Carnivals:

August 2008: The Core Mechanic: Death and Undeath

September 2008: The Fine Art of the TPK: Homebrew

October 2008: Musings of the Chatty DM: Superheroes

November 2008: The Dice Bag: Religion

December 2008: Critical Hits: Transitions and Transformations

January 2009: Unclebear: New Years Gaming Goals and Resolutions

February 2009: The Core Mechanic: Monsters and Maps

March 2009: The Book of Rev: War

April 2009: A Butterfly Dreaming: Humor and Gaming

May 2009: Roleplaying Pro: The Future Of Roleplaying

June 2009: Mad Brew Labs: Steampunk & Klokwerks

July 2009: 6d6Fireball.com: Dungeons & Dragons

August 2009: Chgowiz’s Old Guy RPG Blog: Conventions, Ren Fairs, Carnivals, Oh My!

This month’s RPG Carnival is about RPG conventions. GMing at cons is a fine art. It’s high pressure chaos that includes a lot more table and environment management than your typical home game. Add in a group of total strangers as players with unknown skills and game knowledge, and you have a recipe for an interesting game.

Roleplaying Tips has covered GMing at RPG conventions a few times in the past. Following are links to tips you might find useful next time you run a convention game.

Running Games At Conventions

How to Game Master at Conventions

Epic Weekend Convention Gaming: A Tale From The Trenches

4 Tips For Whipping Up Scenarios For Conventions

Speeding Up Convention Play

GMing Convention Games

In a previous blog, I discussed converting prices from “…and a 10-Foot Pole” from I.C.E. and mentioned a number of campaign-related issues and background elements from “Fumanor: The Last Deity” that complicated the discussion, which I promised to tell everyone about at another time. Since it’s a good example of how to take a rules element (the currency in use in the game) and turn it into a roleplaying ingredient, I thought that it would be a worthwhile subject.

By developing the coinage of the realm beyond the simple “copper piece”/”gold piece”/etc, I was able to connect the campaign background to practical implications surrounding the PCs, impart additional depth to that background, introduce plot threads that they could take up or not (as it suited them), and give some additional colour to the campaign setting.

As it happened, the players chose not to persue these plot threads at the time, with the result that in the sequel campaign “Fumanor: One Faith”, one of the plotlines that have confronted the PCs is a tax revolt, which is making it harder for the Crown to prepare for an imminant invasion, and which has forced unpalatable choices on the Government – such as revoking the tax-exempt status of the Church.

The approach that I’ve decided to use is to quote (with occasional paraphrasing) from the background notes/house rules that I gave the players before character generation commenced, and then add regular side comments, explanations, etc, in a form of pseudo-sidebars, to talk about the objectives, the choices, what worked, and what didn’t. So let’s get started….

Annotated excerpts from The Fumanor Campaign breifing material

Old Kingdom Currency
As stated in the previous blog where this subject was mentioned, Coinage is only now being ressurrected as an art in the Fumanor campaign. For most of the last century, the coins in use were all legacies of the old Kingdom. These coins are:

• Cirunum (Pl. Cirunai): Copper coin, commonly nicknamed “Tibbs”.
• Saudrum (Pl. Saudria): Bronze coin, commonly nicknamed “Slugs”.
• Ardrium (Pl. Ardria): Silver coin, commonly nicknamed “Crowns”.
• Haylernym (Pl. Haylia): Gold coin, commonly ncknamed “Nobles”.
• Daethorum (Pl. Daethia):Platinum coin, nicknamed “Marks”.

Cirunai and Saudria are common coins. The largest coin most people ever see is an Ardrium. It is common practice to exchange letters of ownership, known as Trusts, where larger sums are involved, rather than physically moving the coinage.

The section on ‘Old Kingdom Currency’ sets a romanesque tone to formal language from the old Kingdom while not being directly latin, while showing that informal speech is founded on simpler English, evoking an association between the old Kingdom and the Roman Empire. So strong was this association that over time, it even changed its title from “Kingdom” to “Empire”!

It also gives a glimmer of personality to the ordinary citizen – a slightly wry sense of humour (‘Slugs’) which leavens a pronounced respect for the Old Kingdom. It informs the players not to expect to see hoards of gold coins when they find treasure, states explicitly that the basic unit of currency is the silver piece, and establishes ‘paper money’ in the form of “Trusts” – suggesting that any stray scrap of paper might be worth a fortune. This last implication was lost on the players, who at one point, completely missed a Trust worth 75,000 silver peices.

The New Currency
The newly minted coins are theoretically an attempt to create a unifying social force, something to give the citizens a point of referance to identify with the Modern-day government of the Barony Of Fumanor and not with the Old Kingdom. The mint pays 150% of face value for old coins that they can melt down and remint. Since there is roughly a 30% chance of the shipment being lost to thieves, bandits, or raiders, unless trustworthy guards are hired, the population in general have been reluctant to take up the offer.

This further suggests that the actual number of coins they can expect to find will be about 2/3 of what the DMG/Monster Manual suggest, and tells the players that to get full value for their discoveries, they will have to make regular pilgrimages to the Mint; they didn’t bother, reasoning that there was ‘plenty more where that came from’.

It tells them that they can find employment at low levels as Guards for such trips (which they eventually used as a cover for more important activities), and establishes a level of dissatisfaction with the current social situation in comparison to the Golden Age of ‘the good old days’. The campaign was intended to have a slightly post-apocalyptic feel to it, and this is one way in which that flavour was communicated to the players.

There are also hints as to how the various alignments view the current world, and how the players can reflect their alignment in roleplay within the campaign.

The new mintings are not up to the same standards as the older currency. As a result, they are generally less popular. These facts have led moneylenders to discount the new coinage by 10% or more.

Offers the players a more direct route to currency conversion – at a price, establishes that moneylenders are commonplace and organised, and further adds to the post-apocalyptic atmosphere.

In an effort to encourage the circulation of the new currency, the Baron has decreed that all taxes must be paid in old currency, at face value, while all other payments recognised by the government must be made in new currency, as must any fees, commissions, rewards, or purchases by officials. In effect, this means that the Barony has mandated a 10% surcharge on all public payments, a 10% discount on all public purchasing, and an 11% tax hike – plus forcing ordinary citizens to deal with moneylenders, and pay moneylenders fees, on a regular basis.

There’s a lot of meat in this paragraph – the more you think about it, the more significant it becomes and the more ramifications come to light. The Baron is clearly more interested in practical solutions than being popular, and he clearly has some sophisticated and subtle advisors – there is a multipronged policy which simultaniously encourages the removal of old currency from circulation and the usage of new.

In order to pay taxes, the ordinary citizen has to buy old currency from adventurers (unofficially) or from moneylenders (officially) – that shows that society has integrated the concept of adventurers into its fabric, and has come to expect adventurers to find caches of old coins.

It also gives the first hints that the moneylenders have a very strong lobby within the Government – in fact, the Moneylenders & Minter’s Guild was subsequently revealed to be in the pocket of the Chancellor Of The Exchequer, who was gearing up for an attempt at seizing the Throne. The Baron, an honest but intellectually average man, was not as clever as the Chancellor, and did not appreciate the finer implications of the proposal (which were spelt out explicitly for the players); the extra currency was being diverted into his private accounts to build up his army: ten percent of all government spending, eleven percent of taxes collected, and kickbacks from the moneylenders who were making 20% extra profit on top of the 10% they officially claimed, by taking advantage of the mint’s new-for-old policy. With that 20% split 3:1 between the moneylender and the guild, and half the guild’s earnings being disbursed as kickbacks to the Chancellor, he was effectively soaking up about 18 percent of the gross national product for his own use – while limiting the funds disbursed to the regular army to 9% of disbursements, or about half what he was spending on his private army.

If the PCs had really gotten into the coinage situation, they would have uncovered this threat far sooner than they did – instead of a pitched battle at the conclusion of the campaign, with a PC-recruited army of Orcs and Kingdom soldiers and Commoners confronting a better-equipped revolutionary army with more than twice their numbers.

As a result, there has been growing resentment directed toward the Barony and its public representatives, especially the tax collectors. After a number of nasty incidents, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has recieved permission to recruit guards to protect the taxmen.

The irony that just oozes from this statement once you know the real situation went undetected by the players for years! When play started, it was taken at face value, suggesting another occupation the characters could take up if they got down on their luck. Five years later, when the truth began to come out, someone noticed it and was quite chagrined – and impressed at how deeply the clues to campaign events had been planted. As I recall, he called me some unfriendly names while I sat there with an evil grin…

To date, four coins have been minted:

• Shawler (Pl. Shawlers): Copper coin, commonly nicknamed “Shorts”. Face Value 1 CP.
• Pinnie (Pl. Pinnies): Copper coin, commonly nicknamed “Pinkies”. Face Value 2 CP.
• Kroner (Pl. Kroner): Bronze coin, commonly nicknamed “Groaners”. Face Value 1 BP.
• Royal (Pl. Royals): Silver coin, commonly ncknamed “Boils”. Face Value: 1 SP.

A more deprecating set of nicknames further adds to the character of ‘the common man’, places a relative social value on the new coinage vs the old, and reinforces the statement that paper ‘money’ has replaced gold and platinum coins. Think of these as 1¢, 2¢, 5¢, and 20¢ coins.

Moneylenders have discounted these face values, in addition to charging 10% of the face value for the service:

7 PP = 35 GP = 70 SP = 350 BP = 3500 CP will get you 5250 Shawlers, 3500 Pinnies, 875 Kroner, or 49 Royals.

Greedy moneylenders! What a revelation! And more kickbacks for the Chancellor…

Street values are even further discounted. The same 7 PP will get you 7350 Shorts, 4900 Pinkies, 1225 Groaners, or 70 Boils.

Not as greedy as the out-and-out criminal class, though.

This established, for the first time anywhere, that there was a seedy underside to the Barony; another source of potential scenarios, and one that was flirted with by the campaign. One of the players wanted to be a Wizard, which meant being taught by a Wizard-in-hiding since Magic was outlawed by the Church. Their patron was a High Priest in the second-largest city within the Barony, and was extremely… let’s just say, ‘well-connected’. In fact, the Players still suspect him of being “The Patriarch”, a Godfather equivalent!

Elements Of Coinage
Common Features applied to all coins for convenience:

• Specific Gravity (Weight by volume, water = 1): 15.8 g/cm³.
• Weight: 25 coins weighs 2 lb.
• Actual Volume: 0.14255 cubic inches each = 2.33 cm³
• Effective Stacking Volume: When neatly stacked, you get 9 coins to the cubic inch.
• Effective Unstacked Volume: When loosely contained, you get 8 coins to the cubic inch.

These numbers came about as the result of an article I read (in The Dragon, if I remember correctly, but it was more than 15 years ago now) which showed how to calculate the weight and volume of a stack of coins. From memory, the author assigned the different weights to the different coins, but gave them all the same physical dimensions based on the density of the refined metal of their construction, and went on to show how to calculate how much space they occupied when stacked or thrown in loose. (Side-note: It’s great to be able to acknowledge an article that had so much impact that it’s still remembered, however vaguelly! And a little terrifying – that’s the standard that we’re all trying to live up to…)

This was a fairly realistic view; we’re all used to different coinage denomenations being different sizes and different weights. I made the deliberate choice to make all the coins occupy the same volume and have the same weight, purely to simplify matters, when I realised that the calculations would hold true even if the coins were different sizes so long as they occupied the same volume of space.

It was a deliberate oversimplification, but since coins in AD&D were considered to have zero weight, it was a major step toward realism – and a blunt warning to the characters; coins were heavy, and just because they found a fortune it didn’t mean that they could carry it. This also explained why Trusts – the equivalent of early bank notes – were used for large currency exchanges.

I then went on to give specific numbers for them to digest:

• A chest 18″ x 12″ x 15″ will hold 25,920 coins just tossed in, or 29,160 coins if they are neatly stacked, weighing aprox 2074# and 2333#, respectively. (Plus the weight of the chest!). 34 and 35 STR to lift, respectively – at maximum encumberance. Or two strong men, similarly encumbered.
• A Backpack is assumed to be 16″ x 12″ x 6″, a volume of 1152 cubic inches. This volume could theoretically hold roughly 92# of coins, or 2-3 times the weight that the backpack could reasonably hold without ripping (30-50 lb = 375-625 coins).
• A large sack will hold 20#-30# (250-375 coins).
• A small sack will hold 5#-10# (62-125 coins).
• A Large Saddlebag will hold 10#-15# (125-187 coins) and are usually used in pairs.
• A Small Saddlebag will hold the same amount as a small sack.
• A belt pouch will hold 2#-3# (25-37 coins).
• A pocket will hold 0.5#-1.5# (6-18 coins).

In some cases, these were decided by volume, in others I decided that there was a maximum weight that could be contained before the object tore, based on the usual construction material.

Individual Descriptions of the coins: Old Kingdom:
Cirunum:
0.27″ (6.48 mm) thick and 0.81″ (1.944 cm) in diameter (roughly the size of 2 Australian 20¢ pieces stuck together). Supposedly “copper” coins, these are a 50% mixture of brass and bronze, producing a heavy coin that tarnishes quickly. The derivation of the nickname (“Tibbs”) is uncertain. On one side is the “Personal Rune” of the first King of the former kingdom, Audacious I, who through diplomacy and conquest unified the peoples of many scattered regions into a cohesive nation. (NB: during the Calamities, the landscape was so rearranged that no-one knows where Audacious’ original kingdom was, nor the site of his legendary capital, Althanfair).

And it still hasn’t been found. (Do any of my Fumanor Players read these blogs? I guess I’ll find out)…

Note the use of impurities to change the density to the “uniform value” that I had specified.

The image on this Wikipedia page at the time of writing will give non-australian readers a visual idea of the coin sizes.

Saudrum:
0.225″ (5.4mm) thick and 0.9″ (2.16cm) in diameter (roughly the same size as an A$1 coin and the thickness of an A$2 coin). These are adulterated with lead and palladium, two notoriously soft metals, to bring the weight up to standard. Silver itself being relatively soft, the faces of these coins are normally worn to such an extent that they are close to being unadorned disks; only the vaguest of markings can usually be made out. Physically closest to average in size of all the coins.

Rare Coins: Coins whose faces are as clear as when they were new-minted are extremely uncommon. For coins in general circulation, 3 in 1000 will be worth d10+1 times the face value to a collector. For coins from old caches, reduce the number of coins to be examined by 25 for every 25 full years of time undisturbed, to a minimum of 3 in 200. These are worth d10 x (d10+1 per 25 year period) times the face value to a collector. Beyond this 800-year span, the incidence climes at +2 coins per year to be tested, ie 801 years undisturbed is 3 in 202 coins, 802 is 3 in 204, and so on. These are worth d10 x (d10+32+1 per 20 years over 800) times face value to a collector.

I wanted to offer characters a roleplaying opportunity – spending time examining and polishing old coins – while making them more than just numbers on the page. They didn’t take up the offer – so someone got rich when the PCs went shopping.

Coins that are legible have the faces of famous (or notorious) individuals on them, with a sygil to indicate official approval or dissapproval of the individual. One side is generally used for a warrior or a person recieving recognition for deeds of valour or heroism; the other side is either a culturally-significant person (musician, priest, mage, businessman, etc) or the cultural equivalent of a “wanted” poster (with the dissaproval sygil and a nominated reward). The former faces were changed roughly every 6 months to a year, the former could change on a month-to-month basis.

A lot of nice campaign touches here, and roleplaying opportunities that went begging. These were going to be a means of adding to the campaign background – let the PCs find a coin with a notorious criminal and research what he did that was so heinous, for example – and also clues to other potential scenarios. But all those potentials are still there, waiting for the right circumstance to enter the light of day.

I especially like the notion of using coinage to replace ‘wanted’ posters and the recognition of noteworthy people on postage stamps!

Although it somehow got left out of the writeup, the nickname “slugs” was supposed to have derived from the fact that most of them are now featureless disks of metal. Raw coin disks that have not yet been milled and stamped are known as ‘slugs’, something I remembered from a tour of the Australian Mint.

Ardrium:
0.18″ (4.32mm) thick and 1″ (2.4cm) in diameter. Nicknamed for the crown which adorns one side of the coin, the other side being reserved for the face of the Queen at the time of minting. The coins are closest to what people generally consider “ideal” proportions and are (unofficially) the monetary standard of the Barony.

Rare Coins: Particularly rare are coins featuring Queen Lilliath II, wife of King Ewan III, who choked on a cherry pit only 3 weeks after Ewan’s ascension to the throne. Two weeks later, Ewan wed his wife’s chief chambourmaid. Thus, these coins were only being minted for a couple of months. Their value to a collector is up to 100 times the face value, depending on the quality of the coin (and the bargaining skills of the seller!). Only 1 in 10,000 such coins will be found.

More colour for the campaign – a lively source of royal gossip, and a juicy story that is likely to have survived. This was a practical example of the sort of detail and colour that I was prepared to provide to the players on request; the intention was to replace a lot of ‘rumours overheard in the tavern’ with these.

The unrealised concept was for Old Kingdom coins to form a trail of ‘breadcrumbs’, each hoard or cache giving clues to another – back when the campaign was going to be low-fantasy and not the high-fantasy spectacular that it became.

Haylernym:
0.36″ (8.64mm) thick, 0.71″ (1.704cm) diameter, which makes them the second thickest of the coins (the Shawler is thicker). Instead of a raised moulding, the surfaces of the coin are relief-sculpted. On one side is the face of the King at the time of issue, surmounted and backed by the Eagle that symbolised the Old Kingdom; on the other is an image commemorating the greatest achievement to date during that king’s reign.

Of particular note is King Elanthor VII, whose image is that of the donkey he made an advisor to the throne. And yes, he was serious.

Rare Coins (1): Nobles are inherantly variable in purity, some coins are actually more valuable if melted down to form ingots (refer p16-17 of the Black Book for details). The value of the Noble is defined based on an average purity. On average, every 22,500 Nobles will include 300 such Rare Coins, which can form a single 10# bar of 24-carat gold, valued at 1169 Haylernym.

The “Black Book” was a 200-page exercise book with black cloth cover, in which I had jotted down ten years worth of accumulated ideas for a new AD&D campaign; many of those ideas formed the foundations of the Fumanor Campaign series, while others (that were incompatable with the Fumanor concepts) were used to create the “Rings Of Time” campaign.

This is a practice that I strongly reccomend to every GM out there – you never know how long your current campaign is going to last, so the time to start recording idle brainstorms toward your next campaign is now.

Rare Coins (2): Aprox 50% of nobles can be smelted into bars of 14 carat gold. 338 Coins would include 167 such “pure” coins, which would weigh 13.36#. When smelted and the impurities drawn off, this would yield a 10# bar of 14-carat gold worth 187GP. And of course, there are still the other 171 Nobles worth a face value of 1 GP each. This 14-carat bar cannot be further refined.

I forget exactly where I had found the figures, but from somewhere I had recorded information on the purity and rarity of gold. Again, this was both an offer to the PCs of a money-making scheme that my treasure payouts were going to assume that they would take advantage of, and something for a Dwarven character to get his roleplaying teeth into.

Daethorum:
0.15″ (3.6mm) thick, 1.1″ (2.64cm) diameter. Adulterated with tin to reduce weight and with a hole in the centre for the same reason. One side is stamped with a finely detailed filligree, the other has a crown surmounted by a ring of stars, one for each of the 11 great Kings of history.

Rare Coins: All Daethorum are considered rare coins, and the actual appraisal value can vary by ±20%. When more than 20 such coins are used, assume that the average is 100% of value; only roll individually when coins are treated individually.

You can’t really be more blunt than that, can you? “All [Platinum Coins] are considered Rare Coins”….”roll individually when coins are treated individually”…

Individual Descriptions of the coins: New Baronial Mintings:
Shawler:
0.45″ (1.08cm) thick and 0.635″ (1.524cm) across. The copper mines of the Barony were always of poor grade, but with the best raw material (Old Kingdom copper pieces) reserved for the Pinnie, the local ore was all that was available for these coins, which seem designed for inconvenience. Universally loathed, the thickness was necessary to compensate for the poor ores.

One side of the coin depicts a waterwheel, supposedly symbolic of common industry, while the other shows a fictitous and idealised chapel. Unfortunately, the faces were carved before the need to adjust the proportions became known and as a result, the first batches cut off the tops of the designs. New designs are currently in final preperation, but the nickname “short” will probably stick.

It did, and does. The information in these paragraphs reinforces the post-apocalyptic theme and warns the players that some goods are no longer up to the standards of manufacture or material from 100 years ago – and that they might expect. Which is another way of saying that I was going to hit them with the occasional example of equipment failure. Probably at the most inconvenient possible time.

Pinnie:
0.24″ (5.76mm) thick and with a diameter of 0.87″ (2.088 cm). Features the faces of the Baron’s two most senior advisors, the Councillor For War (Count Madras) and the Chancellor of the Exchequor, (Count Rundgren) on one side, and the face of the Princess Pinafora on the other. Unfortunately, she is even less attractive than the gentlemen, and the sculptor was forced to work from a portrait commissioned when the Princess was 8. The coins are octagonal in shape.

The existance of a Princess was inconveniently forgotten – my mistake as well as that of the players – later in the first campaign. The question of what became of her, and whether or not she ever really existed, still hangs over the campaign. But if she didn’t, why is there an ugly girl’s face plastered on all those coins?

Kroner:
0.165″ (3.96mm) thick and with a diameter of 1.05″ (2.52cm). Nicknamed by the same ‘wit’ whose derisive names for the modern coins have largely permeated the entire Barony. This is the most recently introduced denomenation and the experience of the minters shows in a far superior finished product, approaching the standards of the old coins. 15-sided, it is only thicker than the Daethorum and the Royal.

It is believed by some (as a result of its size) that the Kroner is actually far more valuable than its face value, and it has become not uncommon for those who expect it to rise in value to hoard the currency. Hence, there are relatively few in circulation, much to the annoyance of the Baron. One side of the coin depicts the Baron’s castle, Birchwood, in exquisite detail; the other face is of a rose, the favorite flower of the deceased Baroness.

‘Hope in the face of post-apocalyptic despair’ was one of the central themes of the campaign, reflected in the description of this coin. The current population may have fumbled the ball at first, but they are getting the hang of it, and even starting to plan for the future; things are, slowly but surely, getting better.

Plus more trivial gossip that adds immediatly to the sense of realism of the campaign.

Royal:
0.12″ (2.88mm) thick and 1.23″ (2.952 cm) in diameter. Most valuable of the modern coins, it is (compared with the Old Kingdom mintings) ugly and crude. Shaped as a 9-sided regular solid, it bears the likeness of the Baron on one side and the Baron’s Crest on the other. Although derived from melting down Crowns, the process removes some impurities and adds others, resulting in a coin that is a champaigne yellow colour. Because the more pure Nobles are mixed in with the less-pure during smelting, the likelyhood of any given coin being of exceptional value is virtually nil, well beyond the few thousand which have actually been minted to date.

The coin is physically the thinnest of the denominations in use, testament to the overall increase in purity of the metals. It is also the broadest. It thus has the same volume as the ordinary coins, stacks just as many in a container, and so on.

Spending Money
The prices quoted in various sourcebooks for goods are Purchase Prices for new equipment. Second-hand gear can cost as little as 1/3 the price. Certainly, when characters go to sell equipment, they will get no more than 1/3 to 1/2 of the price listed.

Another ‘fair warning’ to the players, who knew to expect to get exactly what they paid for – at best.

Equipment prices (esp. Magical items) listed in the DMG are 10 x the usual manufacturing cost (including labour). The purchase price for a “new” item will have a 70% profit margin tacked on to the top of the price listed – if any are available at all. Where charges have been used, the loss of value is a straight percentage of the loss of charges. EG a wand usually holds 50 charges; if a wand is purchased with 12 charges, the actual price is 1.7 x 12/50 x the price listed. The sale price will generally be 1/2 to 2/3 of this amount if the item can be demonstrated (reduced for any charges used in the process), and 1/4 the listed amount if it can’t be EG a potion or scroll or something that’s not working, or that conveys a purely numeric advantage – a +1 sword without a visible special effect.

Notice that this drops the redeemable value of the most common magic items while boosting enormously the cost of manufacturing replacements. I’d had one campaign virtually destroyed by the ‘magic item economy’ many years earlier, and was taking steps to prevent it happening again.

Where a price is quoted in the PHB or DMG in GP, it refers to the price in ARDRIA (Silver coins). Where a price is quoted in SP, it refers to the number of SAUDRIA (Bronze coins). Where a price is quoted in CP, it refers to the number of CIRUNAI (Copper coins). Treasures from monsters also convert using these adjustments, EG if a monster’s treasure is “1,000 GP” according to the books, it means they have Old coins worth an average of 1,000 New silver coins.

Explicitly stating things that had been implied in earlier sections.

The exception to the above is magic items, which remain in Gold Pieces. This is because these are unusually rare and precious. Following the Magewars, Wizardry became an illegal practice. Those wizards who escaped public execution have gone underground, and while a few support forbidden research by supplying the black market with new magic items, the laws of supply and demand have driven prices skywards.

[Post “The Last Deity” campaign update: While the ban on Wizards has been lifted by the new King, and the construction of a new Arcane Academy has been permitted by the Throne, only a few Wizards have come forth to teach there, and no students have yet graduated. Consequently, those remaining have been far too busy to construct anything beyond the occasional potion or scroll; while magic items are no longer black-market commodities, rarity and the high taxes currently demanded of all businesses mean that the price has not measurably dropped and availability remains rare. In general, if you want a magic sword in this campaign, you will still have to go out and find an old one for yourself.]

The Value Of The Mundane

The most trivial objects can be a source of information to the PCs. Even though few of the plot threads dangled before them in this section of the house rules were actively persued, the detail provided helped establish the themes and flavour of the campaign, and gave some practical examples of how those themes would manifest in the course of play. Most of the specific information provided was made up out of whole cloth as I wrote; all I had were the general themes that I wanted to express.

Anyone can do the same. This is another valuable tool to have in your kit when next you work on a campaign’s background.

Oh, and for players, here’s a hot tip: read everything the GM provides, a couple of times, and re-read it every now and then after that – you never know what he’s hidden in it!

Wind affects archers, flying mounts and wizards, and more.

The first type of hazard we talked about was Terrain. Another variety of combat hazard is environmental. What are the physical surroundings like? Are there any interesting global effects in place?

My definition of environmental hazard is one that affects everyone. If a hazard is limited to just certain areas of the battlemap, then it is not environmental but another hazard type.

Ground

What are the combatants standing on? Ground is the same as default terrain, bit it’s included here to help you get a complete picture of your combat environment. Determine if there are any global features and modifiers due to the nature of the footing.

Overhead

What do combatants see when they look up? Ceiling? Sky? Perhaps they see large stalactites swarming with bats, a sheet of fire, or black clouds ready to let loose a hailstorm. As with ground, determine if there are any global features and modifiers due to the nature of ‘sky’.

Air or atmosphere

What’s the space like between the ground and the sky? The atmosphere is often overlooked as an entertaining hazard. Thin oxygen makes encounters with undead even more interesting (assuming undead in your game don’t breathe). Dust, airborne particles, and gases can cause choking, sneezing, or limited visibility. Next time a combat takes place in the middle of a boring city street, add smog or smoke to spice things up.

Light

Lighting and visibility are critical to survival for most combatants. If your game system has special rules for limited visibility, such as line of sight or concealment, then consider the lighting a great source of potential hazards.

Imagine a crazy strobe effect caused by a huge fan near a light source. Diabolical game masters might introduce epilepsy rules a couple sessions prior to such an encounter, and then assign a racially modified chance of seizure during such a combat. While you should make the chance very low, the added tension when you ask each player to roll would be momentarily exciting. In addition, the strobing effect might improve stealth skills and abilities during the combat, cause ranged attack modifiers, and so on.

Another example might be a light switch. One side can see in the dark, the other can’t. The switch now becomes an important tactical element to the fight. Does one side need to guard the switch, disable it, or control it?

Sound

Sound is another under-used environmental factor. If communication is limited, combatants must resort to poorer coordination or alternate methods to provide status updates, offer ideas, or issue commands. Conversely, if sound is enhanced so you can hear the slightest whisper, it will be hard to keep your foes from overhearing what you say.

An example of a sound hazard is loud machine noise. Pounding, grinding, rattling, and rumbling machines would make casual conversation impossible. You might restrict players to six words each round on their turn because of the environment their PCs are in.

Esoteric

Depending on your game system and genre, this category is for any global or physical surrounding effects that don’t fall into the other environmental categories.

For example, in one campaign I crafted evil ruled the night, and good ruled the day. If encounters took place at night, any evil foes received a combat bonus. If encounters took place during the day, good combatants received a bonus.

Ambiance

Rules should not be the only determinant for environmental effects on combat. Looks for ways to add flavour to your fights with evocative global effects, such as strange lighting or unusual ground.

Be sure to use description to bring out the full flavour of the hazard. You should provide a description before combat starts so the PCs know what they’re dealing with (as much as they can perceive, at least). However, you should also weave in descriptions of the hazard during combat as well, so players don’t forget about it, take it for granted, or get too lost in number crunching.

The best way to continually message your group about flavour and hazards during combats is to roleplay. Have the foes react to the hazards and environment. Even if no special rules are in effect because of the ambiance (especially when no rules are in effect – many players will then stop thinking about it and focus just on buffs and drawbacks) you should have NPCs and monsters interact with the environment.

Inconsequential behaviours and reactions are a great way to roleplay.

“The beast slips on the wet grass but recovers gracefully, revealing its dexterity despite its massive, stinking bulk.”

“The giant bees sway back and forth in the breeze, which brings you scent of the goblin camp you’ve been heading toward.”

“The warrior parries your blow and a sharp ringing sound echoes throughout the canyon, letting all canyon denizens know for miles that blood will be spilt today.”

Another technique is to roleplay, if the foes can communicate. Have NPCs remark to each other or the player characters about the environment. Add elements of the environment into combat challenges and insults.

A related technique is to visualize to improve your descriptions and roleplaying. Pretend you are the enemy. What do you see around you? How does the environment play to your strengths and affect your weaknesses? Are you comfortable? What’s making you uncomfortable (other than you’re in a fight)? Run through the five senses and not only visualize what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, but how you react to each sense as well.

Finally, keep this visualization going throughout the combat, updating it with what’s happening each round. Are you surrounded, hurt, on fire? Can you taste blood, smell fear, feel your attacks sink in, see your foe trip and fall, hear the leader issuing commands? Describe what’s in your imagination during each foe’s turn to bring combat and hazards to life.

Photo by Scott Lidell, colourshifted by Mike - click the image to view it in the orginal colours

I recently had the need to design a Drow Outpost for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and in the process, I made a few mental notes concerning how I go about designing cities, and population centres in general, that I thought I would share with our readers.

Design First, Draw Later

I don’t put pencil to paper until I have a fairly clear understanding of how the city will operate and what I am going to have to draw. That means defining its style, and its nature – what makes it distinctive – and having some idea of its history, and how all of those elements have influanced the construction.

Planned Cities are Rational, Unplanned Cities Rationalise

All cities have an inherant logic, though the nuances of that logic might escape casual understanding. The most important functions of a city will generally occur at its centre, though that ‘centre’ might actually be on one extreme edge adjacent to a natural barrier that cuts through through an urban area.

Surrounding these will be everything that those functions need in order to operate, in sequence of descending wealth. This defines the inner city, and in a planned community, that’s as far as you need to go in designing it conceptually.

Unplanned cities are rather more haphazard, with structures intended for one use being adapted to another. In such cases, the functions and their overall locations will still be more-or-less the same, but various aspects of the architecture, the streets, etc, will continue to reflect the original purpose. In a word, a pre-existing urban structure has been rationalised.

Surface cities, of the type humans are used to, will often replace older less-permanent structures with ones more suited to the modern purpose of the district, though there will usually be clues to the district’s legacy; this is rather more difficult to achieve when you are considering an underground structure, or a city amongst the trees; and traditionalists may block any reconstruction in any conservative community. Larger and more expensive structures are far harder to replace, and will tend to remain where they were first constructed even if that becomes illogical in terms of the current functioning of the city. For example, opulantly-constructed Temples can cost a great deal of wealth to construct, and will tend to stay put long after the surrounding districts have changed in nature.

It’s also fair to say that no city is ever fully planned or completely random; there once was a logic to the arrangement, and that logic will form part of the history of the city in the form of both its architectural and social legacies.

When designing a relatively unplanned urban environment, the best place to start is by designing what was there originally, and then adapting each district to whatever its modern function is, just as the inhabitants supposedly did. But that can be quite a lot of work, unless you know a shortcut.

I just happen to have one handy: work with ‘districts’ instead of individual buildings and streets. A district is an urban area within which the buildings share a common general function, and hence will have many attributes in common. I treat these as very abstract in nature, drawing a rough ‘blob’ or area on a sheet of paper for each.

Outside Access defines district boundaries and centres

Once the central districts and their industries have been defined, you can determine what variety of access to the outside they require. Do fancy carraiges need a clear path through the city to the Diplomatic centre? Do large wagons need to bring in resources for industry, or will smaller modes of transport suffice? Do smaller wagons imply more frequent traffic? What is the nature of the transport mode, and what infrastructure does it, in turn, require?

Once you have these figured out, you know where the major roads in and out of the city centre are located, and something of their character. One of these will be the dominant freight road, and another may be a dominant civil road; the rest will suit a combination of foot traffic and light freight. It’s those first two that are significant to the design of the rest of the city.

The dominant civil road will have all the things that travellers require or desire lining it, and any industry that targets the passing wealthy. In effect, it has another type of district running along its length. Temples (unless they have already been placed), accommodation, entertainment, eateries, etc, will all be found along that road. It is also likely that the city patrol (or city watch, or police force, or whatever the correct term is for the culture of the city) will have its main office on that route, and most government centres and administrative structures will also be nearby if they have not already been emplaced.

The dominant freight road will likewise have other districts either straddling the roadway or alongside it; animal yards and corrals, warehouses, freight yards, dockyards, other industries which require heavy freight access, etc.

Each time a district is identified, there will be only one or two places where it lies close to the infrastructure districts that it requires (if that has already been emplaced) or where there is room for districts containing that infrastructure to be emplaced alongside it. City design is a bit like those sliding-block puzzles that we all played with as kids!

And if there is no logical connection possible between a functional district and it’s necessary infrastructure because there are other districts in the way? There are two major solutions: either the city operates ineficiently, or more than one district of the needed infrastructure type required will develop, over time. The first is, at best, a temporary solution; canny business types will slowly bring about the second, one building at a time. As a result, you will get impure districts – areas that are a blend of two different functions, giving them a somewhat distinctive flavour.

Complete The Jigsaw

Each type of district will have a type of population district associated with it – factories will have factory worker accommodations, and so on. Again, there will be only one logical arrangement of these when you consider that the wealthy won’t want the lower classes tramping through their streets every day on their way to and from work, and certainly won’t tramp through the poor district daily to get to where they want to go. Piece by piece, you can work outwards to place and define the required district types, and the major roads and byways that connect them.

The results can generally be drawn on your ‘district blobs’ to form a logic map of the urban layout, with a dot at the centre of each district connecting vertices to show the relations between districts.

The next stage is to assess the relative physical size of each district. Some require lots of space (warehouses), some are condensed with low amounts of space per head (industrial workers). Some need more space simply because they have higher populations associated with them, regardless of the function of the district, because of the nature of the urban centre itself. The larger districts will grow and push each of the surrounding districts outwards, away from the city centre.

If the space isn’t available, there will be some development up (multistory structures) and/or down (subterranean structures), and there will be overcrowding despite this – overcrowding which will put pressure on the neighbouring districts to move farther away. So district intersection lines will slowly push outwards from the city centre, taking over structures that – once again – were intended for some other purpose; and the district being consumed will in turn expand into it’s neighbouring regions.

This is where the vertices drawn earlier become significant, because they resist this pushing. As a result, the affected districts will distort into more crescent-like shapes, with the horns located on the edges farthest from the vertices. For each additional vertice, there will be additional ‘horns’ projecting outwards like fingers between the vertices, resulting in a district boundary that looks crennelated, like a castle wall. There will also be some spreading around a circumferance line drawn through the original boundaries of the district and centred on the point in the neighbouring district containing the other point of the vertice.

It is necessary, in order for this to be practical, to be systematic in working outwards from the centre of the map.

A second logic map can be prepared when you’ve finished, in which these relative sizes and distortions are taken into account. Once you have that, you are ready to go to the next stage.

The Way Things Were

It can often be useful to prepare two or three of these logic maps showing the city in different stages of its development, as was intimated earlier. This is especially the case where a city has changed in primary purpose several times over the years. Political Changes can shift the seat of government, new commodities and technologies can encourage new industries or wipe out old ones, trade routes can shift, wars can place an emphasis on defence, and so on.

Onion Skins

In some respects, city design can be viewed as a series of onion skins or layers, either metaphoric or literal. I start with the metaphoric, drawing arrows on the second logic map to indicate the flow of money, the flow of administrative control, the flow of freight, and the daily flow of people, generally using a different colour for each (don’t neglect the flow of money from illegal activities!)

Areas which are part of the flow of money will normally be subject to civic improvements and amenities; areas which are not will be poorly maintained. Areas which are part of the flow of administrative function will receive police stations / patrols (or the equivalents) while those which are not will be wilder. The two define which areas are slums, which are middle class, and which are comparatively well-off. Where the arrows cross, you are likely to get a traffic bottleneck. Each city design and each district quickly develop a more subtle and sophisticated level of definition.

Once these are known, the city plan is finally ready to be converted into an actual layout. This calls for the ‘literal’ layers. It’s my practice to identify, define, and design layouts for these out from the outside in, and then map in “detail” from the inside back out, perpandicular to the exterior ‘surface’ of the city. More important, though, than the actual streets are the district descriptions that you have developed for each part of the urban setting.

With typical human cities, this is all fairly straightforward: you have sewers, water delivery, garbage disposal, roads & streets, and buildings, one layer stacked on top of another. With exotic locations and other societies, it can get more complicated (and more interesting); a cliffside community has waste disposal at right angles to the layers of buildings, and accessways running in three dimensions. A treetop city has multiple layers of each type, some running vertically with gravity, and some horizontally. These layers are all about infrastructure, about how things work in this particular city; consider them seperately, both overall and by district, using the information gathered in the planning so far.

Draw The Map

Armed with all these details, it becomes relatively easy to draw the map itself, however crudely. It’s not necessary to show individual buildings, or (in a modern metropolis) even individual city blocks; an outline of each district showing the major access and travel routes and with individual descriptions of what each part of the city is like, both in population, architectural style, road style, business types, social activities, and even level of criminal activity, is generally enough. You can get more detailed, and more specific, whenever you need to, in-game; there’s no need to invest valuable prep time in doing it now. The street names will reflect the original purposes of the district, giving you a means for making them up on the spot as necessary.

Maps created like this may be less defined than a street map, but they are a HECK of a lot less work, and a heck of a lot better defined. The city becomes areas in which predefined blocks of flavour text describe the districts, a far more functional approach.

Working with Map Generators and existing maps

There are some beautiful maps out there, and there are some pieces of software that permit you to generate your own. But the odds of one of these matching your logical map are so low as to be almost trivial. Unless, of course, you cheat.

Look for natural district boundaries on your existing maps. Relate these back to your second logic map. Stretch and distort the shape of a district as necessary – so long as you don’t change it’s overall size or the district types that neighbour it, your information will be correct. And it’s much easier to do things this way than to go through each and every building and street, deciding what should be there!

Typical Experiences

I generally like to finish each ‘map’ by listing two or three things that the PCs might see or encounter within each district by day, and two or three more by night. In some districts, I might add a description of the early mornings (as workers set out to start work for the day) and/or early evenings (when they are on their way home). I’ll generally drop in half a dozen or more specific landmarks – statues or unique buildings or whatever – with quick descriptions, just to complete the design. A plot hook or two for each district (even if you don’t know the explanation) can also be a good idea. With those in place, the city is ready to be populated with NPCs as necessary (again, I make most of these up on the fly), and for the PCs to stroll into town.

Designing and constructing cities can be as much work as you make it; this technique shortcuts all the fiddly little bits in favour of a more general, more abstract, and much faster approach. And yet, for all that abbreviation, the cities that result often feel more alive than many more detailed ones that I’ve seen, simply because it’s easier for the GM to get a handle on the way of life and the daily routine; his or her consequent narrative is more lively, informed, and cohesive, as a result.

Broken glass for extreme terrain

There are many kinds of combat hazards, such as giant bubbles that trap combatants who bump into them, or a narrow band of strong wind that pushes combatants around. GMs often do not have enough variety in their hazard selections. Use these categories to inspire and keep combats fresh.

Terrain hazards

A classic combat hazard that hearkens back to wargaming days. Use of mixed terrain on the battlemap provides many possible dangers and tactical options.

Sun Tzu wrote about maintaining high ground and using the sun’s reflection on water to blind your foes. Mike Mearls in D&D 4E writes about rock slides and treacherous ice sheets. Past combats in my games have seen cliffs and boiling streams.

How much terrain is covered?

You need to decide when designing and placing terrain how much coverage it has. If the terrain hazard covers the whole battlefield, then everyone is affected. If it doesn’t, only a few are affected.

Partial coverage is more interesting, especially if there are two or three different terrain types, because it offers choices during the combat.

If everyone is affected equally by terrain, there is no choice, and combatants just learn to deal with it. Pockets or zones of terrain create potentially cool offensive and defensive tactics.

Limit terrain to two or three varieties

If you place too many terrain types on the battlefield you’ll slow combat down and over-stimulate encounters. Most of the time consider up to three terrain types for combat:

Default terrain

Where other terrain types are not present on the battlefield the default terrain is in effect.

Default terrain sets player expectations at the start of battle. Whether the terrain is simply dirt, bubbling swamp water, or a field of broken glass, this defines normal for the fight. Any other terrain types will be measured and evaluated against this, which means they need to be more interesting than the default in some way.

For example, if your default terrain is just grassland with no special effects, and you add dirt areas with no special effects, the dirt will be considered boring – if it is considered different terrain by players at all. The additional terrain will have no impact on flavour or gameplay, so why bother?

Avoid terrain inflation – aim for different and interesting most of the time, not more severe. Avoid the trap of escalating terrain effects just to make other terrain interesting. This is important to note because there can be carry-over of player expectations from previous battles, especially if the game has been in a themed region for awhile and encounters share terrain traits. You might be tempted to make each successive encounter’s terrain even wilder and deadlier than the last, which will end badkly for you before long. Instead, try to make terrain different but not more severe.

For example, in the 371st plane of the Abyss, the ground (default terrain) is made entirely of broken glass. Unprotected feet are ripped to shreds within seconds. Falling prone causes extra damage. Falling from a height causes additional wounds if the victim makes it to the ground. During periodic windstorms, victims caught without cover take damage each minute from airborne glass shards. And making camp with a good place to sleep is hell, er, the abyss.

During a battle on this plane you add another terrain type – grassland. Boring old grassland. It might seem like a letdown because grassland has no interesting traits. Yet, to the players, this terrain will seem like a godsend. It’s safe! No extra damage. One can fall prone here all they want.

You might have been tempted to make non-default terrain hot glass, killler thistles made out of glass shards, or glass +1. However, the grasslands is different enough that it offers fun gameplay and combat options without inflating danger levels to an extreme.

So, you don’t always need to beef up default terrain with even more diabolical terrain – it just needs to be different and interesting to the players.

Often you will have a variety of terrain that all blurs together because it doesn’t add much flavour, different game play, or game value. Consider the typical village region battle with grass, cropland, dirt road, and light foliage. Despite having four terrain types, they all play the same.

I would bundle the terrain types up and call them all default terrain, perhaps in this case, village terrain. This gives you room to offer up more interesting terrain as needed.

Enhanced terrain

This is terrain similar to the default but with one or more properties that are different. Enhanced terrain is often a derivative of the default terrain, and so it becomes a thematic as well as a tactical element. It also should generate greater danger or tactical options than the default terrain.

For example, the combat might be in woods. The default terrain is light trees and foliage. The enhanced terrain could be heavy trees and foliage that block movement, break line of sight, and provide cover; a pile of rocks that offers height advantage, cover, and ambush from a small cave; or a stream that blocks tracking and allows more rapid movement.

You might add rain to village terrain to make the road muddy and tricky to maintain footing on, snow to make non-road parts difficult to walk through and fight in, or deep snow to make ambush possible from any location.

Special terrain

This is terrain that is a lot different than your default or enhanced terrain. It can be within theme or breaking it, but it should have notably different game play. It can be extreme, and if so, should be limited to small areas of the battlefield, else it risks being considered default.

Special terrain should increase drama or have the potential for big impact. Perhaps the side that reaches it first, or figures out how to use it to their benefit first, will receive great tactical advantage.

For example, there might be three magic rune circles spread around the battlemap. If people are standing in all three at the same time they receive a significant magical boon that lasts three rounds. This special terrain might change combat from toe-to-toe hacking to positional play with both sides trying to get members into the circles and repelling the other side from doing so at the same time.

Another example might be poison globe plants that allow combatants to search for their fruit, which can be thrown and explode in a burst of poison spores upon impact. You could decide these plants hide well in thistles, so it takes time to find the fruit.

A third example is a combat that takes place near in a small crater. The ground is devoid of plants and the rocks are a strange orange colour. In certain areas larger parts of the celestial body remain intact beneath the ground. These areas have strong magnetism. Anything involving metal, such as moving in metal armour or swinging a sword, meets with great resistance, inflicting combants with potential movement, attack, and defense penalties.

Avoid too much terrain

Earlier I mentioned that offering too many hazards slows combat down and over-stimulates. Multiple terrain types that add a lot of extra rules to an encounter slows combat down because of the additional data tracking and communication involved. Players might get confused, forget, or not pay attention, resulting in lots of extra tabletalk about what terrain type has what effects. This extra data must be dealt with by every player each time it’s their turn. It also creates more for you to think about while game mastering.

If you have a rainbow of terrain types, any dramatic or flavour effects get lost in the crowd. Having magic runes, broken glass, boiling streams, and piles of rocks in every encounter deprives each of these interesting terrains spotlight time. Players will come to expect this large selection each combat, making fights with just two or three terrains seem less exciting.

Also, don’t forget there are several types of hazards. Monopolizing hazards by way of terrain each time is another way to make hazards less interesting over time.

The best case is to stick with two or three terrain types each combat – default plus a combination of one or two enhanced or special terrains. Then, unleash the full menu for important combats, such as with stage bosses or rivals for climatic scenes, or for encounters that have special significance to the PCs.

Mud is strikes fear into the hearts of heavily armoured combatants

The first helping hand you can offer your poor, underrated and under-appreciated combat hazards is to give them a great name. A name with gusto, panache, or spirit gives hazards a surge of vitality and interest. A great name inspires.

Instead of calling the mud in the middle “difficult terrain”, call it Grom’s Brown Demise. Rename ye olde pool of lava The Bubbling Heart of Hate. Switch razorgrass to The Slicing Green Tide.

If you find a hazard inspiring, you’re more likely to remember to use it during battles when you already have a dozen other things going on. Nay, not just use it, but employ it, like a finely honed game master weapon. Instead of just plopping difficult terrain down on the battlemat, the name of it inspires a GMing fever that demands you wield the hazard with subtle malice and perfect implementation before the fever breaks.

A compelling name also adds new interest in the hazard from your players. Some players will riff off the name to roleplay better during combat. Some players will see beyond the squiggly lines drawn on the map and be inpsired to play with more energy just because you’ve put such care and interesting detail into the game.

A spirited name begs world and campaign design. The group will wonder who this Grom person was, or why the locals call lava a bubbling heart of hate. If you get into the habit of naming your hazards with style, you’ll find a new source of development hooks that pays off in the long run.

If you have certain hazards – and their names – recur during the campaign, you are sure to inspire not only yourself but your group to investigate the history, mention the name to NPCs, and get more curious about the world in general.

It sounds too simple, I know, but crafting fun names is another great way to add a sense of wonder and mystery to your world.

Fire hazard - show players pics of real flames for best effect

Throw hazards into your combats to make fights more interesting, regardless of game systm or genre. Dungeons and Dragons, for example, has always promoted dungeon masters using traps and difficult terrain, though in the latest edition there seems to be more urgency for doing this.

To start this series off, I’d like to provide a working definition of what a hazard is. The word hazard can be a loaded keyword for your game, so it’s best not to make any assumptions about what we’re talking about.

A hazard is a combat element, other than the PCs and their foes, that brings danger, risk, or difficulty to the fight. Examples might be quicksand, a witch’s boiling cauldron, or acid rain.

A hazard can be harmful or just add an element of risk. It doesn’t have to injure, for example, like a lava pool could. A hazard might simply be deep snow that slows movement and makes combatants less nimble.

It’s important when designing hazards or dropping them into your games that there be some added gameplay value. The mountains 10 miles away might be dangerous to climbers, but they are not going to have an impact on the current combat, so they’re not a good hazard to add. :)

For hazards to be interesting to the game, I’d extend the definition to make hazards a challenge or exploitable tactic that adds complications, twists, or additional resource depletion to combat.

Some games put traps into a separate category. My definition will include traps as a type of hazard. This won’t affect your game’s rules, hopefully, but by including traps in the upcoming tips and advice about hazards I think your devilish devices and deterrents will make combats more interesting.

It doesn’t take much more than a quick flip through the pages of “…And A 10-foot Pole” to realise that it’s an extensively-researched volume. Aside from breaking history into twelve periods covering everything from the stone age (prior to 9000 BC) to the information age (1980+), it divides commodities into standardised categories and gives prices for each item in a common currency, that used for I.C.E.’s Rolemaster (except for modern eras, which use US$) – in fact, it’s even more extensive than I remembered when I reviewed it for inclusion in my top-20 3.x supplements. And on top of that, it lists Weights, has an Availability subsystem, gives the manufacturing time, and illustrates many thousands of products. Heck, how many RPG supplements do you know of that have 24 referance books listed in the Bibliography – how many even have a bibliography, if it comes to that!? (You can click on the cover illustration below to be taken to the Amazon purchase page for the supplement in a new window).

It should come as no surprise, then, that one of the priority items on my to-do list when I set aside my TORG campaign (due to waning interest and availability of players), and dusted off plans for my first D&D campaign in over a decade, was to work out a conversion system to permit me to replace the one-size-fits-all-eras price list in the PHB (it’s been over a decade since that decision was made, and I’m now GMing more D&D campaigns than non-D&D, so I must have done something right when I made that decision!)

Since others might want to do the same thing, or might want to adapt the procedure to some other referance volume, I thought I would use this blog to explain what I did, why it didn’t work, and how I got around the problems, concluding with the conversion rates in use in my Fumanor Campaign. In a follow-up blog, I’ll describe the coinage that I use in that campaign and list some of the tricks that I use to keep my hair from going grey while enhancing the realism of the coinage system, and that you can use too. But that’s for later…

When Is Right Now, Anyway?

The first decision that had to be made was what era the game was in. I didn’t want black-powder weapons, so that established a pre-gunpowder era. The campaign was set in a fallen Empire that was struggling to emerge from a sudden dark age initiated by the slaughter of most of the Gods and most of the population 100 years earlier, so I decided that the empire had been on the verge of gunpowder but the fall from enlightenment had cost them close to 100 years of progress.

So I looked up the sections on Typical Weapons for the different eras and found the earliest firearms in the “Renaissance” chapter, p85. This chapter therefore identified the technology level of the Old Empire, falling just short of the invention of these weapons. That in turn defined the preceeding chapter as the technological setting of the inner regions (“The Middle Ages”) while the chapter prior to that identified the “Dark Ages” as the technological standard in the outer regions.

While more realistic, I don’t think I’d do it that way again, it made for too much work. Far better to pick an era from “10-foot pole” and simply tag anything not listed in the previous chapter of the referance as being a “lost technology” not available in the outer regions. In fact, when that first campaign concluded and the sequel campaigns began, I quietly updated the setting to an entirely “Middle Ages” standard.

The failure of the obvious

The Rolemaster system uses a coinage system with eight different denomenations of coin: Mithril, Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, Copper, Tin, and Iron. Each of these is worth 10 of the next denomenation, enabling a price like “123456.78” to be read directly as “1 Mithril, 2 Gold, 3 Silver,” and so on. There are clear advantages to such a decimal system.

Until you know of the decimalisation of the Rolemaster currency, the obvious solution is simply to equate “1gp” in the D&D system with “1 Gold” in Rolemaster, “1sp” with “1 silver”, and so on. That solution falls apart immediatly when it is realised that the D&D ratios are not the same.

The next obvious solution is to use the Rolemaster solution exclusively; that doesn’t work either, because there are too many things in the game which have no equivalents in the Rolemaster product listing. How much is “+1 armour” worth? How about a Potion Of Healing, or a Ring of Invisibility? What of the gems and jewellery offered as treasures?

The next obvious solution is to pick one of the coin types common to both and define them as being equal in both systems. The question then becomes, which one? In an effort to resolve this question, I examined the prices for half-a-dozen items and commodities common to both sources – lanterns, arrows, swords, chain mail, a meal, and a pack horse. I was hoping for a consensus view, but some of these gave different answers, some didn’t give any satisfactory equivalents at all.

Complicating Factors

Other questions came to mind; while the copper piece is the most common currency in D&D, for many commodities this was still too gross a measure, as many units of a commodity could be purchased for the price of a single copper piece (or a number of copper pieces not divisible by the number of units). Should I equate like with like, or would ‘like with unlike’ yield more useful answers? Should the value of a copper piece be related to that of a tin coin (or a silver coin?) from the Rolemaster system, instead of the more obvious copper to copper?

This was a question complicated by the fact that the campaign in question was designed to be run with AD&D (this was before 3.0 was released) and was actually being run using 2nd edition rules (I was persuaded by my players). That meant that it had “electrum pieces” in between copper and silver. I disliked these intensely because electrum is a naturally-occurring alloy of silver and gold, and for the life of me I couldn’t see why that should place it’s value as a coin where it was. I intended to rename these “Bronze Pieces”, but otherwise retain their value in the coinage heirarchy.

I was also disturbed to realise that one of my primary intended conveniences, the standardisation of coinage, would not be possible in the D&D system, simply because the ratio of values of precious metals by weight was not reflected anywhere close to accurately by the values of D&D coinage.

Still another complicating factor was that the politics of the campaign background was intruding onto the relatively straightforward questions (I’ll go into details in the next blog post on the subject). Suffice it to say that the Old kingdom’s coins had been supplanted by newer currency (as often happened in the Roman Empire when an Emperor died) and a number of sources of social and political tension were at play as a result. This was, in part, a bid to control how much ready currency the characters acquired, something that I discussed in my last blog post, but for the most part it was to give the characters complications to deal with as a way of having them interact with the game world beyond simply finding the nearest dungeon and stripping it down like an unlocked fancy car in a slum neighberhood.

Finally, I wanted to try and provide some coins with more realistic face values. Why should every coin be worth “1” of something? Why not coins in denomenations of “2” or “5”?

The Lowest Common Denomenator

Part of the answer came when I learned that the Romans, to make change, or pay for something that cost less than a complete coin of the lowest denomenation, used to cut up their coins. This meant that I could keep the copper piece as the lowest denomenation if I wanted to.

I resolved a second of the complicating factors by decided to peg the currency conversion to the ‘modern’ coins in the campaign and worry about relationships with the old coins as a seperate issue.

Another complication was resolved be realising that most coins in modern times were adulterated alloys, often bearing no more than superficial appearance to the metals for which they aren named by common usage. Between that fact, and the realisation that coin values in part represented the rarity of a particular precious metal – something that could be intentionally varied relative to ‘real life’ in a game setting – any ratio of values of precious metals necessary could be stated as the de facto reality.

What’s more, the presence of Dwarvish Miners made it all the more likely that there would BE such a variation; rather than weakening the plausibility of the campaign, this could be a subtle tool to enhance it. I would need to assess just how much more common gold and platinum had to be for the currency ratios to fit, but once I had reverse-engineered my way back to that information, I could then reflect it in the use of precious metals for decoration – gold thread in sewing, and in armour inlays, and so on. This meant that the standardisation of coinage, inspired by an article read with great interest in an issue of The Dragon more than a decade earlier, was back on the table.

That left only two complicating factors, the first being what I should tag as the ‘lowest common denomenator,’ and the other being the desiire for more realistic face values. The second was easily dismissed; the very concept of a ‘lowest common denomenator’ meant that all “10-Foot Pole” prices would have to be converted into that coin scale, exchanged for campaign coins, and that price then converted back up the scale to get the number of sp, gp, pp, and so on. Following this logic, and that in the preceeding paragraphs, I could establish the relative value of coins for the campaign as whatever I liked and then return to the initial question.

I also saw the opportunity to enact another change that I felt quite strongly about during this process. Historically, silver coins were the basis of the economy, the largest denomenation currency that any ordinary person ever saw or handled. Gold coins were rare, and ownership of such vast sums was usually ‘transferred’ with drafts from a bank or moneylender or from the royal treasury; these were the origins of banknotes. I wanted gold coins to be as rare as hens teeth, and platinum even moreso; silver was to be the currency of standard in the Fumanor campaign.

You might think that this will make the work that I did back then less valuable to the readers of this blog, unless they enact the same change, and I’ve described exactly how to go about it if you want to do that; but I’ve taken the liberty of doing the work for you, both ways.

If you want to enact this change for yourself, here’s the procedure:

1. Convert character treasuries

• cp stay the same,
• sp are relabelled “bp”,
• extract about 90% of the gp, double the number of coins, and relable them “sp”
• keep the rest of the gp as “gp”,
• and double the number of “pp”.

2. Whenever you see a price or a treasure in an official source in sp, you read bp, whenever you see one in gp, you read sp, and whenever you see one in pp, you read gp.

3. You then have choices to make regarding the values of gems, artworks, and other valuables – either keep the value as written, keep the numeric componant but change the currency type (as for 2), or convert the values. I went with the middle of those three options to be consistant, EXCEPT that my campaign was taking place in a world where magic items were rare and hence more valuable, so those stayed ‘as written’.

4a. Consequences:

• of choice 1: the value of these immediatly doubles in real terms, ie buying power. It becomes twice as expensive to have these made to order. It can become cheaper to pay temple fees for low-level healing than to carry around healing potions.
• of choice 2: values stay the same in terms of number of coins, but the changed relationships of currencies mean that cheap things in the PHB become cheaper relative to things with the value in ‘gp’. This is slightly closer to being historically accurate.
• of choice 3: this is the most work and gives the most accurate conversion. But every price or value you ever see will need to be converted into copper pieces by multiplying by 1000 and then converted back into the new currency, which is a pain.

If I were doing it over…

Much of this stems from the legacy of ‘electrum pieces’ and the coinage conversions of 2nd Ed D&D and of the AD&D that preceeded it. These days, I would start with the 3e currency and do straight label exchanges: “sp” to “bp”, “gp” to “sp”, “pp” to “gp”, and then a new line for “pp” worth 10,000 coppers. It would make life so much easier. In fact, I’m strongly tempted to grandfather this change in – it’s something that I should have done when I converted the campaign to 3.0, but overlooked or decided not to, I forget which. I’ll have to discuss it with my players….

The Fumanor Basis Of Conversion

Getting back to the discussion at hand, I was more or less left back where I had been before all those complicating factors had tried to confuse the issue: with the question of what to peg as the basis of the exchange rate between the campaign and “10-foot Pole”. I was initially tempted to use salt, as that had been the standard currency used historically before coinage came along, but decided that a higher-value commodity would give more accurate results. That also excluded the price of a meal, or a standard night’s lodgings, and left me with a choice between a longsword, a pack horse, and a suit of chain mail.

The next step was to list those prices in detail, in all the different coin sizes:

Each of these gives radically different conversion standards (NB: this is comparing Fumanor currency with “10-foot pole”. The answers would be different for standard 3.x currency).

The Longsword standard gives a ratio of 75:180 for both copper and bronze, or 5:12, roughly 1:2. It also gives a ratio of 15 to 18 silvers, or 5:6, which isn’t all that far removed from a 1:1 ratio.

The Pack Horse standard gives a ratio of 325:450 for both copper and bronze, or 13:18, roughly 2:3. It also gives a ratio of 75:45 silvers, or 15:9, or 5:3.

The Chain Mail standard gives a ratio of 75:650 for both copper and bronze, or 3:26, roughly 1:8. It also gives a ratio of 15:65 silvers or 3:13, about 1:4.

All of these are potentially viable conversion rates, but by far the easiest to use is the longsword silver pieces rate – it’s so close to being 1:1. Furthermore, the fact that both the PHB (as filtered through ‘Fumanor Eyes’) and “Ten-Foot Pole” both list the price in silver pieces adds a further layer of temptation to the result, enacting the Silver Standard that I desired. So that’s how I worked it for Fumanor:

To convert a price from “10-foot pole”, convert it into sp (if it isn’t already) to get the price in Fumanorian SP.

A Standard D&D 3.x Basis Of Conversion

You only have to run your eye over the price comparisons to realise that the only values that are anywhere numerically close to 1:1 are the sp price in standard D&D for longswords and the bronze piece price from “10-foot pole”. In fact, the 150:180 ratio is exactly the same as the one we simplified to 1:1 when working on the Fumanor Standard. So:

to convert “10-foot pole” prices to standard D&D prices:
1. Convert the “10-foot pole” price into bronze pieces; and,
2. Read that as the price in sp.

ie,

• If the price is given in “gp” in 10-Foot Pole, x100 gives the D&D price in sp, or x10 gives the price in gp, or the price can be read directly in pp.
• If the price is given in “sp” in 10-Foot Pole, x10 gives the D&D price in sp, or the price can be read directly in cp.
• If the price is given in “bp” in 10-Foot Pole, it can be read directly as the D&D price in cp.
• If the price is given in “cp” in 10-Foot Pole, 10x as much can be purchased for the D&D price in cp.
• And finally, if the price is given in “tp” in 10-Foot Pole, 100x as much can be purchased for the D&D price in cp.

NB: “10-foot pole” gives no prices in iron pieces for the “Middle Ages”.

Once again, though, if you wish to usea different historical era as the equivalent civilization within your campaign, you will get different prices from “10-Foot Pole”, and a different conversion rate.

Conclusions:

I wish that it had been simpler; it wasn’t. I wish that the authors of the various editions of D&D had been consistant in their definitions of currency; they weren’t. I wish that they had historically-consistant pricing of goods; they don’t.

I suspect that the authors tried to be too generic, too one-era-fits-all, when compiling the equipment price list in the PHB; there are too many details of armour types and other historical information for them not to have researched the prices. In part, there may have been a “this feels right” allocation of prices, but I prefer to think that they did their research but failed to render a consistant picture through a failure to place the price lists they found into context.

But that’s precisely why a more detailed and researched volume like “…and a 10-Foot Pole” is so useful, even today, a decade after its initial publication, and for ANY roleplaying system.

Many monsters come with treasure in D&D. Taken at face value, these can quickly overwhelm a campaign. I thought I would run through a few measures that the GM can use to control how much hard currency the party gets their hands on.

First they have to find it

Most treasure will be found in a creature’s lair. Most encounters will take place near but not in the lair. That means that characters have to find the lair.

Even then, there is nothing that says that the treasure is in plain sight. Perhaps it’s buried. Perhaps its in another part of the lair – and say, how big is that lair, anyway? Is it a single discrete location, or distributed over a number of sites? Over how wide an area?

Let’s talk about prime real estate for a moment. What’s the chance that some other critter comes across the empty lair and sets up home in the meantime – a creature whose treasure allocation is therefore the same goodies as the first creature had? Okay, so it won’t happen very often, but even the occasional two-for-one deal can contribute to stemming the tide – when you’re talking about two critters for the one stash!

Material Goods instead of hard currency

Let’s say the the rulebooks list a creature’s treasure as 100 gp. Often, a GM will simply give away that much hard currency; this is exactly the wrong thing to do.

How much is the pelt worth (maximum)? Subtract that from the 100gp; then depreciate it according to the wounds and damage inflicted by the party. How about ivory from tusks, or antlers, or horns? Even if only prepared as decorations, they are worth something. There are bones which can be carved into tools, there is meat that can be consumed (even if it is socially unacceptable to do so, or the taste is unpalatable). Or perhaps the remains can be rendered down into glue. All of these subtract from the 100gp.

How about medicinal or flavourful herbs growing near the lair? Or natural veins of mineral that can be found by digging out the walls of the lair? Or rare delicacies like truffles that require exceptional olfactory senses to locate? Or perhaps there’s a pack full of rare foods that are on the verge of going off in the cache, and have to be consumed by the party because they won’t be able to trade or sell them in time?

Are there young in the lair that might be trainable, or inherantly valuable some years from now, or even right now as pets? Are there eggs that might be considered a (valuable) delicacy?

Chinese medicine is another topic worth consideration – are the organs of the dead creature worth something when dried or otherwise preserved? Whether they actually have any medicinal value or not? Sympathetic medicine until modern times often used such “remedies”. All of that should come off the 100gp.

And that’s before we even get to items that might actually be considered “treasure”. One of my favorite treasures to emplace in an artifical environment are artworks like statues and tapestries that are both inherantly valuable but inordinately inconvenient for transport and storage.

It’s not necessary to employ all of these, all the time; even one or two at a time can cut quite deeply into the currency available to the PCs. As with combat itself, treasure is a contest between the creativity of both PCs and GM.

Even in terms of hard currency, perhaps there’s a single coin that’s worth substantially more than its face value for some reason – if the players are clever enough to recognise it!

Finally, consider the potential for treasures that are worth the “book value” that the GM assigns – but only to the right person. A bag that has been embroidered with a particular crest might have a value of only half-a-gold-piece to the market in general, less if the bottom has rotted through; but to a particular collector, or to the family to whom the crest belongs, it might be worth a 1,000gp reward. It’s quite fair and within the rules for the GM to value that bag as 1000gp and leave it up to the party to discover the circumstances which enable them to get full value from it – no small trick if they don’t know what it is that’s worth all the extra currency.

All this discussion also points out that the treasure itself can be the source of future scenarios in its own right, or just the hook to link one scenario with the next. Again, it’s not the only way, but it has its place in the GMs repetoire.

Magic Items: a different problem

The real problem with magic items is that they concentrate and focus wealth into direct benefits for the character who has them. So much wealth that they can be devestating to an economy, and to the game, if converted back into currency; but we want them to be rare, so that the characters appreciate them when they find one. This is a vicious cycle with no easy solution. But there are some stopgaps that can be used to keep things from getting completely out of hand.

When is a treasure not a treasure? When it’s incomplete and only partially functions (if at all) – like gathering the shards of Narsil before it can be reforged, this could be a way of giving the unwashed some goodies without letting those goodies take control of the PCs capabilities. It’s a nice tip of the hat to the original “Wand Of Orcus” from AD&D, and can serve as a way to tie scenarios together that would otherwise be completely unrelated and unconnected.

Even better is a magic item that seems to be quite low-level, but that has additional abilities under specific circumstances – in a particular plane of existance, or in a temple, or in a library, or under a full moon. But that brings up another issue that I’ll get to in another blog sometime – the problem with Identify.

Another possibility is a ‘mundane’ treasure that has been prepared for specific magics to be enchanted into it, but that is ’empty’ until a specific ritual is performed to ‘awaken’ the magic within. Of course, the PCs won’t know the ritual, or even if they want to perform it; that will take further research, consultations with experts, etc.

You can get a wealth of such ideas from “Master Of The Five Magics” by Lyndon Hardy. Although it’s currently out-of-print, Amazon lists a number of second-hand copies for as little as US$0.01 – just click on the image to order it.

The next best solution to the problem is to restrict the lifespan of the object. Potions, Scrolls and other 1-shot items are the best example. Wands and the like – with a healthy percentage of the charges used up – are next best. You should never give away a wand with all its charges intact!

Side effects from flawed construction can work a few times, but tend to exasperate players who feel more than a little cheated, so that solution is best reserved for a few special occasions.

The final answer that comes to mind is, paradoxically, to make the item uberpowerful – something that the party can’t use, but that they don’t dare release onto the market for fear it would wind up in the hands of their enemies. The risk you take with this ploy is that at some future point, a new character might be introduced into the party specifically to take advantage of the item, taking it out of the closet as it were. This is especially likely if the players know that the party treasury has something sitting around that gives that particular character a substantial advantage.

Grabbing Hold with one hand

Of course, just because the characters have something doesn’t mean they get to keep it. Taxes, tarrifs, moochers, beggers, con men, and thieves should all flock to their vicinity. A good rule of thumb is to equate the party’s total wealth (including magic items) to the xp total of the most-skilled thief trying to take it away from them. While not everyone will inflate prices on them, enough to at least knock the edge off their accumulated holdings should try.

The alternative is for the party to make out to be paupers. This deters the swindlers, and their kin, but it implies that the party are unsuccessful, a reputation that should come back to haunt them.

Another excellent tool to bear in mind is the power of expectations – “we have a standard to uphold” should be the refrain from any affiliation the characters might have. Opulance implies wealth, which implies success, which implies power, which confers authority – not only directly on the characters but on any guild or profession that can claim to represent them.

GMs should not ignore the temples, either. There should be pointed sermons on charity whenever a successful character glances sideways at a temple or church, and if a donation is made to any one of them, the others will most assuredly fill the ears of any who will listen with allegations of favoritism.

One measure to be avoided is the ‘poor relatives in trouble’, which has become something of a hackneyed cliche. Far better to have the ‘poor relatives’ kidnapped for ransom, or to play the expectations card again.

The best solution of all, of course, is to find something that the characters want to invest in and soak them for all they’re worth. Political office, with its implications for servants, estates, wardrobe, receptions & parties, is a wonderful choice. Throw in a drought in the region, lowering tax revenues while requiring the purchase of wheat and other foodstuffs from greedy neighboring kingdoms, can relieve PCs with too much wealth on their hands of a substantial burdon!

Levies of troops and funds for a foreign (and hopeless) perpetual war can also be a useful lever to have at hand.

Managing the wealth of your player characters gives them motivation to keep adventuring, creates opportunities for new and interesting events in their lives, adds to the realism and believability of the campaign, offers new and difficult challenges, and keeps them from destroying the campaign with their very success. Its in their best interests, really.

Part 1 of this blog post listed nine general supplements. Parts 2, 3, and 4 added three planar supplements, four supplements about magic, and four supplements about game settings and gaming environments.

That makes a full twenty-count by my tally. This fifth part is all about honourable mentions: supplements that didn’t make the final list, but deserve some recognition, and some explanation of why, and of why they didn’t crack the big time. I agonised over the selection process used to determine the top twenty for quite some time, cutting this and adding that, and debating back and forth over the relative merits of volumes that were as distinctly different as Picasso and Beethoven (they may both be artists, but that’s where the similarity ends)!

Ultimately, I evolved a loose criteria based on the number of campaigns in which the supplement has been useful, then threw in a couple of ringers that I simply could NOT leave out. Right up to the day before making this compilation public, the final list was in a state of flux and revision. The only things excluded were the three core rulebooks.

Like the top 20 that preceeded them, they are not presented in any sort of ranking; they are listed in the order they came to hand, once the top 20 were culled from the list of candidates (except that I’ve lumped one big bunch together, because I use them as one BIG supplement in multiple volumes). Where possible, I’ve given a cover image, linked to the Amazon page for that particular supplement. If that isn’t possible, I’ve pointed the link to the wesbite of the company responsible.

Just because a given product isn’t listed either here, or in the main list, should not give anyone offence; beyond the 40+ supplements I’m listing, there are at least a dozen more that didn’t get considered simply because I haven’t had time to read them yet, and more than twenty beyond those which are on my shopping list but that I have not been able to purchase. This is a dynamic, ever-changing list, and last week’s favorite might be in next week’s doghouse simply because it stops being relevant to my immediate campaigns, or because I feel I’ve exhausted its ideas and need to bring in something new to keep the campaign fresh. Examples include the products collectively represented by the Masterwork Anthology, (which is listed below but for the first twenty-two iterations of the finished list was in the top twenty), and Books by AEG, and Mongoose, and WOTC, and Malhavoc Press, and Green Ronin, and FFG.

Part 5: 28 Honorable Mentions

Nobis

(Pantheon Press)
The only real reason why this supplement, which I’ve reviewed here, didn’t make the top 20 is that it’s so new that it has not yet made an impact on my campaign. Aside from being relevant to the next Fumanor campaign (once the current two are wrapped up, about 3-5 years from now), there are a number of other campaign ideas that sprang to mind when I read it. In terms of quality and as a source of inspiration in depth, it absolutely deserves a place in the top 20.

Mastercraft Anthology

(Fantasy Flight Games)
I had this volume listed in the top twenty for the longest time. Essentially a sampler put out by Fantasy Flight Games containing selected extracts from ten of their supplements, I got idea after idea from this book, including devising an entire campaign for two players from a pair of prestige classes from Path Of Shadow. I have bought no less than three copies of this supplement: I bought my first one, lent it out to someone who didn’t return it, bought another, misplaced it, and bought still another to replace the lost volume (only to have it turn up again)!

You don’t buy a game supplement – ANY game supplement – three times unless it’s incredibly valuable to you. To date, I’ve been able to buy only two of the ten volumes excerpted (the others ARE on my shopping list) and both of those are in my top twenty (Monster’s Handbook and Spells & Spellcraft).

Ultimately, it was the fact that 20% of this volume is already in the top twenty that led to the removal of Masterwork Anthology to the honourable mentions list, to make way for another, equally-deserving game supplement. And that’s the ONLY reason it isn’t in the top twenty.

I urge you: if you (a) Run a 3.x campaign, or might run one at some point; and (b) Don’t already have the FFG suite of supplements; then seek out a copy of this volume. It’s getting hard to come by, but there are still some out there. And, once you have the full set of FFG volumes (and you will buy them after reading the anthology), put it up for sale on Amazon or E-bay so that someone else can benefit!

Chronomancy

(Mongoose Publishing)
A difficult subject, time travel. I’ve seen it done well only once, in the rules to a completely different game, but even those rules only addressed one possible mode of time travel, one possible theory of time. So I approached this supplement with a healthy dose of skepticism, it must be said. To my astonishment, it avoided all the pitfalls of letting time-based magic loose in a D&D campaign. I havn’t actually used it for much as yet, but it forms one of the central hubs of a future campaign that I’m planning once the current Fumanor campaigns wind up, and was also pivotal in shaping my Shards Of Divinity campaign.

I’ve also referred to it once or twice in relation to my superheros campaign and it’s spin-off space opera campaign, but the concepts, techniques, and limitations of time travel in those campaigns are well-established by now. I still havn’t read it in as much detail as I’d like, but even so it was in the top-twenty until the last-possible milliseconds (when I realised I’d miscounted the number of entries in the first part of this series)!

Tests Of Skill

(Skirmisher Game Development Group)
This is a collection of small scenarios that generally need skill and roleplay to resolve and not just beating on something with a weapon. Beginner GMs should buy it to learn how that sort of thing can be done, experienced GMs should buy it because there’s some interesting stuff in it. Mostly of the mid- to low-fantasy nature, I think these would also translate fairly well to Ars Magica and other fantasy systems. In fact, that’s my biggest criticism of it – that it doesn’t fit too well with the high-fantasy subgenre that is my usual stomping ground. Having said that, it will be a great resource for low-level character scenarios, which can be very difficult to write. So I expect to get quite a lot of value from it in the long run. It’s also worth noting that an updated version, Tests Of Skill 3.5, is available as an e-book.

Dezzavold, Fortress Of The Drow

(Green Ronin Publishing)
This is the first real multicultural, multiracial, interpretation of the Drow that I’ve seen. The concepts both bring the Drow closer to the Elves and move them farther away at the same time, a duality that fascinates me. More importantly, it makes Drow and their society seem both more real and more plausible by expanding their domestic horizons beyond the isolationism that most GMs (myself included) make central to the racial and social concept of the Drow.

Dungeonscape

(WOTC)
If the two volumes listed in the top twenty inform you about Dungeon design, this volume tells you how to implement those designs. This was also in the top twenty for a long time – so much so that I was contemplating making the list a top-25 in order to keep it there! Some of it is redundant once you have the Dungeons and Dungeoncraft, which between them do a better job in those areas where they overlap with this supplement. As with Masterwork Anthology, it was that redundancy that ultimately dropped Dungeonscape out of the top twenty. It’s still strongly recommended.

Stormwrack

(WOTC)
I have three books on sea-settings for RPGs – this, and two supplements for Rolemaster. I know of one more, Seafarer’s Handbook from FFG (excerpted in Masterwork Anthology), but I don’t have a copy of it – yet! Those four, plus the material available for Seventh Sea, comprise the sum total of the game supplements relating to sea-based adventures that I’m aware of (but there are undoubtedly a couple of GURPS supplements that would be relevant as well, there almost always are)! Rarity alone makes this a potentially valuable resource.

Only one of my fantasy campaigns has yet taken to the high seas, and that only briefly – the equivalent of a voyage from Britain to Spain – but two of them will do so in a more extended way, in due course. On that brief excursion, this was an invaluable resource, so those longer sea journeys should be when this supplement comes into its own (hopefully joined by Seafarer’s Handbook). So it’s good enough for the top-twenty, but doesn’t get enough use in my current campaigns to stay there – yet. Until that changes, this volume sits and waits.

Frostburn

(WOTC)
The only reason this didn’t make the top-20 (probably displacing Sandstorm) is that I have had more scenarios take place in desert climes than I have in icy terrain. On the one occasion when a scenario did take place in a frigid setting, this was exceptionally useful.

Current plans do involve using an arctic setting for a future scenario or two in the Shards Of Divinity campaign, at which point this supplement will again take centre stage. (It really should be in the top-twenty, darn it…)

The Complete Guide To Fey

(Goodman Games)
This supplement is excellent, as far as it goes. But before I could really get a grip on Fey in my Shards Of Divinity campaign, for which this was explicitly purchased, I had to extract fundamental concepts from the Seventh Sea material on the Fey, and from the Merlin telemovie made a couple of years ago with Sam Neill. So it falls a little short in some measure, but it was hard to pin down what was missing because what IS here is fundamental to the Fey as they appear in that campaign. Finally, it came to me: this volume is too matter-of-fact, too mundane in it’s implementation of the Fey. What’s there is excellant, but simply not enough to elevate the Fey beyond ordinary fantasy-fodder.

Fey Magic

(Mongoose Publishing)
Within it’s quite narrow terms of referance, this is an excellant supplement. But without a context for the Fey and their society, it lacks usefulness. Once allied with the Goodman Games supplement listed above, and the Seventh Sea material referred to, it becomes incredibly useful material. The three sources in combination make one Great supplement.

Spell Compendium

(WOTC)
This supplement compiles spells from a number of other WOTC supplements. This is both its blessing and its curse. For example, I had a number of issues with the contents of The Book Of Vile Darkness and The Book Of Exalted Deeds – too many of the Spells and Feats and Prestige Classes seemed overpowered in comparison with comparable equivalents from the PHB. As a result, those supplements were banned from my campaigns except where I gave explicit permission for an item to be included. Since those spells are amongst those incorporated into this supplement, without indicating their origins, I now have to either accept them into the campaign despite that ban, or ban this otherwise-useful book.

For the moment, I have chosen the latter course, without making a definitive ruling – but it means that every time it is referred to during play, I get suspicious and uncomfortable and unhappy. That alone is enough to keep it out of the top twenty. But even if that weren’t the case, it contains one absolutely unforgivable and totally inexplicable flaw: it’s spell lists are not unified, ie they don’t include those listed in the PHB. Even if WOTC didn’t want to reproduce the spell descriptions, they should at least give a complete spell list. This so handicaps the usefulness of the supplement that it would not make the top twenty. And finally, it’s incomplete, again for no good reason. It doesn’t include the spells from Sandstorm, for example. So it even fails in it’s primary mission of being a complete spell compendium!

With one dissapointment after another, it can even be questioned whether this supplement deserves a place even amongst the Honourable Mentions. Only one thing earns it that place: the sheer number of spells that it DOES include. It reduces the number of supplements that I have to carry when I game, and that is both the only reason why I use it, and why it earns a place in this list.

Magic Item Compendium

(WOTC)
I’m only starting to use this supplement in my campaigns, and that’s the only reason it didn’t force it’s way into the top twenty – though heavens knows what I would have bumped to make room for it (Maybe that top-twenty-five notion should make a comeback…)

This doesn’t suffer from the complaints of the Spell Compendium, and it was the fact that it integrated so seamlessly with the DMG, providing new, unified tables, that I bought the Spell Compendium. Even more usefully, it supplements the DMG with additional rules (which I still havn’t had time to read). This is strongly recommended for any 3.x Campaign, adding more than a thousand items to the DM’s repetoire.

At the same time, they make more work for the GM in outfitting NPCs – simply because there is no master list that says “This is good for rogues, and this for mages, and this for druids, and…”. To use it, you have to read and remember what each and every item does. It might have been useful to generate a 1-line summary of each item the same way that has been done with spells…

Undead

(AEG)
A volume that I’ve only had the chance to skim through so far, it has earned its place here on promise alone (plus a couple of ideas that leaped off the page and into immediate use in the Shards Of Divinity campaign background). How much of the content will supplement that of Libris Mortism and how much of the two will be redundant, I don’t know. This is another item that, like several others listed here, could force their way into my top-20 in the future.

The Unholy Warriors Handbook

(Green Ronin Publishing)
It used to be the case, back in the AD&D days, that the first variant class that was introduced to almost every campaign was the Anti-Paladin, a Dark Warrior that exemplified the “other side” and stood in opposition to the Paladin, which was one of the toughest classes at lower levels.

3.x fixed that game balance issue fairly well, and the Blackguard became an official incarnation of the Anti-Paladin, which – by and large – seemed to conclude the issue of providing an opposition force. A balance of power was established which provides opposition significant enough for interesting adventures to take place.

Green Ronin released The Book Of The Righteous in 2002, containing a customisable core class for the construction of specialised Paladins. To balance the scales, 2003 brought the release of The Unholy Warrior’s Handbook to define the Paladins and Champions of evil gods.

This supplement saw extensive use as a referance in the formative stages of my Shards Of Divinity campaign, and that earned it a place in this list. It also inspired me to construct my own specialist Paladins in Fumanor – something that might have been better done if I had The Book Of The Righteous as referance, but I didn’t – that’s still on my shopping list.

Beyond these initial usages, the supplement has yet to have a measurable in-game impact (though that will change in the fullness of time if all goes according to plan), and so it doesn’t yet warrant a place in the top twenty.

Liber Bestarius (Eden Studios)	Monster Manual II (WOTC)	Monster Manual III (WOTC)	Monster Manual IV (WOTC)
Monster Manual V (WOTC)	Monsters Of Faerun (WOTC)	Creature Collection (Sword & Sorcery Studios)	Creature Collection II (Sword & Sorcery Studios)
Fiend Folio (WOTC)	Hordes Of The Abyss (WOTC)	Tyrants Of The Nine Hells (WOTC)	Epic Monsters (Mongoose Publishing)

The Monster Manual is a huge collection of creatures and opponants, all the more so when you’re talking about the 3.5 version. It has one huge flaw: my players know it cover to cover, often better than I do. They instantly recognise everything in it, and can recite strengths and weaknesses at the drop of a d20.

Now, I like to surprise them and have them think on their feet a lot of the time. I use four techniques to achieve this:

• Tricky situations involving ‘known’ creatures;
• altering (often with great subtlety) the nature of creatures;
• creating a lot of completely original opponant creatures; and
• expanding my repetoire of source creatures with additional supplements.

To put it bluntly, you can never have too many sources of foes with which to confound and confront your players. They should feel like they are confronting the unknown at every turn, and only feel confident when their characters are tough enough to take on that unknown without flinching. But, even beyond that entirely worthwhile objective, you can subtly alter the flavour of an entire campaign just by favoring one source over the others.

No one of these stands out as deserving a place in the top twenty; I mix and match between them shamelessly. But collectively, they are all worth having, especially when joined with the Monster’s Handbook (which DID make the top twenty) to permit the raising and lowering of creature capabilities.

A special comment concerning the Creature Collection: this was rushed out just in time to beat the official Monster Manual to publication, and as a result it contains numerous stat block errors. A second edition fixed those errors, is in a more user-friendly format, and updated the creatures to 3.5 rules. Oh, and it has a different cover.

The Vortex Of Madness (AD&D supplement)

(WOTC)
Every list needs a ringer or two to truly comprehensive. This list of honourable mentions contains two, both of which will play a pivotal role in my D&D campaigns in the future, and one of which has done so in the past. The Vortex Of Madness is the first of these; it contains the descriptions and history of five interesting and unique extraplanar locations. The rules may be AD&D, but the combination of The Manual Of The Planes and The Book Of The Planes (both listed in the top twenty) gives you all the tools you need to convert them. I bought this book for ideas and the inspiration, and those are provided in such abundance that they are enough to carry it this far; the work needed to adjust them to 3.x rules prevents it from reaching the top twenty.

Creatures Of Orrorsh

(West End Games)
The last item on the list, the second of the two ringers, and the one that’s seen past service in my campaigns. This supplement was written and released for TORG; it’s another creatures source, specialising in Gothic Horror. One or two of the creatures are inappropriate (for example, The Rotary Mower Of Doom), and a couple are too “cutesy” for a serious campaign (such as the Kangaware), but most of them suffer from no such problem. What I find particularly useful about this supplement is that many of these creatures have existing analogues in the Monster Manual or related volumes; simply taking the flavour text and the abilities described in the TORG supplement and reinterpreting them builds nasty curve balls into encounters with which to surprise players, and impart a little horrific subtext into the world.

Conclusion and call for input

I wanted to include these ‘honourable mentions’ because under other circumstances, in different campaigns (or even in the futures of my existing campaigns), several are likely to crowd their way into the top twenty (even if it has to grow to accommodate them), and because they are all worth having.

So it’s over to you, the readers: Have a favorite that’s not listed? The odds are that it’s on my shopping list, or that I already have it but havn’t had time to read it yet; but there’s also a chance that I’ve never heard of it. So TELL me about it! What else should be in the top twenty – even if it has to grow? What else should rate an honourable mention? What do you find indispensible, time and time again? And, most importantly, Why?

Someone once asked me why D&D bothers to include skills at all. After all, the GM generally tells the players anything they really need to know (rather than seeing all his hard work in preparing the game crash and burn); and even if he doesn’t, players can always take a twenty.

After further discussion, this person conceded that Spellcraft can be important, and so can pick lock, and possibly track. But most of the skills, he maintained, were fluff.

I disagree. Openly, completely, and vehemently. But with an important qualification: A character’s skills only matter if the GM makes them important.

That takes effort, and forethought, and preperation; and occasionally, the ability to think on your feet.

The subject of this blog is skills, how they are used, and how to write scenarios that make them something for players to expend considerable thought on. The techniques that are described are used in all my campaigns, regardless of game system, so they are universally applicable, but I will be using D&D as my example throughout.

Skill Definitions

The first ingredient needed before skills really matter in a game is for the GM to have a very clear understanding of what it is that each skill describes. At first glance, this is quite self-evident; but think about it a little bit and all sorts of nasty complications rear their ugly heads, gibbering and hooting and doing their best to confuse you.

Action Skills

Some skills are used to test the success or failure of an action, and nothing more. Skills like Climbing and Swimming are examples; so is Diplomacy. But hold on a minute – which skill should be used to estimate how long it will take to climb something? Okay, so climbing is not just an action skill! Is the Swimming skill the same if you want to race a 200m sprint as if you want to swim the English Channel? So what do these skills actually mean?

Clearly, to resolve these questions, we have to look at the game mechanics. Essentially, these come down to 4 factors: How often, how hard, consequences, and complications.

• How Hard: The harder it is to succeed, the more quickly a character will fail. The easier it is, the longer a character can go without failing.
• How Often: The more frequently a character has to make a skill check, the more likely it is that a small chance of failure will manifest. The less frequently a character has to make a skill check, the less likely it is that even a poorly-skilled character will fail on any given occasion (ie, the more likely it is that they can fumble their way to an unlikely success).
• Consequences: If a single failure spells the end of the attempt – what I call sudden-death situations – both these numbers are critical; ‘How Often’ can treated as providing context to ‘How Hard’. If circumstances are more forgiving, ‘How Hard’ is less important than ‘How Often’ – something that most DMs overlook.
• Complications: These are saving throws that are needed, or damage that is taken, or anything else that accompanies the skill rolls or that occurs in case of failure of a skill roll that is not automatically fatal to the attempt to perform whatever action is being attempted.

Combining these permits refinement of our interpretation of the skills in question:

• Any sort of sprint is all about going as fast as possible for the given distance. A character gets a base movement for free; what’s needed is some game mechanism for going faster – at the cost of temporary damage. “DC 5+5 per extra inch of movement, and the character suffers 1d6 for the first extra inch of movement, 2d6 for the second, 3d6 for the third, and so on, lasting until the character rests for as many minutes as he has swum” would be a suitable house rule.
• An endurance swim, on the other hand, is about going as slow as necessary in order to cover the distance – the goal is to stay afloat at any price. Applying the normal rules for swimming but permitting the character to lose forward speed for the rest of the swim instead of damage from drowning does a reasonable job of simulating the required task.

I didn’t have either of those house rules at hand (I havn’t needed them, thus far) – I pretty much created them on the spot for this blog post, in exactly the same way as I would if I needed them in play.

Expertise Skills

Some skills have, as their primary purpose, knowing how to do something. This might be anything from poetry composition to appraising gems. Surely, there’s nothing as likely to trip us up here? Or is there? A successful skill roll might produce an expertly-crafted painting – with absolutely no genuine creativity behind it; technically flawless, artistically devoid of merit.

Every expertise skill has some artistic or creative element – from discerning that a gem’s value will be enhanced when recut in a certain style to producing a masterpiece with baked beans and oil paints. Once again, we have no rules mechanism to guide us, and there is no characteristic that comes close to expressing or measuring creativity.

Here, the first question isn’t ‘can a house rule be created to reflect the activity’, but is one even necessary? This question had a self-evident answer when it came to action skills, because characters are sure to attempt to perform those actions sooner or later.

Interestingly, in this circumstance, the answer can be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, depending on how the GM defines the meaning of what the skill actually measures. It might seem like nit-picking, but a small difference in definition can have a tremendous impact in this case. Most GMs assume that Standard valuation techniques only assess the technical workmanship of a piece of craftsmanship and that the artistic creativity involved remains unidentifiable, simply because the rules only really talk about the workmanship aspects. Even the definition of a “masterwork item” refers only to the quality of the workmanship.

It ain’t necessarily so, folks. If we assume that the value of a craftsman’s work is the product of the execution and the inspiration, then standard appraisal values give us all the guidance we need. A work valued at 500gp might be a flawlessly-executed piece of limited creativity, or a sloppily-executed work of brilliant creativity or historical importance or rarity. That means that we only have to assess the overall value, and any random mechanism can be used to determine the ratio of technique to creativity, within reasonable limits. Or better yet, a value for a character’s creativity can be determined by the referee or the player (as appropriate), documented in the character’s personal description, and the overall value of an item used to determine the technical success of the work.

Similarly, when appraising a gemstone, the appraisal value reflects the value if the gem is used in the way that maximises its value – any lesser usage reduces the value.

Knowledge Skills

Some skills are simply about knowing things. Here, the issue is one of demarkation between one skill and another. Does “Knowledge: Religion” contain knowledge of rituals and church hierarchy and politics, or does it contain knowledge of theology – or both? Does “Knowledge: Abberations” give the character knowledge of Abberations sufficient to identify a footprint as probably not belonging to an Abberation?

Knowledge rolls are usually sudden-death rolls – a character either knows something, or he doesn’t – at least according the assumptions of most GMs, that is! Once again, this is a flawed assumption.

I interpret knowledge checks differently: If a character succeeds in a Knowledge Check, they have succeeded in recalling any pertinant information they have on the subject. If they fail, the GM can either determine that they have no such knowledge, or that they have simply failed to recall it – and can try again after an interval of time determined by the GM. Even taking a twenty – if the characters have the leisure to do so – only gives this level of ‘success’.

How does a GM assess what relevant information a character might have?

There’s a heirarchy of information that I always keep in mind, of varying reliability:

• Common Knowledge: heavily contaminated by superstition, rumour, misinformation, and dogma.
• Race-specific Knowledge: Dwarves tend to know about mining, humans about farming, elves about forests, and so on. Every race has its own areas of knowledge – to such an extent that in my Shards Of Divinity campaign I have created specific racial skills and skill packages (and gave characters extra starting skill points to spend on them). Although each race has its blind spots and contaminated knowledges, a fair amount of this information will be reliable – and usually couched in terminology that reflects/reinforces that race’s perspectives and prejudices.
• Profession-specific Knowledge: Fighters know about weapons, Mages about magic, Clerics about theology, and so on. Like races, this information is sometimes biased, inaccurate, or contaminated in some respect, but much of it is reasonably reliable.
• In-Game Experience: Discoveries made during play are usually accurate but may also be misleading. However, players often make the mistake of assuming that hearsay from NPCs falls into this category, while the GM (who knows the truth) often makes the mistake of having other NPCs ‘know better’.
• Character Background: If the character’s background mentions an encounter with Rakshasa, the character can be assumed to have picked up some knowledge of Rakshasa. If the character’s family come from a farming community, the character will have some knowledge of agriculture. And so on. This is usually extremely reliable knowledge, because everything that’s suspect has been relocated into other categories.
• Hearsay, Surmise, Speculation, Rumour, and Deceptions: These are about as reliable as you can get – not! The more general the information, the more likely it is to be at least partially correct. The more specific it is, the less it can be relied on. For hundreds of years, because the Bible stated that Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs, anatomy texts showed women with more ribs than men. Eventually, someone counted.
• Character Education: This amounts to someone passing on information from one of the other categories as truthful. That makes it equal parts hearsay and racial knowledge &/or profession-specific knowledge.

When a player asks what his character knows about something, I have him make a knowledge roll. If he succeeds, he remembers something – which may or may not be accurate, but will almost always be plausible. If he fails, I feed him disinformation, with a hint that it’s unreliable, or he comes up with a total blank on the subject.

I NEVER reveal what the DC was. I NEVER tell them exactly what the most appropriate knowledge skill is, because that gives hints as well; instead, I let them check on a couple of different Knowledge skills (whatever they think appropriate, but I make sure that the most appropriate one is included) and ignore those that aren’t relevant.

If the character rolls a twenty (as opposed to taking twenty), whatever I tell them explicitly is completely accurate, no matter how limited it is; I’ll also throw in some extra information, but tell the players that they have rather less confidance in that info. If it’s relevant, I may let them read a section from the Monster Manual (or whatever) – without commenting on whether or not that specific entry is relevant, and on whether or not I’ve changed the creature to make it wholly or partially inaccurate. If a player brings a specific referance book to the table, I’ll use it in exactly the same way.

One of my players once asked what his character could determine from the architecture of an archway. Using a book I’d borrowed from the library for the purpose (having anticipated the need), I proceeded to give the character a half-hour lecture on lintel structures (actually, it was only about 5 minutes, but it FELT like half-an-hour!) – then told the player that the lintel on the archway obeyed none of those rules. Result: the character was completely convinced that every scrap of knowledge he posessed said that something funny was going on. The entire question was irrellevant to the question of what really WAS going on with the archway, however!

As a result of these practices, my game has become known as one where the players can trust me to put their character’s knowledge skills – and their ignorance – to good use.

Sensory Skills

The final category of skills are those which describe a character’s awareness of the world around them – Spot, Listen, Search, and so on. You might hope that finally, here is a class of skill in which there is virtually no complication; since these skills are used (in general) in exactly the way they are designed to be used, the official rules should more or less spell out exactly how they should work, right?

If only life was so simple. If a character knows there is something hidden in a specific location, should you permit extra search rolls until the character either finds it or gives up? How much can be discerned with a cursory glance, and what needs a careful and deliberate observation – and which one is the default? How about purloined letter syndrome? How about extra senses, such as Elves and Dwarves have?

Here’s how I handle these skill questions:

• The last one is easy to solve. Elves and other races with some type of extra sense frequently take a skill (analagous to Spot) to define their ability with this additional sense in my campaigns.
• When I write my scenarios, I generally write my location descriptions in short, declarative sentances. I preceed each with a number in brackets, which describes the base DC for spotting something, and carefully sequence them in order of ascending difficulty; then I can use the total generated by each character to tell them exactly what they see. I’m careful not to include any form of analysis in these descriptions; they are all straight observation.
• I consider a cursory glance to be a straight INT check, not a Spot roll, which requires the character to be deliberately looking at whatever is there to be seen for at least a round.
• And “purloined letter” syndrome describes repeated failures of a Search or Spot roll. Each time someone repeats a search, I add 5 to the DC for the next check, and have it take twice as long. The character can double the time to reduce the penalty by 5, or can halve the time and have it go up by another 5.

Writing Scenarios That Make Skills Important

Okay, so now that you’ve got a handle on walking the skills system around the block a time or two until it says “Uncle” and does the things that you want it to as GM, it’s time to look at just how to write scenarios that make skills something that matter.

Don’t give away the meaning

Actually, I’ve already described this technique in the previous section. When you’re describing a scene, start by asking yourself how much of it the characters will see with a cursory glance; that’s your DC5 result. Isolate the most significant element of the scene from the character’s perspective (“The big hairy thing trying to bean you with a club”); describe one or two more specific elements – physical description, clothing /armour, armament, identifying features – and put each into a single short sentence. Add 3 to the DC for each. Then describe details of the scene in general, starting with the next most important, and working down. Keep upping the DC by 3, but start from about 10 less than the highest value assigned to “the most important thing”. Then go into details of each other object that’s there, starting from about 5 less than the highest “general” item, and incrementing each line’s DC by 3.

This sounds like it’s a lot more work, and for the first two or three times you do it, that might actually be the case; but your descriptions will quickly become fuller and more detailed, and you will soon get into the habit. After a while, it actually saves time, because you get used to considering each item in detail. Once you do, you can start cutting and pasting old descriptions and giving each a minor tweak, saving yourself a LOT of time.

…But Don’t make your players play “20 questions” either

At the same time, there are going to be things that are blatantly obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. You should always make sure that “the big yellow truck,” and anything equally obvious, is included in the minimum information you give to the players. Make them work for the nuances, but spell out the obvious – even if you have to be vague about what the obvious actually is.

A little knowledge attaches significance

The GM should never explain anything without a skill roll. Tell the players what their characters see and hear; remind them of noteworthy things they may have seen in the past; then let the players ask their own questions, and find the significance of the answers themselves – in response to the results of relevant skill rolls.

I normally give players up to two skills rolls for free; thereafter, each represents a 1 round loss of action in battle, a 2-3 second delay in speaking in a conversation, or a 1-minute delay in other circumstances. This forces players who want to extract the last drop of significance to pay the appropriate penalty in roleplaying, so that they don’t go on fishing expeditions (except when they can afford the luxury of doing so), while acknowledging and rewarding players who know the system, and hence don’t waste the GM’s time on frivolities.

Many of my players have learned that making a roll on the obvious skill tends to lead to the obvious answers; if they can make some educated guesses based on what they know of the campaign, they can quickly focus their attention on some telling details that let them infer the obvious stuff for themselves. It takes them fewer skill rolls to get to the important stuff, making it easier for them to play the roles of intelligent characters. Some of them are better at this than others – and to anyone who has yet to master the art, it can sometimes seem like the experts are plucking the truth out of thin air!

The next stage in their development as players is for them to start deploying their conversationalists strategically – instead of the character who is most qualified to speak on a subject taking the lead in a conversation, they can leave the opening gambits to other characters while they spend more of their time honing in on the important clues to what’s going on, something they are more qualified to do for the same reason that they are the best people to speak on a subject: because they have the highest skill levels in that particular subject. To date, no-one in any of my campaigns has really figured out how to do this, though on a couple of occasions they’ve managed to do it more-or-less accidentally.

You can often see characters in TV shows – especially high-level political figures – doing the same thing. Some underling starts the conversation, often making greetings and formal small talk, while the real experts and powerbrokers watch and learn. I’ve also seen the same thing happen in panel-based job interviews, where the person with the biggest influance over a yes/no decision is often the last person to speak.

As a result of these practices, not only do skills matter more in the campaigns, but the players are using them more often not only in terms of game mechanics, but to improve their roleplaying. This is a rare example of a game mechanism operating to bring the players closer to their characters and to the game world.

Prepare Historical skill rolls

All this places additional responsibilities on the GM. First, he’s got to really understand what’s going on in his game, so that he’s ready with the answers. This is most easily achieved in a published game setting that is well cross-referanced and has an excellent index – pity there aren’t many of those kicking around! Next best, and almost as good, is a campaign setting that the GM has created himself from scratch, simply because he’s more likely to know what’s in it. A published background with normal production standards is the next best option, and it’s a fairly remote one. The GM needs to have read and digested it several times – and not just from beginning to end; pick a random passage and see how quickly you can find a related passage, so that you learn where to find what you need at any given moment. This is so much work that I find it a LOT faster to create my own ideas!

Secondly, the GM needs to be alert for opportunities to sneak historical skill rolls into his narrative. This comes in two types of circumstance:

• Treasures: Whenever there’s an opportunity for a craftsmanship vs creativity distinction, there is an opportunity for the PCs to assess that distinction. Failure to do so might even compromise the value of some of the treasure that they find – gemstones poorly set or used in a setting that minimises the artistic componant of the maximum valuation, gems that are poorly cut, armour that is beautifully decorated but poorly constructed and vice-versa, etc etc etc.
• NPC Knowledge & Dialogue: NPCs should be subjected to the same rules as the PCs when it comes to analyzing a situation or answering a question – nothing without a skill roll (or at least, the faking of a skill roll by the GM. But that’s a whole different blog topic.)

Be prepared for your players to make mistakes

It might seem to be completely obvious, but when you are designing the week’s scenario, make sure that there is scope for the players to miss the crucial information, to misinterpret, to go off on wild goose chases, and generally to make mistakes. The world will seem all the more real to them when they realise that they can make mistakes and have to live or die by their decisions.

This requires you, as GM, to at least have a vague idea of what they will find in any mistaken direction that they might head. You need to know what clues they might find to suggest that their judgement might be in error (if any), and what the consequences will be of their being in the wrong place when the right time comes.

And there should definitely be consequences. The villains should advance their plans, and it might even become too late for the PCs to derail those plans. At the very least, it should become a far more difficult task to achieve. However, the GM should always build in some form of ‘last resort’ way for the PCs to save the day, no matter how impossible the odds might seem!

Reward Players For Doing The Right Thing

…especially if it means that their characters are penalised in some fashion. Reward original thinking, reward using the game system the way it should be used, and reward them for using the game mechanics to advance their roleplaying. A little positive reinforcement can work wonders.

But bear in mind that if a battle becomes harder as a result of a player mistake, it will be worth more XP, and possibly more treasure – so such rewards are sometimes built-in already.

Punishments should be indirect (usually)

If players don’t do those things that the DM wants to encourage with a reward, they should not be punished directly. Instead, the enemies should gain advantages that do NOT reward the PCs, either now or in the future. Only behaviour that the GM wants to explicitly Discourage should result in direct punishment. The GM should also be wary of collatoral damage to other players who may be innocent of any wrongdoing!

Don’t get angry, get even!

Some Additional Notes:

Additional Uses for existing skills

In Knights Of The Dinner Table issues 119 and 120, there was an article entitled Making The Most Of Your Skills by Jim Davenport, which went through just about every skill in the official D&D 3.5 rules and listed additional uses for them. Some I agreed with, and some I didn’t, but by and large it’s a magnificent resource.

For my Shards Of Divinity campaign, I took the list created by Jim, edited it to reflect my own opinions, and more than doubled the number of additional uses on offer. I’d publish it here in a blog, but don’t want to steal Jim’s work, and don’t really have the time to go through the more than 1000 additional uses for existing skills and work out which are mine and which aren’t. Maybe some other time.

In the meantime, go searching for the original articles. The author continues to write for KODT and is involved in the Serenity RPG; you can read his blog here (opens in a new window). His general d20 articles can be found in the “Creative Gamemaster’s Workshop” category.

Don’t be afraid to add more skills

At first glance, the spread of skills in D&D seems more than adequate. It doesn’t take too much experience with the system, however, before you start thinking of adding more. Some areas aren’t covered; some areas are general and/or generic, and you want to include racially-unique variations; and some house rules work best when expressed as skills.

The next step, as I’ve mentioned for my Shards Of Divinity campaign, is to create “skill packages” that are specific to each race, and express things that the race knows or does that are unique. Then you can do the same thing for each profession, ie Character Class.

I’m a great beleaver in forcing character constructions to be different and diverse. The more choices you force the players to make in terms of what they are good at, the better your game is, and the more individual your players become.

The key to this approach is ensuring that characters who invest in areas that the players don’t, gain an advantage from doing so under the appropriate circumstances.

Let your players run with the ball

If you institute just some of these changes, it might take your players a little while to get used to them, but once they do, they will quickly see an opportunity to take an advantage for themselves – especially if the NPCs are showing the way. It won’t take long before they are running with the ball, suggesting additional skills themselves. My players have reached the point where they will add skills and ask about them later, simply redistributing the skill points expended if their idea is denied. On at least 8 seperate occasions, I’ve found their ideas to be excellent and given complete approval; only once did I find that an idea was redundant (once though, I did change the base characteristic).

Not only does this make your game more unique and more diverse, not only does it make the campaign more plausible and the roleplaying more realistic, not only does it improve your understanding of the game and the campaign, and drive you to be a better GM, but it permits your players to invest themselves in the campaign, and gives them an immediate sense of ownership that is otherwise very difficult to engender.

That’s a lot of reward for a very small downside.

And that’s why I disagree so completely, and so vehemently, with the opinion that I echoed at the start of this blog.