Owlbears

We have started our newest campaign and so far it's a success. The party this time consists of; a half-elf ranger, a halfling barbarian, and a shifter rogue/monk. My husband and I homebrewed the shifter race for this adventure. He wanted to base his character off of the character Geth from the Eberron book series and we used the 5e race format to create his race based off of existing races.

The party started at level one, so the session was really about small encounters to get them leveled up a little before they get to the meat of the quest. I like to have times during the quest where my players are expecting one thing and get something completely different and I got to have a great one of those moments Sunday night. The party was moving through a stand of young trees and they could hear a stream ahead. They started to hear some splashing in the stream and started to sneak closer. Carter, the half-elf ranger, rolled a perception check which resulted in the following. “Through the trees, you, see what appears to be two bears splashing about in the stream.” They debated, should they go around or engage the bears. Hal, the halfling barbarian, wanted to go around but he was out voted. They snuck forward and I reveled the slide showing what they were fighting. “What the fuck is that!” Carter exclaimed. They were not up against two bears per say, they were up against two owlbears. What followed was a pretty impressive encounter that left Carter's character nearly dead.

Sunday was the first time I DM'd without the use of encounter maps. Hal was of course bummed, but I loved it. I think the encounters were much more fluid and it made my players better describe what they were doing in combat. Tyr and Carter are getting used to it, they both kind of like the visual of exactly where they are in relation to everything but they both said they thought it went well. It's only been one sessions of playing this way so I'm going to reserve judgment until we've got a few more sessions like this under our belts. At this point though I'm really liking the theater of the mind over the encounter maps. I'm not wasting time on tokens that didn't properly tie to character sheets, messing with the faulty initiative roller, or having to move tokens for players.

Changes to my Style

The Underdark is the main backdrop of my next quest, but the setting isn't all that's different. I'm approaching things in a couple of new ways. Normally I compose a quest by coming up with a plot skeleton and then I write out certain scenes that I plan to occur during the quest. Now, I've been fortunate in that this has worked out for me. I've never had to force my players into a situation. Thankfully they've always taken the hints and got themselves to where I planned them to be. I've been lucky because goodness knows they've thrown me a lot of twists and curves and polygons over the years. This time I just have the skeleton of the plot planned out, I don't have any prepared NPC dialogues or scenes. I normally DM 80% improv, 20% planned out in advance. For this quest, it's 1% plan and 99% by the seat of my pants. I generally do well at improv so I'm expecting that things should go well since I'm pretty good at coming up with things on the fly.

The bigger change this time has to do with mapping, I'm not using any. This is a pretty bold move given that we are playing on Roll20.net. Instead of maps players will have to use the theater of the mind. I've combed the net for tons of artwork and as they move through the quest I'll take them to different slides that will set the mood, the rest is up to their imaginations. I consider this to be a big positive because I don't really like using encounter maps on Roll20 for a fair few reasons.

Here are some reasons why I don't like them. A decent sized map takes up too much room on the grid, you can't see the map all at once without giving up tons of detail, and it's too hard to find the part of the grid you're working on when you actually have the map at a size where you can see all of the details. I've been using small maps so that the whole map fits on the screen but then I feel like I'm limiting the players' range of movement too much.

Tokens have proven to be a problem and I don't like to take time out of the quest to try to fix them. One of the problems we have is that Carter plays on an iPad and the app very often doesn't let him move his token. We waste time with him trying to move it and then I wind up just having to move it for him. All of which takes us out of the moment. The other problem I have is that tokens don't always reliably connect with character sheets. I've had so many occasions where I've tied a token to a character sheet and it works fine on one map but when we move to the next map I've got to retie the token to the sheet. I feel that tokens also take away from the players' imaginations. Rarely can you find a token that exactly or even closely resembles how a player envisions their character and I feel that that mismatch visual cue takes them out of the fantasy and makes it harder for them to role play their characters. In my last campaign I had a token that was very disruptive. The guys decided she looked like a stripper and there was no end to the pole and glitter thong jokes. Funny stuff, but what was supposed to be an intense wizards battle was way too light hearted. Don't get me wrong the guys had fun but my goal is always to get them deeper into their characters. Things in the quest can be funny, and I encourage that, but when the jokes bring us out of the reality I've created it's a problem in my book and that's why I'm going theater of the mind on this next quest.

My other problem is that I use Dundjinni to make the maps. First off something is wrong with mine, making me very limited in my map making choices. Making things worse than usual because I feel the program can't keep up with my creativity on a good day. I can't make maps that match what I imagine in my mind. For one thing it's a square system and my mind works on curves. When in nature do you find things that are a 90 degree angle? Now I know that there are curved walls you can use and there's always the pencil tool that allows you to draw but I still just can't get things close enough to my imagination. I think it's better to give good descriptions and let the players draw their own scene in their minds rather than throw a sub par map at them which gives them a visual cue that takes away from their imagination.

Tyr is game for this change and I think Carter will be just fine with it once he plays an encounter or two this way. Hall on the other-hand is not going to be happy about this change. Hopefully I'll be providing an exciting enough quest that by the end he will forgive me for not using his beloved maps. I hope this new quest with these changes will be as exciting as I feel it has the potential to be. I know I'm excited to dive into it.

Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, to the Underdark We Go

Things have been a little hectic lately and we've been hit or miss on playing which is why I've been lax in my posting. Last week we finished out the campaign, called Volk, that I based around Hal's cleric with an insatiable lust for killing the undead. I've noticed a trend in my campaign construction when my end villain isn't a dragon, I seem to make the uber “bad guy” a woman. I also tend to make evil NPC's women as well. It has something to do with the way I think. When you're driving down the road and someone's driving like a moron the average person will refer to the idiot driver as the opposite gender to themselves. I on the other hand always assume it's a woman and my husband always assumes they're a man. We're weird, what can I say, but I think it's the wiring in my brain. My players didn't bat an eyelash at the evil women NPC's but for some reason, a female necromancer at the end kind of threw them. They all expressed their shock and said from the way the quest had gone they were really expecting a guy.

This coming Sunday we move on to a new quest, most of which will take place in the Underdark nervous about this campaign. I shamefully admit I don't read the Drizzt books or the Dragonlance books, and I know nothing of Faerun, but all of my players do. Hal and Carter are a little familiar with the underdark and Tyr, my husband, is an underdark expert. I think I have a really good plot, but I'm afraid they won't find it up to snuff. I'm afraid I'll have something in the quest that they'll go, “that just wouldn't happen.” I've had Tyr give me an overview of the underdark. He's walked me through the levels, the races, fighting styles, monsters, and politics. Which I think has given me a pretty good handle on things. Still I'm nervous, I feel like I've got a lot to live up to and high expectations to meet. I've tried to read books that feature the underdark but to be honest I'm dyslexic and I can't read every old authors writing style. I do read, a lot, but books have to be written in certain styles for my brain not to turn them into a jumble. My plot seems pretty solid to me, though this one is a little different from my usual plot set up, more about that in another blog post. Despite my anxiety I'm really excited for this campaign, I think I'll be providing a rich experience that my players will be able to immerse themselves into. I'm always trying to get them to go deeper into their characters and I think this setting and plot will help them do just that.