WANT YOUR 5E CAMPAIGNS TO MOVE SLOWER?

One of the main complaints about modern D&D is that character zip through levels too fast. This often creates a game where the players never really have a chance to get to know their characters and their abilities or, in some extreme cases, even get to use a new ability before another is piled on, thus resetting the process. There are all manner of fixes and tricks and tips that have been suggested and created to address this but it seems to me that one of the easiest ways to do so is to take a note from another RPG, Call of Cthulhu. 

To begin with, I am not suggesting the adoption of sanity rules or even Lovecraftian horror to fix your games. Neither of these is really a fit for all campaigns and so does not really work well as a generic solution that can be applied to any campaign. Instead, what I am suggesting is that the game shift from slaughtering hordes of lesser monsters while delving endless dungeons to something more akin to the investigative style of the Call of Cthulhu RPG and increasing the threat of individual enemies so that they each become meaningful and pit your players against opponents that require more nuance and forethought to confront. For a more direct fantasy example, think The Witcher.

Because 5E, as written, only provides for X.P. for the slaying of monsters, simply reducing the number of monsters the party encounters will naturally slow their characters progression through the levels. This, however, is an overly simplistic way to approach this and must be considered only a piece of the puzzle and not the complete answer. Once we reduced the number of monstrous encounters we then need to consider the power level and complexity of the monsters the party will encounter. Of course, more potent monsters will come with greater experience rewards, but since they will also pose a greater threat to the party at any given level, the players will hopefully be encouraged to spend time role-playing and seeking out help or lore that will aid them in defeating these more potent threats. 

The goal here should never be to punish the players by denying them chances to fight for their X.P. but to make each fight become central to a plot and amount to something more than an a never-ending spree of slain humanoids, wild animals and bandits. That's not to say that these sorts of encounters can't fit into this new model, but you can now do away with the need to pad out an adventure with encounters to keep the action going and use role-playing, NPCs and mysteries to pull the players toward these, in my opinion, more rewarding encounters.

The mechanics of this shift in play style is pretty straight forward. Target your encounters to be at least dangerous or greater difficulty level in nearly every instance with the exception being those lesser encounters that push the plot along such as scuffles with NPCs, minions or the freak environmental encounter (wolves, dangerous plants, lesser undead) that build the theme and tone of the adventure. Choose your featured creatures from those that are complex and powerful, looking for those who have multiple resistances and vulnerabilities that the PCs can learn to counter and exploit. Monsters with lair, legendary and even epic actions are most suitable to this style of play. If needed, I fully encourage beefing up existing monsters to suit your needs through simple tweaks such as increased AC, additional resistances and new abilities that fit their theme. I highly suggest that you avoid adding more HP to these modified monsters as this will not add much in the way of interest to the creatures but will certainly turn fights against them into slogs. What we should always be looking for is creatures that can be defeated if only the party knew how. 

Once you have established the central encounter of the plot, you must then spin a web of motivations, secrets, lore, clues, and useful items the party can find to use against these potent foes. This is the meat of this style of play and I cannot overstate the importance of making the majority of such adventures as much, if not more, about the preparation to confront the foe as it is about the confrontation itself. Items that will aid the party in their fight can be normal magical items that one might find in other D&D games or they can be things that resemble lesser artifacts, full of risk and danger themselves. It is also easy to make these key items into single-use items.

So, you have your plot, it's main encounter and a web of investigative clues, tricks and tricks. Why would your players ever want to play this style of play? 

First of all, any use of this method is going to require buy-in by your players but it is important that your frame it to them in a way that assures them you aren't trying to rob them of X.P. or the chance to see their characters improve and truthfully, this is absolutely not the intention of this method. The real goal here is to provide the players with a chance to act less like cartoon action heroes and more like their favorite investigative, problem-solving characters in fiction, movies and TV. Police procedurals, detective stories, true crime podcasts, even YouTube lore videos are what this style of play feeds into. As mentioned earlier, The Witcher is a great source to reference what you are going for. 

You can assure your players that their characters will grow and develop but they will spend more time getting to know their characters. It is also worth noting that their accumulations of lore, secrets, tricks and items that let them combat these more powerful foes will add texture to their characters while they spend a greater span of time at any given level, much like in older editions. The end goal should always be adventure but adventure with more nourishment of the imagination and the player's abilities. Fights will be tough but rewarding and the pre-work of the players and their characters should pay off every time.

ON THE BENEFITS OF REUSING MONSTERS

With the vast variety of monsters available to DMs, it is tempting to try to use new monsters all the time. The temptation of the next challenge or the fear of encounters becoming boring is a difficult impulse to resist, but there is merit in resisting the call toward ever-new and differing monstrous encounters. It has been said that limitless options is almost as bad as no options and this is demonstrated easily in the use of monsters in your campaigns. If every encounter is something new and unique then no encounter really means much of anything. Reusing monsters helps establish a consistency and believability to your game world. This helps establish a sense of place and thematic consistency. 

As your players learn the world, they will learn its denizens and there is a profound sense of achievement for players as they begin to learn the workings of the campaign setting. Not only does this help the players feel they are getting to know the world, this familiarity will start to take monstrous encounters in new directions. The squeaking and fluttering from a dark cave begins to take on a new meaning with your players after their third encounter with bat swarms or stirges and their recognition of this queue will send them thinking and planning how they can avoid another round of blood loss and/or disease. When they encounters orcs again and again, the will start to find out that sometimes orcs can be bribed and that some orcs maybe aren't so keen on other monsters in the party's path.

There is a strange tradition in D&D of withholding monster identities from players and their characters. This often takes the form of a somewhat tedious, cat and mouse game of selective description that seems to serve no other purpose than to gaslight the players. While I recognize that this is generally intended to instill la sense of in-world wonder and mystery I also have to wonder if it is really all that necessary or even realistic. 

D&D is ostensibly based on the model of a medieval world in which the monsters of myth, legend, and fiction actually exist. The people of those worlds live and interact with, war against, and generally fear those monsters. So, if this is the case, why would any adventurer need to stumble through some one-sides 20 questions description of every monster they encounter? 

This is not to say that there aren't monsters worthy of or where a descriptive encounter is not needed and/or proper, but there are a good number of monsters that people would know from their day to day lives. Other creatures would be known through stories, song, family histories, teachings, and other methods of conveyed knowledge. It is for this reason that I feel the creators of the game really did a great disservice to players and the Monster Manual by removing the "Frequency" (and the number appearing for that matter) entries from the monster listings.

Even when using the frequency mechanic, DM's can still free to choose "show" rather than "tell" when the party encounters a new monster. This is especially true when they are travelling a good ways away from their home territory or when they are encountering creatures that are truly mysterious and unusual. Even when encountering common creatures, the DM can still play it close to the cuff. Would a party of beginning adventurers be able to tell the difference between an ogre and a hill giant? Perhaps locally, as in Tolkien's world, terms like orc and goblin are interchangeable? Just like in real-world folklore and legends, creatures often blur together or are even treated as individuals. When the party encounters fey creatures will they be able to distinguish between a sprite, a pixie, a brownie and a leprechaun? 

In the end, there is room for both descriptive monster identification and explicitly stated identification. Character lore skills, background, and even races can also be used as a guide for determining who knows what or filling in the blanks of any description provided by the DM.

Gonzo Sci-Fantasy - What is it?

Hello all,

It's been a bit since I blogged on gaming in general. Life has taken over and I am pretty sure that blogs have been relegated to a bit of an old guard status, replaced by Facebook groups and YouTube channels but as I started here, I thought I would revisit this realm of communication to begin talking about some things that have come to mind for RPGs, miniatures and gaming in general. To start this return, I would like to talk about gonzo sci-fantasy.

This is the sort of fantasy that really used to the be the norm back in the days when I first started gaming. Fantasy itself was a lot more wondrous and over the top and hadn't learned to take itself so seriously. But this form of fantasy went a step further and intertwined itself with science fiction. Worlds built on this foundation were full of odd mash-ups of knights on robot horses, ray-gun wielding folks clad in strangely medieval garb, or laser word wielding barbarians. Monsters were often simple, odd-ball and a bit goofy. 

Sometimes it was as simple as adding a techno prefix or suffix to and existing medieval/fantasy word or crushing together two words to make strange compound words. This was most frequently done when naming equipment and creatures as it provided an instant reference point for what such a thing was. In cartoons of this sort, these combos were often as blatant as they sounded and seeing the critter on the old 480p TV screen after school or Saturday mornings left zero question what it was. 

Some of the best examples of this from my own childhood and recently, thanks to Netflix, my adulthood are cartoons such as Blackstar, He-Man, She-Ra and, Thundarr the Barbarians even Thundercats. These shows were masters of "punny", forced, literal combinations of words and concepts into some memorable bits. I recall fondly wielding a broomstick as Thundarr's Sun Sword and battlling imaginary foes that were odd robotic versions of mythological creatures or wacky hybrids. 

In the early days of RPGs these things were not foreign to players and we saw much of this sort of fantasy bleed over into D&D and even more so Gamma World. Whole adventures such as "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks" was a D&D adventure that through the party into a crashed spaceship where fantasy and science fiction collided. Meanwhile, Gamma World often presented technology in the hands of post-apocalyptic savages as magic, indistinguishable to those people from true mystical abilities. The presence of psionics is another note of science fiction in fantasy as psionics or psychic powers have a long history of being magic explained as science.

So, there you have it. A brand of fantasy that was, for many of us, part of a splendid, wondrous childhood that has since gone to the wayside. It's fun, it's forgiving, and it is pretty simple to do. In my next post in this series, I'll look at some ways to run such a setting using tools you already have available in your existing collection of RPGs.

Take care,

And get out and game.

-Eli