Cogwheel Gaming

While Aye is spending time with some sympathetic kobolds, the party chills in a bed and breakfast where surely nothing chaotic will happen.

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MP3 Download: Cause & Effect Ep 23: Off To The Races

Music Used: “Pandora’s Box (FB Mix)” by christofori is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

Today I want to talk a little about stereotypes. Outside of a game setting this can be a deep conversation that can lead to some very nasty subjects, but inside a game setting, the same thing can happen and make things be unpleasant all around.

It’s my hope that most people can agree that assuming stereotypes are true is not the recommended path to take, but at the same time, most games I see with orcs have them as big, burly brutes with a penchant for smashing things, goblins are chaotic, murder-happy munchkins, and elves are aloof, self-centered elitists.

Also, most dwarfs appear to be from Scotland? That’s odd.

Now I’m not saying you should stay away from the occasional angry giant as an antagonist, and people have gotten a lot of use out of stereotypes in their games over the decades, but that doesn’t mean these concepts are carved in stone. Consider, if you will, a goblin paladin who helps the weak and poor, an orc mage who’s calm, collected, and maybe a bit of a pacifist, or even a horde of machine-hating gnome barbarians.

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Those who’ve been paying attention to the various editions of D&D may have noticed a decreasing emphasis on Alignment. Sure, they still include it as part of the character sheet, but there it’s meant to be a shorthand guide. “In the lore of the default campaign settings, X creatures are usually YZ Alignment.” It’s a useful tool for a starting GM using pre-created materials to get a quick handle on a recommended way of how those beings could be expected to behave.

But look at the spells Dispel Evil and Good, Detect Evil and Good, & Protection from Evil and Good – none of these actually mention Alignment outside of their names, unlike the previous edition versions that were either about evil beings or good beings, you had to pick when you prepared the spell.

In truth, I don’t even like the term “evil” as a concept. There are beings who are selfish and self-centered, of course, but the number of mustache-twirling ne’er-do-wells tying people to train tracks out there is mercifully small.

OK, so you still want a horde of goblins to besiege the PCs town. Go for it, but just … give them a better reason to do it than “they’re evil goblins, that’s what they do.” Hunting, gathering, and farming are occupations that result in way fewer goblin deaths, and goblins can be intelligent enough to understand this.

Perhaps their crops failed, or a passing army scared away all the game, or they were chased out of their previous home when a dragon moved in, and need supplies to travel further.

None of these options insist that the goblins are evil, but still give them a reason for taking from the people who aren’t them and don’t like them (because of stereotypes, most likely). Better yet, an enterprising party might be able to intervene and find a way to prevent loss of life on both sides. When you assume the enemy’s always evil, that becomes a lot harder to do.

Players of my campaigns have gotten used to this being an option, and have intentionally sought diplomatic options when facing bandits, goblins, necromancers, the undead, undead necromancers, and even dragons.

Of course sometimes an antagonist is just not interested in having a chat, and battle’s inevitable. That’s OK, so long as there’s a reason for it.

(And for the record, “this one’s a bit of a jerk” is a valid reason.)

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 11: Stereotypes

Everyone goes shopping, a super-powerful being pops in, and Aye needs something fixed.

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MP3 Download: Cause & Effect Ep 22: Intermission

Music Used: “Pandora’s Box (FB Mix)” by christofori is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

Today I’d like to talk about an invaluable tool in my arsenal: reskinning. The term comes from video games, but it’s essential to how I run my TTRPG sessions.

When I’m running adventures, I like to tailor encounters to match the theme of the session. While I frequently can find a monster stat block that fits the occasion perfectly, thanks to the number of source books I’ve purchased (no I don’t have a problem), sometimes that’s just not possible.

To fix this, I’ll find a stat block that’s more or less doing what I want it to do, and ignore the appearance and lore descriptions completely.

For example: In a recent session of my home D&D game, the party went to a farm where the resident kobolds ran daily sheep races and everyone was shocked to discover gambling was involved. When combat broke out, it was in the form of a giant sheep that… broke out of its pen. Enraged, it immediately attacked.

Now, “giant, angry sheep” is not a stat block I expect to find, so I didn’t even try to find it. Instead, I thought about the attributes that would be relevant to the situation.

1. I wanted something strong enough that it would be a challenge to the party at their current levels but not utterly crush them. If the damage, health, and armor of this thing are too out-of-bounds, it’s less a fun encounter and either a campaign-ender or a situation where the players ask why they had to roll for initiative.

2. I wanted it to be big. This implies larger damage and health numbers, surely, but sometimes size adds other features, like being able to swallow an adventurer.

3. Sheep aren’t known for being the most intelligent of animals, so I wanted something that also wasn’t very bright. It’s not to hard to take points off of a creature’s mental stats, but smart monsters frequently have supernatural abilities, and I really just wanted this to be a sheep, but big.

Naturally, I settled for a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Now of course, a T-Rex has nothing to do with a common sheep. In regards to fluffiness, it could even be considered an anti-sheep. The being you introduce if you have a sheep surplus, to even things out.

With that said, players don’t normally get to see the stat blocks you’re using. A T-Rex is not known for their intelligence, is a challenge for the party at their current levels, and its size adds some nifty attributes to its bite attack. None of these are things I needed to change. I kept the tail attack but changed the name to “stomp.”

If we were running theater of the mind, I’d have stopped there. As we did have a virtual tabletop (in this case, Foundry VTT). I went one step further and added a T-Rex onto the map before the game. (It’s in the SRD so this was trivial.) With that done, I changed the name to “Ovis Aries Rex” (ovis aries being the scientific name for sheep) and added art of the cutest sheep I could find on OpenClipArt.org.

This is far from the first time I’ve done this. Well, OK, it’s the first time I threw a giant sheep at the party, but I’ve reskinned a lot of monster stat blocks. I’ve used beholder stats for powerful wizards, Earth elementals for piles of enchanted gold, and once used a Stone Defender as a suit of magical power armor.

It doesn’t have to end there, either. Once, when someone wanted to play a goblin but the rules for goblins as a playable race weren’t available, we went with the gnome rules and changed the names.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 10: Reskinning

The kobolds have a crater to traverse before descending deep into the planet.

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MP3 Download: Pack Tactics S4 Ep 16: Crater Crossing

Music Used: “In heaven everything is fine” by JAM is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

I’ve been on a worldbuilding kick lately, so I thought that would make a good topic. I mean, sure, there’s lots of good campaign settings out there ready for you to use, but they’re not yours, you know? Why not make something original, and as an extra bonus, have it be something where that one party member can’t buy the same source book and as a result can metagame everything.

(I’m not saying every group has one, but … OK, a friend was running a Waterdeep campaign and because I read D&D comics in the 80s I already knew who, more importantly what, the Xanathar was. I wasn’t trying to find spoilers, I just remembered that one weird thing from 40 years ago. Once you know something, it’s hard to not know something.)

If you’re serious about building your own campaign, I strongly suggest you read two books: Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master and The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding. Both books are system-agnostic enough to be worth it regardless of your TTRPG preferences. I won’t be going over or even summing up the content of those books, there’s too much, but I do intend to “yes, and” for the rest of this episode.

You may be tempted to build out your whole campaign setting before your first session. If that’s where you find your joy, go for it, but I don’t recommend that path. Instead, flesh out maybe one or two towns, perhaps a smallish kingdom. Your party is going to grow and change in ways you don’t expect, and having room to fill in will have future you remaining eternally grateful.

When I started my campaign setting of Circulus, I gave the players a map of a giant continent with lots of boundary lines, but only one spot had a label – the area where they’d be spending the winter. Even now, with lots of areas explored and tied in with different characters’ backstories, the map’s still mostly empty. We have room to grow.

Of course it’s still a good idea to have a big plot point or two to differentiate your setting from the others. What makes it special? This could be something you tell your players right away to get them interested, or perhaps, especially if it isn’t common knowledge, you save that detail for a grand reveal down the line.

With Circulus, I did a little of both. Players went into the game knowing it was a world where a continent-spanning empire ended, leaving the countries and city states that sprang up as a result more or less loosely confederated. It also, oddly enough for a D&D setting, had no dragons at all. They had legends, they even had dragonborn, but no dragons, no kobolds, and hardly any monsters other than the undead and a handful of goblins who to be quite honest just wanted to be left alone.

This was, of course, a lie. I had an ancient green dragon barnstorming the party when they hit level 3 and the reveal was glorious. It turns out that what I said had been the truth for a long time, but the boundaries between this world and others were breaking down, and all kinds of things were being pulled through.

(Roughly half of the party had origin stories starting them off in other campaign settings before coming to this one. Really, they shouldn’t have been too surprised.)

Note that I didn’t explain why there was any barrier set up preventing inter-world travel, or why it was breaking down. I had some rough ideas in my head about that, but I deliberately didn’t write them all down. As the PCs gained in levels and the plot adjusted course in response to their decisions, I came up with a way better reason than my initial half-formed concept. If I’d planned that out years before anyone would have been able to discover it, I might have felt stuck with a not-as-good concept that I’d carved in stone.

So to sum up, build a town, create one or two world-spanning “truths” that make your world unique, share some facts, withhold others, and don’t be afraid to lie to the party if the real truths aren’t common knowledge.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 09: Worldbuilding

The burning zombies need dealing with after they’ve been … dealt with. And then there’s the matter of what’s controlling them.

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MP3 Download: Cause & Effect Ep 21: Burning Man

Music Used: “Pandora’s Box (FB Mix)” by christofori is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Hello and welcome to Crash’s Course, a short form podcast where I share my thoughts and advice on playing and running tabletop role playing games in roughly about 5 minutes.

Lately I’ve been working on a 1-shot adventure, so in this episode I thought I’d share some of my common steps for designing scenarios for my group.

Yeah, running an adventure made by someone else can be really fun. It’s not that it’s less work, especially if you’re trying to be as close to the printed adventure as possible. It’s about having a shared story, a bonding experience, and … oh, yeah, you don’t need to think up an entire adventure’s plot hooks on your own.

… until the players leave the beaten path of the printed adventure and you have to ad-lib what happens next, at least.

Anyway, I’ve run a few printed adventures, but never exactly as they were printed. Sometimes I only took a few elements that looked like they’d fit my existing campaign and messed with those. More often, I write my own stuff … mostly.

It starts with writing random ideas down. This can occur anywhere, and I have a notebook I keep around for such an occasion. More recently, I made a channel in our Discord called “Campaign Seeds” to both use as scratch paper and gauge how my friends react. The stronger the reaction, the more likely I am to at least pull some of that idea into my next campaign.

Each idea I post contains the following things:

There may or may not be other details included, but these are the big three for me. Yes, I’m limiting character creation by saying “You are all doing X at the start of the adventure,” but having the characters all start in a bar or tavern is so darned cliché that the only time I went there it turned out to not actually be a tavern. Also the characters were all dead. It’s a long story.

With the starting point of some common ground for the characters and their motivation, we bypass the awkward small talk of characters who have nothing in common and may actually prefer to be enemies followed by everyone agreeing to be fast friends because the players want the adventure to actually get started for real, now (whether or not the characters would do that).

Sure, the players might not like the stated motivation or common player element I’ve suggested, but that’s why I’m sharing it in advance. If they don’t like it, they tell me, or at the very least don’t make a character and sign up on the schedule.

With that out of the way, it’s time to flesh things out a bit more. I won’t stat up the big bad quite yet, as I usually wait until closer to when the characters are going to encounter them. If it’s going to be a 1-shot, I wait until I’ve at least read some backstories.

I might make a map of a starting town or roll up a few NPCs, but TTRPGs have enough somewhat generic stat blocks that even that isn’t necessary unless I’m inspired by those backstories I just mentioned.

I love character backstories. I joke that “backstory” is a fancy word that means “How can the GM hurt the character emotionally?” There’s some truth in that, but they also mention friends, family members, and locations. Any time I can weave those into the campaign the whole thing becomes more collaborative, and the players become much more invested in the story.

The party reacts differently when Random Shopkeep 26a is actually the wizard’s Great Aunt Carla, or the BBEG’s Trusted Lieutenant turns out to be the party tank’s former love interest.

My all-time favorite antagonists to RP have been lifted directly from character backstories, and some have remained recurring NPCs long after their introductory campaigns have ended.

Sure, sometimes that requires me to change how I expected the adventure to go, but that’s part of the fun for me.

That’s all for this episode, subscribe to just this podcast on Mastodon at is.aaronbsmith.com/@crashscourse or subscribe to all my TTRPG podcasts at is.aaronbsmith.com/@cogwheel.

Music is Deadly Windmills by JAM from modarchive.org, used with permission, as it’s public domain.

This podcast is distributed under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.

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MP3 Download: Crash’s Course Ep 08: Prepping Adventures

The kobolds attempt to broker a peace between the Moon Touched Carusites and a blue dragon.

#DnD #Podcast #ActualPlay

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MP3 Download: Pack Tactics S4 Ep 15: Electric Boogaloo

Music Used: “In heaven everything is fine” by JAM is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org

Something burned and sank into the swamp. It’s full of zombies. The party investigates.

#DnD #Podcast #ActualPlay

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MP3 Download: Cause & Effect Ep 20: Swamp Excavation

Music Used: “Pandora’s Box (FB Mix)” by christofori is licensed as Public Domain and can be downloaded from http://modarchive.org