IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

CHARACTER BACKGROUND: DOMINIC TROYA

(more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Dominic Troya

With the first prelude concluded, we now move on to introducing the rest of the main characters for In the Shadow of the Spire, starting with an Imperial priest named Dominic Troya.

But while you’re reading that, I’m going to back up and continue talking about the first prelude featuring Tee and Agnarr. This prelude was a modified version of The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho, an adventure by Mike Mearls.

One of the issues I faced in designing the prelude was the non-standard party composition: Agnarr was a 1st-level barbarian and Tee was a 1st-level rogue. A barbarian is obviously pretty interchangeable with a fighter, but that still left two of the four core roles — cleric and wizard — unfilled.

But, truth be told, I find the typical hand-wringing over the need for a “standard party” to be a trifle overwrought. I’ve played with lots of odd-sized and odd-classed parties in D&D before, and I’ve virtually never found it to be a problem.

The one exception I’ve found is the mostly immutable need for some form of magical healing. Combat in D&D is strongly designed around the hit-and-heal cycle: The game assumes that you’re going to get hit and that you will then be healed.

Everything else, in my experience, is negotiable. Yes, if you’re missing other key roles in the party they will be missed. Without the consistency of a fighter, adventuring days will probably be shorter. Without the firepower of an arcanist, more powerful enemies will need to be avoided. Without a rogue, traps will become far more dangerous. And so forth. But, as I talked about in Fetishizing Balance, this is just a matter of adjusting the difficulty of encounters and the style of gameplay to suit the characters that the players want to play.

In fact, I’ve even played in a couple of short adventures without magical healing. This isn’t so much impossible as it is radically different. Without magical healing, combat in D&D almost instantly turns into a grim ‘n gritty exercise. Wounds take days or weeks to heal and any kind of serious injury — which can be almost trivial to receive — will force the party into rehabilitation. Hit point inflation still makes it possible for higher level characters to pull off some amazing things, but they’ll suffer for it.

In the case of the prelude, however, this grim ‘n gritty environment wasn’t what I was shooting for. (In no small part because I was using a published adventure as a foundation and I would have had to pretty much toss out the whole thing.) So I targeted the party’s shortcoming — magical healing — and provided a healing totem that had been given to Agnarr by the shamans of his tribe.

Mechanically this was basically just a wand of cure light wounds that worked with a command word instead of a spell trigger (so that it could be used without having a cleric in the party). And, if you’ll pardon the pun, it worked like a charm. Several encounters still needed to be adjusted due to the smaller group size, but with a large supply of magical healing available to them the barbarian and the rogue were still able to enjoy traditional-style romp through a dungeon crawl.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 1B: THE LOST VAULTS CONTINUED

(more…)

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Prelude 1B: The Lost Vaults Continued

Before our first proper session of In the Shadow of the Spire, I offered to run prelude sessions for any players who were interested. I had never done this before, but I had several reasons for trying it now:

(1) We had some scheduling problems which meant that there was about a three week gap between creating the PCs and starting the campaign. It wasn’t that people weren’t available to play — it was just that we were never all available to play at the same time.

(2) I knew that the campaign was going to start as the PCs woke up with partial amnesia and a period of lost time. I felt this might have a larger impact if the players had actually spent some time playing their characters — in other words, if they actually lost the time.

Because without that first-hand experience, there isn’t that much difference between a character background that ends with the line “… and then you go to the Adventurers ‘R Us Tavern” and one that ends with “… and then you wake up in a bed you don’t know.”

(3) Because most of us were new to the online tools we were using for our virtual gaming table, I thought it might be advantageous to tackle them with smaller groups and work out the kinks.

This experiment with preludes was something of a mixed success. On the one hand, I was mostly right: The smaller groups let us work out the kinks of using the virtual gaming table, the preludes let us get some gaming into a gap when we would have otherwise been idle, and those who participated did feel the effects of the lost time more personally than those who didn’t. (In fact, when one of the players realized what I was doing at the end of the prelude session, they spontaneously exclaimed, “Son of a bitch!”)

On the other hand, only the prelude featuring Tee and Agnarr actually happened. The scheduling for the others just never worked out. Some of the material from those preludes was worked into the character backgrounds of the other characters, but most of it wasn’t.

The prelude had a few other notable effects:

First, it meant that Tee and Agnarr started the campaign at 3rd-level while the others started at 1st-level.

Second, it created a meaningful chemistry between Tee and Agnarr that the other characters didn’t have at the beginning of the campaign. All of the characters (and players) quickly bonded, but I think the instant Tee-Agnarr alliance helped propel Tee into a stronger leadership position.

The original plan had been for two other characters to similarly share an adventure together. Some of that survived into the character backgrounds and, from there, into the actual campaign, but there really is a difference between something that you write up in a character background and something that you’ve “lived” in play. I suspect that if the other preludes had taken place, there would have been a second strong pairing and the group dynamic would have been very different for the rest of the campaign.

Finally, the content of the preludes wasn’t irrelevant to the larger themes and events of the campaign. Many hints and clues could be gleaned from the events that took place (or would have taken place) during the prelude adventures. Most of the content from the other preludes was not included in their character backgrounds, which meant that this material would emerge in different ways throughout the rest of the campaign.

Man in Black: You’re amazing.
Inigo Montoya: I ought to be after twenty years.
Man in Black: There’s something I ought to tell you…
Inigo Montoya: What?
Man in Black: I’m not left-handed either.

The Man in Black switches his sword hand. The duel continues.

Inigo Montoya: Who are you?
Man in Black: No one of consequence.
Inigo Montoya: I must know.
Man in Black: Get used to disappointment.
Inigo Montoya: ‘kay.

The duel continues. The Man in Black disarms Inigo Montoya.

Inigo Montoya: Kill me quickly.
Man in Black: I would as soon destroy a stained glass window as an artist like yourself… However, since I can’t have you following me… and the rules here say that I can’t knock you out for more than 5 minutes…

The Man in Black slits Inigo Montoya’s throat.

CONTEXT FROM THE GAME TABLE

This is not as entirely random as it might appear at first glance. Yesterday one of the groups I was playtesting Keep on the Shadowfell with managed to get back together following an interminable three months of mutually incompatible schedules. And this actually happened at the gaming table.

Well, not with Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black, obviously. But the PCs had forced a goblin to surrender by making an Intimidate check, tied him up, and questioned him. Once they had gotten all the information they needed from him, the group fell into a debate about what to do with him. (“You said you were going to let me go!” “Shut up. We’re talking here.”) Half the group wanted to just knock him out and show him some mercy. The other half wanted to make sure there wasn’t any chance of him coming back to cause them any problems.

The debate was resolved when we checked the rulebook and discovered that, in the Land of 4th Edition, anyone who has been knocked unconscious wakes up after taking a short rest. A short rest is 5 minutes. Ergo, they couldn’t knock the goblin out for more than 5 minutes.

And so they slit his throat and headed for the Keep.

Poor little guy. If it had been 3rd Edition he probably would have woken up a few hours later with a headache and skedaddled back to his homelands in the Stonemarches.