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.

Immediately after the first Bush/Gore debate in 2000, preliminary polling showed that Gore had won the debate (56% to 42%). But Bush’s surrogates hit the airwaves like a hurricano: Bush had performed well considering that he sucked at debating. And did you notice how Gore was sighing a lot? How disrespectful!

By the end of the week, Gore’s debate win had been flipped and he found himself completely on the defensive going into the second debate.

It’s hardly shocking to point out that televised Presidential debates have always been about more than making strong and compelling arguments based in fact. You don’t have to look any further than the poll results which showed that people listening to the Kennedy/Nixon debate on the radio thought Nixon had won while people watching the same debate on television thought that Kennedy had won. And while that poll has been disputed, the belief that visual presentation is an important factor has nevertheless shaped the media’s coverage of the debates.

The media’s coverage has two significant effects: First, it defines the criteria that people use to determine whether a debate was won or lost. Second, the media’s “consensus narrative” of the result of the debate will reshape the opinions people have of the debate. (The Bush/Gore debates are the most pertinent example of that effect, but it’s really a manifestation of the same psychological factors that contribute to peer pressure. Ever known someone who saw a movie and liked it, but then decided it sucked after discovering that Rotten Tomatoes rated it at 15%? Same thing.)

The recent conviction has been that Sarah Palin is destined for an epic failure when she goes to debate Joe Biden. But even if we assume that Palin’s shortcomings in knowledge and experience on the national stage will manifest themselves, there are still three ways in which she could achieve a significant upset.

First, there’s the Expectations Game. It seems absurd to me that the candidates should be graded on some kind of personalized curve, but that’s nevertheless the reality of it. (“Well, Candidate A is clearly not as intelligent or insightful as Candidate B. But, frankly, Candidate A is a complete idiot and he did manage to walk to the podium without walking into a wall… so I think that’s an A+ performance. Candidate B, on the other hand, mispronounced the name of a the Vice President of Paraguay, so I give him a C.”)

And could expectations be any lower for Sarah Palin at this point?

The McCain campaign’s decision to sequester Palin from the press has met with ridicule and criticism. The clear narrative that has developed is that the McCain campaign has decided that they can’t let her answer questions because they don’t believe she can answer them. And I’ve heard plenty of people express the idea that she must be “even worse than we think” because the McCain campaign apparently believes that the damage it’s taking from sequestering her is better than the damage it would take if it didn’t.

But it’s also possible that the McCain campaign has simply decided that this is the best way to lower the expectations for Palin going into the debate.

Basically there is a strategic advantage to making Sarah Palin look like the Uwe Boll of politics. If you go to a Uwe Boll film you can easily find yourself saying, “Well, that wasn’t so bad. I mean, it didn’t make blood actually run from my eyes.” Whereas if Steven Spielberg had made the same film, the words “that wasn’t so bad” wouldn’t have even crossed your mind.

Similarly, with expectations set so low, Sarah Palin has a pretty low hurdle to clear. They did the same with Bush in 2000: Set the bar as low as they possibly could and then deliver a decent debate that looks positively amazing compared to the expectations.

Second, there’s the matter of Looking and Sounding Presidential. This has absolutely nothing to do with actually saying anything insightful or intelligent. It’s a matter of visual presentation; a smooth speaking style; and not saying anything that’s factually incorrect.

It’s very clear that Sarah Palin is good at delivering a canned speech. But she’s also apparently very good when it comes to political debates. Her opponent in the Alaskan gubernatorial debate cites her performance in that debate was the turning point in the campaign. And a large part of her success lay in delivering simple answers in an authoritative fashion.

The McCain campaign has forced changes in the format of the VP debates in order to simplify the questions and shorten the answers. You can rest assured that they are spending all of their free time coaching Palin in short, canned responses.

Finally, there’s the Post-Debate Spin. This is where the campaign surrogates try to establish the narrative of what happened in the debate. And this is crucial because (a) more people will see this post-debate narrative than will actually see the debate itself and (b) as we’ve discussed, even people who actually saw the debate can have their opinion of it re-shaped by the media’s narrative.

My point with all this? Simply that we shouldn’t be setting our own expectations too high in hoping for a complete Palin meltdown at the debate. And that, in some ways, by exaggerating our own expectations of Palin’s failure we end up feeding into the anti-intellectual process that Republicans use to “win” these debates.

I’m hopeful that we will see Palin screw-up and become an even bigger millstone around McCain’s neck when it comes to independent voters. But I think that the growing consensus that this is some sort of guaranteed slam dunk certainty is about as naive as the certainty everyone had that Gore would use the debates to solidify his 3-5% lead over Bush in the national polls.

I’m actually much more hopeful about this Friday’s debate on foreign policy between Obama and McCain. The expectations game favors Obama; Obama looks and sounds more presidential; and if Obama can win that debate it will end up establishing a narrative that will be almost impossible for McCain to overcome as they move towards the final debate on domestic policy.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 1B: THE LOST VAULTS CONTINUED

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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.