tabletopalchemy_ignatius

All right man, you ready to play some D&D?

Are you talking about Dungeons and Dragons?

Yeah! D&D! You said you wanted to try it, today’s the day.

Yeah, I was just tryin to be trendy man.

You got anything better to do?

Well, I was gonna go on a –

On another singles hiking trip when you hate hiking? That doesn’t count, man. C’mon, I got three other players lined up, one of them’s bringing pizza! You wanna be like a wizard throwing some fireballs or you wanna be a badass warrior like The Hound in Game of Thrones?

Well, I do like Lord of the Rings, so I guess it’d be cool to like cast magic spells or whatever.

Awesome! Okay, just fill this out and we’ll start rolling some dice. I sent you a link.

Yep, got it. Is this like a uh … what is this, a tax form?

What’s better than a full, 100% usable, perfectly tuned, perfectly organized, perfectly designed OEM product? Well, if you’re me, the answer is … half of one. 

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we ignore the inevitable onslaught of the digital age and discuss things as if time were standing still. We’re going analog!

So you’ve got a new player or you’ve cleverly duped a bunch of your friends who’ve never played ttrpgs into playing some DnD. Or, you know, you’ve kidnapped some folks and forced them to roll some dice at crossbow point. Hey, whatever floats your boat, ain’t nobody here harshing your vibe.

However you’ve reached this point, nothing changes the fact that onboarding new customers is typically the most difficult thing for most commercial endeavors. So what can we tabletop gamers learn from slick salesmen and women and the retail and commercial service industries? 

Maybe we can settle this right now. There’s a thing that we all know called opportunity cost.

One tip we can take from them is that our goal should be to make the process as smooth and speed bump-free as possible. And you do that by removing speed bumps. Duh.

Now if you just hand someone new to DnD or tabletop rpgs in general a stack of rule books, you’re probably just gonna freak them out. This is a situation that warrants the ol’ boiling a frog trick. You want them in the soup before they know they’re gonna be soup. I musta been drunk when I wrote this, I knew I was missing a bottle of Cynar. What? It’s got an artichoke on the bottle.

Basically, the less someone knows about what goes into making the soup, and the less they have to work to make the soup themselves, the less trouble they’re gonna have attending dinner.

Here’s what I’ve done in the past to introduce new players to the game as simply as possible. Via light conversation, I get a bead on what kinda character they might wanna play. I ask softball questions like:

“Do you like the idea of casting magic spells or stabbing guys with swords?”

“What character would you play if you were in the Lord of the Rings movies?”

“Do you like the idea of healing or protecting your fellow party members?”

“You wanna sneak through the shadows picking pockets or pop off with a bow like Robin Hood?”

I can’t believe I just said “pop off”. 

Essentially I just want to find out what base class they gravitate towards – fighter, wizard, cleric, thief – without even mentioning the word “class”, I don’t bring up any of that minutia with them at all. 

I will ask them if they’d like to be a human, a hobbit, an elf, or a dwarf and just sort of leave it at that, unless they ask further about other races. And that’s it. I just make sure we all agree on a day and time and I just let them be until then. Basically in their minds, I want them thinking they’re just coming to hangout for some beer and pretzels. 

The point here is to do everything you can to not overwhelm them with too much information. I wanna alleviate as much work or even choices as possible. At this stage anyway. Remember, I’m talking about getting people into the game that have no inkling as to what DnD is like. And all we want is to get these folks to the table, which is the actual battle we’re fighting. We gotta think like used car salesmen here, just remove every conceivable obstacle you can think of. Offer to provide those pretzels and beer. Or energy drinks, or dark chocolate, or whatever they like – I don’t know you’re friends, you know them, just make sure the bribes accurate. And make sure wherever you play has access to a bathroom. That sounds dumb, but it’s a consideration that sometimes just doesn’t get considered because it sounds dumb.

Now, you only need a couple things to run a game of DnD. We need dice and we need players at a table. And those players need characters. There is one other thing you need but we’ll talk about that later. At this point, I know what everyone is gonna play, even if they don’t. On the day of the game, I run a very quick, like 30 minute session zero to setup their characters. And I start with this.

It’s a very simple half page character sheet. I print these out two to a page, cut them into half sheets and hand one to each player along with a cheap mechanical pencil.

Now I know some of you are yelling at me that I should just be sending new players to DnDBeyond, and hey, you might be right. But in a few real world instances, I’ve found that even DnD Beyond is a bit much for someone completely new to tabletop games, or in particular rpgs. So this is just what I’ve done in the past and it seemed to work pretty well. I also kinda don’t want them distracted by using their phones or tablets. I’d much rather have everyone hanging out in the same real world space, if you know what I mean. At least for this first session.

Remember, first impressions are … I don’t know, there’s some kind of saying about first impressions right? First impressions are hard to change, maybe. If our new players don’t have a good time or stuff takes too long to get going or they get too confused, the chances of them wanting to play again start dropping. No pressure, right? 

At the table I walk everyone through filling out their sheets together, starting with their character’s name, race and class. Again, I just tell them to put down fighter or wizard or thief, et cetera. And then I give everyone three six-sided dice and we roll up stats. I just tell everyone to roll the dice six times and jot down the totals on a sticky note. Which, yes, I also give them. Sharing is caring. When they’ve got their six numbers, I coach them on placing the highest numbers in their class’s key stats, just now mentioning how something like Strength is good for fighters, Intelligence is good for wizards, et cetera. I kinda give like one-liner descriptions of what each stat sorta represents, like Dexterity is how physically coordinated a character is and Constitution is how much a character can drink before they pass out. Just try to make things relatable at this point, which means for brand new players, referring to real life sorta things. 

Now, you might argue that actually rolling stats is a speed bump that could have been glossed over with either just pre-made stats or some kind of simple point buy or allocation formula, and you’re probably right. I’ve just found that, typically, rolling the dice at this point is usually a pretty fun thing for new players. It gets them into the mindset of rolling dice and calculating results, it’s a fun tactile thing to do that isn’t just writing stuff down and, what to me is the key feature here, this is what starts to make each character feel personal and unique to each player, you know, cause they rolled those stats with their own two hands, their own dice, they got their own results.

Rolling up stats is also a time-honored, classic tradition of tabletop rpgs, right, and I just want my players to have that experience, even if they never play again. But as you noticed, I don’t go with any of the more custom ways of rolling these totals, like my favorite which is rolling four dice and dropping the lowest number. Going with a straight three die roll per stat is kinda harsh but it also just gets rid of any extra math and extra explanations I’d have to do, which both take up time and can become needlessly confusing – so it is a little bit of gloss on that speed bump, if you will.

Glossy speed bumps. I gotta hire a writer.

After stats and their associated bonuses are notated on their sheets, all you have left is some gear and spells. For magic users, I would have already found out what kind of magic they find cool, you know, back when I was lobbing those softball questions. 

“Oh, you like the idea of casting magic spells. All right, what kinda magic do you think is cool? Do you like the idea of manipulating objects like Hogwarts students or do you think reading people’s minds is cool or do you just wanna blow stuff up?” 

So I’ll just hand them spell cards for some cantrips and a first level spell that I’ve already picked out for them. If I don’t happen to have commercially printed cards or whatever, I’ll typically find spell descriptions online and screen cap them and text them to the player.

For the non-magic users, it’s pretty easy: “Do you like hammers, axes, swords or bows and arrows?” I’ll rattle off a few weapon stats for them to jot down and that’s it, we’re ready to play.

Now, some of you may not agree that all the info needed to play a game is on this compressed character sheet and you, again, might be right. But for me, this works totally fine for a first session with newbie players. If they end up having a good time and want to play again, they’ll find a full fledged character sheet pretty cool and interesting having played a game and they usually have fun filling it out on their own.

So I did mention there was one other thing aside from players, characters, dice and a DM that’s necessary for playing a session of DnD, and that would be the “adventure” itself. I’ve got some specific ideas on what kind of adventure to run for brand new players but we’ll save that for next month’s rpg-topic video.

So, go dupe some dummies into playing DnD. That was completely crass and uncalled for, I just couldn’t pass up the alliteration. But you know what I really mean – go find some players who’ve never played DnD and see if you can trick them into sitting down at a table. Maybe that table’s in a bar, whatever works.

See ya at the pub!

You hear the soft snick of the lock’s tumblers falling into place. The leaded glass French doors swing silently open and the rest of the party follows the tiefling rogue into the library. Moonlight streams in through the mullioned windows on the southern wall, riming the furniture and tall bookshelves in silver, making the polished mahogany gleam in the general gloom.

“I search for the stolen scroll.”

“I check for traps!”

“Check for secret doors!”

Okay. Roll an Investigation check.

Obviously a player making a low roll on an Investigation or Perception check is going to have an inkling that they’ve failed to succeed, and inevitably they’re going to feel like they’ve missed something. But if you can get your DM poker face down – and, let’s face it, that’s the best kind of poker face – you might be able to help maintain some game immersion and satisfy that craving for discovery even when reacting to low dice rolls. 

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we just talk about quick tips for new DMs, even if they’re common knowledge and your host is beating a dead horse. 

No horses were harmed in the making of this video. At least not physically. Metaphorically, that’s another story.

And where we also thank our patrons for hitting that tip jar and we thank you, dear viewer, for viewing and commenting and all that fun stuff! You guys know I read and respond to all the comments, right? It’s one of my favorite things to do. 

So let’s talk about this one tabletop rpg game mechanic that’s always bugged me just a little bit. Not the mechanic itself so much, but rather how using it sorta inevitably breaks immersion. I guess really all mechanics break immersion, so I guess that’s not really what I’m getting at. This mechanic has a tendency to kind of break immersion in a protracted sense within a player’s mind. The ubiquitous Investigation check. And to some extent the Perception check. 

There are whole videos out there on the differences between the two and when to use one versus the other, et cetera, but we’re not getting into that today. Mostly because I have trouble parsing that out myself sometimes.

Anyway, the gameplay that typically leads to an Investigation check, like whatever’s happening just prior to the call for one, is usually an interesting or engaging bit of scene setting. At least for me. And a good chunk of rpg gameplay is all about discovery, right? For me, discovery is one of the coolest, if not THE coolest, aspect of, well, not just games but real life. Discovering things, unraveling mysteries, seeing what’s on the other side of that mountain, or what’s at the end of this tunnel, it’s all about that intrinsic human drive to explore, to find something new. To discover something. And Investigation checks are like a little poppers of discovery potential. 

So your players are getting into a scene you’ve set, and then there’s this call for a game mechanic that carries an implicit notion that the player may well miss discovering something cool based on the roll of a die. And that’s fine, that’s part of this type of storytelling. The unpredictable nature of the story created by the RNG of die rolls is one of the core features of TTRPGs, right?

But Investigation checks are fun to make because they’re all about discovery. The thing that’s always bothered me about these checks is how a player will know or feel they’ve missed something when they miss a DC – or target number, for those of you not into DnD. It’s a bit of an inescapable metagame type thing. There’s just no real way to avoid it. And there’s always that delineation of the successful roll – beat the DC, find the secret door, fail the roll, find nothing.

So I’ve started using a technique for checks like these that is A) almost certainly not new at all and B) might be something you already do, whether consciously or subconsciously. My goals with the technique are to A) hit that “discovery” dopamine generator as much as possible, even when a player fails a check, and B) sort of bondo over this hard break of success slash fail.  

Bondo is what they use to fill in and smooth over like dents in cars and stuff … 

Anyway the technique is a very simple concept. You ready for it? Here it comes.

Bulleted lists. Eh? 

Well, I call ‘em ABLs! Ascending bulleted lists. Does that make it sound more impressive? No? What are you, nuts? Who asked you anyway?

Let’s say your players enter a library in a gothic hotel looking for something or someone. They’re on a quest and the last clue has led them here. You rattle off a brief atmospheric description of the chamber. Inevitably, someone’s going to ask something that calls for an investigation check. They roll an 8 and with their bonuses it’s a 12. I glance at my ABL and I know right away how many bullet points – or details – they’re gonna get. Now let’s say I had set 15 as the DC for finding the hidden bookcase door. So this player has technically failed the check, and now I proceed in a non-committal way, with something like “All right, the first thing you notice is the decadently thick carpets on the floor, they appear to be very expensive imports. You also note a hint of candle smoke in the air.” And so on. 

Here’s what my list looks like for this particular scene.

the carpets are thick, plush and imported 

there’s a faint smell of candle smoke 

one window is half-open 

the heavy desk is very neat and tidy, with stacks of organized paper, a writing quill and ink pot placed just so, but the bowl of sand has been tipped over 

one book in the darkest corner sticks out, as if it’s about to fall off the shelf 

And my little numbers there are target numbers. So a player gets all the details that fall below their dice roll result.

Everyone always notices something with their investigation check, it just depends on the strength of their roll how important or specific the details of what they notice are. I mean, maybe for a nat 1 I would just explain that they’ve become preoccupied with that pesky boot lace that won’t stay tied. 

Making ABLs like this serve a secondary purpose by helping me generate more details for specific locations or NPCs, and the more I know about a space or an NPC helps my ability to create a convincing setting and overall immersion. And often writing these details down can spur even more plot ideas or NPC attributes or backstory or whatever.

Now one issue this brings up is “prep”. Like what about checks that occur in spaces I haven’t either prepped or just have no reason to have extra detail pre-planned. I mean, let’s face it, in every session a DM is winging it more often than not. Just having this idea of tiered discovery gives me a general notion of how to proceed with my off-the-cuff improv. So while I’m never gonna come up with a whole list of things on the fly, I do have a mental framework to lean on. Just looking at a dice roll result will instantly let me know if I should give the player one, two, or three details, just as a rule of thumb. And doing that let’s me delve more into the scene as well because I immediately imagine myself in the space and just sorta describe what I imagine I see. Or hear. I always try to keep in mind the notion of the five senses and will try to hit things that aren’t just visual, like smell, sound, tactile surfaces. Even taste if it’s appropriate.

Back to that DM poker face. If you get good at that poker face, after some time, your players will either barely feel like they’re missing something on a roll higher than 10 or on the contrary, they’ll just start constantly feeling like they’re missing something. And that can be just as rewarding for you as any other result, ‘cause you can mess with ‘em all you want at that point.

Of course, one thing you should definitely avoid is having any singular NECESSARY clue or pivotal bit of information gated behind a, well, behind any DC or target number. If a piece of information is absolutely necessary for the completion of a quest or whatever, that info has to be made available somehow. Only put things that are not absolutely necessary behind a die roll.

Anyway, I’d really love to hear how you guys run Investigation checks. What tips or tricks do you use to make them engaging or fun or just not entirely binary metagame-y results. And if you’re a player and your DM’s done some cool stuff with Investigation checks, I’d love to hear about it. I truly am curious and always looking for new awesome ideas on how run the game better.

So, make an ABL. See what it inspires.  No, you don’t have to call it that.

See ya!

God mode! You spend hours trying to find some secret code to download and hack your game. You aren’t even sure the code is going to work, you’re just hoping. And then you punch that thing in and bang! You’re indestructible! Insanely powerful! You fly around doing all the things that were nearly impossible to achieve while playing in a normal mode. And it’s super fun! 

Some people love to play in god-mode. But it’s never sustainable. Right? Maybe that’s just me? I mean, once you’ve got infinite ammo, infinite funding, infinite mana, once you’ve got infinity, things tend to grow a little stale. Dare I say “boring”. This is literally probably why real life is hard. And why elves would be … insane. 

And why From Software games are actually bought and played. 

Not by me, I have no interest those kinds of tears.

But what is sustainable is min-maxing. Surfing Wowhead to find that perfect build for maxing out the DPS on your Shadowpriest. Or looking up info on what levels to dip into for multi classing your Sorlock or your rogue bard. 

Some folks enjoy it as its own kind of mini-game, this min-maxing of stats and rules exploits. And that’s awesome. But how about one time making a character that sucks.

Greetings good humans, and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we bite off more than we can chew by trying to arm-wrestle stupidly large concepts for use in our silly little hobby.

Is our hobby silly? No, not really. I mean, it’s not any sillier than chasing a ball around on a grass field or jumping outta perfectly good airplanes with plastic bags to hold onto. We all just wanna be Mary Poppins.

What came first, the Bag of Holding or Mary Poppins’ suitcase?

Anyway, our topic for today is min-maxing for tabletop rpgs. And yes, this is quite the iceberg. Not in an “ooh” sensationalistic way – though that would be kinda fun – but rather because asking this little anthill-sized question actually leads to a mountain-range sized plethora of topics and ideas to explore. 

I of course wanna say that playing whatever game you dig the way you dig it is always best and the coolest thing. All I want to do today is present an idea for discussion or inspiration that might be fun to try if you haven’t. At the very least it might be interesting to just think about. 

I’ve got a friend who’s tried a couple of tabletop RPG sessions and he’s been bored through every one of them. Now it’s possible some of that reaction stems from either the groups he’s played with or the game masters but I suspect it has a lot more to do with his misguided expectation of D&D being similar to a video game. I kinda explained to him that while video games can excel at “static storytelling” and action, D&D excels at “dynamic storytelling” and unpredictable character development. I should say “can” excel at those things.

Now min-maxing a character really can be it’s own mini-game sort of activity, kinda like how “building army lists” or “war bands” for skirmish games is basically it’s own pastime. But I think what can be even more interesting is how intentionally not min-maxing a character can create way more opportunities for interesting story. Versus, you know, tactical advantage. This really does just boil down to “how do you want to play your character”.

We can look at movies and books for some correlation here. Now these are just some random examples, and they’re all from media I quite enjoy. 

So how about the scene from Force Awakens where Rey just sorta suddenly figures out how to use the Force mind control gimmick. Or when she discovers she can definitely put this light saber to good use, based on her martial training with the staff thing she ran around with in the desert. You know, in D&D a fighter can just sorta pick up any weapon and go to work with it. Or how about any scene in a John Wick flick? This guy’s got gunkata down to a video game science, and it’s super fun to watch. In fact, most min-maxed characters are fun to watch. But to me they’re more like watching spectacle rather than watching story. And one is more satisfying to me than the other, in the long term. 

In contrast, we could look at, say, Ripley trying to survive her situation. Or McClane trying to survive his situation. For me, there’s a lot more investment in the character when I’m hoping John can stay alive on his godawful bloody feet than there is counting how many headshots John manages to crit in a four-second span. There’s probably just north of a gazillion other examples we could compare. None of which is to say one viewing experience is superior to the other, they are just different experiences.

And I’m not saying characters with flaws, or non min-maxed characters, are incompetent at what they do. Far from it. It’s just that they have more opportunity to create dramatic stories because they have limitations or obstacles to overcome in a more relatable manner. 

It’s hard to have a heroic moment while in god-mode.

Maybe one time you might wanna try out something like incorporating a substantial flaw for your character to overcome or contend with. You can do this even if you’re min-maxing a character. Doing something like this could inherently create the basis for a character arc without even trying.

Granted, this kind of reality bummerness might not be what you want in a fun pastime of a game, and that’s perfectly fine. I know a lot of the time we play games specifically for the power fantasy. But, maybe doing something like this once could result in a super satisfying story experience over the long haul. And maybe that would something new. It’s just an idea.

One of my favorite tables in any game book – not that I’ve read a whole bunch of rule sets, I have a pretty limited experience in that regard – but one of my favorite tables is the Permanent Injuries table found in the skirmish game Frostgrave – and subsequently in the Stargrave, Rangers of Shadowdeep and Ghost Archipelago books. I think this is pretty fun – I mean, it totally sucks in the tactical part of the game but it lends so much character to the warband I’m playing with. It almost forces story to imbue itself in what’s essentially otherwise just a chess match. Okay, chess match with ranged weapons.

So what if you’re playing a melee class and you lose an eye to some vile wizard’s bastard of an owl? Now you’ve got no depth perception and have to rely on, maybe a bow? for the first time in your life. I mean until you’ve trained your melee skills back up. Or maybe you go full Jaime Lannister, have to learn how to fight with only your off hand.

Or maybe your monk took an arrow in the knee. You try to be zen about it, but after descending into a life of crime to save up for some extravagant healing spell, you encounter something that shakes up or reinvigorates your faith in the universe and you start down a new, long and arduous path towards redemption.

This is fun, I’m gonna keep rolling.

What if you played a middle-aged merchant who’s always always wanted to cast magic. But your academic acumen has always been a stumbling block – like with me and math. Or maths. Whatever, whatever it’s called. Damn that low Intelligence score! But maybe perseverance in the face of constant failure – and a growing mastery of cantrips – starts to show some progress on the higher level, spell side of things?

Or how about rolling a straight up coward. Like maybe the character starts as a rogue, because they need to hide in the shadows and they’re afraid of things, but after one level goes into fighter class because they decide that dammit, they’re tired of being afraid of everything. Of course there’s no easy way to conquer internal fears, but through hard work, focused determination and internal struggle, they begin to master their overwhelming sense of fear. Maybe you work out some kind of fear-based constitution or wisdom save with the DM, who gets to decide when to call for it – maybe it functions a little like the Wild Magic table.

Here’s one I’ve always wanted to play. A surly egotistical bard who has no musical talent and feels sorely put upon by a world that doesn’t appreciate his craftsmanship. Cause he’s actually a skilled puppeteer who crafts amazing marionettes … How does a bard who’s just kind of an asshole inspire people with puppetry?

Or how about a half-orc zen cleric who’s addicted to opiates and is a steadfast pacifist. He’s a great healer but too long between fixes – or what he calls his “lunar dreams” – and his stats start suffering penalties. You can riff off of other classic existing characters, play someone like a Doc Holliday, a drunk who’s suffering from a terminal illness, but she’s still got things she wants to accomplish – nay, NEEDS to accomplish before she takes that one last long nap. 

That one last long nap? What? That’s terrible, that is terrible writing. Uh, anyway.

This is probably why I really like the idea of the Wild Magic surge or other similar mechanics. Unpredictability is another facet of great storytelling. Yes, stories typically adhere to a sort of pattern or rhythm but what makes a good story good is the unpredictable details that populate those classic patterns. This is why I think it’s fun to come up with strange or unexpected takes on character archetypes. I think Raistlin and Caramon from Dragonlance were a pair of awesome characters, of course Raistlin in particular. In literature some of my current favorite inspirational characters come from Mr. Abercrombie. He’s taken the writer’s advice “stick your characters in a tree and throw rocks at ‘em” to a whole other level. More like, stick your characters in a tree, light the tree on fire and start slinging tomahawks at ‘em. I’m sure at some point we’re gonna see Inquisitor Glokta on the big screen. 

The thing that’s cool about good stories is they typically teach us things about ourselves or about life and they kinda do it without us realizing it’s happening. There’s a reason psychologists are now getting into using role playing games as therapeutic exercises for patients and clients. Tragedy and failure are often what make stories both great and captivating, both because they are relatable to every one of us and because the contrast of those failures against hard won successes can be cathartic. And yeah, this can all be part of a Dungeons and Dragons game without really putting in too much extra effort. It’s just about approaching a character a certain way, and then rolling some dice!

And playing into story is playing into one of the strengths of tabletop role playing games versus video games. 

Like I said, this is really just a portion of an enormous conversational topic iceberg. Right now we’re just the Titanic and we’re interacting with a tiny chunk of it.

I just, I can’t hear the word iceberg without thinking of the Titanic. 

Where were we? Polishing the brass on the Titanic

Right. Well, I suppose that wraps this one up. I mean, aside from the dozens of highly sophisticated and convoluted discussions one could have over several pints of beer or cups of coffee in a dark, wood-paneled cafe. Or pub. Or, you know, wherever the story might find you.

So, go play a character that sucks. Could be fun.

See ya!