Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;940764Death. Er, I mean cake!

In the Forgotten Realms it would be DeathCake. Because in FR even your damn pillow is probably really a monster waiting to eat you. (No. Im not joking. Its in one of the FR MM books. Killer pillows.)

And with FR's occasionally lazy naming convention, it would be called DeathCake! And in 4e D&D you'd get an additional descriptor to create splatted variance, like DeathCake Skirmisher, DeathCake Luchador, & DeathCake Overmind!

Dire half-dragon Deathcake.

Joined by the killer childrens toys, the killer hat, and the killer piece of paper.

In light of this recent thread about the failings of more recent editions of D&D - rules but not many settings or adventures - I think this is a good thread to dig up. If the company isn't producing what you need, you have to do it yourself.

Quote from: Opaopajr;940814And with FR's occasionally lazy naming convention, it would be called DeathCake! And in 4e D&D you'd get an additional descriptor to create splatted variance, like DeathCake Skirmisher, DeathCake Luchador, & DeathCake Overmind!

Deathcake Luchador, that should be your new forum title.

Quote from: fuseboy;940210The problem is that you're setting up pins for them to knock down. Instead, take a different approach.

1. Come up with the basic problem situation (orcs have stolen some people)

2. Add detail. Where do the orcs live? What's the world like in between? Where were they stolen from? What other groups are nearby? Who else cares that the orcs are being bad? Who is interested in propping up the orcs, if only for selfish reasons? Who else wants the stolen people back, but is controlling, manipulative, and/or has secondary goals that might threaten the mission?

3. Now up the difficulty. What if there are too many orcs for them to take in a fight? What if the orcs are few, but tough? Do the orcs have layers of defense? Flunkies? Are they moving soon? (Have they already moved?) Who can they call on for help? What else would try if you were a group of orcs and some badasses shows up to try to steal your lunch?

Don't solve the problem for the players (even in your head), that's their job. Let them thrash around a bit looking for allies, clues, obstacles, advantages.

This is still possibly the best advice you've gotten. Everything else does nothing but expand on these points with the poster's favorite words.

I agree with Tod13. Fuseboy wins the Deathcake Luchador award!

That would be a great forum name.

If only we could get a Wayne Reynold's-esque rendering of DeathCake Luchador... we could make it a prize or something. :cool:

Quote from: Opaopajr;940684Actually Spike's point is good because it ties into the main thrust of advice you've been given from the beginning (from fuseboy's excellent first response,): your presentation lacks uncertainty.

The quest sounds formally given. Everyone speaks the Truth with a capital 'T' from a position of perfect knowledge. All complications between the heroic unified PC party and the path to the villainous unified orc marauders is glazed over as mere inconveniences, not real challenges. The only logical resolution is an honorable fight to the death. And so on...

There is too much certainty in presentation.

That's why rumor & encounter tables existed; that's why surprise, distance, reaction, and morale rolls added value. They shook up the world's certainty. When there are unknowns, there is doubt, which in turn manifests real choice.

You can front-load such uncertainty during preparation, or you can back-load such uncertainty through randomized content contextualization. But in the end you are as GM being asked to present a world where choice has consequence that matters. And one of the most foundational ways to make choice matter is when there is depth of potential.

Shallow context potential leads to shallow choice, which in turn leads to shallow satisfaction.

Quoted because fuck yeah.

Quote from: estar;940211Maybe you need to come up with a more complex situation than arriving at a tavern where a few hours ago a bunch of orcs dragged hostages into the wild.

For example

A bunch of orcs raided a roadside tavern three days ago. This section of road is not patrolled well. The local baron been pocketing some of the royal funds that supposed to go to hire guard. The PCs happened to come across the tavern and find out from the tavernkeeper about the raid. He quite worried about his own reputation and throw himself on the mercy of the PC. He has some coin but best he can do is offer a room as a regular place to stay for free for the party.

The PCs goes off and find the days old trails and starts investigating. They manage to track the trail back to a small hamlet of orcs on the edges of the Blood Forest. After a sharp fight in which the PC triumph, they find out the hostages were sold as slave to one Ogg the Bold, an ogre who lives deeper in the forest. They also learn enough to get a sense there is an entire evil society living in the forest. That Ogg the Bold is a small but important slave merchant.

Luckily the PCs learn where Ogg lives. They have a window of opportunity to get the victims back but need to be properly equipped and prepared. They go back to the tavern and get geared up. During the course of explaining things to the tavernkeeper, one of the baron's men overhears. The conversation is reported and the Baron is worried that the PCs will eventually talk to a Royal Offical. So he begin preparations.

The PCs leaves and enters the Blood Forest. After a challenging adventure they managed to liberate the hostages and kill Ogg. Also learning more about the Blood Forest including the fact that a Hill Giant Chief, Matdock, is planning a pillaging raid on the Baron's Keep. When they bring the hostage outs, they are met by a small force from the Baron who have been ordered to intercept the PCs and kill everybody covering up his incompetence.

Comment

I realize that I wrote this as a story but what you do is setup the pieces. The tavern, the baron, the orc hamlet, the ogre steading, the blood forest, the hill giants. Come up with the plans and the interconnections. Then develop the initial event, the kidnapping.

Then afterwards you play it by ear. It may be that the party slaughters the orc hamlet and totally misses the fact that the hostages were sold to an ogre. Or any number of possible problems or failure mode.

But by detailing all this you create a mini sandbox that could go any number of ways. To make things easier you can use your experience to make predictions about how you think your players will act. Add a little leeway and prepare accordingly. Just don't be welded to a particular chain of events.

I'm going to steal that but modify the orcs and ogres into nasty knights for Pendragon. I'll give you 20% commission on whatever I get paid. So probably zero.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;940288Count Barnacle rules a small county on the seacoast, with its capital his keep and market town, known as Seaview.

Okay, so yesterday I sat down and watched the video below to get +1 on DMing skills. I decided to use this thing I'd written in ten minutes as the premise for the game, and just randomly generate the rest. We had lots of fun. Using 3d6 down the line, they rolled up one fighter and two magic-users, luckily both wizards rolled up different spells.

The party decided to take just Johann, but also found a paladin Ivyst who was fleeing a Princess wrongly (she says) accused of arson. They stayed briefly in Betanta Fell, an iron mining town in the wilderness, and from there got a guide Gant, who had many professions behind him - man-at-arms, miner, gambler, dogfighting trainer and drunkard. The party didn't want to watch the dogfighting, for some reason.

Following the player-decided principle of "you don't get a name until you survive your first combat encounter", at twenty minutes before the game's end they insisted on entering an ancient temple and trying to prise the gem eye out of the four-armed statue of a giant ogre-god, which of course came alive and tried to cut them to pieces. But thanks to the NPC tanks they prevailed.

Where will it all lead? I have no fucking clue whatsoever. And a sandbox DM has to be cool with that. See the vid.

[video=youtube;EkXMxiAGUWg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkXMxiAGUWg[/youtube]

The video is worth a watch.

One thing worth doing to build player agency and the feeling of a living world is to prepare several possible plot hooks and let the players decide which one they want to follow.
The kidnapped tavern patrons taken by orcs coud be one. A trading caravan heading for the dwarven mines stopping at the tavern for beer could be another.  Make a few notes about what each hook might lead to, but don't worry about fully developing the details until the players actually choose one.  Keep the unused ideas as you may be able to change a few details and use them later.

It also comes down to point of view.

The players won't necessarily view something as easy that the GM does. You really have to be conscious of the difficulty of mysteries and puzzles within your game. And err on the side of making them too easy by your own perception.

The players are not you. They don't have your point of view. They aren't looking at the situation through your eyes or perspective. And that's a really important thing to be and stay aware of.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;940288You can also think, will Chief Stonefist mistreat engineer Harold, or will he pay him well and give him access to captured wine and food, or women if Harold is interested? So maybe the guy they're rescuing doesn't want to be rescued? And willing or not, will his advice help the orcs have better defences against assault?

Last night this adventure more or less concluded.

So Theo came back to gaming, and rolled up a character. He got a fighter with Strength 17. He appeared as a prisoner in a room whose owlbears the PCs had just killed, hog-tied, smeared with pig fat and wearing a leather mask. Was he being marinaded, or something worse? They equipped him with the gear of fallen foes. Orcish voices were heard in the next room. "Don't be stupid, I'm not going in there, they just killed the owlbears!"

"I CHAAAARGE!" cried Theo and went running in to find 11 orcs. They promptly knocked him down to -4 hit points. Then the rest of the party caught up, the magic-user cast sleep and they quietly slew all the orcs. They stabilised Theo to stop him bleeding out. Now, BtB in AD&D if you go below 0HP then even after healing you spend a week shuffling about mumbling and not able to do anything. They got tired of having weeks off, so I said, "Okay, you can act but... if you cast a spell or try to carry anything or make a roll, that's exerting yourself, you may bust the sutures or whatever, so you make a System Shock roll - if you pass all is good, if you fail you die."

So they make their way through the dungeon with their orc PW and Theo shuffling along behind, and using owlbear heads and gold they intimidate or bribe all the orcs between them and Stonefist's throneroom. The door is stuck.

"I bash in the door!" cries Theo, and rolls 2 on a 1d6 to open, it flings open, giving the party 2 segments of surprise.
"Okay, now make your system shock roll. Con 9, so that's 60%."
Theo rolls... 83.
So he died kicking in a door. He was slain by interior furnishings.

The party bursts in. They see great braziers burning coals lighting the room, a distant drum thumping slowly and rhythmically. Demonic statues are carved into the walls. A dozen naked but for loincloths orcish eunuchs stand about the place with halberds. Women in diaphanous robes and chains are clustered about on the left, Harold the engineer sitting at a feasting table caressing their thighs absently, his daughter Sally sitting next to him looking disgruntled. On benches are the butchered remains of men. To their side on the stairs down into this pit on iniquity is a great boiling cauldron of split pea and hand soup. Ahead them ogres stand on either side of a great wooden throne, whereon sprawls the largest orc they have ever seen, fully seven foot tall with a great belly, naked but for a loincloth and massive gauntlets, absently dropping gems through his great fist onto the floor, tossing them like a a seer casting bones for the fates.

Women scream in terror, running about. The engineer stands up shouting something, his daughter cowers in a corner.

The magic-user Paul casts sleep, and the eunuchs tumble over next to their halberds. They rush forward, hacking into Stonefist as he rises, blades piercing his legs and belly, darts peppering his chest and arms. His great fists cross and uppercut, and crash into the jaw of the henchman paladin Ivyst, sending her flying back six feet to sprawl unconscious on her back, next cracking the ribs of Johann the son of Count Barnacle, making him crumple to the floor, and finally Jon the cleric goes down like a sack of halfling shoes, clumsy, unwanted and unloved.

Meanwhile the men-at-arms are engaged in melee with the ogres, and the magic-user Paul, burned out of spells, frantically tosses burning oil about, accidentally burns two harem women, their silken robes flaming up with their screams of pain and terror. An ogre goes down, burning, and the second picks up the cauldron of split pea and hand and flings it at the magic-user, badly burning him.

Now Bagalog Stonefist steps forward to end it, and the thief Francois leaps on his back and stabs frantically, sending blood spurting from his neck as he tries to prise Francois from it. Stonefist falls. The surviving ogre tries to drag his body away, but Paul pelts him with darts and oil until he, too, falls.

The battle is won, as is much phat loot.

If Conan the Barbarian taught me anything it's that however you set up the adventure, in the end we all want to kill our enemies while they're having a cannibalistic orgy.

Hey, that's a cool video. Of course, he could've presented either book either way, but it's a good contrast that he did. Who is that guy?