Stuff I learned from the Temple of Elemental Evil

It's been two years since we last played and we're just starting to talk about playing again.

Temple of Elemental Evil, the campaign that broke a roleplaying group and prevented us from playing for over a year.

Was it that bad?  No.  It really wasn't.  But there were some mistakes from character creation that put a big wedge into the party from the get-go and allowed personality conflicts to fester and grow.

And, because I taped all the sessions I can now look back upon everything and evaluate it all, including my own mistakes.  Fascinating really.

1: I can be really mean.
No, seriously.  I realized this listening to the oldest episodes.  There were some encounters where I was relentless.

Now, there is, of course, a reason why.  We had an unbalanced party.  Each player had two characters, and one of the four players had two very unbalanced characters.  So while one person was cakewalking through the adventure the other three were taking all the risk and all the damage.  I felt that I had to push each encounter until all the party was challenged, even when I pushed too far.

If I were to do it again, I'd rather have it be too easy than too difficult.  Still - that didn't address the problem of an unbalanced party.  Even if they had good success on a consistent basis, the other 3 players would have still been frustrated that one person was more powerful and taking less risk.

2: When you feel a player is min-maxing, stop it before the end of character creation.
Unfortunately the player kept pointing to the book and saying 'the book allows me to do this!'

This was one of my failings - I had not DM'd DnD for almost 20 years.  I could clearly tell any white wolf player exactly why I had every single house rule and why certain things would unbalance the game but I couldn't clearly say why the same was true in DnD.

I had a feeling that the two dwarves were unbalanced.  The player had pooled his gold for both and gone out of his way to buy the heaviest armor each character could wear and that he could afford while also buying the weapons that maximized damage for the price - even if those weapons made no sense for a dwarf to use.  Add in the dart specialization which allowed the fighter dwarf to make 5 attacks in one round, each attack doing considerable damage that meant that one character was doing 5 actions per round where every other character was only doing 1 action per round.  Even the ranger with two weapon fighting took a considerable penalty for his off hand meaning he frequently only had one hit; whereas the dart throwing dwarf usually hit at least 4 times.

I noticed immediately on the second listen through that when the dart throwing dwarf got into combat and started felling 2-3 enemies on his turn alone... the other players tuned out.  I could hear the taps on cell phones to open up apps and the sudden disinterest in the combat.

Even though it was within the rules, and even though it made the dart thrower feel special we had one character who could attack 5 times per round with a high chance of hitting versus every other character attacking once per round with only a moderate chance of hitting.

Immediately it felt unfair.  Despite being 'fair' by the book, it felt unfair to the other players.

Compounding this problem was the fact that everyone else spent their gold fairly modestly, spreading it out between adventuring supplies, armor, weapons and 'pocket change' to spend until they could get a supply of gold coming in.

The dwarves pooled their money (two characters, one player) and spent it all on armor and weapons.  They had rope, backpacks... and that was it.  No other adventuring gear.  Very little pocket change.  They had just enough to pay for a night at the inn.  The player was expecting the adventure to run like a video game - the first monster they bashed would certainly pop loot out of its corpse along with XP, right?

Well... wrong.  There was treasure hidden in the module, but it wasn't automatic.  The first session resulted in very little treasure.

Worse, the other party members were the ones in lesser armor, with more modest weapons but were providing extra coin and supplies.

This would have been OK if the best armored dwarf fighter would have agreed to be the tank.  He had the highest HP, he had the best armor.

And the player refused to be at the front of the party.  He wanted to live.  He was the ranged fighter.  He wanted to be in the back.

This is when the party divide started to happen.

The dwarf player thought "I created my build to survive the dungeon.  I will not take risks."

The rest of the players thought "I spent my gold on supplies that not only helped my character, but will help the party as a whole.  Why won't the character who had the best armor, and the best fighting ability lead?  Why are we being selfless while he is being selfish?"

This only got worse when the wizard was jumped by a giant tick.  He took enough HP damage to knock him into the negatives, without killing him.  The Dwarf's immediate response was to do a healing check, even though he still had all his spells.  The rest of the players were upset: why would the cleric not use his healing spells on a clearly dying character?

They pressured the cleric into healing the wizard.  Now both sides were unhappy.

Move forward in time.  The party is heading back and gets ambushed by brigands.  Dwarf 1 is hit by a critical shot.  Despite being still in the positive HP range, the cleric heals him without a thought.

The other players throw a fit.

It only got worse from there.

It was so easy to see in retrospect.  It stuck out like a sore thumb.  One player hadn't learned how to share with the party - he was thinking like a video game that it was every person for themselves and he was going to spend the most resources on his own characters and the other players were expecting the party to be more cohesive.

And worst, I tried to solve this by punishing the Dwarf and taking away his armor.

Bad choice on my part.  That only bred anger and resentment.  But I didn't know what the hell else to do at that point.

3. Don't let players make pairs of characters.

Again - we have paired characters thinking selfishly.  Bad move on my part.  We're never doing that again.

Episode 1 Part 3

March 4th Recap part 3

The path to the moathouse -> inside the ruins in the great hall

Where frogs and rats and lizards are fought, oh my!

Episode 1 Part 2

March 4th Recap part 2

Meeting with the Shepherd -> Talking with Burne at the tower/meeting with Jaroo the druid

And we finally decide to head to the ruins of the moathouse...

Episode 1 Part 1

March 4th Recap part 1 - Arrival into town -> Meeting with the Moneychanger.
And lots of pretzel crunching.  They were delicious.

New Campaign: Temple of Elemental Evil...

And thus we started the path of a new campaign, one of the most famous modules ever written.

Three intrepid players, six intrepid characters.  who will live to make it to the end...

...of the Temple of Elemental Evil...

T1 – Village of Hommlett

3/4/2014

Whirly – Gnome Illusionist (Aaron)

Arnold – Human Ranger (Aarom)

Kinna – Human Fighter (Colleen)

Terrabeth – Gnome Thief (Colleen)

Vartuk – Dwarf Fighter (Eric)

Orsiron – Dwarf Cleric (Eric)

 Your bare bones recap:

The party arrives at Hommlett.  Vartuk literally goes from business to business introducing himself and looking for quests while the rest of the party visit with the locals, check the job board and learn about the town.  The best lead towards treasure and adventure seems to be exploring the ‘cursed’ old moathouse a league southeast of town.

The party stables their horses at the inn of the Welcome Wench and sets out on foot to the moathouse arriving in the area around noon.  They are ambushed by some hungry giant rats, and later face down the giant frogs in the pools of stagnant water.

Crossing a rotting drawbridge, they enter the moathouse ruins.  Turning to the right, the party starts exploring, coming across a room with a broken wall housing a giant snake, several rooms full of detritus and bats, and a main hall.  Bootprints were noticed in the courtyard heading towards the steps that led into the main hall.

~*~

Important names:
Elder Tharo – village elder (not met)

Jaroo Ashstaff – leader of the ‘Old Faith’ in the area.  Druid

Burne – Magic-user.  Part of the town council.  Connected to the viscount.  Building the castle at the eastern edge of town.

Others –

Elmo – young, jovial drunkard encountered outside of the inn.  He offered himself as a hireling in exchange for pay

Spugnoir – traveling student of a sage from Verbobonc.  Offered to accompany a party exploring any ruins in exchange for any scrolls found.

Zert – Fight waiting for his caravan to come into town.  Offering a sword for hire in the meantime in exchange for an equal share of any treasure found.

Ostler and Goodwife Gundigoot – keepers of the Inn of the Welcome Wench

Jed – The old man playing cards who jabbered on about the history of the town.

Traders – Rannos and Gremag – offer goods and services.  They also offer connections for swords for hire.

Melubb – moneychanger.  Can make jewelry.

~*~

Treasure found:

1 ornate dagger with a jewel in the hilt.  (Snake lair)

Notable House Rules

We use:

*Simplified Initiative

Death/dying
*Unconsciousness at 0, death at -10 (or -your hit points, whichever comes first)
*Knocked below 0 requires 1 full day of rest to recuperate from each negative hit point suffered. (even with magic below "heal" level)
*Knocked below zero requires a constitution % roll for system shock or bleed damage will continue
Why? I would rather impose a time penalty on injured characters to force a semi-realistic 'recovery' time than just murderize character all the time.  However it retains some of the brutality of the system.  It gives the newbie players a cushion to err and not completely fail.

I also tend to make most rolls publicly.  For me the dice are arbiters of decisions, not things for me to steer the game.  However being public and honest with rolls rather than using a screen also make a brutal encounter all the more brutal - even with the added -10 hp death cushion.  And my players sometimes make foolish decisions to do things like walk into ambushes.  As a kind and merciful DM I kindly oblige them with a smackdown.

I waver between writing my own dungeons and running pre-written adventures.  I take more liberties in tweaking my own dungeons than I do in tweaking pre-written modules.   

The Great Experiment

The great experiment.

Can one seasoned DM take four raw recruits and teach them the glory of old school gaming?

A bit of background:

I'm a 34 year old female gamer.  Started gaming in 1997 with 2nd ed, ADnD and I loved it from the start.  In college I got caught up with old school WW systems: Vampire: the Masquerade, Changeling: the Dreaming, Werewolf: the Apocalypse ect.  When Exalted came out I got into that, too.  It was fun in an 'over the top, non-realistic' sense. 

After college I bounced from game to game.  3rd edition was out by then and I played it for a bit.  But after my original college gaming group broke up, I could only find groups playing a rules-lawyer tactical battle mat version of 3e.  3.5 only made this issue worse.  While I felt that 3e could be used to promote roleplaying (heck, I remembered doing it when it first came out!) all the groups I could find were focused on min maxing, tactics and rules-lawyering.  White Wolf was no better, I disliked the new world of darkness and couldn;t find a gaming group that played the old style.  Sigh.

So I turned to online chat games for year.  Finally I burnt out of that drama and wanted to start tabletop gaming again.  I found a group playing Pathfinder.  Again, not a bad game, but the group was more focused on tactics and wargaming.

So I waffled.  How do you start a campaign that fits your roleplaying wants and needs?

You make your own.

So I gathered a small group of players and started to teach them the game.

We have the WoW player
We have the 3.5er/Pathfinder player
We have the Vampire: the Masquerade player
and we have the Total Newbie.

And we're all together playing ADnD.  Why?  Because that's the system I chose. Partially because I know it best.  Partially because it's a brutal system with consequences and I wanted to break my WoW player from seeing the game like a series of WoW raids or dungeons.

We have actually been playing for about 9 months now.  But I'm choosing to write about this now because after some game misunderstandings (ok, I TPK'd the party.  Twice.  In a row.  The gods can only come save you so many times...) I started to do some heavy research into the way we used to play old school games, vs the way we play games now.  What are the fundamental differences that put old school playing apart from new school playing?  I found that a lot of them defined exactly why I was so unhappy playing new school games.  So, this is in many ways my record of the journey of a group to learn how to roleplay better.

Tuesday we introduce two new characters (yes, I finally yanked sheets and said 'roll up a new one') and we'll start on a new chapter in our quest.  Along the way I'm making notes and keeping track of what does and doesn't work in this game, trying to refine my DM style as well as my player's ability to interact with the game world for a better game for everyone.