Site has a new name!

Due the limited scope of the blog name I had been using 'D&D 4th Edition Game Design Goodness' I have decided to change the title to better reflect the blogs interests, thus it'll now be Tabletop Game Design Goodness. It is obvious I haven't put much work in this blog for well over the past year now and primarily this had been due to typical family life and other hobbies consuming all available free time. One of my recent projects has been working on creating a new table top gaming system. I will use this site to release more information as additional progress is made but there is still a long way to go with it. Currently the gaming system has the code name AEGIS but I cannot imagine this will actually stick assuming it ever comes to see the light of day.

D&D Insider Virtual Table - Table Top Gaming in a New Medium or Old Hat Repackaged?

D&D Insider has been in beta for awhile now with their much anticipated D&D Virtual Table. The gametable offers a chance to allow a group of people to play table top D&D with nothing more than their computer and an internet connection. The web application ties in a number of resources such as voice communication, macros for simulated dice rolling, pogs for character representation, status and initiative tracking, monster creation with a tie into to the compendium as well as a decent set of tiles to work with when creating a dungeon.

Now I'll admit that It has probably been at least 2 months since I last tried it out but given the rate of progression I'd seen in the application, not much if anything has noticeably changed since the beta first opened with perhaps the exception of being able to invite people not currently in the beta to play it. While I only managed to go through one simulated game with another person I did spend a good deal of time becoming familiar with the controls and UI. Overall it seems like it would be a nice addition to the D&D community and give people with a D&D insider subscription a chance to play virtually more often than they may otherwise be able to in person.

While the Virtual Table isn't finished yet I was rather disappointed with what beta players were given visually to work with. Namely the graphics were strictly limited to tiles and pogs on a virtual map rather than a fully explorable 3D dungeon experience that much of the initial hype was built around.

For an example this is what beta players were given

Credit:
WotC_Trevor

Where as this is what I was expecting:

Credit:
gadgets.boingboing.net

As you can see there is a stark contrast between what was promised in 2008 and what's yet to be delivered to the masses as of 2012. Still it is in beta which is kinda like saying there is still hope for visual improvements. However if you're looking for something in the here and now, or perhaps just lazy like myself and you've let your D&D Insider subscription expire there are alternatives to virtual table top gaming.

Game Table:
The nuts of bolts of any virtual table top gaming environment is, well, the table. This is where everything is placed and is essentially a shared viewing space or desktop among all the players. Here players will be able to manipulate pogs (playing pieces) and tiles(environment). Many such tables also include the ability to draw or write directly on the table as well as point to a location and choose to make views private or public. Marking something such as a pog or tile as private is key for building an adventure ahead of time because it allows a DM to make a room or monster or even an entire dungeon layout and then hide if from the players and only reveal it to them a piece at a time. Some tables have other niceties such as trackers for whose turn it is or which player is slowly dying on the floor as their entrails seep out of their eviscerated abdomen.

I've personally had great success playing through many online D&D gaming sessions using Game Table which is a simple to use, flexible, open source piece of software built in java. There are plenty of others out there however, and rather than list all of them here I'll kindly point in the direction of a resource dedicated to the subject and let you take a stab and whatever tickles you're fancy because I really don't know how you like your fancy to be tickled. Virtual Table Top Options

Voice Communication:
Being able to speak with other players at a virtual game table is essential to the online gaming experience. In some cases premade text could be used, say like if the DM wanted to describe a room in intimate detail but if a player has a a question about something that just happened in the game everything must stop while that player pecks out a dialog on their keyboard to the rest of the group. Good voice communication software can make or break an online gaming session. I can say from experience, nothing is more annoying that trying to listen to the DM unveil some intricate political plot while someone has something like "America's Next Top Model" blaring in the background. This kind of goes hand in hand with having a good set of head phones also but the software should at the least give options to adjust your inbound and outbound sound and of course have good clear voice quality.

In my personal experience I have found Ventrilo easy enough to use. Also the setup isn't bad and it is capable of handling a number of players you might expect to be sitting around a gaming table. As with any piece of software however there are alternatives so here is a site, although a bit dated now, that lists some: Voice Communication Options

Wrap Up:
So if you took the time to look at any of the alternatives to Wizard's of the Coast's Virtual Table you can see there are really a number of online table top gaming options that have been around for quite some time. I feel like many of them are all but unknown to many D&D players however. I am not sure if this is just because most of the people currently playing D&D go to D&D insider for all of their online D&D resources or if the people I've just spoken to about it in person just aren't that technically savvy. In either case if you're interested in trying out an online table top gaming session going it's really not that hard to do. Overall it can really be a nice alternative to traditional meetups especially if your regularly scheduled gaming group is spread out across large distances or you just don't feel like putting on pants when gaming.

I would recommend that if you do plan to start gaming online you make sure that everyone already has all the necessary and agreed upon software installed and working on their systems as well as time to make sure it works before the gaming session actual starts. I can't tell you how many times I have connected to the vent server only to find some's mic wasn't working, or in a few cases, that my own headphones had been used in a tug-o-war match by my kids and had ripped the cables clean in half. Making sure things are working ahead of time, or in my case, having a backup pair of headphones, can help ensure that the actual gaming session runs smoothly and without annoying delays as people trouble shoot problems.

If You'd like to find out more about D&D Insider's Virtual Table you can get information about it here: D&D Virtual Table

December Update has Been Released

For those of you who like to keep in 'know' on the current D&D updates WotC released their December revisions a couple of weeks ago. If you haven't already checked them out you can find them here: http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/updates

One high light that I was over joyed with is that they finally 'fixed' careful attack so that it wasn't a waste of space. Luckily character builder has already been updated with these changes so if you have the subscription to use it make sure you go ahead and get the update. With this last set of changes coupled with the previous updates released in November many people are finding that D&D is a whole new game. I for one am glad to see that WotC has gone out of their way to address design flaws and bring some obviously over and under powered abilities in line with their counter parts.

New Mini Adventure: The Temple into the Abyss (levels 5 through 9)

One of my favorite aspects of being a DM is coming up with adventures. In this case I made a mini adventure which is just like a normal adventure but it allows for more modular game play. For those of you not familiar with this idea, its basically creating small groups of tightly coupled encounters that are ultimately loosely coupled with the main storyline going on in the game. The true role of the DM in this kind of setup is to weave these various adventures accurately into the storyline based on the decisions of the players.

This mini adventure is made up of 3 combats all closely tied together and a skill challenge. Outside of those combats however this mini-adventure can be placed anywhere, as part of an adventure or as a side track, usable whenever the characters might find themselves in the middle of a forest. The beauty of these kind of mini adventures is that they have a good back story and plenty of detail so that they feel real. So real that they could fully exist without PC interaction at all. The player's don't HAVE to go through the adventure but as it stands, no risk, no reward. If the players find they are getting their asses kicked and they want to flee they can. If they do, that might impact the rest of the adventure they are currently on for better or for worse. The possibilities are endless but there are plenty of hooks that can be used both before and after this mini adventure. I personally like to have two or three of these kind of adventures just sitting idly by so if the players go somewhere, do something I would have never expected them to, I have a generic yet detailed, 'something' to throw at them.

So here is my new mini adventure at a high abstract level. This can be used to give people ideas to build their own like mini encounter or you can download the detailed zip version of the this mini adventure I used. This adventure was built in mind for players roughly around levels 5 through 9. Please let me know what you think if you decide to use it.

The backdrop: The quick little, background story for this adventure, like the adventure itself works well within most campaigns to explain how this temple came to be and why it is here today. Basically it was built by an ancient order of druids who wished to worship nature in solitude. They built the temple of powerful magic literally shaping the forest around them to create the temple.

One fateful day a series of events cause the elemental chaos to collide with the world. In some areas this opened up momentary rifts linking the two worlds. In a few cases such as with this remote temple, one such rift that was created actually connected back to the to the part of the elemental chaos known as the abyss. As the natural order of the worlds came back many of the rifts closed. However within the temple there were special crystals that had been used in the construction and had inadvertently become focus points for the rift to the abyss. So long as the crystals are in tact, a gateway would connect these two planes of existence.

With the rift open to the abyss legions of demons started to pour out into the world. The druids, fought tooth and claw to fight back against the destruction that had encroached on their home but were eventually pushed back. They fought until only one powerful druid remained. Badly wounded, he know that is was up to him to prevent the corruption of the demons from tainting the forest. So with his last dying breath he commanded the very forest around him to seal temple so that it could only be opened from the outside. To further protect the vine entwined gate a legion of powerful plant creatures were summoned to eternally stand guard over the entrance prevent anyone from breaking the seal.

The Hook:
The hook in 'The Temple into the Abyss' follows a philosophy I like to use known as KISS, or 'Keep It Simple Stupid' to the non-geeks out there. Thus the hook is, the group of players get a little lost in the woods and happen upon an ancient temple overgrown with vines and dense brush. As the name of this adventure suggests and what the DM will know, is that this temple has a rift leading to the abyss within it's walls, but luckily the doors are locked... until some comes along and opens them.

1st Encounter Guardians at the Gate: Going along the theme of the background the first encounter is made up entirely of plant-like creatures. Since this combat is outside in an overgrown forest I wanted to make liberal use of the terrain. First was to have the vines and brush out in front of the temple to count as difficult terrain. This will make tactical movement more more difficult for the players especially since majority of the monsters have forestwalk essentially allowing them to ignore the difficult terrain. I also included a Daggerthorn Briar to be hiding inconspicuously among the normal difficult terrain. Player's that don't immediately recognize this as threat might blunder into it or be dragged into by the monsters.

2nd Encounter Opening the Door Skill Challenge: In this skill challenge the players need to open the door to the temple without alarming the horde of demons inside.

3rd Encounter Unleashing the Demons: Assuming the players survive the first encounter and wish to continue into the temple they'll find the vines intertwining the double stone door ripped up with relative ease. The seal on the door is broken when the vines are removed. When the players enter into the temple the will follow stone steps leading down a spiral stair case into what was once the main room. Here the players will see the remainants of the druid's last stand and the carnage left by the demons who are still sowing the seeds of destruction. When the demons notice the players they will attempt to eat them.

The interesting feature about this room are the various spiked pits through out it. Originally used by the druids to defend against the invasion of demons these pits have since seen the demise of so many demons that the pointed spikes are now tainted with the blood of slain demons. This is all the more reason for the players to avoid falling into these pits but with rampaging demons about that may be easier said then done.

4th Encounter Nexus to the Abyss: Truly the crown jewel of this mini-adventure the final area where the rift has attached itself to a set of teleportation crystals once utilized by the druids makes for some interesting combat. To get into the final area the players will go through a teleporter. Once there they will be at the center of five walk ways that span out towards different corners of the room. At each corner is another teleporter that will instatly transport someone from the walkway to the floor below or vice versa. Down 50 feet below them will be the churning rift leading into the Abyss. Tendrils of abysmal energy have grown out from the rift and latched on to the lower set of teleportation crystals causing the rift to become permanent. Over the years this rift has caused the very air to become corrupted and soiled limiting all sources of light to only 3 sqaures. This means when players look over the edge of the walk way they'll only see darkness. Unfortunately for them, the demons pouring out of the rift have darkvision and see their next meal above them quite clearly. Not only will the players need to battle their way through two levels of darkness and demons in order to get to the rift. Once there they'll still need to figure out how to close it.

Conclusion: This mini-adventure is a nice little in and out adventure that pretty much any demon-hating PC can get behind. There is also plenty of room for expansion on this mini-adventure to make it a full fledged adventure. Making the temple larger and have more than two encounters is probably the easiest way to go about doing this. What I find works best however is keeping it as a side adventure. Should the players find them lost in the forest it's great to throw that in there to side track them. When the players have multiple paths they can track, rather than just following the bread crumbs the DM leaves behind, it is empowering for them. This adventure can be downloaded here. Please feel free to send me feedback or any questions that might arise.

Design patterns among D&D 4e Skill Challenges

Being that I have a healthy phobia of using other peoples adventure and campaign material, published or not, I find myself constantly working on new encounters and skill challenges. (Hey I gotta fill those down hours at work between 8 and 5) Over the course of creating skill challenges and seeing some others that have been created I have decided to boldly try and classify a good number of different skill challenge mechanics and their purpose or explanation in the storyline.

Now already I have a feeling I've bit off more than I am willing to proverbially chew. I think first and foremost it's best to identify some of the different structures that make up various skill challenge. Since skill challenges are really only limited by the creators imagination there are a limitless number of possibilities. However, just like computer programming there are a number of design patterns that are used over and over again in skill challenges and seem to be very successful. The key is pointing out what these design patterns are and what they are used to accomplish. So here are a few different design patterns I've noticed.

The Trailblazing SC:
Just like the DMing style of trailblazing this kind of skill challenge limits the players choices to only a couple of skills and to quickly lead them along the storyline. Since the story is usually already planned out players will only have 1 or 2 different skills to choose from. In most cases I have seen this kind of skill challenge used to quickly advance the storyline or play a narrative with dice rolls. They require only minimal input from the PCs such as, 'Do you want to go through the mountains or the forest to get to the next town?' Usually these are low complexity challenges because high complexity challenges tend to feel like you're just rolling dice. Basically this kind of SC is used as a narrative or sometimes just introduces an extra encounter into what in previous editions might have just been a flash point or 'Okay a week later you show up in town'. While theses aren't really bad I find them a little unnecessary, the PCs are adventurers if it's not an adventure to do something it doesn't really need to be a skill challenge, then again XP is XP so bring on the trailblazing skill challenges :)

The Resource Pool SC:
The Resource Pool skill challenge is probably the most typical of all skill challenges. This is essentially the framework intended to be used with all (or most all, see social skill challenges) skill challenges. The basic concept is that the party has a pool of available skills to choose from in order to complete the skill challenge. Generally each skill will have some kind of additional effect on top of a success or failure. Such as a +2 to your next skill check or perhaps on a failure, you lose a healing surge. At it's core, this kind of skill challenge encompasses a lot of possibilities for the party. When a group of players are involved in a challenge it makes sense that everyone can take a turn, choose a skill that best suits them and roll to see how they fair. Each individual success or failure brings the entire party one step towards completing the skill challenge.

Since there is a plethora of different kinds of resource pool skill challenges the length of these kind of skill challenges can vary from complexity 1 to complexity 5. More advanced resource pool type skill challenges exist where, based on what skills have been attempted with success or failure, new secondary skills become available that previously were not. A perfect example of this can be found in Dungeon 167 in the"Heart of the Forbidden Forge" adventure in encounter 14: "Disabling the Forge" just to point one out at random.(requires DNDI subscription) It should also be mentioned that in some cases not all available choices in these kind of skill challenges are made known to the players, thus forcing them to come up with their own ideas about how to complete the challenge. In other cases resource pool skill challenges can be modified to become Diminishing Resource Pool skill challenges which add an extra level of decision making on the part of the PCs.

The Diminishing Resource Pool(DRP) SC:
The DRP skill challenge is similar to the resource pool skill challenge but rather than allowing the players to choose whatever available skill they want they are limited to successfully completing each skill a limited number of times. Sometimes a skill will only be good for one success other times the player may be limited to a small number of successes. Sometimes on a success or failure one skill will be replaced with a different skill in the next round. All of these variations build on top of the original idea of the resource pool skill challenge and add the element that certain skills' effectiness deminish as they are used.
When the players have to choose which skill they will attempt on their turn they need to look at who is the most skilled in the party rather than just what their character's best skills are. The idea being that once a skill is used the group might not get a chance to use it again potentially forcing players to make skill checks with untrained skills. This kind of alteration can throw some PCs off their guard, especially when they don't know they are doing a DRP type of skill challenge in the first place. This kind of logic closely follow a lot of fantasy world situations and can make for great enthralling chllaneges. The only downside I have seen among them is that they are usually pretty involved and take a good deal to time to create and flesh out.

An example of a DRP SC might be where the PCs are trying to crack a cipher code on a magical scroll. Each piece of the code can be broken in a unique way but once solved there is no new information that method can present. Say initially the PCs can use insight to learn about the origin of the scroll or Arcana to decipher the magic encrypting it. Succeeding in insight tells the players it has a religious origin opening up a religion check where as the Arcana route displays the text in a certain dialect allowing the players to use nature to determine information about the writer. If the players then succeed in a nature check perhaps they learn it was written by an ancient tribe of magic wielding orcs which could warrant a history check or another arcana check. With each player taking a turn in this kind of challenge the party needs to make sure that the dumb barbarian doesn't end up getting stuck having to make the history check to which he knows nothing about.

The Group SC:
The group skill challenge is a challenge in which the entire party makes rolls as a group. When I say group I mean literally just that, every one's roll weighs in on each others chance of success. Generally this is done with the majority of the party's rolls needing to be successful in order to count as a success towards the skill challenge. If the majority of the rolls are unsuccessful then the party earns a failure towards the encounter. This kind of skill challenge works great for adventures where the entire party is trying to accomplish a similar task such as scaling a mountain or trying gain control of an of crashing air ship. Group skill challenges tend to have a few different skills to choose from and often require at least 1 player to use each of the available skills. As with pretty much all skill challenges variations can exist where the set of skills change. This kind of change tends to have more of an impact with group challenges if a certain number of PCs need to make checks for the new skill presented. A lot of the time such a change can lead to characters making checks for skills in which they aren't trained which can make things tougher, but usually more exciting.

The Puzzle SC:
The puzzle skill challenge as it's name suggests involves an actual puzzle set inside the framework of a skill challenge. Depending on the difficulty of the puzzle this can sometimes be extremely easy or very difficult. Generally this type of skill challenge will deviate from the typical x successes before 3 failues and instead uses some sort of time limit. This arbitrary limit is the amount of time the players have to work on the puzzle. These kind of challenges really give the player's a chance to get their hands dirty, however for those not fond of puzzles it can come as a distraction from the game. Some player's may also not like it when the half-orc warden who has never seen a book in his life and is dumb as bricks is able to solve the riddle the Sphinx while his worldly wizard ally is dumb-founded by it. This can be a draw back because much of the challenge of the puzzle relies on the player rather than the player's character.

To help supplement what a player's character knows there should be skill checks that are made during a set interval of time. Each successful skill check made gives the players a piece of the puzzle that they haven't already solved. A very clever example of this I came across in another DMs game was when the DM wrote out symbols in 'elven' on a grid as glowing runes on a locked door. It quickly became obvious the grid was a sudoku puzzle using symbols rather than numbers. The runes started glowing brighter as the players interacted with them hinting that something very bad would happen if the puzzle wasn't solved quickly. Suddenly the group of players realized the DM was timing them and everyone scrambled into action trying to solve the puzzle. Every few minutes a player could make a certain skill check to solve an empty square. In this case it was exceedingly simple and easy to implement but it got the players involved as if they had just stumbled upon an angry dragon. However, while puzzle skill challenges can be very entertaining you want to make sure to use them sparingly. Too many and your player's will stab you in the throat with a pencil when you're not looking because they came to play D&D not solve puzzles.

While this post turned out to view skill challenges at a much higher level than I anticipated I believe these 5 patterns do a pretty good job of classifying many of the skill challenges out there and many more to potentially to come. I purposely didn't launch into any detail about social skill challenges since I already have a post on them, granted it's not quite the same thing but no point in reiterating the topic. For those of you who are still actually reading this far you probably want your 5 minutes back that I just wasted but I'll make it worth your while and say if you want to read some more about skill challenge design you can check out Mike Mearls' articles on skill challenges, they are very enlightening.