$10 T-Shirts, Not Quite As Often

We've got good news and bad news about our weekly T-shirts. The bad news is that we're not going to have them every single week anymore. The good news is that we're now offering shirts for $10 (plus shipping) apiece. Just in time for you to buy one for your favorite nerd this holiday season!

There's several reasons for these changes. One is that in the whole time we've been up, we've sold a grand total of three (3) shirts. Two of them were to Yax from DungeonMastering. With that single order, Yax became responsible for the vast majority of this site's income (which, if I'm not mistaken, is about to crest $3). Thanks, Yax!!!!

What I'm trying to say here is, we're not moving any shirts. Cafepress's base prices on shirts are really insanely high, so to order any shirts we were offering you'd have to shell out almost $30. And we'd see maybe $2 of it. So we've gone with a cheaper shirt (their "value" t-shirt, which isn't quite as thick as the ones we've been selling but still nice), and only marked it up a buck so maybe we can have a little money to blow at Gen Con next year.

Since we're not moving any shirts, we're also starting to wonder how much interest there is in them. A look at our site stats shows very little activity in the shop (and no sales). We've all got a lot on our plates right now, so we've decided our time might be better spent on doing the things on the site we know people come for: that is, good quality articles and comics.

Not to say that there will be no more new t-shirts. They're still fun to make, and I think I might do a little dance and make a girlish squeal if I ever saw a random person wearing one at a convention. We will be making new t-shirts. However, we'll be doing them a lot more sporadically.

If it seems like the winds of change are starting to blow a little around here, you're probably right. When we first launched and were trying to get the word out about the site, we had several bloggers tell us "great site, hope you keep it up because a lot of them peter out". I think we're starting to see why that is, it's so easy to go at this full bore for a month or two and then get exhausted (especially when Real Life starts getting in the way). But everyone here thinks we'll be OK -- and the main reasons why are that we're starting to get a feel for what people are looking for, setting realistic expectations of what we can do, and adjusting accordingly.

It might be a little bumpy sometimes, but we'll still be here giving you something to waste your time on at work and improve your gaming experience. Thanks for reading!

P.S. every time you buy a t-shirt you save a baby owlbear from a grisly doom

Hotdog Forks!!

On the way home from work, I noticed, out of the corned of my eye, a marquee sign for the camper sales place. It blinked twice: Hotdog Forks!! And I knew that my muse had appeared in those blinking red lights. On the way home from a crazy day at work, the absurdity of the words "Hotdog Forks!!" made me smile, but most importantly, it reminded me how some of the littlest things make such a huge difference, even in the D&D realm.

Spice Things Up

How easy it can be to make your character just that much more interesting by adding a little spice. Add a quirk to your character with a small trinket that always gets lost and without which you won't leave the campsite in the morning. Or maybe you have a lucky feather you have to have tucked securely in your armor or robes before you go into battle.

Add Some Comic Release

In the first half of our current campaign, Ari won a small necklace from the mysterious carnival. Most of the gains from the carnival would disappear in the light of the new morning, but the necklace, for whatever reason, stayed. Ari shrugged it off as bizarre, but it was pretty, and she decided that she would keep it. It was a few days later before she discovered the trick in the trinket. She said the word "necklace" and was transported to another random location, not too far from where she was standing. It was such a fun little item... but the best part was keeping the DM's guessing if she was going to say the magic word.

So, if you find yourself in the situation where you feel as if your muse has abandoned you, try to add some fun to your character with your own "Hotdog Forks!!"

Suspense, continued...

The reason I like writing this blog it gets me thinking about things in new ways. On Monday I posted some thoughts about how difficult that it is to adequately engineer situations that actually compel suspense, and some great comments were made that kept me thinking about this topic as the week progressed.

Getting outside the normal

One of our readers, reid, recommended a gaming system called Dread which puts each player's actions and checks in the embodiment of a Jenga tower. This strikes me as an EXCELLENT way to have an evening of fun and appears to be a system engineered for one-nighters and short runs where the gaming area can be left in place.

I love the inherent risk of the tower falling and I can imagine this wrapping very nicely into a horror setting or one that has a lot of physical risks for your characters.

Some more traditional ideas

Several people (including our very own Vanir) recommended obfuscating or eliminating the fear based systems in favor of rewarding roleplaying. I like these ideas, however there will always be those naturally light in roleplaying that will want to have control over some system of determining the fear response.

We have used props in some of our campaigns up to this point to illustrate objects and add some reality to encounters. I've been toying with ways to combine the Jenga suspense with a situation specific prop to heighten the roleplay experience for those people that don't really get into heavy roleplay.

Then I remembered our experience at Nascrag this year... they had essentially a paper diagram describing a puzzle, with a specific time limit to solve it. It wasn't horror, but let me tell you the pressure was on. I imagine this would be equally cool with a real life prop, or a combination of puzzles and real props to add an air of reality to the situation.

Using some creative applications of concepts like this that many of you may already use may help aid in creating some artificial, yet realistic suspense to your settings and encounters.

Critical Failure #2: Halloween Edition

Happy Halloween!


P.S. if anybody needs a ride to Hell later, I'm sure I'll be going there for this. :)

Stop that Muse!

There are those days... when we really just don't have the energy... when real life just seems so overwhelming, how can we ever enjoy ourselves when the rest of the party is counting on us? How do we survive when our muse escapes us?

I have been suffering a distinct lack of motivation, and I firmly blame the absence of my muse. I haven't gotten fully into the 4-years-in-the-future campaign. And I haven't been particularly moved to create an inspiring post to share with you all. So here's how I'm trying to win back my muse:

1. Reading inspirational literature. Not sunshine & light inspirational. D&D inspirational. I've recently discovered R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms novels... I know, about 20 years after the rest of the population. But nevertheless, they have helped me remember all the awesomeness of D&D, and inspire me to get out there and roll some dice.

2. Reading other blogs. While I'm not a DM myself, I read a lot of the DM blogs... Dungeon Mastering dot com, Treasure Tables, Chatty DM, and many, many, many others. And they inspire me by reminding me that the game isn't just about me, it's about everyone else, including the DM.

So, what else can you recommend for finding my muse?

Evensbrook #15

Suspense, or something like it...

Before I get into this post, I must come clean: in younger years, I was a Halloween FREAK. Monster movies, legends, haunted houses, trick-or-treating... I was in for all of it. Then, in 1995, the mood left me entirely. I couldn't get excited about the holiday any more (I hadn't trick-or-treated for at least 3 years at that point, but it hadn't stopped me yet) and I couldn't muster anything more than a passing handwave as I handed kids their hyper-sugar haul.

I never have gotten to the bottom of why this is, but nonetheless I find my thoughts returning to suspense and horror this year.

Is there a way to do this right?

I have made several attempts at suspense and horror in some of my campaigns, and I am sad to say that I am a better consumer of this genre than I am a creator. All of my attempts generally failed, some spectacularly, and I have pretty much written off any attempt at being able to do this genre justice myself, but I have seen it done.

Our college DM provided us with some of the most chilling scenes of torture that I have beheld since, and he used many classic elements.

Isolation

By machinations of plot, the characters arrived in a situation where they were isolated from one another and stripped of their weapons and abilities (spellcasters had their hands broken in a grisly fashion). This not only removed most normal means of diffusing the situation, but also heightened the sense of urgency for the other characters that were within earshot of the grisly acts that would occur.

Specific, Terrible Pain

Like any good torture film, the DM went on to act individually on one member of our party (played by our very own Stupid Ranger) and explained the acts of torture in such gory detail that it still makes Stupid Ranger cringe to this day when it is mentioned.

The vivid use of specifics and the descriptions that the DM chose to expand upon was what really painted the scene. It was made even more real by the fact that the rest of the characters did not know who or what was causing the anguished cries, nor could they really do much to effect the situation. After some vain attempts to break free ended in failure, the characters resigned themselves to the scenario which gave the DM license to really get inside the characters heads. This is what made the entire scene so horrifying.

Suspended in-game reality

This was done entirely outside of the realm of a system or rules, it was all storytelling. Knowing when and how to craft a situation that can exist outside of the system of rules is a tricky thing, especially when your characters can possess skills such as bluff and diplomacy that can seriously screw with a horrific scene.

This is not a skill that I have mastered, in fact I have extreme difficulty in making a situation that leaves so few paths out that I can exact my plan of suspense, fear, or intrigue. Matters become even worse when the players can see the plot coming, and have mentally prepared themselves for whatever badness was about to happen. That's when out of character comments can really ruin the mood, and I don't have much good advice for getting around situations like that.

My trouble with terror

My trouble with successfully executing a horror or suspense scene is usually the drawn out system of rules, coupled with the fact that obfuscating details or creating unseen twists usually leads to player frustration and disengagement in our group.

A campaign or two back, my co-DM ran a Call of Cthulhu campaign that was good, however the Fear system in that setting often left the players feeling a little cold. The setting itself was very intriguing and the storyline that he was running good, but when having to experience paranormal activities devolved down to a "make a fear check or lose it" roll it seemed to kick me right out of enjoying the storyline.

Has anyone had success applying a rule set to a horror or suspense type of setting? Are there any other key elements that helps drive the spook factor of a campaign through the roof?

Why You Don't Really Want Realistic Combat In D&D

When I was growing up, I couldn't get enough sci-fi and fantasy. And the cheesier, the better. I remember many nights at my grandmother's house watching Troma movies until 4am. Most of the things that happened in these movies didn't make a damn bit of sense, but I loved them anyway. I'm not sure when it happened, but somewhere between then and now I found myself having more trouble suspending my disbelief when something goofy or unrealistic happens. (Which is kind of tragic, considering I'm a big Star Trek fan!)

I've played D&D a very long time, and for many years I never really gave a second thought to how combat worked. Then I read some passage in the 1st Edition PHB that talked about how a character's hit points reflect a character's toughness and experience in avoiding damage. I thought to myself, that's kinda silly. And doesn't Armor Class handle that sort of thing instead? This trend continued, and I began to notice more and more weird things that just didn't mesh right with how combat actually works.

It must really suck to be an assassin in D&D. Zero-level targets are fine, you can kill them in one shot and sneak off into the night. But to kill a high-level PC.... geez, they'd need 20 minutes and a quiver full of arrows with explosive tips. And for their target to be unconscious already. All this just by virtue of him having enough hitpoints to soak the damage of a single attack.

And come on -- SIX SECONDS for a combat round? Any idiot drunk enough to flail his arms can throw 10 to 12 seperate attacks in six seconds. But what do I know.... maybe that bar down the street is secretly training epic level fighters?

To Kill With One Blow

As we've mentioned on occasion here, all of us here at Stupid Ranger have some martial arts experience. This definitely does not help matters, because we have a lot more experience with hand to hand combat than the average joe. For YEARS, I've thought it silly that punches do nonlethal damage without the Improved Unarmed Combat feat. Sure, a trained person might have an easier time landing a punch, but that doesn't mean some 300lb angry redneck at a bar isn't going to push your off button with a big heymaker. A punch delivered by a skilled person causes a shockwave that can do all sorts of nasty stuff to one's internal organs. I don't doubt in the least that a hard enough punch to the head would kill a man, or at least cause him serious brain damage. (It's getting past that pesky armor class that's the problem.)

The nature of real combat is frequently that one hit does the job, especially if a weapon is involved. The blow might not kill the person outright, but a well-placed hit will end the fight (leaving the victor the option to coup-de-grace, if they so choose). This is what we're taught to do in self-defense, and even when we're sparring little weeny techniques are not counted. The Japanese term we use for this is ikken hissatsu, which means "to kill with one blow".

I always thought it'd be completely awesome to have D&D or a videogame behave realistically in this way. That is, until I came across a game called Bushido Blade on the Playstation back in 1997. This game was all about realistic samurai swordfighting. One hit usually killed your opponent, and if it did not, it injured them somehow. And by "injured", I don't mean "his hitpoints decreased". I mean "his leg doesn't work anymore" or "he lost an arm so he can't swing his sword". As you may have guessed, if you got injured, you were very lucky if you won the fight. And usually the fights lasted about 15 seconds -- 12 of which you spent approaching the opponent.

I thought it was completely amazing for the first half hour or so. Then I alternated between being really bored and impossibly frustrated (depending on how difficult my opponent was). And the matches were over so fast that it became a pain to start the game again and again. In short, it was an amazing idea on paper -- but the execution left much to be desired. Applied to D&D, realistic combat would mean (like Bushido Blade) very few hitpoints or keeping track of injuries and their corresponding effects. And very short battles. And lots, lots more character death -- which is really undesirable for a roleplayer (like me) who invests himself in a character.

Crash

The point of all this is, if combat was realistic in D&D it would be a vastly different beast than it is now. And I can't honestly say it would be more fun. Need another example?

I don't think D&D combat addresses the issue of adrenaline crashes at all. I can spar with Dante all night and usually we're tired but we can go an hour or more and be basically OK. A real battle is a lot different -- the body gives you a real nice hit of adrenaline which helps you out for a minute or so, and then you crash. HARD. While I haven't been in many street fights, tournaments are frequently scary enough to give a lot of competitors the adrenaline crash. You drag butt to the point where you can't breathe and you can't hit anything to save your life. In D&D terms, I would say a CON check or a Fort save is necessary every round or you start getting fatigued.

Would it be fun to have your whole party panting and wheezing with large penalties to hit and saves during a long and protracted battle? Maybe, but I suspect not. The rules for combat have been balanced and they work -- maybe not perfectly all the time, but they make for usually-just-long-enough epic battles. And you don't want some random halfling to sneak up and shiv your 18th level barbarian with his tiny dagger, rupturing his pancreas and killing him in one shot. That would suck. However, if you're playing an assassin -- here's hoping the DM sends you after a zero-level target or likes to waive the standard combat rules for the plot's sake.

Que Sera Sera

After all this, I feel inclined to just suspend my disbelief for awhile, accept that the way the world works in D&D in a little different, and let combat happen. (At least, until my character dies and my rules lawyer decides to start issuing subpoenas!)