Through the Fire and the Flames

Well, it's been an interesting week in the Stupid Ranger household. Without descending into too much detail, we had a situation involving carbon monoxide being detected in our bedroom and a faulty 36 year old furnace that was actually venting flames outside the firebox RIGHT BY THE GAS LINE.

Needless to say, the fire department indicated that we were lucky that things didn't end "under much worse circumstances."

What's this got to do with D&D, Dante?

Well, after the initial shock of the situation, I started to think about why this was so scary. The answer, for me anyway, was the impending fireball that would have ensued underneath my house should the gas line burn through.

We are entering into epic levels in our current campaign, and our characters are able to summon some pretty incredible feats of elemental damage. Several of our characters possess fire based magical abilities, and this whole experience got me to thinking what the common guy would think if they saw something akin to a large gas explosion.

You know what? The mere NOTION of this happening to us in real life was pretty darned scary. That's why I always have some trouble with the concept of magical gladiatorial combat, or people that would knowingly put themselves in the vicinity of two powerful mages doing battle.

The gravity that should go along with even a mid-level spell caster able to conjure up a 5d6 or more fireball should be enough to keep a "common" person at a pretty far distance. I would treat a mid to high level sorcerer with the same respect as I would someone with a big flamethrower strapped to their back.

Gravity

The key to this discussion is treating things with the appropriate level of gravity. As a DM, you can use NPC reaction and some colorful description to add weight to your epic scenarios. If someone enters the building that looks edgy and has demonstrated an ability to conjure a 20d6 fireball you'd better make some common folk leave the premises quickly.

I would also engineer activities that play up the uncommon skill required to weild this power. Create some scenarios where your mid to high level players must help a group of common people achieve some otherwise impossible tasks that exercises the players specific epic skills. This puts the players on guard not to accidentally flash-fry a whole group of townspeople, adds an opportunity for them to exhibit uncommon mettle and heroism, and more importantly is a distinctly different type of challenge than their common tasks of annihilating major forces of evil baddies.

Take an opportunity to step back and look at the abilities that your characters wield when viewed through the eyes of a common man. You may get some new inspiration that can add some interest to your sagging high level campaign!

Proper Virtuosity: Foundations of Goodness

I haven't decided if the title of today's post sounds more like some really hippie liberal arts college class or like the title of an Uwe Boll movie. Anyway, in my last post about Goodness, I touched on the subjectiveness of Good as a concept. Today, I'm going to discuss a few ways that Good people get that way.

Damn, That Guy's Good

I try to think of people as neither good nor bad, just as people. Therefore, just like the "bad guys", the "good guys" start as a blank slate and their experiences color how they view the world and what they think is right. A few ways a person could veer more toward the traditionally "good" are:

• Good Parenting
  Simply put, a person can be raised to be a good person. Little kids watch adults and emulate what they do. Their parents reward "good" behavior and punish "bad" behavior. Eventually, the child will form a value system in which they can usually put stuff in the "good" or "bad" column. Sure, there's the occasional ambiguous problem, but by and large this person can assume things like "sleeping with your friend's wife behind his back" and "killing babies" can go in the "bad" column.
  
  The interesting thing about this one is that many times what the parents believe follows their societal norms. So what one set of parents teaches as "good" behavior may be a lot different from another. A good example would be Klingon vs. Vulcan parenting. (I bet there's a high turnover rate at the intergalactic daycare center.)
  
  As you may have guessed, this one makes for good character-building if the parents' beliefs are a bit different from the rest of society because the parents will frequently raise a litter of misfits who will, as their name implies, have difficulty meshing with their surroundings. Conflict is the mother of Interesting!
  

• The Age of Reason
  Maybe it's just a product of me starting to get a little older, but I can remember when I was a teenager. There wasn't a whole lot of ambivalence about any subject, and I had an opinion about damn near everything. Looking back, I can't figure out why in the hell I thought some of the things I did (much less acted on these thoughts).
  
  The best answer I can come up with is not that I got older. It's that I got more experienced. I know now that running in guns blazing to most situations isn't going to be the best solution most times, and I prefer a little more thought and planning before I make my move now. I've learned when to strategically retreat and come back. I don't like burning bridges because sometimes I need to cross them again. I like being nice to people because I like them being nice to me back.
  
  Which brings me to why I think sometimes getting a little older and wiser brings the good out in people: it's harder to do stupid things when you take the time to think about them, and it's harder to be headstrong when you've had direct experience with that ending badly for you. If you've been bad all your life and you've almost died countless times and everybody hates you and you're tired of running -- well, it might make you consider changing your ways. Even if you don't wind up "good", you might mellow out to the point where you're not actively "bad".
  

• Atonement
  This one is more of a continuation of the last one, but taken further. If a person looks back on the things they have done in their life and goes, "oh crap, I'm a horrible person", they may decide they need to try to make up for it. Where an average kind-hearted joe might just live life and be nice to his neighbor, a person who has devoted their life to making up for past misdeeds will actively seek out ways to do what they consider to be "good" things, usually that help others.
  
  Characters who are atoning for something are a lot of fun to play because they want to be good, but given that they've been an asshole their entire life, they frequently don't know how to do that. Morality is an interesting thing -- people generally have a sense to themselves of what's right and wrong, and when you try to deviate from that, it feels unnatural. So you may have some, shall we say, creative interpretations of how to be good.
  
  I would add that when I say "atonement", I mean a person decided to do this on their own -- someone else didn't make them do it. That's something else entirely. For instance, a person forced to do community service for some crime they committed won't come out a better person simply because they did a good deed because someone else made them. (However, if it exposes them to things that make them re-evaluate their choices, that's different.)
  
  

Next time, I'll talk about some of the qualities associated with "good" characters. Now I need something clever to say to end the post. Let's see... um....

Be good, everyone?

Man, evil is so much easier to make a cool exit on.

"Remember me? I mooned for rebuttal!" -- Homer J. Simpson

This classic quote, from the well known Simpson's episode "The Way We Was", reminds me very much of what my good buddy Vanir was describing in his last epic post. Oftentimes when I think about this particular episode of The Simpsons, I don't remember too much about the rest of the plot but being an ex-debater myself I distinctly remember that quote and Homer dropping trou to win his argument.

But it's irreverent!

Yes, it is. However, it is distinctive moments of color like those that go on to live fondly in the memory of everyone that beholds them. Several years from now when we recall our favorite moments from our D&D campaigns, I can pretty much guarantee that the trump card that will come out of Vanir's mouth will be "Oh yeah? Well Bat Loaf humped on the Tarrasque." And much laugher will be had by all.

It is pretty much for this reason and this reason alone that I embrace letting people be a little nuts like this and introduce crazy, obscene, or otherwise hilarious elements to our plot. For the record, I am fairly certain my co-DM would've lynched me on the spot should he have actually been there but that is a story best left for another time.

You too can unclench your butt-cheeks and enjoy this kind of fun!

I can respect wanting to keep some elements of your campaign "by the numbers" and keep the characters focused on the dramatic scenes, but I would like everyone to keep in mind that even epic tales of heroism and valor like The Lord of the Rings had their own comedic elements in Tom Bombadil (book) and Merry/Pippin (film).

The trick is to just let your characters be themselves. Let them take liberties however far they want to during certain times in the campaign, and quiet them down and focus them in others. The trade-off will work in your favor: if the players are allowed to have irreverent fun like Vanir outlined, they'll be much more receptive to being asked to "tune in" during more serious moments in the campaign.

I find it helps to have a "serious look" that you can shoot offending players when you want to quell the silliness. It is much akin to The Look that Stupid Ranger possesses to quiet me down, and anyone else that is married to a human female will have a corollary upon which to draw.

So relax! Have fun! Don't take things so seriously all the time, you may find that some memorable moments will be created in the process.

Never Underestimate The Power of Ernie Keebler

When we play D&D, I really love it when I get a chance to step outside the box. I love it more when I can do it in character. And I really love it when I can do it without derailing the plot that our intrepid DMs have set before us.

(Not that it usually stops me.)

Class Is Now In Session

In our group's current campaign, we now possess, through a series of strange events, a magical item that allows us to control the legendary Tarrasque. We weren't exactly sure what we were supposed to do with it, just that we needed it to combat the forces of a dark goddess who was angry at us. So we were riding it back home so it could eat a couple armies.

As it happened, I had been hitting the E.L. Fudge cookies pretty hard before we started playing Saturday night and I was very thoroughly sugared up. I had reached a state of being Dante refers to as "Professor Vanir", in which insanity starts to pour out of my mouth but I speak with confidence about it as if I was a college professor teaching a class. (I am told he imagines a graham cracker mortarboard on my head when I am like this, but that sounds like the ravings of a madman to me.)

The Inevitable Conclusion of Rock

In the throes of my delicious chocolaty berserkergang on Saturday night, I was possessed by the urge to roleplay. And by "roleplay", I mean "let Bat Loaf's freak flag fly". For those who don't know, Bat Loaf is my rock-and-roll bard. He has settled down (after a fashion), and gotten himself married. He and his wife are both epic-level rock bards, totally metal and totally in love. We had a legendary monster at our disposal with only moderate risk of being torn apart and eaten. We had been afforded the opportunity to do things you never get to do in the span of a normal character's lifetime.

Thusly, the only logical conclusion for me to arrive at was to do the single most metal thing that has ever been done: conceive their first child on top of the Tarrasque.

You Want To Do What?

When I announced my intentions to the group, Dante got that glassy-eyed stare that he gets when he simultaneously thinks something is intensely funny and still wants to kill me. Several players (and my wife) simply put their head in their hands and sighed. But we were escorting the Tarrasque for hundreds of miles at a movement rate of 30 and it was literally swallowing every random encounter we had whole, so it's not like we had much better to do.

Initially, I did not know how I was going to get Bat's wife to our location, and I suggested to Dante that he and his wife had a thing that's called "radar love". I also submitted to him the fact that they had both "a wave in the air" and "a line in the sky", and thusly she would know he needed him and would travel to him as quickly as possible. Incredibly, these arguments fell on deaf ears, and I was forced to come up with a more realistic alternative. (Like magic!)

Eventually, I asked the wizard of the party to use Limited Wish to teleport Bat Loaf's wife to our location, and so they took care of the very serious matter at hand for the next 48 hours as we moved. The rest of the party assumed positions and cast the appropriate spells such that they would not be exposed to any adverse sights, sounds, or fluids, and thusly attempted to pretend all of this never happened. Many steps were taken to assure that the union would bear metal fruit, not the least of which was the use of the spines on the tarrasque's back as a Liberator sex wedge to elevate his wife's pelvis. Our paladin also cast Divine Favor to increase our chances of success and realized he should devote part of his life's work to encouraging people to have babies. At the time of this writing, we do not yet know if the Bardic Torpedoes successfully entered the appropriate exhaust port or whether they just impacted on the surface. However, the attempt was pretty goddamned metal, and thusly worth it regardless of the results.

Our paladin, however, was moved to perform rituals of atonement because of the "wicked thoughts" he was having about how one might mate a human and a Tarrasque -- and consequently that got us all thinking about one might harvest a Tarrasque's genetic material. That conversation will haunt all of our dreams forevermore.

Making The Most of a Unique Situation

Having a psychic link to the Tarrasque making him your ally (sort of) affords you some interesting opportunities you might not normally have. One is to cast Haste on the Tarrasque. I wanted to do this for two reasons. One was to make him eat our enemies faster. The other far more important reason was so that I could imagine the Benny Hill theme song playing as he did so. There was some debate as to whether the Tarrasque was intelligent enough to understand that we were allies and thusly could drop his spell resistance, but in the end I have to think that Dante let it happen because it was just too funny not to.

Somehow, the baddies managed to make the Tarrasque fall over and roll on its back. Which was good for us, since we weren't underneath it like about 500 of the bad guys were. Seeing this inspired me to use the psychic link via Bat Loaf remembering the last time he had the bedspins from too much ale, causing our gigantic monstrous legendary indentured servant to lose his balance and do a barrel roll on command. Gotta be careful with that one.

Just Smile and Nod

You may be wondering if there is a point to all of this. Not really! I just wanted to share some of the delightful retardation we had last weekend. D&D is what you make it . Even if you never get anything done, as long as everybody has fun you did it right. I'm pretty sure everybody had fun (after the initial shock), and somehow we actually DID stay on track for what Dante had in mind to happen during the adventure despite the box lying broken and burned by the side of the road, never to be stepped inside ever again.

And if Bat's wife is pregnant, they're naming it "Tarrasque Loaf". Here's hoping!

On Juggling of Interests...

Thanks to a pretty crazy work and personal life schedule, I had lapsed in the task of reading my fellow D&D related blogs. I headed over to Musings of a Chatty DM after a brief conversation with Phil on Friday to find a wealth of very interesting posts outlining Magic: the Gathering and a few of his other pursuits, and it got me to thinking about the other nerdy pursuits that conflict with my D&D habit.

Dealing with Shared Pursuits

We are blessed to have a very close-knit D&D crew around here in StupidRanger-ville, so it should not surprise everyone that many of our non-D&D pursuits are similar.

Most of us are nerds first, and regularly descend into any of several nerdy pursuits: movies, computer/video games, programming, etc. Several group members (including Stupid Ranger herself) are literary and fantasy nerds, opting for the Dead Tree version of fantasy and adventure.

This interesting melting-pot of interests can often lead to distraction, however many times it leads our D&D sessions into some interesting new areas because of the different exposure. I have drawn inspiration from various video game sources, I know at least one of our group likes to draw elements from motion pictures to weave into his campaigns. It should seem rather obvious how the literary buffs in our group get their fix, and I believe that most D&D folks are at least in some part theater nerds.

Embrace it!

Our focus may not remain on adventuring 100% of the time. For me, motivation often wanders aimlessly from task to task and nothing really seems to stick. I often find with enough distraction, eventually a gong sounds in my head (I'm very auditory for some reason), the sky parts, and inspiration strikes. Then, the ideas just flow easily... sometimes it takes making the effort to explore your other interests to truly inspire you in a new and different way.

So this week I challenge you to identify an area of your own personal nerdiness and give it some extra attention. You might find some real value in the change of pace!