Nerdier Than WoW…

When Saate first approached me about the possibility of adding some articles to the site from time to time, I asked him what exactly he was looking for from me. I was a little perplexed when the response was, “Whatever you feel like doing.”

For long-time followers of the site, you may know that Saate’s articles tend to be very focused on relevant topics as related to WoW, and almost always related to achievements of some form. They’re carefully considered, they’re constructed with graphs and mathematical precision, and it’s rare that he speaks up without some kind of information that can directly relate to obtaining something desirable within the WoW universe. Sometimes they even offer nifty insight to real-life practices with lessons taken from WoW.

Whereas mine are… Well, they’re like taking the concept of chaos, turning it into a person, and then telling Mr. Chaos to chug several pitchers, stick his face against the bottom of a baseball bat which has been upturned and planted firmly against the ground, spin around several times, then go ahead and stumble forward off a cliff until he faceplants on an oversized checkerboard with ideas written in each square, and just go ahead and go with whatever the remains of his face have splattered across.

Anyway, I’d like to think that occasionally the suicidal tendencies of Mr. Chaos spring forth interesting reads along the lines of what WoW players might be up to inside and outside of the game. Kind of Amazonian, I suppose – “You know, if you like WoW, you might also like…”

(I bet I won’t like it).

Anyway, myself and three of my friends are about to attempt a weekly night of Dungeons and Dragons.

Now, let me go ahead and preface this by saying that I’ve never actually had a successful run of D&D. Or even a successful session. My brother was once given the books by my grandmother as a birthday present some years ago, but he wasn’t exactly the type of person who really got into pen-and-paper gaming. In fact, looking back on it, I’m frankly kind of bewildered as to how he ended up with the 2nd edition PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual.

Well, I ended up reading them and getting really into the idea of playing – big shock that I loved RPGs when, at the time, I was playing almost nothing but Squaresoft games on the SNES – so I tried to get a few friends together to play in middle school and high school. Unfortunately, we were teenagers, and as a result, felt much too awkward about trying to roleplay around each other, so the game tended to very quickly become just kind of a dice-rolling experiment. Even more unfortunately, the people I regularly hung out with weren’t really the right level of nerdy to really get into the game. To give you an idea of what I mean by that, they were usually the people who thought it would be more entertaining to piss off the DM (me) by making characters like “The Dirty Mexican! He runs around naked and gets drunk, and then crashes through windows!” than to really try and make a character of any kind.

(Should’ve gone Red Foreman on his ass).

I wasn’t exactly a fantastic DM by any stretch, but I was never really given the opportunity to test the waters and learn. Or play, even. I always kept the idea on the backburner – sometimes I’d get ideas by rereading the books, too – and in the last year or two of high school, I started trying to find other people to play with that weren’t within my regular circle of friends. However, if my friends weren’t nerdy enough, the vast majority of people I found who were interested in playing were a little too nerdy. I don’t mean that they had strange laughs or just looked funny – they were just very, very socially awkward. I mean, to the point that I had trouble spending much time around them, let alone having to listen to their pleas to play a kender.

(One of these motherfuckers).

They’re about as annoying as they look, and I sometimes get the feeling that their race was truly invented by a player who just wanted to give other players a template for how to well and truly troll every DM you will ever play with.

I kind of gave up on D&D at that point – it always sounded like something that could be fun, but just didn’t seem to work in execution for me. I’m sure it could, but I didn’t seem to know or be capable of finding the crowd. Actually, most of the sessions I’d been a part of pretty much went like this:

That didn’t really stop me from reading up about D&D, though. The folks over at Penny Arcade have been detailing their exploits with Mike running a game, and I’m frankly fascinated with the level of detail and effort he goes into while DMing (I don’t quite have the money to fund trips to the hobby shop, but I’m still inspired by his ideas). Rich Burlew over at Giant In The Playground does a regular webcomic about D&D called Order of the Stick, but he’s also written a few articles about effective DMing. I’ve also gone back and read through DM tips and advanced-level guides for PCs and whatnot, and of course, as I’ve grown older, I’ve occasionally thought of how I could run a well-oiled game of D&D.

Well, towards the tail end of college, I figured the internet was as good a place as any to try and find a group to play with, and my interest had been sparked again. Sure enough, I found a group in one of my MUSHes that said they also played every Wednesday – there were about five of them in total, and they were playing 3.5 edition. I had never attempted to play from a PC perspective, but I felt like I’d spent so much time roleplaying in MUDs, MUSHes, and attempting to in WoW (although largely running into the same problems my high school D&D attempts did), and learning how to be an effective player, that I could really contribute.

So I talked to the DM over the course of a week, getting as much information about the world as I could – I didn’t want to just suddenly appear in the party, I wanted to figure out how my character would fit in with the group. So I asked everything I could think of: what had the PCs done before my arrival? What was the party like? What did they usually do? What kind of world do you have? Oh, it’s modeled after that? What aspects of it did you model it after? Is the world war-torn or fairly peaceful? What’s the culture like?

I got the feeling that a lot of my more detail-oriented questions were things the DM hadn’t really been forced to think of with his other group, but that’s really to be expected – you can’t think of everything. Eventually, I gathered that the party started in one world where everyone traveled between floating cities in the clouds on stone airships, and the ground world was covered in mist that nobody had ever gone below before. They decided to go ahead and do so, and ended up going through a portal to an Ancient-Greece-like world, where the ship crashed into the ground.

The denizens of the small village they crashed into assumed these people falling from the sky were gods, but the party decided to head east to a major port city to see if they could find some way to fix their airship. It turns out the world was actually pretty organized – everyone spoke the same language and trade was common. There were occasional wars between city-states, but it was fairly safe to just be a traveler.

(Shut up, I know that’s Rome).

Anyway, I decided to go ahead and roll a fighter, and decided my “in” with the party was that he would be a traveler. While he was capable of defending himself in fights, he largely would try to avoid them, and I designed a lot of his stats, skills, and feats to be centered around someone who would be more of a skirmisher than a toe-to-toe sword-and-board kind of guy. Having heard that a ship full of gods had crashed, and being somewhat skeptical, he followed rumors of where they’d headed to the port city to see if he could find them.

Before I’d even started, though, I was already catching flak from one of the other players. When I said I wanted my character to be wearing leather, he jumped on me and started pointing out that I could have a higher armor bonus by wearing plate. I tried to explain that I was making a character, not a stat-sheet, and that it wouldn’t make sense for a traveler to be wandering around in plate – in addition, with feats like Spring Attack, and with a primary weapon being a glaive, he was really focused on moving in, making an attack, and moving back out, and plate was too encumbering for that style of play.

But on he’d go, berating me for making poor choices and informing me that clearly my character was going to die very early and I wouldn’t be having any fun. Suffice to say, he was the very epitome of the metagaming hack-and-slash player. He wasn’t really interested in roleplaying so much as just killing a lot of shit.

(Goddamnit, my character lives for the road ahead!)

Anyway, eventually I just asked to sit in on a couple sessions to see how they went, and let me tell you, it was not a pretty sight. To make a long story short, it was a lot like listening to the losing side of a PuG battleground. People knew they weren’t having fun, and blame was fired like cannons in an 18th century naval battle from one player to the next.

I had to just pull the DM aside and say that I was really sorry, but I just wasn’t interested in playing after seeing a couple of the sessions. He just said he understood and frankly seemed very burnt out on having to put up with a couple of the players, as well.

So here I find myself, a couple years later, with a few friends who are interested in doing a once-a-week game for a couple hours each night. I want to make it work, and I know they want to make it work, so we’ll see how the experiment goes again.

For the first night, we just had them roll their characters – they picked their race and class, and I started asking them a bunch of questions about who they were. One of the better pieces of advice I had ever read about DMing was, instead of creating a world and throwing the PCs in it, find out what the PCs want to play, and create a world that supports their decisions. For example, if a player makes a thief, and puts a lot of points into picking locks, it’s disappointing if locked doors and chests don’t really crop up very much. If a player wants to do a lot of negotiating, investigating, or puzzle-solving, it’s not very fun for them if I’ve focused a lot of effort on creating dungeon crawls.

So I’ve been asking them for the last week all kinds of questions to figure out what they’re after in playing a game of D&D. “How much combat do you want to see? Are you just going to do most of your actions as kind of a third-person retelling of what you want to do, or are you guys interested in actually roleplaying at the table? How serious do you want it to be? Do you want to go out and explore a lot, or do you want to focus a lot of detail and questing in one central area? What kind of skills and feats are you picking for your characters? Where are they from? Who’s their family? What are their goals? Do you guys want to know each other before the game begins, or do you want to meet each other on the first session?”

(“How do they feel about full frontal male nudity?”)

I’m really looking to try and say yes to anything that interests them and build things accordingly, and really only curb their decisions if it’s game-breaking in balance. If they hit for a metric fuckton of damage, I can always come up with ways to challenge them that don’t involve throwing bigger and harder monsters at them, for example.

I spent probably an hour and a half just poking and prodding at each of them as they rolled up their characters, trying to get a sense of what they’d really like to see and do before I start doing any kind of world-building and development. Thus far, here’s what I’ve established about each of them:

“Player 1″ is a dwarf fighter. His clan is from a fairly remote region of the mountains, so the clan largely kept to itself in the underground tunnels they had dug out. Travelers were few and far between, and while hospitable to outsiders, they just didn’t have much communication with the outside world. He was the son of the clan’s leader, but shortly before he was to succeed his father, his brother usurped power in a coup following the father’s death. He awoke one morning to greet his brothers-in-arms, only to be ambushed by them – he was able to make it out alive with some basic equipment, and has since spent the last two years traveling around as a mercenary of sorts in hopes of eventually gathering enough wealth and power to go back and oust his brother and seek out justice.

He’s quick to anger and enjoys drinking (like a good dwarf should!). His brother is not well-liked by the subjects he has taken over – he rules as a tyrant, mostly through fear and might. His armor and shield bears the clan symbol.

“Player 2″ is a dwarf shaman. Also hailing from a remote mountainside, he was training under the clan’s “head shaman” as a spiritual advisor for the clan. A large force of goblins, however, laid waste to the clan’s home, and he had to make it out on his own. He doesn’t know who else survived and got away, but he didn’t feel any especially strong ties to the clan – at least, not enough to feel any urge to go back and reclaim the home. He’s more concerned with his attunement to nature and its spirits, and a primary driving force for him is to explore and see as much of it as possible.

“Player 3″ is a half-elf warlock. He was recruited into a very secretive academy for magical arts and has been studying there for several decades. The academy is not part of any city, and instead lies in a remote setting unbeknownst to most people. It hasn’t been clearly established yet, but one of the high wizards tried to do something that put him in disfavor with the rest of the school. Unfortunately for “player 3,” this wizard framed him for it, and as a result, he was kicked out of the academy. He has since spent his time trying to find other places to gain power.

They all decided that they would like to know each other beforehand, so I put it to them: “So it sounds like the three of you have a common thread of wanting power? Well, at least you all have a reason to want to travel around, I should say. So perhaps the three of you have been working together as a sort of small mercenary band?” They seemed happy with that suggestion, so that appears to be the route we’re taking.

I expect a lot more character development and fleshing out will occur as time goes on, but I think I at least have the base information to begin building a world for them to start adventuring in. Anyway, I’ll keep you guys updated on how the latest experiment of running a D&D game goes – wish me luck!

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