Not the same industry, but when I heard about 4e, I bought the domain 4ednd.com and was hell bent on getting a sweet 4e site up, with forums, gaming rooms, reviews, blogs, custom 4e applications etc...

But I am a developer by trade and I build web-based applications all day long for my primary employer and as a consultant. Everytime I started coding and/or putting together an application framework for fun.... it felt like work. And I would rather be running a VTT game or prepping for my face-to-face game than programming (again.)

So yes, I feel your pain. Just not specifically as a writer of prose, but instead as a writer of code.

Same as Kevtar for me, marking papers and all. Would love to write more...I just keep writing for my own game & many settings thinking that one day this 'practise' will mean something when i find the time to share ideas and write.

Oh, no footnotes for me either.

Ultimate Toolbox says...

Table 7–7: Getting the PCs Together
1 All related or from the same village
2 Bound by charter or contract
3 Common goal or membership
4 Common social class
5 Conscripted or press ganged
6 Down to last few coppers
7 Former/current rivals
8 Grew up in orphanage
9 Hand-picked by king
10 Highly patriotic
11 Hired by local lord known for his fairness
12 Owe favor to a particular NPC
13 Paying off a debt
14 Received a mysterious letter/invitation
15 Rival families working off blood-oath
16 Served in army or aboard a ship
17 Serve the same church or patron
18 Survived the same tragic event (ambush, etc.)
19 Worked together before
20 Wrong place at the wrong time

And then they're my favorite based off #18, the party wakes up the only survivors of a shipwreck, with only some memories intact.

For me, DMing gets worked in somewhere between raising kids (who play D&D), spending time with the wife (who doesn't play), grading papers, writing lesson plans, and writing my dissertation. Along the line there something has to give, which explains why my sons and their friends just wrapped up their first 1-30 lvls in 4e and I'm only on chapter 1 of the dissertation.

The parenthetical notations are a vast improvement for me.

Also, that column seems strangely familiar - although I'm not a writer, ever since I've started working full time it's become harder and harder to sustain a campaign for any length of time.

I can 100% relate to this post. While not as illustrious an author as Mouseferatu, I have delved very deeply into third party writing for both 4E and Pathfinder RPG products. DMing was once my life; and I can share similar stories about DMing at 9 years old. But writing now takes up the place where DMing was, and I am not sure I want to change that right now, despite the fact that I miss it. I fantasize about a distant future when I retire from full-time writing, and in between working on some hobby novel, I’m DMing for my kids and grandkids. A sort of return to my youth seems like the best time for my golden years. Then again, D&D might have been replaced by some high tech holodeck thing…in which case,…phooey.

Ari wrote: Ah, well. There's always playing. Anyone want to run a game for me?

If you can get over to Chapel Hill or its nearby environs, I will gladly run a game for you.

I'm one of those people who thinks that if you don't run a game, your work suffers for it. I ran a 2 year Dragonlance campaign back when I was working on DL for Margaret Weis Productions, a 2 year Birthright one before that to keep me up to speed on conversion from AD&D to D&D3E, and before that I was running an Elizabethan/Cthulhu D&D game to try the (just released) 3.0 rules.

Right now, I'm running a weekly 4E campaign, but I don't have any 4E design work, so it feels a lot less like work. However, what I need to be doing is running and playtesting Cortex stuff, because that's where the magic happens for me. I could write an entire book but without trying some of it out on people I think the result is hollow.

Oddly enough, I have to say, running 4E feels just like running 3E, or any other game, just with different paperwork. I'm very much an improv GM, so most of the effort on testing ends up being in the hands of the players (and when I decide to do some prepwork ahead of time.) I wouldn't mind actually playing 4E one of these days...

Cheers,
Cam

I'll run a game for you anytime, Mouse!

My solution to your DMing problem (let's call it DMiagra): Dungeon Delve.

No, not specifically the book (although it is a mighty fine starting point). But the structure of the book. One-night scenarios, no prep time required beyond adapting the story. No overarching concerns about metaplot or megatron (metatron? megaplot?).

Point is, if it feels like work, it IS work (and hey, you get someone to bounce ideas off for actual work). So aim for a game that is leisure first.

The point (if my addled brain can make one) is to use the game to unwind, not wind up more.

(And btw, I prefer parenthesis, in case you haven't noticed).

For me...
1. One part is keeping my homebrew and my assignment separate in my mind. This way, I can be excited about each of them for different reasons.

2. The biggest factor, I think, is in the (reduced) amount of time I spend on planning and the specific (minimal/improvised) way I plan games these days. I read once that in a short story "about three things happen." So when I plan a game session, I try to think of three cool elements (which naturally work themselves into beginning, middle, end), the mood I want to convey, and the PCs I'm throwing the focus on that week. I usually do this while taking a walk over lunch, or when I get home and start setting up for the game. I'm also doing skill challenges as retrospective elements of the game ("Oh, you succeeded at breaking in to so-and-so's compound with about ten skill checks and some smart decisions? That would have been a level x skill challenge; here's your xp for that"). And the Monster Builder makes it REALLY easy to adjust any creature to an appropriate level. And of course over the week new ideas develop as I'm working on other things. And I give the players a lot of freedom to explore characters and story--which can carve out a significant portion of a game session if one has those sorts of players; that's like hitting the autopilot button and letting things go. :-)

That said, despite the improvisational time savers that work for me, I have canceled a number of games when I just couldn't work it all in.

When I run a game, I do several thing that helps me separate the writer part of my brain from the GM part. First, I use very few house rules or unique designs. In fact, I've only recently conceded that making unique monsters and NPCs is sometimes a necessary evil. When I GM, I'm playing, not designing. Second, I tend to tap into the sniggering, sarcastic teenager part of my brain. Hence, my campaigns are full of hidden jokes, sly wordplays that takes several sessions to be identified by my annoyed players, blatant ripoffs of scenes from movies and video games, and above all... creative, psychological driven material aimed right at my players. For instance, I have a player who likes to play those Jedi/paladin types but who also likes to play wizards. Thus, I purposefully taunted him with the prize of robes of the archmagi, first as part of an illusionary disguise on an NPC, to give him the taste, then letting him come into contact with a set once his alignment had already slipped to Neutral. Writing stuff like, stuff that gets a very personal and unique reaction, is something impossible to do in published work, so it always feels fresh and worthwhile.

I also tend to run campaigns using different rules sets than whatever I am tinkering with currently. Live playtesting with my own rules always gets pushed back to the very last, since I know it's very little at all like play... it's art.

Well, like I said, I am playing it (even if not nearly as much as I'd like; we only meet once every three or four weeks ). Just not running much of it.

Oddly, prepping and running games just doesn't use the same part of my brain as writing rpg material does. As I have mentioned to many editors, coming up with adventure ideas is not a problem for me. Give me any 3 elements and I can have 12 adventure ideas in 15 minutes. That's not work, and neither is jotting down just info information I can run those adventures. (Ask Rodney Thompson about the pulp heroes game I ran for him and some of his friends at Gen Con one year. It had all of 10 minutes of prep time.)

But writing down all the details so someone ELSE can run those adventurers? That's work. Adventures are the hardest thing for me to do, though I've done a number of them and often have a great time. But it's real work to strike the right balance between enough information for a GM to be saved the time and effort of prepping her own game, and burying them in enough text to drown a marmot? That's effort.

Nothing else in my writing career really comes close to prepping a game. I may write custom PrCs, spells or items for my players, but never in the volume of a new book, so that doesn't feel like work. And a lot of things (like NPC descriptions and cities) I love writing so much that I do it for fun, even if it's not for an active campaign or a project I'll get paid for.

Which is not to say I'm always running the game. For twenty years now, I have been very close to a 50/50 split of GM time and PC time. Which is exactly how I like it. Currently I'm running two games and only playing in one, but it's been the reverse before. (And the games I am running are specifically linked to projects I'm writing, suggesting I actually prefer running and writing about the same worlds.)

I'm not sure I could write for a long time about a game I wasn't playing and running. My hats off to you that you can.

Parenthetical notations grok with how my brain works a little more so than footnotes (but footnotes obviously look more... professional).

Anyway, I suppose like the pro golfer who then plays a practice round with his mates, it's hard to know when to take the professional hat off and put the recreational one on. Doing the creativity dance with your muse can also be so random - and it would suck to come up with all these great ideas for your home game and be left feeling uninspired for the stuff that pays the bills. However, if you are feeling occasionally uninspired with your professional work there may be more issues at play, but heh thems the breaks I 'spose.

Anyway, keep doing what you do, I love reading the fruits of your significant labour.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

Also, I welcome any comments on this third formatting option--using parenthetical notations instead of footnotes, as I did on the past two columns.

Hi Herreman,

Thanks for the comprehensive reply (and also the article on weapon speeds - very insightful). I agree that it would need a lot of work and re-working of existing mechanics, but it's an interesting experiment.

I can see two ways to integrate these ideas into 3.X.

1. Build the mechanics into new classes or feats, not unlike the Book of Nine Swords approach. Advantage: less work, build atop existing rules. Disadvantage: exisiting classes and feats may seem subobtimal in comparison.

2. Build a whole new variant system, changing existing feats, spells and actions, in the vein of Arcana Unearted, but going the whole hog. This would obviously be a major project, but it could be a rewarding exercise.

At any rate, I'm looking forward to your take on magic!

Frank, aka voice220 / Mottokrosh.

Hi Pawsplay,

This response is long enough to deserve its own blog entry but heh, for the moment I'll leave it here.

Weapon Speed was one of those things that made sense in a weird sort of way but that could not be logically put within any of the existing initiative frameworks. Sean K Reynolds did an excellent analysis of why weapon speeds and initiative completely sucked with the whole reach versus speed versus number of possible attacks versus change of weapon issues. However, I think this "5e" framework can handle these issues with weapon speed in a really exciting and natural way – and damn it may I even go out on a limb and say the best way.

Now let’s look at a light blade, a dagger even and compare it to a reach weapon such as a spear and a bulky cumbersome weapon such as a two-handed great-axe.

Now some would say that the dagger is the quickest weapon to wield here and so perhaps should be the quickest in terms of initiative. But then there is the issue of reach: surely as two combatants close, the reach weapon is going to get the first offensive opportunity. And then look at the cumbersome but deadly two-handed great-axe. This thing is surely going last in terms of initiative.

Well in actual fact, it is the speed, skill and experience of the combatants that really determines who goes first and last. A Great-Axe Master is going to be more adept than their novice counterpart. However, we can model the corner cases really nicely through the use or omission of reactions and immediate reactions, and varying the resource cost of such reactions in terms of primary, minor or martial action cost.

The dagger is quick and easy to react with. A dagger wielder should have plenty of different ways of reacting to different opportunities. In particular, the dagger (or light blade) wielder gets some really nice immediate reactions. And the cost of these reactions should be quite low to reflect the “speed” of the blade: martial actions mainly so that wielder can perform as many of them as they have actions. For example, some reaction triggers for secondary attacks could include if a threatened enemy is wounded, or that they momentarily grant combat advantage, or even possibly that they attack a different opponent. The dagger or light blade becomes a weapon a character can validly use rather than being a sub-optimal choice for a fighter. The mechanics elegantly reflect how the weapon is used.

Now the spear isn’t necessarily a super quick weapon like the dagger but it does have reach. As such, the reactive opportunities are lessened but it’s got a really nice immediate reaction. If an enemy moves or even shifts (shifting being tactical movement that normally wouldn’t generate opportunity attacks) through a non-adjacent square you threaten with the spear, then bam you’ve got an immediate reaction which is going to be triggered before the enemy can attack or even close with you. In terms of initiative, your immediate reaction goes first in these situations. You would cost this as a minor action so as to restrict multiple uses in a round (up to two uses if the combatant uses a minor action and then a primary action to perform that minor action again). In this way, the benefit of reach is reflected in terms of initiative and who gets to go first, but also the spear-wielder is not falsely advantaged in terms of other aspects of initiative – his initiative score will still remain where it is.

And then of course we have the two-handed great-axe. Reacting with this thing is tough. An immediate reaction with a two-handed great-axe? Only when your character’s a high master with it. For a novice character wielding that great-axe, you most probably wouldn’t even have the opportunity to even react with it such as using it to block until you had some expertise under the belt. This mirrors the difficulty of wielding such a weapon. However, what you can do with it is focus your effort into bigger and better attacks. For example, a power attack with such a weapon would involve a primary action burning a martial or even a further minor action if you wanted to put all your weight and effort into it for maximum effect and damage potential. This reflects the putting all the eggs into one basket approach of the weapon – again mirroring how the weapon is used rather nicely.

Actions by the way are attached to feats or abilities. If your character has a particular feat or ability, you can perform unlimitedly or at-will the action(s) associated with that feat or ability. I’ll even try to write down some draft actions to better explain them:

Deft Response
Martial Reaction
Melee Light Blade
Trigger: Threatened opponent misses attack on you
Reaction: Attack the opponent that missed you.

Deadly Opportunity
Immediate Martial Reaction
Melee Light Blade
Trigger: Threatened opponent is wounded
Reaction: Attack wounded opponent

Deft Parry
Immediate Minor Reaction
Melee Light Blade *Parry
Trigger: Character is attacked
Reaction: Gain a +2 bonus to Armor Class versus this attack and may then shift 5 ft.
*A light blade can only reasonably parry certain attacks such as a sword strike but not a Giant’s War Maul

Closing Thrust
Immediate Minor Reaction
Melee Reach Weapon
Trigger: Enemy moves through a non-adjacent space you threaten
Reaction: Attack on that moving enemy

Power Attack
Primary Action (burning an additional minor action)
Melee Two-Handed Weapon
Attack: Primary attack (with a penalty to hit but a bonus to damage)

Sidenote
[On a sidenote here, characters usually have two different modifiers when attacking: their primary modifier and their secondary modifier. Primary actions use the primary modifier and secondary actions (be they minor or martial) use the secondary modifier. The difference between these two modifiers is lessened as a character gains skill and experience by gaining particular feats or abilities. A Grand Master for example would have primary and secondary attack modifiers that were identical, where as the novice would have a greater gap between the two modifiers. And this is how iterative attacks are simplified. Rather than having the +16/+11/+6/+1 at higher levels, you just have two modifiers to be worried about. If you use a primary action (even exchanging a martial action for it such as for the Deft Response above) then you get to use your primary (and best) modifier on that attack.]

I suppose what I’m pointing out here is that the initiative system has been carefully designed so as to have a lot of ways of representing different things in combat. In 3.x, there was little reason for a melee combatant to take anything aside from a small selection of all the possible weapons. What I’m trying to do is make the weapons mechanically different and varied rather than just a simple bonus here or an expanded critical range there. It is the actions and reactions possible with these weapons that define them and in a more mechanical rather than narrative way than 4e.

Weapon Speed was always something that could not be adequately mirrored using just the single dimension of initiative score. This “5e” initiative system however has the mechanics to make weapon speeds logically work how players want them to. Your thoughts?

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

Hi Voice220,

I've thought of adapting this but I suppose there are a few serious issues to address:

- You need characters to be able to do multiple things across a round, thus you need a series of actions that they can do (something not quite there in 3.x). Effectively, the options in combat need to be expanded from the 3.x roots to handle this otherwise you are just left with attacks of opportunity and a couple of other things. 4e has a whole heap of great ideas in this regard in terms of powers (although it also has gonzo superhero stuff that doesn't quite fit my idea of fantasy). You have a lot of feats in Pathfinder (and in particular the Beta and their discussion boards where everyone was just coming up with fantastic stuff) that you could use as a basis for this, however, I honestly believe that you would need to revise them all to fit into this framework.

You need to class things as either an action or a reaction, and then you need to decide what it is worth in terms of effort. Is it just a martial action, does it require a little more effort or is it something you want to restrict (make it a minor action), or is it the main thing they want to do (make it a primary action) or is it all encompassing (make it a primary action that requires the burning of a minor and a martial action or have it hang over to the next round to be completed by a further primary action). A lot of decisions here to be made and a lot of work I think to get it working right.

- Spells would need a little work too. Wait for my series of Magic on this blog and you'll see where I'm going with this. However, if you wanted to try it within the Pathfinder framework, most of the big spells would require 1 round casting rather than being instantaneous.

- As a raw method for determining initiative score, you could perhaps have BAB + DEX + WIS + Improved Initiative feat(s). A fighter would also receive a class bonus to initiative I would imagine.

Anyway, I'm going to keep "looking through the crystal ball" as it were and hopefully in the end, we'll have a game here that will be able to be played with all the options done and tested.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

So, weapon speed?

This is well thought out and sounds rather exciting. It rewards players for paying attention throughout the combat.

The system is designed to work as part of an overarching framework, but I would be interested in trying this out as an experimental houserule in, say, the Pathfinder RPG. How might one adapt it for this, for example? What feats and spells would need changing?