Janx

Here's my methods for describing combat:

be familiar with the types of weapons involved in combat. Not an expert, just be aware that a short sword is more of a stabbing weapon, a longsword a slashing weapon. This will help in your descriptions (and for most swords, thrusts, jabs, slashes and hacks will be good enough verbs).

get a list of all the kinds of verbs to describe an attack. A thesaurus may help. For martial arts, know all the kinds of real attacks most schools teach is useful. One my other blog posts has such a list (as I posted one of the monk schools I wrote up, based on my own background). You don't need to be an expert, but just having a sense of how these weapons are used will help you describe attacks beyond "you hit him for 8 damage"

When a player makes an attack, describe each attack differently, using your newly upgrade vocabulary.

Don't overly describe the damage. Firstly, it gets cumbersome when the GM tries to get gruesome. Nextly, since damage in D&D is nebulous, you don't want to commit to a specific injury, lest the players try to lobby for special effects based on that injury. Additionally, combat is fast paced. Your descriptions should be as well, to invoke that feeling.

Since combat takes place in 2 5'x5' squares, there's plenty of room for side-stepping and moving and jumping, enough to explain a miss, besides just blocking it with a shield, or parrying with a weapon, be bouncing off his armor (which are also good explanations).

Here's some examples of what I tell players during their attacks:
"you jab at him, but he just barely sidesteps"
"he catches a grazing blow from your hammer"
"he deflects your attack with his sword, and readies to return the favor"
"your blade skips across his armor"

In all cases, keep it short, and choppy, just like combat itself.

Never use a description that adds more actual event or action that what happened mechanically. If your hammer attack can't knock somebody out of their current square, than don't describe it as "your hammer blow sends him flying across the room." Additionally, since you'll be describing how a PC avoids getting hit, you don't want to ascribe an action the PC didn't actually take, nor block him from his next action that he can legitimately make.

Using these tips will add flavor, without slowing down the game.

My last blog article justified the existence of magic shops. I'm going to look at the topic from the opposite.

First off, let's agree that a small community probably doesn't have a shop, as there is not enough demand or money to support it.

Nextly, let's agree that any magic shop is likely limited in its inventory. It is improbable that a shop could exist realistically, that had every item possible. It's even possible that all the magic shops in a region may still not cover all items (items may very likely have regional availability).

Those first two points bound the problem such that a PC should not expect to get whatever they want, whenever they want, just because they have the money. In short, if you are going to have magic shops, there are rational limits as to what they contain.

Let's cover the social barriers a magic shop would have to overcome.

A king might be leery of having unregulated magic items flowing through his kingdom. If he's not regulating them, he doesn't know what they are. If he doesn't know what they are, he doesn't know who has what items that could be a direct threat to him. That alone would encourage a king to restrict and regulate the flow of magical goods and services.

This means our magic shop has even less inventory, due to outlawing of certain products. It also means it can't buy or trade certain items, at least without permits and registrations.

All it takes to make this happen is a king of this mind-set (perhaps warned by a wizard advisor, who seeks to limit any threats to himself even). Then he sets up a regulatory board, maybe requiring a geas from people seeking a permit to posess, and things are rolling.

The church can also have a hand in things. In the real world, various religions considered charging interest on loans to be a sin, as the loaner was making profit, without doing work. At one point in history, the catholic church forced prices to be static on commodities, not yet being aware of the laws of supply and demand, nor the science of economics. It is entirely possible the church can condemn the use or ownership of certain items that it deems harmful to society.

Odds are good, the only things on the shelves of s magic shop would be low-threat items. Anything else would be black-market.

Lastly, let's consider the rogue element. Namely the 5 finger discount, referred to as shrinkage in the retail industry. A magic shop with rows of items on racks, particularly not behind a counter would be rife with stealing. New shop-lifting spells would have to be invented, because there don't seem to be any that can protect an entire store, not just single items. A building built for customers to walk in, would be a target for after-hours break-ins as well. Once again, requiring siginificant steps to protect against. It would take a high-level wizard to run such an establishment (which would justify the high value amount of gear he owns).

It may be possible that somebody is dealing in small quantities of items, sub-1000 GP perhaps. The risk isn't any greater than a jewelry store.

But larger stuff, is more likely to be black market, heavily regulated, or private transactions. All of it low inventory count.

Because you can easily protect that extra longsword +4 you're trying to sell. Not so easy is protecting a rack of wands, rods and staves, a shelf of armors, and rack of swords, a box of rings and a case of potions.

It's all about inventory and volume.

If in your campaign, there are ZERO magic items, then there will be ZERO magic shops. There's no items around to create a supply, regardless of demand (I'd still want a magic item in a non-magic campaign).

If in your campaign , there are FIVE magic items, there still won't be any magic shops, and odds are good nobody's buying or selling (prolly killing for).

However, if you play in a world where NPCS clerics and NPC wizards are cranking out minor magic items (potions and scrolls), you have the foundation of justification of a magic shop.

Note, I define magic shop as a place that sells magic items, not services. It's also entirely plausible that you can only buy magic weapons from an arms merchant. The nature of the shop is unimportant, only that there is an NPC that PCs can go to, and buy some magic items.

When you consider how many extra items the typical PC gets by 5th level, 10th level, etc, you start getting into having a SUPPLY of magic items. Every PC I've ever played has had a fair amount of these, either oddbal items, or items outside my chosen weapon set.

From there, obviously the PCs want different magic items or money (so they can get different magic items). This is the DEMAND.

Consider the old rule of thumb that 10% of the population is leveled (i.e. NPC adventurers, etc with level appropriate loot). This means that in a large enough population, there are NPCs with similar piles of unwanted magic loot. Once again, creating supply and demand.

At that point, some enterprising individual (likely an NPC adventurer looking to convert his unwanted magic items) will start a business selling and trading items. And making money off it.

All it takes to justify this is two categories of people:
1) minor item makers who crank out commodity items like potions and scrolls selling to adventurers (PC or NPC)
2) higher level chars with items they don't use, looking to trade them in for stuff they can

Given how easy it is to crank out the small stuff, that justifies a "magic shop" that sells the small stuff.

And if I was a new PC, I'd be looking there for magic stuff in general, because those folks are in the know.

And if the campaign I played in was fairly generous with items, I'd easily have stuff I don't want (yay, I found a +2 sword, maybe I can trade in my +1 for something else).

Businesses exist because of SUPPLY and DEMAND. There is DEMAND for magic items, it is the number one reason PCs go adventuring for (that and XP and gold). The SUPPLY is the total magic items in the world. They are not all sitting in a dungeon, waiting for a PC to find it.

There is a demand for a whole lot of things in our real world. And there are people making businesses out of it. Just because you don't like the idea, doesn't make it unrealistic or unfathomable. Otherwise there wouldn't be the gambling, drug trade or human slavery. If people want it, somebody will find a way to get an inventory and sell it.

I suspect that the real root of not wanting magic shops in a campaign has more to do with GM control. The extreme example of anti-magic shoppism is that a PC can declare what he wants and walk into any magic shop and buy it. These types of GMs seem to loathe the idea of a player getting whats he wants. Whereas, all the examples by GMs who accept the idea of magic shops point out that the DM has full conrol of the inventory and prices. Many of these examples include some rather clever integrations with other real world business ideas. I've not seen one example of a magic-walmart, where a PC can buy whatever they want and run rampant over the campaign.

In short, barring a low magic campaign where there isn't enough excess magic items to sell, it defies logic and real world comparison that there would NOT be some form of magic shop.

I wrote a program to do this a long time ago, and actually thought about writing a blog entry about the method I came up with.

Anyway, the method I devised is this:

Lookup the age category/life expectancy for the race involved.

Assume that for your population that there is an even distribution, across age.

If you had a pop. of 1000, and the life expectancy was 100, then that would be 10 people at age 1, 10 at age 2, etc. (math= pop divided by life expectancy)

Multiply this by the % of females in the population (50% for humans). This gets us 5 for a distribution.

Now look at the age categories, and figure out the breeding year range. This is basically the begining of adult hood, to the beginning of the last age bracket. Let's say for humans that's 20-80, which is 60 years. If you had to estimate, assume 1/2 or 2/3 of the life expectancy. This is the span.

Now folks don't crank out babies every year, it's simplest to statistically spread them over their breeding span. Divive the breeding span (60) by the age of maturity (20). We get 3. THat's basically 3 kids per person.

Multiply that by the first number, you get 15.

That means for a population of 1,000, whose life expectancy is 100 years, they will crank out 15 people next year. This seems plausible for humans.

Repeat that math for each year you want to pass.

The interesting mechanic is that a shorter lived race has a lower maturity, and they will basically crank out kids like candy.

Let's say you got 1,000 Kobolds that live to age 30, and mature at age 15.
1000/30*.5=16.67 population distribution
30/2=15 = breeding span
16.67*15=250baby kobolds next year


Now this formula is far from realistic or precise, but it's close enough, and the results compare well against real humans, and produces more babies for short lived races, less babies for long lived races. If you actually plug in real human numbers, it is remarkably close to American growth rate (at least it was when I designed it 15 years ago).

The mortality rate is sort of effectively applied by virtue of the life expectancy. Since Kobolds have a short life expectancy, it is already assumed lots of kobolds are dieing.

I designed this formula years ago, when I had an elven nation that had lost a lot of people in a war, and time was passing, so I needed to know how big they would grow back to, after 100 years after the war (barring other cataclysms).

If you're just looking for a generic answer to "time passed, how many people are in this empire or city?" it is close enough for government work.

Hint: Applying multiple years is easier if you write a small program to loop through the math and add it all up...or just stick it in a spreadsheet.

I've written some on this topic before, and recent posts have made me write more. Here's my view of how to prevent a railroad.

The first step, is to have players who aren't disagreeable, for the sake of being disagreeable. That's kind of like saying get players who will put up with a railroad to avoid having a railroad, but hear me out. There is a type of player, who believes the game world should have no consequences for any PC action. It's almost like everything holds still, while the PC plunders it. The moment the GM has an NPC approach the party with a request to do a mission, he fights it. The moment the GM has a consequence happen for something the PC did, he complains about it. This type of player isn't about railroading. They are the kind of player who will call anything that isn't "their way" a railroad. You can't have a simulationist or narrativist game with those type of player, because either style involves elements they will fight.

Now that you've got the problem players fixed. You owe your players a good game where you don't railroad them. The real trick to not rail-roading is to simply adapt to what the players do. The foundation for that, is realizing that from the start of the game, the GM has visualized what the adventure story will look like. It's human nature, and it's how planning works.

The reality for most GMs is, whether they write it down before the game, or make it up on the fly, once they say, "the party hears a rumor about killings on the docks" it's been planned out. They have an idea of a clue to drop for the party to find. They have an idea of who the bad guy is, even if it's only in their head. At that point, a path has been drawn from party in the bar to party confronting the bad guy. A good GM keeps adjusting that path as the party advances through the story, based on what they do, and how they want to approach the problem. In any even, the goal is to always end at the party confronting the bad guy, though the image of what that scene looks like may keep changing.

In the "Murder on the Docks" mystery, no GM in his right mind creates a murder scene with no idea of the clues left there. And if you don't know who the murderer is, you don't know what kind of clue to leave. So already, a path is figured out. The trick is, that path is not obvious to the players, so you are at risk of running a railroad when the game starts.

When running the game, the GM's job is to adjust that path, per the players actions.

As I've written before, in any given encounter, you can simplify what the players will do to about 6 choices:
-fight their way out
-trick their way out (some spell or item, or sneakiness)
-talk their way out (diplomacy, etc)
-investigate their way out (sneak, find evidence and use it)
-run away (stop trying anything else)
-wait for the other side to act first (react in kind usually)

You can usually set the scene such that some choices are more likely. Confronting the party with a group of armed orcs with weapons drawn will most likely get the fight response. Orcs with weapons sheathed, at medium distance, with one orc calling out to the party opens up the talk option. Orcs seen nearby, but not seeing the party opens up the trick option. And in all cases run away and wait are still viable.

A lot of GMs get sloppy, and don't plan on all possibilities before the game. The most common one is expecting combat from any monster encounter. And for the most part, they're right. Even if you only plan on the most obvious action for an encounter, once in game, being aware of the other types of choice helps you adapt when the players try them.

GM's make a railroading mistake when they have planned solution to the encouter (fight the orc), and the party doesn't do it, and they try desperately to make everything fail but fighting the orc.

The moment the GM hears the party wants to do something unexpected, he needs to pause and consider what's really going on.

When a player doesn't do the expected thing, it comes in 3 flavors:
1) they're trying to quit the mission
2) they're trying to solve the mission, in an unanticipated way
3) they're trying to solve the mission, but going the wrong direction, and don't know it

#1 is easy, let them start quitting, and start showing them consequences as the bad guy moves forward un-impeded. They'll either get back to the mission, or accept the consequences, which continue to roll forward while they "do something else" which you can run for them. This might be occuring because they're the obstinate player I told you to dump in the beginning. Or it might be that the player doesn't think they can win. Or it might be that the mission doesn't make sense for the PC to do, which means your hook wasn't relevant to the PC, which is directly the GM's fault.

#2 is also easy. Pause the game, adjust the "script" to react to the new change, which will probably replace a few encounters and reveal information early, and move them to a different point in the story arc, which is the whole point of finishing any encounter. It's very important to consider what the player's are trying to do and assign a fair and rational difficulty level to it. Don't make it hard, just because you didn't anticipate it. Let it be easy, if it really would be easy to do.

#3 is the trickiest. It can easily happen in a mystery game, but has been known to happen in dungeon crawls, too. The players think some minor element you brought up is important, and pursue it. In a dungeon crawl, this is the KoDT story about the party trying to dig through a dead-end, certain that it is hiding the treasure, when it was really an artifact of the random map generator. In a mystery, it can mean mistaking the red herring as truth, or even worse, following an innocuous element as a lead, which as the GM is trying to make up new material, looks inconsistent, which only confirms the player's suspicions. The sad part is, the players are trying their best, they've simply going the wrong way.

The solution to this scenario takes a lot more work.
Corrective action: establish a house rule that you will tell the party when they've gone too off track, you will tell them. Statements like "Further investigation reveals that this really is a dead end.", "Deeper investigation shows that this person may have some secrets, but they have nothing to do with the case". Etc.
Prevention: Use deception sparingly. While it's obvious that bad guys are going to lie, use misleading information sparingly to increase its effectiveness, and avoid hyper-paranoia.

The Truth should be obvious with any investigation attempt. Let's say there's 3 clues on the ground at the crime scene. If the PCs investigate the red herring first, they learn in a few scenes that it was planted there.

The Truth should lead to the Truth. When a PC investigates a red herring, it should reveal it was a red herring, and further investigation should reveal a clue to who planted it. The reason is the same as to what a clue really is, it's a accidental remnant from the criminal. You can't do a murder with out leaving a trace. For the same reason, you can't plant a red herring without leaving a trace. What you're doing with these techniques is making sure that if a PC investigates it, it leads somewhere. Don't waste their time on things that don't matter, and can lead them too far astray. This is why, red herrings also lead back to where the party needs to go. And it is realistic with crime scenes.


Secrets works best with not expecting them. Don't use the same trick over and over again. Always making the butler the murderer, the NPC who hires the party is always going to betray them, the mission is always evil disguised as good, etc. These are cliche. Cliche's work, but only when used sparingly. Plus if you over-use deceptive practices, the party will hyper-focus on every element, which causes them to go the wrong direction, instead of the obvious and expected "right" direction. If you over-use false clues, hidden elements, betrayals, the party will expect them all the time. This will actually slow down game play (searching every 5' for traps), make for unrealistic role-play (the party distrusts every NPC), and logically a party on alert SHOULD detect these things.


Remember, it's not a rail-road to have consequences for the PCs actions or inaction. "I don't want to find the kidnapped mayor" means the bad guy moves forward. The world is not static. A rail-road is where the party can't choose to be inactive, or a specific action. They're not allowed to. A choice with a bad consequence (that a rational person would never make) is not the same as a lack of choice enforced by the GM who nullifies every action but the acceptable one.

If you can master these tips, by understanding "probable" player action/reaction, and adapt to "actual" player action/reaction, you can run a believable and enjoyable adventure.