World of Alidor » RPGA Activity

Tapped to Run 4e at Flatcon 2009

shent_lodge — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:42:33 +0000

I was tapped to run three 4e RPGA games at Flatcon in Bloomington Illinois this year. I really like Flatcon, because it is a small convention.
There is a little bit of everything going on at the con. It all takes place in one huge room. If you have the weekend of October 2nd free consider this convention.

I will be running these games:
DALE1-4 The Lady in Flames Friday at 7-11pm, SPEC1-3 Ghosts of the Past 7-10 Saturday 9-1pm and CORE1-13 The Fate of Camp 15 Sunday 9-1pm. SPEC1-3 Ghosts of the Past, is the only new one for me. I ran Lady in Flames a couple weeks ago and played The Fate of Camp 15 last weekend.

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Running 4e LFR Tonight

shent_lodge — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:17:37 +0000

I am running a 4e LFR game tonight at the local game store. The table is booked solid, and the dungeon appears to fun from what I read. I have never played the game, so in the RPGA this would be called eating the module, but since the 4e RPGA modules are very straight forward, it is more like a light meal or maybe a topas compared to 3e RPGA modules.

The best part these days are the high or low options for monster encounters which are both fully stat-ed out separately for a specific range like tonight’s 4-7th level session. No more huge range games like the ones I have seen in 3e, stating they can be run for 2nd level parties all the way up to 14th level parties. In most cases those games were written perfect for 7th level, but killed everyone (TPK) at 2nd and 4th level and just got stupid silly for groups above 7th level, especially for the 12th and 14th level parties. Vampire monk dervishs come to mind… That game went well… Not.

I have everything I need to run the game in, oh, about 36 pages. I make it even lighter by using a battle mat and wet erase pen instead of WotC dungeon tiles which apparently you need if you are writing a module for the RPGA these days. Ouch.

I will be taking the party through a Dalelands adventure that begins in good old Shadowdale. It is called DALE1-4 The Lady In Flames By Brad Gardner.

The image is from my original AD&D FR, The Dalelands boxed set accessory by Richard Baker. I dug it out last night just for kicks.

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Running Part Three of a Module Trilogy

shent_lodge — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 01:40:52 +0000

My Tuesday Illinois Living Greyhawk group asked me to run the third part of an adapted module trilogy tomorrow. I agreed, and will spend the next month or so running it every other Tuesday until it is done. The mod is called Fortress of the Yuan-ti it is the finale to adapted adventures that started with the Barrow of the Forgotten King and rolled into The Sinister Spire. It is amazing how devoted this group is to Greyhawk and what I call its evil Living Greyhawk RPGA spawn. I told the group that I prefer not to run Living Greyhawk modules unless they are adapted mods, so they filled my email box with adapted modules and hand delivered the physical published mods to my door. Guess I can not get out of DMing that easily.

I prefer to play the older 3.X rpga games and have issues with running the modules for the setting. I told the group as politely as possible that the 3.x RPGA modules give me ulcers when I run them. I should clarify that I totally respect the effort of the authors, because I have never published game modules myself, and only run my own games off scribbled notes and chicken scratched dungeon drawings, in many cases they are created as the players discuss topics around the tables. Nearly every module I ever ran, I ended up deviating from it, or just taking this piece or that and using a compilation for my home game. Even in the new 4e rpga you still have to run the game from start to stop without deviating, the only cool part is that I can tweak the “feel and flow” to suit the party and increase their enjoyment; something I can live with. It is the strictness of 3.x RPGA mods that give me ulcers. Anyway, tomorrow the group begins the last part of a series they all have played and have had fun with.

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Inspiring and Pacing Combat

shent_lodge — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 04:48:45 +0000

As a storyteller, over the years, I developed a keen eye that picked up on when a party has seen enough combat, and wanted it to end, or when the party wanted it to start. It is like a third eye or something, I just know when it is time to switch gears. This weekend I ran the same game twice for two totally different groups of players at Winter War.

The first of the two groups, the power gamers, ripped through the module like a well-oiled machine; they were unstoppable on their quest to beat the module. They had the right PC classes with all the right feats and powers, and they were armed to the teeth with “rewards cards”, the RPGA players ultimate cheese weapon to overcome the inequities of MMRPG game play. Half the party had already played the module once before; these guys were serious meta-gamers to the max; some role-play banter did drift around the table, but they were there for the glory of battle and destroyed everything that dared to stand defiantly before them.

The second group, I’ll call the role-players, was comprised of what I would consider idealists who had chosen PC classes that sounded cool, whose feats may have made sense for a home game, but were essentially useless, at least in the game I ran before them. This group had no “rewards cards”, and this was their first time through the module.

The power gamers cleared the dungeon in 3hours, the role-players went 5 minutes over on a 4 hour slot. Both groups said they had a blast, and felt challenged, and at some moments they were even scared. I did not pull punches on either party, I always roll dice in front of players, but I did make adjustments to inspire and keep pace. With the power gamers, I had a white D20 that was hot, and I kept rolling one natural 20 after another, so I held up the die, and announced to the table it was retired for the game. The table cheered. I really did not do much else, outside of drawing them into the story and deliver them to the end.

The role-players were lucky, I kept checking my D20 to make sure it was not a D10, because it was rolling so low. With these guys, the problem was they were not together as a group, they were light on the cheese, and because of this the combats dragged on. The solution, I carefully placed hit point smudges. I basically paced the combats, after scanning the table and seeing every PC bloodied and worried; some monsters would get bloodied a couple hit points earlier than normal, or drop dead a couple hit points short of where they were stat’d too. It is amazing to see how just one monster getting bloodied, maybe a smidge earlier than normal will change the mood of the table. I don’t think the players noticed, and I ended up doing it twice at key points in the encounters during play to help move the story forward. I think my slight HP adjustment made the game a success for the role-players without making it into a cake walk.

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A Blast from the Past, Played a Year 4 Keoland LG Mod Last Night

shent_lodge — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:55:27 +0000

One of the guys in my Tuesday “Unofficial Living Greyhawk Group” is a refugee from the East Coast. Last night he ran a module from his old haunt called Active Imagination by Keith Palm and Judy Rudolph, Set in Keoland in Greyhawk. The fun part was we were totally clueless about Keoland, but it did not matter. We played low level (average level was 6), and ended up on some bizarre quest into ”candy land”. Along the way, we fought marshmallow cockatrice peeps that encased one of our players in a rock candy shell. In another battle, we faced an animated oven in a gingerbread house that was surrounded by caramel tanglefoot bag slinging chocolate bunnies. Some of the comments flying around the table were “I’m covered in caramel”, and “will someone help us in the kitchen” and “OK we got the oven, now which chocolate bunny do you want us to take?” We also had a nackle gnome in the party, so we did get distracted a few times by the pure silliness of the dungeon. I’d like to take my hat off to the authors albeit, 5 years later, to say great job, at least on the low level part of the module, and to Norm for running it for us.

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