already use the system & don’t like learning new things,
enjoy medieval fantasy settings, with a 60-70% combat tilt,
like vague, unopinionated systems,
don’t mind overly corporate media,
just kinda like it (which is totally fair)
And if you do fit the bill here, I truly do wish you all the best in your 5e adventures…
But just because one system is for you, doesn’t mean others aren’t! pulls away curtain, exaggerated
…
As a quick disclaimer, this hobby, like many others, is a matter of taste. I, like everyone else, am biased towards a certain kind of game. Specifically, I absolutely adore games
that place roleplay at center stage. Games that deal with the complexities of identity. Games with innovative mechanics. Games that present deep ethical quandaries. Games that make
everyone at the table ponder something meaningful. If you like similar games, you’ll probably love my recommendations. If you don’t, then don’t worry! There are so many more games
out there that will be for you and not for me, (5e included!), and I absolutely love that about this hobby.
I listed a good few options above, but also, I’d encourage you to take a gander at a few of the following games, most if not all of which I will write full reviews for eventually:
Spire: Rise against the oppressive high elves in a revolution destined for ruin, in an attempt to make a difference. Check out the fallout system in this one, it’s genuinely a
game changer.
Blades in the Dark: Gang warfare: the game. Run a gang in a dark, steampunk, ghost-ridden world, and execute sick heists. Prep is for losers when in-scene you can just flashback
to that time you prepared for this exact eventuality.
Slugblaster: TEENS ON HOVERBOARDS! DOIN’ SICK TRICKS! GOIN’ THROUGH PORTALS! GETTIN’ THAT SWEET SWEET INTERNET CLOUT! RUNNIN’ FROM INTERDIMENSIONAL POLICE!
YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Lichcraft: You’re trans and the wait for gender affirming healthcare is 300 years. Welp time to turn to the dark arts and become a lich!
It saddens me a little that D&D (5e or whatever) is so-firmly entrenched as “the” default choice of TTRPG.
It’s fine, I guess (with the caveats above about what it’s best at and, by proxy, what it’s weaker at), and I’ve on many occasions enjoyed D&D both as a PC’s player and as
a DM. But that it’s so much the de-facto standard that D&D is in many circles synonymous with roleplaying is… just a bit of a waste, really!
I love that Kai not only shares an explanation of these limitations but that they also go on to share a handful of recommendations of other games to consider, the next time the TTRPG
itch gets you! I’d heard of Blades in the Dark (perhaps courtesy of the use of the Forged in the Dark engine in other games; I’m
not certain), but the other three are completely alien to me… and they all sound great in different ways.
I wonder if I can persuade some Abnibbers to hook up for a mini-campaign/one-shot of Slugblaster or something at some
point? Spire sounds great too, and I like the theme of Lichcraft: there’s some interesting ideas to explore in that universe!
Y’all seemed to enjoy the “overworld” map I shared the other day, so here’s another “feelie” from my kids’ ongoing D&D campaign.
The party has just arranged for passage aboard a pioneering (and experimental) Elvish airship. Here’s a deck plan (only needs a “you are here” dot!) to help them get their bearings.
In preparation for Family D&D Night (and with thanks to my earlier guide to splicing maps together!), I’ve finally completed an
expanded “overworld” map for our game world. So far, the kids have mostly hung around on the North coast of the Central Sea, but they’re picked up a hook that may take them all the way
across to the other side… and beyond?
Banana for scale.
(If your GMing for kids, you probably already know this, but “feelies” go a long way. All the maps. All the scrolls. Maybe even some props. Go all in. They love it.)
theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner’s brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures
I think that’s all of them, but it’s hard to be sure…
Footnotes
1 Maybe I’ve finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything.
Or maybe it’s just that I’ve embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.
Day #2 of my sabbatical had a morning in which I’ve mostly been roped into some charity-related digital forensics… until I got distracted by dndle.app,
which apparently I accidentally broke yesterday! Move Fast and Fix Things!
tl;dr: I’m tidying up and consolidating my personal hosting; I’ve made a little progress, but I’ve got a way to go – fortunately I’ve got a sabbatical coming up at
work!
At the weekend, I kicked-off what will doubtless be a multi-week process of gradually tidying and consolidating some of the disparate digital things I run, around the Internet.
I’ve a long-standing habit of having an idea (e.g. gamebook-making tool Twinebook, lockpicking puzzle game Break Into Us, my Cheating Hangman game, and even FreeDeedPoll.org.uk!),
deploying it to one of several servers I run, and then finding it a huge headache when I inevitably need to upgrade or move said server because there’s such an insane diversity of
different things that need testing!
DNDle, my Wordle-clone where you have to guess the Dungeons & Dragons 5e monster’s stat block, is now hosted by GitHub Pages. Also, I
fixed an issue reported a month ago that meant that I was reporting Giant Scorpions as having a WIS of 19 instead of 9.
Abnib, which mostly reminds people of upcoming birthdays and serves as a dumping ground for any Abnib-related shit I produce, is now hosted by
GitHub Pages.
RockMonkey.org.uk, which doesn’t really do much any more, is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Sour Grapes, the single-page promo for a (remote) murder mystery party I hosted during a COVID lockdown, is now hosted by GitHub
Pages.
A convenience-page for giving lost people directions to my house is now hosted by GitHub Pages.
Dan Q’s Things is now automatically built on a schedule and hosted by GitHub Pages.
Robin’s Improbable Blog, which spun out from 52 Reflect, wasn’t getting enough traffic to justify
“proper” hosting so now it sits in a Docker container on my NAS.
My μlogger server, which records my location based on pings from my phone, has also moved to my NAS. This has broken
Find Dan Q, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue with that in its current form anyway.
All of my various domain/subdomain redirects have been consolidated on, or are in the process of moving to, to a tinyLinode/Akamai
instance. It’s a super simple plain Nginx server that does virtually nothing except redirect people – this is where I’ll park the domains I register but haven’t found a use for yet, in
future.
I was pretty proud of EGXchange.org, but I’ll be first to admit that it’s among the stupider of my throwaway domains.
It turns out GitHub pages is a fine place to host simple, static websites that were open-source already. I’ve been working on improving my understanding of GitHub Actions
anyway as part of what I’ve been doing while wearing my work, volunteering, and personal hats, so switching some static build processes like DNDle’s to GitHub
Actions was a useful exercise.
Stuff I’m still to tidy…
There’s still a few things I need to tidy up to bring my personal hosting situation under control:
DanQ.me
You’re looking at it. But later this year, you might be looking at it… elsewhere?
This is the big one, because it’s not just a WordPress blog: it’s also a Gemini, Spartan, and Gopher server (thanks CapsulePress!), a Finger server, a general-purpose host to a stack of complex stuff only some of which is powered by Bloq (my WordPress/PHP integrations): e.g.
code to generate the maps that appear on my geopositioned posts, code to integrate with the Fediverse, a whole stack of configuration to make my caching work the way I want, etc.
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk
Right now this is a Ruby/Sinatra application, but I’ve got a (long-running) development branch that will make it run completely in the browser, which will further improve privacy, allow
it to run entirely-offline (with a service worker), and provide a basis for new features I’d like to provide down the line. I’m hoping to get to finishing this during my Automattic
sabbatical this winter.
The website’s basically unchanged for most of a decade and a half, and… umm… it looks it!
A secondary benefit of it becoming browser-based, of course, is that it can be hosted as a static site, which will allow me to move it to GitHub Pages too.
When I took over running the world’s geohashing hub from xkcd‘s Randall Munroe (and davean), I flung the site together on whatever hosting I had sitting
around at the time, but that’s given me some headaches. The outbound email transfer agent is a pain, for example, and it’s a hard host on which to apply upgrades. So I want to get that
moved somewhere better this winter too. It’s actually the last site left running on its current host, so it’ll save me a little money to get it moved, too!
Geohashing’s one of the strangest communities I’m honoured to be a part of. So it’d be nice to treat their primary website to a little more respect and attention.
Right now I run this on my NAS, but that turns out to be a pain sometimes because it means that if my home Internet goes down (e.g. thanks to a power cut, which we have from time to time), I lose access to the first and last place I
go on the Internet! So I’d quite like to move that to somewhere on the open Internet. Haven’t worked out where yet.
Next steps
It’s felt good so far to consolidate and tidy-up my personal web hosting (and to rediscover some old projects I’d forgotten about). There’s work still to do, but I’m expecting to spend
a few months not-doing-my-day-job very soon, so I’m hoping to find the opportunity to finish it then!
Dungeons & Dragons players spend a lot of time rolling 20-sided polyhedral dice, known as D20s.
In general, they’re looking to roll as high as possible to successfully stab a wyvern, jump a chasm, pick a lock, charm a Duke1,
or whatever.
Submerging your dice set in the blood of a halfling is a sure-fire way to get luckier rolls.
Roll with advantage
Sometimes, a player gets to roll with advantage. In this case, the player rolls two dice, and takes the higher roll. This really boosts their chances of not-getting a
low roll. Do you know by how much?
I dreamed about this very question last night. And then, still in my dream, I came up with the answer2.
I woke up thinking about it3
and checked my working.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
2
2
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
3
3
3
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
4
4
4
4
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
5
5
5
5
5
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
6
6
6
6
6
6
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
15
16
17
18
19
20
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
16
17
18
19
20
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
17
18
19
20
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
18
19
20
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
Table illustrating the different permutations of two D20 rolls and the “advantage” result (i.e. the higher of the two).
The chance of getting a “natural 1” result on a D20 is 1 in 20… but when you roll with advantage, that goes down to 1 in 400: a huge improvement! The chance of rolling a 10 or 11 (2 in
20 chance of one or the other) remains the same. And the chance of a “crit” – 20 – goes up from 1 in 20 when rolling a single D20 to 39 in 400 – almost 10% – when rolling with
advantage.
You can see that in the table above: the headers along the top and left are the natural rolls, the intersections are the resulting values – the higher of the two.
The nice thing about the table above (which again: was how I visualised the question in my dream!) is it really helps to visualise why these numbers are what they are. The
general formula for calculating the chance of a given number when rolling D20 with advantage is ( n2 – (n-1)2 ) / 400. That is, the square of the number
you’re looking for, minus the square of the number one less than that, over 400 (the total number of permutations)4.
Why roll two dice when one massive one will do?
Knowing the probability matrix, it’s theoretically possible to construct a “D20 with Advantage” die5. Such a tool would
have 400 sides (one 1, three 2s, five 3s… and thirty-nine 20s). Rolling-with-advantage would be a single roll.
I don’t think anybody’s ever built a real 400-sided die, but Numberwang! claimed to have one.
This is probably a totally academic exercise. The only conceivable reason I can think of would be if you were implementing a computer system on which generating random numbers
was computationally-expensive, but memory was cheap: under this circumstance, you could pre-generate a 400-item array of possible results and randomly select from it.
But if anybody’s got a 3D printer capable of making a large tetrahectogon (yes, that’s what you call a 400-sided polygon – you learned something today!), I’d love to see an “Advantage
D20” in the flesh. Or if you’d just like to implement a 3D model for Dice Box that’d be fine too!
Footnotes
1 Or throw a fireball, recall an anecdote, navigate a rainforest, survive a poisoning,
sneak past a troll, swim through a magical swamp, hold on to a speeding aurochs, disarm a tripwire, fire a crossbow, mix a potion, appeal to one among a pantheon of gods, beat the
inn’s landlord at an arm-wrestling match, seduce a duergar guard, persuade a talking squirrel to spy on some bandits, hold open a heavy door, determine the nature of a curse, follow a
trail of blood, find a long-lost tome, win a drinking competition, pickpocket a sleeping ogre, bury a magic sword so deep that nobody will ever find it, pilot a spacefaring rowboat,
interpret a forgotten language, notice an imminent ambush, telepathically commune with a distant friend, accurately copy-out an ancient manuscript, perform a religious ritual, find
the secret button under the wizard’s desk, survive the blistering cold, entertain a gang of street urchins, push through a force field, resist mind control, and then compose a ballad
celebrating your adventure.
2 I don’t know what it says about me as a human being that sometimes I dream in
mathematics, but it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising given I’m nerdy enough to have previously recorded instances of dreaming in (a) Perl, and (b) Nethack (terminal mode).
3 When I woke up I also found that I had One Jump from Disney’s Aladdin stuck in my head, but I’m not sure
that’s relevant to the discussion of probability; however, it might still be a reasonable indicator of my mental state in general.
4 An alternative formula which is easier to read but harder to explain would be ( 2(n
– 1) + 1 ) / 400.
5 Or a “D20 with Disadvantage”: the table’s basically the inverse of the advantage one –
i.e. 1 in 400 chance of a 20 through to 39 in 400 chance of a 1.
FoundryVTT is a fantastic Web-based environment for tabletop roleplaying adventures1 and something I
particularly enjoy is the freedom for virtually-unlimited scripting. Following a demonstration to a fellow DM at work last week I
promised to throw together a quick tutorial into scripting simple multi-phase maps using Foundry.2
Allow the development and expansion of a siege camp outside the fortress where the heroes are holed-up.3
Rotate through day and night cycles or different times of day, perhaps with different things to interact with in each.4
Gradually flood a sewer with rising water… increasing the range of the monster that dwells within.5
Re-arrange parts of the dungeon when the characters flip certain switches, opening new paths… and closing others.
I’ll use the map above to create a simple linear flow, powered by a macro in the hotbar. Obviously, more-complex scenarios are available, and combining this approach with a plugin like
Monk’s Active Tile Triggers can even be used to make the map appear to dynamically change in response to the movement
or actions of player characters!
Setting the scene
Create a scene, using the final state of the map as the background. Then, in reverse-order, add the previous states as tiles above it.
Not shown, but highly-recommended: lock each tile when you’re done placing it, so that you don’t accidentally interact with it when you mean to e.g. drag-select multiple
actors.
Make a note of the X-position that your tiles are in when they’re where they supposed to be: we’ll “move” the tiles off to the side when they’re hidden, to prevent their ghostly
half-hidden forms getting in your way as game master. We’ll also use this X-position to detect which tiles have already been moved/hidden.
Also make note of each tile’s ID, so your script can reference them. It’s easiest to do this as you go along. When you’re ready to write your macro, reverse the list, because
we’ll be hiding each tile in the opposite order from the order you placed them.
Writing the script
Next, create a new script macro, e.g. by clicking an empty slot in the macro bar. When you activate this script, the map will move forward one phase (or, if it’s at the end, it’ll
reset).
I find Foundry’s built-in script editor a little… small? So I write my scripts in my favourite text editor and then copy-paste.
Here’s the code you’ll need – the 👈 emoji identifies the places you’ll need to modify the code, specifically:
const revealed_tiles_default_x = 250 should refer to the X-position of your tiles when they’re in the correct position.
const revealed_tiles_modified_x = 2825 should refer to the X-position they’ll appear at “off to the right” of your scene. To determine this, just move one tile right
until it’s sufficiently out of the way of the battlemap and then check what it’s X-position is! Or just take the default X-position, add the width of your map in pixels, and then add
a tiny bit more.
const revealed_tiles = [ ... ] is a list of the tile IDs of each tile what will be hidden, in turn. In my example there are five of them (the sixth and final image being
the scene background).
const revealed_tiles_default_x =250; // 👈 X-position of tiles when displayedconst revealed_tiles_modified_x =2825; // 👈 X-position of tiles when not displayedconst revealed_tiles = [
'2xG7S8Yqk4x1eAdr', // 👈 list of tile IDs in order that they should be hidden'SjNQDBImHvrjAHWX', // (top to bottom)'tuYg4FvLgIla1l21',
'auX4sj64PWmkAteR',
'yAL4YP0I4Cv4Sevt',
].map(t=>canvas.tiles.get(t));
/*************************************************************************************************/// Get the topmost tile that is still visible:const next_revealed_tile_to_move = revealed_tiles.find(t=>
t.position.x == revealed_tiles_default_x
);
// If there are NO still-visible tiles, we must need to reset the map:if( ! next_revealed_tile_to_move ) {
// To reset the map, we go through each tile and put it back where it belongs -for(tile of revealed_tiles){
canvas.scene.updateEmbeddedDocuments("Tile", [ {
_id: tile.id,
x: revealed_tiles_default_x,
hidden:false
} ]);
}
} else {
// Otherwise, hide the topmost visible tile (and move it off to the side to help the GM) -
canvas.scene.updateEmbeddedDocuments("Tile", [ {
_id: next_revealed_tile_to_move.id,
x: revealed_tiles_modified_x,
hidden:true
} ]);
}
I hope that the rest of the code is moderately self-explanatory for anybody with a little JavaScript experience, but if you’re just following this kind of simple, linear case then you
don’t need to modify it anyway. But to summarise, what it does is:
Finds the first listed tile that isn’t yet hidden (by comparing its X-position to the pre-set X-position).
If there aren’t any such tiles, we must have hidden them all already, so perform a reset: to do this – iterate through each tile and set its X-position to the pre-set X-position,
and un-hide it.
Otherwise, move the first not-hidden tile to the alternative X-position and hide it.
4 If you’re using Dungeon
Alchemist as part of your mapmaking process you can just export orthographic or perspective outputs with different times of day and your party’s regular inn can be
appropriately lit for any time of day, even if the party decides to just “wait at this table until nightfall”.
I’ve been GMing/DMing/facilitating1 roleplaying games for nearby 30 years, but I only
recently began to feel like I was getting to be good at it.
The secret skill that was hardest for me to learn? A willingness to surrender control to the players.
I’m a big fan of the Karma/Drama/Fortune (K/D/F) model for understanding resolution. My relationship with K/D/F is a story for another blog post, but I’ll use it as as a framework here.
Karma, Drama, Fortune
I could write a lot about the way I interpret the K/D/F model, but for today here’s a quick primer:
The K/D/F model describes the relationship between three forces: Karma (player choices), Drama
(story needs) and Fortune (luck, e.g. dice rolls). For example,
When the lich king comes to the region to provide a villainous plot hook, that’s Drama. Nobody had to do anything and no dice were rolled. The story demanded a “big
bad” and so – within the limitations of the setting – one turned up.
When his lucky critical hit kills an ally of the adventurers, that’s Fortune. That battle could have gone a different way, but the dice were on the villain’s side and
he was able to harm the players. When we don’t know which way something will go, and it matters, we hit the dice.
When one of the heroes comes up with a clever way to use a magical artefact from a previous quest to defeat him, that’s Karma. It was a clever plan, and the players
were rewarded for their smart choices by being able to vanquish the evil thing.
And elsewhere on their quest they probably saw many other resolutions. Each of those may have leaned more-heavily on one or another of the three pillars, or balanced between them
equally.
The balance point varies by group and can change over time, but crucially it doesn’t neglect any one of the three aspects.
Disbalancing drama
For most of my many years of gamemastering, I saw my role as being the sole provider the “drama” part of the K/D/F model. The story
comes from me, the choices and dice rolls come from the players, right?
Nope, I was wrong. That approach creates an inevitable trend, whether large or small, towards railroading: “forcing” players down a particular path.
A gamemaster with an inflexible and excessively concrete idea of the direction that a story must go will find that they become unable to see the narrative through any other lens. In
extreme examples, the players are deprotagonised and the adventure just becomes a series of set pieces, connected by the gamemaster’s idea of how things should play out. I’ve seen this
happen. I’ve even caused it to happen, sometimes.2
What if Bilbo and his party escaped from the wood elves by land, heading directly East to Erebor instead of via Esgaroth? What if he failed to determine Smaug’s weakness, or chose not
to steal from him? What if the dwarves successfully fought off the goblins and didn’t need rescue? The difference between an adventure story and an adventure game
should be that in a game, nobody – not even the author – can be certain ahead of time of the answers to all the questions.
A catalogue of failures
I’ve railroaded players to some degree or another on an embarrassing number of occasions.
In the spirit of learning from my mistakes, here are three examples of me being a Bad GM.
Quantum Ogre
Scenario: In a short-lived high fantasy GURPS
campaign, I wanted the party to meet a band of gypsies and have their fortune told, in order to foreshadow other parts of the story yet to come.
What I did: I pulled a quantum ogre (magician’s choice) on them: whether
they travelled by road, or water, or hacked their way through the forest, they were always going to meet the gypsies: their choice of route didn’t really matter.
Why that was wrong: I’d elevated the value of the encounter I’d planned higher than the importance of player agency. The more effort it took to write something, the
more I felt the need to ensure it happened!
Two things I could’ve done: Reassessed the importance of the encounter. Found other ways to foreshadow the plot that didn’t undermine player choices, and been
more-flexible about my set pieces.
Fudging
Scenario: In a Spirit of the Century one-shot an antagonist needed to kidnap a NPC from aboard an oceanbound ship. To my surprise – with some very lucky rolls – the players foiled the plot!
What I did: I used a fudge – an exploit based on the fact
that in most games the gamemaster controls both the plot and the hidden variables of the game mechanics – to facilitate the antagonist kidnapping a different
NPC, and adapted the story to this new reality.
Why that was wrong: It made the players feel like their choices didn’t matter. I justified it to myself by it being a one-shot, but that undermines the lesson: I
could’ve done better.
Two things I could’ve done: Used the failed attack as a precursor to a later renewed offensive by a villain who’s now got a personal interest in seeing the party
fail. Moved towards a different story, perhaps to a different element of the antagonist’s plan.
Ex Machina
Scenario: In a long-running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st edition!) campaign, a series of bad choices and terrible luck left the party trapped and unable
to survive the onslaught of a literal army of bloodthirsty orcs.
What I did: I whipped out a deus spiritus ex machina, having a friendly ghost NPC
basically solve for them a useful puzzle they’d been struggling with, allowing them to escape alive (albeit with the quest truly failed).
Why that was wrong: It deprotagonised the adventurers, making them unimportant in their own stories. At the time, I felt that by saving the party I was “saving” the
game, but instead I was undermining its value.
Two things I could’ve done: TPK: sometimes it’s the right thing to allow everybody to die! Pivot the plot to
facilitate their capture (e.g. the arch-nemesis can’t solve the puzzle either and wants to coerce them into helping), leading to new challenges and interesting moral choices.
Those examples are perhaps extreme, but I’m pretty sure I’ve set up my fair share of lesser sins too. Like chokepoints that strongly encourage a particular direction: do that
enough and you train your players to wait until they identify the chokepoint before they take action! Or being less invested in players’ plans if those plans deviate from what
I anticipated, and having a convenient in-party NPC prompting players with what they ought to do next. Ugh.3
The good news is, of course, that we’ve all always got the opportunity for growth and self-improvement.
In my defence, many professionally published adventures are a series of scenes connected by the assumption that the author knows exactly how the players will proceed from
each. These don’t teach gamemasters how to handle any deviation: no wonder we don’t learn not to railroad!
The self-improvement path
I’ve gotten better at this in general over the years, but when I took over from Simon at DMing for The Levellers in July, I decided that I was going to try to push myself harder than ever to avoid railroading. Simon was always especially good at
promoting player freedom and autonomy, and I wanted to use this inspiration as a vehicle to improve my own gamemastering.
What does that look like within the framework of an established campaign?
Some days, a critical hit is just enough. Other days, you should’ve just stayed at the inn and got drunk. This third-party photo is copyrighted with all rights reserved; not under
my usual license.
Well: I ensure there are clues (usually three of them!) to
point the players in the “right” direction. And I’ll be on hand to give “nudges” if they’re truly stuck for what to do next, typically by providing a “recap” of the things
they’ve previously identified as hooks that are worth following-up (including both the primary plotline and any other avenues they’ve openly discussed investigating).
But that’s the limit to how I allow Drama to control the direction of the story. Almost everything else lies in the hands of Karma and Fortune.
Let all gamemasters strive to be as prepared as Abed.
Needless to say, opening up the possibility space for my players makes gamemastering harder4!
But… not by as much as I expected. Extra prep-work was necessary, especially at the outset, in order to make sure that the world I was inheriting/building upon was believable and
internally-consistent (while ensuring that if a player decided to “just keep walking East” they wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world). But mostly, the work did itself.
Because here’s the thing I learned: so long as you’re willing to take what your players come up with and run with it, they’ll help make the story more
compelling. Possibly without even realising it.5
This tip brought to you from the Department of Splitting The Party Before They Think To Do It Themselves.
The Levellers are a pretty special group. No matter what the situation, they can always be relied upon to come up with a plan that wasn’t anywhere on their DM‘s radar. When they needed to cross a chasm over their choice of one of two bridges, each guarded by
a different variety of enemy, I anticipated a few of the obvious options on each (fighting, magic, persuasion and intimidation, bribery…) but a moment later they were talking
about having their druid wildshape into something easy-to-carry while everybody else did a group-spider climb expedition down the chasm edge and along the underside of a bridge. That’s thinking outside the box!
But the real magic has come when the party, through their explorations, have unlocked entirely new elements of the story.
Player-driven content
In our campaign, virtually all of the inhabitants of a city have inadvertently sold their immortal souls to a Archduchess of Hell by allowing, over generations, their declaration of
loyalty to their city to become twisted away from their gods and towards their mortal leader, who sold them on in exchange for a sweet afterlife deal. The knights of the city were
especially-impacted, as the oath they swore upon promised their unending loyalty in this life as well. When the fiendish pact was made, these knights were immediately possessed
by evil forces, transforming into horrendous creatures (who served to harass the party for some time).
Every party’s got a character who pores over the textual detail of every prop6, right? Or
is it just every party that includes JTA as a player?
But there’s a hole in this plot7.
As-written, at least one knight avoided fiendish possession and lived to tell the tale! The player characters noticed this and latched on, so I ran with it. Why might the survivor knights
be different from those who became part of the armies of darkness? Was there something different about their swearing-in ceremony? Maybe the reasons are different for different survivors?
I didn’t have answers to these questions to begin with, but the players were moving towards investigating, so I provided some. This also opened up an entire new possible “soft” quest
hook related to the reason for the discrepancy. So just like that, a plothole is discovered and investigated by a player, and that results in further opportunities
for adventure.
As it happens, the party didn’t even go down that route at all and instead pushed-on in their existing primary direction, but the option remains. All thanks to player
curiosity, there’s a possible small quest that’s never been written down or published, and is unique to our group and the party’s interests. And that’s awesome.
“The spell takes effect, and with whoosh of air you find yourself whisked to the bottom of the page, ready to finish reading the post.”
In Conclusion
I’m not the best GM in the world. I’m not even the best GM I know. But I’m getting
better all the time; learning lessons like how to release the reins a little bit and see where my players can take our adventures.
And for those lessons, I’m grateful to those same players.
Footnotes
1 I’m using the terms GM, DM, and facilitator interchangeably, and damned if I’m writing them all out every single time.
2 A gamemaster giving all of the narrative power to any one of the three elements
of K/D/F breaks the game, but in different ways. 100% karma and what you’ve got is a storytelling game, not a roleplaying game:
which is fine if that’s what everybody at the table thinks they’re playing: otherwise not. 100% drama gives you a recital, not a jam session: the gamemaster might as well just be
writing a book. 100% fortune leads to unrealistic chaos: with no rules to the world (either from the plot or from the consequences of actions) you’re just imagining all possible
outcomes in your universe and picking one at random. There’s a balance, and where it sits might vary from group to group, but 100% commitment to a single element almost always breaks
things.
3 A the “lesser sins” I mention show, the edges of what construes railroading and what’s
merely “a linear quest” is a grey area, and where the line should be drawn varies from group to group. When I’m running a roleplaying session for my primary-school-aged kids, for
example, I’m much more-tolerant of giving heavy-handed nudges at a high-level to help them stay focussed on what their next major objective was… but I try harder than ever to
encourage diverse and flexible problem-solving ideas within individual scenes, where childish imagination can really make for memorable moments. One time, a tabaxi warrior,
on fire, was falling down the outside of a tower… but his player insisted that he could shout a warning through the windows he passed before landing in flawless catlike
fashion (albeit mildly singed). My adult players would be rolling athletics checks to avoid injury, but my kids? They can get away with adding details like that by fiat. Different
audience, see?
4 A recent session took place after a hiatus, and I wasn’t confident that – with the
benefit of a few months’ thinking-time – the party would continue with the plan they were executing before the break. And they didn’t! I’d tried to prep for a few other
eventualities in the anticipation of what they might do and… I guessed wrong. So, for the first time in recorded history, our session ended early. Is that the end of
the world? Nope.
5 Want a really radical approach to player-driven plot development? Take a look at
this video by Zee Bashew, which I’m totally borrowing from next time I start running a new campaign.
6 You know what I miss? Feelies. That’s probably why I try to provide so many “props”, whether physical or digital, in my
adventures.
7 The plothole isn’t even my fault, for once: it’s functionally broken as-delivered in the
source book, although that matters little because we’ve gone so-far outside the original source material now we’re on a whole different adventure, possibly to reconvene later on.
Do you play in your daily life? What says “playtime” to you?
How do I play? Let me count the ways!
RPGs
I’m involved in no fewer than three different RPG campaigns (DMing the one for
The Levellers) right now, plus periodic one-shots. I love a good roleplaying game, especially one that puts character-building and storytelling
above rules-lawyering and munchkinery, specifically because that kind of collaborative, imaginative experience feels more like the kind of thing we call “play” when
done it’s done by children!
Family D&D and Abnib D&D might have a distinctly different tone, but they’re still both playtime activities.
Videogames
I don’t feel like I get remotely as much videogaming time as I used to, and in theory I’ve become more-selective about exactly what I spend my time on1.
Similarly, I don’t feel like I get as much time to grind through my oversized board games collection as I used to2,
but that’s improving as the kids get older and can be roped-into a wider diversity of games3.
Our youngest wakes early on weekend mornings and asks to kick off his day with board games. Our eldest, pictured, has grown to the point where she’s working her way through all of the
animal-themed games at our local board games cafe.
Escape Rooms
I love a good escape room, and I can’t wait until the kids are old enough for (more of) them too so I’ve an excuse to do more of them. When we’re not playing conventional escape rooms,
Ruth and I can sometimes be found playing board game-style boxed “kit” ones (which have very variable quality, in my experience) and we’ve
recently tried a little Escape Academy.
Ruth and I make a great duo when we remember to communicate early-and-often and to tag-team puzzles by swapping what we’re focussing on when we get stuck.
They’re not the only satnav-based activities I do at least partially “for fun” though! I contribute to OpenStreetMap, often through the
“gamified” experience of the StreetComplete app, and I’m very slowly creeping up the leader board at OpenBenches. Are these “play”? Sure, maybe.
And all of the above is merely the structured kinds of play I engage in. Playing “let’s pretend”-style games with the kids (even when they make it really, really
weird) adds a whole extra aspect. Also there’s the increasingly-rare murder mystery parties we sometimes hold: does that count as roleplaying, or some other kind of play?
A chef, a priest, and a librarian walk into a party… stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Suffice to say, there’s plenty of play in my life, it’s quite varied and diverse, and there is, if anything, not enough of it!
Footnotes
1 I say that, and yet somehow Steam tells me that one of my most-played games this year
was Starfield, which was… meh? Apparently compelling enough
that I’ve “ascended” twice, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t bothered.
2 Someday my group and I will finish Pandemic Legacy: Season 2 so we can get
started on Season 0 which has sat
unplayed on my shelves since I got it… oooh… two or three years ago‽
3 This Christmas, I got each of them their first “legacy” game: Zombie Kids for the younger one, My City for the elder. They both seem pretty good.
4Geocaching is where you use military satellite networks to find lost tupperware. Geohashing uses the same technology but what you find is a whole
lot of nothing. I don’t think I can explain why I find the latter more-compelling.
Foundry is a wonderful virtual tabletop tool well-suited to playing tabletop roleplaying games with your friends, no
matter how far away they are. It compares very favourably to the market leader Roll20, once you
get past some of the initial set-up challenges and a moderate learning curve.
The party of adventurers I’ve been DMing
for since last summer use Foundry to simulate a tabletop (alongside a conventional video chat tool to let us see and hear
one another).
You can run it on your own computer and let your friends “connect in” to it, so long as you’re able to reconfigure your router a little, but you’ll be limited by the speed of your home
Internet connection and people won’t be able to drop in and e.g. tweak their character sheet except when you’ve specifically got the application running.
A generally better option is to host your Foundry server in the cloud. For most of its history, I’ve run mine on Fox, my NAS, but I’ve recently set one up on a more-conventional cloud virtual machine too. A couple of
friends have asked me about how to set up their own, so here’s a quick guide:
I used Linode to spin up a server because I still had a stack of free credits following a recent
project. The instructions will work on any cloud host where you can spin up a Debian 12 virtual machine, and can be adapted for other distributions of Linux.
You will need…
A Foundry license ($50 USD / £48 GBP, one-off payment1)
A domain name for which you control the DNS records; you’ll need to point a domain, like “danq.me” (or a subdomain of it, e.g.
“vtt.danq.me”), at an IP address you’ll get later by creating an “A” record: your domain name registrar can probably help with this –
I mostly use Gandi and, ignoring my frustration with
recent changes to their email services, I think they’re great
An account with a cloud hosting provider: this example uses Linode but you can adapt for any of them
A basic level of comfort with the command-line
1. Spin up a server
Getting a virtual server is really easy nowadays.
Click, click, click, and you’ve got yourself a server.
You’ll need:
The operating system to be Debian 12 (or else you’ll need to adapt the instructions below)
The location to be somewhere convenient for your players: pick a server location that’s relatively-local to the majority of them to optimise for connection speeds
An absolute minimum of 1GB of storage space, I’d recommend plenty more: The Levellers’ campaign currently uses about 10GB for all of its various maps, art, videos,
and game data, so give yourself some breathing room (space is pretty cheap) – I’ve gone with 80GB for this example, because that’s what comes as standard with the 2
CPU/4GB RAM server that Linode offer
Choose a root password when you set up your server. If you’re a confident SSH user, add your public key so you can log in easily (and then
disable password authentication
entirely!).
For laziness, this guide has you run Foundry as root on your new server. Ensure you understand the implications of this.2
2. Point your (sub)domain at it
DNS propogation can be pretty fast, but… sometimes it isn’t. So get this step underway before you need it.
Your newly-created server will have an IP address, and you’ll be told what it is. Put that IP address into an A-record for your domain.
The interface for adding a new DNS record in Gandi is pretty simple – record type, time to live, name, address – but it’s rarely
more complicated that this with any registrar that provides DNS services.
3. Configure your server
In my examples, my domain name is vtt.danq.me and my server is at 1.2.3.4. Yours will be different!
Connect to your new server using SSH. Your host might even provide a web interface if you don’t have an SSH client installed: e.g. Linode’s “Launch LISH Console” button will do pretty-much exactly that for you. Log in as root using the password you chose
when you set up the server (or your SSH private key, if that’s your preference). Then, run each of the commands below in order (the full script is available as a single file if you
prefer).
3.1. Install prerequisites
You’ll need unzip (to decompress Foundry), nodejs (to run Foundry), ufw (a firewall, to prevent unexpected surprises), nginx (a
webserver, to act as a reverse proxy to Foundry), certbot (to provide a free SSL certificate for Nginx),
nvm (to install pm2) and pm2 (to keep Foundry running in the background). You can install them all like this:
By default, Foundry runs on port 30000. If we don’t configure it carefully, it can be accessed directly, which isn’t what we intend: we want connections to go through the webserver
(over https, with http redirecting to https). So we configure our firewall to allow only these ports to be accessed. You’ll also want ssh enabled so we can remotely connect into the
server, unless you’re exclusively using an emergency console like LISH for this purpose:
Putting the domain name we’re using into a variable for the remainder of the instructions saves us from typing it out again and again. Make sure you type your domain name (that
you pointed to your server in step 2), not mine (vtt.danq.me):
DOMAIN=vtt.danq.me
3.4. Get an SSL certificate with automatic renewal
So long as the DNS change you made has propogated, this should Just Work. If it doesn’t, you might need to wait for a bit then try
again.
3.5. Configure Nginx to act as a reverse proxy for Foundry
You can, of course, manually write the Nginx configuration file: just remove the > /etc/nginx/sites-available/foundry from the end of the printf line to see
the configuration it would write and then use/adapt to your satisfaction.
set +H
printf "server {\n listen 80;\n listen [::]:80;\n server_name $DOMAIN;\n\n # Redirect everything except /.well-known/* (used for ACME) to HTTPS\n root /var/www/html/;\n if (\$request_uri !~ \"^/.well-known/\") {\n return 301 https://\$host\$request_uri;\n }\n}\n\nserver {\n listen 443 ssl http2;\n listen [::]:443 ssl http2;\n server_name $DOMAIN;\n\n ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/$DOMAIN/fullchain.pem;\n ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/$DOMAIN/privkey.pem;\n\n client_max_body_size 300M;\n\n location / {\n # Set proxy headers\n proxy_set_header Host \$host;\n proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For \$proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;\n proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto \$scheme;\n\n # These are important to support WebSockets\n proxy_set_header Upgrade \$http_upgrade;\n proxy_set_header Connection \"Upgrade\";\n\n proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:30000/;\n }\n}\n" > /etc/nginx/sites-available/foundry
ln -sf /etc/nginx/sites-available/foundry /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/foundry
service nginx restart
3.6. Install Foundry
3.6.1. Create a place for Foundry to live
mkdir {vtt,data}
cd vtt
3.6.2. Download and decompress it
For this step, you’ll need to get a Timed URL from the Purchased Licenses page on your FoundryVTT account.
Substitute in your Timed URL in place of <url from website> (keep the quotation marks – " –
though!):
wget -O foundryvtt.zip "<url from website>"
unzip foundryvtt.zip
rm foundryvtt.zip
3.6.3. Configure PM2 to run Foundry and keep it running
Now you’re finally ready to launch Foundry! We’ll use PM2 to get it to run automatically in the background and keep running:
You can watch the logs for Foundry with PM2, too. It’s a good idea to take a quick peep at them to check it launched okay (press CTRL-C to exit):
pm2 logs 0
4. Start adventuring!
Point your web browser at your domain name (e.g. I might go to https://vtt.danq.me) and you should see Foundry’s first-load page, asking for your license key.
Provide your license key to get started, and then immediately change the default password: a new instance of Foundry has a blank default password, which means that
anybody on Earth can administer your server: get that changed to something secure!
Now you’re running on Foundry!
Footnotes
1Which currency you pay in, and therefore how much you pay, for a Foundry license depends on where in the world you are
where your VPN endpoint says you are. You might like to plan accordingly.
2 Running Foundry as root is dangerous, and you should consider the risks for yourself.
Adding a new user is relatively simple, but for a throwaway server used for a single game session and then destroyed, I wouldn’t bother. Specifically, the risk is that a vulnerability
in Foundry, if exploited, could allow an attacker to reconfigure any part of your new server, e.g. to host content of their choice or to relay spam emails. Running as a non-root user
means that an attacker who finds such a vulnerability can only trash your Foundry instance.
I just spent a lightweight week in Rome with fellow members of Automattic‘s Team Fire.
Among our goals for the week was an attempt to strengthen the definition of who are team are, what we work on, and how and why we do so. That’s
basically a team-level identity, mission, vision, and values, right?
We were missing two members of our team, but one was able to remote-in (the other’s on parental leave!).
The cards sat on my ‘plane tickets for a fortnight because it was just about the only way I’d remember to pack them.
Normally when you play Dixit, you select a card from your hand – each shows a unique piece of artwork – and try to describe it in a way that’s precise enough that some
of the other players will later be able to pick it out of a line-up, but ambiguous enough that not all the other players will. It’s a delicate balancing act. Even when our old
Geek Night was in full swing we didn’t used to play it often because our well-established group’s cornucopia of in-jokes and references made it trivially easy to “target”
your descriptions at specific players1, but it’s still a solid icebreaker activity.
Can you see your team’s values symbolised in any Dixit cards?
Perhaps it was the fantasy artwork that inspired us or maybe it just says something about how my team sees themselves, but what we came up with had a certain… swords-and-sorcery… even
Dungeons & Dragons… feel to it.
The projects my team are responsible for aren’t actually monsters, but they can be complex, multifaceted, and unintuitive. And have a high AC.
Ou team’s new identity isn’t finalised, but I love the fact that we’ve been able to inject a bit of fun and whimsy into it. At our last draft, my team looks to be defined as comprising:
Gareth, level 62 Pathfinder, leading the way through the wilds
Bero, Level 5 Battlesmith, currently lost in the void
Dan (me!), Level 5 Arcane Trickster, breaking locks and stealing treasure
Cem, Level 4 Dragonslayer, smashing doors and bugs alike
Lae, Level 7 Pirate, seabound rogue with eyes on the horizon
Kyle, Level 5 Apprentice Bard, master of words and magic
Simran, Level 6 Apprentice Code Witch, weaving spells from nature
I think that’s pretty awesome.
Footnotes
1 Also: I don’t own any of the expansion packs and playing with the same cards over and
over again gets a bit samey.
2 The “levels” are simply the number of years each teammate has been an Automattician,
plus one.
Last night I had a nightmare about Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, about the group I DM for on alternate Fridays.
In their last session the
party – somewhat uncharacteristically – latched onto a new primary plot hook rightaway. Instead of rushing off onto some random side quest threw themselves directly into this new
mission.
They flung themselves not only figuratively but also literally into their new quest, leaping from the side of a floating city.
This effectively kicked off a new chapter of their story, so I’ve been doing some prep-work this last week or so. Y’know: making battlemaps, stocking treasure chests with mysterious and
powerful magical artefacts, and inventing a plethora of characters for the party to either befriend or kill (or, knowing this party: both).
I also put together a “cut scene”
video welcoming the party into this new chapter of their adventure.
Anyway: in the dream, I sat down to complete the prep-work I want to get done before this week’s play session. I re-checked my notes about what the adventurers had gotten up to
last time around, and… panicked! I was wrong, they hadn’t thrown themselves off the side of a city floating above the first layer of Hell at all! I’d mis-remembered completely
and they’d actually just ventured into a haunted dungeon. I’d been preparing all the wrong things and now there wasn’t time to correct my mistakes!
Also in my dream – conveniently for my new “haunted dungeon” environment – my favourite encounter size calculator included a tool to compensate for a player character who can cast Turn Undead, when making an
undead encounter.
This is, of course, an example of the “didn’t prepare for the test” trope of dreams. Clearly I’m still feeling underprepared for this week’s game! But probably a bigger reason for the
dream, and remembering it, was that I’ve had a cold and kept waking up to cough.
