Project Work by Shane P.

I quite like writing in Word. It feels fully featured and does everything I need it to. Mike Mearls in his Happy Fun Hour writes in Word, and if it’s good enough for him it should be for all of us. However, it’s quite wonderful having your content look like a Player’s Handbook cutout.

There’s a website called the Homebrewery which lets you do that really well.

However, there’s an even nerdier way of doing it.

Today I updated my Merchants supplement to be written with LaTeX using a template from Evan Bergeron (and the other contributors) on GitHub. On a slightly less nerdy point, I’ve no idea how to write LaTeX. So, I had to turn to Overleaf which provides a simple UI for it.

It’s a good place to properly store your progress (with a perfect revision history), keep all your images and other files together, and collaborate on the files Google Drive style with other people. Nothing is locked in either – I push all my projects to GitHub just via the UI.

It takes a while to end up in a good TRPG group. If you’re lucky you have a group of friends and can persuade them to run a game with you. Often though, your friends just aren’t that into it, or aren’t into it enough to satiate your appetite. That’s when people end up at their local Meetup.com group. From this point the ‘quality’ of gamer is a mixed bag ranging from ultra-conservative rules lawyers to hyperactive murder hobos and tyrannical DMs.

Eventually though, and I hope this happens before you burn out, all these people – like you, the sane ones – will come together (fleeing their past groups) and make a very sensible game. Good players, smart characters, all of you involved in the world your DM is unravelling.

So, there you are, enjoying Faerun or Tal’Dorei when you come across a minion of the Big Bad. Finally! A lead! You grasp at the chance to gain a little more information about your villain. Your first couples of rolls are a bit so-so though, and not much information is gained. For all your yelling at him, he’s staying tight lipped. This is the situation my group found itself in recently.

I’d decided we had gotten all we could from this guy. He was at our mercy, we’d scared him enough. Our rogue felt differently. He first asked, “is there a bucket of water around?” It was an odd question that the DM narrowed his eyes at and said there was. The rogue then described holding his blade in one hand and the ganger’s ear in the other…

I’m unsure how everyone else around the table was feeling but personally I was wondering if we wanted to turn into a group that role plays this sort of thing. Totally ignoring the considerations of in-character morality, do I want to sit at a table with a bunch of guys ogling over a torture scene?

No, of course not. I’ve been with this group for well over a year now, playing weekly. Our humour has never centred around that type of gameplay. So, I felt safe saying, “how about we skip this scene and just say we roughed him up a little more?” (We still got a fairly detailed map out of the whole thing.)

I don’t blame the guy for trying this out. If it were a different game – a darker game like Shadow of the Demon Lord – maybe I’d feel different. Pushing these social boundaries is the only way to find out where they are. As one of the good, receptive players, our rogue picked up on the hint and dialled it back. He’d discovered our boundary. Paying attention to the table, and not just the DM, is vital to see everyone’s comfort levels.

Maybe there’s an official Code of Conduct for the Meetup group, but I have not read it, and don’t care for it beyond the obvious “don’t be a jerk”. A written code might come from an innocent place but may well be restrictive to the ambiance of certain stories.

I play on-and-off with three different groups and the boundaries in each are very different. A curse word in one group might drop like a deadweight, but the same word in another goes unashamed and even adding enough emphasis to add advantage to an Intimidation check. Generic codes of conducts don’t work from table to table. They should be prodded into shape by the people around them, changing and evolving with the group.

A natural, and concerning, conclusion to this method of self-regulation between tables is groups full of no-holds barred depravity. The good news is this isn’t something I’ve ever witnessed. There’s a certain cringe-worthiness that comes with those scenes which prevents most socially-minded creatures from roleplaying, especially whilst staring into the eyes of their friends.

If you do find yourself in such a group, you’re within your rights to ask them to tone it down – if someone is getting carried with an amorous NPC try interjecting with “and then we fade to black!”. I’ve seen this work at least twice. It diffuses the tension with a laugh and is a subtle nod to your boundaries.

The conventional wisdom here is to talk to the player after the game. I don’t know about you, but I’d find that far to awkward. Nip it in the bud as soon as it happens. With humour and grace, if possible.

If they still don’t get the message, and don’t adjust their boundaries, you may have to stand up and find another table. This sucks but you may have found yourself where your boundaries don’t align with the rest of the group. This isn’t a failing on your part – you’re probably a fine player. It was a failure of the group; either they should listen to your (even subtle) signs of discomfort or they mis-advertised their group to you before the start of the game. Of course, there’s a place for groups who want to be a little more edgy, but the onus is on them to let new players know before-hand.

Everyone has a right to feel comfortable at a gaming table. It’s all of our jobs to make sure that happens.

I’m going to share with you something which might shake you to your very core: when playing Dungeons and Dragons, you can steal from whatever books you like. Think further than Tolkien, and much further than the core rulebooks. Unless intellectual property lawyers have infiltrated your party, you have free reign over all books, comics, and music ever written. (On the off chance that Tom, who sometimes wears a tie to games, is an undercover operative from the Random House legal team, I think you may well get off lightly.)

Published adventures especially need some variation from what’s in the book, to stop them being single-serving stories. There’s no reason why you can’t play Lost Mines once a year, so long as you have added something interesting.

When people like Matt Colville say to just read the first and last chapters of a published adventure and then do what you like with the middle, or Chris Perkins tells you to make the adventure your own, they’re not suggesting you do that within the rigid confines of Forgotten Realms. They mean go and liberally steal, add a saucy twist, and run with it. There’s no need for your sauce to be homemade either.

I just finished reading Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic and have come away with too many ideas to fit into a once-a-week D&D game. Every wizard and his familiar has a bag of holding in Forgotten Realms. Your players are heroes they deserve a sapient pearwood trunk, which they found trapped at the bottom of a cave system, sitting loyally by its late owner. Once they’ve found out how to befriend it, think of the fun they’ll have watching scoundrels lose their fingers. Think of the jealous wizards who recognise the distinctive dark rings.

Spice up your death saving throws by having Death sitting next to the adventurer once they become unconscious, patiently waiting (or not so patiently) for that critical failure. Whilst He’s there your warlock with truesight spots him and has a bit of a chat, revealing a clue that might set up the rest of the campaign. What if this was the only state which you could communicate with Death in, and your players start an odd death cult just for these nice get-togethers.

Don’t let cats be boring cats when you can steal straight from JK Rowling and make them Kneazles. No good detective should be without one, considering their ability to detect truths and lies. Instead of lockpicks, give your forest gnome rogue a Bowtruckle, the adorable and sensitive stick insect-like creature from Fantastic Beasts. There’s no need to change any game mechanic when doing this – maybe instead of proficiency with the lock picking tool, the player can use their animal handling.

Reskin Find Familiar as Find Dæmon for a select few people who live in a recently discovered distant land. Oh, and how interesting, the special connection between the person and the dæmon can be harvested somehow. Just plain rip off Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights and make it into a campaign. Your players will be both excited to play in a world they know, and curious to see which bits you’ve changed.

Swap out your big bad cultist or power crazed wizard for a young girl who’s just discovered her mighty telekinetic powers who’s causing a rather significant amount of bother. Set in the middle of the events of Carrie (Stephen King), how will your murder hobos handle subduing a budding woman when they understand her complex motivations. Surely they’ll have more of a dilemma than merely fighting Krad the Cruel, the latest monster of the week.

Run with a simple idea like the recent discovery of magic which allows you to carve a beautiful marble dragon, slowly leaking your soul into it, bringing it to life fantastically and powerfully. Check out the Assassin’s series by Robin Hobb to find out how that works out.

The lesson you should take away today is that anything is up for grabs. Don’t stick with fantasy. It’s possible your players will cotton on to what you’re doing very quickly, but in my experience, that’s never diminished the game. Being in an already fleshed out world only makes the whole scenario more real. The ideas are already out there; all you need to do is remix them a little.

There’s no stat block for merchants in any of the D&D books I have, so I was forced to write my own.

The special aspect about a merchant is their job; they’re good at buying and selling common and exotic items. A good merchant sets their prices smart enough to make a good profit and still attract those looking for a bargain. That requires a keen eye for pricing an item. So, I made up the Appraisal mechanic, which simply outlines what type of check should be made to work out the value of an item.

Charisma is used when the price is found from socialising with other merchants or even trying to figure out how much a customer would be willing to spend by feeling the general atmosphere around the market. On the other hand Intelligence might be used based on knowledge of the markets far and near – the economy. Charisma is the people-based knowledge gathering, and Intelligence lends itself more to understand the cause and effect of various outside forces.