"The Right Gaming Group"

io9, just moments ago, published an article on resources you can use to find a gaming group in your area. They point out that finding the right gaming group can be tricky, since there's no one set of criteria everyone shares for "the right group", and your mileage may vary at all times. While this is true, I've certainly noticed a few things over the years that are important, and I thought I might share them with people.

The Big Important Points:

1) It is, fundamentally, a game. The very definition of the word "game" includes the phrase "amusement"; it is intended to be a leisure activity that you enjoy doing. This means that if anyone is taking the game so seriously that they lose sight of that--rules lawyering, losing patience with inexperienced players, being needlessly sadistic as a GM, freaking out over missed sessions, demanding strict adherence to in-character behavior, flipping out when your character dies or anything else not on this list that involves getting upset or angry over what is fundamentally a social activity--they need to relax or else they may not be a good fit for a gaming group.

2) It is a co-operative game. This is an important part of it, because while you should never lose your temper or freak out over someone playing a game badly, the counterpart of that is that you should at least put effort into it. You should try to be there for every session (yes, life happens, we all know it, but if you're missing more than one out of every five or six sessions you should look into why); you should always pay attention to the game--phones put away and TV off is a default minimum, but more generally you should listen to what everyone is saying and try to play along so long as they're suggesting something even reasonably fun; and for Pete's sake it is not a competition. Unless it is a clear, agreed-upon-by-all-parties-especially-the-GM, official and well-understood part of the campaign, you should never ever ever ever ever EVER be screwing around with your fellow party members. Basically, if everyone wants to play 'Paranoia' or something, that's fine, but that one person who always plays a Chaotic Evil character so they can backstab another player and claim "I was just being in character"? Kick 'em to the curb. They're toxic, they will ruin everyone else's fun, and they're unlikely to change.

Oh, and if you're a GM, you should always try to apply the rules in a way that makes the players' experiences fulfilling. This doesn't mean Monty Haul gaming; being challenged is exciting and overcoming a big challenge is thrilling, and that's part of a fulfilling gaming experience. It also isn't exactly the same thing as "applying the rules fairly"; sometimes the rulebook gets in the way of a fun game. (And sometimes your adventure notes get in the way of a fun game. Learning to improvise with what's interesting to your characters is a big part of making a good game.) But you shouldn't favor anyone unduly, you shouldn't disregard the rulebook solely in order to do bad things to players, you should be willing to change your mind when a player points out a legitimate rules mistake instead of getting defensive (sometimes the rules lawyer is right!) and you should always give them a fighting chance. And most importantly, you should communicate with them in a mature fashion in order to avoid misunderstandings.

That's my criteria for what makes a good gaming group. You could probably distill it down further to "Everyone should work hard to try to make everyone else's experiences fun", I suppose, but I wanted to mention specific red flags that come up when that isn't happening. Even the red flag-items, though, aren't automatically bad. As long as everyone is relaxed, participating in a spirit of good-hearted fun, and willing to take the unusual in stride, the occasional intra-party kill or GM fiat isn't going to hurt anything. Just try to remember that the point is to create good memories, and those happen whether or not you "win".

Epic Fantasy Football Needs To Happen

Had this idea for a while now, but I need some help working out the details. The idea is that it's "fantasy football" mixed with fantasy gaming; you select a party of real-life football players, with the positions roughly corresponding to classes. (Wide receivers are rangers, quarterbacks are wizards, defensive players are thieves, running backs are fighters, et cetera.) Each week, you select a monster from a list of monsters ranging from "dire wolves" up through "dragons" to fight; the fantasy league points are translated into damage, and you kill the monster if you do enough damage to exceed its hit points.

Killing monsters gives you experience points, which you can then spend on magical items and class bonuses to modify your party's damage each week. This allows you to take on tougher monsters, which allows you to gain more experience, and so on. At the end of the season, whoever has the most impressive group of monster trophies wins.

I think it could work, but I don't know enough about fantasy football to be able to construct a workable baseline for weekly points scored, and that's needed in order to be able to build workable monsters for the party to kill. Anyone know more about fantasy football and want to help me out on this?

If Cartoon Characters Aged In Real Time...

...Pebbles Flintstone would be almost fifty, now, with two kids (Chip and Roxy) who are almost ready to graduate high school. Fred would presumably be dead, life expectancies not being much in prehistoric times.

...Judy Jetson would be sixty-four (and presumably wondering if her boyfriend will need her, or for that matter even feed her.) This being the future, though, she might retain her youthful looks well into her second century, so that might not be so much of a problem.

...Jonny Quest is a bitter fifty-seven year old, who probably has endless therapy sessions where he talks about his intimacy issues due to his dad's inability to love him. "He thought that just giving me an Indian boy would solve everything. Well, it didn't, Dad!"

...Scooby-Doo is forty-eight (that's 336 in dog years. Actually, I think that's just "dead" in dog years.)

...Hank, the oldest member of the "Dungeons and Dragons" party, would be forty-two and probably well into the Epic Character supplements; while the youngest, Bobby, would be thirty-five and have several NPC henchmen by now.

...the Planeteers are all in their early thirties, and have emigrated to the United States due to political instability in their respective homelands. (Kwame's sick of all the "email spam" jokes. Please stop telling them.) They don't do much forming of Captain Planet these days, but they do make sure to recycle, and Ma-Ti attended a rally at the state capitol a few months ago about "going green".

...and Dexter is now twenty-three. Although he has not yet succeeded in conquering the world, it seems like more than coincidence that he got a job at Google just before they changed their stance on Net Neutrality.

The Evil That Demi-Humans Do

So, yes, I've officially sunk so low that I'm willing to tell my old gaming stories on my blog. Let's consider this a test, to see whether all gaming stories are really just "you kind of had to be there" shaggy dog stories, or just the vast majority of them.

This one isn't actually about me (which is, I think, a +1 on the "general entertainment" scale...any gamer will tell you that the worst nightmare is to be stuck sitting next to someone whose every utterance is about how tough their imaginary self is.) It's about a game I was in, though, where we were helping the rightful Emperor regain his throne from a secret cabal of evil mages who feared the Emperor because he was immune to magic. It was our job to foil these evil schemers and restore the Emperor to power!

Until we, um, killed him.

See, we'd found a few magical items on our travels (like you do), and one of them was a "castle in a bottle"--it was a bottle, about the size of a backpack, with a castle inside it. You put on a ring, you got teleported inside the castle in the bottle, and you shrank so that the castle was full-scale to you. Fairly straightforward magical item.

Well, one of the players, Amanda, was getting on everyone's nerves (in a good way--she was a fun person playing an obnoxious character, not an obnoxious person driving the rest of the group up the wall), and someone got the bright idea of sticking her in the bottle. So they grabbed her, put on the ring, let her go, and took off the ring. Bingo, she's in the castle and can't get out until we let her out.

But she's a mage in her own right (not an evil cabal mage, just a mage.) She decides she's not putting up with that, and casts "dispel magic" on the bottle. She actually succeeds, temporarily dispelling the magic that makes the castle small. Suddenly, the entire party is hit with what the GM charmingly describes as a "+1/+1 castle."

Most of us survive. (I was reduced to single-digit hit points, but I survived.) The Emperor? Turns out immunity to magic is great, but immunity to rapidly-approaching stone walls would be handier.

So now our quest is to destroy the cabal of mages and find a new Emperor. Amanda's character is still around, mainly because the gods themselves appeared to us and told us that she has to take part in the divine task of finding the godly-anointed Emperor, and killing her would be met with a little high-quality smiting. Which, fair enough, most of the people who died were NPCs, and the motto of our gaming group was always "NPCs are like tropical fish. They're pretty to look at, but don't get too attached to them." (I should put that on a T-shirt.)

But another member of our group, Joe, was not the "forgive and forget" type. He decided to find a way to bump off Amanda that would be non-smite-inducing. He decided to do a little research on the castle while everyone else was asleep, putting on the ring and taking it off over and over again while walking away from the castle (which had returned to the bottle once the effects of the "dispel magic" spell wore off--it's a powerful magical item, you don't just dispel them with a wave of your hand), and he figured out the exact range of the teleportation spell.

How is this fatal? Well, for the final battle against the cabal, we'd obtained a powerful, destructive magical item...sort of like a nuke, except that it turned stuff to stone instead of just blowing it up. The problem was, it was activated by holding it and speaking a command word. So the user had a tendency to get turned to stone, as well. But good old helpful Joe came up with a plan. "Amanda, we'll fly far overhead with the castle. You take the item, and we'll drop you. Then, you speak the command word, let go of the item and put on the ring, and zap! You'll be teleported back to the castle and perfect safety."

And so Amanda dropped out of the sky towards dozens of evil mages, spoke the command word, put on the ring...and nothing happened. Until, that is, she was turned to stone, hit with just about every destructive spell in the Player's Handbook, and then fell onto the ground and shattered into a million pieces.

Because you really, really didn't want to mess with Joe.

Support Staff of the Magi

A treat for D&D fans, today: I worked this up as part of a book I did for a game company, but the line it was written for crashed and burned, so I've got two sourcebooks on my hard drive. (If anyone wants to publish them, I do own the rights free and clear, and the books are designed to be stand-alone. And they're, y'know, already done.) In any event, this was one of the magical items in the book, designed to be an artifact for a slightly tongue-in-cheek game...

Support Staff of the Magi: One of the strangest, yet most sought-after items in the Gardener, the support staff of the magi resembles its near-namesake physically. However, in terms of its power, it is very different. Once a character capable of using magic items grasps an inert support staff of the magi (“inert” meaning one whose wielder is dead), the five people with spellcasting abilities nearest to him must immediately make a Willpower saving throw with a DC of 20 or be placed under the thrall of the holder of the staff. If any of these five people succeed at their saving throw, the effect continues to radiate outward until it has ensnared five magic-users.

Once the staff has been activated, the holder can command the mages to cast any spell they are capable of casting. Each spell uses up a number of charges in the staff equal to the level of the spell cast. (Hence, a ninth-level spell uses up nine charges.) The holder commands the mage mentally, meaning that they can use the staff even if they cannot speak. They must maintain a hold on the staff, however, in order to cast spells. (If the wielder lets go of the staff, the mages are not freed—they instead enter a default state, remaining motionless until the staff’s wielder picks it back up.) The staff’s wielder cannot command the mages to do anything other than cast spells; however, they will perform any tasks they are capable of that can help the wielder of the staff, so long as it does not endanger them. This function does not use any charges on the staff.

Wielding the support staff of the magi gives characters a spell resistance of 20; they can, however, voluntarily lower the spell resistance of the staff in order to have it absorb spell levels as per a rod of absorption. This is the only way to recharge the staff. If, however, the number of charges exceeds the maximum the staff can hold (50), the enslaved mages go on a retributive strike, awakening from their trance with a compulsion to kill the person who has held them in thrall. Recharging the staff can be risky, since there’s no way of knowing how many charges it already has or how many levels a spell being cast at the holder will be, but since it is the only way to build charges in the staff, it can sometimes be necessary.

If the staff ever runs out of charges, it loses all its abilities save the ability to absorb spell levels. Any mages held under its thrall return to normal, without any memory of their entrancement or any sort of enmity against the wielder of the staff. As soon as the staff absorbs any spell levels, it will enslave new mages as though it had just been grasped.

If someone tries to take a support staff of the magi away from its holder, they must make a Willpower check with a DC of 25 in addition to their Strength check. Success means that they are now considered to be the wielder of the staff, and the original wielder joins the enslaved mages. Failure means that the would-be thief falls under the spell of the staff, and is subject to its effects. (This is the only way that a holder of a support staff of the magi can increase their following—by hostile takeover.)

Nobody knows who created the few support staffs of the magi in existence, but it’s suspected that a wizard with a fondness for very bad puns is responsible.

Caster Level: 20th; Prerequisites: minor artifact, cannot be duplicated; Weight: 5 lbs.