Mathematically I have to start rolling enough to hit before the end of the night….

Have you ever had a night when you just could not roll double digits on your d20?  Ever have that night when 4/5’s of your party is having the same problem?  Welcome to our D&D game last night.  We continued our adventure in the Keep on the Shadowfell, now at 2nd level.  The night was full of some of the worst dice rolling any of us had ever seen.  The only exception, and the reason we finished any room, was our trusty Elf Ranger, who was on fire.  For every 3 I rolled ( and I rolled 7 of them during the night) he was rolling 20’s.  It was a pretty disheartening night.  The adventure itself, and Spenser’s running of it, was quite good, but after rolling your 5th 3 to hit, you lose a little steam.

We did manage to get pretty far into the adventure, and somehow without getting any of us killed.  By the end of the night, my dice rolls were coming up, but not by much.  I recorded all my dice rolls for the night, and the stats for them looked something like this:  Average: 8,  Standard Deviation: 5,  Min: 1, Max 19, Mode 3.  So if my college Stats class holds up, 66% of my rolls for the night ranged from 3-13.  I rolled more 3’s than any other number (though 1,2,and 4 were just behind 3).   It was a terrible dice rolling night.  The only upswing was that in the last encounter we found some magical Scale Mail, and being the only guy in the party wearing Scale..cha ching.

I also spent part of the weekend working on my Iron Heroes adventure for Tuesday.  It was hard to get back into writing for IH, after nearly 3 months off from the game.  But after the first scene, it all started coming back to me.  This is the 3rd to last session of the campaign.  The campaign had a major setback, in the way of players (I will keep the details private) but there are some concerns on how the group of players will do when they return to the table on Tuesday.  At this point, after 3 years of running this campaign, I want to deliver 3 solid final sessions and close out the campaign in a manner befitting the way the campaign was run.  I am not sure if that will happen or not, but I am going to try as hard as I can to limp this campaign to its finale.

I also finished off the Dramatic Conflict chapter of Spycraft.  I love this mechanic.  It reminds me of the Duel of Wits rules for Burning Wheel/Empire. I cannot wait to use these for some car chases, hacking, etc.  This system makes what is typically some either complicated concepts, or at times some boring skill checks, and injects some excitement into them.  I wish I had these rules about 5 years ago, when i was running my Heist campaign.  I would have used Spycraft 2.0 over d20 Modern in a heartbeat.

As for writing this week…it would be nice if I got some done.  I am putting up an article on Gnome Stew this week, as a continuation of my Lessons from the Long Campaign series.  I will try to get one more article up this week here, on my D&D action sheet.

Thats all for now…good GMing to you.

Wow.  Sorry for dropping off the ‘Net like that.  I was called away last week due to the passing of my Grandfather.  I was in Florida all weekend, and playing catch up at work all this week.  Because of this, I have not gotten any posts out this week.  Sorry about that.

I am going to cut my losses with this week, and not make any promises to post.  I will come at this new, next week, and get a few ideas out that I have been talking about on the site for the last two weeks.

So, in the meantime, enjoy some other posts from the RPG Bloggers network or Gnome Stew , and I will see you next week.

–DNAphil

It’s not Monday…but its better than nothing…

Hello all.  Sorry for not writing sooner.  I was on a road trip this past weekend, visiting my parents in Connecticut.  The trip was great, and I had a chance to have lunch with one of my closest friends, and fellow gamer.  We spent more than half of the lunch talking of gaming, while our wives, on the other side of the table, talked of Crafts.

Because I was on the road over the weekend, we did not game on Sunday.  I did, last night, get a chance to meet with my players for my upcoming Spycraft game, and get through most of the character generation.  It was a light session, with a lot of chatting and joking, but in the end, I think we have the stats done on the characters.  By way of testing the system, next week, I will run a few mock combats for the team, so that we can try out the Spycraft combat system and the players can get a feel for their characters.

While my Spycraft game is not starting until January, we will be casually playtesting the game.  We did something like this for D&D 4e, earlier this year, and it worked out great.  The casual test sessions, gave everyone a chance to try out different character builds, and time to work though the rules.  It allowed the DM to get comfortable running game, without his campaign being on the line.  I think this is a great way to bring a new game online, when you have the time.  I have nicknamed this process Beta Playing, and I will likely write a more about it…someday.

As for content this week, I am not making any wild promises.  I have a post I want to do about my GM Mission Statement.  If the next few days work out,  then you should see it on the site.  But I do have another trip this coming weekend, and if prep for that gets to be too much, then I likely will not be posting until next week.

I will not be doing any gaming this weekend, but will be back in the swing of things on the 26th.  As for the rest of you…Good GMing to you.

Logical Volume Failed….@$#%$^&!!!!!!!!!!!

This weekend was crazy.  It started with my home backup server crashing.  Its not that surprising, it was a 4yr old linux box, running Fedora Core 3, with some old hardware.  With its crash, I was forced to use my ritual: Reincarnate Server.   I tried to use Ubuntu Server, but after some frustrating failures configuring the Logical Volume Manager, I abandoned Ubuntu and instead turned the box into a NAS with freeNAS.   That turned out to be a much better solution, and I now have a backup server that is backing up my main PC, where all my RPG files reside.  All that is left is to backup my in-house web server, that contains my wiki and a few other goodies, including my PDF archives.

Last week I finished my first GMing Consulting job.  It was for my good friend Philippe, aka The Chatty DM.  I won’t go into the details here, but rather save if for a post.  it was a fun job, and great to work with Philippe.

We were scheduled to play Sargon’s Star War’s game on Sunday, but that fell through when Sargon developed some kind of GI virus on Saturday and into Sunday.  Instead, I spent the evening with Mrs. DNAphil on the couch, while my backups ran, and watched Iron Man.  Great movie.   My Star Wars game was moved out to Wednesday night, so we will not be skipping a session.

On the Spycraft front, I finished my reading of the skills chapter.  Let me say that this is the largest skills chapter in any d20 book.  It’s not that there are any more skills in Spycraft than another d20 game, but there are very specific rules for ways that the skills are used.  These specific rules come in the form of their own stat-block like format.  It is nice in that it gives you a lot of concrete ways that the rules can be used, but it is a bit daunting and at time times dry to read.  After finishing that chapter, I did not have the heart to read the vast Feats chapter, and instead skipped ahead to the Gear chapter.  I will continue to chug through that.

I also started getting my Iron Heroes group organized again.  We have not played since GenCon, due to some issues with some of the players (maintaining some privacy, sorry for being evasive). The campaign is down to its last 3 sessions.  I started brainstorming the next session, which will be run at the end of the month.  I am looking forward to getting back to the table to put the finale on this game, and at the same time, anxious to end the campaign and start work on some new games.

This week, I am going to be talking about my own definition of what it means to be a GM.  This idea was inspired by an article that was on Treasure Tables, and a post I made on the old Treasure Table forums.  I will also be putting together an article for Gnome Stew, my third from the Lessons from the Long Campaign series.  This time its about listening to you players…

That’s all for this week, and good GMing to you.

This post was originally published a year ago, but at the behest of some of my fellow bloggers, This is the last in a series of three articles, that will run this week.  Enjoy.

Over the past two weeks, I have written about how I assemble my session notes. In the first segment, I talked about my writing cycle, where I mix imagination and productivity in order to produce my notes. Last week, I talked about the tools that I use in order to create my notes. This week, I want to discuss what goes into my session notes. Where the other two segments really focused on the productivity aspect of creating my notes, this segment is really about how my session notes help me to overcome my own shortcomings as a GM and to support my personal philosophy as a GM.

In the past I spent a lot of time tinkering with how I write my session notes. There are not a lot of articles about that subject. Most GMs whom I know, have evolved their own systems based on reading published modules and then applying parts of those structures to their own writing. I started by copying the structure of AD&D modules (for those of you younglings, that is D&D 1.0). Over time I experimented with different writing styles, templates, and formats, but never quite found what I was looking for. Along the way I learned some very important lessons at work in writing Business Requirements for software programs. So, I decided to put what I knew about business requirements to work for my gaming, specifically my session notes. I started to define what my real needs were from my session notes.

After some thought I came up with a short list of things that were true needs… things that I had to have in my notes to run my game effectively. That list of needs as well as how I addressed them is listed below…

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This post was originally published a year ago, but at the behest of some of my fellow bloggers, This is the second in a series of three articles, that will run this week.  Enjoy.

Last week I discussed my writing cycle, detailing how I organize my time and imagination to produce my session notes for an upcoming game. The cycle is an important aspect of how implementing the ideas of productivity can be used to create session notes. This week I wanted to discuss another area of productivity: the tools used to create the session notes. In this article I am going to outline the tools that I use when I am working on my session notes. Each tool has a specific use and an optimal way to be used. Through trial and error I have refined my list of tools down to this set. I find they are, for me, the most efficient tools to get the job done, and they fit seamlessly into my writing cycle.

Here are the tools….

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