Publishing episode 36 reminds me of the Closed Door Problem in RPGs. “All Souls Night” is a bit of a mystery adventure, which was heightened the moment Harold created the characters for the adventure and decided to include The Greenwold’s Greatest Detective (of course I mean Sid Onoso, not that hack Apollo Porous). Mysteries can be tough to run, in much the same way that puzzles are tough. You want to present something that is challenging to the PLAYERS who are playing the game, as they get much more satisfaction from overcoming puzzles and figuring out mysteries than just rolling to see if “their PC figures it out.” But there are two issues with this:
1) who the PCs are – what skills they have, what their background expertise is – SHOULD affect how well they do when the game world presents them with problems to solve, and
2) You can easily stump a player with something that seems obvious, but turns out to be incredibly obtuse or obscure when it comes up in the game. Famously, a Closed Door in D&D can cause serious problems for an adventuring party: the mechanics of every edition of the game are pretty explicit on how PCs go about opening doors, but they always leave a chance for a door that the party fails to pick, fails to force, and/or fails to detect. Absent another option for circumventing the obstacle, the party can be prevented from continuing (this is why the Knock spell was invented, by the way: to ensure that No Door Will Ever Stop Us Dead in our Tracks Again!).
But that’s bad, isn’t it? It certainly doesn’t feel good to have competent, danger-worthy heroes, who can’t proceed with the adventure because they happened to have bad rolls and/or they missed looking under the doormat for the key (as a common example of finding stuff in a mystery game).
So how do you run a mystery game in such a way that it both allows players to figure stuff out AND doesn’t force them to have/understand certain clues in order to proceed? It’s a tough challenge. Let us know how you feel we did with this in “All Souls Night.”
Lucia’s whirlwind editing continues with the next episode of our Hallowe’en 2019 “one-shot,” All Souls Night from Dungeon in a Box. When we last left our heroes, the Greenwold’s Greatest Detective, Sid Onoso, and her friends were confronting a case of mistaken identity when a band of pugnacious goblinoids accosted them, believing the party to be members of the infamous Black Ram Gang.
Listening to episodes of this adventure really emphasized something for Harold: he’s not as comfortable running other people’s material as he is running his own. During editing, we were often laughing at his uncharacteristically-awkward descriptions (as in last episode’s “the gourds and sticks clattering together make a sound of clattering”). It could be that he was just having an off day, or it could be (as he attests) that there is an extra awkwardness introduced when trying to adapt someone else’s language for your own. Harold has a weird aversion to reading any text boxes verbatim, and so we end up with this sort of awkwardness from him when he tries to paraphrase blocks of descriptive text. Weird.
There’s something to learn in every episode, of course. In this episode, Dyrah critically succeeds at an attempt to convince their antagonists that the party is something it’s not. Here’s a question for DMs: how do you feel about how that played out in the game? Do you think that the effect of that persuasion was appropriate, or was it too much or too little? How would you as a player have wanted that critical success to affect the events and story? Thinking about how you would handle such calls in advance of your own games is how we become more successful in shaping our experiences to go in the direction we and our players agree that we’d like to go.
Let us know in the comments how you’d play it out if it was your game. And, as always, let us know how you feel about ours.
After a LONG hiatus which included several recorded game sessions (to add to our already large backlog), the holidays, and the 44th DunDraCon gaming convention, Lucia got impatient enough that she edited this episode herself, choosing a more recent recording for something smaller that, as a one-shot, would encompass only a few episodes. So we bring you a more recent “Dungeon in a Box” entry with episode 1 of “All Souls Night.”
Dungeon in a Box is a D&D adventure subscription service, the brainchild of America’s DM, David Crennen, along with a crew of talented collaborators. We’ve been subscribers since the beginning – Harold’s a sucker for anything by America’s DM – and have actually recorded many sessions of the main Dungeon in a Box campaign for the podcast…we just haven’t gotten to the point of editing them yet! With the exception of some special holiday or crossover adventures – like this one – we’ve tried to present our games in the order that they were played…which is another reason why all you’ve heard on our podcast so far is Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition. As of this writing, we’ve played and recorded over a dozen different games (some one-shots, some ongoing campaigns) in at least six different RPGs, but we’ve only got through the first nine months of our recording history so far…from November 2017 through May 2018. That means that we’re almost two years behind what we’ve recorded!!
We have a bit of a quandary at this point, though: the first non-D&D game we played was a game of The Taint RPG set in a deep sea construction site, with all the PCs as cyborgs designed and enhanced to work efficiently in the dark and pressure of the midnight zone (we made it up on the spot). That’s well and good, and we’d love to share it with you…except it’s incomplete. We ran out of time in our session to complete any sort of satisfactory story arc (or even really to showcase the primary “blossoming” mechanic of the Taint), and we’ve never managed again to assemble all that game’s players in one room again. So our tough decision is between two options: do we post an incomplete story, or do we try to reconvene the group and continue the game before we cut any episodes?
Let us know what you think, and whether you’d rather we hold off on posting our The Taint RPG episodes until we have a complete story (which could be never), or if you’d rather we post what we have in the spirit of “As long as the role-playing is good, it’s fine.”
In the meantime, enjoy this first episode of the All Souls Night one-shot. Dungeon in a Box is set in and around The Greenwold, a large subcontinent populated by sentients of all species, dragons, and the occasional brilliant detective. All Souls Night was a digital exclusive for the Dungeon in a Box service: a Hallowe’en one-shot that is not part of the main campaign, but which adds flavor to the game world. This game is set in the Muttonwood, a sparsely populated forest highland of mountains and crags. In order to get into play faster, Harold set this up like a convention game: he created six PCs with interlocking backgrounds, flaws, and ideals, and let the players choose which they wanted to play. We’ll post the character sheets with the next episode’s blog post.
Episode 33 of the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign.
Harold here. So I was posting episodes more often – trying to make some progress and “catch up” to where I think we should be in the podcast (at this point, we should be well past episode 52), but then there was this huge work conference that took up two weeks of my time. So, now that that’s over, here’s the next episode.
This episode contains the last part of our eighth recording session, which was recorded over a year ago, in May 2018. In it, the players continue to create details, riffing off of each other, as they finish training their characters to level 3. This is the first session that we recorded AFTER I had been edited and started releasing episodes of the podcast – we had a full six months’ of game sessions before we released our first episode – but at this point I’m still learning how bad the sound is of all the nervous habits that the players have. It’s all normal stuff that players – and just people in general – normally do in a conversation at a table, but at this point it is finally starting to get curtailed in our podcast. I am painfully aware of the noise of people playing with handfuls of dice (jiggling and rolling them) and players talking over each other which have been up to this point pretty omnipresent in our podcast. To some extent, this is OK, as it accurately presents how people playing a real game sound. But at the same time I realize it is pretty distracting. I do get better at reducing these behaviors: hopefully you’ll hear the change in the next few episodes.
Another note: a few sessions earlier, Blake had started referring to his PC as “Squeaks” instead of its real name, Squeak. Over the course of a few months, we all joined in, and it became painful to edit and listen to in the future (this past year of posting episodes) as we got the character name wrong AGAIN and AGAIN. As I said earlier, this session (number 8) was our first session post-releasing podcast episodes. So at the beginning of the session (Episode 31), I apologized for getting Squeak’s name wrong. During that session, the players all talked about paying a nickel every time anybody said the name wrong again. You’ll hear references to that several times in this episode.
Overall, I’m delighted with this episode and our eighth session in general, because it marks a departure from our “normal” mode of dangerous adventuring, and returns to what we were doing at the beginning of the game (and podcast): world-building and role-playing. The players throw themselves into that creativity and I couldn’t be more pleased. Decades ago, I played in a long-running “Skyrealms of Jorune” campaign run by Joe Adams (nee Coleman), and I was fascinated by how he constructed each session. From his example, I extrapolated a lot of my philosophy of how to run a game. Combat was not the core of the game, even though in SoJ as in Dungeons & Dragons it is the most extensive and largest part of the rules. Combat is an element of the drama that you are telling together. But the character interplay, world-creation, and exploration creates the context that makes the combat interesting, and often necessary. I may have mentioned “Joe’s Golden Ratio” before: it’s what I call the idea that each session of an RPG should consist of only one combat encounter bracketed by investigation, exploration, and interaction…anything and everything that’s in the game that isn’t fighting. Maybe shopping and eating, for example.
In this episode we continue our account of the several days in Indir following the party’s return from the dungeon-turned-tower, with Vhisuna and Kantu describing their training. In addition, the party gets up to some extra activities, making the most of the relative calm as war looms in Daboboah’s near future. Khyren, a local priest, has decided to hold the annual cosmopolitan street festival for the neighborhood despite the imminent threat of invasion by mammalian forces.
At the end of the episode, Harold mentions that we have started a wiki, to help us and our listeners keep track of all the stuff that we’re inventing as we play. We’re working to continually update this. The wiki is here on our site: http://allagesrpg.com/wiki/guardians-of-indir/ If you have any suggestions or recommendations for our podcast or our wiki, please let us know. We’re also considering providing transcripts of our episodes.
Episode 31 of All Ages RPG: Balasar and Klyde train to level 3
Here’s another episode of our Guardians of Indir Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign. In this one, we get a lot of silliness, but also a lot more detail about Balasar’s trainer, Maval Bersk. I really enjoy this process of discovery, as we each introduce details into the campaign world like these characters, and then the group collectively adds details to the character. This makes a more complicated, nuanced character than one person tends to be able to do on their own, or at least not as quickly. Maval’s backstory is interesting in that it begs a whole bunch of additional world-building questions: how did he get there? What does his name mean? Why was his profession needed?
Recently on Twitter we’ve discussed the use of money in D&D campaigns, and how to keep money interesting, so that PCs will spend it, rather than hoarding it. I find that the requirement to pay for training eliminates this as a concern in these lower levels. For instance, the Guardians have had to scramble to be able to afford training with each level they’ve gained; excess money just doesn’t happen. But then, that’s also a function of how much money the party acquires in its adventures. Does money pile up in your role-playing games? If so, what do you use your party’s wealth for in your games?
Whoa. It’s been months since we’ve posted an episode. Sorry, everyone, for the long wait! We actually have a LOT of content recorded; it’s just that the end of the school year and summer break presented a lot of scheduling challenges that made editing very difficult. We will be racing in an attempt to catch up, so you may see multiple episodes being released per week for a while.
This episode is a bit of a departure for us. It’s still Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, still the same Guardians of Indir campaign, but it was recorded in April 2018 during a period where a couple of the players were being crushed by all the last-minute requirements to graduate from high school. We hadn’t been able to schedule a single session for more than a month when we recorded this, and so I (DM Harold) decided to record a little 1-on-1 session with Blake (who was available), just to keep my hand in it, and also because we did have some side stuff that Squeak needed to experience that didn’t need to happen with the other players in the room.
Squeak started out a sage, studying ancient tomes, which (among other things) led to his leaving the secret island homeland of changelings more than a century ago. Finding his abilities much in demand on the mainland, Squeak worked for various governments as an infiltrator and spy, which sometimes dovetailed nicely with his passion for esoteric texts.
When rumors of the discovery of an actual living dragon broke out, war inevitably followed, as it always does when the question of dragons arises with dragonborn. There seem always to be those who believe in dragons and those who don’t, and there’s very little common ground ever found between them.
Squeak found himself stranded in the middle of a conflict between dragonborn forces as dragonborn civilizations chose sides. The changeling was found and befriended by a young Indiran officer named Balasar, who vouched for Squeak to his superiors in the “dragons no longer exist” school of thought. Grudgingly, Squeak was allowed to work for Indir.
The “Dragons are real” faction, calling themselves “dragonkin,” rallied behind the warlord who claimed to know the location of the living dragon and hold the secret to controlling it. Quickly swelling to enormous size, the Dragonkin forces absorbed or destroyed every nation that stood in their path. The dwarves of Dij Vilca briefly held back the invading army, but their forces broke against the full might of the dragonkin horde. The elven nation of Valtaryn avoided battle entirely, yielding ground and retreating into their deepest forests. The dragonkin army trampled into Indiran lands. The Indiran leaders had not been idle; Karen Balthorek led the party that formed an alliance with nearby tribes of goblins and kobold clans, while Steeev Ganalon continued to fortify Indir itself with a wall that grew steadily higher as he diverted more and more money to the war effort. With humanoids swelling their ranks, the Indiran army was able to shatter the dragonkin army, slaughtering its warlord and putting to bed any lingering superstitions about the existence of dragons.
Returning victorious to the city of Indir, Squeak was feted as a hero along with Balasar, who had been repeatedly promoted on the battlefield as his superiors were killed. The victory celebrations enchanted Squeak, particularly with their music. Fascinated by the music and with no immediate spy missions demanding his attention, Squeak felt free to seek an apprenticeship with the world-famous dragonborn performer, Torinn.
He excelled as a bard, discovering that not only was he fascinated by music and performance, but that he was quite talented at it as well. Soon Squeak, too, was enchanting small audiences at humble venues, performing anonymously in a different form each night. But then, during the adventures of the podcast, he thought he heard someone calling his full name. He followed the voice to an abandoned basement of a building derelict since its owner was killed in the Dragon War, where he found an ancient tome. Eagerly he attempted to read the tome, but the language was none he knew, nor did it fit any linguistic patterns he knew. He became fixated on the tome, muttering to it as he drew scrolls and scrolls of diagrams attempting to discern a pattern of sense from the scrawled “writing.” His music practice was neglected. Dark tendrils of obsession grew in his mind, and as they did so, the book seemed to speak to him, whispering of The Axolotl. The dark thoughts took shape in his mind, the shape of a box. He found he could imagine opening the box, and strange and terrible power would flow through him. So it was that Squeak became a warlock between episode 4 and 5 of this podcast.
Now that the PCs have escaped from the dungeon-that-became-a-tower, they have enough experience points to gain levels, as long as they can pay their class trainers. Will Squeak figure out how to get some more money? Will he choose to continue his world-class music training, or will he choose a more sinister path?
The party gets XP and discusses how to sell their loot to get money enough to train for level 3.
At last we reach the end of our seventh recording session, from all the way back in March 2018! This was just going to be a little blurb of DM Harold giving experience points to the party, but the players were pretty hyped up about the adventure and continued to role-play in character, interacting with new NPCs they created to sell the potentially valuable human relics they salvaged from the dungeon…including the artificial humans Sqt Rp Do and That Guy On The Floor! Will they sell their companions for cash? Do they even think of them as companions? You’ll have to listen to find out.
After this recording session, a bunch of things happened: a bunch of the players left for Spring Break vacations with families, and then final exams loomed for the two players finishing high school, and the result was that we didn’t play Guardians of Indir for a while again. We have continued the campaign! But there is a big gap between this session in early March and the next one in mid-April 2018, which doesn’t include a bunch of the players. The next session with the whole group was in early May…and it was a completely different RPG.
We haven’t fully decided yet, but we may start releasing episodes alternating between the Guardians of Indir D&D 5e campaign and other games we’ve played: one-offs in D&D, the Dungeon in a Box Greenwold campaign, and some games in completely different RPGs. We’ve got a bunch recorded already – it’s been a year now as I (Harold) write this! – but we’d love to hear from you: which system(s) would you like to hear us play? So far as we’ve released so far, our game sessions have had pretty much the same group of players all along. What other players do you think we should bring to the table? Do you want to hear more young kids? More parents? More grandparents, retirees? Let us know in the comments or by tweeting @allagesrpg.
In our 28th episode, the party’s conversation with Timbertina and Sqt Rp Do is rudely interrupted…
This episode of our ongoing Dungeons & Dragons 5e campaign, the Guardians of Indir, has the players enjoying a bit more NPC interaction than usual, as they get into character for more roleplay (it’s been long enough since they did much in-character interaction that some of the players are even surprised at Lucia’s voice for Kantu!). Is this normal? Only time will tell.
I (DM Harold) had a hard time naming this episode, because there were so many good lines from this portion of the game that would have served equally well. For example:
“Surrounded by idiots”
“I’m a telepathy!”
“I’m not sure I like that (but maybe I do)”
“Spiking the kobold”
“I don’t think that was the right way to do that.”
“I want to help”
“Sounds like a mental disorder”
and the classic “Blame Steeev!”
As I post this to allagesrpg.com, it’s more than a year after we actually played this session (we played it in March 2018!). Our game schedule is pretty cyclical. With kid players (at the time, all of our players were in 12th grade or under), the game schedule is strongly affected by the school semesters. So we’re coming up on a break in the game, when we first started playing another RPG! Don’t worry; we have continued to play D&D 5e as well in the months since then; we’ve just been alternating as schedules prevent one or another player from joining us for a session.
What games would you particularly like to hear played on a podcast?
Our 27th episode, “Squeak and Sqt,” featuring a bunch of adventurers trying to figure out what to do when their opponent vanishes and all they can see are ancient mechanical humans.
This episode, our twenty-seventh, continues the D&D 5e story of the Guardians of Indir. The incarnadine elf they’d been fighting vanished abruptly, so that the only people the party could see other than themselves were the mechanical, drab-colored elves (humans, though only Squeak and Balasar have any experience with what humans may once have looked like). There’s a lot of laughter in this episode.
There’s also an example of how a character voice can change on the fly. Late in the episode, a new NPC appears, and I (Harold) must admit that I didn’t give a lot of thought to what he’d sound like when I invented him. As I’ve talked about before, I’m intentionally playing this campaign with as little planning as possible – making it up on the spot as much as I can. This makes for a much more dynamic, interactive story for the most part, but it can mean (as it did here) that the NPC details like voice, cadence, and mannerisms evolve live in the game. You don’t start with a completed character, because the character didn’t exist until it appears in the game. At first I present the character with just a slight tonal modulation and an altered cadence to his speech. But quickly I realized that this wasn’t as fun, nor was it consistent with other Indirans that we’ve heard. So the voice changes abruptly over a few minutes, eventually becoming Tim, the grizzled veteran that the party has since come to know and love.
