Samantha Patri's Blog

Let's talk about this a bit. One of our favourite games as far as setting is concerned, is Exalted . You play larger than life, epic heroes in a super high fantasy world, who can do the impossible, casually. The thing is, there's different tiers of Exalted, who draw their power from different sources, and each type of Exalt has different castes, which focus on different things. The game allows you to build your character how you want - what skills to pick, how you want to set your attributes, what powers you get, what backgrounds, the whole nine yards. You have so many options, so many ways to build your character to be just what you want. Some examples? An Abyssal Exalted who can command you to drop to your knees, tear out your heart, and turn you into her thrall (while keeping you alive). A Solar Exalt who wears power armour, and pilots a self-aware mecha, and in a week turn any normal mob of people into an elite fighting force. A Sidereal Exalt who can leap into the way of a...

Bear with me, this is 100% my opinion, and isn't necessarily going to work at your table. Everyone has their own desires at the table, and everyone's table is different -- and if you play a different game with me, it doesn't mean you're playing it wrong . If you're having fun, that's all that matters. Your table, your rules. And with that out of the way. If I'm going to have a new game master -- one I'm not familiar with (and it's been a long time since that's happened) the first thing I ask is this: do you fudge at your table. And if the answer is 'yes', then I walk away. I don't begrudge the GM -- I hope they find good players and have a blast -- but it's not for me.  And here's why: Agency. To me, agency involves the following: freedom of choice in character creation within the bounds of the campaign setting and rules. My attributes, abilities, feats, gear, etc, are all decisions I make. During the game, agency involves bei...

Our playing group likes to open most encounters with parlay. It just happens to be their thing. If it is at all possible, the party tries to prevent combat - they'll talk things out, try to negotiate, look for common ground, and even win over enemies if there's an opportunity. The excuse that D&D is mostly a 'combat' game doesn't hold water. Yes, most of the rulebook is on how to hurt your opponents - but that doesn't mean that's the best path (or first option) people should take. There's social skills for a reason - so why not use them? "Well, I don't want the BBEG to be defeated with a single roll." Then think of a way to draw it out. How many successes are needed? Each success prevents combat for a few rounds, as the PCs try to work on the opponent's resolve. But it goes beyond this. In 1st edition Mummy (World of Darkness), they discussed what a character with higher-than-human social charms could do (in D&D, we'd go wit...

There's a lot of talk going on right now about WotC's, new "OGL 1.1". First and foremost, something to consider. WotC isn't going to be able to enforce 1.1. They can't. 1.0a already says it can't be revoked if someone's following the rules that are laid out for it. That, right there, protects people using the original OGL. Second, if 1.1 is enforceable, this gives WotC the rights to Lord of the Rings , Diablo , World of Warcraft , Wheel of Time , Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser , Mutants and Masterminds , Star Wars , DC Comics, and Wild Cards . That's a whole lot of companies that would be righteously pissed off with Hasbro. It would most likely lead to a class-action lawsuit. And the courts, when it comes to the kind of contracts you see here, lean in favour of the people signing the contract, and not the people who wrote it up, when there's a grey zone. Not that there's a grey zone. With all that being said, WotC needs a smack upside the head....

Or: "How to play an Evil character in a Good party without alienating yourself, pissing off the players, or pissing off the Game Master.  Our sister is in a Pathfinder campaign, and decided she was going to play a rogue - with a major focus on stealth (+20 by Level 5), deadly sneak attack dice (3d8), and a Neutral Evil alignment. The game master, who has played with us for over a decade, trusted her enough to let it slide, and away we went. The way she's been playing the character's pretty straightforward.  She doesn't quite hang out with us as we travel - she's perpetually in stealth mode (can move her full speed or even run while remaining stealthed). So our group never knows where she is or what she's doing until she lets herself be seen. She does talk with the group but her interaction is usually light during travel time. During a mission into a building, she infiltrated ahead of us because she was the only one who wouldn't trip security. She scoured th...

Ever run a game and have one player just implode during the first session because ' you're not doing fantasy right '? Running a game, and the group is heading into a village. We describe the farms and farm houses along the way - low stone walls to mark regions, low, one-level homes, and the like. It was winter, and the players decided to check on the farms, and we described how the people living on there tended to keep the animals in with them, sharing the body heat to protect them from the cold. One of the players (we'll call him 'Fred') grumbled about this, saying that there should be barns and haystacks and people didn't live with their animals. (Hint. People did .) Whatever. Once the group made it into the village, the first thing that happened was the player immediately looked for the tavern. They found the village pub, and the group went in to sit down and get a meal. There was a few things to eat - not much, mostly bread and a bit of broth, but plenty...

The topic of how D&Done  ( yes, we know it's called 'one D&D' but it is supposed to be the final edition ) is handling "race" has come up a few times lately, and there is a lot of mixed reactions about how it's being done. We compare this to the new Advanced 5th Edition , which we feel is not a bad way of doing things. To wit - your race is not your culture, or nation, or anything of the sort. It's a heritage and should deal only with your genetic traits, and nothing else.  In A5e you choose your heritage, and then you choose your origin - your background, what you've done and where you've done it. Essentially, your homeland. This is what give you skills and ability score modifiers. And honestly, we feel this is a much better way to do it. Consider.  You're playing a dwarf. You were raised among, say, halflings. Let's look at dwarves in basic 5e. Dwarven Combat Training : You have proficiency with the battleaxe, handaxe, light hamm...

 "Just increase the difficulty" This is what we hear from time to time when it comes to competent characters. The big idea is that, well, you want to challenge the character, so you put in things with a higher difficulty for that character to overcome. Let's throw in a theoretical. Let's say you have a 5th level character in 5e who can't roll below 14 on sleight of hand checks and to pick locks and disarm traps , and once per short rest also gets to roll with advantage on such checks. More often than not, the character's going to be fortunate and succeed at such checks.  Note that, in 5e, picking locks is DC 15.  No less, and very, very rarely more. This means the character will only ever fail to pick most locks with a roll of 1, and can usually get through most traps as well. Alright.  So, the game master wants the lock picker to be challenged, and raises most of the DCs for picking locks and removing traps to 25, meaning our rogue is going to need a 11+ to...

World Building The short of it is simple: we love world building. We are fascinated by culture, religion, magic, and how this all intersects. What's the point of having a campaign if the characters aren't given the chance to immerse themselves in some aspect of the society they're in or reflect where they're from? We're really not that interested in lots of combat, or delving into dungeons, or world-shaking plots. We're really interested in looking at the cultures of the people around us, what the local faiths are and how they're reflected in the culture, and how these reflect the style of magic used by the local cultures. We're not interested in generic magic or generic faiths or in a culture which matches every other culture in every other fantasy game out there. If it's vanilla, something's missing. For an example? Well. We've a campaign world, Inspiritus . We've not had a chance to run things in that world in over 30 years, but we...

In which we discuss the history of AD&D through to Pathfinder and its impact on what one could play over time. In the early days of D&D, there was no rhyme or reason about how strong one thing might be against another. In the early days you could play a 'young' balor (demon) as part of the PC party. Later, with D&D, you could play were dragons, faeries, or other creatures of all sorts (BECM), and by the time AD&D came around there were half-ogres, drow, and a variety of other creatures of varying power. With 2nd edition AD&D, things became a bit more formalized. Level Adjustment was added to the mix, increasing the effective level of a character by their race. If you were strong enough, you were treated as one or two levels higher to determine how much XP you needed to level. This carried on into 3rd edition AD&D, which allowed players to play stronger characters at the cost of slower level growth. Then we get into Pathfinder. Here, level adjustment was ...

Sorry, had to slip an Exalted reference in the title. 😉 How much is too much when it comes to sourcebooks? Our simple answer is this: It takes as many books as is needed to cover the major groups within the game and the choices provided in the core rulebook. The rulebook is expected to give broad strokes of the setting and what's available, as well as the rules for playing the game. If it covered everything , it'd be thousands of pages long. For example: Legend of the Five Rings      - Clan          - How do the different Clans stand apart from each other? What are their beliefs and traditions? What makes them unique, culturally?      - Family          - How does one Family stand apart from the others? What are the duties of the families, what's expected of them?      - Dojo          - What is each dojo, what do they teach, what special techniques do each have? In L5R...

Picture It:  Calgary, 1984. (With apologies to Sophia) I was given the D&D Red Box for my 12th birthday in March.  In April, I got my first adventure, Palace of the Silver Princess , and the April 1984 edition of Dragon Magazine. I'd not run a game yet. I had no idea how to run a game, or even to play, since I'd never been in a game and nobody around me had access to game books. I didn't know what a power game was, or min-maxing, or being a munchkin. I didn't know what a Monty Haul campaign was until I saw the term in the Dragon Magazine - and even then all I knew was 'it's a powerful character'. Two years later, I was running games at school. There was a group who played AD&D, and I'd later dub it the illegal D&D group , because the characters had stats above 18, levels in the 100s, and access to Death Stars, laser weapons, and chromatic dragon familiars.  (Yeah, small, 5-headed dragon familiars of Tiamat). I didn't play with that group,...