Monthly Archives: June 2016

Dungeons & Dragons at the 2016 Origins Game Fair

7 Replies

For many gamers, the Origins Game Fair feels just the right size. Unlike Winter Fantasy, the convention offers diversions beyond non-stop Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. Unlike Gen Con, you don’t face a city and a convention center crowded to the limit. In 2015, Gen Con brought 61,423 unique visitors to Indianapolis. Origins 2016 brought 15,479 unique visitors to the similarly-sized city of Columbus. At Origins, you can reserve a hotel room without winning a lottery and you can pay for it without winning a lottery.

I photographed this multi-table megadungeon at Origins 2015

Multi-table megadungeon photographed at Origins 2015

Origins features reasonably priced options in a connected food court. Gamers can also walk to downtown restaurants or cross the street to the North Market. This pavilion features vendors selling Mexican, Indian, Polish, barbecue, Italian, sushi, and many other types of food.

Origins started in 1975 as a convention sponsored by wargaming-giant Avalon Hill in its home town of Baltimore. In tribute to Avalon Hill and its town’s role in the birth of hobby gaming, the convention took the name Origins.

In Origins’ early years, it became the convention where the board- and miniature-gaming enthusiasts could find refuge from the the role-playing gamers who infested their hobby and who took over Gen Con. In 1988, when Origins and Gen Con combined into a single event for a year, those old wargamers grumbled.

Compared to Gen Con, Origins still tilts more toward board and miniature games. It shows fewer signs of fan culture like anime screenings, celebrity guests, and costumes.

In a recap, Andrew Smith writes, “If you’ve been at Gen Con when the Hall opens, you may be envisioning crowds of thousands of people waiting by the doors. Origins is quite different. We got in line a few minutes before opening and were probably behind 20-30 people in a single file line. It’s a completely different atmosphere.” Unlike Gen Con, board game demos spill out into a patchwork of territories outside the exhibit hall. This offers more hours to sample games, more space, and more affordable space for the manufacturers. “Demo lines are shorter and publishers just seem less busy and able to really sit and discuss their games.”

This year, Wizards of the Coast made a strategic move to avoid Gen Con and feature Origins. Members of D&D team, including Mike Mearls, Chris Perkins, Chris Lindsay, and Trevor Kidd visited the con, while none will reach Gen Con.

As with Winter Fantasy and Gen Con, the folks at Baldman Games operated D&D organized play. The con launched a new program where conventions can commission Adventurers League adventures for their events. The organizers gain exclusive access to their content for six months before releasing it to the world at the Dungeon Masters Guild. Adventures in this new program will center on the Forgotten Realms Moonsea region.

The new Baldman Games adventures included a trilogy of adventures set in Melvaunt and four adventures set in Hillsfar, which were were reserved for D&D Experience players. On the Down with D&D podcast, the Bald Man, Dave Christ, talked about commissioning top authors to launch his exclusives. “With this being the first one, I wanted to set the bar really high. I wanted to kind of knock it out of the park.”

CORE1-2 A Cog in the Wheel

CORE1-2 A Cog in the Wheel

The D&D experience pairs tables of six players with the same, top-rated DM for all four adventures. My table’s judge, Krishna Simonse, did an outstanding job accommodating our taste for combat challenges harder than the adventure’s strong level and our love of grids.

D&D play at Origins 2016 with the D&D Experience in the balcony

D&D play at Origins 2016 with the D&D Experience in the balcony

In addition to the exclusive content, the convention premiered the final, season 4 Curse of Strahd adventures and the kickoff for the season 5 Storm King’s Thunder story.

For me, the con’s best moments came with the return of the D&D Open. I explained what made this classic so great in, “Why the awesome Dungeons & Dragons Championship should return.”

The new Open’s all-star team of authors, Teos Abadia, Shawn Merwin, and Sean Molley captured all the challenge that made the old event such a blast.

In eight hours, the new Open aimed to combine the fun and community of a battle interactive, with a measure of the competition of the old tournaments.

Me in black at the D&D Open—despite our game face, we're having fun

My D&D Open team, with me in black, listening intently to the DM’s description of our next challenge.

Most of the event pitted players against an old-school funhouse adventure set in the megadungeon of Undermountain. Here the challenges proved as fun as any tournament I’ve played. I loved how so many locations wrapped combat encounters with puzzles to be solved. In a maze, PCs raced to gather clues while fleeing minotaurs and mind flayers. In castle ruins, PCs needed to find a way to turn catapults against a Death Tyrant. Best of all, the authors made the new Open hard—none of the namby-pamby, say-yes, everybody-is-a-star D&D in fashion now. Characters died. Our table saw one character Plane Shifted to certain doom and a second slain by a death ray. Save or die! Gary would be pleased.

For a climax, the tables joined forces against a diabolic machine constructed by Halaster, the mad architect of Undermountain.  Sean Molley showed astonishing ability to speak loudly enough to be heard from the far side of the ballroom while still taunting us in the Doofenshmirtz-like voice of Halaster.

I still wish for a more rigorous tournament with pregenerated characters, multiple rounds, and elite dungeon masters striving for consistent rulings and style. The D&D team sees that style of tournament as history. For most players, the new Open probably offers more fun. For an old grump like me, the Open still ranked as my best game of the year.

Wizards is already hatching plans for next year’s Open. Based on the event’s success, I suspect they will offer this year’s adventure to other conventions, but that remains undecided.

In all, Origins 2016 ran twice as many Adventurers League tables as in 2015.

The Origins Game Fair returns to Columbus on June 14-18th of 2017. See you there.

Next: Spells that fish for spoilers

Spells that ruin mystery and treachery

5 Replies

In my last post, I explained how Dungeons & Dragons includes a variety of spells that can ruin adventures. Confined to the original megadungeons, spells like Know alignment and Commune caused no trouble. But as D&D grew to embrace more types of stories, such spells caused problems.

Which spells prove troublesome, and how does fifth edition deal with them?

Spells that unmask villains

In the second-edition era, many issues of Dungeon magazine included an adventure that asked players to identify some secret villain who inevitably possessed a Ring of Mind Shielding—inevitable because none of these adventures could have worked without it. In the implied D&D universe, such rings were as common as window curtains.

Spells that reveal lies and evil can be foiled, but they either make adventures with deception impossible or they force dungeon masters to nullify the players’ abilities.  Players who prepare spells like Detect Thoughts will feel cheated if every mystery thwarts them.

Alignment detection spells

Third edition dropped the Know Alignment (2nd level) spell, but the loss did nothing to help adventure designers because Detect Evil, Detect Chaos, and so on filled the same niche. At least 3E kept Know Alignment’s reverse, Unknowable Alignment, on the spell list. Paladins could cast it, because they enjoy deception, I suppose.

Detect Evil (1st level) used to reveal any creature of evil alignment, which told players exactly who to trust. Now, Detect Evil and Good detects any abberation, celestial, elemental, fey, fiend, or undead of any alignment, making the name a meaningless nod to tradition. The redesign keeps the spell useful and makes it trouble free.

As written, Glyph of Warding (3rd level) can still detect alignment, serving as both judge and executioner. In a magic-as-technology world, you would have to pass a glyph before boarding your airship flight.

Lie detection spells

Detect Lie (4th level) entered the game with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, at a time when Gary Gygax should have known better. The original spell didn’t even grant a saving throw. Second edition added one, and then 3E changed the name to Discern Lies. Fifth edition removes the spell from the game. It offered no play value to offset all the adventures it spoiled.

Zone of Truth (2nd level) grants a saving throw, allowing schemers who save to lie freely. Dungeon masters determined to save their adventures can fudge saves. But I eschew fudging die rolls, so I would rather strike the spell from the game.

Mind reading

The-Demolished-ManOf all the troublesome spells still in the game, the mind-reading spell Detect Thoughts (2nd level) ranks as the worst. With just a 2nd-level spell, you can read a creature’s surface thoughts before they even gain a save. If you probe deeper, the target senses the scan and resists with saves and contested intelligence checks. “Questions verbally directed at the target creature naturally shape the course of its thoughts.” Presumably, you could shape a suspect’s thoughts with idle gossip about a murder or traitor. In a D&D world, every schemer needs an earworm on continuous loop in their head. I suggest, “Tenser, said the Tensor.”

At least Detect Thoughts can cut tedious interrogation scenes where the murder hobo threatens a captive while the paladin visits the little boys’ room.

The spell’s description fails to say how long you can read surface thoughts before the victim gains a save. The spell comes from an AD&D spell called ESP, which let scans continue for the spell’s duration without a save. To remove the scientific flavor of extra-sensory perception, 3E renamed the spell. The 3E version adds a save to any attempt to read surface thoughts.

In 5E, I suggest only allowing a 6-second round to scan before the target becomes aware of the probe and gains a save. This will allow casters to gain clues and insights without laying every mystery bare.

In play, Detect Thoughts existence means that if a plot requires someone to keep a secret, then they either need that Ring of Mind Shielding or to be so dangerous that noticeable mind reading creates complications. (Denizens of a D&D world would consider mind reading as rudely provocative as burglarizing someone’s bedroom.) Imagine a scene where the target thinks at the mind reader. So you know my secret, but who will believe the word of a hired sword over the archbishop? Now the party faces proving their case before the archbishop’s inquisitors reach them.

Of course, D&D rarely pits players against schemers too powerful to confront, so the spell’s ongoing existence limits the sort of stories our game can tell.

Next: Spells that fish for spoilers (or perhaps a side trek to Origins)

Spells that ruin adventures, revisited

4 Replies

Have you ever had an adventure spoiled by a spell? Through the history of Dungeons & Dragons, a variety of spells carried the potential to short circuit or spoil whole categories of adventures—at least without significant planning to avoid the spells’ potential.

Many of the adventure-spoiling spells existed in the early days, but given the play styles of the times, they posed few problems.

Drow_costumeOnce upon a time, D&D games took place in huge sprawling dungeons like the one under Castle Greyhawk, where monsters wandered and players balanced their own encounters by deciding how deep they dared to go.

Adventures never featured intrigue. You never needed to find the real killer from among a group of suspects. Detect Lie probably started as a way to determine if the captive Kobold was lying about the treasure behind the “untrapped” door ahead. It also deterred the thief from stealing your stuff. Know Alignment simply existed so the cleric could tell the paladin who to kill first.

Just a few years after D&D reached gamers, players discovered adventures with plot and roleplaying. But spells that served as just another resource in the Tomb of Horrors suddenly prevented entire styles of play.

Spells like Detect Lie (later Discern Lies), Detect Thoughts, and Zone of Truth threatened to eliminate intrigue.

With spells like Commune and Speak with Dead in the game, you can forget whodunits.

The Prince of Murder’s army of assassins cannot keep him safe in his mountain aerie if the characters can scry and fry.

Fourth edition defied D&D tradition by eliminating spells that broke adventures. Too many players felt 4E remade too much of the game. So fifth edition works to balance nostalgia for classic spells with changes that make them less troublesome.

Next: Which spells have proven troublesome, and how does fifth edition deal with them?

Some new, favorite dungeon masters’ tools

10 Replies

My list of dungeon mastering gear needs a new addition. In my original post, I recommended that 3rd-edition Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder players use Steel Sqwire templates to determine the area of spell effects. The wires map circular and conical areas to squares on a grid.

The fifth-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide drops the jagged spell templates of 3E. Instead, the rules suggest that players measure actual circles and cones on the battle map. Spellcasters no longer need to stay inside the lines. Despite the change, eyeballing spell areas on a grid remains a chore.

Macrame rings

Macrame rings

To show circular spell effects, use macrame rings. The rings come in variety of sizes, so you can get an 8-inch ring for Fireball, a 6″ ring for Darkness, and a 4″ ring for Antimagic Field—or for the tactician who wants to launch a fireball above the battle to catch a smaller circle. The sturdy rings pack easily into your game bag.

Fireball-size ring

Fireball-size ring

I still hunt for wire templates for cone effects. I may try to bend my own.

Back in 2014, I backed a couple of Kickstarters from Jonathan Wilson at Tabletop props. He makes covered wagons, tents, campfires, and dead trees all scaled to match miniature figures. The tent and covered wagon props pleased me so much that I wish I had chipped in for more rewards. The props are now available for sale.

Campsite from Tabletop Props on a battle map

Wagon, tent, dead tree, and campfire from Tabletop Props on a battle map

Almost as many D&D adventures have PCs guarding wagons as exploring dungeons. During the inevitable ambush, I used to put a dungeon-tile wagon on the battle map. Now I have the covered-wagon prop.

Tabletop Props covered wagon

Tabletop Props covered wagon

The wagon boasts stunning details. The top-half comes off, turning the wagon into a flatbed. The wheels turn. At two squares across and three long, its scale suits the battle map.

The tent spans a 3-by-3 square on the map, so it represents a big shelter.

The campfire fits perfectly into a square and features translucent flames.

The wagon’s $25 price led me to only order one, but I plan to order a second. I will use the wagon in many more encounters than any of the more expensive dragon figures in my closet.