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Dungeon Master's Guide II
DMG II is a deeper mirror of the first Dungeon Master's Guide. Each chapter in the first book is reflected in the sequel, providing more explanation and a deeper look at the subject matter showcased in the original. In addition to mechanics, which was the primary focus of the first Guide, the DMG II examines the process of running a Dungeons and Dragons game by breaking it into discrete elements.
The first few chapters of the second Guide are entirely devoted to the experience of the game from the Dungeon Master's side of the screen. Like another good book on the subject, Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering , DMG II goes into the psychology of the rules arbiter by laying out what will likely be required from you in your role as DM. The Guide also goes inside the heads of players to offer up to the reader possible motivations for a player coming to the gaming table.
From the broad scope of running a game, the book focuses in on the campaign and adventure specific levels. An examination of campaigns covers a large amount of terrain, starting with game styles and character creation suggestions, and ending up in a discussion of the medieval-renaissance flavor of the default Dungeons and Dragons setting. Adventures as discrete entities get something of a short shrift in the book, with heavy discussion of iconic adventure settings taking up most of that chapter. If you've ever wanted to run a battle in the sky, this tome has what you need. The adventure chapter does have a few worthwhile tips on incorporating material from outside sources into your own campaigns, making a Dungeon Magazine subscription more tempting than it might otherwise be.
Beyond the basics, the mission of the second DMG seems to be to allow DMs with a limited amount of time maximum flexibility. Where the original title had pre-generated NPC statistics to utilize, the second book has chapters on making NPCs more interesting, ways to integrate your players more fully into the campaign world, and an entire mapped out and catalogued city for you to insert into your game. The character chapter includes a system for allowing players to run their own businesses. It abstracts out a good number of factors, keeping the focus of the game on fun and adventure while allowing players to put down roots and make some money. While more realistic campaigns may not find it worthwhile, the average dungeon-crawl will benefit from a small business run using these rules. Similarly impressive is the canned city, Saltmarsh. Saltmarsh is a good-sized town, with plots aplenty and several interesting adventure opportunities spread throughout the different districts. Like the campaign chapter, the city of Saltmarsh gives a window into the standard setting that a first time DM might not otherwise have available.
For a veteran Dungeon Master, there are a few gems that stand out as making this book worthwhile. The sections on Saltmarsh, the business system, and the various tips on tweaking your gameworld (including suggestions for creating prestige classes) would all be handy to have at your fingertips. Newer Dungeon Masters should not miss the opportunity to take a look at this book. The chapters on pacing, performance, and campaign preparation are very well written and will provide some much needed advice for someone just cutting their teeth. Players need not apply. The information a Player would get from this book is simply not worth the money to pick up, unless you're planning on getting into the DM gig.
Wizards of the Coast has created a worthy successor to the original Dungeon Master's Guide. Providing a deeper examination of the original tome's content and a reflection on the performance art that is DMing, to new DMs the DMG II is definitely worth the price-tag.
You can purchase Dungeon Master's Guide II from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The best RPG campaign I remember is one where the DM had no books, no maps, no rules. He had just a ten-sided die. It beat just about all campaigns where there are books and graph paper scattered all over the table.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I may likely get Trolled for this, but I wish people would realize how poor a system strict adherance to D&D rules produces. Philosophically, the purpose of these games is to be given freedom to pretend you are a person in a world that we could never really have (and likely wound not want) so why is it that D&D must tabularize everything? A game founded on imagination tries to eliminate almost every shred of it and instead replaces creativity with canned cities/NPCs/damage-amounts-for-falling-on-hard-sur faces etc. When I have played/DMed something somewhat D&D related, all I use are books cataloging spells and equipment. Damage amounts, loot etc. I create based upon judgement, or as a player allow the DM to control. People are so nitpicky and so concerned with getting something that is "+4" than actually having a fun and challanging experiance that they refuse to trust the DM, and instead make him into a sort of catch all LUT/Name generator. The game is about imagination, why stifile with with a million dice rolls and the demand that damage be down according to a table, not according to what the DM judges makes the game the most enjoyable.
The original Palladium Beyond the Supernatural game had a very good chapter on creating suspense and atmosphere in a game. For example don't say "You hear someone's guts being torn out in the room next door." Instead say "You hear tearing, then a squishy sound followed by a scream. It happened nearby." You can also freak your players out by asking them questions which cause them to think about potential scary consequences (even when there aren't any): "So, are you going to turn that doorknob with your right hand, or your left had?"
Ideas like these are applicable to almost any Role Playing Game, not just horror games. Creating tension and atmosphere makes role playing much more enjoyable. Personally, I find this kind of advice much more valuable than pregenerated NPC tables.
KTHXBYE
Weezer? I always played the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack, or maybe Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or maybe some Enya... although the latter sometimes causes the lower-level players to succumb as though a Sleep spell had been cast.
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
seriously one time a friend of mine's fiance went to a magic the gathering tournament with him and she referred to the attendees as "a bunch of little boys who would never have sex" Had to laugh at that one...saying her future husband was one of the refs.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Its always seem to me that all these new fangled computer games like Doom and Diablio took the wrong bit of D&D. The lifted all the rules, dice roling, Hit Points, Strength points, lots of wapons, magic and monsters, but missed the heart of D&D. What made D&D was the fact that you could spend three hours talking to a Dragon, or with a sutibally lenient dungon master you could add a bit of imagination, say take one clock of flying and two wands of fire and pretend to be the red barron. Computer gamres have so far to go if they are ever going to match D&D for the posibilities. GTA getting closer in the fredom aspect but still so limiting. Computer RPGs don't deserve the title Role Playing.
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
Bram Stoker's Dracula soundtrack, Glen Danzig's Black Aria, Gustav Holst: The Planets Suite, and O Fortuna from Carmina Burrana for epic boss fights. :)
Oh, come on, you have to love a game that takes so much attention to detail that there's code like this in it (god_zaps_you function). This function would be quite simple in most games - a god wants to zap you, it zaps you, you die. Not in nethack:
;) )
;)
* The god sends down a bolt of lightning at you. Normally, you can only evade the lightning by having reflection or shock resistance (caused by several possible means); otherwise you're dead. However, if you were engulfed by a monster trying to eat you, the lightning strikes the monster instead, and if it's not resistance, the game kills it and gives you the experience (since it really takes guts to get your god to kill a monster for you
* The god is undeterred if you survive. It zaps you with a wide-angle disintigration ray. Again, your god can kill something that is trying to eat you with the ray, or you can use an intrinsic disintigration resistance to survive (prompting your god, shocked by your basking in the black glow, to exclaim "I believe it not!"
* The God gives up trying to kill you themself. If you're near ascention, he gives one last ditch effort, and summons three powerful creatures to kill you (which, if you've survived all of this, you probably have plenty of tricks left to take care of them)
Gotta love a game in which you not only can outsmart a deity's instadeath attack, but can get experience for doing so.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Don't forget the skill to pay attention! Much as I'd like to involve my best friend in some D&D action, he has SEVERE ADHD. when i invited him, and he asked if he could bring his gameboy to the table to play with when it wasn't his turn....
I promptly un-invited him.
Its not that he doesn't want to play, its that he can't pay attention to one thing for longer than a few minutes unless its attached to a video screen, and, really, it seems that this is epidemic among potential players, and I'm having a very hard time finding people to play who are interested *and* able, as it seems everyone I know who *could* be interested in joining, has something that prevents them from being *able* to participate fully.
I completely agree. I've been playing dnd since ad&d first edition, and now i find D20 overtechnical and devoid of inspiration. I am looking for alternatives (I once played Mage and liked it a lot).
Since you say "I can name a dozen RPGs that have rules so simple you can learn them in five minutes. The only thing they have in common is that they are usually superior in imagination and quality to the popular games", could you name that dozen as a suggestion?
When I was 14 or so, I had a friend once with too much time on his hands... He made this RPG once that we all played, but I'd never seen anything like it before. It was actually quite fun too (pehraps more because of the people not the rules)...
Anyway, instead of traditional formulas/modifiers and dice rolls, he made tables. He had tables for almost any event you could think of in the game. Some for attacking, some for defending, for lock-picking, even for love-making (sad indeed).
On one side of the table was a die roll--usually d20, but sometimes d100. The top was some other factor (like your skill or attribute related to the action in question or another modified die roll, perhaps). And inside the table when cross-referenced was the result of that action.
This guy had pages and pages of tables he had drawn up on graph paper. It was mind-blowing! He had written down sometimes very detailed results in these tables, many of which essentially role-played for you. Like one of the attack results might have been, "The attack does x 10 damage. If killed, the target is decapitated, launching its head into the nearest wall or ground" or [for picking locks] "Your pick breaks and cuts your finger (Failure)". He had written up by hand hundreds and hundreds of these results within an indexed binder (before computers were affordable).
It was mind-numbing how much time he had apparently spent on it. I mean, I had made some basic RPGs in my day, but nothing like that...
Sorry, but I have to disagree on that one. I think the new rules actually breathed a lot of life into a very old, very clunky system. While we had some great times playing our old 1st/2nd ed. characters, the d20 mechanics are really elegant, and I think they enhance the fun. We had pretty much given up on AD&D (after 15+ years for some of us), but now it is our groups preferred game again.
What I'm interested in now is settings. Harn used to be like that before they started hawking their own system, but in the old days it was a world environment that you popped your gaming system on top of. That way, if you want to play D20, AD&D, Palladium or hell, even Tunnels and Trolls, go right ahead. Rules, to my mind, just get in the way, so keeping them simple and to a minimum, so they don't interfere with the actual roleplaying.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
geek != nerd.
geek = obsessed with "in-character" socializing (chat/IM, DND, acting, funky clothing, Star Wars, etc)
nerd = obsessed with science, technology, numbers, Star Trek, etc.
Geeks tend to be conformist in their social circles and non-conformist with general society. (aka, the Artist). Nerds tend to be the opposite, conformist with society, and non-conformist in social circles (vi! no, idiot, its emacs!,etc)
You can be either, or neither, some funky combination of the two and I guess thats why people confuse the two. Perhaps I can tell easily because I'm a hard core nerd, completely uninterested in geeky things like DND. My brother is a hard core geek, uninterested in nerdy things like programming.
The best litmus test I can see is if you are into Star Trek, you are probably a nerd at heart and will be happier doing nerdy things. If you are more of a Star Wars fan, you are probably a geek at heart, and will be happier doing geeky things.
Interesting. Personally I just find RPGs as another reason to get together with people and *have something to do*. I never got into the go to a bar, or let's all get together and drink till we pass out. I mean, what do you do there? Stand around, try some small talk, hope there's some interesting conversation.
I mean I just find that unless there's some planned activity, all gatherings sputter out in about an hour - after you've either ran out of small talk with people you don't know well, or ran out of updtates for friends. Then what? Hope you're drunk by then? (A lot of this outlook may have to do with where I grew up and the fact I just graduated college - maybe in big cities outside the college lifestyle things are very different)
Aside from that there are a few reasons I prefer RPGs to say computer games. One is how limited computer games feel - it always seems to come down to one way (or if you are really lucky 2 ways) to solve that puzzle. That might be OK if it's the way to activate the gods scepter, but if it's how to get past a guard - in most situations - it's ludicrous. I mean, why can't I try climing to the roof and crawling by him? Why can't I hang off the cliffedge and see if he walks by me? etc...
Anyway - my main point is that there are lots of things you can do at a party - but one of them is play an RPG. You could also play poker, but to me it seems like after one or two games, it would get pretty repetitive.
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Gotta love the comments too:
/* "I am sometimes shocked by... the nuns who never take a bath without
364 |
365 | * wearing a bathrobe all the time. When asked why, since no man can see them,
366 | * they reply 'Oh, but you forget the good God'. Apparently they conceive of
367 | * the Deity as a Peeping Tom, whose omnipotence enables Him to see through
368 | * bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes." --Bertrand Russell, 1943
369 | * Divine wrath, dungeon walls, and armor follow the same principle.
370 | */
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Rules easy enough to explain in five minutes so that the players don't need their own copies:
1) Runequest
2) HarnMaster
3) GURPS
4) FUDGE
5) FATE
6) HARP
7) Paranoia
8) Stormbringer
9) Call of Cthulhu
10) James Bond 007
11) BESM
12) MERP
Note that these rules aren't necessarily simplistic. Some may have complicated character creation rules, complicated combat rules, etc., but they all share one thing in common, and that's a cohesiveness in the rules. With any of the above games you can certainly get away handing out pre-generated characters with a five minute explanation.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
What kind of system you use should depend on how much system-detail you want in your game, and what kind of feel you would like the game to have. There possibly isn't any system which is perfect for what you want to do, but you could just nick the mechanic from somewhere and ignore the rest, since you seem to want to use the setting from the sourcebook you have.
Have you ever looked at the Unknown Armies system? It has nice, simple mechanics and some good ideas which I think can be used in any setting.
It's based on a percentile roll. Under special circumstances, you can flip your dice to get a different result (for example, change 93 to 39). Doubles are extraordinary failures or successes (since they can't be flipped). There's a botch and an amazing success. Damage is calculated from the attack roll (something I really like). There is a list of skills, but you can make up your own skills as well. There is a psychological well-being gauge which is more complex than Cthulhu's sanity system, and which may or may not be appropriate for you depending on what your setting is like.
The advantages: it's dead simple. There is no adding of millions on numbers together, and no flipping through the book to find Obscure Rule no. 349, clause A: "Fighting with your off-hand uphill in the rain while under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs". The system is designed for character-based games - special abilities that characters have are based directly on important parts of their personality. This means that a character's history and personality are actually important to the game, and not just a veneer of flavour painted over combat stats.
Disadvantages: because it's so simple and freeform, it can be broken and abused by power gamers and rules lawyers. People who like having well-defined boundaries and rules for what can happen will probably not like the vagueness. The DM cannot rely on an encyclopaedic reference of cases to fall back on in the case of a dispute, and will have to wing it. The players have to trust the DM's judgement in situations where no rule exists and a decision has to be made (that bit, mind you, is true of any similar freeform gaming system). The combat system is very simple (although I'm sure you can add various weapon bonuses and things to make it more complex), which may not please people who like complex combat systems.
I think the system is great for once-off adventures with pre-generated characters. I've never played in a campaign (although I know of several successful campaigns), so I don't know if the vagueness becomes a problem over time. I imagine it depends on the GM and the players.
Most of the UA sourcebooks deal with the UA setting; I don't think the section with the rules themselves is very long. If you want to check them out I suggest *cough* borrowing the book from a friend *cough*.
Hey, another Harn fan from the olden days!
I went out and bought Harn and Cities of Harn for these very reasons: most of the work comes in writing a background story. Harn provides an excellent starting point for your own environment.
I'll echo many of the other comments here: the greatest part of D&D (and RPGs in general) is the encouragement for you to make up your own rules and your own settings, to pick and choose what you like, make up whatever you need, and throw out what you don't like.
This thread brings back a lot of great memories of fun times I had playing these games for hours on end with my friends.