Tag Archives: Dungeons & Dragons

Being a bad guy without being a “Bad Guy”

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“You can be a bad guy without being a Bad Guy” – Zangief.

Explore the complexities and challenges of embodying morally ambiguous personas in role-playing games. Learn strategies to develop nuanced and compelling antihero characters, delve into the psychology behind their motivations, and navigate the delicate balance between immersion and maintaining a healthy gaming environment.

I had a little bit of anxiety heading into this panel. It was one that could have gone very wrong. I was asked/volunteered to be the moderator for this one. I started off with a bunch of notes and lots to say – but shifted to make sure I had a series of questions for the panelists to really dig into. I did lead into things by stating in my introduction that I had deep feelings about this topic that lead all the way back to the 1982 movie starring Tom Hanks as Robbie, the troubled college student in “Mazes and Monsters” (and I still think it’s unforgivable).

Here are the questions I came up with:

What are some techniques you have for creating the safe gaming environment you want?

Once you have the group / environment you want, do you set limits on what your characters can and can’t do? Follow up – how are we defining ‘bad guy’?

What are some strategies or approaches you can take as a player to be the anti-hero / bad guy without wrecking the game for everyone else?

As a game master, what tactics can you use to create compelling drama without letting the game play get out of hand?

What are your favorite aspects of playing out the ‘bad guy’ ~ and how do you do that while keeping in mind all those questions we just covered?

What are some strategies for taking steps back or making a move to help somebody in your group who is struggling?

I also wanted to include my notes here – before I was in charge of the discussion, here’s what I wanted to keep in mind:

One of the most enjoyable aspects of role-playing is exactly that – it’s a role. It’s not really YOU, right?

Creating a character that wants something is a part of this. Motivation, desires, needs… how do those make this character act? Is it the choice you’d make in the real world? Maybe not.

Give your characters secrets. What would they do to protect those secrets? Is honor vs. embarrassment a driving factor for your street samurai?

Consequences are NOT your consequences, but just because it’s not the real world doesn’t mean they don’t exist or won’t effect you.

Don’t become “that guy” or “that girl”. Yes, your character might be a bit homicidal. Deciding you’re in a bad mood so you’re going to kill all the other player characters is a group stopper. Don’t wreck it for everyone else. OR consider making your ‘bad guy’ character have a specific arc. Talk it out with the game master. A spectacular, massive, explody death is really memorable for the other characters and can push a story along. Yes, you need to make a new character, but that can be OK too.

Reasonable example: I played an anti-paladin. He was a cold hearted killer and had 0 remorse about it at all. He was being guided by a deeply evil wizard… who lied about being a ‘good guy’. We had to team up with 2 ‘good guy’ characters and a true neutral wizard to save the world (balance and all that). The group had a little bit of infighting based on goals, but it made for great tension and a spectacularly messy death for my character in the end.

Unreasonable example: I ran a big one shot session for a friend’s birthday. Co-DM with my friend John. Ten players – two teams of 5, each trying to claim the birthday throne. It was designed to be a battle royale. What happened was one player picked out another and just hounded her. Singled her out and didn’t let her do anything else except constantly defend or deal with being taken out of the action with any of the others. I found out after the fact that made the attacked person cry and now she’s not interested in playing anymore. Don’t be that jerk.

Dungeons & Dragons – The Series?

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There has been some recent (well, relatively recent but I’ve been slow to post) buzz around a television series based on Dungeons & Dragons.

In theory, this makes me happy. The issue is that being too excited to see something like this frequently leads to a big let down or massive disappointment. I’ve been burned in that department before (looking at you D&D movie from 2000). Sure, the latest film Honor Among Thieves did really well and was a lot of fun to watch. It had some great moments and an enjoyable story. There were big name actors involved who actually took on the story, rather than taking on the roll as a… diversion or escape from some other engagement they didn’t want to deal with. I liked it and I’ve watched it more than once. I went and bought a DVD (yes, hard copies personally owned are still a thing) to support the idea that they should make more.

So, why am I not more excited about this?

Fantasy is a very easy genre to do badly. It’s also super easy to mock when it all goes wrong. It’s also maddening when the ‘fantasy’ aspect is wrecked in order to shoe horn in some standard Hollyweird bullshit that some executive who’s never liked that “geeky stuff” anyway thinks it needs. “Where’s the lovers triangle and who’s playing the handsome but misunderstood hero”? Insert vomit noises here.

The good – D&D is now socially mainstream enough that shows and movies are not immediately shelved. There’s hope that this new TV show (streaming show likely) will actually show D&D related things. Real actors, quality effects and a decent story. One article I read (like here) also gives some “geek cred” to the creators behind the process.

The bad – It’s a series, so there’s likely less in the effects budget and that’s kind of a big deal when it comes to magic spells and mythical creatures. It’s being set in the Forgotten Realms, but nothing more specific than that. That’s kind of like saying I’m making a TV show about the police and it’s being set in America. Thanks. Way to narrow it down. There’s an absolute mountain of material there, but that’s where the trouble always begins. The mountain of material falls into the trap of trying to mention it all. We even saw a peek of that in the movie. How many little ‘nod to the fans’ things were spliced between the scenes that moved the story? Can we use any of the things they used in the movie if this show isn’t attached to it? IF we can’t, does that mean we’ll never see anything else from the Red Wizards of Thay?

The worrisome – It’s being set up on Netflix as of right now. I like them as a streaming service generally. They are, however, notorious for giving a show five to eight episodes, letting it start to generate some buzz, then just killing it altogether. That would just make me more mad if all of the stuff above was actually navigated successfully and I was actually a fan of a good show and they axed it.

It’s a lot of unanswered questions. I’ll keep watching for more, but my hope is… guarded.

Scripted

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Writing scripts – the list of what I want to say when starting off a video – is now a thing.

Yes, I tend to color code my pages so I can find various info quickly / easily.

I suppose I’ve been doing that for quite some time actually. I never really thought about it when I was playing in my friend’s game and he was twitch streaming it all. It was just our little group doing their thing. Then I started running my D&D game. That was when I realized that I was making little things to say at the start of each session. I’ve never thought of it as “script writing” really, but I suppose that’s exactly what it is.

Until now (and maybe still beyond now) I’ve been physically writing down the things I want to say using a color coded piece of graph paper and sort of reading from that. Even when I write the words, the things I say don’t always line up with what I wrote. Sometimes that works, sometimes I “out clever” myself and screw up what was a funny written line. Of course, recording live, it’s not like I can just say “cut” and do it again. We’re live, and getting ready to play.

Our little videos are not production pieces (clearly).We don’t have makeup, wardrobe or sponsors. Nor do I expect we will have those at any point in our lives. It’s not what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get a group of friends together and have fun.

So, I’ll keep writing my little intro bits but maybe I’ll make them electronic and post them up along with the videos of my game sessions. We’ll see. This is a learning process. It will take time for me to figure it all out.

The Point

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I’ve discussed many times over the years that I don’t believe you need a date on the calendar in order to make meaningful changes in your life. If you chose to change and stick with it, the change will happen.

I picked up an idea during that time when everyone else is making resolutions. It was the D23 challenge – create one room per day during 2023 and by the end of the year have a 360+ room mega dungeon. I don’t do resolutions, but I do D&D so this caught me.

UPDATE

I’m happy to report that things are going strong. I decided rather than a dungeon room I’d create a building in the Free City of Lithia for my world building. Here we are in the middle of February and I’ve got more than 40 buildings in my sketchbook… and that’s the point of the whole exercise. I haven’t gone to any great lengths, nor have I significantly changed my schedule. I have just grabbed my sketchbook and plopped a single thing each day in there. It takes 5 minutes or less (generally) and that’s it. Sure, there’s lots more development to be done on all these locations, but I *have* all those locations now.

Make a change and stick with it. Keep on creating! Day after day and you will see results!

Some entries are more detailed than others.

The OGL Mess

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I’ve been loosely tracking the mess that has become the open gaming license (OGL) that has been cascading across nerdland over the past 3 weeks. It’s been an emotional ride, and a painful one for many creators out there. I’m going to transfer a part of a social media conversation over here – because I want what I said to live here, where I can get it when I want it. Social media platforms come and go.

My original post:

There’s a lot to keep up with in this ongoing saga, but I think this quote, and the headline says a lot,

“This is a community that literally invented the term “rules lawyer.” WotC simply didn’t realize how literally that would be taken.”

https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-ogl-goodwill-1-2-feedback-1850036746

The response:

Even this is a bit complicit and extremely naïve, given the repeated attempts a corporate gaslighting. It is also hilariously behind the times, as it has not incorporated their latest retraction and attempted capitulation (which is -still- a half measure, for those who are savvy to the issues).

With each compromise “attempt,” WotC have left something out, and it’s been pretty obvious to those of us invested in this fight. That’s what the author is hilariously and flagrantly blind to, which showcases them as a Corpo stooge, and thus part of the problem.

The notion of these companies (outside of WotC) working together, despite being “market competitors” with differing systems, and ORC being a system agnostic license seems to escape them.

The part I wanted to have here:

Couple of thoughts here –

“behind the times” could be me. I have posted this later than the instant gratification time table. While I am a creator, I am not constantly on here. While it’s important to stay up to date on things, immediate response is not for all. Thoughtful consideration matters, and that can take time.

The various stages of WotC’s flailing response were not the intent of this article (as I see it). The author is attempting to express something ingrained in my own point of view ~ corporations are not your friend, and they never will be. You are a resource to them and given the chance they will strip mine everything they can from you. The fact that the author works for a large corporation making them part of the problem is one opinion… but I think name calling is counterproductive.

One thing I take from this whole, ugly slap of pit fighting for cash is that there is a much, much larger community out there than ever before. Having lost friends as part of the satanic panic (being directly told this is why we can’t be friends – go away) it’s more important to me that we recognize the golden age we live in and work harder to be inclusive. We have more now than ever before – revel in it.

Systems will come and go. Companies will come and go. Communicating and finding new (and profitable) ways to do things will be the constant. Be aware of what corporations are up to, pay attention. Be thoughtful and considerate – and support the creators you know. The best thing we have is each other.

MORE TO FOLLOW

Social media is a tricky thing to manage. I’m sure this conversation will continue, but as I time shift a significant amount of my work, it will take time. Stick with the things you love. Find something that will last a lifetime and create! I look forward to seeing what we all make.

OG What?

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I have a habit of holding posts, not publishing them, because I’m trying to give deeper consideration to whatever topic it is along with editing my words before sending them out to the world. I’m thinking that I might start just firing some things off and circling back to them later.

There are changes coming do my life long love, Dungeons and Dragons. These changes are NOT looking good. Bad optics and genuinely… corporate choices. Wizards of the Coast, the company that controls D&D (along with Hasbro – their owners) have decided to move towards making more money for their share holders. That’s what businesses do. They try to make money.

Does that make me feel good about it? Absolutely not. I genuinely worry for the future of the paper and pencil, meet in real life version of my favorite game. It has angered a LOT of people, specifically creators. I’m not going to go crashing into all the details. IF you want to get into that, I think this is a reasonably well put together video on the topic (here).

Does this effect me? You bet it does. It makes a (dubious and flatly evil) grab at claiming MY work and saying they own it. It means that the game I’ve been streaming for more than a year won’t likely be streaming anymore. It means the YouTube channel where all those videos are shown might be going away. It means Attacks of Opportunity, where I sometimes co-hosted with Author Jon Sprunk won’t ever likely return. They have gone out of their way to kill or claim creators who are not them… and that’s very much the opposite of what a creative system like this is all about.

It’s bad optics, but it’s also a bad feeling. I’ll update more as things move and change… but it doesn’t look good for sharing my hobby in the future.

Check out more about all this here.

Trailer Time

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Once upon a time I used to like to be sure to get to the theater early when going for a movie. I wanted to see all the new movies that would be headed out soon. It was something exciting. Something unexpected could pop up. You never knew, really.

In the current age of on demand everything, trailers for shows and movies are almost constant. I don’t rush to the theater at all – even for the films at this point. It takes something special to make me want to endure dealing with everything that goes along with sitting in a dark room with random strangers to watch a movie. The experience is frequently less than ideal.

I’ve stopped being excited about movie trailers too. On a good day, the creators of film can make an amazing 2 minute film. Most days the either misinterpret the story, sell the wrong point or give away all the best parts just to get you to go see the movie and be disappointed. IF you can slip past the spoilers and see something that actually looks interesting, there is an additional culture now that takes frame by frame screen shots and attempts to dig in and find all sorts of things to be happy/upset/curious about. Then judge the film before it is ever seen based on 3 frames that are pointed out a year before the release date. I am SO not interested in all that. Not at all. The joy has gone away.

Some time ago I was asked how I felt when the very first LOTR series trailer dropped. I waited. I decided I wanted to let all this stuff sit and digest a little. It’s easy to have strong reactions and immediate thoughts. Taking your time and putting thought into it will help decide just how important that strong reaction might be in the long run. If you were upset or interested before, are you still? Just yesterday (as of this writing) the new trailer for the Dungeons and Dragons new movie came out. The reaction culture raced to be the first to comment. I will admit – I did acknowledge this trailer on social media. It’s difficult to skip talking about something you really love. Now I’ve got ‘extra’ trailer bits to discuss.

I’m a fan of the LOTR and some of the film works based on Tolkien’s books. I despise the vast majority of that mess they claim is a trilogy about a hobbit and his journey to the lonely mountain. It’s an abomination and should be stricken from the record. And now it looks like various stories, notes and bits from places like The Silmarillion are being mined and shaped into a series.

I love Dungeons and Dragons and have for a very long time. My disappointment with the last big budget movie with the same title has echoed for twenty years now. I can still clearly picture lipstick bad guy and the horror of seeing the Wayans brother just camping out in there. They’ve waited two decades and now they’re trying again. This fills me with trepidation. It could all go so horribly wrong. The new version has Chris Pine you say. The last one had Jeremy Irons. He’s an academy award winner… and it didn’t help.

So now both of these properties are making headlines with new content. There are big names, big action and all sorts of fantastical things racing across the screens. How do I feel about them? A just question. Late is the hour in which we discuss an old trailer (couldn’t resist mangling the quote).

Bandying crooked words.

My feelings are mixed. On the one side, I desperately wish film makers would continue to adapt different works and stop digging back into the same stories over and over again. A good example was the (relatively) recent Shadow & Bone series on Netflix. A fantasy work that is not something that has been done to death (looking at you Robin Hood) and had budget and production value to create something enjoyable. There are hundreds of choices out there… but we’re digging into Tolkien’s old notes to create something so they can say, “Look! Hobbits! You like Hobbits, right?”. It’s not something that’s going to make me happy.

On another side, just look at all the wonderful fantasy that’s out there to pick from! Magic, dragons, sword fights… it’s an embarrassment of riches. There’s so much I have to be picky about what I see, how soon I see it and how much I watch. There aren’t enough hours in the day to consume all the coolest things. I can’t wait to see all the crazy stuff that comes out of the D&D movie. There will be an entire generation of players that will pick druid as a character class, just to wildshape into an owlbear.

On a third side, (this is why I didn’t use hands – polygons give options for sides) I’m afraid this glut of fantasy we’ve been living in is going to cause the dilution of something good. There will be so much that far lower quality things are going to start sneaking in (yes, as they have for ever) and with that interest will fade. When interest fades, the money walks away and THAT is what causes films to not get made. In the end, Hollywood movie studios are in business to make money and if we’re not buying they’re going to sell something else.

On the square side… I’m thrilled to have this kind of stuff out there. I’ve written before about the negative impact the Satanic Panic and all that bunk from my childhood had. Fantastical film and storytelling at this scale was never something imaginable when I was a kid. The shear variety of options is glorious.

Eventually I will devour all of these things. I will rage about some and praise others to inappropriate levels. There will be fan art and philosophical discussions. I’m still a fan after all.

Legend of Who?

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Pre-pandemic, if you’d asked me about the Legend of Vox Machina I would have stared at you blankly. I had heard, vaguely, of Critical Role but that would be about it. The team producing the web hit Critical Role has certainly made a massive impact on media and the route things have to production.

I’ve talked in other places about something people are labeling “the Mercer effect” as it relates to the expectations of people when they play Dungeons and Dragons. The team at CR (and it IS a team, including a lot of production) create a drama that people can follow along with BUT it doesn’t meet the expectations of players when said players get to their own game tables. Most people don’t have a production team to help run their game, nor do they do it as part of their job so even regular old game / planning time is limited. A new players view of the game can be warped by production quality.

Now, take that same story with all the warping. Get professionals to set the script, trim the action, do the voices and then have crazy good animation and you get Vox Machina’s first season on Amazon video.

I have watched the whole season. I can say that I enjoyed it. It is a very well done animated series.

The criticism(s) I have for it revolve around that warping.

I don’t watch CR when they role play their campaign on YouTube. IF I have that many hours, I’m playing or I’m designing my own game for when I’m playing. It’s not a polished show and you’ve got to wade through it all to get to the good stuff. That’s the whole point I hear you saying, but really – I don’t have that kind of time. Am I maybe missing some Easter eggs or not understanding the ‘in’ jokes? Absolutely. Do I care? No. No I do not.

Having watched the show I get what people mean about expectations. They fight and kill a dragon in the first or second episode. I have NO idea what the actual level of the characters are in the CR game, but in MY world dragons are epic, boss level fights that don’t get resolved that quickly. Dragons are part of the name of the game and defeating them like some kind of minor winged reptile without the kind gravitas they deserve just doesn’t seem right to me. It set me off for the whole series. This is made worse by the fact that one of the main bad guys is (or appears to be) a vampire. That in NO WAY works out that way in my world. Are vampires exceptional and challenging monsters? You bet. Do they have more power than dragons? Never. So – my hang up on that one, but I think it ties in with expectations.

Percy has a gun. Yes, it’s demon related and possibly magical in nature, but it’s still a gun. This is not a chocolate in my peanut butter kind of situation. I don’t want guns in my swords and sorcery game. I play fantasy for a reason. IF I want guns I’ll play a role playing game with guns. This was an aspect of the show that clearly worked, but just took me out of the right head space.

Editing the story down to basically half hour episodes is both good and bad. It’s good, because the writers got to the meat of what’s going on without requiring me to wade through all the dice rolling and background decision making that goes with any good role playing game. I really appreciated being able to get through the shows in a timely manner. What they did while doing that is skipped past longer story arc development. I know – can’t have it both ways, but this is the expectation thing again. Part of the joy of the game is working up all those deep character backgrounds and having all the other players know and use that info. It’s that shared aspect that makes the game great. The animated show didn’t give the feeling of weight that all that stuff was in there. It’s not easy to describe that feeling when you don’t know all the backstory, but you KNOW all that backstory is there. You can feel it with little details.

In the end, it was a fun ride. I found myself pointing and laughing on more than one occasion, remarking that actions / choices reminded me of our own game or that we’d had remarkably similar actions in our game. It’s relatable, but it’s just one version of how the game goes. It’s not MY version and maybe it’s not YOUR version either. It’s worth checking out. It’s fun. I look forward to the next season – just don’t expect to see a dragon defeated that easily in any game I run.

Secret Connection

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A starting point. I need some kind of warm up. Sitting and staring into a blank page is a genuine challenge – and one that will be overcome. Writing can be developed, just like any other ‘muscle’ so we’re stretching, then digging into a workout.

From time to time I check out a website called “Post Secret”. The idea of the project, if you’re not familiar with it, is that people write a secret on a post card and send it in to an address. This secret is then shared anonymously for others to see. Some are silly. Some are angry. Many, many secrets make connections and help other people see that they are not alone. I suspect my own life would be significantly different than it is today if something like this had been available when I was a kid.

I have spoken to friends and shared before that when I was in my pre- and early teens I was really into Dungeons & Dragons (I still am!). I started playing and gathering all things D&D very early on. This was also the time of the Satanic Panic. Other kids in my neighborhood were told not to associate with me because I played this game. Some kids didn’t get rules that applied to that degree, but their parents removed any and all chance of them owning anything related to D&D. The quote from one mom was, “We understand this is a game of imagination that only needs a paper and pencil. We know we can’t stop that, but we refuse to support it.”

That’s extremely rough when it’s aimed at somebody just developing social skills. Your friend group, likely already limited based on choices that didn’t necessarily fit the social norm of the time, being bent, battered and reduced because a swath of the adults in your life give you “we refuse to support it” as the answer to you wanting to play a game and be social.

I saw this postcard on the Post Secret site:

The person that sent it in is a little younger than I am, but likely caught the back end of that same panic. It also shows (to me) the deep, far reaching social nature of this game. The reason it endures. Fantastical, imaginative and connection creating. When you find ‘your people’ and they join the amazing journey into a place that doesn’t exist anywhere except your mind it is a powerful thing.

For many, many years I refused to share my passion about D&D. I’m not a professional author (clearly) and not a professional artist (witness my art) but I have played this game, and others like it, for the vast majority of my life. Having had all my early attempts to connect with others about it met with reactionary, panic based push back I was not interested in reaching out to get smacked down or insulted. It became habit.

Putting this out here in writing (again) I think is part of my process of getting past that. Yes, given the massive success and mainstream knowledge / understanding of D&D these days it doesn’t seem like a huge leap, but it feels that way to me. I am used to push back, insults, and demeaning nicknames. I’m not over that, but I’m working on it. I’m certainly not intimidated by any individual these days. Also, I know, intellectually, that people are aware of what I do and what I am interested in among my friends. I have recently started extending that awareness out to others, including people I am associated with professionally. I am still attempting to maintain a clear demarcation between work life and personal life (as my lovely wife likes to say, ‘don’t shit where you eat’) but I am not longer hiding things like the YouTube videos or the Twitch stream from them either.

I am who I am. I am passionate about my hobbies and enjoy sharing them. I love this stuff. Maybe not as much as sex, but this ‘secret’ was out there and did what it was supposed to do… it made a connection.

All that writing, and I didn’t even pull a muscle. Time to keep going. Maybe I’ll write up some adventures for the campaign I’m running…

Still Creating

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I’m wondering about the scale of my lack of focus. I don’t think it’s ADD or ADHD or whatever initials that particular diagnosis have been changed to lately. I am looking at the pattern of my postings here and seeing that they tend to cluster when I have certain things going on and thin way out when I have other things going on. There is nothing consistent about what I’m doing.

Having said that, I realize that there IS consistency, just at a larger scale. The general things I am interested in, and the things I work on are in certain channels, but those channels tend to cycle. There will be times when I am working on art pieces, times when I am crafting, times when I’m writing and struggling along with that and times when I’m reaching out with other creative endeavors.

Lately my energy is being spent on one of those ‘other’ creative endeavors. Gaming. I have posted before about being a player in a role playing game that was streaming on Twitch and YouTube. That game hit a snag ~ the snag of course being that we are adults with lives and responsibilities. Schedule has killed yet another game… OR has it?

I asked my friend if he minded that I step in and take over running a game. He was agreeable and so were the folks playing the game. Since then I’ve shifted gears and dropped back into my Dungeon Master ways. I’m producing art, but it’s generally for the game or the video channel. I’m writing, but it’s centered around the next adventure. I’ve dropped off the crafting and painting a bit simply because we’re running this game virtually across 2 time zones.

In the end, playing Dungeons & Dragons has resurfaced as my hobby of choice. I’m having a great time creating the world and working with the players as they move through various parts of their adventures. We’re still on the Ether Network channel, just under a different “show” title. IF you’re into the story, you should check it out over on Twitch or YouTube: