RPG

It feels somewhat ironc writing this at the moment, since we have had a two week break from the game due to real life getting in the way, but recently I have been really hyped up to get to playing Dungeons & Dragons again which is a refreshing change. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed the sessions we have had, but now I am once more excitedly planning and looking forward to the next time we play as well as seeing how they tackle the challenges I set before them.

I am, however, at the moment somewhat unsure what exactly that challenge will be but I have some ideas that I can refine and more importantly I feel like the time has come to start giving the players some more interesting magic items to play around with as well as encounter in their fights. It’s actually been really fun so far seeing them interract with the magical things in the world that they have already encountered since they are first-time players and as such have no real expectation of what’s in front of them making the reactions they have really unexpected. The best example of this so far was their encounter with an alchemical jug, where one of the players (or their character) assumed it was filled with some sort of invisible liquid instead of being merely magical in nature and consequently (unfortunately for them) ended up destroying the item during their experimentation.

This feeling of not knowing what will happen is what makes me really excited to have them encounter something like that in a combat situation, since they will have to think even more on their feet and prepare a response to such a strange circumstance in a hurry, and the coolest part of course is that once combat is over—should they prevail—they will have the opportunity to confuse their own enemies with such magical items in the future.

The other thing that I find myself really looking forward to again is the whole collaborative storytelling aspect of the game, especially since the players’ actions can sometimes throw rather big curveballs to me as a DM which makes the whole thing that much more interesting along with giving me ideas on how to implement things in the future. I think the best recent-ish example of this was a player simply deciding that they picked up a glowing stone while they were out adventuring, and gave it to the dwarf in the party since they are experts on stones and stonework. This all lead to a somewhat interesting dream-like adventure at a later date that I don’t think the players expected, but that interaction between the two players was the catalyst for it all which I find really cool. That does remind me, I need to try and encourage such creativity from the players more somehow, since as mentioned they are first-timers and I quite often get the feeling that they are somewhat unsure of what exactly they actually can do and it all feels a tad bit safe, though the two above examples are definite counterpoints to that feeling. Still, giving the players even more opportunities for those interactions is definitely something I want to enable, so need to keep that in mind more in the future, maybe a note or the like somewhere?

Having written this, now I just hope all the more that we actually do get the opportunity to play in the not too distant future and that we have the chance to put real life aside for a bit, and I think next time is actually looking rather likely so fingers crossed!

So it slowly seems we are creating a tradition of playing D&D, though with another group than mentioned in the previous post. It’s a bit different since we are running this game online over VOIP and without cameras, so there is a certain amount of communication lost through that, but still it has been quite fun so far. We have even managed to recruit a new player who decided not to join us on the initial session but coming in for the second on and staying for the third, so new convert, yay!

Preparation is still an aspect that I find highly challenging, since it’s hard to know in which direction the players want to go so I don’t really want to overprepare things that are unlikely to end up happening yet simultaneously I often notice how unsatisified I myself am with things I end up improvising on the fly—not that any of the players seem to have minded at any point so far but still! Also the whole “keeping the world consistent” thing is much easier when I actually have some idea of what’s going on beforehand, though maybe that’s an aspect that I personally focus on more than the players themselves do.

Simultaneously, that all can just be solved by taking good notes while we are playing of the things that I’m coming up with on the spot, and our last session actually ended up being mostly improvisation on my part since while I had accounted for a bit what was going to happen if the players ended up going in the direction they finally headed, it wasn’t the “primary” story path—more akin to a sidequest or the like—and consequently the world that they encountered on the way there wasn’t overly fleshed out yet from what I can tell the players seemed engaged and interested in the characters they encountered while doing a bit of investigation on a missing person in the village and their suspicions even gave me new ideas for potential further stories if they decide to go that way even if I had previously had nothing planned for these characters. Though maybe I also need to be careful of confirming any suspicions players may have to often since if jumping at every shadow yields something dark the world might feel a bit more bleaker than it is.

This last experience though has significantly calmed my nerves when it comes to actually running the game, since it was an opportunity to see that I can actually manage the situation coming up pretty well of having to think on my feet and just kind of blurt out things that are forming in the moment which while I knew was important going into the whole dungeon mastering thing, was something I felt really shaky about especially hearing the amount of preparation some dungeon masters choose to do before their sessions that I haven’t really commited to myself—I mean, I try to prepare as good as I can but it just feels very difficult since I don’t know here the next session will go. Still, this does mean I’m not as stressed for our upcoming session and am actually rather looking forward to it, well, moreso than I was before.

Inspired by my playing a lot of RPGs lately, I ended up organising my first actual round of Dungeons & Dragons in a long while, five years or so. As often happens with these things when one self is the initiatior, I had the role of Dungeon Master and wow, I was so stressed going into this even though these are people I know well, but once we got rolling it all ended up quite good as these things tend to. Though to be quite honest, we had a longer break at one point and I think we should have just ended the session there, it went on a bit too long and the concentration was severly lacking after the break.

Despite the not quite as successful latter half everyone seemed to enjoy the session overall and we are planning to do it again some point this year hopefully, though for that I think I really need to be a bit more prepared and have more of the world thought out so I’m more ready to respond to the whims of the players since I encountered a place or two where in hindsight I’m not happy with how I played the situation out.

Having played both of the Pillars of Eternity games, I rediscovered my liking for RPG games and went looking for other recent examples I could get into playing and after a bit of experimentation ended up with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It hasn’t yet drawn me in quite as well as the Pillars games but it has still been quite enjoyable so far though it does certainly feel like a much less polished experience—this game was unfortunately quite known for the amount of bugs it had at launch, and even now some of them still seem to plague the game. The one I most recently ran into that is now making me consider how to proceed is that one of my companions’ pet now simply spawns in the middle of whatever map I happen to be on and is uncontrollable, essentially completely removing the pet from the game and consequently making that companion quite a bit less useful, which is especially unfortunate for me since that was one of the companions I had been quite regularly running with up until now.

Beyond that, the writing also feels quite a bit more cliché, with the game focusing a bit too much on the beauty and prioritising that for both the female companions as well as some of the other NPCs one runs into in the game, especially in some of the dialogue choices the game puts on you.

Still, the kingdom management aspect is actually a nice feature of the game I find, and at times I even find myself getting somewhat annoyed having to go back to questing due to some timed event or another pressuring me away from that part of the game and I think the balance between the two is rather nicely achieved where there are multiple things to keep tabs on and you have to prioritise what is more important at any given time.

The less nice thing is that some of the tools the game gives you for keeping tabs on things are rather poor, namely the way the game indicates quests and where in the world you are actually going leaves something to be desired I find. I’m not saying there needs to be an arrow pointing to every single thing in the world, but when I get a prompt in the dialogue that an NPC pointed out a location on the map to me and I then go to look on the map and see no indication what this “new” location is since I’d already discovered it on the way there, it does get a bit annoying to try to puzzle out what the game wants me to be doing. Most of the time the game does have some indication when hovering over a location of the map that a quest takes place there, but not always, and once enough of the map is discovered and the game suddenly decides to send you off into some far-flung corner of it having some option to just click in the journal to have the map display the relevant part of the map would be a rather nice feature to have. Not having this included might be an intentional decision though, where the game tries to emulate some of the older style of RPG where there were fewer UI elements helping you along but those games also tended to have a bit more thorough descriptions in the text where you could ask where something was supposed to be located, and intentional or not it’s not really a design I agree with.

Despite these flaws, it is a game I definitely want to go back to at some point, when I either figure out how I want to deal with the bug I encountered or when it ends up getting fixed. Despite the clichés, I do want to see where the story ends up going even if the general direction of it seems somewhat obvious.

So the past week or so my time has been pretty much consumed by Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and it has been a pretty amazing time.

It’s the first time in a long while for me where I’ve actually been able to get my mind inside the world I’m playing in or reading about which does mean that it does bring me some sadness to have to leave that world but the journey was great.