The Pink Dice Chronicles

This Code of Etiquette will become a standard part of all games I host online henceforth, subject to further refinement. Etiquette of the GM The GM will maintain Rule Zero: Everyone has fun. The GM will not make changes to character rules (i.e. class, race, feat, or trait specific rules) after character creation without agreement of all players unless it conflicts with Rule Zero. The GM will attempt to maintain a clear set of rules, ensure that players are following them, and not change them arbitrarily during the campaign. The GM will make rule-consistent judgement calls to keep the game going, but may research controversial calls out of session and report back to the players. The GM will make every effort to keep session going on schedule, and will notify players as soon as possible if a session will be cancelled.  Rescheduled games will include all players. The GM will use player feedback, character backgrounds, other player-generated content to influence the game....

With each of my daughters, I made the yearly pilgrimage to the mall to get the oh-so-desired picture of them in their cute little Easter dresses with the Easter Bunny.  Well, in advance, they were told of the wonders of the Easter Bunny, of how he would bring candies and gifts and hide eggs for them to find.  None of this ever caused a stir.  But, at the moment they were brought over in their tiny little shiny black shoes or handed over from mother or father's arms, there was a tremendous terror growing in them.  Screaming, crying, pleading, and begging erupted, with their poor mother or me left trying to coax an acceptable picture out of them with whatever bribery I could muster. The bottom line is that words and deeds alone cannot prepare children for the horror that is a five and a half foot tall Easter Bunny with white or cyan fur, large glassy eyes, and teeth that seem better fitted to chomping at arms and legs than at the carrots left by children.  This ...

A lot of folks have commented on the difficulty of building suspense and even dread and terror in their TTRPG games.  Whether you are in the horror genre, the political saga, or even the cyberpunk realm, there is a lot that can be learned from a simple jenga tower, like that used in Dread to build suspense. Starting a game of Jenga means building a stable tower, pushing the blocks together, clearing the gaps, making things straight.  Similarly, in a game with suspense, things usually start out OK for the PCs.  Everyone is pretty much happy with them and they are pretty happy with everyone.  The more important part of this stage is building the layers that will make up the basis of the jenga tower.  Someone is going to pull the first block out of that tower, usually the bad buys, and this is going to set the party in motion.  Once in motion, for vengeance, good will, fame, or fortune, the party needs to start pulling more blocks out, sometimes on accident ...

Every now and then, GMs get overwhelmed and burnt out, worrying so much about players and rules and games that it all spirals downword into desperation.  We all end up there.  A while back I wrote a brief note to one such GM, who was fighting character deaths and table chaos, and I thought I would share it for those days when we all need it. We are our own worst enemies, piling on all these expectations. I think we all need to learn to do more of what we enjoy and less of what we don't. Make players be responsible so we don't get hit with everything. It helps a lot with burnout. Make players enforce rules. Find a rules lawyer who isn't doing it to min-max and let them loose on it. Let the characters die. Remind that some fights will be too hard for them, so they should always consider fleeing an option. Use more premade content. Rip stuff out of premade adventures and reuse it. Ban anything at the table that makes your life harder. If they need to check their cel...

From reddit: In a session recently my players asked for a ruling on fall damage when it came to flying creatures. RAW fall damage would be equal to the number of feet a target was from the ground no matter how fast they were travelling prior to that. The issue came up where I was attacking with a dragon that had a fly speed of 80 and one of my characters used his turn to paralyze it using a houseruled effect that is basically a copy/paste of hold monster. Since the dragon was paralyzed it couldn't continue flying and fell. It was strafing them at 30ft in the air so RAW it would have taken 3d6 damage, but he thought that was unfair given that it had moved (80ft) and then dashed (an additional 80ft) showing that it obviously was moving at 160ft per round, which if converted to fall damage would be 16d6. TlDR: Is fall damage RAI velocity and therefore equal to ft/round. There were some very misinformed responses to this question.  The bottom line is that the horizontal velocit...

Whatever goes up, must come down.  That goes for inspiration, luck, and all the positive things that go into making a GM host good games.  Sometimes you are going to have a bad week.  Sometimes bad things are going to happen.  Sometimes you have to deal with it.  This week, we're talking about how to pick up the pieces when the inspiration isn't there. I've had a bad couple of weeks, missing games I'm playing in and missing games I GM.  Snowstorms, sickness, internet outages, and a failed Windows Update that trashed my wireless driver all contributed.  Underlying all this, I am fighting a bad back that on bad days leaves me bedridden.  It's a tough recipe for cranking out compelling NPCs, plotlines, settings, and encounters.  Frankly, it's a tough recipe to do anything some days. So how do you pick up the pieces and move on?  First, don't force yourself to do something you don't want to do.  It isn't going to be good for anyone....

Too much pressure! Being a GM is about being a leader that helps your group find spielvergnuegen -- gaming pleasure.  Gaming pleasure seems like a simple thing, but the GM has all sorts of knobs and twiddles to help things along.  In this article we are going to walk through a bunch of those "controls" and see how they can be used to get your gaming group to maximum gaming ecstasy. First, lets divide things up a bit.  In the real world, your gaming group consists of players .  These players control characters in a party .  GMs interact with players directly and use the game world to interact with characters.  Players and characters remain separate things, unless there is bleed .  Bleed is the transfer of emotion between characters and players.  For example, a player might become sad when the character is sad for losing a beloved animal companion, or a character might react violently against another character when the player is also angry. ...

Any GM humbled by experience of session and campaign desires to become a better of GM.  If there is one lesson we can take from new systems like Numenera and foundational systems like Burning Wheel, it is that RPGs are not about rolling dice.  They are about great storytelling.  In this segment we are talking about strategies for rolling less and DMing better. First let's look at a little math.  Assume we have a 5% failure rate for something, which is equivalent to rolling a 1 to fail on a d20.  Make just one roll, and we have a 5% failure rate.  However, make the same player roll that four times, and they now have four times the chance of generating a failure.  The basic principle is simple, making a player roll more than one increases the chances of failure . This leads to all sorts of problems when people alter mechanics.  Do you want to have a critical failure mechanic?  Now you characters that can roll multiple attacks (i.e. your BET...

Professor R. B. Magick stands nearly 6 feet tall with his high heeled black boots, and seems taller with the brightly colored silken garbs that hang loose from him.  He makes a point to twirl often to allow the bright colors to dance on the air about him, as if he himself were magical.  His voice dances similarly as he speak, using all of his bardic knowledge to inflect and sing the words for maximum effect.  He is mostly a salesman and he sells amazing magic items and surprisingly reasonable prices (half book prices) before moving on to the next town with his brightly colored mechanic contraption of a sales wagon. Every now and then, though, he takes a detour through an unknown alley in a city he'd rather not mention.  This alley is where the rejected magical items from the local mage school get dumped for disposal.  Unfortunately the fence is not so high that it can't be climbed and the incinerator furnace is not run so often by the groundskeeper.  The ...

Sly Flourish posted " Four Principles for House Rules " and it is clearly a good view to start with for house rules.  These four guidelines pave the road to good solid house rules.  I just wanted to throw in a couple of key points that might fall under the "Keep it Compatible" portion.  These warnings hopefully can help to avoid the road to hell paved with good intentions in adding house rules. POINT 1  Understand The Side Effects on the Core Mechanics Side effects are a big problem when adding new rules to the game.  Side effects the unexpected consequences of a rule that can result in potentially game-breaking scenarios.  Here is a good example of a good house rule with a nasty side effect. I ran into this house rule recently that required all character actions to be stated at the beginning of the round.  To change that action when your turn came up, you had to make an INT or DEX check.  The intent was clear -- to speed up combat.  How...

A lot of people ask a lot of the same questions over and over when it comes to gaming.  How do I get my characters introduced to each other?  Where can I start my campaign?  What module should I use for new players?  For all these questions and many more, I offer my perfect answer:  A Dark and Stormy Knight. This module has been around for a while and was released for free in a D20/D&D 3.5 converted form back in 2005.  The premise is pretty straight-forward.  The group of travelers get caught in a storm and have to make for a local ruin.  Now, as a DM, I could spin this 100 different ways depending on setting -- a sandstorm in the desert, a snowstorm in the cold North, a lightning storm on the plains or in the woods.  In all cases, the travelers are stuck in the same place. To draw the party together, there are things to experience, things to discover, things to fight, and fortunes to be had.  The best part is that it is only aro...

Part of being a good GM is providing incentives for good, fun things to happen as part of the whole gaming experience.  These incentives and disincentives can take two nonexclusive forms -- direct and cross-over.  Direct incentives work so that the actions result in rewards in the same space -- character rewards for character actions and player rewards for player actions.  Cross-over incentives mix the two realms, often resulting in mixed priorities that can sometimes cause problems.  In this article, we're going to discuss how incentives and disincentives for both players and character's can be used correctly and incorrectly. Gold and treasure are a very straight forward incentive.  They reward characters for character actions.  This kind of non-crossover incentive works very well and is rarely changed.  Some GMs may be tempted to use treasure as a reward to players, but its a trap.  Giving the player influence the ability to influence treas...

Happy Holidays to friends and readers!  Today I thought I would share a Christmas tree inspired method for building a dungeon. When decorating a Christmas tree, one starts with a natural structure -- the tree.  The tree is grown (or made to resemble) a natural form.  Over top of the tree, we add lights as a structure to pull our view from the bottom to the top of the tree, highlighting all the character we will add in between.  Next we add garland to spread the lighting more diffusely and to add color.  Then we add ornaments that give us points of interest on the trees.  Some may be generically the same, while others are unique.  We add tinsel over the ornaments to increase the twinkle.  Finally the tree is topped with a special angel or star to finish the look. In our dungeon, we also need to start with something natural.  What was this area originally?  Was it an underground mine?  Was it a prison?  Was it a series o...

I don't know about other GMs, but I like to end epic campaigns with epic battles.  Sure there might be a big bad that the the PCs need to take out, or a dragon, or both, but have armies fighting in the background just makes for a cool final battle. It also is a good plot point to have throughout the campaign -- building up allies for the final showdown.  However, how does one GM a large final battle? The problem is simple to understand.  If you use the same mechanics that you use for normal battles, you will never reach the end.  The mechanics just weren't built for this many characters in play.  Instead of running the battle with a character vs character level of detail, you need to run it with a group vs group level of detail. To do this, you group allies and enemies except for special NPCs and PCs.  A typical group can be from 5 to 12, though more or less may work depending on the overall size of the encounter.  Each group takes and does damage ...

I always see new GMs asking for advice, so I wanted to put some discussions out there specifically targeted for new GMs.  This one I thought should be first because it is a mistake that a lot of GMs make and never outgrow.  Some folks will tell you that the GM is always right, and perhaps even that this old adage is rule 0.  We can talk about rule zero in a different post, but here I want to address the problem with the GM being always right. If a player engages in a game, there is a social contract between the GM and the player.  A big portion of this social contract is the rules.  As a player, I want to know the rules up front and not have them change during the game.  I want to engage in the game both outside the gaming session where I am growing my character on my own, and in the gaming session where I am growing my character with others.  If the GM either does not clarify the rules or simply overrides the rules at any whim in game, the rules con...

I am thinking about starting a Ponyfinder game very soon.  In preparation for this, I have been watching the cartoon  MLP: FiM.  So far, having watched the first two episodes, I am surprised, impressed, and slightly intimidated.  Unlike cartoons from my younger years, like Animaniacs, which had two sides to them, this cartoon has no "jokes for adults" written in.  It is pure, wholesome.  It is a level of cartoon purity I have not seen in years. And by pure wholesome, I mean no violence, not even a real enemy.  They defeated the foe using honesty, laughter, loyalty, kindness, generosity, and friendship.  Friendship, of course, generated magic, but the magic didn't kill the foe, it turned it into a friend. So, as an apprentice of Candlekeep, Baldur's Gate, and Neverwinter, and with the GM's heart of a dwarf, how am I supposed to GM a Ponyfinder game?  Will player's expect a wholesome "saving everyone" motif?  Is this the end of... dar...

My wife recently got me a "moleskin" style notebook, pink, and took the time to label it "Pink Dice GM".  It was a very thoughtful gift, especially since I had been wanting a nice notebook.  What I didn't realize when I received this thoughtful gift is how big of an impact it might have on my gaming. You see, lately I have been struggling to come up with new pieces of "flair" to keep the game interesting.  It is fun to pull some interesting pieces from one of my numerous books of beasts and items.  Sometimes, however, I like to add something unique -- my own pieces of flair.  Through the years, these are the things that really make the game fun. This notebook has become a place to keep my creative ideas as I come up with them.  So far I have captured ideas for unique creatures, items, and even plots in this notebook.  It is quickly becoming my treasure-trove of inspiration -- raw inspirations that come from me. As all GMs wonder, will there be a ...

GMs all have lots of clever tools for GMing in all sorts of places and scenarios.  Maybe he has a mega-kit for GMing at home.  Maybe she has a nifty on-the-go GMing backpack for cons.  Maybe you even have an online set of tools you use.  No matter what you use to GM, my bet is that you cover your bases and hit all of the requirements we are going to talk about today.  Below I have listed the basic things you need to GM effectively. RULES:  Access to a copy of the official accepted rules MAP:  A map of the environment (optionally shared with players; optionally with tokens for characters and other things in play) MAP KEY:   A key to where encounters, traps, and other things of interest are on the map, that the PCs don't have access to INITIATIVE TRACKER:  A way of keeping track of and displaying initiative order. DICE:  A way of rolling dice (rolling in secret, as needed) STATS:  A resource for stats for opponents, NPCs, trap...

One of the most cliche of all GM problems is dealing with a thief PC that steals from the party.  It ranks right up there with "the Thief and the Paladin" problem.  Most GMs will come across this problem sooner or later.  In this article I give some tips for dealing with the problem from an experienced (30+ years) GM.  Our goal in finding a solution to this problem is to find a way to both make the game more interesting and to deal with the problem in game without generating a player vs player conflict that can disrupt your gaming group. The first stage in setting up to deal with this problem is to establish your position early to your group of how you will deal with it.  My preferred position is that it will be discouraged, but always dealt with in game.  I usually also add that I will not allow player versus player combat, excepting perhaps nonlethal actions.  This gives the players some options without leading to the gaming group-killing scenario ...

Much like religion, advice comes in two forms -- general guiding rules that help you figure things out, and very specific rules that apply to only narrow situations.  This week I want to address a key general rule for a GM:  Be a Nice GM. We've all heard the horror stories of evil GMs just destroying characters for no reason.  We've seen the ongoing discussions of GMs figuring out how to tear down overpowered characters and punish ill-guided players.  We've probably even all played in Tomb of Horrors at least once, so we know how evil a place really can be for characters.  Unfortunately, these widespread tales really emphasize the ability of any GM to fall into the trap of being an Evil GM. Don't do that.  Follow these few easy rules and you will be a nice GM who still can have lots of fun and kill lots of characters without generating unhappy players: Rule 0.  Try to make sure everyone is having fun.  This may mean accommodating changes to...