Tag Archives: DND

My friends ruined Baldur’s Gate 3 for me

Leave a reply

This is going to be a post where I complain about something that I’m very lucky to have, which is a consistent DND group. I know for a lot of people, it’s something they can only wish for.

We’ve been playing together for about nine years, maybe more. People have come and gone but we’ve been pretty consistent for the most part. Considering how long I’ve been playing this game, you could say I have a particular fondness for it. So, when the money was right, I picked up Baldur’s Gate 3 because it was just more DND. I should have loved it.

I started playing it and got through the introduction off of the mind flayer’s ship and started assembling my party. It’s fun and a well made game. The story seems like it’s going to be engrossing. I’ve heard how much people love these characters.

But I found myself after two hours in, starting to get tired of it. I wasn’t disliking playing it but I just couldn’t get myself over the hill on it. I went back to playing Skyrim and modding the hell out of that when it hit me.

It wasn’t what DND is to me.

DND is a collaborative storytelling tool that everyone gets to get a hand on. And the hands that add to my stew are not expert but they know how to make that stew tasty as hell.

I won’t name names but I have one that I call Big Moves because throughout our current campaign, she has consistently made moves that have made me have to upend everything I’ve done. I showed them this portal that would take them to a different world where they could do things. She thought that no one should have that much power and blew it the hell up. The person creating the portal is now an enemy.

Did it annoy and shock me at the time? Of course, but it opens up new opportunities for me.

Then we have our resident murderhobo who I rolled a random encounter and they immediately robbed him. They took the salted beef and onions he had. Mostly out of spite for not having better things. She has blown up her fellow adventurers on multiple occasions.

Then we have the guy who I’ve turned into John Hammond and his ex into Ian Malcolm as they argue about the ethics of cloning and DNA manipulation. He has a suit made of flowers that acts like Iron Man armor.

Then we have the Luxodon dominatrix/inventor who has recently decided to multiclass into bard and use the language of dance to showcase their bardic abilities. Her mom is Dolly Parton from the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Why? Don’t worry about it. She has flying sex toys that she uses to attack people.

We have the Haregon ninja assassin who tried to swim into a shark’s mouth and got chomped in half when he rolled a nat 1 on his dexterity check. He got better.

Finally, we have a tabaxi cleric that tries desperately to get them to act civilly. It hasn’t worked.

I gave them this airship:

So, cool.

They named it the Good Ship Lollipop.

For me, I think the problem with Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it reflects a future that I don’t want. One where I’m playing DND without these people. When I play it, I just miss my friends.

Game Changer and Taskmaster: The Joy of Play

Leave a reply

There are a great number of game shows that exist in the world that I would not want to be on. Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? are two where I don’t need to embarrass myself on a national level. I have a podcast for that. Wheel of Fortune, that’s a solid maybe.

Game Changer is a definitive no. Sam Reich, son of former labor secretary and current administration shit talker, Robert Reich, puts his comedians through their paces and through challenges that border on psychological torture. Don’t believe me? Watch any of the Sam Says episodes.

The face of a man who put his dad’s penis on his game show

The whole point of Game Changer is that the contestants don’t know the rules. They have to figure out what the game is as they go along. The first episode shows the three contestants dealing with a lie detector being asked questions about themselves. It turns out it’s their three partners off camera operating it. Another episode has them answering simple questions but they have to find a working to buzz in. They acquire these by doing things such as throwing balls at a buzzer on a wall, calling a pizza place to deliver one or find the book one is hidden inside.

There’s a similar show to this that has set rules from the U.K called, Taskmaster. The setup is simple Greg Davies and his assistant, little Alex Horne(6’2) challenge five comedians over ten weeks to a series of challenges. These range from doing such things as not doing the thing, getting five grapes out of a mountain of flour while wearing flippers and spilling as little flour as possible, trying to figure out what bin Alex Horne is hidden in and a number of other ones. You can find all the episodes on YouTube. Any season is well worth a watch.

I’m not the first person to point out the similarities between these shows. It’s the reason that when people talk about an American version of Taskmaster, they want Sam Reich and Dropout in charge of it. But the main one for me, is the endless playfulness of both shows.

Game Changer can sometimes have some great prizes, such as trips or money but usually the prize is another joke for the audience and contestants. The buzzer episode’s prize was a bug zapper. Those that win Taskmaster get this haunting faux golden bust of Greg Davies.

See you in my nightmares, gold head.

Because of that the contestants are just trying their best to have fun and enjoy themselves. Laughter ratios competence on a scale of 5:1. This is why you hire professionals rather than any person off the street. This brings something else to the table, camaraderie. On Game Changer especially, the groups have been working together for years. Now their personalities take center stage. A lot has been made of annoying and trying to trigger the higher competitive and competent Brennan Lee Mulligan.

I know that you can’t take everything at face value. I know they’re doing it for profit. But the joyfulness is just such a thing that you can’t help but feel it.

I think it speaks to how important it is to keep playing. To keep yourself going and having fun. Not just in a you never know when your day will be your last but it’s good for your heart.

I think it’s good for the soul to do something, that you find funny. Not for anyone else and nothing that would hurt or inconvenience anyone else but just because you think it’s funny. Make up a funny voice that’s only for you plants. Give your cats nicknames that are longer than the introduction of the king of Westeros.

Find people that you love and engage them in play. It could be anything and you would find yourself freed in a way that you don’t know how.

I do this every Thursday night with my friends around the table during DND. For all those that thought it was satanic in the 70s and such, well it’s made of three things: improv, funny voices and maths. I think in the last few years those nights are the ones where I have laughed the longest and hardest. Being in the middle of a big bad’s speech when someone makes a fart noise.

When my father passed away on a Sunday I was left with four long days to grieve. When we got to the virtual table that Thursday, I told the group I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want anyone asking how I felt, I just wanted to play.

And for the first time in those 96 hours, I felt free. I felt light again. The pain was lost in stupid jokes and stories.

We dismiss play because we only think of it as something for children and children waste time because they’re allowed to waste time. The fact of the matter is that play is good no matter the age. It’s not a waste of time because if it gives you all the joy that it’s meant to, isn’t that worth it in the end?

Oh and one final note, I want to love the inclusion of both shows. They don’t discriminate by age, sex, race or sexuality. It furthers the joy of the show.

DND Talk: Give the Deck of Many Things Early

Leave a reply

In an earlier post I talked about the use of a D20 while writing. But let’s talk about DND in general. Think of me pulling up a chair, turning it around and sitting on it. Let’s rap, kids.

What is the Deck of Many Things? It’s a rare magical item in DND that allows the user to pull a number of cards that they announce to the table. These cards have a wide variety of uses such as giving you a rare magical item, summoning an avatar of death to kill your character or just making them disappear completely to giving them the ability to cast the wish spell. Each card can be a campaign changer. But hey, so can every roll.

And that’s why I think you should give it to them early. Usually, I’ve seen people give the deck when their players are about to hit double digit levels. Mostly, I think to make sure that they can defeat the avatar of death if they pull that card. I think that’s cowardice. I think that you should hand it to them early and see what they do with it.

I gave it to my players in the current campaign at level 6 or so. The person who has it, is known for big moves. She’s pulled three cards. One got her a fighter that is having an existential crisis over being born and having no past. The other did summon the avatar of death, which she one shotted with a very lucky roll. She pulled the void card, which saw her soul ripped from her body and we had a lot of fun with that too. The final was the gem card, which saw money become irrelevant to their game.

I think that it was a net success. Sure, the gem card offset the economy for my game but how much was it really going to change? Why would I want my players to be poor forever? It just gives them different strategies to use.

The fight with the avatar of death was just funny in universe because she summoned this monster and killed it in the middle of a marketplace.

Giving them this deck early gives them the chance to screw themselves over in so many ways. It opens up interesting paths and that’s the important thing. So, hand them that or the wonderful bag of magic beans and have some fun.

Hell, why not both?

Your Writing Can Benefit From a D20

Leave a reply

So for those of you in the less nerdy echelons of the world, you might not know what a D20 is. Below you’ll find a picture of it.

It’s the main dice used for the game, Dungeons and Dragons. Everything comes from this dice. The way it works, is that the dungeon master will tell someone to roll for something. They have various modifiers that add or subtract from the roll. The roll decides on how well they’re going to do.

For example, the DM sets the amount that they have to roll over. So, say you want to have your character jump over a small river. He’ll set a challenge of 10. The players roll and if they get above a ten, they jump over it. If they get under, something happens to prevent them from jumping over it.

There are two conditions though that could spell either doom or success for them. Rolling a natural 1, is known as a critical failure and usually means that something terrible could happen to the person. Like they fall into the river and start drowning because they suddenly forgot how to swim.

Then there is a critical success, which is when they roll a natural 20. This means they do a sick backflip over and land like they just won the gold at the Olympics.

Why am I telling you about this? Well, because I think that these mechanics make writing feel more real and random. In movies, we see the heroes fail usually about three times and then they succeed. We know they’re going to succeed. We know that they’re going to win.

But what if we didn’t? What if something so random happens that it completely changes the path of the story? That is the joy of using a D20 in your writing. You can suddenly throw in a twist that no one, including yourself, was expecting.

Another example, in one of my games, I had my players involved in a brutal death race in massive weaponized cars. In a reference to the fact that Speed Racer’s little brother and pet monkey constantly hid in the trunk of Speed’s car, a great ape(pictured below) was hidden in the trunk of the car in front of them. It was supposed to jump at them, land on the hood, obstruct their view and attack them.

Why didn’t you roll better you damn, dirty apes!

Well, it rolled a natural 1.

I had to follow through with the consequences, so it came up short, landed in front of the players’ car and was immediately run over and killed. Excitement averted, plan thwarted.

We all lost our goddamn minds with how funny it was. We still talk about it in the newer campaigns that we’ve done.

It’s things like this that make me keep rolling for my characters when I’m writing. Yes, you have to keep one hand on the wheel so that your story isn’t horrendously unbelievable but I do think that it adds a certain randomness to your stories that can make them truly unique.

It also helps with my character building. I’ll sometimes give them stat blocks like they are DND characters. There are six stats that make up a DND character: Strength, Intelligence, Charisma, Dexterity, Wisdom and Constitution. Strength, Dexterity and Charisma are pretty self explanatory. Constitution is how well they handle sickness and drinking things like poison. Wisdom and Intelligence might seem similar but they’re thought of more as street smarts and book smarts respectively. Or as the common phrase goes in describing them: “Intelligence is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that they don’t go in a fruit salad.”

Even if you don’t want to try this in your own writing, I think that playing DND makes you a better storyteller whether you’re a DM or a player. It forces you to think on your feet and improvise through solutions. It can lead to beautiful moments between players, where they can work things out that have been bothering them. It is a true joy.