Dice Deliberations

(Dork Tower August 14, 2002 by John Kovalic) Last week, I attended my 29th GenCon ("The Best Four Days in Gaming") in Indianapolis, IN. As always, it was a delightful whirlwind of games, shopping, and friends, though this year you could really feel the crowds with a record 70,000 attendees. I wore a mask for the exhibit hall and any movement through big crowds in the hallways, because that's 69,992 people around me that I don't know. One of the things I really enjoy at GenCon is seeing how the industry is changing, year-over-year. The biggest theme in the exhibit hall this year was definitely new dice. I found that surprising since there are always numerous dice vendors, with wide assortments of must-have shiny math rocks.  But this year, with people able to make their own dice with resin and other materials, it really seemed a step beyond.  It's All About the Dice There were probably 10-12 new dice exhibitors this year. Chessex , Crystal Caste and Q Workshop al

I recently had the opportunity to combine my job, a speech project, and my love of Role Playing Games into a single speech at Dungeons and Toast , my TTRPG-themed Toastmasters club. The Toastmasters speech was from my Persuasive Influence path and was the "Conflict Resolution" project, where you learn about conflict resolution techniques, then apply them to a problem and talk about the results. Conflict resolution, both as presented in the Toastmasters project, and in the types of work I do, does not mean addressing a hostile work environment or other conflicts of that nature. It has to do with helping intelligent, passionate groups of people to find a solution where there is no single right answer, and everything is a trade-off. My Project I challenged myself to tweak the project and make it about Role Playing Games, while still meeting the spirit of the project, and I found the perfect answer in a game that I ran for the club. For the 2022-2023 calendar year, the club ran

TM and © 2021 Monte Cook Games, LLC Invisible Sun   is a completely unique RPG by   Monte Cook Games . The game is designed from the ground up to be not only sandbox-style but to encourage collaborative world-building.  The world is surreal, has ubiquitous magic, all players can use magic in their own way and mysteries hide in every corner. Session Zero  for the game involves collaboratively creating neighborhoods, potential plot hooks, and goals for each person playing in the game. The first part of this process, the creation of each player’s neighborhood, is done by brainstorming ideas for neighbors, points of interest, and problems for the neighborhood; the person whose neighborhood it is picks off the list of ideas, and so creates their own neighborhood. On June 3, 2022, the Dungeons & Toast Toastmasters club did a Table Topics to recreate this process for a single neighborhood, with each speaker identifying one element. Instead of a single phrase, though, the speakers spent 1

  The Final Battle In the last session of my year-long arc as GM, the players went up against a crime boss who seemed to be the link to a key figure in a vast conspiracy. Their efforts had been going on for several months and they were starting to get close. They had names and locations, and had caused a lot of problems while getting this information. But the boss started lashing out with assassination attempts on the character pushing hardest for answers. The final days of the arc were spent checking out then invading the boss's headquarters building. Nearly two dozen opponents waited for them throughout his stronghold. Some were sentries at the door; others clustered in dining halls, or in the final room by the boss. Some were even sleeping during their downtime. The battles was fierce and dangerous--and the party claimed victory at the end of the day with only one opponent dead. For everybody else, they had used non-lethal tactics, allowing some to run, and leaving others uncons

  As a GM, I love alternate planes and have used them for some of my most successful stories. To me, they represent an opportunity to throw out the normal rules, to define a custom reality, and to introduce story elements that are completely alien to the characters. I do this in two ways: I take elements from another plane, and I have them intrude onto the material plane in ways that the players can see and interact with. This could be inhabitants of other worlds wandering into the character's realm with goals, searching or exploring, or even just lost. It could be natural elements that don't exist making their way through, such as a massive, but isolated rainstorm that occupies a 100' radius around a strange key. Or it could be something that is supposed to be bound to a plane that escapes into the character's path. Alternately, I send the characters to another plane and have them deal with whatever they find there. This can involve figuring out the rules of a plane to

  Volk the Scribe, by Steve Stark Mages write spellbooks. Storekeepers maintain records of their purchases and sales. Spies send secret correspondence between themselves and other people. Lovers send letters to each other. Travelers maintain a log of where they've been, and what and who they've seen. In a fantasy RPG setting, virtually everybody that players come across is writing. As my Trinity co-creator and I were discussing dwarves a few months ago we realized that there was an inherent problem and an opportunity. Dwarves are a very lawful and organized people with a strong sense of the community, and we realized that any old dwarven merchants probably have an obscene amount of writing that they've maintained over their career. Assuming they track every purchase, sale, inventory change, piece of correspondence and so on associated with the business, at the end of their 200+ year lives they must have chests full of dusty books, old scrolls and maybe even randomly scribbl

Cover art for Grimtooth's Traps  by Flying Buffalo   Despite being a certified Evil GM (tm) I've never really been a fan of traps. I throw them in occasionally, but just mundane ones designed to keep people out, not the subtle ones that people have concocted over the years. Grimtooth's Traps is the grandfather of all trap books, and in it, and its many sequels, it brings the art of trap making to new heights. They are not just examples of how the traps look to players, but show the implementation of them and what it would take to create  (and possibly defeat) them. Traps like these are designed to be encounters on their own, with significant resources put into their creation and with a goal of not just deferring intruders, but often ending them. Still, they have just never been something I wanted to put into my dungeons--which makes it all the more surprising for my players when I do. Today, I'm going to be talking a few of my standard traps, and the innovations I'v