Alternate Rules: Random and Non-Essential Encounter Resolution

Random encounters.

Ugh.

I hate random encounters. I see their main purpose, to add an element of random danger to cross country travel or dungeon delving, and it has merit. But they're nothing more than a time sink. Completely pointless. Yes, you can have random encounters have meaning by adding special encounters to them, like when you roll a 12 on the random encounter chart and end up stumbling across the Wanderer or the Hound and that having an unexpected effect on future sessions. Those can be interesting. Most random encounters are just randomly running into 12 goblins in the dungeon or stumbling across a shambling mound on its cross country shamble.

Ok, first of all, as the GM, you should fucking know how many goblins/soldiers/whatever are in your dungeon, and you should know their patrol routes, assuming they have patrol routes and patrolling regularly fits with the monster type. Ok? If you don't, you're being lazy. These are things that should not be randomly generated on the spot. Unless of course you're playing a sort of randomized sandbox campaign. There are either thirty goblins in the dungeon or there are not. They either patrol or they do not. They either respond to the loud sounds of battle that echo through the dungeon, or they do not. One of the things I despise is reinforcements appearing from nowhere, like they're miraculously summoned by magic, rather than coming from another part of the dungeon where they could reasonably hear the yells of their allies that are currently engaging the PCs.

Anyway. Random and non-essential encounter resolution. That's what we're here to discuss, right?

Non-essential fights are those fights designed purely to drain resources. These are the fights from scenarios where you're just trying to pad the run time or following the guidelines in a DMG for X amount of encounters. They serve no real narrative purposes and aren't terribly memorable because of mechanics, environment, or foes. Or they're fights that you hadn't planned on that the players pick with faceless NPCs like when the players walk down an alley or something and a gang of thugs greets them and the players botch their Charisma (Intimidation) check and are unwilling to pay the 5 gp toll. They're boring and don't feature compelling mechanics or environments or their only purpose is to drain resources so the PCs are unable to leverage their full power and abilities against the end boss or whatever.

Additionally, random and non-essential encounters both chew up an excessive amount of time, because combat eats up the most time in a gaming session and it's not because of rolling initiative or indecision on the part of players. It's because combat is time consuming because it involves everybody doing something. Fine, you can shave off seconds by being prepared and pre-rolling your initiative and attacks and not getting distracted, but four or more players and a GM that likely controls a similar amount of NPCs (if not more) each have to take actions and that eats up time. 

I don't include random encounters in my scenarios and I only include non-essential encounters if I have to. If a particular bandit keep has sixty bandits as members of the bandit group and the players wander in when all sixty are relaxing at the keep, I'm going to make the PCs slog through sixty fucking bandits. It will take time and be boring and they will hate it, but if there are sixty bandits in a bandit keep, they are going to have to deal with all of them whether it be via murder, intimidation, or just avoiding them. I do this because to me, even though they're non-essential encounters, they need to be there for the sake of continuity and perhaps a bit of realism. If a bandit group has sixty bandits, yes, the players are going to have to resolve dealing with all of those bandits because that's how many bandits there are. If they only deal with sixteen bandits out of sixty, what was the point? Ok, the lead bandit is deposed, dead, or brought to justice or whatever. There are still forty-four bandits out there and one of them is bound to be interested in leading the rest to raid local merchants and villages. What was the point? Nothing has changed. Why should the players consider it a success or the villagers consider the reward earned?

Ok, so random encounters are dumb and non-essential encounters waste time. So how do we expedite them if the GM feels the need to use them? This idea is going to be written for 5th Edition, but the general gist of it can apply to more than that. Since the goal here is to imply difficulty or complication or randomness, and not to kill the players, my thought is to resolve random and non-essential encounters as a skill check of sorts.

There are a few ways you can do this. You can treat it as a skill challenge and have every player participate. You could treat it as a pure skill check where a player rolls based on his skills for the group to resolve an encounter vs. a DC or relevant opposed roll from the adversaries, but that's an inelegant one and kind of steps on talky characters making talking skill checks to avoid encounters and steps on stealthy characters making stealthy skill checks to avoid encounter. Or you could just treat it as a group check with modifiers based on the advantages each side possesses. Blah blah blah blah.

The purpose is to negate the pointless slog of random and non-essential combat encounters, to resolve them quickly in a satisfying way for the players and the GM. I say this method is for combat encounters because if you're taking the route of non-combat to resolve another type of encounter, you're going to typically be using pre-existing mechanics to resolve that (dialogue and stealth skills and such).

My thought is to have the players make a d20 roll as a group with their proficiency bonus (for the sake of this discussion, assume that all players are the same level and that sort of thing and no one ever has to worry about varying proficiency levels between members) and give them advantage or disadvantage based on how they compare to the foe and how they want to resolve the encounter. The purpose is to resolve it quickly without getting into nitty gritty details, so it is abstract. If the players outnumber the foes, advantage. If the players are outnumbered by the foes, disadvantage. Maybe the Wizard says he'll use a third level spell slot to cast fireball against the enemies (make sure you deduct that from their character sheet) and that gets them advantage. Maybe the Fighter agrees to use action surge and that gets them advantage. Use the normal rules for advantage and disadvantage nullifying each other and only applying once to a roll. Once you figure out whether the PCs have advantage, disadvantage, or neither on the roll, make the d20 + proficiency bonus roll.

Since the goal is to resolve the encounter quickly and abstractly, rather than kill the players, the result is never that they lose the combat and die. The d20 roll is meant to represent the randomness of combat, obviously. Sometimes players get unlucky and have to use more of their resources to combat a not terribly tough foe. Sometimes foes get lucky and critical hit the Wizard in round one and drop them. So the way you resolve it is based on the success of the group's roll. Maybe on a natural 20 they wade through the combat like golden fucking gods untouchable by man or fell beast. Maybe on a natural one they all take 1d8 damage and one of the players is dropped to 0 hit points and must make a death save once. Then you vary the results, with high results being less costly and lower results using up more of their resources like hit dice and class abilities and that sort of thing.

My thought is to break it up into a range of results as follow:

• 20+          : Amazing success, player's succeed at no cost to themselves. 
• 11 - 19    : One player loses 1 hit die. Determine who loses the hit die randomly. Players may opt to expend one ability that is restored on a short rest instead of a losing a hit die.
• 2 - 10       : Players lose a total of 1d4 hit dice. Determine who loses a hit die randomly. Players may opt to expend one ability that is restored on a short rest instead of a losing a hit die.
• 1           : Each player loses one hit die and one player, randomly determined, must make a death save. Players may opt to expend one ability that is restored on a short rest instead of losing a hit die. If the character that makes the death saving throw fails, he is not at 0 hit points, it is merely noted that he has failed a death saving throw that day. 

So that is kind of what I'm thinking. I think it does what I want, but I'm not sure it's perfect. I like it more than randomly assigning damage or something. It burns player resources, just like actually going through a fight would, and that's the main purpose here. So that's a success. By opting to use hit dice instead of dealing hit point damage or something, and giving the players the option of expending short rest abilities, it kind of cuts down on the 15 minute adventuring day as well. I think. Maybe. Who the fuck knows? I do think resolving non-essential combat encounters this way will result in keeping the players fresher for longer in the adventure, which will allow a DM to keep the actual plot-related combats more interesting and dangerous. 

Regardless, I think it does what I want. A quick discussion about advantage vs. disadvantage when fighting a group of mooks and making a die roll is way fucking quicker than actually going through three or four rounds of relatively pointless combat. This is actually similar to something I'd occasionally do in 4th Edition where after a certain point everyone expended their encounter powers, but foes were still standing and I'd just call the fight and charge everyone a healing surge instead of going through an hour of everyone spamming their at will attacks for round after round. I think that was a popular way of resolving 4th Edition's long fights back then. 

The Why of Yofga and Hasta

So I know I mentioned rebooting Hekinoe to some degree, but that's on the back burner for a bit. For now, the main task is to get my 5th Edition campaign for Kyle's group put together. I've got a world and some house rules and so on and so forth. I even have what I think is a plot that will work.

Part of me keeps asking myself, why bother with a 5th Edition campaign on a world that exists in the same universe as Hekinoe, but isn't Hekinoe? Especially when I'm initiating some major changes to Hekinoe. Well, there are a couple reasons for this of varying degrees of merit. So let's talk about those today. I guess?

The first reason I want to run a 5th Edition campaign is to give Kyle and Kevin a break. They've been alternating campaigns basically since I joined their group like two years and some change ago. I just figure that it would be a nice break for both of them if another DM steps in for a bit to let them both play. I figure that I was always appreciative of those times Eric stepped in to try and DM something with our group, so Kevin and Kyle might feel the same way if I took up the mantle for a bit as well. I dunno. I very much get what it feels like to run an endless series of campaigns with little to no respite from it, so I guess I just want to show my appreciation for being accepted into the group and for having a chance to play a dozen or so characters.

The second reason is that I miss DMing. I am definitely something of a control freak when it comes to gaming and I struggle constantly (and not always successfully) with telling everyone what to do and reminding Kyle and Kevin of this or that. I'm sure it wears on Kevin and Kyle and the other players and resisting that urge to tell everyone what to do and why they should do it wears on me. In addition to wanting to be in control again, I miss crafting environments and NPCs and plots. I miss worldbuilding. I miss surprising and confusing and terrifying my players. I miss having secrets and knowing things. I miss playing the "I don't know. Does it?" game. I miss DMing.

The third reason, and this is a snarky and selfish one, is that I am fucking sick of "immersion." I have expressed a certain dislike for the immersive aspects of our current campaign. We've always experimented with dim lighting, and it has always given me a headache and I have been up front about that. With the fog machine and soundtrack and lack of maps and visual media, it's borderline unbearable. I'm just sick of being constantly distracted from the game and what everyone is saying by the hissing fog machine and the soundtrack, and never knowing what is happening or what our environment looks like or where anyone is due to lack of representation of those aspects that I can see, and going home after every session with a raging headache from squinting at a backlit tablet in a lightless basement and a scratchy throat and congested nose from the fog I'm constantly sucking in. So yeah, full disclosure, part of why I want to DM for this group is so that I can game in a well lit and comfortable environment.

Side note: Fred and I have recently discussed how when I run my desert world campaign I should make it immersive theater of the mind. By immersive theater of the mind, I mean we should have a space heater running constantly in Kevin's basement while we game, ban all beverages while gaming, and bring a powerful spotlight to blast people with periodically to represent the unrelenting gaze of Hasta's furious sun, and also periodically throw handfuls of sand into their faces. That would definitely be hilarious and immersive and maybe just a smidgen petty. Maybe more than a smidgen. Maybe a lot more than a smidgen. Hehe.

The fourth reason is that I want to challenge myself a little bit. My comfort zone is Hekinoe, Pathfinder, and a certain group of players. I feel like it is important to step outside that comfort zone and challenge myself a little. So instead of the somewhat environmentally stable technologically advanced fantasy world of Hekinoe, I'm trying a campaign on a dying fantasy desert world. Instead of using something I can quote rules and stats from memory from, like Pathfinder, I'm running 5th Edition (which yeah, I'm pretty familiar with at this point, but still). Instead of gaming with Eric and Jason and Lance and Jeremy, etc, etc, I'm running a campaign with this newer group. Instead of doing my politics and warfare plots, I'm doing a semi-tropeish save the world campaign. So yeah, I'm kind of challenging myself a little bit to step outside of my comfort zone a wee bit. Which is cool. It's important to try new things and grow as a GM. I guess.

So those are the reasons why I want to do a 5th Edition, non-Hekinoe campaign. So what am I trying to do with the campaign?

This ties in somewhat to challenging myself. My goal for this is to do a save the world campaign, which I don't do too often. If I have, it's been a while. Pre-Hekinoe at least. My goal is to try and make a save the world campaign, but put my spin on it. Keep my plot creation ideal of grey morality and NPCs with personalities and a world that responds to the actions of the PCs but doesn't pause while they're not directly interacting with a given portion of it. 

My goal is also to use this campaign as a means of focusing and disciplining my scenario creation. Back in the Orcunraytrel Arc we'd game maybe once every two months, sometimes with longer stretches between sessions. We'd augment this with constant RPs via email. Emailing to do RPs between sessions isn't really an option with this group. It's been tried before and kind of falls flat. This group does a game every two weeks, almost without fail, thing that I am very unused to. I'm not sure how my somewhat lackadaisical scenario creation is going to cope with that. I'm normally way more slackass about scenario creation than that. So I'm going to have to get into the practice of disciplining myself and focusing harder on getting scenarios done and that sort of thing. I'm not sure how I'll ultimately cope with this or if I'll be able to keep it up, but I'm going to challenge myself to try. 

Or I'm just going to say fuck it, play video games, and pull everything out of my ass. We'll see.

Another goal is to put 5th Edition and my house rules for it through their paces. I want to hack it up and twist and see how far I can push it before it breaks. Pathfinder tolerated Hekinoe and my house rules fairly well. I want to see what happens when I put 5th Edition under some stress and change how its rules work for magic and recovery and so on. I've tweaked things here and there in ways that tickle my fancy and fit with Hasta and the way it is, now I want to see how that impacts 5th Edition and how it works in a practical way and not a theoretical way. Like yeah, theoretically, I understand that combat is going to be made easier by the group having access to healing spells that are limited only by the fact that they can be used once per round, rather than by spell slots per day. But how is that going to interact with limited recovery of hit dice and being subjected to exhaustion levels more frequently? Six levels of exhaustion kills you, even if you're at full health, and you gain exhaustion levels in my house rules when you hit half hit points and 0 hit points. How are those going to work together? I'm excited to see how all my house rules interact with one another and I'm excited to see how they need to be tweaked. It'll be neat.

So there's some of my goals for my 5th Edition campaign and that sort of thing. Wee!

Hekinoe 2.0

Hekinoe 2.0, eh? We're doing this? Really?

Apparently.

So here's the thing. I keep stalling out on converting Hekinoe to GURPS. I'm not sure why. I go and go and go and I blog about it, I get hung up on races or sorcery or psionics or Nel or what the fuck ever. Then I stop blogging for a year and don't touch GURPS Hekinoe for a year. I've get an idea that I think might help me get back into working on Hekinoe and moving towards a point where I can run things in Hekinoe. 

So let's talk about Hekinoe for a bit.

Hekinoe is a little bit busy. We've got lots of continents. Myrecenar, Fendojon, The North, The South, The Known World, Ieangetniv, Grenaldeen, Orcunraytrel, Fresgulen, The Known World, Yarrom, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. The thing is, most of these continents (aside from Orcunraytrel, The Known World, Grenaldeen, Fresgulen, The North, and The South) are of very little importance and are very poorly fleshed out. Ieangetniv definitely has nostalgic value though.

So Hekinoe is a little busy, lots of places and names with only a very few fleshed out thoroughly. Let's talk about those fairly fleshed out areas. The Known World is super crammed with shit. Orcunraytrel is a little less so. So what we're dealing with here are a few highly concentrated regions of stuff and then a bunch of poorly fleshed out continents. It's kind of a poor way to have a campaign world set up. It would make sense if we were primarily focused on The Known World, which we kind of are, and they were exploring the rest of the world and learning about things, which they are currently not. The problem is that with the technology level of The Known World, they would be exploring the world around them and countries there would have colonies and that sort of thing. Trade and travel and exploration would be occurring. But they're not. We have eight or more fairly powerful nations crammed into a landmass only a little bit larger than The United States. It's not completely unbelievable (I think), but it does make for a very very busy continent with lots of bits and pieces moving and interacting.

I've had a thought, and it has gotten some positive reactions from some of my go to people. My thought is that I remove all the useless, vaguely defined bits of Hekinoe that don't interest anyone and then spread out all the nonsense of The Known World. So remove Myrecenar and Yarrom, and that one continent that I forgot the name of, and then turn most of the nations of The Known World into their own continents. So Kusseth, The Fallen Empire, The Fell Peaks, The Old Empire, etc all get their own continents and The Known World becomes a continent of colonies.

This has the benefit of spreading out the world more, so it at least seems more filled in. Additionally, turning The Known World into a place of colonies makes it more sensible for countries like Serethnem, Vyanthnem, and Steeltown to exist. So when the Rankethlek fled the Fallen, instead of moving like 25 miles west of their undead masters, they moved to another continent. Serethnem and Vyanthnem already work pretty well in The Known World because their rulers fled a different continent. By spreading out the main empires of Hekinoe we also make it much more reasonable for Haven to exist. If more sea travel and trade and exploration occur, the pirate nation has much more believable viability as a country. 

Additionally, I'd remove The Plains of Dust from The Known World because no one has ever been interested in the horsemen of that land and I literally have no background information on them. Like seriously. There's a flag Jeremy made for me and that's it. Clearly that region is not vital to the lore of Hekinoe. In the same sort of thought process, I'd remove the lizardfolk of Mawknell in Orcunraytrel and probably one or two of the Asosan But Not Asosan kingdoms as well.

So this isn't exactly a reboot or a new campaign world, it's more of a heavy modification of a pre-existing one. This change will unfortunately negate all of the super cool maps Jeremy has made. Sorry dude. The lore and everything will for the most part be unchanged. Keroen Skathos is a thing that exists, Kaleshmar fell, The Fallen are made of Elduman, etc, etc, etc. Just the physical shape of the world will be altered. Hopefully it will make Hekinoe feel more fleshed out and less like the only place anything remotely interesting is happening is in The Known World.

I dunno, I have really positive feelings about this idea. I might almost be described as being excited about this.

Dragons...Yeah...Let's Talk About Some Dogdamn Dragons

So there is this dude on YouTube named Matt Colville, he's got a lot of interesting and good ideas. I've recently completed watching his Running The Game series on his YouTube channel. He's got a lot of smart ideas overall, but one thing about his Running the Game #32 video is that he says, "I mean ultimately I think dragons in D&D are first and foremost large bags of hit points with  breath weapons." as well as "But I'm not the only person that thinks that dragons in 5th Edition are somewhat boring."

This section of the video (the first 5 minutes or so) explains how an ancient red dragon would be much more interesting and dangerous if it had an aura of fire damage with no save or attack roll associated with it, or if it had a focused breath weapon that did fire damage against one target that did more damage than normal (because 91 fire on a failed save isn't enough?) and lit it on fire, as well as removing fire resistance from targets that fail saving throws against its breath weapon attacks for the rest of the battle. He also says that it would be more interesting if the dragon's frightful presence had a lingering effect. He briefly discusses the idea of using the 5th Edition dragons as spellcasters variant, but kind of says that adds another mechanic to the encounter that forces more book keeping upon the DM.

The overall point of this video is the idea that 5th Edition DMs can draw a lot of inspiration and steal a lot of cool mechanics from 4th Edition. Which is true, to a certain extent. As I've said before, 4th Edition is hands down the worst edition of D&D, but it is a very solid and enjoyable tabletop tactics RPG. Its rules would be great for implementing something like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre or something of that nature. But they're flat out awful for representing D&D. That said, there are definitely mechanics and concepts to be found in 4th Edition that can augment 5th Edition combat if you're finding it to be a bit stale and boring at higher levels. 

Before we go on, I want to mention that this guy has a really great understanding of aspects of 5th Edition. Part of the video talks about the math behind the mechanics of magic items, proficiency bonuses, and AC. This guy seems to have a pretty solid understanding of the underpinnings of the math of the game. Not enough DMs spend enough time understanding the why behind the action economy and math of the game. A lot of DMs make judgement calls and change rules on the fly with a very minimal understanding of the how and why of the game's underpinnings. I typically run things with a fair amount of house rules, and while I understand the underpinnings of the game, I typically don't give a fuck. I change things because I want them to fit with how my campaign world works or because I want to make the game fit my tastes. Is that any better than making random judgment calls and house rules at random times? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I won't call this guy stupid, because he's definitely not. He's an experienced DM with a lot of great ideas and as the previous paragraph states, he has a strong understanding of the way 5th Edition works. But calling dragons nothing more than large sacks of hit points and implying they are at all boring is incredibly, adorably, preposterous. I am of the mindset that if you are running a dragon of any significant age and your players are bored by the fight and you're bored running the fight, you're doing it wrong.

Let's discuss a few things about ancient red dragons in 5th Edition.

First and foremost, they're a CR 24 creature with an AC of 22 and 546 hit points with an Intelligence of 18. So yeah, they could be referred to as a sack of hit points with a breath weapon. But using that as their main descriptor does them a disservice. If we go by challenge rating alone, an ancient red dragon is a hard or deadly encounter for any party of 4 - 6 players of like 16th level or lower. Obviously the lethality of the dragon increases the lower level the party is. The breath weapon deals 91 fire damage on a failed save. That's enough to chew through almost half the average hit points of a 16th level Barbarian with a 20 in Constitution (12 at 1st level, 15 levels x 7 HP a level, Con bonus of 5 HP x 16 levels = 197 hit points), assuming he fails the DC 24 Dexterity save. Barbarians of this level do have advantage on Dexterity saving throws, assuming they can see it coming, so there's that.

I'm going to get one thing out of the way at the start here. If you are running a dragon battle as a DM and your dragon has an Intelligence score greater than 2 (the Intelligence score of most animals) and it is not flying around, you've fucked up. If the dragon is sitting in its cave fighting the players in an enclosed space where it cannot dive bomb them and unleash its breath weapon and such from range, you've fucked up. Put away your DM screen and your dice, apologize to your players and Gygax's legacy and try again later. You're better than this. You know it, I know it, and the Gygax within us all knows it.

Moving on.

Now if you're doing this right, you've got this dragon making its lair in something like a an active or dormant volcano. For me, I'd make it somewhat active. Maybe not actively gushing lava, but it's a hot place and the dragon has made his home somewhere where the players have to navigate through hazardous terrain to get to it, but the dragon also has a way to exit the volcano rapidly. If it's a really active volcano, maybe he just swims through a lava tube to the exterior or claws his way up the interior walls (ancient reds have a climb speed) of the volcano and exits out of the spout (do volcanoes have spouts? is it called a spout? an orifice?). Or he just flies the fuck out. I'm not a volcano expert. Maybe he just bashes his way out. He's gargantuan size and has a Strength of 30. That's big enough to knock a hole in a rock formation, right?

Two great things 5th Edition added to powerful and iconic monsters are legendary actions and lair actions. On initiative 20, the dragon can make his lair do one of the following things: tremor (knocking creatures prone), cause a geyser of lava (doing some decent fire damage), or create a cloud of volcanic vapor (obscuring line of sight for most people that are not the dragon, it has blindsight). So when our YouTuber talks about focused breath weapon attacks and auras of fire, I feel like the lair actions of this creature already kind of cover those. Maybe not precisely, but enough that I feel like adding an additional damage effect to the dragon is a little bit much.

So what sorts of interesting things can this dragon do that don't involve adding unique abilities into its stats? Yeah, breathing fire, greatsword damage claws, and a couple legendary actions are cool, but let's do something interesting that is not specifically described in the creature's statblock.

Ok, so the dragon has a Strength of 30 and can fly at a rate of 80 feet per turn. Medium creatures with a Strength of 30 can carry 450 pounds and this doubles for every size category bigger than medium, so our gargantuan red dragon has a pretty significant carrying capacity, which means he has a pretty significant lift, carry, drag capacity. What's your average medium size player weigh? Two or three hundred pounds? Cool.

So the dragon starts out going toe to toe with the party's plate wearing Fighter. As its action, the dragon uses frightful presence. Because of multiattack, it then gets to make two claw attacks and a bite. The dragon makes a grapple checks with all three attacks. Grapple checks pit its +10 Strength roll vs the Fighter's Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check. Given the fact that the dragon is three size categories larger than the medium size Fighter, I would be inclined to give it advantage on such a roll. But that's just me. So the dragon grabs our Fighter. Since the Fighter is three sizes smaller, the dragon's movement is not impeded by grappling and the dragon flies up at 80 feet per round. Let's say the dragon flies straight up for two rounds. We're now sitting at 160 feet up in the air and the dragon releases the Fighter. This fall, assuming it is not stopped in some way by something like feather falling, deals 16d6 bludgeoning damage (average of 56 damage, twice as much as 3rd level fireball or lightning bolt). Now, obviously your dragon is dropping the Fighter into a lava lake, so maybe 16d6 falling damage is excessive. I know hitting water from great heights can do some serious damage to the human body, but I'm not sure how lava compares in terms of density and whatnot to water. Anyway. Lava. 5th Edition doesn't appear to have rules for lava that I can find, but in Pathfinder (which has rules for falling into liquids as well as onto the ground), complete submersion deals 20d6 fire damage (average of 70 damage) each round. Assuming your Fighter is wearing a decent amount of metal armor, yeah, he's submerged. Alternatively, if you are kind to your players and they're foolishly not all packing resistance to fire, you can say that the countryside around the dragon's lair is just covered in spiky rock formations and treat the impact on the ground like activating a spiked pit trap.

So that's pretty cool and very in keeping with what an intelligent foe, like a dragon with an Intelligence of 18, might do to neutralize a foe. It keeps him at a distance from foes and is guaranteed to inconvenience someone. Even if the Fighter is immune or resistant to the fire damage from lava, he still has to escape from the lava, which is going to take some time, or require the intervention of other players. He also has to worry about drowning if he can't get out quickly. This is a cool deadly thing that causes tension that requires no additional mechanics to be added to the game. It also gives the players a chance to think quickly and potentially do something really cool and surprising to extricate the Fighter from his fall or get him out of the lava. So it gives your dragon a chance to fuck the players up and it gives them the chance to be awesome and creative as well.

This next idea isn't super cool, but I kind of like it. So let's say this dragon lives in a remote region within a fairly dormant volcano. There's still lava and the like, but this thing isn't going to vomit up rivers of burny death any time in the near future. Let's say two or three hundred years ago, the dragon (who is richer than Dog) hired a bunch of Druids (or we use the dragons as spellcasters variant) to create massive forests around its lair (maybe with the plant growth spell). Once it was all growing nicely, the dragon obviously killed all the Druids, because he's chaotic evil and there's no way he's parting with any part of his hoard willingly. So the players wander into this massive centuries old growth of forest and finally reach the dragon's dormant volcano lair. The dragon immediately flies out of the lair and ignites the forest with its breath weapon. Now the players have to deal with a dragon and a fairly hostile environment. This isn't merely a little plot of woods burning from an out of control campfire. This is a forest that has been magically augmented to be fairly large and extremely overgrown. It is now all on fire (or at least spreading rapidly), getting super hot, and is full of smoke. Pathfinder has rules for forest fires and players having to deal with them, but 5th Edition does not. I'd probably combine the effects of some low level spells that obscure visibility (like fog cloud) and heat (like bonfire) as well as making everything difficult terrain. Additionally, if the players are near the dragon but not actively in the fire in the forest, you can have the dragon use its wing buffet ability to knock the players down and blow sheets of fire at them.

Even if this all doesn't offer a shit ton of tactical advantage to the dragon, it certainly sets the scene for a fucking amazing set piece battle. Everyone is coughing, everything is obscured by thick smoke, trees are cracking and exploding from the intense heat. Somewhere there is a massive fucking dragon roaring like an angry fucking god. Alternatively, perhaps the dragon set up a dam of some kind and instead of using its breath weapon to ignite the surrounding forest, maybe it just knocks down the dam and now there is smoke and heat and difficult terrain and rivers of lava constricting where the players can go. 

Let's go another, less cinematic and burny route. So maybe this arrogant rich as fuck ancient red dragon has been in this region for a long ass time. Maybe this dragon seeks adulation and recognition for how awesome he is. Maybe this dragon is also a lazy shit and wants servants, but can't really stand the stench and incompetence of kobolds. So this dragon sets himself up as the lord of a region. He allows towns and such to flourish, as long as everyone pays him taxes for his horde. Maybe the townspeople see this dragon as their lord, or he masquerades as a mortal line of kings, and this dragon has armies or an order of knighthood serving him. These don't have to be evil soldiers either. They could be Lawful Neutral samurai types that serve their lord and only their lord and good and evil don't really matter to their terms of service.

So now instead of kobold mooks as hoard guards and servants, we have actual soldiers and knights that serve this dragon. Dudes with actual weapons and armor of quality and a competent understanding of tactics that goes beyond the "we outnumber them, attack!" or "they outnumber us, flee!" that you typically see from kobolds. We see kobolds serving dragons a lot, and kobolds are kind of joke to players (unless the kobolds have a belt of dragon might). If you change all those squealing kobolds to a group of mounted and experienced knights dedicated to the service of their liege, you now have a bit of a change to how the PCs may approach their foes and how their foes will respond to the PCs. Additionally, you can add issues like do the knights know they serve an evil dragon to the scenario. Do the knights care? Is the dragon in the castle, or is his lair far away in a nearby mountain? If the players significantly piss off the dragon, will it raze the countryside? Does it have hostages somewhere? Do the players care about these types of things?

Another way you can augment dealings with older dragons to make them more exciting is to apply the "I'm old, entertain me" descriptor to the dragon. Maybe this dragon is older than ancient and is bored out of his mind, kind of just going through his days napping atop a truly massive hoard. Maybe this dragon is easy to find and his lair is easy to enter. Maybe the dragon even encourages challengers to spice up his days of lounging. However, once the PCs enter the lair, instead of kobolds or lava rivers, they discover that this lair is actually a funhouse deathtrap dungeon.

So imagine for a moment, you've wandered through the Tomb of Horrors and all that entails. Instead of finding Acererak at the end, you find a tunnel that opens up into the interior of a volcano. You look up and you can see the mouth of the volcano above you and the sky through it, obscured by smoke and shimmering waves of heat. Before you sits a truly massive dragon flanked by suitably epic rivers of molten lava. It greets you. It tells you that it has been amused by your endeavors in its dungeon. You have earned the right to leave with your lives or face it directly (now that you have been run ragged by the deathtrap you just wandered through). Make your choice quickly, or it will be decided for you. Then the volcano dramatically rumbles and the earth tremors because ancient reds can do that too. It's a regional ability within 6 miles of their lairs. Another regional ability around their lairs are portals to The Elemental Plane of Fire popping open (which dragons should totally drop players into). But yeah bro, dragons in 5th Edition are totally boring. 

Anyway.

So you've got this bored dragon amused by the suffering of the players and the players need to quickly make a choice. Do they dare face off against the dragon now or do they return when they're stronger? Has the dragon been observing their efforts in the dungeon and familiarizing itself with their capabilities? How many gewgaws does it have in its horde that can negate what they can do? Will the dungeon remain the same for their next visit if they leave now? This concept doesn't necessarily make the dragon itself more difficult or interesting, but it does make dealings with the dragon more interesting than attacking it directly in its lair. The players have to think and make choices about how they proceed and weigh pros and cons. 

So there are a few ideas about dragons and playing them as the centerpiece to an adventure. It's not hard to see that you can do interesting things with dragons (if you decide to devote more effort to it than reading their statblock). You just have to think of them the right way and understand what you can do with the rules presented already. There's no need for new mechanics to be added to spice them up (unless you are doing this with the intent to create a legendary and unique dragon). They're dragons. They're fucking spicy enough. 

These are three ideas I came up with on a whim and we haven't even discussed innate spellcasting. Spellcasting with dragons in 5th Edition allows them to cast a number of spells 1/day. They get one spell per point of Charisma modifier and the level of the spells can be no more than 1/3 of the dragon's challenge rating. Which means the ancient red dragon gets six spells total.  You'd have to give them spells based on their age category because each age category has different ability scores.. Young reds have access to 3rd level or lower spells, adults have access to 5th level or lower spells, and ancient red dragons have access to 8th level or lower spells.

Dragons are boring? Folks, go and fuck yourselves. You give me an ancient red dragon in its own lair that gets to pick six spells to use once a day and I'll hand you a TPK. 

So as a final thought, let's go back to the fiery aura, laser beam breath weapon, removing fire resistance, lingering fear effect, and lighting on fire spoken of in the video. Yeah, let's talk about those. If we use the variant of dragons as spellcasters, guess what we can do? As one of the the 8th level or lower spells, we can take investiture of flame that the dragon can cast. Would you like to know what it does? Any creature that moves within 5 feet of you for the first time or starts its turn there takes 1d10 fire damage. No save, no attack roll. It also allows you to use your action to create a beam of fire. Which is not as impressive as a focused breath weapon because it only deals 4d8 fire damage. But you could also take spells like lightning bolt to simulate that. Yeah, it deals lightning damage. So the fuck what? That covers the ignore fire resistance thing and lightning is fucking hot. Just describe it as a white hot beam of fire. Or you could take spells that deal radiant damage. So it's already fiery as written, but the fire resistance of the players is useless. Which is what we're trying to achieve here. As far as a lingering fear effect, I'm not sure how to achieve that. The frightful presence ability already lasts for one minute on a failed save. But I think what he was getting at was a weaker version lingering for a bit on a successful save. My thought is that if your player saved against the frightful presence (which has a pretty high DC of 21) or outlasted its duration (which is 10 rounds of combat), it seems a bit dickish to subject them to it anyway. 

Oh. Starting things on fire. You know what? Fire ignites things. If you feel your players have taken enough fire damage to be lit on fire, light them the fuck on fire. If 91 fucking points of dragon related fire damage isn't enough to start a fucking player on fire, I don't know what is. As far as I'm concerned, every fire effect that actually deals damage should have a chance to ignite players, and even if they're not on fire, their gear should be because it takes way less heat for things like clothing and hair to begin burning than it does human flesh. Plus, metal gets hot, so after being subjected to 91 fire damage from a red dragon or being dumped in lava, your Fighter's plate mail is going to be glowing cherry red and melting their skin off or at least scorching and igniting all the padding beneath the plates of metal. So, in closing, fire is hot. So is lightning, but that's another issue. If you feel that a particular heat source is hot enough to start something on fire, start that thing on fire. Don't add a special unique ability tied to a CR 24 monster. You're an adult, make a judgment call.

Dragons are fucking awesome. They don't need special mechanics to make them awesome. The rules of the game and competent DMs already make them awesome. If you're bored running a dragon and your players are bored with a fight with a dragon, you should get better at DMing, because you're kind of fucking it up.

That got a bit ranty. It was fun. Hehe.

The Myth of the OP Player/Build/Etc

One of the things I'm doing to get back into blogging is going back and finding unfinished drafts of posts and seeing if there are any I want to finish. This one was originally started on 12/27/2013.

One of the things you run into a lot with RPGs is min/maxers. The guy who tweaks every little thing to finagle the maximum amount of whatever out of the rules. This problem is a lot worse in point buy systems like GURPS because the nature of the game allows for a lot more customization than a rigid, class based system like Pathfinder or DnD. You can only min/max so much in Pathfinder core rules, mostly just in terms of ability score, as there aren't any sacrifices you can make anywhere to boost something else up. 5th Edition is even less min/maxable. It's actually kind of impressive how little you can actually tweak your character to secure advantages.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with min/maxing and trying to make your character awesome. That's the point of these games on some level, to be badass. To leave bodies on the floor in your wake. To be awesome and more competent than everyone else. That's what player characters do, or at least try to. Now, it's one thing to find sweet feat combinations, and completely another to play a Fighter with an Intelligence of 7 and a highly boosted Strength or Constitution and then come up with really well thought out tactics and plots. Mental retardation is a real thing, and I'm not making light of it, but there is a reason we don't put people with IQs of 50 or 60 in charge of armies and groups of soldiers. I only take issue with min/maxing when it gets ridiculous and ignores my background material or the character is a collection of stats and not an actual character.

Players often try to find complimentary feats and class abilities and racial abilities to leverage the most power against their foes. Power in this context is a general term for the character's schtick. Karrak's power is shooting things. Donovan's is talking to things, and Karl's is magic and shooting things (with magic). Eran's power is obviously master debating in the woods, while shooting way better than everyone else, and being sneaky. 

Often, you'll hear someone say "that is so over powered," usually as an exclamation indicating they are pissed and feel it is unfair, or an exclamation indicating they think they are brilliant little fucks for coming up with it. Now the problem with finding something over powered and thinking it is unstoppable is that it often ignores a few things about the nature of the game.  

The first thing it ignores is that experience  (I use the word experience here as a catch all term for advancement) should only be rewarded if there is a challenge in the scenario. If a group is consistently walking through encounters, or a certain type of encounter (combat, social, trap, etc) without taking damage (and not because of crafty tactics during the fight or brilliant plans for getting around the encounters), if there's no risk in a situation, why should they get rewarded? That's the whole point of leveling/advancement systems. As you overcome challenges, you get better at things. If there's no challenge to anything, you shouldn't be getting better, because you've plateaued and aren't challenging yourself. It seems pretty straightforward to me. So fine, you're monstrously powerful. Cool. Prepare to be stuck at level three for the rest of the campaign. 

The second thing it ignores is the GM. Assuming something is OP/unstoppable/makes you invincible ignores the fact that the challenges a party faces are not random meaningless situations (assuming your GM isn't a fucktwit). They are built by a thinking creature that typically has a much better understanding of the game as a whole than the players. We're ten levels into the campaign and Eric still can't figure out where to find the cost breakdown for adding new spells to his spellbook. Lance thought for some reason that armor class is  calculated differently for animal companions so his wolf companion had an AC of 7, despite AC starting at a base of 10 and his wolf having +2 worth of natural armor and a Dexterity of 17 and the Dodge feat. I'm not saying this to poke fun at them or to indicate they are big dumb heads. I forgot how Craft skills function last night. Nobody is perfect. However, the nature of the GM's job demands that he know the system of the rules better than the players. Which means, quite literally, anything you can do, he can do better and also that you're probably doing it wrong. Cary used to blast me constantly with OP builds of Pathfinder characters, generally they were solid and functional for what he designed them for, but at least a solid 25% of them completely failed due to him not really understanding relevant rules or even being aware of rules.

Obviously I only deconstructed those failures for him about 50% of the time. You never know when it'll be useful to completely break a player's build and knock their sense of special snowflake entitlement down a peg. 

Thirdly, players are arrogant useless fucks that are predisposed to think that they are brilliant and crafty little fucks that can pull a fast one on the GM. I kid. What I mean is that people, myself included, are predisposed to think they are brilliant and cunning. Unless they are so full of self loathing that they GM Pathfinder games to punish themselves. So yeah, when you find a little bit of synergy you never noticed before, you assume no one else has, and that you've won everything forever. The problem is that these little synergies typically only apply to one aspect of the game. 

Cary and I were just talking about mythic characters and he explained a build to me where an attack has to do over 80 damage to him before he can start taking damage. Which is pretty impressive if someone shoots or stabs Donovan. But what about hold person or phantasmal killer? Finger of death? What about poisons that deal ability score damage? What about negative levels? What about non-combat situations? What about a Fighter that has the feats that lets him stun or daze on a successful attack roll? Will this stuff function if he is unconscious and the Fighter performs a coup de grace? What if he is submerged in water due to a trap and begins drowning? So yes, assuming it works like he thinks it does, his build does possess a power level of over 9000. But it only applies to a small piece of the game, direct damage. If direct damage is the only thing you're leveraging against your players to challenge them in a campaign, you fucked up.

The fourth thing OP builds ignore is the world around them. In this instance, the world around them can be the environment, foes, NPCs, etc. Fine, you've got a combat monster character with  power level of over 9000 thousand. What happens when your goal is to get information from an NPC rather than curb stomp them until their insides squirt out their butthole? What happens when your NPCs have a better understanding of tactical combat than your player's combat monster collection of stats?

In my current 5th Edition group, there is a belief that archery is overpowered, which I don't agree with. The example is the Fighter archery fighting style, which confers +2 to ranged attack rolls. This combined with an archery feat that confers -5 to ranged attack rolls and +10 to damage creates a pretty deadly archer. There's also a feat that ignores all cover except full. 

Ok. That is impressive. You might even call it OP. But guess what? It is completely negated by stepping behind something. Unless the archer has a decent amount of elevation, you can completely negate the archer's power by sitting down on the ground behind a waist high wall. This relates to my fourth point because NPCs are intelligent. Even animals are going to either try to eat the face off the deadly archer, or run the fuck away from him. More intelligent enemies are going to utilize cover. Players kind of tend to see the NPCs populating the world around them as bland and faceless. They forget that any tactic or thing they can do can likely be done by the citizens of the world around them to some degree. My point here is that if something doesn't work, the foes of the players are going to try something else.

I dunno, I'm kind of all over the place here and there's a little bit of overlap between my four points. The ultimate point of this post is that creating an OP build is kind of a myth in my opinion. You might be able to be good at one single aspect of the game (combat, talking, etc), but that's about it. It also doesn't necessarily make you unstoppable in that area either, because there is more to the game than high damage or hit points or AC in combat or high skill bonuses in non-combat situations. There are always going to be impossible tasks that you can't succeed at, there are always going to be lies too unbelievable (whether due to the outrageousness of the claim or because the NPC has information the player does not). If you the GM are doing it right, the game is varied and interesting and not guaranteed to play to the player's strengths at all times and characters that specialize to an extreme degree to get that extra edge are going to suffer. 

The Difficulties of RP

One thing I've heard mentioned and agree with in my current group is that we don't really RP much. Role-playing, getting into a character and speaking and acting as that character, is not something everyone is comfortable with. Even those that are comfortable with it are comfortable with it to different degrees. I'm comfortable describing Navere violating the fuck out druids whose lifestyle offends him on every level, and I'm comfortable representing Andorian and Evandor as homosexual (even though their species doesn't really have meaningful sex designations), but I'm not comfortable describing Navere or Andorian and Evandor having a physical relationship that I describe. At least not in front of other people. If you go back a bit on the blog you'll find a few posts where Keroen and Callifay get a little handsy with each other, but that's something I wrote and thought about and didn't produce on the fly in front of six other dudes. So there are varying levels of comfort that further vary depending on the situation. 

So there are a few problems that I've identified with the lack of RP and I'm going to go over them here on the blog with myself, because aside from last week, I haven't posted in about a year, so who is really reading this? No one. Maybe. 

The first problem I've decided exists is that no one is willing to take or has taken the first step. No one has stepped outside of "Navere/Sven/etc says X" or does X or whatever. We'll do minor role-play. Kevin will make his voice a bit gruff when he speaks as Bjorn (spelling?) or I'll describe Navere in the midst of a fight as having this wild and savage grin on his face or I'll voice Navere's internal struggle with doing one thing and doing what's best for the pack. But no one has stopped in the midst of the session to say anything like: 

Navere sits down on his bedroll and motions everyone over. As everyone sits he says, "We haven't really discussed this place and what it means that we're here. I won't lie, I'm fearful of this place. I wholly suspect we've died in battle and are being punished in some way. I have no idea what our overall plan should be, and I fear we're just going in circles trying to remain busy until something finally ends us and we no longer need to worry about how we'll escape this place or if we even can." 

And then for a solid half hour, the characters discuss their fears and hopes and plans, rather than the players discussing plans for their next move. That's the distinction in my mind, speaking as a player or as a character. To be fair, the line can get pretty blurry at times and it can be hard to identify when someone is speaking as themself or their character. 

I don't really feel like this group is resistant to RP, I'm definitely not resistant to the idea of it. My Orcunraytrel campaign has literal thousands and thousands of words of RP. I feel like everyone is open to it. I just feel like no one has made it normal in our sessions. Our sessions are fairly short, and we like to do things to actually achieve goals and such. There's definitely a focus on doing, rather than talking. I truly feel like if someone steps up, the group will roll (heyo!) with it and it will become the new normal way we do things. 

The second problem that I see with the group is that our campaigns are short. Typically six to nine months, maybe a year in length. Which is fucking short in my opinion. One of the big reasons I've never come up with a background for a character until Kyle made me for Navere was because our campaigns are short. I kept playing a variation of OG 4th Edition Erevan the Bard because I wanted a sense of continuity and I enjoy the pleasantly homicidal ridiculousness of that character. For me, I feel like what is the point of becoming invested in a particular character and their history and emotions and feelings if the campaign is going to be over in ten or fifteen sessions? I'm not sure everyone in the group would agree with me here, but this is my two cents.

The third problem I think we have is comfort level with each other. Don't get me wrong, I think we're all friends and whatnot and we all seem to like each other and we all seem to be able to relate to one another. Personally, part of my comfort level as a GM stems from always having gamed with the same set of four dudes, or a variation of that group, for the past twenty years. I'm super comfortable around those guys and can say and do things with them that I normally wouldn't with random people. There are even versions of that group that I wouldn't have felt comfortable enough with to RP a gay relationship.

Anyway. So yeah, we're all friends. I'm friends with Kyle, Kyle is friends with Kevin. Jacob and Dave are friends with Kevin, Andrew is Jacob's brother, and Chase is friends with Andrew. We're all friends, but we haven't all been playing DnD with each other for decades, or even five years. We're all friends and we like each other, but there's still a little bit of distance simply because we lack that long term association that breaks down a lot of boundaries that self doubt and a sense of shame bring out.

So those are just some things I see that I think might be partially responsible for why my group doesn't really delve into lots of RP during sessions. Which is ok. There's nothing that says a group must RP extensively. If the group just doesn't feel like really in depth RP is its thing, there's no law saying they're fired from DnD. These are just my opinions and they could of course be way off base. They're also completely irrelevant. Ultimately, I think we're having fun and that is what's important. 

Navere, Whose Bones Sing of The Mountain

Is it whose or who's? I dunno. Whatever.

The following is a background for my wild elf druid Navere that I am currently playing in the Curse of Strahd 5th Edition module. It's the first background I've created for a character in literal years, so it didn't exactly exit my brain hole easily and I am a little rusty, which I think shows. It was written as a sort of fireside conversation. As if Navere and the other characters were seated around the fire and started asking each other for their life stories and how they became adventurers and whatnot. Some of Navere's defining characteristics are that he was raised by wolves, not elves, and that he is very focused on flight or flight instincts and predator vs. prey relationships. Here it is:

“My first memories have always been of blinding white snow beneath a glaring sun, glittering coldly like frozen gems. These memories are swiftly followed by ones of cold, a cold like a frost-rimed metal fist gripping my bones. This makes sense, as I grew up on a mountain called Cold Mountain in the Spine of the World. A cold, but beautiful place. Full of stormy winters full of thunder and lightning. I always loved the storms, the howling wind, the thunder rumbling in the distance, thumping in my chest like a second, stronger, heartbeat.”

“I was the youngest of six. My father was the head of our fairly large and extended family, he was strong and harsh, but a good father. My mother, the fiercest and strongest hunter of our people, ruled at his side.”

Navere smiles briefly, his lips quickly returning to their normal stoic flatness.

“I was a small and sickly child. Weak and pale and slow. Nearly blind, half deaf, not only the youngest of six, but the weakest. My siblings were always faster and stronger and tougher. Even as small children I could barely hold my own against them, and that was only because they pitied me and feared our mother’s wrath. I briefly knew an uncle that thought I was too weak to survive life in our harsh land and should be cast out to die on the side of the mountain. I say briefly because one winter, she dragged him by the scruff of the neck out to the side of the mountain and he never returned.”

Navere smiles sadly and says, “In his defense, his points were of merit. I was a burden to my family. But. I was family, and I was loved, and as I grew older I was occasionally useful. I could barely speak, but I could still make my family smile.”

Navere grins as he says, “I remember when I was still young, but no longer a child, the seasons had changed and ice was melting and the snow was heavy but still solid enough to pack. Snow perfect for snowballs. I had a cousin, big for his age and willing to throw his weight around, even if he was just throwing it at a cripple. We got into it and my father broke us up. I was of course the worse for it, black and blue and scratched up from head to toe. But I would not lay down in defeat and pain, and when my cousin turned to return to his siblings puffed up with pride for knocking me down, I hurled the perfect snowball right up his asshole. He yelped and bolted into the forest, and my antics and fine aim garnered a single bark of a laughter from my father.”

Navere shrugs, “Perhaps it is not so funny now, but at the time I thought quite well of myself.”

“I couldn’t fight or hunt well, but I was tricksie and that entertained many of my family members, especially the youngest of our people. When my siblings and parents hunted, I would care for the younger members of the family and make sure they stayed in our home where it was safe. I rarely hunted, but when trespassers came to our lands and my people went to war, I would distract them with my crude noises while my family encircled them and herded them away from our home and dealt with them.”

“Our lands were fairly secluded, so we had few trespassers, but all of them, save one, were met with bloodshed.”

“The one exception that my father allowed to live in our lands was an old thing. He’d lived on our lands as long as I could remember. My mother told me once he’d been on our lands since her own mother was young. He was small and bent, his skin wrinkled like a walnut and burned from wind and sun. He made his home in a broken down circle of stone. He dwelled in a crude lean to set up between the ancient monuments, a drafty thing of snow and ice and hides and damp timbers We had very little to do with him, and he never sought us out, but my father allowed him to remain on our lands because he was a healer. When I was at my sickest, my parents would take me to this bent old trespasser and he would use herbs and very occasionally magic to help me survive another season of poor hunting or bad weather.”

Navere pauses, thoughtful and quiet, before saying, “As a youth that was almost an adult, I was foolish and took risks with little care for consequences. My siblings, though stronger and faster and older, were cursed with the same youthful behavior. We were troublesome to the old healer. He was a trespasser, strange and alien to us. That fact that he had saved my life several times over and was under the protection of my father and mother had little impact on our behaviors.”

“When we were bored and he was away doing whatever it was he did with his time, we would rifle through his belongings, knock about his furniture, dig at his garden of herbs and roots. Childish things that did little harm and only served to annoy an elderly healer living far beyond the edges of civilization.”

“It was on one such immature excursion to the healer’s icy shanty that I discovered my magic. We had nosed around in his personal belongings, gnawed on the tasty roots her grew in his root cellar. Two fallen stones made up the sides of his small dwelling. The stones were grey, darker than the other stone of the mountain, and ancient beyond reckoning. They were chipped and worn and frosted over, and vague designs could be seen on them, too obscured by grime and the slow march of time to be legible.”

“Standing close to the stones, you could sense their power, a vibration you could feel in your bones. We would dare each other to stand close to them, the one that got closest and stayed there longest was proven brave to our adolescent minds.”

Navere smirks as he speaks, “This was one game I regularly won. For whatever reason, I could stand closest to the stones for the longest. So close my nose almost touched them. Once I did so for so long it was the old healer that forced me to leave with bellows of rage and an oaken stave.”

“The story is simple, we had had our fun among the healer’s possessions and began are feats of daring. I slipped and broke my nose upon the cold stone. My siblings said I flailed wildly and screamed and fled to find our parents. All I felt was lightning. Like a bolt had speared me from the sky and ground its way through my spine down into the ground, chewing through every nerve in its path, leaving them ragged and torn in its wake.”

Navere shivers a little as he recalls the pain, but he continues, “I woke to my mother dragging me away from the stone. When I became aware enough that I could stand, I found I could sense something. It wasn’t anything I could see or hear or smell, it was more subtle than that. I found that I could sort of feel the undercurrent of life flowing through everything. I could sense it in the rapid and worried breathes of my mother as she kissed my head. I could sense it in the way the river flowed over rocks. I could sense it in the way the wind howled as it wound its way across the face of our mountain and the way it whirled through the leaves of the trees of our forest.”

A note of pride begins to creep into Navere’s voice as he speaks, “Once I could sense this energy, this pulse of life, and feel how it moved through the world, I learned to manipulate it and reshape it. I could heal, I could command fire, I could speak to my family in a way I never could before. I could shake the earth and call the wind to my aid. For the first time in my life, I could hunt with my people and help them fight off trespassers.”

By the end of it, Navere is smiling almost smugly. But it is short lived and his expression flattens and he continues.

“I am an elf, and we are long lived, and eventually my brothers and sisters and parents and even my younger cousins passed away. My father slunk away from our lands to die alone and in peace. My mother died hunting a bear, refusing to bow to the wearying grip of age and death and instead dying in the heat of a fight, with a foe’s blood steaming on her face in the cold air, her death serving to strengthen the pack.”

Navere smiles as he says, “My mother was, as I said, fierce.”

“I continued living among my people for a decade or so, slowly feeling myself growing more and more distant from them, until I decided to make my home between the old stones where the healer had lived, for he too had passed away at this point. I hunted with my people, made war with them against those that trespassed upon our lands, but they had no real purpose or need for me and my time was mostly my own. There came a time when I found youths in my tiny cave of packed ice and ancient stone, rummaging in my few meager possessions and stock of foodstuffs. They scampered off quickly, clearly delighting in their mischief, and I realized that I had become as much a tolerated trespasser as the old healer had been. I was more involved with my people than he had been, but I had become little more than a tolerated fixture of their lands, rather than a contributing member of our people.”

Navere pauses for a moment, his eyes distant, before refocusing and saying, “For one raised always among family, this was a terrifying realization. Living life as we did, fear was a constant friend, its prickly fingers constantly caressing your neck. We fight or flee, that is our life upon the mountain, and fear is there to remind us of the consequences of choosing wrongly when deciding which course to take. This fear that fell upon me, this fear was not an ally guiding my actions, this was a brutal foe paralyzing me with indecision.”

Navere pauses and looks away from the fire before returning his gaze to you all and saying, “There is no shame in fear. If we did not fear, we would foolishly spend our lives on pointless battles or hunting prey far beyond our skill. But this crippling fear, this alien dread that I felt so long ago, it is shameful and not something I wish to ever experience again.”

Navere pauses to take a swig from his waterskin before continuing.

“I overcame my dread and decided I would leave the lands of my people. I knew little of the lands beyond the mountain we made our home upon, but the old stones and the forest and the mountain whispered to me of life and magic and I knew I would either find my way or find death. With that sense of dread still fresh in my heart, I was unsure which would be more welcome.”

“In short, I gathered a few provisions, including some armor and a blade that had belonged to the old healer, and I came down from the mountain and found civilization. The first few years were...awkward. But I survived.”

“I learned of money and other races and peoples of the land. I lived among them being of use as a hunter and healer.”

He smiles as a self-deprecating tone creeps into his voice while he says, “I discovered what currency was and immediately discovered what gambling was and that it was not something I was talented at. I also discovered that liquor was a fine thing that led to many poor decisions regarding currency and gambling.”

“I survived though, and the shine of civilization wore away after a time and I realized that the fringes of civilization were more suited to me, so there I stayed. I continued my trend of wandering and gaining work as a healer and hunter. As I grew more competent I began finding work hunting more dangerous beasts, and occasionally men. This eventually turned into the life of an adventurer, and only a few short years later I find myself here at this fire with the five of you.”

So there it is.