I had a longer post all ready to go, but then I got laid low with some stomach issues. I’ll have to try again next week, sadly.
A blog that no one should ever read. Ever. Seriously. Nothing to see here, move along.
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Isolation Report, Week #24
[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]
Well, The Mother is back from Colorado, safe and sound. And virus free? It seems so, but she (and our littlest one) are staying even more out of the public than usual for the requisite 2 weeks, just to be sure. It seemed that Southwest, at least, is doing a soft-of-decent job at trying to keep everyone safe(ish): they’re only flying 2 people to a row, and I believe the masks were required (of course our ladies would have done that anywa
Meanwhile I was stuck at home with our two older children, one of whom is ostensibly an adult, but neither of whom is noted for their motivation or pliability. I believe I described it as like pushing elephants uphil
Our politics continues to be somewhat depressing, as Trump’s obvious strategy of constantly inventing new scandals so that all the old ones get forgotten continues to work on a grander and grander scale. Having gotten away with kidnapping people off the streets of Portland, he’s moved on to screwing up everyone’s mail delivery in the hopes that will tip the election in his favor (remember: that’s not just my opinion of his action
Am I heartened by the official acceptance of the Democratic nomination by Joe Biden? Honestly, not that much. (For my level of enthusiasm for Bide
I’m also extremely amused by the people (Colbert, for instance) who talk about the fact that Donald Trump fears going to jail once he’s out of office. Even if Trump were capable of understanding consequence
Likewise, the concept that DeJoy will be in any way inconvenienced by having to testify before Congres
Sunday, August 16, 2020
Minor Magic Items
[This is a post I wrote primarily for an audience of people who play fifth edition D&D. Nearly three years ago now, I pondered starting separate blogs for my eclectic interests, but I never really did. If I had, though, this would certainly be on the gaming blog. So, if you’re not a D&D player, you might want to give this one a pass.]
As part of my ongoing family campaign, the players have accepted a side quest to help out an important NPC in the city they happen to be staying in (temporarily; they’re passing through on a longer journey set for them by their “mysterious benefactor”).1 Of course I expect them to complete this mission, and thus I have to be prepared to have the NPC reward them for their service. I could just break out the hard currency, of cours
Obviously the solution is minor magic items. I’ve now spent a bunch of time combing my books and the Internet for the perfect items to gift my players with, so I thought it might be nice to share some of my findings with other folks: perhaps this info can help your game as well.
First of all, I gather from searching the Internet that there seems to be a some confusion as to what a minor magical item even is. So perhaps we should start with what it isn’t.
- A minor magical item is not the same as a consumable magic item. A major effect is always a major effect. Limited use of that effect does not magically (haha) make it a minor effect.
- A minor magical item is not the same as a wondrous item. “Wondrous item” is a term which here means “item we couldn’t fit into any other category.” While it’s true that sometimes a wondrous item may have a minor effect, many (many!) more of them have pretty major effects. “Minor” does not mean “not a sword or a suit of armor or a staff or a ring or a ...”
- A minor magical item is not the same as a trinket. A trinket is a strange or unusual item which is designed to spark roleplaying opportunities. It might not even be magical at all.
Let’s dispense with these in order of ease of dispensing. Wondrous items are a category of magic items; it has absolutely nothing to do with whether it’s a minor item or not. (To be fair, this is the term least often confused for “minor magical item,” so I think most people already get this.) Consumable items are, again, a completely orthogonal concept. A major magical item might be consumable, or it might not. A minor item could also be consumable, but let’s be honest here: if the effect is already minor, it seems pretty mean to then limit the number of uses on top of that. The question of trinkets is a bit harder, but not much.
First off, as mentioned above, some trinkets aren’t magical at all. Here are some examples from the trinkets table (Player’s Handbook, pages 159 – 161):
- A mummified goblin hand
- The deed for a parcel of land in a realm unknown to you
- A small cloth doll skewered with needles
- A tiny silver bell without a clapper
- A l-inch cube, each side painted a different color
- An empty wine bottle bearing a pretty label that says, “The Wizard of Wines Winery, Red Dragon Crush, 331422-W”
- A black pirate flag adorned with a dragon’s skull and crossbones
These are all great, flavorful items, and they can all provide interesting story hooks for clever players. But no magic.
On the other hand, here are some other examples from that same list:
- A shard of obsidian that always feels warm to the touch
- A small, weightless stone block
- A candle that can’t be lit
- A nightcap that, when worn, gives you pleasant dreams
- A silver teardrop earring made from a real teardrop
- A tiny mechanical crab or spider that moves about when it’s not being observed
- A wooden box with a ceramic bottom that holds a living worm with a head on each end of its body
Also great, flavorful items, but these are all definitely magical. Not very magical, granted, but then we were looking for minor magic items ... right?
This gets us to the heart of what a minor magical item is. A major magical item has a major effect. Whether it’s wondrous or not doesn’t change that; neither does whether it’s consumable or not. A minor magical item has a minor effect. So why aren’t magical trinkets minor magic items? Because a trinket has no effect. Sure, the nightcap may give you pleasant dreams, and the block may not weigh anything even though it’s made of stone, but none of that actually has any effect on the game.
So what would be an example of an actual minor magic, item? There are a few in the DMG, but not too many. Happily, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything gives us a whole mess of ’em. Here’s one:
- Boots of False Tracks (wondrous item, common): Only humanoids can wear these boots. While wearing the boots, you can choose to have them leave tracks like those of another kind of humanoid of your size.
A very small effect, granted, but still something that could be useful in a game. You might have to work pretty hard to come up with a way to use it, but that’s part of the joy of a minor magic item. It’s real magic, it’s impressive to the common folk, it’s useful in the right situation, and it encourages creative play. And what it doesn’t do is make the GM’s job harder.
See, as a GM you have be very careful with those major magic items. Your players might be very excited to get a ring of invisibility, and you might feel quite magnanimous giving them one, but now you have to consider that you’ve got at least one character who’s never going to have to worry about sneaking past your sentries any more, or how to burgle that precious artifact that’s so closely guarded, or how to eavesdrop on crucial NPC conversations. Oh, sure: you can demand stealth checks anyway, on the grounds that someone might hear them, or claim that your evil genius BBEG obviously would install “anti-invisibility preparations” (even if it’s only something as dirt simple as coating the floor with flour), but you can’t always ignore or override power that you specifically gave your players in the first place: it frustrates them, and why did you even give it to them if you didn’t expect them to use it? So, every time you contemplate awarding some sort of major magic item, you have to think carefully about what impact it’s going to have on the game, and how it’s going to make your life harder: that is, how it’s going to make it more challenging for you to challenge your players.
But with minor magical items, you have none of these problems. What plotline do you have planned that could possibly be upset by a pair of boots that can leave confusing tracks? Or (to use a few more examples from Xanathar’s) a helmet that makes one’s eyes glow red? or a sword that gives off moonlight? or a tankard that allows one to drink as much as they like and never get drunk? No, the minor magical item is awesome because the player gets to feel cool and special, and the GM never has to worry about being swept up in a magical powers arms race.
As for the creative play aspect, the OSR2 proponents are fond of touting old-school D&D as facilitating “item-based problem-solving.” The idea is that modern D&D is all dripping with magic items so no one bothers to come up with uses for simple things such as mirrors, or a box of silver pins, or a pouch of herbs and spices. But of course this is silly. You can still encourage your players to use their equipment lists to their full extent; you just have to figure out to make it a bit sexier. In those old-school days, you wouldn’t dream of going into a dungeon without your ten-foot pole, but that was because your GM would gleefully drop you into a spike pit if you didn’t tap all the floors along the way. Also, if you didn’t use some sort of ear horn to listen at all the doors, you would eventually acquire ear seekers. And if you didn’t have a silver mirror, your GM would inevitably spring a medusa or a basilisk on you. Wasn’t old-school D&D fun? It taught you to develop complex and bizarre shopping lists if you wanted to live: not exactly sexy swashbuckling adventure. But that’s how it rolle
But the OSR fans have a point that you really had to get the most out of your equipment list if you wanted to survive. Figuring out how to make do with limited resources can be fun, as long as it doesn’t devolve into the aforementioned shopping list exercise. But we can have the best of both worlds: minor magic items give the players something that they really want to use, because it’s all magical and cool, but because it has very limited application, it forces them to work hard to come up with a situation where they can actually put it to good use. See? Item-based problem solving and cool magic items as a reward and nice, modern rules with no complex resource tracking. All your bases are covered.
Now that we know what minor magic items are and why we want to use them, where can we get them from? Well, as mentioned previously, Xanathar’s is a good place to start. The section is actually called “common magic items,” and it starts on page 136, but “common” isn’t quite the same as “minor” either. Oh, many common magic items are minor as well, true, but some are just consumable, and those (while very useful) aren’t the type of thing we’re exploring here. Happily, the list of items in Xanathar’s are all minor as well as common.3 In fact, some of them border on trinkets: I’m a bit hard-pressed to come up with a creative use for, say, armor of gleaming that would have any actual effect on a game. But in general it’s a great list.
The DMG is, sadly, slimmer pickings. Note that page 135 of Xanathar’s gives you a vital clue: anything on tables A through E in the DMG is considered a minor item. But, looking at those tables (pages 144 – 145 of your Dungeon Master’s Guide), what you see is almost exclusively consumable items. Still there are a few proper minor magic items to be found:
- On table A, we have the bag of holding (which is right on the edge of tipping into a major item) and the driftglobe, which is a great minor item.
- On table B, the alchemy jug is a fun one, and the cap of water breathing, goggles of night, helm of comprehending languages, mithral armor, ring of swimming, and saddle of the cavalier all qualify. The mariner’s armor is at the upper end (like the bag of holding), but still pretty safe. The robe of useful items is, weirdly, consumable, and the lantern of revealing is semi-consumable in that you have to keep putting oil in it. The two wands have major effects; they’re only considered minor items because of their limited charges. I would also be cautious with the cloak of the manta ray, the immovable rod and the rope of climbing: they’re not as minor as they might first appear.
- Table C adds Quaal’s feather tokens, most of which are great minor items (watch out for the bird and whip ones though), and the decanter of endless water, eyes of minute seeing, folding boat, horseshoes of speed, periapt of health, and sending stones are all good choices. Heward’s handy haversack is what you give your players when you feel like a bag of holding is going too far. The chime of opening and the necklace of fireballs are more of those unexpectedly consumable ones.
- Table D doesn’t add much, but the horseshoes of a zephyr are fun. Nolzur’s marvelous pigments are technically consumable, but a moderately thrifty player will probably never actually use them all. Portable holes are another of those more-major-than-they-seem items. Bag of devouring is a cursed item, which is a whole different kettle of fish.
- Table E is 100% composed of consumable items, although sovreign glue (like Nolzur’s marvelous pigments) is one that you’ll probably never actually use all of.
So, a few good things there, but not as much as we might hope for. But don’t count the humble DMG out yet! Look on page 143; see that table marked “What Minor Properties Does It Have”? The concept here is supposed to be that you have some powerful magic item, and you want to give it a little extra flavor by assigning it an additional, magical effect. But there’s nothing saying that you can’t just have a magic item that has one of these minor effects and nothing else ... voilà, minor magic item. In fact, some of the pre-existing minor items seem cut directly from this cloth: a driftglobe is just an item that only has the “beacon” minor effect, while an orb of direction is just an item bearing only the “compass” property.
Another useful trick, if you decide to come up with your own items, is to look at cantrips. Now, cantrips come in two distinct flavors; they don’t have technical designations, but they’re often referred to as “damage-dealing cantrips” vs “utility cantrips.” You probably don’t want to give your players even more ways to magically create damage. Besides: it’s boring. But those utility cantrips can be quite useful to draw inspiriation from. Again, some of the existing minor items seem to follow this recipe: it seems obvious that clothes of mending are based on the mending cantrip, and an instrument of illusions is just a more flavorful way to cast minor illusion.
But perhaps you don’t want to mess around with creating your own. Surely there must be someone out there in the big wide world wide web who has done it for you? Feel free to search for yourself: now that you know to avoid lists that are just consumable items, or trinket lists, you should have better luck. Here’s a few that I’ve found that I like:- Goblin Punch has a list of 100
- S. A. Hunt has collected over 100 from around the Internet for you4
- Spouting Lore has smaller lists of items, one for rogues, one for rangers, and even one for magical swords that aren’t too overpowered
- Tales of Scheherazade has some introductory text which references the same “item-based problem solving” article that I linked to abov
e— which itself contains a list of items that are very much trinkets, not minor magic item s— but then goes on to provide 100 items, the majority of which fall safely into this category
__________
1 By the way, I would be remiss for not giving credit for the bones of this side quest to Justice Arman and his team in their excellent Baldur’s Gate: City Encounters. My characters are not actually in Baldur’s Gate, but that doesn’t keep many of the encounters from being very useful, including this one, which is #12 (“Little Calimshan”). Transplanting Rilsa Rael (an NPC from Descent into Avernus) to my cit
2 Remember: “OSR” stands for “old-school revival”; that is, modern offshoots of D&D based on the 1st and 2nd edition rulesets, but updated slightly to make them less confusing.
3 Even the consumable ones, such as beads of nourishment. But, again, those are really a separate category.
4 Fans of The Adventure Zone will no doubt recognize a few of those.
Sunday, August 9, 2020
Isolation Report, Week #22
[You could also read the most recent report, or even start at the beginning.]
Today I drove to Burbank Airport (much closer and more sedate than LAX) and dropped off The Mother and my littlest one. By this point, they’ve landed in Denver. Flying during these trying times is certainly not something our family was looking forward to. But due to some family medical issues, this trip really couldn’t be postponed. So we put masks and goggles on them, we availed ourselves as often as possible of the many thoughtfully placed hand sanitizer stations, and we got in and out as quickly as possible. That’s the best we could do.
I have to say, this was only my second time at Burbank, and obviously my first during the pandemic endtimes. I was quite impressed at how helpful the airport and airline employees were. When there were buttons to be pushed (such as the “walk” button for the crosswalk), there was nearly always a masked and gloved employee to push it for us. We ended up touching nearly nohting the whole time, and everyone was super polite, not annoyed as you sometimes see with overworked transportation workers. It was easy in, easy park, easy out. I hope I get the opportunity to use Burbank more often. You know, if flying ever becomes a thing we do on a regular basis again.
At $work, I was able to polish off a new project that came up with some urgency, so I’m pretty happy about that. It wasn’t a difficult one, but it had deployment challenges, and a few times when I could have taken shortcuts: that is, doing lower quality work that could be completed faster. But happily my bosses weren’t interested in that route, so we got it done in a relatively short timeline without compromising. I was pretty pleased about that.
I haven’t been keeping up with the news as much due to Colbert being off for the past two weeks and Noah being off for the past one. Possibly this is a good thing. From what little I have heard, I’m probably better off taking a short break from it.
The grocery store Friday was the best it’s been for a whil
Recommendations for how to pass the time:
- I’ve finally gotten caught up on The Adventure Zone: “Graduation”. If you haven’t checked it out yet, and even if you don’t normally care for D&D podcasts, I highly recommend it. As good as Griffin is as a GM, I think Travis may be even better.
- Umbrella Academy season 2 is pretty friggin’ awesom
e— possibly even better than season 1. - Portal Knights is still a great timewaster, although now my gaming partner is gone to Colorado. No worries: my middle child just got a copy of PixelJunk Monsters 2. We used to have a great time playing the original, years ago, so we’re hoping to recapture a bit of magic. So far, it’s been pretty cool.
- Quibi, in its desperate attempt to remain (or maybe even become) relevant, has stumbled on a fun way to leverage the pandemic: they’ve done a “remake” of The Princess Bride, with different celebrites reprising the roles, each one shooting their part in their backyards or what-have-you. Each scene features different actors for the same characters, and of course the whole thing has to be cut together to make it seem as if they’re interacting with each other when in actuality they’re nowhere near each other. It’s all very low-tech, of course, and nothing matches (for instance, the Man in Black hands Vizzini a glass of red wine, but it’s become white wine by the time it gets to Vizzini’s hand), but that’s part of the charm. Some of the casting is utterly inspire
d— Jack Black for the Man in Black’s climb up the cliffs of insanity, Dave Bautista for Fezzik’s rock smashing, Patton Oswalt for Vizzini’s battle of wits (for the princess? to the death?)— and it’s all great fun. Of course, you can’t watch the whole thing, unless you have Quibi (which of course no one does), but you can watch what might be the best stretch of it on YouTube. - I find that just sitting outside (by the pool, if it’s not too hot, or under the patio fan in the side yard) while working from home can be quite relaxing. I have a new laptop and its battery life is much better than my old model, so I can be outside for quite a bit longer than I used to manage. I’m still working, but just reminding myself that the outside world didn’t go away just because I never go outside any more can be good for the mental health, I think.
Sunday, August 2, 2020
D&D and Me: Part 7 (The Next Generation)
[This is the seventh post in a new series. You may want to begin at the beginning. Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguou
[Last time, I talked about my longest-running character, a monk in D&D’s third edition. This was also one of the last characters I played with my long-time gaming group.]
In 2005, I moved to Southern Maryland, and in 2007 I moved again, this time to Southern California. I didn’t find a new gaming group in either location, so, after roughly 15 years of weekly gaming with very few breaks, I began a long hiatus away from TTRPGs. From actually playing, in any event. I still kept up with the news, and I would buy a book occasionally, just to read for myself. In many ways, this period harkened back to my original experiences with D&D: just reading new rules, messing around with creating characters or storylines, but not really playing.
In 2008, D&D released its fourth edition (referred to, of course, as “4e”). I was actually quite excited about this in all the hype leading up to the release, but once the product was in hand ... I was disappointed. Not sure if it would have really made that much difference, seeing as how I had no one to play it with anyway, but for some reason I was really quite irked at how bad the new version was. Luckily, that was about to change.
I don’t need to go into a long explanation about what Pathfinder is, because I’ve already done that, if you care to read it. The short version is, Pathfinder updates the D&D 3e ruleset with major improvements, but little structural change. I’m not opposed to structural change, mind you: the jump from 2e to 3e was huge, and I loved it, because things got better. But this chang
But, of course, by that time my eldest was 11 years old, and that’s plenty old enough to learn TTRPGs. I was back to being solely a GM, of course, but that was okay. In many ways, those early days of Pathfinder were eerily similar to my early days of D&D: after a long period of just reading rules, I had a young child to teach, I had to constantly invent new rules because you can’t stifle a kid’s creativity, and I was generating settings from scratch with way more emphasis on fun adventuring than rational worldbuilding. That the young child was son instead of brother made little difference; that the game was Pathfinder instead of D&D pre-1e was only different in that it was much easier to teach. The big contrast was that, now with about a decade of GM experience under my belt, I mostly knew what I was doing. I also knew enough to play around with other games: we spent quite a bit of time experimenting with post-apocalyptic RPGs, for instance. In Pathfinder, my kid played a half-wood-elf-half-drow named Krad Demonshield who started out as a custom class I made called “witchblade” (that ever-elusive search for the perfect blend of fighter and magic-user) and then multiclassed into another custom class I made which reused my favorite alt-classname “nightblade,”* this time cast more as a shadow-magic-wielding assassin (but, you know, the good kind of assassin). There was also another fantasy character, a minotaur named Foghnar, but I don’t believe we used Pathfinder for that one.
Pathfinder was really fun for me. I spent a lot of time developing classes, which is one of my favorite things to do, and I also enjoyed a lot of the supplemental classes that were released for it. Their witch was so good I abandoned my attempt at building one, and their oracle was so close to something I’d been working on (which I called a “hermit,” after the tarot card, which was its inspiration) that I completely reworked mine to be a slight tweak of it. Their magus gave me major tips for reworking my witchblade, and their hybrid class the hunter may be a better ranger than the ranger.** I loved the rules, which were still way more complex than they should have been, but I was comparing to the previous editions of D&D, and in that light they look delightfully slim. The combat was still a major pain, especially from the GM point of view, but character creation was a joy, with ever-so-many options, and fairly easy (at least for a long-time 3e player) to add even more of your own.
Eventually my child went off to teach Pathfinder to their friend group, and became a GM in their own right. This led to less tabletop gaming for me, but that was okay. I had other things to do, and GMing is a pretty big time commitment, so as long as the kid was having fun and carrying on the family traditions, I was fine. The GMing I had done up to then was still pretty satisfying.
Of course, the only downside was that I didn’t really get to play a character. I had NPCs, sur
Of course, I had another child as well. He was far too young to play with us during our Pathfinder heydey, but, then, children have a tendency of getting older. By the time we’d burned out on Pathfinder, my middle child was now 11, and it was time for him to get in on the action. He first played a Dungeon World one-shot*** for the eldest’s sixteenth birthday, and we moved on from there to a new campaign where I got to create the first paladin character I actually enjoyed, Arkan Kupriveryx. Because, you see, by that point, fifth edition was out.
Next time we’ll talk 5e and the rise of actual play D&D games.
__________
* See part 5 for further discussion on the origin of that term.
** Although probably still not as good as 3.5e’s scout.
*** For those not familiar, Dungeon World is sort of like D&D crossed with Apocalypse World, and if you don’t know what that is, probably just best to think of it as a “modern” TTRPG designed to focus more on narrative than rules.
Gaming Series
Lately I’ve started a bunch of series related to gaming, in particular my love of D&D and similar TTRPGs (tabletop roleplaying game
D&D and Me
My personal story about how I came to love the game and my formative experiences with it.
- Part 1: The Time Beforetimes
- Part 2: Mapping Out the Territory
- Part 3: Playing the Roles
- Part 4: If I Could Talk to the Animals
- Part 5: Multiple Personalities
- Part 6: The Contemplative Life ... of Punching the Crap of out People
- Part 7: The Next Generation
- Part 8: Resurgence of the Game
- Part 9: All in the Family
GM Philosophy
These are posts which outline my personal tenets as a GM (game master). This is mainly to have a formal place to point players to if they want to know what to expect in my games.
Multiclassing
One D&D topic that’s near and dear to my heart is multiclassing: the ability for one character to advance in more than class. I started a series exploring how this was handled in various editions of D&D, hopefully to culminate in some ideas about what the perfect multiclassing system might be.
- History of the Multiclasses (2nd edition)
- History of the Multiclasses (3rd edition)
- History of the Multiclasses (4th edition)
- History of the Multiclasses (5th edition)
General D&D 5e Musings
Occasionally I write something more general about fifth edition D&D in particular. There’s not a lot of throughline for these. It is, by its nature, an open-ended series.
- The Starting Level Dilemma
- Meet Arkan Kupriveryx (Concept)
- Meet Arkan Kupriveryx (Execution)
- Minor Magic Items
- Rotating Through the Gaming
- 5e vs Pathfinder: A Dance of D&Ds
- Perception, Investigation: a Perpetual Imbroglio
- We All Need a Little Guidance Sometimes
General Pathfinder Musings
Before D&D’s fifth edition (affectionately known as 5e) came out, I was pretty big into Pathfinder. I have some musings on that too:
- The Path to Pathfinder (part 1 of 2)
- Destination: Pathfinder (part 2 of 2)
- Looking Forward to Pathfinder’s Next Iteration
General Heroscape Musings
Outside of TTRPGs, my other big gaming love is Heroscape. Here are some thoughts about that game:
- Why Heroscape Is Cool
- Heroscape Forever
- Assault on the Ice Tower (posted on Heroscapers.com as “Xotli”)
- Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map (short)
General Fantasy Musings
Sometimes I just like to talk about fantasy gaming in general, storytelling through TTRPGs, etc. Like these:
Gaming with my Family
Of course I sometimes game with my family, and I sometimes write about it. Here are some samples: (Note: Most of these are about D&D, but some are about Heroscape.)
- Roleplaying After the Fall
- A Game for a Younger Man
- War for Father’s Day
- Genethlian Cartography (quickie)
- Why I Play D&D
- Quiet week, just a few demons to deal with ... (short)
- Another proud father moment (quickie)
- No Time Like the First Time
- Kicking off the Family Campaign
- D&D Story #1: The Demon Doll
Heroscape tournament reports
Most years, I attend an annual Heroscaper tournament with a group of folks called the SoCal League. Typically I take at least a human child or two along for the ride, so here’s a family subcategory consisting of those posts:
- Tourney the First (NHSD 2012)
- National Heroscape Day 2013 (short)
- Tourney prep (short)
- National Heroscape Day 2014 (short)
- National Heroscape Day 2015 (short)
- National Heroscape Day 2016
- NHSD 2017: Quick Results (short)
- SoCal ‘Scapers Summer Gameday, 2019 (short)
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