Last night me mates and I were chasing a black-hearted necromancer through a dark dungeon and he jumped through a magical portal. ‘Not such a big deal,’ thought we. Our wizard figured out the command word and we followed him through. We came out the other side in a city! But not a regular, normal, sane city…it was a place of dark, soot-covered buildings impossibly tall, carriages that hissed and smoked and moved without horses, and people with round little windows over their eyes who used magical rods that belched fire and launched some kind of sling stones with unearthly speed. (And they hurt. A lot.) We gave up on the necromancer and high-tailed it back to the real world.

My question, Uncle, is what kind of a place was that? And what kind of people could possibly adventure there?

Yours,

Regdar

My dear nephew,

It sounds like your portal took you not only across your world, but to an alternate one. As I was not with you, I don’t know the exact name or details of that other place, but your description leaves no doubt about its nature:

STEAMPUNK.

Steampunk is a world of What If? It’s a place where the past that was meets the future that never happened, where technology is the new magic, and where society is bright with possibility and dark with pollution, repression, and crime. In short, it’s the perfect place to adventure!

But how does a D&D Dungeon Master run in a steampunk world? After all, there is no techno-Victorian flavor text in D&D manuals, nor are there mechanics for mundane or fantastical firearms, robots, steamships, or submarines. Must a DM create a world and its ruleset from whole cloth? No! With a slight amount of reskinning, you too can run a D&D Steampunk game. I am currently running a Steampunk campaign set in the homebrew world of Arcium, and it the next few posts, I’ll explain how I did it. Read on, brave DM!

Step 1: Understand the Underlying Mechanics

One of the best things (in my faux-humble opinion) about 4th Edition is how the rules work together. Feats, powers, skills, and stats for weapons, magic, and monsters use the same base mechanics. More importantly, they interact in predictable, logical ways. Notice, I am making no claim about game balance since that concept is debatable, but if you like the way the 4E rules work, then there’s no need to change them at a fundamental level.

Notice that the name or description of a rule has no bearing on the way it works. Take a crossbow, for example. Its stat line (Prof +2, Dam 1d8, range 15/30, Price 25 gp, Weight 4 lb, Properties Load minor) says absolutely nothing about a crossbow. The rule values do not describe a stout bow fitted to a wooden stock with a mechanical trigger that fires a short heavy bolt with an iron tip, because that’s all “flavor text.” Flavor text describes how a thing looks, how a character interacts with it, and how it might appear to observes in a shared world. True, the rule text was designed as a numerical way to approximate the flavor text, but once the rule is generated the numbers can be separated from the description and then applied to other similar things.

So, stop thinking of “Prof +2, Dam 1d8, range 15/30, Price 25 gp, Weight 4 lb, Properties Load minor” as a crossbow. Think of it as “a widget that does moderate damage with reasonable accuracy at a distance up to 50 yards that takes a little effort to reload.”

Step 2: Decide What Your World Looks Like, Ignoring the Rules

Steampunk as a genre means many things to many people. Some like a cinematic Jules Verne-style setting, while others go in for a more Gibsonesque dystopia. That part is up to you. Start designing your world. What kinds of social structures are in place? Governments? Bureaucracies? Monolithic religions? Go nuts. Then start thinking about the technology that is available, since that is a fundamental part of the steampunk milieu. What races are present? Absent? What classes are common? Which are gone entirely? And which are new?

In Arcium, there are fives basic races: humans, elves, dwarves, dragonborn, and gobbers (goblins) who live in a large republic governed by a Prime Minister and the Fraternal Moot of Peers and Worthies. Technology is pervasive, and magic is shunted to the periphery, either as shamanic magic by savage races like orcs or as ecstatic religious fervor by fanatics of the Holy Adamic Church.

In the pre-campaign stage, I sketched out a northern Viking-style land in case a player wants to run a barbarian, but I don’t see them integrating into my pseudo-Victorian society on a regular basis. I also don’t see a place for the monks with their Shaolin priest flavor in my world, so they go away. The idea of the tinkerer and inventor is central to my view of Steampunk, so I pull in the Artificer from Eberron. And while I’m there: Warforged? Can you say…robots? Sentient mechanical men are perfect for my world!

Step 3: Embrace Re-skinning

Probably sooner rather than later, you will run up against the “but D&D doesn’t have _______ in it!” problem. Don’t panic.

Find a rule, piece of equipment, magic item, power, or monster that has the mechanical properties you want. The more fundamental or pervasive the rule, the better. In Arcium, I decided that I wanted to have muskets and pistols be fairly common (and also crazy-tech versions of firearms, but we’ll discuss those later). I also wanted to eliminate bows and crossbows from general use, because they felt very medieval in flavor. Solution: I replaced the “crossbow” flavor text with “musket” and replaced “hand crossbow” with “pistol.”

Stop right there. I know what you’re thinking: “A black powder weapon takes longer to load! You can’t fire every round!” or “But a bullet hits harder than a bolt. Maybe I should up the damage!” or “A musket isn’t as accurate as a crossbow. Shouldn’t I take a point off the accuracy?” or “Shouldn’t there be a mechanic for misfires?”

Sure, you can do all those things. You can also rewrite all the rules to your heart’s content.  Then you can figure how your new mechanic interacts with every other rule (and the new ones that come out). And if it is fair for other “similar” rules at that power level. You can do all the things the designers at WoTC have already done…minus the salary. Have fun.

I found it wasn’t helpful to try to make game mechanics model real world physics or logistics. That’s what I do when I play GURPS. When I play D&D, I prefer to look at things from a different perspective: what is the campaign function of a particular mechanic? In Arcium, I needed muskets, right? Wrong: that’s flavor text. I needed “a widget that does moderate damage with reasonable accuracy at a distance up to 50 yards that takes a little effort to reload.” Sounds like a crossbow mechanic to me, so I changed the name, added a fictitious name, and voila! Behold the Durenberg Carbine Musket (Prof +2, Dam 1d8, range 15/30, Price 25 gp, Weight 4 lb, Properties Load minor).

One important caveat: don’t try to compare things your campaign needs to things your campaign doesn’t have. I don’t need to point out to anyone that a firearm probably hits with greater impact than a crossbow, but it doesn’t matter because I don’t have crossbows. How does my Bic pen compare to a quill and inkpot? It’s irrelevant to me, because I don’t have the latter. The “campaign function” of a Bic or a quill is that it can write words on paper.

Okay, my example worked for something basic, but how do I model Dr. Hawthorne’s Oscillating Ether Raygun? What about reskinning a +3 phasing crossbow? Then describe it like “a big rifle with an ether modulator and pulse generator with a projectile stream that, being ether, passes right through cover?” Boom. Done.

Step 4: Remember Re-skinning Works Both Ways

D&D 4E is predicated on certain assumptions. One of these is that characters will accrue magic items as they progress in level. Without these items, they will be less capable of destroying the foes and overcome the challenges geared for their level. But if your steampunk has no “magic” what do you do? Re-skin the other direction! Instead of starting with a piece of tech and finding a mechanic that fits, take the mechanic you need to include and invent some flavor text to make it fit in your world.

The fighter in my campaign was due for a +1 weapon. If the weapon he got was a “musket”, we simply take a crossbow mechanic, add the “+1 magic” mechanic, and add the flavor text “Your musket is equipped with the latest brass rangefinding and accuracy peepsight.” Look, it’s more accurate and hits a little harder because your shot hits closer to the mark”…more accuracy, more damage…like about +1 to each!

More to come later,

Uncle Per

Next Installment: Tweaking Character Classes and Powers

I wish your Dungeon Master friends would tell us before an adventure starts that it’s going to be a mystery. If I knew that, I’d stay home and wait until they found the bad guy in his lair and go to fight him. When it comes to finding clues, I got nothin’. Perception? Didn’t train it. Arcana? History? Nature? Not a chance. Sometimes I get lucky and get to scare somebody into talkin’, but mostly I sit around.

Well, come to that, we all sit around a lot. Our ranger finds a human footprint in a pool of blood, our rogue spots a recently opened secret door, and the cleric reports the guy was strangled. Then the DM sits back and chuckles into his wispy little beard as he watches us flail about. But how are we supposed to put those three clues together and figure out whodunit?

Looking for advice,

Regdar

Octavus 16

My dear nephew,

You often write to me with misguided complaints and myopic perspectives, but this is not one of those times. If you are bored solving a murder, or you feel a bit dull because you can’t solve the mystery, the crime should be pinned on your DM, not on you, Regdar.

Mysteries are one of the hardest genres of adventure to write successfully, because they depend on a carefully restricted flow of information: if too few clues are given, the mystery cannot be solved, but if too many clues are gathered too quickly, there is no mystery at all. There are a few principles that come to mind regarding mysteries that I want to explain. Mind you, this is not an exhaustive list, and I am sure you will come up with more on your own. First of all:

• If a mystery can be solved with a single skill check, it’s not a mystery. If a party is trying to identify who cast a particularly heinous evil ritual, and the DM requires one Hard DC Arcana check to recognize the perpetrator’s magical signature, then the identity of the evil wizard was never really a mystery, as far as the PCs are concerned. A true mystery requires compiling multiple clues, usually from multiple sources, in order to piece together what really happened or who is responsible.

• Mystery adventures do not have to be related to a crime. Any time hidden information is sought after, you may have a mystery. Deciphering an inscrutable map written in a dead language could be a mystery, as could negotiating a byzantine network of courtiers to learn which minor lady is the object of the bachelor king’s secret affections. Of course, mysteries often ARE crime related: the homicide is the most famous kind of mystery, after all!

• The PCs are supposed to be able to solve the mystery at some point. If this isn’t true, why was it made into an adventure? Let unsolvable questions remain enigmas in the background. For example, I don’t know why that little “Check Horse” light comes on in my carriage even now and then, but I don’t go out and hire adventurers to bring their swords and try and solve it, now do I?

Now, assuming you agree with these tenets (and my unflappable hubris convinces me you do), let us proceed with how to deal with mysteries in the adventures. I have a few simple rules that seem to help me in these situations.

Rule #1:  Remember what game you’re playing. Yes, obviously the game is D&D–that’s hardly what I mean. A tabletop roleplaying mystery is easy to imagine as a scene from a Sherlock Holmes novel or an episode of CSI, and it’s tempting to DM it along those lines. It’s also gravely mistaken. Both of those examples have characters written by an omniscient author, who allows his characters to find or discern exactly the right clues to proceed to the next bit of the story. The problem with this scenario in D&D, though, is that the players are “writing” their characters’ actions, and the omniscient author is the DM, who is limiting how much the players can know. Players are a) not physically in the locations their characters are, so they can’t passively notice things the DM doesn’t explicitly tell them, and b) they may not be professional detectives themselves anyway.

So what game are you really playing? Minute mysteries, or lateral thinking puzzles.

You might remember this game from camp or long car trips. It’s the one where a person gives you a few short, ambiguous sentences to outline a mystery scenario (usually involving death), and you have to deduce what happened using only yes/no questions. For example:

Abraxus and Bellisima and Corwyn and Deliah all live in the same cottage. Abraxus and Bellisima go out to buy armor, and when they return, Deliah is lying dead on the floor in a puddle of water and glass. It is obvious that Corwyn killed her, but Corwyn is not prosecuted nor severely punished.

Your PCs are in a similar situation during a mystery. The DM gives them a description of the event/item/scene, and the PCs don’t know what is relevant to the mystery and what is a red herring, or false clue. Is the buying of armor important? Does it matter that they live in a cottage rather than a manor? The players in the game have only two tools to solve the mystery: the players’ wits and their characters’ skill checks. Skill checks tend to be binary: did I make the DC or not? Yes? No. Either I get the clue, or I don’t.

The other problem is that players often do not know the right questions to ask. Have you figured out the solution for our example mystery? Here you go: Deliah is a goldfish, and Corwyn is a cat. Stupidly simple, right? Well, it would be if you were there, but it requires a nonlinear mental leap to start wondering if all four characters in the story are all humanoid…

DMs love to create clever, convoluted mysteries, but are sometimes surprised when players can’t unravel them on the spot, in real time, with limited information! Which brings me to my next rule.

Rule #2: Provide way more clues than you think you will need. If your mystery is about a man slain by a vampire, the victim’s pale complexion and the two punctures on his neck may be enough to clue the PCs in. But if, in your world, vampire saliva heals the fang wounds or something, you might need to add a shattered mirror in the room and a mangled iron holy symbol on the floor and a small empty glass vial with the church’s symbol etched on it. And then be ready for the PCs to use Heal skill to learn the man has very little blood left in his corpse.

It may seem that by leaving so much evidence at the scene of a crime, you’re showing your villain to be the most incompetent servant of evil ever, but it won’t seem that way to the players. Remember, you don’t have to give all the clues all at once, but keep giving them until the players are on the right track. Don’t waste the players’ time by allowing them to explore dead end after dead end. It may be fun once, but if done repeatedly it kills the fun of the game and makes the players frustrated.

Gauge how many clues you need to give by the player discussion and frustration level. Be ready to make up more clues, to add NPCs with relevant information that might be drawn out, etc., etc.

Corollary to Rule #2: False clues are fun, but beware of PC rationalization. Suppose in that last example, the man was slain by a poisonous snake that bit him in the neck as he slept, and you want to make it seem like a vampire got him. Perhaps you describe the neck wounds to the PCs and wait for them to make a Heal check to ask about the victim’s blood level. When they do, you triumphantly announce that the corpse has plenty of blood in it! In your mind, this exonerates all blood-suckers, but suddenly your players start saying things like, “Well, perhaps the vamp only fed a little, enough to kill him but not enough to be really noticeable,” and they continue with the vampire-as-killer line of reasoning.

Are they being obtuse? Did they just miss it? Probably not. It’s likely they are “meta-gaming” perhaps without even realizing it. In plain Common, they recognize that a DM is not, in fact, omniscient and since vampires are fictitious, the physics/biology surrounding them is up for debate. Therefore it’s possible (so their thinking goes) that the DM’s idea of how much blood a vampire takes during a feeding differs from the PCs’ perception, so they are giving the DM the benefit of the doubt and crafting a plausible rationalization to fit what the DM seems to be telling them.

To counter this, overload any one red herring with five or six correct clues. In the snake example, have the room full of mirrors, and the man be wearing a holy symbol around his neck. Have his complexion be a bit bluish around the lips and eyes, and maybe even let the PCs find a bit of dried snakeskin near a two-inch hole in one wall near the floor. Then the PCs may decide to use Heal to learn the cause of death, and figure out he was poisoned, not drained by a vampire.

Rule #3: If you use skill checks to parse out clues, never pre-assign DCs to the information! I know I’m breaking a cardinal DM rule here, but here’s the point: you want the PCs to end up with the information! If they don’t have it, they can’t solve the mystery and the story grinds to a halt. Make the PCs roll, because a) they trained these skills and like to use them, b) we’re all gamers and we like to roll dice, and c) you can divide up the clues unequally, favoring those who rolled best (so it looks like the high rollers beat higher DCs).

Rule #4: Each PC should find a clue or two. This is a basic rule we learned in kindergarten–share the toys with everyone, and everyone has more fun. If you don’t have a clue ready for that barbarian with no non-combat skills, figure out a way to make him feel useful anyway!

Rule #5: Crazy PC ideas should often net results. The PCs whose trained skills aren’t immediately applicable to a mystery will often either devote themselves to some mundane in-character task and let the other PCs take over the mystery, or they will undertake a completely off-the-wall and bizarre action trying to “contribute”. The former choice is a way of giving up and removing their “useless” character from the scene, and the latter behavior is usually an attempt to amuse themselves and the other players with their antics. Improvise a clue to give them in these situations.

Imagine the PCs come upon a cabin in the woods with a dead human inside. A broken sword lies next to him, and there are a lot of small, strange tracks outside. The DM knows this is the result of a kobold attack, and the ranger and the wizard immediately get to work on the mystery. After a couple rounds of Arcana and Nature checks by the other players, the paladin feels a bit useless and says she’s going to get a fire going in the hearth to stave off the chill of the encroaching night. The DM could let the paladin PC effectively remove her character from the scene, but how much more interesting to have her find a dead kobold under the woodpile outside? Especially if the corpse had the other part of the broken sword still in his guts? Now, the paladin has substantially contributed to (if not solved) the mystery, and it happened in a way that made the discovery seem natural and generated by the player, rather than spoon-fed by the DM. And of the course, the ranger will jump in again and roll Nature to determine that kobolds always try to bury the dead, but these must have been moving light and fast and didn’t have time and..and…and…..

Rule #6: Know when to change the story. The wise DM knows how to pick his battles. Imagine a prince, missing from his tower bedroom. You decide he was surprised in his sleep, rolled up in his bedsheet and tied, and carried out the doorway by his kidnappers. You describe the scene of struggle and tell the players that the bedsheet is missing, but a player gets fixated on the idea that the sheet is missing because the prince struggled with his attackers, realized the fight was hopeless, grabbed the sheet and leaped out the tower window, using the sheet as a makeshift parachute!

Well, that image is a very exciting scenario (and, in fact, much cooler than a heroic prince getting rolled up like a cheap carpet), so the other players jump on the bandwagon and connect the other clues to see how this might be plausible. They run outside to the ground below the tower window and search around. Swallow your pride here. Does the means of egress really matter? No, not this time, so: lo and behold! The PCs find the discarded bedsheet and spot barefooted tracks leading towards the woods. However, they also discover four horse tracks converging on the fleeing prince, signs of a scuffle, and then only four horse tracks leading away, with one horse’s prints deeper than they were before…

You see? The prince is still captured, you have an even better story of how it happened, and the players feel clever for figuring it out…because they did. Remember that D&D is a cooperative story, and your players never need know how much of the story was in your notes, and how much they wrote themselves!

So you see, Regdar, even a fighter may have much to contribute to a mystery. Keep your chin up, your head down, and your bowstring dry.

Until next time,

Pernicious DM.

Octavus 7

My dear Regdar,

What a frightful dilemma! Did the naughty little DM forget to announce: “We’re in a skill challenge!” nor list all the relevant skills and their DCs? Whatever were you to do?

I have a suggestion: stop playing video games, and start playing D&D.

I started running games when Elf was a class and Clerics didn’t get spells until 2nd level, should they live so long. There were about 4 rules and the Magic-User who had that many hit points was damn lucky. A primitive system, to be sure, but you should have seen the games, Regdar! Crazy, over-the-top, seat-of-the-pants cooperative stories that deserved the title  of adventure.

Back then, players were free to try anything and everything because the rules covered almost nothing. So here’s my theory: the amount of perceived character freedom is inversely proportional to the thoroughness of the rules. Notice I said perceived character freedom. That’s important, because as much as the naysayers will flame me for it, nothing in the 4th Edition D&D ruleset limits character choice or roleplaying. But I see players like you restricting themselves all the time, Regdar.

The problem with your dragon construct episode wasn’t that the DM “hid” the skill challenge; I would have done the same thing myself. Instead, what happened was that you restricted your own actions to “move, at-will, encounter, or daily” the minute the initiative die was dropped. Play Street Fighter if you want to toggle between punch, kick, and down-down-kick-left-punch Tornado Strike. D&D isn’t a video game; it’s a roleplaying game, which is why it’s so much better.

Before you sharpen your quill to fire back an angry retort, know that I’ve heard the classic player comeback to whether skill challenges should be announced. They say “When an initiative die is rolled, we know we’re in combat and we have very clear rules and guidelines for what we can do and what will be effective against our opponent. The PHB says nothing about skill challenges, and unless we know we’re in one, how can we know what we can do or what may succeed?” First of all, unless you understand the design thoughts behind skill challenges, you’ll have the wrong perception of them anyway. Go here and read my irascible cousin DM’s great article on the subject.

Back, my dear nephew? Learn something? Good for you. Well here’s my addition to his words of wisdom: This goes beyond skill challenges.

That’s right, I’m talking to my fellow DMs. Ever notice page 42 in your DMG? It’s the one that gives some guidelines about how to handle spontaneous players actions that aren’t covered in the rules…it’s like a one-page Cliff’s Notes of the entire Red Box edition! And as a DM, if you don’t use this page every session, you’re holding your module notes too tightly.

That’s right. If a gaming group isn’t trying all kinds of crazy shit to solve problems every session, it’s because the DM has trained them, passively or actively, to nod and follow along with the campaign story and press down-down-kick-left-punch when appropriate.

D&D should be cooperative storytelling. One of my players is fond of pointing out that a good campaign is a mutable universe. That means if you, Regdar, were to think of some clever way around a problem that I hadn’t thought of, you should be rewarded for that. And if you do something off-the-wall cinematic to achieve a goal, I should encourage your success, not make you feel foolish.

Here’s an example of what I mean:

Suppose an evil high priest is finishing up some dark ritual you need to stop, but he’s across a big moat in the floor and you can’t reach him. Imagine you say,  ”Can I rip that lamp sconce off the wall and try to nail him with it?” A DM should never say, “No, it’s attached too tightly” or even “Make a Strength check to see if you pull off the sconce. A 14? No, that’s not high enough: you struggle but can’t get the sconce off the wall.” For God’s sake, it’s a sconce. Unless it happens to be the only remaining artifact of the DM’s long-dead mother, those kind of statements are just a smokescreen for “I don’t know how to handle this, so I’m going to shut it down,” or, “In Halo, some things are just background texture, and this is like that.”

The DM’s job in that example is to say, “Hell yes, you can. With a loud groan, you twist the old ironwork off its bolts and heave it at the shaman. Roll to see if you hit him.” Obviously if the players rolls high and hits, then roll some damage and move on. But in this situation even a miss should have positive effects, like distracting him or something. Why? Imagine the scene…the burly fighter rips ironwork off the wall, throws it forty feet across a moat…and the shot goes wide and the priest ignores it. Wow. That was exciting, huh? Not. The priest might reflexively duck, stop chanting the ritual, and level a magic staff at the fighter…so in effect, the stunt achieved its goal.

Why? Because it’s more cooperative, more exciting, and more damn fun.

The powers and the skills the player has on the character sheet should be a jumping-off point, or at worst some fallback actions while you think of the next cool thing. They should rarely be a starting point, and never be a boundary. Use your ability scores, skill mods, feats and powers like a detailed description of a particular character, and then react–in any situation–like that person might. Don’t worry if what you want to do is covered in the rules–that’s the DM’s job. That’s the job the Street Fighter code can’t do, which is why it’s not as good as D&D.

You have to play by the rules, but don’t let the rules play you. An initiative die roll doesn’t mean combat. It only sets up an action order, just like those little numbers at the deli counter. You get those manticore-and-cheese sandwiches all the time, Regdar, and so far you’ve resisted the urge to footwork lure that old lady away from the counter and bash her with your maul. Combat doesn’t start with a die roll. It starts when some guy draws a three-foot blade and moves in with the intent to shank you. Just remember that the old yank-on-the-carpet trick is a way for anyone to have a spinning sweep.

So stop worrying whether you’re in a skill challenge, or a combat, or neither. Just play your character, play creatively, play D&D, and let the DM sweat the details.

Your faithful DM,

Uncle Per