Twofold Adept

I walk the twofold path, balancing and blending many skills into one harmonious and deadly whole.

Prerequisite: Novice Power, Acolyte Power, Adept Power

You have decided to walk the twofold path, focusing not just one your primary class but on your multiclass as well. You have better learned how to use the abilities of your multiclass and have even unlocked the secret of combining the powers of both your classes into one furious assault. You understand better than most that true power comes from versatility.

Twofold Adept Features

Twofold Action (11th level): You can expend an action point to regain the use of a single power you selected with the Novice Power feat instead of taking an extra action.
Twofold Training (11th level): You know one additional at-will power that must be selected from the list of at-will powers available to the class you multiclassed into. In addition, when you retrain the Novice Power, Acolyte Power, and Adept power feats you may choose to replace up to two of your class powers instead of only one.
Twofold Harmony (16th level): You may now use the benefit granted by your class-specific multiclass feat twice as often as normal. For example, a character with the Initiate of the Faith class feature could use the cleric’s healing word power twice per day instead of once per day.

Twofold Adept Powers

New Keyword

Multiclass: Powers with the multiclass keyword are considered to have the same keywords as the power source of your class and of the class you multiclassed into. For example, any power with the multiclass keyword used by a fighter with the Initiate of the Faith feat would have the martial and divine keywords.

Today, while talking to Save-vs-DM, he said, when seeing my MSN nickname, “blood for the Blood God!”, to which I answered “Kill! Maim! Burn!”. As any Warhammer or 40K fan knows, those two screams are usually uttered by the blood-thirsted followers of Khorne, one of the four Chaos Gods. This made the following realization come to my head: part of the appeal of Chaos when it comes to people that play those armies, or those types of characters in the RPG, is that they can explore the idea of letting go, and giving in to one´s basic instincts. Following from here, we get to the follow-up idea:

“Blood for the Blood God!” is a scream that talks about something so primal, so basic, (basically, killing and dying) that strikes some chord inside us (whether it repels us or attracts us is another debate entirely). So far, there are no battle cries for Tzeentch, Slaneesh or Nurgle, and yet, Khorne has two. The Blood God definitely represents the decay of civilization at its very core (unlike Nurgle, that is just statism and decay, Tzeentch that represents hope, change and deception, or Slaneesh that represents hedonism taken to the extreme), going to a state of primal barbarism, of the “law of the jungle” that makes it feel much closer to our instincts than the more abstract concepts that other Chaos Gods deal with. Slaneesh is the only one that comes close to the Blood God in that respect, and while pleasure is a huge driving force for us humans, it certainly is not stronger than the instinct of survival, the dichotomy between life and death, nor deeper-rooted in us (or any animals, for that matter).

With all this in mind, one has to wonder if Khorne has been so popular in the minds of players only because its message of “kicking ass and taking names”, or if there´s something deeper going on, that makes it have an extra appeal to most players.

A long time ago, there was only wargames. Then people starting experimenting with things, and we got results like the Braunstein games, and eventually Dungeons and Dragons.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Through the years games have straddled the lines. Examples of wargames with RPG elements include Inquisitor and many of the offerings from twohourwargames (Nuts, 5150, Chain reaction etc). Examples of RPG’s with wargame elements are most strongly represented by D&D and Warhammer FRP.

For our current roleplaying campaign, I tossed around a lot of ideas, and my initial thought was to use a wargame set to run a roleplaying campaign. We’d have rules for the tabletop combat, and then just roleplay through the “talky talky” scenes. In the end, we settled on GURPS, since it has a very strong tactical combat aspect, but if we run a large battle, we may switch the mechanics to resolve that.

In the upcoming session, the two players are respectively the sergeant and corporal of a French infantry squad near the Franco-German border in 1940. They’ve been sent on a routine patrol to check out a bridge in the area, where they’ll be attacked by a German patrol.

The interesting part will be that this will be run using GURPS rules, but with miniatures and terrain set up (if a bit primitive looking, as I only have so much time to prepare), and conducted as a tactical battle, in the vein of a proper wargame.

The players will have to issue orders to their subordinates (8 squad members in this case), and may have to endure those orders being misunderstood or not carried out, based on morale and leadership tests. All aspects traditional of a wargame. Simultaneously, they will be able to act independently, come up with ideas and implement them, and act “outside the box” in the manner of an RPG.

Nothing about this is truly new, it’s existed for years, but I think the core of it, is something that is too often overlooked in roleplaying games. Plenty of games use miniatures and tactical movement, but they often omit the things that wargames have done for years: Opportunity fire, morale, the uncertainty of whether orders are carried out, the importance of leadership. We have to go back to Megatraveller before we see those things making an appearance and that’s been how long?

I often get asked why I don’t like D&D, since I like tactical combat so much. My response is twofold:

A: Swords and spears don’t interest me, rifles and tanks do.

B: D&D has good tactical combat in the sense that it’s fun and is pretty much a game in itself. But it doesn’t have plausible tactical combat. When I play, I want to think about whether I can place my machine gun in enfilade, whether my men will be able to hold the line, whether my ambush will work, NOT whether I am placed in the right square to get a +2, or how these three powers will interact with each other.

And that is where we can turn to wargames, to find solutions to those problems.

Whatever happens, it’ll be interesting to see how they deal with the situation, and how they react to the fog of war of not knowing where the enemy is, until they are actually observed on the table.

Often, when designing an adventure or, specially, a campaign, we have a preconceived idea of what we want to do, and start building a whole story from the ground up, and then we shoehorn the PC´s in, or request that the players create specific kinds of characters for the kind of game we are going to run. This, however, takes very little consideration of the players´ philias and phobias, and specially, it ignores what kind of game they want to play.

For this reason, it is often a good idea to ask players those very questions: what do they expect from this game, what is it that they´d like to see done, even if it´s on simple, abstract terms: for example, in a D&d game, do they want to play a game of high adventure and epic storylines, or a smaller, more down to earth game, with lots of side quests tied to specific locations?

Another thing that must be taken into consideration is the players you are dealing with. A friend of mine recently told me that after playing with some novice players (his girlfriend, a friend of his and his cousin, all of which were first-timers in gaming), he realized that the plot he had come up with was far too complex for them, and they were in over their heads. He reflected on the fact that, for a more experienced RP´er, the plot would have felt simple, and that they would have have no problem uncovering it if that was the case, but that due to their lack of experience, they could not follow what was going on behind the scenes. I pointed out that, for novice players, you needn´t complicated stories to surprise them or make them feel things are new and enthralling, and that often, something they can follow and get to the end of will feel satisfying enough.

Finally, you have to strike a balance between what you want to run and what your players want to play. If you are running something that has no appeal to you, you will soon lose interest in the game, and it will end up in a failure.

With all this in mind, the best way to plan what you want to do is, once you know what your players want, adapt what you want so that it fits both your desires and your players´. Making a rigid outline of the story won´t help. No matter how clever your plans are, your players will always break them in some way. For that reason, be sure to be flexible, and while you will need to plan ahead, don´t be afraid to improvise something out of the path. If you can be quick enough to make the players go back to the original plot without them feeling like they are being led by you, then all the better.

To sum up:

1. Decide what you want to do.
2. Learn what your players want you to do.
3. Mix those two.
4. Spice the result up with some good plots and ideas that fit your players.
5. Be ready to improvise to correct the whole thing
6. Profit.

As a follow up to one of my gaming resolutions, I thought to share some of my own tricks and tactics for making fights a bit more dynamic.  This list is by no means exaustive, but these bits of advice have worked well for in the past.  By way of example I’ll be using two of my favorite systems to showcase how these techniques can be used.

Create A Living Environment
One of the most successful tactics for creating a dynamic fight is also the most GM intensive.  When setting up an encounter area for a game, try to create an environment that lives, breathes, and changes.  I think too many of us (me included) create these incredibly static encounter areas that don’t change over time or in response to player actions.  This can quickly lead to characters standing in one spot and wailing away at enemies until one drops.

So, when I design an area for a fight I try to include three different aspects.  The first, and most important, is littering the area a bit with objects that can be interacted with.  The prime example of this would be the bar fight – you have tables, chairs, and beer bottles that can all be used as improvised weapons.  You have bars and perhaps a stage that can be used as cover.  The area is littered with objects that hamper movement and limit where you can fight, forcing players to move around and use the terrain to their best advantage.

It’s important, however, that this not become nothing but a limiting factor.  You have to use the carrot as well as the stick.  If you’re designing an area that can be interacted with, it’s important that their be bonuses for doing so.  Perhaps ducking behind the bar gives you a bonus to defense.  Using a chair as a weapon might give a bonus to disarming that warrior using the big weapon.  Jumping up on the table should give you a bonus to attack people lower than you.  The basic idea is to reward your players for using the environment, and these rewards should be noticeable.  Error on the side of generosity if you must, at least until it becomes more of a habit.

It is also equally important that your enemies make use of this feature as well.  In fact, having the enemies using the terrain in this manner is a good way to exemplify how the environment can be used.  Be sure to declare (loudly if you must) what the enemy is doing and what tangible benefit this action has.  If the players discover that the enemies like standing on bar tables to get attack bonuses one of two things will happen.  Either they’ll do it themselves to get that nice bonus or they’ll start destroying the tables to negate the benefit the enemy receives.  Either way you’ve suddenly started changing the field of battle.  Which leads us right into method #2.

Change the Environment
Just as you can create an interactive environment, you can also change the environment as play progresses.  This generally comes in two flavors: change that’s independent of the players and change that is initiated by the players.  Both types are equally useful but tend to evolve differently as play progresses.

The first type, player independent change, is best exemplified by the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons.  This new edition added encounter traps that act somewhat like a monster.  I’ve used this to great effect in all of my games by designing some aspect of the area that keeps changing over time.  A prime example is an encounter I ran just recently for my D&D game.  The players entered a room that had grates in the floor.  Every round a few of the grates would fill with flames from an underground volcano sort of deal.  Smoke rising out of grates each round would indicate what grates would be filled with fire the next round.  The players quickly started using this to their advantage, pushing and pull the kobolds into the smoking grates to burn them up quickly.  It made the fight a lot more mobile.

That’s a pretty specific example, I’ll admit, but there are dozens more that you can find in the real world.  A fight in the sewers might have changing water levels, pipes that spew raw sewage every round, or other such things.  Just so long as there is some aspect of the terrain that changes in a mostly predictable way you should be good to go.  But as above, make sure that there’s some benefit to using this terrain to your advantage.  The idea here is to get the players interacting with both the enemies and the environment.

The second aspect of this technique is player initiated change.  If players break a window consider making the area right next to it damage people who run over it or make the square more difficult to move through.  If the players are in the sewer and break a pipe, have it start spewing sewage.  Basically any time a player interacts with the environment it should change in some manner that makes the battle interesting.  This can even be combined with player independent changes, so that the players can change how the environment works with some thought.  In the above fire trapped room example, I gave players with some control over fire the chance to make a square burn permanently or not at all.

Just remember that your enemies can use this same technique as well.  It might be more valuable for the enemies to change the terrain to their advantage than it would be for them to directly attack the characters.  Again this shows the players what they can do and changes the fight dynamic a bit.  And sometimes the ones changing the environment might not even be the players or the villains, but random NPCs that are part of the fight.  Which leads me into my third point.

Use NPCs to Your Advantage
This one really works well in superhero style games.  So long as you’re making an interesting environment, you might as well populate it with people who are mostly just extras in the fight.  This gives you a direct tool to change the environment from round to round and a method of increasing tension as well as limiting player actions for a short period.

The first use of extras is that they can be used as hostages by enemies.  This forces a player to decide between hurting the bad guys or rescuing the innocents.  If you go this route, be sure to reward players for actually rescuing the mother and her baby.  If you’re running mutants and masterminds, give them a bonus hero point right then and there.  If you’re running D&D, use an action point.  Mostly just give them whatever temporary but useful bennie you can to reinforce their actions in a positive manner.

The second way to use extras is as mobile hindering terrain.  If you have a fight taking place in the mall chances are that some of the extras are going to panic and start storming the doors.  Now running through areas with a bunch of civilians is going to be a lot harder.  Enemies might use this to their advantage, putting the extras inbetween them and the heroes.  Now you either have to find a way around them or think creatively to get through them (or over them).

You can also use extras as a sort of trap or mobile benefit.  In a supers game all of the civilians might throw objects at the enemies for a little bit, earning his wrath but giving Captain Hero a chance to get up and rejoin the fight.  In a D&D game all of the Orc mothers and children might try to mob the adventurers with crude sticks and rocks, forcing them to either fight them off or retreat to a less crowded room.  All of these can make the area seem a lot more exciting and lively, as players have to deal with both all of the extras and the people they’re actually fighting.

Create Optional Goals
Finally, I’ve actually adopted a tactic from war games: optinal objectives.  If you give the players something to accomplish beyond simply fighting the bad guys it will make fights more interesting.  This one can be hard to do and it’s something you shouldn’t use all the time, but in big or important fights it can make all the difference in the world.

An optional goal should be just that: optional.  It shouldn’t generally relate to beating up bad guys, but might make that job easier if accomplished.  Basically you create other things your players can do beyond fighting someone and then make sure accomplishing this goal either adds an extra reward or makes the main fight easier.  You’ll have to be pretty up front about this fact, either using a visible goal or using knowledge type skills to inform the players of extra options they can take.

Example #1: The heroes encounter the sinister Dr. Twilight, a mage of great skill.  His minions are enacting a ritual that will summon forth monsters from the beyond that will fight with him.  Now, the players can ignore the mooks until last and just fight Dr. Twilight, but if Mister Magic uses his magic skill to distrupt that ritual suddenly they don’t have to fight the monsters from beyond at all.  Sure, it takes Mister Magic out of the fight for a bit, but in the end it has a greater reward of making the fight easier.

Example #2: A band of shadowrunners has to extract a doctor from a corporation.  When they finally meet up with him he informs the runners that if they can also hack into the computer and retrieve his research he can reward them extra.  It will take extra time and might make the extraction harder, but if they succeed not only do they get an extra reward but the doctor can use his research to install new cyberware into the characters.  Plus it sets the doctor up a bit better in his new life, which in return might mean he can lend them a hand in future games.

Example #3: The hearty adventurers finally catch up to the great dragon Roazun.  Outside the cave they can see a few kobolds working on a ritual.  The party wizard informs them that this ritual is strengthening the dragon but the kobolds are so distracted that they can sneak past them.  Now the players can either kill the kobolds and stop the ritual, which makes the dragon weaker when they fight him, or ignore them and just go fight the dragon.  One path is faster but harder, while the other is longer but makes the end fight easier.

As you can see, some of the optional objectives happen during the fight and some happen outside of the fight.  Either way what they do is change how something functions, giving the players more control and making things a bit more interesting.  If at all possible, try to make the optional objectives happen during the fight, as it makes things more interesting.  But as you can see, even my examples don’t all happen in fights.  It’s a hard thing to do and is usually best used sparingly.

In closing, I’d like to mention that the one thing that helps more than anything else is simple enthusiasm.  If you bring a lot of energy to the table and describe actions well it will do a lot towards making the game more exciting.  It might not change how fights really function, but it will help folks get into things.  It’s also important to remember that everything I’ve typed here works well for me, but it might not work well for you.  If you can find something that makes your fights more dynamic by all means use it!  And tell us about it too, either here or on the forums.

As I sit here waiting for the ball to drop in the western time zone, I’m pondering a little tradition of mine – gaming resolutions.  They’re a lot like normal New Years resolutions, only directly related to my gaming.  Just as we can strive for personal improvement we can also strive for improvement in our gaming.  I thought that I’d share my own resolutions and what prompted me to make them.

Resolution #1: Learn to Put My Foot Down

This one comes directly from the Mutants and Masterminds game that I’ve been running.  While M&M 2e is a great system, it requires quite a bit of GM oversight to avoid potential problems.  I had a player who made a character that, while completely rules legal, didn’t really fit the street level theme I had going for my game.  Instead of putting my foot down and telling the player that the revision wasn’t kosher, I let the player go with it for a session before I realized my mistake and the disparity.  The player was very generous and decided to revamp the character again, but for the player it felt like a downgrade in power.  I’ve I’d actually had the stones to put my foot down in the first place it wouldn’t have been a problem and the player would have gotten an upgrade, not a downgrade.

So from now on I’m going to try and learn how to say no a bit more often, at least when it really counts.  I love saying yes while actually playing, but I need to stick to my guns more when it comes to character creation and big decisions.  Some things just shouldn’t be used in certain games and I need to be clear about that from the beginning.  As a poster over at RPG.net is fond of saying, “You’re the DM and you wear the Viking Hat.”

Resolution #2: Make Fights More Dynamic

It’s weird, but it took running a Supers game to really make me understand how entrenched my idea of combat had become.  For years I’d run almost nothing but D&D and I was locked into a pretty static idea of combat.  It took a game with lots of esoteric and fanastic modes of travel for me to break out of the grid and start working on more dynamic fights.  Even with this impetus I don’t think my fights are nearly as dynamic and fun as they could be.  I really want to start working the scenery and extras into the fights as much as I can, which will make for more exciting encounters.

4th edition has helped in some regards, but I feel it’s going to be my supers game that will really help me break out of my mold.  I’m lucky enough that my players have been good with feedback and I’ve got forums like RPG.net to help me figure things out, but it’s going to be a long haul.  In preparation I’ve been watching shows like Avatar: the Last Airbender and Samurai Champloo to help me figure things out.

Resolution #3: Take Better Notes

I’m lucky enough to have a pretty good memory, but I really need to start taking better notes during play to help with my recaps and to string my otherwise wing-it style plots together.  I’ve gotten better at this and buying a little notebook has helped, but I really do have to be better about this.  I’ve been studying books like Getting Things Done to help me with this, but in the end it’s going to take simple willpower.

Resolution #4: Update This Blog!

I know I’ve said it before, but I really do need to post here more often.  Luckily enough I’ve got a few friends here helping me put content up, but I’d really like to make writing here a more regular thing.  So starting in 2009 I’m going try to make a post a week and then go from there.  If I make this a regularly habit maybe I won’t keep forgetting about it.  I even have my next post, a fun encounter area for 4e, ready to go.

So, happy new year folks!  Hope you have a safe and happy day of booze and debauchery!