Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 42 Part 2 - Ask the DM with Johnn Four

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

In Part 2 of the interview, Jeremy and Johnn discuss how to hand out treasure, and making compelling cultures.  Part 3 will release this Thursday!

welcome to part two of our dm discussion with john four of roleplayingtips.com without further ado let's dive right into the next question let's see uh stewart asks how much treasure experience and magic items should i award parentheses personally i go for the approximately 14 encounters to level up approach but i think it's hard for new DMs to know how much cash and magic is proper for each level. Well, I don't know. Are they giving it to me? Because then it's my maximum amount. More is the answer I would like. Thank you. More, more, as much as possible. So I might have a different philosophy than regular GMs.

First of all, I use Milestone XP or Milestone Awards. The reason why I like that is what we reward is the behavior that we will get. So if we reward for killing monsters, then the players are going to kill monsters. And if we don't want that kind of a campaign or as much in that in the campaign, we only have ourselves to blame because this is the reward mechanism. This is the game engine that we've set up for them i like putting treasure where it makes sense for example i'll take the most i'll ask my players what do you want for magic items they read all the things i want this and i want this and i want this and then i put them on npcs that they have to defeat and i'll put them in use in the game so that they they know it's out there that now the game

becomes how do I get that like a really powerful magic item that the the character wants put it on an ally that's a really interesting dilemma so are they going to try to wow the ally and gain respect and loyalty and earn it as an award are they going to try to steal it and whatnot so that becomes like a game with within the game otherwise i look at the economy of my setting what do pcs spend their money on like i make a list of this at the beginning of the campaign before session one are they going to be buying magic items are they going to be buying specialized equipment because we have to assume beyond like level um three economy where you don't need anything under 500 gold pieces or you don't you're tired of buying torches you don't need them

with your continual light spell anymore once i understand how they'll spend it then i know at what pace and kind of where i want to award it and then the rest i'll tie into basically story beats or like i said that the milestone uh xp and or awards i guess a trap to avoid is to put all the best loot into some chest at the end of the adventure. Like the purpose of loot in sort of a mythical storytelling sense is that the characters evolve. So then they are now ready to approach the basically the monster. If the monster has all of the tools of victory after it's dead to be awarded, then that's like you're missing out on a huge story structure gaming opportunity.

Let your treasure be part of the solution and or option matrix and then put them at the right places so that the characters have these options available to them during the game. Because it's fun to use the magic items and stuff. So that was a bit rambly, but I think that's my answer.

No, and I think it's a good answer because I just actually, I just played in a game last night where there was a, we beat, I'm not saying it's big bad evil guy, but it was like one of the little mini bosses. We beat her right after that in the chest, come to find out there's an undead Bane bastard sword, which my character would have just, I mean, would have given her left foot for. So for that reason, no, that is very frustrating when you find the exact same thing you need in the treasure hoard of the thing that you just killed. And I'm of a similar belief.

I do Milestone XP. I mean, this makes for bad, I guess, talk radio where we should be arguing about something. But I also do Milestone XP. No, you're wrong. You shouldn't be arguing. Shut up. It's my turn to answer. But I do do milestone XP. I try to sprinkle magic items and loot that is appropriate for what they need. A campaign that I'm preparing right now, it's piracy in salt marsh.

They're going to be pirates. So if they go and find, you know, if they find a, I don't know, a potion, you know, like if you look at a prebuilt adventure and it's a potion of jump. Yeah. Congratulations. Okay. So it's a potion of acrobatics. Okay. Maybe somebody could use it down the road. I don't know. I do the same thing. I kind of find out what the players are actually looking for, what they want to spend money on. And then I try to sprinkle that in as I can. Nice. One of the common questions I get by email from readers and customers is how do I create puzzles?

I think there's two kinds of puzzles. There's the puzzles that come out of a puzzle book, or the original, like, really old school modules, where you had a chessboard and you make the wrong move. They are what they are, and so I'm not going to talk about those. The other kind of puzzle that game masters are after, though, is sort of the, how do I make players think? How do I make this kind of a thinkery type of adventure and so i think the answer in part is treasure so if you are giving the characters levers and options that could possibly be of use later in the in the

scenario then you're creating a puzzle because okay i've grabbed this i'd say i get a helm of anti-pirate that's strange but then they encounter pirates and then they can use it, but the helm has flaws. And so the flaws mean that they can't speak or something like that. So they can't parley and pirates love parley. So the magic items and no, your reward system, I think is part of the puzzle that you create in that second type of puzzle that I'm talking about. And overall, I think it's a balancing act, especially as newer DMS. I mean, you want to throw loot at players. I mean, that's the temptation. You can just go here's look at all this cool stuff I'm giving you.

Don't you love me now? Yes. Invariably what winds up happening. And I made that, I made that mistake early on where I was just throwing good loot at people. And, you know, you wind up with a, you know, helm of brilliance and you're level three or whatever. I wish I had one of those. Me too. Especially to answer some of these questions that some of my readers put in.

You throw too much too soon and next thing you know, they are just curb stomping their way through the rest of the adventure. And it's no fun. It's no challenge. There's no imminent threat of even being knocked down because oh look, here's the paladin with the plus four Vorpal Sword again.

There we go. Lop, lop, lop, and he's done. Okay, guys, you want to order a pizza? Nicker snack. Nice, nice Jabberwocky reference. And like another thought is, I have an adventure building course, and in that course, I talk about budgets,

and it's not an accounting game, don't worry. But let's say you know now that you want for this adventure the characters to be 3 000 gold pieces richer by the end of it and you want them to be say 50 000 gold pieces and magic item worth richer by the end of it then you can chunk it out so if you have that interesting culture in your mind at the beginning sorry that's a boy that's a nasty way how do you make interesting cultures to, the culture has to fit not only the environment that they live in, but the experiences of the group of people. It's a primitive culture for whatever reason, because maybe there's been some sort of cataclysm on the planet, and the art of creating magic items has been lost. So magic items are these rare, amazing things built from this

almost untold past where thousands of years ago, we had these superior beings that lived on this planet and they created this amazing technology, but it's all been lost. The culture would almost evolve revering this ancient civilization,

treating them almost as gods, for lack of a better term. So to me, the culture of a group of people, whether you're talking about humans, dwarves, gnolls, what have you, a group of dwarves who had to fight their way through a horde of orcs to make the surface of the planet because they were fleeing from some untold horror behind them, are going to have a certain very warlike belief system baked into their culture because their warriors and their clerics and healers, their strategists are going to occupy the highest levels of society. They're going to be revered and treated as higher class

citizens. Whereas that same group of dwarves, if they never had to go through that fight, it might be in their entire culture, maybe based on hereditary rule where Thane Johnson, the 14th, who was son of Thane Johnson, the 13th and so forth. It may just be all about reverence and the, um, ties to nobility, if you will. So to me, it's, that's where you really got to tie it in. And of course, you know, this, that same culture, I'm picking on dwarves because, you know, they just happen to be nice and convenient. They are obviously built... You being short with me? No, but I will in a second because then I can turn to halflings and then gnomes. But either group of dwarves that happen to treat underground as home versus underground as a thing to be feared.

So they migrate to the hills. They live close to the rock that they love, but they still maybe fear it as a culture because of the things that it contains. That to me is the key to making a culture is that it has to make sense. Did it evolve with a democratic type spin or was it more oligarchical? Maybe the shortest dwarves are the ones that are the most racially pure and they're the ones that occupy areas of control over the entire society because the entire group of dwarves may be bigoted against any other race. Yeah, excellent. How do you try to make a realistic culture out of a group of? Here's my approach.

The first thing is I wrote an article on this a long time ago. So if anyone Googles three line cultures and finds a role-playing tips link on Google, that's a good article to read. In that article, I created like a three-step system because I think everything that you do as a game master should try to make its way to the table.

And I think that in the world of fandom, great example is Dune. Like Dune is on my radar now and in my echo chamber because of the trailer that came out. And the fans, well, Herbert, of course, was a maniac with amazing ideas. Maniac in a good way. So the fans, though on top of of his work

they create this massive universe or another another big one with canon is star wars and so i think that might be some people's expectations like as a game master i'm supposed to come into the game with this like library presence that the players are all you know kind of trying to grok i don't think that's the case at all. Like we're just playing a game. The game moves at a quick pace, kind of move on. Anyway, so I think when we go into culture building, we're not trying to create these in-depth, subtle, nuanced, intense things.

We're just trying to create some levers and some hooks for the characters and players to riff off of and feel like they're part of something different than real life. So I have a three-step framework for that. It's in this article. I'll just outline it briefly for pedantic reasons. Step one, figure out their beliefs. So you touched on that with your dwarves. So figure out one or two or three things that this culture believes. Then for each belief, you turn that into an aim

or a goal. So if I believe this, therefore I want this. And then your third step, and this is where I want game masters to put it on the table, is to turn it into a ritual. So when the characters are encountering the culture at play, they're seeing the culture actually doing things. And then they could join in or not but a ritual in in a sense of like what do the people do on a regular basis when it's that magical day of the year i get happy birthday sung to me that to me is a ritual so to differentiate anybody might be thinking of like cult or religious overtones a ritual is just something that's like a an ingrained habit that is triggered by by an event or that has some rules written around

it. So once you know what they want, then how they get that is ritualized. And that becomes then a cultural artifact. So if I express my aim through art, then I have this cultural artifact, pun intended, I guess, of art. If I express it through music, if I express it through how I train my Spartan warriors, if I express it through my form of government, and then you can Google culture and get basically a list of all the aspects that go into our culture from our food to how we deal with birth and death and things. But by making it a ritual or something tangible that NPCs can do, that buildings are about and whatnot, then the players get to actually experience it. And I think it becomes

much more easy for the game master to detail and then role play. So the three-step framework, beliefs, aims, and rituals. One of the worlds that I'm adventuring in right now is Pathfinder Galarian. There's a great nation. I'm not sure how much Pathfinder that you've played. Quite a bit in the day. Good, good. The nation of Galt is if the French revolution just went on loop. They basically completed the revolution, wait a few years, and then they do another one. And then they wait a few years and they do another one. And they wait a few years and they do another one and so forth. And it becomes almost the act of rebelling and overthrowing the current leaders has become that ritual that you were

talking about. Nice. Exactly. Perfect. Rather than, oh, I'm going to vote to make changes. I'm going to propose new laws. No, it's Farkit. I need to behead somebody today. Yeah. That's become their standard answer. That's almost their ritual of revolution has become almost this, for lack of a better term, religion for that entire nation. I thought about the topic, the question, how do you make an interesting culture? I think it would be good to turn it on its head. So what if we asked, how do we make a culture interesting? I think that's the same as making a faction or an NPC or even a magic item interesting. And again, I have a three kind of

point hack for that. But that would be you give them a quirk, you give them a flaw, and then you give them a boon. The quirk is just some roleplay aspect, like they're angry, or they're secretive, or something like that. And now that's your cue to kind of figure out ad hoc, okay, how do these people behave secretly or angrily with your flaw that always creates a bit of attention so let's say they're authoritarian right you get if you disobey you don't sing happy birthday you're going to jail and so whatever the flaw is of the culture from a from the character's perspective not necessarily from the culture's own perspective but like from the player the most important perspective the players what do they see is the downside of this culture? There's an upside. Do they have this kind of quirk

that's either fun or whatever? And then there's the downside of the flaw. And then the last one is boon, which is my short form for the players get something from it. So if they unlock the levers, if they play the game and win or roll right, or do the things that they should or whatever the game you set up is then they get this benefit and that brings it to the to the game table so now there's a reason to interact with this culture beyond whatever your your adventure is or maybe it's tied together with your plot but the culture itself maybe they're uh but one example is uh gems so back to the economy question 5e sucks at spending money on. So not in real life, of course, it's quite the opposite. That's a good point.

Players, you give, actually, it's a fantastic curse. Like give players a million gold pieces. Here you go, people, like spend it. That's the adventure right there. But yeah, the rules are not really good at extracting treasure one. So what I do is i create a gem a gem economy so the first thing is that gems are are used by religions and politicians as symbols of status and magic items use socketed magic items use gems to draw a power on and then the gems get burnt out and you have to replace it

so therefore what players want is treasure or to go to markets and buy are gems to power their magic items to use as bribes and gifts and things. So once they figure that out, the culture gives them some kind of reward. They do the gem thing and then they get clues or they get a bonus XP or they get animal companion or just something. But the culture offers them something that they would like and value. And I think that would make an interesting culture or the culture interesting. I've been editing like crazy, but there's just too much good stuff to cut this down any further.

As a matter of fact, I'm expecting the last episode to go a little long. Please join us next time for the conclusion of our DM discussion with John Fore of roleplayingtips.com.