The Care and Feeding of Hirelings, pt 2.

The Hounds simply cannot keep themselves together. This sounds worse than it is, and I intended it to. The party isn't coming apart at the seams... no, far from it. What's been happening is damned simple to explain but hard to cope with as a group: they've been splitting the party. Normally, this is the DM's nightmare. Running two, three, or four simultaneous games of D&D takes much more than running them consecutively. Keeping timelines straight is a headache. But the Hounds have something on their side that makes it slightly less troublesome: they're splitting the party, not to explore two locations at once or anything like that, but because certain characters are not in commission. While armor is repaired and the fighter doesn't want to go out, while the mage researches months worth of magic... these are times when the other players get antsy and determine that those long periods of interstitial time will not go to waste.

The solution, it turns out, was both mentioned here on this blog (although in the context of what to do in the case of character death) and also thought of by Danny some time last week, and its a solution that I was aware of but had been waiting (foolishly) for ~level 9 to implement. That solution is: play hirelings. When your character is tied down with research, play your character's proxy. Now, Nauraainen the Laughing Dragon may only be level 5, but he does devote a great deal of time to spell research—three months in this last go. To me, that signifies a good time to begin training an apprentice, simply because of the long periods of inactivity represented in game time. Narratively, perhaps, it is not the best solution... how are you teaching the child while you're working, for example?

Whether apprentice or not, the solution is clearly to play new characters in the form of hirelings (though  in the situation of an apprentice it would be more like a henchman, I'd wager) who can adventure-in-proxy for the PCs. Of course, this opens up a whole host of strange problems (trading money and gear, etc.) However, that being said, those problems are preferable to having players sit out for several sessions which amounts, more or less, to punishing them for researching spells, having weapons made, or getting armor completed.

It's similar to what I imagine people USED to do before 2e, and also to the idea of the Character Tree from Dark Sun. In fact, I find that modeling it a bit on the Dark Sun notion will suit me perfectly, though it will need to be modified to account for the fact that the characters are not COMPLETELY separate but are instead linked by shared interests. A difficult juggling act for players, perhaps, but one that keeps them in the game and playing while also maintaining the verisimilitude of spell research, armor maintenance, NWP learning, etc.

Hirelings, a Review

So while we were at GenCon Indy this year (for the first time) we met John Harris, an awesome fellow with a board game to kickstart. That board game was Hirelings: the Ascent, and its family friendly, putting you and your companions in the shoes of level-less hirelings who's adventurers are dead. You're carrying their backpacks, stuck in the bottom of a dungeon (in this case a dragon's cave), and the dragon is about to breath a roaring cone of fire through all the tunnels and scorch you alive.

Sound like an amazing game premise? It is. Being level 0 stuffhaulers and bodymen, you come into the dungeon with a backpack full of stuff that belonged to the (now dead) adventuring party. However, as it isn't your pack you don't really know what's packed in there. Magical items, generally helpful, fill it to the brim. You have a limited supply of these and they may help you to get out... but you don't get to decide what you're grabbing, you simply dip your hand in and pull out something that may (or may not) be worthwhile to you.

But don't be fooled! Those items are ALSO your health! If the fireball catches up to you, you need to lighten your load to put on some extra speed, thus throwing off one of your treasures from the backpack. If you have none left to ditch, you're done, mate: fried, cooked, annihilated! No more running for you. This simple game design manages to capture the frantic frenetic pace of a real escape very well.

GenCon Digestion, the Report

We set off for GenCon a merry crew, three travelers in a tub-sized ship with naught but the endless stretches of I-80 before us and nothing behind save the lives that we had lived. We had stocked ourselves with provisions and then made off into the wild blue; our GPS told us where to go and we had no other thought but than to follow it to the ends of the earth or Indiana: whichever came first.

We found ourselves rather quickly entering Pennsylvania hill country along the great stretch of the trucking route I-80. On either side rose the wooded climbs, wild and mountainous. Occasionally a dell or little vale would be visible, the hills drawing back for a brief moment to reveal a steep fold in the land populated by pines and hardy oaks. The cocooning webs of spiders were everywhere, lending the endless forest a sinister aspect and the settlements of man were thin and far between. There were lonesome farmsteads and isolated cottages but it was a long way between the coal-mining villages that were speckled across the hills.

From Pennsylvania to Ohio we came, barreling out of the high hills and into the great level lowlands of the plain. Forbidding wilderness was replaced with girdles of tamed land: farms, acres and acres of them in all directions. Trucks along the great arterial road were now seen to be carrying massive blades, as of wind-farms that must reside somewhere in the state. We stopped but once at Grandpa's Cheesebarn along the road to stock up on delicious delicacies before we shipped out once more towards Indiana.

Crossing the border, we encountered more churches than I have ever seen before in my life. Billboards proclaiming the religious epiphanies of Christ and Tom Raper were everywhere. I don't think I've ever felt so uncomfortable before, or so much like an East Coast Librul.

More GenCon

Spotty internet connections in the hotel (the Clarion Northwest) mean that I've been unable to post another blog. I don't have a whole lot of time now, either, because the Con is closing down at around 5 today and we got some serious gaming to do.

I will briefly mention John Harris and Prolific Games as they have built (and taught us, through a playable demo) a great boardgame known as Hirelings, the ascent. I'm definitely going to do a review of it when I get home, since it was amongst our favorite things at the Con entirely -- we played it twice through and considered playing it a third time.

Of course, True Dungeon was also amazing and we're looking forward to doing that again next year. Yeah, I know, it uses the 3rd edition (d20) rules as a base, but what can you do? I'm sure no matter how hard I ask they won't revert it to AD&D.

Plenty of other stuff to talk about, but I want to take my time and compose my thoughts properly before I post about 'em. For your benefit, here are some pictures of Frank running from a dragon.

The Care and Feeding of Henchmen and Hirelings

Since I'm in San Francisco taking in the sites, eating the delicious foods, and all-around enjoying myself, this entry is going to be brief, and on the subject of the invariably put-upon members of any D&D party: the henchmen and hirelings. I'm heading to the MAP conference in Santa Clara later in the week to give a paper on the Liber Eliensis, so I'm also pretty busy getting that up to snuff for presentation insofar as the performative aspects of giving papers go.

Modern incarnations of D&D have forgotten all about these characters; in a dramatic situation, it is thought of as bad form to upstage the main character by giving the action to some lesser fellow. Of course, this is a rule mostly followed in action movies and obeyed to a much lesser extent in serious literary works. However, since a lot of people play D&D like an action movie, and because most modern RPGs exist to paint the player as the prime actor, the idea of henchmen and hirelings have fallen by the wayside. We are warned to be wary of upstaging PCs with NPC actions, lest they feel as though they didn't accomplish the important tasks in the game. Mike at Really Bad Eggs wrote about something similar recently, concerning the primacy of PC actions (and whether or not it really needs to be Prime).

This attitude springs, I think, from the same abuses that most of the other Player's Rights issues arose from. Indeed, I think this is a cornerstone of the Player's Rights movement—that nebulously defined set of core rights that no GM should violate. It is probably true that Bad GMs have foisted characters onto parties, characters that had no right to be there, who conquered all the foes and took all the treasure and essentially made the game into a masturbatory exercise of power. Again, like all Player's Rights issues, I think this is a problem with bad GMs rather than with rules and should be handled as such; the players do not necessarily have a right to primacy of action, but they have demanded it to head off GM abuse.

This has led to the decline of the henchman. I'm guilty, myself, of punishing parties that want to use hench- and hirelings. I once angrily informed a player that they would have to split their xp with their hirelings (even animals, were they to buy them)! What fit of foolish Player's Rightisms sent me into paroxysms of rage I cannot begin to say. My thought was that the players should accomplish their achievements ALONE, without the aid of GM assistance in the form of hired hands. This is patently ridiculous! These penalties were wrong-headed of me; I might consider splitting the xp a few additional ways (ie, count hirelings as members of the party) but to force someone to cut their own xp with a hireling is just nonsense.

Hirelings and henchfolk are an important resource, and no one should be docked for using them.