Got a quick check in.
I Have Altered the Content Schedule
Pray I Don’t Alter It Further
Some work in my own home game and some background work on the Town Mode thing has led me to rejigger what I’m writing about. Which has disrupted the release schedule a little. So, here’s what we’re looking at for September now.
Angry Revised September 2022 Content Schedule
| Production Code | Tentative Title | Early Access | General Release |
|---|---|---|---|
| F0901 | What If My Players Don't Want to Play? | September 15, 2022 | September 21, 2022 |
| F0902 | The Session Script | September 22, 2022 | September 26, 2022 |
| F0903 | Raising Tension with Blessings and Curses | September 27, 2022 | September 28, 2022 |
| F0904 | Town Mode: A New Paradign | September 29, 2022 | October 5, 2022 |
Live Chat Rescheduled (A Little)
The September Discord Mostly Monthly Live Chat is still happening on Thursday, September 22, but it will start at 8:30 PM EDT.
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Totally unrelated but, question I’ve been meaning to ask for a long while.
I’ve deployed your Tension Pool with good results at in-person sessions, it works well in dungeons. However, in my online game it loses all of its impact, as players do not see and hear the pool being filled and rolled. I need to narrate what I’m doing with it, but even then I don’t like it, and players don’t either. Do you have any suggestions for that?
Looking forward to more Town Mode!
For online games with a tabletop simulator of some type, have some tokens that represent the dice on a nearby corner of the map. Each time you ‘add’ a die to the pool add another token to that space – slowly filling it up. It would be particularly clever to have a digital ‘cup’ or space on the table just big enough to fit 6 dice so they can see the cup being filled up.
That should have the same effect, other than hearing the sound of the die being added to the cup, as the Tension Pool in a in-person session…
This is precisely what I do. Did. I kind of stopped doing it for some dumb reason. I suck at doing my own advice.
I’ve had similar issues. One thing I’ve tried that’s a bit better is having another player handle the tension pool. That way the clink of the die going in is replaced by me saying “Alice, add a die.” Causes a bit of a hiccup while playing, but generally I try to make it the first part of my response to a character’s actions, so not too bad. It also lets that player tell the group that things are getting tense, rather than me reminding them. I do have her use a glass bowl still for the sound as well.
That’s a good solution.
Hi Angry, I would also like to ask an unrelated question:
For my upcoming campaign, I want to use your tier- & group-based CR-less monster building system, because I was always a fan of 4E combat encounters. The system seems pretty clear to me, but I do have one major question: how do you arrive at XP values for the combat encounters designed in this way?
I suppose you could just take a monster designed with your system and then *also* calculate its CR following the DMG rules and get an XP value that way, but that seems involved and against the spirit of the system. In any case, I noticed that the monster statblocks in your theme packs don’t have any kind of per-monster XP listed, so I assume this isn’t how it’s meant to work.
Do you simply assign a value equivalent to what the DMG would call Medium or Hard to the entire encounter and leave it at that? Does monster Threat play a role at all?
You’re supposed to use the Angry XP Rewards system, where you reward a set amount of XP – normally the equivalent of a Medium combat encounter in the DMG – for every encounter the players overcome, combat or not. You also halve the reward for encounters that weren’t overcome in a definitive way (eg. sneaking around a monster instead of killing them, jumping over a chasm instead of building a bridge), giving the other half only when the encounter is overcome definitely; and you mostly axe the reward when the players lose an encounter, even if they killed some monsters in the process.
You can find more information about the system… somewhere. Probably as a tangent in an article about a different topic like “How to Add Motivational Experiences to Your D&D Game”.
Ah, thank you 🙂
I recall reading about this somewhere, but not the details, and didn’t see it linked anywhere.
In any case, I think I’ll start using this, thanks!
Also, challenges that arise as complications because of the players fault award a tiny fraction of the regular XP it would (like 10%).
This prevents “grinding” levels and discourages suboptimal/nonsensical courses of action.