Storm King’s Thunder session 3: The Defense of Triboar

I cannot resist the urge to metagame. Reading the DM directives in the book, I had my PC’s and NPCs focus their attack on Ildmane to force her to abandon her mission and run away.

Combat is the least interesting part of playing solo for me. I searched online for tools to automate combat, ideally so I would just press a few buttons and would find the results - who lived, who died, who’s down on hp and what experience they would get. Regrettably, nothing like that exists online and everything I found was more of the flavor of an “Initiative Tracker” - apps that handled the order of each combatant’s turns and maybe had a dice roller app. I realize this is to facilitate actual face-to-face gameplay - players should be encouraged to use their ingenuity, imagination, and vocal descriptions of combat to create unique outcomes that cannot be translated in a simple stat based way.   On the other hand, I just wanted to roll a bunch of basic attacks and wear down the enemies’ hp.

Still, by using physical dice, pencil and paper I was able to resolve combat, albeit slowly.

My PCs and all the NPCs (I learned my lesson from Bryn Shander and involved every story NPC in the battle) zerged the Fire Giant in the first round and brought her below half health, where she and her mate retreated. They will return in 5 days with much greater numbers, but I plan on my PCs being long gone by then.

After all, I’m glad this chapter is over and I’m ready to sink my teeth into the much meatier chapter 3. I didn’t enjoy this chapter’s combat scenarios where the PCs are meant to be vastly outclassed in power and would have preferred if combat itself involved a lot less dice rolls and turn order tracking.

Storm King's Thunder session 2

A male human, large and brawny, wearing a bear pelt as a cloak and hefting a Greataxe, with two more handaxes thrust into his belt, together with a small sprightly female elf, wearing clothing made from woven plants and carrying a handmade wooden longbow, a quiver of arrows, and two shortswords at her waist, journey into a town on the edges of the Savage Frontier in the north of the continent of Faerun.

Their arrival is pure chance, no one yet knows who they are or why this odd pair travels together. They look wild and barbaric, and their reasons for entering such modest civilization is unknown. Perhaps they are there to trade for food, or rest in between some other long journey, or maybe to start a new life away from the harsh wilderness. Whatever the reason, their arrival was cursed with misfortune, for no sooner had they the opportunity to rest their feet when a surprise force of Giants attacked!

Campaign notes: Starting at level 3, skipping Chapter 1 entirely because it doesn't take place in the Savage Frontier, is inconsequential to the rest of the story, and is a boring railroad only meant to push PCs to level 5 quickly. The authors of the adventure more or less expected players to skip it.

Background information for the North is locked behind Chapter 3, so I must play Ch 2 first, so my character's histories and motivations will remain enigmatic for now.

Bryn Shander is a total bust, the battle with Drufi the Frost Giant, her two Frost Giant bodyguards and her two pet Wolves of Winter resulted in a Total Party Kill two times. There is no way my created party could manage that battle as written. The side quests that result from keeping NPCs alive all suck, and take you down south along the Sword Coast to the large metropolitan cities of Waterdeep and Neverwinter, where you engage in urban and political encounters, when I would rather stay inland the North and engage in barbarian High Adventure. So rather than modify the attack and city to fit my Savage campaign desires, I'm focusing on one of the other two towns.

next session, the party is remade and the story begins from scratch at Triboar.

Why a solo campaign using a published module works

Partly, its because 5e relies way less on the DM than 1e does, and because 5e is way less open ended than 1e.

The published adventure modules, Storm King's Thunder in my case, basically do half the work of the DM.

It feels like I'm reading a novel, only the novel's not shit because I play the role of the protagonists and my chance of success or failure, and the consequences and setting thereof, are decided by the dice, the adventure book, and the Dungeon Master's Guide.

It takes reading 3 books - the PHB, the DMG and SKT - simultaneously to properly play solo, but at my novice level of playing it's still a lot of fun.

Session 1 of Storm King's Thunder solo

Went off great! Turns out I don't have the problems at my table solo that I do with other players :P

The instructions for Storm King's Thunder recommend reading the whole module first before attempting to run it as a DM. I didn't want to do that because I didn't want to spoil the major arc of the story for myself, and my player(s) are guaranteed to go off and do something completely different to the published adventure anyway. So I wanted to enjoy the module on my own terms first, simultaneously as a player and as a DM.

The opening two chapters of Storm King's Thunder are a fairly confining railroad anyway, so it's not like I ran into any issues of cognitive disassociation. Thus the act of playing the game solo was very easy - I might have known a bit more 'metagame' than I would have with a real DM, but it really didn't hamper my enjoyment any. I decided my player characters' choices either by what fit their character, or by a dice roll if no choice seemed obvious. There is very little to no roleplay in the opening 2 chapters so I didn't have to deal with that issue, but the Dungeon Master Guide provides handy tables for roleplay situations so I figure I could resolve those with a bit of nondeterministic problem solving and a bit of dice rolling.

My only complaint is with the module itself, I found the first encounter in Chapter 2 to be way too hard for my characters and would have resulted in a TPK if I didn't fudge some dice rolls. Yes, I couldn't resist the temptation to cheat a little. But apart from that I really enjoyed the journey to Bryn Shander and the plot of the first Giant attack.

I realize that the reason they want you to read the module first is because a lot of backstory and setting information is sprinkled throughout the various chapters. As one review I read put it, Storm King's Thunder is 1/3 campaign setting, 2/3 adventure module. Also, as any experienced DM can tell you, it's much easier to weave a cohesive, interesting story if you know where the story will end up going. By tackling STK solo, I get to experience the module half as a player would - with no foreknowledge except what is given to me at the time, without ruining the journey for myself, and without putting myself in an awkward position as a DM where I would not be able to correctly respond to my player's actions as I would not know what consequences would occur further ahead.

In total, the experiment is a success and I can't wait to continue my solo journey through this adventure module.

Playing D&D solo

Am I a loser with no friends? Yes.

Do I spend many a night down in my mom’s basement, crying over an open copy of the Dungeon Master’s Guide and a filled out character sheet? Also yes.

Luckily, I have devised a band aid for the gaping wound of my psyche: solo D&D! And amazingly the 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide has tables that can easily be repurposed for solo play!

Originally I think the DMG added in a plethora of tables to allow DM’s to “quick build” their universes. Everything from town populations to NPC attitudes has a relevant table. They also have tables for the results of player actions, and other things you might not immediately think of when designing your campaign, which would help flesh out details for your players.

But that’s why all this can be repurposed to play an entire campaign “blind”!  Randomly rolling on those tables to determine the outcome of your characters’ actions, PCs and NPCs alike, and the settings and events of the world. The DMG also contains and appendix for “random dungeon generation”, which can be repurposed to actually play a dungeon room by room, randomly creating it after every pass of the door.

I plan on starting with an empty grid for my dungeon map, and as I go through the doorways, to roll to see what kind of room I enter, and then filling out the map by placing in the room I enter. Luckily monsters can all be filled out by CR from the Monster Manual lists. Combat will have to be done either by randomly rolling for targeting and actions, or by playing both sides of the table somehow. In the end I hope to have a large filled out map of nonsensical dungeon rooms strung together, and a few characters who made it through it all.

But that’s the easy part, what about playing a whole campaign this way? Randomly rolling for towns, encounters, NPCs met, and NPC interactions?

More play testing is needed. And next time I’m crying in my mom’s basement, clutching my copy of Storm King’s Thunder that never got read, I might do exactly that.  Fortuitously, the campaign book could serve as the adventure guide, and I would only have to roll for success or failure results, or PC decisions.

Dungeons and Dragons: my history

As an avid player of video game RPGs, I was always aware of Dungeons and Dragons, but my direct contact with the system itself was limited. When I was about 10 or 11 years old I convinced my dad to buy me the boxed set of "Red Steel" which was sold by TSR at the time, but I couldn't understand any of it. It came with a lot of campaign materials like a map, description booklet and even a music CD, but the rules were entirely missing and I had no idea how to make a game out of it. So despite the cool box art, it was quickly shelved and forgotten.

In the early 2000's I played a lot of games explicitly based on the D&D system or a derivative. Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, Knights of the Old Republic, and even action RPGs such as Diablo 2 and Champions of Norrath used systems very similar to the stat-heavy pen and paper.  I quickly grew tired of this system as I perceived it to be deeply imbalanced. Gamers by nature seek to optimize or exploit whatever game system they're given, due to every software being exploitable by nature and the drive in games to win at all costs. Specifically I found most magic spells to be way more useful than non-magical attacks, even if they were nerfed in damage they always had more utility, and any Dexterity based build was always better than a Strength based build, especially if Dexterity measured chance to hit, which made Strength utterly worthless.

Suffice to say, this didn't endear me to seek out the pen and paper game, which at that time was transitioning from 2nd edition Advanced D&D to 3rd edition, and had gained a reputation as something quite complicated, cumbersome, and requiring a large monetary investment to get the full experience.

During my senior year of high school I was invited by a friend to start a D&D group. We the players bought the 3rd edition Player's Handbook and he bought the Dungeon Master's Guide, and another player bought a Monster Manual. We met at his house and played about 4 sessions. I enjoyed it but I had played enough games by then to know how to optimize my char, so like every highschooler who played 3rd ed I played a Rogue dual wielder assassin with throwing knives.

I only really got into Dungeons and Dragons in 2012, when my youngest sisters were in high school and would spend every day of the summer at home, bored, or on their Nintendo DS.  I figured board games at least would be a healthier form of entertainment, so after a few abortive attempts at playing Monopoly and RISK, I went and bought the "Starter Set" for D&D Essentials.

Little did I know at the time that the Essentials line was slowly dying and a new edition of D&D was on its way, but the opening campaign of the Starter Set was a unique gaming experience to my family and enjoyable to everyone, so I went all in and invested in the core Heroes books, the Rules Compendium, and the two boxed sets of the Dungeon Master's Kit and Monster Vault.  My sisters generally despise being involved with my games but they kept returning for the Dungeons and Dragons sessions, even if our playtimes were sporadic and few and far between.

We played through the Starter Set adventure, and next through Reavers of Harkenwold, the adventure that came with the Dungeon Master's Kit, and Cairn of the Winter King, which came with the Monster Vault. Somewhere around the middle of Cairn of the Winter King we all just drifted off. As a DM I didn't really know what I was doing and making a lot of it up on the fly, and that caused issues when my judgement was wrong, and was only exacerbated by issues inherent in D&D 4E.

 A common complaint was that play simply took too long: It took an hour to get set up - to get out character sheets, tokens, to set out the maps and place monsters. In every case I didn't even read the module before starting so we'd waste time where everyone simply waited for me to read the next step of the adventure and nobody really knew the rules so gameplay was halted at many points where players and the I just read the rule books. And finally combat in 4E just inherently took too long - it was much too based around modifiers and gridded 'tactical' play where a lot of time would be spent just calculating damage, to-hit probabilities, and bonus modifiers and detailing powers.  I personally did not enjoy running combat and I didn't like the expectation that every game session had to revolve around, or at least involve an instance, of combat.  Cairn of the Winter King was a straight dungeon crawling adventure and was almost purely combat based, and I think that focus, along with external life interruptions, caused us to lazily abandon D&D play.

A few years later while perusing the local bookstore mega chain, I noticed that there was a whole new collection of D&D books and one in particular looked very appealing to me: The Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure module, which had a White Dragon breathing ice across the cover. My youngest sister enjoys dragons so I figured she'd be interested, and I thought it would be a good idea to get back into pen-and-paper gaming. Now, at the time I had no idea that there was a 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons and that the adventure module was built for that. There was no edition version listed on the covers and the branding simply said "Dungeons and Dragons", which is exactly what the Essentials books said on them, so I assumed they were the same thing. For comparison, 1e, 2e, and 3e all prominently displayed "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition", or "3" and "3.5" respectively on their covers and in their brand, so it was easy to avoid confusion. It's only after we played the first few games that I noticed something was amiss.

My family's PCs were just WAY TOO powerful for Hoard of the Dragon Queen. There's an encounter in the 2nd chapter where the PCs face off against a powerful villain named Langdedrosa Cyanwrath, a half blue dragon fighter who's supposed to challenge one of them to a duel, humiliate them, and walk off. This was supposed to 'raise the stakes' in story and give the PCs a hook for vengeance. My players beat him to the ground, stripped his clothes and took his lunch money. The next few chapters are fights with bandits and a dungeon crawl meant to be somewhat challenging, and my players rampaged through the whole thing, with my youngest sister threatening all the NPCs with an "intimidating glare" and trying to force them to surrender, and basically walked out danger and consequence free. This caused me to actually research the system to figure out what was wrong, and where I came to the revelation that my players had brought over relative superheroes from the 4th Edition of D&D into the more average power 5th Edition world.

I figured I'd need to do some serious research into making this edition conflict work, and to make the game more enjoyable for my players and for myself as well. For one, I'd have to actually read the Essentials' Rules Compendium and Dungeon Master's Book, which I think I read once before maybe but they had contained so much repeated copy and paste information from each other and the Player's Handbook that I had originally just skimmed over them. And I went out and bought the new (5th edition) Dungeon Master's Guide, which I thought would be the core rulebook of the game as that's what my highschool friend had presented it to me as.

Well, I was initially disappointed as the Dungeon Master's Guide (5th edition) contained many options and descriptions for creating a world, characters, and adventures, all of which I could do on my own without needing a guide, or just take from a prepublished adventure module which would render the DMG obsolete. However that was only on a first pass and after subsequent play sessions and more testing I found the DMG to be very useful, however that didn't solve my immediate problem.

Actual criticisms of DOOM 3

I made an impassioned defense of DOOM 3 here in which I pointed out that the usual criticisms of the game are actually due to players having the wrong expectation rather than a fault in the vision of the game.

But by no means is DOOM 3 a perfect game and it has certain flaws that are most definitely due to poor implementation or erroneous design choices that hold back the enjoyment of the game.

First off, DOOM 3 is most definitely a survival horror game and not a run-and-gun FPS, and it has every right to be so. The DOOM series has always been a mix of horror and action and the latter games in the series like DOOM 64 had been leaning more heavily into the horror aspects for narrative purposes, so turning DOOM 3 into a survival horror shooter in the first few levels seemed like a logical progression for the developers. Too bad they didn't have game designers like John Romero still on the team to make the idea amazing instead of pretty bland.

So the first real flaw of the game is the opening sequence on the Mars base where you just walk around and listen to NPCs direct you to the first mission. This sequence is a straight rip off of the opening of Half-Life, which was a fad in the early 2000's. Every FPS released then, such as Halo, Half-Life 2, and even the Battlefield and Call of Duty games, had a sequence where you just walked around to be 'immersed' in the world. Thankfully the industry has moved past this trend and sequences like this do not hold up with age. Literally the only games that do it correctly are the original Half-Life and Half-Life 2.

The second flaw is due to the number of levels that take place on the Mars facility before you first arrive in Hell. Everything between Alpha Labs and Delta Labs should have been cut from the game - even if the layout of the stages was unique the reused textures, backgrounds, encounters, and limited enemy variety made these levels seem bland and repetitive. Only hyper nerds care about how transportation, communication and waste management are handled on Mars and nothing happens in these levels except new monsters appear occasionally. Delta Labs, on the other hand, has a unique design and plot importance - here is where you learn how the demons were able to arrive on Mars and you begin your journey into Hell to stop them.

The third is a technical issue - the reload and weapon switch systems being bugged so that you cannot switch weapons while reloading, and weapons must cycle in order to be switched. This severely handicaps the player while in game and will lead to many frustrating moments while the character is stuck in a reload or weapon swap animation and the enemies are free to constantly attack. The workaround is to turn "auto reload" and "auto switch" off, but its not a perfect fix, and every other game in the genre allows you to cancel the reload animation if necessary.

The fourth are the hitscan enemies. They automatically target you, and know of and can follow the player character's position anywhere on the stage, and by definition their attacks cannot be avoided. The only way to beat these enemies is to cheese their AI and force them to run in circles for a bit to try and blast them, or just soak up their attacks and try to kill them by outputting more damage than they do.  DOOM 3 has fairly weak enemy AI across the board, but the hitscan soldiers really highlight the issue, and the problem is compounded by the fact that they fire faster than the player character and do not flinch or suffer accuracy penalties when hit as the player does.

The last major flaw that I will touch on here is the enemy AI in general. By 2005 some games were making real leaps in game AI. F.E.A.R. is the usual, most touted example but even the Halo games, the first Half Life, and indie modders were starting to make smarter, more complicated AI that acted intelligently in a manner approaching human behavior. The AI in DOOM 3 has none of this, and actually regresses in intelligence from Quake 3. The enemies all attack you from predetermined positions and will move in a straight line directly toward you, spamming their only attack. (Some demons get two attacks). Due to the ambush and unavoidable nature of some attacks, this makes some encounters feel like bullshit, and it makes ALL encounters feel completely repetitive, as since you've killed one Imp demon, you've killed them all. There is no variation in their attack methods or the strategy, beyond pre-scripted ambushes.

DOOM 3 could have been remembered as a really great game. If all portions of the game not directly related to the Hell invasion had been cut, and the pure action portion of the game was available earlier, if the designers had not followed trends and fads of early 2000's game design, and a couple of AI, monster, and technical issues been fixed I'm sure it would be remembered far more fondly than it is today. As I've said before, the gunplay is solid, the engine performance is great, the physics system is nice and fluid, the graphics and lighting are used to great effect (and is probably the system that has aged the best, despite the low poly count and texture resolution compared to modern standards). After all, the original DOOM was just "Evil Dead" meets "Aliens" in Hell.