Infinite Ideas: Building the Infinity Tower

I had a lot of fun this session. I was in kind of a crummy mood earlier in the day and this was a great end to it! Thanks to everyone involved; players, T2T peeps, the chat and you, for reading this. Some weeks you have to play the game to find out what happens. I've been reading a lot of Fate Core and more collaborative, improvisational RPG books this week, with the result that my game prep went down to almost nothing. My rationale for this: We know what happened last time. The building action is pretty clear for the players. They are 'in action' against particular foes and meeting with known allies, so they are going where I expect or doing something totally different. I feel comfortable doing this. Given those things, I decided that I wouldn't stress the prep this week because I just wasn't feeling it. I knew what I thought would happen and what information I thought was necessary. My players surprised me, for sure. That's part of the fun of RPG games...

Adding a new player, even for one session, really changes play. Anyone who has been in that situation knows this to be true, but we had a super positive experience (in my opinion) with having an added player this week. Out of two new players we've onboarded during the course of the game, there have been two different but positive results, so I'm encouraged to write about that. First, I think that players should play characters that interest them. Each of our added players were very experienced with D&D and generally with RPGs. They created characters that they wanted to play. For the first, it gave us a few challenges and rewrites. We started with 'no lady dwarf beards' and ended with 'some lady dwarf beards', which was a lot of fun. For the second, the player asked about the party and actively made a character (that she wanted to play) that she felt fit what the party needed for balance. I appreciated this because it was a clear signal that the player w...

As a DM, I love story development. It's the best part of the game. There can be amazing combat scenes and PCs can gain incredible powers, but I'm there for the story. Some of my favorite things that happened this game: Aurora offering up people that she found irritating to a cosmic power as food. Theopraxis feeling guilty about the time he spent building a party cannon while people needed protection. Arven dealing with all the influences that pull at him and remaining centered. Fiction-first gaming is a buzzword from the PbtA games and Blades in the Dark that I like to appropriate for D&D. I want the most interesting thing going on to be the story of the players, so that shapes a lot of my decisions. I still try not to break the game to the point where it's unrecognizable. This week, we added a monk weapon: the flying guillotine. Flying Guillotine Cost: 10gp Damage:1d6 slashing Weight: 2lb Reach We'll give it some game flavor and say that on a crit it l...

This is a busy week for Time2Tabletop! We had 2 back-to-back nights of Infinity Tower and still have What Game Did You Bring? tonight! So this reflections post is really about both games. Firstly, we never planned to have solo adventures for the PCs. There was an earlier show scheduled to accomodate Kat, who we knew couldn't make the regular game. Our special guest Kelsa was unavailable for the changed time, so we made it work for everyone. The Aurora solo on Monday was great and almost entirely off-the-cuff. This was a great example how dice can change the narrative. I had a scene planned and was setting terrain when Kat rolled a Natural 20 on her Death Saving Throw. Then another on a skill check. Then another. At that point, the fates were clearly with Kat and Aurora started telling us what she wanted to see happen. It was a lot of fun! Then our usual session of Infinity Tower Tuesday. This was a simple battle where numbers seemed overwhelmingly in the players' favor ...

I just got to watch our Infinity Tower Session 12 on YouTube. I loved it. I lost it. In Session 11, the party got access to a Rod of Rulership. That was already going to have consequences. In Session 12, first thing, the player holding it used it on the rest of the party. Result: amazing role-play. Lots of fun. Totally removed the threat and consequence of a powerful magical item in the resolution of NPC conflicts. There's nothing like when you put items out for players to use and they surprise you with them. Even better when you don't expect the things your players come up with. Really, the best part of an RPG is playing things out with your fellow players. I've been obsessing over Powered by the Apocalypse games and so this sort of directed action with a player focus was just what I would have hoped for. Fun and unexpected.

10 sessions! Wow! I feel super honored and grateful that we've come this far already. My first real reflection is that there is so much work that goes into this game that isn't mine. The players all do a great job and Scooter (@Discopreacha) is an amazing host and producer. Ambient Realms always keeps us up to date on our sounds. I just love the sounds. They are so much fun! I have a bad habit of experimenting with new sounds in the middle of a session. Someday I'll learn. Arcknight has given us a bunch of stuff to use for our games and giveaways. I hope we get to do a lot more giveaways, because we're ready for them! Also, their pawns are a lot better than other leading brands. I just need about a million more. For reasons. Every GM wants to field an army, right? :) Before this particular session, I really tried to take stock of who I am and what I believe about games. The biggest change that I noticed is that with recording our game sessions I started worrying abo...

This was a great session! Our biggest hangup was the technical problems that Twitch as part of Amazon was experiencing. I heard about it all day at work and it followed me to the game. Our dedicated and hard-working producer Scooter(@DiscoPreacha) spent hours working on the problem and could not connect to Twitch, but some other people had no problems at all. We did manage to stream to and record video on YouTube, so it was still a great live play session. This session was all about story and DM challenges. My story-writing is always very flexible. Many sessions I run (not this game, but others) I don't prep at all. I let players show me what they want to play. This still informs a lot of the Infinity Tower story. The major example was the riddle in the game. Not to spoil it for those who might watch, but the original riddle was intended to be solved by the party going back to Bayer's Cross and speaking to the wizard they encountered in jail. That had become a problem since...

I'm really excited by where Infinity Tower is now. The players have really started to take hold of the game. They know what they want and they are determined to get it. The characters are a little less assertive, but not much. Everyone has motivations and direction that guides their gameplay decisions. What's coming next? That's the question that I'm really enjoying asking myself as I continue to prep for Session 6. We're getting to the point that it's difficult to determine the next step for the group because of their disparate goals, but I want the players to be able to exercise their ability to help me tell the story. Very exciting! Also, in case anyone ever reads this, I'm amassing a large amount of material on the subject of the regions of Tregeria and the general world that Alluria and Tregeria exist on. Should I make this into a formal setting? It's got most of what I would expect in one.

Session 4 was a little different. I knew going into it that I wanted to have the players reflect on their new class features, because at level 3 the monk, fighter and barbarian all gained their archetypes. We had a lot of fun with this concept. There's been an ongoing debate between myself as DM and Kelly, who plays the barbarian, about switching the barbarian archetypes for the Ranger Beast Conclave archetype to allow her to have a bear as an animal companion. I'm still not in favor of this because I think it will make Barbarian a terrible class. I am instead encouraging proper multiclassing into Ranger in the future, where the decision will be most effective. I'm also looking at the idea of creating some sort of Beastmaster / Feral Companion Prestige Class in the future. We did a dream sequence that probably doesn't make sense from the classic D&D book rules, but I wanted to give some contrast between the power of the Infinity Tower, which lets the players acc...

The initial Infinity Tower concept was pretty basic. When we wanted to start streaming for Time2Tabletop, we wanted to start right away. One of the goals that we had was to do a Session Zero, which would give us a chance to show character creation and share some of our goals for the channel before we were really prepared for our stream. The Session Zero was supposed to give characters a chance to be created and get the players ready to work together. We also wanted a game session to take place and I like non-linear plots, so Session Zero became the part of the story that comes after Session One. As a DM, this was actually liberating for me because I knew where the story was going. For the players, they could make decisions that led them towards their Session Zero without feeling railroaded or forced.There was already an expectation that they would work together and get along because they had already done it. So there was a little space-time paradox going on in Session One, which was...