I Am Now An Official RPGA Sanctioned DM!

Cafe Society
1

But, it’s really not that big of a deal. I’ve been recently interested in the Greyhawk realm of D&D, and stumbled upon the whole Living Greyhawk movement. It really is a movement, especially with the advent of the Internet, which speeds things up a whole lot and brings people closer together.

In case you don’t know, the term Living is used by the D&D people, aka Wizards of the Coast, owned by Hasbro, to describe playing campaigns is a given preset realm, which have results and consequences that change that realm and others’ campaigns. In other words, there are a whole bunch of little groups of players around the globe playing different campaigns that all take place at the same virtual time and within the same realm…

Okay, the word Realm is being used loosely here. Greyhawk, for example, is part of a world. This world is a fictitious planet named Oerth, similar to Earth, that floats in its own orbit around a sun. But when you say Realm, you are referring not only to the physical planet itself, but also the different dimensions that may or may not interact with Oerth. Now that that’s cleared up, back to our usual scheduled program.

…And when each group finishes their different campaigns, the results are forwarded to WotC to tally up and keep track of. Each character that participates in a Living campaign virtually exists in this realm, acquires wealth and prestige and experience. But what the coolest part is, is that the results effect this fictitious world. If enough groups in real life defeat the Evil Wizard ™, then the Evil Wizard ™ truly dies within the realm. WotC occasionally puts out Gazettes and Publishes the changes in Dragon Magazine.

So, this whole experience is like playing an Online Multiplayer RPG, but it is on a tabletop with other people sitting around you, instead of being alone in front of a computer.

There are several types of Living campaigns, and not all of them are limited to D&D. Pretty much any of the larger D20 RPGs have atleast one Living campaign that a player can participate in.

So, I’ve always liked Greyhawk. It’s magical. It’s gritty. It’s the inner city. It’s the outer plains. But it’s only recently that I’ve started to get involved in Living Greyhawk. You have to register with WotC in order to participate in a Living campaign. You cannot do this online. You have to attend a Living campaign somewhere else and fill out a free membership card. So, I looked it up, and the closest Living campaign was in Harrisburg, about three hours away. I was not going to go all that way just to fill out a stupid card and get a number, especially since I know no one else locally who is registered to participate. This would do me no good.

So then I click on a link to DM a Living campaign. You can sign up as a DM and host these Living campaigns. You can also recruit others by handing out this card that you have to fill out. And the best part was that all you had to do was take a free test online and pass it. The test is 20 questions in length. You need a perfect score to pass it, and you can take it as many times as you wish. Honestly, I took it one morning, in my bathrobe, with a cup of coffee. Well, okay, it took me more than ten times to pass the test. By then, I had memorized the answers. And it was more like five cups of coffee. But, who’s counting?

But I passed the test, and in about two weeks, I am going to receive my official Welcome Package from WotC. This is only the beginning. From here, it is only up.

I plan on starting atleast one Living Greyhawk campaign at my local game store. There may be others, but I know of no one else who is an RPGA sanctioned DM.

I may start a thread titled, “Ask the RPGA sanctioned DM.”

Anyone else have any experience with a Living campaign?

2

Damn!

We live so close together, and our gaming styles are so similar- I run Greyhawk as my base world, Spelljammer as the way-between and Planescape for the outer areas- we really should get together for a game.

I’ve been looking for a new group for years because my old group is stagnant, no one else really wants to DM and the main thing that gets done is socializing. We are better off playing NWN on my LAN because more gets done- but I have $1000s worth of books and miniatures I don’t want to go to waste.

We can meet where you like, and I can bring others- my wife and both sons play, and I have a few others who will show up. We could even invite other Dopers who play- Siege for one, I’m sure there are other Burgh area people who may join, like HideoHo and Guinastasia, if we make it a Doper game.

Where is your local game store? I used to go to Games Unlimited in Squirrel Hill, but they moved away from the D&D business and don’t have the selection they used to. There was a game store in Indiana but it closed a few years ago and the comic book store carries a small selection of dice- and that’s it! Online is the only way I can get things these days.

If you’re interested, drop me a line. I know the back streets of Greyhawk City almost as well as Gord the Rogue.

3

Excellent. I knew this whole new fangled Internet stuff was good for something.

I currently live on the North Side, but I have lived all over the Pittsburgh area during my life. I’m not in a strict group, but there are about 20 of us that form different games here and there. At any given time, I’m involved with at least one campaign with about 5 of those people.

Very little gaming takes place at someone else’s abode. Mostly, the gaming takes place at Game Master’s on Babcock Blvd, which runs parallel to McKnight and 279, north of the city. The store is run by a nearly blind guy named Phil. He is a great guy. He’s everyone’s friend. He has set aside several tables at the rear of the store for people to use to play. He runs tournaments and cards and miniatures, and all sorts of other stuff. The only caveat is that you should buy most of your RPG supplies from him. This isn’t a problem since his prices are very reasonable when they are not preprinted by the publishers.

Some of us congregate on an MSN message board that I set up. The link is here.

I’d definitely be interested in having a Doper Game. Have you ever participated in any Living campaigns?

4

I just signed up at the group message board. When I can post there I’ll have more details, and we can work at setting up a game.

I’m looking forward to meeting you.

5

Excellent. My master plan is working - er, uh, nevermind.

I just accepted you. I apologize for that by the way. Someone had figured out how to automatically sign up fictitious members for the MSN Groups and then send mass amounts of Spam to these same Groups. It sucked, so we made it a Members Only Group, but we accept everyone who applies.

By the way, the frequency of messages getting posted on the board is really erratic. It comes and goes in fits and spurts. Weeks might pass by without a single message getting posted, and then 20 in one day. Just so you know.

Wander around, take your time, add to it where you can.

6

So the Evil Wizard™ exists untill he is killed by enough groups?
(but could come back if enough groups resurect him?)

Interesting idea, massively multiplayer offline RPG.

Brian

7

I assume it is ok for the GM to ignore the official changes.
Because if I was a player who just tracked down the Evil Wizard’s Hidden Fortress™ and and was going to raid it at my next session, finding out that he was officially dead before that raid would get me p.o.ed.

Brian

8

Actually, those types of anachronisms are avoided by putting out the various campaigns in staggered waves. That way, WotC has time to tally up the results, and if the Evil Wizard ™ was killed, before they publish the next round of campaigns. Also, each campaign has an expiration date.

The DM is expected to have more than just a passing knowledge of the Realm that the Living campaign is located in. The campaigns have solid core structures to them, but what is not specified by the module is up to the DM to play through with the characters. The hard facts are then collected: How much gold? How much experience? Was the Evil Wizard ™ killed?

I’m not sure how long this has been going on. I’m told that Gary Gygax, who actually invented the Greyhawk Realm to use for his personal group of players, has been passing this around his own groups since the 70’s. It wasn’t until the Internet made it possible, that it started being published worldwide. I believe this has only been going on for a couple years in this form.

Soemthing else that is kind of neat, at least with Living Greyhawk, is that each section of the Greyhawk map is associated with a location in real life. For instance, if you play Living Greyhawk in PA, OH, or WV, your campaigns take place in Keoland. If you take a trip to Wisconsin, then you would be playing in, say, The Scarlet Brotherhood.

9

Did they change it? I haven’t really paid much attention to my RPGA materials of late… I’m not even sure if my membership is still good, but I thought we West Virginians were residents of the Duchy of Geoff.

10

Welcome to the club! Make sure they show you the secret handshake at the next con you go to :).

Unfortunately, my experience with living campaigns is limited because I’ve found them to be not to my tastes. And by “not to my tastes” I mean “sucky,” from both a DM and a player point of view.

As a player, I’ve not actually been officially in a LC, but I’ve been able to sit in on a few sessions with an unofficial character. (This was at Dragoncon, a scifi/gaming convention that seems to focus almost exclusively on living campaigns – grrrrrrr.) Although some of the players were decent people, the tables tended to be dominated by players of the worst sort. Players whose idea of roleplaying was to come up with a bizarre gimmicky character with an annoying screechy voice, for instance. Or players who didn’t give a fig about roleplaying, but rather were solely concerned with getting to the end of the adventure so they could get the reward chits to add onto their character sheets. I was really unimpressed.

As an RPGA DM, I’ve only run one adventure, for a LC set in the Forgotten Realms; I ran it at GenCon three times last year. Two of the tables I ran it for were actually pretty fun – a mix of polite shlubs and great gamers. The third time I ran it, however, I got four newbies (all wonderful people), and two old-school LC guys, the kind of guys that appear in sitcoms as D&D players, stinky, unkempt, sweaty middle-aged men. They had notebook upon notebook of stats for their characters.

The worst part was that one of them had figured out how to game the system. Skip the next paragraph if you don’t care about the details.

Basically, in this LC, expendable items (scrolls, potions, charged wands, etc.) can be used once in a session, but automatically are replaced before the next session. Once you get a potion of cure light wounds, that is, you can use it once per session for the rest of the character’s life. This is balanced by the fact that expendable items cost five times as much as they do in the DMG. This dude had looked up something in the FRCS saying that a specific race of elves could start at first level with an arcane magic item, with a short list; on that list was a first-level wand with ten charges. He took a wand of color spray. I was fine with it at first, until I realized that it was going to regenerate every session, and that I therefore had a first-level character in the game who had an extra TEN first-level spell slots each session. I only realized this after he’d expended four of the charges, using the wand in just about every round of combat that he could, and was far more powerful than any other character in the party, overshadowing everyone else.

I told him that, to be fair, that wand ought to have “cost” five times as much as a normal expendable wand; since he’d gotten it at first level, it should have only a fifth as many charges, or should have two charges. But since I’d told this to him halfway through the session, I’d go ahead and let him have two more charges from his wand.

He and his LC buddy sulked through the entire rest of the session. Near as I could tell, they were the only players that didn’t have fun, and it was primarily because I’d caught one of them bending the rules and had bent them back.

Some people, however, really like living campaigns. Have you ever visited EN World? It’s a fantastic forum devoted to D&D, and there are a lot of Living Campaign folks there, including some who are spectacular DMs. I highly recommend it, and you’ll get a lot of responses to LC questions over there.

Maybe I’ll see you at GenCon this year!
Daniel

11

Since moving to Arkansas in 2001 my primary experience with D&D has been through Living Greyhawk. I started out as a player but by late 2003 I was primarily a DM. I passed the Herald Test when they originally released it and the 3.5 Herald test before I purchased 3.5. Like you I simply took it over and over until I passed.

For the most part I’ve enjoyed LG games but not as much as I enjoy a home brew campaign. A home brew campaign offers more freedom for both the players and the DM then LG can ever hope to achieve. I tend to view LG games as being just a little bit better then a computer game like Baldur’s Gate.

The biggest disadvantage comes with some of the people who play LG. The rules for the campaign revolve around ensuring that munchkins don’t completely take over. They also require tons of paperwork, a bit less now then in the past, which is a pain in the neck to keep track of. Every time you finish an adventure you get another piece of paper to keep track of. After 2-3 years you’ll be carrying a book depending on how often you play.

On the other hand you can play a LG game at just about any RPG convention out there. We run LG games in Little Rock almost every other week and at all conventions that having gaming.

Marc

12

CandidGamera, I stand corrected. Keoland is OH, PA, and NY.

So, Left Hand of Dorkness and MGibson, I do not actually have my official membership yet, so I do not have access to the different campaigns that can be ordered. How are these campaigns set up on paper? I would appreciate a brief description of how they work.

Also, I have a question. Since I am a DM for RPGA, I can hand out membership forms and recruit other people in Living Greyhawk, right? How do I get those forms?

13

I was pretty sure you had to be a member of the RPGA before you became an officially sanctioned DM. Anyone can take the Herald test but even if you pass you can’t run games without being a member of the RPGA.

Adventures (mods) are downloadable from the RPGA in PDF format. Mods typically vary in length from 30-40 pages and may include player handouts and DM information in the form of notes, maps, etc. Each mod is designed to be run by a party of adventurers who are close to one another in level. The mod will be rated from APL (average party level) of 2-12+. Typically in Greyhawk there aren’t many groups running around with an average party level of 10 or higher. You get the APL by adding everyone’s level and dividing the sum by the number of players in the party. So if you have 4 players with a combined level of 15 then you’ll be running an APL 4 table.

At the end of the adventure the players fill out a Record Certificate which includes how much experience and gold they received, accounts of any magical items they’ve found, and any other special notes.

As a DM you’ll have to fill out a Session Tracking report and file it with the RPGA online. The STR just list who played, their RPGA members #'s, and the date the game was played.

Anybody can hand out RPGA members if they have 'em. They send me memberships in the mail every couple of months so I have a boatload of them just sitting around the house. Life time membership with the RPGA is currently free.

Marc

14

As soon as I passed the test, I got a membership card in the mail; they must be linked. Can’t really give any other advice on getting into LC, since my experience with them was so haphazard, and really more related to getting to run a game at GenCon than getting to run a LC game.

Daniel

15

Living City is dead and buried. I think they might have a few more mods coming out in time for Gen Con but other then that it is kaput. Blame Organized Play.

Marc

16

OK, help me out here. I don’t get it.

I’ve played D&D for 2/3 of my life, and I still don’t undersand this “living” concept.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t played any MMORPGS.

Wizards makes up an adventure, like “evil wizard Bob is stealing maidens from the village of Flargh. Enter his dungeon/keep, find him and kill him.” They provide maps and stats and anyone who’s registered as an RPGA Dm can download them and run it at a con between March 10th and May 5th or something.

Now anyone with a registered character can walk into the con, sit down and play this adventure and keep the loot and XP they find for the next one.

Is that right so far?

How does this possibly work?

Do you have a lot of people “mysteriously” knowing where the traps and secret doors are because they played/ran/read the module already?

What if the players do something outside the module? (Like join with Bob and rule Flargh) Do they get roleplaying XP? Do you have to make it up on the fly? Or are they stuck on the rails of the adventure to be fair to everyone?

Do you spend an hour figuring out how the PC’s know each other?

How do you reconcile conflicting histories? (“Hey remember last week when we slew the dragon of Farfeld?” “wait a minute, how did you guys slay the dragon of Farfeld? I imprisoned him on the plane of fire with my buddy Stu!” “Stu? The guy who stole the hand of Vecna last month?” “No way, dude, I’ve got the hand of Vecna.” “Me too” “Me too” “How many hands did this Vecna guy have, anyway?”)

Is there a problem with forged character sheets? Or do you have to have a wireless LAN and look everyone up as they come in?

Also, most cons have 4 or 6 hour slots. What if you don’t finish? (My D&D sessions are usually weekends long and we STILL don’t finish)

What about bad DMs? If my character dies to a DM’s mistake or cheating, is it dead forever? Is there an appeal? Do I have to pay to be raised if the DM screwed up?

17

No, blame my crappy use of acronyms. I meant “Living Campaign.” This one was called Emerald Jungle or something like that – it just started up at last year’s GenCon.

Daniel

18

That’s it in a nut shell.

With tons and tons of paperwork and documentation that the player must have in addition to his character sheet.

Not a lot. There are accusations of reading mods beforehand, falsifying documents, and cheating on dice rolls. Unfortunately there is an ugly side to the organization.

You can join Meta Organizations which vary from region to region. Your characters home region depends on what state you actually reside in. For example if you live in Texas or Oklahoma you’re part of the Bandit Kingdoms. If you’re in Arkansas and a few other states you’re part of the Yeomanry.

Meta Organizations allow your character access to prestige classes, equipment, feats, and spells that would otherwise be forbidden. There are to many meta-orgs to talk about here but there’s one for just about every character class out there.

Nope, you just read the introduction to the adventure and ask everyone to introduce themselves. Essentially you “all meet in a tavern” or on a road or something.

You don’t, in general you just ignore that different groups may have resolved the same adventure in a different manner. There are some magic items that are so rare that only one may be at a table at any given time. These are usually pretty unique things created for the campaign that you won’t find in the DM’s Guide.

Yes, there is a problem with cheating. For the most part it doesn’t seem to severe in my neck of the woods.

The mods are designed to be run within 4 hours and that includes any time it takes to fill out paper work at the end of the module. If you don’t finish it then you can end that game and give out treasure and experience up until the quitting point of the mod. If you have time later you could just have all the players agree to come back and finish it. Option #2 isn’t available at conventions though.

There are bad DMs but in general you’ve got to worry more about bad players. You can appeal DM decisions with the powers that be in whatever region you live in.

Marc

19

I obviously failed my Innuendo roll. It isn’t my fault that Innuendo isn’t a class skill for a Barbarian.

Marc

20

Yes! For about a year, I DMed and played Living City at most of the Southeast cons here. In all honesty, only the smaller cons were fun. You knew the people, you got a higher crust of RPers.

I hate… soooo much hate DMing for large cons for modules in LC. So many damn turnips I could scream. (Turnips being people who just sit like a bump on a log) I have so many damn horror stories from these people.

I will never play another “Living” game again. I can’t really stand them. Too much, powergamers, gimicy (however you spell that) characters that make me want to do bad stuff and turnips. I’ve pretty much been turned off of all tabletop con gaming.

I may try the LARPs when I start going back. I hear they are fun.

But yes, LC was awash of idiotically powerful characters from the longer playing crowd. Those of us who got in later were constantly screwed with crappy “one-shot” items that did squat. I had one character play nearly a year, but never get a set of magic weapons, armor and shield. And he was freaking 10th level in 2nd Ed. Grrrr…

Congratz on being an official DM for Living GH. Don’t over do it. Have fun at cons, even if your players are not.

I prefer homegrown campaigns or Planescape (may the Lady rest in peace.)