Patreon DevBlog #10: Revise, Revise, Revise

We’re slowly catching up on my backlog of DevBlog Topics™! This week, I’d like to talk about some revisions I wound up making to my homebrew campaign. Plus: the problems with Strahd’s charm and how to fix them!

Problem #1: How do I make a linear nonlinear dungeon?

In my homebrew campaign, my players have just arrived at the lair of an evil necromancer, ready and raring to delve in and uncover its ancient secrets. As I’ve previously mentioned, it was always my plan to jaquay this particular dungeon, introducing my players to the concept of nonlinearity in order to really make them feel a sense of agency in how they prioritize, sequence, and approach assorted problems.

There was, however, one problem: the dungeon wasn’t entirely nonlinear. I knew that I wanted everything up to the boss to be entirely nonlinear, but I didn’t want the players to actually fight the actual boss (the nothic remnants of the necromancer himself) until they’d cleared out the rest of the dungeon first.

Okay; not an impossible challenge. Idea One: The door to the necromancer’s sanctum is magically locked, and the players need to visit each other room in the dungeon in order to find the pieces to assemble the “key”/unlocking ritual/etc.

Except there was a problem with this - two, really. First, the players had just had to do the exact same thing (find a hidden key in order to progress) in order to get into the dungeon in the first place. Second, the players had to do this exact same thing (collect a bunch of different pieces from different rooms of the dungeon in order to progress) in order to advance in the last dungeon they’d completed. While I’m a fan of recycling and reusing, this felt a bit ridiculous!

Now, I’d previously made my peace with this problem; sure, it was a bit derivative, but it was a necessary sacrifice on the altar of nonlinearity. However, as I was standing at a bus stop thirty minutes before our session was due to begin, I decided that I wasn’t okay with that level of repetition - and tried to figure out how to fix it.

The basic idea was simple: Find a way to force the players to visit every other room in the dungeon before they can visit the necromancer’s lair. Among the five pillars of gameplay, this was, functionally, a puzzle - a challenge that can only be completed using logical reasoning by solving a number of assorted smaller tasks. Easy enough.

There are three main ways to prevent players from going somewhere you don’t want them to go: (1) make it practically impossible for them to go there, (2) make it really undesirable for them to go there, (3) make it really desirable for them to go somewhere else, and (4) don’t tell them about it.

#1 was the exact kind of repetition I’d been trying to avoid. #3 was impractical because the necromancer’s dungeon was a closed system; the PCs were there to enter his lair, and all the other parts of the dungeon were just window dressing. #4 was obviously irrelevant.

That left #2: make it Really Undesirable for the players to enter the necromancer’s lair before visiting the other rooms first.

As I was pondering this, I abruptly remembered a sequence from Amnesia: The Dark Descent - perhaps the king of “nonlinear fetch quests unlock doors to linear progression.” In this particular sequence, the player must assemble and inject themselves with a vaccine against a particular kind of deadly airborne fungal spore in order to safely traverse an underground area.

As I pondered ways to bring this into my necromancer’s dungeon, I recalled a post I’d seen on Reddit a few years back - one in which a group of PCs had found a strange, red-tinged energy field out in the forest; inside the energy field was a group of dead wildlife. As the PCs watched, a little rabbit approached the energy field, hopped inside, and promptly fell over dead.

I realized that this was what I’d been looking for: the necromancer’s sanctum would be protected by a necrotic energy field (slightly similar to the amber vault wards in Curse of Strahd). Anything that crossed into that field would immediately suffer the effects of the blight spell. (Of course, you need to convey this to the players somehow - I decided to put a dead rat at the top of the sanctum’s staircase; half of its body would be inside of the field, rotted away and lacerated, and the other half would be outside of the field, perfectly hale and hearty.)

This had an exceptionally beneficial side-effect - because the “key” wasn’t a key at all, I had a sudden freedom to allow the players to investigate, explore, and create a method for passing through the necrotic energy field by themselves! Rather than telling them, “you need XYZ to pass; go get them,” I could allow them to organically decide upon and uncover the pieces they needed to pass through. (For example, the sentient rats in the library have the recipe to a protective elixir; the well of shadows in the basement can provide the fuel for an alchemical reaction; the phase spider’s lair is set in the necromancer’s alchemy lab; and so on.)

It actually turned out incredibly fortuitous that I’d made the connection to Amnesia, because I’d felt somewhat lackluster with the structure of the dungeon thus far. Suddenly, however, my mind was spinning with new ideas to link everything together, and proper purposes for all of the different rooms. (I actually wound up going to ChatGPT to ask for fancy Latin-sounding names for all the rooms that might be found in a necromancer’s dungeon, and wound up adding in an extra two rooms that I hadn’t initially considered while folding in an ample amount of Amnesia lore to make them work. One of the rooms - the morgue - was pretty much a direct copy/paste of Amnesia’s morgue.)

How’d everything turn out? My players loved the nonlinearity, the chance to guess at what the different room names meant, and the mystery and exploration that went along with figuring out how to approach all of the dangers in the dungeon. They felt like they had a lot of agency, and none of them recognized that this was, design-wise, the exact kind of dungeon that they’d just finished clearing out in the previous adventure (albeit a lot bigger and far more ambitious).

If I had two takeaways from this story, it’d be this:

• Always be ready to revise your ideas. If something doesn’t feel right, let it simmer, then come back to it with fresh eyes and reshape it until everything clicks into place.
• Consume as much media - books, television, games - as you reasonably can. The best creative inspiration comes from creative works that we’ve already seen. Even direct plagiarism works well (and especially if you’re not caught).

Problem #2: How should I make Strahd’s charm work?

As part of my ongoing revisions in Curse of Strahd Re-Reloaded, I’ve taken it upon myself to rework Strahd’s statistics, giving him a fancy new three-phase statblock. Among other changes, I decided to tweak the way his charm ability worked. Let’s talk a little bit about why I decided to change it, and why I settled on the version that I did.

In the original module, Strahd can use an action to do the following:

“Strahd targets one humanoid he can see within 30 feet of him. If the target can see Strahd, the target must succeed on a DC 17 Wisdom saving throw against this magic or be charmed. The charmed target regards Strahd as a trusted friend to be heeded and protected. The target isn't under Strahd's control, but it takes Strahd's requests and actions in the most favorable way and lets Strahd bite it. Each time Strahd or his companions do anything harmful to the target, it can repeat the saving throw, ending the effect on itself on a success. Otherwise, the effect lasts 24 hours or until Strahd is destroyed, is on a different plane of existence than the target, or takes a bonus action to end the effect.”

This is, of course, the classic vampiric hypnosis ability: Look into the vampire’s eyes, and you’ll lose your free will for a long period of time. As evocative as it is, however, it raises a number of severe design concerns.

Let’s first talk about narrative design. While Strahd’s charm is not, strictly speaking, mind control, it is sufficiently powerful to push PCs into doing something that they’d really rather not do—such as stealing the Sunsword and handing it over to Strahd. (While the Sunsword, as a sentient weapon, has some defense mechanisms against this, they’re not entirely reliable.) This can lead into some really feel-bad moments in which Strahd can charm a PC, ask them to hand over the only weapon that can possibly destroy him, and throw it into a river. This is agency destruction at its finest, demolishing the one thing that makes D&D worthwhile: the ability for players to completely control their own decisions.

This gets worse when you realize that Strahd can also charm players in wolf or bat form as well. If a PC looks into Strahd’s eyes when he’s in vampiric form, there’s at least a plausible excuse that the PC “knew the danger” and therefore chose to risk hypnosis nonetheless. But Barovia is full of wolves and bats, meaning that it’s impossible to know which one is Strahd and which one is not. While this is great for accentuating a paranoid horror atmosphere, it combines with Strahd’s RAW charm ability to create a particularly nasty anti-agency environment.

And don’t forget—Strahd’s Charm ability does not use his concentration, and he’s free to spam it as much as he likes, against as many targets as he likes! As soon as he charms one PC, he’s free to start trying to charm the rest. There’s an exceptionally unpleasant strategy in which Strahd disguises himself as a bat, tries to Charm a PC, leaves immediately afterward, and returns five minutes later to do it again. Since Strahd can spam his Charm infinitely, and because a charmed PC is hypnotized for 24 hours, it’s inevitable that, sooner or later, the entire party will be charmed. Yikes!

Of course, a DM is free not to use these abilities to their fullest extent. However, Strahd is a cunning villain and master strategist. Forcing him to refrain from abusing his Charm is confusing at best and immersion-shattering at worst—once players realize that Strahd is “going easy” on them for no apparent reason, their ability to take him seriously immediately crashes. If a DM takes things a step further and chooses to have Strahd ignore his Charm ability entirely, then the question becomes: why include it at all?

Things get worse when you look at the game-design implications of this ability. There’s no way to meaningfully engage with the Charm feature itself. It is, in a nutshell, the pure definition of the “save-or-suck” effect that so many players and DMs find unfun: if the target succeeds, then Strahd’s effort was wasted, but if the target fails, then there’s nothing for them to do until Strahd (re: the DM) decides otherwise.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Strahd abuses his Charm as much as possible, using it strategically and intelligently to leverage every situation toward his own ends. (There might be plenty of encounters in which Strahd consciously chooses not to use his Charm, of course, in order to see how his adversaries react of their own volition, but there will be plenty of encounters in which he does consciously choose to use it as well.) As “repeat players” in Strahd’s game, the PCs will therefore learn a very clear lesson: Don’t ever look at Strahd, and don’t ever look at any bat or wolf, either.

This, of course, completely nullifies the ability! No longer is Strahd’s charm a meaningful part of gameplay; instead, it becomes a gameplay tax—requiring the players to look away from him (and therefore roll attacks with disadvantage) on each of their turns to automatically counter it.

Fighter: “I attack Strahd!”

DM: “Are you looking in—”

Fighter: “—his eyes? Oh, yeah; guess not. I’ll roll with disadvantage, then.”

The end result: Strahd doesn’t get to use his cool ability, and the PCs get worse at attacking him. Everyone loses.

Obviously, this was a non-tenable situation. Strahd’s Charm needed revisions, and badly. After some tinkering and tweaking, here’s what I wound up with:

“One humanoid within 30 feet that Strahd can see must make a DC 19 Wisdom saving throw or be magically charmed for 1 minute or until Strahd loses his concentration (as if concentrating on a spell). A target that can't see Strahd automatically succeeds. While charmed, the target regards Strahd as a trusted friend to be heeded and protected; it isn't under Strahd's control, but takes his requests and actions in the most favorable way and lets Strahd bite it. The target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on a success. If the target is still charmed at the end of the minute, the effect lasts for 24 hours, until Strahd is destroyed, or until he takes a bonus action to end it.”

This is, of course, a major nerf! Suddenly, PCs have a meaningful way of resisting Strahd’s hypnosis—like most other magical debuffs, they can re-make the original saving throw at the end of every turn. This also, in turn, raises the stakes: if they don’t make the (high-DC) saving throw by the end of the minute, they’ll be charmed by Strahd for the next full day. Zoinks!

This unlocks lots of great gameplay opportunities, especially among PC classes that can find ways of increasing the victim’s Wisdom saving throw (e.g., bardic inspiration). Suddenly, the PCs can recreate the exact kind of dramatic narrative that unfolds in so many mind-control sequences: a lone victim, struggling to break free of their mental bondage, while their friends and loved ones call out to them, seeking to find their “true self” and help it to reassert control. Alternatively, the PCs can target Strahd himself, focus-firing their heavyweight attacks in an attempt to disrupt his concentration and free their hypnotized friend.

Notably, however, because of its nerfs, the PCs should no longer feel completely obliged to avoid Strahd’s gaze. Given that the new Charm requires his concentration and its saving throw can be reattempted each turn, the risk calculus abruptly changes, encouraging PCs to start looking at him again in order to avoid the disadvantage penalty on their attacks. Instead of Strahd’s defining feature, his Charm becomes another tool in his toolbox—which, ironically enough, makes it more useful to him than if it had been even stronger!

As an added bonus, since the charm effect is semi-permanent if the target fails to break free in the first minute, Strahd still retains the ability to kidnap and imprison key NPCs, spam his Charm at them for an hour or two in Ravenloft’s dungeons (until, eventually, they fail to break the charm quickly enough), and use them as his Renfield-esque servants for the remaining hours of the day. However, since he’s unlikely to ever have access to the PCs for that much time, it’s unlikely that he could ever use this power in a way that deprives the players of long-term agency. It’s a win-win all-around!

Campaign Advice Roundup | April 6, 2023

• When trying to decide how a particular NPC might act or react, begin with an OOC Doylist analysis: “What impact do I want this NPC to have on my players, and what role do I want them to play in the campaign overall?” Once you know that, use that information to construct or modify that NPC’s overall personality, character traits, and/or goals. From there, it’s easy enough to decide, from an IC Watsonian perspective, “Given what I know of this NPC, how would they act or respond under this particular set of circumstances?”
• It can be tempting, when your players find a clever way to avert disaster, to try and find a way to make that cool disaster set piece take place anyway. Don’t fall for this temptation! Your players’ decisions and accomplishments must, above all else, always have meaning. If they attempt to stop a disaster and successfully do so, that must be respected! To force the disaster otherwise would be to railroad the campaign into tragedy. Always remember this: When given a choice between “cool stuff happening” and “making decisions that matter,” players will choose the latter option every time. Let them!
• It’s okay to have big, world-altering stuff going on in the background of your campaign in a way that complicates or lightly affects the players’ decisions, but doesn’t directly create new adventures for them to go on. This makes the players feel like the world is a vast, living, breathing environment that changes and evolves with or without them, doubling down on verisimilitude. To put it another way: a player-centric world feels plastic and dull. A player-agnostic world—i.e., a world in which Cool, Weird Stuff keeps happening that has nothing to do with the players at all—makes the PCs themselves feel more vivid, meaningful, and alive.