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On the Batman TV show you would see the meanwhile in action quite often. The voice would come out of no-where and say “meanwhile at the bat cave” or some other story important location. This trick was used to explain that the audience was being shown something else that was going on at the same time so that future events would make more sense. For D&D a “meanwhile” is a short break from current story line to play another short game in the same world with different characters so that you can expose information to the players so that their understanding of the narrative is strong, even when their characters are confused. I think a few examples would do a better job explaining this concept.

WotC_Josh took me on my first dive into a “meanwhile”. In his campaign we are playing a group of freshly graduated arcane school students in a post apocalyptic world. Civilization is kept close to nodes, the only source of water that can be used to grow crops or sustain life in anyway. Our group thought they had found a way to fix the water supply problems of the world. Really they collapsed a barrier between their world and several other planes. For the “meanwhile” quest we played a band of mercenaries sent to investigate a Halfling village that had been taken over by slavers, a quest that our other group had to let go of because they had collapsed the barrier. After three game sessions our mercenary characters caught up with our regular group in the time line and the barrier dropped. Each player chose their favorite of the two characters they had and those characters were shunted to the feywild and the others were left in their home plane. The campaign continued from there but we have all kept our secondary characters, waiting for a chance to use them again.
Josh’s “meanwhile” allowed us to play through some story that we had missed and let us chose to play new characters if we wanted to. If he had done the same thing without the “meanwhile” quest new random characters would have shown up and the player’s feelings of story continuity would have been injured.

I am currently running a game called “Legacy of the Scarlet Fist”, it is a pirate game set in a low-magic world that is quickly becoming not so low magic and the resulting arms race. The characters are the crew of the Scarlet Fist, the world’s most renowned pirate ship. The crew of the Scarlet Fist took a job to hunt down and destroy or capture another ship called “The Red Leviathan”. They did just that, but upon capturing they found out that this massive mechanical, lobster shaped, submarine required undead to run and that it had an army of zombies onboard that they had no way of controlling. Using what power the ship had left they took the Red Leviathan to Ape Island, an island populated by intelligent apes that protect a temple that houses an unknown treasure, and let the zombie army loose. At the end of that session I offered the group a “meanwhile” quest. We would take a three game break from the main story and they would play the part of the Erathis worshipping military specialists that were sent to retrieve the unknown treasure of Ape Island. Next game they exit the temple to find the island covered in zombies, they must make it from the temple to the shore where they can escape aboard the Scarlet Fist where the two story lines will meet back up.
My “meanwhile” gave the players a chance to play in the middle of disaster of their other characters creation, while exposing some plot information that they would not have otherwise gotten. Future parts of the main story will make more sense to the players while still allowing the characters to be confused. My meanwhile will not really allow for new characters to be added to the main crew of the Scarlet Fist but I think the Ape man they picked up along the way may join up with the ship as a low-ranking crew member. This “meanwhile” is important because the players would have felt weird if a group of adventures had stumbled out of the jungles of Ape Island with the unknown treasure in their hands. I don’t think the actions of the characters will have change much because of the “meanwhile” quest but I think the increased understanding and involvement in the story means the players will enjoy it more. Only time can prove my theory, but so far the “meanwhile” has been a lot of fun.

So with my limited experiences I have begun to form an opinion on “meanwhile” quests.
First off, I think they are a great idea, in both examples above the group had  good time while the DM go to expose a part of his world that would not normally gotten a chance.
Secondly, I think it is important to make the character goals between the two groups very different from each other. In Josh’s game we went from altruistic, angsty teens with nothing to lose to experienced soldiers for hire that would check a dying man’s pockets for money before even thinking to help him. In my game they went from the free spirited crew of pirate ship to the bureaucracy laden holy soldiers of Erathis. This was nice because it created a great break from the campaign and cleared divided the two groups of characters.
My last piece of advice is to keep the “meanwhile” short and communicate the desired length of time to your player before you begin. In Josh’s game we were done in three sessions, I was shooting for the same time frame but a string of excellent role-play meant that we are going to be doing four sessions. I think any longer than that and you will start to lose sight of the core campaign. In my next campaign I am thinking about planning in one or more “meanwhiles” or maybe even try to make an entire story out of them.

Have you ever had a “meanwhile” quest in a D&D game? What was it like?

Making the premade characters for D&D Encounters: Keep on the Borderlands, was an interesting task. The premade characters get used in several ways by lots of different kinds of players and I wanted to make sure that they met as many of those needs as they could. Getting to play with them as we playtested Keep on the Borderlands and see them mostly play the way I wanted them to was even more exciting. Since the premade characters don’t have space for a tactical discussion and players are new to them (and the rest of the characters at the table), it took several games for the little synergies I built into them to show. Below is a character-by-character discussion of those synergies and how to use them to your benefit. Most of you won’t be playing at a table with all of these characters, but hopefully some of these ideas will still be helpful, perhaps even for your own characters.

Quinn
I will start with Quinn, as he was my favorite before starting the playtest and is now even more so that I played him through the playtest. The tactics for Quinn are pretty simple – get in the middle and stay there. Most of the time I would be in the hammer hands stance until there were only one or two enemies left, or in fights where I stayed with an obvious big boss (elite or solo). On his turn I would either use hammer hands to push enemies together so that I could get more of them in his defender aura, or move to avoid giving combat advantage. Towards the end of the season I would often take the full defense action instead of attacking. When it isn’t his turn Quinn is always on the lookout for the chance to use his battle guardian attack, particularly when combined with hammer hands so you can push an enemy out of range, causing them to lose their attack. In the end, the only trouble I had with Quinn was that he was too good at being a defender – he would have no healing surges by the time we reach an extended rest, and I’d have to pull him out of his role to keep him standing.

Merric
Merric was always present during playtesting, the simple character combined with interesting options and great seas of damage he brought made him very popular. There are basic tactics that I saw used several times and each worked very well. It is entirely possible for Merric to stay on the edge of the combat and throw daggers for most of the fight, using tactical trick to get combat advantage. Merric also has 34 gp, so I would recommend buying a few more daggers when you get a chance. Generally he would target either an enemy next to Eldeth or Quinn. In most cases I would suggest that he help Eldeth, but Quinn also can use the help as he frequently runs out of surges. The other clever way that I saw Merric used was as a flanker with Quinn, using his unbalancing trick to knock the target prone and then using his move action to get out of flanking. The enemy can stand up and either attack Quinn or trigger battle guardian to move or go after Merric. If they did go after Merric in this circumstance they risked losing their attack if Quinn his them with hammer hands (I often saved heroic effort to make sure this worked) and push them away.

Eldeth
The best off-defender I have seen in a while and a ton of damage on top of that. Eldeth was often used to chase down some combatant that would prefer to fight from a distance and beat them into a pulp. A few things really made this possible for Eldeth. First, the berserker charge stance allowed her to cover more distances and bring an even more accurate attack at the end of the charge. Second, having the ability to take a second wind as a minor action and gaining an additional five temporary hit points with each healing surge allowed her to operate outside the range of the healer(s) with relative safety. Generally an artillery faced with Eldeth would shift away one space and take a shot at her, she would then shift a square away from them and then charge them again. Of course, if she caught one of these unfortunate ranged heavy monsters in a place that they could not shift away from their day got bad, fast.

Hagen
Leader by role, but don’t let him fool you – Hagen brings a lot of damage. If you pick targets with medium to low Fortitude his storm hammer at-will attack becomes super accurate. When he is not using storm hammer, he should be flanking with Quinn or Eldeth to get a bonus to hit with his blessing of wrath for a damage boost. The big source of damage this cleric of Kord brings is the thunder steel encounter power – if you use this power when several of your party members are in position to attack an enemy, it most likely won’t survive the turn. Often times Hagen would open with thunder steel on one opponent and Merric and Eldeth would focus on another, this worked well to quickly bring down two enemies and give an early advantage to the party.

Sola
Healing, resistance, saving throws, bonus to death saves for all, and a daily that can give a +2 bonus to all of your allies’ defenses make Sola a perfect supporting character. The two big decisions to make with Sola are when to use sun burst and if you should use blessing of battle or brand of the sun the rest of the time. If you get the idea that you’ll be making a lot of saving throws or fighting close to your allies later in the combat, you can benefit by saving the sun burst. If you are unsure of where the combat’s going, I would recommend using the sun burst as soon as you can get 3 or more allies in the burst. Blessing of battle can save a hero surrounded by enemies and brand of the sun might save an ally affected by a difficult condition or heavy ongoing damage. Often times I saw Sola choose to give a hero with ongoing damage the resist all 2 because it was guaranteed, whereas they could fail a saving throw.

Berrian
First thing you will want to do if you are playing Berrian is increase the push of beguiling strands and the slide for charm of misplaced wrath by 2 each (his school of magic did not get applied properly to the character sheet).

Okay, enough with the errata. Berrian is an enchanter, and enchanters excel at moving enemies, hopefully into dangerous positions. So most of the time you are playing Berrian, you should be looking for places to push enemies that will cause them problems – pits, fireplaces, off of walls, or into lava. Sometimes you run into situations where there is not a dangerous place on the map to push an enemy on to – when this happens, you have three options. Option 1 is to push them next to Quinn – this works great with weaker enemies, or ones that would prefer to be attacking at range. Option 2 is to create a dangerous space with fountain of flame – once you have a fountain of flame, each creature you push with beguiling strands takes 10 damage (5 from beguiling strands and 5 from fountain of flame), which is pretty good for a close blast 5 that only targets enemies. Option 3 is to use your other spells – if you can get a brute to attack his friend with charm of misplaced wrath or help finish off a few monsters that Merric and Eldeth have grievously wounded with your arc lightning, you will add a lot to the damage output of the team.

Any way you play them, I hope you have a lot of fun with the new premade characters or at least this post has given you an idea for a way to have your party work together in a combat. I would love to hear about other ways the premade characters or characters you have built are working well together in D&D Encounters combats. For me there are few ways to have a better combat encounter than to work together as a team to mulch a big pile of monster into experience points and loot.

Strangest thing happen to me this morning, I was reminded that I was DMing a game tonight. I had completely forgotten about our schedule had changed for September. But that was not the strange part the series of feeling I had right after the reminder are what struck me. First I panicked, if I forgot game was tonight I must be unprepared right? Nope, it is shaping up to be a bit of a dungeon crawl, I have monsters all picked out, miniatures are ready, maps are drawn and I have even cleaned the game room. So in a matter of seconds the panic was over and I started to feel a little lost, I am a generally a nervous before game starts when I am DMing. I spend lots of time just looking at what I am going to run and thinking about how it could go horribly wrong or how I have forgotten something or that the players aren’t going to “get it” or something else I haven’t even thought of will happen. I tried to be nervous about the game, I tried to figure out what could go wrong but all I could come up with was this sense that I was completely ready, the story I had was solid and that if anything went wrong I could easily improvise. So if I am not panicked or nervous what am I supposed to do? I decided to analyze the game I am running and figure out what makes it different, hoping to take away lessons for future campaigns.

This game started when are regular DM needed to take a break, be a player and build up some ideas to continue his campaign, I volunteered because I love running shorter campaigns (10-20 sessions). In the few days before this I had been discussing an interesting phenomena with WotC_Trevor. When I make a campaign I tend to make a game that I would like to play in, and then I end up running it. This means that I never get to play in the game I want and the players in my game are unable to play in a game custom made for them. My games are still fun to be in, my players assure me all the time, but they were not tailored to them. This seemed like a chance to make a leap forward in the quality of campaign I was able to provide. So session one of the new game I sat down with about half of the players and asked them what kind if campaign they wanted to play in. We threw a lot of ideas around before we came up with the following descriptors:

Mercenary – The player did not want to be the good guys or the bad guys, they wanted an interesting group with individuals motivated by personal goals and relationships. The strongest example we could think of was Firefly, but really any Joss Whedon would do the job.

Episodic – Tell short interesting stories that resolve, with only a few story lines going at once. I have not done a great job of this so far, I love my complicated stories without set endings, but I have reined it in a little and I think I might be able to improve even more. They are currently dealing with 7 stories. What happened to Robert Piper, Ape Island, The Scarlet Fist (their ship) is possessed, who do we sell these Warforged juggernauts and instant demons to, what do we do with this massive lobster submarine, we need elementals to power our ship so it can fly and a mysterious stranger that is apparently the opponent of the thing possessing the Scarlet Fist.

Low Magic – This was my addition. For a while now I have wanted to run a game about an arms race between nations as magic became a military options, as they started to talk about being pirate/privateers, I felt this was perfect chance. Character creation wise this means that anything that is an at-will is a natural ability of the character, anything that is an encounter/daily/power point power is gear related. The new tech is using elementals as power sources for some-what modern/steam punk/near future devices. Willow has different kinds of shot for her pistol and the telekinetic power to augment them (psion). Surgeon has elemental powered implants that only he can activate (healing word and the like). Minx has a lot of really sharp knives (ranger). Scutter breaks the mold a little, his encounter and at-wills are different ways of swinging his axe but his dailies are different were-sea animals (warden). Lucky just swings an axe (avenger) but he is a shardmind and is starting to get the idea that he might have been created by someone, maybe for something.

Funny – This is where things got interesting. I am not good at comedy, so I went to the experts (the Internet) and read about it. Still couldn’t figure out how to write a funny story, so I cheated (still on the Internet), I looked for things that were funning, things I knew this group found funny and included them as themes and monsters. When a gaggle of Bear-Shark-Octopus rose up from the depths of the ocean, clambered aboard the Scarlet Fist and attacked them I could see that it was working. Since then we have added Ape Island, giant undersea lobster tank and the players got into the act by starting a zombie apocalypse (thankfully just on one island, poor Apes).

The characters are heroic – The character had to be special. I thought a lot about Joss Whedon’s characters and finally about the A-team. Each character has something they can do, Hannibal’s plans always work, Face can talk his way out of just about anything, BA can fix or break anything and Murdock can pilot a Twinkie in space if it is required. So as people were making their characters I sat with them and we talked about the power that was not on their character sheet. An area of expertise that was generally outside the game elements that they I could ensure they would have a measure of success every time engaged in it.  Examples are better at explaining this than me.

Willow Piper: She is Sir Captain Robert Piper’s heir and captain of the Scarlet Fist, a notorious pirate vessel, and even though she is a slight 17 year old girl she commands respect from leaders of nations.

Scutter: Long time first mate of the Scarlet Fist, its crew follows his orders without second guessing. When the crew follows them into combat Scutter commands them.

Minx: She gets away with anything a pirate cat girl would get away with. She sleeps while everyone works, she almost always wins when gambling and get bonuses to hit when she jumps off of stuff in combat.

Those were the first batch, they are pretty good but I took the concept a little further with the characters that were introduced later. Not only did they get a power, the session that they joined the group was all about their character. When Surgeon joined, the crew helped him retrieve some important medical supplies from the monsters that wiped out his last crew. When Lucky joined the group actually received him as pay for a mission, they also received enough money to buy 20 ships and a small island. There was no doubt who these characters were and the value they brought by the end of introductions.

Surgeon: Surgeon can command elementals that have been placed into machines to power them. Surgeon is also a party animal and never ever has trouble finding wine, women and song.

Lucky: Lucky is very lucky, he finds a lot of secret doors, avoids traps, finds money laying around and the story generally twist so even his failures have some value (this is surprisingly easy now that everyone at the table is making suggestions).

One of the good habits I have as a DM is stopping and looking around the table to see if everyone is engaged fairly regularly. If someone is not engaged I shine the spotlight on their character and generally they reengage. These “other powers” are a great tool for this. If I look up and see that Lucky’s player is starting to disengage Lucky stumbles on to a clue, a pile of money or whatever, he is drawn back in and the plot is moved forward.

Interesting NPCs – There are other crew on the Scarlet Fist and each of them is an interesting character. It takes me a long time to create a really interesting character so I just stole them or used an archetype.

Anchor: Warforged deep sea diver and loyal companion to the Pipers. Anchor is the character I would have played if I had been a player instead of a DM. I am usually hesitant to do that but it happened this time anyway.

Loud Guy: Jay of Jay and Silent Bob. This guy is mostly useless and loud except on occasion I use him to suggest solutions when the players get stuck on something.

Quiet Guy: Silent Bob. This guy is a precognitive ninja that almost never talks. Anytime the players ask him to do something he shows them that he has already done it.

Lucan: Cypher from the Matrix. They know by the way this guy acts that he will betray them someday but they also know he work for someone and they want to know who.

The Twins: Two attractive twin brothers that can move in perfect concert. They make the perfect toy/foil for Minx and add to the feeling that there is magic in the world but that it is not very accessible.

Water Genasi Deck Hand: The story goes that this kid was fished up with a load of tuna and he just stayed with the ship. The crew has noticed him talking to the ship on occasion and is now questioning him about the possession of the Scarlet Fist.

I mentioned this blog at lunch with two of my players and they immediately insisted that I talk about loud guy and quiet guy, they also realized that they did not know the characters names, they never asked.

Players and DM own the world – This was also something that I pushed for. The players are allowed to say something like “The witch doctor of the Galistra island is an expert at ship possession, we should go see her, maybe she can help.” And it is true. Of course she will probably ask for some sort of payment some other kind of complication. I generally allow for this type of investment during character creation where it is easy to control but then back off of it at the table for fear of abuse. So far it has not been abused and has been a lot of fun.

Now that the game has grown a bit I would describe it as an over the top, popular media inspired pirate romp in a magic industrial revolution world.

So guess what I have figured out so far is, if the players have created the world that they are playing in they naturally engage and I don’t have to worry that they may not find it interesting because they made it and they know best what they want.

I have become convinced that you can’t over engage your players and would like to hear your ideas on engaging players, so I can steal them.

I have been looking for some experience with high damage strikers to increase my understanding of the tactical part of D&D (link to old blog). A “Lazy” Warlord and an Avenger combo was suggested several times, so I decided to give it a try at D&D Encounters. After changing the Avenger to a Barbarian (no divine classes in Darksun) I had no trouble recruiting Mike Robles. He already wanted to play a Minotaur Barbarian named SMASH! So I made a “lazy” Dragonborn Warlord named Set. The characters are not quite optimized yet, I had to make them in a hurry, but the basic ideas are good.

The first turn of fighting had me hooked on the combo right away. Smash used Avalanche Strike on a Halfling, and Set delayed to go right after him using Direct the Strike to have Smash attack the Halfling again, killing it. Killing the Halfling triggered Smash’s Swift Charge so he charged another bloodied Halfling killing it with Howling Strike.

For the rest of the combat Smash did a great job of using his 2[w] attacks to set up Halflings for the monk and sorcerer to finish off while Set had him make extra attacks each turn with Direct the Strike and once with Vengeance is Mine.

Smash’s attack during the encounter dealt 35, 15, 8, 19, 25, 15, 15 = 132 damage and Set dealt 6 damage with his Dragon’s Breath. The monsters in the encounter had a total of 261, leaving 123 damage for the other three characters at the table.

After the combat Set is down 3 surges and Smash was untouched, both of us have all over our dailies and action points. Also worth noting, I forgot to grab magic items in my hurry to make characters at the last minute.

I had a great time playing though this encounter, but not entirely because of the vast amount of damage that my Minotaur was dealing. I also really enjoyed the “Lazy” Warlord, I am usually trying to coordinate all the players at the table to make the best battle plan, with this character I have more ability to do that and it felt in character as well. I will play Set through the rest of D&D Encounters and probably make a similar character for a longer home campaign.

This one experience has proven to me that refocusing on damage will help me improve the tactical part of my game, now I just need to get some experience and refine these skills. I am left with the feeling that I there is more to understand about high damage strikers so I am going to look for an opportunity to play another one, the game support guys have a lunch game that I play in when they are short players. For that game I am going to try playing Fighter (Slayer).

I look at combat encounters in D&D as a damage race. There are two ways to help your party win the race, you can reduce amount of damage the monsters deal to your party or you can deal as much damage as you can to the monsters. Assuming that this is true I want to do a thought experiment over my next couple of characters to increase my understanding of the way the game can be played and hopefully take my racing skills to the next level.

Speeding up your party’s damage is mostly the realm of the striker and the controller. They pour as much damage on the monsters as quickly as they can while relying on the rest of the party to keep them safe by slowing down the enemy. I consider this job to be the most straight forward of the two, but I recognize this might be because of my lack of experience.

Slowing down the monsters is where leaders come in and often controllers have some ability here as well. Healing is slowing down the enemy in its truest form, but buffing your party’s defenses or debuffing the monsters attacks fit well into this section. In addition any effect that ends in a monster not being able to attack or being so badly penalized by attacking that it choose not to, also fits into this category - for example, immobilizing a melee brute for a turn prevents it dealing damage for a turn if you can convince the rest of your party not to move close to it.

I am sure you noticed I did not mention defenders - I believe defenders are both categories. My best experiences playing a defender revolve around forcing the monsters to either attack me and slow down his outpot, or attacking another party member and speed up the party damage. For instance, if I am playing a fighter, a marked monster can choose to take his attack on me and likely miss and even if he doesn’t the damage he deals to me means less because I get more hit points back when healed, which in a way is a buff to the leaders key ability to slow down the enemy, his healing. His other choice is to attack another member of my party in which case I get a free hit on him speeding up my parties damage output and the monster is still slowed down a little because of the marks -2 to hit.

I am a “slowing down the monsters” player because I like complicated things, when I complete my best turn of the combat I want the rules lawyer to be searching though the rule book, the DM to be reeling as he refigures the monsters plan of attack and the newest player at the table to ask me for help remaking their character. The thing I have realized is that I can do those same things by dealing excessive amounts of damage to a target, particularly if that damage kills the target. So it is time for me to delve into high damage strikers and see what I can learn.

My plan is to play two strikers both high damage, one melee focused and one ranged focused. This should allow me to become more proficient in the damaging dealing side of things, which will allow me to better weigh the value of speeding up the party as opposed to slowing down the monsters resulting in better overall characters. I have played strikers before, my first 4^th edition character was a ranger, but I have never had the focus on dealing as much damage as possible over the course of the combat.

Do you think I am going about this experiment the correct way and what striker builder would you suggest I use?