I just started listening to the episode, and it's nice to know someone else has the same confusion about "Why the hell are Sorcerers based on Charisma? Shouldn't it be Con?" I have. ... Yeah, it makes sense from a balance standpoint, but really... Stupid game balance.

What ARE you ConciseLocket? What ARE you???

I did not know until now that Concise Locket was a furry.

One of the most memorable events of a campaign I played in long ago happened at a party. We were noobs attending a wizard's ball when an NPC wizard from a guild threw a drink in the face of an NPC wizard from a rival guild. The second wizard died instantly. All hell broke loose. It started the civil war that was the backdrop of the entire campaign.


Also, have any of us oldsters not done the D&D Battlechess thing?

Ah! Febtoberfest! This takes me back. When I got my first apartment I decided that I was going to have a -toberfest for every month I was there. All told I was there for about 18 months. The first -toberfest was Febtoberfest. Other highlights include "Martoberfest II: Night of the Living Toberfest" (a zombie themed party/film screening) and an actual, honest-to-goodness Oktoberfest celebration with a quarter barrel of Spaten Oktoberfest beer (I don't remember much of that one) and my 23rd birthday party "Junetoberfest II: Drunken Fruit Potluck."

Wayne, I feel your pain. I can roll stats like no other. When I played 3rd Ed. D&D, I'd frequently have one or two 18's on my character sheet. Granted, we were using the method of roll 4d6, drop the lowest die and assign. As a player I have habitually rolled terribly. That's why I started looking into optimization - if I had larger modifiers, rolling under 5 for an entire session isn't as big of an issue.

With the dice Mumbles gifted me this past weekend that may change if Jahaili's Deadlands one-shot is any indication.

My Dresden Files campaign featured a player-organized charity Halloween ball as a major plot point. It was a lot of fun having them describe the setting, who was invited, what's going on, and then interacting with them as the various important figures of the Chicago social scene. Of course I had to have the BBEG show up at the party. That was a great bit of RP - lots of tension in the scene.

Since I picked up Neverwinter Nights 2 on a Steam sale I went ahead and rolled up this character to try it out in there.

One of the best "PC's at a Party" ideas I ever saw was from an old Dragon article. The gist was, you allow the players at any point in time to call "cut". When cut is called, you immediately move to the next player or group of players, depending on how things are working out at the party. The GM can also call cut if he thinks one scene is going on too long and the player can also call cut on him or herself in order to get a bit more thinking time.

I've done this a few times and it worked fantastic. I set up the party so that you had eight or ten "named" NPC's that were important in some way - they could be plot important, or character building important, or simply setting presentation important. Sure there were other people at the party, but, these ten or so individuals or small groups of individuals were the most interesting people there.

The players had a blast. They split up, everyone going in a different direction, but, because of the cuts, no one really had time to lose interest. As soon as someone's conversation lagged a bit, Cut!, and we're on to the next person.

It also meant that people who were not actively participating were spending a bit of time planning what they were going to say when their turn came up.

It took a bit of prodding to get the players to call cut on each other actually. I think we're all trained not to interrupt other people and it's a bit tricky to get over that. But, once they understood how things worked, it sailed nicely.

Aggressive cutting can help these kinds of scenes in other ways. If you have a player who is not as eloquent as the character they're playing, you can cover this by cross-cutting between them and someone else. The PC in question is chatting up NPC #47 at a party. If the PC seems to be losing steam, cut to the other characters doing something for a bit, then cut back to NPC #47's response to the PC's ("off-screen") witty remark (perhaps guided by the results of a quick Diplomacy check or something similar).

You can also control the release of plot information the same way.

-- Ben