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A dungeon's theme is largely an aesthetic choice. A theme is the overall look and feel of the dungeon. Crawling through the sewers, going through a labyrinth under the palace, and a set of catacombs under a mausoleum should all feel like very different dungeons to the players.
Choosing a theme
Sometimes the theme is an obvious choice. Is the dungeon in a graveyard? Your theme is probably undead. However, oftentimes you will have to make a conscious choice about your dungeon's theme. The labyrinth under town is a very generic environment. What's its theme? That's up to you to decide.
When coming up with a theme, you'll need to consider such things as how close is the dungeon to civilization, what sort of natural life is near the dungeon, and is there any specific type of monster you want to use in this dungeon.
If the dungeon is close to town, then either there aren't very many dangerous creatures in the dungeon, or there are and the town is a lot more eager to have it cleared out, due to the threat it poses. A dungeon close to town is easier for low-level characters to deal with because there is less travel time between the town and the dungeon, so the party can more easily retreat and rest if they suffer too much damage. A dungeon farther from town allows for more opportunities for encounters while traveling. If the party faces threats just getting to the dungeon, then they will be more cautious and less willing to run back to town when things get tough.
Natural wildlife near the dungeon provides an obvious source of food for potential predators that have taken up residence in the dungeon. However, if the party notices a lack of wildlife around the dungeon, it could be a sign of the presence of the undead, or a very dangerous creature residing in the dungeon.
While some of these ideas may not be obvious to your players, maintaining consistency this way will help make your world and your dungeons feel more realistic.
Designing With a Theme
Once you have decided on a theme for your dungeon, you'll want to design the dungeon with that theme in mind. The majority of the encounters in your dungeon should fit your theme. If your theme is undead, at least 90% of the opponents in the dungeon should be a type of undead. Living creatures aren't very likely to share a dungeon with the undead, so an encounter with a living creature in such a dungeon would be very out of place unless you come up with some interesting reason for it.
The encounters in your dungeon aren't the only thing you should consider. The environment itself should fit the dungeon's theme. A dungeon populated mostly by spiders should have cobwebs lining the halls. If the dungeon is a cave and doesn't contain intelligent opponents, then the floor, walls, and ceiling should all look naturally formed and rough. If your dungeon was once inhabited by intelligent creatures and is now inhabited by monstrous creatures, leave a few signs of the former inhabitants lying around.
Designing Realistic Dungeons
If you want your world and your dungeons to feel like a realistic environment, you should consider why the dungeon exists in the first place. Nobody builds an elaborate series of trapped rooms and corridors, and places guards and monsters inside without a reason for it.
1. Living creatures have needs.
If your dungeon is populated by a lot of living creatures, they will need a source of water, a source of food, a place to sleep, and a place to leave their droppings. In some situations, a magically sustained dungeon can be an exception, but most creatures won't move into an environment where they would be denied their basic needs. For a realistic dungeon with living creatures, you will first need a source of water. Unless your dungeon contains a magically purified water source, then the water has to be moving. Still water eventually turns stagnate and won't be fit to drink. If there is only one water source in your dungeon, then it could become the most dangerous location in the dungeon as every creature in the dungeon visits it several times a day. Secondly, you will need a source of food. This is an easy one. Smaller creatures become the food source for larger creatures. All you need is a source of vegetation for the smaller creatures. Fungi, small plants, or bugs can be the bottom of the food chain in your dungeon. As for a place to sleep, most creatures don't require much, but many types of creatures do at least make some sort of nest or bedding to sleep on. One thing to remember is that most creatures of at least a cat's intelligence won't leave their droppings in the same place where they sleep.
2. Why is this dungeon here?
If your dungeon is located in a civilized area, perhaps it once served as a prison. If that's the case, there should be cells, bars, doors, a few traps, and some remains of the prisoners. Depending on how old it is, and what creatures reside there now, not all of these elements need to be intact.
If your dungeon is located in the mountains, perhaps it used to be a mine. If that's the case, it should appear to have been dug with picks, there should be support beams every 20-30 feet, likely rails for mine carts, and there could be some remains, such as an old, damaged lantern, a broken pick, perhaps the bones of an unfortunate miner under a collapse.
Alternatively, if your dungeon is in the mountains, it could be a naturally formed cave. If that's the case, there should be stalactites, stalagmites, possibly dripping water, a small pool, or maybe a stream.
3. Considering Traps
If you want to place traps in your dungeon, you should consider a few things. First, who built the trap? This is largely decided for you when you consider why the dungeon exists to begin with. Second, what is the trap's purpose? Traps can serve five purposes: keep someone out, keep someone in, kill, hold, or alert. A trap designed to keep someone out should block off passages while the trigger is on the outside of the trap. A trap designed to keep someone in, triggers after the trap is passed, then blocks off the exit. A trap designed to kill will employ something lethal. A trap designed to hold will attempt to keep the triggering character in one place. A trap designed to alert will make noise or create some sort of signal to bring the guards. Traps can serve more than one purpose. A trap designed to hold an intruder does little good on its own, but add an alarm to the trap, and it not only secures an intruder, but summons the guards so they can decide how to deal with the intruder.
From a realistic standpoint, alert traps should be the most commonly built. Think about ways in which we protect our homes, or how businesses protect themselves. Alarms cover doors and windows and send a signal when they are opened without authorization. This sort of trap does nothing to the intruder on its own, allowing someone to decide how to respond. If the owner of the trap sets it off by accident, there's no risk to themselves.
Hold and alert traps should be the next common trap. This is slightly more secure than the alert trap, because it tries to hold the intruder until someone arrives to deal with them.
Traps designed to keep people out would be the next common trap. These sorts of traps should have some sort of bypass after they are triggered, in case they are accidentally triggered by their owner. No intelligent creature would set up a trap that would lock him out of his own lair if he had an accident.
Traps designed to keep people in aren't very common. This sort of trap could be used in a treasure vault, so long as the vault doesn't contain an item that would make the trap pointless. This sort of trap should be combined with an alert as well, so that it acts as a hold and alert trap. However, this sort of trap could also be placed at the entrance to a tomb, in which case alerting someone isn't necessary.
Kill traps should be rare, and only placed in areas where the trap's owner wouldn't worry about triggering it accidentally. Nobody would ever put a trap that's capable of killing themselves in a place where they will regularly go.
This covers most of what you'll need to consider for designing with a theme and designing realistic dungeons. My next few posts in this series will start getting into more details of dungeon design.
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Designing Dungeons: Goals
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Before you sit down to design your dungeon, you should first figure out what it is you want to accomplish with this dungeon, or perhaps, what do you want your players to accomplish. This is the goal of your dungeon. Your dungeon can have multiple goals. Perhaps one of your goals is for your party to achieve their next level. Perhaps you want them to discover an important clue or information that will advance the plot. Perhaps this dungeon will involve a climactic battle with the villain.
Level Goals
Do you want your party to level up at the end of this dungeon? If so, you'll need to plan encounters and experience accordingly. Following the guides in the core books, it takes 13 to 14 encounters to achieve a new level. This assumes the party is encountering challenges appropriate to their level. For example, a party of level 1 characters facing a level 1 challenge is awarded 300 experience to divide among the party. If there are 4 players, this is 75 each. 75 times 13 is 975, and 75 times 14 is 1050. It takes 1000 experience to reach level 2, so 14 level 1 encounters will be enough for a party of level 1 characters to reach level 2. However, it is quite boring to face the same type of encounter every time. You'll want to vary the difficulty of your encounters. According to the DMG, it is recommended that about half of the encounters be equal to the party's level. About a tenth of the encounters should be lower than the party's level, and only a few should be higher.
Challenge ratings are a measure of the overall difficulty of the challenge. A challenge that's the same level as the party will consume about one fifth of the party's resources if handled correctly. You can safely assume the party can go through 3 or 4 encounters equal to their level before they have to rest. Because of the random nature of criticals, never assume that the party will survive the maximum amount of challenge they should survive. Theoretically, a party of level 1 characters can go through four level 1 encounters before they need to rest. However, two orcs are considered a level 1 encounter, and the default stats for an orc assume they are wielding falchions, which deal 2d4+4 damage with an 18-20 critical chance. This means each orc deals an average of 9 damage per hit. Most level 1 characters can't survive more than one hit like that. If that orc happens to score a critical hit, that's an average of 18 damage, enough to drop a level 1 character (a level 1 barbarian with an 18 consitution and the toughness feat has only 19 HP). The lower the party's level, the more likely they'll need to rest between encounters. Take that into account as you design your dungeons.
While designing dungeons, you should have an idea of how much experience the party has and try to plan your encounters based on how much experience you want them to gain.
Plot Goals
Is the dungeon itself the entire adventure, or is it just a piece of a bigger plot? If the goal of the adventure is a simple fetch quest, perhaps the objective is in the dungeon. Perhaps the fetch quest becomes more complicated when the party discovers the objective isn't in the dungeon. For a more complex plot, you can leave a clue to the actual location of their target within the dungeon.
Dungeons can easily serve as a means to advance the plot, because a party goes into a dungeon with clear goals in mind. They expect to have achieved that goal by the time they've cleared the dungeon. If you don't want the dungeon to be the end of the current adventure, then instead of putting the party's target in the dungeon, put some sort of clue in the dungeon instead that leads them to another location.
When designing the dungeon around the plot, you need to keep in mind such things as what information you want the party to gain from the dungeon, and how you want to deliver that information. If the adventure's target isn't in the dungeon, you need to make sure the party doesn't miss the clues, and a diligent party won't. Most players who go into a dungeon looking for something specific, who don't find it, will examine everything they can to figure out what they missed, however some players, particularly new players, won't, and will instead look to you for a hint about their next step. While it is important that you make sure they find the clues, it is also important that you don't make it too obvious. You want them to feel like they found the clue, instead of you handing it to them on a platter. I'll try to go into more details about delivering subtle clues in a later post.
Encountering the Villain
An encounter with the adventure's villain, or perhaps a recurring villain, is always a great moment in any D&D game. As a DM, your objective in such an encounter is to make it memorable. First of all, if a recurring villain is about to show up, you may want to drop a few hints leading up to the encounter that the villain is about to show up, especially if the villain doesn't realize the party is nearby. If the villain is aware of the party and plans to ambush them, then you'll want to keep that a secret. Any good villain will cover his tracks. However, not every villain can prepare for everything, and you may want to reward a clever player who does something you didn't expect by dropping a hint of the villain's presence.
Turning an ordinary encounter into a memorable one is actually fairly simple. The easiest way to do this is to change the environment. A fight with a wizard and his two bodyguards could be just another encounter. That same encounter taking place in a room with a large pit in the middle, and the villains making use of bull rush and spells that threaten to knock the players over the edge makes it into a much more memorable encounter. However, adding such an element increases the difficulty, so you should take that into account. I'll go into more details on this in a later post concerning creative encounters.
Want to make your villain memorable without increasing the difficulty of the fight? There are ways to do this, too. If the villain threatens something important to one or more of the players, you can be sure they'll remember it. I had a dragon once take a barbarian's weapon while the barbarian was frozen in fear. The player wrote the dragon's name on his character sheet along with "took my axe" so he'd never forget why he was angry with this dragon. One of my player characters got married within the game, so for the final encounter with a succubus attempting to become a demon lord, I had his wife chained to a wall, and the succubus had polymorphed his wife to make her look like the elf queen the succubus had been impersonating, and the succubus had herself chained to the wall and altered her appearance to look like the character's wife. Both appeared to be unconscious. The succubus had a nondetection effect on her, so the party couldn't detect evil to determine which was which. There was literally no way of knowing who was who, and the succubus appears to "wake up" and warn the players that elf queen was really evil and was only appearing to be chained up and helpless and that they should kill her now before she attacked.
This covers the basics of defining the goals of your dungeon. I'll go into greater detail on some of these points in later posts. Hopefully, this will get you started when thinking about what your dungeons are trying to accomplish.
Before you sit down to design your dungeon, you should first figure out what it is you want to accomplish with this dungeon, or perhaps, what do you want your players to accomplish. This is the goal of your dungeon. Your dungeon can have multiple goals. Perhaps one of your goals is for your party to achieve their next level. Perhaps you want them to discover an important clue or information that will advance the plot. Perhaps this dungeon will involve a climactic battle with the villain.
Level Goals
Do you want your party to level up at the end of this dungeon? If so, you'll need to plan encounters and experience accordingly. Following the guides in the core books, it takes 13 to 14 encounters to achieve a new level. This assumes the party is encountering challenges appropriate to their level. For example, a party of level 1 characters facing a level 1 challenge is awarded 300 experience to divide among the party. If there are 4 players, this is 75 each. 75 times 13 is 975, and 75 times 14 is 1050. It takes 1000 experience to reach level 2, so 14 level 1 encounters will be enough for a party of level 1 characters to reach level 2. However, it is quite boring to face the same type of encounter every time. You'll want to vary the difficulty of your encounters. According to the DMG, it is recommended that about half of the encounters be equal to the party's level. About a tenth of the encounters should be lower than the party's level, and only a few should be higher.
Challenge ratings are a measure of the overall difficulty of the challenge. A challenge that's the same level as the party will consume about one fifth of the party's resources if handled correctly. You can safely assume the party can go through 3 or 4 encounters equal to their level before they have to rest. Because of the random nature of criticals, never assume that the party will survive the maximum amount of challenge they should survive. Theoretically, a party of level 1 characters can go through four level 1 encounters before they need to rest. However, two orcs are considered a level 1 encounter, and the default stats for an orc assume they are wielding falchions, which deal 2d4+4 damage with an 18-20 critical chance. This means each orc deals an average of 9 damage per hit. Most level 1 characters can't survive more than one hit like that. If that orc happens to score a critical hit, that's an average of 18 damage, enough to drop a level 1 character (a level 1 barbarian with an 18 consitution and the toughness feat has only 19 HP). The lower the party's level, the more likely they'll need to rest between encounters. Take that into account as you design your dungeons.
While designing dungeons, you should have an idea of how much experience the party has and try to plan your encounters based on how much experience you want them to gain.
Plot Goals
Is the dungeon itself the entire adventure, or is it just a piece of a bigger plot? If the goal of the adventure is a simple fetch quest, perhaps the objective is in the dungeon. Perhaps the fetch quest becomes more complicated when the party discovers the objective isn't in the dungeon. For a more complex plot, you can leave a clue to the actual location of their target within the dungeon.
Dungeons can easily serve as a means to advance the plot, because a party goes into a dungeon with clear goals in mind. They expect to have achieved that goal by the time they've cleared the dungeon. If you don't want the dungeon to be the end of the current adventure, then instead of putting the party's target in the dungeon, put some sort of clue in the dungeon instead that leads them to another location.
When designing the dungeon around the plot, you need to keep in mind such things as what information you want the party to gain from the dungeon, and how you want to deliver that information. If the adventure's target isn't in the dungeon, you need to make sure the party doesn't miss the clues, and a diligent party won't. Most players who go into a dungeon looking for something specific, who don't find it, will examine everything they can to figure out what they missed, however some players, particularly new players, won't, and will instead look to you for a hint about their next step. While it is important that you make sure they find the clues, it is also important that you don't make it too obvious. You want them to feel like they found the clue, instead of you handing it to them on a platter. I'll try to go into more details about delivering subtle clues in a later post.
Encountering the Villain
An encounter with the adventure's villain, or perhaps a recurring villain, is always a great moment in any D&D game. As a DM, your objective in such an encounter is to make it memorable. First of all, if a recurring villain is about to show up, you may want to drop a few hints leading up to the encounter that the villain is about to show up, especially if the villain doesn't realize the party is nearby. If the villain is aware of the party and plans to ambush them, then you'll want to keep that a secret. Any good villain will cover his tracks. However, not every villain can prepare for everything, and you may want to reward a clever player who does something you didn't expect by dropping a hint of the villain's presence.
Turning an ordinary encounter into a memorable one is actually fairly simple. The easiest way to do this is to change the environment. A fight with a wizard and his two bodyguards could be just another encounter. That same encounter taking place in a room with a large pit in the middle, and the villains making use of bull rush and spells that threaten to knock the players over the edge makes it into a much more memorable encounter. However, adding such an element increases the difficulty, so you should take that into account. I'll go into more details on this in a later post concerning creative encounters.
Want to make your villain memorable without increasing the difficulty of the fight? There are ways to do this, too. If the villain threatens something important to one or more of the players, you can be sure they'll remember it. I had a dragon once take a barbarian's weapon while the barbarian was frozen in fear. The player wrote the dragon's name on his character sheet along with "took my axe" so he'd never forget why he was angry with this dragon. One of my player characters got married within the game, so for the final encounter with a succubus attempting to become a demon lord, I had his wife chained to a wall, and the succubus had polymorphed his wife to make her look like the elf queen the succubus had been impersonating, and the succubus had herself chained to the wall and altered her appearance to look like the character's wife. Both appeared to be unconscious. The succubus had a nondetection effect on her, so the party couldn't detect evil to determine which was which. There was literally no way of knowing who was who, and the succubus appears to "wake up" and warn the players that elf queen was really evil and was only appearing to be chained up and helpless and that they should kill her now before she attacked.
This covers the basics of defining the goals of your dungeon. I'll go into greater detail on some of these points in later posts. Hopefully, this will get you started when thinking about what your dungeons are trying to accomplish.
Designing Dungeons: Overview
This post is the beginning of a new series specifically for D&D 3.5 DMs. During this series, I will discuss the basics of dungeons, designing around a theme, making your dungeons realistic and interesting, and designing dungeon encounters.
First, why design dungeons at all?
The first, and most obvious answer is that the first part of the game's name is "Dungeons." It's traditional. From a mechanical standpoint, a dungeon serves as a clearly defined path of progression from one encounter to the next. Each room of a dungeon acts as an encounter, usually with doors separating one encounter from the next. In this way, players have the security of knowing that whatever is in the room is the challenge that must be overcome, plus the uncertainty of what lies beyond the next door.
So, what is a dungeon?
Pretty much anything can serve as a dungeon. The classic dungeon is a cave system or series of rooms carved out of stone that form an underground complex. A sewer system can also serve as a dungeon, and makes for a great low-level adventure. However, the king's castle can also be a dungeon. A city in the midst of a rebellious uprising can also be a dungeon. While these last two don't fit the aesthetics of a classic dungeon, they can serve the mechanical role of a dungeon and can be designed the same way.
I'm going to keep this post short, as this is just the basic overview. In later posts we'll delve into the details and discuss the theme and goals of the dungeon.
Part 1: Goals
Part 2: Themes and Realism
First, why design dungeons at all?
The first, and most obvious answer is that the first part of the game's name is "Dungeons." It's traditional. From a mechanical standpoint, a dungeon serves as a clearly defined path of progression from one encounter to the next. Each room of a dungeon acts as an encounter, usually with doors separating one encounter from the next. In this way, players have the security of knowing that whatever is in the room is the challenge that must be overcome, plus the uncertainty of what lies beyond the next door.
So, what is a dungeon?
Pretty much anything can serve as a dungeon. The classic dungeon is a cave system or series of rooms carved out of stone that form an underground complex. A sewer system can also serve as a dungeon, and makes for a great low-level adventure. However, the king's castle can also be a dungeon. A city in the midst of a rebellious uprising can also be a dungeon. While these last two don't fit the aesthetics of a classic dungeon, they can serve the mechanical role of a dungeon and can be designed the same way.
I'm going to keep this post short, as this is just the basic overview. In later posts we'll delve into the details and discuss the theme and goals of the dungeon.
Part 1: Goals
Part 2: Themes and Realism
Friday, April 4, 2014
How to be a Better Gamemaster Part 3: Breaking the Rules
Rules are an important part of any game. They tell the players what to expect. However, within a roleplaying game, sometimes the rules have to take a back seat to the story. In today's post, I'll talk about why rules should and shouldn't be broken.
One of my friends started teaching someone about D&D. The potential new player asked to see an example of a character, so he pulls out his paladin, Archeldian. As he's explaining some of the character's abilities, the new guy asks about an ability that was basically home-brewed. My friend explains that the ability wasn't part of the core rules, but was made up for the game. The new guy asked why, and my friend explained that it was for the story. The new guy said it was stupid to ignore rules just for story, and my friend suggested that D&D wasn't the right game for him.
Roleplaying games are about playing roles. You play an rpg to play a character in a story. That is essentially all it is. When you start worrying about rules to the point that the story isn't your main focus anymore, then you're missing the point. So, why do we have rules? Well, rules are important. They promote a sense of balance. As kids, we roleplayed without rules. Without rules, rpgs devolve into "bang! you're dead!" followed by "no I'm not!" The basic rules of an rpg should always be followed. The real trick to becoming a better gamemaster is learning when to ignore the rules.
When you've been building up a villain over several months of game play, and he's done his final monologue, should you allow that first lucky critical hit take him out in the first round of combat? No, absolutely not! Well, unless you want your villain to go out like a punk. That sort of kill is very anti-climatic. Your players will remember the villain much better if you have him shrug off the hit like a boss, and let him draw out the fight until the players are on their last leg, then if one of them gets that lucky critical, by all means let him die.
Sometimes your villain needs to be able to bend rules. Sometimes they should break them. For example, in the Harry Potter series, Voldemort was able to bind his soul to numerous important objects, making him unkillable until all of these objects were destroyed. In the D&D core rules, there is no such spell that accomplishes this feat. Does this mean you can't have a D&D villain use Voldemort's tactic to achieve immortality? Of course not! As a GM, you are well within your rights to say that your villain has learned ancient powers that aren't readily available to players. If you want to really go above and beyond, allow the players to acquire an "ancient power" once in a while, as a reward for a long plot arc, to give them a little something that isn't in the rules. Just be careful when you do things like that. Make sure you are very familiar with your game system and are sure you won't unbalance the game.
Rules should be broken when it's good for the story, but when should rules never be broken? When it is unfair to a player. If breaking a rule means that part of your party becomes more or less useful than the rest of the party, then don't do it. That doesn't mean you can't break the rules to hurt the entire party. If your story calls for them to be beaten to within an inch of their lives, only to escape at the last minute, then that's fine. If your party wizard has a spell that could ruin your big finale, should you rule he can't use that spell? No, that's not fair to that player. Instead, you should find a way that you can get around that spell, or make it so that the player still gets some use out of the spell, but just can't use it in the way they originally wanted. For example, if the spell would take out your villain in one shot, give the villain plot armor that makes him immune to that sort of effect, but have the spell still take out the villain's henchmen. This way the player still gets some benefit out of the spell, and you still get you climatic battle.
A final note on plot armor: Plot armor is a generic catch-all term used to say that a character is immune to something simply because the plot requires him to be. Plot armor is easiest to use when you have a GM's screen to hide your rolls. The players don't need to know that you actually rolled a 9 when the villain needed an 18 to save against that spell. Just make your roll and tell them he passed. Don't do this too often, though. You have to let them get a few hits in. Plot armor is best used when you want your villain to escape, and best discarded when you're ready for the villain's defeat.
One of my friends started teaching someone about D&D. The potential new player asked to see an example of a character, so he pulls out his paladin, Archeldian. As he's explaining some of the character's abilities, the new guy asks about an ability that was basically home-brewed. My friend explains that the ability wasn't part of the core rules, but was made up for the game. The new guy asked why, and my friend explained that it was for the story. The new guy said it was stupid to ignore rules just for story, and my friend suggested that D&D wasn't the right game for him.
Roleplaying games are about playing roles. You play an rpg to play a character in a story. That is essentially all it is. When you start worrying about rules to the point that the story isn't your main focus anymore, then you're missing the point. So, why do we have rules? Well, rules are important. They promote a sense of balance. As kids, we roleplayed without rules. Without rules, rpgs devolve into "bang! you're dead!" followed by "no I'm not!" The basic rules of an rpg should always be followed. The real trick to becoming a better gamemaster is learning when to ignore the rules.
When you've been building up a villain over several months of game play, and he's done his final monologue, should you allow that first lucky critical hit take him out in the first round of combat? No, absolutely not! Well, unless you want your villain to go out like a punk. That sort of kill is very anti-climatic. Your players will remember the villain much better if you have him shrug off the hit like a boss, and let him draw out the fight until the players are on their last leg, then if one of them gets that lucky critical, by all means let him die.
Sometimes your villain needs to be able to bend rules. Sometimes they should break them. For example, in the Harry Potter series, Voldemort was able to bind his soul to numerous important objects, making him unkillable until all of these objects were destroyed. In the D&D core rules, there is no such spell that accomplishes this feat. Does this mean you can't have a D&D villain use Voldemort's tactic to achieve immortality? Of course not! As a GM, you are well within your rights to say that your villain has learned ancient powers that aren't readily available to players. If you want to really go above and beyond, allow the players to acquire an "ancient power" once in a while, as a reward for a long plot arc, to give them a little something that isn't in the rules. Just be careful when you do things like that. Make sure you are very familiar with your game system and are sure you won't unbalance the game.
Rules should be broken when it's good for the story, but when should rules never be broken? When it is unfair to a player. If breaking a rule means that part of your party becomes more or less useful than the rest of the party, then don't do it. That doesn't mean you can't break the rules to hurt the entire party. If your story calls for them to be beaten to within an inch of their lives, only to escape at the last minute, then that's fine. If your party wizard has a spell that could ruin your big finale, should you rule he can't use that spell? No, that's not fair to that player. Instead, you should find a way that you can get around that spell, or make it so that the player still gets some use out of the spell, but just can't use it in the way they originally wanted. For example, if the spell would take out your villain in one shot, give the villain plot armor that makes him immune to that sort of effect, but have the spell still take out the villain's henchmen. This way the player still gets some benefit out of the spell, and you still get you climatic battle.
A final note on plot armor: Plot armor is a generic catch-all term used to say that a character is immune to something simply because the plot requires him to be. Plot armor is easiest to use when you have a GM's screen to hide your rolls. The players don't need to know that you actually rolled a 9 when the villain needed an 18 to save against that spell. Just make your roll and tell them he passed. Don't do this too often, though. You have to let them get a few hits in. Plot armor is best used when you want your villain to escape, and best discarded when you're ready for the villain's defeat.
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