Thursday, January 28, 2010

Town and Country

Back on my post “Romance, Sex, and D&D: the College Years,” Ben asks:

So how did you weave the plotlines between urban/social settings and the wilderness necessary for many dungeon encounters-- or did you keep your dungeon urban as well?


I’m very glad he asked that, because it’s a topic that never would have occurred to me. I really don’t see a strong separation between the urban/social settings and the wilderness. The two wove into each other naturally.

An early adventure in the college game involved foiling a plot by wererats to infect the town guard of a large city with their brand of lycanthropy through the brothels favored by the guardsmen. The adventure started in the city, then moved into the wilderness roughly a day’s march from the city, where the leadership of the wererats had their secret hideout, then back to the city to root out the wererat infestation. So this was an example of having dungeon-esque elements inside an urban environment which were tied to a traditional dungeon out in the wilderness.

In the Doom & Tea Parties game, the action has primarily focused on the ruin-infested island of Dreng Bdan. The only outpost of civilization on the island (that the players know about, anyway) is the city of Pitsh, founded by the priests of Uban for the purpose of exploring the ruins and cataloguing their history as well as securing anything of significant power that might be found there. The governance, economy, and focus of the city is so heavily tied to the activity of dungeon-delving that what happens out in the wilderness has a strong effect on the town. In the solo game, that meant working closely with the Ubanites. In the group game, the players have been trying to hide their activities from the Ubanites. In both cases, these choices have had a strong impact on what the PCs do when in town: how they fence their loot, where they stay, where they shop, and who they go to for information on the things they have found and the places they’ve explored.

In both the college game and the Doom & Tea Parties games, the separation between wilderness and civilization has been fluid at best. Sometimes, the monsters chase the PCs back into the city and cause them trouble there. Sometimes the town does something that has a strong effect on which dungeons the PCs investigate, or how they go about it. This sort of fluid web of interconnections is the core of my style. I basically let the players do and go where they wish. I create adventures for them primarily by asking how what they’ve done has affected those with the reach and power to affect whatever place they end up next.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Rules and Rewards

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB has recently discussed what he calls his third principle of good game design:
Good game design rewards behavior meeting the objectives of play.

By which he means, an effective game rewards the sort of play that the game is intended to create. To whit, if you make the Tarantino Cinematic RPG, it should involve lots of people sitting around and communicating who they are as people by using pop culture references when discussing matters of morality and psychology, or invoking the creative process, punctuated by periods of horrendous and blood-spattering violence. A Star Wars RPG should be able to handle swashbuckling action between individuals ranging from tiny droids to giant monsters as well as the clash of large armies and massive fleets, while encompassing not just the physical results of such conflicts, but also their spiritual implications as well.

So far, so good, and I’m in completely agreement with JB. He chose as his example the Elf Quest RPG, and I’ll admit that while I’m a fan of the comics, especially the original series as collected in the first four TPBs, I’m going to take his words as an excuse to leap off into areas that I think he only brushed up tangentially against. So this should not be seen necessarily as a criticism of what JB wrote. As I said, I’m largely in agreement with his theme, and believe that a mere character creation and combat system do not an RPG make.

JB is primarily talking about reward systems, but too often people conflate rewards with mechanics. It’s easy to do, because once you’ve mechanized an aspect of an RPG, you’ve made it quantifiable and thus easy to handle in terms of rewards and difficulties. If you have rules that quantify a character’s chi, for instance, it’s then easy to use those numbers in other aspects of the game and control the level of a character’s chi. You can know what amount of chi a character should have at certain points in the game, and you can easily see what sort of obstacles are appropriate for a character who has that much chi.

Life, however, is full of messy things that are difficult to quantify. Measurements of status and prestige, as JB suggests, would have been an excellent addition to the Elf Quest game, but things are very fluid and somewhat chaotic among the Wolf Riders. Cutter is the chief, but that doesn’t stop Strongbow from challenging him constantly. And that, contrary to how things might appear on the surface, is a source of strength for Cutter.

Even worse, however, is that once you quantify something, you stop playing the fuzzy, human aspects of the thing and start playing the numbers. As much as I love BioWare’s games, they tend to boil romance and respect down to a system of potlatch, and while there are certainly historical precedents for such things (like the relationship between a chief and his warriors among the ancient celts), bribing someone to be my girlfriend doesn’t exactly feel like romance to me. Making your romance system more complex only helps if that complexity serves to hide the numbers from the players; taking my lady out for a night at the opera because she happens to be a classical music lover is a far cry from spending $150 (probably the cheapest you can get away with for a night at the opera and a decent dinner) for a +4 bonus on my “Get Lucky” roll. ;p

In short, throwing bonuses at players for going through the motions isn’t the goal. Rewarding and encouraging the sort of play we want should be the goal, and this must often be done obliquely. Old school D&D is about exploration, but it doesn’t reward you for every 10’ of dungeon corridor mapped or unusual geological formation found. It rewards you for gathering treasure and penalizes you for being inefficient about how you gather it.

So in our Tarantino game, maybe every character starts with an artistic obsession and a secret existential crisis that is referenced by those obsessions and a pile of poker chips. Getting another character (that is, the player, in this case) to agree with your argument as to the worthiness of your obsession earns you a poker chip, and two if you can turn their argument towards promoting the worth of one of your obsessions. However, if they guess your existential crisis, you have to surrender most of your chips to them, and those chips are the only things that will keep you alive in the extremely brutal combat that is always threatening to erupt. In our Star Wars game, every strategic-level conflict can include a spiritual goal that might actually be served by losing in the physical realm (“If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”). And in our Elf Quest game, perhaps the resolution of individual conflict results in stronger cohesion between an entire group.

The one thing I would stress, however, is that how the game is played is more important than the rules. In the solo Labyrinth Lord game Oddysey is playing in, there was this past year a near TPK. It was, by every measure, a disaster for her character and that character’s companions. However, the end result has been the creation of a very potent and powerful association. Friendship isn’t anything like the right word, but this relationship is one that Oddysey’s character knows she can rely on. There are no rules to cover this situation, no way to measure its worth in terms of EXPs or gold pieces, and yet it has been a large part of the transformation of the campaign. Oddysey’s character is no longer a single, lone individual in a large, uncaring world. She’s now “plugged in,” with all the privileges and responsibilities that go along with it. Neither of us knew the game could go where it’s gone when we started, but by playing off each other, things have taken some very interesting turns. In short, sometimes the best reward of all is to let the chips fall where they will, and give the players something interesting to play with.

UPDATE: E.G. Palmer (aka Mr. Green) riffs off Tarantino gaming to come up with an intriguing way to use music in your game.

Friday, January 22, 2010

The Year Ahead for WotC

Thought y'all might find this interesting. Some will look at this and see it as a good sign for the OSR. I suppose it is. I'm still not entirely certain, however, how you make an entire campaign out of "Tomb of Horrors." I suspect that you build a bunch of dungeons and other such out of a backstory for Acererak. I just can't help but feel it will widely miss the major point. ToH was written with a certain mindset, one that becomes clear to players who are careful and observant and who take their play seriously. Like "Vault of the Drow" and "Shrine of the Kuo-toa," ToH is a blatant repudiation of the stereotypical kill-and-loot style of play. Can you build an entire campaign out of that theme? Especially in 4e? Is the skill challenges system now robust enough to take the strain of supporting a campaign? Hell, is it strong enough to support an entire adventure? Especially considering that, last I heard, they're still built around the assumption that the players will fail more than half of them?

Of course, that still misses the point, since ToH embraces not rolling dice. Heck, even its most infamous trap doesn't invoke dice, even for a saving throw. I doubt WotC has the cojones to build a D&D campaign that is focused on not rolling dice. But I'll be first in line to buy it if they are, just to see what it looks like.

The world of Hard Fun, er, I mean, "Dark Sun" is, of course, not considered something "classic" in the strictist sense, being very much a product of the era of 2e. It is, however, quite pulpish and pleasantly twisted, and a very fitting contribution to our Year of Science Fantasy. I still regret not picking up the original, and I'm curious to see what WotC does with the setting.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Pixie Class

Another class for my Labyrinth Lord game. We're getting a new player and she made the request to play a pixie. Should be interesting, as the fey have been largely on the sidelines so far, though looming large in the calculations of all sides in the current situation. The numbers were largely generated via Paul Montgomery Crabaugh's Customized Classes article from DRAGON magazine of May, 1986.

Pixies are tiny (1.5 feet tall on average) fey with sleek, elf-like bodies, almond-shaped eyes, pointed ears, and butterfly-like wings. They have no issues with nudity, though most tend to wear jewelry and clothing as decoration, so long as it doesn't interfere with their flying.

Most assume pixies are shy, but the truth is they are just cautious, especially around “clumsy big-folk.” In truth, pixies are socially and sexually promiscuous. They live in large communities based around a tree or trees in which they hang their woven-basket homes. While it's fairly common for young pixies to leave the Tree they grew up in to form a new Tree or join another existing one, it's not common for pixies to head out into the wild in search of adventure alone. Still, the rare restless spirit does strike out from time to time, driven by curiosity, thrills, or for more urgent reasons.

Dexterity and Intelligence are the primary attributes of pixies. A pixie who has a score of 15 or more in either attribute gets a 5% bonus to earned experience. A pixie who has a score of 12 or more in both stats gets a bonus of 10% to earned experience points.

RESTRICTIONS: Pixies use six-sided dice (d6) to determine their hit points. They may not wear armour or use shields, and pixie weapons are so tiny that single-handed arms do only 1d2 damage while two-handed weapons do 1d4 damage. So long as they are flying, however, their initiative is 8. A grounded pixie has an initiative of only 2. Because of their tiny size, any equipment tailored for them costs 50% of the normal price. They must have a score of at least 12 in Dexterity and may not have a score greater than 9 in Strength. They stop advancing at 9th level.

SPECIAL ABILITIES: Pixies save as Elves. Because of their tiny size, all foes suffer a -1 penalty to hit them. They can also turn invisible once per day, as per the third-level magic-user spell. Their wings allow them to fly in all but the fiercest of gales. They fight using the Rogue's to-hit tables and have access to magic-user spells. Like elves, they are able to see by mere starlight nearly as well as humans may at dusk.



Art by Luis Ricardo Falero.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Play, Creativity, and Authentic Experiences

For those of you who missed it at Lord of the Green Dragons. There's some themes starting around 19:40 I'll likely touch on here later.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Anatomy of a Campaign


Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB was wondering:

hmm… I wonder how Oddysey and Trollsmyth’s current on-going campaign developed. Odd has said this is the first time she’s played in a campaign that took things to this particular depth of character interaction…were her former games played in the mini-campaign or forced plot setting? Or is their current gaming style simply built on mutual rapport and understanding of narrative agenda needs?


The answer is, not quickly. That's not the sort of play you can start cold. You have to build up to it.

It would be nice if you could just say, "Hey, we're building a social campaign and it's going to deal with x, y, and z." You could, I suppose, pull it off if the DM was willing to give the players extreme amounts of narrative control, and I've done that in the past with a few players I knew very well and had played with a lot before. If you don't do that, however, you end up in a situation where the players don't have anything to talk about. Even if they've read voluminous amounts of campaign material, they don't really understand the setting well enough to interact with it. (Unless that setting is based on a well-known IP, like Harry Potter or some such, which is why such are the most popular themes for free-form RPing, I'm sure.) The background gives players something to talk about, and knowing and being comfortable with the style gives them ways to talk about those things. If either is missing, they're reduced to talking about the weather in the safest and most boring of tones.

My preferred style is open sandbox and very laissez-faire. But such games need a bit of impetus, and if the players are to be comfortable enough to stretch themselves a bit, they need some limitations. There's nothing more intimidating to a lot of people than a completely blank canvas.

In Oddysey's case, I started off with a very open-ended problem for her to solve: being shipwrecked on a strange coast. This got her used to my rather loose, the-DM-doesn't-have-a-plan-so-do-what-makes-sense-or-is-fun-for-you style. When she returned to civilization and was able to choose her own path, she latched on to dungeon-delving. This was great because it was a style she'd not had much experience with, but comes with its own set of very focused goals and geographical limitations. As Oddysey recently commented, however, it wasn't raw monster-slaying and trap-finding. Since it was a solo game, there were hirelings and such to fill out the party, mostly chosen by her. Whenever she mentioned interest in hiring a particular class to join her group, I'd gin up at least three examples (it's so easy in LL that three take maybe a half-hour or so to roll up and write down) with a brief description of their personalities, reputations, and competencies beyond their class. Because there was no one else to interact with (most of the time) there was a lot of interaction with these NPCs. And that's really where we got things rolling.

Up until that point, I wasn't really sure what sort of play Oddysey was interested in. As she points out, most of the traditional assumptions of Old School play, like dungeons, were not very well known to her, so even she wasn't sure what sort of play she wanted, other than something new that she hadn't tried before. So leaving things open and not forcing a certain agenda left it open for us to explore, and we built the playstyle together out of mutual interests.

(And yes, this did mean that certain dungeon complexes were left "uncleared" but that's fine with me. Like Mr. Maliszewski, I've never assumed that clearing the entire locale was the goal, and my players have generally been happy with focused, surgical operations rather than genocidal invasions. ;p )

The one thing I did rigorously enforce was the verisimilitude. I think that really helps, because it gives players things they can rely on, things they can trust. With that bedrock, they can begin to invest in their characters' interests and goals, and from that comes engagement with the world. And once they do that, it's easy to build an entire session around chatting with a rakshasa and a priestess about boys, because the players know who their characters are, how they relate to the rakshasa and the priestess, and why boys would be fun to talk about.

Art by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Moran

Friday, January 01, 2010

2010 Resolutions

I'm not a resolutions kinda guy. I hardly ever make them, and when I do, I rarely share them. However, between Christmas and New Years, I also got a year older. As I slowly drift towards another magic-number age (40!!!), it seems like a good idea to get certain aspects of my life streamlined, lest things I've always wanted to do get left undone for another decade. So, going to try the resolutions thing this year. It certainly seemed to work well for Oddysey.

Hold Fast on Gaming
This one may seem a bit odd, but I'm going to not add any new games to my schedule this next year. Last year, I ended up adding four. The original Labyrinth Lord campaign bifurcated into two groups playing in the same world. There's also a Sword-and-Planet campaign being run with 2e, and I just started playing in Erin's 7th Sea Wave game. That's four games, meaning I've got a solid night of gaming nearly every other evening. If I add any more, it'll not just dominate my social life, it'll be my social life.

While that might be kinda nice in the short term, it's not a good idea in the long run. Variety is the spice of life and the raw fuel for creativity. A wide range of experiences is necessary to keep things fresh and new, and to keep me from falling into any ruts. So, apart from one other game, which I'm already promised to (and anticipating with more than a little impatience ;) ), my RPG dance card is now officially full.

Get Fit for GenCon
The second is like unto my first resolution. 2008 was probably the worst year of my life. Too much of 2009 was spent recovering. I didn't go camping once the whole year, didn't get out as much as I'd wanted, and ate way too much comfort food. Granted, record heat over the summer didn't help much, but still, I've breached the 200 lbs mark. Not a good thing.

There are state parks within driving distance that I haven't explored yet, and familiar ones I've not been to in some time. The green belts are looking better, now that the rains have returned. Nature has always been my best muse, and now that I'm doing a lot more creative work than ever before in my life, I need to be certain I keep those batteries fresh, and my body healthy. The brain is an organ, just like the heart and liver and lungs; being healthy is a good start towards being "mentally awake."

Give This Blog Some Love

Partly, this just means making time for it, but more than that, it means working out a plan for its improvement. It needs some original art, it needs a bit of reorganization, and it needs a bit more SEO. No, I don't plan to turn it into a money-making venture. I have, however, noticed that I get hits from wide-ranging interests: art, archeology, history, anthropology, and, of course, porn. Getting the word out that RPGs are still alive and kicking via the blog probably won't change the world, but it might add a bit of fun to the lives of a handful of folks. That certainly seems worth a bit of effort.

This last year's seen some serious improvements. Probably the biggest is adding art to most of the articles. Most has come from the excellent Art Renewal Center online galleries. I've also gotten more rigorous about linking, which is always for the good. There's still much work to be done, however. I've hardly scratched the surface on getting old posts properly labeled.

I've also done a lot less of attempting to second-guess my readers. The truth is, I have no idea what you'd find interesting. I've been really surprised at the feedback some posts have gotten, and still get, long after their original publication. My style of play is odd, but apparently not so odd that there are no overlaps of interest. I need to post more, and let you tell me what you like and what is just meh.

Finally, I want to get listed on the RPG Bloggers Network. I should have done this last year, but I really wanted to get something more logo-ish on this page first. I've let myself get bottlenecked by that for too long.

Art by John Byam Liston Shaw.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

State of the Campaign II

Waaaaay back in February of this year, I wrote a quick "State of the Campaign" post, discussing the Labyrinth Lord game I was running with OpenRPG. A lot has happened in the intervening eleven months, and while it may be a touch premature to write a year-in-review (since it's not quite 2010 yet), a critical inventory is long overdue. So here are my thoughts, not quite a year on into the campaign. Er, campaigns...

Campaigns?
Yeah, multiple campaigns. See, when I started, one player was there every week, but for a while we had new "costar" every other session, a player who'd last a game or two, and then drop out. Such things happen, due to scheduling conflicts, tragedy, the shifting nature of life, and the fact that I run a not-quite-normal campaign that isn't a perfect fit (or even a good fit) for everyone. I don't take it personally, and so far almost everyone has been incredibly polite about it when an issue has come up.

Anyway, when a new group was coming together, the character my regular player was playing had developed in interesting ways and we were experimenting with some neat ideas that we didn't want to have deflected by bringing in new players. So that game turned into a solo campaign, the player created a second character, and now I'm running two games in the campaign in kinda-sorta parallel. That means more gaming for me, and gives the campaign a cool Westmarches vibe, with the two groups hearing about each other's exploits. Luckily, the player who is in both is awesome when it comes to keeping player and character knowledge separate. In fact, she seems to really enjoy it when her two characters learn things and fashion opinions about each other that are not quite accurate or true.

Labyrinth Lord
So far, the rules continue to deliver. The gaps have been especially useful in the solo game, where things have taken a strong social turn. Dungeon delving isn't just in the back seat to more social and cultural aspects of play; right now, it's in the trunk, with duct tape over its mouth and a blanket thrown over it. I'm certain that won't last, but the flexibility of the system is really serving us well.

Primarily, what's really working great is what Labyrinth Lord doesn't do. It doesn't dictate how romance should work, or give us mechanics for "social combat" or anything like that. It gets out of the way and allows us to RP that stuff the way we want it. So far, it's working great, and entire sessions can pass without anybody rolling any dice.

When I do need rules, Labyrinth Lord doesn't suffocate. When a character got swallowed by a chaos creature and transformed in its gullet, it was a matter of maybe an hour to create a nixie class. [Note to self: post this to the blog.] I've also completely thrown off my original, self-imposed limit of only using stuff from Labyrinth Lord and have embraced monsters and magic from the full range of D&D, from the little brown books all the way into 2e. There's some 3e stuff that might show up later, specifically from The Book of Vile Darkness, but that's going to take a bit more tweaking to get right. Best of all, I can use stuff from Taichara's Hamsterish Hoard without any tweaking at all. I'm also looking forward to including stuff from JB's Companion addition to the Moldvay/Cook line.

There are a few nits that I've been picking at, though. First, the addition of more armour classes seems unnecessary. Leather, mail and lamellar, and plate would probably serve our needs just fine. Maybe, maybe a separation between mail and lamellar. Maybe.

Also, things have been moving veeeeeeeery sloooooowly when it come to leveling up. It's taken about six months of steady, weekly play to get character from 1st to 2nd level. That seems a bit too slow to me. I'm not sure if the problem is me, or the players, or what. I need to investigate this more closely and make certain that I'm giving enough treasure. I suspect the real culprit is a lackadaisical attitude towards tracking the treasure. Everyone's having fun with the social and exploration aspects of the game, but nobody is really into tracking every coin or jade disk they lug out of the ruins. Part of me is tempted to just let things go as they have been, and let the players take a more proactive attitude about it, but I suspect that this path leads to frustration and social friction that I'd probably better head off before it becomes an issue.

Setting
The setting continues to delight and thrill me. The players seem to really enjoy it as well, and people repeatedly tell me that I have got a fun world to explore and play in. I'm not sure it's quite as flavorful as I wanted it to be, but that may be because my original conception of it was kinda out there, and it's best to let player settle slowly into the aspects of the world that are most unfamiliar, to avoid any "Tekumel-shock syndrome."

Most of the action has taken place on the island of Dreng Bdan, and that hasn't changed much yet, but I know that won't last. The solo campaign has already shifted its focus to the Elemental Planes. There are opportunities for such a shift in the group campaign right now as well, including the potential for a move into an Underground Wilderness campaign.

Efficiency and Pacing
We're still not communicating between sessions as much as I'd like us to be, and this is causing some social friction in the group game. I'm hoping we've got most of that behind us, but frankly, I suspect there are some issues in play style that will continue to trouble us off-and-on. On the one hand, these issues have interrupted valuable playing time and have flared up into open animosity between the players on occasion. On the other hand, having players with divergent styles has pushed the game in interesting directions. So far, I think it's been worth the added stress.

RP
In-character, however, things have been awesome! One of the players is practically brand-new to RPGs and he has done an amazing job of really getting "stuck in" to the world and his character. Honestly, if you want to really improve your RP, the best thing you can do is forget how these games are "supposed to be" played and go back to that little kid who waved a stick in the air, called it a sword, and just had adventures. The magic of Labyrinth Lord is that it makes this very possible, giving us just enough to keep the world consistent and to adjudicate exactly who shot who when it becomes an issue.

In the solo game, things have really gotten to an amazing level where the RP so overshadows the rules we hardly ever roll dice much anymore. I think we're more comfortable with a level of free-form play than many, and we're wallowing in that right now. The RP in both campaigns has me really jazzed to get back to playing as soon as our short break for the holidays is over.

Blogging
If there's one thing I'm not happy about, it's the state of my blogging. The honest truth is, I'm having so much fun actually playing, and prepping to play, that I haven't felt a strong desire to blog. I'm also a bit at a loss for what to blog about; the deeper down the rabbit hole both campaigns go, the harder it is to talk about them. I'm sure you've experienced something similar, where the experiences and assumptions of a campaign become so particular to that campaign, that it takes hours of back-story and explanation just to describe the simplest things. That's a triumph for any campaign, because it means you've really made the game your own. But it sucks for creating bloggable material.

I'm not sure what to do about that. I'll probably start by being less hesitant to throw up some stuff from the campaign and see what you, the readers, respond to. There was a far stronger response to the post about noble hierarchies among efreet than I was expecting. It's likely that I'm thinking too hard about what is fun and useful for you.

Friday, December 25, 2009

Avatar Review: OUCH!

"Avatar" is an incredibly lazy movie. I don't mean you'll fall asleep during it. It's got a good number of action beats and they're filmed in a competent manner. But still...

I have amazing amounts of respect for folks who make movies. I'm the sort who enjoys watching the commentaries on DVDs, and my favorites to date are those that go with the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings Movies. Just seeing all the effort that went into the writing, filming, costuming, prop-making and management... Frankly, it was an amazing undertaking that leaves me in awe.

You don't really see that in Avatar. Ok, sure the effects and the world are amazing, but haven't we seen all this before? The critters with multiple eyes and fan-like projects that wave like palm-fronds when they are startled, the floating mountains, the combat walkers, the glow-in-the-dark plants, etc, etc... Haven't we seen all of this before in various incarnations of the Final Fantasy franchise? Sure, it looks great, but I couldn't help but feel that, as gorgeous as it all is, it felt horribly derivative.

And that's the high point of the flick. The writing is probably the nadir. I should warn you at this point that spoilers follow, but seriously, after the first five minutes you could outline the rest of the flick in perfect safety. You've seen this film a dozen times at least.

This film has a blatant "as you already know" speech in the first act. While the words "as you already know" are never spoken, it is a conversation between two people who know everything that's being said. And the coup de grace is that they word "unobtanium" is used, blatantly, to describe the mysterious super-mineral that has brought humans to the planet. At that point, it became impossible to take the movie seriously.

What follows is stuff you've all seen before. The science fiction elements exist solely to justify the tropes you expect, once you know you're watching a kiddy-fare environmentalism film: the amoral corporate geeks, the hard-ass military guys who can't wait to unleash their toys and hapless soldiers on the noble defenders of nature, and the attack of the animals that shifts the momentum of the climactic battle. It even ends with a mano-y-mano duel between our hero and the bloodthirsty colonel. At least Cameron had the writing chops to give his military maniac a plausible excuse for wanting to drop a nuke in "The Abyss." Here, the colonel's desire to kill and destroy is simply who he is. It's almost too bad he didn't have a mustache he could twirl.

Much has been said about how the blue-skinned, vaguely feline natives are pseudo-Native Americans. Even that's giving the film too much credit. These are tree-hugging noble savages from Rousseau. If you want to seen Native Americans, rent "Apocalypto" or "Dances with Wolves." What you see in Avatar is milk-toast pap that Native Americans are rightly insulted to feel attached to. It is a white man's delusions of what he wishes Native American's were, without any respect for or even knowledge of their traditions, history, or culture.

Things just get worse as the film unspools. Laziness abounds: the amazing secret of the natives is never really exploited or played with, because that would mean deviating from the model. The final battle involves a military force attacking with short-ranged weapons, in spite of being written and directed by the man who gave nerds the phrase, "Nuke 'em from orbit; it's the only way to be sure." Both sides use ground forces in the battle without a tactical explanation as to why. The infantry and ground-cavalry units on both sides seem to have no reason for their involvement beyond a bloodthirsty need to kill each other (all to a heroic but forgettable Horner soundtrack). Or hero has to be rescued in the mano-y-mano fight with the colonel because he momentarily forgets that he has arms and legs.

Lazy, lazy, lazy... Sure, fun spectacle, but of the sort that demands you turn off your brain before things begin. It's hard to not feel the effort is half-assed in a world where you can rent far better films with great spectacle, excellent writing, compelling, complex characters and far more respect for the beauty, danger, and power of the natural world such as "Princess Mononoke." That's the film Avatar should be compared to, and it's one that it can't help but look wanting next to.

UPDATE:
AICN offers an interesting look at the science of Avatar. And I just noticed that this is my 666th post.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

For Taichara: Historical Settings

Taichara's asked for some input on what people want from an historic setting for RPGs, in her case specifically Red Box D&D. Again, I find myself pressed for time, so instead of writing something pithy and quick for her comments, y'all get a whole blog post. ;p

My chief interest is in how this setting can shake up my game. Whether I'm going to use it as a brief jaunt for a change-of-pace in an existing campaign, or the setting for an entire campaign in itself, I want to know pretty early on how this will be noticeably different (and, hopefully, better) than your bog-standard Middle Earth clone.

Culture
This really is the bedrock, from whence all the rest should flow. Who are the folks that live here? What's important to them? Where do their assumptions differ from ours?

Granted, this is the area most likely to be ignored in the heat of a game. Players often bring their cultural baggage to the table, and that's fine. But there's a good chance I'll want to let them play strangers in this strange land. So show me how these folks are different from the people I know. At the very least, let me know what they eat, what they wear, what they love, and what they fear. I'd like to know how they celebrate the stages of life, and if their ideas are different from ours on that score.

Politics would be useful as well. Who wields supreme executive power and upon what mandate? Who is likely to hire the PCs, and what are they likely to want done? Who might try to thwart the PCs? Who's in charge of maintaining law and order, and what are their methods and tools?

Calendar
If you give me nothing else on their culture, I do want this. How do they measure time? What days are special to them, and how do they celebrate them?

Gods
What do the people of this setting worship and how? This is where you can really shine and be useful to the DM, since D&D generally gives you next-to-nothing on playing and adjudicating clerics. Let us know how clerics interact with the temples and the gods. What worldly and organizational resources does the cleric have to draw on? What sort of behavior is likely to get a god's nose out of joint? Does the religion of this setting necessitate changes to the clerical class, or the creation of entirely new classes?

Equipment
The D&D equipment lists tend to be a bit anemic as it is. Feel free to flesh them out with all sorts of setting-specific goodies.

I'd not go on too long about weapons. Yeah, they can be cool, but D&D's combat is so vague it really can't tell the difference between a viking's broadsword and the pharaoh's khopesh. If it's important, go into metals and materials and how they make a difference, but most things can be mentioned briefly (“they make their shields from woven wicker” or “their helms are fashioned from the tusks of boars fixed to leather caps”) and then you can move on.

You'll probably find it's more interesting, especially for folks who enjoy hex-crawling, to talk about mounts and beasts of burden. Ancient India has elephants, and ancient Egypt will have the camel. Such beasts can make a big difference in combat, logistics, and wilderness exploration.

Normally, I'm not a huge fan of additional magical goodies, but they can be evocative and this is Taichara we're talking about here. ;) If you are going to give us new magical items, make sure they are both new and evocative. A bag of holding with feathers stitched to it is still a bag of holding.

Architecture and Maps
Most historical time-periods have evocative architecture that immediately brings them to mind. The Egyptians, of course, have the pyramids and their great, giant columns in post-and-lintel architecture erected on a grand scale. The Romans had their arches and the Colosseum. The Japanese have their sliding paper walls and nightingale floors. Show us how these things work and give us some context for them.

Give us maps of the homes and shops of the average folk, and at least one tavern, inn or similar place where adventurers are likely to congregate. Maps of temples would be useful, especially if there are competing faiths in this setting. A map of a village or a city where adventures can start or take place wouldn't be a bad idea, either.

Think also about common locations for adventures. Tombs, forts, jails, palaces, temples, houses-of-ill-repute, seedy taverns, and inns are all places where adventurers might practice their trade. Maps are something we don't often see enough of in books like this.

Magic
You can do a lot to make a setting feel special by changing the rules for how magic works or creating new magic. One place D&D is historically lacking is in daily-use spells, the sorts of magic people used in their homes or in their work, and yet it's the what we have the most examples of from real history.

Monsters
Again, normally I'd say don't go crazy here, but we're talking about Taichara, and such things don't apply to her. :D Some creatures just scream to be made over (the mummy, for instance) while some are missing all together. Keep it flavorful and remember that this is D&D, so we don't need giant stat-blocks or great whopping lists of powers.

I'd rather not see amazing re-imaginings of the traditional monsters. The scarab-swarm lamia of 4e, for instance, does nothing for me. I'm quite happy with the traditional monsters as we see them in folklore.

Sample Adventures
Please include at least one which highlights how adventures in this setting can be different. I'm just as capable as the next guy of replacing the King's daughter with the Pharoah's daughter. Give me something that really highlights, for me and my players, the possibilities of the setting. Give me something that only this setting and no other can deliver.

And heck, if you want to give me a book of adventure locations that, over its pages, reveals a setting to me, that'd be great. It doesn't necessarily have to be a tightly-linked adventure path, but maybe five “locations” that include an introductory adventure, some tomb-like areas to plunder, a city or town that can supply both a base-of-operations as well as adventures in its own right, the headquarters of a powerful antagonist, and maybe a wilderness area suitable for exploring and building a stronghold on.

Player Handouts
Finally, steal a page from Monte Cook and do a player's PDF. This should help explain the setting, lay out the basics of the culture and any rules changes the players will need to know to make a character in it. If you're going to spend money on art, it should show up here. Art is a great way to make a setting come alive, and to communicate the style, themes, and feel quickly. If at all possible, it should help the DM sell the setting to the players.

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Thoughts on Game Design: 7th Sea

As I mentioned earlier, I've gotten involved in a 7th Sea game. So far, due to things like finals and the general vicissitudes of life, we've only just built our characters. Still, that's given me some insights into how the game's mechanics work, and there's some interesting stuff to see there.

First, 7th Sea is very modern in its design. It's a point-buy, skill-based system which uses a lot of dice-tricks in its mechanics. It only uses 10-sided dice. The basic mechanic is fairly simple: the GM gives you a target number, you roll your 10-siders and try to come up with a sum that's equal-to or higher than the target number. Simple enough, but 7th Sea throws in an interesting quirk: some of the 10-siders you rolled you get to keep, and some you don't count.

When you try to do something, the number of dice you roll is based on a Trait (just like the stats in D&D, only there are five of them) and a Knack (which is basically an ability or bit of knowledge your character has). For instance, if you're trying to parry an attack, you add your Wit score to your Parry Knack, and that would tell you how many dice you roll.

However, when you're counting up those dice, you only count a number of dice equal to your Trait, in this case your Wit score. So, for instance, if your Wit is 3 and your Parry is 1, you roll four dice, but only count the score on three of them. Since you're trying to get a high score, obviously, you count the highest three. So if you rolled a 7, 4, 3, and 2, you'd drop the 2 and your score would be 7+4+3=14.

So that's the basic mechanic: roll as many 10-sided dice as your Trait + your Knack, but only keep a number of dice equal to your trait. Obviously, this makes your Traits very important.

(When explaining how many dice to roll, 7th Sea uses the following nomenclature: xky, where x = the full number of dice you roll and y = the number of dice you keep. So in the above example, it would be described as 4k3, and you'd describe the roll as “four-keep-three.” So when the game says the damage your musket does is 5k3, that means you roll five 10-siders and add up the highest three to see how much damage your shot did.)

Here's another interesting bit: like in most modern games, the folks in 7th Sea worked very hard to make certain that all the Traits are useful. In combat, for instance, you use Finesse when trying to hit your opponent and Brawn when calculating how badly you hurt them. When you're on defense, you use Wit to avoid the attack, and if they do hit you, Resolve to limit the damage from the attack. That means the skilled warrior is going to need good scores all across the board in all four of those stats. Since the average target number is 15, you want 3s in all your important Traits. And 3 is the max starting score characters can have.

As you might guess, most characters are only going to have a few 3s and a lot of 2s. Which means you need more dice. Luckily, 7th Sea dice “explode,” meaning if you roll a 10, you count that as a ten, then roll again and add the next number to that 10. If that roll again is a 10, you add it and roll again. So if you roll a 10 on a die, then roll a second 10 on it, and then roll a 7, the total score of that one die is 27.

However, you can't always count on rolling a 10. If you fail to meet the target number, you can choose to roll extra bonus dice called Drama Dice. The really cool thing about Drama Dice is they count as kept dice. Here's the other cool thing: while you only start with as many Drama Dice as your lowest Trait, you can earn more by being dramatic or cool or doing something very much in the spirit and theme of the game.

Obviously, starting characters are going to need those Drama Dice to survive and overcome, especially in combat situations. Good players are going to be looking for every opportunity they can find to earn some Drama Dice.

This puts a heavy burden on the GM, however. The GM can make or break a game based on how they hand out Drama Dice. Too few, and the players will get eaten alive. But the Drama Dice are the GM's best way to reward excellent play that fits into the themes and style of the game, so it best for the GM not to give them out too often and certainly not for actions she doesn't want to see repeatedly frequently in the game. By rewarding Drama Dice, the GM has a powerful influence on the tone and shape of the game.

Art by Howard Pyle.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Review of Captain Blood

I've recently gotten involved in a 7th Sea campaign, and I've been poking around for proper inspiriation. "Captain Blood" released in 1935, is a classic of the pirate movie genre. Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and Olivia de Havilland in all their black-and-white glory with a soundtrack provided by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Unlike movies in the current uptight and pretentious age we live in, a fun flick like "Captain Blood" could be, and was, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

The story is based on a romantic action novel in the style of Dumas. Our hero, Peter Blood, a man in the prime of his life whose done a bit of everything, has finally settled down to practice medicine in the sleepy English countryside. Unfortunately, that countryside boils over into open rebellion against James II, the last hurrah for Catholicism in England. Dr. Blood is caught doing what he sees as his christian duty for one of the wounded rebels. Narrowly escaping the hangman's noose, the king's justice ships him and other rebels to Port Royal to work as slaves in the sugar plantations. He and the other rebels escape, capture a ship, and set to wreaking havoc on English shipping throughout the Caribbean.

"Captain Blood" is the sort of movie that filled my lazy summer afternoons: a pre-70's flick with larger-than-life heroes, exotic locales, a dash of romance, and a lot of swashbuckling action. It lures young men in with the promise of action and adventure, and then proceeds to give them a sermon on proper manly behavior in the person of the nearly flawless hero. That sort of thing can be cloying after a while, but Blood's thirst for vengeance and his openly thieving ways keep it from getting too thick. The action is very much of its time, with the clash of epees and the back-and-forth swish-swish-clatter-swish of old-style movie swordplay.

The pirates don't show up until nearly halfway through the movie, but they arrive with a vengeance, storming into Port Royal in-mass, overwhelming the garrison and demanding two-hundred thousand pieces-of-eight from the governor. Flynn gets to square off against Rathbone's beastly French pirate in a duel on a beach over Ms. de Havilland's character, of course, and stirring speeches are made about the value of freedom. Dr.-turned-slave-turned-Captain Blood and Ms. Bishop spar and scratch at each other throughout the film, only finally confessing their love in the final moments, to nobody's surprise.

All in all, a fun little flick if you can look past the 1930's era special effects, costuming, and plotting. It does what it does very, very well, but what it does isn't quite what you and I today might ask for in a pirate movie. If you're in the mood for a light little bit of playful fun, with excellent acting, good music, and stirring speeches, you could do far worse than the movie that launched Errol Flynn's career as a leading man.

Friday, December 04, 2009

The Phasors! They Burns Us!

This... looks less than promising.



This isn't the whole game; they promise you'll have away missions where you lead a team of up to five NPCs, plus you can join together with friends on joint missions. Still, the emphasis seems to heavily be weighted towards combat and shooting things. When all you have is a hammer...

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

For Zak S.

Mr. S asked a handful of questions over at his blog. I wrote up a response but blogger or my computer won't let me paste the answers into the "Comment" field, so they're going up here. (Computers sometimes make trolls very CRANKY!!! @|{ )

Chad: This would fly like a lead brick in my campaigns, but that's because my games are very thematic and verisimilitude is my highest good. But I've been in games where that would be cool and add to the wacky fun.

AC: Typically, what it means is that low-level PCs are hard to hit, but have glass jaws. It means they can take some risks, but once they start taking damage it's time to panic. I rather like that. It works well for my games.

Spells: Er, never have had this problem. Not sure what to tell you. The tables on how many spells a PC can cast in a given day seem pretty clear to me: a single first level spell when at level 1, two first level spells at class level 2, etc. There are bonus spells for clerics in older versions of AD&D.

If you're using 3rd edition, I think even magic-users, er, I mean wizards, get bonus spells they can cast for high intelligence.

As for how many spells you can know, for magic-users, that is based on intelligence, and always seemed fairly clear-cut to me, but I usually ignored it. If the PC found it, and rolled well enough to add it to their book, I let them have it.

Which version are you playing now? Maybe we can help you puzzle it out.

Hexcrawl: Yeah, I usually have a few notes about what's in each hex, though most hexes are empty other than their terrain. If a wandering monster roll turns up something interesting, I'll add it to my notes. But for the most part, I have maybe only one hex worthy of notes for every ten or twelve, I think. I make it fairly easy for the PCs to know which hexes are points of interest, and rather difficult to find out details about what, exactly is in those hexes. Rumors and local knowledge tend to be full of half-truths and misleading gossip. True info is available, but costs. Sometimes coin is enough, sometimes it requires a small quest to earn what you want to know.

Anachro-anarcho-anachrids: Hmmm... noted, and thanks. ;)

Vampires/Medusa: I think you did just fine. I routinely throw monsters at my players that they have no hope of defeating... in a fair fight. So my players don't fight fair. Figuring out how to defeat a foe is a lot more fun, to my way of thinking, than going toe-to-toe in a flurry of dice-tossing dueling spreadsheets. ;p

Monty Haul becomes an issue when the players can simply banish, disspel, eviscerate, decapitate, or otherwise discombobulate whatever stands in their way with little effort on their part. When the players can stop thinking and can expect to win just by tossing dice and modifiers at a problem, you're in Monty Haul territory.

Fear of Death: Yes! Yes-yes-yes-YES! Fear of death focuses the players, makes them be clever and sneaky, and just improves the game all around. Though I honestly think that death is kinda boring, especially when you consider all the other wonderful things you can do to the PCs, like curse them in imaginative ways, saddle them with quests, smear their reputations, transform them into cute, fluffy animals, etc...

Stick: Mostly, yes. Part of the problem is that some GMs will simply not let their players be awesome. They'll shoot down any good idea, ruin any plan, and rain on any moment of glory the players try to create. There's a fine line between challenging the players and being a dick.

That said, just about every plan has some flaw in it, and no plan survives contact with the enemy. Adjusting on the fly, overcoming unexpected obstacles, and sometimes narrowly escaping are lots of fun for the players and prevent combats from turning anti-climactic.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Masques & Machinations: Building a Neo-classical RPG About Social Interactions

On Twitter, Oddysey asks:

D&D is a game about exploration with no mechanics for exploration, just success (XP, treasure) or failure (traps, combat, hireling loyalty).

Taken from that perspective, what mechanics would you want in a game about social interaction?

It's an intriguing question and feeds directly into some of my personal interests. I also don't currently have the time and discipline to compose a Twitter-appropriate answer. So y'all get a blog post.

I'm going to talk about two sorts of mechanics here: randomized and inventory mechanics. D&D uses both, as do most of the games that came after. Randomized mechanics are the ones most folks think of when they discuss mechanics specifically, as opposed to rules. They're good when you want to introduce risk and uncertainty. Success usually yields a small reward (in classic D&D it opens up new areas for exploration and grants a few drips of treasure and EXP), but even success drains resources.

These resources are the basis for inventory mechanics. They basically are anything the party keeps track of that can be spent in the course of engaging in the game's primary activity. In classic D&D, we're talking about things like rations, light sources, rope, spells, and potions. Combined with the threat of combat and other randomized mechanics that threaten uncertain levels of resource drain, they serve as the (usually) soft limits on the amount of exploring the PCs can do. The game largely consists of the players judging the amount of risk vs. reward on further exploration based on the amount of resources they have left.

So, in a game of social interaction, we need rewards for successful interactions, and if we use classic D&D as our model, resources that are spent in social interaction and randomized events which could unexpected cause a greater drain on these resources.

First, let's take a look at the rewards. One of the interesting things about the rewards in classic D&D is that they primarily allow for more exploration. Higher levels, more magic, and large piles of coins give the PCs greater resources, which allow them to dare bigger risks. This creates an interesting feedback loop where the players are not only encouraged by success to do more exploring, but also given the wherewithal to do that exploring.

Taking this to our social interaction RPG, we can easily port over money as a reward for social interaction. It might be hard currency, as in D&D, or goods offered by clients who need our PCs to intercede on their behalf. (And these clients could also spur the game as a potential source of “adventures.”) On the other hand, the “currency” might be something more like credit. The more well-known you become, the more likely people are to loan you things, loan you money, or even give you things or do things for you for free, simply so they can get exposure to a larger pool of potential customers and have their work associated with you.

Experience levels also map over quite well. If the culture of the game includes hierarchical levels (and most do), going up a level might correspond to achieving a level of social fame that allows you to elevate yourself to the next hierarchical category: from commoner to noble, from layperson to clergy, from apprentice to master. Cultures with varied layers of social hierarchy and interaction would lend themselves well to this sort of gaming.

So these are your rewards. But how do you earn them? By engaging in social activities and interactions. Some of these may require very little risk for the PCs, but the greatest rewards should go to those who dare the most or find clever ways to minimize their risks, just as in classic D&D. What sort of activities are we talking about? I imagine they might be things like putting on events and spectacles (parties, circuses, the military defeat of a hated or threatening enemy, the publication of memoirs), attempts to forge personal alliances (marriages, blood-brotherhood, partnerships, friendships, romances, treaties, commerce), and overcoming social rivals or triumphing in social contests (court battles, legislation, duels, arguing policy points before a voting assembly or a monarch).

And these offer other suggestions for more personal, but probably more potent rewards: reputation, trust, and respect. Risking these, along with personal fortune, social standing and perhaps even life and limb (“...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”), the players would engage in acts designed to increase their social standing and collective influence. There may be some risk involved (Are the barbarians crushed before they breach the gates? Is the gala rained out? Does the Duchess attend our party or go to the opera instead?) and dice may be rolled. But all of these only set the stage for what such a game would be about: taking on a persona and interacting with each other and the NPCs. Just as classic D&D was about exploring but had no rules about exploring, so this social game would leave the actual interactions up to the players of the game. How the players approached the NPCs, engaged with them, and created the web of relationships the game is about should be left to them and their GM, not the whim of dice.

This, honestly, is what I think should be at the core of a game based on properties like Babylon 5. As for Oddysey's game, I suspect she wants a bit more swashbuckling and derring-do than I've implied above, and a bit less high society. But this sort of game is a ton of fun to think about.

Art by Raffaele Giannetti, José Benlliure y Gil, and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Give Them What They Want...

Over at RPG.net, Old Geezer asks:

One of the things computer games have going for them is QUICK rewards. In an interview about Diablo, one of the designers said they swiped the reinforcement schedule from Las Vegas slot machines; small, frequent, irregular reinforcements...

How do we translate this into table top gaming? How can we incorporate small, frequent, irregular reinforcement -- which Skinner clearly demonstrated is the strongest kind.

The discussion generated deals almost exclusively with mechanical tricks to give table-top play the “ding” of MMOGs. I think this mistakes the symptom for the disease.

Yes, you need to give your players little shots of happiness on a regular basis. That's the core of all games, whether we're talking about WoW or Monopoly or bingo or poker. Different games deliver this jolt of happy-happy endorphins in different ways. For WoW and slot machines, it's the randomly delivered reward for simple, repetitive action. In chess and poker, however, it's the head-to-head cerebral duel between players. WoW kinda combines the two where it incorporates player-vs.-player play, but doesn't do it nearly as well as the card game Munchkin.

RPGs are different from these other games in that they are infinitely flexible. Yes, I used the word “infinitely” and I meant it. As a GM (or a player, though that sometimes takes a bit more cleverness) you can reproduce the quick rewards by giving your players what they want.

No, I'm not talking about Monty Haul campaigns full of +5 dancing vorpal swords and characters with stats in the 20s (or whatever is amazing for your game de jour). I'm not talking about numbers at all.

If it's got a number or rule attached to it, it's completely useless for what I'm talking about. Numbers are only short term, one-time goodies. Sure, they're fun to get, but less fun to have, and you can only push them so far before you start to bump into the limits of your game's mechanics. This is why Old Geezer's thread is full of notions for mini-bonuses and short-term power-ups. Offering longer-term bonuses and such throws the mechanics out of whack and accelerates the power creep that is central to the reward mechanics of most games.

Those little mini-rewards, however, are a lot of book-keeping headaches. Honestly, do you track all the numbers you want to right now? Do you really want to shepherd more? And doesn't this just play to the strengths of computerized entertainment, while ignoring the strengths of pen-and-paper play?

Your players don't want mini-power-ups. They don't want to keep track of more numbers. They don't want more paperwork.

They want to be heroes. And being a hero has nothing to do with numbers.

Ok, I'm guessing here. Maybe they don't really want to be heroes. Maybe they want to be villains. Or they want to be sparkly vampires engaged in blushing teen romance. Or they want heart-tugging drama. Or they want to do things they'll never be able to do in their real lives. Or they want to misbehave. Or they want to fight the good fight. Or they want to evade the fiendish traps while trading verbal jabs with each other.

I can't tell you what your players want. Sometimes they can't (or won't) tell you themselves. You can tease it out, sometimes, through play. What's going on when they become most animated? What do they ask questions about, especially between sessions? When do they tune out? What does their body-language tell you?

Once you know, you can give it to them. If they seem to really enjoying chatting and deal-making with powerful beings, include more monsters that outclass them, but who are willing to deal for the right offer. If they really enjoy outfoxing fiendish traps or turning those traps against their foes, get a few issues of Green Devil Face and sprinkle the contents liberally through your dungeons. If they thrive on Red Harvest/Yojimbo/For a Fistful of Dollars -style cross and double-cross, give them warring factions to play off against each other. If they want romance, toss a handful of potential partners their way and see which ones stick. If they relish overcoming impossible odds, give them adversity. If they're really about exploring, give them free rein to wander where they will, but tease them with places they can't reach, knowledge that is forbidden, and secrets that are dangerous.

This is where games that follow modern design styles paint themselves into corners. When there's a rule for everything, everything is reduced to a roll of the dice. In spite of what some Old Schoolers will tell you, rolling dice isn't fun. It's boring.

Games are about making choices, not rolling dice. It's not the dice that separate pen-and-paper RPGs from computer games, it's the infinite latitude in the choices you can make. It's the ability of a real, live person to riff on your choices, and for the interactions of all involved to make the game something more intriguing than stat modifiers and dice mechanics. RPGs are not, after all, overly-complex, baroque versions of craps.

So when everything has a rule associated with it, you move away from the fun and towards rolling dice. Your elven sorcerer's knowledge of ancient cultures becomes a +6 bonus instead of knowing that winged serpents were associated with planar travel. Your rogue's charm and etiquette are reduced to bonus dice in a pool, rather than scouring the wine-cellar for just the right vintage and learning what her favorite books are.

These details make the game come alive, organically generate new adventures, and draw the players in. They make worlds feel real, they make NPCs seem three-dimensional and multi-faceted, and they make pen-and-paper RPGs something that computer games may never be able to touch.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

"The Gods Have a Plan for You"

Words that would certainly strike fear into the hearts of most of my players over the years. Luckily for them, I'm just quoting this movie trailer:


Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time in HD

Trailer Park | MySpace Video


I'm not getting as much of a fun vibe off this as I got from the "Pirates" movies or "The Scorpion King". Still, it'll be great fun for the visuals and, I suspect, another Hans "ATTACK!" Zimmer soundtrack, even if the rest of the movie is only so-so.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Daisy Chains of Death and Destruction

I regularly read Roleplaying Tips Weekly, and while it's not chock full of gold every week, there's usually one or two bright nuggets in most issues. This in spite of the fact that the styles of play assumed by the authors and contributors tend to be a bit removed from my own.

This week, there was a question to the readership that caught my eye:

Dear Johnn,

Just wondering if you have any tips on large-scale battles
where the PCs can influence the outcome. My entire campaign
has been to get to the point where my players can be part of
a battle that they could possibly do different things where
the outcome is not pre-scripted. It's theirs to win or lose.

I GM a Star Wars Saga game, so it's likely to contain big
starships and starfighters, as well as ground forces with
blasters and Jedi. What's the best way I can manage this
without going insane? Splitting the party is bad enough.

- Melissa

I'm answering this question in my blog, instead of emailing it in, because this poor corner of the 'net has been languishing and needs some love.

Actually, while that's true, I also think the answer I have isn't one Melissa or her group would enjoy. It will probably feel like cheating. But it's perfect for folks who play in a style more similar to mine.

First, don't even think about fighting the battle with dice. That way does, indeed, lie madness, or at least the risk of a few failed SAN checks. Don't think of the battle as a giant combat. Think of it, instead, as a puzzle. A nasty puzzle with a timer that kills more people the longer the PCs take to solve it.

Duking it Out

The Battle of Endor at the end of “Return of the Jedi” is probably the best example from all six movies. It includes both ground and space forces, as well as a clash between jedi, all happening simultaneously, and interacting in interesting ways.

On the planet, Han, Leia, Chewbacca and company need to knock out the shield generator. They are not there to kill stormtroopers, to blow up war machines, or assassinate the commander of the imperial ground troops.

They have one mission, and that is to take out the shield generator so the rebel fleet can destroy Death Star 2.0.

What ends up happening is a disaster of epic proportions. They stumble right into the trap that's laid for them, without any indication they're even aware of it. Luckily, because they befriended the Ewoks, they get a second chance.

Here's where things get interesting for us as gamers. Yes, they're in the middle of a battle. Yes, people are shooting all around them, and yes, people are getting shot and killed, equipment is getting destroyed, and all of that. But the goal remains taking out the shield generator. The combat is a complication to the goal, not the primary focus of our heroes. The troops they have with them are basically told, “Hey, hold these guys off long enough for us to get inside this bunker.” Bodycount is hardly a consideration; the only thing that matters is getting into the bunker before the rebel fleet gets destroyed.

No Plan Survives Contact with the Enemy

Because of the utter lack of success on the parts of Han, Leia, and Chewie, Ackbar and Lando have to improvise a new plan. Their original strategy was to smash through any defending fleet, get to the Death Star 2.0 as quickly as possible, destroy it, and then get the hell out. Because the deflector shield is still up, they have to quickly change tactics. The new plan: stay alive long enough for the folks on Endor to destroy the shield generator.



Again, as a GM, there's no need for much dice rolling here. The battle is huge and you have exact specifics on every piece of hardware in the sky. You know how many rebel ships the imperial fleet can destroy in a round, and vice versa. The trick is to find ways to minimize the damage done to the rebel fleet at all costs. “Accelerate to attack speed,” says the general. “Draw their fire away from the cruisers.” At this level of abstraction, it's more like chess then traditional RPG combat. The pieces (squadrons, attack groups, capital ships) maneuver to support one another, deny movement to the enemy, or move to threaten enemy resources. (Lando's solution to the “fully armed and operational battle station” is, I think, an especially gamist one; the Death Star 2.0 will destroy one rebel capital ship a round, but the star destroyers take four rounds to destroy a ship. Therefore, fight the star destroyers where the Death Star can't safely attack.)

Dice Rolls and Lateral Thinking

How long the fleet must endure the punishment of the trap is largely up to the folks on the ground. R2-D2 and Han both horribly botch their “pick locks” rolls. The most important fight on the ground involves Chewie and some Ewoks taking over an AT-ST. (Notice that the poor guys piloting the thing can hardly fight back. The fight is horribly one-sided, with the imperial drivers trapped without weapons in an enclosed space with flesh-eating, midget hunter-gatherers who are brutally adept at butchering far tougher game with their stone-age weapons). Since the bulk of the imperial troops have been led off into the forest, Han is able to use subterfuge to get into the bunker and destroy the shield generator. This finally allows the rebel fleet to execute their original plan of attack.

Daisy Chains of Death and Destruction

The key to making this work is the cascade of consequences in each part of the battle. The effectiveness of Han and Leia and Chewie on Endor has immediate consequences for the fleet action (which affects Luke's confrontation with Vader and the Emperor). This means that, even though the party might be split up all over the place, the players still have a vital interest in what the others are doing. It also gives the GM clues on when to cut between groups.

Han's Player: Oh, crap! It's a trap.

GM: And the shield generator is still up when the fleet arrives. Lando, when the fleet drops out of hyperspace, you're ambushed from behind by a bunch of enemy fighters, and you're not getting any reading on those shields.

Lando's Player: Ok, we'll use our fighters to screen our capital ships. We get right into their teeth and give them something more important to worry about than destroying our big ships.

(Maybe some dice rolls to take out enemy leaders or some such here, but only things that will have a direct impact on the tactical situation as a whole.)

GM: Ok, the TIE fighters are stuck in swirling furballs with the rebel fighters. Meanwhile, back on the moon, as you're marched out of the bunker by the stormtroopers, the Ewoks attack!

Han's Player: Ok, I try to get back into the bunker. We'll have R2 pick the lock.

(He rolls some dice.)

Han's Player: Crap! My dice are cursed. (He scowls at Chewie's player.) Did you touch my dice while I was ordering the pizza?

Chewie's Player: Hey, don't look at me. Uh, I try to find the leaders of the Ewoks and see if we can't get them to draw the stormtroopers away from the bunker. That should give you more time and breathing space to find another way in.

GM: Ok, while the Ewoks battle the stormtroopers, in orbit over the planet, Lando, you can see the imperial capital ships are not driving home the attack, but spreading out to keep you from escaping. Why becomes abundantly clear when the Death Star 2.0 fires it's giant, planet-killing gun to destroy your cruiser Escargot.

All Players: CRAP!

As one group finishes an action that will have an effect (or lack of an effect) on the chances the other, you switch. When one group says, “Ok, change of plans...” or needs a minute to react to a change in the situation, you switch to the other group.

Note that this is why the combined space-and-ground battle in “Phantom Menace” doesn't work as well as the Battle at Endor. In “Phantom Menace,” what happens on the ground has very little bearing on the success of the overall mission. The only thing that really matters is destroying the ship that controls the 'droids. Once that's done, the battle is over. And there's nothing the ground forces can do to make that easier or harder for the ships in the fleet action. If you're playing a battle like that, try to avoid having any PCs involved in the unimportant ground battle. If players have to be there, try to make it interesting by giving them a chance to face a hated nemesis or achieve some ancillary goal that's important to the group as a whole. Otherwise, the folks in the fleet battle are going to tune out and get bored when you cut back to ground battle.

UPDATE (11/17/2017): Variations on this theme by Chris Lindsay and Satine Phoenix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u14LRYS9qc

UPDATE 2 (08/07/18): Variations on this theme that gets into more detail on how to make this happen at the table from Emmy "Cavegirl" Allen.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Nerds: the New Wanted Demographic

Granted, this ad was linked to from Libertarian Nerd Central, and granted also that they'd already put a foot down this path by hiring Mr. Fillion. But how many nerd-references can you cram into a single preview spot?



Buffy, Firefly (with a kinda-sorta sideling reference to "Millenium" and "Space: Above and Beyond"?), Underworld... Am I missing anything? Is Elizabeth Dryden a name I should know?

Friday, October 02, 2009

Laser Weapon Kills Truck

Fascinating, but less-than-thrilling, video and analysis here.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Sticking My Nose In...

Ok, I'm posting this here because I couldn't get Blogger to allow me to post a comment over there.

“Over there,” in this case, is David's great blog “Tower of the Archmage.” And he's having some trouble with getting a solo game started with his wife. As he puts it:

We both want to have fun, but our ideas of fun are light years apart... I was looking for a good naturally developed dungeon ecosystem, and maybe even a back story for the megadungeon. Virginia's priorities leaned more toward having a fun excuse to draw things like worms in sweaters, flying hamsters, and dwarven ghosts!

And that's a tough divide to bridge. You're thinking Tolkein's Middle Earth, and she's thinking Asprin's Myth Adventures.

Now, normally, I'm not a huge fan of Forge-style gaming. They've got very different goals than I do when we sit down and start rolling dice. But in this case, I think you need to take a page out of their book and work out what sort of game you want in advance. You might be able to wed the drama of High Fantasy with her fields of hungry venus flytraps and flying hamster aviaries. But it you do, it's going to take work from both of you.

As much as you can, outline what you want from the game ahead of time. Dungeon delving? Romance? Slapstick comedy? Funny accents? Ancient terrors that will rise when the stars are right? Make a list and organize in a vague way how you want these included in the game, and to what degree.

Prepare to compromise, and to stand fast where it's necessary. And then honestly adhere to this social contract. Don't try to cheat by sneaking things in around the edges. Don't suddenly spring the thing you agreed wouldn't be in the game on her about midway through the dungeon.

Then, tear the roof off D&D (or whatever game you're playing). Demolish all the boundaries you've created in your minds about what the game “must” be about. If managing a flying hamster aviary and catching rare and exotic hamsters to add to your collection is fun for you, wallow in it. If y'all are enjoying the awkward and forbidden romance between the daughter of a venus flytrap farmer and an elven rogue who always lives on the edge of oblivion, wallow in it. Obviously, you both love the fantastical, so there's some strong overlap there. Find those points of interests in the movies and shows and books you both enjoy and mine them for ideas.

Finally, allow me to scoot even further out on this limb and suggest you try reading Digger. It may give you something of a handle on how you can merge your seemingly unmergeable interests.

Of Caddies and Spartans

Fascinating interview with the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance and Gates of Fire here. Discussions of the warrior ethos, Bronze Age Greeks, the tribes of Afghanistan, and porn. What more could you ask for?