Failing to Entice Your Players

This post, like my previous one, is sort of a post-mortem on my campaign called Kjemmen. In a sort of continuing theme, I’m going to discuss another thing that continually tripped Stewart and I up while running Kjemmen.

In the first post, I talked about how not understanding Mikejl’s player’s ideas about Mikejl’s personality and drives made it hard to draw him into the events surrounding him. This difficulty was not just localized to him but, to a lesser extent, infected the whole PC group. Given that the players should see everything important, this presented a problem for us. I will try to enumerate the causes.

The Most Decisive PC

Mikejl was often the PC calling the shots. In any social situation, one person will tend to bubble to the top and assume a mantle of leadership. In this group, Mikejl was that person. So our misunderstanding his motivations, paired with the fact that he was the most driving force amongst the PCs–the one most often moving the story forward–meant that if we failed to convince Mikejl that something was interesting, the other PCs often wouldn’t (either try or be able to) convince him to go anyway. Since this issue is the topic of my previous post, I won’t belabor why that happened, but suffice it to say that it did.

Fragile Plans

In retrospect, we had a few spots in the plot where we assumed that the players would hook up with one NPC or would want to be in one particular place, but we didn’t give enough thought to really making those choices the most attractive ones. This meant that there ended up being important stuff going on in places or near people that they really had no reason to go be at or near. Hearing about things via the rumor mill is sort of lame, and should be relegated to flavorful things or the-world-is-a-living-breathing-place kind of events. Major plots points should have the PCs present at least, and intimately involved ideally. This could probably have been avoided with some more attention ahead of time.

Self Preservation Instinct

After a certain point, it became clear to the PCs that the stuff going on in the city of Kjemmen was Seriously Bad and would involve potential for grievous bodily harm. There were a few times when the PCs knew some important plot thing was going on, but were very reluctant to go anywhere near it because there was a significant risk of terrible things happening to them. This indicates a major win in the department of players feeling like their PCs can die and in making the setting a threatening place full of bad people (a creative goal of mine from the outset), but man did it tend to keep them away from some interesting stuff.

What Should Have Been

Our idea was this: The head of the oldest order of priests (call them the orthodoxy) in Kjemmen was power-hungry. He had discovered a ritual that would allow him to ascend to god-hood, but it required a lot of blood sacrifice. So he told some lackeys that he wanted to start a conspiracy. The lie he told them was that he was tired of the newer orders and the nobility getting uppity and wanted to make them take themselves out. They would orchestrate an alliance between the new orders and some medium-sized noble houses against the most powerful noble house in the city and the orthodoxy. When things came to a fight, the orthodoxy would pull out and let the remaining combatants destroy themselves (which death the head of the orthodoxy would actually use to fuel his god ritual).

Let me clarify something about the nobility before I go on: They were more like mob families than anything else, really. There were constant, low-level turf wars between the houses and constantly-shifting alliances that could never really be relied upon (like Diplomacy!). Over a few generations, one family in particular had gained direct control over about a third of the city and forged alliances such that they had indirect control over about half the city. That family’s historical rival had forged an alliance against this big guy in order to try to stem his growth.

So the head priest’s lackeys went about convincing the most powerful noble in the city that the orthodoxy wanted to make him king. They also infiltrated the younger orders of priests and convinced them they could gain some considerable power by taking out the orthodoxy and their “king” with the help of the rival alliance. The rival alliance was the PC’s original contact point for our layer cake of conspiracies.

The original concept was that the PCs would start out hanging out with the medium-sized nobility and feel like the plot was about this other noble who was making a power grab. The “king” would look like the Big Bad. Eventually, they would discover that something else was going on and that, in fact, the younger orders were making a power grab and the “king” would look like a good guy for trying to stop them. Then they would discover that all the nobility were being manipulated by the orthodoxy and the “king” would seem irrelevant or, anyway, neither bad nor good. And pretty quickly after that, they’d discover that the orthodoxy was being manipulated by their leader and that he was the real Big Bad.

You might be able to spot some fragile junctures already. One of the biggest was that we expected the PCs to transition from one set of noble houses to the “other side”. We envisioned a sort of low point akin to the end of The Empire Strikes Back where their bosses threw them out and they had nowhere to turn. We expected that would sort of drive them into the arms of the “king”. Instead, they felt so defenseless and threatened by anyone with power, they managed to make a big, personal enemy of the “king”. And allying with him was basically our only route to getting in front of them the clues about the orthodoxy’s manipulation of the nobility.

Also, once they reached the point of seeing the younger orders’ power grab, which was about resurrecting the dead, evil god that all the priests worshiped, they decided being involved in a plot regarding that would be worse than an asbestos bath. This is a sane decision, and in a city which was supposed to be full of evil people (as influenced by the afore mentioned dead, evil god), having a randomly selected group of three decide they’re not the everything-on-the-line hero sort makes a lot of sense. But “and then we’ll hide in a basement and pray for a quick death” is really boring to roleplay… or really depressing.

In my next post, I plan to talk about what ended up happening after all and how it wasn’t as terrible as all my “fail” blog post titles might imply. For now, though, you can learn from some of the things that were less than optimal in my latest campaign. Robustness in planning to get central details in front of the players’ eyes is, I think, the biggest lesson I learned from all this. If we had had more than one way to bring the orthodoxy-run layer of the conspiracy to light, that transition in the story would have felt a lot more smooth.

Failing to Understand Your PCs

This is likely to be only the first in a handful of posts about a campaign of mine that just wrapped up called Kjemmen. It’s been a few weeks now and I’ve had time to mull over what went well and what didn’t and to talk to most of the players about their thoughts. The first thing I want to bring up is a mistake Stewart and I made before the campaign even started.

One of our players was creating a PC named Mikejl. He was to be the last scion of a noble house that was no more. His father had basically squandered everything and left the family indebted to another, larger noble house (the Devraks). This meant that Mikejl was effectively raised as a high-profile servant within House Devrak, but he hated it and them and especially the son, Likhander Devrak. One of the biggest driving forces in Mikejl’s story would be his hate of the Devraks and his goal of reattaining a noble title.

When it came time to flesh that idea out, Stewart had this idea of Mikejl wanting to regain the past glory of his family and hating the Devraks so much that he wanted to do it at their expense. Specifically, he had the idea that Mikejl hated Likhander so much that he’d want anything Likhander owned (or wanted) simply to take it away from Likhander. In this model, Likhander would be about the same age as Mikejl (about 27) and they would have this history of Likhander getting everything that Mikejl felt he deserved.

The player, though, didn’t like this idea so much. He explained to us this idea where Likhander is slightly younger than Mikejl (about 22) and much more bratty. There were some other things in there that we didn’t understand, so we tried to get him to explain again. And here’s the mistake: When the second explanation failed, we shrugged and said, “It’s his PC, we’ll go with his idea.”

Now, to be clear: the mistake was not going with the player’s idea. That’s solid and I don’t regret that one iota. The mistake is shrugging and agreeing to a player’s idea without understanding it. This was the central motivator for this PC and we failed to realize that not understanding it would make us unable to either predict his reactions to events or to put things he would find interesting next to important Plot Things. And this played out very quickly in the campaign: Mikejl ignored entirely things we thought he would find interesting and rewarding. We found it very difficult to entice him into plot events because we didn’t know what was motivating him.

After playing the campaign for roughly 2 years, I now know that the major motivator for Mikejl was power. Just about every action he took or decision he made was in order to increase his control over something; the current situation, his life, some asset, etc. This idea is no less good than Stewart’s idea and if we’d insisted on understanding it going in, we would have been able to use different stimuli to push and pull Mikejl into the events around him. I should say at this point, Mikejl’s player had a fun time and ended up being embroiled in the story just fine, so this wasn’t a game breaker by any means. It did, however, introduce some rough spots in the plot that Stewart and I had to furiously invent Plan B for.

The Takeaway

The real lesson here is nothing new if you’ve been reading this blog much: Create your PCs with your players so that if you had to, you could step in and play the character in someone else’s game. Somehow, Stewart and I let ourselves loose sight of it, so let this serve as a reminder of how easy it is to get distracted. Especially when you’re almost ready to start and you’re excited to get going, it pays not to rush things and make sure your idea of what’s motivating your PCs is the same as the player’s idea.

Minibosses: A Primer

Most tabletop RPG campaigns are action adventures of some form, which is to say that they involve characters that go places and do stuff, and fighting tends to happen along the way.  This puts them in the fine tradition of action movies and most video games, and as such, they tend to have the same conventions.  Most of those conventions (eg. beating up goons with increasing levels of skill, picking up better weapons and allies along the way, etc) adapt to RPGs very naturally.  Today, we’re going to look at my favorite of those conventions: The Miniboss.

A Miniboss is defined by being:

1. A bad guy
2. Less powerful than the final bad guy
3. More powerful than some random goon
4. Distinct and memorable

There are basically two types of Miniboss: the Lieutenant and the Nemesis.

The Big Bad, Just Smaller

The Lieutenant is a powerful antagonist, one that requires the combined efforts of all of the PCs to defeat.  If we go back to the foundations of the modern fantasy tradition*, the works of the venerable J.R.R. Tolkien, we find the seminal Miniboss, Saruman.  He has his own army of Uruk-Hai to fight the heroes, he is more powerful than any one of them on their own, and the protagonists are forced to defeat him before they can move on to facing Sauron more directly.

The mere existence of Lieutentants gives a story structure.  They are defined by being powerful and crucial to the story, so it is easy to create story elements that deal with defeating them.  If your miniboss is an undead horror ruling over an army at the gates to the malevolent kingdom to the north, then your heroes first task might be to raid an ancient tomb where a weapon capable of defeating him is said to be buried.  Then they have to circumvent his army by passing through the Black Wood – but not before assisting in the defense of that one key castle from the evil armies.  Then, finally, they can sneak into his keep and do battle with him directly.  Only then can they turn their attention to the real threat.  Voila! Instant Plot!

Additionally, Lieutenants make for fun and epic battles without endless combat.  There are basically two ways to create epic battles – either your heroes battle their way through a tremendous number of lower-level baddies (think House of Blue Leaves from Kill Bill volume 1) or they have a fight with someone way better than them.  On the screen, these battles are fairly comparable in time and effort.   Scenes where the protagonists dispatches lots of goons with ease look awesome, as it gives them a chance to be totally badass.  In RPGs, fighting your way through dozens of lower-level baddies means hundreds of die rolls, and instead of feeling awesome, it just means monotonous and anticlimactic die rolls to kill yet another baddie.

The Decoy

There is an interesting variation on the Lieutenant that you see from time to time where they are presented as though they are the Big Bad, but it turns out there is something Bigger and Badder waiting behind them to be defeated.  This is a particularly common trope in video games (good job Mario, but the princess is in another castle), mostly because there is no sense of how long a game is supposed to take, so the player/audience can’t look at their watch and figure out if the end is approaching soon.   In films and books, you see this device more commonly in multi-part stories.  The Lieutenant is defeated at the end of the first installment, and then the real villain gets introduced.  Since I’ve already referenced Tolkien, let’s look at the foundation for Sci-Fi RPGS, Star Wars.  In A New Hope, Darth Vader is clearly presented as the Big Bad.  It isn’t until The Empire Strikes Back that we see the real villain of the story — the Emperor that is giving Vader his orders.

The challenge with Lieutenants is keeping them alive long enough for them to be important.  If Lord of the Rings were a role-playing campaign, when the players were faced with the choice of fighting through the snowy pass or going through Moria they would instead have decided to just sneak into Isengard and kill Saruman in his sleep.  This is why Lieutenants usually have armies of goons standing between them and the players – they provide more opportunities for the players to fail Stealth rolls.  On the other hand, this can also be a strength; if your players are particularly effective at short-circuiting campaigns by circumventing obstacles, Lieutenants become magnets for their ingenuity, giving them meaty problems to solve before they can turn their focus to ruining your plan for how the final boss fight is supposed to go.

Like You, Just Eviller

The other type of miniboss is the Nemesis – a character roughly on the same power level as the PCs who serves as a foil for them.   A good Nemesis has two characteristics: they show up more than once, and the players hate them.   Unlike the Lieutenant, the Nemesis usually survives deep into the story, only to be defeated in the final act right before the Big Bad.

I know that this is somewhat less nerdy than my usual fare, but a terrific example of the Nemesis is the “creepy thin man” (masterfully played by Crispin Glover**) from the first Charlie’s Angels movie.  He’s distinctive and memorable, so the audience/players notice and remember him.  He’s a match for any of the protagonists one-on-one, setting him apart from the usual goons to be dispatched.  Because of his skill, he manages to elude them on several occasions, and the protagonists really despise him.

I really, really like using Nemesis Minibosses in role-playing campaigns.  Powerful adversaries are a good thing, and I’ve found that players really like to have somebody that they can hate.  Lieutenants and Big Bads, by their very nature, tend to be powerful and remote, which makes it difficult for them to inspire disdain.  I mean, they can slaughter families and make their goons commit atrocities and the like, but it’s not the same as if you see them up close.  There is a very visceral feeling associated with finally defeating that annoying bastard that’s been bugging you and kept getting away.

The trick with Nemeses, like the Lieutenants, is keeping them alive.  In order for the Nemesis to be effective, you have to throw them at the PCs early and often, and they have to have ways to escape without the PCs feeling like they are being railroaded.   It’s advisable to give them some skills that make them naturally durable or able to escape at will – or both.

The Dark Image

The most common type of Nemesis is one that is a foil for a specific character in a story.  If Magneto is the Big Bad for an X-Men story, Mystique might act as a Nemesis for the entire team – she is formidable, but not so powerful as to take on the whole team at once (conveniently, she also has a power that gives her the means to escape). Sabretooth, on the other hand, is a Nemesis purely for Wolverine.   The Dark Image Nemesis has very similar skills and attributes to one of the PCs, and should be used to make that PCs life particularly difficult.  The fact that they are so similar to the PC somehow serves to make them that much more annoying for the player, and that much more fun to defeat at the end.

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*Interestingly, Tolkien based his work on Danish and Norse mythology – where Grendel is another terrific example of a Lieutenant Miniboss.  The heroes are brought into the story initially just to dispatch him, and the first third of the Beowulf is devoted to his defeat.  Of course, it turns out that Beowulf is the smaller threat, and that the real Big Bad is his mother.  And then there’s this story about a dragon that’s kind of tacked on at the end to make it a trilogy. 

**I saw Crispin Glover once.  I was standing in line for a movie at the Alamo Drafthouse and he was there to present one of his indie projects.  He is In-Tense.  And short.  I mean really, really short.  It kind of threw me off.  The total effect was this little dude that looked like he could start a fire with his eyes and flip out and cut people ninja-style at any moment.  Just thought I’d share.

Conning Your Players

In talking about the Firefly campaign, Stewart and I ran across something interesting. See, we thought we’d develop a (side?) plot in which the PCs get conned. It seems like the perfect thing to have happen in the setting and like it would present some fun moments. So we got to scheming and quickly discovered that we can’t just run a con on the PCs. Say you were going to run the Fiddle Game on the PCs. In the real world, you just have to convince the maitre’d that the violin is worth a ton and hope that he’s dishonest. He’ll assume he’s had fortuitous luck, perhaps, and get swindled.

In a game, however, if you tried to pull this on the PCs, you’re not letting them hold a violin, it’s a very obvious shopping cart. They’ll immediately ask what it has to do with what’s going on or what it might mean. If they can’t come up with anything, they’re very likely to get suspicious. This is basically because there is no such thing as luck in an RPG (I mean–dice rolls aside, of course). So if you are going to con the PCs, you also have to con the players. Whatever story the con man tells them has to make sense in the universe and has to feel like it’s a reasonable thing for you to have put in front of them. Basically if it doesn’t feel at least like a side quest (“Go bring me 12 were-trout fins.”), then they probably won’t buy it… and then what’re you going to do with all those cheap violins?

Some Examples

In Kjemmen, at one point, the PCs wanted something from an evil priest. Being, you know, evil, he wasn’t going to just let them have it, he was going to give it to them and also screw them over at the same time. The idea was to give them a magical artifact that would make the next step in their plan easier and also act as a homing device in case the priest wanted to kill them later, or whatever. But if you go to ask an evil priest a question and he just says, “Oh, yes. You want to go to the Such-and-Such place and in order to get in, you should use this great bauble that I’m happy to let you just have,” you’d be wise just to flee on the spot.

In order to make it seem less like the trap that it was, Stewart and I had to come up with something for them to do to “earn” the information and accompanying magical trap. However, it needed to feel plausible that the priest would ask some strangers to go do whatever it was for him. If it was too obviously just an errand, it would possibly fly under the radar of someone in real life, but an audience would be able to spot the trap a mile away. The specifics of what we came up with don’t really matter, especially since the PCs wound up doing an end-run around the whole trap thing and turning a few plot points on their ear all at once, but the lesson is, again: In order to con PCs, you have to con the players, too.

Another method is to hide the lie in something that players think of as normal in campaigns. If you wanted them to have some terrible, evil artifact, you could put it in the blacksmith’s shop behind the counter as his prized sword that he’ll never sell and possibly trick the thief character into stealing it. As a real world example, Stewart ran a campaign set in the fantasy old west. Pretty early on, we learned about his creepy old healer lady that lived in the woods outside of town. Being that this is a pretty common trope, it never occurred to us that she would turn out to be an evil, horrifying, mind-controlling witch who was trying to subsume the world in darkness.

Basically any time that an NPC lies to the PCs, in order for the players to buy it, you have to make the lie internally consistent with the world (like a lie in real life) and externally consistent with how stories are told. If What Appears To Be Going On isn’t roughly as believable a story plot as What’s Really Going On, then your red herring just won’t be followed. The players have to summarize the story they’re being fed in their head and be able to imagine you sitting down, having this idea for the game and thinking, “Yes. This is a good idea and will be fun.”

Finding the Heart of Your Campaign

Much like any other creative endeavor, there are a lot of things that you have to get right to make a good campaign. You need good players who are both reliable and engaged. Those players need to be playing characters that they find challenging and fun. You need a setting and a story that gives those characters something cool to do.  And as a GM, you have to be prepared and on your game. You have to keep the action moving, keep all of the NPCs and details straight, and set the tone.

If you do all of those things, you’re going to have a good and enjoyable campaign. But even if you accomplish all of them, is doesn’t guarantee you a great campaign. You know that it was a great campaign when people are reminiscing years later about their characters and those awesome things that they did. Part of that is that the GM did a good job of maximizing rockmost – they made decisions and created situations that enabled fun things to happen. But there’s more to it then that. A really great campaign has a heart. The heart of the campaign is the overriding theme, the thing that gives it continuity and makes it feel like more than just a series of events.

Examples of Success

In Ver Jattick, one of the campaigns that Dann ran, the heart of the story was its history. The setting was one that he had played in years before with his friends. For our campaign, he moved the setting forward a few hundred years, so that the actions of his old players were now history and legend. When he described the city, it sounded like an old local giving directions: “Well you go up to Old Barney’s place, and turn right. Then you turn left where that barn used to be before it burned down.”

By itself, that history would have been a cool feature, and would have made the setting more interesting. But the thing that made it better, that took that history and made it the heart of the campaign, is that it pervaded everything. The characters all had dark pasts that tied them somehow to the larger story. The larger story involved uncovering atrocities that happened thousands of years ago. Some of the characters that were PCs in the old campaigns were still alive, though transformed by the years. The history of the place was inescapable. Consequently, when the story reached its epic conclusion, we felt as though the things that we were doing mattered. We felt like we were writing a new chapter in the history of Ver Jattick, and that our actions would determine the fate of generations to come.

In Kjemmen, the campaign that Ben is currently bringing to completion, the heart of the campaign is the feeling of deceit and immorality that pervades the setting. It’s a city built around the corpse of a fallen god of death, run by dark priests and warring nobility that more closely resemble mob bosses than refined lords and ladies.   Every person in Kjemmen has a vice; no one is pure, everyone can be bought and no one can be trusted. There are no good guys, just some people that are less bad than others.

Ben did a terrific job of making this feel real for the players. He gave the NPCs believable vices, and let them be revealed without being too obvious about it. The players were betrayed on all sides, and learned the hard way that no one could be trusted. In time, they internalized this feeling, betraying and distrusting one another. In most cases, having a pervasive aura of evil and distrust between the players would be a bad thing, but in this case it was a terrific success.

The heart of the story doesn’t have to be an abstract idea. I ran a fantasy campaign a few years ago in a setting called Bakad. The original seed for the campaign was that I wanted to try a world with unusual fantasy races and no humans. The whole story took place in and around a single city, and that city was ruled by an undying vampire named Toruf-Tar. I always felt like that campaign was kind of a failure. I had two threads in mind for the story, and I totally screwed one of them up and ended up dropping it. The final battle at the end mostly had the PCs standing around and watching while other people did things that were important.  My players, on the other hand, loved it, and I’ve never really understood why.

I think it might have been that I accidentally gave the campaign a heart, and that heart was the vampire mayor. From the beginning, he had a certain badass mystique about him, and the players were always excited when the story involved him or one of his two vampire lieutenants. The branch of the story that I didn’t abandon, and that I originally thought was the less important one, was about one of his former vampire lieutenants that had betrayed him and was thought dead.  As that story became more and more central, the campaign became more fun. In hindsight, it was obvious. Toruf-Tar was the heart of my campaign. He was what it was about, whether I recognized it or not. As events moved closer to that heart, they felt more significant and more fun.

An Illustrative Failure

A few years ago I ran a Fantasy/Old West campaign. The idea was to make it feel as real-world as possible, but with the addition of magic and fantasy races as stand-ins for the old west tropes. The Dwarves were the train engineers and barkeeps, the elves were the city folk from back east, he emancipation proclamation freed the orcs from slavery, the centaurs were the Native Americans, and so on. The campaign story was about a large, secretive construction project outside of town that was supposed to be an aqueduct but was really a cover for a secret gold mine. Oh, and the miners were being being tricked into unearthing an ancient hidden city full of terrifying monsters. The setting was cool, and the characters were great, but the story was weak. In hindsight, it just kind of felt tacked on.

The reason that the story was weak was that it had nothing to do with what made the setting interesting. The most compelling aspects of the setting were the racial and class politics represented and enhanced by the fantasy races. Not surprisingly, a lot of the best moments in the campaign came from scenes where that theme was central. If I could go back and do it all over again, I would try to find a way to make the story be about that instead.

Lessons

For me, the lesson going forward is to add another criteria to the list of things necessary for a good campaign. Before play begins, I need to figure out what makes my campaign setting special. Then I need to make that a theme for the whole campaign, and come up with a story that emphasizes that theme. If I can’t find a theme, a heart, for my campaign, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Secondly, once I’ve found that theme, it should become a guiding principle going forward. In the same way that, when faced with a choice between two options I should be asking myself “What rocks most?” I should look at every major decision through the lens of the overriding theme, and make sure that I’m not straying too far off course.  If I can accomplish that, I can hopefully turn a good campaign into a great one.

Scene Construction

SPOILER WARNING: I’m going to make some references to the plot of the movie Serenity below. Continue at your own peril.

In recent planning of my upcoming campaign set in the Firefly universe, Stewart and I realized that we had a scene that needed to happen pretty early on in the campaign, but we weren’t sure what shape it should take. To clarify, when I say “scene” in this case, I’m using it in the sense of, “A scene where the PCs learn about the ruins outside of town.” or “…where the Big Bad’s henchman makes his first appearance.” Knowing that something like that needs to happen still gives you tons of leeway in how it happens and that’s what I’m going to discuss today.

In our case, the thing we were worried about was Reavers. Basically, Stewart and I feel like Reavers have Been Done. They were pretty central to the movie and as space boogey-men go, they’re sort of played. So we’re removing them from the universe. Not in a meta-game, retcon kind of way, but in that the Alliance went and cleaned them all out after having gotten egg on their face. We wanted to convey this to the players in an in-game way, rather than just say it once before we got started. So we need a scene where the players learn that Reavers are over.

The First Idea

Our initial idea was to have them overhear someone using Reavers as an excuse; sort of like the dog ate my illegal cargo. We envisioned a scene where they go to meet Badger or some equivalent and see him finishing up with a previous meeting during which the hapless NPC captain says something like, “B-b-but we was attacked by Reavers!” and then for Badger to say, “Oh. Sure. Everyone’s attacked by Reavers these days. They must be slipping, though. Their victims’ mortality rates are suffering greatly. No, you prat! Everyone knows the Alliance cleared them all out months ago! You’re just late with your cargo and you’ve broken our agreement.” That conveys the information, certainly, and it’s passable, but as it was our first idea, we kept going.

The Cliche

The next idea was that cliched scene from all movies where you cut in and catch the tail end of a news report. I imagined the anchor saying something like, “–enate’s Private Security Liaison Office has announced that the government sponsored bounty on Reavers has been rescinded citing the fact that there have been no confirmed Reaver sightings in over a year.” That’s a bit more concise, but that is the only thing it’s got going for it. The first problem, and this is a big one, is that the news is going to be immediately untrustworthy to PCs in this setting. They’ll assume the station is an Alliance mouth piece and it might actually convey that Reavers have not been cleaned out.

Secondly, and this is a failing of the first idea as well, it is a major shopping cart. If you tell the players about something they’ve overheard, it’s almost as big a signal as a prop that this thing is Important and probably a Clue. They will likely perceive it as you going out of your way to make sure they heard something. If it is a clue and important and you want to make sure they know it, then maybe that’s a good tactic. In our case, we don’t want to give them that red herring. We want them to know it and not be distracted by knowing it.

The Actual Idea

We circled back to the idea of a contact and using Reavers as an excuse, but with a twist. See, one way you can slip in information without drawing attention to it (especially valuable for this sort of flavory, setting-establishing information) is to directly engage the PCs about it. Or, rather, bring it up in a conversation with the PCs. Now I’m envisioning a scene where the PCs come to Badger at the completion of a job and are late (or are simply accused of being late) and he says something like, “And what’s your excuse, eh? Wait. Let me guess. You were asked by a passing Alliance patrol to take some emergency medical supplies to Whitefall and, noble souls that you are, you couldn’t decline. Nono! It was Reavers. Were you attacked by Reavers? The last ship of Reavers, which has been pluckily dodging Alliance patrols and bounty hunters for months now came out of hiding to find you. Luckily, you escaped with your lives and managed to lose them before coming here or, clearly, we’d all be in very, very bad danger.”

This is hopefully elaborate enough (and we’d see if I could keep up his accent at the table for that long of a stretch) that it would embed the information in the players’ minds. Also, because we’ve directly engaged the players on the topic, they’ll feel more tied to the exchange than if they merely overheard it. Further, since Badger’s a snotty guy and his goal in this speech is to heap derision on the PCs there’s less chance that they’d get distracted into thinking that Reavers were some sort of plot thing. The more likely case, I’d think, would be that they’d start to think Badger being a jerk was a plot thing. What I’m saying is, the information feels just like flavor, as it should. It would also be at least a little funny.

Of Capes and Guns

Once upon a time, I was really into comic books.  I know, shocking right? In fact, the way that I really got into RPGs wasn’t D&D (though it was the first thing that I played), it was the Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game.  For those of you who haven’t played it, it has most of the standard components for RPGs – characters had attributes, powers, and skills and they gained experience* that they could use to improve their abilities.  One of the things that made the game really fun was that the combat system did a great job of simulating the phenomenon of super-strong characters clobbering each other and emerging unscathed.  They had terrific maps of city areas where you could stage battles, and it was not at all uncommon for a character to get knocked off of a building, go through another building, fall 20 stories and then get up and come back for more.

As I got older, I became more of a fan of the little guy.  Thor was cool and all, but he was a pansy compared to Daredevil.  So I tried to use the same rules system to play grittier stories, with heroes fighting thugs with guns instead of aliens with forcefields.  It fell flat.   Why?  Guns.

“God created man, Sam Colt made them equal.”

Guns are a big problem.  They’re cheap, they’re easy to use, and they are way more effective than most superpowers.  In the comics, characters only get shot when it helps to move the story.  Every other time, the bad guys miss, or the protagonist dodges.  In the Marvel System, guns were assumed to be largely ineffectual.  Daredevil could eat a couple of bullets and shrug it off.  This means that in order to make common street toughs seem dangerous, they needed to be carrying blaster guns and the like – which breaks the gritty, street-level tone that we’re striving for.

So then you decide that you’re willing to change rules systems to get that gritty, 3-color comic feel.   You pick up a system where guns and their damage are more realistically modeled.  Now you have a new problem: dead player characters.  Unless your characters are actually bulletproof, a fight with a few armed thugs is going to be lethal.

Let’s say that you’re playing Daredevil, or even my personal favorite, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.  He’s agile enough to dodge bullets, and he has a nifty spider-sense to make sure that nobody gets the drop on him.  He’s in a fight with a few thugs – let’s say three.  He’s in a dark alley somewhere and he’s rescued that poor lady who was being mugged, and now it’s time to deal with the bad guys.  He spins a web at them, and they point their guns and shoot at him.

A full automatic pistol can fire about three rounds in a second.  So three thugs times three shots gives us nine rounds fired.  Let’s say that our thugs aren’t all that good with their guns, and only four of the nine shots are on target.  Let’s also posit that Spider-Man is agile enough to dodge the bullets 90% of the time.  So, his chances of dodging all four bullets is 0.9^4, or about 66%.  This means that 1 in 3 times, Spidey gets shot.  Those aren’t very good odds for our favorite web-head.

Now hold on a second.  People play realistic campaigns that use guns all the time, right?  And those characters aren’t dying left and right, so something has to be wrong here.  The difference is that in realistic campaigns that use guns, people use different tactics.  They take cover.  They provide covering fire.  They wear body armor.  Most importantly, they use guns themselves, putting truth to the saying that the best defense is a good offense.  In a truly realistic campaign, you should only be rolling to dodge a bullet when everything else has failed.

So what does this mean for our hopes of a gritty, realistic campaign using superheroes?  Well, it depends on what and how much you are willing to compromise.  If the thing that’s important to you is feats of acrobatics and martial prowess overcoming armed men, you’re going to have to use a rules system that tones down the lethality.

If you’re most interested in a realistic setting that happens to have superheroes in it, then you either need to make sure that all of your player characters can survive getting shot several times and shrug it off or you have to accept that they are going to look like SWAT teams with capes.  That’s the problem with realistic campaigns.  The realism tends to get in the way of the fun.

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*The experience system in the Marvel system actually rewarded karma points instead of experience.  This system was particularly clever, as you could lose karma for doing evil things (including leaving bad guys to die), so there was an incentive for the players heroically.  This did a lot to preserve the comic book feel of the game.  Also, you were allowed to spend karma to affect critical die rolls.  I think that this is cool in theory, as you could choose to sacrifice character progression for the sake of the story, but in practice it removed a lot of the drama.  A lot of the suspense is removed when you know that you can ensure that you can’t fail that one critical roll.  That’s why I’m a fan of killing your PCs.

 

Why GURPS is Good

A few weeks ago I talked about why game systems that are closely tied to specific settings can limit the options for players and GMs. Implicit in that is that I have a preference for rules systems that are more universal. In particular, I’m a big fan of GURPS (Generic Universal Role-Playing System). This isn’t meant to be a critique of the other universal rules systems; I haven’t played them enough to criticize them. But I did want to point out some of the things that GURPS does right, and why I think they are important. If you’re not familiar with the GURPS system, you may be interested in looking at GURPS Lite, a free and downloadable abridged version of the rules.

The Character Creation System

This is, far and away, my favorite thing about GURPS. GURPS works on a point-based system, where a player purchases the various attributes, advantages, and skills that make up their character. Additionally, they can choose to acquire disadvantages that will give them more points. As characters progress, the GM can choose to give them more points that they can put into their character. There are no XP and no levels, just points.

There are no classes or limitations on what skills a player may take, so there’s nothing stopping a thief from wielding a broadsword, or a barbarian from learning how to pick a lock. There are templates and examples of typical character archetypes provided, but in my experience they are more of a hindrance than a help once you get familiar with the system.

The thing that I love about this system is that it frees the GM and the players to create any type of character that they find interesting. If you want to play a WW2 fighter ace who worked as a chemist before he joined the war, GURPS can do that. If you want to play a sentient goat with psychic powers, GURPS can do that. And if you want to play a plain old fighter with a big sword, well of course it can do that too. In addition to expanding the options available to players, this also encourages them to build well-rounded characters. Giving a savage warrior a gift for music can add some depth to a character, and the player is more likely to do it if they aren’t being penalized for taking a cross-class skill.

I also really like the system of rewarding players for taking on disadvantages, as the best characters are defined by their weaknesses more than their strengths. Players, particularly during the character-creation process, will usually want to make their character as powerful as possible (because playing a character that’s bad at things isn’t fun). By providing them an incentive to take on disadvantages, the system encourages them to make characters that will be more rewarding to play.

There is, of course, a drawback to all of this flexibility. It is possible to create characters that are overly specialized and narrow in their focus. It is just as possible to make a character that has a wide variety of skills, but isn’t actually good enough at any one thing to stand out. Also, some skills and advantages are more effective than others. This means that it’s possible to create a character that, while having the same number of points as his peers, is considerably less effective. This is why the templates and examples are provided, and why people who are new to the system should be encourage to use them. A master craftsman uses sharp tools.

It Feels Real

GURPS is supposed to be able to handle pretty much any kind of character or campaign, in pretty much any setting. To accomplish this, they’ve created a set of base rules that models reality as much as possible. The best way to accomplish this is to try and model reality as best as possible, and then allow for modifications on the baseline.

Die Rolls

Rolls to see if something happens are determined by rolling 3 six-sided dice and summing the results. If the roll is under your character’s skill or relevant attribute, they succeed (which somewhat counterintuitively means that you want low rolls). This creates a crude bell curve, where a 3 is the lowest possible roll, and an 18 is the highest. Much like a d20-based system, the chances of rolling 10 or less is 50%. But the chances of rolling a 12 or under are almost 75%. And the chances of rolling a 3 or an 18 are both about 0.5%. This means that astronomical successes or failures are unlikely, and a character with reasonable levels in a skill can count on it to succeed most of the time. It also means that the best possible die roll comes up 1 time in 200, instead of 1 time in 20. On the one hand, there are fewer “did you see that!” moments. On the other hand, the ones that come up are even more significant. More importantly to me, fluke failures occur very rarely, so a character who invests in having a high skill in something that rely on it succeeding most of the time.

Mad Skillz

Speaking of skills, I really like the way that they handle them. Each skill has a difficulty associated with it, and that difficulty determines how much it costs per point to improve it. So learning to fight with a knife is easier than a flail, for instance. Also, skills are based on attributes. This means that if a smart character and an average character spend the same amount of time (represented by the number of points) studying math, the smart character is better at it.

They also account for learning curves – the first level of a skill costs one point, the second one costs two, the third costs 4 (and each one above that costs 4 more). This somewhat realistically represents the way that people learn. If you take an intro to Karate class, you are going to improve significantly in your first 6 months of study. You go from zero to decent. If you study for another year, you will continue to get noticeably better. After that, it takes a lot of time and effort to make noticeable improvement.  Thie fact that a small investment creates a significant improvement incentivizes players to put a few points into skills outside of their core strengths.  If your barbarian puts a points or two into stealth or fast-talk, it can really open up their options during play.

Lastly, GURPS has default rules to handle a situation where a character doesn’t have the skill that is required. If, for instance, your character is forced to use a shield to defend themselves even though they have no experience with shields, they get a default score of their dexterity minus four. This means that while they’re not really experienced with it, and probably won’t be very good at it, they can still make an attempt. This also does a good job of modeling reality when it comes to people with remarkable natural gifts (which describes many RPG characters). Even though I bowled in a league for several years, it was not uncommon for people who have never bowled before to beat me. Why? I’m a klutz, and they are naturally dextrous. In spite of the penalties that they incur by not having put points into Games(Bowling), their default skill is still higher than my skill that I’ve put points into. It sucks for me, but it demonstrates why the model is a good one.

The Trouble with World-Based Game Systems

As a general rule, Ben and I have tended to stay platform-neutral in our posts. We’re less interested in what rules people use for their campaigns and more interested in how they craft them. I do, however, believe that certain rules systems constrict or expand the options available to players and GMs in ways that subtly influence the choices they make. I especially feel like this happens in game systems where the rules are tightly interwoven with the setting.

The Sapir-Whorf Theory of Game Systems

The Sapir-Whorf theory in linguistics, or at least the way that it has come to be popularly understood, is that language is the framework of thought, and that if a language lacks a word for a concept, it is more difficult for someone who thinks in that language to conceive and manipulate that concept. Similarly, if a language has numerous words with subtle distinctions for a similar idea, then a speaker/thinker of that language will be more adept at using that concept. The common (though unfortunately untrue) adage for this is “eskimos have thirty words for snow.” The implication is that different types of snow matter for them, and that their expanded vocabulary on the topic gives them the ability to speak (and therefore think) very quickly and precisely about complicated snow-related topics.

The flip side of this is the isolated tribe with no word for war. They don’t have the word because they don’t have the concept. This doesn’t mean that they couldn’t invent or come up with the concept. If they have an idea of two people fighting, or 5 people fighting, it is possible to envision five thousand people fighting. They could probably also come up with the idea of strategy, of feints and ambushes and flanking. But because they lack words for these things, they would speak and think about them cumbersomely. This is why people use jargon – it speeds and simplifies the ability to discuss complicated concepts. As their language expands to include new concepts, their ability to use those concepts also expands.

Like language is the framework of thought, game systems are the framework of the play experience; which one a group chooses to use can similarly empower or impede them.

Wizards Can’t Use Swords*

The most common place where we see this limiting effect is in the character generating process. Many game systems, particularly the ones that are tied to a specific setting, start by having the player select a few broad characteristics for their character. In Dungeons & Dragons, this is your character’s race and class. In Vampire, it’s their clan. In Shadowrun, it’s their race and archetype. You get the idea. Then, having selected these things, the character is granted certain strengths and weaknesses, and a pool of skills to choose from.

This is a common practice because it works. For one, it significantly speeds up the character creation process. It also does a good job of balancing the power levels of different players, preventing Scotty McMinmaxer from making a character with a grab bag of the most powerful skills from each class. Lastly, it ensures that the characters will have skills and abilities that are useful in most campaigns in that setting. These archetypes are tried and true, and there are good reasons to lead people towards them.

This sort of approach, however, can be stifling to creativity when it comes to character creation. It leads, perhaps even encourages, players to start their character concept by saying “I want to play a Dwarven Illusionist,” rather than “I want to play a character with a tragic past and a mean streak.” In a dungeon-crawling hack-and-slash campaign, it might be rewarding to play an archaeologist (that happens to know magic or swordplay or whatever) who studies ancient ruins and marvels at the architecture while the other players loot the treasure. But that occupation doesn’t show up on the list of classes, so people are unlikely consider it as an option.

I Don’t Have a Chapter Here for Spaceships

So let’s say that you are a new GM and your game group wants to play a campaign in a fantasy/space opera/cyberpunk/modern day setting. So you go to the store and you buy a system that is customized for such a setting. After a few sessions, you and your players have figured out the rules. After a few sessions, your players have decided what sort of characters they like. And by the end of that campaign, you’ve probably found your style as a GM.

Everyone had a good time, so it’s time to play the next campaign. What are you going to play? Chances are, it will be another campaign in the same milieu as the first. There are are a couple of reasons for this: Firstly, your players were interested in that milieu to begin with, and they had a good time, so it’s not shocking that they might want to do it again. The other reason isn’t quite as positive. For the vast majority of gamers, learning the rules is not the fun part, it’s the thing that you have to do to get to the fun part. So once they’ve learned a particular set of rules, they’re going to be averse to learning another one. If that set of rules is tightly coupled to a particular setting or genre, then that implicitly limits the group to playing that type of game.

When the group gets bored with their current genre and wants to try something new, they then have to learn another set of rules, and it is easy for people to associate the discomfort and disjointed play of learning new rules with the setting. In my opinion, this is why it is so common to hear somebody say “Yeah, I’ve been playing [setting-specific game system X] for years. I tried [other game system Y] once, but I just didn’t like it.”

Roll a d….26?

The other problem with world-based systems is that they tend to be opaque systems.  This is to say that they are optimized for making setting-specific tasks easy and flavorful, and not for letting GMs see how the sausage was made. There might be one set of rules for casting a spell, and a completely different set of rules for picking locks or shooting a gun, for instance.  The problem is that, inevitably, the GM will be faced with a situation that the rules just don’t cover.  In a system with a consistent and transparent set of rules for all/most situations, this isn’t so hard.  You come up with some sort of skill or default and an appropriate penalty, and you move on.  In opaque systems, this is more difficult.  At the core, the process is the same — the GM is deciding some way to handle it that is slightly outside the rules as written.  They are using judgment to decide how hard that thing should be, and they’re making a call as to how to handle it.  The problem is that if it takes too long it breaks the player experience.

Part of the reason that those first few session with a new rules system are so annoying is that the rules get in the way of getting immersed in the play experience.  When both the GM and the players are well-acquainted with the rules, they become natural and secondhand.  They fade into the background and people cease to really think about them.  Whenever the GM has to bust out the rule book and figure out how something works (otherwise known as every time that grappling occurs), the immersion is broken, and people are reminded that they are sitting around a table playing a game.  If the GM can say, “I don’t have anything for that. Uh…Roll skill and skill.” that’s not too disruptive. If, however, he has to pause the action to debate which of several disparate special-case rules to model his spur-of-the-moment house rule on, it’s going to be impossible for the players to stay in the flow.

Opaque systems also make custom character traits more difficult.  If your game system makes characters pay points for skills or abilities, or awards them benefits for taking on disadvantages, it is common for a player to want a skill or attribute that isn’t listed in the book.  Generic systems, because they have to be flexible to handle any sort of situation, usually provide guidelines for how to create new character attributes and cost them in a balanced way.  World-based systems, which are optimized for a particular setting, streamline the process by obfuscating how things are costed.  This makes life slightly more difficult for the GM, and can lead to good ideas being left unused because they’re not in the book.

Generic Systems are Hard

So if world-based systems are so constricting, why do people use them?  Because they’re quick, and they’re easy.  A system of rules that can accommodate combat using any sort of weapon from any time period is going to be more complex than one that only worries about swords and bows.  Creating characters is faster and easier if the book can guide you through the process and give you a small set of options to choose from.  My GMing style lends itself to discrete campaigns with a beginning and ending, and I like to change the setting dramatically from one campaign to the next to keep things fresh.  I also really enjoy non-traditional characters.  I think that it is more rewarding for the player to invent a character that intrigues them in a setting and then figure out how to make it work than it is to hand them a list of occupations to choose from.  So for me, the extra investment of learning a generic system is well worth it.  I wouldn’t judge someone for limiting their options by playing a setting-specific system as long as it is meeting their needs.  As always, the important thing is to make sure that you and your players are having as much fun as possible.

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*Except Gandalf.

Accidental Awesomness

My current campaign, Kjemmen, is drawing near completion. As such, I’ve been talking more and more with Stewart about the next one, which will be set in the Firefly universe. One of the players who’s slated to join us for that one has been pretty proactive in wanting to talk about his character, etc. We’d been talking over one detail of his character that just wasn’t fitting right. It has to do with a secret, so I’m going to have to be vague, for which I apologize.

Basically, we were working one angle of this idea over and over and none of us were happy with it at any stage. On a whim, I suggested something else, more as a way to jog us out of what I was worried had become a mental rut. But it turns out that the player had some personal experience related to my idea and felt he could bring that to the table in a creative way. Major win, there. The thing is… I had no idea ahead of time that that idea would be any good. I was just spouting off randomly.

It made me reflect on several things to do with Kjemmen and I realized that a lot of Stewart’s and my best ideas are actually totally accidental. On the one hand, I think it underscores the importance of brainstorming and not worrying if an idea is actually good before you say it (I have a really poor brain-mouth filter, so this is particularly easy for me, personally). On the other hand, I think it implies that there’s a skill to identifying those good ideas when you happen across them, which is something I think you can practice and intentionally improve.

I’ve written before about how your players will create awesome situations and that you should try to identify those and run with them. This recent thought is sort of a super-set of that. As another Kjemmen example, let me tell you about Parchak. When Stewart and I were making up NPCs, we had our work cut out for us: We have 15 noble houses each of which needed a minimum of a paragraph about the head, but 5 of which needed pretty robust NPC lists from advisor to scullery maid. So after getting the most important NPCs down, we got to the point where we just wanted to have one thing that set this NPC apart from any other person in their job.

For Parchak, the advisor of one of the city’s houses, we decided he should be from far away Chementol. Then we realized we’d already used that one. So… what if he were a spy from the church in Chementol (whose god killed the god of the Kjemmic churches)? It seemed reasonable to us and so we moved on entirely expecting that not to ever come up.

Almost a year later, some events occurred in the campaign and the PCs were going to need a Kjemmic priest to do them a favor, which, of course, means he wants them to do something for him first. Parchak came to mind; it seemed reasonable that he knew there was a Chementoli spy in Kjemmen, but not know who he was. He set the PCs on the spy’s trail and told them to kidnap him and bring him back. At this point the PCs were in a pretty rough spot (you know the part of the movie where it seems like everything’s falling apart and the protagonists are doomed) and were looking for pretty much any ally in their goal of stopping the evil Kjemmic god from coming back to life and “bringing death to the world”, but had managed to make enemies of pretty much every powerful person in the city.

When we set them on Parchak’s trail, we never expected that, instead of kidnapping him to curry favor with the priest, they would befriend him. They told him about how they’d been hired to kidnap him and warned him of a plot against him and told him about how his church’s ancient enemy was about to return. They had managed, much to our surprise, to find and befriend the one person in the entire city who had a moral impulse to help them out.

When we started talking through the implications, we realized that Parchak would probably get in touch with the home office and basically call in the cavalry from Chementol. It also made sense for him to put the PCs in touch with some of his local resources for acquiring useful equipment. This drastically changed the situation the PCs were in as well as the path of the campaign as a whole.

None of this would ever have happened if we hadn’t invented this no-one character, Parchak and his throw-away fact for differentiation when we were fleshing out NPCs for the various Houses. There are two key points I want to draw your attention to from this story: It’s okay to spend time on details that will probably not matter. That is only a probability, not a certainty. You never know how players’ actions will change the focus of things. Also, the campaign world feels much more real if apparently throw-away characters have some depth, or a least a seed you can build on if you have to make something up on the fly.

The second is that it’s important to remember you’ve got those characters in your pocket and to keep your eye out for an opportunity to use them. Or, rather, for when circumstances need exactly that thing. Identifying those moments when the current situation would be much more awesome (or even just feel more natural) if you pulled something flagged as “unimportant detail” into the spot light can be tricky, but it can have a significant impact on the feel of your game world and your players’ perception of it’s realness.