Category: Advice/Tools

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RPG Tools: A PDF Reader

Since so many RPG products now come in the form of a PDF, wouldn’t it be nice to have a PDF reader that wasn’t a pig?  PDF X-Change Viewer is a free Windows app that is lightning fast compared to Adobe’s reader.  The Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition PDF opens nearly instantly and pages refresh in a flash.  Not only that, but you can annotate it, so the House Rules I was talking about earlier are now recorded in my copy of the PDF.  When you install it by default it makes itself the system PDF reader and replaces the Firefox plugin;  I really appreciate how much faster it loads a PDF there.  There’s also a portable version, suitable for carrying around and running from a USB flash drive.

PDF Viewer – Software To Open A PDF File – PDF Editing Software

Those wishing to view PDF files on their Windows PC’s now have a choice when it comes to Viewing PDF files – the PDF-XChange Viewer is smaller, faster and more feature rich than the Adobe Reader which has until now been the Reader of choice for PDF files – we think that’s about to change !

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Shields and Spears in Savage Worlds

I’ve finally decided to add some house rules to Savage Worlds.  Up until now I’ve been adding setting-specific stuff (various Edges, Races, and so forth), but I’ve been pretty careful not to override any of the core rules because I wanted to have a solid grasp on them before I tinkered.  One of the first pieces of advice the folks on the Savage Worlds forum give is resist the urge to tinker with stuff until you’ve played it enough to see how it works; there are a bunch of things that are slightly different in Savage Worlds than people are used to, and it’s not always clear to a new player how the pieces interact.

I think I’ve gotten beyond that now, and have a decent grasp of the system and philosophy, even if I can’t count myself as an expert, and there are a couple things that I don’t think Savage Worlds handles well even on its own terms.  Chief among these are its treatment of shields and spears.

In Savage Worlds, Shields grant +1-3 to the character’s Parry score (melee defense), but only to the front and right side of the character.  That’s intuitive enough, until you realize that it’s the only place in all the rules that facing matters.  In Savage Worlds there’s no bonus for attacking from behind or the side.  Even if you’re partially surrounded, while the attackers gain a Gang Up bonus (+1 for every attacker over 1, to a maximum of +4), no particular attacker has any extra advantage based on your facing.  In every other case, SW abstracts away facing.  It’s built on the assumption that combatants are naturally moving around, spinning, jockeying for position, even circling each other during combat and that turns are long enough (6 seconds) that there’s no one single way that you’re facing during the turn.  This is even mentioned explicitly in the rules that deal with firing into melee: you stand a chance of hitting a friendly character because even though they may be visibly just standing there in separate squares on the battle mat in the game-world they’re presumed to be moving around erratically.  Even bearing that in mind, it might be worth breaking the abstraction in cases where it’s really likely to matter, and to increase the tactical possibilities…except that every other weapon that grants a Parry bonus (such as Rapier or Spear) does so all around.  There’s no more reason that a fellow armed with a Rapier can defend himself better against attacks from the rear than someone with a Shield, but that’s how the rules have it.

So, first House Rule:

Shields apply their bonus regardless of facing, just like other weapons.  The Gang Up bonus is what represents being flanked or attacked in such a way that you cannot defend as effectively in all directions.

Spears in Savage Worlds are also a bit odd.  They are universally a Two-Handed weapon, that grants +1 Parry and Reach. Reach means they can attack foes up to 2 yards away (1″ game scale).  There’s nothing particularly wrong about that, but historically many if not most spears were 1-handed weapons used in conjunction with a shield.  I’m also not entirely sure why the +1 Parry, unless it’s just the extra length of the weapon making it harder to press home an attack.  Most settings, including pulp settings with primitive tribesmen, are going to need a 1-Handed version of a spear.  You could say that such a weapon has no extra Reach, while retaining the +1 Parry, but that doesn’t really match up with how they were regarded historically (and would ruin the Greek hoplite tactic of being able to have the second rank or even third rank of soldiers able to attack foes that close with the front of the phalanx). The Core Rules 2-Handed Spear is also capable of being thrown, which is silly.  Here’s a nice set of pictures of guys with spears and shields, including both one-handed and two-handed spears.

So, the second House Rule:

Spear (1-Handed) STR+d6  Weight 3  Cost 50  Reach 1  Range 3/6/12  ROF 1  Min STR d6

Spear (2-Handed) STR+d6 Weight 5 Cost 100 Reach 1, Parry +1, two hands, may not be thrown.

Sling Shield –   Weight 12  Cost 50  +2 Armor to ranged shots that hit, +1 Armor to non-ranged attacks if and only if fighting in phalanx (defenders to either side, attackers only on one side), can be slung from the shoulder so that it can be used in conjunction with 2-handed spears (as was the practice of Macedonian phalanx)

Finally, there’s the interaction of Reach weapons and Close Combat in Savage Worlds.  According to the rule “Withdrawing from Close Combat”, if you leave melee then adjacent characters get a free attack on you.  This is a pretty standard kind of “parting shot” rule to keep turn-based movement from having odd effects that allow a character to run up, attack, and run away while the defender just stands there helpless.  Unfortunately, while the rule is about “Withdrawing from Close Combat” technically the body of the rule refers to “leaving melee”–the rules lawyers have seized upon this to argue (successfully as far as the official interpretation) that if you have a Reach weapon and stop being adjacent you are still in melee and don’t attract a free attack.  But if you move more than the reach of your weapon away, then you have left melee, and even though you’re no longer adjacent, the opponent gets the free attack.  This results in people armed with spears, or worse, pikes, having more options about where they can move during a battle than anybody else.  This seems to run directly counter to spears and pikes in history and fiction, and promotes unusual tactics like having your double row of spear men close with the enemy (both rows getting their attacks in because of Reach) and then disengaging and stepping 2 yards back (nobody suffering a free attack, because the front row is still in Reach and the back row was never adjacent) so that if any of them have First Strike they get another set of attacks when the opponents close in again.  Clint, the official rules guy, says that yeah, they can do that, but they won’t be able to do it in battle twice, because who would close with them, so why worry?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe because the spear phalanx can serve as a screen for archers?

Anyway, before I start frothing about the kind of Talmudic pilpul that sometimes goes on around the Fast! Furious! Fun! rules of Savage Worlds, here’s my third house rule:

Withdrawing from Close Combat means withdrawing from Close Combat.  As soon as you are no longer adjacent to an unshaken opponent that you were fighting, the opponent gets a free attack even if you’re still within the reach of your own weapon.  You are counted as fighting an opponent (and not just dashing past) if either a) you make any kind of attack in passing so as to attract his attention, or b) the opponent is otherwise unengaged and not surprised.

The last bit is to cover whether you can run past an entire line of foes without any consequences just because it’s your initiative.  There are those who maintain that as long as you didn’t make a Fighting roll against one of the foes, you weren’t technically in combat with them, so you can charge through without any problem.  There are times, particularly for Pulp adventure, where that even makes sense.  Certainly if they’re busy fighting someone else, they may not have attention to spare.  On the other hand, if you were fighting them, no matter how many other foes they are engaged with, they always have time and attention to spare to get a free attack.  That’s because it’s part of the abstraction that you’re not accounting for every blow, and even though it may not be their initiative they’re not standing there like logs while you do whatever you wish.  So in my opinion, running a gauntlet of armed opponents is not something you should attempt unless they’re distracted.  If you want a good chance of trying this, try tricking them first, or wait for them to be fighting somebody else.  And don’t try to tell me that by throwing something or shooting one of them with a pistol as you pass you’re not fighting them because it wasn’t a “Fighting” roll.

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Listen Now!

Since all the cool kids are doing it (see below), and I actually have a blind friend who might someday stumble across this blog even though he’s not much of a roleplayer, I’ve added Odiogo’s text-to-speech reader to the blog.

Stargazer’s World » Listen to this blog!

Odiogo is a service that provides an audio version of your regular feed. The text-to-speech technology used is quite decent, so it turns your RSS feed almost into a podcast. You can also subscribe to this podcast using iTunes, so your readers can listen to your posts while commuting to work for example.

I’m still not jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.  No sir.

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Adventures in Arithmetic

Or: Why D&D 3.5 is no fun.

I love my friend Russell like a brother, and I’ll gladly play any game that he wants to GM, but I’m so looking forward to him switching systems some time in the near future as he’s planning to do.  As long as we’re not in combat, the game and setting are entertaining as all get-out, but as soon as we roll init…ugh.  There’s just no part of “You rolled a 13, plus 11 for your Attack Bonus, plus 1 for the prayer, minus 5 for the Combat Expertise, minus 5 for it being your second attack is 15…you hit!” that’s exciting.  It’s possible that if we played every week, instead of about once a month for half a year, that we’d get so used to the system–or learn to take notes that pre-figure all the standard options we usually choose in battle–that it would be mercifully quick.   But it still wouldn’t be very exciting, in my opinion.  It has all the panache and tension of doing SAT practice problems.  Continue that sort of thing for a half-hour or more, and I’d honestly rather that we went system-less.

That’s not to say that my current favorite system, Savage Worlds, is without flaw in this regard.  I think that on the whole modifiers are a bit less common and tend to be applied more homogeneously (e.g. the penalty for multiple actions in a round applies to every action in the round, so at least you only have to figure it once at the beginning), and there is an actual requirement that certain kinds of maneuvers (e.g. Tricks) get a description to justify them rather than a bare announcement of the attempt, but on the flip side the die-rolling has the possibility of being more complex with the open-ended rolls and I could see it falling into a similar if shallower rut of “let’s all do some arithmetic now!”  At least in Savage Worlds, I think I see how to speed things along in combat and making the combat more dynamic and descriptive; with D&D 3e, I honestly think that the more dynamic the combat gets in terms of options for the players, terrain, facing, environmental conditions, spells, maneuvers and abilities, the worse it becomes in terms of arithmetic as the bonuses and penalties come and go and fewer things can be pre-calculated.  I don’t really see much of a way to improve that without stripping player options; stacking mods on a roll of a d20 is pretty much the essence of the system.

The bottom line is that with 3e, I end up hoping that we don’t get into any combats, so that we can continue to have a fun time.   That’s probably less than optimal for D&D.

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Tiddle Your Mind… With TiddlyWiki!

Since Freemind and other such mind-mapping tools are getting some RPG Blogosphere loving (such as FreeMind Tips for Game Masters, and Free Your Mind…With Free Mind), I figured I’d give another plug for my favorite light-weight GM note-taking and campaign planning software tool: TiddlyWiki.  I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again, since not everybody who reads this blog assiduously combs the archives looking for the pearls of wisdom that might lie buried there.  Plus I think it was posted before I joined the RPG Bloggers Network.

I’ve tried mind-mapping software before… heck I used TheBrain back when it was a DOS program…  but I’ve never found it a great fit for the way I like to do campaign planning and notes.  Basically I tend to think in “bags”, rather than “graphs.”  I have a bunch of thoughts and notes all related to each other over here, and then another bunch of thoughts and notes related to each other over there.  They’re all in heterogeneous clumps of things like all the PCs, NPCs, rooms, traps, setting, clues, for one particular location or adventure.  They’re not naturally organized into parents, children, and siblings, at least by my notion of natural.  If I try to draw all the lines that might make sense to me, it becomes a mass of little islands with everything in one island directly connected to everything else in that island and then another island of stuff with no bridge in between unless I deliberately add one just to keep my mind map connected.  What can I say, my thoughts are very clumpy.  It’s not that I can’t get anything done with mind mapping software, it’s more that I feel like I waste a lot of time deciding where something goes in the web or moving it around, while not finding a lot of added value in setting up those vertices or using the software to follow them.  I end up clicking too much and writing too little.

Wikis are much more my style.  Lots of text, and just drill down on whatever terms you like to elaborate on, ad infinitum.  But wikis can be a pain to set up, particularly if you want to be able to use it while you’re not connected to the web.  Enter TiddlyWiki.

The implementation is a wiki, but it’s a wiki that requires no back-end or host.  It’s just a single HTML page with javascript that lets it update itself dynamically; all you need to use it is a place to store it (such as a thumb drive or your hard drive) and any modern browser.  You want a new TiddlyWiki?  Copy the HTML file and rename it and you’re good to go.  Change the contents of a couple of pre-defined entries and you can personalize the title, subtitle, and so forth.

TiddlyWiki bills itself as a “reusable personal web notebook” , but conceptually it’s more like a stack of virtual 3 x 5 cards,  3 x5 cards that can wiki link to each other or to anything on the web  and be tagged arbitrarily, much like blog posts, and text searched.  You want a new 3 x 5 card, either click on a link in an existing card, or click on the New Tiddler button (for no real reason, they call a card a “Tiddler”), and start editing.  You can hide or display multiple cards at once, search the wiki for terms that occur anywhere in a card, add or delete tags on a card, and so forth.  Like with blog posts, there’s no real organization or hierarchy other than things being tagged with keywords.  It’s that simple.  Other than learning the specific wiki markup, there’s almost no learning curve unless you get into customization.

Speaking of which, it’s possible to customize TiddlyWiki quite extensively, from redesigning the whole graphical look of it, to adding plugins for new functionality, to writing macros, or even writing your own plugins.   For instance, Berin Kinsman, of the Uncle Bear RPG blog, has two TiddlyWikis available for download, specifically customized for use in RPGS: Worldbuilding 101, and TenFoot Wiki.  The Worldbuilding101 TiddlyWiki is a great way to think about a new setting, and is worth looking at even if you’re going to use mind mapping software or even (gasp) paper and pencil.

I really like TiddlyWiki quite a lot, and have been using it extensively for my games.  Many of the posts you see here about Elves & Espers started their life as Tiddlers in the TiddlyWiki I carry on my keychain, and I’ve been fiddling around with writing a plugin, which I’ll talk about some other time if and when I finally get it done enough to share.

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Just in Time for Valentine’s

Over at Exchange of Realities, Ravyn writes about the dangers of “Designated Love Interests”… that is, NPCs that are designed to become the love interest of one of the PCs.

  • The Dangers of Designated Love Interests – Exchange of Realities

    • People will do amazing things for the ones they love; as a result, such love can be a motivator for story characters and game characters alike. So it’s often tempting to create a character specifically for the purpose of creating a romantic attachment: a Designated Love Interest, or DLI.

      That’s when the trouble starts.

      Limyaael has a lot to say about the Designated Love Interest in novel format, mostly having to do with the fact that said DLI isn’t really human, strains internal consistency by how her romances begin, and is generally cliché and undercharacterized. And yet, despite these flaws, a story with a bad DLI can reach its predetermined end; it just requires the writer to completely overwrite the characters. (The fact that this is bad fictional practice is another matter entirely.)

The problem with a lot of advice along the lines of Limyaael’s is that people read fiction for a lot of different reasons, and I can point to a huge selection of literature that demonstrates that Limyaael’s preferences are not shared by readers looking for romance in their fiction in the first place.  Readers want what they want, and not what some PhD LitCrit candidate thinks they should want.  Contrariwise, PhD LitCrit candidates want what they want, and are under no obligation to enjoy pot-boiler romances just because the masses do.  But people looking for writing advice are well-advised to carefully consider which audience they’re writing for.  My sister Elizabeth is a published romance novelist, with a half-dozen novels to her credit, and one of the first things she had to learn was there really is a tight limit to how much tweaking the conventions readers will put up with before they’re dissatisfied by the fact that whatever its other merits, the book is no longer what they want when they pick up a romance.

What’s more, RPGs aren’t simply a form of fiction, and there are a lot of players who play so that they can revel in the cliches.   They want their good to be good, their bad to be bad, and their fated lovers to be damn well singled out by fate in no uncertain terms. You’re not doing those kind of players a favor by creating a subtle, nuanced portrayal of a realistic sort of person that their character plausibly might or might not  fall in love with if this were a work of fiction where the author controlled both sides of the interest as well as everything that happens to them.

The point is that you have to know your audience.  There isn’t a good way and a bad way to do romantic interests in a game; there are a bunch of ways, and different players may want different ones, or the same player may want different ones at different times depending on the genre or how they see their character.  The real danger in a Love Interest is not that the character won’t bite and that will spoil your plot, it’s that you’ll choose a way that isn’t what the player wants, and even if the plot moves along its rails the game time will be wasted if not spoiled.

Generally speaking, I think the best way to avoid that is to solicit player input.  You want a character that the player’s PC will fall in love with?  Have the player help design the character and the general outline of how they’ll interact.  One huge advantage to this is that if the player isn’t interested in having that sort of thing happen in game, for whatever reason, you find out then and there and can drop the whole matter.  You also get explicit guidance from the player on what the character will find attractive (which is by no means what the player personally would find attractive), as well as just how genre-iffic, and how detailed or abstract, the whole approach to romance should be.  I find that even players who care deeply about playing In-Character are really open to out-of-game discussions about how they as player would like the game to go and the psychology of their character.

The down-side to this approach is that you lose the spontaneity.  There is something particularly satisfying about relationships with NPCs, of any sort, that arise dynamically out of play and not because the GM or the GM and player together contrived it in advance.  After all it’s precisely the actual real-time play of the game that’s the reason we play out the game in the first place instead of sitting around the table collaborating on a novel or a play.  To the extent that important things are moved from game play and into game planning, we risk diminishing the game.

Still, with all the ways that in-game romances are fraught with peril–not just for your preferred plot, but for the cohesion of the game group as a whole–I think the wisest course is not by creating a really attractive character and crossing your fingers and hoping, but by knowing your audience, which includes knowing whether they want in-game romance at all.  And the best, quickest, and most reliable way to know your audience is to openly ask them.

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What’s Normal in Savage Worlds?

Since this is never explicitly spelled-out in the core rulebooks as far as I can see, it’s probably worth a post.  (I originally worked this out in a comment thread that I doubt anybody but Russell is reading by now…)

The default assumption in Savage Worlds is that typical Joe or Jane Citizen characters have a d6 in each Attribute, and a d6 in each skill that’s relevant to their profession and daily life.  Character generation gives you enough points for a d6 in every stat, and you shouldn’t put a d4 in one unless you intend that your character be wimpier than an average adult at it.  You shouldn’t start with a d4 in a Skill unless it’s something the character hasn’t had much practice at up until now.

In the SW:Explorer’s Edition rulebook, the evidence for this is slim, but it’s there:  the Youth Hindrance and the Elderly Hindrance both represent less-than-physically fit adult specimens, and neither drops any Attribute below a d4.  An 8 year-old girl has a Strength at minimum of a d4, as does a 90 year-old grandmother; they could be stronger… even a lot stronger, but they can’t be weaker by the core rules.  There are Hindrances that can give you an effective die-roll even worse (e.g. Anemic, which subtracts 2 from many Vigor rolls), but d4 is the rock-bottom for an Attribute.

The Toolkits add more direct evidence: the “Typical Citizens” entries in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy toolkits have a d6 in each Attribute.  The Pulp toolkit doesn’t have a citizen entry, but has a fair number of everyday sort of archetypes such as Snitches, Typical Mechanics, Nosy Reporters (as distinct from Plucky Reporters) and they all fit the pattern of at least a d6 in every Attribute, with only notably stupid characters such as Thugs having a d4 Smarts, or notably young characters such as Wise-Ass Kid having a d4 Strength and Vigor.  Even Professors are assumed to have a d6 Strength and Vigor.

The Toolkits also provide the only real evidence of the assumptions about what’s a typical Skill level.  The SW:Ex core has few examples of normal people, and orcs and cannibal islanders are just different enough that while they might represent typical opposition to the heroes they aren’t necessarily indicative of what the random soda-jerk, janitor, or dung-spattered peasant is capable of.  Basically, Citizens in the SF and Fantasy Toolkits have at least a d6 in every skill that’s relevant to their daily lives, and a d4 in either Fighting or Shooting depending on the typical weapon of their culture (and Guts, if the setting uses it).  What they don’t have is very many skills: Notice, some Knowledge Skill representing their trade, and either Driving or Stealth, plus the aforementioned combat and Guts, and that’s it.

While the point-buy system encourages PCs to dabble in a lot of skills (adding a new Skill at d4 after character creation is as expensive as raising two other skills by a die type), it seems pretty clear from the supplementary material in the Toolkits that having merely a d4 in a Skill isn’t intended to represent a competent practitioner.  A random NPC that you meet who has that skill as his trade will likely have a d6 in it.  Now, because PCs are Wild Cards, their chance of success on a d4 plus the Wild Die is significantly better than the random Extra’s chance of success on a d6 (62% vs. 50%), but my interpretation would be that represents something like raw talent or luck, not training.

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Not Everything Can Be Near

…because where would you put it?

In the previous post, I talked about Near and Far thinking in RPGs, and recommended that the GM try to make as much as possible in the game amenable to Near thinking.  As much as possible doesn’t mean everything, though; there are situations where it’s either not possible, or not desirable.

  • If the GM and the players don’t know (and can’t be expected to learn) enough details.  E.g. open-heart surgery, or starship hyperdrive repair.  In the former case it’s conceivable (barely) that in a game that’s about being a surgeon it would be worthwhile to learn enough about surgery to not only provide accurate description, but enough real choices of the sort that surgeons face to make Near thinking possible; in the latter, the details just don’t exist, and while the GM could certainly make them up and try to teach them to the players, the amount of effort involved to get the kind of free-wheeling thinking of fully grasping the problem-space as when a player thinks about searching an ordinary desk doesn’t seem like it would pay off, even in a campaign about starship engineers.
  • If the situation is about performance, not decisions.  When the task at hand is something like playing the cello, it doesn’t really matter exactly what the GM or the player knows about cellos, or even music in general, because it’s the character’s physical skill that’s called on.  Now, if you were to search a cello…  Note that this is often going to be true of the physical activity of combat.  The strategy and tactics are decisions that can be carried out by the player, the physical activity of shooting the bow or swinging the sword is all the performance of the character.
  • If it’s about the character’s skill at making certain kinds of decisions.  Even if the GM and the player both understand what’s involved enough that they could go into detail, sometimes it’s about what the character can think or understand, not the player.  It’s often the case that the character is supposed to be better at thinking about certain situations than the player (sometimes the other way around).  In these cases it’s possible to use a skill roll to backstop or supplement the decisions that the player makes, but much of the time you should just substitute Far thinking.  Even if the GM and the player both know how to play chess, actually playing out the match between the character and Death isn’t likely to be a satisfying way of resolving it.
  • For pacing reasons.  There’s only so much time in a session, so sometimes even if the characters would have time to go through all the gory details the game is better off if you hand-wave it.  You don’t want to do too much of this, though.  It’s easy to imagine that you’re getting more done in the game when you fly by everything at 30,000 feet, using Far thinking all the way, when actually you’re just leeching out all the color and vibrancy and eliminating potential decision points.   You should only use this as an excuse when spending the time in Near mode is going to freeze out the other players for too long, or you know that they find that particular activity boring to think about in detail, or it lets you get to a different and more interesting Near mode episode immediately.
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Near vs. Far Thinking in RPGs

  • Overcoming Bias: Abstract/Distant Future Bias

    • The latest Science has a psych article saying we think of distant stuff more abstractly, and vice versa.  “The brain is hierarchically organized with higher points in the cortical hierarchy representing increasingly more abstract aspects of stimuli”; activating a region makes nearby activations more likely.  This has stunning implications for our biases about the future.

      All of these bring each other more to mind: here, now, me, us; trend-deviating likely real local events; concrete, context-dependent, unstructured, detailed, goal-irrelevant incidental features; feasible safe acts; secondary local concerns; socially close folks with unstable traits.

      Conversely, all these bring each other more to mind: there, then, them; trend-following unlikely hypothetical global events; abstract, schematic, context-freer, core, coarse, goal-related features; desirable risk-taking acts, central global symbolic concerns, confident predictions, polarized evaluations, socially distant people with stable traits.

Robin Hanson wasn’t thinking about roleplaying games when he wrote this, of course, but if he and the Science article are right about how minds work–and I think they are–then it has implications for how we play these games.  For one thing, it means that providing detail and concreteness isn’t just a matter of atmosphere and aesthetics, it literally changes the way we think about events in the game.

Take an example near and dear to my heart, the act of searching in-game:

Near

The GM determines there is a desk with three side drawers and a middle drawer, and taped to the underside of the middle drawer is a key.  The desk otherwise contains papers from old cases, none of them relevant, a gun in the top right-hand drawer and a bottle of rye in the bottom right hand drawer.
Player: I search the desk.
GM: How?
Player: I look in all the drawers.
GM: You find a gun in the top right hand drawer, a bottle of Rye in the bottom right hand drawer, and a bunch of papers.  They seem to be old case files.
Player: I flip through them and see if any seem relevant.
GM: Based on a casual flip through, none seem particularly interesting.
Because the player didn’t specify any action that would have uncovered the key, it’s not discovered.

or

GM: How?
Player: I look in all the drawers, then I take them out one by one.  I check the bottoms, and I look for false bottoms, and I check the holes, reaching around if necessary.
GM: That will take about fifteen minutes.
Player: I’ve got time.
GM: Ok, taped to the bottom of the middle drawer you find a key.  You also find a gun in the top right-hand drawer, and a bottle of rye in the bottom right-hand drawer.  There’s also a bunch of papers, that seem to be old case files, none particularly relevant.

Not as Near

GM determines the same set-up as before.
Player: I search the desk, looking in all the drawers.
Because the player didn’t specify actions that would uncover the key, the GM rolls the Player’s Search skill as a “save”, and gets a success.
 GM: You find a gun, and a bottle of rye, plus some old case files.  On an impulse, you check under the drawers, and find a key taped to the bottom of the middle drawer.

Even Less Near

Same set up as before.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls vs the character’s Search Skill, and succeeds.
GM: You find a key taped to the bottom of the middle drawer, a gun in the top right-hand drawer, a bottle of rye in the bottom right-hand drawer, and some old case files.
If he had rolled a failure, the Player would still have found the gun, the files, and the booze, but not the key.

Far

The GM determines that the desk contains a gun, and a hidden key.  He doesn’t bother to think about where.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find a the gun, but nothing else of interest.

Even Farther

The GM determines that the desk contains a gun, and a key.  He doesn’t bother to think about what the desk looks like, where the items are or whether they’re hidden.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find nothing.

Really Far

The GM doesn’t bother to determine anything about the desk.
Player: I search the desk.
GM rolls, and the character succeeds.
GM: You’ve got 1 success.  You need 2 more before you get 1 failure.

Just Plain Wrong

The GM determines the details as in the near cases.
Player: I look in all the drawers, then I take them out one by one.  I check the bottoms, and I look for false bottoms, and I check the holes, reaching around if necessary.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find nothing.

Also Wrong

The GM doesn’t determine any details, but does determine the desk contains a gun and a key.
Player: I look in all the drawers, then I take them out one by one.  I check the bottoms, and I look for false bottoms, and I check the holes, reaching around if necessary.
GM rolls, and the character fails.
GM: You find nothing.

The thing about Near vs. Far is that it’s (probably) not a continuum, where you gradually lose detail and concreteness as you dial up the abstraction: at some point there is a modal shift in the kind of cognition you do.  I think that wherever possible, you want to keep things in the game world as Near as possible, so that the players remain grounded in the situation. This lets them reason about the game world, and not just about the rules.  It also provides more specific details to make the story more vivid, because it’s more like what we do when we’re faced with such situations in the real world.  Using Far abstractions is like having a scene cut to a placard that says “They search the room” and then cut back to show what they discovered.   If the GM doesn’t provide enough details that they could reason concretely (even if he backstops them with abstract game mechanics), then the players just move through a sort of fog of abstraction.  Everything their characters do seems to them to be more distant in space and time, and they’re more likely to group things mentally into larger, coarser categories, which can make it harder to keep their interest and attention since more stuff will be regarded as “the same old same old.”

Providing enough detail to make Near thinking possible in an RPG is more work for a GM, but I think it’s really important work, and pays off in making the experience much richer for everyone concerned.  When budgeting your effort in preparation, try to spend it on the details that the players will actually interact with to make the setting more concrete, and less on figuring out the broad strokes of distant event and times that shaped the game world.  A list of ten things that they can find in the desk beats 10,000 words on the lost empires of the Hyperborean Age.

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Keep Your Filthy Narrative Out of My Roleplaying

My friend Russell writes

I think this is exactly right, at least as far as my tastes go.  Broadly speaking, there are three commonly found attitudes towards what you’re trying to accomplish when you play a roleplaying game.  I don’t want to resurrect the taxonomy wars, so I won’t label them, but the basic breakdown is:

  • Roleplaying games are about experiencing what it’s like to X
  • Roleplaying  games are about constructing stories that are like X
  • Roleplaying games are about playing a game (often a war-game) that draws elements from X

The problem is that these modes are largely incompatible.  If you’re trying to experience what it might be like to be faced with situations and making decisions in the game world, the last thing you want is to have narrative control over the game that the character doesn’t have; how can you face any uncertainty over whether your arrow will strike true when you can just declare that it does?  If you’re trying to play a game to exercise your tactical judgment and formulate clever strategies, it’s damn well cheating when the referee just overrules them in the name of plot.  If you are collaboratively writing a story in your favorite genre, it’s madness to allow that story to be warped or even ended prematurely by something as arbitrary as a bad die-roll.

This isn’t just idle speculation or caricature, these are genuine and deeply felt objections by people who are looking for a certain kind of entertainment from RPGs.  Take this guy gal, for example:

  • Interlude: Character Death « Bard of Valiant

    • In addition, I challenge the entire premise [that “Character death should be a normal part of a well balanced but challenging adventure with natural consequences for poor choices.”]. Books and movies are excellent examples of my point of view. The main character isn’t going to die and you know it the entire time. No matter how steep the cliff, how deadly the bullets, how invasive the poison, the hero lives and we still have engaging blockbuster films and New York Times Bestseller novels. Why? Because the Story is Just That Good.

Leaving aside  the question of whether blockbuster films and bestselling novels really are Just That Good, or whether they’d be even better if there was some actual uncertainty as to the outcome, this is clearly a guy gal who is not only looking for a way to construct stories, but doesn’t even have a glimmer that there might be people looking for other things, people who would therefor find the justification that something happens in films and novels to be unpersuasive, if not a complete non sequitur. (Or maybe I’m just reading to much into his her “challenging” the premise rather than simply disagreeing with it.)

What bothers me is not that the folks who are primarily about constructing narratives exist (de gustibus),  but the blithe assumption that everybody else who plays RPGs shares their tastes, even if they don’t know it yet. (BTW, I don’t intend to single out Viriatha above as an example of that.  I’m talking more about an attitude I perceive all over the place in posts on how to structure your roleplaying session as if it were scenes from a movie, how to design your villains to play up the themes of the story, how to drop detail and consistency from the setting if it doesn’t feed into the main narrative, and so on.) What I miss is any sense that “Your mileage may vary.”  It’s not that I want to see every blog post or forum comment come with a disclaimer “only suitable for certain tastes in roleplaying”, but that I think the advice would be sharper and more on-point if the authors kept in mind that they’re talking about a specific approach to RPGs.  For one thing, they’d spend less time running down the alleged flaws in other styles of RPGing, which should give them more time to devote to their particular style.  More than that, though, I think that the recognition that they are aiming to accomplish one particular kind of thing by playing RPGs would help them separate the wheat from the chaff for their approach; there are a lot of things that are carried over from game system to game system in our hobby because that’s what people are used to, but are irrelevant if not counter-productive for certain styles of gaming.  The result, it seems to me, is a lot of patching of things that get in the way when they should be jettisoned instead.

Take, for instance, Fate or Hero Points.  Such things are often added to systems that have important things, like character life or death, decided by a random die roll, to give players a measure of narrative control; the justification is almost always along the lines offered above, to make the game more like a blockbuster movie or bestselling novel.  The problem is that this is a band-aid.  If what you’re aiming for is a properly-constructed, satisfying story, having a limited number of times you can overrule a story-killing die roll makes no sense.  An unsatisfying end to the story doesn’t become more satisfying because at least you managed to avoid derailing it the first three times it happened before you ran out of Fate points.  You shouldn’t be rolling dice if you don’t want a random outcome.

On the other hand, and this gets back to my original point and the title of this post, if having a limited pot of Fate Points is insufficient to satisfy the legitimate desires of those who are playing for narrative, the existence of such things in the system screws up the legitimate desire of those who are playing for the experience of it to not be forced to confront profound game decisions that can’t be made in character.  I don’t want narrative control when I’m trying to imagine the experience of the character, because it screws it all up; if the character actually had that control, the story would turn into simple wish-fulfillment, if not an outright Mary Sue (as well as breaking a lot of settings where there’s no conceivable reason that a character would have that kind of power).  The more important and the more fraught with consequence the moment is, the less I want to be jerked out of it by meta-game considerations.

Similarly, from the other direction, there are those who think that “something must be done” to prevent the horrifying possibility that some logical, perfectly consistent feature of the game world (such as encountering something unexpected when crossing the dangerous wilderness) could screw up the game balance, so that the set-piece encounter at the end of the journey is no longer a fair contest or the wealth-per-level guidelines get thrown out of whack.  Again, it’s not that they’re wrong to want the game the way they want it, but a greater recognition of what their particular desires are would probably help them narrow the focus of the game to what they actually enjoy.  If you’re going to remove the random encounters as being a pointless and potentially unbalancing distraction from the encounters in the dungeon, you should probably go ahead and remove the travel to the dungeon as well.  Why should there even be a situation “The PC’s are heading to the dungeon and will eventually get to the dungeon, but not this session, and they need a combat to get them moving.”  Just wave your hands and say “Three weeks later you arrive at the dungeon.”

You want a laser-like focus on what you and your players actually find fun, and you want to ruthlessly trim the things that get in the way of that.  But to do that, you need to understand what it is that your players actually want to accomplish by playing RPGs, and to do that you have to keep in mind that what they’re after might not be the “obvious” point of roleplaying to you.  Otherwise you might find that you’re trimming the reason that they enjoy playing, and focusing straight on what they are trying to ignore.