Category: Advice/Tools

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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.

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Ad Vance: To a More Vancian Magic

The tomes which held Turjan’s sorcery lay on a long table of black steel or were thrust helter-skelter into shelves. These were volumes compiled by many wizards of the past, untidy folios collected by the Sage, leather-bound librams setting forth the syllables of a hundred powerful spells, so cogent that Turjan’s brain could know but four at a time.

Turjan found a musty portfolio, turned the pages to the spell the Sage had shown him, the Call to the Violent Cloud. He stared down at the characters and they burned with an urgent power, pressing off the page as if frantic to leave the dark solitude of the book.

Turjan closed the book, forcing the spell back into oblivion. He robed himself with a short blue cape, tucked a blade into his belt, fitted the amulet holding Laccodel’s Rune to his wrist. Then he sat down and from a journal he chose the spells he would take with him.  What dangers he might meet he could not know, so he selected three spells of general application: The Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandaal’s Mantle of Stealth, and the Spell of the Slow Hour.

– The Dying Earth, Jack Vance (c) 1950

In RPGs people generally refer to “Vancian” magic to mean the “fire and forget” aspect of spells that Gygax and Arneson copied from The Dying Earth (as well as the notion that one spell = one effect, rather than, say, a range of similarly themed ones).  Each time you want to cast a spell, you have to “memorize” it anew.  It’s a bizarre notion, and one of the first things that subsequent systems tended to toss overboard.  Even if you want to limit the number of times per day somebody can cast a spell, doing it by making you forget how to cast it afterward is regarded as somewhere between strange and stupid.  Even later editions of D&D replaced “memorization” with “preparation.”  What’s often overlooked is that the idea of having to struggle to hold a spell in your mind and having it vanish once its been unleashed is meant to be bizarre, and to make the magic of the Dying Earth seem weird and other-worldly.  These weren’t super-powers, or psionic abilities that other pulp characters might have acquired…spells in the Dying Earth operated by rules that had nothing to do with physics, even science fiction physics.

Another complaint often leveled at “Vancian” D&D magic is that it’s too “prosaic”, or “not magical enough.”  You have your list of familiar special abilities, the number of times a day you can call on them, rules for their exact effects and chance of resisting them, etc.  I actually think that’s largely true, but the problem is not that D&D magic draws on Vance for inspiration, but that it doesn’t draw on Vance enough.  In the process of creating D&D Gygax and Arneson made spells too “war-gamey”…spells in D&D are in a lot of ways just another type of ammo you can equip your troops with, tracked just as if it were arrows, flasks of oil, or Greek fire.  What was lost, in my opinion, was some or all of the real weirdness of the magic of the Dying Earth.  I think that if you wanted some house rules to put the bizarreness back into magic, instead of looking at real world or fairy-tale magic, you could go back to the tales of the Dying Earth and start over from there.

1. First of all, spells are much rarer in the Dying Earth.  Turjan is one of the more powerful and famous sorcerers of the (admittedly decadent and less magically potent) age, and he can master only four spells at once.  In the second chapter, Mazirian the Magician, who managed to capture and hold Turjan prisoner, was capable of five.  So step one is to cut back on the number of spells.  I would suggest limiting a Magic User to 1 + their Int Bonus (however calculated for the edition).  Moreover, though there were once thousands of spells, only 100 are now extant, and a magician such as Mazirian, who has made it his life’s work to aquire them, has about 70 of them.

2. Spells in the Dying Earth are potent.  The Excellent Prismatic Spray was a death sentence: multicolored lines of fire streak in from every direction, transfixing the target and killing it…. Phandaal’s Gyrator spell can lift the target off the ground, holding it and spinning it as the magician wishes, and can be sped up until the victim just flies apart. If you didn’t have a counter to the spells (such as the amulet with Lacondel’s Rune that Turjan possesses), you have no hope of escaping or surviving.  The Call of the Violent Cloud can transport you in moments (albeit uncomfortable moments) all the way across the world, etc.  It may be that there are lesser spells that the magicians of the Dying Earth seldom bother with, but the ones they’re actually shown using are powerful indeed.  So steps two and three are to eliminate the notion of a saving throw against spells (though you probably want to keep it for things like magic from wands or traps), and to get rid of spells castable by level.  If you have a spell and you’re not at your limit, you can force that spell into your mind.

3. It doesn’t seem to be possible in Vance to use two “slots” on the same spell.  If the Excellent Prismatic Spray is the only offensive spell you have access to, you’ll have to round out the spells you memorize for your adventure with others that might be useful.

4. Memorized spells still take time to cast, enough time that, for instance, a character verbally threatened by somebody who knows the Excellent Prismatic Spray can successfully counter-threaten to push a handy button and drop the caster in a pit faster than the spell could be completed.  Pretty much all editions of D&D can handle this, as long as you assume that casting spells isn’t instant.

5. It is possible to screw up casting the spell, with bad results.  If you accidentally transpose a pair of “pervulsions”, the effect of the spell can be reversed, or go off on you instead of your intended target.  Professional magicians such as Turjan, Mazirian, and Ioucounu don’t seem to worry about this much, but it happened to Cugel the Clever twice in succession. If you want to retain the idea of spell levels, you could require a roll for attempting to cast a spell greater than your current level, with penalties for just how far beyond your current abilities it is.  The roll is made when you actually attempt to cast the spell, not when it’s first memorized.  Or you could only apply a rule for checking for spell failure if a non-magician attempts a magic spell, similar to the classic D&D rules for thieves attempting to use magic scrolls.

6. Spells are something that can only be acquired through adventure, or from a mentor.  There are no generally accessible libraries, or magic shops that will sell you a book or scroll of them, and while magicians can share their spells with their colleagues, they guard them jealously from their rivals.

7. Spells are strange.  The Call to the Violent Cloud doesn’t just whisk the caster to his destination, it summons a strange and malevolent (or at least indifferent) being to accomplish the task, that must be addressed carefully according to ritual:

All was quiet; then came a whisper of movement swelling to the roar of great winds. A wisp of white appeared and waxed to a pillar of boiling black smoke.  A voice deep and harsh issued from the turbulence.
“At your disturbing power is this instrument come: whence will you go?”
“Four directions, then One,” said Turjan, “Alive must I be brought to Embelyon.”
The cloud whirled down; far up and away he was snatched, flung head over heels into incalculable distance.  Four directions was he thrust, then one, and at last a great blow hurled him from the cloud, sprawled him into Embelyon.

(Note, by the way, that Embelyon is either another planet, or perhaps another dimension entirely, not just a far-off place on the Earth.)

8. Because magic is so limited in applicability, albeit powerful when applied, Vancian magic users are capable of fighting with a sword or by wrestling if they have to.  They’re no Conans, but they get by.  I’d keep the hit point and armor restrictions, but lift the ban on using swords and other one-handed weapons.

9. It’s never explicitly spelled out, but it seems that there is no particular limit on memorizing a new spell once one has been cast…neither casting the spells nor memorizing them is particularly taxing.  In their lairs, where they have all their spell books and time to memorize and cast at their leisure, magicians seem limited only by the relatively small (minutes perhaps?) amount of time it takes to memorize a spell.  It does seem that is it extremely difficult to create copies of existing spells.  While the magicians do eventually acquire them, and even teach them to each other if on friendly terms, it seems to be an unthinkable risk to carry an extra copy about in case of need.  They select the spells they venture forth with carefully, and husband them wisely if they can, but they never ever are seen to have a spare or even to have contemplated the possibility.

You can find spell name generators for Dying Earth-style spells here and here, as well as some additional discussion of Vancian magic, but while the name of the spell is an important part of its flavor, the thing you really want to concentrate on is that the effects be potent and memorable. With all due respect to one of my favorite bloggers, Dr Rotwang of I Waste the Buddha With My Crossbow, simply attaching Vancian names to existing D&D spells isn’t good enough. D&D spells are constructed with a war-gamer’s notion of balance, both against the abilities of other classes and the toughness of opponents. A Vancian version of Sleep, for instance, ought to at least cause the target to sleep forever, preserved and unchanging, until countered (much as the Spell of the Forlorn Encystment sinks the target deep within the Earth to remain alive and trapped, but unaging and undying, until the spell is broken, bringing them alive and blinking, with their clothes rotted to dust, to the surface once more). The spells in the Dying Earth are limited by whether there is a spell applicable to the situation (and whether you’ve memorized it), but where they do apply their effects tend to be absolute. Knocking out 2d8 hit dice of creatures until they waken naturally or are awakened by force is just weaksauce.

So, if you make all those changes to D&D magic, will Magic Users still be a playable class?  I think so.  At low levels, a spell like Sleep is an encounter-ender against a lot of foes anyway, just as at mid-levels Fireball can be.  What tends to happen in D&D is the number of truly potent spells (relative to the scope of the adventure) that a wizard can use during a single day remains fairly constant, while the scale of enemies ramps up…  what a truly Vancian system would tend to do is just get rid of all the minor spells that the wizard ends up with (often more than he’ll ever cast in a single day), and eliminate the process of “trading up” from Magic Missile to Fireball to Meteor Swarm (or whatever).  The problem, if there is one, would be that a beginning mage armed with the Excellent Prismatic Spray or something similar would be a threat against an ogre, or perhaps a dragon or other big nasty, possibly even including a much higher level character.  To the extent that this is a genuine problem, and not just blind allegiance to the leveling treadmill concept in D&D where everything scales up in power as the PCs do, you could certainly solve it by restricting the spells available to the PC magic users until they reached a level where you thought a single-target instant-kill spell was appropriate, or by giving special opponents abilities and items such as Laccondel’s Rune to counter it.  Personally, if I were to try this, I would try very hard to just live with it, and design my adventures so as not to assume that 1st level characters are ants compared to high level characters and monsters, and that under the right circumstances even the powerful can be threatened by the lowly.

What about Vancian magic in non-D&D systems?  I think most of the same principles apply, though the mechanics might differ slightly.  In Savage Worlds, getting a new spell “slot” might be an edge, with the limit that you can’t take the Edge more than once per Rank, while individual spells would be acquired by adventuring.  The Arcane Background would probably grant 1 slot and the knowledge of 3 initial spells and casting the spells wouldn’t require Power Points or a casting roll.  In some ways, adding this kind of magic is easy in almost any system (except perhaps ones like HERO, that expect exact cost-accounting for every aspect of every power), since the rules on how many times you can cast a spell are perfectly clear and the effects of each and every spell are sui generis.  As long as the GM is prepared to deal with the consequences of allowing a certain power in the game, there’s really no limit or constraints on what a spell might do.

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The Rule of Goofy

Actually, I think there is a Rule of Goofy, and it goes something like this:

The ability of an element to shatter the Suspension of Disbelief is directly proportional to how goofy it is. Reality is no excuse for fiction.  If the audience finds something so goofy that they are thrown out of the moment in order to analyze or scoff at it, it doesn’t matter how realistic it actually is or how well-documented it is that such things occur either in the real world or in the genre.  Presenting evidence might get them to move past it, but the damage is done and the momentum is lost.

For RPGs one might add that the element might be a result coughed out by the game system that, while 100% accurate to the rules, is goofy in context.

While Dr. Checkmate is correct that one man’s cool is another man’s goofy, that doesn’t mean that the rules can’t be usefully applied, only that you have to know your audience.

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The Rule of Cool: A Useful Tool

The Geek, at Geek Related, writes:

  • Why the Rule of Cool Is Not Cool

    • I’ve been following the debate about the so-called “Rule of Cool.”  It’s a “TV Tropes” concept extended to RPGs by  the Chatty DM, (original post “The Rule of Cool” here, and clarification “The Rule of Cool Takes Flak” here).  A number of people gave it drive-by disses, but I think the most on topic one is from 6d6 Fireball, with Rule of Cool – Only for Idiots and Of Coolness and Idiocy.

      In short, the Rule of Cool states “The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group.”

      If you interpret it very loosely as “Hey, toss in some cool stuff to spice up your game” it’s fine.  But the way it’s stated is setting up “cool” as being carte blanche to roll over realism/suspension of disbelief.  “If it’s cool enough, it can be incoherent and it’s all good.”

First off, as a psychological observation, The Rule of Cool is simply true.  This is a form of “Confirmation Bias“: people find it very difficult to notice discrepancies and logical errors in things that they are favorably disposed towards.  Contrariwise, they’ll nitpick to death something that they find disagreeable, boring, or challenging to their preconceptions.  Indeed, I’d say several of the bloggers who strongly object to Chatty DM’s post are displaying that very behavior.

Second, the Rule of Cool is part of the basis of the hobby.  Practically every RPG relies on the Rule of Cool to excuse inconsistencies and absurdities in the setting.  If your players see a dragon and don’t immediately start in on how such a creature violates the square-cube law and should barely be able to walk when not buoyed up in a swamp, let alone fly, and breathing fire is absurd, why the caloric requirements alone…that’s because they think it’s cool and are willing to suspend their disbelief to that extent.  Magic, psionics, Cthulhoid horrors, vampires, sexy secret agents licensed to kill, giant mecha, Wild West zombies, super heroes, intelligent bunnies, faster-than-light travel, net-running deckers, swashbuckling pirates, private detectives solving murders, artificially intelligent robots, aliens…if it’s fodder for RPGs, it requires a large dollop of willing suspension of disbelief, and that disbelief will only be provided by people who think those things are cool enough to be worth pretending to believe.  Geek culture has become so entwined with pop culture in the past few years that fans of fantastic literature (which is most RPGers) can lose sight of the fact that not everybody really thinks this kind of stuff is cool; there are still plenty of people who think it’s all dumb and puerile, absurd escapist crap that doesn’t deserve any suspension of disbelief.  There are people who look at Spider-Man or The Dark Knight with the same visceral revulsion for the CGI and melodrama being offered as “cool” that others do for Michael Bay or Uwe Boll movies.

Third, as a piece of advice Chatty’s take on the Rule of Cool provides a useful approach to what to spend your limited time and effort as a GM to prepare and convey during a session.  You are better served spending your time making sure that your game is going to be enjoyable to your players so that they’ll want to overlook the inevitable holes than trying to make sure there are no holes to be found without regard to whether it satisfies the players.  It’s an RPG, it’s going to have holes–you can’t present an entire world, even a perfectly mundane world, in its entirety, in the form of a game without gaps or errors–if the players are in the mood to, they’re going to be able to quibble over events and raise objections even if you’re doing nothing more than reprising your day at the office in a session of “Papers & Paychecks.”  No matter what you and your players think of as cool, there is a hurdle to overcome in RPGs that isn’t there in more passive consumption of media in getting the players to engage the world…they can’t let it just wash over them and still be playing, so you have to make them want to play.  And to do that, you’re going to have to grapple with what it is that they think is cool enough to be worth it.

Finally, it’s completely irrelevant whether you happen to be tickled by Chatty’s particular examples; if you don’t think that stuff is “cool,” substitute what you do think of as cool.  And you can’t weasel out of it by claiming that cool by definition means CGI explosions and running up streams of bullets to kick somebody in the face…that’s a straw man.  If you and the players actually think that’s cool, then it wouldn’t be an objection; it’s only when you believe that it’s over-the-top and uncool that you re-engage your critical faculties, and the whole point of the Rule of Cool is to provide what the audience/players actually think is cool.  The TV Tropes site that it’s taken from is absolutely explicit:

Note that you only get to invoke the Rule of Cool if the end product is, in fact, cool. Note also that different opinions on what is “cool” create the most arguments over this.

Instead of trying to come up with an uncharitable reading of the Rule of Cool to make it self-evidentally stupid (If you add enough CGI explosions you can hide any ludicrous inconsistency or plot-hole! Not being obsessed with consistency is the same thing as not caring about it at all!), detractors ought to think about what it is they find cool about the settings they enjoy playing…and then try to think about what somebody with a more jaundiced eye would find absurd and disbelief-destroying about that setting.  Then they might begin to apprehend both what the Rule of Cool is really about, and how to use it to improve their games by emphasizing what the setting provides in preference to all other settings (what they really do find cool about it) to help the players enjoy the setting for what it is and ignore the inevitable gaps and debatable points. It’s not carte blanche to roll over suspension of disbelief, it’s an encouragement to analyze what it is that causes people to engage their suspension of disbelief and provide more of whatever that is.

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Elves & Espers: Drowleks

Drowleks are one of the most feared and hated races in the universe, committed to wiping out all non-Drowlek life everywhere.  Long ago they were a sub-species of Elf that lived underground, until the byproducts of their incessant warfare with the surface-dwellers poisoned their land and nearly killed off their species.  A mad genius constructed cyborg bodies for the remaining members of their species and they set out to cleanse the universe of non-Drowleks, uttering their piercing battle-cry of “Annihilate! Annihilate!”  Physically Drowleks resemble black and silver chess pawns, with eight spider-like legs sprouting from their underside, and a pair of pointed flanges that somewhat resemble Elven ears and have a Jacob’s-ladder electrical effect making a chilling drizzt-drizzt sound when active; these  are the primary ranged weapon of the Drowleks, and can fire tremendous bolts of lightning at enemies.  Their front two legs can extend scimitar-like blades for fighting in melee. Drowleks are nearly impervious to physical harm, but the magical Impermium metal of their outer casings is weakened by sunlight.

Drowlek

Attributes: Agil d4, Smarts d8, Spirit d6, Str d12, Vigor d10
Skills: Fighting d8, Shooting d10, Intimidation d10, Notice d6
Pace: 6 on any solid surface Parry: 6  Toughness: 11
Gear: 2 Scimitars: Str+d8, Lightning Generator: 2d10 Cone attack, ignores metal armor (except self-powered armor, which is presumed to be shielded)

Special Abilities:
Ambidextrous – ignore off-hand penalty.
Armor – +4
Construct – +2 recover from Shaken; immune to disease, poison, aging; called shots do no extra damage; no wound modifiers.  Does not heal, must be repaired.
Fearless – Drowleks cannot be scared or Intimidated, even by magic, though they may proceed with caution if the situation warrants it.
Force Field – Drowleks cannot be harmed by non-Heavy weapons, and count as having Superior Magic Resistance
Sensors – Drowleks suffer no penalty for complete darkness, but are -1 in sunlight, and -2 in bright sunlight (but no penalties for equivalent artificial illumination).
Sphere of Annihilation – The orb on top of the “pawn” contains a Sphere of Annihilation, held in place magically. If it does nothing else during a turn, not even move, the Drowlek can unsheathe the sphere.  Anything that touches the sphere, other than Drowleks, is instantly completely annihilated.  A Drowlek with its sphere exposed is incapable of movement.  It requires another full turn to sheathe it once again.  The Drowlek can also cause the Sphere to expand: on the first turn, the Sphere encompasses the 1″ square the Drowlek occupies, on the second turn it occupies a Medium Burst Template; on the third turn is occupies a Large Burst Template, which is as large as it can get.  This does not harm the Drowlek, but it can not perform any other actions once the sphere has expanded, nor perceive what is going on outside the sphere or communicate with other Drowleks; it will remain blind and immobile until it shrinks the sphere back to its normal size.  While it is in the Sphere is cannot be perceived or targetted in any way, not even by magic or psionics.  Shrinking the Sphere takes the same amount of time as growing it.
Two-Fisted – no multi-action penalty for using both Scimitars at once.
Hated – by ancient tradition and pure self-interest all cultures and races will put aside their differences temporarily in order to fight Drowleks.
Weakness – Sunlight degrades Drowlek armor;  sunlight-based attacks are +2 AP (they must be defined as being sunlight-based, and not ordinary light…generally speaking this requires magical attacks, not lasers), and each turn of exposure to sunlight reduces the protection offered by the armor by 1.  Shade will stop the degredation, and darkness reverse it at the same rate.
Xenophobe – will never agree, even temporarily, to cooperate with a member of another race.

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Skill Challenges: Threat or Menace?

This has been bugging me a while, so I’m finally going to rant about it and get it out of my system.

Skill Challenges are what D&D 4e has in place of roleplaying.  And no, I’m not really kidding.  As a method of injecting some pseudo-RP in a tabletop miniatures skirmish game, they make perfect sense: a series of discrete, finite dice rolls so you can get quickly get past the RP and on with the real business of pushing minis around, and to provide some meta-game tension to the “boring” process of thinking of solutions to problems and playing them out.  As an aid to actual RP, they discourage what you want to encourage (creativity, experimentation, thinking as the character), and encourage what you want to discourage (meta-gaming and thinking inside the box).  I think it’s particularly telling that as originally released, even after all the playtesting 4e got, the Skill Challenge numbers were utterly broken and had to be rewritten and released as errata.

The basic mechanism is that you take something that would otherwise be RPed out and replace it with a Skill Challenge of a particular difficulty: you need to score N successes before M failures (N >M in most of the examples I’ve seen) or you fail.  N and M, and the difficulty of the skill rolls (DC in D&D terms) are determined by the difficulty of the Skill Challenge.  The Challenge will then list the Skills that can be applied and their DCs (at least in terms of easy, moderate, and hard), as well as how many successes (or failures) a check is worth towards completing the Skill Challenge (default 1).  Typically the list of allowed Skill checks, or even whether they can undertake a Skill Challenge, won’t be shared with the players, which is where people get fooled into thinking that this is somehow a form of RP instead of a replacement for it.  The process of discovering whether there’s a Skill Challenge and what Skills are allowed is superficially similar to the discussion you might have around the table of plans and approaches to try, but there’s a world of difference under the hood.

What’s wrong with that?

  • The biggest thing is the “Before M failures” rule.  That changes it from an abstraction to a mini-game.  The difference is that an abstraction simplifies things by ignoring irrelevant (hopefully) features to focus on getting reasonable outcomes, mini-games introduce features that have no counterpart in what you’re modeling and no purpose other than to make the mechanics of what you’re doing game-able.  In D&D hit points are an abstraction…they ignore things like exactly how or where you were hit (or even whether you were hit and actually wounded or just battered, bruised and tuckered out) to focus on the potential outcomes after a certain amount of battle: defeated, unharmed, victorious but weakened and less likely to win the next battle.  The fact that they’re a very high-level abstraction has caused a lot of complaint over the years, and prompted countless attempts to fix them or replace them with a different abstraction, but at least they don’t introduce extra new complications in the form of how do you massage your hit-points to use them most efficiently.  The Skill Check failures rule doesn’t represent anything in the game world (if you’re trying to track goblins through the woods, it doesn’t suddenly become impossible because your companion back in town failed to remember some detail about local politics), it’s just an artificial mechanism to introduce tension and limit the number of things the players can try. Arbitrarily limiting the number of things the players can try is bad. If they’re not expending resources or up against a deadline, cutting off their creativity is the last thing you want to be doing in an RPG, even if it makes perfect sense in a board game.
  • The fact that it’s a mini-game encourages/requires meta-gaming.  The order in which you try the tests is crucial, so rather than leading off with the skills that are the most relevant to the task you’re trying to accomplish you have to lead off with the skills you’re best at.  It’s the codification of the old joke Q: If your keys are over there, why are you looking here?  A: Because the light’s better here.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s something your character would attempt, what matters is how good the character is at it and the fact that if he fails he can screw up the Challenge for the entire party.
  • It discourages improvisation.   Dividing the world into things for which there are Skill Challenges and things for which there aren’t pushes the players towards the courses of action for which there are Skill Challenges and discourages them from trying things for which there aren’t (this is true even if the GM is willing and able to generate Skill Challenges on the fly).   Also, because Skill Challenges are defined in terms of making skill rolls you’re discouraged from thinking outside the box and substituting a non-skill roll approach to the same task (e.g. if you can make a Climbing roll to gain a success by getting to the top of a tree and spotting something, you ought to be able to do the same thing with an innate or spell-given ability to fly, or to send your flying familiar aloft.  The GM could just rule those as successes, but that doesn’t seem to be the way Challenges are designed.  The point isn’t the tasks you need to accomplish, it’s whether you make the required rolls).  Finally, by providing a list of approved skills and their uses to count towards the Challenge, it discourages using substitutes (e.g. if the Challenge calls for intimidating someone, what about persuading, bribing or seducing them instead?) or trying oddball or long-shot things.
  • By reducing everything to a series of die-rolls it eliminates any of the back-and-forth and progressive discovery and reasoning that are the essence of role playing.  This is an old complaint along the lines of if characters can just roll Diplomacy, then what’s the point of playing out conversations?  But it’s as valid now as it was then…if your game allows you to substitute skill rolls for interacting with NPCs and making actual deductions based on your knowledge instead of using them as a supplement or a fall-back if you get stuck, then you’re devaluing roleplaying.  Now 4e has made devaluing roleplaying one of its key components.

Let’s take a look at actual play, by someone wildly enthusiastic about Skill Challenges (note, I’m not criticizing Emptythreat15 or his GM at all; they had a lot of fun, which is what counts, but I’m arguing that they could have just as much fun and more often with a system that doesn’t get in the way of what they’re trying to do):

  • A Brand New Nail-Biter: Skill Challenge « Dice Monkey

    • My male dwarf normally gets decent initiative; however, my female is cursed to having initiative rolls of less than 10. So my dwarf waded into combat with the hideous dogs and I thought to myself, ‘I wonder if we could improve the attitude of that boar and have it help us out…we don’t have Handle Animal anymore…but hell, maybe the DM will think of something suitable’.

      So my turn came around, and I explain to the DM that I want to undergo a skill challenge to improve the attitude of the boar, and what do you know, the skill challenge “Taming The Beast” was listed in the rules for the adventure. Sweet.

That right there is enough to make a grown man weep.  The player comes up with a really neat idea, and what’s he excited about?  The module gives him permission to try it.

This was turning out to be no easy task though. 4 successes before 2 failures? This thing was just built for failure. Fortunately for me though, I was allowed to use the better of my Heal or Nature checks. Asking a cleric to make a Heal check is like asking a clown to make a balloon giraffe, so I was pretty excited. Much to my chagrin, my clerics +11 Heal modifier does very little when you roll a 2 on a d20. One failure already. Not good.

The next two rounds, a 15 and 16 consecutively, making 26 and 27 Heal checks, and successful ones at that. The next turn, two have a bit of a safety net, her brother, the paladin, came over and aided her on her checks, giving her a +2. She made the next check with a roll of 10, and spent an action point for her last skill check, rolling a 10 once again. The boar was calm, and finally, so was I.

So what’s wrong with this picture?  Practically everything, though at least this is a situation where it’s conceivable that botched attempts could make the plan impossible to carry out (fiddle with the wounds unsuccessfully long enough and the boar could be too enraged to befriend even if you eventually get it right) .  Note the way the player meta-games which skills to apply, and when to get the second character involved.  Note also how the player was channeled into a solution that involved making skill rolls, even with two characters that have magical healing abilities that would have made perfect sense in terms of game-world and genre logic to use at that point.  I’d also be inclined to hold it against the system that what seems to drive the tension is the roles themselves, rather than, say, the fact that a fight is raging all around them and they’re spending time fiddling around with the caged animal while their companions are fighting for their lives.

Now imagine playing out the same scene without being anchored down by the Skill Challenge system.  There’s nothing they accomplished that couldn’t have been done by straight role-playing, unless you just don’t trust the GM.  The only difference (besides the fact that the player might have made different choices about whether to involve the second character or use magical healing without the meta-game considerations) is that the task would be open-ended…the player would have an additional decision to make if the first two turns didn’t succeed about whether to continue (and perhaps up the stakes by using special abilities) or give it up and help with the fight.  All the Skill Challenge system does here is dumb it down.

Let’s look at another example, this one a bit more elaborate, and told from the point of view of a GM designing a Skill Challenge.  Again, I’m not meaning to disparage what At Will wrote, on the contrary I’m using this as an example because I think it’s a good Skill Challenge, that would be better if you dumped the whole Skill Challenge mechanic.

You have to go read it, because otherwise I’d end up quoting the whole thing.

So, now that you’ve read it, here’s what’s wrong.   There is, as I believe is typical, no justification whatsoever for the mechanism itself.  There’s just no earthly reason that failing to remember something about the history of the area, or to have a flash of insight, should have any bearing at all on whether you can intimidate a child into telling you what you want to know.  But if you try and fail at those two things as well as using Diplomacy on the villagers, you’ve got no reason to talk to the child…it becomes impossible for you to get information out of him.  The fact that Intimidate is the only skill usable on the child is another failing, in my book…it doesn’t matter if one of the characters is the motherly sort with oodles of Charisma and Persuasion or a spell like Charm Person (or whatever the 4e equivalent is)…that approach is something you can’t even attempt.  In the comments At Will makes it clearer that he’d allow you to use appropriate magic to bypass some or all of the Challenge or to roleplay some of the encounters (but he’d make whether that accomplishes anything contingent on the die-roll…all the talk is just window-dressing), but what advantage is there to even using the Challenge mechanic then?

Here’s how the Old School would do it (in this case, Old School refers to all the way back to 3.5):

Kobolds have kidnapped a group of children from the village the PCs are currently in.  The players must gather information to find out who did it, and find their way to the location in order to rescue the children before the kobolds can sacrifice them to a dragon.

If you talk to the villagers, they don’t know much, but they know that they miss their children and when they went missing.  They were out in the fields…; Someone does report that they thought they saw more children than normal playing for a while…

One child who is still in the village seems to know something. The child doesn’t want to confess because he’s afraid they might come after him if he tells someone, but if the adventurers can persuade or intimidate him somehow he saw some creatures that look like small dragon-people.

Somebody who knows this area and its history will know that this area has not seen too many hard times, but goblins and kobolds can always be a menace. Goblins haven’t been seen around this area for some time…

Examining the tracks in the field, and near some of the houses,  reveals that fairly small creatures kidnapped these children, and they headed North out of the forest.  Appropriate knowledge will further reveal that  creatures are most likely kobolds judging by the tracks.  Appropriate knowledge recalls that kobolds favor mountainous terrain.

Gaining a good overview of the territory (by climbing up to a advantageous spot high among the trees, flight, clairvoyance) grants a good view of the terrain, and suggests three areas that the kidnappers might have gone: a mountain slope, a ravine to the South, or into the dense center of the forest.

And so forth.  Essentially, all the work that went into devising the Skill Challenge is valuable, and can indicate the kinds of information that you can get by talking to the various people and examining the scene.   What’s the matter with Skill Challenges is the mechanism itself, not the putting extra thought and care into how various skills and abilities can be used in the scenario.  You want to strip out extraneous requirements that only specific skills be used (except perhaps noting things that could give a particular approach an advantage, such as so-and-so being a coward and easily intimidated), and beef it up with additional information so that they players themselves can reason about the information they uncovered (the combination of the tracks heading North out of the forest and the overview of the area showing only one likely place to the North, or the overview revealing the mountain and the knowledge check revealing that kobolds like mountains).  You don’t want to artificially prolong it, by requiring a certain number of dice rolls before they can proceed–if they think they’ve figured out that it was kobolds and they’re likely to be in the mountains, by all means let them head for the mountains to take a look around.  You also don’t want to cut them short by saying, oops, you’ve failed, no point in trying to gather more information or recall anything further.  You most emphatically do not want to discourage them trying oddball or long-shot approaches by penalizing them if they fail.  If you want to put them under time pressure, then attach amounts of time that it takes to try different things, and let them decide which they are willing to spend time on and whether they can split the tasks up more efficiently, don’t just arbitrarily rule that failing to recall a fact about kobolds chews up just as much of the day (moves them closer to failure) as canvassing the neighborhood and talking to all the farmers.   For role-playing purposes you can easily get everything that is good about them, and avoid most of the bad, by dropping the Skill Challenge mechanic altogether and just using the list as a guideline to the kinds of things the players can roleplay out.

Skill Challenges take what was a reasonable idea, of examining a situation and making note of all the obvious (and some less obvious) ways that you could use certain skills to obtain information, advance your agenda, or solve a problem and formalizes it into a mini-game that basically piths all that was good and fun about roleplaying to fit it within the framework of a board-game.  The entire Skill Challenge system of collective accomplishment and punishment pushes the players more strongly than ever before into treating the party as a Borg collective of drones with various specializations controlled by a hive-mind, rather than a group of individuals with their own psychologies and approaches to life.  Think about it. There is simply nothing in-character that could be said by one character to another as to why he shouldn’t attempt to recall what he learned about kobolds until some other character elsewhere has either succeeded or failed in picking a lock or climbing a tree (or vice-versa).  Skill Challenges make ordinary role-play harmful to the party, and for no reason at all other than it to satisfy the arbitrary strictures imposed by the mechanics.  If nothing else, keeping the Skill Challenges and dropping the “before M failures” clause would be a step back towards making them at least compatible with role-playing.

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Bait and Switch

This month, the RPG Blog Carnival topic is “Transitions and Transformations,” so I’d like to talk a little about Baiting and Switching campaign premises in RPGs.  The basic idea, seductive in its simplicity, is that you emulate a common staple of fantastic fiction where the protagonists find themselves in a setting or situation that is a radical change from their everyday lives and for which they are unprepared (as when a group of children find a strange world in the back of the wardrobe in the house they’re staying in, or a dying prospector is astrally transported to Mars) by having the players prepare characters as if they were going to play in a particular setting (e.g. the Old West), and part-way through the first session plop them in a new one (Barsoom).  In one swell foop you short-circuit any temptation to meta-gaming in the character build process, eliminating any difficulty over professors, reporters and nurses curiously well-versed in the handling of shotguns and dynamite in your Call of Cthulhu game, and you present the players with the exact psychological experience that the characters have of being gobsmacked when their plans for their lives are turned upside-down.  That’s a pretty rare thing to be able to accomplish in an RPG, so it’s quite tempting.

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking that I’m going to warn you against doing it, because the risks are too great.  The players might not like the new premise that they didn’t buy into; they may have built characters that have rich connections with the original premise and are reduced to hollow shells in the new one or may have an obsessive motivation to return to the original; if the characters aren’t built with the setting in mind they may be ineffective to the point of not being fun to play; if any characters are lost the switch in premise might make it impossible to neatly add new ones, etc.  In essence you’re playing a trick on the players, and what they might have cheerfully agreed to if you’d presented it openly they may end up resenting when it’s forced upon them, ruining a perfectly good campaign for a brief moment of epiphany when they realize what the game is really about.

Let me tell you, though, that when it works, it’s beautiful, and can cause great awe and glee around the table.  To me, that’s worth the risk.

That’s not to say that there aren’t things you can do to minimize the risk.  Take, for example, the Escape From Tartarus game I ran.  You might want to read the recaps of Part 1 and Part 2 before going further.

I knew going into it that the bait and switch I was planning was tricky, so there were some things that I did  specifically to address that:

  • The game was planned as a one-shot, instead of a full campaign.  If things had gone badly the number of sessions ruined would be minimal (it ended up taking two sessions, but it was also apparent by the end of the first session that it was going to work).
  • The players were all given pre-gens.  This reduced their investment in the initial character concept (nobody spent two weeks working on a back-story that would be completely discarded), and allowed me to make sure that everybody had something they could do once the switch occurred.
  • Because I know my players well, I was able to tailor the pre-gens to their preferences, to the extent of having them be reminiscent of characters that they’d already played and enjoyed.
  • It was presented as “Here’s what I’m running this week.”  Slightly high-handed, but again reduced the players investment in the initial premise and eliminated any hint of breaking a promise to deliver them a game based on what had been previously agreed to.
  • The switch granted the characters a step up (in this case a big one) in importance and ability to exert an influence on the course of events.  It’s much better for player buy-in for the alleged madman to find out he’s Corwin, Prince of Amber than for Corwin, Prince of Amber to find out he’s actually a madman hallucinating in the loony-bin.
  • The shift left a goodly amount of continuity between pre and post.  In this case, the literal setting remained the same, while the power-level and style underwent a radical change (from gritty prison drama to super-agent adventure).  I think continuity helps: change the setting, keep the style; change the style, keep the setting; change both, at least keep the themes.  If you change everything, the players may feel that you’ve just switched games in the middle.

The Escape From Tartarus was one of the most succesful games I’ve run, and everybody had a really good time.  In fact, it’s one of the settings my players have indicated an interest in returning to some day.

I’ve run other Bait and Switch games, some wildly successful (The Midnight Special), some failures (The Irvine Effect) and I think the above hits upon the key points to make it work:  Minimize the Bait, by not letting the players get too invested in or put too much work into the initial set-up, and carefully target the switch so that the players can experience some sense of continuity and the switch leaves them in their comfort zone as to the kind of characters and situations they like to play, or places them there if that’s not where they started.  Done right, and it’ll be a game to remember.

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Let’s Get Critical!

Critical hits are fun.  Players enjoy big, flashy unusually good events.  Some enjoy them so much that they play systems where they can narrate them right in, instead of waiting for the dice to serve them up, but that’s a topic for a different day.  This was driven home to me when I was running games with my home-brew.  It was a skill + roll system based around 2d6 but didn’t contain criticals, automatic hits, or fumbles.  Every time a 12 came up there was a murmur of excitement around the table, followed by a sigh of disappointment when the players realized that it wasn’t a critical hit–in fact, due to the slightly unusual way the dice were read*, a 12 was usually a failure.  After a couple of months I finally gave the players what they were looking for and made 12 a critical hit, giving max bonus and a special result on top, and the cycle of Woohoo!  Awwww…. was over.

Critical hits are one of the first things that DMs think of adding to an otherwise fairly abstract combat system like D&D, and some games became notorious for their critical hit charts.  Since they only get rolled once in a while, it’s possible to have a big chart with really detailed results without slowing things down much at all, and the chance of getting, say, a broken arm instead of just 8 hit points gave combat a grittier feel that a lot of players really appreciated.

The biggest problem with critical hits is that in combat heavy games there’s a built-in asymmetry between the PCs and the NPCs even if they’re using the same rules.   PCs get a lot of dice rolled against them during the course of a campaign–orders of magnitude more than any individual NPC that they might encounter–and depending on the system they may well get more rolls against them than they make even in an individual combat, between often being outnumbered by the monsters, many monsters getting multiple attacks per round (the infamous claw/claw/bite) and PCs usually having lots more hit points before they are rendered hors de combat (once you figure in magical healing).  That means that even really unlikely events will eventually hit the PCs, and on the whole the PCs will take more criticals than they dish out.  At which point the rules that were originally added to give the players some more WooHoo! end up serving up heaping helpings of Oh Crap! instead.  Insta-Kill crits are particularly unpleasant in this regard.  And, as commenter Scott said over on the post Making Critical Hits More Interesting at Inkwell Ideas “a smashed ankle matters very little to the NPC who’s going to die in a couple of rounds, but very much to the PC who’s going to suffer until he can get a heal cast.”

A second, lesser, problem is that with systems that keep criticals fairly abstract (say, by awarding double damage but no extra result beyond that) it’s possible to get a critical hit but follow it up with a disappointing roll for damage…the fact that you’ve done 2 points instead of the 1 you would have rolled is cold comfort, and in terms of the emotions that rolling dice have added to the experience, you’d probably be better off not having rolled a critical in the first place.  It becomes an artifact of the abstraction mechanism rather than a proxy for a game-world event; in the game-world it’s presumably not “My arrow hit him in the eye slit!….But it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any….”  And if that’s at all a common result of rolling a critical, you have to start asking whether it’s really worth having them in the game.

So, my suggestions for treating critical hits in games like D&D are as follows:

  1. Have them be something PCs do to NPCs, not vice-versa.  Or, if symmetry between PCs and NPCs is important to you (so there’s no “PC glow”) then at least have the NPCs criticals do abstract damage, such as double damage, instead of rolling on a chart for specific results such as limb amputation.  Otherwise you have to be prepared for most PCs to die or suffer career-ending injuries a lot sooner than their toughness as measured in hitpoints and armor class would otherwise indicate.
  2. If you want to have PCs sometimes face the possibility of a long-term or crippling injury, tie it to something less common than a 1 in 20 shot critical hit.  One neat idea (borrowed from Savage Worlds) is tie it to the PC becoming incapacitated.  In D&D that would mean getting knocked down to zero HP.  Whenever the PC hits 0, then roll on the injury chart (possibly the same chart as the PCs have been dishing out to the NPCs); have the penalties for the injury persist even in the face of magical healing unless extra time and a Healing skill roll is made, or a more special-purpose spell (such as regenerate) is used.  If you just slap Cure Serious Wounds on somebody with a shattered ankle, they get the hitpoints back and can fight again, but the ankle has been healed crooked.
  3. If you’re using abstract damage criticals, either just award max damage for the dice (so a crit on a d8 weapon automatically does 8 points, which is about the expected value of rolling 2d8 anyway), or if you insist on rolling have a minimum of the expected value. E.g. Roll 1d8 and multiply by 2, but have it be 9 points minimum (2 * expected value of 4.5) so that you avoid the WooHoo! Awww phenomenon.

* instead of adding the two dice, you used whichever face was lower.  Doubles were zero.  This yielded results from 0 to +5, weighted towards the 0 end; this meant you always performed at least as well as your skill (a concept borrowed from CORPS) so you never had to roll for tasks with DC <= your skill, but you had a decent chance of getting slightly better than that up to a slim chance of getting much better.  But double-six counted as zero…bummer.   The revised version had double six count as a +5 and a special result.  It barely changed the expected value, but had a big impact on the excitement that players got from rolling.

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Welcome to the Jungle! We Got Fun and Games

RPG Diehard talks about a sandbox session that Ripper X tried to run that went poorly:

  • RPG Diehard: Cautionary Tales from the Sandbox

    On paper, a complete wilderness adventure sounds great! Wandering around blind, not knowing where in the hell you are going, or really what you are looking for. In actual play, this was SLOW!!!! So slow that I was getting bored, and it was all the same thing. I thought that it would be fun, but plotting a coarse and deciding of where to go that day is frickin boring! I don’t know if it was my fault, or if I did something wrong, or what. I thought about it! I really did. How can I spice this up? But with such a large map to explore, I really couldn’t prep anything or describe a scene more clearer then what I was. I really didn’t want to spend too much time talking about a day where nothing happens. I did give the place a lot of sounds and smells, but the players weren’t all that interested, and I kept failing my random encounter checks.

    His post serves as a cautionary tale about what to avoid in a sandbox campaign. It seems Ripper X was a little too wedded to the sandbox concept and could probably have been a bit more liberal with his random encounters (as in, fudge the die rolls so they actually happen, or adjust the rules so you’re rolling more frequently) without infringing too much on the spirit of the game. Moreover, it’s important to note that sandbox games are defined by their lack of a linear plot — but not necessarily their lack of story. Time spent exploring should be time well spent; the PCs should learn something important about the area, uncover a villain or stumble across a previously unknown map feature.

I’ve got some more suggestions for making sandbox play work better, in addition to Diehard’s eminently sensible ones:

  1. The single most important thing you can ask yourself prior to running a Sandbox session is “What’s the PC’s agenda?”   Knowing that lets you know where to concentrate the bulk of your preparation.  It’s absolutely true that you can’t put enough initial work into a large-scale area to cover every contingency and every path the PCs might follow (some settings might evolve to that point over years of play, but it’s unrealistic to try to start there), but you really shouldn’t have to.  Why are the PCs exploring the Isle of Dread?  Are they searching for treasure?  If so, then give them a map, diary, or guide… some reason that they’d embark on this dangerous expedition with some hope of success. (I seem to recall that The Isle of Dread uses both of these.)   Decide what’s on the map or in the diary, and that will tell you what landmarks they’ll be looking for and where to put obstacles for them to deal with.  Feel free to change the published map by deleting or adding information to highlight obvious routes to explore or approaches to take (e.g. if there’s a native village on the map, mark them as “Friendly” if they are a place where the party can get further information about the island.)Are they castaways? Then you can assume that they’re going to be interested–at least initially–in the bare-bones stuff of survival: building or seeking shelter, acquiring food, and so forth.
  2. Change your understanding of encounters.  In a lot of games (D&D in particular) “random” encounters are combat encounters–they don’t necessarily turn out that way depending on the PC and the reaction table, but they have the potential; things that don’t pose a threat to the party are generally deemed unworthy of notice. The standard chance of encounter (e.g. 5-6 on a d6 per 3 hexes traversed or whatever) is geared towards that understanding.  But if you really want the characters to feel like they’re exploring without the feeling that each day brings nothing but MFJ* you need to provide more points of interest–and ideally decision points–than that.  You should be thinking in terms of # of Incidents (info/decision points) per day, say by rolling a d3 and saying they’ll hit that many things to ponder during the day’s explorations.  Roll an additional die to see if one of those encounters is a “wandering monster”, otherwise pick it off a list of things you’ve prepared.  Some things might include:
    • Spoor:  signs of one of the monsters from the chart for the area.  This might warn them of the presence of something particularly dangerous before they actually encounter it, or provide them with the opportunity to stock their larder.  A successful Tracking roll (or whatever, depending on system) can turn this into an encounter with that creature if they desire.
    • Vermin:  some non-dangerous but potentially annoying vermin (mosquitoes, leeches in the stream they’re trying to cross, etc).
    • Game: something they can eat if they can hunt or trap it.
    • The way is blocked: some natural feature that will require a skill roll or some role-playing to traverse; it could be a ravine, or a swiftly running stream, a gigantic fallen tree, a huge mound of stinging ants, or whatever.  They must either backtrack (costing them, say, 1 hex of movement for the day) or do something to get over it.
    • Notable Feature: some unusual feature of the local terrain that’s worth describing, or better yet interacting with.  E.g. A waterfall with a hidden grotto containing the bones of an adventurer and some treasure, a volcanic fumarole, a ravine with a rotting rope bridge, a road-side shrine to a long forgotten god.
    • Hazard: a feature that poses an active menace to the party as soon as they encounter it, e.g. quicksand, an erupting geyser, a dead-fall trap left by native hunters, etc.
    • Clue: something that points the party in the direction they need to go, or furthers their agenda in some way.  E.g. a trail blazed by prior adventurers, a short stretch of paved road indicating the direction of the Lost City, a brief glimpse through the clouds that usually shroud the mountain top of a tower, etc.
    • Setback: somebody gets sick (not seriously enough to be deadly) from some fruit or perhaps the water, some rations have turned moldy or been stolen by monkeys, some piece of equipment was lost through a hole in a pack (or maybe it’s those darn monkeys again), somebody twists their ankle and their pace is halved for 1d3 days.
    • Good Fortune: they discover something fortunate (not counting a clue), such as a medicinal plant that heals 1d3 of burn damage, or a small cache of adventuring equipment (some still usable) left by previous adventurers.
    • The Drums! The Drums: evidence that the party is not alone on the island, or even that they’re being watched.  Nothing like a little PC paranoia to up the tension.
    • and so on.  If you’re good at improvising, you can come up with this stuff off the top of your head, but given some prep time anybody should be able to review various stories and movies to come up with a fairly long list of incidents that can liven up an otherwise dull “No Wandering Encounter” day.

    The important thing to remember is that just because you’re trying to run a “sandbox” adventure where the players are free to follow their own agendas and you’re not going to hem them in or lead them by the nose doesn’t mean that as GM you don’t have the authority or responsibility to give them stuff to interact with in the world, even if it isn’t spelled out on the Encounter Tables in the module.  If anything, the opposite: if you’re going to make them play out day-to-day tasks like exploring a jungle, you have to make sure that the exploration itself is interesting.

That’s not to say that if you follow this advice, your Sandbox sessions will always go well.  Sometimes it just doesn’t work.  Either it’s not a good fit for the players, or the party, or it just doesn’t “gel” and the players flounder around ’til they’re begging to be gaffed with Ye Olde Plot Hooke.  At which point, I say Go For It.  If the only way to get things moving forward again and have the players start having fun in the session is for a crazed wizard to show up and Bamf them to a dungeon, so be it.  The Sandbox is a certain approach to empowering players to have fun, it’s not a substitute for it.

* More Fine Jungle

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Savage Worlds: Tips for Speeding Combat

Nothing Earth-shattering, just some handy hints to keep things moving along:

  • Use two decks for initiative. Have someone other than the GM shuffle the second deck while the first is in use, and at the end of a round when a Joker’s been played just swap decks. (If possible, use decks with different color backs, so that you have no problems separating out the cards when you have people on hold past the point where you reshuffle.)
  • Collect the initiative cards as people take their actions, that way the top of the discard pile always reminds you where the count-down is.
  • People who go on hold should flip their cards over and hang on to them until they act, so you can tell at a glance who’s Holding vs. whose initiative hasn’t rolled around yet, and who doesn’t need to be dealt a new card if they’re still holding at the end of the round.
  • If somebody dithers when their Init comes up, tell them they’re on hold and move on–when they make up their mind they can go.
  • Use physical tokens for Bennies and Wounds (I like to use White and Red poker chips, respectively) and to mark powers with duration (e.g. if somebody has the Armor spell on them, give them 3 tokens, like pennies or life-stones from Magic, and have them discard one each turn–when they’re out the spell’s over).
  • Similarly, mark Shaken characters with something easily visible; if using miniatures, I like to drop a little pipe-cleaner ring around the figure.  When you’re not using minis, another poker chip will do.
  • Roll the attacks for all the Extras (or all of them in a convenient clump) at once. SW is designed to allow for this; since they get no Wild Die, it’s easy to just roll one die per Extra.
  • When rolling to hit, remember that you never care how many raises you get beyond one. After applying any modifiers, just ask Does it beat the Parry?  By 4 or more? (For Throwing/Shooting it’s the range TN instead, but same idea.)
  • When rolling damage, you do care about the number of raises up to 4, but you can still simplify a little if you remember that you don’t care about any remainder so you don’t need to divide.  Subtract off the Toughness and compare does it beat 0? 4? 8? 12? 16?  Most people, even the math-phobic, can just see the answer.
  • Don’t look up rules during play.  (I know I said this in my Three Don’ts post, but it bears repeating.)  If you don’t know the rule off the top of your head, make something up that seems reasonable.  Make a mental note to review it later after the session.
  • If somebody challenges your interpretation, don’t argue.  Either stick to your guns or give in, but don’t stop for debate.  If what they’re proposing isn’t ludicrous, I’d say let them have their way.  You’re going to look up the actual rule later, so at most it’s going to affect this one combat, and Fast! Furious! Fun! trumps your guess as to fidelity to a rule you can’t at the moment remember.  Yeah, it gives your players a minor incentive to challenge you, but if you’re not playing with mature players who won’t abuse the system and you… well, you have bigger problems than that.