Category: Advice/Tools

Posted on

In Praise of Randomization

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action. – Ian Fleming

Here’s two things about human beings:

  1. They are incredibly bad at randomizing
  2. They are incredibly good at recognizing patterns

The implication of the combination of these facts is that if you’re GMing a game and you think you’re introducing something that has no correlation with what’s gone before you’re probably wrong, and your players will probably notice.  In fact, even if you’re right, your players may well think there’s a correlation.

There are times when you can take advantage of this, and bask in the appreciation of your players who think you planned something diabolically intricate sessions in advance when actually they just constructed the pattern on the fly, but a lot of the time it can be a problem.  For one thing, it can make the players suspicious and paranoid.  Since a significant part of the game world always is out to get them, there’s usually plenty of fodder for this.  Paranoid players can turtle, or turn away (or turn on) NPCs that would otherwise be able to offer them resources and support that they’re going to need against the real threats, and they can slow the game to a crawl (such as when they examine and re-examine every ten feet of a corridor).  Unintended or spurious patterns can also lead the players on wild goose chases, pursuing lines of enquiry that you know are a dead end but are hard to block off without going meta–especially since it can be impossible for the players to distinguish between the world not containing the clues they’re looking for and an in-game adversary covering his tracks.  Sometimes the dog doesn’t bark in the night because there is no dog.

That’s where using genuine sources of randomness such dice come in.  E.g., if you have and regularly use random encounter tables to make your world seem alive and bustling, then you have much less risk that the players will conclude they’re being spied on by beggars just because beggars are a bit of local color that always seems to pop into your mind when you’re improvising.  They might still be inclined that way because of a series of unfortunate dice rolls…but if the players know you’re rolling randomly on tables, they’re much more likely to take it the way a real inhabitant of the world would: coincidence, not enemy action.  The tables are important so that you’re just using the randomizer to pick from a distribution that makes sense for the setting; you’re not trying to thwart all pattern in the setting, you’re trying to emphasize the true patterns and mitigate the purely coincidental ones.  The key to remember is that the players have hardly any interactions with the world (including simple descriptions of what they perceive) compared to the characters, so they tend to grossly overestimate the representativeness of the interactions they do have.

Finally, no discussion of randomization in RPGs would be complete without touching on random character generation.  While it’s probably obvious that random character generation, just like randomizing on encounter tables, increases the representativeness of the characters as part of the population, it’s not as clear that’s desirable.  After all, a character picked at random from the population of the setting may not have a single adventure during his or her entire life (and probably likes it that way).  For a long time I was strongly against random character generation.  Not only should players be able to play what they want, but the very fact that they’re expected to go on an adventure (barring certain kinds of everyday-people-thrust-into-peril scenarios where I tended to hand out pregens anyway) ought to be a strong enough filter to justify deterministic character generation.

I’m much less dogmatic about it now, in part because I’ve been a player for the past seven years in a campaign where the GM insists on rolling the six D&D stats in order 3d6 each, no swapping or adjusting (not even racial adjustments or 2-for-1 prime requisite adjustments, so actually more strict than Basic D&D), and I’ve come to appreciate two features of random chargen even without the fun and complication of a lifepath system.  First of all, it really does make you play characters that you wouldn’t consider otherwise and that can make things fresher and present an added challenge.  You might not want to get too attached to that 5 Dex fighter, but while he lasts it really can be fun trying to make the most of him.  Second, it makes being particularly good at something rare, worth treasuring, and a genuine stand-out in the setting.  Mechanically, an 18 STR is the same in a 3d6 in order as in a 4d6 drop low and arrange, but in one you really are the strongest person you are likely to meet in the campaign, in the other you’re maybe one-in-ten Fighters (unless they’ve gone the Dex route), one-in-three who’s 17+.  Random chargen is still not my default preference, but it definitely has its plusses.

Posted on

Special Purpose Wikis

I’m a fan of wikis for organizing and letting you search for game information. I’ve got the main Haunted Realm campaign wiki running on my website using MediaWiki, but that’s for public consumption; I still need a place for working on all my campaign notes that the players aren’t supposed to see.  I’ve mentioned TiddlyWiki before, a lovely little all-in-one-page portable wiki suitable for sticking on a thumb drive, but now Uncle Bear has two nice enhanced versions specifically for campaign notes and world design: TenFootWiki and WorldBuilding 101. Quite spiffy.

Posted on

The Mythic Game Master Emulator

The Mythic Game Master Emulator is pretty good for solitaire play; it’s actually more ambitious than just random dungeon stuff, it’s meant to allow you to use charts to randomly determine much more open-ended adventures. There’s a demo pdf that lacks the main chart, so you can’t actually take it for a test drive, but it does give enough explanation (I think) to get a sense of how it all fits together. Basically it gives a structure for asking yes/no questions and resolving whether it’s a strong no, no, yes, strong yes depending on the odds and how “chaotic” the scenario has become and whether a random event has occurred and if so what sort and whether it interrupts the logical flow of the scenario. A random event isn’t just a wandering monster but something like: Move toward a plot thread, Action: Expose, Subject: Jealousy, and then the player has to interpret what that means in the context of the adventure so far. If nothing suggests itself, it’s just dropped.

It’s surprisingly easy and satisfying, particularly for strongly structured stories like exploring a dungeon (possibly supplemented with random monster and treasure charts for determining things like what precisely is lurking in the cavern that the Orcs won’t enter) or perhaps a manor-house murder mystery…it takes a bit more practice and comfort with taking a “director stance” approach to at least some of the play for a really open-ended story, but it’s really good at keeping you from knowing everything that’s going to happen in advance on the one hand and having the adventure feel completely random and undirected on the other. Even though once you grasp the system, it really boils down to about 2 pages of charts (out of 54 pages), besides explaining the system the remaining pages do have a lot of helpful examples and advice about how to use it and how not to “cheat”… I found it well worth the $7.

I haven’t yet tried to use it for play with other players, and I’m not sure I will…though I can imagine keeping the chart around as a source of inspiration if the players hare off in a direction I wasn’t expecting and nothing immediate comes to mind.

Posted on

Fluffy Crunch and Crunchy Fluff

Matthew Conway recently wrote Fluff and Crunch Are Dead To Me, about how he’s grown to hate the terms, but I see them as getting at something.  To me, anyway, Crunch is all the mechanics of the game: you roll this, and subtract that number from this other thing, if the result is 0 or less, the creature is dead, and so forth.  Fluff is all the stuff that doesn’t touch the mechanics at all, and could be freely swapped with any other fluff without changing the in-game result.  To take a concrete example, if you know the HERO game system:  that an attack is 6d6 Energy Blast, Armor-Piercing, 1/2 End Cost, Activate 14- is all Crunch.  It tells you everything mechanical you need to know to resolve the attack, and absolutely nothing at all about what the attack is or how it appears to the characters.   The fact that it’s a bolt of flame, or darting daggers of ice, or even a pack of pink bunnies that materialize, savage the target, and disappear is pure Fluff, flavor without any substance.

Now, neatly separating things into Crunch and Fluff is a huge convenience to the game designers, who can on the one hand say “Hey, I don’t need to write any special rules for Ice Daggers versus Fireballs, an Energy Blast is an Energy Blast is an Energy Blast…take some advantages or limitations if you want it to have a different mechanical effect”  and on the other can say “Here’s an adventure you can use for any system whatsoever, just plug in your favorite mechanics and go.” It’s also a convenience for the player and GM insofar as it makes the rules streamlined and elegant and lets them use this or that material with their favorite system.

But… it’s not a pure win… at least for players who are interested in having the rules closely track the game description and story.  See, unless you’re approaching it as a board-game, almost everything that actually interests the players is at the level of description.  What they want to do is toss their Fireball at the bad-guy and see the fur fly (or singe); rolling the 6d6 and subtracting the target’s Energy Defense divided by 2 while ticking off 3 endurance spent is just a means to the end, and the end is telling them what happens next when they throw that fireball.  But when the game designer has severed the link between mechanics and description, which is what designating them as crunch and fluff is mostly about, that can make the interface…mushy and undefined.  In extreme cases (cough 4e cough) the player can lose the sense that they know what’s actually happening in the game world to cause the mechanical effect, or worse know that the description is just “flavor text” and ought to be ignored lest it give you the wrong impression of what ought to be possible in the game world.  A clean separation of crunch and fluff makes it impossible to reason from the level of description.

So what players often would prefer…you’re way ahead of me here, I’m sure…is a less clean separation, what I call “fluffy crunch” and “crunchy fluff.”   Fluffy Crunch would consist of making every bit of crunch have a visible, comprehensible description-level corresponding bit of fluff.  You don’t just Soak a wound, you desperately twist out of the way so that it just grazes you.

Crunchy Fluff is making sure all the description-level stuff gets reflected appropriately in the mechanics:  If your super-power lets you created Ice Daggers out of nothing, you darned well should be able to create one and use it to cool your drink, or ice-down a twisted ankle.   No saying the rules don’t support that that just because the crunch description doesn’t allocate a +1/256th advantage “Can be used to cool physical objects in a non-violent fashion.”  Your ice daggers might get a bonus (or a minus) versus fiery creatures, or be easier to generate in artic conditions and harder in the middle of the Sahara, but in any case shouldn’t be indistinguishable from your companion’s Laser Pistol.

Crunchy Fluff also comes about from making the mechanics support the details of the setting.  If vampires in your setting are unable to enter a dwelling without an invitation, it helps to support that with actual mechanics: is it an absolute prohibition?  Can a sufficiently powerful vampire overcome it?  If so, how?  A Will roll?  Or is it something that the vampire can do, but it will have consequences.  Will it take damage for every turn it remains uninvited?  Can an invitation be revoked?  If it can, can the occupant just say the words, or does the occupant have to engage in some kind of test of wills?  This kind of tuning the rules to reinforce the description of the setting is an important way of making it feel like the setting has “heft”…that the adventure that the players are on couldn’t just be “re-skinned” (to use a computer gaming phrase) with the vampires being replaced with killer androids or cattle rustlers and nothing else but the fluff changing.

If you try to write something as pure Fluff, that can be applied to any setting, those are the kinds of things that can come back to bite you, no pun intended.  If the adventure assumes that vampires can’t enter a dwelling without an invitation period, but the system mechanics say that any sufficiently powerful vampire can…and the adventure has a vampire that’s supposed to be one of the most powerful in the world….

In any case the rules should be used to support the description that’s the heart of play.  Fluffy Crunch is there to give the mechanics a reason and a description; a neat mechanic is not self-justifying, even if it does give the player something extra to think about in terms of winning the board game.  Crunchy Fluff makes the descriptive level of play have consequences as well as consistency.  Both are important to a satisfying RPG, and IMO both are preferable to designs where one is divorced from the other.

Posted on

A Puzzling Conundrum

  • Why Puzzles Often Suck in Tabletop Role Playing Games

    A sample “puzzle”

    • Let’s take a few puzzles by example.

      The Lich’s crypt is guarded by six levers, numbered one through six, and can only be opened when levers 2, 4, and 5 are up; 1 and 3 are down; and 6 is in the middle. The party finds said crypt. Ok, what is going to happen when you have five people who have not read your notes reach this dead end door?

To which I say: A combination lock isn’t a puzzle.

There are two ways that puzzles can appear in an RPG scenario: indirectly, as just another feature that the characters need to beat with the appropriate mechanic (skill roll, magical power, etc); or directly, as a challenge to the players.

The first doesn’t really require much discussion.  Some kinds of puzzles, such as bank vault combinations, will occur naturally in the game world and if the characters want to get inside the vault they’ll have to figure out how to deploy their abilities to do so.  It could be the whole focus of an adventure, say in a caper scenario, it could be a feature of a larger scenario, say a wall-safe in a room where a murder has occurred that might contain a clue, or it could be completely coincidental, as when a group of super-heroes interrupts a robbery in a bank.  In any case, the exact details of the puzzles–even the solutions–don’t matter because the players aren’t expected to solve them.  If there’s any solving to be done it will be at the abstract level of the characters.

The only reason to even mention the indirect kind is because scenario designers will sometimes confuse the two types, and present the details of an in-character puzzle as if it were a puzzle for the players, which leads to sucky “puzzles” as above.

Puzzles that directly challenge the players to solve them are a completely different kettle of fish.  The first thing you have to decide is whether the kind of game you’re playing has any place for such direct challenges to the players at all.  If the players want to approach everything from an in-character standpoint, player challenges are problematic.  The player may even see the solution, but feel obligated not to point it out because the character wouldn’t get it.  Now that’s a recipe for frustration right there, or even hard feelings at the table if not all the players are as dedicated to fire-walling in-character vs. out-of-character knowledge and insights.

Even if you decide you’re comfortable with direct PC challenges, you have to decide what the price of failure is: what are you willing to put up with in game if the players just can’t solve it.  In old-school challenge-oriented gaming, the answer tended to be “if they can’t, they can’t.”  If they don’t figure out the puzzle opening the door to the lower depths of the Liche’s tomb, and they can’t figure out a way around the door, they can’t go down there.  Maybe they can come back later when they have an idea.  That probably seems unduly harsh to most gamers nowadays, who may have an entire plot line riding on the party getting past that door, or just see having the players sit around the table brainstorming for an hour trying to figure out the puzzle as boring and a waste of time.  You could give the players an out of letting the characters roll for it if the players don’t make progress after a certain amount of time, but not only is that likely to be a let-down, you still face the possibility that the characters will fail and the party is still stuck.  At that point you could give in and give them a clue, or have a bright idea strike a party member or NPC from on high, but you have to wonder whether putting the puzzle in was a good idea in the first place.  Whatever you decide, it’s best to have thought it out before-hand.  With forethought, you could place clues or resources before-hand, or design an alternate (perhaps more dangerous) route so that solving the puzzle can reward the players, but failing to solve it won’t get them stuck (see “When Failure Is Not An Option“).  Nothing you’re likely to decide on the spur of the moment as the players are getting frustrated and cranky will be as good as what you can design in from the start.

But supposing that’s all settled, and you’ve decided that the players will have fun with a challenge to their puzzle-solving skills and decided what to do if they get stuck: how do you design a good puzzle?

Good puzzles can be solved by reasoning.  Anything that requires a brute-force approach isn’t a puzzle, it’s (at best) a time-sink.  It’s possible that the puzzle can require some bit of knowledge about either the real world or the game world, though in the latter case you had better be damn sure that the players actually know it and it wasn’t buried in some twenty-page back-story that you handed to them and they never read.  Let’s look at the liche’s crypt again:

Levers numbered 1-6 that need to be in an arbitrary pattern (up, up, middle, down, down) to open the door: not a puzzle.

Suppose, though, the levers weren’t numbered.  Instead, each of the six levers has six positions.  Next to each position is a letter.  The letters, top to bottom, read:  D, E, F, I, N, R.

That, at least, is a puzzle.  Moreover, it’s a puzzle that a fantasy RPG geek is particularly likely to get.

Which brings me to another point: unless you’re running a straight-up challenge-oriented game where everybody will happily spend an hour or two wrestling with a juicy puzzle, good puzzles in RPGs should be simple.  Complicated enough to give that little buzz of aha satisfaction when they get it, but nothing the players are going to agonize over unless you’re absolutely sure that agonizing over puzzles is how they’d prefer to spend their RPG time.  Err on the side of the obvious, which at least won’t slow down the game. Also, unless you have personal knowledge that one or more of your players is quite familiar with something, trivia and pop culture references can be dangerous.  Just because they seem blindingly obvious to you doesn’t mean the players will have the slightest clue, and unless you let them Google it, they won’t be able to obtain one during the course of the game, either.

Good puzzles should also relate back to the adventure at hand, if at all possible.  Don’t just plop a riddle or a logic puzzle that you got off the Net in the middle of your adventure unless you can relate it back to the themes and motifs of the rest of the adventure.  A riddle whose answer is “The Sun” might be good in the Temple of Ra, but seems kind of random in the Tomb of the Liche Lord.  The lever puzzle might be improved by using the Liche’s original name as the key instead, if that’s something the players had good reason to know.

Good puzzles, at least in RPGs, also should reward the players immediately.  If it’s a clue, make it a big honking obvious one, not something that itself further confuses the players or that they file away in their minds and might or might not remember later.  And for heaven’s sake, don’t punish them for figuring it out.  Yes, if you really were a diabolical Liche Lord designing a room, you might think it’s hilarious if you arrange it so that “success” in figuring out your lever puzzle releases a swarm of flesh-hungry beetles into the room, but while the Liche Lord may be a dick, you the GM are not.  And unlike the Liche Lord, as GM you’ve got an interest in the players continuing to accept and look forward to your challenges.

I think the best puzzle I’ve ever put in a game, at least from the players’ point of view, was in a game of DC Heroes, where I cut up a picture of Tutankhamen’s mask into a  simple jig-saw puzzle (about 7 pieces, iirc) and had the Riddler leave one piece of the puzzle behind at each crime scene, leading up to a big Museum of Antiquities heist.  These were college-age players, so it’s not as if a 7-piece jigsaw puzzle was a real challenge, but by careful cutting of the pieces and arranging which order they got them I was able to keep them guessing until piece 5 or 6, and they really seemed to appreciate the whole thing out of all proportion to the difficulty of the puzzle or the amount of time I spent preparing it.  And when they figured it out early (before they had the last piece(s)), I let them get to the Museum in time to be waiting when the Riddler and his crew arrived.  That was a moment they really enjoyed.

In conclusion, if your players are interested in being challenged directly, and you’ve thought out the stakes and the fall-back if the players are stumped, puzzles can be one of the most satisfying things in a game.  After all, it’s not the players actually swinging the sword, or flying the chopper, but it is the players themselves matching wits with the puzzle and it’s not lucky dice but the players’ own triumph when they succeed.

Posted on

Simulating Genre vs. Emulating Genre

Over at Critical Hits, Dave Chalker laments:

  • The Professor X Paradox | Critical Hits

    Unfortunately, there always seemed to be a wall that our campaigns hit, and has made us reluctant to pick up another superhero game in many years. While discussing the issue and attempting to settle on a new system, The Main Event and I hit on the core of our problem, and we dubbed it “The Professor X Paradox.” You see, take a typical party. You’re likely to have a wide range of different kinds of heroes in your group. To take some iconic examples, let’s say your party has the Incredible Hulk, Cyclops, and Professor X. Now let’s say, as what often happens in an RPG and in superhero stories, the party gets into a fight. You want to have a challenge for the party members, so you have a brute ala Abomination. Now, for the Hulk, this is an interesting fight. And Cyclops might be able to help out too. But for Professor X, either he’s going to completely take over the Abomination with mind powers and have him pose no threat, or he’s going to get obliterated by one punch from Abomination. Basically, the Hulk’s scale of toughness is so beyond a normal human’s that if you ever have a normal human in the fray, he’s likely to be killed if he happens to get involved in the fray.

My comment was:

There’s actually a fairly simple solution to that problem, that works with any system.

How do teams in the comics that consist of relatively normal guys with no armor or super-reflexes, like Cyclops, coexist with tanks like Colossus? The writer just grants script immunity to the weaker characters. If the Abomination attacks Colossus, he can land a punch, if he attacks Cyclops, he can’t. He might stun him with a near miss, or bury him in rubble, but he’ll never just splat him (unless Warren Ellis is writing it as a joke on the readers).

So grant script immunity to your supers characters. Just rule that if one of the heavy-hitter’s attacks actually lands on a non-tank, the GM decides what happens. What happens can range from being a complete miss, to being momentarily stunned, to being taken out of the fight until helped (rubble lifted to reveal that through luck or skill he has managed to create a safe pocket), to being taken out of the fight entirely. If you apply this equally to PCs attacked by heavy-hitter NPCs and PC heavy hitters attacking weaker NPCs, the PCs will even learn to stick to genre and have their Colossus character stick to attacking the Juggernaut instead of trying to one-shot Black Tom all the time

I’d like to elaborate on that though a bit, and what it means to try to simulate a genre instead of emulating it, and why I think it can be a big mistake.

Gamers are often trying to recreate the feel of certain kinds of genre fiction; indeed that may be the biggest thing that drew them to RPGs in the first place, the idea of what playing out what it would be like to be Indiana Jones, Conan, Sam Spade, or Spider-Man.  The problem they then run into is that the genres have recognizable tropes that they wish to occur in their games, but in fiction the tropes are there because the author put them there, and the tropes only “work” (yield a genre-conformant result) because the author is careful not to misapply them or subject them to too much scrutiny.  Players are not so careful, nor generally would you want them to be, because that care requires thinking about things as an author instead of as a character or player.

When it comes time to reproduce these tropes in the game, there are two basic approaches, which I’ll call “simulation” and “emulation.”  The goal of both is to have genre tropes work in the game, but the process is different.  Simulation attempts to make the tropes arise “naturally” or “organically” out of the rules of the game (sometimes conceived of as the laws of the gameworld); the tropes will, the players hope, occur as the emergent behavior of rules not specifically aimed at reproducing the tropes.  Emulation is concerned just that the tropes occur, by any means necessary.  Most attempts at genre games use some combination of the the approaches, though I think that simulation is seen as more elegant and generally preferable.

As a crude example, suppose you were designing a James Bond-style super-spy game.  It’s a feature of the movies that the villain always explains his fiendish plot to the hero.  The emulation approach would be for the GM to have the villain explain his plot, because that’s what villains in the genre do.  A more simulation approach would be to create a disadvantage (say, “Monologues”) which would grant extra build-points for creating the villain if he took it.  An even more simulation approach (in that it’s one that the villain as character could be aware of and trying to manipulate) would be to have it that the rules of that reality are such that the villain gains extra status or a greater chance of succeeding the more times he can explain his plot to a helpless hero.

In Emulation, making the trope happen is the rule.  In Simulation, the trope is a side-effect some other rule and the more generally applicable the rule is (the less obviously the rule exists merely to justify the side-effect), the better.

A more subtle example might be to change the combat bonus that people have for ganging up on a lone foe to no effect, or even a penalty for getting in each others’ way, in order to better simulate a Jackie Chan-style martial arts movie.  The Emulation approach to that might be to have a rule that flat out forbids multiple opponents from scoring a hit on a single fighter; since it never happens that he’s overwhelmed by numbers, shading the probabilities in his favor may help, but may still result in a genre-busting defeat.

And this leads to why I think it’s often a mistake to try and simulate your way into a genre-compatible result when you could just emulate it.  Simulations usually work by trying to create or tweak generally applicable rules so that “good” genre results are more likely…but more likely isn’t the same as certain.  If some things are required or forbidden by the genre and all you do is adjust the probabilities, sooner or later you will get a genre-busting result.  Dave talks about one such result in his supers campaign: his super-speedster, who only needed to avoid rolling an 18 on 3d6 in order to avoid a Hulk-sized attack that would splatter him completely if it landed, rolled an 18.  This busted the genre for them, and led to them abandoning the campaign and eventually trying to even play super-hero genre systems because they couldn’t guarantee against similar results.

The problem his group is experiencing, in my opinion, isn’t that the system has trouble handling characters of different scales of power (the Professor X Paradox)…it’s that the system allows non-genre results in the first place.  If you’re playing a four color supers game, even if you required all the characters to be of roughly equal toughness (maybe you’re playing an all-powered armor Iron Man squad)…it would still be a genre-busting mistake if one of your characters could die because of a bad die roll.  But getting simulations to refuse to cough up non-genre results is incredibly tricky, and the more you want to hide the fact that you’re directly encoding genre assumptions (wearing glasses is a +20 to your disguise roll, only for purposes of concealing your secret identity), the trickier it gets.

On the other hand, it’s really quite easy for any GM and players familiar with the genre they’re playing to emulate it by disregarding or overriding non-genre results.  Certainly it’s helpful if most of the time, the system yields answers compatible with the genre…I’m not saying that system doesn’t matter at all, or systemless is the only way to do good genre games, but if you have a system that yields a half-way decent simulation it costs you almost no time, effort, or immersion for the GM to be ready to overrule that 1 in 316 chance in order to emulate the genre you’re all trying to play.

Posted on

How to Railroad Your Players

Don’t.

Figure out some other way of advancing the scenario, or at least what path it will take if the players succeed instead of failing.

If you absolutely feel that you have to, then:

For my money, the best way of handling this is openly telling the players that the outcome of the scene is required by the plot.  If you’re going to railroad the players then telling them about it will usually defuse any resentment and may even get their active cooperation. You may even be able to give them a free hand to describe how they fail.

Second best is to present them with overwhelming force.  Yes, the rails will be visible, and you won’t get their buy-in, but you won’t waste their time lying to them about whether they’re really playing a scene where they can have an effect on the outcome, and they won’t waste any rare resources they might have in game trying to escape their fate.  You’ll also avoid poisoning the game further down the road, where they’ll wonder (with good reason) whether every failure or setback they experience–or even every success–was manipulated by the GM.  It’s not even like encountering overwhelming force is likely to be immersion-breaking, unless your PCs are nearly the most powerful entities in the setting; it’s common enough both in real life and fiction.  It’s only in games (and in my opinion not very good ones) where everything is automatically scaled to your abilities and every obstacle can be overcome.

Trying to slip one past them so they think that they’ve actually played the game and made important decisions when you’ve secretly removed any possibility of that is, ime, the number one thing that players hate, and yet GMs keep coming back to it.  Railroading is reviled by players, everybody knows that it’s reviled by players, everybody gives lip-service to the idea that you don’t want to be doing that to your players….but people still come up with scenarios that won’t work without it and try to devise cunning ways to hide it so the players won’t realize they’re being railroaded.  Because, you know, the resulting story would be so much cooler if it came out the way the GM envisioned it without any player input but with the players unwittingly playing their parts.

If you actually think the players will believe the story is cooler too, then put it to them openly.  If they think the point of the game is to make a satisfying and dramatic recap, they’ll be happy to cooperate.  If they disagree, then you’re doing them no service by lying to them to get the story you want.  And on the off chance they actually do think that it would be good if you sometimes disregarded their input to force the story in one direction or another, but they don’t want to know about it when it happens, then you can go back to worrying about how to camoflage your rails.

Posted on

When Failure Is Not An Option

Don’t make it an option.

Seriously.

Wandering the RPG blogosphere and forums, I’ve seen a lot of advice for GMs along the lines of “What to do when the party fails?”  The advice goes on to detail some clever or not so clever ways of preventing the module or entire campaign from going down in flames, but it’s almost always from the point of view of picking up the pieces once the party has failed to notice the clue, bypassed the room with the key, alienated the noble who’s the only one with the information they need, and so on.  Conspicuously absent, from my point of view, is a discussion of how the GM got the party in that pickle in the first place.  And it is the GM that got the party to the point where everything hinged on a single action, make no mistake.

You don’t want a single point of failure in your business processes, and you don’t want it in your RPG scenarios.  Unless, that is, you and your players are perfectly happy to fail (a possibility in some challenge-based games).

I’ve talked about “Scenario Breaker Rolls” in the past, so I won’t go into that again, but a botched die-roll isn’t the only way that the party can reach an impasse.

Take NPC interactions.  Too many GMs (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) make NPCs basically inert in social situations until the PCs prod them, and then decide how the NPCs react based on the PCs’ approach (plus or minus a die-roll).  Then they let the whole game get derailed when the PCs fumble the role-playing part of the interaction, perhaps by offering less deference to the King than the GM thinks the situation warrants.  That’s fine if there’s no problem for your game if the NPC declines to offer the quest after the PCs have insulted him and/or stolen from him, or you regard them ending up in the King’s dungeon as a good adventure hook.  If failure is going to be a big issue, then, as GM you should be taking charge and making sure that failure doesn’t occur.  Don’t make the NPC a surly and suspicious bugger if you need him to trust the PCs, no matter how neat you think it would be if the PCs were able to jolly him around through brilliant roleplaying.  Don’t put on your GM stone-face and wait for the PCs to start talking; have the NPC greet them with open arms and move the conversation along to where you need it to be (e.g. at least the announcement of the quest) before they open their mouths.  Yes, this steps on the role-playing opportunities of the situation, but you know what?  That’s what you get when you make an NPC a plot device.  You can have all the other NPCs interact in a more naturalistic fashion, or even that NPC in other situations, but during the portion of the adventure where you need that NPC to convey certain information or offer a particular deal to keep the PCs from hitting a brick wall, it’s a mistake to leave it up to the RP of the players if you think there’s any chance that they’ll screw it up.

Again, let me emphasize that “screw it up” means ruin everybody’s enjoyment with a failure to get the information/come to terms…whenever “failure” can be just as fun and interesting for everybody as success, I strongly encourage GMs to let things fall out however the players direct it.  But even GMs who are strongly committed to open-ended games without any rails can reach a point where the decisions of the players to that point have committed them to a course of action, at which point game-breaking opportunity for failures can crop up.  My feeling is that unless you and your players are equally committed to challenge-based games,  even in an open-ended sandbox campaign it’s the GM’s responsibility to minimize the single-points of failure.  If the players have decided to solve a mystery, and successfully uncover the murderer, it’s a mistake to make it so the fact that they’ve antagonized the Chief of Police along the way turns the whole adventure into a failure; you either have to make the Chief honorable enough that given proof he’ll make the arrest anway, or there has to be somebody else they can turn the culprit over to and see justice done.

To sum up, fixing game-breaking errors is no substitute for not making them in the first place.  There are all kinds of techniques you can use to recover from error, and it’s good to have some of them in reserve, but your first line of defense should be designing your scenarios so that there just aren’t any places where the PCs could fail unless you are willing for them to fail.  You can’t generally make players happy to fail, and you can’t (IMO) make success inevitable without cheapening it, but I think you can and should make every effort so that even if they fail, the players regard it as time well spent; failures should never result in them saying “That was stupid. What a waste of time.” if you can possibly help it.

Posted on

Roll for your life!

Roll Character History

I've put the preliminary web interface to my table-rolling program up. Currently there are only two tables: a very simple table for rolling up bar names, and a very complex table for rolling character histories.

Play around with it, and feel free to nitpick. Things that I know are still problems in some of the tables:

No [something] yet – means a sub-table was called that I haven't bothered to fill out.

() – means that a subtable was called but didn't yield and answer.

was/were – this should show only the appropriate form. If it shows up as written it usually means that there's some missing whitespace in the table so the pattern matching didn't work

” ” – sometimes a subtable yields nothing, but there's no sign of it except a word seems to be missing from a sentence, e.g. “whose goal is ,”

Various places where the subject doesn't agree with the verb.

Various places where a space is missing between words.

The Character History table is actually a lot more robust than this makes it sound. If you let me know any problems you find (generally I need the exact text to track it down), I'd appreciate it.

Posted on

Characters and Motivations

I’ve been thinking about Scott’s post in which he talks about attitudes towards character development, but I think that he may be conflating two different things: approaches to playing the character, and the type of character one plays. I think they’re related, but are not the same thing at all.
Scott’s List was:
1) hero fantasies
2) ditzes
3) competency
4) real life
and although he didn’t number it
5) different as possible from oneself

Heroes, Ditzes (or Eccentrics, as Rachel prefers) are, I think, types of characters, Oneself and Competency are approaches to playing a character, and Different as possible from Oneself is a motivation for playing a type of character.
For instance, one could easily imagine both playing a Hero because it was different from oneself and attempting to play the Hero in a maximally competent fashion.
Actually, the topic of categorizing styles of play, motives for playing, and even types of characters has been chewed over at great length in places like the rec.arts.gaming.frp.advocacy newsgroup and elsewhere.