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bored

image credit: freeImages.com / Christie Merrill

This is an article in two halves, but the two should segue together seamlessly. The first is partially a rebuttal, partially a sequel, and partially a reply, to Clark Timmins’ thought-provoking submission to the Carnival, The Real Life of Heroes.

The second half looks at how the ordinary lives of the PCs are depicted in the Adventurer’s Club (Pulp) campaign, serving as one way in which the suggestions and comments put forth in the first part can be practically applied in an RPG.

It is also the fifth and final article scheduled to be part of the November 2016 Blog Carnival, which Campaign Mastery is hosting.

Hand-waving the boring bits

Clark starts by pointing out that its good practice for GMs to skip or hand-wave the boring bits. No-one wants to roleplay every stride of a 10,000-league march – let alone doing it a second time when burdened with the fruits of victory. It is neither necessary nor desirable to detail every bite of every meal. Heck, even standing watch is better hand-waved most of the time, and even rolls for wandering monsters can get dull and tiresome.

As Clark writes, “Who wants to roleplay all this drudgery? That’s not really fun.” And he’s completely correct. And so we hand-wave the boring bits.

…taken to ridiculous extremes

But why stop with just the mundane and trivial parts of the game? Why not remove the repetitive as well? All that checking for traps for the umpteen-thousandth time, the rolling to hit, the recording of damage – why not simply have the players taking it in turns to roll once for each battle to see how it works out for the party, how much damage they take, and get on with handing out the XP and the goodies? After all,
     “We break open the door, weapons at the ready.”
     “There are a dozen Orcs in the room.”
     “We kill the Orcs. Do they have any loot worth noticing?”
is a sequence that I’m sure resonates with most of us.

Let’s be clear on this: I am NOT advocating the hand-waving of all combat! On the contrary, most GMs go to great lengths to make combat interesting, both to them and to the players. Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth in that, after a while, all dungeon rooms begin to look alike, all combats begin to blur together. What makes them distinctive and interesting is interaction – between the PCs, between the PCs and the (NPC) enemies, between the PCs and the environment – and in making the story bigger and more substantive than just a combat, attaching meaning to events.

Asking The Wrong Question

Clark’s points get to the heart of what this Blog Carnival is all about. And yet, at the end of his article, when he writes, “Doing “real life” stuff in-game is not escapism, and it’s not fun for most people. And so when it comes to the administrivia of packing a horse, striking a camp, wheeling a wagon… why… we just assume those things happen without comment. When our characters must traverse a mountain range, why… they just do it. When they stagger out of the dungeon at encumbrance capacity with silver coin tucked into every pocket, why… of course they do it. And when they get to town, why… they drink ale. What else is there?”, he is asking the wrong question. Phrased that way, in that context, there can be only one answer, and it traps the GM into the same endless treadmill – dungeon after dungeon, with only the occasional wandering monster for variation.

When you’re 18, it can seem the ideal diet is to live on Pizza and Coke, with the occasional hamburger for variety. But a few months, or years, of such a diet and it will quickly lose its luster. In the same way, a few months or years of unremitting dungeon-bash grows dull and tiresome. That’s when people start doing something else with their free time, leaving the hobby for good.

Real Life vs In-Character “Real Life”: The Right Answer

having fun

image credit: freeImages.com / Ned Horton

The question isn’t why we can’t skip the “bits in between” because they’re boring; it’s how we can make them more interesting. There’s no need to roleplay everything; – but there is an implies assumption that the mundanities that Clark describes are the entire palette of choices, and that’s not the case.

Beyond the dungeon walls there are strange phenomena, breathtaking vistas, deadly environments, social problems and movements, greedy merchants, ignoble “noblemen”, church politics, buxom barmaids (or bar-men if that’s your preference), gypsy curses, Orcish Armies, Sinister Plots, Rogue Wizards, wise-cracking (and just plain wise) trees for those with the wit to hear them, haunted houses, scheming guilds, duels, rivals, friends, allies, enemies, and much, much, more. Why throw all that away? Because it’s “boring”?

The ordinary life of a PC is not like the tedious “real life” that would exist were these adventures our actual existences. We still hand-wave the boring bits – but we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Simplest Implementation: Where are the PCs and What Are They Doing?

The most straightforward way of incorporating non-boring “real life” for the PCs is simply to ask, “Where are they and what are they doing when the adventure comes calling?”

  • Uthrak is in the marketplace, haggling with a vendor about the price of his melons – not to mention the black market jewelery under the counter. If he can get in good with the merchant, a lucrative side-career as a transporter of stolen property awaits him.
  • Berwald is on the run from the watch, having been mistaken for a second-story burglar. Calumny – no-one’s ever seen him casing a target, so it has to be a case of mistaken identity – but the chains on the prison walls won’t care, either way. He has just darted into an alleyway leading at the other end to the market square; maybe he can shake off his pursuers in there.
  • Zarkasal is following the arcane trail of a necromancer. Never turn down a chance to learn something new, even if it forbidden knowledge, is his philosophy of life! Either the Necromancer will agree to give Zarkasal a few lessons or the Fighter-mage will turn him in to the authorities. If the prey rubs him the wrong way, he might do that, anyway. There’s a disturbance up ahead – with a start, he realizes that the Watch are chasing Berwald. He can’t afford to let them catch him – those forbidden scrolls he found are still hidden in Berwald’s pack! Looks like the Necromancer will have to wait for another occasion!
  • Asther is in a poker game in the cellar of the inn where all the PCs have been staying. The dealer thinks he’s smart, dealing from the bottom of the deck; he hasn’t realized – yet – that Asther is marking the cards. A third player has just run out of cash and offered a rather interesting-looking tattered scroll containing, he alleges, a map to a lost treasure from the Old Kingdom. Time for Asther to make her move – and then bail on the game before she gets caught.

There you have it: Plot Hook (the map) and the other PCs are about to have a reason for them to leave town in a hurry. And all it took was the GM to listen to what the players wanted to do and find some interesting twist into which he could drop them at the start of the day’s play. It would be a matter of only a few seconds play for the GM to bring the party together, now in possession of the plot hook, and on the run.

When My co-GM and I started touching on the lives of the PCs outside of the main adventures, it was so that we could lay the groundwork for future plots. It didn’t take too long for the “You all meet up at the Adventurer’s Club” to become a bit stale, however; better to have the plot hook come to the attention to one PC and for him or her to then call in the others. But that raised the logical question of what the others were doing at the time?

Stepping It Up: Mini-Adventures for Fun and Profit

It didn’t take too much longer to realize that the interests of equal screen time were best served if we didn’t simply pay lip service to “What the PCs are doing”, and gave them the chance to roleplay themselves into and out of whatever situation they were in. These mini-adventures didn’t have to be long; the rule of thumb was always how much screen time it would take for the PC to receive the plot hook and what had to be done about it.

Five PCs, five minutes of mini-adventure each – working our way around the table every minute or so, that’s just 25 minutes or so and we’re into the early stages of the main plot. Ten minutes each? About an hour. 45 minutes each? That’s a session’s play, permitting us to use the intro to the main adventure as a cliffhanger. The decisive factor is always the expected length of the part that “matters” in terms of the main adventure, then matching that in screen time for the rest (for more information on our techniques for “splitting the party”, see Ask The GMs: “Let’s Split Up.” – “Good Idea, we can do more damage that way!”).

Mini-Adventures to Mark Time

Some adventures have lulls in between significant developments; once you’re used to the notion of mini-adventures, there’s no reason not to drop in some to mark time in such lulls. Hand-waving the interval with nothing happening is easy enough, but it doesn’t “feel” right to most players; the interval doesn’t seem real. This is doubly true if the GMs want the events pre-interval to fade into the recesses of the PCs memories because they think the adventure is over. On top of that, you have all the considerations of pacing (discussed in a series of articles here at Campaign Mastery). The list below has been excerpted from another post (which is why it may look familiar).

  1. Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 1
  2. Swell And Lull – Emotional Pacing in RPGs Part 2
  3. Pacing and the value of the Pause
  4. Anatomy Of An Interruption – Endpoints
  5. Status Interruptus: Types Of Pause
  6. Compound Interruptions: Manipulating Pauses
  7. The Yu-Gi-Oh Lesson: New Inspirations In Pacing and Style, plus a couple of older articles that touch on the subject:
  8. Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures
  9. and, Scenario Sequencing: Structuring Campaign Flow if applied at the micro-level to the individual adventure instead of the macro-level of an entire campaign.

Zenith:3 and the Adventurer’s Club: The Difference in Philosophy

There are still variations that the GM has to decide between. There is, for example, a profound difference between the approaches employed by the Zenith-3 campaign (described last week in Ordinary Lives In Paranormal Space and Time as part of the Blog Carnival) and that used in the Adventurer’s Club.

In the Zenith-3 campaign, I assume that every event of significance to the character will be of interest to the player of that character, and that whenever something happens, the PCs will be doing something else. The campaign is designed to evolve over time, and the PCs are expected to evolve as it does so, sometimes radically, sometimes only in their relationships with each other or with others. It is a “Continuity-rich” campaign.

In the Adventurer’s Club, in comparison, is far more static and stable. While parts of the background may evolve, the game date is perpetually somewhere in the mid-1930s, and we gleefully expropriate events from whenever they actually happened to suit our storytelling needs. For example, the last adventure, “Boom Town”, took place in late January and early February of Nineteen-Thirty-Whatever, but featured a World Heavyweight Boxing title fight which actually took place on June 13, 1935. This despite many of the events of the previous game year also deriving from 1935… The Adventurer’s Club campaign is a Serial campaign in which the game world is more-or-less static, evolving only as it creates interesting situations for the PCs. We’re quite happy to connect an event from 1933 with another from 1937 and call the whole thing 1935.

The philosophy of the Adventurer’s Club campaign is that we only play interesting events in-game, and any mini-adventures have to meet this standard. Individuals and organizations have memories, and relationships with the PCs evolve as a result, but the calendar is perpetually more-or-less locked. The players will know when the campaign is preparing to end (yes, we do have it planned) when real-world events start synchronizing in a major way with the game world – in essence, when the immediate precursor events to World War II start happening but that’s a long way off.

There may not seem to be much difference, but the distinction is actually quite profound. It’s the difference between things happening as context in the lives of the PCs, as those lives develop, that just happen to be interesting because the PCs are interesting people living in interesting times, and something interesting happening because we need to have something interesting happen to give a character his share of screen time.

Going Even Larger: Personal Subplots

It’s a short step from where things stand to giving characters personal subplots that provide a standalone in-the-background link from one adventure to the next. We have something of that sort going on with one of the newer PCs at the moment; his daughter had a rare form of Leukemia, in one adventure the PCs obtained a cure as a reward. Normally, that would be that; the actual use of the treatment would be handwaved and taken as read. But we saw potential for more interesting interactions with the plotlines, so first the daughter had to travel from England to the US by ship, waiting to meet her gave us the chance for the character to have a mini-adventure finding the parents of a lost child. Then we had the surgery, performed by another PC, be disrupted by an explosion down the street. The cure will take time to fully cure her; she is still convalescing, and we have another couple of small mini-adventures to come in which her position within the game world will stabilize, to be pulled out of our back pockets only when her presence adds something to an adventure or mini-adventure.

Taken collectively, these mini-adventures form a small plot arc, adding additional textural elements to the adventures in which the PC becomes involved.

We’re also going to be initiating another Personal Subplot for a while at some point in the near future of the campaign in which another PC gets to expand his personal “fleet”, we’re just waiting for him to decide what sort of ship he actually wants. If he takes too long, we may present him (one at a time) with three or four alternatives and then tell him to pick one! But we aren’t at that point, yet. Meanwhile, we are deliberately “aging” his current vessel just a little; it’s seen hard use for several years and is going to need a major overhaul eventually. These events will let us use the ship as the hook to connected mini-adventures for the character for some time.

The Oriborous Principle: Plots that eat their own tails

We love it when we can interweave or interconnect mini-adventures with the main plots, using the mini-adventure to give the player information they will need for the main plot. For example, that title bout that I mentioned? We first brought it to the players’ attention through a time-marking mini-adventure, without hinting as to the significance that it would later assume in the main plot as PCs in four separate locations attempted to disarm “planted” bombs being used to blackmail the city – with only one of the PCs having the skills necessary, having to give the others instructions via a patched-together telephone hookup!

But it was the start of that mini-adventure that really serves as the best example: each PC had a mini-adventure, each of those mini-adventures provided part of the plot hook into the main adventure, they crossed over with each other and intertwined… you could say that each of the mini-adventures was a prelude or prologue to the main adventure.

This was done because the players had grown accustomed to one of the mini-adventures being the “hook” while the others were just interesting things that happened. So we changed it up on them – not something that we’ll do every time, but it broke the pattern. We followed that up with an old-style beginning to the current plot that had no mini-adventures at all, simply pitching the PCs into the adventure, because that made sense in terms of the dramatic pacing of the adventure. The only rule is that we will structure the adventure in whatever way works best for that Adventure. Personal Life doesn’t automatically happen; it is subordinated to the exigencies of plot.

A Collection Of Interesting Experiences

Ultimately, the personal lives of PCs are best viewed as a collection of interesting experiences. Whether your approach is for things to happen that you then make interesting, or to only hit the interesting highlights on the way to the main plot, the basic strategy is the same: make parts of the “mundane lives” of the PCs interesting and ignore/hand-wave the rest. The wealth of plot elements that this opens up more than justifies the effort, regardless of genre; it’s as true of Superheros and Pulp as it is for Fantasy games like D&D. Ignoring this potential is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Some time ago, in an article here at Campaign Mastery (which one it was, I can’t quite recall at the moment), I pointed out that I deliberately focus on the mundane elements of character’s lives in the lower character levels of a D&D campaign because they provide a vehicle for me to tell the players more about the world in which their characters are living, the way reality works, and so on. As routines become established and their capabilities rise with increasing character levels, things like making camp and who does the cooking and travel are increasingly hand-waved – unless something interesting takes place along the way. It’s the same principle, simply being applied in still a third way.

Clark asked at the end of his article, “What else is there?” The answer is, quite a lot. You just have to pick the low-hanging fruit.


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