Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Some article ideas are simply not big enough to sustain an entire post on their own. From time to time, I gather these mini-posts together to form one more substantial post.

The last time I did this was in Eight Little Tips: A Confection Of Miniature Posts, 6 months ago. It’s time I did it again.

Contents:

• Typo Inzpiration (Found Ideas)
• The Shape Of A Cup (Social Imperfection)
• Technobabble Gone Bad (Cringe-worthy Sci-Fi)
• Dichotomies Of A Personal Life (Character Generation)
• Pencil Is Erasable (Character Generation)
• Reboots Can Kill (Campaign Content)
• Perfectionist – To A Point (GMing Principle)
• The “Cruising Range” Principle (Game Meta-mechanics)

Typo Inzpiration (Found Ideas)

You never know where your next idea is coming from. There are sources of inspiration all around us, but too many people (who really should know better) ignore too many of them.

Take typos. That’s where you mean to write one word but accidentally input something else. Or your input device thinks you’ve input the wrong thing and auto-corrects you.

Both can be embarrassing when you don’t notice. Both can be irritating when you do notice.

And, every now and then, there can be a gem of an idea lurking in what’s actually been written, but people are so busy correcting the error that they completely overlook the potential.

Let me offer an example: I was typing “Demographics” in a plot outline the other week, and inadvertently typed “Demongraphics”. Before I could correct it, I was interrupted by a phone call, which put just enough of a pause on the process that I was able to look upon the error with fresh eyes. The wheels within my mind immediately began to turn over – what might this refer to if it were not a typo? Demon populations? Possession statistics? Advertising campaigns by the underworld? Fake News? An infographic so fiendishly complicated that it could never be completed and interpreted correctly? An illustration so evil that it drove all who beheld it into religious despair, leaving them open to corruption?

At least four of those ideas could be enlarged into a genuine plotline.

So, before you delete or correct your typos, mine them for ideas. Because you never know where your next good idea is coming from.

The Shape Of A Cup (Social Imperfection)

I was reading a book on British Science Fiction – in fact, I still am – the other day. The chapter I was engaged with discusses post-apocalyptic television. The extremely intellectual and slightly pretentious analysis took the view that the creators of the different science fiction examples under discussion thought that society would degenerate into a specific social form, one that was predetermined by virtue of being the most efficient mechanism for the extant society to achieve the ends for which social structures exist amongst a human population.

Something crystallized in my thinking as I read this discussion. I was already aware that human beings are messy and disorganized by their nature, and structures emerge and mutate and evolve from an initial starting point in response to the conditions and environment in which that society operates. But a number of derivative implications of this principle had escaped me – and had clearly escaped the author of this chapter, too, despite their having referenced a clear literary demonstration of the application of the principle.

In The Day Of The Triffids (a great sci-fi disaster novel, if you’ve never read it, and I also recommend The Trouble With Lichen as related to the subject in question) (links are to copies available through Amazon, I get a small commission if you buy), society is disrupted by a cometary display that somehow renders blind those who observe it. The exact mechanism is never explained specifically, and is only tangentially relevant to the story, anyway. At first, society devolves to a gang level, a dystopian counterpoint to the proposition that “in a kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is King”.

Up to this point, then, the content would argue in favor of the premise identified in the analysis. But, in the next chapter or two, John Wyndham depicts the collapse of these gangs and the emergent society that they represent, and – later still – the coming together of a splinter of the original organizing force around a more communal social structure that is at once more evolved, more civilized, than the simple gang structure and at the same time the product of the devolving and overthrow of what is shown to be a short-term solution confronted by a long-term problem.

For reasons of his own, the protagonist leaves this communal society behind and continues exploring this ‘brave new world’. His next encounter is with a fascist society which is relatively advanced technologically and in terms of captured resources, but which has the eternal flaws of such societies, as perceived by the generation that overcame Nazi Germany. This society will force itself upon the world for a time, but ultimately splinter, wither, and fall in the face of the pressures being exerted upon it by the circumstances.

There’s a lot more to the story, and I’ve glossed over huge swathes of discussion on this and other aspects of it, but that gives you enough to see my point.

You can never impose a utopia by force.

No society is ever perfect in theory, or in implementation. The society evolves in response to causes of dissatisfaction, including failures to adequately fulfill its purposes (both overtly stated and implicitly assumed), often violently, towards something that is perceived as better suited to meeting the challenges and addressing the failures of its predecessor. There will almost certainly be division and disagreement (and that may also be violent), and what ultimately emerges won’t ever be exactly what was envisaged at the beginning. Revolutions take on lives of their own, and all you can do is try not to be swept away by the floodwaters of change.

Even if a particular social structure – that of ancient Rome, for example – is a perfect match to the contrived circumstances envisaged by the writers, you can’t get there from whatever preceded, not perfectly; because the implementation is being performed by flawed and fallible humans.

The notion that circumstances produce a metaphoric ‘cup’ and that any given society which encounters those circumstances will naturally assume the shape dictated by the cup, is total nonsense at worst and a dramatic oversimplification at best. There will always be a gap between ideal and reality, and there will always be flawed participants who seek to subvert the mechanisms of the society to their own ends, who will cause greater deviation from the ideal than can be corrected by any social self-improvement mechanism unless there is constant vigilance exercised against such breakdowns.

And that means that any analysis which proceeds from the assumption of such a metaphoric ‘cup’ or ‘perfect societal shape’ is going to be inherently flawed.

This becomes relevant to writers of science fiction and RPG GMs whenever we imagine a society that isn’t directly modeled on, and derivative of, a historical example complete with creative forces and history – virtually every time, in other words. Because we generally make the same mistake – we create a perfect set of circumstances to match the social structure that we want, and assume that the social structure that we create will perfectly fill that void.

If we’re lucky, this will simply prove to be an oversimplification of a complex structural necessity that doesn’t actually get in the way of the plot. If we’re exceptionally lucky, the flaws might not even be noticed, or might be written off and ignored by any who so notice – which is especially the case where our plot revolves around some transition within the society in question. Most of the time, though, the flaws in the model will come to light unexpectedly, and either be taken advantage of by the PCs or be the subject of hasty patch-work by the GM.

But, if we start by implicitly assuming that the society will be an imperfect fit to the circumstances, and even deliberately incorporate some egregious failure modes, not only is the result more believable, but it is inherently more flexible and able to be massaged into a semblance of what we really wanted in the first place.

So build your societies with flaws. Knowing where the soft spots are permits you to prepare for someone poking at them with a stick.

Technobabble Gone Bad (Cringe-worthy Sci-Fi)

One of my many pet peeves is Bad Technobabble. One particularly devastating example of this phenomenon was recently repeated on Australian television. I am speaking of the Star Trek Voyager episode “Demon.”

The basic premise of the episode is that Voyager is running out of a substance that is crucial to the good operation of the ship. They find a source of that material which leads them into an encounter with a strange alien form of life which incorporates high levels of the substance in question into their biology. Perfectly acceptable premise, and in most respects (by the standards of a TV Sci-Fi Drama) the resulting story is also perfectly acceptable fair.

But the whole thing is almost utterly ruined from the very outset by Bad Technobabble, when some half-wit who knew just enough science to be dangerous decided that the substance in question should be Deuterium, because, you know, it sounds really sciency.

Anyone who knows even high-school chemistry knows that Deuterium is an isotope of Hydrogen and one of the most common substances in the universe. And with that knowledge, the whole premise collapses into nonsense every time the substance is named in the episode. If you work at it, you can force yourself to ignore the Bad Technobabble and find the rest of the episode quite enjoyable. But you do have to work at it, and work hard – and you won’t always succeed, and often won’t succeed right away. It nags at you, and undermines the credibility of everything else.

This wasn’t the first time that Star Trek Voyager had fallen prey to this phenomenon. In the pilot, a big deal is made of a space-faring race, the Kazon, being critically short of Water. Never mind that, like Deuterium, this is one of the most common substances in the universe, and that any space-faring race should be able to ship giga-gigatons of frozen ice to their planet in the form of asteroids and mountain-sized hunks carved out of ice-worlds. Fire these at the planet, let them burn up on reentry – because that simply creates water vapor that will eventually manifest as rain, putting the water onto the surface exactly where you want it to be.

Yes, you can construct all sorts of plausible counterarguments that make sense of the situation – but it’s an effort to do so because the implementation of this concept is halfhearted and not properly thought through. In effect, it’s Bad Technobabble. It makes the Kazon laughable as enemies, a fact that – when first aired on television here – led me to drop the episode from my viewing schedule for several years. Thank goodness, they never refer to this specific problem again, and you can treat all the other ‘Kazon-As-Enemies’ episodes at face value.

I put a lot of effort into the Technobabble that I employ in my various campaigns simply to avoid this problem. If I refer to a “Quantum Instability,” I will have thought over everything I know of Quantum Mechanics, and what “Quantum Stability” might reference, and therefore what a Quantum Instability might look like in terms of appearance and effects – and if it’s not right for what I want, I’ll have dumped that Technobabble in favor of something more credible, if necessary doing additional research to help get it right.

Almost as bad, through lazy writing of Technobabble, is “Reverse The Polarity” as a solution to a problem with a particular piece of technology. I won’t use that (or any variants, like “Invert The Polarity”) except as a deliberate joke.

Fantasy writers and GMs, you can stop hiding in the corner and smirking. Unless you have a rigorously-defined model of how Magic works in your campaign, you are using Technobabble just as certainly every time you translate the process of casting a spell into narrative terms – unless you’ve kept it strictly deterministic, of course: “The mage waves his hands around and throws a pinch of red powder into the air and says something unpronounceable”. It works once, but gets thin very quickly. The fantasy-oriented amongst us are just as capable of writing bad Technobabble as the Sci-Fi-oriented, it’s just that it’s usually less noticeable until they explicitly contradict themselves.

Dichotomies Of A Personal Life (Character Generation)

Let’s perform a quick character generation experiment. Draw a two-by-two boxes on a sheet of paper. Label the cells down the left “occupation;” and next to the first cell write “circus acrobat” and the second, “desk clerk”. Label the other axis “personality” and the cells as “flamboyant” and “office geek”. Now, picture each combination in three ways – speech, dress, and mannerisms. If the results seem especially memorable or compelling or interesting, put a cross in the cell for that combination, otherwise put a circle.

I’m willing to bet that “Circus Acrobat” will have mostly circles under “Flamboyant” – and mostly crosses under “Office Geek”, and that the opposite will hold true for “Desk Clerk”.

A Desk Clerk who looks like a desk clerk, acts like a desk clerk, and speaks in a meek and mild manner, is a very forgettable cliche. A desk clerk with an element of flamboyance about them stands out. They are more interesting to write, more interesting to interact with, and generally, more fun.

Similarly, a Circus Acrobat who is all flamboyance is a stock character who has to work three times as hard to stand out (if not more); one who has something extremely conservative about their dress, mannerisms, or speech, stands out.

All you then have to do is reconcile this eccentricity with the character – background, history, motivation, etc – to make them credible as well as memorable and distinctive.

Pencil Is Erasable (Character Generation)

Okay, that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? This was a thought that came to me during a scene in a TV show about a tattoo, and the degree to which they are indelible. That show was followed by another in which a character writes something on a pad in pencil and then destroys the top sheet, challenging the other person in the scene to recover the message, which they are able to do because the pencil has left an impression on the sheet below.

And one thought connected with the other, and then with a third…

All characters have marks on their past, mistakes and misjudgments that they want to live down. While the outcomes of such deeds can directly impact on the character’s profile – personality and circumstances – the attempt to hide or live down any deed that doesn’t get detected at the time can be an even stronger influence on a character. The problem is that a character never knows whether or not a given black mark is drawn in pencil or written in pen until they try and erase it.

“Out, out, foul spot” – but sometimes the attempt to erase the past leaves a void that can be detected, and sometimes all that you achieve is chewing up the paper.

Every character should have at least one black spot, a blemish on their perfection. How they react to that spot will be as definitive of who they are as anything else you can point to – and often in far more compressed form.

Reboots Can Kill (Campaign Content)

They’ve just started repeating JAG on Australian TV. I’ve seen them all before, so I’m not watching. There’s a pilot episode, which leads into the first season with some retooled characters and some completely replaced characters. The show was canceled at the end of the first season, only to be picked up by another network with the same leading man and another retooling of just about everything else – style, tone, plot direction, and most of the cast got redone.

And thinking about that led me to the aphorism used as a title for this section.

Whenever you reboot – be it a TV series, book series, or RPG campaign – you are accepting an inherent risk of disaster. That comes in the form of alienating more of your existing fan-base than you add to it with new fans.

Knight Rider, season 2, was without Patrica MacPherson as Bonnie. The producers thought she was just a pretty face, and easily replaceable. In effect, they did a partial reboot of the show. The fans didn’t like it, ratings dropped and complaints went up. Result: from season 3 onward, Bonnie was back.

You see the same thing time and time again. For every reboot that succeeds, there’s one that’s a catastrophic failure.

When it comes to an RPG, the Audience are your players, who are also your starring cast. And that’s a serious problem when rebooting a campaign with a different premise.

But there are ways to minimize those risks – most notably, knowing what those players liked about your last campaign and being careful not to mess with those things too much, while still making the new campaign distinctly different from the old.

Perfectionist – To A Point (GMing Principle)

I saw a meme the other day which read something like “I’m a perfectionist. If you aren’t perfect, take notes.” That got me to thinking – when it comes to RPG Prep, I’m a perfectionist, too, often spending time on nuances that the players will never notice, or are quite capable of glossing over on their own – but only up to a point.

I don’t want my players spending time and mental energy glossing over minute flaws and discrepancies if I can help it, I want them focused on being in character and interacting with the plotline and NPCs. If there’s an incongruity or inconsistency, I want them to be able to recognize it as such and work with it because it’s been inserted, or left in place, intentionally, as a clue or hint.

My basic standard is, “would I have noticed this, if I were a player?” If the answer is “no” then ‘good enough’ excludes putting more than a vague effort in the direction of whatever ‘this’ was.

If the answer is “yes” then effort is clearly justified.

It’s in the gray areas, the space in-between these extremes, that there’s uncertainty, and the judgment becomes more nuanced, juggling effort required, expertise required, time available, the likelihood of something else giving a bigger bang for buck, and whether or not the cure is likely to be worse than the disease. Sometimes, these assessments yield a hard ‘yes’ or ‘no’, sometimes the task gets put somewhere on a priority list, and sometimes I’ll start and see how I go with relatively minimal effort, because those assessments are all seat-of-the-pants estimates.

I try to apply these same principles to every facet of my prep work.

The “Cruising Range” Principle (Game Meta-mechanics)

I’ve written before about the prep work done to give the players utility in choosing second-hand cars for their characters explorations of the American south-west. They have now chosen and purchased the autos in question, and I’ve prepared a handout for them to refer to.

Amongst the stats that have been carefully compiled are travel ranges – how far each car will get on a full tank of gas under various traffic conditions. In particular, there’s a high- and a low-range for urban conditions and a high- and low-range for highway conditions.

I’ve interpreted these as being the fuel efficiency in, respectively, low-speed travel urban travel, stop-start traffic, highway cruising, and heavy acceleration – high speeds or a lot of steep uphill motion.

There are two ways of integrating these values to tell me (and them) what the fuel gauge will read at any given point, which can be used to estimate when they will need to stop at a service station to top up. The first is the obvious one of dividing the distance traveled in a given “speed zone” by the range under those road conditions, getting a percentage used of the fuel capacity, and accumulating usage until it starts to get close to 100% and an empty tank. This would tell me quickly how much of their total capacity has been used in stop-start traffic, how much in highway cruising, and so on. Add those up to get the total percentage capacity used.

The other is a little trickier, but is more forgiving of player agency, in which I convert all the fuel efficiencies to a ratio, and apply that to the distance traveled in a given speed zone to determine an overall fuel usage against a given standard – the highway cruising range. By simply accumulating the resulting “adjusted distances”, I can tell with a quick calculation what percentage of the fuel has been used. Instead of four accumulating counters, I have just one.

It also means that where the players can be expected to spend time investigating a possible target, I can use a pre-defined average “stop-start traffic average speed” to convert the actual time spent into a fuel usage rather than spending a lot of time tracking actual distances.

This is all much more useful because it lets the players choose to vary their routes, double back on themselves, take unplanned side-trips, etc, with minimal effort on my part. But it’s counter-intuitive.

To test the maths and make sure it all works, I’ve been working with a hypothetical “average car” obtained by averaging the stats for the top 15 choices according to the criteria that the players set forth. These gave “rule of thumb” adjustments of +50% for stop-start traffic and urban sightseeing, +25% for urban cruising, and +20% for high-speed highway travel. So all I had to do was plug distances into these to convert the fuel usage into the equivalent usage at the base rate. This also let me do rough calculations well in advance of their choosing the actual vehicles that they will be using. Now, though, that choice has been made, and I have to go back through my prep notes, adjusting to the actual characteristics.

The end result will be that the in-game activity will reflect differences and nuances between the vehicles as chosen. The players might never notice it, or it might become crucial, but it’s a source of added color, and because it’s rooted in hard numbers, will be completely internally consistent.

It’s often said that in motorsport, every team will get the big things right, most of the time. What makes the difference between winning and losing is maximizing as many of the little things as possible, sometimes referred to as “the one percenters”, as in, “the things that will make 1% difference”. Compound enough more of these in your favor than your rivals, and you achieve success. I wrote in the previous article that I am content to be a perfectionist, up to a point, and this is another way of saying the same thing. This particular one percent might never be noticed – or it might compound with others to establish a level of realism that could not otherwise be matched.

But realism isn’t necessarily the goal – the goal is to create fun. However, implausibility, a lack of realism, can have a negative effect on fun, as was pointed out in the mini-article on Bad Technobabble. Minimizing that negative, even by 1%, counts. This might not increase the fun – but it can help prevent vagueness and a lack of believability getting in the way of the fun.

And that’s the main lesson to take away from all this, a first law of good GMing: don’t get in the way of the fun. It’s as simple as that. The devil, as always, is in the detail.