Photo Credit: FreeImages.com / Michael Faes

When I was starting the original Fumanor (D&D 3.x) campaign, I tried to get the players to establish the sort of routines that would come naturally in real life.

You see this sort of thing in Fantasy novels all the time and it’s a great way for personalities to manifest and a useful tool for the GM.

Why?

Who is cooking the meals? Who gathers the firewood? Do they have to set up their own tent as well, or will that burden be shared amongst the other characters? What security measures in place? Who will be on-watch, if anyone, and when? Who is in charge of camp sanitation and digging a trench for the purpose?

The characters were gender-mixed – do they require two such trenches, or do they lengthen one and situate it so that underbrush provides privacy, or do they co-mingle? Who takes care of any pack animals / riding animals and do they have to set up their own tent as well? One-person, two-person, or four-person tents, and – if shared – who shares with whom, who carries the tent (do they rotate the burden?).

Who makes sure the campsite is clear of nasties, who clears the site of undergrowth, who chooses the campsite in the first place and what are their priorities, and so on. Do they hunt and gather daily, and in the morning or the evening, or do they rely on the stores that they are carrying? Who is most likely to encounter any wildlife?

The intent was to establish camp routines as an in-character exercise to help the players get to know each other’s characters, iron out any wrinkles in their processes, and then let those routines fade into the background as the characters progressed in levels to the point where they could handle most routine encounters – except as a planning tool for me to employ in describing the situation when something significant occurred.

On top of that, knowing how long they were taking to set up and break camp would tell me how many hours a day they had left for travel, and hence what distance they would cover in a day.

The characters were all of diverse backgrounds, and this was also to serve as a way for those with relevant knowledge to share that knowledge with the others. I wanted to emphasize that some of the characters were more familiar with and at-home in a wilderness setting, while others wouldn’t sleep well until the group were back in an urban environment, and still others would not be comfortable until they were back underground and didn’t have to look up at infinity all the time. This was a tool for making the differences between PCs relevant and significant, putting those differences ‘on-show’ for all to see.

The final purpose was to impart information to the players in a more organic way than a block of narrative delivered from on-high. I intended to color that information according to the source, again as a way of making who they were relevant to their daily lives and what they were doing.

Where Things Went Wrong

As you can see, there were an awful lot good reasons to roleplay the processes of encampment and the breaking of camp the next morning. Would it have worked out so harmoniously? I’ll never know, because one key player absolutely refused to play ball. “Our play time is limited and I don’t want to waste it on housekeeping”.

I had to concede that he had a point; we could only play the campaign once a month, and that’s not enough to spare a lot of time for things that don’t contribute directly to the story. On the other hand, I was looking on that ‘lost time’ as an investment that would enhance subsequent days of play, ultimately packing more game into the few hours we had available.

But he convinced the other players, so I shrugged my shoulders and let it slide.

Your situation may be different

For anyone not laboring under the constraints that we were under, this should be a no-brainer. Even some groups who do experience similar time pressures, this may still be a viable and valid technique for adding roleplay opportunities based on the daily routine. It follows that it deserves serious thought by the GM.

Photo Credit: FreeImages.com / Cody Mummau

Campfire Chats, Rumors, and Misinformation

The situation was a little different when we started the Shards Of Divinity campaign.

Most of the PCs were supposed to be seasoned veterans who had more or less figured all that sort of practical stuff out a long time ago. You see this illustrated very clearly in parts of David Eddings The Belgariad although it isn’t until the sequel to that quintilogy, The Mallorean, that any attention is really paid to the point. Each member of the party in that story naturally falls to setting up the camp while playing to their individual strengths, maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of the group as a whole.

As a result, I didn’t ask the PCs; I told them: Character X is most skilled at Cooking, and so automatically takes charge of the evening meal. Characters Y and Z are the strongest, so they take charge of erecting defenses, gathering firewood as they do so, and digging a latrine. Character A is an experienced handler of animals, so he will look after the mounts and pack animals and feed, water, and brush them while checking them for problems like cuts and infections. Since everyone already has a job, all the other chores, like setting up the tents and cleaning the dishes and so on, gets shared evenly amongst you. That left only Character Zero, the first-level character who was central to the entire campaign, to feel like a fifth wheel. By the time he had his tent set up, the others were relaxing around the campfire and enjoying the smell of the meal being cooked. On top of that, because he was completely unskilled at such things, Character Zero was everybody’s assistant and dog’s-body; the dirtier and more tedious the job, the more quickly his name came to the fore.

Once this routine was spelt out, it was immediately ignored by everyone except when some part of it became significant, such as the time the donkey was tethered (by Character Zero) too close to the guy ropes of his tent and proceeded to eat them.

Instead, I intended to use the campaign down-time for a different purpose. I had carefully given each of the players a set of rumors that they had heard, and some little snippets of information that they had stumbled upon before the group had assembled. Some of these were mutually contradictory, some were outright fabrications or wild distortions of the truth, some told the same story from different points of view, and some told different parts of the one story. Put all of them together, and you could get a pretty good idea of a number of things that were going on.

The idea was that at the end of each in-game day, I would spark the conversation with “you aren’t sure how the subject came up, but you find yourselves talking about X”. Each player would then put in his two cents’ worth and the group would try and figure out what it meant. Some of these were clues to where dungeons could be found, some were about the reasons different NPC groups were doing the things they had been doing, some were about things that were going to happen in the future. As each subject was brought up, I would replenish the lists. Once play was underway, I intended to use the day’s events as a starting point for the conversations, assuming that they had become habitual elements of the gameplay. This was a way to ‘sneak’ background into the game without long-winded narrative on my part.

Where Things Went Wrong

This plan fell apart for three reasons. First, a couple of players with key pieces of information to impart who had committed to the campaign bailed after only a session or two. That alone might have been close to fatal, but could have been worked around simply by adding to what the remaining players ‘knew’ or ‘had heard’. In at least one case, the character remained as an NPC even though the player had gone, giving me still greater opportunities to utilize the technique.

In order to understand the second reason, you have to first understand that these were all Evil characters uniting with each other for mutual profit and protection, and that I had been at pains to point out what an alignment of “Evil” meant in this particular campaign. What it did not mean was a character who was incapable of mutual cooperation, a character who would not assist the group out of enlightened self-interest. Unfortunately, that was how they all approached their characters to at least some extent. None of them wanted to share what they knew for fear of losing some advantage over the others, and as a result, none of them gained any advantage over anyone outside of the group, either.

And the third reason? The same player, with the same argument, as the previous case discussed: “We have limited time and I don’t want to waste it on idle chatter.”

This really irked me in this particular case, because gaming to me is more than encounters and combat and loot; this was part of playing the characters. It wasn’t as though there was a deadline – “you have to reach the dungeon before December 23rd, real time”; if it took an extra couple of minutes once a session – and that was all I was seriously proposing – then it was time well-spent because it brought the world to life, it meant that I was giving the players raw information about which they could make up their own minds instead of putting polished interpretations into their heads, and I was signposting choices that the characters didn’t know they had (One player took this notion to the point of inventing his own stories rather than relaying what the character supposedly knew)!

If it weren’t for the other two reasons, I would have fought a lot harder to keep this game element, this part of the adventure format, going. I was convinced that once the first concrete benefit materialized to show the way, the objection would be forgotten, or at least, overruled. The real killer was problem #2. Without the willingness to share information that meant nothing to the individual in isolation, but which might have become significant when married to what other characters knew, the tactic was doomed to failure.

Your situation may be different

Once again, for a different group under different circumstances, this could be a very viable technique. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it, in principle.

To make it work, the PCs need to be more inclined to collaborate and cooperate; the GM has to be willing to invest both the prep time and game-time required; and he has to be up-front in telling the players that a lot of their key background information will be arriving in this format.

Creating the Snippets

Each character brought three key points of view to the table: Race/Social, Geography, and Class Education. To create the snippets of “rumor, hearsay, and background”, these needed to be considered.

I would start by writing a simple and straightforward statement of events. “A cult in the town of Cromin was trying to resurrect a radical spiritual leader as a lich. The Paladins of nearby Thorwist discovered the plot, sealed all the exits to the town, and burnt it to the ground; there were no survivors.”

Next, I would examine this story from the three points of view of each character – what might they have heard about the story, and how might it have been colored by their perspectives? Each part of the story gets dismembered and allocated to different characters. If a given character has no particular perspective that is relevant to the story, they may have heard a generic rumor; I rolled d8+2 to get a score out of ten for how distorted their account was.

So one character might hear that there was a cult in Cromin; another might hear that there was a Lich in Cromin; a third would hear that the Paladins of Thorwist burned a town alive; a fourth heard the same thing, but it was a town where the whole population were undead; a fourth would simply know that there was a tragic fire in Corwin (note: wrong town!) in which the entire town was consumed; and a fifth might know that the Paladins of Thorwist are obsessively zealous about destroying undead. A sixth might get the whole story completely wrong – “a Lich burned the entire order of Paladins in Thorwist alive” – as might a seventh: “One of the members of the Paladins of Thorwist is secretly a Lich.”

Putting all those together, while they are in one place, is relatively easy. But scatter them at random amongst 11 other rumors or snippets of information (or misinformation – always allow for the possibility of ‘spin’ by someone with a vested interest!) and it’s hard to pick out the right pieces that go together to make this particular jigsaw puzzle.

Recent events, malicious stories, misunderstood decisions, paranoia, misinformation, the occasional bit of prophecy, and an anecdote or two (especially if it has a cautionary element or other such appeal as a story – the hard part shouldn’t be coming up with the rumors to give to each player, it should be in knowing when and where to stop.

The final step is to expand on the starting points, dressing them up into a full ‘story’ by inventing additional details out of whole cloth. This usually consists of answering any of the basic six questions – Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How – that aren’t already covered. (I also liked to throw in the occasional thing that one character had ‘heard’ but that another character knew to be untrue, or distorted, or absolute gospel, simply as a way of teaching the players how the rumors “work”.

In a number of cases, I hadn’t even decided what the truth was – I was going to wait and see what the players came up with and use that as my inspiration, or – at the very least – my starting point. If the players decided to go and investigate the ruins of Corwin, for example, I might have decided that not all of the cultists perished, and the survivors are trying again. Or maybe that they never intended to raise a Lich, but were being persecuted by the Paladins. Whatever was most interesting and entertaining in terms of supplying a day’s play would be ‘the truth’. Until then, it was all rumor and speculation!

Photo Credit: FreeImages.com / Shalom Pennington

Everyday Life Creates a sense of reality

The approach employed in my Zenith-3, Warcry, and Adventurer’s Club campaigns has been rather more successful. It stems from the assumption that at the time an at any given moment, people don’t distinguish between the crisis’s of everyday life and those with larger, longer-term ramifications; the sense of personal involvement in the smaller events more than compensates for their relatively trivial nature.

From that assumption, it becomes clear that signpost events in the personal lives of the character deserve screen time and attention just as much as the latest cosmic menace or weirded-out supervillain. This principle is also taken into consideration when awarding experience points.

One of the reasons this approach is working is because it helps the players feel like they are spending time ‘in the shoes’ of their characters. Another is because I work carefully to balance good with bad, using the principles of the favorite pseudo-science of the 1970s, Biorhythms, as inspiration. In general, there are times when the whole of the character’s life will seem stuffed up, and one shoe drops after another, and times when some aspects of the character’s life are positive and others negative – and even times when everything seems to be coming up roses. What the actual traits being modeled are vary from character to character and even from one occasion to the next.

The final reason this is working is because I’ve been fairly successful at blending events of greater significance with events of personal importance and relating the two to each other. Some background encounters are designed to do nothing more than make the character’s life seem real, but some introduce important NPCs and evolutions within the campaign background and even hints and clues as to the major action that is about to unfold or has just occurred.

It’s a very human thing, but how often has some event taken place and resonated with a recent conversation on a related subject? You hear news of the event and think, ” I was just talking to someone about that the other day”. We completely forget about the other 9,999 topics that came up in conversation that don’t manifest in more significant events and zero in on the ones that do. Spiritualists and “Mind Readers” have been exploiting this for over a century; in fact, it works so well because the human mind is ready and willing to do at least half the work for the fraud/entertainer. The ‘psychic’ or medium says something like “I sense some involvement with water or the sea” and the subject reviews their life and that of everyone they knew for just such a connection, e.g. “My Uncle Jake was a deep-sea fisherman and often used to talk about his love of the sea”; the rest of the audience then inadvertently welds two and two together and afterwards remembers the event as the psychic making contact with the subject’s Uncle. This is a very crude explanation, and modern performers are far more skilled at it.

I realized some time ago that as a GM, I could take advantage of this phenomenon simply by having many of the trivial events of the day be the ones in which the character makes just such a connection. Not all of them, of course – that would be far too obvious – but every character gets the occasional piece of ‘wheat’ amongst the ‘chaff’. And, of course, some of the daily events link directly to the major plotline of the day, sometimes in surprising ways. One character may be asked by a friend for a favor, only for the later adventure to be the result of one NPC doing a favor for another, for example.

By deliberately choosing to (briefly) roleplay these moments of serendipitous synchronicity, when the players look back on the events of the day’s play, or even the previous hour’s play, their character’s lives seem more sweaty and real, because what we have roleplayed are the events that the character would remember as real, as the flavors and milestones of the day or the week or the month.

The Bottom Line

The more of a character’s personal life that can be conducted in-character, the better a game will be. That includes characters trying to figure out what may have happened in a distant place (and what it means for them) and what their daily routines will be and seemingly trivial conversations that just happen to have a thematic similarity to larger events. Work with your players to create and exploit these opportunities, and your campaign will be enriched for both players and GM in the process.