A quick post today about GMs seeking validation plus one or more bonus topics, number depending on time.

I made this composite from two images. The black and white background image is man-5467816.jpg by Trent Garverick, which I extended to the right about 20%. The color image, to which I applied perspective and some tricks to make it look a little more 3-dimensional after that distortion is hand-998957.png by Gerd Altmann. It’s a combination designed to make it unclear who is on who’s side out of this pair and the viewer. Both images were sourced from Pixabay.

1. Keep Your Ace Up Your Sleeve

What’s the biggest metagaming mistake you’ve ever made outside of anything approaching a plot train? Let me tell you mine.

The scenario was over, and it hadn’t gone according to plan for the PCs. They had missed vital clues and had to scramble to pull off something approaching a victory.

As the players packed up, one commented that it had seemed a lot harder than it had any right to be. I answered, “Small wonder. You missed the vital clues, ignored the opportunity to gather intelligence, let the enemy keep and use against you his greatest asset, and failed to exploit his vulnerabilities. So he escaped, but you still managed to scupper his plot, so you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It could have been a lot worse.”

So far, no problem. But then I expounded, “You should have done X, which would have revealed Y, which would have permitted you to do Z – and that would have given you a chance to exploit those weaknesses…” and continued along those lines for several minutes.

Basically, I was showing off how clever I had been, but also how fair, giving the players every opportunity to even the odds, mostly because I didn’t think the criticism justified.

And that was the big mistake. As I said, the villain in question had escaped – and the next time he showed up, it had all the impact of wet spaghetti. If I had kept back a few things, the players would have had ample opportunity to discover them after the fact in play or during the interval between his appearances. But they may have missed things, or misinterpreted them, and still found him a challenge the second time around. Instead, in search of a pat on the back, I spilled the beans.

I was reminded of this by a recent article that I read on the power of implication in writing, of not spelling out anything that the reader didn’t need to know in order to appreciate the plot. I’m not sure that the things that I revealed after the session were quite what the author of the article had in mind, but it came close enough to it to recall the incident.

I tend to be a fairly ‘user-friendly’ GM. I never kill PCs capriciously, and often go out of my way to give them a get-out-of-jail-free card when circumstances tie them down on the tracks in front of an oncoming (metaphoric) train – unless the players make a bone-headed decision in getting into that situation. When that happens, I’ll generally sound a couple of polite warnings – “Are you sure you want to do that?”, that kind of thing – but if they persist, all bets are off.

I make sure that there is always a way for the PCs to win, if they are clever enough to find it, and that there is a path open before them that leads them to the information necessary for them to do so. At the same time, villains will go to all kinds of lengths to camouflage their weaknesses; that path is certainly not guaranteed to be easy. But it’s there – and it’s my experience that where there’s one path to victory, there are usually several.

I work hard to remind the players of anything vital that they may have forgotten that their characters had learned, on the assumption that it was even more important to the PCs and would not have been forgotten. That’s part of the compromise necessary when you only get to run a campaign once a month, something I’ve discussed in the past.

And I never make the mistake of equating a players intelligence or experience with that of their character, and vice-versa – if there’s something the character should reasonably know, I make sure to tell the player about it – and remind them of it if / when it becomes important.

If the players make reasonable and responsible choices, if they come up with some clever plan to exploit something I had overlooked or assumed, that’s fair game – as demonstrated in my discussing another of my big mistakes My Biggest Mistakes: Magneto?s Maze ? My B.A. Felton Moment.

(I should add – at the same time, I plan months or years in advance, deliberately salting the campaign with clues to things that will become important later on, and my players tend to learn this fairly quickly – so taking notes is something someone usually takes fairly seriously).

So if I had stuck to my opening statement in response, all would have been well. The PCs, stung by their near-defeat, would have earned most of the intelligence that I gave away for free, and would therefore have valued it more – and would gleefully have used it to be far better-prepared when next the villain was confronted. They would have earned the satisfaction of taking him down a peg, even though he would be far better prepared for them the second time around. It would have been great, if not necessarily epic – but I robbed my players of that, and turned his return into a ho-hum occurrence.

I want to make it clear that (in general), I trust my players to compartmentalize player-knowledge from character knowledge, and they rarely let me down. But some bleed-over is inevitable – the player knowing what to look for makes it a lot easier to suggest ways and places to look for the right answers, for example, and even separating the two can’t wall off the emotional consequences of being handed priceless intelligence on a silver platter by as big-mouthed GM.

I still have to work hard at not falling victim to this mistake at regular intervals, but I have gotten better at keeping my Ace up my sleeve for future use. Every time I feel tempted to show off how clever I’ve been, I remind myself of how much fun the players will have discovering it for themselves (or at least I try to). Only if the villain is to be consigned to the dust heap, if the players achieved something close to a total victory despite their mistakes along the way, do I occasionally indulge myself – dotting I?s and crossing T?s to complete resolution of the adventure in the minds of the players, when it’s important to draw a line in the campaign so that they can move on.

It’s a lesson worth learning.

2. Keep the cards your NPCs can’t see face-down

Something I’ve always been fairly good at – swings and roundabouts, we all have our individual strengths and weaknesses – is being able to keep what an NPC knows separate from the bigger picture that I have as GM.

If it’s reasonable that an NPC is able to deduce something, they have a fair chance of at least suspecting it. If it’s reasonable that they know something, then they know it.

If it’s reasonable that they lack some foundation for such a deduction, and they know it, it’s reasonable that they would identify that shortcoming and do something about it – and more than one villain has tipped his hand in the process.

But, if there is no reasonable way for them to know something, they don’t know it. And that leads them to make mistakes – exploitable mistakes.

If they are the arrogant type, they can then get taken by surprise and have to scramble for a solution to the problem, a solution rooted in their preparations and resources. Desperate moves often fail to work, though occasionally one will get lucky – especially if they are fairly intelligent (see also my advice on running a Mastermind Villain).

If they are not so arrogant, but are instead the cautious and stealthy type, they may be paranoid enough to have made some general preparations that can be utilized to counter the surprise moves.

My villains are also always capable of making a mistake, or of making an incorrect assumption that leads to a mistake, or of misinterpreting something even if they have the basic facts right. Again, this is largely a function of intelligence, but they all have blind spots.

The difference between the smart ones and the not-so-smart-ones is often that the smart ones will know, or assume, that they have blind spots or have made mistakes, and will have plans to compensate.

It’s also very important to me that the villains have a defined personality, and that this personality expresses itself in their ambitions and the plans that make to accomplish those ambitions. Their way is often not the most effective or efficient road to success, it may even throw up insurmountable roadblocks, but they are who they are.

BUT, unless they have a flaw that gets in the way, they will always learn from their failures and from their successes. They will always filter their perceptions of these through that personality – and that has led some of them to “improve the wrong things” or fix things that weren’t broken – but even the most arrogant will learn something. Whether or not that something is actually helpful is a whole different question, of course!

As I said at the start, this is something that’s always come fairly naturally and easily to me; it’s not something I’ve had to work at especially hard. For a long time, I thought that being able to do this casually was a serious prerequisite for being a GM – so it surprised the heck out of me when I observed that some GMs really struggle with it.

Here’s the funny thing – if something comes naturally to you, it’s really hard to analyze and communicate what it is that you do for the benefit of someone else. Often, the best that you can do is make sure those “someone else’s” know that this is something they do have to master if it doesn’t come naturally to them.

I very much find myself in that position with this subject. I can describe it’s importance, and what the limitations are that I put on my NPCs, and how that can manifest in poor decisions, or in good ones – but beyond that, I can’t explain to someone else how to do it.

That’s not really all that satisfactory, I know, and that’s why I haven’t talked much about this in articles here – but it dovetails with the first piece of advice so strongly that it’s time to lay my cards on the table (to extend the metaphor).

So, if it’s not one of your strengths, learn how to do it. And then offer up a guest post on your solution to the problem, I’ll happily publish it!

3. Debunking Red Shift / Blue Shift

Last night, I watched a short video on what you would see at the speed of light, or approaching the speed of light, and they repeated the hoary old chestnut of everything behind you appearing red because of Red Shift and everything before you appearing bluer because of Blue Shift.

No, I’m not denying doppler shift – but I am stating outright that physicists and science fiction authors have been getting this wrong, basically forever. It’s annoying to me when it happens because the error seems so obvious to me – but I’ve never been both annoyed enough and writing a broader article at the same time, before.

Well, this time I am, so let’s dig into it.

The error lies in treating visible light as visible light – okay, maybe not quite so obvious.

As you accelerate, light from in front of you gets shortened in wavelength – blue shift – and light from behind you gets lengthened in wavelength – red shift. You can hear this happen with sound waves when a car or train passes you.

But that doesn’t mean that you stop seeing reds from in front of you, or stop seeing blues behind you. The visual spectrum remains just as wide as it ever was.

Red shift: let’s say you’re traveling fast enough that everything that was red shifts into the infrared, where we cannot see it. That doesn’t mean you stop seeing red – what was orange becomes red, what was yellow becomes orange, and so on. And, what was low ultraviolet becomes visible as blue.

Blue shift: traveling at the same speed, everything that was blue gets shifted into the ultraviolet, and can no longer be seen. Everything that was Aqua shifts into the blue, everything that was green becomes aqua, everything yellow becomes green, everything orange becomes yellow, everything red becomes orange – and the near-infrared becomes visible as Red.

We still see the full spectrum of color, regardless of whether we look before us or behind us.

What’s more, the shifts described are small enough that I doubt there’s going to be very much difference in WHAT can be seen – not yet, anyway.

If we travel fast enough, these shifts become so pronounced that the entire visible spectrum at rest gets shifted out of our visual range – but those wavelengths will get replaced by other waves that have shifted into our visible spectrum.

Here’s the electromagnetic spectrum:

Image by Victor Blacus based on an image by Penubag, courtesy of Wikipedia, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

And here’s the same, strongly red-shifted:

Derivative work based on the above, made available under the same license terms as the above.

This is a 1000-fold frequency shift, And, if I blue-shift by what I think is the same ratio, I get:

Derivative work based on the above, made available under the same license terms.

Eventually, these shifts will be so pronounced that what we see will in fact be visibly different from what we’re used to. At these extremes, I would expect to see visible differences, so I went looking. Besides, extra eye-candy never hurts!

First, the Pillars Of Creation, part of the Eagle Nebula, in visible light, as captured by Hubble in 1995

Public Domain image, courtesy NASA.

And now the Infrared image, also captured by Hubble. Infrared is very useful to astronomers because these frequencies are not blocked by the gas cloud.

Public Domain image, courtesy NASA.

So, if you were heading away from the Eagle Nebula fast enough, that’s what you would see behind you.

Now, for the Blue-shift: this is the image of the Crab Nebula with which most of us will be most familiar (because it’s such a spectacular image).

The image combines 24 separate Hubble images, but the colors aren’t real, they are encoding spectrographic data identifying the different elements that were expelled during the explosion. Blue in the filaments in the outer part of the nebula represents neutral oxygen, green is singly-ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly-ionized oxygen.

But it still looks gorgeous.

Public Domain image, courtesy NASA.

Without the false coloring, it looks like this:

Public Domain image, courtesy NASA.

(I’ve also seen it colored red). X-rays reveal the high-energy processes occurring, and also pass through any dust that might be in the way, rendering it effectively invisible:

Public Domain image, courtesy NASA, taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

And, just for the sake of completeness, here’s the same location in Infrared:

Public Domain image, courtesy NASA

Note that I suspect these images are of the bright ‘core’ of the original image, not of the whole thing!

EVENTUALLY, the view in front would go dark simply because there’s nothing putting out gamma rays of sufficient frequency to be shifted into the visible spectrum.

But, if you”re ever running a sci-fi game that takes the PCs close to the speed of light, understand what they would see and get the details right!

4. Other (Possible) Cosmic Errors

This isn’t the first such thing I’ve written about. A while back, I boiled three others down into infographics.

This is reduced in size to fit Campaign Mastery’s display area. Right-click and open in a new tab to be able to see it more clearly (768 x 384 size).

Well, I recently saw another video in which 10 paradoxes were described, and this was one of them – but they reported that the second one had been solved, because the spacecraft was the one experiencing the G-forces associated with acceleration. Now, I’m not quite sure why that would make the difference, but it is a point of differentiation between the two. “Problem” 1 remains, so far as I know. Not that the perceptions of the pilot contradict the laws of physics, but it’s an interesting point that I haven’t seen raised anywhere else.

If you’re making the 4 light-year trip to Alpha Centauri and time dilation means that it appears to take 6 months, the pilot would perceive themselves as traveling at around 8x the speed of light.

Actually, because it would take time to accelerate to that speed, that might be a really bad example, involving G-forces sufficient to smear our pilot all over the bulkhead, but let that go; instead, realize that the need to accelerate and decelerate means that at peak, he has to be going even faster to get the total travel time down to a perceived 1/2 year, so his perceived speed would have to be even higher than 8c. A lot higher.

Moving on:

This is reduced in size to fit Campaign Mastery’s display area. Right-click and open in a new tab to be able to see it more clearly (768 x 384 size).

I spent a whole article on this at one point, and copped quite a bit of flack for it from someone who insisted that we would be totally ignorant of anything located outside our observable universe. But this infographic simplifies the point that I was making a great deal, hopefully making it clearer.

Finally, we have this:

This is reduced in size to fit Campaign Mastery’s display area. Right-click and open in a new tab to be able to see it more clearly (768 x 384 size).

The point of this infographic is that the speed of expansion measured by Edwin Hubble has been used to determine that the universe is expanding, a statement repeated so often that it is more or less taken for granted these days. And it might be – but it might not. The problem is that the closer we get to the big bang, the faster objects appear to be receding from us, and a lot of people who should know better have misstated that as “the closer we get to to the big bang, the faster objects are receding from us”.

Now, I admit that I might be totally wrong about this, and Hubble et. al. have in fact taken this into account and still get the same results – but I’ve never seen or heard anyone saying so.

Now, assuming that the visible universe is just about all there is (an assumption I know to be incorrect, and which I’ll cover in a moment), then there must be a center of gravity to the universe that is attracting everything toward it and slowing the motion down – which is why closer objects are not receding as quickly at the more recent point in time at which we are observing them. In fact, if we look only at the Local Group, space doesn’t seem to be expanding at all, so far as I can tell. Which could mean that the expansion has stopped and contraction is about to begin.

I don’t think that’s the case – it beggars my belief in the power of coincidence that we should happen to develop telescopes powerful enough to see the edge of the universe at the precise instant where expansion has stopped. All I think I can say for certain is that the question that has been considered closed by a lot of learned people might not be as definitively answered as they think.

Oh, before I move on – the reason these are 768 pixels wide is because they were originally done as just one graphic – but they were too hard to read if made any smaller. I tried, but couldn’t shrink them any more – and didn’t have the time to redo them. In fact, they’ve been sitting around on my hard drive since the fifth, of may waiting to be used!

5. A Kickstarter For Consideration: The NPC Chronicles Soundboard

I’m going to quote directly from the email that I received about this because I don’t think I can explain it any more succinctly:

The NPC Chronicles soundboard brings characters to life with hundreds of recorded dialogue segments, voiced by pro voice actors.

The software comes with eight different NPC archetypes (and counting), each of whom has sixty unique lines of dialogue that can be used individually or strung together for more complex conversations. Each and every line in the software has been written by professional scriptwriters and performed by professional voice actors to create a coherent NPC archetype that’s engaging, nuanced, and memorable! Its easy to use, and fully customizable so you can add your own sounds and dialogue into it as well!

It’s great for DMs who want to add more flavor or depth to their NPCs. It is also hugely helpful for players with disabilities – anyone with a speech impediment, physical limitations, or social anxiety, can use the soundboard to help bring their voice to the table.

Link: NPC Chronicles

As I write this, there are 53 days to go and they have only reached AU$1888 of the AU$8926 goal (I suspect both numbers have been converted by Kickstarter from some other currency, probably Euros to judge from the prices quoted to back it).’

The basic level is €16, which is about AUD$29, about USD 18.65, and about 13.85 Pounds Sterling. That gets you the soundboard, a lifetime license and all future updates, and of course, any stretch goals.

That’s described as being 50% of what they intend to charge retail if the project succeeds in getting funded.

The next backer tier up costs €33, gets your name in the credits section (not that important) but also gets you the right to vote on stretch goals for additional NPCs.

Higher tiers offer 50% if Tabletopy soundboard immediately – this was the result of a similar Kickstarter run three years ago, with, they say, thousands of satisfied users – and a custom dialogue of up to 30 seconds recorded by the Voice actor (that last one is a little pricey, though).

The final thing to note about this campaign is the expected delivery date – October 2025. Fifty-three days from now is October 1 – so they expect to be able to deliver almost immediately if the campaign succeeds.

There is a lot more that could be said about it, but at this point, I think you should head to the link above if you’re interested and check it out for yourselves.

And, that’s a wrap! Next week, I hope to bring you the next part of the Trade In Fantasy series – it’s almost finished, but I have taken advantage of this extra week to add another quartet of diagrams and the text that goes with them…